I just wanted to say that Royale Watkins does a dead on perfect Jimi Hendrix in Howard Kaylen’s My Dinner With Jimi. A great flick, a Turtles biopic, a true story, with the most eerily perfect Jimi Hendrix I ever saw. On top of all that the movie is really funny. Great screenplay, tightly written I believe by the Turtles lead vocalist Howard Kaylen himself who appears to remember so much from the sixties you’d doubt he was there, except, of course, that he was. Great casting too. All around a terrific film. How it never became a sensation I don’t know. Almost nobody I know has ever seen it. I’d show you a clip but it’s better to watch the entire movie for the full impact of Royale Watkins’ performance. The story builds up to it. It’s a funnier rock’nroll flick than Almost Famous, which I thought was really good too, except this story really happened. It’s also set a couple years before Almost Famous, long before rock’n’roll had become jaded, so there’s all that innocence to mine for material, something not possible in any film set even a few years later, or in any music film since. A generation’s innocence is a rare and fleeting thing, scarcely believable to later audiences. Yet it works here. It works in the great Canter’s scene (dig Jim Morrison, nothing like the Gothic myth). It works in the great draft board scene. And in London where that innocence is shattered by the very purveyors of all that innocence, the Fab Four, after which Howard Kaylen’s dinner with Jimi provides the story’s denouement in that it all comes up again. The film came out it 2003, I think, and I have no idea why it never caught on big. Weird how that works. Some hit, some don’t, ya never know. How is the weather.
A massacre in Bamako, echoing Paris. Alas, this is far from the first time in recent years that Mali has had a run in with blood mad extremists…just a couple years ago, you’ll remember, fanatics ran riot over the northern half of the country, declaring their own Islamic state, Azawad, killing and brutalizing non-believers and apostates and the unlucky, and notoriously destroying the Islamic treasures of Timbuktu. They looted the ancient university, blew up tombs, and ransacked the Islamic libraries, burning manuscripts the way conquistadores had set fire to the codices of the Aztec and Maya. They even banned music. A Mali without music seemed an impossibility, but they were quite serious about it. They said they’d cut out my tongue, a singer said after the town was freed again by Malian and French forces. The insurgents fled into the desert, haunting the mountains and the shifting dunes, moving by night, glowering, remembering, planning revenge. Continue reading →
Woke up with a tenor saxophone solo going through my head and I can’t remember whose and it’s driving me nuts. It’s just a fragment, fifteen or twenty seconds of somebody blowing something really nice. I can’t really even hear the rhythm section. I’m not one of those cats who wakes up hearing a Hank Mobley outtake and recognizing it. I know guys like that, though. Most of them are players. Jazz players know everything about jazz. Well, they don’t, not everything, but to a layman they might as well, we can’t tell the difference. The other kind are jazz critics. Not all of them, but the serious ones. The encyclopedic Scott Yanows and Don Heckmans and Kirk Silsbees and Richard Ginells and Tom Meeks et al of the jazz universe. We’d all be hanging together in the Playboy Jazz Festival press room looking expertly and the conversation would turn to jazz players, then jazz sessions, then jazz sides, then jazz solos, then outtakes. That’s when you find out that basically you’re just a glorified rock critic. I mean these guys know everything. It’s like listening to baseball fanatics rattle off stats. I’d stay quiet, then slip off and stuff the complimentary beers into my jacket pockets to take back to our seats. You weren’t supposed to take them outside but I hate rules. Give the wrong time, stop a traffic line the poet said. Once I copped a whole bottle of wine. Then went back and got another. You just can’t trust some people. That wine sure went down nice with Wayne Shorter’s set, though. Wayne was so out, I mean he didn’t give a flying fuck if the crowd liked it or not (they didn’t) and his band–Brian Blade on the drums, John Patitucci on bass, Danilo Perez on piano–were so intense, and I’d slipped into the seats they reserve for VIPs and network newsmen and beauty queens…like the beauty queen who sat next to me, in fact. Lovely. We chatted, me and Miss California. It wasn’t a bad gig, really, being a jazz critic.
Stan Getz. Obviously. Ligia. That’s what I’m hearing. The Jobim tune. Once the guitar filtered in I recognized it. João Gilberto’s playing is so instantly identifiable. Well, it is now, though it would have spared me some annoyance if I recognized it an hour or two ago. Of course now the whole tune with guitar and bass and drums is going through my head over and over. But that’s OK, I absolutely love this take. I have it on a comp–think it’s The Lyrical Stan Getz–and not on the original. I can hear the long solo blowing through my cerebral cortex now. There are worse earworms. Ça Plane Pour Moi, for one. You even think of that name and the infuriatingly catchy chorus will skip around inside your skull like a broken record. Like it is now, in fact. Brick, you’re an idiot.
Richard Ginnell and Scott Yanow surrounded by rich people and looking way too smart for their own good. Playboy Jazz Festival, 2011. Photo copped from scottyanow.com.
Don Edmondson and his annoying little camera. Here I am, mouth wide open, at the Musicians Union on Vine Street in Hollywood. I don’t think I was singing, but have no idea what I am saying, or drinking, but John Altman can’t get a word in edgewise.
I love those Musicians Union gigs. The Professional Drum Shop is across the street. They have one of Shelly Manne’s old kits in there, I think. And at the Union Hall that afternoon Flip Manne knocked me on my ass with a jazz drummer’s screwdriver–eight ounces of vodka with a splash of orange juice. Is that strong enough, she asked? I asked for a little more OJ. You like ’em watered down, huh? I apologized. Shelley liked his with just a splash of orange juice, she said. Well, he was a jazz musician, I said. You’re not a jazz musician? No, ma’am, I’m a writer. I’m so sorry, she said, and dumped out most of the vodka and filled it to the brim with orange juice.
Those jazz dames can be rough.
A jazz critic explaining to a jazz musician why he plays like that.
Hanging out at a jazz spot with a good buddy of mine and realized he is not a lively seventy something, he’s a livelier almost ninety-something, telling me stories about the summer of ’54. Bird lived one floor up, Prez one floor down. Prez on steamy summer nites in jockey shorts and a pork pie hat; Bird, shy, high, in love, brilliant. Miles would come by, just to hang. I wasn’t even born yet. I ask him what his secret is. He holds up his beer. Good living, he says, and the sax player takes off into Sweet Georgia Brown.
Wandering through Hollywood Forever cemetery on Easter Sunday, past the DeMille family plot, I came across two guys–one English, the other an Angeleno–deep in conversation about Sidney Bechet. Sidney’s not in Hollywood Forever–he’s interred somewhere in France, I think–so why they were talking about him I have no idea, but delighted, I joined in. We talked about what a great soprano saxophonist he was, and what a hellraiser, and what a lousy shot. The French adored him, the Englishman said. But they put him in jail, I said. Yeah, he said, but they also raised him a statue. We laughed. A grieving family around a fresh grave gave us the evil eye. We moved on. More jazz talk. I let drop I’d been a columnist. I know where all the bodies are buried, I said. Well, they were buried everywhere. It’s a cemetery. I did show them where Art Pepper’s ashes lay, in the mausoleum. We talked about what a great alto saxophonist he was, and what a hellraiser, and how he got jail but no statue. I dropped Laurie Pepper’s name, just to be hip. It echoed in the marble corridors. Outside on the lawn again, we passed show biz people on location for their very last scene. There’s Mickey Rooney, I said. There’s Fay Raye. And there are the Fairbanks, at the end of that long reflecting pool. We stood at its edge, reflecting. Are there any Barrymores in the cemetery, the Englishman asked. Are you kidding, I said. They wouldn’t be caught dead here.
Tom Koch, RIP. Not that I ever heard of him, actually. But I heard him, heard his stuff. Some stuff too. He wrote for Bob and Ray from 1955 on. Thousands of sketches. Bob Elliott says the material came by mail. Says he met Tom Koch–pronounced Cook–three times. Three times in three decades. Ray Goulding never met him at all. It’s Bob and Ray, who knows if that is true or not, but it’s a great story and that’s what matters.
Bob and Ray were natural improvisers, and their early stuff was free form when jazz musicians were still playing be bop. On NBC the execs demanded order, though, so in 1955 Bob and Ray somehow found Tom Koch. He’d provide sketches for them to take off on. The head arrangement. Be bop. It worked brilliantly. The Bob and Ray Shows on CBS every day from 1959-1960, each a quarter hour long, are hands down the funniest stuff I have ever heard in my life. Seriously weird. Take it from me. I know. I once spent an entire day at work in a silent office listening to Bob and Ray. The ’59-’60 episodes. Eight hours’ worth. That’s like eight thousand shows in dog years. I emerged at day’s end in a post-LSD state. I think it damaged my chromosomes. Soon afterward I quit the LA Weekly and joined the priesthood and no one has seen me since. And no wonder. The human brain is not designed for that much concentrated Bob and Ray. You don’t mess around with that stuff. I was like Cary Grant after 300 acid trips, acting odd on the set. Judy Judy Judy he chanted, scaring the extras. Me, I left the office mumbling like Webly Webster. I should have known. The humor on Bob and Ray is deep. There are sages high in the Himalayas who spend their whole lives trying to get one joke. They say the humor on Bob and Ray is so deep it might be a couple centuries before the rest of civilization catches up with it. We’ll have big throbbing brains and communicate by telepathy and Bob and Ray will be gods. Then the world ends.
The Reluctant Astronaut is on. Some channel is having a Don Knotts marathon. (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is next, but I’m not in the mood for gothic horror.) I remember seeing The Reluctant Astronaut at a Saturday matinée in Woodbury, New Jersey. And I remember thinking it wasn’t the most exciting science fiction movie I’d ever seen, but at ten, perhaps I was already too sophisticated. This was the same theater where a couple months later Son of Flubber caused a riot. Perhaps the kids knew it wasn’t a first run picture in that Summer of Love in 1967. Perhaps we were just blowing off steam. Perhaps we just wanted to die before we got old. Whatever, it sure pissed off the manager. He turned off the projector, turned on the house lights and stormed on down to the front of the theater and glared at us. If we didn’t stop running and shrieking and throwing popcorn he’d kick us all out and there would be hell to pay when our parents came to pick us up. The place grew quiet, the hail of popcorn subsided. That’s better, he said, and the lights came down, the film came on, and there was Fred MacMurray again, Professor Ned Brainard, turning people on to flubber, and everyone was bouncing and floating and high as a kite. Feed your head, Ned said, feed your head, and the kids laughed and shrieked and the popcorn came down like rain.
I love the blog Beguiling Hollywood. Vickie Lester posts these great pictures of stars of yore–publicity shots, movie stills–and describes them with a quick caption or a little essay and they’re always good. Today’s was a still from the film noir classic Double Indemnity. Barbara Stanwyck (in shades) and Fred MacMurray in a supermarket on Los Feliz. She’s Phyllis Dietrichson, the murderess. He’s Walter Neff, the insurance salesman gone bad, a murderer. Walter sets the scene for us.
…but we couldn’t be seen together any more and I had told her never to call me from her house and never to call me at my office. So we had picked out a big market on Los Feliz. She was to be there buying stuff every day about eleven o’clock, and I could run into her there. Kind of accidentally on purpose.
Now, setting aside the fact that Barbara Stanwyck had been wearing nothing but a towel in her opening scene (the Hays Commission complained it was skimpy), let’s talk about that market. Assuming it was based on an actual place, and I believe screenwriter Raymond Chandler’s locales usually were, this would have been some place in Atwater Village, I’m sure. Los Feliz Blvd is pretty much old residences the entire stretch except for the south side of the downward slope as it comes up on Riverside, which is all apartments now, an unlikely location for a market. Therefore it would have to be on Los Feliz Blvd itself. It might have been. But Beach’s Market, a big market (the script calls for a supermarket), was on Glendale Blvd at Glenhurst, not on Los Feliz. That’s just across the river (and freeway) from us. It was still new in 1939, and the old Red Car trolley ran down Glendale Blvd. People living in our very place probably walked down to the station at the end of our street, hopped the Red Car to Beach’s and back, buying the booze and wine that stains our wood floors half a century later. We like to think they were screen writers or starlets (well, I do.) The cigarette burns on the floor imply a certain amount of wantonness, anyway. The Red Car was gone by 1955. Beach’s (done in by earthquake and competition) was gone by the early nineties. For years the location remained an empty lot, a pumpkin patch in the fall and christmas trees in the winter. Several years ago one of those as un-art-deco-as-possible mini-malls went in, and an ugly thing it is. Gaudy, tacky, shiny, suburban. But there’s a pretty good (and way cheap) Salvadoran place about where Walter Neff would have parked his 1938 Dodge coupe, and Phyllis her La Salle or the Plymouth. I know this because I obsessively found a photograph of Beach’s Market. In fact I just wasted a good chunk of the morning researching all of this, working at my desk in the living room where once starlets canoodled with assistant directors. And of course I’m assuming there was no big market on Los Feliz. That’s a big if.
In the novel, James M. Cain (who also wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice) didn’t bother with a market at all. He had them meet instead in Griffith Park, two hundred yards up Riverside Drive, near Los Feliz Blvd Don’t park on Los Feliz, Neff says. The pony ride is there now. It wasn’t when Cain wrote the novel. But it was brand new when the script was being written a couple years later. Maybe they switched the scene to a supermarket because a no good dame and a pony ride don’t go together. Maybe they just liked the idea of a no good dame and her sucker of a boyfriend surrounded by canned goods. Stepping out of the story and into reality, however, the scene was shot at Jerry’s Market on Melrose Ave. It, like Beach’s, is long gone, though instead of a mini-mall there’s a film studio now. I suppose that’s ironic, sort of.
This is the problem with living in the neighborhood in which a classic movie takes place. You begin obsessing over where these entirely fictional scenes take place. It’s one thing if they’re location shots, like Walter’s apartment building on Kingsley (still there) or Newman’s Drugs at Hollywood and Western where later Hollywood Billiards stood (and talk about real life film noir…), there’s a store there now, something much more innocent. Phyllis’s place was up Beachwood Canyon, the stairwell she strode down in that honey of an anklet was in a soundstage but modeled after the interior of that house. But when they’re backlot it’s pretty absurd obsessing over them like this. Just a few days ago we were at the House of Pies on the southwest corner and I looked across the street and didn’t see Nino Zachetti and felt a little relieved. The guy was a punk. But that scene wasn’t shot anywhere near there. Maybe this is how those hippies who move to New Zealand to hang with the hobbits start. I had a friend who met a stoner in Humboldt County who said he’d met Bilbo Baggins at a séance. My pal didn’t have the heart to tell him that Bilbo Baggins was a fictional character. But I’m not that far gone net. Though half of Hollywood might be.
Incidentally, James M. Cain based his Double Indemnity on a real story, a sensational 1920’s murder with a lady enlisting a lover to get rid of her husband. It was grisly and appalling. She was caught, sentenced to death and electrocuted at Sing Sing. A photographer snuck in a camera and snapped a picture as the current ran through her body. You can see, almost feel, the thousands of volts, her body a blur of movement. The next day the New York Daily News splashed it across the front page beneath the one word headline “DEAD!” Murder is so much more fun in the movies. Stylish even. We stare at Barbara Stanwyck’s legs as she talks of killing her husband. Walter cracks wise, a tough guy. She purrs, deadly. The murder is quick, surprisingly easy. A nice clean job of it. They dump the body on the railroad–near the Glendale railroad station about a mile or so from here–and get on with the cycle of self destruction. We never see the execution. Walter, Edward G. Robinson says, you’re all washed up. I love you too, Neff says.
Speaking of love, Ruth Snyder received 164 marriage proposals on death row. Not even Billy Wilder could turn that into a movie.
Jack Benny was some act, man. He walks out on stage to applause and immediately begins insulting the audience. Goes into a weird riff that winds up with him claiming that he lets seals in for free because they applaud so well. The audience applauds. Jack thanks the seals. Then he introduces a character named Finque (“that’s Fin Kay in French”) played by Mel Blanc who begins insulting Jack Benny and doing weird animal impressions. Then out comes Don Wilson in tux and tails and top hat and Jack makes fat jokes. Don Wilson brings out his son Harlow (played by the brilliant Dale White) and Jack makes more fat jokes. Jack dislikes Harlow. Harlow dislikes Jack. Don and Harlow do the old Ted Heath number “Me and My Shadow”. Jack makes a fat joke and accidentally busts the windowpane that had been surgically installed in Harlow’s stomach for an aspirin commercial. Don gives Jack an evil look and leads Harlow offstage. Next up is Louie Nye as part of a bizarre acrobatic shooting act. Louie shoots the acrobat. End of act. Then up comes an old lady hot jazz band (the Sentimental Sweethearts) who seriously tear it up on Sweet Georgia Brown. Jack is out front on fiddle. Trumpeter blows hot. Weird bass solo. Zany antics. Jazz could be really funny back then. Imagine that. The ladies make their exit. The audience applauds. Jack thanks the seals.
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