“King Creole,” from 1958 and in black & white, is one of the diamond shards in the big pile of Elvis movie jelly beans.
The cast: Walter Matthau as the urbane heavy, Carolyn Jones as the doomed beauty, Pat Stewart as the noble but broke club owner, Dean Jagger as the redeemed and Vic Morrow as the henchman you want to see die. Through brute force of talent they haul the movie from musical into almost classic Hollywood noir melodrama.
Shot in the French Quarter, or what passed for it on a back lot, it has the cinematographic B&W flavor of “Too Have and Have Not.” Hey, even Elvis rose to the occasion, throwing in maybe 20 seconds of a very poor man’s Bogart in the final scene.
There’s a foot chase, organized shop-lifting, beatings, rain-swept streets, a house on stilts in the backbay, vicious blackmail, and murder in all degrees with Elvis sticking a switchblade deep in the chest of Shark, played by Vic Morrow, his tormentor.
And the music? It’s the best of all in the film fest so far, even if you don’t quite notice. From end to end, good, “King Creole,” “As Long as I Have You,” “Trouble (think “Framed” or “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”), “Hard Headed Woman” and “Dixieland Rock.” You can’t beat them.
One bucket of buttered popcorn and a cotton hanky, easy.
“Observe the neatness and precision of the grape fields.” Best line of movie dialogue, ever, from Juliet Prowse as “Lili,” 700 feet up in a cable car over the Main River with Tulsa McLean (Elvis) in “G. I. Blues.”
I take you back to 1960 when Elvis Presley was a worldwide celebrity, a young man in the Army, and there was a draft. He was still very cool.
What country was that? Not America in 2016, that’s for sure. A pop star with an album that went number 1, serving in the military in the endless war? Hahahahahahahahahaha. Where are you from? The Oort Cloud?
Fifty-six years ago on a planet far away, where the US military isn’t a nightmarish global Wehrmacht hovering overhead as a technology-enabled bludgeon, Elvis did a light-hearted movie about GIs looking for fun and love in Frankfurt. And despite a desire to make money on a seedy bet as to who can bed “ice queen” club dancer Lili, in the end, everyone does the right thing. There’s no John Paul Vann in Saigon-like behavior in sight. (Look it up.)
While it’s a farce with plenty of hokum and over-acting, it’s still a warm story. Juliet Prowse dances less but is sexier and more elegant than Ann Margaret would be years later. And “G.I. Blues” is worlds better than “Viva Las Vegas,” and above the solid happy mediocrity of “Roustabout.”
You’d recognize the soundtrack cover in an instant and the music is pretty good to great, from “Shoppin’ Around” to the title track and a restaurant serenade to Prowse, “Tonight is So Right for Love.” “Wooden Heart” with Elvis acting out in a puppet show is especially dear.
N.b.: The most modern American love farce/musical fully supported by the US military that I can think of? Top Gun. Seriously. Think about it. Not as good as GI Blues, though, not even close.
“Live a Little, Love a Little:” It’s 1968, released the same year as the dog’s breakfast, “Speedway.” And Elvis and his handlers still have no idea what to do in the face of the British invasion.
Inexplicably, “Live a Little, Love a Little” isn’t wretched. In fact, it’s serviceable Elvis semi-romantic comedy. And while on the subject of a dog’s breakfast, there’s an acting K9, Albert the Great Dane, who steals a number of scenes.
Elvis is Greg Nolan, a photographer, who rides his beach buggy (a VW chassis with an idiotic orange plexiglas body, remember the Bradley kits?) into the clutches of “Bernice,” a character who could easily have played “Evelyn” in “Play Misty for Me.”
Bernice has Albert drive Elvis into the surf where he suffers hypothermia. Back at her house, she drugs him unconscious for three days. When he recovers he discovers he’s been fired by his newspaper employer who inexplicably has the pressman crew beat him up. When you were fired at the newspaper, didn’t they beat you senseless?
Forced to move in with Bernice, Elvis lands two jobs on two floors of the same building, one as a soft porn photographer, the other as the photo editor in charge of a high button agency run by an aged Rudy Vallee.
The movie veers between Elvis running the stairs, juggling work and trying to avoid becoming weird Bernice’s prey. Dick Sargent, who always played an affable clown, does decent work as Bernice’s ex-husband, a wealthy man who keeps her financed. In the interstices between the farces, Albert barks, whines, growls and threatens to bite when necessary.
There’s an EP’s worth of music of little account. But “Wonderful World,” a gay throwaway which opens the movie, sets the tone as Elvis goes histrionic in its last 20 seconds. Definitely an oddity for his then moribund reputation.
It’s 1964 and the Beatles have made Elvis virtually irrelevant. But I saw “Roustabout” as Saturday matinee in Pine Grove, PA. With a screwdriver cup of soda and bag of popcorn, fitting for a carnival movie.
The music in “Roustabout” is mostly pocket lint. But the opening number after the title sequence, “Poison Ivy League,” is great, particularly for what follows. Elvis karate chops three of America’s privileged into submission (one actually runs away) in a parking lot. Elvis was really into the karate chopping. And in every movie, no matter how lousy, if there’s a fight scene, he always gets one in.
Anyway, Elvis as Charlie Rodgers, a character virtually indistinguishable from his Deke Rivers in “Loving You,” except for a far superior sneer, gets backed into being a carny.
You know how it works: Eventually he saves the nearing bankruptcy business when he sees how he’s let those with better character down. Barbara Stanwyck takes half the show. And outside of “Poison Ivy League,” “Hard Knocks” is all you want to hear.
“So loaded with cash/They give me a rash,” the chorus from “Poison Ivy League” cries out for revival.
It’s the mid-60s. The Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan are happening, so how does Elvis Presley answer? He puts his heavy foot down, pedal to the metal on two racing car comedy musical romances, one sub-mediocre, the other godawful.
“Spinout’s” ridiculous story has Elvis as a bandleader and Grand Prix race car driver in the hills above Santa Barbara. A committed (maybe that should have been “confirmed”) bachelor, he’s chased by three women, one of them his drummer, played by Gidget.
All the characters are either simpering, swaggering or antagonizing. The only things that save the movie are the Three Stooges-like Grand Prix race (dig the cars spinning out and going the wrong direction and Elvis spinning out, and smoking over the same clump of straw more than once) and the music.
About the music: The uptempo tunes save it, special notice to the tromping, swingin’ shuffle, “I’ll Be Back.” There’s the title cut and two, “BeachShack” and “Smorgasbord” played at a pool party without a grain of sand in sight. “BeachShack” is a loose rip-off of Rolf Harris’ “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.” “Never Say Yes” has a snappy drum break, offset by the tune’s terrible fuzz guitar’
“I saw that movie and it was dirty!” yells “Les” (Elvis’s female drummer) at a cookout. “Spinout” would have benefited from some good old-fashioned filth.
“Speedway,” from 1968, is bad from start to finish with moments of laughter only because parts are so senseless.
Nancy Sinatra is dumbfoundingly cast as an IRS auditor and Bill Bixby, fresh off “My Favorite Martian,” is Elvis’ (again as an entertainer and race car driver, this time — NASCAR) manager. There’s also an annoying tv variety show comedian, Carl Ballantine, who seemed to be hot stuff at the time, as Elvis’ mechanic.
One song furnishes most of the unintentional hilarity, “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad,” about Uncle Sam, tax man.
Choice lyric:
“If he calls you, as he may do, don’t be mad, don’t be frightened,
red, white, and blue/Just be thankful you don’t live in Leningrad/Just remember, he’s your uncle, not your dad.”
As a tune, best fit would have been as one of those acetate-mounted-on-cardboard singles included every so often with a copy of MAD magazine. Astonishing Elvis didn’t walk off the set, it’s that humiliating.
“It’s a beautiful job of driving by both these drivers,” raves the “Speedway” announcer. Indeed! And viewers were screwed at the ticket window by this screw-up movie.
Both pics feature major product placement for Fender Musical Instruments, which had just experienced a big expansion when Leo Fender sold out to CBS.
Reprinted from Facebook while I was out. All movies reviewed in the Pasadena Elvis Presley Film Fest were either downloaded or streamed from pirate sites.
From a long time ago and what seems very far away, the only rock song to feature former US Cyber-Czar, Richard Clarke.
“They’ll also launch a big ol’ DOS,” he “sings.”
Taken from a conference call between him, the bosses of the biggest anti-virus companies, and some government officials on what was to be done during one of the big network virus/worm scares (Code Red, 2001, specifically) of the time. “A big ol’ DOS,” or denial-of-service attack was what the virus was going to launch.
At the time, the biggest anti-virus software developer in the US recommended disconnecting the US from the internet. Absolutely true.
“Cyberwar Boogie” is/was a jaunty ditty about trouble on the frontier in cyberspace from someone who was there. I even threw in some poor man’s Jimmy Riddle.
A recent article from the New York Post on profits from digitized music, here, presents us with a “let them eat cake” moment, courtesy of Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer.
YouTube is vilified because it returns zero to little profit in its glued-on advertising/revenue sharing schemes. “The main concern is the fact that ad revenue is not climbing in line with views,??? one industry source says to the Post.
Kyncl, so it says, countered:
“free is the future, ad supported is the future …??? on YouTube’s scheme known as “monetization” and “revenue sharing.”
“Only about 20 percent of people are historically willing to pay for music. YouTube is helping artists and labels monetize the remaining 80 percent that were not previously monetized.???
Let’s roll out what this really means.
What Google/YouTube does is what’s known as a “winner take-all” system. While YouTube, Apple iTunes, Spotify, etc have demolished barriers to entry in putting out music, the data is in on the results over the last ten years and, invariably, what is returned is highly unequal economics.
And it’s described by what’s known as a long-tail distribution. Martin Ford, in his recent book, “Rise of the Robots,” describes it like this:
“[The ubiquitous] long-tail distribution is central to the business models of the corporations that dominate the Internet sector. [These companies] are able to generate revenue from EVERY POINT on the distribution.”
It’s become obvious, though, that YOU (meaning the majority) cannot.
Ford goes on:
“Markets in goods and services [books, music, for example] that are subject to digitization inevitably evolve into winner-take-all distribution. Sales of … books and music are increasingly dominated by a tiny number of on-line distribution hubs …
It’s not an opinion, it’s supported by all the data on sales and profits now in.
So when the Google YouTube montebank says this, “YouTube is helping artists and labels monetize the remaining 80 percent that were not previously monetized,??? you’re only getting part of the story.
What you’re getting is more like the pic of an iceberg, with a little showing above water, and the rest of it, that which is going to rip a hole in your bottom, unseen.
See – almost 100 percent, or eighty percent, or 50 percent of almost zero, which is what Google\YouTube returns to you, is still almost zero. And 80 percent of even 100 almost zero streams is still pennies. You only make money if you own a piece of ALL OF IT, globally. Which, in the case of YouTube music, Google/Alphabet/Whatever does.
No amount of wishful thinking about turnarounds and the sun coming up in some near future can change any of it. The installed system has you screwed. Period.
“Sound City,” the Dave Grohl produced history of the studio in Van Nuys that defined the sound of hit classic rock, was a story waiting to be told. That Grohl rose to enable it is a big credit.
However, once Grohl’s intro is past in the first fifteen minutes, the real meat of the documentary takes flight. (Look, someone has to tell you. Dave Grohl is a bore. He’s very sincere but his real role is — cheerleader. Not historian.)
“Sound City” is an oral history, one demonstrating the success of insider network effects as amplifiers of business and the actually pretty small world of very white super hit classic rock in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.
Producer Keith Olsen tells a lot of the story. Don’t know who he is? If you have a good record collection from 1970-1989, check the backs of the albums. You’ll see that name.
Olsen custom-ordered the much talked about/glorified Neve console used at Sound City for $75,000 in 1972. And he also produced the Buckingham Nicks (that’s Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks) record there, an insubstantial LP that, coincidentally, hooked Mick Fleetwood. (Another hook was the studio’s “big room,” which rendered a perfect drum sound.)
The multi-platinum success of the “Fleetwood Mac” album featuring the duo made Sound City. A surviving owner opines that seven out of every ten records you heard on rock radio during the period were cut at his studio. The place’s other founder even managed and developed Rick Springfield.
Springfield, a subject of a similar documentary (“An Affair of the Heart”), is on camera a lot, telling how Keith Olsen had Neil Geraldo, fresh from Pat Benatar’s “Crimes of Passion” (yes, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” one of the defining hard rock tunes on radio of the era, if you don’t think so, flunk, I’m the pro on these things), do the guitar playing on his smash first album as well as the solo on “Jessie’s Girl.”
RCA sent a check to Sound City for 1 million dollars as a result of it, “Working Class Dog,” and its hit single. And Springfield met his wife, a front office girl, there.
When you really want to get right down to it, Rick Springfield was white suburban/exurban/rural middle class girl America’s sweetheart during his run. Well, multi-platinum’s worth of them, that’s millions, anyway. Sound City did that.
But by the mid-to-late Eighties Sound City was almost out of business. Digital recording was what kids and the industry wanted. The big contract band bookings, after some hair metal in the early-Eighties, dried up. Olsen built his own digital recording studio next door, left and told the studio’s new manager, Shivaun, the old place was doomed.
Then lightning struck for a second time. Nirvana booked the place for their major label debut, “Nevermind.” Recorded in 16 days at Sound City, it went straight to number one and a second wave of success breathed new life into the corpse.
The movie tries to cast the idea that it was the super-special meticulously over-engineered and hand-crafted Neve console and devotion to analog, analog, analog tape that made everything unique and the best. There’s some truth to that.
But it’s not the entire story. It was not just the circuits and accidental architecture of the building. Not just hardware, but people. Networking effects among the connected and some cosmically astounding luck (literally, Mick Fleetwood is shopping at a hippie grocer in Laurel Canyon when someone from the studio is in line with him) with hitmakers had a bunch to do with it.
The ending comes more quickly after the second fade-out. The digital world destroys Sound City for the last time. Grohl phones in to try and save something, buying the Neve for his studio.
Here “Sound City” goes off the rails.
Everyone attests that some tunes by Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield and few others, newly recorded with the Foo Fighters and Grohl, have preserved the memory of Sound City. Nope, the music is spirited but crappy. Stop, Stevie, that song, whatever it was, sucks, you yell at the screen. They even manage to make Paul McCartney, screaming and playing a cigarbox guitar on some lousy hard rock tune called “Dear Mama,” unbearable. It wasn’t just the equipment. The magic that made Sound City is gone.
Cut.
Four out of five stars if you edit out the last fifteen minutes where the Neve is with the Foo-fighters and company. Three stars if you watch the whole thing.
“Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Long Lost Rock and Roll??? is the most depressing documentary about popular music. And that’s because of our part in it, yes America’s, which I’ll get to in a bit. It’s also the best documentary on rock and roll this year.
In a nutshell, it’s about the evolution of pop music in Cambodia prior to Pol Pot and the genocides in the killing fields.
After independence from France, Cambodia had a small prospering middle class in Phnom Penh, the capitol of a nation that was primarily rural, it’s people rice farmers in the fields. An emerging prosperity literally amplified people who considered music part of the soul of the nation. Encouraged by the monarchy of the Sihanouk regime, it built a music scene around the National Radio, city dance halls and bars …
Unintentionally shown, in two minutes on the nightly news.
1. Made in America, in this context meaning generally priced out of reach of the Americans Leo Fender originally aimed his guitars and amps at. Extra points off: Leo Fender is dead and spent his last years working a company, G&L/Music Man, in competition with Fender.
2. Failure to mention the affordable instruments are all made in China and Mexico.
3. Gross misuse of “Born In the USA.”
4. Antagonizing display of gazillionaire classic rock musicians who can buy whatever they and who many people are now mighty sick of seeing all the time.
5. “Handmade,” used as if Americans in custom shops are the only people in the world who can, ahem, hand make stuff.