You have to hand to former Senator Chris Dodd. He’s as corrupt as they come. After resigning from the Senate, he slid into the cushy job as chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America. He thought it would be business as usual.
But after last week’s shellacking by Internet activists, Dodd went ballistic. The truth came out. He threatened to cut off Hollywood campaign contributions to any member of Congress who doesn’t pass his group's Internet-censorship legislation.
After Congress shelved the controversial PIPA and SOPA bills, Dodd told Fox “News,” the voice of the far right:
“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”
This is the very face of corruption in Washington. Outsiders might think its outrageous that Dodd is leveling these threats. But to him, it’s business as usual.
It's time that Congress showed that its votes are no longer for sale. Members of Congress must give back the MPAA’s dirty money or give it to charity. Congress must make it clear to the world that it won’t be bullied into supporting censorship.
The SOPA/PIPA battle is far from over. Thugs like Chris Dodd represent the worst of American interests. Sign the petition here and check to see if your representative is on the MPAA’s “Dirty Dozen” list. If they are, complain vehemently.
Ken Russell after a screening of "Tommy" at Lincoln Center on Aug. 5, 2010 ---
I admit that it wasn’t until last summer, when I saw a screening of the Who’s 1975 rock opera “Tommy” at Lincoln Center, that I began to appreciate the film and its great director, Ken Russell.
Russell, then 83, was in the audience and I met him afterward. However, I was mainly there to meet his fascinating wife, Lisi Tribble, who I was introduced to in a song called “The Kiss” by her old friend, David Massengill, performed at the Gerdes Folk City 50 anniversary reunion on June 7, 2010. Because of the picture I took of David, Lisi and I became Facebook friends. She was a legend in the Gerdes “face down” era and I wanted to meet her, which is what brought me to the "Tommy" screening.
Russell, which news reports said died after a series of strokes, was the kind of filmmaker I love, but who doesn’t exist anymore. He was a polarizing figure who tested everyone with controversy—from studios, to critics, to audiences. He kept life interesting and made some terrific films ranging from the D.H. Lawrence adaptation “Women in Love” (1969) to “The Devils” (1971) about a 17th-century outbreak of religious hysteria.
When I first saw “Tommy” in 1975, it went past me. But like so many older British rock films one sees in later years, it grew with time and became a revelation. It secured Roger Daltrey’s image for life, and who can forget Ann Margaret swimming in that sea of baked beans and chocolate? That is perhaps one of the sexiest scenes in the history of the cinema.
I have always been enamored of great floods—mostly because of the way they alter human history in unforeseen ways. Just as Katrina is still re-shaping modern New Orleans, the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 had a huge effect on American culture that we can only measure today through the remarkable impact it had on our music.
Bill Morrison, the filmmaker, and Bill Frisell, the musician, collaborated on a new project called The Great Flood, which uses archival film of the flood of '27 and a newly composed suite of music to tell the story of that natural disaster, the worst in American history. The live music and film got its New York City premiere Friday night at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles. As a result, there was a forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to northern cities, adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges.
What they don’t teach us in school is the great migration to the north fueled the rise of acoustic blues. This included artists who survived the flood, such as Charley Patton and his High Water Everywhere, as well as Memphis Minnie with her When the Levee Breaks, which was reworked by Led Zepplin and became one of the group's biggest hits. Bessie Smith, Barbecue Bob and Kansas Joe McCoy also wrote songs about the flood. William Faulkner's short story Old Man was about a prison break from Parchman Penitentiary during the flood.
Several decades after the flood, Randy Newman wrote, Louisiana 1927, Zachary Richard wrote, Big River, and Eric Bibb wrote Flood Water. The artistic output since the flood has been significant.
Just as important, the flood also helped create electric blues bands that thrived in cities like Memphis, Detroit and Chicago. This incubated modern jazz, rhythm and blues and eventually, rock & roll.
Morrison used actual nitrate film footage of the 1927 flood, including source material from the Fox Movietone Newsreel Archive and the National Archives. Nitrate film stock is highly volatile and features many imperfections, including burn marks. As great artists do, Morrison fixed nothing, but used the pock-marked and partially deteriorated film as an artistic device and window into history.
As Frisell’s score plays, the mind wanders through the silent film, suggesting different levels of reality. As the program put it, “the bubbles and washes of decaying footage are associated with the destructive force of rising water, the footage seeming to have been bathed in the same water as the images depicted on it. These layers of visual information, paired with Frisell’s music, become contemporary again. We see the images through a prism of history—but one that dances with the sound of modern music.”
Frisell’s music is magnificent and perfectly matchs the film as it tells the story. It is a parade of Americana music, from roots to jazz to modern rock. A crowd pleaser was a is scan of a 1927 Sears Roebuck catalog—one where you could buy anything from to a full orchestra of musical instruments to a full-sized house.
Frisell knows this territory well. For over 35 years he done more than 250 recordings, with film scores from the original Buster Keaton films to the work of mid-century rural Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer. Frisell collaborated earlier with Morrison on The Film of Her and The Mesmerist.
Morrison is a master of combining archival material with original footage to create unique visual tapestries that are set to contemporary music. He has collaborated with John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Michael Gordon, Henryk Górecki, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Steve Reich and Simon Christensen. Morrison first met Frisell while working in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard in the early 1990s.
During the performance, Frisell teamed with Ron Miles on trumpet and cornet; Tony Scherr on bass and guitar; and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibraphone.
A recent New York Times article about the lack of protest songs at Occupy Wall Street has prompted a fierce response from friends, most of whom have written such songs in the past. One came today from my friend, the great Melvin Van Peebles—actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and music composer. Yes, Melvin has done it all!
Though Melvin is most famous for creating the indie film hit, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, he directed the motion picture comedy Watermelon Man in 1970, which starred Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance insurance salesman who wakes up one morning to find that he has become a black man.
Melvin sent me a song from that movie called Love, That’s America, which he recorded 41 years ago. He said he’s thinking of recording a new version of it since “it’s still fresh today.” In the meantime, BW Moving Images has done a video to the song. We live in a time of raging video production that mirrors protests in the streets.
Somehow—out of blind luck—I have worked with two of the great legends of radio. First there was Orson Welles, and later, Norman Corwin, who died this week at age 101.
During an amazing career that spanned more than 70 years, Norman Corwin wrote, produced and directed for radio, television, film and the stage. His writing won Emmy and Golden Globe awards, and received an Academy Award nomination for his script for the 1956 film, Lust for Life, the biography of Vincent van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas.
Corwin was a creative giant of the Golden Age of Radio. Actor William Shatner, who narrated several of Corwin's later radio programs, called him a legend. “He is the poetic soul of discretion and a monument to artistry in America," Shatner said.
During the Golden Age of Radio, Corwin did it all—from variety shows to dramas, comedies to documentaries. He was a contemporary of Orson Welles, who also ruled in the audio medium. He kept writing and producing programs for most of his long life.
I met Corwin through Peggy Webber, who had also worked as an actor for Welles. She still runs the California Artists Radio Theatre in Los Angeles, where I directed a radio adaptation of The Orangeburg Massacre in the late 1980s. Also part of that company was the late Cliff Thorsness, sound effects director for Orson’s Mercury Theatre company.
At the time, he was using the sound effects gear he had used for Orson on live radio more than 50 years earlier. It was 1989, when Mr. Corwin did a segment of what is now a CD titled “A Biography of Abraham Lincoln.”
With Peggy’s help, I signed on as Mr. Corwin's personal assistant—which essentially meant I got sandwiches and ran errands for him. But I also got to sit next to him at the mixing board in the studio and attend all of the rehearsals. He was a charming, friendly man and I knew I was around greatness the first minute I met him.
The production we did starred some great legends from old time radio: Pat Buttram as Abraham Lincoln; Jeanette Nolan as Ann Rutlidge; Kathleen Freeman as Mrs. Rutlidge; and Parley Baer as Mr. Rutlidge. Dan O’Herlihy was the announcer and Sean McClory, Peggy Webber, William Woodson, Lou Krugman and Richard Erdman also were in the cast.
Working only a few days with Norman Corwin and a cast and crew like this was one of the highlights of my life. These were people who could do “instant characters” and write eloquent prose in minutes. Cliff’s sound effects were perfect and came quickly and effortlessly. Each was trained in the best radio tradition, something that is lost today except in tiny companies that seek to preserve it.
Times have changed in our cheap, quick and dirty multimedia world. Thank God for men like Norman Corwin who showed us a quality of work that will be remembered. RIP, Mr. Corwin.
It was in March, 2006—while taking Robert Levinson’s Bob Dylan class at the New School in New York City—that several class members met the guest speaker that night for dinner at a coffee shop before the session began. He was Richard Thomas, director of graduate studies and professor of classics, at Harvard.
Dr. Thomas is quite an expert on Dylan, having written a book and lectured on his performance artistry and such esoteric subjects as “the Aesthetics of Pastoral Melancholy from Virgil to Dylan.”
But that night, what I mainly remember, was our discussion of Dylan’s 2003 feature film, Masked and Anonymous. On the surface, most critics said the film was about how a singer, whose career had gone on a downward spiral, was forced to make a comeback to the performance stage for a benefit concert.
Those critics totally missed what the film was really about. It was immediately panned as another clueless Dylan effort, which if they didn’t understand, no one else possibly could either. Thomas, of course, wasn’t one of those critics. He got the film immediately.
“In three hundred years, when people look back at the entire Sony motion picture catalog of that era, only one film will be remembered as truly important and will have stood the test of time,” Thomas said. “That will be Masked and Anonymous.”
Over the years, I have watched Masked and Anonymous many times and each time I glean new information from what I consider a Dylan classic. This was a film that was never intended to be commercial, but a multi-layered puzzle with the viewer as one of the pieces.
Larry Charles, the film’s director, put it this way in an interview with Trev Gibb: Bob Dylan is “somebody who’s seen more than you have and knows more than you know and if you're wise and you listen, he will tell you everything you need to know. But you're gonna have to do the work of interpreting it and that’s how the movie is also, it's like Bob is telling you everything. This is Bob telling you everything about himself also, but it’s not laid out clearly. You have to do the work of putting the pieces together.”
That, in a nutshell, is why I think Masked and Anonymous is so intriguing and continues to live on in the minds of the viewers who have embraced it. It’s also important that the film was conceived outside the system. “There was no commercial consideration in making this movie,” said Charles. “This was a purely instinctive process which is really an anathema to the making of movies today.”
Much of Dylan’s other work is also met with disdain when it first comes out, Charles noted. “And then later on people go, ‘Wow! You know Slow Train Coming is a brilliant album,’ or whatever... it’s out there and people will find it and it will always be there for them.”
Masked and Anonymous is a movie that’s intended to be savored and revisited like something you’d see in a museum or a poem you’d read in a book, rather than mass-market entertainment, Charles said.
Dylan told Charles that critics would never get the movie, but the audience would if they had a chance to see it. “I think the critics are now, for the most part, part of a larger system—a more corporate system,” he said. “And this (the movie) just doesn’t fit into any niche that they can really relate to. They don’t have time anymore, there’s not that kind of serious film criticism that there was 20 or 30 years ago.”
Part of the initial hype surrounding the film was a sensationalistic aspect of media today. “People thought, we’ve caught Bob Dylan somehow. But instead what they did was—and this is why the story fell apart—because it was so much more complex and so much more enigmatic and ambiguous then the way it was presented, that the media couldn’t handle it after a while,” Charles said. “It’s like, if you really want to enter this world, the world of Bob’s head, you better put on your shoes and get ready for a long journey.”
The beauty of time is that movies are now far easier to access. If you’re a Bob Dylan fan and haven’t seen Masked and Anonymous, rent it from Netflix today or buy the DVD. It’s a genuine cinematic adventure packed with deep meaning and great actors. Perhaps the definitive Dylan film of all time. Watch it again and again—it's not for one viewing.
The new documentary film—Harlem Street Singer: The Reverend Gary Davis Story—previewed before two audiences in rough-cut form Monday night. Some of the participants, including bluesman John Hammond Jr. and guitarist Barry Kornfeld, were in the audience.
The film tells the little-known story of Davis, a great ragtime and gospel musician who impacted a generation of major musical performers. Though not finished yet, the project is nearing completion with a release date expected to be early next year.
Still to be shot is an interview with Peter Yarrow, but already in the film are Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead (with the Dead performing the music of Rev. Davis), Jorma Kaukonen, David Bromberg, Stefan Grossman, Happy Traum, John Cohen and others.
The film is being produced by Woody Mann and Trevor Laurence. Mann is a guitarist who studied with Rev. Davis in Harlem as a teenager. The film features tapes of Mann’s sessions with Davis. Mann is also an expert on American blues and folk music and has been a faculty member at the New School in New York City. He performs in the film.
Laurence is also well schooled in the Rev. Davis’s music and has been a teacher of Davis’s style himself. He is also a directer and producer of videos and DVDs for the music industry.
Rev. Davis, from near my hometown in rural South Carolina, came to Harlem with a bag of guitar tricks that influenced some of the most prominent musicians of the 1950s and 60s. He gave guitar lessons to many of the performers who are well known today. He was close friends with a young Bob Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.
As Weir quipped in the film, because Davis was blind he couldn’t see that it was essentially impossible to play a guitar the way he did. But he did play in ways that other guitarists could only imagine. He was able to conjure the sound of a piano from a guitar as well as emulate orchestras and choral groups. Kornfeld, who used to "lead" Davis, said no decent guitarist of his generation escaped Davis’s unique style of music.
Davis, being a preacher from the deep South, was always conflicted between the devil’s music and the songs of the church. He liked whiskey and cigars, loved women, carried guns and was arrested several times for his antics. He was a tough street player with amazing wit and charm. Audiences loved him.
The filmmakers still need money to finish the project and have a website for fundraising. Or you can e-mail them at: harlemstreetsinger@gmail.com. It’s a very worthy project, seeking to tell the story of one of America’s greatest musicians.
Photo in 1963 of Bob Dylan, Suze Rotolo and Dave Van Ronk by Jim Marshall
The news first slipped out from Joel Coen at a Lincoln Center appearance in May. Now, reports are that the Coen Brothers are working on a film script that's based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, the legendary musician who presided over New York City’s 60s folk scene in Greenwich Village.
Van Ronk, who died in 2002 at age 66, was a friend of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell and was famous for his musical acumen, left-wing politics, general erudition and entertaining storytelling. A noted blues guitarist in his own right, Van Ronk also taught guitar to many great musicians—including my friend, Danny Kalb, who founded the Blues Project.
His story is in the memoir “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” which was published with the help of Elijah Wald after Van Ronk’s death. A source told the LA Times that the Coen Brothers are using that book for background material.
"We’re working on a movie now that has music in it [that's] pretty much all performed on a live, single instrument," Joel Coen told the Lincoln Center audience, without revealing any details of the new film. We assume that instrument will be a guitar.
The Coens made the critically acclaimed film, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," which centered on an earlier era of American music.
With summer upon us, I'd like to recommend a couple of excellent books and a movie for these lazy days.
Good movies are so hard to find during the summer, so I was pleasantly surprised to see Woody Allen’s fine “Midnight in Paris.” I’ve spent some of the happiest working days of my life in Paris, so my view of the city of light is probably biased.
But to watch Owen Wilson time travel back to the 1920s to sip absinthe with Ernest Hemingway at Les Duex Magots or dine on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde was a hoot. In fact, this film is crammed full of expatriates and bohemians from Jazz Age Paris. It’s wonderful fun. I may see it again.
For great reads, check out Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” the remarkable story of Smith’s early days in New York City with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read about becoming an artist. Smith is a fine writer with a remarkable list of notable characters in a great era of New York life.
Also, check out “Tell to Win” by Peter Guber, the film producer, businessman and an old teacher of mine at UCLA. It’s a fine book on the importance of storytelling in our culture, from making movies to selling soap. A quick, easy read, it will open your eyes.
The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
