Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer collaborated on a few movies in the 70s and 80s. Frank, of course, is the photographer behind the book The Americans, the Beat movie Pull My Daisy and the notorious Stones-commissioned, Stones-banned Cocksucker Blues; Wurlitzer is the novelist and screenwriter who wrote the scripts for Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Alex Cox’s Walker.
(Incidentally, Wurlitzer and Cox allege that Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is a ripoff of Zebulon, an unproduced screenplay Wurlitzer wrote for Sam Peckinpah in the 70s. Several years ago, Wurlitzer refashioned Zebulon as the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.)
Among Frank and Wurlitzer’s collaborations is the 1981 pseudo-documentary short Energy and How to Get It, about real-life Tesla admirer Robert Golka’s experiments with fusion. It includes an entertaining turn by William S. Burroughs as the sinister Energy Czar, whose interests are threatened by Golka’s experiments and who knows how the world is really run:
Prayin’ is for the moron majority. They’re handy, they’re useful, but we don’t go in for that sort of rubbish. No, I mean, if we had to start prayin’, we’d be prayin’ to ourselves. ‘Cause we’re the source. If you want anything, you have to come to us.
Frames from Energy and How to Get It
Earlier this year, about fourteen minutes of the 28-minute short surfaced on YouTube. I’m not sure whether this is just the movie’s first half or if it’s the edited version that was released on Giorno Poetry Systems’ home video It’s Clean, It Just Looks Dirty. In any case, to see the 28-minute cut, you’ll have to track down the out-of-print German DVD Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works Volume 4. Good luck with that. In the meantime, behold this tantalizing glimpse of a future that never was.
Hard to remember it now, but it was well into the 1980s before VCRs were commonplace in America life. I lived in lower Manhattan at the time and there were very few video rental stores there. The only ones I can recall are Kim’s Video (originally sharing space with a dry cleaner, then several locations, now down to one again) and the New Video mini-chain, now a DVD distributor. By mid-decade the “tape trading underground” was starting to organize itself (aided by the then burgeoning zine scene) and an unlikely character named “Dan the Record Man” became a key node in that machinery.
“Dan the Record Man” was probably in his mid 50s when I met him, but he was in such terrible shape that he looked far older. He was a classic example of what eating SHITTY FOOD 24/7—in his case dirty water sauerkraut and mustard slathered hot dogs sold by street vendors outside of the Canal Street flea market where his stall was located—could do to a human body. My god did he just reek of poor health and future strokes and heart attacks, but he was a super cool old guy who had been a dancer on Hullabaloo and knew everything about music and had records so rare it made my head spin. Case in point he had copies of The Great Lost Kinks Album as well as the live Yardbirds LP and the novelty record “Stairway to Gilligan” both which Led Zeppelin’s lawyers had yanked off the market. Once he knew you were “cool”—he was really paranoid—he’d pull back the black curtains covering the top shelves in his overstuffed corner booth and show you the bootlegs (there were thousands) and the real treasure he had, the bootleg videos.
Dan had EVERYTHING you ever wanted or could ever want. And if he didn’t have it, he could get it for you (he scored Nancy Sinatra’s TV special for me as I recall). Tapes were $20 and he’d do trade if you had something really good, but in keeping with his Gollum-esque character, you had to have two really good things in order to get one of his really good things for free. Those were his rules and you could fuck the fuck off if you weren’t prepared to play by them. Old school record collectors out there will feel me when I say: you did play by his rules. Otherwise you were cut off from so much illicit bootleg goodness.
Every once in a while you could surprise Dan with something incredibly rare. At the time I knew Dan, I was working in a digital video studio that did Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film transfers. On one occasion, photographer Robert Frank booked time to make a film transfer from his little seen documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American Tour with the title Cocksucker Blues. The Stones had an injunction against Cocksucker Blues being screened (unless for charity) because, well, it was a fairly decadent and at times quite unflattering portrait of them, let’s just say. The staff were told that under no circumstances could we make our own copies of what Frank was coming in to transfer. Yeah right! So, uh, this friend of mine, yeah this friend of mine, made copy, a copy of which I then traded to Dan, for, as I recall, a live video of David Bowie’s “Heroes” tour from 1978 and Bowie’s “1980 Floor Show” performance from The Midnight Special. Whenever I saw a bootleg of Cocksucker Blues, I would always look to see if it was a generation or two (or ten) away from the one I traded to Dan. Over the decades, most of them were my copy’s progeny (I can tell by a warble in the opening credits) although this has changed in recent years as a far better version has surfaced on DVD and torrent sites.
In any case, my rambling anecdote about the VHS tape trading underground of the late 1980s is because I wanted you to know that the legendary Cocksucker Blues documentary has been posted once again by some kind soul for viewing on the Internet. My 25-year-old copy is NOT the parent of this version, which looks pretty good (Note: The film was shot on Super-8 film to begin with, so it’s never going to look much better than this. You can find torrents for a great looking DVD version all over the place).
What do rich people do when they have too much money? Get wrecked. So it was for Conrad Rooks, who by the age of fifteen was a full-blown alcoholic. Money may give you many things, but apparently not self-control or a conscience.
Rooks’ pappy owned Avon. Ding-Dong, no need to worry about quitting the booze or getting a job. Instead Rooks started a new hobby - drugs. He jumped from booze to dope, to coke, to LSD, to peyote, to heroin, then decided to get clean. Off to Switzerland, where he was given a new treatment - the sleep cure.
This is what happened to Rooks. His story formed the basis for a 1966 movie Chappaqua, which Rooks produced, directed, wrote, and starred in. It is an interesting mess of a film. It picked up a Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival, and became a “legendary” underground hit due to its association with drugs and the Beat Generation. This is where its importance lies today: in the appearance of William S. Burroughs as Opium Jones. Along with brief cameos from Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovksy, and the beautiful, quite stunning cinematography by Beat film-maker, Robert Frank, who made Pull My Daisy and went on to make Cocksucker Blues for The Rolling Stones. Add to this performances by Ravi Shankar, Ornette Coleman, The Fugs, and a score by Philip Glass. There is enough going on to keep interest, with perhaps the finger occasionally on Fast Forward.
(Mick Jagger, Mick Taylor and Keith Richards goofing with guest musicians in front of Villa Nellcote)
Just got back from purchasing, that’s right, purchasing, the newly remastered version of Exile on Main St. (I’m about to pop in the bonus disc. Wow, alternate versions of both Loving Cup and Soul Survivor). As mentioned previously, I’ve been looking forward to this thing with equal doses of curiosity and dread (no harm done, says Pitchfork, who score it a perfect 10), but, echoing Mr. Laner, what I’m really waiting for comes out June 22nd, the BBC’s making-of-the-album doc, The Stones In Exile.
Judging here by Mick’s grin at Cannes (and despite his periodic downplaying of the album’s signficance), he’s definitely pleased with the end product. As the mythology behind Exile taps into so many things I’m particularly resonant to beyond the Stones themselves—Los Angeles, the eye of Robert Frank, notions of, well, “exile”— I’m sure I’ll be, ahem, happy, too.
What follows is a stellar clip off Exile, the Stones’ cover of Slim Harpo‘s Shake Your Hips. Recorded in Montreaux in ‘72, various versions of this have been floating around online, but this one’s looking sharp!
While a mood of reflection descends upon on our nation, what better day than today, this 8-year anniversary, to reflect on something approaching its 50th? Like many people, I have stacks of books by my bed, but beyond all the stacks, flat and visible on a nightstand, I keep a copy of The Americans, Swiss photographer—and Cocksucker Blues auteur—Robert Frank‘s epic, black-and-white meditation on what America looked like in the 12 or so months following the summer of ‘55.
Just eighty-three photos winnowed down from oh, twenty-seven thousand, Frank’s book winds up in my hands time and time again, and if, as Rod Stewart says, “every picture tells a story,” I’m by now pretty sure I’ve forged a story from each of its melancholy images.
But that’s what photos do—the good ones, anyway. Reduced to two dimensions, stripped from time and place, photographs compel us to find the metaphor. To search for meaning. That freedom to look and think and wonder, it’s a large part of The Americans’ stark, open-ended beauty. And for Frank’s subjects, too, contemplation shows up as a favored mode of expression. As Anthony Lane writes in the current New Yorker:
Was there ever a book as full of looking as Robert Frank?
