Depths of Mordor: THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976)

If there can be "J-Date" and "Christian Singles" why can't Led Zeppelin fans have their own dating site? Zepdate? Zeppelin Singles? Is that idea too drunken Viking Anglo-Nordic Imperialist swaggerific? The drug-addled, tall, emotionless Teutons of the North, the artistic, insane, and the mad killers never get their own religion officially, let alone a dating service, but the cult of Zep is just as valid and just as fervent and most importantly, very very high.

In the TOP 100 at the back of an old late 1980s High Times issue, right between "Hash!" and "Harley Davidson," was: "Becoming an instant Led Zeppelin fan by watching Song Remains the Same on acid for the first time." AWESOME, I thought: its synchronistic black magic is still winking at me, reverse engineering the miracle because the week before reading it I had become a Led Zeppelin fan in that exact same way!. I never liked them before, probably because Zeppelin was the chosen boombox bus music of the imbecilic, bullying burnouts at my high school. But sophomore year of college, the combination of a Zeppelin-worshipping girl named Chrissy, LSD, and a post-party screening of SONG REMAINS THE SAME freed me of all that, in a single night. 

My band just played in our attic to thunderous applause from keg-addled jonesers, and I was working through some post-performance lysergically "enhanced" paranoia so I could bust a move on Chrissy, with her long dark, wavy hair and great legs, her beauty and warmth marred only by a blue-collar Pittsburgh accent that would scare a teamster off the payroll. Man I just needed some time alone to think for a second, but there were twenty people in my bedroom all looking at me with needy, yearning eyes, their hands twitching and pulsing like writhing hydras, trying to figure out how to ask me for a hit of the same thing that was making the walls twist and breathe. Seeing my predicament, Chrissy took me with her to see THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME at her friend's house. No goodbyes to the housemates. I didn't even bring my keys. I was way too high to offer my usual disparaging Zeppelin remarks (for I had refused to see the film dozens of time prior) and felt calm only while hanging onto her so I just bailed on my own party, to see a film I had no desire to see, on some freshman year dorm room TV, after I'd already moved off campus, like a boss. In my discombobulated state (I'd taken two when a half was more than enough), I was free of all the usual snobby dismissal that had blocked me from the Zep a thousand times before. 

The film itself,--watched while sitting on the floor with a small crowd of tripping Zepp fans--flowed like a dark/light fairy tale; the open-shirt beauty of Plant and Page tempered by the immense industrial thuggishness of their manager Grant and the ferocity of John Bonham on drums (John Paul Jones being the perfect alchemical union of the two energies). Weird acid-soaked visuals and music that engaged the ears from four different directions, aided and accelerated the evolutionary state I was in; it was initiatory, transformative, impossibly beautiful because it never tried to shut out its darker side even as it reached for the light.


Perhaps I use the word groupie unfairly in talking of Chrissy, though not long after that night she drove off with some friends to follow Plant's then-band, The Honeydrippers on tour (it was 1987). She was just a true believer-- when you've found your thing, nothing matters, even if the object of that sort of love is unworthy of it... who cares? You're already free. Rocking out to my band or following the Honeydrippers, or watching SONG for whatever millionth time, she was alive and goddess-like. Chrissy's rock freedom was inspiring. She was Marlene Dietrich, walking barefoot into the Sahara after Gary Cooper in MOROCCO, or Richard Burton and Jean Simmons marching towards their execution in THE ROBE.

Afterwards Chrissie took me home to her dorm, seeing plainly I was too high to ever make it across town by myself. But I was elated, forever changed, new convert, adrip with lysergic fever sweat--and when she had signed me in, unlocked the door and turned on the light I gasped in amazement. Her room was completely covered, all the walls, the entire ceiling. with Led Zeppelin pictures, postcards, posters, and paintings, I do not exaggerate.... every inch. We both knew my being there was no accident of chance, but a cosmic convergence. She had turned an ordinary dorm room into a Zepp temple.

Before I left her the next morning, she loaned me her dogeared paperback of Hammer of the Gods: the Led Zeppelin Story, with the just solemnity of a missionary giving a convert his first bible. I was still vibrating. 


It's over fifteen years later and still one thunderous note of Led Zeppelin's music brings me back with a heady reverence to those transcendental moments: walking home as the sun rose like a cherry red joint tip, me still tripping, hands shaky, the beautiful, pungent smell of tobacco, sex, (1) bodily oils, patchouli, cloves, dirt and hash swirled together noticeable on my fingers when I lifted my cigarette to my lips, enough LSD still in my system for that smell to conjure a thousand cosmic earthy associations. A few cars roared sleepily to life here and there. Syracuse's heavy snow crust was melting like early spring into swirling black tar eddies of amp cord icicle rivulets; I was feeling like the Prince of Swords in the Zeppelin tarot deck, the mirror opposite of my usual panicked, depressed, self-absorbed, sexually frustrated (super shy and innately chivalrous) myopically sleepy slacker state. I felt arrived. The house was a mess, I could smell the vomit turning the corner on Allen St. A car was parked in the center of the front yard, the car door open. The front door open- - that was my home all right. I clearly left at the right time. Luckily, my room was only mildly upturned (my stash was safe). I floated through the door, gliding over the carnage like some A-list Icarus.

Does the film live up to that pungent promise now, ten years gone x 2 and cold stoned sober? Of course it does, for me. Your mileage may vary especially on the four lengthy, indulgent fantasy excursions (each band member gets a vignette). We get the pastorale home life: Three of the bandmates have young children at home and it's a sterling example of how cooler things were in the 1970s that living on rural England estates with wives and moppets in tow actually made you even more COOL. Now the kids are in charge of the cultural stimuli and parents dutifully learn "Tickle Me Elmo" songs and hide in their mancaves. but back then those kids ran wild in the woods, long-haired, underdressed for the weather, and fiery-eyed while their parents looked on with lordly bemusement. There was none of that mawkish 1980s Spielberg child worship we get in America, nowhere the cornball CGI-repainted, "safe" sanitized azure wisps of stratus clouds from Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS adaptations. These guys lived the real deal, the grungy 1978 Ralph Bakshi adaptation, wherein fantasy, sword and sorcery as it was called then, still had a dangerous, sexy currency. This wasn't dumbed-down MTV faux-angst but a living Pre-Raphaelite painting, with all the full mythopoetic heft that implieth. 

Onstage at Madison Square Garden in SONG, Zeppelin is at the same gaudy golden pinnacle as that powerful godly Gandalf in the LOTR poster from 1978 (below), the same level of Godly perfection of, say, Muhammad Ali in 1974 at the "Rumble in the Jungle", or Elvis Presley in THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (1970), Hendrix at Monterey, the Who in ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS, etc You watch and listen and you see manly godliness, performers at the peak of their powers, able to command the full engagement of a packed theater without betraying any effort; barely breaking a sweat, chests toned, shirts opened, persona lit up with fire, speed, savage precision, sexy sweetness, fire and soul, stop-on-a-dime rock anarchy--a bundle of animal fury and godly humor, perfect pitch, roaring blistering brilliance.

For all that, SONG is far from a perfect film: Peter Grant's fantasy opener is rather dopey: a bunch of gangsters machine gunning Nazi werewolves in slow motion like American Werewolf's dream sequence in reverse, but at least it's fairly quiet. The whole first twenty minutes have no music at all, actually, bringing to mind the hushed reverence before a benediction... which is okay if you're with a roomful of worshipful groupies for whom anything the Zep does must be taken as holy writ, and who are still finding their seats and rolling papers (the true fan is always late), but otherwise beware... or even fast forward.

There isalso, alas, the unfortunate matter of John Paul Jones' Prince Valiant hair. Is that a wig? (1) He has no visible part or scalp line, it all seems to meet at a center point at the top of his head, like a Beatles moptop. (PS Note: a lot of the concert had to be reshot on a soundstage when the idiot director fucked up the image, and JPJ had gotten a haircut in the interim, so yes, it is a wig)

And while there's nothing in the light show effects of Page's fantasy sequence that one couldn't easily do today with Final Cut Express, it works. It may seem a bit silly sober but one must remember it's not meant for normies -- it's an alchemical magick working kind of a thing. There's a deep kind of black magic at work in the editing, the ghost that guided Kenneth Anger's editing on Lucifer Rising works overtime through Page's wizards and wandering.


Then there's the music: so rooted in a mix of swaggering sex and Darkest Depths of Mordor-related mythic imagery that without a personal connection like I described above the film might be hard to take seriously until you notice three things:

1) The band themselves aren't taking it too seriously, nor too lightly. They are perfectly balanced between mythic resonance and playful cheek, and most of all, completely tuned to their music; the music controls their swagger, not the other way around. It's archetypo-magickal possession. It never seems fake or a put-on, or pretentious. For an example, pay particular attention to Jimmy Page's arms during his third solo in "Dazed and Confused" -- notice how they bend and vibrate like rubber bands, like he's standing on an electric chair plugged into the ghost of Chuck Berry's amp. It made me realize just how "outside of the Platonic cave" Zeppelin is. They're the original version of themselves. They created this sound from Robert Johnson records, Tolkien, and their own ESP, and from that wrought this accomplished, unique, and electric final product, something that's mega heavy yet always in the light.

2) You can't blame Robert Plant for the hair metal 1980s, just because he's the unbleached root of that strain on the historia del rock tree. Don't laugh at Jimmy Page's double-necked guitar, either, because he's really using both necks--12 string and 6 string--on all the songs it appears in, "Stairway" particularly.

And Plant's hair really is awesome. Even a straight boy like me can swoon unashamedly when Plant casually, languidly brushes back his huge tangle of curls in between lyrics, not because I'm attracted to him, per se, but because he is Arthur, my lord and King. It's way deeper than sexual attraction, it's archetypal.

The cool kids' Lord of the Rings - 1977

3) Remember: at the time (mid 70's) all that Dungeons and Dragons / sword and sorcery stuff was still dangerous and sexy; it hadn't been overrun by a swath of American nerds, Spielberg/Reagan conservatism, the Disneyfication of Times Square, the re-chastening of AIDS and the rise of Harry Potter. Don't forget - in the real LOTR and THE HOBBIT, everyone smokes!

In fact the Ralph Bakshi animated version of LORD OF THE RINGS movie in 1978 (left), by way of illustration, was dark and violent; it was something older kids got high in packs to see at midnight shows. Fantasy of that sort wasn't for children, but purely for teenage stoners - the world of HEAVY METAL, HEAVY TRAFFIC, WIZARDS, THE WALL, FRITZ THE CAT, and FIRE AND ICE. Try to image that kind of stuff coming out today and you can't. Even then you couldn't unless you saw them at the theater at midnig ht. Those sort of movies never ran TV commercials (their soundtrack albums, scaring kids like me at the record store, were enough) and there were no videotape, no cable, nothing to watch at home for slumber parties. If you wanted to see LORD OF THE RINGS, you snuck out when your parents were asleep, jumped in your friends' battered Mustang, got high on the way, and-- still in your pajamas and slippers--snuck in through the back door of the theater. In that rarefied milieu (existing nowadays only at planetarium laser shows), SONG REMAINS was almost a Tolkien prequel.

In terms of rock music films, SONG REMAINS THE SAME bridges the gap between post-1980 downers like THE WALL (1982) and pre-1970 uppers like YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968). Zeppelin's movie isn't a downer or an upper--its trip is between, it rides the balance between light and dark, good and evil, eloi (Page, Plant) and morlock (Bonham, Grant) and the man between (Jones). Zeppelin is not afraid to screw with the vibe by showing that hulk of a manager belittling weak management or sullen cops in the soulless gray outer corridors of the stadium. In other words, the band's not scared of showing the nuts and bolts of their fantasy operation, and it's somehow perfectly aligned to being young, dosed, and willing to surrender to the source of swagger. This 'other' side keeps the genuine danger, the menace of anything could happen, that comes with having a violent thug for a manger. They've surrendered to the darkness and embraced the light. They have found the swagger within rather than just a compulsive insecure outer swaggering, with the result being that they become Swagger itself. They simultaneously give you the great and powerful OZ light show and also expose the man behind the curtain, whose even scarier.

They make it okay to be a straight man swooning at the sight of another straight man strutting around in tight, flared pants. It's way past sex, way past fantasy, it's the mythic chord we vibrate to in chakras accessible only to our unconscious minds. We, who first came to know God while watching TV with a Pittsburgh chick, or riding in an older friend's Trans-Am in high-school, eight-track blasting, pretending we already knew how to smoke...were lit up by the sparks, and finally... 

smoked

for real. 

(P.S. The black magic synchronicity continues as the sublime Kim Morgan also shares SRTS memories over at Sunset Gun)

NOTES:
1. It was, during many of the close-ups, which were re-shot in a studio when the original director's concert footage was revealed to suck. Filmed later with some effort to make it appear to match the concert stuff, Jones' hair had been cut short by then, so he had to wear a wig made to his original show length.

2. Don't lie Erich, you were way too high to bust any move,

Great Acid Movies #2: PERFORMANCE (1968)

In Marianne Faithfull's highly recommended autobiography, she discusses the germination (in 1968) of the film PERFORMANCE (directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell), recounting a particularly LSD-drenched evening with Mick, James Fox and Fox's androgynous girlfriend, Andee:

The carpets undulated in little ripples of apricot and ivory. Andee and I were slave girls of the great pharaoh languidly reclining on the royal barge [Mick's huge bed]. The pharaoh was fondling James. (It was going to be a very tactile trip...)

Later she describes vibrating beyond sex and duality in what might be described in lesser hands as 'tripping your face off' -- for what are faces if not masks?

I was in love with everybody. Actually, I was everybody... it was such a blissful state that you could easily fall in love with a chair, with your own shoes. What an absurd thought, someone belonging to someone else! God, and to think they started the Trojan War over stupidity such as that!

Sooner or later something was going to take place on this bed and tonight was evidently going to be the night. It was raison d'etre for the bed --- if Mick couldn't get Keith into bed, this (James) was the next best thing... No one knew about our little evening, of course, not a soul. But somewhere out in the drab, damp London night, the chief Dracula of this scene, director Donald Cammell, opened up his window and snatched it out of the air....

By which she means, PERFORMANCE --  a movie that was then shelved for two years (released in 1970) and is still way, way ahead of its time. If the Redlands bust in mid-60s London was like overturning a normal rock and finding the madness of affluent and beautiful youth experiencing a level of freedom the average voluntary slave to the system found intimidating, thus inspiring jealous rage, curious prurience and hypocritical pooh-poohing, PERFORMANCE made it impossible to be or do those things anymore - we were suddenly inside the dragon's den, the average viewer, like Chaz, the uncool (or cool, if you weren't class conscious) sadist gangster dosed with shrooms, found himself wrapped up in the new freedom. All it takes is the right set and setting and the right dosage, the bonds of rational sense and order vanished in a Lewis Carroll wordplay identity-dissolving labyrinth of play, sound, light, and movement. Could anyone imagine a better set and setting than that trippy house with those gorgeous, talented, free-spirited, vaguely Satanic, utterly open yet endlessly masked characters? The cast of the film mirrored that menage that Faithfull and Mick had been in before, albeit confusing the matters (as befit the subject): Faithfull's bosom chum (And Keith's girlfriend) Anita Pallenberg was the girl; Michele Breton played the androgyne that Mick could morph into (and James Fox's androgynous real-life girlfriend); Fox and Jagger played more or less themselves -- Camell-ionically warped into endless permutations, mirror dissolves, sex and gender warping, Francis Bacon-ating equations.

Some of the opening half of PERFORMANCE gets a little tedious, with all the thick gangster slang, crosscuts, and seething leatherboy power plays, that is, unless you give up expecting narrative thrust and surrender to Roeg's keen interest in generating meaning from apparently random images and sounds thrust up against each other. Cammell territory kicks in when we get to Mick and Anita's house, but before then the beauty is in short supply, and what there is gets uglied up pretty fast, such as a long scene of Chaz (Fox) pouring acid (wrong kind!) on a Rolls Royce (how wasteful!) or being roughed up by his old schoolboy crush, a small town bookie Chaz's boss has newly muscled into the orginzation.  Roeg cutting back and forth to Parliament in session with various scenes of bullying office drones. Whoa! But cross cutting like that is annoying (was it ever not cliche? If anyplace wasn't, this is it) and overly jarring (as in: sir are you inferring corporate takeovers voted through in Parliament is no different than gangsters muscling in for cuts of criminal enterprises? How dare you sir-zzzz)



The film hits its high "now its kicking in!" moment about 1/3 of the way through, when Turner (Mick) calls Chaz (Fox) up from his basement room, planning to kick the bugger out. Chaz is desperate to stay, and Turner is artistically blocked enough to feel him out like a character study, or just too f*cked up to figure out how to get rid of him, perhaps sensing the danger or sympathizing with what he gleans is a life or incarceration situtation. (If you've ever had to kick a broke meth-rattled scuz out of your hippie house while tripping on acid, you'll relate.) As Turner tries different weird passive-aggressive intimidation tactics, Chaz defends himself with feigned stupidity and music hall clownery. Chaz is initially so clueless about the current entertainment world that he bills himself as a juggler--which is a very easy lie to get caught in (if you can't juggle, which he certainly can't). Turner doesn't buy it, but he seems to be taking notes, filing it all into his own bag of tricks. Finally, Turner decides to keep him around in a kind of jaded rock star "slumming" way, as when Joe Buck and Ratzo get invited to the psychedelic party in MIDNIGHT COWBOY.

From there Anita decides to feed Chaz psychedelic mushrooms and soon he's hallucinating into a table ("How much you want fr'it?") and Turner and Anita start teasing the lad, breaking down his psyche, stripping off the learned layers of rude boyishness, dolling him up in a hippy wig and various flashy Carnaby Street outfits after he tells them he needs a fast in disguise passport photo to leave the country with. And in the end he shacks up with Breton, finally opening up and resembling a real person. And the peak keeps climbing and overflowing all the way to the tragic and confusing ending. (I recently read a piece where Cammell talked about the shot of the limo driving away suddenly turning and being in New York City! - But dude, that shot ain't there!)

Flaws don't matter with a film as subversively noble and--for a fairly substantial chunk--as druggy as this one. I quoted Faithfull at length above because I value her openness and clarity on drugs, and the shifting locus of perception and subjectivity that is required to be truly that free. It isn't just "LSD talk" or "perversion" or "oooh ooooh Mick wanted to sleep with Keith but settled for his girlfriend" (or a dismissive "man we were so wasted" which 80%, alas, of my American tripper friends let it rest at - as if any feeling or insight while tripping is automatically void - a feeling not shared by most Europeans, thankfully), but rather a scissor slash at the very fabric of our society, a challenge not just to the whole idea of "ownership" in sexuality and set gender identity but to the notion of identity in and of itself. In the trysts at play on both sides of the mirror--Faithfull's encounter with Fox and Jagger mentioned above, and the film version of same, wherein Faithfull swaps places with Pallenberg, there's no jealousy or clinging - friends and doubles abound, and that's a common feature in the film - the way Mick and Breton eventually become interchangeable, allowing the film to explore a gay subtext without having to get censored for it (the cutting back and forth between them must have really unnerved the suits at Warners and perhaps led to the shelving)

Anita herself is already a mirror twin of a Rolling Stone - the dearly departed Brian Jones (see their matching mouths above left) - all their friends noted well the way they soaked up each other's tics and styles, ravenous sponges for style and experience (and Pallenberg and Faithfull in turn helped style Mick and Keith). It can all be read as a call for everyone to be openly bisexual and loose-masked, to swap roles and bodies and personas, but it's even more than that... it blows the lid off all notions of persona, racing clear past mere granolification, any hippie Grateful Dead flute dancing, and into the dark recesses of the void beyond identity and duality, the realm of madness, "the only performance that really makes it".

Bergman had tread into this realm with PERSONA (1966) and HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), but no one before or since took it as deep and clear-eyed druggy as PERFORMANCE. And with his masterfully intuitive editing strategy Roeg created all sorts of audio-visual allusion strategies he'd incorporate into the rest of his body of work, including the mixture of miniatures with full size people, disguises, cameras, light sources, mirrors, and the use of recurring authors via books left lying around and author photos (like the famous Borges head shot). As for the persona meltdown, Bergman approached it from a more Nordically removed, intellectual angle while Cammell and Co. plunged headfirst into the madness, and never fully returned from the void they found: Fox, they say, took years to recover; Breton never made another film; Cammell's career was never to be the same - throwing him a kind of early curve ball thanks to the studio shelving the film for so long it lost its buzz; Mick was traumatized by the experience and it warped his relationship with the most important person in his life, his true 'spouse,' Keith, etc. Only Roeg's career would take off, as if winning the big hand at poker. For now he had a director credit and could get into the union. The rest is history - Roeg would show time and again the ability to circumnavigate the void without plunging so far in he couldn't get out by the roll of the credits (sometimes he just barely made it out before the final bell, as in DON'T LOOK NOW).

Life goes on, and death goes often. From 1986-89, I lived a very Cammell-Jagger style life, tripping with my college hippie bandmates. We knew of this film and loved Jack Nitzsche's score (a roommate had the LP) long before it appeared, finally, on VHS. The soundtrack is worth getting on CD even if you also get the DVD, which--even if you're not an ex-rock star-turned robe-wearing drug-taking recluse like some of us-- you must own. For PERFORMANCE is a kind of endlessly fascinating artifact from a looser time, when what would count as certifiable insanity today was just wordplay and mind-melding. Ahead of its time in every way as well as behind it, PERFORMANCE even contains what may be the first MTV-ready video (non-Scopitone): "Memo from Turner." In that photo below you can see how Jagger taps the vein of homoerotic sadism that runs under the "chip chip cheerio" surface of British Imperialism and then trickles down to the Harry Flowers underclasses. It would make a damned good triple bill with DELIVERANCE and GUNGA DIN! Cheers!


Lastly, there's Mick himself as Turner. Always an interesting screen presence, more so than in any film before or sense, Mick relishes the chance to play a darker, more genuinely Satanic version of himself, pale and 'stuck' but way farther out than most of us ever get, with black eye liner and a full mane of black hair making him seem always as if he's vanishing inside a giant wig coccoon... leaving only lips and eyes. The devil seems to have half-devoured him and what we see is the stuff left in the fridge for later. While, according to Faithfull, Jagger really wasn't into Satanism and black magic per se (he just liked to pose in the clothes and do shamanic gyrations - which he was very good at), under the warlock-ish spell of Cammell, Jagger lets loose into some terrifying and funny places. At one point just shaking a luminescent light rod through (via Roeg's editing trucks) Chazz's ear drums, to one of Jack ("The Lonely Surfer") Nitzsche's instrumental tracks, you get a sense of how truly sublime and mind-altering Mick's snake charmer dancing is. Later he even plays guitar and sings Robert Johnson's "Come on in my Kitchen," and you can practically feel the dark forces stir from their Lovecraftian slumber at his power, the devil recognizing the tune he taught Johnson at the crossroads, finally played just right enough to wake him. Mick may not be the devil, or the devil's sympathy-courting minstrel, but there's got to be some sinister reason he and his band are still alive (knock on wood), karate kicking, and-- even in their withered shells--super sexy.

Thank "god," then, PERFORMANCE is finally out on DVD. It too is still alive, kicking, unedited, wild and still pulsing with something almost unknown in modern films, genuine subversion. Come on in its kitchen, at your own invitation - after all, you're the only one left at the party by the end. You've been talking to shadows. But isn't that how it's always been, Chaz? Time to go.

Great Acid Movies #52: THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970)

The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. If our mind can be likened to a big old Victorian house, most of us just live on the first floor. The basement is locked; the attic and second floor bedrooms boarded up. Who knows if rats or squatters are living there? Better not to open them up just in case. Eventually we become convinced the boarded up doors are just walls. Any attempt to open them just fills us with fear, the whole downstairs seems to quake in separation anxiety --where are you?? Come down this instant!

Then, one night, LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doors, and unlocks the basement and attic, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. It turns out the rest of the rooms in the house aren't dirty and dusty and empty as we thought - but teeming with art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come back down the stairs, we at least know they're there. If we have a bad trip of course, he shows us the basement, where all the slimy monsters live; but there's another set of stairs there that leads down... to the attic - you come out on top, in a spiritual awakening.

Dogmatic shrinks might tell us those newly discovered rooms are all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. Bush ran his presidency that way and still got a second term, In fact, the appearance of matter is a hallucination anyway; if we could see the world as it really is we'd see not a chair but a frequency spectrum, vibrating waves...

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970) operates along this line of philosophy, detailing the way LSD's door-kicking habit disrupts the don't ask/don't tell dysfunctional denial-based cohabitation of the all-American middle class family at the end of the 60s. It strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as anti-drug 'there is nothing real beyond the first floor' types, the 'I know every inch of my house so don't ask me what's behind those locked doors because there's nothing behind them, ok? Nothing!' types. But then, in the interest of fairness and perception, the filmmaker/s took acid halfway through preparation for shooting and changed their whole attitude. The result is a film divided. It still has the look and feel of an after-school special coupled to an earthy fly-on-the-wall semi-documentary style (ala say, MEDIUM COOL or ZABRISKIE POINT) but runs a deeper, stranger game. It takes the rare arpproach of truly progressive acid movies, and judges both sides as fucked, and runs off to start a whole new thing, balanced without judgement or condemnation, just trust in one another and the ability to fucking listen to each others' true pain.

Must be we're in Canada.

Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives Maxiee her first trip and her parents later find her freaking out in an upstairs closet. Recognizing symptoms of what they've been reading about in hysteria-mongering tabloids, the whole flock rushes to counseling and then bring it all up the next time they get together with their neighbors, who are steeped in enough adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny--in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation--that there's a problem, until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.

That said, for all its acumen, PEOPLE NEXT DOOR can't stop beating a dead horse as far as making sure we compare Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and plow pertinent wives vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland.

The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her bipolar schizo "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last.

In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, perhaps in that sense it's cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment, even if once again the family strengthens itself by ostracizing the father, paving the way for our current plague of either gone or feminized fathers. Now more than ever... we need the 70s dad, for all his sexism and drunken mischief, to return.

Great Acid Movies 6: HEAD (1968)

Jack Nicholson wrote the script, shortly after writing THE TRIP, so you know drugs inspired the brilliant disconnects and loose-footed anti-commercial totally-free association of HEAD, the Monkee's "no one cares about as anymore so fuck-it" masterpiece. Bob Rafelson directed and he'd risen the ranks by directing the Monkees' TV show, which--though it's aged a bit due to its constant aping of Hard Day's Night, has moments of crackling surrealist wit. Well, HEAD ain't that Monkees, it ain't even the Monkees you don't want to remember but nonetheless, it's the kind of surrealist masterpiece that only gets weirder on repeat viewings, full of great music (the album is a must, and songs from it have appeared all over movies by Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson, etc.) and deranged odysseys, undoubtedly meant as a post-contract nose-tweak at the TV producers of the Monkees' hit TV show for dubbing their instruments, years later it's still a cult classic, studded with cameos from all sorts of Rafelson-Nicholson regulars (from Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider etc), and great bits by everyone from Frank Zappa to Timothy Carey to Victor Mature. Even the fake Tor Johnson shows up!

There are film clips from several of my favorite movies, including THE BLACK CAT and GILDA in HEAD, and there are great talking head interviews that lead nowhere ("If someone laughs at you, that's a violation of your civil rights!") and cameos galore: Terri Garr, Victor Mature, Frank Zappa ("I see you've been working on your dancing, though."), and of course Jack Nicholson in a blink-and-miss cameo, before he was anyone. Zappa later tried to do something similar to HEAD with his 200 MOTELS, but as I recall it didn't quite get there (and was shot on cheap video). This stuff is harder to pull off than Rafelson makes it look.



My favorite of the four lads here is Mike Nesmith, who takes up the exaggeratedly dry and humorlessly hilarious cool leader position, the kind of role I generally assumed when I was the "acting guide" in college "acid tests," which I usually was. I saw this as the back half of a student union double feature with YELLOW SUBMARINE the first time I ever took any sort of psychedelic as a freshman (back when movies were shown from actual film reels at colleges). The experience changed my life forever. I laughed so hard I got almost hyseterical. Fortunately most of the crowd had left by then, and those that were there weren't in much better shape. And if there's a place to laugh hysterically (literally) in the audience, it's HEAD.

The production company behind HEAD wasn't AIP (American International Pictures) but the BBS conglomerate which also made EASY RISER- but it's got AIP in its blood. There's elements of BEACH PARTY movies, and the Corman Poe series. Rafelson's film raids seemingly every prop and backdrop from back lot studio storage,  with western vignettes, cobwebbed castle corridors, World War Two foxholes,.. and, yes, Anette Funicello. Compared to the more death-rebirth focused imagery of Corman's The Trip from the previous year, of course, this is inevitably lighter. The music is better, and the comedy is deadpan gold but the Nicholson 'he knows what he's talking about' LSD savvy is all over the place. It's the kind of thing you can't fake, and if you doubt, just compare to all the terrible, dated big studio productions of the time, all desperate to grab the hip hippie dollar by adding light show frugging, Goldie Hawn in buckskin shorts, and/or old men trying to stay relevant by toking on hookahs.


That all said, there are some draggy song moments, such as Peter Tork wandering through the snow and Davey Jones reviving tacky British music hall. Luckily however, there are no sped up comical chase sequences set to one of their ditties, which The MONKEES were so fond of on TV. Wait, come to think of it, there are... at the very end. Well... that's show biz!

The acid 'peak' for me would be the great Timothy Carey (as "Lord High'N'Low"), running up to boys and shouting "Where ya been? I been lookin' all over the world for ya!" he later shows up again at Mike's birthday party - a Warhol factory-like surprise party scene in which Mike crankily berates the crowd: "Maybe I was better off where I was. You jump out me... scare me half to death," then adds the coup de grace: "The same thing goes for Christmas!"

Then, the crowd parts as Timothy Carey, deformed with some kind of bizarre facial paralysis, dressed from AIP wardrobe in cowboy mining attire with a noose around his neck, stalking through from the back of the crowd, meandering, shambling, slouching towards Nesmith, going "Attaboy, Mike... atta... boy... Mike," over and over again, progressively more hysterical and menacing, which--if you've ever been tripping or a schizophrenic--is hilarious, because that's how it "really" is... any little phrase or word can echo in the head until you go insane. All your filters are off and the world comes in bright and crazy. It's all too much!

Looking into Carey's insane eyes is to glimpse art's true primordial eternal mission: to transmute true existential terror into surreal dark black comedy. If you can laugh even as you're being ripped apart by the demonic lurkers at the threshold, you're doing all right. The demon dogs at the scales of lightness, the camel in the eye of the needle, and Peter Tork's ice cream hand at the commissary: baby, it's all the same. But why listen to me? I know nothing. I know nothing like the back of my hand.


I've only literally fallen out of my seat laughing (in public anyway) twice, and seeing HEAD at that midnight campus screening was the first time. People around me thought I might have to be carried away. I laughed until my stomach hurt and tears streamed down on the auditorium floor. I had been reborn. When I went into the theater that night I was just a frightened nerd with dandruff, wire rim glasses, and clammy hands, but when I emerged from the theater I looked like this (left), a Dionysian representative of crazy Mike Nesmithian absurdist-confidence radiating psychedelic light but without the tacky peace/love gooeyness. How do you thank a film for doing that? If it wanted the sun, I would write it down in letters that would burn a thousand feet high, "to Sir High'n'Low... with love"