Everything You Always Wanted to Know About R. Stevie Moore but Were Afraid to Ask

Review from SOUNDS (U.K.) Issue dated 24 March 1984 •••••(Five stars) "More More Moore" by Jack Barron "THAT AIN'T no kinda music that's the sound of a sick kid dying in the bath," drawls an ancient black dude about RSM's creative noise during a street interview included on this monumental vinyl. Definitely an amusing way of capturing a talent more inspired than the Beatles. Dumb description is what it boils down to. "Like Tom Dolby...but with a sense of humour," a couple of us enthused in the editorial meeting. An easy pop reference point to gain maximum review space. Of course, we lied. True genius (honestly!) is always worth deceiving for. There's 100 minutes of the American's highly personal vision of rock in the grooves of this imaginatively packaged double elpee affair. 96 are fascinating. The remaining four---including a meatball do-over of Slade's "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" ---are just good. None of it echoes a sick kid gurgling in the tub. That reminds me of a relevant joke (Mary) recently told me: what do you do when an epileptic has a fit in the bath? Throw your laundry in! RSM would laugh at that, and the same sort of nasty wit grins through songs like the punky pastiche of "I Hate People." However, the trails of genius are many and we're not dealing with a mere warpo. The weather, sticky sex, the holocaust, the twist, bloody knuckles, love, revenge---a vast array of topics assault the listener. So if he's so skilled, why isn't his name familiar? Well, RSM is yer actual cult legend type. While other artists whinge about the Biz between licking the nearest corporate butt with glee, this son of Nashville has always been an outsider. And that's what you get here---an outsider's melodic and lyrical viewpoint recorded on a couple of reel- to-reels at home with RSM playing all the instruments. Since the early Seventies, he has experimented in this classic bedsit manner. He might have put out a few records on obscure labels but his heart remained tied in a chrome-dioxide bow. And from '81, RSM's strange fruits filtered into the world via his own cassette club. The present collection plucks some of the peaches spawned by RSM in the past decade. Avant-garde rock, I suppose you'd call it, but both compulsive and entertaining. There isn't a set style, rather a sprawl of influences bent and distorted by the artist's individuality into odd shapes. Say one cut mimics the Chipmunks, the next parodies David Byrne, another is an Elvis cover, and where does that leave the other 30 offerings? Somewhere obviously, RSM is like a black hole sucking in the cultural references of white American pop and spewing out a hallucination of modern music. "Everything" is the most undruggy psychedelic record I've heard.