CREEMEDIA

Alan Arkush Gets Crazy

CREEMEDIA

John Mendelssohn

You’ll like the Nada Band. There are about a dozen of them, they all wear a great deal of make-up, and a couple of them have fabulous teased hair. Indeed, one of the saxophonists, Susie Sidewinder, sports a beehive you’d be surprised not to find black widows breeding in. When she’s not singing, Nada herself flies through the air with the greatest of ease—or at least performs a gape-inducing succession of cartwheels and somersaults. Even though the band includes only one punkette, whose hair appears to have been scorched off on the sides, boys with mohawks go into a frenzy at the sight of them and scurry onto the stage, only to be sent hurtling back whence they came by Nada’s dainty foot.

Look for this fab act at no nightclub or concert hall, though, but at your local drive-in multiples, for Nada and her band exist only in the forthcoming motion picture Get Crazy, which director Alan Arkush hopes will help at least in a small way to reunite the rock audience. “The attitude of audiences today,” he notes, “is, ‘I’m going to see Bruce Springsteen, or whomever, and I don’t want to be bothered with anything else.’ Everybody’s on his own little asteroid, and doesn’t want to be exposed to anything different or new.

“I remember back in the ’60s literally running out to buy a new Doors album, running out to buy Sgt. Pepper the day it was released.

I may still do that, but somehow when I run out to buy the latest Clash or Talking Heads album, it only seems to be me who’s doing it. Back then it seemed like the whole world.

“I think Robert Christgau’s Theory of Semi-Popularity is correct—even though it may sell a lot more copies, no Neil Young album, for instance, will ever be nearly as important as Sgt. Pepper. Which reminds me of when that ad was taken out for Abba, pointing out that they’d sold more records than the Beatles. The response to that was, ‘Big deal—they’re still not as popular as Jesus.’ ”

Arkush witnessed a great, great many concerts of the sort around which Get Crazy revolves—one at which acts of many different sorts perform—as a member of the Fillmore East’s crackerjack backstage crew. Indeed, the film is based on his experiences behind the scenes at that historic venue, where he began working in the early summer of 1968 after responding to an ushers-wanted advertisment in his NYU dormitory. “But after a year it began to drive me nuts. It seemed that I was forever trying to make myself heard over somebody like Led Zeppelin, trying to explain to some kid on downs why he had to move out of the second row and up to the balcony.

“The night that I realized that I had to get out of the audience, Sly Stone started a riot. He began his first show real late, and then wouldn’t come off. When we told him that it was raining outside, and that the audience for the second show was getting drenched, he took it the wrong way. He thought the man was trying to bust his music or something. So in the middle of ‘L Want To Take You Higher,’ he yelled, ‘C’mon, everybody—let’s go out in the streets.’ The crowd just surged over us, flinging open the doors and crunching all these kids who were lined up next to the building. Sly goes outside and tells everybody to come in free. All of a sudden, hundreds of people with steel pipes are smashing their way in. I just said, ‘Forget it.’ ”

He soon discovered that backstage life had its drawbacks too. “Witnessing all the hero worship that went on drove me crazy, watching people throw themselves at these perfectly horrible human beings, like the organist in Ten Years After. He’d play the same two notes all night. They might have been all he could play. But people would fawn all over him, and he had this pompous air about him.” So sickening did Arkush find such spectacles that he devoted his NYU senior film to them. Acrid though it admittedly was, Septugenarian Substitute Ball nonetheless won second prize at 1970’s National Student Film Festival.

Arkush was originally inspired to work in film by A Hard Day’s Night. “You hear so many people say that Citizen Kane changed their lives. I appreciated Citizen Kane, but there was something magical for me about seeing a film on a subject that I could relate to personally. The Beatles movie was the first one that I realized had been shot, edited, and directed in a deliberate way. I’ll never forget the first time that it hit me. They were in the cage on the train, playing cards and singing ‘I Should Have Known Better.’ All of a sudden, the camera started moving in time to the music. It was as though not even the cameraman was immune to the Beatles! Then the very last shot, of the helicopter taking off—I thought, ‘My God! Somebody actually thought this whole thing out!’ ”

Once having graduated from NYU, Arkush worked for a light show company in London for eighteen months and then drove a Manhattan taxi for a while before moving to California in the autumn of 1973. There Roger Corman, head of New World Pictures, was occasionally hiring NYU graduates to direct “threeand four-week nurses and teachers movies” at the suggestion of Martin Scorsese, who’d been Arkush’s senior advisor in college. Arkush’s first major break came when he and an accomplice convinced Corman that they could make an action feature for less than he’d ever had to spend on one before. “We wrote our script around scenes from Death Race 2000, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, and a bunch of Filipino women-inprison pictures,” our hero recalls with a giggle. “In the finished film, Hollywood Blvd., there was lots of cutting from actresses shooting machine guns in Malibu to people falling out of trees in the Phillipines.

I got paid a total of about $85 for directing the whole thing, but what was important was that Roger really liked it.”

How much did the since-deposed exploitation king like it? This much. After his fair-haired boy, who looks rather like a Semitic Randy Quaid, had recut a blacksploitation picture called Blast and then overseen the second-unit trashing of a Rolls Royce in the unforgettable Grand Theft Auto, Corman invited him to direct something called Girls’ Gym, which he’d conceived essentially as a pretext for a nude gymnastic scene, but which quickly metamorphosed into Disco High when Corman noted the grosses of Saturday Night Fever.

“Naturally, I had no intention whatsoever of making a picture called Disco High, Arkush reveals, “so it was good thing tht Roger didn’t have the slightest idea of what disco was, and that had already begun to fade fast by the time we were ready to begin production. I decided to rework the script so that it incorporated a lot of the stuff in a treatment I’d written right after coming to California called Heavy Metal Kids, which was based on my own high school fantasies. I used to get myself through French by fantasizing about the Yardbirds setting up to play in the boy’s gym.

“After I got the Ramones to agree to star in it—by telling them that they should mentally cross out the word ‘disco’ every time they read it in Roger’s script, and replace it with rock ’n’ roll —I had to break the news to Roger. I got up on his couch and did my Pete Townshend imitation, and managed to explain to him why disco wasn’t a music of rebellion.”

Ultimately, “seeing kids going crazy on a Saturday night at the 8th Street Playhouse theatre made the whole thing worthwhile,” but “getting Rock ’N’ Roll High School made was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, since it was the only film New World Pictures ever released .that Roger Corman didn’t think up personally.”

(Another hard thing, he admits, was getting over noted critic Greil Marcus’s virulent condemnation of the film. “Boy,” Arkush sighs, “that really hurt. Here I’d been giving copies of his book as gifts for years.”)

Asked why the corpulent old sods who clutch Hollywood’s pursestrings are known to agree that Rock Films Don’t Sell, Arkush theorizes, “Most of them show no real love for the music. And too many of them are about a past too distant for kids to relate to, like American Hot Wax, which I personally enjoyed quite a lot. I mean, when 1 saw I Want To Hold Your Hand, I overheard a girl behind me telling her friend, ‘Gee, I bet it would have been really neat to have been alive then!’ And then there are the abominations, like Sgt. Pepper, that give the whole genre a bad name.”

If nothing else (and members of its own crew were overhead to suggest that its script scored a solid nine on a one-to-ten scale of inanity), Get Crazy should exude lots of love for the music about. As he oversaw the filming, Alan Arkush was virtually never seen without a pleased smirk all over his face. And consider how many fabulous stars appear in the film. . There’s Lou Reed, playing a reclusive Dylanoid, and closing the concert by singing “A song about how the performer should relate to the audience as a loving brother would to his younger sister,” according to Arkush. There’s Lori Eastside (as Nada), the deposed Kid Creole vocalist and sometime Chic choreographer, and in her band there are former members of such fab femme attractions as the Orchids and the Castration Squad. There’s Lee Ving, of the popular L.A. punk combo Fear, and noted jazz vocalist Bill Henderson, playing someone very much like Muddy Waters, who’d have been in the picture himself had he not required surgery. Finally—and surely most surprisingly—there’s the star of the best rock ’n’ roll film of 1971, A Clockwork Orange. That’s right—none other than Malcolm McDowell took over the role Elton John, Rod Stewart, and various other megastars had spurned after Sparks’ Russell Mael was banished from it.

In Defense...

ELVIS by Dave Marsh (Rolling Stone Press/Times Books)

“I remember seeing Elvis on TV in the ’50s. From that point on, he was like the father of my country. ” —Bruce Springsteen

The most insightful writings on Elvis Presley since'his death have dealt less with the human being and more with the concept of Elvis as a nearly perfect reflection, of everything great (the potential) and hideous about America itself. The basic “rags-td-royalty” story has been.repeated so many times that, it’s part of American folklore, and there are many things no one’s ever going to know about the “real” Elvis due to the circumstances of his life. A lot more is discovered about both Elvis and the country that spawned him by examining the factors surrounding this man, who (even during his obese, strung-out period) could elicit mass hysteria in people aged 8 to 80 by simply walking onstage in a Superman costume, this after a decade of not much more than mediocre to terrible motion pictures.

Dave Marsh’s new “critical biography” of Presley joins past essays by Greil Marcus, Linda Ray Pratt, Robert Ward and Lester Bangs as one of the best things written about Elvis because it examines the phenomenon and the art as much as it does the man. The text almost plays second fiddle to a collection of photos compiled by the late Bea Feitler, and the pictures alone should nearly be worth the expensive $35 pricetag to Presley aficionados. (A cheaper paperback edition will be published soon.) However, it’s Marsh’s thoughts, historical perspective and overview of Presley’s career that make the book worthwhile and more than just another Elvis photo album.

Marsh understands the amazing contradictions in Elvis’s myth and character, so he begins his book by debunking both the fanatic “Elvisas-savior” and Albert Goldman “Elvis-as-mohster” viewpoints, explaining that “neither version adds or detracts from his art, and it is Elvis’s art that will continue to inspire—not save—people for decades to come.” Because he was such a beacon of inspiration, Marsh portrays Elvis as a symbol of American democracy (ironic when you consider that Graceland has become a modern Mount Vernon), meaning that he epitomized “the greatest freedom we have been granted, the freedom to invent ourselves... There is no way one man will ever achieve more, working with himself, by himself, than Elvis Presley did.” And from there, the author sets out to prove his claim.

Elvis is less a factual biography than it is an overview of what the man’s life produced, although readers will arguably find more interesting details here than in the Goldman tome, not to mention some historical revisionism (i.e., Sam Phillips is portrayed here as less of a “saint” than is generally the case). The book also includes an excellent explanation of what the ’70s Elvis represented, which was everything anyone wanted him to represent (an amazing feat when you stop to think about it)—“(He enacted) not just the legend of Elvis, but the legend sufficiently emptied of content, so that no person’s fantasies were threatened or denied—even though this also meant that no one’s fantasies (including Elvis’s own) were ever fulfilled. As a gesture, it was awesome in the magnitude of its generosity, an insoluble mixture of humility and conceit. By enacting his legend in two dimensions, Elvis confirmed all suspicions, justified all expectations. It became as easy to see him as the master ripoff artist as it was to envision him as the great American musical genius—or even a genius of America incarnate.”

Marsh’s Elvis is a serious, . compassionate study with good intentions, though it pulls no punches (“all dreams become nightmares unless they’re carefully nurtured”), and the only complaints one might have is disagreement over some critical viewpoints. I hope it sells as many copies as Goldman’s Elvis did, but somehow I doubt that it will.

.☆ ☆ ☆

In a recent New York Rocker column, British critic Simon Frith (whose work I’ve admired over the years) lashed out at Marsh’s writing in Elvis, calling it an attempt to develop “a Reaganite rock aesthetic.” To really debate Frith’s claims, it would be necessary to examine varying political and economic theories, not to mention the concept of “colonial backlash,” and that could take pages. Frith’s attack is reminiscent of the “If you agree with my politics you’re right/

If not, you’re wrong” form of rock criticism that, although inherent in American critics, seems to dominate Britain’s New Musical Express, probably America’s main contact with British rock trends. In this sense, I’d have to agree that the “If you like this you’re hip/If not, etc.” idea does reinforce the notion of British rock expressing “individuality in groups” (witness the Sex Pistols and the Who), although I’d agree that conformity is an American trait as well, expressed less in subcultures than in a current unquestioning acceptance of cultural blandness and political monstrosities.

What “Reaganite” America represents most to me is a death of hope, the very antithesis of what Marsh views both Elvis and rock (hence, his strong attachment to Springsteen) as representing.

Marsh probably explained it best this past summer when he spoke at a Memphis State University seminar on the fifth anniversary of Presley’s death. It was a controversial speech, as the audience was mainly comprised of Elvis fan club members, most of whom appeared to be apolitical types. Marsh discussed his notion of Elvis as a symbol of democracy—“the fundamental importance of everyone, and the right of everyone, rich or poor, to speak up”—and he associated the current “deliberate dismantling of Elvis’s spirit” with the Reagan administration’s “deliberate dismantling” of New Deal programs. “If everyone on welfare is shiftless,” said Marsh, “I want to remind you that Elvis was once on welfare, and he wasn’t shiftless.”

Finally, Marsh expressed the sentimenfrthat “Albert Goldman (and what he thinks of the poor and downtrodden) is not one of a kind—he represents what’s happening in Washington, D.C. within our government right now.” After a brief silence, the audience gave Marsh an overwhelming ovation. As Ed Ward later pointed out, it suddenly dawned on a lot of these people for the first time that maybe they had put the wrong man in the White House back in 1980. It was the best moment of a seminar that included speeches by Sam -Phillips, Otis Blackwell and Greil Marcus, among others., and hardly the work of a “Reaganite.”

Bill Holdship

Dagwood Of A Book

MAKING TRACKS:

THE RISE OF BLONDIE by Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Victor Bockris (Dell) _____

Making Tracks is Blondie’s authorized autobiography, so to speak, prepared by group principals Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, in part to answer the increasing number of critical attacks on the Blondie myth, the most eloquent of which, of course, being Lester Bangs’ 1980 coffee table-diatribe, Blondie.

In the usual call & response ironies that attend these rockcritical field holler sessions, Lester Bangs and his acid typewriter died, just about the time Making Tracks was published, while the band’s own book answers Bangs’ charges of artistic non-sequiturism with a “Yes” and a “No” so resoundingly simultaneous, that Bangs’ Blondie seems even more right-track and alive than it was the first time around. Yep, Blondie certainly aren’t the “punk” saviors we once demanded that they be (they refuse that role repeatedly in Making Tracks), but on the other hand, Nope, does that really matter by now?

The composition of Making Tracks parallels Blondie’s recent albums, as it features a text by lyricist Harry, photographs by guitarist Stein, and production assistance from Victor Bockris (who nevertheless applies a much less rigorous and precise touch to the control board than the indefatigable Commander Chapman always does). As a prose writer, Debbie Harry’s no Lester Bangs (few of us are); her first-person history of Blondie moves well, and maintains the reader’s interest in the fate of the band, even as it includes numerous, disorienting tense shifts, or when it wanders off into nostalgically cosmic, let’s-pass-a-joint-around philosophical digressions.

But I don’t want to belabor Harry’s technique as a writer, both because that’s the same old apples/ oranges argument the musicians always pull on us (you-rockwritersaren’t-competent-to-j udgemusicdon’t-even-play-instruments-etc.), and because Harry’s extreme candor and total unpretentiousness in narrating her rise are so charming and so ultimately winning. For instance, plenty of (male) writers have bitched in the past that Debbie Harry wouldn’t admit to her age, and while she doesn’t necessarily provide a photostat of her birth certificate in Making Tracks, she drops enough hints about the date of her high school graduation, her and Chris Stein’s ages in relation to certain events, etc., that the reader can easily compute that Harry was born around 1945, and that Stein followed her into this vale of nasty reviews around 1948 or ’49.

On the other hand, I suppose that Debbie Harry’s relentless, almost self-deprecating candor in Making Tracks could be seen also as the unfortunate (for fans of her theoretical punk-goddess role) persistence of the nice-girl values Catherine and Richard Harry inculcated in little Debbie back in their bourgeois New Jersey household. Throughout Making. Tracks, Harry tends to curb her tongue or mollify her vaguely negative statements, even when rough talk would appear to be in order. This is most striking in her description of Lester Bangs’ debut as a rock singer; what a tantalizingly worm-turns opportunity to repay him for his Blondiel Deb gets the ball rolling nice & catty: “Lester thought he was a three-hundredpound Jim Morrison” (Touche! Bangs was as sensitive about his . weight as Harry used to be about her age.) But then, after another chuckle or two at Lester’s expense, Harry concludes irrelevantly, . “However, Lester does have a good voice.”

In any event, the hundreds,of Chris Stein photos which illustrate Making Tracks are a perfect complement to Debbie Harry’s nothing-is-revealed-becauseeverything-is-revealed text. Stein has captured the Blondies at all the stages of their Career, from the desperate long-hair-&-platforms glitter of their earliest days as a group, to their current status as N.Y. celebs privileged to mingle with Andy Warhol and Robert Fripp on a first-initial basis. Through all of Stein’s photos, Debbie is obviously his star, as he’s caught her in so many less-than-glamourous contexts—lying on a mattress in a garbage-choked tenement flat, biting her lip to shreds in a nervous airport wait, even scowling over her phone receiver and thigh-high boots as Stein’s probing camera lens gets her down for the ages one more time—and yet she’s so heartbreakingly pretty, so candidly beautiful, in each instance.

Stein’s many eloquent photos of Harry are an extravagant, inspiring love letter to his partner, and help Making Tracks achieve a much-better-balanced photojournalistic wholeness (as a package) than the notorious Blondie. In thfe earlier book, the effect of Lester Bangs’ provocative, thoughtful text, and of his characteristically brilliant captions for the black & white photos, is too often undercut by the glossy, one-hand (and it ain’t clapping) sex-object shots of Debbie Harry in the color spreads. Obviously (as Bangs points out), she rather willingly posed for those shots at the time, but Making Tracks shows what Blondie have learned, in its mature and natural visual erotics.

But all of these words (Harry’s and mine) still beg the chief question posed by the late Mr. Bangs: Do Blondie really have any coherent message for us in their music? I’m still not sure, as Making Tracks is ultimately as open-minded and as emotionally neutral as Autoamerican or The Hunter. I know but I don’t know. (Hiya up there, Lester!) What I am beginning to get glimmerings of, is that “Punk” and “New Wave” and Blondie’s supposed responsibilities for leading such movements are beside the point, beyond the question, when both Blondie and all of us other children of the 1940’s (including all rockwriters, by definition) are eternal hippies, condemned to wander the wastelands of art simultaneously cosmically aware and cosmically detached.

Blondie are terminal hippies as sure as Jefferson Airplane or whoever, they just happened to be wearing different clothes and haircuts when they burst upon the scene, and the usual, those-who-are-ignorant-of-history cautions necessarily apply. Mea culpa, I’ve put on styles and attitudes in my writing as readily as Blondie have stepped into their thrift shop-garbed essences.

So neither Blondie nor Making Tracks contains the whole truth about Blondie, nor does either volume contain the answers us aging hippies so desperately require. But taken together, these two books raise more questions about your own art-life relationships than you might have thought possible, and they can really fuel your interest in going back to Blondie for one more try.

Would I like to sleep with Debbie Harry? Are you kidding? Man, that’s me up there, I already do!

Richard Riegel