Tag: The Monkees

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Pop Art, The Monkees, and a Social Media Tragedy This Week At The Movies

Artist David Hockney in A Bigger Splash

Tonight (Wednesday) at the Malco Powerhouse, Indie Memphis presents a groundbreaking hybrid documentary from 1974. A Bigger Splash is about a crucial period in the life of artist David Hockney. Filmmaker Jack Hazan hung out with the influential painter from 1971-1973, documenting his artistic process and, more importantly, his on-again, off-again relationship with Peter Schlesinger. This is not a fly-on-the-wall verité film of the type you might expect from other late-60s, early-70s documentarians like Les Blank, but rather a documentary hybrid with some staged scenes that the director and subject say reflected their real lives at the time. This film was banned for years in England because of its honest depiction of a homosexual relationship, but the art proved to be enduring. One of the paintings created during this period featuring Schlesinger was Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), which set a record when it sold for $90.3 million in 2018. Showtime is at 7 p.m., with tickets available on the Indie Memphis website.

Pop Art, The Monkees, and a Social Media Tragedy This Week At The Movies

Thursday is a busy film day in the Crosstown area. At Crosstown Arts’ space at 430 Cleveland, Indie Memphis presents an explosive documentary about the infamous Stubenville High School rape case. Roll Red Roll follows online journalist Alex Goddard as she uncovers first the horrific crime of an incapacitated teenage girl whose gang rape was documented by the perpetrators on social media, then the cover-up perpetrated by football coaches and school administrators trying to protect their young athletes in the sports crazy Ohio town. Tickets are available at Indie Memphis.

Roll Red Roll – Trailer from ro*co films on Vimeo.

Pop Art, The Monkees, and a Social Media Tragedy This Week At The Movies (2)

Meanwhile at the Crosstown Theater, a decidedly stranger film from the swinging Sixties. Head started out as the Monkees’ attempt at making a film like The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, but they hired Jack Nicholson to write it and, as Wikipedia puts it, “brainstormed into a tape recorder, reportedly with the aid of a quantity of marijuana.” The results are extremely weird, and much darker than what was expected from the family-friendly TV fake rock band. Tickets are $5, and the show starts at 7:30.

Pop Art, The Monkees, and a Social Media Tragedy This Week At The Movies (3)

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Book Features Books

Hey Hey: On Mike Nesmith’s memoir Infinite Tuesday

Things I knew about Mike Nesmith before reading this book: He was the best songwriter and most interesting persona in the Monkees. His mother invented Liquid Paper and made a fortune. He was one of the first musicians to play country-rock. And he invented MTV, making one of the first music videos to promote his song “Rio” and conceiving of a show devoted to such videos, a show he wanted to call Popclips.

First, a few personal remarks. The second album I owned was More of the Monkees (the first was Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow). I loved the “prefab four,” but my nostalgia for them is not what makes me still listen to them today. The made-for-TV band, against all odds, made some great music. I also own every solo CD Nesmith ever made, even the obscure ones like The Wichita Train Whistle Sings. I think he is one of the most unappreciated songwriters in pop music. I love his songs from the Monkees albums, from “Sweet Young Thing” and “Papa Gene’s Blues” to his ethereally beautiful “I Know What I Know” on their most recent album, Good Times. And I love his solo work, which I would put on a par with Stephen Stills’ or Lou Reed’s, to name two artists who started in a group and then made vital music afterward.

So, I came to his memoir Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff (Crown Archetype, $28) with high hopes. I was not disappointed. Nesmith, as narrator of his own life, is engaging, intelligent, lyrical, and sincere. And it doesn’t hurt that he has quite a story to tell.

Rather than a linear approach he imparts his narrative nonconsecutively, in well-thought-out vignettes and portraits. He name-drops Timothy Leary, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Nicholson, and Johnny Cash, among others, but through all his tales runs a humility and genuineness that is disarming. And, even when he’s not talking about the Monkees or his solo career or his movie star friends, the vignettes are still fascinating because of this honesty and because he’s such a charming narrator. He’s equally appealing talking about his mother, his friends, his study of Christian Science, his interest in quantum physics. He knows what’s meat and what’s fat, and the book is decidedly low-fat. And, eventually, it coalesces into a compelling chronicle, like a novel made from attractive mosaic shards.

If you’re looking for dirt on Micky, Peter, and Davy, you won’t find it here. Nesmith glosses over the Monkees years, mostly substituting self-deprecating feelings of otherness and disassociation for descriptions of on-set craziness or backstage peccadilloes. A reluctant TV star, he outlines some of the surrealistic events which created the show and, ultimately, led to its demise. He says “The creators of The Monkees may have thought they were creating a simple television property, a paean to the times, but what they were actually producing was Pinocchio. The show and all its parts and characters would come to life and begin to breathe and move and sing and play and write and think on their own. What had started as a copy of the 1960s became a fact of the 1960s. What had started as fanciful effect became casual fact.”

Along the way, he experienced some dark times, some periods of self-doubt and instability. He chronicles these gloomy days with grace and wit. Behind the accomplished rock star and actor lies a vulnerable human being, open-hearted and seeking, and I appreciated the opportunity to walk in his shoes for a while.

And, much later, discussing how he came up with the concept which would become MTV, about which he is characteristically humble, he says “To American eyes the little film was a white elephant, a trinket, fascinating and entertaining but with no apparent application among current television outlets. In the U.S., the music video had been born an orphan, without a place to be played.” That, as we know, changed, and a monster was birthed, a monster that would change how folks listened to or thought about rock music.

And, finally, here is a one sentence fractal that can serve as a sum-up for Nesmith’s sometimes absurdist, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, always diverting autobiographical riffs, “I tiptoed through my inner world looking for the rules that governed, being careful not to damage the tulips.”

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Film Features Film/TV

The Wrecking Crew

In film circles, Denny Tedesco’s music documentary The Wrecking Crew has become a shorthand reference to the strained and bizarre state of the copyright regime in 2015. Tedesco first started making the film about Los Angeles studio musicians 19 years ago. Inspired by his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, he spent years arranging interviews, tracking down archival footage, and, teaching himself filmmaking in the true indie spirit. It premiered at the South By Southwest film festival in 2008 to wide acclaim and went on to be a hit on the festival circuit. Normally, a great subject, good execution, and a good festival run gives a documentary a good shot at distribution. But after more than a decade of struggle, Tedesco found himself facing two daunting challenges to getting his film out to the audience. First was the financial crash of 2008, which instantly dried up the traditional funding sources for small budget films in a way the industry has yet to fully recover from. Second was the astronomical cost of licensing the dozens of songs for the film from the media conglomerates that owned them. Since this was a music documentary, the songs were inseparable from the film, so Tedesco begged, pleaded, took out mortgages on his home, and watched all the buzz he had worked so hard to build up drown under a sea of red tape.

The Wrecking Crew in the studio

Now, seven years and a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign later, The Wrecking Crew can finally (legally) meet its audience. The story opens in the late 1950s. Lured by a growing talent pool and closer connections with the film and television industries, the center of the music industry started shifting from New York’s Tin Pan Alley to the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles. At the same time, rock-and-roll was taking the country by storm, and many of the older musicians who had made their living playing on commercial jingles and anonymous teen idol ditties were not enthused by the new style. But a new generation of players, such as drummer Earl Palmer, who were mostly into bebop jazz, had no such compunctions. They earned the name “The Wrecking Crew” when one old timer complained that the rockers were going to “wreck the music business,” but over time, their nickname came to symbolize their fearsome chops.

To earn a spot on the rotating crew, players had to have an almost inhuman ability to figure out what the often inarticulate clients wanted and to nail the songs instantly. Tedesco uncovers a group of fascinating characters. His father tells stories of bands that could dish out entire Disney soundtracks before lunch and then move on to moonlight as the Monkees in the afternoon. Drummer Hal Blaine played on seven tracks that won song of the year Grammys in consecutive years. Legendary bassist Carol Kaye not only wrote the iconic bassline for the Mission: Impossible theme, but was also mistress of the groove on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, all while raising two children. Phil Spector constructed his Wall of Sound in L.A’s Gold Star studio using 15 members of the crew and then refused to use anyone else on recording sessions for years. They made careers, from Cher, who in the film remembers being a young, naive singer who idolized the crew, to Nancy Sinatra, who recalls talking her father Frank out of recording “These Boots Are Made for Walking” before sneaking into a studio with the crew and cutting the huge hit herself.

Carol Kaye and Bill Pitman

But despite their ubiquity on pop radio, few of these day-rate players were recognized for their work. As Dick Clark says in an interview, “Who created it? No one cared.” The big exception was Glen Campbell, who was a session guitarist for years before striking out on his own and taking some of the crew with him as he rose to country music stardom.

Tedesco organizes the documentary around the personalities he encountered, which sometimes makes for a confusing chronology. But what the director lacks in technical chops and narrative clarity, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm and heart, and that’s what make The Wrecking Crew an exceptional documentary.