Tag: music

Video review: The Prince of Egypt

I was so very nervous Sunday morning that my stomach was a vat of acid.

The odd thing about being in the production of The Prince of Egypt musical is that I had never seen the Dreamworks animated film on which it was based until the day before we performed the play at church. And I had had a copy of the video for weeks.

The storyline by Philip LaZebnik and Nicholas Meyer I found to be quite compelling. I had to go back and read the source material, which started in the Old Testament book of Exodus, Chapter 2. There isn’t much there between Moses’ birth as a Jew (placed in a basket in a river to avoid being slaughtered, and taken in by Pharoah’s wife) and him all grown up. So the notion of the fraternal relationship between Moses and Rameses, the son of Pharaoh, made sense. When Moses discovered the secret of his birth, he was understandably conflicted.

The visuals of The Prince of Egypt were quite pleasing; an extra segment with the DVD addressed the process. There were some heavy hitters as voice actors: Val Kilmer as Moses (and also God); Ralph Fiennes as Rameses; Michelle Pfeiffer as Tzipporah (Moses’ eventual wife); Sandra Bullock as Miriam (Moses’ sister); Jeff Goldblum as Aaron (Moses’ brother); Danny Glover as Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law); Patrick Stewart as Seti (the elder Pharaoh); Helen Mirren as The Queen; and Steve Martin and Martin Short as Hotep and Huy (sycophants to the Pharaohs). Martin and Short were the comedy relief, but not in an over-the-top manner that some Disney films,

A criticism of the film is that it takes itself too seriously, not enough fun. I think the conflict of the story makes the approach to the topic with reverence. Yet there was plenty of fun stuff early on, particularly a spectacular chariot race. And it IS a story about slavery and oppression and getting away from the same. I rather preferred this Roger Ebert quote: “If de Mille had seen this film, he would have gone back to the drawing board!”
***
I suppose I should mention that the play went much better than I would have thought, after the dress rehearsal the day before. The leads were particularly good.

As for me, I was so very nervous Sunday morning that my stomach was a vat of acid. I couldn’t remember the lyrics that morning I knew the previous afternoon, or hardly ANY lyrics; a panic attack that I haven’t experienced in years. Finally, I did my part; I muffed one line near the end, but I guess it went OK. More fun was playing God in the next scene.

Book Review: Who I Am, by Pete Townshend

Townshend foresaw a day when music would be delivered digitally long before it happened.

I was a fairly big fan of the band The Who. I never bought any of their singles – I wasn’t much into 45s – and the first album I picked up wasn’t until Tommy (1969), but I purchased every studio album since, the earlier The Who Sell Out, as well as Live at Leeds and a couple compilations.

The lead guitarist of The Who, Pete Townshend, has written an extraordinary book, Who I Am. Part of the great strength of the book is based on Townsend’s fortunate habit of keeping journals.

The first part has amazing detail about his parents and grandparents even before he was born. I’m jealous; I wish I had such information about my recent ancestors. Then he talks about the development of the band. I’ve read a number of rock biographies, some of them quite good. It’s different, though, when one hears the story from the point of view of one of the participants, especially one who writes so well and so thoroughly.

The development of the rock opera Tommy is fully explained. It utilizes, as a jumping-off point, some of the actual abuse Pete experienced while in a grandparent’s care. He added the pinball motif fairly late in the game, in order to get a better review.

Teenage Wasteland

He explores the stresses on the now successful band, after Woodstock, Live at Leeds, and the Who’s Next album. In some ways, the pressure was just as great as when the band struggled to find an identity. The smashed guitars were an artistic expression, not just random mayhem.

Somewhere in this period, particularly after Who drummer Keith Moon died, I was hoping that Pete would stop with the sex and drugs, and stick to the rock and roll. His (now ex-)wife Karen must have been a saint. He could not quit the booze until 1994, though he had tried as early as 1981.

Townshend summarizes, right before his successful abstinence: “Although my marriage was failing, I had a beautiful son as well as two beautiful daughters who were doing well at university, I had fallen in love, and the girl I had found was slowly falling in love with me too. And I was rich. So what was messing me up?

“It would be easy to point to alcohol, but the problem wasn’t the booze; it was the fact that it longer worked as a medicine to fix the dire consequences of my self-obsession, overwork, selfishness, and manic-depression.”

I enjoyed watching his interaction with a variety of musicians, from the evolving relationship with Who singer Roger Daltry to folks such as Joan Baez, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon.

A great read, which he started way back in 1996, and once Pete got his head on straight, I wanted to read more. The false accusation that he was dealing with child pornography wounded him greatly. He foresaw a day when the music would be delivered digitally long before it happened. An interesting feature, mostly in the latter half of the text, are footnotes to The Who website, probably in part a function of having to reduce the manuscript from 1000 pages to 500.

Highly recommended.

Links

Rolling Stone book review.

Pete Townshend receives 2013 Les Paul Award.

Lefty Brown reviews Quadrophenia.

 

The difference between turning 50 and turning 60

When I turned 50, I could think, “Maybe I still have another half a lifetime left.” After all, the number of centenarians in the United States has been growing. Willard Scott, with whom I share a birthday, BTW, still announces the birthdays of those over 100 on NBC-TV’s TODAY show, as far as I know.

Now that I am 60, though, I have to acknowledge that I’m not going to live another 60 years, even if I move to Azerbaijan and start eating yogurt soup. (And if I’m wrong, which one of you is going to write to correct me?)

I note this, not with melancholy or dismay, but with a certain resolve not to waste my time with X or Y. I’ve already done a fair job in that I’ve largely stopped caring about the negative things people who aren’t friends and family say. It’s not that I won’t complain about them, and in fact, I’m even more likely to do so, probably in this blog; it’s that the anger and frustration don’t consume me, as they once did.

Once upon a time, every March 8 (the day after my birthday), I would play a particular Paul Simon tune. The lyric started:
Yesterday it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed
My life’s a mess
But I’m having a good time

I played that song annually for 20 years or more. I should get back to doing that again.

Have a Good Time – Paul Simon

H is for Hello

There are a LOT of songs that start with the word “hello.”

Hello. How are you today?

I’ve been musing a lot about the word hello. The history of the word can be seen read in Wikipedia; basically, a 19th-century creation that Thomas Edison suggested be used in answering the telephone, rather than Alexander Graham Bell’s idea of “ahoy.”

I’m no linguist, but it seems that lots of languages have had a variation of hello for a long time, while others have not. I found this site Say Hello to the World. Some have very similar words: Chinese – ni hao; Hebrew – shalom; Spanish: hola. Others tend to have words more appropriately described as “good day.”

In any case, I was looking for an excuse to list a bunch of songs starting with the word Hello. There are a LOT of them; this is only a sampling, including several that I put on a mixed CD.

The Beatles – Hello Little Girl;
Ricky Nelson – Hello Mary Lou ;
Allan Sherman – Hello Muddah Hello Faddah;
Louis Armstrong – Hello, Dolly!;
Frank Sinatra – Hello, Young Lovers;
Sopwith Camel – Hello, Hello;
Judy Collins – Hello, Hooray;
The Doors – Hello, I Love You;
Todd Rundgren – Hello It’s Me;
Eric Clapton – Hello Old Friend;
Bette Midler – Hello In There;
Oasis – Hello;
Harry Potter Book of Mormon Parody – HELLO;
The Beatles – Hello Goodbye

Someone’s list of Top 10: Songs with lyrics that begin with ‘Hello’, only some of which I used, since I wanted songs with TITLES that begin that way.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

Van Cliburn, and the Temptations

I saw the Temptations perform live twice.

When I was growing up, pianist Van Cliburn was the most famous classical musician in the United States. He had an album sell a million copies, unheard of in the genre. It was a function, in part, of the fact that when he won a prestigious competition in the Soviet Union, he was considered a Cold Warrior.

The only problem, as Dustbury noted, is that Cliburn never saw himself that way; he just loved playing the music. Listen to the link Jaquandor provided, and read the sweet story, while you’re at it.
***
I was a HUGE fan of the singing group The Temptations from roughly 1964 to 1984; I could even tell you roughly when members came and went. Damon Harris (upper right) came into the group in 1971 to be the high-range vocalist after Eddie Kendrick left for a solo career; he left in 1975, having sung on Papa Was a Rolling Stone. He was only 62 when he died, succumbing to prostate cancer, which, not incidentally, is what killed my father.

Richard Street (upper left), though, was an even more vital part of the Temps history. He was part of The Distants back in the late 1950s with future Temptations Otis Williams (the sole surviving original member of the Temps; lower left) and Melvin Franklin (lower middle). Paul Williams (no relation to Otis) started having problems with alcoholism and depression. “By 1969, Richard Street… was touring with the group as a backup replacement for [Paul] Williams. For most shows, save for his solo numbers, Williams would dance and lip-sync on stage to parts sung live by Street into an offstage mic behind a curtain. At other shows, and during most of the second half of 1970, Street substituted for Williams on stage.” When Paul Williams left the group, Street replaced him in 1971 and stayed until 1992.

I saw the Temptations perform live twice, c 1982 during the reunion tour when Kendrick and David Ruffin temporarily rejoined the group, which was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen; and c 1984, on a double bill with the Four Tops, a lesser event because it was at a baseball field, Heritage Park just outside Albany. Of course, Street was a participant in both shows. In the former show, when four of the original Temps did some of their old hits, it was Street once again filling in for the late Paul Williams. BTW, that’s Dennis Edwards pictured in the lower right; he had replaced Ruffin, and is still alive.

Richard Street died at the age of 70.

Does Petula Clark know about Petula Lark? New album by the 80-year-old Clark, including a cover of her massive hit Downtown.

Ken Levine wrote about the 30th anniversary of the last episode of the TV show MASH. I was a huge fan of the show from about midway through the first season until partway through the eighth. I’ve long thought, though, that they should have quit when Radar left in the eighth year. That bloated 2.5-hour program, still the TV finale with the highest ratings, I pretty much hated. I think MAD magazine nailed it.
***
The YouTube video for Tim O’Toole’s book The American Pope.

 

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial