There’s something about the personality type who fixes cars that leads to bad music selection. But it’s a minor quibble. I’m sort of in awe of this whole thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Ship of Theseus, I explained it here a year or so ago. A 1955 Porsche is a very valuable thing indeed, but the one in the video has deteriorated to the point where the iron atoms are barely holding hands. Normally, restorations like this one aren’t attempted, because the car is too far gone. Then again, the customer is in Switzerland. Even the town drunks in Switzerland own distilleries, so I assume they could afford to pay some Britishers and French dudes to go the whole nine yards on the thing.
I think more things and more people should be like what you’re seeing in the video. Autos and many other large and small dollar things should be made to be less disposable. People should get very good at what they do, and should be paid to do it. And people should try to fix what’s broken before buying anything new.
And someone in Switzerland should adopt me. Say dad, can I borrow the car?
Before CGI, filmmakers found people who could actually do stuff, and pointed cameras at them. In the flawed masterpiece, The Big Country, Chuck Connors and a few stuntmen showed Gregory Peck and Carroll Baker how to ride horses:
There’s a great mix of humor in this drama. The cowboy who can’t get his boot on at the beginning of the chase, and then can’t get on his horse, is a nice touch.
The director of the first 3/4 of this movie was William Wyler. Wyler was something of a legend in Hollywood by the time he made The Big Country in 1958. He ended up with three best director Oscars, and had thirteen nominations total (tied for the most). He drove actors up the wall, making them do forty takes, but they all wanted to work with him anyway. Henry Fonda wondered why Wyler wanted another take. “It stinks.” Charlton Heston asked for direction. “Be better.” Gotta love that kind of management.
Wyler made all kinds of movies well. Hell, he made 32 silent movies just to warm up. He did westerns and dramas and comedies and sword and sandal epics and musicals and they’re all still pretty entertaining to watch. The Big Country was a big hit, although the critics mostly thought it was pretty meh. Eisenhower was still president then, and loved it, and had the movie screened four straight nights in the White House.
If you’re in the know about cinematography, you probably know about this movie. Wyler and Gregg Toland developed and perfected what’s called deep-focus cinematography. The lenses they used could keep everything in the frame in focus, no matter what the depth of field was. Nothing on the screen was blurry, no matter where it was.
Lots of directors hated widescreen. There was too much area to cover, and it was easy for the actors to look lost. But movies like The Big Country embraced all that screen square footage. The scenes of the actors pounding across the measureless prairie are amazing. I don’t think you would have Lawrence of Arabia four years later if David Lean hadn’t seen how Wyler used the landscape in The Big Country.
Wyler used the landscape as a metaphor. The fight scene in the same movie is unexcelled, because of the moonlight mood and the tiny men struggling to settle a meaningless score in a gigantic void of featureless grass:
They gave Burl Ives an Oscar for this movie, but I don’t know why. He’s sorta eating the scenery through most of it. But the real problem with the movie is Wyler was incredibly in demand for his work, and he had to ditch The Big Country to go to Italy to make Ben Hur. The movie was finished by a different director, and squanders the vibe that built up throughout the first part of the film. It just sort of fizzles out at the end.
It matters who directs a film. People used to know how to do things, but not everyone knew how to do it like William Wyler.
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I’m not sure we’ve settled on a name for Artificial Intelligence stuff, probably because it really isn’t very intelligent. It’s mostly a massive version of autofill, which is useful enough, I suppose. If you don’t want to (I don’t), you never have to look at Gargle again.
Some call it LLM, for large language models, but that doesn’t encompass what the script kiddies are doing with images and video. Gargle has settled on “generative ai” for non-textual stuff, but their stuff is so locked down they’re not going to be where the action is. If you head on over to Hugging Face, or whatever Stable Diffusion is calling itself nowadays, you’ll see tinkerers tinkering with all sorts of speech to image, image enhancement and melding, music generation,and general messing around with probabilities. The Wikiup likes the term “deep learning,” Deep learning being a subset of machine learning being a subset of artificial intelligence.
Whatever you want to call it, the usual suspects are taking the ball and running with it. First and foremost, they want to use everything they can lay their hands on to have fun. This sure is fun: How about a movie trailer for Alien, as if it were a 1950s movie?
Another outfit did the same with Aliens:
The limitations of the amount of video you can produce in a single snippet isn’t a problem when you’re making a film trailer. They’re almost uniformly stitched together from two or three second images. Every once in a while, you see what has been called a “hallucination.” That’s the term for when the generative AI wigs out a bit, and just inserts any old thing for reasons obscure. They have an especially hard time with hands, but then again so did Van Gogh.
There are a hearty handful of people churning out these homages. They’re all sort of fun. But the funny thing about them is that while the kids are getting the CGI (for want of a better term) right, they don’t really know anything about the 1950s, and they get the text, voiceovers, and fonts all wrong for the era. Even the vibe is off. Here’s a real 1950s movie trailer to compare:
Movies from the 1950s didn’t have CGI, or machine learning. Hell, they didn’t always have color. But they made the chariot race in Ben Hur, and Marilyn Monroe’s dress blow up on a subway grate, among many other terrific bits of entertainment, and without much doctoring to the film. With better tools, you’re supposed to be able to do a better job. I’ll raise my hand when you get there, kids. Keep going.
There is a continual assault on the English language. The intertunnel, and especially typing with your thumbs into a Portable Pandora’s Portmanteau, has led to the destruction of many words, including “led,” which is now misspelled lead uniformly. It’s right up there with vise/vice, loose/lose, and spelling et cetera “ect.” If you point out any of these errors, you are immediately enlisted in the shutzstaffel. Language evolves, you’re lectured. It never occurs to the lecturer that it can also devolve.
So lately the hipsters have glommed onto the term “supper club,” and want to use it to describe ghost kitchens, or informal meals shared by a group of people who use “deck” as an adjective. I won’t have it.
You see, instead of resurrecting a perfectly good term like supper club and debasing it, they should resurrect supper clubs, period. Our parents and grandparents got to go out to eat once in a while and hear live music and turn their ankles dancing. I wish we could.
But as the losing coach said, and I paraphrase, “Larry Bird isn’t walking through that door, and neither is Michel Legrand, or Sacha Distel.” Michel went to his reward after 86 busy years, and is no doubt waving down from a cloud on high to the lava pit his agent is doing the backstroke in. Sacha exhausted himself by trading in Brigitte Bardot for an Olympic skier, and checked out at 71. If he didn’t die happy, he wasn’t paying attention.
No, intertunnel wags, that’s not a typo. I’m referring to Gloria Wood, the most famous singer no one’s ever heard of. Deuced difficult to find a picture of her, which also indicates her relative obscurity. Here she be:
Now, I could shoot fish in a barrel and list plenty of singers and other performers who were a big deal in their day, but are obscure today. Honestly, is their any difference between Leif Garrett and Bobby Sherman? And are you sure you could pick Bobby Sherman out of a lineup if David Cassidy and Bobby Goldsboro were in it, too? If you can, wait thirty years, and you’ll be the last person who can. Time passes, and everything and everybody, no matter how notable they might get, fades into obscurity, or gets blended into a recollective blur:
But I’m going to roll out Medford, Massachusetts’ own Gloria Wood, and even people born in George Bush’s second term will know who I mean, even if they never heard her name. Because Gloria Wood was the voice of Minnie Mouse. Oh, yes, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, at least on records. She was all sorts of voices, singing and speaking, on radio, television, and movies. She’s singing something in almost every Disney thang from back when they still used ink and paper and talent to make their cartoons.
If you’re a little older, you might remember this, because they’re no way you can’t. Jingles do that to you, man, at least if they hire Gloria Wood:
That’s just a notable commercial. Between the years 1955 and 1958, she sang on 2,000 more. Gloria Wood has been in your ear more often than your pinkie, I tell you what. And while this is way before my time, if you’re old enough to move to Florida and wear white shoes, a white belt, and white pants hiked up to your armpits, and drive 15 miles an hour on the freeway, you might remember this:
She was a hired gun in numerous chorus jobs, too. I mean, someone has to sing one word over and over. Might as well be someone talented:
If you watch White Christmas at Christmas, because you’re brave, and not afraid the Technicolor will drill your rods and cones into the back of your skull, you can watch Vera-Ellen sing and dance with Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, and George Clooney’s aunt. Or not. Vera-Ellen’s skills were limited to hyphenation, prancing around, and looking like an anorexic with fetal alcohol syndrome working the Maybelline counter at the department store. Gloria Wood did all her singing.
Gloria’s dead and buried, now, in Glendale, California, but she’ll outlast “the UN,” I’ll bet, in people’s hearts, if not the mental phone books where we keep all the names.
Texas Troubadours, indeed. Plenty of heavy hitters in that band. But Buddy Emmons, holy shit. Ernie Tubb was an impresario. If you’re a musician, you might be familiar with this sort of fellow. You can’t quite put your finger on their talent. Can’t really sing or play well enough to stand out. Not exactly Cary Grantish either.
Tubb was not known to possess the most adept voice: he always sang flat and actually mocked his own singing. He told an interviewer that 95% of the men in bars would hear his music on the juke box and say to their girlfriends, “I can sing better than him,” and Tubb added they would be right.
But somehow or another they end up with ten guys with way more talent working for them. I guess that’s the talent. Getting the gigs is the supreme skill. And a lot of those kinds of guys turn a taciturn, smiling face to the public, but are slightly more, ahem, serious in their private affairs.
In 1957, he walked into the lobby of the National Life Building in Nashville in the early morning hours and fired a .357 magnum, intending to shoot music producer Jim Denny. Instead, Tubb mistakenly shot at WSM news director, Bill Williams, as he was walking in to work. Luckily, Tubb barely missed (twice) before realizing he had shot at the wrong man. He was arrested and charged with public drunkenness.
Ernie Tubb is one of those guys that becomes larger than life. A country Santa Claus. I swear he was born looking fifty-five years old, but in return, the heavens decreed he would never look much older, either. He appeared on the Grand Ole Opry long after he had the chart hits to make it inevitable. He set up shop down the street with an eponymous record store, and hosted his own show, the Midnite Jamboree, right from the middle of the record stacks.
People just liked him. Sometimes it’s a simple as that.
Man the fifties were exuberant. The 1930s and 40s seem pretty (olive) drab in comparison. People were optimistic. When they tried to picture the future, they didn’t default to Mad Max back then. They thought the future would be technically advanced, but they also thought it would be kinda fun. There’s a heaping helping of frivolity in their worldview.
By 1962, they figured they’d be flying, too:
I love the term “space age.” It’s like calling a boxy, plain house “modern.” Both terms are at least 75 years old, but still sound kinda up-to-date to modern ears. Of course space has turned into a humdrum place. In some ways, it always was. The Apollo missions to the moon used rockets that didn’t look very much like Flash Gordon would ride in one. They were the Chevy Citation of space travel. And now it’s just a bunch of nondescript satellites in an untidy mesh, beaming down TikTok videos of people trying to eat cinnamon by the teaspoon.
So the Astra-Gnome, the 1956 car of the future, is plenty fun to look at. But they really only got one thing right on the money about the future, and they got it right completely by accident. There was no way to get any air into the car with the bubble top down. You’d roast and smother in there, because people didn’t think the concept all the way through. The interviewer describes it as the “perfect covid car.”
Woody Guthrie wrote around about 1,000 song lyrics that never got published or set to music in his lifetime. Woody couldn’t read or write music so there were no notations indicating how he would want them to sound. Bob Dylan said Woody told Bob to go to New York and look up his wife Margie and get the boxes of song lyrics and set them to music, but Dylan said that when he got to the house, only Woody’s son Arlo and the babysitter were home, so he went away empty-handed.
Much later on, Woody’s daughter gave them to Billy Bragg and he set some to music and recorded them with the band Wilco. The album is named after the address on Coney Island where Woody used to live.
If you have any questions about why a guy would write a song titled: Ingrid Bergman, watch the screen test again.
If you’ll walk across my camera
I will flash the world your story I will pay you more than money, Ingrid Bergman
Not by pennies dimes nor quarters
But with happy sons and daughters
And they’ll sing around Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman
My sons inform me that they’re still making kids read Shakespeare in high school. I find that odd, because the general level of scholarship in the schools that I’ve observed is so poor. They barely make the kids read any books, and what they do read is trivial at best.
What’s the point of making them read Shakespeare? I’m perfectly happy reading Shaky Bill’s stuff, and do from time to time. But it’s heavy sledding for minds unaccustomed to courtly speech and Elizabethan vocabulary. I suspect that for schools, Shakespeare is like a coffee table book that you buy to impress visitors, but never crack the spine.
Speaking of cracked spines, they should have them watch Richard III, instead of pretending to read and understand it. In this version, Bill and Larry makes something by Stephen King look like The Care Bears.
Shakespeare is the greatest writer the English language ever produced. I’m always on the edge of amazement watching the words float by when they’re delivered by the right actor. Olivier was surely that. His Hamlet has been beaten, but his Henry Vth and Richard III are unexcelled, and probably always will be. When I was looking for this video, I stumbled over Bumbershoot Cumberbund stumbling over it. Every actor for the last fifty years or so thinks alternating between whispering and mumbling makes them more theatrical, and he’s no exception. It makes them something, I’ll admit that. I’m not sure what. Not something good. When you join the FedEx of delivering lines, you can’t just drive by, slow down a little, and toss them out the window onto the lawn. They have to make it all the way to the door. It’s basically your only job, beside making faces. Almost all modern actors just don’t have the chops borne of the kind of training actors used to receive to do the job.
The scene in the video is famous, of course. The opening line, anyway. But it’s the scene after this one in the movie that refrigerates the spine. Olivier, who had to edit the play down to a manageable size, was a consummate pro at it. He made subtle changes, skillful omissions, and even added a few things. The big change is in the next scene. In the original play, the Lady Anne is following behind her father-in-law’s funeral procession, and Richard barges in and starts hitting her up for a date. In Olivier’s version, she’s walking behind her husband’s coffin. The husband Richard has killed. Yikes. And he just launches right into seducing her. It’s the creepiest thing in a play that contains a double child murder, so that’s really saying something.
You can read it if you want to. But if your head isn’t as full of Shakespeare as Olivier’s, it’s better to watch it, and see it literally come alive right in front of you.
We had a light-hearted look at heavy metal guitarists the other day. It got me to wondering. Where did the guitar hero idea come from? I decided to answer my own question. Who else can I trust?
For purposes of this exercise, I should warn you that I’m not going to do any research. It sounds too much like work. Like a true guitar hero, I’ll be blasting away with little concern for anyone else’s input or what the audience wants to hear. Shooting from the hip, as it were.
I guess we should define “guitar hero” before we start. I’ll take a stab at it. A guitar hero plays the guitar to impress people with his guitar playing. That sounds like a bit of a tautology, but it’s really not. Many guitarists are more interested in being musical than being impressive. Jimmy Vaughn is a more musical guitar player than his little brother, who’s in the running for exhibit A in the guitar hero pantheon. Guitar heroism is usually the musical equivalent of weightlifting, not ballet.
So, how did we arrive at this state of affairs? Tell us, oh Sippican! Lay some more of your ill-considered opinions on us!
OK, I’ll bite. I think it started with Django Reinhardt.
Django made his guitar heroism all the more intriguing by the fact he only had two functional fingers on his left hand. It got burned, and his ring finger and pinky were formed into a kind of claw. But man, he could fly. In the video you can see the kind of guitar army he often fronted. Those old Selmer acoustic guitars were made for cabaret music, and they didn’t have the punch needed to get over in a loud world. When he started out, amplification was kind of non-existent, but small orchestras make plenty of noise acoustically. Django used a heavy plectrum to get maximum sound out of the box, and to elbow his way to the front of the pack. Let’s see what the Wikiup says about Django:
It wasn’t until 1938, and the Quintet’s first tour of England, that guitarists [in the U.K.] were able to witness Django’s amazing abilities. His hugely innovative technique included, on a grand scale, such unheard of devices as melodies played in octaves, tremolo chords with shifting notes that sounded like whole horn sections, a complete array of natural and artificial harmonics, highly charged dissonances, super-fast chromatic runs from the open bass strings to the highest notes on the 1st string, an unbelievably flexible and driving right-hand, two and three octave arpeggios, advanced and unconventional chords and a use of the flattened fifth that predated be-bop by a decade. Add to all this Django’s staggering harmonic and melodic concept, huge sound, pulsating swing, sense of humour and sheer speed of execution, and it is little wonder that guitar players were knocked sideways upon their first encounter with this full-blown genius.
Bang! There it is. It’s little wonder that other guitar players were knocked sideways. That’s a music critic talking. He kind of elides the fact that Django was endlessly musical, despite blowing all the other guitarists’ doors off. He gets right down to the meat of the matter, at least for guys like him. Django was impressive.
By the way, when your kids want to undertake something hard to prove their chops, Django beats Knopfler any day:
So where do we go from here? We’re drunk on cheap wine in pre-war Paris, and the greasy cigarette smoke is making us nauseated. What’s next?
The USof A, and Charlie Christian, of course.
That ladies and germs, it the electric guitar, blazing away, a true soloing instrument at last. He played in Benny Goodman’s band, and they featured him right out front. If you’ve never had the treat of standing in front of a Swing band before, you… you… you probably still have some of your hearing. Those bands were loud. I played in the back row of a few of them, and I still have a slight headache.
Pop a transducer in the sound hole of a guitar, plug it into a suitcase with a speaker and some tubes, and all of a sudden even the drummer can’t keep up. Charlie’s playing jazz, of course, but the whole idea of electric guitar soloing over background chord changes popped out of Charlie Christian’s very short stint on the stage. Died young and tubercular. So young there isn’t any video of him anywhere. Jazz musicians, and all sorts of other musicians, talk about Christian in hushed tones. Miles Davis said he wanted to play the trumpet like Christian played the guitar. Even rock musicians mention him, sometimes. They might have no taste, but they recognize a volume knob when they see it.
Now, the next step if fraught with peril. The 1950s has rolled around, and guitarists are thick on the ground at this point. Less well-informed observers might jump in here with any number of really good players who inspired lots of kids to take up the instrument, like Scotty Moore, or Eldon Shamblin, or T-Bone Walker, or even Chuck Berry, but wowing people with blazing licks wasn’t their top priority. Besides, in a way, we’re assigning blame for how guitar hero ethos turned out, not credit. If we’re going to find the pedigree of it goes to eleven malefactors, we’re going to have to go through Les Paul:
If the solid body electric guitar has a true father, he’s it. There may be twenty-zillion brands and models of guitars, but honestly, there are really only two kinds that matter for the purposes of our discussion. Les Pauls and Fender Stratocasters. Gibson made Les Pauls, but he invented them, and lots of other stuff to do with amplification and recording, including multi-track recording, so guitar showoffs could solo over themselves to increase the solipsism. Lots of guitarists went to an intermediate way-station on the road to shredding, using a semi-hollowbody guitar like the Gibson ES 330 or 335, but Les changed the whole scene for everything
Fender Strats are like boat oars compared to a Les Paul. They’re born from a country tradition, like the Telecasters that predated them. Blues heroes love’m. But a Les Paul guitar is a Lambo compared to the Fender musical delivery van. The neck is really thin, but the fretboard is a little flatter than a Strat. It’s got multiple pickups and volume and tone knobs. It’s made for showing off, and at flight-deck volume if you get a big enough amplifier.
So now it’s beginning to really look like the arms race we’re trying to define. Everyone was going to need bigger amplifiers and more necks on their guitars and maybe even some music lessons to keep up with the times. We’re going to get the musical cuisinart humming and dump in blues and country and swing and Broadway and torch songs and whatever else is hanging around.
Oh boy. Now we’ve run smack dab into the side of the 1960s. You’re going to demand I mention Hendrix or something. But we have to stick to the topic. We’re not just identifying showoffs. We’re talking about enablers and prototypes here. Lots of Millenials and Zoomers don’t understand Boomer affection for bands like the Beatles. They hear things like George Harrison’s lugubrious guitar solos and compare them to Eddie Van Halen or somebody. They’ve been taught that Rock Music is a thing, so the Beatles and Van Halen and Sade and Roxy Music and Weird Al Yankovic should all be compared to each other, and on the same merits.
Like I said, it’s the ’60s. The Stones and the Beatles and the Beach Boys et. al. gotta make a mint with pop music and some pedestrian guitar solos. Until we get to here:
It sounds woolly because they’re standing in front of walls of very crappy amplifiers to make all that noise. Real sound reinforcement got invented to replace the ad hoc arrangement you see here, and to keep up with the size of the venues and amount of decibels they demanded. The average wedding band in 2000 had a bigger PA system than the Beatles had to play Shea Stadium. This is why.
If you want to hear clearly what’s going in in that last video, let’s drop in on Tim Pierce and hear it done with all the equipment you could possibly want. It helps if you can play like crazy, too. Tim invited our son over to his house once, so he’s aces with us:
That Cream video was from 1968. It led directly to the end of our search, the go to Guitar Center, go directly to Guitar Center, do not pass out of the garage, do not collect a $200 advance from the record company, the true adumbration of the guitar hero ethos:
Everyone heard Crossroads, and thought to themselves, if I could play like that, maybe I could make time with George Harrison’s wife, too.
Sorry kids, like Marty DiBergi said in Spinal Tap, “Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.
Tag: 1950s
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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