Could it be that Watergate antics, and the body counts of Vietnam, have left Tutt, Magurk, and company in a cheerless funk that won't let go? While Just Forget It is a brilliant, lyrically stunning set of songs, there is no mistaking the lightless bondage of its mood. The assassination of pop culture fills its every note and word, graff and bullies of sour headlines, their prime targets. Our government tops the list.
"Addicts" is a toxic, pin-the-tail-on-the-heartless song about the Watergate break-in, that swarms with bitter imprecations. None gets out alive, including G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, and former President Richard M. Nixon.
The fountain of youth is red, not clear.
The secret of love is playing on fear.
You shouldn't resist, there’s no point.
It's life's dirty trick, the rules of the joint.
Their gifts and tricks never abate, but the songwriters seem to have forgotten the joy of it all. This is an album of myriad gifts, however massively troubled. Whatever needs to lift its head from the dysphoria of U.S. war policy and the bleating rancor of protesters, before Tutt and Magurk have nothing good left to say about anything.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
FROM MY NOTES. MISSOURI.
KITTRIDGE ARMY HOSPITAL
NOVEMBER 4, 1974.
"He can't hear me."
The room is stuffy.
View of cornfields. Smokestacks.
A train filled with frightened livestock rattles by.
A small town; farming, some industry.
They don't see guys like Stomp McGoo coming through too often from atop their tractors and fundamentalism. All that hair and velvet. Bracelets jangling; a scrawny faggot.
Makes their necks redden just thinking about it.
He's holding his brother's hand.
Steven landed his chopper on a mine in Vietnam, and when he came to, there was less of him.
Two arms gone. A leg. Most of his face.
He's blind now. Being fed through a tube.
"You shoulda seen how he threw, man. Fuckin' Steven was the whole varsity team. Could pass into a thimble from half a mile."
Steven moans.
Stomp strokes his hair.
The nurse says visiting time is almost up. Stomp nods, leans down to whisper to Steven, hold him.
I can't hear what he says.
Stomp holds him more tightly. Turns to look at me for a moment. He's crying.
On the drive away from the hospital, Stomp never said a word.
As the jet took off, he looked out the window at the town left behind. Closed eyes. Said something about how Steven could never cry again. There was nothing left of his face that would allow it; tear ducts had been destroyed.
The next night, Stomp did the longest and most amazing drum solo anyone could remember.
FROM MY NOTES.
L.A. WEEKLY ARTICLE.
DOWNTOWN LA.
ALAMEDA RAILROAD TRACKS.
JANUARY 3, 1975. 2:37A.M.
Bad streets, bad people.
Bars that hose death off their sidewalks every morning. A loft building rises, crapped-out—cheap. Inside, a guy who had an emotional blowout at a million miles an hour and kept going, is waking.
His name is Oz Peterson. Used to be a Chi-town blue.
Until he and his partner got grabbed by Peruvian smack monkeys, and Oz watched the guy he rode with get unlaced, slow-style, tortured for DEA leads.
His partner, Nicky, never told. But it took three days to finally kill him. And Oz still has nightmare flashes of Nick, hung like beef, inch-long knife cuts venting his body.
Oz rubs puffy features awake, fixes coffee.
A smoggy sun comes up in his loft space. It's filled with towering canvases painted with self-exorcising images. Oz disappeared after the death and flaked, drank, got lost, hoped he'd never get found.
Ended up in L.A., painting, doing dipshit P.I. work when he needed the gig. Divorce surveillance, riding a telephoto, getting fat. He'd go home at night, talk to a few shots of Huerredura and paint until the images scared him.
Faces.
Screaming children.
Blades slitting skin. Red trickles that dripped onto his loft floor and made him sit cross-legged and think about just yanking his fucking cord.
But a knock at the door stopped him.
She stood there, and he'd seen her before.
But he looked down, not wanting to make the connection, not wanting to chance even liking anybody. And so they rode in the loft building elevator a thousand times, and he buried his face under a dead mask, and she never asked.
He always read her as a hooker. Pale, flashy, Edgar Winter hair, a teased abstraction. Pretty face, smart eyes. Eyes that probably knew he was cocooned and weren’t going to ask.
But then she said she needed to score. Was he holding? It was for a friend. A hungry arm that needed some yummy.
He said nothing. And she knew.
She talked him into bed and did some magic tricks on him that fried the hangover. And they held each other and he watched her, guilt pooling. What was someone like her doing down here?
He liked her. Being next to her.
Battled a decision. Finally pulled cuffs from the bedside table, anchored her thin wrist to bedpost.
She writhed, yelled bad words.
He called the cops.
And as Inga got taken away, he sketched her face; shrieking at him, from the back of the squad car. He stood on the filthy sidewalk, finished the charcoal. Went back to his room. Hung the sketch and got drunk.
The Oval Office was starting to clamp down on drugs, big-time. Gerry F. was pissed, fat head throbbing. Nickel and dimers were gulping years without parole. Magurk couldn't buy Inga out of this one. Even though he'd sent her.
TIME MAGAZINE.
APRIL 10, 1978.
It's been a long wait. And the result is a troubling masterpiece.
The first cut from the new Whatever double album, Skin and Bones, is "Mainline," and, like the rest of the album, it's a full-frontal indictment.
Disease and glitter,
Just take my hand.
I'll never hurt you.
I'm your biggest fan.
And so it goes throughout this lethal stroll, amid the neon Styx of media imagery and false dreams.
In the eyes of Tutt, Magurk, Wall, and McGoo, L.A. is one big, ghastly appetite, rendered in inhuman, industrial grays and gunshot reds.
The band cuts a deep incision, pulling back flesh, to dismiss show business as chic destitution, a party that dips its young in lies before eating them.
In Whatever's bloodied testimony, the city of glitz-gloom swallows lives, and the streets are littered with sick flesh, tar-pit stares.
Hookers strut, peddling death, and everywhere, the poison landscape ingests hope, while no one is looking.
From "Hurting Inside," comes this merry shudder:
My schedule is murder.
I'm hurting inside.
Another new friend
Washes up in the tide.
I feast on misfortune.
I make a questionable friend.
I'm at my best on the full moon.
Close your eyes, let's begin.
I eat men for breakfast,
Drink women for lunch.
I soak in their essence.
It's my favorite punch.
I can't be stopped.
Can't be found.
To me, you're all barking dogs,
Put to sleep in my pound.
(chorus)
I'm hurting inside.
No one understands.
I'm a priceless addition,
Just lending a hand.
There too many people,
Not enough love.
The world is a cliff.
I'm just a shove.
(end chorus)
My schedule is murder
It's just my way.
Another lost dream.
Anothe
r fine day.
Not content to assail serial madness, the group plunges into deeper trauma with Tut and Magurk's pro-environmental "Black Sky," set to a fierce piano and raging vocal by Tutt.
The birds are hiding,
Bleeding in dead trees.
Clouds infected.
Bringing sick men to their knees.
Bad things are coming.
I can hear them on the stairs.
Coming down the hallway. Death is in the air
(chorus)
Black sky.
The clock has stopped for good.
Black sky.
Flames have reached the wood.
Black sky.
Bad man coming with a smile.
He's hungry and he's empty.
Be staying for awhile.
But all is not nihilism here. In the dulcet "Shade of a Blue Affair," the band changes emotional octaves, and Magurk sings a plaintive ballad, backed only by Wall's melancholic twelve-string guitar. On side three, the band's opening track is the sultry "Spanish Lies," a lulling Castillian sway.
The twenty songs, despite frequently scathing lyrics, never oppress melodic invention, nor become brittle allegations. In past albums, Tutt and Magurk have deadened their own heartbeats with polemics and bile. In Skin and Bones, they don't pull any punches, but nor are they self-pitying and lost. What felt like thinly camouflaged star-malaise in past work, is nowhere to be found on this album. Only perception and sleek production. And the usual tunesmithing that soars.
Maybe Bob D. was right, and the times truly are changing. This is not an album that could have been appreciated or forgiven a few years ago. But the way things are going, it's an album which fills an ominous vacancy.
FIVE STARS.
JOYCE HABER'S COLUMN.
LOS ANGELES TIMES.
FEBRUARY 4, 1978.
ROCKER'S GAL PAL FOUND DEAD. Inga Johanneson, former wife of Whatever cofounder Rikki Tuft, was found hanged in her São Paolo, Brazil prison cell. Prison officials say Johanneson committed suicide, using a belt. Tuft was unavailable for comment, but it is known he had tried to secure her release for several months. Whatever manager, Leonard Lupo, said the entire band was in shock, and that Tuft is in seclusion, under doctor's supervision. Those close to Tuft have declined to comment on the troubling coincidence of Johanneson's death occurring on his birthday.
FROM MY NOTES.
MINNEAPOLIS MEMORIAL STADIUM.
NOVEMBER 1979.
Rikki Tuft is bare-chested, staring at himself in the mirror.
His band, Whatever, is in Minneapolis, opening for Latin rock group Malo; about to perform for a half-filled stadium. The days of SRO and number one albums have faded; this juxtaposed billing of differing musical styles places things in telling relief.
In recent years, Whatever has suffered poor record sales and concert attendance, and the group seems a casualty, at least partially, of disco music. In recent months, they were booed offstage, when opening in Sarasota, Florida, for KC and the Sunshine Band.
And they've have had more than their share of genuine tragedy.
Their brilliant guitarist, G.G. Wall, died of a heroin overdose at a party in the Hollywood Hills, hosted by megagroup Seahorse. In further misfortune, drummer Stomp McGoo was jailed for sexual assault on a minor, though the girl later admitted she'd lied. Stomp rejoined the group for its ill-fated, disastrously unpopular double album, Skin and Bones.
Wall was replaced for one tour by Snap Brown, who had played with Billy Preston, Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Eric Burdon Band, Howlin' Wolf, and was a session player in London and New York.
Brown left the group, after eight months, to form SHAKE, an enormous, international concert draw, which features upbeat dance music and colorful calypso costumes. The first album from SHAKE, Boogie Bay, is number one in America and Britain.
All compositions are Brown's.
Although Magurk and Tutt are openly critical of Brown's music, and aghast at Brown's status as a superstar, Brown never responds in the press. His solo album, French Eyes, has been ridiculed by Tutt and Magurk, who termed it French Fries, and compared its musical instincts to fast food.
Meanwhile, Whatever remains on the road to pay spiraling legal expenses, arising from their ongoing lawsuit with former manager, Lenny Lupo, who they claim misappropriated royalties from their four albums.
Lupo counterclaims it's fiction and that he was fired while still having a stake in the band's past albums and future projects—if any.
"Invented sewage," says Tuft.
The group has also been sued by the parents of the fifteen year-old girl who was beaten to death at their Athens concert in 1978. Greek police say private security hired by Whatever did nothing to help when the girl was attacked by an unruly crowd, which was unhappy Whatever had to shorten their concert to one hour, due to G.G. Wall's collapse on stage.
It's hard to say whether the group has recovered from his overdose and death.
"I miss him," admits Tuft. "1 don't know . . . maybe he was smart to get out. The world is falling asleep. No one cares. It's global torpor. I mean, a fucking actor is running for president." Tuft chews celery. "Something went wrong somewhere," he says. "1 mean, Donna fucking Summer is number one. I went to visit my mother in Long Boat Key, and she has a Pet Rock."
Magurk sips a tequila shooter. "Maybe it's just your father. He's awfully quiet." He looks off. "Y'know, not to recklessly mock societal evolution, and maybe it's just me, but rumor is, people used to think we had something to say."
"Did we?" Tuft asks.
Magurk says nothing. Finishes the shooter.
"Ask the Bee Gees."
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE BULLETIN.
JANUARY], 1980.
1:15 A.M.
The rock band, Whatever, a group which many fans and critics felt defined thinking man's rock, and the intellectual cutting-edge of early-seventies music, died in a fatal air-crash last night, outside Montreux, Switzerland.
The group had been returning to the United States after a New Year's Eve performance at Domis Stadium, where they were also recording their first live album, tentatively titled Whatever Happened. Allthree members were killed instantly when their private aircraft collided with snow-covered mountains after losing contact with Montreux Air-Traffic Control.
The group's manager, and original producer, Purdee Boots, reached in his Los Angeles recording studios, said that all of Whatever's friends, family, and business associates in the music industry, were ". . . in shock."
Swiss police investigators, at the scene of the disaster, said the interior of the crashed jet had been filled with the remains of religious objects.
"They must've been holding mass up there, or something," said Lead Investigator, Detective Claude Thom. "Some kind of gloomy thing going on."
OPEN MIKE NIGHT THE COMEDY STORE.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA.
JANUARY 7, 1980.
11:50 P.M.
"So, here's my question. . . Whatever?"
Dead blinks.
"I mean, talk about a band hitting its peak. . .
FROM MY NOTES.
NEW YORK CITY.
JANUARY 15, 1980.
I'm writing this at three a.m.
I was unable to complete this article as I'd hoped. I'd wanted to get into the childhood of each member, the matrices of their lives prior to forming Whatever. But they ran out of time.
I hope that what I've gathered, while fragmentary, compared to the red-blood dimension of real life, captures some of their lives and extraordinary gifts. Maybe it doesn't work.
Maybe I won't either.
When I arrived at the site of the fatal collision, where my friends were buried in steel and snow, my eye was caught by Swiss police, plastic-bagging bits of religious objects found around the crash site. It was quite cold on the mountain, and as I watched the bodies being taken away by helicopter, I remembered the night I'd flown with the group, after a show they'd done at the Forum
, in Los Angeles, five years ago.
We were on our way to Dallas, and I d been around the band long enough to earn their trust. That night they shared something enormously private with me: a ritual. They allowed me to witness it, though I was asked to take an oath that I'd never talk about what I'd seen. Because of their untimely deaths, I feel I can now talk about it. I hope that instinct is right.
This is what I remember:
The night we left LAX, ten minutes off the ground, Rikki Tutt put the band's 707, SPOT, on autopilot. Then, he came into the back with the rest of the band. The main cabin of the jet had no seats, only big throw pillows. It was almost two a.m.
Rikki put on a haunting album of a beautiful choir which sang at Robert F. Kennedy's funeral service. The voices were filled with pain, and it had a strangely opiate effect on us.
Greg Magurk dimmed the small spotlights throughout the fuselage, and the others lighted exactly one-hundred candles of different sizes. I don't know what the number signified. But it was observed; somehow essential. They used candleholders from the innumerable churches Wall had burgled.
The five joined hands, closed eyes.
Then, one by one, each asked for truth always to be there. Wax bled onto countless candleholders, marring the tarnished divinity, like Christ's blood.
In my mind, I can still see Tuft and Magurk, cross-legged on pillows. More serious than I'd ever seen them, faces shadowed by candlelight, eyes seeming to await some onrushing fact of being.
G.G. Wall, Philip Zapata, and Stomp McGoo sat next to one another, and joined hands with Greg and Rikki. All were exhausted from the show, and in the flame-flicker, they glistened; Indian braves readying to meet the Great Spirit.
Truth.
It became their church. Their fortress in a city which had died. In the end, maybe it was the seventies that did it. Who the fuck knows?
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