Head (1968)

Posted on January 13, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

There was no reason to have a Monkees movie, particularly in 1968, when the band was severely out of fashion. But enough money had been made on the records and TV show that it could certainly be financed, and so was born Head, the first feature film from director (and Monkees impresario) Bob Rafelson, who would go on to raw dramas like Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and Stay Hungry (1976). Jack Nicholson, whose most recent projects were hippie exploitation – like The Trip (1967), which he wrote, and Psych-Out (1968) – would compile a script from the random ideas offered by Rafelson, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork. The result would be episodic, but not your typical episode of “The Monkees.” The humor would have a strangely unsettling undercurrent. If they were accused of being phony, they’d own up and detonate the artifice from the inside out. It was all there in the poem/song “Ditty Diego – War Chant”:

Hey, hey, we are the Monkees,
We’ve said it all before.
The money’s in, we’re made of tin,
We’re here to give you more.

The Monkees swim to the psychedelic classic "Porpoise Song."

As they chant, television-sized images of scenes from the film – which we’re about to watch – stack on top of each other, all of it seeming to be conventional Monkees hijinks (in their Hard Day’s Night-aping style), but culminating in the notorious footage of South Korean General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner. That footage was from February 1st, 1968; only about nine months old by the time Head was released. To include the most famous snuff film of all time in a Monkees movie was something of a risk; but since the band’s sun had set anyhow, why not? Also included in Head: boxer and ex-con Sonny Liston, Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, Green Bay Packer Ray Nitschke, silicone injection pioneer Carol Doda (as “Sally Silicone”), Frank Zappa, and even the controversial erotic sculpture “Back Seat Dodge ’38” by Edward Kienholz, which can be glimpsed at Mike Nesmith’s birthday party. Anything controversial, scorned, or otherwise out-of-date was welcome for the Monkees’ going-away bash. The emcee would be Hollywood star Victor Mature, playing himself; part of the film is set in his hair. One interpretation is that the entire film takes place in (and around) Victor Mature’s head, thus the title.

Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith, and Micky Dolenz film a special effects sequence for "Head."

The first time I watched Head, I was eager for some psychedelic madness, but still uneasy with the strange, strange brew that I imbibed. Revisiting the film with Criterion’s (gorgeous) 2010 Blu-Ray restoration, I found myself smiling and laughing a lot more. Any accusations of pretentiousness are batted casually away by the let’s-try-anything anarchic humor of Rafelson, Nicholson, and the Monkees. Micky engages in an epic battle with an uncooperative Coke machine in the desert, culminating with his blowing it up with a tank. Davy hams it up in a spot-on parody of 30’s and 40’s Hollywood boxing dramas (from Golden Boy to The Set-Up), and is terrified to the core of his being when he discovers a giant gazing eyeball in a medicine cabinet. Peter learns a valuable lesson about the nature of reality from a swami in a sauna. Mike is his usual wiseass self. All while they pass from one dimension into the next, tearing through the phony backdrops of sets and even arguing over the script with Rafelson, Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper, who play themselves in a very meta moment. None of it is Mel Brooks-level comedy; a stronger comic voice behind the script would have helped immeasurably. (Nesmith laments on the commentary track that he wished Rafelson would have used some of his “sharper knives,” though this film is hardly gentle.) But one of the strengths of Head is that, for all its unconnected sketches and constant disorientation, the film has a focused point of view. It turns a mirror toward the Monkees phenomenon, often damningly. At the end of the raucous Nesmith tune “Circle Sky,” the Monkees become mannequins, standing behind their instruments and torn to shreds by their fans. Time and again they become trapped in a black box – ultimately, they drown in one.

The soundtrack LP was intended to be a mirror to reflect the beholder's own head.

The film’s other strength – and perhaps its greatest – was its music. It may have been the end of the line, but the Monkees were better than ever. They’d developed into a touring band, playing their own instruments even if the record company insisted they use session players for the soundtrack. “Porpoise Song” bookends Head, set to brightly-colored solarized photography while Micky (and, later, all the Monkees) swim in the ocean after diving suicidally off “one of the finest suspended-arch bridges in the world.” Though the single tanked, the song, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, has endured to become a classic of late-60’s psychedelia. Davy performs a respectable cover of “Daddy’s Song,” a high point of Harry Nilsson’s early songbook, and his dance with Toni Basil is a dazzling feat of editing thanks to Rafelson’s decision to splice together, rapid-fire, two different recitals – one with the pair dressed in white, the other in black. Commendably, Peter Tork composes two of the trippiest songs on the album (though they also sound the most dated – not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your disposition). Meanwhile, Micky’s vocals for “As We Go Along” are simply breathtaking; Ry Cooder and Neil Young play on the track. Nicholson edited together the soundtrack, using random snippets of dialogue from the film and editing them together into a pop art collage; listening to the album is your only chance to hear what a Jack Nicholson mixtape sounds like.

Mike is freaked out by his transdimensional birthday party.

Nobody asked for a Monkees film in 1968, so hardly anybody went – even when the advertising minimized the presence of the band, or, more frequently, didn’t mention them at all. Posters were hung and stickers distributed that showed only a photo of a man’s head, staring forward. If the intent was to hook the head-trip crowd – or even art-house buffs – one could only imagine their bemusement at receiving a belated Monkees motion picture. Naturally, it’s endured as a cult item; it had to. Audiences found it on late night TV or midnight movie screenings. Eventually, teenage girls were no longer the Monkees demographic; instead, they were rock historians and audiophiles mining 60’s esoterica, and naturally delighted to find something as bizarre and singular as Head. Now it’s in the Criterion Collection – go figure; the most unusual entry in Criterion’s indispensable box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, which chronicles the company founded by Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, who used the Monkees goldmine to kickstart a company that would bring us Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show (1971), among others. (Quite the phoenix to rise from those ashes.) Experimental, engimatic, and endearingly self-deprecating, Head stands on its own as one of the most genuinely mind-bending products of the late 60’s; if only the counterculture had noticed.

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The Trip (1967)

Posted on January 11, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“Just close your eyes, it’s groovy now. Close them, because I’m swimmin’ in beauty. It’s all around. Let’s take a trip.” Kim Fowley, “The Trip” (1965)

“We stopped down to reality company to get some instant sleep. And the driver turned, said, ‘Welcome back,’ he smiled and he said, ‘beep beep.'” Donovan, “The Trip” (1966)

“Now, you got to do just exactly like they say. You gotta turn off your mind, and relax, and then just float downstream. OK?” -Bruce Dern to Peter Fonda, The Trip (1967)

“A Lovely Sort of Death,” reads the poster for 1967’s The Trip, which will never be confused with the 2010 Steve Coogan film. “In Psychedelic Color!” it proclaims. Early on, the film hands Bruce Dern a line of dialogue which explicitly references the Beatles’ Revolver (specifically, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” one of the band’s first LSD-inspired songs). That album’s seminal psychedelic follow-up, Sgt. Pepper, was released in June of that year, and Roger Corman’s quickie landed just two months later, at the very end of August. He wasn’t going to miss the Summer of Love. Not when there was a buck to be made.

John (Bruce Dern) delivers the pill of LSD to Paul (Peter Fonda). No relation to Lennon or McCartney.

The cast was a mix of the usual Corman repertory company with some new faces: familiar to Corman’s circle were Peter Fonda (fresh off The Wild Angels), Bruce Dern (The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), and Dick Miller (A Bucket of Blood); Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg (daughter of famed acting coach Lee Strasberg) already had prolific careers in both film and television. Fans of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) won’t miss a cameo by Lance Rocke himself, Michael Blodgett. Corman company player Jack Nicholson, disappointed that his acting career wasn’t taking off the way he’d hoped it would, was beginning to dabble in screenwriting: The Trip is all his. I would assume it’s not a very thick screenplay, since there’s hardly any dialogue. I get the feeling he assembled it in his mind like an animated film: Disney’s Fantasia, but more explicitly aimed at the recreational drug crowd. Or perhaps it was to be more like a Disneyland ride. The one clever conceit of the film (I count just one) is that it is plotted around the trip itself; the title is the story. TV commercial director Paul Groves (Fonda) is prescribed a 250-microgram pill of LSD by his friend John (Dern), whose house has a swimming pool in the living room, bead curtains, candles, psychedelic art and painted walls, and even a prominently-placed copy of “Howl”…all the credentials he needs to be the tour guide to Paul’s first acid trip. About ten minutes in, Paul takes the pill, and the movie begins; you can feel the ride starting when Corman delivers a POV shot as Paul pulls a black sleeping-mask over his eyes. As the camera goes black, a psychedelic kaleidoscope show begins. This was a year before 2001: A Space Odyssey, mind you. But Kubrick’s light show was much trippier; after a minute or so of kaleidoscopes, Corman settles for a milieu he finds more comfortable: a Gothic castle on a stormy bluff (recycled footage from the Poe days), Satanic rites in a dungeon, and a dwarf and a witch stirring a smoking cauldron in what appears to be a California state park.

Paul feels some good vibrations at the laundromat.

Hallucinating that John has a gunshot wound in the head, Paul freaks out and ditches the pad, stumbling off into the night. He imagines himself to be pursued along beaches and through forests by dark, hooded figures on black horses; one assumes Paul was reading The Lord of the Rings the night before. He sees himself making love to his ex-wife (Strasberg) while swirling colored lights illuminate their bodies. And he takes an epic journey through Los Angeles: by visiting a laundromat, where he puts a quarter in a washing machine just to feel the vibrations, and by trespassing into somebody’s house so he can watch Vietnam coverage on television. When a young girl comes down the stairs to discover this stranger in the living room (shades of How the Grinch Stole Christmas?), she asks, “Who are you?” Paul replies, “I’m just a man.” Her proper reaction to this statement would be, perhaps, “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!” Instead, she asks for a glass of milk. He pours her one, and they sit contemplatively in front of the television set. Then the girl’s father emerges from the stairs, and Paul immediately bolts out the door like Dr. Richard Kimble. Hopper, playing a character called Max (after Peter Max, perhaps, but even more Timothy Leary-esque than Dern) is briefly introduced at the start of the film but takes a significant part in Paul’s hallucinations, wearing a judge’s robe and occupying a set that looks like something from The Prisoner, replete with miniature carousel, a throne for Paul which is either an electric chair or (more likely) a salon styling chair, and a screen showing moments from Paul’s past. While Paul sits, appearing to wait for his hair to be cut, Max forces him to confront his failed marriage, and scenes of Strasberg making out with her new lover (Blodgett). When Paul says he’s getting divorced, Max asks solemnly, “Would you like that registered for or against you?” “I don’t know,” Paul says, but Max demands: “For, or against?” A dwarf riding the carousel offers, “Bay of Pigs!”, unhelpfully.

Paul hallucinates that he's interrogated in a psychedelic courtroom by Max (Dennis Hopper).

If this doesn’t seem like your typical acid trip, Corman – who dropped acid himself before making the film – confesses in the DVD supplements that there really was no way, given the technology of the time, to accurate reproduce the experience. He made use of what he had. But as hippie exploitation, it has slightly more authenticity than other films of the time, if only because Nicholson, Fonda, and Hopper were a bit more tapped into the counterculture than, say, Peter Sellers was when he made I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968). The three would soon collaborate on Easy Rider (1969), under Hopper’s direction. Nicholson would script the Monkees movie Head (1968) for Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, which, though equally sloppy and anarchic, was at least more substantial and rewarding than the more obviously exploitative The Trip. (To back up that adjective: I submit the overlong sequence set in an unconvincing hippie club – with a two-drink minimum, and Dick Miller as bartender – in which Corman lovingly photographs the large-breasted, body-paint-covered topless dancers.) Corman strategically places an opening disclaimer stating, “The illegal manufacture and distribution of these drugs is dangerous, and can have fatal consequences…this picture represents a shocking commentary on a prevalent trend of our time and one that must be of great concern to us all.” But the film, of course, is a ringing endorsement of the chemically-induced transcendental experience. The film is about nothing if not Paul’s setting aside resentment and jealousy toward his ex-wife, discovering love for the beautiful blonde (Salli Sachse) who’s been patiently waiting for him at the end of his acid trip; and not just love for her, but for everyone: “All You Need is Love” is the message of the film, and you can get there by taking LSD. Just be careful of the Ringwraiths.

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Monterey Pop (1968)

Posted on January 9, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

With Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) gradually transforming from an engrossing concert film to a Shoah-long historical document, I find myself increasingly valuing D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968). At just 79 (count ’em!) minutes, the great documentarian’s compilation of the June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival manages to capture the feel of a staggering, landmark 3-day rock concert without actually requiring the viewer to camp out in front of their big-screen TV hanging up tie-dyes and rationing the pot. Now, Pennebaker claims he was just making the most of an imperfect situation; in his 2002 introduction to Criterion’s 3-disc DVD set, he apologetically states that they had a finite amount of film to shoot with, so the crew tried to limit themselves to one song per band (he also good-naturedly gripes that the Grateful Dead couldn’t play a song under ten minutes; thus their exclusion).  The numerous outtake footage provided on those other 2 DVDs puts the lie to that claim, however; clearly there was some tasteful editing applied. The result is more of a sugar rush than an epic acid trip. He rockets from one act to the next, devoting equal time to loving close-ups of the rising stars onstage and the awestruck hippies in the audience.

Mama Cass, captivated by Janis Joplin during the performance of "Ball and Chain."

You don’t need sharp eyes to observe that those audience members are frequently other acts, spending their free time in rapt attention of their peers. My favorite moment of the film is during Big Brother and the Holding Company’s lacerating performance of “Ball and Chain.” While Janis Joplin freestyles her way through the blues in her The World is Ending Right Now, exploding-out-of-her-skin fashion, Pennebaker captures Mama Cass’ gaping mouth. It’s not hard to read her lips when she silently mouths WOW. Maybe she’s heard Joplin sing before, but something cataclysmic is happening. Big Brother and the Holding Company is disappearing; Janis Joplin is arriving. So the question becomes, as a director and editor, do you show three, four, five hours’ worth of performances, or do you show the moments that people need to remember, so there’s no good excuse to miss Joplin skipping with joy while she leaves the stage after a fame-making set, or Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar ritualistically, or Pete Townshend smashing his to pieces while Keith Moon’s drum topples into plumes of smoke?

Grace Slick sings "Today" with Jefferson Airplane.

Pennebaker crystallizes each of these iconic performances with little, lingering details captured by his easily distracted camera. Joplin’s foot, pounding at the stage while she remains firmly locked in place, like the gas pedal to her roaring vocals. A mesmerized hippie in the audience tapping her thighs to the rhythms of Canned Heat’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” Many beautiful stoned faces during Country Joe and the Fish’s oozing, psychedelic “Section 43.” And increasingly his images tend toward the abstract. Marty Balin’s vocals dominate Jefferson Airplane’s spellbinding “Today,” but Pennebaker keeps his camera trained on Grace Slick’s profile while she sings along; it seems like Balin’s voice is eerily rising from her lips in an act of possession. With the white spotlight indirectly lighting her features, the image seems to become black-and-white. Similarly, when Otis Redding sings “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” the camera crouches almost behind him, capturing, alternately, his face and microphone – and a blinding spotlight that turns the screen entirely white. You feel what it’s like to be onstage, the audience invisible, singing for your life. An introduction to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ cover of “Paint It, Black” begins in absolute darkness, while Burdon says, “It takes a few hours to get together, this one. But good things always do take a few hours to get together. I hope.” Then, as a fiddle strikes through the darkness, Pennebaker hits us with rapid-fire, grainy close-ups of a woman’s fingers, fingers touching mouth, tongue licking, eyes staring coldly forward. Apropos of nothing, really. Then back to the performance, and we see the fiddler onstage before the swimming and pulsating colors of your famous San Francisco liquid light show. Finally, for the first stretch of Ravi Shankar’s almost twenty-minute-long raga, we don’t even see the performers onstage, only the throngs watching, meditating, praying, working arts and crafts booths (“Free Rocks,” reads a sign next to a dish of pebbles), handing out brochures for “Indian and Japanese Music.” When we do focus on Ravi & Company, we get intense close-ups of fingers plucking sitar, hands beating tabla, and the intensely-concentrated faces of the players. (Pennebaker captures the telepathic communication between the players during the improvisation by cutting back and forth among their faces.) The juxtaposition is strangely moving. When the raga is complete, you understand the rapturous applause. You’re connected to it. You’re in your living room, and you’re applauding, you fool. 79 minutes!

Beautiful people: images from "Monterey Pop" (click to enlarge).

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