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.

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.

Kick Dondi in the Teeth Day

Today, as decreed by MAD magazine 60 years ago, is Kick Dondi in the Teeth Day.

Not sure what MAD had against wholesome, doe-eyed Dondi, and it’s certainly a violent image, but it was funny when I first came across it in MAD’s 1965 calendar, and it still is today.

During its first ten or so years, much of MAD’s parodies focused on newspaper comic strips, which for decades could have been considered the cable TV/streaming series of their time: long-term character continuity, serialized, with millions of viewers.

Our family got the New York Daily News with its Sunday comic section, and most of the strips were already feeling creaky by the mid-sixties: Little Orphan Annie (which began in 1924), Gasoline Alley (1918) and Terry and the Pirates (1934). Dondi (1955) was the newcomer.

I usually stuck to the mild humor of gag cartoons like Our Boarding House (1924), Bringing Up Father (1913), Smokey Stover (1935) and They’ll Do It Every Time (1929); reading them was like a glimpse into the past, the same feel as watching the occasional Model T driving down the main street of my hometown.

Originally, Dondi was a World War II orphan who wandered into the care of U.S soldiers and was brought to the U.S. The strip debuted on September 25, 1955.

David Kory

As he became more Americanized, Dondi’s European roots fell by the wayside. An awful Dondi movie (1961) was a high point for six-year-old non-actor David Kory and a low career ebb for stars David Janssen and Patti Page.

Dondi the newspaper comic strip's popularity waned. By the time the strip ended in 1986 it was only appearing in 35 newspapers (vs. some 200 at its height). Now that was a real kick in the teeth.

Naked girl at Stones party

Marianne Faithfull seemingly moved through the fair that was the Swinging Sixties effortlessly, but the footing was treacherous.

Her father was an academic; her mother came from Polish nobility. A great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom the word “masochist” is derived and author of Venus in Furs, the underground novel about sadomasochism that inspired the Velvet Underground song.

Faithfull was a 17-year-old folksinger adrift in a male-dominated world of rock musicians. She was a musical muse to Bob Dylan – she turned down his advances, leading him to write It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue in response – and a smitten Graham Nash, who wrote Carrie-Ann about her.

(Adding Wild Horses, Mick Jagger’s ode to their relationship, and she overtakes Patti Boyd, for whom George Harrison wrote Something and Eric Clapton wrote Layla).

Faithfull wandered into the tarpit that was the Rolling Stones inner circle, having brief affairs with Keith Richards and Brian Jones, then getting pregnant by U.S. pop singer Gene Pitney who had played piano during a Stones recording session, before connecting with Jagger.

Faithfull the folk singer

She recorded one of the first songs Jagger and Richards cowrote, As Tears Go By, which peaked at #22 in January 1965 in the U.S. (Teenage girls – the true force behind the British Invasion – may have sensed that Faithfull was rival than role model. When the Stones recorded the song, it went to #6. And somehow to #10 on the adult easy listening charts).

A couple of other Top 40 singles, Summer Night and Come and Stay with Me, were pleasant but did little to bolster Faithfull’s reputation as more than just the girl on Jagger’s arm.

In early 1967, the couple and others, including George and Patti Harrison, attended a weekend retreat at Keith Richards’ country estate. Following a tip, a squad of 18 police officers raided the house with Jagger and Richards arrested for drug offenses based on the discovery of a few roaches and amphetamine pills (which likely belonged to Faithfull, but that Jagger claimed as his own to save her from arrest).

Two legends grew out of the party’s aftermath: that the police hid in the bushes until the Harrisons left, thereby not arresting a Beatle, and that the police interrupted Jagger while he was eating a Mars Bar out of Faithfull’s vagina – a rumor the police floated to the British tabloids out to sink those degenerate Stones. (It was always the specificity of the candy brand that made this sound more like the fulfillment of someone’s sexual fantasy than reality).

What is true is that Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops busted in and covered herself with a nearby rug, hence the headline in the next day’s Evening Standard, NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY.

Marianne and Mick went from being photographed in airport terminals and entering clubs, to getting their pictures taken in front of a courthouse. They broke up shortly afterwards.

Faithfull sightings were rare through most of the seventies. She developed a serious drug habit, and was at times homeless, living in the streets or squatting in abandoned buildings.

In 1979, her voice weather-beaten, lived in – you get the idea – Faithfull came out of nowhere to record a new wave single Broken English, a critical and dance floor favorite. She’d found her own voice, and a second career as international chanteuse and actress, touring sporadically, but always intertwined with a long litany of health issues, suicide attempts, marriages, divorces, miscarriages and abortions.

She deserved respect for what she accomplished. All of it can be considered a triumph.

Rod Taylor in Darker Than Amber

(This post is part of the Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon hosted by Films From Beyond)

Between 1964 and 1985, John MacDonald wrote 21 novels in the Travis McGee series. Not a private detective, but a “salvage consultant” – if he recovered what a client lost, McGee received half its worth, allowing him to live an idyllic life on a houseboat in Florida taking his retirement, as he put it “in installments.”

They were noir fiction elevated by McGee’s asides about modern life – gun control, race relations, preserving Florida’s environment and people who use their brakes too much when driving. McGee was cynical, with a strong moral compass and built like a linebacker. He hung out with Meyer, an erudite economist given to wry observations and philosophizing.

Darker Than Amber (1970) stars Rod Taylor and is the only big-screen adaptation of a McGee book. The Australian-born Taylor began his Hollywood career in 1951 and while he’s mostly remembered today for action roles, he was versatile enough to make his mark in science fiction (The Time Machine), horror (The Birds), romantic comedy (Do Not Disturb), westerns (The Bank Robbers), drama (Hotel) and the uncategorizable (Zabriskie Point).

In Darker Than Amber, McGee and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are fishing near a bridge when psychopathic weightlifter Terry (William Smith) drops Vangie (Suzy Kendall), tied to a barbell, into the water. McGee rescues her and as she recovers on his boat learns of her participation, working with Terry, to lure lonely guys on cruise ships into an onboard relationship, conning them out of their money then dumping them overboard.

Terry eventually catches up with Vangie and kills her, leading McGee and Meyer to embark on a plan to retrieve cash that Vangie has hidden from Terry and to trap him.

Much of what you’ll find online about Darker Than Amber is centered on the film’s climax, a violent fight between McGee and Terry in the close quarters of a cruise ship cabin, reminiscent of the Sean Connery-Robert Shaw’s train compartment bout in From Russia with Love. Apparently, the fight turned real. “We didn't use any stunt doubles at all. [Taylor] broke three of my ribs and I busted his nose ... I couldn't even breath and he was still hitting me,” said Smith.  

These guys mean it

Smith, here with bleached blonde hair, had a prolific career in television and the movies, establishing cult star status in a number of 1960s biker movies. In Darker Than Amber he’s all bulging biceps and penetrating stare, violence always bubbling just under the surface.

Taylor is solid as ever, shifting between vulnerable and invincible, and the movie chugs along at a good pace. The resolution, built on a sort of Mission: Impossible-type stunt feels, as it did in the novel, a bit contrived.

Upon meeting Taylor, John MacDonald said, “I like the guy. He has a face that looks lived in. But what matters to me is that he understands what McGee is all about – the anti-hero, tender and tough with many chinks in the armor. I trust Rod's wit, irony and understanding to make the whole greater than the parts.”  

MacDonald, however, felt the original script made McGee buffoonish and provided uncredited writing assistance. He didn’t, however, give the film a glowing endorsement. "I was so convinced it would be utterly rotten, that I was pleased to find it only semi-rotten,” he later wrote.

There are several versions of Darker Than Amber floating around. At one point the film was withdrawn and re-edited to remove its R rating. An unedited version, with the fight scene intact, seems to be currently on Tubi, although the print looks and sounds like it got the worst of the Rod Taylor-William Smith battle. Regardless, it’s worth watching.

The Complete Rod Taylor Site was a valuable resource in writing this post.