I don’t know where this occurred. I don’t know how old this video is. I don’t know one single, solitary fact about the who, what, when, where, and why of it. But I’m absolutely certain of one thing: the man depicted in the video will stand up before a judge and plead NOT GUILTY!
Egad. As a bass player, that many guitar players at the same time gives me the willies.
The Leningrad Cowboys have apparently made some sort of movie about racing in the Panamerica Rally in Mexico. Excuse me, I have to go buy a lawn chair and a thermos and a sleeping bag, and start camping outside the movie theater. Just in case the movie actually exists.
Or maybe that was the whole movie. I dunno. I was too excited and I started drinking really early today. In any case, in the words of the L. Cowboys themselves: “Thank you very many!”
Here’s the wonderful Hot Club of San Francisco:
Django Reinhardt and The Quintet of the Hot Club of France? Maybe you’ve gotten a look at the elderly Stephane Grappelli, heard the sweet violin counterpoint he provided his whole life through to whoever would have it, and gotten this sort of antimacassar impression of the original scene.
These were Gypsys. Romani. Wild men. They were considered profoundly unsavory and subversive. I’d be hard pressed to come up with a modern equivalent. All sorts of people would like to claim the mantle, and not just in music, either — but there’s something incredibly milquetoast about having skulls all over your black T-shirt and your skin alike while selling Stratocasters to suburbanite kids; or maybe torching a half-built condo complex to save the earth while getting away in your mom’s minivan; or perhaps declaring that _________is Hitler loudly into the microphone at your function-room-class performance. Django always wore a suit and tie, BTW. He’d probably stab you if you tried to stiff him after a performance, though.
Django walked out of the hospital because his leg was burned so badly they wanted to amputate it. Hardcore. He returned to Paris, even when the Nazis overran it, gassing gypsies like him in their thousands. Fearless. Not “I married my stepdaughter but still get invited to all the best cocktail parties fearless.” The real kind of fearless.
It’s nice that people still keep the memory of the music alive like you see in the video. It’s a wonderful amber they’ve produced, with a marvelous fly in it. Me? I’m always on the lookout for the new Romani. I need fellow-travelers.
Well, I’m still alive; I’m at liberty to report I’m still at large; I ran happiness up a stump about twenty years back; I’m perfectly happy being dour; and I never waited for any encouragement to be a weirdo, so I’m good. Hope you’re good too, today.
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