disco talk

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33413, 20 December 1973, Page 5

disco talk

The Guess Who 10. RCA Victor APLI-0130. The Guess Who is one of the very few groups that has been able to combine dedicated musicianship with commercial rock. They produce a sound that is at once jumpy (every track is a potential hit single) and thought-provoking and polished.

Without wishing to demean the rest of the group it is only fair to say that the main ingredient in the Guess Who’s success has been their songwriter and lead singer, Burton Cummings. Cummings wrote six of the eight songs on this album, (and most of the songs on the group’s other 9 albums too) and they are the best ones. He has an easy style of writing and a smooth, clear singing style that dominates the group’s sound. Indeed the musicians play for, and around, Cummings—nobody can say that the Guess Who don’t know where their main strength is.

Included on this album is the present hit single “Glamour Boy.” Apparently the idea for this song came from an argument Cummings had with David Bowie. Cummings argued that if the music was any good it would stand up by itself and not need the bizarre make-up and theatrics adopted by Bowie. The argument was never resolved, but it did result in this song. Who knows, there might be a song about Alice Cooper next (especially now that the Guess Who and Alice Cooper are both produced by Jack Richardson).

Guess Who 10 is perhaps just a little too much on the light side and it is cer-

tainly not up to the standard of their best albums, “Wheatfield Soul” and Canned Wheat,” but it is nevertheless, a thoroughly pleasant album that will offend no one.—M.S.

National Lampoon. Lemmings. Blue Thumb Records. ETL 34938.

“Lemmings” is a political statement. “Lemmings” is shrewd social comment. “Lemmings” is a jaundiced view of the youth culture. “Lemmings” is a stage show. “Lemmings” is a very funny record. National Lampoon is the long-established humourous magazine published by various short-term Harvard students. Other than “Lemmings” the only major piece of satire they have produced which has been available in New Zealand was a parody of Hugh Hefner’s glossy celebration of sexual freedom. The National Lampoon people called their version “Pl*yb*y,” and it was funny, too. Now they have done the same with Rock, or more particularly Rock Festivals, or more particularly Woodstock.

Well, let’s face it, even at the time there was something particularly ridiculous (and particularly American) about a bunch of people standing up and congratulating each other for spending three days in the rain-r--something which comparable numbers of Boy Scouts have been doing for years at one Jamboree or another. But of course they weren’t beautiful. And being beautiful was what Woodstock was all about. And being beautiful became a role with its own rituals, rites and raiments. And it sold a lot of records, too.

The record contains some very clever and very accurate musical parodies. Janies Taylor gets his, as does Joe Cocker and “Goldie Oldie” wraps up the Rock ‘n Roll Revival with a very funny song, “Pizza Man.” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (disguised as Freud. Marx, Engels and Jung) also stray into the firing line and every cadillac-uriving, blue grass, get-back-to-the-coun-try-and-be-real soloist who ever laid pick to acoustic is ridiculed right out of the Rockies in the almost cruelly perceptive song, “Colorado.”

Bob Zimmerman is mimicked in lyric and tone and the vicious mindlessness of a iot of heavy rock is captured perfectly in the finale from "Megadeath,” a band which sounds every bit as discordant of many of its "real” counterparts. Linking all this together are some very funny “stage announcements” from a compere who tells the crowd that “ the man next to you is your dinner,” from a member of The Weather Report who tells everybody how to “off themselves” with TNT suppositories, from Farmer Yassir himself, from the ultimate fan—the little groover who autodestructs with “Megadeath.” —M.L.