The Kids Are Alright

Year 10, Day 236 - 8/24/18 - Movie #3,032

BEFORE: With two weeks of music documentaries to go, the person who's appeared in the most movies so far is Paul McCartney, with 14 appearances, if I count the ones that weren't listed on the IMDB when I put the chain together.  That means he could pass Basil Rathbone as the top star of the year, remember I watched all of Rathbone's "Sherlock Holmes" films back in March, and I figured nobody could possibly beat him.  Well, I stand corrected.  Right behind Macca are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards with 12 appearances each (and what's strange is that it's not exactly the SAME 12 films, where one goes the other usually isn't far behind) and then there's John Lennon with 11 appearances in archive footage.  But Ringo Starr is poised to perhaps make a last-minute push, I've got four films with him strung together in the 11th hour.

Both Ringo AND Keith Moon carry over from last night's film, which showed footage of them from Zappa's movie "200 Motels".

THE PLOT: From their early days to their colorful hedonistic era, The Who are seen at their most creative and destructive.

AFTER: This is the only film out of 52 in the chain that I bought on DVD.  When I first started stringing the films I had access to there must have been some kind of gap, and I felt that the only way to close that gap was to order this Who film from Amazon.  Everything else I wanted to add was readily available, either on Netflix or iTunes.  Then, of course, after I ordered it, I re-worked the whole chain to include "Stop Making Sense", and that also managed to take away the need to watch this, I could have dropped it and the chain would still have continued unbroken, since there's now a film with Ringo Starr on either side.  That's the way this goes...

I don't know why, but I thought this was a straight concert film, like a film about just one Who concert, start to finish, like "Havana Moon" was for the Stones, instead it's more like "Eight Days a Week" for the Beatles, or last night's Zappa film, where the best concert footage is strung together from different points in the band's timeline.  But they didn't even go chronologically here, starting with the band's 1967 appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where they performed "My Generation", then they went backwards to 1965 for appearances on "Shindig!" and "Ready Steady Go!", then forward to Woodstock in 1969, clips from their 1975 U.S. Tour, and then near the end of the film, it's back to the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

Sure, any Greatest Hits album might jump around in time to get the best collection of songs from a band in a particular order, but I'd hope that a documentary would help me sort out something about a band's career, and I could probably do that best if they could just start at the beginning and skip forward in one direction through the best bits.  Plus then I wouldn't have to watch the band members get younger, then older again, then really young, and so on.

But the silver lining here is that by buying the DVD, I got to watch the 2003 "restored" version of this film, which is not only of better quality than the version that had been making the rounds for the previous 25 years, but also includes footage from "Rock & Roll Circus", a series of performances put together by the Rolling Stones in 1968 for a TV special, which they shelved for many years because they felt their own performance wasn't up to snuff.  For that event, The Who performed "A Quick One, While He's Away", which was a nine-minute medley made up of four songs that conveniently filled up the remaining space on their second album, but since the four songs tell something of a larger story, many also regard it as the precursor to the rock opera "Tommy".  It's also notable that Townshend wrote this mini-opera with thinly veiled references to his being molested as a child, which occurred at his grandmother's house when his parents sent him to stay there.  So clearly he was working through some stuff.

I was going to ask here in this space why The Who started breaking their instruments in the first place, but I may have just answered my own question, at least where Townshend was concerned.  For Keith Moon, I think he just liked to party, and together they went through a lot of guitars and drum kits.  Today, in fact, marks the anniversary of the day in 1971 when the band's accountants determined that when you factored in the cost of the new instruments and gear needed to replace the ones that the band destroyed during each concerts, that their tours were, in fact, not making any profit.  OK, I might be kidding about that last bit, but maybe you see my point.

Keith Moon died about a week after he had seen the first rough cut of this film, and then it was released theatrically just over a year after that.  Hotel managers all over would have breathed a sigh of relief after Moon's passing, only by then Joe Walsh of the Eagles had taken up the challenge to trash as many of their rooms as possible.  But the filmed clips of the recording of the song "Who Are You" represent Moon's last studio work.

Back on that Dr. Demento radio show I was talking about yesterday, they used to play a comedy routine from a sketch group called the Credibility Gap (whose most famous members were Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and David Landers).  The sketch was an imagined conversation between a concert promoter and a newspaper advertising agent, and it also paid homage to the old "Who's On First" routine from Abbott & Costello.  Of course, the promoterwas trying to take out an ad for a concert that would feature The Who and two other confusingly-named acts so hilarity therefore followed:

"What's the name of the first band?"
"Who."
"The FIRST BAND, what's their name?"
"Who!"

"Never mind, just tell me the name of the second band..."
"Guess Who."
"I don't want to guess, just tell me their name!"
"GUESS WHO!"
"The second band is who?"
"No, Who's on first..."

"Do you have someone booked as the third band?"
"Yes."
"Well, are you going to tell me their name?"
"Yes!"
"Well, what is it?"

and so on...

Also starring Roger Daltrey (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Pete Townshend (ditto), John Entwhistle (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Keith Richards (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Steve Martin (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Tommy Smothers, Russell Harty, Jimmy O'Neill, Melvyn Bragg, Jeremy Paxman, Ken Russell.

RATING: 6 out of 10 windmill moves

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words

Year 10, Day 235 - 8/23/18 - Movie #3,031

BEFORE: Here in Phase 3 of the Summer Rock Music Concert series, we're really getting into the nuts and bolts of the record-making process.  The way that Brian Wilson crafted an album full of music soundscapes to evoke certain moods, and the way that the Wrecking Crew could arrange music on the fly.  The process of getting in the studio and creatively working out the kinks, a composer crafting a song, that's what I'm inadvertently learning more about this week, it seems.  I bet this trend will continue with today's film. 

Frank Zappa carries over from "The Wrecking Crew", via archive footage in both films.  Last night he basically just weighed in on what it meant to have a large studio musician Tommy Tedesco appear on "The Gong Show" wearing a ballerina outfit, and performing a song about what it means to be a studio musician.  But it was only a short clip, and it looks like today Mr. Zappa will have a lot more to say.

THE PLOT: An in-depth look at the life and work of avant-garde musician Frank Zappa.

AFTER: The poster for this film shows four images of Frank Zappa, in different colors, arranged in sort of an Andy Warhol fashion, and that ends up saying something about him, that he was art-oriented, and also subversive in that same way that Warhol was.  Warhol often pushed the boundaries of art, questioned what could constitute art (could a soup can REALLY be considered as a piece of art?) and Zappa did the same thing with music and lyrics.  What does it MEAN if I say these words, do they just have shock value, are they obscene, or is there even such a thing?  At one point in this film he states his belief that there is no such thing as a "dirty word", there are only words, and none of them have the power to send you to hell, so if you can't take them, that's your hang-up, man.

But for many years, I only saw one aspect of Zappa, and that's because of how I first learned about his music, through the Dr. Demento radio show in the early 1980's.  This was a syndicated radio show that broadcast from Westwood, CA (which confused me when I was a kid because I was living in Westwood, MA.  How could there be another town with the SAME NAME as mine, somewhere else out there in the world?) and they played only novelty songs on this show, from people like Weird Al Yankovic (before he was a mega-star), Cheech & Chong, Stan Freberg and comedians like George Carlin and Steve Martin.  They sometimes included weird rock songs, like stuff from Devo and Kraftwerk, and they played quite a bit of Zappa, but only the funny or unusual stuff, like "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", "Call Any Vegetable" and "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?"

So because he had long hair and his music seemed funny, I thought of him as a comedian, and my brain lumped him in with Cheech & Chong and other "stoner" culture icons.  But that's not the whole picture of the man, not by a longshot.  That would be like judging him solely on the hit single "Valley Girl" and ignoring the other 60 albums released during his lifetime, and the other 50 or so that came later.  I wasn't thinking about Zappa the composer, or Zappa the band leader, or Zappa the businessman, or Zappa the political activist.  Remember all that fuss that got made in the 1990's about warning labels on records?  Zappa was one of the most outspoken critics against censorship, of course he had a vested interest in free expression, since he'd been censored by radio stations and the FCC for years.  For the radio stations, the censorship usually came in the form of just not playing his records - I know I never would have heard them if not for that syndicated show. 

Decades later, after college, marriage, divorce and other things, I got exposed to some of Zappa's music again from another source, my new (2nd) brother-in-law was a fan, and he played me some tracks from Zappa's rock opera "Joe's Garage", and also the very explicit track "Dinah-Moe Humm", which is all about a man's struggle trying to give a woman an orgasm.  Again, remember, there are no dirty words, only dirty ways to feel about regular words, so if you find this subject matter obscene or inappropriate, you may need to take a long look at yourself.  What could be a more noble act than trying to bring pleasure to someone you care about? 

From what's shown in this film, a concert featuring Zappa and his Mothers of Invention seems like it was a truly unusual affair, you never knew which songs from his Library of Congress-sized catalog he was going to perform, along with a collection of covers of rock songs like "Whipping Post" or "Happy Together", and for that matter, whether his band was playing those songs seriously, or completely tongue-in-cheek.  But that's the problem with someone who was so enigmatic that you didn't always know where he was coming from, especially when you're trying to assemble a documentary film based on interviews with him, and he was often evasive when answering questions.

Surprisingly, Zappa claimed during these interviews to not take a lot of drugs, other than what doctors might prescribe, but who knows for sure if this was true?  On some level, it sounds like just the sort of thing that a drug addict would say.  But if I take him at his word, he said he only smoked about 10 joints over the course of 9 years, and nothing harder than that.  And he didn't allow his band members to take drugs on the road, because if they did, there was always the chance that one would get busted at the airport, or do something while under the influence that would get them in trouble, and then he'd be missing band members when the concert was about to start.  So it seems he was a businessman first, and was keenly aware that drug use could interfere with this business, so that trumped everything else.  If the band wanted to drink or take drugs at home when the tour was over, they were free to do that, because that didn't affect his bottom line.  And even though he looked like a real hippie, it seems that he may have mostly stuck with good old caffeine and nicotine as his drugs.

I wish Zappa were still around, not for the sake of his music, but because I'd love to know what his take on our current political situation would be.  He identified as a conservative, but as an artist he stood in favor of free expression, and there's a bit of a disconnect right there.  He fought against the conservatives who were in favor of censorship and warning labels, but that didn't seem to make him a liberal in any sense - if anything, it made him seem more like an anarchist than a socialist.  But then again, there are plenty of conservatives today who are against any government involvement in people's lives, except for when it comes to something they don't like, such as abortion. 

Why do the people who claim we need "smaller government" also want the government to pass more regulations on things like abortion, but not gun control?  Zappa hit the nail right on the head when he railed against a "political theocracy", where lawmakers vote according to their morals, yet still find a way to pretend that they believe in a separation between church and state.  A senator who votes against abortion rights because his (or her) God told him too, that's a direct violation of the Constitution.  Matters of state are not supposed to be influenced by a senator's priest or rabbi or imam or whatever. 

But when Zappa blames the media for "getting in the way" between himself and his fans, or for radio stations for not choosing to play his records (which would have had to been full of bleeps if they aired, anyway...) his complaints sound a lot like Donald Trump complaining about "fake news" and preaching directly to the masses via Twitter.  Zappa probably needed Twitter and Facebook to connect with more fans, only they didn't exist while he was alive, which is a shame.  But still I wonder what Zappa would have thought about Trump, since Zappa had money he might have felt that he was good for business, but I'd also like to think that Zappa was smart enough to see right through Trump's B.S. and peg him as the charlatan that he is.  But then I think another part of him might have championed Trump as a political savior, just because saying that would piss off the most people. 

There's a clip in this film from very early in Zappa's career, when he appeared on Steve Allen's TV show to play a bicycle like a musical instrument.  He identifies himself only as a composer (later he mentions a period in his life when he was just writing Baroque and Victorian music, and again, you have to wonder if he was being serious or not) and then proceeds to use the bicycle as both a percussion and string instrument, while asking the show's band to join in, if they feel the inclination to, only they can't play their instruments in the usual way.  And that performance is part music, part art, part anarchy and part madness - and that just about sums up Zappa in one little clip.

Many years later, I remember reading something in the news about Zappa being very upset that his songs weren't given the same treatment as songs from other artists, like you never would hear his songs played via Muzak, that service that used to provide instrumental "lite" versions of pop songs in department stores, elevators and other places.  So he did what any businessman might do, he bought a controlling interest in the Muzak service, in order to get his songs, and the songs of his friends and associates, played in other venues to create another method of securing income.  Then one day I was in a grocery store and I heard an instrumental version of a song, and it took me a minute to identify it as Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money". All I could think about was the change that Zappa managed to bring to the corporate side of muzak, and music.  If you told that son of a bitch he couldn't do something, he'd make it his mission to accomplish it somehow.

Also starring (all via archive footage) Arthur Barrow, Jimmy Carl Black, Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, Aynsley Dunbar, Roy Estrada, Bruce Fowler, Tom Fowler, Bunk Gardner, Howard Kaylan, Ralph Humphrey, Mike Keneally, Martin Lickert, Ed Mann, Tommy Mars, Jean-Luc Ponty, Don Preston, Peter Rundel, Euclid James Sherwood, Jeff Simmons, Chester Thompson, Scott Thunes, Arthur Dyer Tripp III, Ian Underwood, Ruth Underwood, Mark Volman, Denny Walley, Ray White, Ike Willis, Steve Allen (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Adrian Belew, Theodore Bikel, Tom Brokaw, Wally Bruner, Connie Chung, Katie Couric (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Arlene Francis, Jamie Gangel, Tipper Gore, Vaclav Havel, June Lockhart, Keith Moon (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Robert D. Novak, Gene Rayburn, Soupy Sales, Harry Smith, Ringo Starr (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Peter Wolf.

RATING: 5 out of 10 little creatures on display

The Wrecking Crew!

Year 10, Day 234 - 8/22/18 - Movie #3,030

BEFORE: This is film #36 in the Rockumentary chain, I've got 16 more to go.  So it looks like I'll watch the last one on September 7, then it's back to narrative material - and I've already got the link back all planned out, in fact I've got the rest of my schedule for 2018 planned out, even Christmas. Someday I'd like to meet somebody else who plans out their movie schedule months in advance, or maybe I'm the only person crazy enough to do that.  I'm still reserving an option to change around my October horror-movie schedule, once I see what TCM is up to this year.  I just recorded a couple of TCM's films with Peter Lorre, like "M", that aren't really Halloweeny, but have something of a horror nature to them - I'm not sure when I'm going to watch them, but "M" is something of a classic that I should probably cross off my bucket list.

The Beach Boys carry over again, notably Brian Wilson and Al Jardine, along with other members of the Wrecking Crew who were seen in yesterday's film, working on "Pet Sounds".  This could not have worked out better, so maybe I am getting good at this scheduling thing.  It stands to reason, right?

THE PLOT: A celebration of the musical work of a group of session musicians known as "The Wrecking Crew", that provided back-up instrumentals to such legendary recording artists as Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel.

AFTER: It could have been the biggest scandal in 1960's rock music - maybe it SHOULD have been - that the Beach Boys didn't play on many of their own records.  As I saw last night, the work in creating the phenomenon that was SoCal-based surf rock got divided between the faces of the band, who went out on tour, and Brian Wilson and the studio musicians, who stayed in their little beach homes and spent the majority of their time in the studio, crafting the next masterpiece pop album.  And then they'd have to make a dumbed-down version of the guitar solos for the band to play on stage, because who could re-create the exact sound of that brilliant record.  But it worked because the teen girl fans were probably screaming so loud in the presence of their idols that nobody could really hear the guitar work very well.

Oh, you can see how this all started, very easily - somebody like George Martin says, "Hey, I think that a string quartet would work really well on this new song, "Eleanor Rigby", it could really class the thing up."  But he can't teach the Beatles how to play the violin and the cello, that would be ridiculous - so he calls in a professional string quartet to play as studio musicians on the record, and the record is a hit, and even though the fans love it, suddenly you've got a record that can't be replicated in concert (they didn't have a "strings" button on their keyboards back then...) but there's a disconnect between who played the music, and whose faces are on the cover of the album.  Sure, the musicians got paid and MAYBE they even got credited, but that would be inside the album cover, down the bottom, in very small type.  Meanwhile "THE BEATLES" appears on the front cover, in super-large type, and everyone rushes out to buy it.

When I was maybe six or seven years old, the Monkees had been a thing just a few years before, their TV show was in reruns but I still never missed an episode.  When someone told me that they weren't really playing their instruments, I dismissed that theory immediately because I watched the show, I could SEE they were strumming their guitars and hitting notes on the piano.  I didn't understand back then what lip-synching was, or that a music video was put together from hundreds of shots from three different angles, or that if Davy Jones kept walking backwards on those colored lines that seemed to stretch into the vanishing point, he'd smack into a wall.  So I certainly didn't understand what "session musicians" were, or that the guys holding the guitars on camera were not the same people who played the licks on the record that I was listening to, over and over.  It's a Monkees album, so that must mean that the Monkees were playing the music, right?

Little by little, we all came to terms with the truth - I heard Neil Diamond singing "I'm a Believer" one time, and when I asked someone why he was singing a Monkees song, I was told, "Oh, well, he wrote it..." and thought, "Hmm, that's interesting."  And then through watching film credits I learned that Mike Nesmith got into producing, and I thought, "Hey, maybe those four guys don't live in a beach house together, and maybe they didn't share a car or have weird "Austin Powers"-style spy missions.  Oh, right, it was a show and they were acting, so maybe nothing I saw on TV was real.

So now I look back on it and I wonder how the Monkees, and by extension, the Beach Boys, didn't suffer the sort of scandal that later came about in the early 1990's with Milli Vanilli.  The answers, of course, have everything to do with money.  Now, the Monkees did have SOME musical talent - they did at least sing on the records, and Nesmith and Tork could play the guitar.  Micky Dolenz learned to drum over the course of a year, enough to play on stage anyway.  But since those guys basically made it into a band via a casting call, the whole thing was like one of those Greg Brady/Johnny Bravo deals, these guys fit into the costumes, rather than the other way around.  And the factory that produced them needed a hit record FAST, so there wasn't even time to teach them how to play their own songs, so they called in the studio musicians to knock them out, probably in under a week.

There were other reasons that the entertainment factories never let people see how the sausage was made, of course.  When you were watching "Mission: Impossible" on TV, for example, there was a certain mood that the show wanted to give off, and if you were focusing on the name of the bass player who played the opening theme, then that could interfere with the mood, of course.  Same goes for the saxophone solo in the "Pink Panther" theme.  Other music in sitcoms was called "incidental", or background music, and you were supposed to hear it without really noticing it. (again, think of "The Brady Bunch"...).  The Wrecking Crew supplied some of that music, and a whole lot more, essentially becoming the greatest band that never went out on tour.

Touring is a separate beast, I get that.  And not everyone has the look that the public wants to see on stage, having paid thirty or fifty or a hundred dollars for a concert ticket.  This guy over here might be the best drummer in the whole world, but he's got a pot belly and a thinning hairline.  And that girl can play a mean bass, but she's got a lazy eye and a very toothy smile.  They've got better musical chops than anyone else, can sight-read and even come up with their own arrangements, but they'd never look good on an album cover, with a "face for radio", as they say.  Or maybe they've got a couple of kids and they don't even WANT to go out on tour, so they make their rent or their mortgage payment doing session work, and once they've got a resumé and reputation built up, that phone would start to ring, or producers wouldn't dream of booking the session until THAT drummer and THAT guitarist were both available at the same time.

The Wrecking Crew was a loose affiliation of these L.A.-based musicians, who kept turning up in the same studios, day after day, because they were part of the pool that the record producers were drawing from.  And the mid-1960's was the heyday of the studio album, once the record companies started moving out West to tap into the SoCal sounds like the Beach Boys.  Then when the movie industry, TV shows and recording artists started working together (more or less) it was the place to be.  And when the Gold Rush comes to town, the only thing better than being a prospector is to be the guy who's selling shovels.

And of course, I realize the need for efficiency in all things - the time it would have taken to get the Monkees or the Beach Boys to master their instrument was not as solid an investment as paying some musicians to get the record out quickly and efficiently.  Plus, there was a lot of copying going on, as some producers were trying to mimic Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, or if the Beach Boys wanted to start a song like "Surfin U.S.A." with a Chuck Berry-style lick, the quickest and easiest way to get that was to tell a professional guitarist what they wanted, and he could just DO it in a couple tries.  Or if he couldn't do the drum beat you wanted, maybe the guy in the next chair was the guy who worked on that record you were ripping off, and he remembered how to do it.

But I still can't help but feel that the whole business was built on smoke and mirrors, an unspoken industry-wide deception that sold a bill of goods to the record-buying public, along with the feeling of euphoria that goes along with liking music, liking a particular BAND'S music, even, and now when we pull back the curtain and see the lies of omission, it's like seeing that a builder didn't use the right materials, or he cut some corners and the property therefore isn't up to code.  So, naturally that building can't stand up for very long, and slowly the industry turned more toward the singer/songwriters who also played their own instruments.  I get it, everybody did it - like even the Beatles used Eric Clapton as the guitarist on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or Billy Preston for the keyboard solo on "Get Back", and then just let everyone assume that George or Paul played those bits.  But a lie of omission is still a lie, and these recordings just represent very entertaining lies.  And just because "everybody did it", that doesn't make it right.

I would have left out the bits about the Mar-Kets (or is it the "Marketts"?) and the T. Bones, because who cares?  The first band just released a couple of throwaway surf tunes, and the other had something that began as an Alka-Seltzer commercial that turned into an accidental instrumental hit.  Neither one had anything close to an impact on the history of music, not on the same level as the Beach Boys or The Mamas & The Papas, anyway.

This film was completed in 2008, and played at some film festivals then, but not released theatrically until 2015, because there weren't enough funds to secure the music rights.  Finally a Kickstarter campaign raised those funds, but it took an extra 7 years to clear everything.  Wow, I get antsy when my boss finishes work on a film, and it takes us TWO years to run the festival circuit and then get it on a theater screen somewhere, I can't imagine a 7-year wait for a release.  My hat's off to whoever had the patience to see this one through.  I was going to catch it on Netflix - it was there when I planned the chain - but then I saw it was running on PBS during pledge season, so I recorded it on my DVR.  Thank God I did, because it was off of Netflix before I was ready to watch it in my chain.  You can't be too careful with streaming these days.

Also starring Hal Blaine (also carrying over from "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds"), Carol Kaye (ditto), Don Randi (ditto), Glen Campbell (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Al Casey, Bones Howe, Plas Johnson, Joe Osborn, Earl Palmer, Bill Pittman, Tommy Tedesco, Herb Alpert, Cher (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Dick Clark (ditto), Micky Dolenz (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Peter Tork (ditto), Lou Adler (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Leon Russell (ditto), Nancy Sinatra, Jimmy Webb (last seen in "Joe Cocker: Mad Dog with Soul"), Gary Lewis, Roger McGuinn, Frank Zappa, H.B. Barnum, Chuck Berghofer, Snuff Garrett, Dave Gold, Larry Levine, Lew McCreary, Stan Ross, Joe Saraceno, Carmie Tedesco, Julius Wechter, the voice of Denny Tedesco, and archive footage of Mike Love (also carrying over from "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds"), Carl Wilson (ditto), Dennis Wilson (ditto), Phil Spector (ditto),  Ronnie Spector (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: the Rise of James Brown"), Dean Martin (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Davy Jones (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Michael Nesmith (ditto), John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty,  Cass Elliot (last seen in"Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Carole King (ditto), James Taylor (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Stephen Stills (ditto), David Crosby (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Graham Nash, Frankie Avalon, Chuck Barris, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Annette Funicello, Jan & Dean, Bobby Hatfield, Bill Medley, Ricky Nelson, Kurt Loder (last seen in "Hype!"), Eddie Albert, Eva Gabor, Adam West (last seen in "Hooper").

RATING: 7 out of 10 boots (made for walkin')

The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds

Year 10, Day 233 - 8/21/18 - Movie #3,029

BEFORE: Obviously the Beach Boys are the topic here, so they all carry over from their appearance in the T.A.M.I. film, as seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown".  That's Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine all carrying over.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Love & Mercy" (Movie #2,409)

THE PLOT: Five dudes from southern California surf the waves of 1960's radio, with hit after hit of original songs.

AFTER: The history of "Pet Sounds" is a lot more complicated than I first thought.  I remembered there was some delay in its release, or something. Or was it some controversy?  Turns out that because it was a "concept" album, and not just another typical collection of beach songs about girls and cars, the record company executives didn't really get behind it.  Since they thought it was going to bomb, they went ahead and released a Beach Boys Greatest Hits compilation at the same time, and therefore the predictions of failure became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The album wasn't regarded as a work of musical genius until decades later. 

If you ask me, "Sloop John B" is the best Beach Boys song ever, so I was a little disappointed today to find out that they didn't write it, it was an old folk song that had previously been recorded by the Kingston Trio.  But I love love LOVE the Beach Boys version, so any documentary that takes me inside the making of that song, with a guy sitting at a sound board moving those little levers up and down to showcase different parts of the song, well, I'm glad to be along for that ride.

And of COURSE I know "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows" and "Caroline, No".  I sort of knew "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" because of that Brian Wilson tribute concert a few years back, but I'm afraid that for the rest of the songs on the "Pet Sounds" album, I was flying blind, more or less.  "I Know  There's an Answer"? "I'm Waiting for the Day"?  I'm sorry, I'm waiting for a HIT SONG, and those just aren't.  I guess every great album has to have a couple bad tracks, even the "Sgt. Pepper" album had that weird George Harrison sitar track.

This documentary follows the same pattern as the one about Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall", in that the first half is devoted to the background of the band, and then there's sort of a track-by-track analysis of the album in question.  I don't think you have to dig too deep to get a feel for how important the Beach Boys were to American rock music, even though they were basically teenagers when they started.  They really captured that feel of California in the early 1960's, pre-hippie, pre-Woodstock, sort of the bridge between the "Beach Party" movies of the late 1950's and the drop-out San Francisoc culture of the later part of the 1960's. 

It's interesting to me that Brian Wilson sort of followed the same path as the Beatles, when he gave up on touring to spend more time crafting albums in the studio.  Now, of course the Beatles made this decision as a group, but Brian did this as an individual, which allowed the rest of the band to keep going on tour, but he honestly felt more comfortable in the studio, it was his sonic playground.  Working with the Wrecking Crew (we'll see more of them tomorrow...) really allowed him to develop as a composer, at least this was before he was housebound for several decades.  But it's a fair compromise that he could continue in the studio while the rest of the band toured.

This almost felt TOO short, with a running time of just under an hour, but I'm hard-pressed to point out anything that was obviously missing, so maybe it's just about right.  And if there's any Eagles-like animosity between the members of this band, then they're all hiding it really well.

Also starring Bruce Johnston (umm, he's a Beach Boy too, but I'm not sure if he was in yesterday's film...), David Marks (ditto), Karl Engemann, Hal Blaine (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Don Randi (ditto), Keith Altham, Tony Asher, Bruce Botnick, Mark Linett, Lucy O'Brien, Helen Shapiro, David Wild, with archive footage of Carol Kaye, Phil Spector (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Ronnie Spector.

RATING: 5 out of 10 thumbtacks in the piano

Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown

Year 10, Day 232 - 8/20/18 - Movie #3,028

BEFORE: The end of this chain is in sight as I wrap up Phase II of the Summer Music Concert Series, after tonight I'll be (roughly) 2/3 of the way through the entire chain, with 18 films to go.  I'm making an arbitrary cut-off point after this one because there's such a big jump in the style of music between today's film and tomorrow's.  Phase II covered a lot of soul/R&B music, from Whitney Houston to George Michael to Michael Jackson, even the Joe Cocker and Clive Davis docs had a foothold in that world.  But of course, I had some straight rock in there with the Eagles and Springsteen, some country-fied stuff from Glen Campbell and the Eagles, and then some wild urban new-wave stuff from Talking Heads and Lady Gaga.  So things certainly became more fractured in the second third of the proceedings.  Phase III looks like it could be a return to Classic Rock, and will cover whatever's left over, from the Beach Boys to David Bowie, the Who, Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper, then all the metal bands.

Michael Jackson is in this film somewhere, according to the IMDB, so he carries over from "This Is It".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Get On Up" (Movie #2,203)

THE PLOT: A look at the career of musician James Brown, beginning with his first hit song, "Please, Please, Please," in 1956.

AFTER: I admit I didn't know much about James Brown going in to this one, of course I was familiar with his hits "I Feel Good" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", which are American soul staples, part of the fabric of our music consciousness, and then there was "Living in America", that song he did for one of the "Rocky" movies, which was probably the biggest hit he had after I became aware of Top 40 music.  Beyond that, I was pretty much flying blind.

So I didn't know that his first records came out in the 1950's, that he was really a contemporary of Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.  He even impersonated Little Richard for a week's worth of shows, after the more famous singer had moved on to another club, and the management wanted to satisfy the people who'd come to hear him sing.  James Brown just learned to sing in his style and went out to perform, and just didn't correct anyone who assumed that he WAS Little Richard.

His early life, growing up poor in the South, seems to mimic that of Berry and Presley, they also all shared a fascination with gospel music and did their time performing around in small Southern venues before getting around to cutting some vinyl records.  Like Berry, Brown also spent some time in jail, then he worked as a boxer and a school janitor, but kept singing in gospel groups.  Brown met Bobby Byrd and joined his group that performed as both the Gospel Starlighters and the Avons, but eventually became the Famous Flames when James Brown exerted more influence and sort of took over as the front-man. Their first hit record was "Please, Please, Please", but then they didn't have another hit for several years.  And due to label issues, their next single, "Do the Mashed Potatoes", had to be credited to another name, Nat Kendrick & The Swans.

But they couldn't keep the "hardest working man in show business" down for long, and by the early 1960's they had released "Night Train", and James Brown not only had his own record label, but was playing to sold-out crowds at the Apollo Theater. A few more singles led to an appearance in the  concert film "The T.A.M.I. Show" (which stood for "Teenage Awards Music International") that for some reason, had a line-up that mixed together acts like Jan & Dean, The Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones with Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Supremes and James Brown.  (Chuck Berry and Gerry & The Pacemakers both performed "Maybellene", back-to-back. I'd love to learn the illogical reasoning behind THAT.)

There's a lot here from the musicians that made up the Famous Flames, including saxophonist and bandleader "Pee Wee" Ellis, drummers John Starks and Melvin Parker, and other saxophonist Maceo Parker, who all claim that Brown was both a businessman and a tyrant, suggesting that he made tons of money from the performances, then claimed poverty when it was time to pay the band.  Then after those hits I mentioned earlier, "I Feel Good" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", Papa James Brown got a brand new band, when nearly every musician in his employ walked out due to lack of pay (or was sacked, there seems to be some dispute about this) and he hired Bootsy Collins, his brother Phelps Collins, and a few holdovers, in order to form the JB's and develop a new sound, the one heard on "Get Up (Sex Machine)".

I did not know that James Brown was so involved in the civil rights movement, playing at many benefit rallies for rights organizations in the 1960's.  He even performed a free concert in Boston shortly after MLK was assassinated, and though there were fears of riots, the Mayor (Kevin White) arranged for the concert to be broadcast on the local PBS station, WGBH, to encourage more people to stay home and watch the show.  President Johnson then urged Brown to visit other cities that had been ravaged by riots, in order to preach a philosophy of non-violence.

The film doesn't go past the release of "Sex Machine" in 1975, and to be fair, it is titled "The Rise of James Brown" and not "The Decline, Comeback and Eventual Death of James Brown", but just like the Spike Lee documentary about Michael Jackson, it ends up feeling incomplete, like it's only telling half of his story.  So there's nothing here about appearing in "Rocky IV" or "The Blues Brothers", having disputes with the IRS or serving time for assault and weapons charges.  Nothing here about domestic violence allegations, either.  Instead we get a full explanation of the meaning of the "cape routine", when Brown would pretend to be too tired to continue to perform, and his assistant would escort him off the stage, only to have him spring back with some newfound vitality to continue the show.

This technique cuts both ways, because although it eliminates some of the messier incidents from his later life, it also fails to touch on any awards, honors or tributes received during that same time period.  And anyone unfamiliar with the latter half of his career is unfortunately out of luck. A couple of clips near the end of the film of Michael Jackson, Prince and Kanye West, along with playing a couple hip-hop songs that sampled his beats, hardly seems enough to show James Brown's influence on more modern music.

Also starring Bootsy Collins (last heard in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson (last seen in "Michael Jackon's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Chuck D (last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Bobby Byrd, Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, Martha High, Alan Leeds, Christian McBride, Maceo Parker, Melvin Parker, Danny Ray, Al Sharpton, John Starks, Clyde Stubblefield,  Greg Tate, Michael Veal, Fred Wesley, and archive footage of James Brown (also last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Little Richard (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (ditto), Justin Timberlake (ditto), Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Keith Richards (ditto), Charlie Watts (also last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Bill Wyman (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Kanye West (ditto), Jay-Z (ditto), Prince (also last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Flavor Flav (ditto), Brian Wilson (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Al Jardine, Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bruno Mars, Janelle Monae, Darryl McDaniels, Jason Mizell, Joseph Simmons, Ben Bart, Phelps "Catfish" Collins, Don Cornelius, Mike Douglas, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey, Pat Nixon, David Susskind,  Malcolm X, James Meredith, Cleveland Sellers, Dick Gregory, Stokely Carmichael, Kevin White, Louis Lyons.

RATING: 5 out of 10 hand signals

This Is It

Year 10, Day 231 - 8/19/18 - Movie #3,027

BEFORE: I don't really expect much out of tonight's film, because I know about the history (or is that the HIStory...) behind it.  Michael Jackson was scheduled to perform at 50 high-profile shows in London in 2009 and 2010, this was around the time when acts like Celine Dion were settling in at Vegas casinos for residencies and such, and then of course Jacko went and died a couple weeks before the shows opened, so I guess everyone got their money back?  I'll have to check on that.  In the months that followed, the rehearsal footage was cobbled together to give everyone some idea what those shows might have ended up looking like, or I guess somebody had to raise some money somehow to pay everybody back for their efforts in staging the thing in the first place.  I guess this demonstrates why everyone should buy insurance, even movies and stage shows need it.  And I guess the title ended up having a double meaning, not just "there's a great show, and this is it!" but also "there are no more MJ shows after this one, so this is IT!"

Obviously, Michael Jackson carries over from last night's film, and he'll be here tomorrow also as I wrap up Phase II of the Summer Concert series. 

THE PLOT: A compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage of Michael Jackson as he prepared for his series of sold-out shows in London. 

AFTER: They now call it "the greatest concert that never happened" - though it was sometimes hard for me to make sense of what was going on here, so I think it sort of assumes a lot that these concerts would have been "the greatest".  I suppose that's what you get when you take a bunch of rehearsal footage - since Michael's clothes keep changing from shot to shot, even within the same song, they must have taken footage of two or three rehearsals and edited it together to simulate a multi-camera event being staged.  A lot of this footage was initially never meant to be seen by the public, it was only for Jackson's library and personal use, but then of course once people knew that the concert would never take place, those films became very valuable, and of great interest to his fans. 

Jackson doesn't sing every line during the rehearsals, it's explained several times that he was trying to conserve his voice, because I guess if he sang every line at full volume during the rehearsals, he wouldn't have the strength a few weeks later?  I don't know, this explanation sounds a little fishy to me, but I'm often too cynical for my own good.  I suppose if his vocal performance sounded perfect here, then I'd suspect that he was lip-synching, because who sounds good during rehearsals?  But that's why you have rehearsals, to get yourself gradually up to performance level. 

Unfortunately the King of Pop comes off like a fragile flower here, at one point during a song he complains that the music playback is too loud, and it's like a "fist in his ear".  Umm, OK, but how's he going to feel when the music plays full volume during the show AND there are 23,000 fans screaming in the audience?  Given this, it's really tough to say for sure how those concerts would have gone, if the rehearsals seemed like they were too much for him to handle.  He seems physically fine here, he's obviously still got the dance moves in him, though he hadn't done a major concert since 1997.  But they're the SAME dance moves, again and again, and I just don't know if they would have still played well in 2009. 

Then there are some impressive-looking 3-D movies, and also one where Michael was inserted into some classic movies from the 1950's, but again, it's unclear how these videos were going to be shown, or where.  It's one thing to cut them into a film, but where was the screen in the arena, with relation to the stage?  And how was that all going to work? 

Of course they're not going to talk about the things that interest me the most, namely, did the people who bought tickets get refunds?  How much did this whole stage-show cost to produce, and who ended up paying for it?  Did anyone have production insurance?  Was the decision to turn the rehearsal footage into a film done purely for someone to minimize their financial losses?  Did other acts step forward to perform on those dates that Michael was supposed to be at the O2 arena?  None of these questions ended up getting answered.  Instead we get a too-preachy environmental message and a promise to "heal the world" without any specific tips on how to do so. 

It's a great attempt to polish a turd, or perhaps make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but in the end you can only do so much with the materials that you have to work with.

Also starring Kenny Ortega, Jonathan Moffett (also carrying over from "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Orianthi Panagaris, Tommy Organ, Alex Al, Michael Bearden, Mo Pleasure, Bashiri Johnson, Dorian Holley, Judith Hill (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Darryl Phinnessee, Ken Stacey, Michael Cotten, Travis Payne with archive footage of Humphrey Bogart (last seen in "Dark Victory"), Rita Hayworth (last seen in "Pal Joey"), Edward G. Robinson (last seen in "The Cincinnati Kid"), Gloria Grahame (last seen in "Song of the Thin Man")

RATING: 3 out of 10 back-up dancers

Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall

Year 10, Day 230 - 8/18/18 - Movie #3,026

BEFORE: When I started putting this chain together a few months ago, I had only 11 films in hand, and figured it would take a few additions to link everything together - little did I realize that it would take another 41 films to accomplish that, factoring in the ones I wanted to add and the others that were just available and seemed to fit the theme.  So in order to watch tomorrow's film, I had to find something else with Michael Jackson in it, and I found this one, which came out just two years ago, and was directed by Spike Lee.

I'm back to another one of these interview-based films, and sometimes say that a film with a lot of interviews is done in the "talking head" style.  Now I'm finding it funny that yesterday I watched a film about the Talking Heads that was NOT filmed in the "talking head" style, since it was a concert film.  But David Byrne carries over again and is interviewed somewhere in this film, so there's a Talking Head appearing in a "talking head" sort of film today.

THE PLOT: A look at the life of the late pop star Michael Jackson, from his early days at Motown Records to the release of his hit 1979 album "Off the Wall".

AFTER: It's hard to tell here if telling just part of Jacko's story here was a conscious decision, something to commemorate his break-through solo album "Off the Wall" because it had such an impact, or whether an arbitrary cut-off was made in his biography due to time constraints.  Or, more likely, because it wasn't until after he was a mega-star that he started to exhibit strange behavior, even for a superstar.  So there's nothing here about turning his estate into an amusement park, sleeping in an oxygen chamber, giving his chimpanzee pet power of attorney, or any payments made to parents that essentially allowed him to rent their kids.

Either way, it seems a little odd to not mention the "Thriller" album, when it was possibly the biggest selling album of all time, with the most #1 hits of any album ever.  So instead this documentary ends up feeling like part one of a two-part series, with no plans to ever film that second part.  The elephant in the room is the same one that eventually lived in his backyard.  Instead there's the history of the Jackson 5 and the depiction of Michael as a kid eager to learn from every star or record producer he came in contact with, as if he was always diagramming a path to stardom based on other people's advice.  And then the 2nd half is a track-by-track breakdown of the "Off the Wall" album, naming who wrote each track, with other musicians describing why each one is great.  So it can't help but feel like a puff piece, it's very unlikely that anyone would say anything negative given those parameters.

Plus, what about that early life?  Isn't it a well-known fact that Michael's father used to beat him?  I mean, that sort of thing was more accepted back then, people didn't dare tell other people how to raise their children, and if you stepped in to try and stop someone from hitting their kid, somehow YOU were the bad guy.  Why is there no mention of that here, when Joe Jackson admitted this in interviews?  Are we trying to paint a rosy picture here of idyllic family life, or are we trying to figure out what turns people into pop stars, and then crazy pop stars later on?  This is a puff piece, plain and simple, you have to show some balance, take the bad with the good, right?

And then Spike Lee inserts himself into his own film, which is usually my problem with Spike Lee, to tell a story about how he bought two tickets to see "The Wiz" and invited some girl, who turned him down.  Notice how that story has NOTHING to do with Michael Jackson as an artist or as a person, except that he acted in that movie - so anyone with an impartial eye would have cut that story for lack of relevance, but not this director.  By all means, Spike, make sure that it's all about YOU in the end, not your subject.

I find myself confused overall, more than anything else.  To make the case that this superstar was the best in his field, why focus so much on one particular album that wasn't even his best or most successful record?

Also starring Kobe Bryant, Misty Copeland, Lee Daniels, Berry Gordy (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Bobby Colomby (ditto), David Foster (ditto), Kenny Gamble (ditto), Leon Huff (ditto), Quincy Jones (ditto), L.A. Reid (ditto), Verdine White (ditto), Spike Lee (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Susaye Greene (ditto), Jackie Jackson, Joe Jackson, Katherine Jackson, Marlon Jackson, Rodney Jerkins, John Legend, John Leguizamo (last seen in "Chef"), Mali Music, Rosie Perez (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Mark Ronson (last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Carole Bayer Sager, Joel Schumacher, Valerie Simpson, Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson (last seen in "Amy"), The Weeknd, Pharrell Williams, Ron Alexenburg, Lemon Andersen, Larkin Arnold, Tom Bähler, Dan Beck, John Branca, Rob Cohen, Barry Michael Cooper, Suzanne De Passe, Siedah Garrett, Dream Hampton, Steven Ivory, Karen Langford, Steven Manning, Jonathan Moffett, Scott Osborn, Greg Phillinganes, Steve Popovich, Fatima Robinson, Esperanza Spalding, Bruce Swedien, Joe Vogel, Maurice Warfield, Harry Weinger, Walter Yentikoff, and archive footage of Michael Jackson (also last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Patti Austin (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Woody Allen (last heard in "Café Society"), Nick Ashford, Fred Astaire (last seen in "Royal Wedding"), Count Basie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Berry (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Dean Martin (ditto), Little Richard (ditto), Frank Sinatra (ditto), James Brown (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Irene Cara, Cher (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Dick Clark (also last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Miles Davis (ditto), Lou Reed (ditto), Lionel Richie (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Paul Simon (ditto), Patti Smith (ditto), Steven Tyler (ditto), Frankie Crocker (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix"), Steve Dahl, Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Robin and the Seven Hoods"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Nashville"), Farrah Fawcett (last seen in "Dr. T & the Women"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Youth"), Redd Foxx, Marvin Gaye, Debbie Harry, Margaux Hemingway, Charlton Heston (last seen in "Town & Country"), Lena Horne, Jermaine Jackson, La Toya Jackson, Randy Jackson, Tito Jackson, Gene Kelly (last seen in "Cover Girl") Sidney Lumet, Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Some Came Running"), Curtis Mayfield, Linda McCartney (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Maureen McCormick, Stephanie Mills, Liza Minnelli (also last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Tatum O'Neal (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Jane Pauley, Valerie Perrine (last seen in "What Women Want"), Johnny Ramone, Martha Reeves, Smokey Robinson, Steve Rubell, Brooke Shields (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Rodney Temperton, Philip Michael Thomas (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Andy Warhol (last seen in "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Tina Weymouth (last seen in "Stop Making Sense"), Jackie Wilson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 visits to Studio 54