Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

 

The following is part of the Secret Places and Trippy Houses blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room

“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

“They brought their cult to California because everybody does.” Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse

One night in 1969, four strangers – kindly Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges), redneck salesman Laramie (Jon Hamm), lounge singer Darlene (Cynthia Erivo) and hippie chick with attitude Emily (Dakota Johnson) – check into the El Royale, a fading Atomic Age lodge built right on the border of California and Nevada – a painted red stripe of demarcation runs down the middle of the lobby.

Including Miles (Lewis Pullman), the hotel’s only employee, none are exactly what they initially seem.

The same can be said for the curiously vacant Royale. Unbeknownst to its guests there is a hidden corridor running behind the rooms, each with a two-way mirror allowing for unseen surveillance or discreet filming.

When Laramie, in truth an FBI agent on special assignment, discovers wire taps and the two-way mirror in his room, he locates the secret passageway. Looking through the mirrors undetected by the room’s inhabitant is like viewing diorama exhibits in a living museum as the guests reveal their secrets in the “privacy” of their rooms: Flynn taking apart his room, floorboard by floorboard, while Emily has a bound and gagged girl in her room.

Jon Hamm on a dark and stormy night

Later, Miles reveals that under orders from “management” he sometimes secretly filmed visiting VIPs. (Flynn looks through one reel revealing a well-known politician in flagrante delicto, a sociopolitical conspiracy red herring that goes nowhere. Director/screenwriter Drew Goddard crams a few other circa-1969 historical events into the script; only one, Miles' Vietnam service, has any bearing on the plot).

Historical aside: While the Hotel Royale is fictional, the Cal-Neva Lodge was a resort and casino straddling the border between Nevada and California on the shores of Lake Tahoe. In 1960, Frank Sinatra purchased the resort with several others, including Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. Allegedly, John and Robert Kennedy used the lodge to carry on extra-marital affairs.

When Emily blasts one of the guests with a shotgun, it sets off a series of events – including the appearance of Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a psychotic cross between Charles Manson and Jim Morrison – that bring on the “bad times.”

Hemsworth reviews the mystery film

Goddard knows his way around secret places and trippy houses. In his The Cabin in the Woods (2011), there’s a two-way mirror and secret entrances leading to underground passageways, all central to the plot, gateways to understanding why and how things are happening. In Royale, the secret corridor is an ingenious device that provides glimpses into the characters’ behaviors and intentions, leading us to continually readjust our perceptions: “He’s good, no he’s bad, wait he’s definitely good.”

Like The Cabin in the Woods, which turns teen slasher movies upside down and inside out, Bad Times at the El Royale is another genre-bender, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians on acid, as a group of strangers assemble in a vacant hotel on a dark and stormy night and the bodies start dropping.

The film’s MVPs are Bridges, Erivo and Pullman. Flynn and Miles are well-realized characters with backstories, although Darlene is a bit one-dimensional; taken together, however, they forge a bond and the emotional core of the movie. Hemsworth’s Billy Lee is scarily evil.

MVPs Bridges and Erivo

Considered a box office flop when it was released, Bad Times at the El Royale is a clever, suspenseful movie that manages to keep its bursting-at-the seams plot and characterization together. It's worthy of a second, or if you’ve yet to check it out, an initial look. 

And be careful standing in front of hotel mirrors. You never know who might be behind them.

Another tale of two cities

I needed to get this out before circumstances change.

Three of the four teams left in the baseball postseason are expansion teams: Milwaukee Brewers, Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays and there’s still an outside chance that two will meet in the series.

In baseball, that’s not uncommon. In 2023, the Arizona Diamondbacks played the Texas Rangers, the Rangers having started as the expansion Washington Senators in 1961. In football you need to go back to 1972 when Dallas played Miami, as the only time expansion teams met in the Super Bowl.

(Who knows about the NBA and the NHL. Basketball and hockey have added so many teams over the decades, and franchises have moved so many times I don’t have the knowledge or the patience to track their lineages).

There’s a longtime connection between Milwaukee and Seattle. The Brewers began as the Seattle Pilots, an expansion franchise always short of cash playing in a beat-up minor league stadium. Following just one season in Seattle and a winter and spring of bankruptcy claims and court decisions, the team was acquired by Bud Selig, who made his fortune with a car-leasing business, and moved to Milwaukee a week before the 1970 season began.

Moving the team from the Northwest to the Midwest was rare balm for a city that had already been left at the altar when their Milwaukee Braves carpetbagged their way to Atlanta in 1966, amidst whispers that some of its blue-collar, unionized assembly line jobs might also shift to the non-union South.  

In 1970, Milwaukee was still an economic force in the Midwest, and it wasn’t just beer that made Milwaukee famous. Along with Pabst, Miller and Schlitz, there was meatpacking – and as an offshoot – leather tanneries, Harley Davidson and Allis Chalmers which built tractors and agricultural equipment. Most would see their profiles reduced or be gone within the next decade or so.

Meanwhile Seattle, a boomtown in the 1960s, was trying to keep from falling into an abyss. The region's fortunes and employment were mostly dependent upon one company, Boeing. In 1970, the company began a 17-month period without a single new order from any U.S. airline. Suddenly building a new ballpark didn't seem like a priority anymore.

With the Pilots' move to Milwaukee approved less than a week before the start of the season, the Brewers had no time to design new uniforms and were left to rip “PILOTS” off the front of their existing uniforms and sew on "BREWERS". Hard pressed for time, the team blew the dust off this ancient minor-league Milwaukee Brewer “beer-barrel man” image:

In 1970, Seattle and the State of Washington sued the American League for breach of contract. The lawsuit continued until baseball offered to give Seattle an expansion franchise in return for dropping the suit. The Mariners began play in 1977 owned by a consortium led by entertainer Danny Kaye, who was enough of a fan that his gravesite includes a bench with images of a baseball and bat.

The Mariners have been a study in frustration ever since, not fielding a winning team until 1991, holding the longest postseason drought in any of the four major league sports (2001 to 2022) and, as of today, the only active franchise to never appear in a World Series.

It may also be worth mentioning that this year saw the final act in the Mariners-Pilots connection. In 1977, rubber-armed pitcher Diego Seguí, 40 and in his last of 15 major league seasons, became the only player to play for both the Pilots and the Mariners, finishing with an 0-7 record. Segui died this past June at age 87.

Rolling with it

Steve Winwood showed Mozartian skill playing the keyboards at age four, and by the time he was 14 was playing and singing in a professional band, the Spencer Davis Group.

The band's Gimme Some Lovin', which he wrote, played organ and sang lead on entered the Billboard chart at #100, hitting #7 for two weeks in early 1967. Seemingly recorded with no thought towards sound balance, its loud, sweaty party rush doesn't give the listener a chance to catch a breath. 

Cue the Summer of Love footage of dancing hippies as an artistically restless Winwood left Spencer Davis to form Traffic. The band spent several months woodshedding in a rural cottage without electricity; when they needed to plug in electric guitars they ran an extension cord to a neighbor's home. 

Traffic's 1967 album Mr. Fantasy is a whirlwind of flutes, sitars and psychedelic effects, a perfect soundtrack for the times. Winwood's voice kept things close to earth and the band remembered that extension cord for the guitar workout Dear Mr. Fantasy, a cut presaging the sound of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. 

Traffic's promotional video for Paper Sun, the single off Mr. Fantasy is a strange one, filmed at the British Museum of Natural History. 

Only year later Winwood was on the run again, joining Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker to form Blind Faith, whose debut was opening for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Following a brief tour of the U.S., they imploded. 

Winwood declined an offer to join Crosby, Stills and Nash – having survived the ego trips and drugs that sunk Blind Faith, he could be forgiven for not wanting to join another volatile environment. He did a memorable jam with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland’s Voodoo Chile and played keyboards on the B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in London session albums before reforming Traffic. 

Traffic 2.0 was a staple of FM radio; John Barleycorn Must Die (1970) and The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (1971) charting at #5 and #7 in the U.S. respectively. They were versatile enough to be heavy (Pearly Queen), jazzy (Low Spark, Glad) or rustic folky (John Barleycorn). Winwood broke up the band in 1974 and did keyboard session work with Lou Reed, Toots and the Maytals and George Harrison, including playing the synthesizer on Marianne Faithful’s Broken English single. 

Then, while many of his contemporaries stumbled about figuring how to update their sound, Winwood had a career renaissance. His album Arc of a Diver (1980), was a one-man production, performing all the singing and instrumentation, as well as engineering himself. The record included the single When You See a Chance (#7). 

Back in the High Life (1986) went triple platinum, with the single Higher Love reaching #1 and earning Winwood Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Roll with It (1988) and its title track (a rewrite of Junior Walker’s Shotgun; Holland, Dozier and Holland received writing credits) hit #1 on the album and singles charts. 

Smug rock fans felt Winwood's embrace of synth-pop was a sellout, a betrayal of artistic integrity. In truth, it's the sound of a virtuoso musician understanding and adapting, something he's done countless times during his career. 

Seeing Winwood today in concert is a thrill, having listened to his music for nearly 60 years. But Winwood, as with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, any artist with that kind of long-tailed legacy, is also holding up a mirror as we see ourselves in them, all of us trying to come to grips with our own mortality. Same as watching a Robert Redford film or a video of Mark Volman goofing around with the Turtles. Best to just roll with it. 

Salt and Pepper/One More Time

 (This post is part of the 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

It’s late 1967 and Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, several years removed from their Rat Pack/Ocean’s Eleven heyday, are skimming off what they can from the excesses of Swinging London, zipping around Soho on matching motorbikes, hitting the trendy discos in Nehru suits and patched jeans, discovering marijuana and taking full advantage of their fame with the local “birds.”

The duo was in town to star in (and co-produce) the comedy adventure Salt and Pepper, playing owners of an eponymous Soho nightclub who find themselves embroiled in a coup to take over the British government.

Salt and Pepper is yet another late-sixties spy movie, borrowing bits and pieces from everywhere: Goldfinger, Help!, Batman, even Hope and Crosby if you can imagine them smoking, boozing and leering their way through one of their road pictures.

(Davis and Lawford are constantly lighting cigarettes and pouring drinks; one could be led to believe that they serve as mnemonic devices to assist them in remembering their lines).

Directed by Richard Donner (Superman, The Omen, Lethal Weapon) whose credits up till then were primarily in television (Davis worked on an episode of The Wild, Wild West that Donner directed), Salt and Pepper tries hard to come off as being with it, including a groovy musical number with Davis “soloing” on an electric guitar that isn’t plugged in. (For what it’s worth, Donner had previously directed six episodes of the Banana Splits Adventure Hour).

Sometimes it takes more than just long sideburns and bellbottoms to be hip.

Filmed on a reconstructed Soho on a backlot of Shepperton Studios (after gawkers prompted the police to shut down production), Salt and Pepper had a strong initial showing at the box office, good enough for United Artists to greenlight a sequel, imaginatively titled One More Time (1970).

Salt and Pepper can be fast-paced fun. One More Time is only for the morbidly curious.

Shot on location in Herefordshire and London, director Jerry Lewis (yeah, that Jerry Lewis) uses the opportunity to essentially resurrect Martin and Lewis – Lawford the suave, tuxedoed straight man and Davis, an underrated actor who deserved much better, the mugging goofball literally channeling Lewis is some scenes.

Lewis takes a lightweight plot – Salt and Pepper bust a diamond smuggling ring – and milks it into an hour and a half of double takes, surreal visual gags and scenes that drag on forever, none very funny: a soused Davis can’t figure out a teapot, Davis sneezes hard enough from a dose of snuff to knock people down, etc., etc.

Strange moments abound. Like how did Lawford, brother-in-law to John and Robert Kennedy, allow this scene?

The most bizarre moment, below, comes out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. I’d imagine that Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were filming nearby and somehow coerced into these uncredited cameos. Davis’ reaction is straight out of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Following One More Time Lawford, pushing fifty and with serious substance abuse problems, saw his career tumble into a patchwork of television guest shots and B-movies. Davis had two moments of career glory left, his Rhythm of Life number in Sweet Charity (1970), then an unlikely #1 hit with the noxious The Candy Man (1972).

Their bad habits eventually killed them both, Lawford at 61, Davis at 64. Even the coolest and slickest fade away.

Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Wings for wheels

In September 1975, I bought two albums at Korvette’s: David Crosby and Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water and Born to Run.

During the first half of the 1970s, anything bearing the Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young, especially Young) brand was an automatic buy for me. Wind on the Water didn’t disappoint; it’s easily the duo’s best album despite its front cover yacht rock vibe (and Nash looking alarmingly emaciated). Carry Me, Crosby’s song about loss, was one of his strongest. Their eco-prog To the Last Whale was properly elegiac, the perfect soundtrack for a Jacques Costeau documentary. 

But finding turntable time for Wind on the Water was difficult given how obsessively I played Born to Run. 

It’s one of the great rock records (ironically, it’s not the best record of 1975; that honor goes to Blood on the Tracks; honestly, Born to Run may not even be Springsteen’s best album). Yeah, his lyrics can be purplish at times, Jungleland is a tad overwrought and most of its songs have been long over-exposed. (If you listened to WNEW-FM between 1975 and 1985 you heard the song Born to Run nearly as many times as Springsteen has played it live – 1,875 times). 

But with fifty years perspective, it becomes more obvious than ever that Born to Run is the sound of an artist pouring everything into his personal vision. 

By 1975, more "traditional" rock and roll and soul music were beginning to fall by the wayside as the kids clamored for Kashmir and Wish You Were Here, but Springsteen unapologetically took bits and pieces from the 25-year history of rock – Bo Diddley, Phil Spector, The Locomotion, Duane Eddy, the urban vibe of West Side Story – and customized into a contemporary street racer. 

He made Clarence Clemons’ saxophone the centerpiece at a time when, aside from the occasional Stones record, it wasn’t a popular instrument. And this wasn’t that wimpy soprano sax sound popularized by the Saturday Night Live opening theme, Clemons played it with balls and urgency. His solo in Jungleland still raises the hair on the back of one’s neck, a mini-epic itself, like Clare Torry’s vocalizing on Pink Floyd 's The Great Gig in the Sky. 

I always had some problems squaring with Born to Run’s characters. They hung around parking lots and deserted beaches, seemed preoccupied with their cars and had limited prospects for the future. Unlike them, I didn’t feel trapped in my hometown, for which I’d always had a corny civic appreciation. 

It took a while to realize it, but in 1975 I was like them. I was ready for . . . something. Frustrated with still living at home and going to school, navigating a confused personal life, often feeling inarticulate, unsure and unstuck. 

Under those emotional conditions, you could listen to Crosby and Nash and still feel the same way when the record hit that final runout groove. Listening to Born to Run brought a different reaction, a shared common ground of hope.

Help!

Absent the happy glow of Beatlemania, Help! has not aged well.

Help! premiered sixty years ago this summer, an anniversary that has allowed the internet to resurface all that stuff about it being a James Bond spoof (aside from some incidental music that comes close to the 007 theme, it’s not) or that the band were the new Marx Brothers (no, but taking that premise further, John = Groucho, George = Chico, Ringo = Harpo, leaving poor Paul as Zeppo).

The breathless enthusiasm and charm – especially the charm – that made A Hard Day’s Night such fun has, just one year later, vanished in the haze, leaving the band seemingly disinterested in their own movie, vacantly working their way through a live-action Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Maybe the most memorable scene in Help! is the Beatles’ groovy pop art pad, four outside entrances that lead into one room, the perfect metaphor for this brotherhood – four individuals so close that at one point they investigated buying an island off Greece and building four separate compounds on it for their family and friends.

Paul waves hello from his door

But one scene, one word really, undermines that groovy feeling. A cage falls from a ceiling to trap Ringo. George says, “I’m off,” and runs out the door. Someone (it sounds like Paul) says, “Typical.” Kind of a cutting comment and typical of what exactly? Was George always running off in real life whenever a religious cult trapped Ringo? Stupid scriptwriting that betrays the band’s entire ethos.

I’m guessing the band was too stoned or tired to fix it. Or that they even noticed.

Filling the gaps and moving things along is a veteran supporting cast: Leo McKern before he became a household name (at least in the homes that favor PBS), Eleanor Bron, and Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear as mad scientists, forerunners of Dr. Forrester and Frank on Mystery Science Theatre.

The musical sequences hold Help! together. The threatening outdoor weather during I Need You and The Night Before. The dramatic backlighting on You’re Going to Lose That Girl, Ringo’s cigarette smoke giving it a noirish atmosphere. The band looking miserable “romping” in the snow during Ticket to Ride (a sequence that could have served as a pitch for entire Monkees TV series). An added plus is seeing them perform in cool mod clothes and not their usual suits.

You're Going to Lose That Girl

The rain falls on Salisbury Plain

Two other scenes have taken on a kind of prescient eeriness over the years. The fight in the Beatles’ home with the cult members and mad scientists feels a little disturbing today given all the knife flashing and gun wielding, then remembering what lies ahead for George and John.

Second, when the band disguise themselves with fake beards and glasses, we get a glimpse into the near future, George looking disturbingly as he would on the Sgt. Pepper album and John circa his Abbey Road look.

A look into the future?

With the release of the Help! soundtrack, Rubber Soul, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper and Yesterday, 1965 marked the point where the Beatles’ uncanny musical maturation spun into orbit. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep a similar pace when it came to video. Which is all right. That would be asking a lot of any four performers.

Exit strategy

The black-topped spine of New Jersey is the Garden State Parkway, 172 miles of roadway connecting the border of New York State to Cape May across the bay from Delaware, with some 86 local exits in-between, leading to this oft-repeated line: 

PHIL: I’m from New Jersey.

LIL: Really? What exit? 

If it’s possible for any highway in New Jersey to feel more like a golden road paved with promise and freedom, it is the Parkway, as it’s known to the locals, the route taken to the Jersey Shore, where the light and the pace were different than anywhere else in the state. Hot fun in the summertime. 

Driving down the Parkway to the Shore always felt like an event, WABC on the car radio – the only station with a signal strong enough to stretch across the entire trip, as landmarks flew by. The Union Water Tower, billed today as the World's Tallest Water Sphere. The giant beer bottle overlooking the Pabst brewery in Newark. The Driscoll Bridge spanning the Raritan River, a Mason-Dixon line separating the Shore communities from the rest of the state. 

During the night ride home there was the Sayreville drive-in movie visible from the highway, a glimpse of Paul Newman or Lee Marvin silently mouthing dialogue. The families sitting on their front porches in East Orange, homes facing the Parkway, like living on a NASCAR racetrack infield. 

And the exit signs. Coming home, evocatively named shore towns like Spring Lake and Ocean Grove fell behind, their places taken by grey and gritty Freehold and Perth Amboy, a changeover reminiscent of the last days of summer giving way to school. Belmar, another shore town, sharing an exit with its ugly sister Trenton. 

I’ve been making the trip down the Parkway a lot lately, visiting a parent who has suddenly become vulnerable and diminished, driving while getting my mind wrapped around what seems like a slowly unfolding situation that potentially could change overnight. 

The drive-in and the beer bottle were demolished long ago, WABC as we knew it is gone. What endures are the exits, the on and off ramps. The Parkway is dark at night. I can only hope that I get off at the right exit.

Yesterday once more

The ‘50s revivalism in the 1970s felt insincere, almost a parody. Pompadours, poodle skirts, Thunderbird convertibles and carhops on roller skates. Grease. Sha Na Na. Happy Days. Lame pastiches like Loggins and Messina’s Your Mama Don’t Dance and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock. The Carpenters’ maudlin doo-wop tribute Yesterday Once More.

But trends come and go and as the sun began to rise over Reagan’s America came the inevitable ‘60s revival.

Tie-dye came back into fashion. The improbable return of Monkeemania. Soap operas about photogenic upwardly mobile ‘60s survivors like The Big Chill (and its subsequent two-volume soundtrack), Thirtysomething and Almost Grown (and the much more realistic Return of the Secaucus 7). Career encores for John Fogerty and Dennis Hopper.

One aspect of the revival that’s relevant this month was the introduction of Nick at Nite. Older TV shows could always be found on television, mostly on independent stations and scattered throughout the morning or afternoon – I always associated I Love Lucy with sick days from school since it aired weekdays at 9 a.m. In July 1984, Nickelodeon borrowed the oldies radio strategy and launched Nick at Nite: block programming of old television programs, focused mostly on sitcoms.

Watching Hazel or Mister Ed from an adult’s perspective didn’t improve them much and your attention was bound to wander during the hour-long Route 66 but having all these old shows bundled together without having to change the channel was a novel concept for its time. If My Three Sons wasn’t your thing, stick around for Car 54 Where Are You. Or the occasional obscurity like Camp Runamuck or Lancelot Link.

As cable TV gained footing, and in desperate need of 

content, WTBS and the USA Network went the same route and programmed Saturday afternoon marathons of ‘60s adventure programs, like The Wild, Wild West, I Spy, Outer Limits and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., often with commentary from the shows’ original casts.

You could fall asleep watching the marathons, dreams narrated by the jazzy banter of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, James West fighting off ants with human faces, Ilya Kuryakin morphing into the scientist with six fingers and the overgrown cranium.

Today, of course, all this stuff is readily available online. What’s missing is the kick of nostalgia and the thrill of rediscovery that was a big part of the ‘60s revival.

Ragtime

Fifty years this summer, E.L. Doctorow’s turn-of-the-century historical novel Ragtime was published.

An interwoven narrative revolving around a WASP family, a black pianist and an Eastern European immigrant, their lives, like organisms seen under a microscope, collide and intersect each other, along with those of some of the era’s most famous and notorious, including Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit and Booker T. Washington.

Ragtime occurs during America’s Gilded Age (aka The Progressive Era), years of economic growth, industrialization and technologic advances as the country transitioned from an agrarian society.

With its selective view of history and zero sense of irony, the current White House has expressed romantic admiration for the era because of its tariff acts, ignoring the tremendous influence the rich held over politicians who helped boost their financial empires, while the gap between the haves and have-nots grew wider and violent: armed militias were called in to bust heads when workers – mostly immigrants – held work stoppages or tried forming unions. Casual racism was universal.

Coming as it did in 1975, Ragtime was part of the run-up to the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, an affirmation of two centuries of opportunities and anxieties. Burning through the book are lit fuses timed to explode over the coming years: feminism, celebrity culture, domestic terrorism, mental health issues, the rise of the munitions industry, mistrust of immigrants.

Ragtime also acknowledged that what lies at the heart of the American Dream is the spirit of DEI: acceptance and opportunity. An artistic immigrant lifts himself and his daughter from an airless ghetto hovel to a career making movies. Only a few decades after the end of slavery, the black musician makes a good enough living playing ragtime piano to afford a new automobile. A young man who today would be considered on the spectrum designs advanced war weaponry.

The family in Ragtime made its fortune in the fireworks business. As we near next year’s 250^th anniversary celebration, fireworks displays will likely burst over every corner of America’s skies. Expect them to illuminate only what we want to remember, while keeping what we’ve chosen to forget in the dark.

Calling on the Cobra

In 1980, Dave Parker hired a public relations agency to test the waters of celebrity and make him more of a household name. The agency reached out to The Aquarian Weekly, a metropolitan area entertainment weekly that I was freelancing for and I was assigned to write a profile of Parker.

I called him at his home in Bradenton, Florida where the Pittsburgh Pirates trained each spring, and the interview went well. I pictured him in an oceanfront condo, tastefully furnished, while I sat on the floor of my bedroom. Reading it over today, it was a pretty safe article, mostly vanilla answers to mostly vanilla questions.

(Aside from the fact that I was speaking with Parker, who at the time looked like he might someday rank among the game’s all-time greats, I remember that I’d bought a Radio Shack device to tape our phone conversation, a wire with a suction cup at one end for the phone receiver and a jack at the other end to be plugged into a tape recorder. Imagine the terror when I played back the interview and our voices sounded as distant and tinny as if they’d been recorded from Pluto. Thankfully, I took notes).

Parker was one of the coolest major leaguers of the era. He wore an earring and warmed up in the on-deck circle swinging a sledgehammer. He had swagger and presence. And as a black player making significant money, he drew frequent insults and threats from some fans.

A Pirates radio announcer nicknamed Parker the Cobra, thinking a quick-strike predator. (Which is what you want, having someone invent a nickname for you. Unlike Kobe Bryant, who famously gave himself the nickname Black Mamba).

Some of Parker’s quotes from our interview that were a little more vanilla fudge than vanilla:

“I have no trouble whatsoever in getting up for every ballgame. I could play baseball in the middle of December in the snow.”

“I’ve been doing some p.r. for myself. I’ve always thought of myself as being just a ballplayer, not really needing the hype. I haven’t been much of a public figure, but I think it’s time people got to know Dave Parker.”

Dave, be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, part of Parker’s legacy lies with his role in the Pittsburgh drug trials following the 1985 season. He was among several players who testified against a drug dealer and was suspended for the following season before their sentences were lifted in exchange for community service, drug testing and fines. Age, weight problems and injuries began to catch up with Parker and he called it quits in 1991, a 19-year career.

Parker died yesterday; he’d been suffering with Parkinson’s disease for several years. Timing, which he had as a batter, sometimes doesn’t translate into real life. Parker died 29 days before he was to be inducted in the Hall of Fame.

Gimme shelter

Fifty years tonight I saw the Rolling Stones, and in a roundabout way began making my way into the rest of my life.

The Stones announced their 1975 summer tour by playing Brown Sugar on a flatbed truck rolling down Fifth Avenue in New York City, shows that included six nights at Madison Square Garden. For me, discovering pot and holding my youthful belief that rock music was a signpost on the road to illumination, seeing the Stones live was a necessity.

With 120,000 tickets available over six evenings, I drove into a deserted Manhattan around dinnertime, parked a block away from the Garden and bought seats for the June 24 show.

I chose June 24 purposely. What better way to celebrate the third anniversary of the first date with my then-girlfriend? Uh no. She seemed less than thrilled about the prospects of spending this special evening listening to songs about the Boston Strangler (Midnight Rambler), inter-racial sex (Brown Sugar) and groupie sex (Star Star).

1975 Rolling Stones live

If she’d managed any enthusiasm at all for the show, it likely began to slip away as we navigated through the scary flood of humanity that washed up on the sidewalks around the Garden on a concert night: kids out of their gourds stoned and/or drunk, guys selling drugs and bootleg t-shirts, ticket scalpers, wild-eyed city people, vendors selling their diarrhea-inducing gyros.

After fifty years, I’ve forgotten a lot about the show – how could I’ve not remembered that Billy Preston was part of the band for the tour? What I remember best was the spectacle. The giant lotus flower that opened to reveal the stage. The stupid inflatable phallus that rose up from the stage (her enthusiasm now vanished). Jagger swinging on a rope over the stage. Steel drummers accompanying the band on Sympathy for the Devil – they played Sympathy for the Devil! And for some reason, the haze of cigarette smoke around Keith Richards and Ron Wood.

The Stones, man!

(An audience tape of the concert can be found on YouTube. The band sounded a little chaotic, but it was the Stones).

While I’m fuzzy about the show’s details, what occurred afterwards remains clear. Back at her house The Tonight Show was on; Kenny Rankin was singing. Rankin was a popular singer/songwriter with a jazz influence, laid-back music perfect for Sunday brunch programming on an FM rock station. As we watched, she told me how stupid the concert had been and that she’d rather go see Kenny Rankin.

She may as well as admitted to being a Republican.

We had friends who got married out of high school and converted to Christianity. How much of an influence were they? Was I ready to take eternal vows or submit to some mysterious conversion? Or give in to a lifetime of nodding out to James Taylor? Four months later, we agreed to move on. 

In 1975, life seemed full of endless possibilities; I just needed to make the right choices and be true to myself. No crystal ball could have predicted it any better.

Surf's Up

I found the Beach Boys in 1964 when I Get Around hit the charts. It had an instant appeal and didn’t sound like anything else on the radio in that summer of the British Invasion; it wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d realize how complex I Get Around is, seemingly all chorus, no bridge, almost an endless circular loop. It was the first notice that Brian Wilson thought about music, and heard it in his head, differently than anyone else.

Three years later, already a candidate for canonization by having written and recorded God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Caroline No and Good Vibrations, Wilson sang the quietly elegiac Surf’s Up alone at the piano for Leonard Bernstein’s prime time rock music blessing “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” It was to be the centerpiece of Brian’s “teenage symphony to God,” Smile. He struggled to complete the album before his growing paranoia, drug issues and man-child excesses eventually sank it.

Brian in 1965

For decades Smile remained one of the great “what ifs” of popular culture. In his 1993 sci-fi novel Glimpses, Lewis Shiner’s central character time travels back to 1966 to encourage Wilson to finish the record. For those who read the book, it only added to Smile’s myth.

Brian’s trials over the next few decades are well-documented; in 1999 he publicly re-emerged and began touring again, backed now by younger, like-minded musicians. At the Beacon Theatre in New York City, he looked at times a bit startled, as if he’d just woken up to find himself on stage leading a band again. His stage movements were awkward. But the worshipful audience was behind him right from the start when we booed Mike Love’s talking head during a brief Beach Boys history video that kicked off the show.

During his summer 2000 tour performing the emotional powerhouse Pet Sounds, the audience knew every note – we cheered Brian’s brilliant production details, from the bicycle bell and horn in You Still Believe in Me to the bass harmonica solo in I Know There’s An Answer. The train whistle and barking dogs that end the album, sounds that always sent a chill on record, heard live and loud pinned me back on my seat. Wilson's stage moves were still non-existent, although he got out from behind his security blanket keyboard to play bass for a few numbers. I checked back at the setlist from that show. Thirty-four songs.

Encouraged by his band, in 2004 Brian finally completed and released Smile. I had mixed feelings about the record, a suite of interconnected pieces that were sometimes thrilling and at other times corny Americana. We’ll never know how the public would have reacted to the record had it been finished and released in 1967, whether it would have been seen as a masterpiece or interesting novelty. Hearing it in its entirety at Carnegie Hall gave a vibe outside of the usual concert experience, a spectacle that even attracted Lou Reed, who walked past me on the aisle.

What strikes me about those three concerts was the adoration that came off the audience.

Smile wasn’t Wilson’s only what if moment. If he’d been diagnosed early on and treated by real therapists instead of entrusting charlatans, had his supportive and talented younger brothers Carl and Dennis lived longer, his road may not have been so difficult. Even so, a Mount Rushmore of 1960s pop composers would offer up Wilson, along with Lennon and McCartney and Burt Bacharach. To label his music simply as being about “surfing” and “California,” does Brian a disservice. His brilliance was universal.

I was at The Garden Party

The origin behind Rick Nelson’s Garden Party is well-known. And it's all true. I was there.

My friends and I were high school juniors in 1971 who dug early rock and roll. You had to dig a bit to find it (any pre-Beatles rock back then was seen as passe), but we tuned into Gus Gossert’s Sunday night doo-wop program on WPIX-FM and bought those budget-priced Oldies But Goodies compilation LPs. 

In June 1971, we attended the "Rock & Roll Spectacular" at Madison Square Garden featuring, among many acts, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Four Seasons, Jay and the Americans and Little Eva. A follow-up show scheduled for October 15, 1971, just might be our Woodstock: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Coasters, Bobby Rydell, the Shirelles, Gary U.S. Bonds and Rick Nelson, billed as the “special added attraction.”

 

There's no video of the show that I'm aware of, and a handful of stills taken of Chuck Berry, so I'm relying on my not-so-total-recall from 54 years ago.

We bought tickets from a local record store and somehow scored floor seats a few rows back from the stage set in the middle of the arena, not unlike a boxing ring. It was an older crowd, without a black leather jacket or DA haircut in sight. The rumor was that John Lennon, George Harrison and Bob Dylan (or some combination thereof) would be attending, but that kind of wishful thinking was rampant back then. I remember looking up at the luxury boxes and thinking any one of them might have been watching the concert from that vantage point. 

Looking back with the perspective of the present, it was clearly going to be difficult for Nelson and his Stone Canyon Band to win over the audience. He was Hollywood, a nepo baby born of television royalty and whose presence didn't quite jibe with the rest of the bill: grizzled R&B veterans who'd been sharpening their showmanship with non-stop touring since the Eisenhower administration, plus local favorites (the Shirelles from New Jersey and Bobby Rydell – well almost local, Philadelphia). 

And just for the record, Nelson was a local son as well, born in Teaneck, New Jersey before his family moved to Los Angeles when he was still a toddler.

But the starting gun for the cascade of booing that evening was the twang of the band's pedal steel guitar. New York City in 1971 was John Shaft, Frank Serpico and Ratso Rizzo. Country music (aka back then as country & western music) was for shit-kickers and Hee Haw episodes. Someone got close to the stage and flashed him a middle finger. 

Contrast that reaction to the one for Bobby Rydell. I remember a guy behind me yelling, "Mazel tov, Bobby," something that stuck with me because at the time I didn't know its meaning.

Promoter Richard Nader reassured Nelson afterwards that the booing was directed at the police who were breaking up a fight. Possibly true but it feels like the words of someone trying to smooth things over with his star attraction. Playing anything even remotely country (and covering Honky Tonk Women as Nelson did) was misjudging the venue and the audience.

What Nelson really needed was Kris Kristofferson waiting offstage.

Aside from Nelson, what I remember most was Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, who closed the show, both larger than life. Diddley was a revelation, making prescription eyeglasses cool, getting distorted tones out of that square guitar. Berry duckwalked, swung the guitar between his legs and played a jukebox worth of classic songs. The house lights came up for Johnny B. Goode, everyone standing and singing "Go, Go Johnny Go." Who didn't know those lyrics?

Although not a part of the program that night, one mainstay of the rock & roll revivals was Chubby Checker. Like Nelson, in 1971 he was also looking to change his image and recorded an album of self-penned music called Chequered. It included a song titled Stoned in the Bathroom. 

Predictably, Chequered flopped. A year after the concert, Garden Party went to #6 and gave Nelson some critical cachet as a country-rock pioneer. He died on New Year’s Eve, 1985 during the crash landing of his band’s plane. Chubby Checker has survived several decades in history’s dustbin and will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year.

As Chuck Berry sang that night, "It goes to show you never can tell."

Do you remember rock and roll radio?

AM radio has been marginalized over the decades into a continuum of right-wing clowns and sports talk.

(Which is a reminder that in 2017, New Jersey’s conservative Republican governor, Chris Christie, reaching his term limit, was considering a second career on sports-talk WFAN, on paper a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination. He did a couple of fill-in stints, but it didn’t work out for the haughty and dismissive Christie. Arrogance worked for Mike Francesa, the afternoon host WFAN was looking to replace, but Francesa knew his shit. Christie wasn’t about to get his hands dirty digging into the minutia of the final seconds of a Knicks-Pistons game in the middle of January).

Tangents aside, there are occasional outliers on the AM dial that have resisted talk radio. WMTR, based in North Jersey, plays “classic oldies,” music for those of us who grew up between the Eisenhower and Carter administrations. Yeah, there are plenty of commercials and traffic and weather updates. Ski condition reports in the winter. And if you're listening while driving, you'll experience those waterfalls of static that occasionally wash over the broadcast. 

But the station owns a playlist that defies expectations. As part of a national chain of radio stations, there must be algorithms at work, but it seems programmed to purposely feel not like the spoon-fed comfort food one can expect on any of SiriusXM’s “oldie” channels.

Forgotten instrumentals? Here comes Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds Orchestral. Obscure doo-wop? Morse Code of Love by the Capris. Novelty tunes like The Purple People Eater. Pure schlock like Danke Schoen. You Keep Me Hangin' On by the Vanilla Fudge. Love Or Let Me Be Lonely by The Friends of Distinction. The Cookies’ Chains. Out of nowhere, Thunder Road. WMTR can almost – almost – feel like free-form radio at times.

A shuffle through such a wide playlist creates strange bedfellows. You can bear sitting through Helen Reddy’s divorced mom saga You and Me Against the World if it’s followed by Billy Preston’s Will It Go Round in Circles. It works the other way as well: Nobody wants to come off Eight Miles High into Who Put the Bomp. Another strange transition was Wonderful! Wonderful! by Johnny Mathis leading into Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music.

But reconsider the seemingly randomness of playing those two records back-to-back: Mathis, an African American sounding safely Caucasian with a record produced by Mitch Miller and featuring the Ray Conniff Singers, followed by an all-white funk band doing a Rick James imitation on a song that went to #1 on the Billboard R&B charts.

If it’s an algorithm, it has a sense of humor.