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Last week reader “Jckinnick” brought to my attention the fact that Bobby Charles died. I will readily admit I didn’t recognize the name, but on further research I definitely knew the music. Charles was a Cajun rock ’n’ roll pioneer who jumpstarted the subgenre known as “swamp pop” as a performer, but who is best-known as a writer. He gave us “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” by the Fat Man (Mr. Domino) and “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do.” His biggest hit as a tunesmith was this rock classic:
In digging into the Charles tunes that are readily available (where else? YouTube!), I found a bunch of really great traditional r’n’r, such as “Good Lovin’” (not the one the Rascals sang):
I’ve only heard about an album’s worth of Charles’ music, but my hands-down favorite has got to be “Take It Easy, Greasy”:
Charles died last week, and today’s music-obit news was about the passing of dyed-in-the-wool folkie Kate McGarrigle at 63. Of course best known as half of the the McGarrigle Sisters (not to be confused by old movie fans with “the Great McGonigle”) and as mom of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Kate made some absolutely beautiful music, and here is a memorable sample, the song “Talk to Me of Mendocino”:
It was noted in Kate’s obits that she and Anna were first taught to play piano by nuns. It’s good to hear of some teaching nuns actually doing something productive.
I deeply loved Gumby as a child. I still love the little green guy, because his creator, Art Clokey, who died this week at 88, was a wonderfully imaginative individual who subtly injected the Sixties zeitgeist into the minds of children like myself. This is not an insignificant achievement — especially considering that his other contribution to pop culture was the extra-sedate, morally balanced, and too often preachy Davey and Goliath.
Cloakey’s mythology has been explored at length: how his biological father’s odd “tilted” hairstyle inspired Gumby’s odd-angled head; how he was going to make religious films until he studied under avant-garde master Slavko Vorkapich and came up in 1953 with “Gumbasia,” a blissful mindfuck of colors, shapes, and patterns, all rendered in clay. The three-minute short was purely inspired by earlier works of cinematic art. Clokey said that he didn’t even try a hallucinogenic drug until *after* he had completed the first series of Gumby episodes:
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In 1956, he created his first Gumby short, which premiered on the Howdy Doody show (I can’t imagine what it looked like in b&w, seeing as Gumby was always a multi-colored sensory assault). From that early era, here’s “Gumby on the Moon,” one of the many shorts where Gumby doesn’t talk. I love the free-form weirdness of the Fifties shorts, but wasn’t a fan of the sloppier-looking Gumby (I was too used to his later, sleeker incarnation):
The character continued on until 1959, but was fully, er… fleshed out in the Sixties, from ’61-’63 and ’66-’68, when warped children like myself were treated to the color adventures of Gumby, his pony pal Pokey, and the evil Blockheads, who were always around to totally undermine and destroy, for no particular reason other than that they were evil, and very, very square. From that period, I give you the theme song burnt into all of our brains:
One diehard fan has put up several Gumby shorts, but I should also draw your attention to the documentary Gumby Dharma. Here is a clip in which Clokey talks about becoming a middle-aged hippie and experimenting with drugs:
From the Sixties, we jump ahead to 1988, when a new series of Gumby adventures was created by Clokey (a few years after Gumby came back into the public consciousness, thanks to Eddie Murphy's characterization on SNL). I will openly admit that I was unemployed in 1989 for some weeks and became hooked on these episodes, as they were the strangest viewing experience one could have watching commercial television (and did not require the ingestion of any sort of chemical). At that time, Clokey recognized what the hot trends were, and so one adventure found Gumby preparing to make a music video with his band:
And to close out this post, I want to mess up your minds the way Clokey messed up mine. First, you need to see “All Shook Up,” a 1968 short that finds Goo and Prickle, Gumby’s pals, performing a “modern music” concert. Goo and Prickle were intended by Clokey to represent Alan Watts’ two states of being (the fluid and the rigid), and so for this concert, Prickle, the male dinosaur/dragon plays a note on an instrument and Goo, the seal/fish-like female turns into a visual representation of it. This is some VERY STRANGE stuff to watch when young. Clokey was oh-so-subtly working on the developing minds of his kid viewers.
And, finally, a fascinating Gumby adventure called “Funtasia,” which Clokey did not make, but his influence is felt throughout. This must hail from the 1988 series, and it’s an evocation of the 1950s shorts with no dialogue. Here a character perplexes Gumby and his pals by changing shape every few seconds. I’m certain that Bruce Bickford (of Baby Snakes and The Amazing Mr. Bickford fame) — whose stop-action claymation is the freakiest and most imaginative work I’ve seen intended for adults — was heavily influenced by Clokey’s ground-breaking work in the Fifties and Sixties. And, of course, drugs can enhance the experience, but are not at all necessary.
R&b superstar Teddy Pendergrass was an ordained minister at the age of 10, a seasoned drummer, and then a charismatic singer who rose from the ranks of early ’70s Philadelphia soul and kept his career moving right up until his untimely death this week at 59 from cancer. Pendergrass’s crippling injury in a car accident way, way, way back in 1982 might have curtailed his live performances, but it in no way stopped his singing career.
Since I deeply love the works of the wildly underrated filmmaker Alan Rudolph, I’ll of course point out that Pendergrass supplied the sexy songs for Rudolph’s “turning point” picture, Choose Me (1984). The opening credits for the film (sporting that wonderfully dated yet still awesome “neon” Eighties look) have been posted to YT by a Spanish fan (thus the dubbed lines of dialogue at the very end of the clip):
For most AM radio fans, Pendergrass will forever be best known for his terrific work as a lead vocalist for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Here they are back in 1972, doing their biggest hit “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” on (what else?) Soul Train:
And here is arguably the group’s most timely (and timeless) song, the Marvin Gaye-esque “Wake Up Everybody” from 1975. It might not quite be “What’s Going On,” but it stands as a rather conscious “answer song” to “Let It Be” that urges the listener to change the world:
Two posters have already uploaded to YouTube the legendary moment when garage rock burst onto America’s TV screens in the odd guise of a “hippie band” appearing on a very square sitcom: the Seeds, led by the late, great Sky Saxon, doing their hit “Pushin’ Too Hard” on “The Mothers-in-Law,” the Desi Arnaz-produced sitcom starring Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. One upload is here, my own addition folllows... (the color on the first clip is very washed out)
Now that’s all well and good, but I noticed that no one had uploaded the episode’s finale, in which the Seeds encounter a certain Mr. Joe Besser, the fey-est Stooge and well-known as grown-up man-child "Stinky" on The Abbott and Costello Show. Thus I provide the missing link. And just in case this sitcom meeting of immortals isn’t weird enough, let me just note for the record that Desi himself directed this episode. The Sixties were a strange, bizarre time for popular culture….
As if any further indication was needed that the DVD industry is in a tailspin, I sadly note the death this week of the trade publication Video Business, which much to my delight had kept its original name all these years (hey, the “V” in DVD does stand for “video”). In a weird way, the home-entertainment industry has seen nothing but deaths in the past decade or so — most interestingly, the chain that set out to decimate the mom-and-pop store in the Eighties (the dreaded Blockbuster) has now fallen victim to Netflix, a notion that requires the absolute minimum of activity on the part of its customers (ah, the pure American-ness of not having to actually *do* anything, and yet still be a consumer!)
For full disclosure’s sake, I will note that I have been writing for the magazine for approximately nine years as a freelance reviewer and reporter. But I began reading it when I worked at a video store back in the late 1980s and later on, when I worked at the most famous (and still curiously alive… why?) TV listings weekly, I returned to VB as a reader because we were desperately in need of finding someone, *anyone* who actually was watching the crappy straight-to-video features (Shannon Tweed, Don “the Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Shannon Whirry, et al) that we couldn’t evaluate because the cable nets showed ’em but were never going to provide screeners of them.
Video Business has filled that void for thirty years, and yes, these days you can indeed find a stray blogger who will review the same material for free and perhaps even in more depth, but it just ain’t the same, since VB often actually panned the freaking things, and their reviewers (I’m talking a decade before I had any participation in it) seemed to be folks who knew their bad films (and, more importantly of course, their good-bad films). Bloggers generally know their topic backward and forward, but they are a tad cautious to pan things they are getting for free from cordial publicists.
In any case, Video Business issued official word on Wednesday that it ceased publication this week with its current issue, December 4th. As a regular reader of the magazine, I think that it’s a major loss, since I notice several movie-news websites simply tossing up DVD label press releases with no fact-checking or follow-up calls involved. VB has been a reputable source of home-entertainment industry news, even as its happy stories about new horizons in technology were turning to revelations about the ways in which its readership — namely, the local video merchant — were being squeezed out of business by the lazyman juggernaut that is Netflix. I’ve heard that the magazine’s website will go offline, which is a major loss since the magazine covered titles that weren’t being reviewed anywhere else.
As a writer for the publication, I extend a personal thanks to editor and good friend Laurence Lerman, who’s done a terrific job of covering the disparate threads of an industry that’s gone in some very strange directions in only two decades: from a glut of “straight to videos” (with titles like Indecent Deadly Bloody Fatal Illusion), to rather luster-less “DVD premieres” (not ANOTHER Dennis the Menace sequel that no one knows exists?), to crystal-clear BluRay restorations of the same films that have been out umpteen times before. Laurence is a class act who has been one of the best editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. His sweet tooth for kitsch aside (why do you think we’re friends?), he has exhibited a special talent for juggling both the “high” and the “low” in VB’s movie-review section; this aspect made it a very important read for DVD retailers around the country. And yes, there are still some mom-and-pops bravely weathering the slow, strange death of the home-entertainment industry. They deserve your business right now — get up off your asses and forget the Netflix envelopes and *rent* a movie in person, fer chrissake!
And so I raise a glass in toast to Laurence and the other folks who like myself have toiled in any capacity for Video Business. I can’t imagine future news-sources of info about movie “platforms” (Download Business???) ever being as adventurous, or as worth reading.
Last week reader “Jckinnick” brought to my attention the fact that Bobby Charles died. I will readily admit I didn’t recognize the name, but on further research I definitely knew the music. Charles was a Cajun rock ’n’ roll pioneer who jumpstarted the subgenre known as “swamp pop” as a performer, but who is best-known as a writer. He gave us “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” by the Fat Man (Mr. Domino) and “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do.” His biggest hit as a tunesmith was this rock classic: 
Charles died last week, and today’s music-obit news was about the passing of dyed-in-the-wool folkie Kate McGarrigle at 63. Of course best known as half of the the McGarrigle Sisters (not to be confused by old movie fans with “the Great McGonigle”) and as mom of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Kate made some absolutely beautiful music, and here is a memorable sample, the song “Talk to Me of Mendocino”:
