There were two obits that meant a lot to me, the American illustrator Syd Mead and the British singer and songwriter Neil Innes.
I saw Mead's illustrations in magazines in the 1960s, when he did a lot of work for Ford painting of the vehicles of the future. His cars and motorcycles were low and sleek and alluring. My illustrator friends Alan Ponder and Armand Cabrera were both big fans of Mead's work, and they were by no means alone. In the 1970s and 1980s, many films brought him in as a visual consultant, including Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Aliens and TRON. George Lucas credits Mead as the inspiration for the AT-AT design as well. Unfortunately, Elon Musk gave Mead a nod as inspiration on the design of his Cybertruck, but Musk's vision missed the elegance that made Mead great.
Talking to Alan Ponder, he gave a reason for the enduring popularity of Mead's work. He shows a hopeful future based on mid-20th Century optimism, but more than that, his cars look possible. These weren't actual working designs, but Mead's cars make it clear they have enough room for the engine and drive train. There are other futurists from the era, but many of their designs make vehicles so compact, the engine would have to be the size of a small briefcase.
Neil Innes has three claims to fame. His breakthrough work was with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, which I first heard on Dr. Demento in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I didn't learn more about them until I was in The Wonders of Science in the early 1980s and co-founder Michael Dresbach played the album Gorilla, after which I bought my own copy. He worked with Monty Python, most notably on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where he is credited with writing Knights of the Round Table and Brave Sir Robin.
But for me, his crowning achievement is writing the music for the mock documentary All You Need is Cash, the story of the rise and breakup of The Rutles, a legend that would last a lifetime. From left to right we have Stig, Dirk, Barry and Nasty, played by Ricky Fataar, Eric Idle, John Halsey and Neil Innes, respectively. Watching the documentary, one could easily come to the conclusion that this is a star turn for Eric Idle, who has two major roles as Dirk and the narrator. There are lots of cameos from musicians, one from Michael Palin and several from cast members of Saturday Night Live. But All You Need is Cash works because of the 20 songs written by Neil Innes. In my mind, these are Beatles's songs, much in the same way Galaxy Quest counts as one of the good Star Trek films in my head canon. John Lennon liked it so much he failed to return the tape he got for advanced viewing, and warned Innes that Get Up and Go might be too close to Get Back. Lennon thought the company that then owned the rights to the Beatles' catalog might sue. (They never did.) George Harrison was one of the executive producers and he loved it, of course, Ringo and Paul were more ambivalent. To be honest, I think Eric Idle as Dirk McQuigley is somewhere between loving tribute and cruel satire. The look on his face when he sings A Girl Like You mocks Paul's cute puppy dog act when he sang the slower tunes.
Since I mentioned that Get Up and Go might be too close to Get Back, here is a video you can watch to make up your own mind.
Best wishes to the family and friends of Syd Mead and Neil Innes, from a fan. We shall never see their like again.
I've been away from this blog for a while, but this week a topic that fits my memory perfectly came to mind. Next April will be the 50th anniversary of Nixon signing the law that banned cigarette ads from TV. It went into effect on January 2, 1971, which gave the tobacco companies one last push on the college bowl games played on January 1, which back then was the biggest day for college football, bar none.
Of course, print ads were still legal and still are to this day, but even they must have a readable box of a legally defined size that presents a clear message about the dangers of tobacco. If we look at this from the point of view of the tobacco companies, their free speech was severely curtailed, but I haven't heard even the strident free speech advocate take up their case. The United States is a major producer of tobacco, but in terms of tobacco producing states, there's North Carolina and there's everybody else.
As this graph shows, North Carolina is dominant in tobacco production. Their numbers are more than the next four states combined. In this era of free flowing money, an industry as big as tobacco could easily have the entire GOP on their side as well as moderate Democrats, but in 1970, the industry was steamrolled by a bipartisan wave of disapproval of tobacco. This is one of those bills that Nixon signed that no Republican that followed him would have approved. I do not come to praise Nixon, except to say he was pragmatic. The Democrats had an advantage and he decided not to fight every battle to the last breath. His Southern Strategy had many parts, but on this he couldn't save the mostly Southern industry. There was never serious talk of banning cigarettes; the experience of Prohibition was still clear in people's minds. but the American Cancer Society started running their public service commercials and it made a difference in public opinion. Conventional wisdom, usually so hidebound, decided that Something Must Be Done, and the choice was the TV ad ban. This may be the most famous ACS ad, narrated by Gene Wilder, first aired in 1969.
I remember a lot of the ads, and the jingles stick with me the most, as I expect they do for most people. Benson & Hedges decided to measure cigarettes in millimeters, marketing Benson & Hedges 100s, longer than other cigarettes. It was a successful ploy and some Clever Trevor decided to literally one up them and make a cigarette called the 101s. This odd ad ends with the jingle, the music clearly stolen from La Bamba. The tagline reminded me of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap and his amplifier that goes to 11.
Another jingle still fresh in my mind fifty years later is the one from Virginia Slims.
The tobacco industry has always marketed their product to the young, though they deny it at every instance. Here's an ad built into an episode of The Flintstones from the first season. I have never believed their denials since.
Marlboro had started their ad campaign connecting their brand with manliness in the 1950s, but their big breakthrough was buying the Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven. They did many variations on the section best known for the rhythm carried by the horn section and the melody up in the strings. It redefined what cowboy music was supposed to sound like and Marlboro changed their ad campaign accordingly, not just manly men doing manly things but cowboys out in the West.
I'm not sure its fair to call this a jingle since there are no lyrics. I loved the song so much and hated the product equally fiercely, and it formed an itch in me to mock it, so I thought like a MAD magazine writer and came up with some lyrics. Marlb'ro... Marlb'ro country. Home of... the brave cowboy. Somewhere under the Western sky, People are dying there of cancer.
For people under fifty years old, there experience of TV ads for cigarettes is confined mainly to watching YouTube, but the tobacco industry did make an attempt by marketing small cigars, saying they were a different product than cigarettes. This ruse didn't last long, but it did give us an ad in the 1970s featuring a very young Fred Willard selling Tiparillos.
I can't even estimate how many TV ads I saw as a kid, I would expect most Boomers have a similar experience. Like the draft, this is one of those things from the 1960s that never was much of an experience for people about ten years younger than I am.
I was first introduced to Gahan Wilson's work in Playboy magazines when I was way too young to be reading them. How they skewed my sexuality is a story for another time, but let me say Gahan Wilson skewed my sense of humor and I will always love him for it.
Mr. Wilson is now 89. His wife of 53 years died in 2019 and he suffers from dementia. For me, a diagnosis of dementia would be as bad as cancer. There is a GoFundMe account trying to raise money to help him. I sent some money this morning. If his work means anything to you, I hope you will help as well.
One of the joys of trivia is seeing references to earlier work in favorite films. The first clip is from Night of the Hunter.
First things first. This is a wonderful scene. Robert Mitchum has an enchanting baritone and Lillian Gish joining in gives me chills. And then there's the cinematography, the perfect use of black and white, evil confronting good, but good is not defenseless. Lillian Gish as Mrs. Cooper might be the best example of Christian love ever put on film. And then there's her last line, said with such sadness.
"It's a hard world for little things."
The second scene in H.I.'s nightmare from Raising Arizona. The Coen brothers are serious students of film and the borrowing (or theft) of this line is not coincidence.
The films are different as can be, but they have a common thread, protecting children from evil. If you haven't seen them, I strongly recommend both of these films.
Morgan Woodward died last week at the age of 93. He is a prime example of an actor whose named I forced myself to memorize when I was young. My memory was good and I filled it up as much as I could, with everything from facts about animals to trivia about comic books. I also memorized the names of actors I had seen on TV shows and movies, most of the movies when they were on TV years after their theatrical releases. This often meant waiting to the end of shows to write down notes about the cast lists. Back then, there was no Internet, so the research was harder to do. I took pride from a young age in identifying actors when someone would say "Who's that guy who was in...?" Morgan Woodward wasn't just Oh That Guy to me. His TV career started in 1956, and he worked steadily until the late 1990s. retiring in his early seventies. In the 1980s, he finally got lucky enough to be a regular on the long-running prime-time soap opera Dallas. A gig like that was the only way for a man who was never a star to get a steady paycheck.But for me, my favorite roles of his were from the late 1960s, two guest roles on the original Star Trek, once as an inmate in an asylum and once as a Starfleet captain, playing Boss Godfrey, a.k.a The Walking Boss, in the 1967 Paul Newman vehicle Cool Hand Luke.
This is a perfect camera shot. Morgan Woodward's face is framed under the black circle of his hat, his eyes hidden behind reflecting sunglasses. The Walking Boss doesn't say much, and he doesn't have to. The prisoners are terrified of him, as well they should be. Lots of character actors get to chew the scenery - Woodward did in both his guest roles on Star Trek - but here he is not just cool, he is cold. The movie is about Luke defying authority, and The Walking Boss makes the stakes of that defiance clear. One false step and The Walking Boss would kill him. Cool Hand Luke is as entertaining as a trip through hell can be, but it's also a trivia goldmine. The stars of the film are definitely Paul Newman and George Kennedy, but the cast is full from top to bottom with actors whose careers either already had great performances or young actors who would become much more famous within a few years' time.
One of the actors who already had famous credits was Jo Van Fleet as Luke's mom. In real life, she was only ten years older than Newman, but due to make-up and acting ability and Newman being so damned pretty, you never think she's too young to be his mother. A decade earlier, Van Fleet had a small, pivotal role in East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.
Another actor who had great roles before and after Cool Hand Luke is Strother Martin. Many actors' careers back in the day were either defined as TV actors or film actors, but Martin switched back and forth regularly. He was famous for overacting. For a movie actor, his characters have a lot of tics and eccentricities, but it's always fun to see him on screen. He was in several of Paul Newman's films after Cool Hand Luke, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Pocket Money and Slap Shot.
The cast is full to the brim with actors who would be much more famous within ten years. Among the faces you might be able to pick out of this crowd from left to right are Ralph Waite, George Kennedy, Joe Don Baker, Wayne Rogers, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. Of those six, Joe Don Baker was just an extra, his character had no name and he had no lines. As I said earlier, a trivia goldmine.
The movie is over fifty years old, so it is no surprise most of the cast is gone. Now that Woodward has died, the only surviving actors are Lou Antonio, Harry Dean Stanton, Anthony Zerbe, Joe Don Baker, Kim Kahana and Joy Harmon, who played the girl washing the car that George Kennedy's character Dragline named Lucille, the proximate cause of the famous fight between Dragline and Luke. As far as I can tell, she was the youngest person in the cast. Ms. Harmon turns 80 next year. Besides Cool Hand Luke, where she has no lines and only a single scene, her best known work is as Merrie in the 1965 sci-fi movie Village of the Giants, a much bigger role both literally and figuratively in a much less well-known film.
I apologize to Morgan Woodward for making an essay that should be an appreciation of his career into a memory exercise. My only excuse is the name of this blog is To the Best of My Recollection, and a major reason my recollection became good was from following the careers of the character actors like Morgan Woodward that I saw on TV when I was young.
This weekend, I watched Fail-Safe for the first time all the way through. My trivia brain already had a few things stored about the movie, but very few. I knew it was in black and white, just like Dr. Strangelove, the other famous movie about nuclear war from 1964. I knew Walter Matthau played a creepy, pro nuclear war professor, and I must have seen scenes from the film while flipping through cable TV back in the day, because I knew there were scenes with Henry Fonda as the president and a young looking Larry Hagman as the guy who would translate what the Russian premier would say. The scenes were in a nearly blank room, just the two actors. Hagman is now associated with I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, but this is a much different role and he and Fonda are so good together.
I don't love the film the way I love Strangelove, but director Sidney Lumet made a lot of interesting choices. The one that is really striking is there is no incidental music in the film. I wracked my brain trying to think of other films without music, but I had to swallow my pride and look the information up. Someone I just met on Twitter, Allison Stern-Dunyak, brought up a few and Lumet's name kept popping up. I had forgotten there was no score in Network, and I hadn't seen his films The Offence or Dog Day Afternoon, the latter is a gap in my education I plan to fix. But I most certainly did see an earlier film in Lumet's career that had no musical cues, 12 Angry Men.
It was one of my earliest memory self-assignments to memorize the names of all the actors, but I didn't think to link them to their seat numbers. I just saw a scene on YouTube, so it's not all that impressive to list the names right now, but there are two actors in the cast who didn't get quite as much work as the rest. So as a kid, I made an effort to remember Joseph Sweeney as the old guy who is the second vote for not guilty as George Voscovec as the foreign born juror. The other ten actors are better known, the big star being Henry Fonda, and the rest would go to lots of roles in film and TV like Lee J. Cobb, Edward Binns (also in Fail-Safe), Jack Klugman, John Fiedler, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, E.G. Marshall, Robert Webber and Ed Begley.
Now that I have gone through the winding path that got me to thinking about 12 Angry Men, I focused on one scene, Ed Begley Sr. big star turn.
This was the liberal dream in mid-century America, and it rings completely hollow today. In a room of twelve white men, only one of them is a flat-out racist and when he stops talking in code and just uses the kind of racist language we hear from our president. (At the start of the film, we see the defendant. Since the film takes place in New York in the 1950s, I assume his brown skin is meant to tell us he is Puerto Rican.) All of the other eleven shun him completely. He is later so ashamed he votes to acquit.
We know the truth today. A racist like this would stand his ground and this would be an 11-1 vote, which back then would have meant a hung jury. Or even more likely, one of the other jurors - all white and all male - would have backed him up when he went into his racist diatribe.
It is still one of my favorite films, but looking back at it from the era of Trump, it's every bit as big a fantasy as Creature from the Black Lagoon, and more's the pity.
When I was a little kid, I had a rocking horse on springs and I loved it. My earliest memories of listening to music were sitting on the rocking horse, happily squeaking along with the music, though I doubt I was a stickler for keeping to the rhythm.
My older brother says I loved Tubby the Tuba. I remember we had the record because the name rings a bell and I remember the album cover. I went to YouTube to listen to several versions, and I can report the songs and the story are not in my memory. I suspect this is because I stopped listening at a certain age and never went back to it.
I definitely remember a condensed soundtrack album of The Wizard of Oz with all the songs and enough extra dialog to make the plot clear. Like most Americans my age, I have no idea how many times I saw The Wizard of Oz, but it was always a treat to watch after we got a color TV. I also remember loving Artur Rubenstein's recording of the Chopin waltzes, which was the start of a lifelong love of Chopin's music. The springs on the rocker made a racket even when they were oiled, but in my imagination of it, I assume my mom found the noise comforting, since she knew if I was in the rocker, I wasn't running around the house getting into trouble.
What I remember about the radio in the early 1960s are just a few stations. My mom and dad listened to classical and the two stations were KKHI and KDFC. I listened to the rock stations because my older brother and sister listened and I definitely got into it myself. When I started listening, the rock stations were KYA, KFRC and KEWB.
I was also a Giants fan, so I tuned into KSFO for the games and sometimes hung around to listen to their easy listening format after the games were over. The big star DJ in the area was Don Sherwood, but I started listening after he left the station. The names I remember from listening to were Jim Lange and Dan Sorkin, respectively the early morning and mid-morning DJs and a weekend announcer named Scott Beach. The station had a rarely used minute and a half long station identification jingle by the Johnny Mann singers that I always loved to hear.
But most of my memories were of the top 30 stations. While they heavily relied on whatever songs were hits at the moment, DJs would also throw in a few songs from a few years back, so I heard Buddy Holly's music years after he was dead. Other 1950s favorites for me were Chuck Berry and Little Richard. On the other hand, Elvis Presley left me cold. Top 30 radio was weird. Yes, of course we heard the Beatles and the Beach Boys and a lot of Motown acts, but I distinctly remember when a streak of Beatles' songs at number one for months was broken by Puff the Magic Dragon. Other songs that made it into the number one spot on the rock stations included Louis Armstrong singing Hello, Dolly - a much bigger hit at the time than What a Wonderful World ever was - and Barbra Streisand's People. I also remember hearing Allan Sherman's Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah played on the rock stations.
I confess that I didn't listen much to KDIA, the local soul station, so while I heard a lot of black artists, there were also many I wouldn't discover until well after the fact. I remember the first time Etta James was on a jukebox in San Francisco in the late 1980s that had a few of her singles from the early 1960s. Because she was a survivor, her older tunes started to be a big part of media, with At Last used on several commercials, and her 1995 tribute to Billie Holiday entitled Mystery Lady won a Grammy. But I can testify she was not a crossover star on the rock stations in the Bay Area back in the day.
Some music gets more play in retrospect than it did at the time, some gets less. Ray Charles recorded Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962 and it was absolutely huge. The song I Can't Stop Loving You made it to number 1 on the charts for R&B, rock and easy listening. While ironically it didn't do as well on the country charts, many artists like Willie Nelson and Buck Owens acknowledge that the record did wonders for the sales of country artists, opening people's ears and their hearts to how good the best of country music was.
If I could be an "influencer" in today's culture - a highly unlikely event - I think the first name I would like to bring out of the past for more respect is Sam Cooke. He had a lot of crossover hits, but my most vivid memory is listening to the radio report that he had been killed. At the time he died, the song Shake was climbing the charts, but right after the news, some DJ put on the B-side, A Change Is Gonna Come. I had never heard it before and I began to weep uncontrollably. The song can still make me cry. I will write more about 1960s radio in the months ahead, but I wanted to get these few ideas down first.
