You have no idea what William Hurt meant to the baby boomers.

Unless you’re a boomer yourself.

We went to the movies. There was a belief that television would kill the movies, but that turned out to be untrue. Movies superseded television, they were smarter, and although they ultimately reached fewer people, they impacted the culture much more.

We started off with Jerry Lewis and Disney pics. We remember going to the movies in the afternoon, seeing a cartoon before the main feature, buying ice cream and candy with the money our parents gave us. 15 cents got you in the door, nothing in the novelty case cost more than a quarter. I’d sometimes go for the ice cream cone. It was pre-made. With a flat top. You peeled the paper off and ate it, and the cone was soft and spongy.

And then came “2001.” And “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.” It was “The Graduate” that gave another injection of fame to Simon & Garfunkel, they’d been on the way down commercially previously.

And the seventies? The last golden age of film. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of “The Godfather.” I think “Godfather II” is the best film ever made. The first “Godfather” was close. That horse in the bed!

And the iconic pictures of the seventies are too many to mention. But in ’75, the screw turned. “Jaws” changed the business forever, into what it is now. Funny how Spielberg complains about the loss of film tradition, he’s responsible!

So by time the eighties came along, the pictures were more commercial, and generally less daring, but we continued to go. Which is kind of funny, because today most boomers don’t go at all, unless it’s to see the foreign features. You used to have to go to the movies because, like I said, they moved the culture, they were the coin of the realm, they were what everybody talked about. Have you seen it? You had to go to not feel left out. And the discussion could be endless. Analyzing films was a thing, to the point they were studied in college. Today? Who’d study a comic book character?

So we knew all the actors and actresses. We’d marvel that who we’d seen there was now here. You could be comprehensive, you could cover the sphere, you could be an expert. As for the Oscars… It was a ritual. And there was no E! channel and endless commentary on dresses, rather it was all about the movies themselves and who won. And the big pictures did win. The greats were commercial. Like “Tootsie.” And ultimately “Working Girl.” And one picture we needed to see was…

“Body Heat.” We didn’t know Kathleen Turner and we didn’t know William Hurt, but one movie made both of them stars, people who everybody knew. Today you can top the Spotify chart, be number one at the box office, and most people are clueless as to who you are.

But not then.

So “Body Heat” was steamy.

That’s one thing that’s been lost with the advent of the internet. Fantasy. Life fantasy, sexual fantasy. We were all dreamers, and we saw our desired lives on screen. Potential husbands and wives. The actors were larger than life. Nobody was tearing them down on the internet. And a passionate love scene…now you can just dial that up on the internet via Google, but back then?

The goal in acting is to have a career. And that’s very hard to do. Even if you make it to features, you can have one or two roles and then disappear. But if you get momentum and sustain, you become embedded into people’s lives. Especially when the film defines a generation, like “The Big Chill.”

Films about us started to be made. In 1979 there was “The Return of the Secaucus 7.” And then there was “Head Over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter.” Ann Beattie was an icon, for she captured the zeitgeist. Today the goal is to write a genre book, a mystery, to become rich and famous. Whereas forty-odd years ago, people were still interested in writing the Great American Novel, and reading it.

“The Big Chill” was not nostalgia, it was not a look back, it was present-day. In the Reagan years. The boomers were selling out, they were being labeled “yuppies,” but some were left behind, like Nick, played by William Hurt. Yes, some made the transition from the sixties to the eighties quite easily. They went from love everybody and money is meaningless to mine for me and money is everything. But not Nick. He was lost.

And he wasn’t the only one.

And there was “Broadcast News,” where Hurt played the empty suit. Representing the change in television news, which had really started in New York in the seventies, with Roger Grimsby. Suddenly the presenters superseded the events. The anchor team was a family. There were jokes. This had never happened previously, and the main criterion was how you looked. Still is, look at Fox News.

Now the last time I remember seeing William Hurt was in Amazon’s series “Goliath.” The first year was great, but it got progressively worse thereafter. Hurt was the villain. But he still had that slow delivery, unique to him. Hurt was not fungible, like so many of the pretty faces.

And I could cite more of Hurt’s roles, but I don’t think that will convey my feeling today. I mean William Hurt was one of us, he was born in 1950, he was a contemporary. We knew him, or at least thought we did. He wasn’t like one of the old stars, all fabulous, with their twinkling outfits. He was regular, in a world where everybody was trying to be exceptional. In many cases he was just a guy.

But dying? How can that be? William Hurt dead.

It’s not like we saw him decline on screen. And it’s not like he was a notorious druggie. We just accepted that he was there, gonna appear in roles down the line. But now he won’t.

Now when Hurt broke, he had a spouse, Mary Beth Hurt. She radiated spunkiness and intelligence, she was anything but two-dimensional. It was so interesting that they were together. Too many men make it and they want to marry a model, looks are everything. And let me clarify this, Mary Beth Hurt was plenty attractive, it’s just that there was something behind the facade, which was visible on screen. And she was present, not reserved like the models.

 

Mary Beth Hurt was in “Head Over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter,” but I bring her up because after they got divorced, I lost touch with William Hurt’s personal life. I was surprised to just find out he’s got four children. You see Hurt had a whole life we were not privy to. Just like us. Most people have no idea what goes on behind closed doors.

But today it’s all about exposing yourself to gain influencers. Subtlety doesn’t work online. It’s got to be in-your-face all the time.

The seventies are history.

But not in the boomers’ minds. They’ve become part of our DNA. To the point where when one of us passes it’s sad, but it’s also creepy.

I mean it’s one thing if you die by misadventure. But so many of my brethren are gonna be laid low by the Big C, and in this case I mean cancer, but it was also Covid, especially before the vaccines. It seems positively random, one gets it and the other does not. Even those who misbehaved, who smoked like chimneys, sometimes they survive and the clean livers do not. You start to contemplate this when you get old. And the boomers now are. And the younger generation doesn’t care about them. Wear masks? Stay home to keep your elders alive? Screw ’em, let ’em die. It’s a risk we all take. And that is true, we’re all gonna die, but you age and you’re confronted with it and you don’t know where to put your feelings.

Like with the passing of William Hurt.

1

“Left a good job in the city”

No one does that anymore. During Covid a bunch of high-earners decamped to their country home, taking their job with them, but the concept of telling your boss to take this job and shove it and heading out to the country, that’s history. As for the great resignation, many of those jobs were not that good.

But that was the ethos back in the sixties. You wanted to go on the road, you wanted to see things, and if you went to college you wanted to spend time in Europe, maybe flying Icelandic Airlines with a stopover in Reykjavik, then again you could fly from New York to London on Pan Am and TWA for two hundred bucks. And with your Eurail Pass… The goal was to do it cheaply for as long as you could. If you lived large, stayed in hotels with bathrooms in the bedroom, you were derided. You slept in hostels, you learned the code of the road from your traveling brethren, not all Americans, and you felt alive.

Today it’s no longer a dream to drive cross-country. Hell, since the deregulation of airplane travel you can jump on a jet and be where you want to soon. For bupkes. As for all the places in between…. No one seems to care about them anymore, and interestingly those who reside in the places in between have contempt for these jet-setters. Furthermore, fluidity of residence used to be a thing. An American thing. You yearned to get out of your hometown. You moved where the action was, to try and live out your dream. I’m not sure people dream the same way today, the odds are stacked against them, moving up the ladder requires more than hard work. Have you been following the Kim Kardashian kerfuffle? Her advice to women was to work hard like her, to get ahead. There’s been a ton of blowback. But what interests me most is the myopia of Ms. Kardashian. She obviously doesn’t know how the other half, the majority, lives, oftentimes from hand to mouth, doing two jobs.

And shelter is so expensive that moving is a huge hurdle many can’t jump. But when I came of age, you got out on the road and it was a melting pot of travelers. And you learned so much. One of my ski buddies paid for his winter by working on a fishing boat off the coast of New Jersey the summer before. I didn’t know you could make that much money fishing, and my father told me from day one he didn’t want me working with my hands. And then there were those with little dreams. It was a shock after college. They didn’t want to go anywhere, and they weren’t moving fast in any regard. A job at the phone company? Yes, one of the ski bums retired to do that. IN SALT LAKE CITY?? The City of Salt is completely different today, it’s got high tech and a bunch of wealthy immigrant retirees. But back in the seventies it was a backwater.

2

“Big wheel keep on turnin’

Proud Mary keep on burnin'”

Now if you rely on Wikipedia, you may get the idea that Creedence Clearwater Revival had traction on their very first album. But the truth was that whatever success it ultimately had was a result of people going back after the band’s breakthrough. Then you might have heard “Susie Q” on FM radio, but not before, at least not on any station I listened to.

But the band broke with this track from their second LP, “Proud Mary,” from “Bayou Country.” And “Proud Mary” broke on AM radio, not FM, which was now ruling the airwaves of the metropoli. AM was for the car radio at best, assuming you were a hipster. And there was definitely a dividing line, between those in the know and those who knew nothing. Some people believe this dividing line still exists, but in truth we now live in a Tower of Babel society where no one knows everything and there are no elite hipsters, despite some people believing they are so. If you put someone down for their taste today you’re ignored. It’s not one coherent scene, there’s a cornucopia of entertainment and no one knows everything, it’s utterly impossible, there’s just too much out there.

Now in truth FM radio skewed English. With a dose of San Francisco thrown in. “Proud Mary” didn’t fit in. Roots music was still in the future. So we heard the song on AM radio and thought it was a novelty, I mean the band’s name certainly sounded like that of a one hit wonder. But then came “Bad Moon Rising,” a string of undeniable hits, and Creedence was now one of the biggest bands in the land, finally embraced by FM radio. But it was “Proud Mary” that broke the door down, that set the stage for what was to come.

3

My favorite Creedence Clearwater Revival song is the opening cut on “Bayou Country,” “Born on the Bayou.”

Now you have to understand it sounded like it was cut in the bayou. And since the rock press was not omnipresent and solidified, it took years until everyone learned that John Fogerty had no connection to Louisiana and the bayou. But somehow he had the feel. And the feel of “Born on the Bayou”…

“And I can remember the Fourth of July

Runnin’ through the backwood bare”

You could picture it. Something like the bacchanal in “The Secret History”. You have to remember, there were no cell phones. It was easy to be out of touch, and a great swath of American youth wanted to go up the country and what happened there…you had to be there to find out. There were drugs, nudity, sex…and deep discussions about life. It was the peak of experience. This was before you could Google nudity, and sex, when marijuana was still illegal, never mind hash and anything harder. The feel of “Born on the Bayou” was magic, it was the other. Today everything is nuts and bolts, zeros and ones, but in truth life is messy and when you acknowledge it you have a much better ride.

And my second favorite Creedence track is “Green River.” Which in many ways is so simple, but those descending notes during the chorus…utter magic. It’s like Fogerty has ripped open his chest and we can see inside. And just like in “Born on the Bayou,” the lead guitar is simple, but stinging. This was long before acts saw a need to use the umpteen tracks on the recording machine to fill up the record such that listening to it was like looking through steel wool.

And, of course, “Fortunate Son” has become a political staple. It’s almost bigger today than it was then. Let me explain, of course “Fortunate Son” was all over the radio, but this was back when we were all rebelling against the government, “Fortunate Son” was part of a movement, but stripped from its original context it resonates even more, especially in these days of income inequality when a president avoided the war with supposed bone spurs in his heels.

And then there’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” which I didn’t cotton to until I saw the movie so entitled. It could be Tuesday Weld’s best performance, it was gritty and added gravitas to the title song, at least in my brain.

But none of these tracks is “Proud Mary.”

4

At this late date, many consider “Proud Mary” an Ike and Tina Turner song. Their version was never a hit record, Ike and Tina hadn’t yet crossed over to the white market, but when the band opened for the Rolling Stones in 1969, white rockers were exposed to a level of stage performance that was heretofore unknown by them. Tina Turner made love to the microphone and those who saw it never forgot it.

But as good as Ike and Tina’s take was, it was different from the Creedence Clearwater original.

“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin on the river”

That was the feel of the original. Just like you can hear the gallop of the horse in the original Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” on “Idlewild South,” you can hear the paddle wheel turning on that boat on the Mississippi.

And as the years wore on, laying back was a goal. Not taking life so seriously, slowing down and watching the river flow, Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it.

We did a lot of sitting around back then. We didn’t have the world at our fingertips, handheld communicators were something from cartoons, science fiction. You didn’t want to stay home, you wanted to go out, to hang, to talk to the people. And music was a big part of the experience, someone always had a guitar, and they’d strum and we’d sing along, everybody would join in on the chorus, they’d sing at the top of their lungs, with all the power they possessed, as they looked at their brethren, this was what it was all about. Sure, you needed money. But not much. Life was about experiences. Not to shoot selfies during, but to savor and store in your mental bank, so you could make context of the world at a later date.

Most of the tracks of the sixties and seventies have not survived. The boomers might remember them, but the younger generation is clueless. And then there are certain tracks that are sui generis, that are of no time and place, that exist in their own ether, locked in wax, that we can just marvel at.

One of these is “Proud Mary.” It sounds as fresh as the day it was released. It’s not dated whatsoever. So when you hear it today you don’t worry about the way things might have been, you don’t look to the past, you reside in the present. “Proud Mary” can still ride shotgun. It can still inspire. You can count on it.

John Fogerty may have been screwed financially, and I feel for him, but money pales in comparison to “Proud Mary.” In years to come when newbies hear “Proud Mary” and the rest of Fogerty’s canon they’ll be stunned, they won’t believe one guy could be responsible for so much. They won’t care a whit about how much money he made. Music trumps money. John Fogerty wrote a song that’s FOREVER!

Re: LGBTQ Protests

I’m making a statement today.

I can speak up BECAUSE of Elton… he taught me how all those years ago when I was 11 and he showed so many of us how joyful living out loud could be. There were many others like him each paving the way uniquely…and also paying the price for it.

I absolutely do remember when marriage equality was inconceivable… I was married without a license and couldn’t get my wife a green card. I can see a clear possibility of losing marriage equality in this country state by state until it’s no longer protecting families from the myriad of struggles that come from being “unrecognized” federally.

I hope that my kids will be allowed to learn about their family and families like ours in school… being “unrecognized” is not a burden I’d like to see carried forward and placed onto my children.

Xobc

The newspapers are positively wild today.

One interesting story is Peloton’s decision to go to a subscription model for both the classes AND the bikes. With the ability to cancel at anytime. Therefore the hurdle to adoption is lowered significantly. Felice was interested in a Peloton treadmill, but the cost was prohibitive. (Never mind that you can’t watch TV on the screen if you choose not go to to a class. Give people options, they don’t want to be locked in.) But I haven’t read that the treadmill has gone on subscription too. But this speaks to music subscriptions. They represent 83% of US revenues, up from 82.8% the year before. But all the news has been about the increase in CD and vinyl sales. But streaming subscriptions represent $9.5bn in revenue, whereas physical only represent $1.6bn. Revenues increased across the board, and the physical piece of the pie actually shrunk. But don’t let a good headline get in the way of the facts, which you can read here: https://bit.ly/36eQF3j As for the oldsters complaining they like to own something, they are further and further behind in the rearview mirror. Today’s generations don’t want to own anything, they want it all on demand, with improvements in delivery along the way.

And then there’s Margaret Sullivan’s article about fake fact checks in the “Washington Post.” Sullivan is the authority re the analysis of the news business, both the papers and the reporting. However, she is too invested in maintaining the established local newspapers. To speak like the street, their heads up their rear ends, if you’re not willing to think with a blank slate, you’re doomed. Which brings me to the article about Axios. Which is now going into the local news business. We need local news reporting, but the key is to come up with another way of delivering it.

Anyway, Sullivan’s article is not behind a paywall and you should read it, at least part of it:

“Russia’s new control tactic is the one Hannah Arendt warned us about 50 years ago – Fake fact-checks, designed to sow confusion, are Putin’s latest trick for undermining faith in media — and the truth”: https://wapo.st/3J7fVa2

Let me quote the beginning, which is the essence:

“You don’t need belief. All you need is confusion.

That’s how authoritarian leaders manage to control the populace, the great German political philosopher Hannah Arendt once explained.

‘If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,’ she said in an interview nearly five decades ago.

When that happens, people lose the capacity not only to act but even to think and judge. ‘And with such a people,’ she concluded grimly, ‘you can then do what you please.'”

This is a huge problem not only in Russia, but around the world, especially the United States. This is what the concept of alternative facts has delivered.

But it’s the next article that inspired me to write:

“Businesses Assail Texas Move to Classify Care for Trans Teens as ‘Child Abuse’ – A new ad signed by dozens of big companies warns, ‘Discrimination is bad for business.'”: https://nyti.ms/3MHZwuS

Now this is where the music business, the artists themselves, can have an effect.

Like I said last night, unfortunately it’s the corporations that are leading when it comes to societal issues. But this is a natural for artists. Who can’t hide under the umbrella of their labels. Artists are individuals, independent contractors, they don’t get benefits like health insurance, therefore they are singular, which is part of their appeal.

And music appeals to outcasts. That’s its true power. The ability to speak to the disenfranchised, those misunderstood and derided, oftentimes without friends. Those who don’t live in the metropolis, and feel alone. When an artist speaks their truth it gives them power, to be themselves and soldier on. Nothing has the power of music in this sphere, NOTHING!

Not to mention that so many musicians fall under the heading of LGBTQ. Some out, some not. But there is strength in numbers, and if all the musicians came out against the new anti-LGBTQ laws in Texas and Florida…

Remember when gay marriage was inconceivable? Even the legalization of marijuana? Right has traditionally triumphed in America, it’s just a matter of time. But now in so many ways our country is going backward. Catholic countries like Colombia are liberalizing abortion laws and in the U.S. we’re shrinking them. At some point you have to make a stand for rights or you’re in jeopardy of losing them.

I cannot see why a statement can’t be made by artists re these heinous new laws. And in truth, you start with headliners and then everybody else wants to come on board for fear of being left out. Elton John, Brandi Carlile. They commit, and you’ll be stunned who lines up behind them. And it’s got to be from every walk of music. Women and LGBTQ members have been stifled, made to be in the closet, in country music forever. Once you shine light on a subject, change can happen.

Even better, get the major labels and the big streaming outlets like Spotify to pay for ads featuring signees. Both in print and on TV, online too. Facebook, Instagram, etc. Hell, have Facebook donate the ad space. All these outlets have philanthropic programs, why can’t the people they make their money from utilize them and benefit the population at large.

Do you know any trans people? I do. One person who was tortured, was on the verge of suicide living as a man. Look past the canards like bathroom utilization, these are just diversions put up to take the focus off the aggrieved.

Everybody’s got a gay relative. If you don’t think so, that’s because they’re in the closet.

This is a no-brainer.

Furthermore, additional action can be taken. Acts can refuse to tour in Texas and Florida. Hell, the superstars don’t need to go there, they’ve got more demand than they can fulfill.

We’ve got to push back.

This is where artists can lead.

And they should. Right away. Time is of the essence.

And one thing is for sure, musicians can spread the word better than politicians. They make a statement and it’s EVERYWHERE! That’s one of music’s powers, it’s time to employ it.