Katharine Hepburn, flying Howard's plane, "Howard, there's a rather alarming mountain heading our way."

(l to r) Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), Hughes Press Agent Johnny Meyer (Adam Scott),

Errol Flynn (Jude Law) and Kathrarine Hepburn (Kate Blachett) 
at Hollywood's Coconut Grove circa 1927

Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) is a real triumph from many perspectives, but Kate Blanchett's superb portrayal of Katharine Hepburn alone makes this a "must see" film for fans of early Hollywood.

Primarily, The Aviator is the story of the sides of Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) we should know, and by and large, don't. Hughes started out as the renegade heir to the tool bit fortune behind the oil drill bit that revolutionized production in the Texas Boom era. Hughes takes his whiz kid business talent, considerable capital and fearless hubris to California, combining one passion, aviation, with a very expensive hobby, making films.

Hughes and Chief Lieutenant Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly)

As aviation innovator, he helped steer the course of modern aviation. In making the films Hell's Angels (1930) (his aerial war epic), Scarface (1932) (his classic gangster film) and The Outlaw (1943) (his guilty pleasure effort), Hughes showed Hollywood and the Breen Office that he wouldn't be intimidated.

Though not understood at the time, all Hughes' manic bluster -- thrown primarily at commercial aviation, with plenty left for Hollywood and his splashy love life -- would ultimately cost the mogul his sanity. As he became more accomplished -- and challenged -- a combination of obsessive compulsive disorder with paranoiac fear of disease crippled Hughes' interpersonal and home life.


The hand of director Scorsese is easy to see in the attention to detail and quality of the production. Take this montage of flying sequences from the film set to a great piece of music,

Between the Roaring Twenties and the post-war 40s, Hughes helped shaped the direction and look of modern aviation. And the story well told makes one hell of a ride on film.

Kathrarine Hepburn (Kate Blachett)

Hughes defending himself before a Senate committee accusing him of being a war profiteer
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Solomon Burke: "I Gotta Be With You" (2010)

Solomon Burke was preaching in his family church by the time he was seven years old. And all these years later, you can still here the proof in his music. That early preaching was back in the late 1940s, as Burke turns 72 this month. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Burke.

Hal David, Requiescat in Pace

Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick and Hal David

Before I got my first stereo in 1970 at the age of 13 and discovered Top 40 radio pop and rock, my only source of music was my dad's AM radio station of soft pop and too much talk. Of the few songs that grabbed me, most were written by Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David. Dionne Warwick built her career on them. Solid melodies and smart, poetic lyrics saved me until I found rock 'n' roll.

Thanks Hal.

Burt Bacharach (written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David) accompanying Dionne Warwick on 

I Say a Little Prayer

Meandering Musical Musings

A Guest Contributor Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous

The Go-Go's

Last week I was music surfing on Youtube, at the back of my mind was the thought that 80s music ladies were hotter than what we see today. I ran across some interesting stuff.

First up, the Bangles, tearing it up during this concert footage.

http://youtu.be/X0ShN1QTtfo

I love that they are not half naked, and there are no dancers. They just perform. But they look like they are having almost as much fun as the crowd. Some great 80s big hair. Susanna Hoffs has the eyes of an anime character.
Here she is, front and center, in a fairly recent performance, at age 52. The years have been more than kind.

http://youtu.be/5u56TSu2240

Interlude: I once heard WWE chairman Vince McMahon make the distinction between 'sports' and 'sports entertainment'. This was eye-opening, once I extended the idea to the difference between 'music' and 'music-entertainment'. I guess I prefer music. Particularly to the often vulgar antics of modern music entertainment.

Speaking of girl bands, and having fun, here are the Go-Go's, with comedian Jack Black as front man. It's big goof, and everyone is having a blast.

http://youtu.be/wQr6eweWd9Y

What's missing from the clip above is Belinda Carlisle. I mentioned that 80s ladies were hot, check this out. Belinda is dressed quite demurely in this video, and she is still impossibly hot.

Jumping back to off-beat cameo appearances in a music video, check out the driver in this one:

http://youtu.be/dWC2-MFwWr8

If you like music entertainment (guilty pleasure), there is a time and place for it. It's called Glee. Here's a clip with Heather Morris, aka HeMo. She is a world class dancer, funny, and can carry a tune.

http://youtu.be/vvzMb8M23P0

Wrapping up with the Pixies

http://youtu.be/gSQJAiJH9Qo

and Sonic Youth, just because. Below is one of the greatest covers ever recorded.

http://youtu.be/Xs9eh82buls

Only thing missing from this concert set was you, but you were here in my thoughts.

At Twenty, Little Stevie No More

When, in 1970, Stevie Wonder's self-produced (first-effort) single -- Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours -- hit, the song exploded, not only on the black charts, but on the Top 40 (pop) charts as well. Well named house band at Hitsville, U.S.A, the Funk Brothers -- with Stevie on his best released vocal -- created a  rock solid Detroit soul /funk / R&B single and a with a uniquely raw Stevie vocal. Little Stevie had grown up.

I fell in love with it.

For me, this single, as an artist profile of Wonder at Rolling Stone.com wrote calling it the perfect fusion of pop and soul, rock and funk. I'd call it the ultimate crossover record. 

The Motown magic still has me as a disciple.

"There But for the Grace of God ..."

by Guest Contributor Barbara Washburn

Grace Slick and Janis Joplin

(photo credit: Jim Marshall)

They were friendly competitors for Queen of the San Francisco rock scene, good friends who didn't take it too seriously. One was beautiful, with a contralto voice, the other, not so much a babe but she had the pipes. She could literally strike two notes at once. Above is a famous photograph of the two of them, taken on a hot San Francisco afternoon. (Another photo from the same photo shoot is available on Amazon as a poster.) Janis is in a hat and heavy coat, Grace in a Girl Scout uniform. Yet rock was still very much a boy's club, and these two felt more like accessories than players.

And then came Monterey in '67. Janis, with her rendition of Ball and Chain slammed her head against that glass ceiling of the boy's club and shattered it.

Once she'd pushed her way through the hole she created, she pulled Grace up, and there they stood, the undisputed Queen and her heir. Rock changed that afternoon in Monterey, but of all the performances recorded, Janis's still blows one away.

Janis left Big Brother; Grace remained with the Jefferson Airplane. It was a huge risk for Janis, going out on her own, both psychologically and professionally. The experience scarred her, but she persevered, there was music to be made, pain to be articulated in a way that wrenched the heart, a boy's club who needed to see her thumb her nose at them.

All too quickly came Woodstock in the summer of 1969. With all the delays, the musicians had to entertain themselves somehow, and Janis drank so much that her manager, Albert Grossman, refused to allow the footage of her performance into the original film; a wonderful Janis segment is included in the extended version of Woodstock. The Airplane, scheduled to go on at nine, came on at six in the morning, spending their time doing so many drugs Grace Slick later said "I don't know how we performed." But she did, with her rendition of White Rabbit sublime in its own way.

Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (Grace Slick, Woodstock, Aug 17 1969)

Though Grace didn't realize it at the time, she had written and performed the signature song for the slogan "Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll." Naturally she had to perform it at Woodstock, what with all the bad acid going around, it was a form of comfort as well as awe. Blitzed out of her mind, drop dead gorgeous, she told them to follow Alice, it would be all right.

It couldn't last much longer after Woodstock, though no one could see it at the time. On the fourth of October, 1970, Janis died. She was in LA, recording her finest album, Pearl, with a band befitting her amazing talent. She'd been clean for awhile, but for whatever reason, she reached out to a dealer, who delivered almost 100% pure heroin. She didn't know that, just as she didn't know she was dying when she went out to the lobby to get change to buy cigarettes. She died after returning to her room, the change and the pack of cigarettes still clutched in her hand.

When asked that day about Janis's death, Grace said "There but for the grace of God go I."

The boy's club had forever gone coed, thanks to these two women. One can still hear Janis's influence in musicians today, from Robert Plant to Debbie Harry and others. Listen to Plant sing. He owes but will never acknowledge a debt to Joplin's vocals.

One can only long for the music Janis would have made, had her personal demons not been so overwhelming. All one has to do is listen to the acoustic version of Me and Bobby McGee to understand why the song's writer Kris Kristofferson said, upon hearing it, "She owns that song now." His tribute to her is on his The Silver Tongued Devil album, entitled Epitaph Black and Blue. There is no more poignant commentary on the price of breaking the glass ceiling and standing there virtually alone.

As for Gracie, she lived, though sometimes one wonders how. Sober now, she's turned her talents to visual art, and they are prodigious talents. Her paintings and drawings of her dead contemporaries are beautiful and insightful. She calls one she did of Janis "Wood Nymph", talking about a side of Janis she saw, the playful little imp. Grace's portrait of Jim Morrison is called "Sacrifice to Morpheus", a look at his dark side. Grace also painted Janis and her in the forest. Her work is a look backwards and an insightful visual commentary. She has no illusions about Woodstock, no romanticized view of it, though she is reverential about Monterey.

It couldn't have lasted, those few years that gave us such great musicians who celebrated drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And it will never come around again, anomaly that it was, for the hangover is too great. Its end began with Altamont, and the door was slammed on it on May 4, 1970, though it took a little perspective to see that. But while it was there, while it was good, oh man, what a trip. And when it decayed, it was inevitable. The reasons are many, take your pick: "suits" who saw dollar signs and signed all these groups to their label, others who exploited the concepts for their own purposes, ala Manson, a world that was growing older and we along with it. Pick one or make up your own.

But out of it came two women, who with unbridled determination, broke that ceiling, burst through the boy's club door, and gave us some incredible music while allowing many more fine female musicians to follow them. Their musical influences still reverberate today, and the legacy of their music will not fade away. In keeping with the yin-yang, the magic both believed in to some extent, one lived and one died. I hardly think the balance was worth it in this case.

"The Hustler" (1961, dir. Robert Rossen): "The Ability of Character to Triumph Over Talent"

Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman lag for the break in The Hustler

Paul Newman and Piper Laurie Share a Cigarette,

as well as Their Hopes and Insecurities

O so much more than a fine film about the life of a professional pool hustler who wants to prove he's the best player Straight pool player there ever was, Robert Rossen's film also explores the fragile, easily shatterable, relationship between Fast Eddie Nelson (Newman) and the woman he becomes involved with, Sarah (Piper Laurie). This relationship is further strained when professional gambler Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) enters the picture, taking over as the quite Machiavellian manager for Fast Eddie. To reveal more of the plot here would simply spoil the subtle and powerful developments throughout this fine drama, based on Sidney Carroll's 1959 novel of the same name.

(left to right) George C. Scott and Paul Newman

Jackie Gleason's performance as "Minnesota Fats", the Man, the best there is in the game, is truly inspiring. So much so that as a youngster growing up the 60's, I thought, incorrectly, that "Minnesota Fats" was in fact the best pool player in world. I learned recently that, at that time, another player was ranked number one back then. A heavy set fellow by another name, adopted the name "Minnesota Fats" to embellish his own reputation, drawing of Gleason's stellar performance here. And the trick worked.

But that alludes to the most important aspects of competitive sports, making the other player or team think you are the best, as well as having the well-honed skill to back that up. What makes this film even more engrossing than a good sports drama is the tragic psychological triangle that develops when the Newman/Laurie couple encounter George C. Scott's tragic meddling in both their lives. But as I note in the title of this post, character, strength of will, ultimately prevail.

Rossen's film is not only a great sports drama, but also an exploration of human frailty and the ultimate survival of those strong enough to weather the storm of life.

(Note: Check out part of the soundtrack, with more great stills from the film, in the jukebox atop the left column.)