Watched Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha tonight. Gerwig is both insufferably cute and overwhelmingly charming, in a story that is a tribute to her commitment as a writer and actor to her vision of life as a melding of grace and grit. Here it’s filtered through the lens of French movies of the early sixties, notably those of Francois Truffaut, which starred Jean Pierre Leaud playing Truffaut’s alter ego. Frances Ha Gerwig seems to play her own alter ego in a similar style.
In tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, Frances takes and impetuous trip to Paris when she is offered a pied a terre in the Sixth Arrondissement. The montagey staging of her visit is punctuated by Hot Chocolate’s fantastic “Everyone’s A Winner,” which is featured tonight to a much different purpose. Bon soir.
Peter and I have written back and forth about what it is that triggers the “Night Music” pieces, at least for us.
For me, sometimes the impetus is simply hearing a song on the radio (yes, I still listen to that old fashioned medium) or on my shuffle. Sometimes a tune just pops into my head. Sometimes something will occur during band practice and remind me that “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” was not a bad tune and one the Biletones could cover.
And, sometimes it is a stimulus-response thing, as in one of us will write about a song and band, and that starts the whole association moving along.
So, Peter, writing about the Rutles has done for me.
As an already crazy Python fan when The Rutles All You Need is Cash was released in 1978, I watched it, loved it, and even bought it on DVD years later.
I am still a fan of all things Python related, but my familiarity with the music of Python pre-dated my seeing the comedy act by a handful of years. Before that, my friend Stephen Clayton and I had been big fans of the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah Band), whose principle song writer was Neil Innes.
Innes moved on to do the music for the Python films, and as Peter noted, headed up the Rutles (with Eric Idle, from Python) and also did some solo stuff. Innes also appeared on Saturday Night Live, when I believe Idle was the guest host, and if memory serves, he wore white and played a white grand piano, a la Lennon, and performed the Rutles Cheese and Onions.
The Bonzo Dog band were a goofy consortium of great British musicians with a slight twist on everything, pre-dating quasi pop-rock Big Band sound Squirrel Nut Zippers and their ilk produced by nearly 30 years.
The band’s biggest hit–at least in England–was the venerable I’m the Urban Spaceman but my fave song of theirs was the opening cut to the album Gorrilla from 1968 called The Intro and the Outro, a shameless grab of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues, although in the Bonzo’s treatment,Count Basie gets the nod over the Duke lyrically, shall we say.
Still, a great riff, funny words, and everything that is Innes, Bonzo, and Python.
The 1983 Punch the Clock album, along with it’s follow up, Goodbye Cruel World, were the first Costello albums that didn’t deliver fully. One had the impression that after the art move of Imperial Bedroom, the decision was made to get commercial. New producers added horns, there were 12″ dance mixes, and to tell the truth a lot of really good songs on both records. But on Boxing Day every year I wake up singing this song, because it’s the only one I know about Boxing Day.
It has a driving beat and driven insistent horns, and it feels like it should get you jumping, but like many of the less successful tunes on this album, there is a lack of warmth and a brittleness to the arrangements. What sounds like it should be rollicking, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, sounds mechanical and a little heartless. But I hear, with a little more relaxed groove and a suppler beat, a song with a hard groove and an appealing hook. Until they do it that way we have it this way.
I remember seeing the Rutles mocumentary, All You Need Is Cash, back in 1978, and being quite fond of it. A story about it in the NY Times last week sent me to YouTube, where my reaction was of a somewhat different sort. What I remembered as cute parody back then, plays as alternative Beatles tracks now. As Paul Simon says in the Times’ story, “it is more of a panegyric than it is a satire.” I think maybe the confusion stemmed from the title, which sounds satirical. Meanwhile, the music is so much like the Beatles sound that on the surface on crummy speakers it can almost pass.
That’s why Neil Innes, the songwriter, paid when the Beatles’ publishing company sued. And why these songs are a pleasure to hear even today.
I remember a snow day, hanging at my friend Bobby’s house, (this would be when we were 11), listening to this song over and over. It was No. 1 that week, and a fantastic pop song by a couple of Zappa dudes who worked the edges.
Without the instruments, it is less sugary.
But most importantly, they got paid, and felt bad about it. (Hmmm, did they? We should look into that.)
Art dudes made pop music that worked, and they got paid. Bingo.
A lot of Beatles buzz on the site the last few days, and I wondered how much of the world knew that Cheap Trick actually covered the entire Sergeant Pepper album a few years back, taking it to the road (kind of like Phish, who do someone’s classic album every Halloween)?
Though I was a big Trick fan during their early years–especially In Color and Black and White, Heaven Tonight, and Dream Police–I sort of lost track of their newer stuff after that (shame on me, as that is when Buddakon came out, but as good a live band as the Trick are, that one seemed like too much hype too after I had found them).
Not that I ever wrote the band off: I still love all three of those albums from the Rockford band (about 40 miles from where Diane lived in Algonquin) who so emulated the Beatles with their own spin. Though the Trick have been a lot more. Poppy, tuneful, funny, and they don’t take themselves too seriously, which to me means if they take from other bands (like the great bridge chords in I Know What I Want and I Know How to Get It that are lifted from Eight Days a Week) it is more of an homage than a rip.
Well, a few years ago my friend, drummer Steve Chattler turned me onto the Trick doing Sergeant Pepper in its entirety, and the band does a killer job.
See for yourself. I mean, this is nothing like watching a tribute/cover band.
This is not an endorsement of this song. But when I was 12 it was a giant hit, and I loved it. But I had limited funds, being 12 and all, and I remember spending an evening in the record department at some local department store while my parents shopped, trying to decide between Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the Grass Roots, the American Breed and the Who Sell Out.
Here’s Young Girl. I think it’s the record version synced to video from the Ed Sullivan show.
I cannot faithfully reproduce the arguments in favor and against each record that I made that night. I do think I bounced the Who because I didn’t actually know their songs. I just liked the cover and knew they were cool. I also know I held each album, reading liner notes, getting a feel, a number of times. It was agony. I ended up buying the American Breed album, which contained a really excellent one-hit wonderish tune called Bend Me Shape Me. But what interests me now is that both Young Girl and Bend Me Shape Me feature classic rock band configurations and lots of offscreen horns. This is not unlike the window dressing of other instruments and sounds on every one of the Top Hits of 2013, which include lush orchestration and giant beats to pump up their profile.
That’s what people want now. Then, I made the right choice. All the same difference.
Today, of course, I own both the Who Sell Out, on vinyl and CD, and Petra Hayden Sings The Who Sell Out, on CD. And nothing by the band my buddy Bobby Grecco called the Union Crap or the American Breed. But I can listen to all of them whenever I want.
