An exploitation pioneer passes: Deceased Artiste David F. Friedman

Dave Friedman was a very amiable gent whom I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing twice. He will go down in history as the last of the old-fashioned, road-tested exploitation producers. He learned at the hands of a master (Kroger Babb), created with Herschell Gordon Lewis the gore movie, made some very dippy nudie-cutie pics with HGL, wrote a great memoir (A Youth in Babylon), and gave us some of the best-ever trailers for softcore pics in the Sixties. He of course also made features to go with these trailers, but they very often (with one or two exceptions) were much less entertaining than the trailers were.

Here is a classic Friedman trailer for his “roughie,” The Defilers:


The Defilers (1965)


Another great one that reflects beautifully Friedman's attitude toward softcore. A free i.d./password for Daily Motion might be required to view this one, but you should have one of those anyway (Daily Motion is a YouTube with no squeamishness about the unclad body):


The Lustful Turk


I thought I had put up the “carnival pitch” clip from my first interview with Mr. Friedman (who did insist on being called “Dave,” as noted in his New York Times obit), but I evidently never did. I will rectify that in the near future. In the meantime, I offer this great bit from my second interview where Dave just laid it on the line about his profession.

The man was a delight to talk to. His trailers may have indeed been better than his films, but I can vouch for the fact that talking to the guy was FAR more entertaining than watching either. He was an extremely friendly legend.

"A riot is an ugly thing!": Deceased Artiste Kenneth Mars

Show biz folks die all the time, but it does seem like a lot of people whose work I really loved are dying these days. I was introduced to the brilliance of stalwart comic actor Kenneth Mars by my dad, who would tell me of the wonders of The Producers before I finally got to see it and memorize it (the recent-vintage musical remake is an abomination I won’t even comment on).

Mars did play normal characters quite often (he was the dad in a Molly Ringwald comedy, fer chrissakes), including a lead part in a Frank Gilroy picture I’ve yet to catch up to, Desperate Characters with Shirley MacLaine (1971). But it’s for his absolutely brilliant comic turns he’ll be remembered, most especially the two for Mel Brooks (see below).

In reading Mars’ obits, I became aware of how much work he did as a voice talent for cartoons. It makes perfect sense — in his best comic performances, he was most definitely cartoonlike but played the characters with a sincerity that was gorgeous (and made the characters even funnier). Besides his prolific work on sitcoms, I want to point to two of his performances that absolutely blew me away.

The first is in the overambitious and sadly underwhelming Woody Allen film Shadows and Fog (1991). The film, Woody’s last for Orion Pictures, is his homage to German Expressionist silents and also the work of Franz Kafka. It is a confused picture that has way, way, way too many celebrities in supporting roles and cameos (it could be seen as the Expressionist Mad, Mad, Mad World) — John Malkovich, Madonna (who received prime placement in the Spanish poster, as you can see on the right, although she’s barely in the picture), Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Donald Pleasence, John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Philip Bosco, Fred Gwynne, Kate Nelligan, Wallace Shawn, William H. Macy, and of course Woody’s main squeeze at the time, who now threatens to sue if her clips are shown in documentaries about him.

The film doesn’t wind up working well as an Expressionist update or as a Kafka-esque comedy. Kenneth Mars shows up at the film’s end as a magician in a circus that Woody has run to, in order to escape a killer. Mars proceeds, with a beautifully understated performance that seems intended to evoke Bergman actor Erland Josephson, to steal the entire movie. I was already a firm fan of Mars’ when I saw the film upon its initial release, but I was very impressed that a really talented character actor could just steal an entire film away from its unnecessarily star-studded cast. Someone has posted the entire film on YT, here is the very end:



The other Mars performance that is indelible for me is his semi-regular work as William W.D. “Bud” Prize on the terrific Fernwood 2-Night and its follow-up program America 2-Night. In that character, Mars achieved something quite unique: he actually made hardcore deadpan comic actors Martin Mull and Fred Willard break up. Unfortunately, the scene in question isn’t on YouTube, but it occurred when “Bud” Prize began to lecture “Barth Gimble” (Mull) and “Jerry Hubbard” (Willard) about why parents shouldn’t let their children transform themselves into pirates. The show was written by brilliant comedy writers, but one could see that Mull and Willard were always “sweetening” their bits with toss-off lines. Mars was the only guest I can remember whose riffing got Mull and Willard to smile broadly on camera (and Mull to hide his face behind a prop, so as not to be seen laughing).

As for clips of Mars, I offer a late Sixties Prell ad he appeared in:



And, from around the same time, the charming low-key sitcom He and She with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Mars played their Greek fireman neighbor:



Kenny’s introductory sequence in The Producers ranks among the funniest scenes ever. Ever!



An outtake from Young Frankenstein that introduces his Inspector character:



And the classic “a riot is an ugly thing!” bit:



The best for last: Mars as “ambassador-at-large for the Fernwood Chamber of Commerce” William W.D. “Bud” Prize on Fernwood 2-Night. Here he talks to Barth and Jerry about his environmental preservation (which he calls “conservatage”) and his terminal underbite:



Bud Prize debates “Sylvia Miller” (Fannie Flagg) on whether or not she’s having sex with aliens. He also discusses his mentor and “chin-odontist,” the great Cletus Emmett Wheelwelker (Fernwood 2-Night was so goddamned good for several reasons, among them the fact that even the smallest characters had a demented back story):



Bud Prize came back on America 2-Night as Barth’s “interview coordinator.” Here he presents in the flesh the great aviatrix Amelia Earhart… kinda:

Example 6,357: Why variety shows were TV magic

Of all the Golden Age movie comedians, I think Red Skelton is probably my least favorite. However, he did have a weekly TV variety show in the Fifties, and sometimes the bizarro magic that occurred frequently on such programs took place. For example, when he decided he wanted to do Art Carney's Ed Norton character in a sketch — it was a natural fit, of course, forcing him to play "down" for once (Skelton famously was noted for laughing at his own jokes, something Stan Laurel had said was a definite no-no in sketch comedy). In any case, who to get to play Ralph and Alice Kramden? Well, why not (it just must have been a Halloween episode) Peter Lorre and Vampira in full attire? Why not indeed?



Thanks for M. Faust for passing this piece of obsurantia on. It's a doozy.

“Tears on my Pillow and Ave Maria”: Dean Friedman’s “Ariel”

Sometimes the mere mention of a song title will do it. I was moving through the threaded forums I visit that cover topics related to nostalgia, obscurantia, tangentia, whatever you want to call it, and saw a mention of Dean Friedman’s 1977 song “Ariel.” It’s a tune I haven’t heard in two decades (easy!), and that last listen was most likely to an audio recording I made off the radio.

Friedman seems to have a solid web presence with his official website, which is great, as the fellow is talented and quite singular. He appeared on the scene when singer-songwriters were still having top 40 hits (without having to be country-pop hybrids) and has maintained a cult following over here and in the U.K. In fact one of the more welcome discoveries on YouTube is a guest appearance he made on the much-missed The Kenny Everett Show:



In the U.S. Friedman is best known to folks of a certain age (oh, how coy the phrase…) who remember “Ariel” or his other hit, a duet with Denise Marsa called “Lucky Stars” that was evidently a massive success over in the U.K. I hadn’t heard this tune in a good three decades until the other day, but I know certain lines by heart because it is the most Broadway-sounding song that didn’t come from a Broadway musical — it in fact sounds like a pop-single variation of some of the “conversational” songs from Sondheim’s Company. Friedman succeeds in having a chorus made up of one very long but memorable sentence (“And we can thank our lucky stars/that we’re not as bright as we like to think we are…”):



In case you need a little “snapshot of a life,” check out the YT commenter on the above video who notes that he “was on the way to solicitors to get a divorce from my wife — this came on the radio and I couldn't go through with it.” A moving commentary on the healing power of Seventies pop music!

Friedman also writes catchy songs with food themes, as with “Deli”
and the tune of his that has seemingly been covered the most, “McDonald’s Girl” (which I don’t remember hearing at the time it came out). Here’s a pretty tune he performed on Top of the Pops called “Lydia”:



In researching Friedman for this piece, I found that he’s still recording and performing, has a load of loyal fans in England and Scotland, wrote influential books on synthesizers in the Eighties, has designed video games, and, most memorably for a late-night TV addict like myself, is rumored to be the voice singing in this commercial (I think it doesn't sound a thing like him, but hey, it's nice to include the link since I haven't seen this ad for 32 years!):



No word on whether he wrote the above jingle, but he is seen singing it in a different version here.

But onto the song that triggered this musing. “Ariel” is a tune that will probably seem trifling to naysayers, but it is deeply loved by those of us who can’t forget it. Why? Well, it boasts a humble-as-hell lyric about a hesitant guy falling for a Jewish girl (that fact was edited out by the record label, according to Friedman’s site, to get the single more airplay in the South!) wearing a peasant blouse, looking for contributions to the “Friends of BAI” (meaning the NYC Pacifica institution WBAI).

The song references Friedman’s home state of N.J. and is distinguished by his high-pitched warbling on the chorus. The song went to number 20 on the American charts back in 1977, but it has remained charming, catchy, and damned winsome for the last 33 years….



A crafty editor’s public-domain movie visualization of the song can be seen here.

Three lovely ladies exit the stage...

So many talented cult-favorite performers are dying these days it’s difficult to keep up. All three of the actresses below are primarily known for one film performance, but all of them kept going in show business and did interesting things above and beyond their one international “hit” picture.

The first to be announced in the news in the last few days was, as she was called in many obits, “Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider.” She definitely will forever be linked with that performance, which she gave 39 years ago, when she was 20 years old. I’m going to assume that readers of this blog are already familiar with that modern masterwork, one of Bertolucci’s most focused (and popular) pics and Brando’s last great starring performance, the one into which he put a full range of emotion and acting genius.

Schneider was indeed incredibly sexy in the film and gave a very fine performance, as her character navigates between very verbal males (Brando, Leaud). The film’s incredible success gave her a “name,” but seems to have typecast her in many producers’ eyes and the fame clearly affected her personal life, as she had a succession of very public problems, including breakdowns, drug troubles, and public affairs — the European press had a field day with her moving into an asylum to be near her lover (I remember something being made of her yelling across a gate that she loved the woman; the press loves nothing more than an emotional breakdown in public).

Thankfully Schneider moved on from her problems and continued to work regularly as an actress. Here are a few clips to remember her by (check out Last Tango… on yer own!):

A great scene from Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), featuring Schneider and Jack Nicholson. A week or two ago New York Times critic A.O. Scott declared the present a “golden age for foreign film.” I’m very glad that he deflects American readers’ attention overseas to where good movies still are being made regularly, but it’s hard not to believe that he declares the present era to be the best-ever because… he’s writing in the present day…. There are indeed miraculous items being made overseas, but when you had Masters like Antonioni on the scene, the term “golden age” was sorta redundant:



She costarred with Joe Dallesandro in Rivette’s uneven but still interesting Merry-Go-Round (1981). Here she plays a game with Joe and speaks in French (no subs) with Daniele Gégauff, a movie producer who was married to screenwriter Paul Gégauff, who I wrote about in my blog entry on Chabrol:



I was trying to remember what “recent” film I’d seen Schneider in. It was a rare Bertrand Blier comedy called Les Acteurs (2000) that I reviewed on the Funhouse TV show in an English-subtitled print. Here is her scene, sans English subs, from the film. The film is an utterly bizarre creation that pays tribute to the acting profession by having a succession of big-named veteran performers appear in episodic scenes concerning the actor’s approach, his madness, his ego, etc. There aren’t as many big-name female stars, but that is explained early on, when one character notes that men’s egos tend to be much, much bigger than women’s. One of the female stars to make an appearance, though, is Ms. Schneider, looking great as a woman “of a certain age”:



Much like Schneider, Lena Nyman was identified by international movie fans with one movie, or in fact two movies, Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and its sister-movie I Am Curious (Blue) (1968). The films were declared to be “obscene,” but are instead brilliant artifacts of their era, sociological studies that do include sexual interludes between the characters (Nyman plays a slightly fictionalized version of herself), but also interviews with Swedish politicians and Martin Luther King, Jr. The films are brilliant, and the tiny dynamo Nyman is terrific in the lead. Not much can be seen of them online, but here is an outtake from I Am Curious (Blue) in which Lena “abolishes” the state church. I love blasphemy of any kind, and this is a pretty wonderful scene in which Nyman asks a priest how the church became involved with the bourgeoisie, instead of the poor, to whom Christ tended:



Nyman’s only other film seen by American audiences was Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), in which she played a supporting role. I found a lot of Swedish clips on YT, however, that show she had a rich career and had fans who were touched sufficiently by her death to put up very nice tributes to her. She not only acted but also sang in the movies and on TV, including this scene in a comedy called The Adventures of Picasso (1978), where she plays a nightclub singer who becomes Picasso’s object of affection:



Most of the Lena Nyman clips on YT aren’t subtitled, so I was most “grabbed” by the musical ones and the broadly farcical ones. Here is a clip from a comedy called Dromkaken (1993|), in which Nyman apparently played two characters:



And to repeat the comic device in the last clip, here’s yet another sequence where Nyman’s kooky character again sees the stuffy female lead going to the bathroom (so much for the staid image of the Swedes!):



Nyman may forever be enshrined as a “Lolita” figure because of Sjoman’s films (she was 22 or 23 when I Am Curious (Yellow) was made, btw), but she proved herself to be a broadly versatile performer. One final comedy clip:



I never met Maria Schneider or Lena Nyman in person, but I did meet the third woman whose obit appeared this weekend, the iconic “velvet glove cast in iron,” Ms. Tura Satana. I interviewed Tura Satana back in 1996 at the Chiller Theater convention, and she was a delightful lady who was happy to talk about her past film work, and was pleased that I asked her not only about her three exploitation classics, but also her work in other films, including Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce.

Tura did indeed lead a very colorful life as a model, an exotic dancer, an exploitation movie star, a lover of Elvis (!), a latter-day icon for both women and men who liked dominant women, and one of those few folks who had a band named in her honor. As was the case with Nyman, her fans have posted tribute videos to her:



Her starring role as “Varla” in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) remains her best-remembered contribution to the Western World. She has been copied, imitated, ripped off, and enshrined by various and sundry performers and aspiring exploitation moviemakers, but it’s hard to top the original:



Tura’s other two wonderfully memorable starring roles in exploitation were for Funhouse favorite Ted V. Mikels. She played a “dragon lady” character in the completely deranged and wonderful Astro Zombies:



And is seen briefly doing one of her exotic dance numbers in Ted’s Doll Squad, which supplied the template for Charlie’s Angels, but is a whole lot more, well… Mikels-ian:



I regret that there is only a very small slice of my interview with the great Ms. Santana online. At one time a few years back I had offered the whole thing in the short-lived Funhouse video podcast, and the interview was indeed posted on MySpace by her then-agent/manger. It shows the fervor of the Tura fan-base that my interview with her was so appreciated it got booted (proper attribution was added later, I believe — right before MySpace lost all of its audience in what seemed like one fell swoop. Ah, the fickle social-communitarians on the Web…).

A post-script: I have somewhere the hand-typed thank you note that Ms. Santana wrote after I sent her a VHS of the episode as aired. She was one classy dame, that Tura. And quite the black-clad icon:

The loneliest theme song in the world: Deceased Artiste John Barry

Many wonderful tributes have appeared to composer John Barry since he died last Sunday. I have nothing to add to these, except that one of Barry’s best-known pieces of music (outside of the Bond soundtracks, of course) received the noir “seal of approval” in a French TV documentary many years ago.

Jean-Pierre Melville was profiled in the hour-long program, which has been circulating for years and I believe has wound up on one of the Criterion releases of his films. In it, Melville talks at length about his rampant cinephilia — to the extent that the documentarian uses lap-dissolves to show that Melville continued to talk on and on about certain topics for quite a long time.

At one point in the docu, Melville takes a break from talking to the interviewer to play him a record. Since J-PM didn’t like rock & roll, one would assume he would’ve put on a classical piece or a suitably smoky piece of jazz or a tune by Sinatra (who he paid tribute to in his film L’âiné des ferchaux). Instead, he falls into a reverie over a then-current movie theme that he likes very much.

Given Melville’s status as arguably the master noir filmmaker in France and an influence to great directors in France, America, Hong Kong, and Japan, I thought it would be interesting to note what lonely and noir piece of music the Master played for his interviewer:

Noises and faces: Deceased Artistes Charlie Callas and David Frye

Late last week it was announced that two nightclub comics whose work I had enjoyed were dead. Nostalgia buffs mourned Charlie Callas on Friday, but were then diverted by the announcement of the death of impressionist David Frye. The interesting thing I found in researching them is that both comics were represented by precious few clips on YouTube, given the amount of TV work they did (especially Callas); also that the YouTube reposters who put clips back up with their own commercial message in the “About This Video” comment box had decided to repost some of the Callas and Frye TV appearances (ah, the fleeting spotlight of fame…).

One of Callas’ best routines was a long shaggy-dog story about two “nervous” (read: shaky, twitching, moaning, noise-making) hunters. Charlie performed it on a Sixties variety show (which I think is Hollywood Palace) and he performed it on The Johnny Cash Show, but I believe the seminal telling of the tale was on the 1984 Jerry Lewis talk show on Metromedia:



Charlie had earlier had a supporting role in Jerry’s wildly uneven movie The Big Mouth (1967):



Here’s a Johnny Cash Show appearance that finds Charlie mostly utilizing his verrrrry rubber face:



Here he does his Georgie Jessel bit on Dinah Shore’s daytime show (and yes, that is Roy Rogers sitting to Charlie’s right):



Here’s a lengthy Godfather routine, apparently performed on The Tonight Show, which, it was noted in every one of Callas’ obits, he was banned from, when he playfully shoved Carson on-air in 1982 (Johnny could be a vindictive son-of-a-bitch if he wanted to be):



Another Tonight Show fragment, with Charlie commenting on men’s magazines:



And lastly, to show that in show biz, you gotta do a little bit of everything. Charlie was not only a professional drummer before he became a comic, but he could also successfully carry off an act no one does anymore, spinning plates!



I regret not having bought Charlie Callas memorabilia on his official website, which featured his artwork, info about his drumming, many lovely pics of his wildly cartoonish mug, and is now gone forever. He had a wonderfully bizarre-looking drinking mug with his face on it. Oh, these folks who tell us that “that stuff will always be available on the Internet….”

As for David Frye, what was most interesting about him to me is that I noticed he was one of the few standup comedians in the Seventies who made certain to credit his writers on his LPs. Now certainly there were comedians who wrote all their own material during that era, but there were a lot who didn’t (including some key, very famous ones) and never credited their writers, but Frye always did (one of them was a young Gabriel Kaplan).

Frye was a vigorous impressionist who, like Frank Gorshin, literally twisted his body and face to really *become* the person he was imitating. His three most famous impressions were Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and William Buckley, Jr. — in each case, he literally did become a living cartoon of the person, showing their mean, pretentious, or conflicted sides as he impersonated them.

Here is Frye when he was first attracting notice, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967:



In the Seventies, by the time Nixon was out of office, Frye was still doing mainstream TV variety show guest shots, but his material was more unsteady, as here, on the awful Dick Clark show Live Wednesday (I remember this show, and man, it was a loser). He does brilliant new impressions that fit the time (Jack Nicholson, Rodney Dangerfield, etc.), but he has no material to go with the accurate impressions:



And here is Frye’s most recent promotional video, an item where old clips are supplemented by him doing George W. Bush, Jesse Ventura, and Dick Cheney. I really don’t remember seeing Frye on TV after the Nixon era, but from his obits it was apparent that he kept on trucking and worked steadily in his adopted hometown of Vegas, updating his impressions every few years:



To end on an up note, here is some audio from the wonderful late 1980s Steve Allen AM radio show (which aired on WNEW with cohost Mark Simone), with Frye doing a number of impressions for Steve, who was always the consummate straight man:

Stella-vision: Leo Stella's "Seems Like Old Times"

Very few cable-access shows can be watched again and again, and fewer still remain entertaining over a decade later. One of the ones that I can rewatch and am still thoroughly entertained by is Seems Like Old Times, the weekly lounge-piano spectacular that was on in the mid-1990s in Manhattan and starred the one and only Mr. Leo Stella. Leo is lost to the sands of time (if you’re out there, give a shout, Leo!), but his show lives on, thanks to those of us with VCRs who captured “the beauty and the splendor of the magnificence that is me” (as Leo would put it).

I have posted on YouTube a chunk of an episode in which Leo holds forth on an old friend of his who was being put in a home by a young social worker — right after he sings a sleepy and suggestive “Some Day My Prince Will Come”:



In another episode, Leo sang the song from the Broadway show Tenderloin that became a hit for Bobby Darin, “Artificial Flowers,” in classic lounge style:



On the same episode, Leo revealed the reason for his mock “street” attire when he performed an utterly mind-roasting rap version of the Noel Coward song “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington”:



And responded to a youthful heckler on the phone (I felt that the show went a bit downhill when he accepted phone calls from the audience) who would just chant, “Faggot, faggot, faggot!” Leo’s response to this young rapscallion was to serenade him in song:



I have more Leo to upload in the future. You won’t be seeing this kind of entertainment on the major networks anytime soon — but things would be a lot better if you did.

"W for... the Weather Report show": Deceased (Access) Artiste Clinton Freeman

Some public access shows can’t be described, they just have to be seen. Such was the case with The Weather Report, a show hosted and produced by one Clinton Freeman, whom I had been informed died a few months back. I offer this slice of his show on YouTube as an example of access at its most creative, humorous (intentional and otherwise), and definitely strangest.

What “Video Clint” (as he at one time referred to himself on the show) did on his show was to deconstruct newspapers and magazine pieces (articles, ads, illustrations) by pointing out common themes. He was particularly obsessed with weather maps and would discuss them in much detail on the show, referring to how their existence in said periodicals provided references to his show. He had several other preoccupations, which included among others Britpop bands (and his hero Morrissey), very beautiful supermodels, gorillas, and bananas. The last-mentioned I believe was an oblique reference to the famous Warhol cover of the first Velvet Underground LP — Clint was obsessed with Warhol and at times seemed to indicate on The Weather Report that Andy was the inspiration for the show.

Clint had done a number of cable-access shows here in Manhattan. His first, The Four Horsemen, was done with friends and was pretty hard to fathom for those who tuned in casually (the participants wore suits and animal masks and made bizarre pronouncements); the phrase “self-aware” would pretty much cover that show. He returned on his own with shows called Lovecats and The Chair (at least I think it was called “The Chair” — perhaps it was “Electric Chair,” which would, of course, be another Warholian citation). In any case, by 1996, the time when this clip was shot, Clint had his own little world of references going on. It was very unique stuff and provoked fascination, laughter, or boredom, or a mixture of the three. See if you experience any of those reactions:



For the year 2000, access producers (working, very obviously, with no budgets) were faced with a minor dilemma: how to commemorate the new millennium? I wanted to do something about the history of film, but settled for a three-episode history of the film noir. For his show, Clint did “the best rock shows of the 20th Century,” which were revealed to have been the rock shows he had attended and liked the most. He held up tickets from the gigs, recalled stories about them, and told us about the venues they took place in. I can’t imagine that kind of content occurring in any other format than cable access (although, of course, YouTube has fast usurped a lot of the strangeness that used to find a home solely on access). Here is Clint’s obit in the New York Times. RIP, Video Clint, your like will not be seen again!

The stars honor JFK: the pre-inaugural gala

I’ve already rhapsodized on this blog about my love of old variety shows. Well, since the rerun networks have no interest in letting us see these programs, which combined the very, very best and sometimes (often, in the later days) worst of American pop culture, and DVD collections do exist but they are few and far between, we have to turn to — where else? — YouTube.

Thus, I am happy to point you to a variety show that the American public got to see exactly once on NBC. The event was the pre-inaugural gala held before JFK took the oath of office, and was famously overseen by Frank Sinatra. The roster is loaded with A-list stars who wanted to honor the new, youthful president-elect.

The YT upload doesn’t list the guests in the order they appear, so here’s the actual order: Leonard Bernstein conducting, Ethel Merman, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh (performing a pretty bad approximation of a George-and-Gracie skit), Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Harry Belafonte (bringing the show firmly into the Sixties with a terrific rendition of “John Henry”), Milton Berle/Bill Dana (his name Jose Jimenez!), Frank Sinatra (doing a Gallagher and Sheen variant with Berle, whoa baby).

The show ends with a very long bit of “special material” (I’m betting Sammy Cahn was the lyricist) that introduces all these other stars whose bits were presumably clipped by NBC: Gene Kelly, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Joey Bishop, Alan King, Pat Suzuki, and Ella Fitzgerald. Frederic March reads a speech by Lincoln at the end, followed by “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung by Helen Traubel (they left that in and cut out Lady Ella and Louis and Keely???) and a thank-you speech by JFK (with interesting jokes about how deeply in debt the Democratic Party was). It’s extremely strange to see a show co-hosted by Sinatra that doesn’t include a solo number by Frank.



One footnote on the event: some rather obvious absences are the other Rat Packers (although, as noted, Bishop participates in the closing number and Lawford can be seen in the audience laughing at the Bill Dana bit). The story goes that Sammy got a call from Frank saying that he shouldn’t be a part of the proceedings because he had a white wife at the time (Sammy had been booed at the Democratic convention when he came out to sing). Either Dean Martin was so outraged he wouldn’t participate in the show as an act of solidarity with Sam — or he just wanted to stay home that evenin’….

Thanks to pal Jay Hopkins for passing this on.

"And now, for a Special Comment..."

The swift and unexplained departure from MSNBC of Keith Olbermann last week is a major loss for those of us who were hooked on his program and, I would argue, for the TV audience in general, since I viewed Keith as a “corrective” to the fact-less, spiteful, and tunnel-visioned bunch on the Fox News Network.

His commentary-based Countdown was a pundit-laden show like the Fox shows and it had a clear political bias like the Fox shows, but it was predicated on facts, open to correction, and used Keith’s strong, often strident, commentaries to contextualize the news as well as help people in need — particularly those without healthcare, which continues to be our national tragedy and the way in which the U.S. is most like a third-world nation (run by fat, deliriously happy capitalists).

I can’t honestly say I’ve been moved by many news anchors or pundits ever, but the segment below of an episode-length show Keith did on the health care debate, and how important it is to Americans, moved me greatly (read: the *real * healthcare debate, the one to get nationalized medicine, the one that President Obama abandoned in order to play politics-as-usual, we’ll-amend-this-mess-later).

This editorial moved me not just because Keith was reflecting on his father’s imminent death, but because of his inclusion of a story about a baseball-card-collecting friend whose daughter was suffering in the ICU. I cringe when I am confronted by sentimental, Spielbergian art and entertainment, but this editorial touched me:



On the other side of the coin, I will readily admit that Keith has an in-your-face quality that is abrasive. I agree with a good deal of his stances, and so I didn’t find it to be “too much” — perhaps the only thing I thought was pretentious was his decision to close out each show with Edward R. Murrow’s signature “Good night, and good luck.” I can easily counterbalance this, though, with the fact that he has great taste in vintage comedy (Bob and Ray, Sid Caesar, the Goons) and worships the Pythons, Rod Serling, and Bill Hicks — can’t find much wrong with that.

So why is Keith now off the air? He had the highest-rated show on MSNBC, but he was “let go” last week for most likely one of two reasons (or both): a personal conflict with the heads of his network, which he had had in several of his previous high-profile jobs as a sportscaster; or the merger of NBC with Comcast empire. The merger was already seen as a possible threat to Keith’s freedom of speech on MSNBC late last year, when he was suspended for having contributed to the campaigns of three Democratic candidates (including Gabby Giffords). The heads of Comcast are “staunch GOP supporters,” and while each host on MSNBC (except Joe Scarborough) takes on the Republicans, Olbermann did so with a particular relish, focusing in particular on Fox News’ unabashed support for the party.

So it is assumed by both well-respected trade mags and bloggers who don’t care for Olbermann that he was edged off the air by the merger. What did we lose as an audience? A talking head who certainly displayed intelligence and verbal dexterity, but also a conscience, a willingness to admit when he was wrong, and an ongoing acknowledgement that President’s quixotic and ridiculous quest for bipartisanship wasn’t just a big disappointment to his “base,” but was ultimately dangerous and foolhardy.

Whatever the case may be, MSNBC was very willing to dispense with its highest-rated program. Some websites proclaim with assurance that the NBC-Comcast merger had nothing to do with the break and Keith left to create his own "media empire" a la Arianna Huffington, but then the question remains: why the “gag order”? If he left of his own volition, it’s highly doubtful the network would make him remain silent about it, if only to stifle the rumor that they bounced him.

So that leaves those of us Lefties who still watch television with three alternatives:

— the “harder Left” shows like Democracy Now and GRITtv, which dispense facts ignored by the MSM and also offer actual video journalism, but lack Olbermann’s sense of visible outrage (and acknowledgment that a little dash of entertainment is never a bad thing)
— the remaining MSNBC hosts, who will continue to espouse liberal beliefs, but will never be as openly challenging as Olbermann was. I can’t fault them for wanting to keep their jobs, and have already stated how much I love Rachel Maddow as a host (although: bring back Kent Jones!). And Chris Matthews’ adamant moments of disbelief are indeed wonderful. The Mediaite website (coincidentally run by ex-MSNBC host Dan Abrams!) hit the target, however, by noting that not only was Olbermann the most engaging/enraging host on the nework, his show was also just as the best show that MSNBC had, hands down
— The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Those who want to perceive the political situation in a simplistic fashion go for this option. On the comedic level, both shows range from shticky to immaculately funny, but the “can’t we all just get along?” ideology espoused by the former (and playfully struck down by the latter) strikes me as extremely naïve, and also fascinatingly mirrors Obama’s hopeless longing for bipartisanship. The comedy is excellent, but the shows are not news or even news commentary, as the hosts readily admit in interviews (casting aside for a moment Jon Stewart’s “climatologist” remark to Maddow).

Thus, there is a big hole in my weekday viewing habits now that Keith is gone. I do not have a DVR, so for me television is either “preserve it” (something I will watch again or want to collect), catch it at the time it’s on, or miss it.

Whatever the reason for the break with MSNBC may be, I’m sure that Olberman will return, in one format or another. The chances of getting him back in prime-primetime are slim, but if CNN wanted a real reboot — and could honestly admit that Parker Spitzer (even the name, guys!) was a dire idea — perhaps there could be a really viable alternative to the agony of Fox News once more….

In the meantime, there are indeed the clips from the past. First, the moment I knew I loved Keith’s way of slamming public figures, a “Special Comment” about Rudolph Guiliani, the horrific and repellent ex-Mayor of New York City:



The most famous Special Comment found Keith telling Bush to “shut the hell up!” Seen as “too much, too far” by many liberals, it really was needed. Someone needs to be saying these things to the Right:



To show that Olbermann was indeed fair-minded and was willing to call “our guy" on the carpet for slowly sacrificing important points, a commentary about one of the first times Obama did something to mitigate the atrocities done by the last administration (which earned him no “brownie points” among the Repubs):



To end on a humorous note: Although the best-seen impression of Keith was the one Ben Affleck did on SNL, this gentleman does a quieter, more perfect rendtion of the outraged Special Comment Keith:

"I... hate... servants!": Deceased Artiste Susannah York

I was surprised to see that Susannah York was 72 when she died last week, but that was merely my mind having frozen her into her 20s/30s, since that was the age she was at when she made the films that have made the greatest impression on me. Her obits noted that her cute, short-haired blonde looks “fell out of favor” in British cinema come the late Seventies, and she was quite eager to play character parts in her later years. She remained a trooper, doing roles in movies, on British television, and (extensively) on the stage, including a one-woman show in which she incarnated the women of Shakespeare.

She was a top-notch actress, but began, yes, as a sex-kitten type in British film. She made her first big impression on American audiences in Tony Richardson’s superb Tom Jones (1963), where she shared flirtation scenes with the young and equally idyllic-looking Albert Finney:



She had earlier (in 1962) appeared in John Huston’s challenging and disturbing portrait of the father of psychoanalysis, Freud with Montgomery Clift. The whole film is available on YouTube, and it’s definitely one of Huston’s more ambitious pictures:



I love “Sixties movies” (read: transgressive heroes/heroines, parties, psychedelia, open or ambiguous endings), but will confess I’ve never seen Kaleidoscope (1966) and Duffy (1968), both of which feature York as the female lead. This scene from Duffy is a classic bit of “atmosphere” in which James Coburn dances with her at a trippy club:



I also haven’t seen Sebastian (1968) with York and Dirk Bogarde. It contains a nice acid freakout sequence, but York doesn’t feature in that. Here she is, again dancing in a hip, Swinging Sixties nightclub:



One of the most controversial pictures she starred in was Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (1968). It’s a bizarre film that is very important, in that it was one of the first feature-length dramas about lesbianism. It contains a streak of the grotesque, in which Aldrich seems to be revisiting the territory he covered in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, plus it also adheres to the unspoken rule at the time that gay protagonists had to be tragic, haunted figures. I love Aldrich’s wildly subversive style, though, and so do recommend you check out the whole film, but if you want to see a key scene, this would be the one, as Beryl Reid is told off by Coral Browne, as ultra-cute gf Susannah York has to decide which older lady to stay with:



York’s most powerful scene, with Gig Young, in Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of the brilliant Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). Change the milieu from a marathon dance contest in the Depression to the pathetic “reality TV” competitions of today, and you’ve got just about the same story, don’t you?



York was the female lead in the film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971). Contrary to what the YouTube poster and commenters say, it was never a Vonnegut novel, it was an original play. It’s noted that Vonnegut hated it, but I sorta like its claustrophobic staging of the play with its odd surreal moments. The boy in the film, Steven Paul, went on to make the most amazingly off-kilter (read: bad on a whole new level) Vonnegut adaptation, Slapstick of Another Kind:



When I had heard that York had died, I thought of my two favorite films in which she had starred. The first is Altman’s surreal thriller Images from 1972. It’s a hard film to synopsize, in that it concerns a woman who may or may not be losing her mind, but it features York as a children’s book author who begins to experience delusions about the men in her life. It is one of those films that Altman made because he wanted to make it, not because it had the slightest chance to do well at the box office:



The other film starring York that I love and rewatched several times is the American Film Theater adapation of Jean Genet’s The Maids (1975). She and Glenda Jackson play the servant sisters who plot to kill “the Madame” (Vivien Merchant), but also secretly wish to be her. It’s a brilliantly acted film and is also a sexy exploration of roleplaying and domination (although, of course, Genet had initially wanted young men to play the roles in drag). The film is available on DVD from Kino, and I recommend you check it out on disc, or for the limited time it’s up on YT, you can check it out there. Here is the trailer:



York was of course best known to American audiences in the last few decades as Superman’s mom in the Christopher Reeve movies, but I want to end this tribute on an “up” note from a film I believe has never played over here, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (yes, *another* one), called Alicja (1982). Made by Polish directors Jacek Bromski and Jerzy Gruza in England, the film features musical numbers, and here we have a disco-era bit of wonderment with Susannah York, Jean-Pierre Cassell, Lulu (who provided the voice of the film’s lead, Sophie Barjac), Paul Nicholas, and Freddie Mercury’s pal Peter Straker. The song is called “Talk Small” and yes, you won’t be able to forget the awful lyrics (including “They like imported cheese!”). It’s also too long and tacky as hell, so you need to watch it:

"The Man With the Golden Ear": Deceased Artiste Don Kirshner

Don Kirshner was one of the last of those folks from behind the scenes who came out in front of the camera and became a very unlikely TV star. There were a number of personalities in the Fifties and Sixties who began as journalists or authors or DJs and became hosts of television shows — Kirshner started his stint as the monotone host of his own Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in a much later era (the hip and “savvy” Seventies), hosting his series from 1973-81. He was indeed as flat as cardboard on the air, but his show presented musicians performing LIVE, which is more than Dick Clark could ever claim….

Kirshner was of course well known in the music industry long before he became a TV host. He began his “Aldon” music company in the early Sixties (with partner Al Nevins), and wound up employing the cream of the “Brill Building” group of songwriters: Pomus and Shuman, Mann and Weill, King and Goffin, Boyce and Hart, Neil Sedaka, and Neil Diamond. To be geographically correct, Kirshner’s office was up the block from the Brill Building on Broadway (if I remember correctly, it’s where the Mamma Mia theater now stands).

Kirshner never wrote or performed music, but he published some of the early hits of the songwriters mentioned above, and he produced several hit singles. When he was brought on board The Monkees TV project to find the band hit songs, he succeeded quickly in getting them two big singles (“I’m a Believer,” “Last Train to Clarksville”), but the band “fired” him when they wanted to take charge of the music themselves and were furious that the More of the Monkees LP had come out without their knowledge. The famous story has it that Michael Nesmith (wool-hat rebel!) smashed his fist into a hotel wall and told Kirshner, “That could have been your face!”

Here is a perfect example of what Kirshner gave the Monkees on their first album, a great piece of pop psychedelia from Carole King and Gerry Goffin, “Take a Giant Step”:



The song that supposedly was one of the “breaking points” for the band was “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” by Neil Diamond, which was one of those tunes that came out without their approval. It’s still a damned fine pop tune (and no, Bobby Sherman wasn’t part of the production, he was just in this episode):



Kirshner’s next big move was to create a prefab band that couldn’t talk back to him, the studio creation “The Archies,” manufactured to debut on the Saturday morning Archie cartoon show. The “band” (which consisted of studio singers Ron Dante and Toni Wine, seen to the right with Don, and whomever else Kirshner corralled into recording under the moniker) had a few giant hits, including (of course) “Sugar, Sugar” and “Jingle Jangle”:



The last popular band Kirshner discovered was Kansas, but we’ll leave them aside to pay tribute to his TV show, which offered us genuine time capsules, like this live performance by Sly and the Family Stone:

UPDATE: This clip was taken off of YouTube by Andrew Solt's SOFA corporation, which evidently holds the rights to Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. They have pulled most of the clips from DKRC, but have thus far issued no DVDs of the program, nor have they put the shows up in any permutation on iTunes, Hulu, YT, or any of the usual websites. I guess they're hanging onto the shows, a la the Dick Clark empire, for future use in documentaries and in the meantime not allowing fans to share them. I understand a capitalist move like that under ordinary circumstances, but taking them all down right after Kirshner's death so fans can't commemorate Kirshner's contribution to TV rock history is an especially nice, Scrooge-ly touch. So much for your Kirshner tributes, bloggers! The SOFA folks need these tapes locked up in their library, nice and tight.

The Seventies continued on with Linda Ronstadt with the Eagles:



One of the only national TV appearances by The New York Dolls in their prime:

CLIP REMOVED BY THE SOFA FOLKS (see above).

ABBA in 1976 doing “SOS”:

CLIP REMOVED BY THE SOFA FOLKS (see above).

The Ramones, with a full wooden intro by Don!



I can think of no better way to close out a tribute to a leisure-suited gent who gave us some of the best music of the Seventies than with one of my personal faves of the decade, the Ramones’ “Rockaway Beach”:

CLIP REMOVED BY THE SOFA FOLKS (see above).

UPDATE: Mike Nesmith posted a Facebook status acknowledging the wall-punching story: "Sad to learn of the passing of my old adversary Don Kirshner. He was a formidable foe and I send my condolences and sympathy to his family and his many friends. Donny, where ever you are — I want you to know I put my fist thru the wall just for dramatic effect. Apparently it worked. It is all behind us now, and we wrote what we wrote. Rest in Peace." Thanks to Krys O. for passing this on.

Let us now praise Sam the Sham

I brought a number (a big number) of my records back to my apartment from storage last weekend and indulged in a listening marathon that included one of my fave compilation albums, something called “Super Stars/Super Hits,” a two-record comp released in 1968 that was created by the CBS' direct marketing division. I purchased the set for 50 cents back in 1981 from a record-filled joint down on Broadway right near the Unique Warehouse (and how long has that emporium of fine weirdness been gone?). Anyway, this album is constructed like you’re turning an AM dial and “hearing” these hits from various genres: pop-rock, bubblegum, soul, garage, psychedelia, and mawkish ballads.

One of the tunes that always mesmerized me on that collection as a kid was “Ju Ju Hand” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. In rediscovering the song, which does nick from “Woolly Bully” but seems to have its own deranged logic, Sam wails out some proto-New Orleans stuff about spells or something. Like any really great rock ’n’ roll, the song makes little sense, and it fucking shouldn’t. The lyrics online depend on how the listener heard the nonsense words, so you can find this version of the lyrics. Who knows which written lyric is correct and what the song means? Only Domingo Samudio himself, the man better known as Sam the Sham. And here is that song, still as awesome as when it was released in the mid-Sixties and I first heard it in the early Eighties:



Samudio definitely scored a garage/frat-rock anthem with “Wooly Bully” back in the 1965, but in re-listening to his Greatest Hits LP, I realized that he was some kind of missing link between Bo Diddley's truly “classic rock” of the Fifties and the Tex-Mex (and garage) artists of the Sixties. In trying to follow up “Wooly Bully,” he fell into the novelty-record biz, which happens to be another subgenre of pop-rock that I am fascinated by. His other biggest hit was “Little Red Riding Hood.” The follow-up was “The Hair on My Chinny Chin Chin,” and a tune that literally is an old comedy routine done as a song, “Oh That’s Good, No That’s Bad.”

It’s noted on the Net that Sam the Sham is back doing gigs these days, but mostly acoustic, from his homebase in Tennessee. If you want to see what he looked like in his prime, some great examples are on YouTube. Here the band does “Ring Dang Doo” (with an intro from the ever-clueless Ed Sullivan indicating that they had a big hit with “Hully Gully”):



If that ain’t rockin’ enough for ya, here the band does a song called “Go-Go Girl” on Hullaballoo, with some of the titular specimens on display. This is truly in Bo Diddley territory, but it is priceless, since the song is done live:



And there’s no other way to close than a live version of the group’s biggest hit, which is one of the greatest nonsense anthems EVER in rock ’n’ roll:

Speeding cars, racing bicycles, and low-key love stories: Deceased Artiste Peter Yates

Peter Yates, who died at 81 last weekend, was yet another example of the many directors who made sterling, indelible work during the Nixon era, when Hollywood was willing to back “maverick” projects that were low-key, personal, and very character-driven. After that period ended, thanks to Jaws and Star Wars, these directors floundered, occasionally making great works, but primarily genre-jumping and making some sadly unsatisfying multiplex fare. Others, like Funhouse deity Robert Altman, kept making their kind of films by moving to other media, making smaller-budgeted truly independent features, and getting foreign funding.

Since I really don’t want to acknowledge the latter part of Mr. Yates’ career, which included such mainstream fare as The Deep (1977), Krull (1983), the Tom Selleck prison drama An Innocent Man (which I saw for review purposes, and man was it dreadful, but it did have a rather jarring line — for a Tom Selleck vehicle at least — about anal rape), and Year of the Comet (1992). Let’s talk instead about the “hungry” young British director who started with a Cliff Richard vehicle in 1963 (Summer Holiday), proceeded to direct several eps of The Saint and Secret Agent, and then moved on to make some truly memorable work in the “maverick” era.

The best-remembered Yates picture is without question Bullitt because it is a tight, lean specimen of the tough-cop subgenre that is less atmospheric and downright nightmarish than Dirty Harry, but is the most Steve McQueen-ish pic of all Steve McQueen pics. Yates' car chase set the standard for ALL the car chases to follow in the Seventies — and, believe me, there were plenty. Don Siegel himself had to acknowledge that car chases in cop movies were de rigueur by the mid-Seventies and would probably be looked back on with nostalgia in the future (how right he was).

I also have a major, major love for Yates’ John and Mary, the “singles” dating movie that draws on lessons from Godard and other Euro-gods (with a scene directly inspired by Band of Outsiders, plus the characters meeting through a discussion about Weekend). It also HEAVILY prefigures Annie Hall and Manhattan — I’m not saying Woody stole from it, but he definitely had seen it, I’ve always thought.

And lastly, the third “maverick”-era masterpiece by Yates was The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a low-key caper movie with Mitchum and a cast of terrific supporting performers including Peter Boyle. You can’t get much better than Eddie Coyle in the “neo-noir” category of updated fatalistic crime pictures. Mitchum was a wildly underrated actor, but only because he worked in so much garbage throughout his career. Eddie Coyle is a worthy bit of understated Mitchum that, luckily for us, is in distribution on DVD.

Yates did go on to make several fine pictures, including Breaking Away (1979) and The Dresser (1983) with the ever-awesome Albert Finney. His last pic was a James Spader-starrer called Curtain Call, which ain’t that auspicious but, hey, in the scheme of things it’s better than the terrifically talented John Schlesinger closing out his prestigious career with a Madonna rom-com (The Next Best Thing). A man’s gotta draw the line somewhere….

The trailer for Bullitt can be found here, but its most memorable sequence, the car chase that still keeps you on the edge of your seat 42 years later, can be found here:



There are several clips from Eddie Coyle up on YouTube, but here is the trailer, which gives a good impression of the film’s low-key tone:

"Old" meets "new" on Sixties TV

I continually love to return to the late Sixties and early Seventies on the Funhouse TV show, because that was both a most productive and imaginative period in American film and TV, and also an era when producers were scrambling to find ways to discover the “new” in American culture and possibly just throw some of it in with the “old.” Here, that lovable scamp and “Polack… with the nutty wig” (per Lenny Bruce’s jazz musician character) decided to try on a new persona in 1969, for about two minutes. Hilarity ensues. Or at least brain damage:

Daddy Cool: Deceased Artiste Bobby Farrell

I liked the work of recent shufflers-off-this-mortal-coil Gerry Rafferty and Anne Baxter, but they’ve been well covered elsewhere. I’d like to focus instead on Bobby Farrell, who was a star in popular music, but never actually made the music himself. He was described variously in his obits as “lead performer,” “lead dancer,” and “lip-synch artist” in the group Boney M. It was the last credit that made me research Farrell’s life, and I found a wealth of wonderfully kitschy Eurodisco that never really seemed to have caught on over here, as far as the mainstream (I’m sure it was played at many discos in the States by DJs aware of “continental trends”).

Farrell, who died at 61 on December 30th, was an Arruban who traveled to Norway and the Netherlands before he hit Germany and encountered wonderfully mad record producer Frank Farian, who had started to make Boney M. records himself in late ’74, with his own voice put through a filter. He needed to find a face (and dance moves) to go with his voice, so he had Farrell tour as the “lead singer” of the group, with two ladies who were also stylish lip-synchers and a fourth performer, Liz Mitchell, who had actually provided female vocals on some of the Boney M. releases.

There are two wonderful things one discovers when one researches Boney M.: first the trove of catchy-as-fuck and absolutely ridiculous disco tunes Farian came up with for the group, and secondly, the 1990 court case that allowed each member of the touring Boney M. to start his or her own version of the group! Now that is some subdivision of a prefab non-existent enterprise: allow the public faces of the concept to create their own stage versions of it, resulting in a lot of competing Boney M. touring acts, which kept the name alive in Europe right through to the present. Boney M. ran its course hit-wise in the early Eighties, but Farian later came up with several other prominent studio creations, including (you guessed it) Milli Vanilli.

The most interesting thing about Farrell’s death was that he died in St. Petersburg, Russia, where there was still evidently a strong cult for Boney M., lo the many years later. It was noted in one British tabloid that Farrell died “on the same day and in the same city” as Rasputin, who was the subject of one of Boney M.’s bugfuck brilliantly goofy tunes. Actually the Mad Monk died on December 29th (in one of the great fuck-up assassination stories of all time), but I think he might’ve, in his perverse wisdom, actually enjoyed the Boney M. tune that proclaimed him “Russia’s Greatest Love Machine!”

The only Boney M. song that I heard on AM radio back in the late Seventies here in NYC was “Rivers of Babylon,” which is indeed wildly catchy. It has been used effectively in movie soundtracks for years, most notably for me in the mostly music-less Jim Thompson adaptation Série Noire (1979) starring Patrick Deweare and directed by 2010 Deceased Artiste Alain Corneau:



The very first Boney M. hit was the memorably titled
“Baby, Do You Wanna Bump?” from 1975. However, the clip that makes me go into a state of camp overload is the minimalist disco exercise “Daddy Cool” from 1976:



In 1978, Farian released “Rivers of Babylon” backed with “Brown Girl in the Ring.” The fact that the latter song has the refrain “tra-la-la-la” over and over and over again (as well the other Boney M. hit that endlessly repeats "hi-di-hi-di-ho”) immediately makes me think of Neil Innes’ sublime “Mr. Eurovision Song Contest Man.” Then again, Innes was kidding — I’m not so sure about Farian….



I have a complete loyalty to “The Night Chicago Died” as the premier Euro Seventies song that got American history wrong but made a DAMNED fine pop record out of it, but I will begrudgingly admit that Farian’s demented take on the Ma Barker saga, inexplicably called “Ma Baker,” is pretty damned impressive too:



Some really crazy dancing from Farrell in this video, for the song “Boonoonoonoos” (don’t ask me, I can’t answer), which for some reason includes a major portion of the Van Morrison song “I Shall Sing,” which I know best from Art Garfunkel’s cover:



And since disco was all about doing strange stuff in strange ways, here’s Boney M.’s cover of the ultimate rock epic, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”:



I truly must close out with my fave ridiculous song by the group, “Rasputin.” This song, and this video, are both wildly ridiculous ("Rah-rah Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen!"), and that’s why you should watch it NOW: