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AMERICA HURRAH. Jean-Claude van Itallie peels the surface from some of the fruits of life in contemporary U.S.A. and finds there's something rotting at its core.
RECORDS
The San Francisco Sound
What storms out of Western dance palaces these days is mostly thunder and lightning: hard rock, heavy with electronics and accompanied by flashing lights. But there are some 300 groups playing in the San Francisco area, and the only thing they actually have in common is their address. Their recordings, although frenzied in spots, are varied and even sometimes gentle and folklike:
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE TAKES OFF was the first album of San Francisco's best-known group, but their current bestseller is their second, Surrealistic Pillow (RCA Victor). The lyrics are often explicitly about drugs, but the Airplane's popularity comes not from what they say but how they say it: their artful musical ellipses, the easy blend of voices and instruments, and above all the singing of Newcomer Grace Slick. Grace controls the sound with dramatic urgency in While Rabbit, her own song about the wonder drugs of Alice's Wonderland ("Feed your head! Feed your head!") and her fervent evangelism for a more universal proposition: "Don't you want somebody to love?"
THE GRATEFUL DEAD (Warner Bros.) make no bones about what they are up to: "We play loud music for dancing, stealing it from a lot of places—old blues, new blues, jug band, classical licks and jazz." Their album swings to a breathless but controlled climax in the ten-minute Viola Lee Blues.
THE DOORS (Elektra) are actually from Los Angeles, but they have successfully played the San Francisco dance halls. They are a versatile quartet, equally at home in Kurt Weill's Alabama Song and the rhythm-and-bluesy Back Door Man. The electric organ kindles as much excitement as the incendiary lyrics in Light My Fire, their biggest single hit to date.
COUNTRY JOE & THE FiSH call their album Electric Music for the Mind & Body (Vanguard). They have an agreeable melodic approach with many songs in the folk genre, especially Porpoise Mouth, which was written by Country Joe McDonald but sounds like an old English ballad.
MOBY GRAPE has just been pressed by Columbia on five singles and an LP. The year-old quintet creates a rather bland mash—no screaming lyrics, no electronic blasts. They are O.K. for grandma—well, some grandmas. "A good mussing makes you feel so fine/A good mussing with Elderberry wine," they suggest jovially in Hey Grandma.
CINEMA
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. Sean Connery is back as James Bond, this time blowing up a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. haunt in the crater of a Japanese volcano. But the Bonds are beginning to devalue.
THE DIRTY DOZEN. A tough film about a misfit World War II major (Lee Marvin) who trains a squad of case-hardened criminals and psychopaths for a suicidal mission behind enemy lines.
TO SIR, WITH LOVE. Sidney Poitier in the role of an engineer turned teacher in a London slum school. The interim job becomes a dedication to turning hippies and chippies into grownups.
THE DRIFTER. Director Alex Matter and Photographer Steve Winsten make the ordinary something to celebrate in this fragile film about a young vagabond.