Halloween in the Nineteen Seventies---by Michael

We were scared. Held fast to the edge of the couch waiting for the moment when the monster would reveal himself and attempt to kill the hero. Shrinking into the recesses of our beanbags and all manner of funky furniture that the 70’s bestowed upon the accepting populace, we knew that no matter what, the monster would be killed in the end. OR WOULD HE???
It was an era of UHF broadcasting, weekend Creature Feature Matinees, snowy reception, and outdoor antennas that your dad had to get up on the roof and fix after every rainstorm, lest the picture on Charlie’s Angels not be up to his horny standard. Jesus had smiled upon Jaclyn Smith and her white mini-bikini, and Dad needed that sweet frozen moment in the opening credits to make sense of the week.
As Halloween approached we put up shitty plastic decorations that were not in the least bit scary. Plastic must have been able to cure cancer in the seventies because it was employed everywhere. The quality of the decorations didn’t matter, just that they were orange and black and plentiful.
Buying the Costume
This was just a bit different than what we know today. At this time all children’s Halloween costumes were in a small cardboard box at the local department or drug store, and consisted of a paper thin plastic mask with a 1/8” hole for breathing, and a cheap vinyl jumpsuit that was almost certainly guaranteed to rip with any sudden movement. The mask was held to your head with a rubber band affixed by a staple at either end. More often than not this would break when first trying on the mask in the store, thus making your parents put eighteen additional staples in one side for security and rendering the rubber band too short and cutting off all circulation to your face when wearing the mask.
After having the temperature of your face escalate to roughly a hundred and forty five steamy degrees, approximating life deep in a Malaysian jungle, you would stagger with heatstroke and trip over a crack and rip the bejeezus out of your vinyl costume. The rest of trick or treating would inevitably be done with the mask pulled up over your head and a wicked breeze circulating through the breech in your sweat soaked vinyl jumpsuit, inviting pneumonia.
Beggars Night
They still referred to it as Beggars Night in the seventies. People actually gave pennies instead of candy at some houses, and your bag would quickly grow heavy under the weight of coin. There were, even then, many houses that gave manufactured, pre-wrapped candies, but quite a few gave homemade treats.
We would be invited to enter people’s houses and feast on Rice Crispie treats and Candied Apples or Cookies fresh from the oven. No kidding. You would enter a lady’s home and eat Tollhouse cookies right off the sheet pan with a cold glass of milk, then go a few houses down to a guy who was handing out still melting chocolate covered caramel apples dipped in crushed peanuts, and munch this contentedly while strolling down to the house that was giving out FULL CANS OF SODA! And homemade brownies. There were none of the “safe alternative to Halloween” events like they hold now in every public park. People knew who their neighbors were. If you had poisoned their kids I’m assuming the townspeople would have come back to your house and driven you to the old windmill with torches.
We heard the stories every year of some kid in a distant town who had bitten into a razor blade hidden in a caramel apple and somehow died from minor bleeding of the gums. We sensed even at our young age that it was somehow bullshit. None of us had ever met anyone who had gotten a dental makeover from an evil apple, so it seemed something that happened to stupid kids in dipshit, USA.
After coming home and dumping my bag for my parents to go through and select what they wanted under guise of inspecting for my safety, I would proceed to eat chocolate until I had one hell of a stomachache. By this time a marathon of Universal Horror flicks had begun on the UHF channel, and I couldn’t be more satisfied or sick and uneasy.
My sisters would play tricks with flashlights, claim to hear noises in the basement and send me to investigate, or swear that they had seen ghosts in my bedroom just moments before I was sent to bed. Props to them, evil bitches all.
The one aspect of Halloween that never seemed to come up when I was a child in the nineteen seventies was religion. I grew up in a hardcore Christian part of the country where people thumped the bible like a rabbit signaling danger, and none of the adults seemed to care one iota about the evil pagan origins of the holiday.
It was a day of spooky fun for children. That was it. Already well practiced in instilling fear of vengeful immaterial spirits with our young hearts, what was one more day to fear the wrath of the great beyond? There was no taint of the path to preordained paganism, perhaps because the earthy practice of Midwestern Christianity daily recalled its primitive roots and put all the monsters in perspective against the spectre of Lucifer.
It was fun. It was innocent. I never felt victim to the fears and misconceptions of the adults around me, but I was always a potential future victim of the Wolfman.
We were scared. Held fast to the edge of the couch waiting for the moment when the monster would reveal himself and attempt to kill the hero. In the end it didn’t matter, because as tiredness gradually overtook nervous dread and my eyes slowly closed, my Mom and Dad would come fetch me from the couch or bean bag where I was laying and deliver me to bed with a kiss upon the forehead and the promise that everything was alright after all, and they would keep me safe until morning.

Top 5 Essential Light Night Records-jason @ Chandler

We all have our reasons for being up late. Maybe it’s heartbreak, maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s indigestion. The fact remains that when you’re milling around the house at 3:49 in the morning a good record really helps make the whole thing feel appropriately dramatic. These aren’t “the sun’s coming up everyone go home” records, these are by-your-self records, these are “mix up one more whiskey and water” and sink into the armchair records. You won’t cry. But you’ll certainly think, and you’ll get up to set the needle down on side 2.

Bruce Springsteen “Nebraska”

Unfortunately maligned as “the Springsteen album non-Springsteen fans can dig,” “Nebraska” is a truly harrowing album. Recorded alone as demos for the next E Street Band, the record reveals the dark, terrified poetics that always existed at the core of Springsteen’s songs. Without the rapture and redemption of the E Street Band’s rock n’ roll revivalism, the songs stand out as stark missives from middle America, dwelling on the inherent “meanness in this world.” Even the album closer “Reason to Believe” fails to end the album on a restorative note, its chorus of “Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe” sounding more like a tired acknowledgment of our endless search than the call to arms optimism that would later shade the Boss’s work. The entire album sounds as if it was recorded in the witching hour, assuring its status a late night classic. Bonus: Track down the “Nebraska” sessions version of “Born in the U.S.A.” (Found on the “Tracks” box-set) and hear the song devoid of its eventual synth pop sheen, a howlin’ blues lament rumbling over old string Americana and slap back echo.

Marvin Gaye “Here My Dear”So conflicted, personal and challenging that Motown refused to release it at first, “Here My Dear” detailed the crumbling romantic union of Gaye and Anna Gordy, daughter of Motown founder Barry Gordy. Over four sides of cosmic funk, open wound soul and coked out desperation, Gaye reveals more than he ever had, detailing his thoughts on love, religion and death. Embroiled in legal disputes with Anna, Gaye agreed to give her half of the royalties of his next album. Though he went into the studio with the intention to produce a dud, he soon found himself pouring over the content of the album, and instead created the most focused, direct and emotionally raw album of his career. “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” the album theme, is the exact kind of question that will keep you up at night.

Karen Dalton “In My Own Time”Often referred to “Billie Holiday with a 12-string,” and a reputed favorite of Bob Dylan during his Greenwich days, Karen Dalton’s ‘71 album “In My Own Time” stands up as one of the truly wonderful forgotten relics of the New York folk scene. Reclusive, temperamental and prone to wanton drug abuse, Dalton died penniless in New York after a drawn out battle with AIDS. Her works has stood the test of time however, and the songs she lends her voice to here, standards like “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Katie Cruel” and “How Sweet It Is” convey a loneliness and honesty few singers, folk or otherwise can muster. Nothing beats the opening track, “Something is On Your Mind,” where she croons “Yesterday, any way you made it was just fine/So you turn your days into night time,” that one gets the impression that there is something inherently late night in Dalton’s voice, that it is too miraculous and honest and fragile to actually exist in the daytime.

John Lennon “Plastic Ono Band”

Lennon’s solo debut revealed pretty much everything likeable and despicable about the former Beatle. There’s the tender “Love” and the self-righteous “Working Class Hero,” and whether you love or hate him, there’s absolutely no denying the brutal, downright devastatingly honest nature of these songs. Lennon, along with an atypically restrained Phil Spector providing bare bones production and piano, Ringo Starr on drums and long time Beatles associate Klaus Voormann on bass, addresses class warfare, the break up of his beloved band, his love affair with Yoko, metaphysical crisis, childhood trauma and the pressures of being one of the worlds most recognized songwriters. Utilizing tactics he learned in Primal Scream therapy, Lennon croons, howls and screeches his way through these songs, using the world “fuck” more often than any pop record before it, and revealing a portrait of an artist unafraid to attack, confront and challenge his listeners and himself. If you can find me a more tortured few minutes of pop music than the end of “Mother,” or a more strident act than the “I don’t believe” litany of “God,” I’ll buy you a milkshake. The rockers are nasty, the ballads are tender, and absolutely everything is perfect late night listening.

Phosphorescent “Pride”

Forgive Pitchfork’s well meaning, heart of gold, but absolutely shit-balls awful review of “Pride,” (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/46528-pride) the album is truly one of the defining hallmarks of our “New Weird Americana,” a stunning combination of outsider folk, cavern leaning noise soundscapes, tape recorder cut and paste art and mutant country music. While the Oldham comparisons are indeed inevitable, and warranted, singer/songwriter Matthew Houck truly comes into his own on “Pride,” and his songs echo his backwoods travels, the hope and dread of life on the road and the spiritual travails of modern life. “Cocaine Lights” is the modern classic here, a Jennings/Kristopherson via Low style slow-core bit of late night gospel, all mournful late night proclamations: “In the darkness, after the cocaine lights, I will miss you more than ever.” Truly beautiful, truly low and truly heartbreakingly late night, this is one album that just doesn’t make sense on sunny Saturday mornings. Act accordingly.

Please respond with your own late night ruminating albums. Feel free to viciously insult my entries, and as always remember that Zia loves you. Even at 4 in the morning. Get some sleep.

--by Jason P. Woodbury

Hey Spaceman! Can I Hitch a Ride with You? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Future--ed @tempe

Great rock n’ roll movies are rare. For the exception of A Hard Day’s Night, Cry Baby, Wild Zero and maybe a handful of early Jarmusch films, rock movies seem little more than ninety-some minutes of banality and teenage retardation. Now, granted, that’s sorta the point and fun of it all but it’d be nice to watch a rock n’ roll film that aspires to rise above B-movie cult status and deliver some of that Welles/Kubrick caliber of filmmaking (and perhaps even some of that raw apocalyptic energy that’s inherent in at least the promise of rock n’ roll music).

The only film I can think of that comes within a hair of that promise is The American Astronaut, a film that by all accounts defies conventional categorization. Part sci-fi, part Western, and part musical, The American Astronaut is something of an anomaly if not a total mindfuck. To wit: An intergalactic trucker by the name of Samuel Curtis (Cory McAbee) is on a mission to smuggle a boy, known solely as “The Boy Who Actually Saw a Female Breast,” to the all-female planet of Venus where (you guessed it) he will spend his entire existence servicing its inhabitants. Curtis’ journey is further complicated by the presence of a psychopathic killer, Professor Hess, who is obsessed with Curtis, and seeks to kill him. What is originality if not a little weird, eh? Shot in glorious black and white,
I suppose it’s safe to say that you’ve probably never seen a film quite like this one before. In fact, that’s one of the central reasons why I love this film so much. Its rampant, uncompromising originality is what sets this gem of a film apart from 99% of what you’re likely to see at the movie house. Okay, Oscar gold it is not but that only tells me that this film is probably worth a good goddamn. After all, Eraserhead never got any Oscars either, right? But that’s beside the point because it ain’t about the awards or glitz and gravy attached to those awards. It’s about how originality in the arts is so goddamn rare and fleeting these days that you owe it to yourself to experience any shred of originality because it is the only true reminder we as a human race have that there’s still something new in this run-down ramshackle world of ours. And once you realize that, you cannot help but think that everything else is ultimately inane and inherently fraudulent. Make no mistake, people. The American Astronaut is a step forward. Whether or not it’s a step in the right direction is your call.
Ed Irving