Category Archives: Essays

Longer musings on more general topics.

How Cool Is Paul McCartney?

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Dan Wiencek

It was a moment of pop-culture surrealism worthy of The Simpsons: Paul McCartney, schmoozing backstage at the MTV awards, innocently picks up a baguette and bites into it. His front tooth suddenly shoots out of his mouth, and while it doesn’t land into anyone’s Ketel One–and-cranberry, those looking on are flabbergasted enough. Yes, the gap-toothed McCartney confesses: the Cute Beatle wears a fake tooth. The reason? A motorbike accident more than thirty years ago, in which a stoned McCartney flipped over his handlebars and fell face-first into a dirt path. Though the accident had been public knowledge at the time, McCartney kept the full extent of his injuries hidden for more than three decades, the best-kept secret in all of Beatledom.

Somehow it tells you so much about Paul McCartney: the need to present a sunny, all’s-well face to the world; the juvenile streak that manifests so often in his music (even John knew to stay away from dangerous machinery when he was stoned); and most importantly, the essential mystery that has been hiding in the public’s plain sight ever since the Beatles first came to the consciousness of a generation. McCartney was the smiling, puppy-eyed charmer, and he adopted that characterization so expertly that few people to this day have bothered to look past it. They see a shallow media persona and assume it hides a shallow man, and they’re wrong.

It was not always so. Anyone involved in London’s artistic and cultural ferment of the mid-sixties (which John Lennon largely wasn’t, preferring to shuttle his friends out to Weybridge rather than mix it up at nightclubs) knew McCartney as a key figure, popular among the cognoscenti for his intelligence, curiosity, and openness to new ideas. Naturally his cultural pursuits weren’t allowed to infringe on his favored pastimes of getting high and sleeping with women, yet he still found time to help launch London’s first countercultural newspaper and bookstore, talk movies with Michaelangelo Antonioni, collect the work of surrealist painter Rene Magritte years before anyone else thought it worthwhile, be seen with one of London’s most beautiful and talented actresses, and — oh yeah. And write all those songs.

The greatness of McCartney’s songwriting is so self-evident as to be beyond dispute. It need only be pointed out that his work is far less simplistic than is often claimed. “When I’m Sixty-Four” may be a light-hearted toe-tapper, but the fear of aging lying beneath its charming façade can ambush an unwary listener (“indicate precisely what you mean to say/Your’s sincerely, ‘Wasting Away’”). “You Never Give Me Your Money” is a heartbreaking confession of the Beatles’ decaying carmaraderie, simultaneously recriminatory and celebratory; I’ll take its stunningly versatile four minutes over Lennon’s chest-thumpingly obvious “God” any day, thank you. And “Penny Lane,” arguably his finest single achievement, is a joyful, smutty, kaleidoscopic remembrance of childhood every bit as mind-blowing as its more lauded companion piece, Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields.” (Spend a half-hour sometime pondering the nurse who “feels as if she’s in a play” but “is anyway.” Your head may explode.)

So how, despite his undeniable achievements, has McCartney acquired his reputation as a lightweight, middlebrow balladeer, cuddly and unthreatening? Truth be told, the fault is mostly his, and goes beyond the admittedly depressing decline in the quality of his work around the mid- to late seventies. The birth of Safe Paul McCartney can be traced to the summer of 1967, when Rebellious, Intellectual Paul McCartney admitted to a BBC reporter that he had not only taken LSD (the first pop star to make such an admission), but found the experience beneficial, even a little fun. The establishment came down swiftly and mercilessly, deriding him as an “irresponsible idiot” and generally making life difficult for every drug-taking pop star from then on. While John Lennon never lost his taste for outrageous remarks, McCartney has made nary an offensive peep since, and by the mid-eighties was confessing in interviews that his own family was “a lot like” that depicted on The Cosby Show. Thus the perception of Paul McCartney as an ordinary family man, a perception that has preserved his privacy while chopping away at his artistic reputation.

Happily, there are signs that McCartney is finally coming out of the woods and achieving parity with his martyred ex-partner. A pair of studio albums reminded the public of both his songwriting prowess (Flaming Pie) and his rock n’ roll pedigree (Run Devil Run); a new biography called Many Years From Now finally gave him due credit for his role in advancing the Beatles’ art; and the tragic death of his wife Linda, as sincere and humble a celebrity’s wife as any you’d hope to meet, reminded the media that a life of simple decency was nothing to sneer at. Of course there will always be naysayers; Yoko Ono, appalled at what she regarded as a slur on her late husband’s memory, shriekingly attacked Many Years From Now as a compendium of lies, claiming McCartney was merely “Saglieri to John’s Mozart” and that McCartney made little contribution to the Beatles other than insuring they all turned up on time. Her remarks, in their utter falsity and paranoia, make her pitiable. Lennon at his angriest never claimed to be the sole genius behind the Beatles. And when, years later in America, he would weep listening to “My Love” or gently croon “Here There and Everywhere” to Yoko from their white grand piano, he demonstrated something that his widow is still too blinded by jealousy to appreciate: that a song that insinuates itself into your heart is never simple, and never easy. The seeming effortlessness comes from genius, know-how, hard work, and an emotional generosity that’s impossible to feign. May we all live to see them receive the respect they deserve.

Originally published on Pop-Culture-Corn around ’99 or so.

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I Still Kinda Like It When a Plan Comes Together

Posted on July 17, 2002 by Dan Wiencek

There’s nothing like revisiting a TV show from your youth to discover exactly how much you’ve grown up in the intervening years. (Or how grown up you already were, if you’re one of the fortunate ones.) I have no idea who that child was who took such pleasure in the Dukes of Hazzard, whose heart used to leap like a deer at the sound of “Dixie” played on a car horn; the good-ol’-boy-hating adult of today wants nothing to do with him. And I strongly suspect the kid who willingly sat through those episodes of Silver Spoons was, in fact, an alien doppleganger sent to infiltrate Earth society by posing as a witless twelve year-old whose role models were dorks. Maybe he was just a kid too lazy to get off his ass and change the channel.

Whoever those strange alternate selves turn out to be, I do feel a strong kinship to the kid who watched The A-Team. I was thrown back into his presence on the occasion of TV Land’s A-Team Fandemonium Marathon: 48 hours of dummy bullets, exploding cars, and men soaring balletically through the air. Not to mention lousy acting, weak puns, preposterous celebrity cameos, and enough specimens of Geniune Eighties Hair to start a museum. It’s probably not a good idea to watch anything constantly for two straight days, and sitting in front of The A-Team for more than a few hours inflames the human demand for plausibility into a rage-fueled geyser. “How can Hannibal Smith possibly have an acting career when he’s a wanted fugitive?” you might find yourself demanding of your roommate, or girlfriend, or cat, or the wall. “Who actually thinks Face is that good-looking? How could any doctor with brains think that Murdock is really crazy? How many stupid machines are they going to build out of discarded freezer parts or old wheelbarrows? And why the fuck doesn’t anyone ever get killed?”

But why stop at rampant implausibility when you can add repitition? All tv shows rely on formula to a certain extent, but The A-Team is in a league—a sport—all its own. It established a formula in its first few episodes and stuck to it so rigidly one could easily imagine a software program capable of generating A-Team stories. (Oh look—someone already has.) And although every A-Team fan knows the routine, and since you probably wouldn’t be reading this if reams of gunplay and cheesy jokes aren’t your cup of tea, we nevertheless must revisit, briefly, the well-oiled engine that was an A-Team story.

We begin with the Innocents in Trouble: small-time grocers or farmers or cabdrivers just trying to make an Honest Living, being steadily screwed to the wall by the Evil Bastard and his henchmen, who hold the town in an iron grip of fear. The Innocents then contact the A-Team, represented by one of Col. John “Hannibal” Smith’s array of interchangeable disguises; the team springs Cpt. H.M. “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock out of the local psych ward, dopes Sgt. Bosco “B.A.” Baracus into la-la land (the big lug is scared to fly—ain’t that precious?), and flies to their destination. Hannibal thereupon concocts a plan that invariably requires Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck to bully a halfwitted local merchant out of a truckload of dynamite or a crate of fissionable plutonium. At some point, the team will be called upon to assemble some Rube Goldbergian device (like, say, a deisel-powered lettuce cannon—see below), or refurbish a derelict 30-foot yacht, always in a matter of minutes and always to the crisp punctuation of the A-Team’s martial theme music. There may be a setback or two, necessitating an elaborate and thoroughly improbable escape from the Evil Bastard’s clutches, but nobody really gets hurt, and by the end Hannibal is there lighting a cigar, grinning and cackling, “I love it when a plan comes together!”

Do I protest too much? Yes, but only to point out how much The A-Team overcomes in weaving its peculiarly addictive spell. Stick with the show a little longer (say around eight hours or more—I don’t recommend this to anyone with a life) and you develop affection for the show’s silliness and Xerox-like predictability; they’re precisely what make it so fun. An episode of The A-Team is like a Tex Avery cartoon in which the characters fire machine guns and lob grenades instead of pound each other with mallets, and the more idiotic things get, the more pleased the show seems to be with itself. When the team overcomes a group of shotgun-wielding thugs with the aforementioned homemade lettuce cannon, the actors don’t bother attempting a seriousness the scene obviously doesn’t deserve; instead they grin as though they were having the time of their lives. Who wouldn’t?

At the heart of The A-Team, and the idea that still makes it a pleasure to watch, is what the characters call being on the jazz. When you’re on the jazz, nothing can hurt you and you know it—you’re just too damn smart, good-looking, and cool to die, especially when the people out to get you are such idiots. It’s the mindset that leads people to become skydiving instructors or to climb active volcanoes, and while everyone in the A-Team has it, its leader, “Hannibal” Smith, is addicted to it. Intelligent, cunning, and unshakeably convinced of his own invulnerability, Hannibal is one of those talented folks both blessed and cursed to work amongst people who are, almost to a man, complete morons. The worst thing about his job is that it isn’t difficult enough. He’s not happy merely to defeat his opponents; he has to make it look easy, like the kid with the football who stops just a foot from the endzone, seemingly unaware of everyone else hurtling towards him at breakneck speed even as he takes that last lazy step to a touchdown. Hannibal’s cool is damn near unshakeable, and in perfect keeping with the program’s bloodless approach to mayhem; far from being unrealistic, The A-Team is pretty close to how someone like Hannibal would perceive the world. In short, he’s one seriously looney motherfucker, a charming, cocky rogue with a psychotic thirst for violence and danger, like a cross between Dirty Harry and Bugs Bunny. And people thought Murdock was the crazy one.

Like all shows so dependent on formula—Batman comes to mind—The A-Team quickly started to get old, and soon the producers were taking drastic measures to shake things up.
The plots became ridiculous even by The A-Team’s liberal standards, celebrity guests started popping up as themselves (among them Hulk Hogan, Rick James, Joe Namath, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and Boy George—Boy fucking George) and, in the last season, the program’s premise was completely rewritten: the team was captured by the government and forced to work off its debt to society, not by washing dishes, but by completing missions for smug CIA spook Hunt Stockwell (Robert Vaughan). The team was also saddled with a hideous new character in the person of gibbering wiseass Frankie Santana, a special effects whiz who seemed to have wandered in from a failed sitcom. But the worst failure of The A-Team’s ignoble final season is that, having suffered the humiliation of capture and defeat, Hannibal was never the same. His invincibility was shattered; forced to come and go as Stockwell pleased, he became just another guy stuck working for a prick boss. The fun was gone, and nobody mentioned being on the jazz anymore.

Still, it’s not as though The A-Team didn’t earn the considerable success it enjoyed in its first run. Few shows ever reach such meteoric popularity so quickly, and it’s a testament to the show’s creative team that they got so much right on the first try. From the inspired lunacy of Dwight Schultz as Murdock to the self-effacing Dirk Benedict as the kvetchy Face; from the perfectly overblown Mr. T as, well, himself really, to old Hollywood vet George Peppard, who knew when to just let go and enjoy himself, The A-Team presented an ideal balance of acting and writing from the very start. So specific a mix guaranteed eventual viewer burnout, and tinkering with it could only make it worse. The show’s very success—both popular and artistic—was the biggest factor in its decline.

Who would’ve suspected that The A-Team’s greatest failing was that it was too good?

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Revolutionary Fart Jokes: George Carlin

Posted on June 26, 2001 by Dan Wiencek

In September 1970, a famous comedian in a suit and tie went onstage at the Frontier hotel in Vegas and, before a drunk, peevish audience of golfers and conventioneers, inaugurated a revolution in stand-up comedy—and got himself fired.

“I don’t say shit,” the comedian told the crowd. “I’ll smoke a little of it, but I won’t say it.” As pivotal moments in popular entertainment go, it may not quite rank with Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965. But in a town whose comedic taste ran to the it’s-all-in-fun nouveau-minstrelsy of Sinatra and the Rat Pack, to out yourself as a foul-mouthed dope smoker was tantamount to throwing a drink in the Chairman’s face. For George Carlin, it was a shot across the mainstream’s bow. Sick of pandering to the prejudices of an intolerant white middle class, he was ready to risk his livelihood to become the first stand-up of the Woodstock generation.

The idea would have seemed foolhardy even a few years earlier. Occasional mavericks like Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory notwithstanding, the career of a successful comedian followed a predictable, orderly path: from radio to nightclubs to talk shows to theaters until, with luck, the ultimate reward of movies. Carlin ascended this pyramid as a mainstream comic, and, incredibly, grew a beard and did it all over again. He forced the establishment to re-accept him on his own terms, in the process expanding the very idea of what “mainstream” comedy could be. Gone were the square routines about game shows and TV commercials. In their place came openly drug-flavored ruminations about language, culture, and religion that make up the most familiar body of work of any comic of the last forty years.

Born in 1937 and raised in the then-Irish neighborhood of Morningside Heights, George Carlin had no aspirations to be a revolutionary; his chief aim was to avoid getting his ass kicked. The son of a working mother and an absent father, he honed his verbal gifts on the streets of the Bronx, where a well-timed remark might be all that saved him from a beating by the gang from up the block. Quitting high school to pursue full-time his dream of becoming the next Danny Kaye, he landed his first radio job at nineteen, and soon had worked up a comedy double act with a newsman colleague, Jack Burns. “Burns and Carlin” flirted with edgier, more socially conscious material before soon going their separate ways, but Carlin on his own was too ambitious to risk derailing a promising career. He spent the latter half of the sixties working a hard grind of talk shows, B-movies, and seedy middle-class drinking holes, increasingly aware he had nothing in common with his audiences, and that his own act was becoming an embarrassment to him.

When he finally hoisted his freak flag in 1970, he had the advantages of a well-known name and an ear for the nuances of voice and language that let him mimic everything from a hyperactive AM deejay to a first-generation Irish barfly. Beyond that was the accident of fate that found him in his mid-thirties at a time when, as he put it, “the whole country seems to be either 18 or 50.” Too young to mourn the passing of the social order the sixties had demolished, yet too practical to be swept up by the utopian optimism of the youth movement, he straddled the generation gap with unrivaled ease. He could deconstruct the absurdities of contemporary speech as easily as hit you with a killer fart joke—and in a single routine, too.

This process survives today in the six albums Carlin recorded for Little David records, which contain virtually all of the material for which he remains famous: “Baseball and Football,” “Class Clown,” “God” and, most famously, “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” (“shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits”–all he could think of in one sitting). He invented so-called “observational comedy” with a single remark: “Anything we all do–and never talk about–is funny.” His records, like Richard Pryor’s, became valued contraband among underage listeners, prized as highly as joints or Playboys and passed from friend to friend with a ritualistic fervor Jon Stewart likens to a rite of passage.

Carlin’s invention began to flag at around the end of the seventies, and by the start of Reagan’s second term drug use and ill health had sapped most of the vitality from his act. As comics like Steve Martin and Robin Williams became the new innovators in stand-up, the public image of Carlin froze into a caricature of the aging hippie, churning out pothead wisecracks (“Know how you can tell when a moth farts? He flies in a straight line.”) for audiences as old and out of it as he was. The image was not without truth—for a time.

For in the early nineties Carlin, who had already proved American lives could have a second act, reinvented himself again, this time as a raging, misanthropic prophet of doom, whose comic distance from life had grown so vast it literally encompassed the entire cosmos. Gone were the stoner’s winsome, “D’ya ever notice—?” wonderings; in their place, a pissed-off old man who paced the stage like a penned lion, unable to hide his contempt for a frightened culture eager to trade its freedoms for the illusory comforts of euphemism and “sneakers with lights in them.” In the world of comedy, where groundbreaking talents succumb to either early death (Bruce, Sam Kinison), infirmity (Pryor), or embarrassing movie careers (Williams), such a transformation is unprecedented. Perhaps it’s not so outrageous to compare Carlin to Dylan, another artist who’s found renewed vigor among the disappointments of growing old. Both forever expanded the vocabulary of their medium, and both offer permanent warning against ever dismissing an artist as “past his prime”–though Dylan, it must be said, has yet to come up with a really good fart joke.

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