45s: Origin of the term "pussy wagon"

"Greased Lightnin'," by John Travolta (1978)
Written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey

Grease is one of those movies that gets worse every time you see it. The laughably miscast "teenagers." The complete absence of any timing for the placement of the musical numbers. And so on. Yet it remains unbelievably entertaining, in the sense that you sit there on the couch watching it and think, I can't believe I'm being entertained.

I understand why it endures. The plot is simple, the jokes are dumb, and the songs are the kind of super-bouncy pop just made for karaoke and high school productions. If the music sounds dated, realize it could have been more dated. The filmmakers removed a lot of the Fifties groove from the original score and then, to fill in where needed, added shamelessly contemporary numbers from Barry Gibb and John Farrar, the latter serving in those days as producer/co-writer for Olivia Newton-John's music career.

Between them they pretty much took care of the big hits. The only song by original playwrights Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey to find radio play was "Summer Nights," and it gets played more now, with two or (increasingly) three generations of Grease fans listening to oldies radio, than it did in 1978.

But I'm here to tell you, they wrote one really cookin' number. Were "Greased Lightin'" not so irredeemably vulgar, it could have been a contenduh.

Mind you, I am up-front about my admiration for "You're the One That I Want" (a Farrar song) as a slam-bang piece of product. That song grabbed you the first time you heard it, if you were open to enjoying that sort of thing. I wonder if it didn't give Newton-John the confidence to go in a little more aggressive direction in her own career, for she gave up the sweet country-pop for the stylings of "Magic" and "Physical" at this time.

But, really, "Greased Lightnin'" is the masterpiece, the tentpole that holds up the endless and Sha-Na-Na-ified middle of the film. Of course, it's about as Fifties as an iPod.  But if you're going to go revisionist, go all the way. The filmmakers did. "Greased Lightnin'" turned loose Travolta's inner Tony Manero by arranging the song as a horn-driven rocker with disco overtones. The tune itself aside, it's far and away Travolta's best vocal. Though prone to falsetto shrieks--as was everyone in those days--Travolta here holds to a lower-range growl worthy of a rock-solid Elvis impersonation.

As for the visual, the "Greased Lightnin'" segment features the only non-laugh-inducing choreography in the whole movie. Not only do they have the T-Birds working it--you can tell Jeff Conaway did this on Broadway, he's got energy to burn and slides down that car like a cat burglar on a drain spout--they get the immortal Alice Ghostley, herself almost young enough to play a Pink Lady, in on the action. And she's got the beat!

Travolta, meanwhile, channels some Presley. In fact, he channels all Presley. He manages the frequently-vacant look of Movie Elvis during a close-up, goes for the Fifties Elvis sneer, and then throws down a Fat Elvis pose at the end.

As if that's not enough, the man descends from Heaven riding an engine. And Conaway is no slouch. He keeps a cigarette over his ear through the whole number and how he doesn't ignite his hair with that lighter, I'll never know.

A pit stop set to music with a kick-ass chorus thrown in for good measure. Damn right it's systematic. Hydromatic. Ultramatic.

Next on Biography: boredom

Ah, the suburbs and their lousy cable packages. To think I traded Fox Soccer Network, IFC, Sundance Channel, and SiFy (though the last was added here about a month after Battlestar Galactica ended) for overpriced real estate and hyperentitled suburban squires.

While scanning around Channel 400 recently, however, I learned we now get the Biography Channel. You remember Biography. Peter Graves' narration. Lots of Nostradamus and Hitler. The only show worth watching on A&E for the first ten years of its existence. Now, with A&E having gone all-in on reality programming and vehicles for Benjamin Bratt, its former showcase is shunted off to fill space elsewhere in a vain attempt to make me forget I've missed three Premier League seasons just so I can live next to neighbors who tell me I have to remove my Japanese maple because "it'd be a disaster if we all did what we wanted" with our yards.

Last night Biography Channel ran a bunch of documentaries on music figures. As I was surfing I landed on the entry on Queen singer Freddie Mercury. I thought: This cannot possibly be boring. Not only did Mercury have one of rock's great voices, he excelled at theatrics, and his life story--from a childhood in Zanzibar (!) and India to a tragic death from AIDS complications--had all the triumph and tragedy one could ask for in a hour.

You know the next line.

It was boring.

More unforgivably, it was cheap.

How cheap? Biography didn't spring for the rights to use any Queen music. So you have an hour-long documentary on a musician and no idea what his music sounded like. Are you kidding me?

How cheap? The same still photos appear again and again. Virtually no entity on earth gets photographed more than a rock band. There must be literally tens of thousands of photos of Queen. Is it too much to ask the producers to purchase enough of them to fill the hour? Are they aware they're working in a visual medium?

And the interviews. Oy. Look, I don't expect Brian May or John Deacon or Roger Taylor to sit for A&E. I understand their absence limits what the producers can do. But one of the surefire signs you're in the presence of a less-than-awesome rockumentary is a member of the band's fan club is treated as one of the experts.

Okay, in all fairness, the heads offered actual entertainment value. You had a couple of broadcasters, Mercury's longtime personal assistant, famed photographer/art director/scenester Mick Rock, and the ubiquitous Ben Fong-Torres, a man who by Presidential Order must be allowed to comment on any musical figure.

Still... it's a take-it-or-leave-it hour on Freddie Mercury. Shouldn't that be next to impossible?

45s: Rasping for air

"Total Eclipse of the Heart," by Bonnie Tyler (1983)
Written by Jim Steinman

Having moved on from man-mountain mouthpiece Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman took his Wagnerian aesthetic and compellingly weird sentence structures into the larger pop world and entered an alliance with then-forgotten Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler.

Tyler (nee Gaynor Hopkins) had scored a hit in 1977 with the roots rocker "It's a Heartache," and at the time DJs and unimaginative journalists had labeled her "the female Rod Stewart" because of her raspy voice, a product of vocal cord surgery and Tyler's subsequent refusal to rehab her voice by not using it. Her timing was perfect even if her pitch was not. Tyler happened along when the world needed a new Rod Stewart, for the old one had already begun one of rock history's longest descents into perdition, a journey he continues today like a fright-wigged Dante trapped on a treadmill.

By the early 1980s, though, Tyler was already rooted in history as a one-hit wonder. Enter one of the most distinctive plaintive piano intros of the era.

Steinman, the mad Prospero behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, once more conjured a ballad powered by gigantic choruses, seismograph-shattering percussion, and a level of overwrought emotion that outside of the music industry gets one committed for observation. Never one to skimp, Steinman added extra sorcerous juice by employing pros like Rick Derringer and various E Street Band members.

Steinman (left): always subtle

What hooked the public on "Eclipse" remains a matter of speculation. But that Turn around, Bright Eyes refrain is so strangely hypnotic that it must be at least part of the answer. No recording exec in his right mind would have approved a five-minute single with that kind of bizarre and lengthy intro, had Steinman and Meat Loaf not scored with similar material already. I'm not even sure it could get onto Broadway.

Tyler, meanwhile, attacked the lyric as gamely as one could ask. And you better be game because Steinman stacks his trademark drama-by-opposition sentences higher and higher (and higher):

Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I'm only falling apart

Okay, that's really good. But:

And we'll only be making it right
'Cause we'll never be wrong together

And:

Once upon a time there was light in my life
Now there's only love in the dark

These are simply lines no one else would write (for better or for worse, depending on your point of view). Indulge me, one more:

I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks

Ho, man.

To say nothing of the title. Virtually any other songwriter, or writer in any medium, would reject that outright. But if you know who wrote it, you're not surprised. You might even grant that it works. I give him credit for taking the chance. Like him or hate him, Steinman would never write a song called "Partial Eclipse of the Heart."

Tyler did not quite have Meat Loaf's powers of projection, alas. Not surprisingly she labored to stay a recognizable part of the proceedings as the song whipped itself into a hurricane. No matter. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" topped the charts anywhere people spoke English and became one of the monster-selling singles in a decade known for generating unheard-of sales figures. It's lengthy encampment in the Number One position also kept another Steinman extravaganza, Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," from the top spot.

A featured performance of "Eclipse" on Glee introduced the song to new listeners, no doubt guaranteeing more work for the still-trouping Tyler and an injection of cash for Steinman's Bat Out of Hell IV: I Am Wheezing and In Pain.

45s: Spoken word glory

"Big Bad John," by Jimmy Dean (1961)
Written by Jimmy Dean and Roy Acuff

Of all the people who have risen to Top 40 glory, none to my knowledge went on to make a far bigger fortune selling sausage except for the now-late Jimmy Dean.

Dean had been in the sausage factory known as the music industry for years when, with his label itching to drop him, he came up with a tall tale straight off a Johnny Horton* B-side. "Big Bad John" used a classic trope of fiction--a stranger comes to town. John, like Gatsby, provoked dark whispers involving murder, in John's case of a guy who had fallen out with our titular hero over the affections of a Cajun Queen.

The song's pop success exceeded even that of its run on the country charts. Yes, in the early 1960s, a spoken word tale could break the bank, and "Big Bad John" would not be the last. Lorne Greene, sideburned patriarch of the Bonanza gang, scored another a couple of years later.

Why "Big Bad John" (or for that matter Greene's "Ringo") captured the public imagination remains a question for anthropologists. It's got a sort of ominous tone, and Dean's winsome drawl. I believe it moved units foremost because it's a good story but also because it busts the good rhymes:

And a crashin' blow from a huge right hand
Send a Louisiana feller to the Promised Land
(Big John)

A welcome shift in public taste toward actual music ended the spoken-word trend, but Dean's career lived on. Topping the charts always proves one's worth to the Moguls of Showbiz, and those mysterious poohbahs slathered the affable Dean in some of the greatest show business gravy our pop culture can provide.

He guest-hosted The Tonight Show. Headlined in Vegas. Was handed a couple of TV variety shows in an era when country-and-western artists rarely received such an honor (?). And, in a real coup, played the Howard Hughes knockoff in Diamonds Are Forever, a Bond film chock full of features as mythic as Big Bad John: high-kickin' bikini-clad bodyguards, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, and of course, the moon-buggy.

By then Dean had broken with music industry tradition and actually found a way to avoid penury. Fame provides a hell of an entrepreneurial edge, as does the production of highly-processed meat products, and Dean parlayed his advantages into a brand of tasty sausage and an empire of indifferently-staffed restaurants. In doing so he accumulated a sizable fortune and a wife twenty-five years younger. As a bonus (as if the man needed more!), he kept a bit of a public profile via ads for his products.

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* Though a rockabilly pioneer, Horton made his biggest splash singing folk novelty songs about the Battle of New Orleans and the need to sink thyroidal German battleships.

Glengarry Gary Coleman

Though not inclined to believe Gary Coleman had much impact, I can say I remember the first time I saw him.

He appeared on an episode of Good Times. I believe he played a friend of Janet Jackson's character. Memory is a tricky thing, but I'd swear he wore a suit, as in suit-and-tie. Here he came busting in the door with the puffiest cheeks in child-star history, seemingly ageless in that he was as cute as any top-tier child actor but also strangely old, for his face had an elasticity found only in vaudeville veterans, and in people with multiple personality disorder.

Whatever he did in the Evans' apartment electrified me, and I daresay it electrified many. I can recall the neighborhood kids still in shock the next day as we rehashed the episode. Who was that kid? we asked. We repeated all his words, laughed again and again.

I mean, look, he killed. Maybe you had to be eight to appreciate it. But his appearance was so awesome it may have provoked such gales of honest audience laughter that the editors kept their finger off the sweetening button. There was frowning. Cheek puffing. Crossing of the arms. Even the cast members seemed in awe of the comedic hurricane in their midst.

Alas, Coleman hit his artistic peak at that moment. After some guest roles and a failed pilot or two, he became the franchise on Diff'rent Strokes, the first in the extremely-white-people-adopt-black-kid sub-genre of sitcoms. People compared his timing to that of Jack Benny and Richard Pryor. And, amazingly, this was not hyperbole. He was a natural. Norman Lear had put him on $1000/month retainer until he figured out what to do with him.

Like millions of kids I watched the Strokes. As was the case with much of the TV of my youth, I was numbed and hypnotized rather than actually entertained by the show.

It had about all you could ask from a network comedy, though: a catch phrase (even better than "Heyyyy" or Arnold Horshack's ejaculations), one funny actor, untalented but inoffensive other kid stars, and yet another of the single fathers that in TV land (and in TV land alone of all human cultures) dominate the single-parent household demographic.*

The mainstream adulterated Coleman, as it does all. His five minutes on Good Times was funnier than anything in the entire multi-season run of Diff'rent Strokes, was funnier than all the laughs on the latter show put together. What followed doomed him. He became beloved, and then tied to a show that as time went on flailed through every sitcom cliche (marriage of single father, introduction of even younger kid, the horror that was the Very Special Episode).

Thus, by the time Diff'rent Strokes ended, Coleman had worn out his welcome. There was no hope of a second act. A decade's worth of pop culture pablum had buried his five minutes of Good Times genius for good. Coleman went on to flashes of tabloid notoriety and life as a punch-line. The Broadway blockbuster Avenue Q even decided to humiliate him on a nightly basis, for reasons known only to those who find puppets entertaining.

But how could it be otherwise? Coleman's life was a study in the grotesque thing that is American celebrity. And that being the case he, like so many others, proved you can never fall so far that some clever asshole won't kick you again.

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* That the dad was the former neighbor on Maude confused me, by the way. The last time I had watched that show, Rue McClanahan had greeted Mr. Drummond at the door wearing nothing but plastic wrap. I had trouble reconciling that image to the man interacting with Arnold and Willis.

Chipmunks to the sea

In the world of zoology, rodent experts speak of the strange cycle of population crashes. Every so often, a rodent species will run wild with its breeding. Then, bang, there is a die-off. The phenomenon influenced the legend that lemmings decide every years to march to the sea and drown themselves en masse, presumably after selecting a Lemming Adam and a Lemming Eve to stay in the burrow to carry on the species.

Gardening and general anal-retentiveness keep me aware of the local rodent population here at the Satellite of Love. And right now, there isn't much of a population for me to resent. I've had one group of pots or another out for about three weeks now, and all of them out for about a week. This includes an herb garden of nine cubic feet (on wheels, but that's another story).

Knock wood, not a single plant has been damaged by rodents. This is unprecendented. I would have thought it impossible.

Granted, I have leaned toward smellier plants than in the past, in part to drive away animals. Fragrant herbs, cayenne pepper, garlic, and onions have rooted all around the place. But the flowers—often victims in the past—are as abundant as always. Yet, no damage.

In addition, I've added a crop of sunflowers this year, and we all know how the creatures of the earth, and in the case of the squirrel of the tree, love to dig up tasty sunflower seeds.

Again, no damage.

I can say—based on admittedly anecdotal observation—that I do not see many squirrels or chipmunks. Not only in my yard but during my grudging attempts at exercise. Whereas last year the squirrels in particular seemed to swarm the yards, the parks, everywhere. I see squirrels, and chipmunks, too, but only as solo foragers, and not nearly every time I look out the window.

My budget doesn't allow me to subscribe to rodent-oriented journals, so I have no idea if the scientific community has noticed what's happened, or if a crash has happened at all. Still, I'm curious.

Of course I'm not complaining. I like owning a small animal trap but I'm glad I don't need it. The lack of a large rodent population, however, has changed the entire character of the spring. No angst. Less swearing (short of the onset of muteness I'll never be 100% non-profane). No reseeding ravished pots. Larger-than-usual pre-plantings for this time of year, and more of them succeeding.

If only I hadn't left all the basil out in that thunderstorm. It's not nearly as satisfying to swear at myself.

Found

I was never able to make the commitment to Lost so the big finale had no real effect on my life. But from a creative standpoint I'm interested in whether or not the show satisfied its fans, and a few friends tell me the Lost crew did at least an okay job in wrapping up things.

That so seldom happens with serial TV dramas. Kind of odd, as the last ten years have been the golden age of serial TV drama.

But I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of the task. At some point these shows must become impossible to conclude. Clearly the writers/producers made up large parts of the storylines as they went along over a period of years. Characters conceived as minor became major. Actors left or died. Plotlines took on a life of their own.

Chaos, then, inevitably ensues. So unless a head writer/show runner/producer went in knowing where it all was headed—and then had the discipline to hold to that for five or six or seven years—it just seems that dramatic closure is, at best, only semi-possible (i.e., a few characters and threads get it, and everything else dangles or blows up).

Such a conundrum, for example, afflicted Battlestar Galactica in its final season. And I think BG followed a pattern commonly seen when a serialized series ends. Some of the finale worked, some of it didn't but was at least moving, some of it was undercooked or outright stunk, and some of it was just left alone because (I'm guessing) there was no time for the staff to work it out.

I will say one thing about Lost: I caught a few episodes over the years (always reruns late at night), and admired how they always went to a commercial with maximum dramatic tension. Always. And it was sharp every time. I'm sure I just haven't seen the episodes where it was strained or dumb, but I'm guessing—from purely anecdotal evidence and the show's popularity—that the batting average was fairly high. That is hard to do even when you have alternate realities and time travel to work with.