How Burt Reynolds Personally Invented Film Noir (Version Bronzage du Soleil) Late One Friday Evening On His Front Porch In The Everglades

Stick, starring Burt Reynolds, directed by Burt Reynolds
by Bart Bull
published in the Arizona Republic
(For almost exactly one year, I reviewed movies for the daily newspaper in my hometown.  It was weird, and weirdly fun, and weird too.  Seeing pretty much every movie that came out over the course of a year gave me the sense that the movie business was coming unstuck at the seams.  Which, I'd now say, it was.  Anyway, I did get to see Burt Reynolds' Stick, and for some reason, I was getting away with murder as far as movie-reviewing goes, so... 

 I'd hate to have anyone go see Stick on my say-so, but if you're even half-ass faintly interested in Burt Reynolds as a movie-star/phenomenon/entity/whatchyacallit, you can't hardly afford to miss it.

Not that it's any good, because Stick is one of the most inept, uncoordinated, disjointed, confused, and super-completely-confusing movies you'll ever pay to see. There are times when you're not going to believe that anybody could ever have released so limp a blimp, but there it is, stinking loudly from right off the screen.

Burt Reynolds is the director as well as his own movie's star — oh, and Burt Reynolds is indubitably the whole thing's auteur – lock, stock, and stolen hub-caps.  Everything about Stick is nothing, if not an dim reflection of his sensibilities; set in Miami [in the high-water moment of the massive cultural ascendency of Miami Vice] this movie keeps edging uneasily toward the Everglades, where a man's man can let his chest hair breathe, where his toupee may freely flap in the swampy breeze of his airboat's prop-wash. What works about Stick is not the plot or the characterization or the acting — it's the curious inadvertent obsessiveness that keeps oozing through all the gaps, like gooey gumbo mud between your toes.

Anyone who has ever spent time around Miami and its horny little sister Miami Beach knows that they can reek of evil.  They reek of evil, in the finest and most florid moments, like an orchid pinned on a debutante who lost her virginity to a brother-in-law who's currently looking after her family's fortune. As much and even more than Los Angeles, Miami is the perfect setting for a detective thriller and if Stick is too loose-ended to be very thrilling, it manages all the same to be extraordinarily evil. Shoddy and slapdash, as finely tuned as your boss's home movies from his vacation in Yosemite, Stick haphazardly manages to be a filmic landscape of the second humid circle of art deco hell.

I'd talk plot but I got lost only moments after the credits rolled and I'd defy you to do much better. This one's even more boggled a mystery than City Heat [Ex post facto historical note: City Heat was an equally or perhaps even more disastrous film, financially, aesthetically, and spiritually, from the previous Christmas, almost immediately buried deep in an unmarked grave, co-starring Burt and Clint Eastwood, who so clearly had such little time for one another that they barely appeared in any scenes together, which necessarily meant adding secondary characters attached to and orbiting each Star in order that they could each explain out loud what was going on in the plot since the Star under loud expository semi-cinematic discussion had last been seen in the picture long minutes or so before, which seemed, under the circumstances, especially with the added expositional dialog, like hours ago, or from a different decade's movie}; Osterizer ought to get a scriptwriting credit.  Plot doesn't matter here and neither does character because Reynolds is as thoroughly lost in his image as any screen actor has ever been. He has no idea at this point whether he's Gator McCluskey, or W.W. of the Dixie Dance Kings or the man who diddled Cat Dancing or Dan August or Stroker Ace or Smokey or the Bandit. He wears, at one point, the same zipped down wetsuit he wore in Deliverance; he wears, at nearly every other point, the same silly smirk he's worn every time he's done a movie with his acting skills set on cruise-control.

As for anybody else, they're uniformly atrocious. Charles Durning is Shelley Winters; Candice Bergen plays the smirking blonde debutant who looks like Candice Bergen; the greasers are greaseballs; the greaseballs are greasers.  It's greasy.  I'm near-positive that no more racist movie has come out of Hollywood in years, and I don't think it's any coincidence that it contains one of the greatest funniest and most cutting characterizations of a black survivor (excepting only Pryor and Murphy) that the screeen has seen since the '60s.

Early on, this thing feels like Burt sat out on the porch one Friday evening in Florida, getting drunk and throwing beer cans at flamingos while he watched Miami Vice, and and then and there decided to direct and produce his own segment of the show. While he was at it, he decided to guest star too, and then he forgot to include any of the show's actual stars in at all. By Saturday afternoon, he'd shot the basic footage; Sunday, he slept off his hangover. On Monday morning LA time, long after noon in the Everglades, he began making phone calls.

When the show's producers rejected his concept on the following Friday, he got drunk all over again and decided to turn the project into a full-length feature blockbuster, the kind of thing that would revitalize his whole career. Jerry Reed was busy in Nashville; Loni Anderson wouldn't return his calls; Tammy Wynette told him to get lost; Dinah Shore was golfing; Sally Field had an Oscar and didn't need him any more; Dom DeLuise was too busy taping GladBag commercials. Then came the final indignity: Pontiac refused to provide another Trans Am.

Nothing could stop him, no obstacle was too high. This movie was gong to get made. When he saw Glenn Frey's video for "Smuggler's Blues," he tried to get Frey involved. When Frey's manager Irving Azoff wouldn't return his calls, Burt hired a guy who looked a lot like Glenn Frey after about ten tequilas too many and stuck him in the movie. That would teach 'em.

He would make this movie, he would direct it himself, he would be the biggest movie star in America again, and the biggest director and the biggest dinner-theater owner in Florida too.

He thought about composing the score himself but decided the critics would say he was over-reaching. He'd personally witnessed the fall of Jackie Gleason, who'd once based himself in Florida too. It was too late to consider another man's mistakes.

Carol Burnett's personal assistant left a message on the answering machine that said she'd only do it if the location was in Hawaii. He considered it for a moment but he already had too much Miami footage from that first long weekend. If he had it all to do over, he'd have set it in the Okefenokee Swamp, and Stick would have been a runnin' gunnin' moonshinin' redneck devil-may-care detective. It was too late for that now. It was too late for a lot of things.

He established a film endowment at Tampa Community College; the first term's class project would be a documentary entitled The Making of Stick, Starring Mr. Burt Reynolds. Midway through the project, the 20-year-old coed producing the film quit to become a stand-up comic in Hollywood — the Hollywood in California, not the one in Florida. The documentary would never be completed.

As the studio head examined the rushes and rough cuts from Stick, they began to get nervous. "Burt looks like refried death," one let slip to Marilyn Beck. They threatened to shut the production down unless Burt submitted to a full physical examination. The results have never been made public but Stick, intended to be released last fall, was reslotted into the spring schedule to compete head-to-head, mano a mano with Fraternity Vacation and Cave Girl and Gotcha and Gymkata. There was a slim hope that Burt might still draw the crowds.

And when it was done, when it was all over, when it was released at last and attacked by the critics and ignored by audiences from coast to coast, he knew that he had won. He knew that he'd made a movie that was truly and completely decadent, that smelled as much of rot and corruption and depravity as Florida itself, that was as loose-knit as a lunatic's hit-list, that was as lost and out of control as Hollywood.

He was Burt Reynolds, after all, last of the real movie stars, and this movie was his own.

Aphorism Number Seven: Arizona (One of a Series; Collect 'em All!)

Arizona is where the Old West crawled off to die. Or if not actually to die, then at least establish a cranky early retirement.
Bart Bull

Al Green — Amazing Grace

After a dozen years of walking the road to heaven,
the Reverend Al Green raises a little hell.
by Bart Bull
(photography by Anton Corbijn)
published in SPIN

White. White teeth — white, white teeth — white tie, white shoes, white pants, white jacket. And in the buttonhole, a red, red rose. Yes, and Al Green is smiling, smiling. Smiling, grinning, glowing — white, white teeth — gleaming and beaming with joy and gold jewelry, glowing with love and happiness.

And Al Green is always beaming, always, even now. Even now. Even now, just a few slim moments before he'll be out on a Northern California concert stage and the seats will be filled with devout churchified ladies from Oakland and Richmond and San Francisco, big broad-boned black ladies and little black ladies with bones like birds, and yes, they well remember all those worldly songs Al Green used to sing back ten or fifteen years ago, "Let's Stay Together" and "Tired of Being Alone" and I'm Still In Love With You," all of those and all of the others. Yes, they remember. But no, they didn't come here tonight, not one of them, to hear Al Green sing those songs. Tonight they came to hear the man who left all that talk of worldly love behind him when he finally took up his calling, when he stopped fighting and surrendered his life and his music to the Lord. Tonight they are ready to hear the Reverend Al Green.

And tonight the Reverend Green is beaming and gleaming backstage, talking with old friends, laughing, laughing. And if the ladies of the audience had been here this afternoon to see the Reverend rehearse his band, they’d have seen him relaxed and laughing, beaming and gleaming and giggling and just having himself a wonderful time working the band through the evergreen glory of “Let’s Stay Together.” Wearing those glasses of his for the scholarly effect, the clear ones with the tiny, tiny pink roses embedded in the frames, and adjusting the singers’ harmonies, squeezing the horns down tighter, teaching the drummer that unbeatable trot, and preparing to sing, tonight, for the first time in all the nine years since he came to Jesus once and all, one of his old songs, his secular songs, his love songs. Yes, and singing, just for a quick little moment, “Let’s . . . let’s stay to-geth-er . . . loving you whether . . . whether . . . times are good or bad, happy or—” before he cut it short, and burst out laughing. Laughing.

And he’s laughing backstage now, just moments to go, slapping his knees and howling high and maybe even looking out of the corner of his eye just a little to see if everyone is appreciating him appreciating the joke. And they should, truly they should, because tonight is like some moment fallen loose from a history book, a page falling across time. Tonight Al Green will step back across a line he has crossed just once before, a line that won’t be crossed too many times.

Sam Cooke crossed this line one time, going the other way. He left the Soul Stirrers, left the mightiest gospel quartet of all , left it to become a big pop star. And he did too, became the biggest of black pop stars, became a manly black symbol of style and sophistication. Yes, but something was missing, something was wrong that he could not right. Didn’t matter how well his worldly career was going, didn’t matter what he did, and so he tried to come back over the line. He went onstage with the Soul Stirrers in Chicago, and first the good gospel folks were silent as the dead and after that they catcalled him right off the stage. Yes, and it wasn’t too many months later that Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles auto court. What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?

And from the instant the Reverend Green bounces up the steps to this Northern California stage, something is wrong, something isn’t working, some presence, some spirit, is missing. The ladies of the audience are patient but they’re ready too, waiting to be moved, to be shaken and stirred. Yes, and still something is missing, something is empty. Maybe Al Green’s mind is elsewhere, maybe deep in his heart Al Green knows he’s not supposed to mess with those old songs. He hasn’t touched one yet—not yet—but they’re so near at hand. All he has to do right now is call for “Let’s Stay Together” and he’ll have stepped back over that line again.

Those songs are so near at hand, and so are those good gospel-drenched ladies, the ones who have been with him in these years since he came to his calling. “You know,” he tells them, “there are two different kinds of love.” Smiling shyly, slyly, he’s scratching the back of his head and looking up at the lights. “Let’s not ever forget that. Let’s not ever forget that there are two kinds of love, that there’s God’s love and then there’s man’s love, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a wife for her husband. And that’s a righteous love too, because that’s why man and woman was created by God, for love and happiness, so that they would stay together.” And the band has just so very, very sweetly and so very, very softly eased on into a familiar little trot, has slipped into “Let’s Stay Together,” and even the sternest of the ladies can’t help but start to rock in the pews.

Yes, and even though it’s all falling in place for the Reverend Green to lean right back into the open arms of “Let’s Stay Together,” he carries on, he commences, he loosens his tie and continues to testify. A man’s love for a woman, a woman’s love for a man can be a righteous thing, but we all know that God knows when it is and when it is not. Can anyone out there tonight ever say that they have gone and fooled God? No, and it’s only a fool who thinks he can fool God, who thinks he can do any old thing he wants to do, who thinks he can escape from what’s right, from what’s righteous. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about here tonight?

Yes, and the band is still vamping on “Let’s Stay Together,” and before too many minutes the Reverend does grab that song up, goes ahead on and sings the thing but he can’t seem to find the spirit in it. It’s beautiful, it’s sleek as a cat, no one in the world can sing a song like Al Green, no one in all the world, but not this song, not tonight. No.

And it doesn’t matter what he does now, doesn’t matter if he stops and takes off his shoes to get a little more comfortable — he does — and it doesn’t matter if he throws those shoes, throws them deep into the cheap seats — he does—and it doesn’t matter if he sets himself down on the edge of the stage and dangles his stocking feet and lays back on the stage and starts to singing again. No, it doesn’t matter what he does, doesn’t matter that he goes on to sing “Precious Lord” or “He Is the Light,” doesn’t matter that he is Al Green, the Reverend Al Green, the sweetest, finest, greatest singer on God’s green earth, because tonight he isn’t moved, isn’t stirred. Because tonight he can’t find the spirit. And tonight the ladies are going home early.

On the following day, he’s scheduled for a morning taping of Soul Train, though by the time he arrives it’s late afternoon. He and Don Cornelius, the slowest-speaking host in show business, clasp all their hands together like old friends. There was a time when every Al Green song was a hit and every appearance he made on Soul Train was a gift. He sold 20 million records in the early ‘70s, with ten Top 10 hits. But it’s been more than 12 years since the last of those now, and there’s fair reason to believe Cornelius is simply offering an old friend a favor.

Still, if those hits linger in the memory of Don Cornelius, how much respect can be expected of the kids on this afternoon’s Soul Train? The Reverend Green has elected to wear the most conservative of navy blue suits today, in contrast to all the jangling spangled costumes around him; the only things the least bit flashy about him are his gold rings and perhaps the quiet pink roses of his boxy eyeglasses.

The kids dance to his lip-synched version of “You Brought the Sunshine,” — he may be the least interested lip-synch artist in pop music — but they dance to everything once the cameras are on. Everyone, the Reverend Green included, is standing in place so Don Cornelius can muff a few interview lines when out of nowhere a young guy, 17 or so, starts to sing. He sings the contagious little intro to “Let’s Stay Together,” Al Green’s very first No. 1 hit, and in the next instant everyone is singing too, swaying and clapping and urging the Reverend to join in. These kids were all looking forward to kindergarten when “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit, and there’s no telling how they know it but they all do, every word, every note. The Reverend doesn’t sing at all but simply soaks up the graceful sound of his own song. “I hope the tape’s rollin’,” he says, all smiles.

That very evening the Reverend Green is playing L.A.’s heavenly Wiltern Theater, a green-tiled monument to art deco architecture, a cathedral dedicated to man’s amusement, a glorious ornament. The Reverend James Cleveland, gospel music’s stout patriarch, is in the audience and with him are members of the Hawkins family, Oakland’s famed gospel household. In the audience too is Michael Jackson, surgically masked for secrecy, with the little surgically masked Emmanuel Lewis next to him. Alongside the stars and lesser music business scene-makers are the folks who fill the pews every Sunday, an audience with such very different matters on their minds. The Wiltern is lovely beyond compare, and the sound is marvelously bad, and neither matters a small bit when the Reverend Green walks into the light. Tonight when he reaches his right hand up into the air the Holy Ghost is there, lifts him up, raises him up. lifts him, and will not let him down.

And tonight he brings forth “Let’s Stay Together,” brings it forth in front of just as many church folks as were on hand last night, and he says all those same things he said last night, and tonight there is a glory in it. Yes, and tonight he goes past the glory of his old songs, mighty as they are, and he sings “Amazing Grace.” Just “Amazing Grace,” that simple old song that’s been done all to death and back again. Yes, and he is so filled with the spirit, and so much on fire, and so graceful, so grace-filled. Yes, and this is why people who don’t even faintly believe in Jesus find themselves with tears streaming when they stand back and watch gospel music, find their souls moving in step with their feet, find themselves stirred. Stirred.

And tonight the Reverend Al Green isn’t throwing out any shoes. No, tonight the Reverend is coming forth, is climbing down into the seats, is out among the flock. “It’s alright,” he tells the security ushers, “Ain’t no one gonna hurt me here,” and he laughs as he sings. He’s taken “Amazing Grace” and brought it down so very quiet, so very soft, and brought the audience along to higher ground. Any hand not clapping is raised high in the air, and all over the church — this is church now — the ladies have raised the holy shout, have found the sanctified bounce, have commenced to fall out, shivering, rattling, stiffening. And the Reverend passes through the crowd unmolested, hugging and shaking hands as he sings and delivering the spirit with every sound, every motion, every moment. “Was grace that brought me safe so far,” he sings, and the clapping is so many times louder than the band, “...and grace will lead me on.”

And on the day that follows, on Sunday afternoon, at a time when he would usually be finished with the morning services back home in Memphis and not yet ready to start the early evening Bible study, Reverend Green is quiet in his hotel room, quiet and still. A Bible is at hand and a guitar is in his lap. A little soft pass at the strings, a little soft smile. The sound stays and lingers like the last ripple in a small pond after a rock has skipped the surface and settled to the bottom. It sounds like The Belle Album.

Yes, but nothing else sounds like The Belle Album, not in the ten years since it came out, not ever. You could hear a man’s soul tearing itself in two, then knitting together again, larger and far finer. To make the record, Al Green had to part with his producer, his record company, his audience. He produced the album himself and played guitar, tart and crisp and clean guitar, guitar licks just like the ones he’s messing with this afternoon in his hotel, guitar licks that squeeze time and take you home. ‘Belle was Mary,” he says, watching his fingers where they rest on the strings.

And Mary, Mary Woodson, was a woman who was so very taken with the man Al Green was, she believed she couldn’t live without him. She was already married, although Al has always said that he really never knew it. She proposed marriage to him one night, to the man who sang “Let’s Stay Together,” who sang “Let’s Get Married” and “God Blessed Our Love” and so many songs, and after he turned her down he went and took a bath, She took a pot of boiling water—”lt wasn’t grits like they always say in all the stories, it was water boiling to fix grits”—and she threw it at him, scalded and burned and scarred him with it. Then she took her .38 pistol into the next room and there she died.

The water scarred his back but it may have saved his soul. “Belle,” he sings, “It’s you that I want but Him that I need..." and the guitar is a reflection, the words a calm confession. If the Lord is at the front of his life and at the back too, if Jesus is his All in All, his All and All, if He, if He, He, He . . . And words fail him, and the Spirit moves him, and his voice is triumphant. The storm has stilled, peace reigns. “It was Mary who told me first that I was going to be called,” he says, “that l would have a ministry of my own.” He pauses for a tiny sweet lick on his guitar, sweet and slim and pretty. “I laughed at her. She said I was called and I laughed at her and said ‘Who, me?’ “He laughs again just thinking about it a dozen years later. “She told me.”

In an airplane on the way home to Memphis, the Reverend Green claps his hands at the sight of the California coastline falling away beneath his window, gives the Lord a round of applause for some fine truly wonderful work. Smiling and thoughtful, the Reverend Green is reminded again of The Belle Album, of that same line from that same song, and of how much it meant. “That is the pivotal point right there. ‘It’s you that I want but it’s Him that I need.’ That was a statement that was given because it was given.”

Reverend Green is a man given to mild ways of amusing himself in moments of leisure — holding his red rayon scarf over his face and flicking its tassles across his nose, chewing mints, gum, and peppermint Life Savers, elbow-nudging a fellow passenger when a good conversational point is delivered. He has a tendency to view his own past as someone else’s, to see Al Green as though he were someone removed and remote from himself. “I don’t know why he cut that record,” he will say; “I don’t understand why, as much money as he had, I don’t know why he didn’t go to any studio he wanted. I don’t know what he was doin’, I really don’t understand. I think he did it out of the fact they told him it couldn’t he done, and they told him that if he did do it, they told him the album wasn’t gonna come out in the first place. I think it was a challenge for him more than anything else, and he did it in defiance. I think this is why he did it. I’m not sure. He did a lot of things I’m not sure why he did. I don’t know why. Just brought a 8-track studio down, just rolled it in there on some wheels and plugged it in—I don’t know why he done that. I don’t understand. But it does not go without Mary.”

Picking up an advance cassette of Soul Survivor, his newest album, he turns it over and over, admires the typed titles. “Now, this album relates to vintage Al Green because I don’t hear nothin’ else but Al Green, and him chankin’ on a guitar. If that ain’t Al Green, I don’t want to see it. That’s him for real, without all the make up and the glamour and the beauty. That’s him right there.” He raps on the cassette’s blank cover with his finger. “That is the very Al Green. Without all the cookies and candy. This is the very Al Green, right here in the overalls and bomber jacket, sittin’ here playin’ guitar on the floor.” Asked if he can find any hits inside this cassette, he smiles deeply and points to one and another and another after that. He points to every song but one, and then he includes that one too.

The music that Al Green made in the years before The Belle Album shows no sign of aging, no sign that a time will ever come when it won’t feel perfectly right, It’s pastoral music, always cool and sweet. Al was raised up in the country, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, the son of a preacher. There is country in his music, there are Hank Williams and Willie Nelson songs on his old albums, but there isn’t one of his songs, not one of the hits that filled the dance floors through the first half of the ‘70s, that doesn’t somehow suggest just a trace of mud between the toes.

Reverend Green can’t help but laugh and laugh when he considers the wonder of his songwriting. “Cause if you start with ‘Call Me,’ for instance, you start with ‘What a beautiful time we had together.’ He spreads it out flat and simple. “ ‘Now it’s gettin’ late, and we must leave each other. But remember the times we had. And how right I tried to be. It’s all in a day’s work. Call me.’ “ And then he giggles and giggles like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

By Sunday, the Reverend Green is back in church, back at Full Gospel Tabernacle, just a mile or so down Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. There is nothing monumental or magnificent about Full Gospel, although like everything else in Memphis, it has a portable Rent-a-Sign marquee out front, yellow, with black plastic letters listing the hours of worship services. There is a scroll painted on one of the walls behind the altar that says “Let God Be Magnified.” A painting in back shows lily-pure souls rising to Jesus from out of graveyards, from office buildings, from cars crashed on a freeway and driven into the water, and from a Volkswagen van that has been crushed in a collision with an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig.
It’s gathering dark outside and windy cold when the six o’clock prayer meeting and Bible study class is close to commencing. The Reverend Green is sitting just off the altar with his guitar player’s Fender in his lap and the amp cranked up, and if this wasn’t Sunday evening in Full Gospel Tabernacle, you’d swear those were blues he was playing. He fingers a few of those mean, mean little obbligatos, those rippling arpeggios, laughs, and goes off to mess with the organ.

When all the ladies are in the pews, there can’t be more than 20 in attendance What is it that would make a man lay down a singing career that showed no sign of stopping, or even slowing down, a man who had thousands of women battling to grab the red roses he threw them from the stage—what would make a man lay it all down to pick up a Bible and preach a Sunday night meeting that is hard-pressed to total two dozen?

The Lord’s Prayer starts the meeting, and a hymn is lifted. Things are settling in—this will be a long night—when one of the ladies asks her pastor if maybe they can sing one more, one she needs to hear. Her mama’s health is failing, she feels like her mama may pass, and she’s worried and troubled in mind.

“Will you lead us?” the Reverend asks her.

The song’s motion is slow and it rolls along deep. She starts it and he joins it and the other ladies are there too, slow and deep. It’s graceful and mighty and the ladies lean on one another’s voices the way tall trees lean in the wind. Two choruses, three choruses, and then the Holy Spirit is joined, the Holy Ghost stirs the hymn, and the song grows too tall to go over, grows too low to get under. It speaks all language and the woman who called for it is sobbing, screaming, praising God, wiping her eyes with a yellow tissue. Another woman stands, so close to falling out, so close, and thanks her Jesus, thanks her Jesus. The Reverend is with them, and in this moment his voice, his wonderful voice, is one of many.

Tracey Ullman: Just Being Herselves

by Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

To get to Tracey Ullman's closet, you need to go through the bathroom. You don't really need to go through there, but she wants you to; it makes for a more colorful tour. The color is purplish, in fact, or lilac, sort of, or actually a turbo-charged neon mauve. "The man who lived here before was a Czechoslovakian plastic surgeon," she says, delivering the next line in the cigar-chewing gurgle of an elderly Las Vegas lounge comic, complete with perfectly-timed pause for the drummer's rim shot: "And if he does this to his house, what does he do to your body?" Ullman plans to have his remarkable upholstered toilet seat enshrined in a clear Lucite case and mounted on the wall.

She has fewer shoes than Imelda Marcos but they make a far more interesting mess at the bottom of her closet. She's down there now, flinging out Tony Lama cowboy boots and alarming French wedgies with rock star photo patches sewn to the heels and then this . . . this fairly restrained bustier. "Every girl has one of these Madonna bodice-type tops, these slaggy Stevie Nicks-type things. Though they look terribly sad on someone like me, who breast-fed a nine pound infant." She sweeps an unmatched pair of her daughter Mabel's Barbie dolls off the dressing table to clear more room and discovers a complicated sweater by her idol, her all-time absolute favorite, Jean Paul Gaultier. "My friend last night said it falls into every cardigan category. He said, 'You like it because you're not wearing one cardigan, you're wearing every cardigan.' But I do love it, because you wear it and people get frightened."

When it comes to Gaultier, it's impossible for her to keep from rhapsodizing, and she readily admits it. "He's the king for me. I just think he's brilliant, I really do. He still has an element of street about him as well. I went to his shop in Paris last summer — I'd never done any shopping in Paris until last year. I told my husband, 'Go bog off — I'm going shopping in Paris.' First time I'd ever had the money, I'm in Paris, and it was a truly debilitating experience. They were so rude to me. [Smarmy French accent, wreathed in Gauloise smoke]: 'What do you want, stupid British girl?'

"They were so rude — the only people who were nice were a couple of Japanese people who had just opened a shop and were desperate to sell gear. It was horrible. At one boutique, they practically spat at me. Until I got my Platinum American Express card out and said, 'Look! Look!'" She laughs uproariously at the sheer folly of it. "They didn't give a damn.

"It wasn't good fun at all shopping there. Then again, in Beverly Hills, the people who work for the top places are all like [pursed lips, dysfunctional adenoids]: 'Millie, seventy-two, I've worked in sales a long, long time . . . Oh, this is just beau-ti-ful! The colors this season are so gwargeous!'"

"Here's a bit of Christian Lacroix," and she yanks free a finely detailed glass-beaded top. "Had a skirt that went with it — it's here somewhere. I wore this to an awards show and the zipper burst as I went onstage.

"I love clothes," she declares from deep inside the closet, where the hangers are all clumped together. "I love fashion. I used to work in shops on the King's Road when I was sixteen. I was always one who saved up weeks for a decent skirt." Her head is buried deep in the closet again. "And always somewhere I have a leather miniskirt. I just bought another one, and I know it will be the last one of my life, 'cause I know I'm getting too ridiculously old to wear leather miniskirts. I put it on and I do look a bit tragic.

"I mean, I don't even keep my clothes in a very nice state or anything. I'm like a magpie; I'll wear anything unusual or bright. But when yousee these Beverly Hills women who pay twelve thousand dollars and they're sitting at one of those functions with their big freckly armpits hanging over the edge of their bustier— I'd like to bring Christian Lacroix to a Beverly Hills function. 'Don't look now, Christian, but there's a fat tart in one of your frocks.' 'Merde! '

"The Japanese gear, I haven't really gotten into that — the black, baggy, shapeless trousers with the big sort of platform shoes. I mean, some people spend like four thousand dollars they look like a bag of spanners. So they have to keep reminding you who designed it. [Voice of a schlumpf]: 'Djya like the jacket? It's by, uh, Matsudo, ya know?'"

She's back in the closet. "This is the first piece of Gaultier I ever bought," she says, cradling a charcoal shirt in both hands. [Elaborate stage whisper] "Cost me three hundred pounds. I couldn't believe i had a Gaultier shirt. It was like a dream. Always looked a bit strange on me, though.

"Here's my Tracey Ullman Show jacket." It's a perfect example of what fashionable Hollywood cameramen can be seen wearing in supermarkets. "Can you imagine if I wore that? [Dopey TV star]: 'Hey, that's ME! It's MY SHOW!'"

Her own closets revealed, Ullman can't resist invading her husband's. "these are the suits he buys now he's got a bit of money. These over here are the ones he used to buy off the back of the lorry. All men in England have to buy stolen suits. They can't bear to pay the retail price. And these" — she laughs even as she touches them — are his trendy shirts."

Mabel's closets are next. Ullman sweeps up a blue wool coat with wooden toggle buttons down the front. "I love this, her little Paddington Bear coat — so very British. She wore it once and threw up all down the front. You can still smell the vomit on it." She acquires a thoughtful, puzzled look. "So hard to remove the smell from designer wear, you know."

The Finish Line; The Death of Ascot Park Raceway

by Bart Bull

(published in Details)

Ever since the hot rodders of the 1930s began raising dust on the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert, Southern California has been the place where motors and Manifest Destiny meet. Ever since Clark Gable commissioned a custom rod that could smoke Gary Cooper's damn Duesenberg, ever since Big Daddy Roth and George Barris and Darryl Starbird created blown-and-injected objets d'art, ever since Mickey Thompson invented the slingshot dragster, Southern California has been home to more rodding and racing than anywhere else. And through it all, Ascot Park, a half-mile oval near Long Beach, has been the hub of dirt-track racing for the entire Southwest.

In the last few years, insurance costs have killed off most of the drag strips and soaring land values have finished off the speedways. When the sprint-car season ends this fall, and when the last trophy dash winner flings the final mud clod through the chicken wire into the grandstand as he power-drifts through Turn Four, it won't be just the usual acrid smell of racing fuel that makes race fans wipe their eyes. Ascot Park is going condo. Gentlemen, stop your engines.

Springsteen Cases the Promised Land

by Bart Bull
published in Sounds, 1975 (excerpt)

[Scene: Arizona State Fair, middle of the week, late]

Springsteen is brooding still, walking, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, only slowing his pace to look sideways at a big heifer. The heifer grunts as he goes by. Leaving the barn, a security guard lets them out a gate and they converge on the now-empty lot where the car is parked. Somebody put the homemade cardboard parking sign on the windshield. Miami Steve's discussion with the photographer is getting more and more, uhm, involved, and R.M. the road manager has gone over to supply reinforcements to Van Zandt, who's punctuating a very important point by prodding the photographer with his stuffed snake. The kid and Springsteen are standing off together, over to the side, and the the kid is saying something about a hype. "Like I said, I ODed on publicity," Springsteen mutters. "I mean, I like it, I like to talk to people about my music, but it's gettin' to be so much, ya know? I mean the only people who read what a writer's got to say is other writers."

But aren't you a writer?, the kid asks.

"Yeah, but what I'm doin' . . . it's like I'm here, and that's all you can say. I'm doin' what I want. I mean, all I ever wanted to do was make records, have a band like this . . . " His hands, which had been pulled out of his pockets to illustrate his intentions, get jammed back in, and he rocks back and forth on the heels of his boots. "I don't want all this other stuff, ya know?"

[More excerpts will appear until this story is complete and entire]

Bill Graham — Through the Turnstiles

by Bart Bull
California magazine, (excerpt)

“You! Out!” It’s Bill Graham, and he’s charged over to a grizzled Deadhead standing in line at the soup counter wearing something woven and dirty from Mexico. Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill could be called lacking in enthusiasm, energy, panache. Graham is ranting in the Deadhead’s face, yelling, hollering “Get out of here!” Every single other Deadhead has stepped back away from them, pressing back against the wall or somewhere, and now this one finds himself walking backwards toward the door, shoved along by sheer decibels.

Graham keeps after him, top volume and full speed, until he’s backed him all the way out of the building and across the sidewalk to the gutter. Graham’s howling. “You think you’re gonna come in this building tonight?” There’s not an inch between his significant beak and the broken bridge of the Deadhead’s nose. The guy has two inches and 30 years and a lot of weight on Graham and there’s not a BGP person anywhere in sight — no big Event Security guys, no security bluecoats, nobody. Graham doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s about to get killed.

“I got a ticket for tonight, Graham” the Deadhead snarls. He’s keeping his hands jammed inside the woven jacket’s front pockets.

“I see you in here, I’ll bust you wide open,” Graham growls. His voice clatters off the Civic Auditorium’s gray granite blocks. “You threatened me with a gun last night — remember, asshole? I see you on this sidewalk, I see you near this building, I’ll bust you — you don’t believe me, go get your gun! Split! You got a ticket, I’ll give you money for it but you ain’t comin’ in this building!”

[LATER]
As he turns away, a big-shouldered kid in a plaid flannel shirt comes up. He’s from New York, see, drove out here with his two buddies because he hadn’t heard one way or another as to whether his money order for tickets had been cashed and now he has no tickets and no way of knowing if he’ll ever see his 80 bucks again and the Grateful Dead guy in the ticket booth won’t even talk to him about it. He knows Bill has nothing to do with the situation, but he was wondering if there wasn’t something he could do -- not so much about the tickets, maybe but at least the money, or at least maybe get the guy at the window to at least listen to him.

“I’m sorry,” Graham says. “I really feel for you. There’s a lot of people in your position tonight, and they’ve really made a mess of things—” a quick nod in the direction of where the Grateful Dead’s own people are manning the ticket booth “—but it’s really out of my hands.”

The guy says he understands but thanks anyway, and he goes back to his pals, who’ve been watching expectantly off to the side. Graham watches them go, watches them walk away, then he calls over a security bluecoat. “See those three guys? Go get them. Take them and walk them through, around the turnstiles. Tell the person at the door I said it was okay.”

(For Mark Wellins, a true friend; In memory of Bill Graham, mensch)

Frank Zappa — "Ich Bin Das Wasser"

by Bart Bull
published in Sounds (excerpt)

He was scratching the stubble under his chin again. “I figure that ninety per cent of the people that came to the concert tonight came for one reason and that was to hear ‘Dinah Moe Hum.’ I think—”

“I loved the way you played that!” It was pudgy Nancy’s friend, the cute one. She wanted an autograph. “Who’s got paper?” she hollered. Finally, she pulled out her checkbook, tore a check loose, and handed it to Frank. “There,” she said. “And over there.”

He scribbled, then handed it back. Nancy came over and wanted to see too. “What’d he write for you?”

“I don’t know, I can’t read that.” She pulled out another piece of paper and held it in front of him. “Write something . . . really sentimental . . . No!! Something really Zappa-ish, you know?”

“Yeah!,” said Nancy. “Something really Zappa-esque.”

Frank took the pen and paper again, looked at it a moment, then wrote “Ich bin das Wasser.” Nancy’s friend loved that. “Write that on my leg, will you? Please?”

Nancy had a piece of paper now too. “Write something for me now too.” He looked up at her slowly; his eyes were dead again.

“I’m sorry to hassle you.” she said.

“You are hassling me,” Frank snarled.

She went sweet. “I’m sorry...”

“You’re as bad as your uncle.” [Back story: Her uncle was Clive Davis.]

“I’m sor-ry.” Her voice was warm limp syrup. “If I smile nice for you, will you–”

“Nobody smiles as nice as he does.”

Nothing slowed Nancy down. “We’re going up to Las Vegas and see you.”

“Who?”

“Us -- your fans. Can we have backstage passes?”

Luke The Drifter — Hank Williams Blows the Foam Off the River of Life

by Bart Bull

By 1950, Hank Williams was the biggest thing in country music, the biggest thing there'd ever been in country music, and he was making real good progress at killing himself. Haunted by guilt, by sin, by God, by his wife, by alcohol, by chronic physical pain and the pills that dulled it, by the periodic binges that seized the reins of his life if he so much as blew the foam off a beer mug, haunted by the idea and spectre and facts of divorce, and haunted as well by a fierce case of precisely what has haunted hillbilly music from the night it first hit town, by that weird dislocated experience of being a country boy in a city world even if you weren't actually a country boy, or even in the city, either one. Ever.

All alone and lost, lost on the river of life, Hank Williams could no more help but repent than he could keep free of sin. He began to go in the studio and cut remorseful monologues like "A Picture From Life's Other Side" and "Too Many Parties, Too Many Pals" and "Be Careful of the Stones You Throw" and "Men With Broken Hearts," songs that were often fierce old stump-speech leftovers from a time when minstrel shows and religious revivals were both showbiz tentpoles. The word "maudlin" was created for songs such as these. They're parlor pieces of the sort that bloomed up out of the fantastically enriched soil, Southern and Northern alike,  that followed the slaughter of the Civil War. (When Bob Dylan's first album included a Blind Lemon Jefferson song called "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," he was aurally illustrating Samuel Charters' recent epoch-defining book, "The Country Blues," wherein Charters had located the great blind bluesman's neglected grave and had painstakingly drawn arrows all around the irony. What neither Charters nor Dylan knew was that Jefferson's deep blues had been his adaption of the Civil War parlor hit, "See That My Grave Is Kept Green." No matter; somebody collected the publishing funds, and it wasn't a blind street-singing Negro, that's for sure.)

Between him and his publishing company and his record label and Hank again, somebody was slick and sober enough to make sure that these here ones, these morally down-lifting ditties, didn't hit the jukeboxes with the name "Hank Williams" displayed on them anywhere but just only inside of those little publishing-money parentheses where the songwriter credits get listed — even in the cases where Hank hadn't actually wrote 'em. Instead, these records were released under an unlikely old-school alias, under the name "Luke The Drifter."

Which didn't stop Hank from singing them — he couldn't help himself. A month after he was dead and buried and the loose earth stomped firmly over top of him, an Alabama reporter remembered Hank Williams asking of "Men With Broken Hearts," "Ain't that the awfullest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life?" By which he meant, the reporter explained, "Ain't that somethin?" But then, that same reporter described yet another time Hank had played the exact same song and afterward, Hank spoke with wonder and dread of his own work: "Don't know why I happened to of wrote that thing. Except somebody that fell, he's the same man as before he fell, ain't he? Got the same blood in his veins. How can he be such a nice guy when he's got it and such a bad guy when he ain't got nothin'? Can you tell me?" If anybody piped up with an answer, the reporter didn't mention it. Smarty-pants small town Georgia teenager Flannery O'Connor could certainly have launched a rocket-shaped response, especially being as she may have been the only one within a tri-state area who would've been inclined to make a joke about it. Never a giant big hillbilly music fan, young Miss O'Connor was not in attendence at Hank's funeral in Montgomery, which yet again made her one of the few — she would eternally be one of the few. It was his funeral but our trial. Her mordant joke is missed to this very moment.

Luke The Drifter was an ideal way for Hank Williams to watch himself get killed off before the picture ended, to ride the black stallion and still sit in the cheap seats too, to split his personality into two, to cleave his own head in half with a hatchet and see what in hell sprang forth. Who could resist the urge to attend their own funeral?  Especially if Hank Williams was the headlining act? Plainly, Luke had wandered out loose from the deep backwoods and the long lost old days with their old ways, while Hank himself was streamlined, jet-powered, chrome-plated, a two-toned pink-and-black Rocket 88 among men. The difference between Hank Williams's own music and rockabilly is a song by song thing, a matter of degrees and drumming, but it ain't much, most often, and it's very few rockabilly rebels who wouldn't have given it all up to be Hank Williams for a week or so, even if they came back chastened, head hanging low and tail 'tween their legs.  Hank Williams only just wanted to give it all up. He couldn't, but Luke The Drifter could carry some of his load.

Aphorism Number Five: American Urges (One of a series; collect 'em all!)

There's something in an American that makes the urge to save souls and cure cancer and steal votes and sell something -- anything -- all at the same time absolutely irresistible.
Bart Bull, from SPIN

Aphorism Number One; The Internet (One in a Series — collect 'em all!)

The default of the internet is "free."
Bart Bull (circa 1995)

Aphorism Fourteen; An observation on appearances; (one of a series; collect 'em all)

"If I was a girl, I'd want to look like that."

Tom Waits, to Bart Bull