Kick-ass stoicism 

What was Jim Brown thinking when he quit football for acting at the end of the 1965 season? 

He was never going to compete for the black leading man roles that went to Sidney Poitier. Nor was he going to sit still for the types of roles that characterized the career of another former pro football player, Woody Strode, playing African warriors or Pompey the handyman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And Brown wasn’t about to work at honing his craft doing summer stock performances of The Glass Menagerie on Cape Cod. 

Riding the tailwinds of The Civil Rights Act, he barreled into Hollywood as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967) where he only needed to keep his head down while scenery-chewers like John Cassavetes and Telly Savalas did their thing. In Empire of the Sun (1968), he played a mercenary soldier, mostly Tonto to Rod Taylor’s Lone Ranger. Brown’s first leading role was in The Split (1968), a disappointing mess that failed even with a cast that included Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, Julie Harris and Diahann Carroll. 

It wasn’t until Hollywood got the idea of casting Brown with attractive white actresses, and in doing so tapping into white America’s fears of interracial sex and miscegenation, that Brown’s career really took off. 

There’s a strong undercurrent of sex in The Grasshopper (1970) with Jacqueline Bisset and El Condor (1970) with Marianna Hill. 100 Rifles (1969) received a major publicity push, including lots of hot stills of Brown and Raquel Welch, but the film didn’t stand up to the hype: it’s mostly average. Brown’s twelfth film, Slaughter (1972), a terrific tale of vengeance, fired up the taboo meters and delivered the goods thanks to his on-screen (and reportedly in real life) groping with Stella Stevens. 

As cynical and dark as this trend seems, it reached its inevitably violent peak in Fingers (1978) with Brown playing a scary pimp (whose name is Dreams; it might as well have been Super Spade) who brings a “romantic interlude” with two white women to a brutal end when they refuse to kiss each other. 

Brown’s acting was often described as “wooden,” although he became noticeably better with time. But what he was best at was displaying the same kick-ass stoicism he brandished as the greatest football player of his era: inflicting as much punishment as he received before walking back slowly to the huddle with unemotional indifference.

My All-Time Greatest Albums, Part 3

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part three of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Frank Sinatra’s Love Is A Kick (1958) is a compilation of previously released tracks from 1944 to 1952, recorded when he was still with Columbia Records.

The songs cover the young Sinatra’s usual Hoboken waterfront of “she’s here and I’m giddy in love or she’s gone and I’m no longer giddy in love,” but the songs on the album, even those about lost love, are upbeat. Saturday night may be “the loneliest night of the week,” since his girl left him, but there’s hope: “Until I hear you at the door/Until you're in my arms once more.”

Sinatra’s voice is youthful, and he sings with power and feeling. And the big-band arrangements swing. The track Bim Bam Baby – the title alone tells you everything you need to know – flat out rocks, maybe the closest Sinatra ever got to recording something that felt like it belonged with the early R&B band sounds of Louis Jordan or Johnny Otis. Elvis Presley should have covered it.

Love Is A Kick was the only Sinatra record we had around the house for years, so it got played a lot, or at least until we bought our first rock & roll album, the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night (1964). But for a kid like me, whose favorite song up to that point was Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans, Love Is A Kick prepared me for the Beatles by introducing what could be called the language of popular music. Universal belief in, and acknowledgement, of certain feelings. The emotional tone. The beat.

And the use of personal pronouns to make the music more impactful and build connections with the listener. Love Is A Kick included You Do Something To Me, My Blue Heaven, When You’re Smiling and Should I. A Hard Day’s Night is the 101 class on the subject: I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, And I Love Her, Tell Me Why, Can’t Buy Me Love and I’ll Cry Instead.

It all felt like a single river flowing into the same sea. If I could envision Elvis singing Bim Bam Baby, certainly Sinatra could take a swing at I’m Happy Just To Dance With You or And I Love Her. A Hard Day’s Night was the soundtrack to the film, so it included instrumental versions of several Lennon-McCartney songs that were used as background music in the movie. Again, one river, and we never skipped those tracks when we played the album.

To use up all my water metaphors, it wasn’t until rock began to fragment and take on some gravitas, that popular music felt more like a network of tributaries, each bound for different regions.

Love Is A Kick is a forgotten album. Released only in mono, it never made the leap to CD. The soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, on United Artists, was discontinued decades ago in favor of the British version, which didn’t include the instrumentals. To this day, if it isn’t the best pop album ever made, it’s certainly in the running.