Old Movies

Yesterday we said goodbye to Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne. I can’t say it came as a shock. He’d been out of action for about a year. I kept wondering if he was sick, if he was coming back, or – if he was just dying. I looked on the TCM website for any posts about his condition, but there was nothing – until yesterday, that is. He was 84. Not terribly young to end your life, but, as far as I’m concerned, not nearly old enough.

He was more than a small screen personality. In fact, he was pretty low key in the personality department. He was a real film historian. The trivia he shared about each film – what went on behind the camera, the feuds, the personality conflicts – were truly fascinating to an old film buff like me (by “old,” I mean both me and the films).

In keeping with some of my other blog posts, this one is about old movies, one of my great loves.

Before there was television, film makers had the entertainment market cornered, and this gave them tremendous freedom. Of course, the Hollywood moguls were chasing the bottom line, just like any business, but films got made that probably wouldn’t today. In today’s Hollywood, nobody’s taking any chances. Since the endless stream of zombie and super hero drivel never gets an Oscar nod, the studios occasionally greenlight something with a little more substance. I confess, I haven’t seen all – or even most – of this year’s Oscar contenders. I wait until they come on cable. But, for me, even the crème de la crème of modern movies falls far short of classics like Vertigo, which I saw for the umpteenth time the other night. It grabs me every time. Maybe it’s because of my secret imaginary love affair with Kim Novak. I know, not the greatest actress of all time, but someone with a haunting and haunted beauty and mystique that comes, I think, from the person, not the actor. I saw the interview Robert Osborne did with her a few years ago, and she broke down and cried when she talked about being bi-polar before anyone knew what that was, and mean moguls like Harry Cohn at Columbia pushing her around, and the enormous pressure that was on her to keep being a movie star. I don’t think she knew what she was in for when she started down that road. So, maybe it’s that suppressed anguish that comes through her performances as a certain secret, quiet reserve that I find fascinating.

My favorite directors are Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. But Billy was a triple threat because he wrote as well as directed all his films – and produced some as well. In fact, he started out as a writer in the ‘20s, while still in Germany, and made his bones in 1939 (the greatest year for movies?), co-writing Ninotchka, which starred Greta Garbo and was directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch. But, for me, the reason Wilder trumps (god, I hate that word!) Hitch is that Wilder’s work ran the gamut from noir to comedy, to Hitchcockian thrillers. In fact, I think my favorite – and one of the least-known Wilder films – is 1957’s Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama in which Wilder out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock, with more twists than a pretzel, and a surprise twist at the end that, I guarantee you, you will not see coming..

So, if I was stranded on a desert island, with nothing but a TV and a DVD player, and I had to pick all the works of just one director to spend my time with, it would be Billy Wilder. His gravestone reads: “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.”

“Stuy Town”

If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve figured out by now that they are mostly about the past. Actually, not mostly, exclusively. That’s where my expertise lies; not in the present. Most of the music and tech stuff that’s happening now, simply doesn’t interest me. My publisher (I have a music-related memoir coming out soon) wants me to blog about all things music. They want me to be Bob Lefsetz (as if!). If I had one-tenth the knowledge of the current music scene and all the latest tech that Bob has, I still couldn’t produce a tenth of his output. I’ve gotten as many as three missives from Bob in a single day. Sorry, guys, that’s not me.

Instead, here’s a little taste of memoir from my childhood that’s not in my book, “Making It: Music, Sex and Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock,” coming to a car wash near you in March or April…

Even though I was lucky enough to grow up in Manhattan during the ‘50s and ‘60s, one of the most interesting and exciting times and places in the modern era, I always resented living in Stuyvesant Town. It had no character; all the buildings looked alike. It was boring. My family lived at 14 Stuyvesant Oval, one of 35 identical red brick, 12-story buildings on a sprawling 80-acre parcel of land that stretched between 14^th Street on the south and 20^th Street on the north, First Avenue on the west and Avenue C and the East River on the east. If you didn’t have a good sense of direction, you could easily get lost going home at night and wind up at the wrong building.

But my parents were nothing if not sensible, and getting on the waiting list for an apartment in Stuyvesant Town was the sensible thing to do during the big housing shortage that followed World War II. We moved there from my grandmother’s apartment in the Bronx when I was four years old, and just before my younger sister was born, in 1949. Stuyvesant Town was barely finished then, with construction crews still working on some of the many playgrounds that dotted this family-friendly development.

The Baby Boom was in full swing, and “Stuy Town” was crawling with kids. My first best friend was a kid named Barry Abrams, who lived in the next building, 12 Stuyvesant Oval. The only difference between our two buildings was that his had a red door and mine had a green door. He had a swarthy complexion and jet black hair, which he wore in a “brush” cut that stood straight up, presaging the punk look. Barry was the ‘50s equivalent of a “techie.” He could take things apart, fix them, and put them back together; he had “mechanical aptitude.” I had only imagination. Between the two of us we made a promising pair of 10-year-old criminals.

He figured out a way of getting on top of the elevators in our buildings. There was an outer door, which opened on hinges, but which would only open when the elevator was at your floor. Then there was the sliding door of the elevator itself. The sliding door would not close, and the elevator would not move until the outer door was closed. Barry figured out that the outer door had a piece of metal that fit into a receptor in the wall that completed a circuit, and this enabled the elevator door to close and the elevator to depart for other floors. He created the simplest of devices to game this system: an angle brace made out of metal with adhesive tape wrapped around the long end for insulation. The elevator would arrive at our floor, we would push the button for the floor below, holding it on the taped end to avoid being electrocuted, he would plug the angle brace into the rectangular hole that was the receptor, the circuit would complete, the elevator door would close and the elevator would go down one floor and stop. With the outer door still open, we could then climb on top of the elevator. Once the outer door closed, we would hang out on top of the elevator and see where it would take us.

Barry soon figured out that there was a mechanism that would enable the outer door to open that we could control from inside the elevator shaft. It was just a kind of a trip lever that we could press. If we pressed the lever before the elevator reached its floor, the elevator would stop—even if it was in between floors.

So now, here’s where the criminal fun began: We used to play with model cars that had mini jet engines. The engines were fueled by pellets called “Jet-X,” which was ignited with a wick that was built into the pellet. Jet-X created a powerful lot of smoke. So, what we would do would be to wait until a nice-sized group of people were in the elevator, stop it between floors, light the wick, and drop a smoke bomb made with a cigar tin and a Jet-X pellet through one of the small holes that lined the top of the elevator (for ventilation, no doubt). Then we would climb out on the floor above and leave the elevator full of our victims, coughing and choking on the smoke, stuck in between floors, and probably believing they were doomed. Of course, once we closed the outer door on the floor above, the elevator started again. Fortunately, there were no heart attacks and nobody was injured, but we sure scared the shit out of them.

We only did this a few times. Ultimately even we realized this was wicked and dangerous beyond the pale, and we quit before something really bad happened.

In retrospect, I am both horrified and amused at the havoc that can be wrought by two bored ten-year-olds, anxious to make an impact on society.

 

Should Old Creations Be Forgot?

My dresser. L to R: art deco dresser valet — bronze w. pink glass lid (c. 1930), art nouveau lamp — brass and glass (1920s), Center: porcelain fairy (1920s), Gruen Curvex wristwatch (1930s), teak wood carved box w. ivory elephant inlay (origin unknown). The dresser is also art deco, but the veneer has chipped away over the years.

Happy New Year!

As I get older I become less and less ashamed of the fact that I really believe old stuff was better. Go ahead, say it: “You’re an old fogy. Old fogies always think the ‘good old days’ were better.” But, alas, now I’m sure it’s true. Not so long ago, I used to try to keep up with all the cutting-edge trends in music—especially when I worked in the music industry—, literature, art, architecture…politics. I never wanted to become an old fogy. But now, I fly my fogy flag high. I am firmly convinced that all of those things peaked in the past.

In the case of pop music, it was the ‘60s. Art, sculpture, and literature had a number of high points over the centuries. But I think, if you were an artist or writer in Paris during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, you were at the epicenter of an extraordinary time that would never come again: a belle epoch.

Let’s face it, kids, we live in a crumby time.

Charlie Parker forever changed the direction of jazz in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, just as The Beatles brought a sea change to rock in 1963.

And the films. Conventional wisdom says Hollywood movies peaked in 1939—I guess because of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. But, all through the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock cranked out immortal works of art on celluloid that have withstood the test of time. What has Hollywood produced lately? Another super hero sequel. Or a sequel to a sequel. Lasting works of art in almost every field have been all but eviscerated by the profit motive. No, let’s call it what it is: the greed motive.

Growing up in New York City, and then Boston, I was used to seeing buildings that dated back to the nineteenth, and even the eighteenth centuries. Out here in La La Land, you don’t see things like that. Here, everything is new—well, almost. It was in L.A., in the early ‘70s, that I took a part time job in an antique shop called Razzamatazz. It specialized in art deco and art nouveau, terms I was more or less unfamiliar with.

Syd, the owner, gave me a crash course, and I immediately fell in love with the artifacts of the early twentieth century. When you pick up an objet d’art from that period, you can feel the love and pride the craftsman put into it. Back then, there was more time to make things; things that would last. A person could craft an object with his hands and not have corporate oligarchs breathing down his neck, saying “Time is money. This will cut into our profit margin. Let’s mass-produce!” It was another time and, in many ways, a better time.

I started taking my salary in merchandise. I collected furniture, lamps, art prints, and things that defy description (I had a spherical candy dish made of smoked glass inspired by the Perisphere of the 1939 New York World’s Fair). I still have many of those things today. The furniture has had some hard knocks over the years, some fragile items were shattered by my careless and crazy lifestyle, but a few things have survived.

I started buying most of my clothes in vintage clothing shops—mostly shirts and jackets. The jackets have held up remarkably well over the years, but, alas, I did have to jettison some great shirts which finally succumbed to dry cleaning and old age. Now, the so-called vintage clothing shops are filled with the polyester crap I wouldn’t wear when it was new.

I surround myself with the objects of the past, and they remind me that there was a time when people took pride in the work they did, in the things they made with their hands.

 

Spiritual, Not Religious

Like a lot of people in the ‘60s, it was a psychedelic experience that led me to spirituality. I had always disdained religion, believing it was a lot of superstitious nonsense. Something dreamed u…

Source: Spiritual, Not Religious

Spiritual, Not Religious

Like a lot of people in the ‘60s, it was a psychedelic experience that led me to spirituality.

I had always disdained religion, believing it was a lot of superstitious nonsense. Something dreamed up by people in ancient times by ambitious men who wanted to gain power over the ignorant masses. It made the masses feel better about their miserable existences to think there was a reward waiting for them in Heaven—if they were good, that is. If you were bad, of course, you would burn in Hell. It was the glue of society that gave them a code of behavior, a sense of right and wrong. It was also a divider of cultures—“My God is the only true God, and if you don’t bow down to Him, we will massacre you all.”—that sort of thing. I loved the bit by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks in the 2,000 Year Old Man record where Reiner asks Brooks, “What was the first national anthem?” And Brooks replies, “Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave 76.” In that simple and riotously true line, Mel Brooks put his finger on most of what was wrong with humanity: nationalism and religion. They were the same. Ways to divide people and make one culture feel superior.

As a kid growing up in New York City, I came in contact with many people of different cultures, races and religions. I looked at all people the same: were they kind and nice, or were they mean and deceitful? Beyond that, every kind of person was cool in my book. Even before I heard the 2,000 Year Old Man in 1961, I saw that religion was bullshit. In 1958 I turned thirteen, and my parents made me go to Hebrew school and get Bar Mitzvah’d. They didn’t believe in God, they didn’t have an ounce of spirituality about them. They just did it to placate my grandparents, and to fit in with all the other Jewish families with whom they were friendly. I got all that right away. I felt like a pawn in their game. I refused to learn Hebrew (it was all backwards anyway), but I couldn’t refuse to do the Bar Mitzvah. They gave me the Hebrew text I was supposed to read in phonetic English. But I never stopped being a rebel and a nonconformist.

In college, my buddy Steve and I got our hands on some pure Mescaline. That was my first trip. Steve and I both experienced the same revelations: everything and everyone in the world—in the universe—is connected. There is an unseen reality above and beyond the one we perceive every day. It’s a reality that’s unfiltered, where you are bombarded with information, where you see the pure genius of creation, and where you know that it was created by a power much bigger and greater than anything we puny humans could possibly wrap our puny brains around. It is not related to any religion I had ever experienced.

Later, I learned about Hinduism, Buddhism, and Yoga. I sat at the feet of Swami Satchidananda. He was dispensing the same information as the psychedelics I had taken. There was a unity and a humility in this Eastern wisdom that was very different from the Judeo-Christian ideas I had grown up with. It had the ring of truth, and it set me on a path I have tried to follow all my adult life.

I never joined any organized religion, but the yogis and the Buddhists, they don’t care if I join or not. The wisdom is there for anyone to take—for free.

The Old Music Biz: An Artist’s-Eye View

All through my career as a recording artist I was plagued with talentless and incompetent people messing with my work.

It seems to me, in the ‘60s especially, there were people in positions of power in the music business that knew nothing about the creative process, were not especially creative themselves, and yet professed to tell me, the artist, how to do my job. They all claimed to know what sells. The truth is, nobody really knows. I almost always knuckled under to them because my living depended on it. I was scuffling and scrounging to eek a living out of the music business and, as humiliating as it was, I had to go along to get along. It resulted in watered down and sometimes grotesquely altered versions of my songs. And it didn’t sell.

In 1965 my first band, The Lost, started recording for Capitol Records. Capitol had The Beatles and The Beach Boys, the two biggest rock groups in the world, so naturally we were thrilled. Surely they knew what they were doing. But the people we encountered seemed clueless about what to do with a nascent rock band who had no studio experience. We were clueless too, and so we did what we were told. In those days, the term “record producer” was not in common parlance. We were assigned an “A&R man” by the faceless men that ran the New York office of the record company. They had never heard us. Our A&R man, likewise, had never heard us before we showed up in Capitol’s New York Studio A to record our first sides. There were no demos, no pre-production, no reviewing and choosing the best songs. No discussion at all. That was all done by us, independent of the label. And, like I say, we were clueless. We were literally thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim. Today, when I hear the results of that first session, I shudder. The songs were not catchy or commercial, the sound was terrible, and our voices were inchoate. The nameless, faceless powers that be determined that none of those first three tracks, recorded in August 1965, were suitable for release. For once, they were right.

The next batch of tunes was recorded in September and October, and reflected our intense efforts to improve. But still there was no creative input from the A&R man. As I recall, he just sat in the booth with the engineer (an indifferent older guy, who didn’t appear to have any feel for rock ‘n’ roll) and say “Do it again” or “That’s a take.” The technology didn’t allow for much overdubbing, so we had to record all the instruments at once, and they didn’t know how to record loud guitars without them leaking into the drum track, so they kept asking us to turn down. The resulting sound was thin and anemic—not like we sounded live. In spite of this, the October session yielded two tracks the powers that be deemed worthy of being sides A and B of our first single.

We toured extensively in and around our home base, Boston, and across upstate New York. Our local promo man, Al Coury—one of the few Capitol guys we liked and trusted—worked the record hard, and we made a lot of local charts in New England and a few cities in upstate New York. Al was the one who got us the opening slot of The Beach Boys East Coast tour. That was in spring, 1966. But we had no follow-up single to our first single that had run its course by then.

In August, 1966—too late to capitalize on the Beach Boys exposure—Capitol released one more single. But we were unhappy with the recording, and convinced Capitol to pull it back. We recorded the same song again in a local Boston studio. The second version was way better but, since Capitol had already sent the first version to radio stations and then asked them NOT to play it, version two got no airplay. Shortly after that, we were dropped by the label. This fiasco was a result of the collective incompetence of us and the label. We had no actual management; nobody giving us well-informed career direction, no clear strategy at all that I can remember.

We recorded fifteen tracks for Capitol over a twelve-month period. Only four sides were ever released (counting the two on the aborted second single). In 1999, Lost devotee Erik Lindgren and I were, after ten years of trying, at last able to license all the Capitol tracks and release them on a CD on Erik’s label, Arf! Arf! There could’ve been a pretty good album in those tracks, but Capitol had a rule: if you don’t have a nationally charting single, you don’t get to do an album. And so our album remained in the can for more than three decades.

The Lost was well known and loved by many in the Northeast. But we were all nineteen and twenty years old, and mostly left to make all our own decisions, many of them not that wise. We hung on for another few months without a record deal and then disbanded.

In spite of all the bad decisions, The Lost was as close as I ever came to being a rock star, even though I went on to form and join four more bands, three of which landed major label record deals. I kept plugging away right up into the ‘80s.

It’s easy to blame other people for your own failures, but the bottom line is, I made a lot of bad decisions because I was motivated by desperation. Desperation to make a living and desperation to get my music out there—even if it was massacred by incompetent producers.

In the music business—like all businesses—success or failure depends a lot upon luck. But maturity, focus and hard work are also essential. In retrospect, I find myself wanting in all three.