Someone is rebuilding the wreck of a house across the street. Busy with hammering and sawing by day, it’s a silent and dark lot by night. Near midnight a fire engine pulls out of the station on the corner, siren screaming. Instantly a wild and dissonant chorus of coyote yelps and yips and howls explodes from behind the fence, four curs’ worth. Absolutely beautiful in its utter lack of domestication, it makes a mockery of the screaming saxophone in here on the stereo. The saxophonist seems trapped by syncopation, the coyotes sound utterly free. The harmonies aren’t exactly working, but their chorus grows silent just in time for the bass solo, and as the darkness settles the bassist begins to explore.
Gangs of New York
Finally saw Gangs of New York and I am amazed that Martin Scorsese directed such a stupid movie. It was terrible. If his name hadn’t been on the masthead I can’t imagine all those critics and film freaks making such nice excuses for it. It was basically a Blaxploitation flick with heavily stereotyped Irishmen instead of Richard Roundtree. A Micksploitation flick. Of course, Shaft’s Big Score, Foxy Brown and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off never passed themselves off as genuine historical dramas. Scorsese, on the other hand, seems to swear with every shot that this is the way it all went down, right down to the slow mo. What arrogant pricks great directors can be.
Elliot Caine at the York
Caught the last set of Elliott Caine’s Quintet on Sunday night. Was an eerie ninety nine degrees at 8 pm, though a bone dry ninety nine and I dug it. The York, though, was plenty air conditioned and Elliott’s band swung like crazy in all that cool. The jazz got really intense toward the end, with drummer Kenny Elliott and a wild pianist from Portland named Sam Hirsch in one of those crazy drum and piano vortexes, driving and driving each other to crashing, spinning frenzies. Tim Emmons on electric bass was there between them, perfect, while Elliott blew these weirdly melodic lines from off stage and Scott Gilman his trademark staccato runs on the tenor. Then Elliott took the melody and soared with it, Gilman took it back and drive notes like a nail gun through the rhythmic blast and all came back in on the head for an explosive finish. The audience just about screamed its appreciation, and that was it. We paid our check and made our goodbyes and ventured out into the heat. People walked by in a Mojave Desert daze and talked of distant fires.
Barber shop quartets
Barber shop quartets. No one thinks of them anymore. Not even in jokes. Not even in commercials. They are gone. They were everywhere, once, sweet adelining in four part harmony, but they’re gone now. Extinct. Like dinosaurs in candy striped shirts. “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air. You can never capture it again” Eric Dolphy said. Though I doubt he was thinking about barbershop quartets.
There are lots of cemeteries out near Palm Springs–Sinatra’s out there, and William Powell–full of past generations, and there are thrift stores, full of those past generations’ stuff. Flip through the record bins and you will find barber shop quartet LP’s by the dozen. Four guys in candy striped shirts with vast mustaches waxed like my neighbor’s Camaro. They stand mouths agape, and there’s a barber pole and a guy in a barber chair swathed in shaving cream, looking disturbed. You will find all kinds of these albums in thrift stores in Palm Springs, every one of which opens with “Bill Bailey”, and finishes with “Sweet Adeline”. I was always terrified of the idea of a barber shaving me while singing Bill Bailey. Syncopation and straight razors never make a great combination. Sweet Adeline would be OK, though.
The old people–our fathers, probably your grandfathers–also had collections of albums of forgettable music with unforgettable models on the covers in various states of undress. Come hither they whispered. Zowie. How many of my generation lost their imagination’s virginity looking at dad’s records? We didn’t have internet porn then, and Playboys were locked away, so all we had was the thrill of those women and wondering if they really do drape themselves across pianos like that.
They don’t.
The bins are also full of the greatest generation’s Dixieland records. They made the world safe for democracy, that generation did, and then they listened to Dixieland. Not while saving the world for democracy–Basie and Ellington and the Dorseys and Glenn Miller scored those scenes–but afterward, when they settled down and grew vaguely nostalgic about the music their own fathers listened to. As the originals were all ’78’s few could play them, even by the fifties. So they went out and bought records by the Firehouse Five Plus 2, Turk Murphy and a thousand similar bands across the country. Those records are fun, actually, even a blast, and a lot of the bands are first rate. A little hokey, sometimes, redolent of good times and happy funerals and riverboats slapping the Mississippi into white foam. It was a fairly innocent jazz. The Firehouse Five Plus 2 played Disneyland. They never played in whorehouses or got in knife fights or suffered acute alcoholic psychosis that landed them in the loony bin for the rest of their lives. No, this was all straw hats and banjos and good times. But I like them. My dad loved the stuff. I have a mess of them tucked away in the record cabinet, segregated from the real jazz that my real jazz friends listen to. That way nobody gets embarrassed.
And then there were sound effects records that were ideal for early marijuana experimentation, replete with prepared piano dissonance and percussion that would boing from speaker to speaker. Remember those? No? My dad had some, a bunch of them to go with the giant hi-fi console and speakers in the living room. We’d sit in the dark and listen to funny sounds pan from one end of the room to the other. My favorite was the fireworks show. Ten minutes of people listening to fireworks, oohing and ahhing and breaking into applause, big booms and whistles and bangs in the background. Wintry nights in Maine pretending it was 4th of July. There are scores of these records in the bins. Not sure why I never pick any up. They certainly were popular with the exotica crowd a few years ago. They’d put on Tiki shirts like their dads are wearing in the old photographs, and mix long forgotten martinis and listen to Martin Denny records. Somehow these people always thought that I, a jazz fan, was therefore a Martin Denny fan. Funny how wrong people can be. I never made the mistake of thinking the Tiki crowd was nuts about Dixieland, however. Or Cecil Taylor.
You can listen to Martin Denny, though. Listen to a lot of those old space age pop records, if only for the jazz players mentioned in Stan Cornyn’s liner notes. With patience, you can hear some terrific soloing. Those records helped an entire generation of musicians who’d once had steady work in swing bands now make the rent. I still catch myself picking up the occasional LP because a favorite jazz player–Buddy Collette, say, or Don Fagerquist–are in the credits. Jazz on the cheap, sort of.
Then there is Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald. The gene that made those records listenable seems to have disappeared from the genome. What sounded like real music to our grandparents sounds like torture to us now. Their albums stuff the Palm Springs thrift store bins where they sit forever, unwanted. Let’s just say that Gilbert and Sullivan did not age well for the rock’n’roll generation. It must sound like gas music from Jupiter to the hip hop generation. I hear Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald and I thank god for Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald and the others who saved my people from operetta.
Though personally I never minded a barbershop quartet.
No Bill Bailey?
Zambi
Elis Regina and the Zimbo Trio performing “Zambi” in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1965. That’s Amilton Godoy on piano, Luís Chaves on bass and Rubinho Barsotti absolutely wailing on the drums.
The tune is by Edu Lobo with lyrics by the brilliant Vinicius de Moraes, and is about the legendary rebel slave, Zumba Ganga, who ruled a large swathe of inland Brazil during colonial times. This version was recorded in 1965. The military had overthrown the elected government the year before. When Elis sings Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! (Liberdade, Liberdade, Liberdade), the audience explodes in applause, then hushes quickly again. You can almost feel the eyes of the police, watching. At the close of the song the audience, swept along on the drums, erupts again and, with headphones, you can hear cries of viva a democracia! By 1969, though, you wouldn’t dare perform this song in public, and I have to wonder how many in this audience saw the inside of one of Brazil’s military prisons.
Elis Regina and The Zimbo Trio, 1965
Gordie Howe
Oh wow, Gordie Howe died. I didn’t think that was possible. I guess all men are mortal. Even Canadians. Even Red Wings. You’ve got to love what you’re doing, Gordie Howe said. If you love it, you can overcome any handicap. That’s what they tell the kiddies. He also said if you find you can push him around, then push him around. He was a hockey player.
I never saw him play, I came too late for that. But I remember Gordie Howe in the NHL geezers’ games at the all star break, well into his sixties, chippy, scoring goals, checking too hard, looking for a fight. Looking for the first ever Gordie Howe hat trick–a goal, an assist, and a fight–in an old timer’s game. No one took him on. No one was ever sure if he was kidding. All the guys were all retired anyway. Even Gordie Howe, after scoring 1,071 goals, though he hadn’t retired for good till he was fifty something. He retired twice before. Finally, there he was one year, still an NHL player at the incredible age of fifty one (that’s like a hundred and fifty one in people years) skating on the All Star ice in a Hartford Whalers jersey next to some snot nosed kid from Edmonton named Wayne Gretzky. Gordie Howe had scored over 500 goals before the punk was even born. Maybe if he’d clocked the kid one Gordie would still hold all his records. But he didn’t, and he even took it in good graces, almost, when twenty years later Wayno scored that 1,072nd goal.
But that was decades ago. Since then Gordie slipped from the scene, outlived his wife and faded away. He left a fistful of Stanley Cup Rings, various trophies, and more autographs signed than the rest of the NHL put together. He was always the last guy on the bus, they said, signing autographs for every kid out there in the snow.
A lot of Americans don’t know the name Gordie Howe. But all Americans know the name Babe Ruth. Well, Gordie Howe was Canada’s Babe Ruth. Gordie Howe once cold cocked Rocket Richard, laid him out flat. Imagine Canada’s Babe Ruth punching out Canada’s Lou Gehrig. So I guess he was Canada’s Mohammed Ali, too. Hell, he was Canada’s Sea Biscuit and Secretariat. He was Canada’s answer to everything we had. To everything anybody had. He was Mr. Hockey. The quintessential hockey player. Years later, Rocket Richard, in his own retirement speech, said that Gordie Howe was the perfect hockey player. He could do everything, the Rocket said, rubbing his jaw.
Everything except live forever. Not even Gordie Howe could do that. Rest in peace, Gordie Howe.
Gordie Howe, five hole. He’s a Red Wing, and I believe that is a Canadien uniform in net, and maybe Jacques Plante wearing it.
Norman Greenbaum and heavy friends
The things you find when you go digging through the dark recesses of your hard drive. Here’s a parody I wrote over twenty years ago of a very early local blog–a proto-blog, actually. This would have been right after the KISS reunion tour, when perfectly intelligent middle aged men put on KISS make up and collected in vast herds at the Forum to rock’n’roll all night and party every day. I am still mystified by that.
.
Foreigner at Lawrence Welk Village, 4/31/96
I’ve always been amazed at how “unhip” this band has been considered among the Alternative illuminati, especially since Mick Jones has been a member of both Foreigner and the Clash. When I was a college student in Ohio I considered Foreigner to be gods, so a Foreigner show was like going to church or something. Anyway, this being the one night all year I had not scammed tix to a free concert I figured I had better go. The Clash comparison was even more obvious this night, in that the chorus of “Cold As Ice” and the Oh Oh Oh!’s of “Complete Control” are almost identical, which is probably Jones’ signature hook. “Cold As Ice” also starts with a “C” and sounds a little like “Clash City Rockers”. Anyway, although I was in the beer line once again the show really rocked. Of course, a little herbal preparation after work left my buddy and I a little confused as to just which show we were attending this night–let’s just say we looked a little out of sorts in our KISS get up. Still, Foreigner are old and can rock harder than any of these wimpy lowlife Johnny-come-lately bands from Silver Lake.
Bachman Turner Overdrive at the Office Depot parking lot, 6/31/96
I have many fat friends. And just because you are fat doesn’t mean you can’t rock harder than any of these wimpy upstart bands from Silver Lake. Bachman Turner Overdrive are one of the great fat bands of our time. When I was a teenager in Sunday school I thought Bachman Turner Overdrive were gods. Fat gods, but gods nonetheless. I mean when BTO sat around the house they sat around the house. When the houselights dimmed and the cheers went up I was the beer line, but then so was Randy Bachman, buying hot dogs. In fact he bought so many hot dogs he spent most of the set in the head, “Taking Care of Business”. But what a show. Of course, I had gotten confused and was all dudded out in a Foreigner costume and make-up.
Norman Greenbaum at the downtown Greyhound Station, 9/31/96
Just because you are a one hit wonder doesn’t mean that you can’t rock harder than most of these wimpy jumping-on-the Silver Lake bandwagon bands. Of course, being a one-song wonder is a little rougher–still, I thoroughly enjoyed the 45 minute rendition of “Spirit In The Sky”, even if the forty-three minute guitar solo was a little tinny through the pignose amp. His friend the homeless kazoo player didn’t help, either. At least I didn’t miss any of the show standing in line for beer; and this time I remembered to wear my full-on Norman Greenbaum costume.
Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps
Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps
My wife’s quite the science fiction fan, so when she heard that the great Ray Bradbury was having a 90th birthday party at a science fiction bookstore in Glendale, she had to go. Place was packed with science fiction fans—a weird mesh of young hipsters, old hippies, bookish nerds, weirdos who talk way too much, completely normal looking people and at least one person in a fairy costume. Well, some kind of costume, this time it was an upper twenty something chick in a tinkerbelle-esque get up, that is a form fitting micro mini, green nylons, shiny pink fuck me pumps and bright green hair. Oh, and wings…big dayglo fluttery glittery and rather gorgeous wings that in the crowded store kinda brushed against everybody. She was chatty and terribly cute, leggy even, and she was from Texas. I heard her say that to three different guys. Me? I’m from Texas. Can’t you tell?…and she’d giggle a sexy giggle, lashes a-flutter, wings a-quiver. Of course, those pumps gave the whole thing away…this chick was trying like hell to get picked up, and picked up by a science fiction dude. It was hot and sweaty and crowded, there was wine, and I’m sure she succeeded. Which means that somewhere that night some science fiction fan got his nerdy brains fucked out by a nutso chick in a fairy outfit, complete with wings and those shiny pink fuck me pumps.
What a strange town this is.
Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps Again
There was a lady in the lobby here. Selling something, she and some normal looking type at a folding table with signs and stuff…. Not sure what it was as they were taking it all down and put it away. Actually the normal looking girl wasn’t normal looking at all, she was quite pretty. But you didn’t notice her. What you noticed was the other lady’s shoes. They were an insanely brilliant dayglo pink. I mean a violent pink. An eye hurting pink. A glow in the dark like a lighthouse pink. And they were high. Way high. You have to look up at these shoes. The stiletto’s could castrate with one glancing blow—and probably had. Teetering atop them was a tall, white—way white even—woman, thin, short black hair dyed an intense black, her face like alabaster, with gorgeous eye make up and insanely red lipstick. Her arms were covered in a delicate lattice of tattoos. This chick screamed sex, wild, sweaty, insanely positioned, kinkily done, hours long, crazy loud sex. She was this wild splash of x-rated sexuality in the lobby of a Walt Disney office building. She busied herself putting things away, quickly and decisively, and giving rapid fire instructions to the pretty little thing assigned to her. The people walking by made wide detours around her, thoroughly intimidated. They said nothing….but all eyes were on those shoes. You couldn’t help but look at them. They were either the most ridiculous shoes in history or the greatest shoes ever. You looked at her shoes and in that odd part of your brain you think my god she must be wild in bed. She must be the wildest. You hate her, or you’re scared of her, or you want her. Shoes are power.
And Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps again, even.
There have been no shiny pink fuck me pumps again, even. Would that there were. Then I could finally finish this goddamn story. Because everything comes in threes. Pairs, three pairs. Everything comes in threes which would make three pairs of shoes. Not six shoes. Otherwise everything would have to come in sixes. And nothing comes in sixes. Omne trium perfectum.
Epilogue: Finally, some Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps.
I was at Café Nela this past Saturday and there, slowing making their way down the steep driveway to the beer garden in the back (that’s where the coolest of the cool collect, that beer garden) was a truly outrageous pair of hot pink fuck me pumps. Tall, way tall, and a vivid pink, they were the fuckme-ist fuck me pumps I’d yet seen. Almost a parody. But they were sadly harmless. A man noticed these–they virtually glowed in the dark–and then noticed the woman wearing them was modelish, but her shoes weren’t intimidating. They weren’t even especially sexy. They were just tall and pink and gauche. A distraction. You looked at this pretty girl and saw her shoes and she became a tad less pretty. Besides, she was very sweet. Quiet and sweet and unobtrusive. Amongst the huge egos and personalities endlessly talking in the Café NELA beer garden, she was just a beautiful wall flower in some outrageously pink shoes. And though I’ve been waiting years now for that third pair of hot pink fuck me pumps so I can finish this goddamn story (an unfinished story can drive a writer mad) I need them worn with a vengeance. The kind of woman who struts into a room teetering atop some hot pink fuck me pumps and owns the room. Someone worthy of Shiny Pink Fuck Me Pumps one and two. This sweet pretty lady in slightly ridiculous shoes was not it. Damn.
Halloween flicks
Written late on Halloween night, 2013…
You can tell Halloween approaches…mountains of candy in the stores, grown ups in silly costumes on Facebook, and a perfect wallow of old Universal, Hammer and American International horror flix. The TV becomes heroin for a week, and I find myself fixing on the screen for hours on end. Real life dissolves into insignificance when Bela, Karloff, Vincent Price, the Lon Chaneys, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and a glorious cast of aged movie stars act up a storm no matter how absurd the story. Yesterday’s surprises were Joan Fontaine’s refined performance in The Devil’s Own (aka, in England, The Witches), though I passed out for a few minutes–it was way late–and awoke to a berzerk voodoo orgy with perfectly nice English people rocking out like a Busby Berkley production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Thankfully Joan put an end to it with a knife. The other delight was George Sanders as a wonderfully unctuous Satan masquerading as a butler in Psychomania. It’s late period Hammer and sub par, sort of a blend of A Clockwork Orange and Hells Angels on Wheels, though Americans will find it hard to be frightened by bikers who ride perfectly nice street bikes–no Harleys in Britain, apparently–and whose idea of terrorizing a small town a la The Wild Ones is rudeness interspersed with the occasional homicide. Still, I loved it. Great Hammer ending. They could be very creative with very little money.
Speaking of George Sanders–whose Addison DeWitt in All About Eve I based my Brick’s Picks persona on (seriously, I did)–his older brother Tom Conway was in a string of Val Lewton flicks, often getting his in the end, the cad. He certainly did in the Cat People yesterday afternoon, and in a fuck gone horribly wrong was torn to shreds when the gorgeous Simone Simon turned literally into a wildcat in the sack. Or would have, had they gotten there. One kiss and wow, all hell breaks loose, he screams, the neighbors overhear, the police are called, and poor Tom is there on the floor, crumpled and still. He wasn’t quite man enough…but you know those intellectual types, all talk. He walked with a zombie, too, last weekend. Incidentally, I Walked With a Zombie–which features an incredible soundtrack, vividly percussive–features in a smaller part the great calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who does the Greek chorus thing, singing tunes that give the background and predict the outcome of the unfolding tragedy. Splendid flick, one of my favorites. But if you like your zombies zombier, the classic White Zombie was on yesterday, with Bela at his most evil, and the scenes in his sugar mill dungeon are as scary as anything Universal put on screen in their glory days. Considering the year–1931–it’s a helluva picture.
Sir Lancelot in a zombie pic reminds me….will Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors be shown anywhere this week? You’ve seen it, no doubt. A campy British classic. Peter Cushing is a weird doctor on the train, and there’s five tales, the most famous has Christopher Lee strangled by a disembodied hand–not his–that he himself disembodied. My favorite of the five is about a trumpeter–it’s always a trumpeter–who cops a tune from a voodoo ceremony and claims it as his own. Apparently voodoo priests don’t understand how jazz works and seek vengeance and the apple is thoroughly scrappled, indeed. The trumpeter is an actor, but the band is Tubby Hayes’s. Tubby Hayes was probably the greatest of the English saxophonists, and if you’ve seen Alfie that might be him ghosting for Sonny Rollins on the exceptional jazz score (Sonny himself does the official soundtrack LP, but union rules apparently required English musicians on the actual score and Tubby was on the session so who knows…jazzbos still argue about this.) Tubby had a bad ticker and didn’t make it out of the early ’70’s–I’ve heard stories of him lying down backstage between sets, exhausted by the effort of blowing his solos and obviously near the end. But it’s not Tubby’s end that is nigh here, it’s the trumpeter learning a lesson about stealing a black man’s tune that Led Zeppelin never learned. But then Led Zeppelin never stole a Haitian tune. Maybe Dr. Terror’s tale is why. Jimmy Page is an occult freak, and they take this stuff seriously. Mojo his lawyers could handle, but voodoo is a bit freaky….
Anyway, if you are a fan of classic sixties jazz and classic Hammeresque horror (actually Amicus horror, but it’s the same thing style wise) then Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors is essential viewing. Not to mention more fun than most jazz documentaries. Oh…it turns out that the band’s session–recorded at Shepperton Studios, no less–has been issued on CD. I think it’s called Voodoo, and though I’ve never heard the actual disc it does feature that great tune the band plays that resulted in bad juju, and I don’t mean Wayne Shorter. Who probably loves this movie, actually. He’s passionate about old horror flicks. And ya know, one of my few regrets about resigning from the Jazz Critics Guild is that I never got to interview Wayne Shorter. I wouldn’t have asked him about jazz at all, just talked about old horror movies. A whole hour with Wayne Shorter talking about Dracula and Frankenstein and monsters. Spooky, creepy monsters. Trick or treat.
OK, the Children of the Damned are being perfectly rotten now, gotta run.
Tommy Sands
Tommy Sands a jazz singer on Hawaii Five-O laying down a hep cat rap worthy of Mezz Mezzrow. You know, Tommy says, it’s like sometimes you’re just riffing along, playing it by ear, and man, like, you hit notes ain’t on a scale, like you can hit anything, man, you’re ten miles tall. I have no idea what’s he’s talking about. Cut to a commercial, and then we’re in a crowded night club scene and I’m wondering who the vibes player is. Tommy is crooning Going Out of My Head. Crowd digs it. After a few more commercials he is shot by Jack Lord. Not sure why. It’s for the better. His girl screams, cradles his head. Jack calls for an ambulance. Tommy says “Nothing but blue sky, baby, blue sky” and expires. Cue the Ventures.
Moral of the story? You don’t fuck with Frank Sinatra.
Tommy Sands. A long drop from the Top of the Pops.
Brick's Picks 