Beetle (October 1974)

I get it – we’re really stretching the concept of “fanzine” here, as this is a full-fledged rock magazine from 1974, something found on what we once called the newsstand. Perhaps at the grocery store magazine rack. If it’s any consolation, I won’t be tackling any Creem, Circus or Hit Parader here – but the Canadian publication Beetle gives me an excuse to talk about Roxy Music, and I’m always happy to converse about Roxy Music.

Maybe we ought to get a handle on Beetle first, though. While you can find plenty of back issues for sale on eBay, I’m not really coming up with much about it on the broader world wide web, so we’ll have to go with what we have here, the only issue owned by Fanzine Hemorrhage. It’s October 1974 – widely and quite rightly considered one of the proverbial low points in rock n roll history. There are features on Chuck Mangione, a young and not-yet-famous Billy Joel and Brownsville Station (“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” – one of the first rock songs I ever heard). There are excited reviews of The Bee Gees, Earth Wind & Fire and Chicago, whose singer is pictured wearing a Black Hawks jersey. Original six, baby!

Yet there is quality music worth paying attention to, and at least someone at Beetle knows about it. Apparently the New York Dolls took a beating in the most recent issue, and the letters section roundly takes them to task for it. They review Too Much Too Soon and call it “truly fine raunch”, which I guess in hindsight seems a little off, because that record was some serious “sophomore slump” if there ever was such a thing, right? While the staff at Beetle gripe in several places about the Canadian content laws that mean that their radio stations are clogged with Canadian rock garbage, they are homers to some extent: “Mahogany Rush, a heavy Hendrixian trio from Montreal, are soon to be one of the better known Canadian bands in the U.S. So how come they’re unheard of in Canada?”

This reminds me of the time I was reading the morning newspaper when I was on a work trip in Toronto, the day after the academy awards. There were two screaming headlines on the front page – one about the winner of that year’s Best Picture, and an even larger one in which there was a big story about Canadian Sarah Polley not winning “Best Adapted Screenplay”. I can understand it, though. I’ve always been part of the all-encompassing American monoculture that swallows everything, and it was nice to maybe see things from the perspective of someone from Flin Flon or Moose Jaw.

Speaking of film, there’s a laudatory long review of Peter Bogdonovich’s Daisy Miller, which is something that was “quite rare” in those days. But what excites me the most here is the big piece on Roxy Music, including a strange interview with Bryan Ferry that’s threaded in. When I was still obsessively listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 in the mid/late 1970s, I heard a show he did, more like a half-day special, in which he played a ton of the previous hits of the 1970s. I had just become acquainted with “Love is the Drug” around that time, and loved it, but had never heard anything else from Roxy – and Casey Kasem, of all people, busted out “The Thrill of It All” on this program. Life changer.

I immediately bought Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits, this 1977 American album you see here that never really got repressed in the US or UK afterward – this was probably 1980. I played that thing to death, and honestly even now I think it’s a perfect record. Culling the best of Roxy Music into one LP, and actually choosing the best is no easy feat, even if it doesn’t contain “Remake/Remodel” or “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. But it also doesn’t have any of that Flesh and Blood or Avalon crap, and I was really glad when I heard that stuff that I’d started here.

I was also kind of blown away when Casey played “The Thrill of It All” on an American Top 40 special. My impression at the time was that no one cared about Roxy Music in the USA at all, and that they had been more or less an underground band (granted, I was 12 years old at the time so I didn’t know anything about anything). Beetle, and obviously plenty of other extant rock music writing I’ve subsequently seen, showed that this was not really the case; there was a strong contingent of Roxy fans in the US; they were played on both AM hit radio and FM rock radio; and people did go to their shows here (and in Canada). They were just more beloved in their native England, unlike Mahogany Rush in their native Canada, I guess.