When I first heard Fields of Gold, I thought I was hearing a traditional English folk song that had somehow escaped my notice. I am no expert, but surely I would have heard someone’s version of a song this good before this? The song features the repetition of alternating lines “fields of barley” and fields of gold” in a way that can be found in many traditional English songs. But there was a reason I had not heard the song before. Fields of Gold is a Sting original, although it shows a strong knowledge of English folk music. This is a side of Sting he had not really shown before. We knew he loved rock and reggae from the sound of his band the Police. On his first solo album, Sting returned to his jazz roots. Since then, he has explored classical music and continued to make his own brand of what must be called pop for lack of a better term. Fields of Gold is the only original folk song of his that I have heard, but it really works. I could hear in my head a more “traditional” arrangement the first time I heard it.
In searching for such a version, my first stop was Eva Cassidy’s version. Here we can ignite a whole argument about what is and is not “folk”. Cassidy didn’t care. While she is a revered figure among folk fans, her music is not purely folk. She drew songs from a rich array of genres and sources, and her arrangements were not always what one might consider folk. But if you consider the role that folk music served in society when the songs we are most familiar with were being written, you realize that songs like Froggy Went A’Courting were the pop music of their day. On that basis, any song is fair game, and it is the job of any modern folk artist to make their choice of songs their own. Eva Cassidy did that job brilliantly.
Still, I wanted to see if I could find an even folkier version without sacrificing either quality or authenticity. Bennett’s Fields of Gold still isn’t what I heard in my head. For that I would need an Irish singer, backed by just guitar and uillean pipes. But Bennett does the next best thing, giving me a small acoustic ensemble, and featuring the cello in the role I assigned to the piper. Bennett’s voice is perfect here. Like Cassidy, Bennett takes his material from a wide range of sources, and he too makes his songs his own.
Fields of Gold has become a standard since Sting wrote it. You can find multiple versions on Amazon by looking either for wedding music or lullabyes. There are also many covers of varying quality and in various genres. So the song may have started life as a Sting original, but I would argue that the place it has taken in our culture now qualifies it as a folk song.
purchase [Heart of Gold] Sad disclosure to apologize for the quality of my research: Turkey continues to block Wikipedia - limiting my ability to access further steps related to my ideas. (It needs to be said) Crosby, Stills and Nash came out with their first album at the end of the 60s. A veritable powerhouse/Supergroup that included some of the best from Bufallo Springfield, the Byrds ... the top of the charts. (And as JDavid just said, they had their personality problems.) The album [link] they came out with in '69 includes a collection of rock classics: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Marrakesh Express, Guinevere,Wooden Ships, Helplessly Hoping, Long Time Gone. Heck .. they're all good. The collaboration lead them to Woodstock. No small feat. It appears that it was Ahmet Ertegun (back once again to Turkey!) who convinced CSN that another Atlantic artist by the name of Neil Young might fit in with the original 3. It wasn't exactly a smooth transition, but ... the result was historical: CSNY. Neil Young brought in an element of edgy-ness, and probably some additional discord in the process: it's hard enough to get 3 musicians aligned. Adding one more only exacerbates the issues. But the roughness of Young's style took the group to a new level and arguably maintained, if not increased their appeal. Thankfully, they managed to hold it together for longer than most people predicted, and we ended up with Deja Vu and 4 Way Street as they helped lead the political voice of America into the 70's. In '71, Neil Young came out with Harvest - another rock classic that includes Old Man, The Needle and the Damage Done and Heart of Gold. The album was panned by critics but the public was of another mind - one of his most successful works to this day.
Further disclosure: 2-3 years back our blogger Andy LaRayGun, some
friends and I did a Neil Young cover at about this time of year in front
of maybe 500 students. Andy on the left, me next to him (black guitar
doing the vocals)
The legendary supergroups like Cream or Blind Faith or CSN&Y were attempts to join musicians famous from other projects into a, well, super group, but they often foundered due to the conflicting egos of the members. The Golden Palominos, often referred to as an “indie-rock supergroup,” was different, gathering changing groups of generally less famous artists for each album.
Originally founded in the early 1980s by Anton Fier, a drummer who had been an early member of, among other bands, The Feelies, the first incarnation of the Golden Palominos was filled with avant-garde musicians like Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay and Bill Laswell, many of whom were influenced by the “No Wave” movement and often had as much jazz influence as indie-rock. Their self-titled debut was experimental, noisy and even featured turntable scratching, a rarity outside of hip-hop in that era.
My introduction to the band was from their very different second album, 1985’s Visions of Excess, which was significantly more accessible. The original attraction was “Boy (Go),” featuring lead vocals from R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and guitar from Richard Thompson. The album also featured vocals from John Lydon (a/k/a Johnny Rotten) and supergroup veteran Jack Bruce, as well as the debut appearance of singer Syd Straw, who is on the list of people who should be way more famous. Despite the unusual roster of musicians, the album hangs together pretty well, and is never dull. Also, there’s a great cover of Moby Grape’s “Omaha,” also sung by Stipe.
The Golden Palominos put out albums every few years throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a few of which I own, with a constantly changing group of performers, including Matthew Sweet, T-Bone Burnett, Bernie Worrell, Bob Mould and Bootsy Collins, with Stipe, Thompson and Straw dropping by occasionally, joining core members Fier, bassist Laswell and guitarist Nicky Skopelitis for, not surprisingly, varied sounds and results. In 2012 Fier, and a different group of musicians joined Kevn Kinney of Drivin’ & Cryin’ for a new album, A Good Country Mile. That album includes a cover of a Jason Isbell written Drive-By Truckers song, “Never Gonna Change.” (Self-promoting side note—Drivin’ & Cryin’ was the band that Trucker Patterson Hood was opening for when he saw the incident that inspired the song “Opening Act,” which you can read more about here.)
Give Fier and his Golden Palominos sidekicks credit for pushing the envelope, trying new things and always making interesting music. They cannot be pigeonholed, and if that hindered them from gaining an identity and becoming a true “supergroup,” it never prevented them from following their muse wherever it took them. In a world filled with artists mining the same groove until it turns into a rut (thanks, Nick Lowe), it is refreshing, if not always easy, to listen to a project like the Golden Palominos that constantly challenges.
I already had been a fan of the Stranglers when this came out, but my appreciation went atmospheric on this release, sounding nothing like anything else around at the time, a wistful harpsichord led ballad in what seemed to be waltz time. It was also quite different to the music of the Stranglers output ahead of that, previous offerings being of a more aggressive mien, barely suppressed violence and misogyny lurking beneath the surface of not only the songs, but also their audience.
In 1981, when the song came out, I was both married and gainfully employed in my first job as a junior hospital doctor. Hardly, then, typical punk demographic, yet the UK punk explosion of 1975/6 had earlier grabbed my imagination, shortening my hair and straightening my trousers. I felt, it's true, a little too square for the Pistols and the Clash, but the Stranglers were older, uglier and, a bonus, had a keyboard sound redolent of my beloved Doors. They were the first band in that idiom I caught in a live context, on a bill with U.S. band the Dictators in support, at fabled London venue, the Roundhouse, my first and only visit. November 1977, still a student. Of course I was scared, but it was terrific, taking the opportunity to catch them whenever I could, including the infamous open air concert at Battersea Park, with a newly solo Peter Gabriel amongst the support acts. (Infamous? Well, let's say that the headline act were faithfully nice'n'sleazy......... )
But respectability and commitment had to figure in my life, so it was a couple of years before I revisited the legacy of the band, hearing the eponymous song of this piece burst out of the radio one lunchtime. I was now too 'old' for the more dance-oriented Radio 1, the youth radio of the nation, moving to the young fogey-dom of Radio 2. Lo and behold, this staider and more conservative channel had made this song, by the 'Bring on the Nubiles' hitmakers their record of the week. And they were on Top of the Pops, miming valiantly, the impossible to hum melody imprinting in my brain. What strange things could the lanky Hugh Cornwell be singing about, his voice now a croon compared to the spat out venom of yore? Well the drummer, Jet Black, one part of the melodic inspiration behind the tune, along with keyboard man, Dave Greenfield, suggested it may have been Marmite, which I have mentioned before, a yeast based spread either loved or hated. Cornwell suggested possibly a woman, but his already well-known lifestyle and habits probably gave a better idea. This was a man, after all, who had spent time in London's Pentonville prison for possession of Class A drugs, as described here. Shock and horror, Radio 2 seen to be promoting a song about the joys of Heroin.
By now the Stranglers had almost totally morphed their earlier sound into a far more refined and delicate style, described by some commentators as 'Baroque Pop', a phrase I like, and I saw them a couple of more times. Eventually the steam ran out, or possibly the elephant in the room of 'musical differences', and after a couple of lack-lustre cover versions, Cornwell left the band. The remaining 3 members lurched on, and still do, with various replacements, never quite finding their feet or their glory days. Cornwell has embarked on a solo career of mixed provenance, still the highlights of his shows being when he plays some old. Now, if one day they could patch up their differences and play together as the original band, that would be worth seeing, but the chances of that fade by the year. Somehow the spectre of notoriously spiky black belt in Karate bassist, Jean Jacques Burnel, cosying back up with Cornwell seems unlikely, not least as Jet Black, already in his 40s in their 70s heyday, has had to retire from live shows. As I said, they were already older back in the day.
But the song remains a classic and one I return to often. Remarkably, it has been covered, albeit often in spoof or post-modern ironic style, never matching the original. The version below, actually featuring Cornwell, is, however quite fun!
As a final aside, and one that gives me great pleasure, is the knowledge that Cornwell, junkie post-graduate research chemist, was actually a contemporary of Richard Thompson, guitar hero and icon, ex of Fairport Convention. Indeed, as school mates together, Thompson had included Cornwell, on bass, in his first band, 'Emil and the Detectives'. Which led to a later and somewhat unlikely reunion onstage. As Thompson regularly says, or sings, 'It all Comes Around Again'.
Are tap dancers musicians? Because, if they aren’t, making this a transition song from our Songs From Movies About Musicians theme is admittedly a stretch. The main character is a penguin from a group who are great singers, but he can not sing. Instead, his talent is tap dancing, and the movie is about him proving his value to a culture that initially rejects him. Themewise, it only makes matters worse when you know that the song Golden Slumbers/ The End was later used in a movie that definitely would fit both themes: last year’s Sing. There are two reasons why I didn’t want to use Jennifer Hudson’s version from that film: the movie and recording are too new; and k d lang’s version from Happy Feet is just so much better.
Golden Slumbers/ The End is a song that invites overblown bombastic treatments. It is all too tempting to give the song a big production, and have everything crescendo to a big finish. k d lang and producer T-Bone Burnette know better. They understand the power of subtlety here, and they know they have the singer to pull it off. So lang is backed here by piano and the percussion of Medeski, Martin, and Wood, plus very light orchestration and stand-up bass. Burnette trusts his singer to do the rest, and she does, beautifully.
Purchase Anvil, Metal on Metalfrom the documentary, Anvil:
The Story of Anvil.
OK, I’m going to start this the wrong way, like some
apologist whose nothing but guilty of the thing he’s apologizing for…what do
they call that, when someone effusively apologizes for something in order to make
it seem as if they aren’t guilty of the exact thing they are expressing shame
about… hypocrisy?
And what exactly will I be protesting? That I don’t like
Metal. I really don’t. I did. But that was a long time ago. I’d rather you not
know that. But, now that I’ve written it, let’s leave it where it is.
I’m a little embarrassed at the fact that I used to think
the likes of Poison, Cinderella, Dokken, et al were the shit. Big S Shit. I wanted desperately to be able
to grown my hair long. I wore a torn and frayed denim jacket, festooned with as
many patches as I could fit on it: Def Leppard, Van Halen, Judas Priest, et al.
The main back patch was of Iron Maiden’s Eddie, dressed a British infantryman
from their greatest song, “The Trooper.” I wore wrester’s high-top shoes (I don’t know
where that came from, but it was the metal thing to do). I wore a mullet since
my hair is naturally curly and the only part that would grow reasonably
straight was the back. I looked like a tool.
I was abruptly pulled out of my teenage haze of hairspray
and spandex and Ibanez guitars when someone introduced me to R.E.M. It was a
simple change over, like a trigger pull. I went from listening to bad music,
because that’s what everyone else was listening, to being a music snob. Someone
who listened to good music. Someone who was openly critical of other’s
musical tastes. I would hazard that a
lot of you were/are the same…you know who you are. It’s OK; music appreciation
is part intellectual, part tribal, and all an affair of the heart. My
development of said musical appreciation is a long history, of which I gone into at
varying degrees in my writing for this blog, so I won’t digress too deeply into
my own tutelage and history. Except to
say: sometimes your past isn’t at as far a remove as you’d like to think.
Exhibit A: My Spotify library has many of Iron Maidens
albums
Exhibit B: I have an ipod playlist called “Hair Metal Faves”
Exhibit C: my obsession with the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Directed by their former roadie, this film is a documentary
about Anvil, a little known metal band, and, is simply put: brilliant. It is both
heartbreaking and hilarious, but in the end, as uplifting a human story as I’ve
ever seen. The “tragedy” of the band fuels the emotional drive of the story,
and in a sense proves that the tragedy need not be one that moves us to despair
to raise the spirit to a place one finds a sense of thankfulness or
self-perspective. To get a sense of the
film, you should know: Anvil are a Canadian metal outfit that put out an album
in 1982 that is considered by most metal luminaries as singularly influential.
Metallica and Anthrax, Slash, Lemmy, Slayer all fill the film with stunning
testimony to the energy and excitement that Anvil brought to the stage and how
they seemed poised to reach the very pinnacle of metal triumph.
And then…nothing. Anvil disappeared from the main stream and
seemingly into the lore of bands that “might of.” But, they never really went
away. The film details the story of how mainstays Steve “Lips” Kudlow (lead
vox) and drummer Robb Reiner toiled through decades of obscurity and all the
inglorious humiliations of being a band that had tasted success but never quite
made it. Nor ever quit. There’s a lot to this film that makes it great. It is a
meditation of youthful ambition, on failure and will. It is about friendship
and family, but mostly it’s about grit. About never giving in and never giving
up. The movie is at times heartbreaking, but in the end, it’s an important
film—the message is powerful: stick to
what you know you want and what you’re capable of, despite what happens along
the way and all the people who will tell you that you can’t.
I started off talking about how I was embarrassed to admit I
used to be into metal. I’m not saying that Anvil was an amazing band—at least
not by my standards. I don’t really see the “influence” that the people in film
talk about. But, their story, their singular story, is inspiring, fable-like, joyously
uplifting. You don’t have to like metal to hope the members of Anvil have
achieved success, finally, and the kind of happiness that would bring. You don’t
have to like metal to cheer them at the end of the film, maybe even bang your
head, if just a little. Because, despite their “tragic” career arc, what you
come away from this film is that Kudlow and Reiner are happy, are capable of
being joyful, despite the near surreal oddness and frustration of their band’s
story. And that is where the sheer brilliance of this movie, and their story,
come to the fore: rarely will you ever see a lesson of determination illustrated
and perfectly as than in the story of Anvil.
If you haven’t seen Anvil
yet, go get it now. The film will stay with you and you just might get
their signature tune, “Metal on Metal”, stuck in your head. Which will be a
good thing, especially if you need to get off your ass and do something.
purchase the film [Help!] purchase the album [Help!] You've heard the adage "Good thing come to those that wait." I certainly did because I was brought up the child of missionaries - plenty of Christian mores. The statement applies here because I have been looking at the Beatles' Help! film as a possible posts, and today's Guardian includes an article about the making of the film. The Guardian article leads off with the comment that the film has been "lost" for 50 years. There are screen shots from the film and some info about the process in the news article, but the [unseen] video itself is up for sale - if you've got $50,000 or so. Help! from the Beatles comes pretty close to fitting the <Movies About Musicians> theme. It is their second (aiming to build on their success -both after the Hard Days Night film, and their back to back album successes) - but today, the film comes across as almost pathetic .[How the years affect perceptions] What seemed "must view" back in the 60s is now so trite you can hardly watch unless you bring historical perspective glasses with you. That said ... Help! has value. The album itself has several classics: Help (of course), Ticket To Ride and You've Got To Hide Your Love Away.
One of the best documentaries about musicians was 2013’s 20 Feet From Stardom, which focused on the background singers that we all have heard, but often don’t recognize by name. Not only was it interesting and filled with great music, the film addresses one of my regular writing subjects—why are some incredibly talented musicians not as famous as they probably should be. 20 Feet discusses many of the reasons—bad advice, bad luck, bad decisions, and even a lack of that certain something that allows you to traverse that 20 feet. I’ve mentioned the film before, in my piece about Darlene Love, who is probably the most famous of the singers featured in the film.
But maybe the most famous vocal discussed in 20 Feet, and for me the most memorable segment, was about Merry Clayton’s searing “rape, murder” vocal part in the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Luckily, I don’t have to describe the scene in detail, because the video above is a clip from the movie, in which Clayton and Mick Jagger discuss the circumstances. But if you can’t watch the video, in short strokes, Clayton was called out of bed to sing for a band that she hadn’t heard of, was whisked to the studio, pregnant and in her pajamas, to add a searing and unforgettable part to what would become a classic song. Not only are the vocals powerful, the way her voice cracks only adds to the emotional impact of the part. In the video above, you can hear the isolated vocal tracks, which is cool.
Here’s Clayton’s cover of “Gimme Shelter,” featuring occasional Stones sideman Billy Preston:
Clayton, born on Christmas Day (which led to her name) in New Orleans, was a veteran singer by the time the Stones roused her from bed. Her powerful vocals were also featured on, among other songs, Neil Young’s “The Old Laughing Lady,” and Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (reluctantly). While Clayton never covered “Sweet Home,” she did do a great, soulful version of the song that it responded to:
In addition, she has had an acting career, both musically—Clayton was the Acid Queen in the first London stage production of The Who’s Tommy—and in movies and TV. More recently, she contributed vocals to albums by G. Love & Special Sauce and one of my least favorite bands, Coldplay.
Unfortunately, in 2014, Clayton was in a serious car accident that led to her having both legs amputated at the knees. She returned to the public eye in 2015, receiving an award from the Jazz Foundation of America (where Keith Richards performed "Gimme Shelter" in her honor with, among others, fellow 20 Feet star Lisa Fischer, who sang the song for years on tour with the Stones) and supporting Obamacare and the MusicCares charity that installed a chairlift in her home, and reportedly is working on a new album.
It was hearing this on the radio today that gave me the prompt, on a request show fronted by, of all people, Kim Wilde, adding to the 80s exotica of it all. I should add that I hadn't sought to seek this radio station, it was being played in the cab I was traveling in, as most of the other selections were shite. In respect of the station concerned, I won't mention its name, other than to say it was neither Liver FM nor Lungs FM, but in that general territory. I don't even know whether the song(s), the parent film, or the actress/singer, Hazel O'Connor, is known outside of the UK. I suspect not, somehow, give or take the parts of europe she has variously lived in. And even then, again outside this film, her appeal has been somewhat limited. A bit like a substitute Toyah Wilcox, whom she interestingly beat to get the part in the film. (Toyah Willcox? That's a whole other post, preferably by someone who can stand her.)
So, like the majority of films about musicians, it is a fame to fortune fairy tale, this time with sufficient Brothers Grimm downside to add some grit, as her subsequent fall from fame is graphically displayed as well. Scarcely original, but entertaining. "Breaking Glass" it is called, nothing to do with Nick Lowe, and contains enough of the stereotypes to allow those who lived through the music scene of the late 70s to feel comfortably at home. Austerity had real balls in those days, so this is the world of power cuts and strikes, of anti-establishment benefit gigs being big business, of the emergence of a neo-nazism, blunt and crude enough as to make the current versions seem pussies, if no more or less dangerous. There are drugs, drink, violence, mental breakdown, crooked promoters, crooked managers and a shedload of cameos from musos and thesps a little ahead of their current ubiquity. Likewise some behind. So, as well as O'Connor, there is Phil Daniels, of Quadrophrenia and Park Life fame, erstwhile Roxy and Adam Ant bassist Gary Tibbs and, most notably, Jonathan Pryce, the Jonathan Pryce, in an extraordinary exposition of the bleeding heart cliche of damaged goods musicianship. Also, blink and you miss them, 60s legend, George "Zoot" Money, and the late "Rock and Roll Kids'" Gary Holton. No further spoilers as I actually commend the film as being worth a watch, almost as documentary.
Although there is quite a lot of music in the film, not a lot cuts the mustard, somewhat bombastic 80s, just, glam-punk. But the song I feature is quite different, a delightful ballad, notwithstanding the mawkish lyric, with one of the saxophone riffs of the day, the other being on "Baker Street". Played by the magnificently named Wesley Magoogan, scroll down, it lifts the song and makes it immediately memorable. For this one song alone I forgive all the excesses poured forth elsewhere. And it is still the highlight of her set.
Get the film or get the song, but you will have to get the whole album.
purchase [Purple Rain] I started out on the wrong foot for this theme and it has taken me a few days to get back on track: Musicians in Movies. My belated choice: Purple Rain) YouTube actually appears to have a copy of the full film:
Purple Rain dates back to the days when I didn't have much in the way of Internet access. More or less nobody did. (Actually, I had X.25 if you want to go down that path.) WWW was invented in 90 or so, but there were direct dial connections to Bulletin Boards such as AOL/Compuserve. Neither did I have main-stream TV access, being outside the USA. And by this time, MTV had become main-stream for many (USA) people. So .. my access to music videos was limited to what people sent me (USPS VHS packages) or what I could grab on a once a year visit to the US. Back at about that time, I was teaching a class called "Film & Lit" - as the name implies, a study of film and literature. At that time (while still developing the course) our topics included historical films (Great Train Robbery, Citizen Kane, etc) and only near the end of the course moved on to more modern examples. I never braved Purple Rain - but I wish I had. My resource(s) for film reviews were limited to the Compuserve film review "channel". No small hassle considering the state of the Internet. On my ocassional visits to the US, I would video-tape anything I could get my hands on. And at some point in the 80's, that included nabbing a copy of Purple Rain. Vaguely aware that there are autobiographical aspects to the film and newly aware of the phenomena of the artist called Prince (at that time), I/we watched Purple Rain many, many times - this was clearly a different kind of film. Not like Singing in the Rain or even Clockwork Orange - something much more visceral here. But- keep the '84 date in mind - tech levels on all fronts were pretty limited. Certainly no such option as personal computer video editing, and anything else for video editing on the market cost 10s or 100s of thousands - check out I Want My MTV with a critical eye if you want to see state of the art video editing. Purple Rain has its flaws. Several. It is supposedly semi-autobiographical, but hopefully not in terms of the male<>female attitudes/roles.(We may never know.) And it's probably not a thematic model to espouse -it's male brutal in many places. But most critics seem to agree that it was seminal - opening up a genre that hadn't been explored before. And the music is [now] classic. Beautiful Ones from the same fılm/album strikes me as even more seminal/powerful than those songs that became popular. (Sorry, this copy appears to have built-in jitters, but it is still worth your time)
Director Jonathan Demme died last week, so it is only fitting that we include him in this theme. Demme could almost be the subject of his own theme here. He directed fictional films such as Something Wild, which made brilliant use of music. Bruce Springsteen won an Oscar for his song from Demme’s film Philadelphia. Demme also made music videos. But here I turn my attention to another form that Demme excelled in: the concert film.
Talking Heads and their leader David Byrne were great subjects for Jonathan Demme. The band came together in art school, and they always had a strong visual sense. Early in the movie, we see David Byrne in normal clothing. He looks skinny, almost emaciated, but man can he move! Girlfriend is Better is a dramatic moment in the film, because it is our first glimpse of the big suit. Demme shows it to us first in the form of a menacing shadow, and then lets us see the man casting the shadow. Suddenly, David Byrne is transformed into something other. When I saw the film in 1984, I did not know that Byrne was on the autistic spectrum, and if I had known, I would not have understood at the time. Now I know that people on the spectrum often feel that they are “other”, that they don’t quite fit in with a neurotypical society. They do however have much of value to contribute. To me now, the arrival of the big suit in the movie is a great visual expression of all of this.
I don’t want it to sound like the movie Stop Making Sense is some kind of manifesto. Taken as a whole, the movie is first of all a record of a great show. Beyond that, it is also a generous film that makes time not just for the music of Talking Heads, but also for spotlights on solo projects by members of the band, including Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz’ side project the Tom Tom Club. Even when David Byrne is on stage, Jonathan Demme’s camera finds other permanent and guest members of the band, and lets us get to know them through their performances. There was talk in the music press at the time of strains in the band, but the film shows a large group that knew how to be in perfect synch for their performances.
Backbeat, a
bio-pic about the earliest iteration of The Beatles—well, The Silver Beatles,
actually—came out in 1994, and at the time, I remember thinking: wow! What a
movie! So cool, so uber-hip as to be so different from what was happening at
the time. I’ve re-watched it since and all I can really say is, in deference to
the aging process, the accents are good, especially the guy who played George
Harrison. In fact, all the portrayals are good: Lennon is brooding and nasty,
Paul is smiley, yet focused. George is quiet. Then there’s Pete Best, the
world’s unluckiest drummer, but the focus of the film, Stuart Sutcliffe, the
“lost Beatle” or the “5th Beatle”, who left the band to become a
painter and then tragically died from an intracerebral hemorrhage is the central story. The injury
was the possible result of a vicious beating he took, and a kick to the head,
in one of the Beatle’s many misadventures in Hamburg, Germany, where they cut
their teeth as a bar band pre-1964 and their history-making splashdown in
America to start the British Invasion. The film’s focus is on those wild times,
as the Beatles sorted out just exactly who they were, and the irony of seeing
them portrayed as pre-icons, unaware of what was to come, makes for interesting
watching.And the fact that the film
devotes most of its image making to Sutcliffe and his relationship with
photographer Astrid Kirchher, lends to the air of mystery around just who the
Beatles were before they become the biggest celebrities in history.
Sutcliffe died a year after leaving the band, at the age of
21, after having secured a scholarship to attend the Hamburg School of Art.
Pete Best was replaced by Richard Starkey…the rest is history.
It’s sad to think of what could have been when one discusses
Sutcliffe (or Pete Best, for that matter). An artist first, Lennon convinced
him to join the band and play the bass, which Sutcliffe had absolutely no
talent for whatsoever. But, he looked cool, and in a band as image-conscious as
this, that counted for a lot. In fact, it was arguably Sutcliffe that inspired
and invented the Beatle’s image—point in fact: he was the first to wear a
mop-top; the others were copying him. Same with the Beatle boots and the duds.
But, with Lennon, McCartney and Harrison being as talented as they were, tensions
were bound to arise—the looks would only get them so far. Seriously, think
about it: The Beatles started out like any other pop outfit: thriving,
rocketing to fame on their carefully cultivated image and the devastating good
looks. But, they surpassed the look and did something as yet really unachieved
at that time in pop/rock music, which was make music.
Music, as in italicized
music, asterixed music, real music*.
The level of talent, of song writing and
composition skills, has rarely, if ever, been matched since by a pop band. So,
good looks, mop top haircuts, and those Chesterfield suits with the velvet
collars and the drainpipe pants, would have only taken The Beatles so far if
not for the god-given musical talents. Imagine a history where the Beatles were
a relegated to a few oldies hits, dusted off on classic rock radio, never achieving
Abbey Road, or Sgt. Pepper’s, because they were kind of Justin Beiber, or
something even less, a factory made hit, here and then gone. Pop music is more
flash than it is bonfire. The Beatles remain an ever-growing phenomenon not
because they were among the first, but because they deserve, perhaps, had to be
that.
The movie itself, as I said, is…OK. It’s a nice period
piece, full of authentic sets, haircuts, and great wardrobe. It shows the
tensions in the band, defines the personalities that would go on to be more
legendary the real, and depicts Paul’s anger and dislike of Sutcliffe, knowing
he was better on bass than the aspiring art-school aesthete.
But, it is the soundtrack that we will end on. Produced by
Don Was, and featuring a veritable all-star line up including Dave Priner of
Soul Asylum (huge at the time the movie came out); Greg Dulli of the Afghan
Whigs; Mike Mills of REM; Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth; and a young kid named
Dave Grohl from a little band called Nirvana. The album is a vanity project of
sorts, with ace musicians, wildly popular at that particular juncture, covering,
in a most un-ironic way, their roots. The music that Beatles started out with
was and remains some of the most enjoyable ever written: 2-minute, whip crack
rockabilly and soul numbers that really, though covers themselves at the time,
were the very earliest traces of rock n roll. The DNA of the genre, if you
will—what made rock n roll a cultural force, and not just a local southern
radio oddity named after a slang term for sex, with a fast backbeat and a
quicker guitar riff and shuffle.
This modern day crew cuts a fantastic, hyped up and
warp-speed collection of such tunes as Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and
“Good Golly Miss Molly”, “Twist and Shout”, Chuck Berry’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”
and “Carol” and the Berry Gordy penned, “Money”, perhaps the most recognizable
of the later Beatle’s hits.
The soundtrack is well done, recorded crisply and full of a
buoyant, joyous energy. And like its predecessors, it clocks in at under a
half-hour—those 2-minute pop classics, all jangle guitar, shotgun snares and
ripping vox are a thing of the past, sadly. I remember thinking of the album as a nice
little novelty, a different kind of sound from musicians who I loved at the
time, doing far different sounding music than what was popular (Greg Dulli, in
particular, is in excellent form—but, then, the Afghan Whigs were really just a
hyped up, angry soul band…).
For me, having grown up on The Beatles and studied
them deeply well before I even got out of middle school, the soundtrack was a
lark, a fun reinterpretation. But, for a lot of people my age, in the confused
post-Nirvana (Cobain committed suicide just about a week after the soundtrack
came out), still growing grunge and alterna-revolution, the soundtrack to Backbeat was kind of a text book, a
primer for what came before and laid the groundwork for the rock ‘n roll that
was happening now (well, then actually…).
The thing itself, rock ‘n ‘ roll, is constantly changing, but its roots,
as open to debate of ownership and origin as they are, remain solid. The place
rock music came from is sacred, a spring or an oracle, still able to mystify.
Going back, regardless for the reason, proves, like all good art, that
reinterpretation, not necessarily reinvention, will keep the thing perpetually
alive. And kicking. Hopefully to a kicking backbeat…
By conceit and definition, Cameron Crowe's 2000 semi-autobiographical timepiece Almost Famous uses a quite specific, carefully curated set of older songs as soundtrack fodder, the better to establish and maintain both the innate historicism of the cinematic summer of '73 it depicts, and the tonal tension of just-out-of-reach coolness that the film explores as it meanders through the intimate and often hilariously naive tour bus chronicles of reputation-on-the-verge and be-true-to-thyself challenges through the perspective of a 15 year old budding music journalist who misrepresents himself to Rolling Stone to garner an all-expenses-paid journey through America alongside fictional band-on-the-rise Stillwater. Indeed, the music used is so inherently integral to the film, it's no surprise to find that the official soundtrack was awarded the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album; though the published product includes less than a third of the songs heard throughout the movie, the 17-track result offers stunning capture of time, tone, and topic in ways that befit the movie majestically.
But unlike most of the other songs in the film, Elton John's Tiny Dancer - at over six minutes, the longest song on the soundtrack, and arguably the one with the longest screen time and significance as well - also serves the narrative explicitly, in multiple ways. Lyrically, it's a perfect match: the song is directly about a groupie, a seamstress for the band who loves the music man, and sings along to the words from the crowd in performance as if they were poetry for her alone. And in many ways, the song provides the emotional climax of the film itself, serving to prompt a slow-build highway sing-along that doesn't so much resolve the building tensions of the groupies and musicians that storm around our narrator as it releases those tensions to the wind, trading them for the unifying factor that transcends and bonds the group - which is to say, the shared love of song and subject, which must be experienced in the heart and in the moment always.
I'm sure there's a word for soundtrack songs which the characters can hear, and react to - as distinct from songs which merely accompany the story, and lend their layers of meaning from overhead. But even if there isn't, this moment, which Rolling Stone Magazine lists as #11 on its list of the The 30 Greatest Rock & Roll Movie Moments (and, I suspect, only rates so low because it would seem smug and self-centered for RS to place a cinematic milestone about its own magazine at the top of the list), provides the prototype, the idealized incidence of how to do it right. And so today we share the song with context: the scene itself, with a tip of the hat to Crowe for making sure the music matters, and still does...and a bonus coversong, for those who want to hear every note, done live and lovely by tender geekpop sentimentalist Ben Folds, recorded just a year or two after the film was released, and thus perhaps at least partially in homage to the movie itself.
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