The Nubes

ROCK 'N' ROLL

Karen Levine, the daughter of a New York radar engineer, goes to sleep at night with her transistor radio pulsating reassuringly beneath her pillow. Her dream is always the same: she becomes a dancer on TV's Hullabaloo and gaily frugs the night away. Karen, who wears red mesh tights and white Courreges-style boots for real-life frugging, says that rock 'n' roll really gets through to her, especially those tear-drenched ballads about unrequited love. "I know what it's like to be blue," she sighs, "because that's how I feel when my boy friend talks to other girls."

Karen is now eight. She is typical of what the record industry calls "the nubes" (for nubiles), "the teeny weenies" or "the pre-bra set"--the gradeschool girls who are becoming a major factor in the pop-music market.

Bitty Big Market. Once, the movers and shakers were almost exclusively teenagers. Now the trade journals gleefully promote new merchandising angles aimed at "the four-to-twelve-year-old market." They may be teeny-weeny, but with their dollar-a-week allowances, the subteens have become big business. Last year they spent $29 million on big beat music, according to Billboard bought 20.8% of all the 45-r.p.m. records sold in the U.S. "Some of them can't read yet," says one Detroit dealer, "but they can tell what they want by the pictures on the record jacket."

The kids get most of their notions about rock 'n' roll from the radio. One rock radio station offers coloring books as a tie-in promotion for sponsors. Cousin Brucie ("I really believe everyone's my cousin") Morrow, 31, top rock jockey for Manhattan's WABC, has formed a "Cousin Brucie's Pillow Talk Club" for the station's 20,000 sub-teen listeners who go beddie-bye with their transistor radios. "They're my little itty-bitty ones," drools Brucie. "Kids used to go to bed with teddy bears," he says. "Now they go to bed with me."

Trouble is, teeny weenies find it difficult to "identify" with the top rock-'n'-roll singers, most of whom are positively ancient adolescents. As a result, the promoters are busy developing a new stable of pre-teen rockers. Recently, Smash Records signed a four-year contract with three Ohio brothers, the Hornets--Guitarists Greg Calvert, 12, and Gary, 11, and Drummer Steve, 6. Their first record release will be Patty Girl.

You're only twelve years old now,

yeah, yeah, yeah

But when you grow up, I'll still love

you, Patty Girl.

Size-Four Stompers. Motown Records is currently promoting a nine-year-old wailer named Little Lisa, who, they boast, "will become the next Shirley Temple." Decca Records has a prepubescent dreamboat named Keith Green, 12, who has been signed to a five-year contract. He has already written 50 rock-'n'-roll songs, which he croons in a voice trembling with conviction ("Youuu are the girlll/ I am the boyyy/ Yes, it seems we're in loove").

Then there are the Bantams, billed as "three pre-teens with a rocking sound three times their size." They look like Mickey Rooney windup dolls. They twist and shout, stomp their size-four black boots, shake their neck-length flaxen hair and shout, "I got lips that long to kiss you." The freckle-faced Bantams--Mike Kirchner, 12, and his brothers Jeff, 10, and Fritz, 9--honed their gritty style singing for coins on the beach at Venice, Calif., recently landed a recording and five-picture contract with Warner Bros. They are already TV veterans, are now shooting their first film Methuselah Jones, the saga of a sub-teen preacher who sings all his sermons.

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