If you haven't seen Psych Out, run along to Aro St Video and pick up the video for a little LSD and Devil Jack.
Susan Strasberg stars as a deaf runaway teenager in 1968 who goes to Haight Ashbury to look for her wacko brother. She encounters Jack Nicholson and Dean Stockwell as zonked-out psychedelic band members who play terrible ripoffs of songs like Purple Haze while sharing bills with the Strawberry Alarm Clock; Nicholson plays guitar without moving his fingers, which Hendrix never managed. Indie filmmaker Henry Jaglom turns up as an artist armed with a buzz-saw while on a bad trip. Dick Clark produced, and the result is a weirdly compelling mix of celebration and condemnation of the drug culture.
Highlights were headband-wearing pseudo-mystic Stockwell's mock-profundities, Nicholson behaving like a real jerk, a totally fucked up Bruce Dern, and a solid performance from Strasberg holding it all together. The non-stop psychedelic cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs is stunning. The club scenes look terrific, and utilize plenty of oil projectors and patterned swirling lights. The trip scenes are good for a few laughs. Director Richard Rush went on to make the excellent The Stunt Man, which has my favourite Peter O'Toole performance and good turns from Steve Railsback and the ever-reliable Barbara Hershey, and which was every bit as much a Weird Hippy Shit movie as Psych Out, only in a more interesting way (and in the '80s!).
It's on a double feature with Roger Corman's famous LSD experience flick The Trip, which was written by Nicholson and also stars Strasberg and Dern, with Peter Fonda taking the lead and his future Easy Rider compadre Dennis Hooper. I haven't watched that one yet; I'm waiting 'til I'm, er, in the mood.
Right now I'm listening to Miles Davis live at Newport from 1958. It's with the same band that would record Kind of Blue the following year, but doesn't feature any of that album's modal improvisations, instead mostly utilizing songs by folks like Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. It's nice.
Posted by pearce at January 18, 2004 7:30 PMSince when do you know so much about jazz?
(That's an envy/respect-question, by the way.)
Posted by: morgue at January 20, 2004 9:47 PMJazz CDs are cheap, and usually come with informative liner notes. I actually know very little about jazz, but what I do know mostly comes from there.
Your copy of Kind of Blue was instrumental in getting me interested.
Posted by: Pearce at January 21, 2004 8:50 AM