This story will only be relevant to Canadians. Back in June 1979, Conservative leader Joe Clark had just become Prime Minister and unseated the once popular Liberal Pierre Trudeau to form a minority government. It didn't last long. By March 1980, Trudeau had come back from retirement and brought the Clark government down. Once again, he found himself leading the country, but not with the same romantic zeal into the Eighties that he stoked when he took the nation by storm in 1968.
As I listened to the election results on the radio, the station took a commercial break right after they called it. After the news at the top of the hour, the DJ came back with Murray Head's "Say it Ain't So, Joe, " a hit song from earlier in the Seventies. I didn't know the track and only knew of Murray Head when he played Peter Finch's gay lover in Sunday Bloody Sunday. But the song's content, despite being far removed from the political events of the evening, now seemed to serve as some prescient response to the changing of the guard. Given the tune's plaintive tone and the air of resignation in the lyrics, "Say it Ain't So, Joe" also lamented the cost of one man's fall and the price of another man's transformation into Lazarus. The only question that still remains for me – and one that will never be answered – is whether the DJ actually meant it to be so.
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Back in the mid-Eighties, David Byrne went into the studio with The Staple Singers to produce a high voltage pop album that never found its audience. Besides a hopping cover of the Talking Heads' "Slippery People," the gospel group kicked off the album with a scorching version of Pacific Co. & Electric's "Are You Ready?" This hurricane performance gleefully sweeps everything from its path while making you feel intoxicated with the idea of a new day dawning. (For Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday.)
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Raymond Chandler once wrote that "Americans, having the most complex civilization the world has seen, still like to think of themselves as plain people. In other words they like to think the comic-strip artist is a better draftsman than Leonardo – just because he is a comic-strip artist and the comic strip is for plain people." He went on a few paragraphs later to further define the American voice as "flat, toneless, and tiresome." The plain, the flat, the toneless and the tiresome come fully and deliberately to fruition in this odd rarity by The Crazy Teens called "Crazy Date," an unnervingly funny piece of deadpan rockabilly from the late Fifties I first heard – fittingly enough – on an Oxford American Magazine CD.
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I recall as a teenager being first played Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World and Ziggy Stardust, but an audiophile friend first played me Aladdin Sane in a state of complete bliss. And who could argue thanks to Ken Scott's sumptuous production and Bowie's sophisticated arrangements? "How does he get such gorgeous layers of sound on such a thin platter?" he asked while cradling the LP as if it were an extra limb he wouldn't dare lose.
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When I was writing Dangerous Kitchen, I remember immersing myself in the music of Anton Webern with a complete box set conducted by Pierre Boulez (who sadly passed away this month). The sparse arrangements were beautifully compelling and the melodies stretched out as if you could feel the music breathing. Webern quickly became my favourite serialist modern composer who shows you the path of how minimalism can truly work.
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Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who died New Year's Day, had a sure gift for turning the screen into a large and expansive canvas and making you feel keenly aware of your peripheral vision. Through his eyes, the beauty of the rural landscape in Deliverance could also appear largely mysterious and as foreboding as nature itself. The rain and snow in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which emerged delicately like droplets of paint dotting the screen, coloured the mood of Robert Altman's frontier village as if it were conjured up in the clouds. The steel town of The Deer Hunter, which cast long, dark shadows, seemed to cocoon and dwarf the characters in their parochial values. The nightscape of Close Encounters gave full credence to the child's imagination where you were convinced that magical moments could light the sky; just as in Blow Out, the rainy drizzle of Philadelphia created a moral chill where the city became, as critic Michael Sragow once wrote, "snuggled up in sin." Here in this YouTube post defines the genius of Vilmos Zsigmond in less than three minutes.
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Sneezy Waters used to do this show live in the Seventies in various venues around Toronto before this 1980 film version caught what became a ghostly and electrifying evocation of the New Year's Eve show Hank Williams never gave due to his death that night in 1952. The live show turned the imaginary concert into a fever dream percolating in a time capsule where the audience was transported into a psychodrama. David Acomba's film takes place in Hank Williams' psyche, as he dreams asleep in back of his car, and the show he imagines becomes a riveting road map that the viewer follows into the lonely and desolate world where the songs can only deliver Williams to his inevitable end. Powerful stuff.
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