Frederic March

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If we’re talking about movie stars and not, say, jazz musicians or my friends, I’d say Frederic March does the best drunk ever, better even than William Powell, if you don’t count John Barrymore, John Gilbert and Errol Flynn, who cheated, being actual drunks. No one plays a drunk like a drunk drunk.

Now in The Best Years of Our Lives, stone sober Frederic March is drunk and giving a speech. It’s a helluva speech. The major says take that hill, Frederic March. Frederic March says no, Major, there’s no collateral in it. The hill went untaken and America lost the war. And alternate history if there ever was one. I’m not sure if you all appreciate this point. Before multiple universes had even been conjectured over at Caltech, or even on Star Trek, Frederic March laid out the possibilities–the hill not being taken–and the ramifications. In Frederic March’s  alternative universe, even if it was only for the duration of an inebriated speech to some babbity little bankers, the Japanese won World War 2. Frederic March, drunk, changed the entire fabric of the universe.

Now that is a drunk. But no wonder, Frederic March played the best drunk. No mean Foster Brooks he, that Frederic March. He played other roles too, and brilliantly, and is one of my favorite actors ever. But today’s lecture was about drunks, so there.

West Side Story

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The Misfits morphs into West Side Story and I flash back to the time I was nearly killed in a vicious gang dance. Those grade school square dance lessons–if it wasn’t duck and cover back then, it was square dancing–saved me from a mean pirouetting. When you’re a Jet…one of my last soprano moments was reading aloud from one of these scenes in English class in junior high. I was Tony. Bernardo was a kid whose voice had already plummeted. “Bottles!” he croaked. “Bottles, knives, guns!” I squeaked. I remember the teacher giggling. Within days my voice began cracking like thunder, dropping octaves in an instant. But I digress. I just wanted to point out that Natalie Wood has the greatest Spanish accent ever, up there with Sid James’ western twang in Carry On Cowboy. I always picture her dialect coach as Fortunio Bonanova in Citizen Kane, screaming No! No! No! No! No! at poor Dorothy Comingore. Also, it’s amazing what Rita Moreno could do with a pair of stockings. And did everyone sing like Marni Nixon back then?

Ornette Coleman

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June, 2015

A jazz promoter asked a fascinating question:

Do you think Bird would have dug Ornette? I have wondered about this. Not that Bird is the ultimate arbiter of good and bad, but Ornette was arguably the next major innovator in the music and Bird died JUST before Ornette came on the national scene.

And the consensus was yes, Bird would have dug it.

But I think maybe the commenters, nearly all of them jazz musicians, were looking at this from our own perspective today, thinking that Bird thinks like we do. I’m not so sure. Bird might have appreciated it, as a concept, maybe, but I think he wouldn’t have liked the delivery. Ornette was a huge jump from be bop, a totally different philosophy. Bird was reworking the rules of swing, but still within the rules. Ornette rejected those rules. That is a gigantic conceptual leap and there’s no reason to assume that Bird would have dug it. Don’t forget Max Roach punched Ornette out, sucker punched him, it’s said, in the green room after a set. Max was not pleased. I remember when I used to have long conversations with old be boppers–they’re few and far between now–I was struck by their conservatism, jazz-wise. It’s a generational difference. I’m not so sure that Bird would have been able to reject his own ideas and embrace Ornette’s rejection of be bop. Revolutionaries rarely accept the next revolution, especially as it is nearly always a reaction to what they had themselves created. Today we still see Louis Armstrong as a reactionary, as revolutionary as he was, because he loathed be bop and all it represented. I doubt Bird would have hated Ornette, but I can’t see him taking it too seriously.

I’m not a jazz musician, though, so I really don’t know. I’m just riffing, off on a tangent, doing my own thing. The ideas come and the words just flow with them. Let go of the narrative and let pure free thought express itself, see where it goes. That seems appropriate somehow.

So long, Ornette.

Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman, c. 1959.

Eater

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Back in 1977 I almost bought the Eater album, but I bought something else, who knows what. Then listening to a Sonny Rollins cut on YouTube just now, I saw the Eater album in the list of coming tracks. How that happened I have no idea. But I’m listening to the Eater album now. Never heard it before. Some of the cuts I know somehow, but not the whole record. About halfway through their take on Alice Cooper’s 18, I realized that when I didn’t buy this album I was only two years past 18, and next month I will be 41 years past 18 and I still didn’t buy this album. My friend didn’t buy it either, he stole it, way back when, which I suppose is kinda what it is I’m doing now, actually, since I didn’t pay anybody anything. Certainly not Mr. Eater or whoever. But when I tried to envision all the changes in technology between then and now it made my brain hurt, so I typed this instead and tried not to figure out where all these letters came from.

Not that Rollerball

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Rollerball was on. Cool. I was busy writing and wasn’t watching the television but within seconds of half listening I knew something was wrong. For one thing, the voices were all wrong. For another, there was no Bob Miller announcing. And there was a helluva lot of screeching. Tires screeching. Players screeching. Crowds screeching. I didn’t remember that much screeching. I also didn’t remember Rollerball being this mindnumbingly stupid. I looked at the television. Oh yeah, this was a remake.

I didn’t think I was going to hear Toccata and Fugue in D Minor anytime soon. Or Shostakovich. I think I heard Green Day, though. I didn’t stick around to see who the new John Houseman was. Caught a glimpse of some lady without a lot of clothes on. More loud music. Screeching. And LL Cool J. I remember when he couldn’t live without his radio. Rocking the bells with real bells on. And here he is twenty years later in an incredibly bad remake of a favorite science fiction movie of mine.

Yup, this was the Rollerball remake, 2002. You probably never saw it in the theater. It apparently shows up on IFC occasionally for irony’s sake. Unfortunately, by my age, I don’t feel that I have enough time to spend on irony. Irony is best left for the twenty somethings. Things are funnier then. I imagine a man of my reputation being felled by a stroke watching the remake of Rollerball. Staring dead eyed at whoever that is who’s not James Caan, Green Day blasting from the television. My friends wouldn’t remember what I’m writing now. No, they’d remember that I died watching the remake of Rollerball. You spend your life being an arrogant intellectual snob and they find you watching that. My mother used to warn me about things like this. Well, she said I should wear clean underwear in case I ever had to go to the hospital. You don’t want the nurses to know you wear dirty underwear. But the metaphor holds. So I don’t want people to know I was watching the remake of Rollerball either. I can just hear my smartass friends at my wake, snickering.

So I turn it off. The room fills with silence, nothing but the clacking of the keys as I write this. Though in my head I’m hearing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. But that’s not a pipe organ, it’s a Moog. Switched on Bach, Walter Carlos switching into Wendy Carlos. And before it mentally morphs into Hooked on Classics, I turn on the stereo. Afro-funk fills the room and brings this to a close.

James Caan in the real Rollerball (1975), which was set in 2018, actually.

James Caan in the original Rollerball (1975), which was set in 2018, incidentally.

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Love That Bob

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Avoiding Trump, I was going through one of those vast Mill Creek box sets–this one has every old tv show on it ever–seeking out things I’m missed. Not deliberately missed–I wouldn’t watch Petticoat Junction even if Trump were elected–but things I had skipped somehow. Like Love That Bob, aka The Bob Cummings Show. It’s from the late 50’s. There are only five episodes in the set (as opposed to nineteen thousand various Lucille Ball things) and all are really funny and at least two of them flat out hysterical. I’d always thought the funniest fifties sitcoms I knew of were The Jack Benny Program, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Phil Silvers Show  (aka You’ll Never Get Rich) and The Honeymooners.(which at the time was not its own show but a segment of the hour long Jackie Gleason Show.) There are other situation comedies of te era that are very funny and well written but longer on story development and less on a plot devised merely to hold jokes together–e.g. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Danny Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy, even Bachelor Father, but for pure yucks the big four I’ve found were Jack Benny (the fifties shows, which were much like the radio show; it got weaker as television grew stupider in the early 60’s), George and Gracie (the most surreal of the bunch), the Honeymooners (sort of a TV version of the Duffy’s Tavern radio show, actually) and The Phil Silvers Show, which was written at a vaudeville comic’s tempo only Phil Silvers could deliver. Those were my big four. I loved them all, can recite entire bits, and study the writing well beyond the point of fandom, since I think that great comedy writing is as perfect as the use of the English language can get. It has to be perfect to work. For me, the few brilliant sitcoms that have ever been are Shakespeare. I could probably rattle them off and still have a finger or two left for another. And the fifties sitcoms, the Ur-shows, those are the rarest. I’d found only four.
Then I saw The Bob Cummings Show and it is as funny as those four. Jokes flying like Sonny Liston punches. The pacing was so fast that Don Knotts’ speed freak schtick dragged in the dust in the episode he guested on (he was funny anyway but I never realized how leisurely a pace you had to set his nervous man routine in, too fast a pace and it didn’t really work). The jokes on the Bob Cummings Show could also get really weird. Like way weird. “I want to pour molasses in your hair and photograph you with a halo of flies!”, for instance. His timing and delivery are brilliant (he also directed a lot of the shows), the dialog crisp and not a word wasted. His Bob Collins, a professional photographer, is also an incredible horndog, horny beyond the bounds of Leave It to Beaver decency. We forget that side of the 1950’s, that it was not all Ike and Mamie and Ozzie and Harriet. True, John Forsythe’s Bentley Gregg in Bachelor Father was also a horndog, but then he never wanted to pour molasses on their hair and photograph them with a halo of flies. It’s a subtle difference.
Alas, there were but five episodes of the Bob Cummings Show on this Mill Creek twenty three disc box set. But there were nearly 200 episodes, I know. Perhaps Mill Creek has a mess of them on another of these box sets. Perhaps scattered across several box sets. And perhaps there are old geezers cramming episodes of The Bob Cummings Show onto homemade DVDs the way the last of the old time radio fans put zillions of their favorite radio shows on a single disc and sell them for a couple bucks on Ebay (I once got 800 Jack Benny Radio shows for $3.) They feel the cold wind of oblivion at their backs, knowing that when they die their whole universe dies, all those shows, their favorite entertainment idiom, forgotten. They know now how their vaudeville loving dads and uncles felt as the theaters closed down one by one. Of course, digital cable with its constant need for serial content–keep the people watching, but don’t spend any money doing it–keeps the memory of these shows alive. That never happened with vaudeville or Old Time Radio. And sixty years after it was on TV, when every single cast member is long dead, we can watch these shows on television and yuck it up like it was 1956 all over again and I was not even born yet.
They certainly do show a lot of old situation comedies on cable. At any one time I can find half a dozen shows running, all of them at least forty years old, and many of them going back almost to the Ur days of television sitcoms, the fifties. Television comedy goes back to the 1940’s, of course, but those were sketch comedies, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and like that, often as extraordinary as comedy has ever been, but that’s another essay. The first US sitcom, May Kay and Johnny, ran from 1947-1950, of which all but a single episode was lost for all time when the entire Dumont Network library was dumped in the East River. The first ever sitcom was on BBC, Pinwright’s Progress, beginning in 1946. It was broadcast live, unrecorded, and only photographs remain. So our history of situation comedies begins in 1950 when Jack Benny adopted his radio show (and that show’s writers) for television in 1950. (I believe the second show was Amos and Andy, which no one talks about anymore. I Love Lucy began in 1951.)
Amid the fluff and unfunniness and sometimes flat out stupidity of so much of the syndicated sitcoms shown over and over on cable, the Gilligans Islands and F-Troops and Brady Bunches and Leave it to Beavers, are some brilliant funny series, when you can find them, though at inane hours (invariably well past midnight, or even well nigh dawn). Hopefully someone at Cozy or Antenna or ME-TV or whatever, in their eternal quest for public domain entertainment, will start running the Bob Cummings shows. I’ve seen all the Jack Bennys and Honeymooners so many times I catch myself reciting the lines ahead of the beat, and I’m getting there with George and Gracie and Phil Silvers. I need something I’ve never seen before. I need that first time rush of seeing incredibly funny comedy for the first time ever, jokes I don’t know the punchline of, sketches I can watch just like they were watched first run, and not like a writer seeing them for the umpteenth time and stealing the bits uncredited for his own essays. I need some new old comedy in my life, something brilliant, something on every day. Something that makes me laugh outloud at 4 am and wake the cat, if we had a cat. Anything to keep me from having to watch the news.

Joan Marshall

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Fyl decided her husband is still too sick to be life of the party on a wet, cold night and so we’re sitting home on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t argue. Besides, there’s a Jack Benny marathon on Antenna TV. When the pizza came It was guest star Frankie Avalon singing, so I joined Fyl in front of her TV watching old Sid Caesar shows and munching on a Palermo’s special, thin crust, crispy, anchovies on half. Taking my empty plate into the kitchen later the Benny marathon was still on in the living room and I could hear Robert Goulet. Even an hour apart the difference in timbre, phrasing, range–hell, in sheer quality of everything–with Frankie Avalon was beyond glaring. Plus Goulet was much, much funnier in the follow up bit, a natural. Funniest of all, though, was Joan Marshall, the woman in the sketch and one of the great undiscovered comic talents of the sixties. Alas, she was gorgeous, and in that decade gorgeous and funny were not allowed to mix. In the thirties she might have been a screwball superstar, another Carole Lombard; in the fifties she could have been the female lead in a sophisticated comedy. But in the sixties only Jack Benny recognized how funny she was and let her run riot in a couple sketches. They said it really bothered Joan that she never got choice comedy roles, and she never seemed happy in her career being beautiful. Hollywood is full of beautiful women. It’s not full of naturally funny people. But sometimes what you are really good at and the times you live in don’t coincide. If only you’d been born twenty years earlier.

Yawning Man

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A Yawning Man cd from 2010. Nomadic Pursuits. Been seeing these guys forever, but where the first time I can’t remember, or if it was in LA or out in the desert. I remember a show once at a transmission shop in Cathedral City a long time ago. I’d never seen such a clean transmission shop, even the grease pit sparkled. You could eat off the floor. We probably did. Yawning Man played, and Fatso Jetson, and the desert rock vibes were loud and heavy and stoned and pulsating, hypnotic even, the melodies blowing over the creosote, drifting on the prevailing groove. Herb, thick and resinous, permeated everything, and we drank beer from twelve packs and stayed way too late and then drove home, past the turbines and the dinosaurs and the inky black mountains till the lights of the San Bernardino Valley spilled out before us, with the ocean only an hour away.

Hard Day’s Night

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About fifteen minutes into Hard Day’s Night it occurred to me I had never seen it before. I was kind of amazed at that feat of unhipness. I’ve seen so many other Richard Lester flicks. And I liked the movie. It’s funny, for sure, and Paul’s grandfather was as weird a maguffin as any movie has ever had. Alas, I’ve never been a fan of the early Beatles tunes, they’re way too pop for my grizzled sensibilities, though without them it wouldn’t be much of a Beatles movie, would it? The title track is catchy, but I’m embarrassed to admit my favorite musical bit was the inventive little thing Paul McCartney goofed around with on the piano early in the flick. I listened to that three or four times, in fact. There was also a terrific saxophonist in the television studio band, and left me wondering who it was. Maybe John Dankworth?

Meanwhile I kept waiting for the lads to do Hide Your Love Away, my favorite by far of their old tunes, but by the time the credits began rolling it dawned on me that Hide Your Live Away was from Help!, which apparently I had seen and confused with Hard Day’s Night. Anyway, it’s a fun movie, a very unique bit of comedy, and certainly no other rocknroll band managed to be anywhere near as funny on celluloid. But the Beatles, musically, were much more interesting once they’d started doing drugs. Two years after Hard Day’s Night they recorded Tomorrow Never Knows. Amazing how fast things change sometimes.

I gotta admit that it’s kind of embarrassing to see Hard Day’s Night for the first time at age sixty one. Even more embarrassing when your favorite Beatle is the old man. In my defense, though, I did see all the Stones films, even Charlie Is My Darling. I was one of those high school kids in the seventies who hung out at the hippie art houses when they showed rocknroll movies. I saw them all. I could sing along to Country Joe and The Fish in Zachariah. Saw Jimi Plays Berkeley four times. Watched Stephen Stills sucker punch a freak in Celebration At Big Sir. Saw Yellow Submarine I don’t know how many times. But Hard Day’s Night not even once, somehow. Hard to be so ungear.

Eyes Wide Shut

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If Kubrick had died a year or two earlier he never would have made Eyes Wide Shut and his legacy would have been untarnished by such a mediocre flick. Not to mention the dirty old man as director ickiness about the whole thing. And the dialogue, sheesh. Only Pollack sounds like he not acting, and it has to have the worst last line by any genius director ever. The whole mess is just stupid, and there are few things more embarrassing than a genius being stupid. It’s great if you’re really stoned, though, which I was the first time. Unstoned, it’s just endlessly tepid, the lousy performances, inane dialogue, absurd plot devices, meandering subplots and more T & A than Vegas, baby, if that’s your thing.