Ed here: over at MUBI Glen Kenny talks about the Phil Spector documentary. Well worth reading. Here's a long paragraph from the post. I should note here I'm a big fan of Phil Spector's music.
"Jayanti's interview with Spector is the film's fulcrum. Conducted in Spector's castle, with the man sitting in front of the white piano he claims is the "Imagine" piano of John Lennon fame (although I myself saw a white piano that I presumed to be same in Yoko Ono's Dakota apartment when I interviewed her in 1993; rock scholar and critic Kurt Loder drolly speculated, after the screening we attended, that like the many Goldfinger Aston Martins, there were a large number of "Imagine" pianos out there), it certainly is, what do you call it, fascinating. Spector seems to have traded in his actual soul for a welter of resentments a long, long time ago. Of the various tall tales he tells and the people he rags on, the most creepily amusing object of his irritation is the singer Tony Bennett, to whom he returns several times. Nobody ever talks about how Tony Bennett did this and that all through the '70s. Everybody likes Tony Bennett even though he did all these drugs. How come Tony Bennett gets to do duets with Bono? And so on. At a certain point you wanna slap the guy and say, "Hey Phil! Guess what? Tony Bennett didn't ever bring a girl to his house to have her end up with her brains blown out with one of his guns! Maybe that's why people like Tony Bennett better than you! Oh, and also that you have an over thirty-year history of being a lunatic asshole!" Who else doesn't he like? Well, Buddy Holly got a stamp in his honor, and he was only "in rock and roll for three years." Somebody else got an honorary doctorate. Like anybody gives a damn about an honorary doctorate. All the while ignoring the elephant in the room, Spector sits comfortably in luxury's lap, at liberty on bail, and wonders what the world has done for him lately. It's a staggering portrait of blind egotism run rampant."
For the rest go here:
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2018
It would seem that "giving the camera the finger" has been the default "rebellious" music industry pose for decades, all the way up through Lady GaGa at Yankees stadium earlier this year.
ReplyDeleteI would have expected something a little more creative from Mr. Spector, but maybe he invented it.
This sounds unbelievable.
ReplyDeleteBrings to mind something about Michael Vicks' recent behavior I read on a blog this morning: "If there is such a thing as 'Doesn’t Get It' juice, (he) is a wholesale distributor."