He came to the stage from the back of the room, strutting down the aisle of the Wiltern Theatre like a misplaced heavyweight champ. A spotlight illuminated the way. Screeching into a megaphone, he was part carnival barker, part Muhammad Ali and part Rev. Jim from “Taxi.” He left the stage more than two hours later amid rafter-rattling applause, the winner and still champion.
Making a rare concert appearance in his once-native Los Angeles, Tom Waits wasted no time taking control of his long-awaited return with the first song, “The Black Rider.” (Waits has played in L.A. once in the previous 12 years; his last engagement at this theater, over a decade ago, was immortalized in the concert film “Big Time.”) Wearing a rumpled black linen suit over a black and orange striped T-shirt and a dusty fedora that made him look like a cross between a Bowery Boy and Freddy Kreuger, Waits exhibited no rust from his prolonged absence. He stood at the front of the stage, flailing his arms and legs to the baroque strains of “Singapore” while the awe-struck audience slowly adjusted to the reality that it was, in fact, really seeing Tom Waits play live. Though he did provide a few nuggets spanning his 26-year recording career, the bulk of the set featured songs from his recently released album, “Mule Variations,” and “Bone Machine” (1992). The reverent crowd was not about to quibble with any of Waits’ choices, and instead hung on every word the man growled in his throaty rasp.
Tom Waits is no longer merely a singer or an entertainer. As unlikely as it might seem, he’s something of an American icon, even if he’s largely unknown on commercial radio. By combining Tin Pan Alley song craft and near-vaudevillian showmanship with downtown boho artiness and a bang-on-anything-in-sight approach to instrumentation, his sound and style are signature. The scarcity of his performances helps add to his mystique, making a night like this one feel like a memorable, important cultural event rather than just an entertaining Saturday night out on the town.
Recent songs have traded the Bukowski-esque tales of seedy urban night life for tales of rural domestic bliss without forsaking any of the charm or quirkiness that first brought him renown in the early ’70s. Though old standbys like “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six” and the rousing sing-along “Innocent When You Dream” were enthusiastically received, it was actually some of the newer songs that provided some of the night’s highlights. My friend Sara broke down crying during a hushed rendition of the single “Hold On.” “What’s He Building?” — the resident oddball spoken-word piece on “Mule Variations” — was transformed into an extended performance art/stand-up comedy routine. And “Come on up to the House” made me want to get married and move to the middle of nowhere.
Nearly as entertaining as the songs themselves was the folksy and often hilarious between-song banter, perhaps more suited to a smoky piano bar than an ornate, cavernous theater. Some of the shtick was just that, leaving little doubt that some of these one-liners were going to reappear in the next night’s show and the show after that. He regaled the crowd with stories about a gun and ammo shop that sells espresso, and his father-in-law’s invention: a religious candy called “Testamints.” The rapport didn’t feel forced or hokey, and the show as a whole was oddly intimate, the sort of well-rounded and fulfilling concert-going experience that comes around all too infrequently.
Waits’ commanding stage presence owes much to his impressively tight four-piece backing band, featuring Smokey Hormel (guitar), Larry Taylor (bass and guitar), Andrew Borger (drums and percussion) and Dan McGough (keyboards). Together, the group careened seamlessly from the percussive racket of songs like “Filipino Box Spring Hog” to whisper-soft numbers like “Who Are You.” After finishing the cacophonous “Big in Japan,” Waits returned in troubadour mode, closing with a beautiful version of the poignant ballad “The Heart of Saturday Night.” Doffing his hat a final time, Waits exited the stage, leaving several hundred people hoping that it wouldn’t be another 10 years before he comes back.
In the days before the advent of MTV, before video killed the radio star, cinema was as vital to the definition of the worlds premier rock bands as the music itself. From “Dont Look Back” to “The Last Waltz,” the documentary offered a glimpse of the rock star that vinyl did not afford and television would not dare. Seldom-seen films like Bob Dylan’s “Eat the Document” and the Rolling Stones’ “Cocksucker Blues” are notorious to the point of legend. But after the release in the late ’80s-early ’90s of a few high-profile documentaries — Sting’s “Bring on the Night,” U2′s “Rattle and Hum,” Madonna’s “Truth or Dare” — the genre has all but disappeared in recent years, save for an IMAX Stones concert film that gave audiences the chance to see close-ups of Keith Richards’ liver spots on a 70-foot screen. But now that MTV has rendered itself musically irrelevant, and the Internet has splintered the collective pop consciousness into a thousand disparate pieces, the time seems right for a rockumentary comeback to cultivate a sense of the universally experienced spectacle. Leading the would-be revival is “Meeting People is Easy,” a film by video director Grant Gee chronicling Radiohead’s 1997-98 world tour, which is playing to sold-out houses in a limited theatrical run before its May 4 home video release.
Shot in Super 8 and video, Gee’s gritty effort lacks the cinematic pomp of Led Zeppelin’s Dungeons and Dragons-soaked “The Song Remains the Same,” but it is also more than the average straight-to-video tour souvenir. “Meeting People is Easy” is the quintessential 1999 rock documentary in the same way that “Gimme Shelter” is the quintessential 1969 rock documentary; it’s as much about a moment in time as it is about the music. Gee’s movie debunks the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll myth that bands like the Stones and Zeppelin worked so hard to forge, and instead offers a portrait of a band caught in the endless PR quagmire that is the inevitable, if unwanted, windfall of a critically and commercially successful album. Radiohead’s universe not only seems devoid of sex and drugs; even the rock ‘n’ roll gets short shrift compared to the litany of photo sessions and interviews. The film is very much about tedium, but manages not to be tedious itself. Still, watching this marked the first time in my entire life that I didn’t want to be a rock star.
“Meeting People is Easy” serves as a convincing companion piece to 1997′s “OK Computer,” Radiohead’s lauded-to-the-point-of-embarrassment third album, a sort of concept record about the banality of media oversaturation and its resulting alienation. U2, a band to whom Radiohead is often compared, plunked, like, a billion dollars into their “Zoo TV” tour trying to make this same point with all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone film festival. By contrast, the overabundance of words and images in the Radiohead documentary lead to feelings of dread and emptiness, not overstimulation - and not just among the audience, but in the increasingly despondent band members onscreen.
Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Ed O’Brien are sports about fielding inane questions from clueless journalists or recording never-ending promo spots for radio stations, but lead singer and songwriter Thom Yorke looks as if he might crack at any moment. While his bandmates unwind at a post-show fete, Yorke is caught pacing around his dressing room by one of Gee’s hidden cameras, nervously picking at the detritus of a deli tray, looking not at all like a rock star enjoying the high life. Yorke’s brooding does not come off like an affectation for the cameras intended to buttress a dour image — he truly seems ill at ease everywhere except onstage, and even then his presence is intense but aloof. (And as far as rock star sex symbols go, the best that can be said for Yorke is that he does for the lazy eye what Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler did for grossly oversized lips.)
Of course, it could be argued that all this gloom and angst is not what we want to see in our rock stars, and certainly not what we want to see in movies about rock stars. Fairly or not, Gee places the blame not on the personalities of the band members, which get little play here, but on the realities of what it means to be a major rock band amid the corporate synergy of the late ’90s. “Woodstock” had brown acid and mud; “Meeting People is Easy” has white noise and press junkets. There is every indication that Thom Yorke would prefer a coke-fueled romp with barely legal groupies to answering any more questions for Japanese radio. In fact, there is every indication that Thom Yorke would prefer a Novocain-free round of root canal to answering any more questions for Japanese radio. But Radiohead does have a sense of humor, and so does Gee’s film. If it doesn’t immediately come off as funny, that’s because ultimately, the joke’s on us. Gee stops short of being openly disdainful of the band’s fans, but it’s worth noting that the film ends with a version of “OK Computer’s” “Exit Music (for a Film).” As the credits roll, Yorke sings, over and over, “We hope that you choke.”
Everyone loves a rebel, the brash young outsider who spits in the face of
the establishment. It’s an image promoted by the movies and happily co-opted
by filmmakers themselves. Indie film producer Christine Vachon’s new book,
“Shooting to Kill,” is a self-congratulatory cautionary tale, but she can
be forgiven a little bit of gloating. Like “punk,” the word “independent”
has lost its meaning, but Vachon deserves the label as much as anyone. She
has produced such low-budget, taboo-busting films as Todd Solondz’s
“Happiness,”Larry Clark’s “Kids” and Todd Haynes’ upcoming glam-rock epic, “Velvet Goldmine.”
When you compare Vachon with the filmmakers of the late ’60s and ’70s — as witnessed in Peter Biskind’s recent bestseller “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” — their agendas are similar: Both needed to work outside the system to maintain their artistic integrity. Today, however, Vachon makes entire films for the amount of money that Francis Ford Coppola spends at Chez Panisse.
Vachon’s allegiance to the indie scene is the product of sheer necessity. “Unless someone gives me forty million dollars to make a film about bisexual rockers, or a sympathetic pedophile, or a woman who wakes up one day and realizes that modern society is poisoning her to death,” she writes, “it’s the world in which I’ll stay.” Given the recent flap over the distribution of “Happiness,” it’s doubtful that $40 million will arrive anytime soon.
The book itself is somewhat schizophrenic, as if Vachon and co-author David Edelstein — film critic for Slate — weren’t sure whether they were writing for the cognoscenti who patronize Vachon’s movies or for neophytes who can’t tell a dolly grip from a best boy. The book often serves as a how-to (and how-not-to) manual for aspiring producers, and “Shooting to Kill” doesn’t gloss over the less-than-glamorous reality of making films. (I know this reality firsthand, having worked for Vachon as an assistant director on “Kiss Me Guido.”) Interspersed are diary excerpts detailing more esoteric problems with the financing and production of “Velvet Goldmine,” Vachon’s most ambitious work to date. The nightmares that Vachon illustrates — everything from scheduling snafus to ego conflicts to damaged negatives — are not unique; they occur on every film set, a fact she does a commendable job of stressing. Vachon’s book might do more to dissuade aspiring filmmakers than encourage them, and given the glut of subpar low-budget films out there, this could be its most valuable service.
As “independent” as Vachon’s films may be in spirit and in budget, without distributors, theaters or audience members, they’d be overpriced paperweights. Just as Coppola and Robert Altman have swallowed their pride and gone to work for Grisham Inc., Vachon’s movies are released by companies like Miramax. Inevitably the maverick joins the establishment, but that doesn’t really matter as long as the movies are worth watching. The rest just makes for juicy anecdotes.
