I’m sitting here staring at a pair of Robert Benchley’s shorts.
“How To Start The Day” and “How to Raise a Baby”, both one reelers and both really funny.
But to be honest I only posted this because I wanted to write that I was sitting here staring at a pair of Robert Benchley’s shorts.
I met Jack Riley a couple times, some cool little chats, once at Charlie O’s, and once after a Jack Sheldon set at the old Catalina’s on Cahuenga. Last time was at Chuck Niles’ funeral. I didn’t know where the men’s room was. He’d asked. Maybe over there, I said. Over there? Yeah, that looks like the kind of spot a men’s room would be. Yeah, it does, he said, and wandered off. Some time later he walked by again. You find the men’s room? Yeah, it was over there, he said. Was it nice? He gave a Mr. Carlin shrug. I’ve seen better, he said.
Never ran into him again.
Great. Put It Where You Want it again. It’s been days now. I deliberately left a big stack of LPs of all kinds right in front of the turntable and what do I do? Just drop the tone arm on the record already on there. You try to take it off again after hearing those first descending chords on that way groovy electric piano. Then in comes the way funky guitar picking out the single noted melody at a mellow strut. This has been in my head since it was a hit on an AM station in funky town Anaheim during Richard Nixon’s first term. I lived in funkier town Brea but the station was in Anaheim. KEZY. They spun the tune on the hour for a week or two and it dug itself in so deep in my brain it even survived all the seizures later. And I’m gonna take it off now? I’m reliving my virgin youth. I was so young I didn’t even know the title was a double entendre. Irony is one of the last things to develop in the human brain, you know. At some point maybe 40 thousand years ago metaphors happened and with them the capacity for irony and Homo sapiens became insufferable. No wonder Neanderthals became extinct. Imagine sharing a cave with us, let alone DNA. That’s some brow ridge you got there honey. You could recite Shakespeare from that thing. Forty millennia later I’m thirteen and digging Put It Where You Want It like a clueless Neanderthal, wiggling my little white butt and humming along. The deejay comes on and says something filthy. I can’t tell. This is how civilization began. Cue the Also Sprach Zarathustra. Or maybe just flip the Crusaders album over to the B side. Or D side. Whatever. It’s a double album, and those were confusing times.
Burt Reynolds was bald. Way bald. Even the body hair was a toupee. Lonnie said so. She was mad at him and told everybody. I don’t think it fazed his image an iota. Like Cary Grant, Burt Reynolds’ image, that look, was hewn in marble, impermeable. It was hard to believe he was eighty two when he died. We can’t even imagine him old. His Cosmo centerfold sprung up like mushrooms minutes after his death till Facebook, like a high school principal in 1972, took them all down. It offended Facebook’s standards of decency, they said, though perhaps it was just enforcing Zuckerberg’s feelings of inadequacy.
But Burt really was bald. William Shatner bald, but much better toupees. Some guys can wear a toupee. I imagine he was the guy that customers in toupee stores said they wanted to look like. Skinny little guys, paunchy dumpy guys, they wanted to look like Burt. His hairpiece would do it, for sure. Laying across bed with a hand strategically placed and a hair piece. I hate to think how many of those old Polaroids have made it onto the web.
I loved seeing Burt Reynolds on the Tonight Show. Incredibly funny guy but better yet a total show biz anarchist. Once he came out and smashed a raw egg on Johnny Carson’s head, just because because he could. A super hunky Hollywood icon acting like one of the Marx Brothers. Then making toupee jokes.
Now that’s a movie star.
Watched the original Godzilla, sans Raymond Burr. Oddly profound flick, a giant monster movie that leaves you brooding and unsettled, unlike a zillion other Toho movies or, say, the Giant Claw, which left me wondering about the meaningless of a life spent watching The Giant Claw. Anyway, when the scientist with the eye patch (from the war, they say, something I don’t think is mentioned in the Raymond Burr version) drops the oxygen destroyer into the fish tank and reduces its occupants to skeletons I looked at our fish tank but they were still there fully fleshed. Relief turns to guilt a few scenes later as Tokyo is aflame again. First in 1923, then 1945, and now Godzilla. Everything comes in threes.
Watching Fantastic Voyage. Donald Pleasance is standing bald and evil next to Raquel Welch and if you squint your eyes they merge into three thirds of one organism. This film is the first half of Arthur O’Connell’s science fiction oeuvre; the second half being The Reluctant Astronaut. Had that film starred Donald Pleasance instead of Don Knotts it might have been a dark and brooding Dostoevskian study of the human condition. But it didn’t.
Oops, Donald Pleasance just got gooped to death.
I gotta say Chain of Fools still gives me the chills. Aretha’s delivery over that swamp blues groove, you treated me mean, she says, you treated me cruel, then the break, Aretha telling us her doctor says take it easy over a rhythmic hand clapped chant that goes all the way back to the roots, then back to the swamp groove, Aretha hurting even more, how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break, but until then she’s gonna take all that she can take, a hard whacked roll on the snare leading her back into the incredibly simple chorus, chain chain chain, the drummer dancing crazily off the cymbals, leading the way, and Aretha and the chanting chorus and the swamp groove and those crazy tinging cymbals fade off the end of the record, trapped forever in a chain of fools. The juke box clicks and whirs, you better think Aretha says, and the dance floor whirls and struts and gets down.
(I don’t remember this but apparently I wrote it in 2017)
The massive, incredibly rare instrument is over 11 feet tall with a range so deep it goes lower than humans can hear.
Octobass Atlas Obscura
Notes not above but below our hearing. Groovy. It won’t make the dogs howl, but it might piss off the pachyderms. Indeed, Jimmy Garrison began A Love Supreme on the octobass and before Trane could blow a single three hour solo a herd of crazed elephants charged into the studio and pulverized Elvin’s kit into something like Rashied Ali. They were trumpeting and roaring and stomping and Ascension was recorded then and there. Remember hearing Jimmy Garrison’s side long bass solo? Of course you don’t, it was on the octobass. He later repeated John Cage’s favorite parts on a jazzed up 4’33. It was the only time in jazz history that the people at the bar shut up during the bass solo. No one could hear a thing from the bass but Moby Dick said he whaled.
(from a Brick’ s Picks in the LA Weekly, c. 2007)
Several years ago i can remember walking into a posh Valley jazz joint and realizing, alas, no one else had wandered in. The place was so empty that the lounge area where the musicians set up away from the main dinner room seemed cavernous….which was too goddam bad, as one of the best pianists in jazz was up there with a remarkable quartet and the music was simply stunning. Chuck Manning was subbing for the regular saxophonist, and the stuff he came up with…free thinking rushes of chords that just filled up all that space in the room, or low tones, held, that flowed over the rhythm section in shades of blue…wow, and when he and the pianist met in the middle entirely new compositions burst out of whatever standard they were doing, completely new creations that took the breath away and then disappeared forever when they got back to the head and the traditional melody fell into place. Oh man, this jazz music is so ephemeral. All the recorded jazz that there is in the world—your entire music collection—it’s just an infinitesimal bit of all the jazz that’s ever been and will never be heard. Improvisation, it comes, and it goes. If you’re there, you’re lucky enough to hear it and maybe later you’ll remember a bit of it, can even pick out a trace on the piano, or try and write about it. Maybe a photo you took will spark a snippet in your mind’s ear. Maybe, just maybe, there’s even a recording somewhere. Those recordings….jazz fanatics can be driven mad by those, like that junkie following Bird around, desperately trying to catch every last note of his solos on a wire recorder before the bartender threw him out for not buying anything. Imagine that poor tortured bastard, haunted by all Bird’s solos that the world never hear again unless he can catch the sounds on his tinny little machine…and imagine his desperation as he was tossed again out into the street, hearing Bird’s alto spinning brilliance into the air that disappeared like a morning fog in the brutal summer sun….
Brick's Picks 