As I rip the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack CD – which is worth buying for all kinds of reasons – I find myself playing one song over and over: Pete Townsend’s only-available-here version of “Let My Love Open the Door.”
This rendition is a down-tempo, almost coffeehouse version of the ’80s pop standard that played during the most quietly electric moment of the movie. Martin and Debi are at the Grosse Pointe High School reunion, sitting in the balcony alone, leaning on the rail, and looking into each others eyes. At that moment, they stop being the hard-as-nails DJ and the battle-weary assassin, her bitterness and his confusion evaporate, and they’re in love again in a way that you can only be in love at eighteen. She’s his world, and he’s hers.
The song floats and soars, the keyboards giving it an almost supernal quality. Then, about halfway through, Townsend does something subversive – he weaves the iconic chords of “Teenage Wasteland” into the song, giving it an emotional connection with the torment of maturing that the original lacked. We listen, and we, with Martin and Debi, are now doing what we all do – we are hearing those same songs that we heard then, but now they are different because we are different. And yet, fundamentally, the song, and we, are the same.
Townsend, composer Joe Strummer (of The Clash) and Cusack (the clear creative force behind the film) are, in a single song, delivering the message of the movie. You can go home. You can reconnect with your youth without getting sucked into the butterscotch pit of dewy-eyed nostalgia or maudlin regrets. The moment of re-connection brings to an older, more jaded, more wounded heart the essence of what was wonderful and shitty and pure and debased about being young, and in the process becomes a healing that makes us more whole.
Listen to it in a dark room, with a candle burning and your high school yearbooks open.
“Boys only want love when it’s torture.” Taylor Swift. Oh, Taylor. You have so much to learn. Seriously, though, in one song, America’s reigning queen of pop has given us a teeny-tiny window into her dark side. The question that vexes me is, will she keep hiding it? Or will she just let go in […]
For the record, when I say in this forum that “I am not a fan” of an artist, that does not always mean to cast aspersions on the skill or talent of that artist.
Case in point: I am not a fan of the Rolling Stones, and with all respect to Jagger & Co., you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through one of their concerts. I recognize that they are talented. I acknowledge they had an impact on a generation of music. Unfortunately, neither they nor their music ever connected with me.
(My elder sister, twelve years my senior, believes this to be a generational issue. She’s wrong: if my age was the cause of my Stones issue, how to explain my love of The Who, Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman?)
Talent does not mean connection. We too often interpret in others a failure to appreciate the work of an artist we like as an aesthetic failing, a fundamental flaw in their world view that prevents them from really seeing the work.
But if I have learned one thing at this early stage of my swim in a deepening sea of art and literature, it is the truism that no creation is objective. We bring our experiences, our fears, our subjective values to a work. And that is where the magic takes place. Art is not what happens on a page. Art is what happens when creation and perception collide.
And this may prove in the long run to be Lincoln Center’s legacy: It has had a paralyzing effect on the capacity for innovation of the fine-arts groups that once gathered together so hopefully under its outsized umbrella.
A quiet testimonial, perhaps, to the idea that the New York arts scene – like the Lincoln Center itself – may have grown so large that meaningful innovation and aesthetic breakthroughs are crushed.
Bill “The Fox” Foster is long gone but still mourned. Those of you who made the trek to his smoky little pub at Wilshire on the Santa Monica city line will remember his weekly performances as a distinctly American version of Octoberfest: beer, raunchy songs, and unrestrained testosterone.
If Fox were working today, he would probably be the subject of an angry documentary made by some earnest UCLA Sociology grad students incensed by his apparent advocacy of alcoholism and misogyny. Fortunately, Fox was spared by fate from such ignominy, yet many of us who remember him (and his wife, who ran the joint with an iron hand) yearn for a place where, for a couple of hours a week, it is okay just to be a guy with other guys.
My fellow flack Sid Robinson has a superb post on his site, a personal eulogy of sorts both to The Fox and his eponymous SaMo landmark, The Fox Inn. Read it and remember.
In case you missed it, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (the one on Sepulveda at Mulholland) is hosting, through October 8th, a comprehensive retrospective about Bill Graham, one of the most influential rock impresarios in history.
We tend to see music as guided by the hand of the composer and the talent of the performer, and while that it true, we have been remiss in our study of music history in consigning promotors, publishers, recording executives, and marketers into a giant dustbin marked “suits.”
What we miss in limiting our study to artists and composers is the elephant in the room: being good, being talented, is just not enough anymore, and it probably never was. The road that music has carved through our civilization is lined with the carcasses of talented people who never reached their potential, never made it at all, or who lived and died unappreciated. The difference between success and failure was, all too often, a suit: a patron, a promoter, a third-party capable of recognizing, curating, and cultivating talent.
If that is insufficient evidence for the importance of people like Bill Graham, simply consider the legion of talent-challenged stars you have encountered in your life, the ones that made you wonder how the Hell they made it onto a stage at all. Thank a promoter.
Graham’s personal legacy in the music world is not as easy to assess as someone like Ahmet Ertegün, David Geffen, or Jerry Moss, which is why this exhibition at the Skirball is so important: it is an opportunity for us to better understand, through Graham, whether a great impresario can make a real difference, or whether (as LiveNation might want us to believe) a promoter is just an interchangeable cog in the corporate music machine.
I have had a soft spot for Taylor Swift ever since Kanye West jumped up on stage at the Grammys in 2009, grabbed the mike from her, dissed her award for Best Female Video, and proved to the world, including the President of the United States, what a jackass he was and what a class act Taylor was.
But I cannot help but feel that somehow she has hit an invisible peak. Maybe it was back-to-back chart-toppers. Maybe it was the Time cover.
Or maybe it was something bigger, what Chris Molanphy calls the Imperial phase in her career where she can do no wrong, no matter how far overboard she goes. Harsh. But he goes on: Swift, he says, has hit the peak of her career and the peak of narcissism at the same time.
You might find all of this a little too perfect, as so many things involving Taylor Swift these days are. What’s more, all this perfection is in service of one of Swift’s most solipsistic songs, which is saying something: Her self-deprecation and self-satire also inevitably mean self-absorption.
What concerns me is not the image of Taylor Swift spending her days looking into a mirror. I am more troubled by what this portends: artists who rise to a peak and then find themselves as their best subject ultimately find their work derivative to the point of self-parody (Examples: Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin, Elvis and, I would argue, Eminem.) Down that path lies misery, and possibly a premature exit.
But I am most troubled by all of the rest of us celebrating her self-absorption like its almost a good thing. What can you say about a society that lauds narcissism in their role models? Are we not disturbed by the sight of a talented chanteuse who at the grizzled old age of 25 finds herself bereft of any other subjects but herself?
I am, and I will end 2014 with the silent wish that 2015 offers Ms. Swift a comfortable bridge to her next chapter. Because I discern through the fog the outlines of a precipice that I would not wish on my worst enemy.
The essence of Los Angeles is not easily expressed, but that has not kept everyone from essayists to auteurs to muralists from trying to capture it. Perhaps this is part of the eternal allure of the city: the fact that it can neither be easily described, nor readily dismissed. The upside to all of this is that we are now the inheritors of some magnificent works that, while failing to capture the city in full, continue to add definition to the Angeleno Mosaic.
Music, as we have suggested here before, is a part of that mosaic, and a serious effort has begun to revive and rejuvenate some of the earliest efforts to capture Los Angeles in song. The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Public Library, and USC professor Josh Kun have collaborated in a project to select some of those early tunes and provide a modern interpretation. More than just covers, these are thoroughly modern renditions of almost forgotten tunes that give them a modern feel.
The songs are available for free download in a link from this story. I will not critique the music – I leave that to better tuned ears. What appeals to me about each of these tunes, though, is that their ability to transcend time also suggests something timeless about Los Angeles. I recognize that this thought will stick in the craw of a lot of people: the suggestion that there are timeless elements to American cities less than three centuries old – much less one whose maturity is of a far more recent vintage – is probably a joke to a denizen of London, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, or Beijing.
But this music is guaranteed to touch something deep inside any Greater Angeleno, local-born or immigrant. There are themes, feelings, ideas in all of these that resonate to us today in a way that they did to locals eighty or more years ago, and that certainly still enchant those among us who live far away yet are still, somehow, Angelenos.
I never paid much attention to the artfully manufactured bubble-gum pop Robbie Williams cranked out under the fist of Take That leadman Gary Barlow, so when Williams parted ways with the band in the mid-nineties I found it all-too easy to dismiss him as another moderately-successful musician who had fallen under the twin spell of his own ego and Columbian marching powder.
Flash forward to September 1998, and I was sitting in a nearly-empty Leicester Square movie house with my wife waiting for the matinee to start, when William’s anthem “Millenium” came over the speaker system. I was enthralled. The unforgettable string-figure from John Barry’s superb 1967 James Bond soundtrack for You Only Live Twice was woven throughout the song, and that grabbed me long enough to listen to the lyrics. At its heart the song was an anthem, a heartfelt cri de coeur wherein a jaded star realizes that while celebrity is great, it is going to kill him unless he slows down. Williams could have taken that theme down a darker but better-traveled road, but he chose instead to keep it forward looking and hopeful rather than mournful and hopeless.
Nearly every album he has delivered since (and, make no mistake, Williams is best enjoyed by the album, not by the song) has offered us some combination of Williams’ dark wit accompanied (mostly) by a thumping dance beat, the former aimed as often at himself as at others, and sometimes (“Handsome Man”) in both directions.
Cover of Swing When You’re Winning
On Swing When You’re Winning, though, Williams took a hard detour into Big Band territory. Channeling his abiding admiration for The Chairman of the Board, Williams followed Harry Connick, Jr. into Sinatra territory, recording fourteen standards from the 40s and 50s with the appropriate (and sometimes misbehaving) assistance of Rupert Everett, Nicole Kidman, Jon Lovitz, Jane Horrocks, and Jonathan Wilkes. Each song is brilliant in its way. Music lovers, though, will dwell over his rendition of “One for My Baby,” sung to the accompaniment of pianist Bill Miller, who played for Sinatra when he recorded the standard fifty years prior at Capitol’s studios in Los Angeles.
All of this is prelude, though, to the anthem Williams placed at the beginning of Swing When You’re Winning. “Hollywood Will Listen,” penned by Williams and longtime collaborator Guy Chambers, is subtly iconic, a musical artifact that is in its execution pure Hollywood big-production, and in its words captures the hopes of every naif who ever walked through a studio gate.
Shamelessly dropping names, but of people he hopes will eventually revere him rather than those he “knows,” Williams plays the part of L.A. newcomer, facing a Tinseltown he knows to be hard and impersonal yet swearing it will eventually be at his feet. Anyone who has ever mustered the courage and confidence to take an audition knows the feeling, and, with the orchestra swelling to dramatic crescendos behind him, Williams almost makes you believe it.
But then he does something even more powerful: he just ends the song. There is no triumphant climax, no musical cue that suggests the dreamer has or will reach his dream. The final chorus ends as almost a fade-out, an anti-climax. You can almost see the orchestra fading out of existence, leaving the singer alone in an empty sound stage into which he has wandered, the dreams echoing away in the face of the cold reality of another casting call, another audition.
Once again, Williams is laughing at his own ambition, letting his aspirations soar but never forgetting that no matter what he brings with him, Hollywood is and ever will be a cruel crap-shoot.
Williams’ anthem, then, is neither a celebration of success nor a blues-laden wallow in failure, but a subtle reflection on the reality of life for dreamers inside the Thirty Mile Zone. This is Southern California in the cold bright light of a winter Monday morning, a tribute to Hollywood-as-dream-machine in the 21st Century.
The Golden West Review 