Slouching towards Ramseyville (3/15/99)
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Once in a while [though not often] I try my luck with a concert video; when I found
Hendrix Live at The Isle of Wight in the DVD new-release bin the other night I thought I’d check it out. — Indeed this is a curiosity. Apparently it was shot less than a month before he died, in August 1970, rendering it a historical document of note whatever its failings. But it’s obvious that if Hendrix had lived to have a say the film would have been destroyed; whatever the reason [not obviously drugs, he was as straight as I ever remember seeing him], it was one of those nights when nothing went right, and he was clearly disgusted with himself from beginning to end. “Machine Gun” came off fairly well, but the rest of it sucked: one embarrassing mistake after another, forgotten lyrics, blown phrases, missing licks, and several passages where he simply wandered off into the key of Z [as we used to say] and couldn’t seem to find his way back. At the conclusion he apologized to the audience and dropped his Stratocaster on the stage as he walked off.
True, Hendrix fucking up is still better than nearly everyone else at his best. But whenever I watch something like this I feel vaguely ashamed of myself, like somebody buying a slightly used pair of shorts from one of the Roman soldiers who cast lots for the garments of Christ.
Though it’s doubtful, really, that this represents some kind of dark conspiracy to exploit the memory of the late lamented; the guys who shot the movie, like most of the listeners, probably didn’t even know Hendrix was having a bad day. — I remember a night some years ago, in a club [just down the street still] called Tulagi’s, when my brother-in-law Mick was playing a gig with his oldies band of that period, Eileen Dover And The Rhythm Kings. [This was the one after he and Harold the drummer quit Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, and the one before they formed The 4-Nikators; a cash cow they’re milking to this day.] — They had a Sixties dance medley which was guaranteed to pack the floor, seven or eight tunes strung together in succession; I don’t recall all of them but they included “Knock on Wood” and the Mitch Ryder version of “Good Golly Miss Molly”. In the middle of this came “Midnight Hour”, during which Mick was to take his patented guitar solo, an exercise involving little real virtuosity but featuring all of his best flash moves: playing with his teeth, behind his back, jumping up and down, etc., etc. So at the appointed moment, with a dancefloor packed with boogiemonsters, he stepped forward and prepared to dazzle the peasants. — And his amplifier went out. Nothing emerged but white noise. — I was standing in front of the stage, maybe ten feet away, grinning at him. He looked at me. I shrugged, as if to say, now what? He whacked the front of the amp a couple of times, working his left hand to try to make something happen. But nothing but fuzztone was coming out. — Then he looked at the audience. And I did too. They were still dancing. A couple of people were watching him, and [since he was going through the motions of playing] they were shaking their fists in the air and shouting “Yeah!”, “Right on!”, and other slogans not usually indicative of critical acumen. — They had no idea, in short, that there was nothing coming out of the guitar. — So Mick shrugged and went through with the show, pretending to play behind his head, duckwalking, playing with his teeth, jumping up and down. And they loved it. He got an ovation. They were shaking their asses and pumping their fists in the air, dazzled by his virtuosity; despite the fact that he could have tossed his guitar in the dumpster and produced the same musical effect. — This was a kind of epiphany for me. I realized what practiced showmen like Mick had always known instinctively: that the audience was tone deaf; that music was nothing, costume and appearance everything; that rock and roll was theater.
Well. In the Seventies this seemed like a major discovery. Since then MTV has reduced it to corporate science.
Several years later I was driving through the countryside with Stefano [who had simply never understood showmanship, and always seemed to assume he was playing for a club full of jazz critics] telling this story. Since he didn’t appear to be sympathetic to the point of the anecdote, I strained for an analogy: “It’s like that passage in
Catch-22 where Yossarian is telling Milo about the cook who got pissed off at the guys in the messhall because they couldn’t appreciate his cuisine and started putting soap in the potatoes to prove his point, and Milo said, Well, he must have found out his mistake, and Yossarian said No, —” — Stefano interrupted me and exclaimed, “We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more!”
The principle explains this and much more, of course; for instance, Windows NT.
I did finally see Greenaway’s
The Pillow Book, and [should you be able to find it] I think you’d like it. It seems to have been shot [in several languages] in Japan and Hong Kong, and employs many of the devices he used in
Prospero’s Books: windowing, overlays, long slow tracking shots, naked fat guys, etc. The story is about a girl who writes books on the skins of her lovers [and vice-versa], which can be read a number of ways, I suppose, but serves if nothing else as an excuse for a series of fleshbased studies in [mainly Japanese] calligraphy. The female lead is someone named Vivian Wu, unknown to me; the principal male lead is Ewan McGregor, the star of
Trainspotting.
The local video archive seems also to have added a couple of short subjects he made for television. One is a documentary called
26 Bathrooms; this I think I’ll have to see.
Walking past a row of newspaper racks the other day and trying to ignore a series of headlines with the name “Lewinsky” in them, my attention was abruptly seized by the announcement of
The Onion: “Congressional prosecutors demand Lewinsky re-enact blowjob on Senate floor — ’We need to have the facts,’ say investigators.” Of course I thought for a moment this was serious. And why should it not have been.
Later.
____________Cops and robbers (2/3/99)
