Don’t let the name fool you. There is nothing “folksy” about The Folk Implosion, nor about this song. In fact, “Natural One” has a slightly demented, sinister quality to it that I really like.
This skewed quality might be due to the deliberately off-key, jangly sound of the lead guitar, which is the main hook of the song. It’s also, I believe, an example of musical dissonance. (I’m not sure of this; please correct me if I’m wrong.)
Also, don’t be fooled by the graphic for the video above. Those are not the band members. Rather, the image is taken from the poster of the 1995 film Kids, for whose soundtrack the song was composed. I haven’t seen Kids, but I’m told it’s a powerful, brutal depiction of alienation and apathy in a group of suburban youths in the drug-soaked 1990s.
Which means this song is a perfect fit.
Rock on…
BONUS! Here is a really cool video about musical dissonance.
David Bowie was a musical genius. And perhaps the only bad thing about being a musical genius is the possibility that someday another genius might come along and do a cover of one your songs that’s better than the original. That’s what Kurt Cobain did, I think, with this cover, recorded in 1993 on MTV. And he was only twenty-six at the time.
Oh, well. Here, for your entertainment (and, I hope, solace) is a song written by one genius and sung by another, with some really great musicians playing along.
Stone Temple Pilots was one of the best—perhaps the best—band to come along in the second generation of Grunge. They were also the most metal, thanks to brilliant guitar work of lead guitarist Dean DeLeo. But it was really the vocal work of lead singer Scott Weiland that made the band great. Otherworldly. Exhilarating, yet chilling, all at the same time.
My favorite STP song is this one, “Plush”, which has one of the most remarkable tempo changes in the history of rock. It never fails to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
And Weiland’s enormously powerful singing was, as was typical of grunge music in general, completely raw. Naked. Unguarded. This was one reason that, when I heard of his death by drug overdose in 2009, I was saddened but not really surprised. Like Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell and so many other artists, he seemed to feel things too intensely to handle this crazy thing we call Life on Earth.
Or maybe that’s B.S. Maybe he just had an addiction and couldn’t get the right help for it. I don’t know.
There is a scene in Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 noir thriller The Limey when the main character, Wilson, a career-criminal and generally scary guy, is questioning a woman in her house about a man named Valentine. Wilson (played with enormous power by Terance Stamp), is looking for the man who killed his daughter, and Valentine is his prime suspect. The woman, naively, offers to give Wilson Valentine’s phone number, at which point Wilson smiles wickedly and says, mostly to himself, “I’ve got his number.”
It’s a great, almost chilling moment. What we, the viewers, know (and the woman doesn’t) is that Wilson has already killed five men to get Valentine’s “number”, every sense of the term. And Stamp’s delivery of this line speaks volumes about Wilson’s character—his steely-eyed determination, his courage, and his constant, barely controlled rage.
It’s a great moment in a great movie, which marked one of several come-backs in Stamp’s long career. His filmography is so great and varied that one must divide not in stages but in ages. First, there was Stamp the movie star, an epically handsome, Angry-Young-Man who got the lead in several fine, gritty films in the 1960s, including William Wyler’s The Collector and Ken Loach’s Poor Cow. But he never really clicked as a leading-man, either in England or in Hollywood, and his next big break didn’t come until 1980’s Superman II, in which he reprised his role as the evil General Zod (a.k.a. the chief of the three baddies whom Superman’s dad banishes to the Phantom Zone in Superman.)
To this day, Stamp is best remembered for this one, silly role, Zod—at least, in America. But film nerds such as myself admired his work in many other small, supporting roles throughout the 80s. My favorite was his scene-stealing cameo in 1987 Wall Street, playing a redoubtable corporate raider who has reformed his ways and stands in opposition to the evil Gordon Gekko.
Then, in the 1990’s, Stamp had his next, and greatest, comeback with his role as transexual woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which remains one of my favorite films of all time. Stamp was nominated for a BAFTA for that one, and he should have been nominated for an Oscar, too. But no matter. The role is a classic, and it re-introduced him to American audiences.
This led to Stamp’s last leading role in a major motion picture. This was, of course, The Limey, and it is perhaps his greatest performance, in part because he was able to leverage his own, real-life history as 1960s hipster in the role of Wilson, who was a master thief in 1960s England. Indeed, Soderbergh sampled black-and-white footage of Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow to use in flashbacks of Wilson’s earlier life—a daring artistic choice which, although done with permission from Loach himself, remains controversial to this day. However one might feel about this cinematic cribbing, though, Soderbergh made one hell of a good movie—a genuine classic—in which Stamp finally got a chance to shine in the lead, one last time.
Terance Stamp passed away on Sunday, at the age of 87. Not bad, for such a hell-raiser. I’ll miss him.
The early 1990s were an amazing time to be alive. The Cold War was over, the internet was changing the world, and the economy was booming. And the music! Grunge was pumping new life into the American and British rock scenes, resulting in an alt-rock renaissance. I’ve already written about many of the great bands of this era, but there were a lot of great smaller ones, too.
One of my favorites was Belly, which was the creation of a young genius named Tanya Donelly. In 1991, Donelly was already an established rock artist, having co-founded the band Throwing Muses with her sister when they were both still in high school. (She had also formed another great band called The Breeders.) Donelly’s influence was all over the college-rock radio stations in that era, and Belly’s first album, Star, was one of my first purchases after grad-school when I finally got a real job (and, shortly thereafter, a real stereo).
The biggest hit on Star was this little gem, “Feed the Tree.” I like it because it’s slightly atonal, off-kilter, and yet very beautiful. More importantly, it overflows with the two emotions that are essential to any good rock song: desire and anger.
It’s too bad we don’t have a good, portmanteau word for this combination, kind of the opposite of lovingkindness, because I think it is the essence of rock-and-roll. But I digress…
Once again, it has taken me far too long to write a short tribute to a fine person who has passed away—Val Kilmer, who died of pneumonia on April 1. This time, it was more than just my workload that explains the delay. I had a bit of trouble discovering what I wanted to say about Kilmer, who was a great actor but also a bit of a cipher. A few years ago, I read his memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, and I enjoyed it. I was struck, however, by how little Valmer says about his filmmaking experiences. For instance, he barely mentions the production of Tombstone, the film in which Kilmer had his most celebrated film performance—playing the famous gunfighter Doc Holliday—and from which the book’s title is taken. He says even less about the making of Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Kilmer portrays a talented but slightly crazy master-burglar with pitch-perfect ferocity.
This lack of detail was especially disappointing, to me, in part because Heat has my favorite action-sequence of all time—the shoot-out in Century City. More than any other actor in the scene, it’s Kilmer who makes it work, with his fluid transition from cool and controlled bank-robber to machine-gun wielding warrior. I read an autobiography written by a Navy Seal who wrote that he and his comrades once watched Heat together and were impressed by Kilmer’s magazine-changing speed in the film. High praise, indeed.
This reticence on Kilmer’s part to discuss his film-making career—the very aspect of his life that made him famous across the world—suggests to me that Kilmer was deeply ambivalent about being a movie star. I suspect that, like the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, Kilmer was simply too intelligent to think that movie-making was a worthy and serious endeavor. I also suspect that, like Burton, Kilmer was much happier as a stage actor. (His one-man show of Mark Twain was universally praised.)
Unfortunately, his ambivalence somehow bled into his performances whenever he played a leading man, as he did in several major films, none of which was terribly successful. He never seemed to really have his heart in it. But that self-doubt evaporated when he played supporting roles, and these are what he will be remembered for: Iceman in the Top Gun films; Doc Holliday in Tombstone; Chris in Heat. In each of the movies, Kilmer seemed to bring his entire soul to the performance, and he was every inch the movie star.
This entry in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is both old and new. That is, it’s a modern touch-up of the cover from the October 1949 edition of Astounding Science Fiction painted by Hubert Rogers. That issue included a work by A.E. van Vogt, but not the one we are interested in here. This modern version is from a 1999 edition of van Vogt’s classic sci-fi novel, The War Against the Rull, which I distinctly remember devouring in two days when I was in eighth-grade.
I like this cover a lot. It’s not just a classic. It’s an archetype. Specifically, the archetype of the heroic (America) scientist, a buff intellectual and polymath whose ilk could be found in countless works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and on an on. In The War Against the Rull, the man is Dr. Trevor Jamieson, a brilliant scientist who is also a fierce warrior and survival-expert. He’s stranded on an alien planet with a huge, six-legged, intelligent creature called an ezwal who wants to kill him. But when both Jamieson and the ezwal encounter a mutual enemy—a race of aggressive, centipede-like aliens called the Rull—they decide to work together to survive.
It’s a great story, like so many from the sci-fi’s Golden Age. I’ve written before about why sci-fi novels from that era are so much more enjoyable (to me, at least) than most of those written in the last ten years or so. I think it has to do with the gritty humanity of such stories. Yeah, Jamieson is essentially a comic-book character (think Doctor Quest and Race Bannon rolled into one), but van Vogt does a great job of making you believe he’s in real trouble. The ezwal, too—he’s a compelling character in his own right. You get involved in the desperate nature of their situation, and you keep reading to see how they will get out of it.
Anyway, check it out if you can…
Original Cover from AstoundingCover from the 1970 edition that I read as a kid (by artist John Schoenherr)Another version of the Scientist Hero Archetype (by artist James Bama)
The power of rock-and-roll transcends language. And that’s a good thing because I don’t speak a word of Japanese. Even so, I love this song. It’s from Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts, and it sounds like something The Ramones might have done, back in the day.
Also, I’m pretty sure it’s about a girl named Linda. Or maybe two girls named Linda. Or maybe one girl named “Linda Linda.” Or maybe…
My parents divorced when I was a little kid. My mom was struggling with mental illness (undiagnosed, at the time) and so I went to live with my father and his new wife, my step-mother Eileen. I saw my mom mostly on the weekends, and we would invariably go to the movies. I probably saw over fifty movies in the theater per year, all with my mom.
I seldom went to the movies with my father, and even more seldomly when it was just the two of us. The last time I remember was in 1992. Eileen was out-of-town with my brother and sister, so Dad and I went to see Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It’s a great movie, and both my father and I loved it. We especially admired Gene Hackman’s performance as the villainous sheriff Little Bill Daggett, who, as Hackman himself revealed, is a kind of precursor to the modern right-wing movement.
My dad and I went out to dinner after the movie, and we shared our favorite moments from the film. It’s one of my fondest memories. I thought of it this morning when I read that Hackman had died. And I thought of something else, too. It occurred to me that the last movie I saw alone with my mother was also a Gene Hackman film, 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime. It’s about as different a film from Unforgiven as one can possibly imagine, with Hackman playing a completely different kind of character. And yet, it was still Hackman. Still low-key. Still forceful. Still brilliant.
What are the odds that the two last movies I saw with each of my parents alone were both Hackman films? Pretty good, actually. He was in a lot of movies. In fact, you could argue that he was the most versatile, compelling, and attractive character actor in Hollywood history. He played villains and heroes, and everything in between, across genres from action to mystery to sci-fi. In Twice in a Lifetime, he played an unassuming everyman who, on the tail-end of middle-age, leaves his wife to make a new start. He was also Lex Luthor in Superman. And Pop-eye Doyle in The French Connection. And the blind guy in Young Frankenstein.
Being a writer of mysteries, I’m particularly fond of Authur Penn’s 1975 film Night Moves, in which Hackman played a world-weary P.I. searching for a missing girl. It’s one of trademark, understated performances, and yet it crackles with energy. That was his gift.
Ever since Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide in 1994, Courtney Love has gotten a lot of hate from the bros. I don’t know why. I always liked her and her music. If Kurt Cobain was my generation’s Jim Morrison, then she was our Patti Smith.
I say “was” because Love hasn’t released much music recently. I hope that changes. I’m particularly fond of this song, “Malibu”.
Ash Clifton, Writer 