Motor City madness: Bob Seger's East Side Story

Beneath the bare light bulb above
She gazed into the eyes of love
Bathed in the dirty neon lights
She begged him "don't go out tonight"
If we work out somehow maybe
We could find a way out baby
And he laughed and said "I got to go"

And she cried "no"
Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny Johnny no

His arms were warm and strong and young
"I promise I won't hurt no one"
"Oh baby when you gonna learn,
Them folks uptown got bread to burn,

When they see me flash my knife,
They'll be fearin' for their life,
They won't give me trouble this I know"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Johnny Johnny no

[organ solo]

The night passed like a thousand years
The tenemant room had culled her tears
Then came a knock upon the door
Two men she'd never seen before

"Did you know Johnny Brown miss?
We hate to tell you this but
Has he a relative you know?"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny why'd you go?

In posting this, I'm trying to touch something that is virtually untouchable. When I first heard this song, I was still sleeping downstairs, hadn't yet inherited my sister's room upstairs with its strange artifacts in the bureau drawers (garter belts, a rubber douche bag, rollers, several girdles, a pink angora sweater which I once wore to school, and a hair drier with a puffy plastic hat that you wore like a shower cap).  I had a radio beside my bed and constantly listened to CKLW Detroit: we all did, it was just what you did when you lived in Chatham (within striking distance of Windsor, Detroit's boring younger brother). I remember Chatham days now with a kind of ecstasy, which is strange because I did not have a happy childhood. Maybe it's just the escape to something once known, or revised brilliantly, the grass made of emeralds, and the crickets sounding like something out of Handel's Messiah.

When this song came on the radio, a funny feeling came over me. Electric. It's an opera in 2 minutes, a brilliant lyric really, tightly compressed, laden. The vocals are heartbreaking, the "no, no, nooooooooo" in the slightly choked voice that squeezes all the violence and pathos out of the scene.

A funny feeling. Electric. Buzzing. I was beginning to come awake. Given that this was 1966, and that The Doors hadn't even happened yet (or not full-on: that was 2 years later), the bridge and keyboard sound remarkably Morrison-like, meaning that Jim and the gang must've been listening to Seger. But didn't all bands listen to all bands back then?

I am convinced now that the first hormones were stirring in me, and probably I wrote a story about this song because I always wrote about everything. I couldn't explain it. It wasn't just sexual feelings, though I am sure they were included. They had to be. I had been sexual ever since falling madly in love with Maynard G. Krebbs in Dobie Gillis when I was six years old. It was something else, an elevation, a lifting of the vibration of my life. An intensification of the frequency.

Johnny, Johnny, noooooo.

I had some sort of a vision of a man killing a rat with a knife. There were no rats in the song, but at about the same time I watched West Side Story on TV, and the two things may have become conflated. The guy who played Bernardo,  he looked something like Johnny, tough, with his long-suffering girl friend begging him not to go. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, no.

I knew almost nothing then, had not "had sex", not even with myself (though I think that was going to happen pretty soon). I was somehow throwing myself into the centre of the violent scene, smelling the smells, sucking it up. That raw roaring Motor City sound was primal, dangerous, wild. The music came right up out of the core of it, bursting through the scalding pavement, immensely alive, but frightening.

When there was a gang fight, it was a rumble. When there was a biker race, it was a scramble. I had also watched The Wild One, or was soon to watch it, and even though Brando was fat and lethargic and mostly slept through it, there was something about that leather. The danger.

"I promise I won't hurt no one" echoes Brando in another movie, the touchstone movie of my life, On the Waterfront. He says the same thing to Edie when he pulls out his longshoreman's hook and heads over to confront Johnny Friendly and his minions for a final showdown. "And don't worry. I ain't gonna hurt nobody."

That's not exactly what Edie or the unnamed Motor City girl were worried about.

Why was I attracted to this stuff? A shy, introverted, slightly nutty, not-very-well-liked (some things never change) girl with unremarkable looks and way too much intensity for her own good? I wanted to be with that East Side Story guy, tame him down, or else go out with him, wild, my hair like Raquel Welch's in that prehistoric  movie, what was it called? A mane, a mop. I wanted to be with Terry Malloy, walk beside him, shine my light on him like Edie, change him. I wanted to bust out of dull old Chatham with its milk-horses and bread trucks and sugar beet factory and Lloyd's jute bag company and Darling's slaughterhouse that smelled like damnation on a hot day, the museum that should have been in a museum, and the medieval convent where I had to take my violin lessons. I was sick of the nighthawks with their skee-ix, skee-ix, skee-ix, and that bizarre roaring sound that I was later to learn came from air rushing through their flight feathers as they dove to the ground. All that stuff I ache for now, knowing it's gone forever. Most of those old Victorian -era houses would be ripped down, and I happen to know the house I lived in was made into a doctor's office.

My life wasn't, isn't important. Lord knows I've had that jackhammered home since joining Facebook (a handy way to top up your pain when the tank is low). I've felt out of kilter all through my life, and at my age it ain't going to change. I have been told, and I don't believe it by the way,  that "most people" feel like me, feel like they don't belong or fall short in some way. Bull-hoo. All I can say in my own defense is that I have kept my aliveness; even in the midst of howling anguish, experiences you would not wish on someone you loathe, the light has not gone out, I have not opted for deadness or shrinking a size so my shoes will fit. And I can't be around anyone who has made that choice.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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Brando's pants: how they changed the world

Maybe you remember, but probably you don't, the book I'm not reading on Marlon Brando, the thousand-plus-page leg-numb-er by Peter Manso, the one I read a million years ago and refuse to ever read again.
But somehow chunks of text are levitating off the page and insinuating themselves into my brain.

How could you not be interested in a man who, according to Manso, revolutionized not only American theatre and cinematic expression, but the way men wore their pants? Like Gable shedding his undershirt, Brando wearing crotch-huggers inspired a whole generation to follow suit. And they never looked back.

The wardrobe mistress for  Brando's breakout stage role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire knew she faced special challenges in dressing Stanley. Finally she decided to base his clothing on a crew of ditch-diggers she had seen in New York, their clothes so dirty "that they had stuck to their bodies. It was sweat, of course, but they looked like statues. I thought, That's the look I want. . . the look of animalness."

After shrinking his tshirts and dyeing them pink to make them look like flesh under the lights, ripping the shoulder to make it look as if some woman had attacked him, she came to the issue of his pants. This is where the magic happened. (I hope to Christ you can read this, cuz I'm not typing all THIS out no matter how interesting his pants are.)

In the late '40s, this was some big shit. Brando was still in his early 20s then, prime meat. 

It gets better.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The day Brando failed his screen test

Though Hollywood  keeps its tacky red mouth shut about things like this, James Dean wasn't the only person they had in mind for Rebel Without a Cause.

They also thought of Marlon Brando.

They thought of Marlon Brando, who hadn't even made a movie (yet) and didn't know his way around a camera (yet). They thought of him cuzzadafact that he had already made a searing splash as Stanley Kowalski on the stage, and somebody must-of thought: this boy has talent, and not only that, I'd like to suck his face.

I lied a while ago and said that I wasn't reading the massive 1994 Brando bio by Peter Manso. I've started reading it to get to sleep at night, and it works, except it cuts off the circulation in my legs. I wonder what this Manso thinks of Brando. I know he was eccentric to the point of craziness and scarfed down Mallomars by the box, but. . . I've been watching some clips of interviews with him, later ones like the Connie Chung one in which he seems pretty much like an old crank. But once in a while, a certain facial expression, a light in those dreamy eyes will bring back the hard-bodied but soft-faced, almost androgynous hero who ripped his way through a couple dozen brilliant films, playing everything from Marc Antony to a goofy little Japanese guy in a teahouse.

Brando wasn't always good, he wasn't always in good films, and some of them were fatal mismatches (Sky Masterson? The guru in Candy?), but he was as intrepid as Captain Kirk aboard the Starship Enterprise, grabbing at one means of expression after another. He was a primitive with an intricate mind, emotionally damaged, and a leveller: of egos, of feelings, of human mystery. All would be smoothed flat by the forward blaze. I believe he was frustrated and angry and curious and very much like a small child rushing around in the woods, ripping things up and eating them and spitting them out.

Anyway, that's what I think. Though he failed his screen test, he's still worth making gifs of, 60 or so years later.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Why I won't think about Marlon Brando

I am not reading Brando, the behemoth biography by Peter Manso which I somehow stumbled through (I think) back in 1994. I am not reading it because it is too big. I can't accomodate it in bed, which is where I read. It slides off my lap or collapses on to my knees.

When I don't read a book, which happens quite a lot, it's an interesting process. I guess you can say I connect the dots. I keep coming around to the same parts again and again. By the end of it, I know almost nothing about my subject matter.

Having been a book reviewer for approximately one billion years, I got myself into this habit of Reading Critically. Kind of like fucking critically, when you think about it. I had lost all the pleasure. Wrestling around with this beached whale of a book, NOT reading it, is a guilty gratification.

Nobody cares what I think about it anyway, which is good. Frankly I think Manso could've cut about 850 pages out of it. A judicious little trim.

Of course there are a million stories, many of them pretty unsavory. But my favorite anecdote (and I'm going to have to transcribe this out of the book, which I hate, and I can't even use my little paper-holding frame because it would fall apart from all the weight) concerns itself with Brando hanging upside-down.

"Marlon, in one of his frequent attempts at losing weight, decided to try the current fad of hanging from the ceiling. He had already purchased a rotating hoop-frame device and special hooked boots, but because of his girth, he found that he was unable to flip himself over in the frame. He sent Papke and two other assistants out to the garage for a winch that had been mounted on his truck, then had them bolt it to the ceiling of his bathroom.

After six hours had been spent locating the jousts in the ceiling and
setting up a twelve-volt power supply for an on/off switch, the homemade apparatus was in place and the mounting had been tested.

Soon, using the shoes from the discarded store-bought machine, Marlon was hanging in the air. A new problem quickly became apparent, though. "He was hanging head down," Papke explained, "and because of his weight, the blubber started to roll forward, almost choking him. He was coughing and muttering, unable to speak."

They immediately lowered him to the floor. Brando, however, was determined to stretch, and the solution he proposed was to try to use the winch and frame horizontally. The assistants fixed another heavy screw eye into the wall of the bathroom opposite the doorway, and once again, Marlon readied himself."

For what? Whale-stretching time? Why would anyone that fat want to hang upside-down anyway and how could it possibly help him lose weight? Maybe none of it even happened. The book begins with a long quote by Primo Levi about how most writers are bullshitters, making half the stuff up or whatever. Maybe he stretched way out about a mile thin and then snapped back like an elastic band. Maybe he turned into Rubber Man, or a giant condom, or Gumby. And who's this Papke? Sounds like a Hungarian dish to me, or half of one.

I won't be able to sleep tonight, with this vision of a 380-pound man being dragged up to his bathroom ceiling with a winch.

Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.

On the Waterfront: it's a crucifixion

OK, this time I wasn't really going to watch it. It just came on Turner Classics (supposedly: though I knew it was coming on) while I was knitting or working on something else, so I thought I'd just have it on in the background for old time's sake.


For old time's sake. . . The first time I saw On the Waterfront, I was 13 years old and sleeping downstairs in the den on the pullout bed. This was a rare treat because my Mum knew I'd spend most of the night watching monster movies on TV. But this time it was different.


I fell not deeply, but profoundly in love with this movie and everything and everyone in it. It is the most nearly perfect thing I have ever seen. Brando's performance as a shuffling, inarticulate dock worker, a washed-up prize fighter whose one chance at glory was stolen from him, slowly gains focus and fire until, by the end, he is a blazing hero, battered and bruised but still able to walk: to lead his brothers back to work, demonstrating the only real integrity they have ever seen.

This is the very definition of "walking the walk", and powerful beyond measure. All this, and Leonard Bernstein's melancholy, majestic score, so married to the material that they are inseparable.

Every performer, from Rod Steiger to Eva Marie Saint to Lee J. Cobb, and even to bit-players like Fred Gwynne (and Martin Balsam! Blink and you'll miss him) are at the top of their form, doing a little better than they know how. The "cab scene" is the best-known, even with those ludicrous hand-cut venetian blinds in the back window (since the rear-projecting machine was lost or broken or something: this was a low-budget film, like Psycho, lean and spare, so that not a thing was wasted, particularly not the energies of those brilliant actors).

Terry's brother Charlie the Gent is guiding his brother into a trap: either take a cushy, nothing job on the waterfront and keep your mouth shut, or. . . get out of the cab at 437 River Street, a place you emerge from feet-first. When Charlie pulls a gun on his brother, Brando gives the now-classic reaction that is so totally unexpected, even shocking.

The script just says, "Wow, Charlie." Instead of shock, fear, disgust, dismay, what he registers is. . . disappointment. And pity. He gently pushes the gun away, shaking his head, for the first time seeing his brother as he is, completely poisoned by evil. All the crusted layers of a lifetime of denial have fallen down at once.


Wow.

This video clip is a favorite scene of mine, in which legendary character actor Karl Malden (whom I never saw give a bad performance) plays Father Barry, a sheltered waterfront priest who steps out of the sanctuary and into the fire. Any man who even thinks of informing on Johnny Friendly and the mob is immediately killed, and when Kayo Dugan dies under a crushing load of crates full of Irish whiskey, Father Barry delivers a eulogy that would peel the skin off the most hardened criminal.

There is not a false second in this speech: it is hair-raising, and, as always, as has happened every time I've seen this, every time for maybe 15 or 20 times, or maybe more, I cried. I cried because his character has managed to utter that which I cannot utter, or even clarify in my mind. It is so far down in me I didn't think it could even be felt, let alone expressed. 

I too have had to step out of a church that was once a womb, then slowly became a tomb. Father Barry smokes cigarettes like a tough guy, orders beer in saloons, and even decks Terry when he basically tells the Father to fuck off. It's a dizzying performance. Watch it: you'll see.