OK, so what’s the deal with alternate takes? These anthology things are always filled with “alternate takes” or “outtake versions” of songs that have already appeared on albums. Am I missing something, or is “alternate take” a nice way of saying “take that wasn’t good enough to use in the first place”?
Demos, on the other hand, can be interesting. There are some interesting demos and rehearsal tapes from the late ’70s on “Beyond and Back: The X Anthology,” a two-CD attempt to tell the story of Los Angeles’ finest punk band without resorting to a greatest hits format — convenient, since X never really had any hits. These tracks show the band struggling to find and capture the powerful wallop of a sound it perfected in the early ’80s.
The most interesting song here is a demo that wasn’t used and wasn’t even an X song. “Someone Like You” was a mostly acoustic waltz-time ballad on “Poor Little Critter in the Road,” the lone album by X’s country alter-ego, the Knitters (guitar player Billy Zoom didn’t want to play country, so John Doe, Exene Cervenka and D.J. Bonebreak recruited Blaster Dave Alvin and a stand-up bass player to form the shadow group). In the demo version that appears here, “Someone Like You” is a full-on honky-tonk number, complete with fiddle and slide guitar. It doesn’t really sound better, but at least it’s different — you can hear them trying to figure the song out. But does anybody really need to hear a version of “The New World” before they thought of the guitar riff? That’s not instructive, it’s just unfinished.
The CDs are sprinkled with album versions of some of X’s better and better-known songs — “Los Angeles,” “Hungry Wolf,” “In This House That I Call Home,” “Poor Girl” — and some live stuff that doesn’t quite capture how great they were in their prime, but still sounds pretty good. There’s the obligatory inclusion of the band’s two biggest radio breakthroughs, which, sadly, were both covers used on movie soundtracks: “Wild Thing” and “Breathless.”
Much was made of X’s roots in poetry (Doe and Cervenka — now known as Cervenkova — met at a Venice reading), and critics loved to talk about their deeply poetic lyrics. But looking back nearly two decades later, their early, dark lyrics — while a cut above most punk bands of the time (or this time) — come across as vague, opaque, poetry workshop blather: “No one is united/All things are untied/Perhaps we’re boiling over inside/They’ve been telling lies/Who’s been telling lies?/There are no angels/There are devils in many ways/Take it like a man.” Uh, yeah. But boy, could they name a song — like that one, “The World’s a Mess; It’s In My Kiss,” or “You’re Phone’s off the Hook (But You’re Not).”
X’s lyrical abilities improved as they became influenced less by poetry and more by country music. The death of Exene’s sister provided material for the heart-wrenching three-song centerpiece of X’s best album, “Under the Big Black Sun” (1982), and from that point on, the words became less arty, more direct, more meaningful. That album and the next, “More Fun in the New World” (1983), represent X at their most powerful, combining blistering music with incisive, moving lyrics. Those two albums and the more poetic first two, “Los Angeles” (1980) and “Wild Gift” (1981), would be the essential X collection. After that, X lost it a bit, trying on different genres and styles and occasionally courting Big Success, always unsuccessfully. By the end, an unplugged period in the mid-’90s documented on “Unclogged” (1995), they were like an old fastball pitcher who can’t bring the ol’ heat anymore but can still get the occasional hitter out with knuckleballs and slow curves. They were a shadow of themselves, but at least they were still in there pitching, and they could teach those young fireballers a thing or two.
But they didn’t. Unlike the Pixies, also recently anthologized and eulogized as impossibly influential (and therefore impossibly cool), X weren’t influential at all. Nobody sounds like X, with that male-female harmony-as-melody singing thing and that screaming rockabilly guitar over pounding punk rhthym section. Occasionally someone tries, but everybody sniffs, “Oh, they’re trying to sound like X” and the world moves on.
“Beyond and Back” does about as good a job as these things usually do. If you’re already a big fan, you’ll find a few interesting tidbits and complete your collection. But if you’re looking for an introduction, you’d do better elsewhere.
when boxing’s on the front page it’s usually bad news, often the death of a fighter. This time, at least it’s only a chunk of an ear that’s gone.
Mike Tyson, who at one time looked like boxing’s savior but has spent most of this decade embarrassing himself in various ways, bit a piece out of WBA champ Evander Holyfield’s ear in their title fight in Las Vegas Saturday, and then moments later bit Holyfield’s other ear, earning himself a disqualification and the righteously (and rightly) indignant scorn of pretty much everybody who doesn’t count the former champ as a meal ticket. The biggest story of the night may have been that Don King had nothing to say. But President Clinton, a heavyweight from Arkansas, weighed in: “I was horrified by it and I think the American people should be,” he said.
Well, I am. And I like boxing. Hell, I even like Mike Tyson. But I also hate boxing. And I think Tyson’s a bum. Welcome to the mind of a boxing fan — and former boxing reporter. It gets rough in here sometimes.
Like many, I was a lapsed fight fan who was brought back to the sport by Tyson. He was a brilliant and brutal fighter, blindingly fast, hard to hit and possessed of a paralyzing punch. He was also a great story — the whole street thug taken in by kindly old Zen master/boxing trainer (Cus D’Amato, who had trained Floyd Patterson) and turns his life around thing. Smarter than his fierce posturing and relative inarticulateness would lead you to believe, Tyson could even be kind of charming at times. He was refreshingly aware of boxing history and his potential place in it. He studied the boxing film library of another mentor, Jimmy Jacobs, and modeled himself after Jack Dempsey, right down to his look — black trunks, no socks, high-and-tight haircut.
In 1986, Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion ever. By 1989, he was at the top of his career, dispatching Michael Spinks, a terrific fighter, in a minute and a half, about the average length of a Tyson fight in those days. That same year, thanks to some fancy footwork and fast talking, I started covering the pugs for the local blat, the San Francisco Examiner.
There’s a lot to love about boxing. It is, as George Foreman put it, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is competition at its most basic: no teammates, no equipment to speak of, no funny bounces of the ball and basic rules, like no biting. Though it might look like two thugs beating on each other (and sometimes it is), the sport is also an art and a science. As Yogi Berra said about another sport, 90 percent of this game is half mental. Mike Tyson is now the pathetic shadow of his former self, not nearly the fighter he was when he KO’d Spinks. He’s now a very beatable heavyweight. But Tyson’s decline isn’t physical: He’s in great shape, and he only turned 31 yesterday. His problems are “upstairs,” as boxing people refer to the head, and they’ve been evident for years. He no longer does the things he needs to do to win: He doesn’t move, he doesn’t jab, he doesn’t worry about defense, he doesn’t seem to really care.
As a reporter, I watched fighters fight and I watched them train and I talked to them endlessly about the mental side of boxing. I tried to understand how they did it, how they endured the physical pain of a clean shot to the face, a left hook to the kidney, a couple hundred sit-ups at a time.
I learned from them that you can probably take more than you think you can take and you can probably do more than you think you can do. I watched all these misfits and runts and angry young men transform themselves. “What is pain?” Tony Lopez asked me, sincerely, Socratically, when he was the junior lightweight champion. I shrugged, so he answered for me, smiling: “It’s only pain, man.”
And yet, and yet, and yet. It wasn’t all gritty inspiration. There were times when I was sitting ringside, watching two undercard fighters pound on each other, when I’d think, “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?! What are we doing here?! This is nuts! Two grown men are hitting each other, and all these people have paid to watch it, and they’re screaming for blood! It’s barbaric!”
I’d watch Don King ruin the careers of promising heavyweights (including Tyson) with his thievery and scheming. And I’d watch great fighters get robbed in major fights (like Pernell Whitaker beating Julio Cesar Chavez pillar to post in 1993 and having it called a draw). And I’d watch the awful politics of the sport, the politics that give us four fighters in every weight class calling themselves champions, but not fighting each other to settle the claim because it’s more lucrative to have four champions. That way, you can have four times as many “championship” fights.
And I got tired of it. It’s hard to keep an affair going with such an erratic lover. Sure, I leap to boxing’s defense when someone talks about banning it, but that’s easy (boxing is a dangerous sport; banning it would send it underground and make it more dangerous; end of argument). It seems that every time I start to get interested again, every time there’s a great fight on the horizon, like the Holyfield-Tyson rematch could have been, boxing just reaches up and bites me on the … ear.
So the copy is flying and the air waves are humming. Will Tyson be banned for life? (Answer: Are you kidding?) Will boxing finally clean up its act after this latest fiasco? (Answer: Are you kidding?) Will the next pay-per-view fight be worth our 50 bucks? (Answer: You must be kidding.) And I’m tuning out again. As the heavyweight division goes (goes the saying), so goes boxing. Well, I’ve seen the heavyweight division, and — with all due respect to Evander Holyfield, a marvelous champion and a swell guy — I’m going.
“this is Elvis” isn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen. Actually, it’s a pretty awful
thing, a documentary-docudrama hybrid narrated by the King himself,
speaking from beyond the grave (through an Elvis impersonator who doesn’t
much sound like him). It has actors re-creating moments from Elvis’ life in
scenes that have all the production values and drama of a “re-enactment” on
“Unsolved Mysteries.”
And yet.
The only time I ever fell in love in a movie theater, I was
watching “This is Elvis.” And I didn’t fall in love with my date. (Who am I
kidding? What date?) I fell in love with Elvis Presley, who had been dead
for four years.
By the time I came along, Elvis was just another one of those washed-up
guys who’d been famous for a long time and had a TV special every once in a
while, like Andy Williams or Jonathan Winters. I knew the story — the
lunging crowds, the screaming girls, the anti-rock ‘n’ roll speechifying. I
knew about all the records he’d sold and the endless devotion of his fans.
I just never really got it. He’d always seemed, well, sort of tame. You
know, let me be your teddy bear.
Sitting in a theater as a teenager, I figured I’d see more of what I’d
already seen. I sat through the ridiculous early scenes, starting — as
post-1977 Elvis books and movies always do — with the fateful keeling over
in the potty scene, then rushing through his childhood and adolescence,
where he’s portrayed as sort of a Huck Finn with a guitar, not the pretty,
sensitive boy who was much clucked-over by the neighborhood women.
Then comes his television debut, on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show.”
The kinescope clip is a pretty common bit of Elvisianna now. But it wasn’t
in 1981, and I’d never seen it. Elvis comes out in a dark suit and white
tie and launches into “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” For most of the song he’s
in close-up, but at the instrumental break, he and the camera both back up.
Now visible head to toe, he does this frenetic, bouncing, standing-in-one
spot dance as he furiously strums his guitar. As he walks back to the mike,
he turns his gum over in his mouth before singing the next verse, actually
a segue into “Flip, Flop and Fly.”
I felt like I’d taken speed. My heart pounded. I wanted to tear my chair
out of the theater floor and throw it. I wanted to head-butt somebody or
drive 100 miles an hour. Imagine seeing that performance in early 1956,
when singers were gracious, polite and subdued, before people got used to
the idea that one might punctuate his performance by, say, biting the head
off a chicken. He was just so damn wild.
It’s downhill from there. Within minutes, he’s in tails, singing to a dog
on Steve Allen’s show. He appears to be stoned on an interview show called
“Hy Gardner Calling!” The long, dreary decline that occupied 21 of the 22
years Elvis was famous — interrupted only for one night, the magnificent
1968 “comeback special” — is well-documented. And now, Elvis is one of our
national jokes. The impersonators and the wedding chapels and I saw him in a
supermarket in Kalamazoo ha ha ha.
It’s his own fault. He lived like a damn fool and squandered a prodigious
talent. But it’s a shame that he’s remembered more for shooting at TVs and
eating disgusting sandwiches than for his inimitable singing (sorry, lame
impersonators) and his astonishing charisma. I remembered him that way too,
until I saw “This is Elvis.” It taught me a whole new way to see, and what
more can you ask from a night at the movies?
“this is Elvis” isn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen. Actually, it’s a pretty awful
thing, a documentary-docudrama hybrid narrated by the King himself,
speaking from beyond the grave (through an Elvis impersonator who doesn’t
much sound like him). It has actors re-creating moments from Elvis’ life in
scenes that have all the production values and drama of a “re-enactment” on
“Unsolved Mysteries.”
And yet.
The only time I ever fell in love in a movie theater, I was
watching “This is Elvis.” And I didn’t fall in love with my date. (Who am I
kidding? What date?) I fell in love with Elvis Presley, who had been dead
for four years.
By the time I came along, Elvis was just another one of those washed-up
guys who’d been famous for a long time and had a TV special every once in a
while, like Andy Williams or Jonathan Winters. I knew the story — the
lunging crowds, the screaming girls, the anti-rock ‘n’ roll speechifying. I
knew about all the records he’d sold and the endless devotion of his fans.
I just never really got it. He’d always seemed, well, sort of tame. You
know, let me be your teddy bear.
Sitting in a theater as a teenager, I figured I’d see more of what I’d
already seen. I sat through the ridiculous early scenes, starting — as
post-1977 Elvis books and movies always do — with the fateful keeling over
in the potty scene, then rushing through his childhood and adolescence,
where he’s portrayed as sort of a Huck Finn with a guitar, not the pretty,
sensitive boy who was much clucked-over by the neighborhood women.
Then comes his television debut, on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show.”
The kinescope clip is a pretty common bit of Elvisianna now. But it wasn’t
in 1981, and I’d never seen it. Elvis comes out in a dark suit and white
tie and launches into “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” For most of the song he’s
in close-up, but at the instrumental break, he and the camera both back up.
Now visible head to toe, he does this frenetic, bouncing, standing-in-one
spot dance as he furiously strums his guitar. As he walks back to the mike,
he turns his gum over in his mouth before singing the next verse, actually
a segue into “Flip, Flop and Fly.”
I felt like I’d taken speed. My heart pounded. I wanted to tear my chair
out of the theater floor and throw it. I wanted to head-butt somebody or
drive 100 miles an hour. Imagine seeing that performance in early 1956,
when singers were gracious, polite and subdued, before people got used to
the idea that one might punctuate his performance by, say, biting the head
off a chicken. He was just so damn wild.
It’s downhill from there. Within minutes, he’s in tails, singing to a dog
on Steve Allen’s show. He appears to be stoned on an interview show called
“Hy Gardner Calling!” The long, dreary decline that occupied 21 of the 22
years Elvis was famous — interrupted only for one night, the magnificent
1968 “comeback special” — is well-documented. And now, Elvis is one of our
national jokes. The impersonators and the wedding chapels and I saw him in a
supermarket in Kalamazoo ha ha ha.
It’s his own fault. He lived like a damn fool and squandered a prodigious
talent. But it’s a shame that he’s remembered more for shooting at TVs and
eating disgusting sandwiches than for his inimitable singing (sorry, lame
impersonators) and his astonishing charisma. I remembered him that way too,
until I saw “This is Elvis.” It taught me a whole new way to see, and what
more can you ask from a night at the movies?
