Chips From Dovetail

Your Vice Is Italian Horror, and Only I Have The DVDs

2006-02-21T20:41:00.000-05:00

It’s a dark and stormy night somewhere in Medieval Europe. A group of stern-looking robed men are surrounded by a chained-up dark-haired woman. She is impossibly beautiful, but there’s something decidedly both erotic and evil in her large eyes; her chest moves up and down nervously. The supposedly evil witch Asa is being put death for both witchcraft and adultery. A heavy iron mask, itself looking like a demon, is carried solemnly over to her and placed lightly over her face, and then a man produces a sledgehammer.

CRASH! The mask is hammered to Asa’s face, and blood spurts out. The film has begun…

Black Sunday took the world (not just Italy) by storm right off the bat in 1960. Directed by 46-year-old Mario Bava, the unassuming film ushered in the golden age of Italian horror cinema and influenced all who came after it, no mean feat considering what the director was up against: low budgets, limited resources, less-than-stellar scripts, and the realization that the original Italian dialogue would be dubbed and re-dubbed again for the international markets. Nevertheless, it became one of the most beautiful examples of how to shoot in black and white.

But then Bava switched to color, and history was altered even further. Always working on a shoestring budget, Bava nevertheless paid attention to camera placement and use of color. In fact it is his lighting and use of color which probably had the broadest appeal for filmmakers in general; a fan of the old three-strip Technicolor process, he produced scary images of a decidedly candy-colored sort throughout the rest of his career. A case in point would be the murder scenes in Blood and Black Lace, the textbook example of how to do this sort of thing in color (Hitchcock’s Psycho being the complimentary textbook example for black and white). Similar usage in The Whip and The Body propelled the psychosexual drama forward, and made some otherwise boring scenes worth watching. Fans of old school S&M—yes, there is such a thing--would certainly want to check that one out. Even camera movement in the hands of this short Italian was nothing to scoff at: in Blood and Black Lace he used a child’s wagon as a dolly! One would never know from watching the lengthy tracking shot in the ensemble scene backstage at the fashion show, or the extensive panning during the murder scene in the room with the armor. Or the shot of the child running and changing into a man in Shock—today they would use computers for it; back then, only clever camera work and perfect timing was needed. He was the master of the matte painting—putting actual paintings of castles, etc. on the camera lens to look like the real thing in the background.How he photographed is just as amazing as what he photographed. Bava had a knack for photographing female beauty. Of course, the actresses he used were usually stunning anyway (God love those Mediterranean women…) but even a rather plain looking woman like Daria Nicolodi, who to me looks a bit like Ana Gasteyer, never looked lovelier than in Shock. And let us not forget the incomparable Barbara Steele, who became a cult figure forever as the evil witch Asa in Black Sunday. In addition to the babes, Bava had a way with set pieces. Take the anthology Black Sabbath, incidentally the Maestro’s favorite of his own films: three short tales of evil. In the first, “The Telephone,” a precursor to the giallo, a cramped apartment serves as the setting for an increasingly paranoid call girl (Michele Mercier) who is convinced her ex-boyfriend, now out of jail, is calling her to say he will come kill her. She calls over her “girlfriend,” a lesbian who obviously has feelings for her (pretty shocking stuff for 1963!) and the madness continues to unfold. Then comes “The Wurdulak,” starring the legendary Boris Karloff later in life, as an old man who becomes a type of Russian vampire who can imitate the voice of a small child, with shockingly tragic results. And then “A Drop of Water,” with one of the creepiest-looking zombies ever seen on film—five years before George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and fifteen years before Fulci’s gore masterpiece Zombi 2! Also not be forgotten is the borderline-psychedelic sequence in Kill Baby Kill, where a guy runs through a series of rooms over and over again, or the opening of Black Sunday, where Barbara Steele’s character gets a spiked mask nailed to her face as punishment for being a witch. A through-the-eyes shot of the mask about to close in on her face was stolen as recently as earlier this year, by none other than George Lucas for his “birth of Vader” sequence in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

1964’s Blood and Black Lace has been called the first “body count” movie, where people are offed one after the other, and it is also cited as the first important giallo. So what is a giallo? Giallo is Italian for yellow, referring to the most predominant color of the post-World War II pulpy novels on sale in Italy. These paperbacks were basically trashy murder mysteries with loads of sex and violence, so it only makes sense that the name was appropriated for Italy’s most lasting horror subgenre. In a giallo, the plot can be often be convoluted, but at base a series of murders is taking place, and the protagonist takes it upon himself (or herself) to get to the bottom of things and unmask the killer, usually because he or she has witnessed the murder—or else it’s their friends, relatives, or co-workers being killed, and they fear they will be next. The police are typically not too pleased with such “meddling,” although sometimes detectives are portrayed as sympathetic to outside help. The killer himself (or again, herself!) is usually kept a secret until close to the end; they are often masked and/or wearing black gloves. Hence the time-honored cliché of the “black-gloved killer.” Above all, the murders in a giallo (plural: gialli) are filmed lovingly, somewhat like what Hitchcock once said: “I want to film all my murders like love scenes and all my love scenes like murders.” In fact, Hitchcock was an influence on the giallo, Psycho having been released in 1960; other influences include the writings of Edgar Wallace and some of the film noir of the early 1950s. And of course subtle commentary on the loosening of sexual and social mores sweeping Europe at the time. Typically, gialli took place in urban settings, where beautiful young women are plentiful, not to mention a lot of night life, gambling, alcohol, sleazy mob-types, and mod fashion. And yes, American viewers never fail to notice the bad dubbing, which can sometimes lead to performances which seem more histrionic than they actually were meant to be. So a giallo is admittedly style over substance, and as so, Bava could not have made a more propitious choice for the mise en scene of Blood and Black Lace: a fashion house populated by dozens of stunning models, run by a somewhat crooked couple and where cocaine abuse—long before that white powder had become the drug of choice for the European jet-set—has infiltrated the ranks. Breakfast At Tiffany’s, this is not, but one can tell they were both of the same era of haute couture. (One half expects Holly Golightly to show up, but if she did, her neck would probably get sliced wide open in the second reel.) And of course, Bava’s delicious color palate is in full force, used most notably in a heart-stopping set piece where a beautiful model is stalked and killed in a warehouse-type building filled with suits of armor and flashing neon signs. Proponents of France’s Grand Guignol theatre will also delight at the sight of a young woman getting badly burned against an incinerator, or a drowning which ends with the camera lingering several seconds beyond the “comfort level” at the bra-clad girl’s lifeless eyes, staring up at us from the base of the water-saturated sink. It is only fair to note that apparently gialli eventually had quite a following among gay men, probably owing to the fabulous décor and makeup worn by the women.

Roger Corman’s AIP distributed Bava’s Planet of the Vampires in 1965. Considered by some to be a horror film and others to be a horror film, let’s just split the difference and say it was one of the first true fusions of the two genres. While it hasn’t aged well (the cheaply made but admittedly colorful sets look a lot like those on Tracy Morgan’s “Astronaut Jones” sketches on SNL), the actual plot of Planet—a strange virus is turning the crew of a space shuttle into bloodsucking vampires—was later stolen for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as well as the camp classic Lifeforce (1984).

Another man started mining the same vein as Bava: Antonio Margheriti, whose most memorable classic of the era, 1964’s Castle of Blood, can be seen as a neat companion piece to Black Sunday: both are shot in black in white; both star Barbara Steele; and both have an ambience much closer to a 1930s Universal film than to anything else released that year. Its detractors have dubbed it a great cure for insomnia, but the story-within-a-story of Castle of Blood moves at its own pace, and we must accept both the premise—Edgar Allan Poe himself betting a skeptical man he can’t spend the whole night in a reputedly haunted mansion—and the way the premise is illustrated on its own terms, or not at all. The Italian propensity for pushing the envelope is in full swing here; nudity and lesbianism, not to mention the underlying subtext of necrophilia, are found within.

Eventually Margheriti re-made Castle as Web of the Spider in 1970; now it was in color. Alas, the only print I have seen is a full-screen knockoff, so it’s hard for me to compare it with the original. But Antonio himself later admitted, “It was stupid to remake [Castle of Blood], because the color photography ruined everything, the atmosphere, the tension. I’m now convinced that the only way to make a really scary horror film, with that kind of disturbing atmosphere and suspense, is to shoot in black and white.” Has the man never seen Blood and Black Lace or Suspiria?

So the time was right, world-wide, for the horror resurgence of the early 1960s. The 1950s had been a time where sci-fi reigned supreme, owing to the onset of the Cold War and paranoid feelings about “outsiders,” not to mention the curious lingering effects—real or imagined—from the A-bomb, that original WMD, but in the “New Frontier” of the 1960s, all of a sudden it seemed anything was OK—and in fact that did increasingly seem to be the case as the decade wore on. Bava was leading the way in Italy, and in Great Britain, Hammer Studios was in full swing with their takes on the “traditional” Universal monsters of the ‘30s (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, et. al.), updated with more sex and violence than the prior generation could have ever imagined. In America, Roger Corman started cranking out at least half a dozen low budget adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, most of which featured the legendary Vincent Price. At their craftiest, Hammer films gave Italian films a run for their money in the sex and violence department, while Corman’s ability to stretch a lack of budget rivaled Bava’s. Many of the actors of the day were bi-continental, moving between the Italian, British, and American genre pictures.

And what a list of stars: Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Cameron Mitchell, Luciano Pigozzi (the “Italian Peter Lorre”), Eva Bartok, and the elderly Harriet White Medin (who I truly think would make a cool grandmother), to name just a few.

But between 1966 and 1968, all of a sudden it seemed the horror film in Italy took a back seat to other genres, most notably the spaghetti Westerns of the two Sergios (Leone and Corbucci), but also pepla (sword and sandal epics a/k/a cheap gladiator movies), plus comedies of all stripes. Even Mario Bava gave up on horror during this time to make “still-decent-but-not-his-forte” films in other genres like Danger: Diabolik (a James Bond spoof) and Four Times That Night (a sexy comedy). Not to mention such timeless classics like Erik The Conqueror and Knives of the Avenger. By 1969, however, a newcomer with a deep love of both Bava and Hitchcock showed up ready, willing, an’ able to kick some major ass. He was a somewhat scrawny little guy with a bad bowl haircut and perpetual bags under his eyes, but Dario Argento immediately started creating some of the scariest, most thrilling, and most beautiful-simply-to-look-at horror films of the late 20th Century.

It all started with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1969), which made the giallo fashionable again after a 5-year layoff and proved to be the blue-print for the subgenre for the coming decade. Argento “oozes” style on every frame, sometimes at the expense of a coherent plot, but you found yourself waiting with baited breath for the “payoffs”: his frequent murder set-pieces. Bird was followed by The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1972); collectively his first three gialli were dubbed his Animal Trilogy.

As the 1960s became the 1970s, Italy suddenly seemed littered with dozens of young directors; each seeking to become the next Dario Argento—and Argento himself was only getting started! Right out of the gate, a prime candidate for the title of the “next Dario” was Lucio Fulci.

Fulci has been called everything from a hack to a visionary, something like an Italian Jess Franco (but not quite as prolific or quite as challenging as that idiosyncratic Spanish enfant terrible). At base, Lucio Fulci was a pragmatist who actually had kicked around for several years before sort of stumbling upon his métier in the early 1970s with two unforgettable gialli: A Lizard In Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture A Duckling. The latter is a favorite of mine for several reasons; one, it is set in a small rural village (as opposed to the usual oh-so-urbane giallo setting), and two, it dared to tackle the hypocrisies of the Roman Catholic Church—in Italy, no less! In fact (spoiler!), a priest is the one committing the murders because he cannot stand to see his young charges (the boys of the town) developing an interest in sex when they hit puberty. It takes only a small leap of faith, so to speak, to say the film eerily predicts the Church’s public problems with pedophilia which putridly peppered the early 2000s! At the end, the priest in Duckling gets his just desserts by taking a very long fall off a rocky cliff. His face becomes more and more shredded with each contact it has with the cliff, a foreshadowing of all the blatant, unavoidable gore these films would come to include in alarmingly increasing amounts as the decade slithered on. After the one-two knockout punch of Lizard and Duckling, however, Lucio went back to the drawing board for half a decade, trying his hand at crime films and a brutal spaghetti Western, before truly finding what he was born to do…

Sergio Martino certainly made his fair share of gialli in the early 1970s: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key, and the more-violent Torso. Many of these films featured a stunningly beautiful Algerian-born actress named Edwige Fenech, who had more acting chops than the average damsel in distress of the period. Projecting a curious mix of strength and sad vulnerability, not to mention both sex goddess and girl next door, she lit up the screen. And even today she looks good. This woman is my Mom’s age!?! What a “cougar”! She looks like a teenager! For his part, Martino proved himself to be a deft, no-nonsense director, a class act, even if he was often accused of misogyny. Granted, all these guys were, in varying degrees!

One of the more emotionally involving gialli would have to be What Have You Done To Solange? (1972), directed by Massimo Dallamano, and featuring a truly haunting score by Ennio Morricone. The story: someone is murdering students at an exclusive all-girls high school in London. Simply put, the killer has been sticking a very long knife up their vaginas. Who could be doing such a thing—the good looking young teacher who has been having an affair with one of the girls, and who naturally runs afoul of the police? The teacher’s jealous wife, who is herself also a teacher? The dirty old man who keeps spying on the girls in the showers? Or a suspicious priest? The answer to this question—and the motive for the killings—ironically points to a sort of creaky conservatism normally somewhat out of place for the time and place of the giallo, but somehow it works. Solange is a highly watchable film which a fan can let his wife/girlfriend see without her being grossed out (despite the grotesque manner of death, the gore is actually handled quite discreetly save for a few pretty nas-tay black and white police photographs). Unique also is the setting: have any other gialli ever taken place in London? Some of the characters are more sympathetic than others, and in fact many of the girls are quite catty and deserve some sort of punishment (well, perhaps not murder). At the very least we want to do know whodunit. Solange plays like a straightforward murder mystery moreso than a flashy, psychedelic exercise in plotless style and overly affected camera angles (in other words, it avoids many of the things for which critics enjoyed ripping Argento apart). And if nothing else, watch it see where the inimitable Camille Keaton got her start, six full years before becoming the most infamous cinematic rape victim of all time in I Spit On Your Grave. Anyone dare to watch a double feature of Solange and Grave?

Umberto Lenzi got into the game with Seven Bloodstained Orchids. Other minor gialli of the period include Death Walks At Midnight, Strip Nude For Your Killer, Eyeball, Death Laid An Egg, Cold Eyes of Fear (a major stinker), Black Belly of the Tarantula, and The Killer Must Kill Again, this one directed by Argento hanger-on Luigi Cozzi, and which in my judgment shouldn’t even be considered a true giallo because we know the killer’s identity right off the bat. It defeats the purpose.

As mentioned a few paragraphs back, the music could often make or break a giallo. Carlo Rustichelli had been Mario Bava’s composer of choice; he was well-schooled in the mid-19th Century Romantic tradition. He could also jazz it up when he wanted. Ennio Morricone certainly proved he was more than just the man who came up with the heavily clichéd theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. A bit later, Riz Ortolani emerged as a composer of some note. But by the mid 1970s, rock music (as opposed to orchestral music) started creeping into these films—most notably, the works of a struggling Italian jazz-rock combo called Goblin. And their first film score was a li’l ditty called Deep Red.

In 1975 Argento directed Deep Red (Italian title: Profundo Rosso), considered by many to be the finest giallo ever made, and the finest film Dario ever made. (I must confess I think Suspiria is better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) After an opening in which a woman is stabbed to death in front of a child while a perverted take on nursery rhyme music hums in the background, the film gets down to business with the parting of red curtains and the POV shots of someone walking into an auditorium, where a blonde German psychic is demonstrating her powers. Following a few innocuous warm-ups (“you sir, have your car keys in your right front pocket!” “Wow, yes I do!”), she gets down to business and senses that a brutal killer is the audience—of course, it’s the POV person who had just taken a seat! Argento gives us a closeup of the psychic quickly drinking, and then forcefully expectorating, water into a glass, while the killer leaves. From there we are introduced to Mark, an expatriate British lounge pianist (played deftly by David Hemmings, who had starred several years earlier in Antonioni’s proto-giallo Blow Up), who by chance witnesses the brutal murder of said psychic through her apartment window. Almost against his will, Mark finds himself drawn to discovering the killer’s identity, with a little help from a flaky reporter with a bad perm (Daria Nicolodi). As usual, the police are no help whatsoever. Along the way we get several ingenious death set pieces, red herrings, and—to be sure—“comic relief” scenes of dialogue between the two leads, discussing whether women are truly the weaker sex. (Note to Dario: Arm-wrestling scenes between a man and woman will always look slightly corny.) We also see the smallest car ever on the silver screen, which would make a Volkswagen Rabbit look like a Ford Excursion. Deep Red also tackled the twin subjects of homosexuality and cross-dressing head-on, still something of a rarity even in the sexually liberated Europe of the mid-1970s, and Freud would have been quite pleased to see how the opening sequence tied in to the motive for the killings. The de rigueur animal cruelty of later cannibal flicks is foreshadowed when a young girl sticks a lizard with a pin, and Mark also gets to break down a wall to find an important skeleton, a conceit later seen on TV’s Miami Vice. The killer finally dies in a most memorable way, when he (or she) is wearing a necklace that gets caught in the doors of an ascending elevator, leading to a quick decapitation as Mark’s reflection stares, unbelievingly, into the resultant pool of deep red blood over the closing credits.

The acting, set design, camera work, and editing of Deep Red are all exemplary. So is the music. Long a fan of rock music, Argento had in 1971 approached none other than Deep Purple to provide music for Four Flies On Grey Velvet, but that band was too busy to take him up on the offer. (In later years he would employ already-recorded songs by Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, and Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman on 1984’s self-parodic Phenomena). But the association with Goblin, particularly in Deep Red, is the most memorable of Argento’s musical scores. There, Goblin’s pulsing score is almost like a character unto itself—the hard-hitting opening theme, following the creepy death-in-front-of-child set piece, informs the viewer that they won’t be getting a lot of sleep over the next 90 plus minutes. The guitar and bass ostinato in D minor, resembling the ticking of a twisted clock, perfectly matches the scene where Hemmings is looking up at the huge house and debating whether to enter. Goblin returned to make music for Suspiria, Tenebre, and Bava’s Shock, among other films of the late 70s and early 80s. Former Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti is still at it today with his new band Daemonia, who often play covers of Goblin music, and in fact contributed brand new videos to the DVDs of Suspiria and Opera.

After Deep Red, it seemed like there was nowhere else for the giallo to go. For the rest of the 1970s, various gialli were released, but most of them seemed like they were running on fumes from past glories. A case in point: Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1976). The trailer tells it all—a group of blurry images including a car crash and a plastic dummy hanging from a tree, all punctuated by the sound of a male voice who sounds like he’s sitting on the commode, trying to push a big one out: “Spasmo! Spas-mo! SPASMO!” Was this any way to fly the friendly Italian skies?

Dario Argento turned his back on the giallo and went in a whole new direction. Influenced heavily by his spiritual wife, Daria Nicolodi, he unleashed upon the world his masterpiece, Suspiria (1977). Although it has elements of the giallo to it, Suspiria is at its core a modern-day horror “fairy tale.” Not since the glory days of Bava had the supernatural been so thoroughly embraced in an Italian film, and probably not since the early 1960s had color been employed in said genre so deftly. In fact, Suspiria was one of the final three-strip Technicolor movies. I have shown this film to friends and tried to get them to guess what year it was filmed, and no one has ever guessed it was back in 1977, so pristine and alive are the blues, reds, and greens. Hell, even the hairstyles and most of the clothes don’t even look that ’70-ish. No matter what the method of color production, however, Suspiria is nothing if not the very definition of eye candy. I once had an opportunity to participate in a web chat with him where I asked him, “Given your love of and incredible use of color, would you ever consider shooting a film in black and white?” He answered, “No, absolutely not.” Anyone who sees Suspiria will agree with him.

To paraphrase another writer, for those who are “Suspiria Virgins”—those who have never seen this film—I truly envy you. I would love to see it for the first time all over again. It was my grand introduction to Eurohorror proper in November 2001 via Anchor Bay’s gorgeous DVD, and I’m still trying to piece my former life back together, the way someone forever changes after their first kiss, first sexual experience, first concert, you name it. The first 20 minutes alone are some of the most compelling filmmaking you could ever hope to see. Suzy Banyon, an American, has flown to Freiberg, Germany to advance her studies at the Dance Academy. She arrives in a terrific thunderstorm and heads to the school in one of cinema’s creepiest cab rides. Spurned away at the door by a mysterious voice, she must spend the night at the hotel. Meanwhile, a ballet student who has apparently “escaped” makes her way to a friend’s apartment, replete with funky Escher-like wallpaper and gorgeous mood lighting, where a sinister monster pulls her head through a window. Her friend tries in vain to rescue her, but of course the door is locked. Running into the apartment lobby, she looks up to see her friend’s lifeless body crashing through the stained glass ceiling, having been hanged by the killer (after several closeup shots of her heart getting stabbed by a knife). Said stained glass impales the victim’s friend’s head, and so she too lies dead, surrounded by blood so vibrant it looks like red acrylic paint. Where to go from there?

Suzy finally makes it inside the school, where she meets a host of bitchy fellow dance students, a guy who can’t quite work up the nerve to ask her out (he does take ballet, he he), an über-butch instructor, and strange noises at night. Somehow she realizes that the school is being run by a witch: none other than Mater Suspiriorum, the “Mother of Sighs” (the other two Mothers, spread throughout the world, being Mater Tenebrarum, the “Mother of Darkness,” and Mater Lachrymorum, the “Mother of Tears.”) What tipped her off: could it be the sinister Goblin score, which subtly punctuates the “Tubular Bells”-like motif with a voice crying out “Witch!”? As Suzy sneaks out of her bed every night to investigate (actress Jessica Harper, with her doe eyes and brunette hair set against the reds, the blues, and greens, looks just like Snow White), she encounters all sorts of death scenes: Another girls falls into a room filled with barbed wire. And a rather unpleasant blind pianist gets his entire throat ripped out by his newly-possessed seeing-eye dog.

Eat your heart out, Cujo!

Suspiria makes less sense than almost any other film mentioned in this essay, but it’s not supposed to make sense. Sometimes atmosphere and mood happily trumps storyline. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside the modernist twins of logic and science, so why would a modern-day fairy tale be any different? And yet the film itself went on to virtually define Eurorhorror and set it apart forever from product spewing forth from the rest of the world.

It is a supreme irony, then, that the rebirth of the supernatural Italian horror film never really took off. Perhaps Argento’s contemporaries (I almost typed “peers” but caught myself just in time!) realized they just couldn’t compete. Three years after Suspiria, Argento directed a sequel of sorts called Inferno, which while exemplary, almost seemed like he was going through the motions, an exercise in abilities more so than a pushing of boundaries. Instead, other directors in the late 1970s turned to grittier, more controversial, and almost always more gorier fare: the twin sub-sub genres of zombie films and cannibal films.

When Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero’s long-overdue sequel to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, became an international hit ten years after the original, “zombie fever” took off. Sensing this demand, an Italian producer named Fabrizio De Angelis approached Lucio Fulci with a view to filming a “sequel” of sorts to Dawn. The director was only too eager to sign up, given the fact he’d spent much of the decade floundering from genre to genre. Because Dawn had been retitled Zombi in Italy, it was only natural that Fulci’s film was named Zombi 2. Released in 1979, Zombi 2 was an instant sensation, accompanied by a classic marketing campaign (“We Are Going To Eat You!”, plus barf bags often given out to the theatre audiences as a gimmick). And no one could touch Zombi 2 for hot, sweaty claustrophobia: unlike Romero’s more suburban and urban settings, Fulci chose to shoot Zombi 2 in the Caribbean, which was after all the birthplace of voodoo. It also brought to mind images of one of the original zombie movies, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The incessant pounding of voodoo drums lightly in the background, coupled with the eerie electronic score (scarier than Halloween’s, in this writer’s opinion), only added to the flick’s permanent sense of dread.

Perhaps its most remarkable set piece involved the underwater sequence in which a shark and a zombie engage in mortal combat. They shark bites the zombie and draws blood. Not to be outdone, the zombie bites the shark and draws blood in kind. And yes, it was a real shark and a real man dressed as a zombie. For many horror buffs, it was a match made in heaven: everyone loves Jaws, and everyone loves Dawn of the Dead, so when you put them together, it was a gorehound’s take on the old Reese’s peanut butter commercial (“You got your Jaws in my Dawn of the Dead! No, you got your Dawn of the Dead in my Jaws! Let’s see how they taste together! Mmm!”) If the shark was the most remarkable set piece, the actual grossest would go to the eye piercing scene: in which Olga Karlatos (who later played Prince’s mom in Purple Rain!) is grabbed by her hair by a zombie and pulled towards a huge, splinter-filled piece of wood. Most directors would leave what happens next to the audience’s imagination, but not Fulci. A huge shard of wood is shown completely piercing the actress’s eyeball, accompanied by a screaming at least as piercing. Just before the camera finally does cut away we see the eyeball itself sort of falling out to the side.

And now time for the most controversial statement I’ll probably make in this entire essay: Fulci was a better maker of zombies than was George Romero. Why?

Quite frankly, even with the help of makeup demigod Tom Savini (sometimes I think Fangoria should be renamed Tom Savini Worshippers-R-Us), Romero’s zombies sometimes look like high school play-level crap. I mean, come on: Dawn’s green or blue face makeup and a dab of blood on the side of one’s mouth just can’t compare with Fulci’s “walking, stinking flowerpot” couture. The zombies of Lucio Fulci looked like they’d really been stuck in their graves since the days of the Spanish conquistadores. Savini obviously honed his technique over the years, but the Eye-talians seemed to have it down pat much earlier on. It’s damn near impossible to top the iconic “eye worm” man in Zombi 2, or even the zombie that gets his head shredded by an outboard motor on the beach in the otherwise sub-par Zombie Holocaust (which tries to be both a zombie film and a cannibal film and fails to satisfy either camps most of the time).

Zombi 2 ushered in Fulci’s “golden age” of 1979-81, where he became Italy’s foremost zombie auteur. Many of his films of this period got help from his “brain trust” of producer De Angelis, composer Fabio Frizzi, and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti. Fulci himself was not averse to showing up in his films in cameos, usually as a police chief or professor. 1980 saw City of the Living Dead and 1981 both House By The Cemetery and what many consider his true masterpiece: The Beyond.

The Beyond makes little sense, but at least one could sit back and “enjoy” the ride. A young woman, played by Catriona MacColl, inherits a decrepit old hotel in pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; little does she know that 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been executed by suspicious locals by getting whipped nailed the walls of the basement Christ-style, then having hot limestone thrown on his face. His spirit has decided to haunt the basement, which also happens to be one of the seven gateways to hell (and in fact on home video The Beyond often got re-titled Seven Doors of Death). We are treated to acid burning a woman’s face, extremely fake looking spiders made out of pipe cleaners attacking some guy who’s fallen off a step stool, and shots of Catriona looking pretty but confused. These strange goings-on continue to build and build with no sense of logic whatsoever, until finally zombies are invading a local hospital, where our heroine enlists the help of a doctor (the late David Warbeck), a man so stupid he keeps aiming his gun at the zombies’ chests, even though he’s seen that the only way to “kill” them is to shoot them in the head. Just when they think they’ve escaped through a passage in hospital’s basement, our couple takes a wrong turn and end up in hell. Turning to the camera in slo mo, their eyes have gone a milky white, a sign that they are damned for all eternity. Such an ending is almost symbolic of Fulci, once highly critical of Catholicism, suddenly doing a 180 and deciding that hell is inevitable unless one repents, and unfortunately for the couple in The Beyond, their pride just got the better of them. In fact, such religious subtext often distinguishes Italian (and Spanish) horror from northern European and/or American horror: in the horror films birthed in Catholic countries, the final reels are often ridden with despair, while Protestant horror films are more likely to have “happy” endings, where evil is vanquished by some white knight. Christian Fundamentalism writ large: if one just follows the Bible to the letter, nothing bad will happen to you. By contrast, the so-called heroes in Italian horror are often skeptical, clueless, bumbling (“shoot them in the head, David!”) or morally repugnant, and as such often they end up barely breaking even in the final frames—if they’re lucky. The Beyond deserves its cult, and it often drew praise from the fringes of the populace. In the late 1990s it inspired a little-known death metal band called Necrophagia to write and record a video for their song “You Will Live In Terror,” perfectly edited together with Fulci footage and included on the Anchor Bay DVD as a gratis. In addition to being a knowledgeable gorehound, one apparently must weigh at least 250 pounds and be able to sweat like a pig to be a member of Necrophagia.

Directors besides Fulci who tried their hands at the zombie sub-genre include the perennial Umberto Lenzi with Burial Ground, where the skilled-with-garden-implements zombies look like walking cabbages. And of course the frankly cruddy Zombie Holocaust (aka Dr. Butcher, MD), directed by the now-forgotten Marino Girolami.

Ever the whore for cash, Lenzi also tried his hand at a more fringe sub-genre: the cannibal film, with equally mixed results. It had to happen: after exhausting the possibilities of the dead returning to earth and eating people, why not have people actually on Earth (mainly the savage tribes of South America or the South Pacific) eat other people? Someone will watch that kind of trash! So Umberto Lenzi gave it a shot. Eaten Alive! and Cannibal Ferox (akaMake Them Die Slowly) had their moments but sometimes seemed like camp (and as it turned out, they often used “stock footage” from superior films). Sergio Martino went from being a giallo man to being a cannibal man with 1978’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, which played like a cheap Indiana Jones movie which just happened to have a few scenes of natives chowing down on snakes and/or human flesh, but Martino and Lenzi were just pretenders to this particular throne. A brief SAT primer for any high schoolers reading this: if the analogy

Lucio Fulci : zombie films :: _______: cannibal films

comes up in the test which may very well determine whether you go to Harvard or the local community college, the answer is “Ruggero Deodato.” This straight-shooting gentleman with the glasses and the perpetual two-day stubble first toyed with the cannibal sub-genre in 1976 with a nasty film called Jungle Holocaust, a sort of modern-day take on Richard Connell’s classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” where a stranded man escapes from a bloodthirsty tribe in Mindanao in order to get back to his crashed plane. It broke boundaries with its gore, its provincial attitudes towards primitive cultures, and its naked machismo.

Jungle Holocaust was still just an appetizer, if you will, for the main course, Deodato’s ultimate trump card and still one of the ultimate endurance test flicks: Cannibal Holocaust (CH for short). If ever there was a moment where Satan became Man on Earth, you could find a worse candidate than the day Ruggero Deodato submitted CH to be released. But what a glorious hell for all those who dared enter.

The plot is straightforward enough: a professor in New York travels to the Amazon in an attempt to locate a filmmaking crew which has recently disappeared. Four college-age filmmakers had gone to this isolated region of the world—dubbed the “Green Inferno”—in order to film one of the last known cannibal tribes in existence. Rather than find the foursome, however, the professor finds some of their bones, as well as several cans of film. He returns to New York to watch the footage in the company of his colleagues in order to decide whether to air it on TV. To his horror, the professor discovers that not only will he not be airing the footage on TV, he will be destroying all copies if possible. For the party of four has not only discovered a cannibal tribe, they have provoked them into attacking—and killing/eating them. The normally peace-loving tribe had no choice but to turn on the insensitive Americans. After all, they came into the village, burned it down, raped a few women, mocked them, and fired various weapons at them. All of this is played out in straightforward fashion; the footage is highly realistic. In fact, this is where the makers of The Blair Witch Project got their ideas, although they have denied it. It is cinema verite to the extreme—so much so that Deodato eventually went to court in Italy to prove that no one really died during the filming!To be sure, Cannibal Holocaust, even more so than any other film in this essay, is not a film for everyone. This one tops them all in terms of graphic content. Time to separate the men from the boys.

Where to begin…there are beheadings, other body parts being cut off, including a penis, human-looking parts and bones being eaten, rapes and other rough sex, people getting shot, a man getting bitten by a snake and his foot cut off in a futile attempt to stop the poison from spreading, a woman being punished by her husband for adultery by having some kind of stone covered with sticks and mud shoved into her vagina, and then pushed out into the river in a canoe where she bleeds to death, another woman killed and hung up on a stake through her rectum and out her mouth (this looked very realistic and will definitely “stick” with you), and a cannibal is taken hostage and has cocaine blown up his nostrils (so he will be “happy” and do whatever they say). Another woman has a fetus ripped out of her by other women, presumably due to adultery. Said fetus is quickly thrust into mud to kill it instantly. There’s also footage from the college film crew’s earlier documentary, “The Last Road To Hell,” showing scenes of people in Africa (Uganda, perhaps?) being executed, bodies piled up in the back of a truck, and the military leading a guy out into a field with a hood on his head before being shot. This may or may not be actual footage from the reign of Idi Amin, but it sure as hell looks real. It makes Mondo Cane look like a Disney film. And rumor has it that a scene of a guy being eaten by piranhas was filmed but cut out.

If you’re still reading, what actually might be more offensive than even these scenes are the many shots of cruelty to animals. It’s somewhat ironic, but some people are more offended by this than anything which happens to humans (and most PETA activists are probably pro-abortion, but I don’t want to go there), but in CH we are “treated” to a rodent of some sort having his skull bashed in and then eaten, a huge turtle being ripped apart and eaten (his internal organs are still throbbing even after his head is removed), a baby pig being shot for no reason, and a snake being killed. Not to mention a huge spider on Faye's shoulder! These scenes were an unfortunate aspect of the late ‘70s cannibal sub-genre, designed to show what “really” happens in the jungle. (In fact, in Martino’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, there’s a scene where a poor little monkey is eaten by a python, and if you look closely you can see a stick hidden in the bushes, pushing the monkey close to the python so that he WOULD get eaten! Then there’s the man humping the large boar like there’s no tomorrow, but I digress…) 1979 was a different time and place; animal rights activism was not as predominant a political force then, and the tag line “No animals were harmed in the making of this film” had yet to be coined. Keep in mind that I am not a vegetarian and I know darn well that I’ve eaten—and continue to eat—thousands of slaughtered animals, but I must concede that the animal scenes in CH and other cannibal films are a little bit gratuitous. They’re not really essential to the plot, but they do make us think: better that we kill and eat animals than humans! Also remember that similar stuff is often shown on the Discovery Channel and considered “educational,” even taped and shown in 7th grade biology class. How about the ratings-busting “Shark Week,” with its mountains of footage of sharks attacking each other, or smaller fish?

And yet: the final line spoken in the film comes from the shocked professor. He shakes his head sadly and asks, “I wonder who the real cannibals are.” In other words, we Westerners are so disgusted at primitive tribes, but are we any better? We fight wars; we murder; we (ahem) slaughter animals for food; we destroy rain forests, pollute the oceans, and consume fuel like there’s no tomorrow. They wear few clothes (how scandalous—people walking around nude!), but many of us Americans go crazy if we see a Playboy. Are the primitive tribes actually more civilized, then? All of a sudden I must sound like a raging liberal (which I’m not), but it does make me think about how much of a narrow-minded consumer I want to be. To top it all off, in CH the filmmaking crew pays the ultimate price only for being so cruel to the cannibals. Alan (the main filmmaker, and one of the biggest assholes ever captured on cinema, a testament to the actor who played him) does horrible things in order to get exploitative, sensationalized footage. The actor himself started to wonder if he was being paid to appear in a “snuff” film; he also objected to shooting the baby pig because he’d gone on a boat ride with it and had developed a relationship with the little fella. Alan’s very cute girlfriend Faye (played by the rather earthy Francesca Ciardi) plays along at first, but becomes reluctant when Alan and another guy start to rape one of the women. It is even implied that they are the ones who impale her on the stake and film it as if they have just discovered her body—they “pretend” to be outraged by it. Eventually Faye becomes the “conscience” of the group, but it’s a case of too little, too late. Guilt by association in the minds of the cannibals. She is herself raped from behind and then literally ripped to shreds, her head brandished like a trophy.

Cannibalism itself is considered a nauseating, deplorable practice, but in primitive times it was done for a variety of reasons. Even in modern times some have resorted to it in extremis (think the Donner party or the soccer-team-crashed-in-the-Andes film Alive!) Obviously the Judeo-Christian tradition frowns upon it, but primitive tribes existed far outside of this tradition. And ironically, look at the disease and devastation many historians say we brought upon these people we did try to “civilize” them.

CH is ultimately a scathing indictment of the media. In this sense, Deodato was ahead of his time. Before Geraldo, before “COPS,” before Reality TV and 24 hour news coverage (whether on TV or on the web—simultaneously one of mankind’s greatest and worst achievements of the past twenty years), Deodato in 1979 was asking when was too much, too much? He also later said that he was inspired by his young son watching the news and wondering why it was all nothing but killing: a question a child might ask, but not a childish question. When does the media cross the line from simply reporting the news, to blatantly making stuff up or distorting the facts. This is a far too relevant topic even now.

When I got my quasi-bootleg EC DVD of CH from ebay in the summer of 2004, I popped it in that night. My family was out of town, and I planned to watch it and two other Deodato films—to have kind of a Deodato film festival of my own, you might say. Yes, with a beer and a Papa John’s pizza. However, after the 90 or so minutes of Cannibal Holocaust had ended, I quietly got up, turned off the DVD player, and went into my room and read an innocuous book cuddled up with the pet cat, rather than watch the other films. For the first time ever, all of a sudden I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything similar to CH, and I felt unclean, like I needed to take a shower. I was furious at myself and wondered how I’d ever gotten into this whole “Eurohorror crap,” but the next day I realized that CH had simply had a profound effect on me, moreso than almost any other film in any genre. After years of watching controversial/graphic film after controversial/graphic film, I’d finally found one which truly “challenged” me. Ruggero Deodato had had the last laugh—I would be coming back for more eventually. More importantly, it made me think and reflect on both what I had seen as well as the ideas behind such depraved and visceral imagery.

The remainder of Deodato’s career seems almost like an anti-climax, but that’s only because CH was such a first-class mindfuck, the type any agent provocateur worth his salt hopes for once in a lifetime. In 1980, he directed House on the Edge of the Park, one of so many “rape/revenge” flicks popular in the wake of 1972’s Wes Craven potboiler Last House on the Left. (Grindhouse denizens can name the other post-Last House flicks by rote: Night Train Murders, Fight ForYour Life, Mother’s Day, and the almighty I Spit On Your Grave, which I wish was Italian so I could talk about it more). Deodato’s ripoff even starred Last House’s iconic sleazeball, David Hess! In all seriousness, it can be argued that Deodato was robbed at the Oscars in 1980 for making the Best Comedy in House, simply for the scene in which a bald black lady, dancing to a disco song called “Do It To Me Once More,” is having such a good time she yells out, “Hot diggity!” In 1985 Deodato returned to the jungle to make Cut And Run, but it was certainly no Jungle Holocaust or Cannibal Holocaust. How could it be? Ay dios mio, it stars Willie Aames, who played one of the kids on Eight Is Enough! But everywhere he goes, people try to work up the nerve to ask Ruggero Deodato how and why in the hell he made CH. Rumor has it he may yet make a CH II, if he can get the funding and a script worthy of the original.

The relative success of films like Deep Red, Cannibal Holocaust, Zombi 2, or any number of lesser achievements can be traced in no small part to the rise of the Grindhouse Cinemas, in particular those on 42nd Street in New York City. Oh, sure, they played other places in America as well, including drive-ins, but 42nd Street certainly came to be the place to see any number of horror, exploitation, porno, kung fu, or avant garde film from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘80s. Before Rudy Giuliani came along and made Gotham at least seem safer than Disneyworld, 42nd Street was sleaze personified, a place for slumming…

Before we move on to the 1980s, a list of major stars to emerge in the shocking Italian cinema of the 1970s includes Rosalba Neri (unfairly called a “poor man’s Barbara Steele” by Joe D’Amato, and at the risk of sounding sexist let me add that she has one of the nicest butts I’ve ever seen), Edwige Fenech, Tisa Farrow, Alexandra Delli Colli, Ian McCullough, Daria Nicolodi, Anthony Franciosa, James Franciscus (whom I always confuse with Anthony Franciosa ‘cause their last names are so similar!), John Steiner, Mimsy Farmer, Christopher George, George Hilton, Barbara Bouchet, Al Cliver, Laura Gemser, Catriona MacColl, John Morghen (who always seems to die in an interesting manner), David Warbeck, and the redoubtable Ivan Rassimov. For those not in the know, Ivan was a handsome but untrustworthy-looking Russian actor who always seemed to turn up in only two or three scenes, but his characters were always vital to the plot (for the entire decade of the 70s at least 50% of all Italian films featured “and with the participation of Ivan Rassimov” in the opening credits).

In 1980, Mario Bava died shortly after receiving a positive check-up from his doctors . He was 65 years young and had lived a full life, but all of his disciplines, directors or simply fans, obviously missed him. In retrospect, his death can be seen as symbolic of the beginning of the death of Italian horror proper, for while several good films were made in the first half of the 1980s, even then things were never quite the same.

A leading light of the very early 1980s was Joe D’Amato, whom I stupidly used to confuse with Joe Dante, the man behind Piranha and Gremlins. Joe had been the cinematographer on What Have You Done To Solange?, but he was just itching to become a director, so in 1980 he directed Anthropophagus. While not a classic by any means (although it surprises me just how many people put it in their top 10 lists), it’s still a fun little way to spend a Friday night. Without further ado, things I learned while watching Anthropophagus (potential spoilers):

1. If the Tarot card reader says “don’t visit the Greek island,” then don’t fucking visit the Greek island.
2. If you’re in a basement and a blind 15-year-old girl covered in blood that looks like a young Paula Cole (“Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”) swipes you with a knife, you won’t die, but you will be in pain, and it will put you at a tactical disadvantage when a large cannibal dude with a bad sunburn and a pre-Nirvana gray flannel shirt shows up to tear you a new one.
3. Real cannibals ain’t afraid to eat THEIR OWN GUTS, even as they are dying
4. Not every Eurohorror film is full of nudity

Come to think of it, Joe D’Amato is a great mentor. I bow to his erudition. I disagree with the guy at horrordvds.com who wrote, “Explaining the story in a Joe D’Amato film is like trying to explain quantum physics to a goat: what’s the point?” For the same year (1980) he released Anthropophagus, he released his other good film, Beyond The Darkness (Buio Omega), and it’s there I learned the following:

1. It hurts like crap to have your fingernails yanked out one by one, especially if you’re an overweight, pot-smoking British girl who shouldn’t be nosing around the autopsy room.
2. If you need help disposing of a dead body, get your weird, ugly pasta-loving maid to help you, but keep in mind she WILL make you suck her tits later that night.
3. Nothing will keep a creepy rich boy living in a country villa away from his girlfriend after she dies. All he needs is a windowless van, a shovel, an advanced understanding of embalming and the realization that from this point on, you will DEFINITELY be doing must of the work in bed.
4. Goblin rocks! (Of course, I already knew that from Deep Red)

A.D. 1982 can almost be considered the giallo’s last gasp: after over half a decade of knock-offs by lesser directors, the genre took an unexpected leap forward when two of the masters made some of their finest films. Argento ditched the supernatural angle (“at long last,” thought some purists) and put out Tenebre to massive acclaim. Of interest is the fact that although Tenebre is Italian for “darkness,” the film itself is bathed in relentless white daylight—all the better to highlight Maestro Dario’s finest gore set piece ever, in which a woman gets her arm cut off at the elbow and proceeds to paint a kitchen wall crimson. For his part, Fulci took out a raincheck on his beloved zombies in ’82 and put out one of the sleaziest, most nudity-filled gialli ever, The New York Ripper (marred only slightly by the fact that the killer spoke in a ridiculous voice like Donald Duck’s, but the post-modern optimist will at least try to paint this as a gallant nod to the glory days of Don’t Torture A Duckling). But afterwards, each man started putting out inferior product.

It’s not entirely their fault. For there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: after about 1983, the bottom fell out of the Italian film industry, and even two decades later, it has never truly recovered. This point has been driven home by every commentator on the subject, both insiders (directors, actors, and DVD company owners) and outsiders (fans and experts). Horror films were certainly not the only genre to suffer; all Italian films suffered (even if Roberto Benigni pulled off a major coup in 1999 with the Oscar for Life Is Beautiful).

Even as Italian horror was fading, the home videotape market was taking off. Just like the porno industry got an unexpected boost, so did the horror film industry. Now these films could be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home, and not at an out-of-town drive-in (and those were fading fast) or at some seedy grindhouse where you worried that the guy next to you was going to pull a “Pee Wee Herman” and scar you for life. While not all classic Italian horror received much of a video distribution, the films that did definitely attracted peoples’ notice. A bona fide cult sprang up attracted to those movies packaged in the so-called oversized, lurid “big boxes” which were more plentiful on the dusty shelves of the local “Mom and Pop” stores than they would ever be at tight-assed chains like Blockbuster. Videos became treasured possessions, even if their owners often didn’t know what they were missing by skipping out on the original theatrical run (and the vicissitudes wrought by manufacturers): like many other types of movies, videotape usually mean that incorrect OAR making films look like hack jobs (one reviewer said that Zombi 2 in pan & scan basically meant lots of shots of two noses talking to one another), faded colors, bad dubbing and a plethora of confusing re-release titles. Shock, for example, went by Beyond The Door II, even though it had nothing to do with Beyond The Door I, which wasn’t even a goddamned Italian film! Zombi 2 was re-christened (hehe, that’s an ironic analogy) Zombie. And those were just two less-confusing instances of “Anglicization.” In fact, when the DVD craze took off 15 years later, many fans were pleasantly surprised to find that such-and-such film newly remastered and correctly named was something they’d rented under a completely different title and had never been able to track down since as a result! Since this was the conservative 1980s we’re talking about, it’s only fair to mention that many of these films found their cult audiences on video despite (or—it can be argued—because of) the fact that the powers that be often decided to censor, cut, edit, or BAN them. If anything, Americans were relatively lucky in this respect, for we might have several scenes cut out, but in Britain and Australian the “video nasties” movement meant that certain films were completely banned from being bought, rented, or sold for years. Italian horror was certainly not the only genre to suffer; obviously films like I Spit On Your Grave became “video nasties” as well.

And in the country shaped like a boot where everyone likes lotsa Garlic, a few other directors popped up in the 1980s, each attempting to fight the good fight. First and foremost, Mario Bava’s son Eugenio started directing. His career began promisingly enough; his father apparently let him direct much of Shock (1977), and he assisted Argento considerably on Inferno; then in 1980 he issued Macabre, a nasty but compelling little film about a disturbed woman with a gross twist at the end. After that stunner, he gave the giallo a shot with the disappointing A Blade In The Dark (cool name, though; how’d it take so long for that title to be used?) before turning to the curiously overrated Demons series; ultimately he failed to gain as much of a name for himself as his illustrious father, but at least he gave it the old college try!

Michele Soavi (his first name is pronounced Meek-a-lay, not Mih-shell!) was another “coulda been” or “also-ran” a la Eugenio Bava, who suffered from the additional disadvantage of having been born about a decade too late. First known as an actor (he appears as a cop in Argento’s Opera as well as playing the lead in Eugenio’s A Blade In The Dark), he turned his modest talents to directing, ironically with a little help from Joe D’Amato. In the late 1980s he directed Stage Fright and The Church, and then in 1994 came Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man), considered by many to be a “minor classic.”

If gialli were dead and buried, their influence lived on in the States, as “body count” or “slasher” films took off, starting with John Carpenter’s Halloween (and its subsequent sequels). This was followed by the endless Friday the 13th Series, not to mention the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Hellraiser, and Silent Night Deadly Night franchises. No kid growing up in the ‘80s didn’t attend slumber parties where films from these series weren’t rented. While these series obviously delved into cheesy clichés and a lack of artistry, there is no denying the fact that gialli had led the way. In fact, Carpenter has admitted that Halloween, as fine as it is for a variety of reasons not even related to anything European, was little more than his “attempt to make a Dario Argento film.” The first Friday the 13th was directly inspired by Bava’s somewhat obscure Twitch of the Death Nerve, and even the conceit of a “killer doll” in Child’s Play was hinted at in Deep Red when that sick-looking ventriloquist doll showed up and scared the shit out of that Barry Gibb-lookalike in the 3rd reel!

In the early 1980s, horror anthology films suddenly came in vogue for a few enjoyable years. Think Creepshow I and II or Twilight Zone: The Movie. On TV, Amazing Stories and HBO’s The Hitchhiker often flirted with horrific imagery wrought by sexual guilt. These were all a direct descendant of Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology Black Sabbath. Dario Argento and George Romero even teamed up for a two-story anthology film called Two Evil Eyes, but this cross-cultural collaboration, a match made in heaven on paper, didn’t set the world on fire.

Argento himself got his act together in 1987 for one final shot of true Euro glory: Opera. Sometimes overlooked, Opera can actually be considered the last giallo ever made.

Opera certainly featured some amazing set pieces. In a clever nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds, crows figure prominently, including a stunning, swooping bird’s eye view of one of those horrid creatures making its loopy descent upon a perturbed opera house’s patrons—and then later they go to town on the killer. And no one can forget the “scissors puncturing the throat to get at the swallowed necklace” scene, or the ultimate in brutality: needles scotch-taped to a girl’s eye, so that she is forced to watch her lover get murdered (if she closes her eyes, the needles will go deep into the sockets). While Opera features pounding heavy metal songs during the killing scenes, the main theme (composed by Claudio Simonetti) is tender, more classically-oriented (in keeping with the mise en scene) and possessing one of the most beautiful melodies ever written. Retitled Terror At The Opera in the US, it was released by Orion Pictures when that company was still a player, although it didn’t do well in an America that only cared about horror films if the killer was named Michael, Freddie, Pinhead, Leatherface, or Jason (or, God forbid, Chucky). But the quality was vintage Argento; if not for the women’s shoulder-pads (I always think of George Michael’s highly dated video for “Father Figure” when I see this film), men’s Miami Vice jackets, and big hair by everyone, you’d think it had been filmed in 1975 (a good thing).

In retrospect, Opera is quite an anomaly: a seeming near-masterpiece released at a time when everything else on both sides of the Atlantic was basically dung. Even if only “slightly above average” in the overall Argento canon vis a vis Deep Red or Suspiria, it was head and shoulders above any flick laughably dubbed a “contemporary.” Argento has confessed that after the film’s wrap-up, he was deeply depressed and didn’t direct again for a while. One has to wonder if it was really due to Opera itself or due to the fact he knew that the glory days of Italian horror were beyond over, that Opera was a fluke at best. For their parts during these “dark years,” Fulci was ailing (and stuck making Zombi sequels which weren’t an eighth as good as the original), and Deodato had retreated to the world of TV commercials, which might not have grossed anyone out but at least provided a steady paycheck. Sergio Martino had a brief comeback in the mid 1980s with the then-popular post-Apocalyptic subgenre, making sci-fi/action films which ripped off such superior fare as Escape From New York, The Terminator, and Mad Max. Joe D’Amato switched to making direct-to-video porn (and at least acted like he loved it). Many other major players of the 60s and 70s simply retired or occasionally hit the convention circuit.

In 1996, Lucio Fulci died of complications from diabetes. It was the saddest genre-related death since Mario Bava’s, obviously. He died a few years before DVD came along, but at least he got to enjoy attending several conventions, where he was greeted like a rock star. And after he died, the bumper sticker of choice amongst spaghetti horror fans read FULCI LIVES! If he had lived only three years longer, he could have seen a massive resurgence of public interest in his entire oeuvre—not to mention that of all his fellow Italian horror directors’ classic films.

The importance of the development of DVD cannot be overestimated when it comes to quantifying its impact on the public’s awareness of any horror films released before the 1990s, but in the case of Eurohorror (and Italian Eurohorror especially), it can be safely stated that without the little shiny discs, many of these films would have faded into obscurity. In very short order, companies realized there was a slavishly devoted niche market (OK, OK, a CULT FOLLOWING) for them. And these niche companies went beyond simply remastering the original negatives with superior sound and a choice of whether to watch in the original subtitled Italian or in dubbed English. All the usual assortment of DVD extra features—audio commentaries, liner notes, making-of featurettes, full-blown documentaries, trailers, TV adverstisements, poster and still galleries, and hidden “easter eggs”—could be found therein.

So which companies does one go to in order to sample the finest in Italian horror?

First and foremost, Anchor Bay deserves a round of applause for settting standards even at the dawn of the format in the late 1990s. In retrospect, it was the first golden age of Italian horror on DVD. Nearly every major film from the “classic” eras of Argento and Fulci have gotten the Anchor Bay treatment, and while they are all now in various stages of being out-of-print (or being released as two-disc sets which in turn go out of print), there was a time in late 2001/early 2002 when a trip to Best Buy or Media Play could easily yield the purchase of at least 12 films directed between the two of those men. I thank my stars that this is the precise period in time when I got into the genre.

When Anchor Bay heavyweight Bill Lustig left the company around 2002, he delighted genre enthusiasts with the creation of Blue Underground. While Blue Underground has actually focused on a wide variety of horror and exploitation films from around the world, Italian horror nevertheless got its props in a major way with the beyond-staggering 8 disc Mondo Cane collection; the attention to detail would put the Criterion Collection to shame. I must also add that because the Mondo Cane films are essentially documentaries, I have refrained from mentioning them much here. While Blue Underground needs to hire someone in their graphics department with better photoshop skills, they have definitely supplanted Anchor Bay as the outlet for Eurohorror. Without Lustig to guide them, Anchor Bay has mostly released American films the past several years.

Image Entertainment became the go-to place for all of Bava’s 1960s classics; most discs featured highly informative commentary by Bava scholar Tim Lucas, who after years of tantalizing promises, has finally published his mammoth coffee-table book on the Maestro entitled All The Colors of the Dark. Alas, the Image Bava DVDs are all out of print but can still be purchased online at Ebay, etc.

Anchor Bay has also had other imitators: Shriek Show, a division of Media Blasters, has released many definitive Italian films by Deodato, D’Amato, Lenzi, and Fulci; the collection of trailers on each disc is not to be missed either—you never know what goodies are coming down the pike from them, as their website is often woefully out-of-date. Mondo Macabro is another label to watch, although they have actually focused more on Jess Franco films as well as the underrated Mexican horror scene (the nightmarish fantasies of Juan Lopez Moctezuma).

NoShame started releasing films in 2005. They are a class outfit which has thus far focused on the more sex-oriented (as opposed to gore-oriented) gialli, more often than not starring Edwige Fenech. And at long last, Grindhouse Releasing finally put out the definitive 2 disc special edition of Cannibal Holocaust in October 2005. It was worth the half-decade long wait.

Essential viewing (those marked with an asterisk are the 10 absolute must-haves for even casual fans):

*Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1960)
*Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964)
Castle of Blood (Antonio Margheriti, 1964)
Kill, Baby Kill! (Mario Bava, 1966)
The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1969)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Sergio Martino, 1970)
Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)
*What Have You Done To Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972)
Don’t Torture A Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)
The Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)
*Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
Jungle Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1976)
*Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Shock (Mario Bava, 1977)
Mountain of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1978)
*Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979)
*Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1979)
Anthropophagus (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
House on the Edge of the Park (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)
Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)
City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci, 1980)
Macabre (Eugenio Bava, 1980)
Beyond The Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1980)
*The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982)
*Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)
Opera (Dario Argento, 1987)
Mondo Cane Collection (Jacopetti and Prosperi, re-released 2003, originally released 1961-1971)

Dialogues with David Coverdale

2006-02-10T15:19:00.000-05:00

Although I've taken an extended hiatus from it, at one time I was very seriously working on what I hoped would be the definitive book on my favorite band, Deep Purple. I may eventually go back to it when the muse returns, but until then, I have a lot of fond memories of my research which has led me through what seems like thousands of web sites, hundreds of magazines, bootlegs of various qualities, dozens of books, and to several far-off places (like a studio in Florida, even!)

I also have been fortunate to talk to two men who have been in that band: Steve Morse (actually their current guitarist, but it was just a quick "Hi" and one or two questions after a solo show), and David Coverdale, who was the band's singer from 1973 to 1976 during my favorite era: the Mk 3 and Mk 4 lineups. Coverdale has long been my favorite vocalist, his bluesy baritone providing me with much inspiration on those occasions I deign to sing, and in 2001 he launched his own website where he has sometimes been gracious enough to answer fans' queries. In such a way I was able to ask him a number of questions, all of which he answered with his unique mixture of quick wit, honesty, and way with words--I am especially grateful seeing that he is obviously now more involved in Whitesnake, so it was a treat to go back in time 25-30 years. So, without further ado, a quick but illuminating interview.

1. Growing up, you actually played guitar before turning to singing. Did Ritchie Blackmore ever catch you messing around on his Strat?

“Yes, he did ‘bust’ me playing it [while writing “Mistreated”]. He said he liked my vibrato, ha ha...actually; he came in, said he liked the idea and proceeded to work his magic on my very modest riff. The lyrics were mostly what ‘naturally’ came to me while jamming on the song. Not really a ‘sit down, what shall I write about’ lyric, ‘twas all natural.”

2. In the early days of Purple, you used a “boom mike” stand onstage instead of the more common straight up and down stand. Why?

“Basically, I just wanted to be different. But, I must say, the boom stand was very unwieldy, and almost caused some serious accidents at times. [Now] I prefer the regular stand. It’s an extension of my You-know-what! Ha, ha!”

3. How about the first time you were onstage with Purple and Ritchie started destroying his guitar at the end of the show?

“The first time was a mindblower. I was panicking trying to think of something I could smash, and be able to afford to pay for it!”

4. Speaking of Blackmore, why did he favor those pilgrim hats back then?

“I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine. But, it got you talking about him, didn’t it?”

5. On your first American tour, did you have a chance to really get out and meet people?

“Believe it or not, I hardly met anyone when I toured with Purple. We traveled by a private 727, and they fed us extraordinary exotic foods. Straight into limos at usually private airstrips [then to]...hotel...gig...and all wrapped up, nice an’ tight, by huge, intimidating security guards. Nobody had a chance to meet us, or us them, other than when we were actually onstage.”

6. So where did the Raymond Dovetail alias come from?

“Raymond Dovetail came from a real experience. When I left art college and started working in a ‘fashionable’ boutique in the fabled, magical township of Redcar…‘ahem’...I had to go some bureaucratic building in Middlesborough to acquire a P45, a bit o’ paper saying I was ‘allowed’ to work...God knows. Anyway, the woman behind the desk had a hearing aid. When she asked my name I had to repeat it several times for her benefit. She wrote down ‘Raymond Dovetail,’ instead of David Coverdale. I used the name for hotel check-in for several years.”

7. One of my favorite DP albums is Stormbringer. Were you aware that this is also the title of a book by fantasy author Michael Moorcock?

“I lost a bet with Jon Lord over that! He said he was sure he’d heard of it before...I said ‘Bollocks.’ Then I get home, and sitting there is the Moorcock book! I loved all his early stuff; I used to read it in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s.”

8. I notice that you are listed on the writing credits for “Holy Man,” even though Glenn Hughes sings on that song, not you.

“Yes. I had the music to ‘Holy Man’ prior to joining DP. I wrote the verse lyric especially for Glenn to sing. I only sang it to Glenn to give him the melody for the song and, of course Glenn sings it wonderfully. He wrote the chorus lyric. I’m not sure what Jon did; I think it was the ‘synth’ bridge in the middle. I do remember that none of the band believed that Ritchie would play the ‘hump’ groove of the chorus figure, and were very surprised when he did. Though I must say, he and I were much ‘closer’ at that time.”

9. “Soldier of Fortune” was certainly very different from anything DP had done before.

“I do recall the initial ‘seeds of discontent’ being sown between the band and Sir Ritchie on that particular recording. The Guys, particularly Paicey, weren’t ‘getting’ the ‘Soldier of Fortune’ song, so Ritchie and I made a demo of it to, err, ‘convince’ the others of its worth. Ritchie was particularly upset by this (major pissed!) and from then on, he insisted that the publishing was not going to be split five ways, as it had from the beginning. I remember this throwing the proverbial cat amongst de pigeons, big time!”

10. It also features the Mellotron.

“Yes--they're unwieldy buggers at the best of times.”

11. And just what is a “High Ball Shooter?”

“A woman who pursued the, err, ‘rock aristocracy’ at the time, and then took advantage of the situation.”

12. In late 1974 Purple moved to Los Angeles to avoid the heavy British taxes. Where did you live out there?

“A friend of mine, the singer Lesley Duncan, recommended I meet a very ‘Hemmingway-esque’ character in LA, with view to leasing his home. I’m blanking on his name at the moment. Anyway, the house was in North Hollywood—not the most ‘salubrious’ address, but the house was incredibly interesting. For instance, the bed in the Master Bedroom was 300 years old, extraordinary carvings. The ‘deal’ included a Japanese ‘houseboy’ who shopped and cooked for me. He is now a professor at Osaka University. ‘Twas a wild and wacky place, which I still remember fondly. I lived there for almost a year then moved out to Malibu-De-Bum-Bum...2 miles of private beach, baby! Not too shabby for a lad from Yorkshire!”

13. How far of a drive was it to Pirate Sound, where you rehearsed?

“Pirate Sound was on the fringe of West Hollywood. I lived in the Valley [by then], and the drive, in those days, was 20 minutes to half an hour.”

14. Is it true you were asked to sing on the first Rainbow album, but turned down the opportunity?

“Yes. I told [Ritchie] I felt the approach was a return to the Machine Head style of songs, and that we should be looking forward, not back. I don’t think he was particularly pleased. Incidentally, all the members of DP felt the same.”

15. Tommy Bolin, Ritchie’s replacement, was quite a character.

“Tommy would tell me horror stories of his encounters with, please forgive the expression, ‘rednecks’ when he traveled with the James Gang. Some very dangerous moments that I never had to be confronted by. And personally, I’m delighted I didn’t have to share.”

16. Getting to some of the songs on Come Taste The Band, with Tommy Bolin. On “Lady Luck,” what is a “feathercane?”

“Use your imagination. Or would ‘ticklestick’ sound better?”

17. I once saw a picture of you and May Pang [John Lennon’s ex-girlfriend] taken at a party somewhere on that tour.

“I got into a lot o’ trouble with [my girlfriend] for that photo! Still, it was worth it...(wry smile)...My Lord, that was a long time ago, and once again, the past reaches out to grab you by the nuts...OUCH!...when you least expect it.”

Other things I learned: He met his first wife, Julia, while recording Burn in Montreux; he confirmed the story about being in the studio with Glenn Hughes when Stevie Wonder came in and telling Stevie to “get the hell out” (because it was dark and he couldn’t tell that it was Stevie!); during the infamous "Ritchie blowing up the stage" at California Jam, he was watching Blackmore in amazement from just offstage; spoke enthusiastically about a nasty British food called Branston Pickle; said they most amazing thing about America was the sheer size of the country; he said “Love Child” contains his least favorite of Jon Lord’s keyboard solos; that as far as he knew, Tommy Bolin was of Indian ancestry (some sources say he is part Swedish and part Syrian); that even though Lord was over 10 years older than he, he never looked at him as a “father figure” but rather always a musical colleague.

Jumpin' the Shark, Part II

2006-02-02T22:56:00.000-05:00

A while back, I did a listing of some of me favorite shows of all time, stating whether they'd jumped the shark. Here's some more...

The Brady Bunch: Never jumped. Actually got better as it went along. I liked the last few years in the '70s the best, when the kids were all a little older. In the beginning they were too young.

Friday the 13th The Series: The first two years were excellent, then a shark jump came when Ryan left and was replaced by that muscular jerk (Johnny). With Ryan gone, we never got to play the drinking game properly (take a drink every time a knocked-down-on-the-ground Jack cries out, "Run, Ryan!" Of course, you still got to take a drink whenever the redheaded girl turned you on, which was the entire hour for me personally. Schwing!)

Howard Stern: He was once a god to me. I stayed up every night to watch the E! show in the mid-90s. Then Private Parts (the movie) was released, and suddenly he started taking his own hype seriously. The shark was a-circlin'. Then came the ugly new studio, then Fred and Jackie left, Robyn became boring, and that weird black midget with the slender face was in every episode. And now the ultimate jump: moving to Sirius. Am I the only one that thinks a certain sense of danger has been taken away now that the FCC isn't around to fine him $4,000,000,000,000 every time he says "FUCK"!?!

In Search of...: Never jumped. Freaked me out, Leonard Nimoy's voice did. It could even be argued it got better as it went along--viz. the "Elephant Man" episode where he's looking out of the window with purple skin.

MTV: (Whole stations can jump) I didn't see MTV for the first time until 1983, when we moved from Greensboro to Cary. It was so amazing...as a 12-year-old I used to sit in front of the TV for six or seven hours, waiting to see the video for ZZ Top's "Legs." They actually played VIDEOS until early 1992, when The Real World debuted. I actually usually like The Real World, but what does it have to do with music? Plus the whole "Choose or Lose" political reports which were just a naked excuse to try to get young people to vote for Bill Clinton. And the oh-so-serious Kurt Loder from Rolling (Fucking) Stone with his goddamned alternative hair. Why did they need a "serious" journalist? Was Kevin Seal not good enough to interview the members of Whitesnake? (Aside: I love his quote about the hair metal scene--it was the first and last time since the reign of Louis XIV that grown men with long hair and tons of makeup were taken seriously for their minds) The '90s just kept on getting worse and worse in so many ways.

Roseanne: I thought it jumped the shark when they got a new Becky. Or was it when Dan stoppd being a contractor and bought the motorcycle shop? Or when fat-lipped Sandra Bernard came on board to satisfy the Sappho readers? Or when that "depressed" boy with curly hair sort of got adopted by them? Or did it jump from day one? Roseanne was so crude.

Survivor: 2000 was a momentous year in my life: my little girl started preschool, we bought our new Toyota, my brother got married, I got my first DVD player, and I had a hernia operation. Whew...one other thing, I got a new favorite TV show, and Survivor was its name. I absolutely adored the first six or so "seasons" of Survivor; it was true must-see TV and BY FAR the best and classiest of the reality shows. At work my friend Jim and I spent at least an hour on Friday mornings analyzing the night before (it was ok, he was my boss at the time). The All-Stars was incredible, and Rupert (my favorite of all time) finally went all the way and won. I actually cried I was so happy for him being able to get out of debt, etc. But where to go after the All-Stars? How about back to the ol' grind. It just didn't seem the same, and then they had a group which was the most pathetic group of pussies (my aplogies to any females reading this). You know what I mean. Shark jump! I lost interest. I tried to watch last fall, after taking about a year off, but they sucked too. Tonight the new season debuted, and...there's a potential "reverse jump" in the cards! An interesting twist: four tribes, the young men, old men, young women, and old women. Should be interesting. Plus one of the young women is extremely hot. Her occupation is "missile engineer." She can do some work on my "missile" any day.

I'm tired. There may be a part 3 eventually, kiddievinkies.

Concert History

2006-01-27T23:35:00.000-05:00

On one of the sites I frequent, a young lady just informed us she is to go to her first concert next week. The name of the band escapes me...probably a bunch of guys wearing Emo glasses who know about four chords (peace, gurly!) I thought I'd list all the concerts I've been to, while I still have a few brain cells left. There may be some lacunae in my list, but I think it's fairly complete:

1. Aerosmith/Dokken (11/87; Reynolds Auditorium, Raleigh, NC)

My first show! Not the greatest, but still cool...I watched Dokken by myself because my friend John gave "ambiguous" directions on where to meet up. So being a genius, I just went to my seat! My ears were ringing so fucking hard the next day (a Monday!) I remember telling my girlfriend at the time about how Stephen Tyler rode his mike stand around the stage like a horse.

2. Bad Company/Winger (10/88; Raleigh Memorial Auditorium)

Excellent show at the small Raleigh Auditorium. Kip Winger wasn't getting much response from the audience and was visibly pissed. Then Bad Company came out and did a really good set.

3. The Who (summer 1989; Carter Finley Stadium, Raleigh, NC)

A giant arena show. I love The Who. All I remember is that I forgot where I parked afterwards and was nearly in tears.

4. Dave Brubeck Five (early 1990; Raleigh Memorial Auditorium)

Went with my dad to see these ancient jazz cats. Pretty good show, actually. There were guys in the audience wearing tuxedoes, so this concert adds a "touch of class" to my list. Before the show dad and I ate at this really expensive oyster bar.

5. The Kingston Trio (early 1990(?); Raleigh Memorial Auditorium)

Another show with my dad. (His favorite band of all time. He went to college in the '60s but was never exactly a hippie. The Kingston Trio were already passe by about '66!)

6. Motley Crue/Warrant (3/90; Dean E. Smith Center, Chapel Hill, NC)

Fairly good show. Went with a guy named Tom from my school who, a year earlier, had gone to Def Leppard and had gotten so bombed that the police had to take him home (or so the story went). I was nervous that he was going to "pressure" me into drinking (I never really had a drop until I was in college; this show was my senior year in HS) But as it turned out, neither of us drank.

7. Van Halen/Alice In Chains (10/91; Walnut Creek Ampitheatre, Raleigh, NC)

My first outdoor show, at the newly opened Walnut Creek Ampitheatre in Raleigh. Van Halen blew me away--they were at the peak of their powers with Sammy Hagar at the time (shut up! I like him!) Seeing them come up jumping around was like seeing Zeppelin or something. Eddie is just a fucking guitar god, even if his style has been copied so much it now borders on cliche. Towards the end, however, many rowdy drunks started lighting their lawn chairs on fire!

8. De La Soul (spring 1993; fraternity court, Chapel Hill, NC)

Played at a crappy fraternity party. I'd been dragged there by my girlfriend. All the guys in De La Soul did was say, "Where's the party afterwards?" I guess 300 white kids standing around drinking beer wasn't a "party" enough for them. Hell, that's not really a party to me either ;-)

9. Van Halen/Vince Neil (summer 1993; Walnut Creek Ampitheatre, Raleigh, NC)

Not as good as in 1991, but still rocking. My brother and sister went, but with their own friends. I was with a group of guys including another guitar player, a real know-it-all. He and I spent half the night trying to out-b.s. each other in terms of what we could and couldn't play (we'd never met before). He might have been 10x better than me for all I know, but he was a real asshole about it.

10. Meat Loaf (2/94; Raleigh Memorial Auditorium)

Meat was on his Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell tour, his big comeback. He is a very underrated singer and performer, and on guitar he had Pat Thrall (ex-Pat Travers, ex-Hughes/Thrall), who was kicking major ass that night.

11. Stevie Nicks/Darden Smith (summer 1994; Walnut Creek Ampitheatre, Raleigh, NC)

One of the worst shows ever. Stevie at the time was overweight and not in good voice (as it turns out she was addicted to pills). A few years later she came back full force with the reunited Fleetwood Mac, which alas I didn't get to see.

12. The Eagles (summer 1994; Walnut Creek Ampitheatre)

Incredible. The Hell Freezes Over tour. My friend John bought himself, me, his girlfriend, and my girlfriend (future wife) tickets at about $90 a pop. What a good friend! They did every song imaginable, not just from the Eagles, but from Don Henley solo, Glenn Frey solo, and Joe Walsh solo. God what a great night...made me want to go home and play guitar. Joe Walsh is so funny...he should someday be both host and musical guest on SNL.

13. Aerosmith/Collective Soul (11/94; Walnut Creek Ampitheatre, Raleigh, NC)

Just a so-so show. I was actually looking more forward to Collective Soul (who had a hit with "Shine"), but they weren't that good live.

14. REO Speedwagon/Pat Benatar/Orleans (summer 1995; Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre, Charlotte, NC)

Another crap show. It was about 100 degrees outside in Charlotte. I left early because I'd been having some problems with my car's radiator, so I missed REO! (I only listed them for posterity)

15. The Allman Brothers (summer 1995; Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre, Charlotte, NC)

I bought tickets for this with some trepidation, for I was afraid the audience would consist of nothing but 45-year-old biker guys who wanted to kick my ass if I looked at them the wrong way. When I got there, to my surprise I was one of the oldest people there--and I was 23! It was mostly college kids in tie-dyed shirts...you know, the whole Phish/Grateful Dead scene (after all the Allmans are a jam band). Excellent playing that night. I got extremely high off all the smoke there; afterwards I insisted we go to IHOP (which I normally hate!) so I could satiate my munchies.

16. KISS/The Verve Pipe (9/96; Greensboro Coliseum, Greensboro, NC)

Probably the best concert I have ever been to. It was at the Greensboro Coliseum during the make-up reunion tour that magical year of 1996. I was so lucky just to get tickets; I had a message on my answering machine from my mom on a Friday afternoon, of all people, saying to call this number to get tickets (this is before I had the internet!) I got tickets and the show was the next night! Just an incredible, fun, emotional night...honestly one of the best nights of my life not involving sexual activity! KISS were in top form, playing classic after classic. That it happened in Greensboro, the town of my childhood where I spent the late 70s listening to KISS, only added to the emotional impact. Also I saw a girl who remains one of the 3 or 4 best looking girls I've ever seen in my life. She had red hair and worked for a local radio station and had this extremely short denim skirt on. She was about 5' tall and trim. Funny the things you remember 8 or 9 years later...

17. Dio/Love-Hate (6/98; Grady Cole Center, Charlotte, NC)

Only about 200 people attended this show, with open seating, meaning I could be close to the front to see one of metal's greatest frontmen ever, Ronnie James Dio (Elf/Rainbow/Black Sabbath/Dio). What a fucking loud, powerful show...Ronnie sang like a dream. Hard to believe he is pushing 60. The encore was "Neon Nights," the first song on Heaven and Hell. GodDAMN that sounded good live! Afterwards we waited around for 2 hours and I got to meet him by the bus. He signed my Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow CD and posed for a few pictures. He is very short, but not a midget. I'm 5'8" and he was nearly as tall as me with his boots on. That means that Ritchie Blackmore is about my height, judging from photos of the two of them standing together. For days afterwards I could literally think of nothing else other than I had met a man who had been in a band with Ritchie Blackmore.

18. Ozzfest: Black Sabbath/Rob Zombie/Slayer (6/99; Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre)

Ozzfest always consists of at least 15 or so bands, but I arrived only in time to see the final three, and the only one of these that mattered was the reunited Black Sabbath with Ozzy on vocals. This was a few years BEFORE "The Osbournes" had painted him as a doddering caricature of himself...the night I saw him he was running around and wild and sound fairly good, vocally. The main attraction for me, however, was seeing Tony Iommi on guitar. When I first picked up the guitar at 15, my main goal was to learn every single Sabbath song. Tony was GOD to me (this was a full year before I discovered Ritchie and Deep Purple). I played air guitar without shame that night.

Side note: The only two singers I have ever seen who had total control over the audience from the moment they hit the stage are Ozzy Osbourne and Ronnie James Dio. By that I meant all eyes were on them, doing whatever they said or did (you should see the way everyone starts swaying their arms back and forth at the beginning of "War Pigs" along with Ozzy), most people singing along. And coincidentally (or not), both of them have been in Black Sabbath at one time or another.

19. Steve Morse Band/Quiver (11/99; Ziggy's, Winston-Salem, NC)

Steve Morse is Deep Purple's current guitarist. A virtuoso who can play rock, jazz, or country with equal fluidity. Getting to see his solo band in a small club in Winston-Salem was pretty cool. I was no more than seven or eight feet away from him, getting to see his technique up close. Afterwards I got to chat with him and he signed 2 CDs. A funny sidenote is that my wife got hit in the head with a drumstick when the drummer, Van Romaine, threw his stick out into the audience. She was OK, and the band apologized. Another show where I got a pretty good "contact high."

20. KISS/Ted Nugent/Skid Row (4/00; Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte, NC)

Four years after seeing them (one of the best nights ever), I saw KISS again...and Ted Nugent blew them off the stage. It's not that KISS wasn't good, it's just that they weren't AS good...you could tell that Ace and Peter were starting to get pissed off at Paul and Gene. But it was still before Gene and Paul flayed their reputations by hiring two other guys who dressed like Ace and Peter. The two other guys could be the best fucking musicians on earth (and the drummer, Eric Singer, is actually in my top ten!) but for Christ's sake make new costumes/makeup for them out of respect for Ace and Peter.

21. Deep Purple/Scorpions/Dio (6/02; Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre, Charlotte, NC)

Finally I get to see my favorite band (with the added bonus seeing Dio again!) What a night...June 21, 2002. DP opened with "Fireball," which was a rare treat, and played many of the classics. For the last three songs we pushed our way to the front of the audience, where I took a few pictures and got to bang my head somethin' serious during "Highway Star." I hoped to meet them afterwards but only got to see them board the bus by peeking through a wooden fence. Oh well...if I die tomorow at least I can say I saw the mighty Deep Purple.

22. ZZ Top/Ted Nugent/Double Trouble (summer 2003; Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre)

Got free tickets to this show, and quite frankly it was a letdown. ZZ Top are getting up there in years and played their songs at a tempo which was too slow. Ted Nugent blew them off the stage the same way he blew KISS off the stage a few years earlier. Double Trouble also sure sucked without their old guitar player...hmm...some guy named Stevie Ray Vaughan.

23. Van Halen/some crappy opening band whose name I can’t remember! (6/04; Greensboro Coliseum up in the nosebleed section)

I almost didn't go to this one because 2 tickets set me back $140, but I hit the "enter" button because a) they were back with Sammy and b) who knows how long it would last? (Answer: about three months). Of the 3 times I saw Van Halen, this was by far the worst. They were OK musically, but there was a certain disconnect this time which is hard to explain. Eddie had a samurai-like topknot haircut.

Here are some bands I haven't seen yet but wish to...

Deep Purple (again!)
Whitesnake (David Coverdale is just a god to me. Whenever I sing, I try to emulate him and have actually gotten pretty good. He is sometimes my friend, my idol, and my teacher)
Judas Priest (now that Halford is back with them)
Keane
Scissor Sisters
AC/DC
Blackmore's Night
Eric Clapton
Neil Young

Goodbye, Africa...Hello, Uncle Tom(?)

2006-01-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Note: This is a reposting of a blog I did last night on my myspace site. I tried to italicize all film titles (since it didn't port over from that site), but I might have missed a few. The original posting also had a host of emiticons not available on this site.

Having a Best Buy gift card for $25.00 presents you with so many “posh-ibilities,” as our Commander-In-Chief would say. And last Thursday I used it to buy a CD: Carole King: Tapestry, since I knew it would be good, plus a 3 disc limited edition set called Shockumentaries Vol. 2.

This boxed set contains half of the films contained in Blue Underground’s seminal Mondo Cane collection, which I have lusted after for two long years (but long have been dissuaded by a price which ranges from $99 to $149). So when I saw Shockumentaries Vol. 2 for $14.99, I snapped it up, knowing there was no point looking for any other DVD that day. (Cue the Seals & Crofts song, “We May Never Pass This Way Again” a/k/a “Don’t kick yourself in the butt for the next ten years for not buying it when you had the chance! Remember the Deep Purple Illustrated Biography you passed up at Burt’s Music in February 1988! ) I was now in possession of two of the most controversial films ever made: Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom (plus a documentary disc on Jacopeti and Prosperi called Godfathers of Mondo). What I saw over the next two nights rocked my senses…and I’ve gotten to the point where my senses are rarely rocked for more than twenty minutes at a time .

First, some background: in the early 1960s, two Italian guys hooked up to make a documentary about the weird, wacky, and wonderful stuff going on in the hard-to-reach areas of our world. They were polar opposites: Gualtiero Jacopeti was darkly handsome, cocky, intuitive, and somewhat scandalous in his personal life (he was on the verge of going to jail for statutory rape of some 16-year-old, so he got out of it by marrying her). Franco Prosperi, by contrast, was quiet, more intellectual (having studied both biology and theology) and probably more conservative in his personal ways. But together, this yin-and-yang dynamic produced Mondo Cane, an original documentary focusing on bizarre goings-on in Asia, Africa, South America, and other out-of-the-way places. While a bit tame and dated today, Mondo Cane launched the whole “reality” craze which continues unto this day. Without this one film, it’s no exaggeration to say there would be no COPS, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, some of the wilder Discovery Channel stuff, or even Fear Factor. From there they put out the admittedly perfunctory Mondo Cane 2 and then the slightly sexist Women of the World (which was daring for its time by showing lesbians dancing together).

When it seemed the two directors were on the verge of becoming cliché, they threw all semblance of caution to the wind and spent the next three years in Africa, during the time where the old colonials were abdicating their rule (whether voluntary or not), and leaving it up to the natives to govern themselves. The spirit of “Uhuru” (freedom) is everywhere, but what exactly do the Africans plan to do with said freedom: can they handle it? How easy will it be to spread it to the masses? What of the remaining whites—are they to be simply run off, or is it possible to co-exist with them?

Africa Addio sets the scene early on with shots of the old colonial officials (mostly British and Portugese) leaving their posts; black Africans are back in charge of their homelands. But what ensues seems to be non-stop chaos, strife, and “reverse racism”: a “re-education camp,” for example, runs slide shows depicting whites lying on a beach in a vain attempt to “become black,” plus comparing white girls’ blonde hair to that of monkeys’. Then the blacks take bulldozers to the beautiful old farms which had been run by whites. And why do all of this? Well for one thing, several whites had conducted a traditional British “fox hunt”—only that instead of chasing a fox (which, after all, is not indigenous to the African continent), the hounds go after a black boy who quickly scampers up a tree, sweating bullets.

Then, horrible scenes of animal deaths await us. An elephant is “chased” by a helicopter until she is so tired that she gives up, sits down and lets people spear her to death. I was horrified when someone totally nails this noble pachyderm right in the eye (from a pretty good distance) and I found myself thinking, “Nice shot!” A split second later, however, I was back to thinking, “Humans can be such monsters.” The elephant was also pregnant.

Eventually the film once again settles into a political groove. Countries visited include Angola, Rwanda, and the Congo. Jacopetti and Prosperi find themselves driving into the middle of a riot in a downtown area. As the cameras continue to roll, the soldiers get irritated at their car and literally drag the filmmakers out of it, forcing them towards a wall. With a backwards glance, Jacopetti gives the camera a shit-eating grin as if to say, “Play it cool, they’re just fucking with us.” But just as it seems they are really going to get shot, another African (having looked at their passports) runs up and says, “Don’t shot them! They’re not white!” In other words, they’re Italian, not British. Had they been British, their asses would have been grass. At another point, we get a shot of a group of severed hands, plus dozens of Muslims dead near a body of water, and the infamous “vigilante”-styled execution (carried out, to be sure, by troops) of a man who has just been caught burning a school to the ground. A school which had housed 30 women and children. His body is dragged away, leaving a magenta-colored trail of blood along the dusty road. Jacopetti and Prosperi eventually had to go to court to prove that the execution was not “staged,” that they just happened to catch it on film. Eerily enough, about 15 years later, another Italian filmmaker, Ruggero Deodato, would find himself on trial to prove that no one was actually killed during the making of his magnum opus, a li’l family flick called Cannibal Holocaust. And Deodato was simultaneously an admirer of the Mondo films as well as a critic. Ultimately, it’s one of those “Does the public have the right to know?” issues, tinged with more than a bit of “When is enough, enough?”

And still, Africa Addio is not without its lighter moments—whether they meant them to be funny is a different matter, of course. A white woman performs a (rather tame) striptease for a club full of African men. She walks up to one of them and says, “Wannt take them off?” referring to the little cones covering her boobies. With no emotion whatsoever he pulls them off and then simply stares at them in his hands whilst she walks off, cupping her bare chest and saying, “Thanks!” He never once gives her another glance! Later, the camera films several cute (and white) South African girls running towards the beach in slow motion; then they are suddenly on swings, and then—mirabile dictu—they are jumping on trampolines, all in bikinis. Now we know where The Man Show got its inspiration 35 years later! This placid scene cuts brilliantly to a row of black African women doing a native dance in grass skirts—and bare breasted. In other words, a stereotypical “National Geographic” moment, until the camera pans back and we realize that these women are only doing this dance for a movie. A full movie crew is filming them. When it’s time to “take five,” a group of native men break out a piano, set of drums, and upright bass, leading into one of the hottest jazz jams ever caught on tape! This band absolutely rocks out, and meanwhile the native women go into a tent of their own and put on Western clothes. If not for the color of their skin, you would think they were dressing for a ritzy prom in some country club in Connecticut. And getting back to the animals, there’s a humorous sequence where two lions are trying to mate, but they keep getting interrupted by a group of tourists on a safari trying to take pictures. (This seems to symbolize the continent of Africa itself, unable to get on with its “business” due to the scrutinizing eye of the West—or perhaps that’s an ironic thing to think given the more right wing tones of the film itself).

Roger Ebert himself gave the film a predictable thumbs-down:

One would not, of course, object to a dispassionate study of Africa's setbacks since independence. But one would expect an examination of its progress, as well. No hint of anything but disaster, however, is given in this film…as in their earlier "documentaries," Jacopetti and Prosperi have combined a saccharine sound track, arty photography and an authoritative-sounding narration to lend respectability to a film offering perversion and brutality as its fare…

There are scenes…of executions, decomposed bodies, burning flesh, suffering and death. If only they were honestly presented, set in context, perhaps they could be justified. But they are not. Instead, they are staged for our amusement, cloaked in the respectability of an "impartial" documentary, and in the end that is the most disgusting thing about this wretched film. (Chicago Sun-Times, 1967)

Good ol’ Rog was definitely in the majority, of course, and Africa Addio was soon relegated to the cult circuit at best. Jacopetti and Prosperi were roundly dismissed as racist has-beens whose day in the sun with Mondo Cane seemed like a fast-fading memory. So what does this envelope-pushing, decorum-fucking odd couple do? Decide to make a new film, to prove that they are not racists. Ironically, they make a film which could almost pass for a recruitment film for the KKK---or the Black Panthers!

Goodbye Uncle Tom (Addio zio Tom in Eye-talian) “enjoyed” a brief grindhouse run in the US in 1971, having received an “X” rating and scarcely a decent review. The “Godfathers of Mondo” pushed the envelope on this one about ten times further than any of their previous films. The world was just not ready for an ultra-graphic recreation of what African slaves faced upon arrival to America.

Everyone has heard of Roots (or as the Canadians call it, RUTS), but even that fine, "gritty" work has nothing on Uncle Tom in terms of graphic content. I even asked my semi-estranged wife (who took enough classes in college to have minored in African-American studies) if she had ever heard of this film, and she said, “Uhh, no!” It really is “too hot to touch” for either side. Obviously no high school could show it without the teacher getting fired, and in the ultra-P.C. environment of American colleges and universities, whoa mama! Better have tenure at the very least, prof. And balls o'steel. Even many people (like me) who are hardcore into exploitation hadn’t heard of it until seeing its name and an outraged blurb on the back of the Mondo Cane box and wondering, “Just how fucking ‘bad’ can it be?”

I will reiterate: I have Cannibal Holocaust, Caligula, Kids, I Spit On Your Grave, Inga, House on the Edge of the Park, Freaks (tame now, but taboo in its day), Scared Straight!, Jungle Holocaust, the aforementioned Africa Addio, and most of Lucio Fulci’s ultra-gory oeuvre in my collection. Not to mention “blatantly racist” stuff like Birth of A Nation and Fight For Your Life. I’ve rented other controversial films like In The Realm of the Senses, The Devils, Faces of Death (Faces is mostly faked crap BTW), and The Untold Story; I try to catch Roots when it comes on TV, and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 the day it came to my town. I was blown away (in both good ways and bad) upon seeing Triumph of the Will in film class. And honest to Betsy, these films have little or nothing on Goodbye Uncle Tom for several reasons.

The premise itself takes a minute to get used to, but is actually a cool device: An Italian film crew, confused about race relations in the early 1970s, decides to go back in time in an attempt to see how it all began. In a helicopter they fly through the rural American South of the antebellum period, finally reaching a magnificent plantation where below, dozens of slaves work the fields; wind from the helicopter blows all their crops to and fro, but the slaves themselves wave at the whirly bird in awe. In short order it lands and the filmmakers (never seen on camera the whole film, but sometimes heard mouthing "outraged" platitudes) proceed to enter the plantation, holding a dialogue with its owners, and we're off…

After spending time at the plantation, the filmmakers go even "further" back in time to chronicle the journey on a slave ship from the Western coast of Africa. As you might guess, the theme from The Love Boat was not playing during said interlude, nor was Neil Diamond's "We're Comin' to America."

Rather, we get the following: completely naked Africans being transported below deck on slave ships, having diarrhea (and getting plugged up with a sugarcane cork for their troubles, which the slave ship owner brags will “burst like a champagne bottle eventually”), having slop forced down their throats (one guy who refuses to eat has his teeth bashed out and then the slop shoved into his mouth as blood pours out of his mouth ), the whole de-lousing process upon arrival in America, getting examined by a veterinarian (since Africans weren't men, no, they were animals--and this wacko veterinarian has his entire face bandaged up like The Invisible Man), being taken to the market (where in one disturbing sequence an obviously gay guy delights in painting some of the young boys a silvery golden color, presumably to make them “prettier,” and a black dwarf who is somehow allowed to sell slaves compares the nipple colors of several girls of mixed parentage), white men discussing how much they love “dark meat,” young girls forced into S&M-tinged prostitution, slaves living like animals, led around on leashes from a very young age, a visit to a “breeding farm” where the dog-like “main stud” practically rips the girl he rapes in two, a slave getting castrated while yelling “Not my balls!” , a so-called scientist conducting experiments on slaves to prove they are genetically inferior to blacks, ten or so naked amputees crawling like worms or lizards to get their pitiful daily rations, and young children assisting in the capture of escaped slaves in a Floridian swamp. Supposedly all the dialogue comes from historical writings of the time, and in fact I recognized some of the quotes. Few, in my judgment, were spoken too far out of context. Anyone who feels Harriet Beecher Stowe was "enlightened" and/or "liberal" for her time will be shocked to hear some of the things she says—and not to sound too much like a Marxist, a not-insignificant segment of the academic community has always wondered about her true motives behind writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work which is at best often bogged down in the mid-Victorian emotional sentiments of its time. In addition, a man is asked to repeat three times his assertion, taken directly from the Bible, that the white race has a God-given right to enslave the black race.

(Let me comment on that a minute: This little scene certainly gives people who are anti-Christian—and anti-religion in general—a good amount of ammunition. I am no Biblical scholar, and no citation is given for this racist man's assertion, but I don’t doubt for a minute that it’s probably in there. If not, someone at least “interpreted” it to be there. Either way, this is distressing to me. It amazes me how people say the Bible is the true word of God, but then pick and choose which of these “words” to follow. Wouldn’t God be displeased that people took such a “lunch buffet” approach to worship? People have interpreted Scripture as a way to justify beating one’s spouse, killing homosexuals, or, yes, enslaving those of a different race. And yet conversely, many homosexuals say, “No, past interpretations are wrong. You can be gay and Christian. Jesus teaches us to love everyone.” Most Christians I’ve talked to have insisted that the Bible explicitly states it is a sin to have sex with someone of a different race, or the same sex, but they are hard-pressed to name to Chapter and Verse which so states this. Once I read a good portion of the book of Leviticus, which had all sorts of ridiculous laws related to just about everything under the sun. But, hey, God supposedly wrote it! If you’re a Christian [or Jew as well, since Leviticus is Old Testament], you have to wait x number of days before having sex with a woman who’s had her period, or you’re going to Hell! Same thing if you have sex with your father’s sister’s daughter’s cousin’s best friend unless your spouse has been dead x number of years! Bottom line: How is it possible to follow a religion whose main text is open to so many conflicting interpretations? Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-"loving" being choose to be so ambiguous—or, if these racist passages are truly there and truly meant to be followed verbatim—why would he, uhh, be so racist? The larger picture here is probably fit for another discussion entirely, to which the ideas expressed in Goodbye Uncle Tom would be a mere codicil or footnote. But I just had to go off on this tangent!)

For me the most shocking segment was actually the visit to the aforementioned “scientist,” one Professor Samuel Cartwright, and listening to him talk about how his profession viewed the biological and psychological makeup of blacks back then. In short, they were looked at as less than men, unable to express emotions as deep-seated as Caucasians. A telling quote: "They have no past, no future." He shows off all manner of torture devices designed to keep them from masturbating; one man has a bird cage on his head, and there are also muzzles, et. al. He even offers various theories on why their sexual organs all seem to be so large. There are even a few Indian women sitting in the background. At first I thought they were there for sexual pleasuring the men and/or having offspring by them to see what a half-black/half-Indian would be like, but as it turns out they’re just there so the professor can go off on a sidebar about how Indians cannot be compelled to be slaves the way blacks can be. At one point the filmmakers unfortunately undermine the proceedings by asking, “Oh professor, by the way, aren’t you Jewish?” He replies, “Yes, why?” somewhat testily before moving on to the next part of the tour. I think the filmmakers were trying to display the inherit ironies involved—namely, a Jew is opining that blacks are less than human, and a century later Hitler would think the same of Jews! Instead, it comes across almost as, “What goes around, comes around,” as though perhaps Jews deserved this “taste of their own medicine” in the concentration camps. There are two major problems here:
1. Not all Jews (presumably) felt this way about blacks.
2. Even if they did, two wrongs do not make a right. (Or were Jacopetti and Prosperi simply anti-Semitic? They would have grown up in Fascist Italy under Mussolini at the same time Hitler had Germany under his spell; did they thus harbor deep-seated resentment towards those who had raised Hitler’s ire and simultaneously inspired Il Duce?)
My whole “Hitler had the same ideas about Jews in the early 1900s as many whites did in the 1800s about blacks” argument is simply reinforced when we view the cavernous holding areas outside the laboratory as the professor not too subtly recommends we simply kill them all. I was relieved when this section was over. (Cartwright was a real guy; this bio of him makes him sound like a "swell guy": CARTWRIGHT, Samuel Adolphus, physician, born in Fairfax county, Virginia, 30 November, 1793; died in Jackson, Mississippi, 2 May, 1868. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and began practice in Huntsville, Alabama, but removed to Natchez, Mississippi, where he labored for more than a quarter of a century, and served at one time under General Jackson as surgeon. Dr. Cartwright removed to New Orleans in 1848, and in 1862 was appointed to improve the sanitary condition of the Confederate soldiers near Port Hudson and Vicksburg, and while discharging this duty he contracted the disease that caused his death. He contributed largely to medical literature, and received several medals and prizes for his investigations, especially those on yellow fever, cholera infantum, and Asiatic cholera. Some of his methods of treatment are now in use in the army and in hospitals.

(Such a whitewashing--pardon the pun--leaves out "Drapetomania" or causing slaves to "run away" and "dysaethesia aethiopus or herbetude of mind and obtuse sensibility of body-a disease peculiar to negroes¾called by overseers 'rascality,'" which can only be cured, he claimed, by whipping them and treating them like children. [Source: "The Sambo Thesis Revisited: Slavery's Impact upn the African-American Personality," by Yusuf Nuruddin, Socialism and Democracy Online].)

Another shocking (and somewhat confusing) segment was the depiction of escapees getting hunted down. It should have been straightforward enough, but I didn’t understand why the bounty hunters had about a dozen black children chained together and crying. Probably as a way of drawing the runaways out of hiding, but wouldn’t they probably realize it was a ruse? The slaves fall for it, however, and as soon as they show themselves, they are mercilessly gunned down in “loving” slow motion. After about the eleventh shot of a slave falling into the water in slow motion, blood flying everywhere, I wanted to yell, “OK, we get the point!” But it gets worse (or at least more puzzling): the bounty hunters and several black accomplices stand smiling next to a huge pile of dead runaways to smile for the camera. As soon as a picture is taken, every last “dead body” in the pile suddenly stands up, and everyone starts laughing. I can only draw two conclusions:
1. Bounty hunters often exaggerated about the number of slaves they had captured;
2. Someone forgot to yell “cut” when the main sequence was shot, and all the people in pile were simply expressing relief that the scene was over.
I am leaning towards the former because Jacopetti and Prosperi are (if you agree with nothing else I say) too professional in their endeavors to let such a “blooper” slide past the editing room. The only remaining confusion, then, is that I swear some of the guys in the pile were the same ones being mowed down minutes earlier; perhaps I should watch this sequence again, but I just can’t bring myself to do so.

Although dated in more ways than one, the coda to Goodbye Uncle Tom still packs a mean punch. The setup: We find ourselves back in the America of the early 1970s (Miami, by the looks of it), where a 30-ish black minister with a huge Afro decides to spend the day on the beach reading The Confessions of Nat Turner. When I think about it, this immediately dates the film: my parents used to have this book on their shelves when I was growing up, probably next to such early 1970s mainstays as Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Prophet. Getting back to our groovy minister dude: Every three seconds or so, his reading is interrupted by noisy white beachgoers, and he begins to fantasize that he is Nat Turner, killing all of these white people just the way Nat did back in 1831. I know how he feels on one level: I hate it when I’m trying to read an intellectual book on the beach, and everyone keeps interrupting me. How dare they! On another level, though, his “fantasies” get quite disturbing: we see a little baby get its head bashed against the wall by a black militant (although you can tell it’s a doll, and the bloodstain left on the wall looks kinda fake). Then there is the matter of this minister fantasizing about killing a pretty blonde girl in the exact same manner Nat Turner had murdered the white girl, Margaret, who had been the forbidden object of his lust as a slave youth. It provides us with the memorable line, “I must kill you, Margaret, because…I love you! I must kill you because…you are white! White!” To top it all off (albeit slightly anti-climactically), a young white boy’s beach ball rolls towards the minister. He picks it up and beckons the boy to come closer. We think he is going to return the ball to its rightful owner, but instead, his hands start squeezing it until it finally bursts. The minister grins widely behind his hippie glasses, freeze frame, and end credits.

So there you have it: is it the most racist film ever made or a shocking expose sympathetic to all blacks descended from those Africans forced to come to America as chattel? Extremely radical or extremely reactionary? All I know is I would love to teach a college-level class, whether in Film Studies, American history, or African-American studies, show this film to an audience that was 50% black and 50% non-black, and try to have a meaningful dialogue. I would also hope that all those present would be mature enough to hold this discussion without any epithets flying all over the place, or anyone walking out in anger. Of course, I would hope that no one walked out during the film itself out of anger, shock, revulsion, or sadness, but if they did, at least that would answer some of my questions before said discussion even began.

If all this weren’t enough food for thought, consider that Goodbye Uncle Tom was filmed almost in its entirety in Haiti. For the uninitiated, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a predominately black nation which has long been under the rule of oppressive regime after oppressive regime (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ha.html.) What was once a proud republic has since devolved into a country where 20% or more of all adults have AIDS and more than 2/3 of all adults don't have "formal" jobs. Your mother was only half-joking when she told you, “On your upcoming vacation to the Dominican Republic, be careful not to accidentally wander into Haiti.” In 1971, said Haitian oppressor was none other than “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who welcomed Jacopetti and Prosperi with open arms, his only stipulation being that every Friday night they come to dinner with him, where stale food and pool water (gross!) was served. In return the pair somehow got a cast of thousands to submit to stripping and other humiliations, probably for less than union scale. As the DVD extras point out, most of them were probably so excited to actually be in a movie, they didn’t care if they were exploited! It is quite ironic but understandable that in order to make a film about slavery, the directors had to go to a Third World country to find more “pliable” participants. It is also quite telling that not one single “actor”’s name (white or black, speaking or non-speaking part) is listed in the credits.

Various musings...

2006-01-14T11:26:00.000-05:00

After about five months I finally changed the "look" of my blog, just a bit. Took away those deceptively cheery colored dots and replaced it with pure blackness. Even added a quote from Black Sabbath in my profile. My profile removed mention of my lineage...it's not that I'm ashamed to be descended from James Monroe, even if he was a slave owner and friends with Thomas Jefferson, the guy who once said, "See that slave over there? Yeah, I tapped that ass." Last night I watched a highly disturbing "drama documentary" called Farewell Uncle Tom, made by Jacopetti and the other guy who made Mondo Cane. It purported to show the true history of slavery in this country and per the copy on the back of the DVD case--was it from Pauline Kael?--, it made Roots look like an episode of The Jeffersons. It was quite shameful, disturbing, and provocative. I may write more extensively on the "peculiar institution" here soon.
Tonight SNL goes live after a month off! Scarlett Johansson, who's so pretty she's ugly, or is it so ugly she's pretty? Either way, she's not my type. And Death Cab For Cutie? Heard of them, but never heard them. Have to be careful what I say...a good acquaintance of mine is a mega fan. And of course, Rachel (see the pic, a version of perfection in purple, only wish I really HAD a signed one)...
I left out some hotties with glasses last time. How about Carolyn Heldman (sp?), an MTV VJ from the late '80s? Even though her hair was sometimes too straggly looking, I used to just droooool over her while waiting for the next Whitesnake video (which of course would have Tawny Kitaen in it, who is hot without glasses.) Or how about Andrea on 90210?
Will Alito get confirmed? Hell yeah--in yo face, Ted "Jabba The Hut and don't fucking bring up Chappaquidick ever again" Kennedy! I feel sorry for Ted. Some of his legislation has done good in this country (and he actually works "across the aisle" more than you might think), but he's definitely the weakest link amongst the Kennedy boys. Of course, the other two are dead. And his niece, Ahnold's wife, Maria Shriver...she used to be hot and now she looks like a parody of herself. Quite frankly, also, I think Roe v Wade was bad legal reasoning, even if the results are (in my judgment) okay. And if it were overturned, do you know how hard it would be to get state legislatures, even in the Red(neck) states, to outlaw it except in extreme cases? Yes, I am pro-choice and pro-death penalty. My motto is, "Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out."

Top Ten Lists

2006-01-10T22:13:00.000-05:00

Today I've decided just to post some top ten lists.

Top Ten Most Controversial/Sick/Graphic DVDs in My Collection
Self-explanatory.

1 Cannibal Holocaust
2 Caligula
3 I Spit On Your Grave
4 The New York Ripper
5 House on the Edge of the Park
6 Kids
7 Jungle Holocaust
8 Exorcism
9 Zombi 2
10 Day of the Dead

Top Ten Underrated Albums
Albums that are every bit as good as what I would call bona fide classics.

1 Captain Beyond
2 The James Gang: Miami
3 Black Sabbath: Born Again
4 Robin Trower: In City Dreams
5 David Coverdale: Into the Light
6 St. Vitus: Born Too Late
7 Free: Highway
8 Black Oak Arkansas: If An Angel…
9 Iron Maiden: Somewhere In Time
10 Boston: Don’t Look Back

Top Ten “Guilty Pleasures” Songs of All Time
When I hear them on the radio, I crank it.

1 Rebel Yell (Billy Idol)
2 In the Summertime (Mungo Jerry)
3 Holleback Girl (Gwen Stefani)
4 Jesse’s Girl (Rick Springfield)
5 My Kind of Lover (Billy Squier)
6 Working for the Weekend (Loverboy)
7 Heart and Soul (Huey Lewis and the News)
8 Raspberry Beret (Prince)
9 Oh Sheila (Ready for the World)
10 Do You Know What I Mean (Lee Michaels?)

Top Ten Hottest Girls With Glasses
The biggest lie ever told is "Guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses."

1 Tina Fey
2 Rachael Harris
3 Hallie Todd (the mom on “Lizzie Maguire”)
4 Lisa Loeb
5 Thora Birch (in “Ghost World”)
6 Diane Keaton
7 The DA on “Law & Order”
8 Nicole Kidman in “Eyes Wide Shut”
9 the mom in “Sky High”
10 Velma on "Scooby Doo" (live action movie)

Top Ten Guitarists
i.e., "I want to beeeeeeee you!"

1 Ritchie Blackmore
2 Tommy Bolin
3 Tony Iommi
4 Robert Fripp
5 Robin Trower
6 Jimmy Page
7 Jeff Beck
8 Jimmy Henderson
9 Ace Frehley
10 Yngwie Malmsteen

Top Ten TV Shows of all Time
All should be on DVD.

1 Friday The 13th: The Series
2 Saturday Night Live
3 The Rockford Files
4 Kung Fu
5 Gilligan’s Island
6 The Brady Bunch
7 The Outer Limits
8 Survivor (or at least up through the “All-Stars”)
9 The Wonder Years
10 Family Ties

Jumpin' the shark

2006-01-05T22:21:00.000-05:00

Five years ago, during a rahther slow day at work, I started surfing the net and somehow discovered a website called jumptheshark.com. Therein, TV fans of all stripes can read about others' opinions on when their favorite shows (past or present) "jumped the shark." For those who do not know, this is the moment at which a beloved TV show is suddenly just not as good as it used to be. This idiomatic expression has its genesis in no less an iconic series than Happy Days--some time during that series' run, Fonzie took a trip to Hawaii and literally jumped his motorcyle over a shark in the ocean. From that point on, many fans deemed, Happy Days was just not the beloved show it once was. (A much nicer expression than "screwed the pooch," n'est-ce pas?)

So for fun I thought I'd list some of my favorite shows of all time (plus a few I hate!) and indicate when I thought they had jumped the proverbial shark.

Beverly Hills 90210: Awesome when it started. But it jumped the shark during the college years. Everyone was just acting like an idiot, and what are the chances that 8 friends are all going to go on to the same college? Ray Pruit was a dick, and Claire was a bitch! The girls were also trying to out-Friends the cast of Friends with their hairstyles. But then the last two years it actually regained its charm (a "reverse jump") by focusing on Steve and his new wife and their baby. Plus I believe David and Donna got back together. See, I can be a romantic at heart.

Firing Line: Never jumped, in my estimation. But in its early days, it was an hour long. By the time I got into it, it had been scaled back to half an hour. I would love to have seen William F. Buckley, Jr. take on a liberal nemesis for a solid hour. PS: In some ways I am very conservative, in some ways very liberal, and in some ways very moderate.

Friends: I never got into this show. I hated it from day one. It debuted in 1994, the year I graduated from college, and I remember watching it and thinking "My life is nothing like these clowns'--nor is anyone else's I know. In real life these girls wouldn't give these 3 dorks the time of fucking day!" Someone once described it as a condescending minstral show: trying to show people between the ages of 22-35 how to act, how to dress, how to do their hair (actually Jennifer Aniston's hair was pretty hot but it got so played out). I used to work with a girl who was really into Friends, and I used to want to punch her in the nose because of the way she'd laugh when describing the latest episode.

Gilligan's Island: Never jumped in the 1960s. Actually it got better as time went on (I like the later color episodes better than the first season black and white). In fact, my favorite episode, concerning a jet pack, is from the 3rd and final season. Even the TV movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s were OK. I like the Harlem Globetrotters! Sweet Lou Dunbar and Curly rule!

Happy Days: I've never seen the "shark jump" episode in question. In my opinion, the show was good the first few seasons, but then it seemed the producers stopped trying to recreate that authentic '50s feel; the guys all had thick hair and bellbottoms (it was the late 70s!) Plus Fonzie with a beard was just wrong, and Richie left. Plus I never really got into Chachi.

Kung Fu: Never jumped the shark during its 1970s run, I'm happy to say...but, in the early '90s a little show called Kung Fu: The Legend Continues made its debut. It was kind of cool to see Kwai Chang Caine's grandson (who looked just like him!) walk around and kick people's asses, but it was gilding the lilly to an extent. The original should have been left as a fond memory.

Land of the Lost: Jumped the shark in its 3rd and final season, when the Dad left, replaced by wimpy Uncle Jack. "Watch out, Uncle Jack! That's an allosaurus!" "An allo-what?" Uhh, an allosaurus, aka a dinosaur that's going to kill your ass unless you start running, you dumb fuck. Plus they had different "guest stars" each week, like Medusa, or an Indian, or an Old Prospector (and not Gus Chiggins). And finally, Chaka became too intelligent. The first two seasons, he was a monkey boy, grunting and grimacing and barely able to communicate with the humans. Then suddenly in season three, he's practically quoting Shakespeare!

Married...With Children: Many fans say that this show jumped around 1991 when Ted McGinley came aboard to play Jefferson Darcy. In fact, many consider ol' Ted to be the "patron saint" of shark jumping! According to Illuminati Propaganda, he not only "ruined" MWC, he also ruined Happy Days and one or two other shows. In my judgment, this is not true: Jefferson was cool and more likable than wimpy Steve. No, Married... jumped the shark in its last year or two, because the two kids were just too damn old to still be at home. Kelly was like 26 and Bud was about 22 and had a goatee.

The Rockford Files: While I'm tempted to say this show never jumped, that's being a bit disingenuous. In the 1978-79 season, Beth Davenport left the show for contractual reasons. Beth was extremely cute and also provided a touch of a feminine presence on a largely male show. While Rockford did date that blind chick, she just didn't cut it. Also, James Garner looked really old in the 1990s reunion movies, and the guy who played Angel (Stuart Margolin) had hair that looked like Bozo The Clown! Dude, are you 17 or 60?

Saturday Night Live: One of the most controversial shows to judge, because everyone has their own opinion on when the "golden days" were. So, here's my take: the 1970s (Belushi, Aykroyd, etc) rocked; they started it and set the standards. The 1980 cast was lame, but they were gone in a year. 1981-84, with Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, saw a return of fortunes, even if I consider some of the material I've seen to be slightly overrated. In the late 80s and very early 90s, the show continued to be good with such comedic gods as Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Dennis Miller on WU. This morphed into the "Bad Boy" era of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, cool but again overrated. Those guys are way too deified. Then...and 95% of fans would agree..the show seriously jumped the shark in 94-95 with a largely forgettable cast. Janeane Garofalo was never meant to be on it, nor was Jay Mohr. Then in the late 90s, the show did a "reverse jump" and got really cool again with Ferrell, plus Chris Kattan and Molly Shannon. At the dawn of this century came the era where Jimmy Fallon ruled (both as a comic and on WU with Tina Fey)...not to mention the arrival of Rachel Susan Dratch. For all his foibles (laughing during sketches, etc.), Fallon is a talented guy whose looks attracted a new generation of teenage girls (and probably some gay men). When he left in 2004, the show seemingly entered a new phase, and the "mainstream" fans seem to think it has jumped again. ("Is Seth Meyers even a comedian?" more than one person has asked.) But a few weeks ago, a miracle happened: the "Chronicles of Narnia Rap," which has gained the show a lot of attention. I have to say, however, that when Rachel leaves, it may seriously jump...

The Wonder Years: God I loved this show. But as time went on and Kevin Arnold got older, his voice was much deeper than the guy who narrated the show (who was supposed to be Kevin 20 years later as an adult!) What happened in the intervening decades, did Kevin lose a nad or something? Taking female hormones because he was about to undergo an, ahem, operation? To be sure, the producers had no idea that the actor's voice would get so deep, but still. Also, as time went on Wayne (the older brother) "grew up," became responsible and I believe got married. Just not as fun as the younger Wayne who would push Kevin around and call him "Scrote" every five minutes.

This Is Jim Rockford...

2005-12-28T22:40:00.000-05:00

In my next life, I’ve decided I want to be a middle-aged private detective who lives in a trailer in Malibu, charges $200 a day (plus expenses!), drives a golden Pontiac Firebird, has an ex-con best friend, a girlfriend who’s a lawyer, and every Mobster in Southern California as my enemy. In other words, in my next life, I want to be Jim Rockford.

For the uncultured, Jim Rockford, as played by James Garner, was the title character in The Rockford Files, which ran on NBC from 1974 to 1980. And now the first season has been released on DVD, I got it for Christmas, and all is right with the world. No more hacked up, commercial-laden episodes on TV…now all 23 1st Season episodes are uncut, baby!

The first paragraph of this blog entry basically tells you just about everything you need to know. Rockford spent time in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, and upon his release he became a PI (having picked up many useful skills—and connections—in the joint). His best friend, Angel, was also his cellmate. To some, Angel is the most annoying loser in the world, but he’s actually quite a hoot, who always has a scheme. Typical dialogue between these two “friends”:

Angel: Jimmy! Jimmy! My car’s in the shop! Let me borrow your credit card!
Rockford (deadpan): You’ll have to kill me to get that.

Or:

Rockford: Give me one good reason I should get you out of this crazy mess, Angel.
Angel: Because you’re my friend, Jimmy.

Don’t forget Rockford’s sometime girlfriend, Beth Davenport, a lawyer who often has to bail him out of trouble. The girl who plays her is quite cute (and about 19 years younger than him in real life!) but somehow you believe they could be a couple because of the way they relate to one another. But I’ve only seen them kiss one or two times! Then there’s Rockford’s Dad, “Rocky,” a retired trucker who honestly wishes his son had gone into a safer line of work. Many people can relate to this: after all, whose parents haven’t wondered aloud at least once why you didn’t go to law school, for example? And yet they still genuinely love each other. Then there’s Sgt. Becker of the LAPD, who likes Rockford and wants to help him all he can—but he’s embarrassed when the PI shows up at the station and makes the cops look dumb.

But the coolest part of the show is Rockford himself. He lives in a trailer on the beach (next to a taco stand and near the fishing pier). The trailer looks like crap on the outside, but on the inside, it looks like a Penthouse (complete with ‘70s wood paneling, of course!) His car is quite a sweet ride, and he’s quite capable behind the wheel. His wardrobe is quite stylin’; I’ve never seen so many awesome plaid or brown or black sport coats in my life, and those adjustable gold belts! God I bet they’re comfortable! And Rockford obviously knew sideburns would be cool, about 15 years before a show called 90210 showed us the way. His favorite food seems to be tacos; his favorite music is probably country (okay, he and I would disagree on this point, but I’d gladly listen to whatever he wanted to for the opportunity to drink a beer with him). He is a man without pretense, but he always has a way with a phrase.

The show basically proved that James Garner is the most underrated actor of all time. You completely believe he IS Rockford. Someone once said that most acting is actually “reacting,” and if this is truly the case, then Garner is in a class by himself. Some of Rockford’s reactions to others are absolutely priceless. You always know exactly what he’s thinking (and to top it off, you usually agree with him). Another thing of note is watching how much the man aged during the show’s six year run: when it started, he was 46 but looked 40; when it ended, he was 52 and looked 60. Doing all his own stunts and driving took its toll, plus the fact he was basically in every single scene in every single episode. He constantly begged the producers, “Write something for the other characters,” and while there were many memorable supporting characters (Angel, etc), plus many memorable guest stars, he was still the main constant attraction. He broke several bones and also eventually had legal troubles with the company that owned the rights (which may have caused the delay in the DVD’s release…hasn’t just about every other ‘70s and ‘80s show already been released?) I like the four or five “reunion” movies which he did in the ‘90s, but they paled compared to the original series.

Here’s a personal anecdote: Once in college I was hanging out with some guys in my new dorm. We were talking sports (or I was trying to, as I’m not a sports nut). Then various TV shows came up. I said, “I’ve always liked the Rockford Files, myself,” almost as a last-ditch effort to find something in common with these guys. Several other guys’ faces immediately lit up: “Hell, yeah!” “James Garner is the man!” “That show fucking ruled!” You get the idea. From then on I was okay with them. Of course, they thought I was a good guitarist, but that’s beside the point.
Please go out and buy the Rockford Files Season One, so that Universal sees there is a market for it, and releases Season Two! Borrow Jimbo's credit card if you must.

Mario Bava: The Master of Italian Horror

2005-12-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

As a fan of so many types of cinema, I must say that Italian horror remains one of my favorite sub-genres, ever since that fateful day in November 2001 when I was at Best Buy and decided to buy the DVD of Suspiria based on a review I’d half-assed perused that morning on a DVD website. I was blown away and instantly delved head- (and wallet-) first into the strange and creepy (but beautifully shot) world of gialli, supernatural thrillers, and yes, even zombie and cannibal flicks. And like any budding Eurohorror scholar, in no short time I discovered that the true godfather of Italian horror was none other than Mario Bava.

If there were no Mario Bava, there would have been no Dario Argento, no Lucio Fulci, no Ruggero Deodato, and no Lamberto Bava (his son!) Mario Bava was an absolute genius who from the period of 1960 to 1977 made several absolute classics: a partial list would include Black Sunday (a/k/a Mask of the Demon), The Whip and The Body, Black Sabbath (guess what, where the band got their name), Blood and Black Lace, Planet of the Vampires, Kill Baby Kill!, The Twitch of the Death Nerve, Five Dolls For An August Moon, Rabid Dogs, and Shock. To be fair, he also made sword and sandals films like Erik the Viking and Hercules in the Haunted World, plus an underrated sex comedy called Four Times That Night. But it is in the world of horror he made his strongest mark.

Always working on a shoestring budget, Bava nevertheless paid attention to camera placement and use of color. In fact it is his lighting and use of color which probably had the broadest appeal for filmmakers in general; a fan of the old three-strip Technicolor process, he produced scary images of a decidedly candy-colored sort. A case in point would be the murder scenes in Blood and Black Lace, the textbook example of how to do this sort of thing in color (Hitchcock’s Psycho being the complimentary textbook example for black and white). Similar usage in The Whip and The Body propelled the psychosexual drama forward, and made some otherwise boring scenes worth watching. Even camera movement in the hands of this short Italian was nothing to scoff at: in Blood and Black Lace he used a child’s wagon as a dolly! One would never know from watching the lengthy tracking shot in the ensemble scene backstage at the fashion show, or the extensive panning during the murder scene in the room with the armor. Or the shot of the child running and changing into a man in Shock—today they would use computers for it; back then, only clever camera work and perfect timing was needed. He was the master of the matte painting—putting actual paintings of castles, etc. on the camera lens to look like the real thing in the background.

How he photographed is just as amazing as what he photographed. Bava had a way with photographing female beauty. Of course, the actresses he used were usually stunning anyway (God love those Mediterranean women…) but even a rather plain looking woman like Daria Nicolodi, who to me looks a bit like Ana Gasteyer, never looked lovelier than in Shock. And let us not forget the incomparable Barbara Steele, who became a cult figure forever as the evil witch Asa in Black Sunday, incidentally one of the most incredible looking black and white films ever shot! In addition to the babes, Bava had a way with set pieces. Take the anthology Black Sabbath: three short tales of evil. In the first, “The Telephone,” a precursor to the giallo, a cramped apartment serves as the setting for an increasingly paranoid call girl (Michele Mercier) who is convinced her ex-boyfriend, now out of jail, is calling her to say he will come kill her. She calls over her “girlfriend,” a lesbian who obviously has feelings for her (pretty shocking stuff for 1963!) and the madness continues to unfold. Then comes “The Wurdulak,” starring the legendary Boris Karloff later in life, as an old man who becomes a type of Russian vampire who can imitate the voice of a small child, with shocking results. And then “A Drop of Water,” with one of the creepiest-looking zombies ever seen on film—five years before George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and fifteen years before Fulci’s gore masterpiece Zombi 2! Also not be forgotten is the borderline-psychedelic sequence in Kill Baby Kill, where a guy runs through a series of rooms over and over again, or the opening of Black Sunday, where Barbara Steele’s character gets a spiked mask nailed to her face as punishment for being a witch. A through-the-eyes shot of the mask about to close in on her face was stolen as recently as earlier this year, by none other than George Lucas for his “birth of Vader” sequence in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

As noted, his influence extended to every aspect of Italian horror filmmaking. Gialli took off in the 1960s after Blood and Black Lace; supernatural horror owed a debt of gratitude to Black Sunday and Black Sabbath; even sci-fi horror owed much to Planet of the Vampires (a seminal influence on a certain little film called Alien). Specific directors who have sung his praises include Tim Burton and Quentin Tarentino.

Bava died in 1980 at the age of 65, having just helped his protégé Dario Argento with some of the set design for Inferno. He did not live to see the bottom fall out of the Italian film industry in the early ‘80s (from which it has never recovered), nor did he live to see his films digitally restored and presented to a new generation on DVD. And this is quite a shame, for it would be interesting to hear a commentary from him, or better yet, get his take on the current state of cinema. He was always a character. As actor Cameron Mitchell noted, Bava knew little English outside of the phrase “Son of a beetch,” which he called everyone, whether he liked them or not! So Mario, you son of a beetch, wherever you are, we miss you and still like to watch your films on a dark and stormy night.

My top five Bava films:

Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Black Sunday (1960)
Black Sabbath (1963)
Shock (1977)
Four Times That Night (1969) (not a horror film, but what the heck)

Think about it: What would you do!?!

2005-12-13T20:34:00.000-05:00

Picture it: an excrutiatingly hot day in the dead of summer in 1997. So hot you could fry an egg on the pavement. You pull up to your mall, ready to do some serious shoppin' at Sears. You park your car and walk towards the door, and along the way you pass a 22-year-old young lady, squatting next to her car, having diarrhea.

Hey, better "see" her than "be" her at that moment, huh?

This is what happened to my sister-in-law (my wife's sister) in 1997. She has always had a sensitive stomach, apparently from a young age, and probably has IBS. One summer day she went with her mom and grandmother (RIP, btw) to eat at a restaurant called K&W, where she got the mushrooms. Afterwards, the three of them went to the mall to buy a few items. She waited in the car as her mom and grandmother ran inside Sears.

Suddenly, she felt a severe rumbling in her stomach! She knew she had to get to the bathroom, but it was at least a quarter mile from the car in the lot, inside the store to the nearest ladies' room. But she had to make it. She got halfway across the parking lot, sprinting and panting, when it happened. She crapped her pants. Big time.

What would you do? She had on cutoff shorts. She couldn't make it inside without people seeing her shorts before and after. She went back to her car, opened the door, and squatted over the pavement with the door as "partial cover," removing her shorts and underwear. She was totally nude from the waist down. She struggled to look over her shoulder, to see how bad it was, as well as furtively look around to see if anyone could see her. No one did.

She used the front of her underwear to wipe off as best as she could, then discarded them on the pavement. Putting her shorts back on, she got in the car and pulled up to the Sears entry in time to catch her mom and grandma walking out.

"Come on in! We found something you might want to try on!" her mom called.

"No, we need to go home," she replied.

"It'll only take a second!"

"You don't understand. WE HAVE TO LEAVE!"

So left they did. All her grandmother could say was, "I know, honey; diarrhea can be bad." Apparently 90-year-olds often have it.

When my sister-in-law got home, she stepped in the shower to clean up more thoroughly. The second she got in, before she could even turn the faucet on, a ton of hot brown lava poured out of her like water. Leftovers, I suppose. To this day, she carries an extra pair of underwear with her at all times.

Later that night, after we'd stopped pissing our pants over the story, my wife and I drove over to Sears to visit the scene of the crime. We found her underwear, but no pool of you know what; it apparently had evaporated in the 100 degree heat, being mostly liquid. I still wonder what would have happened if her boyfriend at the time had walked by and seen her, or a group of proper older ladies, or THE COPS. She would have been like, "You can arrest me, but I'm probably going to ruin your upholstery!"

It inspired me to write a song, sung to the tune of that old '60s song "Wishing and Hoping":

Squattin, and shittin, and hopin that no one
Walks by and sees you, nude from the waist down
What if your boyfriend, and his parents
Walked by and saw you, wipin off with your underwear?

Remembering John Lennon and Tommy Bolin

2005-12-08T23:29:00.000-05:00

I remember exactly where I was on December 8, 1980…I was eight years old, in the third grade, living in Greensboro, NC. The happiest days of my life. I was actually home sick from school that day…I just remember my Mom watching the TV and being really sad and angry. Not the point of tears, but definitely upset. Like everyone of her generation, she was a Beatles fan. (Of course, she liked the early, Mop-Top era Beatles of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” not the hippie stuff from later in the ‘60s. Neither of my parents were exactly ever hippies, but I digress). I myself knew little of the Beatles, but very soon afterwards I was at my friend Scotty’s house and he pulled out a record and said, “Listen to this band, they’re really cool,” or whatever word we used for “cool” as little kids.

It was The Beatles’ blue-colored greatest hits album (i.e. the 1967-1970 collection which was the companion to the red 1962-1966 set. I now have both on CD). Scotty and I listened to these magical songs, a whole new sonic palate for us (up until then all we listened to was KISS). We even took a pen and made notes in the margins of which songs we liked the best, something I’m sure his Mom appreciated. I’d give anything to see that inner gatefold today to see if my favorites were still the same!

When one thinks about it, the Beatles were the perfect band in terms of a blending of personalities and sensibilities. John was sort of the de facto leader, an outspoken, intelligent “mouth” who also seemed like the only one of the four who could remotely defend himself in a physical fight (sorry guys!) His music tended to be slightly angry, or at least sardonic. A man never satisfied with the status quo. By contrast, Paul was like the most polished, the maker of fine melodies and the eternal optimist. He was shy and romantic. Then there was George, my personal favorite: the “quiet” one, but when he did speak, it was always worth listening to; after all, he was the one who basically introduced a whole generation to a world of Eastern mysticism, that there was a pathway to follow outside of more traditional religious and/or philosophical realms. Although not a virtuoso on the guitar, he nonetheless made it sing. And then there was Ringo. Simultaneously one of the worst AND best drummers of all time, but more importantly, the consummate class clown, smarter than he looked but quite willing to play the fool with a knowing wink.

So there these four lads were, altering the world of pop and rock forever, and then they went their separate ways. Few deaths in rock and roll could possibly be sadder than Lennon’s, especially as he was killed by a deranged fanatic (and remember, “Fan” is short for “Fanatic.”) No one should wonder why celebrities are often apprehensive about meeting and/or being around their fans. The few I have met, I try to give their space and be respectful. Of course, I still walk away thinking “God, I sounded dumb and fawning!” or “God, I wished I’d asked him such and such,” but I never would want them to think I was going to kill them!

December 8th will thus always be a sad day for me, because John Lennon died. It doesn’t matter that I don’t like his solo stuff NEARLY as much as his Beatles stuff, or that I think that Yoko Ono screwed him up in some ways. Or that I’ve read that he actually didn’t even like hippies—the movement he helped start! He was a Beatle and a man, a husband and father.

Someone else musical died in early December. On December 4, 1976, guitarist Tommy Bolin died of a heroin overdose in Miami at the tender age of 25. In its own ways, his death was just as tragic as Lennon’s, for different reasons. Simply put, Tommy Bolin is one of the most underrated guitar players of all time, whose playing inspires me on a daily basis.

Of course, most know him only as the man who replaced Ritchie Blackmore in Deep Purple for a year-long period, but he was that and more. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, he was kicked out of high school for refusing to cut his hair. Panhandling across the Midwest, he played in a number of local bands, honing his unique style, a mixture of rock, jazz-fusion, funk, psychedelia, and blues. In his late teens he was absolutely slaying audiences—and more established guitarists. His work on Billy Cobham’s Spectrum album inspired no less a god than Jeff Beck to go into similar territory. Eventually he ended up in the James Gang, and from there started to put solo demos together when Deep Purple came a-calling. After ten minutes of heated jamming, he had the gig, and more money than he’d ever seen in his life, which he proceeded to spend on drugs (let’s be frank).

With Purple he embarked on a World Tour in late 1975, which saw him experiencing major highs and lows. As his heroin addiction took hold, it was harder to be consistent in his playing, but when he was on, he was on. (In fact, Simon Robinson of the Deep Purple Appreciation Society has recently heard some of Bolin’s solo demos from the period and said it was basically the most incredible effing guitar playing he’d ever heard—and he’s more in the Blackmore camp!) And he was quite a showman with a unique look: flowing hair dyed several colors, hoop earrings, platform shoes, and a rather exotic ethnic background (he was part Native American, part Syrian, and part Swedish!) If I were a girl, I’d be sliding off my seat over him.

After Deep Purple imploded in March 1976 (ironically after a show in Liverpool, the birthplace of you know who!), Tommy Bolin embarked on an erratic solo career where he continued to slay them one night and make them bolt for the exit another night. Finally it all came to a head, and he OD’d. I don’t mean to sound harsh (I’ve basically written an enormous unpublished book about Deep Purple, and have worked on an outline of a major Bolin biography which at times borders on hagiography), but his life basically taught me that hard drugs are a mistake. He would have soared so much higher (no pun intended) without them.

To Mr. Lennon, and Mr. Bolin, I dedicate these words from Bolin’s song “Dreamer”:

Halfway gone, and halfway back
You’re always dreaming, about what you lack
You’re taking your time from your busy day,
To sit by the track and watch the train roll away

Dreamer, I know what you’re thinking
I can see it in your face
Maybe before you were happy
But now your thoughts aren’t of this place…
I only wish that you were here with me,
Someone like you can’t be replaced

PS: There IS a Lennon/Bolin connection of sorts. A few years ago I came across a photo online of David Coverdale and May Pang at a party in 1976. They were smiling for the camera and holding up drinks. For those who don’t know, Coverdale was the vocalist in Deep Purple at the time that Bolin was their guitarist, and May Pang was John Lennon’s girlfriend during the time he was separated from Yoko. On his website, I asked Mr. Coverdale about that picture (he often answers fans’ questions) and he replied that yes, he remembered, and got in trouble with his girlfriend at the time when she saw it in a magazine. Not quite six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but oh well…

More random thoughts, from a random mind

2005-11-21T20:16:00.000-05:00

Tonight I feel kind of scattered all over the place. Time to pick up the pieces of my mind and post a few thoughts.

Does anyone besides me read this blog? Over the past month I've covered such a wide array of topics, some of which might be offensive to the "reasonable man" (or "woman") as defined by Patrick Devlin. The fact I know who Patrick Devlin is, makes me one fuck of an unmarketable nerd. Still, where else can you read about Cannibal Holocaust, Deep Purple, The Sims, Rachel Dratch, and the musings of an absolutely insane 5'8" Pontiac driver?
Isn't this a cool cover? It's the R2 DVD of What Have They Done To Our Daughters? an obscure giallo directed by the guy who directed What Have You Done To Solange? Here's hoping it gets a R0/R1 release (since I don't have a multi-region player).
Today, for the first time in about four years, my computer at work completely crashed. I called the help desk and they told me they probably wouldn't get to it until the morning, so I left early! The last time this happened, I was sans computer for two full days. Now, however, since I'm basically running the place, they'll probably jump right on it.
Who said the most powerful kind of love is the kind you cannot have, i.e. unrequited love? It's probably true, but man does it hurt. As the R&B song from a few years ago says, "And nobody knows it but me..."
On slate at msn.com there is currently a raging debate about the causes behind the decline in those who participate in the Catholic church's sacrament of Reconciliation (i.e. "going to confession"). Could it possibly be that many people have decided that they would rather not be sitting in a small booth next to a potential pedophile who is whispering back to you in a low voice? Indeed, the face-to-face method has supplanted the traditional method in the past 30 years, but still... Having gone to two different Catholic schools (K-2 and then high school 9-12), I can honestly say that few people creep me out more than those who have gone into the so-called "Holy Orders." I am proud to say that I am not a Catholic.

Rachel Dratch Forever!

2005-11-20T20:23:00.000-05:00

Looking over my old posts, I'm surprised I've never devoted an entire one to Rachel Dratch. (Actually, I did post some pictures of her as a Sim, but it didn't really deal with her as a comedienne). So without further adieu, some words on her...

I've been an SNL fan off and on since the early '90s, when my brother and I would stay up late and watch during the Phil Hartman/Dana Carvey/Mike Myers era. During college I watched when I could, which wasn't as often, and then in the late '90s I watched sometimes when Will Ferrell was on. Slowly, however, I drifted away from the show until last fall, when I started watching again because it was an election year (they always have funny parodies of the debates). It was then I started to notice the talents of Rachel Dratch, with whom I'd been vaguely aware of due to her impressions of Calista Flockhart, etc. This lady was really funny, able to play such a wide array of characters, and cute to boot! By February 2005 I was a megafan and looking up stuff about her online. Then rachel-dratch.com started up, and I became a major contributor to the site. In fact, I'm responsible for the chronology there, which covers her entire career.

Enough about the online stuff, however...I'd rather talk about her. This petite little lady with the expressive eyes and distinctive voice can do so many characters, from the ugly to the silly to the crazy to the timid to the sexy...it's amazing. It's difficult for women on SNL to truly break out, no matter what people might say (whatever happened to Cheri Oteri?), but a few have (Gilda Radner), and I hope Rachel has big things awaiting her, considering this may be her last year there. She stands out so much among the other females there, who themselves are nothing to scoff at (the intelligent, witty Tina Fey, with her "sexy librarian" look, the blonde and obnoxious-in-a-good-way Amy Poehler, the exotic Maya Rudolph and her unique singing style, and even the new "straight woman" Kristin Wiig). And of course Rachel holds her own against all the male talent.

Some of my favorite characters must include Virginia Klarven (the "Luvah" with Will Ferrell), Debbie Downer (the role SNL fans will remember her for 10 years from now), Phoebe, with her giant pets, and the senile movie producer Abe Scheinwald. And I love her impressions of Liz Taylor, Nicole Richie, Rita Rudner, Harriet Meyers, Tara Reid, Barbara Walters, and so many others! She is often the saving grace of an otherwise dying sketch--and of course often the highlight of a downright funny one!

It only hurts me when I read about what some people say concerning her looks, especially on sites like imdb. Some of my own relatives don't get my "crush" either..."Why can't you have a crush on Pamela Anderson, or Britney Spears, or Halle Berry?" they ask. People say Rachel's face is weird, or she has "bug eyes," or she's too fat, or the only good thing about her is her big breasts...but I happen to think she is uniquely attractive and the type of girl who if she did live next door to you or work in the next cubicle over, you would definitely be in a sweat over to make a good impression. In fact I wish there were more sketches where she got to use her natural good looks. Last night she got to play Eva Longoria, without a trace of irony...getting to play who most would consider the "hottest" cast member of a hot show! She also has her own fashion sense, which is one-of-a-kind without being too quirky.

Rachel, we will always support you and your career, wherever it takes you.

Random Thoughts

2005-11-14T23:06:00.000-05:00

Haven't done one of these in a while, so here goes...

Just posted some of my wild and crazy college stories on my myspace page. I'm kind of going back and forth between posting here and posting there. It seems that one site's strengths is another's weakness. Of course, the main thing about myspace is meeting people...but I think their "groups" are a joke.
Zoloft: For the past four years I have been on and off (mostly ON) Zoloft. I got prescribed it for a combination of things: depression, social anxiety disorder, moodiness, etc. For the most part it seems to help, but sometimes I wonder if I need something stronger. Some of the side effects have been interesting: waking up at 4 or 5 AM and not being able to get back to sleep; occasional heart burn which feels different from usual heartburn; an increase in (to be blunt) snot--I often have to blow my nose, like I have a slight cold; slight increase in urination frequency (but I don't have diabetes); plus a sexual side effect...ahem...it takes me longer to climax. Like roughly twice as long as it used to!!! Many guys would say "That's not a problem, dude! Many guys would kill to last longer!" But there are times when I genuinely am ready to be "done." And I'm sure my partner is too...THERE, the most intimate thing I've ever posted online! But seriously, the side effects from missing a few days of Zoloft are more serious: headaches, feeling "out of it," plus a weird feeling of weighlessness. Ever been in a swimming pool and had someone lift you by your feet out of the water, only to throw you in the air? That's the closest analogy I can come up with: It's that split second feeling of weightlessness. I told my doctor and he laughed, saying, "Hmm, never heard that one." He just retired, though...the next time I go, it will be to his replacement. I may ask to be put on something different. Paxil, perhaps? I feel slave to Zoloft. So is Sarah Silverman. Sometimes I wonder what high school and college would have been like on Zoloft. I might have had more than 2 or 3 friends at a time.
A few days ago I apparently chipped my right front tooth on "something." It's not really noticeable, but rubbing my tongue on it, it sure feels like a big chip! Looking in the mirror, I see a few subtle signs of aging: hair in my ears (which I constantly get rid of!), plus a few light gray eyebrow hairs. I pluck them out and 2 days later they come back. I still have all of my hair on top, and many people marvel at my thick hair. If the hair on top ever goes gray I would probably dye it, but I don't want it to look fake!
SNL this year has been interesting. Now in high definition, and with new writers seemingly obsessed with butts. I can relate; I am a major "A Man" and have been since I was like 13. Cast-wise, 3 new guys: Jason Sudeikis (cool), Andy Samberg (who looks about 17; I like him but some people consider him kind of goofy), and Bill Hader (who excels at impressions and may very well ultimately replace Darrell Hammond). Rachel Dratch is getting a lot of sketch time, owing to the absence of Maya Rudolph, but it's still "The Amy Poehler Show." I fear it will be La Dratch's last year, and this is probably why there's a new girl in town: Kristen Wiing, who looks fairly cute but has so far not impressed me with her comedic skills. Granted, she's only been in one episode...
Still haven't gotten the 2 disc set of Cannibal Holocaust. But I will...a Borders is soon to open near work (Borders is just about the only b&m store daring to carry it, and I haven't felt like ordering online since Christmas is almost here).
My mother-in-law just put up her Christmas decorations (except for the tree itself). We ate dinner at their house tonight, and I turned to my kids and said, "Don't get any ideas. We are not decorating until December!" Dig it, man...she put up her decorations on November 14th! Almost two weeks before THANKSGIVING! Maybe she's flipped out since tomorrow she turns 60! Happy Birthday, N.W.!

The Tragedy of Marlene Olive

2005-11-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

Have you heard of the tragedy of Marlene Olive? Probably not. The story of this girl, who had her boyfriend murder her parents in 1975, has been overshadowed by other “true crime” stories, like the Charles Manson family, OJ Simpson, the Menendez Brothers, and Ted Bundy. But her story is no less compelling and is detailed in Richard M. Levine’s 1982 book Bad Blood. Recently it was the subject of a short play starring actress Jessica Campbell (pictured here; I have never seen a picture of the real Marlene but she looks like her based on descriptions I have read).

Marlene was still an infant when she was adopted by a middle aged couple, Jim and Naomi Olive, in 1959 in Norfolk, VA. Jim was a successful businessman who had married Naomi, a local beauty, some ten years before. After realizing they couldn’t have a child, they adopted Marlene. In time, however, Naomi had started drinking and possibly developing a mental illness, meaning she would never be the mother Marlene needed. Jim moved the family to Ecuador in the early 60s, becoming an executive for an oil company. The family lived in luxury in Ecuador for the next decade. Marlene was a good little girl for the most part, who often retreated into her own fantasy world due to her mother’s drinking. When she was 13, however, her father lost his job and announced they would be moving to affluent Marin County, California, to start over again. Marlene was terrified, because she had led a sheltered childhood, and to her America meant one thing: drugs.

And indeed, California in 1973 was quite a culture shock for the 14-year-old girl. At first shy, she soon plunged into a teenage world centered on hard rock, drugs (marijuana, cocaine, and LSD), premarital sex, and the occult. She ran with a “fast” group of girls, some of whom were into Satanism, skipping school to have abortions or go to concerts, or even going out with (gasp) black guys. Marlene dove right in, telling friends she was a member of the Church of Satan in nearby San Francisco, that she had been in a porno movie in South America, and that her father controlled the Ecuadorian drug trade. Although slightly overweight, she dressed, quite frankly, like a streetwalker: platform shoes, tons of makeup, multi-colored hair and nails, revealing tops, tight short skirts, etc. An extremely short pair of Daisy Duke shorts particularly infuriated her mother. She gained a reputation at school as being “loose.” All the while she continued to fight with her mother, whose own drinking had accelerated; her father was too busy trying to establish his own business to truly intervene.

In October 1974 she met Chuck Riley, and things really began to accelerate. Riley was a 19-year-old high school dropout, an overweight ne’er-do-well who had become the top drug dealer to all the teens. He had never had a girlfriend, and his friends ribbed him for it. When he met Marlene, he fell head over heels in love with her. After spurning his clumsy advances for several months, she gave in and agreed to be his girlfriend; in the naïve Chuck, she saw a blank canvas on which to indulge her darker fantasies. She encouraged him to take explicit photos of her which she claimed she was going to send in to Penthouse; she made him dress up in a leather mask and whip her; once she even urinated in his face in front of her friends. All the while Chuck continued to be infatuated with her, supplying her with free dope and insisting he would be her slave.

Chuck’s friends noticed he had changed; he was no longer upbeat and eager to please. Now he was short-tempered, carried around weapons, and had begun ripping people off in his drug dealings. Under Marlene’s tutelage, he also lost weight and started to dress in a more hip manner. However, his talk of the occult (spurned on by her) distressed his friends. She was his first girlfriend, and he began overdoing everything.

Soon enough, Marlene began telling him she wanted her parents dead. Her mother was a virtual zombie by this point, locked in her room drinking all day and screaming at her daughter to stop dressing like a whore. Although Marlene loved her father, she had grown tired of waiting for him to “do something” about her mother and pay more attention to her. Marlene began pleading with Chuck to find a hit man, or to do it himself. Her grades in school slipped in the spring of 1975, and she went to an alternate school as a last-ditch effort, but when the grades slipped there, Mr. Olive decided he was going to send his daughter away the next year. The fact that Chuck and Marlene had gotten arrested at the mall on March 26, 1975 for shoplifting didn’t help matters either. They were both awaiting trial for this, and her parents forbade her from seeing him ever again. In clandestine phone calls, Marlene hinted to Chuck that if he killed her father, he could have access to “mountains of snow” from his supposed South American drug connections, and they would be rich…not to mention married. It came to a point of "do it or I'll break up with you."

Finally, on the first day of summer, June 21, 1975, Chuck woke up and dropped acid. Spaced out to the point of barely being able to walk, he borrowed a gun from a friend and proceeded to walk through Terra Linda until he came to the Olive house. Marlene and her father had left momentarily, out to the mall to pay a girl back for some drugs (real class!) Chuck walked into the house and discovered a hammer. Going into Mrs. Olive’s bedroom, he found the woman asleep in bed in a drunken stupor. Still high on acid, he struck her in the head repeatedly with the hammer while bright red blood spurted everywhere. The poor woman was not quite dead; she started to make a sick gurgling sound, choking on her own blood and shards of skull with a golfball-sized hole in her head. Just then, the sound of screeching tires! Mr. Olive entered the house and saw Chuck trying to hide behind a setee. Realizing the drug dealer had just murdered his wife, the older man picked up a knife and lunged at Chuck, who shot him about six times nearly point blank. Jim Olive died instantly at the age of 59, and a few minutes later Naomi finally took her last savage breaths.

Marlene and Chuck sprang into action, cleaning up the crime scene (but carefully saving the victims' credit cards) and loading the bodies into the family station wagon. They drove out to China Camp, a local badlands of sorts frequented by hunters, and cremated the bodies in a cistern. (A fireman the next morning, called to put out the fire, wrote in his report that some idiot had nearly burned the woods down trying to “roast a deer”!) For a week or so, no one suspected anything; the two teens used the deceased couple’s credit cards and lived it up; they hung out with friends and did tons of drugs; and even attended a Yes concert. Soon, however, Mr. Olive’s business partner became suspicious of Mr. Olive’s continued absence from work, and he called the police, who found a house in disarray and some suspicious blood stains on the floor.

For the next day or so, Marlene was interrogated, and the canny girl kept spinning apocryphal tales: her father killed her mother and fled, or her mother killed her father and fled, or the two of them were on vacation at Lake Tahoe. She even told the truth, which the officers dismissed as the least credible story of all! Finally, however, she gained the trust of one of the officers, who came to believe it. Chuck was arrested at his new job at a waterbeds store and confessed immediately, adding that Marlene made him do it, that she would break up with him or kill him or harm him through her “witchcraft” if he didn’t drop the hammer! The so-called “deer bones” were re-examined by forensics experts and found to be the charred remains of a man and a woman.

Both Chuck and Marlene were charged with homicide, he as an adult, and she as a juvenile. Chuck pled insanity (owing to the LSD plus being under his girlfriend’s demonic “spell”), but the jury didn’t buy it. By the end of 1975, the 21-year-old was sentenced to be put to death. Marlene was sentenced to two years at a juvenile prison; although she didn’t physically kill her parents, in the eyes of the law she was just as guilty as an accessory. (Interestingly, several theories hold that Marlene killed her mother while Chuck killed her father, but under hypnosis, Chuck recounted beating Mrs. Olive with the hammer, and chronologically, Marlene would have had to assault her mother before heading to the mall with her father—but she wouldn’t have had time to clean the blood off her clothes, and the older woman wouldn’t have lived for one or two hours so battered.)

So what happened to this tragic duo? In 1978, Chuck’s death sentence at San Quentin was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was sent to a lower security prison, where he remains to this day. I believe he is up for parole soon, but the 51-year-old will probably not get it, having spent thirty years in prison for a crime that shouldn’t have happened. To his credit, he has been drug free for years and is active in many prison programs. For her part, Marlene got out of juvenile prison after two years and hit the streets as a prostitute and drug dealer. A year or two ago she was in the headlines again for passing a bad check. Now about 46, she has still not entirely escaped her black past. For everyone involved, the story is a tragedy, with no real winners. The moral seems to be threefold: 1) Stay away from drugs and excessive alcohol usage; 2) Get help if you or a family member is mentally ill; and 3) Don’t become too infatuated with anyone in a relationship.

Rapture of the Deep

2005-11-06T01:07:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, November 1st was quite a day...not only did Revenge of the Sith come out on DVD, but Deep Purple's newest, Rapture of the Deep, also came out! Needless to say I bought both. Time to geek out, times two, eh? Here is my review of DP's newest CD:

1. Money Talks: Dissonant keyboard effects lead to an ominous ostinato from said keyboards, followed by a mid-tempo heavy rocker. It comes across as a cross between "No One Came" and "Any Fule Kno That." Gillan's lyrics are meant to be ironic: a man saying that money is the answer to everything, that only money makes you happy. At least I hope he's being ironic! At the end he does a pretty good scream, but give the man a break--he turned 60 in August. Already this album is off to a more promising start than 2003's Bananas.

2. Girls Like That: A dreamy guitar intro, not unlike what Steve Morse used to play on the middle breakdown of "Cascades." Then comes the fairly uptempo main track, with a bluesy descending riff. Overall, though, just OK: would make a better solo Gillan track. Simplistic chorus: "Girls like that...I like girls like that..." I'm not clear if he's being serious or not, since in the verses he seems to be complaining about not getting along with her.

3. Wrong Man: One of my three favorites. Nice and heavy, possibly the heaviest on the album. A classic "tough guy" song both musically and lyrically...every DP album has one or two. Again, a simple chorus. It seems like many songs on the disc are like this: just sing the song's title with one or two sustained power chords behind. It works here. Why couldn't have Bananas have been more like this song? (I don't mean to rag on the last album, but it was a real "What the F?" even though I liked it.) Towards the end Gillan gets in some good vocal ad libs. I must also note that Morse still solos in the same way he's soloed since he joined 10 (!) years ago: Humbucky tone, fast chromatic lines punctuated by odd bends, some of them borderline bent too far. Rarely classical, usually bluesy. If you weren't a Steve Morse fan before, you won't be now, but damn--if you like him you won't be disappointed!

4. Rapture of the Deep: Biggest "shocker" of the album: an honest-to-god Blackmore-like song, namely due to the fact it relies on a Middle Eastern melody (most likely based on A harmonic minor/E Hungarian minor, although I haven't broken out me guitar to try to learn any of it yet). Somewhat like a cross between Perfect Strangers and the Rainbow tune of your choice, with a touch of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," and that might be the problem: is it meant as a parody? Probably not. Hell, Roger Glover will probably reveal in an interview two months from now that it's based around an old idea they kicked around with Ritchie back in the late '80s. I like this song; don't love it, but don't hate it.

5. Clearly Quite Absurd: The token ballad. Somewhat like "Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming," but not as good. :-( Still, not a bad track with pretty good lyrics which once again, Gillan probably should have saved for the next solo album. Nice subtle background piano from Don Airey on the verses, but nothing life-changing. Nice chromatic buildup towards the end, leading to a good Hammond organ solo.

6. Don't Let Go: Good uptempo bluesy tune. The melody/delivery on the verses remind me of the Fixx's early '80s song "One Thing Leads to Another," of all things! It took a while to make the connection. The type of song that shouldn't work, but does. Good chorus, and the breakdown chord progression reminds me of Yes' 1977 tune "Parallels." Talk about pulling obscurities out of your ass, even if just subconsciously. Lyrically seems to be about, err, enjoying the people you meet on the road, because you may never see them again. Nice little electric piano solo from Don. I think Don is more comfortable on this album than on Bananas...on the last album it seems he was trying to prove he could imitate Jon Lord, and this time around he's more just having fun, playing a wide variety of keyboards. While I think Lord is a better composer and Hammond player, I think Don has slightly more "chops" (from his fusion days) and more versatility.

7. Back To Back: Straightahead rock tune, but nothing special. Could have been on the last album (draw your own conclusions). Lame chorus: "Back to back, one on one..." Purple deserves better than cliches. The only notable thing is Don Airey's brave use of an ARP-type synthesizer like you'd hear with Styx. And he almost sounds like Jan Hammer in parts, something Jon Lord couldn't or wouldn't have done (send your hate mail if you must; I still think Jon Lord is an absolute god!)

8. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The first time I heard this song, I didn't like it, but the second time, I was bouncing around in my car seat like a kid. Best song of the second half! A loopy tom-oriented drum opening by Ian Paice, followed by a semi-"Bo Diddley" guitar groove (something not often heard in DP, if ever). Gillan practically spits out his lyrics, with an environmental message. Everyone sounds alive on this, Paice's best drumming on the album. Elsewhere, he's more straightahead. The problem there might be that there are no really fast tunes anywhere on the CD, a place where Paice always shines. I like how after the solos, the drum groove comes back in, followed by another verse. There are several tunes on the album that just kind of end abruptly, where I would love to have heard another verse.

9. MTV: Kind of sloppy tune which doesn't work. Gillan doesn't really sing; he's more just talking quickly. I appreciate the sentiment of the lyrics, that MTV sucks now, and that even classic rock radio kind of sucks. But it's all too "cutesy" and made me cringe for some reason. Some things are better unsaid! Actually, the guitar/keyboard interplay in the middle section is kind of cool; too bad they wasted it on this song.

10. Junkyard Blues: Another one which kind of made me shrug. Average guitar riff, cool groove, subpar chorus. Like MTV, too "sloppy" for its own good. Fifty times better than I could do, of course. Morse's laid back solo is kind of Beck-ish, and Airey does an OK piano solo which is too far back in the mix.

11. Before Time Began: Starts out kind of mellow, but not really a ballad. But just when you start think, "Oh great, the fourth crap song in a row," it starts to pick up with a pretty heavy progressive section with cool vocals. Verrry classic Deep Purple! "Every day of my life, I discover, someone murdering my sisters and brothers, in the name of some god or another!" S not subtle dig at both sides of the Iraqi War, but also timeless. Unfortunately, this song ends kind of abruptly. At the end, when it gets mellow again, Gillan sounds like David Bowie!

So in toto, pretty good album which promises to "grow" on me with time. To compare it with the last four: Better than Bananas; about equal to Abandon; and not as good as Purpendicular. (I've resigned myself to the fact that Purpendicular, released ten years ago next year, is the last album where my favorite band came close to touching the face of God, so to speak). Better than some of the reunion-era Blackmore albums, but will in no way make you forget about Machine Head, Burn, or In Rock. Won't make any new converts, but at least those who've dug the Morse/Airey era can definitely get behind it.

Grade: B+ (3 stars out of 4).
Best tracks: Wrong Man, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Money Talks, Don't Let Go, Before Time Began
Worst tracks: MTV, Back To Back, Junkyard Blues
So-so: Girls Like That, Rapture of the Deep, Clearly Quite Absurd (Note: Europe got a bonus track called "Things I Never Said," which I haven't heard yet).

Cannibal Holocaust: A Serious Assessment

2005-10-30T16:10:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has followed my many musings online will know that my tastes in film run to extremes. From serious historical drama to light comedy to the erotic. But more than anything I enjoy horror films, or more specifically what is known as “Eurohorror”—the gory stuff made in Europe (mostly Italy) from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s in particular. Directors such as Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco, Mario Bava and Sergio Martino have provided me with many thrills, chills, and gross-outs (not to mention head-scratchers in terms of plot—anyone familiar with the giallo subgenre will smile at this confession). But none have disturbed me, or made me think, as much as some of the films of Ruggero Deodato. In particular 1979’s Cannibal Holocaust.

Cannibal Holocaust (“CH” for short) has just been released by Grindhouse in a deluxe 2 DVD set. This is exciting news for longtime fans of the film (we can throw out our bootlegs and EC “pseudo-bootlegs”). More importantly, I am hoping a new generation will discover it and discuss the ideas presented therein. Of course, by “new generation” I certainly don’t mean kids under the age of, say, 18 (although mature teens could watch it—god knows they are exposed to a lot these days).

The plot is straightforward enough: a professor in New York travels to the Amazon in an attempt to locate a filmmaking crew which has recently disappeared. Four college-age filmmakers had gone to this isolated region of the world—dubbed the “Green Inferno”—in order to film one of the last known cannibal tribes in existence. Rather than find the foursome, however, the professor finds some of their bones, as well as several cans of film. He returns to New York to watch the footage in the company of his colleagues in order to decide whether to air it on TV.

To his horror, the professor discovers that not only will he not be airing the footage on TV, he will be destroying all copies if possible. For the party of four has not only discovered a cannibal tribe, they have provoked them into attacking—and killing/eating them. The normally peace-loving tribe had no choice but to turn on the insensitive Americans. After all, they came into the village, burned it down, raped a few women, mocked them, and fired various weapons at them. All of this is played out in straightforward fashion; the footage is highly realistic. In fact, this is where the makers of The Blair Witch Project got their ideas, although they have denied it. It is cinema verite to the extreme—so much so that director Deodato eventually went to court in Italy to prove that no one really died during the filming!

To be sure this is not a film for everyone. I have seen many explicit films (dubbed “video nasties” in Britain), such as Caligula, I Spit On Your Grave, The Untold Story, Dawn of the Dead, Faces of Death (which is about 80% FAKE—after all, if it were real footage it would be put out by a reputable company, not by “Gorgon Video”), documentaries on the Holocaust (i.e. the deaths of 6 million Jews in World War II at the hands of Nazi Germany), not to mention any number of sleazy slasher films, and this topped them all in terms of graphic content.

Where to begin…there are beheadings, other body parts being cut off, including a penis, human-looking parts and bones being eaten, rapes and other rough sex, people getting shot, a man getting bitten by a snake and his foot cut off in a futile attempt to stop the poison from spreading, a woman being punished by her husband for adultery by having some kind of stone covered with sticks and mud shoved into her vagina, and then pushed out into the river in a canoe where she bleeds to death, another woman killed and hung up on a stake through her rectum and out her mouth (this looked very realistic and will definitely “stick” with you), and a cannibal is taken hostage and has cocaine blown up his nostrils (so he will be “happy” and do whatever they say). Another woman has a fetus ripped out of her by other women, presumably due to adultery. There’s also footage from the college film crew’s earlier documentary, “The Last Road To Hell,” showing scenes of people in Africa (Uganda, perhaps?) being executed, bodies piled up in the back of a truck, and the military leading a guy out into a field with a hood on his head before being shot. This may or may not be actual footage from the reign of Idi Amin, but it sure as hell looks real. It makes Mondo Cane look like a Disney film. And rumor has it that a scene of a guy being eaten by piranhas was filmed but cut out.

If you’re still reading, what actually might be more offensive than even these scenes are the many shots of cruelty to animals. It’s somewhat ironic, but some people are more offended by this than anything which happens to humans (and most PETA activists are probably pro-abortion, but I don’t want to go there), but in CH we are “treated” to a rodent of some sort having his skull bashed in and then eaten, a huge turtle being ripped apart and eaten (his internal organs are still throbbing even after his head is removed), a baby pig being shot for no reason, and a snake being killed. Not to mention a huge spider on Faye's shoulder! These scenes were an unfortunate aspect of the late ‘70s cannibal sub-genre, designed to show what “really” happens in the jungle. (In fact, in Sergio Martino’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, there’s a scene where a poor little monkey is eaten by a python, and if you look closely you can see a stick hidden in the bushes, pushing the monkey close to the python so that he WOULD get eaten! Then there’s the man humping the large boar like there’s no tomorrow, but I digress…) 1979 was a different time and place; animal rights activism was not as predominant a political force then, and the tag line “No animals were harmed in the making of this film” had yet to be coined. Keep in mind that I am not a vegetarian and I know darn well that I’ve eaten—and continue to eat—thousands of slaughtered animals, but I must concede that the animal scenes in CH and other cannibal films are a little bit gratuitous. They’re not really essential to the plot, but they do make us think: better that we kill and eat animals than humans! Also remember that similar stuff is often shown on the Discovery Channel and considered “educational,” even taped and shown in 7th grade biology class. How about the ratings-busting “Shark Week,” with its mountains of footage of sharks attacking each other, or smaller fish?

And yet: the final line spoken in the film comes from the shocked professor. He shakes his head sadly and asks, “I wonder who the real cannibals are.” In other words, we Westerners are so disgusted at primitive tribes, but are we any better? We fight wars; we murder; we (ahem) slaughter animals for food; we destroy rain forests, pollute the oceans, and consume fuel like there’s no tomorrow. They wear few clothes (how scandalous—people walking around nude!), but many of us Americans go crazy if we see a Playboy. Are the primitive tribes actually more civilized, then? All of a sudden I must sound like a raging liberal (which I’m not), but it does make me think about how much of a narrow-minded consumer I want to be. To top it all off, in CH the filmmaking crew pays the ultimate price only for being so cruel to the cannibals. Alan (the main filmmaker, and one of the biggest assholes ever captured on cinema, a testament to the actor who played him) does horrible things in order to get exploitative, sensationalized footage. His very cute girlfriend Faye plays along at first, but becomes reluctant when Alan and another guy start to rape one of the women. It is even implied that they are the ones who impale her on the stake and film it as if they have just discovered her body—they “pretend” to be outraged by it. Eventually Faye becomes the “conscience” of the group, but it’s a case of too little, too late. Guilt by association in the minds of the cannibals. She is herself raped and then literally ripped to shreds, her head brandished like a trophy.

Cannibalism itself is considered a deplorable practice, but in primitive times it was done for a variety of reasons. Even in modern times some have resorted to it in extremis (think the Donner party or the film Alive!) Obviously the Judeo-Christian tradition frowns upon it, but primitive tribes existed far outside of this tradition. And ironically, look at the disease and devastation many historians say we brought upon these people we did try to “civilize” them.

CH is ultimately a scathing indictment of the media. In this sense, Deodato was ahead of his time. Before Geraldo, before “COPS,” before Reality TV and 24 hour news coverage (whether on TV or on the web—simultaneously one of mankind’s greatest and worst achievements of the past twenty years), Deodato in 1979 was asking when was too much, too much. When does the media cross the line from simply reporting the news, to blatantly making stuff up or distorting the facts. This is a far too relevant topic even now.

When I got my EC DVD of CH from ebay in the summer of 2004, I popped it in that night. My family was out of town, and I planned to watch it and two other Deodato films—to have kind of a Deodato film festival of my own, you might say. However, after the 90 or so minutes of Cannibal Holocaust had ended, I quietly got up, turned off the TV/DVD player, and went into my room and read a book rather than watch the other films. All of a sudden I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything similar to CH, and I felt unclean, like I needed to take a shower. I was furious at myself and wondered how I’d ever gotten into this whole “Eurohorror crap,” but the next day I realized that CH had simply had a profound effect on me, moreso than almost any other film in any genre. Ruggero Deodato had had the last laugh—I would be coming back for more eventually. More importantly, it made me think and reflect on both what I had seen as well as the ideas behind such visceral imagery.

So yes, I will eventually be picking up the 2 disc limited edition. Only 11,000 have been printed, and they’re all numbered. I look forward to the extras as well as the improved picture quality, restored from the old negative and completely uncut.

Rachel Dratch as a Sim?

2005-10-28T20:20:00.000-05:00

So I lied in my last post...my next post (i.e. this one) will NOT be about Cannibal Holocaust, but will instead be a quickie: two screen caps from my Sims. One depicts Rachel Dratch (in a pink shirt and black boots!) checking out the upstairs to her new pad which she will have to share with 82-year-old horror icon Christopher Lee, the ever-sexy Debbie Harry of Blondie, and everyone's favorite black guy with lime green hair, Dennis Rodman. The Surreal Life, indeed. I hope no one ends up drunk and naked on a scooter at 2 AM like Mini-Me, but if it does happen, I hope it's at least one of the women. Ha! The other picture shows her from back in June (when I first got the Sims), playing the guitar. And yes, she will play it the proper way: using all four left hand fingers. Some guitarists don't use their pinky when soloing, and it drives me up the effing wall. Oh, and notice the Ha-tub.

If Star Wars Were Set In High School...

2005-10-28T19:06:00.000-05:00

In honor of next Tuesday's release on DVD of Episode III, I developed this idea at work today. Here goes nuthin...

The Prequels: A long time ago in a school district far, far away...

Qui-Gon Jinn: Mellow hippy teacher with long hair, Birkenstocks, smokes pot on the weekends. Smart, but most people tend not to listen to what he says because he's so "out there." Was Obi-Wan's teaching mentor when he started teaching. Maul ambushes him in the parking lot late one night and beats him up. Obi-Wan intervenes and has Maul expelled for good, which pisses off Sidious.

Yoda: Short foreign exchange student (hence weird way of talking) who gets at least 1750 on SATs. On chess team, always blows the curve in advanced science and math classes.

Mace Windu: Captain of the football team and smart to boot, but kind of intimidating. No one gets too close to him, but they respect him. Likes to read poetry, etc...and dares anyone to make fun of him for it.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: The coolest teacher at school...lets students speak their minds, but he stays in charge. Tries to be fair; sees great potential in Anakin and constantly trying to steer him on right track. Too wrapped up in trying to "save" everyone to see what Principal Sidious is really trying to do.

Anakin Skywalker: Extremely popular guy, but from the wrong side of the tracks (even comes from--gasp!--a single parent home). Tries to do right but has a hot temper (treats his girlfriend Padme like dirt, but she's too blind to see). Good at sports, but has trouble concentrating to be a team captain or get a scholarship. Gets decent grades but constantly argues with teachers. Voted most likely to succeed, of course.

Padme: Class president, somewhat stuck up but tries to be the voice of reason. The "perfect girl" who is fatally attracted to the bad-boy types.

Jar Jar Binks: Annoying nerd (but not smart). A loser in every way, sort of like Napoleon Dynamite. Many students would kill him if they knew they could get away with it. When Anakin was a freshman, he was kind of friends with him, but he ditched him in a hurry because he was holding him back socially.

Boss Nass: Jar Jar's fat father who pays an unexpected visit to the school and embarasses Jar Jar.

Darth Maul: Intimidating guy who has tattoos, rides a motorcycle, and beats people up for no reason. Always in detention (and thus rarely seen in class). Destined to get his ass kicked by someone stronger eventually.

Count Dooku: Richest kid at school. Wears his hair slicked back and a trenchcoat (kind of like the Columbine killers). Very smart but not friendly, but many hang out with him because of his money and his sweet ride.

Darth Sidious/Palpatine: The principal/dean, who is secretly pulling the strings. Has Dooku and Maul secretly on his "payroll" to try to take down all the kids he can't stand. His ultimately prize would be Anakin, who he is secretly attracted to (hehe).

General Grievous: Completely psycho guy who has been in gangs and has no business still being in school. Has no qualms about killing--and thus almost too "crazy" for Sidious. Has been injured and has several armored plates in his body.

R2D2: Short, class clown who always finds a way out of trouble.

C3P0: R2's friend. Not as funny as R2 but tries to be. Everyone secretly feels sorry for him.

The Separatists: The "trenchcoat mafia." A group of outcasts who hang out with Dooku and try to imitate his style. They want to break off from all social activities. They also have secret plans designed to blow up the whole school someday (on the internet they call it the "Death Star" in their chatrooms).

And of course the "next generation":

Luke Skywalker: Boy next door type. Tries to do right. Only goes out for sports because his "old man" did, but does well.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Older teacher, now on verge of retirement. Has high hopes for Luke--doesn't want him to repeat his Dad's mistakes.

Leia: Tomboyish, popular girl with a mouth on her, who falls for Han Solo. More of a "rebel" than her brother Luke. Not as "high maintenance" as her mother, Padme, but still a handful for most.

Han Solo: The senstive rebel. Into cars, from wrong side of the tracks, but basically a decent guy who everyone tries to hang out with. Has the coolest car, but it's often in the shop.
Eventually becomes respectable, tries out for the team.

Chewbacca: Tall, unhygienic kid. Limited vocabulary. Think a nicer version of "Ogre" from Revenge of the Nerds. Possibly on football team. Hangs out with Han for some reason, maybe his bodyguard. Also tries to work on Han's car, but often does more harm to it than good.

Lando Calrissian: Han's friend, a major player with the ladies. Often has parties in his basement--dubbed "Cloud City" because of the massive amount of clouds from the you-know-what smoke.

Boba Fett: Tough, quiet guy you hire to beat someone up. Charges extra if he ever has to "drop the hammer."

Jabba the Hutt: Fat kid everyone secretly hates but tolerates because of his money and because he gets/buys them alcohol/drugs (while charging high fees).

Grand Moff Tarkin: Dean in charge of discipline. Anyone sent to his office is automatically expelled.

C3PO and R2D2: All grown up but still hanging out at the high school like Wooderson in "Dazed and Confused."

Yoda: Now a professor at a nearby college. Luke gets into his calculus class his senior year. Away from the high school, Luke learns all about Sidious' true nature. Yoda and Obi-Wan secretly communicate on the internet--years earlier, Qui Gonn had taught them how to use it.

PS: Enjoy this levity. My next post will probably be a critical analysis of Cannibal Holocaust, of the goriest, most controversial and banned films ever.

Haunted By Soledad Miranda

2005-10-24T08:05:00.000-05:00

The first thing you notice (Ok, that I noticed) is the piercing dark eyes, full of mystery and sorrow. Even when happy, there's a sadness, a wisdom beyond her years. The next thing you notice is the beautiful raven hair, a gift from her Spanish and Gypsy ancestors. Overall, she looks a bit like a cross between Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. Got to love those Mediterranean women. Then you notice...let's face it...the body: slender, elegant, and yet subtly curvy. Yes, Soledad Miranda is hard to forget.

And also hard to get to know. This obscure actress lived just 27 years, dying in a car wreck in Europe in 1970. But in her film career, which lasted less than a decade, she left us with some pretty memorable performances which continue to find new audiences to this day. In particular, the handful of films she made with Spain's low budget enfant terrible, Jesus Franco Manera--or as thousands of eager DVD buyers know him, "Jess Franco."

Jess Franco has directed over 200 films, and today, even in his 70s, he's still at it. But you'll probably never see one of his films on HBO, or in Blockbuster, or discussed in any "normal" film class. He's straddled genres like a gymnast: horror, comedy, historical dramas, experimental. And the reason he's never become mainstream is because his films tend to, shall we say, contain a lot of erotic material. No, not "porn" per se, although in the '80s he did do some hardcore porn when his career took a downturn. But there is a place for erotic cinema, and it need not be confined to seedy late night theatres. When done tastefully and done to advance the plot, of course. The DVD market of the past six years has allowed the man's work to undergo a major reassessment.

Franco's "classic" period lasted from about 1969 to 1973, and during this period was when he worked with the lovely Ms. Miranda. The most notable collaboration was Vampyros Lesbos, a rather groovy, surrealistic retelling of the Count Dracula story, with Soledad as the female vampire. Viewing this film will either turn you off from ever seeing another Franco film, or else intrigue you to see more. There is no middle ground, believe me! He often shoots more than one movie simultaneously, using bits and pieces to edit together. He's overly fond of the zoom lens. The music used is a groovy mixture of jazz, rock, and classical. No one has ever accused him of having high budgets. But still, fans keep coming back for more. There is a reason that a book written about the man's career was entitled Obsession.

They also worked together on She Killed In Ecstasy, where she displays her acting chops as a woman haunted by her husband's death and driven to revenge, Nightmares Come At Night (a lesser film, to be honest, but worth it for her brief scenes), The Devil Came From Akasava, and Count Dracula. In this last film she plays the damsel in distress trying to escape from the Count, played by none other than Christopher Lee. Of Soledad, Lee later remarked, "I've played this scene countless times with countless actresses, but she's giving me something extra I've never gotten before."

And then her life was cut tragically short. Even today, Jess Franco has a hard time talking about it--she was his muse. But like an Elvis, or a James Dean, or a Marilyn Monroe, she lives on today, forever young, immortalized on film and in the imaginations of anyone who has ever delved into the strange world of Jess Franco.

My Deep Purple Book (exclusive excerpt)

2005-10-21T21:48:00.000-05:00

Intro: Off and on for the past decade, I have been working on what will one day be the ultimate book on Deep Purple, drawing from a myriad of sources. My rough draft (single spaced) is nearing 600 pages long. Here I reveal some of the fruits of my labor, viz. the first half of 1974, a very memorable year in Purple history.

1974

For much of this year, Blackmore sports a black top hat in public in addition to continuing to wear the pilgrim hat. (Once, when asked about Blackmore’s taste in hats, Coverdale answers, “I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine. But, it got you talking about him, didn’t it?”)
Blackmore also guests on the title track of Adam Faith’s I Survive, contributing a solo in which he is trying to simulate a car collision. Producer Martin Birch provides the rhythm guitar.
Hughes obtains a Mu-Tron effects pedal which gives his bass a wah-wah funk sound; other players to use the effect include Bootsy Collins and Larry Graham, both of whom are far removed from hard rock.
Also this year, Ritchie’s son Jürgen, still living in Hamburg with his mother, receives his first acoustic guitar at the age of 10. According to his bio, “Blessed with the musical talent of his father and the self-assertion of his mother, a career as a musician was looming early in his life.”
Sometime in 1974 Paice plays a session for jazz player Eddie Harris, drumming on the songs “He’s An Island Man” and “I’ve Tried Everything.”
Also this year, The Final Swing, a Trapeze compilation album, comprising tracks from all three Hughes-era albums, creeps to #172 in the US—their first national chart placing. It also contains two previously unreleased tracks, “Good Love” and “Dat’s It.”
January
3
EMI masters the upcoming album, as well as “Sail Away,” the proposed single.
DP plays three shows at the Paris Olympia.
Then they play a pair of German shows.
About this time, Blackmore briefly road-tests a synthi Hi Fli guitar synthesizer.
12
About this time, Lord feels a pain in his side, but he ignores it for the next two weeks.
25
Stuttgart Boblingen Sporthalle.
26
Dusseldorf Phillipshalle.
Lord almost collapses at show’s end, having become ill with appendicitis. “I could hardly move and I flew back to England on the first plane out, the 08:15…the only time in my life that I caught a plane so early. I was operated on that night but something went wrong. It festered and I ended up being in hospital for three weeks instead of five days.”
Deep Purple must postpone the crucial US Burn tour for one month.
February
1
Paice appears on Michael Wale’s “Rockspeak” radio show and premiered three tracks from the upcoming album.
12
EMI masters “Might Just Take Your Life” and “Coronarias Redig” as a single (in lieu of “Sail Away.”) Coverdale quips, “I wouldn’t mind doing Top of the Pops because it would be an experience, something I haven’t done before, but I wouldn’t like anyone to turn around and say Purple are now in competition with Sweet and Mud because as far as I’m concerned, there is no competition. Singles as far as I can see are visual promotions by pretty guys on television. Can you imagine: I’d look so butch in a glitter suit! There’s just no way. I just couldn’t carry it off.”
15
Burn, with a cover depicting band members’ heads as burning candles (courtesy Candle Makers Supplies in London), is released in Europe. The font for the title is hand-drawn.
In Argentina, it goes by its Spanish title, Quemar. The album is also available in the soon-to-be-doomed Quadraphonic sound. Fans quickly consider it the best Purple album since Machine Head.
“It was like a surreal dream,” Coverdale recalls about the release of Burn. “Hearing myself for the first time, seeing my name on the sleeve... I placed it nervously on the new B & O turntable I’d treated myself to on getting the gig with The Deeps, cranked it up, stood back...and almost died from the excitement of hearing it finished in all its stereo glory. I had never before experienced such an extraordinary rush as I did at that moment. These were totally new sensations for me. I was so proud, and I couldn’t wait to play it for my friends. At last I had made a bloody record...and a good ‘un, too! Actually...I may have wept with joy, to be honest.”
On the candles, the singer ruminates:
“To be honest, I can’t remember who actually came up with the concept of the candles for the cover. I just remember having to sit on a revolving stool, and being slowly turned a full 360° by Fin’s assistant, while he merrily clicked away for the headshots that would be used by an un-named sculptor to fashion the waxen portraits of the band. Ritchie had cleverly decided that a hat would make him more noticeable and he was right, of course. Hardly anyone knows who’s who on the cover, other than ‘is Royal Blackness...
“We were all supposed to get a set of the finished candles, which none of us did, of course, other than the band’s two managers. Personally, I thought the back cover should have been the front. I felt the distressed candles looked heavier and stronger as an image for a band like Purple. I didn’t think they ‘looked’ like us, but, I thought the concept was pretty good.”
(Hughes later adds, “I found them at an auction about five years ago. They were going for a ridiculous amount of money. They were candles that were made. They were beautiful.”)
On the actual album, Glenn says, “I think that was the most coherent album DP ever made, because they had just released Who Do We Think We Are!, which wasn’t really a good record. Made In Japan was a classic album, but the album after that wasn’t...and then we wrote these great songs, ‘Lay Down, Stay Down,’ ‘Mistreated,’ and the band was really tight, but this was before we went onstage
with Ritchie. In the studio it was fine, but when we went onstage with him, he just turned into an asshole, you know?”
Jon Lord: “I’m very proud of Burn. I think the reason for its direction was that Ritchie, for the first time, had a singer he could bully—though in a good way. ‘Mistreated’ couldn’t have come out of Mk II in any shape or form. But it was the direction Ritchie wanted to go, kind of hard rock blues.”
Simon Robinson: “In many ways the faults of Burn mirrored those of Shades of Deep Purple six years before, with musicians together prematurely. It wasn’t until they had begun to tour that the material really developed to its full
potential. An exception was the frenetic ‘Lay Down Stay Down,’ which sounded at least as if they were enjoying themselves. It was the gorgeously moody Blackmore/Coverdale pairing on ‘Sail Away’ which stole it for me however, a direction the band should have pursued more vigorously than they did.”
One UK paper reviews Burn thusly (minus “Mistreated”):
“Burn is an accurate title for Deep Purple’s new album, because that’s exactly what they do! This album has the excitement found in In Rock and Made In Japan and sorely lacking in Who Do We Think We Are.
“In Rock set the roots for Purple’s style which gained them recognition as the King Midas’s of rock. After all they are now one of the world’s top selling and top touring bands but their future was questionable after the split of vocalist Ian Gillan and bass player Roger Glover.
“This album shows that the new replacements Glenn Hughes, on bass and vocals and vocalist Dave Coverdale have acted as a catalyst, injecting a new energy into the remaining members’ music.
“Burn kicks off with the title track; the most high-powered number on the album. Ritchie Blackmore knocks out a series of meaty chords and the rest of the band join in and sound damn tight, it just doesn’t sound as if they’ve only been together for a matter of months. There is some nice soloing from Jon and Ritchie; playing classical type passages which sounds vaguely reminiscent of their In Rock era.
“’Might Just Take Your Life’ drags to the point of lethargy although it’s brightened up by Lord’s keyboard virtuosity.
“’Lay Down, Stay Down’ indicates the direction Purple are heading in and highlights Glenn’s influence; the song’s funky and this makes the band come over funky too. Ritchie plays a beautiful solo, tight, precise but still containing the right amount of energy needed to make it rock.
“’Sail Away’ has a nice soul beat that you hear when Stevie Wonder is knocking out notes on his clavinet. There is some nice vocal interplay between Dave and Glenn and some weird sounds followed by a mellow, even laid back solo from Ritchie, who can be gentle as he is aggressive (listen to ‘When A Blind Man Cries’).
“Side Two opens up with ‘You Fool No One’ which is Ian Paice’s track. Everything is centred around his tireless rhythmic passages and features an interesting phased solo from Mr. Blackmore.
“’What’s Going On Here’ is the hardest rocker on the album, Jon having really opened up and the piano solo is just as effective as anything he’s done with electronics.
“’A 200,’ a very dramatic track based round Lord’s keyboard and Moog work, gradually builds up and explodes with Ritchie playing a flurry of notes. In the background Glenn and Ian work well adding to the dramatic theme of the tune. It’s a bit out of character to the rest of the album but a definite closer. Warning us of things to come? I hope not, ‘A 200’ is the name of a cure for disease acquired when sitting on toilet seats and drinking from other people’s cups (know what I mean?)
“It seems that Purple’s enthusiasm has returned again and this album is like a rebirth for them. All the tickets are sold out on their forthcoming American tour and their crown is getting heavier and harder to shift and to tell you the truth I can’t foresee that happening yet.”
Charles Shaar Murray of the New Musical Express gives it a less than complimentary review, which causes many fans (not to mention band members) to write in and complain. Thus the NME responds:
“The NME wishes to apologize for Charles Shaar Murray, who’s really quite an agreeable fellow and kind to his mother too. Though standing four-square behind his review, Mr. Murray would be if pressed (and particularly when held over a naked flame) concede that in a moment of heavy metal fatigue he may have hit the button marked CRITICAL OVERKILL in mistake for the one marked INFORMED CYNIC(sorry CRITIC). Nevertheless does even CSM deserve the one-word message dispatched to him by D. Purple and contained in anagramic form at the end of this paragraph so as not to offend the more sensitive among our readers? SOCKBOLL!”
Purple management quickly books a full page in the NME the following week to reprint several positive reviews above the offending Murray one, with the headline, “With friends like these, who needs NMEs?” Below this message, in smaller type, is “We do, a little heated controversy never did anyone any harm.”
More reviews:
· Billboard: “Deep Purple is back after a restructuring, with new lead singer David Coverdale doing a commendable job replacing Ian Gillian [sic]. Glenn Hughes also works well on bass and as an added singer. This set varies somewhat from the band’s recent efforts, with a little less ‘pin the people against the wall’ music and some interesting blues numbers like ‘Mistreated.’ ‘Burn,’ the current single, is also a highlight of the album. Many groups lose a lot when two members leave, but Deep Purple are as excellent in their field as ever.”
· Guitar Player: “What separates Blackmore from the legion of heavy-metal players is not just that he’s got more punch, but that his lines are more musical than theirs. Case in point: ‘Mistreated,’ where he uses variations on mid-eastern scales and where, in the middle of a series of fast sixteenth notes, he refers underhandedly to the harmonic minor scale of the following chord. This sort of stuff is stock in trade for Jan Akkerman, but Blackmore’s doing it in the context of a heavy metal band.”
· RAM (Australian paper): “Some will say that Deep Purple has recycled its membership for the sole purpose of keeping the name alive. Burn represents something significantly finer than that: an attempt, moreover a successful one, to lift the musical credibility to its former level.”
Track list: Burn/Might Just Take Your Life/Lay Down, Stay Down/Sail Away/You Fool No One/What’s Goin’ On Here/Mistreated/”A” 200.
Later, asked whether he ever listened to Burn, Roger Glover comments, “Yes, sometimes I have but not recently. I had a hard time listening to Burn but had to admit that ‘Sail Away’ and ‘Might Just Take Your Life’ were rather good. As the others came out I lost interest and have no particular feelings about them, good or not.”
Meanwhile, Australian TV airs segments of a few songs filmed at Hofstra University in summer 1973 by Mk. II.
9
The US tour would have begun in Phoenix on this day; other cancelled dates include Los Angeles (10), San Diego (11), Tucson (13), Ft. Worth (15), Amarillo (16), El Paso (17), Denver (19-20), Minneapolis (22), Chicago (24-25), Louisville (26), and St. Louis (28).
17
Knowing that Lord will be fine by then, DP’s managers are relieved that they will not have to cancel the band’s spot on the first California Jam Festival which is to take place at Ontario Speedway on April 6th (with DP and ELP co-headlining after a dispute over who will top the massive bill). Its first public ad runs on this day. Tickets are $10.00.
A British music mag sarcastically writes, “They have also negotiated to a deal with a theatre in Las Vegas to play six times a week for eight weeks for the next four years. This will earn them two million pounds, which works out to £10,000 a show.”
March
2
DP finally head to America. Coverdale remembers:
“I landed in New York and then Blackmore and me flew over to Detroit; that was in the days when there wasn’t enough fuel to get you all the way [thanks to the OPEC oil embargo].”
3
The US leg of the Burn tour finally begins with the first of two shows in Detroit, Michigan at the Cobo Hall, which holds 12,039.
Purple Records recording artists Tucky Buzzard (whose Buzzard album was produced by their benefactor, Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman, and contains a guest appearance by Tony Ashton) and Savoy Brown open all dates in America save the California Jam. Tucky Buzzard has also toured with Grand Funk Railroad.
Buzzard’s guitarist, Terry Taylor, will one day work with Bill Wyman on the score to Inferno, a film by Italian giallo director Dario Argento.
A fan later remembers that Buzzard hold their own against Purple:
“Tucky Buzzard toured with the likes of Deep Purple when I caught up with them. I had no idea who they were other than another British rock & roll band. Onstage, they started a hot and rockin’ set that had the crowd jumpin’… as they blasted us with ‘Run in the Morning,’ ‘Superfine Lady,’ ‘Wine and Wimmen,’ ‘Bobo’s Hampton’ and ‘The Last War.’ I wanted to hear more, but when you open for Deep Purple, you’re on a certain timeframe. These guys are like a cross between the Stones and Humble Pie, heavy on the guitar, due to their lead and rhythm combination. They were so close to finding the fame that eludes so many…”
The long-running Savoy Brown, currently featuring guitarist/vocalist Miller Anderson, is supporting their Boogie Brothers album.
It is Coverdale’s first time in America; what surprises him the most about the US is the sheer size of the country, with all its arenas and stadiums.
Now freelance (no longer with Tycobrahe), Robert Simon comes in to do the live sound at the behest of Colin Hart—thanks to all the sound problems DP are having. They are grateful to Simon for his work.
At one show a woman throws her bra onstage. Coverdale picks it up and does something obscene to it before handing it to Blackmore, who wraps it around the headstock of his guitar for possibly the duration of the show.
Purple travel to each city on this tour via The Starship, a converted Boeing 720B jet airliner, colored gold, maroon, and silver, replete with a bedroom (featuring a custom furry bed ideal for trysts with a placard overhead stating it is not be occupied during landing or takeoff), a bar, and a videotape machine (an expensive and exotic luxury in 1974). The band enjoys watching X-rated films such as Deep Throat on it.
The Starship (which costs $4000 a day, meaning DP pays about $127,000 over the next month) has previously been leased to Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers; each time out its sides are painted with the logo of whichever band it services. It is owned by one Harold C. Sylvester, Jr., who boasts, “[It is] the most luxurious and expensive private jetliner in the world.”
John Coletta explains the reasons for using it:
“We decided that we had to travel without a lot of hassles at airports. At the time we decided on all this, there was a 15 per cent cutback on flights. We didn’t want to book a plane that had been canceled. We couldn’t afford that because we’re playing like three, four in a row, and one off, and you can’t afford any delay. You want to make it as easy on the nerves as possible, considering the tensions and every other problem.”
Bruce Payne remembers: “Girls would get on the plane and fly to wherever the next show was. Fathers two states over were calling the cops.”
Paice adds, “The Starship was a great place to join the Mile High Club.”
“Believe it or not, I hardly met anyone when I toured with Purple,” Coverdale remembers. “We traveled by a private 727, and they fed us extraordinary exotic foods. Straight into limos at usually private airstrips...hotel...gig...and all wrapped up, nice an’ tight, by huge, intimidating security guards. Nobody had a chance to meet us, or us them, other than when we were actually onstage.”
Further complicating the matter is the singer’s choice of alias when checking into hotels:
“Raymond Dovetail came from a real experience. When I left art college and started working in a ‘fashionable’ boutique in the fabled, magical township of Redcar…‘ahem’...I had to go some bureaucratic building in Middlesborough to acquire a P45, a bit o’ paper saying I was ‘allowed’ to work...God knows. Anyway, the woman behind the desk had a hearing aid. When she asked my name I had to repeat it several times for her benefit. She wrote down ‘Raymond Dovetail,’ instead of David Coverdale. I used the name for hotel check-in for several years.”
Glenn Hughes recalls, “David Coverdale in 1974, only listened to the Ohio Players, I can vouch for it. I used to hear him blasting it out of his hotel rooms.”
When at hotels, there is supposed to be a liquor clause for the band, but most
promoters supply it regardless.
Early 1974 set list: Burn/Might Just Take Your Life/Lay Down, Stay Down/ Mistreated/Smoke On The Water/You Fool No One/Space Truckin’.
At some shows, Don Nix’ “Goin’ Down” (popularized by the Jeff Beck Group) is played as an encore.
Fin Costello is along to photograph this tour, as he remembers:
“At that point I thought I might go to Australia, because England was completely buggered. They invited me to come to America with them, so I went for the Burn tour, having done the cover, and we bought a house in Connecticut. I brought my family over and we stayed there for a decade. And out of that I began working for the American magazines like Circus…Creem, in particular, was fantastic for me. That was such a great magazine, and they opened so many doors into ‘real’ music, if you know what I mean.
“When I would go to gigs I had these flight cases, two camera cases I took around with me. I’d be at the gig, standing at the barrier waiting for the band to come onstage. I had these name plates that were fixed onto the cases. Kids would read them, and they’d know who you were.” (This is, in fact, how two kids—Bruce Redoute and Lee Neaves--approach him at Cobo Hall on May 16, 1975 with a homemade banner and get to be on the back of KISS’ infamous Alive! album).
4
The second show at Cobo Hall takes place.
Author Dave Thompson:
“While the band’s first visit in over six months sold out in near record time, [the delay caused by Lord’s illness]…quickly assumed darkly portentous overtones. At the earliest shows, audiences started out skeptical and occasionally wound up hostile. The group hadn’t simply changed its lineup, it had changed the very character that had once so distinguished it, on vinyl, and, more pronouncedly, in concert.
“It wasn’t something you could precisely put your finger on—more the sense of unease derived from sitting in a sea of several thousand people, for whom the only thing that matters is obeying the repeated demands from the stage: ‘Have a good time—wooo!’; ‘Get up on your feet—wooo!’ Once, Deep Purple had moved the crowd with the power of music alone. Now, it seemed, that wasn’t enough, and Hughes and Coverdale seemed to spend as much time exhorting the crowd to enjoy themselves (‘Wooooo!’) as giving them a reason to actually do so.
“And it worked. By the end of the decade, and increasingly thereafter, the hard rock scene positively seethed with apparently successful frontmen who did nothing but remind their audience what a great time they were having, and they sold an awful lot of records doing so. Forget stagecraft, forget dynamics, forget even a modicum of musical personality. So long as it could convince a stadium full of kids that they were having the time of their lives, a plank of wood could become a superstar.
“At the outset of the America tour, it was more than likely nerves, as opposed to a lack of nuance that drew such utterances out of Hughes and Coverdale. Faced with a crowd of 10,000 kids, all baying for a blood rush to the head, if you can convince them that they’re having fun, even if it’s just a bunch of knuckleheads with the loudest lungs, then it’s easier to convince yourself as well. And what better way to find out than to ask them?
“But the fans who weren’t knuckleheads, though, those who knew something more than ‘Smoke On the Water’ and a clutch of glossy photographs in Circus or CREEM, saw that as the easy way out. Deep Purple’s reputation was built on generating flash and excitement by being themselves, on their music’s power to move or soothe the soul. Had all that truly been distilled into nothing more than a routine series of shouts or gestures?
“From the stage, such discontent might have been muted, but it was certainly palpable, and it needed to be fixed. Quickly. ‘Up against the wall of prejudice,’ Circus’ Jon Tiven reported, ‘the new members [have] been pressured by the demands of longtime fans into mimicking the Purple of old—the sounds and pacing of Gillan and Glover.’ Drop the posturing, cut down on the wooing and, though it certainly contradicted the band’s attempts to make fresh start, cut out the attempts to take old songs someplace new.
“Hughes, in particular, came under the microscope. His vocal range already lent itself to vague comparisons; now, the transmutation was almost perfect, as Blackmore marveled later in the tour: ‘He’s taken over Gillan’s face. He’s taken that slot.’”
Meanwhile, “Might Just Take Your Life” b/w “Coronarias Redig” is released as a single.
A UK paper reviews it:
“Deep Purple are not the band they once were - and I for one don’t mind that at all. The older Purple sound now sounds terribly dated, but the new sounds pretty contemporary - on this single I was even reminded somewhat of Steely Dan. The Burn LP from which this comes is high, high, high in the lists and that could hurt sales of the single. Opening with a spot of drumming over belching organ, the side avoids the crunching excesses or previous Deep Purple records. The vocals are just fine too: expressive, clear and coherent. In America ‘Might Just Take Your Life’ is #97 in the chart I have - but it is climbing. I doubt whether it’ll burst into our very own and truly wonderful Top Twenty, though.”
In Britain, EMI ads proudly proclaim DP’s status as the #1 Billboard Album Artists.
As DP’s plane flies out of Detroit en route to New York, critic Lester Bangs is on board. He writes, “The concert was fantastic. Last time I saw this group in Detroit, with Gillan and Glover, I thought they were true trotting slopbucket, but this night they laid it on and stomped it out till I saw kids at the edge of the stage pounding on it with their fists, shaking their mangy manes in jivaro amokery. It was heartening to say the least.”
5
War Memorial, Buffalo, NY.
6
Civic Centre, Pittsburgh, PA.
Many consider this one of Mk III’s best performances.
Coverdale finds kindred spirits in the industrial working class audiences everywhere:
“I love playing concerts in industrial areas…Man…they are a LOUD audience! Much louder than when I’ve played in nice, clean, well-to-do cities…even though I prefer nice, clean cities…I have a VERY hard time…on EVERY level, with pollution…It seems that those people have a lot more stress…and pressure to release in those darker, socially pressurised towns…so…they respond incredibly well to a good rock show…and sing along great…The energy they release is palpable…Ahh…there ain’t nothing like letting off a bit o’ steam, Baby…It does you good!”
Bootleg: Point Break.
8
Capitol Centre, Largo, MD.
Rolling Stone reviews this concert, noting that “the addition of Coverdale and Hughes has made a good band a great one.” The magazine praises the duo’s ability to create striking vocal harmonies.
“Lay Down Stay Down” is dedicated to Deep Throat porn star Linda Lovelace. DP are lucky to have even seen this movie about a woman whose clitoris is located in her throat, for between 1972 and 1981 it is banned in 23 US states.
(In fact, one importer claims that the film should not be suppressed, because it “puts forth an idea of greater liberation with regard to human sexuality and to the expression of it” and would benefit “many women [who] have an unreasonable fear of the penis.” The court is not persuaded.)
As for Hughes, he remembers DP’s roadies often doing strange things to groupies using bottles.
9
Clemson, SC.
Some sources list this show as taking place in Fayetteville, NC.
This show is bootlegged.
In the UK, Burn reaches #3.
10
Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte, NC.
The only limousine available to drive the band from the airport to the venue and back is one which comes from a funeral home.
11
Omni, Atlanta, GA.
Hughes starts occasionally singing “Georgia On My Mind” during the quiet breakdown towards the end of “Smoke On The Water.”
Hughes: “When DP was touring the US in Georgia, I thought it was good to do the song and after that, it became a routine on ‘SOTW.’ I originally proposed the idea to Jon Lord.”
Meanwhile, around this time he starts to use a Fender Precision bass on the tour, his Rickenbacker seeing less and less action.
13
DP plays their first show ever at Madison Square Garden, NYC.
In the audience is a 15-year-old named Richie Sambora, who will one day play guitar for the New Jersey band Bon Jovi. “Deep Purple would jam for minutes a clip and never get boring,” Sambora marvels twenty-five years later.
At one point Blackmore plays one guitar with his foot while playing another guitar over his head.
“You have to play to the first fifty rows and pray that those people a quarter of a mile away are getting into it,” Lord reveals.
But fan Joe Sac later remembers Lord has no problem with this:
“I was sitting in the front row, right in front of the man himself, making eye contact with me and my friends several times during the show.”
Carmine Appice and Timmy Bogert (once of Vanilla Fudge) are invited to come and jam with the band on the encore of “Goin’ Down.”
At the end of the year the show is listed among the Garden’s top 20 grossing shows for 1974--at $127,175. (Drummer Webb of Savoy Brown recalls, “Yeah, it went well—we took Madison Square Garden by storm…”)
Madison Square Garden has had a rich and varied history and a special place in the hearts of all New Yorkers. The earliest incarnation stood from 1879 to 1889, and the fourth and largest version of “The Garden” (seating capacity: 19,000) had been opened by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on February 11, 1968. It is located in Manhattan on Seventh Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets. Recently it had been the site of Led Zeppelin’s infamous July 1973 concerts which were filmed and eventually released on the silver screen as The Song Remains The Same.
Backstage Ritchie Blackmore lights candles before the show. “[I liked] a little bit of meditation before I went onstage, and I hate the lights in those dressing rooms at, say, Madison Square Garden. But people were convinced that I had an altar in there and I was sacrificing chickens...I’m not a Satanist, as some people have labeled me,” he later recalls.
Back at the hotel, wearing a kimono and watching Star Trek on TV, Lord gives an interview to Circus magazine where he says he has toured so much that he can “find the light switch in a Holiday Inn without even looking”--even if his band is currently staying on the 14th floor of the Plaza Hotel. He also says that politically he is a libertarian.
“Living out of a suitcase” is the worst part of being a rock musician, he tells the journalist. “That’s why musicians have a reputation for wrecking hotel rooms, throwing wild parties and getting sixteen-year-olds in trouble. We get bored.”
Afterwards the Starship flies from New York City to Boston for a reception given to Warner Bros. executives; a writer from The New Yorker is aboard and is entertained by Paice and Lord.
14
Coliseum, New Haven, CT.
15
Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA.
17
Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, LI, NY.
Fan John Rolfe recalls:
“Bummed about the departures of Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, I nevertheless loved the Burn album and eagerly anticipated this gig - the first time I’d ever had the chance to catch Purple live.
“On the way to the show, my two pals and I traipsed through the high grass of Mitchell Field imbibing Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and smoking more than our fair share of Mother Nature. Upon arrival at the Coliseum, we found at least one poor chap already down for the count in the lobby.
“The Coliseum was packed with a fired-up crowd 14,000 strong. The opening act was Savoy Brown, another favorite band of mine, who showed up true to lead axeman Kim Simmonds’ mercurial nature with an entirely different line-up than I expected.
“Purple came on loud, hard, and clean in clouds of white smoke with a dynamite version of ‘Burn.’ Blackmore was on fire all night, manhandling his white Strat on jaw dropping runs that confirmed to me that he was certainly as good as advertised. Purple roared through much of the new album, and I was pretty pleased with how well Coverdale and Hughes handled the classic stuff – ‘Smoke On The Water,’ ‘Space Truckin’’, etc.
“Too bad one of my pals missed it. Tanked to the blowholes, he nodded off shortly before Purple came on and stayed nodded off through a sonic barrage… No small feat, that. At least one of us remembers the superb show.”
This show is apparently bootlegged.
In addition, DJ Don Imus attends this show.
18
War Memorial, Syracuse, NY.
19
Boston Gardens, Boston, MA.
Before the show, as he munches on a chicken wing, Blackmore tells a journalist that he’ll talk about anything but the movie The Exorcist.
Blackmore: “I’m not the Dracula type. Film vampires are getting annoying and boring. I’m interested in strange things, especially in ghosts. Alien life, though, means nothing to me. I like to hunt ghosts. For my own experience I can tell you they do exist.”
“In this business I can meet a lot of people who have had peculiar experiences,” he adds. “Normally it’s a chick in the hotel room who says, ‘What are your peculiar experiences?’ I must be meeting about 100 witches each month. The real ones are willing to tell their stories, you can pick them out. They’re totally different than the chicks who hang around backstage with their tits protruding and say: ‘I’m a witch.’”
Fan Ed Dexter remembers this show:
“I remember certain segments of the audience booing Coverdale...apparently for not being Ian Gillan! As a quick side note, the ‘fire show’ and Blackmore’s guitar destruction led the owners of the Garden to have a press conference the next day and announce Blackmore would never be allowed to play there again...
“Whether he was informed or not, I don’t know...but seeing as it was Boston’s worst concert venue, it wasn’t a big loss. As far as I know, neither Purple or Rainbow ever appeared at the Garden again...geez, all Blackmore was doing was the job that wound up being done about 20 years later, when the old dump was razed anyway... [it had] absolutely atrocious sound, but fairly good sightlines as long as you got tickets in front of the stage somewhere! The place was built for hockey + boxing, not concerts. Oh, yeah...if you went there for enough events, you’d eventually get on a first name basis with the rats ...of which the scrawniest were the size of cats!”
An audience member manages to videotape about six minutes of this show.
20
Civic Centre, Providence, RI.
Burn is certified Gold in the US today.
22
University Arena, Dayton, OH.
Apparently DP gets fined for exceeding local limitations on acceptable decibel levels.
23
Madison, WI, Fairgrounds.
Burn enters the US top 40.
24-25
Ampitheatre, Chicago, IL.
Glenn Hughes: “We played at this old ampitheatre, and there was this rent-a-cop beating this fan in front of me with his club. So, I kicked him in the head with my big boots. When I got off the stage they were waiting to arrest me. It was horrible. I’m not a violent guy, but this cop was beating the shit out of this fan. So, these are my memories of Chicago!”
About this time, Coverdale is also introduced to Chicago’s Plaster Casters, the coterie of groupies interested in making casts of rock star’s sexual organs. He reveals, “I also knew the ‘Chocolate Painters,’ the ‘Pineapple Ring Gang,’ and the ‘Whipped Creamers.’ Fascinating bunch of characters. I avoided the ‘Bottom Sniffers’ like the plague.”
One autograph seeker says that Coverdale is fast becoming a “mass of ego and testosterone” around this time.
Cynthia Plaster Caster herself recalls that one time Bebe Buell (future lover of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and mother of their daughter Liv) gets “territorial” over Ritchie Blackmore.
While in Chicago, Blackmore jams with a black guy, which gives Hughes an idea for a new song.
28
Coliseum, El Paso, TX.
Author C.K. Lendt describes a typical ‘70s show at this venue:
“Inside was a nasty and fearsome crowd. These cranked-up fans, with their clenched fists and scowling faces, were ready to do more than rock. The pungent aroma of marijuana masked the fetid stench of the hogs and steers that were often on display for livestock auctions in the building. Many in the crowd had bloodshot eyes; some were staggering, even keeling over. Some wore leather jackets and had heavy chains wrapped around their waists...
“It was dark inside the Coliseum, and there was no air conditioning. [Outside] it looked like a prison camp, but it had been built to hold over 11,000 people.”
29
About this time, Coverdale buys a Navaho turquoise bracelet in El Paso, estimated to be 350 years old. He treasures it and is rarely seen without it:
“I bought it in a pawn shop somewhere in Texas, which was always a cool place to look for the old stuff. I didn’t realize until later that it’s supposed to be a gift. The stone is the heart and all the other stones round it mean something. It was very, very special to me and still is. It still has the sweat of all those shows. I’ve never had it to a silversmith to clean or anything, so there’s an awful lot of history.”
Another favorite piece of jewelry for him is the St. Christopher medal he wears on a necklace given to him by his mother, Mrs. Winnie Mae Coverdale (September 1, 1924-August 8, 1992), for good luck in all his travels. She has it blessed for him by a church in Dublin (her own mother being from Ireland).
“When I sing power stuff my throat expands and I’ve had to have so many chains to hold it on,” Coverdale reveals. “Sometimes I’d see it fly off my throat and don’t tell me how but I caught it twice, with the spotlight in my face, I caught it in my hand. It became such a talisman for me; that’s one of the reasons I stopped wearing it. If I had lost it I don’t know how it would have affected me, maybe never getting on an aeroplane again, so I just look after it now, it’s with me all the time and it’s kind of a direct link to God, courtesy of me Mam. Who cares for you more than your Mam?
“My Mam was a huge fan,” he continues. “I would call her from all over the world before some of the bigger shows--nervous, you know--and she would always say, ‘Just open your mouth, and let it come out.’ I can still hear her.”
He also recalls that whenever he calls home to England, he must explain to the operator in graphic detail exactly what town he is trying to reach: “Red as in the color, car as in automobile.” The operator thinks it is “cute.”
30
Tarant County Centre, Ft. Worth, TX.
It may be at this show that an enthusiastic redneck (or a “yee-haw,” as Paice calls him) in the front row fires a pistol during the drum solo; the bullet lodges itself in the wall about fifteen feet above the drummer’s head.
“Might Just Take Your Life” reaches US #91.
Owing to the fact that it fails to become a hit, Coverdale often gives a thumbs-up sign and half-jokingly says, “Ah, recognition! Great!” when concertgoers recognize the tune in concert.
31
Civic Centre, Amarillo, TX.
April
Paice tells Circus, “The group is three or four times as strong as when Ian and Roger were in the group. The whole thing got exciting again. Towards the end with Roger and Ian it was getting like a job. There was no social life within the band. People would go onstage and they’d go back to the hotel and you wouldn’t see anybody until the next day when you got on a plane or something.”
“’A’ 200” is featured on the Warner “Loss Leader” compilation Hard Goods.
“Burn” b/w “Coronarias Redig” is released as a single in the US and reaches #105. It is also released in Japan.
1
In the USSR, young rock fan Michael Nakoryakov gets the thrill of a lifetime, the type of thing kids in America and Western Europe take for granted:
“It was April Fools Day, 1974, and I came home from my Moscow high school entirely happy. I had finally got my hands on a copy of Machine Head, an album by a British rock band called Deep Purple.
“It wasn’t important that the vinyl was a bit scratched. In the old Soviet Union, where Western rock music was officially considered decadent and wasn’t sold in the stores, having a chance to listen to such a record, no matter the condition, was a dream for many.
“At least for me it was. For my father, who came home from work sometime later, that was just some ugly, loud noise coming from my room. Our conversation that day was not pleasant.
“I still can feel that warm and breezy spring day in Moscow, visualize a shabby Soviet-made record player and hear the harsh, wild but also strangely melodic sounds of ‘Highway Star,’ ‘Pictures of Home’ and ‘Smoke on the Water.’ I also vividly remember my highly intelligent, well-read father delivering an angry lecture about how awful my musical tastes were.
“He was a great guy, my dad, but he didn’t belong with us. ‘Us,’ in this case, included a mixed-up Soviet teenager and five long-haired, bell-bottomed, immensely talented and rebellious British musicians, just a few years older than I was. There was a close connection between us, even though the Brits obviously had no clue that I even existed. Actually, to me, those guys did not seem real, either -- their mesmerizing hard-rock galaxy was far, far away from Moscow, Russia.”
Michael eventually becomes a journalist, moves to America, and writes for a paper in Utah.
2
Albuquerque, NM.
Also today, all bands participating in the California Jam on the 6th must submit a written list of all the songs they plan to perform, in order to aid the ABC lighting/camera/sound crews.
3-4
Municipal Auditorium, Denver, CO.
5
The Starship flies into Los Angeles so that DP may do a technical run-through at Ontario Speedway. A nervous TV director asks Blackmore if he plans to smash any guitars; Ritchie does not answer directly, prompting the director to ask him to “favor the camera.”
The band then returns to their hotel, the Holiday Inn.
Coverdale: “I was with Ritchie in the Holiday Inn, Ontario the night before the Cal Jam. We watched thousands of cars slowly moving to the festival site and waited to time the sunset, so we would know what time we would take the stage the next day. It was actually in our contract that we would go on at sunset, and be the first band to use stage lighting.”
6
Purple arrive by helicopter for the first California Jam Festival, the all-day event also featuring ELP, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Earth Wind and Fire, Black Oak Arkansas, Rare Earth, and Seals and Crofts. In the chopper they are stunned
to see an audience of around 350,000 people: 100,000 ticket holders and at least 250,000 gate crashers. DJ Don Imus is also present.
In retrospect, the eclectic bill allows just about every major rock subdivision of the day to be represented: prog-rock (ELP), hard rock (DP), heavy metal (Black Sabbath), California country rock (The Eagles), Southern boogie (Black Oak Arkansas), black soul (Earth, Wind, and Fire), white soul (Rare Earth), and folk (Seals and Crofts). Only fusion, glam, and bubblegum seem to be left off.
The event shows just how much WEA has amassed; Purple, Seals and Crofts, and Sabbath are on Warners, ELP and BOA are on Atlantic, and the Eagles are on Asylum.
A latter-day newspaper account sets the scene:
“As one stoned-sounding surfer dude put it in a man-in-the-crowd interview during the broadcast, ‘This is the mellowest concert California’s ever had!’ Another fan predicted that the concert was such an event, the Beatles would reunite onstage.
“Paul Treadway, who was mayor in 1974, said Ontario had never seen anything like California Jam -- and hasn’t seen its like since.
“’This was the largest thing that ever happened here,’ Treadway said. ‘It was another city here for a day. It was enormous.’
“’You never think of that many people gathering in Ontario,’ reflected Maricarmen Ruiz-Torres, curator of the Ontario Museum of History and Art. ‘The Eagles, Black Sabbath -- it must have put some people over the edge.’
“News accounts of the concert use the phrase ‘sea of humanity’ to describe the audience on the grass at the now-defunct speedway, which was located just north of Interstate 10 between Haven and Milliken avenues.
“Aerial photos of the concert bear out the ‘sea of humanity’ cliché. So many people are massed together that from the air, the crowd looks like a march on Washington.
“’It was just overwhelming, the number of people,’ recalled Lloyd Scharf, then a patrol officer who helped with security and now is Ontario’s police chief. “Forget peace and love, though: California Jam was sponsored by a corporate media giant, ABC, which created the event and then aired it on the network’s late-night In Concert series --making the festival perhaps an early example of synergy.
“Among the visual highlights were Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore lighting his guitar and amplifier ablaze, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer keyboardist Keith Emerson playing a piano that was suspended in the air and then spun in circles.
“Thanks to good planning and a security staff of 700, the concert was a marvel of organization.
“Rare Earth went on at 9:45 a.m., 15 minutes early, and the rest of the acts also took the stage on time, with the concert ending as scheduled around 10 p.m. A railroad car was used to wheel one act offstage while the next act was wheeled on, minimizing down time.
“Stars stayed at the local Holiday Inn and were flown to the concert by helicopter. To keep fans away, the message sign outside the motel read: ‘Welcome Western States Police Officers Assn.’ [Super 8 footage of Deep Purple is filmed here as well.]
“Ontario’s City Council allowed the concert with reluctance, ith even supporters fearing the worst from the rock and roll crowd, including drugs and deaths. Critics decried city participation in an event that could prove to be a bad moral example for local youth.
“The concert turned out to be relatively tame. No one died and arrests were scant, although the 250 police officers, from several Inland Valley police agencies, were badly outnumbered [another report states, “no births, no deaths”]. Photos in the Ontario Police Department files show marijuana use, a fan freaking out in the medical aid ‘bummer tent’ and lots of public nudity and urination.
“Scharf recalled watching 30,000 gate-crashers tear down a fence to get in for free. There was nothing he or his partner could do.
“The real problem was traffic. Cars were backed up on the freeway as far as 13 miles. Unable to get to the concert, hundreds of people abandoned their cars by the side of the freeway -- sometimes four deep -- and walked to the show. Some 700 cars were later towed. Meanwhile, the parking lot was half-empty.
“Despite the problems, Scharf said he preferred the festival crowd to the typical speedway audience, which hit the streets after a race in a Mario Andretti frame of mind.
“’At least these (California Jam) people were mellow,’ Scharf said.
“With a crowd of 200,000, California Jam was not the largest festival of its time. Woodstock, Watkins Glen and Altamont drew 300,000 to 600,000 fans. However, those festivals had so many gate-crashers that the majority of people got in free. Concertgoers also left 30 tons of trash, which took a platoon of 62 workers eight days to remove.
“Treadway, the former mayor, said he considered the concert a success. ‘It really focused (attention) on Ontario. It made our name known,’ he said. ‘It was not only nationwide, it was international. We could not have purchased the publicity we acquired from that.’”
Backstage before their performance, Deep Purple is delighted to run into Linda Lovelace, still their favorite porn star. (As one reviewer notes, “Miss Lovelace is at once youthful, passably pretty, and has a lithe and supple body. And while she evidences not the slightest talent for acting, she does not posses what no less authority than the New York Times has termed ‘a virtuoso talent for fellatio.’”)
The huge stage features a painted rainbow backdrop. Because the show has been running early, at 6:30 Blackmore angers the local police--and an ABC-TV promoter—by refusing to go onstage until 7:30, sundown, as stipulated by contract.
“The thing that we wanted to do was to go on at dusk, because it is sort of a mysterious time,” Tony Edwards admits. “As the night falls the effect becomes greater.”
“The show’s producer--I won’t name him--came into my dressing room and demanded that we go on immediately,” Blackmore remembers. “I had just gotten there. I just ignored him.
“The guy kept standing there and said we’d be off the show if I wasn’t onstage by the time he counted to 30. I sat there, tuned my guitar, and listened to him count out loud. He hadn’t reached 15 when I had him thrown out. Forget the
money we stood to lose, it was a matter of principle. Even Jon Lord came to me in the end and said, ‘Look, will you go on...for the band?’ I told him absolutely not and was ready to quit the band right then and there.”
The band hides Blackmore so that the sheriff cannot find him.
“It was always Ritchie that caused these kind of problems. I’ll never forget the show’s producer storming into the band’s dressing room screaming at them,” recalls Tony Edwards. “’If you don’t come out of that fuckin’ Winnebago by the time I count to thirty, you’re off the show!’”
Ossie Hoppe, a roadie, hears this and runs onstage to announce to the increasingly restless crowd that Deep Purple will be on in a few minutes.
“That saved the day for us,” Lord believes. “They couldn’t kick us off the show, after that.”
At dusk, when the lights are the most impressive, DP finally hit the stage and play a show violent even by their standards.
“The Cal Jam was initially rather daunting,” Coverdale remembers. “When I first saw the crowd, my response on mic was ‘Mother,’ like some little lost boy!”
But Coverdale is good-humored enough, joking about swallowing flies (“it must be me deodorant!”) and asking “where’s the sunset?” between songs, and Lord cheerfully introduces all the players. The organist calls himself “Rick Wakeman” and then introduces Hughes as “the man who’ll be selling ice cream after the show,” owing to the bassist’s all-white attire, to which Glenn replies, “Fuck off.”
Between songs Coverdale takes sips from a can of Coca-Cola.
(Fans listening to playbacks of the show often feel that Hughes’ soul/gospel vocal histrionics are getting out of hand, but that Coverdale is too subdued. “I was fine at Cal Jam,” Coverdale later counters. “I just don’t feel it’s
necessary to blow my cookies every time I open my mouth.”)
Blackmore throws one of his guitars into the audience after powerfully swinging it (back in high school he was a star javelin thrower); scores of concertgoers go crazy trying to claim it. Rumor has it that a man named Terry, later a huge fan of Ronnie James Dio, catches it.
During the climax tune “Space Truckin’” Blackmore, angry at everyone from ABC-TV, uses another Strat to smash a $70,000 camera he deems too close to him. According to Blackmore:
“Actually, I hadn’t planned to go for the camera. I was out to kill this guy who gave me the countdown. I thought he’d be onstage. If he had been, you would have seen more than a smashed camera. I don’t like violence, but I was raving that night...”
Then the “bad boy” blows up one of his dummy amps (with the aid of Ron Quinton, who adds perhaps too liberal a dose of gasoline to it); the gigantic explosion sends the guitarist sprawling forward (which some mistake for dancing) and
destroys much of the stage. Paice’s glasses are blown off, and rumor has it Blackmore’s hair catches on fire.
Blackmore also throws an entire speaker cabinet into the orchestra pit.
“Ritchie says that was spontaneous, but I think he had planned that all along,” muses Edwards. “He was on TV before millions of people and I think he wanted to do something spectacular.” John Coletta rushes Blackmore into a helicopter to escape arrest by the fire marshal; from there, he gets flown to the hotel, then to a limo to speed out of Ontario County.
Blackmore reportedly tells Hughes after the show, “You know, you can’t have too many more [good] nights like that.”
(While this is Coverdale’s first ever show in California, Glenn Hughes’ first American show with Trapeze was at Stanford University in December 1970).
A bit of trivia: Ontario Motor Speedway (designed to be a replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway) is used as a location for the shooting of the low budget Roger Corman film Death Race 2000 (1975).
Bootlegs: California Jam '74, Just Might Take Your Life [sic], Let's Go Space Trucking, Perks and Tit, and Pre Snake. (The extensive bootlegging results in part from the fact that several radio stations carry a stereo simulcast of the whole Cal Jam.)
One of the biggest fans of the whole Cal Jam phenomena, a teenager named Scott “Wereo” Lifshine, records the whole thing in stereo. He treasures his reel-to-reels of the event and has this to say:
“Back in my High School days, when we had just grown the hair out long for the first time to look and be like Ritchie Blackmore, when I had to paint the ‘63 Dodge Dart purple, when I had to deafen schoolmates in the back, AND the front bench seats of the Dart, with the Craig Powerplay transmission hump mounted 30 watts per channel 8-track player with Yes and Edgar Winter and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Emerson Lake & Palmer and the like, the California Jam 1974 mega concert was the best thing that could’ve EVER happened to us. And it still is!
“My thoughts on the Purple performance, from the materials that I have on hand here, are that it is an absolutely out of control cacophony, of sound and visual brilliance that must be experienced and witnessed to be believed at all. The Sound Recording of the Deep Purple Set I have on hand here is the truest Scott Lifshine/California Jam lore at its best. What happens at the end of ‘Space Truckin’’ is total chaos and things really do get a bit out of hand. You must hear the Lifshine Cal Jam Recordings to feel that unprecedented audience reaction.
“I think Glenn Hughes’ performance at California Jam is an absolutely brilliant vocal spectacle. However I have had some people tell me over the years that they didn’t like what they called his ‘screeching’ on my recordings. Personally I can and do listen to this so-called ‘screeching’ all day long and I’m loving it. Every day of the week. It’s the Wereo!”
Concertgoer Adam Landers remembers:
“It was my very first concert and an overwhelming experience for a 14 year old kid. My friend Dennis and I took the bus to the show (our parents refused to drive us!). I’d been to the Ontario Motor Speedway before for races and the entire concourse was packed, wall to wall people, some as far as 1/2 mile from stage. We wanted to be up close, and slowly made our way through the throng. ‘What’s that smell?,’ we wondered. Something sweet in the air. Marijuana, of course! Everyone was smokin’. ‘Hey look,’ said Dennis. I turned my head and saw two Hippies (a few were still in existence in ‘74) lying naked on a blanket. Never having seen a naked lady in person, it took several seconds for me to stop staring! We made it to the front of the stage by the end of Seals & Crofts set. There was a 20 foot gap between the chain-link fence and the stage. Security roamed around in there, as well as ABC camera crews. I looked back into a sea of people, as far as I could see.
“Next up was Black Oak Arkansas, turning in a molten set of twin [sic; actually they had three guitarists—CC] guitar boogie. Jim Dandy whipped the crowd up with exhortations against Nixon and the Vietnam War during Tommy Aldridge’s drum solo. Their set culminated with the guitarists smashing two beautiful Gibson 335s together in mid-air! Oh the humanity!
“After a 45 minute wait, Black Sabbath was helicoptered in behind the stage. We then learned the meaning of Rock & Roll. Ozzy was not a clown in those days, but a dead serious front man backed by music that seemed to have been created in Hell. He wore a gold cape with white tights, looking like a spaceman. Tony Iommi’s sound, through stacks of Orange amps, remains to this day the most massive guitar sound I’ve ever heard. Geezer Butler played as if possessed, whipping his head round and round. The whole thing was propelled by Bill Ward, who played like his life depended on it. There was nothing like Black Sabbath in their prime. Their dark sound held a mirror up to Vietnam and the turbulence of the ‘60s. Sabbath’s music was as close to a physical force as music can be. They were on fire that day.
“There was a long delay after their set before Deep Purple took the stage. Seems Ritchie and the boys wanted to wait until sundown before beginning their set. Deep Purple was my favorite band in those days. Blackmore showed me what Rock and Roll performance was all about, dancing all over the stage, playing with his leg stuck out, etc. We blew our minds when he smashed his Strat into the ABC camera lens and set his amps on fire. Put simply, Ritchie Blackmore was, and remains, the greatest guitarist and performer to ever come down the pike. He IS Rock and Roll. DP turned in a killer set. Jon Lord rocked his Hammond back and forth until it seemed it would tip over. David Coverdale remarked that this was his very first American show. What a mindblower for a 21 year-old! If memory serves, they only played about 10 songs, but each one featured extended solos from Blackmore and Lord, two master musicians from the golden age of Rock.
“Finally, at around 9pm, Emerson, Lake and Palmer took the stage. They may have been the three greatest musicians ever to play in the same band. They had just released Brain Salad Surgery, their masterpiece, and their set featured the ‘Karn Evil 9’ trilogy. My jaw was dropped to the ground watching Keith Emerson move between his giant Moog, with all those wires plugged in, and his other synths, his Hammond and his Grand Piano. He tried to outdo Ritchie Blackmore by stabbing the Hammond with daggers during a long solo! Greg Lake’s booming, crystal clear voice cut through the night on song after amazing song. And Carl Palmer turned in a solo on a spinning drum set that has only ever been matched by Neil Peart. ELP set finished with fireworks set off behind Keith Emerson who sat in front of the Grand Piano, held 10 feet off the stage by cables. The piano, with Keith still playing, was then spun around in circles as the crowd went wild. Think about it, Rock Fans: Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Deep Purple; Black Sabbath; Black Oak Arkansas. And those were only the bands we saw. Also featured were Seals and Crofts, Rare Earth, and, oh yeah, some little ol’ band called The Eagles, who were just starting out in 1974.
“As the show ended and the enormous crowd began the slow, stoned-out trudge to the dirt parking lots outside the raceway, I noticed that my friend Dennis was missing. I walked across the racetrack and stepped over the retaining wall where I’d seen Indy cars fly by at 200+ mph. They could never match the sheer power of the music at California Jam! It turned out that Dennis, checking the time, had left midway through ELP’s set in order to catch the last bus home, from Ontario to the San Fernando Valley. I had no such luck. Making my way in the dark, through dusty fields, I managed to find the Ontario Greyhound Station. It was past midnight. I called home and told my Mom of my predicament. ‘Please don't tell Dad,’ I begged. I knew he’d just kill me and never allow me to go to another Rock Concert. So my Mom called next door to our neighbor, who was cool enough to drive 85 miles at one in the morning to come and get me! The next morning, I got up early to throw my paper route. My ears still rung from the volume and everything sounded high-pitched. My little brother asked me how the concert was and I thought about it, but I really didn’t have the words to describe it (and still don’t). The music was still blasting through my head: ‘All I hear is Burrrrrn!’.... ‘You’ve never seen anything like Ritchie Blackmore,’ was all I could think to tell him. There will never again be anything remotely like California Jam. At least, not in this lifetime.”
Some other Cal Jam testimonials:
· Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath: “We hadn’t played live in a few months, and we were skeptical about the gig. So we kind of half pulled out, if you like. But then we got a call saying, ‘Come to California,’ or we would be sued for a lot of money. There were arguments between Deep Purple and ELP over who would close the show, and we just said, ‘Look, just put us anywhere on the bill you want.’ It was really nerve wracking playing for so many people!”
· Harvey Jett, Black Oak Arkansas: “‘Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll!’ screamed 350,000 fans at one of the biggest concerts we had ever dreamed of playing. Ontario Speedway in California was jammed…with people who had gathered to hear twenty [sic] different rock groups. They all preached the same message: eat, drink and be merry. Take it if it gets you high. Do it if it feels good. Right there in the crowd, people died of drug overdose and heat exposure and young pregnant girls gave birth. I was lead guitar player and vocalist for Black Oak Arkansas. Standing there on the twenty-foot-high stage, I looked out across the ocean of sunburned, drug-dazed faces and asked myself, ‘Is this what life is all about?’ I saw people around me die in car wrecks and of overdoses. I started thinking a lot about death and wondering about God. I was growing hungry for the truth about living. Who was I, Really? What if I should die like some of the others--was there life after death? I became so afraid, so lonely, and so miserable, that I wanted to quit and go home. After my surrender to Jesus I knew God was telling me to leave the band and that whole scene. In order to be released, I agreed to forfeit the rest of my record royalties, thousands of acres of real estate, cash in banks, tax shelters, pension funds, and all of my equipment. I felt ripped apart at leaving something behind that I loved and had worked seven years to help build.” (Less than two months after Cal Jam, he quits BOA for good [replaced by Jimmy Henderson] and becomes a minister who also works at a car dealership in Madisonville, Kentucky. As a side note, Glenn Hughes has played shows before with BOA—in 1972 while he was still with Trapeze.)
· Greg Lake, ELP: “Ritchie just kept whacking that camera again and again. Normally, Ritchie’s a pretty nice guy, but he was a bit of a bad boy that night...”
7
Big Surf, Phoenix, AZ.
Behind the scenes, Purple’s management writes a letter to ABC Entertainment, stating, “In the enthusiasm of the moment at the California Jam last night...the Deep Purple lead guitarist clearly, we understand, damaged one of your company’s stage television cameras. First, we would like to express our apologies for the incident. Second, we will of course be only too happy to pay for the reasonable cost of whatever repairs are necessary.
“While writing, may we congratulate you for the excellence of the organization and the obvious success of the event. A lot of young people clearly enjoyed themselves which, after all, is one of the primary objectives.
“Thank you for your own considerable contribution. I hope you get the quality of Video for which you hoped.”
DP is ordered to pay for a new camera as well as damages to a California Jam technician who claims his ears were permanently damaged in the explosion. The band is left with only $10,000 out of the original $400,000 Cal Jam fee.
Ironically, Blackmore remains nonplussed about his onstage antics. “I haven’t taken steps toward becoming a guitar star simply because I don’t fit the mold,” he confides. “That’s best left to people like Jimmy Page, who look the part.
I always get embarrassed when I start flaunting myself. I could be very sexy onstage, but all that business is rather silly. I know I’m a great guitarist. I know I can blow any guitarist off any stage. I’m totally satisfied with myself. Combing my hair doesn’t make me a better artist. I get knocked by other musicians for guitar bashing, but then they’re all starving and they wonder why.”
For a brief time, Emerson Lake & Palmer consider filing suit against Deep Purple, claiming that Blackmore’s destruction had so disrupted everyone that ELP’s own performance suffered, but they drop it.
Perhaps the longest-lasting impact of the Cal Jam on DP is that John Coletta decides never to go on tour with the band again.
9
San Diego Sports Arena, San Diego, CA.
At the start of the show, Coverdale announces, “This is the last gig of our tour, so it’s going to be a bastard, ok?” In actuality it is the second to last show on the American tour.
A few songs in, Hughes gleefully announces, “This one’s not being taped, so we say and do what we want,” but, like Coverdale, he is also off the mark: the soundboard is being taped and will eventually be widely circulated.
During the first few tunes, the Man In Black has a hard time keeping his Stratocaster in tune, particularly during “Lay Down Stay Down.” “Burn” finds the band trying to keep up with Blackmore’s uncharacteristically sloppy but punk-like energy. Finally in tune, Blackmore takes his own sweet time launching into the main riff to “Mistreated,” treating the audience to one of his lengthiest, most echo-laden free-form intros to that tune ever. Lord’s intro to “You Fool No One” is a generous five minutes.
One fan in attendance, however, does not feel it is a great Purple show, stating that Coverdale and Hughes were awful:
“It was a moment of utter misery for Ritchie I could tell you that. I would have quit that night if I had to listen to those two destroy what was left of my reputation and my band.”
This venue has an interesting history: Built in 1966, its first concert was James Brown in 1967, and in 1970 Elvis Presley played there, supplying it with its most interesting bit of folklore:
“[Elvis] met a security guard working backstage who, as it turns out, hailed from Elvis’ hometown. They shared a few laughs and Elvis went on to perform to a full house and leave town. The next day, much to the amazement of the security guard and the entire Arena staff, a brand new Cadillac was delivered to the security guard-the King’s newfound, hometown friend-compliments of the King himself, Elvis Presley!”
Bootlegs: California Earthquake, Burnin’ Passion, and Perks and Tit. (Only the first 50 minutes of the show are known to have survived on tape.)
Around this time, Hughes begins to hang out at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with a fellow Brummie, Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne. (In the early ‘70s, Sabbath and Trapeze occasionally played UK gigs together).
Blackmore, however, does not want to be lumped in with that band:
“Nothing’s worse than hearing someone say, ‘Deep Purple? Wow, man. They’re just like Blaaaack Saaaaabath, knocking out all the riffs.’ If people can’t comprehend the certain subtleties that we put into the music, I'm afraid I haven’t the patience to explain them. I have no tolerance for fools. Nobody tells me what to do.”
By contrast, Lord thinks the primary difference between Sabbath and Purple is that Purple’s music has more humor to it.
10
The Burn US tour ends in Tucson, AZ. (The night before, fellow Cal Jammers Black Oak Arkansas had played a concert there).
On board the Starship, the band is presented with a cake which reads, “Deep Purple It’s been great, from all of us on Starship I.”
Ian Paice reflects on how Coverdale has handled his first American tour:
“When we saw David it was like looking at an uncut diamond. We thought, ‘He’s good, now how can we make it shine?’ He needed a cutter and the cutter was experience. The David we took to America is a quarter of the David we brought back.”
Afterwards the band flies back to the United Kingdom.
This night, ABC-TV airs part of Purple’s performance on In Concert. The second part is aired on the 24th.
From the DP tour, Savoy Brown goes on to headline 16 shows in the US, with an upstart makeup-wearing band called KISS as the opening act. Remembers KISS crew member Rick Munroe, “After a while, we all noticed that the Savoy Brown guys were pretty much a bunch of British drunks. It was nothing out of the ordinary if during the middle of their show one of them wandered to the backline area and just took a leak off the back of the stage.” As for Tucky Buzzard, they break up soon after the Burn tour, having never achieved a comfortable level of popularity.
14
Blackmore turns 29.
Meanwhile, a “Tour Bio” is released in the UK listing all the equipment used by the band:
· Glenn Hughes - 1 Rickenbacker Bass, 2 Custom Built Solid State Bass Amps and 8 Reflex Cabinets
· Ritchie Blackmore - 8 Fender Stratocasters, 1 Gibson S.G. Special, 1 Gibson Les Paul and 1 Yamaha Acoustic. 2 x 300 Watt Custom Built Marshall with 2 stacks of Marshall 100 Watt Cabinets.
· Jon Lord - Hammond C.3 Organ A.R.P. Synthesiser with Marshall and Fender Twin Reverb Amps.
· Ian Paice - Custom Built Ludwig Drum Kit and Paiste Cymbals throughout.
· P.A. System - Contract hire P.A. from Marshall Equipment Hire consisting of 6,000 watts with a 22 Channel Stereo Studio Mixer.
18
The UK tour, with Elf as the support act, begins at the Caird Hall in Dundee, Scotland. Throughout the tour, the band gets praise for sticking to their established tour circuit—theaters and ballrooms—rather than upgrade (or “sell out,” depending on one’s views) and play in the “vast aircraft hangers” so favored by other bands like Led Zeppelin.
Melody Maker’s Jeff Ward reviews the show:
“At 8:50 Purple walk on, cloaked in darkness. There’s an almighty roar from the crowd as Dave yells into the mike: ‘How are you!?’ As a long living chord opens ‘Burn,’ smoke comes rushing on to the stage from both sides and as the lights go up the first thing you notice is the mikestand held high in the air by Dave. Immediately hundreds of kids rush the stage. The first onslaught gets pushed back by stewards into the second one coming down. They crash together and start cascading over the seats. Ritchie plays a ludicrously fast and neat solo and leonine Glenn rips into his high range vocals in a kind of duel with Dave; they push each other all the time. They’re more a balanced group than ever before, it’s wonderful to see them back, looking so good. Backstage afterwards Dave hugged me—and anyone else who go it range—joyfully.”
Coverdale on Dundee: “It was a gas. One interesting thing was that at the show a certain young man, who goes by the name of Gungi, was in the audience. Apparently, he made up his mind, there and then, to get into the music biz. Later on, down the road, he became my front of house soundman for many of my Whitesnake shows, and became a very good friend.”
Elf have just completed their second album, Carolina Country Ball (or LA 59, as it is called in the US), once again produced by Roger Glover at Kingsway Studios. Glover even sings background vocals on one track. Another of the album’s tracks, “Rocking Chair Rock n’Roll Blues,” is an almost verbatim re-write of Humble Pie’s version of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody.” Floridian guitarist Steve Edwards (who drives a Porsche) has replaced Dave Feinstein on guitar duties. Ronnie Dio has given up playing bass to concentrate solely on singing; Craig Gruber becomes Elf’s new bass player.
Mickey Lee Soule: “I thought that [Ronnie] was always a very good bass player especially that he would play and sing at the same time which there is a little extra difficulty in that. He wasn’t very fancy but he played very simple, solid bass lines and he is actually a great musician. When he was younger he played trumpet and all kinds of different things. It was actually his choice really; he decided that he wanted to just be a front man. He could spend more time and more of his efforts on singing and not have to worry about the bass and that is why we got the bass player eventually.”
Asked to comment on the band, Roger Glover is obviously proud—especially of Ronnie Dio:
“[Dio] is essentially the character, has an incredible personality, a marvelous sense of humour, and is the natural cynic I enjoy.
“Ronnie rules—make no mistake about that, he runs the band…what he says goes!
“When it comes to adding Ronnie’s vocal you find his phrasing is perfect…he’s good, a natural singer. Ronnie’s voice has all the qualities of Rod Stewart, John Fogerty and more…he’s got finesse and with time could become a fantastic standard singer.”
This is the first time Elf has toured with DP Mk 3, and Mickey Lee Soule notices a difference right off the bat:
“[Since late 1972] we had done a number of shows with other headliners and a 1973 tour with Uriah Heep. By the time we were back on the road with Deep Purple, the big change had been made. We had been very close to Roger especially, and it seemed weird to not have him or Ian around. David and Glenn were both very friendly, however, but it wasn’t long before Ritchie started talking to us and expressing his displeasure with Purple’s direction.”
19
Edinburgh Odeon.
This venue is close to one of Coverdale’s favorite sites: “Rain or not, get yer arse out to Rosslyn Chapel. It’s about 7 miles outside Edinburgh. It is a must.”
Bootleg: Live In Edinburgh.
20
Burn peaks at US #9 in Billboard magazine. The rest of the back catalogue—particularly Made In Japan and Machine Head--continues to sell well in the States.
21-22
Glasgow Apollo.

Trip To Texas

2005-10-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

I have returned from the Lone Star State.
Friday night's flight was uneventful save a little too much turbulence. I fell asleep for a little bit and when I woke up I looked out the window. "That has to be Dallas," I thought, looking at the endless city of lights. "It's too big to be anywhere else on the way." And it was. There was a football field every ten feet or so. Anyone who's seen Varsity Blues or Friday Night Lights will know why. Ahem...
Jeff met me at the airport and we stopped off and got some fast food on the way back to his beautiful home, which I had never seen before. His wife Jen was there to greet us, as well as his two grotesquely overweight cats, Zoe and Diego. I checked out the huge new home theater. Over the next two days we watched a little bit of everything: SNL's new episode, SNL Best of DVDs, and these DVDs: Suspiria, Fast and the Furious, The Empire Strikes Back, Led Zeppelin (we absolutely cranked it on the song "Kashmir," but the room is soundproofed so much that no one else could hear!)
On Saturday he showed me the city proper: I saw the TX Book Depository where Kennedy's killer lurked on the 6th floor, the grassy knoll, and other stuff downtown. I also saw the ranch where the show Dallas was partially filmed. I'm blanking on hte name right now.
I saw very few people with cowboy hats on--that must be a stereotype. There was one family on an elevator where the father and son were wearing matching hats, and I thought about that scene in European Vacation where Chevy Chase and his son wore matching berets in Paris. Not a pretty site. For lunch we ate BBQ and for dinner, Tex-Mex. It was quite good...I had a Bloody Mary in a glass about the size of the average fishbowl, and then finished off Jeff's potent Marguerita but even then only felt a little tipsy.
On Sunday we went shopping so I could get the kids some kind of treat. I got Ian a Spider Man action figure and Brittney, the Sims Expansion pack known as Makin' Magic. (They were incredibly happy about these two gifts, which combined were less than $20! You don't always have to spend a fortune to make kids happy...I wish more adults were that way). I even picked up a DVD for myself called Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key. We went out to dinner for some Thai food and also played some pool. Got my ass handed to me 3 times in a row, but "it's not whether you win or lose..." Then it was back to the home theater for more viewing! I also got online for a few minutes to hit a few of my regular hangout spots and assure everyone my plane hadn't crashed (WAH-WAH...)
Got up early today and was dropped off at the airport for an 11 AM flight. Got back to NC about 2:30 (our time). What a trip. I thank you, Jeff and Jen (and Zoe and Diego) for a pleasant, very overdue visit.

My Jedi Can Beat Up Your Jedi

2005-10-02T17:17:00.000-05:00

Some controversy has raged on various SW sites over who the best saber duellist was. After much thought, I have come up with this ranking:

1. Yoda/Palpatine/Ep III Anakin (unsuited Vader): 3 Tied for first place! If I was forced to rank them, I would say Ep III Anakin is the best, followed by Yoda and then Palpatine.
2. Mace Windu (Not far behind top 3)
3. Count Dooku (Not far behind Windu)
4. Suited Darth Vader
5. Ep II/III Obi-Wan (beat Anakin due to luck + Anakin’s hubris)
6. General Grievous
7. Ep II (Padawan) Anakin
8. ROTJ Luke (beat suited Vader by channeling dark side of force a la Windu)
9. Darth Maul
10. Qui-Gon Jinn
11. Various Secondary PT Jedi (Kit Fisto/Shaak Ti/Ki Adi Mundi, etc.)
12. Older Obi-Wan (“Your powers are weak, old man”—and they were)
13. ESB Luke

And some sample hypothetical fights:

Suited Vader vs. Maul: The fight we’d all like to see. Some would say Maul would prevail because he’s so fast (and has a double blade), and Vader is a relatively stationary pseudo-cripple. But Vader has excellent defensive skills and the ability to study his opponents, looking for their weaknesses. He would let Maul do his flashy thing, wearing him down, and then lunge in for the kill. Exeunt Maul.

Maul vs. Dooku: Again, many would say that Maul would prevail over the aging, relatively stationary Dooku. But Dooku’s fighting stance, similar to Vader’s, means he would be able to defend himself from the “all flash and no substance” Darth Maul. Dooku would prevail relatively easily.

Maul vs. older Obi-Wan: Here’s where Maul would, ahem, get his revenge on the guy who sliced him in half thirty three years earlier. Older, slower Obi-Wan would find himself quite dizzy trying to keep up with Maul. And remember, Obi-Wan in his younger days really only defeated Maul through sheer luck.

Dooku vs. older Obi-Wan: An interesting fight between two skilled old pros, but Dooku would have a considerable edge considering the younger, stronger, faster Obi-Wan was bested by him two times!

ROTJ Luke vs. Darth Maul: A tougher, stronger Luke would have the edge over Maul, but it would take a little while. I daresay that ROTJ Luke was slightly ahead of Ep 1 era Obi-Wan, who just barely defeated Maul. Maul would get a few licks in, but Luke would last long enough to finally go Medieval on his ass like he did to Vader at the end of ROTJ.

ROTJ Luke vs. Dooku: Dooku has an edge in this fight due to experience. If he uses lightning, Luke is so dead it’s not funny. Like his Dad, he just never developed good defense against this! ROTJ Luke wasn’t as strong as prime Anakin, either.

Dooku vs. Suited Vader: A pretty even match, all things considered. I think ultimately Dooku would have to unleash his lightning and prevail by a hair. Vader could only prevail if he used his full aggression and evil intent over Dooku, who was always somewhat of a reluctant Sith. Age/experience wise, an even match (in the suit Vader is similar in age to an older man).

Qui-Gon vs. Suited Vader: Qui-Gon is underrated, but Maul bested him at little cost. And if we concede that Vader would best Maul, it’s basically a syllogism (Vader>Maul>Qui-Gon). Qui-Gon would go down proud, but go down he would!

Qui-Gon vs. Dooku: A good fight, pitting two radically different styles with two men who have gotten as good as they are going to get. Plus the whole master/apprentice showdown a la Obi-Wan and Anakin. Dooku would prevail; Qui-Gon would have a hard time breaking through his defenses. He would wear Dooku down to some degree, but Dooku would wait to make a killing blow—and probably psych him out with non-stop taunts to boot.

Qui-Gon vs. ESB Luke: Bye bye Luke. Qui-Gon had too much more finesse, patience, and experience, and Luke would be pretty outclassed at that point in his career. In fact, I don’t think ESB Luke would prevail against any of the “A” list characters and probably not many of the secondary Jedi (Shak Ti, Kit Fisto, etc). He really was barely more than Padawan level.

Qui-Gon vs. ROTJ Luke: A pretty even match, but I think Luke would still prevail by a nose.

Grievous vs. Maul: Maul would be dead. I think Maul is good against one or two opponents, but four sabers spinning at once would just intimidate and confuse the hell out of him. He’s not used to fighting that many at a time---he’s used to “shock and awe” against one or two. But this would probably be the “weirdest” looking of all these fights!

Grievous vs. Dooku: Since Dooku trained Grievous, Dooku has the edge. He didn’t teach him everything he knew—probably just in case he ever did have to truly fight him. He would rip him up much faster than Kenobi did.

Grievous vs. ROTJ Luke: Grievous would have the edge by a pretty comfortable margin. Luke would use a lot of aggression, but he has zero experience fighting more than one blade. As stated earlier, he’d have to really “bring it” to best Maul—but Grievous would be like fighting two Mauls (i.e. four blades).

Favorite Web Sites (Part I)

2005-09-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

Going over some old posts, which have obviously set the world on fire...NOT...I realized I had never devoted much time to talking about favorite websites, with the exception of, say Robert Fripp's diary. It is now time to rectum-fy, I mean rectify, that situation. These are in no particular order, although the first few are especially near and dear to me.

http://www.imdb.com

Still the greatest movie site of all time. The type of site you visit wanting to look up one specific thing ("Where have I seen that William H Macy dude in a movie before?") and end up staying for three hours. In the past year the message boards have gone up, and are easy to join. They have only increased my love of imdb. As an added bonus, the site is relatively "work-safe," meaning OK to browse at work, and they never change their classic white/yellow/blue color scheme.

http://www.deep-purple.net

Currently, the best site for Deep Purple fans. At one time, thehighwaystar.com was better, but in the past few years they have really disappointed me. deep-purple.net, by contrast, is run with a lot of input from Simon Robinson, the man behind the DP Appreciation Society and basically the world's foremost authority on the band. All the archives are readily available as well, unlike some band sites that tend to bury the older stuff away.

http://www.horrordvds.com

My favorite site for both mainstream and ultra-obscure horror films. The message boards are full of extreme characters, some you will like and others you will "love to hate," and betterdan's avatar was the stuff of legends. Discussions go off on many different tangents. I post under the name "Coverdale." The reviews are well-written, with great screen shots and thorough write-ups on the DVD extras. I can't say enough good stuff about the site except that at one point I was locked out of the boards for a long time and had a hard time getting a new password. In fairness, the webmaster really has his hands full.

http://www.rachel-dratch.com

Essential for all things Dratch. I am a charter member, posting under Raymond Dovetail. Under my real name, I contributed a chronology of her career which I update every so often.
(http://http://www.rachel-dratch.com/chronology.html) The webmistress, sunflowr, has put a lot of time and love into the overall site. I am proud to have made her acquaintance (online)...hope we get to hang out in "real life" sometime. The links to other SNL sites (plus the infamous "Debbie Downer blog") are also worth checking out.

http://www.the-force.net

"Your Daily Dose of Star Wars." Or "Yes, I'm a geek. Wanna make something of it? I'll hit you with my plastic lightsaber and make you my padawan (SW-ese for 'bitch')." Far more interesting than the "official" site. I especially like the fan fiction section, and one day I will contribute some. I've got a story in the works about Count Dooku (before he turned evil), teamed up with his padawan Qui-Gon Jinn. The two of them travel to Dagobah (fifty years before Yoda goes there) to investigate a cave strong with Dark Force energy. There, they encounter a dark Jedi (i.e. a Sith wannabe)...

http://www.classicrockrevisited.com

Great site for those interested in classic rock. Features penetrating interviews with guys you thought died of overdoses ten years ago. I have to smile, though...I wonder what percentage of visitors are 40-year-old guys with pot bellys who still ride Harleys on the weekend. For the record, I'm 33 and have never ridden a Harley.

http://www.myspace.com

Although I consider blogger.com's Chips From Dovetail page my "official" blog, this myspace site is starting to grow on me, slowly but surely. My own personal page is www.myspace.com/raymonddovetail How original, ehh? However, I'm not sure I like the "mechanics" of having to beg someone to be your friend if you'll be theirs. And if you're not careful, you just might give away "too much information" about yourself in your profile.

Whew...that's it for now. Eventually I'll post some more of my favorite sites.

Random Thoughts (Again)

2005-09-24T22:01:00.000-05:00

Just a few random thoughts before I sign off and go watch a DVD (tonight's SNL is Will Ferrell...seen it...slightly disappointed...next week is the season premiere, though!):

I just started my own page at myspace.com: myspace.com/raymonddovetail I doubt I'll update it often, but it's a decent enough site. And I chose the picture of Count Dooku, above, as my official picture, because he rules.
I'm currently beginning work on a Star Wars fan fic piece about Dooku's early days when he was still a Jedi with Qui-Gon Jinn as his padawan. They go investigate a remote planet called Dagobah, rumored to have a cave very strong in the dark side of the force. About 50 years later, of course, Yoda moves to Dagobah and eventually sends Luke Skywalker into said cave. Anyway, the upshot is that the Cave is the home of a Dark Jedi (not a Sith, just a Sith "wannabe") who is preparing to challenge the apprentice to one Darth Plagueis. Said apprentice, of course, is Darth Sidious, the future Palpatine. But this Dark Jedi never gets the chance, because Dooku and Jinn kill him. Even after his death, the cave remains strong in the Dark Side. When in exile on Dagobah, Qui-Gon's spirit tells Yoda about this cave. There...I gave away the ending.
Tonight I almost went to our local Hooters to see "Jimmy Fallon." It turns out, however, that it's not THE Jimmy Fallon, but some local musician with the same name. False advertising! The last time I ate at Hooters I asked our waitress if many people ever ordered the Three Mile Island (or whatever the hottest flavor is) wings. She said not too many and that she herself couldn't eat them. She also added, "Imagine going to the bathroom later on." Heh-heh...I now know I could date her (if I was single), because I like girls who can joke about diarrhea.
My daughter didn't get her $180 leotard in time for next week's meet (which the gym ordered), and Wifey is LIVID. I am too...
On a more serious note, please keep my wife's grandmother in your thoughts and prayers. She is not doing well, but let's see YOU (or ME) make it to 94.

Thinking ahead to the holidays...already

2005-09-19T21:49:00.000-05:00

Look closely at the man at left. He is Doctor Octopus, a/k/a Doc Ock, and my 3-year-old son Ian wants him for Christmas. The problem is, many of the figures in the Spider Man and Friends set are hard to find...ebay has them often for $20 or $30! Last year, we got him Wolverine, Thing, Spider-Man, and Hulk by taking out a second mortgage. I exaggerate, but not by much. Wal-Mart (yes, I still go there) has both Ice Man and Rhino, which are bound to be major finds, but Ian doesn't want them--at least, not at the moment. September 25 marks 3 months to Christmas. To really depress everyone: This means that on September 26, it will be less than 3 months until Christmas! So anyone who can spare a Doc Ock or Captain America at a reasonable price, please PM me. Does this site have PM's?

Now observe the man at the right. He is a sahuagin, a member of a race of intelligent sea devils who live far beneath the deepest depths of the ocean. The sahuagin are cruel and brutal; few humans have ever survived a sahuagin attack. Their king stands nine feet tall, and he orders prisoners to be chained and fed--to starving barracuda. I searched this picture out after thinking about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons the other day. No, Ian does not want a sahuagin for Christmas.

In other "holiday news," my brother in Texas wants to fly me out on Columbus Day weekend to see his home for the first time. He just completed a big home theater and has told me to pick out ten of my wildest/flashiest/sickest DVDs to view on ze "big screen." I best get packing soon.

Games People Play

2005-09-18T16:13:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched the E! rerun of SNL; the guest host was Eric McCormick. It had one of the single funniest sketches ever—as funny as the first Debbie Downer, or the one where Will Ferrell shows his patriotism by wearing a red, white, and blue thong to a board meeting. Three couples were hanging out at a party and playing a game where they each wrote down names of celebrities. Rachel Dratch played an ultra-competitive woman who couldn’t put up with the fact that her partner (McCormick) was not very good at guessing games. Eventually she goes crazy when trying to guess “Mendelssohn.” “Who the hell wrote Mendelssohn when this is supposed to be about celebrities!?” she screams as she throws glass objects around the room, breaks down the walls, and returns inside with the mail box in hand.

It got me thinking about my own family and friends and playing games. Whenever we go to visit my parents, they always want to play Trivial Pursuit; they assume I like it. Actually, I do, but I’m not obsessed with it. When I was in my teens I used to play it with my brother and sister. Since they were both younger than me, they would take questions from the “Young Player’s Edition” while I would take them from the “Genus Edition” (which they mispronounced the “Genius” Edition). I was good at every category except Sports & Leisure (whenever I get the pie to the center hub, they always pick a question from this cateogory). A word of warning: never play the Silver Screen Edition. I’m a film buff, but it’s hard as hell. A variation on Trivial Pursuit is something we invented called “Kick My Ass,” where we draw straws and whoever loses is on a team by themselves, while the other 4-5 people play on a team together. Sometimes the person by himself or herself manages to hold their own!

I occasionally play charades, but not very often. And for some reason I have never liked card games of any stripe, from Go Fish to Poker all the way up to the most complex Bridge. I’m actually intimidated by cards. Maybe because on my honeymoon we went gambling and I lost about $25 on blackjack in about 2.3 seconds. “Let’s stick to the slot machines!”

I never got seriously into video games, because my brother was always so damn good at them. But I did think Nintendo was pretty kickin’ when it came out around 1986, with the original Legend of Zelda. I was so obsessed; I actually had dreams about what Gannon was going to look like when we finally got to the final level. I thought he would be like a huge dinosaur, but if memory serves, he was actually a fat blue guy with an elephant’s trunk. Lately I’ve gotten somewhat into The Sims, but the novelty wears off and you have to buy all the expansion packs like Vacation and Hot Date to keep the interest up.

When I was younger I was an avid AD&D (that’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for all the non-geeks out there); many people said I was an excellent DM (Dungeon Master), good at making stuff up on the spur of the moment and keeping it interesting for the PCs (player characters). I rarely got to be a player character, but when I finally joined an ongoing campaign that someone else DM’d, I found I grew impatient with it. I also deliberately played non-human characters since no one else seemed to. My favorite was Gorg Ugg, a half-ogre fighter with a Low Intelligence but a heart of gold (always setting out to prove that half-ogres weren’t all that bad). His father was the ogre chieftain, Ugg Mooga, who had stolen a human woman from her village and raped her, thus producing “me.” That’s another thing—I got way too interested in the back story of characters rather than actually playing. One time a bunch of us spent the night at a guy’s house, determined to stay up all night playing, but we ended up just rolling up new characters, and designing a huge castle where we named every single one of the 100 or so troops that lived there. We started to run out of names: thus there was a dwarf named Roy Rogers!

I also went through my wargames period. (Needless to say I wasn’t dating yet.) There was a company called Avalon Hill which made all kinds of games which simulated the Vietnam War, Napoleonic Wars, battles from WWII, etc. Most of them were too complicated to play, especially GI Anvil of Victory. I did like Samurai and B17: Queen of the Skies, because I could play them by myself. Not many guys in the neighborhood wanted to sit down and recreate D Day in five hours.

Back to family games, there’s another game around called Outburst. My family can literally never play it because it always causes fights. A couple of years will go by and I’ll say, “Let’s try Outburst! We promise not to get into a fight!” and then we start to play it and remember why we shouldn’t. A similar game is Scattergories, although it hasn’t caused any friction.

My kids seem to really like Clue. My daughter has also discovered the film and has rented it a few times. She also went through a Life phase about a year ago. Kids think Life is a cool game because of all the pieces (kind of like Monopoly, I guess), but I think it goes on too long. Usually by the end, she’s trying to “make the game salty,” as my grandmother used to phrase it when everyone was getting cranky and trying to do a combination of cheat/cut corners/belittle other players/yell at others/whine about when it will be over. Something adults never do, of course.

A Bit More Fripp, Survivor, Cannibals & Bugs in Peanut Butter

2005-09-15T20:41:00.000-05:00

Checking in, 9:42 PM...Wife Wendy is watching the taped premiere of this season's Survivor. Set amongst the Mayan ruins, it looks okay. We were devotees of this show until about a year ago, when a lame group made us stop watching. Plus, it was hard to top ze All Stars and Rupert. I may try to watch the current season.

Perusing Fripp's diary today, I came across this random "blast from the past" entry from 1999, which I only post because I'm a horror movie buff:

Yesterday: I was reminded of an offer which came through a few months ago, to contribute a soundscapes [i.e. overdubbed guitar tracks, a Fripp specialty] track to the soundtrack album of a movie. The idea was this... the film has no music in it, but at the beginning of the action several college students are listening to tapes of scary music. And then, they go off into the woods. The soundtrack album was of the "scary tapes" they were listening to. The proposition struck me as bogo-to-the-max. Soundtrack albums "inspired by the movie" don't convince me conceptually, so this seemed even more bogo and I declined the offer. In this way soundscapes did not become part of the "soundtrack" allbum of "The Blair Witch Project".

Who knew? I actually liked BW Project, hype aside; few know that the inspiration for the film was Ruggero Deodato's infamous 1979 film Cannibal Holocaust, which I acquired from ebay last year. CH is quite a controversial film, filmed so realistically that the Italian courts actually made Deodato "prove" that no one died at the hands of cannibals while making it! The director also came under fire for actually killing animals. Italian cannibal flicks from the late '70s were hardly "PC." Neither were zombie flicks nor gialli.

Via videotape, old guy Jim is the first guy voted out of Survivor this year. I knew it! Old people rarely make it far in that game. And as a bonus, we got to miss George W. Bush's speech. At this point in the game, he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. Politics.

Tonight we ate at a Japanese restaurant which always seems to upset my stomach. And tonight was no exception. Somehow they have a "Sanitation Grade A" of 100! But since everyone else seems to like it, I'm willing to put up with it. The only problem is that, ahem, three hours later I'm hungry again. I far prefer Thai food, which, although it tends to be spicier, seems to be kinder on my rapidly aging intestinal tract. Kei Krob is my favorite dish!

Stop the presses: Now wifey is watching a show about how most common foods contain bug parts! A jar of peanut butter contains up to 100 bug parts! High in protein! Thanks, Discovery Health Channel!

If anyone wondered, that's not me and Wendy at the top of this post. Instead, it's a charming photo of Mr. and Mrs. Fripp in their garden in deepest Dorset, England, and I promise: no more Fripp for a while.

Forever In The Court...of the Frippian King

2005-09-14T20:55:00.000-05:00

Summer 1988: Whilst visiting a friend named Jeff F., I happened upon an album with one of the most amazing covers of all time. As can be seen above. A critic once said, "one of the most horrific images to ever grace a record. The cartoonish quality is all that keeps someone from screaming at the sight of it." Well, I didn't scream at the sight of it, but I sure as hell wanted to hear it! Jeff allowed me to borrow the album, and to this day I still have it.

Called In The Court of the Crimson King: An Observation By King Crimson, it introduced me to a new world: progressive rock (as opposed to, say, heavy metal). Crimson could be harder and darker than Sabbath or Purple. Just consider the lyrics to "21st Century Schizoid Man":

Cat's foot, iron claw
Neurosurgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door,
21st Century Schizoid Man

My ears naturally gravitated towards the guitar player, one Robert Fripp, whose playing sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I could play along with most of my albums, but when it came to Crimson, the challenge was immense. In fact the overall listening experience could be quite a challenge: Crim's music ranged from brilliant to boring. My top 10 KC albums:

Larks' Tongues In Aspic (1973)
In The Court of the Crimson King (1969)
Starless And Bible Black (1974)
Epitaph (1997; recorded 1969)
Red (1974)
Discipline (1981)
In The Wake of Poseidon (1970)
Lizard (1970)
Islands (1971)
Beat (1982)

(Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the colors I chose for the titles derive from the dominant color found on said album cover.)

By the early '90s I was just as interested in Robert Fripp the man, the instructor. For he was teaching week-long Guitar Craft seminars, having developed a New Standard Tuning (which I have discussed elsewhere), which he proceded to spread to students as a "new way of doing things." I contemplated attending one seminar, which cost in the neighborhood of $600, but what stopped me was not the price tag but the b.s.: much of the "philosophy," so to speak, comes from J.G. Bennett, a discipline of G.I. Gurdjieff, who taught a system of "becoming awake," so to speak. While there was much to praise in the approach, there also seemed a lot of pretension.

Still my admiration for the man continued. Eventually I discovered his "diary" (really a blog) at http://www.disciplineglobalmobile.com, in which he details his travels both on the road with Crimson as well as a "small, intelligent mobile unit." Those fans who email him have "kicked the hornet's nest," so to speak, and often find themselves in the midst of a polemic. Fripp shuns the trappings of celebrityhood; he dislikes posing for pictures, giving interviews, signing autographs, or being front and center onstage (he plays sitting down in the back!) Having said that, he is also something of a subtle bon vivant. With his web cam he often photographs the bed and breakfasts he stays in. He also appreciates art, literature, philosophy, and music theory. He clearly loves his wife, whom he has dubbed "The Little Horse." I can only guess why. Through her, his sense of humor often comes out. Consider this post:

To Holt for lunch in Hostelry Acceptable. The open courtyard has now become a covered area, so we sat inside at the front of the premises rather than inside at the back of the premises. T's soup was flavour-enhanced with a red plastic bottle-top. What made the bottle-top even less welcome to T was it had been well chewed. We informed a waiting-person, who checked with the kitchen. This was not from their kitchen! It must have been in the tomatoes their supplier provided! The soup was deducted from our bill, and there was no charge for the bottle top either.
Somehow, the explanation didn't quite convince – is there no quality control in the kitchen of food from their suppliers? for example; and deducting the cost of inedible food doesn't quite redeem a lunching experience.

Many read it for the "good stuff," of course. And by "good stuff" I mean his battles, so to speak, with fans. Consider Fripp's response to a fan who has unjustly criticized KC:

I don't mind if someone's dopey & on their own territory: that's not my (microcosmic) business. I mind when someone walks into my domain, believing they have "the right" to be there on the spurious assumption that they have "the right" because they have the right, and then delivers ill-considered, under-informed, disconnected & one dimensional judgements on complex situations and authentic concerns.
At this point, the dope becomes dangerous. The "atmosphere" is polluted, an opportunity is spoilt, and there begins a series of unnecessary repercussions which disturb what might be taking place, and/or about to be taking place.
The dangerous dope is not a "bad person": they are a dopey person. In my world, I don't mind someone who's dopey if they know they're dopey. Then, their commentary is attenuated by the knowledge of their ignorance. Then, they no longer seek to assume understanding of the motivation, decisions & choices of experienced players, with aims which go beyond the professional; who work in conditions which are not based on supporting the musical act; and on that basis offer helpful one-dimensional fixed solutions to multi-dimensional actions & events which are ongoing & unfolding in the face of massive intentional & unintentional opposition.

Not long ago someone on one of the message boards I frequent told me that in the early '70s, he happened to meet Robert Fripp backstage at a KC show. Asking the guitarist for his autograph, he was told to "get lost." For the Crimson King, the time must be right to do such a thing. One such time would be at the Epitaph listening party years later, when he agreed to sign album covers. Presented with a reel-to-reel box of In The Court of the Crimson King, Fripp remarked he had never seen that album released on reel-t0-reel. "It was really rare," the fan responded. Fripp smiled, drew a cartoon bubble above the screaming man's mouth, wrote "I'm Rare!" and then signed his name to it.

Sunday Night

2005-09-11T21:34:00.000-05:00

10:35 PM...Although generally a depressing time (which has been discussed), Sunday night can also be relaxing, or at least a time to reflect. Today we saw Batman Begins at the dollar theatre...correction, $1.50 theatre. I missed the film this summer and finally got to see it today--now my favorite of the "franchise." I'm actually glad we now have a 1.50 theatre, a four-screen place which used to be the official theatre in town until the 10 screen, stadium seating complex opened up about six months ago. One of my best theatre-going experiences was seeing Top Gun around November or December 1986 at a dollar theatre in Cary, NC. Although not one of my favorite films then or now, it somehow sticks out in my mind. Also seeing Dazed and Confused three times within about a week at the art house theatre in Chapel Hill in November 1993. I still have not yet been to a drive-in. Once I contemplated opening up one as a business, replete with whatever features a typical drive-in would have had circa 1960, but would it make any money?

Wife is now watching the videotape I made of Bravo's ASSSSCAT. She has informed me she likes it much better than SNL and can't understand why it's not a weekly show, especially given that the group apparently does it every Sunday night. Rachel Dratch shows her many talents (even if I actually think Tina Fey or the guy with curly hair actually deserves the MVP award for this particular broadcast). It's a joy to watch her pretty smiling face in the background reacting to her comrades' antics.

Several times today I still had the sensation I had yesterday following Tilt-A-Whirl--but usually only when I stopped and "thought about it." The inbreeders got their revenge.

Question: are five spelling words and five vocabulary words a week too much for a Second Grader? My daughter seems to think so. When I was her age I believe I had ten spelling words per week, but no vocabulary words (I don't think we did "vocabulary" until about the 7th). It is quite curious how her teacher had said, last week, that "Spelling tests are so 1st grade," and a few days later a circular goes home listing distinct spelling words. Did a parent in the class raise a stink? My own thoughts on this are ambivalent. My own parents interfered as little as possible in the education process; by that I mean that they would help us to an extent with our homework, but never "do it for us," and certainly rarely interfered with the teacher's methods. I'm not saying tell the kids that Satan worship is the way to go, but I think teachers are paid to do a job--let them do it. I can only remember a few times my mother actually went to the teacher to question the methods of their madness. And in at least one case the teacher really deserved it.

The Fair, The Fair, The Unforgettable Fair

2005-09-11T00:32:00.000-05:00

It is 1:33 AM and I still feel slightly queasy. About 3 hours ago I rode, with great reluctance, something called the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. I honestly didn't want to go to the fair, but I went for the kids, as it were. They certainly had fun: my son is 3, remember, and he was allowed to ride rides for people 44" tall and over. He's 36" exactly, if I remember.

To be frank, the county fair is basically a lower-rent version of the state fair. This much should be self-evident. It's also self-evident to me that I've never seen so many overweight people; nearly everyone I saw I wanted to say, "Please tell me that you have been tested for diabetes." And not every girl who wears a bare midriff is sexy. I contemplated getting a bloomin' onion from a kiosk until my mother-in-law, who never consciously lies, told me, "That woman serving that food was ahead of us in line to use the boonie. I guarantee you she didn't wash her hands afterwards!" Of course, had I gotten the onion, most of it would have ended up on my shirt after riding the tilt-a-whirl. Better the shirt than the underwear!

We may go to the NC State Fair this year, which is always held in late October in Raleigh. I have a sentimental attachment to the NC State Fairgrounds themselves. Anyone who's been there and is now reading this will think I'm an effing loon right now, but let me explain: each weekend save October, it's where a large flea market takes place. A great deal of my musical tastes were formed there years ago when I would buy used LPs from a vendor named Gene Scott. He'd always knock off a few dollars for me because I was such a loyal customer. God, he hated CDs! What was also cool was how in the summer, it would be hotter than hell there (his booth was set up in a building which has since been condemned and demolished, not far from Dorton Arena, which also should be condemned and demolished)--and yet the vinyl albums never melted. Then October would come, they'd vacate for the State Fair, and come November, they'd be back in business. And for the whole winter it would be colder than ice there! He'd try to keep the place warm with a little heater which somehow never caught anything on fire.

The NC State Fair itself was always pretty cool. I haven't been since around 1993. It was always exactly the same year after year, or seemingly so, something comforting to someone like me, who is basically conservative, hates change, and loves routine. What I always skipped was the animal exhibits; it always seemed like there were two fairs: the rides ostensibly for kids (but ridden mostly by horny teenagers who walked around with each others' hands in each others' back pockets), and then the exhibits for the 70-year-old farmers with the permanent rings in their back pockets caused by the Skoal can. All the rides were run by people with strange shaped heads and missing teeth who filled their downtime by staring at underage girls' asses. These guys' family trees did not branch, apparently. (As an ironic aside: if being inbred is a sign of being a redneck, doesn't that make the British Royal Family the biggest rednecks on earth?) They used to have a freak show, but this was supplanted, if memory serves, by the "world's largest alligator" and a supposedly headless woman.

My wife got to go to the World's Fair which was held in Nashville in 1982. I still remember the TV commercials: "You've got to be there, the 1982 World's Fair!" Not to be confused with It Happened At The World's Fair. Starring Elvis. Elvis is bad. Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good!

I must now go lie down. The Tilt-A-Whirl really did make me feel sick. I don't think I could cut it as a Navy test pilot.

Tunings

2005-09-08T20:43:00.000-05:00

Having discussed modes yesterday, I will now turn to the subject of tunings.

Standard tuning (EADGBE): Obviously the jumping-off point for almost everyone, standard tuning is the comfort zone. I could spend a lifetime in it and never realize that there is another world of alternate tunings out there; many players do just this and are none the worse for it. I always used to wonder why we tune in fourths until arriving at the second string, where we suddenly slip down to a major third. Would EADGCG be a more intelligent tuning?

Drop D Tuning (DADGBE): A simple enough tuning to master, drop D was first shown to me around 1988 by my friend Mark Paschal. Initially I was attracted to both the darker sound of the lowered 6th string as well as the ability to play power chords with their root on said string by simply barring the index finger straight across. Eventually, however, it seemed somehow limited and even a bit lazy. After 1992 I started to lose interest in this tuning in a major way, owing in no small part to certain sounds coming out of the Pacific Northwest which also contributed in lessening the value of solos which mixed technique with feeling and melody.

Modal tuning (DADGAD): Used by Jimmy Page ("Black Mountainside" and "Kashmir"), it automatically makes the guitar sound like a sitar. It is a surprisingly easy tuning to get a feel for, for it invites shapes and melodies which naturally produce such an exotic veneer. What I call "drones" (alternating an open string with a linear melody on an adjacent string) were made for this tuning.

Iommi tuning (C#F#BEG#C#): Otherwise known as "heavy metal slack tuning," this tuning is basically taking all the strings in Standard tuning and lowering them a minor third. Used by Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi on the Master of Reality, Volume IV, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath albums, it brings a darker tone to the proceedings. Unfortunately, it also severely loosens (slackens!) the strings, making them hard to keep in tune, especially when coupled with whole step bends. Sadly, then, this tuning comes off as a novelty rather than a bona fide way of doing things. We all deserve better than this. Tony, however, got three albums out of it.

Open G tuning (DGDGBD): An ideal choice for slide guitar playing, open G is also the easiest of the so-called open tunings, where all strings played open (or barred straight across) produce a chord (usually major). I like Open G but tire of it quickly, because most of my slide guitar riffs are little more than cliches. One must develop their own cliches, and this I attempted to do one night in the late winter of 1991 whilst sitting alone in my parents' kitchen when I took my Dad's 1964 Guild 6 string (Brazillian rosewood!) and tuned it to Open G minor (DGDGBflatD). It was an inspiring night, one which I believe I taped, but that was a long time ago. I also contemplated developing an open sus2 tuning (where the B flat in the open G minor would be replaced by an A), so that if one wanted a sus2 chord, they would play the strings open, a minor would be to add a finger at the 2nd string 1st fret, a major at the 2nd fret, and a sus4 at the 3rd fret. I am surprised I have not pursued it; no one else has either to my knowledge. Again, we deserve better than this.

Guitar Craft tuning (CGDAEG): I either saved the best for last, or the worst for last. Probably those in the know are divided 50/50, canceling each other out, but thunder from the left and thunder from the right do not equal silence. Developed in 1983 by Robert Fripp, this tuning was soon purported by its developer to be the most perfect tuning ever devised. He even dubbed it the New Standard Tuning. Certainly more logical than standard tuning, which probably was developed by some Spanish lover four hundred odd years ago because he found his strings would not break if he tuned them that way. I have experimented with the Guitar Craft tuning and like certain things about it, and hate others. I have TABed out basic riffs (like "Smoke on the Water" and "Cat Scratch Fever"), have tabbed out certain scales and modes (yikes!) and have even attempted to play songs that way as if I were playing standard tuning. The tuning process is almost a science in itself. The 2nd string sometimes bursts when being tuned all the way up to E. You could poke an eye out. Eventually I realized that one would have to devote a great deal of time to this tuning. And obviously it has not taken the world by storm; imagine if a keyboard designer came up with a whole new keyboard, with all the letters in different places? This is not a dopey analogy; it describes exactly how I often felt when moonlighting as a Crafty wannabe.

So in conclusion, how we tune our guitars determines how we play our guitars. How we play our guitars determine how we make music. How we make music demonstrates how we approach a challenge. And how we approach a challenge demonstrates how we live our lives.

Learning the Modes

2005-09-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

When I set about learning to play the guitar all by myself some 17 years, 8 months, and I believe 16 days ago, originally I had no concept about soloing. In my youthful naivete I believed that since it was an electric guitar, "anything you played automatically would sound good." This was an opinion encouraged by several classmates, and my father, an excellent rhythm player (and entirely, to be sure, on acoustic) could offer no help. At that time I was listening mainly to blues-based players, but I didn't at the time isolate their playing as such. I gravitated more towards the "older stuff" as opposed to the players of the moment, but I admired technique across the board and certainly wished to unlock it. I specifically wanted to "blow everyone away" as a soloist.

Originally, then, I set about simply playing as fast as possible. In time I worked up a fairly decent tremolo picking style, coupled with some flashy atonal tapping (always, at this time, with the edge of the pick). Eventually it dawned upon me that this was, by and large, simply "noise," and through the pages of guitar magazines eventually I came to terms with the old standby, the pentatonic minor scale--and by extension with the "blues scale," i.e. adding the flatted fifth as a passing tone. This opened up a fair number of doors, as I came to realize that songs were set in different keys where one had to solo within said key. A few years of piano lessons at a younger age apparently had not helped with this. Somewhat distraught, I kept at it and developed a more fluid legato style not unlike Tony Iommi's. It took a while to develop a vibrato I could truly tolerate; bending notes was difficult at first, as was producing artificial harmonics--"getting a good harmonic," we sophisticates called it, and usually a "good harmonic" was "gotten" more by accident than by design.

It wasn't until over a year later that I became even marginally proficient within the Aeolian (natural minor) and Phrygian modes, but I remember feeling like a whole new world had opened up. Obviously this lent a more "classical tinge" to my playing, which made sense in light of my next hero, Ritchie Blackmore; an affiliation which grew stronger with my discovery of the harmonic minor scale. I studied Yngwie Malmsteen, but I never could do the sweep picking thing. Arpeggios, however, remained an important part of my vocabulary, but these tended to be more Blackmore-like. At this time I almost never consciously soloed in a major key, but the revelation that the penatonic major was the same as the pentatonic minor for a given key, played three semitones below (the F# for A thingy) was a revelation in itself.

Eventually the Dorian mode came into the picture, but for some reason I didn't develop a natual feel for it immediately. Since it gives many solos a jazzy feel, this may explain it: I didn't listen to much pure jazz vis a vis metal, rock, blues, or even classical music, but jazz was always at the edges through fusion and prog-rock, not to mention some of Al DiMeola's stuff. Tommy Bolin entered the picture in a major way as well. Robert Fripp was always lurking in the shadows, and his playing was more avant garde and thus "jazzy" by default. I belive the solo to "21st Century Schizoid Man" is in the Dorian mode.

After this (we're into the '90s now, a grey wasteland in retrospect and even palpably so at the time) I hit a brick wall as far as learning new scales/modes. To be sure, many were charted out in many places, most of them guitar magazines, but so many of them sounded somehow unnatural or blatantly ad hoc. The same could reasonably be said for chords; I knew major, minor, seventh, major seventh, minor seventh, sus4 and sus2, root fifth power chords, ninths, minor ninths, and add9, but some of the more exotic types escaped my grasp, or at least my patience, which is hardly the same thing.

At this time, too, the general cultural landscape had changed to encourage young guitarists not to solo, and in many cases not to rely on theory in a broader sense. I feel that the musical community still suffers for this. The answer is not, of course, a return to big hair, but a return to big Theory is in order. This time in my life also saw me leaving school, marrying, getting a job, and moving--things not conducive to practicing away for two hours at a time. Guitar moved from being a potential vocation to a probable avocation. Still, I may one day unlock the secrets to more modes. Someone once said it takes a year or more to be truly proficient in a mode, and I do not doubt it.

Now forget all of this

Live From My Computer, It's Saturday Night

2005-09-03T22:23:00.000-05:00

Stream of consciousness, in front of the TV...Wife and kids asleep...cats reasonably subdued...

I just had to do a "live" entry when I learned that Chief Justice William Rehnquist has just died. (1924-2005)...he was a year younger than my grandfather...or was he (I can never remember if Grandad Johnson was born in 1923 or 1924). Anyway, now Bush will have the unprecedented need to nominate someone else and thus have two names in the ring. "Suck it, Ted Kennedy!" He could really have some fun and decide to nominate someone along with John Roberts to be an Associate, and also move to promote one of the sitting associates to become the new Chief, thus having in effect three nominees. Maybe he'll do that! Actually, the poli sci major in me has always thought that it would be a real cheeky thing to nominate someone to come in as Chief; don't you think the Associates who've been on the bench for 20 years would be a tad bit resentful? It didn't work with Abe Fortas in 1968, now did it?

In any event, it is now quite a time for the Con-seh-vative movement (I lean back in my chair, don a grey suit, and suddenly pretend to be William F. Buckley, Jr. the way I did when I was a pretentious, Ludwig von Mises-reading 20 year old, as opposed to the completely insane, "radically apolitical" 33-year-old I am now).

It also just hit me that the SNL rerun I was slated to watch in three minutes may get pre-empted. To quote Darth Vader in the infamous Episode III scene where he learns that Padme is dead, "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" I've been waiting all day to tape Debbie Downer, the one where she says, "Living life on the Down Low!" At least I got to see the Andy Roddick rerun on E! at 10 PM, where Rachel absolutely rocked the black boots and also played the Mary Poppins character. Yes, I love that woman.

Ok...the newscast has returned to the weather. Larry Sprinkle (yes, that's his name) is doing the local forecast and talking about Tropical Storm Maria, which is expected to head out to the North Atlantic. "Unlike Katrina, which turned Louisiana into a Third World Country (WAHH-WAHH)." Thanks, Debbie. Actually I apologize; I know some people who have had family affected. A bit of trivia: our weatherman, aforementioned Mr. Sprinkle, appeared in the 1986 horror film Trick Or Treat, a real masterpiece of cinema also starring John Michael Osbourne (a/k/a Ozzy! When I was 15 I used to write O-Z-Z-Y on my left knuckles with a blue marker and go to school. Didn't lose my virginity THAT year, I assure you! But Black Sabbath's Master of Reality still fucking rocks!)

Christ Almighty, enough with the Mazda commercials. Show SNL!.....Here we go, CO: Will Forte as Bush. Sometimes I think I like his Bush better than Will Farrell's Bush..."oh my god, Tommy, please tell me you got that on tape!" (Tommy nods whilst continuing to videotape). Poor Darrell Hammond, all he does is the effing CO's anymore, and probably makes more than all 3 featured players combined. BTW, I refused to watch the "real" Apprentice, just because everyone else at work DID. Two decades on I remain a rebel, eh. BTW, if my name was Colin, I would pronounce it "KAH-LIN," not "COE-LIN." Why not rename yourself Anus? You'd probably get fewer teases.

Nice orange shirt, Horatio. He looks like he's wearing lipstick. I vaguely remember this monologue. Cut me some slack, it was like 10 months ago. OK, here's Debbie. I'm taping it. Forgot about the bird leaving at the end--I wonder if that was a surprise to RD too, since she tries to keep from cracking up? Next week is Jude Law. An ep more famous for Ashlee Simpson. As an aside, I can't stand Jessica Simpson. Yes, technically she is beautiful, but she just leaves me cold, and yes I have seen "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" video. And how did Jude Law get picked as People's Sexiest Man? I'm not gay or nothin', but I don't get it. What a friggin' wimp! I could understand Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but Jude Law makes Laakso look like The Rock (hi, Jeff!) Of course, Laakso was the Hugh Hefner of the neighborhood, so I should stop while I'm ahead.

American Train Wreck Awards: Forgot about this sketch. Amy is so talented and sexy! Now here's RD as Tara Reid. She looks similar to how she is as Nicole Ritchie. Now she's naked! Not really, I suppose, but they did a good job of blurring it out. Seth was funny as Mickey Rourke. My wife thinks Mickey Rourke is so hot!

OK, I'm tired. I'm going to post this entry now. Join me next time as I discuss...something.

Lords Of The Sith

2005-08-30T20:04:00.000-05:00

Tonight I thought I would indulge my inner geek (okay, guy in the back who just said, "That's all you ever do here," haha, you can have a cigar and simma down now). In honor of the final Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, I have decided to look back and analyze each of said Sith lords. I must preface this by saying I have been a Star Wars fan since the age of 5, when I saw the original (Episode IV!) in a theater in Greensboro. Of course Darth Vader was my favorite character, and I liked how he was called the Lord of the Sith. "Who or what the hell are/were the Sith?" I wondered until about 1999, when Episode I was finally released. Here, then, a look back at the four major Sith lords...

Darth Sidious (aka Senator/Emperor Palpatine): The man who gets the whole ball rolling in Ep I by manipulating an entire conflict behind the scenes, where he plays both sides and wreaks doubt amongst the Jedi by unleashing his apprentice, Darth Maul (see below). To most, he is the intelligent, mild-mannered, even slightly effeminate old Senator Palpatine, but in private he dons a cloak, speaks in an evil voice, and commands the Trade Federation to "Wipe them out." "Always there are two Sith, the master and the apprentice," notes Yoda, and the little green guy is right. For the entire SW saga--all six films--Darth Sidious is the master! (In Episodes IV-VI, the "original trilogy," he is only referred to as "The Emperor." He is never referred to as a Sith, but Vader clearly considers him his master).
Interestingly enough, he was once the apprentice to one Darth Plagueis The Wise, who learned of the power to cheat death. The Jedi knew of this "Tragedy," but forbid it to be taught in any of their history classes, because it is such an intriguing story, they did not wish anyone to be tempted to pursue it themselves. Plagueis was so consumed by this particular thread of dark knowledge, he ignored the fact that Sidious was plotting to kill him. Finally Sidious had the chance: he killed Plagueis in his sleep. This is all mentioned in passing in Episode III, but I would love to see a novel which delves deeper into this backstory. Heck, maybe I could write it...fan fiction has turned into quite the industry. I would love just to see what Darth Plagueis (God that's a hard name to spell; I keep having to hit backspace!) looks like.
Eventually, Darth Sidious gets into a duel with Mace Windu, who uses his purple lightsaber to deflect Sidious' own dark force lightning back on him, thus warping his "human" mask and exposing his hideously gray, wrinkled face. For ever after Sidious wears a hood and walks more slowly, but he still wields a mean lightsaber. His fighting style is Snake-like, and he makes many interesting faces and noises. As mentioned, he wields dark force lightning. Eventually he is killed by his own apprentice, Darth Vader, when Vader turns back to the light side of the force and tosses ol' Siddy down an energy shaft, where his wizened body explodes.

Darth Maul: Just before the events of Episode I, Sidious takes on his first apprentice, the inimitable Darth Maul, a man of few words but many maneuvers. Tattooed in a fearsome red and black motif on his face, his devilish appearance is further augmented by the horns atop his head and his sharp teeth. But what most remember Maul for is of course the unique double-bladed lightsaber, a difficult weapon to wield. Coupled with his preference for martial-arts styled kicks, the double lightsaber was ideal for fighting two opponents at once. And in such a fight, Maul quite easily dispatched Qui-Gon Jinn before nearly killing a young Obi-Wan Kenobi as well. Kenobi perservered, however, and split Maul in two--thus automatically qualifying for the level of Jedi Knight. In the end, Maul was formidable, but not formidable enough, and his intellect was probably not sufficient enough to ever become a Sith Master. Darth Sidious knew all this, of course, and that's why he already had another apprentice just waiting in the wings...

Darth Tyrannus (aka Count Dooku): Tyrannus seemed quite the opposite of Maul, to put it mildly: while Maul was a simple-minded, unspeaking killer, bordering on a beast, Tyrannus was suave, intelligent, and regal in his bearing, an older man who only killed when necessary. Count Dooku was once a Jedi, who defected from the order due to his unwavering political idealism. He became the head of the Separatists because he felt that the Old Republic (and, eo ipso, the Jedi) had become corrupt. It was perhaps the most supreme irony, then, that Dooku fell under Darth Sidious' spell and became Darth Tyrannus. As Tyrannus he battled a host of Jedi using his red lightsaber with its curved blade, perfect for utilizing his Type II fencing style--reserved but lethal. From Sidious he also learned to shoot dark force lightning, although he tended to use it only in emergencies. Always slightly ambivalent about being "evil," Tyrannus remained idealistic to the end, even as Sidious tricked him into fighting Anakin Skywalker. By then Skywalker had essentially become the most powerful Jedi, and he easily decaptitated Tyrannus, the man who had brought a touch of "class" to the Sith!

Darth Vader (aka Anakin Skywalker): Even non-Star Wars fans know who this guy is. Born a slave on the remote deserts of Tatooine, he was apparently a virgin birth and thus marked as someone "special." Eventually he was discovered by Qui-Gonn Jinn, who just before dying at the hands of Darth Maul, made his own Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi, promise to train him. Most Jedi thought Anakin was "The Chosen One" who could bring balance to the force, but what they didn't realize was at what cost this would come. Anakin grew into quite a powerful Jedi, but also a hothead given to showing off, enjoying adulation, and breaking rules.
One of the rules he broke was to fall in love--with Senator Padme Amidala. They eventually married, and she became pregnant. Anakin hid these things from the Jedi Order--but confided them to the seemingly kindly Senator Palpatine, who of course was secretly Darth Sidious. Sidious encouraged Anakin to question things and think for himself, and eventually he encouraged the young man to kill Count Dooku (Darth Tyrannus) in a duel he had set up. From there Darth Sidious told Anakin--who had been plagued by dreams that his wife would die in childbirth--of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, implying that he (Sidious) had learned from Plagueis how to cheat death. In fact, he even insinuated that Plagueis was Anakin's "father," that Plagueis had manipulated the force to impregnate Anakin's mother. Finally, Anakin realized that he was being groomed to become the next Sith Apprentice, but by this time he only wanted to save Padme at any cost. He helped Darth Sidious kill Mace Windu and pledged himself to the Sith.
Reaching back through the wisdom of the ages, Darth Sidious went into a semi-trance and dubbed his new apprentice Darth Vader, which translated ironically meant "Dark Father." He then instructed Vader to kill as many Jedi as he could. Vader immediately dispatched Jedi of all ages, including the youngest ones, before heading to the volcanic planet Mustafar and killing the remnants of the Separatists. When his wife met up with him, he force choked her and then proceded to get into a violent duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Vader's hubris got the better of him, and he attempted a near-impossible leap which cost him both legs and one arm. As Vader's body slipped into the hot lava and caught fire, Kenobi left him for dead and took the near-dead Padme to a safe ship to give birth to twins, Luke and Leia, who were kept hidden for the next 19 years.
Darth Sidious arrived on Mustafar to find Vader all but dead, his body burned and his lungs charred. He took his apprentice back to Coruscant, where he prepared a black life-support suit and breathing mask for him. Darth Vader's new guise combined the demonic presence of a Darth Maul with the regal bearing of a Darth Tyrannus, and the combination provided the Sith with its most visible public "face" for the next two decades of terror and oppression. Although Vader was now only operating at about 65% of the power he had before having to don the life-support system, he was still one of the most powerful beings in existence, since the Jedi were all but extinct. And although he could never learn to wield dark-force lightning (having no remaining natural limbs to channel this power), he could still use a lightsaber, and he could still force-choke people. Of course, some died instantly just from seeing the black death mask and hearing the mechanized breathing--or wished they could die.
Eventually, of course, Vader learned that his son Luke was alive and turning into quite the Jedi himself. Vader brought Luke before Sidious, but neither he nor his master could turn Luke to the dark side. Darth Vader killed his own master and then died right before his son allowed him to redeem himself, and the Sith were no more.

Random Thoughts

2005-08-28T19:54:00.000-05:00

The weekend comes to a close, yet again...today the Missus and I took turns mowing our acre of land. The belt was fine. I used up the rest of the Round-Up spraying around the swingset and some other hard to reach areas. That stuff is toxic...you don't notice the results right away, but after about four days, whatever you sprayed HAS died.
Someone asked me (in person, not by leaving a comment) about why I chose some of the movies I did when talking about the Golden Age of HBO, namely Flash Gordon. Yes, it's cheesy, with some bad acting, but I saw it at a very impressionable age and what I remember about it was the wild Technicolor color scheme, the set design by Danilo Donati (who also did, mirable dictu, a little film called Caligula), beautiful women (namely the girl who played Dale, and the girl who played Ming's daughter-Ornella Muti?), the "wood beast" scene where they had to take turns sticking their hands into the stump with the poisonous creature in it, sex, Brian Blessed as the leader of the Hawkmen yelling "Dive!", Queen's delightfully campy guitar-heavy score, sex, the opening scene with the stock footage of different natural disasters--plus "hot hail," the golden-masked villain Klytus who was like a cross between Darth Vader and Dr. Doom, sex, skimpy costuming, how Flash's tombstone read "Flash Gordon, Earthling, Executed By Ming," sex, the mind reading scene where Flash is trying to communicate with Dale while the Emperor's daughter is making out with him: "God, this girl is turning me on!" "Uh, I didn't quite understand that last message!", the scene where Flash throws Klytus on those spikes and his face melts, a young Timothy Dalton as Prince Baron, the lizard men with really fake looking suits, sex, the weird woman in the ultra-tight leather outfit saying "What do you mean, Flash Gordon approaching?" after everyone thought he was dead, the eternal Max Von Sydow as Emperor Ming, and SEX. These are things I mostly remember about Flash Gordon and why I watched every time it came on.
Someone else asked me (in the Comments) about what I thought about K-Mart. I published my reply in the Comments. You may be surprised.
Today on the radio I heard a semi-guilty pleasure that came out about five years ago: "She's So High," by Tal Bachman: She's blood, flesh and bone/ No tucks or silicone/ She's touch, smell, sight, taste and sound/ But somehow I can't believe/ That anything should happen /I know where I belong/ And nothing's gonna happen /Yeah, yeah (Chorus): 'Cause she's so high... High above me, she's so lovely She's so high... Like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite She's so high... High above me /First class and fancy free/ She's high society /She's got the best of everything/ What could a guy like me Ever really offer?/ She's perfect as she can be /Why should I even bother? (Repeat Chorus)/ She comes to speak to me I freeze immediately/ 'Cause what she says sounds so unreal/ But somehow I can't believe/ That anything should happen I know where I belong /And nothing's gonna happen /Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah (Repeat Chorus) I hearby dedicate it to all those girls from Flash Gordon.
In other music news, the new Deep Purple album, Rapture of The Deep, will be released in early October. Hopefully it will be better than the last, Bananas, which came out almost exactly two years prior. Not that I didn't like Bananas, but it was a disappointment compared to Purpendicular (a godlike CD, perhaps the best album of 1996!) and Abandon, the two that preceded it. I like the album title, Rapture of The Deep, but the tentative cover art leaves something to be desired. It looks like a Shel Silverstein drawing! I long for the days of the gorgeous Stormbringer cover painting, or the Mt. Rushmore parody of In Rock, or even the double-headed dragon of The Battle Rages On. Some of the new song titles are promising: "Wrong Man," "Rapture of the Deep," "Money Walks," "Junkyard Blues," and "Girls Like That." Let's hope they sound cool. I also deeply miss Jon Lord on the Hammond organ, who was replaced in 2002 by journeyman keyboardist Don Airey. Still, this is a band that can definitely show all the young punks how it's really done.

People's Heights

2005-08-27T21:38:00.000-05:00

Tonight we went to the "Open House" for my daughter's upcoming school year. She will be starting 2nd grade, and this will be her first year at this school. As I type this my wife is in the other room reading the "Student Handbook" cover to cover. I intend to absorb the policies by osmosis, or maybe it will just be my bathroom reading. Anyhoo, something that my wife and I always do (and you do it too in similar situations, if you are honest with yourself), is "compare" ourselves to the other parents. By that I mean just where we feel like we fit in on the socioeconomic spectrum vis a vis them, compare our cars with theirs, try to guess how much education they've had, etc. It's all so superficial, I know, so materialistic...but something else we do is see how tall we are compared to everyone else.

We've been to these kinds of things for four or five years now (going all the way back to preschool), and we always feel like we're both YOUNGER and SHORTER than everyone else. I know, superficial time again. But we're not underaged (we had her when we were 26, not when we were 17 or anything), and we're not midgets (I'm 5'8" and she's 5'2"). But we always feel like we don't belong or something. Tonight, however, everyone seemed our age or only slightly older, and everyone was either our height or only slightly taller.

People's heights have always fascinated me. When I was a kid, for a while I was actually taller than most kids in my class. I used to TOWER over my younger brother, who's now about 3" taller than me, and much more broad-shouldered. He can almost pass for buff! But when I was about 13 or 14 I had to go to the orthopedic surgeon for something or another. I hadn't broken any bones, but he had to do an x-ray of my wrist for some reason, and through his analysis he determined I was soon to stop growing. I remember being devastated, because I always thought I would be about 6'2" when I grew to my full height. A strange thing to think, perhaps, considering that my Dad was only about 5'9", HIS father was only about 5'7", and my grandad on my Mom's side was maybe 5'10".

I have an uncle who's about 6' or more, so maybe that's where I got the idea, but I remember thinking on that fateful day at the doctor's I was going to be Alex P. Keaton of Family Ties (this was in the mid 80s) and be like this borderline midget. In high school I guess I was about average height compared to the other guys in my class, and I was taller than most girls. I vowed I would never date a girl taller than me. So shallow! Actually to this day I've only had one girlfriend who was taller than me. Her name was Kelly and she was about 5'9" and I believe eventually did some modelling. But most of my girlfriends have been in the 5'1" to 5'3" range, and voila, the one I married is 5'2." (Her mom, my mother in law, is about 4'11"! She's so cute!)

Apparently my daughter may some day be taller than me. She's tall for her age, but so was I at 7. If she's taller than me in her teens? How can I discipline her? She shall squash me like an insect! My son is actually small for his age, but his spunk I think will take him far. And by the way, have you noticed how tall today's teenagers are? It must be all the McDonald's they've eaten in their lives, full of animal tranquilizers. They still buy jeans too small for themselves.

But in conclusion, it doesn't matter how tall you are, or how much you weigh, or how much money you make. It's what's on the inside that counts. Awww...now let's all hold hands and run through the daisies together.

The Bowels of the Earth: Wal-Mart

2005-08-25T22:18:00.000-05:00

Since my last post was basically a love letter to the HBO of the early '80s, and the post before that was a love letter to my DVD collection, I figured I would write a bit of hate mail, for a change of pace. Granted, I must be careful, because I can get reported for it (see the upper right hand corner, Gentle Reader)...but still I just have to share my experiences at Wal-Mart earlier this evening.

We went out to Wal-Mart (aka "Wally World") around 7:30 PM tonight to get my daughter a new bike. She had the make and model in mind, and luckily it was there. However, the bikes are now attached to some kind of wall thing so that one cannot steal them, so I had to find an employee to assist us. This was much easier said than done--apparently everyone is on break at 7:30. I asked the lady in sporting goods to page someone to come over to the toy department, but she must have had a grudge against me, because I never heard anything on the intercom. A few minutes later I went back to her, but she was helping some guy buy some ammo. (Ain't that America, ammo being sold less than 100 yards away from Thomas The Tank Engine sets...) I walked around and finally found someone else, but by this time 30 minutes had gone by.

So we politely asked the manager for 15% off for our troubles, and she agreed to 10%. Not bad, but I can see why she wouldn't give 15%...the cash to pay the illegal immigrants to clean the place at 4 AM has to come from somewhere. Ka-Ching! I had been this close to telling her we would take our business to Target, but there's no Target ("Tar-zhay?") in town.

Finally we got the bike and so far everyone is happy with it. But man, Wal-Mart gets on my nerves these days...

1.Their selection isn't as great as it used to be, kind of ironic considering their modus operandi is to come into a small town and basically monopolize everything, putting the Mom and Pops out of business. There's always online shopping, I guess. 2.The store is never clean, and the parking lot is even filthier. I almost wish they weren't 24 hours, because the parking lot is always full and repaving it would be impossible. 3.The bathrooms aren't clean, and the one up front always seems to be out of order, meaning the only one available is back in Layaway. ("Wait til you get home to go!" I hear you telling me. I would, except the lines are so long, you inevitably have to take a break). 4.The self-serve lines, aka swipe your debit card and leave in a fraction of the time you would otherwise, are almost never open anymore, and although there are 23 regular lanes, no more than four are ever open. 5. From what I hear, the meats in the grocery section are not so good. Just warning you; I have it on good authority. 6. Does the greeter really serve any purpose other than putting a little pink sticker on merchandise you are returning? Actually, that's an important purpose: The returns desk is always busy! 7. Would it kill them to get new Star Wars action figures? The film came out three months ago and they still haven't gotten in a new Darth Vader. Yes, I just typed this and I'm 33. Wanna make something of it? 8. The baby section is very poorly organized. Being a man, I'm loathe to ask for help, so part of this is my own fault, but one night I spent 45 minutes looking for baby wipes. 9. They have a lousy ordering service. Once it took us a month to get a swingset, and that whole ordeal was such a SNAFU we got another discount. 10. Must I go on? You could probably add your own reasons.

So in conclusion, Wal-Mart is not just a store. It's a way of life. So is self-mutilation, but who wants to do that?

The Golden Age of HBO

2005-08-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

Every morning at work, before I get "serious" about my job, I take a few moments to hit a few of my favorite web sites. "Make the rounds," you might say. Of course, I avoid playboy.com and others of its ilk, but one site I do hit is dvdfile.com, to see what new releases are out there. To my delight I found a review of the Dick Cavett Show Rock-n-Roll Archives (or something to that effect). This new disc features the musical guests on his show from 1969-1974, such obscure folk as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Sly Stone. If I actually had $40 I'd buy it...

But it got me to thinking: I'm too young to remember that show when it aired (being born in 1972 and all), but I love the music of that age. And more to the point of this posting, I remember Dick Cavett as the guy who used to host a show on HBO called Time Was (Time Was the '20s, Time Was the '30s, etc.) A show which aired during what I shall dub The Golden Age of HBO.

Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina in the late '70s and early '80s, "getting cable" meant that in addition to getting the basic channels of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and the independent Washington DC channel that showed Romper Room and Gilligan's Island and commercials for the Baltimore Orioles and K-TEL Creedence compilations, you also got HBO. For God knows how much a month, you'd get the HBO Guide, a small, slim 2nd cousin to the regular TV Guide which would list all the shows playing that month, what the movies were rated, and what kind of content they had. Initially, they only broadcast starting at 7 PM, but eventually they took mercy on us kids and switched to 24 hour broadcasting, which seemed so futuristic back then!

To a kid, the HBO Guide listed movies with a rainbow of things too good to be true: Adult Humor! Adult Language! Adult Situations! Brief Nudity! Brutality! Gore! Graphic Depiction of Surgery (this for All That Jazz)!Mild Violence! Nudity! Strong Sexual Content! Of course, they only showed R rated movies after 8 PM. An announcer would come on and say in his best voice-of-God imitation, "The following feature is rated R" and you'd run up and try to turn the sound down at the "R" (no remotes back then) before your mom walked in and said "What the hell are you kids watching?"

The list of movies I saw on HBO between about 1979 and 1985 reads like a Who's Who of so bad it's good, b-movie cinema which has continued to influence my tastes to this day: The Terminator, Clash of the Titans, Flash Gordon, Transylvania 6-5000, Clue, Porky's, Conan The Barbarian, Halloween, Halloween 2 (my Dad, a graduate of a borderline Ivy League school, let me watch that one! He even said, "Wow, that water is boiling!" while Michael Myers was dumping that nurse's head in the water), Time After Time, Superfuzz (about a cop who lost his super powers when he saw red), Sixteen Candles, WarGames, Purple Rain, Prophecy, Buckaroo Banzai, Jaws, Pandemonium (yet another Carole Kane vehicle...Carole, you are OK in my book!), and of course 10 To Midnight, in which detective Charles Bronson pursues a naked killer. (After you see a naked killer around the time you go through puberty, do you really need to see any other movie ever again?) My siblings would probably never talk to me if I didn't mention 10 To Midnight...or maybe the obverse is true. There are lots more movies we saw; I'll have to publish an updated list.

There were the original series: the eternal Fraggle Rock; various history shows hosted by Dick Cavett, who seemed so suave and urbane to a boy growing up on the mean streets of Greensboro; First And Ten (back when Delta Burke was actually hot); Not Necessarily The News; Brain Games; and of course The Hitchhiker. The Hitchhiker had to be seen to be believed--and even then you didn't believe what you had just seen. It was hosted by Page Fletcher as, you guessed it, The Hitchiker. At the end of the 30 minute episode (which always had at least one scene of TWO PEOPLE DOING IT), he'd appear and say something like, "John thought he could play with fire. But soon he found out that fire sometimes burns!" Then he'd walk off into the sunset, leaving us to ponder the pearls of wisdom which had just falled from his stoic lips. Christmas time brought forth Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas. Some of the heaviest metal every played by muppets came from the infamous River Bottom Nightmare Band. They even had a fish which squirted water out of his tank onstage!

And don't forget the original programming. On July 28, 1979, they world premiered a KISS concert which was filmed the year before in Japan. I was seven (SEVEN!) years old and literally sat in the den all day glancing at the clock, waiting for 7 PM to arrive. A few years later they had a show called Some Call Them Freaks, hosted by Richard Kiley, about various freaks from the 19th Century, including my first ever glimpse at the Elephant Man (a year or two before I saw the movie!) "These are the actual photographs Treves took of John Merrick..." I had nightmares that night, but it was worth it. Similarly, PT Barnum and His Human Oddities introduced me to Joice Heth, the 161-year-old former slave of George Washington (yeah, right). She creeped me the "f" out, playing her zither like a zombie. And don't forget the scariest show of them all, Whodunnit, featuring Lizzie Borden, Zodiac, DB Cooper, and Jack The Ripper. I didn't sleep too well that night either, thinking about Mr. Borden lying there with his head split open in that dagguerotype, all because he didn't want his daughter to be a lesbian (I made that last part up, but they did show the picture of him lying there!)

After the mid-80s, however, HBO started to get a little too..."corporate" for my taste. Not only that, but my family had moved to a new town where "cable" meant a lot of channels (for back then): Showtime (a poor man's HBO if there ever was), USA, ESPN, CNN, Nickolodeon, A&E, and--oh yeah--a little station called MTV, which pretty much defined mid to late 80s teenagerdom for about half a billion people. You could even get the scrambled up Playboy Channel if you pressed the "5" and "10" on the box simultaneously...or so my brother claimed. At least we tried to about four hours a month.

With these kinds of distractions, HBO took a back seat, and I feel I didn't miss much. Later they had a resurgence, o' course, with Sex and The City and The Sopranos, but the sense of adventure was clearly gone. I treasure my childhood spent in front of the boob tube (quite literally, heh), while sadly realizing that you can never go home again.

As The Weekend Ends...

2005-08-21T17:41:00.000-05:00

Sunday night is always such a depressing time, because Monday is just around the corner. At least today we finished our yard, but at some cost. My wife insisted on mowing the rest of the backyard, and I said, "Knock yourself out." Today was even hotter than yesterday, if that is possible. Then to top it all off, the belt slipped again. I'll take a look at it next Saturday.

As a consolation prize, we went out to our favorite Thai place for dinner. Our server suggested next time to try the catfish. It's not on the menu, but it's something they've whipped up. As long as it has ginger in it, it will be good.

Last night I watched the Colin Farrell rerun of SNL. A pretty decent episode, even though I'm getting kind of burned out on the Key Party sketch. Rachel Dratch really looked cute in the Merv The Perv sketch with her antlers (the original ep aired just before X-Mas).

Was trying to think of some other good DVD commentaries. Not to be missed is the commentary for the infamous 1932 film Freaks. Also the cast commentary for the first American Pie. Must to avoid: any Dario Argento commentary. Which is too bad, because Argento is da man. He just genuinely does not like to do commentary tracks...

Well, other family members want to use the 'puter, so I shall bid my fair readers adieu. Until next time, America.

Best DVD Commentaries

2005-08-21T00:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a post with possibly a bit more appeal to the populace. I will name some of my favorite DVD commentaries, and why.

But first, why even listen to a DVD commentary? Aren't they just for extreme geeks with too much time on their hands? (Of course, but that's beside the point). Ideally, the commentary should enhance your appreciation of a film you already like. No one would listen to a commentary track unless it was for a movie they already liked (and had already seen...jeez, no one would watch a film with commentary on before watching it "regularly." Now that would be a geek.) I believe there are two types of commentaries: the "insider" and the "outsider" types. An "insider" would be someone directly involved with the creation of film, most typically the director, or an actor, or the DP/cinematographer, or the writer. Obviously, they can provide insights that no one else could. However, the other type--the "outsider"--cannot be easily dismissed. An "outsider" commentary is one done by a film critic, film historian, or huge fan/self-appointed "expert" on the film. They, too, can provide their own unique insights. Heck, I would love to do one someday, but I would want to make sure I could do the film justice.

So without further ado, here are some of my favorite commentary tracks:

1. The Beyond: For those unhip, the Beyond is a 1981 horror film by the late director Lucio Fulci. It features tons of gore, zombies, and the gateway to Hell itself (in the basement of a run down New Orleans hotel, natch). The commentary is by Catriona McColl and the late David Warbeck, the two main stars. It was recorded shortly before Mr. Warbeck died of cancer, but you'd never know it--he is witty and full of life. He and the beautiful Ms. McColl talk nonstop in a humorous way about how much fun it was to make The Beyond, and how it was to work with the eccentric Lucio Fulci.

2. I Spit On Your Grave: Many people will now dub me a certified perv or wacko for even mentioning this film. It's about a young woman who goes on holiday in the woods of Connecticut, where she is raped by four deranged men. But she gets her revenge on them--one guy gets to experience the John Bobbit route. This DVD features two separate commentary tracks. The first is by director Meir Zarchi, a press-shy man who has finally come forward to defend his reasons behind making this film. He is intelligent, sensitive, and full of detail (once you get used to his accent, which I think is Israeli or maybe Hungarian). He explains the inspiration from the story, which will break your heart. Probably one of the most "important" commentaries of all time (I'm serious). People consider this film porn, or perverted, or trash. The famed critic Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review which is still widely quoted today, and feminist groups would probably love to burn every copy of this movie in existence.
Which is ironic, because the movie actually ends up being very pro-woman. Yes. Jennifer is empowered at the end. Like the tag line says, "No jury in America would ever convict her." Rape is a deplorable crime; as a man it is difficult for me to see how someone could take what is supposed to be a loving (or fun) act and turn it into something violent. I am no flaming liberal, but I have always felt that women deserved respect, and that sex was not something to be forced. End of sermon.
The second commentary on I Spit On Your Grave comes from Joe Bob Briggs, a comedian/film critic. An excellent "outsider" track, Briggs mananges to inject humor at every turn, but at the same time you learn stuff about the film. Like Zarchi, he defends the film, but he also makes aside comments about what's going on. "Are there really any hillbillies in Connecticut? I thought it was a place to go to buy antiques. Maybe I'm wrong..." No, that's not the funniest thing he says (but it is funnier coming out of his mouth), just the first thing I can remember at 1:26 AM.
So in conclusion, you get two great commentaries: the director covering the "serious" side, and a funny guy covering the "funny" side. Hell, I think every movie ever made should have a Joe Bob track on the DVD!

3. Black Sunday: Black Sunday is a black and white horror film from 1960 directed by the amazing Mario Bava. It stars the gorgeous Barbara Steele as a witch who comes back from the dead. Or something. Anyway, the commentary is by film historian Tim Lucas, who has written a 500 page "coffee-table" book about the films of Mario Bava. Lucas is never boring as he talks about every aspect of the film: Bava's techniques, info on the cast, how the film was influential, how it ties in to other horror films, etc. It's like going to an interesting lecture at a film history class.

4. Time After Time: An underrated film from 1979 about HG Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) chasing Jack The Ripper from Victorian England to modern-day San Francisco. The track is done by both McDowell and the film's director (whose name escapes me). Not a life-changing experience, but solid nonetheless. However, I do think that the two men were recorded separately and then the two tracks were spliced together. They never seem to really interract with one another. You'd think that just once, one of them would say, "Yeah, I remember that too."

5. Mask: This is Peter Bogdonovich's film about Rocky Dennis, a deformed kid who really lived about 25 years ago. Sort of a poor man's Elephant Man. ;-) But a touching film nonetheless. On the commentary, the director discusses all kinds of things. He admits that he and Cher didn't always get along and also discusses the whole Bruce Springsteen/Bob Seger controversy (he wanted Springsteen songs in the film, but The Boss' manager wanted too much money, so they used Seger songs. The "director's cut" DVD features Springsteen songs, because when Bruce found out the truth, he got mad and said "You can use my songs. I'm sorry my manager turned you down" or words to that effect. Personally, I think the director's vision should be honored, but having said that, I kind of miss the Bob Seger songs I used to hear when I watched this movie on Superstation TBS.)

OK, here's one more. I don't actually own this disc; I rented it a while back, but the memory still lingers. Drum roll please...

6. Conan The Barbarian: Star Arnold Schwarzenegger and director John Milius hang out and talk about the film. Anything Arnold says is automatically fifty trillion times funnier than the same words out of someone else's mouth, due to his Austrian accent. So we get, "Look! Dogs ahh chasing me!" and "Look! Dat kid looks like he's wearing lip-zdick!" and "Dis wahs a hahd zeeen to film!" Once or twice I swear I could hear the Governor of California lighting up a stogie.

Well...I thank you for your time. Let me know of any other good commentaries out there. I have a special place in my heart for horror films, but as the list above shows, Man shalt not live by bread alone.