Any Fool Notion

Were getting the blog back together!!!

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Hit Parade Episode: 70s R&B Queens

Spent my morning at the marsh listening to Hit Parade, one of the few podcasts I still keep up with.

I've made other posts in the past about this program and its host, Chris Molanphy. The premise is simple, Take an act or genre that has a Billboard chart history and take a deep look at it. The show is always great, even if I'm not that interested in the particular subject, for instance, the episode on Britney Spears a few years ago had a fascinating exploration of the Scandinavian songwriting collectives that were responsible for a number of her hits, as well as those of many other similar artists.

I have been doing a little catchup on the show, as my podcast listening has deteriorated with my general lack of a commute, so the episode I listened to today was centered around four Black female artists who broke through on the charts primarily in the 70s - Dionne Warwick, Patti Labelle, Roberta Flack and Chaka Kahn. As always, Molanphy gives a deep overview, going back to Warwick and Labelle's early girl-group days, and how Flack's first big chart hit got an assist from Clint Eastwood, and how Kahn's name came from a brief association with the Black Panthers. I definitely now have a greater appreciation of Warwick and Flack, who I have always considered a little too easy listening (the wilder Labelle and Kahn were always a bit closer to my tastes).

A great episode, and my background music is likely set for the day. What more can I ask?

How Did the R&B Queens of the Early ’70s Redefine Soul on the Charts?

Dionne Warwick went from smooth to soulful. Patti LaBelle belted out and glammed up. Roberta Flack slowed the pulse and raised the heat.

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Late Night Listening: One Fair Summer Evening, Nanci Griffith

I grew up with country music. It was the music that played around my household growing up, mainly because of or local AM radio station. I was dimly aware of other types of music out there, but really, outside of the Monkees, because I watched those episodes in syndication constantly, I had little exposure to non-country music. And it was a very shallow relationship, basically limited to whatever came out of that radio. Johnny Cash, sure. Tammy Wynette, Charlie Pride, Roger Miller, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, all listened to during my youth, but likely less than a half dozen tunes by any of them, again limited to what was on the radio. The first country star I had more than a shallow acquaintance with was Kenny Rogers. We got an eight-track stereo, and other than some K-tel country collections, we had Kenny Rogers albums. Daytime Friends, to be exact. Pre-Gambler. So, I became a Kenny Rogers fan by default.

At the same time, I was beginning to notice mainstream rock, because of more exposure due to Junior High and High School, and because I got the sense I looked like a rube to my peers. I’m not sure Kenny Rogers helped, because talented as the guy was, there was little about the music he began putting out that screamed “country.” It seemed like it was country because country radio played it, and that was that. Much of the country music of the late 70s was like it, play to the masses, get on Hee Haw, and sell the records. Somehow, I sensed this, and lost interest, or succumbed to peer pressure, or both.

Fast forward to college, because this essay is already showing some signs of bloat. I was at the University of Missouri – Rolla then, failing at being an engineering student. I found one of my best friends ever at that school and discovered that I was more interested in doing little theatre productions than calculus, so I acquired some knowledge of self. The other big thing that happened to me during that time was a work study job at the local NPR station, KUMR, housed in the campus library. One of the shifts I regularly worked was the Saturday evening shift. Saturday evenings were pretty big because Prairie Home Companion was at that time one of the biggest things in Public Radio, so to keep those hours felt like a big responsibility. When PHC ended for the night, the next show up was Bluegrass for a Saturday Night, hosted by Wayne Bledsoe.

Professor Bledsoe taught history at the University and devoted 3 hours of nearly every weekend to programming bluegrass music for the Ozark airways. He’d have call in shows, and I would help pull records from the library, and I would occasionally help him pre-record a show if he were going on vacation. As inadvertent payback, I received a crash course in bluegrass – Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, Ralph Stanley, the Dillards, and so on. He also championed a few New Traditional performers, as they called them back then, like Emmylou Harris, and Nanci Griffith.

The album we were playing back then of Nanci’s was Once in a Very Blue Moon, which I pirated onto a tape that is long lost, and the album itself is hard to find (I don’t think her Rounder albums are in print), so the album of hers I turn to now is her live album recorded at Anderson Fair in Austin, One Fair Summer Evening. Everything good about her is on this album, her humor, her gentle but powerful voice, and her songwriting, and cover interpreting strengths. Her singing on the chorus of “Deadwood, South Dakota” (a song written by her ex-husband) gives me chills to this day. I even laugh with her corny jokes about Woolworths, although it is easier knowing that it’s the lead in to one of her best songs, “Love at the Five and Dime.”

Wayne Bledsoe, Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris were my gateway drug into what is now loosely classified as Americana Music, sort of a catch all for roots music, blues, bluegrass, folk and a type of country music that differentiates itself from the Nashville mainstream. I’m not going to rehash authenticity arguments and I’m not sure Steve Earle is any more authentic than Toby Keith. I personally, fell into this rabbit hole of great music and never looked back. Thank you, Wayne Bledsoe.

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Late Night Listening: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Richard and Linda Thompson

Blame Rolling Stone. I had a subscription to the magazine back in the mid 80’s and one issue had a full page review of the six albums of Richard and Linda Thompson, which had just been reissued through a small imprint called Carthage Records. The review hailed at least three of the albums as absolute masterpieces, the first – I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, the third album – Pour Down Like Silver, and the sixth and final album – Shoot Out the Lights, which ended both the Thompson’s collaboration and marriage. Not being a close reader, I opted not to sample any of these three albums, but went instead with their fifth album, Sunnyvista, mostly because the producer was Gerry Rafferty of Baker Street fame, which I thought might make that a good entry point. As it turned out, the album wasn’t that great, (easily the weakest of the six, IMHO) but there were enough good tunes that I decided to try again, and ordered “Bright Lights.”

I had never had the experience of listening to an album cold before and connecting with it like I did with this one. It’s a dark, dark album. Not the wear black and lots of eye makeup kind of dark either, but a world view that is genuinely pessimistic, with hope being that thing still trapped shut in its container when Pandora closed it in desperate haste. The opening song, “When I get to the Border,” is a thinly veiled death song, so thinly veiled that you wonder why a veil was even warranted. Even a more up tempo and somewhat exuberant track like the title song, an homage to the weekend and stepping out, is almost immediately undercut by the next song, whose title “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” will give you some idea of the content. But that’s nothing compared to the penultimate track, “The End of the Rainbow,” where the narrator serenades an infant in its crib with nothing but hard-learned wisdom, culminating in the line, “there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow/There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.”

I know all this sounds like a dreary slog, but added to this mix is Richard Thompson, who is simultaneously one of the great rock guitarists and songwriters, and Linda Thompson, who is one of the great vocal interpreters. When she sings, she invests the song with a life that few vocalists can match. She was the perfect muse for Richard, who can fill the darkest of material with a humor and specificity that probably only the late John Prine matched. And the guitar playing might seem deceptively muted, because the playing is always in service of the song, but from the surf guitar chords opening “The Calvary Cross” to the precision of closing track “The Great Valerio,” you can hear a master at work.

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Late Night Listening-Late morning edition: AngelHeaded Hipster, the songs of Marc Bolan & T-Rex

AngelHeaded Hipster was the last tribute album curated by Hal Willner, the producer who became best known for unusual tribute albums that were often more than just a bunch of covers. He would take a subject, for instance Kurt Weill, or Charles Mingus, and fashion a selection of music and artists that approached the work in offbeat and often revelatory ways, sometimes using connecting material, such as in the Mingus album, where music tracks played alongside spoken word passages from Mingus's own writings. In what was probably the best known of Willner's tributes, Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music From Vintage Disney Films, he used an eclectic group of artists such as Tom Waits, Los Lobos, and Yma Sumac to put an extremely personal stamp on the music from Disney films such as Pinocchio and Snow White, with odd spoken word passages from Ken Nordine, the word jazz man. The results are unlike any other Disney music compilation around.

Angelheaded Hipster was the last of Willner's works, as it was completed after his death from COVID-19 in 2020. It's hard to know how much of the final product was completed before his illness and death, because this does feel like a more conventional tribute album than the usual Willner project. The general eclecticism of the artists is there, with Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, U2, John Cameron Mitchell, and David Johansen all contributing. Some of the track sequencing does favor the tonal shifts and juxtapositions that occur elsewhere in the Willner catalog, and there are one or two pieces of text in this large two disc album. I wonder if the tracks would have been pared down to a smaller selection and more in between trickery thrown in if Willner had more time, as it does feel like at some point, whoever completed it decided to just use all tracks that were commisioned. It doesn't quite have the bite or discovery of earlier Willner projects, and few tracks compete with Marc Bolan's originals in any serious way. That said, it is still a reverent and well-done tribute to a one of a kind performer whose flamboyance often overshadowed his gifts as a musician and songwriter. Few of the songs are presented in the normal often raucous T-Rex manner (Johansen's jazzy take on Bang a Gong is a rare exception), but there is much pleasure in some of the more subdued renderings - you hear how good the songs really were beyond the boogie. It's a fair argument that the boogie was much of the point of Bolan's music, but the album makes the case that it wasn't all that was going on.

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Dream Diary

I had a dream once that I was watching an "All in the Family" pilot where Archie Bunker was a widower from episode one, and there were ads for a bad Woodstock-like concert film and a Jamaican Zombie movie. I hope to return to this alternate-history 70s sometime and see if James Taylor became the godfather of punk.

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A Theatre Tale

I was once in this strange production of Playboy of the Western World that the director/producer/lead actress put up for an interminable number of Sunday night performances at a NYC comedy club. The show basically was playing for several months, Sundays only. Midway through the run, one of our cast members was scheduled to be in a wedding out of town, so we were promised that there would be an understudy actor for that particular performance.

We started the run, and no word of this understudy, weeks went by, and no understudy. Finally, two weeks before the actor’s wedding obligation, we were called to a special rehearsal to meet our new actor. We were greeted by a very nice man with a thick Ecuadorian accent. To play the Irish father of the main character. We went through the rehearsal, and he read the script with a skill level which could best be described as “phonetically.” Our director assured us that he would be fine, and off book by the performance in two weeks.

To paraphrase Mike Birbiglia: “I know, I’m in the future too.”

Two weeks later we all get calls from the director. Our replacement actor was not off book. Because of that, we were to treat the performance as a staged reading, and we would all have scripts in hand. No word how to deal with stage business, fight scenes, etc. Night of, the rest of the actors decided that we were not going to go out there with scripts in our hands, and he would be just fine going out with a script.

So, the play went on pretty much as usual until his first scene, about midway through the play. He came on stage, saw that no one else had a script, and decided that he needed to toss his too. However, he seemed to remember only one or two actual lines, and tried desperately to exit the stage, prevented by the rest of us. We basically improvised around him for a bit of the scene, until other actors made their entrances, and we went on. Someone persuaded him to keep on script for the next and final scene of his, so it went more smoothly, but his accent and J.M. Synge’s rendering of Irish dialect still pretty much made everything unintelligible.

The next week, our regular actor was back, and we had a smooth show. The week after that, our director/producer/lead actress called us up to tell us that the Comedy Club had reneged on their end of the contract and cancelled our show (there were several more weeks to go). She said she was looking at it with her lawyers and would get us up and running. We never did, and you know, I really didn’t mind.

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The Thing About Pam

I started watching this today. The first couple of episodes are up on Hulu. My hometown is actually the next county over from Troy, Missouri, the setting of this true-life murder mystery (I've lived in NYC since 1996, though, so my alibi is solid). Not sure yet how I feel about it. I'm a bit put off by the archness of tone - Keith Morrison's an acquired taste, and I know Dateline's a very popular show with its own set of fans, but adding his narration to an entire miniseries on the event is a bit over-indulging in cheese. It also flattens out the characters to be a bit one-note and characture-ish. I keep waiting for a caption to explain that what I'm watching is a reenactment, Dateline-style.

Renee Zellweger's make-up doesn't help matters. No judgement on her as an actress, but, the decision to fat-suit the famously tiny actress and hide her under prosthetics that look like someone glued Naugahyde to her face really robs the film of a credible center. She looks uncomfortable trying to emote through the latex, and it shows. Maybe casting an actual plus-size actress would have made a difference. Imagine Melissa McCarthy as Pam Hupp, for instance.

I'll probably stick it out and maybe post again if it improves, but I'm not terribly impressed so far.

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I finally got around to watching The Man who Killed Don Quixote. I'm a Gilliam fan (Brazil and especially the Adventures of Baron Munchausen are among my favorite movies), but even I admit that his output after, say, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been of lesser quality.

Quixote is no exception, except it does have its share of great scenes, and it actually gets better as it goes along. It's visually impressive all the way through but narratively incoherent, a film where fantasy and reality collide, but each of the three films previously mentioned manage to do the same thing while keeping you grounded in what is actually going on. I'm not even sure if it necessarily improves towards the end in that respect, rather than I just got used to it.

It feels like it has just been tinkered with too long, which makes sense for anyone who knows the troubled history of the project. A version starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort became a near legendary catastrophic picture shutdown, with its own behind the scenes documentary Lost in La Mancha. The film has been gestating so long that there is a dedication at the end to two actors cast as Quixote (Rochefort and John Hurt) who both passed away before the current version finally completed.

All that time, Gilliam worked on this script, so perhaps it feeling a bit overcooked was inevitable. That said, it really is a visually striking film, and possibly it may work for me a little better on a second viewing, as Fear and Loathing did for me once upon a time. It's on Hulu, if anyone is interested.

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My Movie Weekend: Nightmare Alley (2022)

Latest foray into my wife's digital SAG screeners - Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. By coincidence, Criterion Channel is streaming the Tyrone Power version of the same story, so I made it a two-fer. I love del Toro's work usually and like Bradley Cooper as an actor, but while I liked their version of Alley somewhat, I wasn't wowed by it. The Tyrone Power film from 1947 is by no means a major film - basically it's a straight up noir, with a charismatic grifter learning how to cold-read people, and passing himself off as a psychic. The del Toro/Cooper version is about this as well, but it also is layering in psychological thriller and del Toro's usual supernatural horror touches on top of it, and I don't think it is a great fit for the material. Not only does it add 30 minutes plus to the 1947 film's running time, it also feels a bit operatic and overheated at times.

Cooper has much more subtlety and range than Tyrone Power, but the new film is working very hard, and I think too hard, to make Stanton, the main character, a generally good person who basically falls due to a mixture of fate and hubris. In the Power version, he's basically a hustler in a world of hustlers, not evil, but an anti-hero like most main characters in noir. Fate isn't tragedy there, it's just like, well, the cards weren't your way, it happens. Del Toro and Cooper really seem to be aiming for high tragedy, so much is made of him being a generally virtuous guy who just stumbles onto this gift of reading people, and the path to bigger and bigger scores poisons him. It just feels fussy and overstuffed to me. I can sympathize with the Power version of the character without thinking he is particularly a good person, because he is a character hardened by circumstance. Cooper and del Toro want me to sympathize with him because he is a fundamentally good person who has fallen into bad things, and I think that misreads the material a bit.

It's hard to fault the movie otherwise. The rest of the cast is great, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collete, David Straithairn, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins - it's just loaded with terrific actors (Cooper is fine too, I just think the interpretation of the character is off). The movie looks great, and the sound design is amazing. I watched on my tablet with my good Sony headphones, and it was an experience up there with listening to the best Pink Floyd albums at times. In particular, a sequence on a carousel with a far-off thunder was just playing games in my head. Sound design Oscar contender for sure.

On the whole I think this is a bad time for a version of this movie, as I think Hollywood right now has a problem with anti-heroes that aren't quip factories like Tom Hiddleston's Loki, in other words, not really an anti-hero but a charming scamp. Television right now would be the place where it could work, but there is not a miniseries worth of material here. The perfect time for a Nightmare Alley film would have been during the 70s, post Hays-Code to get the appropriate sleaziness (del Toro's version also seems to lack some of the sleaze suggested by the carny life) and pre Spielberg/Lucas, where it could be not shooting for blockbuster status. I picture a Five Easy Pieces/Chinatown era Jack Nicholson as Stanton, with Altman, or maybe Monte Hellman directing. Yeah, Hellman, because then we would have Warren Oates in a supporting role. If any actor was born to play a carny, it was Warren Oates. I'm genuinely sad now that this movie doesn't exist.

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Parenting secrets 101: When my son won't get out of bed in the morning, I instruct his Alexa device to play really obnoxious music. He's gotten used to the speed metal and loud country music I had set up, so the current wakey wakey song is the Michael Buble version of the old Spider-Man theme. It is gloriously bombastic with the thundering drums and Buble Sinatra-ing all over the place and it ususally gets Nate out of bed within two minutes. The version Alexa defaults to is mixed way louder than the version on this video, so you're welcome. After he gets used to this one, I'm going to have to program the Residents or something.

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My Movie Weekend

Belfast - Liked it, especially Ciaran Hinds as the grandfather of the boy at the center of this film, about a protestant family in 60s Northern Ireland. The danger suggested there is somewhat held at arm's length, as it is really a boy's growing up story. West Side Story - Sure, it still has a problematic actor playing Tony, and it maybe doesn't go far enough in addressing the ill-informed take on Puerto Ricans from both the original stage show and the Robert Wise film version, but this is a kinetic piece of filmmaking. Stephen Spielberg proves that he is as great a musical filmmaker as in most other genres he tackles - this is the rare musical film where the camera dances along with the actors. Even if you are on the fence about the film, just fast forward to the big production numbers, and marvel. The Tragedy of Macbeth - really liked this one too. Loved the expressionist tone of the cinematography and set design. Denzel Washington was maybe a bit reserved as the Scottish King for my taste, but he was good, as was Frances McDormand's Lady M and the cast in general. Kathryn Hunter as all of the witches was mesmerizing - if she doesn't get a best supporting actress nomination, maybe they can find a place for her in the special effects category. And as this is a film by half of the Coen Brothers, it was nice to see a couple Coen-esque casting touches, namely Stephen Root as the Porter, and pockmarked man of a hundred b-movie villain roles Brian Thompson as one of Banquo's murderers. And finally, The Power of the Dog. This movie was fantastic! Jane Campion, who hasn't made a movie in about a decade, just amazes here. I haven't read the novel that inspired this movie, and I'm glad I didn't, because this film constantly plays against expectations. Just when I thought I had pigenholed it into following some basic storytelling template, it pivoted away from my assumptions into completely different territory. Set in Montana at the very early 1900s, it takes advantage of wide open spaces (played by past and future Middle Earth stand in New Zealand) and is gorgeously shot. Honestly between this and Macbeth, best cinematography could go either way (along with Dune and The Green Knight - this might be an especially tough category this year). Great acting by Jesse Pemons, Kirstin Dunst, Kodi-Smit McPhee, and especially Benedict Cumberbatch. I have always liked him, but after he became flavor of the month from Sherlock, I kinda assumed that his film career might not live up to that hype, and now I feel that I've been proven wrong. Maybe I haven't come across a true rival performance yet, but right now, I will be severely disappointed if he doesn't get best actor for this. Likewise Jane Campion for best director. All in all, a nice weekend catching up with movies.

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From a time long, long, ago...

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I'm slowly realizing that the only way to write is to write something, and if I don’t write something, I’ll never work my way into “have written.” That’s where everybody who thinks themselves capable of writing want to be, and where so comparatively few actually reach.