Irwin Chusid (author, Songs In The Key Of Z): Outsider music is a slippery genre. It's musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications: They are sincere about it. They mean it. They're not doing it to be funny. They're not doing it to be outrageous. This is a sincere musical expression. Wild Man Fischer in many ways is a poster child for outsider music.
2010 marked the Fiftieth (!!) Anniversary of the Bee Gees' career as fully professional all-singing, all-playing musicians, songwriters, and performers.
This January 12 marked eight years since self-styled “man in the middle” Maurice Gibb's tragic passing. And in 2011, remaining Gibbs Barry and Robin are actually threatening to continue recording, and perhaps even tour the globe, beneath the hitherto-mighty Bee Gee moniker.
This is a proposition I frankly find quite incomprehensible to fathom, let alone purchase three-figure tickets to witness in person. Though with Messrs. Pete and Roger insisting on conducting business both on stage and off as [sic?] “The Who,” I do suppose anything is possible (if not exactly practical and/or ethical).
Nevertheless, I'm far happier to report that 2011 also sees the appearance of a grand new five-decade-plus DVD retrospective on Barry, Robin, Maurice and even Andy Gibb entitled In Our Own Time. And from its very opening ultra-decibel, fire ‘n' flashpot-festooned montage of “You Should Be Dancing” footage spanning '76 clear through '96 – which then cleverly cuts far back to a '56-vintage Elvis and his similarly dance-crazed “Blue Suede Shoes” – it's clear this is going to be one of those far too rare roc doc's which actually has a wise and sharpened sense of socio-historical pop perspective. I mean, who was Tony Manero after all than simply Vince Everett in polyester white as opposed to jailhouse black?
Our ride duly launches out of post-war Manchester, England as Barry, Robin and (via interview footage culled from David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's equally adept This Is Where I Came In documentary) Maurice describe years spent as pre-teen Everly wannabe's who eventually emigrate all the way to Australia, where they form a singing act to perform for spare change at a local race car track. But such is this young trio's charm and already obvious talent that they soon blossom into bonafide Down-Under Beatles: the televised performance herein of a ‘63 Bee Gee “Please Please Me” alone makes In Our Own Time nothing short of Required Viewing. Yet the fully airborne promotional footage we're treated to next for their first Number One hit, 1966's still-buoyant “Spicks and Specks,” displays a far more Monkee as opposed to Beatle-like mastery of the lip-sync'd absurd.
Returning to their homeland and soon after magically hooking up with none other than Fab sub-manager Robert Stigwood, a recording contract and string of (self-written and purposefully “melodramatic,” it is revealed) classics appear in typically Sixties warp-speed. Colourful “New York Mining Disaster,” “I Can't See Nobody,” “To Love Somebody,” “Massachusetts,” “Idea” and “Words” clips follow, and even a glancing view towards each should erase all doubts that The Bee Gees were one of that genius-packed decade's surely most accomplished by far. Case closed.
Caution: What shoots way, way up must of course fall down. So as Sixties become Seventies our heroes found themselves struggling beneath the weight of red velvet-ensconced rock operas, mutinous solo projects, meddling better halves and even their very own ill-fated television spectacular, Cucumber Castle (which may indeed be much more fun than Magical Mystery Tour , though it's certainly no Monkees' Head ). Once the audio-visual wreckage cleared however, the brothers found themselves chastened enough to not only fully reform, but come up with two unashamedly allegorical gems, “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart,” which appeared to all concerned to be their career swansongs.
But! We're less than half-way through our show! And so what exactly did spare The Bee Gees at this critical point from a fate worse than Oldie Goldie residencies near Clacton-on-Sea?
Two words: Arif Mardin.
Luring them to the decidedly more sympathetic climes of Miami's Criteria Recording Studios, then cleverly steering the brothers towards their previously unexplored r'n'b leanings (via Barry's falsetto most pointedly), the result was a slow but steady climb both back onto their feet and then extremely high back up the international sales charts. No further explanation is really needed by me here: At least 100 million of you out there bought the ensuing records.
The backlash, of course, was instant and fierce. “Bee Gee-Free Weekends” on radio stations the world over. “Bee Gee Bonfires” of Saturday Night Fever soundtracks in Chicago baseball stadiums.
“The enigma with a stigma,” as Barry still brands The Bee Gees to this very day.
And I'm sure he doesn't just mean the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie either.
Yet for anyone who tuned away from the tale right about here, In Our Own Time continues on through subsequent years of Gibbs stubbornly continuing to craft monster hits …only for other singers (Streisand, Celine, The Divine Miss Ross and Kenny and Dolly, for example: why, there's an additional twenty-or-so million in sales right there). Unfortunately, this otherwise platinum period also saw the loss of a severely over-self-medicated Andy Gibb, and the frightful near-exit of a similarly lost “Brother Mo” to boot. Most thankfully indeed though, Maurice eventually bounced completely back to help create what, tragically, would be his final Bee Gee masterpiece, “This Is Where I Came In,” before death on January 12, 2003.
Well, the story perhaps does not end there. One hour and fifty-one minutes into Our Own Time finds a stoic Barry insisting, and I quote, “The legacy of the Bee Gees MUST go on, one way or the other.” Cut to contemporary footage of he and faithful brother Robin, recently reunited before twin microphones in some faux-recording studio setting, crooning “To Love Somebody” and “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.”
Fade to black. One can only hope.
Video: The Bee Gees' "Please Please Me"
The summer of 1970 was certainly a strange one in, for, and around what we may now quaintly call the pop/rock scene: Paul had just left his Beatles, for starters, the Stones and Dylan were missing-without-much-action, kids were throwing various Jacksons, Osmonds, and even Bobby Sherman way up the charts whilst the older kids were pretending to get back to the garden via a newly-released big-Hollywood Woodstock movie.
Meanwhile, yours very truly was busy buying up every single Creedence Clearwater record he could lay his young hands on, I'll have you all know.
Then again there was the, well, strange case of John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison who, after having closed out those Sixties with a “flop” album ( The Soft Parade ) and even floppier run-ins with the law (their singer having gotten busted acting naughty on stage in Miami, and again on a Phoenix-bound airliner) now found themselves in 1970 under immense pressure to resurrect their career and get back to where they once belonged. As in the basics, musically speaking that is.
These various struggles, conflicts, lewd behavior indictments and then some are all fully explored – along with, thankfully, lots of great music too – in a fascinating new documentary entitled When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors , freshly available on DVD and Blu-ray from those fine folk over at Eagle Rock Entertainment.
Now, unlike the band's own series of understandably self-serving concert films over the years or, on entirely the other hand, Oliver Stone's utterly cataclysmic 1991 biopic The Doors , Tom DiCillo's When You're Strange perhaps comes closest to finally presenting, as no less an authority as Ray Manzarek has long promised, “the true story of The Doors.” It does so by wisely keeping 21st Century interference to a bare minimum, concentrating instead on a wealth of live and studio footage from throughout the band's surprisingly brief career intriguingly intercut with – and this is the film's real coup to my eyes – never before seen segments from Jim Morrison's barely-released 1969 short subject HWY: An American Pastoral.
Without ever getting overtly ham-fisted a la the above-mentioned Mr. Stone, DiCillo (along with Johnny Depp's narration) weaves the HWY footage of Morrison speeding across the California desert to actually drive When You're Strange forward, onward and upward from the band's infant gigs on L.A.'s Sunset Strip through the recording of their landmark debut album in 1966 and subsequent stardom. It's interesting, not to mention important to realize and understand just how big a pop star Jim was at this time: He may have been playing it so cool by singing the dreaded “higher” word when The Doors performed “Light My Fire” on The Ed Sullivan Show , but at the same time this was a man only too happy to appear bare-chested and love-bead-adorned alongside Davy Jones and Mark Lindsay across the pages of 16 Magazine .
When You're Strange similarly pulls few punches in charting the band's just-as-speedy fall from those poppiest of heights, mainly but not fully on account of Jimbo's descent into the depths of alcoholic fear and self-loathing. It was indeed, and still remains, quite disheartening to watch The Doors' slinky frontman decline from the leather-clad Lizard King of every bad girl's Summer of Love dreams to the bearded, bloated ragamuffin who hauled sheep on stage in 1969, only to then berate his audience with cries of “You love it, don't ya? Maybe you love gettin' your face stuck in the shit. You're all a bunch of fuckin' idiots!” Oh, Morrison…
Such performance Art with a capital “F” notwithstanding, footage from the band's 1968 European tour, and then a remarkable sequence from the “Wild Child” recording session itself, show The Doors were without a single doubt a four -piece band, oh so much greater than the sum of its equal parts, with each man contributing his own special brilliance to the creation. There wasn't ever a single weak musical link to this band, its writing, arranging, and (usually) its performing skills, and When You're Strange never once lets the viewer get distracted from this critically important fact …despite the carnival atmosphere which never seemed to cease swirling around the entire proceedings.
Finally, we also see how, following that tricky Summer of 1970, the band fully rebounded with its final two albums, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman (again, When You're Strange presents fabulous footage from the latter's recording sessions …apparently, the last existing footage of the band as a whole).
But then, most inconveniently, Jim moved to Paris and rumor has it actually died there very early on the morning of July 3, 1971.
Now he may indeed remain “hot, sexy, and dead” as Rolling Stone declared a decade later, kicking off the Doors Resurrection each surviving band member continues to propagate most efficiently to this day. Yet Tom DiCillo has bravely succeeded, where few have ever even attempted to before, in stripping away the excess, puncturing the mythology, and – What a concept! – letting The Doors' MUSIC do the talking.
Strange indeed.
When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors (Official Site)
When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors (HD Theatrical Trailer)
Attention, music fans and pop culture connoisseurs everywhere:
Your assignment today is to gather together in one medium-sized concert facility, for one evening only, one dozen of the world’s most popular entertainers. Age, style, size, corporate affiliation and particularly musical pigeonhole is to be strictly of no concern whatsoever. Each act just has to have had a heck of a lot of their songs downloaded, perhaps maybe even sold, over the past calendar year or so.
Then, with a bare minimum of rehearsal or directorial guidelines of any sort – and an equally bare-boned budget to boot – a two-hour concert has to sequenced, scored, choreographed and executed upon a single stage utilizing all these chosen singers, dancers and accompanists, the entire proceedings recorded and video’d completely live, music and vocals, without re-takes, and the resultant miles of tape then edited, printed, promoted and distributed for public viewing into theatres.
Oh. And this all has to be completed within the period of a mere fourteen days, from show-date to release-date, by the way.
Finished laughing? Of course in a 21st century scheme of things such an endeavor would scarcely get past the imagining stage I agree, quickly dismissed out-of-hand (not to mention out-of-mind) as completely unfeasible; one legal, logistical – not to mention egotistical – nightmare of gargantuan proportions.
But, in that strange and distant galaxy known as The Sixties, where anything seemed possible, everything was tried at least once, and “no” was a word only uttered when speaking to people over thirty, undertakings of such grand socio-musical import were thought no more impractical than, say, making orange juice out of freeze-dried crystals then flying with them all the way to the moon and back.
What is hard to believe, however, is that one such concert event filmed inside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on the night of October 29, 1964 in front of a few hundred local high school students should not only survive to be released on DVD, but that its one hundred and twelve monochrome minutes remain as utterly entertaining, and downright engrossing, all these forty-five years later.
The TAMI Show: Collector’s Edition, now finally available from our friends over at Shout! Factory is, you see, simply so, so much more than merely Monterey Pop without the lysergic, Woodstock without the mudslides or, yes, Altamont minus pool cues and homicide victims. True, one could consider this film as “just” the single most frantically paced, ultra-high-decibel time capsule of an extraordinary era ever preserved on disc.
Or even, as Quentin Tarantino most assuredly claims, “in the top three of all rock movies.”
I will go all that one further, however: The TAMI Show (as in Teenage Awards Music International, by the way) is absolutely essential viewing to anyone and everyone who consider themselves fans, followers, and/or students of popular music.
Period.
For what novice director Steve Binder and his crew captured, and what today is immaculately preserved upon The TAMI Show DVD, is busting-full of rich musical (James Brown, just for starters!) and cinematic (Diana Ross’ eyes literally filling the screen during an utterly Supreme “Where Did Our Love Go”) moments which have been oft-shot by everyone from Pennebaker to Scorcese since, but never truly duplicated.
Yes, it may, sorrowfully, have taken nearly half a century to make it into our homes, but this film has not returned anew one single frame, nor scream, too soon.
Trust me, Little Steven is right:
You have never seen, nor heard, ANYTHING quite like this before...
Nowadays, it seems anyone and everyone with easy access to velcro sideburns and a karaoke machine are busy making livings (of a sort) out of playing at Elvis Aaron Presley.
After all, Mojo Nixon was right: Elvis Is Everywhere.
But retrospective credit is definitely due director John Carpenter and dick clark productions for getting there fastest, and first: Even before the autopsy was cold, they were readying their “Elvis” for his home screen resurrection during prime time, February of 1979.
The vehicle? An ambitious, yet quite reverent (especially in view of subsequent bio-pics) made-for-TV motion picture starring Kurt Russell in that title role of a lifetime. And to watch this particular Elvis again today, newly available from the fine folk over at Shout! Factory, is to be reminded just how larger-than-life The King had already become as the Seventies ended and the deification was only about to begin.
Indeed, the original, uncut Elvis tele-film, freshly packaged alongside some revelatory bonus footage (including a real gem from the Dick Clark vaults: a Summer of ’64 Beatle-battling tribute to the King from American Bandstand) makes for a surprisingly entertaining, and sometimes even thought-provoking two hours of music, mayhem and, as is often hinted, pure madness. Yes, it’s the story of a simple man blessed with unusual talents and drive who, armed only with his wits and a twelve-dollar guitar, aspired to little more than moving his beloved parents out of the Memphis projects and into a comparatively better life.
Of course, what transpired over the next ten years Elvis in even his wildest adolescent dreams could hardly have imagined.
Under Carpenter’s direction, this still-improbable tale is told with an unusual eye for detail and a true sense of middle-1950s America, with its music and its morals struggling to break free. More remarkable still, Elvis succeeds in conveying just how one most unlikely young man came to embody this entire socio-musical upheaval, and how it eventually swallowed and, yes, broke him.
Pedigree is present as well, as the cast of Elvis features two actual Memphis Mafia, Larry Geller and Charlie Hodge. Much screen time as well is devoted to the Elvis of Sun Records, where during the years 1954/1955 he and his raw-diamond accompanists Scotty Moore and Bill Black just so happened to change the course of musical history under the ever-watchful ears of producer Sam Phillips. This is a key era of Presley’s development which is much too often ignored for flashier and/or seemlier events in most retrospective recreations of the man, cinematic and otherwise.
Keen observers will also spot in the role of Elvis’ first drummer D.J. Fontana no less than original Spinal Tap sticksman Ed Begley Jr. And while we’re trivially speaking, lest we forget that Kurt Russell’s very first-ever motion picture appearance was at the tender age of eleven, attacking the real Elvis’ shins in 1963’s It Happened At The World’s Fair. So there!
Interesting as well to see the role of Elvis’ long-suffering daddy Vernon played by Kurt’s real-life father Bing (!), and to realize within weeks of the ABC-TV premier of Elvis Kurt up and married Season Hubley, who portrayed his on-screen wife Priscilla!! And keeping things as familialy dysfunctional as possible, the great Shelley Winters is brilliantly cast as Elvis’ closer-than-close mother Gladys, a role she plays throughout Elvis with all her usual devotion and gusto entirely intact.
But it is truly the 27-year-old Kurt who excels throughout, more than ably filling gigantic shoes and faltering only occasionally during some of the key musical numbers. Not that he should be blamed, however: Russell makes as good a hillbilly cat as can really be expected from a former Disney child actor who looks as if he spent his formative years listening to far too many Fabian records. Yet purely dramatically speaking, he portrays the King with a respect and, believe it or not, sly subtlety which has been sorrowfully lacking in most every subsequent way-over-the-top Presley portrayal.To be truthful, I was personally surprised at just how well Elvis stands up, musically, historically, and purely cinematically, amidst the three decades – and insurmountable flood of Presley “tributes” – which have followed. So then I do suggest you watch it today, and watch it often (followed, if you dare, with Allan Arkush’s Elvis Meets Nixon, to pick the story up where Carpenter and Russel leave off).
Then, of course, pull out all the old RCA and especially Sun tracks that you can, and marvel anew at the real thing as well, don’t forget.
Video: Kurt Russell as Elvis shoots out a TV screen
A one-shot music zine by Mike Faloon. Learn more and order today.
Also available: The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock: Stories by Mike Faloon
