Music

Familiarity Breeds Contempt Department: We've never understood, quite, why the Sunset Marquis has been a legendary home for two generations of rockers doing time in Los Angeles. Could it be the absence of room service? The emphysemic air conditioning? The sweaty pool? It's some ineluctable appeal or other. When we were there last, Paul Butterfield was wandering poolside among occasional topless honeys. And it was the hottest new New Wave Brit group in a room below us that decided to crank up and jam just before dawn. In the elevator, on our way to check out, we saw, scrawled and then amended in a feminine hand, on the few square inches of wall not covered by decorator orange-fudge-swirl shag carpeting:

Fuck Rock Stars! Don't!!

Is it a sin to Hum in your Heart? The Ayatollah has threatened to ban music from Iranian radio and television. Music, he said, like opium, "stupefies a person listening to it and makes the brain inactive and frivolous...a youth who spends his time listening to music can no longer appreciate realities." Isn't that the whole idea?

Beatle Monument a bust: Beatlemaniacs in Liverpool planned to erect an $80,000 statue in honor of the hometown fab four. Unfortunately, Liverpudlians may have opened their hearts but not their pocketbooks. At last report, the appeal for funds had raised all of $60.

This past March, Columbia Records sent most of its jazz roster, plus some pop artists, to Cuba for three nights of concerts. The resulting live LP, Havana Jam, is uneven, but Weather Report and the CBS Jazz All-Stars were in top form, as were the Cuban Percussion Ensemble and Orquesta Aragon. The interplay between John McLaughlin and Tony Williams alone is worth the price of admission.

With a Bullet!

Bruce Iglauer wishes the Alligator in his house would leave him more time for socializing--"I had a date last night and I was two and a half hours late because one of my bands couldn't make an engagement, and I had to find a replacement"--but he doesn't want it to go away. There's small chance it will. Alligator, the record company he started on a shoestring in 1972, a fans' dream floating in the corporate sea of the record biz, expects to gross $250,000 this year. Where he once did everything himself, from producing the records to mailing them--"I've packed and shipped at least 75,000 albums by hand"--the intense Iglauer, 32, a perfectionist who had a hard time learning to delegate responsibility, now has three full-time employees helping him record a generation of blues stars--including Son Seals, Albert Collins, Fenton Robinson, Koko Taylor and the artists on Alligator's Living Chicago Blues anthology--that he has developed at a time when the major companies won't touch blues except as a joke. Iglauer, who learned the independent record producer's trade from Bob Koester while working as a shipping clerk for Koester's Delmark label, recorded his own favorite artist, the late Hound Dog Taylor, in 1971 and drove across the country with a trunkful of records, stopping to talk with deejays and distributors. A year later, he was so busy mailing records and helping Taylor with bookings that he had to leave Delmark and sink or swim with Alligator. He endured some lean years before his 18-hour workdays began to pay off. Now he looks forward to moving his business out of his two-story frame house in Chicago and getting it under control so he can spend more time with the ladies, among other things; but since his head is brimming with new projects, and he remains a workaholic--"It's wonderful for the ego, being a catalyst for a great performance or helping someone's career grow"--it looks as if Iglauer's dates will have to continue sharing him with the blues.

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The B-52's--who've just waxed a first album for Warner Bros.--may be the first all-white "party" band to come along in a while. It's a New Wave rock-'n'-roll band from Athens, Georgia, and it leans toward the music of James Brown, Captain Beefheart and Patti Smith. There is no "magic footprint" method to learn the dances the B-52's inspire.

The B-52's look as if they'd been assembled in Woolworth's. Kate Pierson (keyboards) and Cindy Wilson (second guitar) labor under Everest-sized beehive and bouffant hairdos, while drummer Keith Strickland and lead guitarist Ricky Wilson look like two fellas from the varsity team who forgot to dress for the dance. In the middle, lead singer Fred Schneider resembles a punkish Cesar Romero. Just to look at, they're more fun than a barrel of Talking Heads.

But the kicker is that these folks can hold their own, musically, with the most accomplished New Wave groups from either coast, even though they've been touring out of Athens for less than two years.

Like the Ramones, the B-52's don't sacrifice intelligence in the name of fun. Their own songs, and the few they've selected from elsewhere, are a perfect balance of tongue, cheek, ass and feet. Planet Claire and Rock Lobster, their best, are great rockers--and singable, as well. Some of their other songs manage to be both energetic and impressionistic. In that vein, the B-52's perform a tacky-sounding version of Downtown, the old Petula Clark hit, that leads a listener to imagine a different downtown--not bright lights and Broadway but the drugstore, five-and-dime, McDonald's, bar and bus-station strip of Centerville.

After one of their shows, we met up with Kate, Cindy, Ricky, Keith and Fred and asked them to describe the brief history of the B-52's.

[Q] Playboy: Why the name B-52's?

[A] Keith: I don't know; it just popped into my head one day. It could have come from the bomber jackets Ricky and Cindy's dad gave us.

[Q] Playboy: How long have you been together?

[A] Kate: We all met up at parties in Athens back around 1971 or '72.

[A] Fred: All of us would go out together to dance and dress up. We were soon exiled from some of these places: We tended to drink everything.

[A] Cindy: We started to play together at other dance parties. They were one-shot deals, though. We hadn't formally gotten together as a group.

[Q] Playboy: Is that when you decided to form the B-52's?

[A] Fred: Actually, Keith, Ricky and I had made some basement tapes under the name Bridge Mix.

[A] Kate: I was in a folk-type group called the Sun Donuts. We were still going to school in Athens then.

[Q] Playboy: What was going to school in Athens like?

[A] Fred: I wanted to study forestry, but I didn't know you had to take so many science courses. I was never too motivated. Campus life wasn't too exciting. There was one march on the president's house--this was during the Vietnam protests--but it was more like a pleasant walk around the grounds. Once the war 1was over, everything started. Social life. Before, it was either dancing or demonstrating. We were all into dancing.

[Q] Playboy: With only occasional gigs, how did you support yourselves?

[A] Cindy: Well, Ricky and I lived with our parents, still do. So does Keith.

[A] Fred: I lived out of a suitcase with Maureen [McLaughlin, the group's former manager].

[A] Kate: I lived on a $15-a-month tenant farm just outside Athens. I still live there.

[A] Cindy: We all worked odd jobs. I worked in a luncheonette--Kress's Whirli Q. I also worked in a factory, putting tickets on jeans. I also shoveled nuts and bolts in another factory.

[A] Kate: I had a job where I'd look for imperfections in clay pigeons made of pitch.

[A] Keith: I was a porter in a bus station.

[A] Ricky: I was a ticket agent there. Not for long.

[A] Fred: We all find it hard to work, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Cindy and Kate--where did you come up with those hairdos?

[A] Cindy: Well, you know, Athens is a kookie place. It's not like the rest of Georgia. A lot of people in Athens still do up that kind of exotic style.

[A] Kate: We first used wool hats that we'd brush up and puff out. Now I use a wig. I take them to LaVerne of the Salon de Venus in Athens. She does a great job. All it takes is a lot of hair spray. Like creating a cake.