Page 1594 – Bohemian | Sonoma & Napa Counties

Georgia Rules

Movies

Richard von Busack

Oct 31, 2007

10.31.07

Aside from the fact that it makes you feel like human scum, Jimmy Carter: The Man from Plains is an inspiring film. “How does a man of 83 have such energy,” you think, feeling appendicitis-like stabs of remorse over time wasted in dissipation and Halo sessions. Director Jonathan Demme is granted access that probably no president, current or ex-, has ever given a filmmaker. Looking over Carter’s shoulder, he scurries to keep up with the peppery ex-prez during a multicity book-flogging tour last winter.

For the most part, Carter meets a love fest. Demme’s film seems to wonder at a man who can accept all of this praise and thanks without feeling unworthy of it. (After you see this movie, you’ll know why the Lone Ranger always rode off before someone could thank them.) Fortunately for the film’s dynamic, there’s also plenty of scorn in store. It’s worst at a large protest rally in Phoenix, where a combination of evangelicals, Jews for Jesus and Israeli pressure groups wait for him.

They, like many commentators, can’t get past the title of Carter’s bestseller Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He is forced to explain repeatedly that the apartheid in question is not in Israel, “a country universally admired,” he says, which is laying it on thick. Rather, he refers to the discrimination in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza.

In breaking with his party’s policy of going along quietly with the wall-builders, Carter is condemned by Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and Bill Clinton. Some members of the Carter Center resign—14 out of 224. As The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn noted, “The headlines could be saying, ‘More than 90 Percent of Carter Board Members Support Former President.'”

With great patience, Carter suffers himself to be made up for the TV cameras. He meets his opponents, though declining a debate with Alan “the Torture Never Stops” Dershowitz at Brandeis, prompting Dershowitz to accuse Carter of “hard left anti-Israeli zealotry.” When an al Jazeerah interviewer tries to sweeten Carter, the ex-president also comes down with asperity against terror bombers.

For recreation during the tour, the ultraspry Nobel laureate wields a hammer in New Orleans for Habitat for Humanity. At night, he keeps up midnight Bible-reading sessions via telephone to his wife back in the small Georgia town of Plains.

In flashbacks, we see Carter’s biggest accomplishment, engineering the Camp David accords. (At the time, Menachem Begin jested that Carter worked harder on that than the Jews worked on the pyramids.) The then-president closed the deal, we’re assured, by passing around photos of his grandchildren to Begin and Sadat.

Live long enough and you’ll see political figures make an entire circuit from demonization to canonization. When first elected, Carter seemed like the Spirit of the Bicentennial. On Saturday Night Live, Carter was impersonated by Dan Aykroyd as a man who could fix anything from a nuclear power plant to a bad LSD trip. His work-shirts and Levis, his love of the Allman Brothers, his winning admission that he “lusted after women in his heart” in Playboy magazine, made him an alternative to the venom and skullduggery of the Nixon years.

Carter’s diagnosis of national “malaise”—and the blasphemy of asking Americans to reduce their energy consumption (indeed!)—led to the palmier days of restored innocence and unslaked greed in the 1980s. Forget Carter’s failure to smite Tehran with great vengeance. During his Phoenix stop, for instance, Demme shows Carter being thanked profusely by retired Air Force colonel Thomas Schaefer, a former hostage of the Iranians. Carter reiterates that nuking Tehran (as our blood-thirstier commentators wanted, then as now) would have ended up with the hostages dead.

Unfortunately, Demme is so rapt by his subject’s energy, charm and humility that he doesn’t follow the money. The words “Paul Volcker,” “cold-bath recession” or “double-digit prime rate” do not figure in this movie. A director as left-wing as Demme could have got in a word about how the labor movement met some cruel defeats under the Carter regime.

The film illustrates Carter’s toughness. “This is the first time I’ve been called a liar, a bigot and an anti-Semite,” he says. Demme captures the way Carter gets a bruising for saying what only the Israeli—not the American—media are permitted to say. And in the end, Jimmy Carter just looks like the stronger man for taking it.

‘Jimmy Carter: The Man from Plains’ opens Friday, Nov. 2, at Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. 707.525.4840.

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School for Soul

Music

Gabe Meline

Oct 31, 2007

10.31.07

There is no record label in the country today reissuing decades-old soul recordings with more avidity, frequency and sense for archaeology than the Numero Group, an academic and semi-mysterious company possessing the secret added ingredient of impeccable taste. While soul and funk reissue labels have flourished since the turn of the millennium, many of them, particularly of the highly elastic “heavy funk” or “northern soul” persuasion, are perfect examples of curators who confuse mediocrity with authenticity. The Numero Group got off on a similar foot, focusing on arcane recordings from the Capsoul and Bandit labels, which at best were historical facsimiles (the sounds of copied sounds) and at worst, painful to listen to (poorly recorded a cappella tracks).

But then the Numero Group took a vacation to Belize, which most Americans know as a trendy and inexpensive getaway offering empty beaches, scuba diving and, if you know where to look, cheap blow. Who could have guessed that there was such a rich musical legacy down there? The unearthed music from Belize City Boil Up, released early this year, runs the gamut, covering funk, soul, reggae, calypso and highlife, all with a hard-to-define Belizean twist that is as peculiar as it is intoxicating.

Next came the label’s foray to the Bahamas, which produced the incredible Grand Bahama Goombay, the gold star of the label’s work so far. Outputted from a single studio on the island, the tracks envelop everything attractive about music: rhythm, politics, love, sex and poetry, all done in such an innocent, unaffected fashion that you almost feel guilty listening to it, like traipsing uninvited into a private party. But by providing extensive liner notes and reproduced cover art from the original Bahaman albums, the Numero Group essentially shoves the invitation into your hands.

The latest addition to the label’s catalogue is Home Schooled: The Sound of Kid Soul, which revisits American shores by spotlighting the attempts of grade-school children to capitalize on the Jackson 5’s 1970 breakthrough success. Most of these recordings were masterminded by overzealous parents, but it’s clear that the kids of Home Schooled are the ones in charge. The songs are largely sweet and unrefined, as in the particular case of the sublime and otherworldly “Time After Time” by a group of forgotten Milwaukee brothers called Step by Step, though other tracks flirt with youth empowerment, like the leadoff track “Trust Your Child” and the campy “Now That School Is Through” by a group called Cindy and the Playmates.

How did all of this great music come to suddenly see the light of day with proper licensing, royalties and historical perspective? Ken Shipley, head of the Numero Group, credits the curiosity of his small group of record-collector friends, who for purely personal reasons had taken to tracking down the original artists of obscure 45s that they had collectively discovered, pored over and fallen in love with. “I figured that as long as we’re finding these people,” Shipley says from his Chicago office, “why don’t we document what we’re doing?”

Part hoarder, part musicologist, part detective, Shipley as a child collected baseball cards and comic books and, more obsessively, G.I. Joes and Transformers (he still boasts owning complete sets of both). Coming of age in the early ’90s San Jose punk scene, he started collecting records, booking shows and running a small indie label, all by the age of 18.

Around 10 years ago, Shipley discovered soul music, particularly of the unknown, thrift-store, what-the-hell-is-this variety, and after a stint at reissue label Rykodisc, he finally launched his dream label in Chicago. Right next to the Jackson 5’s hometown of Gary, Ind., there’s possibly no better city in which to compile the kid-group sounds of Home Schooled.

“The Jackson 5 actually set off something pretty important,” Shipley emphasizes. “When you think about the Jackson 5, you think, ‘OK, there might have been a couple other groups, like the Osmonds.’ But you don’t realize that hundreds and hundreds of groups were set off! People were really trying to ride this phenomenon.”

The obstacles involved in finding now-grown singers on records made 30 years ago are myriad. The children of famed organist Merl Saunders, who contribute to Home Schooled a psychedelic, black-power jam in “Right On,” were relatively easy to locate. But the adults often retained the rights, and in some cases, like the Three Simmons’ playfully innocent “You Are My Dream (School Time),” the copyright holders turned out to be drug-smuggling criminals using record production as a tax shelter.

“Here’s the real rub with the record: we were only able to find half the actual kids,” Shipley says. “Like the Atons, for instance—nobody knows who that group is. Nobody knows who the Triads are. But these producers, they were just pumping kid groups out. They were like, ‘You got some kids? All right, let’s throw these three kids in the studio and see what happens.'”

Another problem Shipley faced was the Embarrassing Childhood Photos factor. The Eight Minutes’ Wendell Sudduth was easy to find—he still lives in Chicago—but nearly impossible to convince that reissuing his group’s killer track “Here’s Some Dances” was a good idea. “A lot of this stuff, it isn’t a positive note for most people,” Shipley admits. “When they think about this stuff, they don’t think, ‘This is exactly how I want to be viewed in my life.'”

The Numero Group makes deluxe packaging, especially for vinyl releases, which always include extra tracks, heavy gatefolds, inner sleeves and full-color illustrated liner notes. There’s a cohesion of style in the label’s design, inspired by the matching spines of Impulse Records and Jim Thompson’s crime books, and a variety of projects on deck for the future (this year’s Ladies of the Canyon explores unknown female singers from the era of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which Shipley cites as his favorite album).

But the biggest task, always at hand, is the musical detective work, the Indiana Jones&–like passion for discovery. Shipley knows that even the tiniest clues from seemingly insignificant people can lead to goldmines, like the box of original tapes from long-lost soul singer Helene Smith that he listens to in the background during our interview, which he recently rescued from someone’s ex-wife’s basement in Miami, or the singers in the Bahamas who opened the nooks and crannies of their archives and shared every minute detail of their lives with him for Grand Bahama Goombay.

“If you keep cataloguing it and cataloguing it,” Shipley says, referring to his reams of notes and boxes of old photos, “you get a real database of weirdness.”