Music: Vaudeville Rock

Whither rock? If the salad days of Dylan, the Beatles and their near peers constituted its high renaissance, rock music has now evolved into a florid and self-conscious rococo period, which is also, sad to say, often decadent. Once the sound was what mattered most; rhapsodizing players would even turn their backs on the audience, and “performance” was almost a dirty word. Now the show is everything. A few rock groups share the evening with stand-up comedians or clowns and trapeze artists to liven up their act. Some musicians wear mime makeup and practice ersatz Marcel Marceau. Others appear in full drag—flowing scarves, high-heeled wedgies, false eyelashes, mascara, lipstick and cheek-clinging glitter. With the revolt long since gone out of the music, what is left is really a new kind of vaudeville or sometimes a freak show—occasionally first-rate, frequently diverting, but too often merely repulsive. Items:

> Alice Cooper is the name of both the leader and the group that have climbed to infamy as the chief practitioners of what can only be called Grand Guignol rock. The discovery of Frank (Mothers of Invention) Zappa, Alice the group is a gaggle of allegedly straight males who started out by pretending to be transvestites. Now they are into horror and, as they describe it, the purging of the evil within the souls of their young fans. Alice the leader sometimes throws live chickens to the audience, axes dolls to death, carries a snake that sometimes works its way between his legs with phallic suggestiveness, wears a straitjacket, and in final mock penance has himself executed either in a blinking electric chair or on a full-size gallows.

“Violence and sex sell,” says Alice. “That’s our appeal. The audience knows I’m parodying what they see every day on television. We’re the ultimate American band—the end product of an affluent society.” Once in Muskegon, Mich., the offspring of that society tore Alice from the stage, ripping off his clothes and jewelry. Nursing a cut on his back, Alice chirped: “They’re like piranha fish. I like an audience that’s alive.”

Who is Alice the man? If Alice himself still knows, he is not talking. His real name is a closely guarded secret, probably to protect the reputation of his father, who is a Baptist minister in Arizona. What is known is that the singer is a wiry, bleary-looking ex-track star who once won a 26-mile marathon race, then keeled onto a street curb nose first. His still flattened nose is a constant reminder of that day, especially when he walks into a multimirrored bathroom of the 40-room mansion he owns in fashionable Greenwich, Conn. The mansion also sports swastika flags on many of the ceilings, as well as a man-size doll hanging by its neck in the ballroom. When concert tours and promotional appearances do not beckon, Alice can usually be found in his Greenwich “pad,” curled up in an armchair with a six-pack of beer, seeking further inspiration from his TV set.

Alice’s reputation, plus the group’s music—a tight hard-rock blend of unmerciful drumming, lush piano playing, deft guitar work and the leader’s own Transylvanian vocal whine—have made $1,000,000 sellers of their last three Warner Bros. LPs—Love It to Death, Killer and School’s Out (a free pair of bikini panties is included with that album).

> Rod Stewart is one of the two or three finest and most popular of the current crop of English pop composer-singers, a wise, witty, upbeat force who neatly counterpoints Mick Jagger’s pervading and well-publicized sympathy for the devil. As a soloist, Stewart displays one of those rare voices—a raspy, surcharged cross between Joe Cocker and Rod McKuen—that is instantly recognizable and that can draw all sorts of emotional magic from his own songs (Maggie May, Every Picture Tells a Story) as well as standards by Dylan (Only a Hobo) and Elton John (Country Comfort). As a sometime member of the good-time British rock-‘n’-roll band known as Faces, he is one superstar who is out mostly to have fun. That includes giving a humorous zing to his guitar playing, handing bottles of wine to lucky members of the audience, and place-kicking bright red soccer balls far beyond the footlights.

Stewart and the Faces recently made two U.S. tours with a company of acrobats, clowns and trapeze artists, billed as the World’s First Rock and Roll Cyrcus. Among other acts, Cyrcus included the Martinez Flyers, who missed their double flips on purpose, and Ming Wong, who stripped off 15 kimonos while hanging 100 ft. above the floor by her hair.

> Dr. John, the Night Tripper, high priest of voodoo rock, whose music is often eerily grisly and whose personal appearances are usually heralded by the lighting of torches and a processional of undulating dancers. His gaudy, African-style headdresses are woven out of ostrich feathers, vines, ivy and snakeskins. Dr. John’s music is a pulsating blend of African and Caribbean rhythms and dry-throated incantations. As it turns out, Dr. John comes from New Orleans, and his latest ATCO LP, Gumbo, is a personal nostalgia trip, a rollicking pastiche of voodoo, rumba, Dixieland and good old Mardi Gras stomp. If his high skill shows the inventive, assimilative style of a virtuoso studio musician, it is because Dr. John used to be just that under his real name, Mac Rebennack.

> Cheech and Chong are the Amos ‘n’ Andy of Rock, even if one is of Mexican heritage and the other Chinese Stand-up rock and droll is their game, and each can assume a hundred different voices and roles in talking about the things that matter most to their young audience—marijuana, wine, cops, rock concerts, records and radio. One of the characters Cheech parodies is a rubber-throated disk jockey named Wink Dinkerson of station KRUT. Dinkerson’s spiel is far-out and solid: “Hi there, groovy guys, groovy girls. Peace love dove peace bells, incense, light shows, crash pads, and Hare Krishna, all you groovy freaks.” As president of the United Heads for Hemp, Chong begins a TV interview: “Some people say grass makes you lose your memory…Uh, wow, I forgot what I was gonna say.” Cheech and Chong (real names: Richard Marin, 26, Tommy Chong, 34) surfaced nationally a year ago. Wherever they give concerts, usually with one or two rock acts on the bill, the S.R.O. sign is out. A far cry from the days when, says Cheech, “the only comic relief in rock was when the public-address system went out.”

> David Bowie is a hugely gifted British singer-composer-guitarist who at once embodies and transcends the new vaudeville. Bowie boasts, in interviews and in songs, of his bisexuality, affects orange-hued hair, laced high-heeled boots, and moves in feline contrast to his heavy rock beat. At 25, he is an ex-actor and mime who is currently on his first tour of the U.S. It began with a surprise sellout in Cleveland. Then came an overwhelming success in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, where Bowie, in a British music-hall voice, parodied Andy Warhol, sang about the bisexual life (Width of a Circle) and invoked rock’s new vogue for sci-fi (Space Oddity).

Bowie looks like an extra directly out of A Clockwork Orange—an effect heightened intentionally at the start of each concert by the use of white, jabbing strobe lights and the playing of the electronic version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the sound track of the Stanley Kubrick film. If Kubrick posed the threat of futuristic shock, so does Bowie. His recent RCA album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, is perhaps the most portentous concept LP since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. It anticipates a cataclysm of worldwide proportions that could be World War III, pollution overkill or an invasion from outer space. Bowie is not very clear on the subject, and it does not really matter, since the cataclysm is in effect a megaton metaphor for the confusion and pessimism Bowie sees in much of the rock world today. Ziggy Stardust also chronicles the rise and eventual assassination of a rock-‘n’-roller who is partly Dylan, Jagger, Stewart and Alice Cooper, but mostly Bowie. “I know that one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage, and I keep thinking that it’s bound to be me,” says Bowie, with a Grand Guignol touch of his own.