Love You More: The Playlist Pounder

 

One characteristic of the Pounder I forgot to mention last week is its ability to be lost and found again, perhaps over and over. Sometimes maybe you find it again exactly when you need it most. The Buzzcocks’ “Love You More,” like all the songs on Singles Going Steady, played on repeat, on glorious cassette, in my childhood bedroom, in cars, and in assorted dorms. I’m not sure what happened to that tape; it disappeared through various moves and adopting new formats (side note: my current approach is an all-formats approach, which is a lot of fun certainly, but you find yourself seeking more and more new cases on eBay to hold all your various formats in.).

Last week, while driving, when I played Singles Going Steady, now mine on groovy CD, “Love You More” grabbed me by my grayed sideburns and forced me to hear it like I did as a 16-year-old, for just a moment. I can remember listening to it in my bed, too loudly (some habits never go away), bouncing a tennis ball off the wall and ceiling, ringing guitars, sneering, singing it out sometimes, “I’ve been hurt so many times before,” and “although I’m not a child” and “with every heartbeat I want you madly.” I loved the way Pete Shelley sang, “I just can’t explain,” emphasizing “can’t” so very British. And then it ends: suddenly, violently. Then rewinding it and playing it again and feeling it so hard, like only a teenager can.

“Love You More” is only one minute and forty-five (ish) seconds long. According to George Gimarc’s Punk Diary, 1970-1979, when the song came out, on Friday, June 30, 1978, the band promoted it as the second shortest single ever to be released in the U.K. (“Noise Annoys” was the B side). Swell Maps had claimed first place with “Read About Seymour” at 1:27 earlier in the year, he writes. But Girmac also points to Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ famously short “Stay” from 1960. Beyond oldies radio, I think I can certainly credit “Love You More” as one of my more foundational songs that made me appreciate brevity. I mean also obviously there’s the Dead Kennedys’ “I Like Short Songs” at 29 seconds (“Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out”), which like “Love You More” I included on early mix tapes.

In October 1978, Kit Rachlis, in the Boston Phoenix, wrote about the difference between Shelley and original Buzzcocks vocalist Howard Devoto, while discussing Shelley-voiced songs like “Orgasm Addict,” “What Do I Get,” and “Love You More.” Rachlis described Shelley’s voice as “moonier, more vulnerable,” writing, “If Devoto’s ideal was (Johnny) Rotten, Shelley’s is Jonathan Richman.” Also released on June 30 was the Sex Pistols’ “My Way,” with Sid Vicious on vocals. He was dead by the next February. Singles Going Steady debuted in Sept. 1979 on IRS Records, but The Buzzcocks, who had been signed to United Artists on the day Elvis died, had released the last album of their original run, A Different Kind of Tension, the month before. Here’s the band playing “Love You More” on Top of the Pops, the announcer cutting in perfectly after “until the razor cuts.”

View the entire playlist for the Nov. 28 Zero Hour and listen to the archived audio.

 

When We're Dead & Gone: The Playlist Pounder

 

I haven’t let the fact that the The Moaners, Melissa Swingle and Laura King, last released an album in 2010 — about a year after the debut of Zero Hour — stop me from playing the late Chapel Hill band all the damn time on my show over the last 15 years. It’s no surprise then that I’m making them the first honorees for something I’m calling The Playlist Pounder. I’m planning to highlight one song each week from my weekly radio playlist. A “pounder” to me is a song that can hit you in the head, heart, toes, ass, whatever at whatever moment you fully connect with it, and it does not matter if it is from 2025 or 1925, or if it’s the first time you’ve heard it. It’s whenever you surrender to the song’s now undeniable and overwhelming power and just let go, just let it pound you, baby. But a pounder is so well constructed you can also more superficially feel its marvelous magic.

 

“When We’re Dead and Gone” comes from The Moaners’ last album for Yep Roc Records, 2007’s Blackwing Yalobusha. The band produced the album with Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers at Money Shot Studios, located in a former school lunchroom in Water Valley, Mississippi. A lot of certified bad asses recorded there, including Fat Possum’s Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Hasil Adkins, T-Model Ford, and the Neckbones, as well as Jack Oblivian and Blue Mountain. The Moaners’ song has some of the booty-moving crunch and grind that Fat Possum’s stars rode to glory, and the song is no doubt catchy and rocking, but it is also rough and jagged in ways not uncommon with the likes of someone like Billy Childish, especially his more recent work with CTMF. It’s also made memorable by the tenderness in Swingle’s voice, her slight Southern twang, its wonder and sweetness, mixed with clever lyrics that center on life and death, desire and pain, history and the eternalness of songs.

 

The Wrong Man Revisited: Nope, Not That One

 

Let’s turn the channel back a few decades to the early 1990s, when cable television’s premium networks were airing more and more original movies and shows, especially of the “adult after dark” variety, to build and hold on to audiences that had dwindled some since cable’s great expansion in the 1980s. Showtime was especially prolific in this period, debuting dozens of movies and cool movie series such as Rebel Highway, in which modern directors of the time such as Joe Dante and Robert Rodriguez tackled the American International Pictures catalog. During this period, Showtime also delivered some solid crime and neo-noir movies, today mostly long forgotten and secluded on formats like VHS and laserdisc, including Dennis Hopper’s Nails (1992), Past Tense (1994), and today’s interest, The Wrong Man (1993), directed by Jim McBride.

It is not a remake of Alfred Hitchock’s 1956 movie starring Henry Fonda, but it does borrow its title and central focus of a man wrongly accused of a crime. McBride’s movie was the first of several efforts for Showtime by the director most famous for the groundbreaking David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and his remake of Breathless (1983), not to mention the first movie I saw by him, The Big Easy (1986). His failure to sell the mother humpin’ legend of one Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989’s Great Balls of Fire seems to have brought him premium cable’s way. For Showtime, he also directed 1997’s Pronto, based on the Elmore Leonard novel (review of that Peter Falk-starring movie coming soon), The Informant (1997), and an episode of the unjustly unavailable mid-‘90s noir series Fallen Angels, “Fearless,” co-written by Walter Mosley.

Set in Mexico, The Wrong Man is about Alex Walker, a merchant sailor (Kevin Anderson) who gets in murder trouble while on leave, and on the run from the police, links up for a wild, drunken, road trip to hell with the magnificent Mills: Missy (Rosanna Arquette) and Phillip (John Lithgow). Walker, like Warren Oates in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, wears a white suit through the movie, but The Wrong Man is not a dark tale of decapitation and annihilation in Mexico. It is a saucy and sleazy and sometimes silly film noir satire with touches of Tennessee Williams that is a fun, deliriously acted road movie about Americans being assholes south of the border.

Coming off Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), Lithgow plays Phillip with delight and maximum blustering that the actor expertly filters through levers of drunkenness, giddiness, and peckerwoodness and greases it all with a hard-to-pin-down moral code. He meets Alex’s youthful defiance with lines like “I like someone with shit in their shoes.” Rich Kogan in the Chicago Tribune did not appreciate Lithgow’s approach, which he called “stunningly weird.” He meant that as a bad thing, but Kogan might have been playing with a different set of rules than Lithgow and McBride had adopted for this Showtime effort.

While some praised Lithgow’s performance, Anderson seemed to bring out the grumpiness in a lot of critics. None more than the Toronto Star’s Craig MacInnis, who calls Anderson “an annoying little snip whose dramatic range veers from wooden determination to determined woodenness.” But for me, Anderson manages his role, which does not really ask very much of him, fine. Alex is a bit of youthful blank slate, a guy who deludes himself about his purity while stealing pickup lines from the man he is accused of offing, introducing himself to Missy by telling her he is in “the monkey business.”

Not surprisingly, Arquette’s Missy stirred the most attention, and, oh, yes, yes, Arquette most certainly sizzles through an assortment of monkey business in The Wrong Man. The promotional VHS I have hypes the movie as a “sultry sexpenser” (apparently a phrase Variety also used for Body Double, according to a recent episode of the Guide for the Film Fanatic podcast) and an “old style thriller with up-to-date nudity.” Arquette and McBride subvert the idea of a “femme fatale,” showing Missy sucking her thumb and twirling in her tight dresses and smiling like an eager little kid ready to hit the playground. Her husband, Phillip, is significantly older, and Alex is the perfect stupid playmate for her.

MacInnis did not think Arquette was right for the role, and added disapprovingly, “no major American actress I can think of has appeared without her clothes in so many scenes.” Indeed, Arquette’s nudity prompted a story in the Tribune before the movie aired with the headline “Arquette and Lithgow Do Nude Scene for Cable.” Arquette, who was about to turn 34 as the movie debuted, is fully committed to her steamy performance and in interviews seemed to mostly relish the role. However, she told USA Today that her request to McBride for a body double was denied, but ultimately, she decided the nudity was “crucial” for the scene. In a syndicated interview with Frank Lovece, she voiced her love of TV and cable movies and called most theatrical movies of the time “big action movies with no depth to them.” For The Wrong Man, Arquette said “the actors all fell in love with the dialogue, because most of us don’t get a chance to speak really sharp, interesting dialogue anymore.”

Filmed on location in Veracruz, Mexico, McBride’s movie is engagingly debauched throughout. In one scene, our merry Americans, as heavily sauced and rowdy passengers, cause a tourist bus to crash into a river. The Mexican police in pursuit of Alex are also quite entertaining, especially Jorge Cervera Jr. (Three Amigos, Real Women Have Curves) as the older bored, jaded cop who tracks him down. Los Lobos’ great moody “Blue Moonlight” plays over the ending credits. While the movie played only on Showtime in the United States, The Wrong Man hit some theaters in Europe and was screened at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Written by Michael Thoma, The Wrong Man was based on a story by Roy Carlson. Thoma played Gentry in Major League and wrote The Set Up (also not a remake), starring Billy Zane, for Showtime in 1995. As for Carlson, he also served as a producer on The Wrong Man and as screenwriter and producer for the following year’s China Moon, giving him a slight neo-noir double punch from which he promptly disappeared. His only other movie credit to date came on the 1985 vigilante flick Stand Alone, directed by Alan Beattie, who also served as a producer on The Wrong Man.

The Orlando Sentinel was ready to start a Roy Carlson Fan Club after seeing China Moon, which is set in the Tampa Bay area. Filmed in 1991, the Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe-starring movie was left to dry until 1994. But back in 1990, with cinema glory and the sound of money singing a sweet melody in their ears, the Sentinel thought Carlson, who had “come from Hollywood to show what can done,” might be the spark the state needed for more Florida-set movies. I guess they had the wrong …

You can find The Wrong Man on the Internet Archive.