From 1986, on MTV's much-missed Basement Tapes show, please enjoy The Silent Types and their lost power pop classic "I Can Live With That."
I know very little about those guys, except that apparently they were playing in Greenwich Village around the same time in the '80s as The Floor Models. Lead singer Tom Scarpino informs me that I actually saw them perform at Kenny's Castaways, but highly potent drugs were probably being consumed at the time and I don't really remember. Which is probably a good thing, since I have no doubt that if I did see them I would have been intensely jealous.
In any event, I'd been meaning to post that video for ages. I mean, that's a genuinely great freaking song; if they were doing that when I saw them at Kenny's, it's even more embarrassing that I don't recall it. 😎
[I originally posted this piece here back in 2007; it remains my favorite thing I've ever written. Have I mentioned that this death shit is really starting to piss me off?]
I'm gonna get horribly self-indulgent now, so please forgive me in advance.
Here's the deal: I stumbled across this clip yesterday and I'm finding it difficult to describe just how moving I think it is. A caveat before you watch: The video quality is just barely adequate, but the audio is mostly fine. Listen to it with headphones -- you'll miss the bass, otherwise.
Okay, the backstory: The song of course, is the Kinks' gorgeous "Waterloo Sunset," and the guy singing it is Brit cult figure Terry Reid. If you don't know him, suffice it to say that he's a brilliant songwriter and vocalist (think a more soulful Steve Marriott) who made a couple of wonderful albums in the late 60s and early 70s but alas his career never really took off for all the usual reasons. What makes him slightly more than a fondly remembered footnote to history is that Jimmy Page actually offered him the frontman slot in Led Zeppelin; considering that he's also a terrific guitarist, the fact that he punted on the gig probably changed the world in unfathomable ways. Seriously -- can you imagine what Zep might have been like with a better singer and a twin-guitar attack? Wow. In any case, the clip derives from a series of club shows Reid did in L.A. in 2002; the band is led by longtime scenester Waddy Wachtel, and apparently all sorts of 70s and 80s B-list rockers did guest shots at one point or another.
So -- why do I find the vid so emotionally shattering? Well, the song itself has something to do with it, of course. Longtime readers are aware that I am occasionally of the opinion that it's the most beautiful song written in English in the second half of the 20th century. To my ears, it's about somebody who, for whatever reason, has concluded that they will never themselves find love, but who can watch other people -- total strangers, actually -- who have, and has decided that the solace they get from that is ultimately enough. It's a perfectly observed little vignette that manages to be both heartbreaking and strangely uplifting in its generosity of spirit; it's also, probably, the most revealing thing Ray Davies has ever written (and frankly, I can't think of another songwriter who could have pulled it off).
Reid gets all that of course, but he adds a lot more. It's a wonderfully theatrical performance, and at the heart of it is the not so dirty little secret of so much 60s Brit rock, i.e, that as much as the English pop boom owed to blues and r&b, it also owed to that now vanished English institution -- the music hall. The examples are almost endless -- see Sgt. Pepper or the Small Faces "Lazy Sunday" -- and one of the first things that struck me watching the clip is that Reid, singing his heart out up on that cramped little stage, could almost be a tragi-comic version of Archie Rice, the title character from John Osborne's The Entertainer. To really understand that you have to remember that back when Reid was an almost star, he was one of those skinny pretty boy rock god types. Here, of course, he looks like nothing less than one of those slightly puffy second tier expatriate Brit actors at Warner Brothers in the 30s. And he's not posturing like the pop idol he briefly was; instead he's swanning around in that ridiculous ice cream suit like Herbert Marshall in The Letter. It's laughably hokey but it's also quite brave; he's playing the fool and yet it's as if his relationship to the song and the audience and to the whole idea of being a rock star parallels the relationship of the song's narrator to the starcrossed lovers. There's something just enormously compassionate about it, and it just chokes me up.
And don't even get me started on Wachtel's solo or that gorgeous riff he introduces at the end to ride the song out (neither are on the actual Kinks record), or how Reid trails off into wordless falsetto, thus finding an unsuspected link between Davies' teddibly British original and the American street corner romanticism of old Doo Wop and Goffin-King songs.
Alright, I''ve gone on about this for a little too long, and yes, perhaps I'm reading too much into it. In any case, I'm gonna go watch it again, and thanks for stopping by.
PS: I forwarded this to my old pal Eric Boardman (who's a fan and lives in LA), wondering if perhaps he'd been in the audience when it was shot. Just got his reply.
I was not (SIGH) at that show, but have been to Waddy's Monday night jam at The Joint quite often. A great scene as who's-who in rock drop by. Check the concert & club listings as to which bands are in town for the week-end and gamble. For instance, I saw Keith Richards play for an hour, including a few Chuck Berry numbers and a torn-up version of "Down The Road Apiece."
Terry Reid's album with "Horses in a Rain Storm" kept me company summer of '70 along with "After The Gold Rush" and Donovan's "Open Road."
The trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, i.e. the forthcoming Boss bio-pic starring The Bear's Jeremy Allen White.
I gotta admit -- when that excerpt from White doing "Born to Run" live with (whoever's impersonating) the E-Street Band appeared at the end, I actually got kinda choked up. 😎
I should add that so far I can't determine exactly whether White is gonna be doing a Timothee Chalamet -- i.e., himself singing and playing guitar in emulation of Springsteen -- or rather merely lip-synching actual real Springsteen records. And to be honest, I'm not even sure I actually care.
In any case, it's scheduled to open October 24; I'll keep you posted as things develop.
Or so said pretentious frog auteur Jean-Luc Godard, but what the fuck did he know?
In any case, I bring it up because a certain Shady Dame and I have been bingeing on documentaries of late -- specifically, music/rock-and-roll documentaries. I can't remember all of them, but I do know that in the last two weeks we watched docs on The Cowsills (creepy and sad), The Hollies (lotsa fun), Led Zeppelin (a little dull) and Billy Joel (a must see, even if you're not particularly a fan of either the man or his music. Among other things, it's an amazing time capsule of the last 60 or so years of pop culture).
All of which leads us, inexorably, to the subject of the business at hand. To wit:
...and your favorite (or least favorite) non-bio-pic film about a post-Elvis pop/rock/folk/soul/r&b/country group or solo artist is...???
No arbitrary rules here; obviously, I'm talking about documentaries per se, but I understand that, for example, a lot of good music movies blur the distinction between docs and concert flick. So if that's what floats your boat, then go for it!
Anyway, in case you're wondering, my choice in the fave category is this one.
Great story, great music and a charismatic figure at the center of it -- what more could you want?
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