Month: March 2022

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FREEWAY 2: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Director: Matthew Bright

This bizarre hidden gem has all of the odds stacked against it.

It’s an uncalled-for sequel to an offbeat cult film.

It’s got a different cast from the original, with its most established name at the time being David Alan Grier (who’s very funny as a lascivious lawyer).

It was released straight to video.

Like most straight-to-video movies in 1999, you likely didn’t know that this existed until you saw it on a shelf. Holding the VHS or DVD box in your hand, this looked like a cynical waste of time. Probably a bad imitation. Something watered-down. Very possibly a money-laundering front. Or at least the product of a bad deal made by somebody.

Writer/director Matthew Bright, returning from the original film, seems to know this and as if to make up for it he coughs up one of the craziest, sleaziest midnight movie freakouts of the final years of the 20th century. Freeway 2 does NOT want to be obscure. It’s a scream in the night. It’s a film full of left turns, uncomfortable laughs, and characters who most normal people would find repulsive. If Freeway 2 is heading straight toward a dead end, Bright works to crash it at top speed.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #15: ODDBALLS

Frank Black
Oddballs
2000, no label

Oddballs has some of my favorite inner sleeve notes of any album. They’re simple, but strangely touching.

It begins with a brief explanation written by Frank Black himself that the disc in your hands is a collection of B-sides and other off-road trips from his early solo years (1994 to 1997). Below that is the tracklist and for every entry Black adds a quick note about who he was “trying to be” on that particular song.

Opening track “Pray a Little Faster”? “Trying to be Dylan”, Black says.

Second track “Oddball”? “Trying to be Stones”.

He goes on to namecheck Springsteen, Bowie, Daltrey, Strummer, (Doug) Sahm, Lou (Reed) and even himself.

It may not seem like much, but for a rocker like Black, who prefers a veil of mystery about him, these tidbits felt like a rare moment of opening up. It was Black saying that behind his aloof stage persona is just a dude who likes rock music. The Stones, The Who, The Clash. He’s not that weird. He’s perfectly normal even. He’s so normal that he sometimes even has to “try to be” Frank Black.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES

Guided by Voices
The Best of Jill Hives
2003, Matador Records

When I play this CD single (no vinyl for this one), I ALWAYS get stuck on the Cheap Trick cover. I play it over and over again.

A) It’s just a great song. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. The jeans are tight, the hair is long, the girls are pretty and the night beckons. I was in diapers and had a bottle in my mouth in ’77, but I’ve seen Dazed and Confused. I’ve seen The Pom Pom Girls. I know those old records. They were easy to find when I was a dedicated vinyl freak. Your Cheap Trick education could be had for a few bucks and a little extra dust in your lungs. Maybe I wasn’t there like the men of Guided by Voices circa 2003 were, but I felt the vibrations decades later and they felt pretty good. The song survives.

“Downed” passes one of the great rock ‘n’ roll tests.

I love it, but I have no idea what it’s about. Never thought about it. Still not thinking about it.

B) Guided by Voices do it right. They play “Downed” like they ARE Cheap Trick. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. Their version goes for the flashback. Nobody’s young anymore, but songs live forever. We all need to do our part to keep old songs alive. It’s easy. You want to do it. You love to do it. Whether you’re sharing a mix or passing around a Youtube clip or writing on a stupid website, this is what music fans do. We can’t help it. We’re fucking crazy.

Also, “Downed” stands as one of the very rare examples of Guided by Voices taking a break from Robert Pollard’s avalance of songs to cover someone else’s song. Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES”

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Bob Armstrong’s VANILLA SLIM: AN IMPROBABLE PIMP IN THE EMPIRE OF LUST

Bob Armstrong
Vanilla Slim: An Improbable Pimp in the Empire of Lust
2006, Carroll & Graf Publishers

Bob Armstrong’s brief career as a pimp is not the wildest story ever told. It’s crazier than what most people do, but Vanilla Slim was no Iceberg Slim. He didn’t see violence. He didn’t commit violence. He was nice to his girls. He didn’t confront some truly dark side of himself. He didn’t make enough money to roll around in a show-off car. He wasn’t dangerous. That’s all according to him in this first-person account, at least.

When the law eventually came down on him and Armstrong went to jail (he begins the book pondering his holding cell and all its glorious sights and scents), even that wasn’t too bad. He didn’t do serious time. Even the law could see that this Vietnam vet who was closing in on 60 merely misbehaved a little, even with drugs out in the open.

Or that’s how the wind blows in San Francisco, at least.

So why the hell did I blaze through this book in a couple of days? Why did I get hooked? Why did I sit on the barstool next to this guy and take in every word he said?

I guess that’s because this is a bigger story than pimps and drugs and beautiful women and the men who pay $500 an hour for their company. This book is really about people who’ve missed the boat in life.

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