Joe (where’s my pentagram?) Fernbacher, Creem, 4/79
My initial reaction to this album wasn’t exactly nuclear. To put it mildly, all I wanted to do was send a speeding silver bullet through its nervy hide. From a group with a name like the Werewolves, you’d expect a certain quotient of primal, savage, sonic thrombosis, which is exactly what they projected on their first album. Their nepionic mycterism was seemingly a spector for an ensuing history of rabid raunch and plain old “rock alotus toomuchus.” They could have been the next Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) (I hate abbreviations--hate ’em so much in fact that I stopped wearing jockey shorts and switched to boxers), but they blew it by slipping into the famous “second album syndrome,” also known as the “arty effort syndrome.”
Bands usually bust their balls trying to worm their way through the puke’n’slime of the bar band trenches and get signed to a fat recording contract. They get excited and play their rented souls off for that first big plunge into vinyl reality, but after a short while, there they are, sitting by the pool, able to afford such luxuries as Jack Daniels and women and Heinekens and women and reviews in the rock press and women and women. And they also begin to take themselves seriously. Wrong. As Lester Bangs once moaned, “Once you get competent, you’ve had it.” (I think he said it, and if he didn’t then I think I did. Whatever.) So here we have a good band that’s taken the puce brick road into merehood instead of the glittering brick road of crotalic violence and bellowing nonsense. Nice bit of feeble minded morcellation, aeh?
However, enough of this bavardage. Let’s stroke the armpit. Let’s talk about the record. Or rather, let’s talk about a friend of mine from my mournful college days, a friend named Skip. Skip used to be in a sort of collective cum drug web called Dope Wash, now just a memory. Skip and the other souls from Dope Wash were for sure tied into the sub-cosmic mainline of American anykindacultureyou’dwannamention. Anyway, they all went the ways of age and drifted on into the realms of what Kerouac called the Dharma Bums. I’ve only bumped into him once or twice since those misty-eyed days of tear gas and roses--he was heavy into paddleball, playing life for its physical angle. Stay in shape and you’ll survive when it all goes pfft.
But the importance of this bit of psychoautobiographical reliquism comes a few years later. Being a moolvee of hootch and hooosegow glomography (in other words, a drunk), I happened upon Skip one night in a local juice academy when I couldn’t even remember what decade it was. Fade in on two guys and a dog at a bar. Guy 2: “Hey, what’s happenin’?” Guy 1 (aka me): Just strokin’ along on that thin red line...whaddya been up to?” Guy 2: “I’ve been living in the woods. I’m raising wolves. I got one of ’em with me right now.” Guy 1: “You mean that dog’s a wolf?” Guy 2: “Yeah, but don’t worry, just don’t make no sudden moves at me.” Guy 1: (Thinking to himself, “That’s a wolf and I need another drink. And I really need to make a sudden move...right out of this place.”)
Now, raising wolves is much more effective than calling yourselves the Werewolves. And I guess that’s the morological crux to this whole verbal barcarole. Why name yourself a werewolf when you can raise one and be a real part of the pack. Like, if you’re gonna call yourselves the Werewolves, you’ve gotta hit that miracle lick, the essence of all that animal noise right off, and maintain it. On their first album, the Werewolves were the Werewolves. On Ship Of Fools they’re only Larry Talbot. That’s it, in a nutshell.
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