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RECORDS

Unsung Hero: Better Off Left That Way

By Rob Pritchard
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

Watermelonishly bounding off
more paunches than eardrums,
unswerving in its inversive design,
still another sound erupts from the
seat of Middle America; but on this
occasion it's only a record, so don't
hold your breath. Recorded by the
renowned crooner Terry Nelson,...
("Who?" "Terry Nelson," "Oh")
..."Wake Up America," featuring
the single hit, "The Battle Hymn of
Lt. Cally," could be labeled
Agnew's answer to the Buffalo
Springfield's "For What Its Worth"
or John Lennon's "Give Peace A
Chance" - if it's that good.

Most by now have been
subjected to Mr. Nelson's claim to
fame, "The Battle Hymn of Lt.
Cally," and have formed their own
opinion of the song, but take my
word for it, on an album saturated
with paranoiac jingoism, this is the
definitive work.

How can you beat such lyrics as

That the song makes a hero out
of a convicted murderer does not
bother me so much, for, as the
remainder of the album attests, the
mentality of the products and their
puppet is so low that they can't
even pull off a socially arousing fart
and have it diffuse in the projected
direction.

What does bother me though, is
the attempt by such cretins to
speak for, if not to influence, the
opinions of a vast segment of the
population who honestly feel that
Cally's present situation is unjust. It
is one's right, and in fact, one's
duty to speak out when your
opinion differs from contemporary
policy, but to create a war hero
from the remains of bullet riddled
Vietnamese and attempt to
attribute such inhumanity to
popular sentiment is totally
deplorable even in the rat-race of
trying to make a buck. In this
respect, I am quite happy that they
have failed.

Taken as a whole, "Wake Up
America" is directed at a soft spot
in the bulging profile of Middle
America - patriotism. But these
producers took a different point of
attack than did Bob Hope who
tried to simply ignore the opposite
extreme in his flag-waving
ceremony of last July 4. Rather
than take the defensive, as did
Hope, Nelson's bosses assumed the
offensive, and to do so successfully,
or so they thought, they had to
utilize the powers of jingoism.

Now once you rely mainly on
emotional impact a often becomes
necessary to divorce yourself from
reality in order to forcibly get the
point across, as the following lines
from "The Battle Hymn of Lt.
Cally" indicate.

When I reach my final
campground in that land beyond
the sun/ And the great
commander asks me "Did you
fight or did you run?"/ I'll stand
both straight and tall (Cally is
just over five feet high) stripped
of medals, rand/ and gun, and
this is what I'll say:/ Sir I
followed all my orders and I did
the best I could/ It's hard to
judge the enemy and hard to tell
the good/ Yet there's not a man
among us who would not have
understood

A song or an album can often
get away with this, as do most rock
productions, as long as the music is
good enough to counteract the
insubstantial lyrics. But it also
follows that the worse the lyrics,
the worse the music, and I can
thing of no better example of this
than "Wake Up America."

I somehow find it hard to slight
Nelson's attempt at playing the
guitar, though. It would be like
laughing at a blind man who just
walked into a wall, not that he is
unusually untalented, but rather he
just doesn't have the talent
necessary to make music where