Ludwig van Beethoven: I cannot hear them, but I know they are making a hash of it. What do you think? Music is… a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What does it mean?
Anton Felix Schindler: It – it exalts the soul.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism.
That’s the Young Rascals on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. They were a blast.
They mostly get lumped in the “Blue-eyed Soul” category. That’s semi-amusing, because with one exception, they’re goombahs with olive oil voices and guinea charm, and definitely sans blue eyes.
Ed Sullivan featured scads of interesting music on his shows over the years, usually before they’d become well-known. He was famous for introducing Elvis and the Beatles to mass audiences, but if you look over the rosters of his show, you’ll find dozens of acts like the Young Rascals that got notable for the first time by appearing on his stage.
Ed was the coolest square that ever lived. He was a popular sportswriter in New York, and eventually sidled over to doing reviews of Broadway shows and a smattering of gossip. That was enough to get him a gig on the early days of teevee. He started broadcasting in 1948, when very few people even had a teevee, and he lasted until 1971, setting a record for the longest run of a variety show in history.
Ed’s great gift, if you want to call it that, was encapsulated by comedian Alan King: “Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else in television.” And the Young Rascals proved Fred Allen’s quip, that “Ed Sullivan will last, as long as other people have talent.” They did, and he did.
Ah. Irish Setter hairdos and braless babes in hot pants. What’s not to like?
I’m too young for the first go-round of this song. I played in an oldies band many years after this, and it was plenty popular then. The pretty girls all danced in front of the bandstand just like that — just like their moms and aunts and big sisters did for the original. There’s no reason for it, really. The song would have to get a lot more sophisticated just to be considered a trifle. It’s a three-chord raga with lyrics about as compelling as a self-addressed stamped envelope. So what? Soap bubbles wouldn’t float as well if they were made from steel.
That’s the McCoys from Union City, Indiana. They got their name from the extremely B side of the Ventures Walk Don’t Run single. I’ve been in a lot of bands that spent more time trying to come up with a witty name than they did practicing. I’m right there with the McCoys here. Use whatever’s handy and get on with it. Hell, people used to name their children random things by opening the Bible to any old page, placing an unseeing finger on the text, and using the words under their digit. Of course the modern method of using a Boggle game or spilling Scrabble game tiles on a Ouija board is much less silly.
There’s two brothers in the band. The Zehringers. Brother Rick eventually changed his name to something easier to spell, and became Rick Derringer. That song might be as simple enough to be played by a chicken pecking a toy piano, but Rick is no slouch. He played guitar on several Steely Dan records. If you’re familiar with their coterie of session men, you know that they didn’t settle.
This is Rick playing the guitar solos on Chain Lightning:
The McCoys were marketed as a bubblegum pop band by their record label. Sloopy made it to Number One on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies, and was named the “Official Rock Song of the State of Ohio.” I’m not sure if that last one is an encomium or an unintentional diss, but it sure is something.
Most musicians can’t handle that kind of success. The McCoys wanted to make heavier rock and psychedelic music. They quit their music label over it, and signed with Mercury Records, who let them make two unlistenable flopparoos before cutting them loose. Two of the original band members didn’t make it to fifty years old by living the serious musician lifestyle a little too seriously.
Rick Derringer hooked up with a bunch of interesting people like Edgar and Johnny Winter and Steely Dan. He eventually had a hit of his own in the mid-seventies called Rock and Roll, Hootchie Coo, which rivals Sloopy for pedestrian lyrics and a general kind of enthusiasm.
Everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down, but sometimes the simple things are best.
In movies, there are actors commonly referred to as “That Guy.” That Guy actors are fellas who never starred in much of anything, but seem to at least be in hundreds of movies. Movie producers and directors rely on them to be able to show up and bring something special to the film, even if their name doesn’t merit the marquee.
Let’s use the term in music this time. Otis Rush is not That Guy in this video. Otis never received the kind of notoriety that fellas like Muddy Waters or BB King, or even Albert King achieved. But he was hardly obscure, especially if you were a blues aficionado. In many ways, he was the most influential Chicago blues guitar player I can name. I played in blues bands in the seventies and eighties, and more people wanted to play like Otis Rush than anyone else.
But that drummer. Now he’s That Guy, that’s for sure, blues-wise. That’s Fred Below. You probably don’t know his name, but you know his music. All my guitar playing friends knew they wanted to sound like Otis Rush, but the drummers all ended up playing like Fred Below without even knowing it. He sort of invented the Chicago Blues drumming style.
If you think I’m exaggerating about Fred’s invisible notoriety, I’ll mention that it’s him you hear playing the drums on Johnny B. Goode, and a hearty helping of other Check Berry hits. He played with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, and of course Otis Rush.
And you can try your whole life long to get your freak on every whichaway you want, and never equal his beret, cravat, and Van Dyke beard.
My son likes Wes Anderson movies, so we got Asteroid City, and looked at it. I can’t testify that we watched it, only that we looked at it. Watching something has a specific meaning.
Watch
intransitive verb
To look or observe attentively or carefully; be closely observant.
“watching for trail markers.”
To look and wait expectantly or in anticipation.
“watch for an opportunity.”
To act as a spectator; look on.
“stood by the road and watched.”
The thing being watched requires a certain amount of interest to merit watching, and Asteroid City was a solar system removed from that level of interest.
Of course ol’ Wes has always wanted his audience to look at his movies. He makes them bizarre and otherworldly for just that reason. He favors two-dimensional scenes, with exaggerated colors, anachronistic clothing and props, and weird, static poses for his actors. He’s the filmic equivalent of walking along a wall in Tutankhamen’s tomb, and wondering what everything means and why everyone has two left hands.
Believe me when I tell you that the trailer has a more coherent storyline than the movie.
But Wes didn’t always produce such directionless kitsch as Asteroid City. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel had a more subdued version of the same sort of visual style, but they also had a story of some sort to knit it all together. It’s always a loopy and somewhat misanthropic story, but it gets you to watch. Asteroid City isn’t even a disconnected series of tableaus or vignettes. It literally starts noplace, goes nowhere, and ends in midair. I can’t give it a bad review, because it’s not coherent enough to merit one. It’s simply a self-indulgent mess.
Call me crazy, but my mind started to wander pretty far afield about ten minutes in to Asteroid City, and as it dragged along, it struck me that I’d seen this movie before, only not so sucky. An excuse to put a bunch of recognizable, but mostly second-string actors in a movie for no apparent reason, strictly so the audience can sort of collect them as the movie bumps along, like the baseball cards of a team in last place. I couldn’t stop thinking about It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World:
Mad World is from 1963, but it’s a 50s movie all the way. The cast was mostly 50s retreads, like Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, with some up and comers like Jonathan Winters and Dick Shawn sprinkled in. The director was Stanley Kramer, famous for ponderous dramas, but Mad World is anything but.
It’s funny, but Kramer captured the stark high desert vibe with oversaturated sunshine much better than Anderson did. And unlike Asteroid City, the movie was a genuine attempt to entertain the audience. There is nothing as funny as Jonathan Winters wrecking a gas station in Asteroid City, and there are ten things as funny as it elsewhere in IAMMMMW.
Like Asteroid City, IAMMMMW is a single joke told over and over more than a plot, with a sprawling cast and disconnected actions. Unlike Asteroid City, each scene is at least amusing, and the actors are all used to good effect. There are many uber-short cameos by people who just want to be included in the movie, very much like actors lining up to work for cheap money in a Wes Anderson flick. The difference is Stanley Kramer gave them all something to do, and knitted all their zany efforts into a bag at the end at the foot of the big W.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, actors, writers and producers rebelled against a studio system that they felt stifled their creativity, and put a brake on their off-camera behavior. IAMMMMW is a product of the studio system, the result of a committee of people who were honestly trying to make entertaining movies. The writers, Bill and Tania Rose, the directors, the studio, the actors, everybody was constrained by their roles, but worked as hard as they could in their orbit to make the best movie they possibly could. It was a trifle, but it was a stone cold groove. And it made plenty of money, too.
So the studio system is so dead and buried that it’s out of memory now. Wes Anderson doesn’t have to listen to anyone, and he doesn’t. He writes it and produces it and directs it, and if Asteroid City is any indication, he figures he’s the only person that needs to be entertained by it, too. He’s trying too hard to be Wes Anderson at this point.
Sometimes, trying too hard is the same as not trying at all.
Tag: 1960s
sippicancottage
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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