I still remember my brother getting a Beach Boys record for his birthday when I was probably five. It was a Greatest Hits, and the pop-surf classics that made oldies radio play. And we dug it.
But as a kid, I took the Beach Boys for granted. Their music was everywhere - absolutely on the radio, at restaurants, and in every fifth commercial when summer rolled around. Like Elvis, they simply were.
It wasn't until college that two folks flipped me from "oldies station Beach Boys" vs Pet Sounds Beach Boys. One was NathanC, and the other was a fellow named Robb, who was absolutely grooving out to Pet Sounds when I dropped in at his place one afternoon. Robb was also my compatriot in discussing Phil Spector and The Wall of Sound, so this all lined up pretty neatly.
I'm absolutely one of those guys who thinks Brian Wilson was pretty great, but also one of the great American tragedies. This is not an original insight, but I don't know how else we can discuss him. He has a certain genius that was still very much in force when I picked up Smile several years ago, and you always wondered what could have been.
But mental illness is a real sonuvabitch, and he struggled with his issues for so many years. His family managed to keep him healthy and making music, and I can't imagine the love and care that took.
Still, what a legacy he left behind.
Go put on Pet Sounds and Smile today, if you can. And here's the the Wilson family today.
A couple of months ago, I rewatched It's Always Fair Weather, and remembered Dolores Gray existed. The first time I'd seen the movie, she was my favorite part of the film. And, sure, I like a smile that makes Geena Davis' grin seem understated, but she was hilarious and her two numbers were fantastic.
My understanding is that: as a teen she was given a shot by Rudy Vallee, and became a nightclub chanteuse, headlining by age 18 or so. There's a whole story about her getting caught as a bystander in a drive-by shooting as a young woman, but that she recovered and was back performing in night clubs in a couple of months, the bullet never removed.
Gray's career was primarily on the stage, both in New York and London. She played Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun for two years in the West End. Back in the US she co-starred in a popular stage production of Destry Rides Again with Andy Griffith.
Like many radio and stage performers, she'd have disappeared into the collective memory hole if not for her few movies.
This journey through the career of Lacey Chabert (just live action work, and only movie-length material - we have to contain this somehow) has become a study of the work of someone who is truly a working actor.
Sure, Chabert is a star. Even if she'd never been in anything after Lost in Space, I'd remember her as a young actor. If Mean Girls had been her last role, we'd all definitely still know her. But Chabert started in movies as a child (and we'll get to that), and her current role as the face of Hallmark and Christmas movies was not a foregone conclusion. She had a lot of work that was clearly putting food on the table, and that's kind of what we've been watching for a bit.
And so we find a movie here from 2013 in which she barely appears. It's one of six films she had released in 2013, and one of ten projects - as she voiced cartoons and video games (she's the default voice for Zatanna at DC Entertainment). But I'm betting she was in and out of Detroit - where this movie seems to have been filmed - in about three days.
This movie is very independent, very well intentioned, and very much not my thing. It is also less about Chabert's character, who book-ends the film, and a vehicle for real world child prodigy of the piano, Ethan Bortnick.* Based on the age of the child star and editing timelines, I am guessing it was filmed in 2011, and finally found distribution in 2013.
Longtime readers will know Jamie and I are Blondie fans and have seen them a couple of times.
I say this not lightly - Clem Burke was likely the best drummer I've ever seen live. Some of that (a lot of that) was technical proficiency, but no small amount of it was that he was having a party behind his drum kit. The man always seemed to love what he was doing.
I confess to following him on social media and going down a COVID-era YouTube hole a night or three just watching him play across the years and sometimes with different bands.
Increasingly lost to time is the impact Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. had on American culture of the 20th century. A showman, theatrical empresario, producer, promoter and more, Ziegfeld is most famous for his Ziegfeld Follies, a series of extravagant Broadway shows that ran from around 1907 to his death in the 1930's. Much of what we thought of as a stage full of beautiful young women that flooded musicals in the 1930's and 1940's and gave Busby Berkeley (credited here) a career was Hollywood tinkering with the shows Ziegfeld had staged, based on French revues. He managed to employ folks like Irving Berlin, WC Fields, Will Rogers and many, many more.
Had Ziegfeld not passed when he did, it's likely he would have expanded into Hollywood in a more serious manner (he was already there and died in Hollywood in 1932), bringing his sensibilities to the big screen.
He was credited with creating "The Glorification of the American Girl", both featuring and populating shows with large choruses of female performers. But he featured acts of all kinds, and shows to this day are based within the Ziegfeld Follies (see the currently running Funny Girl). He was also not afraid to push into the risque, and folks knew what they were getting. You can find all sorts of interesting photos online looking for Ziegfeld girls.
In what is a star-studded flick - the movie follows three girls/ women who enter into the Follies. Like the Schwab's Pharmacy story, Ziegfeld - never seen in this movie! And treated a bit like that Wizard Judy Garland had previously tangled with - would pluck girls out of their mundane lives by finding them behind perfume counters, working in elevators, etc... A bit of instant wish-fulfillment if you caught the right guy's eye (which is kind of a nightmare, but in an era in which women's career options were limited, and many Ziegfeld girls married well, it's not nothing).
It's Always Fair Weather (1955) is a weird and wildly uneven movie. It's either having an astounding number like the whole sequence in the boxing gym where Cyd Charisse seems like magic, or its three dudes boring me to tears with their individual issues. And, yes, I'd seen it before.
I get that the movie is trying to replicate the trio of guys from On the Town, and, according to IMDB trivia, that was the original plan, but Sinatra was having his studio issues, and Munshin was on the outs with Hollywood.
But I think if this movie had just been about Gene Kelly's character, it would have worked a heck of a lot better. Or if it had been able to bring back all six of the characters - sure. Instead, we get this weird "men in crisis" story that just kind of lacks charm and even feels depressing.
It had been a minute since I'd watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), one of those movies they used to play more often on TCM and where I'd just stop and usually watch it from wherever I came in. It's still a favorite.
No doubt the movie's gender politics play badly for The Youth, but in context, this is a movie about two women on either side of the coin - asking whether one pursues money or not when it comes to matrimony and romance. And, in 1953, we are very much still in an era where a marriage is going to make or break the vast majority of women. We're only a handful of decades from women being able to vote, and they still can't have their own credit cards.
The gag, of course, is do you play the men? And, if so, how?
If I were going to program a series of movies and those movies were *about* (at least in part) music, I'd feel compelled to include Hangover Square (1945). And I think I'd really manage to freak out the squares with this oddball character study/ thriller.
Apparently the movie had a long road from book to screenplay to how it was finally shot and made. It was also the final movie of Laird Cregar, one of the most promising actors of the 1940's, who died before this movie was released - a heart-attack brought on from a speed-fueled crash diet, intestinal issues from his attempts to lose weight, and other factors. He was only 31.
Along the way, the book - which took place in modern London - was changed into a gaslight-era story about a composer, and almost nothing of the source material remained except the title. Part of me is horrified for the original author, part of me knows this is basic studio mechanics, and part of me quite likes the final result. So....
It's a bit of an odd movie because I'm not sure it has a "hero". It has a protagonist you follow, but out of morbid curiosity. After all, we know he is a killer in the first 30 seconds of the film - it's that no one else knows or wants to believe it. So what happens when he's left free? And gets cross-wise with a conniving songbird who is a walking red flag in the shape of Linda Darnell?
The score of the film is phenomenal, culminating in a diegetic performance of the concerto Cregar's character has been working on since before the film's start, The Concerto Macabre.
The concerto is worked into the film throughout, as is the use of fire, pits, and other signs of Cregar's character's madness. I really don't know how to talk about Bernard Hermann's work without gushing, or this one in particular.
And Cregar, himself is pretty terrific. This may be his finest role in a very brief, very impressive slate before his untimely death. He's sympathetic, even while you're screaming at the other characters to knock it off or stop him.
I also think Darnell is at the height of her powers here. Gorgeous, crafty, acting for the benefit of other characters while the audience knows what's up, and not making it cheesy... And, ultimately, iron willed about what she wants and how to get it...
oh no. I've accidentally posted a pic of Linda Darnell.
Anyway - it's a dated portrait of mental illness that treats it a bit like a magical curse, but is pretty good nonetheless. And manages two of the best scenes I've seen in a movie in recent years, with the Guy Fawkes sequence, and the finale, which I think is how real filmmakers should end a movie (more fire, you cowards).
At a tight 77 minutes, it's a complete story that rides like a roller coaster, ending in a huge twist and turnover at the end.
I guess my pitch is this: If the factors in a movie are imagery, sound and performances - they surely line up incredibly well in this movie. That it stars two actors who died young and tragically, and that this likely got lost a bit in the shuffle as the war wrapped up may be why it's chattered about with a subset of film nerds, but not more in the conversation. It was also not universally beloved when it came out - so maybe it just hits my sensibilities particularly well.
In this movie, Elvis comes down hard on the side of @#$%ing one's cousin(s).
This is not me inferring something. This is what happens in this movie from a few different angles.
To be sure, one is hard pressed to find a more problematic movie than Kissin' Cousins (1964), the movie I watched last night. And when people say they want to go back to a better America - I want to say "this America? Cousin @#$%ing America?" The contemporary reviews of this movie sure weren't great, but they also don't seem overly concerned with how this movie is about two things: putting ICBM siloes on US soil and normalizing gettin' with yer kin.
It also features suggestions that the best way to win a woman is to pursue her relentlessly and a little bit violently, despite her express wishes. It goes in hard for sexualizing the infantilization of women. And probably a dozen other things, but those are some of the eye-poppers.
Like a lot of Elvis movies, it's not so much a musical as an excuse to roll out a new Elvis record. There's some plot, but it's a framework to stop the eight minutes' worth of story for Elvis to sing a song. In this way, it's not so much a musical - which uses songs to carry the story and have characters express themselves - as a series of music videos interspersed between goofily delivered plot points.
I don't have a special relationship with the music of John Williams - we *all* have that relationship.
Music lays there in your mind somewhere next to the smells of your grandparents' basement that will come back to you when you smell something similar, or the taste of the food from your youth. And John Williams' music was as important to us as pop, as Christmas music, as *anything* we heard growing up.
Of course there are other great movie composers... but probably the vast majority of them I'd put anywhere in the category of Williams are dead. And none who seemed to hit with every score.
My earliest memories are of John Williams' music. As a very small kid, post-Star Wars, we'd Imperial March around the house. I remember the Christmas after Empire came out, my cousin Susan had purchased me the two-record soundtrack, and I lay on the floor listening to it over and over.
Now, I get teary hearing Leia's theme - and have since Force Awakens reused it as Leia came off the ship. I still feel my pulse quicken to the Indiana Jones theme, or Superman. I feel that pit in my stomach when I hear the Schindler's List score, or swell with wonder with Jurassic Park and Close Encounters. Or ET.
We could probably rattle off his scores all day. He's made plenty (I about gasped when I saw Home Alone for the first time since high school a couple of years ago and John Williams' name was on the film). Honestly, it's staggering how prolific he's been, and that's part of what the doc tries to cover. It's not just one Star War - it's 9. It's not one Indy movie, it's 5.
Soundtrack: 517 (this is a mish-mash of work he did used on films - like "Superman Main Titles" being used on Superman IV)
I will be honest - I found out I knew absolutely nothing about John Williams while watching the doc. My assumptions about who he was, his background, his education... all completely wrong. I won't get into his background - that's in the doc. But I will say that if I appreciated Williams before, I'm in absolute awe of him now, and don't just think he's a genius, he's a prodigy.
I was also unaware of his personal tragedy, or how he fell in with the biggest filmmakers of the past several decades.
The doc trots out a who's-who of personalities, none of them a lightweight, to make their arguments for Williams, to talk about their experience working with him, and it's all a delight. I am fine with the narrative that Williams' genius is innate, he's kind, etc... the man is the greatest possible argument for the value of sound in movies, and maybe the last great orchestrator for film.
And, yes, I don't understand why - in this era of franchise pictures - we don't have more folks emulating Williams.
What I agree with - and looking at the listings for the Austin Symphony bares this out - is that film music is now as serious and important to symphonies as anything. Sure, you still have the heavy hitters - some Mozart, Dvorak - but there's the show the whole family will dig. John Williams.
Anyway - watch the doc. I found myself getting a bit emotional. That music has a hold on you and taps into something pretty serious, and hearing all of it together is *a lot*. But watch the doc and learn more about the man and the myth.
Quincy Jones, maybe one of the single most important musical minds of the past 70 years, has passed.
Personally - Quincy Jones is how I learned what a producer was as a kid as the media dug into whatever they could discussing the shockingly popular Michael Jackson album, Thriller.
Jones perpetually found himself in the middle of everything, from playing with Lionel Hampton and Tommy Dorsey as a young man, playing regularly on television, to finding himself the composer of a movie in 1961.
We became involved in scoring movies while continuing to produce music and creating and arranging, this his collaboration with Michael Jackson. In 1985, he was one of the key figures in the creation of USA for Africa's "We Are the World".
Jones also produced media, behind shows like Fresh Price of Bel-Air and several movies. I cannot imagine how much money this guy had, but he did okay.
Jones is a true American success story. A genius, a mover and shaker, a man who seemingly couldn't sit still... he managed to have massive impact on the media landscape in music, in television creation, in movies...
Today marks the birthday of Susan Janet Ballion, better known as Siouxsie Sioux of the bands Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Creatures. And, recently, a solo performer.
We've been fans of Siouxsie since the video for Peek-a-Boo hit MTV. And we still think Peepshow is a killer album.
Sioux recently did some dates in Europe. It's unclear if she's thinking of a longer tour or hitting the US. If not, fair enough. But it would be great to see her again.
Songwriter and musician Richard Sherman has passed at the age of 95.
Sherman was one half of The Sherman Bros., who co-wrote some of the most familiar songs in the world, including "It's a Small World (After All)" for Walt Disney, and songs for Mary Poppins and Jungle Book. They worked on stage musicals, screenplays, and wrote music for Disney parks, including "There's a Great Big, Beautiful Tomorrow" and, of course the music for the Tiki Room.
In recent years, Sherman was treated as a Disney emeritus, and would often consult on their re-makes of films he's worked on, like Jungle Book and for Mary Poppins Returns.
Our pal NathanC, in his professional capacity at Texas Public Radio, interviewed Sherman a few years ago. You can listen by clicking here. Or read it here.
I just recently wound up writing about Lollapalooza and music festivals over on my more "personal journal" blog, League of Melbotis. Originally the post was about ACL Fest and fading interest in festivals, but I was half-way through with the post when I saw an ad for Lolla (2024), a documentary tracking Lollapalooza from it's late-80's origins to today and into tomorrow. I'd started the post talking about that festival as well as ACL Fest, so it's all of a piece.
This evening we went ahead and blasted through the three sections of the doc, each about 50 minutes, for our Friday night viewing.
For a fuller picture, do check out that post at LoM. But the key points include the fact I was a fresh-faced 16 year old when I attended the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991, and attended the first four years.
To begin with: The doc has a lot of constraints. It needs the involvement of the people who were there in the past, it needs the partnership of the people who currently work with and own Lollapalooza (Austin's own C3 Entertainment), and it's distributed by MTV parent company, Paramount, who lent a lot of material to the film. For all those shackles, I think they *mostly* do a solid job of painting at least an interesting and accurate historical portrait. It's just when you get to the modern era that I kind of side-eye the doc as propaganda.
I very much remember the first time I heard or saw Talking Heads - because the two happened at the same time. I would assume it was sometime in 1983 that the video dropped for Burning Down the House on MTV. This would have made me about 9 years old, and it didn't take much to sell me on a video or song, but the band appearing in white tuxedos in what looked like a ballroom in a shoebox, and absolutely kicking ass - while also being replaced in some shots by folks who were *not them* in white tuxedos, did not need any literal translation. It just made sense.
At the front of the band was a wild eyed man who looked like no other front-man in rock and roll. He was thin, almost gaunt, with slicked dark hair and committed to the bit. And in a landscape of Europop, American rock like Journey and Springsteen, and even the hints of punk that made its way to MTV, it was like seeing your awkward high school chemistry teacher strap on a guitar.
Radio play and MTV were enough for me. I was into them, but I was also a kid happy with whatever form I was getting music. I was aware from 4th grade that Talking Heads were not in step with the pop music scene, were not fitting neatly into any categories, but did their own thing.
One of the things they'll tell you in some creative writing classes is "write what you know", but they'll also tell you "don't write a story based on your life and just swap the names out, because now people reacting to a story are reacting to you". JLo did not receive this advice.
So, what happens when a person who has been wildly successful for decades for things she got good at in her mid-20's, and who lives mostly surrounded by sycophants, decides they want to pen a not-at-all disguised analog of their autobiography as a sort of Moonwalker-esque extravaganza?
There is *a lot* going on in This is Me... Now (2024), the sort-of-film/ musical video montage/ visual media spectacle which is 100% the creative product of Jennifer Lopez and everything that suggests.
Spoilers: It will not make you walk away thinking "wow, she's a humble, grounded person" in any way. And not even really in the fun way that you watch Mariah Carey passing through this plane. But the thing is absolutely, mind-bogglingly engaging. You simply cannot believe this thing exists, and with all the resources (her own money!) spent on it, that this is what JLo decided to do.
