Autumn of the Band Part III: Music From Big Pink

Now we are finally at the albums by The Band proper. Music From Big Pink is less a record than a talisman or symbol, far larger than the sum of its parts, which are pretty great to begin with. According to the legends, hearing this music prompted Eric Clapton to break up Cream and form the rootsier Derek and the Dominoes. George Harrison met The Band and had a similar road to Damascus moment, leading The Beatles to "get back" to simpler music. Beyond those verified legends, the Stones also took a rooty direction with Beggar's Banquet after the flower power of Their Satanic Majesties Request. Fairport Convention drew deeper from the well of the English folk tradition with Liege and Lief. Dylan himself, who had been there in the pink house too, went country with Nashville Skyline. Big Pink hit the late-60s rock scene upside the head by favoring murder ballads and downhome harmoies over the phased drums and hippy-dippy love songs of the reigning psychedelia. Much as punk banished prog rock to the margins and grunge killed hair metal, Big Pink spoke to an inchoate desire for less affected, more authentic music. 

Music From Big Pink stands as one of the most important and influential albums ever. It's also pretty damn good. While it often gets credit as the origin of "roots rock" I realized on this listening that it just doesn't sound like anything else, much less old timey American music. Much of this is down to Hudson's organ, which is the true MVP of this album. The most virtuosic of The Band's members was also the most experimental, and what he plays does not sound like psychedelia, soul, country, or jazz, but like a singular genre no one else can play. "This Wheel's On Fire" gets a creepy, otherwordly feel from these sounds, for example. "In A Station"'s shimmering keyboards are hypnotizing. The electro riff Hudson puts on "The Long Black Veil" elevates it from a country cover to something more interesting entirely. Fittingly, Garth gets the spotlight on "Chest Fever," his organ sounding like Bach if he had spent a couple of years in New Orleans. It's so overtly muso that it almost becomes an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer song before stepping back and letting the rest of the band groove. 

That groove is key. The Band brought the roll back to rock and roll, which you would expect from a bunch of guys who spent years getting paid to get the punters out on the floor to shake their asses. The groove is there even on the sadder songs like "Long Black Veil." Robbie Robertson's guitar has the Chicago blues' ghost of electricity in it, but there are none of the self-indulgent pyrotechnics of the likes of Clapton and Hendrix. None of the songs are the kind of up-tempo ravers they reeled off with Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan, however. They are profound, mysterious, like messages from another world. These songs emerged amidst the tumult of 1968, but only speak to them elliptically. "Tears of Rage" references the state of the nation, but more the feeling of things being unsettled, rather than the events themselves. The same goes for "I Shall Be Released." a song about injustice, a topic of much discussion then, that universalizes the plea of the poor prisoner singing the song. 

In spite of themselves, The Band managed to write one hippy anthem, "The Weight," due to its use in Easy Rider. I think this song is why people assume this album is the wellspring of roots rock, since it's the most country, with the famous harmony vocals rough-hewn and full of Gospel flourishes. Most people today don't know The Band, and if they did, it'd be through this song. It is a glorious song, one made for campfire singalongs and dive bar juke boxes both. There's good reasons for its endurance. It also signals the direction the group will take on their next record, which to me is in fact the real beginning of "roots rock." 

I think the key to this album can be found in its interior gate-fold. On the one side there's a picture of the group in black and white wearing beards and hats in a look that I heard someone describe as "Appalachian rabbi." These are not people conforming to the love beads and Nehru jacket fashions of the time. On the other side is a picture of the band members with their families, including their parents. In the time of "don't trust anyone over 30" this was a pretty radical move. What's especially interesting to me is that this iconography is wedded to truly innovative music. By calling on the past, The Band found the future. It's quite a magic trick, one that might be useful in our own confused time of turmoil. 

Rating: Five Levons (out of five) 

Autumn of the Band Part II: Dylan's Gunslingers

The Band's story is one that makes me think about the role of fate in the universe. The Hawks were a crack rock and roll band of the old school, ripping it up at dive bars and jook joints from Dallas to Toronto. They were precisely not the kind of band that emerged from The Beatles' revolution. They spawned garage bands from coast to coast of young men trying to imitate the mop tops and the more rough and rowdy Rolling Stones. By 1967 this had morphed into psychedelia, which Richard Manuel commented on hilariously in The Last Waltz as a time with groups with names like "Chocolate Subway" and "Marshmallow Overcoat." One can imagine a universe where The Hawks just faded away, relics of the pre-rock era rock and roll talked about by record collectors who might note that this Robertson guy who played on some killer obscure Ronnie Hawkins records went on to be a session man. Or a kid in Ontario may have discovered that his high school music teacher Mr Hudson was once a rock and roller. 

That didn't happen. Instead, the hand of fate came down in the form of Bob Dylan, who chose The Hawks to be his backing band for his tour in 1966. Dylan had famously gone electric, apparently giving in to the post-Beatles shift to rock (not rock and roll) music and abandoning the folk religion. That at least was the narrative of a certain subset of butthurt folkies who loom a bit too large in the memory of the event. What really happened was that Dylan was already shifting his songwriting away from folk into more personal and I would daresay poetic territory, even if he still strummed an acoustic guitar and blew into a harmonica. He was going to make music in a rock band format that was going to go way beyond what it had done so far. 

On the '66 tour he played an acoustic set followed by an electric set, which the aforementioned sect of aggrieved folkies detested and even booed. It was a whole lot of mishagas and Hawks drummer and de facto leader Levon Helm pulled out of the tour, not wanting to put up with it. The rest of the band drew on Canadian stoicism and soldiered on. You can hear the results in the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series, a famous show in Manchester that had been erroneously labelled as being from the Royal Albert Hall in London. If you were to ask me about my favorite Bob Dylan album, I would tell you that it's the second, electric disc from this release. Dylan and the Hawks play with both abandon and precision, rocking harder and louder than what just about anyone would have heard at the time. "She Acts Like We Never Have Met" is not a Dylan classic on the record, but here it rips and snarls. "Tell Me Mama" rollicks like a runaway train. The sneer behind "Ballad of a Thin Man" cuts sharper knowing that Dylan is directing it straight at members of his own audience who think him a Judas. Someone in fact famously yells that accusation (which you can hear on the album) right before Dylan turns to the band, tells them "playing fucking loud man" and they tear into a monumentally percussive version of "Like A Rolling Stone." Those folkies didn't know they were messing with some rock and roll gunslingers who had played some of the toughest clubs in North America. 

Relistening to the "Royal Albert Hall" show again I found myself even more impressed with it. I also thought of the role of fate. Dylan could have chosen any number of backing bands, many that have fallen into obscurity since. Somehow I don't think any of them would have worked as well as The Hawks. They were steeped in the older musical traditions, the ones Dylan had been drawing on his whole musical life. Hearing Rick Danko's high lonesome backing vocals I just don't think any other group could have worked out as well. In 1966 the meeting of Dylan and The Hawks was a world-historical bit of kismet, like Paul McCartney being the Liverpool bloke that John Lennon happened to meet and make music with. 

Even if The Hawks had never become The Band, they would have thus written a page in rock history. They ended up making a bigger impact with Dylan not by taking the stage and daring his audience to hate them, but by recording songs in their basement in upstate New York while Dylan was taking a break from the spotlight in Woodstock in 1967 after the tour in 1966 almost killed him. It was here that Dylan and The Band's shared expertise in the forms of American music really came together. Their basement recordings were bootlegged and circulated at a time when Dylan had taken a step back from the ground-breaking glories of his trio of albums from 1965-1966. The Basement Tapes are quite a thing to listen to, a combination of covers and Dylan songs far more elliptical and even silly than what he had done up to this point. The epic, logorrea of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" had been replaced by relatively terse trifles like "Santa Fe" and "Quinn, The Eskimo." "Clothes Line Saga" funnily parodies/references the Gothic horror of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" while "Lo and Behold" takes us to a Mark Twain universe of shysters and ramblers. The Basement Tapes are such a rich text that Greil Marcus wrote a whole book about them that I consider one of if not his best (I read it when it was called Invisible Republic, not The Old Weird America.) 

For this blog I re-listened to the entire officially released six disc set, which I own because I am a weirdo like that. (Although a friend did burn CD copies of his bootlegs for me back in the 2000s.) This time around it was interesting to hear the primitive nature of the early recordings and covers, and slowly find The Band and Dylan figuring out an entirely new path in American music by drawing on its deepest wellsprings. It starts mostly with covers, with the lonesome "Still in Town" among my faves, along with the Johnny Cash covers like "Big River" and "Folsom Prison Blues." There's folk classics too, like "Ol' Roisin the Beau." It's a whole lot of fun, the fun you might have just hanging out with friends and banging out old favorites on guitar, like some of my happiest evenings in my 20s in grad school. Things get really wacky on stuff like "See You Later Allen Ginsburg," but there's also heartfelt beauty like the epic "The Sign on the Cross." 

I am not giving this album a ranking as a "Band" album because Levon Helm did not join up with them again until late 1967, after completing these recordings with Dylan. It's not the true Band sound without Levon on drums. Richard Manuel would often play drums in a delightfully ramshackle way that I think Greil Marcus described once as a "shopping cart with a broken wheel." (If you can't tell, Manuel is my favorite.) Levon also doesn't play on the 1966 tour, and you can hear it. Mickey Jones eagerly bashes the shit out of his kit, and in the context of that tour and its alienation of its audience, it makes sense. However, Helm played the drums with a kind of light, loving touch that would give The Band a foundation more profound than the hard rockers of the day. 

I can't even imagine what impact the Basement Tapes bootlegs would have made at the time, coming amidst the countercultural explosion of 1967-68. According to the Dylan obsessives of the day, the Bobfather had withdrawn from his position as generational prophet (one he NEVER wanted) at a time when the hippie masses needed him most. Here the supposed savior is making silly songs disengaged from the headlines. I think his true prophecy was to understand that "the Sixties" were going to run out of gas, and that the Chocolate Subways and Marshmallow Overcoats of the day were going to be period curios, not lasting milestones. By partnering with The Band, he rediscovered the rich seam of American music that could sustain him for over another fifty years. Again, a true moment of the rare benevolence of the hand of Fate.

Next time I will finally get into The Band's first proper album, one that supposedly prompted Eric Clapton to break up Cream and ended up radically reshaping rock music. Appropriately, it would be named for the big pink house where the Basement Tapes were mostly recorded. 

Autumn of The Band Part One: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks

I have been neglecting this blog in favor of my Substack and part of the reason is that I use this space for pop culture stuff, but I have been getting that out of my system through multiple academic writing projects. To get back on track here I have decided to do one of my patented "listen throughs" of a classic rock artist. 

This summer, as I was driving home from a Southern trip and I decided to put on the entire Last Waltz show so I wouldn't have to futz with Spotify while trying to concentrate on the road. I hadn't listened to The Band for a long time, and I was suddenly reminded that there was a three year period in the 2000s where I was absolutely obsessed with them. There is something about them that inspires fervid conversion experiences, like Clapton hearing them and breaking up Cream because they exposed the emptiness of the en vogue psychedelia. I had also been fortunate this summer to spend time with old friends from those 2000s days who shared my love of the group. Since it's been awhile, I thought it was time to go back, both to The Band and the time in my life I associate with it. There's also the sad fact that with Garth Hudson's passing, all of the original members are dead.

Unlike my other listen-throughs, I am going to do this one mostly album by album, since The Band's catalog is not as huge as Dylan or Springsteen's. The first installments, about their days before their first proper album under the name of "The Band" will be exceptions. Albums will be rated from one to five Levons once I get there.

They started as The Hawks, playing with Arkansas rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins. The story is improbable, as Hawkins settled in Toronto and over time replaced his Arkansas band with local Canadian musicians (except for drummer Levon Helm.) The Band made some of the most quintessentially American music, but ironically, five out of the six members were Canadians. As a lover of Canada in a time when our president is threatening our relationship with that great nation, I think it's especially good to contemplate The Band.

I listened to Hawkins' first album, even though it was still the Arkansas players, just for context. He really rips it up on this record, which is a hidden gem in my book. I am a big fan of 1959's "Forty Days," his take on Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days." This is some real deal rockabilly from the piney woods of the "Natural State," not the watered down music that was beginning to cash in on and replace the harder-edged stuff that broke out of Memphis a few years before. 

After that first record (which was without The Band) it's hard to know which songs and albums had the whole compliment of The Band on them since different members joined at different times. Instead of trying to name them, I'd rather write about the general feel of the music. I've heard rockabilly described as up-tempo country-style hillbilly music with R&B singing over it, which makes sense with Hawkins' first record. On Mojo Man, which had a lot of Band participation, things are VERY bluesy. I find it striking because while The Band was obviously aware of the blues in their music, the first music with their name on it drew more from country. That in fact is what seemed to draw in other musicians in the late 60s, who had mostly been playing a hopped up version of Chicago blues music. It's as if The Band already went through their blues phase before anyone else got there. 

The Hawkins records, which I do really enjoy, are a reminder that The Band were not of the British Invasion, nor were they of the legions of garage bands that formed in the wake of The Beatles and Rolling Stones. They predated both, but like The Beatles they cut their teeth playing in rough clubs to rough customers. It makes sense that they would seemingly come out of left field in 1968 with Music From Big Pink because they had been woodshedding far from the mainstream. Even though their music in that time sounded nothing like the raw early rock n' roll they cut with Hawkins, it had the same uncompromising spirit. 

That spirit meant that the Hawks would have to leave Hawkins' nest and fly. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.) They would really make a name for themselves playing with Bob Dylan, but before then managed to cut a 45 for Atco with "The Stones I Throw" on the A side and "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)" on the flipside back in 1965. The A side seems to be a song in favor of civil rights, and it's dominated by a heavy organ from Garth and muscular singing from Rick Danko. The B side is less hooky but better, a funky groovy number that sounds like a lost track from the Stax vaults. Danko gives it the appropriate level of sweat. This sounds nothing like their later music, but crucially, it also does not sound like Ronnie Hawkins, either. 

You can hear in their early music why Dylan would have chosen them to be his backing band on tour in 1965. If he was going to enrage the folkies by going electric, best to do it with a bunch of guys who could really play some hardcore, gut bucket music and knew how to survive a hostile audience. The angry folkies were child's play next to the kind of people who showed up to Jack Ruby's burnt-out club in Dallas. 

Next time I will write about those famous live shows, along with the "Basement Tapes" recorded with Dylan.

Memories of Ozzy

[Editor's Note: I apologize for letting this blog slip. My writing on Substack has been my focus, as well as academic projects I am working on as well. I plan on using this space for more personal and pop cultural thoughts with more frequency. Don't worry, Orson Welles will be back!]

Ozzy Osbourne's death this week flooded my mind with memories far more than most celebrity deaths usually do. He was a singular figure of a kind we don't see much today. In the first place, rock stars are no longer really a thing in terms of youth culture, and heavy metal is no longer being blasted out of cars in high school parking lots anymore. While the culture wars still rage, he was a figure from a time when its frontlines were quite different than they are now. 

In the 1980s fundamentalist Christians felt far more confident in attempting to censor cultural life in the United States. They did not merely criticize "the culture," they were of the mind to drive out what they didn't like completly. In the era of the internet the explicit content stickers added to so many tapes and CDs seem absolutely quaint. Likewise, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s sounds like a joke, but in the moment some people really did think that Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music were full of satanic messages. This panic destroyed lives, but it was in many ways tamer than what we have today. QAnon, for example, is the Satanic Panic directly applied to our politics, with far greater harm. 

No one cultural figure embodied what the culture warriors opposed more than Ozzy Osbourne. Growing up in a small Great Plains town in the 1980s (as I did) he was less a musician than either a folk hero or a demon, depending on who you talked to. For the hordes of disaffected teen headbangers in these places he was a demigod, an avatar of rebellion. Your Ozzy t-shirt told everyone around you that you were not interested in conforming to the rules of conservative small town life. Now that parental figures are less interested in regulating their children's pop culture diets, we really don't have people like this anymore.

I was not a metal head at all, and the metal kids felt dangerous and scary to a meek altar boy like myself. Despite not being a part of that crowd or liking the music, I respected Ozzy because I really disliked the fundamentalists and their agenda. Part of this was my Catholicism, which I knew marked me lesser in their eyes. Part of it was the folk libertarianism of teendom, with its "just leave us alone" attitude regardless of what the adults were trying to regulate. My opposition to music censorship ended up being the germ of my growing feeling that I did not align with the conservative politics of my hometown. 

In the 90s in high school I was one of the earliest adopters of grunge in my hometown, a music that made the metal heads look like yesterday's news. I didn't really learn to appreciate metal until I was in college, due to my friend Dave. He was a Black Sabbath superfan, and dubbed the Paranoid album onto a cassette tape for me (remember doing that?) At that point I was hooked. He also moved to Chicago after college, and in the year we roomed together I really got immersed in Sabbath. Dave had every single album of theirs (no mean feat pre-CD burning), including strange non-metal ones like Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die. He had a VHS tape with a documentary about the band that we watched a few times, which made me appreciate Ozzy's talents as a live performer. 

At that point I realized that Ozzy was not some demigod of rebellion or a demonic influence, but an outcast working class kid from Birmingham who was saved by rock and roll. It made his appeal to so many of my classmates in high school make more sense because the same could be said about their circumstances as well. Dave did not quite come from such a background, but he was a totally unique character who was very self-conscious about being a misfit. He knew he was never going to fit in no matter where he went, and Ozzy helped him embrace that. 

I also remember one day Dave told me a unlikely story in our apartment. He was riding the bus in downtown Chicago, and swore he saw Ozzy, but he looked very feeble, and there was an older woman helping him cross the street. I was initially doubtful of this sighting, but a couple of years later when The Osbournes reality show came out I realized Dave had not been lying at all. That show completely dispelled the whole "prince of darkness" thing and showed Ozzy as a befuddled family man. It was the final nail in the coffin to the propagators of the Satanic Panic from two decades before. 

When I head the news of Ozzy's death, Dave was the first person I thought of. He sadly didn't make it as long as Ozzy, dying suddenly in his mid-30s. Other deaths since have impacted me, but none has lingered as long as his. There's hardly a week that goes by that I don't think about him. This week I am not mourning Ozzy so much as the Dave, one of the many misfits who found a kindred spirit in times hostile to eccentricity. 

Orson Welles Spring: The Lady from Shanghai

While in his interviews Welles claimed that The Stranger made him want to leave studio film-making, he did it one last time with The Lady From Shanghai, famously made at Columbia under its notoriously difficult mogul Harry Cohn. Columbia put out a lot of great, truly dark noir at the time, and Lady From Shanghai is best seen as Welles doing his own treatment of that drama. I am a noir lover and watching this film again I realized what an excellent example it is of the genre. It makes me wish Welles has tried other genres, like making a Western or sci-fi film because he takes the genre conventions but gives them a real spark on uniqueness. 

Like many noirs the plot is a maze, and maybe besides the point. If I can restate in generally, Welles plays an Irish sailor who gets tangled in a web of intrigue, adultery, and murder spun by a hotshot lawyer and his femme fatale wife, leading to dramatic deaths in the finale. Like the best noirs it deals with the cruelty of fate. The sailor gets drawn in by actually doing a good thing by rescuing the Rita Hayworth title character from an assault. After World War II, where some lived and some died and there did not seem to be any morality behind the hand of fate, narratives like this made a lot of sense. In our current moment, where the world also feels inexplicable, they resonate again. 

Notably, Welles' marriage to Hayworth was falling apart at the time. For this film he had her sheer her long wavy red hair, and then dyed it blonde. This enraged Cohn, who knew it would drive audiences away (which it did.) Knowing their own relationship difficulties gives this an extra edge, as does the unspoken pain that's always on the title character's face. She seems haunted and desperate and despite being a villain in the end, I never stopped sympathizing with her. Due to her stunning looks, it's easy to underrate Hayworth as an actor. This movie shows that she really had the chops, especially in tackling noir. 

I was also struck by the performance of Everett Sloan as her husband. He played the ebullient Mr Bernstein in Kane, here as the lawyer he is a menacing viper who makes every scene that he is in. Through this character and his corrupt partner Welles also makes several digs at the legal system, which is shown to be a tool of the wealthy and connected. This is a truly down and dirty noir, with little sympathy to go around, since even the sailor seems to be lacking a moral center. 

Of course, not all is well. As I mentioned, the plot is hard to follow even by the standards of the genre. The scenes in San Francisco's Chinatown are gorgeously shot, but also full of cheap Orientalism. Welles' character is Irish and despite his deep love for that country and the time he spent living there, Welles' brogue is notably deficient. The thing is, you forget that all at the end with the shootout scene in the funhouse, for my money the best cinematic montage in the entire noir genre. It's a moment when the sheer thrilling inventiveness of Kane is back and on full display. It's Welles last scene in a studio picture, and it's a helluva way to go out. 

According to Welles' story, he did this movie to quickly get money to pay off debts so his stage production of Around the World in 80 Days could proceed, and the source material was a random novel he saw while he was literally on the phone with Cohn to get financing. Had he had more time and better source material Welles may have filmed an even better noir, but I'll take this one. 

Orson Welles Spring: The Stranger

The Stranger made the most money of any Welles film, and it also happens to be his least favorite of this own works. Knowing him, this should hardly surprise us. A man who was so willfully committed to art against the odds would be bound to have mixed feelings about success, since it would imply that his work had not been sufficiently challenging. This film has the look, pacing, story, and even actors of a film noir, made during the apex of that genre. Of all of his films, The Stranger conforms most to genre convention. 

It tells the story of a small town in Connecticut with a secret: one of the teachers at the elite college prep school is in fact Franz Kindler (played by Welles), a Nazi intellectual who had escaped Germany after its fall. He is newly married to Mary Longstreet (played by Loretta Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Kindler is tracked down by Nazi-hunter Wilson, played in a typically spirited performance by the great Edward G Robinson. 

On a political level, it's easy to see why Welles was attracted to this project. He was and remained a full-throated anti-fascist and many of his films speak to that anti-fascism. Here that concern is literal and on the surface, probably too much. Kindler comes across as some kind of evil genius, a way of framing the Nazis that gives them a far more powerful image than they deserve. It's also striking that Kindler and the fascist threat is coming from outside, rather than inside. I can imagine the very WASPy town the film is set in was full of the type of people who had embraced the Klan in the 1920s, as well as the fascist-friendly elements of the opposition to FDR in the 1930s. The whole framing of Kindler as a benign-looking man who is actually indoctrinating the youth in extremist ideology takes the Red Scare framing of communists to such an extent that this may be the only legitimate "Brown Scare" film. 

With all of that said, there are still some very effective elements. The Stranger came out only a year after the end of World War II, and incorporates film footage from the liberation of the camps, evidently the first time this was done in a Hollywood film. The Holocaust was a raw wound at this moment, but one the wider culture did little to reckon with. Edward G Robinson's life experiences and identity give his portrayal of Wilson a power and passion that overcomes the limitations of the script. Robinson had emigrated from a Jewish community in Romania as a ten year old after his brothers were targeted in a pogrom. He was an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany well before Pearl Harbor, something that later caused him to suffer during the Red Scare. When Wilson confronts Kindler and his "just following orders" excuses, Robinson's righteous fury practically blasts through the screen. 

Living as we do now in an era where overt fascism is making a comeback, this scene electrified me. However, narratives like The Stranger's present the values of small-town America as an antidote to fascist ideology, when in fact they have been just as likely to be their incubator. In that respect, The Stranger is an optimistic film, seeing the victory against the Nazis in the war as establishing a new anti-fascist future. The hardest thing to endure in the current political situation for me has been the knowledge that fascism never died, and that its defeat this time around looks far from inevitable. 

I re-read the parts of Welles' interviews with Peter Bogdanovich compiled in The is Orson Welles related to The Stranger, and while he does not have a lot of affinity for the film, he is very much proud of its politics. Evidently he had contemplated dropping out of showbiz for politics full time, and supporting more radical causes like one world governmnet. His issue with the film really stemmed from it being a lone case of him being a studio gun for hire. Other people wrote and produced the film, and they had cut several scenes he had written and filmed for the beginning. In the aftermath he decided from now on to take acting jobs he was not enthusiastic about so that he could have the money to do the directing work he really wanted to do.

Orson Welles Spring: The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles' first film still stands as one of the cornerstones of world cinema. His second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, still stands as the most infamous example of studio meddling in a great director's work. I and many other film buffs keep hoping and praying that a complete cut somehow emerges somewhere. For now we are stuck with a film with 50 minutes cut off and a jarring, "happy" ending tacked onto it. 

Because the editing job defaced Ambersons so much, I had not really gotten much out of it on previous viewings, apart from the excellent acting performances and the moments of Welles' brilliance that still shined through. This time, something deeper clicked. Whereas I had seen the film as a family drama before, now I understood it as a social document. If Welles had made this film a mere three years later, after the war was over, the studio would not have butchered it and it would have been embraced by the public. 

At the end of the war, dark film visions made sense to Americans who experienced the death and destruction of a war that was far scarier than depicted in John Wayne movies. Films like The Lost Weekend and The Best Years of Our Lives won Oscars in 1945 and 1946 not despite but because of their dwelling on the dark side of American life. Ambersons is a similarly dark vision, but not one for the rah-rah days of 1942. On a basic level, this film is asking what kind of country we are defending in the first place, not a question people were asking back then, but soon would be. 

The film takes us to the turn of the century, but more than that, it imitates its rhythms. The rat-a-tat-tat of Kane's editing is gone, things have slowed down. The emotions and conflicts are more muted. Like Kane, the character of George is humbled but here he "gets his commupence" in ways that are truly sad to watch. Much of the drama of the film comes from these characters in a bygone, duty-bound world being anguished over not being able to have what their hearts cry out for. To add insult to injury, many of them also end up in penury, stripped of their old comforts.

Welles like Werner Herzog may be a master of a twentieth century art form, film, but his sensibilities lie in the literate, non-specialized world of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the rise of the automobile is not presented here in a positive light. At the same time, Welles is also critical of the Victorian elite that resisted the massification of American society mostly out of their own self interest. His heart lies in a different time, but he is not a reactionary. 

I also have the say that the roughness of the edits made me emotional when I watched Ambersons this time because I felt like something great had been stolen from me. The early parts of the film work so well, then suddenly the main characters are in dire straits with no explanation, and by the time the viewer can recover from the whiplash, a poorly shot improbably happy ending seems to invalidate all the emotions the viewer has put into the film. It was especially painful after the fadeout to hear Welles' conclusion praising the book's author and the cast and proudly taking credit for something that I knew was not what he had intended. 

I found myself on the verge of tears at this humiliation, which puzzled me somewhat. Why was I getting so emotional? It hit me that I was probably reacting to current events. Musk's DOGE initiative is yet another example of wealthy powerful people destroying beautiful things in the name of money because they are incapable of creating good things, or are even interested in doing so. Welles will still make many more movies, but the path would be rocky forevermore. 

Orson Welles Spring: Citizen Kane

This scene really hit different this time

Orson Welles Spring kicks off with a film so monumental that it seems pretty silly for me to write a commentary on it. It's one of if not the most analyzed films of all time, and the stories behind its making have been turned into multiple films of their own (RKO 281 and Mank). Instead of writing any kind of general overview, I thought I would just offer a few notes for thought that might generate some thoughts of your own. 

When I was growing up I heard about Kane all the time as the film that had been anointed the "best movie ever." I had heard others my age who had sought it out on that basis, and left disappointed. Kane is one of my favorite movies, but to present it to someone on the terms of "best ever" is a bad idea. Luckily for me, I did not see it until my mid-20s, after I had already seen a lot of other films of that era. With that context in mind, Kane absolutely blew me away. It looks, feels, and MOVES like nothing else of its era in the "golden age" of Hollywood. It shows, frame after frame, just what cinema can do. It's hard for modern viewers who don't know old movies to get what's going on because the films they have been raised on live in a post-Kane world. 

Watching it again last night, I was struck by its inventiveness. Practically every shot grabbed my attention. The chopped up timeline combined with the masterful editing kept me far away from scrolling on my phone. It's easy to see why Kane became such a totem among cineastes, since it shows just what can be done with the medium. Things were getting there in the late silent era, where the camera achieved freedom. The advent of sound put the camera within new limits, but Kane found ways to overcome them. 

This time around I watched Kane thinking about the current political situation, and the political nature of the film really came home to me. When I first saw it in the early 2000s I didn't really think about this much, focusing far more on Kane as a person rather than as a political figure or symbol. Because this is a film long praised for its film-making accomplishments, we have tend to miss its message and the historical context it emerged from. 

Kane came out in 1941, in the midst of World War II and at a time when disenchantment with capitalism had reached its highest point in the Western world. Welles himself was on the left and had done work for New Deal theater programs. His famous stage adaptation of Julius Caesar made it into an allegory for the rise of modern fascism. In America the was the age of the Popular Front, the broad anti-fascist coalition that mainstreamed leftist radicalism more than it ever had been. Looking at Kane with fresh eyes, Welles is telling the story of America before the New Deal. Charles Foster Kane is a robber baron raised by a bank, the type of man who when challenged about what people will think of him crows that they will think what he tells them to think. 

Kane is the exemplar of American capitalism after the Gilded Age, and thus is shown rather intentionally as a figure from the past, adrift in the present. Welles was prone to his own arrogance, and he seems to be telling the audience "Aren't you glad that these people don't have ultimate power any more?" It feels like a victory lap for the New Deal and Popular Front, but the aftermath of the film's release showed that the forces of capital were far stronger than suspected. Welles put a thumb in the eye of the mega-wealthy and they retaliated against him. Hearst almost had the film destroyed (shades of Zaslav!) and Welles would never again be able to make a Hollywood film with the financing and freedom he had on Kane. I still admire the man for using his one shot at glory to show how completely craven and dysfunctional the wealthy can be. 

On this last point I feel the film is far more relevant than when I first saw it about 24 years ago. Modern America is dominated by Kane manques (see what I did there?) like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and of course, Musk. Yes there were rich people with massive fortunes back in 2001, but unlike Kane they were not overtly political figures with pretensions of using their wealth to mold public opinion. As the film vividly illustrates, wealth is a corrosive thing that warps the souls of those who possess it. We are now witnessing an attempted revolution from above so sweeping that Charles Foster Kane could not conceive of it. As scary as the moment is, I can find comfort in Welles' film. As much power as these wealthy people seek, they will never be happy, and they too will have to die someday, just like the rest of us. 

Watching Kane again last night with that in mind, the final scene hit differently. There was the usual shudder at watching so many of his possessions being burned after his death, including the childhood sled that represented an alternate life where he would not have been rich and maybe have become a decent human being. I usually feel a heavy sadness in that moment, and a clear warning about how to live my own life, but this time a smile came to my face. In the final shot, watching the smoke of all he had accumulated go through the chimney I muttered to myself with spite, "good." 

Introducing Orson Welles Spring

For fourteen years I posted regularly in this spot, but have let things go to seed while I've been concentrating on my Substack, where I am writing less and with more intention. I have been missing writing here for Notes From the Ironbound, however. In recent years I've loved doing my album-by-album retrospectives of legacy artists' back catalogs. I wanted to do another, but my potential picks just aren't inspiring me. 

Last year I happened to watch all of David Lynch's films, the first time I had ever really done that with a legacy film-maker. It was such an enriching experience, and I began to think I should do a blog series about a director rather than a musician. I listen to the Blank Check Podcast, so I also knew I would have to go with someone they had not covered yet. 

As the country has descended into its current state I have clung to comforting things to watch to distract myself and try to get rested enough to sleep at night. Late at night I often fire up an old interview with Orson Welles, it's my own version of ASMR. I was watching one from the early 80s where he said he was more interested in politics than film, and that suddenly unlocked something for me. Welles' films are indeed political, and his politics were formed in the crucible of the interwar years, a time that feels uncomfortably like our own. 

Welles' did not just critique capitalism in his films, he lived the consequences of that critique. He only got to make one Hollywood movie without interference, his first. He spent much of his career working independently, begging for money and scraping together productions under difficult circumstances. He is the patron saint of artists who insist on creating against difficult odds. His is a spirit that we need today, both in our culture and our politics. At a time when mainstream culture seems almost opposed to the entire concept of artistry, I think viewing his films will be an inspiring endeavor. 

Soon I will post about Citizen Kane, that one shining moment where his artistry had the full backing of a major Hollywood studio.