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WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW
When Francis Ford Coppola heard this album of electronic music from 1974 he tried to hire its composer, Tomita, to do the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now. When Tomita proved unavailable, Coppola got his father Carmine to compose soundtrack cues then had them transposed into electronic versions.
Snowflakes Are Dancing is mostly melodic and lush, but the edgier cuts have an unsettling quality which is probably what got Coppola’s attention. It’s not really my kind of music, but it has its charms and fascinations.
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QUALITY CONTROL
. . . at EMI for the newest Beatles album. Defective LPs were very rare in the 60s, depressingly common in the 80s and 90s, when the music business was boosting the new CD format. I continue to believe that record companies deliberately abandoned quality control standards for vinyl in order to get people to switch over to CDs.
The quality of pressings is much better today in the wake of the vinyl revival.
Photo courtesy of Bryan Castañeda . . .
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TIM
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A COMIC BOOK COVER FOR TODAY
THE SHIRELLES
When George Martin first encountered John, Paul, George and Ringo, he liked them personally, and he thought their music had commercial potential, but he couldn’t place their act in any convenient industry category.
Successful pop groups normally had a front man with generically named backing musicians — Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Internally, Lennon was the leader of The Beatles, to the extent that they had a leader, but he wasn’t their front man — he and Paul were co-leaders as writers of original material and at the time they shared lead vocal duties and harmony work fairly equally with Harrison. As an ensemble, with Ringo as the genial fourth wheel, they presented themselves as co-equals, as a genuine “group”.
But Martin had a conceptual and somewhat visionary breakthrough. Maybe, he thought, these guys could be the male equivalents of The Shirelles — an up-and-coming girl group that was essentially a group, not a lead singer with back-up support. That idea, eccentric as it was at the time, gave him a model he could get his head around.
It proved serviceable. John and Paul moved to the fore as vocalists as their original songs came to dominate the group’s repertoire, but as personalities the band remained a team of equals. Martin contributed a lot to The Beatles, musically speaking, but his vision of a white male pop group that was primarily a group was not the least of his contributions to their success.
If he could sell that idea to himself, he reasoned, maybe he could sell it to the industry — and the world. In the end it became a model for all the pop and rock groups without nominal front men that followed in the wake of The Beatles — from The Byrds to The Band.
ON THE SET
The Treasure Of the Sierra Madre, 1948.
You’ll probably recognize Walter Huston on the left and his son John, wearing the fedora and the tie — you may not recognize Jack Holt, on the right, father of Tim Holt, who’s standing between the Hustons. Jack, once a star in Hollywood, then a regular leading man in B-Westerns, was visiting his son on the set and John thought it would be fun to give him a small part in the movie, as one of the residents of the flophouse at the tale’s beginning.
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A STEVAN DOHANOS FOR TODAY
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A B-WESTERN LOBBY CARD FOR TODAY
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TWO PLAYMATES FOR TODAY
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
The reputation of A Hard Day’s Night gained a lot from the film’s being better than it had any right or reason to be. Made quickly on a relatively modest budget, it was designed to cash in on the astonishing worldwide popularity of The Beatles. It would have served its commercial purposes adequately by being a bit of mediocre pop fluff. Instead, it was a bit of superior pop fluff.
A faux documentary about a day in the life of the lads, it seamlessly incorporated surreal images and transitions, varied and innovative presentations of the musical numbers, daffy Goon-Show humor, and social satire. In the process it captured the high spirits and self-mocking attitude of The Beatles themselves, making it a perfect setting for their joyful and expertly crafted songs, which were really the point of the whole exercise.
The Beatles on screen were sometimes quite skillful comedians, sometimes awkward and amateurish, like kids showing off in home movies. It’s fascinating to watch them in either mode, impossibly young as they were then, the hottest act in international show business, becoming very rich, and enjoying it all as a fab lark.
It’s depressing to compare them to young musical celebrities today, with their desperate exhibitionism, their inflated sense of their own importance, their demons and their recklessness. The Beatles, partly by long experience as club musicians, partly by temperament, were already canny professionals in 1964 — brilliant musical craftsmen who took their work seriously and the brouhaha around them with a grain of salt.
In a sense, their cultural impact and almost unbelievable commercial success were what changed the business of pop music into the spangled corporate cluster-fuck it is today, but it’s hard to blame The Beatles as people for this. Through all their success they stayed relatively sane — or as sane as any twenty-somethings who suddenly found themselves sitting on top of the world could reasonably be expected to be.
Their wit and professionalism come through in A Hard Day’s Night — as does their core innocence, which mirrors the relative innocence of the culture they took by storm. As a pop artifact, the film is both moving and instructive.
And then there are the songs, which sound as fresh today as they ever have — not so much a reflection of the individual personalities of the young men who made the music as of their dedication to their craft, their irrepressible joy in their craft.
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A LANGDON CLAY FOR TODAY
The good old days . . .
Photograph © Langdon Clay
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ESSENTIAL
The craven, dickless men who run Hollywood today have an understandable hatred of the Western, a genre which has traditionally mocked, with scorn and contempt, cowardly eunuchs like themselves. Still, it’s a hard genre to kill. Real Westerns keep showing up unexpectedly astride the trail every ten years or so — an Unforgiven or a True Grit — always welcomed by audiences, always profitable. It must annoy the hell out of the eunuchs.
The Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit, from 2010, may be a sort of miracle, as Unforgiven was, but it’s real enough and its commercial success understandable enough. It’s one of the best Westerns ever made, beautifully crafted, humane, inspiring, thrilling, dealing with the timeless themes of the Western — shame, honor, redemption.
The Blu-ray edition of it belongs in every American home. It’s not just a joy in itself, it’s an immensely satisfying rebuke to the Hollywood nullities who fear and hate such works from the shallows of their shriveled, dessicated hearts.
SHORT TAKE: GRAVITY
Through the miracle of modern technology I was able to watch Gravity on HBO in 3D. It’s a modest film both narratively and emotionally — the events are simple, the character illumination (provided through the bits of back-story delivered in the dialogue ) is thin. But what an amazing adventure it is visually, especially in 3D — fascinating and gripping on that level at every turn.
It’s basically a B-picture tricked out with dazzling special effects and as such an admirable entertainment.
WHY B-WESTERNS?
In most B-Westerns you can expect to find formulaic and sometimes quite preposterous plots, stilted dialogue given a stilted delivery by mediocre actors, crude comic relief that only a child might possibly find funny, cheesy interior sets and romantic subplots involving cardboard female characters. You will often find musical interludes featuring anachronistic Western swing numbers.
You can also expect to find superior cinematography in the outdoor scenes, picturesque landscapes, superb horsemanship by any player who gets up on a horse, and beautifully choreographed equestrian action scenes. You will often find examples of expertly driven horses pulling wagons, buggies or stagecoaches, which can be thrilling.
The scenes involving horses are like the arias in an opera — they’re almost always beautiful or stirring, and as in opera they can utterly redeem a bad libretto.
If you don’t have an eye or a taste for watching men and women on horses move through beautiful landscapes, most B-Westerns won’t have much to offer you, just as most operas won’t have much to offer you if you don’t have an ear or a taste for beautiful melodies.