Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXV

There was always a sly self-deprecation and a sweet sensuality in pianist Fats Domino's voice which added great warmth and emotional intensity to his work. After building a solid rapport with black audiences in the early fifties, he infiltrated the white charts later in the decade with a succession of crossover hits including the moody "Blue Monday," the rollicking "Whole Lotta Loving," and the subversive "Blueberry Hill." Since Fats (who went to spirit in 2017) didn't possess in his voice the swagger of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, he preferred seduction to aggression and the words would often be couched in innuendo. Randy Newman learned much from Fats Domino in both style and humour. He also did some of the arrangements on Fats is Back!, Domino's 1969 comeback album. Fats returned the favour by covering Newman's Domino-inspired "Have You Seen My Baby?" from 12 Songs. One can't imagine Domino covering, as critic Scott Montgomery once mused, Newman's songs about sex and arson ("Let's Burn Down the Cornfield"), a genteel rapist ("Suzanne"), or suicide by way of a beach cleaning machine ("Lucinda"). But "Have You Seen My Baby," which borrows its opening line from Ernie K-Doe, is right in Fats's wheelhouse. It's a playful romp that easily takes its place in the canon of great New Orleans rhythm and blues – especially with shrewd Newman lines like "I say, 'Please don't talk to strangers, baby' / But she always do / She say, 'I'll talk to strangers if I want to / 'Cause I'm a stranger, too.'"

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I've always loved the lonesome sound of a train whistle going off in the distance, but I never thought I'd hear it again – and as frequently – as during game five of the memorable 2017 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros. After the amazing 13-12 home field victory in extra innings by the Astros, who celebrate every home run with a tiny locomotive train in the outfield bleachers running down the tracks tooting in celebration, that sound was no longer signifying a lonely train alerting all within hearing distance that it's out there travelling the country. It was instead the celebratory blast of a runaway caboose mowing down everything in its path. One of the advantages of not having your own team (Toronto Blue Jays) in the October classic is that you can enjoy the playoffs without much at stake. If you were a fan of exemplary pitching, you were at the wrong World Series. But if you wanted to watch two equally matched teams who refused to lose despite the inevitable fact that one of them must, then you found this series explosively entertaining. With its twists and turns, game five made you feel like it could go on for years. Stros! Dodgers! Last man standing. In a few days, the city that survived a devastating summer hurricane stood tall again.

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It's no big secret that George Harrison's 1974 tour with Ravi Shankar, the Tom Scott band, and Billy Preston was a huge bust largely due to Harrrison's failing voice, his lingering bitterness over the legacy of The Beatles, and his recent divorce from Pattie Boyd, which had just had a painful airing on his Dark Horse (or "Dark Hoarse") album. But the concerts did have their highlights. While Harrison shredded The Beatles' catalogue on stage by changing the words and the arrangements, this fascinating bit of east-west fusion music (written by Ravi Shankar) with Tom Scott's LA Express more honestly freed Harrison from that legacy. Hearing himself play music from the stage that he never got to perform with his mates from Liverpool, Harrison seems to experience a much happier divorce from his past.

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The Webb Sisters took part in the Leonard Cohen tribute concert last November in Montreal where they joined Adam Cohen for a rendition of "So Long, Marianne," and in the second set teamed up with Borns to do "If It Be Your Will." Here they pay tribute to George Harrison with a stirring cover of "I Need You" from Help! Harrison sounds like a soul adrift who hopes the one he is singing to knows exactly how he deeply he feels for her. The Webb Sisters' version works like an answer more than a cover. Their interpretation tells him that as far as reciprocation is concerned, he never had a thing to worry about.

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For those who thought Dion was a relic from the fifties, he actually continued recording without The Belmonts long into the sixties and seventies. In 1968, he came out with an album, Dion, a chamber work featuring covers of songs by Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, and it led off with his moving anthem, "Abraham, Martin and John." Devin McKinney called the album "a strange and beautiful hippie-folkie mélange," which it is. It also made me think of a scene at the end of Phil Kaufman's little-seen adaptation of Richard Price's The Wanderers (1979).

The movie is loosely based on Price's 1974 novel about a youth gang in the Bronx named after Dion and The Belmonts' hit song ("The Wanderer") and the other New York city misfits they encounter and clash with. Set in 1963, the plot is a coming-of-age story not only for the hormonal kids, but also for the adults, and for the nation on the verge of JFK's assassination. The appealing adolescent cockiness of Dion & the Belmonts' "Runaround Sue" and "The Wanderer" soon gave way to the adult emotions of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" (and even later in the film by Bob Dylan singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'," which sends Ken Wahl's Richie, the leader of The Wanderers, into retreat from Dylan's new world and back into the safe and familiar one that's about to be irrevocably changed by the decade ahead). When I think of Dion as maybe another version of Richie – that is, one who didn't fall back into the past but stayed and listened to Dylan that night – his work and life seem to trace the fragile course of the decade itself. Dion took (as McKinney went on to say) "what he liked from the new sounds, worked the margins, and created consistently beautiful, soulful music that never found, as they say, the audience it deserved." I'd add his lovely interpretation of Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy" to that observation.

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Like the famous duets of Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, or maybe Bizet's "Au Fond du Temple Saint (The Pearl Fishers' Duet)" as performed by Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli's "Minor Swing" turns the intimate language of a musical conversation into a shared and loving dialogue with the listener.

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I never could understand the commercial failure of Lindsey Buckingham's remarkable 1992 solo album, Out of the Cradle, which he made after fleeing Fleetwood Mac after their tepid Tango in the Night record. From the buoyant opening track, "Don't Look Down," to the breathtakingly beautiful cover of The Kingston Trio's "All My Sorrows," to the rippling lava of "Countdown," Buckingham's third solo record (in which he plays almost all the instruments himself) has an irresistible and desired engagement with the listener. Without abandoning the pop hooks that fueled the intensity of his best work with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham creates a masterful hermit project, a kind of basement tape, that comes to us like a message in a bottle that somehow never found the shoreline it was intended for.

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When I was in college in the seventies, I got a first part-time job working at Music World on Yonge Street in Toronto. I was consigned to the jazz and R&B section of the store and when I did the morning shift on weekends, after long weeks working on media projects, I needed a boost. Knowing that it would take some time for the coffee to kick in, I immediately turned the lights on in my section, fired up the amp, put this track on – loud – and I miraculously came to attention. From the front of the store, as Billy Cobham's compulsively speedy drum rolls dueled with Tommy Bolin's guitar shredding, I could hear the manager tell a colleague, "I think he's awake now."

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The death of AC/DC's co-founder Malcolm Young in 2017 brought to mind a trip I made to a now-long-gone Toronto CD shop a number of years back. The sales clerk was playing some pretty lively bluegrass music yet one track had a melody and some lyrics that kept gnawing at me while I browsed through the stacks. The song was "Hell's Bells" performed by a band called Hayseed Dixie (say it quickly four times). For those who may have wondered how "Purple Haze" might sound on an accordion, "Hell's Bells" is actually a successful little experiment. From the moment a bicycle bell opens the track, as opposed to the huge gongs of Big Ben, the group performs with an earnest joy. Their tongues aren't tucked in their cheeks but that doesn't mean Hayseed Dixie loses any of their cheekiness.

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The sad news of the passing of actress Ann Wedgeworth brought forth plenty of commentary about her role in TV's Three's Company (which I never watched). I first recall seeing her as the sensitively streetwise Frenchy in Jerzy Schatzberg's 1973 Scarecrow (a modern homage to Of Mice and Men) during one of our Friday night screenings at Sheridan College. She would later light up the screen in Sweet Dreams as Patsy Cline's mother, where she and Jessica Lange (as Cline) created familial bonds of love that couldn't be splintered. But I probably adored her most in The Whole Wide World, where she again played a mother, this time of pulp writer Robert E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofrio), who created Conan the Barbarian. The film is about the relationship between Howard and Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), a young Texas schoolteacher who had aspirations to be a writer. Director Dan Ireland provides a probing and touching appraisal of the gulf between the genders and how these two innocents attempt to bridge it. Where Price craves experience and is deeply drawn to Howard’s fervid imagination, Howard, who can only live in the world of his own imagination, is initially drawn to her passionate desire to take in the whole wide world. But Howard's Oedipal attachment to his terminally ill mother prevents him from forming any adult relationship with another woman. If the generational currents between mother and daughter in Sweet Dreams provide a foundation for Patsy Cline's turbulent marriage to Charlie Dick (Ed Harris), in The Whole Wide World they are chains of imprisonment for Howard.

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I wasn't planning on wasting time and space writing about the recent passing of Charles Manson, but it did remind me of a surreal experience I had at Sheridan College involving someone who knew him quite well. While taking a sociology class in 1977 with Robert Livesey for an additional credit in Media Arts, we learned that he was working on a book about the legendary bank robber, Alvin 'Creepy' Karpis, who shot up the Midwest in the thirties and rode with the Ma Barker gang till J. Edgar Hoover arrested him. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Karpis was later placed in the brand-new maximum-security federal prison on Alcatraz Island, where he remained for 25 years before being transferred to McNeil Island (from which he was later paroled, spending ten free years in Canada before dying in 1979). During his time in Alcatraz, he came to know and share a cell with Manson and taught him to play the guitar. Beach Boy Dennis Wilson was the first to hear the results. Livesey would also later publish his book as On The Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz by Alvin Karpis.

One day, Livesey brought Karpis to class so that we could all be entertained watching a TV movie about his exploits with the Ma Barker gang. Of course, Karpis (who arrived decked out in what appeared to be his pajamas) sat beside me laughing and prodding me with his elbow whenever the film demonstrated scenes of his ruthlessness. As I looked over at this guy, who suggested a retired accountant who could barely tie his shoelaces, I couldn't reconcile the elderly Karpis with the young Robert Foxworth gleefully shooting up banks on the screen in front of me. Since we didn't chat much during the movie, I had to wonder (given the hackneyed script and pedestrian direction) whether in that brief moment of his guffawing a former bank robber had – just for a single second – turned into a film critic.

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You can feel a slight melancholy looking back at the young, spry and lanky bassist Rick Danko in The Band's The Last Waltz bopping up and down (as a friend once described it) like Robert De Niro's out-of-control Johnny Boy from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. His happy abandon, even when singing a tale of fear like "Stage Fright," has a way of reminding you of what what soon would be lost in later years, when he grew bloated by abuse and neglect and then ended his life in heart failure. (He ultimately resembled a more genial version of the defeated Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's Raging Bull.) While it was Richard Manuel who was often considered the true soul singer in the group, and you'll get no argument from me, I'd have to put forward Rick Danko's singing on "Where I Should Always Be" from High on the Hog as his equal. Even more than his aching performance on something indelible like "It Makes No Difference," Danko's "Where I Should Always Be" unburdens the weight of defeat while taking one final glance at all that was once beautiful and satisfying.

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I was never a big fan of the heavy rock sound of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's mid-seventies hits "Takin' Care of Business" and "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet," which possessed all the monotony of clumping hooves. But my late friend Brent Eikhard came to my rescue one day and drew attention to their debut album, where the track "Blue Collar" revealed an entirely different animal. Written by bass player C.F. Turner, "Blue Collar" has a catchy jazz swing which boasts not only a slinky and seductive vocal from Bachman, but also some fine picking that invokes – at various moments – Chet Atkins, Ed Bickert, Lenny Breau, Wes Montgomery and even some Hendrix wah-wah. While unlikely to ever be a staple – even on FM – "Blue Collar" gives you a taste of what possibilities were there before they took care of business.

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Sadly, veteran editor Gerald "Jerry" Greenberg passed away this past year. He had more than forty feature films to his credit, but most folks will likely remember his switchblade quick cuts in the car chase from The French Connection. Earlier he had been one of the first protégés of the master Dede Allen, who initially brought him in as her assistant on Elia Kazan's 1963 America, America. He later assisted her in the cutting of Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant (for Arthur Penn) before he began flying solo on Sidney Lumet's 1968 Bye, Bye Braverman. Along with The Missouri Breaks, Apocalypse Now, Heaven's Gate and Reds, he edited five pictures for Brian De Palma. One of those, Dressed to Kill, has one of my favourite bits of film editing. In the sequence, which takes place in an art museum, Angie Dickinson is vulnerable after a session with her therapist and is desperately needing intimate contact. She meets a handsome (but difficult to interpret) guy who indulges her in a cat-and-mouse game where crossed signals create both humour and suspense. There is no dialogue in this six-minute sequence, only the Pino Donaggio score (which Pauline Kael humourously described as sounding in this scene like "Bernard Herrrmann on Quaaludes") and the deft adagio cutting of Jerry Greenberg. One who once learned to bring quick ballet moments to the historical conclusion of Bonnie and Clyde, here he finds a similar power in the more languid tug-of-war seduction between two strangers who don't have to say a word.

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 . . . But can it also play Also sprach Zarathustra?

 – Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Talking Out of Turn: A Collection of Reviews, Interviews and Remembrances currently being assembled on Blogger