The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1980. Kim Wilson, the singer, recovers quickly from an opening soundman brainfart with a simple gesture, and the train keeps a rollin’.
There’s never been a better roadhouse band. Jimmy Vaughan is playing the Stratocaster boat oar with very tasteful stick-on mailbox letters. Keith Ferguson is playing an old-school Fender Telecaster bass upside down, or backwards or something. This is more or less their original iteration of the Thunderbirds, except Fran Christina had replaced Mike Buck on the drums after their first album.
Fran’s interesting. He’s left-handed I think, but he plays a right-hand drum kit. He plays with what’s called an open-handed method. Drummers usually cross their hands, with their right hand playing the hi-hat cymbals on their left, and the left hand banging on the snare between their legs. They generally “open up” only when they move the right hand over to the ride cymbal on their right. Open handed drummers play the left side of their kit with their left hands, and the right with their right. Fran’s got two big rides, but he favors the one on his left, and plays the high hats with his left, too. Lots of heavy metal drummers play this way now, but only because they really don’t know how to play the drums. Fran’s terrific.
Fran’s a paisan from Westerly, Rhode Island. He was an original member of Roomful of Blues, which is still kicking around, although the personnel is a ship of Theseus at this point. Here is Roomful playing in the Knickerbocker Cafe in Westerly in 1979:
I performed in so many places back in the day, I can’t remember if I ever performed in the Knickerbocker Cafe. But I certainly remember being drunk in there. It was a terrific place to hear blues bands. There was an underground railroad of musicians from Providence to Texas and back, back in the day. Duke Robillard and Preston Hubbard were both in Roomful, and eventually made their way into some iteration of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. The Austin crews used to make the trek north to perform in places like the Knickerbocker and Lupo’s and did cameos in the old Met Cafe. I remember seeing Jimmy Vaughan’s brother, Stevie Ray, playing at the Knickerbocker with Lou Ann Barton doing the singing. I think she ended up getting traded to Roomful of Blues, with a player to be named later.
There was no such thing as “recreational” drugs back in the seventies. There was plenty of booze of course, and ditch weed doobies galore. What drugs there were were serious drugs. Several of these fellows I mentioned favored the most serious of drugs. Several of these fellows are dead, and died young, with a sandbag where their liver used to be. Rest in peace, fellas.
Please observe that we’re discussing why it’s a masterpiece. If you’re still wondering if it’s a masterpiece, you’re obviously lost and need to hit the back button on your browser a few times to get back to safety. It is. We’re only here to analyze the why.
We have to put aside the fact that it’s funny. It was obviously supposed to be funny. They put Don Rickles in it, for instance. I’ve seen a short list of the scenes that were edited out of the movie. It’s pretty obvious that KH was intended to be the Animal House of Hohenzollern. The out-edits mostly involved girls with their shirts off and assorted other 70s bilge. The Ingrid Pitt Breast Delivery System was hired to bring some sort of incongruous feminine presence, but she was laid off before they even started filming. Like many good movies, its sounds like the producers tried to ruin the venture as hard as they could, but couldn’t manage it.
Clint Eastwood leads the cast. He’s always been a replacement for John Wayne in the firmament of Hollywood. He just plays himself, over and over, just like the Duke did. It doesn’t matter whether he’s driving around with an orangutan in a pickup truck, or with Donald Sutherland barking like a dog in a Sherman tank, Clint the Squint is just Clint. Complaining about Clint’s acting style is like getting up a petition to put Franklin Pierce on Mount Rushmore instead of one of the Borglund four. Clint might not know a Strasberg from a Starbucks, but he knows what he’s about. Try imagining anyone else as Kelly in this role. Kelly has to appear stoic, stolid, fearless, formidable, a man to be followed. Actors who can project that are always in short supply. And he wasn’t afraid to sort of poke fun at his carefully cultivated image, if the moment called for it. Here’s the spaghetti western meeting the German deli:
Telly Savalas has a big part in the show. He was supposed to be George Kennedy. George wanted too much money to be in the movie, so they got Kojak. He turned out to be perfect for the job. Once again, the producers won by losing. The movie would have been diminished some if you replaced Telly’s bald pate with Kennedy’s combover, but it’s not like they were trying to hire Don Knotts. It wouldn’t have been a trainwreck. Without Clint, the premiere would have been held at a drive-in.
Hollywood has always been full of actors that don’t, ahem, know their limitations. Another giant slab of beef, Charlton Heston, never knew enough to stick to his knitting, and embarrassed himself numerous times by trying to act in things, instead of standing in the right spot, remembering his lines, and avoiding knocking over the furniture. Clint has never made that mistake.
Donald Sutherland steals the picture, of course, with his oddball Oddball character. It was completely misunderstood at the time, and even moreso now. Everyone describes him and his crew as hippies, which they find incongruous in a story that includes a mention of Omaha Beach not once, but twice. It’s the result of two errors. First, they assumed that everyone came home from the war, kept their crewcuts, got a job making cars with fins, and had 2.3 children and a dog to kick. But just like after WWI, lots of WWII vets had trouble fitting in after the war, and were quite bohemian, if not downright criminal. The Wild One is one example of that sort of man. Oddball and his ilk are another. He isn’t a hippie. He’s not even a proto-hippie if you ask me. He’s a Beat Generation free spirit all the way. Hell, what hippie ever listened to country music, whether he’s flattening a railroad crossing in a tank, or not? The Beat Generation worshiped idiosyncrasy for its own sake, just like Oddball’s crew. There has never been a more lockstep bunch than the hippies.
That’s the second error. To the modern eye, hippies were a new phenomenon, peculiar to the late sixties and pre-disco seventies. Nonsense. It was a warmed over fad. Hell, Germany had hippies wandering around the Black Forest, who called themselves wandervogel. They liked to commune with nature in the woods while singing folk songs, and had been doing it since the 19th century. After Charlie Chaplin’s accession to Fuhrer, they were either invited to become Hitler jugend or were directed to commune with nature more closely, as mulch. At any rate, the Greatest Generation had a lot more variation than how they’re usually portrayed, and the generations who followed had a lot less.
So the movie doesn’t really rely on comic relief. Comedy is a strand woven right through it. It’s not a series of rest areas on the usual highway to shooting other people, and blowing stuff up. It’s funny, but the premise of the movie, a bank robbery that’s quasi-legal because the bank is behind a shifting dotted line on a military map, sounds more outrageous than any number of more staid WWII movies. The problem is, it’s a true story. Some soldiers from various armies robbed a NAZI bank and made off with lots of gold, almost none of which was subsequently recovered. Kelly’s Heroes, which is supposed to be a romp, might have more truth in it than one of those slavish war movies with the Germans floating on a cushion of subtitles.
The miracles in the movie’s production are legion. The director was Brian G. Hutton, who wasn’t exactly David Lean. He was a bit actor for a while, before he decided it was easier to sit in a sling chair with his name on it. He’d just got finished making Where Eagles Dare in ’68, so he was a natural to put an x in gaffer’s tape on the floor and point Clint towards it.
It’s fun to compare WED to KH, since they share so many details in their productions and cast. Where Eagles Dare made a small fortune, but it’s a really dumb movie. It’s dumb fun, but admit it, it’s really dumb. There isn’t any comedy in it, but it’s very funny accidentally. Richard Burton is completely miscast, yelling his lines like drunken Hamlet, while stolid Clint just sort of glares at him and wonders why he doesn’t just say the lines. The plot is like fourteen war/spy movies put in a Cuisinart and put back together as a papier-mache movie. All the German soldiers are basically NPCs who throw their arms straight up and fall over a second or two before one of the heroes shoots them. It’s a hoot.
So Brian tried again, and got it exactly right this time. He left Burton at the happy hour drink rail, took Clint to Yugoslavia, and blew up more of the country than the Allies and the Wehrmacht ever did. The second-rate actors were all first-rate. The battle scenes are better than Saving Private Ryan by a long shot. The campfire scenes mostly show guys as they are, believably pensive, tired, and tongue-tied, instead of exposition factories. Their dumbfounded, silent expressions when their fellows are killed have more pathos in them than any ten anti-war movies. And their motivations are completely believable, instead of the usual supermen charging at machine guns to die for freedom words.
It’s a masterpiece. So watch it again. Don’t worry about being bored because you know how it turns out. Have a little faith, baby.
That’s Eumir Deodato tickling the plastic horse teeth. He’s from Brazil. He’s been around for what seems like forever, doing his thing. He was mostly an arranger and producer of records. He made records with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Kool and the Gang.
He eventually got around to making his own records in a serious way. In 1973, his first album sold five million copies and won a Grammy. It had his very funky version of Also Sprach Zarathustra on it, which was notably featured in Being There. If you thought using Also Sprach in 2001: A Space Odyssey was brilliant, well, using this version of it in Being There was genius.
The TooYube clip is just the song laid over a truncated clip from the movie, but in the original, it weaves in and out of the dialog and street noise, and lasts a lot longer. It’s the most effective melding of music and film footage I’ve ever seen.
The first video is a performance of Super Strut. It’s much less recognizable than ASZ, but it was a modest hit in the US, too. It’s on Deodato’s second album, which is delightfully odd, with jazz covers of Knights in White Satin, Rhapsody in Blue, and a Ravel piece.
I gather that Eumir tours like a lot of old Blues musicians used to. He travels on his own, and expects whoever puts on the show to assemble a band for him to play with. Chuck Berry used to do that, too. In the first video, Deodato is playing with the Euro Groove Department, who are definitely up to the job. There are many videos of Deodato performing the song online with less capable musicians.
The drummer is terrific, but one can’t help but notice that Deodato gets up and goes to the john or something until the drum solo is over. I cast no aspersions. The audience mostly does during any drum solo, so why can’t the other musicians?
The Faces doing “Stay With Me” back in the early ’70s. Absolutely rollicking stuff. It’s a wonder they all lived to finish the song what with Rod Stewart swinging the mike stand around like that.
This is what the Rolling Stones would have sounded like in 1972 if they had learned how to play their instruments and sing a little. I guess it was easier to just hire Ronnie Wood and keep going.
Aw yeah. That’s 1964. Dobie Gray on Shindig, one of the many musical variety shows on TV back then. It was only broadcast for a couple of years, but managed to showcase lots of good artists. The first show had Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, and The Righteous Brothers, for instance.
The In Crowd had several popular iterations. Dobie’s was the first. A little later, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis decided it would make a fun jazz cover.
Jazz was very big in the fifties, but rock ‘n roll steamrolled it in the sixties. Despite that, The Ramsey Lewis Trio had a big hit with it, sold a million copies, and got a Grammy for their trouble. The song has more or less become a jazz standard on the back of Lewis’ version. In the seventies, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music took a run at it, and made the hind end of the charts again with a… a… well, a Bryan Ferry sort of version of it.
The three versions couldn’t sound more different. Dobie sounded playful singing the song. Ramsey sounded sophisticated. And Bryan sounded like he had a pocket full of rohypnol, and was cruising a louche bar in Marseille.
This is a Minuteman ICBM, on its way somewhere with its cargo of canned sunshine:
ICBM of course an acronym for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It’s called a Minuteman because it’s got solid fuel in the rumble seat instead of liquid propellant. You’d have to fill up the tank just before launch if it relied on liquid fuel, and you’d feel pretty silly getting an incoming missile on top of your head, what with you standing there with the gas pump nozzle in your hand.
America has three kinds of ICBMs. Minutemen missiles are the land-based leg of the stool. Trident submarines are loaded up with missiles, and skulk around the world’s oceans waiting for Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman to agree to turn the keys at the same time. Bombers carrying nuclear weapons are the third leg.
Minutemen are old tech. They’ve been in service since 1962. They got upgraded to deliver multiple warheads from the same missile in the ’70s. They’re due to be replaced by something else ghastly in 2030. I wouldn’t stand on one leg and hold my breath expecting the replacements to be delivered on time, however. Many Ukrainians currently have one leg, and have decided to permanently hold their breath, while waiting for munition deliveries from our Military Industrial Complex, for example.
So if you’ve ever wondered what it was like sitting in an underground bunker, waiting for the president to drop the nuclear football and step on the button, here’s a virtual tour of one from aerospaceutah.org. Press anywhere on the photo to visit the interactive wonderfulness. One word of caution: it starts making noises right away:
I’ve worked in a defense plant, so I’m used to these sorts of drab surroundings. The cheap toaster oven on the counter is a nice, human touch. And far be it from me to wonder why a facility that can end the world has about the same amount and quality of equipment you’d find in your average college radio station. Better chairs, though.
Never mind all that. Poke around with your mouse, and zoom in here and there, and you’ll discover just how serious this whole procedure became. Over in the corner, in someone’s duty bag, you’ll find this:
Nuclear Armageddon could turn out to be a long slog. Best pack your fuzzy doggie slippers.
It’s marked 1973, and I sure believe it. Man, that’s some 1973 hair. Please to not be displaying any ears, thank you. The tenor sax player’s “leisure suit made from grandma’s couch slipcover” is timeless, however.
Tower of Power was the only band that could give Sly and the Family Stone a run for their money. Bad venue, though. They really shouldn’t be in a room with chairs.
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.
The internet really likes lots of seventies bands. However, they pick the strangest ones to resurrect, if my tastes are the yardstick. I don’t need to see a Queen video, thanks, and never needed to hear an Abba song in the first place. But hey, knock yourselves out kids. Like what you like.
The seventies are starting to slip into that never-never land of eras known to a younger generation solely by movies and TV shows about the decade, not so much actual recollections. One band I never see mentioned anywhere on these here intertunnels is Little Feat. They get listed under Southern Rock, but they don’t seem much like that to me. They seem like Little Feat. Anything else is a category error.
Well if no one else is going to paste them on their website, then I might.
Tag: 1970s
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments