McCabe & Mrs. Miller

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Directed by Robert Altman
Starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie
Awards: Nominated – Best Actress (Christie)

“I got music in me!” insists John McCabe, protagonist of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. McCabe is a different kind of Western hero. His first scene in the film gives us a fairly standard Western character entrance. He arrives into a small town on horseback, with townspeople gawking at the well-dressed outsider. He enters a local saloon and sits down to play some cards, and the locals fall over themselves to sit at his table. He carries himself with a confidence and air of superiority, and he speaks with a tone of vague, easygoing menace. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a different kind of Western, however, and before long McCabe is confused and incoherent, drunkenly mumbling about his grievances to no one in particular.

McCabe (Warren Beatty) sets himself up as the leading businessman of the frontier town of Presbyterian Church, a remote, lonely place somewhere in the wilds of Washington state. Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond do well to film the town in a perpetual state of gloom. Presbyterian Church is always foggy or snowy; the sun never shines here. The town is naturally beautiful, but there’s a constant quiet, eerie pall over the place.

McCabe establishes a brothel in the town, largely to keep his workers happy and energized while they build his various projects. He’s soon visited by Englishwoman Constance Miller (Christie) who convinces him that they should be partners in the whorehouse business. She has experience, and her expertise will lead to more money for both of them. He agrees with her assessment.

Typical Western protagonists, heroes and anti-heroes alike, would be domineering in such a partnership, running the business and dictating how things are done. Here, McCabe’s attempts to assert his authority are rebuked by Mrs. Miller. She uses his money to build an opulent whorehouse with adjoining bathhouse, something not agreed to by McCabe. When he complains, she uses logic and economic sense to convince him that their construction was a good idea. She doesn’t take advantage of McCabe; she’s just actually able to reach him with thought and reason.

The local mining company, Harrison Shaughnessy, later offers a sum of money to McCabe for all of his land and his holdings in the area. McCabe overplays his hand, rebuffing the initial offers from the company and expecting they’ll return to him with more money. His refusal becomes his death sentence. When the company sends bounty hunters to the town, we see McCabe trying to make a deal with their leader, a mountain of a man named Butler. “I don’t make deals!” he laughs, and McCabe knows that he is in serious trouble. There is no bravado; he doesn’t kick in the saloon door and start shooting. He’s resigned to his fate.

To see how much different this film is than the average Western, witness its final sequence. The bounty hunters are after McCabe. Rather than meet them on main street at high noon, McCabe slinks around town, hoping to pick them off one by one. He’s scared of them, and he hides from them. Never has a Western hero been so desperate.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller sweeps away the romanticism and excitement of our conventional idea of the Old West, the one we usually see in films. McCabe has too much vitality, is too smart, is too nice and fair for Altman’s West. Mrs. Miller is too forward-thinking, too much of an entrepreneur. Altman’s Old West is led by simpletons and brutes. It’s a lifeless, stagnant place, a place destined to claim both McCabe and Mrs. Miller as soon as they arrived.

A-

The Random Ten #25

1) Grateful Dead – “Easy Wind” – Workingman’s Dead (1970)

Some Dead fans point to American Beauty (1970) as the seminal Grateful Dead studio record, but I’ve always preferred the down-home rusticity of Workingman’s Dead. It’s a straightforward blues/country record full of pleasant listens, which in my opinion is superior to the often syrupy-sweet American Beauty.

“Easy Wind” is a dusty blues rocker, spending a good portion of its time on guitar solos and harmonicas. What’s different about Workingman’s Dead is that the solos and the jamming aren’t interminable space-rock noodle fests. This is competent blues jamming; rarely boring and always used in the purpose of furthering the song rather than creating a diversion from it. The Dead’s studio work is often unfairly maligned, but they never reached this high level of songwriting and craftsmanship again.

2) In Flames – “Dead Eternity” – The Jester Race (1996)

We should ask ourselves: should melodic death metal be a thing? Death metal is supposed to invoke thoughts of darkness, destruction, and yes, death. It should be brutal and unlistenable to all but those with a morbidly refined palette. It probably shouldn’t sound like Iron Maiden.

That’s my main problem with In Flames, a band I used to like a lot back in 1999/2000. I don’t think I understand melodic death metal anymore. It sounds cheesy, overproduced and clumsy. The guitar riffs are top-notch, but they simply don’t match the screeching Swedish death metal vocals of singer Anders Fridén. It’s like death metal was dragged to the prom and this is how it dolled itself up. “Dead Eternity” might well be a very good song, but I don’t think I’m the man to review it.

3) Neil Young – “See the Sky About to Rain” – On the Beach (1974)

On the Beach was originally released in 1974 but wasn’t issued on CD until 2003 for reasons still unexplained by Young. During that time, after the album went out of print on vinyl, it developed a rabid cult following whose pleas and petitions helped bring about a re-release.

It’s a good thing, too, because the album is full of gems like “See the Sky About to Rain”, a delicate country-tinged number that makes great use of slide guitar and Young’s understated vocals. The slide guitar and organ accompaniment make the song bend and wave, adding a nice ripple effect to the music and making it a little more than a standard “pretty good” Neil Young song.

4) Wilco – “Handshake Drugs” – More Like the Moon EP (2003)

This version of “Handshake Drugs” was originally released on a bonus disc added to the Australian version of the band’s famous Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002). That bonus disc was released on its own via the band’s website in 2003 and would be called More Like the Moon (or Bridge, or Australian, depending on what part of the world you live in). “Handshake Drugs” would see a proper release on 2004’s A Ghost is Born, so this version provides us with an earlier look at the song.

Naturally, this version doesn’t sound as full as the later album version, but it’s not too much different. There aren’t any different lyrics or different pieces in this older version. I’d imagine that crazed Wilco lunatics might be able to hear subtle differences, but to the layman they might as well be the same.

Because “Handshake Drugs” is a really good song anyway, this version is good too. The main difference is that the version from A Ghost is Born is much louder and more chaotic, especially at its conclusion. Though that version fits that album particularly well, I think I like this softer and smoother version a little better.

5) David Bowie – “Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me” – Diamond Dogs (1974)

I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that most of Bowie’s music sounds like it was written for a movie. The theatrical nature of his work can often be a distraction. It all sounds like it was written for another purpose. I think this is the main reason why I haven’t really gotten into him too seriously.

Despite my overall thoughts of Bowie and his music (which, I admit, is grossly uninformed), it’s hard to quibble too much with this song. This is a tight, towering rock song, with great piano, guitar, and choruses. Because of “Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me”, I’m going to try again with him and see if it sticks this time.

6) Anthrax – “In a Zone” – Stomp 442 (1995)

This would be from the album that tanked so badly that Anthrax got thrown off of Elektra Records. In the 1980s, every semi-competent thrash band was signed to a major label because it was the trend of the day. Even Testament was on a major label. As the 90s dawned, it seemed like these labels were looking to renege on their commitment to the whole metal thing, and lucky for them, mainstream audiences turned away from metal when the whole grunge movement blew up. Of the popular thrash bands of that time, only Metallica escaped that era relatively unscathed in terms of popularity.

This really might be the most boring song I’ve ever heard. It’s like listening to one of those generic metal riffs that play football games into commercial, except that it lasts five minutes. This was the second Anthrax album to feature lead singer John Bush, and it’s remarkable how much more life their earlier records had with previous singer Joey Belladonna. Those albums sounded fun and lively; this tries to mask its dullness and flatness with a more “aggressive” sound that really makes this whole thing sound like shit. No wonder they got booted from their label.

7) The Clash – “Lover’s Rock” – London Calling (1979)

Better. I don’t think it’s fair to call the Clash underrated, but people may not be fully aware of all of the things they could do. Their first album is full of terrific punk tracks, and they were able to then morph and change themselves with each album moving forward from there. They progressed incredibly rapidly, never dwelling too long on one kind of sound and instead doing all sorts of different things on each subsequent album.

London Calling is a very famous record, but “Lover’s Rock” is buried towards its end and isn’t as well known as some of the other songs on the record. Like everything else, it’s truly great. It moves along as a slow-moving light pop tune, with Joe Strummer’s snarling, rough British voice playing well against the easy going music. A breakdown in the middle portion quickens the pace, with Strummer rambling between backing vocal harmonies. A fine song.

8) Beck – “Total Soul Failure (Eat It)” – Stereopathetic Soulmanure (1994)

Stereopathetic Soulmanure was released independently a week before Mellow Gold and its single “Loser” hit stores. Wikipedia describes this as “comprised mostly of home demos, live performances, and abstract noise experiments”. You can imagine what this sounds like.

It’s basically Beck fucking around with a drum kit and an off-key guitar for two minutes. I don’t think this is necessary even for Beck loyalists.

9) moe. – “Tambourine” – Warts and All, Vol. 1 (2001; this is a live version. “Tambourine” originally appeared on Dither (2001)).

Warts and All, Vol. 1 captures moe. playing live in Scranton in 2001. “Tambourine” is from their 2001 album Dither, released the same year. Dither is a very good album, finding moe. at perhaps their strongest and most focused in the studio. As with all jam bands, though, “you have to hear them live, brah!”, so moe. released a whole bunch of live concerts under the moniker Warts and All (think the Live Phish series or String Cheese Incident’s On the Road releases).

On Dither, “Tambourine” was a fast-paced diversion, a two-minute ditty gently nestled between a number of monster rockers on that album. Here, it’s a little more fleshed out, given a lengthy intro and slowed down to give the verses some space. What was once a pretty good, completely forgettable song is now a slightly longer, pretty good, completely forgettable song.

10) Ride – “Vapour Trail” – Nowhere (1990)

About four years ago my friend Brendan gave me so much music at once that I still haven’t gotten around to listening to it all. Ride’s Nowhere is one of those records I haven’t heard yet.

What a shame. I grew intrigued when I saw that Ride was a highly regarded British shoegazing group, and when I read that Nowhere was listed at number 74 of Pitchfork Media’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s”. I became more intrigued when I read that this particular song was listed at 145 of Pitchfork’s “Top 200 tracks of the 1990s”. And I was really intrigued when I put the song on and listened to the first few notes.

“Vapour Trail” is beautifully dim. The vocals are low, the guitars are murky, the bass is prevalent. It sounds like a sad song, but something about it is unmistakably victorious; well-timed strings cause the song to rise out of its own downtrodden self and create a bittersweet melancholy that makes it truly memorable. More than a pleasant surprise to me, this is an absolute triumph.

John Lacey