Valentines from the Danger Zone

By JAY COCKS

The Roche sisters sing ballads of the heart's misadventures

Love songs like diary notes stuffed in a bottle and set adrift; quick, clenched passages of autobiography set down before the wounds heal and while the wit is still fresh. All in three-part harmony, mind.

The music of the Roche sisters is startling, lacerating and amusing, pretty enough to sing along with, sly enough to linger. It restores a personal, lyric dimension to folk music, cuts through the smugness and self-absorption that have characterized it for too long. The Roches share a kind of skeptical innocence that is delicate but far from fragile. Maggie and Terre Roche flirted with fame once before and have logged a fair portion of time in the psychic danger zone. "We went so far out there/ Everybody got scared," Terre Roche wrote in one song.

The sisters have at least had a strong family to return to. The Roches--Irish, Catholic, suburban, middle class--are the subject of a couple of the sisters' best songs and cast a long shadow over most of the rest. Their father, John A. Roche, developed and marketed a language-skills course on tape called Speechmaster, and spent a fair portion of his off-hours encouraging his daughters to sing. Maggie, at 27 the eldest of the sisters, started writing songs at the age of eight. She and Terre performed them first in the family living room in Park Ridge, N.J., then later on the back of a flat-bed truck in nearby shopping centers for the benefit of a local politician and the glory of the Democratic Party. Terre, 26, the most voluble Roche, shipped off a couple of these campaign ditties to the White House for L.B.J. to use in his battle against Barry Goldwater; she also wrote a letter to the Pope, requesting instructions for achieving sainthood. Neither the President nor the Pontiff replied.

These days, politics and theology no longer come up for much consideration. Questions raised in the Roches' music are decidedly personal. The songs are sharp and deceptively cool, like being stabbed by an icicle. After a while, the weapon disappears and only the wound remains. Maggie's Damned Old Dog proposes an ironic alternative to womanhood ("Do I wanna be a dog?/ any diddlin' male would do/ . . . Limpin' around in the moonlight/ coverin' up what I did"). The Married Men is a confession in cameo that cuts neatly both ways. "One says he'll come after me/ another one'll drop me a line/ one says all o' my agony is in my mind" covers it nicely for the fellows with the lickerish eye. But Maggie Roche is not a songwriter who likes to cop a plea; "Makes me feel like a girl again/ To run with the married men," the sisters sing, adding one final reflection on wronged wives: "I know these girls they don't like me/ but I am just like them/ pickin' a crazy apple off a stem/ Givin' it to the married men." The Roches' songs, which come out of a very particular and womanly conscience, are feminist after the fact. Says Terre, "I missed the whole new consciousness thing." Her sister Suzzy, 22, adds simply, "We're women who make our own music."

The best songs on their just released Warner Bros, album are all informed with this uninsistent but tenacious simplicity. They are haunted by memories of divided families (Hammond Song), faithless loves (Pretty and High) and tentative, thwarted personal encounters (The Train).

The sisters sing in pure, clear voices that shine like sunlight on a spring lake, but the songs are often dark. "There's a bitterness there that won't go away," Maggie acknowledges, a feeling that may have come in part from some bruising years on the folkie circuit and a wrangle over a first album (released by Columbia in 1975). When the record came out, and bombed, Maggie and Terre were hiding out in Hammond, La., waitressing in the Magnolia Restaurant and living at a friend's Kung Fu temple, where they picked up a few rudiments of self-defense.

It was not until late 1976, when Suzzy left college and the women formed a trio, that the Roches began to appear again. They sang Christmas carols, played troubadours for small change at train stations, began to be noticed on the relay of folk-oriented clubs around New York.

The new album has already brought a first rush of attention that both soothes and spooks the Roches. "The more things people say about us the better," says Terre, trying to look on the bright side. "I guess it gives us room to move."

Space of all kinds seems to be a matter of some concern. "We're like three people in an elevator," Terre says. "We learn to keep out of each other's way."

Maggie and Suzzy share an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Terre lives a few blocks away with her boyfriend. Just now, the sisters are starting on a concert tour to promote the new album and are packing their own winning skepticism along with their guitars. "There's no sense of permanence to any of this," says Suzzy, and if the Roches were to be judged by the impact of their celebrity, rather than the staying power of their work, she might be right. But Maggie, characteristically, goes a little deeper. "There's a fear," she says, "that you might not comeback."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.