12/22/23
Newsletter #535
The Crack of Dawn
I’ve undoubtedly already stated too many times that I haven’t got an iota of nostalgia in me. There is no time to which I’d like to return. There is no golden age, or those freewheeling days in college, or wasn’t I just so fit when I was in the my 20s. I don’t care. I still had me to contend with all of that time, and that was mostly a painful struggle. I feel way better now than I did then.
Now I don’t give a shit what happens since I no longer need to succeed. Whatever success I have achieved, I already achieved and don’t have to do again. Don’t get me wrong, I really love shooting movies – I love the high pressure of directing – but I can live without it, too. If someone came to me with financing, and a script that I didn’t hate (which would be a miracle), I’d direct as a work-for-hire in a second. Alas, no one wants 65-year-old directors. That’s a shame because I can direct a TV show or a low-budget movie better and faster than any 25-35-year-old, no question. But Hollywood venerates youth. Youth is the main market. And I don’t give a shit about youth. As has been said many times, “Youth is wasted on the young.”
The first ten years of my life, 1958 to 1968, was a time of incredible change in society. I love watching any movies from 1958 just to catch a glimpse of how different the world was then. 1958 may as well have been 1948 as far as the clothing fashions for men and women. Men wore suits, ties and hats; women wore dresses to mid-calf, with gloves and a hat to go out. Fashion-wise, the only thing that was new and prevalent was young boys wearing coon skin hats like Daniel Boone on TV. I had one. Of course it wasn’t really coon skin.
Since I really can recall, if I try, how emotionally difficult and painful it was going through the years to get to ten years old, I am absolutely certain that I don’t want any of that back. However, it was a great time period, ’58 to ’68. All fashions changed. Movies, TV and the world went from black and white to color (they stopped giving a separate Oscar for B&W cinematography in 1967). Growing up in Detroit, the main soundtrack was Motown, the Supremes and Marvin Gaye. I was six or seven, but I remember dancing the Hitchhike in 1963-64 to Marvin Gaye’s song, Hitchhike.
But I wouldn’t want to relive the pain and horror of being a seven, eight, nine-year-old child again. But the music was good.
The next decade – 1969 to 1979 – was my ‘60s, if you will, and I’ll grab just a random moment as the beginning of that decade for me. I had just purchased the brand new first album of a fledgling band called Led Zeppelin, cleverly entitled, Led Zeppelin (it would, over time, come to be known as Led Zeppelin I). I paid the vast sum of $3.00 for the album. I sat on the couch in the living room with the sealed album on my lap. I knew that the cover was a still from the newsreel of the Hindenburg blowing up, which I’d seen. I thought (at eleven), “This is sort of in bad taste, using an image of a disaster where people died.” Then I flipped the album over and read the credits. Even though I was only eleven years old, since my older sister had Jeff Beck’s album, Truth, which we’d both listened to a lot, I was aware of the connections, like both albums cover Willie Dixon’s song, You Shook Me. Also, here was the guy, Jimmy Page, who inexplicably wrote the great song for Jeff Beck on Truth, called Beck’s Bolero (my question was why didn’t Beck write his own Bolero?).
In any case, I finally tore off the cellophane, which felt like a commitment, and put the album on my dad’s stereo, which was an actual stereo with an amplifier and speakers. My sister and I had record players. I turned it up kind of loud since nobody was around, then really listened to each track. I knew that I was listening to an important recording, that there was a sea change in rock and roll music, and the album, track by track, was everything I could ever have hoped it to be. Side one: Good Times, Bad Times; Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You; You Shook Me; and Dazed and Confused. Side one ended. I thought, “That’s fucking perfect.” I turned it over, sat back down on the couch, undoubtedly lit a cigarette, and listened to side two: You’re Time is Gonna Come; Black Mountain Side; Communication Breakdown; I Can’t Quit You Baby and How Many More Times (with Jimmy Page breaking into Bolero at a point). I thought, “Well, that’s perfect, too. That’s the best record I’ve ever heard in my whole life.” I swear to God I thought, “That was a well spent three dollars.” I think Led Zeppelin I was perhaps the fourth or fifth album I had ever bought. It was a major investment.
It seemed like just a couple of month later – it was still 1969 – and I was up at Tel-12 Mall. I was in Montgomery Ward and fuck if Led Zeppelin didn’t have another album out already, cleverly entitled Led Zeppelin II. I bought it, but I felt sure I was going to get ripped off. They had clearly let the corporate executives push them into rushing the follow up to their first hit record, and now they had probably put out a bunch hurried crap.
No. Led Zeppelin II was a great album, too.
Which doesn’t make me the slightest bit nostalgic.
I’m listening to it right now.