[film] "The Swimmer" [1968]

This was the only non-music film I saw in the recent Dublin film festival. It is an old film (from 1968) that I had never seen before but which had somehow come up in conversation a couple of weeks before the festival programme came out. The basic premise of the film is simple enough. Burt Lancaster plays a man who arrives out of the blue in the enormous back garden of some friends. He is wearing only swimming trunks and he takes a dip in their pool to call off. He chats to his friends, who offer him a lift home, but he then decides that instead he will swim home through all the swimming pools in the gardens on the way. As he heads off on this strange journey, he at first meets more old friends (all of whom seem to be resting after parties to which he was not invited) who are invariably pleased to see him.

As the journey goes on, people become less pleased to see him, with the first inkling of this being a nudist couple who worry that he is going to try and palm money off him, implying that he is in some financial difficulties. We get an increasing sense that all is not right in the world of the Burt Lancaster character - are his wife and daughters really waiting eagerly for his return? Why is he so evasive when his wife is mentioned? Has something gone very wrong with his financial affairs? And his behaviour seems increasingly odd the more you see of it (beyond deciding to swim home through neighbour's swimming pools). He meets the daughter of a friend who when younger used to babysit his now grown-up daughters. He talks to her about coming over to babysit them again, which she takes as a joke but it starts looking like he is a bit confused. He persuades her to come with him, but his behaviour to her becomes increasingly inappropriate. She runs away, but he swims on, meeting people who are increasingly hostile to him. It would not be a spoiler to reveal that things do not end well for him.

So by now you get the idea of what we have here - a film about a crisis of masculinity in middle class middle aged white America, the sense that something has gone wrong with the lives of the parents of the baby boomers. The sexual politics are fascinating, both in terms of the swimmer's relationships with the women he meets on the way (especially the friend's daughter and another character, an actress with whom he had had an affair that ended badly) and with his wife and daughters at home. And race gets thrown into the mix too, when he meets the black servant of one house he visits, he mixes him up for the servant they used to have and talks about how wonderfully musical he had been, whereupon the actual servant says something like "I bet he had a great sense of rhythm?"

I have seen Burt Lancaster in relatively few films, but in this he is perfect, conveying the kind of ambiguous confidence that the role requires. He projects this awesome virility but also the sense that it is a mask hiding some terrible failure.

So this is a film I recommend whole-heartedly to people who like films.


image source (Wikipedia)

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[film]"Bad Brains: a Band in DC" (2012)

And this was the last of the Allison and Tiffany Anders programmed music documentaries in the 2014 Jameson International Dublin Film Festival. It tells the story of the well known DC hardcore band. They emerged in the late 1970s and had two notable features separate to their music. First of all, they were African American, which made them extremely unusual in the white-tastic world of punk. Secondly, they were weird. Now, lots of musicians are weird, but Bad Brains' weirdness, in their early days, came from an espousal of Positive Mental Attitude, a kind of cargo cult psychological approach they had acquired from a self-help book with the title Think And Grow Rich. Part of this Positive Mental Attitude thing was an avoidance of alcohol and drøgs, which means that Bad Brains arguably brought straight edge into the world (this is not necessarily a good thing, and I should know, for right now I am enjoying a relaxing time with some fine Yamazaki whisky).

There is some very grainy early footage of Bad Brains playing live, and this gives the sense that the band really had something. They come across as really intense, playing very heavy punk music with the winning feature being their extremely driven frontman. But I think they might be one of these bands who rather outstayed their welcome. Several things went wrong for them and I do not think they really ever recovered from them. For one thing, the music seems to have nose-dived in quality after their period of initial promise. Part of their slide into shite was an embrace of the kind of turgid metal that eventually gave us second division grunge bands. The other musical wrong turn was their embrace of reggae after seeing Bob Marley play live. I may be wrong, but I fear that no non-Jamaican act has ever improved their musical output by going reggae. Bad Brains efforts in this area do not suggest to me that they were bringing anything particularly new to the reggae table, in contrast to the rather exciting sounds of their early punk music. The other thing that went wrong for them was that their lead singer developed pretty serious mental health issues and became rather erratic in his live performances (and not in a good way).

Overall this was an interesting documentary about a band who were important in a scene I am ultimately not that bothered about. While the human story was engaging enough, the music was definitely the least interesting of the music films shown in the film festival. What also made it a disappointing experience was that the two Anders were not present at the screening, which was a shame as it would have been nice to have them close off their strand of the festival.

I should also mention that I was sorry I did not make it to Deconstructing Dad, another of the films in the music documentary sub-festival. This one was made by Stan Warnow about his father Raymond Scott, who apparently made all kinds of bizarre music for films and TV.


Bad Pandas

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[film] "Family Band: the Cowsills Story" (2011)

This is another of the music documentaries Allison and Tiffany Anders programmed in the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It tells the story of the Cowsills, a band I only know of because one of my correspondents wrote a fascinating piece about them for that august publication Frank's APA. In case this is all new to you, the Cowsills were a band of brothers, their little daughter and their mother who had a couple of hits in the late 1960s. Their music has a sunshine pop quality to it, characterised by lots of vocal harmonies and stuff like that. They laid down the template for the Partridge Family. I am unclear as to what extent they played their own instruments or if any of the band wrote their songs. My sense is that their moment of fame was relatively short in the United States and they never troubled the charts over here.


This film was directed by Louise Palanker and is narrated by one of the surviving Cowsill brothers (Barry? Brian? Bill? Boris? Bohemond? There are so many of them and I struggled to get a fixed sense of which was which, though it turns out the narrator was Bob Cowsill). There is a lot of fascinating archive footage and interviews now with the surviving members of the band. And the film looks behind the sunny exterior at the darkness lurking within the Cowsills. That darkness emanated from their father, Bud Cowsill, who seems to have been a thuggish bully. As well as running the family band with a rod of iron, being quite handy with his fists whenever anyone stepped out of line, he reportedly was also sexually abusive to his daughter Susan. His management of the Cowsills seems to have been a bit erratic; his bullish personality opened doors for him, but his ability to piss people meant that these doors tended to quickly close, which may explain the band's short period of success. And he made the bizarre decision to sack the most musically creative of his sons from the band. At the time the story was that whichever one of them he sacked had been caught smoking a joint, but the film argues that it was actually because he stood up to his dad (which in this case means he refused a beating).

Bud Cowsill is no longer alive and so cannot answer these accusations on camera. Barbara Cowsill, mother of the others, also died some time ago, so Bud is only dealt with by interviews with his children and his sister and Barbara's sisters. The picture painted of him is not a pleasant one but it is one-sided, even if confirmed by so many different voices.


What I was struck by, though, was the contrast between the adult Cowsills accounts of their miserable past and the archive footage of them playing on TV shows. In the old footage they look so carefree, so effortlessly happy that it is hard to imagine the tenterhooks they lived on at home. I thought maybe that was something the film could have explored more. Was their scary dad explicitly telling them to go out there and look happy or they would get it at home? Or were they able to escape their father's reign of terror when they were performing? They do seem to have genuinely liked playing music, so the latter is perhaps more likely.

The film brings the story up to something approximating to the present day. Things went better for some of the Cowsills than others, with some of them battling substance abuse issues and that kind of thing. Many of them seemed to have retained some kind of engagement with music, and there is an interesting sequence where they are invited to sing the national anthem before a baseball game in Fenway Park. They decided initially that all of them would sing it, even Dick Cowsill, who years previously had been blocked from joining the band by their father (Bud claimed Dick failed a drumming audition but it seems more that the father just hated him). This leads to an awkward scene where the siblings are practicing in a hotel room, and Dick just cannot do the harmonies as he does not have the singing experience, leading to some terrible inter-sibling sulkiness. In the end he show up at Fenway and mimes and the whole thing goes off very well (what a great national anthem America has, tears even came to the eye of freedom-hating me). The only downside to that incident was one of the more freewheelin' Cowsills passing out in the Red Sox hall of fame after having a bit too much of the hospitality.

The film rolls on, presenting the sad deaths of two of the more wayward siblings and showing the others as they continue on in music (to at least some extent) and with life generally. For all the sadness that these people went through the film ends up being quite uplifting in its portrayal of people who really do seem to love music and love that they are continuing to make it, even if they know that their fame was a fleeting period in the past and one that will not return.

Links:

MusicFilmWeb interview with Louise Palanker and Bob Cowsill (image source)

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[Film] "Lawrence of Belgravia" (2011)

This is another one of the music documentaries from the Allison and Tiffany Anders music section of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It tells the story of Lawrence, frontman of the iconic 1980s indie band Felt and then in the 1990s of Denim. More recently he has led Go-Kart Mozart. If you are old like me or have read books about indie music of yore you will know that Lawrence was long famous as a somewhat eccentric character. In the 1980s he was known for the extremely OCD rules governing his home, which went so far as not allowing his flatmate's friends to use the toilet there (as the flatmate's friends included Bobby Gillespie this was perhaps not such a crazy idea). This film does not go over this old ground, eschewing a biographical approach in favour of presenting a portrait of Lawrence as he is now ("now" being the eight years or so the film took to make, something it largely obscures).

This was a film I had been looking forward to seeing for ages and I was excited that it was finally coming to Dublin. But five minutes or so into the film I was starting to think it was perhaps one of the most depressing things ever committed to celluloid. Lawrence is still making music but he is someone whose moment has very much passed. If there was ever a real possibility that he was going to hit the big time, that possibility is now gone. That would not necessarily be a problem, as many people plug away in relative obscurity, following their music and happy enough to make music for whoever ends up liking it. But Lawrence still comes across as a driven character feeling that his day is yet to come, that any day now he will see himself on a revived Top of the Pops and find himself being driven around in a limo while screaming fans run down the street after him. That this is not going to happen seemed at first to mark him out as some kind of delusional saddo.

The other disturbing thing about the film initially is shock at what a wreck Lawrence has become. He has notably aged far worse than other contemporaries of his who show up in the film. When he was younger he was a rather stylish character. While now he is still someone who takes a certain interest in his appearance, his look is now one of a crazy eccentric rather than anyone who is ever going to grace the pages of The Chap. And his living conditions seemed to have declined somewhat. I doubt he was ever inhabiting penthouses, but the first flat we see him in looks extremely dingy. I suspected that Bobby Gillespie would have no problem using the toilet there.

The reason for Lawrence's decline is touched on obliquely rather than directly stated. Basically, as well as suffering from mental health issues, he has for many years now been in thrall to heroin and methadone. It seems that he fell into a dark place after the record company dropped Denim in 1997 or thereabouts. He has been living in relative poverty since then, though he is lucky that he is in the UK and can get access to council accommodation and be prescribed opiates rather than become a homeless junkie (though obviously it would be wrong to think that the UK is some kind of utopia where people with drøg addictions are looked after; there are plenty of homeless junkies in that country).

Once that penny drops the film becomes a lot less depressing. For one thing, I found myself becoming habituated to Lawrence's droll sense of humour. I particularly liked when he mentioned some people he had fallen in with, saying that he met them while he was living in Pete Astor's loft (too cumbersome to explain if you do not get it straight off). But I think more generally I started finding Lawrence almost inspirational. He has his vision of pop stardom and he keeps working to achieve it. Maybe he is delusional and has no realistic chance of achieving his goal, but he keeps at it, not letting poverty or opiate addiction stop his pursuit of his muse. I think anyone who has engaged in largely pointless artistic endeavour will see something of themselves in Lawrence's refusal to give up.

Paul Kelly, the film's director was there for questions and answers after film. He proved to be an engaging and likeable character. He said that Lawrence would have come along to the film's screening except that travelling outside the UK would have required him to take off his hat, something he never does in public (I think for reasons of baldness, another terrible cross he has to bear).


Links:

London Film Festival 2011 Diary: Day 11 (Death image source)

Foxtrot Echo Lima Tango (old Lawrence image source)

Chapter one of a recent example of my own largely pointless artistic endeavours

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[Film] "The Wrecking Crew" (2008)

I saw a number of films in the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Most of them were music documentaries, brought to the festival by guest curators Allison Anders and Tiffany Anders, a mother and daughter team from Los Angeles who combine film-making chops and music appreciation (and indeed music-making - Tiffany Anders has released an album produced by P.J. Harvey). This was the first film they presented to us, a documentary by Denny Tedesco about the Los Angeles session musicians who played on every record released in the 1960s. It featured interviews with some of these people as well as with some of the people who fronted their records (Cher, Brian Wilson, Nancy Sinatra, Jimmy Webb, among others). Glen Campbell manages to straddle both camps, as he worked for a long time as a session musician in Los Angeles before eventually releasing his own records, on which many of the other session musicians played. Tedesco's father, was the late Tommy Tedesco, another session guitarist, and he appears in archive footage and some interviews filmed before he died.

I was a bit worried before this film started that something would go wrong with it. I am not sure what exactly I feared, but maybe the experience of the Muscle Shoals film had me thinking that the film would be over-poncey or that it would feature too much in the way of irrelevant talking head stuff from gobshites who would have had little or nothing to do with the music under discussion. But it all works. The music does a lot of the talking (they managed to get rights to lots and lots of it, thanks I think to some kind of Kickstarter campaign that raised a lot of cash), and it is very good music. The musicians tell their stories, though as these people were jobbing musicians rather than people going on the road and getting up to hi-jinks the stories are a bit "I played on this record and came up with this baseline; then I played on this record and came up with this guitar lick". There is not really much about snorting cocaine off the buttocks of underage groupies in this film.

Even so, the musicians do not come across as boring. Tommy Tedesco seems to have been a bit of a roffler, while Carol Kaye (one of few women musicians at the top level of this scene) comes across as an interesting character. Drummer Earl Palmer maybe says the most interesting thing of all of them, revealing that he did not particularly like any music other than jazz, but when you are being paid to play on a rock, pop, or country record you have to play it like it is your favourite thing. That probably is stating the obvious, but I can imagine that very few people are capable of doing it.

There were a couple of interesting questions that the film did not explicitly address. One of these was the question of creativity. The musicians and the other voices talk a lot about the session players' contribution to the recording process, which went far beyond just playing parts handed to them. There is much mention of distinctive guitar riffs, drum rolls and basslines created by the session players, contributions without which these records would lack so much that in many cases they would not have been hits without them. I found myself wondering whether the musicians found these contributions a sufficient outlet for their creativity, or whether they cared. They were being very well paid, after all, and it was striking from the film how few of them bothered releasing records with their own original compositions.

The other question was one that would have jarred in a film that was such a celebration of these musicians. Basically, if you have a situation where the same people are playing on all the records, does it end up with all the records sounding the same? These were very versatile players who could adapt their styles to the type of music they were playing, but did these players' ubiquity lead to music that was plastic and soulless? No one asks this question in the film and there is no real expression of the somewhat rockist contention that bands should play on their own records without recourse to session players.

The film reports that the glory days of the Los Angeles session players came to an end. The bands got better at playing their own instruments so the Wrecking Crew were no longer so needed, and another generation of younger and cheaper players came up and took their place. But the film does not have a "rock music is a shit business" vibe to it. The sense I got was that in the heyday of the scene these people made a lot of money (at one point it was mentioned that in the mid-1960s Carol Kaye was earning more than the US President) and that if their income declined it did not disappear. Perhaps because so much of the music in this film is so appealing, the film could not really leave the viewer with anything other than a sense that music is great.

Links:

Forgotten Heroes: Carol Kaye (Carole Kaye image source)

Drummerworld: Earl Palmer (Earl Palmer image source)

Tommy Tedesco and Friends on the Golden Age of Studio Guitar (Tommy Tedesco image source)

Muscle Shoals (my review of this film)

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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