(no subject)
heavens what a weekend of cinematic delights! i've done very little this weekend other than catch up with sleep - and much of it! - catch up with my cd purchases from america (there'll be more on that later, but generally speaking plinth you were so incredibly right about the sam prekop album! BEAUTIFUL!), a bit of shopping in town (the first song from the new robyn album "spooked" with gillian welch and david rawlings on the free word magazine cd is absolutely wondrous) and - well - films!
first of all "off the charts: the song poem story". if you don't know about song poems go to here and take a look and several deep breaths. it's an incredibly weird but addictive world once you get into the heady realms of the song poem universe. basically little adverts advertising recordings for your poetry - the audio equivalent of vanity publishing - in the back of magazines result in various studios (for a price) recording a version of your lyrics in a variety of styles - country, pop, gospel, folk etc etc. - on a record for your pleasure and the wider public's bafflement. song poems are probably the most accessible form of outsider music to get into - it takes a while to listen to the shaggs beyond just badly performed music, and many people can't get over the ludicrousness of shooby taylor "the human horn" to hear the absolute glory of his unaffected enthusiasm. but song poems are a different matter - you can get easy laughs with such oddities as john trubee's "blind man's penis" (which he tells us on the documentary he wrote merely to prove that song poems were a con and instead found himself in the extraordinary position of having his deliberately offensive lyrics - the mildest being "I got high last night on LSD/ My mind was beautiful, and I was free/ Warts loved my nipples because they are pink/ Vomit on me, baby/ Yeah Yeah Yeah." performed as a wonderful country ballad by the great ramsey kearney) or "junkies and monkeys" (a warning to us all) to more extreme stuff like the genius of "non violent taekwondo troopers". this is written by the incredibly eccentric caglar juan singletary and sung by the most extremely odd of all the song poem people, david fox, goes something like this "angelariaaaaa! (the name of singletary's bicylce) Show me yourself/ Come in the spirit of Jesus Christ/ thank Jehovah for kung fu bicycles and priscilla presley." singletary is a bit of a ladies man ("the subjects i write about are martial arts, ladies and religion, oh and science fiction too") as his masterpiece "annie oakley" demonstrates: "i have taken a vow of celibacy until marriage/ but if Annie was to tempt me into her carriage/ I might lose to Miss Oakley - it's not funny/ Annie is one of my historical honeys."
the greatest thing about this documentary is that it manages to introduce us to some of the oddest people ever seen on the screen (singletary, norm orvitz, gary forney and david fox) and never once treat them with anything other than love and respect which is a hard thing to do. your first reaction to this stuff - as with much outsider music - is to laugh or sneer at it but NO! this stuff is just - wired differently. there is a naivety and innocence to the best of the stuff that the director really understands. unlike "spellbound", the documentary about the national spelling bee, i also saw this week which sometimes did laugh at the protagonists (well it's almost understandable considering one of the main children involved was the single most annoying individual ever) this film really does treat them with respect. but neither is it worthy - oh heavens no. it's ruddy hilarious. gene merlino, the king of the demos, who once recorded some 86 demos in four hours and won a grammy with the anita kerr singers in 1966 over the beatles and the rolling stones and worked with sinatra and elvis, is one of the most charming men ever. the footage on the extras with him battling with the concept of how he ever recorded the song "moon men" is simply wonderful, as he struggles manfully through one take of badly written doggerell and yet still makes it out alive. we see him taking fifteen minutes to knock out such memorable songs as "the 23rd channel", "i am a ginseng farmer" and "out in the woods" in ONE TAKE AND ONE TAKE ONLY is wonderful. then we get david fox, perhaps the only song poem recorder to not quite demonstrate any distance from his clients as his manic excitement and speedy recording of norm orvitz tribute to john carpenter's "the thing" demonstrates. it takes forty eight minutes from opening the letter to recording the final version of the single and fox sings it like it's the most important moment of his life. yet the sequence isn't over until we witness norm ovitz's rather bemused expression as he realised that fox has added a few boogies to the song as it is played back to him for the first time. surprising poignancy with the king of the song poem, rod keith, who managed to really polish some of the biggest turds in musical history and make them sound special and his early death and his song poem collecting son
and the iowa mountain tour. oh yes. how can we forget. gary forney is possibly the most wonderfully self deluded man i have ever seen. we see a painful sequence where he phones a danish radio station at probably the early hours of the morning and asks how his music is going down. long standing customer of the song poem industry ("caravan": ""What are we doing here/ where are we going to/ Caravan/ Tell me if you can, what is the big plan/ Everywhere we go everyone we know seems to be Insane."), he suddenly decided that he can do this himself and with his rather bemused son forms the wonderfully unironic iowa mountain tour. there is a sequence of them performing such numbers as "chicken insurrection" and "three eyed boy" live at a folk festival which manages to be one of the most painful things you've ever seen (you know the bit in "father ted" where ted and dougal try and enter eurovision with their own ragged acoustic guitar rendition of "my lovely horse"? well imagine that bit musically but with a vocal completely in a different key. for both songs), the most hilarious thing you've ever seen and - as he manages to win the audience over - the most inspiring thing you've ever seen. "i think i may have played a few wrong notes" says forney's son as they leave. you're not kidding my friend. but the stuff that really hits home are the passion and love of all those involved. even old pros like gene merlino seems to have fondness for the daftness of it all and the most moving scene in the film is a long standing and aging song poem client, who once paid two thousand dollars to record his own gospel album ("but it came out wrong. still i tried") hearing his rather movingly naive poem of his young love set to a rather charming ballad by ramsay kearney. it's a wonderfully touching moment and it is to meltzer's credit he focuses on this rather than the bell laugh
the film is genuinely a wonderful thing though - oodles of extras as well. really if you love or are vaguely intrigued by the extreme world of song poems you could not do better than this film and the setanta (bar/none in the states) cd "do you know the difference between big wood and brush". dave is currently trying to write a poem and send it off, so desperate is he to get one for himself - bless him. hugely recommended
first of all "off the charts: the song poem story". if you don't know about song poems go to here and take a look and several deep breaths. it's an incredibly weird but addictive world once you get into the heady realms of the song poem universe. basically little adverts advertising recordings for your poetry - the audio equivalent of vanity publishing - in the back of magazines result in various studios (for a price) recording a version of your lyrics in a variety of styles - country, pop, gospel, folk etc etc. - on a record for your pleasure and the wider public's bafflement. song poems are probably the most accessible form of outsider music to get into - it takes a while to listen to the shaggs beyond just badly performed music, and many people can't get over the ludicrousness of shooby taylor "the human horn" to hear the absolute glory of his unaffected enthusiasm. but song poems are a different matter - you can get easy laughs with such oddities as john trubee's "blind man's penis" (which he tells us on the documentary he wrote merely to prove that song poems were a con and instead found himself in the extraordinary position of having his deliberately offensive lyrics - the mildest being "I got high last night on LSD/ My mind was beautiful, and I was free/ Warts loved my nipples because they are pink/ Vomit on me, baby/ Yeah Yeah Yeah." performed as a wonderful country ballad by the great ramsey kearney) or "junkies and monkeys" (a warning to us all) to more extreme stuff like the genius of "non violent taekwondo troopers". this is written by the incredibly eccentric caglar juan singletary and sung by the most extremely odd of all the song poem people, david fox, goes something like this "angelariaaaaa! (the name of singletary's bicylce) Show me yourself/ Come in the spirit of Jesus Christ/ thank Jehovah for kung fu bicycles and priscilla presley." singletary is a bit of a ladies man ("the subjects i write about are martial arts, ladies and religion, oh and science fiction too") as his masterpiece "annie oakley" demonstrates: "i have taken a vow of celibacy until marriage/ but if Annie was to tempt me into her carriage/ I might lose to Miss Oakley - it's not funny/ Annie is one of my historical honeys."
the greatest thing about this documentary is that it manages to introduce us to some of the oddest people ever seen on the screen (singletary, norm orvitz, gary forney and david fox) and never once treat them with anything other than love and respect which is a hard thing to do. your first reaction to this stuff - as with much outsider music - is to laugh or sneer at it but NO! this stuff is just - wired differently. there is a naivety and innocence to the best of the stuff that the director really understands. unlike "spellbound", the documentary about the national spelling bee, i also saw this week which sometimes did laugh at the protagonists (well it's almost understandable considering one of the main children involved was the single most annoying individual ever) this film really does treat them with respect. but neither is it worthy - oh heavens no. it's ruddy hilarious. gene merlino, the king of the demos, who once recorded some 86 demos in four hours and won a grammy with the anita kerr singers in 1966 over the beatles and the rolling stones and worked with sinatra and elvis, is one of the most charming men ever. the footage on the extras with him battling with the concept of how he ever recorded the song "moon men" is simply wonderful, as he struggles manfully through one take of badly written doggerell and yet still makes it out alive. we see him taking fifteen minutes to knock out such memorable songs as "the 23rd channel", "i am a ginseng farmer" and "out in the woods" in ONE TAKE AND ONE TAKE ONLY is wonderful. then we get david fox, perhaps the only song poem recorder to not quite demonstrate any distance from his clients as his manic excitement and speedy recording of norm orvitz tribute to john carpenter's "the thing" demonstrates. it takes forty eight minutes from opening the letter to recording the final version of the single and fox sings it like it's the most important moment of his life. yet the sequence isn't over until we witness norm ovitz's rather bemused expression as he realised that fox has added a few boogies to the song as it is played back to him for the first time. surprising poignancy with the king of the song poem, rod keith, who managed to really polish some of the biggest turds in musical history and make them sound special and his early death and his song poem collecting son
and the iowa mountain tour. oh yes. how can we forget. gary forney is possibly the most wonderfully self deluded man i have ever seen. we see a painful sequence where he phones a danish radio station at probably the early hours of the morning and asks how his music is going down. long standing customer of the song poem industry ("caravan": ""What are we doing here/ where are we going to/ Caravan/ Tell me if you can, what is the big plan/ Everywhere we go everyone we know seems to be Insane."), he suddenly decided that he can do this himself and with his rather bemused son forms the wonderfully unironic iowa mountain tour. there is a sequence of them performing such numbers as "chicken insurrection" and "three eyed boy" live at a folk festival which manages to be one of the most painful things you've ever seen (you know the bit in "father ted" where ted and dougal try and enter eurovision with their own ragged acoustic guitar rendition of "my lovely horse"? well imagine that bit musically but with a vocal completely in a different key. for both songs), the most hilarious thing you've ever seen and - as he manages to win the audience over - the most inspiring thing you've ever seen. "i think i may have played a few wrong notes" says forney's son as they leave. you're not kidding my friend. but the stuff that really hits home are the passion and love of all those involved. even old pros like gene merlino seems to have fondness for the daftness of it all and the most moving scene in the film is a long standing and aging song poem client, who once paid two thousand dollars to record his own gospel album ("but it came out wrong. still i tried") hearing his rather movingly naive poem of his young love set to a rather charming ballad by ramsay kearney. it's a wonderfully touching moment and it is to meltzer's credit he focuses on this rather than the bell laugh
the film is genuinely a wonderful thing though - oodles of extras as well. really if you love or are vaguely intrigued by the extreme world of song poems you could not do better than this film and the setanta (bar/none in the states) cd "do you know the difference between big wood and brush". dave is currently trying to write a poem and send it off, so desperate is he to get one for himself - bless him. hugely recommended