Should it hurt to make art? Or should it be a total blast? Where does the line get drawn, and who draws it?
Plus a musing on Fathers & Sons & AD ASTRA (2019)
“there remains a sense in which artists do expose themselves to the torrents of their time, in a way that can't help but do damage, and there's nothing wrong with calling it noble, if they've done it in the service of something beautiful.”
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King.
When my ex-wife took me to see Ad Astra, a film she jokingly referred as “Dad Astra,” I was sold on it before I even knew what it was about.
She said Brad Pitt was in it. I love Pitt, always have, ever since Kalifornia, but it was Se7en and Fight Club that made people, and me, go, “woah…this good-looking man can actually act!”
So I was in. Then she said Tommy Lee Jones was in it. I love Tommy Lee Jones. So I was even more in. Here’s a clip from Norm Macdonald Live where guest Jim Carrey tells Norm & Adam Eget of his first meeting with Tommy Lee Jones. Jones grabbed Carrey’s hand, shook it, then leaned over and said softly into Carrey’s ear: “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” I hope to god that this tale isn’t apocryphal, but…it just sounds like it might be too good to be true.
But then, still en route to Ad Astra, my ex-wife ____ said Donald Sutherland was in the movie, and my heart did a somersault. I love Donald Sutherland.
See, I love actors who look real people. I’m talking guys like Chris Cooper (who just might be my favourite actor of all-time). He looks like a bus driver. Fuck George Clooney. Gimme Danny Trejo. People who look like people.
I like Jonathan Banks for the same reason. And the only reason he entered the Breaking Bad universe was that Bob Odenkirk was doing a week’s worth of work on How I Met Your Mother. So Saul’s “fixer” is a hulking figure of a man, and he made an immediate impression on BB’s faithful viewership. Vince Gilligan remembered Banks from his college days when he watched a late 1980s police procedural called Wiseguy, 1987-1990, in which a hunk named Ken Wahl who couldn’t act for shit shared the camera with Jonathan Banks.
I am praying Banks remains stays healthy for my own selfish reasons. I really want to, no…need to…see that final season of Better Call Saul. As the COVID shutdowns get extended longer & longer, the already difficult task of finding somewhere to film is becoming a major hassle. By the way, this park scene? Where Walt informs an initially skeptical but very soon concerned Mike that the Albuquerque Police have come to arrest him? How the fuck does he get away? There are cops everywhere looking only for him. We’re supposed to believe that Banks hiding behind a tree fools Albuquerque’s finest? Whatever. He gets away.
And then we reach the Mt. Everest of normal looking guys who also happen to be great actors, the aforementioned Donald Sutherland, who is fathoms better at acting than his son (just as Martin Sheen is fathoms better at acting then Charlie). I love the Stalin moustache he grew for 2011’s The Mechanic, a still from which is below.
Neither Donald or Martin can help that their Dads are better actors than they are. I think Keifer is really good. Of the four, Charlie is easily the weakest actor - what was supposed to be his breakout role actually turned into a career springboard for Willem Defoe, who performs one of the most memorable & cinematic death scenes in movie history in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1985). Yes, it’s overwrought, but Stone fought in Vietnam. That fact alone gives him the heroic right to make this scene. And damn did he make it good.
Poor dying Sgt Elias (Defoe) reaching helplessly upward, as so many in their death throes have reached up or reached out to God and begged to remain alive or begged for the pain to stop and all the platoon can do is watch with horror as the scene unfolds below them. Elias is running, scrambling to his feet after each bullet that punctures him, until finally he can run no longer & is gunned down by the Viet Cong. It’s weird how the VC were so invisible. This is every veteran of Vietnam’s complaint. One said that “[the Vietnam War] was my chance to do what that WWII generation had done and seemed to be so proud off.”
Those boys went over there expecting epic, WWII-style battles and, according to W. D. Earhart, what they got instead was an unseen enemy constantly picking them off with snipers & mines, Viet Cong sappers destroying as much of the temporary American infrastructure as possible (things like pre-fabricated vehicular bridges, antennae, two-way radio transmitters hidden (or at least thought to be hidden. It was maddening how swiftly the V.C. were able to seek out and destroy vital communications systems, leaving many platoons cut off from their main battalions and not knowing which way to go or what to do, all while trudging through jungle with 50 lbs on each soldiers backpack. Dehydration and heat stroke were constant, and nobody knew where the hell they were. Imagine that. Your own C.O. (Commanding Officer) telling you that he doesn’t know what actions are to be taken. And as he’s saying that, something that sounds like a bumblebee whizzes by your left ear. An instant later your C.O. is shot in the throat and falls to the ground, wheezing, kicking his boots into the ground; a common reaction to pain and shock in war. More bullets scream into the clearing, some of them missing, some of them wounding, and others killing. And then you realize that the bumblebee that whirred past your ear was a bullet meant to hit you in the head.
The survivors scramble into position, facing outward, everybody protecting the other guy’s six. A dying American marine reaches out and grabs the ankle of a kid he remembers training with. They’d even gotten their head shaved that same day. The standing soldier shakes his head, trying to convey the message the he needs to hang on, stay alive through this firefight, and then they’ll get him out of here & into triage. Ah, but the momentary distraction is all a sniper needs. He shoots two bullets cleanly through the head of the headshaking soldier. The Marine on the ground watches in horror as his only chance of survival lands on the jungle floor with a deadening thud. The dying Marine wonders how it is that humans can tell when another human is landing as deadweight, without breaking his fall, or is landing sprightly on his toes. The former sounds like a very large sack of potatoes landing on soft Earth. The latter sounds closer to shoes on pavement, dragging ever so sightly before moving again.
And so, the Americans are in a heightened state of awareness, scanning the jungle, their human eyes able to discern between a staggering variety of green shades…and they see nothing.
“[T]here was nobody to shoot back at,” Earhart says, with wonder in his voice even 20 years later. “So you start to think that these people (here he is referring to the South Vietnamese they were supposed to be protecting) are the enemy. Or that the enemy is out there somewhere and we couldn’t tell one from the other.”
The chief source of horror in that epic Platoon scene discussed above is the utter lack of emotion on Barnes’ face (played perfectly by Tom Berenger, by far his best role) as the helicopter carrying the Platoon flies directly over the man he betrayed by shooting him and leaving him in the jungle to die.
If Judge Holden in Cormac Macarthy’s Blood Meridian is war incarnate, then Sgt. Barnes in Oliver Stone’s Platoon is reality incarnate. And reality sucks. Barnes even say so when he catches half the platoon smoking dope (the platoon is divided across substance lines. Pot smokers on one side, whiskey drinkers on the other). Later or in the evening on the day of Elias’ death, Sheen is trying to rally his troops. “Barnes killed Elias. I know he did! We should kill him!”
At which point a hammered Barnes, who has been eavesdropping the whole time, peeks his head around the corner, walks over to the smoke filled side, and grabs a pipe. “Y’all know about killin? Well, I’d like to hear about it potheads. Do you guys smoke this shit to get away from reality?” *hauls on pipe* “Me…I don’t need this shit. I am reality. There’s the way it oughta be. And there’s the way it is.”
Charlie Sheen admittedly does do a great job of getting revenge on Barnes, I will admit, but his performance as Charlie is merely good, not great. He wasn’t doing anything noticeably different from how his father had played a soldier in Apocalypse Now, yet he still comes off weaker. Martin Sheen is simply a stronger actor than his son (he’s better than Emilio Estevez too).1
Keifer can hold his own with his Dad, as you can see from this scene in 2015’s neo-Western Forsaken.
It’s not the total beatdown that Martin lays on Charlie in the elevator scene in Wall Street, but I still think the old man bests his boy.
Have you seen that Wall Street elevator scene though? God damn. The look on Martin Sheen’s face when his son (both in real life and in the film) tells him he’s a sucker for working as a union representative under some corporation is so devastating, an expression of such shock, surprise, defeat, disbelief, and betrayal.
He cannot believe what his own son just said to him, which was: “You never had the guts to go out there into the world and stake your own claim!”
Watch the scene. Martin is mesmerizing. Charlie is barely hanging on, several times stepping out of the shot, as if physically afraid of his father. Like even he doesn’t believe what he’s just said.
The camera stays on Martin for about ten seconds. We can see that he is visibly hurt. Then we can see him thinking. Then, generous as always (he’s by far the most generous character in the film), he blames himself for what his son just said to him.
“Boy if that’s the way you feel, I must have done a really lousy job as a father.”
It’s a heartbreaking scene. Martin acts circles around his son. I don’t dislike Charlie Sheen, but I don’t think he ever cared about acting as a craft. It was more a means to an end for him. Acting allowed him to live a comfortable lifestyle, have sex with 4000 women, smoke crack, and basically do whatever he wanted to do, whereas by the time Wall Street was being filmed Charlie was already doing a gram of blow a day while his Dad had gotten sober in 1980 after suffering a near-fatal heart attack on the set of Apocalypse Now.
Martin had to crawl to 3 miles of jungle to get to medical attention. He nearly died. Was it worth it? You’d have to ask Sheen, I suppose. Apocalypse Now is the greatest American War film. As far as U.K. contributions, I think the 1979 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is terrific. Just like Wilfred Owen, who died a week before the armistice was signed, Paul Bäumer, the enthusiastic German who becomes completely shattered by the end, is sketching a sparrow from his trench position just four hours before the armistice. His death is not shown, and some people think he survived. But if he did, there was nothing left for him. A brief visit home weeks before confirmed this for him. He is so changed that his own mother tells him he shouldn’t have bothered coming back:
I am a soldier, I must cling to that. Wearily I stand up and look out of the window. Then I take one of the books, intending to read, and turn over the leaves. But I put it away and take out another. There are passages in it that have been marked. I look, turn over the pages, take up fresh books. Already they are piled up beside me. Speedily more join the heap, papers, magazines, letters. I stand there dumb. As before a judge. Dejected. Words, Words, Words -they do not reach me. Slowly I place the books back in the shelves. Nevermore. Quietly, I go out of the room.
Bäumer has lost his humanity, his family, and his faith in institutions, after seeing an officer who cowered on the battlefield instead of lead the charge, receive a medal for bravery from the German High Command. So there would be no solace even in remaining a soldier, if his superiors are men like his C.O., who waver at crucial moments, who blunderingly send men to their deaths.
For me, the title of best war movie ever must be shared between Frances Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985).
Klimov’s movie focuses on the internal transformation. Flyora and Glasha are two Belorussians who are days away from being overrun by the Germans. One day they go play in he forest and when they return, everybody is gone. The whole village. Flyora says he thinks he knows where everyone is and he and Glasha begin to run to the spot Flyora is thinking of. But on the way, Glasha sees something that Flyora does not (it’s at 11:38 of the below clip.) By the end of the film, the 15-year old Flyora looks 50. He takes a rifle that has been lying on the ground and begin shooting a portrait of Hitler, imagining all the horrors he wrought reversing themselves. Exploded buildings fly back into sturdy brick and mortar. Flyora shoots and shoots and as he does so the time speeds up until he is faced with a picture of Hitler a young baby boy. He hesitates. Does he shoot the portrait? Does he shoot the baby Hitler? Could you shoot an infant if someone told you it would save up to 30 million lives? Could you shoot this child?
Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) is the most frightening film I’ve ever seen because of how deep it shows ideology can go. In one scene, some members of the local Belorussian resistance capture a small group of German soldiers. Maybe 10 or 15 but the village is delighted and act like they’ve saved the world.
Most of the captured Krauts beg for their lives to be spared, save for one fanatical soldier who, even knowing he will die, repeats the Nazi Party Line, growing more indignant as he goes along: “Some nations have no right to a future. Inferior races spread the microbe of Communism. Your nation must be exterminated. We’ll carry out this mission. If not today…tomorrow!”
The sheer sureness of this doomed German soldier who has been thoroughly brainwashed by Nazi propaganda and thinks that anyone living east of Germany but isn’t part of the “Reich” must be exterminated to fulfill Hitler’s plan for German Lebensraum, or “living space.” How much fucking space did they think they needed? Jesus, Hitler could have won WWII if he didn’t open a second front and attack the Soviet Union. But thank God he did. Because it was the Red Army who took Berlin. It was their clomping boots above his head that lead Hitler to take his cyanide pills and have somebody burn his body to make identification more difficult.
The Klimov movie focuses on the internal, of what the war does to poor Flyora’s psyche. It ruins him, but it doesn’t rob him of his humanity. He does not shoot the infant Hitler. Watch:
Coppola’s film is more about the sheer geographical sweep of war, its far reaching effects, and its sublime surreality. Many soldiers speak of entering into a kind of trance-like state during battle. Not Kilgore. He’s as American as apple pie. I love how he doesn’t even flinch when a mortar shell lands fifteen feet behind him, as he’s so lost in reverie and the story he’s telling Willard (Sheen). But as he searches for an appropriate word for the feeling of winning that battle, and lands on “victory,” he seems dissatisfied somehow in that little nod. Because after one victory, you have to fight the next one. And the next one.
The disappointment ins plain in Kilgore’s face when he says, after his famous Napalm speech, “someday this war’s gonna end,” (the implication being he’ll be a very unhappy camper on that day,” initially makes it seem that Kilgore is war incarnate. But even the few mind of screentime we have with Kilgore show us he has other interests. He likes surfing, for example, at one point ordering a terrified & quivering young private from California who is an up-and-coming, semi-famous surfer, to surf the waves in the middle of a battleground.
“If I say it’s safe to surf this beach Captain, it’s safe to surf this beach! …I’ll surf it right now!”
Nut to assuage to young blonde California surfer’s fears that Viet Cong could be hiding in the treeline, he calls in an airstrike: “Bomb it to the stone age, son!”
It would be a mistake to confuse Kilfore as being of the same ilk of Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Holden is of entirely different order. He is over seven feet tall, completely bald from head to toe, & can speak with great authority on hundreds of arcane subjects. If William T Vollman and Judge Holden had met somehow, they wouldn’t have it off, but Vollmann, being the maximalists maximalist, would have gotten five or fifteen or fifty books out of their chats.
McCarthy has steadfastly refused to do any interviews regarding Blood Meridian, even when he agreed to go on Oprah to promote The Road, he refused to talk about Blood Meridian, insisting that everything he wanted to say was in the book. This is not an unreasonable position, unless you’re McCarthy’s editor in the late 70s and are tearing your hear out because he only sells about 5000 copies of Suttree a year, his last southern Appalachian novel. After that, he went west and, like many before and after him, produced work after work that will endure.
All the Pretty Horses, and the Border Trilogy changed McCarthy’s financial situation, but it is roundly agreed that Blood Meridian is still his greatest utterance to date on the violence inherent to man. Inside man. Inside people. McCarthy chose his epigraphs careful (as I do too…it’s like cherrypicking your fav quotes and deciding which on best fits the bill):
"Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time" –Paul Valéry
"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness" –Jacob Boehme
"Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped" –The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982
So this last point, that a scalp from 300 000 years ago shows evidence of being scalped points, if not to the eternal nature of war, to the fact that it’s been around since before the wheel. Fighting other humans was probably our earliest activities.
McCarthy sees Judge Holden as war incarnate. The judge admits as much many times by the campfire light but his companions, save the kid, are numbskulls, and too stupid too realize what he is saying. Taking notes by the campfire one night, the kid glimpses over Judge Holden’s shoulder to see what he has written:
“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
It is the that leads the kid o decide he cannot work around such a demonic, no immoral but amoral, bring. So he runs. And the judge follows. For about a week they chase each other across the desert, into a foggy, surreal landscape where the judge speak in tongues, kills rattlesnakes for meat, calls out strange incantations in the night and still the kid eludes him. How can the kid still believe alive if the judge is a godlike figure, studying flora and fauna in his journals because their growing without his consent incenses him.
The chase continues into sandstorms where skeletal remains lie prone, as if washed ashore from some long ago dried up Inner American Ocean. The judsge taunts th kid, knowing he is experiencing deja vu. Again, if the judge has these powers, why is playing cat and mouse?
I think I just answered my own question.
A one point in the foggy, craggly section of desert Judge Holden calls out, sounding both far away and right behind them: “Perhaps,” he called, “perhaps you've seen this place in a dream. That you would die here.”
Soon after, that very same night, the kid has a perfect shot at the Judge’s temple and doesn’t take it. And this inaction haunts him for the rest of his brief life.
Knowing he’s gonna die soon, the kid tries, with increasing desperation, to do something good before death gets him. Or he Judge. Or perhaps they are the same thing. At one point in his travels he find an old Navajo woman sitting perfectly still on a rock in a canyon.
Approaches her slowly, he asks “agua?”
No answer.
“Where is…everybody? Your family…tu campesino?”
No reply. The woman’s hands are clasped and calloused. Farmer’s hands. So the kid ain’t as dumb as he seems. The woman is a peasant farmers. Campesino. The kid sighs. How come nobody’s around whenever he makes these clever deductions?
“You have to leave this place,” he says to he woman, a little more forcefully. “Now. Do you understand me? Somebody, or some…thing is coming. And he will kill you if you are still here,”
No answer. The kids walks over and lightly touches her back shoulder, “ma’am…” then stops in frozen horror as the woman disintegrates before him. Where the woman had been a mere second ago was now what appeared to be a smattering of salt and pepper. She was an empty shell, probably dead at that spot for years, maybe decades. Petrified in the desert sun.
At this point the kid begins to realize the judge is a demon, or something worse, He is strong enough to hold two howitzer cannons, one in each hand, and children often go missing when he is nearby. With no predecessors or readily available replacements. He sees in “the kid,” Blood Meridian’s protagonist, someone he can manipulate into a mini version of himself. But the kid has other plans. He drifts across the American southwest for decades, leaving whenever another fuckin’ tract of land declares statehood until he has no choice but to call himself an “American” an get all the pertinent papers proving as much. Local pride was far more intense in those days, even just a century ago. The kid considers himself a Texan. Not an American.
Years later, the kid, now referred to as “the man” stumbles blindly into a bar, blinks to adjust his eyes to the gloom, and plunks himself down at a stool. The barkeep eyes him warily. The man doesn’t look too drunk to be served, but there is something troubling about him. He tells his co-manager to keep an eye on him.
The Judge clomps down in the stool next to the man. We could have made a killing, you and I, he says, motioning to the bartender. The man chose to ignore the pun.
The Judge then goes on & on about his exploits here and there until the man finally stop him.
“I know, Judge. I saw you split a baby infant head’s wide open at Nacogdoches. The brains was slithering down the rock. Some quick thinkin huckster got himself a roll of fake police tape, “cordoned off the scene,” then charged people a buck to go see the kid’s smashed head. Know how much he made?”
“Oh yeah.”
“How much.”
“Four hundred dollars, if my memory serves me.”
The man spins in his stool so fast the head of his pint whips onto his pants. “That was you?”
The judge nods and repeats again how they could have made a great team but the kid’s problem, which is now the man’s problem, is that only the kid wasn’t 100% evil.
“You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”
“Clemency for the heathen.”
The man, finally grown disgusted of this fifth business, this random immortal who pops in & out of his life, leering, inviting him to rape & pillage & destroy all that is good, this Judge who just walks onto the set of the man’s his life from time to time, is finally ready Judge Holden something. Something, we the reader, think must be profound and highfalutin like something from the Old Testament. High speech from ancient noble tongues. Speech that used to sentence men to beheading. Speech that fed Christians to the lions.
But what the man says to the Judge is: “you ain’t nothin’.”
Now, I know that might seem disappointing. But for me it wasn’t. Nor for one of America’s pre-eminent champions of literature for its own sake. For the aesthetic pleasure and excitement it provides.
“It is heroic,” Harold Bloom writes, “after having seen the judge in full operation, to call him ‘nothin’.”
This is a man who can carry two howitzers at once. A man who steals, rapes, pillages, and dashes young children off rocks from great heights. But when the man says
you ain’t nothin
the Judge replies gleefully, you speak truer than you know, implying he is some kind vacuous demon who exists in some kind of limbo maybe? A nothing who easily could have been involved in that scalping 300 000 years ago near Yuma.
His dark humour is immediately apparent from Chapter 1 when he indignantly tells the congregation at a religious tent revival that he personally witnessed the priest having sexual congress with one of his goats just last week on his dairy farm.
The kid is watching all this with great interest. The priest tries to defend himself but it it too late. The crowd rips the priest apart, limb from limb.
Curious, the kid follows the Judge across the street over to the bar where someone asks the Judge, hey Holden, how’d you come to know of such perversion and depravity? Who is that man?
‘I’ve never seen that man before in my life,” says the judge triumphantly, raising his beer glass to his lips.
Martin Sheen has repeatedly stated that re-connecting with his Catholic faith helped him get through, and he found steady work throughout the 1980s in That Championship Season, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and obviously, Wall Street. Director (and Vietnam war veteran) Oliver Stone liked Martin so much he hired him to do JFK in 1991.
But if you watch Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which consists mainly of voice-overs and interviews with the actors, directors, and crew members who worked on the film, they all say that Sheen’s outburst in the motel room at the beginning of the film, where he punches a mirror, cuts his hand and covers a white sheet in blood while bawling, was real. He was a total mess. Just look at him. Apparently Coppola was telling Sheen to think about his father, who’d never supported his acting ambitions, not even when Sheen started to have success. Sheen’s father thought acting was a “profession for a pussy, not a real man.”
So Martin punched the mirror in a rage and cut himself and the rest is movie history.
Sheen had to be carried from the room, so drunk and distraught he couldn’t stand up under his own power. Now, the ethics of this are questionable, no doubt. But…Apocalypse Now is such a powerful movie that you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to suffer a little in order to make a good piece of art great?
If you want to see a man totally breaking down, watch this clip. I time-stamped it to begin @ 3:59. You can hear Coppola egging Sheen on from behind the camera.
As Sheen himself recalls in the documentary: “That opening sequence we shot on my 36th birthday, August 3rd, and I was so drunk I couldn’t stand up.”
So, once again, is it worth it to suffer for art?
Let me give you a long-winded answer.
In 2003 my favourite band in the world was Queens of the Stone Age, whose 2002 album Songs for the Deaf I’d become obsessed with. It was a trip in the very real sense, a concept album about driving from L.A. to Joshua Tree, and made to sound like a listener flipping through radio stations, complete with static between stations, random preachers yelling out snippets of the Old Testamnent, and some other odds & ends, like snippets of Mariachi from Mexican stations just across the border.
For example, after the first chorus of “First It Giveth,” the song gets really quiet & you can hear a nylon stringed acoustic guitar plucking out the notes as Josh Homme, lead singer & lead guitarist. plays a gorgeous Ranchero-styled lick on his guitar. I’m going to leave in the part just previous, because it is also Mariachi influenced, with crisp acoustic guitars panned in both left and right speakers. The part I mean starts at 1:39.
Little bits like that really made the album for me. I thought it was a work of terrific power and energy, and soon enough QOTSA was my favourite band in the world. I saw them 3 times on the Songs for the Deaf tour (they came to Toronto 3 different times to promote the same album). I’ve seen QOTSA about 15 times in my life, but that first show was always the best one because Nick was still in the band and the crowd was treated to QOTSA’s super-rare cover of The Subhumans “Wake Up Screaming,” which ended up being the b-side to the “First It Giveth” single.
Anyway, the band had a dangerous element to them with Nick in the band, a sense that anything could happen. Would Nick dive naked into the crowd? Would they open with “Tension Head” and make the place go berserk (this was back when QOTSA were still playing clubs, where they actually sound good, not fuckin arenas, which are meant for sporting events, not musical performances. I saw QOTSA open for NIN in 2005 and the sound quality was so bad that I couldn’t even tell what song Queens were playing.
Also, with the departure of Nick, the band seemed to just consist of hired guns. Not for nothing, but Troy has never seemed to be anything more than a second guitar, which is probably why he’s been in the band so long. But first QOTSA hired some nobody named Dan Druff to play bass. He can be seen in the “Little Sister” video. Then some Mikey dude from a band called Mini Mansions joined Queens as the new permanent bassist. And even though Troy and Mikey have now been in the band longer than Nick ever was, that element Nick brought to the band is still missing. It became Josh Homme & His Faceless Backing Band. Joey even left too! He was fired during the sessions for 2013’s …Like Clockwork, which is when I stopped paying attention to Queens.
Now, Lullabies to Paralyze was the most hotly anticipated album in my life as a music fan. The only other records that come close is My Morning Jacket’s Z and Washed Out’s Paracosm. I hated the first single. “Little Sister” when it first came out but after a while it grew on me.
The band had already tried to record it for Deaf but it hadn’t worked out. Think about that for a second. Think about what that means in terms of the drop in quality. A song not good enough to make it onto the previous album is now the lead-off single for the subsequent album? This did not bode well for the songs on Lullabies to Paralyze. “Little Sister” was too shitty to make it onto Songs for the Deaf but it was the first single for Lullabies to Paralyze. Even then, I knew something was wrong.
Even the title of Lullabies had been recycled from a song on Deaf, one of its best, “Mosquito Song.” I time-stamped it so you can hear the whole chorus, which is “Where will you run? Where will you hide? Lullabies to paralyze.”
Admittedly, the medieval lullaby vibe was already present on “Mosquito Song,” which is the final track on Songs for the Deaf, so perhaps Homme was telling fans the direction he was heading in. as the first song on Lullabies is called “This Lullaby.”
The self-titled QOTSA album was a desert jam fest consisting of a duo and one lone engineer at Rancho de la Luna, former Kyuss drummer Alfredo Hernández banged the “Bateria,” Josh Home played guitar and sang vocals, and Carlo Von Sexron made his debut on bass2. You can hear from that beginning of “Give the Mule What He Wants” that it’s Homme playing, not someone else.
The follow-up album Rated R was a slow walk down the sleazy streets of Los Angeles & scored Queens their first radio hit with “The Lost Art of Keeping A Secret.” The band quickly began work on a follow-up. Drummers I know insist that Rated R is the best Queens album from a drummers perspective. Gene Trautmann did play on :Millionaire” though, so it seems Homme like to keep a thread running from one album to the next. The self-titled album ends with an answering machine message in which Nick agrees to joins Josh’s band. Songs for the Deaf ends with a line that forms the title of the next album.
Homme told the press that the follow-up to Deaf reminded him of the Brothers Grimm. Demented Lullabies. Unfortunately, not one of these so-called “demented lullabies” on Lullabies to Paralyze bested “Mosquito Song.”
As the recording progressed, Queens would update their site with pictures like this:
Initially they wanted Gibbons to play lead on “Someone’s In The Wolf,” but the track was a bit to bizarre for Billy to add much to, so they used his patented pinch-harmonic technique on “Burn the Witch.” One note Gibbons played, his beard touched the string and made a harmonic. Homme would proudly tell the press: “I am the keeper of the first ever beard harmonic.”
Maybe he is. But don’t be so sure Josh. Many musicians have done strange things in studios when the witching hour arrives.
Neil Young’s “Vampire Blues,” that percussive scratching sound is The Band’s Rick Danko scratching a credit card across his prickly facial hair. (Danko also played bass on “Revolution Blues.”) For a beach dweller in Malibu, Young didn’t seem to be having any of the fun Charlie Sheen would have on the terrible sitcom Two and a Half Men. Both Danko’s credit card audio-lib and Gibbon’s beard harmonic made it onto the the final pressings of the albums in question.
In another interview, Homme told a journalist that one of his new songs, “Long Slow Goodbye” was the song he was “most proud of writing. Ever.” Coming from the guy who wrote such gems as “In the Fade,” “Regular John,” “Song for the Dead,” “God is in the Radio. I figured this song, this “Long Slow Goodbye was going to be incredible.
Anyway, the day Lullabies came out, me and all my friends bought it. The album started with a kinda silly medieval ballad sung by Mark Lanegan. Okay. Whatever. Then “Medication” kicks in. It’s “rocky-ness” didn’t feel authentic though. It felt more like a capitulation to old times. “Everybody Knows That You’re Insane” was a forgettable number that seemed to be aimed at Nick Oliveri, and “Tangled Up In Plaid” was, as one critic nailed it, ‘a poor re-wrote of ‘No One Knows,’” and its chorus sounded like a Green Day song. Still, “Long Slow Goodbye” was waiting for us, gibbering and chimerical, at the end of the album.
I could barely get through “The Blood Is Love” the first time, although now it’s one of my favourites on the album. And “You’ve Got A Killer Scene Thee, Man,” recycled from Desert Session 7 & 8’s “The Idiot’s Guide,” was a sexy badass number that took a while for me to appreciate too. So I can appreciate that the album was fun to make. I really enjoy this video of Mark Lanegan singing a ZZ Top cover, “Precious and Grace,” and saying “Josh…I thought I asked for no comments” after making a mistake:
“Precious and Grace” didn’t show up on the album. And it’s last song is tied with the same album’s “I Never Came” in QOTSA’s Most Boring, Coma-Inducing Song Category.
Then came the most anticlimactic moment in all of my years as a music fan. “Long Slow Goodbye” was an acoustic dirge that actually began with the line “Where have you gone again, my sweet?”
What the fuck? Did Homme fancy himself a 1940s bluesman? Who calls anybody “my sweet?”
Suffice to say, I hated the album. But I still went to the shows and followed QOTSA in the press, where I began to notice an interesting pattern. Homme kept alluding to how difficult Songs for the Deaf was to get done. How he “worked his brain til it pulsed and worked his fingertips til they bled.”
In one Much Music interview, where I stood five feet from him, he said “there were time while making Deaf where I started thinking “where’s the gun? where’s the tower? But this album was really fun to make.” Lullabies, he stressed, had been a blast to make. Well, at least someone was having fun on that album. For the listener it was a wretched thing. After the slick sleazy waltz down Sunset Boulevard, then the drive from L.A. to Joshua Tree. we hear Josh Homme walking into a dark forest and making these boring medieval ballad influenced songs that just plain sucked/.
Well. What do you do with that? As a fan, you don’t want your fav artists to suffer but making a record is something I consider sacred. You are laying down sounds and songs that will exist long after you die. That’s an honour and a privilege. So what if it feel like pulling teeth sometimes if, when you’re finally finished, you’ve got an album like Songs for the Deaf to turn in to your record label (Interscope was QOTSA’s label at the time.)
Like, I’m glad Homme had fun making Lullabies to Paralyze, but it’s not one tenth as good as it predecessor.
Canadian rockers complained of a similar experience when recording their second album, The Pleasure and the Greed, wioth Dave Jerden, a no drugs, no alcohol. no bullshit guy who had produced Alice in Chains. Jane’s Addiction, The Offspring, etc. In fact, the Big Wreck album was one of the last projects he ever worked on before leaving the industry for good. Now, I happen to think that the sound of the album is excellent, even if you hate the whole post-grunge thing:
Soon after, Big Wreck broke up and their singer, Ian Thornley started a band called Thornley and made an album produced by Chad Kroeger. He told every DJ at every radio station than the difference between working with Jerden and Kroeger was like “day and night.”
Too bad Kroeger totally ruined what is a really good song acoustically:
And he turned that pretty little sad bastard ballad into this:
He totally ruined the song by making Thornley scream “you’e RIGHT! you’re RIGHT!” instead of singing it as he does in the acoustic version.
But hey! Ian Thornley had fun making his comeback album, so who cares right? An album that was supposed to be his return to the top of the Canadian rock charts, even if Big Wreck had failed to break through in America.
So they called their album Come Again and hired Storm Thorgerson to make the ridiculous cover. That whole summer of 2005 I was bombarded, on every radio station, with that fucking Kroegerized version of “So Far So Good,” what was once a good song now turned to Nickel, if you know what I mean.
I think some suffering is worth it to make great art, but not like…extreme suffering like torture. Enduring a tropical rain storm so you can shoot a few scenes for Jurassic Park is not like you are being asked to walk into the maw of death.
It’s worth it to work hard, and out everything you have into the craft you have chosen. That’s why Martin “outsheens” his son in that Wall Street elevator scene, and all the scenes they share in the film. Martin is simply more dedicated to the craft. Charlie was more about the things his fame would get him.
I think you owe it to your craft to do he best you can while staying safe. Don’t crash a helicopter and kill two kids: Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, and veteran actor Vic Morrow just to make a movie. You don’t have to die for your art.
But some suffering is good. And necessary. You gotta get it out of you and onto the page or canvas or film. That’s catharsis. And catharsis is good.
and Joe Estevez, for that matter, that mainstay of B-movies who is now starring in Decker, Tim Heidecker’s online show spoofing shows like 24 and the whole Jack Ryan “the nation is counting on you.” Watch this trailer. It’s so bad, it’s good. I love Tim Heidecker. “Luck is for pussies like you,” he tells the President (played by Joe Estevez. “All I need? Is this gun.”
Mr. Sexron is just another of Homme’s silly aliases, like Baby Duck & Ginger Elvis.