In This Issue:

Music

The Negro Problem/Stew/”Passing Strange”

DVDS/Movies


Movies - Jesse James, The Return of Frank James (although to be honest, I got a little off on a tangent and the article ended up being mostly about sequels and 80’s horror movies and James Cameron and…well, like I said, I got way off the subject before I remembered what I was talking about)

Box Set -
Clint Eastwood Western Icon Collection

Classic/Romance of the Month - Laura

The Negro Problem - Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997)
The Negro Problem - Joys and Concerns (1999)
Stew - Guest Host (2000)
Stew - The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs (2002)
The Negro Problem - Welcome Black (2002)
Stew - Something Deeper Than These Changes (2003)
“Passing Strange” - A play by Stew and Heidi Roedewald

Once upon a time, Immy and were sitting in our favorite bi-polar record store in the world, London’s wonderfully schizophrenic two-stores-in-one Stand Out Records/Minus Zero Records, talking to the respective owners, the Bills (Stand Out’s Bill Allerton and Minus Zero’s Bill Forsyth), during one of our usual 2-4 hr visits to the tiny store(s). You see the way it works is that we go there with one or two ideas of things we think we want (and that’s all well and good) and then we end up spending the next two, three, or four hours endlessly listening to music as Bill and Bill compete across the two foot aisle that separates one store from the other to play us different music they’re sure we’ve never heard before (they’re often right) that they’re certain we’ll love (they’re pretty much ALWAYS right) and therefore purchase (they get us there too). We nearly always spend every penny we have and leave with several huge bags of CD’s each. Half the great music I’ve discovered over the past decade was played for me by the Bill’s in their tiny wonderland on Blenheim Crescent just off Portobello Road. It might seem strange to those of you who aren’t utterly obsessed with music, but they’ve been as big an influence in my life as any of my musical idols.

And the funny thing is, I’m not even sure if they like Counting Crows all that much, if at all. I know they like me, just as I know I like them, I just have no idea how they feel about my band. It’s just never come up and I never thought to ask. In retrospect, it’s even better if they don’t. I love that we simply meet on the bountiful common ground of our deep mutual love of good music.

Anyway, I’m off on one of my tangents again, and I really want to talk about something else today. This story is (I swear) actually leading somewhere.

One day, one of the Bills (I can’t actually remember which) said “Hey, if you guys are from Hollywood, you have to hear The Negro Problem. Have you ever heard of them?” We hadn’t so he grabbed a CD and said “This is their 2nd CD Joys and Concerns (1999). You’ll love it.” And then he pushed the drawer in on the CD player and out came the sound of the Beatles transported into the soul of a black man from Silverlake at the end of the last millennium. Every song had a unbearably perfect pop melody I couldn’t get out of my head, harmonies, strange instruments, trumpet and flutes, strings, funk , soul, and the feeling that music was the most important thing in the entire world and that, at least on THIS record, they were damn well going to celebrate the fuck out of it.

From the 1st song “Repulsion (Show Up Late For Work On Monday)”, I was hooked as bassist Heidi Roedenwald’s harmonies slid above the ends of singer/songwriter Stew’s vocal lines and out from the tails of them into “Yeah yeah’s. Two songs later, after the deliciously funky soul of “Sea of Heat”, the album segues into “Comikbuchland”, which (and I hate comparisons like this) comes the closest anyone’s ever come to re-creating “Penny Lane”, except this “Penny Lane” is set in a Los Angeles bohemian ghetto (check out Heidi Roedenwald’s perfect Paul McCartney/Brian Wilson bass playing on the song).

“Comikbuchland”

At least I think it does. I have to be honest, I never think about what Stew means in his songs. I’m so entranced by the wordplay and the unearthly hook-heaven of the music that I never have the concentration to really ponder them, although I do think the whole thing is worth the price of admission just for the otherworldly lyric cleverness of:

Tell me again what constitutes good hair
And tell me how the guns and bums
Unbraided your deep dread of reason in Comikbuchland

“Unbraided your deep dread of reason”? C’mon. I would kill to have written that. Now that is some seriously funky metaphorical double-meaning shit right there. THAT…is not for beginners.

I keep coming back to The Beatles but, once again, that’s exactly the same way I feel about them. I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about and I don’t really care at all. I DO know this. The Beatles were brilliant lyricists and so is Stew. I’m not gonna lie to you, and let me get this out of the way right here at the top of this article, he is flat-out unquestionably no doubt in my mind whatsoever the finest songwriter working today. He is so far and above my favorite that I can’t even think of anyone working in the same stratosphere as him, at least not off the top of my head. The six albums I’m going to talk about here are some of the best albums anyone’s made over the past decade. Ever since Joys and Concerns, whenever Stew released an album, as far as I was concerned it was hands down the best album of that year.

By the time I got to the middle of the album where the transcendent “Bleed” resides, I was hooked for life. It’s truly one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard (Immy and I got to play it onstage with them a few years ago at Symphony Space in New York. I can’t sing it as well as Stew but it was fun to do it together. I put the recording up on the Counting Crows MySpace Page and on my own page as well. Check it out.).

It’s followed by the soul-meets SMiLE “Peter Jennings” a subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) jab at race in America and the way being black is more than just a little different from being white, whether it’s in the way it’s portrayed on the news, the way some people look at it as different branch of the evolutionary tree, or just the way the experience of being pulled over by the cops takes on an entirely different tone when you don’t look anything like a blond surfer kid from Malibu (which is perhaps why it’s so important for the band to be called The Negro Problem, not just because you might have forgotten in this wonderful pc world we live in that there is a problem, but also because maybe it takes a name like that that to remind everyone how ill-prepared the music business is to deal with an all-white band fronted by a black guy from the LA ghettos who grew up obsessed with The Beatles and Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson as well as Parliament and Sly Stone and The Jackson 5).

Hey LAPD, oh why you chase me?
Didn’t I have my blinker on?
Didn’t I say I love the law?
See it’s higher than me
Here in Newton’s tree
Full of Monkeys and sacred songs

The joyous Looney Tunes soul musical of “Ahmnot Madatcha”, a bizarrely celebratory “slice of life” (love?) story that could only have been sliced from the funky-as-all-get-out chocolate cherry cream cheesecake that is Stew’s life, is followed by “Ken” which examines the possibility that a certain very popular anatomically incorrect doll just might prefer to spend his time with G.I. Joe than that bimbo Barbie.

“Ahmnot Madatcha”

They always stick me with Barbie
But I want them to know
I prefer G.I. Joe
But any able-bodied man-doll will surely do
Just someone to love since I am not set up to screw

Somehow it manages to be both an hysterical and a heartbreaking examination of the tormented life of an in-the-closet (literally) gay plastic doll.

Someday soon I’ll be in your child’s room
And I’ll be forced to kiss Barbie’s plastic tits
And I will hate myself but what’s more I’ll hate you
For not allowing me to love as I wish to

Or is that not really a song about a doll at all?

The sad joy of “Goode Tyme” is followed by the strangely familiar distorted pop Monkee-delia of “The Rain In Leimert Park Last Tuesday”, which drove me crazy the first few times I heard it because I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard it before but I just knew I had. I finally figured out it was so familiar because it was simply a sped up punky version of “Comikbuchland”. Such a strange thing to do. Whatever, it works.

And then…“Come Down Now”. Just when you thought you’d never hear another song as beautiful as “Bleed” as long as you lived…along comes one even lovelier.

“Come Down Now”

So come down now
Remove your bandage
So I can see your damage
More than the law allows

So come down now
Remove your bandage
So I can see you’re damaged
More than the law allows

Have the courage, he says, to utterly reveal yourself to the ones who love you enough to want to see the pain the world has caused you. Open your life to the only people capable of providing the healing you need. And even if they can’t do it, Stew bathes you in a song that almost does it for you anyway. It’s five minutes of heaven and then the album is over…except there’s actually another 27 minutes of silence and music and silence and music. If you have a little patience, there are three more fantastic songs. “Stumble” waits a full nine minutes to appear but gives another five joyous minutes, then segues into the gentle folk of “New World”, which lasts another 4 minutes before giving way to the the falsetto choruses of “Ordinary One” into a building cacophonous harmonic low-fi live revisitation of the last verse of “Peter Jennings” that sounds like all of The Polyphonic Spree crammed into a phone booth screaming a magnificent climax over the phone line into your answering machine.

And then, just like that, in a tumble of tom rolls and trumpets and flutes and cymbal crashes and snare drum and piano and distorted guitar, it’s over.

And then it comes back for another 4 seconds.

And then it’s done.

Until…

…16 months later, in the fall of 2000, the band reappears, now renamed Stew (I don’t know. Sometimes I think he just got tired of telling people “No, it’s cool. I’m black.”) with the album Guest Host (2000). And, by the way, when I say “reappears”, I mean they put out the best album of the year. They told me the next album was coming out and I was excited but a little nervous because how could they top Joys and Concerns? It turned out the answer to that was question was…simply release Guest Host.

I mean you put the cd in your player and out blows a wind of soul and pop heaven called “Cavity”. When I hear Guest Host, and “Cavity” in particular, I imagine Brian Wilson and Prince and Burt Bacharach and Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone and Arthur Lee all meeting somewhere for a weekend to make a record together, and then realizing there was no need…because Stew had already made it. So instead, they all relaxed, had a few cocktails, got high, and spent the weekend listening to Stew over and over again until they felt the world was safe because someone was out there making truly transcendently great music.

“Cavity”

It’s sex and emptiness and loneliness and loss and being lost and love and desire and so much heart you feel as if yours will simply fill up from listening to it until there’s no more room and then it will simply break and you’ll just cry from how wonderful it is. I’m ranting, aren’t I? I can’t help it. The first words on the album are:

Sister there’s a cavity in me
Your sugar causes me such endless pain
And I was blind til I ate your sweet thing

Has anyone ever written better about the hole inside all of us and the agonizing pain that comes with the sweetness of love dangling just out of reach? The taste of desire and love seeming as if it lights the world and makes a blind man see, and yet, at the same time, makes him ever so more painfully aware of NOT possessing it.

Several songs later they sing the most hysterical/painful song about re-hab ever written. Maybe you just have to have lived in LA for awhile and watched the revolving door carousel that is the Hollywood re-hab scene (“I mean, dear, how can you be taken seriously if you haven’t been?”) to truly appreciate this song. Considering what a serious problem drug addiction is in the world, the way people wear their re-hab cred like designer jeans in LA makes you just want to hit them with a stick. Stew provides the stick on “Re-Hab”.

The comes the piano and string section epiphany of “Ordinary Love”. I want to tell you what it’s about but I don’t know. I just know it’s beautiful and I just feel something about the heartbreaking hopelessness of holding onto love even as it inevitably becomes somehow MORE ordinary and LESS extraordinary every day. It’s about about the struggle you go though to try to understand your slipping interest and get a grip on it before you lose hold of something which might mean the world to you and certainly once did. It begins:

“Ordinary Love”

I met her on the stairs and she showered me with her “hello’s
Next thing I know I was stuck in her abstract quiz show
Her faces no longer are the suns in which I bask
I’m still fascinated by the mask behind the mask

In all the choruses, Heidi sings over and over again:

The ordinary love that you want to leave

until Stew interrupts it (just once right before the end of the song) with the line:

Is like the ordinary lie that I don’t believe

and then Heidi goes back to singing:

The ordinary love that you want to leave

as the song fades…

I want to go into detail on every song. I want to tell you about how beautiful the Beatle bass, acoustic guitar, harmonica, oboe (or is it a clarinet), and organ all mesh with Stew’s vocal on “Stepford Lives” or about the viciously civilized lyrics of Stew’s unforgivingly detailed portrait of an aging Parisian prostitute in “Bijou”, the shimmering 12-string guitars and woodwind pairing of “Sister/Mother” but it’s too much to tell with three or four more albums to still talk about.

I will say that it all ends with the joyous “doo doo doo” opening of “C’mon Everybody”, which is about as good an ending as you could hope for on a perfect album, all acoustic guitars and sunshine melody vocals traded back and forth between Heidi and Stew until the last verse when the string section sweeps up to take out to the end. See if you can listen to the song less than at least five times in a row the first time you hear it. It just makes you feel good. The world is alright. Stew and Heidi and the gang are here and, even though the record’s about to end, they’ll be back again soon to fix the world just as soon as they have the time. “This is a message! From the East Hollywood Tourist Bureau! Come On Everybody! Come On Everyone!”

“C’mon Everybody”

Oh yeah, and for what it’s worth, Entertainment Weekly named Guest Host “Album of the Year” for 2000. It was the first time they did that. It wouldn’t be the last.

The next record, again a Stew album, didn’t appear for another year and a half until the spring of 2002. It was well worth the wait. Not as sunny as Guest Host, The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs (2002) is much more concerned with dissolution and the harm you can cause to the ones you love even when you don’t want or mean to. The soul-pop psychedelia of “Reeling” faces the latter concern:

Do you want to do this again?
I knew when we started,
I wanted to be more than a sin.
And I did see
The pitfalls in front of me
But I laughed and filled them in…

… I might kill the dove.
Not ’cause I want to,
But because I don’t know love.
But I can see,
You might carry me
Out of this empty hole I’ve dug

And the former is faced in the astounding nine-and-a-half minute triptych “The Drug Suite (I Must’ve Been High/I’m Not On A Drug/Arlington Hill)”, Stew’s reverie about his childhood experiments with LSD, the experience of being at a party where you’re the only one NOT high, and finally, the beautiful memory of getting stoned in a VW bug up on Arlington Hill, relaxing with your friends looking down on LA and then going down to church to sing in choir practice. It’s a memory perfectly captured on tape of a moment when everything in his life suddenly had meaning, or at least seemed to. It’s a beautiful painting of a song, capturing perfectly the memory of a sunny day with all your friends and the sense the drug and the view and the church and the choir gave you of a moment of perfect well-being and happiness. It’s a song about drugs but it’s also an absolutely sublime bit of songwriting about an oasis of utter joy and peace in a kid’s life.

“Love Is Coming Through The Door”

And just as you sigh at the beauty of his memory fading into silence, the album greets you with the love celebration joy of the Byrds-like “Love Is Coming Through The Door”. I wish I could tell you how this song makes me feel but I’m running out of superlatives. Sometimes I feel, though, as if I’ve made it through the times in my life when I couldn’t feel very much solely because I could listen to Stew’s records and know we do live in a world where it possible to truly love someone, and that there is joy waiting out there somewhere even for a miserable fuck like me. All I can say is that “Love Is Coming Through The Door” makes me feel as if it actually is doing just that. He conjures the feeling up so vividly that I feel okay and I believe in love again myself. I’m sitting here listening through each of these albums as I’m writing this essay and it’s taking days because of moments like this: I’ve just listened to “Love Is Coming Through The Door” four times in a row and, as it’s ending now, I know I’m going to listen to it at least one more time before I move on.

I have to re-think my initial assessment because the second half is almost a celebration of all the myriad and wonderful, if sometimes somewhat fucked up, ways it’s still possible to fall in love. Even if you’re crazy and the people you love are crazy, it’s still love and I think Stew wants us to remember that, crazy or fucked up or drugged out or whatever, love is still love and it’s amazing and it means the world and you’re always going to carry the imprint of it and the memories wherever you go for the rest of your life.

“North Bronx French Marie”, with it’s impossibly catchy piano part grooving over the top of the acoustic guitars, bass, drums, and…(what do you call that hooter thing…crap, I can’t remember) might be my favorite of all his songs. It’s conjuring up the image of love during one of our ridiculously sweaty New York summers just hits every right note for me.

“North Bronx French Marie”

Moonlight brushing against the window of American landscape night
Typical Tuesday night
My love is standing in the doorway
And she unlocks the screen door for me
Juvenile fantasy
Still houses whisper ever so silently
I’m alone on the sidewalk you see
Waiting for French Marie

Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
Hey, but it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree
Sticks to me
French Marie

I’m waiting to see where the wind blows
Maybe she’s lost in thought about me
The way I’d like her to be
Tomorrow she’ll ask
“Why’d you wait so long for me?
Are you all knocked out baby?
That would be too crazy!”
I tell the girl “don’t flatter yourself so”
But you know I’m deep in check, you see
Waiting for French Marie

Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
Hey, but it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree
Sticks to me
French Marie

Well, she smokes half my cigarettes and laughs at me
And asks if all the negroes are like me
Well baby…

Tonight I sleep with television
The warm talkative lover
Sexy electric
North Bronx Marie is somewhere screaming at the leaves
Of her hopeless brother
I guess her life is hectic
I’d like to think she needs a fireman like me to get her out of her family tree
The way I’d like her to be

Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
Hey, but it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree
Sticks to me
French Marie

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I just wanted you to hear the whole song. Can’t you just see the girl in the t-shirt with the sweat making it stick to her body? Can’t you just feel yourself getting there late at night and just looking at her and knowing it’s everything you want in the whole world just to be right there right then?

I’m pretty sure “The Smile” is written about his daughter. He just has a way when he writes songs about her. It’s still about love and the power it has to redeem even crazy people like us who are seemingly always a million miles from home and the people we love. It’s just lovely. Christ, I love this record.

Another interesting thing about The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs is the way it was recorded. To quote Matthew Greenwald on AllMusic.com,

“This unique album had its basic tracks recorded live during a residency at L.A.’s Knitting Factory and then buttressed by some immaculate studio overdubs. By juxtaposing Stew’s live spontaneity with some extraordinary studio audacity, the end result is a breathtaking catharsis, as well as one hell of a show for the listener. Brilliantly written, conceived, and performed, The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs is one of the first (and maybe finest) singer/songwriter masterpieces of the 21st century.”

So…uh…that’s a good review. And he really captures maybe the coolest thing about the record: the way it’s integrated into the sense of being at a concert. Musically, you’d never know it wasn’t a studio recording, except perhaps the sense of space and reverberation that you get at a live show, but a Stew/Negro Problem gig is a magical thing because of Stew’s monologues and the way they connect the songs with both pathos and his unique, and effortless, sense of humor. The great thing about The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs is the way it manages to give you the best of best worlds. The studio work allows for all the overdubs they need to fill out the album with as much complexity, or lack thereof, as they wish but the live setting gives you the unique experience of being there. You get to have your cake and eat it too. I only say it’s unique, by the way, if you haven’t been to a show, in which case, this album should convince you to get off your ass and go. All you need to do is go once. You’ll never miss another if you can help it as long as you live.

Ha. I just realized I totally forgot to mention the title song. How do you review and album called The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs and forget everything but the “…other songs”?

Hmmm. I actually can’t find the words. Like “Re-Hab” on “Guest Host“, it’s one of Stew’s longer lyrical masterpieces; his versions of “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”…except his are better (and, of course, he, unlike me, actually HAS a sense of humor). I have no problem saying that. I love my songs. Seriously, I think I’m a great songwriter. I really do. I just think he’s better (and, as I mentioned before, he’s funnier than me because he has a sense of humor and I just have this sort of mopey look and a sense of grim foreboding and…well, I just know we’re all gonna die someday soon) and I would give my left arm…well…I would give someone’s left arm anyway, to write as well as Stew. Actually, the nice thing is, I don’t need to. I write as well as I do and that’s pretty fucking good. And if I ever want to listen to someone better, all I have to do is put on a Stew record.

So I don’t know what to say about “The Naked Dutch Painter”. It’s a song about living in Europe and being an “artiste” and wishing you could screw another particularly hot “artiste”, except she’s not giving you the time of day because maybe you’re not enough of an “artiste” until she finally does fall for you and then she won’t leave, which is ok because you’re in love with her, but then she blows you off for her professor who’s even more of an “artiste” than either you or her, which breaks your heart so you try to call home to America but nobody answers the phone and you’re heartbroken until the particularly hot “artiste” shows up back at your door to tell you that she truly loves you, and only you, after all, which would probably be really great except that, at that particular moment, you happen to be entertaining another particularly hot “artiste”, which hurts the first particularly hot “artiste” for a moment until she realizes how much you like the fact that she missed you, and then she just gets pissed off and probably tells you to fuck off…

Ain’t that just life? Ain’t it a bitch?

There’s even the proverbial hidden track called, in this case, “The Proverbial Hidden Track” and another song after that called “Very Happy” ,which is exactly how it makes me feel. It’s just a cool little gem of soul-pop (what else can you call Stew-he’s like early Prince with acoustic guitars and brass sections recorded by The Beatles) about the fact that love isn’t really going to hurt you and , even if it does…it’s cool…it’s still going to make you, as Stew sings “very happy”.

It ends the album by making me feel just that.

The New York Times called The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs “perhaps the finest collection of songs an American songwriter has come up with this year”. And once again, for the 2nd album in a row, Entertainment Weekly named their record “Album of the Year” for 2002.

So you have to say to yourself. “Wow, they’re really on a roll with this Stew thing. Maybe switching over from The Negro Problem wasn’t such a bad idea after all.” It certainly seemed to be working out, both critically and creatively, because they seriously raised the bar pretty high on The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs.

So what do you do for an encore when you’re Stew and you’ve made the “album of the year” for two records running?

Well, obviously…you change your name back to The Negro Problem, go straight back into the studio, and you do it all over again.

And that’s exactly what they did.

Only maybe six months later, in the Autumn of that same year, just when you thought they’d disappeared, The Negro Problem reappears with the oh-so-aptly named Welcome Black (2002).

Nothing like an album title that reminds you why they named the fucking band The Negro Problem in the 1st place. “In case you thought it had gone away and in case you thought the “problem” had gone away too (and if you did, you were dreaming)…well, we’re back!

And what a return. The album opens with “Fox Hills”, a beautiful 30-second prologue of trumpets and…French horns maybe?..over piano leading into Heidi’s sweet pure voice singing the perfect melody of “Father Popcorn”

“Fox Hills/Father Popcorn”

See if you remember the song
Long after the song is gone to the memory graveyard

And then at the end of the verse, the music suddenly stops for a heartbeat…and the Stew booms in:

Don’t wanna put you in a pop coma

Followed by a wall of harmonies and then:

And then they put you in the popcorn machine
Don’t wanna put you in a pop coma
Don’t wanna put you in the popcorn machine

And WHAM! You ARE in a pop coma. It’s takes all of one minute for The Negro Problem to return and hit you with such a heavy dose of the sweet soul candy of pop music that it knocks you on your ass like some late Halloween evening up in your bedroom sneaking the rest of the candy your parents told you NOT to eat until the sugar hits your system and sends you up through the roof and out into the star-filled night sky. You just know you’re gonna come down hard later but for now it’s a very cool way to get high.

Welcome Black indeed.

“Lime Green Sweater” follows and explores the interesting, and funny to me anyway, idea that teachers are human beings too.

Huh?

In other words, like all human beings…they probably smoke pot and get high too. Maybe it’s just that when I was a kid, we didn’t think of authority figures fucking around the same way we did, but the song just blows my mind. It’s silly too, because 1968 was a VERY long time ago and a kid who was 20 in 1968 was in his mid thirties when I was in high school. Jesus…what if they were all getting high?

(It’s a theme explored, by the way, in Stew and Heidi’s genius genre-bending semi-autobiographical theatre piece “Passing Strange”, presently being staged eight times a week at the Public Theatre here in NYC. Even though the song “Lime Green Sweater” isn’t a part of the musical, “The Drug Suite (I Must’ve Been High/I’m Not On A Drug/Arlington Hill)” from The Naked Dutch Painter…and Other Songs and that theme, as part of Stew’s life, certainly are.)

It’s got this great melody, psychedelic doo-wop harmonies, and lines like “He’s like a rock star strumming electric chalk”. It’s also about how people change throughout their lives but, at the same time, don’t really change at all. The last chorus sums it up:

But now she’s partial to lime green sweaters yeah
C’mon Baby if we burned this rope together yeah
Oh, she pulled something out of her lime green sweater yeah
And said “Maybe if we burned this rope together yeah”

You always end up changing the clothes but you don’t always change the habits and you NEVER really change the person.

I almost can’t listen to “Is This The Single?” because it’s just so familiar and so horrifying to anyone who was ever on a record label. It’s also a great pop song and the rest of you will love it. The great chorus repetition question “Is this the single?” answered by the band members’ nervous expectant choir responses of “uh-huh” is hysterical and chilling at the same time. How do the lives, careers, and artistic work of so many talented people end up at the mercy of these…fill in the blank yourselves (I’m still under contract)…whose sole musical thought capability seems to be summed up in the title of this song? I don’t know. However, Stew gives them a good 4 minute rogering here and then turns to skewer the entirety of the rest of pop culture on the rest of the album.

He goes for a funky stabbing of ignorant illiterate rednecks and over-literate under-comprehending hipsters simultaneously on “The Teardrop Explodes”, channels Syd Barrett and Henry Mancini tripping out together out on “Astro Sister”, and then…well, to be honest, Stew is such a fountain of cultural influences and references that when he says, in “In Time All Time”,

It’s like my birthday everyday
Cause Mr. Monk is such a ray of wisdom and light

I actually have no idea whether he’s talking about Tony Shalhoub’s creation Adrian Monk from the TV show Monk or Thelonius Monks or someone else. I’ve always wanted to have a night where we just sit down and spend an entire night just talking about all his songs and what the hell he’s talking about but I know I hate doing that myself so I’m just going to sit here and try it figure it out myself. The truth is I feel like I understand it perfectly well but I have no idea how to explain it all to you.

“Out Now”

Anyway, why do you need anything this catchy explained to you. By the next song, “Out Now”, Stew and Heidi are trading cascading vocals in and out of each other until the chorus where they’ve got this robot in the background singing:

I came to get this party started in your mind, in your mind

while Stew and Heidi sing “It’s coming out now” over and over again. It seems to be some bemused commentary on pop culture around the world and how you can “be the man” somewhere and not even exist somewhere else. Maybe. I don’t know. I keep getting distracted by how damn funky the singing robot is.

By the time I get to the penultimate song, “Bong Song”, I’m ready to just accept that this is Stew’s trip and I’m just along for the ride. But this is a very treacherous ride. Stew’s melodies and music are so addictive and distracting that you can miss the fact that he’s just as busy gutting our culture and viciously attacking the bullshit ways we all just accept the status quo without question as he is reminding us of the simple joys and beauties of a child’s birthday or the possibility of love on a humid New York summer night or just the fun of getting high. It’s both the genius and the curse of his astonishing musical and compositional ability that it distracts us from some of what’s underneath. When every record you make is an Abbey Road/Pet Sounds level musical sugar high, it can make a listener fail to notice the anger and the pain that lies beneath. I actually think The Beatles and The Beach Boys probably experienced some of the same difficulties. The music’s so good and such a joy to the ear that they lyrics get a little overshadowed. As Thom Jurek said about “Bong Song” in his review of the album, “Why look for solutions when the problems keep us happy?”

The album ends with “Bermuda Love Triangle”, a girl’s tale of revenge sought for her fiancée’s infidelities in which she explores the personal ads looking for a threesome to join, only to find…well, let’s just say nothing turns out as planned, a waterbed is brutally murdered, and Stew actually has a character say “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”, and gets away with it. Not only that, as the song fades, he mumbles “Do you come here often? (heh heh) Geographically speaking, I mean.” and gets away with that too.

It’s a funny upbeat ending to the album. A least it seems like it is. I got to thinking about it later on last night after I wrote this section and I started to think that maybe it wasn’t really all that funny after all. I mean, it’s a funny situation, almost slapstick in the disastrous way it turns out, but here on this album which spends so much time asking questions about what really lies underneath all the things we accept about our “pop” culture and what ARE the things you should really care about and WHY don’t we care about some other things…I sat there and thought…wow, it’s actually kind of sad. I mean, she loves a guy and he betrays her and so she tries to betray him just to find any way to make herself feel better and that gets fucked up too.

She goes home alone.

It’s funny, but people seem to go home alone a lot in my songs too. How funny is going home alone ever REALLY going to be? Anyway, that’s what I got to thinking about.

And suddenly I thought, he’s really screwing with my head now.

Another year went by before the next album came out. We spent the summer before the release touring together so I had all my own personal relationships with these songs before I got to hear them in album form. I was surprised at how different they all seemed when viewed as part of the whole in which they were all intended.

Don’t get me wrong. I love this album. I know a lot of people get demo-itis and complain
about the way songs they loved live or in rawer forms turn out when they finally end up on an album. This is not a problem you run into with Stew or The Negro Problem.

So when the summer ended, the tour came to a close, and we all went our separate ways. I found myself in a record store about a week later and I remembered that Stew’s new record was out that day. I always expect something different from them. The world is filled with disappointments and things that turn out to be so much less than you expect or hope. I expect something better from Stew. I always expect something more. The nice thing about these guys is that they do too. So when Autumn rolls around and you go to the store to buy their new album, instead of disappointments, you get Something Deeper Than These Changes (2003).

I write a lot of songs about love and loneliness and loss and, as I don’t seem to be making any inroads into fixing these issues in my own personal life, I often wonder if I’m really getting anywhere near the heart of the matter in my songs either. There’s a complexity to these subjects and sometimes I think I’m missing some of the more subtle aspects of it. I don’t know. I think about it a lot but I don’t know. I DO know that Stew is not missing anything. Something Deeper Than These Changes takes a long look at love from a lot of different angles, and comes up with perspectives on subjects that seem at first glance to be mundane, but turn out to be almost shockingly rich. As always with Stew, that puddle you’re staring at your reflection in turns out to be a very deep pool.

In “Love Like That”, he looks at a mother’s love and sees reflected in it the way we take things for granted in our life that we should NEVER EVER take for granted. There are things that come from very deep places within us and they’re so powerful and so much a part of our daily life that we miss how rare and immeasurable they are until they’re gone. And then, of course, it’s too late (This is another subtlety I missed until I saw “Passing Strange” because Stew really gets into his relationship with his mother in the play).
The funny thing is that they’re only so invisible because they’re so constant and they’re only so constant because they’re so all-encompassing and powerful. Think about it. How often have you struggled just to care about someone for a week or a month or a year?
Now think about the loves you took for granted that lasted the length and breadth of all the time over which your two lives overlapped.

It’s just an organ, a bass and a piano. And Stew’s voice.

“Love Like That”

I remember when I owned everything
The sun and the moon and the rain
And my domain stretched and yawned along the astral plains
Of cosmic Kansas to LA
The Universe is a toy in the mind of a boy
And life is a movie too, starring you
Holy family, cast and crew
A little secret ‘tween God and you
One day he whispered:
“Mother’s love might seem insane
Cause she really knows everything
Too bad it takes so long to see what you been missing”

Love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway

Love’s taken for granted when you don’t understand it
Since it came so easily
It must be free
Wish I woulda listened carefully
When I was Icarus in my grandma’s tree
And she was was singing:
“Mother’s love might seem insane
It’s cuz she really knows everything
Too bad it takes so long to to reveal the holy mission”

Love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway

Ain’t it strange how it all makes perfect sense
When your life is the evidence
She needs to feel how the love made you more than real
It church you up and it fills your cup
And if you’re singing:
“Mother’s love might seem insane
It’s cuz she really knows everything
Too bad it takes so long to to reveal the holy mission”

Love like that can’t be measured anyway

And you know Mother’s love might seem insane
It’s cuz she really knows everything
The candy wisdom hidden away
In your lunch pail mind you’ll find
Tastes like nothing in the world today

And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway
And you know love like that can’t be measured anyway

He looks at it from the perspective of an alcoholic whose love for the bottle is what holds him together AND tears him apart in “The Kingdom of Drink”, then follows it with the simple message of “The Instrument of Pain”, which takes care pain to point out that love isn’t the thing that screws up your life; you are:

Love is not the enemy of life
Love can give more freedom than it takes if you like

It’s an important statement because while writing and listening to all these mopey songs about pain and loneliness, we can get into the habit of forgetting that it’s not actually love that is the guilty party in our sorrow; we are. It seems like such a simple statement but it’s funny how rarely someone remembers to point it out in a song, especially in a song called “The Instrument of Pain”. You’d expect the opposite view to be the one taken but Stew is never one to take the expected tack. Instead he calls himself, and all of us to account, ending the song:

Love is not the enemy of life
Love can give more freedom than it takes if you’d like it to

Love is not the instrument of pain
It’s your own mind

You don’t get to just cry about it, not without admitting it’s your own fault. You can miss the fact that your mother loved you, and you can drink yourself yourself to death, and you can even choose to spend your life alone…but, at least on this record, you have to look in the mirror and at least admit that you see who’s staring back at you.

At least you get to stare at your own face with a background track of acoustic guitars and banjos and bass and the sound of Stew’s voice and Heidi’s incredible harmonies.

The song that really kills me is “The Sun I Always Wanted”, a birthday wish to Stew’s daughter, in which you realize that all the lessons learned by whatever he may have missed out in not recognizing his mother’s love until it was too late is not going to happen with HIS daughter. Along with David Bowie’s “Kooks” from Hunky Dory, it may be the most perfect rock and roll expression of a father’s love for his child ever written.

I would love to be sitting here writing to you about the way Stew exquisitely captures the pain and lonely emptiness of homeliness in “The Statue Song” and how he manages to utterly capture the plight of a man living on the outside of society and outside of his own life by comparing him metaphorically to a statue. I really want to be writing that because I really think this is the most incredible song.

“The Statue Song”

It ends:

…Tonight I’ll dream of being a pigeon on rooftops in the sun
Tonight I’ll dream of reading newspapers
The left and right wing ones
And I will dream of seeing a movie
Jerry Lewis meets Bergman
And I will dream of a scoop of ice cream and being indoors again
Just being indoors again

Well I had to wake up sometime from this dream of being real
They put me here exposed to the world and expect me not to feel
So if you think your life’s not going anywhere
Please consider me dear friend
Out here in the fog with the tourists and the dog while you’re indoors again
While you’re indoors again

So when you think your life’s not going anywhere…

The only problem is that I KNOW this song was written by Stew when he was commissioned to write a song for an opening at The Getty Museum in LA and that it IS actually a song about a statue because I remember when he told me about the commission.

But I shouldn’t even be writing that like it’s a negative because the truth is that the fucker took that commission and still managed to write a song about a statue that conveys all the things I was just talking about because he is
JUST
THAT
GOOD.

The song that killed me all summer long when we were on tour was “Way of Life” and it’s still the one that hurts the deepest.

“Way of Life”

Ostensibly about a one night stand, the verses tell the story of a post office-party screw as if it didn’t matter. They keep scrolling on as if nothing really matters before finally landing on a discussion of a chess shop where old men play as if love and life were just these things we do like plastic pieces in a game. It’s all very cool except it’s all belied by the chorus which keeps reminding us in the painful achingly beautiful refrain that:

Love love love is a way of life

As if Stew’s saying that you can lie all you want about WHAT you care about and WHO you care about, and what you NEED and who you DON’T need, and what matters to you and what DOESN’T matter and whatever else you want to tell yourself. You can tell yourself whatever you want but it’s all just a fucking lie so it doesn’t matter WHAT you say. There is only ONE TRUE THING:

Love love love is a way of life

I didn’t catch the lyric when they were playing it live. I just thought it was an unbelievably beautiful love song. I was disappointed at first when I got the record and discovered it was really just this song about this very banal affair but then I realized what he was really getting at and, once again, I had to face just how much more subtlety and depth he has as a writer than me. That chorus is almost cruel in its’ beauty as it refuses to let them be banal. You can call it a fling all you want, it seems to say, but if you don’t eventually look for something more out of life, you will be left with nothing.

And this choir will STILL endlessly echo in your ears:

Love love love is a way of life

As he says:

Good love should be just like a weekend getaway
But you gotta go home somewhere to someone someday
Let the choir say
Love love love is a way of life, my love
Love love love is a way of life

…All the kings and pawns and queens of plastic, wood, and steel
Pretend it’s just a game
It’s too sad to be real
Love love love is a way of life, my love
Love love love is a way of life

Something Deeper Than These Changes is a quieter album than any of the earlier Stew or The Negro Problem albums, dominated by acoustic instruments and voices but it’s every bit as soulful and musical. It just does it more gently, which, considering the subject matter, is perhaps fitting. He has something specific he wants to say on this album and he doesn’t want anything to get in the way of that, even his own musical prowess.

I just realized I wrote all this chronologically beginning with Joys and Concerns, which was the first album of theirs I ever heard, but I forgot that there was an album by The Negro Problem that preceded that album.

Their first album, Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997), is actually pretty amazing. It’s actually a collection of ep’s that the band had been recording for three or four years. In a way, it’s the most aggressively rocking and challenging of the status quo of all the albums, both musically and lyrically. They seem really determined on the large part of to announce themselves to the world. The songs are unabashedly awash in brass and harmonies and politics and humor and anger and woodwinds and attitude…lots of attitude.

It’s got a lot of my favorite TNP songs, songs that are still live staples today. For instance, in the show that Immy and I played with The Negro Problem a few years ago at Symphony Space in NYC, a full 7-8 out of the 19-20 songs played over the course of the show came from Post Minstrel Syndrome. and both sets opened with songs from this album, the first set with “Buzzing” and the second with “If You Would Have Traveled On The 93 North Today”.
Immy and I joined them onstage and opened the evening’s final encores with “Submarine Down”.

It’s kind of shocking me now that I’m back listening to the bootleg what a large portion of the show was devoted to material from PMS (I wanted to abbreviate it that way at least once in this article…because I’m 8).

That’s a lot of songs from an album that I always forget about and think about as a collection of ep’s. The truth is, listening to it now, I’m kind of being blown away at how much I love just about every song on this album. It may be the most fully orchestral “Sgt. Pepper”-ish of all The Negro Problem albums, as well as the most rocking. I wish I had the original ep’s so I could tell which order these songs were all recorded in.

I’m going to take a break from this and listen to the whole concert from Symphony Space. It’s too cool and I can’t enjoy it while I’m writing at the same time.

I just listened to my bootleg of The Negro Problem’s “Silly Symphonies” show (I like to title my bootlegs) again and it made me remember how much I loved that night as a whole. I hadn’t seen The Negro Problem in a few years so it was a really special night. I actually feel silly saying that because I had seen Stew a ton of times in the meantime (and even done a few tours together) and it’s not like they’re not pretty much the same people. But, for whatever reason, they’d been “Stew” for a few years and, at least on this one night, they were “The Negro Problem” again, which is how I was first introduced to them, so I was excited.

It was uptown at Symphony Space (hence the bootleg title “*Silly Symphonies”) and I had annoyed the hell out of all my friends telling them they HAD to see this show or I would hate them all or, at the very least, not speak to them. The first part was probably a lie; the second, since I knew this show was, in all likelihood, all I would be talking about for days, probably wasn’t all that far off.

Anyway, it was a great night. They did two full shows with two entirely different sets (three full hours of music) and Immy and I even got to sit in on a few songs at the end of the second set, which was a dream-come-true/nightmare for me (I didn’t want to fuck anything up), especially after Stew insisted I had to sing the lead vocal on “Bleed”. I didn’t exactly show up knowing all the words to the 200 or so songs the guy’s written so I spent most of soundcheck sitting on the side with my iPod (thank god for iPods) frantically scribbling down lyrics for it and the other songs Stew wanted to play in the encores (the fucker actually picked some of the hidden tracks off “Joys and Concerns” for us to play on-HIDDEN TRACKS!!!-I mean, I knew the songs but I sure as hell didn’t know the lyrics or the harmonies).

It all went really well. The bootleg’s killer too. It’s funny for me because you can clearly hear Immy, and occasionally my friend Deb Kletter, laughing throughout the whole bootleg (of course you can clearly hear Immy laughing in Cleveland when he’s in Portland so that’s not really such a big deal). I think Ehud must have been sitting either right in front of us or right behind us when he was recording it.

It’s funny how I still get nervous about stuff like that night. I don’t get nervous about our shows but I really don’t like the idea of fucking up my friend’s shows and, for some stupid reason, I still get the idea that I’m going to. It’s dopey because I’m actually kind of good at this sort of stuff at this point in my life, but some part of my brain doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

There are times when I just want to say to my brain,

“Will you just fucking behave yourself! I mean, I like having you around, and you can certainly be a lot of fun at a party, but mostly just want you to be there so I can do some math when I feel like it or juggle. I used to think you’d be useful when I was talking to girls but that turned out to be a total miscalculation. Mostly though, I just want you to stop with all the extra-curricular shit like the memory gaps and the general hallucinatory crap. Why can’t you behave like everyone else’s brain? Bad brain! Bad brain!”

Okay. That was creepy. I am so clearly loopy and all that did was air it out in public.

Oh well, fuck it. Anyway, I’m going to put the version of “Bleed” that Immy and I played with The Negro Problem at Symphony Space on that wonderful magical silly night up on my MySpace page. I probably have to put it up on the CC page to do that so it’ll be there as well.

Look, as you can tell from this exhaustive article, I love this band. As far as I’m concerned, Stew is the finest songwriter working today and Stew and The Negro Problem make as good, if not better, records than anyone out there. I know you’re probably thinking, “If they’re so good, why haven’t I heard of them?” Well, the truth is that’s the way the world works. There are just a lot of amazing bands that nobody’s ever heard of. And most of them are bands that nobody’s ever GOING to hear of. Some of you may have gotten the Sordid Humor album years ago. They were a great band. They came and they went because nobody got to hear the music until it was too late.

Don’t let that happen here. Don’t miss this band, because they are as good as it gets and they are only getting better.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, why they haven’t released anything since 2003, I assure you it’s not because they were lying around New York City moping (like I was). They were actually developing and working out a theatre piece for the past few years. It’s called “Passing Strange” and it opened in Berkeley at the Berkeley Rep last Fall and right now it is playing a block from my house at The Public Theatre right here in New York City.

IN December, I posted this update on CountingCrows.com after seeing the play in Berkeley:

Dated December 3, 2006 - Evening somewhere above America

So I am endlessly amazed by my friends Stew and Heidi. From the very first time I heard their music in a little hole-in-the-wall record shop in London I have been a huge fan. Their albums with The Negro Problem (”Post Minstrel Syndrome“, “Joys and Concerns“, and “Welcome Black“) and as Stew (”Guest Host“, “The Naked Dutch Painter” and “Something Deeper Than These Changes“) are some of the best albums of the past decade. I would even go so far as to say that, if you ask me, he’s the best songwriter there is working right now. Friday night in Berkeley, I saw something that will only help to confirm that view in more people’s eyes.

Stew and Heidi and I always talked about our desire to write for the theatre. I still want to do it, maybe after this record. They’re doing it right now. They’ve been work shopping a play through New York’s Public Theatre for the past year or so and this Fall they finally put it into production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. There I sat Friday night, in the theatre where I saw so many plays as a kid, where so many of my friends had performed growing up, watching Stew and Heidi on-stage with three other musicians and six actors in their play “Passing Strange“.

It’s an fantastic musical odyssey that traces the life of a young black musician from his church choir and garage punk band roots in LA’s Crenshaw district through the pot haze of Amsterdam’s coffee shops to the art riots of late 20th Century Berlin and finally back to LA again. It’s about a search for identity. It’s about his memory of a grandmother who was light enough to “pass” for white and the way that memory haunts him in the form of his own endless question of whether or not he is actually “passing” for black. It’s about the fact that Stew and Heidi are just freakishly gifted and the play, while still unfinished and a work-in-progress, is also a work of genius. I’m jealous and I can’t wait until Spring when it opens at the Public Theatre in New York. It closed tonight in Berkeley but I expect to visit Lafayette Street weekly to see how it progresses when it reopens.

How did it turn out?

See for yourself. Here are some excerpts from the New York Reviews:

“FRESH, exuberant, bracingly inventive, BITINGLY FUNNY, and FULL OF HEART” with “A TERRIFIC CAST that delivers perfectly pitched comic performances.”
–Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“With EXCELLENT SONGS and a vulnerable heart, Passing Strange could join HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH as a PUNK MUSICAL MILESTONE.”
–Mark Blankenship, Variety

“STEW tweaks the received wisdom of racial identity as cannily and wittily as any playwright since George C. Wolfe when he unleashed The Colored Museum in 1986.”
–Eric Grode, The New York Sun

“Passing Strange introduces an EXCITING NEW VOICE to contemporary musical theater. PART CONCERT, PART book MUSICAL with DRIVING ROCK MUSIC and a tart satiric tone – Passing Strange DEFIES generic categories. It dares in its playful way to honor those big questions that have set adolescent souls yearning for centuries. How to discover and be true to your convictions, how to live a meaningful life, and still pay the bills, how to find the understanding you need with out throwing away the love you’re offered.”
–Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

The following is the link to Charles Isherwood’s rave review in The New York Times. The show was supposed to close June 3rd but it’s been extended through June 10th. See it if you’re here. See it if you can.

To quote Isherwood in the closing paragraph of his review:

For all its witty puncturing of youthful pretension, and despite the sardonic attitude Stew often strikes toward his younger self, “Passing Strange” is also full of heart. It dares in its playful way to honor those big questions that have set adolescent souls yearning for centuries. How to discover and be true to your convictions, how to live a meaningful life and still pay the bills, how to find the understanding you need without throwing away the love you’re offered. Its mournful finale also acknowledges the damage that accrues in those heedless years spent asking them with such stridency, before you come to realize that learning to listen is just as important as making yourself heard.

Tell all your friends. Make yourself heard.

In the end, you should find your way to this music because it is music worth finding your way to. It’s filled with all the best things that music has to offer you. It’s beautiful and complex and sad and happy and, in the end, deceptively simple.

Because, in the end, I guess it’s just about what I heard when I first listened to their music in that little record store on Blenheim Crescent off the Portobello Road in London: it’s about joys and concerns.

Stew knew what he was doing when he titled that album because…well, I mean, what else is there? It’s all just stories about joys and concerns. It’s all just songs about life.

***Footnote***

You all have to check out this YouTube Video from Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven frontman, co-producer of This Desert Life, and general musical idol of mine, the incomparable (drum roll please) …David Lowery.

After seeing the video (which is, by the way, REALLY cool, I asked Dave what it was all about, to which he replied:

    Well. I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing. I’ve been writing songs, with cracker and CVB here and
    there,  but I keep just doing these songs by myself with just the studio guys.  I have like 4 or 5 that    
    I like now.  for some reason it seemed like I needed to stop and put videos to all of them. put them   
    on YouTube and see what people think of them. I’m calling it my YouTube album right now.

So check out the first of hopefully many more videos to come from Dave because THIS one is very cool. It’s called “Deep Oblivion“.

Jesse James (1939)
Directed by Henry King, Irving Cummings
Starring Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, John Carradine

The Return of Frank James (1940)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Starring Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, John Carradine

So these are kind of a strange pair of movies. They begin starring one actor and end starring another, which is unusual. It’s difficult to make a successful sequel based on a secondary character from the original movie but they do that here. In fact, they do it so well that I’ve always liked the sequel more than the original, which is also very unusual. How often is that true?

I like The Godfather Part II (1974) more than The Godfather (1972). I just think it’s a better, more complex/ambitious movie but that’s really splitting hairs. You’re talking about the difference between one of the greatest films ever made and one that’s a little better. I mean…who cares? You’re going to watch the one…and then you’re going to watch the other…so what does it matter? (By the way, if the preceding sentence doesn’t apply to you…stop being an idiot and see the movies. I…well, I’m not going to waste time justifying myself. Just go see them)

I like James Cameron’s sequel Aliens (1986) more than Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979), but that’s just personal taste. Truthfully, Alien is probably the better film. It’s certainly one of the most original horror movies ever made, managing to place the viewer in an entire fresh Science Fiction environment we’ve never seen before while simultaneously holding us in gut wrenching suspense and then repeatedly shocking and scaring the living snot out of us. It’s just that, having already pissed my pants watching it two or three times in my life, I’m tired of doing the laundry so I don’t watch it very often anymore. The sequel, Aliens, I watch over and over again, at least once every year just because it’s so much fun.

Who the hell came up with the idea to make a sequel to a horror movie and NOT make it a horror movie? It’s particularly surprising when you consider that, at the time in the late 70’s and the 1980’s, movie studios were (and, now that I think about it, still are) making millions and millions of dollars turning every good horror movie into an infinite series of sequels.

A good example of this is Halloween (1978), which is a friggin’ brilliant film, taut and terrifyingly suspenseful with almost no violence until the last 10 minutes (and even that is not particularly gory). It is a great film, nearly the quality level of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it’s closest predecessor. It was directed, not surprisingly, by another great director-John Carpenter. It was followed by Halloween II (1981), which is not a “friggin” (or any other kind of “iggin”) great film, Halloween III-Season of the Witch (1982), Halloween 4-The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), Halloween-The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) (for which they actually went out and got Paul Rudd), Halloween H20-Twenty Years Later (1998) (the triumphant return of Jamie Lee Curtis!, along with (somehow) Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams (taking the weekend off from Dawson’s Creek to get her ass chopped up into little pieces I assume), and…LL Cool J? What the f#%@! LL Cool J! They better not have fucking killed off LL Cool J! LL Cool J would so kick that pussy Michael Myers ass!), and Halloween–Resurrection (2002), the film that FINALLY unites Jamie Lee with Tyra Banks, Busta Rhymes (continuing, I assume, the “revenge on rappers” theme of the previous film, speaking of which…well…I mean…this just occurred to me but…shouldn’t it have taken place underwater? I think I would be much more tolerant of it if it had taken place underwater. Otherwise, why call it…I’m just sayin’…oh fuck it. Forget it. What’s the point?), and some guy from American Pie, all of whom hopefully get carved like pumpkins for taking part in this…well, except for Busta. I love Busta. Who doesn’t love Busta?

Halloween was followed shortly thereafter by Friday the 13th (1980), the film that taught us the very important lesson (in the newly minted “Just Say No” golden age of Reagan-esque attitudes towards sexuality) that teenage fucking will get you gutted like a fish by a maniac hockey goalie with a huge fucking knife (or an arrow through the throat, which is how Kevin Bacon, then 22 years and only 3 films removed from his debut in the classic, and groundbreaking, comedy Animal House (1978) (which taught us the much more pleasant Jimmy Carter-era lesson that teenage fucking will get you…laid), bought the farm in Friday the 13th

(Do you ever ask yourself why, thirty years later, there’s still NOBODY teaching kids that teenage fucking might very well get you AIDS?)

Anyway, Friday the 13th is a pretty good scary movie, groundbreaking in its’ own way, but they just HAD to go and follow it with a whole Friday the 13th Series: Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), Friday the 13th-The Final (oh yeah…right) Chapter (1984), Friday the 13th, Part V (ooh, roman numerals)-A New Beginning (1985), Friday the 13th, Part VI - Jason Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part VII-The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII - Jason (without any Muppets…seriously, all by himself) Takes Manhattan (1989), and finally Jason Goes to Hell-The Final Friday (1993). I assumed at the time it was the last one because they couldn’t figure out the roman numeral for 10, which makes it impossible to make IX, but some asshole must have told them because (coincidentally?) nine years later…along comes…dum da da dum!!! Jason X (2002), which, I think, takes place in outer space (no shit. Outer space), and then the (I guess?) inevitable Freddy vs. Jason (2003), which leads us to…

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the film that showed us how much fun Edward Scissorhands (1990) could really be if he was Robert Englund trying to KILL Johnny Depp instead of being Johnny Depp trying to bang Winona Ryder (although, admittedly, since I am male and have a pulse…I dug that too). Once again though, here was a very original premise, a crazy guy with knives for fingers who haunts the dreams of children and kills them while they sleep in nightmares they can’t escape from. That’s scary as shit! And director Wes Craven invested it with all these creepy genius psychological implications too as well as coming up with a truly great, and totally original, character in Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger. Plus, I just thought Heather Langenkamp was soooooo hot when I was a kid. Unfortunately, A Nightmare on Elm Street scared the living shit out of me (I was already an insomniac-I didn’t need any help NOT being able to sleep) and she barely did anything other than those films so I never got to see her again (sigh).

On second thought, I liked Edward Scissorhands way more. I wish they’d made Edward Scissorhands sequels. I’d much rather watch Johnny Depp in anything and Winona Ryder is truly deeee-lish. Unfortunately, she’s never shown the slightest interest in me. I’ve met her a million times and she just ain’t interested. Notwithstanding that article a little while ago that voted me the world’s greatest living heterosexual for, among other things, knockin’ boots with Winona, the truth is she’s never seemed to even notice I exist (hope that doesn’t lose me the title). Too bad, there was a time when she coulda had me with a whistle. But that was before she…well, you know…aw screw it, that’s her business. We all got problems. Who the hell am I to talk? I’m about as nutty as a fruitcake.

Wow, I got off the subject. Anyway, they made a bunch of A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. I just got incredibly bored with the idea of listing them all here so if you want to get them, Heres a page that lists all of them …or there’s just The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection box set which has all 7 movies but not not the Freddy vs. Jason thing. Oh yeah, there’s also a Friday the 13th-From Crystal Lake to Manhattan 8 - Movie Collection that…uh…collects, obviously, the 1st 8 movies for something like $49 dollars which, at about $6 per movie, is a pretty great deal…as long as you avoid thinking about the actual movies you’re paying $6 for. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say that. I’ve never seen most of them so how do I know. I shouldn’t speak like that out of total ignorance. I dunno. If you like them…they’re there.

Of course the scariest of all the 80’s horror series was the Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Beat Street (1984) triumvirate, but everyone seems to have forgotten them.

I actually meant that as a joke but a friend of mine read it and told me he bought this box set with all three movies on it and it was actually pretty cool (if slightly cheesy) as a portrait of the early 80’s hip-hop scene. He said there were some cool extras and documentary stuff on the set as well. I looked it up on Amazon and one of the reviewers there, Cubist, claims Beat Street, in particular, is a really cool “East Coast answer to Breakin’ that was grittier, edgier and therefore not as successful but definitely more authentic. Shot on the dirty, grungy, pre-Giuliani streets of New York City…” He also mentions the “cameos by pioneers of the genre, featuring the likes of DJ Kool Herc, Kool Mo Dee, Doug E. Fresh, Afrika Bambaataa, and Melle Mel. This also results in a great soundtrack that shows many of the influences on early hip hop: calypso, salsa, jazz-all thrown into the mix.” I don’t actually remember any of those movies and, like I said, I was just making a joke but apparently some people, one of whom has some serious cred with me, think this is a cool set so…I dunno. It’s there. Make up your own mind. I make noooooooooooo promises on this one.

Christ, I got way off the subject again. This is why this fucking magazine is always so long. What I was trying to say, about an hour ago, was that Aliens isn’t a horror movie at all. Instead, it’s one of the greatest and most enjoyably thrilling action movie shoot ‘em ups of all time You gotta love James Cameron. He was really on a roll just then. He had made The Terminator (1984) and written the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) before making Aliens (1986).

He followed Aliens with The Abyss (1989), one of my favorite Cameron films.

I’ve connected you here to the The Abyss-Two Disc Collectors Edition because it contains both the theatrical release of the film and the Director’s Cut. The Director’s Cut is important with this film because the studio, concerned about the film’s length, butchered the theatrical release to the point that, although the film is still a great great movie, its’ ending is essentially incomprehensible. The Director’s Cut, which is a full 30 minutes longer (and probably 3 or 4 minutes TOO long), restores the correct ending and makes sense.

There is also a release of just the Director’s Cut coming out this week if you prefer that.

After The Abyss, he made and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the best of all the Terminator Movies, before sort of slipping up a little with True Lies (1994).

Still, that’s FIVE absolute blockbuster special effects heavy movies (four of which are simply fantastic-the way BIG movies SHOULD be made but unfortunately aren’t) in only 10 years. Three years later, he made Titanic (1997) which, if a little sappy (and burdened by a useless AND pointless present-day framing device), is still a great piece of period romantic filmmaking. Then nothing for ten years except 3 or 4 documentaries (admittedly great IMAX 3D documentaries) and the creation of one TV show: Dark Angel (also admittedly a really cool TV show for which God, and James Cameron, created Jessica Alba. Thank you God. Thank you James Cameron…No really…seriously…I mean it. I think I speak for all us XY chromosome types when I say, “Holy crap. Wow. That’s…wow…really something. Well done. Thank you very much.”)

It’s a shame he hasn’t really made anything but documentaries for a decade. Fortunately, the word is (at least according to Ain’t It Cool News) he’s just, aside from loving documentary filmmaking, been interested in experimenting with and perfecting IMAX and 3-D film effects, and is now in the process of starting production on two new movies. Supposedly one of them, Avatar, is already filming and the other, Battle Angel, is in pre-production but every new story I read has the details reversed so it’s hard to tell. They’re very hush-hush about everything over there in Cameronland. Still, I mean…Jessica Alba…c’mon.

Wow. Holy shit! I got way way way way further off on a tangent there than I even thought I did. Talk about loving the sound of your own voice. I thought I’d forgotten I was talking about James Cameron but I really forgot the whole point of this was to talk about Jesse James and The Return of Frank James. Movies…sequels…horror movies…James Cameron…blah blah blah blah blah. God, I’m such an ass sometimes. Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

…deep breath…

Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda were both at interesting junctures in their careers in 1939 when Jesse James was made. Tyrone Power had recently made the transition from bit-player to featured actor and had just made the move from co-starring to starring roles. Power was (sort of) just a little ahead of Fonda. In 1935, he was still an uncredited actor. In 1936, he got two featured roles and then one starring role in the very successful Lloyd’s of London. IN 1937 and 1938, he made EIGHT more movies in which he took leading roles, including the major box office smashes, In Old Chicago (1937) (included in Issue #1’s 20th Century Fox Studio Classics Collection Boxed Set) and Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) (also included in Issue #1’s 20th Century Fox Studio Classics Collection Boxed Set along with 3 other classic Tyrone Powers films, The Mark of Zorro (1940), The Black Swan (1942),and The Razor’s Edge (1946)). He would go on, in the 1940’s, to become possibly the biggest box office star in Hollywood, making 16 films over the next 10 years, most of them huge smash hits, including Johnny Apollo (1940), Brigham Young (1940), The Mark of Zorro (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), Son of Fury (1942), The Black Swan (1942), The Razor’s Edge (1946), Nightmare Alley (1947), Captain From Castile (1947), The Luck of The Irish (1948), That Wonderful Urge (1948), Prince of Foxes (1949), and The Black Rose (1950). Five of those films (Blood and Sand, Son of Fury, Captain From Castile, Prince of Foxes, and The Black Rose) have all been recently collected in a Tyrone Power: The Swashbuckler Collection Box Set which I just received in the mail from Amazon. I haven’t watched all of them yet but I saw Captain From Castile and The Black Rose on AMC or something when I was younger and they were both a lot of fun. Anyway, it’s $45 so you’re paying about $9 per movie for five pretty fun films, which seems like a pretty fair deal to me. I’ve never felt like Tyrone Power was the greatest actor but he always devoted himself to his material and brought an intensity to the performances that makes him, and his movies, fun to watch. He was, basically, a ridiculously good looking man and, for a while there, he was a HUGE movie star. He’s just got that “star” thing. What can I say?

I’m tempted to say Henry Fonda, on the other hand, was just a year or so behind Tyrone Power in 1939 when they made Jesse James together, but it’s really difficult to categorize his position. Nine years older than Tyrone Power, he doesn’t make his film debut until he’s 30 years old (as opposed to his co-star who makes his 1st two films at ages 11 and 16 and is a legitimate star by 22) but, from the very first film he makes, he is already playing the lead role (largely on the strength of his Broadway resume and the fact that his 1st film, The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), is based on the Broadway hit of the same name, of which Fonda was also the star). He’d made 15 films in 4 years, all as a lead actor, by the time he made Jesse James but, of the fifteen, I think only three, The Moon’s Our Home (1936), That Certain Woman (1937), and Jezebel (1938) were very successful, the latter two quite possibly more on the strength of his co-star Bette Davis, who, by that time, had already been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Of Human Bondage (1934), won one for Dangerous (1935), and would win another for Jezebel (1938), a film for which nearly everyone involved EXCEPT Henry Fonda got nominated. He was making good movies but he wasn’t necessarily becoming the kind of bankable star you could really hang a HIT movie on.

Which brings us to Jesse James…

I like Jesse James. It’s got a good star in Tyrone Power and a good director in Henry King who, beginning in the silent era, directed 117 films between the years 1915 and 1962, 8 or 9 of which starred Tyrone Power, including Lloyd’s of London, In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, A Yank in the R.A.F., The Black Swan, Captain From Castile, Prince of Foxes, and The Sun Also Rises (1957). It’s got a great supporting cast in Henry Fonda as Frank James and Randolph Scott and John Carradine as Robert Ford, and especially the wonderfully cantankerous Henry Hull as a newspaper publisher and friend to the James family who, throughout both movies, begins every editorial with the lines, “If we’re ever going to have civilization in the west, then all the (fill in the blank with the requisite bad guys) will have to be taken out in the street and shot down like dogs!”. It even has Brian Donlevy in a smaller role as a railroad heavy who starts all the trouble in the first place by taking over people’s farms and accidentally killing the James boys’ mother. I’m not crazy about Nancy Kelly, who plays Zee, Jesse’s love and eventual wife. She’s not bad; just a little bland, but that seems a small loss compared to the quality level and depth of the rest of the cast.

Still, somehow, it’s sort of emblematic of both the trouble, and the strengths, of the movie.

Having a weak female romantic lead could kill a movie. It doesn’t kill Jesse James because the movie isn’t really interested in Jesse’s love life. Oh, it pretends to be but it really isn’t.

It isn’t REALLY interested in anything except Jesse James himself, which is fine as far as the love story thing goes, but it’s a shame as far as the rest of the cast is concerned because they’re all REALLY good and it seems a shame to waste them. But that’s the choice they made. Jesse James is a star vehicle and Tyrone Power is the star and that’s that. It all still works because Tyrone Power is pretty intense as Jesse and the rest of the cast, whenever they get a chance, do EVERYTHING right so the movie’s still a lot of fun but, and maybe this is just because I’ve seen other great Jesse James movies like Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) or Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980), I missed the richness of the story surrounding Jesse James. One of the great elements of this particular piece of history is that they were all brothers.

There were the two James brothers, the three Younger boys, the two Millers, and the two Fords. The family aspect of the James-Younger Gang, and the dynamic it adds to the whole thing, is part of what makes their story such a great story, and this movie ignores that.
Other than Robert, and eventually Charlie, Ford, none of the other famous members of the gang are ever mentioned. It’s still fun but it hurts the movie a little. So I like Jesse James but mostly as set-up, because it makes the sequel a lot better if you’ve seen the first film and I absolutely love The Return of Frank James.

Now The Return of Frank James (1940) is just a great movie, in my opinion. It’s strange, because it still doesn’t address any of the historical issues that bothered me about Jesse James but it does address a lot of the other issues and, for whatever reason, it’s just a way better movie. I’ve seen it many times over the years and I never cease to enjoy it. It’s not that it’s more intense or somehow groundbreaking or anything like that. It’s just a really enjoyable movie to watch and, no matter how many times I see it, I just seem to always enjoy it.

There are a lot of reason for this. First of all, Henry Fonda is just a lot better than Tyrone Power. That’s just a fact, and in the single year since Jesse James, he’s released six more movies and he’s proven it. He’s taken supporting roles in two okay Irving Cummings movies, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) and Lillian Russell (1940) and starred in the quality Let Us Live!. But what really makes the difference are the stunning performances he gives in the three films he does in 1939 and 1940 with the great director John Ford: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along The Mohawk (1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Drums Along The Mohawk is a really good pre-Revolutionary War adventure with Fonda and Claudette Colbert. It was one of the earliest TECHNICOLOR films. It’s a lot of fun and it’s simply beautiful to look at. The other two, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath are simply two of the finest films ever made and Henry Fonda’s portrayals of Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad are two of his best. All three movies were nominated for Academy Awards. The Grapes of Wrath alone was nominated for 7, including a Best Actor nod for Fonda, and won 2, including Best Director for Ford.

The film also has a better director in Fritz Lang. This is the man who directed M (1931), Fury (1936), Ministry of Fear (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), Clash By Night (1952), and The Big Heat (1953). He just knows how to tell a better story.

It’s not so much that The Return of Frank James has a better cast (it loses Donlevy and Scott and, of course, Tyrone Power) but that it cares more about what it does with them. Henry Hull, as newspaper publisher Major Rufus Cobb, and John Carradine, as Bob Ford, fill pretty much the same enjoyable but one dimensional roles here as before, although Ford’s role is much larger in this film since it’s mostly about Frank James’ pursuit of him. The differences are in two additions. One of them is the now 18 year old Jackie Cooper, nine years removed from his starmaking performance in the original version of The Champ (1931), who plays the orphaned son of one of the former James Gang members killed in the Northfield raid. Taken in by Frank James, he’s by his side for most of the movie, providing an extra character and relieving some of the one-dimensionality that plagued Jesse James, even with Henry Fonda in the role of Frank James because the earlier film underused Fonda, although he’s great whenever he’s onscreen and certainly a far superior actor to Cooper, who was a star at age nine, and making a comeback at 18, but who would mostly work in minor television roles for the next 40 years until being cast as newspaper editor Perry White in Superman (1978), Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983), and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987) (Also all recently collected as The Christopher Reeve Superman Collection).

The other addition, and the one that really makes ALL the difference is the casting of Gene Tierney as Frank James’ love interest, would-be journalist Eleanor Stone. She’s 20 years old and it’s her 2nd film (but the 1st to be released) and she’s great. She provides an emotional center for the film that it’s predecessor lacked and it makes the whole film more than just one man’s single-minded pursuit of another. It also helps that she is probably the most beautiful woman that ever lived. I’m sitting here trying to think of anyone I’ve ever seen who was as pretty as Gene Tierney and the only thing I can come up with is possibly the French actress Isabelle Adjani. But that’s it. No one else even comes close and, strangely, the two of them look a lot alike now that I think about it. Aside from being stunningly beautiful, Gene Tierney also brought a warmth to all her performances that lit up whatever film she was in.

Her most famous role was as the title character in director Otto Preminger’s phenomenal film noir romantic masterpiece Laura (1944). She, along with Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Dame Judith Anderson make up the cast in what is probably my favorite all-time movie (I didn’t say it was the best, by the way, but I do think it’s probably my favorite. It’s at least in my top three).

There’s just something about the chemistry between Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney that makes The Return of Frank James work so much better than Jesse James. No matter how many great actors are giving perfectly good performances in the first film, it steadfastly refuses to be about anything but the lead character which makes it a much lonelier, and more claustrophobic, film.

And perhaps that’s as it should be, because Jesse James, unlike his brother, is doomed. So maybe the movie has to be that way to show how his single-mindedness leads him and almost everyone around him to their eventual deaths. When I look at it that way, I guess it makes a lot more sense. It’s still not as much fun as the sequel, although I’ll stick to my original premise that seeing Jesse James first is the way to go because it makes the contrasting warmth of The Return of Frank James that much more enjoyable by comparison.

Anyway, they both just got re-released on DVD and the print transfers look great. I watched them both on our road trip down through Florida, New Orleans, and Memphis and it was really nice to re-visit them. I hadn’t seen Jesse James in years and, like I said, I’m always happy to watch The Return of Frank James again any time. Now that I think about it though, I don’t think I’ve ever watched them one after the other before. Hmmm. That’s kinda cool.

Anyway, enjoy.

**Footnote**
My friend Tyler Fredrickson reminded me that I wanted to mention that there is another James Gang movie coming out soon that I have high hopes for. Aside from the movies I’ve talked about here, there are two truly great Jesse James movies. One, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, is unavailable on DVD, which is tragic because it’s an amazing early film by the great Philip Kaufman, and the other is Walter Hill’s The Long Riders, which used the unique casting trick of casting all brother in the roles of the various brothers: James and Stacy Keach play Jesse and Frank James respectively, David, Keith, and Robert Carradine (coincidentally the sons of John Carradine who plays Robert Ford in the movies in THIS article) play the Youngers, Dennis and Randy Quaid play Ed and Clell Miller, and Christopher Guest (director of Waiting For Guffman (1996), Best In Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003), and For Your Consideration (2006)) and his brother Nicholas play the Fords. It’s very cool.

Anyway, the film I’m speaking of is called The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford and it stars Brad Pitt and Sam Shepherd as Jesse and Frank James, Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell as Bob and Charley Ford, and most especially, my best friend Mary-Louise Parker as Jesse’s wife Zeralda. It was directed by Andrew Dominik. I’ve only seen one other film he’s directed (that may be the ONLY other film he’s directed) but it was this intense Australian film called Chopper (2000), which is basically the movie that MADE Eric Bana’s career, playing the riveting career criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. This could be an amazing movie. I hope so. It comes out in October.

**this is so you know the footnote is over, in case you didn’t**

Clint Eastwood Western Icon Collection
Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970)
Joe Kidd (1972)
High Plains Drifter (1973)

To me, this one is a no-brainer, and another one, I gotta admit, I owe to Ain’t It Cool News because I read about it there. It’s as simple as this: you get three really good Clint Eastwood movies for $16.99. That’s just a pretty fucking deal.

Sometimes Amazon just does these bizarrely good deals. I don’t understand how they decide to sell 40 movies for $240 or how they decide to suddenly reduce all the 1st Season Fox TV Series to 55% off but, for some reason, they just do. Ain’t It Cool News has a whole page listing the bargain sets at the bottom of the page. By the way, if you go to that page, in my opinion, and they make this point as well, the one to get is Murder One-Season 1. The show only lasted two seasons but Season 1 is just about as good as network television ever got (I never saw Season 2). According to AICN, it was $54 a year ago, $28 last week, and it’s $18 now.

Anyway, for some reason, they’ve decided to take these three really fun movies and sell them as a package for $17.

So let’s look at them one at a time

First of all, Two Mules For Sister Sara was directed by one of the 60’s and 70’s great unappreciated filmmakers, Don Siegel, who had already directed the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the great war movie Hell Is For Heroes (1962), with Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Fess Parker (TV’S Daniel Boone), Bobby Darin, and even a young Bob Newhart, the edgy Hemingway-based thriller The Killers (1964), with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan, Madigan (1968), and one of my own Eastwood faves, Coogan’s Bluff (1968), before tackling Two Mules For Sister Sara. He would go on to direct three more films for Clint Eastwood, the underrated The Beguiled (1971), the classic and groundbreaking Dirty Harry, and Escape From Alcatraz (1979), as well as the classic Walter Matthau heist thriller Charley Varrick (1973) . He’s also important historically, at least as far as moviemaking is concerned, because he directed the great and final film of John Wayne’s long career, The Shootist (1976), a brilliant film and a fitting ending to Wayne’s career, also starring Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Jimmy Stewart, and John Carradine.

Second of all, Two Mules For Sister Sara has got Shirley MacLaine going for it. Now I’ll be the first to admit, there’s something really weird about Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine being in a movie together to begin with, but it’s somehow just pretty funny and…well, hell, Shirley MacLaine’s just great so why shouldn’t she be in a movie with Clint Eastwood? C’mon…Cowboys? Nuns? Mexican revolutionaries fighting the French. Shit. I had fun.

Then you get Joe Kidd. I just dig this movie. Clint Eastwood’s made a lot of good movies and, especially since he started directing them, he’s made a lot of great ones too.

He’s also made a bunch of movies that are just a lot of fun to watch. There were two when I was growing up hat I would always look for on TV on a Saturday afternoonor go to the video store and rent over and over again. I really dug Coogan’s Bluff and Joe Kidd.

Coogan’s Bluff just had that cool fish-out-of-water plot where the western lawman comes to New York City, loses the crook he’s come to extradite, and then has to do the whole “cowboy in the big city” thing. It’s just great Clint.

And Joe Kidd just has this outrageously good cast. Clint Eastwood is the great ex-bounty hunter tracker cowboy turned outdated drunk who gets hired by the extremely creepy Robert Duvall to help track down some Mexican revolutionaries (lots of Mexican revolutionaries popping up in these movies) led by John Saxon. The plots a little bit of a mess but I never cared. Robert Duvall is great, just like he is in every one of the other hundred movies he’s made, Clint and Duvall have an awful lot of cool “Who’s the biggest badass?” type interaction between them, and Don Stroud, who appeared in apparently 145 different TV shows and movies (and pretty much played the bad-guy in all of them) gets to run around being an asshole with this really cool old west half-pistol/half-rifle pseudo-Uzi machine gun pistol thing. It doesn’t always make a ton of sense but it’s a lot of fun because all the characters are great and they get to run around with cool guns, ride horse, kick each other’s asses, and, for some bizarre reason which I still can’t explain to you, attack a town by crashing a locomotive into it (haven’t you always wanted to do that?).

The fact that it’s a little clumsy plot wise is strange given the fact that the screenplay was written by Elmore Leonard. Elmore Leonard is a great writer and, more than that, he’s a great writer whose books generally translate very well and very smoothly to the big screen (often with screenplays written by the author himself). Aside from writing the movie and the novel upon which it is based for Paul Newman’s Hombre (1967), Leonard wrote the novel Mr. Majestyk upon which was based the Charles Bronson movie Mr. Majestyk (1974) (which he also wrote), wrote the novel Get Shorty upon which was based the John Travolta/Danny DeVito movie Get Shorty (1995), wrote the novel Rum Punch upon which Quentin Tarentino based the movie Jackie Brown (1997), and wrote the novel Out of Sight upon which Steven Soderbergh based the movie Out of Sight (1998).

He also wrote about a thousand other books. If the idea of a book that’s a really enjoyable easy read with great characters, a clever funny plot, snappy dialogue, and usually some great action scenes appeals to you, then Elmore Leonard is your man. He wrote more good fun books than you’ll ever read in your life. They’re not Proust (seriously, nothing against Proust, but I’d rather shove bamboo under my fingernails and I was an English major) but you’re not really looking for Proust, are you? Elmore Leonard’s way more fun. Here’s a link to 600 of them.

Lastly, you get High Plains Drifter, which is either the first or the second movie Clint Eastwood ever directed. I can’t remember whether this or Play Misty For Me came first and (I’m sorry) I’m just feeling too lazy right now to check. In any case, it’s definitely the first western. In High Plains Drifter you can clearly see the influence director Sergio Leone had on Eastwood. The “Man-With-No-Name” stranger character is present and the slightly twisted Fellini-esque quality of the town and the townspeople is very reminiscent of the Leone-directed Spaghetti Western trilogy A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) that gave TV actor and supporting player Eastwood his first big movie breaks and made Clint Eastwood a star (the three Leone films are also available in The Man With No Name Trilogy Box Set for $30).

There’s a darkness in High Plains Drifter and the Leone films that sets them apart from the westerns that came before them. Leone and Eastwood’s vision of the American frontier forever changed both the way moviegoers saw the west and the way filmmakers portrayed it. They’re trying to make a point about the coarseness and the absolute raw lawless brutality of the time. They’re trying to make it clear that this is not about nobility. There’s no nobility in High Plains Drifter. The nobility is in his, the main character’s, memories and flashbacks, but they’re almost there simply to illustrate the falseness of all that. He had it beaten out of him and he’s come back to beat it the hell out of everyone else.

It’s the same point being made right now on TV on a show like Deadwood. They’re pushing it a little further but that’s only because this is 2007 and you have to push it further in 2007 to make the point now. But it’s still only the same point Eastwood was already making in 1973, some thirty years earlier. There was no law. Anyone could do anything they wanted to anyone. All you needed was a gun and the willingness to point it at another person, pull the trigger, and kill them. Leone and Eastwood were looking to totally re-imagine the old west. Not that they were the very 1st to do it, but after more than two-thirds of a century of cowboys portrayed as “knights in shining stirrups”, Leone and Eastwood tore a page out of the film-noir anti-hero book and turned loose on the American West a far darker rider. Eastwood, in High Plains Drifter, arrives seemingly just in time to save the town from destruction at the hands of outlaws but his particular brand of salvation is not exactly the one the bible intended. He quite literally turns the town into Hell. He “saves” them from the outlaws by turning the town into a a blood-red flaming hell and he both saves and destroys the American Western movie at the same time because he shows you a whole new way to view the West but he makes it almost impossible to see it the old way ever again.

He seems to realize this too because, although he made his name as a western star and it’s almost impossible not to think of Clint Eastwood as a cowboy, after High Plains Drifter, he almost never made another western again, returning to the form only three more times: once just 3 years later when he, at the last minute, replaced director Philip Kaufman (one of my all-time favorite directors) at the helm of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1975) (I would have loved to have seen THAT movie, perfect as it is, done by Kaufman), then again 9 years later in Pale Rider (1985), another “Man-With-No-Name” movie, and finally, almost 20 years after High Plains Drifter, in the phenomenal Unforgiven (1992),the movie which may have put the western myth to rest once and for all.

To be honest, after Unforgiven, I really didn’t think anyone could make a serious western ever again. I was proven wrong when, in 2003, Kevin Costner directed himself, Robert Duvall, Annette Bening, and Michael Gambon in the beautifully rendered Open Range, a film that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved. It is easily far and away the best western made since Unforgiven and, although it certainly owes a debt to that film, it stands on its merits as well. There’s a darkness and a violence in it, and a similar theme about the repercussions of a life of violence and the damage it wreaks on one’s later life, but there is also great tenderness and an attention to the little details that make up the bonds of friendship and love between people and the ache of loneliness that tears at them that Open Range manages to convey with an almost elegant yet subtle simplicity. It’s a fantastic movie and one that I cannot recommend highly enough.

There’s no point in arguing about which is the better film because it really doesn’t matter. Both Unforgiven and Open Range are brilliant movies that deal with a lot of the same subject matter in slightly different ways. The former is certainly a darker film but the latter has a truly great heart at its’ core and it shows that heart without ever being obvious or cloying or sappy. I should really be writing this article about these two movies because they’re both examples of truly great cinema but I guess I got to mention them anyway so it’s cool. Besides, like I said before, it’s the influence of High Plains Drifter and a few other films that leads to films like Open Range and Unforgiven anyway.

So, to sum it up, if you haven’t seen them, you gotta see Open Range and Unforgiven. If you’ve already seen them, or if you just like Clint Eastwood and you want the chance to buy three DVD’s of his movies for a little over $5 each, then the Clint Eastwood Western Icon Collection is a great deal too, and you should take advantage of it now while it still exists because these things seem to come and go on Amazon.

And while we’re on that subject, I just noticed that there’s also another great bargain-priced Clint Eastwood box set out there called Clint Eastwood-The Westerner that collects Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven all in one package for only $23. That’s a little under $8 each for one pretty enjoyable movie and two absolute classics. It’s not quite the ridiculous bargain of the Clint Eastwood Western Icon Collection but it’s still a good deal and that’s a serious little set of movies. The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven are two of the best western films ever made.

Oh, by the way, High Plains Drifter (1973) is the 2nd film Clint Eastwood directed, following by two years his directorial debut on Play Misty For Me (1971). It still remains, however, his first western.

Laura (1944)
Directed and Produced by Otto Preminger
Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson

I really like this section of The Rabbit Hole because it gives me a chance to go back and find some of my favorite films and talk about them. Especially nowadays, people seem unconcerned with anything but whatever happened in the last fifteen minutes so older films get easily overlooked. I saw a post on one of our message boards where a guy said he loved the Rabbit Hole because he liked reading about things I was interested in even though he had no interest in older films or anything that was filmed in Black & White. While I appreciate the support and, I have to admit, it’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this, I wish there was something I could do to convince you all to view this differently. People have been making art in all its’ myriad forms for thousands and thousands of years and, in case you hadn’t noticed, age doesn’t necessarily diminish its’ worth or beauty. Culture is a rich thing, and the best part of it is that the longer time goes on, the more there is to discover because people just keep making more and more and more of it.

America is a relatively young country and our culture, therefore, may not possess the lengthy artistic history and depth of other nations. That’s just the truth. But there is one art form that found, in a small Southern California town mostly made up of orange groves, a home from which to flourish and from which we filled the world with spectacles of sight and sound and laughter and drama and tragedy and into which all the greatest literary, dramatic, and scientific talent poured until it became one of the biggest and most influential industries in the world. What I’m trying to say is this: if America has one art form in which we have a rich and magnificent history, it is the art of filmmaking. Actually, calling it “filmmaking” takes away from a little of what I’m trying to say here because it makes it sound too dry and intellectual. Let’s call it moviemaking, because movies sound like more fun than films and the original intent was simply to entertain. And that’s a lot of my intention when I recommend these films.

I’m not recommending The Shop Around The Corner because it’s a smarter, more intellectually satisfying version of the same story than You’ve Got Mail. It IS all that, but that’s not why I think you should see it. I think you should see it because I think you went to see You’ve Got Mail so you could relax and see a romantic movie that made you laugh and also made you believe it was still possible to fall in love. The reason I think you should see The Shop Around The Corner is that it does all that, and it does it about 100 times better than You’ve Got Mail. It’s just a far better movie, by which I mean it’s more entertaining. If you want to see a movie about falling in love, then see the better one. See the one that really makes you feel the feelings rather than the one that takes all the short cuts that movies take when they want to remind you that “this is the place where you’re supposed to feel something”. See the one that actually makes you feel, not the one that skips the actual feeling and instead simply cues the musical montage with the song you like from last summer and expects you to fill in the emotional gap yourself.

We’ve been making movies here in America for a long time and, for awhile, there was a time when almost everyone in the world who was good at it came here to do it.

And don’t be put off by Black & White movies filmmaking either (and here I will use the word “film”) because Black & White was never just a lack of color. It was an art form in and of itself, and the men and women who worked in that art form knew how to take two colors and create textures and shading so creatively that no one noticed the lack of reds or blues or greens. These were the colors they had to work with and they MASTERED the form, turning what could have been a limitation into a spectacularly rich and elegant palate, finding in the shades of grey all the richness Technicolor would eventually provide for the rest of the spectrum.

Ok. Lecture over.

Now..Laura.

This may be my favorite movie of all time. I probably could have written this essay from memory (I’ve seen the movie at least twenty times) but I watched the Laura today anyway, partially because it seemed like the right thing to do before writing about it but mostly just because, once I thought about it for a second, I realized I just felt like seeing it again.

I have no regrets. Laura is a masterpiece.

It is probably the greatest film noir ever made. I know that’s a statement that would get a lot of argument. There are certainly many other great films of the genre that are far darker movies, like the magnificent Double Indemnity (1944), made the same year, or the equally great The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). I think you could probably make just as good a case for either of those movies, and a few others as well, and it would hard for me to argue with you too strenuously. They’re certainly great films and Hollywood made a lot of great films in the 1940’s. I just like Laura more, I think precisely because it’s so different from both those films. Film Noir was a genre consumed with the inherent darkness in the human spirit and the inevitable doom that resulted from that even where seemingly good people were concerned. I love many of those films but the inevitability of it all got a little “one-note”-ish to me sometimes.

I love Laura because there’s nothing “one-note” about it. It’s a detective mystery and it’s a comedy (well, not really but it has a razor sharp wit), and, through one of the truly great surprise plot twists of all time, it’s a romance even though it seems impossible that it could ever be one. That twist and the change it brings about in the movie make it one of the more satisfying films I’ve ever seen.

The direction is flawless. Otto Preminger was a great director. Laura was one of his earliest films (his fifth or sixth). He had already made the movie adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Kidnapped (great book too) in 1938 with Freddie Bartholomew and would go on to direct Joan Crawford in Daisy Kenyon (1947), before making Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950), which would re-unite his Laura co-stars Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, The Moon Is Blue (1953) with William Holden and David Niven, River of No Return (1954) with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, Carmen Jones (1954) (which, by the way, was nominated for several Oscars and is a great deal on Amazon, selling for around $5.50) , Frank Sinatra’s tour-de-force performance as a gambling junkie in The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Pearly Bailey in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1959), Exodus (1960) with Paul Newman, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, and Eva Marie Saint, and about thirty other films. Christ, I almost forgot Anatomy Of A Murder (1959), which, aside from being a great film with James Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, and Ben Gazzara, has one of the greatest soundtracks of all time (The soundtrack album Anatomy of a Murder can also found here on the iTunes Store) composed by the incomparable Duke Ellington (Duke’s music can, of course, also be found on iTunes as well).

But Preminger wasn’t simply a great director, he was a great producer as well and the talent he assembled for Laura is impressive. The cast begins with Dana Andrews as the hard boiled Detective Lt. investigating the Laura Hunt murder, a brutal crime in which a young woman was horrifyingly shotgunned in the face just inside the front door of her apartment. The young woman, Laura Hunt, is played in flashback by Gene Tierney, who is, as I’ve mentioned before, maybe the most beautiful woman who ever lived. She’s 24 here, just four years past her film debut in The Return of Frank James (1940), four short years into which she’s packed ten films so she’s far more self-assured in Laura.

She seems like a beautiful girl earnestly acting in The Return of Frank James. By Laura, she’s a woman and she simply inhabits the role of Laura Hunt. Although the murder occurs before the start of the film, Tierney’s Laura Hunt haunts us, and Andrew’s Lt. MacPherson, throughout the film both through the flashback memories of the film’s other characters and through the gorgeous portrait of her which hangs over the mantle in her apartment, seemingly refusing to let her die before the murder can be solved.

The story is mainly told through MacPherson’s questioning of the other three main characters and their memories of Laura.

I think most people pinhole Vincent Price as the creepy guy from all the horror movies like House of Wax (1953), House of Usher (1960), or The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the latter pair of which are out on DVD as a double feature two-pack for only $10.99, but he’s both amazing and unexpected as the formerly rich now fallen on hard times kept-man southern playboy Shelby Carpenter (I guess, now that I think about it, he did play a nice old man in Edward Scissorhands).

He’s both pathetic and sympathetic. He manages to hint at the leading man type person he almost could have been were it not for his inherent weakness of character. You see how Laura Hunt could have loved him while at the same time wondering how she could possibly not despise him. Judith Anderson (later Dame Judith Anderson), who was nominated for 7 Emmys and won three, and had been nominated for an Oscar just four years earlier in only her 2nd film for her chilling performance as the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), is wonderfully bloodless and cold as Laura’s calculating aunt (and competitor for Shelby’s love) Ann Treadwell.

But the real prizewinning performance in the movie is that of the incomparable Clifton Webb as newspaper and radio critic Waldo Lydecker. Webb takes hold of the perfection of the script’s dialogue like it’s a dagger and then spends the entire film effortlessly and mercilessly skewering each and everyone around him, stabbing at them as if his wit were a very very sharp knife and his sarcasm a dagger, simultaneously dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief and cutting his co-stars to ribbons, all the while dressed impeccably and standing remarkably still. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, as was Preminger for his direction, and the writers and the art directors as well.

Joseph LaShelle won the Oscar that year for his gorgeous cinematography (if you want to see what I mean about the work that can be done visually with only a black & white color palette, Laura is all the proof you need).

The real crime is that David Raskin did not win for his score because the music is not only both haunting and beautiful, it has proven to be timeless. The “Theme from Laura” became an almost immediate standard played by every big band of the day and every great jazz musician from the mid-1940’s to the present day. The Soundtrack from Laura is gorgeous.

I don’t want to say much more about the film because I don’t want to ruin it for you. I’ll just say that Webb and Price and Anderson are fantastic supporting characters and Dana Andrews is great as a tough hard man coming slowly unraveled as he realizes with horror that he’s falling in love with a dead girl who’s murder he’s investigating. And Gene Tierney, of course, is amazing as Laura Hunt, managing to be so powerfully warm and beautiful a figure in her friend’s memories that you truly believe someone COULD fall in love with a dead woman.

And Preminger, holding both the directorial and the production reins, holds it all together so masterfully that it all results in a movie as fresh and perfect today, 63 years after it’s initial release, as it was in 1944. Laura is amazing, a masterpiece, and a perfect feat of movie making.

You’ll notice that THIS time I said “Movie” making. Because although Laura is a perfect film, Laura is also a wonderful movie, one that you can and will watch over and over and over again, just like me. Like I said, I could have written this whole essay from memory. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see Laura today.

And why should I deny myself the pleasure of that?

These are just some links to other places to find cool Counting Crows stuff:

Try this site for Sheet Music. (sheetmusicplus.com)

Try this site for Posters, Gold Records, T-shirts, and Framed CC art. (allposters.com)

See also Pushposters.co.uk for more options

Also, lest I forget, you can get all the Counting Crows albums HERE or, if you just want to down load them digitally from iTunes you can get them HERE.

Remember, the never-before (officially) released record by the legendary (at least in our minds) San Francisco band The Himalayans (featuring me) is being released on my indie label Tyrannosaurus Records and is, as of right now, available for pre-order at our Dino-Store. It will ONLY be available through the Dino-Store. We are not planning on selling it anywhere else. Order your copy now and it will be shipped to you on April 12th, the day of its’ release!

Visit The Himalayans’ MySpace Page
or at TheHimalayans.com.

Also, visit the Trecs MySpace Page and our other bands:
NOTAR’s MySpace Page
Blacktop Mourning’s MySpace Page
blacktopmourning.com.

Blacktop Mourning will be playing May 6th at the Bamboozle Festival at The Meadowlands In New Jersey.

They’re also playing four dates on The “Kevin Says” stage on the Warped tour:

Sat 7/28 Chicago, IL First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
Sun 7/29 Minneapolis, MN Metrodome
Tue 7/31 Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheatre
Wed 8/1 Cincinnati, OH Riverbend Music Center

And don’t forget to visit CountingCrows.com. They have last Summer’s concert in Houston there to listen to and some rare live stuff I just sent them going up soon.

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Credits (so we can be just like a REAL magazine):

Publishers: Me & Lisa

Editor: Me

Editor-in-Chief: Me

Editor-in-almost-but-not-quite-Chief: Lisa

Head Writer: Me

Contributing Writers: Me & the nice people I steal quotes from

Designer: Lisa

Photographers: All the nice people we steal photos from

Head of Production: Lisa

Heads of Marketing: Lisa & Kat

Heads of Advertising: Lisa & Kat & me & MySpace Bulletins

Heads of Hair: Charley & Immy

Heads of Circulation: All of you

Head of Lettuce: aerofreak1

In This Issue:

Music

Jackson Browne

Beach Boys (see American TV/DVDS)

DVDS/Movies

Movie - The Great Raid

Box Set - The Paul Newman Collection

Romance Of The Week - Two Family House

TV

American - Carnivale (Twin Peaks & The Beach Boys)

British - Cracker

Books

Fables

Etc.

Everything Else, Where to eat in New Orleans during Jazzfest

Welcome to Issue #2 of “Down the Rabbit Hole-Adam’s pick’s (and other assorted crap)”, my weekly (Okay, that turned out to be total bullshit and, as I’m two days late on the bi-weekly thing, that’s not looking very impressive right now either) picks and recommendations webzine.

This is the Issue wherein Adam learns that putting out a magazine that he writes entirely by himself while simultaneously making an album and running an independent record company is not the sort of thing one promises to do every week or even every other week unless one is a proper fucking idiot. I got this one in just a little over the two week deadline but THAT IS IT for that schedule.

Still, I think this is a really cool issue and I’m pretty damn proud of it even though twice I set out to write articles about one thing and then accidentally wrote an article about something else altogether. Sometimes “Inspired but Stupid” is my middle name. Usually it’s Fredric, but I go by both depending on the day and the mood. I was going to change it to “Danger” but apparently a lot of people are using that these days.

In any case, it ain’t Fredric today.

Soooooooo…for those of you who missed the now very rare and valuable collectible Issue #1, there is a reason for this thing’s existence. It’s like a mission statement. If you’ve already read it, just skip this part; if you haven’t, be sure to read every word-there is a test to follow and everyone who fails automatically grows up to be a dick.

I’m sorry. It’s just the rules. I don’t make ‘em.

But I digress…the mission statement…it goes like this…

I decided that a lot of what I wrote in my slightly irregular Online Diary was talking about records I liked and movies I’d seen so I decided to just start my own little webzine and talk about cool stuff.

This way, my regular diary can be a little more about my life in general and here in The Rabbit Hole, I can talk a little more about music and movies and books and all that stuff that I really enjoy writing about, as well as looking for places that have weird collectable Counting Crows stuff we don’t sell on our website that YOU might enjoy.

So…uh…that’s it.

Welcome to Issue #2

Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using) (1972)
For Everyman (1973)
Late For The Sky (1974)
The Pretender (1976)
Running On Empty (1977)

Me, I love Jackson Browne. As far as I’m concerned, his first four albums, Jackson Browne (1972), For Everyman (1973), Late For The Sky (1974), and The Pretender (1976) are as good if not better than any run of albums from any of the other Southern California singer/songwriters of the early and mid-70’s, especially Late For The Sky. I challenge you to find a run by any of them that even come close. Not James Taylor, not Crosby, Stills, and Nash, not even The Eagles. The only LA singer/songwriters really in his league right then were Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and The Band (if you want to count them because they DID move out to LA somewhere around that time), although their true masterpiece albums were behind them by then.

Strangely, all those musicians are Canadian. Maybe only Canadians and Jackson Browne were allowed to make consistently great singer/songwriter records in LA in the 1st half of the 1970’s. The songwriting is brilliant and the band is out of this world. He’s an unbelievable lyricist, writing themes of loneliness and failed love affairs as if life in California was a civilization disintegrating into an apocalyptic future. And he lucked into one of the coolest bands ever. David Lindley, Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar and Craig Doerge, among others, formed the nucleus of a simply incredible sound. It ain’t punk rock but, for its’ time and its’ style, it’s as good as it gets. And you know, it’s ok not to be punk. I know by the late 70’s, rock and roll was getting kind of stale and the changes that came with the punk and later alternative revolutions of the late 70’s and 80’s were welcome changes but the music that got stale was more the music made by the many artists who were pale imitations of Jackson Browne than by Jackson Browne himself.

In 1973, when he released his self-titled debut Jackson Browne, also known as Saturate Before Using, Jackson Browne was 23 years old. He’d written a lot of songs for other artists but couldn’t get a record deal himself. I’ve heard that David Geffen started Asylum Records solely because he was Jackson’s manager and he needed somewhere to put out his records. From the opening piano chords of the beautiful romantic “Jamaica Say You Will” to the closing piano chords and plucked guitar of “My Opening Farewell“, it’s a pretty stunning debut, dominated instrumentally by Browne’s spare but emotionally poignant piano playing. I sucked at 23 and he writes with a maturity I couldn’t even have imagined then. In between, the devastating “Song For Adam“, a rumination on mortality following the suicide of a friend, used to break me when I was a kid. The fact that life is nothing but uncertainty is somehow already heartbreakingly apparent to Browne at the age of 23

I sit before my only candle
But it’s so little light to find my way
Now this story unfolds before my candle
Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
Well, I feel just like a candle in a way
I guess I’ll get there but I wouldn’t say for sure

Somehow he segues from that song into the hit “Doctor My Eyes“, a nearly perfect pop song that still manages to remain as fresh today as it was then. It’s about trying to figure out how to look at the world in all it’s manifest disappointment and not become so disillusioned that it becomes impossible to even face what you see. It’s also a statement of anger from a young man saying “OK, I’ve looked at all of this long enough without judging because I was young, but now I’m a man and want to know why this is all so fucked up!”

“Rock Me On The Water” manages to be gospel with out really being gospel. It’s got some kind of Curtis Mayfield vibe in it but it’s pure Jackson Browne at the same. His piano playing here, as on the entire album, sets the tone that makes it all work. Well, it’s a fucking great chorus too.

The song that really kills me however is “Something Fine“. I don’t know what it’s about exactly. Maybe about wandering the world there on the cusp of manhood looking for something to really mean something, finding it in the memory of the eyes of someone he loved, but knowing his life, just beginning to take him somewhere, is leading him somewhere that it’s not leading her. He’s going to go his way and she’ll go hers, but they’ll take a little bit of each other when they go and that makes it ok.

I’ve heard people say his second album For Everyman is an example of the problem so many songwriters face when, after using up all their great songs on their first album, they aren’t really ready to face the task of writing enough quality material to fill out a second. Certainly he goes to the well a little on his sophomore effort, recording some previously released songs he’d written earlier for or with other artists. The album opens with “Take It Easy“, a song he co-wrote with Glenn Frey which had already been a huge hit for The Eagles the year before. Their version is obviously a great single but the song gets a more earnest treatment here. It doesn’t rock quite as hard but you feel it a little more. It’s pointless to argue over which is better but there’s no arguing with the fact that this version has every bit as much a right to exist as the hit version. Their’s is probably a little bit more fun and his is a little more true. His song “These Days” had already been recorded by Nico, Ian Matthews, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tom Rush, Gregg Allman, and New Grass Revival before Jackson ever got around to recording it himself and it has since been recorded by everyone from Fountains of Wayne and The Golden Palominos to Barbara Manning, Nectarine No. 9, 10,000 Maniacs, and Paul Westerberg. It was even a staple for us for years at The Devil and The Bunny Show. (download)

There’s a reason. It’s an amazing song. I just listened to it six times in a row. I always wanted to sing it so we did it at The Devil and The Bunny Show but I can’t really touch it the way it should be sung. I don’t know why. I’m usually pretty good at that stuff and it’s a song I really identify with, a writer talking about why he can’t seem to be in real life the person he sees himself as when he sings.

Now if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it’s just that I’ve been losing for so long

God, what a thing to say. Hope lives in the song but not in the heart. But then he follows that statement with the lines:

Well, I’ll keep on moving, moving on
Things are bound to be improving these days
One of these days
These days I sit on cornerstones
And count the time time in quartertones to ten
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

And for a moment, it’s as if he was telling himself that hope is still within him but then he admits it’s just a lie he was telling himself:

Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

And then the sound of David Lindley’s slide guitar over the Jackson’s piano and the band carries us out to the end of the song. I don’t care who or how many other people covered this song. This is the only version that matters. So whether it’s a brand new song or not is utterly unimportant. It matters.

And as the songs winds its’ way out towards its’ conclusion, I realize that the other major difference is that this is more of a band album than his first. There’s a band on the first album but the piano is all that really matters. Here, the addition of Lindley changes the whole tone of the sound as most of the melodic leads are carried by his guitars and the piano is free to hold down the song itself. It’s a huge addition as Lindley will turn out to be one of the greatest and most original guitar players in that or any other era, in effect becoming the sound that, along with the strength of the songwriting and the tone of Browne’s effortless singing, defines Jackson Browne’s music.

And then it all culminates in the title song.
“For Everyman” is the delivery on the promise of all the potential Jackson Browne’s songwriting has shown up until that moment. It foreshadows the epic apocalyptic vision of emotional life in the modern world, and the impossibility of love existing in it as anything but a prelude to loss, that would color so much of his work that point onwards. It may not possess the perfect brevity of “These Days” but, at six minutes and twelve seconds, it is beginning to reach for something larger. It’s a beginning that would reach it’s full fruition the following year, when Browne released what I consider Jackson Browne’s masterpiece Late For The Sky.

Late For The Sky has only eight songs. Five of them clock in at over 5 minutes and a 6th comes in just 15 seconds shy of that. He’s obviously decided to try for something larger and Late For The Sky is just that. It’s the place where musically, at least for me, all the hopes for change and dreams and possibilities of the late 60’s come to a crashing halt.
The album makes the case, in song after song, that we are all forever utterly and unalterably alone and no amount of music or optimism or, ultimately, false feelings of unity are ever going to change that. We are going to fall in love and we are going to lose that love. We are going to keep our memories, and at times those memories will comfort us, but in the end they, like the photographs that capture the images of them, will only serve to remind us of how much we’ve left behind or simply lost. As evidenced, listen to the outpouring of not only pain, but also very detailed memories, caused by stumbling upon a photograph in “Fountain of Sorrow“:

You were turning ‘round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes

In those lines, he’s remembering all the magical little details that seem both so beautiful and so sad, but then something changes and he also remembers how, in some way, they began to add up to something less than magical.

But when you see through love’s illusions
There lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
While the loneliness seems to spring from your life
Like a fountain from a pool

But everything does that. The magic is an illusion you build up around someone as you fall in love. It’s just that when you’re in love, if you can’t live with what’s left after all the pretty illusions dissipate, you can make all the wrong choices until you’re left with nothing at all. We can’t help ourselves and, in Browne’s eyes, everything we love eventually turns to dust or a photograph.

The summer of love is over for Jackson Browne in 1973.

He manages to make each song a very detailed personal heartbreak (like a song about someone stumbling upon a photograph) and at the same time make it a larger statement about a civilization that is disconnecting from itself and people who are disconnecting from each other so completely that we are actually in danger of becoming extinct, at least metaphorically. If human beings aren’t actually going to die out as a race, in Browne’s vision of the Apocalypse, our inability to function as anything other than pain-filled solitary beings is still going to kill off everything that makes us human.

On “The Late Show“, he confronts all the fears and insecurities everyone is forced to face when they take a chance on someone else. It’s like a dance two people do, endlessly circling each other as they work up the courage to do something abut it…or just walk away and do nothing at all. It’s so hard to really reveal yourself to anyone else. The risk of rejection is just too scary so we fake it and couch it in grander terms:

No one ever talks about their feelings anyway
Without dressing them in dreams and laughter
I guess it’s just too painful otherwise

No one except him. But then again he, like me, dresses them up in songs, which is sort of the same thing as hiding them in any other way. After all, you’re pretty safe saying what you want to say in a song. Even if the person you’re talking about it knows it, you still have the distance of “artistic expression”. You don’t really have to face them. Still, at the end of the song, he offers some hope;

Look, it’s like you’re standing in the window
Of a house nobody lives in
And I’m sitting in a car across the way
Let’s just say it’s an early model Chevrolet
Let’s just say it’s a warm and windy day
You go and pack your sorrow
The trash man comes tomorrow
Leave it at the curb and we’ll just roll away…

But does she? Or does she even hear him? Does he even say it out loud? Or does he leave it unsaid, preferring to wait until he can tuck all his feelings away safely in the confines of this song? We never know. The song just ends there…or at least the words do. The song quietly wanders along for a minute before building back up to an instrumental reprise of the music of the song’s final lines. But it’s never made clear whether A) he ever says what he wanted to say to her or B) even if he does, what she does when she hears it. And that’s the closest the album gets to hope.

Up until this point, the record has concerned itself with confronting all the fears of being a young man growing up (he’s 25 now). He’s sung of both the horror of life’s uncertainties and the pain of life’s certainties, most prominently the certainty of sorrow and loneliness.

Then something seems to change. On “The Road And The Sky“, he sings as if this rock and roll life has, at least a little, freed him from some of the pain. It’s a song filled with possibilities. It’s still filled with uncertainty but at least, as it rocks along and David Lindley rips off line after line of searing electric slide guitar, it offers the hope of possibility.

Then the song, and any hope it contained, ends as the album spins right into “For A Dancer“, a song about the one thing that is a certainty in every life: death. And then you realize that all “The Road And The Sky” really offered was false hope, as if he was trying, for 3 minutes at least, to tell himself it could be better. But then something happens and the reality of it all comes crashing back down. Maybe that’s why “The Road And The Sky” is the shortest song on the album.

But even in “For A Dancer” he seems to be trying to tell himself not to give up. He says near the end of end of the song

Don’t let the uncertainty get you down
The world keeps turning around and around
Go on and make a joyful sound…
…And somewhere between the time
you arrive and when you go
May lie a reason you were alive
that you’ll never know…

And then the songs winds to a halt accompanied by the wailing crying sound of David Lindley’s sorrow-filled fiddle.

So maybe he’s saying that even in the face of all this impossibility and inevitability, you still have to live your life, because the only possible way for it to have ANY meaning is if you at least live it as if it DOES mean something. And that’s the reason this album is a masterpiece, because in song after song he writes and sings about simple moments of everyday life and somehow turns them into statements about everything that means anything in a person’s life.

Whatever Jackson Browne was thinking of at the end of Late For The Sky, by 1976, when The Pretender was released, everything had changed. His wife Phyllis, the mother of his son, had committed suicide the previous year and everything he had been surmising, all the painful inevitabilities of life he had been contemplating, had come horribly true. Love does come, in the end, to loss. People do die. And you are, in the end, left to cope with it on your own, or, in Browne’s case, with a young, now motherless, son. The songs take on a much more bitter tone. The sorrow and pain of the previous albums has been leavened by an undercurrent of something darker.

The music and the production has all changed as well. For whatever reason, for the first time, Browne chooses to work with a producer, in this case Bruce Springsteen’s manager/producer Jon Landau, responsible for producing (sort of) Born to Run a year earlier. So the pianos on this album are played by Craig Doerge and The E-Street Band’s Roy Bittan, instead of Browne himself, and nearly every other major LA star makes an appearance as well. Bonnie Raitt sings the harmony vocal on “Here Come Those Tears Again“, Don Henley and JD Souther sing on “The Only Child“, Graham Nash and David Crosby tackle “The Pretender” and, best of all, the great Lowell George from the band Little Feat plays beautiful slide guitar and sings the harmonies on “Your Bright Baby Blues“.

George’s participation is all the more poignant because, only three short years later, Lowell George himself would be dead of an apparent heart attack probably brought on by his habitual drug use. Browne would eulogize George with the song “Of Missing Persons” on 1980’s Hold Out, a song directed towards George’s daughter on the occasion of her annual 4th of July birthday party picnic. It may be Brown’s most heartbreaking song, written to a child about the death of her parent from someone who knew all too well what he was singing about.

But it’s not just the additional personnel that makes The Pretender a different album from those that preceded it. Jackson Browne’s albums were always sad and they always dealt with the difficulty of finding hope in a world that seemed to offer little reason for it, but the reality of Phyllis death brought about a change in Browne. The songs are no longer sad meditations on the possibility of loss leavened by the possibility of a hopeful future future which might offer more than sorrow. Now the songs face a harsh reality in which everything he had worried about has simply come to pass. It brings about a bitterness that wasn’t there before and the slicker production only makes that bitterness even colder and harsher than it might have already been. Rather than warming up the album, the increased production, while beautiful, somehow makes Browne’s world, which had already lost a lot of its’ warmth with Phyllis’ death, just a little bit colder.

The Pretender also contains “Linda Paloma“, the one kinda crap song Browne had ever recorded up til that point in his career. And at the close of the album, Browne this time placed “The Pretender“, a particularly cynical statement about the empty dreamless void of the materialistic world and future he saw stretching out before him. It’s a very different song from the ones that ended his first three records (”My Opening Farewell“, “For Everyman“, “Before The Deluge“). Whereas other songs had lamented the loss of hope and tore apart the illusions of hope and happiness still left over from the end of the 60’s, “The Pretender“simply takes aim and bitterly fires at a world he sees as being not even concerned with things like “illusions of hope” and “dreams of a better world”. He looks out and sees instead a world of people content to move out to greener (or maybe “whiter” is the better word) pastures, make some money, and live emptily-ever-after. Worse yet, He seems to want to be one of them. The album ends:

I’m gonna be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender

And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender

Are you there?
Say a prayer for The Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender

Say a prayer for The Pretender
Are you there for The Pretender?

It’s as if he’s saying he no longer wants to look into his own heart for answers anymore either. He just wants to get away from all that feeling and live a life of numb contentment, as if the pain of all his fears coming true was just too much and not something he can look at any longer.

And that’s just exactly what he did. The album was the breakthrough hit everyone had always been waiting for and he spent the next few years on the road, making an album along the way. Running On Empty, recorded live on tour, sometimes onstage, sometimes on bus rides, sometimes in hotel rooms, was a record for which he wrote very few actual songs, writing only two songs himself (”Running On Empty” and “You Love The Thunder“), co-writing five others (including one, “Rosie“, he and his manager wrote about life on the road jerking oneself off), and recording three more he didn’t take part in writing at all.

It became an even bigger hit.

Those lines from “The Pretender” come back to haunt you:

And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender

The last line is the heartbreaker. Even from a writer who claimed he believed love was always doomed to fall apart, he admits at the end that it might have made all the difference in the world.

Though true love could have been a contender

But that’s not how things turned out.
[The albums mentioned in the above article can also be found on I-Tunes (below).]

Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using) (1972)
For Everyman (1973)
Late For The Sky (1974)
The Pretender (1976)
Running On Empty (1977)

The Paul Newman Collection (Somebody Up There Likes Me / The Left-Handed Gun/ The Young Philadelphians/ Harper/ Pocket Money/The Mackintosh Man/ The Drowning Pool)

Lately a lot of the big movie companies have been releasing collections of movies by specific actors. There’s been two Gary Cooper Collections, two Steve McQueen ones, several Film Noir Classic Collections, A Warner Gangsters Collections, a fantastic Controversial Classics Collection and a Controversial Classics Collection, Vol.2-The Power of Media (featuring All the President’s Men, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon), a Tennessee Williams Film Collection, A Bogie & Bacall Collection, a Complete James Dean Collection (Including East Of Eden (1955), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), and Giant (1956)), a Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection, a ton of John Wayne Collections, a John Ford collection, and another one just made up of movies John Wayne and John Ford made together. They’re a lot of fun because you get some well known films along with some lesser-known ones.

This set in particular is strong largely because Paul Newman is just so damn good. He’s like electricity when he’s young. There’s a reason is career has lasted fifty years and the reason is evident from the very beginning. Other than The Silver Chalice, his ridiculous 1954 sword-and-sandals starring debut, he been absolutely magnetic from day one. By his second film, 1956’s Rocky Graziano biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, you can’t take your eyes off of him. Apparently the role was supposed to go to James Dean but he died and Newman got his lucky break. Personally, I have trouble imagining James Dean as the boxer Graziano but Newman inhabits the role, taking to it and giving it a realism uncommon for its’ time.

Two years later, he takes the western genre and turn is on it’s ear with The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Newman and director Arthur Penn’s take on the Billy the Kid legend (Penn would later direct several other classic and highly original biopics and westerns, including The Miracle Worker (Helen Keller), Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman in an outrageous tragicomic look at the ridiculousness of the mythical western cowboy hero when viewed in light of the horrific Native American genocides. It was Hoffman‘s 3rd classic role in a row and his 3rd in three years, following his debut in The Graduate with first Midnight Cowboy, and then Little Big Man. All of Penn’s movies are strange gripping psychological views of mythic figures and they’re all good but The Left-Handed Gun just has something all the others lack, and I suppose that something is Newman. The only one of Penn’s other films that can really match it, in my opinion, is Bonnie and Clyde just because the combination of Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and even Gene Wilder in a smaller role, is pretty hard to beat. The picture, when we first meet Billy Bonney as a lost boy, and the palpable sense of relief when he finds a father figure, only to have it shattered when the man is murdered just days after their meeting, and the tragic inevitability of the rage and the violence that follows are all reflected in Newman’s haunted eyes that flicker between a dead coldness and a heartbreaking vulnerability. It’s just a great film, even more amazing when you consider that, along with The Long Hot Summer , Cat On A Hot In Roof, and Rally ‘Round The Flag, Boys! , Newman fade a total of four pictures that year, three of which are classics and one, Rally ‘Round The Flag, Boys!, which, if not anywhere near that level, is still, a lot of fun (For some reason, it’s not officially available on DVD, but you can get it here on VHS and you can always check on eBay. Stuff just seems to pop up there).

The Young Philadelphians (1959), made the very next year, is closer to melodrama than the edgy psychological darkness of The Left-Handed Gun or the blunt, if hopeful, realism of Somebody Up There Likes Me, but only in comparison to those two films. It’s still the story of a good man’s disintegration and it has far more depth than anything else that might have been considered “melodrama” in the late 1950’s. One of the reasons is a great tragic drunken performance by Robert Vaughn but the lion’s share of that depth is, of course coming from the fact that Paul Newman is the axis around which the rest of the film revolves. Anyone else in the role and the film might have just been another movie. But it’s not anyone else, it’s Paul Newman and that makes The Young Philadelphians a very enjoyable, as well as a very good, movie. It was on all the time when I was a kid and, as I’ve just finished watching it again, I realize this must be the 4th or 5th time I’ve seen it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it just as much, maybe more because, by watching it as part of this set of films, I’m more interested and focused on how good Newman is.

I’m sure this will come up over and over again as I work my way through all these films but it still bears saying now: there’s a reason this guy’s had a 55 year career spanning somewhere around 65 or 70 films. He’s just very very good. And when you watch him, you realize what an enormous influence and effect the depth and realism and gravity of his performances must have had on all the actors who saw him and followed him and one the ones who followed them all the way down to today. The fact that very handsome actors like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp don’t end up as “pretty boy” leading men in mindless b-level movies stems from the kind of work that James Dean and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando did in the early to mid-1950’s. Even if you don’t consider the fifties one of the “great” periods in American cinema (and you could argue it either way), some of the acting work done in that decade is among the most influential and groundbreaking work ever done.

Pocket Money (1972), on the other hand is a totally different experience. Well, I shouldn’t say totally different because Newman is still great in it but it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen him in where he plays this sort of character. Jim Kane is a loser, and not the cool romantic type of “Fast Eddie” loser Newman played in The Hustler (1961). Jim Kane’s a good guy; he’s just not a very smart guy. He’s overly noble and really prideful and easily deceived and just all-around kind of dopey, if sweet. In Pocket Money, Newman plays Kane, a horse trader who gets down on his luck when some horses he rounds up get quarantined for having a disease and, needingto make some quick money, he gets involved in a deal to go to Mexico and get some cattle for a couple very dubious characters, played by Strother Martin and Wayne Rogers, even though everyone he knows warns him not to do it.

Eventually he gets down to Mexico, where he rounds up his old friend Leonard, played by the very funny Lee Marvin, who’s far more savvy (or at least thinks he is) than Kane (truthfully, they’re both dopes) and together they set about dealing with the local Mexicans, buying the cattle and trying to get them back to the buyers in Chihuahua. Things go wrong, things go right, Newman and Marvin hang around and generally try to not make a disaster of things. Not a whole lot happens and the movie passes but when it was over, I realized I was sad it was over. I kept waiting for something big to happen but I later realized that I didn’t really care. I enjoyed my time with the characters and I was sorry to see them go. It actually ends kind of beautifully. It’s very simple and, at least for me, totally unexpected. It really reminded me of a Robert Altman film, like The Long Goodbye (1973), a detective movie that’s not really about solving a crime but more about spending some time with the character, played by Elliot Gould, of the detective (watch The Long Goodbye sometime and take a moment to think about the fact that Elliot Gould is playing the same character, Raymond Chandler’s anti-hero Philip Marlowe, that Humphrey Bogart played in The Big Sleep (1946)). Pocket Money is a western that’s not really about cowboys. It’s just about what it’s like to spend a few days in the lives of some guys and one of them wears a cowboy hat and rounds up horses for a living.

I thought I didn’t like the movie at first but I was sorry when it ended. It’s a totally unique Paul Newman film. I can’t think of another character he ever played that was anything like Jim Kane.

The Mackintosh Man (1973) is a pretty strange movie. I can’t seem to decide how I feel about it. First of all, the 1970’s ARE the golden age of spy/cop/crime thrillers and one of the true golden ages of American Cinema period. In this particular genre, though, the 70’s just shined with films like Three Days of the Condor (1976), Marathon Man (1976), Serpico (1973),and Get Carter (1971), it was just a magical time for THAT type of film. Gene Hackman alone made The French Connection (1971) and The French Connection II (1975), The Conversation (1974), and Night Moves (1975) before the decade was half over.

So how do you put an actor like Paul Newman and a director like John Huston together and get a movie as…I don’t know what? I swear to god, I still can’t decide whether I liked it or not. Newman made Sometimes A Great Notion (1971), Pocket Money (1972), The Sting (1973), The Drowning Pool (1975), and Slap Shot (1977) during those ten years. Huston directed Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Wise Blood (1979). Hell, They had just made The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) together the year before The Mackintosh Man.

So what the hell’s going on with The Mackintosh Man? It’s got James Mason too and Ian Bannen, one of my favorite Scottish actors, and Dominique Sanda, who, if not particularly brilliant here (I suspect she didn’t really speak English very well yet), is at the very least hot as shit (which counts for something). The thing is…it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s going on. I don’t mean the plot. I could follow the action; I’m just not sure what all the action was about. I’m still not sure whether the plot was to catch a spy or to catch a group of people who were helping spies or to…hang on…this is going to sound totally ridiculous but I just realized who they were trying to catch. Hmmm. That does sort of change things for me.

Okay, well that makes it a more sensible movie. I think part of my confusion has to with the fact that some of the principals in the movie aren’t really aware of what’s going on behind the scenes either. There are machinations behind machinations, which is, I suppose, how it should be in a good thriller.

Still, there are some weird things going on. I’m not absolutely clear on whether Newman is a British secret agent masquerading as an Australian jewel thief or an American WORKING as an agent for the British Government and masquerading as an Australian jewel thief. He does a pretty good Aussie accent. It’s definitely better than his British one, which is why I’m unclear on this point. There’s also a casual brutality to his character and I couldn’t tell how I felt about that either. There is a great chase scene across some moors with Newman being pursued by bad guys and a big ass dog. It’s pretty brutal but it’s really good too. Strangely, the most satisfying moment is when Newman kicks this particularly bitchy woman in the balls. It doesn’t seem to matter that she doesn’t actually have balls. It’s still an extremely satisfying moment.

Look, this is one you have to figure out for yourself. With The Mackintosh Man, you get John Huston and Paul Newman and James Mason and Ian Bannen and Dominique Sanda (who, I’ll say it again is fucking hot as shit). So that’s a lot of talent, and talent is worth watching. It’s for from any of their best work but, then again, their best work, is far better than most everyone else’s so…I dunno. It’s a box set and it ain’t the best movie in the box but it’s a box set of Paul Newman movies so how bad can The Mackintosh Man really be?

I wrote the rest of this article in chronological order based on the movies’ release dates but I stepped outside of this for these last two because they’re so closely related to one another, The Drowning Pool (1975) being a sequel (of sorts) to Harper (1966), albeit one separated by nine years. They’re both ostensibly adaptations of Ross MacDonald’s famous series of Lew Archer detective novels but, and having not read them I can’t say for sure, reportedly the relationship is rather thin and mostly in name only, and not even that really since the name of the character in the films is Lew Archer (I had always heard that Newman superstitiously insisted on the name change himself because his biggest successes had come in movies beginning with the letter “h”, as in Hud (1963) and The Hustler (1961), but Robert Horton, in his Amazon review claims that is simply an “urban legend” and that the change came about because MacDonald, although willing to sell the story rights to his novels for the films, was unwilling to sign away the franchise rights to the “Lew Archer” name). In any case, I liked both movies.

They’re strange detective movies because neither of them is really a detective movie. They’re both far more interested in being character studies, both of Newman’s decent, if somewhat sad and slightly world-weary, gumshoe, and of the people and the times around him. Harper is a really colorful mid-sixties psychedelic beat-language romp around Los Angeles as the detective is called in to investigate the very rich missing husband of his very “seemingly-glad-to-see-the fucker-gone” wife, played by Lauren Bacall. Bacall is at this point 42 years old but, in her youth, was herself the ingénue in several of the greatest noir/detective movies ever made, especially the quartet of films made at the beginning of her career with Humphrey Bogart: To Have And Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), all of which are , by the way included (and for a cheaper price I believe) in the Bogie & Bacall Collection listed at the top of this article.

(Just as a side note, it’s pretty astonishing that, beginning with her first film, To Have And Have Not at the tender age of twenty, and ending six years later co-starring with Kirk Douglas AND Doris Day in on of my favorite movies Young Man With A Horn (1950), she makes six films in a row, five of which (leaving out only Confidential Agent (1945) which I can’t judge because I’ve never seen) are five of the all-time great films. Not a bad beginning to a career.)

The film also stars Janet Leigh, Julie Harris, and Shelly Winters, all great beauties and ingénues in their own right in their younger days, as once (and ,in some cases, still) beautiful women now fallen on harder times. Winters is a former starlet reduced to “dating” rich hicks for free meals, Harris is a once –promising talented jazz singer turned junkie, and Leigh is Harper’s ex-wife, torn between loving him for his decency and bitterly hating him for his failings and ambivalence. His pain at losing her is palpable and her feelings for him, although worn down by time to the point of being all-but-extinct, are still kept alive in a sort of bitter acid affection for him. I loved how both films dealt realistically with their characters’ age. There is a beautiful young girl, played by the 24 year old Pamela Tiffin, who makes several passes at Harper over the course of the film but he brushes them off, reserving his feelings for Leigh’s character. Newman is 42 at this point and in almost any other film, it that would be considered fine, and even romantically good for the box office, to have him hook up with the younger woman but the film never betrays the interior truth of the characterization by doing that. And that counts for something.

Maybe the fact that the screenplay was written by William Goldman has something to do with that. Close or not to the source material it’s still a good script. It was his first produced screenplay. He would go on, and still continues, to write some 25 more, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Stepford Wives (1975), All The President’s Men (1976), Marathon Man (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Princess Bride (1987) for which he wrote both the book AND the screenplay, Misery (1990), Chaplin (1992)…the list goes on and on. He’s a brilliant writer.

The film also star Strother Martin in a great role as a classic Southern California 60’s bullshit spiritualist guru using his religious guise to hide the fact that he’s actually involved in smuggling Mexicans across the border (He goes from being a jokey cowardly cliché to a sort of scary guy in the blink of an eye) and a very young Robert Wagner in a good performance as the family chauffeur/gigolo.

The Drowning Pool is a lot like Harper in some ways and very different in others. For one thing, it takes place entirely in New Orleans instead of Southern California and for another, it’s not really concerned with giving you much of a sense of the atmosphere of the place outside of a few “We’re from down here and you’re from out there so we hate you” kind of clichés. Harper was drenched in southern California sunshine and 60’s kitsch. New Orleans in The Drowning Pool is just another bleak downtrodden 1970’s southern town. It’s a surprising choice, given all the atmosphere the area offers but it’s just not what the filmmakers are going for and I think (maybe?) the film is better as a result of that. Because the important thing in The Drowning Pool is the state of the degradation that the lives of all its’ characters have fallen into and Lew Harper’s attempt to keep his head ever-so-slightly above the level of the water in the cesspool they’re all drowning in. Too much atmosphere might have distracted from, and interfered with, the bleakness of all that and that would, or might have screwed up the movie.

Once again, it’s a detective story without much detecting. There’s a mystery here but it turns out not to really matter in the end. Instead, what’s important are the people in the film and the damage the situation does to all of them and , by extension, the damage and pain it wreaks on Harper himself. And all of this is beautifully rendered by Paul Newman. Once again, the women in the movie, and the way the film treats them, set it apart. This time, the Janet Leigh role is played by Newman’s wife of then 13, and now nearly 50 years, Joanne Woodward. She is a former lover who walked out on him and disappeared years before. The pain and guilt he feels about it and the shame and bitterness she feels about both it and the present state of her life color every moment they spend on the screen together. He truly cares about her so, even after all this time, when she calls, in trouble because she is being blackmailed, he comes to New Orleans to help. Once again, there is a young girl hitting on Harper and once again she is gorgeous and once again he doesn’t care. And, more importantly, once again, it’s not really out of some sense of nobility; it’s just that there are things that are important to him in his life and, even though (for reasons we are never given in either movie) he has fucked them up beyond repair long before the movie even begins, they’re still the things that matter to him and he holds on to them, maybe because they, and the sense of himself that they give him, are the only things keeping him from going under while everyone around him is sinking as fast as they possibly can.

This is what I mean about Paul Newman. None of that is talked about or examined in any way in either movie but you get this feeling of all these characters’ histories anyway, just by something subtle in Newman’s performance. You could say I’m just making all this up or imagining it but isn’t that the very definition of great acting: the ability to create (sometimes without even words) a portrait of a person deeper and more textured than that which simple words could express. I mean, the advantage books have over movies is that they can explain and comment and give you all sorts of interior dialogue that a movie (which only has dialogue) cannot, but a movie, with a good enough actor, can take just the dialogue and still give you all that and more if it’s done the right way. You can read Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and it’s a great play but you GOTTA see Marlon Brando in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). And you MUST read East of Eden by John Steinbeck simply because EVERYONE should, but, using only the last fifty pages or so of a (300-400 page?) book, Elia Kazan and James Dean in the film East of Eden (1955) manage to create a character and a picture so vivid that it changed the whole way people viewed acting as a performance. And there, once again, we find ourselves talking about James Dean and Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. And there’s a reason for that. Obviously. They’re all just so fucking good.

But to get back to the women, I feel I have to mention that the young girl in The Drowning Pool is played by Melanie Griffith who, in her first two credited films, Night Moves and The Drowning Pool, both made in 1975 when she was 18 years old, turned in two of the great wanton underage slut performances of all time. A large part of what makes both films, and Gene Hackman and Paul Newman’s roles in them, work is their ability to cope with the absolute torrent of sex pouring off this…I don’t know…child. Without the power of her performance in both films, Hackman and Newman wouldn’t have nearly as well defined characters, because so much of the definition of who they are comes to you as a result of their reaction to her. She’s very…well, I just wonder what people made of her at the time.

Anyway, The Drowning Pool goes on and some things work themselves out and some things turn out poorly and I was left thinking about how little I remember of the plot of the movie and how strongly I remembered the character Lew Harper himself.
In some ways, as in Pocket Money, I found myself wondering where the movie was going, only to realize I didn’t care about that so much as I just really cared about what was happening to Newman’s character. He’s just so breathtakingly good in all these movies, especially because they’re all so different. You really get to see the depth and sensitivity of his powers as an actor.

It’s strange how close in sensibility some of these films are to the films of Robert Altman. They’re just so much more interested in wandering through the lives of the people than they are in advancing a plotline. That’s certainly a trait that can be good or bad depending on the filmmaker. Even for Altman, it worked sometimes (M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001)) and not others (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Pret-a-Porter aka Ready to Wear (1994), Kansas City (1996), Dr. T and the Women (2000)). You’ll have to judge for yourself.

My only regret, or complaint, with the set (and it’s really a stupid complaint when I think about it now) was the films from that period they left out. The set’s films all take place between 1956 and 1975. Just between 1958 and 1967 Newman also made The Long Hot Summer (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), and Cool Hand Luke (1967). I guess Hud and Cool Hand Luke have both had significant and well publicized DVD releases but I still think a lot of people have never seen either The Long Hot Summer or The Hustler. The former, based on a mix of different William Faulkner stories and co-starring a loaded cast made up of Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury, is just one of my favorite movies and the latter is just one of Newman’s best and is also interesting because, aside from featuring a great performance by Jackie Gleason as legendary pool hall hustler Minnesota Fats, 25 years later Martin Scorcese made a sequel, The Color Of Money (1986), with Tom Cruise, and with Paul Newman once again reprising his role as “Fast Eddie” Felson. Now those are all great films but they’re not in this set. And maybe that’s ok because I’m not sure I would have seen some of these movies like Pocket Money or The Mackintosh Man or The Drowning Pool otherwise, which would have been a shame because, even though they may not be as great as films like The Long Hot Summer or The Hustler or Or Cool Hand Luke, they give a fuller picture of Paul Newman as an actor. And THAT, I can really appreciate, especially because I’d already seen all those movies, and I already knew he could do all THAT stuff. I didn’t know he could do THIS stuff.

So I guess I’d sum up this set by saying that it’s worth purchasing for several reasons. One is that Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Left-Handed Gun, and The Young Philadelphians are just great films. Period. The other is that even though Harper, Pocket Money, The Mackintosh Man, and The Drowning Pool are only GOOD films, Paul Newman is still a GREAT actor, and there’s something about being in a merely good movie that brings out the truly great actor in him.

Plus, it only costs something like $42, which is basically $6 per movie. I’m not sure you could even buy the 1st three alone that cheaply. SO check him out. He’s worth every penny, especially if you’re ever considering being an actor yourself.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer but it really bothers me that writing, which used to be the foundation upon which most good movies were made, seems to have been forgotten nowadays in favor of special effects and “high concepts” (which, by the way, is a euphemism for basic, moronic, or merely simple-minded. The trailer usually sounds something like “HE’S A WHITE GUY FROM THE SUBURBS! HE’S A BLACK (or Asian or Indian or Native American or any other particular skin color or sex you can think of) GUY FROM THE GHETTO! HE PLAYS BY THE RULES! HE’S NEVER HEARD OF RULES! HE’S ALWAYS WANTED A CAREER WHERE HE DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THESE KINDS OF FILMS! HE’S GIVEN UP ON LIFE AND NO LONGER CARES AS LONG AS GETS PAID! PUT THEM TOGETHER AND WATCH THE SPARKS FLY! IT’S THE MOST HILARIOUS ACTION/BUDDY/ROMANCE/COMEDY SINCE THE LAST PIECE OF SHIT ACTION/BUDDY/ROMANCE/COMEDY WE SOMEHOW TALKED YOU INTO PAYING $10 FOR! IN OTHER WORDS, IT’S THE MOVIE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO SEE AND WE KNOW THAT BECAUSE OUR FOCUS GROUPS AND TEST AUDIENCES ALL TOLD US “IT’S THE MOVIE WE’VE BEEN WAITING OUR WHOLE LIVES TO SEE!”. DON’T MISS IT OR EVERYONE AT WORK WILL THINK YOU’RE A DICK!”).

It seems like most studios think it’s enough to come up with a one clever idea or a marketable cast or some new technological advance and that any one of these things should somehow be enough of an excuse upon which to base an entire film.

(By the way, sorry about that parenthetical with all the CAPS up there. I…uhh…got carried away.)

Not to seem like an old fuck talking about the “good old days”, especially when the days I’m speaking of took place fifty to seventy years ago, but once upon a time, people like William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker (A Star Is Born-1954), Raymond Chandler (Double Indemnity-1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on A Train-1951), Ring Lardner, Jr. ( A Star Is Born-1937, Nothing Sacred –1937, Woman Of The Year-1942, Laura-1944, The Cincinnati Kid-1965, and M*A*S*H-1970), James Hilton (Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent-1940, Mrs. Miniver-1942), Clifford Odets (None But The Lonely Heart-1944, Hitchcock’s Notorious-1946, Sweet Smell of Success-1957), Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle-1940, A Guy Named Joe-1943, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo-1944, Roman Holiday-1953, The Brave One-1951, Spartacus-1960, Exodus-1962, Lonely Are The Brave-1962, The Sandpiper-1965, and Papillon-1973), and Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie-1950, A Streetcar Named Desire-1951, The Rose Tattoo-1955, Baby Doll-1956, Suddenly, Last Summer-1959, ) moonlighted as screenwriters, both on original screenplays and on the movies that were adapted from their own plays and novels. For chrissake, Faulkner alone in the space of nine short years between 1939 and 1948 wrote the screenplays for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s The Big Sleep (1946) and To Have And Have Not (1944) (humorously enough, based on the novels of the aforementioned Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway respectively), and was an uncredited writer on Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford, The Adventures of Don Juan (1948) with Errol Flynn, Gunga Din (1939) with Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as well as John Ford’s Guns Along The Mohawk (1939) starring Henry Fonda along with six or seven other less well-known films.

It’s also worth mentioning that Trumbo, who, according to John Hopwood, supposedly wrote almost all of his seventy plus screenplays while “chain-smoking in his bathtub…later on with a parrot given to him by Kirk Douglas perched on his shoulder”, wrote nearly thirty of them, and won two Academy Awards (which he was unable to pick up) for The Brave One and Roman Holiday, while living in Mexico under an assumed name after being blacklisted during McCarthy’s anti-communist HUAC hearings. In fact, the films mentioned above as a whole were nominated for a total of 128 Academy Awards and won 32!

The reason movie studios and producers hired writers like Faulkner was because they realized the very simple truth that movie making is, at it’s core, simply storytelling, and the better the story; the better the movie. So they hired people who could write great stories and they made great movies.

I’ve dragged you through this long preamble because a lot of the movies I’m going to recommend to you in Down The Rabbit Hole are great films not because they had clever ideas or a hugely famous cast but because they tell great stories, Many of them are simple films; they didn’t cost a fortune to make, not in cash anyways, but they were all the product of something deep in someone’s heart, which carries a price many of the studio executives who make these crap films could never afford anyway.

Which leads me to Two Family House (2000), a film my mom and dad actually recommended to me (more proof that, even at the tender age of 42, you should still pay attention to your mom and dad, who somehow never quite stop being smarter than you). They saw it at a tiny theatre around the corner from our house in Berkeley and loved it so much they mentioned it to me over and over again, practically begging me to see it, for almost a year before I finally ordered the DVD on Amazon.com and watched it. I’ve seen it six or seven times since then. I showed it at Sunday Night MovieNite at my house in LA and again later to a different group of friends after I’d moved to New York. I wrote an essay about it for my friend Robert Kahn’s upcoming and, unfortunately for the moment, unreleased as-of-yet book CITY SECRETS-Movies. I love this film.

The film takes place in New York City, on Staten Island, in an Italian neighborhood in the the mid-50’s. It’s about a very nice guy named Buddy, a small guy with big dreams. He just wants to own his own bar. So he buys a fixer-upper two-family house and decides his family will live upstairs and he’ll build the bar downstairs. He just wants a place, and a life, of his own. The problem is nobody, not really his friends and certainly not his wife, believes in him. On top of that, the tenant upstairs, a violent Irish drunk, refuses at first to vacate the premises and when he finally does, he leaves behind his very young and very pregnant wife (not to give too much of the movie away, but her situation also involves some racial aspects that might not cause problems in 2007 but would have been catastrophic for her in 1956). The film is basically about the friendship that develops between this guy nobody believes in and this girl no one wants anything to do with and very beautiful thing that blooms between them on the common ground where their very lonely lives happen to intersect. It’s a lovely story because, like The Shop Around The Corner, reviewed here in Issue #1, they don’t take short cuts. You see the friendship develop. You see and feel two people begin to care about each other and the movie treats their story with the same kind kind of slow affection with which you treat something or someone you begin to love. The people who MADE this movie LOVED this movie and it shows.

Michael Rispoli is wonderful as Buddy and Kelly MacDonald, all grown up from her 1st role as the teenage junkie Diane in Danny Boyle’s landmark film Trainspotting (1996), is heartbreakingly beautiful as the pregnant and deserted Mary. The truth is that everyone in the film is really good. It actually looks like the cast all fell out of a cab on the way to work on The Sopranos because it seems like nearly everyone in the movie has been on that show at one time or another. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, it’s a cast of really great character actors, two of whom are finally given a chance to shine in lead roles and they do just that.

The movie was well regarded, at least in the indie world, at the time of its’ release. It won the Audience Award at Sundance in 2000 and Michael Rispoli won Best Actor at the Verona Film Festival the following year. Both Kelly Macdonald and witer/director Raymond De Felitta were nominated, for Best Actress and Best Screenplay respectively, at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards and the film was also nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival.

You can tell yourself it’s a simple thing to tell a simple story but the truth is that films like this are far and few between, and the world is a worse place because of that. Our art and our films and our music are a reflection of our selves, and we, in turn, are a reflection of them. In a world where all real emotions are reduced to shorthand clichés, what will we eventually be reduced to?

Do you feel a little numb sometimes these days? Do you want to remember what it feels like to really feel something?

Watch Two Family House. Then watch it again a few weeks later. Then give your copy to one of your friends so they can watch it. But make sure to get it back, because, after awhile, you’re going to want to watch it again.

(American)

Carnivale - The Complete First Season
Carnivale - The Complete Second Season

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Immy and I lived in a warehouse on 4th St near Gilman in Berkeley.
It’s a nice area of the city now but, at the time, It was pretty much just us and the ink factory across the street. We were on 4th St and the train tracks were on 3rd St so huge Amtrak trains went by every few hours literally about forty yards from our window. It was an interesting time for us. Other than music (of course), Immy and I had two major obsessions in our lives: the legendarily mysterious unfinished (and nonexistent) Beach Boys album SMiLE and David Lynch’s groundbreaking genre shattering Twin Peaks.

This was before CD’s so there were a lot of records that were out of print back then. It seems hard to believe now but there were a ton of famous albums that you just couldn’t find at all, records we’d read about and heard about but never actually heard. For the longest time, even Pet Sounds wasn’t available. I got my copy from a dealer who got it from a record collector. So after freaking out over Pet Sounds, Immy and I became obsessed with piecing together SMiLE .

The interesting thing about SMiLE was that most of the album was actually completed before Brian Wilson had his breakdown. The album wasn’t unrecorded, it was just uncompleted and unreleased. Basically what the Beach Boys did over the next ten years was release a series of records working mostly without Brian, usually including one or two tracks from SMiLE on each album and then filling out the rest of the album with other decent but lesser tracks. So what occurred to Immy and I was that SMiLE was actually out there: it was just hidden among all the other songs on all these other albums. So we set about finding all the other records. Unfortunately these albums, like Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20, and Surf’s Up were all out-of-print as well so we were reduced, between all our various gigs and rehearsals for all our various and different bands, to scouring the used bins of every Bay Area record store searching for the hidden treasure, SMiLE , buried inside all these Beach Boys albums. When we’d find one, we’d rush home and wait for each other, then listen to the SMiLE tracks ensconced somewhere in each album. It was all very much like digging for buried pirate’s treasure and it was all very cool. Incidentally, most of the Beach Boys albums except for SMiLE and Pet Sounds are available as twofers with great packaging. They’re pretty much paired in the order they were released:

Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ U.S.A. (download on Itunes)

Surfer Girl/Shut Down, Vol. 2 (download on Itunes)

Little Deuce Coupe/ All Summer Long (download on Itunes)

Concert/Live In London (download on Itunes)

Today/Summer Days and Summer Nights (download on Itunes)

Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks (download on Itunes)

Smiley Smile/ Wild Honey (download on Itunes)

Friends/20/20 (download on Itunes)

Sunflower/Surf’s Up (download on Itunes)

Carl & The Passions-So Tough/Holland (download on Itunes)

My personal favorite is the Today/Summer Days and Summer Nights pairing which shows the band at the height of its’ hitmaking glory but is also tinged by some of the sadness and depth they are about to explore with their next album Pet Sounds. That said, Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks is one of the coolest/weirdest pairing ever. The former album, recorded just before the band began work on Pet Sounds, is just the boys in a studio with acoustic guitars playing live and singing their asses off. “Barbara Ann”, which I think is their last really big hit comes from this album. The latter is even stranger. It’s just re-mixed instrumental versions of the songs put out, I guess, with the notion that their fans could then hang out and sing along (in harmony?) to all their favorite Beach Boys songs. SO all the albums up until Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks have the hits but the later albums have the hidden SMiLE tracks. The SMiLE version available isn’t actually the original album but rather a 2004 recording of the songs by Brian Wilson and his unreal fucking awesome touring band. That said, I have a bootleg of the original and the recreation is freakishly close to the original.

Our other obsession came about because someone had given us all the videotapes for the complete Twin Peaks, the incredible mind bending television series by the great filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead (1970), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild At Heart (1990), Mulholland Drive (2001)). So night after night, we’d come home from rehearsal or a gig or whatever, and whoever got home 1st (and that was almost never before midnight) would watch an episode of the show and then, when the other guy got home, go take a break for an hour while the other guy caught up. Then we’d watch an episode or two together until 4 or 5 am and then we’d crash. It was all very creepy and it was all very very cool. If you never saw Twin Peaks, I highly recommend it. The only problem is that, at the moment, the only truly simple part to obtain is the 2nd (and final) season, which was just released (Finally!!) on DVD this month. The whole release has been botched from day one, to be honest. Because of the fact that Paramount refused to give up the rights to the two hour feature-length Pilot episode (just because they’re dicks, I suppose), when Artisan got around to releasing the 1st season on DVD in 2001 they did so without it. In other words, the FIRST season box was released WITHOUT the FIRST episode! Paramount then released the Pilot episode on its’ own six months later (just because they’re, as I mentioned before, dicks, I suppose). Because releasing a series without its’ (in this case) impossibly necessary first episode tends to screw up sales, Artisan never released the 2nd season. IT didn’t come out until this April of this year, 2007, and it didn’t come out on Artisan. For some reason, the fucking thing came out on PARAMOUNT!

The end result is that the Pilot episode AND the 1st season are both out of print, which is not to say they’re impossible to find. All of the links take you to the Amazon pages for the Pilot episode, 1st Season, and Second Season and, in the case of the former two, there are plenty of DVD copies available through Amazon Marketplace (meaning they are sold by private sellers through Amazon), through which I’ve purchased many many books, CDs and DVDS and which is perfectly reputable. The Pilot and the 1st Season, being out-of-print, are just kind of expensive. You may have better luck here at ebay, which I’ve checked. They have plenty of the items on sale or up for auction and you might be able to get them cheaper there.

It is probably one of the most fascinating and unique programs ever broadcast on television, the nexus where a show like Lost meets The Twilight Zone. Truthfully, you could never have a show like Lost without there having been a show like Twin Peaks . It was simply amazing and eye-opening and truly unlike anything that had ever come before or has ever come since.

It begins with the body of a beautiful young teenaged girl named Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) washed up on the shores of a lake in the small Pacific Northwestern logging town of Twin Peaks, Washington. From there, the investigation of her murder leads FBI agent Dale Cooper (brilliantly played as a more-than-slightly deranged genius by Kyle McLachlan) literally into the heart of darkness as neither the prom queen-ish Laura nor anyone else in the seemingly quaint lovely town is at all what they seem. They are all hiding something and some of them are hiding truly horrifying secrets. Everyone has their quirks and everyone has their own personal demons. The town itself seems to literally have its’ own demon, whose name (Bob) and first appearance onscreen are both so simple and mundane that I think they scared me, or at least creeped me out, more than any “shock” moment in any horror movie I can ever remember. To this day, I can still remember the first moment I saw Bob and to this day it both fascinates me and creeps me out beyond belief. There are good people in Twin Peaks but there is also a corruption that runs so deep and is so riddled with complexities that Agent Cooper begins to have dreams and visions that haunt him at night as he searches his mind for the answers to the riddle of the death of Laura Palmer and the almost mystical darkness that lies just beneath the surface of Twin Peaks.

It’s a great cast, featuring Michael Ontkean (Slap Shot), Sherilyn Fenn, and a very young 20 year old Lara Flynn Boyle (Las Vegas, Huff, The Practice, Men In Black II, Where The Day Takes You). In some very David Lynch casting, he bizarrely resurrects a trio of young 60’s actors, now all grown up, for roles in the series. Peggy Lipton, the beautiful blonde member of The Mod Squad appears as do both Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn (who is, by the way, both the father of Joan of Arcadia and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star Amber Tamblyn and the brother of organist Larry Tamblyn of the great LA 60’s garage band The Standells (”Dirty Water“)), last seen together beside Natalie Woods and Rita Moreno as the two males leads Tony and Riff in Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins 1961 film classic West Side Story. The cast also included Michael Horse (Roswell), Everett McGill (Under Siege II: Dark Territory-which, along with Under Siege and Above The Law
, I love-Steven Seagal=total guilty pleasure kung fu guilty pleasure for me!-Heartbreak Ridge, Dune), Piper Laurie (Carrie, The Hustler (1961)), David Patrick Kelly (Flags of Our Fathers, The Longest Yard (2005), Songcatcher, The Warriors (1979) “Warriors, come out and play-ee-yay!”), a 21 year old Heather Graham (Swingers, Boogie Nights, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Anger Management), David Lynch himself, and, in a truly bizarre early role (his 1st credited television appearance), a pre-X-Files David Duchovny as transsexual DEA Agent Dennis/Denice Bryson.

In other words, you gotta see it. The only downside to the series is that it went off the air after two seasons, before Lynch had a chance to complete his story and, given the chance a year later to make a full-length Twin Peaks feature film sequel and complete the tale, Lynch instead chose inexplicably (don’t ask me to explain to you the mind of David Lynch) to make Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a prequel to the TV show which takes place during the last 7 days of Laura Palmer’s life, pointlessly explaining things which were just as well left unexplained mysteries and leaving unexplained and unfinished one of the great stories ever told on television. It’s not a bad movie; it’s just a really bad choice.

I just went up to the top of this article and realized it was supposed to be a piece about Carnivale, the amazing recent HBO series which owes such a debt to the influence of Twin Peaks. The connection I was making, aside from the stylistic and darkly magical similarities, the two series were both cancelled after two seasons and Immy and I both experienced watching them ALL together, albeit some 15 years apart. Unfortunately, this is now obviously an article about Twin Peaks and The Beach Boys and Immy and I staying up all night in our warehouse watching DVDs and listening to the music of one of our heroes as his life slowly disintegrated and NOT an article about Carnivale at all and there’s no point in either pretending it is or trying to make it into one now. Carnivale will have to wait for another time. With The Himalayans-She Likes The Weather record release over on my record label Tyrannosaurus Records last week, this is obviously a time for remembering 1991 anyways so maybe it’s just fate. Let it be so.

(British)

Cracker
Starring Robbie Coltrane, Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville
Series 1 (1993) - Series 2 (1994) - Series 3 (1994)

Granted, just about every person on earth (myself included) has spent the past ten years reading Harry Potter books and the past six or seven years watching the Harry Potter movies. So when you see Robbie Coltrane’s face, you probably think of Harry’s kindly friend and protector, the warm gentle half-giant Rubeus Hagrid. But for three years between 1993 and 1995, Robbie Coltrane played one of the darkest and most rivetingly fucked up self-destructive characters ever to shotgun his personal shit all over the TV screen. Eddie Fitzgerald, or “Fitz” as everyone calls him, is a drunken rage-filled overweight furiously angry chain-smoking misanthrope who also cheats on his wife in his spare time. Most of all, he’s a compulsive, and worse than that, he’s a compulsive addict. He’s addicted to alcohol, food, cigarettes, pills, and, worst of all, he’s addicted to gambling. As the series begins, he’s lost all his money, fallen deep into debt, his wife has left him, and he’s still gleefully showing no signs of changing a single thing that might fix any of it.

Which is when the cops show up.

You see, along with all of his other charmingpersonality…uhh…quirks, Fitz is also a brilliant criminal psychologist. So when the police are looking for a serial killer, a woman’s body is found very dead and very bloody on a train, and the only suspect is an amnesiac found lying unconscious beside the train tracks, the police come looking for Fitz who is, at the moment his life is falling apart and his family is leaving him, standing outside the door of a university classroom where he is supposed to be giving a lecture making a bet on a horse race. Or maybe he’s listening to the race on his phone. It’s one of the two. I can’t remember. I saw it a long time ago. The point is, he’s fucking things up. And then the cops come to ask him to take a look into this case…

…and therein is born one of the four or five best crime shows ever about maybe the most complex and interesting character ever portrayed on TV on television. Fitz is a man disintegrating right in front of our eyes but he’s also a genius, dissecting the minds of everyone around him and using that to both help analyze and solve brutal crimes, while at the same time brutalizing, and therefore dissolving, his relationships with, all the other people around him. He has a razor wit but it cuts without care through the people he loves, and their desertion of him in turn slices away at his own psyche. He’s crazy, funny, brilliant, cruel, lonely, loving, and, in the end, maybe the most fascinating and original character ever written for television. If you’re at all intrigued by Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the misanthropic Gregory House on House M.D. (and I love that show), then all I can say is that you have to see Cracker because Gregory House is a pale shadow of the wild bloody volcanic wonder of a man that is Eddie ”

Fitz” Fitzgerald.

I just realized that I went through this whole review without mentioning the whole detective story/crime element of the show which is just fucking brilliant. Every episode deals with a truly chilling criminal investigation and the writing is brilliant. American TV has definitely come a long way in the crime drama department in recent years with NYPD Blue and all the Law & Order and CSI shows, but this is an area the Brits have just excelled at for thirty years and they just keep getting better and better at it. I also forgot to mention the supporting cast because it’s so hard to think of anyone but Robbie Coltrane when one is talking about Cracker but cast members like Christopher Eccleston (now appearing as the invisible guy on Heroes) and Geraldine Somerville (who, coincidentally, plays Harry Potter’s dead mother Lily in the Harry Potter Movies) are all uniformly excellent, and you also get occasional guest stars such as Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) and Samantha Morton (Minority Report).

Television seasons are different in the UK than they are here. They make series rather than seasons and they tend to have three to four episodes per series. The episodes are usually two to three hours long and, at least in Crackers case divided into 3-4 segments per episode. So each series encompasses about 6-8 hours of material. I can’t imagine you won’t be hooked and buy all three series but try Series 1 to begin with and see how you like it.

But put whatever prejudices you might have about British television aside first. Because Cracker is sure as hell no Masterpiece Theatre, that’s for damn sure.

As a side note, there was an American television version of Cracker made a few years later. Avoid it. It’s ok at best. It lasted about 12 minutes before it was cancelled.

Fables

I wasn’t going to write a section on books for this issue but then I was talking to Charlie yesterday and it reminded me of something so I decided to write about it.

Now I grew up reading comic books. I’m 42 years old and, these days, they frustrate me more often than not. Their release schedules are all fucked up, everybody’s always trying to turn every fucking character into Dirty Harry, and they’re just generally not as much fun as they used to be. They’re also incredibly unoriginal and they steal from each other in the most obvious boring ways.

That said, I still like ‘em and, especially when I’m on the road, they get me through some days.

Anyway, one night last summer, I was wandering around Georgetown on a night off. It was about 9pm and I was bored so I was just walking around looking into stores when I happened upon a little comic store called Big Monkey Comics on Wisconsin Ave. I was just browsing the shelves looking for something interesting and I got into a conversation with the owner who happened to be a big Counting Crows fan. We were talking about music but at one point he asked me asked me if he could help me find anything. I said honestly that I was getting pretty bored by comics lately and I asked if there was anything out there I might not have heard of that was worth getting into.

He paused for about a half second and said “Fables“.

I said I’d never even heard of it and he said “It’s the best book out these days. Nothing even comes close. It’s not just the best comic either. It’s better that any book I’ve read for the past year or two. It’s just amazing. You have to read it.”

He was so enthusiastic that I said ok and asked to see the books. At this point, the series was about 40-45 issues old and most of the issues so far had been collected into 6 or 7 different graphic novel collections, each containing anywhere from 5-8 issues of the comic (they actually call them Trade Paperbacks, but whatever-basically it means a number of issues collected together into a larger book on better stock paper with a cover, the same thickness as a paperback book). I bought the 1st three, Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile

Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm

and
Fables Vol. 3: Storybook Love

I went home that night and started reading the 1st collection: Legends In Exile. The next morning, before we left for the gig, I got up and bought the remaining books:

Fables Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers,

Fables Vol. 5: The Mean Seasons

and Fables Vol. 6: Homelands.

I was hooked completely.

Picture as world where all the fairy tales worlds of our childhood stories actually exist and all the characters in them are real: Snow White, her sister Rose Red, The Big Bad Wolf, Old King Cole, Hansel and Gretel, Dorothy, The Scarecrow, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Mowgli, Aladdin, Bagheera, The Three Pigs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and every other fairytale creature. Now imagine that they all live in different worlds or dimensions or kingdoms or whatever you want to call them and they all live pretty much the same kinds of lives we do.

Now imagine one day, hundreds or thousands of years ago, someone or something called the Adversary begins to conquer each of these worlds one by one, unstoppable and all-powerful, slaughtering and enslaving all the inhabitants in one bloody war after another until they are forced to flee from world to world and kingdom to kingdom over a period of years and countless years until some of then discover a world without fairytales and without magic and they make their escape to this world in the hope that it is the one place The Adversary will never find them.

Now imagine that hundreds more years have passed and the time is somewhere around the year 2000 and they are all mostly living in a hidden enclave in downtown New York City called Fabletown, trying to survive in a different world and living with the hope of someday going home and the fear that eventually The Adversary will find them, all of the haunted by the memories of dead friends and millions of murdered once-immortal fables.

I know this sounds like Shrek. I assure you it is not.

The 1st story opens with Bigby (aka “the Big Bad…”) Wolf, former huffer and puffer and hunter of pigs and little girls dressed in red, the king of all wolves, whose mother was a wolf and whose father was the North Wind, now transformed into human form and acting as the sheriff of Fabletown, coming to investigate a murder. He arrives at the apartment of Rose Red, the wilder sister of Snow White, Fabletown’s Deputy Mayor, to find a scene of absolute carnage. The apartment is a shambles, the furniture is all smashed, Rose Red is nowhere to be found, and, worst of all, the walls are all absolutely covered in blood.

By using this detective story to open his series, the author, Bill Willingham, is able to follow Bigby through his investigation and therefore is able to introduce us to many of the inhabitants of Fabletown, familiar names living lives in much the same way we do, all worried about the same difficulties that dog us in our day-to-day lives, and all living under the crushing knowledge that everything they had and knew for thousands and thousands of years is gone, crushed underfoot by a tyrant who may, any day now, be coming for them.

The first story is the only one of its’ type and it’s mostly there to serve as an introduction to all the various inhabitants of Fabletown and to show us how all these characters that we know so well from the stories of our childhood are actually faring in a world nothing like the ones they were meant to living in. Later in the story, and it is a long epic story, the action takes us out to “The Farm” outside New York where all the Fables (like talking animals or flying monkeys or giants) who can’t pass for normal humans are forced to live and where a revolution is brewing, and later still, the tale leads us actually back to the Fairylands, lands now under the control of The Adversary, where various Fables secretly go, some seeking allies for the coming battle, and some, driven mad by despair and rage, simply seeking revenge.

I have read all the books religiously. They have since come out with three more volumes:

Fables Vol. 7: Arabian Nights (and Days),

Fables Vol. 8: Wolves,

and the hardcover Fables:1001 Nights of Snowfall

1001 Nights of Snowfall exists outside the regular timeline of the books and retells the Scheherazade myth with Snow White in the role of an emissary sent to the Arabian Nights world in search of allies and forced to tell a different story every night to put off her execution as an infidel. The story structure of the book enables Willingham to fill us in on the backstories of many of the characters we’ve come to know over the now almost 70 issues of Fables. It fills in many of the blanks and it is an incredibly beautiful and very dark look at the mythos surrounding these characters but my advice is not to read it until after reading at least the first six or seven collected volumes of Fables. Reading it before getting through at least Homelands or Arabian Nights (and Days) will only detract from the power of the stories in those volumes as well as lessen the impact of 1001 Nights of Snowfall.

I tried as best I could to explain Charlie how cool and dark and fascinating Fables is but, no matter what I said, I got the feeling it just sounded like Shrek to him. So I finally just bit the bullet and, without telling him, I ordered them for him on Amazon. I think he’s going to love them. I think especially someone like Charlie will really get it and dig the books. Either way, it’s fun buying stuff for your friends.

I did the same thing for my tour manager Tomas a few months ago and he is now completely hooked. Anyone would be. These are dark tragic occasionally grisly and bloody tales but they are also heroic stories of great depth and hope and pathos. There is nothing either frivolous or cynical about them although they are in turns both very bitter and very funny. Willingham’s writing is brilliant and worth reading whether you like comic books are not because Fables isn’t really anything like any other comic book I’ve ever read. It’s a unique thing in and of itself and it deserves to be thought of as such.

By the way, the next volume, Fables Vol. 9: Sons of Empire, will be released on June 6, 2007 but you can order it now on Amazon.

I just got off the phone with my friend Jacques Leonardi down in New Orleans a few minutes ago and it occurred to me that many of you may be heading to the Crescent City for the Jazz and Heritage Festival this weekend or next. With that in mind, I thought you might be able to use a few suggestions of places to go while you’re there.

To begin with, you should start with Jacque’s own restaurant Jacques-Imo’s Cafe. It’s our favorite restaurant in New Orleans. I know, there are many more famous places but WE looooooooooooooove Jacques-Imo’s. He’s just got a really amazing and original vision of “New Orleans cuisine meets the mind of Jacques”. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the menu. C’mon, aren’t you dying to try the Shrimp and Alligator Sausage Cheesecake or the fantastic corn bread muffins? I would if I were you. For a few more recommendations, let me suggest the Smothered Chicken with Biscuits, the Paneed Rabbit with Oyster Tasso Pasta, the Grilled Escolar with an Artichoke Ginger Mushroom Sauce, the amazing Fried Chicken or, my personal favorite (and the reason I could never get around to trying anything else on the menu for years), the Fried Mirliton with Oyster Dressing and Fried Oysters. You won’t be sorry you did.

It’s also just a really nice atmosphere. I don’t know what everyone considers the “hip”hang down in New Orleans these days but Jacque and his wife Amelia run the coolest place down there as far as I’m concerned. You can find Jacques-Imo’s at 8324 Oak Street between Cambronne and Dante Streets just a few blocks past Carrollton in Uptown. The phone number is 1-504-861-0886

It’s a nice location as well, being that it sits right next door to The Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street uptown so you can have dinner and then go see some music at The Maple Leaf.

Jack also runs a Crabby Jack’s, a cash-only lunch joint out on 428 Jefferson Hwy. The number is 1-504-833-2722 (CRAB). I couldn’t find their website but here’s a review. They have a lot of different cool stuff to eat but I personally go there for the Po’ Boys and the Boil. The half-and-half Po’ Boy (half fried oysters and half fried shrimp) is excellent and the boil is one of the best in New Orleans. Now Boiled Crawfish is my favorite food in the world and Jacque’s is incredible but, as long as you’re there, you should probably try the boiled crab and shrimp as well.

For breakfast, you should really try Mother’s on 401 Poydras St, at the corner of Poydras and (I think) Tchopitoulas (1-504-523-9656). They got great Po’ Boys there too (a lot of people’s fave) but I go there for the Crawfish Etoufee Omelette with Grits. Mmmmm. I dig their Bread Pudding too. It’s not like any other bread Pudding I’ve ever had but it’s really good. My boy Andre Carter claims it’s the best. This is a decade long argument with us. I like the Bread Pudding out at the Fest, he likes Mother’s. The nice thing is that we’ve gotten to test our theories over and over again at breakfast and lunch every day we’ve been in New Orleans together for the past ten years. We never agree but the debate is delicious.

If you’re out late at night and you’ve got a craving (and, believe me, both of these things will come to pass) and you’re worried you won’t be able to find something good to eat at 5am…don’t sweat it. The answer is to just head into the French Quarter and find your way to 1201 Royal Street at the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls. There…you will find the Verti Mart. It’s the fucking eighth wonder of the world. It looks like a little bodega but if you walk through the store to the back, you’ll find a deli counter and, trust me…the guy behind the counter will make you either some bizarrely good Po’ Boy or some other food that will fix any possible craving you might have. They make all the regular Po’ Boys really well. They got the fried catfish and the fried shrimp and the fried oyster AND the friend shrimp and oyster, all that stuff. But they also make some crazy Po’ Boys I’ve never had anywhere else. They have (and I know this sounds ridiculous) a French Fry Po’ Boy. Seriously, I’m not shitting you. It’s a big sandwich filled with…French fries and covered in gravy. Doesn’t that sound like shit? Well, and this is beyond my understanding (and I know you won’t believe me because nobody does), it’s freakin great! But the king of all Po’ Boys there is the “All That Jazz”, which is basically grilled ham, turkey & shrimp, Swiss AND American cheese PLUS grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, on grilled French bread. They deliver too, and they are open 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. The phone # is 1-504-525-4767.

If you want a few more places in the Quarter to eat, let me suggest Petunia’s at 817 St. Louis St for breakfast for their crepes and for the best Bananas Foster you’ll ever eat, Acme Oyster House (1-504-522-5973), right at 724 Iberville Street between Royal and Bourbon for the Po’ Boys, the raw Oysters, and the Boil, and Central Grocery at 923 Decatur Street (1-504-523-1620), home to, and inventors of, the Muffaletta Sandwich. A Muffaletta, if you’ve never heard of one before, is, to quote restaurant reviewer Michael Stern, “A circular loaf of soft Italian bread, sliced horizontally and piled with salami, ham, and provolone, which are in turn topped with a wickedly spicy mélange of chopped green and black olives fragrant with anchovies and garlic.”A Muffaleta is, to quote me, “Fucking incredible.”They’re also the size of two or three normal sandwiches so, if you’re not absolutely starving, you might want to either order a half-sandwich or split one with a friend.

Lastly, I just want to address the food at the Jazzfest itself. With one exception, I’m just going to list a bunch of stuff to eat here because there’s too much to get into. But remember, Jazzfest is not like other large festivals where the food is overpriced AND shitty. Everyone here does what they do the best, which is why they have their booth at the Fest. So eat til you puke. And here’s the list: Crawfish Pie, Strawberry Lemonade, Boiled Crawfish, BBQ Shrimp Po’ Boy, Boudin (which is out of this world), the Iced Teas, BBQ Ribs, Bread Pudding, Crawfish Monica, and the Sno-Cones. I eat lots of Sno-Cones because you get dehydrated out there. (Just a word of advice and feel free to ignore this. Drink lemonade and iced tea and water during the day. Get drunk at night. The former allows you to do the latter. Reversing this order can have disastrous effects and cause you to be such a puss that you can’t stay out til 5 or 6 am with the rest of us.) It’s just a suggestion.

Now here’s the exception: YOU MUST EAT CRAWFISH BREAD. It’s delicious bread baked with cheese and crawfish and peppers stuffed inside it. So you get this warm baked bread filled with melted cheese and crawfish. Believe me, Every single day since my very first day at Jazzfest when I first tried it, I have walked into the Fairgrounds, made a right at FOOD #1, walked to the end, sent one friend to get the lemonades two booths to the left, sent another to get the crawfish boil five or six booths to the right, and gotten in line for the crawfish bread myself. Then we all sit down and eat. And ONLY after that is done, do we even consider doing anything else.

Just a sad note: I would certainly be recommending the wonderful Italian food at Maximo’s to everyone but I hear it’s been closed since Katrina and has yet to re-open. If I’m wrong, you should definitely go there. If I’m right, then I’m truly sorry Jason and I hope you’re back up and running soon. Check it out when you get there anyway just to be sure. It’s at 1117 Decatur St and the phone # is, or was, 1-504-586-8883.

That’s all folks!

These are just some links to other places to find cool Counting Crows stuff:

Try this site for Sheet Music. (sheetmusicplus.com)

Try this site for Posters, Gold Records, T-shirts, and Framed CC art. (allposters.com)

See also Pushposters.co.uk for more options

Also, lest I forget, you can get all the Counting Crows albums HERE or, if you just want to down load them digitally from iTunes you can get them HERE.

Remember, the never-before (officially) released record by the legendary (at least in our minds) San Francisco band The Himalayans (featuring me) is now available on my indie label Tyrannosaurus Records and is only available for pre-order at our Dino-Store.
It will ONLY be available through the Dino-Store. We are not planning on selling it anywhere else. Order your copy now and it will be shipped to you right away.

Visit The Himalayans MySpace Page or at TheHimalayans.com.

Also, visit the Trecs MySpace Page and our other bands:

NOTAR’s MySpace Page
Blacktop Mourning’s MySpace Page and blacktopmourning.com.

Blacktop Mourning will be playing May 6th at the Bamboozle Festival at The Meadowlands In New Jersey.

They’re also playing four dates on The “Kevin Says” stage on the Warped tour:

Sat 7/28 Chicago, IL First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
Sun 7/29 Minneapolis, MN Metrodome
Tue 7/31 Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheatre
Wed 8/1 Cincinnati, OH Riverbend Music Center

And don’t forget to visit CountingCrows.com.
They have last Summer’s concert in Houston there to listen to and some rare live stuff I just sent them going up soon.

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I figured, being a huge geek, maybe I know some places you don’t know about or some movies you’ve never seen or some book you haven’t read or some record your local radio station isn’t going to play that I think you might really love. I’m also going to provide links this time so that if something here DOES interest you, they’ll take you right to someplace you can find it. That way you don’t have to go searching for it because some (not all) of these things might be a little obscure.

Anyway, that’s the deal, so…without further ado…Welcome to Issue #1

(remember to store it in plastic so it retains its’ value)

Sufjan Stevens-Come on Feel the Illinoise (2005) Only Sufjan Stevens could write a 2:14 song called “The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You’re Gonna Have To Leave Now, Or, ‘I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight…” without any words. You’re tempted to laugh for a second then the next song comes on and at 1st sounds like an edit from Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, then it continues and throughout it’s two movements he both explores The Great Columbian Exposition of 1893 and a Hallucinatory dream visitation with the poet Carl Sandburg. By the time the song ( called, incidentally, “Come On! Feel The Illinoise!: Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition/Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream”) reaches the end of its’ 6:45 length, it’s as if the bastard son of Pet Sounds or Smile-era Brian Wilson and Stephen Sondheim had appeared immaculately to make a record just for us.

It’s also really interesting because it’s nothing like you really expect it to be, although if you’ve ever heard Gaye’s very 1st album The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye (1961) or his 4th album When I’m Alone I Cry (1964) or got to know his work in the 70’s beginning with the classic What’s Going On (1971), you can kind of see where he was coming from. Soulful Moods and When I’m Alone I Cry aren’t really typical Motown soul albums at all. They’re really a collection of Marvin Gaye singing standards by such very non-soul songwriters as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Nat King Cole and Rodgers & Hart. What’s Going On, of course, is also nothing like the soul hits Gaye mostly recorded in the ten intervening years during the 60’s when he, like The Temptations, The Four Tops, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, and others turned Motown and the city of Detroit into America’s personal hit factory.

Beginning with That Stubborn Kinda Fella (1963) and continuing on with such records as Moods of Marvin Gaye (1966), Take Two (1966), Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston(1966), United (1967), In The Groove (1967), You’re all I Need (1968), I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1968), and That’s The Way Love Is (1970), Marvin Gaye unleashed album after album and, like so many other Motown artists of the time, seemed to churn out hit after mega-hit after super-mega-hit. Over that decade, he had hits with“Stubborn Kind of Fellow”, “Pride and Joy”, “Hitch Hike”, “Ain’t That Peculiar”, “It Takes Two”, “Baby I Need Your Loving”, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, “If I Could Build My World Around You”, “Your Precious Love”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, “Some kind of Wonderful”, “You’re All I Need to Get By”, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”, “That’s The Way Love Is”, Don’t Do It”, “You’re A Wonderful One”, and “Can I Get A Witness”.

That’s an unreal string of success but all the while Gaye was chafing under the restraints of the Motown hit factory system and feeling like he had more serious things he wanted to say through his music. So in late 1970, he recorded the single “What’s Going On” and, when Motown declined to release it on the grounds that they felt it wasn’t very good and wouldn’t sell any records, Gaye simply told them he was never going to record another note until they did. They finally released it in early 1971, the song was a huge hit, and Gaye recorded the rest of What’s Going On in about a week a couple months later and it came out early that summer. Not only was it a massive hit, it changed the whole way people looked at soul music. It wasn’t a collection of singles; it was a full length album and, more than that, it was actually a concept album, supposedly, according to John Bush in allmusic.com, “from the viewpoint of a Vietnam veteran… a baffled soldier returning home to a strange place”.

It’s also sort of a crooned album. The songs are soul songs but Gaye croons them, in much the same way he crooned the songs of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Nat King Cole on The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye and When I’m Alone I Cry ten years before. Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that Marvin Gaye always saw himself as more of a crooner than a straight soul singer and for the rest of his career, from 1973’s “Let’s Get It On” on the album of the same name (available in the normal album version or in this Deluxe edition which includes almost 30 additional tracks of demos, live recordings and alternate takes) to “Sexual Healing” on Midnight Love (1982), he proved it over and over again.

So when Marvin Gaye arrived in New York City in 1966 to play the world famous Copa, he had something completely different planned from what Motown President Berry Gordy had in mind. He wanted to play a show that was some kind of amalgamation of a Motown Hit Factory Soul Revue and Rat Pack style Sinatra or Dean Martin Vegas Lounge set.

And that’s just what Marvin Gaye-At The Copa is. It’s not what you’d expect. It wasn’t what anyone expected. It’s bizarre and unique and different and I guess, for the Motown execs at least, it was a disappointment, but in a way, it’s also the beginning of the revolution. At least for Marvin Gaye, it was one of his first steps toward taking the stand that would lead to him becoming something more than just a soul singer with a lot of hit songs. In this case, it landed him with a live album that, until now some 40 years later, never got released. But a few years later, that backbone he’d been developing would produce What’s Going On which, in this Deluxe Edition expands from 9 to 35 tracks and includes the alternate “Detroit” mix of the entire album, an unreleased 1972 live recording of Marvin Gaye at the Kennedy Center, lyric sheets, killer liner notes and an essay by Smokey Robinson), probably the greatest soul album ever made and, in terms of the revolutionary changes it wrought in the attitudes of other artists and the listening public about what soul music COULD and SHOULD be, definitely the most important soul album of all time.

Jackson 5-In Japan!

The first concert I ever attended was a Jackson 5 concert. The first album I ever bought was either Jackson 5-Greatest Hits or Michael Jackson’s first album Got To Be There. I can never remember which one but I think it was the Greatest Hits album because that came out a year earlier. Either way, whichever one wasn’t first was definitely 2nd. My point is…I fucking loved this band when I was a kid. They were just so cool, and they were kids, like me. Well, sort of like me. Even little Michael was six or seven years older than me.

PANIC! AT THE DISCO-A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
(2006 US exclusive Commemorative Limited Tour Edition 2-disc set)
including
*13-track CD album
*DVD featuring: Live Concert Performance from the Denver show plus
Tour Documentary with backstage interviews,
*Presented in a deluxe 9″ x 6″ sealed picture box complete with
Lyric Cards
Summer 2006 Tour Program
Poster
Phenakistoscope (no fucking idea what that is)
Photos
Blank Diary
Mask
Newspaper
*And Certificate Of Authenticity).

See also:
PANIC! AT THE DISCO-A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
(2006 Japanese issue 17-track CD album)
*Including the singles ‘Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off’, ‘But It’s Better If You Do’ & ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’ plus
*Bonus Track ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’ [Recorded Live in Denver]
*3 CD-Rom Videos, picture sleeve + obi-strip.

This website is also really good for weird Counting Crows Memorabilia. They have everything from Import Singles and Albums to Posters to Gold and Platinum Award Discs to Unreleased Promo Videos to Concert Tickets for your scrapbook to a
(I shit you not) rare “Recovering The Satellites” wristwatch “with a ’shooting star’ style seconds hand”. Bizarre.
Because the stuff is often rare memorabilia, it comes and goes often with in days so many of the things listed above may not be there by the time you check this. Still, there’s always something new. Click here to go to the Counting Crows page or here for their Main Page just to find cool shit by other bands.

or

I don’t know why I didn’t mention this before but, if you’re not a fanatic Panic! At The Disco fan, you could also just go buy yourself a regular old copy of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. It really is a very good album, I love it. My friend Omar raved about the band to me so I went out and bought the album. Sometimes I have no patience with “styles” of music. I get really annoyed by “scenes”.

Now that is fucking funny.

Between that one and other songs like “Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off”, “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage”, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”, and “There’s a Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven’t Thought of It Yet”, this may be the best and funniest collection of song titles ever. I’ve had people tell me that annoys them. I can’t see why. I ask them and they inevitably say something stupid like “I don’t know, it’s just a little too clever for me” which makes me really want to look at them and say “Yes. It certainly is.” The world is filled with slack-jawed morons but that’s no reason for you to pay any attention to their taste in music. I mean, for chrissake, like it or don’t like it but please don’t tell me it’s for a reason like that. It makes me want to go out and find something stupid for them to listen to. That shit’s certainly easy enough to find.

Ong Bak-The Thai Warrior (2003)
Starring: Tony Jaa

That all ended last night.

I was waiting for them to get all the sounds ready for the next song here in the studio and I decided to just watch Ong Bak-The Thai Warrior. It is so fucking great. I don’t really know crap about martial arts but Muay Thai, at least the way Tony Jaa kicks everyone in Bangkok’s ass with it, is totally different from Kung Fu or Karate or Jiu Jitsu or anything else I’ve seen before. I’m tempted to say it’s more basic and more brutal but I think “brutal” is the wrong word. There’s just a simplicity to it that somehow makes it rawer and more exciting. By “simplicity”, I don’t at all mean slower or stiffer. It’s just got this raw…I don’t know…maybe “brutality” is the right word, but it’s balletic as well in some of the same ways the Jackie Chan films are. It’s not as humorous but it has a sense of humor.

I don’t know. I just know that I went home last night, finished watching it, and immediately went online and ordered The Protector (2005), Tony Jaa’s last American film. I’m watching it tomorrow as soon as it gets here. I am back on the “Asian-people-beating-the-living-crap-out-of-everyone” movie kick. For the next few weeks anyway, I’m going to pig out on Muay Thai, and then have some Kung Fu for dessert, go to sleep, have some Karate for breakfast, go to work, and then come home and get my Samurai on! My suggestion is that you do too.

20th Century Fox Studio Classics Collection Boxed Set

Every once in a while Amazon does these ridiculous package deals on a bunch of movies from one studio. I got a couple different sets for myself last Xmas. I found those, like this one, on Harry Knowles fantastic AintItCool.com website. I already have too many of these movies to make this set worthwhile but if you’re a fan of classic films, it’s an incredible bargain.

Basically you get 40 fantastic classic films for $240, so they cost you essentially $6 per DVD. I don’t know what that would normally run you because I don’t know what each of these films costs separately but I looked up one of them, All About Eve, and it ran $12 so…you do the math (ok, fuck it, I will): 40 x $12 = $480. You save $240. So, at $240, it ain’t cheap but, if you’re into these kinds of movies (and these are all REALLY good ones), it’s a really great deal (essentially half-price).

In case you’re interested, these are the films in the collection (I got the list off Amazon. Thanks to calvinnme “Texan refugee” of Fredericksburg, VA for the research on all the films):

• In Old Chicago (1937) Nominated for Best Picture, won Best Supporting Actress for Alice Brady. Starring Tyrone Power in film about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
• Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) Nominated for Best Picture
• The Rains Came (1939) Starring Myrna Loy
• The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Nominated for Best Picture
• The Mark of Zorro (1940) Starring Tyrone Power
• How Green Was My Valley (1941) Won Best Picture
• The Black Swan (1942) Pirate movie starring Tyrone Power & Maureen O’Hara
• Orchestra Wives (1942) Starring Glenn Miller and his band.
• The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Nominated for Best Picture starring Henry Fonda.
• The Song of Bernadette (1943) Nominated for Best Picture, Won Best Actress for Jennifer Jones, Best Cinematography, and Best Score
• The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) Gregory Peck nominated for Best Actor
• Leave Her to Heaven (1945) Starring Cornell Wilde & Gene Tierney
• Anna and the King of Siam (1946) starring Rex Harrison
• My Darling Clementine (1946) Directed by John Ford & starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp.
• The Razor’s Edge (1946) Nominated for Best Picture.
• Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)-Won Best Picture, Best Director for Elia Kazan, & Best Supporting Actress for Celeste Holm. Starring Gregory Peck
• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) Starring Gene Tierney (I love her) & Rex Harrison
• The Snake Pit (1948), Nominated for Best Picture, starring Olivia DeHaviland
• A Letter to Three Wives (1949) Nominated for Best Picture
• All About Eve (1950) Won Best Picture, starring Bette Davis
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Klaatu Nikto Barada! (or something like that)
• Titanic (1953) Starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck
• Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Nominated for Best Picture
• Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) Nominated for Best Picture
• Anastasia (1956) Won Best Actress for Ingrid Bergman
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) Starring Gregory Peck
• An Affair to Remember (1957) Starring Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr
• Desk Set (1957) Starring Spencer Tracy & Katherine Hepburn
• The Three Faces of Eve (1957) Won Best Actress award for Joanne Woodward
• Peyton Place (1957) Nominated for Best Picture
• The River’s Edge (1957)
• The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) starring Ingrid Bergman as a missionary in China.
• The Best of Everything (1959) starring Joan Crawford
• The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) Nominated for Best Picture, won 3 other Oscars
• Return to Peyton Place (1961)
• Zorba the Greek (1964) Nominated for Best Picture, starring Anthony Quinn.
• Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) starring Bette Davis
• How to Steal a Million (1966) 60’s comedy w/Peter O’Toole & Audrey Hepburn.
• Two for the Road (1967) C’mon, Albert Finney & Audrey Hepburn. Nominated for best screenplay
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) Won Best Actress for Maggie Smith. This is one of Immy’s favorite movies

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Starring: James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, Director: Ernst Lubitsch

This is pretty much one of my all-time favorite romantic movies. It’s been remade about a billion times, the most recent being the fairly lame You’ve Got Mail. If you watched that movie and thought, “Wow what a cool idea for a plot” but didn’t really get a charge out of the film itself, then the answer to all of your problems, and most of the rest of the world’s too, is to just sit your ass down and watch The Shop Around the Corner. It takes place in Budapest for reasons beyond my understanding (actually, I think it’s because it’s based on a Hungarian play) and right off, that’s pretty cool because the soundstage sets (or maybe that’s just what Hungary looks like) give the movie this really warm homey contained feeling, like you’re watching a movie but with the intimacy of a play or like watching a play with the openness of a movie. The cast of Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan and Frank Morgan (he was the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz) just deliver in every way possible and between them and their director, the great Ernst Lubitsch, they craft a film that manages to be truly romantic without taking any of the cheap shortcuts so many movie romances take. Rather than let the main characters express their feelings through easy movie clichés, the film takes its’ time and lets the relationship between the characters develop slowly and naturally so that we actually feel them fall in love.

(American)

Threshold-The Complete Series
STARRING: Carla Gugino, Charles S. Dutton, Peter Dinklage, Brent Spiner

My friend Carla Gugino has a lot of things going for her: she’s just about the hottest woman on earth, she’s an unbelievable actress, she dates seemingly the nicest guy on the planet, she’s smart as hell, and she’s had enough success in her career from huge hit movies like Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Sin City, and Night at the Museum that she can afford to do other things she really wants to do like take time out to do theatre.
I went to see her in Tennessee William’s “Suddenly Last Summer“ a few months ago (It’s too late for you to see the play but you can see the movie Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor, Kathryn Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift) and she was so good it freaked me out a little bit. I was right there in the theatre and I felt like I was watching some woman I didn’t know. It’s a one-act play and I felt like I forgot to breathe until it was over. It was 80 minutes of the most intense riveting theatre I have ever seen. She had a great supporting cast (Blythe Danner was especially good) but pretty much the entire play focuses on Carla’s performance and it was unreal. She’s simply amazing. She just has this one problem.

Every few years she gets her own TV series and, every few years, it’s the best thing on television…and, every few years, it gets cancelled before it makes it halfway through the season.

It was just such a fucking great show!

So of course they only made 12 episodes. TWELVE EPISODES!!! That’s less than either of the other two and it was ten times as good. Not only that, but I don’t even think they aired them all. Whatever. I hate whoever makes decisions like this.

If you’re out there, whoever you are, I hate you.

Just so you know.

No seriously. I hate you.

Now you have to live with that.

And it’s all your own fault.

You want to know how good this show was? The first episodes were a two-parter called “Trees Made of Glass”. I don’t even know why that’s so cool but it is.

I went out to dinner later that night after “Suddenly Last Summer” with Carla and Peter Dinklage and his wife, who happened to be there at the show as well, and I teased Peter for being foolish enough to get on a TV show with Carla. It was funny but kind of half-hearted because it made me sad. We’re getting dumber and dumber as a culture every day. Canceling Threshold isn’t the end of the world or anything but it’s not exactly the start of anything brilliant either. Maybe I’m just pissed because it was my friend’s show. It’s out on DVD, including the episodes I don’t think they ever aired. I’ve watched 11 of them. I’ve been sitting around with the 12th in my backpack for about two months now. I can’t get myself to watch it because I don’t want the show to be over. Don’t bother telling me how stupid that is. I’m more than well aware. Do me a favor. Go get it and tell me how it ends.

And next time Carla has a show, can we all agree to watch the fucking thing so this doesn’t happen again? Seriously Karen Sisco AND Threshold. Two of the best shows on television in the past decade and they make a grand total of 22 episodes.

It just kills me.

(British)

Jeeves & Wooster: The Complete Series

Most Americans had never heard of Hugh Laurie until a few years ago when House M.D. first aired and Gregory House suddenly became everyone’s favorite anti-social asshole doctor and Hugh Laurie’s fascinating portrayal of the misanthropic House made it one of the most popular shows on television (and won him a bunch of awards if I’m not mistaken). But back in the mid to late eighties and early 90’s, he and partner Stephen Fry were one of England’s most popular comedy teams. Their partnership resulted in not one, but two television shows which filmed and ran at the same time: A Bit of Fry and Laurie, a sketch comedy show which ran off and on for four seasons from 1987-1995 (A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Season One & A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Season Two) and Jeeves & Wooster, which ran for four straight seasons from 1990-1993.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (1986)

In 1996, Richard Ford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Independence Day so you’re probably wondering why this is really a recommendation for The Sportswriter, a novel he wrote a decade earlier in 1986. Well, I don’t know, except to tell you that this book moved me deeply. The writing is simply beautiful. It’s the first in a series of three novels Richard Ford wrote about the life of Frank Bascombe, his 38 year old protagonist whose once hopeful life crumbles following the death of his son. Don’t be fooled by the title. I know you all know I’m a big sports fan but this is not a book about sports. This is a book about failed dreams, despair, and the disconnection one man makes from his life as a result. It’s simply one of the great works of modern fiction. Independence Day is an incredible novel, it really is. He deserved the Pulitzer Prize he won for it. I loved it. I just happen to think The Sportswriter is a better book. It didn’t go unrecognized either at the time of its’ initial publication. It was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I think Time Magazine may have named it the Best Book of 1986, or “one of the best books” or something. I KNOW they later named it one of the 100 Finest English Language Novels. I remember reading that somewhere.

In any case, it doesn’t really matter whether The Sportswriter or Independence Day is the better book. They’re both great. It’s just that the latter is the sequel to the former so, if you’re inclined to get into reading Richard Ford and you’re deciding between these two books, you might as well start with Part 1, so to speak. I know people who read Independence Day first, not knowing it was a sequel, loved it, and then later went back and read The Sportswriter. They claimed the book stood on its’ own. Most said you didn’t necessarily need to have read The Sportswriter first but they all sort of wished they had. They liked the one so much that they were decidedly inclined to go back and read the other and, that being the case, they all thought they might as well have read them in the correct order.

Not to pile more crap onto what, reading back over the last paragraph, seems to have been a fairly pointless circular argument I just had with myself over two probably equally good books by the same author but…I should add that, the necessary decade having passed, Frank Bascombe reappeared last year in Richard Ford’s latest novel The Lay of the Land. So the story continues. I bought The Lay of the Land right away when it came out but I was on tour and I put it away in the side pocket of a suitcase, promptly forgot where it was, and didn’t find it again until a few weeks ago. I haven’t read it so I can’t really offer any opinions of my own about it but I’ve read several reviews and they all rave about the book so…well, I’m going to read it anyway. You do what you like.

As one more side note, I’ve never really gotten into audiobooks but, if you prefer them (my mom loves them for long trips), the audiobook of Independence Day is apparently fantastic. I don’t remember who the reader is but I distinctly remember several reviewers either in newspapers or on Amazon.com saying it was amazing.

Just so there’s no confusion, these are not the only books written by Richard Ford. He’s actually written six novels and three or four books of short stories, two of which, Women With Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002), I both read and loved. He began his writing career in the mid 70’s with two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). When neither book sold well, despite solid reviews, he quit fiction writing and became an actual sportswriter for the now-defunct magazine Inside Sports. When that magazine failed and Ford’s application for a job at Sports Illustrated got rejected, he decided to quit sportswriting and went back to writing novels, which resulted in The Sportswriter. So, ironically, Ford’s failed sportswriting career actually resulted in a novel about a failed novelist who turns to sportswriting.

One more bit of trivia: Independence Day, is, I believe still to this day the only novel ever to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

These are just some links to other places to find cool Counting Crows stuff:

Try this site for Sheet Music. (sheetmusicplus.com)

Try this site for Posters, Gold Records, T-shirts, and Framed CC art. (allposters.com)

See also Pushposters.co.uk for more options

Also, lest I forget, you can get all the Counting Crows albums HERE or, if you just want to down load them digitally from iTunes you can get them HERE.

Remember, the never-before (officially) released record by the legendary (at least in our minds) San Francisco band The Himalayans (featuring me) is being released on my indie label Tyrannosaurus Records and is, as of right now, available for pre-order at our Dino-Store. It will ONLY be available through the Dino-Store. We are not planning on selling it anywhere else. Order your copy now and it will be shipped to you on April 12th, the day of its’ release!

Visit The Himalayans’ MySpace Page
or at TheHimalayans.com.

Also, visit the Trecs MySpace Page and our other bands:
NOTAR’s MySpace Page
Blacktop Mourning’s MySpace Page
blacktopmourning.com.

Blacktop Mourning will be playing May 6th at the Bamboozle Festival at The Meadowlands In New Jersey.

They’re also playing four dates on The “Kevin Says” stage on the Warped tour:

Sat 7/28 Chicago, IL First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
Sun 7/29 Minneapolis, MN Metrodome
Tue 7/31 Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheatre
Wed 8/1 Cincinnati, OH Riverbend Music Center

And don’t forget to visit CountingCrows.com. They have last Summer’s concert in Houston there to listen to and some rare live stuff I just sent them going up soon.

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