"Burning Wheel" became my favorite song in the whole world about ten minutes ago.
"Burning Wheel" doesn't have anything to do with rocks, but I'm not going to let that stop me from filling up this post with pictures of rocks.
In case you're wondering, half of these pictures were taken in Acadia National Park in Maine, while the other half were taken in the Wildcat Park chert glades just outside Joplin, Missouri.
Do I know which are which? No, I don't. (Any more stupid questions?)
"Burning Wheel" was released on Primal Scream's 1997 album, Vanishing Point. The group's lead singer, Bobby Gillespie, has described the album as "an anarcho-syndicalist speed-freak road-movie record."
That makes sense because the album was inspired by the 1971 movie of the same name, which can fairly be described as an anarcho-syndicalist speed-freak road movie.
You can click here to read a 2 or 3 lines post that featured another song from the Vanishing Point album and discussed the Vanishing Point movie in considerable detail.
Today's featured song, "Kowalski," is named after the hero (antihero?) of the 1971 cult movie Vanishing Point, which is also the name of the 1997 album that "Kowalski" was released on.
Primal Scream's frontman, Bobby Gillespie, has said that he loves Vanishing Point (which hit theaters when Gillespie was eight years old). But he didn't think that the movie's soundtrack fit its mood nearly as well as Primal Scream's album of the same name:
The music in the film is hippy music, so we thought, "Why not record some music that really reflects the mood of the film?" It's always been a favorite of the band, we love the air of paranoia and speed- freak righteousness. . . . I think our music suits it perfectly because it's so f*cking heavy. It's the heaviest record we've done.
I remember seeing Vanishing Point when I was in college. I guess I would describe it as half car-chase movie and half hippie-drug trip movie – sort of Bullitt-meets-Easy Rider, but about a hundred times better than Easy Rider.
Here's the Vanishing Point trailer:
To the extent that Vanishing Point has a plot, it's about a car-delivery-service driver (Kowalski – no first name) who is assigned to drive a new Dodge Challenger R/T 440 from Denver to San Francisco.
Kowalski, who's portrayed by Barry Newman, arrives in Denver late on a Friday night. The car is due in San Francisco on Monday. Given that the distance he has to cover is just over 1200 miles, all on interstate highways, that doesn't sound like much of a challenge.
Kowalski's Dodge Challenger
But Kowalski wants to drop the car off by 3 PM the next day. That time frame requires him to average 75 mph. (That's much tougher, of course, but hardly impossible.)
Why is Kowalski in such a hurry? He never offers a reason, and I suspect there isn't a real one. Kowalski – a Vietnam vet and ex-cop (he stopped his partner from raping a woman and was shunned by his fellow officers as a result) whose girlfriend died in a surfing accident – is either an adrenaline junkie, or he's a guy who simply doesn't like to be told what to do . . . or both.
Barry Newman (Kowalski)
Kowalski's first stop is a biker bar, where he loads up on amphetamines. Speeding (literally and figuratively) across Colorado, he is pursued by two motorcycle cops. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon he's being chased by dozens of police from several states.
Kowalski gets help from "Super Soul," a blind black DJ at a small radio station. (Super Soul is played by Cleavon Little, who would go on to star in Blazing Saddles a couple of years later).
Cleavon Little (Super Soul)
Super Soul, who monitors police-band communications and broadcasts hints as to how Kowalski can elude the posse that's on his tail, tells his listeners that Kowalski is "the last beautiful free soul on this planet":
There goes the Challenger being chased by the blue, blue, meanies on wheels . . . the last American hero, the electric centaur, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are getting closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soulmobile. Yeah baby, they're about to strike! They're gonna get him, smash him!
Kowalski runs into some interesting characters along the way – most notably an old prospector who catches snakes and sells them to Pentecostal preachers for use in their church services, a couple of gun-toting gay hitchhikers who try to rob him, and (best of all!) a nude, motorcycle-riding hippie chick.
After a particularly narrow escape, you begin to think that Kowalski might break through the law-enforcement cordon that surrounds him. But California police park two bulldozers across the highway Kowalski is speeding along, with blades lowered.
Kowalski seems to see the roadblock before it's too late to stop, but chooses to drive right into the bulldozers at high speed – I'm guessing Mach 1.2 or so:
(Cue the fiery explosion . . . fade to black . . . roll the closing credits.)
Vanishing Point is one of my favorite guilty-pleasure movies. I hope you're not worrying too much about what the point of the movie is, because I'm not sure there really is one.
To me, it's about a man who didn't fit in – a loner who was too noble for this sinful world.
Adios, Kowalski!
So Kowalski strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage and then drove his 440-cubic inch Dodge challenger into two parked bulldozers. After the resulting explosion, Kowalski was heard no more.
Vanishing Point is full of sound and fury, and may very well signify nothing. But is that the movie's fault? Or is that just the way of the world?
We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. . . . And we want to get loaded!
In 1912, a small-town newspaper reported that a 64-year-old woman named Martha Carliss was marrying for the third time:
That Mrs. Martha Carliss evidently believes in peace and happiness in wedlock and that she probably thinks third time's a charm is shown by the fact that she was granted a license today to marry Andrew W. Mowery.
The belief that you are more likely to be successful the third time you try to do something is very old.
The Scottish group Primal Scream is a believer in the "Third time's a charm" proverb. After releasing two albums that were didn't sell well and were poorly reviewed to boot, the band's third effort was a commercial and critical success.
The Screamadelica cover
Screamadelica sounded nothing like Primal Scream's first two albums. The group had gotten caught up in London's late-eighties "acid house" electronic dance music scene, attending raves and consuming drugs like the Coneheads consumed beer -- in mass quantities.
An interview with the band that appeared in 1991, the year Screamadelica was released, opens with these lines: "Ecstasy, amphetamines, magic mushrooms, cocaine and hash. And that's just for starters. Indie dance pioneers Primal Scream make no secret of it, they like their drugs."
The band's frontman, Bobby Gillespie, said later, "I always remember being quite fascinated by [the acid house scene] but not quite getting it."
Bobby Gillespie with supermodel Kate Moss – just friends?
"Loaded" is actually a remix of "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have" from Primal Scream's second album. Andrew Weatherall, who was a DJ at London's Shoom club, deconstructed that track, adding a drum loop from an Italian bootleg of Edie Brickell's "What I Am," an Andie MacDowell line from the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and – most significantly – a Peter Fonda soliloquy from Roger Corman's 1966 biker movie, The Wild Angels.
In that movie, Fonda plays "Heavenly Blues," the president of a fictional Hell's Angels chapter. His best friend, who is called "the Loser" (and is portrayed by Bruce Dern), is shot and killed by police, and the Angels arrange for him to have a church funeral in his hometown. After Blues interrupts the minister's funeral sermon, the minister asks him a question:
Minister: Tell me. Just what is it that you want to do?
Blues: We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. . . . We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man. And we want to get loaded! And we want to have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a good time. We're gonna have a party!
That speech obviously hit home with Primal Scream. In a 1991 interview, Bobby Gillespie said something that reflected a very similar philosophy:
See the whole point of Primal Scream is that we want everybody in the audience to get their rocks off. And for us to get our own rocks off in the process. So everybody gets their rocks off and feels high. . . . That’s the whole point of it. To get your rocks off. You should print that. We wanna get our rocks off and we want the audience to get their rocks off.
Back to The Wild Angels. After Fonda says, "We're gonna have a party," he and his fellow Hell's Angels do exactly that. (You betcha!)
First, the Angels remove the Loser's body from his casket (which is draped with a Nazi flag), sit him up and place a joint in his mouth. Then they knock the minister out and put him in the casket. Two Angels drug the Loser’s grieving widow (played by Bruce Dern's real-life wife, Diane Ladd) and rape her, while Blues (whose girlfriend Mike is portrayed by Nancy Sinatra) is having sex with another woman.
Henry Fonda's son and Frank Sinatra's daughter in The Wild Angels
(Man oh man . . . they don't make movies like they used to!)
The screenplay for The Wild Angels was credited to Charles Griffith, who wrote the screenplays for many other Roger Corman films, including The Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000. But Corman didn't like what Griffith came up with.
Corman had hired novice writer-director Peter Bogdanovich (who is best known as the Academy Award-nominated director of The Last Picture Show) to write a script for an adventure movie in the mold of Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge on the River Kwai, "only cheap." He pulled Bogdanovich off that project and paid him $300 to rewrite Griffith's screenplay for The Wild Angels.
Bogdanovich on the set of The Last Picture Show
The Wild Angels, which cost only $360,000 to make but was the 16th-highest grossing movie of 1966, inspired a spate of other biker movies, including The Glory Stompers (which starred Dennis Hopper) and The Born Losers (which featured Tom Laughlin as the "Billy Jack" character before the Billy Jack movie was made).
The story goes that Fonda conceived of the most famous biker movie of them all, Easy Rider, when he was autographing a movie still from The Wild Angels.
George Chakiris in West Side Story
Fonda was originally cast in the second-fiddle role of Loser in The Wild Angels. But Corman's original choice to play Blues, West Side Story star George Chakiris, couldn't ride a motorcycle.
If George Chakiris had been able to ride a motorcycle, would he have been cast as Dennis Hopper's compatriot in Easy Rider instead of Fonda?
Here's the album version of "Loaded," which has been called the "Sympathy for the Devil" of the ecstasy generation:
I'm not complaining, but I'd like you to shake it to the north and shake it to the south as well. Maybe even shake it a little to the southwest – better yet, to the west-southwest.
Oh yes . . . THAT'S the spot, honey . . . shake it right there! That's perfect!
Speaking of Meg "When Harry Met Sally" Ryan (who one critic called "the current soul of romantic comedy" in 1995), what has she been up to lately?
In 2007, the perky Ms. Ryan starred in an independent film titled In the Land Of Women, which she described as "kind of like The Graduate, but with cancer." That's because she played a mother with breast cancer who gets romantically involved with her neighbor's much younger grandson (who's a soft-core porn writer).
A patriotic Meg Ryan
In 2008, Meg starred with William H. Macy in a picture called The Deal, a satirical comedy about a movie producer who takes a PBS-style screenplay about 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and turns it into an espionage thriller titled Ben Disraeli: Freedom Fighter. The reviewer for Variety said that the audience "has nothing to cling to but the horndog flirtation between mismatched leads William H. Macy and Meg Ryan – hardly ideal ingredients for mainstream success." (You can say that again.)
The Deal went straight to DVD, as did the "action comedy" movie, My Mom's New Boyfriend, which was also released in 2008. One critic called it "an unmitigated disaster virtually from its opening frames.
Meg Ryan in high school
Meg Ryan's last film of 2008 was a remake of the 1939 classic, The Women. Richard Schickel of Time magazine said it was "one of the worst movies I've ever seen."
In 2009, Meg starred in the indie comedy, Serious Moonlight, which was directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Cheryl Hines. (Faithful readers of 2 or 3 lines will remember that Ms. Hines was accused of flaunting her extramarital relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to the point that Kennedy's wife committed suicide by hanging herself. Click here to read the whole sordid tale.)
According to Wikipedia, in that movie Ryan portrayed "a high-powered female attorney who learns that her husband . . . is about to leave their troubled marriage, and decides to hold him captive by duct-taping him to a toilet." (That doesn't sound familiar – I must have missed it.)
Since then . . . well, since then she hasn't had a single movie released.
Meg with beau John Cougar Mellencamp
Ob the bright side, it appears that Meg and former boyfriend John Cougar Mellencamp, who broke up last summer, have gotten back together. Yay!
Primal Scream is a Scottish rock band originally formed in 1982. (By the way, Wikipedia says Primal Scream "are" a Scottish rock band. Really?) The band started out playing jangly indie pop, then switched to electronica/acid house dance music.
Primal Scream circa 2000
In 1994, they released Give Out But Don't Give Up, which sounds a little like the Stones' Exile On Main Street. Today's featured song, "Jailbird," which was the first track on that album, sounds a little like Cracker, but the lyrics certainly remind you of Stones songs like "Stray Cat Blues" and "Monkey Man."
Meg loves the Stones, too!
Here are the first two verses:
Scratchin' like a tom cat
Got a monkey on my back
I'm gonna push and pull, and howl like a wolf
And drive my Cadillac
I've got medication, honey
I've got wings to fly
I've got horse hoof tea to buzz you like a bee
Gonna blind the evil eye
Here's the chorus:
I'm yours, you're mine
Gimme more of that jailbird pie
I'm yours, you're mine
Gimme more of that jailbird pie
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