by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two Lifetime TV-movies in a row, both
of them advertised as “premieres” even though the second one in the sequence, The
Wrong Friend, must have been shown before
in some context because it had 11 reviews on imdb.com (most of them saying how
wretched the acting was) and was dated 2018 whereas the first film in the
sequence, My Mother’s Split Personalities, was dated 2019 and therefore really did seem to be a “premiere.” My
Mother’s Split Personalities was originally
intended as part of the “_____ at 17” series since it was shot under the
working title (the one imdb.com lists for it) as Terrified at 17, and it dealt with the once-fashionable diagnosis of
multiple personality disorder that generated films like The Three
Faces of Eve and Sybil, both based on best-selling books about (allegedly)
real cases. There’s a revisionist literature suggesting that multiple
personalities don’t really exist and that Sybil — or Shirley Ann Mason, to use
her real name — was really a garden-variety schizophrenic misdiagnosed by an
unscrupulous psychiatrist who exploited her for years. The film opens with an
(at first) incomprehensible sequence in which two men who look strikingly
similar (both dark-haired but otherwise the tall, lanky type Lifetime generally
likes in its sympathetic males) in which they’re in the home of one of them,
Jeffrey Price (Paul Popowich). He’s drinking with a (supposed) friend of his,
Warren Stacey (Jefferson Brown), when Warren slips a drug into his drink,
killing him in a way that makes it look like he had a heart attack and died
naturally. It turns out that Jeffrey Price was fabulously rich — well, $55
million dollars’ worth of rich, anyway — but to maintain that status he was
also very busy taking a lot of business trips (and we’re clearly intended by
writer Stephen Romano to believe they were just business trips and not pretexts for him having an affair).
Instead, out of loneliness and
frustration his wife Gail (Lindsay Hartley) started her own affair with Warren,
not knowing that Warren was a con artist and already married to Toni Conrad
(Jordana Lajoie), the bartender who introduced him to Gail as part of an
elaborate plot to get the Price family’s fortune by killing Jeffrey, seducing
and marrying Gail, getting her to transfer the inheritance to him, then taking
her to South America, killing her there and then sending for his true love,
Toni, to join him there. While all this is going on Gail starts showing the
indicia of what used to be called multiple personality disorder and is now
known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). She keeps talking about “staying
in the light” as if she’s doing New Age/New Thought exercises, but it turns out
that in this version of DID “staying in the light” is the code term for
whichever one of Gail’s alternate personalities is inhabiting her body: Gail,
the normal upper-class suburban housewife; Madeleine, the slut; Amy, the
six-year-old girl who fastens on Gail’s real-life daughter Julie (Kayla
Wallace) and identifies herself as the daughter and Julie as her mom; and
Sadie, the psycho killer. The central intrigue in this one is whether Julie and
her quasi-boyfriend Mike Jared (Benjamin Eli — curious that both the character
and the actor playing him have two first names), depicted as a tousled-haired
nerd who’s cute but not drop-dead gorgeous (and who’s clearly in unrequited
love with Julie — in another sort of Lifetime movie that would make him the villain but we’re obviously supposed to think of
him as a nice guy on the side of good in this one) — can prove their suspicions
that Warren is a rotter after Julie’s mom’s money before he succeeds in
marrying her, getting his hands on her fortune and offing her in a remote
country with which the U.S. doesn’t have an extradition treaty. Given that the
first thing we saw was Warren offing Gail’s husband with a drug that simulates
a heart attack (I’ve read that in the 1960’s the CIA actually developed such a
drug), I had assumed through most of the film that Gail wasn’t really a
multiple personality victim but Warren was slipping her something on their
various dinner dates that made her think she was — but eventually writer Romano and director Curtis James
Crawford (a frequent collaborator with Christine Conradt, whose ability even
within the Lifetime formulae to create genuinely rich, multidimensional
characters is sorely missed here) make it clear that we’re supposed to think
Gail is the real DID McCoy.
In one scene — ironically, just after Mike has
jokingly called Julie “Lois Lane” — Gail transitions to Madeleine, goes out to
a bar called Épicure (which seems like an awfully sleazy place for such a
pretentious yuppie-ish name) and gets picked up by a man with a striking
resemblance to Lex Luthor, only as soon as he takes her out of the bar to
wherever he thinks he’s going to get to fuck her, she transitions again and
Sadie attacks him. She escapes arrest only because Julie, who’s been following
her mom hoping she was going out with Warren and Julie could get the goods on
Warren as a no-good seducer and con artist, showed up and agreed with the cops that
she could take her mom home and no charges would be pressed. The situation is
complicated by the fact that Julie is an intellectual prodigy who left home at
16 to take advantage of a fantastic college fellowship that’s only awarded to
three people every five years, and mom didn’t want to let her go — and this
seems to have been the event that triggered mom’s descent into
multiple-personalitydom. Julie finds (absurdly easily) an old journal that
contains an account of Gail’s own childhood — the hellish maelstrom of parental
abuse that seems to be the origin story of all movie multiple personalities —
and when she reports her discoveries to the police they don’t believe her.
Fortunately, Toni Conrad (ya remember Toni Conrad?) was concerned enough about her own well-being and
the possibility that Warren might turn on her and knock her off that she recorded all their discussions of the
murder plot against Gail, and in exchange for lenient treatment she leads the
cops to this evidence and they set out to arrest Warren just as he’s taking
Gail out of the country on a private plane. Gail insists that before they leave
she wants to speak to her daughter one last time, and when Warren gets angry
Gail manages to get him to stop the car, whereupon she goes into a restaurant
and borrows someone else’s cell phone to call Julie — who’s with the cops
trying to figure out where Warren and Gail are. In the climax, Warren corners
Julie and is about to kill her when Gail saves her daughter’s life by stabbing
Warren to death — and in the end Julie is safe and Gail ends up in a mental
institution for the criminally insane, where she reports to her visiting
daughter that she’s “doing better.”
My Mother’s Split Personalities has a few interesting twists in their formulae — for
one thing, I can’t recall them doing multiple personality in a fiction film
(though they did do a remake of
the supposedly “true” story of Sybil); also the know-it-all character who finds
out who the villain is and what he’s up to but is killed before they can tell
anyone else isn’t an African-American woman, as usual, but a white man:
Jeffrey’s brother John (Richard Nash), who has connections because he’s the
special assistant to the mayor of the town where all this is taking place
(unidentified in Romano’s script, though judging from the license plates it
appears to be in Washington state), whom Warren, whose favorite modi
operandi of murder is making his crimes
look like natural or accidental death, kills by pitching him down a flight of
stairs in John’s own home (which he’s broken into ridiculously easily —
apparently, though these are all affluent people, none of them have a home
security system). My Mother’s Split Personalities benefits from engagingly Gothic direction by
Crawford and a florid, all-out performance by Lindsay Hartley as the multi-mom,
elements which put this at least a bit above the common run of Lifetime movies,
but it’s still pretty much a chip off the old cliché block. And I also should
give a shout-out to actress Sarah Kryszak as Jane Banner, the psychology
professor Julie and Mike go to for background information on dissociative
identity disorder, who in order to express the character’s erudition pronounces
the “t” in “often.”
Sunday, January 13, 2019
The Wrong Friend (Hybrid/Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
So is The Wrong Friend — another in a Lifetime series of movies with the title “The Wrong _____” (my favorite so far is The Wrong Car, about a rapist and killer who meets his victims by picking them up as an Uber driver … though of course they called it something else!) and a pretty typical Lifetime tale about the new student in a prestigious but still public high school, Chris Andrews (the strikingly handsome Jared Scott), whose well-heeled family (at first we think his dad is a computer tycoon but later it’s revealed he’s a high-powered super-attorney) has been buying him out of one scrape after another. They’ve just had to pull him out of the ultra-exclusive St. Joseph’s private school — one of those places where the children of the 1 percent are trained to assume their hereditary mantle of getting to run the country and everyone and everything in it (The Wrong Friend is surprisingly class-conscious for a Lifetime movies, though others, including the marvelous Restless Virgins, have done this even better!) — and they get him into Kennedy, a better-than-average but still public school (one wonders whether writer Adam Rockoff thought of it as a charter school) whose principal, Atkins (Vivica A. Fox, a Black woman similar in appearance and “type” to S. Epatha Merkerson on the original Law and Order, and one with enough of a following some of the imdb.com reviewers complained about the brevity of her part), agrees to admit Chris Andrews as a student in exchange for the Andrews parents making a major donation to the school’s information technology department. Chris immediately zeroes in on Riley Cramer (Li Eubanks), a student of ambiguous ethnicity — she looks African-American but her mom Jaclyn (Galyn Görg) looks like a Mediterranean type (though imdb.com’s bio of Görg lists her as the product of a German father and a Native American, African-American and Irish mother) and one wonders whether she’s the product of an interracial marriage and the father who walked out on the family in the backstory was full-blooded African-American (to the extent that anyone actually is full-blooded African-American given how much coerced interracial fucking was going on between women slaves and their male masters in the ante-bellum days).
Jaclyn is a nurse who’s worked multiple shifts and stayed away a lot to make enough money to raise Riley as a single parent, and Chris is not only from a filthy-rich family he’s home alone a lot because his folks are jet-setting to one exotic vacation locale or another quite often. During one of these jaunts Chris decides to host a party and thereby ingratiate himself to his new classmates by letting them swim in his family’s pool and help themselves to his parents’ stash of alcoholic beverages, and he slips a drug into Riley’s drink, then takes her to his bedroom and not only has his wicked way with her while she’s powerless to resist but photographs the whole thing and sends the pics first to Riley’s estranged boyfriend Matt (Cole Reinhardt), a typical dumb jock who’s more butch than Chris but considerably less sexy (at least to me), then to Riley herself. Riley and her mom complain to the police but are told by Lt. Forni (Michael Paré, a name that meant nothing to me but Charles recognized him in the credits as a young action figure in movies like Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers in the 1980’s; Charles said Paré’s looks have fallen even farther than the norm for such young pretty-boys when they hit middle age) flat-out that the Andrewses have way too much money and clout to be prosecuted for Chris’s crimes, and if Matt’s parents try to win justice for their son’s girlfriend, the Andrewses will tie them up in court and bankrupt them. So of course Riley, Matt and Riley’s best female friend, Kim (Sophia Katarina Kraak), hatch a plot to get the goods on Chris themselves. The plan is that Kim will vamp Chris and get the information out of him by pretending to be interested in him sexually (though as it turns out she doesn’t actually have to go to bed with him — a disappointment for me because I was hoping we’d get to see a soft-core porn sequence involving hot Jared Scott, who probably had a lot of straight women and Gay men in the audience, including me, thinking, “Stalk me, honey!”), and though they have to deal with the usual complications beloved of Lifetime writers, including people coming home unexpectedly when they weren’t expected and Chris suddenly getting suspicious of Kim’s real motives in cruising him even though he’s also drawn as the sort of egomaniac who thinks no (straight) woman can resist him, eventually they get the goods on him and figure out why he’s so interested in destroying Riley.
It seems that way back when he was still at St. Joseph’s he did to a classmate named Lori Nelson the same thing he did to Riley — he drugged her, raped her, took pictures of them having sex and splashed them all over social media — with the result that Lori was ostracized at school, denounced as a slut (and worse things), and ultimately she committed suicide. Chris didn’t suffer any legal consequences but was quietly told to leave St. Joseph’s, and though he got into a school considered almost as prestigious it was still a public school and Chris freaked out that having a public school on his résumé would hurt his 1-percent cred and might keep him out of the very best colleges to which he felt entitled. So he freaked out and determined to get his revenge on the person he blamed for his predicament — Riley’s mother Jaclyn (ya remember Riley’s mother Jaclyn?), who had given Lori Nelson the rape exam the night Chris drugged and assaulted her, who had reported this to the police and thereby, in Chris’s egomaniac view, ruined his life. Riley, Matt and Kim learned all this from a police file on the case they obtained from Lori Nelson’s mother (played with an indelibly ineffable sense of overwhelmed sadness by an actress herself named Tracy Nelson!), and in the final scene Riley goes to her mom’s house — alone, having (like a typical Lifetime idiot heroine) refused Matt’s offer to accompany and help protect her — and Chris shows up intent on murdering both of them. Only, just as Chris is about to slash Jaclyn’s throat with a straight razor (an oddly outré choice of weapon for a film both made and set in 2018), Riley pulls out a gun that’s been previously established as being in the house and drills Chris with five perfectly spaced shots to the chest — maybe we were supposed to assume she was on the target-shooting team at Kennedy and that’s how she learned to be so good with a gun. At the end the other sympathetic characters assure Riley that she did the right thing because Chris was a monster and if he had been allowed to live he would have just kept doing this over and over — and I couldn’t help but joke, “And 50 years from now he could have been elected President!”
The Wrong Friend is typical Lifetime, but it’s decently acted by the principals and well staged for suspense and thrills by director David DeCoteau. A number of the imdb.com reviewers have come down hard on Jared Scott in the bad-boy lead — one even wrote, “The kid playing the psycho could not act to save his life” — but what others read as incompetence I saw as powerful understatement. Charming and a little bit gawky, Scott makes Chris credible as a character, showing both the superficial appeal and the underlying spoiled-brat evil, and while writer Rockoff (almost as appropriate a name for a Lifetime scribe as Kirby Dick and Barbara Kymlicka!) could have made more of the class-conflict notions in his story (particularly Chris’s ability to screw over other people with impunity because he’s confident that his parents, with their social position as well as their limitless funds, will be able to bail him out of whatever trouble he might get into), Scott does project the spoiled 1-percenter aspect of his character. The only problem is that ever since Alfred Hitchcock cast Anthony Perkins, who’d previously been an innocent boy-next-door type, as the crazy killer in Psycho, the calm, understated type of movie psycho performance has become almost as much a cliché as the older type in which actors played psychos by rolling their eyes and bellowing their lines at such intense volume you wondered why they felt they needed to shout. We’ve seen an awful lot of them on Lifetime — and many of them have been women psychos who added perkiness to the mix — and it doesn’t help that Jared Scott has clearly learned how to play an alienated teenager from the same source the last three generations of young actors have: from watching James Dean’s movies. I quite liked The Wrong Friend even though I’ll admit it didn’t have either Christine Conradt’s humanism or the stark portrayal of class conflict and wealthy privilege of Restless Virgins!
So is The Wrong Friend — another in a Lifetime series of movies with the title “The Wrong _____” (my favorite so far is The Wrong Car, about a rapist and killer who meets his victims by picking them up as an Uber driver … though of course they called it something else!) and a pretty typical Lifetime tale about the new student in a prestigious but still public high school, Chris Andrews (the strikingly handsome Jared Scott), whose well-heeled family (at first we think his dad is a computer tycoon but later it’s revealed he’s a high-powered super-attorney) has been buying him out of one scrape after another. They’ve just had to pull him out of the ultra-exclusive St. Joseph’s private school — one of those places where the children of the 1 percent are trained to assume their hereditary mantle of getting to run the country and everyone and everything in it (The Wrong Friend is surprisingly class-conscious for a Lifetime movies, though others, including the marvelous Restless Virgins, have done this even better!) — and they get him into Kennedy, a better-than-average but still public school (one wonders whether writer Adam Rockoff thought of it as a charter school) whose principal, Atkins (Vivica A. Fox, a Black woman similar in appearance and “type” to S. Epatha Merkerson on the original Law and Order, and one with enough of a following some of the imdb.com reviewers complained about the brevity of her part), agrees to admit Chris Andrews as a student in exchange for the Andrews parents making a major donation to the school’s information technology department. Chris immediately zeroes in on Riley Cramer (Li Eubanks), a student of ambiguous ethnicity — she looks African-American but her mom Jaclyn (Galyn Görg) looks like a Mediterranean type (though imdb.com’s bio of Görg lists her as the product of a German father and a Native American, African-American and Irish mother) and one wonders whether she’s the product of an interracial marriage and the father who walked out on the family in the backstory was full-blooded African-American (to the extent that anyone actually is full-blooded African-American given how much coerced interracial fucking was going on between women slaves and their male masters in the ante-bellum days).
Jaclyn is a nurse who’s worked multiple shifts and stayed away a lot to make enough money to raise Riley as a single parent, and Chris is not only from a filthy-rich family he’s home alone a lot because his folks are jet-setting to one exotic vacation locale or another quite often. During one of these jaunts Chris decides to host a party and thereby ingratiate himself to his new classmates by letting them swim in his family’s pool and help themselves to his parents’ stash of alcoholic beverages, and he slips a drug into Riley’s drink, then takes her to his bedroom and not only has his wicked way with her while she’s powerless to resist but photographs the whole thing and sends the pics first to Riley’s estranged boyfriend Matt (Cole Reinhardt), a typical dumb jock who’s more butch than Chris but considerably less sexy (at least to me), then to Riley herself. Riley and her mom complain to the police but are told by Lt. Forni (Michael Paré, a name that meant nothing to me but Charles recognized him in the credits as a young action figure in movies like Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers in the 1980’s; Charles said Paré’s looks have fallen even farther than the norm for such young pretty-boys when they hit middle age) flat-out that the Andrewses have way too much money and clout to be prosecuted for Chris’s crimes, and if Matt’s parents try to win justice for their son’s girlfriend, the Andrewses will tie them up in court and bankrupt them. So of course Riley, Matt and Riley’s best female friend, Kim (Sophia Katarina Kraak), hatch a plot to get the goods on Chris themselves. The plan is that Kim will vamp Chris and get the information out of him by pretending to be interested in him sexually (though as it turns out she doesn’t actually have to go to bed with him — a disappointment for me because I was hoping we’d get to see a soft-core porn sequence involving hot Jared Scott, who probably had a lot of straight women and Gay men in the audience, including me, thinking, “Stalk me, honey!”), and though they have to deal with the usual complications beloved of Lifetime writers, including people coming home unexpectedly when they weren’t expected and Chris suddenly getting suspicious of Kim’s real motives in cruising him even though he’s also drawn as the sort of egomaniac who thinks no (straight) woman can resist him, eventually they get the goods on him and figure out why he’s so interested in destroying Riley.
It seems that way back when he was still at St. Joseph’s he did to a classmate named Lori Nelson the same thing he did to Riley — he drugged her, raped her, took pictures of them having sex and splashed them all over social media — with the result that Lori was ostracized at school, denounced as a slut (and worse things), and ultimately she committed suicide. Chris didn’t suffer any legal consequences but was quietly told to leave St. Joseph’s, and though he got into a school considered almost as prestigious it was still a public school and Chris freaked out that having a public school on his résumé would hurt his 1-percent cred and might keep him out of the very best colleges to which he felt entitled. So he freaked out and determined to get his revenge on the person he blamed for his predicament — Riley’s mother Jaclyn (ya remember Riley’s mother Jaclyn?), who had given Lori Nelson the rape exam the night Chris drugged and assaulted her, who had reported this to the police and thereby, in Chris’s egomaniac view, ruined his life. Riley, Matt and Kim learned all this from a police file on the case they obtained from Lori Nelson’s mother (played with an indelibly ineffable sense of overwhelmed sadness by an actress herself named Tracy Nelson!), and in the final scene Riley goes to her mom’s house — alone, having (like a typical Lifetime idiot heroine) refused Matt’s offer to accompany and help protect her — and Chris shows up intent on murdering both of them. Only, just as Chris is about to slash Jaclyn’s throat with a straight razor (an oddly outré choice of weapon for a film both made and set in 2018), Riley pulls out a gun that’s been previously established as being in the house and drills Chris with five perfectly spaced shots to the chest — maybe we were supposed to assume she was on the target-shooting team at Kennedy and that’s how she learned to be so good with a gun. At the end the other sympathetic characters assure Riley that she did the right thing because Chris was a monster and if he had been allowed to live he would have just kept doing this over and over — and I couldn’t help but joke, “And 50 years from now he could have been elected President!”
The Wrong Friend is typical Lifetime, but it’s decently acted by the principals and well staged for suspense and thrills by director David DeCoteau. A number of the imdb.com reviewers have come down hard on Jared Scott in the bad-boy lead — one even wrote, “The kid playing the psycho could not act to save his life” — but what others read as incompetence I saw as powerful understatement. Charming and a little bit gawky, Scott makes Chris credible as a character, showing both the superficial appeal and the underlying spoiled-brat evil, and while writer Rockoff (almost as appropriate a name for a Lifetime scribe as Kirby Dick and Barbara Kymlicka!) could have made more of the class-conflict notions in his story (particularly Chris’s ability to screw over other people with impunity because he’s confident that his parents, with their social position as well as their limitless funds, will be able to bail him out of whatever trouble he might get into), Scott does project the spoiled 1-percenter aspect of his character. The only problem is that ever since Alfred Hitchcock cast Anthony Perkins, who’d previously been an innocent boy-next-door type, as the crazy killer in Psycho, the calm, understated type of movie psycho performance has become almost as much a cliché as the older type in which actors played psychos by rolling their eyes and bellowing their lines at such intense volume you wondered why they felt they needed to shout. We’ve seen an awful lot of them on Lifetime — and many of them have been women psychos who added perkiness to the mix — and it doesn’t help that Jared Scott has clearly learned how to play an alienated teenager from the same source the last three generations of young actors have: from watching James Dean’s movies. I quite liked The Wrong Friend even though I’ll admit it didn’t have either Christine Conradt’s humanism or the stark portrayal of class conflict and wealthy privilege of Restless Virgins!
Saturday, January 12, 2019
King of Jazz (Universal, 1930; restored by the Criterion Collection, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on a movie Charles and I had seen together more than once before, but not in this format: the much-ballyhooed restoration of the 1930 Universal mega-musical King of Jazz, featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra along with what passed for an all-star cast at Universal then: John Boles, Jeanette Loff (a quite interesting actress and singer I’ve only seen in one other movie, a 1934 Mae West knockoff called St. Louis Woman), Laura La Plante, Glenn Tryon (father of writer Tom Tryon) and a number of comic-relief character actors, including Slim Summerville and the young Walter Brennan. I’ve written about this film extensively before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/12/king-of-jazz-universal-1930.html and so I’ll just give a recap: Paul Whiteman was by far the most successful bandleader of the 1920’s. His first record, “Whispering” b/w “Japanese Sandman,” was a super-hit in 1920. In 1922 his publicist, Mary Margaret McBride, staged a ceremony where Whiteman was literally crowned “King of Jazz” (an event satirized in the opening of this film via a cartoon by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz) for his having taken the raw early jazz of groups like the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band and turned it into a sophisticated form of syncopated music played from written scores and essentially made safe for mass consumption. Whiteman’s career today is inevitably seen through the prism of the reverse-racist legend that has become the mainstream view of jazz history, the idea that jazz is exclusively an African-American creation and whites have simply copied Blacks and offered no real innovations of their own. This is nonsense: jazz was already a fusion of African and European traditions (through most of its history jazz has been played almost exclusively on European, not African, instruments and its basic harmonies and musical structures are mostly European, with modifications like the so-called “blue notes” — the African influence on jazz came through mainly in its freer, more flexible and more insistent rhythms compared to the Western music that preceded it) and I once assembled a partial list of white jazz musicians who had offered creative innovations of their own and hadn’t just copied Black models: Bix Beiderbecke (who played in Whiteman’s band for nearly two years and should have been in King of Jazz, but he’d drunk his way out of that job before the film was finally made), Django Reinhardt, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck (and his superb saxophonist, Paul Desmond), and Lennie Tristano.
King of Jazz contains a feature showing the Whiteman band playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (about half of it, anyway), a piece Whiteman had commissioned and led the premiere with Gershwin himself playing piano (though in the film the piano soloist is one of Whiteman’s two regular pianists, Roy Bargy — oddly, even though he’s clearly identified on the credit introducing the sequence, a New York Times reviewer when the film first came out said Gershwin was the soloist and that mistake has been repeated for decades in the literature on this film), which introduces the piece with a visually magnificent sequence of dancer Jacques Cartier wearing what appears to be a lamé body suit to which the announcer, Charles Irwin, says that it proves jazz was invented “to the beat of the voodoo drum.” That’s about all the acknowledgment we get of jazz’s African-American origins; later there’s a stunning 12-minute production number called “The Melting Pot of Music” which closes the film and offers us an account of all the different sorts of music that allegedly found their way into “this exciting new rhythm — Jazz!” These include British march tunes, Italian serenades, Latin themes, Italian songs, Viennese waltzes and just about every other conceivable form of white European pop music. This rather skewed version of jazz’s origins has been a talking point about this movie ever since King of Jazz, long thought lost, was rediscovered in the 1980’s in a badly faded copy of the reissue print from 1933, which added three surprisingly racy comic sketches that hadn’t made the final cut in 1930 (one in which an anxious man asks his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry her, and when the father asks if they aren’t worried that they’ll have children before he’s financially well off enough to support him, the young man says, “Oh, we’ve been lucky so far,” and another in which a young couple receive word that their marriage was not legal. “That makes me a bachelor!” says the young man. “That makes me a spinster!” says the woman. “What are you complaining about? Look what that makes me,” says their baby, played by an adult in an oversized prop cradle) and are included in the version we watched last night (a new Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection) as “deleted scenes” and reduced the film from its original 105-minute running time to 90 minutes mostly by trimming the long on-screen intros to some of the numbers.
Whteman took his band from New York to Hollywood to make the movie in January 1929 and the film didn’t get made until March 1930 because, to Whiteman’s astonishment, when he got there the writers at Universal hadn’t completed a script for the film. The band hung out there for several months doing nothing but making elaborate sound tests at Universal for the recording directors who had become the virtual dictators of Hollywood in the early days of the talkies — they made recording seem like an obscure, arcane art to which only they had the keys, and actors, directors and producers who’d never been involved with recorded sound before bought their we-know-it-all act. Whiteman, who’d been one of Americas best record sellers for nine years, didn’t, but he put up with the regime and probably rationalized, “At least we’re getting paid for this.” But when the pre-production and pre-pre-production processes on King of Jazz had lasted for months and the band members had got into trouble (Bing Crosby took a girl on a date one night, crashed his car, she was killed, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and, though he only served a one-month sentence, he was essentially work-furloughed, allowed to leave jail under guard to do his work on the film but then taken back into custody), Whiteman got a job offer from a New York nightclub. Worried that the band was getting stale from not having played before an audience for so long, he took the job and served notice to Universal that he wasn’t coming back until they had a finished script for him to shoot. During that time the plans for King of Jazz morphed from the original concept — a biopic of Whiteman with Ruth Etting playing his girlfriend (which Whiteman turned down because he knew his talents well enough to realize that acting — even playing himself — didn’t fall within them) — to a revue, a plotless musical that simply alternated songs, dances, production numbers and comedy sketches.
Alas, by the time King of Jazz was finished and ready for release, audiences were tired of musicals in general and revues in particular. MGM canceled a revue they were in the middle of shooting, The March of Time (though bits of it surfaced as clips in other features and stand-alone shorts like The Devil’s Cabaret), and King of Jazz — conceived in the free-wheeling economic boom times of 1929 and released at the start of the Great Depression, which couldn’t have helped it at the box office (in 1930 the highest-grossing movie released by any U.S. studio was Warner Bros.’ hard-edged gangster drama Little Caesar, a film about as different from King of Jazz as could be imagined) — was a huge flop and nearly bankrupted Universal. (What saved them was the enormous grosses they earned on two 1931 releases, the horror classics Dracula and Frankenstein.) King of Jazz was an unusually expensive movie because the entire film was made in the two-strip Technicolor process, at a time when shooting in color doubled the production cost of a film. I’ve long been a fan of two-strip — though it had severe limitations (notably, it could not photograph blue because blue has the shortest wave length of any color and the films used then weren’t sensitive enough to pick it up), at its best it had a harmonious, painterly elegance the more accurate but also more garish three-strip process that replaced it often did not (especially with Technicolor “consultants” riding herd on the filmmakers and demanding that the hues be as bright as possible). The colors two-strip Technicolor did best were salmon and turquoise, and those are the dominant colors in King of Jazz — though in that “Melting Pot of Music” finale the British soldiers are in bright red uniforms and the Irish tenor who sings “Killarney” is wearing the bright emerald-green jacket we would expect given the Pavlovian conditioning of Hollywood costumers and set designers that “Ireland = green.” The color scheme in this beautifully restored version of the film is beautiful, harmonious, painterly but also a bit monotonous, especially since the entire movie was filmed inside soundstages, the skies are clearly painted backdrops, and one wishes they could have gone outdoors for at least one sequence.
In 1933 — after the huge popularity of Warners’ 42nd Street had reawakened public interest in musicals — the father and son team of Carl Laemmle, Sr. and Jr., who ran Universal reissued it with a new beginning title and a few tweaks to the comedy scenes as well as trims in the on-screen introductions to various numbers, thereby bringing the running time down to 90 minutes — and the film did better than it had in 1930 but still wasn’t a big enough hit to salvage the film career of its remarkable director, John Murray Anderson. Anderson had been hugely successful on the Broadway stage, mostly as director of the Ziegfeld Follies and other big revues (“The Melting Pot of Music” and some of the other King of Jazz numbers are based on concepts Anderson originally developed for his stage shows), and King of Jazz is full of sweepingly innovative production numbers including the sorts of overhead shots and tracking shots usually associated with Busby Berkeley (who was making his first film, Whoopee — also in two-strip Technicolor — while Anderson was filming King of Jazz, and who ripped off Anderson’s visual ideas for numbers in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933), staged on dazzling sets by Herman Rosse, an associate of Anderson’s from his stage work who won an Academy Award for his designs for King of Jazz. (I once mentioned that to Charles and he said Rosse was almost certainly the first person to win an Academy Award for a film that was entirely in color.) King of Jazz has some of the lacunae often associated with extensively “restored” films (including a few places where the soundtrack survived but black-and-white stills had to fill in for missing footage), though at least the people doing the restoration kept to the original two-strip color scheme instead of tweaking the colors to be more natural but less authentic for the process, but on the whole this is a great movie and the Criterion release does full justice to it.
I put on a movie Charles and I had seen together more than once before, but not in this format: the much-ballyhooed restoration of the 1930 Universal mega-musical King of Jazz, featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra along with what passed for an all-star cast at Universal then: John Boles, Jeanette Loff (a quite interesting actress and singer I’ve only seen in one other movie, a 1934 Mae West knockoff called St. Louis Woman), Laura La Plante, Glenn Tryon (father of writer Tom Tryon) and a number of comic-relief character actors, including Slim Summerville and the young Walter Brennan. I’ve written about this film extensively before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/12/king-of-jazz-universal-1930.html and so I’ll just give a recap: Paul Whiteman was by far the most successful bandleader of the 1920’s. His first record, “Whispering” b/w “Japanese Sandman,” was a super-hit in 1920. In 1922 his publicist, Mary Margaret McBride, staged a ceremony where Whiteman was literally crowned “King of Jazz” (an event satirized in the opening of this film via a cartoon by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz) for his having taken the raw early jazz of groups like the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band and turned it into a sophisticated form of syncopated music played from written scores and essentially made safe for mass consumption. Whiteman’s career today is inevitably seen through the prism of the reverse-racist legend that has become the mainstream view of jazz history, the idea that jazz is exclusively an African-American creation and whites have simply copied Blacks and offered no real innovations of their own. This is nonsense: jazz was already a fusion of African and European traditions (through most of its history jazz has been played almost exclusively on European, not African, instruments and its basic harmonies and musical structures are mostly European, with modifications like the so-called “blue notes” — the African influence on jazz came through mainly in its freer, more flexible and more insistent rhythms compared to the Western music that preceded it) and I once assembled a partial list of white jazz musicians who had offered creative innovations of their own and hadn’t just copied Black models: Bix Beiderbecke (who played in Whiteman’s band for nearly two years and should have been in King of Jazz, but he’d drunk his way out of that job before the film was finally made), Django Reinhardt, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck (and his superb saxophonist, Paul Desmond), and Lennie Tristano.
King of Jazz contains a feature showing the Whiteman band playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (about half of it, anyway), a piece Whiteman had commissioned and led the premiere with Gershwin himself playing piano (though in the film the piano soloist is one of Whiteman’s two regular pianists, Roy Bargy — oddly, even though he’s clearly identified on the credit introducing the sequence, a New York Times reviewer when the film first came out said Gershwin was the soloist and that mistake has been repeated for decades in the literature on this film), which introduces the piece with a visually magnificent sequence of dancer Jacques Cartier wearing what appears to be a lamé body suit to which the announcer, Charles Irwin, says that it proves jazz was invented “to the beat of the voodoo drum.” That’s about all the acknowledgment we get of jazz’s African-American origins; later there’s a stunning 12-minute production number called “The Melting Pot of Music” which closes the film and offers us an account of all the different sorts of music that allegedly found their way into “this exciting new rhythm — Jazz!” These include British march tunes, Italian serenades, Latin themes, Italian songs, Viennese waltzes and just about every other conceivable form of white European pop music. This rather skewed version of jazz’s origins has been a talking point about this movie ever since King of Jazz, long thought lost, was rediscovered in the 1980’s in a badly faded copy of the reissue print from 1933, which added three surprisingly racy comic sketches that hadn’t made the final cut in 1930 (one in which an anxious man asks his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry her, and when the father asks if they aren’t worried that they’ll have children before he’s financially well off enough to support him, the young man says, “Oh, we’ve been lucky so far,” and another in which a young couple receive word that their marriage was not legal. “That makes me a bachelor!” says the young man. “That makes me a spinster!” says the woman. “What are you complaining about? Look what that makes me,” says their baby, played by an adult in an oversized prop cradle) and are included in the version we watched last night (a new Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection) as “deleted scenes” and reduced the film from its original 105-minute running time to 90 minutes mostly by trimming the long on-screen intros to some of the numbers.
Whteman took his band from New York to Hollywood to make the movie in January 1929 and the film didn’t get made until March 1930 because, to Whiteman’s astonishment, when he got there the writers at Universal hadn’t completed a script for the film. The band hung out there for several months doing nothing but making elaborate sound tests at Universal for the recording directors who had become the virtual dictators of Hollywood in the early days of the talkies — they made recording seem like an obscure, arcane art to which only they had the keys, and actors, directors and producers who’d never been involved with recorded sound before bought their we-know-it-all act. Whiteman, who’d been one of Americas best record sellers for nine years, didn’t, but he put up with the regime and probably rationalized, “At least we’re getting paid for this.” But when the pre-production and pre-pre-production processes on King of Jazz had lasted for months and the band members had got into trouble (Bing Crosby took a girl on a date one night, crashed his car, she was killed, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and, though he only served a one-month sentence, he was essentially work-furloughed, allowed to leave jail under guard to do his work on the film but then taken back into custody), Whiteman got a job offer from a New York nightclub. Worried that the band was getting stale from not having played before an audience for so long, he took the job and served notice to Universal that he wasn’t coming back until they had a finished script for him to shoot. During that time the plans for King of Jazz morphed from the original concept — a biopic of Whiteman with Ruth Etting playing his girlfriend (which Whiteman turned down because he knew his talents well enough to realize that acting — even playing himself — didn’t fall within them) — to a revue, a plotless musical that simply alternated songs, dances, production numbers and comedy sketches.
Alas, by the time King of Jazz was finished and ready for release, audiences were tired of musicals in general and revues in particular. MGM canceled a revue they were in the middle of shooting, The March of Time (though bits of it surfaced as clips in other features and stand-alone shorts like The Devil’s Cabaret), and King of Jazz — conceived in the free-wheeling economic boom times of 1929 and released at the start of the Great Depression, which couldn’t have helped it at the box office (in 1930 the highest-grossing movie released by any U.S. studio was Warner Bros.’ hard-edged gangster drama Little Caesar, a film about as different from King of Jazz as could be imagined) — was a huge flop and nearly bankrupted Universal. (What saved them was the enormous grosses they earned on two 1931 releases, the horror classics Dracula and Frankenstein.) King of Jazz was an unusually expensive movie because the entire film was made in the two-strip Technicolor process, at a time when shooting in color doubled the production cost of a film. I’ve long been a fan of two-strip — though it had severe limitations (notably, it could not photograph blue because blue has the shortest wave length of any color and the films used then weren’t sensitive enough to pick it up), at its best it had a harmonious, painterly elegance the more accurate but also more garish three-strip process that replaced it often did not (especially with Technicolor “consultants” riding herd on the filmmakers and demanding that the hues be as bright as possible). The colors two-strip Technicolor did best were salmon and turquoise, and those are the dominant colors in King of Jazz — though in that “Melting Pot of Music” finale the British soldiers are in bright red uniforms and the Irish tenor who sings “Killarney” is wearing the bright emerald-green jacket we would expect given the Pavlovian conditioning of Hollywood costumers and set designers that “Ireland = green.” The color scheme in this beautifully restored version of the film is beautiful, harmonious, painterly but also a bit monotonous, especially since the entire movie was filmed inside soundstages, the skies are clearly painted backdrops, and one wishes they could have gone outdoors for at least one sequence.
In 1933 — after the huge popularity of Warners’ 42nd Street had reawakened public interest in musicals — the father and son team of Carl Laemmle, Sr. and Jr., who ran Universal reissued it with a new beginning title and a few tweaks to the comedy scenes as well as trims in the on-screen introductions to various numbers, thereby bringing the running time down to 90 minutes — and the film did better than it had in 1930 but still wasn’t a big enough hit to salvage the film career of its remarkable director, John Murray Anderson. Anderson had been hugely successful on the Broadway stage, mostly as director of the Ziegfeld Follies and other big revues (“The Melting Pot of Music” and some of the other King of Jazz numbers are based on concepts Anderson originally developed for his stage shows), and King of Jazz is full of sweepingly innovative production numbers including the sorts of overhead shots and tracking shots usually associated with Busby Berkeley (who was making his first film, Whoopee — also in two-strip Technicolor — while Anderson was filming King of Jazz, and who ripped off Anderson’s visual ideas for numbers in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933), staged on dazzling sets by Herman Rosse, an associate of Anderson’s from his stage work who won an Academy Award for his designs for King of Jazz. (I once mentioned that to Charles and he said Rosse was almost certainly the first person to win an Academy Award for a film that was entirely in color.) King of Jazz has some of the lacunae often associated with extensively “restored” films (including a few places where the soundtrack survived but black-and-white stills had to fill in for missing footage), though at least the people doing the restoration kept to the original two-strip color scheme instead of tweaking the colors to be more natural but less authentic for the process, but on the whole this is a great movie and the Criterion release does full justice to it.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Raton Pass (Warner Bros., 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night's “feature” was called Raton Pass — “Ratón,” with an accent and pronounced “Rah-TONE,” being the Spanish word for “rat” and a location both in the California gold country (Charles remembered visiting that Ratón) and a place in New Mexico where this film was set (though the location work was done in the town of Gallup, one of the locales made famous in the song “Route 66”). Raton Pass deals with a huge ranch owned by the Challon family, which at the moment consists of father Pierre (Basil Ruysdael, whose presence puts the whole rest of the cast one degree of separation from the Marx Brothers) and son Marc (Dennis Morgan, top-billed) — I guess from the spellings of their first names that the Challon family are supposed to be French-Americans. The action of this film kicks off when outlaw Cy Van Cleave (Steve Cochran) arrives in town on a stagecoach with a woman named Ann (Patricia Neal, who did this piece of cheese the same year she made The Day the Earth Stood Still) and asks her to lunch. She declines and takes the lunch invitation with Marc Challon instead, and within a reel or so Marc and Ann are engaged and, as a wedding present, Pierre deeds them the huge Challon Ranch.
There are basically three parties fighting over the future of this huge property (one suspects the creators of Bonanza may have been thinking of this story when they created the Ponderosa and put the Cartwrights in charge of it, with Lorne Greene playing the sort of all-powerful paterfamilias Basil Ruysdael is portraying here): the Challons, a local gang of cattle punchers headed by Jim Pozner (Louis Jean Heydt — more grizzled and stouter than he was in his prime; in his prime he was actually gorgeous and had charisma to burn, and why he was never able to grasp the brass ring of stardom has long puzzled me), and outlaw Van Cleave (whose name, perhaps unconsciously referencing a later real-life star of spaghetti Westerns, I kept hearing as “Van Cleef”). The Pozners and Van Cleave both see their chance when Marc Challon invites Prentice (Scott Forbes), a representative of a bank in Kansas City, to the ranch to negotiate a loan on it that will enable him to build an irrigation dam on the property. Instead Prentice seduces Ann — we’re still only three reels into this marvelously economical 84-minute movie (writers Thomas Blackburn, adapting his own novel, and James R. Webb certainly sensed the clock ticking on their allotted running time and moved the movie along accordingly) — and the two plot to take the ranch away from Marc.
Marc agrees to sell them the ranch (at least the half of it Ann doesn’t already own from the terms of daddy’s transfer) for a $100,000 down payment because he’s got a plot up his sleeve: the ranch’s cattle are on the other side of a stretch of lava rock to which he still owns the passage rights, so Ann’s and Prentice’s ranch is worthless without the cattle stuck on the other side of the passage Marc controls. Only Marc’s scheme is dependent on the continued allegiance of the ranch’s hands, and Pozner gets them to come on his side in an attempt to bankrupt both sides and take over the ranch himself. Needing more hands, Ann invites Van Cleave to supply them — only Van Cleave has his own ideas: his plot is to drive the cattle away in a stampede, blame Marc for this (thanks to false testimony he elicits from Pozner by threatening to beat up Pozner’s Mexican wife), get Marc hung, drive Prentice from the area and get both Ann and the ranch for himself. He kills Pozner and shoots Marc — who looks like he’s at death’s door until Lena Casamajor (why is she named “main house”?”), the Mexican girlfriend Marc jilted to marry Ann, takes charge, pulls the bullet out of Marc and enables him to recover. In the end Prentice flees, Ann and Van Cleave both get shot, and Marc regains the ranch with Lena as the new woman in his life.
Though it’s little more than a standard-issue “B” (or at least “A-minus”) Western, and the roles of Marc and Ann cry out for Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck and get Dennis Morgan and Patricia Neal, Raton Pass is actually a pretty good movie. It’s directed by Edwin L. Marin (best known for his films based on British literary classics with Reginald Owen, as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet and Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) with a nervy intensity — though it doesn’t really qualify as a Western noir the way Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon or Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 do, it has some of the same elements, notably the way Patricia Neal’s character morphs from seemingly harmless gold-digger to cold-hearted villainess — and it’s especially noteworthy in the characters of the villains. As Charles noted afterwards, Neal’s character has an unusual combination of unscrupulousness, intelligence and ultimate weakness, and Cochran turns in one of his usual intense performances that offers far more impact than a film like this deserves or generally gets. Raton Pass turned out to be an unexpectedly good movie that’s been lurking in the backlog of my collection, a studio product directed and acted with more intensity than the rather clichéd story really needed. It also has a musical score by Max Steiner — one of his last credits as a Warner Bros. contractee — even though it’s unusually low-keyed by his usual standards (something already signaled by the opening credits, where for once he does not underscore his own credit with a thunderous chord that says, “Music by Max Steiner — as if you couldn’t tell!”) and he had a lot of help from others, particularly Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and Sebastian Yradier’s “La Paloma.”
Last night's “feature” was called Raton Pass — “Ratón,” with an accent and pronounced “Rah-TONE,” being the Spanish word for “rat” and a location both in the California gold country (Charles remembered visiting that Ratón) and a place in New Mexico where this film was set (though the location work was done in the town of Gallup, one of the locales made famous in the song “Route 66”). Raton Pass deals with a huge ranch owned by the Challon family, which at the moment consists of father Pierre (Basil Ruysdael, whose presence puts the whole rest of the cast one degree of separation from the Marx Brothers) and son Marc (Dennis Morgan, top-billed) — I guess from the spellings of their first names that the Challon family are supposed to be French-Americans. The action of this film kicks off when outlaw Cy Van Cleave (Steve Cochran) arrives in town on a stagecoach with a woman named Ann (Patricia Neal, who did this piece of cheese the same year she made The Day the Earth Stood Still) and asks her to lunch. She declines and takes the lunch invitation with Marc Challon instead, and within a reel or so Marc and Ann are engaged and, as a wedding present, Pierre deeds them the huge Challon Ranch.
There are basically three parties fighting over the future of this huge property (one suspects the creators of Bonanza may have been thinking of this story when they created the Ponderosa and put the Cartwrights in charge of it, with Lorne Greene playing the sort of all-powerful paterfamilias Basil Ruysdael is portraying here): the Challons, a local gang of cattle punchers headed by Jim Pozner (Louis Jean Heydt — more grizzled and stouter than he was in his prime; in his prime he was actually gorgeous and had charisma to burn, and why he was never able to grasp the brass ring of stardom has long puzzled me), and outlaw Van Cleave (whose name, perhaps unconsciously referencing a later real-life star of spaghetti Westerns, I kept hearing as “Van Cleef”). The Pozners and Van Cleave both see their chance when Marc Challon invites Prentice (Scott Forbes), a representative of a bank in Kansas City, to the ranch to negotiate a loan on it that will enable him to build an irrigation dam on the property. Instead Prentice seduces Ann — we’re still only three reels into this marvelously economical 84-minute movie (writers Thomas Blackburn, adapting his own novel, and James R. Webb certainly sensed the clock ticking on their allotted running time and moved the movie along accordingly) — and the two plot to take the ranch away from Marc.
Marc agrees to sell them the ranch (at least the half of it Ann doesn’t already own from the terms of daddy’s transfer) for a $100,000 down payment because he’s got a plot up his sleeve: the ranch’s cattle are on the other side of a stretch of lava rock to which he still owns the passage rights, so Ann’s and Prentice’s ranch is worthless without the cattle stuck on the other side of the passage Marc controls. Only Marc’s scheme is dependent on the continued allegiance of the ranch’s hands, and Pozner gets them to come on his side in an attempt to bankrupt both sides and take over the ranch himself. Needing more hands, Ann invites Van Cleave to supply them — only Van Cleave has his own ideas: his plot is to drive the cattle away in a stampede, blame Marc for this (thanks to false testimony he elicits from Pozner by threatening to beat up Pozner’s Mexican wife), get Marc hung, drive Prentice from the area and get both Ann and the ranch for himself. He kills Pozner and shoots Marc — who looks like he’s at death’s door until Lena Casamajor (why is she named “main house”?”), the Mexican girlfriend Marc jilted to marry Ann, takes charge, pulls the bullet out of Marc and enables him to recover. In the end Prentice flees, Ann and Van Cleave both get shot, and Marc regains the ranch with Lena as the new woman in his life.
Though it’s little more than a standard-issue “B” (or at least “A-minus”) Western, and the roles of Marc and Ann cry out for Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck and get Dennis Morgan and Patricia Neal, Raton Pass is actually a pretty good movie. It’s directed by Edwin L. Marin (best known for his films based on British literary classics with Reginald Owen, as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet and Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) with a nervy intensity — though it doesn’t really qualify as a Western noir the way Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon or Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 do, it has some of the same elements, notably the way Patricia Neal’s character morphs from seemingly harmless gold-digger to cold-hearted villainess — and it’s especially noteworthy in the characters of the villains. As Charles noted afterwards, Neal’s character has an unusual combination of unscrupulousness, intelligence and ultimate weakness, and Cochran turns in one of his usual intense performances that offers far more impact than a film like this deserves or generally gets. Raton Pass turned out to be an unexpectedly good movie that’s been lurking in the backlog of my collection, a studio product directed and acted with more intensity than the rather clichéd story really needed. It also has a musical score by Max Steiner — one of his last credits as a Warner Bros. contractee — even though it’s unusually low-keyed by his usual standards (something already signaled by the opening credits, where for once he does not underscore his own credit with a thunderous chord that says, “Music by Max Steiner — as if you couldn’t tell!”) and he had a lot of help from others, particularly Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and Sebastian Yradier’s “La Paloma.”
Monday, January 7, 2019
76th Annual Golden Globe Awards (Hollywood Foreign Press Association, NBC-TV, aired January 6, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night when it was 5 p.m. I was ready to watch the blessedly live telecast of the Golden Globe Awards. (Thank goodness for the Internet and the rise of social media, which has led at least some awards shows to reject the way we viewers on the West Coast for decades were palmed off with a three-hours-later rebroadcast instead of getting to see the shows in real time.) Last night’s 76th annual Golden Globe Awards were a relatively low-keyed show — the hosts, Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh, took a self-deprecating line and avoided the slashing insults of previous Globe hosts (can you say “Ricky Gervais”?), making fun mostly of themselves. One of their best bits was when they announced they were going to show emotional highlights from previous Globe shows — but then the only clips they showed were of awards they themselves had won. (Later Oh won another one and had to make a quick and odd transition from host to recipient.) Their best joke, when they weren’t making fun of themselves, came when Samberg announced that the film Vice, about Dick Cheney (Christian “Batman” Bale — who astonished me in his acceptance speech when he spoke with a thick British accent he has totally eradicated when playing Americans) and his role in the administration of George W. Bush (Sam “Moon” Rockwell), was a drama but was nominated in the best comedy or musical film category because “it invaded the wrong category based on faulty intelligence.” (Meanwhile, the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which was obviously a musical, was nominated for — and actually won — Best Motion Picture, Drama.)
It’s hard to judge an awards show when you haven’t seen most of the products being nominated — virtually all the TV series the Globes nominate these days air on streaming channels so I couldn’t watch them even if I wanted to (I have stuck with a cable connection rather than deal with the world of “streaming” services and the elaborate interfaces between TV’s, computers, smartphones and whatnot needed to watch them, at least partly because I suspect signing up for Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hulu and CBS All Access and all the other ones out there would add up to considerably more money per month than a cable bill and would cut me off from a lot of news and other channels I do watch regularly), and since Charles and I almost never go to movie theatres anymore but wait for things to emerge on DVD (and a lot of the films the “streaming” services produce don’t ever make it to DVD because the companies want subscribing to their services to be the only way you can watch their programs, which just gives me an even sourer view of the “streaming” world than I had before) we haven’t seen most of the movies, either. Charles did get to see the film Green Book when he last visited his family in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it won last night for Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) even though from the subject matter (the great jazz pianist Don Shirley — presented in the film as a frustrated would-be classical piano virtuoso forced to play jazz for a living because he’s Black (that wasn’t my impression of the real Don Shirley at all; I played my poor-quality dub of his first album on Cadence, Don Shirley Trio, for Charles and asked him if what was heard in the movie had any resemblance to Shirley’s actual music, and he said no) — and the film’s focus, his white “minder” who had to drive him on a tour of the Deep South in 1962. Green Book also won an award for Mahershala Ali (Oakland-born despite his African-sounding name), who played Shirley; and for the writing team of Nick Vallelonga, Peter Farrelly (who also directed) and Brian Hayes Currie — and what I didn’t know before (though Charles did) is that Nick Vallelonga is the real-life son of the white lead Viggo Mortenson (redeeming his career after it suffered from his casting in Gus Van Sant’s insane remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) played in the film. I guess you’re already two steps ahead of the game when you can base your film on a true story that happened to your dad!
In an era in which “inclusion” has become a fetish word for at least half of America, there weren’t any direct attacks on President Trump the way Meryl Streep did two years ago (and got named in a Trump tweet as “overrated” even though she’s won more Academy Award nominations than any other actor, living or dead, male or female) but there were a lot of veiled references to walls (bad) and bridges (good) and how art is a force that brings people together. Alfonso Cuarón turned his acceptance speech for Roma, a Mexican production that won for Best Foreign-Language Film, into a plea for inclusion as well as a defense of his native country against all the attacks certain people in public power have been making against it and its people. I have no idea what Roma is about — the title suggests either a film about European Gypsies or about the Italian capital (like Fellini’s marvelous 1972 film of the same title) but imdb.com’s brief synopsis says it “chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family's maid in Mexico City in the early 1970’s.” (I remember seeing the film Seven Women, One Homosexual and Carlos a while back and being amazed that there was a movie out there acknowledging that Mexico has a middle class and isn’t just a handful of padrones and a lot of peons living in dire poverty and aching for the chance to become undocumented immigrants to the U.S.) Like other awards shows, even a relatively apolitical one like this year’s Golden Globes gives me the impression that in this heavily (and, at least according to the closeness of the 2018 midterm election results, just about evenly) divided country, artists generally are part of the group that values inclusion over exclusion and acknowledges the equality of women, people of color and Queers (though Hollywood often talks a better game on that than they actually play — one routine during the show said that when producers are hiring a director they first consider a man, and if no man is available they look for two men, and if no two men are available they look for a group of men, and if they aren’t available they just might consider a woman — and this was delivered in a growling voice that suggested John Wayne as Godzilla and made the point even funnier and more incisive).
It was indicative of how inclusive the entertainment industry has become — this slice of it, at least — that there were an awful lot of African-descended faces accepting awards and three of the films nominated for Best Motion Picture — Drama, Black Panther, BlackkKlansman and If Beale Street Could Talk, had largely Black casts (though the winner, Bohemian Rhapsody, was one of the two, along with the fourth version of A Star Is Born — fifth if you count the 1932 What Price Hollywood, which had essentially the same plot but split the Norman Maine character into two people — that didn’t, though I guess Bohemian Rhapsody counted as at least half a film about a person of color because Freddie Mercury was part-British and part-Turkish). During the show I posted a couple of tweets (aimed, I’ll admit, largely at Charles) praising the two winners who pronounced the “t” in “often” during their acceptance speeches (one of them a woman who made the demand that all employers, not just in the entertainment industry, commit to making 50 percent of their workforces female — it’s indicative of how far we have to go on women’s equality in the workplace that the newly sworn-in 116th Congress is being taken as a model of inclusivity because over 100 members of the House of Representatives are women, but that’s less than a quarter of the House in a country where women are slightly more than 50 percent of the population). Awards shows are lumbering beasts generally, and this one was no exception — it ran 22 minutes over its scheduled three hours, and so I didn’t watch the Lifetime movie I’d planned to turn to after it was over and looked for other stuff on the “tube” instead.
Last night when it was 5 p.m. I was ready to watch the blessedly live telecast of the Golden Globe Awards. (Thank goodness for the Internet and the rise of social media, which has led at least some awards shows to reject the way we viewers on the West Coast for decades were palmed off with a three-hours-later rebroadcast instead of getting to see the shows in real time.) Last night’s 76th annual Golden Globe Awards were a relatively low-keyed show — the hosts, Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh, took a self-deprecating line and avoided the slashing insults of previous Globe hosts (can you say “Ricky Gervais”?), making fun mostly of themselves. One of their best bits was when they announced they were going to show emotional highlights from previous Globe shows — but then the only clips they showed were of awards they themselves had won. (Later Oh won another one and had to make a quick and odd transition from host to recipient.) Their best joke, when they weren’t making fun of themselves, came when Samberg announced that the film Vice, about Dick Cheney (Christian “Batman” Bale — who astonished me in his acceptance speech when he spoke with a thick British accent he has totally eradicated when playing Americans) and his role in the administration of George W. Bush (Sam “Moon” Rockwell), was a drama but was nominated in the best comedy or musical film category because “it invaded the wrong category based on faulty intelligence.” (Meanwhile, the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which was obviously a musical, was nominated for — and actually won — Best Motion Picture, Drama.)
It’s hard to judge an awards show when you haven’t seen most of the products being nominated — virtually all the TV series the Globes nominate these days air on streaming channels so I couldn’t watch them even if I wanted to (I have stuck with a cable connection rather than deal with the world of “streaming” services and the elaborate interfaces between TV’s, computers, smartphones and whatnot needed to watch them, at least partly because I suspect signing up for Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hulu and CBS All Access and all the other ones out there would add up to considerably more money per month than a cable bill and would cut me off from a lot of news and other channels I do watch regularly), and since Charles and I almost never go to movie theatres anymore but wait for things to emerge on DVD (and a lot of the films the “streaming” services produce don’t ever make it to DVD because the companies want subscribing to their services to be the only way you can watch their programs, which just gives me an even sourer view of the “streaming” world than I had before) we haven’t seen most of the movies, either. Charles did get to see the film Green Book when he last visited his family in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it won last night for Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) even though from the subject matter (the great jazz pianist Don Shirley — presented in the film as a frustrated would-be classical piano virtuoso forced to play jazz for a living because he’s Black (that wasn’t my impression of the real Don Shirley at all; I played my poor-quality dub of his first album on Cadence, Don Shirley Trio, for Charles and asked him if what was heard in the movie had any resemblance to Shirley’s actual music, and he said no) — and the film’s focus, his white “minder” who had to drive him on a tour of the Deep South in 1962. Green Book also won an award for Mahershala Ali (Oakland-born despite his African-sounding name), who played Shirley; and for the writing team of Nick Vallelonga, Peter Farrelly (who also directed) and Brian Hayes Currie — and what I didn’t know before (though Charles did) is that Nick Vallelonga is the real-life son of the white lead Viggo Mortenson (redeeming his career after it suffered from his casting in Gus Van Sant’s insane remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) played in the film. I guess you’re already two steps ahead of the game when you can base your film on a true story that happened to your dad!
In an era in which “inclusion” has become a fetish word for at least half of America, there weren’t any direct attacks on President Trump the way Meryl Streep did two years ago (and got named in a Trump tweet as “overrated” even though she’s won more Academy Award nominations than any other actor, living or dead, male or female) but there were a lot of veiled references to walls (bad) and bridges (good) and how art is a force that brings people together. Alfonso Cuarón turned his acceptance speech for Roma, a Mexican production that won for Best Foreign-Language Film, into a plea for inclusion as well as a defense of his native country against all the attacks certain people in public power have been making against it and its people. I have no idea what Roma is about — the title suggests either a film about European Gypsies or about the Italian capital (like Fellini’s marvelous 1972 film of the same title) but imdb.com’s brief synopsis says it “chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family's maid in Mexico City in the early 1970’s.” (I remember seeing the film Seven Women, One Homosexual and Carlos a while back and being amazed that there was a movie out there acknowledging that Mexico has a middle class and isn’t just a handful of padrones and a lot of peons living in dire poverty and aching for the chance to become undocumented immigrants to the U.S.) Like other awards shows, even a relatively apolitical one like this year’s Golden Globes gives me the impression that in this heavily (and, at least according to the closeness of the 2018 midterm election results, just about evenly) divided country, artists generally are part of the group that values inclusion over exclusion and acknowledges the equality of women, people of color and Queers (though Hollywood often talks a better game on that than they actually play — one routine during the show said that when producers are hiring a director they first consider a man, and if no man is available they look for two men, and if no two men are available they look for a group of men, and if they aren’t available they just might consider a woman — and this was delivered in a growling voice that suggested John Wayne as Godzilla and made the point even funnier and more incisive).
It was indicative of how inclusive the entertainment industry has become — this slice of it, at least — that there were an awful lot of African-descended faces accepting awards and three of the films nominated for Best Motion Picture — Drama, Black Panther, BlackkKlansman and If Beale Street Could Talk, had largely Black casts (though the winner, Bohemian Rhapsody, was one of the two, along with the fourth version of A Star Is Born — fifth if you count the 1932 What Price Hollywood, which had essentially the same plot but split the Norman Maine character into two people — that didn’t, though I guess Bohemian Rhapsody counted as at least half a film about a person of color because Freddie Mercury was part-British and part-Turkish). During the show I posted a couple of tweets (aimed, I’ll admit, largely at Charles) praising the two winners who pronounced the “t” in “often” during their acceptance speeches (one of them a woman who made the demand that all employers, not just in the entertainment industry, commit to making 50 percent of their workforces female — it’s indicative of how far we have to go on women’s equality in the workplace that the newly sworn-in 116th Congress is being taken as a model of inclusivity because over 100 members of the House of Representatives are women, but that’s less than a quarter of the House in a country where women are slightly more than 50 percent of the population). Awards shows are lumbering beasts generally, and this one was no exception — it ran 22 minutes over its scheduled three hours, and so I didn’t watch the Lifetime movie I’d planned to turn to after it was over and looked for other stuff on the “tube” instead.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Michael Bublé: Tour Stop 148 (Warner-Reprise Records, PBS-TV, aired January 5, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I chose as last night’s TV “feature” a PBS pledge-break program called Michael Bublé: Tour Stop 148. Michael Bublé, like Andrew Lloyd Webber, seems to be one of those people you either love or hate — either you think he’s the ultimate destruction of pop music forever or you think he’s a little god — and I recently shocked a friend by telling him I liked Bublé. “Well,” I said somewhat defensively, “I don’t think he’s a great singer, but it’s nice to know there’s someone out there who’ll still be able to sing the Great American Songbook after Tony Bennett croaks.” Alas, Michael Bublé has become one of those modern-day artists who doesn’t trust just himself, his voice and his music to win an audience. Like Beyoncé — a great soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Diana Ross who is currently burying her true talent in overproduced recordings so full of “samples” you can barely hear her and even more overproduced videos that look like they were directed by the love-child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl — Buble has filled his current touring show full of “production,” including projected images of sky, sunsets, clouds, fires and whatnot behind him, the use of his projection screens to show multiple images of him so he looks like he’s about to do a solo re-enactment of the last scene of The Lady from Shanghai, and an oversized band that contains rock players, jazz players, string players and everything else he can think of he might need for whatever he wants to sing.
What’s more, the sheer elaborateness of his production means he has to do the same show every time and can’t vary his repertoire according to the mood of an audience the way the great cabaret singers of the past could do. Though PBS’s announcers were proudly proclaiming Bublé as one of their own because his first U.S. TV appearance was on the public network, the shows I’ve seen him on before were on NBC and overlapped some of the same repertoire as he did last night as well as some of the same lack of focus. Bublé is, quite frankly, at his best when he’s singing songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s; when he tries to do more contemporary material — or, even worse, when he tries to write more contemporary material himself — he seems to wander off cue and spoil the simplicity of his act. Last night he opened with “Cry Me a River,” the 1953 song by Arthur Hamilton that was a huge hit for Julie London in 1955 with a simple backing by jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Bob Leatherwood (no other instruments!). (Wikipedia lists at least two more recent songs called “Cry Me a River,” by a band called Pride and Glory in 1994 and Justin Timberlake in 2002.) Wikipedia’s page on “Cry Me a River” says that the song was originally written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1955 film Pete Kelly’s Blues but was dropped from the final cut — though Ella recorded a superb version in 1961 on her album Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! Bublé drowned his version in an overwrought orchestral arrangement — in fact that was my complaint about much of this show, that he was doing big-orchestra versions of songs that had worked far better for other singers with smaller bands.
Then he did a version of Little Willie John’s “Fever” that successfully combined John’s R&B original and the superb jazz cover by Peggy Lee (again, with just two musicians behind her — bassist Joe Mondragon and drummer Shelly Manne); Lee dropped one of John’s lyrics and added some of her own that turned the mood of the song from fervent and pleading to detached and cool, and Bublé sang both the verse Lee had dropped and at least some of the ones she’d added, to good effect. Then, alas, Bublé departed the older material he does best and did one of his own songs, “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet,” which was an O.K. modern-day romantic ballad but hardly at the level of the older songs on the program, and he followed it up with another recent song, “It’s a Beautiful Day.” Then there came the first of the pledge breaks with which KPBS studded these programs — and whereas previous PBS pledge-break musical specials have already aggravated us with the repeated (ad nauseam) statement that what you’re seeing is only a fraction of the full program, which you can get for a three-figure contribution to your public TV station, this one threw fragments of Bublé’s performances into the pledge breaks themselves, hinting that you’d get complete versions of these songs later — which you didn’t. On the first pledge break there was a hint that we’d get a version of the song “I’ve Got the World on a String” and a mention of Frank Sinatra, who recorded it in 1953 on his first session with the great arranger Nelson Riddle, though there’s a just as beautiful version 20 years earlier by Louis Armstrong — and Bublé’s version, at least from the fragments we got to hear, wasn’t as good as Armstrong’s or Sinatra’s but still communicated the song effectively and showcased him in the material he does best. Then we got two fragments of Bublé’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” one in rehearsal (there were a lot of shots of people setting up or tearing down his sets and interviews with members of his behind-the-scenes crew, in an attempt to distinguish this from every other PBS concert special with a major star) and one in performance, which indicated that once again, as with “Fever,” Bublé had tried to combine the two best-known versions of this song — by Frank Sinatra in the 1940’s (quiet and prayerful) and Otis Redding in the 1960’s (loud and soulful) — whether or not they were compatible.
After that Bublé did the Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse ballad “Feelin’ Good,” which has received a lot of great performances over the years, including a superb, unbeatable one by Carmen McRae on her 1964 live album Woman Talk and a great instrumental version by John Coltrane in 1965. There are also editions by Nina Simone (a great performance as far as she is concerned, but saddled with an overblown, tasteless arrangement by Hal Mooney) and Jennifer Hudson (who tried to copy Simone’s but, alas, copied Mooney’s arrangement as well), and Bublé too worked from the Simone-Mooney version rather than Carmen’s superbly understated one (and I missed Carmen’s marvelous vocal ornamentation, particularly her change of the leap in the melody on the line “it’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life for me” into a scale). Then Bublé did “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” in the style of the great Sinatra-Riddle version from the 1950’s — and did it quite well. After that, however, it was back to contemporary material — “I Wonder Who’s Loving You” and a pledge-break excerpt of “Kiss and Hold Her Tight” (interrupted with another pledge-break excerpt, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” the Drifters’ 1959 hit and one that, judging from what little we got to hear of it, would have been right up Bublé’s alley) before his next full song, “Home,” a Bublé original which he decided to use as an excuse to fire confetti at the audience and do bits of other songs with the word “love” in their titles, the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” (Elvis’s last #1 hit — in 1972, five years before he died — and though I’m hardly a big Elvis fan he did sing this song with far more throbbing emotion and soul than Bublé could muster) and a fragment of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” that’s been manhandled by all too many singers — Russell’s own version is quite good but to me this is another song “owned” by Carmen McRae, who staked her claim to it on her 1972 live album The Great American Songbook and who sang the hell out of it with a level of passion and emotion that totally eluded Bublé.
After that we heard Bublé’s orchestra playing the outro to his concert and Bublé himself taking his bows, saying goodbye to the audience and the final credits flashing preceding … another pledge break. You might have turned off the TV set (or changed the channel) at this moment, but if you had, you’d have missed the simplest, the most beautiful and the best Bublé performance of the night: his encore, in which he sat alone at a piano and sang and played “Smile,” the beautiful song Charlie Chaplin wrote as the theme for what I think is his greatest movie, Modern Times (1936). Though, according to the Wikipedia page on the song, Chaplin had nothing to do with the lyrics — they were added by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons in 1954 — their theme of surviving through adversity and holding to hope and happiness in the middle of despair is very Chaplinesque, and Bublé responded to the song’s simple, affirmative mood with low-keyed singing that made far more of an emotional effect than the heaving and straining he’d been doing, especially on modern material, though much of the evening. Michael Bublé is unquestionably a singer of talent, and the fact that he doesn’t always use his talent in the ways that showcase it at its best makes his work and his career even more frustrating than it might be if he had less vocal talent and less potential for real greatness.
I chose as last night’s TV “feature” a PBS pledge-break program called Michael Bublé: Tour Stop 148. Michael Bublé, like Andrew Lloyd Webber, seems to be one of those people you either love or hate — either you think he’s the ultimate destruction of pop music forever or you think he’s a little god — and I recently shocked a friend by telling him I liked Bublé. “Well,” I said somewhat defensively, “I don’t think he’s a great singer, but it’s nice to know there’s someone out there who’ll still be able to sing the Great American Songbook after Tony Bennett croaks.” Alas, Michael Bublé has become one of those modern-day artists who doesn’t trust just himself, his voice and his music to win an audience. Like Beyoncé — a great soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Diana Ross who is currently burying her true talent in overproduced recordings so full of “samples” you can barely hear her and even more overproduced videos that look like they were directed by the love-child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl — Buble has filled his current touring show full of “production,” including projected images of sky, sunsets, clouds, fires and whatnot behind him, the use of his projection screens to show multiple images of him so he looks like he’s about to do a solo re-enactment of the last scene of The Lady from Shanghai, and an oversized band that contains rock players, jazz players, string players and everything else he can think of he might need for whatever he wants to sing.
What’s more, the sheer elaborateness of his production means he has to do the same show every time and can’t vary his repertoire according to the mood of an audience the way the great cabaret singers of the past could do. Though PBS’s announcers were proudly proclaiming Bublé as one of their own because his first U.S. TV appearance was on the public network, the shows I’ve seen him on before were on NBC and overlapped some of the same repertoire as he did last night as well as some of the same lack of focus. Bublé is, quite frankly, at his best when he’s singing songs of the 1930’s and 1940’s; when he tries to do more contemporary material — or, even worse, when he tries to write more contemporary material himself — he seems to wander off cue and spoil the simplicity of his act. Last night he opened with “Cry Me a River,” the 1953 song by Arthur Hamilton that was a huge hit for Julie London in 1955 with a simple backing by jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Bob Leatherwood (no other instruments!). (Wikipedia lists at least two more recent songs called “Cry Me a River,” by a band called Pride and Glory in 1994 and Justin Timberlake in 2002.) Wikipedia’s page on “Cry Me a River” says that the song was originally written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1955 film Pete Kelly’s Blues but was dropped from the final cut — though Ella recorded a superb version in 1961 on her album Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! Bublé drowned his version in an overwrought orchestral arrangement — in fact that was my complaint about much of this show, that he was doing big-orchestra versions of songs that had worked far better for other singers with smaller bands.
Then he did a version of Little Willie John’s “Fever” that successfully combined John’s R&B original and the superb jazz cover by Peggy Lee (again, with just two musicians behind her — bassist Joe Mondragon and drummer Shelly Manne); Lee dropped one of John’s lyrics and added some of her own that turned the mood of the song from fervent and pleading to detached and cool, and Bublé sang both the verse Lee had dropped and at least some of the ones she’d added, to good effect. Then, alas, Bublé departed the older material he does best and did one of his own songs, “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet,” which was an O.K. modern-day romantic ballad but hardly at the level of the older songs on the program, and he followed it up with another recent song, “It’s a Beautiful Day.” Then there came the first of the pledge breaks with which KPBS studded these programs — and whereas previous PBS pledge-break musical specials have already aggravated us with the repeated (ad nauseam) statement that what you’re seeing is only a fraction of the full program, which you can get for a three-figure contribution to your public TV station, this one threw fragments of Bublé’s performances into the pledge breaks themselves, hinting that you’d get complete versions of these songs later — which you didn’t. On the first pledge break there was a hint that we’d get a version of the song “I’ve Got the World on a String” and a mention of Frank Sinatra, who recorded it in 1953 on his first session with the great arranger Nelson Riddle, though there’s a just as beautiful version 20 years earlier by Louis Armstrong — and Bublé’s version, at least from the fragments we got to hear, wasn’t as good as Armstrong’s or Sinatra’s but still communicated the song effectively and showcased him in the material he does best. Then we got two fragments of Bublé’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” one in rehearsal (there were a lot of shots of people setting up or tearing down his sets and interviews with members of his behind-the-scenes crew, in an attempt to distinguish this from every other PBS concert special with a major star) and one in performance, which indicated that once again, as with “Fever,” Bublé had tried to combine the two best-known versions of this song — by Frank Sinatra in the 1940’s (quiet and prayerful) and Otis Redding in the 1960’s (loud and soulful) — whether or not they were compatible.
After that Bublé did the Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse ballad “Feelin’ Good,” which has received a lot of great performances over the years, including a superb, unbeatable one by Carmen McRae on her 1964 live album Woman Talk and a great instrumental version by John Coltrane in 1965. There are also editions by Nina Simone (a great performance as far as she is concerned, but saddled with an overblown, tasteless arrangement by Hal Mooney) and Jennifer Hudson (who tried to copy Simone’s but, alas, copied Mooney’s arrangement as well), and Bublé too worked from the Simone-Mooney version rather than Carmen’s superbly understated one (and I missed Carmen’s marvelous vocal ornamentation, particularly her change of the leap in the melody on the line “it’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life for me” into a scale). Then Bublé did “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” in the style of the great Sinatra-Riddle version from the 1950’s — and did it quite well. After that, however, it was back to contemporary material — “I Wonder Who’s Loving You” and a pledge-break excerpt of “Kiss and Hold Her Tight” (interrupted with another pledge-break excerpt, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” the Drifters’ 1959 hit and one that, judging from what little we got to hear of it, would have been right up Bublé’s alley) before his next full song, “Home,” a Bublé original which he decided to use as an excuse to fire confetti at the audience and do bits of other songs with the word “love” in their titles, the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” (Elvis’s last #1 hit — in 1972, five years before he died — and though I’m hardly a big Elvis fan he did sing this song with far more throbbing emotion and soul than Bublé could muster) and a fragment of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” that’s been manhandled by all too many singers — Russell’s own version is quite good but to me this is another song “owned” by Carmen McRae, who staked her claim to it on her 1972 live album The Great American Songbook and who sang the hell out of it with a level of passion and emotion that totally eluded Bublé.
After that we heard Bublé’s orchestra playing the outro to his concert and Bublé himself taking his bows, saying goodbye to the audience and the final credits flashing preceding … another pledge break. You might have turned off the TV set (or changed the channel) at this moment, but if you had, you’d have missed the simplest, the most beautiful and the best Bublé performance of the night: his encore, in which he sat alone at a piano and sang and played “Smile,” the beautiful song Charlie Chaplin wrote as the theme for what I think is his greatest movie, Modern Times (1936). Though, according to the Wikipedia page on the song, Chaplin had nothing to do with the lyrics — they were added by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons in 1954 — their theme of surviving through adversity and holding to hope and happiness in the middle of despair is very Chaplinesque, and Bublé responded to the song’s simple, affirmative mood with low-keyed singing that made far more of an emotional effect than the heaving and straining he’d been doing, especially on modern material, though much of the evening. Michael Bublé is unquestionably a singer of talent, and the fact that he doesn’t always use his talent in the ways that showcase it at its best makes his work and his career even more frustrating than it might be if he had less vocal talent and less potential for real greatness.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
West Pole (KQED-TV, KQED Experimental Television, 1968)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I decided to run Charles a package of two music programs from KQED, the PBS outlet in the San Francisco Bay Area, made in the late 1960’s on the San Francisco psychedelic-rock scene. Both were produced by Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who discovered the local rock bands in the mid-1960’s and wrote articles hyping them — he even published an entire book called The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound which consisted of a long essay on the history of the San Francisco rock scene and extended interviews he did with all the members of Jefferson Airplane (as it then existed) as well as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. I had strong memories of one of the programs in the package, West Pole (the title being a Gleason inspiration to suggest that the polar attraction in American music just then was to the West in general and San Francisco in particular), which featured music videos of four of the key bands on the San Francisco scene — the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve Miller Band — along with live performances of two bands Gleason considered among the strongest up-and-comers, Sons of Champlin and Ace of Cups. I ran across this on amazon.com while I was looking for material on the Ace of Cups, a fascinating all-woman rock band from the late 1960’s (a decade earlier than the Runaways and a far, far better and more interesting group), especially since they just reunited in their 70’s and did their first studio album at long last. A previous collections of demos and live tapes from their heyday in the late 1960’s was issued in 2004 as It’s Bad for You but Buy It — the title is a line from a song called “Glue” that satirizes advertising and sounds like one of the great women-led punk bands of the late 1970’s: the Patti Smith Group, the Pretenders and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Elsewhere the Ace of Cups occasionally look back to the girl-group harmonies of the early 1960’s — they were a five-piece and all five members sang, while all but one of them did lead vocals — successfully grafted onto the basic acid-rock style of most of the San Francisco bands.
Charles called the Ace of Cups “the discovery of this program,” and that they are: they did three songs — “Music,” an a cappella number singing the praises of music and how it can get you through tough times (“We got no money to pay the rent/And what we earn tonight, you know it’s already spent/But baby said don’t worry if times are hard/Just before the dawn it always gets this dark/And when you get so black you think the end is near/Just one moment and the stars appear”) which the Ace of Cups routinely used to open their shows and sang on the new album from 2018 at the end; “Simplicity,” a good if somewhat rambling song they used after the video clips of the more famous bands; and a gorgeous ballad that’s haunted me ever since I watched this show originally (and taped — and frequently played back — the soundtrack, among other things waiting in vain for a full album of this incredible music) which I assumed was called “Listen to Your Children” but its “official” title is “Gospel Song.” In one way it is a gospel song — the lyrics are framed as a direct appeal to God — but in another way it’s a plea for older people to understand the young, a lyric theme that resonated in the political and social tumult of 1968 but also has relevance today: “Lord, oh Lord, will you listen to your children?” When the new Ace of Cups album was released it came with a blurb from Jackson Browne that said, “I’ve been waiting 45 years to hear this.” I’ve been waiting even longer — ever since West Pole first aired in 1968 — and it’s nice to have a two-CD set of new Ace of Cups music as well as the 2004 album of old demos (seemingly out of print as a physical CD but available from Amazon.com as a download) that includes “Gospel Song,” just in case you want to hear it. (You should.) “Gospel Song”’s aspect as an appeal both to divine and human authorities to respect and understand the challenges of rebellious youth was just emphasized by the decision of Gleason and his director and co-producer, Robert N. Zagone, to place it last on the program and run the closing credits over it.
The other “new” band featured on West Pole, the Sons of Champlin (named after their lead singer, Bill Champlin, though after their first album they dropped his name from the band moniker and just called themselves “The Sons,” much the way the Chicago Transit Authority shortened their name to just “Chicago” after their first album) were a fairly large ensemble with horn players and a vibraharpist, obviously going for the same jazz-rock fusion that was selling records big-time for Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago (and indeed Bill Champlin would much later be one of the replacements Chicago drafted for their original lead singer and guitarist, Terry Kath, after he accidentally shot himself). They did a song on this program called “Have a Nice Time Being” that later became part of a much longer 13-minute medley called “Freedom” that took up an entire side of their two-LP debut on Capitol, Loosen Up Naturally. They never became huge national sellers but they did get on a major label and had respectable sales in the Bay Area and wherever they toured — a fate that eluded Ace of Cups, partly because their manager, Ron Poltz (who also handled Quicksilver Messenger Service), turned down the offers they got because he didn’t think they were lucrative enough, and also because the five members of the Ace of Cups were straight women who did the usual things straight women did in 1968 — they dated men, fell in love, married and had children. This stood in the way of their being recorded big-time because any label that signed them would be expecting them to tour in support of the record — and while they were willing to get babysitters so they could play Bay Area gigs and get home in the early morning, they weren’t willing to leave their kids behind for months to do a major tour.
West Pole begins with a fascinating introduction narrated by Ralph J. Gleason (who not only appears on the soundtrack but is actually shown in the film introducing the various segments) comparing the San Francisco rock scene of the 1960’s to the Kansas City jazz scene of the 1930’s (he even quotes Mary Lou Williams, the superb pianist whose name meant nothing to me in 1968 and is now one of my very favorite musicians) and saying that the burgeoning bands in San Francisco had places to play because the ballrooms that had been open during the swing era and had showcased the great big bands still existed in San Francisco because they “had escaped urban renewal.” He mentioned the principal venues for the San Francisco rock bands — the Fillmore Auditorium (in the middle of San Francisco’s African-American district), the Avalon and the Carousel, though he does not mention the fierce rivalry between the Fillmore’s proprietor, tough, no-nonsense East Coast-bred businessman Bill Graham, and the more low-keyed Chet Helms who ran the Avalon. (The show briefly mentions Graham’s takeover of the Carousel and renaming it the “Fillmore West.” Within three years Graham would abruptly close both the Fillmore West and the Fillmore East, his New York venue that had previously been the Village Gate Theatre in Greenwich Village, saying that bands were demanding so much money it was neither fun nor profitable to keep going — though he remained a major rock concert promoter until his death in a helicopter crash in 1991.)
The show features interviews with a number of San Francisco rock fans — many of whom are surprisingly clean-cut and don’t look like the stereotypical image of a hippie — asking them who are their favorite bands in the scene and why. One woman said Big Brother and the Holding Company was their favorite because Janis Joplin’s voice always made her feel good (Janis’s voice to me always carried a message of misery and despair even if she was singing a song whose lyrics and melody were, on their face, happy and upbeat) and a man said he liked the Jefferson Airplane better than Big Brother because when they finished a performance the members of the Airplane would talk to him and other fans, while the members of Big Brother standoffishly refused. Gleason also presented a list of 135 bands in and around San Francisco and admitted that his list was probably incomplete; it contains bands that were already stars (the Airplane, Dead, Quicksilver, Big Brother, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape), bands that were relatively unknown then but would become stars (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone) and a few that developed cult followings and made at least one album (A. B. Skhy — I can remember when MGM Records signed them and released their first album you could barely move in the Tower Records store in San Francisco amid all the crates full of copies of it — Sopwith Camel, Mother Earth, and It’s a Beautiful Day, which had at least one hauntingly beautiful song that became a cult classic, “White Bird”) and odd bands like Frumious Bandersnatch and the Thorstein Veblen Blues Band (Charles laughed out loud at the audacity of that name!) that never went anywhere.
After that — and a quite beautiful impressionist sequence of the audiences at outdoor rock concerts set to a hauntingly beautiful extended song by Quicksilver Messenger Service from their first album called “The Fool” (named, like the Ace of Cups band, after a card in the Tarot deck) featuring some quite impressive sound effects — at one point the band sounds like a lion-taming act with leader John Cipollina’s guitar making both the noises of a lion’s roar and a lion tamer cracking a whip (which Cipollina said he produced by mounting a razor blade to his guitar pick and using it to scrape against the wound steel outer layer of his strings, then processing the sound through his wah-wah pedal) — come the music videos. Jefferson Airplane’s is set to a song called “Greasy Heart” that’s one of Grace Slick’s boom-it-out hard-rock specials — Slick’s voice didn’t have the desperate blues power of Joplin’s but it was quite an impressive instrument in its own right, and she had a much better band behind her than Joplin ever did. The Grateful Dead’s sequence is identified as just one song, “New Potato Caboose” (one of the trademarks of the psychedelic age is that bands named both themselves and their songs with these weird, seemingly meaningless combinations of adjectives and nouns — it was the Dead’s leader, Jerry Garcia, who suggested to the Jefferson Airplane that they call their second album Surrealistic Pillow), though there’s an audible break and change in tempo midway through the movie that suggests director Robert Wilson combined two songs. (Wilson made a number of live appearances showing his films in the San Francisco area and prepared a different version of this video in which the visual portion was exactly the same as the one in West Pole but it was set to other Grateful Dead music.) The Quicksilver sequence is a bit disappointing mainly because it’s set to one of their weaker songs, “Dino’s Song,” also known as “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” which just invites comparison to the much better song the Beatles wrote and sang under that title.
Steve Miller is represented by a video of a song called “Sittin’ in Circles,” though earlier in the film they’re heard in a quite pop-sounding number called “Roll With It” to illustrate a sequence set at San Francisco International Airport supposedly illustrating just how many people were coming to the city to take part in the rock scene as musicians, fans or hangers-on. This one led Charles to ask me if San Francisco had had a major bubblegum rock scene as well as the adult-rock bands — they hadn’t, though one early San Francisco band had predated psychedelica and achieved a sort of stardom. They were the Beau Brummels, a five-piece from 1964 who (like a lot of bands then) were promoted as the “American Beatles” and were managed by Tom Donahue, later a D.J. who invented the so-called “free-form” style in which D.J.’s selected their own recordings instead of working to a strict management-ordered playlist and could freely mix genres. (Free-form radio was later shut down by the Federal Communications Commission on the ground that D.J.’s who could select their own records to play could easily be bribed by record companies to play their records, which was called “payola” and was illegal.) To produce the Beau Brummels’ recordings Donahue hired an African-American songwriter named Sylvester Stewart, who later became an artist himself and achieved international fame as Sly Stone. (The Beau Brummels made Gleason’s West Pole list of San Francisco bands even though they really weren’t part of the scene he was depicting.) What’s interesting about the music videos — to use the generic term even though this early they were shot on 16 mm color film, not videotape — on this program is how early the conventions of music video hardened into orthodoxy. Much of what you saw on MTV if you were around when it launched in the mid-1980’s was already in evidence here — the quick cuts, flashing images, photographic distortion and mere lip service played to the pretense of actually depicting a performance. (Through the Jefferson Airplane’s video one hears the band members singing but without their lips moving, and as I noted above the Grateful Dead film was so loosely sequenced around their music that director Robert Nelson later replaced its soundtrack with different Grateful Dead songs, and the film worked equally well.)
West Pole is a fascinating historical curio for someone like me who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area while the scene was going on (though I wasn’t quite old enough to see much of it — my mom took me to several Jefferson Airplane concerts but I didn’t see the Grateful Dead until much later, and though I had a thrilling experience at one of their concerts which I was allowed to watch backstage I never became a Deadhead and mostly regarded them as highly overrated) and it’s a slice of history even for someone who didn’t (like Charles, who was living on the East Coast and whose age was still in single digits when all this was going on). It’s also indicative of the value of home video (and, now, streaming on YouTube and similar channels) that history like this is still preserved and still available — even though I no longer believe (if I ever did) Gleason’s assertion that by far the most powerful rock music being made in America in the late 1960’s was coming from San Francisco. At this point I think the most powerful rock bands in the U.S. at that time were the Velvet Underground from New York (whom Gleason wrote a particularly snotty review of when they came to San Francisco as part of Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an attempt to duplicate the San Francisco rock experience and turn it into Manhattan chic; Gleason called them “The Velvet Underpants” and ridiculed them for doing a song about S/M while two dancers did an onstage act with whips) and the Doors from Los Angeles; of the San Francisco bands the Jefferson Airplane hold up beautifully but the Grateful Dead (especially now that their founder, Jerry Garcia, has died and taken the mystique with him) just sound boring and Big Brother and the Holding Company were an otherwise mediocre rock band that lucked into hiring a fabulous singer, Janis Joplin.
Last night I decided to run Charles a package of two music programs from KQED, the PBS outlet in the San Francisco Bay Area, made in the late 1960’s on the San Francisco psychedelic-rock scene. Both were produced by Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who discovered the local rock bands in the mid-1960’s and wrote articles hyping them — he even published an entire book called The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound which consisted of a long essay on the history of the San Francisco rock scene and extended interviews he did with all the members of Jefferson Airplane (as it then existed) as well as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. I had strong memories of one of the programs in the package, West Pole (the title being a Gleason inspiration to suggest that the polar attraction in American music just then was to the West in general and San Francisco in particular), which featured music videos of four of the key bands on the San Francisco scene — the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve Miller Band — along with live performances of two bands Gleason considered among the strongest up-and-comers, Sons of Champlin and Ace of Cups. I ran across this on amazon.com while I was looking for material on the Ace of Cups, a fascinating all-woman rock band from the late 1960’s (a decade earlier than the Runaways and a far, far better and more interesting group), especially since they just reunited in their 70’s and did their first studio album at long last. A previous collections of demos and live tapes from their heyday in the late 1960’s was issued in 2004 as It’s Bad for You but Buy It — the title is a line from a song called “Glue” that satirizes advertising and sounds like one of the great women-led punk bands of the late 1970’s: the Patti Smith Group, the Pretenders and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Elsewhere the Ace of Cups occasionally look back to the girl-group harmonies of the early 1960’s — they were a five-piece and all five members sang, while all but one of them did lead vocals — successfully grafted onto the basic acid-rock style of most of the San Francisco bands.
Charles called the Ace of Cups “the discovery of this program,” and that they are: they did three songs — “Music,” an a cappella number singing the praises of music and how it can get you through tough times (“We got no money to pay the rent/And what we earn tonight, you know it’s already spent/But baby said don’t worry if times are hard/Just before the dawn it always gets this dark/And when you get so black you think the end is near/Just one moment and the stars appear”) which the Ace of Cups routinely used to open their shows and sang on the new album from 2018 at the end; “Simplicity,” a good if somewhat rambling song they used after the video clips of the more famous bands; and a gorgeous ballad that’s haunted me ever since I watched this show originally (and taped — and frequently played back — the soundtrack, among other things waiting in vain for a full album of this incredible music) which I assumed was called “Listen to Your Children” but its “official” title is “Gospel Song.” In one way it is a gospel song — the lyrics are framed as a direct appeal to God — but in another way it’s a plea for older people to understand the young, a lyric theme that resonated in the political and social tumult of 1968 but also has relevance today: “Lord, oh Lord, will you listen to your children?” When the new Ace of Cups album was released it came with a blurb from Jackson Browne that said, “I’ve been waiting 45 years to hear this.” I’ve been waiting even longer — ever since West Pole first aired in 1968 — and it’s nice to have a two-CD set of new Ace of Cups music as well as the 2004 album of old demos (seemingly out of print as a physical CD but available from Amazon.com as a download) that includes “Gospel Song,” just in case you want to hear it. (You should.) “Gospel Song”’s aspect as an appeal both to divine and human authorities to respect and understand the challenges of rebellious youth was just emphasized by the decision of Gleason and his director and co-producer, Robert N. Zagone, to place it last on the program and run the closing credits over it.
The other “new” band featured on West Pole, the Sons of Champlin (named after their lead singer, Bill Champlin, though after their first album they dropped his name from the band moniker and just called themselves “The Sons,” much the way the Chicago Transit Authority shortened their name to just “Chicago” after their first album) were a fairly large ensemble with horn players and a vibraharpist, obviously going for the same jazz-rock fusion that was selling records big-time for Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago (and indeed Bill Champlin would much later be one of the replacements Chicago drafted for their original lead singer and guitarist, Terry Kath, after he accidentally shot himself). They did a song on this program called “Have a Nice Time Being” that later became part of a much longer 13-minute medley called “Freedom” that took up an entire side of their two-LP debut on Capitol, Loosen Up Naturally. They never became huge national sellers but they did get on a major label and had respectable sales in the Bay Area and wherever they toured — a fate that eluded Ace of Cups, partly because their manager, Ron Poltz (who also handled Quicksilver Messenger Service), turned down the offers they got because he didn’t think they were lucrative enough, and also because the five members of the Ace of Cups were straight women who did the usual things straight women did in 1968 — they dated men, fell in love, married and had children. This stood in the way of their being recorded big-time because any label that signed them would be expecting them to tour in support of the record — and while they were willing to get babysitters so they could play Bay Area gigs and get home in the early morning, they weren’t willing to leave their kids behind for months to do a major tour.
West Pole begins with a fascinating introduction narrated by Ralph J. Gleason (who not only appears on the soundtrack but is actually shown in the film introducing the various segments) comparing the San Francisco rock scene of the 1960’s to the Kansas City jazz scene of the 1930’s (he even quotes Mary Lou Williams, the superb pianist whose name meant nothing to me in 1968 and is now one of my very favorite musicians) and saying that the burgeoning bands in San Francisco had places to play because the ballrooms that had been open during the swing era and had showcased the great big bands still existed in San Francisco because they “had escaped urban renewal.” He mentioned the principal venues for the San Francisco rock bands — the Fillmore Auditorium (in the middle of San Francisco’s African-American district), the Avalon and the Carousel, though he does not mention the fierce rivalry between the Fillmore’s proprietor, tough, no-nonsense East Coast-bred businessman Bill Graham, and the more low-keyed Chet Helms who ran the Avalon. (The show briefly mentions Graham’s takeover of the Carousel and renaming it the “Fillmore West.” Within three years Graham would abruptly close both the Fillmore West and the Fillmore East, his New York venue that had previously been the Village Gate Theatre in Greenwich Village, saying that bands were demanding so much money it was neither fun nor profitable to keep going — though he remained a major rock concert promoter until his death in a helicopter crash in 1991.)
The show features interviews with a number of San Francisco rock fans — many of whom are surprisingly clean-cut and don’t look like the stereotypical image of a hippie — asking them who are their favorite bands in the scene and why. One woman said Big Brother and the Holding Company was their favorite because Janis Joplin’s voice always made her feel good (Janis’s voice to me always carried a message of misery and despair even if she was singing a song whose lyrics and melody were, on their face, happy and upbeat) and a man said he liked the Jefferson Airplane better than Big Brother because when they finished a performance the members of the Airplane would talk to him and other fans, while the members of Big Brother standoffishly refused. Gleason also presented a list of 135 bands in and around San Francisco and admitted that his list was probably incomplete; it contains bands that were already stars (the Airplane, Dead, Quicksilver, Big Brother, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape), bands that were relatively unknown then but would become stars (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone) and a few that developed cult followings and made at least one album (A. B. Skhy — I can remember when MGM Records signed them and released their first album you could barely move in the Tower Records store in San Francisco amid all the crates full of copies of it — Sopwith Camel, Mother Earth, and It’s a Beautiful Day, which had at least one hauntingly beautiful song that became a cult classic, “White Bird”) and odd bands like Frumious Bandersnatch and the Thorstein Veblen Blues Band (Charles laughed out loud at the audacity of that name!) that never went anywhere.
After that — and a quite beautiful impressionist sequence of the audiences at outdoor rock concerts set to a hauntingly beautiful extended song by Quicksilver Messenger Service from their first album called “The Fool” (named, like the Ace of Cups band, after a card in the Tarot deck) featuring some quite impressive sound effects — at one point the band sounds like a lion-taming act with leader John Cipollina’s guitar making both the noises of a lion’s roar and a lion tamer cracking a whip (which Cipollina said he produced by mounting a razor blade to his guitar pick and using it to scrape against the wound steel outer layer of his strings, then processing the sound through his wah-wah pedal) — come the music videos. Jefferson Airplane’s is set to a song called “Greasy Heart” that’s one of Grace Slick’s boom-it-out hard-rock specials — Slick’s voice didn’t have the desperate blues power of Joplin’s but it was quite an impressive instrument in its own right, and she had a much better band behind her than Joplin ever did. The Grateful Dead’s sequence is identified as just one song, “New Potato Caboose” (one of the trademarks of the psychedelic age is that bands named both themselves and their songs with these weird, seemingly meaningless combinations of adjectives and nouns — it was the Dead’s leader, Jerry Garcia, who suggested to the Jefferson Airplane that they call their second album Surrealistic Pillow), though there’s an audible break and change in tempo midway through the movie that suggests director Robert Wilson combined two songs. (Wilson made a number of live appearances showing his films in the San Francisco area and prepared a different version of this video in which the visual portion was exactly the same as the one in West Pole but it was set to other Grateful Dead music.) The Quicksilver sequence is a bit disappointing mainly because it’s set to one of their weaker songs, “Dino’s Song,” also known as “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” which just invites comparison to the much better song the Beatles wrote and sang under that title.
Steve Miller is represented by a video of a song called “Sittin’ in Circles,” though earlier in the film they’re heard in a quite pop-sounding number called “Roll With It” to illustrate a sequence set at San Francisco International Airport supposedly illustrating just how many people were coming to the city to take part in the rock scene as musicians, fans or hangers-on. This one led Charles to ask me if San Francisco had had a major bubblegum rock scene as well as the adult-rock bands — they hadn’t, though one early San Francisco band had predated psychedelica and achieved a sort of stardom. They were the Beau Brummels, a five-piece from 1964 who (like a lot of bands then) were promoted as the “American Beatles” and were managed by Tom Donahue, later a D.J. who invented the so-called “free-form” style in which D.J.’s selected their own recordings instead of working to a strict management-ordered playlist and could freely mix genres. (Free-form radio was later shut down by the Federal Communications Commission on the ground that D.J.’s who could select their own records to play could easily be bribed by record companies to play their records, which was called “payola” and was illegal.) To produce the Beau Brummels’ recordings Donahue hired an African-American songwriter named Sylvester Stewart, who later became an artist himself and achieved international fame as Sly Stone. (The Beau Brummels made Gleason’s West Pole list of San Francisco bands even though they really weren’t part of the scene he was depicting.) What’s interesting about the music videos — to use the generic term even though this early they were shot on 16 mm color film, not videotape — on this program is how early the conventions of music video hardened into orthodoxy. Much of what you saw on MTV if you were around when it launched in the mid-1980’s was already in evidence here — the quick cuts, flashing images, photographic distortion and mere lip service played to the pretense of actually depicting a performance. (Through the Jefferson Airplane’s video one hears the band members singing but without their lips moving, and as I noted above the Grateful Dead film was so loosely sequenced around their music that director Robert Nelson later replaced its soundtrack with different Grateful Dead songs, and the film worked equally well.)
West Pole is a fascinating historical curio for someone like me who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area while the scene was going on (though I wasn’t quite old enough to see much of it — my mom took me to several Jefferson Airplane concerts but I didn’t see the Grateful Dead until much later, and though I had a thrilling experience at one of their concerts which I was allowed to watch backstage I never became a Deadhead and mostly regarded them as highly overrated) and it’s a slice of history even for someone who didn’t (like Charles, who was living on the East Coast and whose age was still in single digits when all this was going on). It’s also indicative of the value of home video (and, now, streaming on YouTube and similar channels) that history like this is still preserved and still available — even though I no longer believe (if I ever did) Gleason’s assertion that by far the most powerful rock music being made in America in the late 1960’s was coming from San Francisco. At this point I think the most powerful rock bands in the U.S. at that time were the Velvet Underground from New York (whom Gleason wrote a particularly snotty review of when they came to San Francisco as part of Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an attempt to duplicate the San Francisco rock experience and turn it into Manhattan chic; Gleason called them “The Velvet Underpants” and ridiculed them for doing a song about S/M while two dancers did an onstage act with whips) and the Doors from Los Angeles; of the San Francisco bands the Jefferson Airplane hold up beautifully but the Grateful Dead (especially now that their founder, Jerry Garcia, has died and taken the mystique with him) just sound boring and Big Brother and the Holding Company were an otherwise mediocre rock band that lucked into hiring a fabulous singer, Janis Joplin.
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