Pete Christlieb

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(2013)

Pete Christlieb was so goddam good at the Desert Rose tonite. The applause after every solo and every tune was loud and prolonged, impassioned even. I know I was transfixed…Christlieb has this huge sound, strong and muscular, and a tone you never really hear anymore. We caught the last set, and he owned that room, filled it with sound, danced around the melody like a boxer always on his toes, jabbing, pulling, throwing the sudden punch, or the slow motion sidewinder that lifts the tune right off its feet. And sometimes he was that fighter on a leisurely run down the beach, throwing jabs and dancing, one two, one two, one two three and pow. The band was so hot, Jon Mayer especially, playing like only he does, these brilliant solos like shards of blues and jazz strung out in  perfect, crazy, beautiful forms. No sweeping arpeggios for Jon Mayer, rather he breaks them up and reassembles them, like you know jazz pianists did before they were all university trained. Chris Conner was in heaven on his 180 year old bass just out of the shop–repairing that thing took two years, and when he pulled out the bow and followed Christlieb’s fiery solo you can hear just why it takes two years to revive a 180 year old bass….the thing resonated like you can’t believe. This ancient, beautiful sound quality, so rich, a perfect match to Christlieb’s own rich tone. And drummer Mark Z Stevens–this is his trio, and his  weekly gig–was so freaking tight, tighter than I’d ever heard him here, that in the pocket doesn’t do him justice. What a quartet this was.  But it was really all about Pete Christlieb, that sound, that style, that presence. Maybe a dozen or so bars in I was thinking Dexter Gordon and suddenly he’s doing Dexter doing Good Bait and I nearly fell out of my chair…a bit further on he’s quoting Sonny Rollins. And why not? He’s in their class. That’s how good Pete Christlieb is, he’s one of the greats. One of the true greats. A hundred years from now they’ll be lining up all these tenor players like gods, and Pete Christlieb will be in that pantheon. Yet  not even jazz fans in this town realize that, most of them. If they knew–if they’d seen what I just saw tonight, heard what I heard–they would know that, know what a lifetime of saxophone dominance the man has coming out of that horn, and they’d beg for the chance to sit four feet from the bell of his saxophone, eyes closed, sipping whiskey and wondering how it was that they happened to be in such a right place at such a right time. But that’s jazz, man, that’s the nature of improvisation. It just happens, and you have to be there. And I was. For that last set, I happened to be right there, in a perfect seat, with a perfect drink, in perfect company, hearing perfect jazz saxophone. Pure jazz it was, people, the purest, and it was beautiful.

The Mark Z. Stevens Trio (sometimes plus a horn, as tonight) is there every Saturday night from 7-11 p.m. at the Desert Rose, corner of Prospect and Hillhurst in Los Feliz, right across from the new Cap’n’Cork. In fact it stands on the grounds of the old Cap’n’Cork, where Ernie Kovacs bought whiskey and cigars and dreamed up his next crazy show on ABC, all proto-psychedelic and surreal and hysterically funny. I think about that every time I’m there eating one of their hamburgers or just drinking a whiskey (Irish, Kovacs preferred sour mash) and watching and listening. The food is good, the bar is full, the waitresses gorgeous, and the jazz is just fine.

(And in 2016 the Trio is still at the Desert Rose every Saturday night.)

Unfabulous

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Silver Lake is being straightified. It’s unfabulous. Plus you used to be able to get a great burger and get called sister at the Blue Nun.

I wanted to show you a picture of the Blue Nun but apparently it never existed. Nothing undigital ever was. Maybe’s it’s for the better. Like where that steam punk guy is hitting on that breezy little blonde. I saw something unspeakable right there. But that was in analog times, fabulous, and not online. Ain’t that right sister, the guy at the Blue Nun said. I nodded and took a bite out of my burger. The conversation was about writing and liberation. Leather and ear studs and big hairy words. Big men, big smart men. I listened. More coffee, sister? I nodded.

There. Now it’s digital. But memories are never in fabulous three dimensional full color. And all you’re getting here is my digitized memories of the Blue Nun. Pale. Wan. Distant. Unfabulous.

Phyllis Diller impersonator

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We had a Phyllis Diller impersonator crash one of our parties once. No idea who was. He got super stoned and stopped impersonating Phyllis Diller and was just a guy in a frumpy dress and boa staring into space.

People kept asking me who’s the guy in the dress. I said he’s a celebrity impersonator. Who’s he impersonating? Phyllis Diller. Phyllis Diller? But Phyllis Diller is funny, they said, and all that guy is doing is sitting there. He’s stoned, I said. Phyllis Diller smokes pot? I couldn’t answer. I have no idea if Phyllis Diller smoked pot. I just found recently out she played the piano. I doubt the celebrity impersonator played piano, though you never know, this is Hollywood.

Well, this is Silver Lake, actually, part of Greater Hollywood. A suburb of Hollywood, on Hollywood’s eastside. East Hollywood remains as it has always been, working class, the opposite of its glitzy westside opposite. But just beyond East Hollywood were Los Feliz, full of movie stars, and Silver Lake, full of character actors and gay bars. It was in a Los Feliz rock’n’roll bar on Hollywood Blvd that an old queen in eye make up and billowing floral print fell onto the stool next to me and told us all the story of his life, how he’d been raised just down the street by Tallulah Bankhead, and what a wonderful, mad, sodden old lust bucket she’d been and how he still missed her every day, and then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth and departed. Sorry about that, the bartender said. I shrugged. It’s Hollywood. Not long afterward a bunch of us were hanging out in a living room after a raucous weekend at the Sunset Junction Street Fair. Someone fired up a joint. Is that pot I smell? came a loud voice, and a drag queen flounced through the door. Someone handed her the joint and she took a deep hit and exploded in giggles and sass. She used to be a dancer, or do wardrobe, or make up, I can’t remember, and there were some hysterical Chaka Khan stories. She loved us girls, the drag queen said. He took a few more hits off the joint and fled in the night, thanking us for the hospitality. Never saw her (well, him) again. You know, I could go on with drag queen stories. I never knew I had so many. That’s Silver Lake. Or was. They’re few and far between now. I can’t remember the last time I saw a guy in a dress, actually. I have no idea if they’re congregating somewhere else or if they’re a dying species.

Phyllis Diller left after a couple hours. Had a great time, he said. He took the stairs a little uneasily, but made it to the bottom and wobbled off into the night. He left his boa. I’d have returned it to him, but there was no internet then. Nowadays you can google Phyllis Diller impersonators and there he’d be, available for parties and bar mitzvahs. Back then they just disappeared, stoned, into the night.

Interns

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The thing about being a celebrity is that you never have to write your own blog posts. That’s what interns are for. I could be watching TV right now or doing a crossword puzzle instead of this. Do you think Al Pacino or Miley Cyrus write their own blogs? Hell, A-List celebrities can’t even tweet without sounding like idiots. So they hire interns. I love that, hiring interns. It’s not like they’re paying them anything. What cheap studio sonofabitch invented this system? In fact, there are even interns who pay to be interns. You hire them to let them pay you. Welcome to Hollywood. You pay to join, like Scientology or Costco. So the first thing a Z-List blogger will ask a D-List celebrity is do you have an intern, sir? I’d laugh derisively. I always laughed derisively. That’s how you distinguish between the lists, by who is laughing derisively at who. Of course I have an intern, I’d snort, who doesn’t? Interns are a dime a dozen in this town. You get to keep the dime, too. End of interview. Then I let the blogger by me a drink.

Dwight Trible

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Had my mind blown by an open air Dwight Trible set yesterday afternoon (on Saturday, April 30) in Leimert Park. Trevor Ware on bass. Theo Saunders on piano. Yow. Apparently there will be another open air Dwight Trible set next weekend also in Leimert Park (and also absolutely free, money wise). Will keep you posted. Every time I see him perform I think that Dwight Trible is maybe the greatest thing in jazz at this moment, and has been for many moments so far, and yet so few seem to realize it. Next week add in Justo Almario on tenor, and there will be a point where your mind will sizzle past the point of no return.

Leimert Park is gorgeous, and cool and amiably funky, a hipness as yet unhipsterized, where people wear Eric Dolphy tee shirts because they actually knew Eric Dolphy, and kids in dreads do the Big Apple. Dwight soars above it, meanders through it, grooves inside it. I could hear him two blocks away as I drove up. I walked in, said hey to a pal and was nearly run down by Barbara Morrison in her souped up motorized wheel chair. I love the place. Seen so much incredible jazz down there over the years. Ordinarily jazz in LA comes in tiny confined spaces, like Charlie O’s or the Blue Whale or the World Stage or the four tables in front of the stage at JAX, rest in peace. But in Leimert Park it can cover entire city blocks, audible blocks away. It’s in the air, in the streets, in the bones.

So next week, Dwight Trible in Leimert Park. Details anon. Be there.

Dwight Trible

Dwight Trible (I believe from a London gig, unknown photographer.)

Spellbound

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Watching Spellbound. First time. In fact, it was one of the only Hitchcock flicks I’ve never seen. And I keep getting so lost. It’s all about Freudian analysis, which is one of those archaic things that few understand anymore. But everyone did back then. Hitchcock just assumed that a sophisticated audience in 1945 would understand the dialog. But that was half a century ago, and since then the study of the mind became the study of the brain. It’s all about neurology now, mechanics over assumptions.

So it’s kind of like trying to watch a movie based on marxist theory. As recently as the seventies a sophisticated audience would understand the basics of Marxist thought and a plot would have to explain little. It might have been excruciatingly dull, but the hip crowds would get it. Now most of us would be lost, Das Kapital in all its turgid detail finally relegated to the 19th century. Oh it hangs on in some academic circles, in literary theory and semantics, but once all those professors retire it’ll disappear, and all the Marxist allusions in fllms of the sixties will be understood only by historians. People will read about them somewhere and try as hard as they can to understand, but they won’t. Just like we can be so bewildered by Freudian pscyhobabble. It obviously meant something to them back then…but you had to be there.

I suspect that Chomsky will go the same way, relegated to philosophy courses where the elegance of a theory is more important than its scientific legitimacy. We still study Aristotle even though, face it, he was wrong about a lot of things. But the elegance and brilliance of his thought in the context (i.e., he thought it up a helluva long time ago), and the influence it had on western thought, makes it key to the study of western philosophy. Just don’t quote him in your biology class. And Chomsky’s brilliant theories, so simple (unlike his prose) will be studied as a key to language…even though the neurological evidence is a little light so far. I mean his generative theory should hold up (although there have been some doubts thrown up there too…namely the language of the Piriha in the Amazon) but there is no center of universal grammar uncovered so far; we are not born with all the grammar in the world set in our head, like some perfectly formed language homunculus.

Of course no one makes movies based on Chomskyan theory. The dialog would drag. “For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial appears to correlate rather closely with nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory” she says breathlessly, her nude body glistening…..they couldn’t even show that on Sundance.

Anyway Spellbound is nearly over. Gregory Peck is in the clutches of the police, and Ingrid Bergman is still gorgeous. But I dunno, somehow Ingrid’s saying “People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents.” doesn’t have quite the same punch as “Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.” That Bogie could understand.

Uh oh. Surprise ending. I won’t say who or what. No spoiler me. But Ingrid figured it analyzing dreams. Something symbolized a revolver. Voila! The killer revealed. Dreams, you know. Last nite I dreamed that my wife and I had to take two separate submarines across the East River to get to Brooklyn. Obviously the submarines are phallic. I don’t know about the East River, though. Whatever.

Anyway Bullitt‘s up next. That one I can understand. Gunfights, car chases, Jacqueline Bisset in a miniskirt and gogo boots. Maybe she’ll be in my dream tonite. Of course I won’t remember even if she is….I almost never remember my dreams. Not even dirty ones. Submarines I remember. And without Freud, a submarine is just a submarine.

John Gilbert

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King Vidor’s The Big Parade is a helluva movie, maybe my favorite silent. The battlefield scenes are terrifying, and the end is perfect. John Gilbert was awfully good. You couldn’t see the booze yet. The story about him having a squeaky voice was nonsense, I’ve heard him in talkies and his voice was fine. He just drank himself out of a career, drank himself to death. I remember seeing him in a flick from 1934 called The Captain Hates the Sea, and he is terrific playing a drunk. A failed playwright of a drunk. Like John Barrymore and even Erroll Flynn, drunks play the best drunks. It’s amazing how many raging drinkers came out of Prohibition. That whole Bix Beiderbecke thing. My uncle Carl was one of those. A brilliant pianist who died in a cold Michigan jail of delirium tremens. You can’t even imagine how much hooch that must have been in his short, creative, sad life. That was John Gilbert’s story too. His drinking was completely out of control by the end, despite a series of heart attacks, and not even Marlene Dietrich couldn’t save him, though she tried. He died a year or so after The Captain Hates the Sea, in bed in his huge house way up in the Hills. He was thirty seven. My Uncle Carl’s age. Carl was buried in a cemetery in Flint Michigan, now completely forgotten. John Gilbert is just across the river here at Forest Lawn, on a hillside, in full light, under a blue sky.

Eighty years on we’re still talking about John Gilbert, but for the wrong reasons. John Gilbert, they say, sound did him in. He had that high, squeaky voice. It’s a nasty rumor, mean, emasculating. He’d battled the studios his whole career, and made enemies, and it was probably they–perhaps a mogul, perhaps a publicist–that spread the rumor that, in death, ruined him for good. He may have won a few battles, John Gilbert did, but the studios won the war. They always did back then.

For a long spell in The Big Parade I forgot all about this. Was completely caught up in the story, the three hometown boys, the army life, the front, the shells, the final, cataclysmic battle. This was the western front in 1918, a mad and utterly violent place, beyond all understanding then and even now. There’s a bombardment scene that is unsurpassed. There’s a  panorama of a whole battalion moving forward through machine gun fire, men dropping randomly. John Gilbert is in a shell hole, his leg shot to pieces, staring at a corpse. Maddened with pain and fear and frustration he begins yelling, yelling at the top of his voice. It’s a silent, and there are no subtitles in the scene, but you can hear his outrage, and it is loud and rich and resonant. And when in the end he rushes into the arms of his girl, you smile.

John Gilbert in The Big Parade (1925).

John Gilbert in The Big Parade (1925).

Stan Cornyn

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I used to own utterly worthless LPs just because I liked the liner notes. All those liner notes were by Stan Cornyn. My favorite was a profound piece of fluff that accompanied Happiness is Dean Martin. That was from 1967, the Summer of Love. The Age of Aquarius. The Human Be-In. Hair opened on Broadway, stark naked. I have no idea, though, if Stan Cornyn took lots of LSD or if god made him like this. But what a ball it must have been writing liner notes back then. They’re almost literature, and now that he’s dead, they are. I no longer have the album. I sold it to somebody at a garage sale after showing him the liner notes. I told him they were literature. Plus the vinyl was clean. He was thrilled to death. Offered me ten bucks. I said five was fine. He thought he was getting a bargain.  I made a five thousand per cent profit.  Here are the words:

Nothing is more Dean Martin than Dean Martin.

“Of course, doing a really preposterously good job of being Dean Martin depends a lot on knowing the rules about what makes the best Dean Martin. Knowing the archetypal definition of Martinism: How is he different? Why is he individual? What is he driving at?

What Dean Martin is driving at seems to be to lead a Life Of Sloth. A Life of EPIC Sloth. Not just your common little ol’ Sunday afternoon lazy Sloth, like you get with minor Erskine Caldwell Georgia darlins.

No, Martin now epitomizes EPIC SLOTH. Sloth like Joseph E. Levine would come up with. In big, 3-D letters, like in those Ben Hur movie ads, with all forms of EPIC EXHAUSTION draped over the letters. “Epic Sloth,” starring Dean Martin, and then running around the bottom, instead of Mongol hordes and Jack Palance you find other things, for this is “Epic Sloth.” Things like deflated innertubes. Like the ears of sleeping Spaniels. Like Kleenex ashes. Like all of Life’s Most Unresilient Stuff.

 And there, leaned up in Herculean-Scope against those giant letters, our Pop Star slumps. Dean Martin. Kind of half-eyed looking out at you, grinning “Hi ya, pally,” like he hopes you haven’t got anything heavy on your mind. Dean Martin has been working at becoming an Epic Pop Art Object. He’s been getting in a good deal of pop art hypnotizing. Avis knows, you don’t get to be Number One by just sitting round. Some detractors have published this about Martin: that he sits round, trying to make spaghetti look tense.

“Pish tosh,” we say, and “Yellow journalism.”

You have to publicize to get to be Our National Epic Sloth. Martin has. His medium: the most popular art object of Our Times, meaning . . . your television set. (Breathes there a soul with fingers so dull he can’t find his Vertical Knob blindfolded?)

The mind-boggling task which DM has accomplished in his upwards surge to Number One Epic Sloth in this: he has put other would- be number one lazy slobs into limbo. “Amos ‘N Andy’s” Lightnin, for instance, now is largely forgot. Shiftless and No-Account has moved to Beverly Hills, where dey got no deltas, chile. The other competition–those slothy Southern belles once played by Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward–are now minor league stuff.

Martin (few people have known this until this very minute; it has been a closely kept secret) was actually only Number Two until quite recently. The spot of Number One Epic Sloth was recently held by another performer. Not a human being, but a small dog. His name: Red Dust. He is (or was, for he has largely disappeared from our scene) part of a Vaudeville turn. His master would bark out commands: “Red Dust, Roll Over! Up, Red Dust!” But Red Dust was an utterly and irrevocably sag-boned hound. Red Dust never voluntarily moved anything, least of all a paw. The pooch looked permanently pickled. It was pretty funny stuff.

Dean Martin finally won out over Red Dust. Much of his triumph has been ascribed by some scribes to his ability to project an alcoholic aura from coast-to-coast, into millions of Puritan homes. Good, Puritan, beer-drinking homes. Martin has almost by himself established Booze-o-Vision as America’s new Art Populaire. It’s difficult to imagine any other object that would currently be more welcome in our historic nation’s thousands of beer bars and juke joints. Nothing more popular than DM, slumped there, looking for his cue card, all brung to you in NBC’s surrealist color. Martin and his–dare we say it?–goopy baritone. Martin: the biggest sex symbol to hit neighborhood taverns since the heyday of The Rheingold Girl, may she in our secret imaginations requiescat in flagrante delicto.

Nothing should slow up his reign as our beloved epic boozer short of a sudden attack of dysphagia.

You don’t see too many liner notes that end in the word dysphagia anymore. Hell, you don’t see many liner notes anymore. But those were the days. Record albums were new, liner notes newer, and nobody knew what they were doing, except it made a lot of money. Not to mention made me the easiest five bucks I ever earned.

Rutabega

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It was the Silver Lake Ralphs’ last day. I went to the produce dept. All that remained were two bags of rutabagas. I don’t remember ever seeing rutabagas at this Ralphs. Not even before Thanksgiving, when I needed them. Now this is all the produce they had, two plastic bags’ worth of rutabagas. So I bought them. I love rutabagas. Someone has too. It was the last thing I ever bought at that store, rutabagas. I’d been shopping there for thirty years, first as a Hughes, then as a Ralphs, huge carts fill of groceries, and now there I am with nothing but rutabagas. There has to be a moral in that somewhere.

I actually was looking for eggs, however. You can’t hard boil a rutabaga. Not even Whole Foods will hard boil a rutabaga. It’s going to be a weird Easter.

(3/12/15)

Thanksgiving

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So last Thanksgiving I showed my wife an email from someone who is protesting the white man’s treatment of Native Americans by not cooking a turkey. It said beef, pork or lamb or chicken are alternatives to turkey. It recommended tamales too. Turkey, according to the email, is symbolic of colonial oppression. Don’t eat turkey.

My wife, a Yankton Sioux (and half Oneida) said she thought turkeys were a North American bird. I said they were. I also mentioned that Christopher Columbus had brought the first cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens to America (which he did, on the second voyage, in 1493). I’m a gold mine of historical trivia, which she tolerates. So how is it that eating something that Indians already ate is oppression, she asked, while eating something brought by Columbus is protesting oppression? I shrugged. My mother (a full blooded Oneida) cooked turkey for Thanksgiving every year, she said. We didn’t think it was oppression. Well you were Indians, I said, so it wouldn’t be. We didn’t celebrate Columbus Day, though. I said that was understandable. No white men discovered us, she said. I agreed. I think that goes along with why we’re not supposed to eat turkey for Thanksgiving. Then why not eat venison, she said. You mean shooting a deer? She said sure, why not, venison is delicious. Indians ate venison. We ate venison. Dad killed a deer or two every year and we ate lots of venison. Ducks, too. I said I doubt anyone protesting eating a turkey would suit up to go hunting. They probably don’t even have a hunting rifle, I said, or belong to the NRA. She sneered. My father went hunting every season, she said. He had several rifles, a shotgun, an NRA membership, and was a full blooded Sioux. I changed the subject. How about fish? I asked, fish is nice. She said no one eats fish for Thanksgiving. I said I think they had fish at the first Thanksgiving. And oysters. And corn. I’m not giving up corn, she said. OK, so how about a Vegan thanksgiving then? She gave me the Sioux death stare. Indians ate Vegans for breakfast, she said, cooked over a slow fire.

I’m gonna go pick up the turkey, I said.