That’s Stevland Hardaway Morris on the Dick Cavett Show back in 1970, I think. It’s a stone groove, as they say. Made it to #3 on the Billboard charts. Got beat out for the Grammy by the execrable Patches song, sung by Clarence Carter, who is also blind, an interesting footnote.
Both Stevie’s mother and wife are listed as co-songwriters on that track, which makes them eligible for a split of the royalties. One wonders if Stevie knew exactly what he was signing all the time. I’m not sure I can identify everyone on the stage there. The singers might be Lynda Tucker Laurence , Syreeta Wright, and Venetta Fields. They’re listed as the singers on the record. Lynda eventually became a Supreme, and Syreeta eventually became the ex-Mrs. Wonder. But studio people didn’t usually tour. It’s more likely Shirley Brewer, Lani Groves, and Delores Harvin.
I’m a little sketchy on the power trio members. Fo sho that’s Michael Henderson on the bass. He played on the first few Miles Davis fusion records, plus with a bunch of Motown acts. He was terrific. The drummer looks like Ollie Brown. Cool as a cucumber. No idea about the guitar player. Ray Parker Jr. used to play guitar with Stevie, but that ain’t him. Well, whoever they are, they’re tighter than a cow’s tuchus at fly-time.
Way back when, I used to sing and play the bass on this song in a cover band. This is long overdue, but I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Wonder. I promise I won’t do it any more.
We re-watched Dog Day Afternoon the other day. I don’t want to talk about the movie. I want to talk about the opening credits.
The movie came out in 1975. It’s depicting a real robbery that happened in 1972. The opening credits use an Elton John song released in 1970. If it’s not the most effective use of music in opening credits in a movie, it’s got to be close to the top. I’ll explain.
No one goes to the movies anymore, really. People still did in 1975, and the movies were still being produced to be seen by crowds of people in a darkened theater on a large screen. You had to stand in line, and buy tickets, have them torn in half fourteen feet later by a nonagenarian usher for some reason, and then fight for seats in the middle rows, halfway back. The lights would dim, the movie would play, and the opening music would produce a mood, transporting the audience from a tattered seat and a sticky floor to the time and place where the story begins. If it were done properly, which wasn’t a given, it became a shared, out of body experience.
Movies aren’t like that anymore. Movies were real competition for teevee back then. Now they’re indistinguishable milieus. Netflix makes movies, and shows them on your home screen. It’s like hiring the projectionist to direct the movies, because he’s watched so many. What the hell does Netflix know about making movies?
Sidney Lumet directed this movie. He made lots of movies, many of them really good, in addition to the various demands made by being P.J. O’Rourke’s father-in-law. He never won an Oscar for direction, but they gave him an honorary one for hanging around so long and putting so much money in the till over the years. Here are some:
12 Angry Men
The Pawnbroker
Fail Safe
Serpico
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
Prince of the City
The Verdict
One thing I’ve noticed about good directors. They don’t look gift horses in the mouth. Some guys are loosey-goosey anyway, and let things happen all the time. Others are pretty strict about sticking to the script. But all good ones of both kinds know when they’ve stepped in something good, instead of that stuff you see on the sidewalk in those opening credits.
There’s a lot of these happy accidents, as it were, in Dog Day Afternoon. The reply to the question of where Sal wants to go when they escape was left blank on the script. Cazale ad-libbed “Wyoming,” and Lumet had to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing and ruining the shot. The “Attica” speech by Sonny (Pacino) was entirely ad-libbed, after the assistant director whispered the topic to Al as he was about to exit the bank to address the crowd. They hired hundreds of extras for the crowd scenes, but passersby started joining the crowd, and after a while, the whole bunch of them starting acting on cue like professionals. Lumet egged them on, and used all of it.
But maybe the happiest accident is the opening credits. Lumet was driven around New York in a station wagon, filming this and that, and it added up to a perfect encapsulation of the time and place that was New York in the seventies. Dirty, rundown, disintegrating, with people trying to live their lives in the disassembling city.
But that was just the visuals. It’s funny, but there is no music in Dog Day Afternoon, just random diegetic sounds, except the opening credits. Lumet originally didn’t intend to have any music score in the movie, but the editor was playing Amoreena by Elton John in the editing room, and Lumet decided to use it, soaring over the opening scenes of the city, eventually coming out of the getaway car’s radio to tie the whole thing together.
I don’t know why a strange song by a flamboyant London singer, who was trying and failing brilliantly to write his idea of American country songs, was the perfect fit to encapsulate that time and place, and set the scene for the audience, reminding them that they weren’t home on their couch anymore, but plunged into some nether world of Stockholm Syndrome and low IQ, fuddled robbers with an eclectic tastes in wives. But it was.
I’d rank the guitar intro in the top 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. Maybe higher. That’s the antipodean Hindley Street Country Club taking a crack at it. I guess they’re just a cover band, but up several notches from the usual.
I was tempted to paste the Detroit Spinners original here. It was a million-seller in 1972. All the vids of the Spinners on Soul Train and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and similar shows are all lip synched. The band does their steps, and generally look genial, but I’d have preferred something fresh.
It’s understandable. Back then, the audiences just wanted to hear their favorite songs without waiting for the top of the hour over and over on the Top 40 stations. They might revolt if it didn’t sound just like the record. People are more interested in different versions of things these days, I think. It comes from having pretty much all forms of entertainment at your fingertips at all times. Something new sticks out.
The framework of the song lends itself to various permutations of it. This is my favorite bent version of it:
The original song was used to great effect as the outro for the movie Roman J. Israel, Esq., a very underrated movie:
Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:
Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!
Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.
So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!
Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.
So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!
Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.
Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.
I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.
Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.
You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.
The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.
No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.
The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.
But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years
Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.
When I’m driving in my car And a man talks on the radio He’s telling me more and more About some useless information Supposed to fire my imagination
It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.
I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.
The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.
Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.
And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.
Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.
They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago. You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.
In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
Easy Rider (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Chinatown (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.
Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.
Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.
Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:
Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video. In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.
“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.
No, I’m not talking about Bernard Purdie, shown here playing the drums with Vulfpeck, although it would be alright with him if I was. Bernard played on the original Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan minor masterpiece. I like how Bernard is wearing a Bernard Purdie tee-shirt. I think I’ll wear a Sippican Cottage t-shirt when I pick up my Nobel prize for literature. Or maybe a sweatshirt. I hear it gets cold in Stockholm. On further reflection, maybe they can just mail me the money and the bronze coaster with the dynamiter on it, and save me the trip.
Speaking of trips, in the title, I’m not referring to Bernard, or Becker or Fagen, or even Owlsley, the LSD king that Kid Charlemagne is written about. All that chemistry was in aid of the largest deliberate experiment in subverting the culture ever attempted: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Ken Kesey has had a larger influence on the United States than anyone going back to maybe Alexander Hamilton. And while it ultimately led by a very circuitous route to the wonderful agglomeration of Bernard Purdie and Vulfpeck playing Kid Charlemagne, it would be hard to come to any conclusion but one: That influence was all bad.
The Merry Pranksters, as they styled themselves, wouldn’t mind being called bad influences by the L7s, because they were rebelling against the squares. Many people thought the Pranksters were doing a good thing by telling people that drugs would expand their minds, and that these expanded minds would lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like whirled peas, face painting, and luxuriant armpit hair on women.
Well, it didn’t.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face They’ve joined the human race Some things will never change
These are the Day-Glo freaks Becker and Fagen were talking about, and Kid Charlemagne was supplying with LSD:
Kesey is largely responsible for the two major problems currently haunting America. First, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That made him a pile of money, and earned him plenty of notoriety. It was the lever that started the big rock of “reform” rolling downhill for US mental hospitals. Of course Chesterton’s Fence wasn’t consulted, and the benighted denizens were simply turned out of doors instead of firing all the prototypical passive aggressive girlbosses like nurse Ratched and starting over. So mentally ill people get to live under bridges and yell at cars, courtesy of Ken Kesey.
Then Kesey started the sixties counterculture, nearly singlehanded, if Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is to be believed. Now that Wolfe is dead, I figured it was safe to read something written by him. My wife found a dogeared paperback copy of it for me in a used bookstore. If I’m still reading the frontispiece correctly, this paperback edition was printed in 1989, but was already the 31st edition of the thing. I’m always amazed at how well bad writing used to pay.
I’m exaggerating some. The book’s not bad, exactly. But the breathless praise for TEKAAT book seems a bit much to me. The author was trying way too hard, and ends up sounding like a stoned, short-bus James Joyce. But that was the spirit of the times. To a normal person, a species which of course has currently been hunted to extinction, hearing the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the bad rock music, you realize that it only sounds like something if you’re stoned.
But that was the other Kesey shoe that dropped. Giving people LSD, including giving it to them unawares, is just one act in his passion play. The whole idea that it is completely normal for everyone to be stoned on one thing or another, or everything all at once for that matter, was adumbrated by Kesey and his coterie of Day-Glo freaks. I found it interesting that in the book, Wolfe describes what the merry band used when LSD was hard to get. They’d smoke a lot of weed and take a lot of speed, and reported that it gave them almost the same sort of trip. I immediately thought of today’s kids, gobbling ritalin and other ADHD drugs, which are a kind of speed, and smoking now-legal marijuana. Everything old is new again, I guess.
Downstream of all that, Kesey’s idea that any productive behavior is strictly for the squares now reigns triumphant. Riding around, stoned out of your gourd, and annoying the locals while filming it, just like the Merry Pranksters, is the number one career choice for young people these days, at least according to various polls:
86% of young Americans say they’d try being an influencer; 12% already identify as one, according to a Morning Consult poll (ages 13–38)
57% of Gen Z teens (13–26) believe they can easily make a career as an influencer, with the same share saying they’d leave their current job to pursue it
40% of teenagers (13–18) are actively considering becoming social media influencers, per a Citizens Financial/Junior Achievement survey
16% of teens explicitly want to become a “social media influencer/content creator,” ranking just behind entrepreneurship in a Junior Achievement/EY study
It doesn’t matter that there are no more squares to outrage. Grandma’s got an ass-antler tattoo and grandpa is swinging at The Villages hot tub with his current girlfriend. Whatever. Today’s young girls make endless videos of themselves stuffing comped food in their faces at various vacation spots, or take off their tube tops on OnlyFans to make a few bucks. The guys record their video games and publish them on Twitch or suchlike, and mention that they might also acquiesce to being a pro athlete, but pretty much no one wants a real job. Kesey did that.
So Wolfe’s book accidentally shows what happens the day after tomorrow when you take Timothy Leary’s advice to: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Plenty of those Merry people ended up in mental, and other sorts of hospitals. An assortment ended up dead. Jail was pretty common. Eventually the hippie chicks learned that Merry Pranksters thought Hell’s Angels were just as merry, and invited them over for what sounds to me like a gang rape that Tom Wolfe should have called that. And the whole lovely worldview soldiered on through the decades until it reached its apotheosis in Fentanyldelphia, Pennsylvania:
It’s useful to recall that the original idea for giving Americans LSD was part of a CIA mind-control experiment called MKUltra. I guess you could call it a failed experiment, but then again, you’d have to know what they were really trying to accomplish to know if it was a failure, and almost every record of it was burned by the CIA. But a list of the known and likely participants in the “experiments,” some unwitting, sure is interesting. Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, James Whitey Bulger, Ted Kaczynski, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson. Nice bunch of people there. Very tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Jim Jones had his own Kool-Aid test down in Guyana, too, and while no one can positively say the CIA was in on it, it sure sounds fishy, and one is reminded that denying they’re in on it is right on their business cards.
So what did it all add up to, really? Driving around in a garishly decorated bus, dressing in clown motley, taking drugs, and annoying regular people while filming it? Let’s go back to Steely Dan for the answer.
While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light.
[Editor’s Note: Originally from 2017. Republished with comments intact. Also, there is no editor]
When I was a kid, we lived in a neighborhood.
Well, I thought it was a neighborhood. That term has fallen out of favor with the nattering nabobs of negativity. They heap scorn on developments now. They reserve the word neighborhood for where they live. Their neighborhoods are defined by constantly shifting imaginary lines in a featureless desert of concrete spangled with chewing gum and crime. It was a lot simpler for us back in the day. If you weren’t in the woods, you were in the neighborhood.
I had deer under my window from time to time, instead of a dumpster morning, noon, and night, but the world has spoken. They aver that I was raised in a exurban hellscape, a cultureless wasteland, and I’d identify myself as a troglodyte to say otherwise.
Who would want to live in Smalltown Sprawltown USA? Well, a lot of people did. My parents sure did. They didn’t know any better. They thought they lived in a neighborhood. They made the mistake of getting along with their neighbors, and they called it a neighborhood, and they thought that made it a neighborhood.
It seemed like the whole wide world to me, that little warren of splits and capes. In a way, it was. At first, there were only a couple dozen houses. After a while, they punched through the curb cuts and added several more neighborhoods, er, developments. It got so a kid couldn’t play street hockey without having to drag the net to the curb every ten minutes to let a car pass.
It was a polyglot place, no matter what you’ve heard from people who live in concrete dovecotes and write for the Gnew Yourk Toimes. In our neighborhood, Irishmen lived right next door to Englishmen. One side skipped car bombing his neighbors. His counterpart eschewed channeling the Earl of Essex. There was a French family right next door, too. I can still picture their little doe-eyed girl named Suzanne, forever frozen in my mind’s amber, immortal and fey and unchanging. Unlike on the continent, they required only a privet hedge instead of a foggy channel to keep from falling on each other with misericordes and getting busy.
There were Germans living next to Poles. The crabgrass invaded the neighbor’s yard looking for lebensraum, but that was about it. There were Scots living next to people I thought were sorta German, but were really Swiss, I think. If they didn’t care enough to explain to me what they were, why should I bother to figure it out?
The whole town was lousy with Italians. Italian is a funny word to a real Italian. A lot of Eyetalians got unshod of the Italian boot with firsthand memories of the Risorgimento. It wasn’t smart to assume they were all the same. A Calabrian had no use for an Abrusseze. A Venetian had no use for a Neapolitan. No one had any use for Sicilians, and still don’t.
A block away from me, a Lebanese dad pulled his Ford into his carport, waved to a French-Canadian family on one side, a Portuguese guy on the other, and a neighbor with a name out of Charles Dickens across the street. The Lebanese family had a girl that broke several thousand hearts, no doubt, besides mine, without uttering a sound. She had eyes like dishes of used motor oil, skin like two days at the beach, and a head of hair like a mink.
My school was topped off with Armenians, with a couple of Jewish kids thrown in. They seemed about as exotic as a pothole. Though we lived in New England, we had truck with real live rednecks, too. I remember Calvin, fresh from below the Waffle House/IHOP line, slouching in class and drawling like a goober. I’ll say he sounded like a goober now. No one said he sounded like a goober back then, at least out loud, because Calvin was six-two in eighth grade, and he shaved.
There were black families. In high school, my ignant bogtrotter friend from across the street went out with an Ashanti princess from the newer development a mile away. She pulled her afro into a pony tail that formed a perfect sphere that followed her like a satellite, wore tube tops, and pretended to like his Bachmann-Turner Overdrive records. He pretended to like her Earth Wind and Fire records while actually liking her tube top. The only person to disapprove of the whole affair was her father. He was moderately well-to-do by our standards, because he ate in restaurants and had a brand new car. The one-toilet Irish kid was one step from feral. Dad looked the other way a little, and wondered if maybe his daughters would mind if they moved away. Like, to Venus.
When I got a little older, I slept on a Syrian lady’s couch when I was stuck in a snowstorm. She was immensely old, forty at least, wore too much jewelry and makeup, smoked like a film noir plot, and was missing a portion of one middle finger. I don’t remember what the couch looked like.
Anyway, for a couple of decades, I’ve watched a continent full of fools and knaves trying to ram themselves into a political, social, and monetary union while they royally screwed the pooch nine ways from Sunday in the attempt. I suppose it would be unkind of me to point out that we managed it, all on our own, completely by accident, back before disco, simply because there was no corrupt, contemptible government trying to make us do it.
Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pain in the ass to type. I’m not one of those eleventy!1111!1!11!1 guys from the internet from ten years ago. I like to think I’m a competent male writer, so exclamation points are rarer than honest congressmen in my text. I have to go looking for the exclamation point, and hunting for it three times in a row makes me peevish. It also makes me peevish to be unable to tell you if, you know, the movie is any good. If I was getting paid, I could write either side of the equation for you. But I’m doing this for free, so all I can rely on is my opinion. I’m not sure I have one.
Let’s go to the trailer, shall we, while I try to make up my mind one more time:
Of course trailers like these were designed to get you to drag your carcass to the theater or drive-in the next time you had five bucks burning a hole in your pocket. You couldn’t tell if a movie from the 1970s was going to be good by relying on the trailer. You had to go see it to figure it out. The TV, VCR, and the internet took all the mystery out of movies. You could just flip the channel or pop in another tape or whatever, or fold your laundry while Freebie and the Bean plays unwatched in the background.
Well, I saw, you know, this movie in the theater when I was a little kid. It used to be on TV a lot. You could rent it ten ways from Sunday after a while. Hell, at this point, you can watch the whole thing, or download it, straight from the Internet Archive.
I watch this movie every once in a while. I have no idea why. I think it’s sorta like the reason people eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s no good, but they like it anyway. I have a hunch that, you know, the movie isn’t any good, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear at it, either, so maybe it’s not that bad. The movie didn’t make any money back in the day, and the critics weren’t kind to it. But here we are, talking about it, and maybe watching it once a year. I’m really not sure why.
The internet will tell you that Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa directed this movie. Akira was hired to do it, but he bugged out before it started. But the internet loves Kurosawa for more or less the same reason it likes Mac and Cheese, so he gets mentioned when the movie gets mentioned at all. At any rate, Fleischer, and some guys with unpronounceable names made of little pictures made the thing back in 1970. Richard Fleischer’s whole career was Mac and Cheese, now that I think of it. He directed plenty of profitable pictures, but you mostly watch them ironically, or not at all. Stuff like Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings. Why do I watch them, too? I don’t know, but I do.
When you get right down to it, Tora… you know, the movie is dry as dust. In a way, it’s duller than a documentary would be. The events plod along and you get the impression that someone had a clipboard with a long list of things that had to be included, and checked them off one by one. It has an enormous cast of That Guys on the American side, and a bunch of Some Japanese Guys playing the villains.
Except they aren’t, really. Its funny, but the Japanese characters are portrayed as either fairly noble or completely clueless. If it wasn’t for Tojo, you wouldn’t find anyone to dislike enough to call a villain. And the Americans are so clueless in their own right, finding heroes is harder than you’d think. But then again, the American soldier’s vibe in World War II was mostly just farmboys and guys from Brooklyn who shrug and spit on their hands and get on with it. Americans are not a traditionally warlike people, I don’t think. We don’t have a bushido class that I’ve seen, anyway, or a Prussian officer class. Even the uniforms are drab.
Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was all the model ships they constructed to film it. Those were great. I’m sure it’s evident with me mentioning it, but I sniffed a lot of model airplane glue as a kid. It was a big thing back in the 60s and 70s, and we built plastic battleships in between P-51 Mustangs and funny cars. Check out these from the movie:
That’s from the Model Ships in the Cinema website. It’s one of those wonderful websites that used to be common on the intertunnel but is very rare these days. People used to post things on the internet simply for the love of it. The movie spent a lot of time, money, and effort into building an American and a Japanese fleet. And these things aren’t tiny things floating in a glorified bathtub. Some were forty feet long, and were powered by golf cart motors. They were big enough to climb on:
So, you can watch Tor… you know, the movie. I have, and will again. If you can determine if it’s any good at all, I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure if I’d like it less if you told me it was terrific, or it stunk, but either way, I’d rather just enjoy it in peace. If enjoyment is the correct word. Beats me.
We’ve featured a hearty handful of combos on this blog that resurrected old stuff and put their own spin on it. I nicknamed them Lazarus Bands, because they bring somewhat forgotten songs back from the dead. Leonid and Friends are another sort of cover band. They’re more like tribute bands than cover bands. They can play stuff just like the record. In this case, I can assure you that it’s not easy to play much of any Tower of Power record just like the recording. What Is Hip? might be the hardest one you could undertake.
Ah, Little Feat live in the seventies. Making the world safe for overalls, one Midnight Special at a time.
No, really. Overalls were a thing back then. Or painter’s pants. That was big, too. The girls wore duster jackets and overalls, too sometimes. Tube top, overalls, duster jackets, round tinted sunglasses, straight hair, and a pack of cigarettes was peak ’77 girl fashion.
That’s a lot of firepower on the stage there. Then again, everybody loved Lowell. Teddy bear of a guy. He had quite a trip through the musical world on his way to Little Feat on the Midnight Special. He appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour playing the harmonica when he was only six years old. At one time or another, he learned to play the flute, the guitar, the sitar, the saxophone, and various other instruments. When he was around 20-years-old, he was in a band called The Factory. They made a record or two, and almost got their head above water in the entertainment biz. Not exactly how you’d expect, though:
Mmm. Melody Patterson. Back in the day, when you tired of the Ginger/Mary Ann contretemps, you could fire up the Wrangler Jane/Ellie Mae druthers thought experiment. Anyway, people trying to get famous don’t turn down offers to appear on TV, even if they do change your name in the script to The Bedbugs. I’ll spare you their appearance on Gomer Pyle, USMC.
After that, Lowell started playing with The Standells. I was in a cover band in Massachusetts for a bunch of years, along with assorted lovers, muggers, and thieves, so I’ll bet I’ve played Dirty Watermore than Lowell George did. He probably didn’t like it any more than I did, either.
Then Lowell joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, of all things. Frank didn’t approve of drugs and Lowell did, which could be forgiven after watching that F Troop episode. They parted ways, but remained friendly. Lowell started Little Feat, and Zappa convinced Warner Brothers Records to put out their first album. It wasn’t a big success. It wasn’t until their third album, Dixie Chicken, that they had any mass appeal, if you can call it that. It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of proto-swamp rock, funk, and Nooawlins rhythm and blues. Lowell’s slide guitar stuff was his calling card. He got an original sound with audio compression and a Sears Craftsman spark plug socket from a wrench set.
His time in the limelight was limited, though. The drugs caught up to him, and his heart gave out when he was only 34 years old. He had a wife and three kids, so his friends threw a benefit for him: The rest of Little Feat, Jackson Browne, Nicolette Larson, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou, Bonnie Raitt, Michael McDonald, and the Tower of Power horn section all performed.
Speaking of the Mississippi, the lyrics to Dixie Chicken have a hint of Twain about them, don’t they? A sly little story, with a crusher of a punch line at the end.
Many years since she ran away
Guess that guitar player sure could play
She always liked to sing along
She’s always handy with a song
But then one night in the lobby, yea, of the Commodore Hotel
I chanced to meet a bartender who said he knew her well
And as he handed me a drink he began to hum a song
And all the boys there, at the bar, began to sing along
We’re still singing along, Lowell.
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.
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