Cine-Rock:
An Embarrassment of Riches
CD notes to Morpho's MORPHO CD, Doctor Jim Records, Melbourne 2005
“Man – I just flashed that chick Barbara.”
So says Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s THE TRIP (1967).
Whether you’re six or sixty – whether it’s
1967 or 2067 – that scene, that line, that whole film
is and always will be plain embarrassing. And that is its
‘universal’ charm. Like each and every instance
of cinema trying to be groovy, it evidences the monumental
gulf between rock and film. It’s a dimensional divide
between the complex sonic corridors of rock’s near-century
worth of soundings and carvings of guitar, neo-guitar and
post-guitar auras, and cinema’s near-century worth
of pretentious image-making and portentous story-telling.
Like
fools searching for their gold, film writers, directors,
producers and actors globally sidle up to rock. Like ugly
Americans, sweaty Italians, weedy Brits and repressed Japanese,
they blur into a horde of hearing-impaired internationalist
businessmen trying to pick up chicks half their age at a
bar somewhere in the hot spot of an urban underground. The
sounds of movies from the 50, 60s and 70s document their
failed lechering gloriously. Be it Alexander Courage thrilling
us to nimble twanging for HOT ROD RUMBLE (1957), Les Baxter
freaking us out with trippy bacchanals for WILD IN THE STREETS
(1968), or Jerry Goldsmith fluffing up some bachelor pad
muzak for ROLLERBALL (1976), the only sex stud machismo
in these films comes from the musical equivalent of hairy
backs, comb-overs and Fred Flinstone 5 0’Clock shadows.
Maybe this is why Russ Meyer’s late 60s/early 70s
films like GOOD MORNING AND GOODBYE (1967), FINDERS KEEPERS
LOSERS WEEPERS (1969), CHERRY, HARRY & RAQUEL (1969)
and THE SEVEN MINUTES (1971) look and sound better as time
goes by: the ultra-vixens are matched to ultra-square scores
and ultra-ugly men desperate to swing with the new sexual
revolution.
THE
TRIP (“Feel Purple! Taste Green!”) posits Peter
Fonda as an advertising director ‘tuned in and turned
on’ by Jack Nicholson who plugs him into LSD. The
spectre of Roger Corman – a mannered non-Libertine
figure of exploitation – hangs heavy over the film.
Its disingenuine affectedness is a wonderful testament to
the 60s as it slips down the plughole of a reality in which
we still live. As then, nothing now is ‘cool’
despite the fact that even tricycles for kids are sold as
being cool. The X-MEN movie (2000) positions itself to be
for ‘8-9 yr old boys’ when in fact it’s
for their 38-39 yr old dads whose wives think it’s
‘cool’ to wear black leather designer jackets.
Cool in fact was never cool – no matter how many advertising
executives think that the visual flair of David Fincher’s
SE7EN (1995) is ‘edgey’. Cool is and was only
ever camp. Which is why exploitation movies trying to be
cool demonstrate the vacuousness of ‘being cool’.
Similarly, great rock music is never cool: it’s always
deluded, self-aggrandizing, embarrassing. So in a perverse
fashion, the score to the trip (by the pompously named ‘The
Electric Flag – An American Music Band’ featuring
Mike Bloomfield) is – through and despite its artifice
– great rock music.
Norman
Herman’s TEENAGE REBELLION (1967) was marketed as
“The truth about the ‘Now’ Generation
– a documentary report”. Like, do I need to
go on? That’s like a movie ad line telling me that
Russell Crowe is a gladiator. The film is like a trip inside
the mind of an advertising executive straight out of movies
like THE TRIP, here trying to explain to a general audience
‘what’s going down’. Of course the movie
was pure exploitation: a MONDO CANE of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
Sections of the film are actually lifted from obscure low
budget European and Japanese teen dramas, here passed off
as documentary footage to a xenophobic American audience.
Best of all, the film is wall-to-wall with chunky gritty
‘rockzak’ courtesy of Mike Curb’s production
and Davie Allen’s amazing fuzz-guitar. Parts of the
score sound like an eerie forecast of Sonic Youth’s
great grunge anthem, “Teenage Daydream”; parts
of it sound like The Cramps at their most theatrical.
In
John Boorman’s POINT BLANK (1971) there’s a
bar scene. It’s like any bar scene from the era where
a private detective (in this case, a real fucked-up Lee
Marvin) goes to chase up a lead. There’s an unnamed
band playing on a miniscule bar-stage: they’re black,
all dressed like Black Panthers in skivvies (just like The
Commodores on their best album MACHINE GUN, 1974). A bizarre
‘soulzak’ blares with the lead singer doing
Wilson Pickett on some serious speed. And lined in front
of him at the bar is a line of balding 40s-plus pudgey men
in suits, actually grooving to the music. At this point
– as with all movies from the expanded 50s-to-70s
era trying to rock-out – the whole film melts into
surrealism if you have the faintest sensitivity to rock,
pop and recorded music. The scene is about as convincing
as the live sets from LANCELOT LINK – SECRET CHIMP
TV series (1971). And believe me, those chimps rock more
convincingly than most Hollywood depictions of ‘rock
performers’. Again, that fleeting scene in POINT BLANK
is magic due to its utterly repellent inappropriateness.
Those
who make mention of ‘the real’ in rock need
to read less rhetoric from rock’s own self-validating
history and watch more of these movies. It is through its
glaring fakeness that rock shines brightest. The abject
granularity of rock – its plastic energy, its glistening
grime, its gorgeous destructiveness – is well preserved
in the sonic amber of the film soundtracks from this embarrassing
epoch. It’s a time where ‘getting it on’
was always about ‘getting it wrong’. And it’s
an undying era. Today’s equivalent can be seen in
the precum from record companies who sniff a distant frisson
of an AC/DC lick played by a bunch of teen boys –
preferably from a bogan country town. Sign ‘em up
quick. I hope they have a cameo in a film I can enjoy ten
years from now: their rock will be perfect for the scene.
