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Tom Graves... hmm.
Rock & Roll Disc Magazine... and he wrote a book on Bluesman Robert
Johnson, Crossroads. Your eyes move to the ceiling, remember the box set of the
Complete Robert Johnson Recordings propped beside your vintage Bob Carver gear
upstairs... have you listened to it recently? No. Got the Crossroads book in
your music library? Don't know. Maybe. These days amnesia is just a nameless,
familiar melody or a sleeping black guitar that's been below the couch for 15
years.
He writes about the
movies like a fan, not a mechanic trying to pull the narrative apart. Picture
of Louise Brooks, the silent screen star, on the cover of the book. Has the
fatale look, the Surgeon General Warning, this chick is dangerous for your
health. Interesting profile in the NJ style, the story-of-the-story, part
biography (Louise), part autobiography (Tom). Was she Kenneth Tynan's lover?
Suicide is part of the conversation. She's awfully interested in George
Sanders... you remember when he checked out, 1972, Nice or Barcelona or
someplace in between. "I'm bored with it all," his note said.
What's interesting
about this cryptic biography by TG is not how Linda ends but rather how he
ends.
a lonely woman with
many bad men in her past
So cherchez la
femme, folks. Following the aborted Louise Brooks project, Graves uses the
mystery narrative as an envelope to profile Linda Haynes, the seventies B-movie
star that some might remember from the cult movie Rolling Thunder
(1977). Where is she now? Why did she drop out of sight around 1980 after
generating some heat with Paul Newman (The Drowning Pool, 1975) and a walk-in
with Robert Redford (Brubaker, 1980)? Maybe the last shoot, Guyana
Tragedy -- about the horrific Jim Jones mass suicide -- fried her head, so
you're thinking, son-of-a, did she become a victim of one of her own parts as
so many artists do... writers write their destiny, actors act their fate sort
of thing... Mishima... Tony Scott... Hemingway... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia
Plath... the Black Dahlia... Diana Dors... Pamela Moore... Diane Arbus, et al.
Or is she just another Hollywood cliche, you know how they finish, rob a bank
and end up on a warm beach or die before they get there.
As he paints the
portrait, Graves develops the enigma while seeking aesthetic justice. She was
"white trash beautiful" and "a woman who walked the edge between prostitution
and respectability", says Graves, drawing the fantasy from her on-screen
persona. Sounds like a Cornell Woolrich woman, available in dream, unavailable
in life.
The film that throws
the switch for Graves is Paul Schrader's Rolling Thunder, in which Linda Haynes
plays a waitress working in a diner who drops everything to tag along with
Major Charles Ranes, a Vietnam vet just repatriated back to Texas after several
years of incarceration in the "Hanoi Hilton", and now looking for justice. His
wife and son have been murdered by a gang of home invaders looking for his
blood money, some silver dollars gifted by his home town during his return
ceremony.
Yes, you've seen it,
late night TV... the gunfight in the whorehouse. William Devane with a hook and
a Winchester. Maybe you yawned, or maybe you thought, cool.
Devane -- you know,
the guy who sells gold and silver on TV. Appeals to survivalists in the Age of
the Bullshit Derivative. He's good at it.
Rolling Thunder was
eclipsed by Rambo as the more popular vet-returns-for-revenge movie of the era,
even though the director Paul Schrader had established his killer credentials
with Taxi Driver. Rolling Thunder... sounds familiar, right? Maybe you saw the
Bob Dylan and friends tour of that name in 1976 but this isn't where the handle
comes from... that's right, it was President Johnson's code for the B-52 carpet
bombing campaign that was meant to take the Vietcong back to the Stone Age. So,
fits good with this neo-western where Vietnam reverberates in the Homeland as a
violent and bloody festival of repatriated violence.
Is/was Linda Haynes
really worth getting hot and bothered about? Fantasy drives the submerged
bicameral mind without regard to reality. While we supposedly left all this
behind thousands of years ago, a case could be made that military training, for
example, reintroduces the "command voice" so that the ability to kill without
question is always latent, no self-awareness necessary. Seems to work for Tommy
Lee Jones in Thunder. So maybe this is also true for film in general, which, as
a form of sensory immersion and hypnosis, re-introduces the bicameral
proto-consciousness.
A classic of this sort
of schizophrenia would be Sunset Boulevard, where Norma Desmond appears
to take instructions from the celluloid version of her former self.
Just thinking, just
saying.
But Linda Haynes...
would she drive a man mad? All it took for Tom Graves to lose his infatuation
with Louise Brooks was to actually enter the hive, meet her and her drone
friends. Linda was different.
Once again the Jack
Daniels brushes your lips. You think, should I get myself a Ranes hook and a
trigger bitch like Linda or should I make a piece of toast and continue
reading? You make the toast.
"I played to the
camera and no one else," says Linda.
There is a certain
beauty in the Tom Graves method, an artifice that allows two appositions to
mingle. He's a writer in search of a subject, not a voyeur in search of a
lover. His extensive telephone trawling finally pays off and he finds Linda
Haynes -- neglected and forgotten -- living in Florida. Well, not completely
forgotten; it seems that the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has recently phoned,
suggesting she come to Los Angeles, test for a part. She declines to test, so
it comes to nothing, yet reading her story you sense no lasting disappointment,
no permanent defeat. TG's portrait is sympathetic -- perhaps overly so --
downplays the drug abuse and so on, yet you have to admire a journalist who has
some moral restraint in a world where neither morals nor restraint are common.
Reading this story, you might be reminded of Max Cherry's gentlemanly crush on
Jackie Brown in Tarantino's film of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch.
Or you might think of
Joe LaBrava when he gets involved with Jean Shaw... eh, when you enter a
darkened cinema and look up, beware of the 50 foot woman!
I know who Ray
Wylie Hubbard is, so why don't I know who Harry is
Who is Harry Crews?
Another New Journalist? A novelist? Name seems familiar, like a porno star or a
fictional detective from the pulps. You missed this guy, you have to admit.
Southern. Has written all kinds of well-received novels but you missed him. As
you read TG's gritty interview with the gritty Crews, you realize what a
multifarious ghetto the whole lit scene is, and truly, in the post-modern world
there are more writers than readers.
But the Darwinian
Crews is interesting, his character vivid even if you haven't read him.
"Florida is not the South," he insists, and goes on to make some pithy remarks
about Norman Mailer, Truman Capote... boxing, pit bull fighting, even the
photag Diane Arbus. And Graves baits the hook, feeds him the verbal meat, has
him going. The beauty of an interview like this is that the reader becomes a
voyeur, the conversation, fiction.
Graves also writes on
music, and has included several profiles, reviews and interviews. His extended
essay on the white gospel group the Blackwood Brothers Quartet is educational.
So much of rock journalism is a blurry impressionism where you can't separate
the hype from the reality, the worship from the dream. Not these pieces.
a kind word for
Albert
"I have a confession
to make: I like the work of Albert Goldman, rotting carcasses and all."
Rock music... and
those who feed off it. Often you just end up writing info commercials,
especially if you like the stuff. It's hard to get aesthetic distance; it's
like booze, gets you drunk, mission accomplished, move on. But when you
politicize and fictionalize the profile in order to create a sensation, as
Albert Goldman did, then you wonder about the moral boundaries. Yeah, you know
Goldman... you read his outrageous bio of Elvis, and you read the John Lennon
assassination job. Good writer... but prurient. Fame and fortune got to him.
Bad disco. He became a member of the Mile High Club, died from a heart attack
on a transatlantic flight... like Paul Kossoff, the Free guitarist, although
Albert was no guitarist, had a shitty Pioneer stereo setup.
So TG tells us. He did
some research/editing work for Goldman, certainly has some reservations about
him, his way of doing business... yet withal remains fond of the man, even
after Goldman "grew tired" of him. Picked up some chops, realized the Lennon
bio was slanderous... yet the brutal humour of the New York iconoclast tips the
scales.
Do we all lie the
minute we set pen to paper? The Cuban novelist Gabriel Infante has a good line
about this sort of phenomena: "Everything you write is fiction, even the
grocery list."
Re Elvis, some of
those stories about the Memphis mafia had to be told, y'know. Maybe Goldman was
like a sewer worker -- somebody has to do it. "(He) came up with a morality
tale and an American nightmare... no one explored the dark side of Elvis better
than Albert Goldman," says Graves.
The Goldman piece is a
good read, and all too brief. You wish there was more... because, well...
because you know there is more. Well, you can always speculate, go meta. How
about Albert ending up as a drug-crazed Elvis impersonator before he implodes?
Just saying.
Pistols
The Sex Pistols...
first of the Art Rock bands? Did they really burgle their amps and PA system
from Keith Richards' Chelsea pad when he was away? Your mind wanders back to
the time, the late seventies, early eighties when psychedelic rock was just
about done. There were new oilers in the engine room, the "Punks". Everything
about these jeering Morlock reactionaries who took music back to the Jurassic
is apocryphal, although you can take it to the bank that TG's account in When
The Sex Pistols Played Memphis in 1978 isn't. In a town where an Elvis
impersonator like Bill Haney can draw a full house, these guys should've been
playing a local art gallery instead of a "former dilapidated ballroom (the
Taliesyn) attached to the Twentieth Century Club on Union Avenue." $3:50 a
ticket, 900 inside, 200 left standing outside in the freezing drizzle,
according to TG who was there with his young wife and a friend. Imagine if
they'd been a band of Brixton blacks, not cockney white trash, same act... what
kind of crowd would they have pulled? You sigh. Didn't the singer, Johnny
Rotten, say, "Gandhi is my life's inspiration" or something like that?
The idea of the
Pistols playing Memphis stuns the imagination, like Woody Allen playing Mecca,
say. Or American Idol.
'Sid Vicious, none of
us knew at the time, could not play bass guitar at all. His sound was so thick
and muddy, you could not distinguish the notes; all you could hear was a huge,
earth-swallowing throb. Sid was shirtless and had red markings all over his
torso that I originally thought had been made by a red felt-tip marker. I
didn't know until much later that he had carved a message into his chest with a
knife: "I need a fix."
Zappa
Anyone who has
followed rock and jazz from the fifties probably knows about Les Paul's pioneer
work in developing multi-track recording, but did you know that Frank Zappa had
one of the first multi-track studios in Los Angeles in the early sixties? This
is something that you learn in TG's interview with Zappa. Killer stuff for
those interested in early analogue recording and the start of the shift into
digital (early eighties). For those seeking info on Zappa's fractured music
narrative -- face it, he used rock as a subterfuge -- check out In The Ocean
[a film about the
classical avant-garde] which includes a clip of Zappa's BeBop Tango. Here
he says, "Progress is not possible without deviation."
Sure... Weasels
Ripped My Flesh.
Zappa: his name is
like a cigarette lighter, and his approach to music just as incendiary. The man
looked like a Sicilian bandit, and although he was pure L.A., he really came
out of the fantastic Italian avant-garde tradition. Think of people like Luigi
Russolo... even the over-exposed Ennio Morricone has done some off-the-wall, so
Frank was no surprise inside the Academy even though he worked the street.
It was well-known that
Zappa was anti-dope, and he reiterates this here. "Anything with a needle, give
me a break," he says (although he didn't mind some nicotine).
Graves: What
kind of hate mail do you get?
Zappa: Little
or none. Well....
[Zappa
on the Steve Allen Show 1963]
Mick
Taylor
Remember when he
joined John Mayall, the English blues singer who sounded like a eunuch? Sure...
"Bare Wires" and "Laurel Canyon", best stuff Mayall ever did, some nice
psychedelic blues going on in there, and Mick was perfecting his version of the
"woman tone", roll back the treble and go sinal, that warm tube harmonics sound
Clapton based his fortune on. Sure, you know him, admired that killer solo on
the coda of the Stones' Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers 1971). Yes,
he was good, and he walked away from it all after six years.
The Graves interview
is from 1988, originally published in Rock & Roll Disc Magazine. It's long,
and very good. Taylor is quite forthcoming. His first rock concert? Bill Haley
& the Comets, 1958. Check (you saw them at the Belfast Opera House, 1957).
His first guitar? A Hofner President. Check. His first Blues album? B.B. King
Live at the Regal (1965). Check. Why did he leave the Stones? Personal, not
saying. Check (uh, you read too much coke blah blah). What do you think of
Stevie Ray Vaughan... and so on. Yes, it's mostly life-style evaluation, with
some Guitar Player technical, but it's good stuff for those interested in the
greatest rock period, that is, the British re-colonization of America... and
the world.
So, you say, where can
I get this book? Do I have to go to Memphis?
© LR
January 15 2016
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