Josh Alan
The Worst!
1994, Black Cracker Music
Here’s what I consider to be a genuinely happy thought: the sad, strange life story of the world’s worst movie director has inspired three different masterworks in three different forms of media. There aren’t many, if any, other people whom you can say that about.
First, there’s Rudolph Grey’s book Nightmare of Ecstasy, the first serious piece of research on Edward D. Wood, Jr., presented as an oral history by damn near every living person who ever knew him, whether they liked him or not. It covers Wood’s life from the cradle to the grave, from his World War II service to his struggling filmmaker days to his later years as a pulp pornographer slinging out quickie novels about transvestite life and prison sex with a bottle of booze by his typewriter. Along the way, Grey’s book can’t help but also emerge as a vivid picture of 1950s low-budget filmmaking. How these movies were made, where they played, how the money was raised. It’s an essential read for anyone who gets their kicks in movie history’s dirty back alley.
Later came Tim Burton’s film Ed Wood (for which Grey’s book was The Bible), a sincere celebration of Wood’s legend, boldly black-and-white, boldly optimistic and endlessly sympathetic. It’s the best movie that Burton has ever touched.
In between both of those (post-Grey, pre-Burton) came this stunning song cycle from Texas-by-way-of-New-York writer and musician Josh Alan Friedman. He’s a pure blood appreciator of the lowdown. He wrote the classic book Tales From Times Square, his first-hand account of life on The Deuce in its wilder days when he worked for Al Goldstein and ran across every huckster, stripper, pornographer, nut and also-ran with fading memories and a broken heart who roamed under the bright lights in the early 1980s. It’s on the shortlist of my most re-read books (my copy looks like it was dropped on 42nd St. and trodden on all day by ornery pedestrians). In it, Friedman finds beauty in the pathetic and finds laughs in bleakness. He’s never shocked and never above it all. It’s a very human work. There’s not a sentence in it that lacks breath and a heartbeat.
This album from him has the same soul. It’s a slow dance with Ed Wood, a smokey cabaret music embrace and an affectionate stroke of his angora sweater. Its melodies ache and sparkle in the spare production (backing music provided by Dallas throwback gypsy jazz band Cafe Noir). Its mood is funny and sad at the same time. Every song tells a story.
In “Kodak City Special”, Wood gets his own camera and decides that he’s gonna make movies someday in a lovely song that sounds like the sun rising. “Let Me Die in Angora” approaches Wood’s transvestism with humor and a heart as big as all outdoors. “Bela Lugosi” grants the horror icon a heartbreaker ballad worth savoring. Tor Johnson and Criswell also get their own themes and Friedman grants Lugosi’s funeral a restless and beautiful instrumental piece.
My favorite song is “Stripper’s Audition”, a rapturous, hilarious, bring-the-roof-down showtune and intended closer of Act One of Friedman’s stage musical that, best I can tell, has yet to be produced. Which is too bad. The scene-by-scene breakdown in the CD liner notes sounds like something that I sure as hell would like to see. Friedman ought to be a millionaire from this.
Instead, he’s got some dork in Texas who bought this CD at Half Price Books twenty years ago and hasn’t gotten over it ever since. I play this often, particularly during the autumn months. It’s consistently inspiring and even jerks a tear or two out of me once in a while.
In the end, Edward D. Wood Jr. fumbled the ball, spilled the drinks, dropped the cake and accidentally broke a whole cabinet of fine china when he tried to tell a story on film. Meanwhile, the REAL gold was Wood’s own personal story. His legendary perseverance, his tragedy and the wild characters with whom he collaborated. And you know what? That’s just as good.
Bless Edward D. Wood, Jr. forever.