Here’s the infamous live version of “Sympathy for the Devil” from the December 1969 concert at Altamont where a Stones fan was stabbed to death (caught on camera for the documentary “Gimme Shelter”). However, contrary to popular belief, the stabbing took place during “Under My Thumb,” not “Devil.” However, one of the scariest scenes in any documentary comes in at about 4:10 into this clip when a certain Hells Angel (who has been hired to provide “security”) starts eyeballing Jagger. I can’t tell if he wants to f–k Mick Jagger or kill him … or both. In any case, that look he gives Jagger is really f–king scary.
More Keith Richards for you folks tonight. This is a smokin’ live version of Keith’s signature song “Happy,” recorded on the Stones’ 1972 American tour. From the 1975 concert film “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones.” Originally from the 1972 album “Exile on Main Street.”
From the 1969 album “Let it Bleed,” comes the first Stones track with a lead vocal by Keith Richards. This is also the last recording the Stones released with Brian Jones (who plays autoharp on the track). The song appeared prominently in the notorious Michelangelo Antonioni film “Zabriskie Point.” A very nice slice of blues in the finest Stones tradition from their golden era.
From 1991’s “Trompe Le Monde,” comes the Pixies’ take on hardcore punk … at least for the first minute or so, until the song segues into a mellower, but still extremely heavy vibe that sounds more like the Pixies we know and love. One of my favorites from one of my favorites.
From the Cure’s 1981 album “Faith,” “Primary” is a song that always sounded just about right when you’re driving alone after midnight. You don’t hear it as much as their other singles, but “Primary” is a great adrenalized, bass-heavy track. It’s also interesting to see lead singer Robert Smith just starting the makeup and glam … just a few years away from the fright wig and black eye makeup.
In the early 1970s, legendary comic actor/director Jerry Lewis decided to make what he believed would be the film that would finally make critics take him seriously … and hopefully shower him with Oscars. The film was “The Day the Clown Cried” and the plot involved a clown (played by Lewis) who is sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis in World War II and the clown’s job is to entertain the children in the camp before they’re sent off to the gas chambers.
That’s a VERY … um … heavy and bizarre subject for a film … not to mention potentially tasteless. To be fair, I’m not saying that this concept would be impossible to bring off in a non-offensive manner. But it would take an artistic genius on the level of Orson Welles during the “Citizen Kane” era to do this and I’m not even sure he could pull it off.
Nobody’s entirely sure what happened next, but Lewis got into battles with his financiers and eventually, the film was never released. It’s allegedly locked in one of Lewis’s vaults somewhere and he has never shown it to anyone. The subject matter is verboten for any Lewis interview.
However, a few people have managed to see it, most notably comedian Harry Shearer who saw it in a surreptitious screening back in the 1970s. I’ve attached a clip from the Howard Stern Show from 2011 where he talked to Howard about seeing the film.
When Shearer was interviewed for a famous Spy magazine article about the film in 1992, he described it as like “if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You’d just think ‘My God, wait a minute! It’s not funny, and it’s not good, and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling.” He also said “With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh My God!’ – that’s all you can say.”
Some extremely rare and behind-the-scenes footage of the making of “The Day the Clown Cried” recently surfaced on YouTube, which can be seen here. It is so rare in fact, that the mere posting of this footage on YouTube was a major story:
A pretty good and detailed article by Justin Bozung can be found at the Mondo Film + Podcast website:
One of the most harrowing documentaries about drug abuse ever made is Michael Cain’s and Matt Redecki’s documentary “TV Junkie.” The film chronicles the downward spiral of former “Inside Edition” commentator Rick Kirkham. When Kirkham was 14 years old, he received a movie camera as a present. From 1978 through 2000, Kirkham filmed or taped everything in his life, culminating in over 5,000 hours of footage. This included everything from happy family events, sexcapades with various women (presumably filmed before he was married), and … most importantly, for the purposes of this documentary … his drug use.
The entire film is comprised of home video footage edited together with next-to-no narration. You see everything in Kirkham’s life, from his happy life with his wife and kids to his smoking crack and fretting about catching AIDS from using a dirty needle to shoot up. Kirkham is amazingly self-aware for an addict, which is arguably a big part of his problem. He just seems to think he’s too smart to let his life fall to pieces, but it does … graphically. What’s especially disturbing are the fights with his wife while his young children are watching … and crying. At several points, I seriously considered turning the film off because it was just too damn disturbing to watch. I started to get really angry, because I thought what kind of sick, narcissistic a–hole would mentally torture and manipulate his family during some of their most painful moments … and tape it? Oh, right … a crackhead. Kirkham may have been a sick narcissist for taping his (and by extension, his family’s) downward spiral. But he also has balls of steel for allowing this footage to be used to illustrate how bad addiction can get and the collateral damage such addiction has on loved ones. This is easily one of the ugliest self-portraits in movie history.
“TV Junkie” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, premiered on HBO in 2007, and then kind of dropped off the radar. However, it is now available to stream through iTunes, Amazon, VUDU, and other services. One of the most compelling films you’ll ever see. I guarantee you won’t forget it.
From the Marx Brothers’ best film “Duck Soup” comes the manifesto (set to music) of the fictional country Freedonia’s new dictator Rufus T. Firefly. Key lines: “The last man nearly ruined this place, he didn’t know what to with it. If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ’til I get through with it!”
When it was released, “Duck Soup” wasn’t as successful as other Marx Brothers films. However, contrary to popular legend it wasn’t a bomb (it was the 6th highest grossing film that year). According to Groucho Marx’s son Arthur Marx, “[MGM studio head Irving Thalberg] said the trouble with ‘Duck Soup’ is you’ve got funny gags in it, but there’s no story and there’s nothing to root for. You can’t root for the Marx Brothers because they’re a bunch of zany kooks. [Thalberg] says, ‘You gotta put a love story in your movie so there’ll be something to root for, and you have to help the lovers get together.'” And I would argue this is EXACTLY why the movies the brothers made for Thalberg pale in comparison to the earlier, more anarchic ones they made for Paramount. And it’s probably why “Duck Soup” is widely regarded as their best movie these days.
Some other fun trivia about “Duck Soup”: The residents of Fredonia, NY were upset that the use of their name as the country in the film would hurt their town’s reputation. The Marx Brothers argued that they should change the name of their town, lest it hurt the reputation of their film.
Determining the reason why Dave Chappelle walked away from a rumored $50 million deal with Comedy Central when he was ostensibly on top of the American pop culture pyramid is a parlor game many comedy and entertainment junkies have engaged in for nearly a decade. New York Times writer Jason Zinoman doesn’t really present any new theories in his insanely readable 54 page Amazon Kindle Single “Searching for Dave Chappelle,” but it’s the best profile on Chappelle’s career I’ve ever read and provides a lot of food for thought not only about comedy, but also about race, success, fame, spirituality, and happiness. Along with Joe Eszterhas’s “Heaven and Mel” and Joshua Davis’s “John McAfee’s Last Stand,” “Searching for Dave Chappelle” is a fine example of how damn good a Kindle Single can be.
And if you like what you read, you should really pick up Zinoman’s terrific book on 1970s horror films “Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror.”
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