I was at The Garden Party

Bob Dylan caused a minor buzz recently covering Rick Nelson’s Garden Party, a choice our of leftfield, but maybe not so considering his stated admiration for Nelson, whom he called "the true ambassador of rock and roll," along with long making it his business to keep the porch light on for artists who’ve passed. That same week he covered Shane McGowan (Pogues), Charlie Rich and Route 66, a hit for both Chuck Berry and Nat King Cole.  

The origin behind Garden Party is well-known. And I was there.

My friends and I were high school juniors in 1971 who dug early rock and roll. We tuned into Gus Gossert’s Sunday night doo-wop program on WPIX-FM and bought those budget-priced Oldies But Goodies compilation LPs. Not the standard vision of 1971 counterculture, but we fit the definition.

Richard Nader was a promoter whose all-star rock and roll revivals were selling out places like Madison Square Garden and Nassau Coliseum. We'd attended a show at the Garden that summer with a bill that included Jerry Lee Lewis, the Four Seasons, Jay and the Americans and Little Eva. But the concert scheduled for October 15, 1971, figured to be our Woodstock: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Coasters, Bobby Rydell, the Shirelles, Gary U.S. Bonds and Rick (no longer Ricky) Nelson, billed as the “special added attraction.”

Somehow, we scored floor seats a few rows back from the stage, which was set in the middle of the arena. I can't recall if it was an older crowd cosplaying the fifties with black leather jackets and jeans with the cuff rolled up, but I do remember a lot of younger people in attendance. 

I'm not certain if the crowd resented Nelson and his band for their Hollywood Cowboy look or his nepo baby status, and he clearly wasn't the underdog on the bill: hardworking R&B veterans, plus local favorites the Shirelles (from New Jersey) and Bobby Rydell (well, Philadelphia), whose popularity had been blunted by the British Invasion. 

However, in 1971 New York City there was little tolerance for country music, and that's certainly true for an audience more tuned into Hank Ballard than Hank Williams. Times Square wasn’t Music Row, and the starting gun for the cascade of boos that evening was the twang of the band’s pedal steel guitar.

Nader apparently reassured Nelson that the booing was directed at the police who were breaking up a fight, but that may have been a promoter trying to smooth things with one of his star attractions. 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 about the show as Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. They closed the concert in that order, both larger than life. Diddley was a revelation, making prescription eyeglasses cool, playing that square guitar and getting distorted tones that reminded us of Jimi Hendrix. Berry played all the hits, duckwalked, played guitar between his legs and when the house lights came up for "School Days," everyone stood and sang the "Hail, hail rock and roll" chorus. 

Although not a part of the program that night, one mainstay of Nader's shows 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 plan. 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 sang that night, "C'est la vie, say the old folks/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.

Tarzan's New York Adventure

(The following is part of the Adventure-a-Thon hosted by the friendly folks at Cinematic Catharsis and Realweegiemidget Reviews)

Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) is a movie of milestones: the final MGM Tarzan film before the franchise moved to RKO and Maureen O’Sullivan’s last appearance as Jane. It has a lot more going for it as well.

When a plane lands in the escarpment that Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller), Jane (O’Sullivan), Boy (Johnny Sheffield) and Cheeta call home, Tarzan finds a hunter (Charles Bickford, three-time Best Supporting Actor nominee) trapping animals for a circus in the U.S. Tarzan, naturally, has a problem with this and gives him until the next morning to leave.

But Boy is fascinated with this visit from the outside world and despite Tarzan’s warnings, goes out to the plane. Bickford sees Boy as the ultimate circus attraction and under the distraction of an attack from local natives who trap Tarzan and Jane in a brushfire, kidnaps him, the plane miraculously taking off out of the jungle without benefit of a runway.

Desperate to find Boy, Tarzan and Jane trek across Africa to the nearest city where they learn that the plane’s destination is New York City. Paying in gold nuggets, they trade their loincloths for tailored clothes and leave for America, Weissmuller’s shoulders even more impressive in a double-breasted suit.

The “stone jungle” they encounter is the 1940s Hollywood vision of Manhattan: swanky nightclubs, people employed in jobs that barely exist today, like taxi drivers, or not at all: bellhops, cigarette girls, hat-check attendants. All that’s missing is a reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jane takes charge and helps Tarzan navigate through modern conveniences like radios, mirrors, telephones and, memorably, walk-in showers.

The other fish out of water is Cheeta, who adapts to city life easily and gets plenty of screentime, including a “soliloquy” running amuck in a hotel room. Based on her performance, I would have supported the superstar chimp’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Tarzan and Jane’s attempt to get Boy back through the legal system hits a roadblock when Jane admits under oath that she and Tarzan are not his true parents. Tarzan, chafing from that suit and from listening to lawyers, chooses jungle justice over a Kramer vs. Kramer custody battle.

Tarzan breaks free from the courthouse, and leads the police on a one-sided, if exciting, rooftop chase, a daring climb up the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and a death-defying 200-foot plunge into the East River.

(Some online swear Weissmuller really took that leap – pure suicide in reality – when it was all done with rear projection, editing and a dummy tossed into an MGM water tank. The bigger question is how did Tarzan figure out he was swimming toward Long Island, where Boy was being held, and didn’t wind up in Jersey City?)

A group of circus roustabouts (including Elmo Lincoln, who played Tarzan in three silent films) overtake Tarzan and lock him in a lion cage. But with the help of a herd of circus elephants, wise in the universal animal language spoken by Tarzan, he defeats the bad guys and gets Boy back.

Placing Tarzan outside of his world provides context for him to explain the unspoken philosophy of the jungle: “Jungle laws easy. In jungle, man only kill bad animals. In civilization, men kill good men,” a message that may have resonated with audiences in May 1942 when the movie was released, America having entered World War II just a few months before.

Tarzan movies will always be subject to modern-day criticisms about racial and gender stereotypes, but at the same time, viewing this film made more than 80 years ago reveals a progressive tale about the power within non-traditional families, bound not by blood, but by love and commitment to each other.

As with the movie, Cheeta gets the last word

Tarzan’s New York Adventure is a bite of the Big Apple that leaves a sweet taste.