Merci, Patrice Chéreau.

Patrice Chéreau died today at the age of 68. His career had many highlights, but for many, including myself, the high point was his direction of Bayreuth's Centennial Ring Cycle, which debuted in 1976. The production was filmed and released on video. One day (probably around 1995) I rented Das Rheingold from the library, popped it into my VCR at home, and as soon as the Rhinemaidens began to sing, standing at the top of that hydroelectric dam, the ineluctable genius of Wagner suddenly made itself plain to me. Today it's one of four complete DVD sets of the Ring I own, and I've viewed over half a dozen more, but it's the one to which I return over and over again, never tiring of its genius, its profound dramatic sensibility, the mesmerizing sets, the brilliance of the performers and the music conducted by Pierre Boulez. I'll never be able to thank him for the gift, but I would if I could. This will have to do, though it's certainly inadequate.

Another Pussycat gone



Haji. 1946-2013.



Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was a writer who really understood and appreciated the amazing and probably endless variety of experiences which could be expressed through the medium of film. Because of that understanding, he approached each movie on its own terms. My favorite review of his was for "The Devil's Rejects"- which he called "a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre" in his three-star review. What I admired was how he appreciated (and respected) who the audience for the movie actually is and how he viewed it from their perspective, even if it wasn't necessarily his own.

That's the sign of a professional. That he could be entertaining and enlightening while doing it marked him as an artist in his own right. He will be fondly remembered.

Bill Bennett

The recent death of Bill Bennett, Principal Oboist for the San Francisco Symphony is tremendously sad news. The details of what happened, and more importantly Bennett's biography, have all been made available in the last week, but I want to offer my condolences to the Bennett family and to his fellow musicians. He was a truly gifted musician and will be greatly missed.

Black Friday

I wouldn't normally use this blog to comment about events like today's, but these deaths have deeply saddened me. Little kids in an elementary school were killed. That can't be rationalized in any way. There is no way to make this an "acceptable fact" of everyday life, like we try to do for unexpected accidents and misfortunes.

Because it didn't have to happen.

There is something seriously wrong in a society where people's lives are potentially at risk when they go to school, attend a popular movie, or go Christmas shopping, because the gun lobby and some misinformed enthusiasts of the Constitution insist it is the right of Americans to to own guns. It is not.

The Second Amendment reads "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Period. The end.

An individual with a gun or a rifle is not a militia, and a country that cannot protect its citizens from the kind of senseless violence that happened today is neither secure nor free. It is a state held hostage to fear.

It should be the right of every American to be able to go to school, see a movie, or go Christmas shopping and not be murdered in the course of pursuing everyday life, liberty and happiness. And for those in the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" camp, sure- okay. Let's assume that's true. But people armed with guns kill people much easier and in greater numbers than they do using any other method.

And the fact is, it's going to be easier to control the distribution and availability of guns than it is to anticipate the actions of an insane person bent on murdering as many people as possible. And since we can't take the guns away from just the crazy people, the American way to do this- the right way to do this-  is to take the guns away from everyone.

And the time to do it was a long time ago. If you don't think that's fair, that that is somehow un-American, tell that to one of the parents whose child was killed today. Please explain to them how it is more important that America be able to arm itself than it is to expect that its children will return home safely after a day at elementary school.

My deepest condolences to the families of the victims, and for the community of Newtown.

The Queen is dead

In the spring and summer of 1978 I was madly in love with a girl named Patty. She had a boyfriend at the time, a guy named John who was on the football team and frankly he terrified me, but not enough to stay away from her. Even after he blindsided me one day on the school quad, hitting me in the side of the head so hard I was knocked flat to the ground, I didn't give up, even though I spent most of that summer with one eye constantly looking over my shoulder for him and his friends on the football team, who seemed intent on beating me to a pulp.

There used to be a place on Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley called the Teen Center, where kids could go dance. I used to meet Patty there during the summer of '78, and though there are many songs that remind me of then, especially "Miss You" by the Stones and Patti Smith's version of "Because the Night," the one that's indelibly etched in my mind is the first one she and I ever danced to together- Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." To this day I remember that night whenever I hear it, and the ineluctable, thrilling terror of dancing with the most beautiful girl I'd ever known at that point in my life.

I have only the faintest knowledge of Patty's whereabouts these days, courtesy of John of all people, but around 1988 she unexpectedly popped into my life again when she walked into a strip joint I was working in to take part in an amateur contest. We were both shocked to see the other there. I made sure she won that night, which she likely would have even without my help, and she was offered a job on the spot, which she immediately took. The first night she came in as a pro, she handed me the music for her first set: "Because the Night," Joe Cocker's "You Can Leave Your Hat On," and "I Feel Love."

While the summer of '88 and what happened during it was quite different from ten years earlier, she still had a powerful effect on me and easily pulled me into her thrall once again, if only for a short time. I had moved on to other "Bad Girls."

Donna Summer died today. What set her apart from the other disco and R&B divas of her era was her superior voice and a knack for choosing great material. It didn't hurt that the quality of her voice made the top talent in music industry want to work with her- Giorgio Moroder, David Geffen and Quincy Jones among others, in creating a long string of hits which bore her distinct stamp even as her music evolved far beyond disco. Summer stood out as a smart voice in a genre riddled with mediocre talents. She could sing anything.

And though I'll always have a soft spot for "I Feel Love," her version of Richard Harris'  "MacArthur Park" was the best thing she ever did. A soaring epic of a song, an irresistible dance track, and one of the few remakes that seriously improves on the original. Enjoy this seventeen minute version of it, cause we'll never have that recipe again.

With Patty in the Summer of 1978.

"The Godfather of Go-Go" is gone

Chuck Brown in 1992

In the early '80s when my friend Kevin and I were DJs, we'd haul our gear around in his '68 Dodge Dart or his lowered 1959 Hudson to wherever it was we were going to spin records that night. Once there, we'd haul out the turntable coffin, two huge speakers, a 28lb QSC amplifier and 8 to 10 milk crates full of records and set them up on whatever flat surface would hold it all. After everything was hooked up, we usually checked the acoustics of the room and the EQ settings by playing ELO's "Fire on High,"and then maybe "Poker" if the room sounded really good. Then, after a couple of more tunes, when we were ready to make people dance, we'd put on Kurtis Blow's "Party Time"- a 1983 track which had Blow rapping over an irresistible go-go beat, and the floor would begin to fill up.

"Party Time" was the first go-go song I heard, and its rhythms were so amazingly funky I had to find more, which led me to bands like Trouble Funk, whose "Drop the Bomb" may be the best go-go jam ever. But "Drop the Bomb" was never my favorite. That distinction belonged to a tune by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers called "We Need Some Money," which in its eight-plus minutes seemed to capture everything that no one seems to now remember about Reagan's presidency in a blast of knowingly desperate lyrics over a deliriously happy beat. It's generally acknowledged that Brown, a guitarist, created the genre.

Though it's never gone away, in its hey-day during the 80's go-go music stood out from other "Urban" music of the time for two reasons: it took an actual band with real percussionists to play it at a time when almost everything was being recorded with drum machines and synthesizers; and the best go-go tracks always sounded like they'd been recorded during a really great party- lots of call and response, heavy horn riffs, extended jamming, getting down just for the funk of it, and always the heavily syncopated beat of multiple drummers going to town while the horns just ripped across the top of the beat.That's the genre's secret weapon- that combination of horns and drums.

Go-go inexplicably never really caught on beyond the borders of its hometown in the nation's capitol, despite the musical performances captured in the otherwise shitty 1986 movie Good to Go (aka Short Fuse), which promoted the genre on its fine soundtrack and inexplicably starred Art Garfunkel, and the popularity in 1988 of EU's "Da Butt," an embarrassingly lame example of the genre which turned out to be a big hit because it was in a Spike Lee movie. But you could hear it in some clubs, including the old Palladium in San Francisco on Saturday nights in the early 80's when they had these incredible DJs spinning until the wee hours of the morning. Sometime around 1984 I caught Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers at the Palace in Hollywood and it was a hell of a show that in my memory lasted for hours and had the entire placed drenched in sweat by the time it was over.

Brown died of pneumonia today at the age of 75, but he kept playing go-go all this time, earning him the moniker " the Godfather of Go-Go," which he well deserved. Listening to these tunes, so entwined in my mind with those of the first two Beastie Boys albums (which I've been listening to constantly since MCA's recent death), aural madeleines of an era long gone, has made me quite nostalgic for a time when things were hard, but felt much simpler, and you could just dance your problems away, if only for a little while.

Men at Work: Kevin, Buns, Marcher circa 1986.

Take me home and eat me- yeah!

The Beastie Boys: true innovators, pioneers, and brilliantly creative. And if that weren't enough, always the soundtrack to a good time, going all the way back to this- the very first song of theirs I heard way back in 1983. Remember when hip-hop was fun and the source of the most creative popular music being made? These guys were at the center of it all.

Rest in peace, MCA- and thank you.

Blame Ken Russell

Do you ever wonder where your own particular fetishes/quirks/peccadilloes came from?  Today  I realized where mine began. It was all of those damn Ken Russell films I saw starting at the tender age of 7, when my mother took me to see "Women in Love" at the drive-in. I haven't missed many of his films since. Sex, horror, rock and roll, and classical music- there you have it- Marcher explained. Though the films were often awful, he was a true master of the indelible image. Here are a few of the tamer ones which will never leave me.

This should explain my bathroom to anyone who's ever wondered "what's with those photographs?"

Thanks for the memories, Ken (and the therapy bills).

Southern Gothic

"Where has Marcher been?" you may have wondered these past weeks. Not a post, not a word. I've just returned from the deep South, where I spent many hours talking with Molly Bloomberg in her enclosed porch (pictured above) in between visits with the family of the Naturalized Southerner, who had summoned me for an important family event.

Trips to the South rejuvenate me. The South has its way with you. Spending time with my oldest friend provides a distance from which to view the current state of things in ways not possible at home.

That state is in flux. Penelope has been lost to me in a storm of my own creation- an event I thought impossible has now happened. A tether ripped free by my own hand. Molly has a similar tale, a Southern Gothic if there ever was one, which I didn't learn the full scope of until this weekend. Sitting there on the porch, sipping whiskey and listening to the cicadas while Romeo and Juliette sat nearby, perhaps listening, perhaps not, we spoke of losses unintended and yet inevitable when seen from behind.

During the morning of the last day, the Southerner and I sat in his backyard. He counseled and I listened. We then took a drive, ate some breakfast at Lucy's, took a walk through abandoned blocks of defunct industry, and drove through streets which once burst with life but are now vacant and boarded up. JJ's All Star Lounge. Ricky's BBQ. The Birmingham League of Gentlemen. Gone, but their presence looms.

But I'm still here, with an "...old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, 
stamping in its stall."

Amy

What made Amy Winehouse such a marvelous singer had more to do than the fact that she possessed a great voice, perfectly suited for R&B, quite unlike anyone else's yet firmly within the tradition of great R&B singers, regardless of gender or race. As a white girl her only peer was Teena Marie, whom I  think she was better than, if for no other reason than Winehouse's persona was so much more her own, her presence so much larger. It wasn't just that she had great phrasing and an artist's intuition of how a song should sound. No, there was something more to it.

With her one classic album, Back to Black, Winehouse gave a ferocious update on the 60's pop/soul sound that is unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon with such equal impact. Her lyrics angrily rubbed out the false sheen of happiness and hope found on the records she so obviously admired and was influenced by. Winehouse's songs were about what really happened once the singer left the stage, the life behind the lights, the despair, the self-destruction and insecurity, the games people really play- with others and with themselves. She gave a real voice to all those women singers of the 50's and 60's who couldn't sing about what their lives were really like behind the careers controlled and manipulated by men. And she made it sound sexy, alluring, and fun, though danger lurked within every line and every beat pulled the listener forward even as her words said don't follow in her wake. Hers was a truly unique voice and vision. I'm sad there isn't going to be more to come.

LA Opera to commemorate Daniel Catán

LA Opera will remember the life and legacy of Daniel Catán at 6pm on Monday, May 23, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The program is open to the public.

http://www.laopera.com/company/catan/

RIP Teena Marie

This was always my favorite song of hers....

Paula Superti: 1962- 2010

Paula.

The second Sullivan to leave us this year. An incredibly vivacious, charming woman. She was smart, opinionated, funny and unique- as are all the members of this special clan, to which I am honored to be close.

I cannot believe she too, has left us.

Anatole, Amy and Peter, I haven't the words. I wish I did.


Well I picked a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed that winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they are not what they seem...

Bob Dylan

Another tribute to Paula can be found here.

In memory of: Liz Reiman 1962 - 2010

The first real rocker chick I ever knew, though her taste for the Grateful Dead and Bowie didn't match my own when we were kids.

We had Friday night poker games, she had more addictions than I could list and a terminal case of lymphoma which she somehow managed to beat that left her feeling invincible.

But she wasn't. Now she's gone. A unique, alive, large spirit always game for anything. Over.

She'll be missed.

Colin Sullivan: 1963-2010

A unique, brilliant and funny man. An encouraging and challenging friend. He'll be missed dearly.