Lawrence Welk

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Wow. Lawrence Welk.

I’ve never been able to watch The Lawrence Welk Show long enough to see if that’s Eddie Miller blowing sax. But this was one of Lester Young’s favorite shows. Yes it was. He loved Perry Como too. A friend of mine lived next door to him. Every time he dropped by Prez’s pad, he was listening to a damn Perry Como 78. Listening to it over and over. Obsessed with it. Said he was trying to learn it. My friend couldn’t hear what Prez was hearing and went back upstairs and listened to bebop. I wish I knew what Perry Como song it was that Lester Young was listening to over and over. No doubt it slipped into one of those airy, lazy solos of his, perfect and gorgeous and so square but you’d never know it. Lester Young, a bottle of gin, a saxophone and this, The Lawrence Welk Show. Geniuses can be so strange.

Uh oh, the tap dancer.

One of those records nobody talks about.

One of those records nobody talks about.

The oats they’re feeding me: the poetic license of Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad

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The lyrics to “Inside Looking Out” by the Animals, with the Grand Funk Railroad version in italics.

Sittin’ here lonely like a broken man
Sell my time and do the best I can
I wasn’t boss this around in me
I don’t want your sympathy, yeah

I’m sitting here lonely like a broken man.
I serve my time doin’ the best I can.
Walls and bars they surround me.
But, I don’t want no sympathy.

Oh baby, oh baby
I just need your tender lovin’
To keep me sane in this burnin’ oven
When my time is up, be my rebirth

No baby, no baby,
All I need is some tender lovin’.
To keep me sane in this burning oven.
And, when my time is up, you’ll be my reefer.

Like Adam’s work on God’s green earth
My rebirth, my rebirth
Baby, yeah it means my rebirth
Yeah

Life gets worse on God’s green earth.
Be my reefer, got to keep smokin’ that thing.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Baby baby baby
C’mon c’mon c’mon
Yeah yeah, c’mon, yeah yeah

I said now baby … baby …, let me smoke it … smoke it …
Makes me feel good … feel good, yes, I feel good … ahhhhh …
Yes, I feel alright … feel alright …, yes, I feel alright … feel alright …
Yes, I feel alright … Ahhhhh …
Ohhhhh …

Ice cold waters runnin’ in my brain
They drag me back to work again
Pains and blisters on my minds and my hands
From living daily with those canvas bags

Ice cold water is runnin’ through my veins.
They try and drag me back to work again.
Pain and blisters on my mind and hands.
I work all day making up burlap bags.

Thoughts of freedom they are drivin’ me wild
And I’ll by happy like a new born child
We’ll be together, girl, you wait and see
No more walls to keep your love from me

The oats they’re feeding me are driving me wild.
 I feel unhappy like a new born child.
Now, when my time is up, you wait and see.
These walls and bars won’t keep that stuff from me.

Yeah, can’t you feel my love
Baby, baby, need you, squeeze you
No-body but, nobody but, you girl
I love you, need you

No, no, baby,
Won’t keep that stuff from me.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

All right
I said everything’s gonna be all right
And if you don’t believe what I say
Just listen baby and I’ll tell you

I need you right now mama.
I need you right now baby.
Right by my side, honey.
All night long.

Can’t you feel my love
Can’t you see my skill
Can’t you yell my love
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
A little closer, yeah

Make me feel alright …
Yes, all …, yes, all …, yes, all … alright

I said baby, I need you, c’mon, squeeze, please
Lord, I love you, I need you, yeah
Yeah, right by my side
I need you here by my side

You better come on up and get down with me.
I’ll make you feel real good, just you wait and see.

But I can’t help it baby
But, I’ll be home soon
I’ll be home soon, yeah
All right, whoa

Make me feel alright …, yes, I feel alright …
Yes, all …, yes, all …, yes, alright.

 Apparently if there was a lyric sheet, Mark Farner was too stoned to read it.

Eddie Albert, sentient tumbleweeds, and the ramblings of a deranged mind

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“Thought has no language. We think in pictures and sensations. And then we translate these ideas into our own words and sentences.”

–Andy Thorne, played by Eddie Albert, in the “Cry of Silence”, Outer Limits (1964)

To be honest, I had never gotten past Eddie Albert and wife being attacked by sentient tumbleweeds. What might have been a workable idea in Louis Charbonneau‘s original story looks beyond ridiculous on TV. Tumbleweeds creep up, creep back, hurl themselves at Eddie. At one point he grabs one and smooshes it all over his face as if he’s being attacked. After a struggle, he wins. Did you see that honey? he asks. That thing attacked me! You actually feel bad for Eddie Albert, the actor, at this point. Eddie Albert, who wrote and starred in the first ever teleplay on television way back in 1936. Eddie Albert, hero of Tarawa. Eddie Albert, anti-hero of Attack. And here he is battling a crazed tumbleweed. There are hundreds of the things. Vast hordes of murderous tumbleweeds. We get back to town, Eddie tells his wife, and l’ll give up the idea of living on a farm. That usually did it for me right there.

This time I stuck it out but nearly gave up after they were attacked by hundreds of frogs. The scene lacked even the production values of the Ray Milland opus a decade later. Here, someone appeared to be hurling basketfuls of frogs at them. Worse yet, they were apparently living frogs, big bull frogs. You’ve never seen so many bullfrogs. The frogs squirmed, the wife screamed. They retreated back to the farmhouse. Their next foray out almost made it to the car but was driven back by deadly sentient rocks. It looked liked Buster Keaton in the avalanche scene in Seven Chances except Arthur Hunnicutt, playing a farmer named Lamont right out of Green Acres (and whose house they had sought refuge in) is struck and killed. That never happened in a Buster Keaton movie. Continue reading →

Stephen King

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Fyl’s watching yet another Stephen King movie. Apparently that is all IFC shows anymore, Stephen King movies. Or is this Sundance. Or whatever channel this endless series of commercials punctuated by monsters, violence and really bad acting is on. After an afternoon of this, as I rush about from one household crisis to the next (refrigerator is dying, which is actually a lot more of a hassle than a dead cat, let me tell you), I’ve a genuine appreciation for the old studio system, in which these two howling babes, possessed of the devil or whatever, would have been left spinning on their stools at Schwabs. Oh Lord, what hath Brando wrought. Method acting for dummies.

If only King hadn’t let his characters talk so much. Nobody ever mumbles in a Stephen King story. No one ever just shuts up. He’s from Maine, I know, but in Maine they appreciate silence. Yup. Nope. That’s a whole conversation right there. There are more words spoken in a single Stephen King movie than in the entire state of Maine in an entire year.

Another half hour of commercials and then back to the movie. One of the principles–a bad guy, I think–is talking and talking and talking. I could be watching a hockey game and instead someone is putting a curse on someone in ten thousand words.

Ohhh…the guy exploded. I think exploded. Something. I thought he was going to make it with the hot blonde but he exploded or glooped or turned inside out or something. Then this tentacle thing shows up and it’s the blonde’s turn.  This all makes sense to Stephen King fans, of course. They never seem the least bit confused by his stories. It’s like trying to listen to Alan Watts lectures on KPFK and thinking they’re complete nonsense while all around me people are omming. I say I don’t get it. This is just babble. They look at me and shush. I ask my wife where the tentacle thing came from. She looks at me and shushes. I want to ask about the hot blonde but decide against it. But does anyone ever get laid in a Stephen King movie? Without getting schlorped into the other world, I mean.

More commercials. Zombies this time. Funny ones.

Om.

Hole

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Greatest review of a hole ever. “Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction…”

Urs Fischer, the artist, called the hole “You”. A rich guy bought it for a whole lot of money and took it to his estate in Connecticut. Well, not the same hole, he had a hole dug just like it. So he paid a whole lot of money for another hole. I guess you look in it and think how rich you are. I assume the first hole, now that it was sold, was just a hole again and was filled in. Too bad. Imagine how much it would have been worth once the artist dies. They could have buried him in it, crammed in with the chaos and contradiction.

This was before the recession, though. I have no idea what the going rate on a hole is now. Maybe the Chinese are buying them up. Or maybe holes are just holes again. Free fill dirt. I wonder if big rocks are still in. Or did LACMA get the only one?

I think I picked the wrong gig. If I were an artist this blog post would be worth a zillion dollars.

Art.

Art.

Oklahoma City

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(2010)

The most fervent local news coverage I ever saw was in Oklahoma City, where all four networks had local news and the competition was so intense that L.A. looked bush league. In fact, the level of TV news competition in many of the cities we’d stayed in throughout the Great Plains for a night or two was incredible, all these young reporters and anchors trying to make a splash and get the hell out of their television backwaters and into the big time. But Oklahoma City was by far the best. The coverage of a house fire in one of the suburbs was every bit as intense as the coverage of a hellish fire season in Southern California. We saw the distant column of smoke while driving into town. Apparently if we hadn’t been a good ten miles away–or actually been inside the house–we could have been killed. A night I shall never forget. Actually, I haven’t. I couldn’t. Every station on TV seemed to be reporting live from the scene of the conflagration. They must have been tripping over each others’ wires and in and out of each others’ shots. KOKH bumping into KWTV blocking KOCO in KFOR’s way and the fire crews trying to avoid all of them. The house was destroyed, gutted, a total loss. The fortunate circumstance that no one was living in the house or was inside the house or even out in the yard when the conflagration erupted kept casualties to a minimum. To zero, actually. All this was reported, over and over and over, on all four stations. The coverage was breathless. The footage unforgiving. I felt sorry for the neighbors, with CBSNBCABCFOX crowding them, looking for the story, that human touch, that Pulitzer. There was more media than onlookers. I saw a neighbor lady interviewed four different times, and by the last interview she was almost a pro. Please shoot me from my good side, I hoped she’d said. Get out of my light. What is my motivation here? Continue reading →

Chinatown

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Jazz geek that I refuse to admit that I am, my favorite thing about the classic flick Chinatown is Uan Rasey‘s trumpet tone. It’s perfection. Not that it’s pure–you can hear the breath in it–but it’s one of those utterly human sounding things that defies a digital replacement. You cannot create that sound again artificially. You can only create that sound with the exhalations of Uan Rasey. Alas, he stopped exhaling in 2011, and trumpet players being such fragile and irreplaceably analog things, you’ll never hear a sound like that again. You’ll hear re-creations–you can re-create anything digitally–but you’ll never hear Uan Rasey’s breath coming through the brass like that and creating something new and as haunting. Not that his breath itself was special, it was the same as the air we exhale too, 78% nitrogen, 16% oxygen, 5% carbon dioxide and a little argon, at 100% humidity. But our breath will never create that trumpet sound in the theme from Chinatown. We just breathe. He blew trumpet. And while there are zillions of trumpeters still torturing themselves on that miserable little horn–it hurts, a trumpet, a lot of pain–and some absolutely magnificent ones, each is an utterly unique analog thing. Some of those trumpeters are very special and a select few are uniquely perfect. And that is what I hear every time I watch Chinatown. I don’t even always watch it, I sit and write like now, or whatever, and listen. I hear Jack Nicholson says something noir and nasty, then an oof as the cop hits him. There’s a scuffle, shots, and the long, pure, disturbing tone of a car horn cut through the middle by the harsh soprano shrieks of a young girl. Forget it Jake, a voice says, it’s Chinatown. Then the room fills with Uan Rasey’s trumpet and I melt.

Faye Dunaway, looking like the theme sounds, her lines softened, worried and tinged with blue.

Faye Dunaway, looking like the theme sounds, her hard lines worn, haunted and tinged with blue. One of the great films about my town.

Tonight Show

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I went to the Tonight Show once. 1975 or 1976. Johnny Carson, of course, took the night off. John Davidson was the host. I was so disappointed. Then they announced Davidson couldn’t make it. A surprise host would be filling in. Out comes Steve Allen. He brings out Tom Poston, then Louie Nye, then Bill Daily. It was the original Tonight Show all over again. Sheer anarchy. At one point they’re all doing an out of control Chinese Fire Drill around the desk. Half the jokes were off camera. No guests got on. They kept going right through the commercial breaks, like they couldn’t stop. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw in my life. Later that night, watching on television I realized that only a fraction of what was going could be seen, let alone understood, by the TV audience, which made it even funnier. That was the only time I ever saw the Tonight Show in person. Never did see Johnny Carson, to my infinite regret, but I saw Steve Allen doing it old school, like it was live television all over again. Beautiful.

Steve Allen at rehearsal, 1954. A great photo from the Associated Press, no idea who took it.

Steve Allen at rehearsal, 1954. A great photo from the Associated Press, no idea who took it.

 

Dead of Night

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Watching Dead of Night on Turner Classic Movies, an old British horror flick from 1945. It is a thoroughly entertaining collection of spooky stories (I’ll give none away here) until the segment where Michael Redgrave portrays an utterly mad ventriloquist. Suddenly the picture turns very disturbing, very unsettling, and very creepy. Creepier even than Cliff Robertson as the tormented ventriloquist in that old Twilight Zone. I mean Robertson was terrific (it’s my favorite episode), but the noiry feel of that episode, like a particularly odd scene from Sweet Smell of Success, just complicates the whole thing. Movies, especially American movies (and television dramas as well) became very complicated in the fifties, layered and textured and fraught with social significance.  So a mad ventriloquist was not just a mad ventriloquist, there was a backstory or two, and context, and women, and all kinds of psychoanalytical stuff that we can’t even decipher anymore, Freud being deader than communism. Not so Dead of Night. It’s just an old fashioned creepshow, not far removed from the Universal horror flicks, complicated only by English class stereotypes that are beyond American understanding. In these plots evil is just evil, society had nothing to do with it. A monster is a monster and not to be understood as anything but a monster. Things supernatural are  just that, supernatural. No explanation necessary. Don’t even ask. Think of all those Hammer films. As appealing as Christopher Lee’s Dracula is in an evil sort of way, you feel no pity when the ice cracks and he plunges into the icy waters never to be seen again till the next sequel. I think that lack of subtlety was one of the things that made them so appealing. That and Barbara Shelley’s heaving bosom (though she was at her best in Five Million Years to Earth aka Quatermass and the Pit, but that is another genre and another essay.)
So that’s what makes Michael Redgrave’s character so damn scary. He is a crazy ventriloquist, stark raving bonkers. Look into his eyes and it’s pure wackoness. Sure it’s not exactly his fault, not with the dummy coming to life and taking him over and all that, but unlike Cliff Robertson’s character you never get the feeling that Redgrave’s ventriloquist was such a swell guy to begin with. Redgrave’s character was not banging all the chorus girls. He was an insecure if talented in a ventriloquistic kind of way little runt. That Tony Perkins’s character in Psycho thing. That Bates kid was no good from day one. I don’t know if Redgrave’s ventriloquist had been a disturbed child, but I think had there been a backstory his would have been a sorry tale. I mean alpha males do not get their personalities appropriated by a ventriloquist’s dummy. Doesn’t happen. So while Cliff Robertson struggled with the madness, Redgrave is conquered without much of a fight and as we said winds up crazy as Tony Perkins in Psycho. There’s no shower scene, nothing that ghastly, but the stare is the same.  Redgrave played it to the hilt, and I imagine it always clung to him.  I remember you, the cab driver would say, you were that barmy ventriloquist. No one ever took a shower with Anthony Perkins in the house, either. Well, they did, but tried not to think about it.
Makes you wonder about Edgar Bergen.

Dead of Night.

Frogs

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I can’t believe all you people are watching Dinocroc vs. Supergator when you could be watching Frogs. Frogs is much scarier. OK, it’s not. There is nothing scary about frogs. Not even a swamp house full of frogs. Ray Milland gets killed by frogs. They never explain how.  They leave it to our imagination. But I never could figure out how those frogs killed him. At least in Night of the Lepus the rabbits, if fluffy, were huge and carnivorous. Sort of adorably floppy thumper deadly. But a frog unhuge is not scary. That’s a big chicken Marjoe Gortner said to Ida Lupino in Food of the Gods and he was right, it was a big chicken. Big and deadly. He escaped, something Joan Collins didn’t in Empire of the Ants. The giant ants snipped her clean through her pretty little thorax. I thought of this as I came face to face with her one night at the bar at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre. She looked up at me, all four feet of her, startled. I looked down at her, surprised, and said Empire of the Ants! Or would have, if I hadn’t had the safety on. Instead I said nothing and smiled. She turned back to her friends, a queen among queens, giggling, whispering. I almost said Empire of the Ants to Joan Collins, I remember thinking. You get one chance in life for a faux pas like that, and I let mine get away. Meanwhile, back in the movie here, Ray Milland is being frogged to death.

Frogs.

Frogs.