Levi Stubbs (that's him on the right, in 1967) wasn't the greatest of Motown frontmen, but he was the most insistent. He didn't sing so much as declaim. The Four Tops singer, who died on Friday, possessed a powerful baritone with which he made his feelings unmistakable. His wasn't slinky soul music, it was rugged and raw. When he asked "Are You Man Enough?" on the Four Tops latter day (and lesser) hit single in 1973, there was no doubt that he was.
Here's a clip of the Four Tops doing "Baby I Need Your Lovin'," and below it, Billy Bragg singing "Levi Stubbs Tears," his quite awesome 1986 examination of the power of music to, if not heal, at least make life livable in the most painful of circumstances. Because "when the world falls apart, some things stay in place/Levi Stubbs' tears run down his face." The song also name checks Motown great songwriter Norman Whitfield, who died in September, as in, "Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong are here to make right everything that's wrong/Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier too, are here to make it all okay with you."
There’s a heartbreaking scene at the end of Act One of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll, which winds up its theatrical run at the Wilma Theater on Sunday. Jan, the Czech dissident intellectual and Plastic People of the Universe fan, played by Barnaby Carpenter, comes home from prison in 1976 to find that his most prized possession – his record collection – has been smashed into pieces on the floor.
Ouch. That hurts us almost as much as it does Jan, a true believer in the power of music to foster the passion for free expression that the Soviet-era totalitarian regime so despised because they understood, as Paul Wilson, the former Plastic People member said to me last weekend over a cup of coffee in Center City, that “the revolutionary effect of rock and roll is in the mind. That’s where it starts.”
Being Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll is a rich argument of ideas - about cold war politics, the nature of consciousness, the romance of socialism and the biology of the human soul. And it’s also the ode of a rock fanboy - that would be Stoppard - to the music he loves with a Rolling Stones-Pink Floyd-Velvet Undergound soundtrack whose staging by former Czech dissident Blanka Zizka possesses a more “interior authenticity” as Wilson puts it, than the original 2006 production both he and I saw in London in 2006.
(One thing that was better about the London cast I saw, though: it included the devilish Dominic West – that’s Detective Jimmy McNulty to you Wire fans – as a far more charismatic Jan than Carpenter’s.)
The real musical – and political – stars of Rock 'n’ Roll, though, are the Plastic People (that's them looking suitably hippieish, above), the Czech group who Wilson, a Canadian who has just translated author and, after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Czech president, Vaclav Havel’s memoirTo The Castle And Back into English, sang with in the early ‘70s.
That's Wilson, who flew into town from Toronto to take part in a Rock 'n' Roll panel discussion with my erstwhile colleagues Carlin Romano and Trudy Rubin, taking a break from his latte, below.
For reasons I don't quite understand, the music of the Plastics - who took their name from a Frank Zappa song and were one of the thousands of mythical bands formed after hearing The Velvet Undergound & Nico (that's the banana album) - which tends to combine Velvets-style drones with excursions into free jazz, isn’t heard in the play. (There is plenty of Syd Barrett, though: seeing a picture of the late former Floyd frontman riding his bike down the street in Cambridge, England was the inspirational spark that got Stoppard’s juices flowing to write Rock 'n' Roll.)
The Plastics are the stuff of legend because even though they were never a really a political band, the refusal of their members or their Andy Warhol-John Sinclair style ringleader Ivan Jirous to buckle to the repressive regime led the Czech secret police to be "obsessed" with them, says Wilson. "We didn’t fight against the political power," Plastic person Vrata Brabanec said in 2006. "We just wanted to do what we liked doing. Because the state didn’t allow us to, the whole thing turned political. We weren’t a political band at all, we wanted to make music. We looked for new poetry and tried to live a free existence. That’s all.”
But as Rock 'N' Roll dramatizes, it was the arrest of band and their followers in 1976 that led Havel, then an internationally known playwright who bore a long haired resemblance to Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, to write the Charter 77 manifesto that grew into the opposition that eventually brought down the Communist regime. So though the Plastics' rock-star singer Milan Hlavsa, who died in 2001, only wanted to play his music and grow his hair, his band wound up having a far more legitimately "revolutionary" effect than the self-styled pop music rebels who inspired them.
In Rock 'n' Roll, Jan believes in the power of the Plastics' defiance of the state. That faith makes him seem naive when his position as a university instructor is taken away, and he's arrested, and all of his records are smashed. But it makes him seem prescient when the regime eventually falls and the Rolling Stones come to play in Prague in 1990 at the request of Havel, evidence, in Jan's eyes, that "life has become amazing."
But even before that happens in Stoppard's play, when life doesn't seem so amazing as Jan's vinyl lay shattered in pieces, music points towards a way to at least dream about a less repressive future. Jan's friend Ferdinand shows up to solicit signatures for a protest petition, and return a borrowed record that's still in one piece: The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. He offers his condolences for all the lost music. Jan tells him not to worry, because, after all, "it's only rock and roll." And then Stoppard tells us he knows it's really much more than that, by having Jan drop the needle on Brian Wilson dreaming of a better world on "Wouldn't It Be Nice."
The Plastics' music can he heard here. And purchased here.
Just like the fan in Yong Kim's photograph, I was wearing my Phillies lumberjack hat last night. It failed to bring the team good fortune, however. So, now that the buckets of rain have fallen, we're sitting here in limbo, like Jimmy Cliff. And as Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.
Sam Wood, my esteemed Inquirer colleague and the man I'm forever indebted to for turning me on to the Pet Shop Boys, has now actually made his recording debut, collaborating with none other than those very same Pets.
Wait... what's that you say? That Marlene Dietrich manque in the "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" video isn't the Inky's Sam Wood, but actually noted British photographer and film maker Sam Taylor-Wood? Ah, that explains it. She''s the Brit artist who's made high art out of David Beckham and relocated the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew in an east London pub in The Last Century, and has sung with the Pets on covers of Donna Summer and Serge Gainsbourg songs. She's also fond of using a cigarette motif in her short films, and that's her, in top hat and tails, burning one as the Pets' Neil Tennant sweetly sings in the video for "Film Star," which is a cover of a 1981 hit by Brit pop-band The Passions.
And speaking of, here's the Passions' original, with a Dietrich cameo at the end.
The geographically strategic use of pop culture personages as endorsers by the Obama campaign knows no bounds. Bruce Springsteen in Philadelphia, Ralph Stanley in southern Virginia and, perhaps coolest of all, the cast of The Wire in North Carolina. And whatever your political preference, this get out the vote ad has the auxiliary upside of giving hard-up Wire obsessives who just can't bring themselves to watch Marlo and Bubbles on Heroes one more glimpse of Kima, Cutty, Carver and Lester Freamon. Stringer Bell, however, is nowhere in sight. I guess he's working the streets for McCain with Omar and Brother Mouzone.
Going into the most important 3 1/2 innings in Philadelphia history, as we wonder whether it's wiser to start Durbin, Romero or Madson, it's good to know that, even if the baseball gods may not be on the Phillies side, the rock and roll gods are. That's Joe Strummer of the Clash dressed for a Red October, and John Lennon, in a nifty piece of photo shoppery by the good souls over at Glyph Jockey, depicted as a member of the old Philadelphia Athletics. The Punk Baseball Stars site also has an Iggy Pop card depicting the man born James Osterberg as a member of the Fightin' Phils, along with Patti Smith as a New York Poet, Bob Dylan as a Cleveland Indian and Jim Morrison as that noted slugger Moe "Joe" Risin. Check it out here.
Apple Corps Ltd. and MTV announced this morning that, along with Rock Band creators Harmonix, they'll create a new interactive video game built around the Beatles' music. In the Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero battle, that counts as a huge victory for MTV and Rock Band. But contrary to reports, the new Beatles game, which is still in development and will be in stores for the Christmas 2009 shopping season, will not fall under the Rock Band umbrella, but be "a new full blown custom game" that will offer "an experiential journey through the band's career," according to Jeff Jones, CEO of Apple Corps. Soon, it seems, you too with be able to play "She Loves You" on the Ed Sullivan show, visit the Maharishi and be interviewed by Larry Kane.
The Beatles have been the great white whale of the digital music age, and the Liverpudlians' music is still not available on online services such as iTunes. There's no new news, however, as to when the digital distribution of the band's music might be made a reality. "We're still working out the details," Jones said, in a teleconference. "We have no announcement to make, no dates or any other information."
I went to my first Phillies parade two months after I moved to the city, celebrated the Andrew Toney-Dr. J Sixers' championship three years later, and have been waiting for another one, along with everybody else, for the last 25 years.
This year, I'd have to say that I've spent more time watching and listening to the Phillies than doing anything else, other than maybe sleeping. So it's gratifying, alright, to have all that time spent be not only so exciting and involving and rewarding in its own right, but also to add up to something meaningful that fills so many people with joy. "People only listen to the winners, that's how the world is," Jimmy Rollins said during the on-field celebration Wednesday. An astute observation, and it'll be nice to no longer be known as the long suffering town with the angry fans, and instead the winners to whom attention must be paid.
I'm also glad that it was the Phillies, and not the Eagles, that broke the drought. That's partly because the team is so lovable, flaws and all, from Charlie Manuel on down to Shane Victorino and Pedro Feliz. But it's also because the only thing that's been more annoying than the incessant talk about the quarter century of losing, has been the way the green religion that is the football industrial complex had taken over the sports culture in Philadelphia. That is, until the Howard-Utley-Rollins-Hamels Phils became too thrilling to ignore. Enough with E-A-G-L-E-S chants at rock concerts and Phillies games, and corporate-speak Andy Reid press conferences, and all-football, all-the-time sports talk radio.
For my money, baseball is the beautiful game, played without a clock, every day, all summer long - and this year, all the way into ice cold October. Now that the Phils have rolled over the competition with astonishing Moses Malone-like fo'-five-five ease, a Sixers championship is next on my wish list. And since the mini-me Billy Penn atop the Comcast Center has removed the curse, maybe that'll be coming along sooner rather than later. (Though with the way the new Elton Brand led squad looked in Wednesday's loss against Toronto, maybe not.) And if the Eagles want to go out and win the Super Bowl, good luck to them. I'm just delighted that the Phillies got there first. Like Pat Burrell said after his clutch double led to the winning run on Wednesday: "I'm just overwhelmed with happiness. And I'm going to enjoy it."
When is a secret show no longer a secret? When everybody on the Internet knows about it. Tonight, Britishers the Ting Tings, of the the execellent, and excellently titled, We Started Nothing, play their third Philadelphia gig this year, this time at a free My Space Secret Show at the Barbary. There's an interview I did with the band back in June here. That's Katie White and Jules De Martino playing the Popped! Festival in West Philadelphia, above. Info about tonight's show is here and here. And here's the "That's Not My Name" video.
It's a treat, not a trick. There's a new Bruce Springsteen video and download up at brucespringsteen.net. The song's called "A Night With The Jersey Devil," and it's a blues-stomp that borrows from Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy," and employs the voice altering microphone that Springsteen used on "Reason To Believe" on the Devils & Dust tour. Spooky. Watch the Boss rise from the swamp, and pretend he was born with a forked tail like Mother Leeds' mythical 13th child on the YouTube version below, or in higher quality at his official website. The download is free here.
