Now Playing: Gruff Rhys--"Cycle of Violence"
Live At PJ's has the understandable reputation of being a kind of uber-sleazy meat market, much along the lines of Conor O'Neill's on Friday and Saturday nights. Why was I there, especially on a weeknight? Wattstax was on, I'd never seen it before, and I wasn't about to let the atmosphere of general disarray (when WCBN can barely put verbally comprehensible DJs on air, I suppose it's too much to ask that a function of theirs runs smoothly--not that I'm ungrateful, and I'm sure it wasn't their fault that there was ear-splitting construction work being done or that the sound system took an hour after "showtime" to hook up--after which there was a pointless twenty-minute milling session, which meant that we started watching the movie about an hour and a half late) hold me back, especially when I'd walked two miles to see it. The endless wait did nearly drive me away, but a well-deployed barrage of soul and R&B, some from the movie and some not, like the Curtis Mayfield classic "Get Down," managed to keep me situated. When empty, PJ's actually looks pretty sweet, rather like that place in The French Connection where Russo and Egan notice notorious drug smuggler Sal Boca and listen to the Third Degree. I might actually have to check it out when full.
Wattstax was touted as the "black Woodstock," a film of the historic 1972 Los Angeles concert featuring Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Carla Thomas, the Staples Singers, B.B. King, and others, commemorating the Watts uprising seven years previous (and directed by Mel Stuart of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory fame). Once it got going, Wattstax was well worth the wait, even with the cute but slightly annoying hipstress accidentally kicking me several times from her higher-placed barstool. Like the best concert films, it's not just a straight record of the shows, but thematically looks at black culture of the early 1970s and the effect of and debates over "black power." The movie's introduced by Richard Pryor (and the concert itself by Jesse Jackson), and features a great many random interviews (alternately amusing and poignant) with Watts residents on a great variety of topics, ranging from politics to economics to romantic relationships (among whom appears to be a slightly younger and appealingly feistier Ted Lange--Isaac from The Love Boat). Real-life comedy enlivens the proceedings on a number of occasions--the crowning moment comes when Rufus "Prince of Dance" Thomas (you haven't lived until you've seen a portly, middle-aged soul singer in purple coat and little else rock a pair of go-go boots and get away with it) rouses the crowd to hustle a karate-chopping troublemaker from the field (and they hilariously respond en masse). The music's superb--the climax of the movie comes with headliner Isaac Hayes nailing his recently Oscar-winning Shaft theme song to rapturous acclaim, although my favorite was Carla Thomas singing the lovely "Pick Up The Pieces" (not sure of the title, but that was the chorus), which I recently heard on the radio (WCBN, curiously enough) and fell in love with--fantastic stuff. The rapid-fire editing and panoramic view of life and music gives the movie a propulsion that sends it sailing over the edge. I haven't actually seen Woodstock, but when I do, it'll have a lot to live up to if it's gonna be the template for this flick.