Movie directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel by Edmund Naughton

When I was growing up, some magazine lying around the house purported to dissect the best movies that had ever been made. They sliced and diced by genre and critic and popularity and awards and whatever else they could use to fill the space. This was well before the Internet, so spending time perusing its pages was pretty much the best equivalent available to surfing IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert’s site– essentially a good way to spend an hour if nothing better were available.

I remember that the editors of the publication had saved their final pages for critics’ selections of the best movie ever. As it floats before my mind’s eye, the usual suspects of that day were named: Citizen Kane, Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, Casablanca, and Gone With the Wind. Growing up in a movie household, I knew all of them but two. Citizen Kane made its way to me in its time, but one lone outlier had selected M*A*S*H, a film that I knew as the television show, which I had not really seen yet. Careful close reading revealed that the same critic had also called M*A*S*H the greatest war movie, also- explicitly praising its anti-war tone.

That was enough to make me think that I might not want to ask around the house about the film since I really had no idea what sort of can of worms I might be opening. Self-censorship, especially the unnecessary kind, is never a good thing, but we do learn it at a young age. The most I ever heard from my dad about the movie was that he had enjoyed it- I think he had seen it with one or both of my older brothers. So, I was on my own later to make sense of that first viewing. Robert Altman does not make easy films. By the time I got to it, the TV show was burned into my consciousness, so I had to set that imprint aside. In the end, M*A*S*H, Nashville, and a lot of others by Altman proved favorites, and always enjoyable.

For whatever reason, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and I had never intersected until recently. I’ve been thinking about that critic who called M*A*S*H an anti-war war movie (which most “war” movies are- they may be patriotic, but truly pro-war themes usually falter after “we had good reasons”). One of my viewing companions asked if people really thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a western. The ambiance is present and there is a long gunfight, but the world shown is not standard Western fare.

I thought the movie was fantastic, but could it have existed without all those westerns before it? The strange thing about stories that “defy” genres is that the person who writes them has to inhabit the genre in order to see the unexplored corners. You need to slip into the envelope before you can push it. Genres only become tired when people police them for acceptable content. Between the border pushers and the authors wishing to avoid classification, I don’t know where this all leads. Readers are playing fair when they just want a mystery… are they in conflict with the writers seeking their attention?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 261 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Peter Straub

Like many of my generation, that first horror novel was written by Stephen King. I spent winter vacation one middle school year devouring The Shining. As intended, I was terrified and so enthralled that I finished the book anyway. I recall my parents discussing whether or not they should intervene in my reading choice. They doubtless had concerns about mature themes, which I mostly glossed over, reveling instead in the ghosts and the living topiary. In the end, they probably regretted not stopping me as it turned out that The Shining was the stuff that nightmares were made of.

Be that as it may, I mostly conquered the bad dreams, but kept on reading Stephen King. Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Christine, and Pet Sematary all followed whenever school allowed. Looking back on them, they constituted something of an explanation of adults for me. At an age and in an era that seemed determined to paint the world as a great divide between youth and maturity, these books found heroes and villains across all ages, many races, and the entire economic spectrum. To someone unfamiliar with the history of Gothic literature (really not too hip to plain literature either), they opened up whole worlds of storytelling possibilities.

Between a sister-in-law who willingly shared her reading habit and the local library, I had ready access to the legions of writers who followed King into the suddenly burgeoning field of horror authorship. Many were talented, but none held my interest at the time. At some point, Ghost Story landed on my nightstand and that changed.

The setting in a small New England town was familiar from King’s oeuvre. The language, however, was different. The rhythm and pace felt special. The villain was a seductress, somehow more adult and more primeval than anything I had read before. Despite the vampires and zombies and poltergeist and apocalypses of other books, the sweep of years in Ghost Story felt like a grand scale fight against something that could not be defeated.

The conceit of the story around the multiple narrators and their ghost story telling group gave layers that resonated even with an inexperienced reader like myself. More than that, the behavior of the men echoed that strange tendency of repeat readers to return to the horror genre even when it terrified the bejeezus out of them.

While I had been reading scary things for quite a while, I still struggled to make my peace with frightening movies. When it came time to see the movie based on Straub’s book, I could not resist the enticement, but I distinctly remember my trepidation with every scene change. The strange and usually comforting sight of Fred Astaire and John Houseman on the screen did nothing to calm my tremors. I loved every minute of it, glimpsing a future willingness to watch darn near anything.

At a time when vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and what have you seem passé, the thrill seems almost gone. We’ve had monsters killing children for so long that the very idea of literary horror seems absurd. King continues to sell books, but he has been an anomaly. Harry Potter certainly had horrific elements, but they were hardly the point. Maybe these tales were always destined for the moving image and that same subset of people who seek out collections by Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 262 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Song written by Billy Admire and Baker Knight
Performed by The Grass Roots

My older brother owned the first cassette player/recorder that I had ever seen. Of course, you could buy cassette tapes in record stores and he did. Somehow, he also managed to record some records onto blank tapes. I believe early attempts were made using a microphone plugged into the cassette recorder and held against the speaker on our console record player in the living room, probably when I was not around in order to keep external noise from bleeding into the recording. The introduction of cables connecting the recorder directly to our new console stereo system greatly improved the sound quality.

In his bedroom, my brother kept a shoe box full of cassettes, any one of which would be playing when I dropped by in the evening to distract him from homework. Soon enough I started pestering him to let me listen to music when he wasn’t around. The fact was that he was not playing my favorite music often enough.

Once permission had been granted (at least, I remember the granting…), I had to figure out which tape had the right music. Just looking at the labels made it fairly clear that it was not David Bowie or Yes or J. Geils. Somehow, I stumbled onto the right cassette: Sixteen Greatest Hits by the Grass Roots. I cannot explain how the tape survived my repeated plays, including rewinds and fast forwards to get to the best song at that moment.

The song that I adored above the rest was The River is Wide, or, as I referred to it for years- the one that starts with the thunderstorm. The thing about blank cassettes in those early days was that they did not come with cases or cardboard inserts to list songs, so… You either knew the titles or you didn’t.

So, here’s the deal- up through college, I could talk about Bowie and Yes and anything else from that shoe box of music with anyone and they always had an idea of who I was talking about. But The Grass Roots became a strange barometer of some common heritage. It was not enough to have heard Midnight Confessions (which pretty much everyone had), but that strange knowing smile that crossed people’s faces revealing shared knowledge- they were part of the tribe, too.

As it turned out, K-tel or one of the other television packagers had included Sooner or Later on one of their collections somewhere along the way and people recognized that one also, whether or not they were really in the know.

So, were the Grass Roots really any good? Was most of their music recorded by the Wrecking Crew? Tommy James accomplished some amazing things in pop music and the Monkees certainly have staying power. Something about those sixteen songs by the Grass roots though… they have a brightness and a tightness and that certain something. I don’t know if you can really go to these songs later in life and appreciate them- maybe they are the soundtrack to a feeling and that is probably enough.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 263 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.