CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Richard Hell on Smithereens

SMITHEREENS Directed by Susan Seidelman (New Line Cinema)

by

Vernon Gibbs

Smithereens is the story of a notalent girl from New Jersey trying to make a name for herself in the “glamorous” punk rock fast track of New York’s decaying “new music” scene. The film was shot on location by unknown Susan Seidelman, making her directorial debut with a spartan budget of $100,000—the kind of bucks that don’t even buy toothpicks in today’s megadollar film mentality. Surprisingly, it was picked to be the first independent American film ever entered in the main competition at Cannes, a stroke of luck that occured when one of the judges overheard Seidelman talking up the film over lunch. It opened in New York in November to very favorable reviews, and by the time you read this should be making its way to the hinterlands. If you’re looking for the definitive movie on the “underground” music Scene in New York, this isn’t it.

Most people agree that what’s left of the scene is pretty much the dregs, the original impetus of ’76/’77 having long since burned itself out (Ramones) or gone to the top of the charts (Blondie). What’s left are a few of the die-hard originators like Richard Hell (who plays a major role in Smithereens) and a lot of new bands who are either parroting the cynical self-destructiveness of the original punkers or are busy trying to fuse punk/new wave with “African” rhythms—hoping perhaps to catch the tail end of what The Police/Blondie/Talking Heads/Cars discovered early on, which is that the Ramones/Sex Pistols approach was only good for a laugh—you couldn’t dance to it in the usual sense. This doomed nihilist rock from the beginning, since unlike equally undanceable art rock or some heavy metal, raw punk didn’t have the saving grace of at least being listenable. This movie isn’t about what’s left of the music, even though the background music is provided by a local new wave band, The Feelies. It’s about one girl’s quest for fame in the milieu made possible by the music. The realism with which it’s , done captures the core of what new wave was about, at it’s peak.

Wren, the central figure in the film, has no talent. Just like many early punk stars, she can’t sing, play or write songs—and doesn’t even try—yet she feels she can become a star by publicizing herself. This, naturally enough, leads nowhere. What’s really fascinating about the film is the role played by Richard Hell. He practically plays himself: he’s the leader of the band Smithereens—who made one legendary album a few years back—who is now trying to reestablish himself in the music business, this time by leaving New York for L A.

In real life, Hell’s claim to fame is that he practically started the punk scene in New York as leader of Television along with Tom Verlaine. Hell is said to have “invented” the spiky haired, tom T-shirt look and to have pioneered the idea that the new generation of the mid-’70s could invent themselves (his real name is Richard Myers), making up the rules as they went along. This included performing in bands when you barely knew how to play (Hell came to New York to be a poet). By 1977, when he landed a deal with a major label and released “Blank Generation,” which became a new wave anthem, Hell kr\ew how to play—but the song was still about starting over, without standards.

His second album, Destiny Street, didn’t come out until last summer and had not been released when the movie was made. Hell could more than empathize with the character he portrayed, since like Eric of Smithereens, he too was trying to make a “Comeback.”

The comparisons end there, however. In terms of artistry and manipulating culture, Hell’s career has made an artistic statement which will guarantee him at least a footnote in rock ’n’ roll history. It is both fascinating and ironic for him to co-star in a film about a young woman who is the very epitome of punk, determined to make it but totally devoid of even the most rudimentary tools. It is blankness^ taken to its logical conclusion.

Hell defines the Blank Generation:

“When I wrote that song it was actually half a joke, but people took it very seriously. That song was intended to be in the genre of promoting your generation against the elders, and it was inspired by a song by Rod McKuen called ‘I Belong to The Beat Generation”, in fact it has the same chord progressions. I wanted to distinguish my generation from what had gone before, because I hated hippies, it seemed like just a load of bullshit to me. It seemed to be like people blinding themselves on purpose to love and peace and hanging flowers all over. It occured to me that whenever I was contemplating anything especially serious, that ultimately I didn’t care.

I thought that the ideal way to look at your life and to conceive of yourself was that you were your own blank slate, you could make yourself into whatever your ideal picture of who you wanted to be was. It was a combination of those two factors, it’s not apathy, it’s active indifference. I wanted to set a trend but it was just for me—the trend wasn’t supposed to be for people to do what / did, with the hairdo and the torn T-shirts, but to do what they wanted to do. I realize now that it was unrealistic to try to set a trend against setting trends.”

Hell says that he hopes to make the definitive new wave movie, since Smithereens was never intended to be that.

“It would sorta be based on Sid Vicious, because his is the archetypal punk story, the Blank Generation story. He was just a real quiet nice guy, in fact every time I ever met him he was always apologizing to me for shit that he ripped off from our groups. But the thing about him—and what really happened with that big flurry of action in ’77/’78/’79—was that a guy like him, who was just basically a young kid who didn’t have any future, all of a sudden he saw that by being self-destructive he had a chance to really become somebody. In spite of what I wish it could have meant, and what we were all trying to do, what it ended up meaning was just that—that a guy like him, without any hope, suddenly saw how by pulling a razor blade across his chest which doesn’t hurt very much but causes a lot of blood, he’d suddenly become a star. It led where it must lead, with him eventually killing himself. People like Hendrix and Jim Morrison, who also OD’ed, didn’t get paid for being self-destructive. They got themselves thrown into an environment where it’s very easy to destroy yourself, but it wasn’t what made them a star. Sid Vicious couldn’t do anything as a musician, while Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest musicians who ever lived. Sid Vicious was only a guy who was capable of offending everybody and hurting himself. He really didn’t hurt other people, it was all directed at himself. He got conditioned, because it was the only way he ever had a chance of being somebody. It’s really a tragic story, but I’d like to make it into a movie. Smithereens touched on the reality -of this scene and stuff, because it’s a case like that, of somebody with no visible talent of any sort who sees the only hope for herself ever being anybody as getting famous somehow. She doesn’t have any idea how. But at the beginning of punk, people like the Sex Pistols knew how, thay saw how and they really exploited it to the hilt.”

So while you’re waiting for Richard Hell to make the definitive punk movie, see him in Smithereens. He plays the part quite well, and the movie makes you feel good—because the characters are so desperate and end up getting exactly what they deserve. It’D also make you happy not to live on the Lower East Side of New York and surrounding environs. That must be worth af least $4.50.

Sleaze, Sleaze Everywhere, Not A Drop To Spare

ROCK ¥ ROLL BABYLON

by Gary Herman

(Perigee)

Nearly a decade after we first heard of the concept, Lester Bangs’ and Michael Ochs’ book, Rock Gomorrah, a major exposes of the moral sloppiness attendant to the rock V roll lifestyle, remains unpublished. Hopefully the glamorous turpitude of the subject matter brought out the best in Bangs’ soaring, moralizing-justshort-of-moralistic hyperprose, but I don’t know how much of the text Bangs had completed by the time of his death last spring, nor do J know what editorial obstacles Ochs may be facing now in finally pushing Rock Gomorrah into print.

Under the circumstances, we’D be ecstatic over whatever fragments of Lester Bangs’ probable masterwork may become available, but in the meantime, British writer Gary Herman has published a kind of generic version of the Rock Gomorrah concept in his Rock TV’ Roll Babylon. Herman can hardly be faulted for “lifting” Bangs’ and Och’s idea, not after the extremely protracted birth passage their book has endured, nor do we really need to be limited to just one illustrated tour of what’s become such a huge and hairy subject.

Besides, Herman has taken on a wide-ranging scope of rock’s potential for corruption than I might expect from Bangs’ frequently obsessive, Lou-Reed-as-amicrocosm-of-gomorrah approach to the subject. Rock TV’ Roll Babylon is actually something of a total history of the music, as it covers nearly every major r ’n’ r performer, not with any humdrum artistic celebrations and discographies, but with anecdotes of weakness and depravity, of overdoses and crashes, of “near satyriasis,” all delivered in a coffeetable-shotgun authorial approach (not too different than Lester Bangs’ own treatments of the narrower subjects in his Rod Stewart and Blondie books, come tq, think of it).

Herman has collected all the most quoteworthy dirt on every ; rock star you’ve ever admired (or hate‘d), and he shoots these backpages stories right back out, in a well-written if freewheeling text, loosely organized into chapters on drugs, sex, hero-worship, etc., all the r ’n’ r staples. Hardly any of Herman’s anecdotes of rock’s backslides (and backsides) are really new to me, I’ve read or heard almost all of these tales of woe somewhere before, but this is the first time I’ve seen them all collected into one photo-happy volume, so I suppose that Rock TV’ Roll Babylon is an entertaining read for its speedy keen, free-association prose, in which the translation of some of these tired old rockstar peccadilloes into dry, understated British sarcasm breathes whole new life into their weary sleaze. For instance, remember the time John Lennon hit the gossip columns in recognition of his stunning Kotex headgear? Per Gary Herman,

Lennon “paraded in the club with a sanitary towel fixed to his head.” “Towel”?? “Fixed”?!? Was this story intended for the drug chapter, maybe? Or check Herman’s (or somebody’s) wonderful caption of a photo of the late Tommy Bolin: “Heroin consciousness equals a man in a frock with a plastic dog turd.” (Pictures don’t lie!)

Herman largely refrains from invoking the heavy object lessons that might be derived from such a collection of broken lives, letting his anecdotes speak for themselves, especially (as he points out) as the risks of the rock ’n’ roll life can’t be easily separated from the music’s vitalities, anyway. So there’s room on the rock ’n’ roll coffeetable for volumes on both its Gomorrahic and Babylonic sides, and undoubtedly someone is hard at work at this very moment on yet another clever expose, to Sodomize rock ’n’ roll right up its ever-widening arse. It all comes out in-the end.

Richard Riegel

Cyclone No Lie! Machine Lie!

by

Bichard C. Wall,

Whoever put together the current hot syndication entry Lie Detector has obviously made a study of what ingredients are most likely to make up a syndy hit, ’cause this one’s got them all.

The premise is simple enough. Some poor schmuck—a convicted felon, an accused adulterer, Zsa Zsa Gabor—is given a chance to clear him or herself via a polygraph test.

A polygraph, a.k.a. a lie detector, is a machine that monitors one’s breathing, heartbeat, and galvanic skin response (i.e. sweatiness) and, through a process as shrouded in mystery as alchemy, determines whether or not the testee is lying. The tests here are given by the redoubtable Ed Gelb, president of the American Polygraph Association, whatever that is, a low-keyed type (he looks like an Ed Gelb) given to pronouncements like “I’ve been in this business many many years and I don’t make mistakes.” Which should be reassuring to the honest among the test takers. Unless he meant show business.

And speaking of show-biz, the show’s presiding father figure is F. Lee Bailey, who occasionally takes time out from his career as a famous trial lawyer to indulge in dubious entertainment ventures such as this one. Bailey makes passing reference to the lie detector’s controversial aspects at the beginning of each show choosing not to mention that in most courts polygraph readings are inadmissable evidence and that most scientists believe that the machine’s accuracy is, at best, debatable. Bailey’s faith in the machine is total, touching, necessary for the maximum effectiveness of the show’s punchlines, and somewhat unbelievable (say, maybe he could take a polygraph test to determine whether or not his belief in the machine is on the level—but then if the machine is inaccurate like so many say—oh, never mind). The punchlines are those wonderful moments when Bailey confronts the test takers with the results. Their reactions, the meat of the show, usually fall into one of four categories: 1) No reaction, as though stunned—“There’s not a. shred of truth in what you’ve been saying, Mr. Smedlap.” f“Oh.. .hmmmm.” or “These graphs tell us conclusively that you did not burn down the orphanage in order to collect the insurance money.” “Yes.. .1 see.” Such reactions, much to the gratification of the show’s producers, are rare. 2)

Relief. Obviously this only happens if someone passes the test and at first it may seem like a natural reaction. And often it is. But sometimes it seems that if the person is innocent why should they be so relieved to have passed the test? “You’ll be happy to learn, Marty, that according to the machine you did not rape and murder that old gypsy woman, despite what the 45 witnesses have said. Apparently, your contention that it was some other eight-foot albino with one arm was the absolute truth.” “Oh God...you don’t know.. .I’ve been trying to find somebody who’d believe my story, and now... bless you, Mr. Bailey” (kisses Bailey, Gelb, the polygraph machine). I’m exaggerating, of course, but not as much as you might think. 3) Outrage. This is a common reaction to having failed the test but it really doesn’t tell you anything ’cause if somebody were telling the truth, naturally they’d be outraged but then so might somebody who was trying to beat the machine and got caught. Anyway, it’s the reaction which provides the show with its liveliest moments. My favorite berserk-o so far was a wrestler who goes under the nom de ring of Cyclone Negro. The “polygraphical issue,” as Gelb would say, was whether or not Cyclone’s bouts were on the up and up. In order to pad the show and add a little suspense (very little, since everyone knows that no wrestler is on the up and up, especially one named Cyclone) a woman standing in for Bailey (he was probably busy signing a fresh pile of glossies—“PolygraphicaHy yours, F.”) interviewed the personable Cyclone, who spoke in a growly Spanish-accented voice. Cyclone strove to make the point that he was not just another freaky palooka. “I use my brains more than my muscles,” he said, pointing to a prominent forehead full of weird dents. Ms. Interviewer (primly): “Does it take brains to go into the ring and be mutilated?” “I beat everybody who hump into ring with me,” Cyclone claimed, having already lost the thread of the conversation. And then, natch, he failed the test after which, again meaningful surrealism you can only find on syndicated TV shows, nowhere else. 4) Confession. This is one I’m waiting for, the one where the person confronted with the evidence of the polygraph says “what the hell—I’m guilty.” The closest they’ve come so far is the one time where, when Bailey said, “Well I guess you tried to beat the machine and failed,” the guy just smiled goofily and shrugged.

Now the reason I’ve gone into these categories at such length is because digging the reactions is the whole show. What with Gelb’s dour mien and Bailey’s clipped restraint, the soporific sets, the long interviews before the tests, the mysterious squiggly lines on the polygraph, there ain’t a lot happening here (besides, the identification factor is less than that afforded by People’s Court’s parade of petty greed). Maybe if they cut back on the long buildups and just had 5 or 6 reaction segments per show... some people may think these real incredible people squirming type shows go too far, but I don’t think they go far enough. I also don’t think that syndication producers have exploited to the max the concept of wedding semipopular personalities with the appropriate lucrative fad and/or currently popular Sunday supplement issue. And if this sounds like I’m leading into an Obvious Comedy Bit, well, I am.

My proposal for sure-fire syndication hits (sorry about the abrupt segue here, but I’m running out of space):

Phyllis Schlafly’s Workout Time:

Why should that commie scum Fonda rake in all the exercise bread—you just know she’s going • to use it for something subversive like equal rights for Lesbians trying to take your job away. Schlafly’s certainly got the spunk to lead a nation of (happy to be) housewives down the road to firmer buns and tighter tummies and she could even introduce a note of patriotism into some of the more strenuous bends, like squatting over a map of El Salvador in symbolic encouragement of our brave and gallant military advisors. Can’t fail.

Juvenile Divorce Court: Selfexplanatory.

Biopsy Playhouse: The charismatic Dr. Art Ulene hosts a series of dramas centered around some medical disaster or other. Topicality counts, so AIDS, herpes, pre-menstrual syndrome, and various forms of cancer—never out of date—should be worked into the first few episodes. The human angle is what people respond to, so get the audience to care about the character through some manipulative bit of business (voiceover: “gramps just loved children—he couldn’t help himself’'’), then bump him off in the direst way possible, the audience’ll love it. The moral here is that if there’s a chance to exploit misery, milk it, milk it.