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Is this actually a soundtrack?
It's songs from a fictional band of comic book characters and they
had an animated tv series and the band was in the tv series and I think
these songs probably were too and that makes it likely that this is
a collection of original songs composed for a tv series and so
our final verdict is a tie between "who cares?" and "close enough!".
Most of the songs were written by Jeff Barry.
It begins with "Archie’s Theme", unsurprisingly.
This is a very Beach Boys-influenced song that calls out all the character
names. It's not bad but it seemed like it was lacking in energy.
The next song, "Boys and Girls", is similar to both “Summer Nights” and
“We Go Together” from Grease.
"Time for Love" is bouncy and a bit on the insipid side, a sunshine pop song that
sounds under-orchestrated, since they’re sticking with just the band. It could use
more of "Veronica"’s keyboard playing! (In real life this was apparently
Ron Frangipane.) There’s some whistling but that’s not the same.
The first song here that has real energy and feels really solid is
"You Make Me Wanna Dance" Letting the
organ do more and having the electric guitar play something a bit smokier were good
choices. The drums also have an edge to them that was missing from the previous songs.
"Reggie" (probably either Chuck Rainey or Joey Macho) even steps out on bass!
"La Dee Doo Down Down" does in fact feature that five-word phrase quite a lot. It’s a bit
like "Da Do Ron Ron", I guess, which isn’t a surprise.
“Truck driver, where are you bound?” asks the singer, "Archie" (Ron Dante),
in “Truck Driver”. He wants a ride
to follow his girlfriend but he doesn’t know where she went. There are lots of different
license plates on the truck so that suggests a quite a few options. Baltimore or Hollywood?
Or New York City where “the skies are grey but the lights are pretty”? This is a decent song
and "Archie" gives the vocals some emotional urgency.
When I first heard "Sugar Sugar" I assumed it was just a straight cover of
a popular song. But this is where that song actually comes from! According
to wikipedia it "went to number one on the pop chart in 1969, sold over
six million copies … [and] was ranked as the No. 1 song of that year,
the only time a fictional band has ever claimed Billboard's
annual Hot 100 top spot".
"Catchin’ Up on Fun" has a nice lilt to it. It’s a sunshine pop number that works
well with this band. The instruments mesh nicely, the vocal harmonies add some
nice layers and the lyrics are better than most and even hint at some possible
psychedelic experiences.
"I’m in Love" picks up the pace and intensity and maybe has a "Back in the USSR"
feel to it. Something like that anyway. The bass playing is especially active on this one.
Things slow down a little bit for "Seventeen Ain’t Young" but there's
more going on here than there is in a lot of the other
songs. Again the singer seems to mean it a bit more and the tremolo guitar adds a nice
sonic atmosphere.
The influence of Chuck Berry in general and
"Johnny B. Goode" in particular
can be heard clearly in "Johnny Ride, Ride, Ride", a straight up-tempo rocker that
might work in the cartoon but on the record needs to be rougher and louder. A fuzz
guitar solo and some car noises are a welcome addition and the guitar even adds a
touch of freak out at one point. It’s kind of close to being a great song but it
doesn’t quite get there.
"Hide and Seek" has a really great beat and organ playing. This is one of the best
songs. It has a nice arrangement, with some hand percussion and a few other
little details, like various cool guitar figures. And hide and seek is a geat
subject for a song, a natural.
Finally we get another big hit for this fictional band.
"Bang-Shang-A-Lang" apparently reached #22 in the charts.
It's also the sound "Archie"’s heart made when he saw “her”.
There’s some nice ascending harmonic movement in the chorus and the verses are agreeably perky.
2019 April 19 • Friday
Martin Amis is only one person but he has for so long been received
in so many different ways by so many different people for so many different
reasons that you could make a case that are a few Martin Amises out there.
A recent collection of Martin Amis short non-fiction pieces, The Rub of Time:
Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017,
is by the Martin Amis that I like best, the Martin Amis
for whom I try to be a better reader than usual.
There's much here about literature and politics and there are some
sections with the heading "Personal". For literature Amis offers
further examinations of writers important to him. Nobody has ever written
more usefully about Nabokov than Amis does, and one of Amis's many
strengths as a reader and a critic is to dive into the swift currents of
love and awe for genius without being swept away.
(Amis often deploys two comma-divided nouns within parentheses
in what I believe to be a conscious display of Nabokov's influence, a sharing
of a gift with readers who know their Lolita.)
Alas, while Amis's enthusiasm and insight for Nabokov are thrilling,
I have never been able to follow him on his hikes up the mountains
of Bellow and Roth. But I doggedly read every word he has to say on those
subjects, because everything in this book is worth reading.
A few pieces on tennis from the 1990s stand out for
not being the equal of everything else here. And this despite
my having a considerable personal interest in the sport. Part of the problem
might be that they were written for The New Yorker, a
periodical that so favors a tone of weary condescension thatit might
as well be the official house style.
But Amis's short, non-fiction pieces have gradually been
circling something that's stated here almost explicitly,
a kind of artistic and humanistic and intensely verbal morality.
Something like this: "The foundational literary principle is
decorum, which means something like the opposite of its
dictionary definition: 'behavior in keeping with good taste and
propriety' (i.e., submission to an ovine consensus). In literature,
decorum means the concurrence of style and content—together with a
third element which I can only vaguely express as earning the right."
This is the crux. And the principles contained within it can be expanded
to include just about anything.
Later, when Amis describes Saul Bellow's biographer Zachary Leader as
"respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne",
whose "literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly
stylish and acute", he could be fairly describing himself.
One of the strongest pieces in this collection shows Amis
the explorer making a foray into the porn film industry in California.
It could so easily be a condescending item about the grotesqueries
of various "others" and shock value in abundance on low hanging branches.
But Amis encounters a truly remarkable porn star, a woman he finds
to be admirable and worthy of respect, moreso than most people described
in this book. She describes herself as a prostitute, because she looked
the word up in the dictionary and recognized her profession: exchanging
sex for money.
At the end of his journey, however, Amis decides, "not quite. Prostitution
is the oldest profession; and market-driven porno is, perhaps, the newest
profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator.
Of course, the gladiators were slaves—but some of them won their
freedom. And you, I think, will win yours".
This is a rallying cry not so much for the reader but for the subject;
though I expect readers also to feel elevated and inspired by it.
And this is why these particular Amis books are so rewarding.
He travels the world and considers people
whose lives and existence I hadn't even had notions of. He can
bring a sympathetic eye to a Trump rally, a movie star,
a destitute, paralyzed mass-murderer in a South American slum.
But he's never swept away. Just as Nabokov's genius won't
blind his critical vision, his understanding of the reasons
people might commit horrible acts does not lead him to
a placid acceptance of those actions.
We can disagree with Amis about anything. But I never doubt
his effort, his sincerity and his honesty. He makes large swathes
of the world and its denizens understandable because he makes
himself understandable.
Does that sound like an easy thing to do? I don't think it is.
We all stand to gain by trying it, though, and this is a
dazzling result of that process.
2019 April 17 • Wednesday
Edmund Naughton's The Maximum Game is a great page-turner.
It's short and lean at 158 pages and carries no excess baggage.
This isn't an action story but a procedural. Howard
DeWitt is a World War I veteran and a widower who's been running
a hotel in Paris for decades.
He's conservative, right wing, quiet and racist:
"His only problem was with blacks. He did not like to
admit them, and he let them in silently only
because he did not care to be criticized by his
French neighbors".
The book takes place in the real world of
the Watergate era. DeWitt's character
is important because he's the type of person
one might expect to be sympathetic to Nixon.
But he thinks that Nixon—whose name never
appears in this novel—is a disgrace and is destroying
both the United States and its constitution.
Not given to doing much of anything about anything,
certainly not somebody who messes around in politics,
DeWitt does mention that he knows it would be possible to assassinate
the American president.
A consortium of wealthy businessmen are interested
in doing just that and hire a British recruiter to
find somebody for the job.
After some diverting interviews with German and Irish
candidates, DeWitt is interviewed. He's an old man,
no record, an American citizen who wouldn't need a visa
to enter the country. He's also an expert big-game
hunter, a crack shot who can expertly take down
moving targets at long distances.
And he's interested. In fact, he'll do it just for expenses.
Of course, there is one slight problem: he's just
started having heart attacks, something only he and his doctor know.
He's supposed to avoid excitement. And no more safaris, no more hunting.
But maybe just one more...?
2019 April 15 • Monday
The 565th Soundtrack of the Week is
the music by Maryvonne Giercarz, Lars Eric and Richard Bond
for the Timothy Leary movie Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,
on psychedelic vinyl!
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So... there isn't really a lot to say about this.
Maryvonne Giercarz plays "veena" (which sounds like a tambura
to me), Lars Eric plays guitar and Richard Bond plays tabla.
The music part of it is mostly a drone with guitar
and table just kind of doing whatever. It's pleasant
enough.
Sometimes it sounds like Indian music, sometimes
more like acid rock/pop. Sometimes you just hear bells.
I thought I heard sitar in there also.
A lot of the record is dialogue and sound effects
from the movie. You hear a lot from Leary himself.
"You brought your own mind games with
you. Dreary old paranoias."
"Can you throb to the pulse of life?"
"Drift within, on a thread of sound."
All the talking makes it a little hard to enjoy
the music but this is more of a document than a music album, I suppose.
2019 April 12 • Friday
Here's Howard Roberts again but this time as a leader. The record is
called Color Him Funky.
Everything about this record is great. Every track is
swinging and spectacular and the album is one of the best
organ combo recordings I've ever heard.
And why not? Roberts has got Paul Bryant on organ,
Chuck Berghofer on bass and Earl Palmer on drums.
While everybody is absolutely perfect on this,
and Roberts's guitar playing is thrilling and musical
and exciting, it's especially wonderful to hear Palmer
away from session work and really cutting loose.
His feel and time and groove are all just fantastic.
Two of the highlights for me are Jackie Wilson's
driving "Florence of Arabia" and "Good Bye, Good Luck,
I'm Gone!" which Roberts co-wrote with another ace
guitarist, Jack Marsall.
A pair of familiar standards get a sprightlier
read than usual here as well. "What Kind of Fool Am I?"
is surprisingly brisk, breezy and swinging, while the
classic "Days of Wine and Roses" ups the tempo to the point
of giving it an aggressive edge, a feel which makes the minor
chords and blue notes cut a little more sharply.
This is a really great record and I think it's available
on CD, although I have only a vinyl release. Highly recommended!
2019 April 10 • Wednesday
Here's a record that all fans of jazz organ - guitar - drums
trios will want to hear: Rieber Hovde's Organic Sound.
I'm generally up for anything in this genre but
I was also intrigued by the presence of Howard Roberts,
whom I know mostly as a session musician. Hovde plays
some other keyboards besides organ.
This was recorded sometime in the 1970s, "live
at the Sea Wolf Restaurant" in Oakland, CA, and
the audience is present throughout.
The first thing you'll notice is how amazing
Ed Thigpen is. And you'll never stop noticing it.
The first few tracks make it clear that
Hovde and Roberts are also extremely strong and sensitive
players. But it's on the Hovde original "Avenida
Atlantica" that Roberts really blasts off, beginning with
some phenomenal comping before launching a devastating
guitar solo, as virtuosic and inventive as it
is tasteful and soulful. This track,
the last on Side A, ends in a fade out, which is a shame.
The whole record is a solid thrill and it ends
on an especially powerful note, with a bluesy
"Greensleeves".
2019 April 15 • Monday
This had to happen one of these days.
Our 564th Soundtrack of the Week features
a certain Hans Zimmer. But this is very early
Zimmer, a score which was a collaboration with
Stanley Myers. It's The Zero Boys,
on blue vinyl!
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This is an interesting score.
Hans Zimmer was a young
German composer almost nobody had ever heard of at the time,
and Stanley Myers an established composer who
thought that Zimmer would do a good job.
According to director Nico Mastorakis’s liner notes,
Mastorakis had already worked with Myers on a couple of movies and
Myers came up with the idea that Zimmer
would write synthesizer-based music for “some action sections”.
I haven’t seen the movie but listening to the record
gives me a sense of something more collaborative than that.
Myers’s strings and Zimmer’s synths are frequently working together
as well as weaving in and out of each other.
Between the two of them they come up with a wide
range of sounds, moods and textures. Often the sounds of
the synthesizers give a strong indication of the film’s
mid-1980s origin—not a bad thing—but at other timed will
back up Mastorakis’s remark that Zimmer could
“squeeze amazing sounds out of ordinary synths”.
The two sides of the record are very
different. I wonder if Side A is Zimmer and Side B is Myers.
Side A is more swinging and melodic, even poppy in
places, and I thought I heard the influence of Ennio Morricone
and John Barry in spots. (There’s also a short and silly Bach quote.) A
romantic acoustic guitar piece comes out of nowhere and
earns a response from some menacing sounding synthesizers.
The music on Side B is almost certainly for die-hard
soundtrack freaks, though. There’s very little that could be
called melodic or groovy or lyrical or swinging, but if you
like dramatic underscore, atmospheres of tension or suspense or
horror—the synths quote Bernard Herrmann’s famous Psycho
violins—and of course action cues, then you’ll have fun with this.
Apparently there are some unused pieces included in this
release but no clue what they are.
2019 April 05 • Friday
If anybody ever asks you the world’s greatest jazz guitarist
is, you can answer with confidence that no such person has ever existed.
But in 1962 or thereabouts, somebody was trying to tap
Elek Bacsik for this conceptual dead-end of an honor.
Who? That was my thought when I first saw this record.
Apparently he was one of Django Reinhart’s cousins.
And so I brought this home with me. I don’t love it.
If you like guitarists who play a lot of notes really fast
and will dash up amd down the neck in modal sprints at the
drop of a drum stick, then Elek Bacsik is likely to bring you
a lot of pleasure.
That’s not my favorite approach, though I certainly enjoy
it in the right quantity.
But I would have preferred some more melodic ideas,
a more sensitive touch. Bacsik has some shapes and
intervals he likes enough that you hear them repeated
in different tunes, which suggests to me the “blowing over changes”
style of jazz improvisation. The actual tune, melody, song and its
meanings and feelings are left standing on the sidewalk as the
musician speeds away in a muscle car.
And I think it would be fair to say that interaction,
another crucial element of improvised music, is not
particularly important to Mr. Bacsik, at least on this record.
The liner notes will explain it more concisely than I can:
“All of the tracks in this album were done first by recording
the rhythm guitar part along with the rest of the rhythm section
and then, at a later date, the melody line”.
Well, there you go. When he’s improvising, he’s playing over a
tape recording of a band. Interaction has been made impossible.
The liner notes attempt to bluff their way through this:
“This enables the guitarist to weave his own rhythmic patterns
for his solo”.
Yeah, nice try, but no.
Having two Elek Bacsiks on every tune, playing two different
parts on the same guitar on two tracks, also creates an
uncomfortable, claustrophobic feeling. The impression he
gives is of someone with a big personality, a loud voice and a
lot to say. Two of him is one too many.
And who’s playing with him? On some tracks you’re hearing Pierre
Michelot on bass (“the first Frenchman to treat the bass as a
melodic instrument”, the liner notes inform us) and Kenny Clarke
on drums. On other tracks the rhythm section is Michel Gaudry on
bass and Daniel Humair on drums.
But if you want to know which tracks feature which rhythm section,
you won’t find it noted anywhere here, with the exception of “Take
Five”, about which we’re told “Take Five really takes the cake, as
you will hear in the strange drum solo that Kenny Clarke takes”.
What’s strange about it? Well, as I recall, he mainly just plays
hits on the snare and leaves a lot of space. I found myself wondering
if maybe Mr. Clarke was just a wee bit bored.
This is overall a decent record, however, pretty fun to listen to,
despite my reservations. Elek Bacsik plays the guitar very well,
but he doesn’t make my list of ten greatest jazz guitarists or
probably even twenty.
2019 April 03 • Wednesday
Gold Medal paperbacks can be good or bad
but they're usually not boring. Robert Kyle's
The Golden Urge is one of the exceptions.
Robert Kyle was a pseudonymn for Robert Terrall,
about whom you can read quite a bit
here, in this interesting
bio and interview with his son.
It sounds as though Terrall wrote
some books worth reading. He wrote quite a lot.
As far as this book goes, the front cover arouses a few suspicions.
First, the breathless blurb comes from King Features
Syndicatre. This is not a reviewer or a magazine or a newspaper.
It's a syndication company that distributes varied content.
So a recommendation from King Features Syndicate is
kind of bizarre in the absence of any other information.
Imagine seeing a movie poster with "'Best Movie of the Year'
— United Parcel Service" on it.
And then there's what the blurb actually says.
"Best robbing-the-bank thriller since Cain's 'Double
Indemnity'".
Double Indemnity was a story of insurance
fraud and murder, based on the real-life
case of Ruth Snyder. Nobody robbed any banks. So both the
origin of this excited recommendation and the recommendation
itself are dubious.
Heist novels and movies are almost always attractive
to me and I was kind of hoping that The Golden Urge
would be one, but it isn't.
It's actually a poorly paced and tedious mixture
of mystery and melodrama, with incredibly long-winded
dialogue and unconvincing behaviour from its characters.
The "likeability" of people in a story has never
been especially important to me but I do need to
have some slight interest in what happens to them. By page
78 of The Golden Urge I found myself groaning, "Why
hasn't this book ended yet?"
Carol Winter works at a bank. So does her husband.
In the first chapter of the book he tries to kill himself.
She saves him and he confesses that he's been embezzling
money from the bank to pay his mother's hospital bills.
Carol intends to put this right.
She decides to ask her boss, the bank's vice president,
for help. But this guy has actually just embezzled a much larger
amount and is skipping town.
Once this becomes known, an insurance investigator
shows up and we follow him around while he tries to find
the absconded vice president and the money.
He's pretty bad at his job, doing stuff like leaving
his gun lying around for anybody to take, right after
the same gun had been taken from him and he'd been beat up.
I can't imagine anybody letting go of their gun and
such circumstances. You'd put it in your pocket or just
hold on to it.
He also manages to get his wallet stolen by the same
young punk who takes his gun and doesn't even
realize it for a long time. Not until, of course, the
author needs him not to be able to identify
himself to some police officers.
In places you can see Kyle/Terrall straining for depth that isn't here.
"Fessenden had a wall-to-wall carpet in his office, comfortable leather
furniture, a little fireplace that no longer worked—the old chimneys
had been cemented up before DeAngelis was born."
This isn't a great sentence. And when I got to the chimneys
that had been cemented up before DeAngelis, the insurance
investigator, had been born I thought,
who cares?
Later on we learn that DeAngelis's boss is "a fat man
shaped like a teardrop, fast on his feet for a man who
rarely moved behind a desk".
The fat man who's surprisingly fast is a cliche and
a human being can't be shaped like a teardrop. That doesn't work.
Another simile that falls flat is when an old man "straightened
painfully, his knees crackling like heat lightning".
Lightning is silent, of course, and heat lightning in
particular is sometimes known as "silent lightning".
The overall impression is of a book written in one sitting,
for money and without much care. The wrapping
up at the end is particularly abrupt and actually borders
on the offensive, veering unexpectedly into some unwelcomely
sadistic and gruesome territory.
The first line is "The apartment seemed a little too
neat, as usual".
2019 April 01 • Monday
The music from Ganja & Hess,
by Nina Simone's brother, Sam Waymon, is the
563rd
Soundtrack of the Week.
It's on brown vinyl!
The A side starts
out with an "Intro", a voice counting numbers and being run through an echo,
and then a plaintive solo piano playing a melancholy piece.
Then are parts one and two of "The Blood of the Thing",a
male voice singing a spiritual-influenced song about blood and
slavery. “Thousands of strangers bled today.” The second part is
subtitled "Shadow of the Cross".
"Bongili Work Song" is a field recording of people
singing and dancing but at a distance and run through an
echo. The liner notes explain that it's “a recording from
the 1950 Smithsonian Folkways collection Music of Equatorial
Africa" and the original version is included as a bonus track.
Sounds of thunder, drones and alarming musical stings form
the background for "Hess Is Stabbed".
And then there's the Mabel King "March Blues",
what you’d expect, classic old timey intensity,
just piano, trumpet and voice. It's accompanied by
sound effects and some other music that must
belong to the action on screen. The song
eventually gets run through an echo device.
"You've Got To Learn To Let It Go (instrumental)"
is a pleasantly groovy song with a friendly beat and a
cheery melody played on flute and vibes with support from horns,
a nice instrumental pop soul number that also has sound effects
from the movie.
"Survival/Drive" is an interesting electronic cue with
synth and delay, getting a lot out of a few notes.
The last piece on the first side is "The Seduction
(Analgam)", in which zithers or instruments much like
them set the tone, with a low throbbing note above
which strings are plucked and strummed, creating a
dreamy and richly textured atmosphere in which other
instruments appear and disappear. Eventually the zithers
fade out, electronic instruments and various shrieking and
yelling come in and it builds in intensity.
The B Side begins with a reprise of the "Intro" and
what sounds like dialogue from
the movie: “I had a strange dream last night. I dreamed you murdered me.”
Then solo piano comes in with the song and we hear more
dialogue. “I will not be tortured, I will not be punished,
I will not be guilty.”
This sort of fades out and into the vocal version of
"You've Got To Learn To Let It Go".
The Evangel Revival Church piano and choir
sing the religious number "Just As I Am", followed by a reprise
of "The Blood of the Thing".
"Resurrection" is a short percussion cue that sounds
like mostly hands clapping.
Then a children’s choir sings "There Is a Fountain
Filled with Blood".
This is followed by the studio version of
"You've Got To Learn To Let It Go" and it's awesome,
with a deep groove and impassioned singing.
The record concludes with a couple of bonus tracks:
The previously mentioned Folkways recording and something called
"Theme from Blood Couple".
I'm not sure what that is other than a
solo synth piece “reassembled by Fima Noveck”. It’s cool and spacious,
though.
