Patronizing the Nashville Sound
COOK, BRUCE
On Music PATRONIZING THE NASHVILLE SOUND BY BRUCE COOK As I write this, I am still trying to recover from the critical blitz done on behalf of Robert Alt-man's new film, Nashville. It may, as its...
...What is such obviously amateur work doing in a widely-advertised and highly regarded motion picture...
...The singing won't offend the vast majority of the movie's audiences...
...There is dismal evidence aplenty on ABC Records' Nashville-Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (ABCD 893)-an album that is astonishing only for its having been released commercially...
...He is a consummate performer with a sure sense of taste, as is apparent from side one of his Columbia album Red Headed Stranger (KC 33482...
...Actually, it was Altman's idea to have the actors compose their own material...
...Perhaps the movie critics don't know better, yet some of the music critics do...
...Unintimidated, Hance proceeded to report the comments of Lloyd Green, a first-rate steel guitarist who has done many important sessions in Nashville-including, as it turns out, a couple of background tracks for Altman's movie...
...This "hairy-headed hippie from Austin,' as I heard him called in Nashville, doesn't have a great voice-it's thin, reedy and occasionally a trifle flat-but he can phrase with a delicacy even Sarah Vaughan would have to respect...
...But the music stinks...
...Miller was marred by the Leonard Cohen songs that commented on the action...
...Yet they are remarkably crude and tendentious...
...But is it really fair to country music...
...Two of the stars, Timothy Brown and the hapless Ms...
...The day after his review appeared, Hance received a call from an angry Robert Altman, who cited the overwhelmingly favorable verdict of the movie critics and told Hance that he seemed to be "in left field...
...It may, as its enthusiasts have said, be the last word on Middle America's dark urges to fascism...
...Baskin [Nashville's music supervisor] argues that 'a lot of these well-known country singers aren't so great,' but many of them have a technical security and above all a stylistic confidence that the film performers lack...
...love and violent death, it is quite simply beautiful music...
...The amazing thing to me, in fact, is that not one movie reviewer has even hinted that the songs in the film are inferior, imitation country...
...You needn't take my word on this...
...Willie Nelson, on the other hand, offers listeners something entirely different...
...the lyrics are as stale as last month's bread...
...Instead, he sent his writer, Joan Tewkesbury, and took her word on what the place was like...
...The acting is good, and the story is good, and the presentation is excellent...
...I don't believe he did, either...
...It has long seemed to me that his one fundamental fault as a director is his insensitivity to music...
...Of course, I can already hear the rebuttal: Ms...
...it merely gave him a way of saying what he wanted to say about certain aspects of American society and culture...
...The arrangements are professional enough (the background musicians are among Nashville's best), but at least half of the tracks are so poorly sung that you might think you were listening to a put-on if you didn't know better...
...I thought the music was atrocious," Green opined...
...I'd be shirking my duty as a music critic if I tried to avoid the issue, for Nashville is not only a musical (with a soundtrack album that features 13 country songs sung by the picture's stars), it is Hollywood's first big country & western film...
...and the tunes are no more than cliched phrases strung together like dime-store pearls...
...In any event, I would not be surprised to hear that Altman feels the songs in his film are pretty good...
...Few singers in any field can make a song so completely their own, for few can infuse as much personality into a single line as he does here line after line...
...Some of the songs are just plain bad-especially two by Karen Black, "Memphis" and "Rolling Stone...
...When Henry Gibson sings that he can't leave his wife "For the Sake of the Children," he's giving us a nudge, and pointing an accusing finger at the hypocrisy of the Silent Majority...
...The rhymes of these are weak and obvious...
...The refrain of "It Don't Worry Me," for example-"You may say that I ain't free/But it don't worry me"-blares Altaian's pietistic message about complacent, Right-wing Nashville at the audience...
...From what I gather, he spent no time in the city before going there to shoot...
...Even his much acclaimed McCabe & Mrs...
...Bill Hance, an entertainment columnist for the Nashville Banner who frequently writes about country music, was a little more to the point: "Nashville is a good movie, and for movie freaks it may be a double shot...
...But I suspect that many of those who love country music will be bored or even annoyed by these songs, and will find it patronizing that Mr...
...He has a new RCA album out, Waylon/Dreaming My Dreams (APLI-1062), and he's groaning away as eloquently as ever...
...If Alt-man thinks that this is our kind of music, he's got another think coming...
...Organized into a kind of song-suite with two numbers-Nelson's own "Time of the Preacher" and Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman's "Red Headed Stranger"-used thematically to string together a cowboy medley devoted to (what else...
...Altman obviously has no affection for the music...
...Black are embarrassing...
...There is, for instance, Waylon Jennings, whom I loudly declared several issues back (NL, March 3) to be America's best country music singer...
...That is, his skill exceeds his talent, and he exudes what John Rockwell calls "stylistic confidence...
...And it is country-pure country...
...The real thing...
...For those who may have been taken in by the counterfeit sounds of Nashville, I feel I ought to call attention to the real thing...
...The bicentennial hymn, "200 Years," is included to remind us of the Merle Haggard hits, "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me," which were so enthusiastically embraced by the superpatriots of the far Right that Haggard came to regret he ever wrote them...
...John Rockwell of the New York Times, for one, said that "the music isn't anywhere nearly so good as the best country music...
...That, however, is precisely the point...
...This comports with his notions about the open, collaborative nature of film making But it's simply not true that anybody can write songs, and the few decent numbers in Nashville are by Ronee Blakely, who is a professional singer-songwriter (and an amateur actress) and Keith Carradine, who is clearly-as they say-a natural...
...Nonetheless-to answer the question-if you think this "incomparable masterwork" (-Judith Crist, New York magazine) presents even an approximation of what is sung and played in the town that calls itself, with no false pride, Music City, U.S.A., then you don't know any more about country & western than the people who made Nashville...
...That confidence is enough to make hearing Nelson a genuine pleasure...
...The film bears the name of our city, but the music is unlistenable...
...Gibson barely manages to talk his way through his own bad songs...
...The background music and the studio work came off fine, but we had nothing to work with...
...Altman maintained at the time that he was delighted with them, demonstrating that he doesn't have much of an ear...
...Blakely and Carradine are also the only two in the cast who can really sing-although when she settles down to it, Barbara Harris finally does a good job of belting out Carradine's "It Don't Worry Me...
...I don't think he did his homework on this one...
...Black is an actress, not a musician, and her songs are competent enough for an amateur...
...Altman hasn't cared as much about music as he obviously does about acting...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 15
