There are very few of rock and roll’s innovators left. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis are the only ones I can think of, now that Bo Diddley has gone. His records have always made me happy — the standard riff, the shuffling beat and tumbling bass. The songs were rarely about anything, and that worked out fine, since Bo Diddley found a groove and stayed in it. Music fans never got tired of it. The saddest thing was that most of the tributes I’ve read in the past day or so mentioned that, despite the enormous impact he …
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Elsewhere Online: Rock-It Man
Here’s the famous William Shatner performance at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, which was nicely parodied on Family Guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvQwXOCKNLY That’s what living in the ’70s was like, kids.
Country Music Reclamation Project: Once A Day
I’ve been picking fairly poetic songs for this series of posts, and have so far ignored some of the tightly written hit songs that drew the attention of both country and pop music fans. Among the most-successful of these was “Once A Day,” recorded by Connie Smith on her debut LP for RCA in 1965. The song spent eight weeks at #1 in the Country charts, longer than any other single. Once A Day (recorded by Connie Smith) Written by Bill Anderson When you found somebody new I thought I never would forget you For I thought then I never …
Movie Review: There Will Be Blood
2007. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. This is a perplexing film: beautiful and crude, detailed characters and awkward violence, long scenes without dialogue and scenes scored with odd, overwhelming music. After a second viewing, I thought it was all of the above, and a fascinating film, after all. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a solitary prospector who abandons his search for silver when he strikes oil. Trying to stay a step ahead of competitors such as Standard Oil, he follows up on a tip to buy a remote goat ranch that has crude seeping out …
Country Music Reclamation Project: Lonely Tombs
As it’s Sunday morning, and much of America is at church, allowing another human being explain God to them, it’s a good opportunity to spotlight one of the thousands of great country gospel songs. There are so many — and none that I’m aware of have prosperity theology as its subject. Most of these country gospel songs address the concerns of regular people: what will become of loved ones who die, will the afterlife be less painful than life on earth, will I be accepted into Heaven despite being a relentless sinner. There are few country gospel songs that are …
Elsewhere Online: Going Up
The New Yorker’s online edition has a fascinating article that combines everything you might want to know about elevators (“The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.” I did not know that!) with the frightening story of Nicholas White, who in 1999 was working in Manhattan’s McGraw-Hill Building and returning from a smoke break, when his express elevator stopped a third of the way up, in a section that had no outlet for many floors in either direction. Oh yeah, and it was …
Elsewhere Online: Spending Time With Big Star
Will Rigby, drummer for the DBs, writes a post on Ted Barron’s always-entertaining Boogie Woogie Flu blog about a road trip to Memphis, hanging out with Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, and a visit to an abandoned Sun Studios. There are oral histories of rock, like Please Kill Me and Jim Walsh’s book on the Replacements, All Over But The Shouting, and I bet there’s a history of Big Star waiting to be told. Rigby’s recollection includes meeting a very depressed Bell, who was managing a family restaurant prior to recording I Am The Cosmos, not long before his death. …
Movie Review: Into The Wild
2007. Starring Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener. Directed by Sean Penn. In 1992, Christopher McCandless graduated from college and began a mission — the point of which has since become the speculation of a best-seller written by Jon Krakauer and a film by Sean Penn. His journey winds through the American Southwest, to the corn fields of the Dakotas, but always — as he reminds everyone throughout the film — to Alaska. There he would he would finally escape other humans, then discover how much he needs them. McCandless, here portrayed by Emile Hirsch, comes off as wise-beyond-his-years free spirit and …
Passings: Richard Widmark
Richard Widmark died on March 26 at the age of 93. His debut, as crazy gangster Tommy Udo in 1947’s Kiss of Death, won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and was followed by other film noir roles. Although he starred in a number of other noir classics — including The Street With No Name (1948), Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, Joseph Mankiewicz’s No Way Out and Panic in the Streets (all 1950, quite a year for crime dramas!) — my favorite performance has to be that of the cool Skip McCoy in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup …
Out of Touch
After having spent two weeks riding the couch, watching daytime TV and coughing my lungs out, I have emerged from the twilight world. I don’t know that I chose life so much as death just couldn’t close the deal. Way behind on the blogging, though, I know.