Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Uan Rasey

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Was watching a rerun of the Bob Newhart Show last night. It was the Father Death/Mother Death/Uncle Death episode. When the trumpet came in near the end of the theme I thought it sounded like Uan Rasey. Something about the tone, brassy and perfect. Googled it. It was Uan Rasey. He died a couple years ago, but I’d met him a two or three times at Jack Sheldon shows. Rasey was Sheldon’s trumpet teacher, and Jack was still taking lessons well into his 70’s. Go figure. But fortunately I didn’t know at the time that Uan Rasey played the famous trumpet break in the uptempo Bob Newhart Show theme. I might have said something really stupid. Quoted Howard or done a Mr. Herd impression. TV shows you were raised on always make you say something stupid.  I have friends that quote F-Troop. I pretend not to know them till the moment passes. But I can quote entire scenes of the Bob Newhart Show. That’s all you need to get by in life. Or death. Every time I go to a funeral dialog lines from the show’s funeral episode go through my head. The one that killed off Mr. Giannelli. Jack Riley once told me–at Chuck Niles funeral, actually–that the actor had demanded more money so they dumped a load of zucchini on him. And while a hysterically funny episode, it’s best not to quote at funerals, especially if family members are weeping.

Rasey probably never even saw the Bob Newhart Show. It was on Saturday nights and jazz guys are never home on Saturday nights. They work then, or watch others work. But they’re not home. So I’d have quoted Howard Borden or stumped around like Mr. Herd and Rasey would have thought so this is what passes for a jazz critic now? And Rasey wouldn’t remember that handful of notes solo either. It was just the twelfth studio gig one day in 1974. Studios and movies were full of live musicians then, musicians with quick reading skills who you could hand a chart to, and they could nail in one or two quick takes. They’d do that for hours, everyday, making gobs of money and buying nice houses up in the hills with swimming pools and music rooms and three car garages and an actress next door on the one side and a director on the other. There was so much work it looked like they were set till the end of their lives. It was heaven for a studio musician, Hollywood. One quick session after another all day long, then jams in the clubs all night. Music and parties and fast cars. Hanging with movie stars. Those were the days.

But we were at Jax in Glendale and Jack Sheldon was blowing trumpet for a couple dozen people. Sessions gigs were thin. Those big band themes were history. Movies were full of synthetic trumpets and rapping. You couldn’t even buy Tijuana Brass knockoff LP’s at the grocery store anymore. Now you taught, played the occasional gig, took a studio gig when it came up. Sometimes an old movie star would pop in and talk about the old days.

Uan Rasey’s gone now. I remember the very nice obituaries. One of the best of the studio players. A complete pro. A musician’s musician, the trumpeters’ trumpeter. And I remember hearing the theme from Chinatown a lot. Probably his most famous work. A haunting tone, a haunting theme, a haunting final scene that bothers you a long time. That’s Uan Rasey’s sound. That’s the sound I thought I heard when the trumpet took off for a few fleeting seconds there in the Bob Newhart Show theme. I’m glad I got to meet him. The last time, not long before he passed, was at a Jack Sheldon show at Catalina’s. Rasey was in a wheelchair, surrounded by glad handers, well wishers and old friends. I stopped for a moment and told him how much I loved the sound of his trumpet. He looked me in the eye and smiled.

Oh…there’s a mellow Bob Newhart Show theme too. The trumpet is replaced by a flugelhorn. Bobby Shew played that one. But I’ll be damned if I’ll ever say anything to him. There’s a little Howard Borden in everyone, waiting to come out, but a jazz club is just not the place for it..

Wallace Beery

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As I fell asleep Wallace Beery was yelling and when I woke up Bette Davis was yelling and now I can’t fall asleep again. So I tried looking for a photo of them together, to see the loathing. No luck. But I found a picture of Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford, and she hated the both of them, Wallace and Bette. Hollywood was a minefield then. Everyone hating and sniping and drinking and fucking.

We live in an old Spanish style duplex on an old street in and old neighborhood in Silver Lake. That’s next door to Hollywood. They lived here, those movie people. There was no Beverly Hills then. There’s old studio buildings everywhere around us. Silent movie studios full of silent ghosts. What to you are old movies to us might have been drunken arguments right outside. Parties spilling out into the street, singing and laughing and fighting. Shut up, we’d yell. We’re trying to sleep. Irene Dunne lived down the street. Her place is surrounded by an immense wall. If the parties spilled outside her house they’d wind smack up against that wall, trapped. Servants would come and sort things out. People would get home eventually and all would grow quiet again, interrupted only by the mockingbirds. There are nuns there now in Irene Dunne’s place. No parties. Just prayers and reflection. I wonder if they watch TCM and imagine Irene’s fabulous bashes.Those old Hollywood mansions have kitchens like medieval castles. Vast feasts were prepared there. You stand at the stove frying your eggs now and feel small.

I look out our bay windows and reality ripples, the glass is so old. Glass is a liquid and flows with gravity at a very slow speed*. It shatters in our time, but oozes downward through the centuries. The people who looked through that window unrippled are long dead now, probably buried in Forest Lawn over the river there, between rows of movie stars. Wallace Beery is over there. So is Bette Davis. Jean Harlow is too. Not Joan Crawford, though. She’s back east somewhere, New York, I think. Not the city, but outside, White Plains or something. I don’t know if that is sad or not, but you’d think that if any movie star ought to be buried in Hollywood it’d be Joan Crawford. But then this piece wasn’t about her, was it? It’s not even about Jean Harlow, sweet Jean Harlow, and William Powell placing flowers on her fresh grave. No, this post is about Wallace Beery, or at least the title is.

It’s funny, you say Wallace Beery in this town and the first thing people will tell you is what a jerk he was. They don’t like him, Wallace Beery. Even if they love the movies he’s in, they can’t get themselves to admit he was good in them. Not even Robert Osborne and he loves everybody. No, not Wallace Beery, that unlovable brute. No, not him. Like Wallace Beery would have given a fuck what they thought. Shut up, he’d say. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

No, you shut up, Jean Harlow yelled. Everyone yelled. Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, both Barrymores. Joan Crawford yelled. Greta Garbo swooned, but Billie Burke yelled, and Billy Burke never yelled at anybody. Bette Davis yelled, and she wasn’t even in the movie. Or movies. It was a Wallace Beery film festival and they’re all mixed up. As am I. So I’m going back to sleep, and hopefully no one will be yelling at anybody. Not even movie stars.

Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford. Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford.

* Alas, I’ve been informed, this is a myth. Glass does not flow. But it is such a pretty couple lines I’ll leave it in. Literary license.

Barry Fitzgerald

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Ahh, Barry Fitzgerald. One of my favorite actors ever, and that brogue of his is so exquisite. Every time I hear him speak I wish I could write with the same poetry that he can say a sentence or two, or a fragment of a sentence, or even one word with just a hint of a trill that fades past the last syllable like tenor sax players letting a melody trail off, pads closing, just air. The people he’s trading bits of dialog with speak a hard American English, the consonants end words like a window slamming shut, and you can really hear the germanic underlying our common tongue, hard and unyielding. Fitzgerald’s gaelic is pure melody, with all the gaelic guttural ch’s and gh’s merely hinted at…when the Irish crossed the Atlantic those disappeared. I suppose English had no use of them, with its solid, punctuating consonants that turned an Irishman’s ch’s into k’s and the gh’s into sad little puffed F’s. Barry Fitzgerald scarcely hints at them. That’s what gives Irish English that melodiousness, I think, that sound of flutes softly talking, gives it that twitter and laugh and those words and passages that glisten….because it’s only the soft and melodious Gaelic sounds that make up the brogues you’ll hear at a wake or in a bar or an old movie full of cops and priests and gangsters. Like Barry Fitzgerald now, as this movie rolls, talking to a grieving, bitter mother. Her words are hard, angry, unforgiving. Hate–a hard, hard h, the long vowel unyielding, the t almost spat. I hate her, she says, I hate her, like a boot stomping on a wooden floor or a hammer pounding a nail into a wall. No you don’t hate her Barry trills, aspirating the h’s ever so slightly, the simple sentence as much breath as sound, ’tis no time for hatred. The Good Lord will see to her soul. His Lord is almost a lard, its r ever so slightly aspirated that it is almost impossible for a non-Irishman to replicate or even hear. The mother weeps inconsolably, and Barry Fitzgerald, sighing, says now now…..letting it trail off into nothingness, his hand on her arm finishing the sentence. She turns away and weeps and weeps, the lens shifts and she’s weeping off camera. Barry Fitzgerald sighs and turns and shuffles off. Sweet Jesus, he says, sweet Jesus.

Barry Fitzgerald in Naked City. Barry Fitzgerald in Naked City.