Mad Dog Blues

Mad Dog Blues

ROOKS

Pattie Smith — she’s bad!

MAD DOG BLUES & OTHER PLAYS by Sam Shepard Winterhouse

I never could take plays too seriously. Movies were okay, even those Sam Katzman thriller serials that always ended with walls crashing down and Superman zonked by Kryptonite as the water rose — they were black, white and gray and two-dimensional, they existed only on a screen. You could either believe in them or ignore them, but you couldn’t change them. If you sat thru the feature twice, the same exact things happened, the same way.

But plays . . . those were people up there, dressed-up and pretending that they were somewhere else than in a theatre with a whole wall missing, and that space filled with other people who sat watching in the dark — the actors were there, right at that moment — and they were vulnerable. (What if I ran up there and kicked Peter Pan? Bet it wouldn’t just go on as if nothing had happened.)

One of the first plays I ever saw on my own was “The Connection” — an early slice-of-life thing about junkies. According to the script, one of the characters was supposed to circulate in the lobby during intermission and offer to tell “what-it’s-really-like” in return for bread. He came over to me, laid down his hype — I opened my hand which contained two dex caps ... he blanched, and split in a hurry. So much for believing in plays.

That was a long time ago, and now there’s theatre of confrontation, and theatre of the absurd, ahd theatre of involvement — and the concept of audience as enemy to be conquered, motivated, or just plain messed with. So? So playwrites have gotten more agressive — but words on paper and words in somebody else’s mouth are still different trips.

If a word is placed with other words on a lukewarm piece of paper, your mind can fill it with flesh or draw out images, or suck up energy — or do damn near anything you want — limited only by how much the writer-cat put into words in. the first place, and by how much you can make out of them. Take the same words, stick them in somebody’s mouth — and your ear has to deal with them first; the images you can make are limited by the fact that you also have to deal with the image of the person containing that mouth in front of you. Plus the time element, too — read a book or article, you can stop anywhere, go off, do anything, come back and it’s there waiting. But walk out on a play for a drink, or smoke in the john, and it continues to roll head on — it don’t need you, except to clap at the end.

Hmmm. This seems to be getting ^ little convoluted, but that’s what always happens when you start persuing perceptions. (Was that a fire engine or a falling star?)

In otherwords, though reading play’s ain’t exactly my cup of meat, I’d rather read than see them. It just seems that most plays never have much to do with anything real to me - it’s like some kind of big exhibitionit’s fantasy (picture a playwrite whipping open a raincoat to reveal - HIS SHINING INTELLECT & SENSITIVITY!!)

But Shepard’s plays are real to me, maybe because there aren’t lots of socially conscious plots running rampant thru them, or any weighty philosophical profundities being crammed into your conceptions. The four plays in this collection all tend to be basic (rtiost with little scenery), and full of street talk and rock-and-roll images. (Shepard, by the way, did the screenplay for Zabriskie Point, was a drummer with the Holy Modal Rounders, and could be seen running with rock stars and auto mechanics from time to time.)

“Mad Dog Blues” is a tale of Kosmo, the rock star, and his junky buddy Yahoodi — who share visions and concerns. Kosmo hooks up with Mae West, Yahoodi ends up in the jungle with Marlene Deitrich, hustling for gold. At one point Paul Bunyan wanders by looking for his ox, and the following exchange ensues:

KOSMO: My mind’s going a mile a minute! I’ve got to slow down.

PAUL BUNYAN: This is the best place for if. Nothing like the north woods for a little peace and quiet. Just chew on some acorns. Hum a little tune. Whittle your fingernails.

KOSMO: But I’m a musician! I’ve got to create! I’ve got to get back to the city. Back to my band. Back to my roots. I’ve lost touch with my roots. PAUL BUNYAN: You city folks are all alike. Always tryin’ to make a buck. KOSMO: No. I’m not in it for the money. I’m an artist.

PAUL BUNYAN: Me, I’m a lumberjack. See ya around.

Other characters appear including Waco, the re-incarnation of Jimmie Rodgers, Captain Kidd, who has an island treasure guarded by a ghost-girl, and Jesse James, who robs everybody in the jungle. There’s a chase scene, which delves into friendship/paranoia; there’s betrayal, suspicion, humor, despair and songs — and the play ends with the whole cast singing:

Ride me in a silver airplane

Ride me in a passenger train

Move me against the grain

Move me

Home

Home \

—while joining hands and marching out thru the audience into the street. Synopsized like this, it may appear campy and all that shit, but though it might be in somebody else’s hands, in Shepard’s, it’s real, and it works. There’s a real love for language, and it’s touched with all the elements of the fantasy and fury that life gets to be when you live inside your own head. Shepard has an ear for word-phrases that jump right into the hearts of matters (He falls for Mae West cause he had a vision of her singing like Janis Joplin) — and a drummer’s sense of rhythm in the way he lays them down. I dug reading this, I’d think I’d like to even see it.

But the main reason I got the book is for the second play, “Cowboy Mouth” co-authored with Patti Smith, who is one of the greatest poets writing in Engiish.(Probably other languages too, but English is all I got covered right now.) The play is heavily auto-biographical; the two characters, Slim the Coyote and Cavale the Crow were played onstage by Shepard and Smith. The premise is basic, and bizarre enough to be real; Cavale has kidnapped Slim from his wife and kid at gunpoint — she wants to make him a rock and roll star. Slim is torn between leaving and embracing her fantasy. The action takes place in Cavale’s room (with an imaginary run to the shoe-store to get her some red ballet shoes: “I’m gonna break the window,” he says. “But we got money — ” she replies. “A good thief never hesitates” he answers, and crash.) In the room and their minds they run through all the changes of demondoomed lovers; they tell each other stories,they play coyote and crow, they curse each other out, they howl at the moon, they collapse from exhaustion. Each author wrote their own character’s speeches, and a rough and ragged poetry spurts out.

Dig these excerpts as Cavale tells Slim about a 50’s singer: “Johhny Ace. Johhny Ace. Johhny Ace was cool. He was real cool, baby. Just like you .. . And one day when all the girls were waiting, when everybody paid their fare to see Johhny Ace on stage in person singing sad and dressed in black, Johhny Ace took out his revolver, rolled the barrel like his 45 record, played Russian Roulette like his last hit record, and lost. Johnny Ace blew his brains out, all the people jump and shout. All the people jump and shout Johhny Ace blew his brains out.”

Or this, as Cavale explains about rock being the only religion she’s got: “ . .. the old God is just too far away. He don’t represent our pain anymore. His words don’t shake through us no more. Any great mother-fucker rockn’-roll star in his highest state of grace will be the new savior ...”

Slim understands, but — “I got another life! I can’t do it now! It’s too late! You can’t bring somebody’s dream up to the surface like thatl It ain’t fucking fair!” Soon another character enters and Cavale pours her myths and beliefs into him. Slim leaves; Cavale is still swimming in, and committed to, her dream.

Words in this play are more than words, they’re vehicles for lots of emotion. The whole man-woman thing is dug into, overlaid and under-cut by all the sounds out the window that affect every bedroom, no matter how the air is conditioned.

The remaining two plays are mostly sketches: “The Rock Garden” (a scene from which appeared in Oh Calcutta”) is about communication hassles, “Cowboy’s #2” is kids’ fantasies brought into grown-up time. Though neither move much spatially, they make you think.

Add a foreward by Mike McClure (a pretty fair wordslinger himself) and a long poetic biography by Patti Smith, and you got a book of plays that even people like me will dig.

Shepard has a basic simplicity that has nothing to do with put-on and put down, a sincere love for America dreams that many of us still have scattered in our psyches, and a sense of humor hip enough to keep it all interesting. Plays for those who grew with Dylan, Joplin & Hendrix.

Try this one out — and keep an eye out for future works by Patti Smith — she’s a bad motherfucker.

Tony Glover

ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE:

The Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-62 Edited by Helen Manfull Bantam

If you only know about Dalton Trumbo because of Johnny Got His Gun, his faihous peacenik book (now, movie), Additional Dialogue will come as a surprise. Trumbo has been, for almost thirty years, one of America’s most gifted screenwriters. You wouldn’t know that, though, unless' you were particularly involved with Hollywood history, for in the years since 1948, TrumbO'has only two major films to his credit, Exodus and Spartacus, along with one underground classic, Lonely Are The Brave, and now Johnny.

This isn’t all the work that Dalton Trumbo did in those years, and it isn’t even the measure of all his successful work. In fact, the great mystery of the 1957 Academy Awards presentations, Robert Rich, who was awarded an Oscar for the script of The Brave One, but never showed up to claim it, was not resolved until Trumbo stepped forward years later to admit that he was the author.

Trumbo was unable to claim his Oscar in 1957 (he never did get physical possession of the trophy) because he had been blacklisted, along with about 200 other members of the film industry in 1948. Trumbo had refused to testify before the notorious House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

These HU AC hearings set the stage for the later, more celebrated political inquisitions of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The present spate of government accusations and political trials (Angela Davis, the Harrisburg Seven, Harlem Four, Panther 21, Daniel Ellsburg, the Soledad Brothers, Ruchell Maggee, etc.) are a consequence extrapolated from the activity of those years. In them we can see the seeds of the Cold War corner America backed herself into, from which there was no escape save through total leftist change or an ossification into totalitarianism. Interestingly enough, Richard Nixon served on HUAC at the time the Hollywood hearings were held; it is no accident that the worse siege of political trials in American history comes under his presidential administration.

To be blacklisted meant to be banned from working in any Hollywood studio, no matter how large or how small. It is undeniable that many of those who did testify before the committee did so not out of political conviction but through pure professional jealousy and a desire for self-aggrandizement: the so-called “friendly witnesses,” whose testimony set the stage for the purge of the others, were largely not as successful as the workers who were purged. (They included such “distinguished” figures as Ayn Rand and Adolph Menjou.) Writers purged included Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Bertolt Brecht, Adrain Scott, John Howard Lawson, and Albert Maltz. (Brecht so befuddled the committee, they couldn’t actually do much with him.)

Trumbo and nine others were the first to be cited for any criminal charge: contempt of Congress. They became the Hollywood Ten, accused, not of any overt act, but of refusal to testify about their own political convictions. And, equally importantly, because of their refusal to give any information about the political ideals of any other person they knew.

The men the government attempted to. break in this manner were not without economic means; Trumbo had recently signed a contract with MGM guaranteeing him $75,000. A contract, incidentally, which did not include a “morals” clause, which set a precedent of considerable import. He was not alone in being able to command such high prices.

Immediately, the offenders were cited for contempt; most ended up doing six months to two years in federal penitentiaries. Worse yet, the film industry presented them with an ultimatum: the Blacklist. This meant that, in effect, none of the 200 blacklisted persons could get a job in Hollywood. Unless, of course, the person would agree to inform. Commendably, only one (Edward Dmytryk) did, and he served six months in prison before he was broken.

Trumbo saw his responsibilities at this point as two: first, to establish himself in the black market (writing under an assumed name, for a fraction of the price he usually commanded), in order to support his rather large family; secondly, but of co-equal importance, to break the blacklist.

Additional Dialogue is largely the chronicle of Trumbo’s efforts to accomplish these goals. It is not, precisely, Trumbo’s biography, because so much of his life is left out; but a clear picture of the man emerges anyway.

I didn’t like the movie of Johnny very much, and that book seems a little obvious when I look back on it, but Dalton Trumbo has thoroughly impressed me with these letters, both as a thinker and as a man. This is a wonderful and often charming book, distilling the bleakness and terror of the fifties into all the situations it presents, horrifying in its grasp of what (and how farreaching) the actual menace is. At their best, each of Trumbo’s letters cuts through the terror to reveal the people living inside it. This does not reduce the tension and anxiety one feels, it intensifies it: you learn to care that Trumbo’s daughter is being red-baited so much that she can no longer attend school; you suffer when the family must move to Mexico, because of harassment by Internal Revenue.

Eventually, as cinematic as that sounds, you are brought back to the hard-bitten reality: this is not a movie, this is real life. Real Life, even. Life, indeed, in America, when we were children.

Trumbo’s letters are not always of political intent; they are sometimes merely whimsical notes to his children, love letters from prison to his wife, angry epistles from consumer to businessman, witty correspondences to friends (the series of letters which keep popping up to Ring Lardner, Jr. is hilarious).

But the point of the book, of course, is its chronicle of the rise of totalitarianism in America after World War II. The tactics Trumbo suggests aren’t applicable, I don’t think, because the tactics of the government aren’t the same now. One thing that the Hollywood Ten and the others taught the feds was that people can’t be shamed out of their political convictions; that just doesn’t work any longer. As a result, the government has had to get a lot tougher — resorting, in some cases (like George Jackson’s and Bobby Hutton’s) to murder, pure and simple and more frequently to trumped-up “conspiracy” charges.

What is important to us in Additional Dialogue is that it can give us a sense of our own history; a sense that our “movement,” in whatever terms we care to define it, didn’t begin when the record business decided it would be good if we registered to vote.

More than that, it affirms something that just might be true of us, with a little luck. The blacklist was broken; Trumbo — as Robert Rich — just made the entire situation look ridiculous. Hollywood couldn’t survive without its left.

Of course, nothing really changed. Lots of stupid, demagogic, inhuman and even fascistic movies still get made. Breaking the blacklist wasn’t the revolution, anymore than being able to vote, or even voting itself is; no matter how many rock and roll stars say different, it’s only gonna change the faces, make things a little better (we can be thankful for that, I guess) for awhile. But it isn’t going to change the face of America anymore than Trumbo’s breaking the blacklist changed Hollywood, except for awhile. Even then, it’s all done with mirrors.

The Hollywood Ten and the blacklist are all but forgotten by now. Robert Baughan talked about it on the Dick Cavett Show the other night, but only because he’d done his doctoral thesis on the 200 blacklistees — and he had to explain what the blacklist had been.

Additional Dialogue is the sort of reminder we need, both of the fascism our government has long had a propensity to unleash and of what a difficult struggle dealing with that ideology is. That Dalton Trumbo remains so warm and so powerful in the face of such tyranny is more than enough reason that this book be recommended without reservation.

Dave Marsh

OUR TIME

Interviews From the East Village Other Compiled and Edited by Allen Katzman Dial

Yes, Virginia, there is a counterculture, and if you can’t see it all around you there is also a plethora of books examining, exploiting and dissecting it in minutest detail. There are the reports by virtual or total outsiders from academe (The Making of a Counter Culture) and straight journalism (Streets, Actions, Alternatives and Raps and Diana: The Making of a Terrorist), and then there is the Real Stuff. The reason you know it is Real is that it is put together and marketed, however slapdash, by bona-fide members of the Underground. Tim Leary’s three stupefying tomes certainly qualify in this department, as well as such post-beatnik scribbles as Woodstock Nation and Jerry Rubin’s last book which I can’t even remember the name of. Some of the latter are moderately entertaining, and even have some nice graphics, but the operative principle, as with the reports of the sobersides lookers-on, seems to be to stuff as much rhetoric and superficial scenemongerirtg as possible on each page, and the only real difference in the pall of boredom cast by both brands seems to be that the Inside Reports of the real cats are a bit less coherent.

Which brings us to this exhaustive, not to mention exhausting volume, which sells for nine dollars in hardback and $2.65 in paper, and is nothing more than 400 pages of old interviews from that late, raffishly gross and indiscriminate underground paper, The East Village Other. I read most of these things when they first appeared, and though I can’t honestly say I thought much of them even in the heydaze of fleur-purr, they come off as even more soporific now, though maybe that’s because I didn’t smoke dope this time. Or, more likely, because this kind of spew (and I am hardly one to denigrate good spew) only works in the context of a grainy tabloid with rips in the creases, grass being sifted on the pages spread across the living room floor, and joyously shoddy layout that looked like it was done by people under acid and speed at the same time; when removed from all that queasily nostalgic contextual charm and layed down forever or at least until next season’s 694 drugstore cutouts in endless series of clean white pages with stark black type, well, it’s just not the same thing. God knows books are hard enough for most of us to read these days, without subjecting us to yesterday’s papers in today’s socialsignificance-by-medium drag.

Raps. Trips. Menopausal ideological balderdash. Tim Leary blathering through four different encounters, moving from his early borderline Charles Reich simperings to the firebrand parratings and self-justifications from exile with equal blithe superficiality. Dope. Dope of all kinds everywhere, but the question at this point is whether, short of the invention tomorrow by the government of some totally unforeseen new papifier, we ever need to read another word about it again (though certain arcane alleyways, such as glue sniffing, have not really been charted yed). Politics — or at least some people call it that. I call it mostly, from the white voices anyway, show biz, no matter how many times they skip through the guillotine. Iggy Stooge did the same thing, but he had the good sense not to say, “Go thou and do likewise.” It’s all so deadly dull, like Jerry Rubin calling the film Yellow Submarine “the best vision of the revolution I have ever seen,” or John Sinclair making the standard distinction between highand lowenergy music and including AM programming as exemplification of the latter. Most of the thinking is trivial and based on a limited, spaced-out analysis, like assuming that since a situation does obtain in which the government bans marijuana, that automatically makes all dope smokers at least potential outlaws. It’s almost pathetic in a way, and not without a feeling of deja-vu, as when Sinclair spoke to some of us in the Detroit area the other night and said that everybody was going to start taking acid again. And, as seemingly fixed in certain daylong eras as such notions are, this book never attempts to question them unless the interviewees in question are such pop dilettantes as Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, in which the Mike Wallace type incisions are hardly called for anyway, since they at least don’t make any bones about their fantasies being any more than just that. For some reason, though, people nowadays seem to have a tendency to push musicians to the wall for exact clarification of what they intended by this or that jam with perhaps ad-libbed lyrics, when they will let politicos and politistars get away with the most grossly irrational conclusions and generalities. But then, it has been said often enough that generality is what it’s all about. In which case, as Lou Reed once said: “Do it do it do it — goodbye!”

Lester Bangs

LIEUTENANT LSD by “Lan Creston" (Alan Kaplan)

The Whoreghether Press distributed by The Book People, Berkeley

So here I was, sitting reading a literary essay by some New York literati about how he’d gotten sick and taken to his bed with some books he’d planned on reviewing, and there was one of them that was so terrible it just gripped him right through to the last page. I laughed and thought “what a cruel way to get back at some guy who’s insulted you or something.”

Then I got sick and picked up this book to pass the time. Folks, you ain’t gonna believe this, but this book is so horrible you can’t put it down. Really. What we have here is the first psychedelic greaser autobiographical novel. It’s printed in eight colors on different color paper to signify the changes Kaplan (Creston is an acid vision or something who never quite gets explained) went through, from soaking toilet paper rolls and throwing them around the University of Wisconsin, to the Army’s Officer Candidate School. And what changes! Do you realize the agony of working all summer in Catskill resorts without any decent grass??? Did you know that the Army is inhuman and vast depersonalizing machine, even if the war in Vietnam is necessary? After fucking the same damn chick for three years did you ever want to search for adventure only to be brought down by her getting pregnant? Lemme tell ya, this kid may be from the Bronx, but he’s seen it all.

But seriously, this book has its own fascination. You may not care about the grades he got at Wisconsin (they’re all dutifully written down), but Kaplan is indeed a child of the times. No hippie utopian of 1965 could have foreseen him, but he and his are with us, and, like the cabbie said, “There’s some good and some bad in all kinds, ya know?” I wouldn’t really advise anybody to invest their four bucks in this book, but aS sociology it can’t be beat, and, even though I disagree with the prononciamento in the front of the book that says that it “makes Robin Hood look lame,” the section where he turns into Lieutenant LSD and commands a bunch of men in Panama (“Don’t call me lieutenant call me hey man”) are really funny, if much too short (but you didn’t expect the Army would let him get away with it for long, now, did you?).

By the way, the distributors of this book are Book People, who are at 2490 Seventh St. in Berkeley. They distribute the products of the better small presses out west, including the underground comix, and their catalogue is well worth looking through, whether you’re a bookstore or a reader.

And Lan Creston is just hanging out, waiting for a movie offer on this book. He wants to star in it, natch.

Ed Ward

ERRATUM

In Charlie Gillett’s book review last issue (May), the price of Lynn McCutcheon’s Rhythm and Blues is given as $2.95. The book actually retails for $3.95, in paper, and $5.95 in hard cover. It’s still available from R.W. Beatty Ltd. P.O. Box 26, Arlington Va.