Prime Time

Prime Time

Arrrrrgh...

by

Richard C. Walls

excerpts from a low budget diary III...

Mon. The Rolling Stones are in the Detroit area today and tomorrow and the local media coverage has been unprecedented...phenomenal ... weird. True, the Stones have been around long enough to earn the attention of the establishment newspeople, and the Detroit Free Press special Stones section was semi-knowledgeable, quoting CREEM alumni Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs (and calling Its Only Rock n Roll a greatest hits album)...but the local TV stations, with their awed predictions of crowd sizes and their breathless live coverage of the early arrivals, seem to be hoping for a little post-Cincinnati scoop...not an actual tragedy, of course, just a little violence or maybe some colorful arrests... Meanwhile, back at Newscentral the sententious anchorman shows a chart of the massive Pontiac Silverdome:over heres where the stage will be.. .this is where those without reserved seats will sit.. .and over here is where the crazed idiots are most likely to crush themselves to death... He doesnt say that last part, but its in the air, nonetheless. Why else would they bother to bring out the chart?...then, proof that the spirit of Dean Martin lives on and on, the resident humorist, who usually unwinds his wit with features on the lighter side of home repairs or coverage of the Dead Hen, Michigan yam festival, does an embarrassing turn, the point of which seems to be that he misses Sammy Kaye.. .its not even a good generation gap bit because you just know that if this clown were a young music consumer today hed be heavily into Barry Manilow.. .so whats the point?

On the 11 p.m. newscasts, undaunted even tho their live mini-cams had been barred from backstage by the Stones management, the reporters delivered their punchlines... nobody died...

(Later I heard the show was a good one...personally, I wouldnt go to a 75,000 seat stadium to see God, let alone what Casey Kasem might not entirely inaccurately refer to asSuccessful industry pros.. .but Im glad that everyone had a nice time...)

Tues. eve. Tried once again, without success, to watch The Tomorrow Show...the problem is that our local NBC outlet has wedged a virtually impenetrable abomination between the Carson and Snyder shows called Entertainment Tonight... theoretically it would seem that a movie buff and confessed TV watcher like myself could find something of interest here.. .but its just too dull, too many stale Alice Cooper jokes and Erik Estrada updates, the hosts are too colorless (the guy, whose name I can never remember, is the type of anachronism who would follow a tape of David Bowie in performance withWhat wont they think of next) and watching them is like watching Rona Barrett without the unlikely wig, the mealymouthed diction, the outrageous pretentions—all the little things that make Miss Rona such a fun person...and so, with a dearth of relevant news items and the Nowhere Twins at the helm, the seeker of truth is lulled to sleep, never again to wake in time to catch Tom Snyder and his madcap encounters with modern reality... Sat. Thought Id check in on Sneak Previews.. .rumor has it that the behind-the-scenes personality conflicts of Ebert and Siskel have reached new heights tho personally I dont believe it.. .what could be more sincere than Eberts delighted chuckle each time Siskel tenders a particularly witty critical insight or Siskels charming guffaws underscoring Eberts latest bon mots?... obviously these guys love each other.. .besides, they have a cause to unite them, their ongoing crusade againstmad slasher movies... Ebert (or was it Siskel?) especially disdained the woman-indistress theme and the use of the subjective camera to depict the murders from the killers point of view encourages the audience to indulge their most craven post-womens lib backlash fantasies.. .one can be skeptical about the details while accepting the premise (that these movies are immoral) especially if one remembers that the terrorized woman is a genre convention that predates the modern feminist upsurge and that the subjective camera is a B-movie cliche that allows the director to hide the identity of the murderer until the final reel without having to devise a more creative (and possibly more expensive) subterfuge.. .so the rough aesthetics and dubious morals of these movies are steeped in tradition and Ebert and Siskels backlash hook may be just that—something to hang their justifiable outrage on... (altho only an apologist for the most pathological aspects of macho culture would deny that movies like Maniac and I Spit On Your Grave are unambiguous in their misogynist intentions)...

Aside from all that, the boys do seem a little harsher this year (tipoff: Siskel—or was it Ebert— calling Neil Simons Only When I Laughintellectually gutless) tho overall its the same loveable blather, with both of them lusting afteradult movies aboutreal people and generally, the disemboweling of Neil Simon notwithstanding, upholding the standard of middlebrow decency...

Its all become fairly predictable and at times one wishes the producers of the show would replace E&S with two more adventurous critics.. .perhaps Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris could go at it for a season.. .two more opposing critical temperaments wpuld be hard to imagine, tho the dialogue can be guessed at...

Kael:The movie literally shimmered with comic book intensity...

Sarris:Actually, I thought that the tension generated by the confrontation between the directors contrived mise-en-scene and the innate demands of any attempt at this particular type of genre classicism was inexpertly resolved...

Kael:Aw, go fuck yourself, you pompous poof...

Sarris:Might I suggest you would experience a certain ˜comic book intensity by squatting over a hot movieola...

Now thats entertainment... Meanwhile we must learn to settle for what we can get...

Music For Money!

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

by Joseph C. Smith

(Grove)

"Popular musics a business, nothing more, the veteran record man tells the idealistic young executive.And its a competitive business, like shoes or real estate or politics. If youre reasonably honest, its based on the profit motive. If youre not, its based on screwing your fellow man out of as much as you can.

That paragraph defines the essence of Joseph C. Smiths epic novel, The Day The Music Died. Only in his title,the day in question doesnt refer to February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly crashed into oblivion. One day would be too easy for Smith, a black performer who knows from the heart the late 1950s and early 1960s about which he writes. If one accepts the downbeat message of the book, the music dies a little every day—when an enterprising black record company operator is forced to sell to the Mob, when a supporter of creative music finds himself hacking for a marketing monolith, when a huckster whod be proud to be called a racist gets a shot at running one of the worlds recording giants.

Smith hasnt aimed to create art, or vied for longevity, in The Day The Music Died. He has unsparingly written about rocks first era, years that now reach us in a crackling haze of Little Richard and Bobby Vee singles, visions of American Bandstand and the payola hearings we see on fuzzy kinescopes. What Smith has accomplished, in forthright style, is to have sharp focused upon those years. Through the eyes of country go-getter Car Clinger and rhythm n blues maker Monroe Wilcox, Smith traces the paths of the hundreds of independent record companies that sprung up when 45-record buyers were first recognized as a commodity. In his characterization of Class-A ripoff artist Paulie Schultz, the kind of guy thatas soon as he says hello, youd get this overpowering urge to kick him in the ass, Smith epitomizes all the reasons why A&R men are still encouraged to sign third-rate talent as tax losses.

Perhaps The Day The Music Died does veer too far in one direction, concentrating upon the sharpies and sellouts of the powerless. But Smith doesnt rely on the usual crutches of sex and drugs to make his points; nor does he advance a conspiracy theory other than the tendency of white music moguls to exploit blacks. And that, as is proven time and again, isnt theory but fact, except that the powers that be in reality often control naive white artists as well.

One of the books most insightful moments occurs when I.T.R.C., Smiths hitmaking conglomerate, forms a quasi-independent subsidiary called Arrow Records, which is to be a hitmaking factory with no regard for quality. Its 1961, anddumb rock is selling millions of faceless singles to white teenagers.

Smith writes,Ostensibly, the product was music. In truth, it was image, a deceptive image of youth. The ploy, a penultimate con based upon the supposedly inherent virtues of being young. Not of being good, or wise, or caring, nor even honestly ambitious. Just young. That was enough. And beneath all the marketing jargon, the talk of profit-erosion, input-output ratios, lay a verification overwhelming in its emptiness. Top 40, anyone?

Toby Goldstein