The Entroporium

Just as I was getting all happy and comfortable with my new “dispassionate critical voice,” Angry Robot goes and praises me for my personal writing style. And GrapeJuicePlus, too! Aw heck, I’d better write something embarassing and revealing…

This is so sad that Debbie Harry is being replaced by Star Wars at the top of my blog. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan. I actually managed to miss Episode Two; are we of a certain age allowed to do that? But I let Susie drag me to the new one and I was pleasantly surprised and entertained, so long as I didn’t expect basic film stuff like acting, plot and dialogue.

Me being me, I had to sit there in the front row and go all metacritic, and so a couple of things jumped out for me (which basically means that I wasn’t really paying attention to the movie). Here’s a dumb one: in George Lucas’s conception of the city of the future (or “Long Ago,” yes, I know), there are no plants. No parks. No ballfields. No nothing. Just city blocks and traffic. There is not a smidgen of greenery on the planet where the government governs (but is presided over by some kind of self-appointed meritocratic Joint Chiefs Of Staff, what? We’d never let that happen here, right?).

Here’s another thing. What sets the original Star Wars apart from the rest of the series is the sly humor, which is pretty much absent from the other five. (Important exception: Harrison Ford.) And music, which is otherwise overwhelmingly serious, provides the best comic relief in the film. Why do these films have to so darn ponderous?

And remember, it’s the Fun of the Star Wars universe that captured you in the first place. Let’s pretend we’re back in 1977, we’re 10 years old and we’re all seeing Star Wars for the first time. What’s the scene where a little family drama with spaceships went blasting into hyperspace and took over your intellect? You got it: The Cantina. It’s there that we meet the charismatic Han Solo, we first glimpse the personal threat posed to Luke Skywalker by The Empire, we meet all manner of weird aliens, and the adventure is really ON! This is a thrilling, funny, scary rollercoaster of a scene and arguably one that George Lucas never again got close to in his career. (Please don’t argue with me about it. I don’t care.)

And your favorite part of The Cantina was the band, of course, a bunch of strange creatures playing happy weird swingin’ tunes. It’s the best joke in the whole six movies when Han Solo shoots…whatever that was… and the band resumes playing as if nothing happened.

In the Summer Of ’77, Star Wars and disco mania took hold over America’s youth, and Meco provided the perfect combination. Each time we sat in the back seat, we hoped and prayed that Meco’s “Star Wars Disco” would come on the radio. The most highly anticipated part of the song, of course, was The Cantina Band segment, leading to a whole lot of gleeful car dancing and spastic behavior. For those of us lucky enough to own the 45 (to bring to classroom parties, natch), everyone knew exactly the place visually on the record where the needle needed to go to get to that “good part.”

Here for your edification — and my embarassment — the infamous Star Wars Disco. The Cantina Band comes in at 3:30.

[Soundtrack]
Meco – Star Wars Disco.mp3

Get inside the mind of Meco!

The cantina band’s stock has sunk low in the Lucas universe. The LucasArts folks apparently think so little of music other than John Williams bombast that they’ve banned “other” music from the Star Wars universe. Why can’t we get some intergalactic karaoke love?

Thanks to Angry Robot for the inspiration.

Rodney Bingenheimer, long-time DJ at Los Angeles’s KROQ, is all confidence and smiles as an “expert witness” in The Ramones: End Of The Century. As the main character of George Hickenlooper’s excellent documentary, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, an entirely different picture emerges of a lonely man living on the tail end of his time in the sun.

Arriving in Los Angeles in the mid-60s, Bingenheimer somehow wormed his way into the city’s flowering hipster music scene, a constant at every party and a certainty to turn up whenever visiting rock royalty came to town. In the 70s, he became a virtual A&R man without portfolio, opening the first glam club in the US and breaking tons of artists through his popular radio show – everybody from David Bowie to X to No Doubt.

But no hipster can keep his cred forever – especially one whose cred depends on the cred of others, a step removed from the locus of hip – and most of the movie concentrates on Bingenheimer’s long, slow slide from Center Of The Action to Merely Relevant to Eccentric Relic. By the end of the movie, Rodney has only a tenuous hold on his lonely 12am-3am Monday morning time slot and seemingly nothing but regret and loneliness. It’s chilling to see how quickly it can all go and how much worse it can be when one refuses to acknowledge it. Bingenheimer is too savvy an operator to wind up as Norma Desmond, which is all the harder to take since he’s all too aware of his plight.

Don’t let the horrific box fool you at the video store. The box copy screams COLDPLAY!, GWEN STEFANI!, GREEN DAY! and many others. Well, yes, they are all in there, and in typical rip-off fashion, the appearances are fleeting though relevant to the movie’s ‘plot.’ More striking are all the archival photos of 70s rock decadence and interviews with early US punkers like X and Blondie. Nevertheless Mayor Of The Sunset Strip is a riveting portrait of what happens when someone stays on stage too long because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Hickenlooper, whose previous movies include documentaries on Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper at their scariest, will be mining this area again in his next film, a biography of Edie Sedgwick with Guy Pearce playing Andy Warhol.

[Soundtrack]
Kim Fowley – The Trip.mp3
There are several interview segments with Bingenheimer’s longtime friend, scenester mercenary Kim Fowley, notorious for (among many other things) “discovering” The Runaways. Members of The Runaways are interviewed and make quite clear that they detest the man. Here’s one of Fowley’s earliest cynical moves, a single he recorded in 1966 to cash in on the Psychedelic Music trend. It’s a neat trick to be so condescending towards the audience you’re trying to rip off and still be so damn amusing. Flying dogs and silver cats and emerald rats, indeed!

Trailer for Mayor Of The Sunset Strip

A day with a Debbie Harry picture on your blog is a good day.

The Ramones: End Of The Century had a limited run in theatres last year and should be turning up on DVD any day now. It tells the band’s fascinating and sometimes harrowing journey from formation to its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

While the film seeks to be a “warts and all” account of The Ramones’ brilliant career, the dirt is really secondary to the array of loving interviews given by friends and contemporaries like Deborah Harry, Joe Strummer and Clem Burke.

Archival footage of The Ramones’ early performances makes End Of The Century essential viewing for any band that aspires to rock as pure power performance. But the unchanging nature of the band’s performance clips over time also highlights one of the interesting undercurrents of both the film and of The Ramones’ career, indeed any band that makes ‘purity of form’ a part of its visual and sonic presentation. There’s a constant tension in the interviews between Johnny, the leader and the protector of the group’s image, and the rest of the band, who sometimes bristle artistically and personally at being pushed to constantly and continuously keep the songs the same, the same haircuts, the same clothes, the same everything. While artistically laudable, it’s easy to see that maintaining the image and the consistency was wearing at the band members as early as 1980 when Joey pressured the band to hook up with eccentric (and dangerous) superproducer Phil Spector.

It’s also interesting to study the underlying story of The Ramones as a business. By 1981, the group had determined that it would never “make it big” and instead concentrated on other business alternatives for turning its passion into a respectable living. In fact, End Of The Century could be required viewing for Business Schools: how to care for a brand, how to work with difficult co-workers, when & how to make the decision to be a niche player instead of a market leader. It’s never discussed, but the band obviously did quite well for itself in the end — not Jimmy Page rich, but rich enough. Johnny had the world’s largest collection of old-time glossy 8×10 baseball photos, while Joey was so into day trading that he wrote a song for his posthumous solo album about Maria Bartiromo, CNBC’s reporter from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

All in all, End Of The Century is a colorful portrait of a band that carries the DNA for pretty much every other rock band you love. Even if you know the story, it has enough impressive concert footage, interviews and subtextual hints about what was left out to make for riveting viewing. Check it out!

[Soundtrack]
Ramones – I Wanna Live.mp3

Punky baseball fans will want to check out this article in which Johnny & Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane interview each other

Wattstax catches Soul and the Black Power movements at a critical time of transition. The Sound of Black America was shifting away from indie labels like Stax and Motown, while majors like Warner and Columbia were quickly muscling their way in with money and “distribution deals.” Soul artists, meanwhile, were finding it harder to reach a white mainstream audience – and the Afrocentric styles and attitude of the day probably didn’t exactly help either. The money was shifting into the major media centers, radio was re-segregating and so was the rest of the culture industry. As urban Americans of all races were more & more forced by law and by economic circumstance to live closer to each other, their lives ever more intertwined, American culture was rapidly re-balkanizing after the halcyon days of ’60s soul – “The Sound of Young America.”

Stax’s evolution was a perfect example of this cultural shift. After the bi-racial triumphs of artists like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Booker T & The MG’s, Stax started to move away from the mainstream (though the quality of the music remained very high). The label was at a crossroads, having ejected or alienated most of its white management and keystone musicians in place of a paranoid gun-toting regime under Al Bell. The pinnacle moment came in 1972 when at the behest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the label funded a concert in Los Angeles to showcase many of its remaining hit acts. Meant to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots, Wattstax took place on a Saturday afternoon in the cavernous Memorial Coliseum.

With over 100,000 seats, this was an unforgiving place for what was essentially a restaging of 1950s-style showcase tour, each act getting maybe 30 minutes to run through its hits and quit the stage for the next act. The stage was placed at the 50-yard line, seats were sold towards in a horseshoe towards one end zone and the 60-70 yards of field between the stage and the seats was left open. Schlitz kicked in for a sponsorship, so all the seats were $1, bringing out many folks that probably had few opportunities to see concerts.

For acts that typically performed in clubs and churches, this was at best a daunting situation, and unsurprisingly some acts fare better than others. Albert King and Pops Staples don’t make much of an impression, while the science-fiction Afro craziness of the Bar-Kays brings down the house. Rufus Thomas’s spastic dancing and razor wit also cut through, but his nearly his short peach jumpsuit is what’s really memorable about his brief set.

Headliner Isaac Hayes, nattily attired in his trademark chain mail, was the only performer to go on after dark, but even with that advantage he doesn’t have the charisma to overcome the stage set-up. Riding high on his current smash hit “Theme From Shaft,” Hayes had only recently become a performer. Starting as a house songwriter for Sam & Dave and others, his breakthrough album Hot Buttered Soul was so lightly regarded by the label that he was forced to record it outside the Stax studios and cut the whole thing in one take. It also didn’t help that Hayes elected to simulate the “Shaft” string arrangements by playing over a rickety 1972 click track.

The film of Wattstax was re-released by Warner last year in a “30th Anniversary Special Edition.” What’s evident is that Stax didn’t want to simply make a concert movie, but rather create a collage of urban life in 1972 Los Angeles: a Black Power-oriented view of the Watts community and its consciousness. The film opens with an effective montage of street scenes over The Dramatics’ “What You See Is What You Get.” The cameras also visit churches, barber shops and the streets of Watts to capture the sound and thought of contemporaneous black culture. A particularly rich bonus is that Richard Pryor is interviewed several times in a nightclub, basically doing his then-current act.

The consciousness scenes are not entirely successful, though. The presence of Ted Lange, best known as Isaac from The Love Boat, rapping with “his brothers” in a barber shop about ghetto life throws the “spontaneity” of the documentary sequences into doubt. It’s also curious that Stax, so rooted in the South by its sound, staff and tradition, would only choose to portray LA and skip the South entirely.

The “dialogue” and styles are so dated that Wattstax becomes essential viewing as a historical document; surely portraits of the ‘real life’ of ’70s American black life are few and far between. (The only alternatives that leap to mind are the horrific Blaxploitation movies that ironically made superstars of some of Soul’s most ‘conscious’ artists.) The crowd concert scenes showcase an incredible array of colorful clothes and gravity-defying hairstyles that we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetimes. You may want to keep your hand on the Fast Forward button for some of the boring bits, but if you’re at all curious about Stax, its artists and its demise, Wattstax is well worth your time.

[Soundtrack]
Bar-Kays – Son of Shaft.mp3

[Recommended Further Reading]
Peter Guralnick – Sweet Soul Music