WHAT IMPRESSED ME THIS WEEK (A Brief History of White Boy Stomp….From Garage Bands to Quentin Tarantino)

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Mojo Workout Paul Revere and the Raiders (Recorded 1964, Released 2000)

MOJOWORKOUT

This two-disc set was released by Sundazed in 2000. Basically, it sets out to demonstrate that, before they were the Ultimate Garage Band Made Good, Paul Revere and the Raiders (who came out of the Ultimate Garage Band Scene in the Pacific Northwest) were, well, the Ultimate Garage Band.

Most of Disc 2 is studio material from their early days on Columbia Records (where they were the first rock and roll band signed to the high-falutin’ home of folk, blues, jazz and other “adult” forms). I’d heard most of it before, and the repackaging is just fine–especially nice hearing all the gutbucket stuff in one handy, hard-hitting place.

But the real ear-opener is Disc 1, which captures a show the label arranged for the band to perform in front of a teenage audience in Columbia’s own studio.

According to the liner notes, this came about because, after an initial dry run–made dry in part because famous ass-dragger Mitch Miller (whose sing-a-longs were, of course, the contemporary standard of “maturity”) had scotched proper promotion of the band’s version of “Louie, Louie” which was subsequently stomped by the Kingsmen–some of the honchos were having a hard time remembering exactly why they had signed the band in the first place.

I don’t know if the resulting explosion of atomic level noise and energy made the suits any happier. I can bet it didn’t make Miller any happier and, certainly, little of the show saw the light of day at the time (though the band did soon thereafter proceed with its glorious near-decade run of hit singles).

But, however it came to pass, it’s a true signifier of the garage-band ethos as it has come down to us in the present day. It’s a kind of pure (or impure) reminder that “garage” bands–so called because there was a perception, which, to my knowledge has never been proved or dispoved, rather like the existence of the Deity, that many of them had formed in garages–were a phenomenon that could only have been produced by a Land of Garages, i.e., a culture that was just beginning to glimpse the possible end of its five hundred year winning streak.

To that end, it’s a joyful noise, reveling in its complete and utter abandon (to steal a phrase and turn it into a paraphrase) to an extent that can only be achieved by not giving a rip about winning streaks, cultural or otherwise. The Raiders came from a place that epitomized an attitude that wasn’t so much committed to either stealing or honoring black music as stomping all over it. Whether the object was to replace one America with another, or simply level it all into a great fruited plain shared by all is unknowable. There may have been some up-and-comers in the scenes the Raiders both participated in and inspired who contemplated such questions, but this particular band became Ultimate by leaving all of that to one side most of the time and most especially here.

Heck, by the time they break into “Crisco Party” (all the boys on one side, all the girls on the other side, now everybody….disrobe) they even manage to make orgies sound like something they are inherently not.

Namely, democratic.

Baby that was one version of Rock and Roll that has gone the way of the dodo and taken democratic America right along with it.

And, while, they may or may not have been honoring the spirit that made the streak possible (stomping on things was certainly part of that spirit), I doubt they were threatening its continuance nearly as much as the purely cynical decisions being taken concurrently in the Corridors of Power regarding troop movements in South Viet Nam (to be announced immediately after the forthcoming election!)

True Romance, 1993

TRUEROMANCE

Tony Scott (Ridley’s hackier brother) directed. That he did so with a little more distinction than usual was probably due to Quentin Tarantino’s script, which has plenty wrong with it, but also has some promising, non-nihilistic aspects which, aside from the anomalous Jackie Brown, (based on an Elmore Leonard story that, like this one, has a likable and unlikely couple emerging from the mayhem) his own directing career has never come close to realizing.

Too bad.

Yeah, the I’m-so-racist-I-can’t-possibly-be-an-actual-racist-because-no-actual-racist-would-think-he-could-get-away-with-this-hee-hee attitude is there, as is the cartoon violence masquerading as some kind of arty “statement” (or, more likely, the dread non-statement statement which is such a close cousin of the political world’s style of non-apology apology that emerged around the same time) and the mind-numbing ethnic/racial/regional stereotypes.

But there was still a lot to like. Yeah, Patricia Arquette is playing a Hollywood Southerner, and, because the script has her being from Tallahassee–a place I know something about–it was more than usually annoying to note that she did not remotely remind me of anyone I’ve ever known in my forty years of hanging about the place. That plus she’s called Alabama. Which, believe me, she wouldn’t be. Not if she was from around here. The only place you would be less likely to find somebody called Alabama than Tallahassee is Alabama.

Then again, she’s Patricia Arquette, so after a few minutes I didn’t care. That, plus Christian Slater in his all-to-brief likeable phase, a few pretty good sub-Donald-Westlake plot twists and a handful of effective music interludes (something Tarantino became famous for elsewhere, though, except for Nancy Sinatra at the beginning of one of the Kill Bill movies, I’ve never for the life of me understood why–good Lord, the man muffed Santa Esmerelda’s version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which, until I saw/heard it with my own eyes/ears, I would have deemed beyond mere human capacity–I mean, with that playing, ten minutes of black screen should have been mesmerizing) kept the whole thing chugging along pretty well until the ending, which has a couple of genuinely clever and touching moments.

I’m not making any claims for it being a great movie or anything, but, if I’d seen it when it came out, I would have tagged the writer as having some genuine promise (I think I would have known Tony Scott wasn’t responsible for very much). And genuine promise he had, even after Pulp Fiction.

Shame he squandered it.

Bigger shame we rewarded him for not living up to his potential.

But you know what they say. All winning streaks–large and small–gotta end some time.

 

EVERY MAN’S EVERYMAN (James Garner, R.I.P)

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There are two kinds of “stars.” Those who are like the rest of us, and those who most definitely are not like the rest of us.

Of those who are like us, no one ever was–or ever will be–quite so much like us as James Garner.

I’m sure all the important, universal things will be said elsewhere. For me, on a strictly personal basis, I’d just like to apologize to my mother’s shade.

When I was in high school, The Rockford Files always aired on Friday night. On Friday night, when I was in high school, there was almost always a football game or a basketball game to attend. Somehow, I thought those games were more important than watching James Garner with my mother. Understandable I guess, and, of course, she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

But there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have known then just how much more watching Jim Rockford with my mom on even one more Friday night–on that 19″ black-and-white loaner with the not-quite-stable vertical hold–would mean now.

So, for the shade of James Scott Bumgarner (and, believe me, for no other)….just this once:

 

WHERE WE WERE THEN…WHERE WE ARE NOW (Quarterly Book Report: April–June, 2014)

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THEN:

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The Underground Man (Ross MacDonald–1971)

Classic from his late period. By then, he was getting serious reviews in serious places (to the extent that was possible in 1971, which, though limited, was not quite as limited as in the decades hence). They were earned. He was always a master plotter (and almost unique in that respect among thriller writers), but his books went way beyond thrills or even the world-weary (and wary) moralism of the classic hard-boiled school (frequently, and conveniently, rearranged into amoralism by the crit-illuminati).

At this point in Lew Archer’s long journey, things like Kent State and Viet Nam are in the air without ever once being specifically referenced, or even mentioned. Instead, the whole sad tale is told in passing phrases, tossed of almost haiku-style, which are both transcendent and very time-and-place specific:

I had no children, but I had given up envying people who had.

Or:

“She sounds like a kook. But it’s hard to tell about young people nowadays.”

“It always was.”

Or:

He had to live out his time of trouble as she had. And there was no assurance that he would. He belonged to a generation whose elders had been poisoned, like the pelicans, with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.

That, bear in mind, from 1971–before the fall, when it was still possible that the center might just hold. I’m not sure anyone writes like that now.

You know, now that the center hasn’t quite…

Which maybe means all that wary moralism was never quite as easy as he made it look.

STILL THEN:

 

RADICALCHICWOLFE

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (Tom Wolfe, 1970)

Good…and prescient.

Not as good or prescient as Ross MacDonald, but he does come at the very same moment from a very different angle. Like Jean Renoir and Cecille B. Demille, Wolfe had/has a genuine and nuanced feeling for the travails of the upper classes (given full reign–no pun intended–in the classic essay on the spectacle of Lenny Bernstein and his wife (and their social circle) being fleeced by the Black Panthers back when getting fleeced by radicals was, as the title has it, “chic.” Here, where Wolfe has friends (or at least friendly acquaintances) in the fight, the zingers keep coming:

Well, anyway, one truly FEELS for them. One really does. On the other hand–on the second track in one’s mind, that is–one also has a sincere concern for maintaining a proper East Side life-style in New York Society. And this concern is just as sincere as the first, and just as deep. It really is.

Or:

…Friends of the Earth was Radical Chic, all right. The radical part began with the simple fact that the movement was not tax deductible.

Or:

These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big–these are REAL MEN!

Alas, also like Renoir and DeMille, Wolfe was a bit crude when dealing with common clay, that is anyone not perched, however precariously, inside the magic circle of some real or imagined court. And, lacking their optimism, he ends up with a curdled view of the middle and lower classes (as opposed to a rather absurdly romantic one). That cynicism shines through in “Mau-mauing” which takes up the second half of this little volume. It’s still perceptive, but–given its cast of well meaning government bureaucrats and street hustlers–there’s nowhere for Wolfe to place his small store of human empathy. Thus, for all his tactile skill, the  second part grows tiresome rather quickly. The zingers, oddly enough, lose their sting once he reached full contempt mode.

I can see why he had to turn to fiction–and why I’m still not likely to be his preferred audience.

NOW:

HITMEBLOCK

Hit Me (Lawrence Block, 2013)

Assassin lit as pure entertainment. And, for once, it actually is purely entertaining. It’s a bit of a cheat, giving an amoral man a sort of conscience (faithful to his wife, won’t kill kids, that sort of thing). But this very cheat–once accepted and combined with Block’s considerable devotion to craft–also makes it dangerously seductive. (It’s part of a series and it’s the first I’ve read of either Block or the series, so I can’t speak to the norm–but what I basically mean by “dangerously seductive” is that one can enjoy it immensely while also recognizing such a book could only be conceived–let alone published, let alone published without fanfare, let alone enjoyed–in a society that has rotted from the inside….That is, forgotten everything worth knowing. Sort of like Ross MacDonald imagined we would.)

See ya’ next quarter!

 

 

WHEN BUDDY HOLLY SANG AND PLAYED FOR THE STILL-GESTATING STEPFORD WIVES…(Found In the Connection: Rattling Loose End #29)

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…at Arthur Murray’s place, no less. Comment is probably superfluous, but for those who think rock and roll was either fundamentally childish or fundamentally unnecessary, all I can say is, these people sure look to me like they could use a little liberating. (And, as Buddy’s reincarnated soul, I would just like to tell any of those still with us, who may have been liberated at the time, there’s absolutely no need to thank me…I served a Higher Power then.)…

 

JOHN FORD’S PEOPLE….LANA MARTIN (Drums Along the Mohawk)

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Film: Drums Along the Mohawk
Character: Lana Borst Martin
Played by: Claudette Colbert

[NOTE: This is the latest installment in a series on major and minor characters in the films of John Ford. I'm breaking the routine this time in order to write about Drums Along the Mohawk for the blog-a-thon at Krell Laboratories. (to whom, much thanks for allowing me to participate) Please be sure to follow the link and check out the other participants! For newcomers here, the first three installments in this slow-l-y-y-y developing series concern minor characters from The Searchers, and can be found by accessing John Ford's People under the category listing at the right.]

TO BEGIN…

Let’s pause a little for the expression of some common sentiments (however passing strange), concerning Ford and the fairer sex:

“What he (John Ford) brought to the screen that made me admire him more than any other filmmaker was a kind of poetry, specific to the screen and specific to men. Granted his women were not his best creations….” (Elia Kazan)

“For a long time, I criticized his view of women–which I found too 19th century.” (Francois Truffaut, who, to be fair, had softened his view somewhat–though only somewhat–by the time he said this)

AND THEN…SINCE WE’RE GRANTING THINGS:

Grant this first: Hollywood being what it was, not even John Ford could make every film his.

Grant this second: He made more of Hollywood’s inevitable product “his” than virtually anyone else.

So…

Every Ford film is familiar. Every great Ford film, no matter how familiar, is unique, a world unto itself and, irrespective of its particular adherence to, or departure from, “realism” (which, with a certain kind of critic, and most often with the kind who strives to be influential, always means whichever version of the “facts” they themselves find most convenient), amounts to a steadfast refusal to allow human history and behavior to be turned into hard sciences after the manner of physics or engineering.

Drums Along the Mohawk, which has a certain amount of realism and a great feel of authenticity (which, accounting as it does for irrationality, mythology, imagination, isn’t really the same thing) seemed ultra-familiar when I first saw it roughly a quarter-century ago. As generally happens with Ford’s best films, it has grown more singular–more authentic–with each repeated viewing in the long years since.

And, by now, that’s a lot of viewings.

One reason it seemed so familiar in the beginning was because I recognized the people–not from other Hollywood product, where (except for John Ford’s other films) such folks are virtually absent except when they are being caricatured–but from the communities I grew up in during the sixties and seventies.

Maybe that was the last time such people will be familiar. I don’t get out enough anymore to speak with much authority on the matter. Suffice it to say that Ford’s signature gift for portraying ordinary lives (unique in the history of Hollywood, sure, but also, lest we forget, highly unusual in the history of anything) was never more fully on display than here.

One of the clearest markers of delving into the ordinary–lives as they might actually have been lived–is the cycle of destruction and renewal that sufficiently authentic lives tend to accumulate. Ford caught these cycles to a degree no other American filmmaker has approached. As I hope to demonstrate below, he never caught them more fully than here.

I suspect the intensity with which such rare qualities are presented in Drums, and its place as probably the least written about of Ford’s major films, are not unrelated phenomena. Hollywood has gone through a lot of changes in a century-plus. Its addiction to fantasy (to the studied and persistent absence of authenticity)–fully enabled by the audiences of successive generations (meaning, of course, us)–has, however, remained fundamentally unchanged.

To all of that, add this–Drums defies genre even more readily than the usual Ford masterwork. Nobody was quite so adept at confusing such issues–at reminding us that a film might be a Homeric epic despite modest length, that it might be a comedy of manners despite ultra-serious subject matter, that it might be about the future even though it is set firmly in the past, that it might be a “woman’s picture” despite the presence of forts (a recurring Ford theme) and muskets and Red Coats and Redder Indians.

Cue the music!

Ford was the best at a lot of things and the thing he was very best at–besides narrative depth–was overturning expectations.

The first thing worth noting about Drums Along the Mohawk, then, is the billing, which, despite a title and subject matter that seems to speak pretty directly to the misguided notions quoted above, places Claudette Colbert first.

That might have happened anyway. Henry Fonda was the male lead. His star was still on the rise, and, despite his eventual iconic status, he would arguably never be quite the glittering box office star that Colbert was in the thirties. In 1939, if she was in a picture, she was pretty much guaranteed top billing.

That didn’t necessitate it being her character’s story to anything like the extent Drums Along the Mohawk is–or that the character would be anywhere near as challenging or fulfilling.

For all that to happen, on a picture like this one, Ford had to trust he was working with a first-rate actress (as he certainly was), and he had to do his usual bang-up job of blurring conventional genre lines (as he certainly did).

Result? A picture that–once viewed a sufficient number of times–sneaks up on us slow-learner types and resists easy exegesis.

So, in a tale that includes a multitude of Ford’s usual arc-within-an-arc narratives, a story where even minor characters and by-the-way settings, take remarkable journeys, one journey stands out.

It isn’t this one, which goes from here:

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to here.

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Or this one, from here:

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to here.

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Or yet again, this one, from here

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to here…

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It’s not even the more general journeys, such as that from here…

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to here…

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or this one, from here…

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to here…

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Not any of those, or any of a dozen others….But this one…

From here…

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To here.

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…is where Ford chose to put the center.

No doubt he could have found other centers for a narrative as rich as Drums. Given a story set in the Revolution (America’s great un-examined subject) and also on the Frontier (America’s–and Ford’s–great familiar subject), he no doubt would have done just that, if he had been a man who truly misunderstood women.

But Lana’s story is the one he chose to build everything else around. If modernity doesn’t quite get her, (if Truffaut was unhappy with the women of the 19th century, one can only imagine how he felt about the 18th) then I suspect we’ve lost something. In America, at least, that amounts to something like where we came from.

What Kazan, Truffaut and, oh so many others, seemed to miss, is that Ford-the-director (I’ll leave speculation on Ford-the-curmudgeon, Ford-the-monster, Ford-the-terrible-person to others) was imminently interested in women.

He just wasn’t very interested in Hollywood’s ideas of women.

That being the case, Claudette Colbert, who had, by 1939, already personified, just about as perfectly as anyone could, nearly every type of wondrous woman Hollywood was interested in (the Dizzy Heiress, the Screwball Dame, the long-suffering Madame of Melodrama, the Queen of the Nile, all that just for starters), might have seemed the last possible choice for Lana Martin. Given the stories that have circulated regarding their conflict on the shoot, she might have been Ford’s last choice.

But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t the best choice.

However she got the job, she put everything she had into it. And everything she had was consummate skill and artistry–including the ability to diffuse her star power in order to fully represent a gentle, naturally subservient spirit that must have been as far from her own as it was possible to get. On the evidence of this single time they worked together, she certainly understood both big-picture arc and small-picture moments (the long and the short) as exquisitely well as any of Ford’s regulars. And, whatever his feelings about her insistence on glamour makeup, Ford was right to put the story in her hands.

Truth be told, I love just about every element of Drums: Edna May Oliver’s Mrs. McClennar (okay that’s an easy one); the wealth of period detail (especially the interiors); the genuine feel of Appalachia–the American Frontier’s first barrier–rendered glorious for once (and in Utah no less); the you-are-there aspect of the pioneer experience (especially the barn-raising scene that turns into an Indian raid). All that and so much more.

But the real reason I keep watching is to find out how Lana got through.

How the rich girl from Albany survived (and survives) not just the frontier, but The Frontier–the process of winning the hard ground the Mohawk valley represents, and the weight of Myth that winning created.

Drums Along the Mohawk keeps this balance perfectly, and it does so in large part because Lana is such a well-drawn character, an exemplar of the quiet, essential, forgotten women, generally ignored by both history and literature (fact and myth).

In order to understand such women, Ford had to be not only a poet of community (something that is generally acknowledged) but of community’s historical foundation stone: marriage. Which meant he also had to understand just how and where women stood in the very particular stories he was telling.

Women generally, yes, but also specific women–and not always the most familiar types.

Even when Ford was making his films, Americans already had a long-demonstrated preference for the firebrand–the kind of women played in their respective primes by Maureen O’Hara or Vera Miles, or Ava Gardner or Anne Bancroft (to stick to obvious examples from Ford’s own oeuvre).

I suspect the main reason  Lana Martin is infrequently–if ever–mentioned among Colbert’s finest performances, is that she does not fill this bill. Lana is genteel (a strike against her already), but she’s also genuinely eager to please. Give her almost any circumstance through the first parts of the film and she will look to someone else for approval.

Most often that someone is Gil–as definitive an example of the stolid husband as she is of the demure, even submissive wife.

Fragile as a flower you might say:

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With that vivid image established, we’re hardly surprised, then, to find her forever seeking approval, assurance, a new kind of self-worth. Be it in a tavern:..

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On the road…

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In a cabin…

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In a field…

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In church…

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In a crisis:

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At a turning point:

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One could go on. One could even note that Lana’s persistent need for some sort of assurance isn’t limited to Gil (who you will note, is generally not indifferent, but rather oblivious, as though he can’t imagine anyone of Lana’s background needing such assurance from the likes of him)….Meanwhile, Mrs. McClennar, in particular, operates on a lot of levels, none more important than as a kind of anti-Lana, an assurance to all and sundry that the firebrand spirit is alive and well!

Where Lana fusses…

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Mrs. McClennar asserts:

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Where Lana, fearful of the future, pines…

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Mrs. McClennar (wife of the late Captain Barnabas “Blast his eyes lovin’ it” McClennar and mindful of the past), pontificates:

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Where Lana demures…

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Mrs. McClennar snorts with derision…

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To this point, even the most generous critique might have us wanting to leave Lana where we found her–to share what is evidently her low opinion of herself (and that’s without the screaming and fainting that were much more accepted as dramatic norms at the time than any right-thinking modernista is willing to put up with at this distance….heaven forbid any woman should act effeminate in the movies these days, when they would only be taking jobs from all the leading men so eager to shoulder the burden).

But, Ford being Ford, it’s a safe bet there’s a convergence coming–that we won’t leave Lana there. That there will be a moment when Lana starts to show that, while she’ll never be Mrs. McClennar (that sort of obviousness would do for most filmmakers, never for Ford), the differences between her and her de-facto mentor, don’t cut all the way to bone either.

Let the crisis rise to a sufficient level and likenesses–specific to them, general to woman’s accepted place in the times being portrayed–begin to emerge.

What Mrs. McClennar already knows about men returning from battle…

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Lana will know soon enough. If not here:

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Then certainly here (where the care she gave Gil’s immaculate clothes upon his departure, pictured above, is finally turned to something genuinely useful as she applies it, in heightened degree, to his torn body):

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[I'll pause to note that the sequence referenced here--where Gil recounts his experience in battle (a battle, incidentally, which was genuinely significant in the foundation of the country and during which the colonials won despite suffering the horrific casualties Gil mentions, and which Ford shows us only through this scene), has been justifiably praised for its striking portrayal of a soldier suffering what is now called PTSD. Fonda has received plenty of well-earned praise for his harrowing performance. But Colbert had perhaps an even harder task--to both support Fonda's performance and, simultaneously, to bring forth, for the first time, the full measure of Lana's residual toughness. To focus on the nuances she deploys throughout this very long and compelling scene--to achieve the considerable accomplishment of tearing your eyes away from Fonda throughout--is to be awed.]

A simpler narrative, moving on straight lines, would mark this as Lana’s ascendance, perhaps even the moment when she swaps places with Mrs. McClennar. No such simplicity occurs. Lana gets tougher, Mrs. McClennar eventually goes a little dotty. But neither woman loses her essence. Being molded by time and circumstance is not the same as having your basic character overthrown.

Hard to imagine Mrs. McClennar, for instance, ever being afraid of Indians. Certainly not this afraid:

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Or even this afraid:

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Let alone still this afraid…

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Right after she has done this:

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No, However much bonding Lana and the older, saltier woman do, Mrs. McClennar will always be more apt to respond this way…

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Or this…(mounting the barricades, instead of cowering below):

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This separation of natures, does not preclude an essential sisterhood, of course…Mrs. McClennar does hate sewing:

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And, it being the 18th century, it will still be woman’s lot to watch and wait…

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And tend the wounded…

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And mourn the dead…

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Strong bonds indeed.

Still, for all that, we know that, if Lana, young and beautiful, were to find herself a widower, she would not be caught cavorting with handsome young men…

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Or leading cheers…

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No, her own lot will still be to quietly validate the passage of the seasons. The living…

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The dying…

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The high tide…

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And the low…

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And, most significantly of all…the worrying…

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And the hoping…

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Hoping, perhaps, that this…

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And this…

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And all of this…

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Will somehow, finally, be validated by all of this…

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The future that had not quite arrived in Ford’s time…and has not quite arrived in ours…That remains tantalizingly out of reach…NVE00724 NVE00725 NVE00726 NVE00727

A future that was once brought into view by those John Ford was forever reminding us we would forget only at our peril…

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OH YEAH, NOW I REMEMBER WHAT I WAS MAD ABOUT (Bob Dylan, the Coen Brothers and Why I Still Need Rock and Roll: Session #11)

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Inside Llewyn Davis–Coen Brothers, 2013

BOBDYLAN

One reason I keep listening to music–even really familiar music–is that it keeps paving the road to understanding (not to mention truth, beauty, peace, love and harmony, besides which, people who can dance can dance to it and make me smile).

When I saw this in the theater I considered writing a long, semi-angry piece on its shortcomings (while acknowledging it had some of the Coen Brothers’ usual strengths). Time and circumstance intervened and I basically abandoned the idea.

But, this being Bob Dylan week at my house and all, I found a moment from his eponymous first album that crystalized why I thought the movie failed.

I already knew (and, had I managed to finish that original piece, would certainly have emphasized), that this (see below!) was faster, funnier, more melodic and, you know, TRUER (not to mention autobiographical, though I hasten to add that is not always the same thing as “true,” since autobiography can lie its shiny white posterior off as fast as anything else in this god-almighty-world) than any single element of Inside Llewyn Davis, forget the whole mish-mashed thing.

But “Creeque Alley” was told looking back, from the standpoint of what turned out to be not-very-stable fame and fortune which did not yet know quite how very-unstable it was going to be.

Meaning it maybe had an unfair advantage over a fictional film that was set in the days just before the Greenwich Village folk scene became a big, freaking deal.

Catching up with Dylan’s first this week, though, I was taken back to the heart of the moment–the very point in time which the Coens were trying to recapture (albeit for purposes that remained obscure both while I was watching the film and, later, wondering what I might have missed).

And, this time, it was the man whose ascendance would be part and parcel with all the reasons why anyone would want to make a film about that moment fifty years later, who brought the point home.

By being–you guessed it–faster, funnier, (at least a bit) more melodic, and, you know, TRUER (not to mention autobiographical in ways that almost certainly amounted to Robert Zimmerman lying his shiny white posterior off).

The point is, you can listen to either one of these records for the five hundredth time and still have no doubt the people who wrote and sang those words had lived lives worth making movies about–and that they were the tip of a communal iceberg.

I left Inside Llewyn Davis wondering if the early sixties’ folk scene had even happened at all–let alone how the world I had just seen depicted (if it really did exist) could have ever amounted to anything anyone might care about.

I probably took the smug nature of the film’s failures a little more personally than usual because those failures were, for me, a tad personal. I didn’t feel defensive about what the film mocked, because none of the things (or people) it mocked came anywhere near representing anything (or anyone) remotely realistic.

But I did care about what it ignored–which was the music itself.

I mean, they didn’t get any of it right. Some of it was pretty, some of it was “authentic,” some of it was “poetic,” some of it was obviously meant to be parodic. But the stuff that worked didn’t work the way commercial folk music worked and the stuff that failed (which was almost all of it) didn’t fail in the ways commercial folk did either.

If I took all this a little too hard, it was perhaps because commercial folk music–the music of big city Leftists–was my first musical love. It was my first musical love because it found its way to my conservative Christian world by virtue of the very good hearts so many of the folkies wore so proudly on their sleeves–conscientious hearts which seemed very much in tune with the world I knew.

And if that didn’t give me enough of a stake, there was the added fact that encountering the music that grew out of that scene–the folk rock of the Byrds specifically–was the first great leap to freedom I ever found in art (and, not at all incidentally, fully at one with the leap I had long since found in faith).

In other words, if somebody was going to make a movie about Greenwich Village in the early sixties, I wanted it to be skillful, sure (which Inside Llewyn Davis certainly is), but I also wanted it to be, you know…

True.

By which I very specifically do not mean merely “factual.”

What I really wanted was for it to maybe, just maybe, catch the spirit–in what is very likely to be the most high profile film ever made about this “scene”–of at least one of the thousand or so great records that (directly and indirectly) went forth from it and changed the world just a little bit for the better.

Like this, maybe:

And this–the thing that would have been worth doing, if you were going to make a film about that particular time and place which could not have been set in any other time or place because it honored what was unique about its subject matter–is something Inside Llewyn Davis, sadly, did not even attempt.

Fortunately, we do still have all those records. So maybe I’ll just keep listening.

MAYBE BOB DYLAN REALLY WAS EVERYWHERE…(Found In The Connection: Rattling Loose End #28)

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…In the sixties, I mean.

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Nashville Skyline, which Dylan released in 1969, was the first album from him that could have been mistaken for being disengaged from the times. Not only is there nothing like an obvious protest song–in either topical or abstract form–the singing and playing are literally old-fashioned to a fault, a move that’s emphasized by a lead track that’s a duet with Johnny Cash in his best vocal equivalent of blank-verse.

But, while Skyline was superficially treated at the time (and for the most part since) as a version of “country rock”–or, having been recorded in Nashville itself with truly modest arrangements–just “country” that happened to be recorded by a rock star, it was really rooted in a musical value system that was more akin to nineteenth century parlor music.

Beyond the superficial, I don’t know if this comes as news to anybody but me. I’ll confess I’m not really up on whatever deep scholarship might exist concerning this album. And, to tell the truth, I’ve never really listened to it much outside of two tracks which happened to be on one of those old two-fer-one oldies’ forty-fives that record companies used to put out in the seventies and early eighties. I bought the 45 (long before I even knew there was an album called Nashville Skyline) for the A-side (“Lay Lady Lay”) and started listening to the B-side (“I Threw It All Away”) a few years later, after I read Greil Marcus’ famous “Presliad” essay in Mystery Train, where, in 1974, he had imagined it as something like Elvis Presley’s epitaph several years before Elvis’ death.

As I’ve been gradually striving for some sort of Dylan completism on CD in recent years, I ordered Nashville Skyline (which finishes the sixties!) on disc and it showed up in the mail yesterday, then found its way to my automobile’s good old-fashioned CD player (so-o-o-o twentieth century) last evening, when I had to drive in to work to figure out why my twenty-first century computer wasn’t linking the office (construction messing with the internet btw, and no telling when it will be fixed, so if you think I’ve been doing some slow posting here lately, don’t worry, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!).

Forced to be alone with the entire record and give it my full attention for once, I might not have found much more in it than I ever found before. Except that, in context, a throwaway ditty called “Peggy Day” sounded so exactly like a man who wasn’t much of a singer trying to woo a sweetheart in 1905 somewhere in an Indiana living room with hardwood floors gleaming and Booth Tarkington taking notes for a short story, that I found it irresistibly charming and even–for 1969–a bit daring and even visionary.

Mind you, I say that is how it sounded. I got no notion, merely from listening to that sound, as to what the song might be about, though I’d be surprised to learn it was about much.

What the pure sound of the thing did, however, was haul the track that came before it (which happened to be “I Threw It All Away”) and the track that came after (which happened to be “Lay Lady Lay”) into a new kind of light.

“Lay Lady Lay” (rather like Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “(Leaving On A) Jet Plane”–which hit #1 not long after Dylan’s record hit the Top Ten, but which had been recorded and released as an album track three years earlier and which I could easily imagine having informed Dylan’s increasingly laid back vocal approach throughout the late sixties) suddenly sounded like a search for peace among terrible turmoil.

And, while I didn’t hit the track search and go back to “I Threw It All Away,” it lingered in my mind until after midnight, when I was home again and found myself glued to CNN’s episode from its series on The Sixties, which was either about Martin Luther King or the Civil Rights Movement in general (having missed the intro, I couldn’t tell).

And, amidst the street-level tumult and mountain-top shouting, I found that: “Once I had mountains, in the palm of my hand, and rivers that ran through every day/I must have been mad, I never knew what I had…until, I threw it all away” no longer had anything to do with Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan’s lost lover, and had become irrevocably about, well, 1969.

And all of us.

So much for being disengaged.

 

HAVING FUN WITH THE CELLULOID SIXTIES

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TAMITICKET

Sheila O’Malley recently participated in–and linked to–an interesting poll of best/favorite movies from the 60′s that posted here.

I don’t do a lot of these, but this concept was pretty interesting, mostly because, well, the sixties are always interesting. Besides I haven’t done any autobiography for a while (and that’s what such lists always amount to) and this was something I could get my head around. There weren’t so many contenders it made my head swim (as would be the case in the forties or fifties or probably even the thirties). And there were enough that I cared about to make it worthwhile (as would not be the case from the eighties onward). The poll (which I recommend as interesting reading) had everyone put their choices in order, so I’ll do the same…albeit with commentary:

1) The T.A.M.I. Show (1964–Steve Binder): Greater in every conceivable way than A Hard Day’s Night, which is pretty great on its own. Binder, who directed Elvis’ comeback special among many other things, should absolutely be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This would be a huge cultural touchstone if only for preserving a visual record of James Brown’s stage show, but it’s much, much more than that.

2) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962–John Ford): The source of “Well, Pilgrim,” “You don’t own me,” “Print the legend,” and “Aren’t you proud?” As far as I can tell, everyone who wasn’t aiming for Lesley Gore’s demo pile mistook it for a film about the past.

3) The Miracle Worker (1962–Arthur Penn): For reasons I discussed at length here.

4) Medium Cool (1968)–Haskell Wexler): “The whole world is watching” side of the sixties rendered with harrowing immediacy.

5) The Graduate (1968)–Mike Nichols): “Plastics!” Funny line, sure, but it also feels more like the future we live in than anything else anyone was predicting at the time.

6) Swiss Family Robinson (1960–Ken Annakin): Laugh if you want. But Annakin spent the fifties honing a laughs-n-thrills approach that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg made fortunes and legends from a generation later. They’ve given him plenty of kudos and paid plenty of homage (including a lot of direct scene steals and, of course, Darth Vader’s real name). All to the good, but one thing they didn’t ever do was beat his time. (Besides which, Janet Munro was my first movie love, so leaving it off would obviously make me a churl and a cad.)

7) The Apartment (1960–Billy Wilder): I never quite bought that Shirley McClaine’s character would fall for a creep like Fred McMurray hard enough to attempt suicide over him, but, if it’s not quite perfect, this is still the only truly poignant romantic comedy outside of the truly perfect Roman Holiday.

8) The Truth About Spring (1965–Richard Thorpe): There are those who can contemplate a list of what’s best about the sixties without including a Hayley Mills movie. I’m the wrong age and temperament to be one of them, so I’ll just add that if J. Lee Thompson had been able to snag her for Cape Fear–a Divine Intention that was thwarted by a conflict between God’s schedule and Hollywood’s (which was resolved, as these things so often are, in favor of the latter), stung him (Thompson, though probably God as well) for the rest of his life, and, of course, greatly hastened the decline of Western Civilization–it would be on this list instead, and no worse than fourth. (That said: “Tommy…if you shoot Ashton, I’ll never cook for you again!” still slays me.)

9) Monterey Pop (1968–D.A. Pennebaker): The pinnacle of what The T.A.M.I. Show promised–and, with the soon-to-follow deaths of its most dynamic performers (Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin–the latter two already operating at a pace that any rational person watching this at the time must have known could not possibly be sustained)–the first step in the long fall from the mountain-top of the sixties’ dream.

10) Age of Consent (1969–Michael Powell): Features a very young Helen Mirren running around some South Sea paradise with little to no clothing on. Whether God or Satan was responsible for this particular aesthetic choice (which, as far as I’m concerned redeems the sixties all by itself) is obviously a matter for each person to decide in consultation with their own conscience. However, just “artistically” speaking, the beauty is that, either way, that single aspect surely redeems any and all shortcomings–real or imagined–for which this film (or this list!) might ever conceivably be held otherwise responsible.

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Honorable Mentions That At Least Crossed My Mind (In No Particular Order): Gambit (1966–Ronald Neame); El Dorado (1967–Howard Hawks); Charade (1963–Stanley Donen); Psycho (1960–Alfred Hitchcock); Ride the High Country (1962–Sam Peckinpah); Cape Fear (1962–J. Lee Thompson); The Great Escape (1963–John Sturges); The Guns of Navarone (1961–J. Lee Thompson); The Best Man (1964–Franklin Shaffner); Don’t Look Back (1967–D.A. Pennebaker); The Americanization of Emily (1964–Arthur Hiller): Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964–Stanley Kubrick); The L-Shaped Room (1962–Bryan Forbes)