Something in the night 

You can call me a lapsed Bruce Springsteen fan. Just as a lapsed Catholic still identifies as Catholic but has stopped practicing, I kept my interest (which ebbed and flowed over the years) in Bruce’s newest records and tours but hadn’t seen him perform since the three times we caught him in 18 months between 1977 and 1978. 

Suddenly this summer, something inside told me it was time to go back.

Life felt like it was closing in a little too much. There were some family issues, work-related worries and, on the other end of the spectrum, a nest of hardy yellowjackets that kept making uninvited drop-ins inside our house. I can't intellectualize why, it was more of a feeling that attending a Springsteen show would be an uplifting, maybe inspirational, way to break the cycle. And the irony wasn't lost that Bruce's concerts at MetLife Stadium were during Labor Day weekend, providing an upbeat, hopeful finale for a summer that didn't deserve it.  

Throwing away all our previous apprehensions about attending concerts at a football stadium, we bought tickets and started planning with all the precision of a military campaign – a dry run to the stadium two weeks before to scout out exits and parking; a careful study of the available food vendors; and me, not being used to their seemingly ephemeral nature, ensuring every single day leading up to the show that our mobile tickets were safe on my phone. 

If we could, we’d have built a miniature layout of the highways and the stadium, moving a model of my car around the map with a long stick like when World War II movies show military commanders tracking troop efforts back in headquarters. 

We gave ourselves four hours to get to the stadium, go through the mobile ticket check-in – I was positive that I’d be the person who couldn’t find their tickets on the phone and got pulled off to the side for special treatment – and find our seats. 

We made it with hours to spare. 

Most of those issues mentioned earlier seem to be working themselves out, and the yellowjackets are finally finished. 

The show? Awesome. I feel much better now.

 

My all-time greatest albums, part five 

If you asked me to list the best guitar players when I was 12 or 13, the only names I knew were George Harrison, the Ventures and Wes Montgomery. 

My first exposure to Montgomery was probably on December 12, 1967, when Herb Alpert hosted The Hollywood Palace with a lineup of acts taken mainly from the roster of his A&M label: Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, the Baja Marimba Band, Boyce & Hart and Montgomery. 

A&M’s signature style back then was a cool, jazzy easy listening vibe, and signing with the label was surely intended to introduce Montgomery to a wider audience beyond the jazz-head subscribers to Downbeat magazine who annually voted him the best jazz guitarist on earth. 

Looking to hit with the pop market, Montgomery began covering safe pop music that adults could dig, like California Dreamin’ and Goin’ Out of My Head. On Hollywood Palace, he played Windy from his new album, A Day In The Life. 

Which cued my interest. You mean this older black guy in the tuxedo (he was 44 at the time) had recorded his own version of what was at the time the coolest, most progressive song on the planet, A Day In The Life? 

The album was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, on June 6 and 26, 1967. The liner notes say Montgomery hadn’t heard the Beatles song before recording it, which I guess is possible given that Sgt. Pepper was released on June 1. Certainly Herbie Hancock, who plays piano on the cut, was familiar with it. Hancock was 27 at the time, 17 years Montgomery’s junior. 

A Day In The Life opens with Hancock’s prowling cocktail lounge piano and while it swapped the overpowering orchestral sound of the original for strings that push the song into Mantovani territory, overall it worked. Call it psychedelia for suburbanites. 

The album also included Montgomery’s takes on When A Man Loves A Woman, Eleanor Rigby and one weird choice, Leslie Gore’s California Nights. And I admit to being familiar with Watch What Happens and Anthony Newley’s The Joker, some adult gravitas that I knew from our kitchen radio and from watching God knows how many television variety shows. 

One year after recording A Day In The Life, Montgomery was dead of heart failure. A heavy smoker, you’ll note the irony of the album cover, a collection of cigarette butts in an ashtray. Surely, and unfortunately, representative of a day in Montgomery’s life. 

Gone With The Wind

The irony of TCM showing a documentary last week called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession wasn’t lost on anybody paying attention. During a week in which five TCM executives were fired and staffing cut, jeopardizing the channel’s existence, showing a documentary about a cable channel devoted to airing, without commercials, an eclectic mix of overlooked and under-appreciated movies, foreign films, six-hour director’s cuts – essentially films that weren’t being shown anywhere else, felt like a cautionary tale about history repeating itself.

With nearly 100,000 subscribers in Southern California at its height in the mid-1980s, Z Channel became embroiled in lawsuits, then sold to Cablevision and NBC in March, 1989. Three months later, it was off the air.

TCM is still here and on the surface seems to be running the same as ever. For now, we have the assurances of several TCM hosts on social media that things aren’t changing. Spielberg and Scorsese, among others, have both spoken out loudly about the need to keep TCM alive, including personal calls to the guy ultimately calling the shots here, the same Warner Bros. Discovery CEO who rebranded HBO to Max and hired the exec – since fired – who attempted to make CNN more appealing to conservatives. That Trump town hall went really well, didn’t it?

The Z Channel documentary was originally made in 2004 for the Independent Film Channel. Originally a commercial-free service devoted to airing independent films, today it’s known as IFC where you can catch repeated airings of Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3 through most of the day, followed by six-hour blocks of Everybody Loves Raymond and Three’s Company.

My all-time greatest albums, Part 4 

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

When Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was released in 1971, I was in my early teens and beginning to question the eternal wisdom of parents and teachers, and especially, institutional beliefs. 

Ian Anderson always claimed that Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, and he’s right. While one side is a travelogue through some of the more threadbare neighborhoods of London, side two is a diatribe against organized religion. And while everybody dug side one, and Martin Barre’s awesome guitar on the title song (the opening riff and the fantastic solo), it was on the flip side, which Anderson conveniently titled on the record label, My God, that he got down to some heavy-duty axe grinding. 

Essentially, his thesis that organized religion is a crock comes down to two lyrics: “He is the God of nothing/if that’s all that you can see/You are the God of everything/He’s inside you and me,” and “He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.” Heavy stuff when you’re a high school sophomore. 

Some random thoughts about Aqualung: 

When Aqualung was recorded, Ian Anderson had only been playing the flute for three years. 

Once rock and pop began to diversify and add new instrumental colors, flute solos were all over the charts, gracing You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, California Dreamin’, There Is A Mountain and Spill The Wine, among others.  

The artwork on Aqualung are watercolors done by an American artist named Burton Silverman. The original paintings were stolen decades ago. 

The early 1970s were a golden age of album cover constructions: Déjà Vu, with its “leather” photo album look; Sing It Again, Rod (shaped like a shot glass); L.A. Woman (die-cut center); and Through A Glass Darkly (octagon shaped). The cover of Aqualung was manufactured with the texture of an artist’s canvas to show off Silverman’s paintings. 

There was a kid in my high school who took the portrait of Aqualung on the album cover to heart, with long hair, scraggly beard and wearing an old overcoat that I’d bet once belonged to his grandfather. 

Ian Anderson had a distinctive style when playing the flute, sometimes noisily taking in air – which added another “voice” to his music – and (something I learned from a flutist message board) rolling his tongue the way the Spanish do when pronouncing their “Rs.” 

Rock and pop songs that charted on Billboard during the late winter and spring of 1971 when Aqualung was released: George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord; Judy Collins’ version of Amazing Grace; two songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the title and I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which can go either way, secular or religious; that trilogy of happy-hippie soft-headedness, One Toke Over the Line, Put Your Hand in the Hand and Signs; and Aretha’s gospel version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Somehow, TIME magazine missed running a cover story on this “trend.” I’m sure it would have been positioned as “disillusioned with drugs and meditation, today’s youth find new kicks from the Old Testament.” 

Decades before – heck, lifetimes before – critics were praising Nirvana and the Pixies for their “soft/loud/soft” aesthetic of playing a quiet passage, then blasting (with great dramatic effect) huge electric guitars, it was the central sound of much of Aqualung, with several songs building from quiet to loud and back again. The electric guitar that erupts in the quietly acoustic second verse of My God is like the thunder accompanying the delivery of the Ten Commandments.

Ian Anderson also drops in a reference to a “plastic crucifix,” and when you’re questioning the sincerity – and the brains – of those who embrace Christianity, dime store crap like a dashboard Jesus or lenticular portraits of Jesus, seemed an apt symbol. 

George Carlin on The Tonight Show in 1974: “If God is like us … big trouble, man.”

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. 

Seen on the Screen blogathon: The Killers in Hackensack, N.J.

 

The Killers (1946) earned three Oscar nominations, introduced Burt Lancaster and served as Ava Gardner’s career breakout. It may also be the only film noir set mostly in New Jersey, with its pivotal plot point a daring daytime robbery in Hackensack. 

Yup, Hackensack, New Jersey, located some 12 miles west of midtown Manhattan and my hometown. Mostly residential and with a thriving retail scene when I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, the name Hackensack has a rhyme and rhythm to it, and as such, has lent itself to the lyrics of popular songs for decades, written by the likes of Cole Porter, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Billy Joel. 

But this is about The Killers. Its one-sentence TV Guide synopsis might read, “A former boxer gets involved with a gangster’s moll.” But there’s much more to it than that. Within the first ten minutes, Lancaster as “the Swede,” is gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why. 

What he discovers is that people were lining up to kill the Swede under the belief that he was aware of the location of a $250,000 payroll stolen years before from the "Prentiss Hat Company", located in Hackensack. 

The film is mostly told through flashbacks as Swede and three others walk through a factory gate wearing faked employee badges before they storm the payroll office and make off with the cash. 

While plenty of pre-war architecture still existed in Hackensack when I lived there, it’s safe to say there was nothing resembling the Prentiss Hat Company. With its arched gated entryway and central road running through the site, if anything it resembles the familiar look of the entrance to a movie studio lot – which it probably was. 

In real life, the only factory in Hackensack that came close to what’s depicted in The Killers was a sprawling throwback, built in 1896, that at its peak employed a few hundred people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, with all the loading dock doors open, we’d ride our bikes past the site and hear the machines punching out soles or stitching. 

After making off with the payroll, the gang meets later at a farmhouse eleven miles away to divide up the loot. There’s some discussion about the “hick roads” they’ll take to get to the place, leading one to think this is a totally rural area. 

Downtown Hackensack, circa 1960s

In 1940, the countryside outside Hackensack was fairly rural; there were scattered farms with apple orchards and small-scale cornfields, but nothing like the desolate farmhouse with its dirt roads pictured in The Killers. Even in the 1940s, the residential boom was beginning to eat up the available farmland. 

In the two brief scenes that take place in Hackensack, handy and somewhat generic buildings stand in for the real thing. Which is fine. Anthony Veiller’s Oscar-nominated screenplay at least treats Hackensack like something other than an old vaudeville joke. (Unlike Superman: The Movie (1978), where Hackensack was ground zero for a nuclear missile launched by Lex Luthor – more of a punchline than a destination). 

It’s probably worth mentioning one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster looks up at the blue summer sky and marvels, “It’s beautiful, as if we’re on the bow of a ship – Lisbon, Naples, Istanbul,” to which a neighbor flatly adds, “Hackensack.”