Winamp Wednesday: He's in Every Film
And sometimes wearing a towel.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Robyn Hitchcock, “Don’t Talk to Me About Gene Hackman”
Starting off 1999 with an actor who didn’t appear in a single film that year. But still, let’s talk about “Gene Hackman”…
Hidden away at the end of the 1999 LP Jewels for Sophia, “Don’t Talk to Me About Gene Hackman” is peak Robyn Hitchcock. Or maybe that’s to say it’s Robyn Hitchcock at his peak. The rest of the album is Peak Robyn Hitchcock, an aloof collection of weird narratives that dare you to find the joke in them. Jimmy Guterman of The Worst Rock ‘n’ Roll Records of All Time fame once declared that the only people who didn’t get the joke of Hitchcock naming one of his albums Queen Elvis were Hitchcock and his fans. I’m not even sure that there’s a joke to get in his work. There’s a prolific dadaism to Robyn Hitchcock that holds the audience at bay, that dares them to get invested in one man’s stream of consciousness. His songs are as much constructed as the intricate performances of someone like Devo or Talking Heads, but there’s absolutely more Less involved.
When Jonathan Demme partnered with Talking Heads we got the euphoric building collaboration that is Stop Making Sense. When Demme made a concert film with Robyn Hitchcock we got him performing alone in a storefront on 14th Street. It’s the same attention to craft that leads to the opposite outcome. Someone like David Byrne wants to channel the euphoria they feel into you through their music. Robyn Hitchcock wants you to understand his melancholy.
Jewels for Sophia is…you know, it’s a good record. It plays better now than it did back in 1999 where it was lost for me in a quick deluge of incredible new CDs all at once. The full set got one or two plays coming back from summer break before I was lost to Guided by Voices’ Do the Collapse or something similar. Pitchfork gave Jewels for Sophia an 8.9 out of 10, a stupidly high score for them and way too high for this record, but the review contains this fantastic nugget of truth about Robyn Hitchcock’s music: “this is a song that starts out sounding silly and winds up telling you more than you wanted to know about yourself.” When he’s very good he can harness that elemental truth. When he’s bad he’s just leading you on the pop equivalent of a shaggy dog story.
(“Darlin' you don't have to call me Stalin or even Mao Tse Tung 'cause I'm far too young. My rising sign is Capricorn; is that surprising?” What in the hell, Robyn? You’re going to lead off the film with that?)
“Don’t Talk to Me About Gene Hackman” works because it’s hovering between the good and bad of Robyn. Sometimes he wants to tell you about how much he hates Rush Limbaugh, sometimes he wants to rap about the folly of memory, sometimes he wants to remind you that we’re all headed to the grave. This time he wants to tell you that he just saw Unforgiven on cable and man wasn’t Gene Hackman great in that! Can you believe the range he has? Also he’s scary, don’t talk about him!
“He’s in every film! He’s sometimes wearing a towel! And if it isn’t him you get Andie MacDowell!” That is one of the worst rhymes in pop history and at the same time it’s one of the best. It’s so astonishingly low effort that it had to have taken a week to come up with. To this day it never fails to make me laugh. Can you sub in one actor for another? Would Andie MacDowell have been great in Crimson Tide? (Hell yes!) Could Gene Hackman have handled the graceful touch of something like Michael? (I need to see this movie!) In what movie is Gene Hackman wearing a towel? Are there several that would constitute “sometimes” in that sentence?
It often feels like Robyn Hitchcock’s intent was to mystify to the point that you’d find some existential truth inside yourself. This time I was just mystified to the point where I started giggling. It became an inside joke between me and some of my high school friends, now unable to disassociate Popeye Doyle or Lex Luthor from the fact that he’s sometimes weaaaaring a towwwwellll.
Some things make me laugh no matter how many times I encounter them. Weird Al screaming explosions as Rambo in UHF. The phrase “Bill Maher the Science Car”. All but that one punchline in Duck Soup. And “Don’t Talk to Me About Gene Hackman”. This time Robyn Hitchcock knew the joke was there; there’s a reason why it was shuttled in as a hidden track like a blackout gag. Twenty-five years later it endures in my library where The Soft Boys and Moss Elixir have faded. What makes it so great? It could be Gene himself for all I know…
Next Time: Everything’s bigger but smaller. It’s computers…