Where Did All The Mystery Go?

 

 

A few years ago, I remember a boring and empty evening at my condo in Antelope trying to decide on what to watch for some less than memorable hours to pass the night.  I had recently cut the cord with Comcast for its cable service, but still was connected to the internet line the conglomerate carrier provided.  The price for both internet and cable, with its feeble TV offerings provided to me at exorbitant rates while I was on a strict fixed income, was unsustainable.  I discovered a viewing service on the web, and decided I’d give Britbox a go. Amazingly, this new entertainment option worked out beyond my wildest expectations. 

Over my lifetime a funny thing had happened to American television, and especially to programs broadcast on the public over-the-air waves: TV became almost unwatchable for maybe 22 out of every 24 hours on any given day for any sentient creature who had a life and modest mental faculties. A combination of advertising time becoming a 50/50 proposition on any show, and that a half-hour sitcom was now reduced to three 5 minute segments to convey a minuscule idea and get a laugh had become too painful for me. Also, the vast majority of programming broadcast on the public air-wave front was now pseudo entertainment talk or fake reality, phony sports crap selling dreams and nightmares of tormented fabricated drama with only money as its goal. Original drama, comedy and all of their sub genres of fiction had all but disappeared from the television broadcast landscape of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC here in the US of A.

There had been cable, but during the last 10 years cable offerings had gotten very sparse, too sparse to keep the service. The glory days of channels like FX, TNT and AMC on cable with shows like Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Castle, Bones, Rescue Me, Damages, Breaking Bad and Mad Men to watch just a little over a decade ago were gone. The last vestiges of that era close this year with the ending seasons on Killing Eve and Better Call Saul.

 

It is all pay per view streaming now with rates on the inevitable sharp incline by a few big companies controlling the pipes where the flotsam/jetsam flows. And so, I go on to streams like Britbox , Amazon Prime & Netflix for most of my viewing now. One of the interesting programming notes these days on American broadcast and cable television (to me) is the total lack of mystery fare. Tons of law enforcement cop shows of all stripes with heavy doses of doctor & hospital hours sprinkled with comic book episodes but no real mysteries that happen anymore.  What I find truly pitiable is seeing the original Law & Order series resuscitated after being put out of its misery in 2010 after 20 years on air.

So, streaming off the cable grid it is.

Britbox and Amazon Prime have remedied my television/movie mystery fix and have given me some great authors of fiction to explore heavily over these COVID years of confinement.  Georges Simenon created Chief Inspector Jules Maigret in the early 1930s and wrote the last Maigret novel (Maigret and Monsieur Charles) in 1972. The books are all superbly written with keen observations on the human condition. Over the last several months I’ve read around 15 of the 78 Maigret novels Simenon produced currently and all are focused on various individuals entering the orbit of the famous French detective.

Two different interpretations of Simenon’s detective creation are found on Britbox. Michael Gambon played Maigret for 2 seasons and 12 episodes in 1992 and 1993. I played them all and they held my attention. They were good, not great but that might be due to how different television looks today versus 30 years ago. Gambon certainly looks more the part of the character Simenon envisioned and is an outstanding actor. Good television, even after all these years. However, I was stunned to watch the latest British version of Maigret, which originally aired from 2016 & 2017, with Rowan Atkinson in the lead role.

Atkinson has been a brilliant comedic star for decades through iconic characters like Mr. Bean and the Black Adder. I had never seen him in a dramatic role, and thought when I first put this latest Maigret on that a Peter Sellers type of performance might be in the offing. Spoiler alert! Wrong, wrong and wrong. Rowan Atkinson was the perfect Maigret in temperament, delivery, style, nuance and mood that anyone could ask for. He became Maigret. Sadly there are only 4 episodes, but they do run approximately 90 minutes in length instead of the 50 minute episodes from the early 1990s. These 4 Maigret stories I found exceptional from the screenplay and performances to the great camera work and sound.

Those two seasons became my motivators for reading the Simenon novels, for which I’m eternally grateful.

 

 

Another long running detective series from British television on Britbox is Inspector Morse, who was played by John Thaw throughout the show’s run (1987-2000). The crimes are usually all set in the area of Oxford colleges in Oxford City. The TV show episodes are mostly 90 minutes in length and are very well done and interesting but, for me, the books hit it out of the park.

Inspector Morse is a bit like Sherlock Holmes, brilliant but not a pleasant person to be around if your lamp is burning a bit low. Morse’s Watson is Inspector Lewis, although Lewis is not the chronicler of the tales. Morse is a serious language specialist, crossword puzzle expert and classical music buff who found Wagner the ultimate classical composer. Holmes addiction was cocaine, while Morse pursued classic ales and single malt Scotches throughout every investigation with more relish than his pursuit of the criminal adversaries. I loved every book in the collection. The television series, being older video fare, looks and feels its age, although I thoroughly loved the pilot, or first Morse installment, The Dead Of Jericho,Very unique story with camera work, and, curiously, not the first Morse novel.

Funny, although Inspector Morse is one of those prominent fictional literary figures which helped tell and sell the Oxford Colleges’ story for nearly a thousand years, the author, Colin Dexter went to Cambridge. Apparently, in the early years of these two educational forces existence around the 13^th century, a group of educators from Oxford felt compelled to leave and start up a rival college, and hence Cambridge came into existence. Side notes, Rowan Atkinson is an Oxford alum.  John Thaw, aka Inspector Morse, died at 60 years of age just 2 years after the show’s last episode. This may account for the fact there were no more Inspector Morse novels coming from the author. Both Colin Dexter and Georges Simenon lived 17 years after closing down their famed detectives.

An American detective that has seen some video love from a streaming source other than the broadcast/cable tunnel of despair is Hieronymus Bosch from the LAPD. Michael Connelly has authored 23 books featuring the eccentric single-minded detective plying his genius in greater Los Angeles.  Connelly also has created novels from various principle characters found in several of Bosch’s investigations, such as Rene Ballard and Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer. 

I have to admit, many of these characters I find much more interesting than the indomitable and singularly driven Detective Bosch. Bosch is named after the Dutch painter who plied his talents during the 15th & 16th centuries with some startling devotional paintings depicting good & evil at play. It's a clever and great literary device to get into the personality/mind of the character we follow on the hunt. The Bosch stories both as novels and 7 seasons on Amazon Prime are more studies of police procedure than mysteries per se. Titus Welliver is exceptionally good as Harry Bosch and the supporting casts through the seven seasons are all top notch. I must say, quite a few alums from The Wire appear over the years, which always tells me a high level of production and skill went into the shows. 

 

 

As I started writing this latest blog chapter, I started thinking about the many detectives in books or on film I've enjoyed over the years and wondered why here in this country we've almost murdered the genre currently. I grew up as a kid reading The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Sherlock Holmes & many of the cheap paperbacks my mother had read featuring Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason. My mom was a sucker for both Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner who-done-its. By the time she went through a Mickey Spillane cycle I was on to Ian Fleming's James Bond. In the 1970s, I caught the Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Phillip Marlowe bug from the pages of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I found Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer as an exceptional private investigator who understood human motivation and reality. I've reread those mysteries a few times. P.D. James arrived shortly after that on my radar with her policeman detective/poet, Adam Dalgliesh, and then Walter Mosley with Easy Rawlins, both of whom I enjoyed a lot. And then came Bosch.

As I mentioned above, today's menu options of televised mystery material is sparse to nil currently. After the decades of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Monk etc going all the way back to Perry Mason in the 1950s to only have the banal offerings of "Cupcake" mysteries on the insipid Hallmark Channel is a mind boggler to me, particularly since British television is chock full of mysteries in every stripe. If it is not a comic book hero, a police/government law enforcement hero or doctor hero it cannot be on the air in the USA seems to be the rule of the hour. Pathetic. 

A final observation regarding the near death status of the American mystery genre. The French Chief Inspector Jules Maiget has empathy in all his stories for both victim and criminal. Many of the mysteries are filled with subtle nuances of motive and deep looks into the real or imagined actions of the characters found surrounding the crime. The English Chief Inspector Morse finds solace in classical music, crossword puzzle expertise, fine Scotch single malts with craft ales while also having a keen sympathy for both victims and perpetrators in the Oxford surroundings of the novels. 

You find no sympathy or empathy from Bosch, as either a private investigator or as a police detective working the homicide beat in Hollywood or the great L.A. basin. Bosch loves jazz & maybe his daughter while having an encyclopedic knowledge of Los Angeles, just no appreciation for anything in the city except the view and takeout menus. His various love interests in the books all seem sterile, and the various escapades feel doomed from the start without gaining any true personal insights other than career matters most to all the characters. The books and series are excellent procedural reports which are far far removed from the Marlowes, Spades and Archers of yesterday. Maybe America will get a great detective with some humanity once again, but for now Bosch reigns over the mystery landscape finding the worst in his and our surroundings. 

Thanks for the visit. March has been busy but we'll visit soon again.

 

 

Should Have Been Contenders

 

 

So what does an old geezer do when he can’t drive to most of his favorite places for two years and wants to avoid the 800 pound political gorilla of autocrats undermining and making war on democracies?

I covered in a post or two back that I had been playing a lot of guitar to while away some creative time most days.  That works for an hour or two on a daily basis, but hardly fills up the 16 waking hours I’m accustomed to living currently. Yard work sporadically can make a bit of time pass efficiently with a little nod to the jobs well done when you’ve made a visible difference on the landscape.  I just can’t do the yard on a daily basis, or for any length of meaningful work measurement past 90 minutes. It’s just not a healthy choice for me.

Videos, the internet clips, cable and other visual offerings some days work to engross a self into a good space and explore, just not as a steady diet por moi.  Some of the interesting stuff I’ve discovered I’ll try to pass on and you can make the determination if my take fits what works for you. Music and books, though, take me out of time and space completely which fulfills some deeper need and intellectual curiosity I require to get through the continual disappointment of today’s American and world reality.

Today, I thought of how I had found some of the recently added tunes to my collection. Many articles and statistics show the current trend of much older music being the choice du jour for listeners now. What’s old is new, or if I did not get to it in the past I have time for it today and the tunes sound fresh and new in this 2022 setting.  A song on my iTunes player may inspire me to search the band through Google on the web and look for purchasing options. This might cause a spark to listen to another group from that era or look for the producer of the record and other acts he did production work on and so it goes. I am my own human algorithm. I refuse to use the stream method.

 

 

For the record, I’m just not a music stream person. For many, the subscriptions and streams work by tossing out the algorithms to find the similarities in music acts that entice them to stay connected to the particular site doing the stream. From 2016 to today streaming by either subscription or through advertisements has been the dominant method of listening to tunes here in the USA. Pay to play services with math genies allowing you not to think of what that next selection will be without Mr. DJ, or you, getting in the way. The machine will find the better choice for you every time. You the listener are only important as a revenue source or a click/eyeball for advertisers. The music? Just a means for revenue not an art form, not an elegant and powerful communications method, just one more lane to make money on the endless internet highway. And the best part of this new era? No true human interaction. Not for me, sorry.

 

I’ve got a City Boy song, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, mesmerizing me as I type.  I remember finding out about this group in 1978 with a High Fidelity magazine review, or was it a Stereo Review music column? Maybe it was in both mags, which would have been unusual for an obscure Brit act but not impossible if some people with some dough were really pushing the record.  It was a lucky find for me. Living in California all my life the reviews from out west usually centered on west coast acts, or those major players from England. This was that rare under the radar act here on the west coast that the eastern seaboard critics embraced but most in my circle had never heard of. The band had tremendous vocals and harmonies reminiscent of Queen, 10cc & The Hollies with great guitar chops and arrangements with top notch production from Robert John “Mutt” Lange. Lange produced the first 5 City Boy albums, and this group was his first major production credit.

“Mutt” Lange today is known as one of the greatest producers in the rock era with astounding successes coming with AC/DC, Def Leppard, The Cars, Foreigner, Graham Parker, Boomtown Rats, Brian Adams, Celine Dion, Shania Twain and many more. City Boy had one modest semi-hit from the seven albums they released during their brief stay (1974-1982) on the rock media stage, 5-7-0-5. They lasted for the exact same time ABBA did during that period, just without the sales results. I will say to anyone reading this little blurb that should you have some affinity for Queen or 10cc you should download, or stream, this band’s albums. The group sounds current, fresh and innovative with themes that still matter 40 some years after being recorded.

 

Don’t just take it from me. I use You Tube frequently to check on various pop culture items I still peruse, and one reliable source for music has been Pete Pardo’s Sea of Tranquility show. His show is a great source for prog/metal/power pop acts specifically, but as he goes along his show grows to embrace more diverse musical acts current and past. I find it a great resource. Muchas Gracias, Pete.

Here’s the part where I usually bemoan the sad financial state of the forgotten or hard luck band members. Not so with this outfit. The guitarist, Mike Slamer, went on to work with Steve Walsh after he left Kansas on few of Street’s records released in the 1980s and 1990s. He’s also done a ton of work as a studio session player for various artists and for soundtracks on television projects. Steve Broughton was incredibly successful after leaving City Boy when the original members started wrapping it up. He wrote songs and produced records for the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett, Peter Frampton and Jefferson Starship to name a few. He headed up the A&R division for Jive Records bringing acts and hits to Britney Spears, NSync, Justin Timberlake and following that became a top executive for Atlantic Records in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. He’s been a music making money machine, like “Mutt” Lange, just not with his original band members.

While reacquainting myself with City Boy, another band that came and went during the 70s into the early 80s started bouncing echoed beats on my eardrums recently. This band actually had several major hits, unlike City Boy, but bad timing, bad luck and horrific management killed the band’s hopes and aspirations. This power pop machine was the first act signed by the Beatles for their Apple Records label which was formed in 1968. This ill fated group was Badfinger.

 

Seemed fitting almost nine years ago while watching Walter White die (or did he?) at the end of Breaking Bad  to hear the Badfinger song, Baby Blue, the color of Heisenberg’s chemical genius of crystal meth, end the series. End of brilliant creativity and long relationships that once held much promise undone by lies and betrayals.  Fade to green felt, and the chorus takes me back to a Bakersfield locale circa 1970-74 on Chester Avenue with a big sign reading….The Cue Ball.  

 

Snooker & eight ball with my good pals, Lynn & Lou, were the games we played on the various tables in downtown Bakersfield in the early 1970s, when we weren't on the concrete shooting hoops. We played for chump change and beers with the goal of holding the table we’d chosen to play on those many evenings at the Cue Ball, Little’s & the Brew House.

 The best listening behind the games was the power pop of the day at The Cue Ball. Badfinger was always on heavy rotation with Come & Get It, No Matter What & Baby Blue to go with The Hollies and The Air That I Breathe, Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, The Raspberries’ harmonize Go All The Way with Deep Purple blasting Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, oops, Smoke on the Water all reverberate in a memory quadrant of the brain from those days.

At the time, Badfinger looked like a sure bet to be a regular at the top of the pop charts with the Beatles backing coupled with a track record of pop hits. But, no matter what great songs the band wrote from that point in time they never got paid, the tunes seldom got played, and they never found that elusive magic between management and record company to give them some financial peace. People move on …..David Bowie, T-Rex, Queen, Earth Wind & Fire, The New York Dolls and Etc. Etc. Etc. came on the immediate scene.  With changes in the music landscape to go with the loss of their two key creative forces due to financial ordeals, stress, bad litigation and bad suicide Badfinger became a mostly forgotten group by the mid 1980s. You can read about some of the tragic details here if you’re interested.

 I‘ll try to keep the focus on the redeeming fact that great songs never disappear. The echo-chamber of our physical atmosphere and the multitudes of ear canals find the great songs and keep them in some form of rotation while our Earth wobbles on its axis, even 45 years after the brief heyday of the song.  Name Of The Game is the Badfinger story told in poignant and heartbreaking honesty with an arrangement that on every listen always seems understated and eloquent. February of 2022 marks the 50 anniversary of its release. George Harrison loved the song and worked on it as a producer for awhile, but other Beatle litigation matters drew him away with Todd Rundgren taking over and getting the final production nod and credits. Timeless is another epic song that seems to have retained magic for over 45 years. Their catalog is sincerely worth checking out in detail, especially for the Beatles fans in the house.

 

If you’re looking for that twinge of nostalgia with a unique blend of today mixed to bring out the best mental images of a zone beyond time and space for a moment or two, check out what these somewhat forgotten groups of the 70s are all about. You won’t be disappointed. There are seven City Boy albums and nine Badfinger releases to connect with on a variety of platforms.  

Thanks for the visit. I'll see you soon.