Austin Peralta
The Beast has been remiss in posting this week, but we've been busy elsewhere. Here's our latest live reviews from the Los Angeles Magazine blog:
(2/8/13)
(1/22/13)
(2/13/13)
Charlie Haden
Friday, February 15, 2013
Moonlighting!
The Beast has been remiss in posting this week, but we've been busy elsewhere. Here's our latest live reviews from the Los Angeles Magazine blog:
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Silkworm [UPDATED]
AN ADDENDUM TO OUR PREVIOUS POST:
One of the final bits of wisdom in Searching for Sugar Man comes from one of Rodriguez's construction buddies, who compares him to a silkworm: "Someone who takes the raw material of life and transforms it into something beautiful, something transcendent, something eternal."
It reminded the Beast of a scene from the 2010 documentary Catfish, which Sugar Man somewhat resembles. In the former, the husband of a lonely, frustrated artist who has created curtains of internet-born mystery around herself compares her to the titular fish, which ships transporting cod from Asia to North America would throw into the tanks to keep the captive cod agile: "There are those people who are catfish in life, and they keep you on your toes, keep you guessing, keep you thinking, keep you fresh....and I thank god for the catfish because we'd be boring and dull if we didn't have someone nipping at our fins."
It's a definition which has now entered the modern lexicon thanks to the film's recent MTV spinoff. But the Beast thinks there's another type out there -- the Silkworm, someone who quietly transforms life into art in isolation from the mainstream. What's more, there's been a particular type of "Silkworm project" that we've noticed over the last decade or so -- and most of them are music documentaries. They usually involve tracking down an unappreciated or forgotten cult artist. Here's our top five Silkworm projects:
Jandek on Corwood (2003) Probably our favorite and the creepiest of the lot. This doc is notable for being about an experimental freak-folk artist from Texas so willfully obscure that he doesn't even appear in the film. (We only hear his voice from a lone phone interview.)
You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story (2005) Name-checked as an influence by Beck and the founders of Sub Pop Records, Gary Wilson recorded exactly one 1977 album of bizarre experimental cocktail jazz before dropping off the face of the earth. Probably the most similar to Sugar Man in structure.
Paul Williams Still Alive (2011) OK, this guy was pretty unavoidable in the '70s, when he wrote hit songs for The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, David Bowie (??) and Kermit the Frog. (Not to mention about 287 Tonight Show appearances.) But then he sort of disappeared into coke and alcohol addiction. Filmmaker Stephen Kessler charts his own cloying "search" for one of his heroes, who is now clean and sober and President of ASCAP.
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004) Jessica Yu's gorgeous, disquieting and groundbreaking documentary uncovers the itinerant life of a disturbed Chicago artist who was an "outsider" in the most expansive sense of the term: The man lived his entire life in anonymity and his art was discovered only when they were cleaning out his one-room apartment.
Mingering Mike (2007) A joint book-art-film project centering around the album cover art of a fictional 1960's soul/funk singer named "Mingering Mike." A true inspiration to those of us who created album cover artwork for our own phantom music careers. (Guilty!) The amateur artist who created Mingering Mike has even released a full-length album called Super Gold Greatest Hits.
UPDATE (3/9/13): Wow, talk about "serendipity-doo," turns out there was an actual post-punk band from Chicago called Silkworm and there's a new documentary out about them with commentaries by Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy, Steve Albini, Clint Conley and more. We haven't seen it yet, but check out the trailer below:
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
The Music Detectives
Lost my heart
When I found it
It had turned to dead, black coal
Silver magic ships, you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet maryjane...
Sugar Man, you're the answer
The lyrics and music were composed in the late 1960's by a second-generation Mexican day laborer named Sixto Díaz Rodriguez, who had been busking around the anonymous taverns and dives of Detroit's bombed-out Wharfs Riverside district. He released just two nil-selling albums -- Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) -- before being dropped by his label and, ostensibly, dropping off the face of the earth. Rumors of his demise were profligate and ugly: he blew his brains out onstage; no wait, he set himself on fire onstage; he died in prison; he succumbed to a drug overdose.
They were also wholly inaccurate. As Malik Bendjelloul 's quietly startling documentary Searching For Sugar Man, reveals, Sixto Rodriguez is alive and well and living in the same small house in downtown Detroit that he's lived in for 40 years. He still cleans people's lawns, knocks down sheds, dabbles as a carpenter and construction worker. If he plays any music, it appears, it's by himself in a modest room that's heated with a wood-burning stove. Until 1998, he apparently remained completely unaware that half a planet away in South Africa, his two forgotten albums had made him, in the words of one giddy admirer, "bigger than Elvis."
There are many lucky coincidences and convergences in Searching for Sugar Man, which was justly nominated for Best Documentary Feature for this year's Academy Awards. If you set the remarkable set of circumstances and the Sherlock Holmes detective story shaped by the film aside, the whole project would not have worked had Rodriguez's music not stood the tests of time so well. Like his fellow Detroiters The Stooges, Rodriguez's music reflected the gritty harshness of urban life in America while not being directly about it. It carried grains of soul and R&B -- the label's founder was an ex-Motown executive -- and electric folk. ("Soul folk" might be a more accurate description.) Rodriguez's lyrics -- elliptical, metaphoric, removed, oblique -- unmoored the songs from any time capsule. Only the occasional syrupy string section, tinkle of a xylophone or bloat of easy-listening horns could enable one to nail it down as the early 1970s.
It was this quality that allowed Rodriguez's songs to float halfway across the earth and settle in bootleg form in the old vinyl shops in Cape Town, where they were memorized rallying cries for a generation of young, mostly white South Africans who were beginning to question to the inequalities of Apartheid. One of the pivotal players in Rodriguez's unlikely "comeback" -- a record-shop owner named Stephen Segerman, dubbed "Sugar" by his compatriots -- testifies that the song told him and his that "It was okay to be angry at your society." The P.W.Botha regime soon caught on and certain rabble-rousing tracks like "This Is Not A Song, It's An Outburst, Or: The Establishment Blues" were literary scratched with sharp tools to keep DJs from playing them on state-owned radio.
One of the rare gaps of Bendjelloul's film is that it never directly addresses why the radicalized generations who responded to Rodriguez's Aquarian-age protests seemed to be mostly white; they included including university students, journalists, aficionados and musicians who made up the subsequent "Afrikaners" music movement. It almost invites this query in shots of adoring crowds at Rodriguez's triumphant March 1998 "comeback" concert in Cape Town in March 1998, which show virtually no black faces. It's one of the rare gaps in the film that explains why this was, and it bodes the questions: Did any black South Africans respond to Rodriguez? (Follow-up: Does Charlize Theron like Rodriguez?)
But when the film showcases the music itself, often with intricate animation or foreboding shots of burnt-out Detroit, does it truly come alive. Suddenly, the subtle swell of French horns buoying the transcendent "Crucify Your Mind" or the bed of strings that uplift the devastating lyrics of "Cause" aren't cheesy reminders of a studio era best left in the past but lift these simple, skeletal songs to greatness. Everybody involved in this music at the outset -- the producers, the engineers, the musicians, the artist himself -- did everything right. We feel their confusion and heartbreak when the first album sold, by one estimation, six copies in America. Steve Rowland, who produced Coming From Reality, plays "Cause" and notes that Rodriguez's opening line "I lost my job two week before Christmas" wound up actually happening when A&M Records dropped him just before the holidays. "Nobody was even invested in listening to this," the baffled man says before practically breaking into tears at the rawness of the music. "How can that be?"
Surrounding the heartbroken and the jubilant alike is Rodriguez himself -- a little frailer, a little more bent, still dressed in all-black with dark sunglasses like some lost link between Johnny Cash and José Feliciano -- who despite his "resurrection" maintains a sort of monkish life of willful poverty and quietly busying himself in community politics that the filmmakers allude to as being almost Christlike. He cannot -- or will not -- reflect on his situation. "I don't know if it would have been better," he says after a question about how his life would have been different if he had been more famous with typical stoicism. "But it's certainly a thought." Even reporters notice his reticence when confronted with what to them is the ultimate question: The "miracle" of his final, long earned acceptance. ("Most of us die without ever having come anywhere close to that sort of magic," one marvels with typical overheatedness. "Home is acceptance.") The film alludes to something beyond this question, something that Sixto Rodriguez, in all his quiet reticence and deferential dry humor and gnostic life of simple things, may know but won't divulge. It was, after all, his hard-earned path. He lived silently amongst the filth and chaos for over 40 years without once picking up a gun and going postal on the rest of us.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
The Onion's History of Skewering Jazz
...and you know what? Most of it is pretty accurate.
From The Onion Book of Known Knowledge:
JAZZ …did you hear that? Listen again. Hear it? C’mon, now, you’ve got to really listen…there—there it is. That right there, my friends, was a beautiful quarter-note rest. Music to my ears. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Man, I didn’t hear anything. What’s that got to do with jazz? Turn up the volume, for Pete’s sake!” Well, believe it or not, that’s exactly the point—and volume ain’t got nothin’ to do with it! You see, just as important to jazz as the notes we hear—the audible melodic, harmonic, and percussive elements that really make it swing—are the spaces between the notes, the notes we don’t hear, if you will. Without these silences, jazz would lack definition, texture, mood; in a way, jazz would be robbed of its very essence! Completely blows your mind when you stop to think about it, right? It’s a total yin-and-yang thing, like what negative space is to art, but in this case the canvas is silence and notes are the paint. Nothing is actually everything, and vice versa. Get it? And if you want to break it down further and get really philosophical, a genius improviser like, say, Clifford Brown was actually consciously thinking about what he wasn’t playing just as much as he thought about what he was playing. It’s wild, man. Just totally wild. You know, John Coltrane is actually the perfect example of how crucial silence is to jazz music, and before you say, “Oh, brother, not that Coltrane guy again!” just hold on a second, and this will all make sense. Now, we’re all familiar with Coltrane’s virtuosity and the sheer cascades of notes he would produce early on in his career, the whole “sheets of sound” incarnation that we’ve already discussed at length. But it wasn’t until he became more influenced by modal music and, consequently, the immense value of space and silence, that he really reached his full potential and began composing these incredibly affecting jazz soundscapes, arguably some of the best music of his tragically too-short life (heroin is no walk in the park, folks, take it from someone who knows), and yes, I’m aware that ’Trane died of cancer, but the point still stands, okay? Anyway, with that in mind, let’s be quiet and listen again…and don’t be embarrassed to close your eyes, like I’m doing…now, let that sink in for a minute…pretty cool, huh?
From The Onion Book of Known Knowledge:
JAZZ …did you hear that? Listen again. Hear it? C’mon, now, you’ve got to really listen…there—there it is. That right there, my friends, was a beautiful quarter-note rest. Music to my ears. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Man, I didn’t hear anything. What’s that got to do with jazz? Turn up the volume, for Pete’s sake!” Well, believe it or not, that’s exactly the point—and volume ain’t got nothin’ to do with it! You see, just as important to jazz as the notes we hear—the audible melodic, harmonic, and percussive elements that really make it swing—are the spaces between the notes, the notes we don’t hear, if you will. Without these silences, jazz would lack definition, texture, mood; in a way, jazz would be robbed of its very essence! Completely blows your mind when you stop to think about it, right? It’s a total yin-and-yang thing, like what negative space is to art, but in this case the canvas is silence and notes are the paint. Nothing is actually everything, and vice versa. Get it? And if you want to break it down further and get really philosophical, a genius improviser like, say, Clifford Brown was actually consciously thinking about what he wasn’t playing just as much as he thought about what he was playing. It’s wild, man. Just totally wild. You know, John Coltrane is actually the perfect example of how crucial silence is to jazz music, and before you say, “Oh, brother, not that Coltrane guy again!” just hold on a second, and this will all make sense. Now, we’re all familiar with Coltrane’s virtuosity and the sheer cascades of notes he would produce early on in his career, the whole “sheets of sound” incarnation that we’ve already discussed at length. But it wasn’t until he became more influenced by modal music and, consequently, the immense value of space and silence, that he really reached his full potential and began composing these incredibly affecting jazz soundscapes, arguably some of the best music of his tragically too-short life (heroin is no walk in the park, folks, take it from someone who knows), and yes, I’m aware that ’Trane died of cancer, but the point still stands, okay? Anyway, with that in mind, let’s be quiet and listen again…and don’t be embarrassed to close your eyes, like I’m doing…now, let that sink in for a minute…pretty cool, huh?
SAMPLINGS FROM THE ARCHIVE:
Five-Disc Jazz Anthology Still Unopened (6/11/03)
Friday, January 25, 2013
My Dream Date with Petra Haden
[photo by Steven Perilloux]
The Los Angeles indie-music world has its crushes, its chanteuses, its artists who make hearts go flippety-flop, but Petra Haden may be in a special category all by herself. At 41, she is L.A.'s perpetual little sister and a member of SoCal royalty: along with twin sisters Tanya and Rachel (with whom she's currently recording an album of old Louvin Brothers and Carter Family chestnuts) and brother Josh, she's one of the many talented offspring of Charles Edward Haden, one of modern jazz's most mercurial bassists; she's sister-in-law to Jack Black and BFFs with the likes of Mike Watt, Bill Frisell and Sean Ono Lennon; she's sung with the L.A. Philharmonic, toured with The Decemberists, and sat in with actress Megan Mullally on everything from torch songs to Cypress Hill covers.
She's also a bit of a glamourpuss. Just check out the cover for her new solo album Petra Goes To The Movies, which dropped Tuesday:
A sequel of sorts to her 2005 record Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out, where she recreated an entire classic album by Pete Townshend & Co. using just her multi-tracked voice and strange powers of aural mimicry, Movies is a (mostly) a cappella song cycle constructed from sixteen fragments of scores from such films as Psycho, 8½, Big Night, and The Social Network. It is Haden's valentine to Filmdom's great composers and dedicated to, in her words, "all composers around the world who help make images on a screen come to life." She even called in some of her famous friends like Frisell, pianist Brad Mehldau and—for the first time on one of her solo records—Haden paterfamilias.
Recently the Beast sat down with "Pet" at Du-Par's diner at the L.A. Farmer's Market to discuss her lifelong love affair with these invaluable artists who most moviegoers couldn't pick out of a police lineup. And we tried not to make an ass out of ourselves.
Do you think you're musical outlook has been influenced by growing up in a movie town?
I don't know, maybe so. It certainly seems like I would be. When catch those old Hollywood films on Turner Classic Movies, it reminds me of when I was eight or nine and my dad would take us to the Movieland Wax Museum. I was obsessed with how weird all the Hollywood stars looked in their hair and clothes and makeup. There were even some figures like Joan Crawford or Christopher Reeve who didn't look anything like how they did in real life. I thought, "Wouldn't they take the time to get it right?" I wish I was a sculptor because then I could work there. I'd put as much concentration into that as I put in my music. [laughs] Music is what I'm better at.
Do you like those old noir music scores?
Oh yes. My dad would call me, "You have to turn on Turner Classic Movies; they're showing The Big Sleep!" And of course the music is the first thing that jumps out at me. The same with David Raskin's music for that film Laura. I wanted to buy that score right when I heard it! Recently, I saw The Old Man and The Sea, which I know is not a noir film, but I noticed that the music was going on throughout the whole movie. That's what I love about those old movies, that the music is like a constant companion. Even in scenes that aren't particularly dramatic, like a woman checking her watch, you hear the music as a comment on that action.
Sort of like the old classic cartoons...
Yeah! Since I've been little I'd hear Carl Stallings' music for Looney Tunes and I thought, "Man this is deep!"
"Deep"?
The music was just so funny and sophisticated and silly and smart. Those guys were so ahead of their time. It moves along so quickly and there's so much going on. I remember seeing it as a kid thinking, "Wow, I want to see this performed in concert!"
You've had some previous experience doing music for films and TV commericals. Did that in any way inform this current project?
Yeah. When I was recording my first solo album Imaginaryland, I was listening to a lot of movie scores. There's this movie called Delusion that I was obsessed with because this band Miranda Sex Garden had some of their songs in it. Their music was a cappella with some instruments, and it reminded me of Steve Reich. So I covered a song of theirs for Imaginaryland and that sort of put it my head: "Well, as long as I'm on this roll I might as well go ahead and do that Bach piece I love so much." Then there was this movie called Green Card...
The one with Gerard Depardieu?
Yeah. I love Andie MacDowell. [laughter] There was an Enya song they had at the end credits called "Watermark" that just blew me away. So I always related my favorite music to the movies. That's when I got planted in my brain: "Why does every time I see the move I want to sing every part or be in the orchestra playing that score?" For me, playing the score for Leonard Rosenman’s "Rebel Without a Cause" or one of the Looney Tunes cartoons would be pure ecstasy." So I thought, "I’ll just pretend I’m my own orchestra and sing all the parts.”
That's the approach you took with The Who Sell Out. Were you unprepared for all the attention you got from that?
Yeah. When I was recording my first solo album Imaginaryland, I was listening to a lot of movie scores. There's this movie called Delusion that I was obsessed with because this band Miranda Sex Garden had some of their songs in it. Their music was a cappella with some instruments, and it reminded me of Steve Reich. So I covered a song of theirs for Imaginaryland and that sort of put it my head: "Well, as long as I'm on this roll I might as well go ahead and do that Bach piece I love so much." Then there was this movie called Green Card...
The one with Gerard Depardieu?
Yeah. I love Andie MacDowell. [laughter] There was an Enya song they had at the end credits called "Watermark" that just blew me away. So I always related my favorite music to the movies. That's when I got planted in my brain: "Why does every time I see the move I want to sing every part or be in the orchestra playing that score?" For me, playing the score for Leonard Rosenman’s "Rebel Without a Cause" or one of the Looney Tunes cartoons would be pure ecstasy." So I thought, "I’ll just pretend I’m my own orchestra and sing all the parts.”
That's the approach you took with The Who Sell Out. Were you unprepared for all the attention you got from that?
Yeah, I don't know really why it got the attention it did. I still kind of want to re-record it in a real studio, but that's the past and I just love it how it is. It shows a certain spontaneity, that I didn't care to make it sound perfect, which is what I like about it. Of course after it came out I was beating myself up about it...I wanted the music to be right, that's what I get really paranoid about. But it was so exciting for me to have all this positive reaction to a record that I started five years earlier. Then in the middle of recording it I got hit by a car and that slowed me down...
As getting hit by car will do, I hear.
Yeah, but once I felt better, Mike Watt would call me: "Pet! How's it goin'? You finish that record yet?" "No Mike, but I will, I promise!" I finally finished it and played it for him and he said, "Now you should put it out." "Put it out? I recorded it when I was sick, I got some of the lyrics wrong because I wasn't really paying attention and a I didn't know how to work the 8-track!" [laughs] Luckily, Bar None [Records] heard it and they liked it just how it was.
Was there any pressure to do a follow-up or sequel of sorts?
Not really, although Pete Townshend called me to tell me how much he liked The Who record, and he suggested I cover an album by the Village People.
The VILLAGE PEOPLE?
No, no, I'm sorry. I meant that record by The Kinks...
"We are the Village Green Preservation Society"?
Yeah, that one. [laughter] Although the Village People would be interesting, wouldn't it? I know people asked me a lot if I was going to do a solo record with my own original music, which I want to, but the original songs I write come from working out melodies on Garage Band or something. Like with Imaginaryland, I was still figuring out how to use my 4-track, and those songs just developed organically. I didn't write out anything, I just sang, and out of that a melody or a bass line would sort of reveal itself. Like for the movie Hurlyburly, the composer Steve Lindsey and I developed the song "A Small Resurrection" with instruments and I remember thinking, "Oh man, do I need a band!"
Not surprisingly, your selections for Petra Goes to the Movies are pretty eclectic. I was excited when I saw you included that Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross song "Hand Covers Bruise" from The Social Network. That's the tune that plays in the beginning when Zuckerberg is running from the bar back to his dorm to invent Facebook, right?
Not surprisingly, your selections for Petra Goes to the Movies are pretty eclectic. I was excited when I saw you included that Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross song "Hand Covers Bruise" from The Social Network. That's the tune that plays in the beginning when Zuckerberg is running from the bar back to his dorm to invent Facebook, right?
I loved that movie but it was the music that kept paying more attention to. The music so informed those scenes and what they meant. That was the last song I recorded for the album. It's so simple yet so amazing: that one note just hovering over this simple piano line. I felt a sense of history when I heard it -- like the whole world is about to change and no one knows it yet.
It sort of reminded me of John Carpenter's music for Halloween, especially in that opening scene where young Michael Myers creeps up on his sister.
Yeah, that synthesizer part with the piano over it. I see that now!
Do you like scary-movie soundtracks, by the way?
Oh yeah! After I did the theme from Psycho I thought "I should do something so shockingly scary that it will blow people's minds." My engineer Justin Burnett suggested, "Why don't you do The Exorcist?" So I did [Mike Oldfield's] song from that movie but I had to leave it off the record.
Do you like scary-movie soundtracks, by the way?
Oh yeah! After I did the theme from Psycho I thought "I should do something so shockingly scary that it will blow people's minds." My engineer Justin Burnett suggested, "Why don't you do The Exorcist?" So I did [Mike Oldfield's] song from that movie but I had to leave it off the record.
Wait, you did "Tubular Bells" but didn't put it on the record?
Yeah, I know. [laughs] I had so many songs by that point. When I added "Hand Covers Bruise" I think it bumped the track list up to sixteen songs. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to do twenty!
Are you planning on releasing any of the b-sides online, like you did with your cover of "God Only Knows."
I should. I'll have to discuss that with the label. I also did some of David Shire's score for The Conversation with Gene Hackman, which is another one of those deep movies I love so much. I watched it and thought, "Man, they got the best composer, the best producer, the best director [Francis Ford Coppola], the best actors -- how did they get it so right?" Can we have more of that happening now, please?
What was the first song you did for the record?
I think it was Ennio Morricone's score for Cinema Paradiso...My dad covered it with Pat Metheny a long time ago. It's an important song for my family and it's a part of me, so I felt I needed to do it.
You also cover Bernard Herrmann's "God's Lonely Man" from Taxi Driver. Which one is that?
It's in the scene where De Niro is driving though Times Square and he's reflecting on how disgusting and gross the streets of New York are -- "someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum of the streets," that one -- and he says, "I'm God's lonely man." The whole time he's saying this you hear this slow, pulsating chord that just builds and builds and then the ending chord comes -- BOOM! -- and then it starts over again. Listening to it feels a lot like a wave. Those are the easiest to sing for me, because I relate to things like that. You know how when you're in a theater and the lights go own and before the film starts there's the studio logos with the animation and the music, like for "Tristar Entertainment" or "Miramax Pictures"? I always wanted to cover those little studio jingles because some of them are so beautiful.
Do you have a favorite?
The one for Columbia Pictures [sings the theme] It's a lot like "God's Lonely Man" in that there's sort of a building of notes that sound like waves and there's always dissonant notes that I really like -- the song "The Planet Krypton" [from Superman] has that too. I actually wanted to open the record with me covering one of those studio-theme songs, but we decided to use "Rebel Without a Cause" instead.
So there's a method to the track sequencing...
Yeah, I'm so bad with sequencing, but I'd go hiking and I would listen to the record in different playlists and orders. I had sent my version of "Rebel" to Pat Metheny just for him to check out and he said he loved how powerful it was. He said: "Well, you should start your record with that."
The NYU Symphony Conducts "Rebel Without A Cause"
Which song was the hardest to re-create?
The beginning of "Rebel Without A Cause" is really hard to do...I actually wasn't going to do it because it was so challenging. The melody is really easy to remember and sing, but you have to get past that crazy beginning. It doesn't last long, so I thought, "Whether I like it or not, I'm gonna figure this out."
You also chose a song from the film My Bodyguard. Weren't you like seven when that came out?
I cry every time I see that movie, especially when Linderman reveals the hard life he had groing up. And the music really made me understand that. [The composer] Dave Grusin also did the music for Tootsie. I had no idea I liked Dave Grusin so much before I did this record. [laughter] They should do a remake of My Bodyguard, especially with all of the bullying going on now. It would be perfect. I actually reached out to the agent of Adam Baldwin, who played Linderman, because I wanted him to be in a photo for the record. I did photo stills from eleven movies, like Superman, Cinema Paradiso, and Goldfinger, and I wanted to have that shot of Chris Makepeace with Linderman standing behind him -- "You should talk to my bodyguard" -- and Matt Dillon and his friends are all pissed off. Either that or the shot of the two of them on the bike. I emailed Adam Baldwin's agent -- "Hi, I'm kind of a nobody but I'm doing this record of movie themes..." -- but no one ever wrote back.
You also chose a song from the film My Bodyguard. Weren't you like seven when that came out?
I cry every time I see that movie, especially when Linderman reveals the hard life he had groing up. And the music really made me understand that. [The composer] Dave Grusin also did the music for Tootsie. I had no idea I liked Dave Grusin so much before I did this record. [laughter] They should do a remake of My Bodyguard, especially with all of the bullying going on now. It would be perfect. I actually reached out to the agent of Adam Baldwin, who played Linderman, because I wanted him to be in a photo for the record. I did photo stills from eleven movies, like Superman, Cinema Paradiso, and Goldfinger, and I wanted to have that shot of Chris Makepeace with Linderman standing behind him -- "You should talk to my bodyguard" -- and Matt Dillon and his friends are all pissed off. Either that or the shot of the two of them on the bike. I emailed Adam Baldwin's agent -- "Hi, I'm kind of a nobody but I'm doing this record of movie themes..." -- but no one ever wrote back.
"You should talk to my bodyguard."
For Goldfinger, did you paint yourself gold like Shirley Eaton?
Yeah! I wanted to do what did with The Who record, like that shot of me in the bathtub with the beans. I thought. "Why not just go all-out with this one?"
Petra as Janet Leigh
That theme from Goldfinger is a pretty iconic song to boot. How did you tackle that one?
I wasn't sure if I wanted to sing the lyrics or just do it instrumentally with my voice. I tried it a few different ways -- because how could I possibly keep up with Shirley Bassey? I ended up singing it an octave lower, which I'm not used to doing. But it worked and I liked it. I even have a version I did as a joke where I sing it like Edith Bunker -- "GAWWDLFINGAHHH!" [laughter]
There's a smattering of foreign films scores on here too, like Fellini's 8½...
That another crazy movie that's all over the place...I love how mysterious it was, and the score is almost like circus or carnival music. I wanted to do something off the wall like that. It's so crazy and wacky it could be a Looney Tunes song now that I think about it...My friend Woody Jackson, who recorded it, had a taken-apart trumpet hanging on his wall and he let me sing the song though the mouthpiece. Jut to get that brassy feel that the original has. Hal Willner suggested I do the song "Carlotta's Gallop" because he's a big Nino Rota fan.
What was the first movie you remember seeing, by the way?
I think it was Benji.
This is the first solo record of yours that your dad plays on. What took so long?
He always wanted to play on something of mine, but it never seemed to work out...I played him my version of "It Might Be You" [from Tootsie] and he said, "Man, that sure could use some bass! If you can think of anyone who’s interested..." [laughs] “I said, ‘Daaaad, of course! I want you to play on it, it'd be perfect!" But then he heard my version of "This Is Not America," which Pat Metheny had written for The Falcon and The Snowman and my dad covered with the Liberation Music Orchestra, and was like, "This is the one I want to play on." He did and he made it a hundred times better. It made sense. Every single note he plays is beautiful.
Petra Haden and her 18-voice choir will be bringing Petra Goes to the Movies
to life in selected L.A. dates in the upcoming weeks, including shows at
The Getty on 1/26 and the First Unitarian Church on 2/9. Not to be missed!
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
What'd We Miss?
My there was quite a bit of it, wasn't there? Welcome back my friends, to the Blogroll that never ends. Oh, and Happy Birthday, Django Reinhardt. (The "D" is silent.)
(Spin)
(L.A. Magazine)
(Pitchfork Media)
(SF Gate)
(Salon)
(NPR)
(Pop + Hiss)
(Twitter)
(New York Times)
(A Blog Supreme)
(Flavorwire)
(Portlandia)
(Pacific Standard)
(The Jazz Chill Corner)
(West Coast Sound)
(L.A. Weekly)
(NPR)
(David Fricke's Alternate Takes)
(The Quietus)
(A.V. Club)
(YouTube)
(Just Outside)
(Dangerous Minds)
(The Creators Project)
(New Music Box)
(Blu Notes)
(Buzzband L.A./Give It Forward)
(Destination: OUT)
(Wax Poetics)
(L.A. Record)
(Pitchfork TV)
(NextBop)
(On An Overgrown Path)
(Do The Math)
(Burning Ambulance)
(Jazz Beyond Jazz)
(Wax Poetics)
(Detroit Free Press)
(Cult of SOC)
(Indiana Public Media)
(Burning Ambulance)
(MetalJazz)
(Perfect Sound Forever)
(VICE)
(Point of Departure)
(Austin Chronicle)
(Musicians Are...)
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