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Tennis fans: the most constant commercial playing during the US Open seems to be the IBM Cloud spot. And that insistent rock music playing on it is worth nothing.
The song is “Jump into the Fire,” written and sung by the late Harry Nilsson in 1972. It was the third hit single from his “Nilsson Schmilsson” album produced by Richard Perry. The album was a smash, and nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. Other recognizable hits from the album are “Without You” (covered years later by Mariah Carey) and “Coconut.”
Perry– the most successful pop producer of the 70s– had an an all star lineup for “Schmilsson.” You’re hearing Beatles sideman Klaus Voormann on bass, Chris Spedding on guitar, John Uribe on guitar, Herbie Flowers on bass, and Jim Gordon on drums. Gordon’s incredible solo is featured on the long version below of “Jump into the Fire.”
Gordon, of course, also wrote the piano part of “Layla.” A few years later he killed his own mother. He was crazy. But also a good composer (although Rita Coolidge claims she wrote the piano part of “Layla” and he just put his name on it).
Anyway. “Nilsson Schmilsson,” like Richard Perry productions with Carly Simon, Ringo Starr and the Pointer Sisters, is among the high water marks of pop music. So a tip of the hat. Forty five years later, “Jump into the Fire” sounds brand new.
PS The pair also made a hit sequel, “Son of Schmilsson,” which had the hits “Space Man” and “You’re Breaking My Heart.” It also featured my guilty pleasure Nilsson song, “The Lottery Song.” Nicky Hopkins plays piano. Absolute perfection.
On Friday night Sam Moore and William Bell led an all star group of singers including Tom Jones and Beverly Knight in a 50th anniversary Stax Records show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Don’t you wish you could have been there!?
Here are a couple of clips. I’m kind of hoping Sam Moore gets a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award this year. In October he turns 82.
Sam Moore and Tom Jones sing the Sam and Dave classic “I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down”
Sam Moore “Soul Man”
William Bell and Beverly Knight sing Bell and Judy Clay’s 1968 hit “Private Number”:
Steely Dan fans showed their support and love for the group and the late Walter Becker over the weekend.
The entire Dan catalog– the original 7 albums plus the Grammy winning “Two Against Nature” have now zoomed up the iTunes chart. They are all on the top albums chart this morning, along with a greatest hits package “A Decade of Steely Dan.”
The same can be said over at Amazon, where all the albums starting with “Aja” have come to occupy slots on the top 100.
If fans really want to honor Becker, they could also be buying his solo album “11 Tracks of Whack.”
Meantime, Becker’s partner and pal for 50 years, Donald Fagen, cancelled his show last night in San Antonio, Texas. I don’t know how he could have done it given the circumstances.
There are also some nice remembrances that have been published, by journalist turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe on his website, and by Rickie Lee Jones on hers. Rickie opened for Steely Dan last fall at the Beacon; Walter had produced one of her albums.
What happens next should be interesting. Steely Dan usually sits down at the Beacon Theater in New York for a dozen or more shows in October. The dates haven’t been announced yet. But you can bet they will serve as a memorial event to Becker with tickets selling out instantly.
Yes, I watched all 18 hours of “Twin Peaks: The Return” in real time. To paraphrase Albert Brooks from Lost in America, I want those 18 hours back.
Well, 17. Part 8 was very unusual and magical. But the rest of “Twin Peaks” season 3 as some call was one of the great cons in entertainment history.
There was no plot, no story, nothing that connected any of it. It was like a cynical bet made by people who thought, Just shove whatever you want on the screen and people will buy it.
Alas, the ratings indicated that no one bought it. The show didn’t crack the top 150 cable shows on most Sundays. So what if some watched it later in the week? No one cared. No one could makes heads or tails of it. The people who said they got it hoped they did. But they couldn’t have. There was nothing there.
Some of the strands of plot lines were wrapped up sloppily over the last couple of weeks. When so called characters– people who’d appeared out of nowhere– ran their course, they were just eliminated– shot, electrocuted, vanished into the ether.
The original “Twin Peaks” was a 13 arc about the mysterious murder of Laura Palmer, a high school girl who left behind a sketchy journal. The local sheriff couldn’t handle the case, so the FBI in the form of Agent Dale Cooper came to investigate the case. That was 26 years ago. For a while it was fun until it was apparent that all the kooky types in town were just kooky, and there were no clues. This would not be “Murder, She Wrote.”
By the second season, the supernatural was to blame, which meant anything was possible and nothing had to make sense. Laura’s killer turned out to be her father, who’d been possessed by the Devil. And his name was Bob. In the final episode, Bob took over Agent Cooper and put Joan Chen in a doorknob. Everyone was grateful the whole thing ended.
So what to do now? David Lynch and Mark Frost had 25 years to plot a sequel. They went to Showtime, which balked at the price. Lynch announced he couldn’t do the show he wanted. He rallied public sentiment for an 18 episode show. Showtime caved: they wanted prestige. But Lynch never showed them what he was doing. If he had, the whole thing would have been stopped.
We waited 18 weeks for an explanation of the two Coopers and got none. Audrey– who only arrived in the last few episodes– was left screaming at a mirror. We never learned who Billy was– and we never cared. We never learned what Ashley Judd was doing, or what the buzzing was in Horne’s office. There was no point to stories involving Harry Dean Stanton, Matthew Lillard, Amanda Seyfried. The few characters who returned from the original show were just ornamental.
It was grueling, to say the least. My favorite people besides Kyle MacLachlan (I give him credit for trying, hard) were Robert Forster, Don Murray, and Naomi Watts. I’m sure they had no idea what was going on, but they really invested in “Twin Peaks.” I thank them for making it a little easier to put up with the most bull I’ve seen on TV.
If only Frost and Lynch had written a real story for all these people, something that didn’t eat itself as it became more and more ridiculous. Imagine if there had been another weird murder in “Twin Peaks” with echoes of Laura Palmer’s story. Everyone could have been involved. Instead, they just screwed the pooch.
RIP Miguel Ferrer and Catherine Coulson. And I never want to hear that music again.
I don’t know what’s wrong with Tom Cruise’s “American Made.” Few have seen it, although several top reviewers said they liked it. Doug Liman makes good movies, as we’ve seen with “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
But something has really gone wrong with “American Made.” UNiversal sent it into some new foreign markets this weekend and yielded just $9 million. The overseas total so far is $19.8 million. And now it’s played in a lot of countries to ambivalence.
None of this bodes well for September 29th, when “American Made” hits US screens. No one I’ve talked to even knows it exists. Of course, Tom is recovering somewhere (Scientology Centre?) from his injuries on the now-stalled “Mission Impossible 6.”
And even if he comes out on crutches on a late night talk show– he can’t do real interviews, obviously– the lack of enthusiasm for “American Made” from far flung places may overwhelm the American release. Universal was hoping to rake in some dough before that, but so far it doesn’t look too good.
Donald Fagen’s official statement about the passing of Walter Becker, his partner in crime for 50 years in Steely Dan. We will all be reeling in the years today.
NEW: Walter Becker of Steely Dan passes away at 67; bandmate Donald Fagen remembers him as “an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter.” pic.twitter.com/3CcHHZvFO4
Walter Becker, one half of the duo that comprises Steely Dan, has died at age 67. Becker and Donald Fagen met at Bard College in the late 60s, and formed a band that included Chevy Chase. Later they went on tour with Jay and the Americans as their back up band. But they were destined for bigger things. In 1972, as Steely Dan– named for a dildo in William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”– they had their first of many hits with “Do It Again” from their premier album. Steely Dan broke up in the late 80s, but reformed a few years later and won Album of the Year with their album “Two Against Nature.” They were also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They are still touring now, constantly, although Becker has been absent from the stage show for the last several months. He was a funny, gentle man who fought demons, most notably heroin. His death was announced without words, just pictures, on his Facebook page this morning.
Walter’s own credits included producing an album for Rikki Lee Jones and recording a solo album that was beloved by fans. He was a genius, no kidding, no overstating. He will be sorely missed but remembered forever.
More to come…
My 2000 interview with Becker and Fagen follows:
When Steely Dan was last a major part of the pop music marketplace, it was the summer of 1980, and their final hit — “Hey, Nineteen,” about an older guy dating a young girl who shares none of his cultural references, like Aretha Franklin — was wedged into the Billboard charts between such sappy ballads as “Endless Love” and the “Theme From Arthur.” With a Duke Ellington horn section and snarling vocals from Donald Fagen, Steely Dan was going out just as it had come in-as an anomaly.
The duo returns, with Two Against Nature, just as they left: with trumpets, saxophones and trombones blazing away, Mr. Fagen’s voice laced with self-pity and doubt, and Walter Becker’s keen musicianship underneath it all. The album was made, painstakingly and at great cost, over the last three years in Mr. Fagen’s home-away-from-home, River Sound Studios, a four-story walk-up in the East 90’s.
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Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen were ensconced in the studio where they made the album, watching videotape from their upcoming PBS and VH1 specials. (When they split up 19 years ago, there was no VH1 or even MTV, and PBS was living on reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs.) Mr. Becker, who once sported Rick Wakeman-like tresses, keeps his hair short now. He’s the kind of hip 50 you get to be if you’ve spent the better part of two decades in Hawaii. Mr. Fagen, who has remained in Manhattan, is a different story. Gray-haired, thin-lipped, round-shouldered, he resembles someone’s cool Jewish doctor dad who plays weekends in a neighborhood jazz combo. Unlike his partner, he’s certainly not the kind of guy who would feel at home in Maui. “Did you ever see Burden of Dreams? I feel like Werner Herzog when I’m there.” Mr. Fagen put on his best Mel Brooks German accent. “And the trees are miserable, the birds are screeching in misery!”
They’ve each been through some stuff. Mr. Fagen got married in 1991, to songwriter Libby Titus. He gained two stepchildren. Mr. Becker, who is divorced, has a son in high school and a daughter in college.
In the 20 years spent away from the studio as Steely Dan, Mr. Fagen put out two respected solo albums, The Nightfly and Kamakiriad. Mr. Becker, even in his seclusion, issued a solo self-titled album, produced some jazz things for other artists and for Rickie Lee Jones. He also conquered what he refers to as “health problems,” i.e., substance abuse. In ’93 and ’94 the band toured as Steely Dan, issued a live album, Alive in America, and toured again in ’96.
Through the magic of sampling, Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker never really went away, playing a major role in songs by such rap artists as De La Soul, Coolio and others. In fact, Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker were the winners of the 1999 award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for most-played rap song, “Uptown Baby,” by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, who relied on a riff from the 1977 Steely Dan song “Black Cow.”
“ASCAP sent us these handsome plaques, but they told us we shouldn’t come to the ceremony,” said Mr. Becker. “They said there was some violence the year before and we should stay at home. So I did.”
Mr. Fagen had been planning an acceptance speech. “I would have thanked Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz,” he said. “But they were angry because the sample had already been licensed for Puff Daddy and Mase. But then my stepdaughter heard it on the radio and said it was a different record. And they — Lord Tariq — had never asked for a license. So there was a copyright violation and we made them pay a little extra, and they were mad … We actually heard,” added Mr. Fagen, laughing, “that Puff Daddy was riding around in a limo with Lenny Kravitz and went crazy when he heard it. He said, ‘They stole my sample!’”
They were asked if sampling was really all that different from, say, wind player Wayne Shorter adding some Miles Davis-flavored riffs to Steely Dan’s Aja album.
“It’s not exactly the same thing,” said Mr. Becker with an edge of sarcasm to his voice. “We wrote new music, hired new musicians. In those days nobody [sampled]. We could do it now, and we didn’t consider it. I have nothing against people who do it. Our whole thing is to try and write some songs.”
But doesn’t that take a lot of time?
“It does!” said Mr. Becker. “But at the end of the day you’ve actually written some songs, which is the fun part.”
“And that’s the intellectual property that you eventually own, which you can sell for samples,” said Mr. Fagen. “There’s no other reason to do it anymore, apparently.”
Steely Dan may seem out of step with a pop music world dominated by sampling, lip-synching, and beautiful faces and bodies, but they were unique even in their time. Their early days as Steely Dan, circa 1971-72, were not marked with the hedonism that infected other rock outfits of the day. Groupies were never a big factor.
Mr. Fagen: “Even when we did tour we were too-”
Mr. Becker: “-anxious and weird.”
Mr. Fagen: “We were quite introverted. But we had extroverted members of the band. We were writing the songs.” He paused. “There were groupies no matter who was playing every Saturday night. By 1972 the groupie action in, say, Portland was not that appetizing. And the better-looking class of those was already gone by the time we got to them. Walter and myself and [band member] Denny Dias were more into the cannabis crew than the alcoholic crew, and we were just too slow on the uptake. We just didn’t have enough enthusiasm.”
By the time Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker split up in ’81, Steely Dan had turned out seven platinum albums and a dozen or so hit singles, including the sarcastic “Reeling in the Years” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” What is that latter song about, anyway?
Mr. Fagen: “We always thought of Rikki being a girl and the number being a phone number. He [the narrator] was a desperate guy.”
Mr. Becker: “The idea that this girl has stumbled into some kind of debauched situation and has momentarily recoiled from it.”
Mr. Fagen: “In the 70’s, linear lucidity wasn’t that big a priority.”
Mr. Becker: “The depravity of the day contained drugs and sex.”
There is some of that in the new songs.
Mr. Becker: “Well, I hope so. We have our reputations.”
Mr. Fagen, who describes his family as “poor,” was raised on jazz near Princeton, N.J. His mother, a singer, fronted a dance band at the Ideal Hotel in the Catskills and “used to sing constantly.” (His dad, who seems to turn up in the new Steely Dan song, “Don’t Take Me Alive,” was a bookkeeper.)
“That’s why I’m familiar with those standards from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s,” Mr. Fagen said. “My grandmother gave us a piano when I was 11, and I started fooling around on it. I took a few lessons but learned off jazz records.” Mr. Fagen, who “despised” his music teachers, started a trio at South Brunswick High School. “I was really an amateur jazz player by the time I was 14 or 15.” And a self-described jazz snob. “I despised rock-and-roll,” he said. “To a jazz fan or jazz musician it seemed dumb. They only used simple chords, a couple of chords. It seemed to be very repetitive.”
He met Mr. Becker at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., around 1966. Mr. Becker, who came from Forest Hills and was a year younger, had picked up blues guitar from Spirit founder Randy California. Before Mr. Fagen graduated from Bard (Mr. Becker never got the diploma), they were joined on drums for a time by fellow student Chevy Chase.
In short order Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen arrived in Los Angeles, writing songs for ABC Dunhill Records and playing behind Jay and the Americans. “We were supposed to be writing for groups like Three Dog Night and Grass Roots,” Mr. Fagen said. “But we were terrible at it.”
The pair turned to their literary influences for their own lyrics, everyone from Nabokov and Bruce Jay Friedman to Philip Roth and Terry Southern. Students of the band’s lore know that the band’s name is an allusion to a dildo mentioned in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
Very few bands have had the combination of platinum sales and critical respect the Dan achieved over their 10 most fruitful years. But the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has yet to recognize the band, even three years after they became eligible. For the guys, it’s a tongue-in-cheek puzzlement. They’ve written the hall several times and posted the letters on their Web site. Among the inducements they’ve offered: dozens of old 3-M digital recorders, Mr. Fagen’s childhood piano, which at the time was already in Cleveland, and a case of honey mustard.
“That was for Jann Wenner personally, though,” Mr. Fagen added, referring to the Rolling Stone founder who is behind the museum. He recalled his attendance-along with Warner Brothers music boss Mo Ostin-at the early Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, at the Waldorf-Astoria: “Mo Ostin would come from L.A., and he needed someone to talk to. So he’d get me and Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels. It was fun. Mike Love made an insane speech. There was all this insane stuff, and it was kind of interesting. Then they decided it was going to be a Grammy-type video thing, and it lost all its character. All the main people are already in there, and now they’re going to have to induct people from the 80’s.”
“We’ve qualified several times,” said Mr. Becker. “Ozzy Osbourne described us as the perennial losers.”
“We tell them we want to be in it and that we’re devastated when we lose,” said Mr. Fagen.
“The first year we became eligible we wrote a letter on a lark,” Mr. Becker said. “We though it would be funny to be inducted by ourselves and not with our old band mates, just for crassness. Subsequently, we found out there was a real debate about that with some other band. So we stumbled into this minefield. So then we reversed our position. We demanded that all of our band members be inducted, plus other bands that had been neglected, like the Fugs, Jimmy Carl Black, the drummer from the Mothers of Invention. Different incarnations of the Jefferson Airplane. We might be the very last band inducted.”
Maybe the Rhythm and Blues Foundation is more in their line?
Mr. Fagen: “What do they like over there? Honey mustard? Belgian chocolate? Swedish ginger cookies?”
With or without the Hall, they will continue to go their own way. Indeed, Two Against Nature reveals only slight changes in their thinking. In the single, “Cousin Dupree,” the main character is an older guy sleeping on his aunt’s couch and fantasizing about his young teenage cousin. “It’s just a little rural love song,” Mr. Fagen likes to say. “What a Shame About Me” concerns a Strand book clerk who’s gone nowhere in his life while his girlfriend has become a major movie star.
“He’s gotten a certain integrity,” Mr. Becker said. “He’s having a moment of bleak epiphany and is in a state of grace.”
But some of Two Against Nature reflects a stark change from the past. Set against a rich melody, “Almost Gothic” is an exuberant love song in which the narrator announces he spells love “L-U-V.”
“It’s a little quote, you know,” Mr. Fagen said. “From the Shangri-Las, I think, some throw away thing from ‘Leader of the Pack.’ I guess maybe because I connected the Shangri-Las with unwholesome sex. There’s no way to explain how powerful his feeling is for this woman is so he has to spell it out.”
What accounts for the un-Steely Dan-like feeling of glee that infects the song?
Mr. Becker: “Well, we have to enlarge the franchise a little bit, expand the territory. We don’t want to be stuck in a rut.”
Mr. Fagen: “You have to perk yourself up every morning when you get older. So you start thinking of these perky subjects.”
Walter produced a Rickie Lee Jones album. Here’s my favorite track
Well, congrats to “Law & Order” star Stephanie March. She just married Dan Benton, a nice guy and a rich one, too. Last November they came to Bob and Lee Woodruff’s Stand Up for Heroes on a date. Benton also brought along his pal, Silicon Valley mogul Dan Rosensweig.
At the event, Benton– who runs Andor Capital Management and is a big time tech investor– and Rosensweig bought a signed guitar from Bruce Springsteen at auction. They paid $280,000 for it. We chatted for quite a while. And the picture I took here is of the two of them flanking Bruce. (Dan’s on the left).
I don’t know who got custody of the guitar. But Benton got custody of March. She’d been ambushed by ex husband, chef Bobby Flay, when their 10 year marriage ended a couple of years ago. He’d been working in someone else’s kitchen, apparently. Now Stephanie’s found a better recipe for love!
All’s well that ends well– and maybe Bruce’s guitar had something to do with it!
I’m holding this spot until 1pm when the “Tulip Fever” embargo breaks. That’s when the piling on will begin because good or bad, “Tulip Fever” has become a meme in social media. Justin Chadwick directed the movie based on the novel. Steven Spielberg was supposed to direct it years ago, but financing fell apart.
Why or how it proceeded from there is another story, but it’s here now after many release dates were missed. Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O’Connell, and Christoph Waltz star. One thing is clear: “Tulip Fever” is beautiful to look at. There was no stinting on production design, costumes, lighting, scenics.
The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, who counts among his many achievements “Shakespeare in Love.” This movie looks like that one, except without Shakespeare.
Is it “Days of Heaven”? or “Ishtar?” Any of the terrible misfires of 2017 so far, from “King Arthur” to “Rough Night”? No. Nothing like that. But hold on. I’ll tell you more later this afternoon.
UPDATE WITH REVIEW
Is it good, is it bad, what’s the big deal? Sumptuous to look at, “Tulip Fever” is simply uneven and rushed. Justin Chadwick’s direction is all over the place. But that doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t have a lot of good things going for it. The acting is top notch. I really liked Jack O’Connell in the main supporting role. He actually has more chemistry with Alicia Vikander and Dane DeHaan.
You could ask, where have all the flowers gone? One thing “Tulip Fever” is missing is…tulips. You know if Martin Scorsese had shot this movie like “The Age of Innocence,” we’d be awash in them. Lots of them. You see, all of Amsterdam is engaged in buying and selling of tulips as commerce in the mid 1600s. They are passionate about it. and money is flowing.
Wealthy Mr. Waltz has married for the third or fourth time, to the much younger Vikander, desires an heir. He also hires a young Rembrandt like painter (DeHaan) to execute their portrait. It’s not much of a leap to see the younger people are going to get it on under the older husband’s nose. In a subplot, Vikander’s ladies’ maid (Holliday Grainger) is shtupping O’Connell, who’s come up with a way to make money in tulip trade.
“Tulip Fever” doesn’t know whether it’s a Judi Dench type historical piece, or a Cinemax Late at Night sex romp. There’s a lot of sex, at least in the first half, kind of gauzy and soft core. It’s like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” with a Harlequin cover. It’s all rapidly told so we can get to the plot, and the mechanism that spurs us along to the third act. And that’s where things get wonky. The film has moved so fast that the big reveal is anti-climatic. And then no one knows what to do.
And still, for TV, for other platforms, “Tulip Fever” will play just fine. It’s far ‘less worse’ than a half dozen other big movies this season. Once Stoppard’s structure kicks in you can’t help but pay attention and even care some for Vikander’s peril. I think the biggest problem is here is what happened to the release. If “Tulip Fever” had just come out, no one would have cared. Now curiosity is piqued– for the wrong reasons. It’s a handsome little romp. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Where in the world is David Muir? The ABC anchor has been MIA since the beginning of Hurricane Harvey, the biggest story for network evening news in eons. Muir has been like The Ghost and Mr. Muir– unseen. And no word from him on social media. It’s weird. When you’re an anchor of one of the Big 3 newscasts and something bad happens, you come home from vacation. Immediately. No word from ABC. I’ll tell you when I hear. (UPDATE He’s on vacation, most likely enjoying the Tuscan sun or Provencal cuisine. An insider says Muir was told the ABC was bench was deep and he needn’t return.)
Muir’s absence has been to the benefit of Lester Holt, who put on his big boots and got in the water. On Monday and Tuesday this week, Lester beat ABC World New Tonight in the key demo 25-54 handily. You can see the numbers below. Around 400,000 ABC viewers didn’t come back from Monday to Tuesday. The same number didn’t return to NBC, but the difference was that younger viewers stayed. On Tuesday night, NBC had 500,000 more key demo viewers than ABC.
CBS Evening News, which I like a lot (it’s very well written) remained in third place. But it’s got a lot of quality, and Anthony Mason is doing a great job. Norah O’Donnell puts on the rainboots for the Tiffany network. And she’s doing swell, too! UPDATE here, too: Mason didn’t do Thursday night’s show, as CBS seems to have given up the ratings war.
