Chuck Eddy & the Holy Greil (1987/2002)

My interview with Marcus and Chuck is right near the top of my favourite Nerve pieces. If I didn't mention as much in my contribution to Scott's Nerve retrospective, that's only because it was an interview rather than something I really wrote.

I have a vivid memory of how different it was to talk to each of them. I wrote to Greil beforehand, to get his phone number and to see if he was receptive to an interview. I sent along a piece on junky '70s music that Scott and I had written (a precursor to the book we later wrote on the same subject) for Graffiti. Greil wrote back to say he enjoyed the piece and to give him a call. When I did call soon after--this is the part I remember so clearly--there was a long pause, followed by an intimidatingly impatient "Just a minute." I think he later explained that I'd caught him at a bad moment, but at the time, I wanted to crawl under a rock. ("I was just being polite, doofus--I didn't mean for you to actually call.") I remember also that when we finished, I asked Greil if he'd put together some kind of index or bibliography of his writings that we could publish alongside the interview. More withering exasperation: "I can't do that..." It was, indeed, a pretty strange request. You always remember the bad stuff first, and I'm laughing at these two specific lowlights now. Greil was in fact great once the interview got going, and after publication he sent a nice follow-up postcard that is visible on the bulletin board pictured in the Nerve piece.

I'm guessing Marcus had been interviewed many times by 1986; I don't know if this was Chuck's first interview (I seem to remember him mentioning another one he'd recently done), but it was close enough that he couldn't have been more accommodating or enthusiastic. That it was someone from Canada must have made the experience even more novel and unexpected, comparable, I suppose, to me getting an interview request from Iceland tomorrow. It was actually Chuck's wife, Martina, who fielded my first call (I must have gotten the number through directory assistance), so as soon as he got on the line when I called back, he was ready to go. And, as I wrote in my preface to the interview, that's exactly what Chuck did--probably not as breathlessly as I indicated at the time, but even today I remember the conversation as a blur. A friendship developed from there, one that's had its ups and downs over the years. The downs are adumbrated in a line from the intro: "even though I rarely agree with him about anything," a gap that I have personalized at times. Hüsker Dü = Big Country--all we needed was Bette Davis in the wings telling us to fasten our seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Whenever I take a look at an old Nerve, I especially love anything that's hopelessly dated. I think my favourite part in the whole Greil/Chuck interview is either the burning question of whether or not the Cro-Mags deserved space in Spin--the Cro-Mags??--or the part where, given the chance to ask Marcus his opinion of anybody, I stepped back, took a good hard look at history and posterity and all of that, and got a few words from him on...Anita Baker! It's invaluable that I was able to get that clarified for future pop-music scholars.

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Greil Marcus and Chuck Eddy are critics that anyone interested in rock writing--anyone interested in rock'n'roll for that matter--should be reading. Some brief introductions.

Marcus, although he insists he's just a guy who writes a couple of columns, is almost certainly one of the most revered and influential critics around today. (As my conversation with Eddy was winding down, he suddenly asked out of the blue, "So what was it like talking to Greil?") Marcus has been writing for some 20 years, so there's a wealth of material I would refer you to: Mystery Train, the kind of book that could conceivably outlast rock'n'roll itself; Stranded, a collection of indispensable 'desert island' essays that Marcus edited and contributed a critical discography to; his essays on the Beatles, Girl Groups, Rock Films, and Punk included in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock 'n' Roll; his monthly Voice column, which covers Eddie Money, toy Godzillas, and other less bizarre subjects; his monthly Artforum column (soon to terminate) which will make you feel painfully stupid; and countless other odds and ends strewn across the pages of old Creems and Rolling Stones.

Eddy, who has emerged in the past three years as the Voice's most prolific contributor, is a critic I never miss even though I rarely agree with him about anything. Besides his monthly singles column in Creem Metal, Eddy's sharpest writing can be found in the following Voice pieces: "Howls From the Heartland," a tour through Midwestern grunge (Aug. 5, '86); "Dead Air," a vehement blast at the current state of radio (Jan. 6, '87); "Umlauts From Hell," which traces the evolution of surf music from the Beach Boys through Celtic Frost (Feb. 3, '87); and "Slime Is Money (Bastard)," a critique of Forced Exposure (March 31, '87). To explain why I love these Eddy pieces, I'd echo Marcus's words on Elvis Costello and the Mekons found below.

Marcus talks like he writes: orderly and concise. For him, I've used the interview format. Eddy also talks like he writes, something like his beloved Die Kreuzen: "all over the fucking place before you know it." So I've arranged Chuck's words into some semblance of categorization.

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Phil Dellio: In the last (1985) Pazz & Jop poll, Tim Somner suggested the time has come for the '70s critics to bow out. How do you feel about the long-term domination of yourself, Bob Christgau, and Dave Marsh?

Greil Marcus: I don't see myself in any sort of dominant position in any way--I just write a column and say what I think. Until I started the Voice column a year or so ago, I did it in a small-circulation art magazine, and before that in a magazine that wasn't circulated outside of California. All I'm doing is writing about stuff that continues to interest me in a very intense way. I'm still struggling to make sense of it and feeling vitalized by writing about it. But I don't consider myself a player in a game of taste-making, or any sort of a critical powerbroker or anything like that. When Tim says the '70s critics should bow out, my response is, "I guess I don't have to worry--I'm a '60s critic." I don't know who he's talking about when he said that--I really don't. There's another thing, too, to get obnoxious about it for a moment. People will stop reading me and Bob and Dave and people of that ilk--if that is an ilk--when other people come along with better ideas, a more intriguing writing style, more stamina, and more commitment to the subject matter. There's nothing surprising about that.

Dellio: A few months back you commended Steve Albini's highly personal diary in Forced Exposure. Do you think the people at Forced Exposure are writing out of genuine conviction, or just looking for a forum to make a name for themselves?

Marcus: I don't know the people on Forced Exposure, so I don't know what their motives are. As someone who reads the magazine, I often get the feeling they're just writing for fun. And that could mean dozens of things. To try to piss people off--easier said than done. I don't know why Byron Coley keeps dropping the g's off his words. It's so affected. I talked to him on the phone recently--I've never met the guy--and told him he's just gotta stop that. It's like a quadruple irony, and I got lost somewhere on the double irony.

One of the reasons I like Steve Albini's writing is because he isn't working within someone else's form. He's working within his own. I was very moved by that diary. I really thought the guy was talking about real things. Making a fool of himself, shooting himself in the foot, and not giving a damn--he was gonna say it and leave himself completely naked. I don't think he was trying to be provocative, and I don't think he was copping a pose; I think he was really trying to figure out what the fuck he wanted to say, and to say it to its limit. And I think he did a real good job.

Dellio: What do you think about Chuck Eddy's writing?

Marcus: I liked Chuck's writing a whole lot when I was first seeing it in the Voice, but I guess I've gotten the impression over the past year or so that he's trying to convince himself that what he's saying on the page is true. Like, "I'm supposed to like this album, so I like it, and I'm gonna write about how great it is." You see the letters H-E-L-P tearing through the lines. So I'm not convinced by what he's been writing lately. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he believes it with all his heart and soul. But if he doesn't, I don't have any idea what's going on with him.

Dellio: Since interviewing Peter Townshend and Elvis Costello earlier this decade, you seem to have completely given up on interviews.

Marcus: I've never done interviews. I did the Townshend because the person who was supposed to had cancelled at the last minute, and my editor called me up desperate. I did the Costello simply because I'd always wanted to meet the guy. I'm real glad I did because we've become friends, and we talk, and he's really quite a guy.

But I'm not an interviewer--I'm not good with it and I'm not comfortable. What's wrong with me is I want the other person to like me. And that's fatal for an interviewer. The best interviews come when you ask stupid questions. You say, "Is it true your mother's really a dolphin?" And the guy says, "No! Where did you hear that? She's not a dolphin, she's a burrow. And let me tell you how she got to become a burrow..." And he'll tell you everything. Obviously, if you want the guy to like you, you're not going to ask if his mother's a dolphin. So I'm not cut out to be an interviewer.

Dellio: Would you agree, as Chuck Eddy wrote earlier this year, that radio is in its worst shape ever?

Marcus: Look--except for a few years, and they were mostly in the mid-50s and mid-60s for AM, and in the late '70s for college FM, the state of radio has always been the worst in history. There was a time in around 1959 when I stopped listening to the radio because it almost made me physically ill every time I turned it on. All I'd hear was Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy." There was another time like that in the late '60s, the early '70s were beyond belief, and the early '80s were astonishing. Top 40 or hip FM--whatever the standardized form of pop music might be--has an infinite capacity for dullness and stupidity. We'll never know when we hit bottom. So sure, I completely agree with what Chuck wrote--except it's not the worst in history if you want to take a longer view than six months.

Dellio: How about the mid-70s, the radio that Chuck Eddy and a lot of other newer writers grew up with?

Marcus: Well, I thought "The Night Chicago Died" was really funny, and "Beach Baby" was a truly wonderful record. But it was one of those fallow periods. And since it wasn't my period, in the sense that it wasn't when I was first starting to write or argue with my friends about music, it was just a time I had to get through. One of the great things about major changes in pop music, like Elvis or the Beatles or the Sex Pistols, is that unless you're a lot smarter than I am, it's a shock. Moving along in the mid-70s it was, "Jesus, seems like it's gonna be like this forever." The ultimate nadir was reached with that song "How Long" by Ace. Remember when that record came out? There's a mid-70s record for you. Well, rock critics all over the country said, "Hey, this is good! This is kinda interesting! Maybe this is gonna be a good new band!" I mean, that bland piece of shit? It couldn't get any worse than that, Chuck Eddy to the contrary.

Dellio: I take it that it still means something for you to hear a song over your car radio, as opposed to sitting at home.

Marcus: Yeah, because it's a surprise, it's more tactile, you're closer to the speaker, your hand's on the dial. I find it a lot of fun to be moving along and have something come on that will take me out of the day, take me back 20 years, confuse me in terms of a context, or just hear some song that I'm thinking, "What the fuck is that?"--something I've never heard before that just sounds great or weird. I think that's a lot of what living a good life is all about, to be able to be surprised like that.

Dellio: The collection of Lester Bangs's writing that you're editing was undertaken soon after his death five years ago. Has there been a delay in getting it out?

Marcus: It took a good while to collect everything we could collect. That meant gathering all the material from his apartment, which was thousands and thousands of pages, some of it in order and some of it not, then shipping it out to me; it meant gathering hundreds and hundreds of published articles from obscure sources, as well as from the Voice, Creem, etc., and getting all the stuff in one place and me going through it, dividing it into piles of 'yes,' 'no,' and 'maybe,' and then starting to read it and think about it.

But I finished the book last June, and it will be coming out in September. I think it was worth the wait. I hope it will have a big effect on how not just rock'n'roll, but culture or politics or anything is written about. I think people are going to see new possibilities for talking straight and for talking twisted when they see this book.

Dellio: Do you think people who write about rock'n'roll still tend to write in the shadow of Lester Bangs, or with Lester Bangs in the back of their mind?

Marcus: Well, I don't know. He's certainly on my mind, and I know he's on Dave's mind in the sense that he's a literary conscience. Often you'll write something and you'll say, "God, that's pretentious--Lester would kill me." Of course, people felt that when he was alive, too. That's not just a function of his being dead.

Dellio: Between your columns in Artforum and the Voice, you usually manage to say a few words about most performers. I wanted to get your thoughts on a few I've yet to see you comment on. The Jesus and Mary Chain?

Marcus: I thought (Psychocandy) was a good record, but in a real cold way. I always tried to get my British friends to explain to me why they're so big and important and controversial over there. I've got some smart British friends, but they never could explain it to me.

Dellio: Anita Baker?

Marcus: I think Anita Baker is ridiculous. Any time you hear somebody bringing back this kind of genteel, effete black music--the same number the Pointer Sisters pulled in the early '70s when they gave concerts with "Black Tie Recommended" printed on the tickets--it's an incident in class politics that has nothing to do with music.

Dellio: Robert Cray?

Marcus: I don't like Robert Cray, and I particularly dislike his new album (Strong Persuader). What really puts me off about him is that you just can't do blues in the self-conscious way you can do a lot of other things. You can't get up and say, "Ladies and Gentlemen, now I'm gonna do a blues song," without immediately sounding ridiculous. There's something very demagogic about that. The Bonzo Dog Band could do it, but they were supposed to be ridiculous.

Dellio: R.E.M.?

Marcus: The most boring of the boring--forget it.

Dellio: Both "Real Life Top 10" in the Voice and "Speaker to Speaker" in Artforum are fairly free-form in what they draw upon for subject matter. How does each take shape?

Marcus: For "Real Life," I keep a running file. Whenever anything crosses my path that might conceivably go into the column--something I hear on the radio, a book I see in a store, a strange news story I see in the paper, something I might see at an art exhibit--I write it down. You need a balance: I don't think it would be much fun to read a column about ten records, or ten books, or ten movies.

I suppose the subject of "Speaker to Speaker" is, "What does it mean to be a listener?" What are we doing when we listen? What happens? What doesn't happen? What could happen? I really am a critic in the sense that I don't give a shit what the artist intended, or what he meant. I couldn't care less. What I'm interested in is what happens when you listen. If the artist made a record intending to convince all right-thinking people to send money to the I.R.A., but the record is in Swedish and nobody can know that, it's sort of pointless to discuss the guy's intentions. What you really have to discuss is what is it like to hear a record in Swedish, and does it have a good beat?

Dellio: The last couple of years you've written a disproportionate amount about Elvis Costello and the Mekons. What do you see in them?

Marcus: They provoke me more, they give me more to think about, they give me more visceral pleasure, they upset me more, than any other people. But I don't like the new Mekons album (Honky Tonkin'); I didn't like Blood and Chocolate. I don't like everything those people do. But for the last few years, it's true, they've been the people who have gotten under my skin.

It just so happens with the Mekons that when I started to write about them, they weren't much being written about. So I had both a cause to trumpet and a subject to explore. And with Elvis Costello, to be perfectly frank, I don't think anybody else writes anything halfway intelligent about him. And I don't know why; don't ask me why no one else wrote a whole column on "Pills and Soap," because it sure as hell deserved it. You could write a whole column on his version of "Withered and Died," an old Richard Thompson song.

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Breaking Down Barriers

Damn right I try to subvert a readership's assumptions, no matter who I write for. I grew up not knowing what heavy metal was. I do know what loud guitars are. Sonic Youth, the Janitors, Squirrel Bait, they all have loud guitars. So the people who read Creem Metal should like that kind of music. The problem is, heavy metal is not a kind of music anymore--it's a marketing term. The paradox is that heavy metal listeners are probably about the most open-minded people out there, for a couple of reasons. Number one, speed metal had just opened the door between metal and punk--the stuff just goes back and forth. So if I tell the kids who read Creem Metal about Sonic Youth, I would assume that for a lot of them it makes just as much sense as somebody else telling them about Suicidal Tendencies. The other reason is, even the pop-metal stuff, which I don't really like--bands like Poison and Motley Crue--where they take off from is T. Rex and Slade and Sweet. One of the most ridiculous things I've heard in the last couple of months is that Red Kross, who have their album being distributed by a major label, are touring with the Butthole Surfers. They ought to be touring with Poison--they'd be huge. They draw on the exact same kind of music as Poison and Motley Crue and those bands do. Somebody's messing up somewhere. But to answer your question, yeah, I want to expose people who read Creem Metal to everything from Run-D.M.C. to the Janitors.

In the Voice, I want to piss people off. Especially in the Voice. Since I started writing for that paper, I've always assumed that there's something complacent about those readers. So yeah, I want to shock them. Besides, it's interesting to talk about Venom in terms that somebody who reads the Voice might appreciate. I mean, hell, Christgau ended up giving Slayer a B-plus in his Consumer Guide; he put Motorhead in his top 10! I have to think I played a part in that--I know I did. I can't believe he ever really played that Slayer record--I can't imagine Bob doing that--but I think it's neat breaking down some of the barriers he has toward this kind of stuff.

Cliques of a Different Colour

Let me put it this way: I would be allowed to give Hüsker Dü a negative review in the Voice, but you can't give the Swans a bad review in Forced Exposure. Byron Coley called me two weeks after "Slime Is Money" ran, and he told me flat out that a lot of those people he writes about are his friends. He told me that he will not write something negative about Chris D. or the Misfits. So the way Forced Exposure is cliquish has to do with the music they cover; Spin, the Voice--or before that, New York Rocker--are maybe cliquish internally, but they don't only cover one kind of music.

I have a lot of problems with Spin. I've told this to John Leland, but since I write for them it's not something I really want to...I was gonna say I kind of hate Spin. There's like a trendy schtick there. The Cro-Mags, for instance, don't deserve any space anywhere--they're a generic hardcore band. That Spin would devote that space to somebody like the Cro-Mags only indicates to me that whoever's writing that article, whoever's serving as the editor for that article, doesn't know about the kind of music they're covering.

Favourites

The albums I play more than any other albums in my collection are Paranoid, Funhouse, and ZoSo. Paranoid's amazing--it's a jazz album. Big influence on early Pere Ubu and electric Miles Davis. Anybody who takes time with Paranoid or Master of Reality, I'm convinced they'll come away thinking those are amazing records. Thing is, they're not that far from what the Stooges were doing. But what divided the critics then was audiences: a different audience listened to the Stooges and MC5 than listened to Sabbath, and it was assumed that the audience who listened to Sabbath were dumb. And that's reprehensible.

I listen to Zeppelin records right now, and there's never been a more avant-garde rock group. Never. Those guys..."When the Levee Breaks" is just so hard. "Communication Breakdown" is like hardcore ought to sound. It confuses me: I can't figure out why punk revolted against that stuff. The Pistols are nothing compared to Zeppelin. The difference is, people are dancing to Zeppelin right now. They were making dance music all along: "When the Levee Breaks," "Wanton Song," and "The Crunge" are great dance songs. I can't imagine anybody's ever gonna match that music. ZoSo's my desert island record if Greil ever asks me to write a chapter for Stranded.

If I was asked to name the most important rock artists of the '80s, I'd be really hard pressed. I think Motorhead have been really consistent, and I think AC/DC have too. But they're nothing like geniuses. [laughs] They've only made a couple of albums I really liked, but they've made a lot of good ones. Maybe the Fall, who are completely ignored by most critics. I don't know what I'm missing, but I think the Fall make brilliant records.

Critics

I've never met Greil Marcus, and I really want to. He's one of the people in the world I would really like to meet. Sometimes, I think he's way out in left field somewhere; I don't even understand what he's writing about. I mean, I've got to be honest--I'll read his "Real Life Top 10" and...you can't say it's over-intellectualizing, because that's not it. I have a radio in my car, and being in Detroit without mass transit, I drive around a lot too. So I really sympathize with what he does there. He was the only person besides me who realized that "Calling America" by ELO was one of the most brilliant records of last year. I thought it was really neat that it ended up on both our top 10s.

I've got nothing against Greil. Yeah, I probably do. I think both him and Christgau miss a lot. With Marcus it's probably not that important, because he never set out to hear everything there is. With Christgau it is important, although I know he realizes that he misses a lot.

The thing that bugs me about rock criticism more than anything else, and this applies to both Marcus and Christgau, and Marsh even more, is what I would call a hero-worship syndrome. Both Marcus's and Christgau's aesthetics are at least partially based on the idea that anybody can make great music. But I don't think they carry that out in practice. To me, it's not that likely that Elvis Costello will make four great albums; most people will make one great album or one great single. Making one great album doesn't really increase the chances of making another great album. I guess I'm not as convinced by the concept of genius as most critics are.

Hüsker Dü are a perfect example. If they emerged now, playing the kind of music they do, they'd be deservedly ignored. They sound like Big Country! There's no punch to that music. The other thing that makes me real different from Marcus and Christgau--probably makes me different from most critics--is that I want music to have immediate impact. That's one of the reasons I really like heavy metal. There are very few albums that grow on me over time. The Mekons's Edge of the World is probably the only album I've loved in the last couple of years that didn't hit me right off and kill me, and just continue to kill me.

Another thing is--I say these guys are great, and then I come up with all these things I hate about them--these guys judge music on lyrics. Marcus does it less than most critics, Christgau does it less that most critics, both do it way more than they ought to. Music is not lyrics. To me, lyrics are almost irrelevant. The only time lyrics will affect me one way or the other is if they outwardly annoy me, like with the Wiseblood record. I don't look for meaning; I don't think most people who listen to music do.

Words matter to me when they're funny, like on the new Cult album. I think it's by far one of the best records this year--it's just so stupid! Or like the Shonen Knife record, this power-pop group from Japan. They're three Japanese girls who are playing '79 style power-pop, influenced by the Buzzcocks or early XTC, with all the songs about animals, ice cream, and stuff like that. To me, those are good lyrics.

Steve Perry vs. Bob Mould

Bryan Adams, Boston, and Lou Gramm--or Steve Perry, who I think is a great singer--I acknowledge that it's crap. I like it as crap--it's great crap. They set their sights low, so they don't have to be that good. Whereas Hüsker Dü, to do what they set out to do, they have to be real good. And they're not.

Doug Simmons (Voice Music Editor) thought my Third Stage review was one of the better things I'd written. He pictured a whole city of people with their morning coffee and that review in front of them just spitting their coffee all over the table. And that's kind of what my intention was. I'm not gonna write about Boston and tear that album apart. I mean, why?--billions of people could do that. There's no use writing about Boston or REO unless I'm going to sit down and figure out what it is people like about Boston and REO. On the other hand, a big part of that Boston review was tongue-in-cheek. It was definitely aimed to piss people off. Rock criticism should.

Bono vs. Bonzo

I loathe U2. I hate their guts. But--just like Pee Wee said in his movie, there's always a big but--if "Bullet the Blue Sky" comes out as a single, that'll be my single of the year. Oh, man--the drums are pure Bonham! I heard it on the radio last week, and they played it back-to-back with "Love Removal Machine," and then went into "Kashmir." I was in heaven--I was in heaven.

Teenagers vs. the World

To me, rock'n'roll is a teenage music. One of the things that excited me so much about Metallica is that this was no frills, teenage music--and there's kids out there buying it. The thing that bugs me more than anything else is that there's no radio for kids anymore. There's nothing on the radio. Although the Beastie Boys, man...I hate their guts, I hate their guts--as people or whatever. But they proved something that Run-D.M.C. and Metallica started to prove last year: there's a teenage audience out there that's thirsting for their own music. And they're not being given it. Every generation of teenagers since rock'n'roll started had their own music. Until this one.

Chuck Eddy vs. Chuck Eddy

I don't know if my tastes will change; that's one of my big questions. One of the things I've taken Marsh to task for is that in old Creem, in the early '70s, he wrote all these amazing high-energy reviews of Raw Power, Sir Lord Baltimore, and Dust. Then he started taking bands like Pere Ubu--who to me are a natural extension of that kind of music--to task as being too arty, or too noisy: "Stop listening to noisy music." I guess a lot of that has to do with getting older.

But as I get older, I find my tastes lean more and more towards noisier music. I hate to refer to it in those terms, because it's almost as if someone like Albini likes noise just for the sake of noise. I don't--I want music to express emotion. I guess that's a Lester Bangs thing, but that's what I want. And right now, most of the music I see expressing emotion is loud, noisy music. So what will probably be the deciding factor is not whether my tastes change, but whether the music changes.

I'm convinced that I'm listening to the best music there is right now. I've got no doubt in my mind.

(Originally published in Nerve; revised introduction written for rockcritics.com)

Quality Time with Balaam & the Angel (2002)

My first submission to Nerve was a page-long review of the Ramones' "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" in either July or August of '85. Nerve had been around for maybe a year at that point, but I'd only really taken notice of it the last couple of issues. In particular, it was a long R.E.M. piece by Howard that made me think it might be a good place for me to try sending something. I'd done a little music writing through university: a review of Damaged for a journalism friend at Ryerson; reviews of Hüsker Dü, the Butthole Surfers, and the Gun Club for The Varsity my last year at the University of Toronto; and a letter published in The Newspaper, UT's other student newspaper, in which I was very distraught that the Psychedelic Furs and Joe "King" Carrasco had been left off a preemptive best-of-the-80s list compiled by their writers. (One of them, Sam Guha, who I came to know through the campus radio station a few years later, would die very young of a heart attack; I imagine all the guilt he carried around over the Joe Carrasco slight played a role.) Life in general had gone steadily downhill in the intervening year-plus since graduation, and however awkwardly, I think I was able to get some of that feeling into the "Bonzo" review. I sent a copy to Nerve, and also one to the Voice. I didn't hear back from New York--it's my understanding that they reluctantly passed following a series of high-level editorial meetings--but within a couple of weeks, I got a call from Dave at Nerve telling me that it was too late for anything to be included in the issue they were just finishing, but I should drop around and try to set something up for the issue after that.

I went in to a nearly empty Ryerson either that weekend or the next and met Dave. I don't remember if Nancy was there or not, I don't remember what we talked about, and I don't remember if I came away with a specific assignment then and there or whether I had to follow up later. I do remember being tremendously excited as I headed downtown that day. My first two reviews ran in the September issue: X's Ain't Love Grand and an album by the Proletariat "featuring Lydia Lunch," a rather optimistic sales come-on that I pounced on for laughs. I was a regular contributor for the rest of Nerve's two-year-plus run, album reviews only for the first few issues and eventually live reviews, interviews, and other stuff too. Yes, live reviews--if you know me at all well, that's pretty funny.

More than just getting me started as a music writer, Nerve had a huge effect on me socially. Basically, it was the first time in my life I made a number of new friends beyond the handful I'd been close to since middle school. I started working at a downtown record store around the same time, widening my social circle some more--it seemed like I knew a lot of people all of a sudden. Fifteen years later, the circle has contracted back to those same middle-school friends and the handful of Nerve people who remain, which is what you'd expect. But as meaningless as almost all of that activity ultimately was, I'm glad I experienced it--everyone should get to play Edie Sedgwick at least once in his life.

Those first two reviews, especially the X, got kind of mangled in the editing process, and if there's one thing I'll be arrogant enough to take some credit for at Nerve--I'm sure other contributors have a similar story--it was in getting Dave and Nancy to pay more attention to typos, and to be less quick to change copy without talking to the writer first. As I remember it, Dave was partly amused by how agitated I was over the X review--I probably did blow everything out of proportion. But as time went on, you could much more reliably expect that what you'd read in each issue was pretty much what you'd written. Too much so in my case.

My writing more or less passed through three phases at Nerve. I was earnest and fussy at the beginning, occasionally (as with the Proletariat review) getting some humour across, but still half-dedicated to that stilted kind of writing you fall into at university. As clunky as those early reviews were, though, they strike me as better than what came next: the self-important know-it-all, alternately glib (when imitating Bangs) and pretentious (when imitating Marcus), sometimes both at once. (No reflection on Bangs or Marcus, just an acknowledgment of how destructive their influence can be when misappropriated.) Unfortunately, phase two accounted for much of my stay at Nerve, making a lot of the writing I was so enamored of at the time hard for me to look at today. Somewhere along the way, I settled down and wrote some stuff that still reads well to me: a largely autobiographical look at obsessive record buyers, pieces on the Angry Samoans and the Gun Club, interviews with Roger Ashby (a DJ with CHUM) and Paul White (a former Capitol A&R; guy I ended up working with at the aforementioned record store; he played a surprisingly large role in breaking the Beatles in Canada). I'm also inordinately proud of a Mel Torme space-filler I wrote towards the end, inspired by the discovery that an old album of his shared the title Right Now! with a recent Pussy Galore release. Pigfucker esoterica very much of its moment.

The timing of my involvement with Nerve was perfect in terms of the chance it gave me to interview some people who figured prominently in my imagination at the time, and to do so while the idea of interviewing somebody was still new and exciting: Bob Mould and Grant Hart, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Paul Westerberg, Curt Kirkwood, Marcus and Chuck Eddy, Schoolly-D, the Beastie Boys (possibly their first Canadian interview, a few months before Licensed to Ill, and gross enough that I wrote it up under a pseudonym), Richard Berry, and, for Graffiti (another Toronto publication that many Nerve people also wrote for), Johnny Thunders and the Pet Shop Boys. And again, whatever I might feel about the whole interview process today, everyone should get to play Barbara Walters at least once in his life--it's very satisfying that I got to talk to those people, especially in view of the fact that some have passed on. In keeping with the no-free-lunch rule, the trade-off for such access was quality time spent with the Thrashing Doves, Balaam & the Angel, the Raunch Hands, Matt Bianco, and various other mid-80s luminaries. As you might expect, there wasn't a lot left to ask the Thrashing Doves that the whole world didn't already know.

I'll second a couple of Tim's observations: monthly Nerve parties ("meetings") at Dave and Nancy's were great, and Dave was a little bizarre. His two standard greetings: "Let's wail, babe," after something Huey Lewis once said to me, and "Phil D, totally out of control," after something Dale Martindale (don't ask) once said to him. He sometimes spoke in code, all of which carried a specific meaning and all of which I've forgotten except for "Did you tell her your life story?" Sometime in the mid-90s, long after Nerve's exit, Dave ran into Scott on Yonge St. "Scott Woods--hey." Scott had been living in Vancouver for four or five years, and they probably hadn't spoken in seven or eight. That won't make any sense unless you know Dave. The magnitude of his deadpan at such moments is very hard to convey.

Nancy, Dave's girlfriend and Nerve's co-publisher, was synonymous with two things above all else. First, there was her spacey interviewing style, the "If you were a major food group, which one would you be?" school of interrogation that's weird enough when practiced on regular famous people, doubly so when Zodiac Mindwarp is at the receiving end. (He was a self-identified meat or meat alternative, if memory serves.) Also, half or more of us had major crushes on Nancy at one time or another. That's an old story to the participants not worth dwelling on, but it was definitely a large part of Nerve's dynamic.

I have a weird kind of relationship today with the music of that time, the music of the mid-80s, both what Nerve covered and what it didn't. When I began, I was perfectly in sync with Nerve: Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, R.E.M., the obviously misguided certainty that whatever was hugely popular was almost always worthless (albeit a certainty that was sometimes the source of a compelling kind of us-against-them special pleading). Under Dave's influence, I added the Jesus & Mary Chain to my list of heroes. And then, sometime in 1986, my interest in Top 40 was reawakened by the record-store job. (I started to hang around with Scott at this point, and he also influenced me in that direction.) Dave was always good about letting writers pursue whatever they were interested in at any given moment, so soon I was reviewing Lisa Lisa, Alexander O'Neal, Madonna, and Bananarama for Nerve. Today I hardly ever listen to or think about any of that stuff--not the Amerindie end of it, and not the pop hits that followed. I connect more with my favourite '90s music, the songs that went into Radio On, and more still with my favourite '70s music. It's not that I think what I listened to during Nerve days is bad or overrated or anything like that. It's all just kind of walled-up for me for the time being, the Blow Monkeys included. I'm sure it'll sound great again at some point.

Overall, I have nothing but good feelings about Nerve 15 years later--not necessarily about the writing I did, but rather the heady sensation of being right in the middle of a fledgling publication that felt like the most important thing in the world at the time. That has a lot to do with the fact that Nerve was basically the first publication I wrote for--I doubt that it retains the same significance for Tim or Howard, both of whom had already been writing for a while when Nerve came along. When I read Robert Draper's history of Rolling Stone a few years back, I found myself really caught up in the early chapters, which were charged with the same kind of excitement I experienced at Nerve (and, in very different circumstances, that I experienced again when Radio On started to feel like something special). There have been numerous occasions since during my time as a music writer that I've been extremely happy about one thing or another, but I can honestly say that it never got any better than scooting around Toronto in the back of a van, delivering that month's Nerve to record stores and clubs around the city.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com, part of a lengthy Nerve retrospective)

Kill the Headlights and Put It in Neutral (2002; w/Andrew Lapointe)

Phil: I take it you're young enough that this is the first Sight & Sound poll you've taken an interest in. I first caught up with the poll in 1979, when I found the '72 list reprinted in The Book of Lists. That was right when I started to obsess over Taxi Driver, Nashville, and The Conversation (and Manhattan, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and other stuff I'm less eager to admit to), so it was quite an amazing thing to find. I think one of the key foundations of my long-standing friendship with a guy named Peter Stephens--we met while working as ushers in Georgetown's new theatre at the time--was my ability to rhyme off the Sight & Sound top 10. I drove into the city that winter to see Persona (#5 in '72) at the Eatons Centre. Hard to believe now, but the Cineplex there began by showing Persona, Dr. Strangelove, Last Tango in Paris, and the like.

Andrew: Actually, I've never taken a look at the Sight & Sound poll before, but when I saw the recent list, I was pleased to see The Godfather Parts I & II on there. At least The Godfather Part II, which I believe is the rare sequel that is more complex than its predecessor in methods of cinematic storytelling (e.g., flashbacks and present connections in the Corleone family history). I'm glad you mentioned Taxi Driver. I saw that again recently on video, but I wish I had the kind of accessibility that you have seeing these films in repertory theatres. I live in Ottawa and there are only two (the ByTowne and the Mayfair), but in modern suburbia there's the AMC that shows the mega-blockbusters.

Phil:  You're forgetting C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud among sequels, but that and Godfather II are the only ones...I guess the one noteworthy breakthrough in this year's poll is The Godfathers becoming the first post-1970 films to make the top 10. I thought that was going to happen in '92, either them or Raging Bull, but it took another 10 years--the fact that they made the directors' top 10 in '92 may have helped. The gap between the poll and the most recent film in the top 10 continues to widen almost unabated, though: three years in '52 (Bicycle Thief), two years in '62 (L'avventura), six years in '72 (Persona), 19 years in '82 (8-1/2), 24 years in '92 (2001), and now 28 years (Godfather II). If Raging Bull were to get on next time and nothing newer, the gap would be 32 years. For what it's worth, I think they were right to count votes for the Godfathers together--I read somewhere that there was some grumbling about that.

Andrew: Yes, I've heard some people talking about The Godfather I & II being listed together, which is something I don't think they should have done. Both films are extremely different, and I believe Godfather II is better for the reasons I talked about above. And for the record, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud was originally meant as a sequel to Return of the Living Dead.

Phil: Andrew--you're my sparring partner here, and I respect you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against The Godfather again. Ever...I want to check voting for a few horror films, actually. Psycho, Night of the Hunter, and Blue Velvet would have gotten lots of support, and there was undoubtedly some votes for Nosferatu and Rosemary's Baby. I hope Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Peeping Tom, Repulsion, and Carrie also got something--all of which I prefer to 8-1/2.

Andrew: For horror films, my top choice is definitely Dawn of the Dead, which I think is a skilled work of horror cinema. I know a lot of people would back me up on that, notably Roger Ebert. Poltergeist would also be a choice of mine.

Phil: I'm not a fan of Dawn, though I haven't seen it since it came out. I remember it being campy and comic-book gory and in overly bright colours, and that the film's basic premise--that consumers are zombies--was driven home with a sledgehammer one scene after another. I'm a Pet Shop Boys fan and a full-time consumer--get off my case! Night, on the other hand, is grimy and surreal and appeared out of nowhere; I can totally understand Ebert's famous review where he sat there numb, completely unprepared for what he was seeing. And the political stuff in Night, Viet Nam and race, is so much more subtle. By the way, Scott Woods played me the opening scene of Dawn last year, inside the TV station, because he was convinced that John Cazale had an uncredited role as one of the technicians. Chronologically it's possible, if you assume that the film was shot in '78 before Cazale died, and there's one shot where the guy indeed looks like a dead ringer. But it's not him.

Andrew: Dawn had an intelligent verve to it. I thought the characters in the film were believable and smart and not cardboard idiots just there to get killed. The movie wasn't just a zombie flick, it had something to say, politically and socially. How often do you see a horror movie like that?

Phil: There are quite a few, but we've got to get off horror films. Before we do, though, as a service to Robin Wood/Forest J. Ackerman groupies, I quickly went through Sight & Sound's master list and, without bending the definition of "horror film" too much, found all the titles that got votes: Blue Velvet, Bride of Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Carrie, Cat People (original), Cul-de-Sac, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, Eyes Without a Face, Hour of the Wolf, I Walked With a Zombie, Jacob's Ladder, Jaws, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Night of the Hunter, Nosferatu (original), Psycho, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, The Tenant, The Thing From Another World, Vampyr. I haven't seen Cul-de-Sac or Jacob's Ladder, but I think they're generally classified as horror films. I didn't check vote totals--I'm guessing Night of the Hunter got the most and Let's Scare Jessica to Death the least (what a weird choice). I'm really surprised there was nothing for Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freaks, or Peeping Tom. Frankenstein, too, which I remember was on Fellini's list in '92. There's someone we can talk about, Fellini--as I indicated earlier, I don't get the appeal. He and Bergman were basically on even footing 30 years ago, but Bergman has dropped out of both the critics' (two top 10s in '72, Persona and Wild Strawberries) and directors' lists, while Fellini's higher than ever. I find Persona much more absorbing than 8-1/2--the credit sequence, Bibi Andersson's monologue, and the frame burning up are unforgettable. As John Waters once wrote in Film Comment, c'mon Ingmar, how about Persona II?

Andrew: First of all, Blue Velvet isn't a horror film, so I guess they're branching out to the more psychological thrillers. Persona is definitely a psychological thriller. I hear so much more about 8-1/2 than I do about Persona, so it seems 8-1/2 is getting overrated, as are a lot of the films on that list. But they're excellent nonetheless. I don't see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is one of my all time favorites, anywhere on the list. An excellent film that seems underrated.

Phil: You don't consider Blue Velvet a horror film? Is it because there's no creaking doors or lengthy hand-held shots from the killer's point of view? Surely it's as much of a horror film as The Shining or Psycho. Or maybe I just don't understand genre--the Action Channel has been playing Five Easy Pieces recently, one of my favourites but a little hard for me to get a handle on as an action film. Maybe they're thinking of the ping-pong game between Nicholson and the guy in the neck brace...Cuckoo's Nest did get votes: one critic and two directors, none of whom I recognize. It's a great film--I wouldn't put it right at the top of the '70s heap with The Godfathers and Nashville and Taxi Driver and a few others, but it's in the second tier. Milos Forman's own list is pretty interesting to the degree that almost half of it is made up of competitors from that time: he's got American Graffiti, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather, and Raging Bull. I've sensed from scanning the directors' lists that a lot of them shy away from contemporaries.

Andrew: Okay, you could consider Blue Velvet horror because it does reach beyond the elements of a drama, or it could just be a psychological thriller with horror film elements (in the vein of Psycho perhaps). Or maybe I'm thinking in video store terms, in which you would probably find Blue Velvet in the drama section. Anyway, I disagree with lumping Cuckoo's Nest in the second tier. I think it's probably the best film of 1975, if not one of the best of the '70s. And while we're on the subject of Jack Nicholson, I was curious if you knew of his earlier roles in some of those Roger Corman classics?

Phil: Basically my rule is, if it scares me, it's horror...Nashville or Frederick Wiseman's Welfare is my #1 for '75, I'd put Cuckoo's Nest or Jaws next, then Dog Day Afternoon, Night Moves, and Smile. I think a lot of people count '75 as the high point of American film in the '70s because of the strength of that year's five best-picture nominees, but I think '72, '73, and '74 were probably stronger. Cuckoo's Nest does provide one of the four Jack Nicholson impressions I amuse myself with on a semi-regular basis: "I want you to hold it between your knees," "Keep on talkin' 'bout the good life, Elton, 'cause it makes me want to puke," "I goddamned near lost my nose for you Mrs. Mulwray, and I happen to like my nose--I like breathing through it," and, Nicholson's impassioned plea to Will Sampson, "You wanna watch a ball game, Chief?" (I had to double-check Sampson's name on the IMDB--you know he gets something like 20th billing? Ridiculous.) I don't think I've ever seen any of the Corman films, though I can visualize Nicholson in The Terror, so I've probably caught bits and parts.

Andrew: Peter Bogdonavich once saw The Terror and said, "Gee, I hope Jack makes it as a director, because he's not much of an actor." Nicholson had done a number of Roger Corman films beginning in 1958, and when Corman had to leave location when shooting 1963's The Terror, Jack offered to direct parts of it. (Francis Ford Coppola directed some parts as well, not to mention Monte Hellman.) Nicholson probably had exceptional promise as a director when he first started out co-directing The Terror voluntarily, while at the same time honing his acting craft, which I guess he hadn't perfected until he broke through with Easy Rider. (Though he has an infamous bit part in Corman's 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors, playing a creepy young man who loves dental pain. Jack remembered attending the premiere of Little Shop and the audience going berserk. He couldn't hear his dialogue when the film was screened because the audience was going crazy, so Jack really didn't get much notice as an actor until Easy Rider in 1969.)

Phil: I've never seen Drive, He Said, or Goin' South, the '78 film Nicholson directed; The Two Jakes was a big disappointment, and he hasn't directed since. If I get really ambitious sometime, I'd like to go through the whole poll and compile a list of the ten actors and actresses who got the most votes. You could go by either most films listed or most total votes. In some cases, there'd obviously be a strong correlation with director votes: John Wayne's total is probably very close to the sum of votes for Ford and Hawks. The '70s, as you may have guessed by now, is the decade that most interests me--I'd like to see how the voting for Nicholson, Pacino, and De Niro compares. My guess is that Nicholson has the most films listed, but Pacino or De Niro would outpoint him because of The Godfathers. Actresses, who knows? Somebody like Janet Leigh, somebody you wouldn't necessarily think of right away, might come out on top. She'd do well just on the basis of Psycho, Touch of Evil, and The Manchurian Candidate.

Andrew: I imagine Diane Keaton would make the list, with The Godfather I, II & III and Looking For Mr. Goodbar. She's one actress who comes to mind. Actually, I recently bought a copy of the 1969 political drama Medium Cool, about the Democratic Convention in Chicago with all the riots. Aside from being impressed with the movie, I liked the performance of Verna Bloom. I don't know if she'd make the list, but she'd be an exceptional choice.

Phil: Yes, Keaton would rank for sure. I'd be surprised if Goodbar got any votes, but besides The Godfathers, I know Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Love and Death did--she'd do really well. Medium Cool's really good; I saw the Robert Evans movie recently, and in describing the fork in the road that defined Hollywood circa 1969, he contrasted Medium Cool and Paint Your Wagon. But I can't remember Verna Bloom in anything else noteworthy, except maybe a small part in After Hours. What about cinematographers? Haskell Wexler must have a bunch of films listed.

Andrew: I read that Haskell Wexler won on Oscar for his work on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and he also worked as a cinematographer on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I also found out that he was a supervising cameraman on American Graffiti, and that he shot Bound For Glory in '76, for which he won an Oscar. In terms of other cinematographers, I imagine Michael Chapman would rank for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. I also found out he did The Last Detail in '73 and The Last Waltz in '78. I really liked Robert Elswit's cinematography on Boogie Nights in '97. There's a great shot of people at a party and following someone diving into a pool that you might remember if you saw that picture. There's one quite lengthy shot of a handshake that's great too! Speaking of Verna Bloom, she was also in National Lampoon's Animal House.

Phil: I remember the poolside shot in Boogie Nights very, very well--it's one of my favourite shots ever, not just for the camera movement but for the way Anderson uses "Spill the Wine" overtop. It's kind of a double homage: specifically to a similar shot in I Am Cuba, and more generally to the Copa shot in Goodfellas. In an issue of Cinema Scope devoted to the '90s, John Harkness named Boogie Nights' opening shot, the lengthy track through Luis Guzman's disco where we meet all the principals (an even more pointed reference to the Copa sequence), as the shot of the decade. I think he had the right film and the wrong shot. I really wish P.T. Anderson had submitted a list for the directors' poll. There were a number of people missing who I wish had voted: Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Joel Coen, Terry Zwigoff, Jonathan Demme, Coppola, De Palma, Altman, and Polanski, to name a few. I assume that just about any living director with a credit gets an invitation. Scorsese didn't vote, but his ballot first time around, in '92--where he named the five films that most influenced him and declined to expand his list beyond that--explains why. It was good to see Tarantino's ballot, which accounts for one of the weirder choices I came across: Bogdonavich's They All Laughed. It's about as un-Tarantino as a film can be (and pretty marginal from what I remember).

Andrew: Tarantino also loves John Carpenter's 1976 film Assault on Precinct 13, which is sort of a Rio Bravo equivalent where people are held up in a police station and are fighting gangs from the inside. You might see why Tarantino was influenced by that: he co-wrote that tongue-in-cheek horror flick From Dusk Till Dawn, which is sort of similar in plot to Precinct 13. One of my all time favorite directors, Cameron Crowe, voted for Pulp Fiction. As for Scorsese, he was a guest host on Roger Ebert's show and he voted Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket as one of his favorite films of the 1990s.

Phil: I watched, taped, and showed a bit of the Scorsese/Ebert show to my grade 6 class when they were writing movie reviews a couple of years ago. I wanted them to listen carefully to Scorsese's explanations for his choices, and to try to get some of that into their reviews--I can't think of anyone I'd rather listen to talking about movies. Bottle Rocket surprised me--besides the fact that, as with They All Laughed and Tarantino, it's a very genial film that doesn't seem a good match for Scorsese's temperament, I thought it was a little ordinary after loving Rushmore so much. (I had the same problem when I saw Hard Eight, P.T. Anderson's first film, after Boogie Nights.) I'm sort of in the middle with Cameron Crowe: I like parts of Say Anything and Almost Famous (that's all I've seen of his), but I don't think either of them is a match for his contribution to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Maybe this is an opportune moment to ask you for your own Top 10.

Andrew: Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High has some poignant moments, but it's best approached as a classic seminal sex comedy, much better than most of those kinds of movies; not his best but a good one to see. He wrote and produced a sort of follow-up to it in 1984 called The Wild Life, which was directed by his Fast Times producer Art Linson. The film flopped and very few producers talked to him after that, so I guess his salvation was Say Anything. Crowe's masterpiece is Almost Famous; Vanilla Sky is a very different and surreal film, and I feel those two are his best. Say Anything is his much loved teen romance that has a lot of great moments; Singles, more of a low key romantic comedy set against the Grunge scene in Seattle, also has great moments; and Jerry Maguire put him on the map with an Oscar nomination. Almost Famous tops it, which segues me into my proverbial Top Ten List of Best Films. Please keep in mind, lists are not my strong suit. I've listed what I believe are a few favorite films in no particular order. On a final note, you'll notice my strong agreement with Scorsese on Bottle Rocket.

1. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2001)
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
3. Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
4. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
5. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
6. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
7. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
8. Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
9. Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)
10. Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996)

Phil: Wow, you really do like Almost Famous. I like seeing it on your list--it's a nice change from the reaction of most music writers, which was to jump all over it. I thought it had problems (the biggest for me was the bland wholesomeness of the kid who played Crowe Jr.), but as a period piece it had a good feeling for the '70s, and Billy Crudup is great every time out. My enthusiasm for Apocalypse Now has waned considerably since first seeing it at the old University Theatre in its initial run--before its initial run, actually, one of the "special previews" ($10 per ticket--unthinkable!) they had that winter, when I of course rushed back to Georgetown and told everybody I worked with at the theatre that it was the greatest film ever made. When I saw the rerelease last year (I'd seen it a couple of times in the intervening years), all the impressive pyrotechnics were negated by Martin Sheen's plodding narration and the murkiness of the Brando scenes, and the two restored sequences seemed very clumsy. In its own way, Apocalypse feels like the very definition--one definition, anyway--of Manny Farber's "white elephant" art. My turnaround probably has as much to do with the course of my own moviegoing biography than with the film itself. It's not the only film I loved from that time that's lost to me. Heat was another one on Scorsese's '90s list; it didn't make much of an impression on me, other than I remember being very impatient with all the meticulous cutting during the heist. It was a sequence I'd seen too many times before. I liked Being John Malkovich, especially the first half-hour; I'm surprised Spike Jonze hasn't followed up yet. I'm not that big on Clerks--I thought some of Chasing Amy was strong, though. I haven't seen Donnie Darko, though I read something to the effect that it's acquiring a passionate following. And that leaves you with two from my own list, which I'll get to shortly. The earliest title you have is '74; I've always thought my own taste is relatively weighted towards the recent and near-recent, but I'm like William K. Everson next to you. Anything from the '40s, '50s, or '60s that was close?

Andrew: I watch movies from most eras, but my list starts in the early '70s. I really like movies with Abbott & Costello, like Abbott & Costello in Hollywood (1945) and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). I also really enjoyed Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), which struck me as an uncompromising and realistic look at alcoholism, something a lot of movies and TV shows today cover with less effectiveness. I also liked Key Largo (1943), not to mention many others from that time. Those films don't quite reach my top 10, but I did really enjoy them, and I like the work of Edward G. Robinson. I also have a penchant for Psycho (1960). I like Hitchcock's detailed and specific filming techniques, especially in the famous shower scene, of course. As for my list, I didn't want to limit my choices to a certain decade or era, just basically take the main films I've loved regardless of their age. I saw Donnie Darko months ago and have seen it numerous times by now. I remember being blown away by its meticulous narrative, and by the performances of Jake Gyllenhall, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osbourne, and Drew Barrymore (who also executive-produced). The film has an abundance of ideas and imagination, but unfortunately few people saw it in its token theatrical release. It's a wonderful movie that does require multiple viewings and an open mind. Francis Ford Coppola came on the set of the film, read a section of writer-director Richard Kelly's screenplay, and then circled the key line Drew Barrymore's character says: "Kids have to save themselves these days because parents don't have a clue." He circled that line and told Kelly, "There. That's what your film's about."

Clerks was a hard choice. Kevin Smith is one of my all time favorite writer-directors, and I like all of his films, especially the critically trashed Mallrats, which I see as some sort of cult classic. Clerks has a unique style of storytelling and really intelligent dialogue, but I was torn as to whether I should go with Chasing Amy as my Smith pick. Heat I saw years ago, and I remember thinking it was probably the most original and different action film I'd seen. And, of course, I've always liked Pacino and De Niro. I was really impressed with Being John Malkovich in terms of the versatility of the actors, especially Cameron Diaz in a very different role, and of course also with the film's stark originality. The Godfather Part II is a huge cut above the first. I really like the contrasted stories between young Vito Corleone and Michael Corleone rising to power. I think that's a great way to raise the bar and continue a film story.

Bottle Rocket was a film I didn't particularly like that much when I first saw it! But for some reason I wanted to see it again and again and again, till I realized it was a good example of independent filmmaking with gifted new actors and a sharp script. It's also good to have James Caan in a little movie like this--even though his role is kind of minor, he's still great. Apocalypse Now is a film I'd seen partially years ago, but I've since seen the whole thing and I think it's probably the best approach you could take for a war movie, in contrast to the recent war pictures that just seem to glorify the subject. I was torn about maybe putting Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse on my list. That's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen about the troubles and ultimate disasters a movie production can bring. How many movies have you seen where the documentary of its making is on par with the actual film? Taxi Driver is dark and bleak and very unpleasant, but the film is meant to illuminate those subjects and themes, and Scorsese does it masterfully. It works excellently as a character study of a complex person who basically wants good but is driven by rage and turns to violence in retaliation, as many people do in real life. Finally, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Almost Famous top off my list as films that take my perception of film and storytelling to another level with fantastic screenplays and stories that ring true to life. So, let's see your list!

Phil:  

1. Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
2. The Godfather I & II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972/74)
3. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
4. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
5. Goin' Down the Road (Don Shebib, 1970)
6. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
7. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
8. Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut, 1960)
9. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
10. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

This is basically the same as a Top 10 I had in Radio On five years ago. I dropped GoodFellas, which at the moment I've seen one too many times (I fall into that trap a lot, but after staying away from such films for an extended period of time, I'll watch them again and they generally look as good as ever), and Miller's Crossing. In their place, I've added Nashville, on my list of runners-up last time, and Boogie Nights, which hadn't yet been released. Anderson's film is my favourite out of the handful of things that made a deep impression on me over the past five years: there was also Rushmore and The Virgin Suicides, and, among older films I caught up with for the first time, Welfare, Ermanno Olmi's The Sound of Trumpets, and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. (Pather Panchali especially, but really the whole trilogy, which I was lucky enough to see in one six-hour sitting at Toronto's Cinematheque. It was an experience comparable to the night I saw the first two Godfathers together for the first time, at a Toronto rep house called the Nostalgic that closed down a number of years ago.) But I'd need to see the Olmi, Wiseman, and Ray films again before being sure I like them better than what I've seen many, many times. I'm glad you mentioned Double Indemnity, which is real close for me. I just filled out the favourite-movie-lines Top 5 elsewhere on this site, and after I did, I regretted not including some of the amazing back-and-forth between MacMurray and Stanwyck from Indemnity. Stanwyck: "I wonder if I know what you mean." MacMurray: "I wonder if you wonder." I had something from Sweet Smell of Success as my #1--I think you could draw up a list of 20 brilliant lines from Sweet Smell of Success alone. I even thought it was a longshot for Sight & Sound's Top 10 this time, it's attracted so many testimonials the past decade, but it wasn't even close--two votes from critics, five in the directors' poll.

Andrew: As for movie lines, I liked the last exchanges between Edward G. Robinson and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, and their "I love you too..." lines. In The Godfather Part II, the conversation between Robert De Niro and Bruno Kirby about their plans to compromise with the neighborhood Mafia Don over the two hundred dollar payoff was great. In Taxi Driver, there's a great scene where De Niro gives sort of a testimonial to the Senator about how bad New York City has become. I was glad to see both those films on your list. As for Rushmore, I did enjoy that and it's in my collection, but I thought Bottle Rocket had more charm, even with Caan playing sort of a gregarious thief with a little eccentricity. But Rushmore has terrific scenes and some great performances. The Royal Tenenbaums, I think, is Wes Anderson "epic," but some would disagree. The Virgin Suicides was intriguing but I was lost with the ending, even though it was an interesting film and I admired Sofia Coppola's direction (with her father's backup as producer). There are some diverse choices on your list there.

Phil: I'm not a Billy Crystal fan, but whenever I think of Edward G. Robinson I'm always reminded of this inspired bit I saw Crystal do (probably on the Academy Awards) about how insanely anomalous Robinson's tough-guy staccato is in The Ten Commandments: "Ah, so where's your messiah now?" That, and finding out that Chief Wiggam's voice on "The Simpsons" is based on Robinson...Leonard Harris, the guy who played Senator Palantine in Taxi Driver, was a film critic for CBS, I think. One reason I become less interested in the Sight & Sound poll each time out is that, because I don't keep up with current film criticism--my frame of reference is still the Kael, Kauffmann, and Simon books on my shelf--most of the writers who vote don't mean anything to me. The only names that even register now are the people who've been around forever: David Ansen, Peter Cowie, David Denby, Ebert, Jim Hoberman, Laura Mulvey, Donald Richie, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Amy Taubin, Peter Wollen, Robin Wood, and a few others. Sarris didn't vote this time (a major surprise--in the annals of obsessive listmakers, he's like the blueprint for High Fidelity), Kauffmann last voted in '72, Simon never did (and seems to be in retirement--he hasn't been in The National Review for months and months), and Kael's dead (and never voted anyway). Phillip Lopate didn't vote--I loved the long opening essay he had in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism From a Lifelong Love Affair With the Movies about going to the movies in the early '60s. The one critic I've taken some notice of recently, Charles Taylor in Salon, didn't vote. It'd be more meaningful for me to see ballots from occasional film writers like Greil Marcus or Luc Sante than a lot of the people in there.

Andrew: I was curious to know if you have ever read any reviews by Rod Lurie, who went on to direct such movies as The Contender (2000) and The Last Castle (2001). He's the rare critic who went on to become a filmmaker. I wonder if he's listed as a director or critic on the Sight & Sound poll, if he is listed there. Also, I read Roger Ebert's "Movie Answer Man" column and someone pointed out that the films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were absent from the Top 10 in the poll. He noted that he wanted to screen some of their movies in a film club, while others wanted to see the films of Kevin Smith and Wes Anderson. The others laughed at his choices of Chaplin and Keaton. Now, I personally feel that the films of Smith and Anderson are just as worth seeing as those of Chaplin and Keaton. Some would argue against having anything from the 1990s or even 2000s on the Sight & Sound poll, but I think time can be irrelevant sometimes with films. As you can see, I have Donnie Darko on my list. Some would be outraged over having a film that's one year old on a list, but I'm 17 and I'm still experiencing new and old pieces of film. The oldest film on my list is from 1974, but I still find the films of the '60s, '50s, '40s, and '30s to be very important in cinematic history, and to me as a young filmgoer. Lists don't come as easy to me as they do to you probably, but I selected the films that stood out to me personally, regardless of whether they were 30, 20, 10 or even a couple of years old. My list will probably change in a matter of years as I see more and more films, and maybe by then it will contain a more diverse selection of films from the '30s through the '90s. Another problem is that some of the older films are harder to find on home video. I do think it's great, however, that resources like DVD are restoring them, so they can get as much attention from younger audiences as the newer films.

Phil: Seventeen? Seventeen? Wow. That puts you inside a demographic I basically have zero contact with at this point in my life--from about 14 to 20. I'm afraid of the grade 8s at the school where I teach...I didn't know that about Lurie; if he had voted, they would have put him in the directors' poll. I guess critic-turned-director isn't such a fact of life anymore (possibly replaced by the Tarantino route of video-clerk-turned-director), but at one time it was fairly common: all the Cahiers people (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, etc.), their British equivalents (Anderson, Reisz, Wollen), and later such Americans as Bogdanovich and Schrader. On the basis of The Contender, which I thought was overwrought and pretty hokey at times, I'm not that eager to track down any of Lurie's writing. (I did like Gary Oldham, but a comment about Joan Allen attributed to Kael--"See if you can scrape her off," when informed by a friend that Allen was "growing on him"--sums up my feelings about her perfectly. She's so dull.) Anyway, I'm envious that you get to spend the next 20 years discovering all these great films that knocked me out when I first saw them. Not that I'm not still catching up myself--like I say, it was only recently that I saw Pather Panchali, and after fidgeting through about a dozen Godard films over the years, I finally saw one I liked last winter, Vivre sa vie. One request: try to do your catching up at actual movie theatres whenever possible. I know that's difficult for you living in Ottawa, but videos, DVDs, whatever--films are meant to be seen in movie theatres. And not just because of the screen, though obviously that's a big part of it. In that split-second before Michael shoots Sollozzo, or before Raymond Burr glances down at Grace Kelly wiggling her ring finger in Rear Window, I want to be part of an audience; I want to experience the shared anticipation that leads up to that moment, and I want to feel the astonishment that cascades through the theatre right after. It's worth the occasional inferior print (not a problem at the Cinematheque, my usual haunt) and the less occasional grief of chattering idiots. I get the feeling a lot of critics who started writing about film in the past five or ten years have taken a crash-course in film history via videos--I go to a lot of rep screenings, and I hardly ever see any local critics, even at things that I know are rarely screened. I guess seeing something on video or DVD is better than not having seen it at all, and again, I understand that I have the advantage of living in a city with a half-dozen rep theatres--home-viewing by choice and by necessity are two different things. But in general, I think watching films on video/DVD is as poor a substitute for the real thing as the art education I've gotten looking at reproductions in books.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com)