IT'S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME...

I wrote a review of Meshuggah's Catch 33 about five or six weeks ago, and sent it off to the Cleveland Scene. It vanished. Now, all of a sudden, here it is in this week's paper.

Does this mean the album has a street date? I sure hope so; it's an astonishing record, guaranteed to make metal fans (and metal-friendly critics) shit themselves with joy, and forget all about the crushing disappointment they felt when they heard the new System of a Down disc.

After checking the Nuclear Blast website, it seems Catch 33 is coming out on Tuesday. Wow; they're doing almost as much publicity for it as Limp Bizkit did for that EP they pinched off the other week. Well, you heard it here: Catch 33 is fucking mind-roasting, and you owe it to yourself to go buy one on Tuesday.

STARTING COUNTDOWN CLOCK...

So the book has a cover (which I'm a little disappointed with, but never mind), and a release date: September 9, 2005. Almost exactly four years after my first book came out. (Street date on that one was September 11, 2001. No, really.)

The manuscript has to be 100 percent finished, edited and author approved by June 6, so I'm gonna be spending the next week or two exchanging versions of chapters with the copy editor, who seemed like a decent enough guy on the phone. I did a quick re-read of some early chapters the other day, and I'm pretty happy with it. There are a few things I need to add, just for the sake of touching on releases that have come out since I turned in the first version, but other than that, it is what it is. Whoever's gonna hate it, is gonna hate it, no matter what I do now. And I already got paid. So fuck, let's just get it on already, right?

I've got two competing ideas for my next book rattling around in my head. The one isn't coming together as quickly as I'd like (usually, when I decide to write a novel, it appears in my brain fully-formed), but the other will require extensive research for historical accuracy. I think I'm up to the homework, so I'm gonna go with the latter, and if the currently semi-shapeless idea starts to sharpen up in my mind, I'll make detailed notes, and that'll be the book after next.

In the meantime, I earned some grocery money by writing about Porcupine Tree this week, so go read that if you want. The new album's good; you should buy it. It'll make you much happier than the new System of a Down disc will. I've only listened to that record once, but it really didn't impress me at all, and I can't imagine myself going back for another helping at the end of the year.

FROM BLACK COCK TO WHITE POWER

Here's an amusing little tale of a porn girl who pretended to be Latin when she needed a marketing hook, took on all comers of all colors until the business got bored with her psycho antics, and went White Power when she had nowhere else to go. (Here's an earlier story about her wars with her neighbors, down in Florida.)

In other news, I gave the revised version of my novel to my agent early this week, and now I'm working on a couple of Next Things: notes toward another novel, and a possible anthology of music-related essays. A few of the higher-profile names I asked to contribute said yes right away, which will make the proposal that much more salable. So I'm feeling okay about that project. There probably won't be a ton of money in it, but it'll be fun.

THE BONG-RATTLING BASS..., ETC.

In the last month (first batch April 12, second batch last night) I have bought six CDs by Grand Funk Railroad. I now own the 2002 remastered editions (w/bonus tracks) of On Time, Grand Funk, Closer To Home, Survival, E Pluribus Funk and We're An American Band, plus Live: The 1971 Tour, which I bought a couple of years ago. Unless someone can make a really convincing argument for Phoenix or anything post-WAAB, I think I'm done. But only because the discs I do own seem to contain a lifetime's worth of knuckle-dragging joy.

I'll step right off the ledge with my opening gambit: I prefer Grand Funk's version of "Gimme Shelter" to the Stones' original.

[waits as everyone leaves]

Seriously, that one track, contained on Survival, sort of encapsulates everything great about Grand Funk - the album as a whole is kind of their defining statement. (It's not their best album; I think Closer To Home is. But it's their most unadulteratedly Grand Funk-ian.)

On the Survival cover, the members of the band are clad in loincloths, covered in mud, clutching bones and huddling at the mouth of a cave they're clearly supposed to be living in. (This is a pretty fair approximation of the circumstances critics of the time would have wished upon these three lunks, had they their way. But anyhow.) They're running with the Nugent-ian noble-savage thing, a few years before Terrible Ted would put on his own loincloth, and swing across arena stages on a rope.

The music on Survival, as on every Grand Funk album I own, is as gloriously primitive as the artwork. The mix is crystal-clear, allowing the listener to wallow in the sheer...competence of every recorded moment. For a band no more talented than your average collection of sixteen-year-olds in a suburban garage, these guys sure liked to jam. The bonus tracks on most of these reissues contain extended versions of album cuts - and wow! did they bloat up in concert.

I think it's the dumbness of Grand Funk that makes me like them so much. They distilled American white teenaged Seventies-ness down into a thick, tar-like muck, and spread it everywhere. It's not the hostile dumbness found in, say, NYHC country or Toby Keith, though. It's unthinking fun, with occasional outbursts of semi-coherent philosophizing ("Save The Land").

Make no mistake, though: my newfound enthusiasm for GFR contains not a drop of contempt or irony. I have always preferred the music of 1970-75 (and even the late 1970s) to the music of 1964-69. The Beatles? Pre-Let It Bleed Stones? The Velvet Underground? No thanks; I'll take Black Sabbath, ZZ Top and Grand Funk. (And Blue Öyster Cult and Motörhead and Cactus and Montrose and Free and Bad Company and...and...and...)

COWBOY POETRY

I’ve seen all four of what I’d consider the major works of Sam Peckinpah. Two of them, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, are great. On the other hand, I tried to make it through Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (newly released on DVD) the other day, and by about the halfway point I was ready to saw my own head off. And The Getaway - well, all I can say is that the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger remake didn’t do the half-assed original any harm. Some folks like his stuff a lot better than I do, though. Walter Hill loved Bloody Sam so much he made his very own Peckinpah movie, back in 1987: the baroque, blackly hilarious, sweaty, bloody, fucked-up border blast-’em-up Extreme Prejudice, which I watched last night for the first time since catching its theatrical run at 15.

The movie has two main plotlines, which intertwine pretty well. Plot No. 1: Jack Benteen [Nick Nolte] is a Texas Ranger; his best friend from childhood, Cash Bailey [Powers Boothe], is a drug dealer who lives across the Mexican border in Kurtz-ian splendor, strutting among his thuggish banditos in a gleaming white suit and crushing the occasional scorpion in his naked fist, just because he can. (Today’s movies are really missing the ostentatious, context-less displays of macho that substituted for character development in 80s action flicks.) In their constricted, manly way, they both love the same woman, played by Maria Conchita Alonso. Conflict ensues. Plot No. 2: a group of killing-machine veterans, all supposedly dead, travel the world doing the U.S. government’s dirty work, and their latest assignment, they believe, is to take out Cash Bailey, who used to be an informant but who’s turned rogue. (There’s a twist here, but I won’t spoil it, because this movie really is worth a spot on every Netflix queue.) As part of their anti-Bailey efforts, they blow up large sections of Benteen’s home town, which makes him angry. Eventually, though, he travels down to Mexico with them, aiming to get a personal confrontation with Bailey while the soldiers tear the place up.

The supporting cast is sort of an 80s action all-star team. The soldiers are played by, among others, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, and Michael Ironside. (The guy who played Lamar in Revenge Of The Nerds is in there, too, but if anything, that should be a laudable tribute to his range.) Nolte’s running partner, the local sheriff, is Rip Torn. Cash Bailey’s two main henchmen are “Tiny” Lister and Luis Contreras (you may remember him as a tall, surly supermarket security guard in Repo Man). Forsythe steals most of his scenes, as he so often does (side note: a friend of mine interviewed Forsythe once, and the actor's recollection was that in true Peckinpah spirit, this was the drunkest set he'd ever been on), but this movie really belongs to Powers Boothe.

Boothe’s madness in this movie is brilliant and hilarious. The first time he confronts Nolte in the desert, his white suit shines like the sun. The next time we see him, he’s wearing the same suit, but he’s unshaven and it’s practically pinto-spotted with dirt and sweat. He’s a true sleaze, the centerpiece of Walter Hill’s view of Mexico as a place where no one seemingly could get clean even if they wanted to. Clouds of dust float around greasy, heavily-armed Mexicans, and Boothe lists in the middle of the crowd, tequila bottle in one hand, revolver in the other. His delivery of the sometimes preposterous, other times oddly brilliant dialogue is note-perfect: you never believe he’s anything but an utterly dissipated, depraved scumbag, and yet he’s oddly pitiable even in his psychosis. It’s sort of like he’s channeling his earlier, equally unforgettable work in the 1980 TV movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story Of Jim Jones.

There are a bunch of extremely violent outbursts, including a massive explosion, a bank robbery, and a shotgun-to-the-foot scene that made me wince when I first saw it as a teenager, and did it again this time. But the climactic massacre is where the Wild Bunch comparisons really come into play. Just like the Peckinpah version, there are machine gun nests, blood squibs as far as the eye can see, and bodies tumbling from roof to street in lovely slow motion, all expertly edited so the plot is never lost. At the same time, the duel between Boothe and Nolte over Alonso has an almost Leone-like majesty. This film reveals the extreme difficulty of making a modern-day Western that really works. Walter Hill pulls off what very few other directors could (probably because most wouldn’t even try).

Hill is one of my favorite directors, and I think this might be his best movie. It’s the movie that made me start looking for his name as a factor in whether I’d buy a ticket, or hit the video store, or not. It’s underrated, and too infrequently seen, compared with his better-regarded, better-known movies like 48 Hrs., The Warriors, Southern Comfort or Hard Times, but I think Extreme Prejudice distills everything great about Hill’s cigar-chomping, balls-out approach to filmmaking (and everything he stole from Peckinpah’s few lucid moments). It’s a movie that deserves a reputation beyond folks like me. (And a widescreen DVD release would be nice, too.)