I remember when Seinfeld went off the air and I told someone at work I had never seen it and soon there was a stream of people coming by my desk to ask if it was really true that I had never seen Seinfeld. Apparently I had done something really wrong.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
The Saints Are Coming
Watching a hockey game on ESPN–a rare thing, hockey on ESPN–and an ad for an upcoming New Orleans Saints game is on and I immediately recognize the vamp to the old Skids song The Saints Are Coming. Wow. I loved that song, but it’s ancient history. It’s quickly obvious that it’s not the Skids, though. Google said it might be U2 and Green Day doing a limp rock star rendition some years ago. Well, Google didn’t say limp, I said limp. But it was. Or maybe it is some ESPN only version. I have no idea. I just thought it was bizarre hearing a Skids tune that was utterly unknown in the US back in the day in an NFL ad. Now somebody will tell me they play it every time the New Orleans Saints play and that everybody knows that except me. Life is so bewildering when you never watch football. Drop the puck already.
Anyway, Team USA was beaten by the Kazakhstani Paralympic team and have now gone home to earn millions and millions of dollars.
Safe European Home
I wore this record out back in ’78, played it incessantly, and this opening tune even more incessantly and as loud as possible from that first snare blast till even my roommates came to love this song. I’d loved everything the Clash had done before then–Complete Control especially (wore out two copies), and White Man in Hammersmith Palais–and I didn’t like much of anything they did after this LP–they turned instantly way too commercial for me, way too pop–but this album cranked hard and massive and when I saw ’em on their first US tour at the Santa Monica Civic, it was one of the most thrilling concerts of my life. There weren’t even a thousand people in the joint, but it seemed like a million.
Listening to Bob and Ray
Listening to old Bob and Ray radio shows for a couple hours in isolation is pretty mind bending. I have a whole library of Bob and Ray, maybe a hundred very weird 15 minutes, and you can get lost in them, doing whatever it is you need to do, and when you finally turn them off, the world seems some discombobulated and unBob and Ray and wrong. Maybe it’s those McBeebee Twins, a bit that is actually somehow disturbing, like how did Bob and Ray think up that bit, and why, and was anyone damaged in the process, like people in early LSD experiments, or dogs sent into space, or saxophonists who blew free jazz so hard that melodies terrified them and they hid under their beds hiding from syncopation and the landlord.
Meat
Watching a David Attenborough documentary–Planet Earth–with a Sioux Indian is mildly disconcerting. Attenborough is intoning about the bison. That’s a magnificent animal I say. That’s a lot of meat, she says. We used to hunt them with arrows, she says. You could kill them with arrows? Nah, but if you could immobilize it you could hack at it. I blanch even whiter. That’s a lot of meat she says again.
Real estate values
There was a fatal stabbing on the east side of Hoover street. Domestic squabble. Sad. The east side of the street is Silver Lake now, since the LA Times set the borders hard. West side of Hoover is East Hollywood. It used to be that apartments for rent on the east side of Hoover were Silver Lake adjacent, but stabbings were in East Hollywood. Or Virgil Village, actually. Virgil Village disappeared somewhere on the maps and now East Hollywood goes all the way to Beverly, where there is nothing even vaguely Hollywood. Silver Lake tumbles down from tony breezy heights to come to a hard stop on Hoover Street. If only the tiff could have been taken across the street. It’s narrow enough, two lanes, tight parking, a moving trucker’s nightmare. They could have run over there easily enough. But no, it happened on the Silver Lake side, and now the crime reports scream murder in Silver Lake, a knife flashing through very expensive air, and try explaining that to the lawyer you’re selling that insanely overpriced bungalow to.
Theo Saunders and George Herms tonite, Friday September 16, at LACMA–6-8 pm FREE.
Theo Saunders and George Herms tonite at LACMA–6-8 pm FREE.
Sitting here listening to Theo Saunders Jassemblage for the umpteenth time, digging how each tune is different tunes pieced together crazy logically illogically into new things, like Nuttiness that is half a dozen Monk tunes in one, or I Steal Good Moments that somehow slides Oliver Nelson’s Stolen Moments inside James Brown’s I Feel Good (or is that vice versa?), or the gorgeous Naimanox or Caramanteca or or more Monk in Rubistrophy–Theo Saunders digs his Monk. Great band on board this CD too–Chuck Manning and Louis Van Taylor on saxes, George Bohannon on the trombone. Love this album. Love it even more as the great George Herms designed the sleeve. Meanwhile, as I listen I’m flipping for the umpteenth time through the gorgeous double volume The River Book, which just gushes with George Herms crazy brilliant art. Madness, this stuff, things he finds and turns into other, cooler things. It incluides a DVD of a show he did at the REDCAT a few years ago that I still have difficulty describing. But why should I? After all, tonite, Friday, September 16 from 6-8 pm George Herms and Theo Saunders and band–including Phil Ranelin and Chuck Manning–will share the stage at LACMA and its free. Free free free. Be there. This has to be one of the jazz and art events of the summer. The year, even. Certainly the now. What a spectacularly groovy and weird and swinging and out way to begin the weekend. Believe you me, this will be something pretty special. And believe you me, be there or be unassembled.
Great Society
Here’s an obscure psychedelic classic by San Francisco’s Great Society. You used to hear this spooky take on Sally Go Round the Roses on the free form FM stations on occasion in the ancient daze when a DJ was hip to the band. Recorded in 1966, released in ’68 after the Airplane became superstars (Grace Slick began in this band), check out Darby Slick‘s guitar extended solo….way ahead of the curve, he soon went off it entirely, when he went to India to really get deep into the roots. (Check him out on Facebook). Also, dig Peter Van Gelder‘s soprano sax in the long vamp that leads into White Rabbit. If any other rock band was getting that far out (as they used to say) with the Trane inspired reed work in 1966 I’ve never heard ’em, and notice how naturally it folds into Darby Slick’s raga inspired solo that follows. Grace Slick’s vocals blended in perfectly. Brilliant and vastly underrated stuff by a band that even more than most at the time, didn’t seem especially concerned about being rock stars, let alone making top forty singles. I had an early vinyl version of these recordings–think it was a double LP–way back when, have no idea where it went. Somewhere stoned, no doubt. Feed your head.
Family Affair
Checking out Alice Cooper in these old Leave It To Beavers, I posted, way before Jerry Mathers was killed in Viet Nam.
But after Buffy OD’d, a pal added.
No, I said, it was before. Buffy died in 1976. I had been living in OC at the time, and it was front page news and highly detailed. I was a freshman in college that year, in fact, and Buffy’s demise was a big topic of conversation on the quad, especially all the drugs and Marines.
He was strangely silent, imagining, I figured, Buffy and drugs and the U.S. Marines.
Getting back to my narrative, I explained how Eddie Haskell became Alice Cooper sometime in the mid sixties, after the usual child star failures. I had learned that in 10th grade, and felt humiliated I didn’t know it already being that it was common knowledge. I had just arrived at a new school after year at a high school that had Future Farmers of America on campus. Future Fags of America the few hippies kids at Brea-Olinda High called them, then were beaten up by sons of farmers in overalls spattered with pig shit. There were still farmers with farms and farm animals in Orange County in the seventies, and their presence on campus was a secret thrill. Cows. Sheep. Chickens. Pigs big as Volkswagens being poked along by freshman girls in pony tails. It wasn’t cool but it was groovy in an earthy kind of way. That was Brea, and if anyone on campus knew that Alice Cooper had been Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver, nobody told me. Then again, Leave it to Beaver almost seemed real at Brea-Olinda High. I knew the mildly thuggish Lumpy, the dopey Republican Wally, and the brainiac with the glasses. I even knew Eddie Haskell, though he was a short Albanian kid, funny as hell. I learned everything I know about being a smartass from that short Albanian kid. Probably the only funny Albanian kid in all of Orange County. Certainly all of Brea.
Then we moved to the other end of Brea at the end of my freshman year, which put me in another school district, and when I began my sophomore year at the much richer El Dorado High School it was like I’d fallen off the turnip truck. A lot of rich kids. I was out of my element. I soon found losers to glom onto, though, the serious rock’n’roll cognoscenti. They smoked cigarettes and talked about Roxy Music. I learned everything I know about being a music snob from those guys. And it was while with them, behind the handball courts during PE, in that holiest of high school stoner sepulchers, that I was told that no, Eddie Haskell was not Alice Cooper. How absurd. I felt like such a dork.
Now about The Beav and Viet Nam, he had died either during the Tet Offensive or on Hamburger Hill, I remember both. I’d heard that in maybe 1970, when I was in seventh grade and the Viet Nam War was at full roar. One two three what are we fighting for, we sang during recess, don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam. We enunciated that damn with particular gusto. I learned to say fuck then too. Been saying it ever since. The Beaver was killed on Hamburger Hill someone with an older brother said. Older brothers knew. I didn’t have an older brother and had no idea how full of shit older brothers can be. Fuck I said. The Beaver is dead? Yup. Fuck. Damn fuck. What about Wally? Someone said he was a hippie. Maybe they said that, or maybe I am making that up. I’s been so long now it’s hard to remember what is true and what was once a joke, or a lie, or a parallel universe. In real life I think he became a director. I don’t remember what exactly we thought happened to Wally, though. Or Lumpy. All I remember for sure is that the Beaver was killed in two places at once when he was not anywhere at all. Weird the shit from junior high you remember, while forgetting everything else but a smattering of useless French sentences about le plume being sur le table.
I just wish all that other stuff was true, my buddy said, but that Buffy was still alive. I just read her wiki, he said, damn. The second saddest wiki after The Singing Nun’s.
I hope you feel ashamed, I said.
I just loved Buffy so much, he said.
Well, Jody didn’t do so well either, I said, but has recovered. I spared him the details of drugs and booze and adolescent failure. Mr. French died in his fifties after a series of strokes, and Brian Keith blew his brains out. Suicide, they say. Prostate cancer and bottomless depression. Cissy, however, thrives.
Are you TRYING to bum me out? He was almost yelling at me. He had no idea that Family Affair was so tragic. But good news about Cissy, he said, at least there was one happy ending.
Silence.
Their little dog got run over by a steamroller, I said.
Preston Sturges
A smart ass writer’s heaven tonight on TCM–The Lady Eve (Barbara Stanwyk is vamping Henry Fonda as we speak), Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, Hail the Conquering Hero and an earlier gem, the Great McGinty. All that’s missing are that other early gem, Christmas In July, and his penultimate classic (that’s the fourth time I’ve written penultimate this week, and this is the next to the last time) Miracle on Morgan’s Creek. Preston Sturges wrote and directed these two near perfect and five flat out classic screwball comedies beginning in December 1939 and ending in September 1943. Seven flicks in less than four years, and not one of them less than great, and most of them as near to perfect as any comedy on film has ever been. Then it dried up just like that and he released a string of OK comedies that only worked in places (such as 1947’s The Sins of Harold Diddlebock, with Harold Lloyd, the final flick in this Sturges marathon), as if he were the less talented younger brother of Preston Sturges, say, or the son who could never compare to his old man. But it was him, sadly, mysteriously, and he faded away, not forgotten, but certainly wondered about. He died in 1959. You can’t blame the studios, as with Buster Keaton, and you can’t blame psychotherapy, as with Woody Allen. Sometimes you are incredibly funny and suddenly you’re not so funny anymore. Creativity is a strange thing, you never know when it will dry up and wither away. But I forget all about that and lose myself in these flawless scripts and perfect direction and jokes for days. They call me the Weenie King, the old man says.
(September 1, 2016)
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