Mom!
No fuss, no muss: it’s not yet Saturday night, but desperate times call for desperate measures, as your host, Mr. Moderator, struggles to get back in the flow of revitalizing the music discussion blog he founded with a core group of contributors many moons ago.
RTH Saturday Night Shut-In 142
[Note: You can add Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your digital library by subscribing to the Rock Town Hall feed.]
Daydream Reliever
A few years ago my wife got me hooked on Hogan’s Heroes, a show I enjoyed as a kid but never subscribed to, if you know what I mean: I had little rooting interest in the characters and plotlines other than an instinctive love of Newkirk’s turtleneck and sideburns. As an adult, however, I realized what a comic genius Werner Klemperer was as Klink, not to mention the comedic support provided by dummkopf Schultz. Bob Crane’s Hogan is an outstanding wiseass character, who my wife pointed out is very much in the vein of one of my old college friends. They’re all great, even LeBeau, the little Frenchman in Stalag 13, who used to annoy me with his spells of overt cuteness when I was a kid.
Every few years since childhood I tune into reruns of The Monkees. Once I even rented a DVD of the second season from Netflix. Each time I try revisiting The Monkees the show gets worse. I still enjoy seeing them lip-sync to one of my favorite Monkees songs, but the wacky hijinx style, which was innovative in its time, looks more and more like the Nickelodeon tweener sitcoms my boys used to watch when they were of that age. And speaking of spells of overt cuteness, I don’t think a single entertainer’s cutey-pie routine has ever annoyed me more than Davy Jones’ act. Not when I was a kid. Not to this day. If I want to gorge on cuteness I’ll watch a Shirley Temple movie. That’s cute! Davy just strikes me as the worst kind of attention-seeking ass kisser.
Look at me! Aren’t I adorable? And don’t you love my British accent? Here, let’s have a little tap dance!
Yuck! Any time he shows up and gets a few lines on an episode of The Monkees I want to denounce my fairly strong case of Anglophilia.
Over the last 2 years, as I’ve grown to admire and love that little French rascal Louis LeBeau, I’ve had a recurring thought: What if LeBeau replaced Davy Jones in The Monkees? The benefits, as I see them, would have been mind blowing, show altering, and even extend to exerting positive influences over Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz’s burgeoning egos.
Get a job!
The latest from our mystery artist “BD,” in which glimmers of light can be seen through the Stygian work void. Or so he says.
The next two tracks from the Job album describe the closest things our hero has to hopeful moments during his tenure at Anonymous Inc. The first of these, entitled “The Losing Side,” is a track written by another member of RTH, who I will not name here. As the seeds of the Job LP were planted in my mind, I told a few musician friends what I was up to, and this guy offered up a rough demo of a song that seemed to fit the spirit of the effort. I loved it, but, with his permission, took some liberties with melody, lyric, and structure that I thought tightened things up a bit. Today, I say to this anonymous songwriter: listening back to your original demo after 10+ years, I now question my editorial decisions, and I am sorry if I effed up your fine song.
The second of the momentarily hopeful album tracks details the one thing that keeps our hero coming back to work every day: his love for—or at least unhealthy obsession with—an unattainable female co-worker who works in Office 242. Many thanks to the last of our anonymous Townsman collaborators, who vastly improved my original draft lyrics, and who penned this wonderful line, among many others: “How I wish it wasn’t Friday, ‘cause now I’ll spend the next two days on what I did so badly, and what I wish I had the nerve to do, with the girl who works in office 242.”
I appreciate your patience as we wend our way through this album. And thanks for the thoughtful comments and production suggestions — keep ‘em coming. Stick with me — important life changes are in the works for our protagonist.
Brothers and cousins and whatever the members of Full House considered themselves, come together with your pertinent thoughts on the world of music.
OK, so Love & Mercy Week wasn’t the thread-a-day, gripping discussion shot in the arm to Rock Town Hall that I’d hoped it would be. Traffic to the site continues to be down, and Facebook and actual telephone calls continue to be an easy way out for even regulars to discuss threads outside the forum. One Townsman was content to air his objections to my movie review via private messages on Facebook, while E. Pluribus Gergely, the man who accompanied me to the movie felt his daily phone calls with encouragement for my “great work” would do the job. Offlist feedback and deep friendship are much appreciated, but that’s not why any of us drafts a post for public consumption in the Halls of Rock.
Who knows, perhaps enough people haven’t seen the movie to focus on my follow-up piece regarding Dennis Leary’s involvement. Regardless, as too often is the case, life (including work) got in the way of me drafting all the excellent threads I had in mind. In case you’d like to pick up any of the projected threads that I’m not going to have time to flesh out, they are as follows:
The one thread that I will complete this week is the concern I’ve had with Beach Boys worship since the late-’80s. It’s an issue I don’t believe will ever be resolved until my hot mute cavewoman of the prehistoric future drops the needle on “I Get Around” in the Cave of the Forbidden Zone.
Dennis Leary (far right) as Dennis Wilson.
There was much to take in during a recent screening of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, which Townsman E. Pluribus Gergely and I took in over the weekend. My overall critique appeared yesterday and is still open to discussion, but I plan on spending the rest of this week examining some of the finer points of the film. Today I’d like to discuss the troubling casting of a young Dennis Leary as Dennis Wilson as well as the broader issues I had with other casting decisions in regard to the ’60s-era Beach Boys.
I’ve grown to like Dennis Leary over the years, although I found his entire act entirely contrived when he burst on the scene with his MTV faux-chain-smoking rants. (He never looked like he inhaled, did he? Bogus!) Anyhow, Leary grew on me a bit when he followed up his failed fallen cop show with that fallen fireman show, Rescue Me. For the first time he struck me as actually passionate about something: himself playing this character. The show and Leary’s commitment too it were absurdly sincere. Although I rarely appreciated the show at anywhere but chuckling arm’s length, the peak into Leary’s humble freak aspirations helped me appreciate him and his act. It was an impressive run.
Even more impressive is how Leary transformed himself into a young man for his role in Love & Mercy. The problem, however, is twofold:
Brian plays Melinda his early sketch of “Lick My Love Pump.”
There’s a scene early in Say Anything 2: The Healing of Brian Wilson, in which John Cusack’s Brian attempts to find the condo of his new infatuation and future wife, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) by walking in circles and calling her name up to the dozen balconies overlooking the courtyard of her complex. I kept expecting Cusack to pull out a boombox and serenade his new infatuation with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” There were some strong scenes in Say Anything 2, when the story inexplicably strayed from the middle-aged exploits of our hero, Lloyd Dobler, and zoomed back to the 1960s, to follow a confusing parallel tale of a brilliant, troubled musician during the creation of his band’s masterpiece, Pet Sounds, but the Dobler-Ledbetter second-chance-at-love scenes, set anachronistically around the same time as the original film’s timeframe, could not have been what any fans of the original Cameron Crowe classic were expecting!
