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Memphis's James Godwin and the Power of Hog Jowl (2020)

NOTE: I interviewed James Godwin for the late, great Quixotronic back in December 2020. Godwin just this week released two groovy new songs on Bandcamp: "Goin' Back to Arkansas" and "Ain't Nothing Goin' On in Memphis." Happy to see he is back in action!

You know James Godwin from Memphis’s James and the Ultrasounds, and if you don’t know them – hot damn, check ‘em out. You’ve got some fun in store!

Godwin has just released a new solo EP, Hog Jowl, on his new label, Rainbow Recording Co. The fantastic five-song EP shows a similar rock’n-roll fervor as the Ultrasounds at times, like the fun, slabby title track or the gospelized and groovy “Down to the Valley,” but Godwin ends with a pair of more heartfelt and low-key – but not unnoisy – songs in “I Told You This Would Happen” and “Only I Know.”

Godwin recently checked in with us from Memphis about the new EP and what else he’s been doing since tearing up Circle A (photographic proof above) on the Ultrasounds’ visit to Milwaukee last year.

You’ve recorded two albums and a few singles with your group the Ultrasounds to great acclaim. I read that this solo EP isn’t just a break. What made you decide to move on from the band?

Oh, I haven’t officially put an end to the Ultrasounds or anything like that. I’m just putting that particular musical coat in the closet for the time being, given the circumstances. Right when Covid hit, I was playing and touring with a few different bands, and it had become easier to tell people to just look me up under my name. All that, plus the fact that I no longer feel like the person that’s on those Ultrasounds recordings. I’m just somewhere else in my life and in my mind, and I think certain moments on my new EP reflect that. I’m really just trying to continue to create music during these weird days, and hope that people check it out. I don’t know if the traditional 4-piece rock band that tours is gonna be a thing again anytime soon, but hopefully we'll get to a point soon where a very stripped down, yet energetic duo might be a thing. Maybe me and a cocktail drummer from the back of a U-Haul in a field?? Who knows what it’s all gonna look like a year from now. But still, I’d like to do a third Ultrasounds record someday with weird combinations of all of the different members that never actually played together. That could be fun.

Were these five songs all written and recorded during the pandemic? Any of them have earlier origins?

The songs were pretty much written and recorded between late February and October minus one song. I wrote “Down To The Valley” while driving back and forth from Memphis to Water Valley, MS doing studio work at Dial Back Sound Studio in the early months of 2020. The title “Hog Jowl” comes from having Jimbo Mathus over on New Year’s Day of 2020. We were doing rehearsals for an upcoming string of shows. Since it was New Years Day, Jimbo wanted to cook up some Greens and Black Eyed Peas. He also had a large and mysterious block of meat going in a skillet. I asked him what kind of meat he had going there, to which he enthusiastically replied,“Hog Jowl.” That just stuck with me for some reason. Then when Covid hit full on, with the news, the politics, all of it, ya know.. I just kept thinking about that big chunk of meat sizzlin’ on New Year’s Day, and how my mind was starting to feel the same way.

Do you have any plans for a physical release or will this be digital only? After spending time with Madjack for the two Ultrasounds albums, are you talking to any labels about the EP or any future recordings?

It'll be coming out on CD soon, and then there will be a very small 7" release as well. Both on my own micro label, Rainbow Recording, Co. which is something I was thinking of doing pre-Covid. I'm hoping it’s something I can build up into 2021, and I've already got a few releases lining up with a handful of different artists in Memphis. It’s going to be a very small operation, just funky, small batch stuff and digital, but it’s going to be 100% artist/musician operated. Like farm to table music. I'm also hoping to work with all different kinds of artists, not just “rock and roll” people.

Besides making music, what else have you done to keep your sanity/inspire you during the pandemic?

Hmmm..some painting, the home improvement kind...chopping up branches from fallen trees in the yard and burning them has brought me a great deal of satisfaction. Intense cat observation. I think this year has taken quite a toll on everyone.

How much do you miss performing in front of a crowd? Any particular past performances stick in your mind as you find yourself stuck on pause because of the pandemic?

I do miss it. I miss traveling with other musicians, and that good feeling you get when you’ve got something good going on, and the calendar is filled with work. Maybe my first show ever in London. That was the first stop on the first Ultrasounds European tour. You’re in this room full of strangers in a strange place, and you’re up there with your boys from Memphis and ready to take ‘em for a ride. I miss that shit.

 

Things Change for Lonesome Bob (2002)

 

NOTE: Here's an interview I did with Lonesome Bob, aka Bob Chaney, for Country Standard Time back in June 2002. The interview was timed to promote his second solo album, Things Change. Unfortunately, it was Lonesome Bob's last album to date, but he continues to perform shows in and around Pittsburgh, where he now lives.

Just call him Lonesome - Bob, that is. Look at him quickly, and it's hard to believe that Robert Chaney - aka Lonesome Bob - a big lumberjack of a man at 6-foot-4, is capable of the songs he writes and sings with rocket-fire force, undiluted and straight to the heart.

The man on the cover of Chaney's new album, "Things Change," is bald, bearded and fierce, clad in boots, faded jeans, sunglasses and a black sleeveless shirt. He towers imposingly over a cloudy industrial setting - smoking, pissed off, ready to get the hell off work.

But listen to "Things Change" or his first album, 1997's "Things Fall Apart," and you'll know big Bob of Nashville with the extra large voice is capable of much more empathy than you would have ever thought at first glance.

Perhaps, the character who most seems to exist on a different planet than that rough man on the cover is the Volvo-driving office worker in "Heather's All Bummed Out." Heather's blue, and it's hard to explain why, Bob sings, other than she's 35 and running out of time. She looks for love on the Internet and fails miserably: "There's something missing from her life and today it's making her cry/and she'll never take another chance, and that's the crying shame."

The biggest crying shame is that not more people know Chaney's music. Compare him to fellow Americana musician Mike Ireland (who recently released his first effort in four years, the excellent "Try Again"), another guy whose reward for laying it all out emotionally seems to be indifference from record buyers.

However, Chaney's music is even more emotionally raw than Ireland's countrypolitan confessions. He simply rages and rocks, soft and hard, with humor and sadness. Hell, he actually has warnings on "Things Change" and "Things Fall Apart," telling listeners to avoid taking songs like "Plans We Made," a dandy murder ballad duet with Allison Moorer, or "Got Away With It," a dandy murder rocker with Moorer, too seriously. They're just songs, after all. 

But it's hard not to take songs like "Where Are You Tonight?" or "Dreaming the Lie" seriously. These songs are among several on the new album that deal with the death of Chaney's son, Zachary, who died in 1998 at age 18 of hepatitis, contracted after he used a dirty needle.

"I sit, I stare, I wonder, I swear," he howls on "Where are You Tonight?" (the vocal was recorded in one take) as you find it impossible to ignore the suffering of a father. He played the song live just once at an in-the-round in Nashville.

"People were pinned to the back of their chairs," Chaney says.

He grew up in Mount Ephraim, N.J., a "classic suburban" town outside of Philadelphia, where he graduated from high school in 1974 and learned to love the Grateful Dead. "I deprogrammed myself from being a Deadhead," he explains.

After high school, Chaney attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball for two years. By 1984, five years after Zachary was born, he moved to New York City and joined the Ben Vaughn Combo as a drummer. As a member of the combo, he played songs like "Lookin' For a 7-11" "blotto, balls to the wall, as crazy as you can make it." Vaughn, a high school friend, has gone on to do the music for television shows like "That '70s Show" and "Third Rock From the Sun."

After the group broke up in 1988, Chaney began his brand of country music around New York. "I was looking around New York City, where there are a chunk of people big into country. People told me you're not never to get anywhere playing country here. All of the country music industry is in Nashville...I was told I needed to come down here if I was serious enough about it."

In 1994, he decided he was serious enough and made the big move to Music City USA. Once it got there, it wasn't exactly what he expected. "I guess I should have listened to country radio to at least know what to expect," he says. "Robbie Fulks ran into the same thing, with a publishing deal where you basically write bad songs for people who suck. Robbie left before the next wave (of talented musicians) came to Nashville."

That next wave includes people like Greg Trooper, Gwil Owen, Tim Carroll, Phil Lee, Tommy Womack and Moorer.

"We're the same 12 people at each other's gigs," Chaney says.

He established a special musical relationship with Moorer, who sings on both of Chaney's releases. Bob remembers the first time he heard her sing.

"My draw just dropped," he says. "It was like, 'Where have you been?' It was amazing. And I really haven't worked with anybody else since."

He and Moorer even performed together on the Grand Old Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. "They're over really fast," Chaney says. "You think about it. This is going to be cool. What am I going to wear? I hope I don't fuck up."

There was a tense moment, however. 

"I walked up to sing the first line, and the monitor's not on. There's a panic. I thought, 'I'm going to suck.' It's a really great way to break the ice."

After "Things Fall Apart," Checkered Past, which released the album decided not to exercise its option on Chaney and set him free along with fellow Nashville artists Tom House, Paul Burch and Womack. "We all scrambled and found new homes in varying lengths of time," he says.

One year after "Things Fall Apart" was released, Zachary died in April 1998. "It was hard to put one foot in front of the other," he says, "much less make a record."

He eventually got back to writing songs and completed "Things Change" with former 20/20 guitarist Steve Allen serving as co-producer. The album was released this spring on Leap Recordings. Chaney says he's pleased with the results. "I'm looking forward to getting sick of it."

 

Workin' at the Car Wash: Michael Schultz Returns to Milwaukee

Big, big news in Brew City. Milwaukee native and legendary film director Michael Schultz is returning home this weekend, and you can catch him at the Oriental Theater on Saturday. 

Milwaukee Film is paying tribute to the 86-year-old with screenings of Car Wash (3 p.m.), Cooley High (7:30 p.m.) and Last Dragon (8 p.m.) Schultz will appear for Q&A sessions after Car Wash and before Cooley High, which will also include an awards presentation.

I was very lucky and honored to interview Michael Schultz in 2022 for Wisconsin Public Radio, and I’m thrilled he is coming to town. All three movies are well worth seeing. Cooley High is the best, and certainly the most acclaimed, but there’s something about Car Wash that draws you in every time, and it’s not just Norman Whitfield’s funky ass theme song performed by Rose Royce.

I asked Schutlz about the joy the movie brought to audiences, including me, when I interviewed him, and I wanted to share some of his comments about his experience making the 1976 movie starring Richard Pryor, Bill Duke, Ivan Dixon, George Carlin, Antonio Fargas and others. I talked to Schultz for more than an hour, and, of course, I didn’t get to use everything from the interview in my radio segment and web story. So, here’s a little more about Car Wash, a music-filled movie that wildly tells the story of a Los Angeles car wash over the course of a single day.

Coming off 1975’s Cooley High, a film that had combined comedy and drama to devastating effect, Schultz was unsure initially he wanted to follow up with Car Wash after reading Joel Schumacher’s script.

“I almost turned down the movie because it was just all sorts of humor, slapstick, kind of what I call bubblegum comedy,” he said. “And I was talking to a friend of mine, Suzanne de Passe, who was like Barry Gordy’s right-hand person. She had discovered the Jackson 5 and all that. And I said, ‘Suzanne, they offered me this movie, and I’m going to turn it down.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? It’s like, if it’s not what you want, take the job and make it what you want,’ which is some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”

Schultz went forward and set out to put a “spine of seriousness” in Car Wash to balance the comedy. But at the time, he said, “dramedies” were not the rage they have become, and Universal Pictures did not understand why he wanted to make changes.

“They said, ‘you can’t do that,'” Schultz said. “'You can’t mix comedy and drama, or comedy and melodrama, or whatever you want to.' I said, ‘Why not?’ Because I came out of theater, and I knew from the experience of Cooley High, which was all comedic in the beginning that led to some serious drama at the end, and how effective that was on the public in terms of storytelling.

“So, all through the making of that movie, I’m fighting with the studio to have the film end the way I wanted it to end,” he said. “So, I built this throughline between the old school ex-convict, Lonnie (Ivan Dixon), and the young revolutionary, Abdullah (Bill Duke). Because again, like in Cooley High, the bond and love between young black men. But this time, I wanted the father figure to save the young revolutionary and learn from his experience, and the studio just hated that idea. So, I convinced them to let me shoot the film in chronological order, which is almost never done in Hollywood.”

Shooting chronologically can be less efficient and can result in a loss of time and money, he explained, but Schultz thought he could convince them to accept the ending he had planned if he did that way. But he told executives he was shooting chronologically because he had been influenced by Robert Altman’s approach in Nashville.

“I said, ‘Look, I've modeled this movie after Nashville, and like Robert Altman was doing multiple stories in audio, I’m doing multiple stories in the visuals that we might be seeing something happen, you know, through the glass of the of the car window, that’s as much a part of the story as the people who are talking, you know, and there’s no way to keep track of that if you don’t shoot in order. But the real reason was, I wanted to keep trying to convince them that the way I wanted to tell the story was the best way to do it.

“And the hardest part of convincing them was the scene at the end of the movie where Abdul was coming in to rob the place and Lonnie stops him. They embrace, the revolutionary cries, breaks down and all that.”

According to the 1978 book Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents by David Talbot and Barbara Zheu, Schultz was given only 28 days to shoot Car Wash, and he exceeded that time limit by about 10.

“It’s so finally I’m going to one day over schedule, two days over schedule, three days over,” he said. “The head of the studio calls me and says, ‘Schultz, you finish the damn film.’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you let me shoot it the way I want to shoot it, OK?’ Go ahead, because they figured they could change it in the editing, right?

“So, that’s kind of how it kind of came to be. So, yes, it was joyful. It was a lot of fun. I got Richard Pryor to do a dick part, you know, yeah, and the Pointer Sisters, and that led to a whole experience of working with Richard on other movies.”

Schultz told the authors of Creative Differences in 1978 that he was about 75% happy with Car Wash and the movie “has its values.”

Roger Ebert praised the movie for its “tremendous sense of life.” “It’s one thing to have an idea like this — a zany, sometimes serious day in the life of a car wash — and another thing to make it work,” Ebert wrote. “But the screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax M*A*S*H.”

Pauline Kael, meanwhile, ripped Car Wash, writing, “it has no more class than a Hostess Twinkie, though it, too, might make you gag a little.” However, Kael also knocked Norman Whitfield’s music in her review, so she was obviously out of her mind when she watched the movie.

People have certainly wanted to return to the vibrant 1976 world of Car Wash, as it has enjoyed cult success and attempts to revive it over the years. A pilot for a TV version of the movie, starring Danny Aiello, was made in 1978, and a roundly dismissed remake came out in 2001 with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

The movie’s energy, the perfectly selected cast, most especially Dixon and Fargas, and Schultz’s passion and determination make Car Wash feel so right-on -- even if "you might never get rich.”

Turner's Picture Palace: August 2025

 

It’s been a full year since the last time I did a movie column, but I’m trying my best to get off my butt and post more frequently, so here we go.

As I mentioned in my Jonathan Kaplan post, I did a ‘70s movie class over the summer. For many months before, I pretty much exclusively watched movies from that glorious decade. After the class ended at the end of July, I decided to turn my focus to the ‘80s and ‘90s. Have I regretted it? Not at all. It’s been fun reconnecting with the period I spent frequently in video stores, both working in and as a customer.

But mostly I tried to get to movies I had not seen before. Another aspect of the class was rewatching many movies I had seen several or many times before. Bring on the “new” movies!

Have You Forgotten: One movie that I thought I had seen before was Brown’s Requiem (1998), adapted quite well from James Ellroy’s 1981 book by screenwriter and first-time director Jason Freeland. Michael Rooker is terrific as Fritz Brown, an alcoholic former cop who has found a comfortable living repossessing cars but also runs a half-assed private detective agency. He comes alive at the bequest of one “Fat Dog” Baker (Will Sasso, who contributes one of many brilliant performances int the movie) to watch over his sister, Jane (Selma Blair, who also in 1998 before her Cruel Intentions breakthrough in 1999 played Girl Mike Hits on #1 in Can’t Hardly Wait). Such a great cast: Kevin Corrigan, Brion James (who died in 1999), Brad Dourif, Barry Newman, Christopher Meloni, Harold Gould, Jennifer Coolidge and more.

Brown’s Requiem came out a year after L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s massively successful, award-winning, etc., etc. Ellroy adaptation. I’m sure I was interested, but maybe I had a hard time tracking down Brown’s Requiem back then. It’s currently only available on a DVD released in 2000. Fortunately, Freeland was able to record a commentary with Rooker for the DVD. They talk about their disagreement over how much of Ellroy’s exact wording and dialogue from the book to use. From their discussion, it’s apparent that the veteran Rooker got his way often. Indeed, one of the highlights of the movie is Rooker’s voice over, in which he fully inhabits the losing, boozing, fighting spirit of Fritz Brown.

Interestingly, Freeland, who won awards for Brown’s Requiem from the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and Portugal’s Festróia-Tróia International Film Festival, apparently identified a little too much with Fritz Brown. In 1999, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, when he was in town to show Brown’s Requiem at the Maryland Film Festival, Freeland said, "I was at this point where finally I was getting a chance to direct a film, which was what I wanted to do for so long in my life, since I was 18 years old. I kept holding that out as what will make me happy. And I started to see that it wasn't the case. …I wasn't enjoying it,” he said about the editing process. "I really saw how much I identified with him." He stopped drinking while finishing Brown's Requiem.

Freeland would make only one more movie, 2008’s downbeat Garden Party, which is somewhat engaging (thanks in part to a confident, sexy performance by Vinessa Shaw)  but comes off kind of like a CW update of Melrose Place in a sleazy, stoned, flip phone-era (so cheap you could just hand them out to any homeless wannabe pop stars) LA setting and ends unsatisfyingly. These days, Freeland, who got his start making informercials for the Psychic Friends Network (yep, the one with Dionne Warwick), is CEO of California Psychics, a Los Angeles-based organization whose slogan is The Joy of Certainty.

Let There be Zane: Another 1998 movie I completely missed was I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. There seems to be some foreign releases (legitimate?) of the movie on DVD along with bootleg versions, but I was able to find it in good quality on the Internet Archive. I had a lot of fun watching the movie, but I think I appreciate most of all the audacity of making this wordless movie boasting an Ed Wood script, starring post-Titanic Billy Zane (who also produced and contributed “music design”) and featuring a range and level of celebrities and actors not seen since the days of ‘70s disaster movies. I kept waiting for George Kennedy to show up.

Granted, in the ‘90s, Ed was Everywhere; however, just making this movie a reality seems impressive: a very optimistic endeavor. Maybe it was just a foolish idea, but while the finished project failed to connect with audiences and critics at the time,  and seems to be utterly and unjustly forgotten, it has a wild energy and creativity that is undeniable and worth holding on to in these decidedly dark days.

Zane stars at The Thief, who escapes from a mental institution dressed as a female nurse and goes on a stealing, murdering binge before ultimately losing the money and then desperately trying to regain it. Along the way he meets the likes of Tippi Hedren, Ron Perlman, Maila Nurmi, John Ritter, Christina Ricci, Bud Cort, Eartha Kitt, Dana Gould, Tara Reid, Karen Black, and many others. Sandra Bernhard is fantastic in her role as stripper Sandy Sands. Only about a year out from the end of USA’s Reel Wild Cinema, she’s a perfect fit for the role and the movie. After coming off the stage topless, she smokes a joint, gives another dancer stink eye, and then slaps another dancer’s bare ass. I snickered when I read J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review of I Woke Up Early when he describes Bernhard being “allowed to do a striptease.” Hoberman’s review was at least mildly positive while the New York Times called it “sad and misguided and boring.”

The fabulous Ed Wood blog, Dead 2 Rights, dug up all kinds of interesting information about the movie and interviewed director Aris Iliopulos in 2014. Adding more context to Bernhard’s part in the movie, Iliopulos says she insisted on heavy metal music playing while she danced, and filming for the scene took place in the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It was little bit too much,” he added. Ha! One of my other favorite parts in the interview is the director’s memories of Karen Black, who he says, for her closeup in the movie, was remembering a young man she met who was going to Vietnam and wasn’t likely to come back home alive.

Chicago native Zane, 32 when the movie came out, was incredibly fun as the demented Thief. An interview with him in the (Arlington Heights, Ill.) Daily Herald in January 1998 claimed producers of the I Woke Up Early were thinking about shooting the movie in the Chicago area. While promoting the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival during Christmas time 1998, Zane got drunk on cheap  champagne at a party for the movie and missed his press conference and interviews the next day. The Toronto Star described it this way: “Great party, terrible movie.”

Also in August, I watched Zane in 1991’s Femme Fatale, which I described in my notes as “another bad movie that was enjoyable to watch” – lots of those actually this month (I’m looking at you, Death Wish 3 [1985], Inferno [aka Desert Heat,1999], Necromancer [1988], Prime Target [1991, more on that] and Blindside [1987]). Colin Firth stars in the movie, and on the surface seems like an unlikely choice in a slightly seedy thriller, but he does quite well  despite the not always fantastic storyline. Zane fits into a noir-tinged movie more (see Dead Calm, This World, Then the Fireworks, etc.) and is cool and humorous often as Elijah. He goes around shirtless mostly and says things like, “He’s from England, so keep it down, right.” Meanwhile his real-life sister, Lisa Zane, is the object of mystery and alleged possessor of multiple personalities in the movie who splits after marrying Firth.

El Salvador native Andre R. Guttfreund directed Femme Fatale and was not happy that Republic Pictures released the movie straight to video as an erotic thriller in the United States (it played theaters in England). There was nothing erotic about his movie, Guttfreund said to the Seattle Times in June 1991, “It’s really an old-fashioned romance about unconditional love. It’s Orpheus in search of Eurydice. Aren’t video renters going to feel ripped off when they see it?”

More Kaplan Connections: After writing about Pamela Ludwig in Over the Edge, I was curious to see her in something else I had not seen before, and that brought me to Rush Week (1989). I was a dumbass and bought this movie twice on Blu-ray after selling the first one on eBay without watching it. Ludwig plays a college newspaper reporter who starts looking into a series of murders taking place during, you know, rush week. She’s charming and confident, and she would have made a great Nancy Drew. Ludwig helps make up for some of the movie’s dumber aspects, mainly any scenes with the frat boys together. The Dickies perform in costume for a monster-themed party and that by itself is almost worth buying it twice.

Truck Turner himself, Issac Hayes, sent me in search of more Ike, and somehow I landed on the previously mentioned Prime Target, my first David Heavener movie, but certainly it will not be my last – though not any of recent vintage, to clarify (see below). It all starts with him doing a country rap song in the opening and then, as cop John Bloodstone, burning a kidnapper to death with a blow torch. I mean, shit, c’mon, damn. Hayes, unfortunately, has a lame role and is forgettable. Tony Curtis is hilarious as the gangster Bloodstone is transporting to jail, and the movie also features Robert Reed, Andrew Robinson, Don Stroud, and Jenilee Harrison, who also was in Curse III: Blood Sacrifice in 1991, which I unfortunately also watched in 2025.

In addition to starring in the movie and singing all the songs, Heavener wrote, directed, and produced the movie. He’s still active, and in July 2024 in the Greenville Daily Advocate (Ohio) announced a “red carpet premiere” for something called The Last Evangelist, which airs on his own David Heavener TV, “End Times Prophecy Channel of Truth.” The plot is described thusly: “The Last Evangelist is a crime drama set in the near future where unregistered churches have been ruled illegal. Just like Saul on the road to Damascus, when Agent Rhodes’ spiritual eyes are opened, he turns against the government system to challenge the Antichrist’s tactics.” Uh-huh.

At the Movies: A great month in the theaters for me, led by Weapons (2025), which was excellent and scary and funnier than I expected. Amy Madigan is magnificently frightening in the movie, and in fact, I dreamed about her several weeks later in costume, but instead of being her face, it was my old high school assistant principal’s.

Also terrific was She Rides Shotgun (2025), which was violent, realistic, and seemed to capture the ‘20s lawlessness law exactly right. Ana Sophia Heger is heartbreakingly great from the moment we meet her waiting in a tree after school for her mom. John Carroll Lynch was awesome in Ballard on Amazon Prime, one of my favorite shows of the summer, and is a very different, and very disturbing, kind of cop in She Rides Shotgun.

Ethan Cohen’ s second collaboration with wife Tricia Cooke, Honey Don’t (2025), got many negative reviews, but it provided a very satisfying Friday night at the theater for me. The quirky detective setup is frankly something for which I’m nearly always in the mood, and Margaret Qualley is a badass in it. I do agree with the Chicago Tribune, which calls Qualley “kind of a latter-day lesbian Phillip Marlowe from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye,” that the movie could have used more badass: “more vibes and less plot.”

The Naked Gun (2025) made me smile and laugh frequently as I watched. I enjoyed it a lot. Loved Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson together. Watching this and The Last Showgirl (2024) made me realize I have underestimated Pamela Anderson. Excellent in both very different roles.

 

 

 

The Dogmatics Still Keeping the Faith (2022)

NOTE: Here's an interview I did with the Dogmatics' Jerry Lehane back for the Shepherd Express before they played Last Rites in Milwaukee in 2022 (posted July 14, 2022). The Dogmatics have a new album out on Rum Bar called Nowheresville.

Here's a funny quote from Lehane that I wasn't able to fit in the original story. I mentioned to him how in the Trouser Press the band is described as "dirtbags and proud of it." Lehane told me: "We've had all kinds of things. We'd go into radio stations and they would say, 'You guys are the ugliest band we've seen from the pictures. We're like, 'What!?'. The twins (Pete and Paul O'Halloran) were always known for the faces they made on stage. They've got quite rubbery faces, and if you like at those albums, it almost looks like we are from England or somewhere, early Stones look, you know. But we weren't dirt bags and proud of it. If anything there, you know, we like to take showers, just like the next guy."

Tragedy ended the first run of The Dogmatics. But it wasn’t the end of the story for the Boston garage rock’n’rollers, who make their Milwaukee debut Saturday night at Last Rites MKE.

Back in the early ‘80s, The Dogmatics played shows locally and traveled in a van across the United States sharing stages with bands like The Fleshtones and Replacements. They lived together in the same Boston loft, where they also wrote and tried out new songs together. They would also grieve together when bassist and founding member Paul O’Halloran died in a motorcycle accident on Oct. 23, 1986.

“We just got back from a tour of the Midwest and the West Coast,” says lead singer and guitarist Jerry Lehane. “He was on the back of motorcycle in the afternoon, and they got a flat tire. He went under a truck and got run over and passed away. That was 1986, and we stopped playing after that.”

O’Halloran had formed The Dogmatics in 1981 with his twin brother and guitarist, Pete, drummer Dan Shannon and Lehane. The brothers and Lehane had grown up together and attended Catholic school in Dorchester.

Tommy Long, who is still with the band, would replace Shannon on drums after the band’s first year. They self-released a debut single on their own Cat Records in 1983 and then put out two full-length albums, Thayer Street and Everybody Does It, on the legendary Homestead Records, with unhinged rockers like “Gimme the Shakes,” “Whipped,” and “My Little Sister’s Got a Motorbike.”

Reunited in Earnest

In the years after O’Halloran’s death, the Dogmatics would continue to play two or three times a year, but around 2018, as band members’ children began to grow older or leave home, the band decided to reunite in earnest and record new material. They have kept most of the same lineup, with O’Halloran’s older brother Jimmy taking over on bass and the addition of James Young on mandolin and other instruments.

The Dogmatics have connected with Boston-based label Rum Bar Records for a series of well-received EPs, as well as a collection of the band’s older material, and have received enthusiastic airplay on Sirius XM’s Underground Garage channel and elsewhere around the country, including Milwaukee’s WMSE.

Ramo Records, run by Miss Georgia Peach and Travis Ramin, both also members of opening band Beebe Gallini, reissued The Dogmatics’ Cat single, which includes a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “20 Flight Rock,” in 2008.

The band is keeping busy with shows this summer, including an upcoming date serving as backing band for Barrence Whitfield, and will likely take a break afterward to work on new material, a process that moves more slowly these days, Lehane says.

“It takes a while,” he says, “It’s not as easy as the old days. You have to work at it. You’re not living that life 150% like we used to.”

Rock‘n’Roll Spirit

While they have grown older, the rock’n’roll spirit that has always guided the band has not disappeared. How else can you explain their willingness to participate in the show Saturday at Last Rites? The Dogmatics will fly from Boston to Minneapolis on Friday afternoon to play that night in St. Paul, drive five-plus hours to Milwaukee on Saturday and then hop on a plane at 6 a.m. Sunday morning out of Mitchell.

“There’s something wrong with us,” says Lehane, laughing. “We like to torture ourselves.”

But they keep doing it because, ultimately, it’s what they love to do, Lehane says.

“I kind of make the analogy that we’re in single A baseball,” he says. “We’ve been trying to make it to the big leagues forever, but we’re still stuck down here in single A, still slugging. But it’s a lot of fun, you know? We wouldn’t been doing this if we didn’t like each other and we weren’t having fun.”

The Dogmatics, Beebe Gallini, Fun Bois and Lavish Waste perform 8p.m. Saturday, July 16 at Last Rites MKE, 625 S. Sixth St.

Lost in the Suburbs: A Tribute to Jonathan Kaplan & Over the Edge

 

Over the summer, I taught a college class on 1970s movies, and one of my favorite parts was showing two movies by the always entertaining and delightfully distinct director Jonathan Kaplan: Truck Turner (1974) and Over the Edge (1979). I was very happy that both movies played well with the students and prompted lively discussions. Sadly, as the summer session was concluding, news broke that Kaplan had died Aug. 1 of liver cancer at age 77.

Students had particularly connected with Over the Edge, and one scene hit me a little differently this time around, sitting there in the classroom in the dark. Sometimes a moment in a movie locks into you, knocks you around, turns you inside out, maybe brings on the tears. It could just be the way you are feeling right then. Sometimes the scene, or the actors, or something else, strikes you so hard, just thinking about it a week later might activate Crying Time or at least Far Away Eyes Time. Lorraine Newman and Tim McIntire in American Hot Wax (1978), Eddie Albert and Ida Lupino in Out of the Fog (1941), and Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea  in Dead End (1937) – there are parts by those actors in those movies that just tear me up even thinking about them.

Add to that list Michael Kramer and Pamela Ludwig in Over the Edge. Carl (Kramer) runs away from home and holes up in an unfinished condominium, his world in turmoil after the death of his best friend, Richie (Matt Dillon), at the hands of Officer Doberman, a local rabid cop played by Kaplan regular Harry Northup. Carl has no one to turn to except for Cory (Pamela Ludwig), and he calls her on a payphone (we know it has to be her) to meet up later at the condo. She sneaks off after her parents go to bed and arrives at the condo with a sleeping bag. They sleep together and she returns home in the morning before her parents awaken.

Cory’s arrival: a teenage prayer delivered in the dark by a girl who apparently dreamed of big trucks and lost highways. She tells Carl a story about a female trucker, a 95-pound “gypsy of the road” who has given her a new idea for a potential career path, and a fucking way out of New Granada, Colorado. In the morning, she stands at the door of the condo and stares out at the road at a traveling truck, awakening to new possibilities for the future, before slipping back into the reality of needing to get home before her dad wakes up for work.

She had almost made Carl a statistic earlier at the condo while doing an ill-advised “gun dance” to a stolen radio playing Cheap Trick. Only moments before she had told him, “You have pretty eyelashes.” Richie reads the scene perfectly after Carl fake dies: “I bet you’re in love with her now that she almost blew your brains out.”

Construction trash litters the outside of the half-finished condo, a secret hideaway that Richie and Carl have claimed as their own. “My father said they ran out of money,” Carl says. It’s another reminder of the failures of this town, of development at any cost, an attitude that has made the teenagers and  their lives far less important than property values, which comes out explicitly at the explosive community meeting following Richie’s death.

Cory and Carl talk briefly about women truckers and remember Richie, but Cory gets cold, and they both end up in the sleeping bag, which she says she used to play in when she was little.

“You know, I think you’re really beautiful,” Carl tells Cory. “No,” I’m not,” she says. “I think you are,” Carl says.

Then they kiss and pull the sleeping bag over their heads. It’s a touching moment and both young actors are so incredibly tender in the moment. Kaplan captures it all so beautifully, so sweetly.

In the morning, Kaplan frames them kissing in the doorway as the sun is rising. They look like Wild West lovers embracing before the final shootout. And as Cory walks away, it’s a lovely shot of her, looking back at Carl, still standing at the door, as she, and this magical moment in their teenage lives, fades away.

It’s a powerfully emotional scene, and it’s a testament to the powers of Jonathan Kaplan and the classic movies and moments he directed.