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MEASURED MOVEMENTS

with HANK ZEVALLOS

So then, who's to blame?

"JUICE" & AUTHORITY

Providing you got your Pop-up Real Player up and playing, you are now listening to official evidence in the case of The People vs. James Douglas Morrison, recorded on cassette the night of March 1st, 1969 at the over-crowded Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, Florida. It was not by any means one of the better performances by Jim and the rest of The Doors. Nor was it one of their more dramatic. However, it certainly was one of those memorable events in the history of Rock And Roll. It became an international focus of Rock And Roll On Trial. Whether the audience suffered a sort of mass hallucination, as keyboardist Ray Manzarek has suggested, or whether a pissed-off Morrison really flashed it as some sort of protest at having had to deal with being reduced to a sex symbol, is not the subject of this column.

The Miami concert was supposed to have been a triumphant homecoming of sorts for the leather-clad rock and roll rebel raised in a military family. Before continuing on to other dates, the plan was The Doors and their loved ones would vacation briefly on one of the islands after this show. But, en route to the Los Angeles airport, Jim and Pamela reportedly had a fight and The Doors left without her. In Miami, The Doors then found the Dinner Key Auditorium had been seriously over-sold by a greedy promoter trying to make the most of the flat fee he had contracted The Doors for. Jim reportedly got pretty drunk by showtime. That, plus just days before Jim had attended and been impressed by a "Living Theatre" presentation at UCLA where the audience was confronted and actively engaged by the performers. So, the stage had been set for the comfort zone of middle-class America and authority in general to once again be shaken with shock waves from that evil corrupter, unbridled Rock And Roll.

The problem was hardly a new one. It's a cycle thing in Rock And Roll, with fans and musicians having little control (with the exception of the glory days of FM Radio's birth in the late 1960s). Adventuresome youth in search of "juice," full of rushing energy and curiosity that challenges the values and standards of their parents and those in authority.

It's been around all of "recorded" musical history and most likely dates back to a young caveboy banging sticks and rocks as his "old" 30 year-old parents tried to rest.

No question the youths of the 1920s shocked their parents as they wildly danced the Charleston to the hot new strains of Fletcher Henderson and other swinging new dance bands of that era. Such "sexual" abandonment on the dance floors was as close to Hell damnation as the older set who had voted in Prohibition could imagine it, and the Crash of 1929 was clearly seen by many as God speaking up! But it was too late, the "kids" had heard it and they were addicted! So as 1929 introduced "talking" movies with the generational split shown in The Jazz Singer, moguls couldn't help but notice how young adults went wild in theatres as Al Jolson broke out with "Toot Toot Tootsie." Soon they were keeping them happy spending their nickels and dimes with cartoons featuring the energetic music of Cab Calloway and others.

As parents and authorities wrestled with The Great Depression, escapism in movies and music couldn't be suppressed and the generational music gap grew as Prohibition was repealed and the Lindy and then the Jitterbug became the dance of youth.

I heard it came to town / A new kind of rhythm / Spread around, sort of set you sizzlin' / Now I'm all through with symphonies / Oh rock it for me!

Every night you'll see all the nifties / Lindy types swingin' down the Fifties / Now they're all through with symphonies / Oh-oh-oh rock it for me!

Now it's true that once upon a time / The opera was the thing / But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme / So won't you satisfy my soul with rock and roll / You can't be tamed while the band is playin' / It ain't no shame to keep your body swayin' / Beat it out in the minor key / Oh-oh-oh rock it for me!

With guitars instead of a horn section, the above song, Rock It For Me, would have fit right into the rockin' 1950s, but it was recorded in 1937 by Chick Webb & His Orchestra featuring a hot young vocalist named Ella Fitzgerald.

But, with the end of World War II, a generation of swing kids came home with the discipline of the military well-established within them. General Eisenhower became president, replacing the very earthy Harry S. Truman, and a polite new society of suburbia spread under the new threat of Communism or anything remotely considered "different."

Into this polite new society that had-yet-didn't-have a Korean War, the "Baby Boom" went to school and was terrified with such "test" games as air raid sirens and Duck-And-Cover.

Meanwhile Negroes had been picking up electric guitars and giving the blues a whole new flash while hillbilly and country swing bands started noticing how the tail end crop of Jitterbuggers really hit the dance floors when they added a dash of that "jungle" rhythm.

Trying to keep things "nice," record companies got groups like The Crew Cuts to cover The Chords' "Sh-boom", and soon you had people like metal giant Pat Boone making a career out of producing radio-safe covers of artists like Little Richard.

Whereas Rock's First Great Band, the wild and rowdy Rock 'n Roll Trio with their screaming vocalist Johnny Burnette was just too unabandoned for national radio in those "I Like Ike" times, nothing could be done to hold back Elvis Presley and his snearing sex appeal. Rock And Roll exploded. But, "thank God," the U.S. Army did what all those record burnings couldn't do. Elvis was drafted and American Authority prayed that was the end of all this wild craziness. And things looked "good" as Buddy Holly died and was replaced by a tamed-down Bobby Vee and other wholesome "fun" teen idols like Frankie Avalon and the "cute rebel" Fabian. Jerry Lee Lewis was chased out of record stores for being the "pervert" older America had always known real rockers were. Little Richard threw his jewelry into the water from a bridge and renounced Rock And Roll for Christianity. Realizing the tide had changed, the original rockabilly wildcat, Johnny Burnette decided he'd try rockin' with a violin section, but even his first such Liberty release, Settin' The Woods On Fire, was banned by an uptight America that thought he was telling teenagers to commit arson!

Despite some minor flare-ups, sanity and order had generally returned to the American radio scene. Chuck Berry's music no longer complained about Too Much Monkey Business as The Beach Boys redressed his sound and took us to the beach, like Daddy did. Working their way through high school, Baby Boomers discovered soul and Motown as Joey Dee & The Starliters, Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, Johnny Rivers and a handful of others like The Rivingtons, James Brown, The Contours, etc., gave us that occassional burst of unadulterated "juice" we needed so much. Johnny Burnette also returned to his more rockin' ways with his final Capitol single, "Sweet Suzie", just before starting his own record company for rockin' freedom immediately prior to his 1964 boating accident death.

The shift was on, back to more "juice" when The Beatles ushered in The British Invasion which swept folk hootenannies back into the corner. But, except for those "outrageous" soup bowl haircuts, The Beatles were deliberately wholesome and not controversial. What quickly followed them through the ajar door, however, was another matter - The Rolling Stones (Gosh, they were reported to piss on walls) and the darker sounds of The Animals. And American groups like The Seeds started giving "the kids" songs to sing to like "You're Pushin' Too Hard." Church groups and other respectable bastions of authority began to complain loudly again about the threat to morality. And this turned into a new round of record burnings when. in August 1966, during their fourth and final American tour, John Lennon's observation during an Evening Standard interview months earlier that The Beatles "were more popular than Christ" became known in the USA.

As the industry had responded before with The Crew Cuts, Pat Boone, Frankie Avalon and others, they went all out again with a new creature of wholesome fun, The Monkees. But it didn't work with the boomers already graduating high school. These youngsters dared create their own musical "underground" where hit records were unimportant. So as The Monkees grabbed for the younger brothers and sisters glued to television sets, scary new groups like The Doors brought back the earthier sensuality of blues with Willie Dixon's "Backdoor Man" while singing about "breaking on through to the other side" and telling us we knew it would be untrue if we were told we couldn't get much higher. Other groups, like The Grateful Dead started packing concerts with no hit records but word-of-mouth of the wild dancing marathons to the liberation of raw, adventuresome Rock And Roll.

Now this!! With hit records like The Unknown Soldier questioning the highest authorities and Patriotism, The Doors had gone beyond the now acceptable standards of "hunk" sexual attraction to "let it all hang out" and, worst yet, "incite rioting!" And The Beatles had proven to hardly be harmless. As their hair grew, this once wholesome bunch was now singing about "doing it in the road" and revolution! The Viet Nam oil war and authority just wasn't supposed to be questioned. Why couldn't the young boomers be happy with The Monkees or the fun of other more "wholesome" recording acts being rushed to the AM Radio Stations boomers turned away from as a new free-form FM Radio underground developed with "real," unsaddled Rock And Roll, and expression.

As before, the "juice" was attacked. It was now too dangerous. It was firing up a generation of Charlie Manson followers! Manson even received secret messages from The Beatles, the court evidence said so! FM stations had their licenses threatened. Major municipal arenas basically refused to allow troublemakers like The Doors or Rolling Stones to perform in them by requiring promoters to pay for ridiculous amounts of policemen and police dogs.

It always has come in cycles because there are some true lovers of the music in the music industry. As a disc jockey in Boston, Joe Smith had been one of the courageous few to play "Train Kept A-Rollin'" and "Honey Hush" by the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n Roll Trio. It soared to the top there and in Baltimore where another DJ championed it. But it was too wild for the rest of 1956 America. By the latter 1960s, Joe Smith had established himself as a major force at Warner Brothers, where Jimi Hendrix, The Fugs and The Grateful Dead had found a home. At Columbia there was John Hammond Sr. who signed Bob Dylan, and Clive Davis who signed Big Brother & The Holding Company with its uninhibited Janis Joplin. MGM had Grant Gibbs who battled within to get the truly revolutionary Mothers Of Invention heard. And, of course, there were the small labels like Elektra with founder Jac Holzman and West Coast head David Anderle. But, behind artistically liberated men like these (and those just wanting to make money by giving us what we wanted), where the lawyers, investors, accountants and committees. And everytime "the juice" started flowing too freely, the reins would be pulled again and again to keep things respectable.

Record companies both love and hate "the juice." It's draw is always phenomenal when unleashed, bringing in appreciative dollars. But the social backlash always threatens them, as it did again when Ice T was forced to pull from the market of this "Free Society" the kick-ass hard rock Body Count "rap" album with such killer delights as "KKK Bitch."

Who owns this music anyway? If it really belonged to us, AM radio stations would have let the young boomers of the late Sixties hear more of what they would have related to, like David Peel & The Lower East Side singing hilarious complaints of police harassment and wanting "to get high." It's always been a war behind the executive offices of authority between the "juice" we've wanted and the "wholesome" cute crap we've often been fed with a danceable beat.

The 1970s are a perfect example of what's been happening. With the unleashing of power rock groups like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jeff Beck Group, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, a new high standard of "juice" was at hand and developing to where lawyers and accountants in control of major music mediums became alarmed at the glorious emergence of such metallic pioneers as Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, Judas Priest, Armageddon and German groups like Sweet, UFO and Scorpions. This was harder than anything that had preceded it. But, luckily, it was mostly on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe, without radio and tour support, this embarrassing outrage could be prevented from spreading. So, citing that Deep Purple and Black Sabbath had "had their day," it was easy to dismiss this new wave of "juice" as "Dinosaur Music" and usher in something totally new, modern and wholesome - something I had already experienced in the nightclubs of 1971 Montreal - DISCO. I can testify to this first hand because I was there on the battle lines with a young group of teenagers I discovered in 1976 who called themselves BadAxe.

These kids were a true reflection of their contemporaries who were cruising up and down streets across America with their car speakers pumping out the taped music of Sabbath, Aerosmith, or Deep Purple, instead of radio stations full of a smothering ocean of wholesomeness. Their passion for the music was such that they had rented a warehouse near Sound City Recording Studios and were rehearsing and writing kick-ass Rock And Roll literally every night of the week! They seized upon new groups like Rush and Judas Priest mostly by word-of-mouth. But, no, said the record companies, that's not the music of today. Even when I got them gigs at the Starwood and they soon became headliners drawing an illegal 1,561 standing-room-only into the 800 capacity nightclub on a Monday night! Frustrated by record company executives who insisted our music was not what the public wanted and we needed "hits," we pressed up 10,000 copies of our own single, rejected by them, got a Billboard Top Single Pick on May 7, 1977, as well as Los Angeles FM radio play, sold out all available copies - AND STILL COULDN'T GET A MAJOR LABEL DEAL!

The San Francisco-based Musician's News said "Cry For Me is a swaying rock ballad with thoughtful arrangement; All You Can Stand is loaded with drone raunch guitar tones and White Witch-style vocal screams (look that up in the cut-out bins); both lack subtlety. In other words, a great one-two punch from this hard-working Los Angeles band."

KMET 94.7 FM, "The Last Radio Show," had listeners vote for the annual Rocktober Awards that year and BadAxe was voted by Southern California listeners as 4th Best New Group behind Foreigner, Cheap Trick, and Lake (ahead of Detective and others) as well as 3rd Best L.A. Group behind The Eagles and Van Halen! Not bad for an unsigned band with no record company support!

And that's how we remained. Unsigned. We delivered too much "juice!"

A couple of years later, as Disco pooped out and Van Halen's success could not be ignored, Atlantic finally saw BadAxe as the more metallic "urban" answer to Warner's L.A. rockers. We were offered a contract, but by now it was too late. Our chance to become young millionaires doing what we loved best had been lost when the group split with the singer. Inferior groups who had shared the Starwood stage such as Quiet Riot and The Motels hit the charts as our guitarist, David Carruth formed Bitch with his girlfriend and our bassist Dana Strum recruited Randy Rhoades for Ozzy, joined Vinnie Vincent then Slaughter. Last I heard, Steve Ward, our drummer, had become a dentist and vocalist Bob Gaudreau was going to make it on his own. Heavy Metal finally was given a chance to get very popular, with some glam posers taking full advantage. And a whole new jolt electrified the juice, AC/DC, Metallica ... Then again, as the "juice" again embarrassed the authorities, it was eased off radio and MTV to only be found knocking on the door once more. This time, with newer dimensions as well, as in Nine Inch Nails. Damn! That kind of stuff just isn't nice! Some people would sure love to outlaw it if possible! And, if not, maybe they can just flood it out with more wholesome hunks and chicks!

Our inside front cover ad in RAW POWER Magazine, Spring 1978
The album was never released.

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