ABANDONMENT ISSUES

'You abandoned me, love don't live here anymore' 

Rose Royce are an American soul and R & B group formed in 1973, who achieved considerable success between 1976 and 1979, particularly in the UK.

The band are perhaps best known for their song 'Car Wash' from 1976, the title song from a hugely successful comedy film starring Richard Pryor. It remains a popular track, being catchy, up-tempo, memorable and relatable: who doesn't know of a groovy car wash where the staff work hard and you might get the chance to meet a movie star or even an Indian Chief?

But Rose Royce's best work isn't about the joys of private enterprise and getting along, in fact, it isn't about happiness and togetherness at all. The band's greatest songs are about heartbreak, loss, loneliness and uncertainty. The incredible 'Wishing On A Star' is an ethereal ballad made of desperate longing. It's about somebody trying to will a reunion with a lost loved one who is now so hopelessly removed - physically, mentally, emotionally - that they are unimaginably distant. All practical means of reconciliation exhausted, only magical thinking and superstition remains.  

Even greater, in my opinion, is 'Love Don't Live Here Anymore', a song so good that even Jimmy Nail couldn't completely mess it up. Written by Miles Gregory during a period of drug induced bad health, it is an exquisite work of high drama that, nevertheless, portrays a very small, very human tragedy. The resounding feeling is one of desolation, of loneliness, a one act play in which the home, that all important refuge, is reduced to an empty shell and the heart, that desperate organ, continues to function but is left without purpose.

The singer, Gwen Dickey (who used the name Rose Norwalt while in the band) gives a flawless performance, and makes every single word count. You can imagine her sat at the dining room table, her head in her hands, half a person in the hellish vacuum that used to be a happy home. Drawn curtains, a dripping tap, an uneaten meal, cold sheets and only memories, regrets and unanswered questions for company.

The arrangement on the record is phenomenal, sweeping seamlessly from one section to another, synths and strings combining to evoke a world of pain. Weirdly, a Pollard Syndrum punctuates the action. Usually a jolly, even comical, instrument, here it sounds ineffably sad, like a signal beamed out into an empty or unreceptive universe, a desperate SOS.   

The lyrics, for me, pivot around two killer lines. The first is quoted at the top of the page. There is no part of 'abandoned' that is ambiguous. This vacancy is permanent. The second is 'Why did you have to go away? Don't you know I miss you so and need your love?' This gets me every time, and it stings because it is a crystal clear, almost childlike expression of abject loss summarised in two simple questions that, like the Syndrum pulse into space, will go answered.

'Love Don't Live Here Anymore' was the band's last big hit (although, astonishingly, it didn't even crack the Top 30 in their native country). They released more records, including the superb 'If It's Love You're After' (a banging disco psychodrama about uncertainty and disparity between lovers), but their audience waned, almost certainly emotionally exhausted by the unforgettable melancholy brilliance of their most indelible recording.  

A LOAD OF OLD BULLETS

I've just watched the 1988 Gary Busey action thriller Bulletproof. Busey plays McBain, a secret agent turned maverick cop. It starts with him breaking up an illegal arms deal. Villain Danny Trejo shouts 'Who the fuck are you?' and McBain shouts back 'I'm your worst nightmare, butthorn!'. Trejo dies in a ball of flame when McBain throws a grenade into the back of the ice cream van the baddies are using as a getaway vehicle.

McBain gets shot in the shoulder during the raid but refuses medical attention, instead going home where a beautiful lady is waiting for him in a bubble bath. He takes a swig of whiskey, then pulls out the bullet with a pair of forceps. He washes the extracted slug and drops it in a jar that has between 10 and 15 other old bullets in it. He then makes love to the beautiful lady and afterwards she says 'You may be bulletproof, McBain, but you're certainly not love-proof'. Oh, and later on there's a flashback where he's playing a sax solo on a beach.

That's all I have to say, really, I just wanted to tell someone.

INSPIRATIONAL SUBTITLE

 

If only it were true...even just a little bit.

TOOLED UP

 

From The How & Why Wonder Book of Arms & Armour (1977).

NINJA TERMINATOR: THE TWEAKENING

 

When I first saw this sequence in Ninja Terminator I thought 'that guy is really good at pretending he is having his nose tweaked'. I then realised that he probably wasn't acting at all, and was just having his beak pulled about for real. Godfrey Ho has a lot to answer for, in my opinion.

RANDOM HARVEST: HE WILL HE, WHO BURIED YOU IN THIS SHIT WILL DIE

 

Folder find. I don't remember where this came from, doesn't matter, something Spanish, maybe. Needless to say, this attracted my attention even though everything else about the source clearly did not.

NINJA TERMINATOR (A SERIES)

 

Hong Kong born film director Godfrey Ho is an interesting fellow, but a total rogue. A prolific movie maker and copyright violator, his method was to combine 'borrowed' footage from other films, stolen music and badly dubbed and appallingly written dialogue to provide a series of incomprehensible Z quality martial arts movies. To maintain a claim to being an auteur, he would also cheaply film fight and sex sequences of his own and then insert them into the melange seemingly at random, often spreading the poorly executed original material across several movies. He made a 100 films in total,  81 of them between 1982 and 1992. 

The oddest thing is that the results are supremely watchable, and never boring, mainly because you  never have to go more than a few minutes before there's a big old scrap or something so ridiculous that it makes up for the chaos around it.

Ho retired from film making in the year 2000, and became a film teacher. Seriously, the sheer audacity of this guy. Anyway, one thing I've always liked is stills of people punching and kicking each other, so here's some action from 1985's Ninja Terminator.

VARTOX

 

The Bronze Age (1970-1985) is my favourite period for American comics for lots of reasons, not least because that was the period I grew up in, and I found Marvel, DC, Charlton, Gold Key, Atlas (and other) comics terribly exciting and alluring, especially as they were still quite hard to come by (I don't think I ever read consecutive issues of any US comic until the late 80s). It was also a period when things got weird and groovy and kind of cosmic in a way that dull people might attribute to drugs, but someone more astute might say was the zeitgeist, a time of extraordinary creativity, curiosity, freedom of expression, war, protest, music, film, technology, alternative religions, the occult, and, yes, drugs, and lots of them.

Superman, however, stayed kind of boring. Perhaps wary of besmirching the good name of their golden goose, DC kept Superman safe and stuffily heroic, and the stories that featured him were noticeably more staid and steady than those of most of his competition.

In this issue, from November 1974, the villain is called Vartox (no prizes for guessing what wild film release of the same year inspired this character), and the cover at least offers a hint of deviance that lasts a mere couple of pages before settling into a fairly mundane battle between supreme good and the mildly naughty (Vartox isn't that bad, just a bit of a dick).   

I love Zardoz too much not to appreciate this shameless steal, so I now have two Superman comics*. Purchased from e-bay, the buyer baited the trap by describing it as having a 'slightly gay' cover.

*  The other comic, issue 261, has a cover that references feminism, BDSM and a foot fetish, but goes absolutely nowhere interesting with any of it.

NON-TERRIBLE LIZARDS

 

The Animal World is a 1956 documentary directed by 'the Master of Disaster', director and producer Irwin Allen. After a brief look at amoebas and protozoa, there's a ten minute stop-motion sequence about dinosaurs put together by King Kong man Willis O'Brien and all-round special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. 

This kind of animation can look a bit quaint now, but I'm still able to connect to how thrilling it would have been to watch back when I was less jaded and CGI was the stuff of science fiction. The dinosaurs here are menacing, violent,  rheumy eyed and slobbery: they look tired, desperate, hungry and under pressure. 

I'm 57 years old, but I still have a favourite dinosaur, the Triceratops. I really love those guys.

FEEL THE BURN

 

I'm still on a TV movie kick, and I have absolutely no regrets. One of the additional benefits to watching these things is that often the only copies available now are digitised from video tapes, so the viewing experience is characterised by specks, lines and signal loss, drained or other saturated colour, and quiet, distorted or intermittent sound. It's not a problem for me, I like it. 

Here's a degraded scene from The Savage Bees, an ABC TV Movie Of The Week from 1974. It's disappointingly light on killer bee action, but has a weird gothic vibe going on that almost (but not quite) makes up for that. That's Gloria Swanson, by the way, in her last acting role. Her first film was in 1914, so it can't be said that she didn't make an effort.