I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #202 - Chinatown (1974, dir. Roman Polanski)

It is possible that Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is one of the few movies that has absolutely everything. Beginning with a labyrinthine script by Robert Towne, which simultaneously deals with issues of public policy, water rights in California, entitlement among the wealthy, murder and even incest, all within the rich cloak of a stylish noir mystery. For his part, Polanski treats each scene like an individual work of art, utilizing his skill in set, light, movement, music and performance to make each plot twist an indispensable piece of a larger puzzle, which inexorably leads to the emotionally shocking and politically relevant conclusion. The casting and performances are world-class with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway offering the best performances of their careers and veteran John Huston offering one of the most understated studies of evil in the history of film.

Jack Nicholson is J.J. Gittes, a Los Angeles private detective who has made a name for himself as a high profile cheating spouse catcher. His routine is disrupted when he gets hired to investigate the commissioner of water and power in Los Angeles who is suspected of cheating on his wife. A seemingly normal “Sam Spade” type mystery quickly goes off the rails into much more politically treacherous territory as Gittes’ subject, Hollis Mulwray, becomes embroiled in a controversial plan to divert water to Los Angeles county at the same time he is suspected of carrying on an extra-marital affair, and then, suspiciously, ends up dead shortly thereafter. I have seen this movie at least half a dozen times and this time I REALLY paid attention to the details of the plot, and I have to say, it is extremely hard to keep them all straight. This doesn’t take away from the excitement of trying to figure it out. There are so many levels to this mystery that figuring any of it out before the end of the movie is an accomplishment. The water rights issue is relevant to today’s world as much as it was in 1937 (when the movie takes place), as are issues of land usage, real-estate manipulation and county zoning - all seemingly boring topics that Polanski masterfully turns into a breathtaking mystery. You will literally not be able to guess what is going on until the final scenes, but you will be on the edge of your seat getting there. Running parallel courses throughout the film are the complex and disturbing relationships between Mulwray, his supposed girlfriend, his wife (Dunaway), and her ultra-wealthy father (John Huston). An adequate synopsis of this plot would take pages there are so many twists and turns in both the story of stolen water and in the dysfunctional family/marriage/sex/incest sub-plot. Ultimately, the solution is not as important as how we got there.

The title of the movie refers to J.J. Gittes’ past life as a police detective in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. As a younger man he experienced a lawless and anarchic subset of society that comes to act as a metaphor for past sins in this movie. Everyone in the movie has their past “Chinatown” that they would rather forget, or at least not admit to. Similarly, many people in real life have done things in order to get what they wanted which they might now regret. Towards the end of the movie John Huston tells Gittes that in the right circumstances people are capable of almost anything. This turns out to be tragically true for the characters in Chinatown as the movie moves speeds like a train headed for a downed bridge. We know this is going to end badly for everybody, but we simply can’t guess the ghastly truths that make up the characters’ secret motivations. When the truth comes out in a series of scenes that are as revelatory as they are disturbing, we come to understand the depths of depravity involved here. Ending with the classic line “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown,” the viewer feels sucked down into the moral vortex with Gittes.

Every single thing works in Chinatown. It is a suspenseful and ultimately rewarding story, filmed with a master’s eye toward the traditions of film-noir, and acted by an ensemble cast for the ages. This is a mystery that keeps you guessing and leaves you scratching your head when it’s over. So few films are this intelligent and unpredictable, yet Chinatown succeeds in keeping us guessing and then offering a believable and shocking conclusion.

- Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On #215 - Neil Young – On The Beach

Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach marked the middle of what has become known as his “ditch trilogy,” whereby he deliberately drove his career (on a major high after the one-two punches of CSNY and his own top 10 album Harvest) off the road to success and into a ditch of excess. Although recorded after the even bleaker Tonight’s The Night (his most controversial and emotionally raw album), and the somewhat baffling live album Time Fades Away (which contained all new material played in a ragged, almost haphazard style), On The Beach was released before, thus preparing the public for the darkness to come. While the production was comparatively crude, and Neil’s voice sometimes reduced to a pained howl, I have always found On The Beach to be one of Neil’s most honest and personally affecting albums. In many ways, the startling image on the cover tells much of the story. We see Neil, dressed in a thrift store leisure suit, his back to the camera, facing the ocean of Zuma Beach, while in the foreground are the accoutrement of a burned-out, artificial and pointless society: a potted palm, gaudy patio furniture, a crumpled newspaper with the headline Senator Buckley Wants Nixon To Resign, the back fins of a vintage Cadillac stick out of the sand like some weirdo, hipster version of the Statue Of Liberty from Planet Of The Apes and a couple of Coors tall-boys stand by like dead soldiers. Surreal in the extreme, the image also seems to sum up an age of Watergate, Vietnam, disillusion and the shattered hippie dream with tremendous clarity. It remains my favorite album cover.

As for the music - its stature grows in my mind’s ear with each passing year. On The Beach contains some of Neil Young’s most reflective and intelligent songs, set in rough-hewn settings that are alternately fragile to the point of breaking or roar with the anguish of a lost soul screaming in the wilderness. Let’s look at it song by song.

Side One

"Walk On" - The closest thing resembling a pop song on the album, this irresistible gem has a perfectly crushing guitar hook, exquisite slide guitar by Ben Keith and a rock-solid rhythm section provided by Crazy Horse alums Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot. The lyrics are an anthem for the disaffected hippies facing the cold realities of a new decade.

"See The Sky About To Rain" - A lovely ballad dominated by Neil’s cracked falsetto, memorable Wurlitzer playing, and, again, Ben Keith’s sympathetic steel. An ominous sentiment of lost dreams almost anyone can understand. Neil has an uncanny ability to poetically conflate natural phenomena with manmade turmoil. He never did it better than this one.

"Revolution Blues" - The most strident song on the album, this tale of an apocalyptic L.A. filled with psycho murderers (“10 million dune buggies coming down the mountain.” “I’m a barrel of laughs with my carbine on”) and a doomed, vacuous celebrity culture (“well I heard that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/well I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars”). There’s obviously some insider-baseball irony here as he had recently married his second Hollywood starlet. The rancor feels real and fresh here though. Musically, the song is a barnburner with David Crosby and Young going on the warpath guitar-wise, while Rick Danko’s fretless bass slides the song along like mercury.

"For The Turnstiles" - A harrowing plea for sanity and understanding in a world that makes no sense. A spare recording of just Neil’s banjo and Ben Keith’s lonesome dobro and the two of them yelping like scalded dogs.

"Vampire Blues" - One of the fuller productions on the album, it features a classic, nerve-shattering guitar solo by Neil and some woozy organ work by Ben Keith, who, you may have noticed by now is the secret weapon on this album. Neil decries the petroleum industry as vampires “suckin’ blood from the earth.” The song is both moving and incredibly prescient. Oh yeah, and it rocks hard.

Side Two

"On The Beach" - One of the most hypnotic songs he ever committed to wax, Neil weighs the relative pros and cons of fame and fortune, discovering that’s it all pretty much nowheresville (“I went to the radio interview, but I ended up alone here at the microphone.”)  In the meantime the song staggers along like a lonely drunk in a dark alleyway. Neil lets loose with a couple of last-shred-of-sanity guitar solos and guess who adds the crucial backing with a simple hand drum part? Ben Keith of course.

"Motion Pictures (For Carrie)" - No question what this one is about. His relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass had hit the skids, and he was broken. A beautifully touching ballad informed with equal parts heartbreak and scorn (“all those headlines they just bore me now”). Gently acoustic with a lovely harmonica solo and some great slide guitar by Rusty Kershaw.

"Ambulance Blues" - “Back in the old folkie days/The air was magic when we played” Neil comes to grips with the passage of time in this epic tale of days and friends lost. “Old Mother Goose, she’s on the skids” he moans as he contemplates lost innocence and the reality of now. “I guess I’ll call it sickness gone/It’s hard to say the meaning of this song/An ambulance can only go so fast/It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last.” Not that many artists have looked at their own lives and legacies with such an honest and jaundiced eye. But he’s not just tough on himself: “So all you critics sit alone/ You’re no better than me for what you’ve shown/ With your stomach pump and your hook and ladder dreams/ We could get together for some scenes.” It’s hard to imagine an artist who actually likes critics, but Neil spares no quarter in eviscerating them. In one song, he closes the curtain on the magic trick of 60’s idealism. A profoundly disturbing yet highly enlightening song.

On The Beach ends on that bleak and honest assessment of Neil Young’s own self-worth and place in the popular music cosmology. While not exactly uplifting in subject matter, the album succeeds wildly in terms of being an accurate snapshot of a great artist at a pivotal point in his career. This is not the only time he has done this, in fact it could be argued that more than any other modern artist, Neil Young has honestly bared his soul to his public for better or worse. He doesn’t shy away from the reality of his feelings, and, remarkably, the music he produces reflects that reality with clarity and beauty, lifting it from the merely confessional to the profoundly artistic.

- Paul Epstein

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #201 - Willie Dynamite (1974, dir. Gilbert Moses)

You’ve seen films in the “Blaxploitation” genre before undoubtedly, and while Willie Dynamite has all the trappings of one - the story centers on a pimp, it has a funk-centered soundtrack (courtesy of the great jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson), drugs and violence are commonplace, there are corrupt white cops - it’s got things going on that I’ve never seen in another film in the genre. Namely: it draws an explicit parallel between pimping and capitalist enterprise early in the film, and when a social worker and a Muslim cop work to bring down Willie Dynamite for the good of the community, the film doesn’t invest its energy in just seeing the downfall of a bad man, it’s interested in seeing what happens to him after his fall as well, in seeing if he can be rehabilitated.

            Pimping is paired with American business in the very first scene, as the Martha Reeves title song introduces us to Willie Dynamite on the soundtrack while Willie’s “stable” fans out on-screen into a business convention in New York City. The film cuts back and forth between Willie’s “stable” working their territory and a television monitor in the convention center extolling the virtues of small business enterprise, explicitly linking them together. Later, when one of Willie’s younger star performers, Pashen, hasn’t met her quota, Willie admonishes her with a combination of threats and coercion, noting “This is a business baby, a production line. And just like GM, Ford, Chrysler, Willie’s comin’ through!” Pashen is subsequently busted and while in jail a social worker, Cora, tries to convince Pashen to exit the life of prostitution she’s entered - and tries even harder to try to bring down Willie, stating to her D.A. partner “I wanna see him finished. Wiped out!” Outside of this, the leading pimp in the city, Bell, holds a meeting of the city’s pimps. With heat coming down hard on all of them from the police, he offers to break up the city’s territory so there are no conflicts over turf but Willie declines to participate, gunning for the #1 position himself by saying “Man, I thought we was all capitalists. Free enterprise, you dig?”

Willie is at no point softened or made likeable by his behavior, and yet we hold an interest in him in his efforts to retain control of his territory despite the encroachments by Bell and the other pimps, the pressure exerted on him by the police, and Cora’s efforts to undermine his “stable” - we’re instinctively prepared to watch a flashy and ostentatious bad guy take a fall in a film like this. But what we’re not prepared for is the coda to that, in which Willie learns again how to be a human being, thanks to the dual efforts of Cora and the Muslim cop Pointer, who both admonish him through the film for the damage he does to the black community. The acting is above par all around - Willie is played with the exact right amount of arrogance, confidence, and anger by Roscoe Orman (a face probably most familiar as Gordon, from Sesame Street); Cora, played by Diana Sands (Beneatha Younger in the famous filmed version of A Raisin in the Sun), mixes a checkered past into her earnest and driven social work; and Pointer is a small but pivotal role played by Albert Hall (Malcolm X, Cry Freedom, Ali, Apocalypse Now). Others fill out the more typical roles of the Blaxploitation genre with aplomb, and sometimes (especially in the case of Roger Robinson’s Bell) an extra-memorable flair.

Produced as the first picture by the partnership of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who’d go on to produce two early Spielberg films, The Sugarland Express and Jaws, and a string of big hits in the 80s, the film is treated not as the bargain basement affair or exploitation quickie that afflicts many genre films. Though it bears all the marks of Blaxploitation, the core of the film remain the arc of Willie’s fall and what happens next, not flashy action scenes or stylized cool. In the end, does he still have his dignity? Is he still a human being? Yeah, the film says, and that's why I think it's pretty great.

- Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On #195 - Kenny Rankin - Silver Morning

Here’s a gift for the holiday - something rare, warm and beautiful. You may have never heard of Kenny Rankin - he was never a top ten artist, he garnered little airplay, and he barely penetrated public consciousness. However, if you were among those lucky enough to have discovered this artist of uncommon gifts during his heyday in the 1970’s, (although his career stretched from the mid-60’s to ’07) you were given a mighty respite from tumultuous times. Kenny Rankin’s magic was very simple for me. His music evokes a state of calm. His voice is a magnificent instrument of sooth and healing, and his music is inviting and approachable. My favorite album by Kenny is 1974’s wondrous Silver Morning, because it so beautifully balances his own compositions with world class covers and exudes the gauzy comfort of happier times. While clearly of another time, there is paradoxically, a timeless quality about this album. It always seems to make emotional sense.

Kenny Rankin’s greatest gift was his angelic voice. One of the great interpreters of song in the rock era, his versions of Beatles songs endeared him greatly to the authors, with his version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” being played at George Harrison’s memorial service. On Silver Morning he takes on both “Blackbird” and “Penny Lane” to amazing effect, turning them into patented jazzy vocal swingers. He reimagines complex arrangements into equally complex different arrangements which replace many instruments with the power of his own voice. But Kenny Rankin did not skimp on musical muscle. The performances are lush and full featuring the cream of 70’s jazz and rock session cats. Rankin has a way of getting inside the most iconic songs’ melodic core and adding his own cool sensibility to it, giving it life outside of its classic original. Take his amazing version of Curtis Mayfield’s undeniable “People Get Ready.” Rankin takes the song to a place of folk-soul bliss, mellower than Mayfield’s, yet with a new sheen of beauty driven by John Sebastian’s beautiful harmonica playing and Rankin’s own nylon-string guitar strumming. Also covered on this album are Baden Powell’s lovely “Berimbau,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Pussywillows Cattails” and a sublime version of Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”

However, my greatest affection is for the Rankin originals on this album. The title track “Silver Morning” is an orchestral ballad that never fails to lift my spirits. It is the musical equivalent of a warm patch of sunlight on a Persian rug during the dead of winter. It is a welcome and comforting presence in the room. Equally beautiful is “Killed A Cat,” a downbeat memoir of his youth growing up in New York City. And no song on this album has thrilled me more over the years than the exhiliratng “In The Name Of Love.” The first time I heard this song, shortly after getting my first acoustic guitar, I just about lost my mind. This guy was doing everything I could have aspired to accomplish in the cultural open-wound that was the early 1970’s; he played like a demon (Dylan had used him on some mid-60’s sessions), he had a voice that was like mercury coated with honey: controlled yet liquid, and his arranging sensibilities were both honoring the past and totally forward-looking. This song was really something, and it still feels that way when I listen to it 43 years later. Nothing else is quite like this, and very few albums have had such a consistently tranquil effect on my psyche as Silver Morning has. Need a remedy for today’s political nightmare? Take Kenny Rankin and call me in the morning.

-         Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On #141 - Phoebe Snow – Phoebe Snow

There is a phenomenon of the debut album. The theory is that many great artists have about oh…one great album in them, and that the process of developing into an artist is the gestation period that the one masterpiece in them needs to prepare for birth. This is obviously an oversimplification, which gives short shrift to the artistic process and to the ongoing accomplishments of many important artists. Yet, there does seem to be some abiding truth to the fact that some artists spend their early lives so deeply in visualization and preparation, that when the debut album does come out, it is an overwhelming and defining creative statement, containing the individuals’ most realized work. Such is the case with Phoebe Snow’s magnificent self-titled 1974 debut. She had a long and distinguished career with many highlights, yet she never seemed to transcend this first, fully-formed artistic statement.

Possessed of a voice that defies categorization or genre, she was equal parts Billie Holiday, Laura Nyro and Bessie Smith. Her tone is clear and perfect with a jazzy quaver, yet her performances are all deeply informed by the blues she loved so. Her writing produced heartfelt, poetic and intelligent songs of artistic ideation and lost love. Heartbreak is her constant companion, and would remain so for the rest of her life as she fought for the health of her daughter and eventually herself, in a career marked by tragedy and lost opportunity. And yet Phoebe Snow stands as one of the absolutely great first albums. There are no weak songs, including her two covers, “Let The Good Times Roll” and “San Francisco Bay Blues,” and the best of her originals – “Poetry Man,” “Harpo’s Blues,” “Either or Both,” “I Don’t Want The Night To End” and “Take Your Children Home” - succeed as poetry and song. Take for example “Harpo’s Blues,” her tribute to an early lover who died tragically. The lyrics are a beautifully sustained balance of reference and original thought:

I wish I was a soft refrain

When the lights were out

I’d play and be your friend

I strut and fret my hour

Upon the stage

The hour is up

I have to run and hide my rage

With her own substantial guitar chops and unearthly voice, she is accompanied by Zoot Sims, Bob James and others to create an unbelievably poignant and lovely recording. I don't usually buy into lists, but if I had to make a desert island compilation of songs, this one would be on it. It falls into a small category of gerascophobic songs, or songs about the fear of growing up. In the final verse she sings:

I'd like to be a willow, a lover, a mountain

or a soft refrain

But I'd hate to be a grownup

and have to try to bear

my life in pain

It's hard to put into words how strongly this song and this album affected me as a 17-year old, however the acid test here is that I find it even more affecting now. In fact, there has never been a time that I've listened to this album that I haven't come away with a deeper appreciation for the singer and her songs, and that is incredibly rare.

I don't think I'm alone in this, because “Poetry Man” was covered by many and remains a beloved folk/rock staple, however, because Phoebe Snow was forced to turn her back on fame, she has been forgotten by many and has been relegated to the historical back shelf. Her debut album is a stunner from start to finish combining a truly original voice, all the magic that professional recording studios and ace musicians of the era could bring, and a truly great set of songs, combining to make this one of the albums that built my emotional life and my store.

-                Paul Epstein