Chris Petit - Wreckless Eric - Melody Maker - 1979

 

I did not know that Chris Petit, maker of the great Radio On, also did a bit of rock writing, for Melody Maker.  (He was also the Film Editor of Time Out at this time)

Here he reviews Wreckless Eric, whose "Whole Wide World" is memorably used in the film

Here Melody Maker's then editor Richard Williams blogs about a later Petit work The Museum of Loneliness and recalls sending Petit to Germany to write a piece about German music including Kraftwerk but also Boney M!

And here's Petit himself, talking about how his brief foray into rock journalism was instrumental in the making of Radio On: 

"I became a rather bad music journalist for Melody Maker with the express intention of meeting Kraftwerk. This achieved, I gave them a folder with the script for Radio On. Ralph Hütter mistook the name of the folder for the title of the film and thereafter it was referred to between us as The Digby Wallet. We completed the package by going to Dave Robinson at Stiff Records and offered the film as a way of promoting Stiff’s material. The specific track wanted was Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World, but we were given the run of its catalogue." 

Wreckless Eric is someone I would have probably never bothered to check out, if not for the film, which introduced me to "Whole Wide World"

Elton John rather perceptively described it as Troggs-y.

At his enjoyable blog Eric Goulden remembers the  moment when Elton John was infatuated with Wreckless Eric and - very briefly - a guest member:

 One night we were at the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion. I was sitting in a corner of a large dressing room full of bands, trying not to let everything get on my nerves, when a woman I knew walked in. I knew her because she’d done some PR work for Stiff Records at some point and we’d got on well. She came straight over to me, said hello and addressed me in hushed voice:

‘I’m here with Elton John, he’s out in the corridor - he’d really like to meet you.’

... He was in a corner of the corridor looking as though he was trying to melt into the wall. There must have been other people around but I didn’t see them, just him, alone and exuding vulnerability. His face lit up when he saw me. He seemed at once other worldly and completely normal. He was wearing a black 1920s flapper suit and a floppy herringbone tweed cap. 

We said hello, and our awkwardness hung in the air between us. His eyes were soft and grey, and very kind. He had an Edwardian shirt buttoned to the neck with some sort of Art Deco, bakelite bow tie.

‘Um, er... does that light up?’

He laughed: ‘No, I’m off duty.’

Elton joins the band onstage to play piano on "Whole Wide World" and then the whole thing escalates:

Then he was at the piano, playing and singing some weird slow blues that turned out to be a half speed version of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen. We were playing along and it was getting intense, and then there was one of those massive piano fills that goes from one end of the keyboard to the other, and we were up to full speed and rocking. The guitars were shrieking and I turned round in time to see Elton kick back the piano stool, take a backward run, then head forward like a raging bull and leap off the stool and on to the top of the piano where he stood for an instant like the rock god he most undoubtedly was. Then he jumped off the piano into the centre of the stage and cut the entire band with one gesture.

He stood in the spotlight and just for an instant the world stopped turning. He raised his arms above his head and started to clap his hands. The energy that was coming off him was almost physical. I’ve never again experienced such a thing. At that moment I fully understood why he was such a huge star.

The whole story is well worth a read. 

Lester Bangs on Black Sabbath - stick your wrong foot out, then your right foot in

In the wrongfooted-in-real-time category, this review for Rolling Stone of the debut Black Sabbath album is lacking clairvoyance. I don't have the whole thing unfortunately: 

 "Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England's answer to Coven. Well, they're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck – despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master's tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other's musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse."

That's from September 17 1970. He really bangs away at the Cream connection. This might be where I got the Sabbath as "crude putsch" on Cream idea. Then again I don't remember reading this before...

However Bangs changed his tune / wised up / saw the light pretty quickly. Suddenly he's right-footed-in-real-time, especially as most rock critics continue to hate the Sabs. 

Here's Bangs review of  Master of Reality for Rolling Stone, November 25, 1971: 

The second-generation rock audience (that is, those who went steady to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and got serious with Highway 62 Revisited) suffer mightily wrestling with the phenomenon represented by Grank Funk and Black Sabbath. If nothing else, though, both Funk and Sabbath are for all their monotony at least supremely consistent — as opposed to schtick collectors with no personal vision like Deep Purple. And since when is monotony so taboo in rock & roll, anyway? Rock has been — some of the best of it too in large part monotonous from the beginning, hypnotically so, as rightwingers would say. As far apart as they are, Black Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, and any Stooges or MC5 fan who disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted.

The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more than they might seem. Grand Funk's vision is one of universal brotherhood (as when they have spoken of taking their millions to the White House with a list of demands), but Black Sabbath's, until Master of Reality anyway, has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let's Get Together platitudes of the counter culture.

Their first album found them still locked lyrically into the initial Spiritualist-Satanic hype and was filled out mostly with jamming, while Paranoid reflected that theme only, in the great line in "War Pigs": "Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses." The rest of the album dealt mostly with social anomie in general, from the title track's picture of total disjuncture (rendered with authentic power too) to "Iron Man's" picture of an unloved Golem in a hostile world, the stark picture of ultimate needle-freak breakdown painted in the philippic "Hand of Doom," and finally the unique "Fairies Wear Boots": "I went walkin' late last night Suddenly I got a fright/I looked in the window, was surprised what I saw/Fairies in boots dancin' with the broads!"

Not all of this, incidentally, was rendered in La Brea sinks of lugubrious bass blasts — several of the songs had high wailing solos and interesting changes of tempo, and "Paranoid" really moved. If you took the trouble to listen to the album all the way through.

Master of Reality both extends and modifies the trends on Paranoid. It has fewer songs, if you discount the two short instrumental interludes, but it is not that the songs are longer than the first record — the album is shorter. The sound, with a couple of exceptions, has evolved little if at all. The thick, plodding, almost arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound the group is celebrated and reviled for only appear in their classical state of excruciating slowness on two tracks, "Sweet Leaf" and "Lord of This World," and both break into driving jams that are well worth the wait. Which itself is no problem once you stop thinking about how bored you are and just let it filter down your innards like a good bottle of Romilar. Rock & roll has always been noise, and Black Sabbath have boiled that noise to its resinous essence. Did you expect bones to be anything else but rigid?

The rest of the songs, while not exactly lilting, have all the drive and frenzy you could wish for in this day and age. Thematically the group has mellowed a bit, and although the morbidity still shines rankly in almost every song, the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid. "Sweet Leaf," for instance, shows that Black Sabbath have the balls to write a song celebrating grass this late date, and the double entendre, if you can even call it that, is much less tortuous than it would have been in 1966, with an added touch of salvation from grosser potions: "My life was empty forever on a down/Until you took me, showed me around ... Straight people don't know what you're about..."

 Unfortunately, the religious virus also rears its zealot head, in "After Forever," which is a great Yardbirds-type arrangement nevertheless and despite its drubbing us over the head with "God is the only way to love" it does have the great line "Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope?"

 And besides, isn't all this Christian folderol just the flip side of the Luciferian creed they commenced with and look back on balefully in "Lord of This World"? And for those of us, like me, who prefer the secular side of Black Sabbath, there's "Solitude," a ballad as lovely as any out of England in the last year (with flute yet), and "Children of the Grave": with "Revolution in their minds the children start to march Against the world they have to live in Oh! The hate that's in their hearts They're tired of being pushed around and told just what to do. They'll fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through."

 I'm not saying that either that or the arrangement it's set in is the new "My Generation," but it is a rocking, churning addition to the long line of defiant, self-affirmative and certainly a little defensive songs that goes right back to the earliest whap and wail of rock 'n' roll. It's naive, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel — but in the tradition. Chuck Berry sang in more repressed times. "Don't bother us, leave us 'lone/Anyway we almost grown." The Who stuttered "hope I die before I get old," but the MC5 wanted to "Kick Out the Jams" or at least escape on a "Starship," and Black Sabbath have picked up the addled, quasi-politicized desperation of growing up in these times exactly where they left off: "Freedom fighters sent out to the sun Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution/Leave the earth to all its sin and hate/Find another world where freedom waits."

 The question now is not whether we can accept lines as obvious and juvenile as that from a rock & roll record. They should be as palatable to anyone with a memory as the stereotypic two-and three-chord structures of the songs. The only criterion is excitement, and Black Sabbath's got it. The real question is whether Black Sabbath can grow and evolve, as a band like the MC5 has, so that there is a bit more variation in their sound from album to album. And that's a question this group hasn't answered yet.

 

 

And then continuing the Lester as headBangser trajectory, he wrote this high-flown appreciation in Creem, June 1972

 

I need someone to show me

The things in life that I can find

I can’t see the things

that make true happiness

I must be blind.

 

—Black Sabbath, "Paranoid"

 

"The world’s comin’ to an end."

 

—British bobby, interviewed on network

news in the first bloom of Beatlemania

 

We have met dark days; the catalog of present horrors and dire morrows is so familiar there’s not even any point in running through it again. It may be a copout, but people will do almost anything now to escape from the pall. The (first) Age of Anxiety gave way to the clammy retreat of the Fifties, when every citizen kept a tight bomb shelter, then to the sense of massive change in the Sixties, but the passing of that agitated decade has brought a new Age of Implosion, yesterday’s iconoclastic war babies siphoned off en masse, stumbling and puking over each other at the festivals which were celebrations such a short time ago. Tying off their potentials and shooting them into the void in bleak rooms.

It’s a desperate time, in a "desperate land" as Jim Morrison said just when things seemed brightest. If the terminal dramas of the Doors and the Velvet Underground were prophetic, their "sordid" plots have now become the banal stuff of everyday life, which certainly doesn’t lessen the pervasive dread, but does imply a new music, a music which deals with the breakdowns and psychic smog on another level and, hopefully, points toward some positive resolution.

We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into its maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it’s worth, turning it into a circus. But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly on terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that’s both personal and universal, but actually managing to prosper as well. That band is Black Sabbath.

Naturally, you can’t pull off something as heavy as that without creating a bit of controversy. Most people are familiar by now with the great Sabbath-Grand Funk vs. rock press controversy (although the press has begun a large-scale reroute in the last year). The band’s first album made the top 20 in England, their second went to number one, the single of its title song made number three on the British charts, and by the time they came to America their record company was ready with a hype fronted by "LOUDER THAN LED ZEPPELIN" banners, though, as lead singer Ozzy Osbourne says, "They had to drop that fairly soon because we just told them not to **** around." The company has never really known what it has in the group or how to handle them. But it really didn’t matter at all, because Black Sabbath wasted no time in repeating their English triumph in this country; all three of their albums were on the charts at the same time for months on end.

The audience, searching endlessly both for bone-rattling sound and someone to put the present social and psychic traumas in perspective, found both in Black Sabbath. They were loud, perhaps, with Grand Funk, louder than anything previously heard in human history; they possessed a dark vision of society and the human soul borrowed from black magic and Christian myth; they cut straight to the teen heart of darkness with obsessive, crushing blocks of sound and "words that go right to your sorrow, words that go ‘Ain’t no tomorrow,’ " as Ozzy sang in "Warning" on their first album.

The critics and others who just couldn’t hear it, whether they were so far from it as to find their spokesman in a James Taylor or merely felt that the riff’s essence had already been done much better by the Stooges or MC5, responded almost as one by damning it as "downer music." Since much of it did lack the unquenchable adrenaline imperatives of its precedents and one look around a rock concert hall was enough to tell you where the Psychedelic Revolution had led, the charge seemed worth considering.

Lots of Black Sabbath fans take downs, but there are certainly many that don’t, and just as many barbiturate and heroin casualties that have no truck at all with the group, including many of those devotees of the mellow acoustic sound who are supposedly into healthier lifestyles than the minions of the music of desperation; if the pop audience knew how many of the heroes whose pockets they’ve filled were on smack right now, they... would probably not be the least bit surprised. But somehow it’s easier to picture the kid down the block, as fuckeded-up as we’ve watched him become, slumped in his bedroom gorged on Tuinal, listening to Black Sabbath prate of the devil and nuclear war and what a cruel kitchen the world is, nodding to himself as he nods along anyway and finding justification for his cancerous apathy.

 That’s the public myth. But it’s not exactly Black Sabbath’s myth, not really, and a consideration of the true vision inherent in their "downer rock" reveals that phrase for exactly what it is.

 Come you masters of war

You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks.

 

You that never done nothin’

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

Then you turn and run farther

when the fast bullets fly.

 

—Bob Dylan, "Masters of War"

 

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at Black Masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerer of death’s construction

In the fields the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds.

 

Politicians hide themselves away

They only started the war

Why should they go out to fight?

They leave that all to the poor.

 

Now in darkness world stops turning

Ashes where the bodies burning

No more war pigs of the power

And as God has struck the hour

Day of judgment, God is calling

On their knees the war pigs crawling

Begging mercies for their sins

Satan laughing spreads his wings.

 

—Black Sabbath, "War Pigs"

 

Listen to my last words anywhere.

Listen to my last words any world.

Listen all you boards, syndicates and

governments of the earth. And you

powers behind what filth deals con-

summated in what lavatory to take

what is not yours. To sell the ground

from unborn feet forever . . . And

what does my program of total resis-

tance and total austerity offer you? I

offer you nothing. I am not a politician.

These are conditions of total

emergency. And these are my in-

structions for total emergency if

carried out now could avert the total

disaster now on tracks: Peoples of

the earth, you have all been poi-

soned . . . Any minute now fifty

million adolescent gooks will hit the

street with switch blades, bicycle

chains and cobblestones..."

 

—William S. Burroughs, "Last Words

[of Hassan I Sabbah]" Nova Express

 

Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists. Like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious present situation in an honest way. They are not on the same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate, subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who have looked around them and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward offering alternatives.

 In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that given the current paucity of social leaders worth investing even a passing hope in, the coalition made up of the young and the free-form wing of the Left should turn to the ancient notion of the shaman, the holy madman whose prescriptions derived not from logic or think-tanks or even words sometimes, but an extraordinarily acute perception of the flux of the universe. Well, we’ve reaped Roszak’s script in spades by now, there’s a shaman slouching on every corner and tinhorn messiahs are a dime a dozen. Some are "political" and some are "mystical" and some are building their kingdoms on a "cosmic" stew of both, and each seems to have his little cadre of glaze-orbed acid casualties proselytizing for him.

 Then there are also the cultural shamans, Dylan being the supreme artifact. Burroughs too, of course, and his "Hassan i Sabbah" is nothing more than a particularly malevolent form of shaman, while the "Nova Police" are the benevolent regulation agency out to save the universe from addiction and control. Burroughs has been one of the foremost moralists in American literature; his work amounts to a demonology for our times, portraying the forces currently threatening our planet’s survival as evil gods operating from without.

 Dylan, of course, has always been the moralist par excellence, but his referents are more Biblical, more rooted in the soil and tradition and his own Old Testament brand of conscience.

 Where Black Sabbath fits into this seeming digression is that they unite a demonology not far from Burroughs’ (if far more obvious) with a Biblical moralism that makes Dylan’s look positively bland, although they can be every bit as vindictive in their Jehovahn judgments as Dylan.

 They are probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent.

 They may deny all this; Ozzy Osbourne responded to a question about how the bands’ concept came about with a vague "I don’t know. I met the guys, we got together and rehearsed for about two years, starved, bummed around hoping for a break and it just happened. You relate to me that it’s about doom or something, but I can’t relate it to you because I’m in the middle of it."

 It really doesn’t make any difference how conscious they may be of that they’re saying, though. The message is there for anyone with ears, and it’s unmistakeable. The themes are perdition, destruction and redemption, and their basic search for justice and harmony in a nightworld becomes more explicitly social all the time. On their first album the social quality only appears in one song, "Wicked World" ("The world today is such a wicked place/Fighting going on between the human race/People go to work just to earn their bread/While people just across the sea are countin’ their dead") and the prevailing mood is a medieval sense of supernatural powers moving in to snatch the unwary soul and cast it into eternal bondage.

 The band was named after an above-average British horror flick from the Hammer company, starring Boris Karloff, and their namesake song actually opens with rain sound effects and a tolling bell that’s echoed in the slow, dolorous fuzz guitar that will set the pace for opening cuts of future albums and do much to lend credence to the "downer rock" stigma. Satan appears in their material in this song for the first, but hardly last, time, leering and licking his lips as he tots up the fresh-caught souls. Though "Warning" really seems to be his entry point, rounding off what sounds at first like a rather Creamish love song and jam with a surprising twist that make it into something entirely different from what you thought it was:

 Follow me now

and you will not regret

Leaving the life you led

before we met

You are the first

to have this love of mine

Forever with me

until the end of time...

 

Look into my eyes,

you will see who I am

My name is Lucifer,

please take my hand.

 

Since the band’s name is what it is and the thematic content of this album, as well as its packaging, leaned so far towards this sort of thing, it’s easy to see why people should stereotype the group as either exploiting for profit or living and promulgating the form of pop Black Magic which finds high school girls intently reading books on how to become a witch and trying out spells on prospective boyfriends (and a sharpie like Anton La Vey cleaning up) even as dead (literally)—serious organizations such as the Process carry out their grim rites in Los Angeles, Mexico, New York and elsewhere, promoting total nihilism and the end of the world, engaging in incredible machinations to, yes, get people in their power (obtaining zombies fit for any job they don’t want to soil their own hands with) even committing murder in some instances with the ritualistic precision of absolute psychopathy. There are scheming salamanders like Manson everywhere, finding fantastic utility in this phase when it comes to their own less bizarrely "religious" ends. What Black Magic is about is absolute control; since rock ’n’ roll is power music with strange effects on people, sometimes, with undercurrent themes of almost fascist dominance and subjection running from the earliest blues through the Stones to Alice Cooper, there were bound to be some psychic and subcultural connections made. No doubt there are Black Sabbath fans who like the groups because it seems to reflect their own preoccupation with hocus-pocus and supernatural manipulation, just as people used the Velvet Underground once as soundtracks for the hard-drug movies they’re living to the stone hilt.

 But the band themselves will have no part of any of this, according to Ozzy: "We never have been into Black Magic. But one time, just to get a break, we decided to do a thing because it’s never been done before—the crosses and all that, that black mass on the stage, but we didn’t intend it to be a thing where you go onstage in a pair of horns, and yet even now people come up and think we’re going to put a ****ing curse on them. Or if they’re not afraid they think we’re heavy, heavy heads. For instance we did a gig on one of the tours, and after the show we went back to the hotel, and I could hear a lot of feet walking up and down the hall outside, so I went and opened the ****ing door and there’s all these weird people with black candles walking up and down and writing crosses on the doors and things, and they ****ing frightened me, I tell ya. We all blew the candles out and sang 'Happy Birthday,'" he laughs. "They didn’t like that at all."

 Not only that, but when you begin to listen to their music with open ears, it quickly becomes apparent that rock ’n’ roll sorcery is only a handle devised to make Black Sabbath into a concept more immediately graspable. As much as Satan, the righteously vindictive Old Testament God and spiritual-super-natural agonies recur in their music, they are almost invariably used to make a moral point. "The Wizard" is a song of reassurance for those nursing paranoias about neighborhood witches and warlocks who might be nursing a grudge against them, painting a benevolent shaman:

 

Evil powers disappear

Demons worry

while the Wizard is near

Everyone’s happy

when the Wizard walks by

 

The Black Sabbath vision of life on earth and the machinery of civilization becomes concrete in their second LP, Paranoid, whose very first song takes the epithet applied so indiscriminately for the past half-decade to anyone the speaker happens to be in disagreement with, and carries it to its ultimate gross characterization in a vignette reminiscent in verbal content and unbridled bitterness both of Dylan’s "Masters of War" and the firebrand rhetoric of agit-prop pamphlets of the Socialist Workers and other parties farther left since the time of the First World War. I remember seeing old books with vitriolic cartoons of Capitalist Pigs (literally) strolling along in tophats and waistcoats with buttons ready to pop from the accretions of fat, lighting giant Havana stogies with $100 bills. Possibly the only difference between that was conscious inflammatory propaganda and this is (you can accept this to whatever degree you choose – I tend to take it all the way) true folk culture, where the hatred is more organic and sensate, churning straight up from the bowels in catharses of rage as apocalyptic as the End they visualize in this song and "Electric Funeral," probably the two most vicious statements we’re ever going to hear from this band. Even Dylan, after finding it in himself to write "I hope that you die," realized that there was nothing more he could say on the tip of that particular limb.

 "War Pigs" ends up a fantasy of Judgment Day, the sword of the Archangel cleaving the necks of those who have chosen to serve Lucifer and now must follow him into Gehenna. You can laugh, but Black Sabbath are something of the John Milton of rock ’n’ roll: "You turned to me with all your worldly greed and pride/But will you turn to me when it’s your turn to die?" The Christianity running consistently through their songs is cruel and bloodthirsty in the way that only Christianity can be (which is to say, lopping off heads with feverish pleasure, clad all the while in the raiment of righteousness and moral rectitude). "Electric Funeral" is their picture of atomic war as the Second Coming:

 Dying world of radiation

Victims of mad frustration

Burning global box of fire

Like electric funeral pyre...

 

Supernatural king

Takes earth under his wing

Heaven’s golden chorus sings

Hell’s angels flap their wings

Evil souls fall to hell

Ever trapped in burning cells.

 

And the vengeance motif ain’t just limited to Biblical referents, because "Iron Man," one of their greatest songs, is a piece of almost pure program music utilizing lugubrious drums clomping like the falls of Golem feet and a guitar riff that swoops recklessly like a Hulk arm demolishing buildings, to depict a miscreant, much reminiscent of the Karloff Frankenstein’s monster who really only wanted to play with the other children, who finds himself ostracized as a total freak because of his size and lumbering lack of grace (Hmmm, know some people like that myself; maybe Iron Man is really a symbol and fantasy for every adolescent ever tortured by awkwardness and "difference") and responds with understandable rage and a havoc-wreaking rampage:

 "Is he live or dead?"

"Has he thoughts within his head?"

"We’ll just pass him there

Why should we even care?"

 

Nobody wants him

He just stares at the world

Planning his vengeance

That he will soon unfurl

 

People are strange, when you’re a stranger. It’s a melodrama of alienation, just as "Paranoid" is a terse, chillingly accurate description of the real thing, when you suddenly find that you’ve somehow skidded just a fraction out of the world as you have and other still do perceive it. "Paranoid" renders perfectly the clammy feeling of knowing that at this point there is absolutely no one on the planet to whom you can make yourself understood or be helped by. All alone, like a real rolling stone; it’s no wonder in such circumstances that the imagination might get a little hairy, and turn to dreams of science-fiction revenge. I’ve felt the arctic wedge of disjuncture myself at one time and another, stuck in the painful place where you can only send frozen warnings cross the borderline and those inevitably get distorted. Because they’ve captured it so well Black Sabbath means a lot to me and a lot of my friends for "Paranoid" alone. With the experience so common these years is it any wonder that this group has conquered the world (so to speak)?

 And now that they have conquered it by detailing several of our most prevalent forms of malaise, what have they got to offer as curative? Well, this is where their moralism begins to break down, for many of us at least, because what else would an Old Testament group be offering but Jehovah? Or, to slip across a few centuries into the Greek Scriptures, Jesus. It’s not that they’re acting as sycophants for the virulent proliferation of hippie fundamentalist sects. Master of Reality conveys the impression that with the cloud of gloom hanging over their persona, and the "downer-rock" label, they felt obliged to carry their moralism into outright proselytism, suggested by "Lord of This World" and clinched in "After Forever," which follows a paean to the joys of cannabis (see, kids, we don’t take those horrible pills, we use and advocate this healthy stuff...) called "Sweet Leaf" with:

 Have you ever thought about

your soul—can it be saved?

Or perhaps you think

that when you’re dead

you just stay in your grave.

Is God just a thought in your head

or is he a part of you?

Is Christ just a name

that you read in a book

when you were in school?...

 

Well I have seen the truth.

Yes I have seen the light

and I’ve changed my ways.

And I’ll be prepared

when you’re lonely and scared

at the end of your days.

 

The song goes on to assert that "God... is the only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate" and even includes a line that goes, "Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope—do you think he’s a fool?" Well, yes, and yes, as a matter of fact, because the Pope is a War Pig if ever there was one, or at least an evil angel. Maybe I’m making a fool of myself but I see this band making an attempt to provide direction for a generation busy immolating itself as quickly as possible. Since nobody else around that I can see seems to have any better advice for them than Black Sabbath, it pains me perhaps unduly to see them suggesting the hoariest copout conceived in 2,000 years. I mean, what’s the difference between a vegetable babbling about how much crank he can hold and stay alive, and one locked into repeating a zealot litany with mindless persistence to every stranger coming down this side of the street?

 But then, I suppose I shouldn’t expect Black Sabbath’s answers to be sophisticated. Master of Reality has more than one alternative to suggest anyway. "Into the Void" is a fantasy of escape from the dire mess in this orbit via "Rocket engines burning fuel so fast/Up into the night sky they blast... Freedom fighters sent out to the sun. Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution" a la the reedy Starship recently promoted by the Marin County Cocaine Casualty Musical Auxiliary. This version of the fantasy at least has the advantage of some solid, pulverizing music behind it.

 A much more interesting solution is drawn in "Children of the Grave," a deep, gutty, driving piece that’s one of their finest and one of the highlights of their current live show. It couches the expectable hints of looming catastrophe ("Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear?") in a romanticized picture of the children born in the megaton shadow standing their ground, insistent on the salvation of the planet, with an uncharacteristic happy ending:

 

Revolution in their minds—

the children start to march

Against the world

they have to live in.

Oh! The hate that’s in their hearts!

They’re tired of being pushed around

and told just what to do.

They’ll fight the world

until they’ve won

and love comes flowing through

 Which is fine with me. The cloudy romanticism of the song’s social conception removes it from the limitations of any one faction’s Utopia, making it much more palatable than the vested-interest jams of a group like the Up (musical agitprop arm of the Ann Arbor Rainbow Peoples’ Party) or the dilettantism of a Jefferson Airplane, even if it does bear about as much dialectical meat as Grand Funk singing "People Let’s Stop the War."

 

^^^^^^^^^^^

I think there might also be some Sabbath Lester-love in this grubby little paperback called Rock Revolution that Creem published in '76,  contents all written just on the eve of punk, a fascinating little document. Most of the contents are written by Lester and there's an appreciation of heavy metal by him in there. But it would be almost impossible to scan on account of being one of those cheap mass-market tight-paged glue-bound pocket-size paperbacks with the margins going right to the centrefold, almost to the point of being unreadable without breaking the spine. 

RIP Peter Shapiro

Shocked and saddened to wake up yesterday and learn that Peter Shapiro has died. 

I used to know Peter in the '90s and we worked together occasionally. He did some stuff for me at Spin (including a piece during which he explained what a dubplate is to an alt-rock readership and visits Music House in London to see the process of making one). And I contributed a piece on Krautrock for Modulations, an anthology of writings about electronic music that Peter edited. 

His magnum opus is Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, which is the definitive book on disco as an ever-expanding and mutating musical form.

The Peter Shapiro byline will be familiar to people who read this blog most likely from his contributions to The Wire, although he wrote for all kinds of places. He carried on contributing to Spin after my one-year experiment at being an editor came to its natural conclusion, and amongst other things wrote a memorable reported piece about an Air Guitar World Championship in Finland - he took up the gonzo challenge of living the story and entered the contest himself and actually came fourth!  

Peter was a brilliant writer who pulled off the harder-than-it-looks double thing of being illuminating and funny at the same time. 

Sadly but shrewdly he quit freelance music criticism and became a lawyer, eventually specializing in intellectual property rights and media. 

Here's some more about Peter extracted from a tribute written by close friend and onetime fellow Spin contributor Mike Rubin:

"Peter was a native of Larchmont, NY.... His work appeared in URB, Vibe, Uncut, and The Times, The Wire, where he wrote cover stories on DJ/Rupture, Kool Keith, Kid 606, Talvin Singh, Anti-Pop Consortium, Quannum Projects, the "Illbient Alliance" (let's not hold that against him), A Guy Called Gerald, Coldcut, Stereolab, Jah Wobble, and Natacha Atlas. In addition to oodles of album reviews, he also frequently quizzed artists for the magazine's listening-test column "Invisible Jukebox," including Tom Moulton, Super_Collider, El-P, Mike Patton, Bill Laswell, Lemmy, Caetano Veloso, Alec Empire, and LTJ Bukem. A glance at the partial list of topics he wrote Wire articles on should give a sense of the dazzling breadth of his interests: artists like Larry Levan, Dabrye, Mike Ladd,  Anticon, Fog, Playgroup, Q-Bert, Phil Cohran, Dan the Automator, Phoenicia, Dr. John, Mark the 45 King, Graham Haynes, Jungle Brothers, Prince Paul, Stacey Pullen, Omni Trio, Cristian Vogel, Larry Heard, LFO, & Emergency Broadcast Network; "Primer" listening guides to US hardcore punk, turntablism, James Brown, Fela Kuti, & P-Funk; genres like cosmic disco, Latin freestyle, mutant disco, psychedelic soul, and the new Americana; and topics like bootlegs, mixtapes, and machine beats.

"He penned several volumes of the Rough Guide series, including surveys of hip-hop, drum 'n' bass, soul, & R&B, before authoring his magnum opus: TURN THE BEAT AROUND: THE SECRET HISTORY OF DISCO (2005, Faber and Faber). He also edited MODULATIONS: A HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC (2000, Caipirinha Productions). "

And here's a tribute from The Wire with much  more on his involvement with the magazine - I forgot that he had been living for years in England, then moved from back to NYC in the late '90s. Also that he had worked on the staff of the Wire for a few years. 

They mention a particular piece (below) which Peter did, kicking off their long-running Epiphanies column in January 1998, about rock riffs. It captures well a familiar arc - the writer pursuing the minutiae of electronic dance music culture (or some other ultra-hip, super-intricate area of music) and then tiring and turning off it, or just finding diminishing returns, and returning to the reliable thrills of dumb riffs. (Which could be find in dance music itself obviously - Big Beat) I remember going to a hipster bar in the Lower East Side regularly in the 2000s premised on this scenario, or at least that's what I assumed had happened. Instead of the trendy audio-trickly stuff that you'd expect and would have heard at similar bars in the late '90s, the audio fare was all classic rock riffola, James Gang and The Guess Who and "Jump Into the Fire" . It really felt to me like a recovery space for the jaded cool-hunter. I loved it - it was like when we would go on a car trip, renting a car and then starting out playing all the music we'd brought with us, CDs and mixtapes... but inevitably, after a day or so, we'd find ourselves tuning into the classic rock stations on the radio and sticking there. It suited the open road, just as in this bar, it suited drinking beer better than Kruder & Dorfmeister or Kompakt or whatever. 

My own later versions of this "I've seen the future and I've left it behind" epiphany: "nifty groovers" and "brockism" (aka the hard rock continuum) and "my kind of rap"

Dave McCullough on the "after-Rock" of A Certain Ratio - Sounds - January 16 1982

 Following Simon Frith's "afterpunk" contention, here's another term that never quite caught on

Not catching on might come down to it not being entirely clear what Dave McC means here

Also - "Strategically tired"?

I believe I have seen Dave McC using the term "afterpunk" or "after-punk" as it happens... one of the few adherents of the Frithism... maybe that led him to "after-Rock"

Simon Frith - Afterpunk: the different drummer (Melody Maker, spring 1979)

A critic right-footed by history  - not through the success of his coinage "afterpunk" (postpunk would be the winner there) but through siding with the right side in the schism of Artpunk versus Realpunk 

(also known as Street Punk and later Oi!)

 

"Consuming Passion" was an overview-oriented column Frith and others did in Melody Maker - this was a time when MM was giving NME a run for its money on the writing front, if not the design. Along with Frith, the team included Jon Savage, Mary Harron, Vivien Goldman, Chris Bohn, Ian Birch, James Truman, Idris Walters, as well as veteran staffers like Richard Williams, Michael Watts, Allan Jones, Brian Case.... 

Lester Bangs on 1981 and the state of rock

As mentioned by Nick S in comments to the Meatloaf Manifesto, here is Lester Bangs's "protest ballot" for the Village Voice's 1981 Pazz and Jop poll of America's critics. Plus a satirical anticipation of 1982's best records....

As Nick notes, for someone supposedly utterly alienated from current music (a soul-less wasteland) he has no trouble listing a bunch of favorite records from the year 

His number 1 album is a great lost post-No Wave record, very unusual sound. 

LESTER BANGS’S BALLOT

Because of the realities of the situation and a simple respect for music itself I am compelled to state in response to your poll that 1981 was in my view such a dismal year that I cannot in good conscience vote for more than two or three albums, much less 10. As you know, I always vote in these things strictly on the basis of how much I actually listen to the record, as opposed to how “significant” it might be. What I did this year was what almost everybody else, certainly including critics, did: listened to old music, when I listened at all. Because almost all current music is worthless. Very simply, it has no soul. It is fraudulent, and so are the mechanisms which perpetuate the lie that anybody else finds it vital enough to do more than consume and file or “collect” (be the first on your block). New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow xeroxes of poses that aren’t even annoying anymore. Rap is nothing, or not enough. Jazz does not exist as a musical form with anything new to say. And the rest of rock is recycling various formuli forever. I don’t know what I am going to write about — music is the only thing in the world I really care about — but I simply cannot pretend to find anything compelling in the choice between pap and mud. I haven’t made this decision without some soul-searching, but I feel that I can best serve the purposes for which I became a music critic in the first place by filing a protest ballot, with the following exceptions:

ALBUMS: 1. Jody Harris & Robert Quine: Escape (Infidelity) 30; 2. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: the album Richard recorded last spring and never got around to putting out. 20; 3. The Clash: Sandinista! (Epic) 10; 4. Public Image Ltd: Flowers of Romance (Warner Bros.) 5; 5. Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna (Modern) 5.

SINGLES: 1. Rolling Stones: “Start Me Up” (Rolling Stones); 2. Ramones: “We Want the Airwaves” (Sire); 3. Hank Williams Jr.: “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” (Elektra); 4. Roseanne Cash: “Seven Year Ache” (Columbia)

EPs: 1. A Taste of DNA (American Clave).

LOCAL BANDS: 1. DNA; 2. The Bloods; 3. Robert Quine.

P.S. Perhaps it will help to explain if I list the other albums that would have been in the running for my “Top 10”: Stones, Iggy’s Party, and Miles Davis, which in various ways manifested varying degrees of contempt for their audience so palpable they were ultimately unplayable; Ramones’ Pleasant Dreams and the Byrne-Eno album, which just didn’t work somehow; and John Lee Hooker’s Live Alone Volume 1, which is really all old stuff anyway.

Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll Ballot 1981

LESTER BANGS: ALBUMS: 1. Jody Harris/Robert Quine: Escape (Infidelity)30; 2. “Velvet Underground 1966” (bootleg) 20; 3. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: Richard Hell & the Voidoids Now (Richard recorded it last spring but never got around to releasing it) 15; 4. The Clash: Sandinista (Epic) 5; 5. Public Image Ltd: Flowers of Romance (Warner Bros.) 5; 6. The Mekons (Red Rhino import) 5; 7. Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna (Modern) 5; 8. John Lee Hooker: Live Alone Vol. 1 (Labor) 5; 9. Ramones: Pleasant Dreams (Sire) 5; 10. Iggy Pop: Party (Arista) 5.

SINGLES: 1. Rolling Stones: “Start Me Up” (Rolling Stones); 2. Joy Division: “Atmosphere” (Factory 12-inch); 3. The Mekons: “Snow” (Red Rhino import); 4. Hank Williams Jr.: “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” (Elektra); 5. Roseanne Cash: “Seven Year Ache” (Columbia); 6. Ramones: “We Want the Airwaves” (Sire); 7. Blondie: “Rapture” (Chrysalis); 8. Afrika Bombaataa: “Zulu Nation Throwdown” (Paul Winley 12-inch); 9. That Charlie Daniels single that goes “blah blah water, she’s the devil’s daughter, she’s hard and she’s cold and she’s mean, blah blah blah, blah blah to wash away New Orleans”; 10. Richard Lloyd: “Get Off My Cloud” (Ice House).

EPS: 1. DNA: “A Taste of DNA” (American Clave); 2. The Angry Samoans: “Inside My Brain” (Bad Trip); 3. Dead Kennedys: “In God We Trust, Inc.” (Alternative Tentacles).

LOCAL BANDS: 1. DNA; 2. The Bloods; 3. The Angry Samoans.

and

FOLK AND ROCK

ALBUMS I LIKED THIS YEAR

By L. Bangs

1. Quine & Harris: Escape (Infidelity) 30; 2. The Clash: Sandinista (CBS) 10; 3. Public Image Ltd.: What the Hell’s the Name of that Fucker? (Warners) 5; 4. Beck Bogert & Appice (Epic) 5; 5. Beck Bogert & Appice Live (Japanese Epic) 5; 6. Grateful Dead: Dead Set (Artesia) 2; 7. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: Second Album Richard Never Got Around to Titling or Releasing 2; 8. Stevie Nix: Rat Poison (Chump Change) 2; 9. Rolling Stones: What’s in the Can, Charlie? (Mango) 2; 10. Muammar Qaddafi: Live on Hee Haw (Shelby Singleton) 2.

and

Just to save some time, here’s NEXT YEAR’S TOP 10

1. Robert Quine Orchestra: I Heard Her Call My Name Symphony (Columbia); 2. DNA Live at Madison Square Garden (Prestige); Richard Hell Sings the R. Dean Taylor Songbook (Tamla); 4. Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Heard Ya Missed Us, Well We’re Back (Factory); 5. The Clash: Rappin’ with Bert ’n’ Big Bird (Guest Artist: Oscar the Grouch) (Sesame); 6. Ramones: 14,000,000 Records (Epic); 7. Sue Saad and the Next with Robert Fripp: Jiggle Themes from Prime Time (Verve); 8. Lichtensteiner Polka Band: Hamtramck Oi Gassers (WEA); 9. Brian Eno: 24 New Songs with Bridges & Everything! (Egregious 2-album set); 10. Miles Davis: Rated X (Alternate Take) (Columbia).

Lester Bangs - Meat Loaf: A Political Manifesto of Sorts - Hit Parader - January 1979

Not sure if this counts as wrongfooted or rightfooted by history (the dissage of Wire is certainly wrongfooted - I assume the lifeless record he heard was Chairs Missing?) but an enjoyable if over-exuberant contrarian take on the Bat Out Of Hell multiplatinum-shipper, with named-and-shamed swipes (playful) at major rock critics of the time. Sort of a proto-Chuck Eddy move. (The Lisa referenced in the text must be Lisa Robinson, his editor?)

Meat Loaf Nation

Hit Parader
January 1979

Meat Loaf - Why Him?

I Would Buy A Used Car From Meat Loaf -
A Political Manifesto Of Sorts by Lester Bangs

Robert Christgau, whom not a man nor woman here among us would dare challenge for his throne as Dean Of American Rock Critics (Yeah, but what about the Dean of Senegalese Rock Critics, huh?) (Lisa, I beg your pardon, you do seem to get around a lot, perhaps you after all want to contest Mr. Christgau for the crown 'n' scepter or whatever the hell it is deans tote around with them? "No thanks. I have to go interview Jerri Hall...why don't you and Billy Altman slug it out with him, Lester?" Okay, if you'll change the name of this magazine from Hit Parader to Incest - come to think of it, we'd probably sell more copies of it that way, specially if we put the Bee Gees on the cover into the bargain), recently said to me these exact words: "I'm proud that the Village Voice 'Riffs" section," which Big Bob edits, "is the last bastion of pretentious rock criticism."

We were having two beers and two hamburgers at the time. And speaking of time (oh, yeah; that stuff), in the time between these thoughts and words turn turn turning till everybody's been burned one must in the face of all artificial energy ask if this is placing too great a burden on Bob's shoulders. I think so, don't you? Sure. (God, I feel like Mr. Rogers, writing in this lousy magazine.) Okay, so let's, uh, let's...hey let's SEIZE THE MOTHAHUMPIN TIME & DAM WELL DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT? I WANNA KNOW, ARE YOU PART OF THE SOLUTION OR PART OF THE PROBLEM? IT ONLY TAKES FIVE SECONDS TO DECIDE YOUR PURPOSE HERE ON THE PLANET? (To steal Super Sneaky Squirtin' Sticks c. WHAM-O Inc., from Kay-Mart, that's why.) SO I WANNA KNOW ARE YOU READY FOR THE NIGHT TRAIN? READY READY READY READY and furthermore GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE? I GOT MAH EYES WIDE OPEN!

Well, then, good then - we will hereinafter endeavor to make Hit Parader the most pretentious rock mag around: critics whom no one has ever heard of or certainly would not recognize on the street squabbling interminably over nothing like whether say Kaya or Darkness at the Edge of Town is (as sex critic A) "one of the most masterful manifestations of a fundamental change in the dental charts of rock occurring during this vernal equinox" or (according to Brew 102) "a bucket of shit."

Yeah! What fun all you readers'll have, watching us rock critics here every month, picking the onions out of each others' teeth! So, herewith and with no little pomp I fire the first salvo: MEATLOF! (oops, spelled it wrong) Meat Loaf is (sic) a genius. I'm listening to his first album through headphones right now as I write this, and you can see from what rubbish you already read how this record has inspired me. I love it. Wow, here comes the Delaney & Bonnie section! Hey, where'd they get those black chicks (hope I'm not being presumptuous calling 'em that) chanting "Shop shop shoo" just at the right time! Hey hey HEY! Wodda recud! Whooops, what's that, I smell smoke, oh it's a synthesizer and what sounds like a carnival barker imitating Phil Rizzuto - holy cow indeed! This record is like a one-way ticket to Coney Island, if not that place where they sent Pinocchio and the other little fools to eat cotton candy till dey come a crop a vomit.

Oh my god, you're not gonna believe this, but right at this very moment (well, not while you're reading it, but while I'm writing it; guess we must make allowances for the yawns of Father Time who has seen ALL of 'em come and go, besides which the Meat Loaf circus is probably playing somewhere, in some stucco-armored suburban bedroom way down Encino way even as your eyes scan these codwallopings, in fact a record as great and with such universal appeal as Bat Out Of Hell, why hell I bet it's somewhere lots of places in fact, every second of your waking day, while you're taking a crap, while you're stuck in traffic, while you're wondering if she's gonna get weird when you say "Wanna come up to my place for a while?", while you're whiling away the endless existential hours making love, a physical juxtaposition mit attendant rotational/gravitational differentials which Mr. Loaf himself is not ashamed to say he is totally in favor of, as did Sky Saxon before him - face it, you're never gonna escape from this elpee slab of gorgonzola) Mr. Loaf and his lady are getting ready to, uh, wait a second, click, dit dit dit dit dit bzz, click, brrring, “Robinson Amusements incorporated.”

“Hello, is Lisa there?” “Who is calling, please?” “Halston.” “Okay, just hold on a second, sir.” “…Daaa-ling…!” “Lissen Lisa, this is Lester, I have to know whether in the process of describing this Meat Loaf fellow you saddled me with, I can refer to or describe the sights or sounds of implied effluvia of a man and woman having sexual intercourse?” “Well, Lester, you know Hit Parader’s policy on that word…!” “Lisa, please, I don’t even use it in my daily speech at Washington Square Park! I just want to know if I can describe a couple of heterosexual adults…uh, well, you know…”

“Is it absolutely necessary to the piece?” “It’s on the record.” “Hmmm. Well, I guess if we can print makeup tips we can get by with this. Just try to curb your Meltzerisms and not say anything bad about people like Clive or Ahmet Ertegun, okay? You know you’ve been a very bad boy lately, don’t shape up and mama gon’ spank!” “Yeah, I know, you’re right Lisa, it’s okay, Mr. Loaf’s on Epic and I forgot the name of their president, okay, yeah, great, thanx, like I said, whew!” - yes my friends as I was saying, should you happen to ply up the provender necessary unto purchase of this Meat Loaf album, which is the only one out so far so you can’t get too confused, then you and your lady friend too if you’re so minded can apprehend the luxuriant privilege of hearing a man and a woman (Mr. Loaf and his Femme de soir, sans doute) MAKING LOVE as all the broken umbrellas are shipped in dark slitlid cattlecars like fallen silos off to cherbourg death camps.

Now, here’s where the political part comes in: just because Mr. Loaf is in favor of heterosexual intercourse, apparently, all the gangly four-eyes spindly-legged hunchbacked sissifixated rock critics have decided that he stinks! Never mind that American boys and girls, or American citizens with money of whatever wherever, ran out by the hundreds of thousands to buy this mothahumpin album - these self-appointed expert hotshot rock critics have all decided that Mr. Loaf is just a sham if not a scam if not both.

Now, I ask you, in the light of that, how could they possibly have the gall to think they’d gleaned enough of your trust to get you to go out and buy the Sex Pistols or whichever foulmouthed hyped-up bit of regurgitated Dylan dog vomit they’re pumping up this week?! Forget it! Robert Christgau made Bat Out Of Hell his “Must to Avoid” in the Dean of American Consumer Guides the same month he made an album by an English group called Wire “Pick Hit.” Pretty funny, a dean picking hits in the first place, Clark Kerr abacussing out Screamin’ Jay Hawkin’s in the 7 A.M. light. But I heard that album by Wire, that “Pick Hit.” It sucks.

It’s the deadest record, possibly, that I have ever been privy to in my life to date. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with Meat Loaf blasting through my headphones, taking the words right out of my mouth, thanks a lot you fat sonofabitch, but no, that’s just kvetching between friends, or should I say stars and their functionaries, you all know if you seen say My Man Godfrey what that’s about, and is not Meat Loaf a metaphor for the Man Godfrey in us all, I ask you? Though starbrite now, has he not so obviously, as have we not each, been a Godfrey at some point in his poor pathetic life? Yes. This man has been thru the tongs and pangs and backalleyes of hell.

He’s PAID HIS DUES BUSTER, so you better just SHUT UP whatever you were gonna say agin him. Like f’rinstance this other rock critic Billy Altman, who also writes for rock magazines, well he happens not to like the Meat Loaf album any better’n Mr. Xgau, in fact he described it to me thus: “A real sucker punch. Meat Loaf’s just a patsy for Jim Steinman and who’s really getting taken with all this let’s - fill - the - cars - and - girls - operatic - Springsteen - gap business is the poor suckers that end up buying a record like that piece of crud.”

So, you hear that, that’s what that guy thinks of you, all you Meat Loaf fans, he thinks you’re so stupid he can’t even be bothered just calling you jerks, he’s gotta condescend to you “poor suckers.”

Christ, and people wonder why rock critics are looked upon by the populace gen’ral as below the gnat. Hey, wait a second! That means he must think the same thing of me, since I like the Meat Loaf album too! All right, that’s it - jeeze, how appropriate that just as I am writing this Meat Loaf is singing, “All Revved Up With No Place To Go,” now why can’t these stupid rock critics see that just like Dylan in the Sixties he, Meat Loaf, the Big M, defines for we, the people of the Meat Loaf Nation, exactly what we are thinking and what we should do about it at any given moment.

Sure am glad there’s always some guy like that around. Meat Loaf is the Dylan of the Seventies, the real peoples’ populist Rocky type Dylan, not some twit like Elvis Costello. Well, look - you’re pissed off, I’m pissed off. Are we just gonna let these pea-brains keep on squatting round our headphones, muttering how we really should be listening to the latest Punkenwald monstrosity instead of real music?

Hell no! I, as a disaffected, possibly disbarred rock critic, want to give up my media soapbox, let Dave Marsh have it so he can push more Bruce Springsteen albums about the hotrod American adolescence he (Dave) never had. Let me just mellow down easy ‘mong the people, my people, the only people not covered in People magazine, and that’s because we’re real people, the people of Meat Loaf Nation, who may well outnumber you establishment media pigs who don’t wanna think there should be anymore hit singles from this album, and as we gather like Rastas smoking our doobies and plotting our revenge, you may hear our battle cry: “WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!” Either that or “THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!”

"The inaugural Meat Loaf album" - bombastic, moi?

A clever sod, Jim Steinman - seldom has cleverness been so misapplied (sez the Wire-loving four-eyed rockcrit)

Me on the Steinman Universe

Snippets from his interviews:

Steinman: When I was writing the record, I'd say my major influences were the key things I'd grown up with - Wagner, The Who and Alfred Hitchcock movies. Those songs are cinematic. But producers are a bit like critics. I'm sure you'll recall that great line that Frank Zappa came up with: 'Rock critics are people who can't write, writing about people who can't talk for people who can't read.' It's hard to generalize but I've read some brilliant writing about rock 'n roll and I've also read Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone who I think is a complete fool. I'm astounded that he has the power that he possesses on that platform. He regularly reaches the heights of lunacy. His review of the latest Patti Smith album was the worst piece of rock 'n roll writing I've ever read.

Meat Loaf: Jim has got the rock 'n roll recipe pinned down to six key ingredients. He views it like a menu and we've gone all the way with it. He's the Julia Child of rock 'n roll.

Steinman: Well, it's just that the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are really only six essentials, beyond the obvious requirements of melody rhythm and lyrics. I think the art of creating great rock 'n roll comes down to

1) fever

2) fantasy

3) romance

4) violence

5) rebellion and

6) fun.

It's how these six things are interplayed that makes a record magnificent. To me the greatest rock 'n roll is both romantically violent and violently romantic. It's not one or the other. It's just that the romance should be desperate. Be My Baby is desperately violent - it's a cry of desperation. Whereas the Sex Pistols are transparent.

Q. Let's rap about the future of rock 'n roll in general.

Steinman: I don't think that records have begun to scratch the surface of what they can do. The more Fleetwood Mac's there are, putting out albums of ten short and cute little cuts, the more it hurts music in general. I worry about the effects of formats and such in the long term. Rock 'n roll and TV are the two most powerful art forms the world has ever seen, yet they are probably the two most misused mediums. I mean, think of what TV could do....

Jim Steinman: I grew up studying classical music and even before I heard any other kind of music, I'd been exposed to all sorts of classical things. The style I was most heavily drawn to was German romantic music, especially opera. When I was 14, I became an incredible Wagner freak. And my other favorite kind of music was Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. I used to listen to Wagner and rock back to back.

I'd listen to an entire Wagner opera and be totally paralyzed by it - I literally wouldn't move an inch because I was afraid I might upset something. I was somewhat insane in those days. So I'd be virtually paralyzed there listening to these five-hour operas in complete form. Then when it was over I'd sit in awe for an hour or so and then I'd put on Little Richard and it would be a magnificent combination. The more I listened, the more I was convinced that Wagner and Little Richard came from the same place. Even though Wagner elevated me to a point that Little Richard couldn't achieve. Little Richard wasn't so much elevation as revitalization.

The thing is that they both amplified human beings. The Wagner material was about God and Little Richard sounded like God. It made me realize that you don't have to remain a human being - that one of the great uses of art (which I'd only heard talked about as some valuable cultural asset that meant nothing to me) is that it was like taking a pill and you were no longer just a human being. That's how I perceived the situation when I was 14 anyway. I just never thought of rock 'n roll and classical music all that differently - to me they were essentially the same thing.

Meat Loaf: Jim has got this old book of reviews of Wagner operas, and they all panned the hell out of Wagner's work. The critics hated it.

Steinman: Yeah if you take out the names, the original reviews of Wagner's operas read exactly like rock 'n roll reviews. Wagner's arch enemy - who was like Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone to my way of thinking - was a guy named Hanslick who wrote for a German paper equivalent to the New York Times in America. His reviews were the most vicious slurs on the greatest operas ever written.

When Wagner premiered his opera Tristan and Isolde, Hanslick wrote that it was 'a barbaric savage assault on the ears.' He said it was 'nothing but noise.' He noted that the next day he felt sick and his ears were still ringing from 'the primitive, dissonant cacophony.' It was, he said, 'sexually lewd and designed to arouse people into a frenzy.' It just went on and on. And it's still the same nowadays. It just shows that there's really nothing new under the sun.

Meat Loaf: The Rite Of Spring by Stravinsky actually caused a riot, didn't it?

Steinman: Yes, and that's one of my favorite things in history. When The Rite Of Spring was performed, in Paris in 1913, it caused one of the major riots in history. The entire audience tore the Paris Opera House apart and it had to be rebuilt. Police were called in, three people were killed, it was amazing. I remember discovering the story behind it when I was 14 and I thought, 'what a magnificent power.' If a work of music could actually cause people to riot, that is astonishing. It's destructive but it's also magnificent. So I always think of that as one of the great moments in history.

Stravinsky was savagely attacked by the media. They wanted to deport him because he wrote dissonant music. They couldn't believe that someone would put those particular ten notes together. They considered it sacrilege. Now those same chords that Stravinsky put together are used in every Starsky and Hutch episode on TV. They've been totally assimilated into movie music and everything.

So that's how I became aware of the incredible power of sound, as well as its function as an art form. So I was fascinated by Wagner and Little Richard, and later in the early 60's, by the production techniques of Phil Spector. There was a four year period during which I lost interest in rock 'n roll but the obsession returned through the records Phil Spector made with the Ronettes. The first time I heard Be My Baby I had chills. It's still basically unexplainable to me.

Steinman: I don't think that our album is over-produced at all. But even Todd Rundgren, our producer, felt it would be viewed as such by some critics. Todd was very reluctant to do a lot of the things we wanted to try. He said at the beginning his job was to get our vision onto the record and he really did succeed in doing that. I suspect that he probably disagreed with about 60% of it, but he brilliantly captured it, nonetheless.

Anyway, anyone who thinks the album is over-produced should hear what I had to leave out. For instance, in Bat Out Of Hell (the title track) I had to delete two of my favorite things. In the soft section, I wanted to have a boy's choir. I argued with Todd about it and he wanted to do it with the existing vocal backup section and then speed up the tape and use other technical tricks to get the boy's choir sound. I said that we needed a real boy's choir but he insisted. But it didn't work out so we weren't able to use it. You see, I'd heard this symphony by Mahler and I really wanted a boy's choir. There's nothing more beautiful than the sound of 20 boy sopranos singing.

I also wanted a choir in the motorcycle section of Bat Out Of Hell. Just like in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, they used a choir sounding like it was singing whole clusters of notes. I wanted to use an entire orchestra, and I wanted to use them viciously. Procol Harum have done some of the best things in that vein in the past. Giving an orchestra special parts to play rather than simply supplementing the band.

"I awoke about three a.m. on a floor littered with unconscious bodies in a hotel above Sunset Strip. It was at a time when the deal with Warner's was about to fall through. Earlier in the day, Meat had picked up these two identical twins - human surfboards with hair - and bought them back to the hotel. They cooked this huge duck in white wine sauce for dinner and when I woke up, the room was fairly dripping with it.

"I was looking out at the vista of violence that is L.A. - except out there they call it romantic violence - thinking about how I'd like to wipe away the stagnate dross of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles with a single stroke. Then I saw this chemical fire in the distance. It was eerie - a blue and red haze everywhere. I felt like I was trapped in a jukebox. About ten minutes later all the smoke was absorbed into the valley and the network of city lights molted into electrical strings and veins. I thought: 'L.A. is a total junkie, the rouge on a scar. And Fleetwood Mac is the rouge.'

"Then Sam, the only other conscious person in the room, said he'd like to levitate. I said, 'Just stay where you are, because everybody else is sinking.' Suddenly the image dawned as a powerful metaphor for rock & roll: when everybody else is sinking and going the way of L.A. music, when fever and passion become an air-conditioned thrill and fantasies become cluttered by tax-returns, rock & roll dreams come through."