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jonathantaylorthomas · 7 years ago

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Taylor Swift's New Album 'Reputation': Everything We Know, Everything We Want

The Old Taylor can’t come to the phone? Long live the New Taylor. Reputation is one of this fall’s most tightly guarded secrets; Taylor Swift’s sixth album is her first in three years, her longest vacation ever. So far, each Swift LP has been a major musical departure. But this time, she isn’t letting any secrets slip, declining interviews and, somehow, avoiding paparazzi detection wherever she may be. All we have to go on is a quote from a source close to the project who tells Rolling Stone, “Reputation is lyrically sharper and more emotionally complex than 1989. This music has and will continue to speak for itself.”

So what do we know about Reputation? We know it has 15 songs; “…Ready For It?” will be the first track and “Look What You Made Me Do” will be the sixth. We know it drops on November 10th, which happens to be Richard Burton’s birthday. (What if that makes Reputation the Burton to Taylor’s Taylor? What if she is about to marry herself and embrace her muse as her soulmate?) It’s one day before the nine-year anniversary of Fearless, which came out in 2008 on November 11th, whereas she usually prefers to pounce in late October, as she did with Speak Now, Red and 1989. So here’s a rundown of all the clues to the burning mysteries around Reputation – what we know for sure, what we wonder, what we want, what we hope.

The sound. The first two singles are moody electro-pop: the Hot Topic quasi-goth blare of “Look What You Made Me Do” (produced by Jack Antonoff) and the hip-hop island breeze of “…Ready for It?” (produced by Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami). “Look What You Made Me Do” is Sal-Tay in supervillain mode; “…Ready for It?” is sultrier and far superior. Neither sounds like any of her previous work. But drastic swerves are what Swift does. All five of her previous LPs have developed a sound she could have milked for years – but she’s never made the same record twice, even when that’s what everybody wanted, from her record company to her fans.

Last time the world was hoping for Red II: Fifty Shades Redder, Red III: Revenge of the Scarf or Red IV: Maple Latte Massacre, but instead she made 1989, an album as far from Red as Speak Now was from Fearless. Nobody sane would have advised her, “You know what you should do next? Make an album that sounds nothing like Red, but exactly like Erasure or the Pet Shop Boys.” Yet Swift followed her own muse and turned out to be right – when it comes to high-risk moves that pay off, she’s gone five for five. So whatever she tries on Reputation, it won’t be what she did last time.

The romance. The line that jumps out from “…Ready For It?” is “He could be my jailer / Burton to this Taylor.” Not her usual kind of love story. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor got married and divorced twice, which by 1970s standards made them the ultimate glamour couple – even Sonny and Cher only got to break up once. Their boozy jet-set affair lasted a total of (hmmm) 13 years, despite the fact that they basically loathed each other. Burton was fond of referring to Liz as “MGM’s Little Miss Mammary,” while she called him “the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare.” By the time Liz was Swift’s age, she was on Husband Four; Burton was Five (and Six). So Liz and Dick weren’t exactly Romeo and Juliet – their Shakespearean duet was a 1967 film adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Fans have speculated the song is her ode to her beau of the past year, British actor Joe Alwyn – currently filming Mary Queen of Scots, where he plays the lover of Queen Elizabeth. Burton once got an Oscar nomination playing her father, King Henry VIII.

The playlist. Her Spotify playlist “Songs Taylor Loves” is loaded with sad weepy ballads – the side of her music missing from the two new singles. It’s also full of younger artists – from pals like Selena Gomez and Ed Sheeran to country upstarts like Maren Morris and Brett Young to indie brooders like the National and Bon Iver. But none of the legendary names Swift usually loves to invoke – the girl named after James Taylor isn’t bumping “Fire and Rain” these days. Is the playlist representative of her new music? Or is she digging these tearful ballads because she’s no longer writing them?

The cover. She’s wearing black lipstick, clearly a sign that Old Taylor is dead, given her affection for the red-lip classic thing. She gazes blearily through newspaper headlines spelling her name – math experts have counted her name on the cover 899 times. The cover’s weirdest detail: the Richard Hell-like torn sweatshirt, stitched up to create five triangular peaks, one for each previous album.

The magazines. The exclusive Target edition comes with two different 72-page magazines full of Swift’s poetry, watercolor paintings, handwritten lyrics and fashion photography. (Oh, pop stars – always secretly fantasizing about being editors of print magazines.) Judging from the cover of Reputation magazine, the typographical sensibility evokes the famously experimental (and often illegible) 1990s music mag Ray Gun.

The snakes. She’s teased the album with serpentine imagery – want to buy a $60 Gold Snake Ring? Either she’s a budding herpetologist or she’s reviving her Kimye feud. You remember – from last summer, before Kanye’s 5150 or his rock-bottom moment ass-kissing the new President. But it’s safe to surmise the feud factor will be the least intriguing aspect of Reputation, since her celebrity conflicts have been fruitless musically for all the artists involved. “Look What You Made Me Do” is much stronger than Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” or Kanye’s “Famous,” but that’s hardly an achievement given how those remarkably wretched gaffes sandbagged the albums they were intended to launch. All evidence indicates that we’re in a post-beef era where nobody cares about pop-star feuds, since we’ve got more pressing problems. Swift sending Cardi B flowers to congratulate her on “Bodak Yellow” hitting Number One – even though it replaced “Look What You Made Me Do” – is much more in step with the 2017 zeitgeist than snake emojis, which are so last year. And you have to love how Cardi B made sure to document the flowers on Instagram, to thwart any would-be Cardor truthers.

The Drake factor. Be on guard for Drizzy content. Last year, while the rumor mill was full of reports of them hanging out and possibly working together, the two did linked Apple Music ads, one with Taylor lip-synching the Drake/Future collabo “Jumpman” and the other with Drake doing “Bad Blood.” Since Aubrey Graham is the only pop star on earth who can approach Tay’s feelings-per-minute ratio, the mind reels at how they might sound together – let’s just say they could go from zero to 100 real quick.

The shirt. The “Look What You Made Me Do” video ends with an attention-grabbing shot of Swift in a “Junior Jewels” t-shirt decorated with her friends’ names. Squadologists plotzed at the roll call, from Patrick Stewart (he’s on it twice? Make it so!) to Abigail (the “Fifteen” bestie whose wedding had Swift as a bridesmaid last month). Who’s lurking on the back of the shirt? And who’s a blank space? The most high-profile absence was Karlie Kloss, currently seen in a new Cole Haan ad campaign with well-that-escalated-quickly pal Christy Turlington. (In Elle a few weeks ago, K.K. gushed, “I am surrounded by extraordinary women – from my mom and sisters to role models like Christy Turlington, Melinda Gates, and Sheryl Sandberg, and many more.”) Will Reputation offer a state-of-the-squad update?

The exes. Just because Swift seems to be in a functional relationship, is that any reason she should keep a dignified silence about her Long List of Ex-Lovers? Dignified silence is not this lady’s style. Between Tom Hiddleston and Calvin Harris, she has some real content opportunities. In the new video, Zombie Tay digs a grave marked “Nils Sjoberg,” her ghostwriting pen name; there’s also an empty engagement-ring box. Perhaps she’s mocking Harris for both his career and love life, given that Nils Sjoberg is an anagram for “Jobless Ring”? Or maybe she’s accusing him of swiping her work, since it’s also an anagram for “Robs Jingles”? Or maybe – just maybe – anagrams are meaningless and dumb coincidences?

The tour. One thing Swift has made clear over the years – she’s not into looking back. In the spirit of Madonna or Bowie, when she tours, she focuses on the new songs, not the hits of yesteryear. It was a shocker when she left “All Too Well” off most stops of the 1989 tour, just as she left “Enchanted” and “Long Live” off the Red tour. But given the choice between reprising the oldies or showing off her new songs, she’ll go new every time. And that goes for her albums as well – she’s never been an artist who repeats herself. Don’t expect her to start now. “Honey, I rise up from the dead, I do it all the time”? Bring on the New Tay-stament.

#rolling stone magazine #Taylor Swift

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ts1989fanatic · 7 years ago

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Taylor Swift's New Album 'Reputation': Everything We Know, Everything We Want

Predictions, wishful thinking based off electropop lead singles, possible hints about feuds, ex-boyfriends, squad members, where Cardi B, Drake fit in

The Old Taylor can't come to the phone? Long live the New Taylor. Reputation is one of this fall's most tightly guarded secrets; Taylor Swift's sixth album is her first in three years, her longest vacation ever. So far, each Swift LP has been a major musical departure. But this time, she isn't letting any secrets slip, declining interviews and, somehow, avoiding paparazzi detection wherever she may be. All we have to go on is a quote from a source close to the project who tells Rolling Stone, "Reputation is lyrically sharper and more emotionally complex than 1989. This music has and will continue to speak for itself."

From teenage country tracks to synth-pop anthems and little-known covers, a comprehensive assessment and celebration of Swift's one-of-a-kind songbook

So what do we know about Reputation? We know it has 15 songs; "…Ready For It?" will be the first track and "Look What You Made Me Do" will be the sixth. We know it drops on November 10th, which happens to be Richard Burton's birthday. (What if that makes Reputation the Burton to Taylor's Taylor? What if she is about to marry herself and embrace her muse as her soulmate?) It's one day before the nine-year anniversary of Fearless, which came out in 2008 on November 11th, whereas she usually prefers to pounce in late October, as she did with Speak Now, Red and 1989. So here's a rundown of all the clues to the burning mysteries around Reputation – what we know for sure, what we wonder, what we want, what we hope.

The sound. The first two singles are moody electro-pop: the Hot Topic quasi-goth blare of "Look What You Made Me Do" (produced by Jack Antonoff) and the hip-hop island breeze of "…Ready for It?" (produced by Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami). "Look What You Made Me Do" is Sal-Tay in supervillain mode; "…Ready for It?" is sultrier and far superior. Neither sounds like any of her previous work. But drastic swerves are what Swift does. All five of her previous LPs have developed a sound she could have milked for years – but she's never made the same record twice, even when that's what everybody wanted, from her record company to her fans.

Last time the world was hoping for Red II: Fifty Shades Redder, Red III: Revenge of the Scarf or Red IV: Maple Latte Massacre, but instead she made 1989, an album as far from Red as Speak Now was from Fearless. Nobody sane would have advised her, "You know what you should do next? Make an album that sounds nothing like Red, but exactly like Erasure or the Pet Shop Boys." Yet Swift followed her own muse and turned out to be right – when it comes to high-risk moves that pay off, she's gone five for five. So whatever she tries on Reputation, it won't be what she did last time.

The romance. The line that jumps out from "…Ready For It?" is "He could be my jailer / Burton to this Taylor." Not her usual kind of love story. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor got married and divorced twice, which by 1970s standards made them the ultimate glamour couple – even Sonny and Cher only got to break up once. Their boozy jet-set affair lasted a total of (hmmm) 13 years, despite the fact that they basically loathed each other. Burton was fond of referring to Liz as "MGM's Little Miss Mammary," while she called him "the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare." By the time Liz was Swift's age, she was on Husband Four; Burton was Five (and Six). So Liz and Dick weren't exactly Romeo and Juliet – their Shakespearean duet was a 1967 film adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Fans have speculated the song is her ode to her beau of the past year, British actor Joe Alwyn – currently filming Mary Queen of Scots, where he plays the lover of Queen Elizabeth. Burton once got an Oscar nomination playing her father, King Henry VIII.

The playlist. Her Spotify playlist "Songs Taylor Loves" is loaded with sad weepy ballads – the side of her music missing from the two new singles. It's also full of younger artists – from pals like Selena Gomez and Ed Sheeran to country upstarts like Maren Morris and Brett Young to indie brooders like the National and Bon Iver. But none of the legendary names Swift usually loves to invoke – the girl named after James Taylor isn't bumping "Fire and Rain" these days. Is the playlist representative of her new music? Or is she digging these tearful ballads because she's no longer writing them?

The cover. She's wearing black lipstick, clearly a sign that Old Taylor is dead, given her affection for the red-lip classic thing. She gazes blearily through newspaper headlines spelling her name – math experts have counted her name on the cover 899 times. The cover's weirdest detail: the Richard Hell-like torn sweatshirt, stitched up to create five triangular peaks, one for each previous album

The magazines. The exclusive Target edition comes with two different 72-page magazines full of Swift's poetry, watercolor paintings, handwritten lyrics and fashion photography. (Oh, pop stars – always secretly fantasizing about being editors of print magazines.) Judging from the cover of Reputation magazine, the typographical sensibility evokes the famously experimental (and often illegible) 1990s music mag Ray Gun.

The snakes. She's teased the album with serpentine imagery – want to buy a $60 Gold Snake Ring? Either she's a budding herpetologist or she's reviving her Kimye feud. You remember – from last summer, before Kanye's 5150 or his rock-bottom moment ass-kissing the new President. But it's safe to surmise the feud factor will be the least intriguing aspect of Reputation, since her celebrity conflicts have been fruitless musically for all the artists involved. "Look What You Made Me Do" is much stronger than Katy Perry's "Swish Swish" or Kanye's "Famous," but that's hardly an achievement given how those remarkably wretched gaffes sandbagged the albums they were intended to launch. All evidence indicates that we're in a post-beef era where nobody cares about pop-star feuds, since we've got more pressing problems. Swift sending Cardi B flowers to congratulate her on "Bodak Yellow" hitting Number One – even though it replaced "Look What You Made Me Do" – is much more in step with the 2017 zeitgeist than snake emojis, which are so last year. And you have to love how Cardi B made sure to document the flowers on Instagram, to thwart any would-be Cardor truthers.

The Drake factor. Be on guard for Drizzy content. Last year, while the rumor mill was full of reports of them hanging out and possibly working together, the two did linked Apple Music ads, one with Taylor lip-synching the Drake/Future collabo "Jumpman" and the other with Drake doing "Bad Blood." Since Aubrey Graham is the only pop star on earth who can approach Tay's feelings-per-minute ratio, the mind reels at how they might sound together – let's just say they could go from zero to 100 real quick.

The shirt. The "Look What You Made Me Do" video ends with an attention-grabbing shot of Swift in a "Junior Jewels" t-shirt decorated with her friends' names. Squadologists plotzed at the roll call, from Patrick Stewart (he's on it twice? Make it so!) to Abigail (the "Fifteen" bestie whose wedding had Swift as a bridesmaid last month). Who's lurking on the back of the shirt? And who's a blank space? The most high-profile absence was Karlie Kloss, currently seen in a new Cole Haan ad campaign with well-that-escalated-quickly pal Christy Turlington. (In Elle a few weeks ago, K.K. gushed, "I am surrounded by extraordinary women – from my mom and sisters to role models like Christy Turlington, Melinda Gates, and Sheryl Sandberg, and many more.") Will Reputation offer a state-of-the-squad update?

The exes. Just because Swift seems to be in a functional relationship, is that any reason she should keep a dignified silence about her Long List of Ex-Lovers? Dignified silence is not this lady's style. Between Tom Hiddleston and Calvin Harris, she has some real content opportunities. In the new video, Zombie Tay digs a grave marked "Nils Sjoberg," her ghostwriting pen name; there's also an empty engagement-ring box. Perhaps she's mocking Harris for both his career and love life, given that Nils Sjoberg is an anagram for "Jobless Ring"? Or maybe she's accusing him of swiping her work, since it's also an anagram for "Robs Jingles"? Or maybe – just maybe – anagrams are meaningless and dumb coincidences?

The tour. One thing Swift has made clear over the years – she's not into looking back. In the spirit of Madonna or Bowie, when she tours, she focuses on the new songs, not the hits of yesteryear. It was a shocker when she left "All Too Well" off most stops of the 1989 tour, just as she left "Enchanted" and "Long Live" off the Red tour. But given the choice between reprising the oldies or showing off her new songs, she'll go new every time. And that goes for her albums as well – she's never been an artist who repeats herself. Don't expect her to start now. "Honey, I rise up from the dead, I do it all the time"? Bring on the New Tay-stament.

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disappearingground · 5 years ago

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Jenny Lewis Escapes the Void

Pitchfork March 21, 2019

After a turbulent childhood and two decades of brilliantly vulnerable songs, the L.A. idol has finally arrived at something like happiness.

By Jenn Pelly

Jenny Lewis and I are in her brown Volvo, idling outside her childhood home. On a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, we are two blocks from Van Nuys Middle School, where Lewis once sang “Killing Me Softly” in a talent show and got suspended for flashing a peace sign in a class photo (it was mistaken for a gang symbol). We are walking distance from what used to be a Sam Goody record store on Van Nuys Boulevard, where Lewis once bought a life-changing tape of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, stoking her obsession with magnetic wordplay, as well as her first Bright Eyes CD, Fevers and Mirrors, which she quickly shared with the three men in her burgeoning indie band, Rilo Kiley, in the early 2000s.

We are not far from the bar where Lewis’ older sister, Leslie, sings in a cover band every Saturday, following in the tradition of their parents, who sang covers in a Las Vegas lounge act called Love’s Way in the 1970s. And that strip-mall pub is just across from the movie theater where Lewis and her mother once conspired to steal a cardboard cutout of Lewis’ 13-year-old self—a souvenir from when, as one of the busiest child actors of her generation, she starred alongside Fred Savage in the 1989 video game flick The Wizard.

Lewis left the Valley alone when she was 16 and vowed to never go back. “That was my number one goal: just to get out,” she tells me now, at 43. But on the occasion of her fourth solo record, On the Line, I asked for a tour of her past life, and here we are—Lewis in a royal blue jumpsuit, with electric blue sneakers and eyeliner to match; me, staring up at the rainbow of buttons fastened to the sun visor of her passenger seat, a collage that includes Bob Dylan, a peace sign, and a hot-orange sad face.

From the driver’s seat, behind her oversized shades, Lewis mentions the Bob Marley blacklight poster that once hung in her Van Nuys bedroom, and I imagine the scores of teenage bedroom walls that have made space for her own iconic image through the years. Lewis’ catalog of cleverly morbid, storytelling songs with Rilo Kiley and the Watson Twins ushered a generation of young listeners through suburban ennui and personal becoming—like a wise older sister we could visit on our iPods, offering an example of how to do something smart and cool with your sadness and your solitude.

In the mid-2000s, Lewis was like an indie rock Joni Mitchell for the soul-bearing Livejournal era, or an emo Dylan, the poet laureate of AIM away messages. Words—some cryptic, some elegant, some brutally, achingly direct—burst from the edges of her diaristic songs, with a dash of Didion-esque deadpan for good measure. It’s no surprise that Lewis’ earliest bedroom recordings were just Casio beats and what she describes as “raps.” Lewis was the first feminine voice I ever encountered leading a band outside the mainstream, with a sound that initially befuddled my ears because it was, in that overwhelmingly male indie era, so rare: a woman’s plainspoken voice.

Cruising around L.A. together, my mind maps the California of her lyrics. What does it mean for the palm trees to “bow their heads”? What becomes of the cheating, California-bound man in Rilo Kiley’s filmic “Does He Love You”—the soulful rave-up where Lewis belted the heroic mantra, “I am flawed if I’m not free!”? But my most pressing question, the one I must ask Lewis: Is California still “a recipe for a black hole,” as she sang on 2001’s “Pictures of Success”? “I guess it’s all the void,” she tells me straight. “It’s not really geographical. That’s what you find out on your adventures. It doesn’t really matter where you go. You accompany yourself there.”

The main destination of our Van Nuys excursion is the small ranch home of Lewis’ youth—or rather, homes, as there are two, practically adjacent. It’s a little complicated, I learn, as are many things with Lewis’ upbringing.

Lewis was born in Vegas on Elvis Presley’s birthday. In 1976, her parents and sister were living out of suitcases on the road, playing Carpenters and Sonny and Cher songs at casinos like the Sands, the Mint, and the Tropicana. “My mom was so pregnant but she would not miss a show,” recalls Leslie, who was 8 at the time. “Jenny would be kicking her on stage, and I remember seeing my mom flinch. I think that was Jenny saying, ‘Let me out, I want to sing!’”

Soon after Lewis was born, her parents divorced, and her father, Eddie Gordon, left the family and continued his career as one of the world’s leading harmonica virtuosos. Lewis’ mother, Linda, moved back to her native Los Angeles, working three jobs to rebuild a life with her daughters. At 2-and-a-half years old, Lewis was discovered by the powerful Hollywood agent Iris Burton (a young Drew Barrymore and the Olsen Twins were among her clients) after the toddler spontaneously wandered over to her table in a restaurant.

When Lewis was 5, she was already supporting Leslie and their mom with her commercial and TV acting, and they bought their humble first home, the one we’re visiting. “But we always used to dream about the house on the corner,” Lewis says, slowly circling the block, “so then my mom bought that house, too.” It’s two doors down, looks pretty similar—why dream of it? “Because it was right there,” Lewis says, “and it was nicer than the one we had!” (A 1992 L.A. Times headline dubbed Lewis “A Teen-Age Actress With 3 Mortgages”—she owned a townhouse in North Hollywood by then as well—calling her “the youngest member of the United Homeowners Association.”) “I know it’s confusing,” Lewis says. “This is part of the simulation; this is craziness. Why did we also want that house?” She erupts into a cackle. “None of this makes any fucking sense.”

In life as in her songs, Lewis is a consummate storyteller, mindful of how tiny details make a great tale. In the car, for instance, she tells me about the time she played Lucille Ball’s granddaughter on the notoriously bad 1986 sitcom “Life With Lucy.” It was the last show Lucy ever starred in, and it was canceled before the first season even finished. The mood was blue, but a wrap party was still planned, and Lewis’ mother convinced Lucy to have the gathering at their little house in Van Nuys. “So Lucy rolled up with her two dogs,” Lewis remembers. “She walked in the front door, looked around, and said, ‘What a dump!’”

Lewis’ mother typically attracted fascinating characters to the house—like the producers of the TV special “Circus of the Stars,” who trained Lewis in trapeze; or “Fantasy Island” star Hervé Villechaize, who came over for a scammy “Pyramid Party”; or The Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty. One year on Halloween, at the recommendation of the family’s illusionist friend—who, according to Leslie, levitated Jenny in their house—her mother invited over Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd’s brother Peter, who was himself a real-life ghost buster. Peter planned to “check out the levels” of the house.

Intrigued by the Lewis’ paranormal investigation, the local news showed up. Back then, Lewis was hanging out with fellow child actors Sarah Gilbert, Toby Maguire, and Leonardo DiCaprio—who also came through to scope things out. Recalling the ghost-busting scene, Lewis says, “They came over and set up their vague, infrared equipment and they captured some sort of reading coming down the hallway and going into my childhood bedroom.”

I ask Lewis if the ghostbusters’ findings felt accurate. “Well, totally,” she says. “Something was going on. We always had weird vibes in the house. Very dark vibes.”

In person, Lewis’ temperament is one of constant cheer. She radiates positivity, takes bong rips in her kitchen, says “dope” and “vibe” often. This sunny disposition is occasionally punctuated by looks of deep, welling concern for others—as if she is on the brink of tears for humanity. Still, she calls herself a “total skeptic,” and tells me that show business trained her, early on, to master the art of getting along. “I didn’t ever wanna be one of the dicks on set—like in a family situation, where one person can really fuck up Thanksgiving,” she says, before veering into more existential territory. “We all know we’re careening towards the end of humanity. I just wanna do my work and hang out with my people.”

It’s only later, while sipping Modelos at the dining room table of her quaint ranch house in the hills of Studio City, that Lewis reveals the source of her childhood home’s “dark vibes” was her mother’s lifelong heroin addiction. “It is painful to go back there,” Lewis tells me. “I get a weird feeling. I don’t know if the ghostbusters could have detected it, but there was some kind of energy that was not conducive to survival. So when I left, I left.”

“My mom was an addict my entire life, and it was a fucking rollercoaster,” she continues. “It lent itself to some amazing situations, but it was manic as fuck, and there were drugs constantly. It’s a lifestyle, and it’s a community to grow up around. I feel grateful for having been witness to some pretty outrageous human behavior from a young age. Nothing really shocks me.”

Leslie attests to their complicated home environment, and recalls “stepping over people trying to find my books to go to school.” She became a mother figure to Jenny, taking her little sister to school on her bicycle and making sure she did her homework. Leslie was just a teenager when she put it together that their mother was pushing Jenny’s acting money into buying drugs and, ultimately, selling them. “It was a terrible realization for both Jenny and I to have,” Leslie says. “I give our mom a lot of credit for being resourceful prior to that. We probably wouldn’t be talking to you today if she hadn’t been so inventive and so diligent. But it escalated.”

When Jenny quit acting in her early 20s, Leslie wasn’t surprised. “I remember her finally having the burden lifted off her shoulders, that she didn’t need to support our mom anymore, and she didn’t need to be told what to do anymore—she was free,” Leslie says. “Her agents were calling me, asking ‘What the hell’s going on? We’re booking her in all this stuff.’ It was a big deal for her to walk away. But she had to do it. I think she didn’t want to be saying other people’s words anymore.” Leslie recalls the bubbly dialogue Lewis would have to recite on screen and adds, “That’s just not where she was at in her life.”

Focusing on her own words, Lewis arrived instead at death, disease, loneliness, deflated dreams. Rilo Kiley’s 2002 breakthrough The Execution of All Things opens with a hushed monologue from Lewis about the melting ground. On the title track, she sings genially of a will to “murder what matters to you most and move on to your neighbors and kids.” Disguised by twee album art, Rilo Kiley created an indie rock uncanny valley, a sweet-sung pop moroseness of Morrissey-like proportions.

The centerpiece of Execution is a gritted-teeth fight song called “A Better Son/Daughter.” It bursts from a music-box twinkle to a monumental marching-band wallop, from a depressed paralysis to refurbished self-worth, from “your mother […] calling you insane and high, swearing it’s different this time” to “not giving in to the cries and wails of the Valley below.” In the past, Lewis has rarely discussed how her own biography fits into her songs, but the sense of hard-earned triumph and conviction powering this particular song is unequivocal. When I ask what might have inspired its climax—“But the lows are so extreme/That the good seems fucking cheap”—she simply remarks, “I mean everything I say.”

In 2006, Lewis wrote the fablistic title ballad of her solo masterpiece, Rabbit Fur Coat, to convey the feeling of her story—a mother waitressing on welfare in the Valley, the promise of a working child, a fortune that fades—if not the concrete details, which, she says, don’t really matter. But the haunting “Rabbit Fur Coat” laid her mythology bare. “I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid/When I was old enough to realize/Wiped the dust from my mother’s eyes,” Lewis sings, the last line quivering into a moment of piercing a capella. “Is all this for that rabbit fur coat?”

I ask Lewis where she thinks her optimism comes from, and she just says “survival.” This summarizes an equation of emotional resilience that more women than not are tasked with solving young. “Jenny has basically been on her own her entire life,” says her best friend, the musician Morgan Nagler. “She’s the definition of buoyant.”

It’s hard to imagine rock in 2019 without Lewis’ radical honesty, without her hyper-lyrical mix of the sweet and the sinister. “In the early 2000s, the really big indie artists were Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie, and Jenny was one of the only women fronting that kind of music,” says Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee. “But in the next generation after that in indie music, there are so many women. How could she not have been a huge part of that?”

Crutchfield, now an indie figurehead in her own right, says no songwriter has directly influenced her more than Lewis. When she was still a 20-year-old punk living in Alabama, Crutchfield got the cover of The Execution of All Things tattooed prominently on her arm. Lewis’ odd, poppy, poetic songs had a musicality she hadn’t found in punk, but they still spoke to her as an outcast.

Seeing Rilo Kiley play for the first time—at a Birmingham venue she would go on to play herself—was a watershed moment. Crutchfield and her two sisters stood front row center, sang every word, and cried. “It was so huge to see a woman on stage holding a guitar, being powerful but still very feminine,” Crutchfield says. “That was my first foray into seeing that as a possibility for myself.” She recalls the exact outfit Lewis wore that night: red leather skirt, knee socks, T-shirt tucked in, and “a belt that was like a ruler—something you would see on a teacher.”

When Eva Hendricks, singer of sugarrushing New York pop-rock band Charly Bliss, was still in high school, she would spend days writing Lewis’ lyrics in her notebooks over and over, becoming attuned to the virtues of unsparing openness in songwriting. “Listening to that music unlocked something I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to understand about myself,” says Hendricks, who also appreciated how Lewis never downplayed her femininity. She distinctly recalls going to a Lewis record signing around 2014’s The Voyager: “I waited in line and when it got to be my turn, the only thing I could think to say was, ‘I can’t believe that your voice is coming out of a real human being.’”

Harmony Tividad, of Girlpool, was 12 the first time she heard Rilo Kiley, and calls Execution’s “The Good That Won’t Come Out” one of her favorite songs of all time. “That song is more like a diary entry, and vulnerable in this way that feels like a secret,” Tividad says. The unvarnished album opener peaks with Lewis speak-singing, “You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me/Maybe you’re right.”

“I was a really emotional, awkward young person and felt kind of socially trapped,” Tividad, now 23, reflects. “I was a freak. And that song is about exploring all of this stuff inside of yourself that you can’t really show people. It’s about isolation, which I have felt a lot. This music was a soundtrack to that recalibration of personhood. It was very integral in me developing a sense of self.”

Lewis has resided in the quiet show-biz neighborhood of Studio City—which she refers to as “Stud City”—for 11 years. She mentions that her current home is still, technically, located in the Valley, and shoots me a conspiratorial look: “Don’t tell anyone.” There are retro-looking landlines all around the house (cell service is poor), and eye-catching vintage Christmas bulbs strung in the kitchen window. The house was previously owned by the late Disney animator Art Stevens, who worked on Fantasia and Peter Pan. Standing amid dozens of plants in the little green room at the heart of her home, sipping a coconut La Croix, Lewis enthuses about Mort Garson’s obscure 1976 electronic record, called Mother Earth’s Plantasia. The whole place has an air of magic.

Its infrastructure has been unchanged for decades, which stuck out to a location scout for Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Charles Manson film, who knocked on the door one day and asked to take some photos. He did not return, but his business card is on Lewis’ refrigerator, alongside one from legendary songwriter Van Dyke Parks, and a Bob Dylan backstage pass. The fridge is mostly covered with hospital stickers from when Lewis was visiting her mom, who died of cancer in 2017, and inspired her new song “Little White Dove.”

The other big change in Lewis’ life was the dissolution of her 12-year relationship with singer-songwriter Jonathan Rice—after which, to shake up the energy of the house, Lewis’ friend and photographer Autumn de Wilde painted the walls of her bedroom a striking shade of rose. Directly outside the door is a life-size photo of her best friend Morgan, and the window of her bedroom, spanning the right wall, looks out to a built-in pool. The sill holds carefully arranged objects: ruby slippers, her passport, a candle, a plethora of sunglasses, and a violet notebook labeled “Lewis homework for On the Line.”

Talking with Lewis, the despairing elephant in the room is Ryan Adams, who played on the album. Two weeks before we meet, Adams was accused of sexual misconduct and emotional manipulation from musician Phoebe Bridgers, his ex-wife Mandy Moore, and others, including a woman who was allegedly 14 at the time, prompting a criminal investigation by the FBI. “The allegations are so serious and shocking and really fucked up, and I was so sad on so many levels when I heard,” Lewis tells me. “I hate that he’s on this album, but you can’t rewrite how things went. We started the record together two years ago, and he worked on it—we were in the studio for five days. Then he pretty much bounced, and I had to finish the album by myself.”

“This is part of my lifelong catalog,” Lewis continues. “The album is an extension of that thing that started back at my mom’s house—I had to save myself and my music, and get away from the toxicity. Ultimately, it’s me and my songs. I began in my bedroom with a tape recorder, and it was like my own fantasy world. I’ve taken all these weird turns in my life—with mostly men, sometimes women—but I feel like I’m finally back to that place, which is autonomy.”

Though On the Line features an impressive array of players—Beck, Rolling Stones producer Don Was, Dylan drummer Jim Keltner, literally Ringo Starr—the album marks the first time Lewis has penned an album of songs solo, without co-writers, since Rabbit Fur Coat. “I’m not fully myself when I’m co-writing,” Lewis admits, describing a directness to the songs she’s penned with men, like Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes,” as opposed to songs she’s written alone, like “Silver Lining.” “With the songs I’ve co-written, it’s almost as if there’s a trimming of the emotional, rambling, poetic hysteria, which is where I live when I’m writing by myself,” Lewis says. “I don’t think of songs structurally. It’s a feeling, and I’m chasing the feeling.”

The cover of On the Line is a close-up of Lewis’ chest in an ornate blue gown. She chose the snapshot intuitively, from a pile of Polaroids taken by de Wilde, and only later recognized it as a deep homage to her mom, who once dressed similarly in Vegas and had an identical mole between her breasts. “Over the years I’ve become more comfortable in my skin,” Lewis says. “It’s funny to feel good in your skin when it’s not quite as tight as it used to be.”

With her voice sounding more refined than ever, On the Line finds Lewis singing about getting head in a black Corvette, feeling “wicked,” and—on the devastatingly delicate “Taffy”—sending nudes to a lover she knows will leave. “There’s a lot of fantasy in my songs,” Lewis tells me. “Sadly, I don’t get that much action. I should have gotten more.” She says she has always written about sex as “character projection,” but when she did so on Rilo Kiley’s final album, 2007’s Under the Black Light, it polarized fans. Lewis recalls one journalist who made a flow chart claiming to correlate the declining quality of the band’s music and the shrinking size of her hot pants. “It was so puritanical,” she says. But as the borders between the underground, mainstream, and genre have broken down, the artists who Lewis inspired are continuing to make space for more expansive expressions of sexuality.

The new record’s sound is warm and sleek, and when Lewis says she listened primarily to Kanye’s recent work while mixing it, I recall yet another wacky tale she shared with me at her house: Once, circa 2008, Lewis chanced upon Kanye at an airport. He played her a cut from 808s and Heartbreaks, and she played him her sprawling psych-rock triptych “The Next Messiah.”

Listening to On the Line, I find myself fixated on “Wasted Youth,” which uses a jaunty piano arrangement to deliver its neatly bleak refrain: “I wasted my youth on a poppy.” Lewis then slyly draws a line from the drugs to our numbing daily realities. When she sings, “Everybody knows we’re in trouble/Doo doo doo doo doo/Candy Crush,” I can feel my phone festering in my palm.

“I feel like that song is more about Candy Crush than heroin, if that’s even fucking possible,” Lewis says. “That’s the fuckin’ end: Candy Crush. It’s terrifying. I feel like my brain has been taken over by one of those weird fungi that grow out of the head of an ant in the rainforest. It’s like we’re spracked out on our Instagrams. It makes me feel like shit even talking about it.”

By the bridge, however, Lewis offers a blunt jolt of hope: “We’re all here, then we’re gone/Do something while your heart is thumping!” That’s a surprisingly heartening sentiment from a songwriter who has referred to herself as “a walking corpse,” who once made a springy emo anthem entitled “Jenny, You’re Barely Alive.”

“I’m in my 40s and something has shifted,” she says, when I ask what she does these days to help herself through. “Maybe you’re more aware of your own mortality, and have the balls to walk away from things, and be untethered, and do the reflection and the hard work—getting your ass out of bed and walking a couple miles, going to the gym, talking to a therapist.”

Lewis says her relationships with her female friends have deepened profoundly in recent years. “Maybe this is what we’re picking up on: the collective consciousness,” she says. “Women are talking to one another more. Reaching out to my girlfriends has helped me through these lessons that keep coming up. It’s the same lesson, where I’m like, ‘How am I in this situation with this fucking person that’s crazy… again? Why am I here and why have I stayed this long?’ And then my girlfriends are there to go: ‘Get the fuck out of there!’” (She is clear that this is not about her relationship with Rice, but rather about other romantic and working partnerships.)

I tell Lewis that these get-me-out predicaments remind me of her own song, “Godspeed,” from 2008’s Acid Tongue, which I had been revisiting quite a bit lately—a golden-hour piano ballad from one woman to another, a paean to “keep the lighthouse in sight,” to get “up and out of his house,” because “no man should treat you like he do.” “I wrote that for my friend,” Lewis says. “But maybe I wrote it for myself now.”

By the end of my time at Lewis’ house, the sun has set and we’re sitting in near total darkness, save for the neon pink glow of one of her many landlines. “You have to make a choice to be happy, or try to be,” Lewis insists. “Sometimes that involves moving away from people that you love, or that hurt you, or that are toxic. You have to find your bliss in life, right?”

I almost can’t believe that the same woman who provided me with my personal millennial-burnout anthems is asking me about unfettered joy—the artist who wrote the lyrics “I do this thing where I think I’m real sick, but I won’t go to the doctor to find out about it” and “I’m a modern girl but I fold in half so easily when I put myself in the picture of success” and “It must be nice to finish when you’re dead.” But I nod; it’s true.

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newagesispage · 6 years ago

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DECEMBER 2018

PAGE RIB

***** This Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just seems to keep growing. Added to the cast are Al Pacino and Luke Perry. Damien Lewis will play Steve Mcqueen, Emile Hirsch will play Jay Sebring and Dakota Fanning will play Squeaky.

***** The Stones are gearing up for a U.S. tour in the spring ending in Chicago.

***** Peoria Players Theater is celebrating 100 years, one of only three theaters in continuous operation in the country. Their first production was ‘The Maker of Dreams.’

***** Paul McCartney wrote a children’s book, Hey Grandude!

***** Wow!! We have now seen a Mars sunset!!

***** A CNN investigation found that Police departments around the country destroyed rape kits before the statute of limitations was up.

***** Patti Hansen has a book out: A Portrait

*****Ignore your rights and they will go away.

***** The Stan and Ollie movie looks awesome.

***** Head from the Monkees is 50 years old.

***** Goodfield, Illinois has finally repealed prohibition.

***** Deep Time from director Noah Hutton has been out a few years but is still worth a look. It is the true story of the indigenous people of North Dakota and the oil boom in the age of man.

***** Sajak and White have renewed until 2022. OY!

***** Robbie Robertson is finishing the mix on his latest album.

***** The people have spoken even though some states took a long time to get answers. Bernie Sanders and Tim Kaine have both been re- elected.** Ted Cruz won but just barely.** Mitt Romney won in the senate in Utah. The republicans kept the Senate but the Dems took the house. Journalists throw around the words, ’blue wave’ but it was all a bit too close for me. Too much of this country still just does not get it. I will never understand how a person puts their own religious or financial needs above the rights of others. There is reason to celebrate the young people who got involved and that there was great voter turnout. I still heard excuses though like, “I was too tired” and “they put in who they (?) want anyway.” My Mother was headed into surgery that day and still she voted. You Go Mom!!** Colorado gave us our first openly gay Governor. ** Two female Muslims and two female Native Americans have been elected to congress for the first time. Michigan will legalize recreational marijuana.

***** The Doobie Brothers are working on new music.

***** Jeff Sessions is out. Trump is attempting to keep Rod Rosenstein from overseeing the Mueller probe and put Matthew Whitaker in there.

***** #Blaze it forward

***** Scary Clown took away Jim Acosta’s press pass after a dust up at the WH. Sarah Sanders lied about the whole thing. Acosta and CNN sued. A judge says that the WH has the right to keep people out but once you let the press in, you can’t pick and choose. Acosta has his pass back.** Trump disgraced us in Paris with snarky comments about Macron and missed the ceremony at the American cemetery for the 100th anniversary of WWI because of the rain.** The administration is proposing there should not be protests in front of the WH.** The use of private e mails by Ivanka is being looked into by congress. Will she or Daddy ever be questioned for 11 hours?? Doubtful.** The Finlandians are the latest to mock our Pres. After his ridic comments about the President of Finland telling him about raking the forest (which that Pres does not recall), many are posting themselves raking or vacuuming.** A big part of Scary Clowns legacy will be overturning rules we had in place for good reason. It is likely the romaine lettuce E-coli outbreak could have been avoided if regulations had not been eased on testing water on farms.

*****Mueller has filed paperwork stating that Paul Manafort lied to the FBI and the special counsel despite signing a plea deal. This could mean that that it is unlikely he could testify since he would not seem credible.** James Comey got a subpoena on Thanksgiving.** Michael Cohen has also been accused of lies.

***** 7 NY hospitals have made settlements with rape survivors after illegally charging them $300 for rape kits.

***** It looks like 5 mil in unpaid labor will bring plenty of lawsuits from workers at the Trump hotel in Washington.

***** Major League Baseball has requested the return of a political contribution they made to Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde- Smith. Why are they giving their money to politicians anyway, especially without checking them out thoroughly?? This is a woman who had made it clear she was racist even before the comments about wanting to be in the front row for a public hanging. I suppose they give to campaigns like all other big biz, to pass the bills they want like the Save Americas pastime act that makes it legal to pay minor- league players dick. Oh and they were asked to donate by Mitch McConnell. Wal Mart, Union Pacific, Google AT&T and Blue Cross and Blue Shield, just to name a few have asked for their money back as well. It is good to know what companies give to the right wing racist nut jobs. And She Won!!

***** The U.S. waived background checks for the staff at immigrant children holding facilities and there is still no set date for the kids to be released.

***** Hooray to the Macy’s Thanksgivings day Parade for putting on The Prom!!

***** Russia has ceased 3 Ukranian ships off Crimea.

***** After a rocky start, Murphy Brown is starting to find its mojo.

***** I hope we see more of The Cool Kids. I mean, Charlie Day, Jamie Farr, Clyde Kusatsu, Julia Duffy, Charles Shaughnessy plus the regular cast.. wow! I knew they could fill out the facility with top notch talent.

***** This year the Kennedy Center honors will go to Cher, Reba McEntire, Wayne Shorter and Phillip Glass.

***** I love the way that Seth Meyers represents the local channels with mugs on his desk. I saw WEEK 25 on there this month!!

***** Dick Van Dyke says he paid Walt Disney to play the banker in Mary Poppins.

***** Robert DeNiro and Grace Hightower are getting divorced.

***** The administration is like a shit show in a dumpster fire._ George Conway (husband of Kellyanne)

***** A man in a Baltimore audience of Fiddler on the Roof yelled out, “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”

***** Meg Ryan and John Mellencamp are engaged.

***** Robert Redford is selling his St. Helena residence for 7 mil.

***** Joan Baez is on her farewell tour.

***** The suicide death rate is higher than it has been inn 50 years.

***** Toy Story 4 will be out next summer with a new character, Forky voiced by Tony Hale!!!!

***** Days alert: Did Days actually age Abigail’s baby on the same episode? I mean, there was a little bundle with tiny little features, Chad walked outside to ring for help and when he came back there was a wide eyed baby sitting up and looked like a whole new baby.** So sad to see Paul go but at least he got a tearful sendoff. I kind of hope Will cheats on Sonny again. Is that wrong?? Oh wait.. it looks like Leo is gonna put a crimp in their plans. It also looks like all the secrets all over town are about to come out** I can’t wait for Jack to come back!

***** There is to be a Northern Exposure reboot.

***** Rock and Roll hall of fame noms this year are Def Leppard, Devo, Janet Jackson, John Prine, Kraftwerk, LLCool J, MC5, Radiohead, Rage against the Machine, Roxy Music, Stevie Nicks, The Cure, Todd Rundgren, Rufus and Chaka Khan and The Zombies.

***** Hate is never right and love is never wrong- Roman Kent

***** R.I.P. Francis Lai, the victims of thousand Oaks, Peggy McCay, victims of the California wild fires, William Goldman, Stan Lee , Bernardo Bertolucci, Ricky Jay, Stephen Hillenburg, Harry Leslie Smith, Hogan the Zebra, George Bolton , George H. W. Bush and Nicolas Roeg.

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radioleary-blog · 6 years ago

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Nixon’s Apprentice

For news junkies like me, this past week was the best week of news in a long, long time. Ever since Bernie Sanders “lost” the Democratic primary race to Hillary Clinton, the Queen of the Illuminati. or is it Hilluminati? Since then, the news has all been pretty bad. I don’t need to recite a litany of all the affronts to sanity and society to which we have all borne witness these past hundred-odd days, and it’s been a hundred very odd days indeed. Things have gone rapidly downhill since the election, down a slope as steep as a double-black diamond ski trail. Down a mountain where Trump is the tree, and the whole country is Sonny Bono.

If you are too young to know who Sonny Bono is, he wasn’t related to U2’s Bono, you could tell because Sonny Bono found what he was looking for. He was a hippie-ish singer and musician who racked up a string of hits with his wife Cher in the 1960’s, then in the 1970’s they had a long-running TV variety show (with David Letterman as a writer), then he served three terms in Congress in the 1990’s representing California, until he was killed in a tragic skiing accident when he hit a tree. They say the bark is worse than the bite, and to Sonny Bono, the bark was definitely worse. Some people say Sonny probably should have spent more time in Congress and less time at a ski resort, but who knows, maybe he had a time-Cher. Sonny Bono was another TV celebrity turned incompetent Republican elected to high office, so he wasn’t all that different than Donald Trump. Except The Sonny and Cher Show on CBS was the highest rated television show in America, and The Apprentice didn’t even crack the top 50 in its last four seasons. People viewed Sonny Bono as a bit of a joke and a lightweight, but compared to our current President he looked like Teddy Roosevelt, if Teddy could carry a tune instead of a big stick. He even had the moustache.

The big difference between Trump and Sonny Bono is that Sonny had a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor, he was charming and humble, and he was honest about how unqualified he was for high office. “The last thing in the world I thought I would be is a U.S. Congressman, given all the bobcat vests and Eskimo boots I used to wear.” Sonny said. “What is qualified? What have I been qualified for in my life? I haven't been qualified to be a mayor. I'm not qualified to be a songwriter. I'm not qualified to be a TV producer. I'm not qualified to be a successful businessman. And so, I don't know what qualified means.” Wow, that’s a refreshing change from the self-proclaimed super-genius President we have now. The one who was surprised that being President was harder than having a reality game show. That genius. You know, Wile E. Coyote thought he was a Super-Genius too, but in the span of five-minutes he gets crushed by a giant boulder, takes an anvil to the head, and is turned into an accordion after falling from a fatal height.

But I digress.

So the news has been bad and getting worse, until right now. It’s been exhausting. Used to be, before we entered what I affectionately call the ‘end of days’, a President would get embroiled in a scandal, it would unfold slowly over months or years, and it would either bring him down or it wouldn’t. But this time around the scandals have moved faster than Anthony Weiner’s texting hand. Or maybe his other hand, if you know what I mean. Even hardcore political junkies like myself are starting to O.D. like a frontman in a grunge band.

With the firing of FBI director Comey to stop an investigation against him, and subsequent veiled threats about secret “tapes”, Donald Trump has raised the specter of Richard Nixon. By the way, somebody should tell Trump that when you put quotation marks around a word like that, it’s usually meant to indicate sarcasm. It’s called ‘Irony punctuation’. In the 1580’s, a printer in England introduced the percontation point, and French poet Alcanter de Brahm called it the irony mark. Both are the form of a question mark reversed, like this, "⸮". Irony punctuation is used to convey that a sentence should be understood at a second, deeper level.

Initially the reverse question mark was used at the end of a rhetorical question, like “Why is it your feet smell and your nose runs "⸮" or “How can you ever get off the airplane if it’s a non-stop flight "⸮" (that one actually has an answer, you fly United and they drag you out before take-off). Eventually, the reverse question mark disappeared, but the quotation marks around it are now put around the word or phrase you mean sarcastically or ironically. Like, if you see a sign in a restaurant window that says: OUR BURGERS ARE 100% “BEEF”, you’d better make sure those are grill marks on the burger and not whip marks from when it lost the Kentucky Derby. So listen up, Donald Trump, stop putting quotation marks around words that are not intended sarcastically! Okay, Mr. “President”?

But I do digress.

I remember Nixon. Man-o-man, do I remember Nixon. My dad was a lifelong Democrat, and he was draft age as the Vietnam war raged across the evening news, so Nixon’s name came up a lot. Not really in a positive way. I grew up thinking Richard Nixon’s middle name was F***ing. That’s the way it sounded in my house, anyway. My dad would be watching Cronkite, and since like most Americans we were a one-TV household, that meant I was watching Cronkite too. It was either that or actually do my homework, so hello, Walter. And ol’ Tricky Dick was always up to something. My dad would seethe at every new scandal, from “He’s sabotaged Johnson’s peace talks! That Richard F***ing Nixon!” to “He attacked Cambodia? On Christmas? That Richard F***ing Nixon!” to “Can you believe he fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox? That Richard F***ing Nixon!”

That was all well and good, until one day in school my teacher asked us what President Nixon’s full name was. My hand shot up, with about the same positive result as when Janis Joplin shot up. “I know! I know! It’s Richard F***ing Nixon!” I got the feeling I may have been incorrect when twenty-five third-graders gasped in unison, sucking all the air out of the room like the Allied air raids over Dresden. After Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was regained consciousness, her teacher training took over as she tried to regain control of the classroom with all the nervous calm of a woman about to lose tenure. “No, Chris, President Nixon’s middle initial is ‘M’.” I raised my hand again. “I got it now, is it Richard Motherf***ing Nixon? Because I’ve heard that one a lot too.” And that’s right about the moment my name started going on lists. I was sent home with a note for my mother. I read it, but I had to ask mom what “political dissident commie pinko” meant. Mom said it meant I was smarter than my teacher.

Did you know that Richard Nixon happened to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the very day President Kennedy was killed there? It’s true. After Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960, Nixon went to work as a lawyer for Pepsi, and he gave a speech that day before a group of Dallas businessmen. But for some reason, Nixon later told three separate lies saying he left Dallas before the trouble started. Nobody thought he had anything to do with the shooting, it’s not a conspiracy, just a weird coincidence, but Nixon lied about it anyway. It was completely unnecessary too, because thanks to Trump, we now know that JFK was actually killed by Ted Cruz’s dad. And probably Hillary. And maybe Pocahontas.

And did you know that besides the astronauts, the only other name on the Moon is Richard Nixon? Well, that’s true, too. There are plaques left behind by the Apollo astronauts, with their signatures and Nixon’s signature, because he was President for all the Moon landings, so he’s the guy that signed the checks. I think they left the plaque right beside that cool flag they planted for MTV. It reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." Wow. That’s pretty noble. I guess they decided not to add the part that says “But mainly, we did it to show up the Russians.”

And I’m sure that plaque is still there, untouched, on that secret Nevada movie set where they really filmed the Moon landing. I think history will eventually give the director’s credit for the Moon landing to Stanley Kubrick He probably filmed it between 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, we could ask Kubrick, but he died mysteriously less than one week after finishing Eyes Wide Shut. Some say he was killed for revealing a long-hidden truth in that film. Not the hidden truth that the world is run by a secret society of elites that control the levers of power, commit murder with impunity, and engage in ancient satyric orgiastic rituals. But rather he revealed the long-hidden truth that there was absolutely no sexual chemistry at all between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Faked the Moon landing? I think Tom Cruise faked the Poon landing! I understand that before filming started, Tom Cruise asked Kubrick if he could keep his beard in the movie. Kubrick said yes, so Tom Cruise brought Nicole. Get it? She was a beard? No? Ah, forget it. I should have closed with Poon landing.

Now I, for one, truly appreciate the irony of Nixon’s name reaching the lofty height of being on a heavenly body, because he was infamous primarily for his gutter politics. Dick Nixon was a dick alright, right from the beginning. He worked with “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy and the HUAC, the House Unamerican Activities Committee. They basically just went around ruining the careers of anyone who opposed them, usually by accusing them of being secret Communist agents. Most of ‘em were completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but the committee black-balled them out of their professions if they were any more liberal than Rorschach from The Watchmen. “Hurm.” The HUAC black-balled thousands and thousands of decent, patriotic Americans with all the credibility of the Salem Witch trials. The HUAC were responsible for more black-balling than the Kardashian family.

Too bad the HUAC isn’t around today, they wouldn’t have to look any further than a few blocks down the street to the White House to find a whole mess of Communist agents and Moscow Moles, and this time they wouldn’t have to make it up. Hell, between Trump puppet Devin Nunes and the newly-elected Montana body-slam man, they’d have plenty of careers that need ruining right there in the House itself without bothering the rest of us. It’s mind-boggling to me that the Republican party was once so obsessed with preventing Russian agents from infiltrating the government, and today they are the Russian agents infiltrating government. And the ones that aren’t actually Russian influenced are spending all their energies and political capital defending and making excuses for the ones that are. I’ve said it before, we are living in a land without irony.

Nixon was a low-down red-baiter from his very first campaign in 1946, when he was recruited into politics by Republicans in California's 12th district to oust incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis, who supported the New Deal and had a liberal voting record. Nixon came out bullshit blazing, saying that because Voorhis was endorsed by a group linked to communists, it must mean that he’s a left-wing radical commie himself. In reality, Voorhis was staunchly anti-communist, and he was voted by the press corps to be the "most honest congressman.” But Nixon was able to paint him red all over, even though Voorhis refused to accept any endorsement that didn’t renounce communism. Nixon won by over 15,000 votes, and the rest is history, and it’s even written on the Moon. It’s too bad Jerry Voorhis wasn’t Jason Vorhees, now there’s a dude that would know how to effectively respond to a hatchet-job. Probably with a machete.

Nixon was a creep, and it’s no coincidence that the group behind the break-in at the Watergate hotel was called the Committee to RE-Elect the President, or CREEP. You can’t make that shit up. Next thing you know, Nixon fires the special prosecutor who is investigating him, Archibald Cox. Heh heh...Dick fired Cox...heh heh. Just like Trump fired Comey. And then Trump hints that there are secret tapes. Or “tapes”, if you don’t get sarcasm. Just like the tapes that Nixon was forced to turn over in which he implicates himself in a million-dollar payoff of hush-money to cover up the break-in. Nixon was the master of recording, Trump is like a Nixon cover band.

Donald Trump knows nothing of history, or he’d know that it wasn’t the initial act that drove Nixon from office, it was the endless cover-up that did him in. And there were no “tapes” of Nixon getting golden showers. But in the end, I believe all these comparisons between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump are a little unfair.

After all, Nixon never went to prison.

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houstonlocalus-blog · 7 years ago

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Laugh-In: An Interview with George Schlatter

Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was a phenomenon of its time and one that’s not likely to be repeated.

In television primetime comedy you have benchmarks that include shows like The Ernie Kovacs Show in the 1950s (which at one time or another was on four different television networks), That Was the Week That Was (1964-1965, itself a remake of an English series), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969 – 1974) and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1967 – 1973).

The current go-to irreverent comedy skit show Saturday Night Live, which in many ways amalgamates elements from all the previous shows mentioned, while not actually in prime time, uses subliminal social and overt political humor to achieve its laughs.

One thing is certain — all of these shows were cut from a unique bolt of cloth that eludes the majority of television shows comedy or otherwise.

George Schlatter was the executive producer and producer (and wrote the pilot) on over 140 episodes of Laugh-In. Schlatter’s previous producer credits included variety shows like The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1960-1962) and The Judy Garland Show (1963).

“It was a different time; one year there were seventeen variety shows,” says Schlatter during a phone interview with Free Press Houston.

Laugh-In launched on January 22, 1968 on the Peacock Channel. The comedy revue was a Monday night replacement for NBC’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and was up against CBS war-horses Gunsmoke and The Lucy Show.

“NBC put Laugh-In against them because it was cheap and they didn’t have anything else. It took them fourteen weeks to develop a replacement. We were cannon fodder against Lucy and Gunsmoke,” says Schlatter.

Somehow Laugh-In caught the zeitgeist of that tumultuous era. Think about all the events that formed 1968, whether it was the Vietnam War, Chicago election riots or the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy. Almost immediately Laugh-In was catapulted to the number one show of that year.

“We appealed to little kids with the colors and the old guys with the content, but in the middle was your group who knew we were saying something,” Schlatter says when I tell him Laugh-In was a staple of my then 12-year old existence.

Laugh-In coined what became catch phrases like “Sock it to me” and “Here comes the judge.”

“We had Sammy Davis, Jr. and when he came up with ‘Here Comes the Judge’ we immediately put it in the next show. The following day, when the Supreme Court justices walked in, someone in the back yelled out ‘Here Comes the Judge,’ and the whole room cracked up. It was the first laugh the Supreme Court ever got,” says Schlatter.

The show mainly used one-liners at His Girl Friday-speed and as such the editing was equally rapid fire, another first for television at the time. Laugh-In would be perfect for a re-launch in the current era of one sentence social media interaction.

“There was a woman named Carolyn Raskin who developed many of the editing techniques we had. We didn’t even have time code then, we had to physically splice everything,” says Schlatter about some of the transitions that had multiple images per second. “It was an adventure technically as well as creatively.”

Guest stars like John Wayne, Cher, Carol Channing or Johnny Carson would appear in the studio for one episode but could be edited into numerous episodes. “Some of them we grabbed off the hallway,” says Schlatter referring to another Laugh-In catch phrase: “From NBC Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank.”

Here’s another typical joke that was delivered by Cher: “I’ve heard of all the great Hollywood marriages. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.”

You like that? Here’s another Cher zinger: “Sonny and I are totally compatible. Anytime there’s a problem his psychiatrist contacts my psychiatrist and they work it out.”

While the heart of the show was slipping in sly drug references and double entendre, the show became such a hit that it attracted conservative faces like Dr. Billy Graham. Graham can be seen mugging for the camera saying, “The family that watches Laugh-In together really needs to pray together.”

“We had Barry Goldwater, we had Bill Buckley. Buckley, you know, was a conservative reporter. We wrote to him and he replied, ‘Not only do I refuse to appear, I resent having been asked,’” says Schlatter. “I responded that I would fly him to California in an airplane with two right wings, and he agreed to appear.”

Laugh-In also debuted talent like Goldie Hawn, Flip Wilson, Tiny Tim and Lily Tomlin, who herself didn’t appear until the third season. On Tomlin, Schlatter recalled: “The night after she did Ernestine, everyone was walking down the hall saying ‘One-ringee-dingee.’ In one show Lily would do seven characters, and nobody had seen anything like that before.”

Other performers who came and went over Laugh-In’s six seasons include Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, Eileen Brennan, Chelsea Brown, Gary Owens, Teresa Graves, Pamela Graves, Larry Hovis and the list goes on and on.

Hawn won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1970 for Cactus Flower and left the show, but when she made a post-Oscar cameo the cast played it to the hilt like she was a princess and they were all trying to kiss her ass.

Every episode introduces serious performers goofing it up. Jack Lemmon’s son told him he couldn’t possibly be a movie star because he hadn’t been on Laugh-In. In its first year Laugh-In got a cameo from then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

“It might have been the reason he was elected,” says Schlatter. “I apologize for that.”

In one early episode Nixon says “Sock it to me,” phrased like a question. In fact it’s the same iteration that Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) uses in the debut episode. Carroll was the head of the show bearing the U.N.C.L.E. logo that Laugh-In replaced.

Tiny Tim was a longhaired fop that played songs from the 1920s on a ukulele and had never been on television prior to Laugh-In. “We brought him in what we called the new talent department. He sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” Schlatter recalled. “The network said ‘You can’t put him on, he’s a freak.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘He’s a big star.’ And they were like, ‘Okay.’” Perhaps not oddly, once Tiny Tim appeared on Laugh-In, he became a star.

As big of a success as Laugh-In was, Schlatter also produced a show on ABC the following year called Turn-On. It took the Laugh-In ethos yet made the tune-in-turn-on message more obvious. It was no problem for Schlatter to be running shows on two networks, in a time when there were three broadcast networks and PBS. Laugh-In gave him carte blanche.

“Well, I’m arrogant now, but with a fifty-share back then, c’mon,” says Schlatter. “The network was selling time for so much per commercial they pretty much looked the other way.”

The writer’s room, while atypical of the time, mirrors modern day writing groups. “There were maybe fifteen writers. But they were not the normal sitcom writers or the variety show writers,” says Schlatter. “These were rebels. One had been a professor of political science, and many of the others did not fit any categories.”

Schlatter realized early on that the way to get lines past the censors was the blindside them. “Every week they would send the script back full of paper clips. Sometimes we put things in we knew would purposely upset them so we could slip by other stuff. They didn’t have a way of handling us because there had never been anything like that on the air.”

Turn-On was greeted with a different response.

“It didn’t even last one episode; it lasted twenty minutes of the first episode,” recalls Schlatter. “Some stations literally pulled the show during the middle of the opening show.”

Another show Schlatter produced, Real People (1979), predated reality television by decades.

“That was another adventure,” says Schlatter. “An attempt to look at ordinary guys, the unsung hero, eccentrics. It was the first television show that saluted the little guy but without any guest stars.”

Just months after, another network had a copycat series called That’s Incredible.

Schlatter made a foray into feature film making with Norman … Is That You? in 1976, which revolved around Redd Foxx discovering his son is gay.

“At that time I could do anything I wanted to do on television, but to go on a movie lot and spend the time it takes to make a film took a year. Television was immediate. We’d write it down and it could be on the air the next day.

“We were freefall television. We touched on all sorts of issues but we never dwelt on them long. We were always off on something else but by the time you got the previous joke you would’ve realized we just said something revolutionary.

“Dan [Rowan] and Dick [Martin] did a sensational nightclub act. They were not friendly. When they left the stage they didn’t talk to each other until the next time they came back onstage. But it was one of the funniest nightclub acts ever.

“Timex said they wanted us to have hosts so we got Dan and Dick for our pilot. They wore tuxedos and craziness happened around them. It worked.”

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In – The Complete Series is available exclusively through TimeLife. The box set includes thirty-eight discs and will likely take you months to conquer.

Laugh-In: An Interview with George Schlatter this is a repost

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