Gigs, TV. More to come!
I did one of these (two, actually) for 2022. 2023 isn’t over yet, but with two weeks remaining I feel okay starting to shake out the purse of my year and seeing what all besides a lipstick and some earbuds was in there.
Gigs:
Sky Ferreira at Webster Hall on December 11. I don’t know the real story behind all the ongoing drama with her label. Her version of it is that she’s a perfectionist, which I believe, and that Capitol has not been at all supportive, which I also believe. It could also be that she’s a lunatic and no one wants to deal with her. Putting out and promoting a record is a commitment, a sustained relationship among many people and business entities! But Ferreira’s new songs are excellent and Capitol is fumbling a big opportunity for cred by letting her go, especially with popular music trends catching back up with what she does — pop-punk, sharp-tongued women, “sexy mental illness” as the stuff of memes. And yet, the women who succeed in pop today are very agreeable and pliable. They’ll talk shit about toxic exes in their lyrics, but they can always be counted on to be obedient representatives of the music industry. And to be some old creep’s idea of fuckable enough. And these days to be exactly 20 years old, unless you’ve generated enough supernova-grade shareholder value that you’re grandfathered into being allowed to stick around, or you’ve shown that you can stay on the Pitchfork hamster wheel and quietly thug it out in festival-circuit purgatory forever. And when you’re a lunatic and you’re more influenced by Jesus & Mary Chain than “Mr. Brightside” and you’ve never made money for anyone and you’re in your thirties now… well. She sold out her Webster Hall show, by the by. She sounds fantastic. Very goth.
Bob Dylan at Kings Theatre in November. Meanwhile, the industry has accepted and perhaps even embraced Bob Dylan as a quite credible loss leader. He’ll never be without a label or people to throw their financial and promotional weight behind what he does. A 17-minute ballad about the death of JFK? Sure, why not? He didn’t perform that one at the Kings, but his set was packed with Rough and Rowdy Ways numbers, him at the piano with a sparse band, now singing in a fuller and duskier voice. Like vintage Dead shows where the set list or the arrangements could go in a multitude of directions, Bob’s gigs are conversations. He’s in conversation with the cities he holds court in — and as with his choice to do Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” at the Beacon the following night, sometimes offering up covers that may be joking, dead serious, or a secret third thing. He’s telling us where his head’s at with his readings of history, his musical fixations. And there’s so much more he’s not telling, verbally or otherwise, that it’s a crapshoot what we get when he does literally address the audience with a passing thought instead of elliptical psychic conveyance. So in hindsight I was happy he didn’t really talk at the Kings performance, because we were spared the Jann Wenner apologia.
TV:
Moonlighting on Hulu. The crowning achievement of 2023 in television was finally getting Moonlighting onto streaming after years upon years of working out the music licensing. It was a music-heavy series, and per Scott Ryan’s lovingly detailed oral history, apparently the showrunners had a hell of a time renegotiating those songs for use in the VHS and DVD releases too because they didn’t anticipate that they’d need to do that. When the series first aired beginning in 1985, home media you could buy was a pretty new idea, and viewers were mostly just taping episodes on their VCRs or waiting around for reruns. Anyway, cut to 2023. The streaming explosion, “prestige TV” as a well-established cottage industry, the historic WGA strike calling renewed attention to screenwriting as both labor and craft, and the tragic news of Moonlighting’s lead actor Bruce Willis being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. It did seem like the right time to reintroduce America to David Addison and Maddie Hayes and Agnes DiPesto and Herbert Viola. Me, I watched it religiously as a kid but had only revisited a handful of key episodes over the decades. And I’m so delighted at how well it holds up. Screwball comedy! Fast-talking Bogie-Bacall gumshoe noir! An extended dance number directed by Stanley Donen and featuring Bob Fosse mainstay Sandahl Bergman! A sense of, as the book puts it, being “off the ground,” a bit magical, a heightened reality that can escape into the rainbow light-wave matrices of a bubble bath and not bat a lash. Some nifty Downtown L.A. exteriors, although as time went on, the locations defaulted to Santa Monica a whole lot. Cybill Shepherd sparkles as a comedic actor and looks divine in the posh, flowing baby blues and rose tones of Robert Turturice’s costume design. Bruce Willis, not yet a known quantity although he’d guested on Miami Vice in 1984, is ASTOUNDING in his versatility and depth. If you’re only aware of him as a swole action star with a couple of quotable one-liners, his wholly multidimensional turn as David Addison will surprise you: it’s on the level of Jon Hamm as Don Draper/Dick Whitman, except Willis’s David sometimes breaks into Spuds MacKenzie ’80s Cool Guy shit and sings Big Chill R&B. The two principal archetypes became so iconic that show creator Glenn Gordon Caron had the confidence to let them become anything, any curveball extension of their personae (shapeshifting Claymation Maddie!) and they’d still be completely themselves, a trope we’d see mirrored later on as braintrusts like The Simpsons empowered their character universes to get elastic and weird. I’m on Season 4 now and productionwise the show by this time had careened off the rails with script delays and stars who hated each other and decreased patience from ABC, but the ridiculous Hail Marys to keep it going are good, damned fucking good. Just smart, intuitive, idiosyncratic creative moves, nonstop.
