Onstage, the Tubes are the Marshall McLuhans of rock & roll because the sheer force of their audio-visual firepower practically demands a ravishing rethink about the media, the source of many of our national, everyday preoccupations. An uncanny blend of public dream and personal nightmare, the troupe's double vision is so diabolical and precise that one is both entertained by the magic of the recreated medium artifact and seized by the simultaneous philosophical comment upon it. At its best, a Tubes set moves like a runaway express train through the dark heart of pop America, dangerously mixing comedy with tragedy, music with theatrics, and throwing off enough sparks to burn a hole in all but the most stagnant imagination.

On record, of course, things don't work quite so well yet, although Young and Rich is a great improvement over the band's first LP. In the studio, the multiple meanings that the in-concert Tubes always project somehow seem to flatten out into singular and disarmingly simple-minded parodies too often unworthy of the National Lampoon, much less the aural half of the group's remarkable split vision. The problem isn't really that one has to see the Tubes to appreciate and understand them, but rather that the band hasn't yet developed a sufficient knack for writing or picking songs that can survive as separate entities. On the new album, "Brighter Day" and "Poland Whole/Madam I'm Adam" are strictly dead on arrival.

"Tubes World Tour," however, with its "Baba O'Riley" synthesizer and explosive drumming, effectively evokes the Who and proves that the Tubes can play fine rock & roll when they are not too busy outsmarting themselves (as on the disastrous arrangement for "Stand Up and Shout," a song which should have been easy to get right). "Don't Touch Me There," a natural single, lovingly reconstructs an archetypal Phil Spector production and pokes gentle fun at the teen ballads of the late Fifties and early Sixties, when a taboo was still a taboo ("Darling, if you really care/Don't touch me there"). "Pimp," partially derived from Nelson Algren's brutal A Walk on the Wild Side, is as serious and chilling as it is unexpected—no laughs here.

Technically, all of Young and Rich sounds like a million dollars—Ken Scott produced—but half of the material seems too bogus to earn anything more than a low interest rate. In the long run, though, the Tubes are certainly talented and ambitious enough to recommend continued critical investment. They could pay off handsomely someday. (RS 216)

PAUL NELSON