Spokane Spokesman-Review, May 27, 1979

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Spokane Spokesman-Review

Washington publications

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There's something amiss
in the holy land of rock music


Abe Peck / Chicago Sun-Times

A few years ago Bill Graham, then the country's ranking rock promoter, staged a stadium-sized benefit for the San Francisco school athletics program, which was broke. The affair attracted talent from Santana to Willie Mays, along with some 50,000 ticket buyers, and had a cooperative, positive spirit.

Yet something about it suggested a question: Did Graham think that this frenzy, fantasy and crowd fascination could be harnessed by reactionary forces in the same way the Nazis took control of German culture?

Graham, himself an escapee from Nazi Germany, replied that he thought it couldn't happen here.

Now I'm not paranoid enough to hear coming out of my stereo speakers, but some recent developments speak ill for rock and roll's current relationship to matters of race and religion. The gamut runs from New Wave hero Elvis Costello to the lesser lights of the punk scene. From the utterances of some white rock fans to Frank Zappa's ugly ode to a "Jewish Princess," to punk bands coming on like Hitler's children.

The best-publicized incident concerns the rock and roll tag-team match that took place in Columbus, Ohio, in late March. In one corner was singer-guitarist-Buddy Holly-look-alike Costello and his entourage. Singer Bonnie Bramlett, guitarist Stephen Stills and some compadres held down the other. The festivities began when a drunken Costello punctuated his remarks by running down James Brown as "a jive-ass nigger" and Ray Charles as "nothing but a blind, ignorant, nigger."

Reportedly, the immediate debate concluded with some good right hands and feet from Bramlett. But word spread and Costello received death threats and enough critical brickbats to encourage him to meet the press in New York.

Costello told the rock scribes that he'd shot his mouth off simply to get rid of Bramlett and the others. "It became necessary to outrage these people with the most offensive and obnoxious remarks I could muster." One thing in Costello's favor: He knows "offensive and obnoxious remarks" when he hears - or says - them.

Costello's manager, Jake Riviera, correctly labeled the incident "a drunken barroom idiocy." But what makes Costello's remarks more than just inebriated ranting is that they seem to have company.

Last summer, the Rolling Stones outraged many people with their now-famous remark about the all-night sexual proclivities of "black girls." At least the stereotype in "Some Girls" was tempered a bit by the next, less-quoted line, in which Mick Jagger lamented his own inability to rise to the occasion. And "Some Girls" was more sexist than racist, another chapter in the same book.

But what were we to make of punk dean Lou Reed's mean-spirited ditty, "I Want To Be Black," from his last live album? Reed defended his casual references to "niggers," Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but saying he was actually satirizing " - up Jewish college students" who want to be hiply black. Great consolation; when somebody in the audience called him on his "dirty Jew jokes," he cursed them out. "I never said I was tasteful," Reed continued.

Writing in the current issue of the Village Voice, critic Lester Bangs discussed rock's intentional and unintentional racism. Bangs, who cares about New Wave music, is angered that Nico, the former icy lead singer with Reed's legendary Velvet Underground, sang "Deutschland uber Allies" at a New York punk club and then explained her departure from her former record company to New Wave Rock magazine thusly: "I said to some interviewer that I didn't like Negroes.... They took it personally... although it's a whole different race. I mean Bob Marley doesn't resemble a Negro does he? ... I don't like the features. They're so much like animals ... It's cannibals, no?"

Bangs also mentions punk legend Iggy Stooge's introduction from his "Metallic K.P.": "Our next selection tonight for all you Hebrew ladies in the audience is entitled "Rich Bitch." (Is this why "the Ig" chose to live in Berlin?) And Bangs fires both barrels at the offhanded tribute rendered in a Florida punk magazine by one Miriam Linna, whose estimable musical career has included stints with such musical giants as the Cramps, Nervus Rex and Zantees.

“I love the Ramones,” wrote Linna, hailing America’s archetypal punk group. “This is the celebration of everything American – everything teen-aged and wonderful and white and urban.”

Bangs: “You could say the ‘white’ jumping out of that sentence was just like (black jazz great) Ornette Coleman declaring, “This is out music,” except that the same issue featured a full-page shot of Miriam and one of her little friends posing proudly with their leathers and shades and a pistol in front of the headquarters of the United White People’s Party, under a sign bearing three flags: ‘GOD’ (cross), ‘COUNTRY’ (stars and stripes), ‘RACE’ (swastika).”

“Sorry, Miriam,” Bangs says, “I can go just so far with affectations of kneejerk cretinism before I puke.”

The punk scene alternates between deliberately nasty comments and a lack of awareness that’s almost comatose. During a set by a hot punk band one kid kept yelling for a song called “Hey Little Gook!” Asked about it after the show, a band member told Bangs: “Aw, c’mon, that’s just like World War II movie where they say ‘Kraut’ and ‘slants’ and stuff like that.”

It’s not just the unknowns who are unconscious. That titan of weirdness, Frank Zappa, recently released “Jewish Princess,” a song filled with ugliness masquerading as satire. Yet Zappa told Rich Wiseman of People magazine that he was stunned and outraged by a protest from the Anti-Defamation League.

I’m not suggesting that a Ministry of Truth rule on lyrics. And I’m not sure if a new group of music fans called Rock against Racism will catch on here, as it did in England, where the general social situation is more intense. But I like one of Bang’s statements:

The first is Bangs’: “Since rock and roll is bound to stay in your life you would hope to see it reach some point where it might not add to the cruelty and exploitation already in the world… If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay (to my knowledge, Bangs is none of the above, whatever that’s worth) those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, little torture-flak hailing on you wherever you go. “Another reason for getting rid of all of those little verbal barbs is that no matter how you intend them, you can’t say them without risking misinterpretation by some other bigoted ass; your irony might be taken seriously.”



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The Spokesman-Review, May 27, 1979


Abe Peck's essay on racism and antisemitism in rock includes a brief account of the Columbus incident.

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1979-05-27 Spokane Spokesman-Review page F-01 clipping 01.jpg
Clipping.

1979-05-27 Spokane Spokesman-Review page F-01.jpg
Page scan.

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