0 Patti Smith Group, "Because the Night" (1978)

May 13, 1978, #13
(listen)

I did not know or suspect for a long time that this is a Bruce Springsteen song, and now I have to wonder how I ever missed it. Recorded in 1977, it has the heroic thrust and optimistic face to the sun of his autopilot mode down to the thundering drums and tinkling circling piano intro. It's co-credited to Patti Smith because she reworked Springsteen's original lyric, though Wikipedia tells me he has also performed it over the years with his own lyric. I hope that doesn't mean tensions because I have long indulged a romantic sense that this was the result of a serendipitous connection between two New Jersey natives. Certainly their personas are simpatico here. Smith is a natural at the Springsteen swagger, which had to come from somewhere, and the tumbling surreal bent of her wordplay is part of what makes it work. I have to think the romantic view holds. They're playing and singing the hell out of it. The guitar solo from Lenny Kaye is a model of economy, a hallmark of its times (compare Iggy Pop with James Williamson, "I'm Bored"). And Springsteen had a way of insinuating himself into the greater New York City area elite, as remember also he showed up mumbling, "Well hey, man, that's just a lie" on Lou Reed's masterpiece title cut of Reed's Street Hassle LP. Springsteen was likely dealing with a fair amount of pent-up creative energy at the time, precluded from releasing anything while a legal battle with his former management was resolved. The dispute erupted shortly after he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, three years before. Problems, problems. And out of all that came this wonderful surprise hit song in the spring of 1978.

Detail: Patti Smith Group, "Because the Night" (1978)

0 The Stand (1978)

I saw some list awhile back that ranked Stephen King's books—he's up to over 60 now. I was only a little surprised to see The Stand top the list, which did not specify an edition: either the ginormous edition originally published or the unexpurgated edition that added some 400 more pages to that, evidently after King had won the authorial clout to add back requested editorial cuts. I've only got the first version; I understand the longer version isn't that much of an improvement. I also happened to be watching Twin Peaks AND The Lord of the Rings at the time, so I had my hands full with fantastical showdowns between good and evil. King's mammoth novel starts with a super-flu virus that wipes out better than 99% of the human population on the planet. All in itself that qualifies as a staggering vision. The survivors sort themselves into Team Good (headed up by a centenarian African American woman known as Mother Abagail, who lives in Nebraska) and Team Evil, headed up by a demon known as Randall Flagg, the Walkin Dude. Team Evil is headquartered in Las Vegas (of course) and Team Good in Boulder, Colorado. The to-do list for the novel is giant, starting with wiping out most human beings. Thus a lot of the action is devoted to setting up the many, many pieces—there are dozens of significant characters—and putting them through their paces. It was a page-turning thrill ride my first time through but has been relatively more sedate since. In fact, I've only managed to get all the way through it again once (hence the real reason for my reluctance to go for the bigger version). As with all of the King I've read it's as compulsively readable as you'd ever want the first time. After that you start to see how he does it more—it's often a matter of repetition, stroking out the main points like brushing an animal. I have no quarrel whatsoever with calling him the master of horror literature for our times—also its best critic. King is good at striking the affable tone that draws you in and stands by all the way as your friend, alternating more secretly with the creep who will say and do anything to get a rise out of you. His imagination truly is fiendish and almost all of his stuff I know, not least The Stand, manages to unnerve me one way or another. The difference in The Stand is that it is on such an epic, colossal scale. If you don't know it yet, as the saying goes, I envy you. Try the big version.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Stand (1978)

0 This Year's Model (1978/1993)

(Also this.)

I guess it took me 15 years to fix on This Year's Model as Elvis Costello's best album and my stone favorite by him. That's partly because for many years there Costello pumped out product, fine product, like a crazy man, a regular dot-matrix printing machine churning through the reams. So I had good reasons for setting this album aside—Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, Taking Liberties, other stray singles, etc. As it turned out, however, This Year's Model improved immeasurably with the 1993 Rykodisc CD, which with a few deft moves and additions clarified so much. There always were version problems with this one. The original UK release had "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Night Rally" instead of "Radio, Radio," likely the biggest difference between the two, and for me a huge one. So I am happy settling for that year's model—1993—over the original which I knew.



And loved deeply, make no mistake. In 1978, the vinyl album—though Columbia product and marketed aggressively (if perhaps not expertly)—looked more like an art object, with mock "selfie" photographs on back and front, minimal information, and a dust sleeve imprinted with bright primary-color fashion and/or consumer objects. On the album label itself "Columbia" was replaced with "Costello." It may not have ultimately been a major marketing inspiration, but it made a point I wanted to believe, that something big had arrived. Trivia point: Costello requested that photographer Chris Gabrin play "Hotel California" during the cover shoot because he wanted to look pissed off.

So it was already a great album then. Take the bookends (at least on the US version): "No Action" (at 1:59) and "Radio, Radio" could well be the most ferocious things on it. "I don't wanna kiss you, I don't wanna touch," Costello's muffled bare vocal opens it, and then comes the band. I have one of those convenient theories about Elvis Costello and the Attractions, which is that the latter is to the former as Crazy Horse is to Neil Young, his most natural house band not least because they are fitted so well to him and bring out the best. Together they are greater than the sum of the parts. The debut My Aim Is True was a good album filled with great songs but the difference was clear in three seconds' time, which is as long as the band takes to come clattering in on "No Action."

It is the rhythm section that moves This Year's Model, two guys named liked brothers but who aren't (Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas), prowling, seething, constantly on the attack. Tom Waits has said that Pete Thomas is one of the best rock drummers alive, and that sounds about right when you're listening to this album. Pete Thomas hits them hard, but he's also capable of Keith-Moon-style frenzies that never get lost in the thrash and only propel the momentum. His soul brother Bruce the bass player is tight with him, and gets his own moments to shine and/or rip off the Rolling Stones (in homage, of course). Keyboards guy Steve Nieve stays pretty close mostly to farfisa organ tones here, which works fine. On This Year's Model especially, Costello's primary instrument is more properly his vocal than his guitar-playing, which is mostly another rhythmic element, and perfectly adequate. But the nervous, raging, ferret-like attack of his singing, coupled with the often dense and punning lyrics, can serve up a head-twisting pummeling.

But let's hold up a second on "Radio, Radio." Poised at the very end of the vinyl album, last track on the second side, that song seemed intended to sound a major (and obvious) theme, which came off so compelling that I took it in many ways for the album's theme at large—recall also Costello's Saturday Night Live performance a few months before the album's release (subbing for the Sex Pistols), when he made a show of stopping "Less Than Zero" midway and breaking into "Radio, Radio." He had been told not to play it and it resulted in a 10-year ban from the show, which seems weird now—but perhaps indicates something about the issue that set him howling.

In fact, this furious resentment was echoed among other significant punk-rock players (the Ramones perhaps the best other example), a gnawing sense—and I shared it too—about the goddam radio systematically denying them. "Radio, Radio" is a showcase turn, for sure, specifically leveled at the American market by its abrupt inclusion on the album over the songs eliminated, which were deemed "too British" by the American handlers at Columbia. And as I say, I have a good deal of sympathy with the view—it's clear to me the corruptions of radio harmed punk-rock and popular music both in that time. But, as always, the winners get to write the history, and over time, for all its fine attributes, "Radio, Radio" has not aged real well. It now seems radically diminished, more on the order of petulant, insidery whining. The song roars, it rocks, but it also wallows just a little unattractively in its own envy and impotence. There's a whiff of privilege and entitlement.

So that sends me back to the album's title for a better sense of its intentions—after all, however passionate Costello was about "Radio, Radio" at the time, it was basically tacked onto a secondary version of the album. The clues are there, in the title, the art, explicitly in many of the songs: fashion, seductive superficialities, beauty, frustration, and horror. It may seem strange, or not, coming from a guy who looks like Elvis Costello, but I think there's a deeper point here about surfaces and interiorities.

Start with the two lips songs. Start with the fact that there are lips songs at all, let alone two of them. Already things are self-consciously fashionable (and sassy). "Lip Service" is a classic Costello exercise, a zippy freight train driven by a lovely bass figure in the chorus, built around the kinds of puns Costello makes almost reflexively. It's his favorite theme, especially in his early recordings—the frustrations and consequent bile raised by attempting relationships, the powerlessness encountered. The singer has been cruelly dumped and all he can sputter in reply is that from then on his politeness (or possibly his kissing) will be only a sham. "Lip service is all you'll ever get from me … If you change your mind you can send it in a letter to me," he says. That's telling her. This is the kind of song Costello would spend the next five years writing over and over, filling one whole album, Get Happy!!, with them.

"Lipstick Vogue" is even better, practically epic in the way it moves within its tidy three and a half minutes. The singer is all fucked up again about connections ("Sometimes I think that love is just a tumor / You've got to cut it out"), but now the object(s) of his adoration and loathing have been further abstracted. You really get the sense here the Costello is looking into the abyss, but what is he looking at? A woman? A model? A commodity? He seems to be insisting it's a real person: "It's you, not just another mouth in the lipstick vogue." Meanwhile, the song has crazy dynamics. At nine seconds in it hits a groove strung tight enough to snap necks, and proceeds, wandering through breaks and bridges that pivot at strange angles, backing up Costello's vocal, which plays like a breakdown as much as anything.

As a song, as a rave-up, as an interesting musical exercise, as a showcase for band members and songwriting, "Lipstick Vogue" works remarkably well and sounds as fresh as ever. I think Costello is really trying to get it all sorted out here: beauty, fascination, consumer culture, love, rage, meaning. But his mind is going a million miles an hour. I take it not so much as a complaint about the constant pressure of media image saturation as an expression of it, which radiates out to the artwork. He is psychically twitching above the neck, a foretelling of Max Headroom, absorbing and reflecting sensation, but the metaphorical rest of him—hands, feet, heart (well, part of his heart)—are rooted in firm ground. The band and the songwriting are in peak form.

Every song here is at least good, and the totality of them, coming one after another, can make your head swim. "The Beat" gets all wrapped up in itself, musically and thematically ("stop looking at the scenery / I keep thinkin' about your mother"), with the band staying hot on the one. "Pump it Up," next up, is equally hot out of it, with a big fat bass figure leading the way over a cliff. Costello gets to practically snarling at points. "You Belong to Me" is gaudy with Rolling Stones riffs, a cute throwaway gesture for a skinny guy in a jacket. Costello is clearly at a level of songwriting here that others only dream of.

I should also say some things about the songs that were "new" to me. Context may play an interesting role here. I knew both "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Night Rally" from Taking Liberties, the US-only roundup of missing tracks, b-sides, and whatnot. It was a pretty big album, with 20 tracks, and honestly it never held my interest long enough to notice more than a handful of the songs—it seemed a little weak to me even for a b-sides album. "Chelsea" was one of the songs I noticed but "Night Rally" was not. Now, for what it's worth, "Chelsea" is a song I'm more indifferent to, while "Night Rally" really jumped out when I heard it again in the Rykodisc version, sounding dark and stirring like the title. Whether that's something about the sequencing, I can't say, but it sure sounds good following on immediately from "Lipstick Vogue." In 1993, it became one of my favorite tracks on the album.

Hearing This Year's Model again in the '90s and becoming obsessed all over again with basically the same music and songs sealed the deal. As much as anything, This Year's Model is an undeniable rock 'n' roll document, giant, roaring, original, smart as tacks. That a way was found to make it even better made for a pretty neat twofer.

Detail: This Year's Model (1978/1993)

0 Gates of Heaven (1978)

USA, 85 minutes, documentary
Director/editor: Errol Morris
Photography: Ned Burgess

I had better note how strange it was to sit down to watch and write about Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries, within days of the death of a long-time pet cat. As I feared, the context tended to confirm my impression of the worst qualities of filmmaker Errol Morris, even here in my favorite film by him, his first. He can often come across as a shallow ironist, falling back continually on an unpleasant mocking element that curdles the best here. In many ways we are in David Byrne territory (before even David Byrne had arrived there), with an insulated and smug complacency that too often misses and obtrudes the point.

The themes Morris attempts to smother in jocularity often entirely resist that—themes of faith, love, responsibility, some of the most profound questions we ask. The result is hardly unflawed, a movie that appears to be having an argument with itself about something we don't understand, like a feuding couple at a dinner party. Yet, in terms of form and in terms of filmmaking strategy, it brought things to bear that we are still seeing released every month in new documentaries.



To me, the parallel is The Passion of Joan of Arc. Both take basic syntactical elements of their forms—the close-up in The Passion, the documentary every-man interview in Gates—and abstract (and/or abuse) them into something greater and certainly other than they had been, altering the course of cinema, no less. Morris has much to answer for in documentaries since, but he opened doors wide with this. Even as it raises the power of the talking head shot to new levels by example and by implication, it also brings along an acute awareness of the self-consciousness that a camera inevitably intrudes in documentary interview situations, which points down the road to Ross McElwee and a new, personalized style.

Gates of Heaven doesn't know much of what to do with either of these fundamental elements, except to look at them, but that's all it had to do. Morris has elected a subject area he seemed to feel was slight by definition, the better to explore the nuances of the every-man interview. His next effort, Vernon, Florida, would abstract even further by focusing on marginalized, semi-coherent cranks around a small town that he could cajole into talking to the camera. (There's a taste of Vernon, Florida here in the interview with the old woman in a pink smock sitting in a doorway.)

What remains interesting to me is the collision between this early-pomo exercise in ironic affectation, on the one hand, and the homeliest of vital experiences in human affairs on the other: namely, deaths of loved ones, pet division. As with Bresson in Au hazard Balthazar (and/or as with my projections onto either or both), this is material that simply does not yield control easily, an area freighted with wide ranges of perception at primal levels.

It should be noted that, even across its relatively brief course, Gates of Heaven attempts to be many different kinds of documentary: there are investigative pieces about a California scandal related to a real estate deal gone bad, various interview studies reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis and a certain style of middle American businessmen culture, freak shows of pet owners, and any number of intriguing oddballs and happenstance event caught on film. It plays like a first film in many ways—raw, disjointed, in love beyond reason with certain of its own passages. That's the expectation to bring to it, I think.

I like it best when the material overwhelms Morris—he was on the right track with a pet cemetery idea, and he definitely had the right idea to make it as still and focused on the interviews as possible. The dignity of grief belittles its mockery, and the few glimpses Morris allows us of that dignity forces a flood of gravitas willy-nilly. He is otherwise so busy evading the profound questions he is implicitly raising—of life and death and love—that they are forced all the more on the viewer. What is appropriate to an animal's death? Why do we feel so deeply for them? What does it mean to place a corpse in the ground and mark it with a stone? Is it foolish and silly (and unsustainable)? Or is it one of the most profound things we do? Why do I want to laugh here? Why do I want to cry?

Gates of Heaven raises all of these questions and more, and then looks for answers to people it patently appears to think are inconsequential. Most of the people populating this film are obviously motivated by vanity or greed or both. They often contradict and undermine the points they are trying to make. The pet owners are petty and eccentric. But some of these characters manage to fight back too. Dan Harberts, a young man in his 20s in 1978, a college graduate, the son of the owner of the pet cemetery Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, is one such. He is humble, full of common sense and perspective, and his guitar playing is perhaps the most memorable image people take away here.

Along the way Gates of Heaven opened up an avenue, a stance, whose emphasis was new in documentaries. Where Frederick Wiseman had used the increasingly portable, utilitarian technology to purify verite, Morris was leading the charge of an intruding, personalizing element, working explicitly with the power of the camera and the power of the talking head, a live wire of connection between image and viewer and a way to instantly evoke the tensions of real human interaction as never before quite so intentionally.

Top 10 of 1978
Appears the movies or I had heaven on our minds in 1978. Perhaps so, or maybe it was just a reasonably weak year, low point of the decade? Straight Time I only saw for the first time recently, then two genre classics. I really do not like the Vietnam sequences in The Deer Hunter, but the stateside stuff is so good. Inordinately fond of the Altman. And warming all the time to The Last Waltz, which still seems to me a little too Rolling Stone magazine establishment. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The stuff I didn't like so much was not bad so much as underwhelming in most cases. I do think Dawn of the Dead is overrated, which I know is sacrilege, but to me it plays more like a jokey action picture.
1. Gates of Heaven
2. Heaven Can Wait
3. Days of Heaven
4. Straight Time
5. Superman
6. Halloween
7. The Deer Hunter
8. A Wedding
9. Drunken Master
10. The Last Waltz

Didn't like so much: Animal House, Autumn Sonata, Dawn of the Dead, Interiors, The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Gaps: Blue Collar, Le chambre verte, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Perceval le Gallois, Pretty Baby

Detail: Gates of Heaven (1978)