Random Shuffle – Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Pat Carrell, & Sam More with Conway Twitty

Originally written on August 31, 2006.

“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” – Lucinda Williams
From Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Lucinda has a voice that is country, earthy, sad, and beautiful all at the same time. She writes lonely songs about country roads, failed love, and all the pain and hurt that make up a life. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the album, is about as perfect as an album can be. There simply isn’t a bad song on it.

The song is just exactly the kind of song I love. It has jangly guitars, a nice little rhythm section to it, it is country without being too country, it rocks without really being rock, and it has a great sing-along little chorus.

If it was socially acceptable, if my wife wouldn’t kill me, and my God wouldn’t damn me, I’d ask Lucinda Williams to be my mistress and ask her to sing this song to me.

“Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings” – Lucinda Williams
From 05/16/03

Originally this is off of Lucinda’s World Without Tears album, an album I have never found myself getting into all that much. There are some good songs there for sure, but overall it never really catches me, not like Car Wheels anyway.

Upon listening to this live version I may have to reconsider the whole album again. The bootleg itself is exceptionally good, which is tremendous considering the other Lucinda boots I own sound like crap. A terrible thing, in my opinion, to get a bootleg of an awesome live artist only to be let down by the sound quality.

This is the show closer of that boot, and I get a couple of minutes worth of crowd noise before, presumably, she comes out for the encore. An interesting thing that comes from listening to a bootleg that is still on the computer in a random order. You get every note and every pause.

“May This Be Love” – Emmylou Harris
From Wrecking Ball.

Emmylou Harris has a gorgeous, moving voice, but to be honest many of her songs leave me with little impression. This is doubly strange when I consider that she does convey a great deal of emotion in her songs. They just don’t tend to stick with me.

This is from her second album, I believe, with producer Daniel Lanois. There are lots of his trademark ethereal sounds throughout, but to be honest, once again, most of the album doesn’t leave a mark.

Take this song for instance, it is four minutes of guitar fuzz and Emmylou singing what must surely be a great, tragic song, but while listening I keep wondering when it will end. It is moving in its own little way, and perhaps if I had the headphones plugged in and a starry sky to look upon, I would be moved. But as is, it seems nice, but it is nothing I’ll remember.

“Single Girl” – Pat Carrell
From Songcatcher

Songcatcher, the movie always seemed like a way to cash in on the whole O Brother, Where Art Thou? buzz. The soundtrack carries several lovely songs and a number of irritatingly country songs.

“Single Girl” is a funny, very country little ditty that reminds me of both my grandma and a lady who tells stories on the local radio station on Saturday mornings. At just over a minute it isn’t much more than a snippet, but one that sticks with me.

“Rainy Night in Georgia” – Sam Moore and Conway Twitty
From Rhythm, Country and Blues

This is a great old, sad, soul song made famous by Book Benton. Here it is covered by Sam Moore of Sam and Dave fame and country legend Conway Twitty. It is from an album that coupled country singers with their soul-singing counterparts. Mostly, it stinks but this and a version of “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away” by Lyle Lovett and Al Green make the album worth any money you might spend.

Sam and Conway are obviously having a lot of fun singing this old song, and they even throw a little banter midway through that sounds natural and fun.

Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

unfaithfully yours

While trying to explain the type of film we were about to watch to my in-laws, my wife said it was a Rex Harrison film. I immediately began thinking that I would explain that it was a Preston Sturges film, starring Rex Harrison. Not really much difference there, when you think about it, especially since the in-laws have probably never heard of Preston Sturges or Rex Harrison, not being much for film watching.

It’s not that they are opposed to film, but rather they don’t ever go to watch movies, being too expensive, or read up on them, or study weekend grosses or any such thing. They don’t really go to rent them either. They are just not that type of folk.

I mean they still watch regular TV, no cable or satellite, and still use the internet via dial-up. They only have a DVD player because I bought them one, and only then because I was tired of watching the same old VHS tapes when we came down. And that’s just it, when we come down we watch movies, and they enjoy them. So, they aren’t opposed to movie watching, they just don’t go about seeking them out.

Anyways, I would have said it was a Preston Sturges film because when I think about movies I think more about directors than stars. Directors, it seems to me, have more of an effect on the final outcome of a film than an actor. If I had to choose, I’d go for a film with a bad actor and a great director, then a great actor and a bad director. Odds are a director can elevate a bad actor’s performance, more than an actor will elevate bad direction.

This isn’t always true, especially in older films, say starring Humphrey Bogart. I might be able to tell you who directed Casablanca if I thought about it (it’s Michael Curtiz right?) and I know that Howard Hawks directed The Big Sleep and John Huston did the Maltese Falcon. But still all of those pictures, and pretty much everything starring Humphrey Bogart is a Bogart picture to me.

This is all a convoluted way to say that I picked up a copy of Unfaithfully Yours at the library (man you’ve got to love a public library with a massive collection of excellent films) on the basis that it was a Preston Sturges film. Really, I only know Sturges because of the Coen Brothers. Their hilarious film, O’Brother, Where Art Thou? Gets its title from Sturges’s film, Sullivan’s Travels. Loving the brothers Coen and wanting to see their inspiration I rented Sullivan’s Travels and found it to be beautiful.

Preston Sturges is now on my list of directors to watch.

Unfaithfully Yours is an odd little picture. It starts out like a fast-paced comedy in the style of Bringing up Baby or His Girl Friday and then heads into surrealistic art territory before slipping over to a slapstick farce.

The plotting involves Rex Harrison starring as a celebrated English conductor, Sir Alfred De Carter, living in New York with his beautiful bride. Things are going pretty well for the old man, too. He has fame, fortune, success at something he loves, and a beautiful woman to fawn over. Sure he must put up with his petulant brother-in-law, but he’s got his wits and they are enough to take care of him.

Things turn upside down after he gets back from a trip abroad and finds out that when he told his brother-in-law to “look after” his wife, he was taken quite literally. The brother-in-law hired a private detective to look after the wife and the detective found out a few things. Mainly, that said wife spent some time in her negligee late one evening in Sir Alfred’s secretary’s bedroom.

This information naturally outrages Sir Alfred and moves our film into the surreal. During an evening concert, Sir Alfred begins to fantasize about what he will do. The camera moves into his eyeball, and into his mind.

Three fantasies of revenge, remorse, and self-loathing play out during the course of three songs that the actual Sir Alfred is conducting. During the interlude between each song, the real audience goes mad as if the music performed is the best Sir Alfred has ever conducted. Giving us some commentary on the passions and art.

When the concert is over, Sir Alfred rushes home to implement his first, and most devious fantasy – that of killing his wife and framing his secretary. But all does not go as well as the fantasy and we move into the final act, which is pure slapstick.

Nothing goes right for poor Sir Alfred, he cannot find anything, breaks everything, and is too inept to work a recording machine. It is all perfectly paced and consists of the funniest parts of the movie.

In the end, misunderstandings are worked out and everything becomes a happy ending.

Unfaithfully Yours is an odd little film and not for everyone, as can be seen from a fairly dismal box office at the time of its release. The ever-changing tone of the film may turn some people off, but for those willing to stick it through and enjoy a film that is experimental but well made, the payoff is worth it.

Random Shuffle: Louis Armstrong, Bruce Hornsby, The Libertines, The Rolling Stones, The Blues Brothers

Originally posted on August 26, 2006.

“Kiss to Build a Dream On” – Louis Armstrong
From Sleepless in Seattle

I periodically think of myself as a great jazz lover. In fits and spurts, I try to be. Back about ten years or so I was with a friend at his friend’s house and the subject went naturally to music. Well, it went naturally there because I was checking out his CD collection. The discussion turned to jazz and I mentioned I liked Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. Condescending with a whisper he said, “Oh so you like vocal jazz?”

I had never thought about it like that. Isn’t jazz jazz? I had just begun to listen to the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and by that, I mean I had heard talk about their frenetic awesomeness amongst deadheads. I got the knock of vocal jazz not being real jazz and split. I have since dug what this guy would dub real jazz, but it is a moderated digging. I whip out all that cosmic jazz once in a while, but I can’t take in more than smaller doses.

Louis Armstrong started in the real jazz category, being a trailblazing blower, but in the latter days became the unique voice singing such family hits as “Wonderful World” and “Hello Dolly.” This song falls straight in that camp, being off of the soundtrack to Sleepless in Seattle of all things. It’s a darn fine song though, and one I stuck on my wedding CD.

Most days I’ll take this version of jazz over the real stuff, hands down.

“Rainbow’s Cadillac” – Bruce Hornsby
From 11/06/98

There is a video on YouTube, but the embed has been disabled, you can watch it by clicking here.

I didn’t really get into bootleg trading until just after I graduated college. I had moved to Abilene, TX to start graduate school – start over really, as I didn’t know a soul. Actually I never really got to know many people and left after a semester. But while I was there my refuge was bootlegging.

During this time Bruce Hornsby played a long run at Yoshi’s in Oakland California to promote his album, Spirit Trail. The tour was highlighted by guitar work from Steve Kimock, and a couple of guest spots from Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. This was one of the few performances Lesh had given since Jerry Garcia’s death a few years back and really marked his return to music.

This run came out on tape quickly and with a fantastic sound quality. In those days we were still using analog tapes and the sound quality often degenerated quickly through each generation of recording (unlike CDs where you can get an exact copy of the music, with analog the quality of a recording digressed every time you recorded it). This was an amazing thing to me to have so much high-quality music so quickly after it had been performed.

Now that I’ve moved to the CD world and almost everything is high quality, such recordings are no longer rare. In fact, I’ve only got a couple of these shows on CD and the tapes have long since been given away. But it still brings fond memories. Some of the only ones from that small chunk of time I spent in Texas.

It’s a great performance too. “Rainbow’s Cadillac” is one of Bruce’s finest songs, and an excellent jamming song done live. He pretty much nails the sucker. The sound is great and there is an energy at these shows that this was a new Bruce. Great stuff folks.

“Can’t Stand Me Now” – Libertines
From the Libertines

Peter Doherty, lead singer of the Libertines, and now Babyshambles, is a pretty danged good musician/songwriter but has so thoroughly screwed up his life that it’s all kinds of sad. We don’t hear much about him on this side of the ocean, but in England, he’s all sorts of tabloid fodder, what with the heroin addiction, the multiple arrests, and his off-and-on relationship with Kate Moss.

The Libertines were an excellent British, indie rock outfit, that broke up in, well, tabloid fodder. This is a really great upbeat, heavy drum, pop song. Maybe that’s not very indie rock of them, but a good pop song is a good pop song. And 9 times out of 10 I’ll take a good pop song over a great classical, jazz, or obscure rock song.

“Dead Flowers” – The Rolling Stones
From Sticky Fingers

The first time I ever heard this song was through a live performance by Townes Van Zandt over the closing credits of The Big Lebowski. I hunted the song down and eventually got the Rolling Stones album. Yeah, I know I’m a little behind on the Stones, but I’m slowly catching up with them.

Great freaking song. What more can be said? One of my all-time favorites. It’s a favorite daydream to learn to play this song (when I learn to play an instrument) and please the crowd (for of course I’ll make it big as a musician) when I whip it out.

“Turn On Your Lovelight” – Blues Brothers
From Blues Brothers 2000

This is an old blues number, but I know it mainly through the Grateful Dead. Pig Pen used to do these half-hour rave-ups to it. He’d rap along about women and drinking and whatever while the Dead freaking took off behind him. If I could go back in time I’d go back to 1968-69 San Francisco and groove to Pig taking off on this song. The tapes simply can’t do him justice.

The Blues Brothers don’t do the song justice. Man I dig the Brothers, and the original movie is a classic. The sequel had some good moments but sorely missed John Belushi. I miss Pig Pen on this song. It’s got all kinds of cool bluesmen playing along, but it ain’t got no soul.

RIP Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan

Bootleg Country: REM – 06/09/84

I have somewhere around 1,000 CDs in my bootleg collection. I usually get one or two new shows a week. I simply don’t have the time to listen to all of this music. Because of this, a lot of bootlegs get lost in the cracks.

From time to time when I am fingering my way through my collection I am completely surprised by something. Either I have forgotten that I owned a certain bootleg or the music contained therein, while previously dismissed, kicks the tongue to the back of my head.

One of the great things about this series is that I am forced to look closer at the music I may have previously ignored. I am a musical creature of habit. Even though I have thousands of CDs in my collection, there are maybe a few dozen that actually get any type of heavy rotation.

It’s not that I’m opposed to new music, for there is plenty of that rolls across my eardrums every week, but for certain moods or events, I have a select set of music that meets my needs. When I’m feeling sad or introspective I grab Willie Nelson’s Stardust. Or if I want something a little off-kilter that makes me smile I’ll grab some Wilco. In the mood? How about Norah Jones.

This rotation changes over time. New stuff finds its way in, while other music slips away to collect dust until I rediscover it.

With Bootleg Country, I’m continually walking outside my normal musical boundaries to find something different. One of my initial goals in this series was to show the diversity that can be found in the bootleg community. It’s not just a bunch of hippie, jam-band music, but jazz, folk, punk, and every other genre you can think of.

06/09/84
Capital Theatre
Passaic, NJ

My first full-length memory of REM is coming out of play practice in the eighth grade. It was well into dark and I was looking for my brother amongst all the headlights. A moment later he rolled up in his K-Car and as I opened the door “Stand” blaringly filled up the night air. I jumped in singing along at the top of my lungs.

I was not a popular kid in junior high and by singing along with such a cool song I felt that, I too, was cool. As by simply knowing the music, it’s popularity might somehow rub off on me. It was a perfect moment and I savored every minute of it.

It didn’t last, of course, the next day I went to school and I was the same pimply-faced shy kid. No one had even noticed, or cared that I dug REM.

Dig I did that band, for many years. They were one of my first true musical loves and I remained faithful up until a few years ago when they become so maudlin as to nauseate.

I’ve had this show now for many months and not given it much attention. When I would see it I would skip past it feeling it wasn’t worth any more listens. Thinking about that now I’m not sure if this is because of a general distaste I have for the band, or because I have another bootleg from 1995 that’s not very good at all. Whatever the reasons, I haven’t given it a spin in a long time.

Actually listening to it now, I don’t think I ever gave it a spin. The music is completely new to me, so it must have been something that was acquired and immediately put into my collection.

What a shame because the music contained here is as fresh and vital as it must have been when it was originally performed some 22 years ago. Wow, if that doesn’t make me feel old.

This is a band on a mission; they are on fire playing like Greek Gods before the Vestal Virgins. This is well before they become the biggest rock band on the planet, and a few years before “alternative” became an overused buzz word. This is indie rock at its finest.

They open with a sweet cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” which isn’t as pretty as the Velvet’s version but a lot tighter than REM’s drunken version on Dead Letter Office. Anytime you hear a band cover the Velvet’s first thing, you know you’re in for a good night.

Like a lot of early REM, the music is heavy on the lower end, and light on the high-end levels. Mike Mill’s bass trudges, and thumps along like a Chihuahua on sugar tablets, while Peter Buck’s guitar slithers like a snake. Michael Stipe’s vocals are as muddled as ever, but it all assimilates into a growling, beautiful piece of rock music.

Highlights include a howling “Hyena” that reverberates into my jowls and“Gardening at Night” for the ages.

It is a great bootleg, and one that I’m knocked out to have found again, for the first time.

You can grab a download of this show here.

TV Review: Vanished

vanished tv

Originally written on August 22, 2006. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show. I don’t think I watched another episode and it was cancelled not very long after. – Mat

Fox has been hyping their new mystery series Vanished for weeks. Hoping for something like 24 meets The Fugitive I stopped watching Italian maestro Dario Argento’s slasher epic Deep Red to watch.

The first episode of any series is difficult, double for an ongoing mystery series where presumably each episode will lead in the next without any loose ends being tied up until much, much later. With all of that introduction of characters and establishment of plot, it’s hard to really get into the meat of the show at first and create enough suspense to keep everyone tuned in next week.

By the midway point of the first episode of Vanished, I was ready to write the show-off and was missing my Italian blood bath.

We are quickly introduced to Senator Jeffrey Collins (John Allen Nelson), his wife Sara (Joanne Kelly), and son Max (John Patrick Amedori) before Sara gets a phone call and just like that, disappears. Just as fast an investigation is brought down and the poor Senator’s wife is suspected of being kidnapped.

FBI agent Graham Kelton (Gale Harold) is running the show and is, of course, as brash as he is awesome. He’s introduced with a flashback of doing some type of ransom cash handoff for a small boy. A sniper shoots the bad guy but not before the boy is blown to bits by the bomb planted on his body. This is supposed to give Agent Kelton a dark, somber side and an attitude that says ‘let me do it my way’ because he didn’t actually want the sniper there, and without the sniper, the boy would have been in one piece, not a thousand.

The problem, midway, was that we’d been introduced to the characters and the core problem, but I didn’t actually care about any of them. The show rests upon the fate of Sara Collins, yet we only actually see her for about 10 seconds, not long enough to develop any emotional attachment to her. The senator and his family are more developed, but in an attempt to make everything more mysterious (and presumably to add more plot twists later on) they don’t come off as too sympathetic. The agent’s back story was just kind of dumb, and there are so many obnoxious but genius crime fighters on TV these days that it’s hard to notice one more.

Ah, but in the back half of the episode, things got more interesting. It seems young Sara was previously kidnapped 12 years ago but the media coverage was covered up. She also apparently had another name as some stranger in a bar tells us after seeing her picture on the television.

The past is even more mysterious as Agent Kelton uncovers the body of a woman who was also kidnapped at the same time as Sara. Her body had been frozen since then and has now been thawing in the house registered to a man who happens to own the same type of gun that shot the waiter who told Sara about her disappearing phone call.

And the body has a card on it bearing the number 9:29. The number nine was also tattooed, post-mortem, on the waiter’s hand.

That’s suspense and has me interested in next week’s show.

While not exactly 24 meets The Fugitive, it’s more like a poor man’s Lost meets Matlock, it has enough juice to make me want to turn in next week. Unless Blockbuster sends me Dario Argento’s Suspira, then all bets are off.

Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On

what's going on

Originally written on August 22, 2006.

It’s been a year since Hurricane Katrina blew away much of the Gulf Coast and pummeled New Orleans. There is still much work to do in the city to bring it back to its once renowned glory. To help benefit the clean-up effort, New Orleans’s own Dirty Dozen Brass Band has released a song-for-song covering of Marvin Gaye’s classic album What’s Going On.

It is more of a reimagining than a straight cover version for they have added in fatter beats punctuated by brass horns and brought in a number of guest stars including Chuck D, Ivan Neville, and G. Love.

My perceptions of this album changed during the course of the numerous listens I gave it in order to write this review. In fact, I wrote a totally different review before giving the album one last spin and deciding my initial thoughts were completely wrong.

That’s an interesting side thought, actually, how perceptions of something can change over time. I’ve been writing reviews for about 18 months and periodically I’ll go through my files and check in on what I thought of a piece. Generally, I agree with what I thought back then, but sometimes I’ll totally disagree with myself.

Case in point I wrote a review of the zombie spoof, Shaun of the Dead and I was rather unexcited about the whole thing. I didn’t give it a big jeer, but neither was I particularly enthused. Watching it again, recently, I found myself wondering how I could not have been bowled over by the hilarity within that film.

So many things can affect our consumption of an artwork, and then our own critique of that work, that a review – something set in stone for the ages – is an odd thing. Does Ebert ever go back and admit he’s wrong, I wonder.

For What’s Going On, I initially dismissed large parts of it as having hip-hop and rap roots. I am too old, too white, and too from Oklahoma to ever really get rap music, and it wasn’t pleasing to my ears to have rapping over one of the classics. In my mind’s eye, all of the songs had some kind of rapping going on over what was actually pretty good back-up music.

Listening to the album again, I realized that only the first and last songs actually had rap artists laying down rhymes over the music. The rest of the album is either instrumental, or has guest artists actually singing along. Some of the beats are deep and fat, and certainly there are hip-hop influences throughout, but very little actual rapping. I suspect the bookended rapping caused me to believe there was more on the album than there actually is.

So, my review changed and was updated to reflect the new reality.

Covering a well-known song, less an entire album, is a difficult task for any artist. If you stay too close to the original then critics will say it is frivolous and redundant. If you completely rearrange the song making it your own then fans will cry sacrilege and call out for the Inquisition. An artist must ride that line, staying close to what made the original a classic while still maintaining their own uniqueness in the song.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band manages to find sublime methods of doing this. Often the horns will blow out the lines normally sung, and in the case of the titular track, Chuck D raps his own lyrics, while the musicians stay on track with the melody.

The title track is where I previously spent a lot of negative energy knocking the album. “What’s Going On” is a classic, beautiful piece of music. You can’t not like that song. In this reimagined version, Chuck D gets his rap on and throws down some hard political lines dissing the aftermath of Katrina and the US government’s response to it.

It’s not that I’m against political statements in art, or even specific words towards specific situations, it’s just that Marvin Gaye created a song that is universal. Though he was speaking about the Vietnam War and the political, racist environment of his time, his lyrics maintain a resonance today. His statement speaks out against our current situation and will continue to speak to generations to come. I’m not sure Chuck D’s words will hold up as well.

However, what the Dirty Dozen Brass Band lay down behind the rhymes shakes me inside and out. Like their name implies they hit some brassy, dirty beats with a little Dixieland thing thrown in for fun. They aren’t afraid to lay down deep, heavy beats either, and I’m not afraid to like them.

I can see myself cranking this disk at full volume and shaking my middle-aged-white-boy arse all night long (or at least until 10:30 which is still past my bedtime.) What’s Going On won’t make you throw out your original copy, but it stands enough on its own to find itself in party rotation or anytime you just want to groove.

Bootleg Country: Jimmy Cliff – Towson, MD (12/17/01)

Before I begin talking about Jimmy Cliff I must first admit I know none to very little about reggae music. Sure, I’ve got Bob Marley’s greatest hits package, Legend, and do dig it from time to time. That live version of “No Woman No Cry” is a marvel to hear. I’ve got a couple of other Marley bootlegs that are also quite awesome. But other than those, I’m pretty useless when it comes to Jamaican music.

This is most probably because of the sheer crappiness of the non-Marley reggae music I’ve heard. Anytime I’ve heard reggae music being played on the radio or some city festival somewhere it’s all heard like generic, worthless garbage. It all has the same monotonous, rhythmic beat that makes everyone in the near vicinity move up and down like ducks on a pond. It’s just inane and annoying.

I realize that’s not particularly fair to reggae music. It would be like writing off pop music after listening to nothing but Top 40 radio, or 70’s rock from the Classic Rock stations that play the same four Led Zeppelin songs over and over again.

I only happen to have this Jimmy Cliff bootleg due to Nick Hornby’s book, High Fidelity (or maybe it was the movie) where the main character notes he would like Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” played at his funeral. I quickly found a copy of the song and came to realize he was right – that is one danged fine song to go out on.

From the single, I put myself on a bootleg vine for this very recording.

12/17/01
Recher Theatre
Towson, MD

Coming into this bootleg I thought “Many Rivers to Cross” was the only song I knew of Jimmy Cliff, he quickly finds fault in that belief, running through a stream of familiar songs. I have multiple recordings from a series of shows in the early 90s with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing “Sitting in Limbo.” I dug the song enough to include it on a Christmastime mix tape for my wife, and never even knew who wrote it. Cliff shows me who is the master of that song and performs it beautifully.

Later he rises up for “Many Rivers to Cross” and brings it to the people on a hymn. It lifts and praises this beast called man as we journey to our final destinations. He then tears through a version of “The Harder They Come” that leaps and roars across the land. Coming but three months after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers there is both a somber and angry political tone attached to many of the songs. His song “Terror,” written specifically about those attacks, speaks out against both the acts of terror by Osama Bin Laden and the retribution from the USA. Terror, he says, comes from every side, and must end for there to be peace.

With other songs he finds hope. With “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” he sees the beauty in all people. Covering Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” he seems to point to a brighter future for us all.

And with that, I think I’ll go back to the record bin and find some more reggae music. For if this is the sound of Jamaica I need to do some exploring.

Set List:
Samba Reggae
Sitting in Limbo
You Can Get It If You Really Want
The World Is Yours
Many Rivers To Cross
Terror
No Problems, Only Solutions
Wonderful World, Beautiful People
I Want, I Do, I Get
The Harder They Come
I Can See Clearly Now
War in Jerusalem
Black Magic
Vietnam

Poison – 20th Anniversary Remasters

poison remasters

Originally written on August 15, 2006.

Slide into your leather pants. Strap on your stiletto boots. Fray your hair out with 12 gallons of hair spray. That’s right boys, it’s hair metal time.

Hair metal, or glam metal as many like to call it, arose in the late 1970s but became the dominant form of rock music in the 1980s. Equal parts heavy metal and glam rock, hair metal ruled my school for many a year.

Mötley Crüe has been cited as the world’s first hair metal band, and certainly, they brought it to the masses. With the Crüe reaching sales in the millions many bands soon followed with wild hair, more make-up than a cheap hooker, and plenty of loud cock rock. Oh, and let’s not forget the power ballads.

Ah, power ballads, the way for the tough, ultra-manly boy bands to show their sensitive side (for what better way to get some nookie than show your feminine side – besides the mascara I mean)? I recently made a hair metal mix tape and was kind of shocked to find that the vast majority of it was made up of power ballads.

Here are the big rockers, with the three neck guitars, the heavy riffs, the super-powered machismo, and the songs that I remember are the slow, sappy ones like “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn,” “Home Sweet Home” and “Heaven.” Mary Louise Parker, what the crap is up with that?

My favorite hair metal band has always been, and will always be, Poison. They didn’t have the cops of Mötley Crüe or the longevity of Bon Jovi, but they sure beat the spiked boots off of Warrant.

With the 20th anniversary of their first record, Look What the Cat Dragged In, Poison have re-released their first three albums (Look What the Cat Dragged In, Open Up and Say…Ahh!, Flesh and Blood) in souped-up remastered versions with bonus tracks.

If that doesn’t make you want to tease your hair and put on heavy mascara, I don’t know what will.

The disks all sound great; this is Poison sharper and more glammed up than you’ve ever heard before.

1986’s Look What the Cat Dragged in fell in the middle of the hair metal glory days. Everywhere you turned it was nothing but heavy metal and big hair. Poison maximized everything that was right about the genre. The guitars were loud, the drums were pounding, the lyrics were juvenile, and the music was all metal all the time.

You really can’t blame young men in metal bands for singing about what they want. With songs like “I Want Action” and “Talk Dirty to Me” Poison left little to the imagination in terms of what they wanted, and how they wanted it.

With their first album, they immediately established their mastery of the genre with balls-out rock followed by a big power ballad du jour.

The bonus songs on the disk include two 7” singles of “I Want Action” and “I Won’t Forget You” which, honestly, I can’t tell the difference between this and the regular album cuts. There is also an electrified, hair metal cover of Jim Croce’s “Don’t Mess Around with Jim.”

In the 20 years that have passed between the release of Look What the Cat Dragged In and Open Up and Say…Ahh! the differences in those two albums have blurred significantly. I’ve been a fan of Poison since their first beats hit the Top 40, but I really can’t remember hearing Open Up and Say…Ahh! for the first time.

I remember quite fondly the heavy rotation of “Nothing But a Good Time” on MTV with its slave-to-the-grind restaurant dishwater beginning, but in my memory “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and “Mama Don’t Dance” were already big hits, and they were not released until afterward.

This is it for me. This is the cream of hair metal. Give me Open Up and Say…Ah! Along with Dr. Feelgood and you can put me on a deserted big hair island forever.

“Nothing But a Good Time” is cock rock at its finest. It’s sing-along party music and there ain’t anything wrong with that. “Every Rose” is the greatest power ballad ever written, period. I mean, Brett Michaels has it tattooed on his arm, and he’d never do anything stupid.

In 9th grade, a long-haired student pulled out his acoustic guitar and lipped-synched himself a performance of “Nothing But A Good Time” for drama class that left us all teary-eyed. You can’t do that with “When the Children Cry.”

The disk’s bonus tracks include a previously unreleased track “Living for the Minute” and an interview with Brett Michaels.

When Flesh and Bone came out in 1990 I wrote it off pretty quickly. It seemed to me like a couple of hit singles thrown in with a lot of lousy filler material. I wondered if the band wasn’t falling back on its hit-making formula for a few numbers and then just throwing together any old crap to fill out the album.

Listening to it again I can’t believe how wrong I was. This is a band at its most mature. They have grown as songwriters and musicians. The music here is more than just cock rock, it’s infused with the blues and incorporates a range of styles and musicianship.

I can see why I didn’t like it to begin with, for it is quite different from their previous outings. And different is no good to a 14-year-old boy who wants to rock.

Sure the cock does peek its head out to rock here and there and especially on the hit single “Unskinny Bop,” but they also play with odd experimentation, (“Strange Days of Uncle Jack”), bluesy acoustic instrumentals, (“Swamp Juice (Soul-O”)), and Eagle-esque harmonies, (“Let It Play”).

Together it makes for their best album to date and a movement away from the shallow depth of hair metal and into something, if not exactly deep then a more mature musical entity.

The extra tracks include a blazing instrumental, “God Save the Queen” and an acoustic take of “Something To Believe In” with a few different lyrics.

With the re-release of their first three disks, Poison is giving their fans a better sound than they’ve ever had before, and a pristine example of why they were the kings of hair metal to those who’ve never heard them before.

Dark Water (2005)

dark watert

In certain places around the world wide web, there are debates raging about the Hollywood craze of remaking films, especially those of the horror variety, and more specifically the Asian horror variety. For years those crazy Asians have been making twisted, bloody, and freaking scary horror films. Recently Hollywood has realized there is a market for such a thing and has been remaking them ad nauseam.

Scanning the Internet Movie Database you’ll come across all kinds of debates on such a thing, most of them beginning with:

“Why are Americans so dumb?”
Or
“American movies suck, all they do is remake other better movies. Can’t they think of anything original?”

Or my favorite

“Can’t Americans read? Why can’t they just read subtitles and stop remaking perfectly good non-English cinema?”

The fact is Hollywood has been remaking films almost as long as they’ve been making them. The third funniest movie ever made (His Girl Friday) was a remake of an earlier film, The Front Page, and it was released in 1940!

Do the majorities of Americans watch foreign language films? No, probably not. Do the majority of the French, German, and Japanese people watch non-dubbed, foreign-language films? I suspect not. It doesn’t seem that unusual for people to want to watch what is essentially a passive medium, passively.

Hollywood remakes films, and specifically Asian horror films because there is money in it. Let’s face it, if The Ring was a total bomb we wouldn’t have seen The Grudge or Dark Water. But it made a bundle and so more Asian horror remakes came. And they’ll continue to come until they stop making money.

For my money ($14.95 a month for 2 movies at a time via Blockbuster) they can keep on remaking J-Horror. Even when they are less interesting than the original (which is most of the time) they are still generally entertaining.

Dark Water, the American remake of a Japanese film of the same name starring Jennifer Connely is about 3/4th of a good movie. I haven’t managed to catch the original, so I came into the remake fresh, which probably helped me to like it more. Watching a remake when you’ve seen the original is a bit like watching a film when you’ve read the book. You always want the current bit to act more like the images in your head.

So, by not knowing anything about the original I could take on the remake without any preconceived ideas. Turns out it’s not a bad film at all – lots of good imagery, some good acting by great actors, and a rather unconvincing plot.

Jennifer Connely plays Dahlia a soon-to-be recently bitterly divorced mother. Dahlia and her young daughter move into a run-down high-rise apartment that has constant leaks.

Water permeates this picture. It is everywhere. In the constant rain, in sinks and baths, running down the walls and spilling over into the floor. It’s as if the water is a living thing and it wants to be the star of the show.

The real stars include a bloody good cast including John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite. Connelly, who can usually hold her own, is completely outdone by her supporting characters. Both Reilly and Postlethwaite turn creepy, simmering, unhinged performances as the manager and caretaker of the apartment. Tim Roth takes a good guy role as a divorce lawyer with a heart of gold.

The direction draws out the suspense and creepiness very well. The apartment is filmed in dim light, with lots of scary shadows overcoming everyone. There is a real sense of dread throughout as we wrangle over the drama of Dahlia’s impending divorce, struggle with her child who seems to be going crazy and an apartment that just might be haunted.

As with many films of this type, Dark Water can’t sustain its premise for the entire length of the film. About the ¾ mark, many of the supernatural activities are oversimplified, and the ending is less than satisfying.

But up until the end, it is a pretty good flick. Not bad for a remake.

The Goonies (1985)

the goonies movie poster

Editors Note: I apparently wrote a review of this movie, then immediately went back and wrote a second one. Posted both of them. My guess is that the second part was unintentional – that I wrote the first one, but didn’t like the draft yet accidentally posted it. Then the next day went to rewrite it, probably couldn’t find it in my drafts and wrote a new one from scratch. Or something like that. Yesterday I reposted the old one without realizing this one existed. I guess I make bonehead moves over and over again. I think it is fascinating to compare the two as I used some of the same language, but also changed quite a bit.

Come back with me to a time of innocence and fun. Let’s all go back to my childhood when movies were watched for entertainment. When I didn’t have to dissect hidden meanings and write about the symbolism or depth of a film. When I wasn’t a critic, but an audience member. Jump into my DeLorean and set the date for the 1980s.

It is a time when you could count on jokes about getting kicked in the nads, plot lines weren’t important, and you could always count on a good action figure to play with after the end credits. There was always a musical montage, you knew not to feed the mysterious animals after midnight, and a red Ferrari was your ride when you cut class.

Simple tasks such as fixing breakfast, or opening a gate became immensely difficult by using everyday items as complex machinery. If you were good, you could incorporate a ball (preferably bowling). It was a time when a small boy named Jonathan Ke Quan ruled the world.

I suppose I must admit that there were some very serious films made in the 1980s, but I was a child then and I didn’t see any of those films until much later. For me, it was a time of action, adventure, and plenty of buttered popcorn.

One of my favorite movies from the time is The Goonies. It’s a perfect movie of the 80s, what with the high adventure, the pirate gold, a steaming heap full of Jonathan Ke Quan, and bloody mother f’ing Sloth. Nothing beats Sloth.

Watching it again I am amused by the fact that the Goonies aren’t explained in any way. There is no background to how the club was formed or what even a Goony (or is the singular Goonie?) is exactly. And they don’t have to. As a kid I didn’t need a back story, they were the Goonies and that’s all I needed to know. I wanted to be a Goony, and I had many a pretend adventure going after the rich stuff.

The plot – O’ the glories of the plot – concerns an entire neighborhood that is about to be turned into a golf course. It seems the golf course people have managed to evict every single person in the neighborhood at the same time due to a lack of funds. For if only one family could come up with the extra funds then they could tell the golfers to buzz off.

Never mind that the neighborhood seems to be made up of middle-class suburbanites or that none of them can manage to pay this mysterious amount of money (mortgage?). How a pile of jewels manages to take care of everything isn’t exactly explained either.

But that’s getting caught up in the plot, and that’s never the point with a good 80’s flick. The Goonies – a group of misfit teens (and I mean that in the totally 80’s kind of way, and not the post-Columbine psychotic meaning of the term) – find a treasure map leading to pirate booty. They have many an adventure finding the treasure and are followed by the Fratelli crime family. Of course, the Goonies find the treasure and save the neighborhood, but like so many things in life, it’s the journey that really counts.

Along the way, we are treated to glorious action, romance, comedy, and of course, a moral involving teamwork and acceptance – even acceptance of a grotesque-looking monster man dubbed Sloth.

Sloth – the greatest of all 80’s characters – is a deformed giant and a member of the Fratelli family. The chubby Goony – kindly named in 80s cinematic glory as Chunk – is captured and thrown in with Sloth. We are all petrified as to what this hideous creature is going to do, only to find a moral in the monster with a heart of gold.

Critics will scoff at the The Goonies plot holes, cheesy effects, and overall silliness. But if you’ll step back a moment in time with me you might find a wonderful slice of nostalgia, and a little bit of fun in a movie meant to do nothing more than entertain.