Entertainment
Page 6 University Daily Kansan, December 5, 1980
Upper left: guitarist Marc Koch. Lower left: Koch. Lower right: bassist Lisa Werman. Above:
drummer Frank Loose.
Get Smart tells audiences to wise up
By BLAKE GUMPRECHT Staff Writer
Staff Writer
Frank Loose displays mude self-portrait
photographs at art exhibits.
Marc Koch plots his and more bizarre hairstyles to have his hair styled. Already he has it cut so angles to a V in the center of his forehead—like something you'd expect to see on an "AddamsFamily" shirt.
Lisa Wirtman tots around campus atop a pink, spike-heated shoes in a mock tribute to Dora.
It's all for reaction.
They are Get Smart, only three months old and innovative bands in the Kentucky Kawasaki.
Loose, Koch and Wertman, all three roommates and students, have the same idea when they hop on a stage with electric guitars, a bass and drums.
While most area bands seem content to bang out cover after cover of rock'n'roll classics and recent favorites along with a few originals in the same dance style, Get Smart writes songs that are meant to do more than just fill up the dance floor.
Their music is unusual and often ex-persistent. Many mainstreamers would simply call it a struggle.
Hence the name Get Smart.
"The name has nothing to do with the TV show," Koch says. "Oh, sure. I thought of that."
But it's a definite statement. It deals with all the apathy, the feeling that there's nothing you can do."
Indeed, Get Smart is not just another pop band. It's a cliche, and they have something to say and they say it through music. The lyrics are written first. The music comes later.
"We're trying to show them that there is more to the world than what you see in J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward." loose says. "We want people to understand that smart thought of using, but Smart sounded better."
Get Smart sings its social commentary with
songs like "Numbers and Colours," a subtle anti-
war song, "Justice in Full Motion," inspired by the
1960 film, "A Beautiful Day was Different." Koch writes most of the lyrics.
The band's melodies, furthermore, are well-structured and simple—almost sparse—and the lyrics easy to understand even through a muddy sound mix.
Get Smart has only been played together since August and has only played in public four times, excluding parties. Their most recent anniversary bash last night at Off-the-Wall Hall.
"We don't want to overblown our lyrics with the music," Loose explains. "We want our lyrics to be free."
They'll play again tomorrow night at a "Hock Against Reagan" party at 81/2 A/W $1,500 in Chelsea, NY.
the Young Reagans, formerly Home Improvements, is also on the bill.
Wertman and Loose didn't begin playing until last summer. Wertman bought her bass in June after acouring the classified for months, and later at a club where the drums along with albums a few weeks later.
"This is the main thing for us right now," Loose says.
Already, though, Get Smart has 14 originals and the lyrics for several others. Koch, furthermore, plans to skip spring semester to work fulltime so he can save money for the band.
All three met while living in Oliver Hall in 1978. Both Koch, from the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, II, and Loose, Lake Worth, Fla., senior, came to KU to study graphics.
Koch, who has been playing the guitar since he was 13, was playing in another local band, the Fizz Tabs, when the three first talked of putting their own band together last semester.
"I was very, very disappointed and angry," he says. "Here I had all these songs and ideas in my head and all they wanted to do was play Beatles and Who covers."
thing over and over again . . . there's only so much you can take." Koch says. "We're trying to show people that different types of music can be interesting."
Talk of originality dominates conversations with Get Smart. They don't like playing covers and have set a goal of introducing a new song at each performance.
Still, it appears unlikely that Get Smart will ever gain the broad local popularity of the Debs, the Clean or even the Blue Rididim Band. Simply, they are not a dance band. Oh, their music is danceable, but their covers are few and unknown to most.
"It's fun to play 'You Can't Do That' and
things like that, but to keep playing the same
Their music is unlike that of any other area band.
"Our original material—you can talk all you want about Joy Division and the other people we like—but no one influences me but myself . . ."
Koch says.
"And the guys at the Wheel," says Loose, intertwining with a grin.
The guys at the wheel inspired Get Smart's satirical "Moderne Boy" 'I'm living in a modern world/I'm sleeping with a modern girl/I'm dancing and beat/I'll have fun with the people I meet ...'
Loose and Koch regularly stop at the Wheel for a beer. Loose, with his shirt always buttoned to the top button and his rat tail hair cut, and Koch, with his "beak" hair cut . . . well, they just don't fit in amid the Izod shirts, Top Siders and Calvin Klein ieans.
"We like to watch them watching us," Loose savs.
Says Wertman, "It's all a statement, just like our music. We're not trying to shock. We're just trying to have a reaction, to change people to think personally, as pink hair or bleached hair and just it's fine."
Cultural forecast: entertainment may be next religion
Bv KEVIN MILLS
Entertainment Editor
Spawned by the self-serving society of the 1970s, a new cultural force is poised to dominate American life to an extent greater than the government.
Backed by big bucks, coddled by the mass media and devout of morality, entertainment is often a source of violence.
L
Yes, entertainment. Unlimited pleasure.
Heaven on earth. As technology progresses,
entertainment will ultimately create a utopian
life. Perfectly programmed, available 24 hours a
day, it will eliminate the hardship of contending
with a flawed reality.
I'm overstating the case of course.
Entertainment is not, and never will be, a cure-all for our social ills. But with increased leisure time and a high standard of living, it has become reckoned with. And it shows no slim of lettuce up.
The 70s saw a resurgence of attendance at American theaters and music halls. Moviegoers turned in doves for such sheer entertainment spectacles as "Jaws," "Star Wars" and "Gregle." Cable television has proliferated across the land. Wide-screen TV, once a concept in the stories of Ray Bradbury, is now a reality in most homes and office buildings for years, home computer sales have indicated that the public is ready for the next quantum leap in entertainment-artificial intelligence.
Computers, with their wealth of knowledge and function, may someday allow anyone to become a filmmaker, a musician or an artist. When home computers are eventually linked to a world data bank, everyone will have access to the world's greatest library. Such fingerprinting could be useful for protecting homebodies, never wanting or needing to leave the protective shell of their computerized homes.
The applications of home computers seem limitless. Already they are handling budgets, recording news and playing games. They have the capability to run a house (turn on lights, open doors, turn on thermostat), although the mechanical devices for such operations have not yet been marketed.
As long as public theater and movie houses survive, technological advances will be made to keep the consumer happy. Soon, a movie may become a powerful physical experience as well as an auditory one. Movies 3-D and 3-D have already made motion pictures a bit more like real life. Theoretically, there's no end in sight. Perhaps by tinkering with the chemical and electrical balance of the brain's pleasure centers we may be able to experience the life of a flicker-eared "feelie" in the Orwellian sense of the term.
Some speculate that this would mean the demise of public theaters and movies. Why film "Star Wars XIV" when it could be beamed directly to home computer terminals? But such reasoning ignores the communal aspects of public entertainment: audience participation, mingling at intermission, and, most importantly, getting out of the house.
Barry Malzkberg, a science fiction writer and self-proclaimed "Jeremiah at four cents a word," said in the Jan. 1979 "High Times" that by the year 2010 everything will be entertainment. In the vein of Marshall McLuhan, he reasons that "after you've seen 'Mork and Mindy,' and the president being shot, it all becomes entertainment." He suggests that Mr. McLuhan will define the same death; sex, moral difference, visual difference. "The primary pursuit of Americans will be death. They're really turned on by death," Malzkberg contends.
While such a dim view of humanity is shared only by the hardest of cynics, there is logic to the argument that entertainment could oversteep its bounds. The next great religious revival? Like entertainment offers something for everyone. Perhaps even life and death.
Rock poets tap American spirit on new albums
By MARK PITTMAN
Staff Writer
Listening to Nell Young's latest, "Hawks and Doves," one gets the distinct sensation that one is watching reurns of Election Night. Cronkite read the roll call of the states as the pressure mounted toward the Republican conservative tidal wave that swept the country. Each cut on "Hawks" wraps Young a little tighter in the American flag and answers the Reagan query; "Are you any better off now than you were four years ago?"
This album is as spit in its personality as Young's last studio outfit, "Rust Never Sleep."
Review
You choke the dichotomy between New Wave and gold fok in "Rust."
Young picks the widening rift between political ideologies as the theme of "Hawks and Dyers."
ideologies as the theme of "Hawks and Doves." The "Hawks" side speaks with the voice of a 24-year-old autoworker who can't find a job, takes pride in the flag and stepped into the voting booth to pull the lever for Reagan. His wife did, too. She was going to attend a green that was going on at the college, and he remembers when you could buy a car for three brand.
With melodies spun from fiddle and steel guitar, Young has brought the recession's blue-collar story to vinyl. The five songs on the "Hawks" side stick to themes of sacrifice, patriotism and sitting tall in the saddle—basic Reagan clichés.
Since the plant hit the skids, the United Auto Workers union has been picking up his check, and he's beginning to lose his faith in the free-enterprise system.
The "Hawks" centerpiece, "Comin' Apart at Nail," expounds on the uncertainty and frustration of this decade.
rung singst. "It's awful hard to find a job/ On one side the government, the other the mob/Hey, hey ain't that right/ The workin' man's in for a hell of a fight."
Reagan sang, "Get the government off the backs of the neocle."
Whether through rock 'n' roll or political oratory, it is the message that is important. Young has adopted the person to illustrate a mood of America, from doves to hawks.
On the flip side, Young reassumes his old mask of a lost little idealist adrift in a sea of cynicism. A soft, strumming acoustic guitar and a harp replace the country-swing mood of "Hawks."
"On Doves," Young sings of the death of liberalism and the end of the "Lost in Space" generation. "Captain Kennedy." Young says, "If you are a patriot, you're safe, and now his son must go to war and 'kill good.'"
"Hawks and Doves" is Young's testament to the events of the fall of 1980. It is musical journalism that neither condemns nor readily excludes. It taps a waltzing of the new American songbook, "I Can't Live Without You," bled. It is a spirit that is simply confused about where America is going and where it has been.
The straight population has a morbid fascination with the sheer concept of heroin addiction. The needle brings out the worst in stigma and the ultimate in ecstasy, according to users. The fast lane was discovered by a skin-popper and widened by mainliners way back in the bebop jazz days. Rock 'n' roll history is loaded with casualties to Sister Morphine: Keith Richard, Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Lou Reed.
★★★★★★★★★★★
But any addict with sense realizes that "junk is
a 9 to 5 gig like anything else." That statement was written by a 13-year-old boy in his first novel, "The Basketball Diaries." The boy, Jim Carroll, is now 29. He is been off junk since 1974 and has his first album, "Catholic Boy," out on the Ato label.
"Catholic Boy" stems with the seamy side of city streets. Vapors pour from manhole covers, while pimps and dealers run over junkies lying in the gutter. Friends fall off rooftops stoned in the
cough syrup and airplane glue. Henry Miller would be right at home here in the Tropic when he was a teenager.
Jim Carroll's pedigree makes a listener's
expectations almost untaintable. After the "Basketball Diaries" was published, Jack Kerouac, chronicler of the Beats, said Carroll wrote better than "89 percent of the novelists working today." Not bad for someone just out of grade school. When he was 22, his third volume of poems, "Living at the Movies," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His circle of friends includes Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Alain Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. He used to date Patti Smith, the leather rocker, and shoot baskets with the then Lew Alecinder.
"Catholic Boy's" lyrics deliver on that promise. Carroll reaches out and stops the heart. He then brings it back to beating with a blow from his vocal fist. He doesn't sing, he recites the words of the poem and gives his confession to a priest who cannot absolve him. In the purest sense, he is a Catholic boy.
Carroll's band is what keeps him from becoming a morose Bruce Springsteen or a latter-day Lou Reed. Both the B Street Band and the Velvets were class musicians capable of welding poet's eyes to rock 'n' roll riffs. Carroll's band suffers from that New Wave three chord progression disease that marks the worst of that era, which has led to a melancholy tone, and does not vary from cut to cut on the album. They sound a lot of a lot like any garage band that might do soundtracks for lazy film
Maybe it's intentional, but it's probably incompetence.
The final judgment on the Catholic boy is that he already writes better songs than 89 percent of the rockers working today. The catechism that comes next album will be what wins him redemption.