0 Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris" (1974)

Aug. 24, 1974, #22
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Of all the many musical masks worn by Joni Mitchell, it is her turn as pop tunesmith I most favor. Court and Spark is the best one-stop for it and "Free Man in Paris" could well be my favorite of all on that album, although I hate to be pinned down on these things. As a lustrous expression of joy, high-flown stepping into a big bottom, a jouncing exuberant blast of giddy sunshine, with those lush howling self-harmonies that make it snap (her knack for which is the best feature on the album, woven even into the sad songs), it has few parallels. Even Stevie Wonder might have to take a back seat on the joy front for a minute. It sounds like Paris, in spring, fresh air and flowers and the streets warm and easy and charming to stroll in the afternoon. It sounds like Paris, it sounds like spring, it sounds like liberty. It is captivating that way from the first time it's heard—an unbelievably sweet pop confection. Yet for all of the things it might have been about—think of that expression, free man in Paris—I must say it is a little disappointing that it is about David Geffen. But so go the ways of rock mythologizing. Don't pay attention to that. Try to put it out of your mind. Stop thinking about David Geffen. "There was nobody calling me up for favors / And no one's future to decide / You know I'd go back there tomorrow / But for the work I've taken on / Stoking the star maker machinery / Behind the popular song." I said STOP THAT.

Detail: Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris" (1974)

0 Roberta Flack, "Feel Like Makin' Love" (1974)

July 6, 1974, #1
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Not to be confused with the Bad Company song of the same title one year later, although with the ongoing corporatization of rock 'n' roll in those years they perhaps stand equally as heralds of a new way to sell, sell, sell w/ sex to undazing hippies and other children—"adult contemporary" and "classic rock," by name. I was less aware of that at the time with all the other breakdowns going on. Indeed, I have wonderful memories of this song on the air in the late summer of 1974. I mean literally the air, not just radio. I heard it swelling from apartment windows and cars most unexpectedly, most welcome, as walking with friends on the Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis one night, on one of those gorgeous, still, warm but not hot August nights, coming from a taxicab. I'm prude enough that the frankness of the song made me blush a little—have always thought "making love" an awkward way to talk about sex (with or without our friend the gerund-friendlyin' apostrophe). But that's just me. On the other hand, Roberta Flack sounds like a woman in love, not in heat (again, compare Bad Company for the dopey male version of the usage), and that is what makes this song particularly beautiful and affecting in spite of my efforts to resist it. It is indeed a harbinger of the adult contemporary to come (more often than not a problem, I admit, though I like perhaps surprising amounts of it in the '70s), with its sultry, swirling, softly treading electric accompaniment. The lyrics unfold a wonderfully romantic and domestic scene that sounds as healthy as a walk on the beach, with a happy ending. Winner.

Detail: Roberta Flack, "Feel Like Makin' Love" (1974)

0 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

USA, 83 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
Photography: Daniel Pearl
Music: Wayne Bell, Tobe Hooper
Editors: J. Larry Carroll, Sallye Richardson
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen, John Dugan, Jim Siedow, John Larroquette

(Spoilers ahead if you can call them spoilers.) I had seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only once until recently. That was enough to convince me it was one of the scariest movies ever made. The decision to look at it again was thus soon hampered by gnawing unease and procrastination at the prospect. I realized the last movie that had given me this kind of problem was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the link is clear. Neither particularly involves the supernatural, unworldly monsters, and/or abstract forces of evil. It's just human depravity, and that's enough.

To be sure, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is fiendishly conceived and full of exaggerations for effect large and small. Based loosely on the legends of Wisconsin serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein, it seems to take a special glee in the quotidian intricacies of the butchering industry as well as solemnly nodding over tales of how Native Americans put to use every part of the whales and buffaloes they slew. So along the way we find a lot of human bones, hair, skin and such (and feathers, in a room where a live rooster squats in a cage hung from the ceiling) draped all over everything, including the faces of the killers. But the movie is also remarkably free of blood and gore, though in turn that may be offset by larger-than-usual doses of screaming, which at one point toward the end seems to go on for 25 minutes or more.



Free of blood and gore but it never shrinks from making sure we understand exactly what's going on. After all, you really don't have to see a lot of blood or brain matter to understand that a sledgehammer to the skull (with the sickening sound) is brutal. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is obviously a low-budget production but director and co-writer Tobe Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl worked with what they had, putting the supersaturated color of the cheap film stock to work in methodical if lurid dimensions. Red and yellow really pop and red and yellow things are particularly unsettling. The images often have a clinical feel to them, as if studied through a lens. And they're not afraid to let the screen go black when it suits them, worrying you to death at that point with the noises. The Saw franchise actually owes it quite a bit in terms of look and feel.

The range in tones is amazing and goes beyond the visuals, keeping viewers continually off-balance. It lumbers with deadly pace. There's a lot of setup in the beginning about grave robbers, corpses, slaughterhouse procedures, and an extremely unpleasant hitchhiker. But all of it is essential to what makes this such an extraordinarily powerful experience. There are five teens and it seems to take forever to kill the first one. But we have been so lulled by that time that it's as shocking then as it is efficient. The next three go down fast, leaving only Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), perhaps the original "final girl." In the last third the movie goes places I'm not sure have been matched anywhere yet, notably a dinner table scene where the demented family makes fun of the blubbering terrified Sally (and later when Grandpa can't keep hold of a hammer). It is abjectly horrifying yet also hilarious but it is laughter inside of a void. The scene may be funny, but unlike the later ironic self-referential approaches of Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, and others, we're not really in on the joke. They could be making fun of us next and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it, and it wouldn't be so funny then.

Well, actually, there is one thing we could do about it, which is the thing Sally does: scream your head off and run if you can and don't ever stop screaming. Marilyn Burns, who died recently at 65, never did much in movies besides this and it's not hard to see why. There's not a lot of range there. But it is an iconic role and she owns it completely, working effectively off the low-budget trappings, letting the story itself winnow away the others—an altogether distracting crew, including the raw vulnerability of Sally's disabled brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), who travels in a wheelchair, and his haunting face. Finally it is just Sally and the fundamentals of life and death. And no one can argue she isn't one hell of a screamer.

I have some sense that people who do not watch horror movies on principle want an explanation from those of us who do—"enjoy" them is not exactly the right word, at least for me, though obviously there can be elements of camp that provide a good old-fashioned entertainment to many (e.g., The Bride of Frankenstein). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre inevitably became a franchise and a camp supervillain emerged, one "Leatherface," the artist butcher of this film (Gunnar Hansen), who then became just another action figure with Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. The reasons for watching are complex, a mixture of many different motivations, some so familiar now as to be hackneyed: Catharsis, for example, the exhilaration of surviving, which is also the kick with amusement park rides. Or testing limits—seeing how far "out there" you can go and still get back to a safe place (the implicit question: is it possible to go too far?). Then there's flinty realism—looking at the horror with a cold eye because it is real. This can be something of a passive-aggressive position, favoring things that are ugly by design simply because they are ugly (justified because "real," which I think, enlarging some, applies to believers in regard to the movies that are more overtly supernatural, wherein the "real" becomes Satan and evil). But I suspect all this is more like the proverbial 10% of the iceberg that's visible—a lot of business lurks out of sight in the unconscious, even among those who don't like horror movies. My curiosity about how or why these movies have such a powerful effect might be it. Aside from the violence, which looks like it hurts for sure (not to mention maims and kills, and I'm opposed to that), why does this mayhem frighten me, charge me with adrenaline, make it hard to breathe easy, worry me about the dark corners at night? It's only a movie, right? One thing's sure. Something keeps drawing me back.

Detail: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

0 Bread (1974)

I have to be resigned when I go off on my binges of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which was not his real name either) to reencountering books I have already read because I couldn't remember the title when I was swooping them up in my frenzies. It's too overwhelming to consider reading them in order—over 50 titles, published between 1956 and 2005, not to mention I happen to know some of the early entries are rough (because I have tried to read them in order at least once before). So I just plunge on in when the McBain mood strikes again. Bread is where I started on my recent rounds, and as it happens it's not one I had read before. It's got an intricate plot involving fraud and / or larceny of some kind and eventually multiple murders and assaults. It introduces an interesting character from another precinct who would go on to become a series semi-regular, Fat Ollie Weeks, a bone-deep racist with disconcertingly good police instincts, who among other things slips into an annoying W.C. Fields routine when he's in a good mood. I was just reading on Wikipedia how much McBain felt he owed Jack Webb and Dragnet—I don't think I had known that before, though it makes sense, and indeed (full disclosure) Jack Webb is one of my own favorite filmmakers, within and beyond the procedural subgenre. Because of the time frame when I first became acquainted with McBain I have more often associated the 87th Precinct series with Hill Street Blues, which owes it many obvious debts. But yes, now that you mention it, even that opening disclaimer McBain used at the front of all these books—"The city in these pages is imaginary," etc.—derives quite clearly from Dragnet's "This is the city, Los Angeles," etc. Sometime I will have to get into the matter of police procedurals a little more, because I'm not always on board with the most popular ones in this post- / hyper-forensics period we now live in (e.g., the whole CSI franchise is lost on me). Homely true-crime TV trumps them consistently I think. But there's a lineage last seen in the Law & Order standard-bearer (less so the offshoots) that wends back through Hill Street Blues and Dragnet and finds a nice place to dwell in the majority of these great McBain novels and stories. Read 'em by the handful.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Bread (1974)

0 Lenny (1974)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Bob Fosse
Writer: Julian Barry
Photography: Bruce Surtees
Music: Ralph Burns
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Valerie Perrine, Jan Miner, Stanley Beck, Gary Morton

In the chronicles of the careers of stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, director Bob Fosse, and the movie star Dustin Hoffman, Lenny may well be considered a low point. Downbeat, dreary, black and white—something of a willful distortion of a figure now basically obscure beyond "free speech" nuances of legal interpretation and general '60s martyr-mongering, where his reputation largely rests. Released in a particularly emblematic year of '70s cinema, overshadowed by Chinatown, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, and many others (not to mention box office juggernauts The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport 1975), Lenny sometimes seems all but lost to history now.

For me, at 19, having dutifully plowed through Albert Goldman's Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! and in the process of attempting to construct an authentic bohemian existence for myself in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was a revelation and running away my favorite movie of that year. I saw it numerous times. The Goldman biography was written before his books on Elvis Presley and John Lennon revealed Goldman to be a mean-spirited distortion artist, and some of those problems plague his Bruce project as well, albeit in milder form. For the most part they are cleaned up in the movie, which then as now is much less about Bruce anyway and much more about Fosse and Hoffman and their egos and pushing the boundaries of moviemaking.



In fact, what I always liked most about Lenny was the Bob Fosse style, adapting the original Julian Barry play (which I otherwise don't know), making it stagy and showy with razzamatazz editing, bold use of light and dark in black and white, and an elliptical, glancing narrative style that has only the dimmest acquaintance with sequential chronology, yet tells a story very well. I suspect I liked Lenny so much because Cabaret had proved too challenging for my teen self in terms of its sexual license and the various dangerous implications of freedom (later I changed my mind). Besides being more or less strictly heterosexual, Lenny also offers visions of a world I thought I knew better, the underground West Coast bohemian life of the '50s shading into the Kennedy era, with its cool jazz and fondness for language that comes in powerful torrents.

Lenny is full of that, underlined by the grainy black and white scenes of people in apartments getting high and nodding out to jazz, laidback, low-key, drinking wine and talking the cool talk, dig—visual representations of what I was reading about avidly in books like Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians. Lenny Bruce was not exactly in that set, but moved easily enough around it, coming somewhat later than its main figures, if Goldman's book and this movie are to be trusted. In many ways, Lenny was exactly what I was looking for: the gritty realities of decadence and Nazis in Weimar Germany giving way to the gritty self-absorption of bohemians in post-WWII California. I thought Fosse was totally making the right move.

The most confounding element of the whole thing, of course, remains Dustin Hoffman. At 19, I was dazzled by the brilliance. Now I am a little more baffled by the bullshit. Until then—notably in The Graduate, but also in Midnight Cowboy, Papillon, Little Big Man, and other of his virtuoso performances (many still ahead, of course)—his persona tends to be a person who is a bit of a square and conventional. Ratso might have known the score, but what he wanted was to live in Florida. When I sat down to look at Lenny again for the first time in probably decades the first thing I noticed was how many shots are framed to make Lenny Bruce look like Benjamin Braddock. Hoffman and Fosse are playing equally to it, and it's a little unsettling, occasionally too much entirely.

In terms of a monster of language, well, this is the movie where Hoffman proves he can play exactly that, just as Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, The Rain Man, and many others provided "stretch" roles for him to flex his considerable cinematic acting skills. The let us say "orality" of this picture is emphasized from the opening shot, an extreme close-up of Valerie Perrine's mouth as she prepares to answer questions for an off-camera documentary filmmaker. The obscured voice of that filmmaker is Bob Fosse's, by the way, and spinning reels on reel-to-reel tape recorders come to take the role of the reporters in Citizen Kane, attempting to piece together the puzzle of a life. This is another strength of the movie, as the freedom for jagged, abrupt movements of the camera and editing (Cassavettes style, yet another note) is afforded by explicitly making it a faux documentary.

The only surprise, in retrospect, is that it opens on Perrine's mouth rather than Dustin Hoffman's. It is very much a movie of Dustin Hoffman talking, talking, talking—numerous stand-up routines at various stages of Bruce's career, which eventually devolve into ranting and reading from trial transcripts, and then scenes from those trials themselves, with Bruce trying to get a word in edgewise to the legal pedantry and succeeding to the extent that he is jailed frequently and harassed. He had their attention. The climactic scene, shot in long from the back of a small club, shows Bruce zonked out on heroin, wandering the stage barefoot and bare-legged in an overcoat, paranoid, mumbling, muttering incoherently, never getting it together to make a point, let alone crack a joke. It reads in many ways like a grotesquely puffed-up piece of self-indulgent improv on the part of An Ambitious and Important Actor, but it turns out to be a verbatim reproduction of a tape-recorded show by Bruce.

I'm calling Lenny the movie of the year for 1974 because it's a sentimental favorite, and because, if you haven't seen it yet, or not in a long time, it just might be more skillful than you think. There's a case to be made for Hoffman chewing the scenery, obviously, and a sadder one about an iconic stand-up comic who doesn't actually seem to have much of a legacy, and yeah, after Star 80 I can see the case for it being the least of Fosse's movies. Yet however much the underpinnings of Lenny may or may not have decayed out from under it, it is simply so good at doing what it does that it's still well worth seeing.

Top 10 of 1974
1. Chinatown
2. Lenny
3. Young Frankenstein
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
5. A Woman Under the Influence
6. The Conversation
7. Thieves Like Us
8. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
9. Blazing Saddles
10. Phantom of the Paradise

Other write-ups: The Godfather: Part II

Detail: Lenny (1974)

0 Phoebe Snow, "Take Your Children Home" (1974)

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In which I disclose both methodology and a base sentimentality that motivates me: One reason I never made it as a journalist was lack of an ability to stay on top of things and fix on what interests a wide or general (or even niche and specific) audience, which is mostly a matter of keeping up, which probably just means I'm lazy or a crank or both. But there you go. Instead of swimming the zeitgeist, I have to make long lists way far in advance and plod through them in order. Phoebe Snow's lovely "Take Your Children Home" made it to the list because in 2009 it became the unofficial theme song of the death of my cat Floyd—paralyzed me with sadness when shuffle suddenly began insisting on it. Phoebe Snow's death came in 2011, the last grace note in her own sad story of children found, lost, taken home. And now my time to write about this song has come in the same week that my cat Esme has died—Floyd's sister, who outlived him by more than four years to make it to 16 years old. My constant companion, and best friend in many ways. "Death has no mercy," as the Dead put it, and I feel that acutely right now. But I feel grace at work too, putting this song in my way. It's more playful than I'm letting on, a shambolic meditation on carousing, but I hear (or project) such a world of wisdom in the title phrase, rooted in the here and now but facing the eternal. Leaning into the eternal, actually. "Take your children home, I am one." Death as a matter of going home. So even as this song makes me appallingly sad ("children" being so vulnerable by definition), it comforts me too. I like to think that Floyd and Esme are safe at home now, where I took them.

Detail: Phoebe Snow, "Take Your Children Home" (1974)

0 Chris Bell, "Though I Know She Lies" (1974)

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Chris Bell's one and only solo album came out in 1992 but he had been gone nearly 14 years by then, dead at 27 from a late night auto accident in East Memphis. He was a founding member of Big Star, mostly estranged from the band after the first album as Alex Chilton came more to take the central role. I Am the Cosmos truly sounds like a lost Big Star album. In fact, it also helps explain some of the curves and bends of Chilton's own post-Big Star career, which veered much more wildly, from real good bluesy stuff to effective noise squalls and back again to these dark nights of the adolescent soul, at which Big Star particularly excelled. In my opinion Third/Sister Lovers is as good as it ever got. That was long after Chris Bell had left the band, but Cosmos, recorded at approximately the same time, is nevertheless at the heart of the project, it can't be denied. Both albums are possessed of a similar eerie spirit, disconnected lost souls wandering the audio hollows of a recording studio. "Though I Know She Lies" closes the original '92 release, letting Bell retreat all the way into himself as the story turns blankly naturalistic, and thus bleak. As far as I'm concerned it's the deepest point reached by the album, which is otherwise the usual story about wanting a girl, told from multiple points of view, enlarged thematically as unrequited love, obsession, depression, yearning and failure to connect, even Christian faith. Just another story about a guy who liked a girl who didn't like him, and there are a lot of those. But seen from certain angles Bell makes it look like looking into the abyss.

Detail: Chris Bell, "Though I Know She Lies" (1974)