Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Christmas specials

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So I flipped on the TV where just hours earlier I’d been watching one of those Irene Dunne films Irene Dunne thought would be forgotten forever. This channel has shown the flick maybe eight hundred times. I feel bad for Irene Dunne because we live in the same hood, if at different times, and in different sized homes. Ours is half of a duplex, hers a walled castle, vast and decadent. Some hugely stacked pop singer whose name escapes me is trying to live there now. The far end of Waverly Drive is exciting, headline making even. At our end is us. But this post is not about Irene Dunne. It’s about Mitzi Gaynor. Because where Irene Dunne was struggling through a half assed wartime script with a 4F leading man, Mitzi Gaynor is now singing a verse of the Frank Loesser tune “I Believe In You” to Santa. That got my attention because it’s from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which is funny as hell and the only movie musical I can watch fifty times. Robert Morse is the leading man. Michele Lee sings the first take of I Believe In You. Nails it. But no Michele Lee is Mitzi Gaynor. She’s a pretty lady, though. Nice legs. Fur coats to die for, and this being the 1970’s entire herds of mink must have met their nasty little ends to don her in such luxury. Aside from those legs and the wanton mink slaughter, though, it’s quite unwatchable. Not unwatchable in a Star Wars Christmas Special kind of way, but unwatchable in a 1970’s King Family Christmas Special kind of way. Perhaps you remember. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. I know I’d forgotten.

Oh god, a Perry Como Christmas Special, and I can’t find the remote.

Mitzi Gaynor coming unwrapped.

Mitzi Gaynor coming unwrapped.

Ozzy Osbourne’s hair

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I fell on my face in Fresno at a very tender age, and there’s a jagged scar where the middle of a mustache ought to be. Any chance I had at a mustache in college were ruined. I know, I tried. A big kid with a wisp of a mustache. Sad. I was doubly afflicted, actually, as my magnificent widow’s peak, long since lost, kept me from parting my long hair down the middle to look like the guy on the cover of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4.  A record I never owned, actually, but it was for sale at the local Ralph’s and every time I was sent to the store to buy milk or Hamburger Helper there was Ozzy Osbourne flashing his inane peace signs from the LP display rack, his hair parted with ying and yang perfection. With my gap where a mustache middle should be and the part in my hair coming to grief on that widow’s peak, a hippie I would never be. Just as well. Punk rock happened and hair became way short and mustaches unheard of and all that psychic follicle sturm und drang of my teen years became moot and forgotten.

Or so I remembered it. But recently I just saw Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 in a record bin and realized, to my astonishment, that Ozzy’s hair was not parted down the middle. Not at all. It’s just sort of a squiggly unwashed mess, what you can see of it at all. I must have been thinking of some other rock star, one with perfectly bisected hair, and gotten him confused over the years with Ozzy Osbourne. I stared at the cover, blinking, realizing that my entire life, from teenhood to the waning daze of middle age, had been spent under the impression that Ozzy’s hair was parted iconically down the middle on the cover of that album. I can still see him now, in fact, his hair parted perfectly, gazing at me in line at Ralphs from the front of that album, waving his peace signs and looking so cool that all the absolutely hottest chicks in school–the ones with their skin tight ass-patched jeans who smelled like pot and patchouli and wore no underwear even on the coldest days–would have been his sex slaves. The same chicks who never even knew I existed despite the fact that I sat next to them in English class. And now I see how wrong I was (about Ozzy’s hair, I mean.) How wrong we can be our whole lives. Memory is a cruel thing, it plays tricks, it lies. It alters the course of our lives, turning failed hippies into punk rockers. But it’s too late to change now, my life has been lived and this essay written, and unless some of you pull out that album and look for yourself, you’ll never know the difference.

Valentine’s Day

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So late last nite we weren’t able to get into any restaurant–it was like Disneyland on a crowded day–so we celebrated Valentine’s Day at Philippe’s, which is actually kinda romantic in a rough hewn old punk rocker kind of way. They even let us keep the beer glasses. I watched some rotten kids pass by on their Valentine’s Day dates and remembered going there 35 years ago and looking at all the old people and thinking they must have been coming here for thirty years and that seemed like forever. I felt a twinge but it was just my back. We clinked glasses, toasted us, and ate our French dip sandwiches, which haven’t changed an iota since the stoned age.

Hockey again

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Kings skunked the Hawks five zip and I didn’t have to hear that stupid song once. So I sang it myself as the Black Hawks slunk off the ice in front of an eerily silent toddlin’ town crowd. Doo doo da doo, doo da doo, doo da doo do doo.

Now watching my hapless Jersey Devils, who are actually outplaying the Ducks. The Devils won’t make the playoffs–one of those endless rebuilding phases, the Kings’ lasted decades–but I still love ’em. If they’re good enough for Chris Christie, they’re good enough for me. Though maybe it’s genetic.

Damn….Ducks goal. Now their song, whoa, whoa whoa whoa, whoa whoa whoa. Cool, Devils goal, thirty seconds later. Baby we were born to run! or whatever they sing at Devils games. We got us a game.

Back and forth, forth and back, and Iron Man on the PA. Orange County. Damn, another Ducks goal. And another. And another. And another. And another. A brief interlude to remove hats from the ice. Then one more goal. The Devils season sinks somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. I wasted three hours of my fast disappearing middle age hoping my birth place’s team could redeem itself even a little bit. But no. Just whoa whoa whoa whoa.

And while I was spared the doo doo da doo, doo da doo, doo da doo do doo, I had to listen to that Ducks song seven times tonight. Whoa whoa whoa whoa, like some bad Clash cover band.

We don’t have a Kings song, I don’t think. We just share memories of Warren Wiebe.

Kings vs Hawks

Corned beef and cabbage

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Never have cared for corned beef and cabbage. Or boiled potatoes. Irish cuisine…. The Irish can do many things–sing, write, tell stories (some even true), fight, be funny, blow things up–but they can’t cook. Thankfully my mother’s mother-in-law, who’d come from Austria-Hungary when she was twelve years old and could scarcely speak understandable English seven decades later, was a terrific cook. The Germans can do lots of things too, some of them scary, but their cooking never hurt anybody. So we were fed fairly well, with dishes learned from Grandma Wahl, even in the seventies, when inflation and recession–stagflation they called it–reduced America to Hamburger Helper.

I vividly remember St. Patrick’s Day as a kid. I’d always refused to wear green, figuring that anyone half-Irish didn’t have to, and some kid named Smith or Thompson or Smith-Thompson would pinch me and I’d think how just that week several Smiths or Thompsons or Smith-Thompsons had been blown up in Northern Ireland. And then, that night, my mother (a full-blooded Nelligan, and her mother a Kelly) would serve us corned beef and cabbage for dinner. I distinctly remember her saying how she could never stand corned beef and cabbage, but my father requested it. I supposed boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage was a minimalist treat to someone raised on a myriad varieties of each, from scalloped potatoes with cheese and gravy drizzled lightly across them, to sauerkraut. But I hated boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage. I love potatoes every other conceivable way–they are my favorite food–but plain boiled is kind of an insult. So our supper every St. Patrick’s Day was my least favorite meal all year, one I liked even less than fish sticks on Friday. It wasn’t until my Sioux Indian wife insisted we go out for corned beef and cabbage on my holiday (can’t we just stay home and drink whiskey and listen to Bing and the Undertones? No?)–that I learned to barely tolerate boiled cabbage. Apparently her home town of Milwaukee (her parents had been born on the reservation, but she was born in a pleasant suburb of Milwaukee), where there haven’t been any Irish since Spencer Tracy moved to Hollywood, is just awash in green and corned beef and cabbage every St. Patrick’s Day. All the bars serve it up, free. Anything that sells beer, I guess. And as for me and corned beef, well, it was better than Spam, I guess, but not as good as pastrami. I would rather have a kielbasa (we used to get incredible kielbasa from a Polish butcher in Flint a zillion years ago), or a hamburger, or carnitas, or nothing. I remember feigning an upset stomach once or twice on Saint Patrick’s Day, and sneaking out later to raid the fridge. Faith and begorrah, I did.

And now I avoid, if at all possible, eating corned beef and cabbage every March 17. Just like I avoid going out to see people who aren’t even slightly Irish sing happy Irish songs and smile happy Irish smiles and talk in incredibly bad fake brogues. It’s a kelly green minstrel show all over Los Angeles every Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s embarrassing. Hell, the very same people who go into conniption fits about cultural appropriation every Columbus Day or Cinco de Mayo or ethnic holiday of your choice become a greenface Stepin O’Fetchit on March 17. Top o’ the morning to ya! and green beer. Any excuse to get shitfaced, I guess. You know those Micks, always shitfaced. Which a lot of them are, actually. But at least they’re not smiling that stupid happy Irish smile. Well, unless they are drunk. Faith and begorrah. The hell with it. I’m staying home and watching Barry Fitzgerald movies.

But back to corned beef, here’s a bit of history of the dish, and the part it played in the Potato Famine.

The Celtic grazing lands of Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.— Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

Which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose, to avoid a meal of corned beef and cabbage. Wrap the fact that I simply don’t care for corned beef and cabbage in tragic history and moral outrage, as if eating corned beef and cabbage is some sort of genocidal act. You read it here first.

But it’s not. I just don’t like corned beef and cabbage, and this is a blog, and people get carried away in blogs, and say overwrought and ridiculous things, which then prove embarrassing at cocktail parties when people bring it up. Eventually someone catches you with a big steaming plate of corned beef and cabbage, and you splutter between mouthfuls.

I will drink the whiskey, though. No argument at all.

National-Corned-Beef-and-Cabbage-Day-March-17-1-1024x512

George Kennedy

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(You never know what will get to people, and this was a couple hundred words I dashed off on Facebook the day George Kennedy died that got a great big response.)

I see George Kennedy died, another big–6’3″–lummox of a Mick with kraut mixed in. He signed up for the infantry in the War, just a kid, and wound up an officer and spent sixteen years in uniform. I remember a zillion years ago him telling some interviewer, Larry King I think, about how the Army gave him his start in show biz. Seems the Pentagon assigned him to the Phil Silvers Show as official US Army advisor. The Army wanted Sergeant Bilko done just right. I don’t think George advised anybody anything, but he watched and learned. He was never a great actor–he himself said that–but he was a good actor, and he knew how to laugh a big laugh on cue and he sure could charm an audience. I even think people, deep down, identified with him more than Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.

He almost lived forever, George Kennedy did, to ninety one, and he made who knows how many movies. You never switched off the television because it was George Kennedy. And he played everything and anything, a real journeyman, good at no matter what it was the director wanted. They don’t even call them emergencies anymore, he said as George Petroni in some ridiculous Airport movie, they call them Petroni’s. That’s the only line I remember from that movie, and he’s the only cast member I can name. There’s some big guys you never forget, and once gone, you’ll always remember.

Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke

Garry Shandling

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Garry Shandling was an incredibly funny guy. They say only the good die young. Or the not exactly old die young. Well, you can’t be old if you die young. But 66, for a comic, if not young, is certainly a couple decades too soon. That’s a lotta untold jokes, a lotta unlaughed laughs. It happens. He’ll live in syndication forever, they’ll say, him and Lucy and Phil Silvers and Bob Newhart, who isn’t even dead, and syndication is almost like never dying, plus somebody else can have your parking space. That’s what death is for a TV comedian, syndication, a big Jewish funeral and somebody you hated getting your parking space. Not that it matters to Garry Shandling. Garry’s up in heaven now, yelling at the birds to shut up.

Too bad. A funny guy.

garry shandling and johnny carson

Infinite groove

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(from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, c. 2007)

The table was so close it abutted the stage, and when Azar blew that soprano of his you could look straight up into its innards and almost see the frantic rush of notes coming out all harmonized. It was that close. So close that you could feel the rhythm section, Lorca Hart’s pounding toms and John Heard’s thrumming bass and Nate Morgan’s jagged chords vibrating through the stage and through the table and into our bones. They had a groove going, a monster jazz groove, and it was unstoppable…even Azar gave into it and left the stage to let the groove whirl itself senseless, turning and turning, ever widening. Morgan’s fingers were completely mad, pounding and pirouetting insanely intricate melodies out of Monk and McCoy and the blues and Chopin. Lorca, laughing, was all motion and whirring sticks. Yet things did not fall apart, for holding down that center was Heard, just his second night back at Charlie O’s after a long, scary illness. He leaned into his instrument and laid out a perfect lattice of bass notes that held everything together as it propelled it all forward. No mere anarchy this. This was an infinite groove. This was a happening. This was jazz in all its overwhelming power, deep black music played white hot. Nothing else mattered. Not the whole crass music business, not the manufactured pop and rock and hip hop that passes for American culture anymore, not a music press that pompously elevates mass-produced trash into art. None of that mattered, not an iota. This was a Sufi moment, all the horrors of the world dispelled by the twirling monster groove. No one slouching nowhere. When at last it came to a stop, the audience, spent, exploded with applause and rushed the stage to congratulate the players like they’d won the Stanley Cup.

But then if you dig jazz you’ve been there. Moments like that don’t happen every time, but if you see enough jazz you’ll experience them. It’s one of the very last things in America, this battered America, that can take a sick and tired you and make you feel like you touched the sun. It still does what the American music industry has destroyed in almost every other music. It remains real, unpackaged, spontaneous. It’s immune to marketing campaigns and image consultants. They may have killed rock and pop and the rest, sucked them dry, but they haven’t touched jazz. Certainly not that night at Charlie O’s…for if there had been any A&R people in the audience that night, as Lee Ving once said, they certainly went and died.

Azar Lawrence

Azar Lawrence

Jon Mayer

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Saw Jon Mayer last nite out in Beverly Hills. A trio gig, with rock solid down the middle Chris Conner on bass, always good, and Roy McCurdy on drums. They don’t make drummers like Roy anymore. All that power. Not Elvin Jones power, but metrical power, swinging like he swung everybody, Cannonball Adderley and everybody. Jon was playing a huge piano that was last tuned in 1967 or thereabouts but he didn’t seem to have much trouble with it. I was at Charlie O’s one nite–might have been this very same trio–and I was sitting with John Heard back at the bar. Heard was digging Mayer’s playing, totally digging it, and said Mayer was the real thing. “That’s the way they used to play” he told me, “trying stuff on the fly, taking big risks like that. Just pure creativity. They don’t do that anymore.” He said something like that, anyway, back at the bar downing a brandy, me a whiskey. We listened to Mayer working through whatever it was he was aiming at, and I got it. Heard what John Heard was hearing. Saw in Jon Mayer’s face that creative process Heard was marvelling at. Sometimes an idea wouldn’t pan out and Jon would curse to himself and strained a second to rebuild it into something that would work. Fearless improvisation, falling back on nothing but the centrifugal force of pure jazz improvisation to carry it along. It’s like Mayer doesn’t see a beautiful lattice of possible patterns, nothing he learned in school, nothing somebody else did before. That doesn’t even seem to exist to him. He’s not making art, like pianists tend to do anymore, he’s making jazz. Pure jazz. Jazz the way it was played in NYC in the 1950’s, when he was first gigging. You can imagine the heavy cats he had to play with, play for–hell, there was a session with Trane, even–back when jazz was at its absolute apogee. Those were then days that all jazz musicians look back at now as Olympian, as something jazz players now would give anything to be part of, and Jon Mayer was there, really was. You can hear it in those crazy clustered chords of his, these sensitive yet almost dissonant things he drops in where almost everyone would lay out a straight melodic line. I mean he’s not dropping any huge Monk clomps, not even dropping one handed bombs like McCoy Tyner, but instead turning the melody into pieces, oddly shaped pieces he lays out with spaces between them that distill into single notes that plash on the keys like drops of rain water. He does this even in the most gorgeous tunes, a magnificent Green Dolphin Street or something by Tadd Dameron, or something he’s drawn up himself.

I dunno, I find writing about jazz piano impossible, absolutely impossible, and I flail around looking for ways to explain something that I don’t even understand. I wrote about jazz in the LA Weekly for seven years and never did learn how to write about jazz piano. I failed again with this. But Jon Mayer’s piano playing affects me like no other, I just listen in disbelief wondering how his musical thought process works. And I wonder if anyone else in town realizes what a treasure this jazz player is, and why they aren’t lining up to see him. He’s that good.

Pink Hat

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A few summers ago it was a very hot day at the Playboy Jazz Festival and I had snuck into the press room to cool off in delicious air conditioned comfort and have an ice cold beer. Suddenly there was a rush of reporters and activity and it was time for Hugh Hefner’s press conference. He gives an impressive performance every time, but I’ve seen too many and slipped away to another corner of the room, found a table and sat and relaxed.  Suddenly I was surrounded by photographers and video crews. Two gorgeous, sweaty babes appeared two feet away. One was tallish and gorgeous and young and confused, the other was little and gorgeous and came off dumb. Older looking. Experienced. The idiot reporters asked all kinds of inane questions. The younger one tried to answer them seriously, the poor thing. Finally one asked the little one about the future of jazz. She batted her eyes and started talking about her new hat. It was a huge cowgirl thing, big and floppy and pink and very expensive looking. She pushed it back and posed. Posed again. And again. The cameras went mad. End of press conference.

You can do amazing things with a pink hat.

The big pink hat.