Bob Dylan at the State Theater, Cleveland, Ohio, November 12, 2014

Signs in the lobby of the State Theater reminded patrons that Bob Dylan and his band would take the stage promptly at 8:00 p.m., and they did with a predictable reaction. Once the house lights were dimmed and we could see several shadowy figures move to their positions on stage, the applause, mixed with shouts of “I love you, Bobby,” were almost deafening. Dylan is in what I call the “later Elvis” period of his career. Like Elvis, Dylan merely has to make an entrance to bring the crowd to its feet, and while Elvis could bring the house down with nothing more than a sluggish shake of a leg, Dylan does it blowing on his signature harmonica. It did not matter that all but a handful of songs were unrecognizable to anyone but fans of his most recent albums. It did not matter that he talks his songs more than he sings. He’s still the best show in town.

Wearing a white hat, a long white scarf, and a dark duster that might have come from the wardrobe department of an Italian western, Dylan opened the show standing at center stage, blasting out “Things Have Changed,” his Oscar winning song from the 2000 film, Wonder Boys. The rest of the night found him alternating between that position and the piano. The band crackled and, unlike the last Dylan show I attended at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the stage was well-lit. You could see the guy as well as hear him. He even spoke for a change, not to introduce the musicians (he never did), but to alert the audience that there would be a 15-minute intermission.

Although the highlights were when Dylan performed the undisputed classics in his vast catalogue (“She Belongs to Me,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and the first encore, “Blowin’ in the Wind”), my ears gained a greater appreciation for some of those newer, less familiar songs thanks to his impassioned delivery. This was no aging legend giving a perfunctory reading of his “hits” for the benefit of an undiscriminating audience, but an artist who is still inspired or can sure make you feel that he is. “Long and Wasted Years,” with its distinctive guitar riff, was especially impressive. And the closer, a cover of an old Sinatra ballad called “Stay with Me,” gave the audience a preview of his upcoming album of standards, Shadows in the Night. If the album is anything like his performance of this song, it will be worth the wait.

Then, cloaked in those shadows, Dylan and his band headed for another joint. It was a memorable night, one that will stay with me until my own long and wasted years are complete.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Diamond Jim

There was a police car in front of a bar that I passed on my way home one recent night. There was also a police officer standing outside. As I walked past, he asked me where I was coming from.

“The library and the store,” I said.

I had two bags from the latter in my left hand, and I gently waved them as proof of my previous whereabouts. The officer seemed to find that satisfactory and he asked no further questions. I continued on my way, but wondered what motive he had for quizzing me. Had he received a report about suspicious behavior in the area? Had someone been assaulted or robbed in the bar?

It makes me a little nervous to be questioned by a police officer, no matter how pleasant his demeanor. This cop was agreeable enough, but what if my answer had not satisfied him? What if he needed one more arrest to meet his quota for the night? What if a drunken whore, having failed to incite the sexual interest of a male patron at the bar, wanted revenge against the entire male species and had falsely accused me of fondling whatever she wanted to have fondled?

I was falsely accused before.

It was the summer of 1971, and as I and two companions returned from downtown Cleveland on foot by way of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, we noticed two teenagers running in the opposite direction. We paid them no mind until we reached the center of the bridge, where a well-dressed man who reminded me of actor Harold J. Stone was loitering, smoking a fat cigar. I don’t remember if the police were already present or if they arrived later, but the man who would identify himself as Diamond Jim, the proprietor of a nightclub by that name in the Flats, soon accused me of having thrown a muffler over the bridge on to his Cadillac parked below. Of course, I didn’t do it, and neither did my two companions. Suddenly, I realized why those two kids we saw earlier had been running. One or both of them had done the dirty deed.

Diamond Jim didn’t care. His fancy car had been vandalized and he wanted to blame somebody – anybody – and I was the most convenient victim. I was a redhead. My two companions had dark hair and both wore glasses as I did not. I was the easiest to identify. I recall being quite passionate in my defense, but also a smart ass. When the police grilled me, my responses were tainted with anger. There was a question about my mother:

“Is she your real mother?”

“No,” I said, “she’s fake.”

As any viewer of Dragnet, NYPD Blue, or any dozen or so crime shows is aware, the police do not appreciate a smart-ass, especially if he’s only 14-years-old, and I was driven home in a patrol car. My bravado failed me once I got home. I burst into tears the minute I entered my house where my brother was the only one present at the time.

Nothing more came of the incident. The police did not follow up by investigating me further. Years later, however, fate, God, or something caught up with Diamond Jim.
I have to admit I’m a vindictive sort and I remember feeling a certain gratification when reading about Diamond Jim’s death in the newspaper. In 1985, he was remodeling his restaurant before the revitalization that briefly made the Flats, an area of Cleveland previously dominated by steel mills, into a center of nightlife. One day, someone entered Diamond Jim’s shuttered nightclub and forced him to lie down on the bathroom floor. He was then shot, point-blank, in the back of the head. A handyman was also murdered.

And just like that, no more cigars for Diamond Jim, and no more Cadillacs, and no more bearing false witness.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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"A Beautiful Day"

It’s what people like to call a “beautiful day.” There are clouds in the sky, but they’re white and fluffy, magic carpets for the souls of the dead. The sun is bright enough to blind anyone bold enough to stare directly at it, but not quite hot enough to make your skin sizzle.

The fact that such a “beautiful” day brightens other people’s mood only makes mine darker. Somehow, I feel more in tune with the world when the clouds are dark and threatening rain. More than anything else, a warm, sunny day like today seems tailor made for a funeral.

It was on a day very much like today, only twice as gorgeous, that a 12-year-old girl, one of my classmates at St. Procop, an elementary school in Cleveland, Ohio, was laid to rest, as they say, in Calvary Cemetery. It was May 1, 1970. Only a few days before her death, she had spent recess outside in the rain, collecting worms in a plastic bag for use in a science project. I can still see her, wearing a blue jacket, showing the worms to the nun who was angry that she had brought these slimy creatures into our seventh grade classroom (“DON’T! YOU! BRING! THOSE! THINGS! IN! HERE!”). That was a Friday, exactly one week before her funeral. Sometime over the weekend, she became ill with pneumonia, probably caught when she was collecting those worms in the rain.

By Monday, when the entire school assembled in the gymnasium/cafeteria for a tribute to our fat (and mean-as-hell) principal, the girl was probably dead, but the news didn’t reach us until Tuesday morning. As always, I was late for the mass that started every school day. A classmate whispered the news to me, and the priest performing the mass confirmed the sad report when offering a prayer for her from the altar. After mass, the girls in the class gathered outside, rallying around the fat (and mean-as-hell, but not this morning) principal who visited our classroom along with the priest to comfort the dead girl’s classmates.

“Safely Home,” the heartbreaking poem written from the perspective of someone who has just arrived in Heaven, was distributed to each of us, and the principal tried to cheer us up, telling us how lucky this girl was because she no longer had to go to school. No mention was made of the fact that she could no longer breathe, eat, see, think, feel, fall in love, and could never do any of those things ever again, but the comment did bring smiles to a few faces.

Even at that age, a person’s character was revealed in the way they reacted to this tragedy. The two bullies in the class snickered at the solemnity of these sad days and expressed indifference. They would also bow their heads in mock respect when passing her family’s home. A bully is a coward at heart, and one of them later admitted that when the class visited the funeral home, he was afraid to look at the corpse. I did look at the corpse and was appalled at what I saw. The girl’s breasts had been padded and were far too prominent for a 12-year-old. Her jaw jutted out in a way it never had in life, and I remember the grim expression on her face that seemed to suggest she did not go peacefully.

The class attended her funeral that first day of May. The sun was ablaze in the sky, the birds were chirping in the trees, and the humidity made my shirt stick to my skin. Here we were, perspiring with the sun at our backs, watching a 12-year-old girl’s lifeless body lowered into the ground. Summer, the season whose arrival we welcomed like no other, was right around the corner, but this girl would spend it and every summer since under six feet of earth.

Such are the thoughts that a “beautiful day” inspires.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Bob Dylan at E. J. Thomas Hall (April 19, 2013)

Bob Dylan never makes chit-chat on stage and speaks only when introducing his band, but he didn’t even do that at Akron’s E. J. Thomas Hall on Friday night. He brought his hat with him but never wore it. He never cracked a smile the way he did many times last August in Youngstown. Maybe he didn’t feel well or was in a bad mood. It was a good show, but a little flat.

He opened with “Things Have Changed,” an appropriate choice for these troubled times (“If the Bible is right, the world will explode”), then segued into “Love Sick” from 1997’s Time Out of Mind. From the ’80s, there was “Blind Willie McTell” with a bluegrass arrangement that was one of the evening’s highlights, and "What Good Am I?" from 1989's Oh Mercy. The 1970s, the decade of Desire, Street Legal, and Slow Train Coming, were represented only by “Tangled Up in Blue” from Blood on the Tracks. From the ‘60s, he gave us “Visions of Johanna,” with an intro that sounded similar to "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues." The decade with which he will forever be associated was also acknowledged with “All Along the Watchtower,” and the encore, “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

But there was no “Like a Rolling Stone,” nor did we hear “Simple Twist of Fate,” or “Rainy Day Women,” staples of late that were pruned from his set to accommodate several selections from the recent Tempest album. That would be fine if not for the continued inclusion of some less memorable cuts from Modern Times and Together Through Life. The man’s song catalog is equaled only by the Beatles, and it would be great to hear “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Every Grain of Sand,” or something really surprising like “The Mighty Quinn” or “Foot of Pride.”

The stage was always dark, cast in a sleepy blue hue, and Dylan spent most of the time hunkered over an organ in the corner where he seemed to be reading those newer songs from lyric sheets.

I arrived too late to see much of Dawes, the opening act, but I liked what I heard.

It may not have been a great show, but it was a good one. And it was Bob Dylan. That’s enough.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

SETLIST
1. Things Have Changed
2. Love Sick
3. High Water (For Charley Patton)
4. Soon After Midnight
5. Early Roman Kings
6. Tangled Up In Blue
7. Pay In Blood
8. Visions Of Johanna
9. Spirit On The Water
10. Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
11. Blind Willie McTell
12. What Good Am I?
13. Summer Days
14. Scarlet Town
15. All Along The Watchtower
16. Ballad Of A Thin Man

Superman's Kryptonite is in Cleveland

I hate to say it, but my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio sometimes lives up to its unflattering nickname, "The Mistake on the Lake." It's a town where corrupt or simply incompetent politicians make decisions that benefit their bank accounts while an indifferent public let’s them get away with it.

Cleveland successfully lobbied to get the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum built there, but failed to secure the all important induction ceremony which is held in Cleveland only on an occasional basis. Nothing says more about Cleveland’s loser status than its inability or refusal to honor its most famous native son. It’s not Paul Newman. He came from Shaker Heights. It certainly isn’t LeBron James who hails from Akron and whose honors are way out of proportion to his accomplishments and who abandoned Cleveland for Miami.

Who is Cleveland’s most illustrious native son?

It’s not a bird. It’s not a plane. It’s Superman!

Born 75 years ago in the Glenville neighborhood, an area of town now associated with gangs and criminal activity, the visitor from the planet Krypton is known and loved around the globe and his secret identity of Clark Kent is equally famous. He may very well be the most recognizable figure in fiction, and he was created by two Cleveland boys, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Other than Elvis Presley, he may be the most recognizable figure in all of pop culture.

Superman should be prominent all over the city, but once visitors leave Cleveland Hopkins Airport where his image is plastered on posters, they will see no reminders of the Man of Steel’s origins right here in Cleveland, Ohio. The statue that should be standing prominently in Public Square was never erected, and there’s no museum. Since Superman turned the comic book into an industry, a Superman museum could honor all the superheroes that followed in his wake: Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, X-Men, and on and on and on.

It never happened, and Cleveland’s unimaginative track record suggests it never will.

Thank God that Elvis didn’t come from Cleveland. If he had, there would be no Graceland today. In Cleveland, the second most visited house in the United States (after the White House) would have been demolished and replaced with a parking lot.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Nature or Nurture?

On this, my 90th birthday (or so my aching bones suggest), I could think about the many things that went wrong in my life, but instead I'll be positive and think about what went wrong in the lives of others.

Nature or nurture?

Which defines a person's character?

Is it a little of both?

The question comes to mind after spending a couple of hours searching through the court docket at a county web site. Type in a name and you get the criminal history of county residents. So many of the people with whom I crossed paths in my youth, often as classmates in Catholic school, have criminal records, and a number of them have died of something other than natural causes.

Dennis D. (last name withheld to discourage lawsuits from survivors), the ferret-faced loser who tried to sell me some catnip for a dollar back in 1971 (claiming it was marijuana), spent several years in a "correctional facility" after two different drug busts. He was apparently selling drugs in the vicinity of a schoolyard when he was arrested in 1999. He was about to begin another period of incarceration when, on May 31, 2000, "the court being notified of the death of the defendant, and being satisfied of the truth thereof. . ."

Well, it's hard to prosecute a corpse, so Dennis, at age 43, left this earthly realm to face a more fearsome judge in the hereafter. The cause of death was not available but I assume drugs were involved there, too.

Mark M. was the younger brother of a kid who died in 1970 at age 16 after he caught fire while simultaneously smoking a cigarette and siphoning gas from a car. (Brains were not abundant in the “hood” of my youth.) On February 9, 1994, the kid brother, obviously having failed to learn from his older sibling’s mistakes, was facing charges of felonious assault. He, too, avoided time in a correctional facility when "the court being notified of the death of the defendant, and being satisfied of the truth thereof. . ."

Like Dennis D., Mark M. exited this world for one in which the judgment is truly final.

And there are others. . .

Billy H. went up in flames at age 27 in 1982, not long after he was released from a "correctional facility" where he had been sent after inserting a knife into someone’s gut. Upon his release, unemployed and without prospects, he moved into his parents’ garage. On a crisp October night, a fire broke out. The suspicion was that he was either asleep or simply too high to notice the fire, which probably resulted from the careless smoking of an illegal substance. There was a certain poetic justice in his fate. As a teenager, he was notorious for setting off fire alarms. Now, the fire department was notified too late to save him, and he died, of smoke inhalation, at a hospital less than a quarter of a mile from his home.

I became acquainted with Billy H. through John S. who acquired the nickname of Hardy due to his resemblance, in weight only, to Stan Laurel’s on-screen partner. I had known him since third grade when he followed me home from school and pestered me into a relationship that continued through high school. A classic “latch-key kid,” his mother worked and his father was a drunk. The father was also a bully, and John S. was a bully who later became a drunk. It’s as if he was handed a script at birth and followed it faithfully, having been too unimaginative to improvise.

“How come you're not a drunk like me?" he asked when I saw him for the last time two years before he reached his expiration date. "You lived the same way I did."

I never lived the way he did. My "best friend" never realized that when I reluctantly accompanied him in wandering the streets and, later, hung out at the playground where he had found a home and family with the thugs who loitered there, I was merely physically present, an observer in his life. A quiet, self-contained lad, I would have preferred to stay home and read, write, draw, watch movies, etc. I savored my solitude and needed no companion other than my imagination. True, I seemed to have lived the way he did. When in the company of the "friends" of my youth, I did as they did. I drank beer, I occasionally smoked dope, and listened to the music they favored (Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Hawkwind). But I only drank ONE beer, two at most, while my companions downed one after another and encouraged me to do the same.

"He sips his beer," John S. would point out.

"Gulp it!" he'd say before gulping his Colt 45 to demonstrate the technique.

But I didn't "gulp." I defiantly "sipped." Once I got home, I returned to my life which I shared with no one.

John S.’s fate was sealed from the beginning. When I learned he had been found dead at age 35 in a room in the house of a friend (for which he could never pay rent), I was neither surprised nor saddened. I remembered how, following the death of a 12-year-old girl in seventh grade, he would chuckle as he lowered his head in mock solemnity when passing her house. When I once expressed the wish to be cremated when I died, he sneered and asked, “Who’d want your ashes?” Now he was cremated, his ashes dumped, per his request, on the playground that represented his only true home. His death also went unnoticed since no one bothered to pay the fee for a newspaper death notice. What a man sows, surely he shall reap. John S. sowed nothing but misery, and he met a miserable end.

I know little about the home lives of the others who met premature and unnatural ends, but, like me, they all came from working class families and were raised in the foreboding shadow of the Catholic Church. Lord knows I’m far from perfect, but I’ve never been arrested, I’m not a drunk, and I find nothing amusing about the death of a child. Oh, and I’m still alive, if not that lively.

Nature?

Nurture?

A little of both?

Are some people just born assholes?

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Haunting Memories

“Scream . . . no one will hear you! Run . . . and the silent footsteps will follow! . . . for at Hill House the dead are restless!”
Poster copy for The Haunting (1963)

Halloween is right around the corner, and we’re sure to see the predictable lists containing the most frightening movies of all time. In most cases, the titles will also be predictable – The Shining, The Exorcist, Jaws. Less likely to be included, though probably as predictable as the others, is my own choice for the scariest movie: The Haunting, the 1963 original (a more gruesome and less imaginative remake appeared in 1999) based on Shirley Jackson’s novel. Movies about things that go bump in the night rarely remain scary on repeat viewings since you can anticipate where those bumps will be, but though The Haunting holds few surprises for me now, it remains the best ghost story ever put on film. From a journal entry dated July 17, 1990, here are some rather persoanl memories of that film:

When paging through Stephen King’s Dance Macabre, I was pleased to find so much space devoted to Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson also wrote “The Lottery,” the classic short story that has probably been anthologized more than any other horror tale. The Haunting of Hill House is a great book, and few films are as frightening as the 1963 black-and-white classic released under the abbreviated title, The Haunting.

Directed by Robert Wise following his Oscar win for 1961's West Side Story, this adaptation of Jackson’s story puts most subsequent ghost stories to shame. There are no white sheets floating through the hallways, no monsters, and no rotting corpses rising from the floorboards as there were in 1982's Poltergeist, but that later film can’t hold a candle to The Haunting which relies on subtlety and suggestion for its horror and does so more effectively than any other film I’ve seen.

Director Wise, best known for putting the Jets and Sharks through their paces and for bringing the hills alive to The Sound of Music, was no newcomer to the horror genre. His debut as a director came with Val Lewton’s 1944 production, The Curse of the Cat People. A year later, he led Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi through the mayhem of The Body Snatcher. In 1951, he directed the science-fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Haunting concerns a group of people, all of whom have had a brush with the supernatural, meeting in a brooding century’s old house that is said to be haunted. At least one of the guests, Eleanor, played by Julie Harris, may be haunted herself. There are strange occurrences, including loud noises in the night and a crashing chandelier, and no one is sure whether these events have to do with the house or the sensitive, neurotic Eleanor. After all, both are a little strange. Still, the mansion in which the story unfolds is a frightening, unusual place where “whatever walked there, walked alone.”

I first saw The Haunting in its entirety in the mid-‘60s when it aired on ABC-TV, but I saw the first ten minutes on Sunday November 24, 1963 at the now demolished Garden Theater, a second run movie house on West 25th Street in Cleveland, Ohio where it played on a double bill with Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire. My mother had promised to take me on Friday night (the Garden was only open on weekends), but President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the day, and the theater, like the whole country, was closed for business. I was disappointed that our Commander-In-Chief’s death interfered with my movie going plans (I was only six years old, and the death of a president was beyond my intellectual grasp at the time), but my cousin agreed to be my escort the following Sunday afternoon. Since I was mainly interested in seeing the full color vampire film, we didn’t stay to see all of The Haunting. That was fine with me. Based on those first ten minutes, The Haunting looked a bit too scary, even a little depressing. At the time, I preferred decidedly more ghoulish thrills, the kind that a colorful Hammer horror could provide.

When I finally caught up with The Haunting on television, I realized my original hunch was correct. This movie was too scary. It remains scary now. It’s the rare film that can truly give me goose bumps and make me turn around to see if a ghost is lurking over my shoulder when I watch it.

All these years later, The Haunting haunts me still. Whereas Poltergeist leaves me repulsed, The Haunting continues to work on my imagination. It is, after all, a film that one experiences in one’s own mind. Director Wise doesn’t show us the horrors. Instead, he does something much more frightening: he lets you imagine them yourself.

July 17, 1990

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Sherlock Holmes, Marijuana, and Me

I remember the first time I smoked dope, at least good dope that had an effect. I was 14-years-old, on Christmas break from ninth grade at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Cleveland, Ohio. It was December 27, 1971, a Monday. I remember it as a night of cool temperatures with the threat of rain, and that day’s newspaper, retrieved through a search of the archives of The Plain Dealer, confirm this. In the top left corner of that day’s front page there is a brief weather report: “Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers. High in the middle 40s.” I remember the exact date for reasons that I’ll elaborate on later.

I was with two companions. I wouldn’t call them “friends,” although that’s how most people, less particular about what a word actually means, would have described them. I would have insisted, as I still do, that I have no “friends,” only acquaintances, some of whom I am better acquainted with than others. We were loitering in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront on Storer Avenue. Two strangers, both of them older than us (maybe 21, but no older than 25) approached us from across the street. I remember one of them wore a green Army jacket, very popular attire among those who considered themselves “hippies,” though that’s a word that was often mistakenly applied to, and embraced by, anyone who wore blue jeans (preferably faded), long hair, and listened to rock and roll. John Lennon frequently wore an Army jacket even as he outspokenly protested American involvement in Vietnam. Other protestors and “hippies” did the same. Such were the ironies of that peculiar period.

One of the strangers pulled a joint from his pocket and offered to share it with us. Of course, we agreed. We were kids eager to be treated as adults, and my two companions thought of themselves as hippies, too, and were probably flattered that these two older hippies were willing to share their marijuana with us. One of my companions had previously acquired some pot and we had smoked it, but it had no effect whatsoever, and I wasn’t expecting much from the fat joint that these strangers were inviting me to share.

I was wrong. This was powerful stuff and it left me giggling uncontrollably for the next hour or two. We went back to the house of one of these companions where the giggling continued as his older sister watched, perplexed. But as I sat in the bedroom decorated with black light posters (and a black light which anyone around at the time would confirm was actually blue), I remember hoping the effects of the weed would wear off by 1:40 a.m., the approximate time that Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror was scheduled to air on WJW-TV 8’s Late Night Movie. I had seen it before, but I was an avid film buff with a particular fondness for the movies of the 1940s. The Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were favorites that I enjoyed watching repeatedly, particularly after midnight, the perfect hour for a series of films whose greatest attribute, aside from those two stars, was the atmosphere – lots of dark shadows and sinisterly lit faces. My two companions would have had little interest in watching Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, and would not have been likely to mark their calendar to stay home to watch any movie. This was a good five years before the introduction of the Betamax, the first home video device offered for sale to the public. There were no VCRs or DVDs, and cable TV, if it existed, was strictly for the elite. A movie might air once or twice a year, and you were never sure if you would ever have a chance to see it again. I’m sure that neither of my companions knew that Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror was airing that night unless I told them, which I’m sure I did not do since we had little in common and I knew they would not have cared. They certainly wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity to get high (or to aimlessly wander the streets, for that matter) to watch any old movie.

I would not have remembered the exact date that Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror aired on this particular night if not for my experience earlier that evening, but I wouldn’t have remembered the exact date of that experience unless Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror hadn’t aired later that night. It was the combination of the two that stamped the date on my brain.

The second time that I smoked dope, I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was a case of “Been there, done that.” Giggling, which may have been fun on that particular evening, was not the way I wanted to spend my time, and such silliness was soon joined by paranoia and the “munchies.” Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, however, continued to hold up on repeated viewings, and it isn’t even the best film in the series (an honor that belongs to The Scarlet Claw).

I lost touch (thank God) with one of these companions, but I watched as the other one continued to smoke dope when it was available, as it rarely was to someone who never held a job for more than two weeks and was dependent on his mommy for beer money. He also “experimented,” as they say, with LSD and other substances. At his urging, I took THC at age 17, but otherwise had no interest in getting “high” or “stoned.” Why would I? Why does anyone?

My theory is that those who consider it “fun” to be stoned are shallow boobs who have a void in their life that they are too dumb to fill with something other than pointless and often self-destructive activities. (Sherlock Holmes, as conceived by Arthur Conan Doyle, may have disagreed. His request, at the conclusion of the 1939 film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles - “Watson, the needle!” - was a confession to the serious nature of his own addictions.) In 1991, at age 35, after years of drinking and drugging, this former companion was found dead, a direct result of all that drinking and drugging. He was a shallow boob, indeed, whose life was spent pretending he was a bad-ass (he wasn’t) and a ladies man (he wasn’t that either). Was his failure to realize these foolish ambitions to blame for his drug use and early death? I don’t know. I do know that I live on, and partly attribute my survival to Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Bob Dylan at Covelli Centre, Youngstown, Ohio August 28, 2012

Bob Dylan performed for nearly two hours without a break at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio last night. He didn't have an opening act and didn't need one. At 71, the bard can still draw a big crowd (most of the 5000 or so seats were occupied), and put on a damn fine show, one that I found superior to his excellent concert at Nautica a year ago.

It helped that I had better seats (only 10 rows from the stage) and was also equipped with a pair of small binoculars. The man refuses to chit-chat, speaking only when introducing his band, but he sure appeared to be enjoying himself, smiling often and blowing the shit out of his harmonica (the highlight of the evening, judging by the rapturous applause). He spent almost as much time at center stage, singing at the microphone, as he did at the organ, sometimes kicking his feet in the air and gesturing with his hands. His upbeat mood may have also influenced his choice of songs. He opened, as he often does, with "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat" from 1966's Blonde on Blonde, and also performed, as expected, "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate" from 1975's Blood on the Tracks. But he also tossed in a trio of tunes that have not been staples of his most recent tours: "Love Sick" from 1997's Time Out of Mind, "Sugar Baby" from 2001's Love and Theft, and, most surprisingly of all, Blonde on Blonde's epic "Visions of Johanna." He closed with a trio of powerful classics - "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "All Along the Watchtower" - before encoring with "Blowin' in the Wind" from 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

The voice is cracked and sometimes resembles a gargle, but nobody can sing (or write) a song with more conviction than this man.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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SET LIST
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Blonde on Blonde)
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bringing It All Back Home)
Things Have Changed
Tangled Up In Blue (Blood on the Tracks)
Rollin' and Tumblin' (Modern Times)
Sugar Baby (Love and Theft)
John Brown
Love Sick (Time Out of Mind)
Summer Days (Love and Theft)
Visions Of Johanna (Blonde on Blonde)
Highway 61 Revisited (Highway 61 Revisited)
Simple Twist Of Fate (Blood on the Tracks)
Thunder On The Mountain (Modern Times)
Ballad Of A Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited)
Like A Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited)
All Along The Watchtower (John Wesley Harding)
Blowin' In The Wind (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan)

William Shatner at Playhouse Square, Cleveland, Ohio

The guy in a Cleveland Indians jacket standing a foot or so away from the curb on Playhouse Square seemed like he might have tickets to Saturday evening's events, so my companion shouted out to him from our car. "Do you have tickets?" He sure did. "What for?" The answer we wanted to hear was also the one we expected. "Shatner!"

William Shatner's one man show came to Cleveland, Ohio and I considered getting some cheap tickets, the 10 dollar back row leftovers that are usually available at the last minute. When that was not an option, I considered spending as much as $30. "I've got two tickets for the tenth row," the man said. "You can have them for 100 bucks." That was too much, and when we talked him down to 80, he had a deal. There's only one Captain Kirk, after all, at least to those of us who grew up on the original Star Trek that aired on NBC from 1966-69, and there wasn't anything else to do, anyway.

For two hours, Shatner strode across the State Theater’s stage, reminiscing about his most unusual career. A Shakespearean trained stage actor, he got his first break as an understudy for Christopher Plummer in a production of Henry V staged in their native Canada. Plenty of stage work followed, and also film roles in The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg, but it was in television that he flourished. Among dozens of guest shots, at least one would become a classic: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the Twilight Zone episode in which Shatner's nervous passenger spots a gremlin on the wing of an airplane. He didn't achieve stardom until Star Trek, a series that struggled through its three season run, but became a cult phenomenon in the next decade, inspiring a series of big-screen movies beginning in 1979, and, later, several successful spin-offs.

But that was still in the future. After Star Trek's cancellation in 1969, Shatner admits he was broke, owing as much to the end of those Desilu paychecks as to a divorce. He was living in a camper and doing dinner theater for the money. He remembered watching the moon landing on a four-inch black and white TV set while lying outside, his eyes taking in the stars above when not glued to the TV. One of Shatner's most memorable stories relate to this rather dismal period. One day, there was a knock on the door of his camper. "Are you Captain Kirk," the little boy in the doorway asked. "Yes, I am," a game Shatner replied. "Is this your spaceship?" the boy inquired. Shatner invited the kid in, showed him the shower where he "beamed up," and the dials on the stove he used to guide his spacecraft.

Even the most charitable fan would have to agree that if not for Star Trek, this very talented actor might not have had much of a career to build a one man show around. Before Star Trek: The Motion Picture revived his career, Shatner was most frequently cast in TV movies (Go Ask Alice being among the better ones) and kept busy in guest shots of popular shows like Columbo and Hawaii Five-O. In 1975, he bombed in a series of his own called Barbary Coast, while the best he was offered for the big screen was grade Z shit like 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders.

Captain Kirk cast a long shadow, but thanks to David E. Kelley, creator of The Practice and its spinoff, Boston Legal, Shatner may be as well-known for his role as Denny Crane, the pompous attorney for which he won an Emmy. The mere mention of the name brought the loudest cheers of the night, so Shatner may not go to his grave, as he admits he once feared he might, known only as Captain Kirk.

But Kirk and Crane probably take a backseat to the even more intriguing character known as William Shatner. Following Star Trek's cancellation, the man was becoming a bit of a joke, owing as much to several bad toupees, a general air of pomposity (comparing T.J. Hooker, his TV cop, to Hamlet), and the "singing" career highlighted by side-splitting versions of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Everyone seemed to be in on the joke except him, but then, in a classic example of reinvention, Shatner embraced his image as a pretentious boob and emerged triumphant. The "singing" career was revived thanks to Ben Folds who produced Shatner's Has Been album, and now, of course, there's this highly entertaining one man show. Shatner closed the show by encouraging the audience to say "yes," as he has done so many times in his life. His life and career demonstrate the advantages of taking risks.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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The Incredible Shrinking Movie Theater

When I was a young lad, I practically lived at the movies. Correction: I lived in the movies. The real world was merely something to pass through on my way into and out of the theater. Not anymore. The movie-going experience is not what it used to be and the movies are not to blame. The culprit is the movie theater.

When I was growing up in the late Sixties, downtown Cleveland, Ohio was home to such theaters as the Hippodrome, the Allen, the Loew’s State and Ohio, and the Palace, most located in an area still known as Playhouse Square. The Palace was especially well-named because, like all of these theaters, it was fit for a king. Plush architectural wonders, they made a trip to the movies an event even when the attraction was as mediocre as Murderer’s Row, a ridiculous spy thriller starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm, a secret agent less super, and certainly less sober, than James Bond whose fantastic adventures were all the rage during that decade. Yet I clearly recall seeing this turkey during my first visit to the Hippodrome in December 1966. I recall it more vividly than many superior movies I’ve seen since precisely because of the theater in which I saw it.

The downtown movie palaces are gone forever. The State, Ohio, and Palace are still standing but not as movie houses. The Hippodrome, however, exists only in memory. After closing its doors in 1980, it became a target of the wrecking ball to make room for a parking lot. Considering the grade Z exploitation movies the Hippodrome played throughout much of the Seventies (black exploitation and kung fu flicks), its demolition was a mercy killing. The Allen, boarded up for years, reopened its doors but only for live theater, not for the beam of a 35mm projector.

That’s a shame. These were special, distinctive theaters, completely unlike the multiplexes that dominate the industry today. Seeing a movie at the Hippodrome or the State was comparable to dinner at an elegant restaurant. Today’s multiplex cinemas are closer in spirit to McDonald’s. In the past, the theater where you saw a film was almost as important as the movie itself. If you saw the James Bond thriller Thunderball at the Loew’s State, as I did in December 1965, chances are you’d remember that you saw it at the State. Today, it’s doubtful anyone can accurately say where they saw a particular movie because the theaters all look and feel the same, and the movie playing at one multiplex is usually playing at all of them.

The neighborhood theaters of the past were not as impressive as the downtown movie palaces, but they had their own individual charms. My favorite was the Garden, located at West 25th Street and Clark Avenue, since it was in its darkened auditorium that I was introduced to the glorious world of cinematic make-believe, a world in which I spent some of the happiest times of my youth.

Today’s theaters are barely worthy of the name. The old theaters that do survive have been split up into multi-screen mini theaters, while the newer models built in the past thirty years are buried inside those ghastly shopping malls that are as lacking in character as the theaters themselves. And not just one theater, but often more than a dozen under one roof, all as unimaginatively numbered as so many of the sequels that play on their screens.

Those screens are another source of irritation. In the Fifties, when television lured Americans away from the movies by offering free entertainment in the living room, the motion picture industry fought the threat by offering what could not be found on that square box. Cinemascope, Cinerama, Vista-Vision (“Motion Picture High Fidelity”), and other innovative processes that required larger and wider screens were introduced. Now that television, as well as cable and home video, has proven victorious, theater screens are smaller than ever. It’s as though theatrical releases are little more than promotional tools to hype the disc or download scheduled for release a few months later.

Even walking through the lobby of those great old theaters was more pleasurable than being anywhere in one of the shoeboxes of today. The walls were adorned with large colorful posters of the current and coming attractions. Just as the screens started shrinking, so did those posters. They’re not as eye catching as they once were either. The poster for Thunderball featured panels of exciting artwork that conveyed the action in which star Sean Connery engaged in on screen in a way that may be more memorable than the movie itself. Posters for more recent 007 films simply feature photographs of the star posing with a gun and maybe a Bond girl or two.

Well, kids, let me sum up by saying you don’t know what you missed. I may sound like an old codger drawing unfavorable comparisons between modern reality and an idealized past, but the fact is a night at the movies isn’t what it used to be. Today, you buy your overpriced ticket, see the movie and maybe a coming attraction or two, and are then rushed off the property. Considering the quality of too many of today’s films, who needs to be rushed? Chances are you’ll be hurrying out the door with no encouragement from management for fear of being locked in overnight and subjected to another viewing of The Human Centipede by a deranged projectionist.

Murderer’s Row: now that was a good movie!

PS: On a bright note, the Capitol, a grand old neighborhood theater on the west side of Cleveland, has been restored and is a full time movie house (with digital projection rather than film, which could be the subject of another nostalgic blog entry). It's a multiplex with three screens, but the two smaller theaters are upstairs. If you see a movie in the main auditorium, it's just like old times, especially on those Sunday mornings when, for five bucks, you can see everything from Citizen Kane and North by Northwest to The Pink Panther (the original with Peter Sellers) and The Bad Seed.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Bob Dylan at Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica (Saturday August 6, 2011)

It was pretty exciting to catch a glimpse of that hat Bob Dylan wears as he climbed the stairs in back of the stage of Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica where he performed Saturday night. You suddenly realize that he's really here, and then . . . HE'S THERE, in front of you, at the organ and singing "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35," the boozy kickoff to his classic Blonde on Blonde album. The audience let out a roar, and they cheered again when, after "To Ramona," he moved to center stage, stood before the microphone, and sang "Things Have Changed," his Oscar winning song from the 2000 film, Wonder Boys. He followed that with an even more famous song, "Tangled Up In Blue," from 1975's Blood on the Tracks, but with a radically different arrangement than the original. Occasionally, he'd strap on a guitar, and he thrilled the audience every time he blew on the harmonica. For the most part, though, he was behind the organ, leading his incredible band through a diverse sampling of his massive songbook..

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was given a dramatic reworking, and he also hauled out "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." There were a couple of songs that I couldn't identify, probably from Modern Times and Together Through Life, which are not as implanted in my brain as securely as the others, but there was "Mississippi," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Simple Twist of Fate," and the climactic "Ballad of a Thin Man" whose ominous intro, now powered by Charlie Sexton's guitar, elicited another roar from the crowd. After addressing the clueless Mr. Jones for a final time, Dylan and his band left the stage to a thunderous ovation. The ovation continued until he returned and ripped into "Like a Rolling Stone" before concluding with "All Along the Watchtower."

In between his final two numbers, Dylan introduced the band, the only time during the 90 minute show that he spoke. He's often criticized for his refusal to chit-chat. "What the hell is there to say?" he told Rolling Stone in 2009. "That's not the reason an artist is in front of people." His message is in those songs, so take it or leave it. Dylan isn't known for his stage movements either. He did, however, dance a little, kicking his feet in time to the music. He seems pretty spry for a 70-year-old man, but I never think of Dylan in terms of his age. Even when he was young, he seemed to be a thousand years old, a time traveler who has inhabited many periods of history and whose songs report on the times that never really change at all. It's not hard for me to imagine Bob Dylan strumming his guitar and singing any of his songs at a fairground during the Civil War, or even entertaining an emperor in Ancient Rome with a ballad or two.

Yes, that damn eye was projected on the black curtain behind Dylan and his band during the final numbers. Dylan once said it "don't mean nothin'," and I read somewhere that it was designed by an artist in his employ. Having had kind words to say about Masons on his radio show, he must know that the symbol is tied to that secretive sect. Maybe he dismisses the belief that the symbol, like Freemasonry in general, has its origins in the occult. It's supposedly the all-seeing-eye of God, but which God? The God of the Old Testament in whom Dylan has always professed belief, or the lowercase god of this fallen world?

Leon Russell, riding the wave of his recent comeback, was the opening act. He didn't speak either, but sort of waved to the crowd with a finger as he walked on stage supported by a cane. During his 45 minutes on stage, he ran through a batch of songs without pause, including the Beatles' "I've Just Seen a Face," the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," and a pair of classics from the songbook of the Rolling Stones: a funky "Wild Horses" and a rocking "Jumping Jack Flash." In a mellower vein, he offered "A Song for You," the ballad that was once covered by The Carpenters.

Dylan's set list from bobdylan.com:

1. Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 (Blonde on Blonde)
2. To Ramona (Another Side of Bob Dylan)
3. Things Have Changed (The Essential Bob Dylan)
4. Tangled Up in Blue (Blood on the Tracks)
5. Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Together Through Life)
6. Mississippi (Love and Theft)
7. Ballad of Hollis Brown (The Times They Are A-Changin')
8. The Levee's Gonna Break (Modern Times)
9. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (The Times They Are A-Changin')
10. Highway 61 Revisited (Highway 61 Revisited)
11. Simple Twist of Fate (Blood on the Tracks)
12. Thunder on the Mountain (Modern Times)
13. Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited)

ENCORE
14. Like a Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited)
15. All Along the Watchtower (John Wesley Harding)

I'm really not much of a concertgoer. I prefer to listen to music the same way I would read a book - alone, without distraction, where I can really "listen," which I think one must do to fully appreciate Bob Dylan. Of course, those whose tastes run more to American Idol, KC and the Sunshine Band, Aerosmith, or (insert the name of almost any "pop" or "rock" group that you'd like) might be mystified by that approach. So, this was my first Dylan concert, and, yes, I was there more to see the "LEGEND" than to hear the songs. Observing the behavior of some of the audience was a reminder why "concerts" are really not my thing, and why it takes an artist of Dylan's stature to bring me out for one. Some of the audience struck me as unworthy of being in his presence. They included the folks who left early, before the encore, and even before "Ballad of a Thin Man." They were probably in a rush to get to their cars and beat the traffic on the way home. It's a little rude, I think, but I guess fairly typical of Joe Average who goes to the movies and chats throughout, and is racing toward the exit before the closing credits. If getting home is your priority, why not stay there?

I had to chuckle, silently, when visiting the men's room before the ride home. A guy made a reference to a drunk woman who was walking around in front of the grandstand, pointing an accusing finger at no one in particular. The guy said something about how ironic such behavior was while the guy on stage was "singing about peace." Hmm. Of course, Bob Dylan will never escape his association with the 1960s, and for many people that era brings to mind flower children and psychedelia, a world of which he was never really a part. He was more likely to sneer at such nonsense. Still, he's the most potent symbol of the "Sixties" that we have, so those who haven't really followed his music through the years don't know that he is more than a symbol, but a living, breathing, still vital artist. And he most definitely does not sing about "peace." "You can reload your rifle," he once said, "and that moment you're reloading it, that's peace." He doesn't need a rifle. He's got those songs. One of the most potent is "Ballad of a Thin Man," and it's appropriate that he still sings it. Many in his audience don't know what's happening any more than Mr. Jones did.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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A tale of two Anthonys

I never heard of Casey Anthony until last week when she was being discussed on Bob Frantz's morning radio show on WTAM, here in Cleveland, Ohio. Why, he asked his listeners, was there such an interest in her saga while Anthony Sowell's trial, now in progress, is being ignored by the national media?

For those as clueless as I was until a few days ago, Casey Anthony is a 25-year-old Florida woman acquitted this week on charges that she murdered her daughter who was inhibiting her freewheeling, party-hearty lifestyle. She's probably guilty, but there was, as they say, "reasonable doubt," at least in the minds of the jurors.

The other Anthony, Mr. Sowell, is the alleged serial killer whose home on Cleveland's east side was the scene of numerous grotesque slayings. One of his victims - luckier than most in that she managed to get away after a visit to smoke some crack with her host - reports that she saw a dead body, its head cut off, lying on the floor of his bedroom. During the initial search of the house, a head was discovered in a coffee can in the basement and there were bodies buried in the backyard. That initial search was a long time in coming. The police apparently ignored reports through the years about the foul stench emanating from the house, as well as turned a blind eye to eyewitness accounts of the carnage that took place there. Finally, just as 2009 was about to gasp its last, the police paid a visit and discovered that Mr. Sowell was a sort of real life Dr. Hannibal Lector, lacking the good doctor's charm, perhaps, but sharing his appetite for blood, death, and sadism.

The Sowell story was big news for awhile, locally and nationwide, earning the top spot on Time's list of the top 10 crime stories for 2009. Now that his trial is in progress, it remains a local story, but the networks, both broadcast and cable, are apparently not taking much notice, whereas Casey Anthony's trial was a cause celebre, and its aftermath warranted a special hour long edition of Nightline. As of this writing, the ABC news program has spent two consecutive nights on the story, and there was also a prime-time special for those who either don’t stay up late, or can’t wait until 11:35 for their Casey Anthony fix.

Many of the callers to Frantz's radio show blame racism for the media's relative lack of interest in the Sowell trial. Casey Anthony and the daughter she allegedly murdered are white. She is also young and attractive, enough so that she was offered the lead in a porn film after her acquittal. Sowell and his victims are black, and the women he allegedly murdered were from the wrong side of the tracks - crackheads, hookers, and the like. There's a tendency to think they got what they deserved, shameful as it is to think such a thing. Caylee Anthony, the daughter who died under highly suspicious circumstances, was an innocent victim.

I think location, not racism, is to blame for the lack of interest in the Sowell case. The Casey Anthony trial took place in sunny Florida. Sowell is in gloomy Cleveland, the economically depressed rust belt city, and no one wants to hear about Cleveland any more than they’d want to visit it. Whoever decided to ban the national media from providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Sowell trial certainly wasn’t thinking about what’s best for the city. Think of the boost that the local economy would have gotten if Court TV and the like descended on the town? Ah, but coverage of a murder trial, especially one as tasteless as this one, might be bad for Cleveland's image. That might make sense if Cleveland had an image worth protecting, but is that true of the city once called and perhaps still known as "The Mistake on the Lake"?

I’m surprised there’s any interest in either story. Haven’t we seen it all before? Didn’t the O.J. trial satisfy everyone’s lust for tales of jealous rage and sensational murder? Didn’t the Amy Fisher and Monica Lewinsky business feed their appetite for a salacious sex scandal? The media always has a freak show in progress to keep the populace distracted from more important matters, such as those wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya that are adding to America’s crushing debt, but serve no other discernable purpose. The two Anthonys are just the latest “stars” of this long running show. The names change and so do the faces, but once the Anthonys leave the stage, other freaks will emerge to take their place.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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