SCREEN BEAT
Far be it from me, one lone U.S. citizen, to try and personally intervene in our government’s foreign policy, but I feel it only my patriotic duty to point out to the leaders of Home Box Office that if there’s even the slightest chance that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev staved in a house equipped with cable during his summit conference with Ronald Reagan, then the network had better have kept the Billy Joel From Leningrad, USSR special off that week’s schedule lest they wish to be held responsible for threatening the entire course of international diplomacy.
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SCREEN BEAT
FROM RUSSIA WITH SCHMALTZ
by
Billy Altman
Far be it from me, one lone U.S. citizen, to try and personally intervene in our government’s foreign policy, but I feel it only my patriotic duty to point out to the leaders of Home Box Office that if there’s even the slightest chance that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev staved in a house equipped with cable during his summit conference with Ronald Reagan, then the network had better have kept the Billy Joel From Leningrad, USSR special off that week’s schedule lest they wish to be held responsible for threatening the entire course of international diplomacy. Could one man’s music really singlehandedly jeopardize the quest for global peace? That question I leave to my erstwhile colleague Richard Walls, who reviews the album culled from Joel’s Russian concert tour elsewhere in this issue. Could one man’s video singlehandedly jeopardize the quest for global peace? YOU BET!
Actually, there are many hard questions raised by this whole affair. Like, why was Billy Joel sent to Russia anyway? Because everybody was hoping he wouldn’t come back? Because the KGB needed some sneaky method to lure Christie Brinkley to Red Square so they could spy on her hair? Because the Kremlin saw in him just the right capitalist symbol to prove to their disenchanted youth that rock ’n’ roll isn’t dangerous? Who knows? One thing I do know, though, and that’s that you won’t learn very much about the Soviet Union watching this program. There are a few obligatory Moscow and Leningrad street scenes right at the beginning, but they go by so quickly that about all you’ll notice are a few minor things, like the fact that in the summer fewer women seem to wear babushkas on their heads, and that somebody finally smuggled in a skateboard to help amuse Russian youngsters (either that or a Jan & Deanski tour is being planned as we speak).
Mostly what you see in this show is Billy and his band and the 10'or so excited kids in the audience that the cameras keep cutting to over and over and over again. Are Russian concertgoers as a group simply very reserved, or was it that most of the folks in CCCP-land found Billy not much to get worked up about? The crowd seems generally underwhelmed throughout, and who can blame them? It wouldn’t be so bad if Joel and his eight-man group only looked like a bunch of misplaced Yuppie businessmen (not only is there considerably longer hair in the audience than onstage, but the crowd even dresses hipperl), but they act like it, too, as when guitarist Russell Javors is captured grinning from ear to ear throughout the supposedly serious “Goodnight Saigon.” As for the often-alleged Billy Joel showmanship, it is virtually nonexistent here—unless you count his putting on a pair of sunglasses before singing “Baby Grand,” the song he recorded with Ray Charles, as showmanship. Personally, I call it marginally racist.
Actually, there is one moment when the crowd does seem genuinely energized— besides when Joel plays the Beatles’ “Back In The USSR,” that is (not only do they not know him, but they’ve got taste!)—and that’s in the middle of “Only The Good Die Young,” when Billy leaves his piano to venture to the lip of the stage and a few people grab at his arms and legs. Given the generally drab atmosphere of the concert, I’m thinking to myself, they don’t want him, they want his American clothing. Sure enough, a little while later, Billy unties his sneakers and throws both of them, as well as his jacket, into the crowd. Like they say, give the people what they want.
SNAP SHOTS
Look, If It Came In A Bottle, Wouldn’t Everyone Make A Great Video? Cher, “I Found Someone”—I know it’s easy to end up in terrible movies. You commit yourself based on a quick reading of a script and the next thing the entire screenplay gets re-written by the producer’s illiterate kid, the director’s a wimp, and you show up for the big love scene and it’s all you can do to not crack up when Sam Elliot tells you he likes your tattoos. But while being in bad movies and getting blond may be easy, making a terrible video requires a lot of personal hard work. After all, it’s your song, your face and your wardrobe that nrtakes the whole thing exist in the first place. I hate to say a discouraging word about this woman—she did, after all, call David Letterman a seven letter a-word right to his face on his own show, bless ’er oft-married heart—but I can in no way endorse this video. The song’s awful. It may take three or four Chers to equal one Ann Wilson physically, but all the metal mamas in the universe bleating at the same time couldn’t equal one “Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves.” Her hair’s awful. She looks like she’s auditioning for the first non-yellow-headed spot in the Giuffria lineup. And that, er, costume! Bob Mackie wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing. It looks like a body stocking wrapped in primate entrails. (If she really wants to appear this silly, why not resurrect the exoticbirds-of-South-American outfit she wore to the Oscars a couple of years ago? That one was fun!) They say it about the President, but since this entertainer’s advisors aren’t serving her well, either, I think it applies here, too. America, LET CHER BE CHER!
