FRAMED BY W. DART

Rip It Up, Issue 27, 1 October 1979, Page 18

FRAMED BY W. DART

Ry Cooder Auckland Town hall Sept 26. A night with Ry Cooder is a musical lesson in American history. From the trigger-happy saga of Billy the Kid through the Thirties Depression years, World War Two and the absurdity of

"F.D.R. in Trinidad", rock and roll, and on to the New Depression of the seventies, Cooder chronicles life through his music, a meld of the prairie and the ghetto, balmy breezes and pulpit preaching. His music pulses with life. He plays the roots of rock and roll with a vigour few who trade under the name could hope to match.

An appreciative audience (and a very mixed one, with a sizeable smattering of time-warp hippies) was right behind Cooder from the start and he and fellow guitarist David Lindley responded well to the enthusiasm. Some nasty sound mixing marred the opening song, Johnny Cash's “Hey, Porter", but after that it was plain sailing for an hour and three quarters of spellbinding and, at times, sublime string music. Cooder is a masterly guitar and mdndolin player who never allows his abundant technique to interfere with the engaging musical portrait he paints, whether it is Sleepy John Estes sitting alone and blind on his Tennessee porch with mice playing at his feet or the New Mexico punkhood of pyschotic William Bonney. The back-up work of David Lindley, especially on lap steel, added textures and shadings that had been necessarily absent when Cooder played solo here last year. The rapport of the

two men was such that it could have been one man with four hands. Where excellence is the standard it is hard to isolate highlights perhaps "Tattler”, “If Walls Could Talk” which segued into a delightful workout on Freddie- King's “Hideaway”, the encore of (a restructured) “Blue Suede Shoes’’, and the angry “.Bourgeois Blues” (“I'll sing this for Jimmy Carter his days are numbered”). If there was a disappointment it was 'TThink It’s Going to Work Out Fine”, which fell short of the perfection of the rendition on Bop Till You Drop. It was the only song from the new album. Cooder says the complex backing and vocal arrangements of Bop make the songs largely inapplicable to the duo situation, but he does intend to get the superlative Bop band together again in the future. The group performed publicly for the big New York anti-nuclear rally just days before Cooder and Lindley played in Auckland, but Bob Dylan has now spirited away drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Tim Drummond.

Cooder regards Bop as his most successful album to date and his next record will explore similar paths. He feels Bop brings him closest to his long-time ambition to create an idiom for himself in which to play. We can look forward to great music from Ry Cooder for quite some time to come. He expects to be playing guitar when he’s 80. After all, “it’s not a job, it’s a lifework.” Ken Williams

MEAN STREETS Director: Martin Scorsese Scorsese's films all seem to share the common theme of disintegration, whether it be the Band's farewell concert in The Last Waltz or the eventual split up of Minelli and De Niro in New York New York. The earlier films such as Boxcar Bertha and Taxi Driver also present this vision, although in somewhat grimmer terms than these two 'musicals’. In fact this bleaker territory of Scorsese’s work is where we might place Mean Streets, the director’s second film. Mean Streets parallels the lives of four men coping with the pressures of living in New York’s Little Italy. Two, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and Charlie (Harvey Keitel) are at the core of the drama and much of it centres around their endless bickering and quarrelling, culminating in a climax such as we would expect from the director of Taxi Driver. The film is not really new (1973) and probably its delayed release is the result of our relatively enlightened censorship of the late 70s. Six years ago certain expletives would have had to be cut out, and if one was to do this in the last 15 minutes or so of the film, it would mean excising a good deal of the dialogue. Whatever

could be said of Mean Streets it could not be accused of pulling its punches. It portrays an edgy nervous world with a probing camera always trapping the characters in corners, hallways and bars. Certainly the bleak red lighting of Tony’s bar where quite a few scenes take place is as effective an image of hell as the most fervent revivalist could conjure up. Music plays an important part in Mean Streets from the evocative use of r & b numbers on the soundtrack to the snatches of the opera in a plusher restaurant scene. Indeed, this musical dichotomy is reflected in the shooting style of the film which often juxtaposes the seedily realistic with a more stylised operatic treatment. Performances are quite exemplary, and Amy Robinson in the role of Charlie’s epileptic girlfriend, Teresa, is one of those marvellous women that the American cinema seems to find for us, from the same mould that gave us Lauren Bacall, Suzanne Pleshette and Angie Dickinson (in her pre-Policewoman days).

WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS OF EUROPE? Director: Ted Kotcheff

Comedy-thriller is a genre which often seems to be a last ditch attempt to categorise something which fail dismally on both counts. This clumsy little effort seems to have had the baking powder forgotten somewhere along the line and the only oasis is Robert Morley who, as usual, plays Robert Morley. And, if you don’t like Robert Morley, and I don’t, it all just ends up being rather dull. NOSFERATU

Director: Hans Werner Herzog A stunning film. The German director’s interpretation of this Bram Stoker classic is the purest quintessence of Romantic mal de siecle, and Isabelle Adjani's pale heroine makes one realise just how nauseatingly inept all those Hammer heroines were/are. Here Dracula emerges as a sympathetic character; thanks to a moving performance by Klaus Klinski. Nosferatu is not without its touches of sardonic humour or occasional nudges at the genre, but this homage to the great German director Murnau is a total success, right down to the tips of Nosferatu's long talons. A LITTLE ROMANCE

Director: George Roy Hill About 15 years ago this director made a rather touching film about the trial and tribulations of teenagerhood called The World of Henry Orient. This is a flabby scamper over the same territory, oozing with sentimentality and directed with a sledgehammer. Even Delerue’s score is a little on the leaden side, with its rather crude pastiches of Vivaldi whenever the real article isn’t being piped through the auditorium. Sally Kellerman and Broderick Crawford look embarrassed and Laurence Olivier seems a little more hardened, but then he was in The Betsy too. William Dart