“You Can’t Hear What I’m Hearing”

This scene in the movie “Crazy Heart” is probably my favorite music business scene in any movie ever, including documentaries. Bear, the deaf-and-dumb front-of-house goober, tries to tell Jeff Bridges’ character, Bad, that he can’t believe his lyin’ ears and should trust someone who probably never critically or competently listened to a record in his life. “The mix is good man. You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here.”

Instead, Bad does what every musician should do in a live performance; he stops the rehearsal until the goober does what he tells him to do. “Yeah, you’d be surprised. Set it the way I tell you and leave it!” After a short, hilarious wrestling match between the goober and Bad, the show goes on. Of course an even better solution would be to have a bodyguard/assistant standing behind the FOH nitwit smacking him every time he touches a fader. It doesn’t matter how much the assistant knows about music, it will always be more than the FOH goober.

The power of the mix should be on the stage, but usually it isn’t because the musicians are so swollen up with their ego crap they don’t bother to listen to what the audience is suffering through. They smother themselves in a wash of stage monitor noise that buries the FOH sound and allows the worst people on the planet to torture their fans with incompetence. Worse, most musicians are convinced that being loud will cover up flaws, which is beyond stupid.

There are at least two ways (both negative) to take Bear’s reply, though:

1. “You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here” could be a reflection of Bear’s deafness: “I’m mixing to compensate for decades of severe hearing loss and general stupidity and you’ll never know what I’m hearing.”
2. Or Bear is pretending the FOH position is important enough to tell Bad “you can’t hear” what he’s doing because what Bear isn’t going to allow it. The goober thinks Bad’s opinion doesn’t matter. In other words, you don’t have permission to “hear what I‘m hearin’ out here.”

Movie Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

As a rule, I not only don’t do movie reviews but I don’t buy movies. I had a small (probably 15 tapes) VHS collection that I tossed when we moved to Red Wing in 2014. I have about that many DVDs, most of which my wife inherited from her father and some motorcycle DVDs that were sent to me to review when I wrote for Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly magazine. I kept most of the review DVDs because I couldn’t find anyone to give them to. Mostly, I’m happy to watch a movie once and forget about it.

Bohemian Rhapsody may prove to be an exception.

Before you get driven away from seeing Bohemian Rhapsody by the bullshit reviews—most of which apparently wanted long scenes of gay erotica, lots of orgies, and other soap opera gibberish—try to imagine that the band (and, most likely, Freddie) wanted a movie about their musical lives and the music. That is the movie they made and they have good reason to be proud of the outcome. (Brian May and Roger Taylor are listed as “Executive Music Producers) Also, remember that when the band was in its prime most of the reviewers, media rags, and television nitwits hated Queen and Queen’s music, including Bohemian Rhapsody. They were wrong then and they are wrong now, but at least they are consistent. Take everything Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Rotten Tomatoes, the Guardian, and the rest of the wannabe rock critics with a block of highly diluted salt. A typical comment from that crowd was this bit of drivel by a Pitchfork reviewer, "The film also manages to rob Mercury of nearly all his queer pleasures." Another way to say that would be that the film manages to keep its eye on the musical ball rather than Freddy Mercury's balls.

Likewise, the movie spends a little time portraying the media obscessing on Mercury’s sex life, even during band media events intended to promote their music and touring. Nobody dislikes having their image accurately held up for ridicule and nobody deserves that more than the entertainment jackals.

Rami Malek nailed Freddy Mercury perfectly and bozos like sore loser Sacha Baron Cohen are just jealous that not only did he not get the part but the members of Queen thought Cohen’s take on Mercury was pure bullshit. The movie covers more territory in 2 1/4 hours than we have a right to expect from a pop music movie. All four of the character actors who played the band’s members knocked their parts out of the park. Brian May must have felt like he was watching a 30 year old mirror Gwilym Lee had him down so perfectly. Honestly, before a recent documentary about Queen and this movie, I didn’t know squat about Roger Taylor or John Deacon, but Ben Hardy and Joseph Mazzello nailed the characters I saw in the BBC documentary and all of the scenes I’ve seen of Queen on stage.

Watching the actors in the recording studio reminded me of how much I love that world. The freedom, creativity, sounds, energy, control, fun make the recording studio one of the few places on the planet that some of us every get to be who we are; the best of who we are. Taking time away from the performances, the recording studio experience, to spend it on Mercury’s gay high life would have ruined the movie for me. Watching the band on stage, backstage, and on the road reminded me of why people get into pop music in the first place.

Movies are snapshots, at best. They are not rambling 1,000 page tomes on history, society, and sociology. Screenplay authors often have to condense moments that you and I might think are important to something that, to us, may not resemble the story we’ve heard. Often, the story we’ve heard has been distorted and doesn’t even slightly resemble the truth. Movies are not Ken Burns PBS documentaries that can go on for hours in a series of segments. 135 minutes is pushing the boundaries of movie length and if you would have rather had less of Queen’s Live Aid performance or any of the music this movie was supposed to be about and more gay bar scenes, you probably were never a Queen fan. This a movie for fans of the band’s music, but probably not a tell-all semi-porno if that’s what you’re hoping for. 

 

What Do You Buy?

Earlier this summer, I hauled myself off to a self-funded writing retreat in Thunder Bay, ON, Canada. I gave myself a week to restart old writing habits with the hope of knocking out at least 1,000 words a day and editing 50 pages of any of 3-4 books I’ve had in the works for the last couple of decades. The good news is that those goals were really easily met. The bad news is that I have apparently lost interest in my own words. I came home a couple of days early, slightly discouraged but oddly relieved. After a lifetime of telling myself “you should write books if you want to call yourself a writer,” I am done with that mission.

Part of my disillusionment with the craft and discipline of writing is personal and part is financial. In the last couple of years, I’ve been paring down the things I do to see if there is any passion left in me at 70-years of age. I have been working for money, billing customers and putting in “day job” hours, for 55-plus years. With that motivation removed, it’s hard to remember what I like to do because I’ve spent 90% of my life doing what needed to be done to turn a buck. Even with that background, if I believe that nobody will value my work with a few dollars investment I can’t convince myself the work is worth doing.

Looking at my own unwillingness to part with money for the art I’ve spent much of my life creating—fiction and non-fiction, music, audio electronics—I have to suspect most other consumers feel the same. For example, for 50 years I’ve hauled a fairly substantial library with me from one end of the country to the middle and back, several times. When we moved to Red Wing, 90% of that library was either sold or donated. Practically, the only books I’ve kept have been autographed copies of work that had special meaning to me. A friend owns a used book store and is always trying to convince me to buy something. I just don’t feel the need. My local library has access to anything I want to explore, digitally or on paper, and after I’m done reading a book I’m generally done with it. If I want to read it again, I’ll ask the library to find it for me. My preference is eBooks and I don’t even keep the few eBooks I buy.

The same goes for music. While I have a fairly substantial CD collection, I gave away almost half of what I once owned along with the books. Worse, I almost never listen to the CDs I own, so their position in our home is precarious. I’m mostly happy with Pandora and ripping my CD collection to MP3’s that I listen to while I work in the basement or garage. I’m even happy with that sound source from my ancient SanDisk MP3 player and in-ear monitors when I’m bicycling or walking for exercise. Blasphemy, right? When I want to really explore something new, I order it from my library, listen to it, and give it back. I am totally uninvested in modern music, although I like a lot of it. I just don’t care enough to make it part of my life.

I have never had much of a video collection, but today we might be able to count a dozen movies we still own. Most of those were review copies and a couple are, like our books, signed by the artists involved. Again, I can get all of the movies I want to see through our library.

My wife is a visual artist; a painter and sculptor. We have a house full of her artwork. She is no longer particularly interested in selling her work and while we enjoy the work of many artists, neither of us is interested in acquiring more art for our home. We often prowl art galleries and festivals, but rarely buy anything other than food.

I barely remember the impulse to subsidize artists I respect and enjoy, because the impulse to manage our limited and non-renewable resources rules out that sort of philanthropy. In many ways, “we’ve done enough” comforts us when a twinge of guilt rears its head. So, our lives as consumers of the work that we do ourselves have withered down to the vanishing point. I have to wonder if that is common. If not, why not?

Winds of Change

Last night, I hung out with a collection of students, some audio instructors, and a West Coast movie-audio wizard, Tim Hoogenakker, who was at our school to talk about audio in movies, surround sound, and all things Hollywood. Things, are as everywhere, dismal. The economy has squashed hope and employment all over the country, including Hollywood. Audio folks of all sorts are out of work, underemployed, and on the edge of unemployment. On the other hand, the $400M chick-flick, Avatar, which is as of this writing the 2nd largest grossing movie in history. I have no clue what the 1st is, sorry. Supposedly, this one movie is making the industry look profitable. 

I can imagine this is true, since when my wife and I saw Avatar the multiplex theater was practically empty outside of the lines for Avatar on three or four of the theater's screens. Far better movies, like The Road or Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus are barely drawing flies in the same market. Avatar hit the market with the right combination of predictable writing, chick-friendly cutsie characters and video-game action and tons of marketing. Honestly, it's hard to imagine the movie making a profit, even with the monster gross profits announced, after the enormous budget and world-busting PR. 

 For me, the most interesting moment of the night came after the event was wrapped up and some of us were talking about movie economics. Tim described all of the movies that had left California for cheaper climates; Canada, Iowa, New Mexico, and beyond. I brought up the most recent Cohen Brothers' film, A Serious Man, that was filmed in the Cities. Another local audio guy dismissed that movie because "it only cost $6M." On the way home, I was still going over "it only cost $6M" in my head. 

It struck me that good parts of the game have changed and not many have noticed. As a long-time SF fan, with damn little tolerance for Hollywood SF, I saw something happen in 2009 that should have flipped Hollywood upside down and inside out. Peter Jackson and Neil Blomkamp's District 9 completely blows away all SF and story-line aspects of Avatar and did it for 1/20th of the budget. Of course, District 9 was not 3D and that's something to consider, but on every other plane District 9 was a total triumph of movie-making. If you didn't know what was coming up in every scene of Avatar you're either retarded or just arrived on this earth with no experience in either movies or television. District 9 was story-driven and interesting enough that even someone as movie-jaded as me could consider seeing it again. The only way I'll sit through Avatar twice is if I'm trapped in a wheelchair and can't get to a staircase. 

Technology has obsoleted most of the Hollywood industrial base. A creative kid with a few creative friends can outdo hoards of James Camerons and all of Hollywood's business lawyers in story-telling, special effects, acting, and (soon to follow) distribution. A great story can go Internet-viral before it hits the screens. Stay tuned for the changing of the guard. It's on its way to your town, even if your town is in southern California.