This is technically a re-post from a review I wrote in March 2010, but I've made enough edits and revisions that if you were around then it's worth revisiting.
It's always strange to look at an artist (or group of artists) who made groundbreaking work in their time and know that had they been around today, they would have never been given a chance. Networks, record labels, film studios, none of them are keen on taking chances on something that deviates wildly from the norm, and the ones that do always have a hard time getting picked up by fans and critics. It took a good season and a half for the American adaptation of The Office to gain appeal, for example.
Sketch comedy is a wildly uneven bag. For every groundbreaking series like Chappelle's Show, there are dozens of copycat programs (on TV and online) that take Dave Chappelle's example of crude, shock-peppered humor but opt to leave out all the discussion-generating topics the master comedian was addressing.
In my original version of this post, I riffed a bit on Saturday Night Live - a viewpoint I will never shy away from having - but let me trim that whole argument down to me simply saying that its reputation as being groundbreaking, subversive, or cutting-edge is more or less a mythology put into its place by its creators and by contemporary critics whose other viewing options were such dreck as Happy Days and Three's Company. By contrast, early Saturday Night Live must have seemed like the onslaught of punk amidst the easy-breezy swill of California rock and the pomposity of progressive rock.
But let's just call it for what it is: early Saturday Night Live was young and energetic, like a cheetah among dinosaurs, but it didn't rewrite the book on sketch comedy. For the most part, though, the old episodes have not aged well - select segments are timeless, but on the whole it is little more than a charming artifact.
The reason I harp on this is because I don't like the comparison that Saturday Night Live was an "American Monty Python." It just isn't. These guys shook up the rules of what had become a stagnant format for televised comedy and did it in a way that truly has yet to be replicated - and, with the present state of affairs in the entertainment industry, probably never will.
For that reason, I submit to you a revised and revisited review of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Season 1, Episode 1, "Whither Canada?"
Reasons #2 through #45 shall follow on a (hopefully) weekly basis.
And so it began:
Click here if the video isn't working.
By and large, one should not judge the strength of a series by its premiere episode. With American programs, pilots are generally the first aired, and they usually suck. Even if they're "good," they pale in comparison with the rest of the series. Although not a proper pilot so much as it is simply the second episode they shot and the first one aired on the BBC, this one is no exception. Not to say it's awful, in fact, it's still very watchable - plenty of classic Python bits to be found here - but the moments where the show is off it feels like a cheap skit put on at a talent show.
The opening sequence, with Michael Palin emerging from the water as the tattered "It's" Man, takes just a little too long for my liking. Still, seeing this hairy scruffian wearing the haggard shreds of a suit emerge from the sea, only to collapse and sigh the word, "It's..." before the animated credits roll is iconic absurdism.
One of the great features of the Flying Circus series was that the troupe wanted to avoid sketch program cliches. One such cliche is that sketches are written, built up, but then brought to an end by way of a punchline, which more often than not didn't hold up to the rest of the sketch. Why end sketches in a program, when they could all be linked together, in a surrealistic stream-of-consciousness fashion?
This first time out, though, the comedic device of people sitting on pigs is a source of linking material. Frankly, I think it's poorly played the first time (not well-performed by Graham Chapman, also some poorly synced sound), though later on in the episode it's quite funny. Maybe it's the repetition.
That aside, this isn't some crummy pilot. They don't hold any punches with their first sketch, a phony program entitled It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring John Cleese as the composer, hosting a program featuring the deaths of historical figures - why him? Why not?! It's got a dark undertone to it (a commentary on television violence, perhaps?), balanced out by the sheer slapstick of seeing Genghis Khan (Cleese in a filmed bit) die a cartoonish death by way of leaping in the air and landing on his back.
My great thesis on Python, whether it's the films, albums, or television series is that their brand of humor succeeds because it combines some intelligent, cerebral wit with simple, funny-no-matter-how-many-times-or-how-old-you-are gags. This is best symbolized by the death depicted of Admiral Horatio Nelson. You don't need to know about the Battle of Trafalgar to laugh at seeing a dummy in early 19th-Century garb tossed out of a high-rise window. That in itself is a funny visual. However, you can laugh just a little harder knowing among his last words were "Kiss me, Hardy!", to his second-in-command.
The Italian For Italians sketch is...okay. The audience laughter at Terry Jones' instructor saying he is from Gerard's Cross is something lost on me, and honestly, the only time jokes fall utterly flat for me with Python, it's usually moments like this. They also seem to make fun of a town called Dorking a lot throughout the series - is it the name, maybe? As for the Italians taking the lesson, they're played broadly, but that's the point: the Pythons are offering their own twist on the trope of using stereotypes for an easy gag. They would do it again throughout the series, and frankly, the underlying point is much more obvious in later episodes. It's amusing enough, but not a strong sketch, ending in minor-league chaos before a poor little pig is sat upon by the flustered teacher.
A runaway pig from the tallyboard, where dead piggy #3 is crossed off, marks the debut animation from Terry Gilliam. Even in the weaker shows, the cartoons never cease to amuse. Explaining what all happens would suck the fun out of seeing it. It leads to a phony commercial for Whizzo Butter, "containing 10% more less," a product that brings with its purchase admission to Heaven. Pitchman Palin is seen with the other four actor Pythons (Idle, Cleese, Jones, and Chapman) all dressed in drag as middle-aged housewives. These little wenches are called "pepperpots," dubbed such in Cleese's pre-Flying Circus special How To Irritate People, relating to the shape of their bodies. The term has since become a fixture of the Python fan's glossary.
The pepperpots can NOT tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab, and this is apparently a good thing, although they threaten Palin that if he's one of those television pitchmen trying to get them to compare Whizzo Butter to a dead crab, they'll slit his face.
Unfortunately, the Whizzo bit ends in a very un-Python manner, with a hard edit to the credits for It's The Arts. (According to Kim Johnson's marvelous Python book, The First 28 Years of Monty Python, quite a few sketches were cut from this episode, many to be seen in future episodes, which may explain the edit.) The first segment of It's The Arts features a great lampooning of the formality of names and nicknames, with filmmaker Sir Edward Ross (Chapman) being called a litany of names: Ted, angel-drawers, Franny-knickers, and everything in between. Storming off the set, Ross is summoned back by Cleese's Tom (don't bother with the "nonsense" of calling him Thomas!) with a serious question about his latest film, leading to a pleasant destruction of an anticipated punchline.
Eric Idle, who I now unfortunately think of as the Python with the honor "Most Likely To Ride Python All The Way To The Bank," gives his own variant nickname-based interview. While Cleese's interviewer tries so desperately to be polite and personable with his subject, Eric is a cheeky smart-ass in his interview with composer Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson (Jones), who earned his nickname not by actually having a second shed but rather by simply thinking of building a second shed.
This doesn't keep Idle from asking if Jackson wrote his latest symphony in the shed. He drives him to his breaking point, turning from sheds to inquiring about Jackson's interest in trainspotting. After a snippy, ready to crack retort of "What's that got to do with my bloody music?", Cleese's Tom joins Idle in booting the irate composer off-set. Again, another sketch ended before getting stale (maybe even a little early) and without some silly punchline.
The final bit of the It's The Arts segment centers around Pablo Picasso's latest painting, which is being done whilst riding a bicycle. If this notion isn't delightfully silly enough, the entire thing is played out with the detailed enthusiasm of a sportscast. Picasso's route is outlined, the model of bicycle is explained, and in one of the best moments of the episode, Cleese presents an on-the-scene report while a laundry list of famous artists (dead and alive) zip by on bicycles. Palin's surprisingly informed pepperpot tells Cleese that it's Vassily Kandinsky he's seeing and not Picasso, later correcting Cleese that the (dead since 1948) Kurt Schwitters was German, not English.
What makes the scene, beyond the incongruity of Palin's middle-aged housewife displaying a good knowledge of 20th-Century art is more than just the attention to detail. It's Cleese's performance. He delivers his lines at a mile-a-minute, like his head is ready to explode...it's one of those things, you can't explain why it's funny. It just is.
How does this build-up climax? With the absurdist logic that makes Python so great: Picasso falls off his bicycle, unseen, the details of his painting unknown. We are informed, thankfully, that the artist is unharmed, "although the pig has a slight headache." One more piggy pops its head up from under the desk as Palin's host bids us goodnight, right in time for the end credits (around the 21-minute mark) if this were American television.
With the lack of commercials from the BBC at that time, we've still got nine minutes to go! We get another wonderful cartoon, featuring what I consider Gilliam's staple art: animations of vintage photographs. It's twisted and slightly disturbing, but it's marvelous. And to think this was on mainstream television some 40 years ago!
The show ends this week with an extended sketch, featuring the world's funniest joke, which induces fatal laughter. The film version of the sketch's first half featured in the 1971 film And Now For Something Completely Different is performed a little better - notably in the joke's author and his mother's deaths from reading the joke - but this is a fairly important sketch for the lads. It seems all three writing teams (Chapman/Cleese, Idle, and Palin/Jones) all contributed their own bits to it, and while there are no animations, Gilliam appears on-screen in two minor roles.
Rounding out the rest of the show, the segment lags at times (mainly in the battlefield scenes), but its high points more than make up for the bumps. Terry Jones' dorky, unsuspecting Army test subject and his tittering demise still makes me laugh, Cleese makes for a great Nazi, and the scene where the defense ministers laugh themselves to death (on the other side of a guarded door) is a beautiful stroke of macabre humor. History geeks will appreciate the stock footage of Chamberlain declaring "Peace in our time!" as Idle mentions "England's great pre-war joke."
Idle's narrator wraps the segment with a solemn tribute at the burial site of the Unknown Joke, before a quick cutaway to stock footage of a ref blowing his whistle and a title frame saying "THE END". As a long-form sketch, this showed a sense of ambition from the get-go that the group had some interest in collaborating on long-form sketches; this approach, where Idle, Jones/Palin, and Cleese/Chapman all had a hand in the conception and delivery of the "World's Funniest Joke" sketch, would set the tone for their feature films in the 1970's and 1980's. While that is still 44 incredible half-hours of sketch comedy away, it marked the planting of a very important seed.
Cutting back to the beach, the "It's" man is roused by way of a pointed stick (an incredibly specific prop we'll be seeing and hearing of again in future episodes) and he drags himself back out into the surf as the end credits play.
FIN
Low Points:
+ I feel like the first few episodes of this series treat Cleese as if he were the leader of the troupe, for better or for worse. He'd enjoyed the most success already by this point with At Last The 1948 Show, The Frost Report, and his TV special How To Irritate People (which plays like a really, really bad episode of Python.) He certainly seems to elicit the most laughs from the audience.
+ Parts of this episode's first portion, before we get to It's The Arts, come across as wobbly.
+ The piggy gag - not unfunny, but a weak running gag.
High Points:
+ This episode is kind of like "I Saw Her Standing There," the first song from the first Beatles album. It's hard to define the inaugural quality of "Whither Canada?", as the show most definitely picked up some serious momentum in the episodes to come, but damn if it doesn't make me happy every time I see this and know this is where it all started.
+ Cleese's stream of ridiculous nicknames for Sir Edward "Ted/Eddie Baby/Sweetie/Sugar Plum/Angel Drawers/Frank/Fran/Frannie/Little Frannie/Frannie Knickers" Ross.
+ Idle's ribbing of Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson.
+ Cleese's sportscaster, forerunner of so many classic Cleese moments.
Best Lines:
"We are proud to be bringing to you one of the evergreen bucket kickers. Yes, the wonderful death of the famous English Admiral Nelson."
"He say, 'Milan is better than Napoli!'"
"Oh, well, he shouldn't be saying that, we haven't done comparatives yet!"
"I don't like being called Eddie Baby!" - this implies he's been called this before...
"I'm going to get rid of the shed. I'm fed up with it!"
"Then you'll be Arthur 'No Sheds' Jackson."
"In 1945, peace broke out."
SCORE: 84% B
In future reviews of the show, I'll be sure to go into some detail on each member of the troupe, using a key performance as a springboard (like the "Nudge, Nudge" sketch to talk about Eric Idle) for the information.
I also plan to keep a tally on two on-screen occurrences throughout the series. The first is the number of times John Cleese appears in drag. Seeing this freakishly tall man dressed as a woman is one of the funniest sights, ever. The other is the number of times Terry Gilliam appears on the show. As the animator, he didn't fancy himself as much of an actor, but when it came time for bit parts and/or the occasional grotesque, Gilliam was perfect.
John Cleese in drag count: I
Terry Gilliam count: II
Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts
Monday, November 14, 2011
Friday, March 12, 2010
Monty Python's Flying Circus, S01/E01 - "Whither Canada?"
It's about bloody time I got around to doing this! This has been getting kicked around in the back of my head since last year when Shelley and I were watching Python religiously. A few weeks ago I watched a few vintage Saturday Night Live episodes on NetFlix, and I have to say the comparisons between SNL (even in its "Not Ready For Primetime Players" heyday) and Python are bullshit. That's like saying so-and-so is "an American Beatles" or even, like so many critics and fans were searching for in the early 1970's, "the NEXT Beatles."
Both were sketch comedy shows, yes. Both were radical departures from the standard fare of their respective countries (and that, too, makes a key difference)...but that's about it.
Subversive by American standards was "I want to feed your fingertips to the wolverines."
Subversive by English standards was...well, watch:
Click here if the video isn't working.
Regardless, this shouldn't be an excuse to knock Saturday Night Live. We're here to praise the Python...although something about that sentence just doesn't sound right.
On with the episode.
By and large, one should not judge the strength of a series by its premiere episode. With American programs, pilots are generally the first aired, and even if they're "good," they pale in comparison with the rest of the series. This one is no exception. Not to say it's awful, in fact, it's still very watchable - plenty of classic Python bits to be found here - but the moments where the show is off it feels like a cheap skit put on at a talent show.
(Yes, yes, Python geeks, I'm aware that Season One, Episode One, "Whither Canada?", was the second episode filmed. No matter, what I consider canon is the airing order. This aired first, this was England's introduction to the Pythons, so there.)
The opening sequence, with Michael Palin emerging from the water as the tattered "It's" Man, takes just a little too long for my liking. (I clocked it at 55 seconds.) Years later, Palin made a joke about the not-at-all steep grade of the ground underwater, hence the length of the sequence. Still, seeing this hairy scruffian wearing the haggard shreds of a suit emerge from the sea, only to collapse and sigh the word, "It's..." before the animated credits roll is iconic absurdism.
One of the great features of the Flying Circus series was that the troupe wanted to avoid sketch program cliches. One such cliche is that sketches are written, built up, but then brought to an end by way of a punchline, which more often than not didn't hold up to the rest of the sketch. Why end sketches in a program, when they could all be linked together, in a surrealistic stream-of-consciousness fashion?
This first time out, though, the comedic device of people sitting on pigs is the source of linking material. Frankly, I think it's poorly played the first time (not well-performed by Graham Chapman, also some poorly synced sound), though later on in the episode it's quite funny. Maybe it's the repetition. The idea of repetition being a simple gag for humor would be taken to its most bizarre next season, but that's...well...next season.
That aside, this isn't some crummy pilot. They don't hold any punches with their first sketch, a phony program entitled It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring John Cleese as the composer. However, it's nothing really to do with Mozart - he is merely the host - and instead is a program featuring the deaths of historical figures. It's got a dark undertone to it (a commentary on television violence, perhaps?), balanced out by the sheer slapstick of seeing Genghis Khan (Cleese in a filmed bit) die a cartoonish death by way of leaping in the air and landing on his back.
My great thesis on Python, whether it's the films, albums, or television series is that their brand of humor succeeds because it combines some intelligent, cerebral wit with simple, funny-no-matter-how-many-times gags. This is best symbolized by the death depicted of Admiral Horatio Nelson. You don't need to know about the Battle of Trafalgar to laugh at seeing a dummy in early 19th-Century garb tossed out of a high-rise window. However, you can laugh just a little harder knowing among his last words were "Kiss me, Hardy!", to his second-in-command.
Don't miss Cleese, with a German accent, uttering, "Blimey, how time flies!"
The Italian For Italians sketch is...okay. The audience laughter at Terry Jones' instructor saying he is from Gerard's Cross is something lost on me. As for the Italians taking the lesson, they're played a little broadly, pinstripe suit-wearing spivs divided by regionalist pride. Political correctness makes sketches like these age poorly, but at the time other sketch programs would often display national stereotypes and call it humor. The Pythons are in fact offering their own twist on this trope. They would do it again throughout the series, and frankly, the underlying point is much more obvious. It's amusing enough, but not a strong sketch. Thankfully, Terry Jones sits on a pig (porcine casualty number three in this episode - PETA would be pissed!), leading to the first cartoon.
A runaway pig from the tallyboard, where dead piggy #3 is crossed off, marks the debut animation from Terry Gilliam. Even in the weaker shows, the cartoons never cease to amuse. Explaining what all happens would suck the fun out of seeing it. It leads to a phony commercial for Whizzo Butter, "containing 10% more less," a product that brings with its purchase admission to Heaven. Pitchman Palin is seen with the other four actor Pythons (Gilliam's on-screen presence is generally that of an extra and/or grotesque, making "Terry Gilliam appearances" a tally category at the end of this post) all dressed in drag as middle-aged housewives.
These little wenches are called "pepperpots," dubbed such in Cleese's pre-Flying Circus special How To Irritate People, relating to the shape of their bodies. Along with Gilliam's on-screen appearances, I'm also going to have Cleese's appearances in drag as another tally. At six-foot, five inches tall, Cleese is an extraordinarily unconvincing woman and, to me at least, as unfailingly hilarious as Gilliam's cartoons.
The pepperpots can NOT tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab, and this is apparently a good thing, although they threaten Palin that if he's one of those television pitchmen trying to get them to compare Whizzo Butter to a dead crab, they'll slit his face.
So far, we've got animal cruelty, broadly-played national stereotypes, clever historical references, death, a mockery of consumerist stupidity, and one demented cartoon. Yep, this is Python, all right!
Unfortunately, the Whizzo bit ends in a very un-Python manner, with a hard edit to the credits for It's The Arts. (According to Kim Johnson's marvelous Python book, The First 28 Years of Monty Python, quite a few sketches were cut from this episode, many to be seen in future episodes.) The first segment of It's The Arts features a great lampooning of the formality of names and nicknames, with filmmaker Sir Edward Ross (Chapman) being called a litany of names: Ted, angel-drawers, Franny-knickers, and everything in between. Storming off the set, Ross is summoned back by Cleese's Tom (who doesn't want Ross "bothering with all this 'Thomas' nonsense") with a serious question about his latest film. Ten seconds into Ross' guaranteed-to-be-dull yarn, Cleese interrupts with an, "Oh, shut up!", expertly dashing audience expectations.
Eric Idle, who I now unfortunately think of as the Python with the honor "Most Likely To Ride Python All The Way To The Bank," gives his own variant nickname-based interview. While Cleese's interviewer tries so desperately to be polite and personable with his subject, Eric is a cheeky smart-ass with composer Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson (Jones), who earned his nickname not by actually having a second shed but rather by simply thinking of building a second shed.
This doesn't keep Idle from asking if Jackson wrote his latest symphony in the shed. He drives him to his breaking point, turning from sheds to inquiring about Jackson's interest in trainspotting. After a snippy, ready to crack retort of "What's that got to do with my bloody music?", Cleese's Tom joins Idle in booting the irate composer off-set. Again, another sketch ended before getting stale (maybe even a little early) and without some silly punchline.
The final bit of the It's The Arts segment centers around Pablo Picasso's latest painting, which is being done whilst riding a bicycle. If this notion isn't delightfully silly enough, the entire thing is played out with the detailed enthusiasm of a sportscast. Picasso's route is outlined, the model of bicycle is explained, and in one of the best moments of the episode, Cleese presents an on-the-scene report while a laundry list of famous artists (dead and alive) zip by on bicycles. Palin's surprisingly informed pepperpot tells Cleese that it's Vassily Kandinsky he's seeing and not Picasso, later correcting Cleese that the (dead since 1948) Kurt Schwitters was German, not English.
What makes the scene, beyond the incongruity of Palin's middle-aged housewife displaying a good knowledge of 20th-Century art is more than just the attention to detail. It's Cleese's performance. He delivers his lines at a mile-a-minute, like his head is ready to explode...it's one of those things, you can't explain why it's funny. It just is.
How does this build-up climax? With the absurdist logic that makes Python so great: Picasso falls off his bicycle, unseen, the details of his painting unknown. We are informed, thankfully, that the artist is unharmed, "although the pig has a slight headache." One more piggy pops its head up from under the desk as Palin's host bids us goodnight, right in time for the end credits (around the 21-minute mark) if this were American television.
Thank God for the commercial-free programming of the BBC, as we've still got nine minutes to go. We get another wonderful cartoon, featuring what I consider Gilliam's staple art: animations of vintage photographs. It's twisted, it's slightly disturbing (the man trapped inside the military officer begging to be let out), but it's marvelous. And to think this was on mainstream television some 40 years ago.
The show ends this week with an extended sketch, featuring the world's funniest joke, which induces fatal laughter. The film version of the sketch's first half featured in the 1971 film And Now For Something Completely Different is performed a little better - notably in the joke's author and his mother's deaths from reading the joke - but this is a fairly important sketch for the lads. It seems all three writing teams (Chapman/Cleese, Idle, and Palin/Jones) all contributed their own bits to it, and while there are no animations, Gilliam appears on-screen in two minor roles.
Rounding out the rest of the show, the segment lags at times (mainly in the battlefield scenes), but its high points more than make up for the bumps. Terry Jones' dorky, unsuspecting Army test subject and his tittering demise still makes me laugh, Cleese's goose-stepping interrogator is great (and we'll see him again as a Nazi before the season's end, a more famous one, in fact...), and the scene where the defense ministers laugh themselves to death (on the other side of a guarded door), with the laughter punctuated by the sounds of bodies dropping, is a beautiful stroke of macabre humor. And history geeks will appreciate the stock footage of Chamberlain declaring "Peace in our time!" as Idle mentions "England's great pre-war joke."
Idle's narrator wraps the segment with a solemn tribute at the burial site of the Unknown Joke, before a quick cutaway to stock footage of a ref blowing his whistle and a title frame saying "THE END".
The "It's" man is roused by way of a pointed stick (an incredibly specific prop we'll be seeing and hearing of again in future episodes) and he drags himself back out into the surf as the end credits play.
FIN
Low Points:
+ I feel like the first few episodes of this series treat Cleese as if he were the leader of the troupe, for better or for worse. He'd enjoyed the most success already by this point with At Last The 1948 Show, The Frost Report, and his TV special How To Irritate People (which plays like a really, really bad episode of Python.) He certainly seems to elicit the most laughs from the audience.
+ Parts of this episode's first half, pre-It's The Arts, come across as tentative.
+ The piggy gag. (In all fairness, Shelley liked it.)
High Points:
+ This episode is kind of like "I Saw Her Standing There," the first song from the first Beatles album. It's hard to define the inaugural quality of "Whither Canada?", as the show most definitely picked up some serious momentum in the episodes to come, but damn if it doesn't make me happy every time I see this and know this is where it all started.
+ Cleese's stream of ridiculous nicknames for Sir Edward "Ted/Eddie Baby/Sweetie/Sugar Plum/Angel Drawers/Frank/Fran/Frannie/Little Frannie/Frannie Knickers" Ross.
+ Idle's ribbing of Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson.
+ Cleese's sportscaster, forerunner of so many classic Cleese moments.
Best Lines:
"We are proud to be bringing to you one of the evergreen bucket kickers. Yes, the wonderful death of the famous English Admiral Nelson."
"He say, 'Milan is better than Napoli!'"
"Oh, well, he shouldn't be saying that, we haven't done comparatives yet!"
"I don't like being called Eddie Baby!" - this implies he's been called this before...
"I'm going to get rid of the shed. I'm fed up with it!"
"Then you'll be Arthur 'No Sheds' Jackson."
"In 1945, peace broke out."
SCORE: 84% B
John Cleese in drag count: I
Terry Gilliam count: II
Both were sketch comedy shows, yes. Both were radical departures from the standard fare of their respective countries (and that, too, makes a key difference)...but that's about it.
Subversive by American standards was "I want to feed your fingertips to the wolverines."
Subversive by English standards was...well, watch:
Click here if the video isn't working.
Regardless, this shouldn't be an excuse to knock Saturday Night Live. We're here to praise the Python...although something about that sentence just doesn't sound right.
On with the episode.
By and large, one should not judge the strength of a series by its premiere episode. With American programs, pilots are generally the first aired, and even if they're "good," they pale in comparison with the rest of the series. This one is no exception. Not to say it's awful, in fact, it's still very watchable - plenty of classic Python bits to be found here - but the moments where the show is off it feels like a cheap skit put on at a talent show.
(Yes, yes, Python geeks, I'm aware that Season One, Episode One, "Whither Canada?", was the second episode filmed. No matter, what I consider canon is the airing order. This aired first, this was England's introduction to the Pythons, so there.)
The opening sequence, with Michael Palin emerging from the water as the tattered "It's" Man, takes just a little too long for my liking. (I clocked it at 55 seconds.) Years later, Palin made a joke about the not-at-all steep grade of the ground underwater, hence the length of the sequence. Still, seeing this hairy scruffian wearing the haggard shreds of a suit emerge from the sea, only to collapse and sigh the word, "It's..." before the animated credits roll is iconic absurdism.
One of the great features of the Flying Circus series was that the troupe wanted to avoid sketch program cliches. One such cliche is that sketches are written, built up, but then brought to an end by way of a punchline, which more often than not didn't hold up to the rest of the sketch. Why end sketches in a program, when they could all be linked together, in a surrealistic stream-of-consciousness fashion?
This first time out, though, the comedic device of people sitting on pigs is the source of linking material. Frankly, I think it's poorly played the first time (not well-performed by Graham Chapman, also some poorly synced sound), though later on in the episode it's quite funny. Maybe it's the repetition. The idea of repetition being a simple gag for humor would be taken to its most bizarre next season, but that's...well...next season.
That aside, this isn't some crummy pilot. They don't hold any punches with their first sketch, a phony program entitled It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring John Cleese as the composer. However, it's nothing really to do with Mozart - he is merely the host - and instead is a program featuring the deaths of historical figures. It's got a dark undertone to it (a commentary on television violence, perhaps?), balanced out by the sheer slapstick of seeing Genghis Khan (Cleese in a filmed bit) die a cartoonish death by way of leaping in the air and landing on his back.
My great thesis on Python, whether it's the films, albums, or television series is that their brand of humor succeeds because it combines some intelligent, cerebral wit with simple, funny-no-matter-how-many-times gags. This is best symbolized by the death depicted of Admiral Horatio Nelson. You don't need to know about the Battle of Trafalgar to laugh at seeing a dummy in early 19th-Century garb tossed out of a high-rise window. However, you can laugh just a little harder knowing among his last words were "Kiss me, Hardy!", to his second-in-command.
Don't miss Cleese, with a German accent, uttering, "Blimey, how time flies!"
The Italian For Italians sketch is...okay. The audience laughter at Terry Jones' instructor saying he is from Gerard's Cross is something lost on me. As for the Italians taking the lesson, they're played a little broadly, pinstripe suit-wearing spivs divided by regionalist pride. Political correctness makes sketches like these age poorly, but at the time other sketch programs would often display national stereotypes and call it humor. The Pythons are in fact offering their own twist on this trope. They would do it again throughout the series, and frankly, the underlying point is much more obvious. It's amusing enough, but not a strong sketch. Thankfully, Terry Jones sits on a pig (porcine casualty number three in this episode - PETA would be pissed!), leading to the first cartoon.
A runaway pig from the tallyboard, where dead piggy #3 is crossed off, marks the debut animation from Terry Gilliam. Even in the weaker shows, the cartoons never cease to amuse. Explaining what all happens would suck the fun out of seeing it. It leads to a phony commercial for Whizzo Butter, "containing 10% more less," a product that brings with its purchase admission to Heaven. Pitchman Palin is seen with the other four actor Pythons (Gilliam's on-screen presence is generally that of an extra and/or grotesque, making "Terry Gilliam appearances" a tally category at the end of this post) all dressed in drag as middle-aged housewives.
These little wenches are called "pepperpots," dubbed such in Cleese's pre-Flying Circus special How To Irritate People, relating to the shape of their bodies. Along with Gilliam's on-screen appearances, I'm also going to have Cleese's appearances in drag as another tally. At six-foot, five inches tall, Cleese is an extraordinarily unconvincing woman and, to me at least, as unfailingly hilarious as Gilliam's cartoons.
The pepperpots can NOT tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab, and this is apparently a good thing, although they threaten Palin that if he's one of those television pitchmen trying to get them to compare Whizzo Butter to a dead crab, they'll slit his face.
So far, we've got animal cruelty, broadly-played national stereotypes, clever historical references, death, a mockery of consumerist stupidity, and one demented cartoon. Yep, this is Python, all right!
Unfortunately, the Whizzo bit ends in a very un-Python manner, with a hard edit to the credits for It's The Arts. (According to Kim Johnson's marvelous Python book, The First 28 Years of Monty Python, quite a few sketches were cut from this episode, many to be seen in future episodes.) The first segment of It's The Arts features a great lampooning of the formality of names and nicknames, with filmmaker Sir Edward Ross (Chapman) being called a litany of names: Ted, angel-drawers, Franny-knickers, and everything in between. Storming off the set, Ross is summoned back by Cleese's Tom (who doesn't want Ross "bothering with all this 'Thomas' nonsense") with a serious question about his latest film. Ten seconds into Ross' guaranteed-to-be-dull yarn, Cleese interrupts with an, "Oh, shut up!", expertly dashing audience expectations.
Eric Idle, who I now unfortunately think of as the Python with the honor "Most Likely To Ride Python All The Way To The Bank," gives his own variant nickname-based interview. While Cleese's interviewer tries so desperately to be polite and personable with his subject, Eric is a cheeky smart-ass with composer Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson (Jones), who earned his nickname not by actually having a second shed but rather by simply thinking of building a second shed.
This doesn't keep Idle from asking if Jackson wrote his latest symphony in the shed. He drives him to his breaking point, turning from sheds to inquiring about Jackson's interest in trainspotting. After a snippy, ready to crack retort of "What's that got to do with my bloody music?", Cleese's Tom joins Idle in booting the irate composer off-set. Again, another sketch ended before getting stale (maybe even a little early) and without some silly punchline.
The final bit of the It's The Arts segment centers around Pablo Picasso's latest painting, which is being done whilst riding a bicycle. If this notion isn't delightfully silly enough, the entire thing is played out with the detailed enthusiasm of a sportscast. Picasso's route is outlined, the model of bicycle is explained, and in one of the best moments of the episode, Cleese presents an on-the-scene report while a laundry list of famous artists (dead and alive) zip by on bicycles. Palin's surprisingly informed pepperpot tells Cleese that it's Vassily Kandinsky he's seeing and not Picasso, later correcting Cleese that the (dead since 1948) Kurt Schwitters was German, not English.
What makes the scene, beyond the incongruity of Palin's middle-aged housewife displaying a good knowledge of 20th-Century art is more than just the attention to detail. It's Cleese's performance. He delivers his lines at a mile-a-minute, like his head is ready to explode...it's one of those things, you can't explain why it's funny. It just is.
How does this build-up climax? With the absurdist logic that makes Python so great: Picasso falls off his bicycle, unseen, the details of his painting unknown. We are informed, thankfully, that the artist is unharmed, "although the pig has a slight headache." One more piggy pops its head up from under the desk as Palin's host bids us goodnight, right in time for the end credits (around the 21-minute mark) if this were American television.
Thank God for the commercial-free programming of the BBC, as we've still got nine minutes to go. We get another wonderful cartoon, featuring what I consider Gilliam's staple art: animations of vintage photographs. It's twisted, it's slightly disturbing (the man trapped inside the military officer begging to be let out), but it's marvelous. And to think this was on mainstream television some 40 years ago.
The show ends this week with an extended sketch, featuring the world's funniest joke, which induces fatal laughter. The film version of the sketch's first half featured in the 1971 film And Now For Something Completely Different is performed a little better - notably in the joke's author and his mother's deaths from reading the joke - but this is a fairly important sketch for the lads. It seems all three writing teams (Chapman/Cleese, Idle, and Palin/Jones) all contributed their own bits to it, and while there are no animations, Gilliam appears on-screen in two minor roles.
Rounding out the rest of the show, the segment lags at times (mainly in the battlefield scenes), but its high points more than make up for the bumps. Terry Jones' dorky, unsuspecting Army test subject and his tittering demise still makes me laugh, Cleese's goose-stepping interrogator is great (and we'll see him again as a Nazi before the season's end, a more famous one, in fact...), and the scene where the defense ministers laugh themselves to death (on the other side of a guarded door), with the laughter punctuated by the sounds of bodies dropping, is a beautiful stroke of macabre humor. And history geeks will appreciate the stock footage of Chamberlain declaring "Peace in our time!" as Idle mentions "England's great pre-war joke."
Idle's narrator wraps the segment with a solemn tribute at the burial site of the Unknown Joke, before a quick cutaway to stock footage of a ref blowing his whistle and a title frame saying "THE END".
The "It's" man is roused by way of a pointed stick (an incredibly specific prop we'll be seeing and hearing of again in future episodes) and he drags himself back out into the surf as the end credits play.
FIN
Low Points:
+ I feel like the first few episodes of this series treat Cleese as if he were the leader of the troupe, for better or for worse. He'd enjoyed the most success already by this point with At Last The 1948 Show, The Frost Report, and his TV special How To Irritate People (which plays like a really, really bad episode of Python.) He certainly seems to elicit the most laughs from the audience.
+ Parts of this episode's first half, pre-It's The Arts, come across as tentative.
+ The piggy gag. (In all fairness, Shelley liked it.)
High Points:
+ This episode is kind of like "I Saw Her Standing There," the first song from the first Beatles album. It's hard to define the inaugural quality of "Whither Canada?", as the show most definitely picked up some serious momentum in the episodes to come, but damn if it doesn't make me happy every time I see this and know this is where it all started.
+ Cleese's stream of ridiculous nicknames for Sir Edward "Ted/Eddie Baby/Sweetie/Sugar Plum/Angel Drawers/Frank/Fran/Frannie/Little Frannie/Frannie Knickers" Ross.
+ Idle's ribbing of Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson.
+ Cleese's sportscaster, forerunner of so many classic Cleese moments.
Best Lines:
"We are proud to be bringing to you one of the evergreen bucket kickers. Yes, the wonderful death of the famous English Admiral Nelson."
"He say, 'Milan is better than Napoli!'"
"Oh, well, he shouldn't be saying that, we haven't done comparatives yet!"
"I don't like being called Eddie Baby!" - this implies he's been called this before...
"I'm going to get rid of the shed. I'm fed up with it!"
"Then you'll be Arthur 'No Sheds' Jackson."
"In 1945, peace broke out."
SCORE: 84% B
John Cleese in drag count: I
Terry Gilliam count: II
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Monkees - Instant Replay (1969)
Remember three years ago back in August when I promised I'd come back with an album review that garnered something below a B?
For all two of you who read my reviews, you can finally stop holding your breath.
I'll lay off the "they weren't a real band, but they also weren't the Backstreet Boys" argument this time around - pretty sure I covered it when I reviewed Headquarters way back in June - and instead focus on their decline.
The first nail in the coffin, despite Don Kirshner's insistence that it was his dismissal as their music supervisor, was NBC canceling The Monkees television show. The band members had grown tired of the madcap adventures geared towards 13 year old kids (keep in mind that in the 1960's 13 was equivalent to 8 years old in 2009 - I'm working on a conversion chart) and regularly challenged the show's format by the end of the second season. Rather than deal with temperamental musicians/actors, NBC canned the show.
That's one.
The second, as much as it pains me to say this, was their motion picture, Head. I'll just go ahead and say it: I have weird tastes. This manifests itself the most with my taste in movies. Yes, I would worship Charlie Chaplin if he came back from the dead. Yes, I enjoy The Godfather. Yes, I love Star Wars. But there's a lot of other "classic" films that I can't stand. There are a lot of modern movies I can't be bothered to watch. If a movie is surreal, bizarre, odd, uniquely shot/edited, abnormally colorful, or just plain funny, chances are it's one of my favorites. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is all of the above. The Beatles' films - Let It Be notwithstanding, I've never seen it, and so long as Sir Paul is alive, I don't think any of us will be seeing it (legally) anytime soon - all check off various criteria on this list. Hell, even Chaplin had some surrealistic humor in his short films.
That all said, I think Head is a brilliant movie. It was ahead of its time in the same sense as Magical Mystery Tour, much-maligned in its time but worshiped in the art-house/film school circuit, having developed a strong cult of defenders. But that was not at all what all the teenyboppers were expecting. In some television documentary on the band, Davy Jones said they should have made "something like Ghostbusters," a 90-minute version of their television show where The Monkees are the heroes on a much more grand scale than any of the Marxist (of the Groucho variety) plots of the television program.
I was really tempted to include a clip from the film...but I can't. I've got to save that for my review of the album Head. I'll just pretend I did and jump to my conclusion about their film:
He has a point.
That's two.
Then - try not to laugh - after Head flopped, plans were hatched for a television special entitled 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee, which really, really sucked. I've seen it. Peter Tork compared it to being a TV version of Head, but that's being charitable.
This was God-awful. Later in the sequence, three survivors of the first wave of rock and roll (who weren't Elvis, who ironically had his big comeback special the month they filmed this garbage), Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino play and partake in an "oldies" medley. The Monkees are treated like rock and roll's first test tube babies, appearing in segments that spoof their personalities on the original show, while in Head they played themselves attempting to escape said image.
In fact, it was such a negative experience that Peter quit.
That's nails three AND four!
So by 1969, the show was done (though even then being rebroadcast as reruns), their venture into film was befuddling to the squares and largely unseen by the acid-eaters who would have loved it, their return to television was a joke (do I need to embed them doing "At The Hop" a second time?), and one of them left after buying out his contract. The band had become a sinking ship, yet the three remaining members - Davy, Micky Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith - were constantly in the studio (separately, mind you, sometimes in different studios on the same day) recording.
In spite of the prolific in-studio work going on by the members individually, Instant Replay is a fragmented pop record. Many of the tracks date back to the early days of The Monkees in 1966, when they were a project rather than a band. Many of them were re-recorded at some point in the time that had passed, but one song indeed is a mixed, mastered track dating from before the show had even aired.
You'd think this hodgepodge compilation of songs ranging from three years to forty-five days old (yes, I looked it up - the album was released 2/15/69, the last vocal overdub was done on 1/4/69 - Andrew Sandoval, your insanely well-researched book is a Godsend!) could barely even be considered an album. Surely "real" artists (the floating quotes are meant to convey sarcasm) didn't do that, right?
Actually, it's not uncommon, for better or for worse. Tattoo You (1981) by The Rolling Stones had songs dating back to 1972 with Mick Taylor on guitar. No new songs were recorded for the album, with only vocal overdubs from Mick Jagger being the sole contributions from the band. On the other hand, there's Neil Young's lopsided 1977 offering, American Stars & Bars. The new stuff was all country music with Nicolette Larson and Linda Ronstadt in tow, and yet among the older material on side B of the album is "Will To Love" (one of my favorites) and "Like A Hurricane," one of my favorite songs from anybody...and yet it sat for two years!
Then there's Zappa, where a guitar solo from 1974 is spliced with a bass track from 1976 and a drum track from 1977. ("The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution," anyone? "Rubber Shirt?" "Friendly Little Finger?") He called it "xenochrony," and it has since become regarded as an art all its own.
That said, Instant Replay is the musical equivalent of taking last night's dinner and reheating it in the microwave. Some bites are going to be piping hot and fresh, like it had just been prepared. Others are going to be slightly cold, making for a grating, unsatisfying clash.
01. Through The Looking Glass [9.5]
A Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart song first originally recorded in 1966, my personal favorite version, this reworked version - sounding more like a Magical Mystery Tour outtake than the lo-fi Beach Boys-meets-Help! tone of the original - plods along with a beat you can do high kicks to. That's not a bad thing, at all. In fact, it's a terrific recording. The piano is bright and punchy, the song itself is well-arranged, and Micky's singing is top-notch. Very catchy, should have been a single. (We'll get to the actual single in a bit...)
I recognize the strangeness of my own tastes. The songs I give the highest scores to here wouldn't have gotten played on the radio, sure, but I can also take a step back from my own selfish interests and say this - "Through The Looking Glass" is the only song on this album that I can say qualifies as deserving the title of classic in The Monkees' canon.
02. Don't Listen To Linda [2]
That's right. A two. Not to be driving home a motif of things in pairs or double-sidedness, but there are two sides to the songwriting of Boyce and Hart. It was evident as far back as the band's first album. Yes, they gave us the classic "Last Train To Clarksville," but they also gave us their spin on "Yesterday" with the schmaltzy Davy Jones vehicle "I Wanna Be Free." Their dichotomous style is never more obvious than here. "Through The Looking Glass" showed McCartney-esque pop sensibilities amid some deft orchestration.
"Don't Listen To Linda" has a dumb title, clearly thought of first as the song's hook, with everything else very poorly being written to accommodate it. Whoever Linda is, I know now not to listen to her. For a pop song - actually, let me restate this with emphasis - FOR A POP SONG, these lyrics are awful. A good writer can discipline themselves by forcing five pages of text (prose, poetry) a day. Some days it probably comes easily. Other days it's probably like pulling teeth. This must have been written at a dentist's office.
Then you get someone like me, who does one of these dumb little reviews once every two weeks apparently, resulting in the written equivalent of explosive diarrhea. It goes - and gets - everywhere. I generally write these on days where I've had coffee. I think I have a problem.
The sotto brass arrangement gets drowned in a sea of Hollywood strings in the over-dramatic bridge. Not even Davy's munchkin pop singer voice can compete with the orchestration here. And that's saying something.
Before I move on from my Homeric simile on "Don't Listen To Linda," let me just say that you shouldn't only not listen to Linda, you should not listen to this song. You should package it and sell it as a sugar substitute for diabetics. This isn't pop. This is sucralose.
03. I Won't Be The Same Without Her [11]
This song was recorded, mixed, and had Mike's vocals dubbed all before the first episode of The Monkees aired in September of 1966. And yet it's one of the best songs here. What does that tell you?
That said, I love the harmonies. A perfect blend of sorrow on the verses and a catchy title-chorus. The key change in the bridge is beautiful. Sounds like California in 1966. So what if it's 1969? This calls back to a much more innocent time, back before Nixon got elected, before the political turmoil and social unrest, and before Peter Tork quit The Monkees. Wait, what?
Whatever. This is a great song. In the parallel universe where I determine the songs that will become great hits, "I Won't Be The Same Without Her" briefly dominated the radio in the autumn of 1966. Though in said parallel universe it was released by Mike & The Monkees.
04. Just A Game [6]
Micky Dolenz wrote this song, and actually demoed it back around the time of Headquarters as "There's A Way." It starts off very simple, but gradually builds with more and more instruments entering the mix. In spite of the strings and brass that come in, the song is really slight. Forgettable, even. Running only 1:48, this song either should have been fleshed out (if just a bridge to get the song over two minutes) or left in the can.
05. Me Without You [6.5]
Kinda sounds like this...
It's not a full-on carbon copy of The Beatles. That would be Oasis. But the similarities are pretty uncanny. Again, another Boyce/Hart collaboration, and while this isn't a total wash, I think they thought they were doing their best work when they aped John and Paul.
Actually...recalling all the stuff I've read, they modeled "(Theme From) The Monkees" after "Catch Us If You Can" by The Dave Clark Five, "Let's Dance On" is "La Bamba" with every single Chuck Berry riff mixed in, the fade-out of "Paperback Writer" inspired "Last Train To Clarksville," "I Wanna Be Free" clearly came out of "Yesterday," this song is son of "Your Mother Should Know." Yikes.
One thing we can give Boyce and Hart, no matter how derivative they may or may not have been, is "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone." Since someone who owns the rights to The Monkees - arguably one of the most visual groups of their era - ironically wants them off YouTube, here's some other versions, including the original by Paul Revere & The Raiders:
Wait, what were we talking about? Yeah, "Me Without You" is good musically - and that solo is straight out of Sgt. Pepper. I can hear George Harrison playing that guitar solo. Lyrically it's pretty banal...and it loses at least a point and a half on principle. While one could in theory make their career mimicking The Beatles, history will not be kind to you. Although if they'd tried a little harder, I would have loved to have heard The Monkees' "psychedelic" album. Can you imagine?
I smell a mixtape!!!
06. Don't Wait For Me [7.5]
I don't hate country. I just hate most of it. Then again, I feel the same way about most genres. Yeah, The Kinks, The Sex Pistols, Zappa, Neil, Dylan...all great, but then there's all the bands that literally do nothing for me. Grand Funk Railroad (whose best moment is a Rolling Stones cover) is a fine example of this. I'm not even that big on Springsteen. I don't necessarily hate them, I just don't care. It's the musical equivalent of going on a date with a bad kisser.
Then there's bands like Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Boston, and Chicago, which I equate to being like dates who have eaten garlic, suffer from meth-mouth, chain smoke, have had partial maxillofacial surgery, and are bleeding from the gums. And yet they still want to kiss you. They force their tongue down your throat.
Mike Nesmith did some great things - overlooked, even - with fusing country and rock and roll, eliminating the laughably awful middleman of skiffle from the equation and sidestepping folk so as to avoid any Dylan connection. In 1968, Mike did a marathon of recording sessions with a bunch of Nashville's finest session men, including later Neil Young producer David Briggs on piano, yielding almost an album's worth of material. Though not all of it got released while The Monkees were intact, it has all since been released posthumously on compilations like Missing Links or as CD bonus tracks. Most of it is pretty good. This one's not his best - "Propinquity (I've Just Begun To Care)" earns that title for my money, yet that went unreleased until Missing Links Volume 3? - but it's good.
Even when Nesmith falls short of his mark, it stands fairly tall on this album. I also love how genuine he sounds on these country tunes. When he does "Sunny Girlfriend" or "I Won't Be The Same Without Her," he sounds his age. But on this, he sounds like a golden-throated master, with years of experience, heartbreak, and whiskey drinking in every inflection.
07. You And I [12]
Davy dominates on this album, and not one of them score above a 6.5 except this, which is the greatest song he did with The Monkees. Hence, it is a 12. (For good measure, Davy actually has a writing credit! No fresh from the Brill Building songwriters here! Just Davy and Monkee collaborator Bill Chadwick.) This wins by a long-shot, over anything else he did with the group. Odd he would have his best moment so late in their career...and I swear to you it has nothing to do with the mystery guest on lead guitar.
In fact, I loved this song as a kid before I even knew who the guy was who played guitar. I knew his name, but that was it. We'll get to him in a second.
You know how earlier I talked about "I Won't Be The Same Without Her" takes us back to a much more innocent time? This does just the opposite as a new composition, addressing the band as having potentially outstayed their welcome:
"You and I have seen what time does, haven't we?
We've both had time to grow
We've got more growing to do
Me and you
And the rest of them, too."
Then comes the bridge, which carries the most potent acknowledgment of their own waning stardom:
"In a year or maybe two we'll be gone and someone new
Will take our place" - David Cassidy, anyone?
"There'll be another song, another voice, another pretty face..."
Wow. (See what I mean about how this couldn't have been a hit?)
Then there's the dramatic lead guitar line, provided by Buffalo Springfield's resident guy who dresses in fringe and sideburns, Neil "Mr. Soul" Young, the king of impassioned, dramatic lead guitar lines.
08. While I Cry [10]
Nesmith's last contribution to the album comes a little early, with this deceptively simple, plaintive lament for a wicked ex-lover who the narrator had been warned of. It's a beautiful song in its gentle form here, but a closer listen to the acoustic guitar in the left channel, the syncopated rim clicks in the right channel, the tremoloed electric guitar, the backing vocals on the bridge (with a slight flange applied)...just a little more voltage, this could have been a psychedelic ballad. But since it doesn't need any adornments to be a great song, it's here in its best possible form.
And the melody in the song's bridge is magnificent. Even when he's not getting his rocks off with surrealist poetry and bouncy rock, Nesmith is a Hell of a songwriter.
09. Tear Drop City [3.5]
And the sky lifts up its almighty leg and resumes urination. I always thought this sounded WAY too much like "Last Train To Clarksville" for comfort. Then I read that the song was originally recorded in a lower key.
Somewhere along the way, The Monkees got sick of being their own music supervisors, so the guy they hired suggested that by rehashing their old "sound" (thus explaining all the 1966-era material), they would be guaranteed hits. Thus, this song was sped up 9% to match the key of "Last Train To Clarksville." Listen closely to the tambourine. Unless it's a tambourine designed for a midget - note that I'm refraining from making a joke about Davy Jones been five foot three - I've never heard that instrument sound so tiny! And tinny, while we're at it.
I haven't bothered to slow this song down to its original pitch...I'm curious. The fact that I haven't yet means that it's not really been on my mind. Care to know why? It's not a great song. Then it was manipulated to make it sound MORE like their first big hit!
Okay, okay, seriously, it isn't a good song. Even if "Last Train" had never come out, this song wouldn't be that outstanding.
So, did the new music supervisor's gambit work?
Nope. It got to #56.
10. The Girl I Left Behind Me [5]
This song has a great chorus and an all-too-short 12-string acoustic solo, but the rest of the song is the kind of phony-baloney crap that would have been a huge easy listening hit in the 1970's. Unfortunately, it's from 1966. A re-recorded version from 1967 is a bonus track on the CD reissue of The Birds, The Bees, And The Monkees, and it's much better.
You know who could have done this song, obviously making a change for gender? Tina Turner.
11. A Man Without A Dream [1.5]
Somewhere I read Davy likes this song because it was more in his range as a baritone rather than as a tenor. Um, okay, the guy makes his career singing with the range and timbre of a 14 year old boy...anyway, the lyrics are stupid. ("Sometimes I think I'm a prisoner of fate / Doomed to find out things a little too late") The backing vocalists sound like they are half-awake. And the brass interlude is horribly out of place. At least with "The Girl I Left Behind Me" I can picture it being a feminist anthem for Tina Turner, produced by noted producer/murderer Phil Spector, but with this, I don't think anyone should be allowed to sing it. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you look at the sheet music (or even the master tape) directly without first praying a Latin incantation, this could happen to you:
In Hell, this song and "Don't Listen To Linda" play constantly along with "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey on the radio.
Ready for this? Boyce and Hart, surprisingly, did NOT write this song. Gerry Goffin and Carole King did. The same team that gave us "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow."
Care for any further evidence that man is inherently flawed?
12. Shorty Blackwell [10]
Micky Dolenz gets the benediction this time around, and wow...he and his sister Coco share lead vocal (and harmonize really, really well!) in this epic tale of cats, houses on hills, etc. He said it was his own indulgence to pursue a Sgt. Pepper-style sound. So, if anyone ever asks you what happens when someone has virtually unlimited studio time and access to a world-class recording orchestra, look no further. It's a goofy number, but after everything else that's befallen us for the past 35 minutes, it's welcome relief. Even on a good album, this song would remain memorable.
Subtotal: 68.75% D+
Replayability Factor: 0
Can I listen to this album again and again? No. The low points are too low.
Can I extract the best and make a playlist on iTunes? Oh, yes.
Consistency Factor: 0
It's for the die-hards, plain and simple. Davy Jones fans will probably eat this record up, but keep in mind, these are Davy Jones songs that weren't considered good enough for SIX OTHER ALBUMS before making onto Instant Replay. Just...just think about that one.
External Factors: -1
Yep. I went there. Was it out of the members' control that they had a music supervisor who said, "Hey! I know! Let's make you sound like you did 30 months ago! THAT should sell records!" ? Of course. But it still happened.
TOTAL: 67.75%, rounded to 68% D+
Ouch.
For all two of you who read my reviews, you can finally stop holding your breath.
I'll lay off the "they weren't a real band, but they also weren't the Backstreet Boys" argument this time around - pretty sure I covered it when I reviewed Headquarters way back in June - and instead focus on their decline.
The first nail in the coffin, despite Don Kirshner's insistence that it was his dismissal as their music supervisor, was NBC canceling The Monkees television show. The band members had grown tired of the madcap adventures geared towards 13 year old kids (keep in mind that in the 1960's 13 was equivalent to 8 years old in 2009 - I'm working on a conversion chart) and regularly challenged the show's format by the end of the second season. Rather than deal with temperamental musicians/actors, NBC canned the show.
That's one.
The second, as much as it pains me to say this, was their motion picture, Head. I'll just go ahead and say it: I have weird tastes. This manifests itself the most with my taste in movies. Yes, I would worship Charlie Chaplin if he came back from the dead. Yes, I enjoy The Godfather. Yes, I love Star Wars. But there's a lot of other "classic" films that I can't stand. There are a lot of modern movies I can't be bothered to watch. If a movie is surreal, bizarre, odd, uniquely shot/edited, abnormally colorful, or just plain funny, chances are it's one of my favorites. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is all of the above. The Beatles' films - Let It Be notwithstanding, I've never seen it, and so long as Sir Paul is alive, I don't think any of us will be seeing it (legally) anytime soon - all check off various criteria on this list. Hell, even Chaplin had some surrealistic humor in his short films.
That all said, I think Head is a brilliant movie. It was ahead of its time in the same sense as Magical Mystery Tour, much-maligned in its time but worshiped in the art-house/film school circuit, having developed a strong cult of defenders. But that was not at all what all the teenyboppers were expecting. In some television documentary on the band, Davy Jones said they should have made "something like Ghostbusters," a 90-minute version of their television show where The Monkees are the heroes on a much more grand scale than any of the Marxist (of the Groucho variety) plots of the television program.
I was really tempted to include a clip from the film...but I can't. I've got to save that for my review of the album Head. I'll just pretend I did and jump to my conclusion about their film:
He has a point.
That's two.
Then - try not to laugh - after Head flopped, plans were hatched for a television special entitled 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee, which really, really sucked. I've seen it. Peter Tork compared it to being a TV version of Head, but that's being charitable.
This was God-awful. Later in the sequence, three survivors of the first wave of rock and roll (who weren't Elvis, who ironically had his big comeback special the month they filmed this garbage), Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino play and partake in an "oldies" medley. The Monkees are treated like rock and roll's first test tube babies, appearing in segments that spoof their personalities on the original show, while in Head they played themselves attempting to escape said image.
In fact, it was such a negative experience that Peter quit.
That's nails three AND four!
So by 1969, the show was done (though even then being rebroadcast as reruns), their venture into film was befuddling to the squares and largely unseen by the acid-eaters who would have loved it, their return to television was a joke (do I need to embed them doing "At The Hop" a second time?), and one of them left after buying out his contract. The band had become a sinking ship, yet the three remaining members - Davy, Micky Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith - were constantly in the studio (separately, mind you, sometimes in different studios on the same day) recording.
In spite of the prolific in-studio work going on by the members individually, Instant Replay is a fragmented pop record. Many of the tracks date back to the early days of The Monkees in 1966, when they were a project rather than a band. Many of them were re-recorded at some point in the time that had passed, but one song indeed is a mixed, mastered track dating from before the show had even aired.
You'd think this hodgepodge compilation of songs ranging from three years to forty-five days old (yes, I looked it up - the album was released 2/15/69, the last vocal overdub was done on 1/4/69 - Andrew Sandoval, your insanely well-researched book is a Godsend!) could barely even be considered an album. Surely "real" artists (the floating quotes are meant to convey sarcasm) didn't do that, right?
Actually, it's not uncommon, for better or for worse. Tattoo You (1981) by The Rolling Stones had songs dating back to 1972 with Mick Taylor on guitar. No new songs were recorded for the album, with only vocal overdubs from Mick Jagger being the sole contributions from the band. On the other hand, there's Neil Young's lopsided 1977 offering, American Stars & Bars. The new stuff was all country music with Nicolette Larson and Linda Ronstadt in tow, and yet among the older material on side B of the album is "Will To Love" (one of my favorites) and "Like A Hurricane," one of my favorite songs from anybody...and yet it sat for two years!
Then there's Zappa, where a guitar solo from 1974 is spliced with a bass track from 1976 and a drum track from 1977. ("The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution," anyone? "Rubber Shirt?" "Friendly Little Finger?") He called it "xenochrony," and it has since become regarded as an art all its own.
That said, Instant Replay is the musical equivalent of taking last night's dinner and reheating it in the microwave. Some bites are going to be piping hot and fresh, like it had just been prepared. Others are going to be slightly cold, making for a grating, unsatisfying clash.
01. Through The Looking Glass [9.5]
A Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart song first originally recorded in 1966, my personal favorite version, this reworked version - sounding more like a Magical Mystery Tour outtake than the lo-fi Beach Boys-meets-Help! tone of the original - plods along with a beat you can do high kicks to. That's not a bad thing, at all. In fact, it's a terrific recording. The piano is bright and punchy, the song itself is well-arranged, and Micky's singing is top-notch. Very catchy, should have been a single. (We'll get to the actual single in a bit...)
I recognize the strangeness of my own tastes. The songs I give the highest scores to here wouldn't have gotten played on the radio, sure, but I can also take a step back from my own selfish interests and say this - "Through The Looking Glass" is the only song on this album that I can say qualifies as deserving the title of classic in The Monkees' canon.
02. Don't Listen To Linda [2]
That's right. A two. Not to be driving home a motif of things in pairs or double-sidedness, but there are two sides to the songwriting of Boyce and Hart. It was evident as far back as the band's first album. Yes, they gave us the classic "Last Train To Clarksville," but they also gave us their spin on "Yesterday" with the schmaltzy Davy Jones vehicle "I Wanna Be Free." Their dichotomous style is never more obvious than here. "Through The Looking Glass" showed McCartney-esque pop sensibilities amid some deft orchestration.
"Don't Listen To Linda" has a dumb title, clearly thought of first as the song's hook, with everything else very poorly being written to accommodate it. Whoever Linda is, I know now not to listen to her. For a pop song - actually, let me restate this with emphasis - FOR A POP SONG, these lyrics are awful. A good writer can discipline themselves by forcing five pages of text (prose, poetry) a day. Some days it probably comes easily. Other days it's probably like pulling teeth. This must have been written at a dentist's office.
Then you get someone like me, who does one of these dumb little reviews once every two weeks apparently, resulting in the written equivalent of explosive diarrhea. It goes - and gets - everywhere. I generally write these on days where I've had coffee. I think I have a problem.
The sotto brass arrangement gets drowned in a sea of Hollywood strings in the over-dramatic bridge. Not even Davy's munchkin pop singer voice can compete with the orchestration here. And that's saying something.
Before I move on from my Homeric simile on "Don't Listen To Linda," let me just say that you shouldn't only not listen to Linda, you should not listen to this song. You should package it and sell it as a sugar substitute for diabetics. This isn't pop. This is sucralose.
03. I Won't Be The Same Without Her [11]
This song was recorded, mixed, and had Mike's vocals dubbed all before the first episode of The Monkees aired in September of 1966. And yet it's one of the best songs here. What does that tell you?
That said, I love the harmonies. A perfect blend of sorrow on the verses and a catchy title-chorus. The key change in the bridge is beautiful. Sounds like California in 1966. So what if it's 1969? This calls back to a much more innocent time, back before Nixon got elected, before the political turmoil and social unrest, and before Peter Tork quit The Monkees. Wait, what?
Whatever. This is a great song. In the parallel universe where I determine the songs that will become great hits, "I Won't Be The Same Without Her" briefly dominated the radio in the autumn of 1966. Though in said parallel universe it was released by Mike & The Monkees.
04. Just A Game [6]
Micky Dolenz wrote this song, and actually demoed it back around the time of Headquarters as "There's A Way." It starts off very simple, but gradually builds with more and more instruments entering the mix. In spite of the strings and brass that come in, the song is really slight. Forgettable, even. Running only 1:48, this song either should have been fleshed out (if just a bridge to get the song over two minutes) or left in the can.
05. Me Without You [6.5]
Kinda sounds like this...
It's not a full-on carbon copy of The Beatles. That would be Oasis. But the similarities are pretty uncanny. Again, another Boyce/Hart collaboration, and while this isn't a total wash, I think they thought they were doing their best work when they aped John and Paul.
Actually...recalling all the stuff I've read, they modeled "(Theme From) The Monkees" after "Catch Us If You Can" by The Dave Clark Five, "Let's Dance On" is "La Bamba" with every single Chuck Berry riff mixed in, the fade-out of "Paperback Writer" inspired "Last Train To Clarksville," "I Wanna Be Free" clearly came out of "Yesterday," this song is son of "Your Mother Should Know." Yikes.
One thing we can give Boyce and Hart, no matter how derivative they may or may not have been, is "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone." Since someone who owns the rights to The Monkees - arguably one of the most visual groups of their era - ironically wants them off YouTube, here's some other versions, including the original by Paul Revere & The Raiders:
Wait, what were we talking about? Yeah, "Me Without You" is good musically - and that solo is straight out of Sgt. Pepper. I can hear George Harrison playing that guitar solo. Lyrically it's pretty banal...and it loses at least a point and a half on principle. While one could in theory make their career mimicking The Beatles, history will not be kind to you. Although if they'd tried a little harder, I would have loved to have heard The Monkees' "psychedelic" album. Can you imagine?
I smell a mixtape!!!
06. Don't Wait For Me [7.5]
I don't hate country. I just hate most of it. Then again, I feel the same way about most genres. Yeah, The Kinks, The Sex Pistols, Zappa, Neil, Dylan...all great, but then there's all the bands that literally do nothing for me. Grand Funk Railroad (whose best moment is a Rolling Stones cover) is a fine example of this. I'm not even that big on Springsteen. I don't necessarily hate them, I just don't care. It's the musical equivalent of going on a date with a bad kisser.
Then there's bands like Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Boston, and Chicago, which I equate to being like dates who have eaten garlic, suffer from meth-mouth, chain smoke, have had partial maxillofacial surgery, and are bleeding from the gums. And yet they still want to kiss you. They force their tongue down your throat.
Mike Nesmith did some great things - overlooked, even - with fusing country and rock and roll, eliminating the laughably awful middleman of skiffle from the equation and sidestepping folk so as to avoid any Dylan connection. In 1968, Mike did a marathon of recording sessions with a bunch of Nashville's finest session men, including later Neil Young producer David Briggs on piano, yielding almost an album's worth of material. Though not all of it got released while The Monkees were intact, it has all since been released posthumously on compilations like Missing Links or as CD bonus tracks. Most of it is pretty good. This one's not his best - "Propinquity (I've Just Begun To Care)" earns that title for my money, yet that went unreleased until Missing Links Volume 3? - but it's good.
Even when Nesmith falls short of his mark, it stands fairly tall on this album. I also love how genuine he sounds on these country tunes. When he does "Sunny Girlfriend" or "I Won't Be The Same Without Her," he sounds his age. But on this, he sounds like a golden-throated master, with years of experience, heartbreak, and whiskey drinking in every inflection.
07. You And I [12]
Davy dominates on this album, and not one of them score above a 6.5 except this, which is the greatest song he did with The Monkees. Hence, it is a 12. (For good measure, Davy actually has a writing credit! No fresh from the Brill Building songwriters here! Just Davy and Monkee collaborator Bill Chadwick.) This wins by a long-shot, over anything else he did with the group. Odd he would have his best moment so late in their career...and I swear to you it has nothing to do with the mystery guest on lead guitar.
In fact, I loved this song as a kid before I even knew who the guy was who played guitar. I knew his name, but that was it. We'll get to him in a second.
You know how earlier I talked about "I Won't Be The Same Without Her" takes us back to a much more innocent time? This does just the opposite as a new composition, addressing the band as having potentially outstayed their welcome:
"You and I have seen what time does, haven't we?
We've both had time to grow
We've got more growing to do
Me and you
And the rest of them, too."
Then comes the bridge, which carries the most potent acknowledgment of their own waning stardom:
"In a year or maybe two we'll be gone and someone new
Will take our place" - David Cassidy, anyone?
"There'll be another song, another voice, another pretty face..."
Wow. (See what I mean about how this couldn't have been a hit?)
Then there's the dramatic lead guitar line, provided by Buffalo Springfield's resident guy who dresses in fringe and sideburns, Neil "Mr. Soul" Young, the king of impassioned, dramatic lead guitar lines.
08. While I Cry [10]
Nesmith's last contribution to the album comes a little early, with this deceptively simple, plaintive lament for a wicked ex-lover who the narrator had been warned of. It's a beautiful song in its gentle form here, but a closer listen to the acoustic guitar in the left channel, the syncopated rim clicks in the right channel, the tremoloed electric guitar, the backing vocals on the bridge (with a slight flange applied)...just a little more voltage, this could have been a psychedelic ballad. But since it doesn't need any adornments to be a great song, it's here in its best possible form.
And the melody in the song's bridge is magnificent. Even when he's not getting his rocks off with surrealist poetry and bouncy rock, Nesmith is a Hell of a songwriter.
09. Tear Drop City [3.5]
And the sky lifts up its almighty leg and resumes urination. I always thought this sounded WAY too much like "Last Train To Clarksville" for comfort. Then I read that the song was originally recorded in a lower key.
Somewhere along the way, The Monkees got sick of being their own music supervisors, so the guy they hired suggested that by rehashing their old "sound" (thus explaining all the 1966-era material), they would be guaranteed hits. Thus, this song was sped up 9% to match the key of "Last Train To Clarksville." Listen closely to the tambourine. Unless it's a tambourine designed for a midget - note that I'm refraining from making a joke about Davy Jones been five foot three - I've never heard that instrument sound so tiny! And tinny, while we're at it.
I haven't bothered to slow this song down to its original pitch...I'm curious. The fact that I haven't yet means that it's not really been on my mind. Care to know why? It's not a great song. Then it was manipulated to make it sound MORE like their first big hit!
Okay, okay, seriously, it isn't a good song. Even if "Last Train" had never come out, this song wouldn't be that outstanding.
So, did the new music supervisor's gambit work?
Nope. It got to #56.
10. The Girl I Left Behind Me [5]
This song has a great chorus and an all-too-short 12-string acoustic solo, but the rest of the song is the kind of phony-baloney crap that would have been a huge easy listening hit in the 1970's. Unfortunately, it's from 1966. A re-recorded version from 1967 is a bonus track on the CD reissue of The Birds, The Bees, And The Monkees, and it's much better.
You know who could have done this song, obviously making a change for gender? Tina Turner.
11. A Man Without A Dream [1.5]
Somewhere I read Davy likes this song because it was more in his range as a baritone rather than as a tenor. Um, okay, the guy makes his career singing with the range and timbre of a 14 year old boy...anyway, the lyrics are stupid. ("Sometimes I think I'm a prisoner of fate / Doomed to find out things a little too late") The backing vocalists sound like they are half-awake. And the brass interlude is horribly out of place. At least with "The Girl I Left Behind Me" I can picture it being a feminist anthem for Tina Turner, produced by noted producer/murderer Phil Spector, but with this, I don't think anyone should be allowed to sing it. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you look at the sheet music (or even the master tape) directly without first praying a Latin incantation, this could happen to you:
In Hell, this song and "Don't Listen To Linda" play constantly along with "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey on the radio.
Ready for this? Boyce and Hart, surprisingly, did NOT write this song. Gerry Goffin and Carole King did. The same team that gave us "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow."
Care for any further evidence that man is inherently flawed?
12. Shorty Blackwell [10]
Micky Dolenz gets the benediction this time around, and wow...he and his sister Coco share lead vocal (and harmonize really, really well!) in this epic tale of cats, houses on hills, etc. He said it was his own indulgence to pursue a Sgt. Pepper-style sound. So, if anyone ever asks you what happens when someone has virtually unlimited studio time and access to a world-class recording orchestra, look no further. It's a goofy number, but after everything else that's befallen us for the past 35 minutes, it's welcome relief. Even on a good album, this song would remain memorable.
Subtotal: 68.75% D+
Replayability Factor: 0
Can I listen to this album again and again? No. The low points are too low.
Can I extract the best and make a playlist on iTunes? Oh, yes.
Consistency Factor: 0
It's for the die-hards, plain and simple. Davy Jones fans will probably eat this record up, but keep in mind, these are Davy Jones songs that weren't considered good enough for SIX OTHER ALBUMS before making onto Instant Replay. Just...just think about that one.
External Factors: -1
Yep. I went there. Was it out of the members' control that they had a music supervisor who said, "Hey! I know! Let's make you sound like you did 30 months ago! THAT should sell records!" ? Of course. But it still happened.
TOTAL: 67.75%, rounded to 68% D+
Ouch.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
It seems the greatest artists of all time can have their careers divided into trilogies, or even have their best works sorted into groups of three. The Beatles had a great one-two-three punch of Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, maturing rock and roll and readying it for psychedelia alongside Dylan's own electric trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde.
Though I can bicker to no end about this (and I'm sure I'm not alone), The Kinks' string of Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall of The British Empire) is regarded by the heavily opinionated Kinks writer John Mendelssohn as a trilogy. On one hand, I see where he's coming from - three distinctly British records, musically timeless, and each equally approachable and palatable without any overt anger or vitriol towards anything other than "the man."
Dylan's career can almost completely be broken down into a series of trilogies, with the occasional odd one out - his first album is almost all cover tunes, but then came The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin', and Another Side Of Bob Dylan, these three being the albums that turned the world onto Dylan. Then came the electric trilogy. Then came the roots trilogy of John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning, allowing for the odd one out of the almost unanimously-panned crapfest of Self Portrait.
After a spell on the sidelines, his "divorce trilogy" came out - Planet Waves, the fantastic Blood On The Tracks, and Desire, though Glenn Gass suggested in his course on Bob that Street Legal is just as much part of this set, being the first album he did after his divorce from Sarah Lownes-Dylan. Then came the Jesus trilogy - Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot Of Love - love them or hate them. His last string of albums are considered part of a latter-day grouping of mature albums by one of rock's most revered elder statesmen.
Aside from Dylan, Neil Young stands out to me as the one artist who can be defined by trilogies (even with the odd fourth record, making a tetralogy). He had gained acclaim as a member of Buffalo Springfield, which had also featured a young Stephen Stills and Richie Furay (later to form Poco along with Jim Messina...less said about that guy the better, unless of course "Your Mama Don't Dance" is your kind of thing.) Unfortunately, Buffalo Springfield was marred by in-fighting and the fact that they were never able to capture their stage sound in the studio.
His first trilogy (throwing in his 1968 debut Neil Young to form a tetralogy) of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After The Gold Rush (1970), and Harvest (1972) forms a story arc of sorts. Neil makes a name for himself as a solo artist, with the greatest garage band in the world (Crazy Horse) backing him on the first two, able to promote himself further as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, before finally recording a fairly slick-sounding country/folk/singer-songwriter album in Nashville (Harvest) with a bunch of session players, which in turn becomes the greatest-selling album of 1972.
As he said, success "put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there." (Neil Young, Decade liner notes, 1977.) The so-called "ditch trilogy" makes up what I consider his best work: the rough 'n raucous live album Time Fades Away (1973), the schizophrenic On The Beach (1974), and the so-depressing-it-sat-for-two-years-before-it-got-released-but-it's-a-fucking-masterpiece Tonight's The Night (1975), the most haunting, harrowing, and desolate album of the 1970's, the brutal murder, embalming, and burial of the spirit behind the 1960's. It probably didn't help that his friend/Crazy Horse collaborator Danny Whitten overdosed on heroin purchased with money Neil gave him to help him get clean.
Though I can bicker to no end about this (and I'm sure I'm not alone), The Kinks' string of Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall of The British Empire) is regarded by the heavily opinionated Kinks writer John Mendelssohn as a trilogy. On one hand, I see where he's coming from - three distinctly British records, musically timeless, and each equally approachable and palatable without any overt anger or vitriol towards anything other than "the man."
Dylan's career can almost completely be broken down into a series of trilogies, with the occasional odd one out - his first album is almost all cover tunes, but then came The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin', and Another Side Of Bob Dylan, these three being the albums that turned the world onto Dylan. Then came the electric trilogy. Then came the roots trilogy of John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning, allowing for the odd one out of the almost unanimously-panned crapfest of Self Portrait.
After a spell on the sidelines, his "divorce trilogy" came out - Planet Waves, the fantastic Blood On The Tracks, and Desire, though Glenn Gass suggested in his course on Bob that Street Legal is just as much part of this set, being the first album he did after his divorce from Sarah Lownes-Dylan. Then came the Jesus trilogy - Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot Of Love - love them or hate them. His last string of albums are considered part of a latter-day grouping of mature albums by one of rock's most revered elder statesmen.
Aside from Dylan, Neil Young stands out to me as the one artist who can be defined by trilogies (even with the odd fourth record, making a tetralogy). He had gained acclaim as a member of Buffalo Springfield, which had also featured a young Stephen Stills and Richie Furay (later to form Poco along with Jim Messina...less said about that guy the better, unless of course "Your Mama Don't Dance" is your kind of thing.) Unfortunately, Buffalo Springfield was marred by in-fighting and the fact that they were never able to capture their stage sound in the studio.
His first trilogy (throwing in his 1968 debut Neil Young to form a tetralogy) of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After The Gold Rush (1970), and Harvest (1972) forms a story arc of sorts. Neil makes a name for himself as a solo artist, with the greatest garage band in the world (Crazy Horse) backing him on the first two, able to promote himself further as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, before finally recording a fairly slick-sounding country/folk/singer-songwriter album in Nashville (Harvest) with a bunch of session players, which in turn becomes the greatest-selling album of 1972.
As he said, success "put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there." (Neil Young, Decade liner notes, 1977.) The so-called "ditch trilogy" makes up what I consider his best work: the rough 'n raucous live album Time Fades Away (1973), the schizophrenic On The Beach (1974), and the so-depressing-it-sat-for-two-years-before-it-got-released-but-it's-a-fucking-masterpiece Tonight's The Night (1975), the most haunting, harrowing, and desolate album of the 1970's, the brutal murder, embalming, and burial of the spirit behind the 1960's. It probably didn't help that his friend/Crazy Horse collaborator Danny Whitten overdosed on heroin purchased with money Neil gave him to help him get clean.
Once he was back on his feet artistically, Zuma (1975) embodied this feeling that the dark times were over. He reunited Crazy Horse for a great, rocking album, additionally marked by Neil's development as a guitar hero. After a stint with Stephen Stills as The Stills-Young Band, the 1977 hodge-podge American Stars & Bars featured a side of shit-kicking country music and another side's worth of bitchin' guitar rock, including the sublime "Like A Hurricane." It's as if that album was a collection of extra songs from Zuma and the country/folk Comes A Time (1978), the odd man out in what could have been a trilogy. This "trilogy" ends with Rust Never Sleeps, a eulogy for the classic rock era; one side of the LP was beautifully done acoustic folk/rock, representing the best of Comes A Time, while side B showed Crazy Horse playing in a previously-unheard balls to the wall style, taking their primitive style and making it leaner, with "Hey, Hey, My, My (Into The Black)" featuring the most distorted guitar sound you could possibly play on the radio without it being called noise rock.
I could keep going, but the album at hand is by this point waving and yelling, "Um, hello?! What about ME?" with perfect reason. Let me preface the rest of this discussion by saying that I love Neil Young. Aside from Link Wray and Dave Davies, he stands as my favorite guitarist - noisy minimalism does a lot more for me than seeing Eddie Van Halen or even Jimmy Page wanking their ways up and down a fretboard.
To put it simply, to get your point across, would you stand in the middle of a riot and deliver a well-written piece of rhetoric or light a molotov cocktail and lob it at a(n unoccupied) bus? It isn't difficult to see where I stand on the issue. Neil also has a great sense of tone on guitar, right alongside Rick Nielsen with the sounds he's capable of making, whether it's that aching squeal on "Like A Hurricane" or the farting buzzsaw of "Hey, Hey, My, My," I hear his playing and hear beauty.
Neil also has a flair for deeply personal lyrics. He's got a brand of artistic honesty - see the ditch trilogy - that pulls at the heart, all his own, separate from the poetic approaches of Dylan and Ray Davies, just as intense as John Lennon's debut album at his personal low points, and just as mystical as George Harrison with his sense of romance. I've met a few people who bitch about Neil's singing voice...I fail to see the problem, much like Dylan as a singer. People, I listen to The Residents, Captain Beefheart, and Masonna. (Not a typo - Masonna is a noise artist from Japan. If you can listen to him, consider yourself my newest friend. Special thanks to Dan Crall for the introduction.) With that, I can listen to pretty much anything else.
Pretty much. That's a pretty vague caveat. Some tones just strike my ears as offensive - for example, I HATE the sound of the clarinet in almost any setting - while the stuff we're not supposed to like - feedback, the atonal shrieking of an out-of-tune (or burning) guitar - I think sounds great! Maybe now would also be a good opportunity to say I am a fairly weird guy.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere stands as a very solid album. It is musically entertaining, consistent (for the most part), and it set the standard for his career. Isn't that what we look for in a good album? It's hard to describe an album I rank fairly high without this turning into a handjob convention. I'll just let the songs speak for themselves.
01. Cinnamon Girl [11]
This is essential Neil. Using a heavy guitar tuning of DADGBD, the song crunches from the get-go, contrasted by the beautiful two part harmony sung by Neil and Danny Whitten (Neil on the low part, Danny on high.) Ralph Molina is a great powerhouse of a drummer, with his hi-hat and ride cymbals sounding like instruments all their own. I don't think this guy ever played a fill in his life, but that's hardly the mark of a bad drummer. In fact, it arguably takes more talent to play like that than it does to play like a bat out of Hell sitting in a dynamite pond.
It also bears mentioning that the guitar solo at the end is just one note. Therein lies the power of minimalism.
02. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere [9.5]
Too short! Again with a great Danny Whitten harmony, the lyrics tell a good story of escaping to "nowhere." It's just right where a guitar solo would come in had this song been on, say, Zuma, followed by a repeat of the chorus, it fades out. I'm sure this song is fantastic on stage.
03. Round And Round (It Won't Be Long) [5.5]
The great fun of these first two songs is almost interrupted by this folk/country ballad. Neil would do a whole album of songs in the style of this one called Comes A Time, which seems like a bunch of Crazy Horse tunes minus Crazy Horse and the perpetual female backing vocals, sharing as much or even more airtime than the song's composer's own voice. Plug this song in, get Danny, Ralph, and Billy Talbot (the bassist from Crazy Horse) to do their thing, and you might have a great song. At the very least, a good song. Just not this.
To be fair, it's a good melody. It's just too repetitive. The chorus repeat of "Round and round..." doesn't help to remedy this quality of the song.
04. Down By The River [10]
Oh, HELL yes! This brooding rock song takes its time, and in the best way possible. Two electric guitars lead the song in. Billy and Ralph enter the fray without much fanfare before Neil starts the verse. The beautiful pre-chorus leads into the chorus at 1:10 with a muted drop of feedback (keep in mind, this was 1969, before Sonic Youth but after Jimi Hendrix - needless to say, that above linked clip of Pete Townshend making his guitar squeal at Woodstock was at the time not considered a sound one's guitar should make), transitioning into the chorus with a touch of majestic irreverence. And that chorus! If I didn't love "Cinnamon Girl" for reminding me of the girl I intend to marry, this would have easily been the 11 on this record.
The song thumps along for 9 minutes and 15 seconds, ending side A with an epic rock song.
05. The Losing End (When You're On) [7.5]
Hardly a filler tune, it just seems aloof among the rest of the titans of this album. An odd choice to start side B of this record. This song would have been welcome on Comes A Time, or even Harvest. I don't know...this one is just kind of there, not unlike "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" on the next album.
06. Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets) [10]
Now I know just why "The Losing End" seems like a lost child of a song, sandwiched between "Down By The River" and this haunting, borderline lo-fi elegaic masterpiece of shame, regret, and sadness. The best songwriters can own up to their own failings as humans, and this song nails it. The violin weeps through the song, briefly double-tracked in the middle portion, which in tandem with Neil's mournful melody makes this sound like something centuries old. This wouldn't have been out of place, lyrically, in the ditch trilogy; its musical offspring is "Will To Love" off American Stars & Bars, a similarly moody acoustic ballad with an equally odd, off-center feel that makes it disturbing with little in the way of studio trickery.
07. Cowgirl In The Sand [10]
One could assume that two extended guitar exercises would be monotonous on the same album (I'm looking at Frank Zappa's Zoot Allures as a fine example proving this theory), but other than the fact that they are long and have plenty of guitar work worth fawning over, they are quite different. It isn't until we're almost at the two-minute mark that Neil starts singing. If anyone finds his voice annoying, look towards his delivery on this. He is able to hit some high notes without cracking. Much goes to Billy for laying down a remarkable bassline, especially during Neil's solos. Yet another classic Neil Young song - and on an album with only seven tracks, this is something quite noteworthy.
Subtotal: 90.7% A-
Replayability Factor: 2
A great album to have on in the car, plenty of “classic rock” essence to it, and for my money the heaviest of what I consider his first trilogy. A great introduction to a great artist, but it’s hard to sit and concentrate during the big guitar solos on every single listen. The 2 I’m awarding for this is hardly a sign of this record being a slouch, as it’s no crime to have music on to get lost in.
Consistency Factor: 2.5
This became the benchmark for later albums being considered a “return to form, in the style of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, though I personally don’t like that phrase all that much. Still, clichéd as it sounds, for a “return to form” to be an album driven by heavy, thumping rockers and the occasional beautifully arranged ballad, you could do far worse. It's really hard to ponder what the "average" Neil Young record is. On one end of the spectrum is an album like this, and on the opposite end is Harvest, with plenty of head-scratching albums in the middle (including a techno album, rockabilly, the bipolar Rust Never Sleeps, and even lean R&B featuring Booker T. & The MG's as his backing band) that makes him hard to peg down. But Neil's refusal to be pegged down is one of his most endearing qualities.
This album gets its 2.5, first of all, for being a good album, but for being diverse enough in only seven songs for being a fine example of Neil flexing all of his songwriting muscles, from hard rock to country to folk. Little bits of the career to come is here on this album. I honestly don't think he'd ever have such a broad palette on a single album ever again, hardly a criticism for the rest of his career, but a mighty comment for this album.
External Factors: 1
Just a year after leaving Buffalo Springfield, Neil’s second album overcame the threat of the “sophomore slump” – mainly because his first album wasn’t that popular, to the point that this writer thought this was his debut – and showed his flexibility as a folk balladeer and as one of the leading precursors to grunge, all on the same record. Different moments from his future were foreseen on this album. Unfortunately, Neil’s had a bit of an inconsistent career, so when it’s good it’s fucking on…but when it doesn’t succeed it stands out. On its weakest track, it's overlong, and while it can’t always be back-to-back tens, this veering into extended and repetitive country-stuff is a predecessor to the weak spots on Harvest, American Stars ‘N Bars, Comes A Time, etc. However, this album marks the debut of Crazy Horse, a great backing band; no bullshit, no frills, just good playing. This album doesn't sound dated - it isn't too slick or too bleak - and it could just as easily have been recorded last week.
FINAL SCORE: 98.6% A+
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