Though tempted by late-released tickets, we decided not to return early from visiting family in Las Vegas to catch the Rolling Stones concert at the Key Arena the day before Halloween. We’d seen them on their last tour a couple of years ago at the Tacoma Dome from great seats just off to the side of the stage – but weren’t as thrilled as we’d hoped.
However we did buy tickets early on to see Jethro Tull, who performed at McCaw Hall – Seattle’s new opera house – last night. We went even though we were tired after seeing Werner Herzog present the US premiere of his new film The Wild Blue Yonder at the Seattle Art Museum the night before – and would miss seeing who dies in Lost as it was broadcast on TV.
Tull’s Passion Play tour stop at the LA Forum was the first rock concert I ever went to in the summer of 1972, I think it was – Tull previewed unreleased albums in their tours at the time, you bought the album later as a memento of the live performance as I recall – so it seemed appropriate to see them one more time before they finally stop touring – even though I haven’t listened to any of the albums they put out after about 1976.
That didn’t seem to matter last night – I think they only played one song whose relative youth made it unfamiliar. And although Ian Anderson has unfortunately lost his voice – he now sounds and looks a more like Popeye the (pirate) man than the sonorous hippie wiccan of yore – I nevertheless found myself pleased to renew my acquaintance with songs I used to listen to almost religiously.
Or should I say – sacreligiously. For it started to dawn on me during the concert that what had made Tull compelling in the early 70s was the way they took the kind of Tolkein-esque, Renaissance Fare-ish revival of British Folk in bands like Fairport Convention – and lent it an almost satanic metaphysical urgency and amplified sonic energy. Not that they were quasi-Satanists like the later heavy metal bands that inspired a rash of muder-suicides among ignorant youth – but more like the satanism of Milton in Paradise Lost, of the devil’s party without professing it. They tapped the primal energy of our most atheistic humanitarian urges, in songs that challenged man – and God if there is one – to make good on the promise contained in religion to save each and every one of us – from the wealthiest rock star to the lowliest of crazy homeless people, Aqualung (Anderson’s own doppelganger):
If Jesus saves
well he’d better save himself,
from the gory glory seekers
who would use his name in death.
Ah, Jesus save me!Well I saw him in the city
and on the mountains of the moon,
his cross was rather bloody
and he could hardly roll his stone.
Oh Jesus save me!
Alas, that kind of moment doesn’t last forever. It’s to Tull’s credit that they seem to have realized they can do no better service today than to replay Aqualung in concert retrospectively, elegiacally, reviving all they can of its original energy in an cultural environment that, strangely, seems to have regressed back to the one they were reacting against over 30 years ago.
And so they played mainly Aqualung, and gave out free CDs of a live studio concert recreation of the album they did for XM Satellite Radio a year ago. Tull bookended the playlist with the opening “Life’s a Long Song” – “but the tune ends too soon for us all” – and concluding encore “Locomotive Breath, which allegorizes life as a runaway trainride leading to certain death: “oh the train it won’t stop going no way to slow down.” Not many aging rock stars have the wit and honesty to thematize their own decline while still ritually re-enacting the glory of their youth – but then, Ian Anderson was always a bit too witty and irreverent to seem fully comfortable in the role, even at Tull’s height. What were memento mori in the songs are now – well, even more pointed. Maybe the Stones will never die – just keep rolling along forever like vampires on vaseline – but that’s never been Tull’s ambition. Death and (hopefully) resurrection was more their cup of tea – the fool’s trajectory in tarot cards.
Werner Herzog, who as I mentioned we saw the night before, is cut from the same cloth, and has always celebrated the inevitable entropy of even the most heroic – or satanic – human aspirations – or artistic careers. My wife and I first became acquainted with Herzog’s oeuvre in his masterpieces Aguirre The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo – epic movies of the grandest scale, each following a man (in both cases played by Klaus Kinsky) who sets off into the South American jungle intent on greatness – finding Eldorado, funding an Opera House to bring Caruso to the Amazon. Both end not so much tragically – that would be merely conventional – as elegiacally – witnesses to the humane modesty of native civilizations they are destroying, willing finally to compromise their vision in order to salvage something – anything – from disaster (or in the case of Aguirre – in disaster).
It seems fitting, then, that Herzog’s new movie The Wild Blue Yonder is itself a salvage job. Made immediately after the wonderful Grizzy Man with whatever money Herzog made from it, it includes footage salvaged from the NASA archives of the last Space Shuttle mission where the astronauts recorded shipboard life on actual movie film (and not cheap video like later missions), diving scenes taken under the Antartic ice cap by a friend and colleague of Herzog’s, and the idyllic image of a South American rainforest plateau with waterfalls coming off it that ending up on the cutting room floor of the movie made immediately before Grizzy Man, White Diamond.
Herzog brought along the only actor in the film – the guy who plays the doctor on Deadwood, Brad Dourif, sporting the same bald spot, but longer stringy hair and a truly huge mustache. His appearance in the film was a salvage job too apparently – Herzog flew him out to a location near the Salton Sea for a six hour job, from receiving the script till shooting wrapped.
What’s the film about? Well, near as I could make it out – entropy. Dourif is an alien who comes – despite the hardships of the voyage – with others to earth when their planet orbiting Alpha Centauri freezes. They start building a city they hope will someday rival Washington DC near the Salton Sea – but it never takes off. We earthlings discover one of their supply ships that oozes bacteria, frightening the authorities enought that they divert the Space Shuttle through wormholes to – you guessed it, that planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. They explore its frozen seas of helium, decide maybe we could make a go of it there if necessary – but the bacteria threat has dissipated, so they return home by light beams. Alas, miscalculation ensues, and they arrive 800 years in the future – after our entire civilization has disappeared and all that’s left is the beautifull rainforest plateau, full of life – just not human life.
Unfortunatley, I can’t say the film is a success – the Antarctic scuba sequences – though beautiful – go on much too long, and the plot drowns in their cold lusciousness. Maybe on a larger screen – or smaller, at home – it would work better.
Still, I admire Herzog his artistic – and personal – courage. He often risks death filming, lays it all on the line – only to rub our nose in the fragility, isolation, and impossibility of transcendence specific to our humanity. He closes Grizzy Man with the observatiion that the bears, despite the illusions of his protagonist (who died indulging them), have no human sympathy – nothing can move them beyond contemplating us with a mixture of boredom and gustatory inquisitiveness. And in the talk after The Wild Blue Yonder, he expressed his conviction that we’ll never voyage beyond our own solar system, or find anything in space that’s really worth the difficulty of the trip.
No Star Trek dreams for this director, no way. The voyage to El Dorado – or the Mountains of the Moon – doesn’t lead anywhere near there. It only leads back here, and we have everything to lose – but the experience.
