I’ve frankly struggled to process the death of the great rock vocalist Mark Lanegan since his passing at the age of 57 this past February. When someone has essentially been your musical spirit animal for 30-odd years it’s very difficult to say goodbye, particularly as Mark’s passing was just the latest in a numerous and dispiriting series of deaths of all-time greats in the music world. It wasn’t the extreme gut punch of Chris Cornell’s painful and unexpected suicide back in 2017; or the shock of Prince’s sad and seemingly pointless OD in 2016; or the extreme melancholy of a stoic David Bowie succumbing to liver cancer that same year. Lanegan was, by his own admission, a long-time hardcore drug and alcohol abuser, as well as a chain smoker, even if he had been reportedly sober for some years now. Then, he also had an extremely nasty case of COVID that put him in the hospital and even into an induced coma for far too long a spell in 2021. (A true artist, Mark wrote two emotionally honest, raw and well-received autobiographical books about those horrible experiences of addiction and illness, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir and Devil In A Coma.)
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Borracho
A standout track from just his second solo effort, 1994’s Whiskey For the Holy Ghost , the barn burning “Borracho” shows a young artist already nearly fully formed.
So, hearing he had died suddenly in late winter of ’22 was not exactly a complete surprise. A total bummer, yes, but one couldn’t be surprised that his extreme lifestyle, born out of a brutally unhappy childhood in rural Washington, had caught up with him and that the bill had finally come due. It wasn’t really any more surprising than Kurt Cobain cashing his check back in 1994. Mark Lanegan was every bit the self-destructive rock poet Cobain was and at least he beat the curse of 27 by about 30 years, not to mention somehow outliving his other doomed contemporaries, Andrew Wood, Layne Staley, Scott Weiland and Cornell. Though that time still seems far too brief now that he’s passed, he put it to astonishingly good use. His longevity and prolific output of exceedingly high quality material, as well as his unflinching honesty as an artist and aversion to self-indulgence, make him one of the towering if woefully underappreciated figures in Rock history. While he was often primarily noted for his work as the Screaming Trees frontman way back in the ’90s, or compared as a solo artist to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen in a facile, shorthand way, the long view shows many more similarities with Jim Morrison (and even Rimbaud), from the brooding, almost unfathomably deep and textured baritone that could all at once rise to a banshee’s wail, to that craving for riding to the very edge of self-destruction in search of some sort of twisted enlightenment and then — for a long while, at least — returning to tell the tale as only a debauched survivor can.
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Because of This
An 8-minute, raga-inflected mini-epic from his third solo album, 1998’s Scraps at Midnight, shows Lanegan’s virtuosic understanding of dynamics in songwriting and within his own vocal range.
Lanegan put his time on this earth and his haunting and beautiful instrument to good use. If you only know Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees or even just the hit single “Nearly Lost You” then you are really missing out. To get first things out of the way first, though, Screaming Trees themselves were way more than that one big hit from the Singles soundtrack, no matter that Mark held little fondness for his first band. They started well before most of their grunge brethren, back in the mid-1980s, and were key pioneers of that Seattle scene even if never quite fully a part of it. Their earlier recordings are well worth seeking out and show a band rapidly evolving into a semi-psychedelic hard rock powerhouse, with 1991’s Uncle Anesthesia being a particularly tight precursor to their big breakthrough, Sweet Oblivion.
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Dollar Bill
Not “Nearly Lost You” — one of the many ‘hidden gems’ hiding in plain site on Oblivion.
Oblivion, which featured “Nearly Lost You” as its breakthrough hit, is a total ass-kicker from opening to closing track. But the toxic band dynamics and the record label’s condescending view of the Trees as “inferior” to their labelmates, Alice in Chains (perhaps the Trees were not really “Grunge” enough), squelched any momentum they should’ve had. The fantastic, technically impressive follow-up four years on, Dust, failed to build any kind of commercial momentum. Continue reading →
As if 2020 wasn’t already a rotten enough year, legendary Scottish actor and screen icon Sean Connery passed away on October 31 at the ripe old age of 90. The New York Times obituary is here.
The iconic incarnation of Bond…James Bond but also so much more.
While it’s only natural that the majority of tributes for this great man focused on his career and character-defining creation of James Bond on the big screen — a role that he will forever be linked with through his singular excellence even though he had not played the part in 37 years — Connery was at best ambivalent about this seminal pop culture cinematic contribution. He worked hard both during and after his time as 007 to establish a screen persona distinct from the debonair and dangerous secret agent. While Bond was undoubtedly his ticket to the big time, as early as 1964 Connery was looking to expand his horizons as an actor with his intriguingly complex role as Mark Rutland in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) breaking down a neurotic and sexy Tippi Hedren. Even as his career-defining work as Bond turned him into a 1960s pop culture icon on a level with the Beatles, Connery bristled at the confining nature and potential career cul de sac of such a monolithic character. Indeed, he was right to worry that his entire career would be defined by Bond and he would never be able to be perceived or accepted by the public in any other manner. Famously unhappy during location filming in Japan for 1967’s You Only Live Twice and the suffocating and hysterical adulation of his fans and paparazzi there, Connery shockingly renounced the role and passed on making the next film in the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. While 1969’s OHMSS is actually one of the greatest Bond movies in terms of plot, featuring complexities of character that wouldn’t be plumbed again until Timothy Dalton’s brief, unsuccessful tenure in the late ’80s and then the rampaging success of Daniel Craig’s current edgy and penetrating portrayal, and one-off Bond George Lazenby did a perfectly capable job, one still wonders what kind of special performance Connery might have given in that final scene mourning the death of his new bride Tracy (the lovely, late Diana Rigg), a victim of Blofeld’s vengeful drive-by shooting.
Alongside Michael Caine getting carried away with their success in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King
After Lazenby self-destructed, Saltzman & Broccoli lured Connery back into the EON Bond fold by means of the then-unheard of amount of $1.25 million dollars for the somewhat tacky but enjoyable Vegas romp, Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Pocketing his money like any good Scotsman, Connery bid adieu to Bond and the requisite toupee for the remainder of the 1970s, embarking on a career no longer entirely beholden to the super spy. With his receding hairline a near declaration of liberation, Connery built on the grittier realism of Bond-concurrent performances in The Molly Maguires (1970) and especially Sidney Lumet’s excellent The Anderson Tapes (1971), to craft an equally charismatic but much more jaded and cynical character on screen, particularly the latter’s swaggering, unrepentant thief at large in 1970s New York City. Sure, Connery was still bigger than life, as witness his game participation in the bonkers sci-fi of Zardoz (1974) running around in only a red loincloth for most of the picture; the fantastic Kipling-derived adventure of John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), finding the perfect partner for fortune hunting in Michael Caine but getting fatally carried away as a pretend god; and a very Scottish Berber bedeviling Theodore Roosevelt from afar in The Wind and the Lion (1975). But his finely crafted performances, natural as ever, now revealed men with serious flaws and character defects that made them all the more interesting, most notably delusions of grandeur and a true and sometimes self destructive soft spot for the ladies (unlike Bond’s love ’em and leave ’em ethos).
With the beautiful Audrey Hepburn as aging legends in Richard Lester’s poignant Robin and Marian
Connery embraced his middle age with Robin and Marian (1976), Richard Lester’s touching and elegiac reimagining of a post-Crusades Robin Hood returning to find Maid Marian, played by the wonderful Audrey Hepburn, a devoted nun and Nottingham unacceptably under the thumb of his old foe, the Sheriff, played by the always compelling Robert Shaw. Shaw was that rare match in equalling Connery’s natural machismo and toughness, as he had been back in the From Russia With Lovedays when he was a homicidal defector trained by the Russians to kill Bond. Sir Sean was back at his lighter, mischievous best in Michael Crichton’s excellent 19th Century heist extravaganza, The Great Train Robbery (1979), wonderfully paired with the always unique and equally roguish Donald Sutherland as two particularly brilliant and stylish thieves. After notable cameos in the star studded but bloated A Bridge Too Far (1977), one of several possible suspects for Poirot to consider in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and the very trippy and enjoyable 1981 Terry Gilliam opus, Time Bandits, where he was perfectly cast as a fatherly Agamemnon, Connery gave another terrific lead performance in the criminally underrated space “western” Outland (1981), laying down the law against long odds Gary Cooper-style, only with a mining station orbiting Jupiter as the scene of the showdown instead of a dusty frontier town. In 1983 he gave in to the siren song of a return to Bond in the “unauthorized’, non-EON Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball, the rights of which were not controlled by the Fleming estate. While the film and Connery’s return as an aging but still peerless Bond have their undeniable pleasures, not least of the them very worthy opponents in Klaus Maria Brandauer’s flamboyant Largo, a lethal, leather-clad Barbara Carrera as femme fatale Fatima Blush and a delectable Kim Basinger as Domino, it was a strange lateral and some might say spiteful move by Connery. By making a Bond movie in direct competition with not only his old mates Broccoli & Saltzman but also then-current Bond, Roger Moore, it may have satisfied audiences for a double dose of 007 but it did nothing for his reputation as a somewhat irascible star prone to view producers as rip-off artists — certainly with some justification — and to cling to long-held resentments even against those who had helped launch his amazing career.
As a seasoned Irish cop instructing Kevin Costner’s green Eliot Ness on The Chicago Way in The Untouchables
Never Say Never Again was the last time Connery would revisit Bond and not only was he truly done with the legendary character but he embarked on an arguably greater chapter in his career, embracing his age to evolve into a kind of grand old man of Hollywood complete with gravitas and prestige to deliver to any larger than life role. After a fun, swashbucking turn in the silly but enjoyable fantasy of Highlander (1984) — as a Spanish swordsman, no less — Connery found the greatest critical success of his already highly accomplished career as the veteran Irish cop Jim Malone, teaching Kevin Costner’s green Eliot Ness “The Chicago Way” in order to hunt down Al Capone in Brian De Palma’s mega-hit The Untouchables (1987). The role, which the great film critic David Thomson noted culminates with his character “dying a samurai death,” won Connery that year’s supporting actor Oscar, his first and only Academy Award. It also opened up the floodgates of terrific parts to close out the ’80s and provided serious momentum well into the ’90s. He was Indiana Jones’s amusingly cantankerous dad in Indiana Jones and the LastCrusade (1989), a skillful Soviet submarine commander matching wits with Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan in the smash hit The Hunt for Red October (1990) and a British publisher involved in Cold War intrigue and wooing Michelle Pfeiffer in the smart and intricate film version of Le Carré’s The Russia House (1990). As if that wasn’t enough of a third act, Connery also starred in and was executive producer on 1993’s Rising Sun, schooling Wesley Snipes in the ways of the Yakuza; likewise star and executive producer of the Simpson/Bruckheimer/Michael Bay summer blockbuster extravaganza The Rock (1996), as a long-imprisoned British commando freed to team up with Nicholas Cage to stop a group of rogue soldiers from turning Alcatraz into ground zero for a biological terror attack; and showing a lithe, cat-suited Catherine Zeta-Jones the ropes as a suave veteran thief planning a very high concept — and very high! — skyscraper robbery in Entrapment (1999). Even his last real film role, 2003’s very promising but troubled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, offered a treat for Connery fans with his resonant portrayal of legendary adventurer Alan Quartermaine in twilight.
Connery’s cunning Soviet sub commander matches wits with Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October
So Sir Sean Connery’s passing offers us an opportunity not only to mourn the man who defined James Bond for decades of enchanted fans but also an actor of great daring and bravery who was not content to be solely pigeon-holed by Bond and actively worked to slip the potential trap of such a career-making role. That he succeeded so brilliantly is all the more proof that he was a film actor and a true movie star of the highest order, one of the last of that rare breed who was able to dominate cinema for a multi-decade span by the strength of a very fixed but adaptable screen persona. To revisit the Connery Bond films is always a pleasure and a delight of almost childlike enjoyment; to revisit his other great roles is to see the craft and skill of the mature actor whose joy in more complex parts was always evident on screen and therefore contagious to the audience, a multi-generational audience that never seemed to get enough of the great Scotsman. Godspeed, Sir Sean, and thank you for a lifetime of special performances. While we won’t see your like again we will always have your wonderful films and those many magnificent moments on screen to remember you by.
Positives have been hard to come by during the COVID-19 pandemic. But reading more books is definitely one of them. Without plays, movie theaters or sports for so long, and absent the regular hustle of commuting and socializing, there is plenty of time to give oneself permission to read books again. I’ve always envied those people who say they read like three-four books a month and wondered exactly where they found the time to do so in this modern, high-productivity world where you end up working even when you’re not technically on the clock. Even if I had somehow carved out that time when things were normal it would’ve felt like slacking to take, say, two hours in the middle of the day to read a big chunk of a book. Reading was reserved for evenings before bed, usually balked before long by sleep, and beach vacations with endlessly relaxed hours of leisure between breakfast and lunch with which to consume the literature of one’s choice while lying in the sun. But during these crazy, restricted circumstances the regular rhythms of workaday life have been so disrupted that there are vast swaths of time while “working” from home that are justifiably and easy filled with a bit of reading. And one of the best books that I’ve read during this forced hiatus in any genre or on any subject is Michael Herr’s Vietnam War classic, Dispatches.
Michael Herr in Vietnam – photo by Tim Page
I was honestly surprised that I hadn’t come across Dispatches before now since it is regarded as one of the classics on the subject if not the finest journalst’s account of the Vietnam conflict. Like many young Americans during the 1980s, I went through a major period of fascination with Vietnam during my school years over and above any mandatory history courses. Films like Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now, which echoed long after its initial 1979 release and continues to do so today, and then Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) seemed to ignite a resurgence of interest in that star-crossed war. I consumed a lot of first person accounts like Mark Baker’s grueling oral history, Nam, and Philip Caputo’s personal experiences there as a Marine lieutenant in combat, A Rumor of War. Yet somehow one of the very best of these accounts slipped through the cracks of my reading list those many years ago. So I’m all too happy to have “discovered” Dispatches now, however belatedly and however weird the present circumstances. Fortunately, I was reading an anthology of long reportage called TheNew Journalism (co-edited and featuring a long essay of principles by the late, legendary Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism’s leading practitioner and proponent), when I came across a brilliant excerpt of Herr’s writing and I knew I had to get the whole book.
“And at night it was beautiful. Even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.
I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.”— excerpt from Dispatches
Michael Herr –Photograph by Jane Bown
The late Michael Herr (b. 1940 – d. 2016) was a fairly green reporter with not much more than some rock criticism under his belt when he somehow wangled an assignment from Esquire to cover the war for them on the ground in Vietnam. Continue reading →
A Formula 1 season already delayed indefinitely by the Coronavirus pandemic suffered another heavy blow on Sunday as the legendary British motoring ace, Sir Stirling Moss, passed away peacefully at his London home at the age of 90. The New York Times obituary is here.
Widely considered to be one of the best racers of his or any other era, with some rating him second only to Juan Manuel Fangio in Formula 1’s golden decade of the 1950s, Moss won 16 Grand Prix and had 24 podiums between 1951 and 1961 but never managed to win the title. Moss famously defended his chief rival for the 1958 Championship, countryman Mike Hawthorn, from the stewards’ wrath after Hawthorn’s unorthodox recovery maneuvers following a spin during the Portuguese GP. That sporting gesture, not altogether dissimilar to Peter Collins handing over his car to Fangio at Monza in 1956 to enable the Argentinian great to win that year’s Championship, allowed Hawthorn’s second place points to stand. So despite winning four Grand Prix to Hawthorn’s one victory that season, including that fateful Portuguese contest, Moss was edged out by Hawthorn for the 1958 title by a single point. It is also widely acknowledged that Moss’s steadfast desire to race British cars in F1 most likely cost him other championships, as they were often inferior to their Italian or German competition during that era. But that same stubborn nationalism earned him a fanatically loyal and adoring following in Great Britain that remains to this very day. If you’re looking for Britain’s top heroes in their national psyche there is Churchill, James Bond and Moss.
A prolific winner in other classifications of motorsport at a time when the world’s top drivers tended to compete in nearly every high level event, Moss was also victorious at 1956’s 24 Hours of Le Mans driving an Aston Martin DB3S along with Collins and owner David Brown; he had two overall victories at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1954 and 1957; and a 12 Hours of Reims win in 1953. Perhaps most famously, Moss and co-driver/navigator, the revered racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, took the overall victory in 1956 at the always treacherous Mille Miglia while piloting the stunning Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. That victory, chronicled by jenkinson in the seminal motorsport article “With Moss In the Mille Miglia” was made all the sweeter in that it came at the expense of the second place Fangio, who so frequently bested Moss in Formula 1 for the ultimate prize — the Drivers’ Championship — throughout the 1950s. Continue reading →
A blunt spoken Austrian and born racer, Lauda competed in the 1970s and the 1980s, one of F1’s most dangerous eras. The 1970s in particular was a decade when the ever-increasing speed and aerodynamic technology of the cars was not matched by any significant safety improvements in the chassis themselves, which resembled nothing so much as low flying bombs with drivers strapped into them, or the old circuits on which they raced and had been “upgraded” with only the flimsiest of safety measures amidst heavily wooded forests perilously close to the racing line. Despite constantly advocating for greater driver safety, Lauda himself nearly bought it deep in the Green Hell of the original 14-mile Nürbergring when he lost control of his Ferrari during 1976 German Grand Prix amidst slick conditions, perhaps due to suspension failure on the punishingly bumpy forest circuit. His car subsequently burst into flames after hitting a barrier, bouncing back and being hit by onrushing cars. While Lauda had his helmet ripped off in the initial impact and was badly burned on his face and head and suffered concussion and broken bones his worst injuries came from inhaling toxic fumes from his burning car that scarred his lungs and threatened his life.
Despite being close to death’s door and having the last rights administered while in hospital, Lauda prevailed through sheer force of will and bloody-minded determination to get back into the championship fight with his English arch-rival, James Hunt. Just six weeks later Lauda returned to Monza and despite his bloody and scarred appearance and fending off immense pain, he finished fourth in the Italian Grand Prix in front of the adoring, Ferrari-fanatical tifosi. Perhaps even more bravely, Lauda had the personal courage to retire early in the last race of the season at an absolutely waterlogged Suzuka Circuit in Japan, even though he had a very good shot at snatching the championship away from Hunt with a decent result. It was an act for which some at Ferrari never forgave him, though he would return to the team the next season to claim his second title, also returning the favor on Hunt by besting him for the Championship in their spirited rematch.
That famous Hunt-Lauda season of ’76 is well-chronicled in Ron Howard’s underrated 2013 film Rush. But there was more to Lauda than that admittedly compelling relationship and rivalry. A child of wealth and privilege from a prominent Austrian family, Lauda was willing to defy his family’s disapproval to pursue his passion for speed. Lauda bluffed and cajoled his way up the Formula ranks, using money to get his foot in the door but then proving he was genuinely quick in the car against all the up and coming competition of the early ’70s like Hunt and Super Swede Ronnie Peterson. By 1974, he had caught the eye of Enzo Ferrari himself and, once signed to the team, even had the stones to tell Ferrari what a pig his latest car was. But Lauda also had a legendary mechanical sympathy and ability to translate a driver’s feedback into usable technical improvements for the mechanics to implement. In 1975, his second year at Ferrari, Lauda won his first world title. After his epic 1976 season of redemption and the epic runner-up finish to Hunt, Lauda won it all again in 1977. He lost the fire and retired in 1979 to start his own private European airline but was coaxed back into the cockpit by McLaren and Ron Denis for the 1982 season. In 1984 he just pipped his rising young French teammate Alain Prost, another future legend, for his third F1 title.
Lauda retired from driving for good in 1985, focusing most of his attention to his airline businesses but always keeping a toe in the Formula 1 waters. He returned to the sport full-time with a flourish in 2010, becoming the non-executive chairman of the Mercedes factory F1 program and helping lead the Silver Arrows to one of the most dominant team runs in Formula1 history that saw them win five consecutive Constructors’ Championships from 2014-2018. Mercedes are also well ahead this year. It was a fitting final act for the one of the great hard-nosed competitors, straight shooters and all around characters in motorsports. When they say they don’t make ’em like they used to, that is Niki Lauda in a nutshell. Farewell and godspeed, you fine old warrior.
The death of Burt Reynolds at the age of 82 a few weeks ago has been a real bummer. Burt was one of our heroes here at MFL, so much so that no one could bring themselves to write the tribute. Looks like I drew the short straw…
If you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s Burt Reynolds was about as close to a vicarious favorite uncle as you could get. With his swagger, hairy chest and mustache, not to mention a varying assortment of ever-changing custom toupees, Reynolds dominated the box office through a series of increasingly Dixie-centric action films that featured fast cars, hot & spicy women and real stunts. If the plots were a little less than Mensa-level they were redeemed by Reynolds’ knowingly wry performances, bemusedly observing some of the more ridiculous antics in a self-depricatingly humorous way that rarely failed to connect with his audiences. All Burt had to do was let out one of those high, hyena-like laughs and you knew that he was having as much fun making the movie as you were watching it.
Reynolds had a very long career and was already a known, working actor in the 1960s and at the dawn of the ’70s, with prominent parts on TV in Riverboat and Gunsmoke leading to title roles on the short-lived police dramas Hawk and Dan August. Somewhat burdened by his physical resemblance to Marlon Brando in his early career it took his performance as a macho businessman on a rafting holiday gone horribly wrong in 1972’s Deliverance to sear a distinct screen identity into the national culture and catapult Reynolds to the top of the Hollywood A-list. That role cleverly exploited the limits of the self-styled man of action when faced with uncontrollable circumstances and the shifting nature of the alpha-male within a small group under siege. The film itself, directed by that keen observer of male codes and primitivism, John Boorman, has gone down as one of the all-time classics, if a grim one. As if to undercut the somberness of his career-defining role in Deliverance, Reynolds became equally famous that year for posing semi-nude on a bearskin rug in Cosmopolitan magazine. Although he never failed to mention how much he regretted the publicity stunt even in the last interviews of his life there is no doubt that it gave a major boost his overall popularity if not his standing as a serious actor (and if he regretted it so much why did he also put out a risqué paperback called “Hot Line” that featured him bottomless in a football jersey among other playful beefcake photos?). His Cosmo centerfold in all its hirsute glory became one of the most iconic and subversive images of the ’70s, right up there with Joe Namath posing in pantyhose.
That was always the yin-yang with Burt Reynolds. He was the ultimate crowd pleaser but yearned to be taken seriously, capable of expounding on his personal foibles in unvarnished detail and then prowling around a studio audience of middle-aged ladies like a sex panther. Beginning with White Lightning(1973) and then its sequel Gator (1976), the first film he directed, Reynolds perfected the reliable screen persona of a good old boy out to stick it to the man, one that drew on his southern roots and proved enormously appealing to moviegoers both above but especially below the Mason-Dixon line. This character and formula found its apotheosis in the immensely successful Smokey and the Bandit, which was second only to Star Wars in 1977 box office gross receipts. Smokey and the Bandit brilliantly tweaked the Reynolds man-of-action character with a more comic slapstick approach and fused it with a host of ’70s zeitgeist touchstones like trucker CB culture, contraband Coors beer, Jerry Reed’s killer theme song “Eastbound and Down,” a feisty young Sally Field and Burt’s black and gold T-top Trans Am all while being pursued by a fat, tan and uproariously foul Jackie Gleason. But enjoyable as his redneck gearhead protagonists were, Reynolds most interesting work was often in more challenging and uncategorizable movies, parts more in the Deliverance vein that were propelled by some inner hurt within Burt that he worked so hard to gloss over most of the time.
He was particularly productive with director Robert Aldrich, another keen observer of flawed macho behavior, with the morally ambiguous and very moody L.A. neo-noir Hustle (1975) and even better as the footballer behind bars in The Longest Yard(1974). His Paul “Wrecking” Crewe in Yard is one the best roles Burt ever had, funny, cocky, sensitive and rebellious in all the best ways, outwitting the guards and a corrupt warden by whipping his misfit cons into a cohesive football team and cleverly finessing a seemingly no-win situation. His background as a serious amateur ballplayer was put to good use again in Michael Ritchie’s Semi-Tough(1977) alongside Kris Kristofferson and Jill Clayburgh in a very funny and very ’70s send up of football, its wealthy patrons and the patently ridiculous self-realization craze of the time. Other notable films of this era are Hooper & The Cannonball Run, more antic action frolics helmed by Bandit director and Reynolds’ pal Hal Needham, the ace stuntman & his former housemate; and The End directed by Burt about a man with a terminal prognosis determined to end it all in ineffectively hilarious fashion with the unwanted and homicidally zealous aid of Burt’s frequent sidekick during this era, Dom DeLuise.
Despite the star-studded guilty pleasure success of Cannonball Run, Burt was essentially running both the car chase genre and his grinning good ol’ boy persona into the ground due to a series of weak sequels — Cannonball Run II, Smokey and the Bandit II & III — finally bottoming out with the poorly received Needham-helmed stock car farce Stroker Ace in 1983. He had ridden this particular wave as far as the public wanted it to go and it had broken. He had also tried diversifying his screen persona with relationship comedies like Paternity (1981) and the very good Starting Over (1979). And he also explored relatively humorless tough-as-nails cops in the Clint Eastwood vein in crime thrillers like Sharky’s Machine (1981) and Stick(1985), both of which he also directed, as well as the rather more tepid Heat (1985). But even though those films hold up well now for the most part the reception at the time was decidedly mixed. The public was suffering from Burt Reynolds fatigue.
Worse still for Burt he was injured during the making of the Prohibition period pic, City Heat(1984), in which he co-starred with Eastwood himself on something of a Hollywood macho man action star dream team. His laudible penchant for performing as many of his own stunts as the insurance companies would allow, which earned him tremendous respect from the stunt man community, boomeranged on him when he was accidentally hit in the face with a non-prop chair, shattering his jaw. His recuperation would see him drop a scary amount of weight, leading to ugly rumors, and a debilitating dependance on sleeping & pain pills, which unfortunately would recur later in life. But he came back strong on the small screen with an appealing homage to small-town life, Evening Shade (1990-94), which won Burt an Emmy. Better yet was his auteur director of smut Jack Horner, adult entertainment impresario and surrogate father figure to a group of misfits in the porn industry, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Boogie Nights (1997). It was perhaps his best acting since the early to mid-1970s, a fully realized portrait of an honorable man with artistic leanings in a scuzzy business, a professional with X-rated standards who resists the move to cheap, plotless videotaped carnality performed by amateurs and serves as the protector and enabler of his porn family’s dreams. It was a stunningly rich performance with a palpable backstory that not only earned him an Oscar nomination but also newfound respect in the industry for his acting chops.
His bewildering reaction to the success of Boogie Nights illustrated the conflicts raging beneath the surface of this seemingly glib stud. Despite its critical success Burt disowned Boogie Nights, claiming never to have seen it straight through. He feuded with prodigy director Anderson, although it seemed like a one-sided grudge as Anderson was willing to cast him in his next picture, Magnolia. But Reynolds turned him down. It’s unclear whether Reynolds didn’t really understand Boogie Nights, not only one of the best films of the ’90s but certainly one of the best performances of his career, or simply found the end product distasteful. But, like his reaction to the Cosmo centerfold that came on the heels of his breakthrough in Deliverance, Reynolds seemed intent on undercutting one of his greatest successes with needless public second-guessing and airing his discontentments. It was as if within the man there was an unresolvable conflict between being taken seriously as an actor to earn the respect of his peers and the absolute need to subvert that potentially pretentious goal by treating so much of his work as a series of mistakes or purely mercenary undertakings, often even the good stuff. His loudly professed dislike of Boogie Nights cemented his reputation as a difficult star to work with and short-circuited his comeback. Perhaps it even cost his that year’s Oscar. Along with his epically complicated relationships with women, including Dinah Shore, Sally Field and Loni Anderson, it all pointed to a strangely restless and unsatisfiable soul.
But in his best work on the screen — and in hours of old talk show clips still viewable on You Tube — Burt channeled those deep waters into the pursuit of having the best possible time, inviting the audience along with him for the ride and letting them in on the jokes like a lucky passenger in that famous speeding black and gold Trans Am. His physicality and daring were perfectly suited to action romps but behind the mustache and hairy chest was also the deft touch of an expert light comedian, a nearly unique combination in such a macho dude perhaps only paralleled during that era by the sly Roger Moore in a suave English version (and with some echoes today in Ryan Reynolds’ impressively deft action-comedy performances). He successfully escaped the massive shadows of Brando and Eastwood to create an entirely unique screen persona, self-mocking but capable, tough but romantic, anti-establishment but with his own code of honor, always a faithful friend. He was, above all, an absolute charmer, as self-effacing and yet as confident in his excellence and good looks as a Southern 1970s Cary Grant, the cackling laugh substituting for Grant’s untraceable accent. Like Grant, he was massively complex in real life, often dissatisfied and full of self-doubt. But in front of the camera he was a master and a “natural” by way of hard work and experience. To ponder all the happiness Burt Reynolds leaves behind through his extraordinary and prolific career, the omnipresent drive-in movie and videotape/cable TV background for those of us who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, is precisely why his passing leaves us so bereft. There are a ton of Burt Reynolds movies out there to continue to watch and enjoy. But to think that he will never make another, never laugh that hyena laugh again while he burns out and outfoxes the law is more than a little bit sad. It’s more like losing a wry older friend from childhood and a masculine role model than simply another movie star. But isn’t that the mark of this special man and his particular quality of stardom? Adios and via con dios, Burt — you were always a great amigo.
The only thing I can think to add is that she occupies the same hallowed place in American culture as other luminaries like B.B. King, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson, an elite group of seminal cross-cultural pop superstars, giants of entertainment in the second half of the 20th Century one and all. These are the special musicians and entertainers who bridged the gap between “black” and “white” music, in the process cross-pollinating the two for an even stronger hybrid that we recognize today as uniquely American popular music. Aretha, like those other greats who came before and after her, took from the past, put her own indelible stamp on it and left that as a foundation for succeeding artists to build upon, leaving us all the richer for it.
As if to nail that point home here she is in 2015 at the Kennedy Center Honors paying tribute to Carole King by singing the blockbuster hit “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” — causing Ms. King, the song’s author, to freak out in happiness, the first couple at the time to wipe tears from their eyes and the place to go nuts in general. That spellbinding Aretha magic in action, even at that late date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHsnZT7Z2yQ
The Queen of Soul is gone but the voice lives on. Long live the Queen.
A titan of motorsports and a tireless innovator for more over 60 years, Gurney survived the most dangerous era of Formula 1 in the 1950s and 60s and not only lived to tell the tale but thrived. Gurney participated in 86 Formula 1 Grand Prix and took victory four times, most significantly at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps in 1967, where he drove a car of his own design and construction, the beautiful Eagle Weslake, to become the first and still only American to win as both constructor and driver in F1. If that wasn’t enough in that banner year for Gurney and the USA, he had only a week earlier triumphed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans with co-driver A.J. Foyt in a Ford GT, again becoming the first all-American team to achieve that illustrious feat at the most famous 24-hour race in the world. It was on the Le Mans podium that a delighted Gurney first sprayed champagne on his teammates and the crowd after victory, something that instantly became a permanent tradition across all forms of motorsport.
Of course the podium celebration was not the brilliant Gurney’s only lasting contribution to racing. Blessed with not only movie star good looks but also an engineer’s keen mind, Gurney devised several technical improvements for racers and their cars that are still used today. Unusually tall for a driver at 6′ 4,” the big American became one of the first high level competitors on four wheels to adopt a full helmet and perspex face shield similar to that of those worn by dirt bike racers back in his Southern California home. He debuted the protective helmet designed by Bell at Indianapolis in 1968 and soon thereafter it became standard equipment for all drivers. In 1971 he came up with the now de rigueur Gurney Flap, a small right angle lip at the edge of the rear wing to increase rear downforce by creating vortices that enhance the airflow coming off the wing. In the early 1990s Gurney’s All American Racers team came up with a radical design for their IMSA Prototype entry that featured not only a small 2.1 liter 4-cylinder turbo engine by Toyota capable of producing a whopping 750 horsepower but also a monocoque chassis made entirely of carbon fiber, a radical proposition at the time, especially in sports cars. The AAR car also featured built-in aerodynamic assists from the front air intake holes and superior ground effects beneath. The result was the Eagle Mark III, a beast of a car that won the 1992 and 1993 IMSA drivers’ and constructors’ championships going away, including a streak of 17 wins in a row.
To the very end Dan Gurney was still utilizing his prodigious gifts as a designer and innovator, playing a key part in the radical Delta Wing project and even helping design and fabricate the carbon fiber landing legs for the reusable Space X rocket. But he shone brightest as a driver. In his heyday he won races in Formula 1, Indycar, NASCAR and sports cars. Only the great Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya have posted such a display of victorious versatility in all four major automobile racing categories. He survived several crashes in the unsafe cars of the 1950s and 60s, the second in a BRM at the 1960 Dutch Grand Prix that killed a spectator. It was then that Gurney remarked to legendary journalist Robert Daly that racing “is a cruel sport.” And yet even with a young wife and growing family Gurney persisted. Even through the deaths of his rivals and friends on the track over his long career — Wolfgang von Trips, Swede Savage, the Rodriguez brothers, Jimmy Clark, Bruce McLaren and Jo Bonnier — Gurney persisted and kept his foot down. He had full faith in his ability to delineate a necessary risk from a foolhardy one and when he started designing his own cars in the late 1960s he finally had full faith in his equipment, as well. A wonderful story teller, a survivor of a deadly golden era, a rarely matched driver and innovator and an all-around gentleman, Dan Gurney lived a true racer’s life from his teen years as a hot rodder in Riverside trying stay one step ahead of they cops to his discovery by Ferrari’s man in America, the brilliant Luigi Chinetti, to his remarkable, decades-long career full of victories to his final moments on the Earth just a few days ago. As the Spanish are fond of saying about a truly exceptional person — ¡Qué Hombre!
We here at Man’s Fine Life are deeply saddened by the untimely passing of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Tom Petty at the age of 66 after a cardiac arrest at his LA home on October 2. The Rolling Stone obituary is here.
Tom Petty was one of the best of the straight-ahead American rock ‘n rollers to come out of the 1970s, arguably forming a triumvirate with Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger that spearheaded a rebirth of singer-songwriter rock with a gritty edge characterized by narrative lyrics about the common man and impeccably crafted tunes played by top notch bands. It’s easy to forget just what that meant at a time when it looked like conventional blues-based rock was on the wane due to the onslaught of Disco, Heavy Metal, Wus Rock (Firefall, Dan Fogelberg, Bread, et al) and Punk. But like Springsteen and the E Street Band and Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers recaptured traditional fans of rock and made legions of new ones with whole albums full of catchy singles suffused with the passion of the true believer in the redemptive power of Rock.
Petty and the Heartbreakers started off with a bang way back in 1976 when they had Top 40 hit with the sinuously assertive “Breakdown” and a very influential non-hit with the Byrds-inflected “American Girl” on their eponymous debut album (legend has it that people were calling up Roger McGuinn to see if it was his new single). With Petty’s oddly effecting trademark nasal delivery and 12-string Rickenbacker, Mike Campbell’s stinging lead guitar, Benmont Tench’s pivotal swirling organ adding uncommon depth and the rock solid rhythm section of the late Howie Epstein on bass and Stan Lynch on drums, the original lineup seemed to emerge as a finely tuned outfit from day one and never took their foot off the gas for the next few years. Their consistently excellent efforts culminated in one of the decade’s best albums, Damn the Torpedoes, in 1979. With such all-time classic as “Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” “Here Comes My Girl” and “Breakdown,” Torpedoes was an artistic and commercial smash, going 3-times platinum with over three million in sales.
The band entered the 80s with two more fine releases — Hard Promises (1981) and Long AfterDark (1982)– that, while not as successful as Torpedoes, still solidified their rep as major hit makers and one of the most important acts around. Then came Southern Accents in 1983. A beautiful album with a very troubled recording process — Petty broke his hand badly punching a wall in frustration during the mix of the lead single “Rebels” — Southern Accents was originally conceived as something of a concept album by way of an exploration Petty’s “red neck” Florida roots. Other than a general thematic similarity the songs on Accents do not quite add up to a concept album, perhaps because it was trimmed down from a double LP. But it is beautifully produced, significant for its lyrical ambitions and ultimately lovely and artistically satisfying. It hit platinum and so was also successful commercially. But Petty considered it a noble failure and for him the album never quite lived up to the magnum opus that he had in his head when he conceived it.
Southern Accents and the strains of making it marked a true turning point and after that Petty and the band changed subtly but significantly, as if the reach for something grander and more profound had led instead to a sort of artistic burnout. After Petty’s rehab and recuperation from his self-inflicted wound, as well as drug issues which would continue to plague him in the years to come, the music became much simpler and more stripped down if no less radio friendly. On the full band’s Let Me UP (I’ve Had Enough) (1987) and Into the Great Wide Open(1991), as well as Petty’s smash solo album Full Moon Fever (1989), the narratives became more detached, the characters observed from a distance for the most part rather than from within their skins as had been the case on the band’s earlier material. The songs seem more programmatic, more LA and less Gainesville, and frankly, from an artistic standpoint, less interesting. There’s a less nuanced, less bluesy feel overall that sacrificed some complexity for a more universal “rock” sound, which ironically hasn’t aged as well as the earlier hits. If it marked a return to the basic pleasures of the straight-ahead 3-minute single the updated style clearly seemed to abandon much of the passionate involvement of the earlier 1970s music.
His work with the enjoyably light supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, where he teamed up with other legends like Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and ELO mastermind and super producer Jeff Lynne, to create one of the surprise hit albums of the late 1980s seemed to confirm that Petty was done taking things too seriously and suffering for his art. From here on out it would be all rock, no angst, jamming with friends, playing the hits live and just generally enjoying being one of the world’s most successful rock musicians. Petty evolved into a wryly funny wise old hand with hooded eyes and his trademark deadpan drawl, almost a different person from the strangely sharp featured, almost androgynous angry young rocker of the early days.
And who could blame him for that transition from hot blooded rebelliousness to satisfied professionalism? Taken in its entirety the music is still good and highly enjoyable in the later 80s and 90s. But that earlier stuff is where the magic still shines and resonates in a timeless way. Those first 9 years were a remarkable run and stand up with the creative output of pretty much any Rock artist of any era over that kind of sustained period of time. Of course there are probably fans who fall into the other camp and prefer the later, lighter stuff. But for me I’ll take the music up to and including Southern Accents as peak Petty. It’s the music I grew up with and the music I still reach for and play with pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETHdszZQZDE
Personal preferences aside, one thing’s for sure — Tom Petty was a great rocker and well deserving of his Hall of Fame status. He was a music giant who will be sorely missed and the world is poorer for his passing. But the gift of his music lives on as one of the real high water marks in Rock & Roll because Petty was one of the genuine originals in a genre where that’s about as rare as hen’s teeth. Godspeed, Tom, and thanks for the terrific tunes.
When Hugh Hefner, the maverick founder and publisher of Playboy, died last week at the age of 91 it was tempting to say that it marked the end of an era. But in truth that era ended long ago, perhaps as far back as the 1990s and the birth of widespread internet access with all the instant onanistic delights that would bring. It wasn’t hard to see that his death was treated as the passing of a retrograde dinosaur by the gleeful way so many piled on, tamping the dirt down on poor old Hef before the body was cold or the last period was put on his New York Times obituary.
The first Playboy cover in 1953
Hef was called a creep, a pervert, an exploiter of women, a pimp, a lonely old loser. Great claims were made about how he had single-handedly degraded the sexual culture of the United States and done us all irreparable harm. That these claims were primarily made by women on the left of the political spectrum, as well as a few pearl clutching conservative men, made me wonder if Hef wasn’t lying bemused there in his special crypt in Westwood Memorial Park — a final resting place that he purchased so he could spend eternity next to his feminine ideal and also the ticket to his success as a publisher, Marilyn Monroe. It almost seemed as if Hefner’s sexual revolution had turned back on itself and become a new puritanism despite — or perhaps because of — the unlimited, undreamed of access to the multifaceted turn-ons of the cyber universe, a time where most if not all sexual imagery is debated as someone being exploited and all nudity, artfully shot or otherwise, is once again shameful “pornography.”
Hefner’s legacy is an understandably complex one. But of course judgements from the distance of 2017 on men who made their fortunes in the mid-20th Century amidst its highly sexist, highly male-dominated society are rarely going to be favorable. That Hefner made his particular fortune on the naked bodies of nubile young women would make him a polarizing figure no matter when he did it. That very first coup of the Monroe nudes that instantly propelled Playboy to a must-buy men’s publication — photos which mortified Marylin but which she also admitted helped her career — illustrated the dichotomy of Playboy in a nutshell, the opportunism and panache, the exploitation and pitch perfect taste. In future all the other models would be willing participants, paid certainly, but also unashamedly showing their naked bodies at the peak of their sexual attraction — young, fit, and airbrushed to perfection. It’s true that Hefner was selling the idea of “sexual liberation” and revolt against puritanism. But of course it’s also true that he saw it exclusively through the male lens of available sexy college coeds and girls next door to perfectly compliment a swinging bachelor’s lifestyle filled with little black books and a pad decorated with Eames and Saarinen furniture with a premium Hi-Fi system playing Miles Davis and John Coltrane on quarter inch reel-to-reel tape.
But then, this was a men’s magazine back when such notions were not yet vigorously contested. The barbershop, the pool hall, the club and especially the board rooms were almost exclusively men-only (and white men only, at that). In publishing a racy magazine for men in the 1950s how much could we really expect Hefner to cater to an equal-opportunity female perspective? He had no interest in that whatsoever and he never really would. But as time passed and Playboy became an American institution like Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes, Hefner pushed the intellectual boundaries that could be intertwined with such a publication. If sex was undoubtedly still the main selling point he wanted something that was worth discussing after orgasm filling the pages of his life’s mission. So alongside Miss July one could find minor (and sometimes major) works by literary giants like Ian Fleming, Arthur C. Clarke, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, Alex Haley, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and even feminist icon Margaret Atwood, among many others. And Hef put his considerable fortune not only into his famously cheesy Playboy clubs with its parade of tightly corseted, cotton-taled Bunnies (blisteringly exposed by a young, undercover Gloria Steinem in “A Bunny’s Tale”) but also groundbreaking television shows, Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark, which featured swinging, fantastically hep soirees with entertainment by the leading black, white and Latino performers of their time, a quietly revolutionary fully-integrated scene in the 1960s.
He was also a staunch advocate for free speech, civil rights and a woman’s right to choose (though obviously feminists will say that last one was completely self-serving, as do, ironically, staunch conservatives). The Playboy Interview series had some of the better in-depth conversations with stars of sport, politics, technology, music and film. The interview conducted with Jimmy Carter while he was running for president where he admitted that he “lusted in his heart” is probably one of the most famous ever given by an American politician, while future Roots author Alex Haley’s chilling interview with American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1966 was another of many important groundbreakers that put a spotlight in American race relations, a long-time Hefner concern.
So yes, it’s a complicated legacy. Like a lot of the greats he peaked after an extraordinarily fertile period and then rode his fame and stereotype to ever-diminishing returns. If he somehow opened the door to the pornographic free-for-all that some perceive around us now it’s also true that he never capitulated to hardcore and gynecological close-ups like his main competitors, Bob Guccione’s Penthouse and Larry Flint’s execrable Hustler (Flynt may be a fee speech hero to some but his magazine is absolute garbage). Although Hef did try to have his cake and eat it with the quiet purchase and publication of the more explicit Oui magazine, over at Playboy even pubic hair was a long time coming. As swinging and revolutionary as it had been in the 50s and 60s, by the late 1970s amidst the tumult of the real sexual revolution that it had arguably uncorked, Playboy was actually reactionary in its “wholesome” approach to the female nude. And by the time of the internet explosion Playboy was more of an American fixture like a Chevrolet or a ranch house than any kind of avant grade trendsetter or integral part of a happening zeitgeist. It’s what respectable people read when they wanted a little titillation and perhaps an interesting article or interview. Sure it was cringe-worthy to see Hef still walking around in pajamas and squiring a rotating harem of identical perfectly proportioned blondes in their 20s preaching the gospel of Viagra. But that was the image Hef had created for himself and he was unable or unwilling to slough it off despite his advancing years. What did we really expect this ultimate adolescent-cum-swinging bachelor to do after all these years, stop living his fantastical dream, settle down and grow up? From a marketing perspective, if Hef and Playboy were essentially the same entity how could this aging Don Juan possibly change himself as the embodiment of the Playboy lifestyle that he so enthusiastically promoted?
In some of the fierce critiques that have emerged in the short time since Hugh Hefner’s passing there has been an effort to tarnish him with the tragic death of Dorothy Stratton in 1980, as if her introduction to and promotion to stardom by Playboy had been responsible for her murder rather than her scheming, scummy, murderous husband. I would only answer that with a question: how many murders have occurred among employees of other “respectable” businesses during all the years Playboy has been published? A hell of a lot more than one, that’s for sure. There is also a concentrated effort to portray Hefner as the ultimate exploiter of women, somehow luring them to bare their flesh for his personal profit and satisfaction. This seems to me to be one of the more ironically antifeminist positions, as if the countless models and centerfolds of Playboy did not have any choice in the matter. True, they did not make the money that Hefner made off of their labors. But what employee makes the same money as the CEO? Many former playmates wound up working for the company and many were happy with their nude photo shoots. I’m sure some were dismayed in retrospect but again, in what employment transaction is satisfaction 100% guaranteed? The idea that these literally thousands of women were exploited against their will seems like utter nonsense. It’s much less condescending to think that they knew what they were doing and perhaps had a plan for what they would do with money they were being paid to better their lives. It’s a distinct possibility that many of the models actually enjoyed the prospect of being desired by millions of men and perhaps look back now when they are older at their youthful images with pride. If that’s a sick proposition to some it may be time to re-examine just where exactly the border lies between exploitation and willing sexual participation, of human desire and fantasy, of lust and admiration, of voyeurism and necessary physical gratification. And to the critique that Playboy presented an unrealistic vision of perfect women that warped the boys and men exposed to it I’d just say this: look at the millions of boys and men who read Playboy at some point in their lives. As one of them I can tell you the boys were certainly ecstatic to finally find out what grown-up women looked like under their clothes and what to look forward to when they grew up to be men. And the vast majority of men understood the idealized nature of the images and simply settled down to perfectly normal marriages and relationships undamaged by such visions of All-American Aphrodites no matter how much they may have enjoyed them and, like President Carter, lusted in their hearts.
Hef’s last laugh on us all may just be how far we’ve regressed as a society where to be successful at what Hugh Hefner and Playboy did 50-60 years ago involves exponentially more debasement and exponentially less aesthetic and intellectual veneer, where pundits knowingly reference PornHub but turn around and excoriate Hefner and Playboy. You can lay the blame at Hefner’s feet for the fact that there’s a strip club in every town and endless porn available on the internet if you like. But better to look at our own human needs and weaknesses to find the real answer to the question of just why that is so. If men didn’t want it and women weren’t willing to participate in it Hugh Hefner and Playboy would’t have been the massive success that they were. He sold an openly sexual dream world at a time when Americans were desperate for it and people bought it in spades for decades afterwards. So tell me how exactly did he corrupt such willing consumers? You can shoot the messenger if you’re uncomfortable with that. But I’m afraid he and his silk pajamas have just left the Mansion.
