TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/013089/01308900.065

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.4 KB | 103 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 74

Chocolate-Covered Razor Blades


And other treats from a fun funk band

By Jay Cocks

    Was (Not Was). Outside the parentheses is a terrific dance
band; inside is a real trailblazer. The group, out of Detroit by
way of some dark but friendly musical star, gets hold of a
brawny rhythm-and-blues foundation, overlays it with some
up-to-the-second dance sounds and ladles up lyrics with strains
of Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
After that's all done, the band gets down to its real mission:
to shake the house down. Explains Was (Not Was) co-founder Don
Was: "We would like to sound like the Motown revue on acid."

    The band, which has two featured singers and seven
rambunctious musicians besides Don and his compadre David Was,
has a distinctive, daffy humor, a rhythmic sense that is honed
until it gleams and a stiff spine about matters of conscience.
Once badgered by market-wary Geffen Records, as Don puts it, to
"get rid of the black guys," Was (Not Was) hung tough. Same as
they did when told by another company there would be no band
pictures, "because we don't want black radio to see they're
white, and we don't want white radio to see they're black." Don
says Geffen told the band to whiten up and lighten up "not
because they were a racist record company. They were only
reflecting a basic reality of the music business." But then,
deflecting such realities, changing the perspectives and
finding a soulful congeniality is the method behind the band's
mad music.

    Success helps too. The group's new album, What Up, Dog?, is
currently cooking on Billboard's Top Pop Albums,  and the first
single, Spy in the House of Love, hit the No. 1 position on the
dance chart. The band has been a smash in Europe, but until the
release of What Up, Dog?, America seemed to resist its charms.
"We had a hip cachet in Europe," says David, the band's
co-founder and lyrics writer. "In America we were has-beens."
David puts the band's long history together with its newfound
fortune and reckons, "If we have a hit album this time, it will
work out to a minimum wage over the last eight years." Adds
Don: "We had to go outside of America, to a place where black
music and older soul singers are revered. Remember, not only
were these guys black in a supposedly white band; they didn't
even sing in the modern black style. They were out of vogue."

    The gentlemen in question represent the classic poles of
soul. Sweet Pea Atkinson sports an open shirt and a pirate's
booty of gold chains that make him look, according to a
standing band joke, like "a killer pimp." He worked on a
Chrysler assembly line for eleven years; when he sings, his
voice is all rough edges, Wilson Pickett-style, that soar and
spar. Sir Harry Bowens may still be unknown to Burke's Peerage
(relax, guys: his knighthood is self-imposed), but fans of the
O'Jays will recognize the cool, platinum elegance of his
phrasing. He sang with the O'Jays for seven years, but no
musical grounding adequately prepared him for his first meeting
with the Was boys. "I thought," Sir Harry recalls, "that they
were a couple of crackpots."

    Well, of course. It is easy enough to get a solid fix on the
R.-and-B. cornerstone of the band's music. It is the Was
deviations on the form that require an off-road map. The CD and
cassette versions of What Up, Dog? contain a nifty number
called Wedding Vows in Vegas in which Frank Sinatra Jr. provides
some very atmospheric vocalizing. Clearly, Was (Not Was)
musical inspiration has deep roots in strange places. Nothing
less should be expected from a couple of guys whose first taped
effort was a Frank Zappa tune and who put on a show in high
school titled You Have Just Wasted Your Money.   The band's
name was an offshoot of a running dialogue in baby talk that
Don carried on with his young son Anthony ("Anthony want
pretzel?" "Not want."). According to Don, the name also
"parallels the reaction to our music, which is `What?'" No
matter what its inspiration or explanation, Was (Not Was) is
certainly an improvement on Fagenson (not Weiss), which, while
never a consideration, would at least have been straightforward.
Don Fagenson and David Weiss first met in eighth grade outside
a gym teacher's office, where they awaited disciplining. Don's
parents were both teachers. David's mother was an actress, and
his father was a radio and TV actor who worked with everyone
from Orson Welles to Soupy Sales and appeared for a decade as
Santa in the Detroit Thanksgiving parade. "We started to worry
about his health after there was a bomb threat on his sleigh,"
David remembers. "Only in Detroit would they want to kill Santa
Claus."

    That kind of black humor and street sass is carried over
into Was songs, which David characterizes as "chocolate-covered
razor blades." The Dog CD features a startling but ultimately
respectful and impassioned reappraisal of the J.F.K.
assassination, 11 MPH, set to a heavy funk beat, as well as a
barn-burner reworking of Otis Redding's I Can't Turn You Loose.
Both do memory proud. The group is working on a brand-new Was
(Not Was) album for release this summer. The music will,
naturally, be the same (only different). "It's a
come-as-you-aren't party," says David. Be there or be square.
And don't pass up the chocolates.