by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I switched on Lifetime for
my weekly fix of decidedly fictional kinkiness: a TV-movie originally shot
under the title Early Release but aired under the ludicrous-sounding Mommy’s Prison Secret. Mommy is Taylor Reynolds (played by the
frumpy-looking Kelli Williams, though I don’t know whether she’s just not
especially attractive or the filmmakers decided to “frumpicize” her on purpose),
who six months before the action of the film begins got out of either a local
jail or a state prison (writer Thom Richardson isn’t clear on the point) in
Framingham, Massachusetts. She got arrested for driving under the influence,
having marijuana in her car (which was actually her husband’s) and mouthing off
to the cops who took her in; she was sentenced to three years but was given an
early release after serving a year and a half. As the film begins she’s
completing her probation, having her last meeting with probation officer Blake
Peterson (Conrad Coates, an older, avuncular African-American actor with a
resemblance to the current Bill Cosby) and signing the papers that free her
from legal supervision at long last. She’s back at home in Springfield,
Massachusetts with her husband Jeff (Justin Mader, tall, with a goatee beard
and considerably hotter than most guys who play husbands in Lifetime movies)
and their daughter Bianca (Niamh Wilson —is that a name or an eye chart?). Only
in the year and a half she was “away” dad and daughter were perfectly happy
without her, and her reappearance — especially her reappearance ahead of
schedule — has caused some family tensions. One day she’s shopping at the local
grocery store, “Crisp Market” (I couldn’t help but joke, “Our produce is limp
as a wet rag, but our name is crisp!”), when she’s scared out of her wits meeting someone whose
appearance — tall, leggy, with blonde hair cut severely in a woman’s version of
a mohawk, and wearing skin-tight clothes that flaunt her sexuality — marks her
right away as a “bad girl.”
She turns out to be Meghan Flanagan (Sarain
Boylan), Taylor’s former cellmate and about the last person on earth Taylor wants to see just then.
When Taylor gets to the front of the grocery line she suddenly discovers she’s
“lost” her wallet (though later on, after seeing Meghan in action with several
other people, we suspect that Meghan actually picked her pocket and stole it)
and so she’s got a $60 grocery order and no way to pay for it. The checker,
Geraldine (Kate Hurman), is an old acquaintance and would be willing to give
Taylor the groceries on credit, but she says if she does so the new day
manager, Brian (Don Anderson), will fire her. Meghan whips out her wallet and pays for the
groceries, then insists that Taylor take her home since the man she was
intending to spend the night with has bailed on her. By chance the night Meghan
first shows up at Taylor’s is dark and stormy (stop me if you’ve heard that
before), and the combination of the stormy weather and Meghan’s sheer force of
will is so overwhelming that she’s able to get Jeff to let her spend the night.
Once there, Meghan predictably becomes the Houseguest from Hell, slipping
alcohol into Bianca’s soft drink and making passes at Jeff as well as fighting
back against Bianca’s scapegrace boyfriend Neil Garland (the genuinely cute
Darren Eisnor), including making a pass at him just so she can get close enough to cop his wallet. It seems that Bianca told her folks she
was going to be studying with a girlfriend (not that old line!) but was really out on a date with Neil
— only he was so desperate to get in her pants he literally stole her cell phone and kept her out for 2 ½
hours, and since she didn’t have her phone she couldn’t return her parents’
increasingly frantic messages — and when mom catches up with them, Meghan is
there and fights back by taking a crowbar and smashing the driver’s-side window
of Neil’s car. (“It’s my dad’s car!” he whines.) Once Meghan is in the Reynolds’ home she just stays,
insisting that she’s not leaving, and she makes herself so much at home she
even brings a guy over and they start humping in the Reynolds’ basement.
Taylor
calls the police on Meghan, only Meghan makes a call on her cell phone and the
officer that’s dispatched ends up handcuffing Taylor and putting her in the back seat of his car before
reluctantly letting her go. Taylor gets the message loud and clear: despite her
ex-con status, Meghan has her hooks — financial, sexual or both — into the
local cops and so Taylor can’t just call the police on her. Then Meghan makes
clear what her real agenda
is: it seems that Taylor won her early release by ratting Meghan out to the
prison authorities — Meghan had an elaborate scheme to smuggle drugs into
prison and make herself and the corrupt guard who was helping her money from
selling them. Taylor reported her to Warden Feldman and the two of them
successfully busted Meghan — but instead of the extra years on her sentence
Taylor thought Meghan would get, they put her in solitary for six months and
then let her out, while the gang took out their frustrations by having Warden
Feldman killed so a new, more compliant person would get appointed to run the
place. Now Meghan wants Taylor to take over as her “mule,” and to that end she
has Taylor accept the offer of Lenni Page (Leni Parker), her supervisor at the
social-service agency where Taylor works (while Jeff has what he calls his
“dream job” at an auto dealership that sells Porsches, even though he laments
that they’re paying him far too little to afford one himself), to have her lead
a workshop inside the prison. Uncertain where to go, Taylor hits on the idea of
telling her old probation officer, Blake Peterson — only it turns out he’s part of Meghan’s operation, which he joined
because just as he was getting ready to retire after 30 years on the job, the
state legislature cut his pension in half and he decided he needed the money.
At this point the story is beginning to look like an updated version of Franz
Kafka’s The Trial — with Meghan’s influence
so far-reaching Taylor isn’t sure whom she can trust — only the person she finally confides in who isn’t part of her criminal scheme is Lenni. Along with
the prison’s new warden, they work out a scheme to entrap Meghan and her
confederates by having Taylor enter the prison with drugs, pass them as per
plan, only they’ll be monitoring and they’ll nail the corrupt guard as soon as
he gets the drugs.
The plan works and Taylor successfully records Blake’s
conversation with her, so they have the evidence they need against him — he catches her recording her on her smartphone
but doesn’t realize she has a second recorder on her person that takes down
their conversation — but Meghan fulfills the ultimate destiny of every Lifetime villainess who goes after a woman with a
kid: she kidnaps the kid and demands $40,000 from Taylor for Bianca’s ransom.
Taylor shows up at the rendezvous with a gun and actually shoots Meghan in the
shoulder. Meghan’s response is to drive her car into the lake where they’re
having the meet so Bianca, who’s in its trunk, will drown. Taylor manages to
wade into the lake and pop the trunk open in the nick of time, but Meghan
escapes. Assembled by Thom Richardson from a stock of clichés, some of them
hoarier than the cast members, and directed pretty much by-the-numbers by John
L’Ecuyer, Mommy’s Prison Secret has one saving grace: the brilliant performance by Sarain Boylan as
Meghan. So overpowering in her butchness, her charisma and her out-front
sexuality (so much so that through much of the movie I thought that Mommy’s
prison secret was that she and Meghan had had a Lesbian affair while they were
cellmates), Meghan is a “hard” woman and nothing else. She says she’s spent at
least 14 of her 38 years on the planet incarcerated in one institution or
another, and she divides the world into “us” and “them” — those who are in
prison and those who aren’t. It’s also clear she regards “them” as fair game to
be used, cheated and manipulated by “us.” Mommy’s Prison Secret could have been a much more interesting movie in a
lot of ways — if they’d kept the original title, Early Release, instead of the dorky one they replaced it with; if
we’d got more intimations of just how far Taylor had fallen to the “dark side”
that she pulled a three-year prison term for what seem like relatively minor
misdemeanor alcohol and drug offenses; if we’d got a Christine Conradt-like
backstory on what happened to Meghan to get her that way (though arguably the
movie is more powerful without one — if Meghan is just a wicked force of nature we awe and fear and don’t really “understand”); if the boyfriend Neil had
turned out to be a good guy after all and come back into the action to help the
Reynoldses — but as it is it’s a really powerful piece whenever Sarain Boylan
is front and center, waving her tits at the camera and giving it, us and the other
actors full-bore “attitude,” proudly and unashamedly doing just about
everything she thinks she needs to do to survive, no matter how scummy and evil
it would seem to the rest of us.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
The American Epic Sessions (Lo-Max Films, Thirteen Productions, PBS, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the show I really wanted to see last night: the final episode of the American Epic series, The American Epic Sessions, consisting of a remarkable project undertaken by the series’ producer-director-writer, Bernard MacMahon, and modern-day singer, songwriter and guitarist Jack White. It involved reconstructing a recording machine of the late 1920’s (as nearly as I could make out it actually meant assembling a cutting lathe from one source, an early Western Electric amplifier from another and condenser microphones from still another), getting it in working order and hiring living musicians to record on the old equipment, with all the limitations inherent thereto. That meant not only no overdubs, no multi-tracking, no mixing but also no editing: the musicians would have to perform a single song in real time and keep to the three-minute limit of a 78 rpm master, dictated not only by the size of the master disc they were cutting on but also the length of the canvas ribbon connecting the ground weight to the recording lathe. That’s right: though the machine depended on electrical current to run the amplifier and cutting head, they were not depending on electricity to power the turntable because in the 1920’s electric service was still too variable to give the constant speed they needed to avoid minor but annoying fluctuations in the pitch of the recording, known today as “wow” and “flutter.” So they went back to medieval technology and powered the turntable the way Galileo had with his clocks: a falling weight to provide the energy, a pendulum to regulate its fall, and a clockwork mechanism to propel the turntable via gravity.
There was only one way in which I could tell they “cheated,” and that was though they still referred to the master discs on which they recorded as “waxes,” instead (judging from the visual evidence of the machine in operation in the show) they used lacquer masters. The early cylinder machines had recorded on hard wax, which allowed the cylinder to be played back instantly — indeed cylinder phonograph makers, in their long and ultimately losing battle against competition from discs, ballyhooed that their machines could be used to make amateur recordings, not just play pre-recorded material — but Émile Berliner, the inventor of the flat-disc phonograph, had first etched his discs with acid and then realized that use of a soft wax master would produce better-quality sound. Only wax came with a whole host of problems. First, it meant the masters were very delicate (“You could ruin the wax with a toothpick,” recalled John Hammond, one of the great record producers of the 1930’s and later, in his autobiography). Second, their delicacy meant that they had to go through an elaborate set of metallurgical processes before they could be turned into a playable record (though made after lacquer masters replaced wax, the 1936 short Record Making with Duke Ellington at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ0Vn7ul42s shows the highly elaborate metallurgical processing used by the record industry to turn a master record into a playable disc), and this meant literally weeks of waiting before the producers and the artists themselves could hear what was recorded. (Some producers worked around this by simultaneously recording the session on a cylinder phonograph or an amateur disc recorder using acetate blanks so they would have something they could play back for the artists immediately.)
Lacquer masters could be played back immediately after the recording was made, and the giveaways that the technical crew on The American Epic Sessions were using lacquer instead of wax are: 1) the black color of the master discs (the wax discs used before lacquer were usually either tan or light brown, the natural colors of beeswax); 2) the absence of the warming oven needed in studios using wax to keep the master blanks soft enough to make good records (many 78 rpm discs have a high-frequency whine that starts about midway through the record and gets louder as it progresses: this is what happened when a wax master sat too long at room temperature and cooled too much before it was used); 3) the absence of a technician wielding a soft-bristled brush and holding it over the cutting lathe to sweep off the wax removed from the master disc as it was inscribed (with lacquer, the cutting stylus merely etched a groove into the master disc without removing any material from it); and 4) that after Elton John’s performance the master was removed from the cutting length and transferred to a playback turntable so it could played for him immediately. (Elton John is also told as he’s entering the studio — the old Vox Recorders in L.A., which wasn’t being used when the producers stumbled on it and outfitted it with the antique equipment — that he has four minutes to record, while the other artists were given only three; this probably means that they gave him a 12-inch master instead of the 10-inch ones everybody else got. Well, maybe that’s the privilege you get when you’re a knight.) What’s more, MacMahon and White insisted that, while they had the studio miked separately to catch between-songs chatter and false starts, what you hear when the musicians are actually playing comes from the masters being cut on that old machine — which, if true, is quite remarkable evidence that the recording machines of the late 1920’s were capable of capturing far more sounds than the playback machines of the time could reproduce. By using lacquer masters, pressing on vinyl instead of the noisier shellac-and-clay mix used to make 78’s, and playing the vinyl 78’s on modern equipment, they were able to showcase that old recorder at its very best; compared to modern recordings the sound is a bit congested and doesn’t have a full frequency range, but it’s also honest, noise-free and quite a bit better than even the best-sounding reissues of actual 1929 recordings.
As for the performances themselves, the producers assembled quite an illustrious mix of modern-day artists (as well as one deceased one, Merle Haggard; they’re coy as to just when these sessions were done but Haggard is listed as being on the last one, which means they must have taken place before April 6, 2016, when Haggard died; it would be ironic indeed if it turns out Haggard made his last record on this old equipment!): Jack White, rapper Nas, the band Alabama Shakes, Los Lobos, Elton John, Ashley Monroe and the Americans, 1960’s blues artist Taj Mahal (Black, not East Indian as you might think from his appropriation of India’s famous landmark), Steve Martin and Edie Brickell (yes, that Steve Martin, who in addition to a comedian and actor is an accomplished bluegrass banjoist and frequently teams up, as here, with Mrs. Paul Simon), a new blues artist named Jeroen “Blind Boy” Paxton (I couldn’t tell whether he actually is blind but he had apparently never recorded before, and the last verse of his song contains an ironic reference to the colored lights above the control-booth window there to tell the artists when to start and stop), The Hawai’ians, Bettye Lavette, the Avett Brothers, Mexican singer Ana Gabriel, Beck (I couldn’t help but joke that Jack White recruited him by telling him, “Let’s see what you can do with one turntable and a microphone!”), Rhiannon Giddens, Raphael Saddiq and, for the finale, Haggard duetting with Willie Nelson on two songs, one new and one old. The artists seemed evenly split on their sources for material, with some of them doing actual songs from the period dramatized on American Epic and some doing their own originals written to be compatible with the older musical styles. Jack White kicked off the proceedings with a piece called “Matrimonial Indiscretions,” lamenting that his current girlfriend is telling him to “keep your hands to yourself” unless he’s willing to make his commitment permanent and exclusive; it was the subject of quite a number of blues “in the day” but White’s use of multisyllabic words throughout the song marks it as new. Then Nas did a cover of the Memphis Jug Band’s “On the Road Again,” complete with the “N-word,” and in a clip that was also used in the first episode of American Epic itself defends rap (or “hip-hop,” since he used the euphemism favored by those who like it) as an extension of those old blues that described street life in graphic terms, with all its violence and sex included. I’m not sold on that point — it seems to me the older singers merely described raunchy scenes of sex and violence and didn’t celebrate them the way modern rappers do — but the old song shook a better performance out of Nas than his own material does.
I was hoping Alabama Shakes, with their heavy-set Black singer/lead guitarist/frontwoman Brittany Howard, would cover something by Sister Rosetta Tharpe — perhaps it’s just because I first heard Alabama Shakes on an Austin City Limits episode shown by KPBS right after a PBS documentary on Tharpe, but I’ve thought ever since then she’d be the perfect person to play Tharpe in a biopic — instead she did “Killer Diller Blues,” originally recorded by the great Memphis Minnie in 1946 (which means Minnie probably recorded her version on considerably more sophisticated equipment than Howard and band recorded theirs!) and tore into it with searing electric guitar riffs and a vocal delivery that did her, Minnie and the song justice. Los Lobos did a Mexican folk song called “El Cascabel” and sounded pretty much like they always do when they reach back to their roots and record Mexican folk material in Spanish. Then Elton John came in to record a piece called “Two Drinks of Whiskey” under unusual circumstances; his long-time lyric writer, Bernie Taupin, gave him a sheet with the words printed out and John was obliged to work out a melody on the spot, then record it. (Jack White gave him support on guitar during the final performance.) Elton John gave a remark to the effect that this would be the first time Taupin would witness him record a song they wrote: usually, as dramatized years ago in a TV special called Two Rooms, Taupin merely mailed John his finished lyrics and didn’t hear what John had done with them until the records were released. The song is quite a nice piece of material, reminiscent of the similarly titled one Bono Hewson of U2 wrote for Frank Sinatra with the hope of getting the Chairman to record it. Afterwards came one of the nicest pieces of material in the whole show, Ashley Monroe (a blonde slip of a girl with a voice that sounds like someone tried to cross-breed Sara Carter and Joan Baez) and a neo-bluegrass group called The Americans doing a song called “Jubilee” which is new (I think) but certainly seems credible as a bluegrass oldie.
Then Taj Mahal did a cover of Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” a blues about the Mississippi River floods of 1927 (as I pointed out in my comments on the first American Epic program, a lot of blues songs about the Mississippi floods of 1927 exist because the Melrose Brothers, two whites who ran a music publishing company in Chicago, did a nationwide contest for them that was won by Bessie Smith with her masterpiece, “Backwater Blues”). After that came a real surprise: Steve Martin and Edie Brickell doing a song called “The Cuckoo” which they credited to blues singer Clarence “Tom” Ashley from 1929 but, according to various online sources, it might be even older and may have its origins in British folk traditions. What startled me is that my only previous encounter with this piece was as one of the bonus tracks added to Janis Joplin’s first album with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company when her later label, Columbia, took over the master from Mainstream, the company that made it originally. Then Jeoren “Blind Boy” Paxton came on and did “Candy Man,” credited to Rev. Gary Davis but, given the sexual salaciousness of the lyrics, written well before Gary Davis became a Rev. (It’s on a 1961 album called Pure Religion and Bad Company, recorded for Folkways Records, and it seems as if side one of the LP was about bad company and side two was about pure religion; it also seems as if Bob Dylan bought the album almost as soon as it was released, because a version of “Candy Man” is on one of his early amateur tapes.) Afterwards a group called The Hawai’ians came out and did Sol K. Hoopii’s “Tomi, Tomi,” one of the most infectious of the late 1920’s Hawai’ian records and a lovely song.
It was followed by blues singer Bettye Lavette doing “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business,” not the professionally published one by Clarence Williams that Bessie Smith recorded in 1923 and Billie Holiday, Jimmy Witherspoon and many others later covered, but the version recorded in Memphis, Tennessee in 1928 by Frank Stokes which, though it was done five years later than Bessie’s version, probably reflects an older, “folkier” version of the song. Then the Avett Brothers came on to do a version of the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” that reflected the technical glitches that frequently afflicted the old recording processes; in the middle of their performance one of the mikes cuts out and the machine develops a ground-loop hum that drowns out the music, forcing them to retake. (Despite all the ballyhoo about the old artists having to get everything “right” in one take, retakes were a frequent feature of 1920’s record sessions — though producers were probably less patient with folk performers than they would be with a major star like Paul Whiteman who had the clout to insist that his band and the record technicians cut a song again and again and again, no matter how much money got spent in the studio, until they’d come up with a version he felt was worthy of his formidable reputation.) Finally the technicians got the equipment up and running again, and the delay actually improved the Avett Brothers’ performance — instead of performing the hymn with just one guitar and otherwise a cappella, as they’d originally planned, they started jamming with piano, a second guitar and two string basses, one plucked, one bowed, and came up with a much more appealing version (though the definitive “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” for me remains the masterpiece cut by Louis Armstrong with the Dukes of Dixieland on state-of-the-art stereo equipment in 1960).
After that Ana Gabriel came on and did a song that was one of the highlights of the American Epic documentary: “Mal Hombre,” recorded by Lydia Mendoza for Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary in 1928 and sounding for all the world like a Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht lament by a ruined woman tearing into the man who’d ruined her. The title literally means “Bad Man” but was rendered in the subtitles as “cold-hearted man,” and I was glad it was subtitled but not sure why this song merited translation while “El Cascabel” and “Tomi, Tomi,” the other non-English songs in the program, hadn’t. Then Beck came on with a pseudo-gospel chorus to do a song called “Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods,” and after various problems with the arrangement and the balance between his voice, his guitar and the chorus, racked up no fewer than 13 takes before he finally got it down (so much for “no retakes”!). Afterwards Rhiannon Giddens, one of the modern singers I like best, did one of the more disappointing songs of the night, a pastiche of old blues called “One-Hour Mama” featuring a sentiment better expressed by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin when they wrote “A Guy What Takes His Time” for Mae West in 1933 (and I think Giddens would have been better advised to cover that song than write one of her own along the same lines). Things looked up a bit when Raphael Saddiq came up to do “Stealin’, Stealin’,” originally cut by the Memphis Jug Band in 1929, which I liked better than Nas’ version of “On the Road Again,” partly because it’s simply a better song but also because he and his bandmates did it “straight” without Nas’ rap affectations.
For the finale Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard came out with two songs, a new one called “The Only Man Wilder Than Me” (it was a great song, though along the lines of much of what both artists had done before, jointly and severally — its most ironic moment was when Haggard sang, “I’ve never done time,” when it was a major part of the real Haggard’s legend that he had served time: he was arrested for robbing a roadhouse in Bakersfield in 1957, paroled in 1960 and finally given a full pardon by California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1972) and an old one, “Old-Fashioned Love,” which they identified as a Bob Wills cover. That’s probably where both of them learned it, but it’s actually a Black pop song, written by piano giant James P. Johnson (also the composer of the famous “Charleston”) and “Shine” writer Cecil Mack in 1923 — yet more indication that the interchange of musical ideas and song materials between white and Black American musicians was considerably more complicated than posited by the extreme racialist readings on both sides would have it. All in all, the American Epic project was superb, bringing to life folk-music traditions of both Black and white Americans, profiling artists both well known (like the Carter Family) and largely forgotten (like the Memphis Jug Band) as well as figures like blues legends Charley Patton and Mississippi John Hurt that live in the netherworld between known and unknown (Hurt through his late-in-life comeback on the folk-music circuit and Patton through the number of later bluesmen he influenced, including Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf) — and this appealing adjunct of new musicians recording on the old equipment and having to create great music within its limitations added to the project even if none of the new recordings created for The American Epic Sessions seemed to me to hit greatness.
I watched the show I really wanted to see last night: the final episode of the American Epic series, The American Epic Sessions, consisting of a remarkable project undertaken by the series’ producer-director-writer, Bernard MacMahon, and modern-day singer, songwriter and guitarist Jack White. It involved reconstructing a recording machine of the late 1920’s (as nearly as I could make out it actually meant assembling a cutting lathe from one source, an early Western Electric amplifier from another and condenser microphones from still another), getting it in working order and hiring living musicians to record on the old equipment, with all the limitations inherent thereto. That meant not only no overdubs, no multi-tracking, no mixing but also no editing: the musicians would have to perform a single song in real time and keep to the three-minute limit of a 78 rpm master, dictated not only by the size of the master disc they were cutting on but also the length of the canvas ribbon connecting the ground weight to the recording lathe. That’s right: though the machine depended on electrical current to run the amplifier and cutting head, they were not depending on electricity to power the turntable because in the 1920’s electric service was still too variable to give the constant speed they needed to avoid minor but annoying fluctuations in the pitch of the recording, known today as “wow” and “flutter.” So they went back to medieval technology and powered the turntable the way Galileo had with his clocks: a falling weight to provide the energy, a pendulum to regulate its fall, and a clockwork mechanism to propel the turntable via gravity.
There was only one way in which I could tell they “cheated,” and that was though they still referred to the master discs on which they recorded as “waxes,” instead (judging from the visual evidence of the machine in operation in the show) they used lacquer masters. The early cylinder machines had recorded on hard wax, which allowed the cylinder to be played back instantly — indeed cylinder phonograph makers, in their long and ultimately losing battle against competition from discs, ballyhooed that their machines could be used to make amateur recordings, not just play pre-recorded material — but Émile Berliner, the inventor of the flat-disc phonograph, had first etched his discs with acid and then realized that use of a soft wax master would produce better-quality sound. Only wax came with a whole host of problems. First, it meant the masters were very delicate (“You could ruin the wax with a toothpick,” recalled John Hammond, one of the great record producers of the 1930’s and later, in his autobiography). Second, their delicacy meant that they had to go through an elaborate set of metallurgical processes before they could be turned into a playable record (though made after lacquer masters replaced wax, the 1936 short Record Making with Duke Ellington at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ0Vn7ul42s shows the highly elaborate metallurgical processing used by the record industry to turn a master record into a playable disc), and this meant literally weeks of waiting before the producers and the artists themselves could hear what was recorded. (Some producers worked around this by simultaneously recording the session on a cylinder phonograph or an amateur disc recorder using acetate blanks so they would have something they could play back for the artists immediately.)
Lacquer masters could be played back immediately after the recording was made, and the giveaways that the technical crew on The American Epic Sessions were using lacquer instead of wax are: 1) the black color of the master discs (the wax discs used before lacquer were usually either tan or light brown, the natural colors of beeswax); 2) the absence of the warming oven needed in studios using wax to keep the master blanks soft enough to make good records (many 78 rpm discs have a high-frequency whine that starts about midway through the record and gets louder as it progresses: this is what happened when a wax master sat too long at room temperature and cooled too much before it was used); 3) the absence of a technician wielding a soft-bristled brush and holding it over the cutting lathe to sweep off the wax removed from the master disc as it was inscribed (with lacquer, the cutting stylus merely etched a groove into the master disc without removing any material from it); and 4) that after Elton John’s performance the master was removed from the cutting length and transferred to a playback turntable so it could played for him immediately. (Elton John is also told as he’s entering the studio — the old Vox Recorders in L.A., which wasn’t being used when the producers stumbled on it and outfitted it with the antique equipment — that he has four minutes to record, while the other artists were given only three; this probably means that they gave him a 12-inch master instead of the 10-inch ones everybody else got. Well, maybe that’s the privilege you get when you’re a knight.) What’s more, MacMahon and White insisted that, while they had the studio miked separately to catch between-songs chatter and false starts, what you hear when the musicians are actually playing comes from the masters being cut on that old machine — which, if true, is quite remarkable evidence that the recording machines of the late 1920’s were capable of capturing far more sounds than the playback machines of the time could reproduce. By using lacquer masters, pressing on vinyl instead of the noisier shellac-and-clay mix used to make 78’s, and playing the vinyl 78’s on modern equipment, they were able to showcase that old recorder at its very best; compared to modern recordings the sound is a bit congested and doesn’t have a full frequency range, but it’s also honest, noise-free and quite a bit better than even the best-sounding reissues of actual 1929 recordings.
As for the performances themselves, the producers assembled quite an illustrious mix of modern-day artists (as well as one deceased one, Merle Haggard; they’re coy as to just when these sessions were done but Haggard is listed as being on the last one, which means they must have taken place before April 6, 2016, when Haggard died; it would be ironic indeed if it turns out Haggard made his last record on this old equipment!): Jack White, rapper Nas, the band Alabama Shakes, Los Lobos, Elton John, Ashley Monroe and the Americans, 1960’s blues artist Taj Mahal (Black, not East Indian as you might think from his appropriation of India’s famous landmark), Steve Martin and Edie Brickell (yes, that Steve Martin, who in addition to a comedian and actor is an accomplished bluegrass banjoist and frequently teams up, as here, with Mrs. Paul Simon), a new blues artist named Jeroen “Blind Boy” Paxton (I couldn’t tell whether he actually is blind but he had apparently never recorded before, and the last verse of his song contains an ironic reference to the colored lights above the control-booth window there to tell the artists when to start and stop), The Hawai’ians, Bettye Lavette, the Avett Brothers, Mexican singer Ana Gabriel, Beck (I couldn’t help but joke that Jack White recruited him by telling him, “Let’s see what you can do with one turntable and a microphone!”), Rhiannon Giddens, Raphael Saddiq and, for the finale, Haggard duetting with Willie Nelson on two songs, one new and one old. The artists seemed evenly split on their sources for material, with some of them doing actual songs from the period dramatized on American Epic and some doing their own originals written to be compatible with the older musical styles. Jack White kicked off the proceedings with a piece called “Matrimonial Indiscretions,” lamenting that his current girlfriend is telling him to “keep your hands to yourself” unless he’s willing to make his commitment permanent and exclusive; it was the subject of quite a number of blues “in the day” but White’s use of multisyllabic words throughout the song marks it as new. Then Nas did a cover of the Memphis Jug Band’s “On the Road Again,” complete with the “N-word,” and in a clip that was also used in the first episode of American Epic itself defends rap (or “hip-hop,” since he used the euphemism favored by those who like it) as an extension of those old blues that described street life in graphic terms, with all its violence and sex included. I’m not sold on that point — it seems to me the older singers merely described raunchy scenes of sex and violence and didn’t celebrate them the way modern rappers do — but the old song shook a better performance out of Nas than his own material does.
I was hoping Alabama Shakes, with their heavy-set Black singer/lead guitarist/frontwoman Brittany Howard, would cover something by Sister Rosetta Tharpe — perhaps it’s just because I first heard Alabama Shakes on an Austin City Limits episode shown by KPBS right after a PBS documentary on Tharpe, but I’ve thought ever since then she’d be the perfect person to play Tharpe in a biopic — instead she did “Killer Diller Blues,” originally recorded by the great Memphis Minnie in 1946 (which means Minnie probably recorded her version on considerably more sophisticated equipment than Howard and band recorded theirs!) and tore into it with searing electric guitar riffs and a vocal delivery that did her, Minnie and the song justice. Los Lobos did a Mexican folk song called “El Cascabel” and sounded pretty much like they always do when they reach back to their roots and record Mexican folk material in Spanish. Then Elton John came in to record a piece called “Two Drinks of Whiskey” under unusual circumstances; his long-time lyric writer, Bernie Taupin, gave him a sheet with the words printed out and John was obliged to work out a melody on the spot, then record it. (Jack White gave him support on guitar during the final performance.) Elton John gave a remark to the effect that this would be the first time Taupin would witness him record a song they wrote: usually, as dramatized years ago in a TV special called Two Rooms, Taupin merely mailed John his finished lyrics and didn’t hear what John had done with them until the records were released. The song is quite a nice piece of material, reminiscent of the similarly titled one Bono Hewson of U2 wrote for Frank Sinatra with the hope of getting the Chairman to record it. Afterwards came one of the nicest pieces of material in the whole show, Ashley Monroe (a blonde slip of a girl with a voice that sounds like someone tried to cross-breed Sara Carter and Joan Baez) and a neo-bluegrass group called The Americans doing a song called “Jubilee” which is new (I think) but certainly seems credible as a bluegrass oldie.
Then Taj Mahal did a cover of Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” a blues about the Mississippi River floods of 1927 (as I pointed out in my comments on the first American Epic program, a lot of blues songs about the Mississippi floods of 1927 exist because the Melrose Brothers, two whites who ran a music publishing company in Chicago, did a nationwide contest for them that was won by Bessie Smith with her masterpiece, “Backwater Blues”). After that came a real surprise: Steve Martin and Edie Brickell doing a song called “The Cuckoo” which they credited to blues singer Clarence “Tom” Ashley from 1929 but, according to various online sources, it might be even older and may have its origins in British folk traditions. What startled me is that my only previous encounter with this piece was as one of the bonus tracks added to Janis Joplin’s first album with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company when her later label, Columbia, took over the master from Mainstream, the company that made it originally. Then Jeoren “Blind Boy” Paxton came on and did “Candy Man,” credited to Rev. Gary Davis but, given the sexual salaciousness of the lyrics, written well before Gary Davis became a Rev. (It’s on a 1961 album called Pure Religion and Bad Company, recorded for Folkways Records, and it seems as if side one of the LP was about bad company and side two was about pure religion; it also seems as if Bob Dylan bought the album almost as soon as it was released, because a version of “Candy Man” is on one of his early amateur tapes.) Afterwards a group called The Hawai’ians came out and did Sol K. Hoopii’s “Tomi, Tomi,” one of the most infectious of the late 1920’s Hawai’ian records and a lovely song.
It was followed by blues singer Bettye Lavette doing “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business,” not the professionally published one by Clarence Williams that Bessie Smith recorded in 1923 and Billie Holiday, Jimmy Witherspoon and many others later covered, but the version recorded in Memphis, Tennessee in 1928 by Frank Stokes which, though it was done five years later than Bessie’s version, probably reflects an older, “folkier” version of the song. Then the Avett Brothers came on to do a version of the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” that reflected the technical glitches that frequently afflicted the old recording processes; in the middle of their performance one of the mikes cuts out and the machine develops a ground-loop hum that drowns out the music, forcing them to retake. (Despite all the ballyhoo about the old artists having to get everything “right” in one take, retakes were a frequent feature of 1920’s record sessions — though producers were probably less patient with folk performers than they would be with a major star like Paul Whiteman who had the clout to insist that his band and the record technicians cut a song again and again and again, no matter how much money got spent in the studio, until they’d come up with a version he felt was worthy of his formidable reputation.) Finally the technicians got the equipment up and running again, and the delay actually improved the Avett Brothers’ performance — instead of performing the hymn with just one guitar and otherwise a cappella, as they’d originally planned, they started jamming with piano, a second guitar and two string basses, one plucked, one bowed, and came up with a much more appealing version (though the definitive “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” for me remains the masterpiece cut by Louis Armstrong with the Dukes of Dixieland on state-of-the-art stereo equipment in 1960).
After that Ana Gabriel came on and did a song that was one of the highlights of the American Epic documentary: “Mal Hombre,” recorded by Lydia Mendoza for Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary in 1928 and sounding for all the world like a Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht lament by a ruined woman tearing into the man who’d ruined her. The title literally means “Bad Man” but was rendered in the subtitles as “cold-hearted man,” and I was glad it was subtitled but not sure why this song merited translation while “El Cascabel” and “Tomi, Tomi,” the other non-English songs in the program, hadn’t. Then Beck came on with a pseudo-gospel chorus to do a song called “Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods,” and after various problems with the arrangement and the balance between his voice, his guitar and the chorus, racked up no fewer than 13 takes before he finally got it down (so much for “no retakes”!). Afterwards Rhiannon Giddens, one of the modern singers I like best, did one of the more disappointing songs of the night, a pastiche of old blues called “One-Hour Mama” featuring a sentiment better expressed by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin when they wrote “A Guy What Takes His Time” for Mae West in 1933 (and I think Giddens would have been better advised to cover that song than write one of her own along the same lines). Things looked up a bit when Raphael Saddiq came up to do “Stealin’, Stealin’,” originally cut by the Memphis Jug Band in 1929, which I liked better than Nas’ version of “On the Road Again,” partly because it’s simply a better song but also because he and his bandmates did it “straight” without Nas’ rap affectations.
For the finale Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard came out with two songs, a new one called “The Only Man Wilder Than Me” (it was a great song, though along the lines of much of what both artists had done before, jointly and severally — its most ironic moment was when Haggard sang, “I’ve never done time,” when it was a major part of the real Haggard’s legend that he had served time: he was arrested for robbing a roadhouse in Bakersfield in 1957, paroled in 1960 and finally given a full pardon by California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1972) and an old one, “Old-Fashioned Love,” which they identified as a Bob Wills cover. That’s probably where both of them learned it, but it’s actually a Black pop song, written by piano giant James P. Johnson (also the composer of the famous “Charleston”) and “Shine” writer Cecil Mack in 1923 — yet more indication that the interchange of musical ideas and song materials between white and Black American musicians was considerably more complicated than posited by the extreme racialist readings on both sides would have it. All in all, the American Epic project was superb, bringing to life folk-music traditions of both Black and white Americans, profiling artists both well known (like the Carter Family) and largely forgotten (like the Memphis Jug Band) as well as figures like blues legends Charley Patton and Mississippi John Hurt that live in the netherworld between known and unknown (Hurt through his late-in-life comeback on the folk-music circuit and Patton through the number of later bluesmen he influenced, including Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf) — and this appealing adjunct of new musicians recording on the old equipment and having to create great music within its limitations added to the project even if none of the new recordings created for The American Epic Sessions seemed to me to hit greatness.
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Michael Jackson: This Is It (Columbia Pictures, Michael Jackson Entertainment, AEG, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was one I’d had sitting in the backlog for a while but which I dug out because it seemed like a logical choice after we’d seen the recent Lifetime TV-movie Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland. It was Michael Jackson: This Is It, the release basically thrown together after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and consisting of rehearsal footage for the 50 comeback concerts he was scheduled to do at London’s O2 arena — and blessedly, Kenny Ortega, who was the credited director for both the concerts and the film, decided to go with a cinema verité presentation: no voice-over narration, a minimum of interview footage, mostly just straight documentary of Jackson’s rehearsals for the concerts he tragically didn’t live long enough actually to give. As I’ve commented about Michael Jackson in previous posts about him and his products, the poor man seems to have been a bundle of contradictions: “the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It seemed odd that Quincy Jones, the veteran jazz, pop and rock producer who worked with Jackson on his three greatest albums — Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987) — would describe him as a “workaholic” when he didn’t make a releasable album after Invincible (2001), eight years before his death. (About the only music he had out after Invincible was a duet single called “Hold My Hand” with someone named Akon, which was the lead-off track on the first posthumous release of “new” Michael Jackson material, Michael from 2010.) Instead Jackson spent the last eight years of his life being prosecuted for child sexual abuse and, though he was acquitted, deciding never to go back to his fabled Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara because — at least according to the script of Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland, based on a book written by two of his bodyguards — he felt it had become “contaminated by evil.” Instead he lived a peripatetic existence, staying in Bahrain for a while and then returning to the U.S. in rented “digs” and spending so much money he ultimately had to sell half of his 50 percent stake in Sony-ATV Music (the current holder of the Beatles’ copyrights) to Sony just to pay off his debts.
Apparently the message got through to him from someone in his often-shifting entourage that he couldn’t keep spending like there was no tomorrow without bringing in some income, and rather than follow a course a more normal pop star plotting a comeback would have — recording a new CD and then doing live shows in support of it — Jackson finally (reluctantly, if the portrayal of it in Searching for Neverland is correct) accepted the offer of the giant AEG Entertainment company to do a series of live shows at the newly constructed O2 Arena in London. According to the Searching for Neverland script, Jackson originally just wanted to sign for 10 shows but got talked into doing a 50-show stand, and called the concerts “This Is It” — which he announced at a press conference that made it seem like these were going to be the last live shows he would ever give. This Is It (the movie) begins with dancers from all over the world flying to Los Angeles, where Jackson was going to live and rehearse until the concerts were ready and he would fly to London for the performances, for an open audition to be part of Michael Jackson’s chorus line, and as someone who was never particularly a fan of Michael Jackson (when Thriller was at its peak I was probably one of the few regular record buyers in the U.S. who didn’t purchase it — my taste in current music in the early 1980’s ran more towards my late-1970’s British punk heroes like Elvis Costello, The Clash, Graham Parker and Nick Lowe, along with the great Australian rock bands Big Country and Men at Work that put out their first albums around then), I was astonished that these people would describe hearing his music and (especially) seeing his videos as literally life-changing experiences, so much so they were willing to fly halfway around the world for a chance to work with The Man Himself. Much of This Is It hovers in this netherworld between Michael Jackson the almost godlike apparition and Michael Jackson the lifelong (well, what else can you say about a man who made his showbiz debut at age 5 and had his first record — and first hit — at 10?) working entertainer who was making a comeback under uncertain circumstances and working with professionals who knew going in that it would be a challenge to get a great performance out of him. Indeed, on the imdb.com page for This Is It there’s a “Trivia” item that speculates that after Jackson’s death Sony had his footage digitally manipulated to cover for him — to make it look like he was in better physical shape than he actually was.
One of the big pressure points on Michael Jackson — and part, I suspect, of what ultimately did him in — was that between them, he and Madonna had so totally changed the audience expectation of what a big pop concert would be he couldn’t just show up and sing his songs the way an older singer like Frank Sinatra could. Sinatra could go on performing until nearly his 80th birthday because all his audiences expected was to hear him sing: as long as he could stand up, remember (or be telepromptered on) his songs’ lyrics and croak out a decent approximation of their melodies, they’d be satisfied and go home glowing that they’d been in the presence of a living legend. Michael Jackson’s audience would not have been happy if he’d just shown up, put a great band together and run through his old songs; they wanted to see him dance, and to see him in his late 40’s execute perfectly in one go steps he’d first done in his 20’s in music videos with the benefit of being able to retake if he screwed up. (No wonder Fred Astaire never again performed “live” as a dancer after he started making movies, though in his later years he did do a few concerts just as a singer.) And they wanted to see him dance as part of elaborate production numbers that at least reproduced the original videos and hopefully went beyond them. One of the reasons there were professional-quality cameras filming Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for This Is It, aside from documenting them for Michael’s production company and giving Ortega and his production staff a way to see what was working and what wasn’t, was that the concert was going to be studded with filmed inserts — including a bizarre pastiche of 1940’s film noir clips that was supposed to introduce Jackson’s song “Smooth Criminal” from Bad and give us the experience of watching a live Michael Jackson have an on-stage shootout with a filmed Humphrey Bogart. (I joked, “Michael Jackson in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid — who knew?” Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was Carl Reiner’s 1982 tribute/spoof to film noir in which Steve Martin and other then-modern actors were filmed in scenes to resemble film noir and their images were combined with clips from the actual 1940’s noirs.) Part of the reason the film crew was there was to make the inserts, including an elaborate graveyard montage sequence for the attempt to reproduce John Landis’s famous 14-minute video for the song “Thriller” with various performers costumed as monsters — though it’s impossible to tell from what we see, which looks about as convincing as the monsters that popped out of the wall in the old “Haunted Mansion” attraction at Disneyland, whether the final stage effect would have worked.
Indeed, the biggest single frustration about This Is It is it offers surprisingly little evidence to answer the question we have watching it, which is, “If Michael Jackson had lived long enough to give these concerts, would they have been any good?” Part of that is we’re obviously seeing just bits and pieces of what were planned as quite elaborate on-stage productions, and not only is it hard to tell just what the final numbers would have looked like, it’s also unclear how they would have related to each other in the context of a complete performance. Would these elaborate productions, many of which used digital and film technology to reproduce music videos “live,” have been genuinely entertaining, or would they — especially coming one after the other with few if any less “produced” segments to give the audience a break — have become as oppressive, overloaded and pretentious as Beyoncé’s ridiculous performances at the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards? (Beyoncé is one performer who’s really been trapped in the changed expectations of pop performers since Michael Jackson and Madonna: a singer who should be presented as a straightforward soul diva in the manner of Aretha Franklin has instead been shoehorned into these gargantuan productions both Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl would probably have thought were overdone.) Another reason we can’t tell from This Is It the movie what “This Is It” the concerts would have been like is that Michael Jackson was singing at half-voice throughout most of the rehearsals. Singers call this “marking” — using half-voice during rehearsals to save their full vocal volume and power for the actual performances — and at two points in the film Michael is very adamant that this is what he’s doing: “I’m conserving my voice,” he tells his technicians, who are getting frustrated with him because they can’t get a good idea of vocal balance and blend with him singing so deliberately softly and putting almost no emotion into the songs. (At the end of “The Way You Make Me Feel” — possibly inspired by the power and majesty of the voice of the Black woman he’s duetting with — we hear Michael Jackson sing with his full vocal and emotional power — and then he chews out his staff for having let him do that!)
Still, for all his occasional bouts with “attitude,” Michael Jackson in rehearsal for “This Is It” emerges as a consummate professional: his comments to his musicians (and he did assemble a great band, especially guitarist Orianthi Paraganis, whom he hired because she could perfectly duplicate Eddie Van Halen’s solo on the original record of “Beat It” and she was a drop-dead gorgeous woman who could play the solo while strolling across the stage in rhythm — whatever happened to her? She deserved a shot at stardom!) about the groove he wants for his song, and to the dancers and technicians about what he wants from them, are logical, sensible and workmanlike. There’s none of the out-of-it weirdness we hear from Elvis Presley on the outtakes from his last recording sessions recently issued as part of a two-CD set called Way Down in the Jungle Room; the Michael Jackson we watch and hear in This Is It is a consummate professional, clear and open about what he needs from the people he’s working with and at the same time fully recognizing their importance to him in creating a show that will make him look good. It’s hard to square this Michael Jackson with the one the media — the mainstream outlets as well as the tabloids — told us about when he died in the final stages of the This Is It rehearsals, knocked off by Propofol, the powerful anesthetic his controversial doctor, Conrad Murray, gave him so he could get some sleep during the ordeal of preparing for the concerts. That Michael Jackson — the drugged-out wreck, barely aware of his surroundings or in control of his perceptions — doesn’t seem to be anywhere in evidence in This Is It; instead we see a committed entertainer, determined to give the audience what it wants from him and still surprisingly in command of himself, his voice and his body. About his only professional slip-up is when he forgets the words to his first hit, “I Want You Back,” during a run-through of a segment paying tribute to his origins as part of the Jackson 5. At the same time we see the other side of “This Is It,” the Michael Jackson who was disgusted by the whole idea of performing again, and clearly hoping these would be his final concerts — that he’d make a ton of money doing this a few more times so his debts would be paid and he’d never have even to think about doing it again after that.
Michael Jackson remains one of the most enigmatic of major celebrities, a charismatic performer who had done it so long he’d never had a chance at a “normal” life (as I’ve written about him before, one can read the last eight years of his life as the Curious Case of Benjamin Button-style attempt of a middle-aged man at last to have the childhood he’d been denied when he actually was a child biologically, and even Jackson’s song “Childhood” — the one he said would explain him to anyone who wanted to understand him — was, not surprisingly, a lament that he’d never really had a childhood) and who’d achieved fabulous success with a series of the sorts of fantasies one would come up with if one’s whole idea of how other people lived came from movies and TV shows. As I wrote when Charles and I re-watched the original “Thriller” video on the HIStory collection just after Jackson’s death, “It also is yet more evidence that Michael Jackson lived his whole life separated from the reality of the rest of humanity — that virtually his entire understanding of human emotions of any kind came from movies, TV shows and songs — and how he never really outgrew his adolescence … the ‘Thriller’ segment is a mad mélange of images from cheesy horror films, and whereas a more sensitive, grounded artist might have created something like this as a tongue-in-cheek camp homage, for Jackson these images seem to have been a serious metaphor for terror.” A lot of Michael Jackson’s songs portray him as a normal man carrying on (or attempting to carry on) normal romantic and/or sexual relations with women, yet when we see him enact these scenarios as part of the “This Is It” rehearsals, he comes off like an outer-space alien from a planet where reproduction is asexual and he really doesn’t know how these strange human beings do it. (The debates among Michael Jackson’s biographers about whether he even had a sex life — Lisa Marie Presley says during their marriage he was perfectly normal in that department, but at least one biographer has argued Jackson never actually had sex in his life, and I remember joking during his Thriller heyday that he might in fact be a modern-day castrato, which would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a sex life and he could still sing the Jackson 5 songs in the original keys — just add to the enigma.)
Had he lived to perform them, the “This Is It” concerts would likely have been a tribute to Michael Jackson’s professionalism and determination to give his audiences his all, though it’s also possible they would have “typed” him as yet another nostalgia act, trading on past glories and not pushing himself the way he had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when he managed to mesh soul, R&B, rock and other pop-music styles like disco and funk into a sound that still dominates much of what we hear at the top of the charts today. As I’ve been writing the above I’ve broken open the back end of the Michael Jackson Collection boxed set of five of his six adult solo albums for Epic Records and listened to the last two in the box, Dangerous (1992) and Invincible (2001) — and it’s clear that the reason these aren’t as good as Off the Wall, Thriller or Bad isn’t a deficiency in the production (Michael Jackson had learned his lessons from Quincy Jones on how he should be produced and the basics of his musical style hadn’t changed — though Invincible, his final full album, had a lot more slower songs and featured his voice a lot more than some of his previous productions had, and I like it because he wasn’t ramping up the tempo and cranking out the disco beats on every song) as much as a falling-off of quality in the songs themselves. Invincible supposedly ran way over budget (the final cost was $30 million) and sold poorly (though not that poorly; Wikipedia lists its worldwide sales at 10 million and that just seemed like a major comedown because Thriller sold 65 million and Bad sold 32 million!) because by that time Michael Jackson the tabloid joke had taken over almost totally from Michael Jackson the committed artist. Michael Jackson remains, in the words Winston Churchill famously used to describe Russia, “a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” and This Is It is just another part of the riddle-mystery-enigma, though it shows that at the end Jackson, unlike quite a few other prematurely dead entertainers, was able to approach his career dispassionately, professionally and with awareness of what his job was and what he needed to do to do it.
The film Charles and I watched last night was one I’d had sitting in the backlog for a while but which I dug out because it seemed like a logical choice after we’d seen the recent Lifetime TV-movie Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland. It was Michael Jackson: This Is It, the release basically thrown together after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and consisting of rehearsal footage for the 50 comeback concerts he was scheduled to do at London’s O2 arena — and blessedly, Kenny Ortega, who was the credited director for both the concerts and the film, decided to go with a cinema verité presentation: no voice-over narration, a minimum of interview footage, mostly just straight documentary of Jackson’s rehearsals for the concerts he tragically didn’t live long enough actually to give. As I’ve commented about Michael Jackson in previous posts about him and his products, the poor man seems to have been a bundle of contradictions: “the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It seemed odd that Quincy Jones, the veteran jazz, pop and rock producer who worked with Jackson on his three greatest albums — Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987) — would describe him as a “workaholic” when he didn’t make a releasable album after Invincible (2001), eight years before his death. (About the only music he had out after Invincible was a duet single called “Hold My Hand” with someone named Akon, which was the lead-off track on the first posthumous release of “new” Michael Jackson material, Michael from 2010.) Instead Jackson spent the last eight years of his life being prosecuted for child sexual abuse and, though he was acquitted, deciding never to go back to his fabled Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara because — at least according to the script of Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland, based on a book written by two of his bodyguards — he felt it had become “contaminated by evil.” Instead he lived a peripatetic existence, staying in Bahrain for a while and then returning to the U.S. in rented “digs” and spending so much money he ultimately had to sell half of his 50 percent stake in Sony-ATV Music (the current holder of the Beatles’ copyrights) to Sony just to pay off his debts.
Apparently the message got through to him from someone in his often-shifting entourage that he couldn’t keep spending like there was no tomorrow without bringing in some income, and rather than follow a course a more normal pop star plotting a comeback would have — recording a new CD and then doing live shows in support of it — Jackson finally (reluctantly, if the portrayal of it in Searching for Neverland is correct) accepted the offer of the giant AEG Entertainment company to do a series of live shows at the newly constructed O2 Arena in London. According to the Searching for Neverland script, Jackson originally just wanted to sign for 10 shows but got talked into doing a 50-show stand, and called the concerts “This Is It” — which he announced at a press conference that made it seem like these were going to be the last live shows he would ever give. This Is It (the movie) begins with dancers from all over the world flying to Los Angeles, where Jackson was going to live and rehearse until the concerts were ready and he would fly to London for the performances, for an open audition to be part of Michael Jackson’s chorus line, and as someone who was never particularly a fan of Michael Jackson (when Thriller was at its peak I was probably one of the few regular record buyers in the U.S. who didn’t purchase it — my taste in current music in the early 1980’s ran more towards my late-1970’s British punk heroes like Elvis Costello, The Clash, Graham Parker and Nick Lowe, along with the great Australian rock bands Big Country and Men at Work that put out their first albums around then), I was astonished that these people would describe hearing his music and (especially) seeing his videos as literally life-changing experiences, so much so they were willing to fly halfway around the world for a chance to work with The Man Himself. Much of This Is It hovers in this netherworld between Michael Jackson the almost godlike apparition and Michael Jackson the lifelong (well, what else can you say about a man who made his showbiz debut at age 5 and had his first record — and first hit — at 10?) working entertainer who was making a comeback under uncertain circumstances and working with professionals who knew going in that it would be a challenge to get a great performance out of him. Indeed, on the imdb.com page for This Is It there’s a “Trivia” item that speculates that after Jackson’s death Sony had his footage digitally manipulated to cover for him — to make it look like he was in better physical shape than he actually was.
One of the big pressure points on Michael Jackson — and part, I suspect, of what ultimately did him in — was that between them, he and Madonna had so totally changed the audience expectation of what a big pop concert would be he couldn’t just show up and sing his songs the way an older singer like Frank Sinatra could. Sinatra could go on performing until nearly his 80th birthday because all his audiences expected was to hear him sing: as long as he could stand up, remember (or be telepromptered on) his songs’ lyrics and croak out a decent approximation of their melodies, they’d be satisfied and go home glowing that they’d been in the presence of a living legend. Michael Jackson’s audience would not have been happy if he’d just shown up, put a great band together and run through his old songs; they wanted to see him dance, and to see him in his late 40’s execute perfectly in one go steps he’d first done in his 20’s in music videos with the benefit of being able to retake if he screwed up. (No wonder Fred Astaire never again performed “live” as a dancer after he started making movies, though in his later years he did do a few concerts just as a singer.) And they wanted to see him dance as part of elaborate production numbers that at least reproduced the original videos and hopefully went beyond them. One of the reasons there were professional-quality cameras filming Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for This Is It, aside from documenting them for Michael’s production company and giving Ortega and his production staff a way to see what was working and what wasn’t, was that the concert was going to be studded with filmed inserts — including a bizarre pastiche of 1940’s film noir clips that was supposed to introduce Jackson’s song “Smooth Criminal” from Bad and give us the experience of watching a live Michael Jackson have an on-stage shootout with a filmed Humphrey Bogart. (I joked, “Michael Jackson in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid — who knew?” Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was Carl Reiner’s 1982 tribute/spoof to film noir in which Steve Martin and other then-modern actors were filmed in scenes to resemble film noir and their images were combined with clips from the actual 1940’s noirs.) Part of the reason the film crew was there was to make the inserts, including an elaborate graveyard montage sequence for the attempt to reproduce John Landis’s famous 14-minute video for the song “Thriller” with various performers costumed as monsters — though it’s impossible to tell from what we see, which looks about as convincing as the monsters that popped out of the wall in the old “Haunted Mansion” attraction at Disneyland, whether the final stage effect would have worked.
Indeed, the biggest single frustration about This Is It is it offers surprisingly little evidence to answer the question we have watching it, which is, “If Michael Jackson had lived long enough to give these concerts, would they have been any good?” Part of that is we’re obviously seeing just bits and pieces of what were planned as quite elaborate on-stage productions, and not only is it hard to tell just what the final numbers would have looked like, it’s also unclear how they would have related to each other in the context of a complete performance. Would these elaborate productions, many of which used digital and film technology to reproduce music videos “live,” have been genuinely entertaining, or would they — especially coming one after the other with few if any less “produced” segments to give the audience a break — have become as oppressive, overloaded and pretentious as Beyoncé’s ridiculous performances at the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards? (Beyoncé is one performer who’s really been trapped in the changed expectations of pop performers since Michael Jackson and Madonna: a singer who should be presented as a straightforward soul diva in the manner of Aretha Franklin has instead been shoehorned into these gargantuan productions both Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl would probably have thought were overdone.) Another reason we can’t tell from This Is It the movie what “This Is It” the concerts would have been like is that Michael Jackson was singing at half-voice throughout most of the rehearsals. Singers call this “marking” — using half-voice during rehearsals to save their full vocal volume and power for the actual performances — and at two points in the film Michael is very adamant that this is what he’s doing: “I’m conserving my voice,” he tells his technicians, who are getting frustrated with him because they can’t get a good idea of vocal balance and blend with him singing so deliberately softly and putting almost no emotion into the songs. (At the end of “The Way You Make Me Feel” — possibly inspired by the power and majesty of the voice of the Black woman he’s duetting with — we hear Michael Jackson sing with his full vocal and emotional power — and then he chews out his staff for having let him do that!)
Still, for all his occasional bouts with “attitude,” Michael Jackson in rehearsal for “This Is It” emerges as a consummate professional: his comments to his musicians (and he did assemble a great band, especially guitarist Orianthi Paraganis, whom he hired because she could perfectly duplicate Eddie Van Halen’s solo on the original record of “Beat It” and she was a drop-dead gorgeous woman who could play the solo while strolling across the stage in rhythm — whatever happened to her? She deserved a shot at stardom!) about the groove he wants for his song, and to the dancers and technicians about what he wants from them, are logical, sensible and workmanlike. There’s none of the out-of-it weirdness we hear from Elvis Presley on the outtakes from his last recording sessions recently issued as part of a two-CD set called Way Down in the Jungle Room; the Michael Jackson we watch and hear in This Is It is a consummate professional, clear and open about what he needs from the people he’s working with and at the same time fully recognizing their importance to him in creating a show that will make him look good. It’s hard to square this Michael Jackson with the one the media — the mainstream outlets as well as the tabloids — told us about when he died in the final stages of the This Is It rehearsals, knocked off by Propofol, the powerful anesthetic his controversial doctor, Conrad Murray, gave him so he could get some sleep during the ordeal of preparing for the concerts. That Michael Jackson — the drugged-out wreck, barely aware of his surroundings or in control of his perceptions — doesn’t seem to be anywhere in evidence in This Is It; instead we see a committed entertainer, determined to give the audience what it wants from him and still surprisingly in command of himself, his voice and his body. About his only professional slip-up is when he forgets the words to his first hit, “I Want You Back,” during a run-through of a segment paying tribute to his origins as part of the Jackson 5. At the same time we see the other side of “This Is It,” the Michael Jackson who was disgusted by the whole idea of performing again, and clearly hoping these would be his final concerts — that he’d make a ton of money doing this a few more times so his debts would be paid and he’d never have even to think about doing it again after that.
Michael Jackson remains one of the most enigmatic of major celebrities, a charismatic performer who had done it so long he’d never had a chance at a “normal” life (as I’ve written about him before, one can read the last eight years of his life as the Curious Case of Benjamin Button-style attempt of a middle-aged man at last to have the childhood he’d been denied when he actually was a child biologically, and even Jackson’s song “Childhood” — the one he said would explain him to anyone who wanted to understand him — was, not surprisingly, a lament that he’d never really had a childhood) and who’d achieved fabulous success with a series of the sorts of fantasies one would come up with if one’s whole idea of how other people lived came from movies and TV shows. As I wrote when Charles and I re-watched the original “Thriller” video on the HIStory collection just after Jackson’s death, “It also is yet more evidence that Michael Jackson lived his whole life separated from the reality of the rest of humanity — that virtually his entire understanding of human emotions of any kind came from movies, TV shows and songs — and how he never really outgrew his adolescence … the ‘Thriller’ segment is a mad mélange of images from cheesy horror films, and whereas a more sensitive, grounded artist might have created something like this as a tongue-in-cheek camp homage, for Jackson these images seem to have been a serious metaphor for terror.” A lot of Michael Jackson’s songs portray him as a normal man carrying on (or attempting to carry on) normal romantic and/or sexual relations with women, yet when we see him enact these scenarios as part of the “This Is It” rehearsals, he comes off like an outer-space alien from a planet where reproduction is asexual and he really doesn’t know how these strange human beings do it. (The debates among Michael Jackson’s biographers about whether he even had a sex life — Lisa Marie Presley says during their marriage he was perfectly normal in that department, but at least one biographer has argued Jackson never actually had sex in his life, and I remember joking during his Thriller heyday that he might in fact be a modern-day castrato, which would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a sex life and he could still sing the Jackson 5 songs in the original keys — just add to the enigma.)
Had he lived to perform them, the “This Is It” concerts would likely have been a tribute to Michael Jackson’s professionalism and determination to give his audiences his all, though it’s also possible they would have “typed” him as yet another nostalgia act, trading on past glories and not pushing himself the way he had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when he managed to mesh soul, R&B, rock and other pop-music styles like disco and funk into a sound that still dominates much of what we hear at the top of the charts today. As I’ve been writing the above I’ve broken open the back end of the Michael Jackson Collection boxed set of five of his six adult solo albums for Epic Records and listened to the last two in the box, Dangerous (1992) and Invincible (2001) — and it’s clear that the reason these aren’t as good as Off the Wall, Thriller or Bad isn’t a deficiency in the production (Michael Jackson had learned his lessons from Quincy Jones on how he should be produced and the basics of his musical style hadn’t changed — though Invincible, his final full album, had a lot more slower songs and featured his voice a lot more than some of his previous productions had, and I like it because he wasn’t ramping up the tempo and cranking out the disco beats on every song) as much as a falling-off of quality in the songs themselves. Invincible supposedly ran way over budget (the final cost was $30 million) and sold poorly (though not that poorly; Wikipedia lists its worldwide sales at 10 million and that just seemed like a major comedown because Thriller sold 65 million and Bad sold 32 million!) because by that time Michael Jackson the tabloid joke had taken over almost totally from Michael Jackson the committed artist. Michael Jackson remains, in the words Winston Churchill famously used to describe Russia, “a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” and This Is It is just another part of the riddle-mystery-enigma, though it shows that at the end Jackson, unlike quite a few other prematurely dead entertainers, was able to approach his career dispassionately, professionally and with awareness of what his job was and what he needed to do to do it.
Monday, June 5, 2017
The Perfect Soulmate (Pierre David and Tom Berry Productions, N B Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the evening’s “feature,” a Lifetime “premiere” movie called The Perfect Soulmate whose credits immediately warned me I was likely to be disappointed because both the producers (Pierre David and Tom Berry) and the directors (Curtis James Crawford and Anthony LeFresne) were frequent collaborators, including on previous “Perfect” projects, of Lifetime’s greatest writer, Christine Conradt, but la Conradt herself was not involved this time. Instead the writer was someone named John Serge, and that was doubly disappointing: not only was Conradt not involved but a man was taking her place in scribing a tale about women’s miseries and maltreatments both of men and each other. The “Perfect … ” template as Conradt and others have been working it since Conradt sold her first Lifetime script, The Perfect Nanny, in 2000, features an innocent heroine who thinks she’s found the “perfect” husband/lover/co-worker/nanny/teacher/servant/in-law/whatever until horrible things happen to her and those around her and finally she realizes that “perfect” really means “psycho.” The Perfect Soulmate suffers from the lack of the kind of dimension Conradt has brought to at least some of her villainesses; instead the title character, Lee Maxson (Cassandra Scerbo, who like most Lifetime villainesses is of medium height, dark-haired and affects a veneer of perkiness), is a pretty straightforward bad girl whose backstory is that she murdered her abusive father (we’re never told whether dad merely beat her or sexually molested her as well), though the authorities ruled it suicide, and thought she’d be able to get out of the generic small town (actually a big enough city to have at least two book publishers headquartered there) where all this takes place to New York City to pursue a career in publishing.
Instead she got trapped as the unwilling caregiver of her diabetic mother Marlene (Deborah Grover) and ended up in a sucky life in which she got to do nothing all day except work at a bookstore to make ends meet and go home to take care of mom — who asks her why she doesn’t have a boyfriend and Lee fires right back that it’s because caring for Marlene leaves her no time or energy to date. Lee takes care of Marlene when she goes into an attack and collapses on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator, and instead of getting mom something to eat Lee — in a scene suggesting that either she or John Serge has seen the 1941 film The Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis dispatched her invalid husband by refusing to get him his heart medication — instead kicks her, walks out of the house and leaves her to die. The “perfect soulmate” Lee thinks she’s found is Sarah Miles (Alex Paxton-Beesley), unhappy wife of construction-company owner Daniel Miles (Jeff Teravainen) — the more directors Crawford and LeFresne show us of his unclad chest in his opening scene, the more we’re sure that like virtually all attractive guys in Lifetime movies, he’s going to turn out to be a no-good rotter, and indeed he does. He spends virtually all his evenings away from home on so-called “business meetings” which are, of course, actually trysts with other women — the cops later pick up one of his paramours and she says, “It was my first time,” to which the laconic woman cop who’s going to solve the whole thing replies, “It certainly wasn’t his” — and when she threatens to divorce him, he announces that he’ll cut her off from his entire fortune and leave her penniless (which she doesn’t mind, or at least says she doesn’t) and that he’ll demand and get sole custody of their daughter Megan (Habree Abrys Larratt). That she decidedly does mind, and so she remains stuck in the marriage until she finally gets up the courage to see a divorce lawyer, a woman who says she’ll hire private investigators to tail Daniel and catch him cheating, which hopefully will give her the evidence she needs to break up her pre-nuptial agreement and get her a decent settlement and at least shared custody of Megan.
Only Daniel, who as a building contractor is used to working with “shady” people, makes the P.I.’s tailing him on the first night and tells Sarah that she’s got two choices — either abandon the divorce, or pursue it but at the cost of never seeing her daughter again. Then Daniel leaves for one of his evening trysts — and who should be waiting for him but Lee, who has “met” Sarah online through her poetry blog. It seems that when Sarah met Daniel she was an aspiring poet who had already brought out one book of verse with a local independent publisher, Will Lawrence (Scott Gibson) and convinced a number of people in the literary world that she was the next Sylvia Plath, even though what we hear of her poetry makes it sound like her true métier would be writing for greeting-card companies. She’s continued to publish poetry on a blog which Lee has stumbled across and decided on the basis of her poems that Sarah is the one woman who will understand her, love her and be her “perfect soulmate.” So she starts stalking Sylvia at her home, sees Daniel slap her during their argument over her seeing a divorce lawyer, and as Daniel goes out for his next tryst Lee sticks him up, shoots him with the same gun with which she killed her dad years before (Crawford and LeFresne give us a lot of close-ups of her giving loving attention to the gun so we realize it is the same weapon), and leaves him for dead. She also takes his wallet to make it look like a robbery, but does not steal his car even though she found a key for it (as well as one for his house, which will be an important plot point later) — which mystifies the woman detective put in charge of the case, Chris Collins (Gwenm Carsley —where did casting directors Aaron Griffith, Lisa Parasyn and Ilona Smyth dig up all these actors with such oddball names?), until she finds a witness to the crime, a neighbor who saw that the killer got out of a late-model sedan to commit the crime and then got back in it to escape.
Sarah (one wonders whether writer Serge deliberately named the character after the 1970’s actress who made headlines for her scandalous sexual affairs and even did a one-woman show about them, Smiles — originally called S. Miles Is Me — in which she played herself) responds to her new-found freedom from that terrible husband of hers by reconnecting with her former publisher Will (who looks at her with doe eyes that make it seem like he wants to be her next boyfriend) and committing to publish a new book of poetry, compiled from what’s been on her blog as well as new works. He’s convinced there’s still a market for Sarah Miles after Lee gets the store where she works to host a book-signing, and she attracts a surprisingly large audience. Sarah lets Lee into her home — where she repays Sarah’s kindness by sneaking rat poison into the drink bottle used by Sarah’s housekeeper Nina (Edie Inksetter), knocking Nina out for a couple of weeks so Lee can get closer not only to Sarah but to Megan, who comes to call her “Auntie Lee” and who trusts her even after mom stops doing so. The perfect-soulmate relationship between Sarah and Lee starts to cool after Sarah, who’s sought help from Lee on editing some of her poems for the new book, submits the manuscript and starts dating Will. Lee tries to get Sarah a contract with a larger publisher, Solomon House (maybe they could split the book in two and each publish half of it — joke), but Sarah insists that she’s staying with Will, who in turn wants to make sure she’s now fully committed to a career as a writer and won’t just jump ship to marry another rich guy. The movie ends exactly the way you’d expect it to: Sarah, who’s been arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband and is bailed out but under house arrest with an ankle bracelet to make sure she doesn’t leave home, sends Will out on a mission to find out Lee’s real story — while her criminal defense attorney hires a private investigator, Paul Crawford (Norman Mikael Berketa), to check out Lee’s background but the first night he’s on duty he breaks into her home, she catches him, kills him and somehow manages to drag the dead weight of his body (he’s about twice her size) into the trunk of her car and dispose of it without leaving a trace.
In the finale, Lee comes to Sarah’s home — she lets herself in with the spare key she stole from Daniel after she killed him — and tries to dispose of Will with a single shot to the head, then tries to make off with Megan (is there a rule in the guidelines for Lifetime writers that whenever the good and bad characters are both women, the bad girl must kidnap the good girl’s kid at the end?), and Sarah gets in her car and follows, knowing the signal on her GPS ankle bracelet will alert the cops, they will follow, and in a bit of deductive brilliance worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Detective Collins somehow figures out Lee, not Sarah, is the real killer and arrests her. A tag scene shows Will, alive, well and clearly on his way to becoming Sarah’s next husband and Megan’s stepfather, with Sarah in the Miles home and the natural order of domesticity restored. The Perfect Soulmate is perhaps a bit too “perfect” in its plotting, its meticulous checking off of each Lifetime cliché, but what it really suffers from is the absence of Christine Conradt as writer. Surely she could have come up with a more complex and dramatically interesting villain — especially given the weird scene about an hour and a half in during which Sarah decides to come to Lee’s place and make her dinner, drugging her dessert so she can put Lee under and search her house for the murder weapon. I was beginning to wonder if John Serge was planning a reversal in which Sarah would turn out to be involved with her husband’s murder after all; she had hired Lee to do it with the promise of future payment from Daniel’s estate and now wanted to eliminate her increasingly inconvenient co-conspirator. That underscores another problem with The Perfect Soulmate: the leading characters are all pretty much unlikable. About the only person who comes off as sympathetic in this story is Jay (Asha Talbert), Lee’s African-American co-worker at the bookstore, who at first thinks Lee and Sarah are Lesbian lovers and makes it clear she wants to see Lee get her ashes hauled, and whether it’s by a man or a woman makes no difference to her!
I watched the evening’s “feature,” a Lifetime “premiere” movie called The Perfect Soulmate whose credits immediately warned me I was likely to be disappointed because both the producers (Pierre David and Tom Berry) and the directors (Curtis James Crawford and Anthony LeFresne) were frequent collaborators, including on previous “Perfect” projects, of Lifetime’s greatest writer, Christine Conradt, but la Conradt herself was not involved this time. Instead the writer was someone named John Serge, and that was doubly disappointing: not only was Conradt not involved but a man was taking her place in scribing a tale about women’s miseries and maltreatments both of men and each other. The “Perfect … ” template as Conradt and others have been working it since Conradt sold her first Lifetime script, The Perfect Nanny, in 2000, features an innocent heroine who thinks she’s found the “perfect” husband/lover/co-worker/nanny/teacher/servant/in-law/whatever until horrible things happen to her and those around her and finally she realizes that “perfect” really means “psycho.” The Perfect Soulmate suffers from the lack of the kind of dimension Conradt has brought to at least some of her villainesses; instead the title character, Lee Maxson (Cassandra Scerbo, who like most Lifetime villainesses is of medium height, dark-haired and affects a veneer of perkiness), is a pretty straightforward bad girl whose backstory is that she murdered her abusive father (we’re never told whether dad merely beat her or sexually molested her as well), though the authorities ruled it suicide, and thought she’d be able to get out of the generic small town (actually a big enough city to have at least two book publishers headquartered there) where all this takes place to New York City to pursue a career in publishing.
Instead she got trapped as the unwilling caregiver of her diabetic mother Marlene (Deborah Grover) and ended up in a sucky life in which she got to do nothing all day except work at a bookstore to make ends meet and go home to take care of mom — who asks her why she doesn’t have a boyfriend and Lee fires right back that it’s because caring for Marlene leaves her no time or energy to date. Lee takes care of Marlene when she goes into an attack and collapses on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator, and instead of getting mom something to eat Lee — in a scene suggesting that either she or John Serge has seen the 1941 film The Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis dispatched her invalid husband by refusing to get him his heart medication — instead kicks her, walks out of the house and leaves her to die. The “perfect soulmate” Lee thinks she’s found is Sarah Miles (Alex Paxton-Beesley), unhappy wife of construction-company owner Daniel Miles (Jeff Teravainen) — the more directors Crawford and LeFresne show us of his unclad chest in his opening scene, the more we’re sure that like virtually all attractive guys in Lifetime movies, he’s going to turn out to be a no-good rotter, and indeed he does. He spends virtually all his evenings away from home on so-called “business meetings” which are, of course, actually trysts with other women — the cops later pick up one of his paramours and she says, “It was my first time,” to which the laconic woman cop who’s going to solve the whole thing replies, “It certainly wasn’t his” — and when she threatens to divorce him, he announces that he’ll cut her off from his entire fortune and leave her penniless (which she doesn’t mind, or at least says she doesn’t) and that he’ll demand and get sole custody of their daughter Megan (Habree Abrys Larratt). That she decidedly does mind, and so she remains stuck in the marriage until she finally gets up the courage to see a divorce lawyer, a woman who says she’ll hire private investigators to tail Daniel and catch him cheating, which hopefully will give her the evidence she needs to break up her pre-nuptial agreement and get her a decent settlement and at least shared custody of Megan.
Only Daniel, who as a building contractor is used to working with “shady” people, makes the P.I.’s tailing him on the first night and tells Sarah that she’s got two choices — either abandon the divorce, or pursue it but at the cost of never seeing her daughter again. Then Daniel leaves for one of his evening trysts — and who should be waiting for him but Lee, who has “met” Sarah online through her poetry blog. It seems that when Sarah met Daniel she was an aspiring poet who had already brought out one book of verse with a local independent publisher, Will Lawrence (Scott Gibson) and convinced a number of people in the literary world that she was the next Sylvia Plath, even though what we hear of her poetry makes it sound like her true métier would be writing for greeting-card companies. She’s continued to publish poetry on a blog which Lee has stumbled across and decided on the basis of her poems that Sarah is the one woman who will understand her, love her and be her “perfect soulmate.” So she starts stalking Sylvia at her home, sees Daniel slap her during their argument over her seeing a divorce lawyer, and as Daniel goes out for his next tryst Lee sticks him up, shoots him with the same gun with which she killed her dad years before (Crawford and LeFresne give us a lot of close-ups of her giving loving attention to the gun so we realize it is the same weapon), and leaves him for dead. She also takes his wallet to make it look like a robbery, but does not steal his car even though she found a key for it (as well as one for his house, which will be an important plot point later) — which mystifies the woman detective put in charge of the case, Chris Collins (Gwenm Carsley —where did casting directors Aaron Griffith, Lisa Parasyn and Ilona Smyth dig up all these actors with such oddball names?), until she finds a witness to the crime, a neighbor who saw that the killer got out of a late-model sedan to commit the crime and then got back in it to escape.
Sarah (one wonders whether writer Serge deliberately named the character after the 1970’s actress who made headlines for her scandalous sexual affairs and even did a one-woman show about them, Smiles — originally called S. Miles Is Me — in which she played herself) responds to her new-found freedom from that terrible husband of hers by reconnecting with her former publisher Will (who looks at her with doe eyes that make it seem like he wants to be her next boyfriend) and committing to publish a new book of poetry, compiled from what’s been on her blog as well as new works. He’s convinced there’s still a market for Sarah Miles after Lee gets the store where she works to host a book-signing, and she attracts a surprisingly large audience. Sarah lets Lee into her home — where she repays Sarah’s kindness by sneaking rat poison into the drink bottle used by Sarah’s housekeeper Nina (Edie Inksetter), knocking Nina out for a couple of weeks so Lee can get closer not only to Sarah but to Megan, who comes to call her “Auntie Lee” and who trusts her even after mom stops doing so. The perfect-soulmate relationship between Sarah and Lee starts to cool after Sarah, who’s sought help from Lee on editing some of her poems for the new book, submits the manuscript and starts dating Will. Lee tries to get Sarah a contract with a larger publisher, Solomon House (maybe they could split the book in two and each publish half of it — joke), but Sarah insists that she’s staying with Will, who in turn wants to make sure she’s now fully committed to a career as a writer and won’t just jump ship to marry another rich guy. The movie ends exactly the way you’d expect it to: Sarah, who’s been arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband and is bailed out but under house arrest with an ankle bracelet to make sure she doesn’t leave home, sends Will out on a mission to find out Lee’s real story — while her criminal defense attorney hires a private investigator, Paul Crawford (Norman Mikael Berketa), to check out Lee’s background but the first night he’s on duty he breaks into her home, she catches him, kills him and somehow manages to drag the dead weight of his body (he’s about twice her size) into the trunk of her car and dispose of it without leaving a trace.
In the finale, Lee comes to Sarah’s home — she lets herself in with the spare key she stole from Daniel after she killed him — and tries to dispose of Will with a single shot to the head, then tries to make off with Megan (is there a rule in the guidelines for Lifetime writers that whenever the good and bad characters are both women, the bad girl must kidnap the good girl’s kid at the end?), and Sarah gets in her car and follows, knowing the signal on her GPS ankle bracelet will alert the cops, they will follow, and in a bit of deductive brilliance worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Detective Collins somehow figures out Lee, not Sarah, is the real killer and arrests her. A tag scene shows Will, alive, well and clearly on his way to becoming Sarah’s next husband and Megan’s stepfather, with Sarah in the Miles home and the natural order of domesticity restored. The Perfect Soulmate is perhaps a bit too “perfect” in its plotting, its meticulous checking off of each Lifetime cliché, but what it really suffers from is the absence of Christine Conradt as writer. Surely she could have come up with a more complex and dramatically interesting villain — especially given the weird scene about an hour and a half in during which Sarah decides to come to Lee’s place and make her dinner, drugging her dessert so she can put Lee under and search her house for the murder weapon. I was beginning to wonder if John Serge was planning a reversal in which Sarah would turn out to be involved with her husband’s murder after all; she had hired Lee to do it with the promise of future payment from Daniel’s estate and now wanted to eliminate her increasingly inconvenient co-conspirator. That underscores another problem with The Perfect Soulmate: the leading characters are all pretty much unlikable. About the only person who comes off as sympathetic in this story is Jay (Asha Talbert), Lee’s African-American co-worker at the bookstore, who at first thinks Lee and Sarah are Lesbian lovers and makes it clear she wants to see Lee get her ashes hauled, and whether it’s by a man or a woman makes no difference to her!
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution with Howard Goodall (Huge Fllms/PBS, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Los Angeles Times announced that their local PBS station (not the one in L.A., which left the network, but one in Orange County) would be showing yet another documentary on the making of the Beatles’ classic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band followed by a blues program featuring singer-guitarist Joe Bonamossa (whom I quite like, even though his whole career seems to have been a deliberate attempt to fill the void in the white blues singer-guitarist virtuoso niche left vacant by the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990), but instead our local station, KPBS, showed the Sgt. Pepper documentary and then a remastered version of a 30-year-old music special, Roy Orbison: A Black & White Night. The Beatles’ documentary had the full title (according to imdb.com) Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution with Howard Goodall, Howard Goodall (any relation to Jane?) having been the host. Goodall also showed up in certain sequences with an electric keyboard and actually sang bits of the Sgt. Pepper songs to illustrate the differences between the final versions and how the Beatles either did sing them earlier on the alternate takes or might have sung them if they’d been willing to settle for the artistic “easy outs” available to them instead of pushing themselves in fresh new directions. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Beatles’ career in general and Sgt. Pepper in particular is how far out the Beatles went in pushing themselves artistically; where most pop groups, then and since, looked for a salable sound and then stuck to it once they found one, the Beatles kept making radical changes and essentially daring their audience to follow them.
Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution begins with the last formal concert the Beatles ever played as a live band — in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966 — and the disgust with which the Beatles greeted the entire insanity of touring. There’s a clip from a November 1966 interview with Paul McCartney in which he complained that they couldn’t hear each other, the audience couldn’t hear them because they were screaming too loudly (in a later interview Paul said it was like trying to perform a rock concert on an airport runway with a jet airliner just behind you readying its engines for takeoff) and the whole strain of doing concert tours was setting them back creatively and keeping them from doing what they really wanted to do by then, which was make great records whether or not the sounds on them could be duplicated in live performance. The break had actually happened on the Beatles’ album immediately preceding Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, which generated one of their biggest hit singles (“Yellow Submarine” b/w “Eleanor Rigby”) but for the most part consisted of wildly experimental songs that anticipated much of Pepper, including one of George Harrison’s exercises in raga-rock (“Love You To”), experiments in mind-bending sound effects (John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping” and “She Said She Said” — for the latter Lennon actually asked if he could be hoisted to the ceiling of EMI’s Abbey Road studios and swung around to get the “phased” effect he wanted on his vocal; fortunately engineer Geoff Emerick thought of a less potentially lethal way to get the effect Lennon wanted; he ran the vocal through a Leslie organ speaker and miked the speaker, whose rotating horns created an artificial vibrato and “faded” the vocal in and out the way Lennon desired) and an awesome final track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for which Lennon wanted a Gregorian-chant effect of a chorus of monks but which was created electronically instead.
As I’ve said before in previous posts about the Beatles, one of the great things about their career that enabled them to accomplish so much is that they did not fall into the hands of conventional managers and producers who would have steered them into the commercially reproducible formulae: their manager, Brian Epstein, and their producer, George Martin, had both come from the world of classical music, and Martin had additionally recorded comedy albums with groups like the Goon Squad (a popular BBC radio program featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe), Flanders and Swann and Beyond the Fringe, antecedents of Monty Python, whose records required elaborate sound effects and manipulations most producers recording pop singers didn’t know how to do and wouldn’t have cared about anyway. Of course, some of the Beatles’ techniques had been used on pop records in the 1940’s and even more in the 1950’s, as the development of tape recording made it possible to record different parts of a record at different times — if your singer was having a bad day vocally, as Frank Sinatra was when he came into the Columbia studio in 1950 to record the album Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, you could just turn off the vocal mike, get good backing tracks from the orchestra, and call him in to add his vocals when his voice was in better condition. Also one of the basic recording tricks that subsequently became nearly universal was double-tracking, which had been done as early as 1941 by jazz musician Sidney Bechet but first reached the general record-buying public with the records of Les Paul and Mary Ford in 1950 (he played guitar, she sang, and they put out records that sounded like they had multiple guitarists and singers — only it was just them, recording themselves over and over and sometimes altering the speed of the recording so you could hear them singing and playing twice as fast as they actually were) and then with the double-tracked vocals of Patti Page on a lot of her 1950’s sides for Mercury Records.
When the Beatles first started recording for George Martin at EMI’s smallest and least prestigious label, Parlophone, in 1962 EMI’s best equipment was a two-track tape recorder, which allowed Martin to record the Beatles’ vocals on one track and their instrumental parts on the other. By 1967 EMI had upgraded to four tracks, which were then mixed down to a two-track recording for a stereo record release, and in creating the orchestral phantasmagoria of Sgt. Pepper the Beatles and Martin did the only thing they could: record four tracks, mix them down to one or two, then copy (“bounce”) them to one or two tracks of another four-track machine and add additional parts, including extra vocals and instruments played by the Beatles, parts played by studio musicians to add horns, strings or other instruments the Beatles themselves could not play, and special effects. Instead of attempting to crowd the entire making of Sgt. Pepper into one hour of documentary film, Howard Goodall chose to emphasize seven particular songs, five of which were on Sgt. Pepper itself (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Within You Without You” and “A Day in the Life”) and two which weren’t but were integral to the overall Sgt. Pepper project even though the Beatles and Brian Epstein pulled them off the album at an early stage so they could have a single ready for release in February 1967: “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” Indeed, the entire Sgt. Pepper project was first conceived as a concept album about the Beatles’ childhoods in Liverpool; Strawberry Field (singular) was an outdoor children’s park maintained by the Salvation Army and Penny Lane was a street in Liverpool which contained a “roundabout,” essentially a circular traffic island where a number of Liverpool’s bus lines stopped, so you could transfer from one to another — as the Beatles often did when they were making their way around Liverpool as kids.
Goodall tried to present the information in his show as if it had never been published before, but most of the basic stories have been known since George Martin published his autobiography All You Need Is Ears (a valuable book not only for his accounts of working with the Beatles but his in-depth reports on the comedy records he’d made earlier and their importance in teaching him how to do unusual sound effects on records that stood him in good stead when the Beatles became more experimental) in 1979, and most of the film clips from the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions have been in circulation at least since 1995, when the surviving Beatles collaborated on a documentary project called The Beatles’ Anthology that included a three-part TV series as well as three two-CD boxed sets containing alternative takes of Beatles’ songs as well as a few previously unissued tracks (like their lovely early Buddy Holly pastiche, “I’ll Be On My Way,” and a slower, funkier and better version of their early song “The One After 909” than the one we eventually got on the last released Beatles’ album, Let It Be). What’s most missing from Goodall’s run-through of Sgt. Pepper is the historical context and in particular what other rock artists were doing when it was made; when the Beatles started Sgt. Pepper a number of the San Francisco “psychedelic” bands had already recorded — the Jefferson Airplane had put out their second album, Surrealistic Pillow (their first with Grace Slick as their female singer and their commercial breakthrough that included the hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”) and the Grateful Dead had put out their first — and recording historian Roland Gelatt suggested in the revision of his book The Fabulous Phonograph that the Beatles were feeling the hot breath of American competition behind them and wanted to make an album that would catch up with and surpass what their rival U.S. bands were doing. There was another American band that the Beatles themselves regarded as rivals: the Beach Boys, who had put out their Pet Sounds album in 1966. Paul McCartney instantly proclaimed Pet Sounds as the greatest rock album yet made and demanded that the Beatles produce something that would surpass it.
The “concept album” — an LP that would contain not just a loosely connected group of songs but would express a story or theme that would unfold continuously from beginning to end — had been around since 1955, when Frank Sinatra had responded to the breakup of his marriage to Ava Gardner by recording a whole set of songs about lost love and heartbreak, In the Wee Small Hours, meticulously picking the songs and working with his arranger, Nelson Riddle, to sustain the bittersweet mood throughout the disc. With Pet Sounds, Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson set out to make the first rock concept album — a story of a relationship from its ecstatic opening (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”) to the more mature emotions of “God Only Knows” and the final heartbreak of “Caroline, No.” The Beach Boys suffered from Brian Wilson’s mental breakdown (which I’ve long suspected at least in part because of the huge creative burden he was carrying: he was both the principal songwriter and the record producer for his band, while the Beatles had three people to do those jobs: John Lennon and Paul McCartney as songwriters and George Martin as producer) and their eventual retreat to a sun ’n’ fun nostalgia presentation based on their earliest and least ground-breaking songs, but at the time a lot of fans, not only in the U.S. but in the U.K. (where in the late 1960’s the Beach Boys’ records were consistently charting higher than they were in the States!), regarded the Beach Boys as serious artistic rivals to the Beatles. Their first attempt to outdo Pet Sounds was Revolver, which as mentioned above anticipated Sgt. Pepper in its sonic experimentation and use of both studio musicians and alternative instruments to extend the Beatles’ sound past its rock roots — and it’s indicative of how the Beatles felt playing live was holding them back artistically that though Revolver had already been released when they did their final tour, they played nothing from it in their tour sets. (Today it would be unheard of for a hot rock or pop act not to promote their current album on their tour.)
Brian Wilson heard Revolver and was as determined to top it as Paul McCartney has been determined to top Pet Sounds, and the result was the ill-fated Smile project which overlapped the creation of Sgt. Pepper and which Wilson abruptly abandoned when he heard a tape of the final track on Sgt. Pepper, “A Day in the Life,” before its official release (Paul had visited him in California and brought the tape as a sort of friendly “Here’s what we’re doing” gesture), and Brian was flabbergasted that the Beatles had already created the ultimate rock album and even if he finished Smile it would be seen as merely “the Beach Boys’ Sgt. Pepper” instead of the new and unique breakthrough he was hoping for. Meanwhile, Sgt. Pepper evolved into a semi-concept album drawing on various influences, including the original inspiration in the Beatles’ Liverpool childhoods as well as even earlier forms of entertainment (the entire song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” was based on a poster for a circus performance John Lennon had picked up in an antique store — the performance it advertised had taken place in 1843 — and that wasn’t the only song John wrote for Sgt. Pepper that was based on an ad: “Good Morning, Good Morning” was based on the famous Kellogg’s Corn Flakes commercial), the generation gap embodied in the song “She’s Leaving Home” (in which, as Goodall points out, the Beatles include not only the yearnings of the runaway girl but the heartbreak of her parents), the East Indian influence on George Harrison that produced “Within You Without You” (which sounds like a Harrison vocal grafted on to a raga performance but is really, as Goodall shows, a fusion of East and West; he even brought along an Indian singer to show how an Indian would have ornamented the vocal line George sings “straight,” and he seems to spend forever on melismatic extensions of the word “talking”) and the final triumph of “A Day in the Life,” fused together from song fragments by John (the chorus) and Paul (the release) and built into an impressive soundscape.
One of the best moments in All You Need Is Ears is George Martin’s recollection of how the famous orchestral glissando heard twice in “A Day in the Life,” once at the transition point between John’s and Paul’s portions and again at the end, was created: he wrote a score for a 40-piece orchestra that began with the lowest note that could be played on each instrument, ended with the highest and instructed the musicians gradually to go from the lowest to the highest, and to break the most sacred rule of orchestral playing: they were not to listen to each other as they performed the score. Goodall compares it to the chance-based “aleatoric” music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen (though Cage, who said he wanted to create entirely new forms of music that would not be determined by the composer, rejected the term “aleatoric” for his music because he thought he’d gone beyond that, just as Jackson Pollock didn’t like being called an abstract painter because he thought his work had gone beyond abstraction), an artistic horizon John Lennon had been introduced to by Yoko Ono (whom he’d already started to see in 1966 even though they kept their relationship secret until 1968), who also turned him on to musique concréte, a pioneering style of recording ordinary sounds on tape, manipulating and splicing them to create entirely artificial performances, that was created by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in 1948 and is essentially the basis of all “sampling” today. (The Beatles did all-out musique concréte in 1968 with “Revolution #9” on the “White Album.”)
Though hampered by Goodall’s narration and in particular his annoying pretense of presenting new information when he’s really pretty much rehashing what the late George Martin had been saying about Sgt. Pepper for decades, Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution is a serviceable documentary on an extraordinary work of phonographic history, which despite its antecedents did serve to break the rock world from the formula of the three-minute single song and lead bands to seek to create entire albums in which the songs would relate to each other and form a continuous work of art. It was also, more than any other, the album that asserted once and for all that rock ’n’ roll music was art, and it deserved to be taken as seriously as any other musical form. It’s fascinating that not only does Sgt. Pepper hold up as an album today, it and the Beatles’ other recordings are still making new fans and passing the test of time. The show was presented as part of a commemoration of Sgt. Pepper on the 50th anniversary of its initial release (June 1, 1967) that includes no fewer than three CD packages — a bare-bones single disc, a two-disc set with a second disc of alternates and unreleased material, and a big box with a six-CD set, a remastered DVD of The Beatles’ #1’s documentary, a hardback book and other goodies. The new presentation is based on a new stereo mix of the album created by George Martin’s son Giles, which has caused a certain degree of controversy — the “official” reason from Universal Music (who absorbed EMI’s pop catalog, while rival Warner Music got their classical recordings, in a corporate consolidation that reduced the number of the world’s major record companies from four to three) and what’s left of the Beatles’ organization was because the mono mix was the one the Beatles and George Martin worked on for a month and a half after the sessions were completed, while the original stereo release was thrown together by the engineers in about a day and a half without either the Beatles’ or George Martin’s direct involvement, just to have a stereo version for the U.S. market (where stereo had made a much bigger market penetration than it had in Britain). But there’ve been some kvetchy letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times and other outlets wondering why Giles Martin and the current owners of Universal Music have dared monkey with a masterpiece!
The Los Angeles Times announced that their local PBS station (not the one in L.A., which left the network, but one in Orange County) would be showing yet another documentary on the making of the Beatles’ classic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band followed by a blues program featuring singer-guitarist Joe Bonamossa (whom I quite like, even though his whole career seems to have been a deliberate attempt to fill the void in the white blues singer-guitarist virtuoso niche left vacant by the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990), but instead our local station, KPBS, showed the Sgt. Pepper documentary and then a remastered version of a 30-year-old music special, Roy Orbison: A Black & White Night. The Beatles’ documentary had the full title (according to imdb.com) Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution with Howard Goodall, Howard Goodall (any relation to Jane?) having been the host. Goodall also showed up in certain sequences with an electric keyboard and actually sang bits of the Sgt. Pepper songs to illustrate the differences between the final versions and how the Beatles either did sing them earlier on the alternate takes or might have sung them if they’d been willing to settle for the artistic “easy outs” available to them instead of pushing themselves in fresh new directions. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Beatles’ career in general and Sgt. Pepper in particular is how far out the Beatles went in pushing themselves artistically; where most pop groups, then and since, looked for a salable sound and then stuck to it once they found one, the Beatles kept making radical changes and essentially daring their audience to follow them.
Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution begins with the last formal concert the Beatles ever played as a live band — in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966 — and the disgust with which the Beatles greeted the entire insanity of touring. There’s a clip from a November 1966 interview with Paul McCartney in which he complained that they couldn’t hear each other, the audience couldn’t hear them because they were screaming too loudly (in a later interview Paul said it was like trying to perform a rock concert on an airport runway with a jet airliner just behind you readying its engines for takeoff) and the whole strain of doing concert tours was setting them back creatively and keeping them from doing what they really wanted to do by then, which was make great records whether or not the sounds on them could be duplicated in live performance. The break had actually happened on the Beatles’ album immediately preceding Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, which generated one of their biggest hit singles (“Yellow Submarine” b/w “Eleanor Rigby”) but for the most part consisted of wildly experimental songs that anticipated much of Pepper, including one of George Harrison’s exercises in raga-rock (“Love You To”), experiments in mind-bending sound effects (John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping” and “She Said She Said” — for the latter Lennon actually asked if he could be hoisted to the ceiling of EMI’s Abbey Road studios and swung around to get the “phased” effect he wanted on his vocal; fortunately engineer Geoff Emerick thought of a less potentially lethal way to get the effect Lennon wanted; he ran the vocal through a Leslie organ speaker and miked the speaker, whose rotating horns created an artificial vibrato and “faded” the vocal in and out the way Lennon desired) and an awesome final track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for which Lennon wanted a Gregorian-chant effect of a chorus of monks but which was created electronically instead.
As I’ve said before in previous posts about the Beatles, one of the great things about their career that enabled them to accomplish so much is that they did not fall into the hands of conventional managers and producers who would have steered them into the commercially reproducible formulae: their manager, Brian Epstein, and their producer, George Martin, had both come from the world of classical music, and Martin had additionally recorded comedy albums with groups like the Goon Squad (a popular BBC radio program featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe), Flanders and Swann and Beyond the Fringe, antecedents of Monty Python, whose records required elaborate sound effects and manipulations most producers recording pop singers didn’t know how to do and wouldn’t have cared about anyway. Of course, some of the Beatles’ techniques had been used on pop records in the 1940’s and even more in the 1950’s, as the development of tape recording made it possible to record different parts of a record at different times — if your singer was having a bad day vocally, as Frank Sinatra was when he came into the Columbia studio in 1950 to record the album Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, you could just turn off the vocal mike, get good backing tracks from the orchestra, and call him in to add his vocals when his voice was in better condition. Also one of the basic recording tricks that subsequently became nearly universal was double-tracking, which had been done as early as 1941 by jazz musician Sidney Bechet but first reached the general record-buying public with the records of Les Paul and Mary Ford in 1950 (he played guitar, she sang, and they put out records that sounded like they had multiple guitarists and singers — only it was just them, recording themselves over and over and sometimes altering the speed of the recording so you could hear them singing and playing twice as fast as they actually were) and then with the double-tracked vocals of Patti Page on a lot of her 1950’s sides for Mercury Records.
When the Beatles first started recording for George Martin at EMI’s smallest and least prestigious label, Parlophone, in 1962 EMI’s best equipment was a two-track tape recorder, which allowed Martin to record the Beatles’ vocals on one track and their instrumental parts on the other. By 1967 EMI had upgraded to four tracks, which were then mixed down to a two-track recording for a stereo record release, and in creating the orchestral phantasmagoria of Sgt. Pepper the Beatles and Martin did the only thing they could: record four tracks, mix them down to one or two, then copy (“bounce”) them to one or two tracks of another four-track machine and add additional parts, including extra vocals and instruments played by the Beatles, parts played by studio musicians to add horns, strings or other instruments the Beatles themselves could not play, and special effects. Instead of attempting to crowd the entire making of Sgt. Pepper into one hour of documentary film, Howard Goodall chose to emphasize seven particular songs, five of which were on Sgt. Pepper itself (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Within You Without You” and “A Day in the Life”) and two which weren’t but were integral to the overall Sgt. Pepper project even though the Beatles and Brian Epstein pulled them off the album at an early stage so they could have a single ready for release in February 1967: “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” Indeed, the entire Sgt. Pepper project was first conceived as a concept album about the Beatles’ childhoods in Liverpool; Strawberry Field (singular) was an outdoor children’s park maintained by the Salvation Army and Penny Lane was a street in Liverpool which contained a “roundabout,” essentially a circular traffic island where a number of Liverpool’s bus lines stopped, so you could transfer from one to another — as the Beatles often did when they were making their way around Liverpool as kids.
Goodall tried to present the information in his show as if it had never been published before, but most of the basic stories have been known since George Martin published his autobiography All You Need Is Ears (a valuable book not only for his accounts of working with the Beatles but his in-depth reports on the comedy records he’d made earlier and their importance in teaching him how to do unusual sound effects on records that stood him in good stead when the Beatles became more experimental) in 1979, and most of the film clips from the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions have been in circulation at least since 1995, when the surviving Beatles collaborated on a documentary project called The Beatles’ Anthology that included a three-part TV series as well as three two-CD boxed sets containing alternative takes of Beatles’ songs as well as a few previously unissued tracks (like their lovely early Buddy Holly pastiche, “I’ll Be On My Way,” and a slower, funkier and better version of their early song “The One After 909” than the one we eventually got on the last released Beatles’ album, Let It Be). What’s most missing from Goodall’s run-through of Sgt. Pepper is the historical context and in particular what other rock artists were doing when it was made; when the Beatles started Sgt. Pepper a number of the San Francisco “psychedelic” bands had already recorded — the Jefferson Airplane had put out their second album, Surrealistic Pillow (their first with Grace Slick as their female singer and their commercial breakthrough that included the hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”) and the Grateful Dead had put out their first — and recording historian Roland Gelatt suggested in the revision of his book The Fabulous Phonograph that the Beatles were feeling the hot breath of American competition behind them and wanted to make an album that would catch up with and surpass what their rival U.S. bands were doing. There was another American band that the Beatles themselves regarded as rivals: the Beach Boys, who had put out their Pet Sounds album in 1966. Paul McCartney instantly proclaimed Pet Sounds as the greatest rock album yet made and demanded that the Beatles produce something that would surpass it.
The “concept album” — an LP that would contain not just a loosely connected group of songs but would express a story or theme that would unfold continuously from beginning to end — had been around since 1955, when Frank Sinatra had responded to the breakup of his marriage to Ava Gardner by recording a whole set of songs about lost love and heartbreak, In the Wee Small Hours, meticulously picking the songs and working with his arranger, Nelson Riddle, to sustain the bittersweet mood throughout the disc. With Pet Sounds, Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson set out to make the first rock concept album — a story of a relationship from its ecstatic opening (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”) to the more mature emotions of “God Only Knows” and the final heartbreak of “Caroline, No.” The Beach Boys suffered from Brian Wilson’s mental breakdown (which I’ve long suspected at least in part because of the huge creative burden he was carrying: he was both the principal songwriter and the record producer for his band, while the Beatles had three people to do those jobs: John Lennon and Paul McCartney as songwriters and George Martin as producer) and their eventual retreat to a sun ’n’ fun nostalgia presentation based on their earliest and least ground-breaking songs, but at the time a lot of fans, not only in the U.S. but in the U.K. (where in the late 1960’s the Beach Boys’ records were consistently charting higher than they were in the States!), regarded the Beach Boys as serious artistic rivals to the Beatles. Their first attempt to outdo Pet Sounds was Revolver, which as mentioned above anticipated Sgt. Pepper in its sonic experimentation and use of both studio musicians and alternative instruments to extend the Beatles’ sound past its rock roots — and it’s indicative of how the Beatles felt playing live was holding them back artistically that though Revolver had already been released when they did their final tour, they played nothing from it in their tour sets. (Today it would be unheard of for a hot rock or pop act not to promote their current album on their tour.)
Brian Wilson heard Revolver and was as determined to top it as Paul McCartney has been determined to top Pet Sounds, and the result was the ill-fated Smile project which overlapped the creation of Sgt. Pepper and which Wilson abruptly abandoned when he heard a tape of the final track on Sgt. Pepper, “A Day in the Life,” before its official release (Paul had visited him in California and brought the tape as a sort of friendly “Here’s what we’re doing” gesture), and Brian was flabbergasted that the Beatles had already created the ultimate rock album and even if he finished Smile it would be seen as merely “the Beach Boys’ Sgt. Pepper” instead of the new and unique breakthrough he was hoping for. Meanwhile, Sgt. Pepper evolved into a semi-concept album drawing on various influences, including the original inspiration in the Beatles’ Liverpool childhoods as well as even earlier forms of entertainment (the entire song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” was based on a poster for a circus performance John Lennon had picked up in an antique store — the performance it advertised had taken place in 1843 — and that wasn’t the only song John wrote for Sgt. Pepper that was based on an ad: “Good Morning, Good Morning” was based on the famous Kellogg’s Corn Flakes commercial), the generation gap embodied in the song “She’s Leaving Home” (in which, as Goodall points out, the Beatles include not only the yearnings of the runaway girl but the heartbreak of her parents), the East Indian influence on George Harrison that produced “Within You Without You” (which sounds like a Harrison vocal grafted on to a raga performance but is really, as Goodall shows, a fusion of East and West; he even brought along an Indian singer to show how an Indian would have ornamented the vocal line George sings “straight,” and he seems to spend forever on melismatic extensions of the word “talking”) and the final triumph of “A Day in the Life,” fused together from song fragments by John (the chorus) and Paul (the release) and built into an impressive soundscape.
One of the best moments in All You Need Is Ears is George Martin’s recollection of how the famous orchestral glissando heard twice in “A Day in the Life,” once at the transition point between John’s and Paul’s portions and again at the end, was created: he wrote a score for a 40-piece orchestra that began with the lowest note that could be played on each instrument, ended with the highest and instructed the musicians gradually to go from the lowest to the highest, and to break the most sacred rule of orchestral playing: they were not to listen to each other as they performed the score. Goodall compares it to the chance-based “aleatoric” music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen (though Cage, who said he wanted to create entirely new forms of music that would not be determined by the composer, rejected the term “aleatoric” for his music because he thought he’d gone beyond that, just as Jackson Pollock didn’t like being called an abstract painter because he thought his work had gone beyond abstraction), an artistic horizon John Lennon had been introduced to by Yoko Ono (whom he’d already started to see in 1966 even though they kept their relationship secret until 1968), who also turned him on to musique concréte, a pioneering style of recording ordinary sounds on tape, manipulating and splicing them to create entirely artificial performances, that was created by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in 1948 and is essentially the basis of all “sampling” today. (The Beatles did all-out musique concréte in 1968 with “Revolution #9” on the “White Album.”)
Though hampered by Goodall’s narration and in particular his annoying pretense of presenting new information when he’s really pretty much rehashing what the late George Martin had been saying about Sgt. Pepper for decades, Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution is a serviceable documentary on an extraordinary work of phonographic history, which despite its antecedents did serve to break the rock world from the formula of the three-minute single song and lead bands to seek to create entire albums in which the songs would relate to each other and form a continuous work of art. It was also, more than any other, the album that asserted once and for all that rock ’n’ roll music was art, and it deserved to be taken as seriously as any other musical form. It’s fascinating that not only does Sgt. Pepper hold up as an album today, it and the Beatles’ other recordings are still making new fans and passing the test of time. The show was presented as part of a commemoration of Sgt. Pepper on the 50th anniversary of its initial release (June 1, 1967) that includes no fewer than three CD packages — a bare-bones single disc, a two-disc set with a second disc of alternates and unreleased material, and a big box with a six-CD set, a remastered DVD of The Beatles’ #1’s documentary, a hardback book and other goodies. The new presentation is based on a new stereo mix of the album created by George Martin’s son Giles, which has caused a certain degree of controversy — the “official” reason from Universal Music (who absorbed EMI’s pop catalog, while rival Warner Music got their classical recordings, in a corporate consolidation that reduced the number of the world’s major record companies from four to three) and what’s left of the Beatles’ organization was because the mono mix was the one the Beatles and George Martin worked on for a month and a half after the sessions were completed, while the original stereo release was thrown together by the engineers in about a day and a half without either the Beatles’ or George Martin’s direct involvement, just to have a stereo version for the U.S. market (where stereo had made a much bigger market penetration than it had in Britain). But there’ve been some kvetchy letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times and other outlets wondering why Giles Martin and the current owners of Universal Music have dared monkey with a masterpiece!
Roy Orbison: A Black & White Night (Stephanie Bennett, Barbara Orbison, Albert Spevak, Virgin Records, PBS, 1987_
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution KPBS showed something called A Black & White Night 30, which I briefly thought was going to be an entirely new program paying tribute to Roy Orbison by reuniting some of the guest stars that joined him for the original A Black & White Night program in 1987 — Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, k. d. lang, T Bone Burnett and others — in new performances of his songs. Surprise: it was actually simply a rerun of the original A Black & White Night, with Orbison in surprisingly good vocal form in songs he’d first recorded nearly three decades earlier (though, alas, he did not still have the vocal chops to sing that awesomely beautiful falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” — Linda Ronstadt duplicated that on her 1970’s cover but it’s nowhere nearly as much a surprise to hear a woman go that high than a man) and with the other stars placed well back of the mix because the business of the evening was to allow Roy Orbison to present his songs directly instead of to shoehorn him into a series of slapdash “duets” with later artists. Roy Orbison had one of the weirdest career trajectories of just about anyone with a reputation as a rock ’n’ roll artist. It looked like he was going to begin where so much white rock of the 1950’s began — at the legendary Sun record label of Memphis, Tennessee, owned by Sam C. Phillips, which had broken the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis (and Black artists like B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and Ike Turner before that!). He and his first band, the Teen-Kings, landed a Sun audition after recording a song called “Ooby Dooby” on a tiny label called Je-Wel (notice the hyphen). Sam Phillips heard both the song and the Teen Kings, liked them, thought he could do better re-recording the song in his own studio, and Orbison had a minor Southern hit. But he didn’t get along with Phillips, he didn’t really fit into the rockabilly mold of most of Sun’s white artists, and after his contract ran out he signed with RCA Victor and made seven records with them, of which only two were considered releasable. The one single RCA put out on Orbison flopped and his attempts to place his songs with other RCA Victor artists also failed (though he did get a song called “Claudette,” named after the 17-year-old girlfriend he eventually married, placed with the Everly Brothers, who recorded it as the B-side of their mega-hit “All I Have to Do Is Dream”).
In desperation Orbison signed with a producer named Fred Foster who owned a tiny record label called Monument — and Foster’s idea of how to break Orbison and have hits with him was to steer him away from rock ’n’ roll and make him over into a ballad singer, using soft-rock backbeats on his songs but backing him with strings and “whisper” backing vocalists in the style of mainstream country crooners of the period like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. While Orbison kept up his rock chops on songs like “Mean Woman Blues,” “Mean Little Mama” and his last Monument hit, “Oh, Pretty Woman” (a big seller in both the U.S. and Britain in 1964 despite the rivalry of the Beatles and the other groups of the so-called “British Invasion”), most of his Monument successes were slow or mid-tempo songs in ballad tempo that took advantage of Orbison’s unique voice, perched on the edge between tenor and baritone and with a far stronger legato than most rock singers. Coming in during the early 1960’s, generally a wretched time for rock ’n’ roll — Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and Eddie Cochran had died; Elvis Presley had been drafted for two years (and had come home to a new strategy by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, to steer him away from rock and rebrand him as a mainstream crooner); Little Richard left music for four years to become a minister; and sexual scandals wrecked the careers of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry — and these overpowering greats had been replaced on the charts by the bland likes of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Besides Orbison’s Monument hits, about the only enduring rock being made in the early 1960’s was coming from the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys (I’ve often joked that if you lived, or wanted to live, on the East Coast in the early 1960’s you thought the Four Seasons were the future of rock and if you lived, or wanted to live, on the West Coast you thought the Beach Boys were the future), and solo artists Del Shannon and Ricky Nelson (who was often lumped in with the fakers like Avalon and Fabian but who actually had a flair for rock and went out of his way to record with the best musicians, including session guitarist James Burton who later toured with Elvis).
As Orbison’s Wikipedia page sums him up, “While most male rock and roll performers in the 1950’s and 1960’s projected a defiant masculinity, many of Orbison’s songs instead conveyed a quiet, almost desperate, vulnerability. His voice ranged from baritone to tenor, and music scholars have suggested that he had a three- or four-octave range. During performances, he was known for standing still and solitary, and for wearing black clothes, to match his jet-black hair and dark sunglasses, which lent an air of mystery to his persona.” He achieved superstardom with the ballad-rock hit “Only the Lonely,” an extraordinary song that was a major influence on the Beatles — John Lennon tried to write a rock ballad like it called “Please Please Me,” and when the Beatles’ record producer, George Martin, rejected it John sped it up as an all-out rock song and it became the Beatles’ first Number One hit in the U.K. and the real start of their career — and throughout the rest of the early 1960’s the hits just kept on coming: “Blue Angel,” “Dream Baby,” “Blue Bayou,” “I’m Hurtin,” “Leah” (a bizarre song about a Southern Pacific pearl diver who drowns while attempting to pull up the biggest pearl of all for his girlfriend Leah — Orbison was known as an inveterate movie-goer who when he wasn’t working would see as many as three movies in one day, and this song suggests his film viewing extended to the 1931 F. W. Murnau-Robert Flaherty Tabu), “Crying” (later remade by Don McLean in 1980 into a comeback hit for him), “Pretty Paper” (a Christmas-themed song by the young Willie Nelson at a time when Nelson was trying to get his career established by placing songs with other, more established artists: he placed “Hello Walls” with Faron Young and really scored big when he placed “Crazy” with Patsy Cline). “It’s Over” and occasionally a midtempo rocker like “Uptown” for a musical and commercial change of pace. After releasing “Oh, Pretty Woman” in 1964, Orbison went into a slide; he made the mistake of leaving Monument Records and signing with MGM Records because MGM also owned a film studio and promised him five movie roles as well as a record deal. (He made only one film, a 1967 comedy Western called The Fastest Guitar Alive in which he played a Confederate spy who carried a guitar that could convert into a rifle, of which he says in the film, “I could kill you with this and play your funeral march at the same time.” The film was such a flop MGM canceled his other movie commitments.)
His personal life also unraveled at the same time, reaching its lowest point when in 1968, while on a tour in England, he got word that his home in Tennessee had burned to the ground and killed two of his sons. Later his health declined; he was diagnosed with heart disease in 1977 and had triple bypass surgery, though as soon as he was well enough to record Scott Mathews, Ron Nagle’s songwriting partner in the Dúrocs, got him a gig recording a new version of “Oh, Pretty Woman” for the woman’s beauty product Tone Soap, and he made a lot of money both in song royalties and his performance. Orbison drifted around to several record companies when his deal with MGM ended, including a one-album return to Monument and an attempt to cut a new album for Asylum (home of Linda Ronstadt, who had covered “Blue Bayou,” and the Eagles, who had once opened for Orbison), Laminar Flow, which was such a big flop cut-out copies turned up in record close-out bins for years after its release in 1976. Orbison finally got his crack at a comeback in 1987 when Jeff Lynne, co-founder of the Electric Light Orchestra and a major record producer in his own right, recruited him for an all-star band called “The Traveling Wilburys” that also included George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. He parlayed that into the deal to do the Black & White Night video, which was shot at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel where Bing Crosby had first achieved stardom with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931, and a new solo album called Mystery Girl which sold well. But Orbison responded to his comeback by scheduling a back-breaking tour that caused a return of his heart disease, which killed him in 1988 at age 52. I hadn’t seen A Black & White Night since pretty close to its original release (though it’s been a mainstay of PBS pledge-break periods ever since) and this time around I was surprised at how deliberately retro the production was. Not only was it shot in black-and-white, it was lit very much like a band performance from a 1940’s musical and there were even shots of cigarette smoke drifting past the stage lights and becoming visible. (In fact there’s a brief shot of a cigarette girl working the audience exactly as would have happened in a 1940’s club — and the whole thing is a wrenching reminder that in my lifetime it was still not only permissible but even encouraged to smoke inside a night-life venue.)
The other thing that sets this apart from most tribute shows to veteran acts today is that the focus remains exclusively on Orbison: there are no duet performances (though Bruce Springsteen contributes virtually inaudible second vocals to “Uptown” and “Dream Baby,” and these songs — among the few uptempo hits Orbison had at his peak — might actually have been more exciting as Orbison-Springsteen duets) and none of the guest artists are introduced: they’re just there, and one goes, “Was that — ?” as you see Costello playing harmonica on “Uptown” or Browne or Raitt or lang at a backing-vocal mike. It also helped that Orbison’s voice was surprisingly intact (he had to duck the big falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” but that was pretty much the only time he had to compromise), and unlike a lot of singers in his later years that killer legato was still intact. (It’s the legato — his ability to sustain a long, heavily ornamented vocal line and enunciate each note clearly but also bind it to its neighbors — and his command of melisma, the “sliding” from one note to the next that rock ’n’ roll inherited not only from Black gospel and R&B singing but also traditional Irish folk music — which is where Irish-descended singers like Bing Crosby and John Lennon learned it — that make Orbison’s voice so unique in the history of pop music in general and rock in particular.) A Black & White Night seems astonishing today not only for how well Orbison’s voice had held up from its heyday in the early 1960’s in this 1987 performance but for how the production strove for a “class” image throughout, with the musicians (the male ones, anyway) in suits and ties, the cinematography recalling classic Hollywood rather than the quick cutting and disconnected imagery of music videos that was already being established as the standard way to present rock on film, and the visible evidence of the entire orchestra, including the string players, being present and performing their parts in real time instead of Orbison singing to pre-recorded backing tracks the way Elvis did on most of his later TV specials. Orbison’s legacy is one of the quirkiest in rock ’n’ roll, and though he could rock he was always most effective on ballads, and his unique performing style (he stood stock-still through his songs and didn’t move around to the music, which he said was because so few of his songs contained the instrumental breaks during which other rockers did move, but may have also been part of his big-time stage fright) was well showcased in A Black & White Night.
After Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution KPBS showed something called A Black & White Night 30, which I briefly thought was going to be an entirely new program paying tribute to Roy Orbison by reuniting some of the guest stars that joined him for the original A Black & White Night program in 1987 — Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, k. d. lang, T Bone Burnett and others — in new performances of his songs. Surprise: it was actually simply a rerun of the original A Black & White Night, with Orbison in surprisingly good vocal form in songs he’d first recorded nearly three decades earlier (though, alas, he did not still have the vocal chops to sing that awesomely beautiful falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” — Linda Ronstadt duplicated that on her 1970’s cover but it’s nowhere nearly as much a surprise to hear a woman go that high than a man) and with the other stars placed well back of the mix because the business of the evening was to allow Roy Orbison to present his songs directly instead of to shoehorn him into a series of slapdash “duets” with later artists. Roy Orbison had one of the weirdest career trajectories of just about anyone with a reputation as a rock ’n’ roll artist. It looked like he was going to begin where so much white rock of the 1950’s began — at the legendary Sun record label of Memphis, Tennessee, owned by Sam C. Phillips, which had broken the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis (and Black artists like B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and Ike Turner before that!). He and his first band, the Teen-Kings, landed a Sun audition after recording a song called “Ooby Dooby” on a tiny label called Je-Wel (notice the hyphen). Sam Phillips heard both the song and the Teen Kings, liked them, thought he could do better re-recording the song in his own studio, and Orbison had a minor Southern hit. But he didn’t get along with Phillips, he didn’t really fit into the rockabilly mold of most of Sun’s white artists, and after his contract ran out he signed with RCA Victor and made seven records with them, of which only two were considered releasable. The one single RCA put out on Orbison flopped and his attempts to place his songs with other RCA Victor artists also failed (though he did get a song called “Claudette,” named after the 17-year-old girlfriend he eventually married, placed with the Everly Brothers, who recorded it as the B-side of their mega-hit “All I Have to Do Is Dream”).
In desperation Orbison signed with a producer named Fred Foster who owned a tiny record label called Monument — and Foster’s idea of how to break Orbison and have hits with him was to steer him away from rock ’n’ roll and make him over into a ballad singer, using soft-rock backbeats on his songs but backing him with strings and “whisper” backing vocalists in the style of mainstream country crooners of the period like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. While Orbison kept up his rock chops on songs like “Mean Woman Blues,” “Mean Little Mama” and his last Monument hit, “Oh, Pretty Woman” (a big seller in both the U.S. and Britain in 1964 despite the rivalry of the Beatles and the other groups of the so-called “British Invasion”), most of his Monument successes were slow or mid-tempo songs in ballad tempo that took advantage of Orbison’s unique voice, perched on the edge between tenor and baritone and with a far stronger legato than most rock singers. Coming in during the early 1960’s, generally a wretched time for rock ’n’ roll — Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and Eddie Cochran had died; Elvis Presley had been drafted for two years (and had come home to a new strategy by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, to steer him away from rock and rebrand him as a mainstream crooner); Little Richard left music for four years to become a minister; and sexual scandals wrecked the careers of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry — and these overpowering greats had been replaced on the charts by the bland likes of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Besides Orbison’s Monument hits, about the only enduring rock being made in the early 1960’s was coming from the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys (I’ve often joked that if you lived, or wanted to live, on the East Coast in the early 1960’s you thought the Four Seasons were the future of rock and if you lived, or wanted to live, on the West Coast you thought the Beach Boys were the future), and solo artists Del Shannon and Ricky Nelson (who was often lumped in with the fakers like Avalon and Fabian but who actually had a flair for rock and went out of his way to record with the best musicians, including session guitarist James Burton who later toured with Elvis).
As Orbison’s Wikipedia page sums him up, “While most male rock and roll performers in the 1950’s and 1960’s projected a defiant masculinity, many of Orbison’s songs instead conveyed a quiet, almost desperate, vulnerability. His voice ranged from baritone to tenor, and music scholars have suggested that he had a three- or four-octave range. During performances, he was known for standing still and solitary, and for wearing black clothes, to match his jet-black hair and dark sunglasses, which lent an air of mystery to his persona.” He achieved superstardom with the ballad-rock hit “Only the Lonely,” an extraordinary song that was a major influence on the Beatles — John Lennon tried to write a rock ballad like it called “Please Please Me,” and when the Beatles’ record producer, George Martin, rejected it John sped it up as an all-out rock song and it became the Beatles’ first Number One hit in the U.K. and the real start of their career — and throughout the rest of the early 1960’s the hits just kept on coming: “Blue Angel,” “Dream Baby,” “Blue Bayou,” “I’m Hurtin,” “Leah” (a bizarre song about a Southern Pacific pearl diver who drowns while attempting to pull up the biggest pearl of all for his girlfriend Leah — Orbison was known as an inveterate movie-goer who when he wasn’t working would see as many as three movies in one day, and this song suggests his film viewing extended to the 1931 F. W. Murnau-Robert Flaherty Tabu), “Crying” (later remade by Don McLean in 1980 into a comeback hit for him), “Pretty Paper” (a Christmas-themed song by the young Willie Nelson at a time when Nelson was trying to get his career established by placing songs with other, more established artists: he placed “Hello Walls” with Faron Young and really scored big when he placed “Crazy” with Patsy Cline). “It’s Over” and occasionally a midtempo rocker like “Uptown” for a musical and commercial change of pace. After releasing “Oh, Pretty Woman” in 1964, Orbison went into a slide; he made the mistake of leaving Monument Records and signing with MGM Records because MGM also owned a film studio and promised him five movie roles as well as a record deal. (He made only one film, a 1967 comedy Western called The Fastest Guitar Alive in which he played a Confederate spy who carried a guitar that could convert into a rifle, of which he says in the film, “I could kill you with this and play your funeral march at the same time.” The film was such a flop MGM canceled his other movie commitments.)
His personal life also unraveled at the same time, reaching its lowest point when in 1968, while on a tour in England, he got word that his home in Tennessee had burned to the ground and killed two of his sons. Later his health declined; he was diagnosed with heart disease in 1977 and had triple bypass surgery, though as soon as he was well enough to record Scott Mathews, Ron Nagle’s songwriting partner in the Dúrocs, got him a gig recording a new version of “Oh, Pretty Woman” for the woman’s beauty product Tone Soap, and he made a lot of money both in song royalties and his performance. Orbison drifted around to several record companies when his deal with MGM ended, including a one-album return to Monument and an attempt to cut a new album for Asylum (home of Linda Ronstadt, who had covered “Blue Bayou,” and the Eagles, who had once opened for Orbison), Laminar Flow, which was such a big flop cut-out copies turned up in record close-out bins for years after its release in 1976. Orbison finally got his crack at a comeback in 1987 when Jeff Lynne, co-founder of the Electric Light Orchestra and a major record producer in his own right, recruited him for an all-star band called “The Traveling Wilburys” that also included George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. He parlayed that into the deal to do the Black & White Night video, which was shot at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel where Bing Crosby had first achieved stardom with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931, and a new solo album called Mystery Girl which sold well. But Orbison responded to his comeback by scheduling a back-breaking tour that caused a return of his heart disease, which killed him in 1988 at age 52. I hadn’t seen A Black & White Night since pretty close to its original release (though it’s been a mainstay of PBS pledge-break periods ever since) and this time around I was surprised at how deliberately retro the production was. Not only was it shot in black-and-white, it was lit very much like a band performance from a 1940’s musical and there were even shots of cigarette smoke drifting past the stage lights and becoming visible. (In fact there’s a brief shot of a cigarette girl working the audience exactly as would have happened in a 1940’s club — and the whole thing is a wrenching reminder that in my lifetime it was still not only permissible but even encouraged to smoke inside a night-life venue.)
The other thing that sets this apart from most tribute shows to veteran acts today is that the focus remains exclusively on Orbison: there are no duet performances (though Bruce Springsteen contributes virtually inaudible second vocals to “Uptown” and “Dream Baby,” and these songs — among the few uptempo hits Orbison had at his peak — might actually have been more exciting as Orbison-Springsteen duets) and none of the guest artists are introduced: they’re just there, and one goes, “Was that — ?” as you see Costello playing harmonica on “Uptown” or Browne or Raitt or lang at a backing-vocal mike. It also helped that Orbison’s voice was surprisingly intact (he had to duck the big falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” but that was pretty much the only time he had to compromise), and unlike a lot of singers in his later years that killer legato was still intact. (It’s the legato — his ability to sustain a long, heavily ornamented vocal line and enunciate each note clearly but also bind it to its neighbors — and his command of melisma, the “sliding” from one note to the next that rock ’n’ roll inherited not only from Black gospel and R&B singing but also traditional Irish folk music — which is where Irish-descended singers like Bing Crosby and John Lennon learned it — that make Orbison’s voice so unique in the history of pop music in general and rock in particular.) A Black & White Night seems astonishing today not only for how well Orbison’s voice had held up from its heyday in the early 1960’s in this 1987 performance but for how the production strove for a “class” image throughout, with the musicians (the male ones, anyway) in suits and ties, the cinematography recalling classic Hollywood rather than the quick cutting and disconnected imagery of music videos that was already being established as the standard way to present rock on film, and the visible evidence of the entire orchestra, including the string players, being present and performing their parts in real time instead of Orbison singing to pre-recorded backing tracks the way Elvis did on most of his later TV specials. Orbison’s legacy is one of the quirkiest in rock ’n’ roll, and though he could rock he was always most effective on ballads, and his unique performing style (he stood stock-still through his songs and didn’t move around to the music, which he said was because so few of his songs contained the instrumental breaks during which other rockers did move, but may have also been part of his big-time stage fright) was well showcased in A Black & White Night.
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