Dollarama!

Meta Heads of the World Unite!

2006-11-29T01:57:00.000-05:00

Howdy if you breezed over here from New Music Box.

Not much has been shaking here since summer. Feel free to poke around, grab a beer from the fridge and flip through some old records. My new site will be up in January, to coincide with the release of Jazz Guide NYC: 2nd Edition, a book so nice we did it twice. Actually, I think it's two new sites. Stay tuned, hombres and hombrecitas!

Screenshots 2: Interviews, profiles, and so on ...

2006-06-06T00:14:00.000-04:00

Dennis Hopper

Hopper's Edge

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Staff writer STAFF
DATE: September 23, 1990
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
PAGE: N/1

CRAWFORDVILLE, Ga. There is only one pay phone in town, and Dennis Hopper is using it. The actor is in costume, a frayed gray suit and vintage straw hat, for his title role in "Paris Trout," a prestige production that offers Mr. Hopper another chance to venture deep into the yawning maw of cinematic psychosis - a place where many a niche bears his name.

Set in 1949 Georgia, the movie measures the seismic reverberations caused when Trout, an eccentric businessman, shoots and kills a 14-year-old black girl, then stubbornly refuses to accept the consequences. Tensions build until this sad, haunted character steamrolls into a tragic act of madness - a climactic moment that occurs amid a noisy sesquicentennial parade.

That parade is going full steam at the moment, complete with marching band, scores of costumed extras and actors Barbara Hershey and Ed Harris, garbed in their choicest postwar chic. And here is Mr. Hopper, in the humid glare of the midafternoon sun, straining to hear his wife's voice from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's maternity ward in Los Angeles.

By one crew member's estimate, there are 20 cellular phones in nearby trailers and automobiles. Due to some electronic fluke, they all refuse to work.

So, swamped by smiling autograph-seekers in front of the county courthouse, Mr. Hopper grins when he learns that he has a new son, Henry Lee - named for the father of Confederate hero Robert E.

No stranger to weird scenes, Mr. Hopper has to agree that the instant is positively surreal.

"I said, `Katherine, you're not going to believe this!' I mean, here I am in Crawfordville, Ga., and I'm looking at the sign that says, `Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Hamilton Stephens.' This is his home, and there's these Confederate soldiers. And I listen to the drums marching by, and these Confederate flags [are] everywhere. I said, `This is totally bizarre.' "

No less odd, perhaps, than the notion of Mr. Hopper, 54, as a nurturing paternal figure. Imagine his mystery-gas snorting Frank Booth, the demonic villain of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," plopped down in the nuzzling conviviality of, say, "Parenthood." But the actor-director, after decades of endorsing his image as an untamed Hollywood wild man, has long since figured how to sort perception from reality.

"I don't feel like any god, OK?" he says later, quizzed about his status as a cultural icon, someone whose zigzagging career connects the unlikely dots between "Rebel Without a Cause" in 1955, "Easy Rider" in 1969, and "Blue Velvet" in 1986 - each, in its way, a definitive film for the decade that spawned it.

"I feel like a pretty normal guy," Mr. Hopper continues, finally settled into his trailer. "A working guy. I don't know what cult hero means."

But he knows a juicy role when he's offered one.

"Paris Trout" - a $12 million Viacom production that just wrapped a two-month North Georgia shoot - casts the actor in the thorny psychological terrain of Pete Dexter's novel, a 1988 National Book Award winner. The author, who also wrote the screenplay, sketches Trout's world along lines of race, class, sex and family that divide it like tripwires.

"I have great empathy for Trout," says Mr. Hopper, the brim of his hat jammed tight above a formidable squint, his pale blue eyes virtually opaque. "I think he's a very mentally ill man. I don't think he knows a lot of the stuff that he's really doing. He's also a product of his time."

The novel provided a keen dissection of the often delicately subtle rules governing life between blacks and whites in the Deep South of the '40s, but the actor doesn't respond to the piece in strict terms of color.

"I don't think about this piece as a racist kind of film," he says. "I think that's probably unfortunately what everyone will get out of it, because of killing the blacks and so on. . . . I think that it reflects a place and time in 1949, in the same way that this could be in Israel now, and it could be in South Africa, surely."

Director Steve Gyllenhaal, who chose the project in part for the chance to work with Mr. Hopper, tries to pinpoint how the actor brings complex shadings to the role of a crazy man. "He really is, in some primary way, Paris Trout," Mr. Gyllenhaal says. "There's an element of fear and weakness in him that then explodes into aggressiveness, and I think that's something that Dennis understands in some primary way."

Indeed, Trout promises to stack up with such Hopper derangements as Oedipal menace Frank Booth, his Oscar-nominated performance as a small-town lush in "Hoosiers," and Feck Weed, the burned-out hippie relic who romances a blow-up sex doll in the harrowing "River's Edge."

For Mr. Hopper, it's a living, and has been since his earliest television roles in the 1950s and '60s - "the crazy young gunfighter, the crazy guy on `The Defenders' or `Naked City.'

"That put me in the position of playing these crazies, which I could play very well. And having people with narrow minds, I never got to play anything but that. It would be really nice someday to play a very straight kind of guy, whose problem is outside, not internal," he says. "The other side is that I enjoy playing these roles. I have a great deal of experience in certain areas: alcoholism, drug abuse and, like, insanity, I do know about."

If Mr. Hopper's peculiar genius as an actor has been to turn those visions of excess into astonishing catharsis onscreen, he doesn't elaborate much about the process.

"I was getting work," he says, simply, "I didn't want to stop." He's recalling the period in the mid-1980s when, having been in and out of rehabilitation programs and the Cedars-Sinai mental ward, he began to rebuild his career with a vengeance. A reborn workaholic, he took roles that inevitably led him to Edge City, which pleased critics who loved the madness in his method but often horrified his agents.

"No one wanted me to do anything but `Hoosiers.' I had management at that time that was not interested in having me do `Blue Velvet.' They couldn't understand. `Well, there's no redeeming qualities to this.' And certainly `River's Edge' was not uh . . . Harry Dean [Stanton] turned down `River's Edge.' He said, `This is probably something you'll do.' "

After playing a series of extreme characters, Mr. Hopper went mano a mano with Leatherface in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part 2." And why not, he asks, the money was good.

"Man, they had a meeting at the agency and said, `Consider maybe we part company over this?' I said, `Fine man.' I said, $125,000 may not be a lot to you people, but like, you know, I just did `Hoosiers' for $50,000, I did `Blue Velvet' for $50,000, and I did `River's Edge' for $50,000. And this is $125,000, man, that's a major jump for me, and besides nobody's going to see this movie."

No one did. Though the actor proved viciously effective with a Black & Decker.

These days, Mr. Hopper is decidedly more prosperous. The former outsider's outsider craves nothing more than to move into the Hollywood mainstream - as a director. "It'd be nice," he says, "to get into an auteur position, like Woody Allen, where I can do my work without having to go through a lot of story conferences and people questioning my taste."

The movie he hopes will turn the trick is "The Hot Spot," a lurid, deliciously ill-humored drama about a conniving drifter (Don Johnson) whose hormonal urges entangle him between a troubled, virginal "good" girl (Jennifer Connelly) and an insatiable, unscrupulous vixen (Virginia Madsen).

Directed by Mr. Hopper, the film (opening Oct. 26 in Atlanta) makes the most of a rural Texas backdrop and potboiler scenario adapted from novelist Charles Williams's pulp sizzler, "Hell Hath No Fury."

"Did you read the review?" he asks, shoving a copy of the Variety notice across the table. "Man, this is a great review!" Highlighted in yellow ink are such phrases as ``Twisty, languorous and very sexy" and "twisted amorality."

Just returned from the film's premiere at Toronto's Festival of Festivals, Mr. Hopper discovered that he may have anticipated a trend.

"Film noir's like a dirty word in Hollywood," he says. "It's weird though. We just went to Toronto and [the critics] said, `How come you're always on top of it? [There are] 200 films in this festival and like 100 of 'em are film noir. Why did you do that?' "

The question Mr. Hopper asked, however, was, "Where's Don Johnson?"

The absence of the Sockless Wonder provoked a media tirade from the angered director.

"I got bugged, man," says Mr. Hopper, relishing the opportunity to, um, amplify on earlier published comments. "I am bugged! He's good in the movie and he should support the film. I want to get off this, but people are paid an awful lot. He's paid an awful lot of money. . . . He shouldn't have to wait for the reviews to figure it out, does he? Can't you see when you're good? It just irked me. I spent a year of my life working on this film, he spent 10 weeks."

Those pale blue eyes are dancing, but they also speak of a weariness staved off by caffeine. Dennis Hopper is ready for a nap, though his very existence seems a denial of the possibility of sleep. He rises, and is moved to a moment of whimsy.

"So this will be the day Henry Lee was born . . . ," he says, and walks to the couch.

Michael Moore

Filmmaker takes on GM in `Roger & Me'

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: January 10, 1990
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Constitution

The Atlanta Journal
SECTION: FEATURES
PAGE: E/1

Steve Dollar Staff writer

He yawns. A sleepy bear slumped against the corner of a couch in a Midtown hotel suite, Michael Moore looks in need of a blanket and a warm glass of milk. Instead, the one-time journalist shrugs off his woozy aura, closes his mouth for a nanosecond, and plunges into his umpteenth phone interview on a recent morning.

Not a man to miss his moment, Mr. Moore, 35, is working the media as exhaustively as he pursued General Motors (GM) CEO Roger Smith, the elusive executive who lends both his name and a raison d'etre to "Roger & Me."

Mr. Moore's moviemaking debut, the product of a dogged, 2 1/2-year struggle, is a post-industrial answer to "Our Town." The populist tour de farce humorously documents the decline and fall of his hometown of Flint, Mich., during the 1980s - a decade that saw some 30,000 GM autoworkers lose their jobs amid multiple plant closings and layoffs.

The documentary, scrambling up Top 10 movie lists for '89, opens Friday in 15 to 20 cities, including Atlanta, with a wider release to come.

"I decided to go on a quest to find Roger Smith and bring him to my hometown," says Mr. Moore, finally free of the morning's telephone obligations. "What I really wanted to do was take him on a tour."

A career gadfly, Mr. Moore, the first member of his family not to work in the automotive industry, initiated the project in 1986 after an abortive 4 1/2-month stint as editor of the left-trendy magazine Mother Jones. While he would eventually win a $58,000 settlement from his former employers, the novice director also financed his no-budget movie with the sale of his house, yard sales and proceeds from a weekly bingo game.

The lack of experience didn't seem to be a handicap. "I didn't know how to set the timer on my VCR," he boasts. "Still don't."

What the heck. With a week of lessons from Kevin Rafferty of "Atomic Cafe" fame, Mr. Moore set off with a ragtag crew and an out-of-focus camera, playing Captain Ahab to Mr. Smith's corporate white whale.

There's no success like failure. Mr. Moore engages Mr. Smith only briefly in the film, after numerous rebuffs. But the filmmaker's first-person detours around floundering Flint lead into revealing, if absurd, cul-de-sacs. While families are evicted on Christmas Eve and crime soars, the city fathers strive to rally the locals with tourist attractions (such as the doomed $100 million "theme park" AutoWorld) and celebrity cheer (visits by Pat Boone, Anita Bryant and "Newlywed Game" host Bob Eubanks, who graces the screen with an anti-Semitic AIDS joke). At one point, Ronald Reagan arrives to treat a dozen unemployed workers to pizza, then advises them that there may be jobs in Texas.

From penthouse to pavement, Mr. Moore unerringly dissects a distinctly middle-American social stratum, showing how the victims of capitalism's caprice turn on each other to survive, while the fat cats grow ever plumper.

If, as Film Comment recently charged, the film's chronology is often fuzzy, its emotional agenda couldn't be clearer. With his quirky, on-camera narration and salt-of-the-earth sympathies, Mr. Moore comes off as part Woody Allen, part Karl Marx.

All this scored to the music of the Beach Boys - and irony dense enough to cut with a blowtorch.

"Humor is a very effective weapon," says Mr. Moore, who was elected class clown at 18 and won a seat on his local school board the same week. "More documentary filmmakers should use it, not be so damn serious."

Mr. Moore blinks through goggle-size frames that, with his trademark gimme caps ["I'm Out for Trout," declares one], bargain-bin sneakers and nerdy Rust Belt warble, mark him as a K mart Garrison Keillor. Yet, it only takes a moment for the good-humor man to mount a soapbox.

"I'm bummed out," he declares, "and I want people to be bummed out. But I didn't want to make a movie that bummed people out. What happens is, if you give people an hour and a half of depressing images, all you get is depression. What happens if you're depressed? Well, if you're healthy, you want to get undepressed real quick and forget about what you see."

"Roger & Me" has been a smash everywhere it has played. The movie's debut at the New York Film Festival brought down the house. "They gave it a seven-minute ovation," marvels the director, who, during an alert evening chat, is a walking quip machine. "I thought, this is a movie, not a Metallica concert."

Mr. Moore, who stopped in Atlanta on a 30-city, 30-day promotional tour, inked a $3 million sale to Warner Bros., which outbid 13 competitors and promised him a $10 million budget for his next effort.

"I didn't make it for the money," says Mr. Moore, whose first concern was that a lot of people get to see the movie. "They said it would play Hays, Kansas. I didn't know where the hell that was. I said, `It sounds good to me.' "

He also got Warner's to donate 20,000 tickets for unemployed viewers around the country and to pick up three years of rent checks for the four Flint families who are shown being evicted in the film.

Still recovering from his previous night's guest shot on "Late Night With David Letterman," Mr. Moore is savvier than his shambling demeanor suggests.

Repeatedly in the film, this big little man hovers near the powers that be, while they figuratively strangle themselves with his microphone cord.

"I'm sure they looked at me and said, `This guy doesn't have enough money to develop this roll of film,' " Mr. Moore says. "Here we were, stumbling, bumbling along, appearing not to know what we were doing because we didn't know what we were doing. So they didn't take us seriously."

Who's laughing now? Mr. Eubanks has issued a formal apology to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. GM, meanwhile, is exercising low-key spin control.

Mr. Moore has pledged to reserve a seat for Mr. Smith at every "Roger & Me" screening. But the executive, says GM spokesman John Mueller, has no plans to attend.

"He [Mr. Smith] says that how he feels is unimportant, but he feels bad for the people of Flint who are held up to public embarrassment by the film," says Mr. Mueller. He adds, "Most of us haven't seen it. From what we understand, it's not exactly based on facts. He takes liberties with the facts and does not give GM credit for the many positive things that we have done in Flint."

Mr. Moore is the first to admit that "Roger & Me" has upset a lot of people. "I hate documentaries," he says. "I think we need more documentaries by people who hate documentaries."

Indeed, "Roger & Me" is only the latest - if most widely publicized - in a new wave of unorthodox documentaries that deliberately break the rules, employing a highly subjective point-of-view to create a form of personal journalism. Recent examples include Tony Buba's steel-town elegy "Lightning Over Braddock" and Ross McElwee's lovesick tour of the South, "Sherman's March."

"It's like Letterman said to me last night, `What would you call this? Documentary? Cinema verite?' I said I don't know what any of those mean. This is just a movie. I mean, you don't ask Tim Burton ["Batman"], `So what do you call this, narrative fiction?' It's a movie!"

It's also politics. As Mr. Moore will tell every journalist he meets, "It's a commentary on all of corporate America. Roger Smith is not the problem. GM is not the problem. The problem is we have an economic system in this country that's unfair and undemocratic."

Pausing for a preflight beer at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club in the early evening, Mr. Moore chuckles over a negative review from The Wall Street Journal. "They hated it for all the right reasons," he says. "They said I was trying to overthrow capitalism through mockery."

Peter Greenaway

Director Greenaway intends provocation, not pornography

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Staff writer STAFF
DATE: April 27, 1990
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Constitution

The Atlanta Journal
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: D/10

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Peter Greenaway's scabrous "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" arrives on the American art-movie circuit at a volatile time, when any aesthetic that dares to gate-crash the limits of taste puts censors on red alert.

But "The Cook, the Thief" has aroused a new set of objections. "Whereas before people might have found [my films] obscure, arcane, recondite . . . [they've now] taken exceptions on the grounds of morality," he says. "But I don't think there is anything extraordinarily original about this movie. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Peter Greenaway's scabrous "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" arrives on the American art-movie circuit at a volatile time, when any aesthetic that dares to gate-crash the limits of taste puts censors on red alert.

An allegory of conspicuous consumption, "The Cook, the Thief" (which opens in Atlanta today) gorges on taboos - child torture, cannibalism, strong images of sex, violence and carnal decay. All the better to craft a portrait of absolute evil: the porcine form of Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), East London gangster and terrorist gourmand.

Given the Thief's insatiable appetite for human degradation, and the film's sumptuous restaurant setting, you might call this "My Dinner With Noriega." The Motion Picture Association of America ratings board called it smut, however, branding the film with an "X" rating. Miramax, its distributor, released the work unrated but with a saucy ad campaign that leers "Totally Uncensored! Totally Uncut!"

Hubba, hubba.

But not so fast.

"There is a certain bravado thing, I suppose," says Mr. Greenaway, speaking from Amsterdam, where he's filming an adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." He's quietly concerned that his movie is receiving some misplaced attention. "I just hope people regard the film deliberately, as a provocation intended in the best of all possible ways and not just sheerly as a piece of censorable sensationalism," says Mr. Greenaway in a precise, sophisticated tone. "That would be much too cheap, and that's not what I'm in this business for."

Not that the British director, 48, isn't accustomed to audiences having sharp responses to his typically high-minded films.

Challenging entertainments such as "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1986), "The Belly of an Architect" (1987) and "Drowning by Numbers" (1988) match a clinical detachment worthy of a forensics investigator to a perverse wit that playfully dabbles in arcane systems and cultural footnotes. This former painter is to contemporary film what, say, Thomas Pynchon is to the modern novel: dense, allusive, encyclopedic, pun-drunk, twisted.

Moviegoers are readily polarized by his work, says Mr. Greenaway. "They either find the thing totally impenetrable or they find that it opens doors to them which perhaps had not been open to them before."

But "The Cook, the Thief" has aroused a new set of objections. "Whereas before people might have found [my films] obscure, arcane, recondite . . . [they've now] taken exceptions on the grounds of morality," he says. "But I don't think there is anything extraordinarily original about this movie.

"People who apprize shame have probably gotten very inured to forms of violence and masochism, torture and appalling moral behavior through American cinema anyway. I mean, we've seen many, many movies which have covered the screen in tomato ketchup from corner to corner."

The difference, of course, is that "The Cook, the Thief" is a serious work of art, one whose transgressive thrust is more lethal than Freddy Krueger's precisely because it's not presented as a slasher-sex frolic.

Mr. Greenaway cites the gore-drenched Jacobean revenge drama as an influence on his film, which depicts an escalating cycle of cruelty as the jealous Thief correctly suspects his abused Wife (Helen Mirren) of having an affair with the bookish Lover (Alan Howard). The sex bouts are staged in the fecund kitchen of a chichi London restaurant, safeguarded by the beneficent Cook (Richard Bohringer), who apparently represents whatever good remains in Western culture.

Mr. Greenaway reckons the sometimes extreme reactions prompted by the film - screenings in some West German theaters drew arson threats -are due in part to the impassioned narrative and an accessible tone that soft-pedals the usual Greenaway arcana.

"They've been wrapped up in a more approachable form, but they're still there," the director says, mentioning the film's "references to classical Trojan Horse history, the idea of Adam and Eve, the washing down of the Christ-like figure who ultimately becomes the Lover-of-All-Time, the color-coding . . ."

There's also, for art-history hounds, abundant nods to the table-painting tradition - a reproduction of Frans Hals 1614 "The Banquet ofthe Officers of the S t. George Militia of Haarlem" looms over the film's dark-red dining room.

"Cinema has always used food and restaurants and eating as a continuous subject matter, ever since the first custard pie was thrown," Mr. Greenaway says. "But for me, it would relate more to the way that [French director Claude] Chabrol uses meal tables as a battleground. And also like Fellini's gargantuan feasts in `Roma' and `Satyricon.' I'm thinking of the blasphemous use of the Last Supper that Bunuel used in `Viridiana.' "

It's not difficult to see the Thief's carnivorous rampage as an analogy for what's happening in Thatcherite England - or, as Mr. Greenaway notes, Ceausescu's Romania.

"I wouldn't like the film regarded as about a polemical, parochial British situation," he says, "I think it addresses itself to much larger issues. Consumerism, cannibalism - I mean metaphorically as well as literally - and just general ideas about the way we are raping the world.

"Consumer society seems absolutely bent on eating up everything there is to be eaten until all we've got left to eat is one another." Photo: mug of Peter Greenaway, Director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover"

Jerry Lee Lewis

Goodness Gracious, It's JERRY LEE
As `Great Balls' Flickers, The Killer Flames On

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Staff Writer STAFF
DATE: June 25, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
PAGE: L/1

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - "I believe in God Almighty, and I believe in the Archangel," Jerry Lee Lewis was proclaiming. Despite the steady driblets of rain pelting his greased-back scalp, he was poised above a piano like a chickenhawk about to snare his prey. Only now he was experiencing some doubt.

"I do believe these two creatures are conjuring up something for me now, and I don't want to suffer the consequences," Jerry Lee continued, punctuating the sentence with a throaty half-chuckle as he performed in the drizzle on the rooftop of the Peabody Hotel.

Six wives, two of them dead under clouds of suspicion that shadowed him. Two sons dead, as well. The IRS on his tail. Those touch-and-go stays in the hospital to repair a bleeding stomach. The lost years filled with booze and pills and gun lust. His career ricocheting like a wayward bullet fired in a crime of passion.

And now, now that some smart Hollywood fellas have gone and made a movie about his life - just the briefest, happiest fragment of it - the Good Lord might be about to dispatch a bolt of lightning. Strike Jerry Lee dead right here on the roof, in front of a couple of hundred journalists, an armada of publicists, movie people and hangers-out, and some of the finest barbecue ribs that money, and Orion Pictures, could buy. The studio had gathered everyone to Memphis for the greater promotional glory of "Great Balls of Fire," the movie in which Dennis Quaid is Jerry Lee Lewis, or at least Dennis Quaid with a blond dye job, a year's worth of piano practice and some dang nifty cat clothes.

Jerry Lee marveled at the crowd, a select audience but one well-equipped to spread his still-living legend. He had been rained out in Pittsburgh, he said, and earthquaked out in Los Angeles. He thought God was trying to tell him something. ``And it's not wine, spo-dee-o-dee."

And then the rain stopped.

And The Killer stepped away from the ivories to croon a few bars of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" until it was evident that the local rockabilly revival band hired for the occasion didn't know the song. "Don't want Judy Garland churning in her grave," Jerry Lee said, then found himself a country number to sing.

Memphis was where it had all begun: for Jerry Lee, for Elvis Presley, for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, a bunch of slick-haired country boys trying to be hep cats - and for a wily entrepreneur named Sam Phillips, who owned Sun Records and was convinced he could turn vinyl into gold.

Thirty years later, Jerry Lee's life has been turned into celluloid. "Elvis didn't have a movie made about him when he was still alive," The Killer told Adam Fields when the Hollywood producer proposed to put the Jerry Lee Lewis saga on film. "I guess that makes me bigger than Elvis."

That overlooks the fact that Elvis was a movie star. But now, in a way, Jerry Lee is, too.

When "Great Balls of Fire" opens Friday, the Lewis boogie will hit the screen as a kind of ultravivid '50s flashback, a cotton-candy vision of Memphis in its rebel rockin' heyday, as nearly divorced from reality as Jerry Lee has been from several of his ex-wives. The film's curiously mixed modes - retro-rock musical, gonzo domestic comedy, teen dream romance - are splashed in bold deco tones, "using colors that sort of had to be reinvented," says director Jim McBride.

Mr. McBride and his screenwriter and creative partner, Jack Baran, reinvent everything else as well, basing their brisk biography on a meteroic 18-month span - between 1956 and 1958 - that saw The Killer emerge from Ferriday, La., to descend on Memphis and his bass-playing cousin J.W. Brown (played by rocker John Doe), his cousin's wife Lois (Lisa Blount) and their 13-year-old daughter, Myra Gale (Winona Ryder).

As Jerry Lee, then a boisterous 21, rose to fame at Memphis's tiny but influential Sun Records - blistering the piano keys on such hits as "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "High School Confidential" - he also fell in love with Myra, and one afternoon swept her away to Mississippi where he married her. J.W. was so upset he went after his new son-in-law with a shotgun, but it was the British press that finally nailed the wild-haired rock star. His 1958 arrival in London, child bride in tow, prompted a career-smashing scandal.

"We didn't go out of our way to make it a faithful, accurate, historical biography," says Mr. McBride, the chipper director of the 1987 sleeper "The Big Easy" (which also starred Mr. Quaid) and the remake of the French classic, "Breathless," which features the Lewis tune of the same name.

As raw material, the director employed the 1982 book "Great Balls of Fire," penned by Myra - now Myra Williams of Stone Mountain, Ga. - and Atlanta writer Murray Silver. "We used our imaginations a lot," Mr. McBride says. "But I think that anyone who investigated the record would come away feeling we were faithful in spirit."

But which spirit? Indeed, which Jerry Lee? Mr. Fields, the young producer who spent nine years developing the project, envisioned the film "as something out of a Faulkner novel."

"He was the son of a moonshiner," he says. "Sold 39 dozen eggs to come to Memphis to record in the shadow of Elvis. The catapult to stardom and his decline . . . it's like a great movie." Mr. Fields has seen that project survive almost as many turbulent phases and bizarre twists as Mr. Lewis's life.

Traveling to sweet-talk The Killer at his Nesbit, Miss., home - "It was like Martin Sheen in `Apocalypse Now,' going up to see Kurtz," he says - Mr. Fields recounts Mr. Lewis's reaction. "He said, `Son, you could make a movie about me, wouldn't be nothin' but weddings and funerals.' "

There's only one wedding in "Great Balls of Fire." No funerals. The mind boggles at what sort of movie this might have been had Mr. Fields made it in 1983, with director Barry Levinson and star Mickey Rourke, both hot off "Diner." That deal fell apart in a barrage of negative vibes stirred by the drug-overdose death of Mr. Lewis's fifth wife, Shawn. Later, Mr. Fields nearly sold a package pairing Dennis Hopper (as director) and Sean Penn. That, too, collapsed.

"Michael Cimino was involved for about two seconds," Mr. Fields says. Under any of those directors, the movie could well have been dubbed "Great Balls of Fire and Brimstone." That picture, Mr. Fields suggests, would be "a lot darker, less entertaining but more powerful, closer to a `Raging Bull' - a film that critics would have loved and no one would have seen."

Mr. Baran refers to the unmade film as "Part 2," the sequel that may follow "Great Balls of Fire," should the film detonate the summer box office.

"That wasn't the movie we wanted to make," explains Mr. Baran, a writer and producer ("Renaldo and Clara," "Barfly") who joined Mr. McBride in streamlining "Great Balls of Fire." Knocking back a Corona at the bar of the Omni Memphis Hotel, Mr. Baran talks excitedly about that other script, written by Terence Malick, the acclaimed, recluse director of "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven."

It's pitch black. It's scary-brilliant. It's so penetrating in its icon-trashing tone that, having read it, Mr. Baran briefly felt compelled to go home and smash all his Jerry Lee Lewis records. And not for nothing. The Malick script includes a scene, Mr. Baran says, in which Myra phones her husband on the road and threatens suicide with a handgun. Jerry Lee tells her to hold the receiver close, so he can hear her pull the trigger.

And they say 90 percent of the stories about Jerry Lee Lewis are true. Even so, as Mr. Fields observes, "Accusations of wife-murder are not what made Jerry Lee Lewis the living legend that he is, any more than the last five years of Elvis's life, when he was obese and dressed up like Batman, made him the king of rock 'n' roll."

By contrast, "Great Balls of Fire" presents Jerry Lee more as Clown Prince than Rebel Angel. There's an odd comic buoyance to Mr. Quaid's performance, a cartoonish swagger that eerily evokes Foghorn Leghorn. Weird. You're dying to ask the actor what he had in mind.

"Playing The Killer is like climbing a mountain," says Mr. Quaid, at once living-room casual and just a bit rehearsed, a rasp lending an edge to his Texas drawl as he slouches in a plump armchair and reporters pepper him with questions. "You get halfway up the mountain and you look up and the mountain's grown twice the size.

"I play him as a 9-year-old boy who fell in love with music. I just tried to concentrate on his heart more than anything else."

And his walk. Mr. Quaid is sporting some switchblade-sharp '50s footwear - a pair of black-and-white, two-tone creepers like those from The Killer's own closet. "It's up," the actor says. "He really thinks highly of himself. It's not arrogance, it's self-confidence."

Though it's Mr. Lewis who sings on the movie's soundtrack, his vocals coming out of Mr. Quaid's lips, the actor originally insisted on tackling those chores himself.

Uh-huh. Right. But you've got to give him credit. He had the nerve to go toe-to-toe with The Killer.

"Our first meeting backstage in Las Vegas, he said, `Son, you can't sing like Jerry Lee Lewis.'

"And I really don't do this way most of the time, but I had to, I said, `You can't act like Dennis Quaid, either.' "

Says Mr. Quaid: "It went up from there."

The star takes a drag off his cigarette. Then confesses. "It was a matter of me coming to my senses. These are classic rock 'n' roll songs. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive. I'd be lip-syncing to my own voice if I was singing. I woke up and smelled the coffee."

Interviewed separately, Mr. McBride expands on The Killer-versus-Quaid question.

"The truth is," the director says, "all of us were very big Jerry Lee Lewis fans, but we had seen him on off nights, too, and it seemed like in recent years that he wasn't really giving it the juice that he used to. It was never really clear to us what we were going to get out of him."

But then, the director continues, "He started putting out this stuff, which was just incredible!"

Re-recorded under the guidance of producer T-Bone Burnett, the songs on "Great Balls of Fire" are as energetic as the Sun originals but seasoned by Mr. Lewis's 30 years of hard living. They're the soul of the movie.

Such vitality bodes well for The Killer's future. A rock 'n' roll Lazarus, Mr. Lewis has journeyed back from the grave's edge more than once and, at 54, appears shockingly healthy. He looks his age, but displays a sly, impish spirit that belongs to someone half his years. Between interviews, reporters note the sixth Mrs. Lewis, Kerrie McCarver, tending to the toddling Jerry Lee Lewis III in the Omni Hotel hallways.

Can a man enjoy a third or fourth lease on life? "I feel thankful to God that I'm living and breathing and functioning," Jerry Lee says, his face as lined, his jaw as proudly set, as a bulldog's. "I'm having a ball . . . whether they like it or not."

The Killer chuckles. It's a knowing sound he makes, the last laugh of someone who knows that the joke - if there is one - is on anybody else but him. "I took a wild chance here and let the boys roll with it," he says. "Hope they don't screw up."

Mr. Lewis served as a technical adviser on the film, tutoring Mr. Quaid in the ways of The Killer. "A movie's a movie," he says, when asked to review "Great Balls of Fire." "What do you expect out of a movie? There's no way you're gonna get your whole life up on a screen. I like what they've done. Now, if I could just get paid for it."

The singer delights in contradicting every other comment, gauging the honest confusion his actions provoke and then, like a boxer feinting before lunging for the kill, taking it all back. Chuckle.

An Italian journalist wants to know: Does Jerry Lee Lewis believe in destiny?

"Do I believe what? Destiny? Hmmm, what does she look like? Whoo-ah! Destiny? I don't know, baby. I believe in God Almighty and Jerry Lee Lewis."

Anthony Hopkins

Hopkins offers food for thought
Cannibal role a career boon

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Staff writer STAFF
DATE: March 29, 1991
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Constitution

The Atlanta Journal
SECTION: FEATURES
PAGE: C/1

The cobra's gaze that mesmerized moviegoers is softer, almost pensive, as Anthony Hopkins sips from a bottle of fruit juice, nestled in a trailer that feels even smaller than the subterranean cell he occupies for much of "The Silence of the Lambs." No fava beans or chi-an-ti in sight. But Dr. Hannibal Lecter, cannibal sophisticate and pop-culture phenomenon, is still very much with us.

"I know what scares people," Mr. Hopkins says during a break from filming "Free-Jack," the futuristic movie in which he will share the screen with that other Satanic majesty, Mick Jagger. "And I don't know why I know that."

Instinct, perhaps? Or just the right actor in the right role at the right moment?

Mr. Hopkins's performance as the sociopathic Lecter, the black heart of director Jonathan Demme's forensic shocker, has put millions on edge -and catapulted the 53-year-old actor to the sort of fame that spreads like an epidemic.

"It sounds weird," Mr. Hopkins says of the formidable Dr. Lecter, the psychiatrist with a taste for internal organs, "but I conceived of him as a kind of romantic figure, for all his horror. It was something that came out of me and I don't know where it came from. This dark thing that came out of me. I don't mean to sound terribly complicated, but it has begun, in its way, to change my psychology.

"I feel all relaxed," he continues, "and it was no sweat to get it out. I didn't have to go through agony or psychoanalysis. I'm surprised that it was in me to do it."

Garbed in suspenders and a fluffy white shirt for his role as a 21st-century villain in "Free-Jack," the British actor looks less like America's Best-Loved Psycho than a plantation owner from the antebellum South. Yet, after "The Silence of the Lambs," it's clear that no matter where Mr. Hopkins goes, or whatever new roles he takes, his persona will be forever linked in the popular imagination with Lecter's.

"If it was somebody with a big machine gun just blowing people away, I wouldn't have done the film," says Mr. Hopkins, whose performance likely will make him an Oscar nominee next year. "But I found the film immensely sad and overwhelming in its power. Those scenes when [Jodie Foster] visits the dead girl's house. That's a veritable wasteland. [It shows] the horrors that we've brought upon the world."

Certainly, Hopkins-as-Lecter is having an uncanny effect on the national psyche.

"This psychiatrist friend of mine said, `You've uprooted the shadow side of yourself' - this is a Jungian analyst - `People are identifying with it because they realize they've got it in themselves.' "

But not everyone embraces "The Silence of the Lambs" as a chance for communal exorcism - a cinematic purge of the demon within. Some people are simply scared to death.

In Atlanta for wardrobe fittings last week, Mr. Hopkins caused double takes at a local diner. "These people came in and said, `Are you Hannibal Lecter?' I said, [drops into his unearthly Lecter voice] `Yes, would you care to join me?"

Mr. Hopkins dined alone.

"Now that this phenomenal success has happened, I just go into a kind of a neutral phase and I feel so totally detached from it," he says. "It's got nothing to do with me anymore. I put the character on and you accept him. He's there and he's alive and he's around somewhere. He's out in the movies. And I can switch it on and switch it off, just for the fun of it."

He is the first to admit that it's the role of a lifetime.

"I said to my wife, `I've done one,' " says the actor, his fingers thoughtfully drumming a paperback of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero Within." "I've done one which is a big hit. I've always wanted to do one, and now I've done it.

"I've lost the insecurity that I used to have," he continues. "`Because I used to grab any [role] I could. Sometimes I'd have an enormous fit, a rebellious tantrum, and do some total rubbish for the kick of it [but I] never lived to regret it."

Mr. Hopkins, who will be in Atlanta through next week, is due to star next in an adaptation of E.M. Forster's "Howard's End" for director James Ivory. He hopes there will be a sequel to "Lambs." Dr. Lecter may be too good a thing to let go.

"When I was a kid," he says, "these two little girls used to come sit on the doorstep and I used to tell them this story about the Old Dark House. I used to scare the hell out of them and send them screaming across the street. And their mother complained to my mother. And then they'd come back for more.

"It's like Hitchcock said, when he was asked why people like to go to scary movies. He said, `Well, what's the first thing we do when we see a child, a baby? We go `boo.' "

Jay McInerney

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar STAFF WRITER STAFF
DATE: July 5, 1992
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: ARTS
PAGE: N/1

Nashville - Bright lights, big deal.

Breezing home for a 14-hour pause in the endless media blitzkreig that often is his life, Jay McInerney still finds himself dodging the glare of his celebrity.

Even here in Music City, where cameras and wagging tongues are more likely to be directed at the latest wiggle of Billy Ray Cyrus's hips, Mr. McInerney can't slip past the buzz that has followed him like an elastic cartoon shadow since 1984. That was the year "Bright Lights, Big City," the writer's slim, poignant and introspectively flip first novel, made him a media darling and a literary phenomenon - a drinking buddy with the wobbly zeitgeist of the Reagan era, when New York was the place to be and Mr. McInerney was every place in New York.

Now 37, the former boy wonder has settled down . . . a bit.

He has a new, best-selling novel, "Brightness Falls" (Knopf, $23), that traces the dubious destinies of a dozen New Yorkers on the brink of the 1987 stock market crash. And, as if taking a tip from his own reality-based fiction, he has a newly domestic lifestyle with the only sign of extravagance being a 1986 Porsche 911 Carrera parked in back of the Nashville home he shares with his wife of half a year, Helen Bransford.

Her cats use the car for sunbathing, much to Mr. McInerney's chagrin.

"God, I never thought I would be on my book tour, taking my off day to fly home to Nashville and that actually would be my home," Mr. McInerney says, sitting in the cozy, unfussy house on the city's upscale west side, on a street where real estate goes for $80,000 to $250,000. "It's been a refuge for us so far."

And even all this is trendy, source for an exhaustive Vanity Fair profile on Mr. McInerney's sudden, unannounced wedding to Ms. Bransford. A jewelry maker and member of one of Nashville's oldest families - which made its fortune in real estate - she was a friend and frequent dinner companion of the writer for seven years. Along with the marriage - which delighted the pair's mutual friends but stunned model Marla Hanson, Mr. McInerney's recently estranged companion of four years - came a change of lifestyle.

"I had created this monster that was out of control," Mr. McInerney says. "For a while, it was a bad thing for my writing life."

Residing in Nashville six months of the year (the author continues to rent an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side), Mr. McInerney has traded the cocaine-and-limousine trappings of his profligate, and he says exaggerated, public image for a quieter life in the Land of the Big Hat.

"There's such a sense of history here," Mr. McInerney says. "There's no sense of history in New York. In New York, it all starts yesterday. That's one of the things this book is about, how you reinvent yourself. There are obviously places, like Fifth Avenue, where your family matters. But hell, they'll let somebody like me in in a minute. Heh, heh. If suddenly I look right and I'm profiled in the right magazines."

He's eager to downsize that profile. It's one that, much as Norman Mailer's in the 1960s, seemed to bloat beyond all reasonable proportion. In a swift few years, the writer was transformed in print from sexy, envied young gun to haggard prey for the gossip columns. The low point came when Spy magazine, the satirical rag that seemed customized to antagonize Mr. McInerney and his high-rolling buddies, published second wife Merry's embarrassing testimony about their failed marriage.

Pushed far enough that he finally donned Ninja garb and slashed at his critics from the cover of Esquire, the writer now is more comfortable riding horses and fishing for bass - preoccupations not easily pursued in Manhattan.

"I like to think it's gonna fade a little bit," says Mr. McInerney, who sits cross-legged and barefoot on an ottoman as tomatoes fry in Ms. Bransford's kitchen and Tammy Wynette sings "Stand By Your Man" in the background. "Running off and getting married is a good story. Three years from now it's not gonna be a great Vanity Fair story that Jay and Helen are sitting around Nashville with their cats."

Which would suit Ms. Bransford just fine. "New York is certainly stimulating," she says. "But I've been to that party 200 times and I've gotten sick of it. . . . It's absurd bordering on lurid in New York the interest the gossip columns have in his every move." A 15-year resident of the city before moving back to Nashville in 1990, she counted Mr. McInerney as one of her best celebrity clients, and also as a confidant.

His third wife, 6 1/2 years his senior, "didn't count on being married to the media circus from hell," Mr. McInerney observes, wise to the pressures sudden fame and nagging infamy can put on a relationship. Though his first marriage, to a model who inspired a character in "Bright Lights," was over before the book was written, both his second marriage and his long-term relationship with Ms. Hanson suffered from the spotlight.

He says he's looking forward to shutting it off. But first, there's a new book to promote: "Brightness Falls," a kaleidoscopic narrative about New York before and after the '87 crash, focused on scenes from an outwardly perfect, inwardly troubled union between rising publisher Russell Calloway and his stockbroker wife, Corrine. Colorful characters bubble through the 416-page narrative, which often reads like a roman a clef of Manhattan's literary and nightlife scenes.

Commercially, and to some degree critically, the book scores a rebound for a novelist whose previous two efforts - "Ransom" and "Story of My Life" - were widely maligned. Critics who like the book compare it to a "Bonfire of the Vanities" with heart. Some who don't charge that its saga of smart, ambitious thirtysomethings riding the fickle crest of the snatch-and-grab-it '80s owes more to market savvy than literary invention.

Now in its fifth printing, "Brightness Falls" smells like vindication to its author. "It's outsold my last book by 10,000-15,000 copies and it's only been out two weeks," he says of the multi-perspective work, which sheds the unconventional second-person tone of "Bright Lights" for a more common, omniscient narrator. Three years in the writing, the novel was conceived as a bookend to an over-amped decade, the falling arc of the tainted rainbow glimpsed in "Bright Lights."

"It's a kind of epitaph," says Mr. McInerney, who also saw the effort as a chance to redefine his reputation on new terms.

"I got way too much exposure after `Bright Lights, Big City,' " he says. "There was an inevitable backlash against it. Ultimately, people had stopped being able to read my work in any kind of clean slate. They were just reviewing me, which was certainly annoying and harmful to the way I wanted to conduct my career.

"There was a moment when I asked, `What the [expletive] is happening?' But now, it's like, I dunno. I'm used to a certain amount of resentment my career has aroused and that my writing arouses, too. I don't write good, well-behaved fiction, even though my training is very conventional and just as academic as any American writer I can think of."

As if to play off of his media-inflated image, Mr. McInerney includes a bit of distorted self-portraiture in the novel's doomed figure of Jeff Pierce, a young, instantly successful writer whose acidic wit echoes from a tragic, downward spiral of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Some of the novel's funniest and most perceptive passages are voiced by Jeff during a stay in a drug rehab asylum, slicing with surgical precision through the spine of Mr. McInerney's story:

It was the fall of 1987. The leaves in Connecticut were bursting, slow motion, into flame; one night, as we smoked on the porch after dinner, a girl in my unit who claimed to suffer from precognition declared that she could see paper airplanes crashing to the pavement of Manhattan, fifty miles away. Of course she would turn out to be right. But this was just before all that, before the big discount of gross expectations.

"People ask who's who, but none of the characters are based particularly on anybody," he says. "Jeff kind of lives out a fate that is a 20-year-old's vision of what a writer's life is like. There are so many literary role models, everybody from Byron to Fitzgerald, Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas . . . and he gets lost between where to draw the line between his life and his work.

``I guess Jeff is like the most extreme part of me," he continues. "Maybe something like that fate could've befallen me a few years ago."

Mr. McInerney, whose tone rarely is anything but easygoing, admits he made a few mistakes in the past eight years but is unapologetic, even taking the offensive against critics who brandish the "Brat Pack" epithet to describe the '80s boom in under-30 writers that the author helped to ignite.

"Publishers had written us off for a long time," he says. "Sometimes I want to say to these cranky, middle-aged critics, `Would you rather that we watch [expletive] MTV and went to the movies?' Give us a chance here, you know? I've mellowed on this, but I still wonder what all the screaming was about. I mean if the books weren't good, they'll fade away.

"I think it's a great thing when writers seize the attention of more than the 20,000 people in this country who regularly read fiction. It's something I can still do, even if I'm controversial. That very controversy at least indicates that the kingdom of letters is not entirely dead and that rock 'n' roll hasn't completely rolled over us."

In countrypolitan Nashville, of course, controversy is Travis Tritt dissing Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart." For the most part, the city seems oblivious to the fancy New York writer in its midst.

"I don't think they like him or dislike him," says Kyle Young, assistant director of the Country Music Foundation and a friend of Mr. McInerney and Morgan Entrekin, his longtime editor and a Nashville native. "To me, this is not a calculated move at all. He is one of a lot of celebrities in this town. The same reasons Emmylou [Harris] or Steve Winwood would like to live here, he would, too. There's a certain acceptance that brings with it a comfort level that people who find themselves in th e public life would like."

Recent splashy newspaper profiles in the weekly Nashville Scene and the daily Tennessean prompted a flurry of letters from distinctly unimpressed readers.

"Pardon me while I gag over your Jay McInerney article," wrote Edie Sutter in a letter to the Nashville Scene. "Lucky for us, I guess, that Jay chose our fair city as a temporary roost." Another letter, from Martin Aucoin, wondered if Nashville was so depleted of celebrities that "you seize the opportunity to devote the cover . . . to a recently transplanted New York novelist whose claim to fame is that he did too much cocaine in the '80s."

Bruce Dobie, editor of the alternative tabloid, has been receiving similar letters six weeks after he published the profile.

"Most of the people here don't know who the hell the guy is," he says. "So much of his persona was the urban, drug-infested, late-night dance club kind of existence. Now he moves to Nashville, which is a horsey, genteel, slow-moving, medium-sized city. That juxtaposition, we thought, was pretty interesting."

If anything, Mr. McInerney's arrival may contribute to Nashville's emerging, urbane flipside. "We're not just Porter Wagoner fans," Mr. Dobie says. "There are a lot of flights out of here to Los Angeles and New York. That part of the city sees that Jay McInerney has moved here and says, `Hey, great. It can only help the city.' "

Now at work on a fifth novel, with screenplays in the pipeline and a top-secret HBO pilot penned for David Lynch, Mr. McInerney is enthusiastic about moving ahead - and wrapping up a final round of interviews and bookstore readings.

"I don't pretend to really know anything about my surroundings here," he says. "But it's not a totally passive thing. I'm listening and learning and watching. I like the people here; they're much friendlier than most places. Despite the occasional letter to the editor.

"I just wish I didn't have to announce my appearance in Nashville," he says while, of course, doing just that. "Unfortunately, I have this book. I want to give this book a chance and my life seems to be part of the currency."

Screamin' Jay Hawkins

FILM
Screamin' Jay Hawkins a `Mystery' off camera too

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: December 22, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: E/10

Steve Dollar Staff writer

TORONTO - Stare too long, and your corneas begin to fry like a pair of Grade-A eggs popping on a short-order griddle. His shirt a vivid wash of nova-burst orange, flecked with splotches from a leftover Jackson Pollock canvas, Screamin' Jay Hawkins lives up to his name before he mutters a word.

Everything about him shouts in defiant testimony to the glories of self-invention. But then, what would you expect from a man who gave a generation the willies with his incantatory 1956 hit "I Put a Spell on You"? A mutant waltz, the song churns in obsessive delirium, then yawns as bleak and wide as a sepulcher, a dank and unholy place from whose depths emerges - woooo-HAH-ha-ha - the toe-curling sound that is uniquely Screamin' Jay's.

A buoyant and ageless 60, the Los Angeles resident, eyes shaded and hair pomped, is on his best behavior as he slips in from an adjoining room in his Toronto hotel suite. En route, he kills the volume on a tape-deck tootling vintage Tiny Grimes, the '40s rhythm-and-blues singer who gave the young Jalacy J. Hawkins his start when Elvis Presley was still negotiating puberty.

The King is much to the point. It's an Elvis Presley song, after all, that lends its name to "Mystery Train," the new film by Jim Jarmusch that features a pivotal performance by Mr. Hawkins, cast as a stoic night clerk in a seedy Memphis hotel.

The Manhattan-based director first evoked the performer as a spiritual presence in his 1984 cult favorite "Stranger Than Paradise." The existential road movie includes a scene in which Eva (Ezster Balint), a 16-year-old Hungarian refugee, clutches a boom box pounding "Spell" like the zombie national anthem - the voice of some mythic, primal America, indecipherable yet impossible to ignore. "Screamin' Jay Hawkins is my main man," Eva declares in her newly appropriated language, over the objections of her irked cousin Willie (John Lurie). "So bug off!"

Conjured in the flesh for "Mystery Train," Mr. Hawkins was told to suppress his wild-man persona, the better to match the chilly tone of Mr. Jarmusch's patented minimalism. His character's pent-up attitude did not come naturally.

"I told him, `I'm a stick of dynamite and you done lit the fuse and you defy me to blow,' " Mr. Hawkins said during a mid-afternoon interview at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto this fall. As he speaks, his fingers, a set of creeping cypress roots encircled by skull rings, drum the top of a coffee table.

That's virtually all he manages to say about the movie, and that some 20 minutes into a conversation that rambles from barroom brawls in the '40s to California divorce courts in the '80s; from the wilds of Ohio - where he says he was raised by Blackfoot Indians - to prisoner-of-war camps in Japan.

"I hate the Japanese, hate 'em!" Screamin' Jay announces. That's ironic. "Mystery Train" was bankrolled by JVC, the Japanese electronics company, and stars two young Japanese actors in the first and best of its three segments. The Orient also was the only place to welcome the singer's 1968 rendition of "Constipation Blues" (since re-recorded with New York band The Fuzztones), a moan-'n'-groan meditation certain to alienate polite company.

Ignorance, however, must be bliss.

"They don't know this," Mr. Hawkins says, before launching an anti-KKK diatribe. "I cannot afford to let them know this."

Elvis Presley, who looms over "Mystery Train" like a pop-cultural hologram - you can look, but you can't touch - doesn't exactly cater undying respect, either.

"[Gossip columnist] Dorothy Kilgallen kept comparing me to him [during the '50s]," says Mr. Hawkins, his voice by turns Happy Hour affable and laden with Stygian gloom - a voice a spider could spin a web from. "Kept saying I made Elvis look like a choirboy, Little Lloyd Faunt'roy. I couldn't understand it.

"The girl I was going with at that time, she was a feisty little devil, 4-feet-5, she was wicked, she was pah-er-ful! She said, `You got to go see this guy.' I said, `What person?' She never told me the man's name. I never knew who I was going to see. I sat down in the arena in West Philadelphia, and all of a sudden onto the stage comes Elvis Presley. And all the girls, including my girl, jumps into the seat. WAHHHHHH-oooooo! And I grabbed her by the thigh. I pinched her as hard as I could and I said, `Don't you know I sing? I have yet to see you jump and holler for me. What's wrong with you?'

"Finally, we left. Went home in the car. I said, `What's the big deal about Da Pelvis?' That's what I called him, Da Pelvis. She says, `Oh! He's handsome.' I said, `You need a new man! You are spennin' my money like Niagara Falls drops over that huge cliff! I mean, I was teed off about it. Because it was my woman raving over another singer. We never questioned the fact over what color he was."

But color, Mr. Hawkins insists, was always the heart of the matter. "Bo Diddley always said, `Elvis stole my act.' I said, `No, he didn't. Let's face it, they were ready for a white boy, and you ain't it.' It coulda been Lloyd Price, it coulda been me. It coulda been B.B. King. But I would never blame the man," he says. "You forget, the world was bought for Elvis."

The world according to Screamin' Jay Hawkins is clouded with suspicion, innuendo, conspiracy - as smoky as the stages he's prowled, toting a cane topped with a skull he calls Henry. But when a man records songs with the pungency of "She Put the Wamee on Me," "Screamin' Blues," and "Feast of the Mau-Mau," people listen - even if most of them are in Europe, where the singer tours exclusively.

"I learned to believe half of what I see and don't believe nothing of what I read," he declares, and proceeds to explicate a few of the verities that have sustained him.

- On natural genius: "You gotta have your head busted against the wall, you gotta scrape your behind, you gotta cry, you gotta be ornery, you gotta suffer and love. You gotta believe in God, you gotta love the devil. You gotta go through a whole lot of things to understand that inside of you is a certain talent i f you just bring it out."

- On honesty: "People say, you tell the truth, the truth will set you free. I say, you tell the truth, the truth will get you killed."

- On home remedies: "I carry my own garlic. Garlic is good because I have high blood pressure. That stops me from getting a heart attack. I'm only hoping to get a stroke, and my ex-wife is trying hard for me to get a stroke."

- On loving thine enemies: "If it's somebody I really hate, kill him or cripple him. So you can hear him dragging his leg six blocks. This way, he can't pull a snake attack on you."

Screamin' Jay is still laying it down as the tape runs out. A female publicist lurks in a back corner, heroically maintaining composure as he begins detailing an ex-wife's "woman troubles."

"Some people," he says, "don't want to deal with the truth."

Screenshots: Reviews, Interviews and Otherwise, Circa 1989-92, Part One: Reviews

2006-06-05T23:56:00.000-04:00

Batman

`BATMAN' CONQUERS
Forbidding and Subversive, Burton's Vision Captivates
Film Review
Batman. An action film. Starring Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton.
Directed by Tim Burton. Rated PG-13 for language, violence. At metro area
theaters.

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Film Critic STAFF
DATE: June 23, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: F/1

Movie review. Batman. An action film. Starring Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton. Directed by Tim Burton. Rated PG-13 for language, violence. At metro area theaters.

A winged descent into swirling banks of smog, industrial decay and unfettered psychosis, Tim Burton's "Batman" feels, at first take, about as welcoming as a detour through a Manhattan sewer. Or maybe a day trip to Dante's Inferno. Dank and grimy, the movie leaves a charcoal smudge on the mind's eye.

But what a smudge. Owing little to the jokey superheroics of the '60s television show, this revisionist "Batman" is thrilling in its subversive fusion of visionary set design and kinky sociopathology, special-effects wizardry and sophisticated wit. It's in love with its own musty Bat-scent.

Cloaked in Danny Elfman's dark, expressionistic score - which pinches spine-tingling grandeur from Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann - the movie takes its time in unfolding. Before it's anything else, "Batman" is a tour-de-force display of how to make inner-city rot look fascinating, exotic. The Gotham City conjured by production designer Anton Furst harks back to, among other sources, the haunted utopia of Fritz Lang's '20s silent classic "Metropolis," with its Babylonian towers and creeping shadows. Like such recent films as "Brazil" and "Blade Runner," the way "Batman" looks is the guiding, crucial element; its mordant nightscape suggests an urban dream that collapsed on itself and is now fit turf for vermin alone.

Which is where Jack Nicholson comes in. As The Joker, he's every inch a blithe psychopath, a bloodthirsty trickster who dispatches his enemies with an electroshock joy buzzer and an elbow-to-the-ribs aside. Mr. Nicholson, who's top-billed, is the movie's unpredictable Jack-in-the-Box, its imp of the perverse, its manic dramatic motor.

During an extensive opening sequence, we meet him as Jack Napier, aspiring cr ime boss, who gets momentarily snared in police crossfire when an industrial heist turns into a mob setup. Just as Napier's about to make his getaway, Batman (Michael Keaton) glides in from the girders and sends him plunging into a vat of churning industrial goo. Disfigured by the accident, which has left him with a permanent, outsized grin, this arch-felon adopts his new identity and launches an unprecedente d crime wave. He sabotages cosmetic products, causing their users to die painfully, their faces contorted by a demonic, Joker-style smile.

And Batman, who doubles as billionaire dude-about-town Bruce Wayne, has to stop him.

That's about all the plot there is to "Batman," which leans hard on film-noir atmospherics and sharp visual jokes to sustain what is an often sluggish, unfocused story line. It's Bruce Wayne, a Spandex Nosferatu welded into a muscle suit, versus The Joker, a plastic surgery disaster with the soul of a game-show host.

At its japing best, however, "Batman" doesn't need much of a narrative. Director Burton, who began his career as a Disney animator, brings his black-comic sensibility to bear in scene after scene, moments not so much stolen by Mr. Nicholson's Joker as made by him. It's the same role Mr. Keaton played as the title ghoul in Mr. Burton's "Beetlejuice," down to the green-and-purple wardrobe and toxic-looking pancake cosmetics.

Mr. Burton's peculiar brand of wit shines through in such memorable episodes as The Joker's trashing of Gotham's Fluegelheim Museum, in which he gaily prances through a hall defacing art masterpieces, Prince's sprightly "Partyman" blaring from a boombox, and declares, "I'm the world's first fully functional homicidal artist." When he arrives at a horrific canvas by British Expressionist painter Francis Bacon, however, he backs away. "I like this," The Joker announces, and dances on.

Mr. Keaton, an unpopular choice for Bat-fanatics eager to see a more heroic caped avenger, acquits himself well, given the limited range his Batman is allowed. Giving off the heebie-jeebies of an uptight bachelor, his Bruce Wayne persona engages in a touch-and-go romance with daredevil gal photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger, ever imperiled) that screenwriter Sam Hamm never really develops. Doubtless, this Batman was a benevolent psychopath on paper - Dirty Harry in the year 2000. On f ilm, he's more suggestive of a yuppie-era coffee achiever w ho gets his jollies crunching evildoers with his Bat-gloved hands.

That's the only sense, really, in which "Batman" fails to follow through on its forboding promise. Were it truer to its cinematic roots in '40s film noir and '20s German Expressionism, Bruce Wayne would have a genuinely nasty streak - something to make him a mirror image of The Joker, and more darkly compelling to the sunshine-blond Vicki.

Eh. Producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber can fiddle with that next time. There's more than enough under "Batman's" cape to give you the willies and inspire some old-fashioned matinee wonder. You won't see anything else like it this year.

How To Get Ahead in Advertising

FILM REVIEW
Trouble Boils in `How to Get Ahead in Advertising'

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: June 30, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: F/2

Movie review. How to Get Ahead in Advertising. A black comedy. Starring Richard E. Grant and Rachel Ward. Directed by Bruce Robinson. Rated R for language. Garden Hills. How to Get Ahead in Advertising. A black comedy. Starring Richard E. Grant and Rachel Ward. Directed by Bruce Robinson. Rated R for language. Garden Hills.

By Steve Dollar Film Critic

With his sallow cheeks, ectomorphic frame and speed-freak delivery, Richard E. Grant is rapidly shaping up as Great Britain's answer to that Great American Schizo, James Woods.

He's younger, of course, and the actor's widow's peak brands him more as a frazzled intellectual than the social-climbing street sludge that is Mr. Woods's specialty. It's difficult, though, to imagine any other performer who can match him for sheer, nerve-rattling mania.

Or one who looks so smashingly splendid with a talking boil on his neck.

In Bruce Robinson's caustic satire "How to Get Ahead in Advertising," the boil is half the show: a psychosomatic sac of pus with a mind - and mouth - of its own.

Mr. Grant, last seen as the fey narcissist Withnail in Mr. Robinson's death-of-the-'60s comedy "Withnail & I," plays advertising wizard Dennis Bagley, a driven media manipulator "who's taken the stench out of everything but [excrement]" but now has to devise a scheme to sell pimple cream. He's stymied, and so directs his frustration in a torrent of mercenary invective aimed at his secretary, his colleagues, his dinner guests and his long-suffering, ever-gracious, utterly knockout wife, Juli a (Rachel Ward, who brings surprising gifts as a "straight man" to this absurdist psychodrama).

Bagley's so obsessed, he begins ridding the cabinets of commodities, fearful that the products' only value is in the clever lies that led consumers to buy them. He's buggy, no less so than Richard Dreyfuss trying to construct a space mountain in his living room in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Beware the return of the repressed. Overnight, Bagley sprouts his own boil. It's a demon doppelganger, one that takes delight in haranguing this backsliding adman for his loss of faith in the profession. The boil converses in the soothing double-speak of TV commercials, the smarmy voice of corporate patronizing. It's ruining Bagley's life and terrifying his wife, but as the film swiftly, and wickedly, reveals, the bully on his neck is an advertising genius.

And Mr. Robinson, whose script is etched in corrosive bile, is an incisive satirist. His blistering skills bring to mind Billy Wilder on an ether binge or, closer to home, the director's friend, cartoonist Ralph Steadman of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" fame.

Not much of what's said in "Advertising" is printable here, and often Mr. Grant's Brit-inflected, Mach 5 cadences are too fast for Yank ears to snag. Nonetheless, it's a tour-de-force performance, especially once the boil begins to assert itself.

Rollicking through to its logical, over-the-top finale, the film conflates the existential dread of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" with the ad-world spoof of Frank Tashlin's Madison Avenue comedy, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" Mr. Robinson slams his message home with the vitriolic cheek of vintage Monty Python, but adds his own savage spin. He's nervy enough to celebrate the glamorization of boils and cue up William Blake's "Jerusalem" as the party music.

In Country

`In Country' Impact Due More to War's Lasting Hurt Than to Drama Itself
Film Review

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: September 29, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: D/11

Movie review: In Country. A drama. Starring Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis. Directed by Norman Jewison. Rated R for language, violence, sexual situations. At metro area theaters. In Country. A drama. Starring Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis. Directed by Norman Jewison. Rated R for language, violence, sexual situations. At metro area theaters.

By Steve Dollar Film Critic

A girl's own story, the drama that unfolds throughout "In Country" conflates the teen anxieties of a dozen coming-of-age sagas with something more gravely, and permanently, traumatic. As 17-year-old Sam Hughes (Emily Lloyd) jogs past the junkyards and diners of tiny Hopewell, Ky., her blond curls bouncing to the beat on her Walkman, Bruce Springsteen chimes in, a Greek chorus in blue denim.

"Hey little girl is your Daddy home?/ Did he go away and leave you all alone?" The song hints at something sexual, but in Sam's case, it's poignantly matter-of-fact. Not yet born when her father, a peach-fuzzed soldier, died in Vietnam, Sam's grown up as the daughter of a cipher, a shadow, a ghost. Bursting at the seams with life, she's surrounded by death - or, rather, the diminished expectations of the local men who survived the war and came home weirded out and blown away.

Adapted from Bobbie Ann Mason's 1985 novel, "In Country" reaches the screen with its themes intact. As directed by Norman Jewison, the Canadian journeyman with as many hits ("Moonstruck") as flops ("Jesus Christ Superstar"), the film could be fancifully retitled "Vietnam: The Next Generation." Yet it confronts the war as an echo whose full impact is nearly impossible to recuperate.

Sam can see its effects on her addled Uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran who may be suffering from exposure to Agent Orange; she can gauge the way it riles Emmett's hometown war buddies into spontaneous fistfights; she can sense it through a packet of letters her father wrote her mother, now remarried and living in another town.

Still, it's just out of reach - something that propels Sam all the more.

Though inventively cast, "In Country'' remains a little distant as well. Mr. Jewison has crafted a gentle, humane drama that fairly aches in its sincere intentions, but it seems as if the loaded and volatile subject of Vietnam has caused him to pull back, soften focus. This is, above all, a nice movie; too often, its emotional punch has more to do with the powerful subject matter - the film concludes with a heart-slamming visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial - than the way Mr. Jewison shapes it. Certain theatrical impulses go astray: a misguided series of Vietnam flashbacks, for instance, and the film's final shot of birds in flight, which caps an intensely emotional sequence with the ersatz sentiment of a Kodak commercial.

What connects are the performances. Ms. Lloyd, who all but smashed up the screen as a rebellious, love-starved teen in 1986's dour-funny "Wish You Were Here," adopts a Kentucky accent to play Sam, but changes little else about her effervescent persona. She's a natural, conveying the essence of adolescent doldrums when she grouses to a girlfriend, "This town's dead without a mall!"

By turns coquettish and dead-earnest, Ms. Lloyd appears to be playing what she is, dovetailing into her character's untamed bursts of energy and stifling frustrations. And with her 100-watt smile and almond-sliver eyes, the actress commands your attention. At times, though, her accent suggests she's mastered the sound, but not the sense, of regional American dialect.

As winning as Ms. Lloyd can be, it's always apparent how much she's working. Another actress, let's say Winona Ryder, may not be capable of such an incandescently robust performance, but you wonder what nuances may be blotted out by Ms. Lloyd's natural light.

Which makes Mr. Willis's work all the more remarkable. "In Country" is not Emmett's story - the character exists as a Sphinx-like borderline nutcase, ballast to anchor Sam's helium-balloon spirit. But the actor, so sweetly understated, winds up making Emmett the heart of the film. Balding, pudgy, with a ragged Fu Manchu moustache, he stubbornly refuses to face his demons - or reconcile his sense of loss - retreating into a cocoon of eccentric behavior.

Mr. Jewison steers the actor toward tragicomedy. Emmett, after all, may be doomed by Agent Orange, but that lingering threat hardly seems as crippling as the way he's simply caved in on himself. His cohorts (a swell ensemble that includes filmdom's favorite new redneck, actor Stephen Tobolowsky) each reel from the war's aftershocks in their own way, revealed as Sam persistently makes her rounds, dredging up bits of information about what went down.

Both Sam and Emmett find what they need, at least a part of it, in the movie's climactic pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The sequence is a five-hanky spectacular, but its force is honest. Unfortunately, in terms of the film, it's a moment that can pretty much stand alone. You're not crying because of what Mr. Jewison's created, you're crying because it's the Vietnam memorial. The truth of "In Country" is not in the getting there, but the going.

Dangerous Liaisons 1960

FILM REVIEW
'60s `Liaisons' Jazzy Look at Jaded Society

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: October 6, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: E/2

Movie review. Dangerous Liaisons 1960. A drama. Starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philipe. Directed by Roger Vadim. Not rated, sexual situations. Screening Room. Dangerous Liaisons 1960. A drama. Starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philipe. Directed by Roger Vadim. Not rated, sexual situations. Screening Room.

By Steve Dollar Film Critic

Sly devil that he is, cinematic flesh-peddler Roger Vadim - the man who made Brigitte Bardot a household derriere - writes his own introduction to his swinging '60s version of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses."

Dragging from a cigarette, the director saunters onto an empty movie set and begins oozing about the sexes ("As far as I know, zere are only two.") and the oversexed: Yes, sports fans, "a new species of liberated young girl," not bound by those boring old traditional norms.

Sounding like nothing so much as a suave, pseudo-existentialist answer to Russ Meyer (grindhouse auteur of "Mudhoney" and "Vixen"), Mr. Vadim plunders the 17th-century Choderlos de Laclos novel for an art-directed ode to the jazzed and the jaded. Silken thighs, narcissistic preening, the frosty boredom of Jeanne Moreau: Ahhh, Paris, my kind of town.

The film, a scandal in France three decades ago, pops up in 1989 as a revival, cashing in on interest stirred by Stephen Frears's classy "Dangerous Liaisons" and somewhat pre-empting the winter release of "Valmont," director Milos Forman's own adaptation of the durable costume drama.

Updated to the cocktail-crazed Continent of 1960, these "Liaisons" transpire in the same ceaselessly hip party circuit as "La Dolce Vita," with chic deco living rooms the site of whispered gossip and snake-tongued come-ons. Thelonious Monk shimmers on the soundtrack, and leopard skin is very in, darling.

Tacky things up a bit, and we might be watching Hugh Hefner and the boys on "Playboy - After Dark." Much like the recent documentary "Let's Get Lost," which glanced back at the era, the film celebrates a hedonistic joyride that defined the transition between the Beat Generation '50s and the peace and love '60s. It's also a reminder of what - for a while, before Ingmar Bergman ruled on America's college campuses - made foreign movies so - ooh la la - fun.

Pleasure at others' expense is the province of Ms. Moreau - a freon femme fatale - who brings an impressive range to the Countess, more or less Mrs. Valmont, as she plots some new devilment with the hubby, played by turtlenecked smoothie Gerard Philipe.

You know the story. Only some details have been changed. Gullible Madame de T ourvel (Bardot-clone Annette Vadim, one of Mr. V.'s earlier wifies) now encounters her doom at a ski resort. She'll be proof of Mr. Valmont's theory that "there aren't impregnable citadels, only ones badly attacked."

Later, the sometime-diplomat - he's bidding for a juicy United Nations post - seduces his pouting, nubile cousin by imparting such golden nuggets of carnal knowledge as "Love is the art of helping nature."

Human nature, of course, is what finally does Valmont in. Too weak to break off his affair with Madame, he stands by helplessly as Ms. Moreau's crisply cruel Juliette dispatches a telegram, using a flowery tongue that is dutifully speed-read back to her over the phone. (It's one of the funniest bits in the movie.) As the now-feckless diplomat strives to undo his wife's fling with callow Danceny (Jean Louis Trintignant), he winds up in a fistfight, fatally bashing his head during an overheate d jazz jam session.

Never more than skin deep, "Dangerous Liaisons 1960" is enjoyable trash buffed up to a coffeetable sheen. Like Valmont's mistress, the movie's simply irresistible.

Look Who's Talking

FILM REVIEW
Travolta Aside, `Talking' Evolves Into Baby Blather

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: October 13, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: F/2

Look Who's Talking. A romantic comedy. Starring John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Directed by Amy Heckerling. Rated PG-13 for language, violence, mildly off-color humor. By Steve Dollar Film Critic

Hollywood's diaper brigade marches on in "Look Who's Talking," a tiresome comedy about sex and the single mommy that deserves a more telling title: "Baby Boom-erang."

A rerun in more ways than one, the film serves up a puffy Kirstie Alley in the Diane Keaton role, playing a yuppie accountant in Manhattan whose affair with a sleazy married client (Famous Bad Actor George Segal) yields not only constant frustration but, waaaaaaaah, a little bundle of joy. Determined to assert her independence, Ms. Alley's besieged Mollie tells Mom (Olympia Dukakis, bizarrely annoying) that she was artificially inseminated. She then proceeds to cope with morning sicknes s, balloonlike maternity wear, a break with her philandering lover and the wisecracks and untoward attentions of the cabdriver (John Travolta), who scoots her to the hospital when it's time to deliver.

All along, the fetus chatters like crazy from its vantage point in Mollie's belly. (They cut to a scene of a phony-looking electronic doll, smiling and waving from the womb.) The patter seems to be an attempt to emulate Robin Williams. But the "Voice of Mikey," as the part is billed in the credits, belongs to Bruce Willis, who did pretty much the same routine in the first episode of the last season of "Moonlighting." That was the one in which Mr. Willis, portraying the unborn fruit of the show's feuding-cooing detectives, David and Maddie, engaged in free-associative banter from a uterine hot seat. Or, as the show's producers called it, "A Womb With a View."

No such wit enlivens "Look Who's Talking." The fetal-speech and toddler-talk gag is milked repeatedly - matching punch lines to every aspect of baby activity - until you're reminded of the "Lancelot Link" children's TV series. The trick there was anthropomorphic monkeys who mimicked action-adventure heroes, with lip-synchronized dialogue supplied by real human voices.

Mr. Travolta's genial James, an Italian-American palooka with a heart of warm ravioli, plays Mr. Nice Guy and part-time babysitter to Ms. Alley, a flustered Ms. Mom who doesn't realize Johnny Boy's the guy for her. That is, not until she endures a series of Blind Dates from Hell and shares a traumatic episode involving James's doddering grandpa (the redeeming Abe Vigoda) and wayward Mikey.

Strictly made-from-TV, the situations are broadly drawn and overtly hand-me-down. This extends to the casting of Mr. Travolta, who's had his head in the sand since "Perfect'' bombed.

The producers, with an eye to Tom Selleck in "Three Men and a Baby," must be counting on women flocking en masse to worship another damp-eyed hunk, turning all gooey inside at the sight of a bassinet.

But, hey, here's a morsel of charity. With so much of the movie a loud, brassy embarrassment, Mr. Travolta's easygoing performance is welcome. Whether it represents a comeback is another question. Top-billed but third-ranked in terms of screen time - after Ms. Alley and "The Voice of Mikey" - the actor appears content to simply have his dimpled chin back in action.

Such prudence whistles far above the head of director Amy Heckerling, whose reputation has steadily spiraled toward the critic's wastebin since her increasingly appreciated debut, 1982's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." A teen genre piece with a subversive undercurrent (no visible parents, an abortion, sex jokes that rang true, Sean Penn), "Fast Times" wasn't without its requisite moments of meatball yucks, but it was easy to forgive some missteps because the movie was so smart in other ways. [NOTE: Glitch here] what she can get; or (b) she's so cynical about the whole process that she doesn't care anymore.

The occasional successes of Susan Seidelman or Euzhan Palcy aside, movies like "Look Who's Talking" are a poor comment on the status of women directors in Hollywood. They say that in an equal opportunity society, women are as free as men to become dimwitted hacks.

Tango and Cash

FILM REVIEW
This `Tango' dances with two left feet

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: December 22, 1989
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: E/1

Film critic, Steve Dollar, reviews "Tango and Cash." Tango and Cash. A buddy film. Starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell. Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Rated R for language, nudity, violence and drug scenes. At metro area theaters.

Steve Dollar Film critic

A $50 million weenie joke, "Tango and Cash" earns several distinct honors:

- It's the last buddy movie of the decade.

- It's the first buddy movie to recognize the influence of "Batman" - though it's sometimes hard to tell if that means the recent blockbuster or the '60s TV show.

- Sylvester Stallone (he's Tango) tries to upscale his screen image, sheathing his rippled pectorals in slick Giorgio Armani threads, but he still has a mouth like a smoked trout.

- Neither Mr. Stallone nor Kurt Russell (he's Cash), as he-man undercover cops framed and forced into the slammer, actually has a love scene - even with each other. But they do flash their bare buttocks on the way to the prison shower, where they coyly bat their eyes and make drop-the-soap jokes.

Cutting up on a recent "Arsenio Hall Show," the pair resembled nothing so much as a couple of schoolboys on the lam, burning off excess testosterone by clowning around, taking playful jabs at each other's masculinity.

Male bonding. Gosh, gets you all misty, doesn't it?

"Tango and Cash" operates on a similar formula. The movie is so utterly facetious that it's impossible to regard seriously; the plot - in which our pals meet cute, are set up, get mad and even the score with a heavily armed drug cartel - is paper-thin, never posing a plausible threat to the alternating currents of bone-crunching action and macho horseplay.

Two hunks kick butt. They crack jokes. Ooops, they're in trouble again - omigod! - they just might die! But, hey, why worry? They think it's pretty funny being lowered into tanks of water while subhuman behemoths torture them with electric cables. It's a laugh riot! After all, it's only a movie and they already know they're going to kill everybody before the last reel.

Produced by Jon Peters and Peter Guber - the men whom Sony just paid untold megabucks to run Columbia Pictures, the men who made "Batman" -"Tango and Cash" is big, stupid and a ridiculously shameful lot of fun. You may need an emergency EEG after leaving the theater, but you won't be any dizzier than Michael J. Pollard, who is one of the film's secret pleasures.

Underneath its package-deal facade (Sly! Kurt! Together again for the first t ime!) there's a wormy little B-movie trying to chew it's way through. Director Andrei Konchalovsky, who won respect for the vaguely similar buddy-slugfest "Runaway Train," walked off the set after three weeks, but not before hiring a dandy ensemble of drug-lord heavies and bug-eyed weirdos.

Jack Palance, reprising his villainry from "Batman," is a quirky kingpin whose desiccated elegance is worthy of '40s pulp fiction; Brion James, one of the nastiest men alive, is a cockney terror with a bad ponytail; Clint Howard, Ron's little brother, is a Slinky-hefting psycho; and Mr. Pollard, wearing a magnifying lens over one eye just like Rick Moranis in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," is a space-cadet munchkin version of "Q" from the James Bond films. He even builds Mr. Russell and Mr. Stallone their own batmobile - "an RV from hell."

That's as much subtlety as you can hope from "Tango and Cash," but, hey, I'll take it. Two seats away from me at the preview, a woman bounced in her chair and bellowed at the plasma-rich tapestry unfolding on the screen.

"Kill him!" she shouted. "Kill him again!"

Onward and upward with the arts.

Lambada

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE STAFF
DATE: March 20, 1990
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Constitution

The Atlanta Journal
SECTION: FEATURES
PAGE: C/1

"Lambada." A musical. Directed by Joel Silberg. Starring J. Eddie Peck and Melora Hardin. Rated PG for sexual suggestiveness. At metro area theaters. "The Forbidden Dance." A musical. Directed by Greydon Clark. Starring Laura Herring and Jeff James. Rated PG-13 for sexual suggestiveness. At metro area theaters.

Moviemakers give lambada a bum's rush

Steve Dollar Film critic

Ah, lambada! The forbidden trend.

Deep in the tropical rain forest of Hollywood, where even the sun dare not penetrate smoke-filled studio boardrooms, men with exotic names - such as Golan and Globus - have dreamed rich dreams. They've felt a stray polyrhythm slither up a Sansabelt pant leg, enflaming the loins and gripping the soul with the supple fervor of an anaconda.

That's right. They smell money!

And they're not alone. The rush to cash in on the curious non-craze that is lambada is the exploitation film's version of the 100-yard dash. As with bygone cycles of break-dance-graffiti movies and "Flashdance"/"Dirty Dancing" clones, the trick is to be the first to slap your movie on the screen, before the public gets bored with the whole idea.

There's a flaw in the theory, though. They might get bored with the movie, too.

It's the snooze button, not hips unhinged by a taboo beat, that proves irresistible in "Lambada," a Cannon Pictures quickie ushered into production so quickly that it's virtually forgotten the dance that supposedly inspired it.

Blade (rent-a-hunk J. Eddie Peck) teaches math to Beverly Hills brats by day; at night, he dons motorcycle leathers, kisses his homely wife goodnight and rumbles down to an East Los Angeles nightclub where he does . . . the lambada! However, his purpose is deceptively noble: Born of humble Chicano parents, Blade heeds a civic urge to educate the club's dance-crazy street kids.

Meanwhile, spoiled little rich girl Sandy (Melora Hardin) develops a wicked crush on her teacher and trails him to the club, where she offers to lick his sweat. Complications ensue.

Not much dancing, though. "Lambada" looks like a "Stand and Deliver" knockoff that somebody (executive producer Yoram Globus, perhaps?) decided would be a little less stale spiced with a couple of lambada references and a hint of hanky-panky.

Way cheesier, and a lot more fun, is "The Forbidden Dance," swept into theaters by Mr. Globus's former partner, Menahem Golan. Leave it to the fearless Mr. Golan and exploitation wizard Greydon Clark ("Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate") to leap into the absurd by tapping not one, but two trends.

Yup. Lissome Princess Nisa (former Miss USA Laura Herring) is in midgrind, performing a tribal dance ritual in the steaming heart of the Amazon when - drat! - evil white men with guns and tractors plow right over her village, dispersing her people into the jungle. Being a plucky princess, Nisa flies to L.A., where she and stoic shaman Joa (Sid Haig of "Spider Baby") intend to confront a rain-forest-burning developer (Richard Lynch).

Wouldn't you know it? Joa's busted and Nisa winds up as a housemaid, patronized by Beverly Hills bigots. (Much like its competitor, "The Forbidden Dance" ex ploits class divisions and, yes, lambada-phobia. The way some folks react in these films, you'd think the dance was a Sandinista conspiracy instead of an Anglo marketing ploy.)

Poor Nisa finds an ally in Jason (Jeff James), the disco-possessed son of her snooty employers who happens upon her in the middle of a solo lambada and is smitten. (He feels that anaconda grip, too). Together, they fly in the face of convention - not to mention class snobbery and Jeff's miffed ex-girlfriend - and plot to win a dance contest. If they succeed, the pair gets to appear on national TV with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Maybe then they can warn America about the vanishing r ain forest!

Will they make it? Or will Nisa succumb to corruption and spend empty nights on Hollywood Boulevard, billed as "Queen of the Jungle" and forced to lock hips with overweight businessmen out for cheap thrills?

Only the lambada knows.

Strapless

FILM REVIEW
Hare's moody `Strapless' isn't all that revealing

BYLINE: DOLLAR ,STEVE Steve Dollar Film critic STAFF
DATE: May 18, 1990
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
EDITION: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
SECTION: PREVIEW
PAGE: D/1

Movie review on "Strapless," a drama starring Blair Brown, Bruno Ganz and Bridget Fonda, and directed by David Hare. "Strapless" A drama. Starring Blair Brown, Bruno Ganz and Bridget Fonda. Directed by David Hare. Rated R for language, sexual situations. At Tara

Much ado about Blair Brown knitting worry lines into her forehead, "Strapless" is the latest feminine character study from David Hare -another instance of the British writer-director attempting to corner the market in the sophisticated life-crisis drama.

This sort of thing can play great onstage, where a singular performance can reflect brilliantly in the footlights and draw an audience dangerously close, as moth to flame.

Onscreen, however, Mr. Hare's mood pieces (they include 1985's "Wetherby" with Vanessa Redgrave and "Plenty" with Meryl Streep) have a tendency to dither, to court vagueness even as their troubled heroines seek a difficult clarity. Say what you want about the virtues of ambiguity in art, but my biggest problem with these films is that there is, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, no "there" there.

Instead, "Strapless" has Ms. Brown, who offers a variation on her weekly role as a bemused, indecisive woman in that post-"Annie Hall" Manhattan of hip neuroses, "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd." If the TV show finds the actress treading a high-wire suspended between wobbly poles marked Wit and Torpor, the movie pitches her into an existential swamp, where Important Choices lay, like lifesaving branches, just within tentative reach.

As Lillian Hempel, an American physician employed at an embattled London hospital, Ms. Brown is a victim of the career-first syndrome. Her only visible rewards are the quaint digs she shares with baby sister Amy (Bridget Fonda) - a guiltless free-spirit with a thing for swarthy men on motorcycles.

On vacation in what looks like Italy, Lillian is solicited by an elegant cont inental gentleman named Raymond (Bruno Ganz, the earthbound angel of "Wings of Desire," who's obviously read the Euro-trash edition of "How To Pick Up Girls"). Refusing no for an answer, he woos Lillian over an impromptu lunch, then trails her to London when she fails to show up for an evening date. Presenting a horse as love offering, he proposes marriage; Lillian's flabbergasted . . . but charmed.

What happens next is an elliptical pas de deux in which suave mysterioso Raymond convinces Lillian to take a leap, then vanishes, leaving behind a pile of bad debt. Lillian reels, uncovers secrets and, yipes, experiences interpersonal growth. Amy, given a winning surplus of sass and vinegar by the always-sporting Ms. Fonda, becomes pregnant and elects to deliver the newborn in a hot tub, accompanied by Mozart.

The point being that you can't plan life, but you shouldn't let it steamroll past you, especially if you're an unmarried professional woman whose biological clock is winding down, poor thing. (Critics make claims for Mr. Hare's sensitive feminist credentials, but I wonder . . . )

The dilemma with writing scripts about characters who are essentially self-absorbed - as is Lillian - is that they have to grab an audience by the collar. Unlike, say, a standard genre exercise, with its prefabricated hooks to snag your attention, such a drama is constructed from the interior.

Ms. Brown, whose performance has a delicate, winsome quality, is engaging in a showcase role; too bad it showcases her treading water. (Except when she feud s with Ms. Fonda as her sibling rival; suddenly, it's a different movie.)

The flaw is the way "Strapless" has been imagined. The narrative relies on visual asides, symbolic gestures - a stranded Mercedes-Benz that Raymond offers as a gift, a dying cancer patient, a proud horse bathed in moonlight - to lend it resonance that the dialogue can only grasp at.

Mr. Hare, while obviously no Thatcherite, still represents the British film industry at its toniest. "Strapless" is a movie for coffee-table sensibilities - and decaffeinated ones at that.

Rhymes with Australia

2006-05-17T19:42:00.000-04:00

Nick was chill. Q&A version to follow. Watch this space.

Effin' A ... DFA

2006-04-04T01:08:00.000-04:00

{ ... a chat with Tim Goldsworthy of DFA, a production duo with unambiguously awesome new coffee mugs. This was for Time Out Chicago. The super-elongated Stomp & Stammer version is here ...}

Fearlessly shaking loose dance music for all its spare change, the production team of Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy—better known as DFA—is coming off one huge year straight into another one. The New York mixologists scored with 2005’s debut album from LCD Soundsystem, and DFA’s clashy, hybrid style is credited with inspiring the rise of dance-punk.

Goldsworthy, an affable Brit who hails from Polly Jean Harvey’s hometown of Yeovil, is indifferent to the surface noise. He sat down recently at DFA headquarters in Manhattan’s West Village to chat with us about their achievements—summarized quite pulsingly on The DFA Remixes – Chapter One (DFA/Astralwerks)—and suggested that the “punk” label is a misnomer.

Time Out Chicago : What’s it like to have Britney’s people dialing you up for a remix?
Tim Goldsworthy: It just seemed silly and a bit ridiculous. We were being called the Neptunes of underground dance music. It’s just really, really stupid. They’re working with Britney and Gwen Stefani and selling millions and millions of records, and we’re working with Radio 4, and selling maybe a couple of thousand. It also showed us the ridiculous side of the major-label A&R scene. We’d been in a few magazines, and people are going, “They must be great,” without ever listening to our music at all. You’ve heard the remixes. I don’t think there is one under ten minutes. People call us “funk-punky,” but it’s pretty proggy. I don’t know how that would have transferred to someone like Janet Jackson.
TOC : How would you pervert the sound of the bands you remixed?
TG: You listen through the track and try to find that one little spark: “Oh, that’s interesting!” Sometimes it’s like working on those influences that the band themselves might be a bit too tasteful about. It might be a little cheesy, so they don’t fully go for it. Me and James, we have absolutely no shame in doing outrageously cheesy disco or out-there spacey, proggy Pink Floyd The Wall –era disco.
TOC : That’s the joy of it.
TG: A lot of bands do play it safe. James and I came from the worst areas for that. James came from more of a math-rocky American indie-rock thing, and I came from trip-hop. Both are very up there in their deep seriousness. We’re helping these people out. We freed ourselves, and we’re helping them along the way.
TOC : How did you free yourselves?
TG: The first breakthrough is the first remix we did on the record, which was the Le Tigre (“Deceptacon”). At that point, people were doing remixes that were very experimental or else very banging club mixes. We went out for pretty classic early ’80s New York gay disco—arty gay disco—and some of those records are really bad. But they didn’t have that superseriousness about them. And that kick-started the whole thing. The Gorillaz (“Dare”), I guess, and the Chemical Brothers (“The Boxer”) almost, at some point, get a little [King] Crimson. So, gay disco and prog.
TOC : Like chocolate and peanut butter.
TG: Yeah, yeah. And Radio 4 (“Dance to the Underground”) has a saxophone in it. I don’t think that’s been a safe instrument for the last 30 years.
TOC : The early ’80s New York dance scene was so much fun. You had the gay disco on one hand, but you also had these scrappy CBGB punk bands and these street funk acts, and they all overlapped.
TG: There weren’t any cliquey rules about it then. The idea of doing something experimental and new, people were actually doing it. And now, when people are experimental, you know what it will sound like. It will have some [ Makes clicking noises ] kind of bits and it will be atonal, and won’t have any structure to it. I’ve forgotten about it already. Back then, it was a bit different. It was about weird sound machines and marimbas.
TOC : Despite the notoriety, you’re not doing duets with Snoop Dogg.
TG: James and I have been through it before. We’re aware of how machines can take things away from you. We’re lucky enough that this is our second or third chance at this, which doesn’t happen very often. At the time, when we were on magazine covers and were being talked about as huge and fantastic and beautiful, we could have got people in to be like, “Oh, let’s launch a range of cutlery.”

Dog Star Man

2006-03-11T23:38:00.000-05:00

Woof!
Full Q&A text to come ...

Album of the Week

2006-03-05T18:06:00.000-05:00

{...from Time Out Chicago ... for a somewhat revised version, go here ...}

Neko Case

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
(Anti-)

Reverb swathes Neko Case in an angelic glow on her latest album. It catches her up into a rapturous cloud and somehow makes her voice—already vibrant and rich in emotional nuance—into something atmospheric. It also gives the material on the Chicago singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album a specific vibe whose pleasures, paradoxically, aren’t so easy to pin down.

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is a blissfully out-of-time song cycle that evokes a lot of different things, and keeps revealing more with each listen. At any turn, we’re reminded of old-school country-gospel harmonies, the otherworldly twang of Angelo Badalamenti soundtracks, the early 1960s dream pop of half-forgotten girl groups and doo-wop swains, and the soulful Americana of the Band (yep, that is Garth Hudson playing piano and organ on several cuts). But, mostly, we marvel at how Case inhabits this ephemeral world of sound as if it were her own private playhouse—a jukebox of the mind, stuffed with tumbleweeds and glimmer.

Four years in the making, between Case’s stints backing up various pals (like John Doe), working various side projects and performing with the New Pornographers, Fox Confessor is unabashedly retro in spirit yet contemporary in its imagination. Her collaborators, who include members of Calexico and the Sadies, help create intricate and detailed arrangements that animate the lyrics with subtle flourishes. These allow Case to sidestep the literal in her songwriting, as she delves into self-invented fables (“Margaret vs. Pauline”), dwells in sweet-sad waltz-time (“Star Witness,” “That Teenage Feeling”), dials up John the Revelator (“John Saw that Number”), and limns enigmatic scenarios (“The Needle Has Landed”) that resolve in cello-and-dulcimer duets and a few descending guitar notes that keep echoing—even when the reverb is off.

The Onion Domes of Tallahassee ...

2006-03-02T01:16:00.000-05:00

It's official. Birthday follies and literary excess: March 25 at Barbes in beautiful brownstoned Park Slope. Showtime is 6 p.m. Admission is free. And musical guests Matt Moran (vibes) and Oscar Noriega (reeds) will provide some of that groovy free-associative late-night radio hepcat jouissance. I'll be workshopping a memoir-in-progress about punk rock, the Florida Panhandle and the sound of breaking glass. C'mon, feel the noize ...

Viva Las Vegas

2006-01-11T20:47:00.000-05:00

Barbie and the Anti-Ken, Mr. Tim Von Swine, celebrate a moment of glory at the Circle Bar, Las Vegas, following the "porn Oscars." My only lament is I left my sparkling midnight velvet smoking jacket back home in Brooklyn, and the sad fact of $6.50 plastic bottles of Miller Light instead of anything resembling actual beer. Standards are falling fast in Babylon.

Album of the Week

2005-12-22T17:53:00.000-05:00

Beck
Guerolito (Interscope)

Beck made his bones on the sheer recombinant jollies of cut-and-paste: He snatched up hip-hop's fetish for hooky samples and microsurgical sonic stitchery, added goofball dada lyrics and created his own ongoing art project. Whether ear candy like Odelay was nutritious or merely a zesty backdrop for Beck's inspired doggerel didn't matter as much as the pleasure it gave. He got back to those roots on this year's Guero, a return to chock-a-block form after the orchestral melancholy of 2002's Sea Change. And now, on Guerolito, Beck goes one step beyond. The remix disc punches up the singer's natural affinity for gonzo noise-bursts and studio arcana, with 14 freshly scrambled versions of original Guero tracks, variously deconstructed and super-sized by folks like Adrock (from the Beastie Boys), John King (of Dust Brothers fame), Air, El-P and Boards of Canada.

The disc is a huge amount of fun, even when it overdoes the quirky synthesizer shtick. 8Bit maxes out the video-game noise effects of "Hell Yes," now accurately described by the title "Ghettochip Malfunction," letting Beck rock with a robot voice (À la Kraftwerk) and laying in hard on the lo-fi keyboard blurts. Meanwhile, Air takes "Missing" and reinvents it as a Gary Numan tribute called "Heaven Hammer." Diplo goes for a mild mash-up on "Wish Coin" (a version of "Go It Alone"), which matches Beck's sing-songy vocals and spare handclaps to a downtempo rhythmic bed borrowed from the English Beat's "Twist and Crawl." We have to admit, though, that our favorite moment is Petra Haden's "la-la-la" chorus fluttering over ominous synths on "Rental Car." It's so incongruous it's perfect—which is an apt description of Guerolito's best parts, as well.

I Think I Saw That Flying Squirrel Suit on eBay

2005-11-20T23:29:00.000-05:00

{... this is another version of the version of the version I misplaced somewhere on my hard drive, so until that gets re-transcribed, enjoy this one. I was still wobbly from surgery and more than a tad zonked on Vicodin when I made it through a cold February rain to her loft. What with the French roast, the green tea cookies, and the smart conversation, I really hated to leave. Stay tuned for an update ...}

One day the phone rings. Laurie Anderson picks it up. It’s NASA, a voice says, and we want to hire you as our first artist-in-residence.

Now, Anderson, a performance artist who has hitchhiked to the North Pole and experienced near-death in the Himalayas, is as intrepid as she is insatiably curious. But this threw even her for a loop.

She hung up, thinking it was a prank. And a pretty damn good one. NASA called back, and Anderson spent 2002 doing all kinds of things she never imagined. “They never had one before,” she says. “So I said, "What do I do?" And they said, "We don't know. What do you think you should do?"

What Anderson did was create The End of the Moon, her current one-woman show that comes Nov. 20 to the Art Institute of Chicago. “It was incredibly freeing,” Anderson says. “So I invented the job. The End of the Moon is the story of how I did that - how I thought about where to go, what to do, what to see, what to make. In the end, what to make is totally intimidating.”

We’re sitting in Anderson’s airy, Zen-calm TriBeCa loft, which she calls her “bachelorette pad.” Her boyfriend, the leather-clad New York rocker Lou Reed, is on the road – though that’s his portrait hanging on one of the walls. (An image of the Dalai Lama is its only competition). That’s not the sweet funk of incense floating across the room, but rather the intoxicating, French-roasted aroma from a pot of Peet’s Coffee brewing in the corner. This isn’t Tibet, but downtown Manhattan, after all.

Anderson, at 57, is as pixie-like as ever. Her wide smile produces big dimples, and conversation spills from her with an ease as certain as the encyclopedic whir of her intellect. This is handy, since Moon is scarcely more than 90 minutes of Anderson talking. There’s a few minutes of viola, and some evocative light and stage design, but the show is stripped down to the basics.

Much of the piece reflects on Anderson’s adventures with NASA. “They’re already doing colossal art projects,” she says, “like building a stairway to space out of nano-tubes. This is Jack and the Beanstalk stuff. Biological electronics. I met people I would never meet otherwise: An ex-NAVY Seal, a mountaineer. One of his friends, who was also a mountain climber, had just climbed a mountain and died in a cave in the snow. He went to get his friend’s body in the same snowstorm to bring it down. I don’t know guys like that in the New York art world.”

Anderson’s loft lies in viewing distance of the World Trade Center site. The events of 9/11 lent a strange prescience to her 1982 hit “O, Superman” (“Here come the planes/They’re American planes/Made in America”), which sounded eerie to start with. With Moon, Anderson sketches a vivid and unlikely analogy for the catastrophe, one that only begins on that morning in September.

“I've become more and more aware that this is a sad piece,” she says. “And I didn't think that it was when I wrote it. But I understood, touring it, that it's really about losing something. I wrote this when we were going into this war with Iraq, and what I lost was my country. I think that I am not alone in feeling this way: this feeling of uneasiness and sadness and loss.”

These are things Anderson finds hard to put into words. “I don’t want to say things in words like ‘terror’ and ‘torture’ and ‘loss’ and ‘sadness.’,” she says, explaining why the violin and viola have become important to her work again, as they were when she began in the 1970s. “But a violin says that right away and right to your heart. And it doesn’t do it in a rhetorical way. It does it in an emotional way. It comes in through your skin.”

Something Anderson’s peers might lament is that she was the first – and last – artist to receive the NASA seal of approval. The program was a one-shot deal. We have to wonder though, now that Internet millionaires are ponying up long green for day trips to outer space, if Anderson considered taking the big ride.

“I’m such a cheapskate,” she says. “No. But there’s an incredible ride near Dollywood that I would recommend over that. It’s a large cylinder, right in the road to Dollywood. Big cylinder, a net in the middle. The cylinder is about 100 feet in diameter, padded. You walk onto the net suspended in the middle of it in a kind of flying squirrel outfit, and they turn on a giant fan and you start to fly. Wow. I did it all day. I went back again and again.“

It’s not just another roadside attraction?

“It’s a big roadside attraction. Ask anybody. Go flying in a squirrel suit. Unbelievable!”

Clance!

2005-11-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

{... for the Oxford American, now revised ...}

Nobody fronts on Clarence Fountain.

Sixty-three years as a gospel singer, a man learns something, and what he doesn’t learn he’s crafty enough to convince you that he knows anyway. You’ve got to believe him, just as he believes in Him. Sure, he’s a mere mortal vessel – like all the members of his group, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the most widely heard and flat-out exuberant of extant old-time houserocking black gospel harmonizers. But the man has trace elements of Tabasco in his blood. He is blind, yet he has seen. He gets up there every night, and he hollers, and he moans,
and he vamps, and he prances, kicking up a leg and swerving around on one foot and then the other, placing his hands on his hips in a gesture of playful defiance – getting sassified – a regular dandy for the Lord, with those lapels as wide as dove’s wings, that growl swelling from deep in the back of his throat only to become subsumed into the ether of praise.

That’s what it’s all about. How much is there to know, really? Fountain and his surviving original bandmate – George Scott – who first sang together at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, and Jimmy Carter, who came along later, are in their 70s now. Pop culture, with its unpredictable warp and woof, has embraced them with an enthusiasm no one could quite have expected. Sheer longevity and relative good health seems to have guaranteed the singers some of that, as if they were indefatigable emissaries from some now-intangible theme park of Southern consciousness: Jubilee Land! But instead of declining into, say Branson, Mo., cheesiness, the Blind Boys sharpened their vision. They got game. Twenty years ago, when they performed as a Greek chorus in Bob Telson and Lee Breuer’s off-Broadway hit The Gospel at Colonus, they were part of a conceptual coup: How clever to hire a blind gospel group for a downhome retelling of the Oedipus myth? Even there, though, that fusion of bedrock New Testament gravitas that the Blind Boys represent, pre-Christian tragedy, and the composers’ pop-R&B sensibilities was a touch prophetic. The audience for so-called “roots” music wasn’t as focused then and jam band culture was still the nearly exclusive province of the Grateful Dead. The gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where the Blind Boys were as eminent and electrifying as the Rolling Stones, still felt like a well-kept secret among the hung-over rock fans who gathered there among the genuinely faithful, sheepishly pulling on a cold Dixie Beer and calling it a sacrament.

These days, the Blind Boys bring the gospel tent to the beer drinkers. They record for Peter Gabriel’s label. They’ve won back-to-back Grammy Awards. They cover songs by Tom Waits and Prince and even the Rolling Stones, with an ear for the spiritual message – the yearning, perhaps – embedded in the secular. Or, at least, they find the most gospel-friendly material from performers whose absorption of gospel feeling is evident, even as they walk in sin.

This is not a big thing to Clarence Fountain. This is the natural thing. “I’m singing gospel and that’s the end,” he says. Fountain is propped up in bed, as lunchtime nears in a Day’s Inn hotel room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s still in his underwear – the silky stage duds are stashed in the closet – but he’s got those pitch-black hundred-dollar wraparound shades that only a blind man can wear with such authority. (Two-thirds of your onstage presence, he insists, “is how you dress.”) He’s dragging a bit. A head cold has littered gravel over his red-carpet baritone, and a late night at the Jammy Awards -- the Oscars of post-hippie rock – has him off to a slow start. The Blind Boys shared the stage with Robert Randolph, the astonishing sacred steel guitar player who backed them on last year’s Higher Ground album, and that amplified whine was too loud for Fountain. “Ooooh, God,” he says, making a shushing noise. “I’m not singing rock’n’roll. You might hear a rock’n’roll tune. But listen to me. See what I’m singing about. I’m not singing about ‘Darling, I love you’ or ‘Bring it on home to me.’ No. I’m singing about the Lord. So ever how I turn a song around, it doesn’t matter, I’m still singing about the Lord. Pick the right song at the right time and you hit the jackpot. You can make a song. Make sure you’re singing the right words, and singing them at the right time, and singing about what you singing about. My forte is to sing about God. He said the cattle of a thousand years belonged to him. So if he can keep the cows going, I know he can keep me going.”

He might be right. One thing that’s immediately obvious, comparing the group’s older recordings to more recent collections, is the greater complexity of arrangements and instrumentation, and the blossoming variety of the vocals. These albums, with their phalanxes of special guests and session aces, risk the “all-star blues revival” syndrome in which elder “legends” who have never claimed their due are trotted out with rock stars du jour. The legends get a nice paycheck. The rock stars fulfill an adolescent fantasy. The music stinks. Not so the Blind Boys. If, at times, the productions are a touch over-calculated, the singing always brings it back home. And Fountain is too danged ornery for it to be any other way.

Look at Sam Cooke, he says. Sam Cooke, a memory, a moment of eternity on an all-night oldies station. Sam Cooke made his choice. Clarence Fountain made his. “Me and Sam was buddy buddies. We recorded for the same label. When the man gave him a contract he gave me one too. He offered me one, I just didn’t take it. I thought it was a thing that he shouldn’t have done. But listen, you can’t control people. Y’know? They have a mind of their own. And I think that the Lord gave me a few more years, just for that particular thing that I did. I ain’t saying it’s true! But I’m here, and he gone. Sound like I could be right, y’know. So, I’m here. He give you longevity. He give you what you deserve. Hezekiah prayed to him to give him 15 more years. He was sick on his deathbed – heh! – God gave it to him. Y’know. I feel like he done the same thing for me. Yeah.”

In a few hours, Fountain will be back onstage. There’s a big show at the Bowery Ballroom. Randolph, an ordained minister who favors cornrows and sports jerseys, will be back rocking that pedal steel for the jammy constituency. The Blind Boys will be in their element. And Clarence Fountain will be laying down the Word. He’ll sing Mick Jagger’s words, too, and cut up when you ask if he ever broke bread with the man who begged “Sympathy for the Devil,” as he has with another British rock star, a man named for an archangel.

“I never met Mick Jagger,” Fountain says. “If I did I’d tell him give me some of my money!”

He’s tickled now. Gospel, the singer will tell you, was the first music. But Clarence Fountain is having the last laugh. He incarnates something we all feel and know, those of us who are given to feeling and knowing, those of us who are never more vulnerable and wise then when the speaker cones tremble and a mighty voice tumbles from on high. When that happens, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that gospel and blues and R&B and rock’n’roll – and by extension hip-hop, even when it’s all abstract Timbaland bleep-blip -- are all guided by an essential transformational energy. It’s that alchemical flash of the spirit that takes an ordinary observation – “Bring your sweet loving on home to me,” “Don’t wanna walk and talk about Jesus, I just wanna see his face” – and makes it gigantic, the heart’s loudest thrum of desire, and whether it’s carnal or spiritual, it feels very much the same. The Blind Boys stay grounded in the Rock of Ages, but they found a way to satisfy those of us who still subscribe to the way of all flesh. And make our hearts thrum, just a little bit louder now.

Omni Omni Omni Omni Omni Beer!

2005-11-18T23:39:00.000-05:00

Hit it or quit it.

An Interview with Half a TomKat

2005-11-18T23:14:00.000-05:00

Edicion Espanol, y'all I remember that she was very, very late and that we barely had enough time for her tea to arrive and it was over. She did have a cute way of wrinkling her nose to express disfavor, but otherwise did little of great interest. Plays better now, though ...

Banging on a Can

2005-11-15T18:27:00.000-05:00

{... written a couple of years back for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ...}

Classical music is not what it used to be. Recently, the often alarmist British critic Norman Lebrecht declared that the field's recording industry, already in decline, would actually collapse by the end of the year. That's an extravagant prediction, but indicative of a crisis.

Michael Gordon is not worried. The composer is rolling with the new. "Orchestras will become more like museum pieces, focused on repertory alone," says Gordon, who co-founded the contemporary music organization Bang on a Can in 1987, with fellow composers Julia Wolfe (his wife) and David Lang. Since then, they've produced more than 150 concerts, including the annual Bang on a Can marathons of new and untested music; launched a successful independent record label; and spawned a chamber outfit, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, which performs their compositions and dozens of pieces commissioned from an eclectic variety of other composers. "Ensembles like Bang on a Can are a whole different thing. The only connection between the two will be technique," Gordon says.

Boasting a repertoire of (mostly) newly minted pieces, the six-piece Bang on a Can All-Stars weds conservatory chops to vividly imaginative music. It's the kind of sound that reflects the influence of both 1960s minimalism and amplified rock, the improvisatory flair of jazz and the ambient whir of modern life.

While the Kronos Quartet has pioneered a similar approach in a conventional string quartet format, the All-Stars flaunt a more diverse instrumentation and a grittier East Coast attitude. The ensemble's roster suggests a crazy quilt of affiliations: Guitarist Mark Stewart tours with Paul Simon; cellist Wendy Sutter has backed up Baryshnikov; percussionist David Cossin was a key player on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack. And so on.

"The energy of the group continues to really excite me," says Evan Ziporyn, the clarinetist, whose own passions, for instance, run to the Boston-based gamelan orchestra he leads. "Normally, there are two paradigms in Western music. Chamber music produced an incredibly disciplined, exact thing, which is amazing when it works. And then there's the jazz model, where you have this amazing empathy between the players. You have this latitude. We always wanted the precision of chamber music and the complexity of that -- we wanted to do composed music -- but we really wanted the players to be individuals. There is no one way that the cello is going to sound."

The band's liveliness extends to its choice of material. Because the Atlanta concert is the only stop on the tour where the All-Stars won't be joined by minimalist godfather Terry Riley, the concert will feature works by more composers. There's a piece each by Wolfe and Gordon, as well as salutes to Dutch heavyweight Louis Andriessen and American visionary Conlon Nancarrow, whose music -- deemed too difficult for human hands to play -- was composed mainly for player pianos. There are works from jazz musicians (Don Byron's "Dark Room"); a composer who notoriously concocts pieces for armies of boomboxes (Phil Kline's "Exquisite Corpses"); and discoveries from the Bang on a Can marathon (Zack Browning's "Back Speed Double Marathon"), a kind of American Idol of the new-music world in which composer/players get 10 minutes in the spotlight.

"I'm a pretty good example of their mission," says Kline, known for his yearly "Unsilent Night" gatherings in which participants march through downtown Manhattan with boomboxes on their shoulders, all playing tapes made by the composer. Eventually, Kline's work came to the attention of Bang on a Can , and he wound up in the 1992 marathon.

"That was the beginning of my big break," continues Kline, who has moved onto song cycles, such as the one on his new album, Zippo Songs, which was released on Bang on a Can 's Cantaloupe label. "The All-Stars are the first chamber group that to a large extent really got it both ways. They've got no trouble with the flyspecks -- those complicated pieces of modernist music -- but if I give Mark Stewart a rock riff, he has no problem with that, either."

Perhaps, as Gordon suggests, it's all part of a healthy paradigm shift. On his forthcoming Nonesuch album, Light Is Calling, the composer works with producers known for their expertise in electronica. That's the sound of the dance club now, but 40 years ago a minimalist pioneer like Steve Reich was doing pretty much the same thing -- splicing tape loops by hand rather than using a Powerbook. "Popular music is consumed so quickly," Gordon says, leaning forward in an armchair in the TriBeCa loft he shares with Wolfe and their 8-year-old daughter. "But in classical music it's always been possible for someone to be ahead of their time. Things are moving at a faster pace now."

The challenge for enterprises like Bang on a Can seems to be one of walking the line: to capture that of-the-moment cachet of the next pop wave while resisting instant consumption. It makes for the best kind of creative tension.

Gordon, who points out a view of the former World Trade Center site from one of the generous windows in his apartment, is nothing if not optimistic. Classical music as we know it may be in trouble, but it's far from an endangered species. "Even that girl in the Dixie Chicks who plays the violin has done an incredible amount for the instrument," he says. "My daughter plays violin, and she saw her picture in the paper the other day. She got very excited."

No Stone Unturned

2005-11-13T16:46:00.000-05:00

Improvisation is the soul of jazz and blues, but what happens when the spontaneous act of musical invention is freely embraced for its own sake? There's a broad wing of the contemporary music scene devoted to finding out. These artists may draw from any sort of tradition, and performances - such as the summit staged Friday at The Stone in the East Village - can become occasions for playful, bold excursions. Indulgence loomed, but was tartly dimissed.

The concert, billed as a "John Zorn Improv Party," was a benefit for the tiny, artist-run venue. Zorn, who runs the newly opened club, is a downtown New York composer and fiery advocate for new music. He straddles the worlds of jazz, classical, and experimental rock. Often, he scrambles them all together, working with dozens of musicians within his considerable orbit of influence. Several of those performers got together for the first of two hour-long sets, playing brief pieces in groupings of two, three or four.

Brevity encouraged wit. One of the most enjoyable encounters featured Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa - or Chinese lute - with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and Ikue Mori, a percussionist who uses a laptop and a processor to generate blurts, bleeps, blips and other sci-fi soundtrack effects. At its fleetest, the trio blurred definitions: they played a mirror game in which sounds created by one instrument glimmered in the others, stringed resonances whizzing through the air like a jai-alai ball. The Brazilian percussion master Cyro Baptista commanded ear and eye in his appearances. In a trio with bassist Shanir Blumenkranz and drummer Matt Wilson, he wielded a crazyquilt succession of bells, shakers. poppers, and whizzers, turning often child-like instruments into vessels of shaman-like intent - and absolute fun. And with Min Xiao-Fen he found a conspirator in humor. The musicians held their poker faces while tossing their far-flung cultural heritages into a zesty sonic mash: A mad scientist of rhythm versus a nimble-fingered mistress of ancient Chinese strum,

Zorn, himself, gave listeners familiar with his alto saxophone sound a "greatest-hits" display of extended techniques for stretching the instrument's vocabulary. He used circular breathing maneuvers that puffed his cheeks like an adder, pursing his lips and pestering the horn's valves to create squelchy volleys of notes, or an Audobon's gallery of bird cries. Even though it is old hat for insiders, it's always fun to hear Zorn in this mode, since so much of his current work is composition for other musicians to perform, or presented by his erstwhile jazz quartet Masada. It's a reminder of grittier days in the 1980s, when much of this music lacked a venue as accommodating as The Stone. (Named after the late jazz benefactor Irving Stone, known well to regulars at such venues as Tonic and the Knitting Factory).

Perhaps the most penetrating moment was provided by Courvoisier and Wilson. Their succinct duet, in which disparate strikes of the keys (and finger-traces across the piano strings, Henry Cowell-style) were interspersed with the bleats of car horns along 2nd Street, taught the value of silence as a sound itself. Wilson's squint at the presumptive end of the piece held the attentive audience silent on the cusp of applause. Honk! Then Courvoisier began a final trill.

Something's Rotten in LA

2005-11-11T12:53:00.000-05:00

{Johnny Rotten, aka Lydon, Q'n'A'd for playboy.com, prior to the Sex Pistols reunion tour a couple of years back ... Yes, I'm temporizing until I churn up some of that "fresh meat" I keep promising to throw on the grill ...}

He proclaimed himself an anti-Christ in the first sentence of his first record. “Anarchy in the U.K.” was a snarling smash-up that made the once and future Johnny Rotten not merely a reviled or adored iconoclast, but a cultural symbol that transcended the brief, chaotic and abortive career of the Sex Pistols – which ended in January 1978 with a calamitous American tour. Bassist Sid Vicious was dead just over a year later, victim of a heroin overdose while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. It was an ugly, scandalous, blood-spattered ending to “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle,” as the band’s apocalyptic art project was termed. But, over the years, the Sex Pistols never really went away, their saga recurring in films (such as Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy” and the Pistols-approved documentary, “The Filth and the Fury”), books (Greil Marcus’s epic “Lipstick Traces,” Jon Savage’s “England’s Dreaming”) and song. “The king is gone but he's not forgotten,” Neil Young once declared. “This is the story
of a Johnny Rotten.”

The story isn’t over. The offstage John Lydon, now a happy resident of Los Angeles and former television persona (he enjoyed a brief run as the host of VH-1’s “Rotten TV”), is up to his old tricks. The Sex Pistols have reunited! Actually, it’s the second time around on that front, as the band also reformed in 1996. Then as now, original bassist Glen Matlock fills the Sid-slot, while guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook assume their old roles. With a 12-city U.S. tour
Beginning August 20 in Boston, the band is keeping it nasty, brutish and short. That’s just as their fans – whom Lydon insists now includes a good number of angry middle-aged housewives – would most likely prefer it. But there’s another twist to the tale: Lydon plans to take Baghdad. That’s right, the Pistols are campaigning to play an Iraqi charity gig. Politics occupied his thoughts as much as the punk-rock legacy left in the Sex Pistols wake: a legacy Lydon views as thoroughly dubious. He speaks in a constantly modulating voice, shot through with the rough wit of working-class England and a highly animated quality that inflects many of his comments with knowing mockery and exaggerated attitudes. He is, perhaps, the most Swiftian of rock stars, an intractable wrench in the star-making machinery.

Me: John, how’s it going?

Lydon: Well, we got this little’ tour coming up. But it’s quite amazing the bleedin’ obstacles put before us. We’ve gone through tour managers at a relentless pace. They seem to come in, look at it, and run. Record companies, no interest at all from them. As far as sponsorship goes, nobody wants to have a tax cut on our name. Even Tampax turned us down. Sanitary napkins? We’d be more than happy! I know I’m one of the disenfranchised and always will be. And so what? I don’t care. That’s our audience also. And there are many like us. We’re the majority.

Hasn’t it always been thus?

Yeah. I don’t expect no help from this industry, I don’t care for it. You’ve got your Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and if that’s what people are going to judge reality by, that’s a world I don’t need to live in.

I’m surprised you haven’t scored a sponsor.

It’s the way we are. We tend not to give a shit. And I suppose we went fishing a bit too late. The second they heard I was ferreting into playing in Baghdad, wooo. We’re talking some unreturned phone calls.

Was there a political backdraft there?

I don’t know. What do any of us know? I’m not going over there to play for the troops. I can play to the troops in their own countries. I’d be going there for the people. I don’t see a problem in it.

How tricky is that to set up?

You wouldn’t believe it. You would not believe it. I don’t mean to be paranoid. Hello, we’re probably being monitored right now. And so what? Tits! Tits! Tits! Let’s just talk tits and cunts!

Can’t you ring up your friend Tony Blair to sort it out?

Ah, ha ha. I do not see eye-to-eye with that man. I don’t like socialism. We’re not all equal. We’re not supposed to be.

So, then, do you prefer the British class system to the more Darwin-like American –

I cannot stand the class system. I’m not talking that. I don’t like that kind of oppression. Right? But I don’t think to fight that you say, “You’re not spasticated. You’re just vertically challenged.” I think you’re not facing up to something when you talk like that. And that’s a hypocrisy.

You’ve been in Los Angeles for a long time. There must be something here you like?

I like Americans very much. No problem. [Belch]. I like England, but I don’t like the government. And the government here is as wack as anywhere else. Ain’t no different. I don’t know where that lot [the Bush Administration] go to breed. It’s ridiculous. I suppose in England they vote in idiots that can talk clever or sound clever, and have a bigger vocabulary, but it’s still an idiot. At least your idiots can’t spell potato.

So you’re still untangling the red tape to get to Baghdad?

Gawwww. [Laughter]. Last week, I was asked that. I said, yeah I got bigger scissors. It’s now a fucking chainsaw. There are internal and external negatives coming at me. But that is not a silly novelty trick. I don’t do things for those reasons. I would like to see the Sex Pistols become the Iraqi Water Pistols. They’re still thirsty!

Are you sure it’s not going to be like Sting waltzing into the Rain Forest, glad-handing the pygmies?

No waaaaay! I’m not doing this for publicity! I don’t mind telling you though. And I don’t mind it being filmed. No, this isn’t one of those sanctimonious – this is not a fund-raising expedition. This is charity gig, mate, off our own back. And we can hardly fuckin’ afford it. That’s the difference between us and the rest of the pack. You might see the Sex Pistols as negative, nihilistic and a bit of a con and a swindle, but you’d be wrong! The whole point, when we told you those things, you were supposed to understand irony.

I think a lot of people got it.

I think so, too. But a lot of journalists don’t.

After “The Filth and the Fury,” the Sex Pistols documentary that came out a couple of years ago, it would all seem pretty clear, right?

There’s an entire cottage industry out there that’s turned into actually a city of rip-off merchants. This entire punk movement: Look, this is a title given by Caroline Coon in Melody Maker. Years ago she called me the King of Punk. I had a blazing row with her, because I didn’t like that term. And ever since then, that term’s been applied to a genre of music and it’s transformed into a uniform and a list of rules and regulations, and rigid attitudes, and humorless, and bland outright copying, and fake – and I don’t like it. It’s the enemy.

When was the first time you realized that was the case?

Probably two days before I started the band.

Do you feel like you – yourself – have continued to be swindled over the years? I mean beyond [former Sex Pistols manager and self-styled svengali] Malcolm McLaren, whom you sued and beat in court?

I was swindled the first day I signed the contract.

We all know that part.

I’ve had a very serious learning curve! At a very, very early age. Seventeen, 18, to be thrown in to that. It’s like this: I don’t go along with all these junkies in this business, blaming the industry for the pressure. I’ve got even worse pressure than anyone, really. Being Mr. Rotten was a fucking heavy load to carry at 18. And I’m here, and I’m no junkie.

What was the hardest part of that?

Loneliness. You do get yourself isolated. ‘Cos who do you trust? Everybody’s out to steal from ya. But you get used to anything, I suppose.

Last time the Sex Pistols toured, the slogan was “Fat, Forty and Back!” --

That was because the British press were very negative before we started – and still are –

They’ve never been nice to you, have they?

No, they haven’t, and in a way that’s been really useful. Whether they like it or not, they’ve given me a wonderful career and it hasn’t cost a penny. I knew at that press conference that they were going to go into whatever, so I initiated it. I just stood up and said, look: Fat, forty and back. We’re here for the money. So what? And the joke is, how could we be? Really? There’s something more in it, there has to be. There’s a deep loyalty between us, to each other. We know what we’ve gone through. We don’t like each other, but there’s something better going on.

Has your relationship with the other band members
ever approached friendship?

It’s everything all at the same time. Human beings are volatile creatures. We’re all over-selfish at times, and we’re all over-generous. Hate to me is such a waste of time. It just requires too much energy.

Would you say anger is more useful?

Anger is, yes. Anger you can work out and see more clearly. This isn’t for everyone, this is just how I work. I’m a victim of meningitis in a coma! A six-month coma when I was 7. So, I have to get my brain to do something right.

Do you enjoy getting on stage, still?

Not the process beforehand. I’m nervous all day, and panicked.
Always will be. Can’t eat. Shakes. Stage fright, I suppose you call it. But one song. Cor! Love it. Love it! And why not? Someone like me given a chance to say what they think, it’s incredible.

What did you think the first time?

Well, I never thought that Kelly Osbourne would be describing herself as a punk all these days later. That one’s difficult to come to terms with.

See what you wrought!

I know. Daddy must be turning in his … drug dish? It’s kind of silly. What do they think it means? What’s the joy of grabbing at a category like that, and calling yourself something that someone else has done?

Given all the mediocrity out there –

Good word! That’s a very good word because it’s led by “media.”

And followed by “crit.” Is there anyone you respect musically?

Probably. Not off the top of my head. Every now and again there’s a little gem. Even if there’s highly corrupt, formulated boy bands or girl bands, every now and then they make a really great record. What’s the harm in that? You can’t yin without a bit of yang.

The Rev. Horton Heat’s on your tour? He must be OK.

Yes! Raging nutcase. Love him. Kate Bush I respect. Always will. Tori Amos, confused about. I don’t get it. To me, she’s like an American Kate Bush but without the content, without the genuine heart. Things that move me, people screaming about wanting to die, things that sound like they mean it. You can tell emotion, and emotion doesn’t come note perfect. Never does. Listen to someone crying.

Of your lyrics, which lines would you like to be remembered for?

“Could be wrong. Could be right.” It’s up to you. It’s not for me to judge myself. I just do the best I can with it. I don’t do no wrong, but if you wrong me, you got a fucking enemy for life. And that’s how it should be. There’s a line, a wall of respect, and if somebody trips over that – kill ‘em.

In that case, how would you resolve the Iraq situation?

I don’t know if I would have started it, quite frankly. Resolve it? There’s only one way and that’s shitloads of money. If you don’t get the UN in to share that burden, you’re really silly. Look at Afghanistan. They’ve been knocked back five centuries. And that’s not helpful. You’re not gonna answer men on the back of donkeys and camels with airport technology and surveillance equipment. I mean the last lot did it with plastic knives! Forget it. They’re attacking you with plastic cutlery! Get wise. If somebody’s angry, find out why they’re angry and solve that. But I don’t think 100 tanks blowing down the street does fuck-all. But sometimes it might. I’m up for getting rid of bad bastards. You ask me which side of the fence I’m on: USA. Because it’s common sense. There’s more better things here than there is there. I don’t want the whole world to be like Iraq. So there’s your reason for being there, and that’s all that needs to be said and all that should have been said in the first place. All this “weapons of mass destruction” – it sounds like a stupid album title for Boyz II Men.

Or Guns N’ Roses.

Oh yes. That new lot.

That album will never come out.

Who’s in that supergroup they’ve formed?

Buckethead, the guitarist who plays with a KFC bucket on his head. A guy from Nine Inch Nails. Tommy Stinson, from the Replacements.

They played here the other week. Their opening song was “Bodies” [one of the more virulent songs from “Never Mind the Bollocks”]. It’s like, oh yeah, right, go supergroup! You need to do somebody else’s song. That’s good.

How was their version?

Their version? Dead slow. [Laughs]. That’s a long train coming, that one.

You should get back on TV.

Fuckin’ right, I miss it. I miss it. I miss it. September 11 screwed a lot of things for everyone, but particularly anyone that had something going – or raised a point of view that might not be the official line. At the same time, I see opposite points of view as not being a threat at all but highly bloody useful.

You should get on The O’Reilly Factor.

I’d like to have a word with him. He still hasn’t shaved his hair. He promised didn’t he? How everybody quickly forgets. But I don’t. I’d like to bring the shaver. [Laughs]. What’s the opposite of a Mohawk?

A tonsure? A landing strip?

O’Reilly couldn’t make it in politics, he couldn’t make it with the Kennedys. So he went Republican.

It’s always there. You can always convert.

And I see [“Politically Incorrect” host] Bill Maher heading that way, too. It’s very odd.

Maybe he’s just chasing Ann Coulter.

They need to be liked, so they do whatever is required. If you can’t question your own philosophies, and you have to – daily – then they’re not philosophies you should be following. Rules are for fools.

I think a lot of people who purport to be some sort of political firebrands are playing a part, but I don’t trust their integrity.

You shouldn’t. When I met Newt Gingrich, I really liked him. He’s one of the very few politicians who outright said, look, I’m a politician. I’m a liar by trade. Great. Thank you. Watch him, he’s way clever that one. He’s always making moves. Margaret Thatcher, her politics were everything that I ever despised, but I really liked her because she stood by what she said.

She was honest, right, even if she was a bitch?

She would give you a word back. Fantastic.

How did you meet Newt?

It was the last Rotten show. I went to the Democratic and Republican conventions. I think because I went to the Republican, VH-1 were angry. It’s all very much Clinton World there. They were fearful I would come out of it a Republican. And I said if I did it would be because they’re right. Why are you worried?

Hoo boy.

It’s a silly world we live in. So do I get a free subscription to the porno?

I’ll inquire on your behalf.

I’d like to keep abreast of the situation.

I can’t imagine why not.

Oh, stop.

The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O

2005-11-10T02:44:00.000-05:00

{... if anyone really wonders about this "skronk" business, read on. From Stereophile ...}

Nothing exceeds like excess. It’s wisdom not lost on Revenant Records, the over-the-top archival label that specializes in definitive compilations of artists whose work shimmers outside the frames of convention. “Raw musics” is what its late founder John Fahey called it. And after recent, exhaustively detailed box sets devoted to such American originals as Charley Patton and Captain Beefheart, Revenant has found its ultimate subject: the titanic tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. The square root of skronk, Ayler barreled through the 1960s, a forceful and singular figure even within the revolutionary context of the free jazz scene – which never lacked for outsized personas. Beginning in 1962, when he left the Army to follow his calling, and ending in 1970, when his body was found floating in the East River, Ayler epitomized jazz as unfettered, ecstatic expression.

Across nine CDs (and a brief, bonus disc), Holy Ghost illuminates Ayler’s creative life as a series of passionate excursions. Laid out as a crazyquilt of amateur-taped concert recordings, European radio broadcasts and other scarce ephemera documenting a dozen different performances and several interviews, the package is swollen with historical significance. Ayler was distinguished by many things, including a penchant for green leather suits and cosmic pontifications. But his importance as a musician often has been overlooked. Despite inventing an enduring template for collective improvisation in jazz and staking claim on a whole range of harmonic phenomena on the reeds, he’s never been invited into the canon; instead, he’s became the patron saint of jazz rebels, cited by the burliest saxophonists as their Godhead, no matter how intemperate their howling.

Yet, as this box set proves, Ayler commanded much more than the Vibrato That Ate Cleveland (his hometown). Though he was the most extravagantly “out” saxophonist of his day -- even pushing John Coltrane toward bold, late-career epiphanies -- Ayler forged a sound that drew explicitly from jazz’s most traditional elements and influences. His compositions pulsed with the polyphony of New Orleans parade music, whether exultant or dirge-like, and evoked the primal shouts of holy-roller gospel services, which also inspired the Pentecostal themes of his melodies, with names like “Saints,” “Spirits,” “Ghosts” and “The Truth Is Marching In.”

The truth about Ayler, as revealed on Holy Ghost, is that he was an artist constantly in transition, striving to fashion a sound that was as soulful as it was startling, and unafraid of the risks necessary to achieve his goal. The earliest recording here, from a 1962 gig in Helsinki with a group of Finnish be-boppers, shows off the 23-year-old’s grasp of swing, and his debt to Sonny Rollins, whose “Sonnymoon for Two” leads off the set. Just a few months later, though, Ayler is sitting in with pianist Cecil Taylor on a Copenhagen date recorded for television. This is Taylor’s seminal outfit – with alto saxist Jimmy Lyons and pioneering “pulse” drummer Sunny Murray – in a 21-minute run through the piece “Four.” And as it displays the beginnings of fully open improvisation in a group context as a blueprint for one kind of jazz future – a post-swing future at that – it is also the moment we first hear Ayler off and running. His own trio, with Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, was perhaps his most classic. Featured on Discs One and Two, the combo that recorded the landmark Spiritual Unity for ESP comes off as a seedbed of fiery invention. Ayler’s blistering lines are buoyed by the ceaseless rush of Murray’s drums and Peacock’s eerily singing strings, by turns moaning as if to echo Ayler and percolating with percussive intent.

The saxophonist left behind the organic perfection of the trio (plus occasional guests, like trumpeter Don Cherry) to front a variety of quintets, captured in various concert settings from Cleveland to Berlin to Newport, on Discs Three through Six. The results are as mixed as the musicianship, which varied wildly – despite a succession of distinct and original drummers, including Ronald Shannon Jackson, Beaver Harris and Milford Graves. With the additions of brother Don Ayler on trumpet and Michael Samson on violin, Ayler’s performances became more expansive and otherworldly. Their very peculiarity compels interest, as if some mutant marching band were to twist a melody as sturdy as “Amazing Grace” into a pretzel of droning strings, trumpet fanfare, galloping drums and explosive, skyscraping saxophone. It shouldn’t work, and often it doesn’t, but even then it’s somehow strangely wonderful. Less prone to praise was Ayler’s shift towards a rhythm-and-blues/pop-gospel style during the last two years of his life, with girlfriend Mary Parks (Mary Maria) singing “peace and love”-type lyrics that were as awkward as the bands were ramshackle. Even then, as on Disc Six’s “Thank God for Women,” the melodies are hard to shake. At his wobbliest, Ayler maintained a jaunty dignity.

Much the same can be said for his box set. Definitely not for strict audiophiles, the recordings still sound miraculously good given the dodgy nature of much of the source material, such as poet Paul Haines’s cassette made at a 1964 gig at the Cellar Café in New York – in stereo, no less! -- or the mystery tape of Ayler blasting out “Love Cry” at John Coltrane’s funeral. The packaging outdoes Revenant’s impressive prior efforts: CDs in vellum slipcovers are housed in a faux-onyx “spirit box,” along with facsimiles of artifacts like The Cricket, the 1960s Black Arts zine edited by Amiri Baraka. The 208-page clothbound book sets a high standard for scholarship and a kind of musical investigative reportage, detailing the history while leaving the mystery intact.

Hey-La, Hey-La

2005-11-08T14:45:00.000-05:00

{The Q&A version of something originally written for Time Out Chicago. I don't think it made the transcript, but Carl Newman told me that the band's name was also inspired by one of my favorite Japanese films of all time, Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers, as well as by the requisite Jimmy Swaggart rant about rock music. Still gotta try that vanilla vodka and Dr. Pepper concoction, but I am currently on the wagon ...}

Boy genius tunesmith Carl Newman is the Big Mamou behind the New Pornographers - that snappy Canadian supergroup known for its surging, sugared melodies, swell harmonizing, quirky lyrics and "Letter From an Occupant," the 2002 bust-out single that features a soaring vocal from our favorite sassy lassie, Neko Case. (Reputedly, Newman instructed the twang-friendly Case to belt out her lines "like a robot," and, over time, her career as a New Pornographer has made an equally compelling case for Case as her countrified solo arc.)

Newman, a gangly redhead, is on tour promoting the most recent Porno epic, Twin Cinema (Matador), an excursion into sheer pop gorgeousness that attempts to keep the band's sound intact while ditching some of the more obvious allusions with which it gets stuck.

Carl Newman: Yesterday was a landmark show for us. It's the first time since Mass Romantic came out that we played a show without Neko. My niece, who was on the record, was singing all the Neko parts. It was actually cool. I knew that Katherine could totally slay them but I was still kind of nervous. Are people going to be: "Boo! We want Neko!" But it wasn't like that at all.

Me: Is she about the same size as Neko? Could you put a Neko wig on her and pretend?

No.

I've always loved your records, without being much of an aficionado. I just liked the super-melodic element, the over-the-top pop and the originality of the lyrics.

We're trying. Pretty much, that's it. Working within the pop song format, and trying to create something that's catchy and will appeal to somebody on a simple, easy level. But hit them in a different way. Those were always the bands that inspired me. Roxy Music, or Love. The Thinker Fellers ... no one really remembers them, they were a Matador band. They had the most amazing combination of amazing melodicism and just really crazy odd music. Sometimes they sounded like a hillbilly version of the Residents. They had mandolins and banjos in a very odd way. But they always sang together and were very melodic. People always talk about the Beach Boys, and that's an influence - sometimes it's hard not to be influenced by stuff that's so iconic. But bands like the Thinking Fellers really inspired me. Or a band like the Fiery Furnaces right now. I like the bands that are really off in their own place and aren't that concerned that their music isn't the style.

Those bands probably find their audience faster in today's environment.Those bands probably find their audience faster in today's environment.

Things have definitely changed.

MP3s.

When our record was finished, even before the record was in the hands of the label, they wanted to put an MP3 on the site so they could beat the leaks. The distance between an album being handed to a label and ending up in the Internet is two or three weeks. I can probably already go see our album being reviewed on a blog. The information superhighway: More so than ever, it's conceivable that bands could just explode overnight.

I still remember waiting for copies of import 45s to make it over from England, and lining up for weeks-old copies of NME.

It's really cool that the NME has become less powerful. Now you have stuff like Pitchfork. I remember being a teenager, and, like, NME seemed like the coolest. Even though you know if you were hanging around with a bunch of NME writers you would probably want to punch them - a bunch of annoying 22-year-old assholes who want to be Lester Bangs.

That describes all rock critics, actually. How did you get into songwriting?

I started out because I fell into being a singer. My first band, which we used to call a "fuck band," just for "what the hell," we were called Superconductor, and we were never meant to be a real band. We had six guitar players. We were jamming, a bunch of us playing guitars and making noise, and one day I got bored with playing guitar and I walked over to the microphone and I just started yelling, or whatever the hell, and that's how I fell in and became the singer because nobody wanted to. I became fascinated by it. Then I decided to try writing songs. It was prog-grunge. It wasn't long after that I became fascinated by the classics, like Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson. And I decided to do something more musically sophisticated, so I started Zumpano, and did that for a while. Both those first bands, they got some notoriety but I felt I was just learning. I think I began to figure it out with this band. I finally decided, screw it. I'm tired of band politics. I want to do these songs the way I want them done. And if it sucks, I'll take all the blame. That makes it seem like it's all me, though - but it's not.

To me it all sounds cohesive but there's a lot of push-pull. It feels very collective.

One of the things we've got going for us is we have a monstrous rhythm section. People talk to me like I'm some kind of Brian Wilson. If I made records by myself, they'd probably sound more like the Shaggs. I shouldn't say that, but me, just myself, is more minimal, and John and Curt bring those rock ‘n' roll chops.

It swings. There's a buoyance beneath it all. It helps to see Neko bounce across the stage in some crazy fur hat.

I haven't seen her hop onstage in a long time.

It was the only time I saw you guys, at Warsaw in Greenpoint.

That was one of our best shows ever. That's when all the people were onstage at the end.

My girlfriend at the time showed up drunk and angry, so it didn't work out so well for me. Great show though.

Drunk, angry girlfriends? I feel for you there. We're not such bad guys, do we deserve that drunk anger?

I know! Other than that, I still remember that trampoline feel to the music. But the lyrics take me forever to decode. I like the way they sound. They aren't obvious.

Sometimes I think the lyrics are gibberish, but I don't sit there and study my own work. When I look at them, I don't think they're gibberish. That song "Sing Me Spanish Techno" I basically write for my girlfriend. She inspired the title. She listened to it, and said, "Aside from the line ‘Sing me Spanish techno,' I don't know what you're going on about." So, I had to go through it line by line and explain this means this, and this represents that. And she said "OK, I get it." It's maddening. I sat there in high school and college and had to dissect these stupid poems by these great poets that I didn't understand and I had to figure them out. And I write these poems and lyrics, and nobody even bothers to dissect them, and I had to do that bullshit. I had to dissect terrible Jim Morrison poetry when I was in grade 10. I had an ex-hippie teacher. "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding ..."? It's the one about the dead Indian that jumped into his soul. He also made us dissect "American Pie," which I could get behind. That one's pretty simple, although kind of cheesy.

It has a mystique. A cheesy mystique. So, Twin Cinema, is that a flashback to pre-multiplex days?

It's a metaphor about looking. You ever look at something, you look at the same thing and all of a sudden you see it in completely different ways. It's the idea of looking at the same thing through two different eyes. There's a lot of film and theater imagery to convey this simple idea. On the corner of 16th and Valencia in San Francisco I went through an epiphany. All of a sudden everything looks slightly different. I don't know if that happens to a lot of people. It's also about the things that remain. What seems universal and what changes. It's kind of vague.

I was thinking about actual twin cinemas. It was a big step forward. Now twin cinemas are relics, where they show 99 cent movies.

It must have been revolutionary: You have the choice of two movies!

I used to be an usher at one in my hometown. I didn't last very long.

You made a good career move.

OK, dumb question time. What's the deal with the band's name? I think it's brilliant but some people could easily think it's kind of stupid.

It was inspired by the Japanese movie The Pornographers.

That's a great movie. I thought that might be it.

And then the fact I always wanted to have a band called "The New..." Like the New Seekers. I was fascinated that there were the Seekers, who rule, and they were these square-looking people, and then there were the New Seekers, and the New Seekers were these good-looking hippies. They sang "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing." I decided it was funny, even though there was no band called the Pornographers. Some names have a portent, and I trust that.

Do you sit around with a notebook and torture yourself?

The music always comes first. "Sing Me Spanish Techno" is the only song on the record that started with a phrase.

Will you sing me Spanish techno? What is Spanish techno?

My girlfriend, I forget why we talked about it, she went to school for a couple of semesters in Spain, and she said the only Spanish she remembered was Spanish from Spanish techno songs she sang along with in clubs. So when she told me that I probably said, "Sing me Spanish techno." And then I thought, "Hey, that's a catchy bunch of words I just said there."

Your keyboards remind me of late '70s new wave.

We got away from that. I was tired of the Cars references. That song doesn't sound anything like the Cars, but the keyboard sounds like the Cars so I guess we sound like the Cars.

I always thought the keyboards were there like little triggers to pull people in. It reminds you of a period, but nothing else does.

It was fun for a while, but then you get sick of it. Some of these songs if they had a synth on it, we decided to use a pump organ or a piano. We're more into using low atmospheric synths or using it for little burbling stuff. We didn't really use synth much. We used a lot of E-bow. The one synthesizer sound we liked to use sounded a lot like an E-bow.

E-bows rock. Are you a beer-drinker at all?

Yeah. I don't feel like one right now.

Have you converted to Anchor Steam since moving to San Francisco to live with your girlfriend?

I haven't been drinking beer much lately. I'm drinking vanilla vodka. I stumbled upon this drink that I totally loved. It was vanilla vodka and Dr. Pepper, which basically tastes like Dr. Pepper. I thought, shit, this drink is tasty. Now it's my drink. It's like drinking pop, and I'm getting wasted.

It's going in the rider now, right? You'll set new standards for rock star debauchery.

Hey, it IS going to go in the rider!

Winter Light

2005-11-04T21:08:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you can float a message in a bottle across a river without even realizing what it is you have done until one day you get the same bottle back with a different note stuffed in it. And then you have to ask: How fast can I swim to the other shore?

Album of the Week

2005-10-28T02:12:00.000-04:00

Triptych Myth
The Beautiful (Aum Fidelity)

Cooper-Moore, once a fixture on New York's 1970s loft-jazz scene, is the current that drives the Triptych Myth trio: a crackling AC outlet for the self-made musician's pianistic urges. In other guises, he's a composer for stage productions, a folklorist, and an inventor of stringed and percussive instruments like the twanger and the ashimba.

But on The Beautiful, the bandleader brings his native extroversion to bear on the piano-trio tradition—and boy howdy, does he ever give it an overdue boot in the ass. Triptych Myth's self-explanatory opening "All Up in It" sets the pace: lots of dramatic tension ignited by C-M's colorful use of glissando, and kept grooving by the crisp collusion of bassist Tom Abbs and drummer Chad Taylor of the Chicago Underground Duo/Trio.

What's refreshing about the pianist's outside-in approach, however, is the way it embraces uncommon variety. "Pooch," an elegy for the late bassist Wilber Morris, is a gentle theme with gospel flourishes whose reflective tone is offset by Taylor's dazzling percussive display—imagine French composer Erik Satie sitting in with bebop master Max Roach. The title track ("Frida K. the Beautiful"), originally penned for the stage, likewise juxtaposes languid stretches of lyricism with sudden bursts of fireworks. Elsewhere, the avant-garde vigor the musician is known for is translated into boppish rural reveries ("Poppa's Gin in the Chicken Feed") and delicate chamber pieces ("Robina Pseudoacacia").

Throughout the disc, Triptych Myth thrives on its own group dynamic. The trio functions neither as an ad-hoc jam outfit nor as an overbaked concept act. Instead, The Beautiful heralds an increasingly rare and welcome thing in jazz: a great working band.

The Playlist

2005-10-22T15:48:00.000-04:00

Song X, Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny (Nonesuch; 20th Anniversary edition)

Yo!, Silvana DeLuigi (American Clave)

Pentagon, Mat Maneri (Thirsty Ear)

In the Reins, Calexico + Iron and Wine (Overcoat)

Alvin Lucier, Anthony Burr/Charles Curtis (Antiopic)

The Beautiful, Triptych Myth (Aum Fidelity)

50 Vol. II, Bar Kokbha Sextet (Tzadik)

Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple (Epic)

Chavez Ravine, Ry Cooder (Nonesuch)

Dimanche a Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (Nonesuch)

Forever Hasn't Happened Yet, John Doe (Yep Roc)

Twin Cinema, New Pornographers (Matador)

American Primitive Voi. II, Various (Revenant)

Drumming, So Percussion (Cantaloupe)

Arular, M.I.A. (XL/Beggar's Banquet)

Power to the People, Right On!

2005-10-20T15:35:00.000-04:00

{... notes for the 2005 Table of the Elements release. Deja vu all over again ...}

An October afternoon in 1969. Midtown Manhattan. A rally in Bryant Park
against the Vietnam War. Down 42nd Street towards Times Square, Tony Conrad is adjusting microphones in his 5th floor loft, one directed at
the TV set - where it will pick up live local news coverage -- the
other pointing out the window, where the echo of speeches and crowd
noise mingles with the oceanic rush of crosstown traffic. As the event
is about to begin, he rolls tape. Thirty-four years later, we hear what
he heard. And the juncture, for so many reasons, could not be more
critical. As the Bush Administration pursues a risky military agenda in
the Middle East - one with unsettling long-term implications both at
home and abroad - we see a nation not divided, as in the Vietnam Era,
but strangely complacent. Our media-saturated reality functions like a
drug, instantly televised warfare a new entertainment, and organized
public dissent a novelty at home and a roaring chorus everywhere else.
Conrad's recording of the Oct. 15 Vietnam Moratorium Rally is an eerie
flashback that offers urgent new insights into our own lives and times,
post-9/11 and full on into a new millennium.

"This was one event that I didn't have to leave the house to attend,"
says Conrad, whose recording coincidentally chronicles not only the
rally - an archival moment - but doubles as a kind of sonic residue of
a New York City that doesn't quite exist anymore, a place as swept away
by the tilt of time and the circumstance of history as the twin towers.
The Times Square area, now a Disneyfied circus of commerce suitable for
morning show wallpaper, once was something far scarier and more
radically chaotic. And it was from this perch that Conrad spent the
afternoon. He remembers: "The street was awash with humanity, but no
one lived there. It was like being in a desert in some ways. The number
of voters were very small. There were people of every stripe and
pandering to every kind of base and debased desire. There was a huge
crossover, because millions of people came to work there every day, but
it was also skin deep. People lived at the edge of the gutter."

The perfect place to make your life as an artist, amid the democratic
bustle. That ruckus is key to this recording, which indulges the
composer's interest in issues of documentation, the nature of public
spectacles, and the deep biological impulses that govern the
individual's response in the face of a mass. "What quickens your pulse
in the wake of thousands and thousands of people?" he asks, while
holding up this construct to a dual one. "That phenomenon of somehow
the abstract voice of the media that comes down to us, can shape
individual reality."

With that in mind, listen to how the two channels of this tape define
the gap between media (the instantaneous leap of audio from a
microphone in the park, transformed into a signal, and broadcast
through his television's speaker) and reality (the delayed and muffled
arrival of the same information at his window). It was funny, Conrad
notes: "Because being there is later than TV. This brings up the
phenomenological notion of the present, whether we live in it or after
it. So you have this situation of TV vs. live, or TV vs. the street,
all these issues of presence. The tape invokes that time really
accurately and thoroughly. It's a big chunk, and that makes things so
much more different than a sound byte."

The rally, part of that date's full slate of public demonstrations
against the war, proves to be at once poignant and a bit comical.
Powerful oratory from the Rev. William Sloan Coffin (who cites the
gospel according to Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us.")
shares time with quips from Rod McEuen. A stageful of Broadway stars
enjoy cameos ("Dick Benjamin!"), while Dick Cavett and Woody Allen
chime in with quick comments. Leading anti-war politicos - such as
Eugene McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm - take the microphone. It's a
remarkable day in the life of a city.

"People really owe it to themselves to go to these things," Conrad
says. "Because these occasions are such important markers of the events
of our time. The moratorium rally put the media and the people
side-by-side, and presents a very important idea that comes into the
picture in today's protests as well. The media and reality: It's hard
to attend both."

Album of the Week (2)

2005-10-15T20:25:00.000-04:00

Tom Verlaine
Warm and Cool (Thrill Jockey)

One of those guitar players that other guitar players drool over, Tom Verlaine has had a strangely bifurcated career. Two classic albums with his 1970s outfit Television escalated the wiry musician into the punk-era pantheon. His subsequent path as a solo artist has never drawn nearly as much attention. Warm and Cool, recorded in 1992, marks a further departure. The all-instrumental disc collected 14 chilled-out evocations of mid-1960s surf and twang styles, unveiling Verlaine’s inner Dick Dale while maintaining a deliberately nuanced posture. “Depot (1951)” epitomizes the minimalist approach, the guitar all noirish inflection and insinuation over the spare shhhh of brushed cymbals and a simple bass pulse. Fans used to contend that Verlaine was a CBGB’s version of Jerry Garcia, but it wasn’t always easy to hear Americana in Television’s swirling hypno-epics. Here, Verlaine sounds perfectly at home in a continuum that might include Ry Cooder or Bill Frisell. The lines Verlaine plays on the appropriately spacey “Saucer Crash” could almost pass for one of Garcia’s engagingly digressive solos, with its eloquent high notes, before the guitarist slips into his own version of a blues jam. If Warm and Cool was neglected by the faithful awaiting Television’s brief, early ‘90s reunion, this reissue argues for a second listen. Nine bonus tracks extend the original’s range, though Verlaine’s approach is so ethereal that the CD begs to be spun long afterhours. Tracks such as “Please Keep Going,” with its quivering tremelo and slowly picked, poignantly bent blue notes are a reminder of the soul imbedded in Verlaine’s virtuosity. They feel like silent prayers under a Moorish moon.

In Remembrance of Zucchini Past

2005-10-15T19:47:00.002-04:00

{... and the hits just keep on comin' ... for Stomp and Stammer.}

Way back in high school, during that ‘70s show called my adolescence, Led Zeppelin held such mythic sway that I actually believed they might be satanic. This was well before I’d ever heard of Aleister Crowley, the British mystic and original “magick” man who so fascinated guitarist Jimmy Page, and whose influence would often prompt dark innuendo regarding the fret wizard’s own Faustian bargains. (After all, if there was ever a rock musician who could be suspected of drinking the blood of virgins, it was Page, though evidence suggests he only deflowered them). No, my fears were based solely on two factors. One was the tape-distortion effects used on “Whole Lotta Love,” which, combined with Robert Plant’s harrowing wails of unimaginable torment and/or forbidden ecstasy, really did sound like a field recording from the Lake of Fire. The other was Roddy Jones. Roddy was, as perceived by some not in his clique, a “bad kid.” Or, if not outright bad, surely up to trouble. He was skinny and had long hair and probably hung out in the parking lot well after the first bell rang smoking cigarettes and cranking, well, Zep, on an 8-track player in some Chevy dashboard. I mean, I guess. It’s hard to remember. I do recall that pimply-faced 14-year-old girls, their tube-tops buoyant with glandular effervescence, were drawn to him as bees to honey, and that he had a band, one filled with guys who looked a lot like him, with the tight jeans and the boots and the shaggy feathered mullets and, most important of all: The Squint. The Squint always gave their peachfuzz moustaches an nth more definition, making them look less like straining wanna-bes who would most likely end up in the military if not pumping gas for a living, and more like – well, definitely NOT Jimmy Page, but not like clean-scrubbed college prep types, either. Actually, all these young dudes looked exactly like Kid Rock, avant la lettre, as the French say, and I figured, since they swaggered and talked back and could mysteriously ferret out the encoded meanings of Physical Graffiti as if it were the Kabbalah, whispering its secret knowledge between their ceaselessly masticated wads of chewing gum and nodding in conspiratorial unison – “Not even yet!” – and then cackling as if this ensured them nights full of Boones Farm and trailer-park lovin’ – I figured hey! how could this not be of the Devil? No music known to mid-70s youth came closer to reflecting the coarse hormonal surges that drove us all bonkers, except maybe the Rolling Stones, but they were nearly INTELLECTUALS compared to Led Zeppelin and, besides, had already “gone disco,” which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because we all listened to Wings, too, and how lame were they? But when Roddy’s band blew helter-skelter into “Whole Lotta Love,” or maybe “Black Dog,” at one or another illicit keg party at the house of some kid whose parents were away for the weekend (think a milder, gentler Larry Clark, with beer and pot and no AIDS yet), and the lights were dim and such ribald activities as “feeling up” and “making out” and “the Bump,” were going on, damn, perdition seemed pretty goddamned cool.

That’s what electric guitars are supposed to do! If Led Zep was scary, it wasn’t solely because they reveled in the sexual mastery we had yet to put a finger on, it was because they tapped so profoundly – and more profoundly than your standard middle-to-lower class white kids would be aware of – into blues, Celtic folk sources and Middle Eastern traditional music, plus dirty-ass funk that sounded even dirtier because the drummer wasn’t the exquisite and nimble Clyde Stubblefield, but the plodding and thundering Bonzo, aka John Bonham, whose Neanderthal tumult might as easily have been your own heartbeat, lurching from your chest cavity as you spun, dizzied by whiskey or the heat-seeking thrust of that new girl’s tongue down your very own throat. The song remained the same, but we never would.

You can experience it all, all over again, for the very first time on the minor avalanche of Zep artifacts released earlier this year by Atlantic Records. The 3-CD How the West Was Won, which compiles live recordings exhumed from some forgotten archive by Pagey himself, accompanies the 2-disc DVD, which is the same deal, pretty much, only different: An assortment of concert documents that span the band’s career. The shocking thing, now, is to see how danged INNOCENT the band looked, and marvel at their gradual evolution from farmboy punks to slicked-up rock icons. Clocking in at more than four hours (extras included), DVD atones for the paucity of Zep celluloid, and the laughable The Song Remains the Same concert film that, sadly, was all fans had to remember the band by following Bonham’s 1980 death. Though reunions of a sort have recurred, the surviving band members clung to an integrity their peers eschew, never pretending there could ever be a Led Zep again without the original Heavy Metal Drummer. It wasn’t as if the music had not pervaded everything since, permeating hip-hop’s juicy ribs like so much mojo sauce, making the Beastie Boys and Schooly D (who gave Puff Daddy the notion) possible, spawning Soundgarden and Jeff Buckley, and supplying the style template for “Almost Famous.” All of which are just a few of the thoughts that occur while watching this blissfully endless footage. All this time, I had only thought that Led Zep had given Johnny Rotten something to hate besides Pink Floyd. Lo and behold, they invented punk rock! I know, it sounds crazy. But there it is, 10 tracks into Disc 1. The Royal Albert Hall, 1970. Plant shoots Page a loving glance, whirls an arm up, and the guitarist starts plucking a high, buzzing, fuzzing rhythm, swinging his axe down low against his hip, while seeming to execute some sort of sideways crabwalk. A few repetitive measures in, and you realize it’s not the Ramones, ferchrissakes, it’s Eddie Cochran. “C’mon Everybody,” a flat-topped rockabilly anthem that challenges Page, for one fleeting instance, to be anti-virtuosic. (This, after all, was the guy they brought into to play the scorchy solo on The Kink’s “I Really Want You,” since he had the kind of mad chops none of the other art-school yobbos could muster, even if they did have a bustle in their hedgerow). I keep replaying those tight few seconds over and over, because it’s always such a shock. Nearly as much a reality check is how freaking good they were, already, in 1970. Beyond Page’s mercurial flash was a stunning grasp of traditions, his Celtic Delta dervish blues not merely a hypnotic display of musical finesse and bravado but beautiful, even breathlessly so. The band already had an immaculate sense of the dynamics that would make a fortune for Nirvana 20 years later, and also knew how to balance Page’s folkie affinities with sheer, ball-busting power chords. The opening downstrokes of “Whole Lotta Love” do constitute the Greatest Rock Riff Ever. And this proves it.

Likewise, Plant’s prowess as a front man can never be second-guessed. True, he was a human swizzle stick, a pretty boy, a Pre-Raphaelite heroine whose resplendent waterfall of curly blond locks played gender-bent mindgames with all the zucchini he was smuggling in his snug, frayed jeans. Cockzilla! Chris Robinson owes him style royalties. So does Michael Stipe. Or, well, he DID, back when he had those same curly locks, and knew how to muse them. All hail the Shark Whisperer.

As much fun as this is, and as fulfilling as is the footage from Zep in prime time (Madison Square Garden 1973 – and, in an acoustic set that gives the band it’s fully dimensional due -- Earl’s Court 1975), a lot of the magic has begun to rub off by the final concert sequence, staged at Knebworth in 1979. It’s all a bit valedictory (which, of course, it was), though thrilling to hear tracks from Presence (the last studio album that mattered) and Page at his magisterial best (“Kashmir”). Yet, it’s all a little too clean. Page has passed through his Cozmik Sorcerer phase, traded in his star-studded balloon pants for a pair of nice white slacks and a billowy blue shirt. Plant’s twirling in polka dots. Even Bonzo has tidied up. Urgency seems to have yielded to professionalism. It makes perfect sense though, this arc. The dark overlord didn’t own their souls, it was only Ahmet Ertegun.

Love That Zeena

2005-10-14T20:39:00.000-04:00

{Liner notes, more or less, for the reissue of Nightmare Alley. We had a swell little chat over tea in her tiny tenement walkup above Max Fish, the notoriously model-swarmed Ludlow Street bar, which now looks a bit like the first cantina to stake out the Gold Rush. Zeena's pad has some of the same feel: an artist's cocoon, used for pitstops between tours, redolent of a time when the Lower East Side was neither trendy nor particularly safe afterhours -- maybe a dozen years or so ago, back about the time I first saw her rock the electric harp in Atlanta.}

She goes the whole wide world, Zeena Parkins does. The sonic spectrum she annexes via her inventively modified electric harps, beautiful instruments of handcrafted rigor and industrial elegance, streaks across the tangled terrains of genre and history. Her purposeful distortions, stark noise-bursts, mysterious elisions and hypnotic reveries expand not only the language of the instrument – indeed, she is nothing less than its Jimi Hendrix – but have been her passport to a colorfully varied career. It’s one that has taken Parkins from the grungier precincts of Lower Manhattan’s performance scene to the glittering spectacle of the global arena. She has, in the course of being singularly distinguished at what she does, stepped free of predestined musical niches. Parkins has managed the micro and the macro: She was an integral member of such important improvising ensembles as Skeleton Key (with Fred Frith and Tom Cora) as well as a key player in ongoing creative scenarios with John Zorn, David Shea, Butch Morris and Elliot Sharp, among others. At the same time, she’s rocked out with the boisterous likes of Courtney Love and Hole, and tours a good part of the year with the Icelandic avant-pop diva Bjork. Almost furtively, Parkins has succeeded in connecting with the large, worldwide audiences that would seem out of reach to most of her downtown NYC peers -- save for the occasional Sonic Youth or Marc Ribot. Recorded in 1992, Nightmare Alley resonates from a moment when notions of popular music and “the avant-garde” were on a collision course. Punk rock was about to bust mainstream (in the guise of Nirvana), a decade-plus of arty/improvy/jazzy/noisy New York sounds began to consolidate around a club called the Knitting Factory, and, out in San Francisco, a record label called Table of the Elements was in its embryonic stage: Parkins would become its first recorded artist, and this CD its first release.

But long before Parkins became the preeminent improvising electric harpist of her day – indeed, the one improvising electric harpist whose name comes most immediately to mind when the question is popped on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? – she worked in the circus. The traveling troupe billed itself as the Janus Circus, and because its number was small, each member performed a variety of tasks and, natch, amazing feats. Parkins designed costumes. But she also played the accordion, while dressed up as a dancing bear, the kind of bear that might also make a fearless dash and leap through the terrifying “heart of fire.” On an afternoon in downtown Manhattan, many years later, Parkins took in a matinee at Film Forum. The feature? Nothing less than the 1947 film noir sideshow Nightmare Alley. A grim and despairing look at the making of a low-rent carnival huckster (Tyrone Power), who ultimately comes to get his geek on, the film is downbeat morality tale laced with deliciously lurid details of carnival life. Parkins was sketching ideas for this album, and became totally inspired by what she saw on the screen. “I completely fell in love with the film,” Parkins says. “At that time it had particular resonance for me. And I knew instantly that I would shape the album around the film in a loose kind of way. It just fit into a cozy spot for me. And of course there happens to be a main character whose name is Zeena – a clairvoyant – so how could I possibly resist?”

Parkins choice of the harp was somewhat more incidental. Originally a piano player, she was assigned the instrument while in a Detroit high school and participated in what she describes as “a boot camp harp training situation.” The instructor was firm. “She inspected our fingernails to make sure they were tidy and clean and we were instructed to wear special shoes while playing harp and a proper pastel gown while performing concerts,” Parkins recalls. “It was a bit ridiculous. I resented that sort of superficial regiment but loved the instrument.” The next three years provided her only formal training. Instead of developing a classical technique, Parkins taught herself, creating a performance style that is more purely idiosyncratic. In that, she is consonant with many improvising musicians of her generation, who have taken instruments associated with certain types of music and, in effect, retrained them to suit new purposes. Whether it was what John Cage and David Tudor did with their “prepared” pianos, Derek Bailey with notions of guitar tradition, John Zorn with his duck calls and compositional cut-ups, Eugene Chadbourne and his plugged-in rake, Zeena Parkins cast a similar gaze upon the harp. “I decided to have a rhythmic approach – more like a rhythm guitar player or a drummer than a flute player or a violinist. I see the instrument as a luxurious sound machine more than a sweet angelic stringed creature floating around on a cloud.”

Nightmare Alley, the album, is at once psychic and luxurious, though not in ways you might easily assume. The release, as the flagship title for Table of the Elements, marked not only a beginning, but a sign of things to come. During its 10-year history, the label has consistently championed various forms of exceptional string music, made by artists looking for ways not only to extend the potential of their instruments but also to more richly explicate the fundamental impulses that animate their vibrations. These include sonic magi such as Arnold Dreyblatt, Tony Conrad, Paul Panhuysen, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, and Rhys Chatham. In a very real sense, the album helped to forecast a growth market in so-called “unheard music,” and an expansion of possibilities for art musics that had previously been fostered only by universities, galleries and the international warehouse bohemia. And while many of the 15 tracks on Nightmare Alley connote a sense of hall-of-mirrors distortion, unreeling as if a long, shimmering dream sequence, deeper listening reveals a genuine, if not always comforting, lushness: Here, tucked away behind the gawkers and hawkers of the sideshow, is a consuming bed of sound.

“I had a kind of map for the pieces, instructions that I followed in the studio,” Parkins recalls, “and also pieces that developed from an improvisatory beginning but were layered and edited in the studio. I also had ideas for various studio techniques that I wanted to try — these were pre-Pro Tools days. The record was recorded on 2-inch tape, so there was turning of tape inside-out, changing the speed of the tape, wobbling the reel, and so on—as well as experimenting with different amp setups as well. Many of the pieces developed in this way, taking full advantage of some of the things I had access to in the studio: fancy effects processors, and beautiful vintage amps, a Leslie tone cabinet, overdubbing, things that were not possible at a gig or in my rehearsal space.”

Pieces such as “Freak” overlay loping note patterns, mocking psych-out effects that suggest Zippy the Pinhead channeling Jimi Hendrix, and a percussive attack on the strings that would not be misplaced on a Sonic Youth record. “Peephole” generates a flurry of dueling harmonics that eventually opens into a fusillade of musical effects: from nimbly articulated rhythmic dialogues to deranged heart of midnight clangor. “Hairless,” which begins with the gentle, contemplative bending of strings, gradually takes on sinister, unsettling airs. Again and again, the music lures the listener into a parallel world of sensations, one that is disorienting and surreal, strangely pleasurable and more than a little dangerous. Nightmare Alley proved to be the living end for Tyrone Power’s corrupt carny, broken like a butterfly on the karmic wheel of fortune. But for Parkins, it’s an occasion for some truly amazing feats, no less than a leap through the heart of fire and animated by the same spirit of derring-do. You won’t believe your ears.

Album of the Week

2005-10-13T18:02:00.000-04:00

Gangbé Brass Band
Whendo (World Village)

If John Philip Sousa was Fela Kuti, he would feel right at home in the
Gangbé Brass Band. Its bold and joyful horns take the European brass tradition on a high-stepping tour of West African voodoo rhythms, incantatory Yoruban soul and infectious percussive shakedowns. The group hails from Benin, a once-flourishing empire that was colonized by the French in the late 1800s. Its music, which incorporates choral call-and-response and lyrics that switch between several local languages, could simply exist as an evocation of various African styles: This happy-foot sound would segue seamlessly between King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

But on Whendo, its sophomore release, the outfit is as much new world as old. There are mighty mambo beats and trombones that recall James Brown's killer horn sections, as well as up-tempo affinities with the marching brass bands of New Orleans (i.e., the bottom-end bustle of a sousaphone, lots of punchy riffage and metallic percussion that features one musician who totes a giant bell on his head).

That said, Gangbé wears its cultural heritage on its sleeve. Its name translates as "the sound of metal," a reference to the raw material of its horns, and the musicians take the stage in a riot of colorful traditional garb. The members aren't too shy about revealing their sources, either: Late Nigerian bandleader Kuti gets name-checked in a tune that deploys one of his stock arrangements as an homage. And, yes, they will take you for a ride on the "Night Train." But whether it stops in New Orleans, Havana or Lagos, nobody knows.

Shake 'Em On Down

2005-10-13T17:33:00.000-04:00

{I felt like I almost died making this trip, and got spooked the fuck out when we breached the *real* crossroads -- out by "old" Highway 61 -- where, at dusk, even the dust is bedeviled. Or maybe I'm a sucker for lore, and someone was just pulling my Legba. Originally published in 1992 (?), and unearthed now in remembrance of R.L. Burnside and Paul "Wine" Jones. I'll revisit this with some footnotes that will make for a much more interesting tale. Editorial compromises, writerly sloppiness, hangovers, cliches. But, for now ...}

Near Holly Springs, Miss. - Junior Kimbrough's sad eyes spark with mischief as he hoists a pint bottle of clear liquid and takes a warming swig.

"We ain't drinkin' no corn liquor," the longtime blues singer announces, sly as a fox, as the sweet intoxicant begins to tickle his belly.

Across the dusty floor of the barn-sized juke joint known only as "Junior's place," an antic Sunday-night crowd laughs, offering shouts of affirmation between sips of beer and the irregular clack of pool balls.

It could be a scene right out of "Deep Blues," a lively documentary survey of Mississippi's contemporary blues scene that features vital performers such as Mr. Kimbrough, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Jack "The Oil Man" Johnson and Lonnie Pitchford. It runs through Wednesday at Cinefest on the Georgia State University campus (651-2463).

Each musician is an inheritor of the traditional blues legacy, keeping the mu sic alive as entertainment, a soundtrack for social dancing and as an up-to-the-minute oral history.

Narrated by former New York Times critic Robert Palmer, who wrote a DON'T YOU AVANT ME, BABY?
definitive 1981 musical history also called "Deep Blues," the film rambles through the juke joints and tin-roofed shacks where the music has been nurtured for decades. It travels south from Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., now, sadly, a Disneylike mall for tourists, to the hard-rocking Playboy Club on Greenville, S.C.'s, crack-infested Nelson Street, where most tourists fear to tread but the music is some of the Delta's hottest.

Nothing on celluloid, however, compares to the real-life scenery of a long night spent jukin' at unreconstructed, rustic blues haunts such as Junior's. Only six hours by car from Atlanta, this hot spot in Mississippi's northern hill country might as well be on another planet, one where the rough-hewn music and festive social rituals seem virtually unchanged since the days when seminal bluesman Robert Johnson roamed the crossroads.

Midway between the regional cultural meccas of Oxford, Miss., and Memphis, Junior's is directly on Robert Avant's Anheuser-Busch beer route. Only on this recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Avant, in his mid-30s, is hauling firewood with half a dozen companions. The logs are a gift for Mr. Kimbrough, whose juke is a multipurpose facility that serves as a community gathering place, party central and a magnet for anyone willing to sit in or drums or guitar.

"We've got some of the goodest guys around here as you get anywhere," Mr. Avant says, ready to work in bluejeans, a flannel shirt and an old baseball cap. "They can play anything you want 'em to play."

A former musician who gave up guitar when on the verge of regional fame, he laments the onset of professionalism. "Back then [1960s], people would go out and play for something to drink or to party or for food," he says. "Now they're more organized."

They're even using cordless electric guitars - "You couldn't buy that stuff when we were playing," Mr. Avant says - but rarely at Junior's.

Yet in rural towns like Holly Springs, no less than at corner jukes in Clarksdale or Memphis, playing blues is not so much a way to make a living as an essential tool for communication - something to let off steam after a long day working in the factory or field.

"There are more musicians in Holly Springs than you'd ever know," says Norris Hibbler, who, like his friend Mr. Avant, has patiently waited at least an hour for Mr. Kimbrough to arrive and open his club. "They'll be playing so much music, people don't want to leave."

That's a home truth, whether the venue is Green's Lounge in South Memphis - where the house band the Fieldstones wraps its last set around 3:30 a.m. - or Margaret's Blue Diamond Lounge in downtown Clarksdale, whose busy concrete dance floor is lighted only by two bare bulbs, one red, one blue. At Green's, the crowd may be dressed to the nines - 82-year-old regular Willie Williams even sports a ruffled tuxedo shirt as he squires dancing partners one-fourth his age - while the regulars at Margaret's wear overalls straight from the job site.

But a juke joint is always a juke joint, distinguished by a visual language that is part folk art, part functional and part found object.

Decorated by twinkling Christmas lights, malt liquor posters and hand-drawn signs that warn "No dope smoking" and "No outside beer" -often with creative spellings - the clubs are havens from workaday reality. For decades both incubator and preserve of blues heritage, juke joints are perhaps the only place to hear the music with all its vibrancy and quirks.

"People who have never set foot in a real moonshine-swilling, gun-toting juke joint have been declaring the down-home blues dead, or dying, or anyway, not what it used to be," Mr. Palmer contends, writing in the liner notes to the "Deep Blues" soundtrack album, financed, like the movie, by former Eurhythmics guitarist and blues fan Dave Stewart. "But the blues is enjoying an unprecedented resurgence in the areas that originally nurtured it."

That's the argument "Deep Blues" persuasively makes. Yet the jukes always have been jukin', even when the outside world failed to take notice.

"In the African-American community, especially, people like to be with each other and hear blues music," says Judy Peiser, director of the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis and a regular at Green's Lounge -where your $4 cover charge includes a frisk by a friendly rent-a-cop, an almost genteel nod toward patron security. "So they have these . . . bastions of cultural survival. Living, breathing, wonderful places where men and women can listen to live music on weekends."

An outgrowth of segregation, when blacks were compelled to run their own nightclubs and house parties, juke joints continue to offer a loose, open space for musical performance. "At first, the reason there was such incredible musical creativity [on Beale Street] is because there was a segregated society," Ms. Peiser says. "The musicians might perform at country clubs, but after hours . . . that's where the real jam sessions took place."

Holly Springs guitarist R.L. Burnside, 64, who lives next door to Junior's an d performs his "Burnside style" blues in the documentary, says he always plays best in juke joints - though he's made several tours of Europe.

"You get a better feelin' about it," says the performer, who has eight of his 12 children playing music. "It makes you think about the old, way-back blues and the house parties. In those days, you could really enjoy it. Wasn't as many young people out there as there is now, buggin' people. Heh, heh, heh."

Esau Shaw, 48, a local gospel choir leader and drummer, confirms that there's more to the scene than just music. "The atmosphere's a bitch!" he volunteers, drinking a Budweiser outside Junior's as night falls. "It's loose. No tension. Everybody learns to leave the tension home. Nobody wears no tie. Everybody knows everybody."

When at last Mr. Kimbrough arrives, handshakes are exchanged all around and a wood-burning stove begins to smoke in the rear of his club, its walls lined with an extravagantly colorful series of folk art like portraits of young black women in a variety of high-fashion poses.

"C'mon, Junior!" somebody yells, as a vocal, mostly male audience begins to gather not long after dusk. When Mr. Kimbrough smiles in response, the lean angles of his face suggest an African-American Lenny Bruce.

Nodding to the grandson and son of Mr. Burnside - 14-year-old drummer Cedric Burnside and his uncle Dwayne, 24, who doubles on bass and guitar - the musician grabs the guitar in his lap and conjures a flowing, hypnotic vamp. The song is called "All Night Long" and for one obvious reason: Mr. Kimbrough loves the tune so much he can't stop playing it.

For nearly half an hour, primal rhythms shake the room. Dwayne Burnside, a driving force in his father, R.L.'s, Sound Machine, pumps the bass with cocky ease while Cedric attacks the drum kit with the joyous aggression most kids save for shooting hoops. But it's Mr. Kimbrough's chilling, spectral moans that carry the song, making him seem a force of nature - no less than the breeze that sweeps through the piney woods of the north Mississippi hill country.

Mr. Kimbrough, nearly recovered from a stroke that has left him with a limp but "didn't take away my hands," doesn't play as a matter of profession. What's evident as he sings - sometimes with a predatory groan, sometimes in a high, mournful wail - is that he does this because he has to. And because he does, he functions as a kind of backwoods oracle, an admired figure who receives tokens of cigarettes and beer while he performs in the creche-like band area.

"Sometimes you play, you get the feelin' that it is the blues," Mr. Kimbrough says, taking a seat and firing up a menthol cigarette before he begins the first, open-ended set of the night. "Just like you out working in the field or something like that, and it's close to quittin' time and your blues hits you and you start to sing. Heh. Gettin' close to quittin' time so you know, work all day in the field, and then stay up all night."

He doesn't jest. But Mr. Kimbrough's stamina is almost a running gag in Holly Springs.

"We joke about that all the time," says Mr. Burnside, who first met Mr. Kimbrough 35 years ago in the same juke joint. "Tell 'im, `We have to pull the plug to get you to stop, here.' He gets to drinking, you know, and the women get to dancing."

Is Brooklyn the New Downtown?

2005-10-13T14:57:00.001-04:00

{Written for Newsday during the strangely lively dog days of August ...}

Downtown isn't what it used to be. It's not even where it used to be. Ever the roost for New York's creative bohemians, neighborhoods like the East Village and the Lower East Side have fostered grassroots arts scenes for decades. But the era of affordable rents and accommodating venues, which made all this possible, has faded fast.

As real estate values soar and landmark music clubs such as the Bottom Line and CBGB have been shuttered or threatened with eviction, artists and entrepreneurs have taken flight. Once, the so-called downtown scene celebrated free-ranging sensibilities in which genre boundaries, particularly musical ones, were gleefully blurred.

Now, geographic lines are blurring. More and more, it's Brooklyn -- and its neighborhoods in immediate reach of Manhattan - that looks like the new "downtown."

"Musicians were living there but there wasn't a scene before," said Anthony Coleman, a pianist and composer who lives in the East Village but often finds himself riding the F train to Brooklyn for gigs. "It's not like the scene is dead here, but Brooklyn is where it's gone."

Coleman is symbolic of the shift. One of the core members in a closely knit circle of musicians who defined the downtown jazz scene in the 1980s and '90s, he celebrates his 50th birthday this week with a pair of concerts. They won't be in striking distance of his tenement apartment, near the former residences of Allen Ginsberg and Charlie Parker. Instead, two Brooklyn venues will host: Barbes, in Park Slope, and the Issue Project Room, a non-profit space on the Gowanus Canal, where events are staged in a renovated concrete silo.

"It was amazing when Barbes started," said Coleman, who once was a regular at the Knitting Factory, a sprawling TriBeCa club that made its name with avant-garde jazz but now rarely books it. "The fact that it built so quickly into a scene made a lot of sense. I never thought of Park Slope as a happening place, but Barbes gave it focus."

The shoebox-shaped bar was opened in 2001 by a pair of expatriate Parisians, Olivier Conan and Vincent Douglas. They began booking a lot of improvisatory jazz and traditional string music, and now give whole evenings over to Balkan and Brazilian-themed dance bands. Partly, this was because they liked an eclectic vibe. Also, noise-control regulations mandated that they keep the volume down. Even though its back room barely holds 40 people, the venue draws some unexpected luminaries to its intimate confines. Neighborhood literary icon Paul Auster likes to drop in. On occasion, mellow pop divas Norah Jones or Madeleine Peyroux might slip up to the stage to sing with their pal, violinist Jenny Scheinman, one of several players with weekly residences there.

"This neighborhood has a sense of community that's slowly disappearing from the East Village," said Conan, a musician himself, who wanted a space to showcase the abundance of local talent. "Most of the people who play here live within a 10-block radius."

Club regular Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist who performs every Sunday with a workshop ensemble, has embraced Brooklyn as a cultural refugee. He sold his East Village apartment and moved back to his native Flatbush after his co-op board refused to let him practice his horn in the building. "They wouldn't even let me soundproof," said Nathanson, whose band the Jazz Passengers has featured vocalists Debbie Harry (of Blondie fame) and Elvis Costello. "This has been the new downtown for a long time, but it's more spread out."

Brooklyn hasn't lacked for cultural institutions. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has, during the past 20 years, become a blue-chip arts hub in Fort Greene. Choreographer Mark Morris opened his Dance Center down the block in 2001. St. Ann's Warehouse, an expanded facility for the non-profit presenter Arts and St. Ann's, opened the same year in DUMBO, in a renovated spice warehouse. What's different now is that everyday venues have begun to pop up. And not only in Williamsburg, which has long functioned as an adjunct to the East Village, with scores of art galleries, and a promising alternative theater scene.

The Issue Project Room is one such arrival. The non-profit's director, Suzanne Foil, lost her space in the East Village earlier this year but quickly latched onto a new site. The building, a former storage silo, is circular, which allows for unusual staging. "It's outrageous," said Fiol, whose programs feature experimental jazz and chamber music, electronic sounds, poetry readings, film screenings and even theme dinners. "People tell me it's their favorite building in the whole city."

The obscure location, adjacent to the Carroll Street bridge at the Gowanus Canal, hasn't deterred audiences. It's only a 10-minute walk from Smith Street, Brooklyn's popular "restaurant row." And artists have been responsive. Fiol has already forged ongoing partnerships with composer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Institute, and will host a 2006 residency with the Ne(x)tworks Ensemble, which features the avant-garde soprano Joan La Barbara. Coming events include an evening devoted to short story readings, with the author Grace Paley, and a 36-hour concert to inaugurate the space's 16-channel speaker installation. "If I was going to have to go anywhere," said Fiol, a photographer and former gallery manager who lucked onto the commercial rental, "this is where I would want to go."

Coleman, who performs there Tuesday in the first of his two birthday events, will be coming full circle. He grew up a few blocks away in Cobble Hill. As a teenager, he took lessons from jazz piano great Jaki Byard, and spent all his spare time hanging out at jazz clubs. "Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Earl Hines and Duke, that would be a good week," he says, name-checking a shortlist of piano heroes. "That was a normal week." Along with such peers as guitarist Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, and saxophonists John Zorn and Tim Berne, among many others, Coleman became a central figure in a thriving new music scene in the mid-1980s.

A man given to affably encyclopedic discourses, the composer works out of thoughtful conceptual backdrops that display a sharp wit. His piano trio Sephardic Tinge explores Jewish themes as a galloping collision between Jelly Roll Morton and the Borscht Belt by way of Spanish Harlem. It takes a cue from Morton's dictum that jazz must evoke "the Spanish tinge."

"Salsa was more an ethnic music for me than Jewish music ever was," he said. Another combo, Selfhaters, is a joke on the idea of the self-hating assimilated Jew. As Coleman explained, he was trying to separate himself from the '90s klezmer revival. "I wanted to send things reeling a little bit," he said, "in a trickster, joker, gadfly way."

The Tuesday night concert, with a cast of sidekicks that includes bassist Greg Cohen and saxophonist Michael Attias, deals with Coleman as a composer. Its centerpiece is an ambitious revival of the 1998 chamber quintet piece "The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same." The music "sits there," he said, "and it evolves, and it degenerates, and it evolves again, and then it loses it. And I really like that." The following night, Coleman will lead two different improvising trios at Barbes. Those shows, he said, will offer some relief. "When you start rehearsing this stuff, you realize why you don't do it very often."

Despite his frequent appearances in the borough, Coleman doesn't expect to join the downtown diaspora, even as it continues to grow. "How many musicians from the downtown scene live in Brooklyn? Most of them," he said. Who's left? "Only those of us who have apartments that we'd be crazy to give up."

Fear Not The Pig Sauce

2005-10-13T02:23:00.000-04:00

Another Midwestern tourist falls prey to the lurking evil.

An Interview With My Favorite Photographer

2005-10-13T01:24:00.000-04:00

{Atlanta, 1997 ...}

Even on a gloomy afternoon, light pours through the picture windows in Harry Callahan's condominium. It floods the living room where the celebrated photographer sits, several floors up in a Colony Square high- rise, gracing a splendid view of a stately oak tree in adjacent Ansley Park, and beyond it, of cars and people moving along Peachtree Street.

Most of us, blessed with such a perspective, would venture a glance and say, yeah: a tree. Trunk, limbs, branches, leaves. Great tree. Atlanta's got a lot of 'em. Harry Callahan would no doubt agree, but he would see so much more. He would see a universe of possibilities. He would take a camera, and he would begin to explore all the different ways that a tree could be looked at.

He might photograph it using such extreme contrast that the tree no longer resembled a tree at all, bleaching the image into pure abstract form; he might shoot multiple exposures of the tree, so that it blurred vertiginously against a blank sky; he might aim his lens directly up from the base of the tree, so that its limbs and branches and leaves came to resemble an aerial photograph of some anonymous marsh; he might conjure mystery in the shadow of the tree; or he might impose upon the tre e the image of his patient and gracious wife, Eleanor, her face, perhaps, or her classically nude torso.

Harry Callahan might snip off twigs from the tree and make something of that. You get the picture. It's just a tree, but there are so many ways to see it. This is what Callahan, who is 84, has done for most of his adult life. Look at trees, and city streets, at brick walls and natural expanses, at Eleanor and their daughter Barbara, at scraps of paper and complete, unknowing strangers, at light and at dark, in color and in black and white. Look, and reveal what others missed.

"The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image," Callahan has said, "is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively ---intuitively ---the camera can write poetry."

There's a lifetime of that in "Harry Callahan," a career-spanning exhibit of 116 photographs opening Tuesday at the High Museum of Art. The show, curated by Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art, reflects every aspect of Callahan's work, which has been marked by its rich, inquiring variety. There is not one style that belongs to Callahan ---who came to photography as an amateur enthusiast, embraced it as a fervent faith and would become one of its most influential teachers ---but rather several.

"If the show does nothing else, it absolutely cements his reputation as one of the greats of 20th century photography," says Ellen Fleurov, the High's curator of photography. "He's been a restless experimenter all through his career."

But Callahan, who continued to steadily produce new work until impaired by a 1995 stroke, makes no grand claims for himself. He is, and has always been, a solid, workaday Midwesterner wholly invested in the process of his art, which, alongside Eleanor, his wife of 60 years, has been a singular and consuming passion.

"I've always been nuts about photography," he says, enunciating each syllable with effort and care as he sits beneath a wall covered with framed images ---an abstraction of dense foliage; a Chicago street scene alive with striking angles ---which make his home a kind of one-man museum. "That's the only thing I could do. And when I ran out of gas with something, I tried something and later came back again. I think I photographed almost everything in the first two years. But I went away an d came back, and it had changed. My treatment, that's really what it is. The person changes."

Yet Callahan, who moved to Atlanta 13 years ago to be near his daughter and her family, has been remarkably consistent throughout his career. "His work is absolutely about the potential of the medium," says Keith Davis, fine art programs director for Hallmark Cards, whose extensive collections include some 300 Callahan photographs. "It's about how a visual genius sees the world. They're about the process, about the world, about living."

Despite the work's historical significance, it hasn't made Callahan a household name. "His work is not `controversial,' it's not `provocative,' " Davis says. "It's simply great."

That work began in earnest after a life-changing encounter with Ansel Adams in 1941, when the epic landscape photographer gave a workshop at the Detroit Photo Guild.

"Ansel came and all the lights lit up, " recalls Callahan, who had been struggling to find a direction for his photography while employed as a clerk for Chrysler. It wasn't Adams' "spectacular stuff" that grabbed his attention, but rather close-ups of seemingly more prosaic gravel pits, of grasses and ferns. "I was living in Michigan and there were no big mountains," Callahan says, laughing. "I was anxious to go West before, but I didn't like what I got. I like what I got in Michigan."

Tellingly, a 1942 trip to Colorado yielded one print: a snapshot-like portrait of the Callahans posed face to face in the foreground with the grandiose sweep of the Rockies as backdrop. Even here, the photographer sought a sense of intimacy. Back home, he began an intensive phase of exploration, applying what he learned from Adams. The master photographer stressed not only the necessity of tactile clarity in an image, but the inherent spiritual nature of photography itself. These lessons hav e stayed with Callahan, who was satisfied photographing immediate, everyday scenery that most urban dwellers took for granted or ignored: ripples on Lake Michigan, a weathered concrete wall in Chicago, a utility pole, studded with hundreds of staples, on Peachtree Street. "I like the walls," he says simply. "I like signs. I like surfaces."

Adams was not his only inspiration. He was greatly influenced by Alfred Stieglitz, whom he met on a 1942 pilgrimage to New York. And a pivotal 1946 appointment to the Institute of Design in Chicago ---where he taught until 1961, when he left to develop the new photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design ---brought Callahan into a heady new orbit. He absorbed lessons from the school's founder, Bauhaus artist Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, the architect Mies van der Rohe and a host of others associated with the modernist hothouse.

Importantly, he began a second career in teaching, one that would support his photography until retirement in 1977. "I don't think I am very bright," Callahan says, a disarming statement from someone whose work fused the key qualities of both European and American modernist styles, whose technical savvy is matched by an enthusiasm that makes his late work feel as fresh and engaged as his earliest exposures. But this is modesty of the self-made, all-American kind. "I had a good IQ, but I didn't ever go to college." Instead, he learned on the job. "This is how I got an education ---teaching. I liked it because I could say what I believed. Many times I thought I would quit, but when I saw the students' work at the end of the semester I was happy again." ("Harry Callahan and His Students: New Acquisitions," a parallel exhibit at the High, will showcase works by Callahan and some of his more notable students, who include a diverse group of photographers such as Emmet Gowin, Linda Connor, Bil l Burke, Ray Metzger and Atlanta residents John McWilliams and

Constant through all of Callahan's endeavors, however, has been Eleanor. Now a youthful 80, she represents an essential core of her husband's work, appearing in classic nude abstractions and posing in the couple's Chicago ballroom studio of the 1950s, standing on street corners and up to her neck in Lake Michigan.

"This was just an everyday occurrence," Eleanor Callahan says. "Whatever was on his mind at the time was what we shot. . . . It's his life, and he does it every day. He's never let up a minute, even now, after the stroke. He's loved every minute of it."

Except for images of Eleanor, and Barbara as a child, Callahan shuns traditional portraiture. He preferred, after Walker Evans, to catch subjects "when their guard is down," and so stealthily snapped close-ups of Chicago pedestrians edged in urban anxiety. Yet he could focus prolifically on his wife, whom he met on a blind date and who would become a kind of all-purpose muse, distinguished by a profound calm and unwavering dignity.

"Yes," Callahan explains, "because I know her. She was wonderful. She did it. She was agreeable to everything I asked her. I think I have always been moved by what I thought was beautiful. She was beautiful . . . not Hollywood's type."

The photographer, whose lively spirit persists despite age and health ailments, who, in fact, is still taking pictures, turns a lens on himself for a moment. "I think I have always been affected by looks, " he says, and laughs again. "I thought grass was beautiful. I thought trees were beautiful."

I'm Lazy, So I'll Torture You With Unpublished Liner Notes -- Hah!

2005-10-13T00:49:00.000-04:00

{For a pending release on Table of the Elements. These have been lingering for a few years, all 3,000 words. Just to get us kick-started ...}

Few experiences in life are as emphatic and direct as the hour spent in a dark room when Tony Conrad is on stage. Instinctively, you want to reach for some epigram to qualify what happens, because what happens demands a rationale – an explication, a tidy summing-up. But that’s elusive, much as Conrad’s own history of recording and performance. Say this though: Tony Conrad has been kicking the violin’s ass for longer than most of his contemporary audience has been alive.

Curiously, though, it may have been necessary for Conrad to wait until now to find an audience as keen to appreciate the particular brand of whammy he lays on it. There is a quality that is thrilling and absolute in the way that it thoroughly reasserts the primal nature of sound. It smacks you in the gut, as all such encounters should, but never ever lets up, never lets you catch your breath. Instead, that immediate physiological response to the massively amplified bowing of Conrad , and the dream cathedral of overtones this generates, becomes profoundly psychological as well. Consciousness-altering, even. You think that it's just washing over you, but those oceanic tremors might as well be a map of your own nervous system. To pull a concept out of Thomas Pynchon, that tight knot gathering in the belly is the beginning of a knotting into:a logical reaction to the quickening jolt of the infinite that announces Conrad's arrival. The best strategy for riding the storm out is to ride the storm in. All that mile-high oscillating resonance, all that extremism in the pursuit of liberty, erupts into hearty metaphor. This is the belly of the beast, in a lost time, under a full moon. And the beast is roaring.

Here's the catch, though. It's easy enough to make romantic claims for an artist like Conrad. He's one of those guys. Ur-Sixties. Quintessential cult figure. Resident outsider. Rebel angel . He's got the kind of immaculate credibility that can't be bought and can't be sold.[And how else, otherwise, could he have persevered?] Rumbling under the cultural radar since the Kennedy Era, Conrad is at once first cause and last laugh, a covert operative who can stand as a primary influence over succeeding generations, while pretty much conducting most of his business in obscurity. That is, until about 10 years ago, when he began re-materializing as a live performer and started recording a series of releases for the Table of the Elements label. Because he'd kept such a low profile, when Conrad did pop up, the impression made was a good deal more spectacular by sheer dint of surprise. Who, exactly, was this guy? It was an unusual weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, when people began to ask -- again. Conrad was having one of his first "coming out" parties, and despite some of the odd circumstances, it could not have been staged more memorably. The Manganese Festival, which doubled as a kind of avant-garde debutante ball for, Table of the Elements, went down April 23 and 24, 1994, at the exact same time as Freaknik, the "spring break" for students from the circuit of predominantly black colleges. Atlanta became an urban version of Daytona Beach for about three days, with traffic grid locked, boom boxes shouting, and provocatively ample derriere-shaking for mile after mile along Peachtree Street -- the main stem that runs into the heart of "The City Too Busy To Hate." The festival was sequestered in a complex of art galleries off an industrial side street intersecting Peachtree (and thus, cut off in such a way that anyone who managed to drive in could not possibly hope to drive back out until the traffic jam subsided many, many hours later). This was ideal, for anyone hoping to maximize the singular nature of the experience. You could check out any time you liked, but you could never leave. Perfect for a first encounter with Tony Conrad. He cut a curious figure, Tony did, in his bowler hat and his shorts, prowling the premises with a video camera, documenting the goings-on as if at some family reunion. In a sense, it was: The gathering tribes included Thurston Moore, Lee Randaldo and Steve Shelleyfrom Sonic Youth, harpist Zeena Parkins, avenging Japanese guitar hero Keiji Haino, the anarchic artistes of Faust -- Conrad's long-ago collaborators on "Outside the Dream Syndicate" -- and Jim O'Rourke, wonder boy. From Europe, the trioAMM, godfathers of free improv, was in the house, as was New Zealand’s rare-to-such-shores Gate. This was an unusual assortment of performers, a Lollapalooza for fringe-dwellers, and a model for further electrical storms – such as the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival – that would light up the skies into the new millennium. By the time Conrad finally came to perform, sandwiched between the jet-engine decibel bath of Haino and the ritualized freak-out of Faust, even those not in the know were primed for a paradigm shift. The city was in a gridlock, as surely as if suffering a collective panic attack or celebrating a coup d’etat. What better moment to pump up the volume, and tune in to those strange frequencies?

Ten years on, and some four decades since he began making trouble from a fourth-floor walkup loft on Ludlow Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Conrad is back in New York. He visits fairly often, to work on collaborative art projects, or take a gig at Tonic, a renovated former kosher winery on Norfolk Street that has become a kind of trans-genre performance salon: an engine room for 21st century musical imagineering. Conrad is 62, and he’s enormously fun to watch, even now, even when he’s not onstage, teaching that violin what’s what. He’s circled around nicely, from pre-this to post-that, at once the guy who anticipated (with former roommate John Cale) the whip-song feedback drone rock of the Velvet Underground – which then anticipated everything else, polluting young minds who formed generations of rock’n’roll bands to follow – and someone it is enjoyable to think of as the Jerry Lee Lewis to La Monte Young’s would-be Elvis of All Things Minimal. ‘Course, Conrad did not show up drunk afterhours at the Church Street entrance to Young’s drone-sweet-home, the DreamHouse, waving a pistol and cajoling his former colleague, though Jerry Lee once pulled that stunt at Graceland. But the debate over authorship of certain musical ideas and properties shared with Young and other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music has sparked much of Conrad’s intensive activities during the past decade. And in marshalling his minority report, he’s had much better aim than the so-called Killer.

Conrad’s been both the frying pan and the fire. He’s a reminder of what early Sun Records phenom and cottonpatch bad-ass Charlie Feathers said once – about rockabilly, of course – constituting “the beginning and the end of music.” And, in both his sonic fundamentalism (which is to say, an insistence on hewing close to a nearly indivisible root) and insurgent idiosyncrasies, Conrad’s in league with a whole pantheon of American visionaries – figures variously perceived as cranks, weirdos and aliens before their names graced boxed sets and they were feted on the White House lawn. Think of Johnny Cash, or Harry Partch, or Cecil Taylor, or Don Van Vliet. Conrad has those essential qualities we prize in our iconolasts. He’s ornery, , but he’s crafty, too, like that slippery cartoon wabbit who always finds a way to turn his antagonists’ weapons back on themselves.

In the process of challenging the very history he helped to create, Conrad has the good fortune to revel in its aftermath. He’s looped. When he mounts his bicycle, as he does for a tour of old Lower East Side haunts on the DVD included in this package, he conjures a flashback to a 1965 Look magazine spread that identified the artist as an archetypal happener. Behold! The young urban explorer whose bohemian enthusiasms defined a certain way of life – an aesthetic code that was also an ethical position – which New York City, in its fathomless churning, its insatiable hunger for fresh meat, at once compelled and fostered. It’s a different New York now, in many sad and irreversible ways, but Conrad can still feel that thrumming at its core, can still feed on its boundless appetite. He fits right in. When he rides up the street, the gunmetal gray bicycle chain he drapes around his neck registers as an unconscious hip-hop gesture. (And Pythagoras becomes another sucker MC, getting the beatdown from Tony C.) The sounds on the street are a midday downtown babelogue: salsa rhythms blaring out of modest taquerias; Hasidics murmuring over their knishes as they slouch towards Williamsburg; the blunt thud of car-trunk subwoofers rattling windows with the new Nelly single; kids screaming; garbage trucks loading their haul, grinding and clanging without end; somewhere, a bird. You don’t have to spend very much time with Conrad to see how he enjoys this ruckus. It’s his candy shop. And business is better than ever.

“It amazed me that in the 1990s, for the first time, you would go to a club and find an audience that was just ready for anything,” says Conrad, sitting across the table in a Mexican restaurant on Rivington Street on a late summer afternoon. He’s sincere, clearly buzzed about the idea that his own assault on the Western canon, on received notions about -- well, have you got some time? Pull up a chair. Conrad is insistently inclined towards cultural investigation, and not someone who takes much for granted. Rather, he digs for the back-story in any given scenario. Even, in this case, his own prominence on the latter-day performance circuit, which might include anything from an art gallery to a rock club. He’s caught on, and if, so far, “official” histories of the 1960s minimalist movement relegate him to a footnote, that same outsider status is a big part of what makes him matter to listeners who aren’t likely to be shelling out the Jeffersons to catch the new Philip Glass opera. Thus, with “Slapping Pythagoras,” Conrad took advantage of a pool of kindred spirits from Chicago’s indie music scene – including stalwarts like O’Rourke, guitarist Kevin Drumm, and engineer Steve Albini – to bridge a generational divide. It gave him currency. The kids are alright, right? But, um, why? “That still has to be thought through,” he continues. “Like, what happened? Was the young audience simply untrained and gaga? Are they completely so overexposed to everything they're just jaded to death? Are they so saturated with the pop-market that they’re ready to hear anything else that just doesn't sound like the shit on the radio? Or is it a combination of the above? No one has really diced this out that I know of, but the result is that there's a whole sea of people who really are hungry to be exposed to sound in a different way.

“Once at the Kilowatt in San Francisco, my performance was preceded by a wind octet playing contemporary sounding wind octet music, composed by academics. The audience comes in and sits in the thrash pit and listens patiently to the octet. Ten years before people would be fleeing. Or screaming for relief. So, were they there because they didn’t give a shit what they heard? Or because they had absorbed the lessons of John Cage, and found they could adapt their senses to anything that came along? Or were they so grateful to hear something very strange and focused?”

Conrad’s not merely dishing rhetoric. He’s puzzling over the paradigm. What are the political implications of performance? What happens when art music becomes fuck-art music? What happens when it’s not dry but humid? What happens when it’s raw and dirty? What happens if you kill off the myth of the composer and roll dem bones?

“When the music got very loud it meant that it took on this identity of its own that required a kind of handshaking,” Conrad says. “You could think of that engagement with the sound in a couple of different ways. You could think of yourself as submitting to the sound, and that evokes a whole discourse of sadomasochistic analysis. Another way of thinking about it is that you flow with the sound, you go into it and inhabit it and interweave your space with it. That’s a completely different power dynamic. That’s very fascinating because there's this paradox between those two things. I was always inclined to prefer the second approach. I guess in the way that I enjoyed Cage, and the challenge of being confronted with a situation and assimilating it and controlling my responses to it. There's a contest of some sort. You rise to the occasion, so to speak, and I always thought that was bracing and challenging. Like you test yourself in a sporting event. You see how much weight you can lift or how fast your can pedal on your bicycle. There's just this great rush of energy that comes with the omnipresence of the sound: The sound being all around. For me, this was a way of dealing with the problem of the composer.”

Punk rock, with its volume and intensity, and its anti-virtuosic, DIY credo, brings up similar issues. But Conrad makes an important distinction. “What’s different, say, between this music and punk rock? In punk rock there's a gestural element of ‘I'm jazzing my guitar so it will spit cum all over you.’ The feeling you get is very, very masculine fucking power trip that's supposed to really damage you. That's quite different. It's interesting. But it’s not the same. This has a more neutral power flow, but it does go into a space that is recognizable from that. That’s one reason why there could have been such a powerful crossover to New York rock in the '70s. The New York punk movement was a little less – originally, at least -- focused on that kind of football mentality. There was plenty of blue-collar feeling in New York, too, displaced into alienation. Think of Lydia Lunch for example. That was alienation turned into articulateness. So there’s a shriek there but it’s not supposed to destroy you. It’s supposed to get your attention and deliver a blow in a meaningful way. It’s ancient music now. I’m 62, and when I started doing music I was 22. That was 40 years ago. When I first came here I remember finding out through Jack Smith -- he was into a kind of nostalgia trip -- I began to find out about the pop music of the ‘30s and ‘40s, old 78s and stuff like that. It struck me as so alien, and so bizarre and weird and distant and remote from my life that it was thrilling, and intriguing, but also just coming through the pipe from some other universe! And that was, let's say, the sounds from 1942, and that was 20 years earlier [in 1962] and now looking back 20 years I'm finding myself looking at 1982! For today's younger person things that were going on in 1980 must seem completely weird and irrelevant and strange and alien.”

Yet, in a funny way, what Conrad is doing now is utterly timely. It has to be, and in a more specific way than merely the ease with which it provides a youthful audience an opportunity for reinvestigation of performance tactics and philosophies they were not alive to experience the first time around. His refreshing populism makes me wish we could elect him to public office, because Conrad grasps the essence of democratic thought in a way that is heartening. He sees through the Big Daddy posturing that’s gotten us ass-deep in the jaundiced miasma of contemporary times, and argues persuasively that’s there is another way. But history is sometimes the dream we DON’T want to wake up from. Because history is familiar, makes us feel secure even if its nipple succors only with spoiled milk. The body of Conrad’s work, much of which has come to light through a series of releases initiated by Table of the Elements, not only makes an immediate demand on the listener – strap yourself in kids, we’re going for a ride! – who must negotiate his own terms with the music, but has stealth implications as well. These are something like, for lack of a more appropriate or immediate comparison, the parallel worlds of “The Matrix.” Do you want the red pill or the blue pill? Do you want the crime or do you want the punishment? Must ignorance always be bliss? Or can’t bliss signify its own self-evident truths?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but the very axis our lives spin around. And they’re part of the paradigm whose shifting is Conrad’s enterprise. It’s there in the drone, the switched-on throb of alpha and omega, earth and ether, that fills the room when the strings are stroked. Conrad’s predilection for playing behind a billowy white curtain, while his shadow is projected – and magnified – against it, lends many of his performances an air of some arcane mystery theatre. Time unhinges. The mind wanders. You begin to think about Bill Monroe, hollering high and lonesome, or a frayed traveler moaning in the Delta night of 1931. You being to think about a thousand choirs massed in a Biblical prophet’s hallucination, or a ritual staged by some lost tribe in a forgotten part of the world, whose secrets no tongue will ever again speak. You begin to feel strangely connected to a world of experiences you can never possibly know. Which is funny, because Conrad doesn’t come off as a mystic, and he’s no shill for anyone’s hogwash. If anything, he’s a born debunker. But in liberating this music from orthodoxy, he also unleashes it for democratic free association. Not much, these days, can do that. Tony rocks. And, maybe, that’s epigram enough.

Testing, testing

2005-10-12T22:11:00.000-04:00

Well, here we are.
How exciting.
Welcome.