0 Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

June 15, 1968, #3
(listen)

There are times I'm pretty sure this is the greatest rock 'n' roll song ever made. There are other times when it only seems overplayed and trite—the penalty for loving a song too much and too well perhaps, though to date it remains resilient enough to stage occasional pulsating comebacks every few years. Part of the reason I like it so well I'm sure is that it came of the Beggars Banquet sessions, an album that takes regular turns for me as favorite Rolling Stones album (trading off generally with Sticky Fingers and Out of Our Heads, though others butt in as well now and then). Why "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was not released on the album is anybody's guess, as far as I know. I'm willing to take the mythologizing route at this point and make the extravagant claims: It's too big to be contained on an album. It is an album. It rewired our brains and forced us to redefine the very concept of what an album is, etc. Yes, I know. But there is a tremendous amount packed into this three and a half minutes. It's the kind of song with the power to inspire one to sweeping statements. That impossible trebly crashing guitar, that stomping back beat, the way it finds a space that logically belongs to somebody else a long time ago and puts its stamp all over it, Grade AAA prime rock 'n' roll. It glides, it soars, it struts and preens. Can't take your eyes off it. Older than rock 'n' roll. Older than the 20th century. But work the focus and there it is again: the Stones, Mick Jagger a-leaping about the place, cranking out the mocking, jeering, irresistible sounds of bitter envy and revelry. For better and for worse. And in sickness and health too, for that matter. In other words, and to get right to the point, "Jumpin' Jack Flash is a gas gas gas."

Detail: Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

0 Deep Purple, "Hush" (1968)

Aug. 28, 1968, #4
(listen)

Written by Joe ("Walk a Mile in My Shoes") South, originally for Billy Joe ("Down in the Boondocks") Royal, it's a bit of a crooked line to Deep Purple, which has incidentally made something of a career itself of crooked lines. "Hush" was an early top 40 hit for the hard rockers, and their biggest until "Smoke on the Water" matched it five years later. (For that matter, "Smoke on the Water" found its home on my favorite Deep Purple album, Machine Head, which also contains my favorite Deep Purple song, "Lazy," but that wasn't a hit.) For me "Hush" stood with "Itchycoo Park" as a kind of sinister, undertowing milestone of psychedelic music, drugs, and looming adult awareness. It seems quite serious, a transgressive menace of some kind though hard to put one's finger on why. "Hush" is not concerned nearly as much if at all with a drug experience, but attacks with an alluring and mysterious quality, opening up as it pleases for instrumental breaks. It is beautiful and ugly at once—homely ugly, not dangerous. I thought I didn't hear it nearly enough on the radio at the time, which has left me vaguely convinced it's overlooked or underrated, though it's hard to argue with a #4 (if you're inclined to accept the premise). More recently it has become popular among filmmakers, who have inserted it into Apollo 13, Children of Men, and other movies. Sure, I guess it's a little overdone in the dramatics department, with the arrogant guitar and heavy organ and the booming rattletrap drums and the freaking wolf howling in the distance in the overture. More operatic for sure than I would have expected from a de facto collaboration between Joe South and Deep Purple.

Detail: Deep Purple, "Hush" (1968)

0 Glen Campbell, "Wichita Lineman" (1968)

Nov. 16, 1968, #3
(listen)

Written by Jimmy Webb, produced by Al DeLory, sung by Glen Campbell, with a twangy guitar break by James Burton, the much-honored "Wichita Lineman" is still somehow vastly more than the sum of its parts. Jimmy Webb wrote "MacArthur Park" and, more importantly for our purposes here, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Galveston," more hits for Campbell. All were produced by DeLory (except "MacArthur Park," produced by Webb). I think Glen Campbell may have been a little underrated for much of his career (too commercial or something)—"Wichita Lineman" comes from the same album that also yielded the wonderful sad schmaltz of "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife." But consider the larger pattern: Wichita, Phoenix, Galveston, even MacArthur Park. The sense of place is strong with this team, and indeed, it's the specificity of the working man in Kansas that contributes so much to what makes the song work so well. It oozes a clean and bracing sadness, better in every way than any kind of self-pity, no matter how justified. The singer is working and he is sad and he is working. It describes a universal experience: unrequited love, and the requirement to keep working. The sadness is thus exponential and infinite. It has strange, affecting lines: "I hear you singing in the wire / I can hear you through the whine," which mimic the effect of hearing songs like this late at night from a strange AM radio station very far away. The Wichita lineman is still on the line. The orchestra swoops and soars. James Burton, perhaps most famous as an Elvis Presley sideman (and Ricky Nelson too), enters. Is it possible anything could ever be more beautiful on this God's green earth?

Detail: Glen Campbell, "Wichita Lineman" (1968)

0 Rosemary's Baby (1968)

USA, 136 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: Ira Levin, Roman Polanski
Photography: William A. Fraker
Music: Krysztof Komeda
Editors: Sam O'Steen, Bob Wyman
Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy, Maurice Evans, Angela Dorian, Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Grodin, Tony Curtis, William Castle, Hope Summers

Devil worship in the heart of Manhattan was not exactly a new idea in 1968—producer Val Lewton had already taken a turn at it with The Seventh Victim some two decades before. But Rosemary's Baby is a series of contradictions at multiple levels, mixing old and new, outlandish and pedestrian, fashionable and homely, into a heady brew. It starts with the contradiction of stylish European film director and screenwriter Roman Polanski at the helm of a William Castle production. Castle, whose legend is lampooned in Joe Dante's 1993 Matinee (worth seeing), was famed for his horror movie promotions in the '50s and '60s: The House on Haunted Hill ("filmed in Emergo"), The Tingler ("filmed in Percepto"), and 13 Ghosts ("filmed in Illusion-O"). The words ending in "o" refer to stunts such as vibrating motors attached to the undersides of theater seats for The Tingler.

Castle even makes a cameo in Rosemary's Baby, grinning and honking on a stogie while he waits for Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) to free up a public phone. Rosemary's Baby, both the movie and the novel it was based on, was very much of its particular moment, come swirling out of the mid-'60s and the year of the beast, 196-6-6, long hot summers and deepening of the Vietnam War, etc., when Joan Didion first began to embrace dread as a critical aesthetic and Time magazine dedicated one of its covers to the question, "Is God Dead?" That very Time magazine cover puts in an appearance at one point in Rosemary's Baby in a doctor's waiting room. Blood and fantastical images are used sparingly, but Polanski is working very self-consciously in the realm of horror, with these devil worshipers and a celebrity appearance by Satan himself. At one point, the gnawing physical pain Rosemary experiences in her pregnancy suddenly vanishes and she feels it kicking inside her. "It's alive," she cries with joy and relief, echoing the famous lines from Frankenstein. "It's alive!"



More often, Rosemary's Baby is full of low-key scenes and characters of New York City life—in many ways Farrow's audition for Hannah and her other roles in Woody Allen movies. There are times I'm convinced the best performance in the whole thing is by Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castavet. Listen close and you can hear where Christopher Walken picked up some of his tricks. Minnie is a frumpy wizened aging housewife, a wall-sharing neighbor of Rosemary and Rosemary's husband Guy (John Cassavetes). Minnie is married to Roman Castavet, the son of a notorious diabolist of another era. She worships Satan but as a wifely duty, much more relishing her time gossiping with the girls (who are also devil worshipers—this movie has more than one connection with The Seventh Victim).

Rosemary doesn't like Minnie, describes her as nosy and pushy, and it's true enough Minnie really belongs in Queens more than the midtown Manhattan Dakota (called the Bramford in the movie). Like any good New Yorker, and unlike Rosemary who is easily buffeted about, Minnie remains flinty and unmoved in the face of everything, another sharp contrast that adds to the movie's effect. At the scene where the Angel of Darkness is having his way with a drugged Rosemary, and the rest of the coven stands around the bed naked (and unattractive) and chanting, Guy is worried Rosemary may be coming to. "As long as she ate the mouse, she can't see nor hear," Minnie hisses, brushing him off. "Now sing." She pronounces "mousse" as "mouse."

Polanski balances new and old in other ways as well. Rosemary's severe Vidal Sassoon haircut, which comes midway, or trendy '60s New York in general and its easygoing, pervasive focus on youth and energy, is set off with a phalanx of old-time Hollywood players: Gordon, Elisha Cook Jr., Ralph Bellamy, Sidney Blackmer, and more, pros one and all. Tony Curtis makes a wonderfully chilling uncredited appearance in a phone call as the disembodied voice of Donald Baumgart, an actor who wins a part Guy covets and then is mysteriously blinded.

"Blinded"—nice detail. It sounds like the kind of thing midtown Satanists would ask and receive from their dark lord. Rosemary and Guy skirt the other extremes. She is from Omaha and he is from Baltimore and they are in New York for Guy to start his career as an actor. Rosemary is the classic loyal helpmeet, content to stay at home and fix up their apartment, eager to start a family. She is not really of Manhattan, just passing through. Guy is a little more complex, or at least a little more easily corrupted, as he is effectively turned the second night after meeting the Castavets. His betrayal is rapid and thorough, scoring Rosemary's isolation. "I dreamed someone was raping me. I don't know, someone inhuman," she says the morning after her night with the devil. "Thanks a lot!" Guy yells from the next room.

The name of Alfred Hitchcock is often invoked in relation to Polanski movies, which is hardly surprising because they both work the terrains of anxiety so diligently. In Rosemary's Baby, the parallels are as obvious as they ever have been. Rosemary and Mia Farrow stand in as the classic Hitchcock blonde woman, warm and giving yet framed and shot as icy-cold, the better to become the objectified focus of a kind of sublimated rage of impotence, victimized every which way and up and down, continually. It's bad enough that Rosemary is raped by the devil, but the hardest scene to watch is when she turns to her original obstetrician for help. Even though Rosemary has added up all the elements of her situation pretty accurately, she inevitably sounds insane when she tries to explain it. She is almost perfectly pitiable in that moment.

Mia Farrow gives a fine studied performance, playing best I think at the most hysterical levels, as late when she reacts to first sight of the baby. Her quiet moments are often blank and empty, worked out carefully with Polanski. She feels impossible to read sometimes, out of synch and disconnected, though on the surface clean and pleasant and all convention. There's something not right about her even as she explicitly becomes the victim. The subtle horror of the ending—"You're trying to get me to be his mother," Rosemary says to the mollifying Roman Castavet as they stand before the black crib. "Aren't you his mother?" he responds—has shifted subtly over the years, thanks in part to Mia Farrow's deeply ambiguous performance, and the way the role was written. It's harder than ever to make out in the end whether she is a monstrous mother or a victim to be pitied, even as her next actions are transparent.

Top 10 of 1968
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Night of the Living Dead
4. Salesman
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. The Swimmer
7. The Party
8. Pretty Poison
9. Hour of the Wolf
10. Shame

Detail: Rosemary's Baby (1968)

0 Night of the Living Dead (1968)

USA, 96 minutes
Director/photography/editor: George A. Romero
Writers: John A. Russo, George A. Romero
Music: Capitol / EMI Hi-Q stock recordings
Cast: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Keith Wayne, Russell Streiner, Marilyn Eastman, Judith Ridley, George Kosana

If anything is famous for being famous it is Night of the Living Dead and its rules of the road for zombie movies. These unique new monsters had been around before, or anyway the word had—I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and White Zombie (1932) at least are well worth tracking down. But you won't find a whole lot of lurching around by beings with rotted flesh, let alone intimations of viruses from outer space and such. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombies were a product of voodoo and strictly a Haitian affair. They also more represented minor problems for law enforcement, as opposed to the onset of apocalypse.

The deeper levels and fine details of the fantasy narrative, in fact, are still mostly nascent in this flagship production: the undead here have no particular taste for brains, for example, although the pseudo-scientific explanation advanced is that the brains of corpses have been "activated" by radiation. Authorities really don't know. That's part of the horror. But the cultural connecting point—that wonderful sense that masses of people around us no longer function the way they were intended, but instead only cling to materiality and sensations they once knew, ignoring everything that conflicts with a narrow world view (as exemplified in popular phrases such as "Fox News zombie")—is not explicitly emphasized at this early point.



Truth to tell, it's not really such a scary movie anymore, except insofar as zombies scare us because we recognize the rote mindlessness. I'm not sure Night of the Living Dead ever was that scary. But its sordid atmosphere still penetrates like miasma, it is unmistakably creepy, and it has high levels of soul-deadening desolation (Yeats: "The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed on the world"), which is most obvious in its ending, as purely nihilistic as it is cheap. The low-budget appurtenances all work in the favor of this movie—the weird, unprofessional photography (that's director and editor George A. Romero operating the camera), the less than competent acting (to be kind), the choppy editing, the almost complete lack of production design. All these elements, artifacts of the low budget, along with novel monsters in the zombie phenomenon itself, serve to make Night of the Living Dead an unforgettable, unnerving, and often unpleasant experience.

In fact, looking more closely, I think it's clear Romero knew what he was doing, however intuitively. This has been borne out by later developments in the franchise (where most consider the 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead to be the crown prince of this particular peerage). Indeed, Romero's partner on Night of the Living Dead, co-writer John Russo, chipped in his share of critical developments too. A lengthy legal dispute followed between Russo and Romero, ultimately producing a settlement that, among other things, gave Romero rights to a time reference and the word "dead" (e.g., Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead), while Russo won the term "living dead" and in 1985 scored another classic of the subgenre with Return of the Living Dead, which features perhaps for the first time the aforementioned desire to consume brains.

The fundamentals for all of it are found in Night of the Living Dead, of course, but two relatively deliberate aesthetic choices clarify (for me anyway) just how acutely Romero (and Russo) worked this material. They leave me feeling Night of the Living Dead remains the strongest entry for both. The first choice was casting African American Duane Jones to play the hero Ben opposite Barbra (Judith O'Dea), a mousy blonde woman in a trench coat who spends the movie cringing and shuffling in a semi-stuporous state. Later, barricaded inside a farmhouse, Ben also comes into conflict with Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman), a stereotypical angry white man. More: The movie is set in western Pennsylvania where Romero lived at the time, and was produced during the "long hot summers" of the '60s, when racial tension was high. Racial politics are never mentioned, of course—they don't belong in horror movies, generally speaking—but the simple expedient nevertheless imposes an outsize tension. They don't have to be talked about.

The other element I love is the music, which was pulled off of stock recordings first used in the 1959 movie Teenagers From Outer Space (according to IMDb.com) and also used in the movies The Devil's Messenger (1961), The Hideous Sun Demon (1959), and TV episodes of Ben Casey and Naked City (according to Wikipedia). Romero has thus made the music itself into a kind of zombie—created for another use, made into something it was never intended to be, and lurching in place in its new setting. In experiential terms, the music is familiar in unsettling ways, cheesy as hell, and works fine in every scene.

I like many other things about Night of the Living Dead too, such as the way it uses media and media reporting to fill in the narrative details and create a sense of ongoing disaster. Nearly 50 years and a slew of zombie movies, sequels, remakes, and reboots later, Night of the Living Dead might look a little shabby. In terms of basic filmmaking it has any number of flaws— poorly conceived scene to scene, poorly shot, poorly performed, etc. But it lives on, and it's coming to get you, slowly.

Detail: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

0 Jefferson Airplane, "Lather" (1968)

(listen)

People will tell you that the early albums by Jefferson Airplane are good, better than you would expect. As it happens, I am one of those people. And here is one of those songs. There are a surprising number of good ones, not just the hits, on Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter's, and Crown of Creation (with the mushroom cloud on the cover), which is the home for this plaintive meditation, so deliberately constructed. By most standards Crown of Creation is a reasonably conventional LP: 11 songs, most in the range of two to four minutes. Grace Slick wrote two of them, including "Lather," Paul Kantner and Marty Balin collaborated on two others, and the rest are by others or other combinations of others (Balin has his name on four, Kantner on three). So a tremendous amount of diverse creative energy applies. As for "Lather," among other things it's an interesting choice for the album kickoff, with fully absorbed '60s politics and values and loudly espousing them (basically, "don't trust anyone over 30" multiplied by "don't ever grow up" multiplied by reality). If this was supposed to be "acid rock," as touted, it didn't sound like anything I expected: mournful mostly, and slow, though full of tricks like typewriter keys and random vocal eruptions for texture, operating on parallel levels. The result is a weird ballad that is nonetheless affecting—not the story, which is a bit trite, but the focus brought to bear in making the music realize the story. In its outrageous way it is understated, and vice versa, and they make that look easy. I think for them it actually might have been easy, at least across those first several albums.

Detail: Jefferson Airplane, "Lather" (1968)