Only the Dead Know Basel

"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Orson Welles, The Third Man (1946)

Cut to 1965, and you'd have to add the eponymous debut album and several singles by Switzerland's The Sevens to the list.



Hands down the greatest rock band out of a historically neutral country. Ever.

Basically, these guys were the Rolling Stones of Switzerland; as you'll hear they might as easily be described as the Pretty Things/Animals/Kinks of Switzerland. In any case, they never had much impact outside of their home turf, where their peak years were 1965-66. I should confess at this point that I'd never encountered them until a few days ago, although I assume they're rather highly regarded in Garage Punk/Nuggets circles.

Here's their first single -- titled, with absolute pop perfection, "Seven," and a more eerily apocalyptic pop record had never been heard by sentient mammalian ears, I'll tell you that for free. Recorded essentially live -- the pistol shots were done in real time, although they never used the gimmick onstage -- and in just one take; if the freakout/raveup at the end doesn't get you going, you probably need to have it looked at.



Oh, and you'll never guess who the producer was.

Wait for it....

Giorgio Moroder. Yes, him.

Here's what they sounded like in stereo -- from the aforementioned album, it's the equally ominous "You Should Know." Which sounds to my ears like a mid-tempo ballad by The Zombies, albeit if that band consumed a case of Italian Swiss Colony before the recording session.



Obviously, the musicianship on both these tracks has a certain...primitive quality, I think is the phrase, but both of them also have a very palpable end-of-the-world vibe that I find remarkable. I should also add that lead singer Pierre Aebischer, who comes across as alternately creepy and amusingly suave, was either a genius or a madman, at least from the sound of this stuff.

RIP: Clare Amory

via Pitchfork:

A post on the Facebook page of NYC experimental outfit Excepter confirms that band member Clare Amory has died of cancer. According to the blog of band member Jon Nicholson, she was 35. As a member of Excepter, she contributed to the band's free-form musical explorations and noisy, improvisational live shows (as well as their prolific release of live recordings).

I saw Clare in one of her earlier bands, more mainstream.

But I really knew her through her family, who I've known for 25 years. Her mom and I have been good friends, and as I watched her struggle with the devastating illness her daughter faced, she did so with all the strength and grace and obvious suffering of a parent losing a child.

Clare was a beautiful young woman (you can see in the video that I'm not exaggerating at all): smart, talented, graceful (she spent many years as a dancer) and creative. She died partly because we sneer at people who want to make their own way creatively in our world: she had no health insurance when she was diagnosed. Her death is a tragedy, and it sits heavily on me (as it has all week, knowing it was imminent), and I send my warmest sympathies to her family.

Big Star Third in NYC

I'm going. Will you come?













Hell, I'll even buy you a drink! Why not?

Weekend Cinema Listomania (Special A Broken Heart For Every Light On The Great White Way Edition)

Video Event of the Week: Is the Dreamworks DVD/Blu-ray combo of Megamind, the not as funny as it should have been supervillain animated flick featuring the voice of Will Ferrell, possibly in contention? Might Sony's DVD of Get Low, with Robert Duvall as an eccentric Tennessee woodsman who decides to organize his own funeral bash, by any chance what we're talking about? Or is there the remotest chance that Warner Home Video's Blu-ray edition of Due Date, the rather blatant rip-off of Planes Trains and Automobiles starring the ill-served Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Gallifinakis, could conceivably be The One?

A very middling field, I think you'll agree, so for my money it simply has to be the incredibly cool new Criterion Collection refurbishing of the quintessentially NYC-ish Sweet Smell of Success from 1957, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.

If you haven't seen SSOS before -- in which case you're in for a treat -- it's about (among other things, including greed, lust and betrayal) the nexus between show biz celebrity and politics, which actually makes it even more relevant in our current media age than it was back in the day, when it seemed to be ripped from the headlines. Based on a script by North by Northwest writer Ernest Lehman (rewritten by lefty playwright Clifford Odets -- the unforgettable Broadway dialogue is mostly him), it stars Lancaster (in the performance of a lifetime) as sinister and deeply amoral gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a character that everybody in America recognized as a barely disguised portrait of real-life tabloid and radio journalist Walter Winchell; Curtis (equally good) is Sidney Falco, a small time press agent/hustler with a love/hate and vaguely parasitical relationship with the great man. The film's un-billed costar, however, is New York City itself; director Alexander Mackendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe staged the story against a backdrop of (many now sadly vanished) Manhattan locations, and it's hard to imagine a more exciting time capsule of the Big Apple in all its slightly sleazoid sharkskinned glory.

Here's Criterion's trailer to give you an idea.



Criterion's package begins with a gorgeous digital restoration from the original 35mm negative; it's so vivid you can practically smell the cigarette smoke and stale whiskey in the nightclub scenes. There's also a second disc with some bonus features that are almost as fascinating as the film itself, including Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, a 1986 profile of the director (who is every bit as clear-eyed and acerbic about the movie business as you'd expect, and also charming as hell), a new video interview with Neal Gabler, who wrote the definitive book on Walter Winchell, and a terrific 1973 documentary on Oscar-winning cinematographer Howe. The accompanying booklet also features a characteristically perceptive essay on the film's history by critic Gary Giddins and (best of all) both of the Lehman short stories (from Colliers and Cosmopolitan) that introduced the Hunsecker and Falco characters.

The bottom line: You can -- and frankly what are you waiting for? -- head over to Amazon and order Sweet Smell of Success here.

Okay, and with that out of the way, and because things will as usual be mostly pretty quiet around here for the next couple of days, here's a relevant and hopefully amusing little project to wile away the hours until whenever:

Best or Worst Inside-Showbiz Film (Fictional OR Documentary)!!!

And my totally top of my head Top Five is:

5. Lonely Boy (Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig, 1962)



Snicker if you will, but if there's a better look at the star-making machinery and the price of fame than this cinema verité portrait of teen idol Paul Anka back in the day then I, for one, haven't seen it.

4. Can't Stop the Music (Nancy Walker, 1980)



A musical comedy(?) account of how the Village People got together in which the word "gay" is mentioned exactly never. And yes, it was directed by THAT Nancy Walker.

3. The Oscar (Russell Rouse, 1965)



The rise and fall of an incredibly obnoxious heel of a movie star (Stephen Boyd) and the bad actors (Tony Bennett) who enable them until they don't. Co-written by Harlan Ellison, of all people, and to his credit he's apologized for it on numerous occasions.

2. Stardust (Michael Apted, 1974)



The aspiring rock star Essex played in That'll Be the Day goes on to Beatles-size success in the 60s, with all the attendant drug use, artistic and personal sell-outs and betrayals that entails. Surprisingly downbeat and realistic, plus the fake band includes Dave Edmunds and Keith Moon.

And the Numero Uno perfectly awful that-business-we-call-show film of them all simply has to be...

1. Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001)



Rags to riches mishegass about an 80s pop diva, and also known as Somebody Almost Killed Mariah Carey's Career. Truly one of the worst films ever; see it for the scene where Carey gets seduced by a guy whose big move is playing the marimba for her.

Alrighty then -- what would your choices be? )

They Had Faces Then

No Early Clue to the New Direction™ today, due to tomorrow being one of our bi-weekly Cinema Listomanias.

In its stead, however, I thought I'd share this quite remarkable promo film from 1964 a friend hipped me to the other day -- the pre-cosmic Moody Blues, featuring the great Denny Laine, doing "Go Now."



I have no idea who directed the thing, and 'm not sure whether or not it was done as a deliberate homage to that iconic black-and-white Robert Freeman Meet the Beatles album cover. But it sure is arty in a wonderfully 60s sort of way.

[h/t Kerrin L. Griffith]

The Unreleased Beatles Albums: The Final Conflict

EMI's roll-out of archival material by the Fab Four concludes next week with two final releases.

First up on Monday:

The Little Red Album (1968)




From EMI's press release:

"Mainly inspired by John, who happened to be on acid while watching the Paris students riots in the summer of '68, this collection was recorded on one night between dusk and dawn, in a "very collective" session (John speaking). Its release was blocked by Yoko Ono, who, being a Jap, doesn't like Chinks."

TRACK LISTING
Love Mao Do
(Won't You) Please Police Me
The Long and Winding Capitalist Roaders
Happiness Proceeds Out of the Barrel of a Warm Gun
Rice Paddies Forever
I Don't Want to Spoil the Party, So I'll Criticize Myself
Paperback Tiger

And on Wednesday:

McCartney and Friend (1970)



EMI again:

"Not to be outdone by his colleagues, Paul sought to make a statement about his musical roots. The result was Paul McCartney and Friend, a lavish, saccharine overorchestrated Nelson Riddle production. McCartney blocked release of the LP when Sinatra dedicated "That's Why the Lady is a Tramp" to his wife Linda."

TRACK LISTING:
I Did It My Way
Theme from The Man With the Golden Arm
A Foggy Day
My Funny Valentine

Ask And You Shall Receive

My pal Andy Pasternack requested a Marshall Crenshaw version of The Walker Brothers classic "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" downstairs.

Here it is.




Actually, it's a one-off live version by Marshall, Jules Shear and the great Graham Maby on bass; if there's another solo Crenshaw version, I can't find it. When it was recorded -- at Tramps, sometime in the 90s, I believe -- the trio were doing business as Bag of Soup.

In any case, the song remains too gorgeous for words no matter who does it. Hell, I even like Cher's cover.

Honesty in Animal Husbandry

Okay, I'm acutely aware -- as I've noted here on numerous occasions -- that the name of this blog is PowerPop, not Pissed-Off Leftist, and out of a decent respect for the views of some of our faithful readers I try to limit expressions of my occasional righteous indignation over current events in the non-musical precincts of the world to a minimum.

That said, today I'd simply like to post my favorite crudely lettered sign from the recent protests in Madison.



And while I can't speak to the literal accuracy of the above statement, I will add this about the deeply cynical and deeply evil governor of Wisconsin -- it is extremely irksome that he has the same name as, and thus might be unfairly mistaken for, one of the truly great artists of our time.

My Old School

The things you can find on the intertubes.

The short version: Back in 1968, while dodging the draft by attending what I refer to as an unidentified college on Long Island, I met a fellow student -- a musician who I occasionally jammed with -- whose claim to fame was that he'd been in a pop band that had an East Coast (and NYC) radio hit the previous year. Said hit, alas, had been nationally eclipsed by a simultaneous cover version by some West Coast group, thus putting the brakes on his rock star future. For years, I've been trying to remember what the song was, who the kid was and what the name of his band was -- all info that apparently dribbled out of my brain sometime during the Ford administration.

The only thing I COULD remember, distinctly, is that at the time I kind of half suspected the kid might have been jiving me about the hit record thing, but no -- it (and he) were for real. As I discovered when I found his album, with his photo unmistakable on the cover, in the library of the college radio station.

Anyway, thanks to said intertubes I just stumbled upon the record again, at last. So, from 1967, please enjoy my long ago chum Dave Gordon and his pals in The Blades of Grass, with their East Coast hit version of the winsomely Harpers Bizarre-ish "Happy."

A record, I have since learned, that is very highly regarded by devotees of the rock genre now known as Sunshine Pop.




That's Dave on the right, with the glasses.

According to All-Music, these guys were "a real band from the New York metropolitan area, with two of the members coming from Maplewood, NY, and the other two from South Orange, NJ. They were finishing high school around the time they recorded their only album, and unlike many groups from the time (even high school-aged ones), they boasted the clean-cut, short-ish-haired look that was actually much more common among average high schoolers in 1967 than long hair."

Heh.

As for Dave himself, a little Facebook detective work turned up the fact that he's currently teaching music at Columbia University, which isn't too shabby. If I can find an e-mail addy for him, perhaps I'll update the story in a few days.

Hey -- I didn't say this would necessarily be all that interesting.

The Unreleased Beatles Album: Part II

EMI's roll-out of legendary vault material from the Fab Four continues.

New out this week -- The Beatles' often bootlegged Rabbi Saul from 1967.



From EMI's press release:

This album was recorded for the benefit of Queenie Epstein on the occasion of her son Brian's untimely death. The idea was simply to cheer her up after her terrible loss, but not content with being cheered up, Queenie wanted to have the album released, claiming it would make "a pile." When the group refused, she sued, claiming that since they had given her the album, she owned it outright. The court case was continued until Allen Klein took over the management of the Beatles, at which point Mrs. Epstein inexplicably dropped the suit.

TRACK LISTING

Hey, Juden
Here Comes My Son, the Doctor Robert
Helter Schmelter
Your Mother Should Only Know
P.S.I.O.U.
If I Kvell
Mocky Raccoon
Sexy Seder
The Schul on the Hill