Head: The Monkees’ ‘Ulysses of a hip New Hollywood’

02.10.2011
Richard Metzger
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/head_the_monkees_ulysses_of_a_hip_new_hollywood/
Tags:
Frank Zappa
Jack Nicholson
The Monkees. Head
Bob Rafelson

As habitual readers of Dangerous Minds know, when I do “product reviews” I try to stay away from debating the merits of the music of “classic rock” acts because, frankly who cares what I think about Neil Young or The Beatles? As for me, I really don’t care what you or anyone else has to say about their music, either. If you don’t like Young or the Fab Four, too bad, buddy, I just can’t help you. They’re awesome, and it’s been long ago settled. Done.

But what I do care about is: Does it sound/look good? Is this newest version a significant upgrade from the last “definitive collector’s edition” they put out? And most importantly, “Is it really worth shelling out the money for this sucker if I’ve already bought this goddamned album in several obsolete audio formats, including 8-track tapes?”

Admittedly, oft-times the answer is “No.” (I don’t think the newly released Tommy Blu-ray sounds all that great, for instance. The surround mix of David Bowie’s Station to Station album is just terrible). Other times the answer is a resounding “Yes!” as in the case of the newly restored Criterion Collection Blu-ray of The Monkees’ psychedelic opus, Head.

Head was written and produced by Bob Rafelson (co-creator of The Monkees) and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson. The film aimed to deconstruct the “manufactured” image that the Monkees wished to leave behind far behind them in 1968. The group wander through a number of surrealistic scenes, Hollywood sound stages and trippy pop art musical production numbers. Along the way, they encounter the likes of Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Annette Funicello, Terri Garr, stripper Carol Doda, Frank Zappa, Toni Basil, fighter Sonny Liston, and weirdo character actor Timothy Carey. Victor Mature, an over the hill actor known for appearing in Biblical epics and sword and sandals films, played a King Kong-sized version of himself (I’m not old enough to have much context for Victor Mature, but the way I take it is that he’s playing himself in a “human punch-line” kind of way, something that will no doubt be lost on future audiences for whom he’ll just appear to be a weird old giant who appears appropos of nothing).

Head was initially released with a mysterious advertising campaign that never mentioned the Monkees and instead featured the head of a balding man (John Brockman, future literary super agent). The Monkees’ teenbopper fan base must have been mighty confused. These were still the Monkees they loved, but what was with all the lysergic Marshall McLuhan stuff, the Viet Nam footage and the hookahs? Head is an audio-visual mindfuck. Head was a total flop.

Head’s reputation grew during a couple of national CBS late night TV airings in the 1970s. A VHS was released in the mid-80s during the revival of interest in the group brought on by MTV screening The Monkees for a new generation. Today Head is properly considered a odd milestone in Hollywood history—it’s one of the highest budgeted rock films of the era (and what a stylish time capsule it is!) and one of the first counter culture films to be produced by the studio system. In his liner notes, Chuck Stephens called Head, “the Ulysses of a hip New Hollywood about to be born.” What he said!

I’d have to say that of all of the various music related Blu-rays discs that have passed through my BD player since I got it last year, Head is the very best of all. It’s THE thing I’d reach for to geekily demonstrate my sound system for a guest. Seldom are things done this right, but when you consider that it’s Criterion behind this issue of Head, of course it makes more sense. I have no doubt that seeing this new Criterion version on a large HD screen with a good surround system is a superior experience even to seeing it in a movie theatre when it was first released. How could it have been better then? 42-years after Head’s initial release, we have the technology!

So, is it a significant upgrade from the Rhino DVD of Head, still on the market? Hell, yes. There’s simply no comparison, either in the video quality—Rhino’s DVD sucks on that count, they used a scratchy fullscreen print, whereas Criterion’s disc is letterboxed and immaculate, transferred from a 35mm negative—or in the audio department, either, as Head has been gloriously remixed in 5.1 surround. Holy shit did they do an amazing job with the audio.

Head’s opening moment, where Micky Dolenz runs through the dedication ceremony and jumps off the bridge, has, of course, as its soundtrack, one of the greatest numbers the Monkees ever did, “Porpoise Song.” The pristine quality of that scene’s solarized underwater footage combined with the HD DTS surround mix is nothing short of astonishing. Visually, it’s like looking at a stained-glass window. The audio is deeply immersive—like you’re standing in the midst of a strange waterlogged orchestra—and the video so vibrant that I must’ve played that one scene ten times in a row before moving on to “Circle Sky.” Again I wasn’t disappointed, the group’s presence is immediate and electrifying—Head’s performance of “Circle Sky” is the first time a “live” rock performance was used in a Hollywood film. I’ll say it again, they usually never get it this right. As far as slick audio/visual products go, Criterion’s Head deserves a special award.

At the moment, Head is only available as part of the Criterion Collection box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. Although the rest of the films in the set—Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The King of Marvin Gardens, Drive, He Said and the first ever release of Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (with Nicholson, Tuesday Weld, Orson Welles and Dangerous Minds pal Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre)—are all worthy, frankly I’d sooner have just had Head. Although it’s not on their current release schedule, I’m sure Criterion will release Head solo on Blu-ray soon enough. Surely the word of mouth, in the meantime, will continue to spread.

[A personal anecdote here: In 1994, I met Micky Dolenz and his (super cute) daughter Ami, at the Whisky Bar in New York. He was really cool and a gas to talk to, but after about 20 minutes I sheepishly revealed to him that although I could not have possibly had any forewarning that I was going to meet him, earlier that day I’d actually bought a CD of the Head soundtrack that I had in my coat pocket. The conversation got slightly awkward for a minute until I changed the subject and he politely allowed me to do so. I got the feeling that he had about as much desire to talk about something he’d done 30 years ago as most people would.]

Zappa Meets Kirby

http://royalflushmagazine.com/2009/10/13/zappa_meets_kirby/

World’s Finest – Royal Flush 6 Exclusive!
Step inside the Fourth World as we relive that one magical day when…
FRANK ZAPPA met JACK KIRBY !
by Jeff Newelt • Illustration by Rick Veitch • Photos by Michael James Zuccaro
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve always been a sucker for the big teamup: Superman / Shazam. Hulk / Thing. chocolate & peanut butter. So when I came across a photo of Jack Kirby and Frank Zappa embracing finally, my synapses started firing like FBI at Waco.

Were they friends? Did they hang? Play action figures together? WTF! I had to know.

For those not so in-the-know as us ubergeekanoids, Jack Kirby was the visionary artist who created The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Captain America…the Marvel universe sprang forth from his (and writer Stan Lee’s) head. In the ’70s, Jack went solo, rocking out idiosyncratic cosmic characters – the New Gods, Omac, Forever People, Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, Kamandi, Demon, all nutty, jazzy, psychedelically mythic stuff.

Frank Zappa was a musical iconoclast and genius composer/producer/guitar player. He wove together humor, avant-garde classical guitar-rock, doo-wop, dada, jazz-fusion, and political satire, hired the badass-est musicians, and rolled with world leaders like Czech playwright/philosopher Vaclav Havel. His songs are like audio comic books, hypervisual with colorful characters and scenarios like “Camarillo Brillo,” which includes the lines “She had a snake for a pet / and an amulet / and she was breeding a dwarf / But she wasn’t done yet / She had gray-green skin / A doll with a pin / I told her she was awright / But I couldn’t come in.” Sounds just like a character out of Kirby’s Demon.

Jack and Frank, both universe builders, one music, the other, comics. But what was the connection?

Fast-forward to present day. I’m at a conference in New Mexico teaching social media to female entrepreneurs, and one lady says, “Yer not one of those comics people, are you? My husband’s one, Steve Sherman.” D’OH! Steve Sherman was one of Kirby’s fabled assistants! I reached out to Steve and turns out Jack and Frank Zappa were not only pals, but also essentially neighbors. How was this friendship kept secret so long?

A mere week later, I wind up having drinks with fellow Flusher Paul Pope and none other than Frank’s youngest son, Ahmet Zappa! We learned all about Kingdom Comics, the new graphic novel line Ahmet is helming for Disney.

Contextual rewind: Not just a comics impresario, Ahmet’s been rocking in different media since he was a wee young lad. He was lead singer/songwriter in Z, a band he formed with his brother Dweezil in the early ’90s, an actor on Roseanne and Growing Pains and in films such as Pump up the Volume and Jack Frost, and most recently hosted VH1’s But Can They Sing?

So I had to show Ahmet my Blackberry screensaver, the image I had found of his dad and Jack together, and Ahmet goes, “Whoa, I never saw that! That’s in my living room… Jack would come over and smoke cigars and Frank would smoke cigarettes, and they’d talk and talk.”

One of the things Frank and Jack had in common: the prodigious amount of cosmic goodness that extruded from their respective noggins was not the result of drugs; they both enjoyed tobaccy but only the unwacky. We had other stuff to discuss that evening, so I made Ahmet promise to reconnect ASAP to spill the magic beans on this egregiously undocumented duo. And he kept his promise.

Ahmet, one of four Zappa kids, the other three being Moon Unit (the oldest), Dweezil (second oldest), and Diva (youngest), was always into superheroes his entire life.

“I loved Spider-man; it’s the jam,” gushed Ahmet. “My dad loved comics and was the first to advertise rock n’ roll in comics, for We’re Only In It For The Money [in Fantastic Four #72, 1968, Natch!]. My mother made Dweezil and I costumes of Spider-Man and The Mighty Thor.”
The son of a gregarious rock star, Ahmet grew up meeting every celebrity musician under the sun. But it wasn’t a rocker who gave Ahmet that first feeling of being around greatness. “I was not starstruck at all by rock stars because music is its own language and my father spoke it, so we spoke it,” Ahmet explains matter-of-factly. “This totally demystified the fame or the celebrity. There was no currency for ‘oooh, that guy sold a million records, we just cared about good music. One of the most significant moments in my life is when my dad said, ‘meet Jack, he’s the guy who created all those superheroes you love.’ That blew my little mind. I thought it was awesome and weird that my dad had this friendship with this guy. It was like meeting like a real magician!”

And Jack brought some presents for the kids, but oddly, they weren’t comics. “Actually, he first came over with these Mr. Men books, you know Mr. Tickle, Mr. Impossible… I thought they were fantastic, and was like ‘did you do these too?’ Weird. Dunno why he brought those instead of his own books, but later, of course, he wound up giving us comics too. Jack gave me this Silver Surfer book. I didn’t know what to make of this silver dude on a surfboard; it didn’t make any sense but, he was super cool. This was around the time Empire came out and was HUGE [1981 –ed.], and I remember Jack confided in Frank that he felt like the stories he created helped shape the Star Wars saga, that he saw direct parallels between his characters and the movie’s story arcs.”

Of all rock stars in the world, Zappa, famously an outspoken champion of free speech and artist’s rights, was the ultimate sympathetic ear.

“He told my dad stuff like, ‘Darth Vader was Doctor Doom and the Force is the Source’ and that George Lucas ripped him off. Now this you may not know, and I was only a kid, but I remember learning at the dinner table that my dad was asked to write the music for Star Wars; he turned it down, he said he wasn’t interested. That would’ve been really strange, the lives of us Star Wars fans woulda taken a different turn and that whole score woulda sounded like Tatooine Cantina music.”

Two powerful worlds that happened to collide one special night in 1981. A friendship began and a mutual bond was formed. These two titans are now sadly no longer with us, but their spirit lives on now through their family keeping tradition alive.

The only regret, Royal Flush readers, is that we’ll never get to visit the parallel universe where Frank Zappa actually got to score Star Wars. The place called the Fourth World. ?

Zappa on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc

Frank Zappa on CNN's Crossfire in 1986. Zappa's the man!

Frank Zappa Explains Why things Today Suck

Thanks to Retroland.com for the following...

See the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0&eurl=http://www.cartoonbrew.com/

“One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were... Next thing you know [the hip young executive has] got his feet on the desk and he’s saying, ‘Well we can’t take a chance on this because that’s not what the kids really want and I know.’ And they got that attitude. And the day you get rid of that attitude and get back to ‘Who knows. Take a chance.’ That entrepreneurial spirit where even if you don’t like or understand what the record is that’s coming in the door, the person who is in the executive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste of the entire population.”