Anita noted District Cock-ups, a cautionary tale (well actually he sounds practically optimistic). He probably didn’t even bother getting drunk first! Kids today, I tell you.
Pleasing to Remember stood up for Howard in the Fightin’ Fifth, and veiled4allah stepped up to the plate in the Frugal Forty-Seventh.
I didn’t excavate further caucus tales in the limited time I devoted to assembling this mess o’ pointers.
Some notes on the new Jason Webley CD, Only Just Beginning.
At the concert at Town Hall Friday night, I sat next to a man I introduced myself to, but whose name I have forgotten. He mentioned that he’d recently interviewed Jason for a San Francisco-based publication, but did not mention it by name.
We briefly discussed the experience of interviewing Jason and I asked him some questions about what he’d learned from Jason in the interview. He told me that yes, this new record is the end of the cycle that began with Viaje; that the songs on Only Just Beginning are about family, and finally, that each song on Only Just Beginning relates direcly to the songs on Viaje.
Curious, as I was ripping Only Just Beginning, I looked at the tracklistings for Viaje. What I noticed was interesting enough that I’ll reproduce both side by side here.
| Viaje | Only Just Beginning |
|---|---|
| Prelude | February Relaxing Her Fingers After A Brief Winter’s Grip |
| Without | Music That Puts Everything Together |
| Halloween | Balloon Feather Boat Tomato |
| La Mesilla | Icarus |
| Postcard | Mine |
| Rocket To God | Map |
| Old Man Time Ain’t No Friend Of Mine | Viaje |
| Avocado Mushroom Devil Trap | May Day |
| Music That Tears Itself Apart | With |
| August Closing His Mouth After A Long Summer’s Yawn | Coda |
The songs are structured as the close of a fugue begun on Viaje, such that Viaje’s “Prelude” determines Only Just Beginning’s “Coda,” and so on. “Halloween” and “May Day.” “Old Man Time” and “Icarus.”
(Update: oops, I reversed the songtitles titles at first.)
There are musical relationships as well – “Music That Puts Everything Together” echoes both “Halloween” and, obviously, “Music That Tears Itself Apart,” but I have, er, only just begun to listen for them.
Finally, I noticed that Jason also studded the concert last night with simiilar puzzles – the only one I really saw and got was at the beginning of the second song, “Balloon Feather Boat Tomato,” when he pulled these objects, in that order, from within the grand piano on the stage. As the audience recognized each, cheers rang out, presumably for the roles each symbol hs played over the years at these elaborate shows.
The title of the song, by the way, relates in reverse chronological order, the ways in which Jason’s end-of-season Death Day shows transported the performer-character to the Other Side. At the first Death Day show, the Tomato led the procession, where Jason was shorn and placed into a coffin; At the second (my favorite of the ones I saw), he departed in a boat, accompanied by Charon and the Lady of the Lake; at the third, he was cocooned against a tree as feathers rained down on the freezing, silent crowd; and at the most recent, his avatar ascended through the drizzle slung beneath a clot of balloons.
One cannot help but wonder what in the world will happen at the end of this summer.
So I guess IFC was having a Who-athon or something; I remarked to Viv as we flipped by that the band had been very lucky cinematically, with the three films they were involved with that I know of.
It was the closing scenes of Tommy we were looking at. Tommy is a completely ridiculous movie; but at the same time, that is what makes it great. Then the credits informed me, startlingly, that it was directed by Ken Russell, something I guess I had never bothered to even think about before, but which in hindsight should have been obvious to me.
A few hours later, I turned off the DVD player and flipped into the middle of The Kids are Alright, whose soundtrack of largely live performances I strongly prefer to the studio renditions also available. I recall seeing the film around 1982 in a theater in Europe and have seen it a few times since, but I had never really watched it as film critic or as a musician.
I was not prepared to be as impressed as I was. From the clever intercutting of many interviews, a clear picture of the artistic dynamic of the band emerges (there’s Pete, and there’s them lot), and although I hesitate to say such an obvious thing, Keith Moon’s improbable gifts as a drummer are also conveyed cinematically.
Even in the studio-shot segments, or possibly most strongly in them, the filmmakers insist on presenting a direct, pure-verite style that is very successful. We see the band apparently recording “Who Are You,” and the filmmakers cut between several tracking sessions, creating a visual analogue of multi-track recording without resorting to dumb effects like multiple exposures.
In that section, and elsewhere in the film, the visual motif of an isolated Pete Townshend crops up again and again, which is clearly a deliberate choice by the filmmakers – and possibly what Mr. Townshend himself would have desired as the film was in production.
The persuasiveness of the film in establishing this illusion of documentary transparency is fantastic. Watching it was a deep pleasure. I wondered, naturally, “Who the heck made this thing, anyway?”
The answer is that Jeff Stein and Ed Rothkowitz are primarily responsible. Rothkowitz was the film’s editor and an associate producer who was in charge of garnering the documentary footage, and Stein was the director and driving force behind the film.
A remastered DVD has been released, with information at this noisy flash-based site.
I found a long interview with Jeff Stein at the Hollywood Reporter, which I found fascinating.