Penthouse April 1976

Penthouse

April, 1976

April, 1976, and atop the Top 40 singles chart is 'Disco Lady,' by Johnny Taylor. I remember 'Let Your Love Flow,' by the Bellamy Brothers, also getting quite a bit of airplay on the Top 40 AM channels. And of course, 'Show Me the Way,' by Frampton, would come to dominate the AOR airplay that spring.

Let's look through the pages of the April 1976 issue of Penthouse magazine, shall we ? 

 

Among the major contributors to this issue is Nick Tosches, a writer of numerous fiction and nonfiction books and articles during the 1970s, on into the 1990s. Tosches deployed a hardboiled style of prose that regularly approached (unwitting) self-parody. In this regard, his 1992 'biography' of Dean Martin: 'Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,' is a great novel, but questionable as a work of nonfiction.......

In this issue of Penthouse, Tosches has this to say of the hapless Bay City Rollers:
 

Those five silly, meatless bodies ringed in Tartan Fauntleroys and smile buttons. Those five hideously bland faces with their frozen pasteboard grins and wide idiot eyes. And you've heard them. Those thin, autistic, sissy-voices singing 'Saturday Night,' a geld pasteurized vision of teen-age fun-fun-fun.  

Elsewhere in the media reviews pages, Karen Thorsen has good things to say about one of the first mainstream compilations of underground comix: 'The Apex Treasury of Underground Comix,' which I reviewed here.

 

These being the mid-70s, disillusionment over America and its place in the World Order is a major topic of analysis. 'The End of the American Dream,' by Jeff Greenfield, is typical of these treatments. It does have a great illustration from 'Cosimo.'

Reflecting Bob Guccione's and Kathy Keeton's interest in the future, 'Beyond 2001,' by Stephen Rosen, predicts all kinds of cool stuff awaiting us in the 21st century, including a 'people washer' egg-shaped chamber for personal hygiene; a nuclear-powered artificial heart; and 'eye movement command machines.'

The interview in this April issue is with Patti Smith, who in '76 was riding high as an object of worship by the New York City hipsterdom. I always regarded Smith as heavily over-rated, but it must be said that she was quite shrewd in her self-promotion. Smith recognized the value in contrasting her appearance and behavior with the wholesome female pop and rock stars of the mid-70s, like Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Olivia Newton-John, and Toni Tennille. 

In her interview, conducted with Tosches, she has this to say:

I got along better with the niggers, but they didn't wanna fuck me either.

I wrote a poem where this guy comes in this girl's window and she's sitting there and she has this real dense mind, so he simply takes a pistol and shoves it her mouth and shoots it. That's what I think of sperm - it's the shell that bursts brains, y'know ? I mean, women need their brains burst out.

I mean, to me Erica Jong ain't a woman; she's just some spoiled Jewish girl who'd rather whine than go out of her brain. 

When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck.

A word like Ms. is really bullshit. Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. And these assholes take the only fuckin' vowel out of the word Miss. So what do they have left ? Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee. It sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms. ? It's all so stupid.

That's our Patti; quite the punk, back in those days......!  She remains alive and well in this year 2026, fifty years after that interview appeared on the newsstands.

Thankfully, our April Penthouse Pet, the lovely, dark-eyed, nineteen year-old Sandy Bernadou, is a more....... relatable......... young woman. We're told she likes to be outdoors, she goes swimming without a bathing suit, and once, she had sex atop a boulder overlooking a river. And her favorite drink is a Tequila Sunrise........that's the Seventies, for you !