One for Danny

Did I ever tell you guys about the first screen­play I ever wrote, or, rather, co-wrote? No, I did­n’t think so. Among oth­er things, I figured that doing so might foster the mis­con­cep­tion that I went into cri­ti­cism as a “frus­trated” film­maker, which is really not the case. But in any event, I’m gonna get into it now, not for any sake except to tell you about a great guy I came to know in that peri­od, and about how you might be able to help him out right about now. 

In the very early ’80s, when I was kind of poised between flunk­ing out of col­lege and fig­ur­ing out what I was gonna do with my life after I flunked out of col­lege, a pal I’ll refer to as Stefan K. approached My Close Personal Friend (and once and future band­mate) Ron Goldberg and me with the request that we pen a screen­play. Stefan had been look­ing at the num­bers, and doing prodi­gious mar­ket research. He had recently com­pleted a stint work­ing down south for Earl Owensby, under­stand who will. And he was con­vinced that with the right concept and $500,000, he could make a splash in the industry with an inde­pend­ent fea­ture. Said fea­ture would have to appeal to the youth mar­ket, so the three of us, under the influ­ence, if I’m not mis­taken, of a not insub­stan­tial amount of marijuana and a tele­vi­sion view­ing of Beach Blanket Bingo, came up with the notion of a “New Wave” beach movie pas­tiche, to be called, in true post­mod­ern­ist fash­ion, Beach Movie. 

As you may have already sus­pec­ted, we were being a little to clev­er for our own good right off the bat. (And the hits just kept on com­ing; we dubbed the motel the prot­ag­on­ists would stay in the “Sun Ray,” and spe­cified that the neon “y” in its name would flash out sporad­ic­ally, get it, huh, huh?) But that’s neither here nor there. As we labored on the script we also went about set­ting up meet­ings and get­ting “let­ters of agree­ment” from vari­ous tal­ent, loc­al and oth­er­wise. We signed Floyd “Uncle Floyd” Vivino to play the role of the beloved own­er of the beach burger-and-beer joint, which, our scen­ario dic­tated, was in danger of being run off by a shark­like fast-food sushi entre­pren­eur (we really wanted Michael O’Donahue for that part but nev­er got to him). Jane Modean and Russell Todd were to play our young prot­ag­on­ists Bud and Dina. And then there were the bands. Since we were doing a beach movie, it behooved us to seek out the band that was The Ventures, The Shadows, The Davie Allan and the Arrows, etc., of our time. Improbable as it seemed, there exis­ted just such a band: The Raybeats.

The Raybeats almost lit­er­ally rose from the ashes of the very fren­et­ic and con­front­a­tion­al “no-wave” band The Contortions. That band’s drum­mer Don Christensen, gui­tar­ist Jody Harris, and bassist George Scott teamed with com­pors­er and multi-instrumentalits Pat Irwin and set about very con­sciously con­cocted a dis­tinct altern­at­ive form of music­al enter­tain­ment than was com­mon at the time. That is, they were fun. Unabashed fun. They played a very infec­tious blend of surf and twang music with vari­ous pro­gress­ive and spacey and jazzy inflec­tions. They offered a com­bin­a­tion of ori­gin­als and extremely know­ing cov­ers (their ver­sion of The Shadows’ “The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt” is very nearly the equal of the near-untouchable ori­gin­al) and they worked their asses off; a typ­ic­al show for them con­sisted of two one-hours sets and a gen­er­ous batch of encores. Their incep­tion was alas marked and marred by tragedy, when Scott died of a heroin over­dose in the sum­mer of 1980. The fel­lows, who’d formed a pretty tight bond by that time, decided to keep on, and they were lucky to find the slightly young­er Danny Amis, who had recently blown in from Minneapolis (hence his com­pos­i­tion “The Calhoun Surf,” which he ori­gin­ated with the Overtones back in Minnesota). When you’re in your 20s, an age dif­fer­ence of five or six years seems a lot big­ger than it does when you’re older, and Danny’s rel­at­ive youth—born in 1959, he was pretty much my age—and the cir­cum­stances under which he joined the fra­tern­ity kind of gave him the per­man­ent status of “the new kid,” with many of the draw­backs that des­ig­na­tion almost invari­ably confers.

But I’m get­ting ahead of myself. The Beach Movie team tracked down the Raybeats, set up a meet­ing, explained our scen­ario and ambi­tions, and to our grand sur­prise, they loved the idea and were incred­ibly enthu­si­ast­ic about it. Also to our sur­prise was the fact that they were among the most approach­able, funny, and nice guys we’d had the priv­ilege of meet­ing in show busi­ness, as it were. You have to remem­ber, as fun as the Raybeats really were, if you’d first encountered them as Contortions, they came off as pretty intim­id­at­ing. Look at the back cov­er of No New York, the com­pil­a­tion album Eno pro­duced in the late ’70s, and check out the blurry indi­vidu­al por­traits of all the musi­cians involved. They look like mug shots at best. But the Raybeats in real life went very much against that impres­sion: they were loose, funny, smart, lit­er­ate, access­ible and not only ready but entirely will­ing to work with a trio of schmucks from New Jersey who had­n’t much of a fuck­ing clue as to what they were on about. The band really got a kick out of the eccent­ri­cit­ies of our storyline; in this par­tic­u­lar beach movie, the motor­cycle gang turned out to be a troupe of per­form­ance artists doing a “piece,” and Donny Christensen, who knew and worked with Phillip Glass a bit, actu­ally had a notion that Glass might have an interest in play­ing the “gang” “lead­er.” That did­n’t pan out. But the ‘Beats put us in touch with The Waitresses, the one-time Chris Butler solo lark that trans­mog­ri­fied into a real band after his song “Wait Here, I’ll Be Right Back,” retitled “I Know What Boys Like,” became a sleep­er hit. The Waitresses, too, were eager to come on board, as was its sax­ist Mars Williams’ weird side combo Swollen Monkeys, which were led by the great Ralph Carney. 

As you can ima­gine, we were in clover as we began to hang out and become friends with these people we were such huge fans of. As Ron and I worked on drafts of the script, we expan­ded the par­ti­cip­a­tion of the Raybeats so that they actu­ally had speak­ing parts, and we based their dia­logue on their actu­al inter­ac­tion, in what we took to be true A Hard Day’s Night style; Donny was the sage with the dry sense of obser­va­tion (I remem­ber in real life how he once referred to some­time col­lab­or­at­or Lydia Lunch as “not exactly what you’d call a team play­er”), Pat the laid-back quiet one who was also the most stu­di­ous work­er; Jody the skewed mord­ant wit (Ron and I have nev­er for­got­ten the par­tic­u­lar way in which he said, remem­ber­ing a par­tic­u­larly bad music­al exper­i­ence, “I just about lost the will to live”), and Danny the sweet, slightly shy goof who was quick with bad puns. And Danny was the guy we wound up hanging out with the most. He was liv­ing in Hoboken, in a big multi-floor brown­stone apart­ment with Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who at the time were col­lab­or­at­ing on amus­ing comic-strip style record reviews for New York Rocker and who would soon form Yo La Tengo. Danny had this amaz­ing vinyl col­lec­tion of records by celebrit­ies not known for their singing—what Rhino would later des­ig­nate the “Golden Throats of Hollywood.” Ron and I knew about Shatner’s Transformed Man, and Nimoy’s Bilbo Baggins song, but on vari­ous after­noons at Danny’s place he intro­duced us to many won­ders: Telly Savalas’ mon­strous long play­ers, Chad Everett’s near-comatose bland­ness, and of course the epic aur­al spec­tacle of Sebastian Cabot, act­or, read­ing the words of Bob Dylan, poet. He was just an abso­lute sweet­heart and great to hang out with.

Things did­n’t work out with Beach Movie. Modean and Todd, oddly enough, wound up star­ring in actu­al movies Spring Break and Where The Boys Are ’84, respect­ively. Our own concept found its way into the lap of David Sonenberg, then-manager of Meat Loaf, or something—there seemed to be some lit­ig­a­tion going on at the time—who was very eager to break into film, but some­what skep­tic­al about our ideas and our choices of bands. He wanted us to take apart the script, which we had spe­cific­ally engin­eered to a PG pro­pos­i­tion, and add copi­ous amounts of nud­ity, aver­ring “There’s noth­ing wrong with get­ting a hard-on in a movie theat­er.” God, I love that line. But that’s anoth­er story. As the pro­ject imploded, the Raybeats went through their own changes, and Danny left the group; their sub­sequent record, It’s Only A Movie, recor­ded with David Hofstra, showed the group mov­ing in a some­what more abstract dir­ec­tion kind of at odds with Danny’s more groun­ded rock-and-twang sens­ib­il­it­ies. Danny moved to Nashville, an envir­on­ment that seemed to suit those sens­ib­il­it­ies, and sub­sequently formed Los Straitjackets, a combo that reflec­ted his mul­tiple eccent­ric and kicky enthu­si­asms. Among oth­er things, they play wear­ing Mexican wrest­ling masks, which has to be pretty uncom­fort­able. In sub­sequent years Jody worked with the Golden Palominos before back­ing out of a full-time music career; Pat enjoyed a stint with the B‑52s; and Donny, who was kind enough in ’82 to pro­duce a demo for my band Artificial Intelligence, went on to work pretty extens­ively in a record­ing capa­city with Philip Glass. I haven’t really been in touch; Jody and I poin­ted at each oth­er when he took the stage at a Golden Palominos re-convening at Le Poisson Rouge last year but did­n’t get a chance to talk. But the Raybeats are reform­ing next week, Wednesday, June 29, at Hoboken’s Maxwell’s, play­ing a bene­fit for a very good cause. Danny was dia­gnosed with mul­tiple myolema last year and is under­go­ing treat­ment for the con­di­tion, which is both dire and, thank God, man­age­able (that’s not really the right word, but bear with me) with the right med­ic­al atten­tion. Which costs. Danny him­self explains the situ­ation here; the page also has a Paypal wid­get that I don’t need to tell you what to do with.

Now based on the West Coast, Danny won’t be attend­ing the Maxwell’s show, and Steve Almaas, late of Beat Rodeo (and later still of Suicide Commandos) will be occupy­ing the bassist chair. Jody, who I’ve been cor­res­pond­ing with via e‑mail, prom­ises an excep­tion­al Raybeats set, and he’ll also be play­ing with Ira and Georgia, who are also con­trib­ut­ing their sub­stan­tial music­al tal­ents, as will be Glenn Morrow’s The Individuals, The Schramms, The Tall Lonesome Pines, Purple Knif and oth­ers. I’m happy to report tick­ets are going fast, but hell, you should buy one or two as well, because it’s gonna be a fun night of great music and catch­ing up with old friends. The Facebook page for the bene­fit is here, and here is where you can pre-purchase tickets. 

Hope to see you there. And Danny, if by chance you’re read­ing this, I’m think­ing of you, buddy; God bless and keep get­ting bet­ter. Hope to see you soon.