I’m a Poached Egg

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I remember the first time I ever saw Kiss Me Stupid (probably on TCM, who rescued it from the Pauline Kael Home for the Morally Depraved) and Dean Martin (as Dino) runs into a police roadblock and says What’s the matter? That Sinatra kid missing again? I knew Billy Wilder had pulled out all the stops, as the kidnapping had only happened a few months before. I always wondered what Frank said. It was a funny line, after all, and a laugh is a laugh. It was certainly funnier than anything in Robin and the 7 Hoods, which Frank was making at the time, with Dean Martin, and which the critics thought was just fine, even though it’s not especially funny, and they forgot to keep the palm trees out of the shots. Palm trees in Chicago. A lotta laughs. But Frank was distracted with the kidnapping, and who cares about a stray palm tree in a dumb movie anyway

The critics hated Kiss Me Stupid. They hated the story, they hated the script, they hated the cast (Peter Sellers was supposed to play the Ray Walston part, incidentally, but had a heart attack on the set.) I love Kiss Me Stupid. Now Irma La Douce I’m not too nuts about, it kind of drags on about an hour and a half too long, though it might have made a nice two parter sitcom–but at least that didn’t bring about the fall of western civilization like Dino’s hand in Kim Novak’s kleenex box did. The Catholic Legion of Decency went through the countryside, trying to scare up another crusade. By the hand of God the movie flopped, was pulled from the theaters, and Billy Wilder shamed and broken (he made one more minor classic, The Fortune Cookie, and then a string of box office losers), but it was too late. Pretty soon everyone is running around naked and the seventies began in a cloud of cocaine. But we know why. I’m a Poached Egg, that’s why

But then what do I know from movies anyway? I don’t even like Ingmar Bergman films. But I do know funny, and I’m a Poached Egg is funny. Maybe not the way it was intended, not as Ira Gershwin wrote it. George was working up I Got Rhythm. Ira comes in with some lyrics. George is on the melody, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. I’m a poached egg, Ira sings, without a piece of cheese. I’m Da Vinci, without the Mona Leez. Mona Leez? George yells, and threatens to call Cole Porter.

You had to be there.

KissMeStupidLobbyCard

Devil Doll

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Or there’s always this method, she posted, adding a link to the trailer for Devil Doll, an old MGM horror from 1936. Born of a revenge crazed mind, the screen said. The strangest story ever told. Lionel Barrymore looking twisted, Maureen O’Sullivan looking innocent, Robert Grieg looking quite unlike a butler. Will you dare believe what your eyes behold? it asks. I can’t remember why she posted this.

But it reminded me of a very noisy band from the very weird Basel, Switzerland scene in the late 80’s. The band was called Fluid Mask and they released a huge mess of a double album called, I think, Fluid Mask. I thought it was pretty great. You wouldn’t. Well, a few of you might, but most of you would have pulled it off the turntable and frisbeed it off my balcony as far as it would go. Jazz fans, rock fans, no matter. It just irritated everybody. Continue reading →

Mix tapes

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Was reading about the lost art of cassette tape spines at Dangerous Minds. Silly little bit of nostalgia, maybe, but it brought back some memories.

cassette spine art

I have so many of these. Found a mess of wonderful compilation tapes I made back in the 80’s (before they were even called mix tapes) and I don’t even know what all the music is, even though I made them. I remember watching High Fidelity and knowing how infinitely cooler, crazier and non-bogus my compilation tapes were than their weak record geek little things. And I didn’t need no fucking theme either. Then again, mine weren’t plot devices. And it was a good movie. But I’d never invite any of those losers to a party at my place. Jack Black maybe, if he promised to be an asshole. None of the sensitive little fucks, though. The world is full of sensitive little fucks, and they all irritate me. Anyway, some of the tapes I found have stoned spine art like those in the picture (not that I could stand the music on these, of course). I can’t really get into the mindset of the stoner cassette (or K7, to use 80’s hipster speak) spine artist, though, even though I was one. Like what was I thinking? Did we really have that much spare time back then? What a lazily analog world that was. We would read books. Whole books. Imagine that. And we hung out and talked with people we actually knew, and could even reach out and touch, especially if we were drunk and they were female and probably played bass in a band. Continue reading →

House of the Rising Sun

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(I think this was an unused first draft of something I posted to the blog a couple years ago.)

I was never into the early Beatles stuff. Not my thing. Too teeny bop. I thought they were much better once they started taking drugs. But also in 1964, amid all the screaming and yeah yeah yeahs, the Animals released House of the Rising Sun and rock music suddenly grew up. Most fans didn’t–they were still silly squirrelly teenagers–but House of the Rising Sun is a thoroughly adult piece of music. A man whose squandered his life away in a whorehouse in the New Orleans has his tale told by the incredibly blues soaked and angry voice of Eric Burdon. The arrangement is hip and driving and Alan Price’s keyboards are soaked in jazz, just wonderful. There is nothing teenaged about this, the only innocence has long ago been lost to sin and damnation. I mean this was grown up shit. And I’ve never understood why people don’t recognize this record for what it is…that The House of the Rising Sun points the way to the depths of feeling, emotion and blues authenticity–as well as sophisticated soloing– that British rock music would be capable of within a couple years. I Love You Yeah Yeah Yeah stuff is fun, but House of the Rising Sun is real. The subject is real, the words are real, and the music is as real as pop music got in 1964.

I’m not putting down the Beatles at all. I’m just saying it’s time to recognize House of the Rising Sun as the landmark record it truly was. It was the first great grown up rock record of the 1960’s, and must have opened up a whole new world to zillions of kids looking for something deep and dark and bluesy, something beyond Merseybeat. More than any other British Invasion single, it brought back to America its own music, the blues, with all its passion and power and groove. And to this day, even after a zillion listens–I heard it on the radio today, in fact–it has lost none of its power for me. It’s still gets down and gets evil.  You see Eric on Ed Sullivan howling this sad tale, and Alan Price unrolls one of the great bluesy organ runs, the band pushing themselves harder and faster till Eric, channeling a doomed, broken man, tells the kids not to do what he has done. Do they listen? No, they scream themselves silly. Helter Skelter began with the Animals, with this song, all that vile, twisted nastiness to come with Hells Angels beating up hippies and hippies slaughtering movie stars, you can hear all of that in House of the Rising Sun. You can hear it now, anyway. Back then all you could hear was the silly, squealing girls.

Bill Direen

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Let’s Play by the Builders. One of the greatest LPs you have never heard. I have a mess of greatest albums you’ve never heard, but this might be the greatest. It’s a Bill Direen project, a New Zealander you might have heard of. Maybe. What does it sound like? Vaguely sorta kinda Talking Heads, but coincidentally I’m sure, with its spare, minimal, slightly funky vibe. It’s deeper, though, more out there. It showed up in the mail circa 1987 when we still lived on Edgecliffe–perhaps you partied there once or twice (a week)–and I’ve been playing side one ever since. That’s nearly three decades of playingness and yet I’m blown away every time I play it, still. One of those. Kind of like Bob Moses Visit With the Great Spirit or Essential Logic’s Beat Rhythm News or the Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxters or S.H. Draumur’s Bless or Marlui Miranda’s Todos Os Sons or way too many jazz albums. Like that. If you’ve been that first guest at any of our parties, you’ve heard it. It has inaugurated every party we’ve every thrown, all zillion of them. Let’s play indeed.

Anyway, find it. You won’t be able to, but it’s worth it. Sometimes the hopeless quests are the best.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets

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Check out this live Peggy Sue from Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the London Palladium, 3/2/58. Strange how under recognized this outfit is as a trio, for they had tight and organic sound that was light years ahead of most, if not all, other rock’n’roll bands of their time. When you see footage of them you can see that it’s not just instrumental backing for his vocal numbers, but three guys playing their asses off, driving each with genuine intensity. It was a tragic loss when Buddy’s plane went down, not only because he (and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper) were killed, but because it broke up one helluva band. Who knows, man, who knows.

Vinicius de Moraes

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Vinicius de Moraes was a lyricist unlike anything in English, his stuff was so extraordinarily literate it read like real poetry, great poetry, with such imagery and feel. Check out this one, a remarkably good translation of Arrastao from the Portuguese, set to an Edu Lobo tune. The version here is Elis Regina’s classic take with the Zimba Trio, recorded live in Sao Paulo in 1965. It is intense and huge sounding yet it is just Elis with an acoustic trio, piano, bass and drums. There was absolutely nothing in American music like this at the time, not in jazz or rock, or in words even. Here below is the lyric, in English, awash in syncretic meaning, the ancient Mediterranean Roman Catholicism and Yoruban candomble intertwined, orishas and saints one and the same in the way the Holy Trinity is one in the same, consubstantial. Hypostatis the scholars described in it late Roman days, in Greek, a concept rejected by the Arians with great slaughter, but is now so embedded in Catholicism that the holies and spirits and gods of other religions become one with Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit, and with the Madonna and the saints and martyrs, and of course Satan and his minions. Thus our narrator here guilelessly prays to Yemanja the goddess of the sea with syncopated piano and rolling drum meter; then to her Catholic side, Saint Barbara, in a melody like the inside of a cathedral, soaring, the notes hanging in the still air. The people go out into the sea in boats and let float candles on tiny rafts and the bay is filled with points of light and the silhouettes of fishermen, and the night air rings with drums and chants and the low mumble of prayers. Yemanja answers, Santa Barbara answers, and the nets are filled with fish and hearts with love. Somehow, Vincinius tells all this in a simple fisherman’s prayer on a night spent trawling, in Portuguese arrastao.

Eh! There are dinghies in the sea
Hey! hey! hey!
They’re trawling today
Eh! Everyone fishing
Enough of the shade, João Continue reading →

Time Has Come Today

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Trying to encourage flashbacks, I listened to Time Has Come Today–the long version–fourteen times in a row on YouTube this morning. I discovered three things. First, flashbacks don’t come easily, not like on TV. I also learned that Nexium 24 Hour–the little purple pill–is the latest choice for frequent heartburn.  And finally, I discovered that Brian Keenan was a monster drummer back in 1967. No idea who else he played with after the Chambers Brothers, if anybody. He sure rocked on this cut, though. Tore it up. Erupted almost. Happening. Far out. I don’t know if it was the brown acid or the little purple pills, but things were getting strange. About the seventh or eighth listen a naked hippie chick beckoned to me from the corner, but it was only the table lamp. We danced anyway. By the tenth listen I was air drumming like a madman. By the twelfth listen the time had like so come today it blew my mind. The thirteenth was even heavier. On the fourteenth listen my wife asked me what the hell I was doing. I said I was listening to Brian Keenan play the drums. She asked if I had to listen a hundred times in a row. I said it was only fourteen times. She said there won’t be a fifteenth.

So I switched to sulking. Wikipedia is excellent for sulking. Turns out in his earlier days Brian Keenan had played Doo Wah Diddy Diddy with Manfred Mann, a song I truly detest. But that was about it. Then he was a Chambers Brother until ’71 when management and other things got weird. And he died way back in the 80’s. Heart attack. A shame. So Brian Keenan wailed on the traps for the Chambers Brothers but who was he? I run into Willie Chambers on occasion at our local House of Pies (on Vermont at Franklin, or vice versa) and will have to ask him about this cat. He’s a helluva story teller, that Willie Chambers. Musicians generally are. I’ll also ask him if all the people making bad psychedelic videos for the Time Has Come Today make him nervous. They do me. Or maybe that’s just a flashback. That purple pill again. I knew I shouldn’t have dropped three. I have so little acid reflux I’m unbalancing the universe. Now the time has come. Oh there ain’t no life nowhere. I’ll go down to the sea shore and let the waves wash my mind. Break china laughing laughing laughing. Whose baby does the hanky panky? If that cat don’t stop it, man.

It’s a peninsula.

 Time Has Come Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea_bpzJWZfw

Chambers Brothers

The Chambers Brothers, Brian Keenan–they called him Curly–on the left.

Gerald Wilson

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[from Brick’s Picks in consecutive issues of the LA Weekly, 2011]

The Gerald Wilson Orchestra are perhaps this town’s signature big band. Gerald Wilson has that direct connection with this town glory days, when jazz ruled up and down Central Avenue and L.A.was second to only New York City in the quality and quantity of jazz. Of course, that was a helluva long time ago. But Gerald Wilson was there. Way back in the thirties, playing trumpet and writing arrangements for the great Jimmy Lunceford band. But here’s the thing…..Gerald Wilson never stayed back there. He left that era behind. He may have lived that history, but he’s not stuck in it. He kept writing and playing all along, putting out incredibly hip stuff in the sixties, the seventies, right into this new century. He’s had a vital, muscular orchestra all these decades, cycling in new blood and keeping on the veterans who still have the fire. The material is thrilling (including, of course, “Viva Tirado”), the solos are exultant, and the band always plays like their lives depend on it. Wilson, all ninety plus years of him, is up front driving them. The players feed off his energy and he feeds off their power. The audience gets swept up in all this jazz celebration. You see the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and you feel lucky to be there, like you’re in on a very rare thing. You are. On a good night (and we’ve yet to see a bad night) they just might be the greatest big band in the world. They’re at Catalina’s on Sunday at 7:30. One set only. Be there, man. Just be there. Continue reading →

Chuck Niles

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(my first piece for the LA Weekly, 2005)

Longtime KKGO-KLON-KKJZ disc jockey Chuck Niles has passed away, having worked up until quite near the end. In a medium full of empty-headed blowhards and Clear Channel Stepford-jocks, Niles was in every sense an “on-air personality.”

I met Niles a couple of times — it was easy enough. He was a denizen of the local jazz clubs; pop into Charlie O’s on a weeknight, and there was a good chance he’d be there. Last time I spoke with him, I was standing at the bar, and there was that voice: the unmistakable Chuck Niles whiskey baritone. He spun a few stories. Though he didn’t know me at all, as with all great radio personalities you’d swear he was your friend — you’ve spent so many hundreds of hours listening to him. He came off as just a neighborly cat who happened to be the greatest jazz disc jockey in the world.

Niles was quite a supporter of living jazz, plugging local players on his show. And in the clubs, you’d see him approach some young piano player between sets and compliment him on his swing, and the kid could barely keep his imperturbable jazz expression, he was so thrilled. Because Niles had been there; he had that bemused sense that I believe comes from having lived near the beginnings of a cultural revolution — bebop. Niles knew many if not most of the founding boppers; he saw them play, bought their earliest 78s. A lot of stories slipped away when Chuck Niles passed on. We’ll still hear some of those stories, of course, but now they’ll seem like just history instead of experience.

I’m spinning the bop and the straight-ahead for myself now, just wishing that some folks could live forever.