In 1965, Oriana Fallaci sat down to interview Sean Connery. It remains one of my favorite celebrity interviews ever, it’s the wild west honestly, and can be read in full in her book The Egotists. Here’s an excerpt, which I post in tribute.
Among the thousand pieces of advice that I was given was never to mention James Bond. You’d think he was your worst enemy instead of the character who’s brought you fame and fortune. But they say that at the very sound of the name James Bond you become angry and get up and go. Well then? Aren’t you angry?
Angry? Why should I be?
Because I’ve said James Bond. 007. Bond.
O.K. O.K.! Bond. 007. Bond. They must have told you wrong. I get angry when they ask me if I’d like to be James Bond, if I’m like James Bond, if they should call me Connery or Bond, when they plague me with idiocies of that kind, not when they make me talk about Bond. Why should I? I’m not in the least ashamed of the Bond movies. They’re amusing, intelligent, each one is more exacting than the last, each one is of better quality than the last. And quality isn’t to be found only in the Old Vic. Old Vic or Old Smith, the hell with it! What does it matter? Above all, I certainly don’t have the snobbishness or the bad taste to spit on something that gives me success and money, and anyway in my job there’s room for every kind of acting. For me, playing James Bond is like playing Macbeth in the theater. I’ll say more: if I hadn’t acted Shakespeare, Pirandello, Euripides, in short, what is classed as serious theater, I should never have managed to play James Bond. It’s not so easy, that role. It’s a role for a professional. It requires movement, for example. And to know how to move well you need to have been on the stage. I’d been on the stage for four years when I made my first appearance, in Anna Karenina, playing opposite Claire Bloom. I’d been another four years in movies when they offered me Bond and …
And you didn’t hesitate, you didn’t waver, before saying yes? Leaving aside Old Vic or Old Smith, it was a bit like taking up tap dancing after dancing Swan Lake. Eight movies about the same character are a lot. It was only to be expected that the character would eventually dog your footsteps. “Would you like to be Bond, are you like Bond …?”
It was luck, my dear, and luck only knocks once. And when it knocks, you have to grab it quick and then hang on tight. Would they identify me with Bond? Would that make me angry? Too bad. For an actor, for a writer, there’s always the danger of being identified with his character. Look how many people still write to Sherlock Holmes although they know quite well he doesn’t exist and never has existed. Look, I didn’t hesitate for an instant, particularly as the contract was so very amenable: it arranged that I would make a Bond every fourteen months, which left me time to devote to the theater, to other movies. And I’ve used it. In the break between From Russia with Love and Goldfinger I made Marnie with Hitchcock. In the break between Goldfinger and Thunderball I made The Hill with Sidney Lumet: a war film, in black and white, with an all-male cast. After Thunderball I’m going to make a movie in Australia with my wife. And then the character of Bond was amusing, certain to appeal. And lastly it suited me physically. You see, I’ve never had a handsome face, an acceptable face. I’ve always had this difficult face, adult, lined; it was like this even when I was sixteen. When I was sixteen I already looked thirty, and without a handsome face it’s far from easy to break in. So, honestly, I was careful not to make too much fuss. The only thing I said to the producers was that the character had one defect, there was no humor about him; to get him accepted, they’d have to let me play him tongue-in-cheek, so people could laugh. They agreed, and there you are: today Bond is accepted to such an extent that even philosophers take the trouble to analyze him, even intellectuals enjoy defending him or attacking him. And even while they’re laughing at him, people take him terribly seriously.
And how about you, Mr. Connery? Do you take him seriously or do you laugh at him?
Laugh at him? If I laughed at him, I’d be laughing at myself, at my work, and where would be the sense in that? And then being egotistical, as I said before, and ambitious, as I said before, I have to believe that what I am doing is important. Therefore, Bond is important: this invincible superman that every man would like to copy, that every woman would like to conquer, this dream we all have of survival. And then one can’t help liking him. Don’t you like him?
I don’t know, I wouldn’t like to say. As the symbol of our dreams I find him, when all’s said and done, a rather sad one: this man who always wins, without morals, or ideals, or friends, rather ignorant, too, except about explosives, cards and drinking. Forgive me, won’t you? Don’t be offended.
Immoral? I’ve never seen him steal anyone’s wife, anyone else’s woman, or betray his own; he doesn’t have one. He likes women all right, but he never rapes them; it’s they who worm their way into his bed. He kills people, he has to; if he doesn’t, they’ll kill him. He abides by no laws, but nor is he protected by the laws that protect others; society does nothing to defend him, he isn’t known to society. He’s rather ignorant, O.K., but he doesn’t exactly have the time for reading Joyce. His struggle for survival obliges him to be practical, functional, to reduce everything to the verbs sniff, look, listen, taste, think. His safety depends on this and not on Joyce. He doesn’t fight for old people and children, but who said he couldn’t? Have you any proof? Your accusations wouldn’t be valid in any court of law. Yes, sure, it would be interesting if I spoke badly of Bond. But I’ve got nothing at all against Mr. Bond, and I’m only too sorry he has to die.
Die? Is he ill?
I don’t know, I’m not sure yet, but I’m afraid so.
Once more for those in the back:
“It’s not so easy, that role. It’s a role for a professional.”
I reviewed the sequel – sort of – of the 1996 cult classic The Craft. It’s toothless. I’ve read a bunch of articles released before the film came out, and it’s all this stuff about how great “female friendship” is. Because this is the stance, the characters have been watered-down. No one is three-dimensional. This keeps happening in the name of the utopia that girls are always awesome to each other, which we all know is not true. It’s just not interesting to have people onscreen who get along all the time. I don’t understand why this is a thing. It’s so boring. Anyway, here’s my review.
It’s her birthday today. She always hated her birthdays.
Reading the recently published two-volume full correspondence of Plath was an absolute eye-opener for this lifelong fan. Finally: light from the caves! One of the many revelations in those pages was what a massive movie fan Plath was. I never knew! I wrote about it in my column at Film Comment: Sylvia Plath Goes to the Movies.
Here’s a draft of “Stings,” written in the month of October, 1962, the productive (understatement) month when she wrote many of the poems that would make her name (posthumously). It’s written on the back of pink Smith College stationery (her alma mater).
Here’s the final poem:
Stings
Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I
Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it
Thinking “Sweetness, sweetness.”
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?
If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush—
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,
The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her—
The mausoleum, the wax house.
In October and November of 1962, she worked at a literally insane pace, and the phenomenal part of it is that she did not just toss off drafts carelessly. She worked these poems, bringing each one through multiple drafts, paring down, re-writing, re-organizing. (There is an entire book written about the revising process of the Ariel poems: Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems).
There is a myth that the Ariel poems represented a burst of creativity, but that is a misunderstanding of what creativity is all about. Creativity really means work.
It’s incorrect to assume that the “bee sequence” poems, or “Lady Lazarus”, or “Ariel”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103”, her most famous poems now, were only the result of a manic and wild despair brought on by the dissolution of her marriage. Yes, she was not sleeping, and, yes, she would stay up through the night working on these poems. Sleep deprivation can intensify mania/depression. But as anyone who has experienced it knows, mania can be extremely productive. Beethoven, in his manic phases, composed at a similar white-hot pace. When the mania subsided, depression came, and the leveling-out of moods that go along with that. And in that quieter state, he would look at what he had composed earlier, and start the editing process. It was depression that helped him edit out what didn’t work. A similar cycling may have been happening with Plath, although I find mental health speculations pretty distasteful and over-simplifying the matter. This is merely a defense of some of the BENEFITS of the manic/depressive cycle: productive/get the work out and then calmer mood/edit down what was written before. (Got this idea from Kay Jemison’s Touched by Fire, an excellent – and hugely controversial – book about the connection between bipolar/mood disorders and creativity.) I am going on like this because it is insulting to Plath’s great art to assume that every word was the dashed-off result of a nervous breakdown.
She had the impulse, the inspiration, and she also maintained the cool-headed eye of the editor, slashing out stuff that didn’t work. She only had a couple of months left to live. There’s a beautiful and strange irony of seeing the drafts of these poems written in white-hot fury, appearing on the pink stationery of the college that had tried to turn her into a nice and socially acceptable young lady.
If you read Sylvia Plath’s poems chronologically (from the beginning, I’m talking, from before her first published collection The Colossus and Other Poems), it does seem that the October/November 1962 poems come from somebody else: an entirely new person is now speaking. You can read this chronological progression in The Collected Poems.
She always had talent, although perhaps a bit arch and precocious with it at the start. Ted Hughes gave us the image of Plath composing a poem, Thesaurus balanced on her knee. You can feel the Thesaurus’ presence in those earlier poems. She did not gallop out of the gate a full-blown Genius. You can feel how hard she works.
Her talent burst into full-form seemingly suddenly in the fall of 1962. You can feel it happen when you read her poems in order. She knew it, too. “These poems will make my name,” she declared. Many of her friends were frightened by the poems she wrote at that time. They are among the most ominous poems ever written, the “Gimme Shelter” of poetry.
Although it is useless to speculate I have often wondered: if London hadn’t gone into a deep freeze in December 1962, leaving her isolated and freezing, with two babies to care for, no one to help her, would she have found the strength to make it through? Plath had tried to kill herself before. It was always her trump card. She kept that option open. But her domestic problems in that winter, frozen pipes, the sheer difficulty of day-to-day existence, didn’t help.
Late that fall, she read some of her poems on BBC Radio (“Lady Lazarus”, above, being one of them). Here she is reading “Daddy”, her most famous poem.
I find her voice hair-raising.
Fever 103 (another October 1962 poem)
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern —
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise —
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) —
To Paradise.
In honor of her birthday, here’s one she actually wrote about her birthday in 1962. She wrote this poem, now one of her most well-known, on Sept. 30 1962.
A Birthday Present
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
‘Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!’
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed–I do not mind if it is small.
Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—–
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. I just wrapped up posting his 50 Best Albums, but wanted to keep “Music Monday” going with more of the stuff Bren has written about music.
This is part of Brendan’s lengthy series of essays on Scott Walker, which I’ll be posting for the foreseeable future, one every Monday.
Fugitive Kinds: Scott Walker, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams
Scott Walker reclaimed authorship of his career after 1978’s Walker Brothers swan song Nite Flights. But what kind of career did he have? The Walker Brothers, after an improbable comeback, had finally ceased to be viable. Any remnant of his solo cultural impact had long since dissipated and the insider appreciation for his work didn’t have any commercial manifestation.
In short, he was at very loose ends.
His next album wouldn’t come out for six years. Between 1965 and 1978, Walker, either solo or with the band, had released fourteen full-length albums and countless stray singles and b-sides. Thirteen years of churning out product.
Then six years of complete silence.
Rumor has it that during this time he turned down the opportunity to have David Bowie produce an album for him. That sessions with Brian Eno did not satisfy him. So he hadn’t entirely disappeared, but he was certainly unwilling to put something out that he wasn’t completely happy with.
1984’s Climate of Hunter ended the self-imposed exile.
The first seven songs on the album are Scott Walker originals and if you can imagine Simple Minds being forced at gunpoint to play Nine Inch Nails songs you can get a vague idea of the direction he was headed in. Gone are the ’70’s string-drenched country covers, schmaltzy balladry and gauzy anthems.
But there is one song on the album that Scott Walker didn’t write. And it was written by, surprise surprise, Tennessee Williams.
In 1959, Williams wrote the screenplay for Fugitive Kind based on his stage play Orpheus Descending of 1957. Brando stars as a drifter named “Snakeskin” who flees New Orleans and gets into trouble in a small town. Williams collaborated with Kenyon Hopkins to write a song that Brando sings, the character accompanying himself on guitar.
Watch Brando sing Kenyon Hopkins and Tennessee Williams’ “Blanket Roll Blues”.
Scott Walker must have seen the film at some point. He enlisted Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, at the time one of the biggest stars on earth, to play spectacular lone acoustic guitar to accompany his incredible voice, which would never be so straightforward again.
Listen to Scott Walker and Mark Knopfler go about as deep into a blues song as you can possibly go.
Walker lets Knopfler ruminate on the melodic figure of the song, creating a sparse landscape that seems lifted out of a John Steinbeck novel. Almost a full minute and a half go by before Walker begins singing, and while it is subtle and understated, Knopfler’s guitar work here is as amazing as the most soaring of Hendrixian or Van Halen solos.
“Blanket Roll Blues” from 1984’s Climate of Hunter is just one more remarkable achievement from this staggeringly under-appreciated career.
Let me guess … it starts in the bunker. Sam sits at the table, reading. Dean comes into the room, holding a laptop, and says, “You got anything?” Or he says, to really shake things up, “I think I got something.”
Here’s a post I wrote awhile back after seeing the great and legendary Wanda Jackson play a show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. She was 74 years old. She opened for Adele at the age of 73. LEGEND.
The Queen of Rockabilly and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Wanda Jackson, age 74, played Maxwell’s in Hoboken and Jen, Charlie and I were there. I assumed it would be an older crowd mostly, with a couple of rockabilly types mixed in. I thought for sure I would be one of the youngest ones there. But the club was packed – and the age range was 60-something to 20-something, the majority being 20-somethings, which warmed my heart no end. Wanda Jackson got her start in the mid-50s, and here she still is today. I imagine the fact that there were so many young people in the audience had something to do with Jack White producing her last album.
Maxwell’s is a small joint, no seats, a true rock club (reminds me of Lounge Ax in Chicago a bit, may it rest in peace). We scored a spot over to the side. People were pouring in.
The Saddle Tones opened for her, and they were awesome. People were dancing. You could feel the excitement. Wanda!! A legend!
After The Saddletones, Wanda’s band took the stage. It’s a small stage. These were some burly big men. There’s no backstage area, so I wasn’t sure where she would appear from, but then there she was, being led through the crowd up to the stage. She is so tiny (as my friend Caitlin would say: “Minz”. She’s so minz.) The excited crowd parted to let her come through, and then she was helped up onto the stage. She looked fantastic and we all just exploded at our first full sight of her. She was wearing a red fringed blazer. She must have a closet full of fringe.
One of her fringed dresses was on display in an exhibit at Graceland when I visited in 2013.
Her hair was jet-black, and swooped up high. She wore sparkly dangling diamond earrings, and a sparkly necklace, bracelet and rings. She sparkled all over like a damn disco ball. Her fingers are long and tapering and she uses them brilliantly in all of her gestures, which were simple and eloquent.
She started off by saying, in that raspy lived-in voice, “We are going to go on a musical journey tonight.”
And I flashed 50 years into our future, suddenly, and I wondered who, of our young stars today, will still be going at age 74, playing small clubs, and touring constantly, who can command a room swiftly and suddenly with a simple statement like, “We are going to go on a musical journey tonight”? Who will still be standing? Who loves it that much, is basically the question. It’s an open question, that’s the best part about it.
There is something so hot about seeing a minz old lady backed by these giant guys, all of whom are in their 30s and 40s. It gives such a sense of history, of celebration, of continuity. These guys were poker-faced geniuses, and they were playing for the coolest lady in the world, and the sound they gave her … the giant rocking sound … was worthy of her.
It was the end of Elvis Week, and that seemed rather perfect since, of course, Wanda and Elvis dated (here’s Wanda telling the story), and they started out together.
Wanda Jackson, Elvis Presley, 1955
I hoped she might say something about him, and she did, but it far surpassed what I had hoped. I had thought she might reference Elvis Week, say she knew him, and then move on, but no, it was much much better than that.
She said:
“The first person I toured with was Elvis. We dated. Went to the movies, dinner. I was a country singer then, but Elvis encouraged me to try rock, although we didn’t really have a word for it. He pushed me, ‘Wanda, you’ll be great, do it, do it…’ So I did. He is one of the reasons I am standing here today, so at every show I do, anywhere, I always pay tribute to the King.”
I looked over at Charlie, and he looked back, nodding, like, “I know.”
After her beautiful words of tribute to Elvis, she went even further, and sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Here’s a clip of Wanda and Jack White performing “Heartbreak Hotel” live.)
It’s one of those songs that is so much a part of our cultural landscape that I absorbed it by osmosis as a child. But to hear it live. To hear its movements, its change-ups, its boozy burlesque open, its grinding-sex guitar blasts … when Elvis would rotate his shoulder for his live audiences and the girls would go wild… to hear it live made it sound like a whole other song. Wanda Jackson rocked it out, and on the line “cry there in the gloom”, she mimed tears falling down her cheek with her beautiful sparkly-ringed tapering fingers. It’s difficult to explain why something so simple and perhaps even cliche works. It’s because it is comes from a truthful and expressive place.
I looked around at the club at one point during ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and the entire place was in a ZONE with the song, swaying and grinding, singing along in unison, arms pumping in the air. I got goosebumps.
She sang many of her old hits, treating us to some of her yodeling (off the charts!). She talked about how she started writing her own stuff, because she was really out there on her own back then, a woman singing this type of music. The Boys weren’t writing stuff for her. There weren’t any songs from the girl’s point of view, so she went ahead and wrote them.
Here she is performing on television in 1958, singing “Hard Headed Woman.”
I think my favorite anecdote she told at the Maxwell’s show was one involving Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen has talked often about Wanda, and how much he loves her and how inspired he has been by her career. Jackson said:
“I was playing in Asbury Park and I look out and there’s Bruce Springsteen and his wife. I was playing in a bowling alley. There wasn’t even a real stage. But there they were.”
If you are not moved by that moment, if you don’t get why Jen and I held hands with tears in our eyes picturing Springsteen and his wife going out to a bowling alley to see Wanda Jackson the legend … then I certainly can’t (and won’t) explain it to you. You’re on your own.
She spoke about how she invited Jesus into her heart in 1971. She spoke in a simple and beautiful way about how every day she thanks the Lord that it happened: “Wherever I sing in this world, I want the world to know that I thank the Lord for that day, when I Saw the Light.”
And then, of course, she sang Hank Williams’ ‘I Saw the Light’, which she also recorded. It starts slow and churchy, and then explodes.
Jackson talked about how Jack White came into her life, wanting to produce a new album (as he had done with Loretta Lynn to monumental success).
Wanda Jackson and Jack White
Jackson said she had some hesitation about him but he said, “Wanda, I don’t want to change you. I want you to do your thing, but I just want you to have new fresh material.” She was IN from that moment forward. (She laughed, “And so far, it has been my most successful album. It actually cracked the Top 100.”) They worked together on the lineup. He suggested songs, he talked with her about what she wanted to do, he was very prepared. He was also flexible. For example, one song he brought to her she loved but she also felt that some of the lyrics were not “age-appropriate” for her. Jack White could have tried to twist her arm, he could have forced her into something she did not feel comfortable with, but instead, he sat down, took out a pencil, and edited out the lines she felt embarrassed about. I love him for that.
Jack White suggested Amy Winehouse’s “I’m No Good”, which Jackson did record. Jackson spoke to us of her sadness when she heard of Winehouse’s death: “I had hoped to meet her.” She performed “I’m No Good” at Maxwell’s, and listen to that growl, man.
Jack White also asked her in one of their preliminary conversations, “What is a song you have always wanted to cover but never did?” She thought a bit and said it was a song Elvis did that she had always loved, called “Like a Baby”. So Jack White was like, “Okay, let’s do that one.”
We didn’t want her to leave the stage at the end of the night, and there was this strangely touching moment, piercing even, when she had “exited” after her last song – only there was nowhere for her to go, because there was no backstage, so she just huddled over to the side of the stage, in full view, as her band kept playing and we all screamed for an encore. There she was, huge smile on her face, and of course, she waited as we whipped ourselves into a frenzy (and we could SEE her, we knew she was coming back because she hadn’t gone anywhere), until finally she knew when the time was right and she came back on and sang”Let’s Have a Party”, and nearly blew the top of the roof off. But it was the vision of her, a “minz” 74 year old woman with a black swoopy pompadour, red fringe shimmying jacket, and sparkling jewelry reflecting and refracting the light, a legend, a Hall of Famer, huddled over to the side of a tiny stage in a small club in Hoboken New Jersey … that nearly did me in completely. Because it was how she started in her career, too. Playing at school fairs and gymnasiums and picnics, where there would be no big celebratory opening, no backstage, you just walked up there with your guitar and started. You either had star quality or you didn’t. You couldn’t rely on a light show or a big fanfare to pump up the crowd. You had to be GOOD and you had to grab them and not let them go.
And there she was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, 74 years young and 50 years into her career, but loving every second of it. Not caring that there was no backstage, not caring that we could still see her as we screamed for an encore … not caring at all, because she knows that what is important is not the trappings of success, but the immediate energy ricocheting around that particular room of 100 people.
She was responsible for that energy. She nurtured it and fed off of it.She created it.
That’s a rock star.
Update:
My nephew and I went to the “Play It Loud” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, and it was a thrill to see Wanda Jackson’s guitar on display. Look at that BRANDING.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. I just wrapped up posting his 50 Best Albums. But I figured I’d keep “Music Monday” going with more of the stuff Bren wrote about music.
This is part of Brendan’s lengthy series of essays on Scott Walker, which I’ll be posting for the foreseeable future, one every Monday.
Scott Walker: Mrs. Murphy
Listen to The Walker Brothers “Mrs. Murphy” from their 1966 album Portrait.
This song is an entire melodrama in three minutes and twenty four seconds. Apartment complex neighbors Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Murphy flirt. Mr. Wilson complements her dress, she says “this old thing”. As they talk, Walker pulls his camera a flight up to a lone boy stretching on his bed in a languorous state.
Cut back to Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Wilson asks if it is true that the Johnsons are expecting a child. Mrs. Murphy says yes, but word is out that Mr. Johnson is NOT the father. The true father lives in apartment 22.
Walker then returns to the lone boy (now placing him in apartment 22, letting us know that he might be a father soon) who is lost in a daydream of adventure on the high seas.
Mrs. Murphy describes the Johnson’s marriage in scathing terms, criticizing Mrs. Johnson, implicitly sanctioning Mr. Johnson’s infidelity.
The final line of the song is perfectly succinct.
“Upstairs he sits
He hears a knock, and nothing more
Come on in, you’re late
Well, don’t just stand there
Mrs. Johnson – close the door”
Now, what is interesting about this song, apart from the incredible string arrangement and cavernous melody, is that you would think the most dramatic subject would be the BOY, or Mrs. Johnson who is pregnant from an extramarital affair with a boy “less than half her age”.
But, no. The song is about Mrs. Murphy, the gossip. She is talking with a man who is obviously NOT her husband, ostensibly Mr. Murphy. We don’t know anything about Mrs. Murphy. She seems to be close enough with this Mr. Wilson that they openly and immediately jump to salacious stories of their fellow tenants.
This is a major component to Walker’s appeal at the time. The repressed sexual drive of the English housewife who longed to be swept off her feet in some doomed romance but was trapped by propriety and societal pressure into remaining a dutiful wife. So while Walker clearly self-identifies with the “boy” upstairs, he removes the narrative from his own perspective and puts it into that of an observer.
This also may be the first modern musical appearance of the Cougar. Compare this song to the great “Maggie May”.
Imagine “Maggie May” somehow being told third hand, the focus of the song shifting from the young boy trained and burned by the older seductress to two completely uninvolved strangers discussing the affair.
This seemingly minor shift in perspective gives the song a much wider context, gives the personal a layer of society, forces us to watch what is unfolding as part of a larger collective. In “Maggie May” you are Rod Stewart and that’s that. Here? Who are you? How do you get inside the story? You are forced to CHOOSE something.
Not many pop songs force that kind of rigor. Plus, good lord, listen to the damn song. Walker was very young, 23, and already he was pushing at the boundaries of pop music, chafing at what was expected of him. This discomfort would eventually catapult him about as far into the musical wilderness as anyone has ever gone.
I really enjoyed this film about a new stand-up comedian who finds himself all at sea during his first paying gig. Great cast, filled with stand-up comics, legends and up-and-comers. Lots of payoffs. And also surprisingly emotional! What more can you want! I reviewed for Ebert.
. Here’s an excerpt, which I post in tribute.
). 
), it does seem that the October/November 1962 poems come from somebody else: an entirely new person is now speaking. You can read this chronological progression in 
.
