Detroit Creole
By Michael Hurtt
The evening of Saturday, July 15, will be a milestone for filmmaker Dan Rose.
On that night at One Eyed Jacks, he’ll screen Wayne County Ramblin’,
the film that he’s dedicated the last 15 years of his life to making. Like
any self-respecting rock ‘n’ roller born and raised in the Detroit,
nothing that Rose puts his heart into could be devoid of great music, which is
why this isn’t just a movie premiere, it’s a full-fledged rock ‘n’ roll
show: immediately following the 8 p.m. screening will be sets by former Memphis
soul rockers the Reigning Sound and Boston garage pioneers the Lyres. Neither
combo has played in our fair city in years—the Reigning Sound were last
seen holding forth at the Matador to four people and now tour with the Hives,
while the Lyres (the original line-up!) simply don’t tour anymore, period.
And they’re two of the finest rock ‘n’ roll bands on the face
of the planet. So this is hardly an occasion to be taken lightly.
Both bands contribute to Wayne County Ramblin’s mammoth soundtrack—and
Lyres’ organist/ vocalist Jeff Connolly has a cameo in the film, playing
Farfisa organ while Iggy Pop bashes out a backwoods juke joint drum beat in an
empty bar room as they await the eminent arrival of one man blues band Doctor
Isaiah Ross. If you can picture this, then you have a pretty good understanding
of the kind of atmosphere that threads Wayne County Ramblin’ together.
Ross never actually walks onto the screen, but his spirit is certainly conjured;
a work shirt emblazoned with his name hangs on a chair and his guitar sits in
waiting. There’s a lot of conjuring going on in this film—often in
tandem with the miracle of music—for its main theme is how the spirit world
affects and guides us in every day existence.
The story centers around a young girl, Penny, and her boyfriend Johnny, who are
traveling from Detroit to Mississippi to visit her long lost grandfather. They
meet up with the like-minded Jim, who’s making a pilgrimage South to William
Faulkner’s grave in Oxford, Mississippi. In the course of the film, they
come face to face with virtually every human emotion known to man, unaware of
the role that a trio of African spirits are playing in their lives.
One of these spirits, Ogou, played by the Dirtbombs’ Mick
Collins, appears
constantly, sometimes as a specter, other times a barber, a gas station attendant
and finally, a musician, blasting out his trademark overdriven guitar style to
an appreciative audience at Memphis juke joint Wild Bill’s. He’s
backed by drummer Peggy O’Neill, who lays down the beat behind him as no
one else has since the demise of their ground breaking Detroit R&B destruction
squad the Gories. (Gories fans should also note that Rose directed the video
for their song, “Nitroglycerine,” a scorching tour-de-force that
somehow managed to capture this incredible band’s sheer mayhem on film).
Collins speaks barely a line; the only time you really hear his voice is when
he hollers into the microphone at Wild Bill’s. But he doesn’t have
to speak, because—like virtually all of the characters in Wayne County
Ramblin’—his very presence imbibes the entire film.
“Ogou is a real strong spirit in the voodoo pantheon,” says Rose. “An
all-pervasive, simultaneously elusive and in-your-face kind of spirit.”
Collins’ charismatic, slightly sinister countenance fits Ogou’s character
perfectly, as do those of Mississippi fife-and-drum patriarch Otha Turner and
swamp blues chanteuse Lorette Velvette, cast as spirits Legba and Oshun respectively.
Velvette accompanies herself on piano in one scene for a devastatingly haunted “Ain’t
No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.” Other stellar casting abounds. Memphis
jazz-rockabilly grandmother Cordell Jackson is an electric guitar wielding prison
guard, engineer Ron Easley plays a cop, rock ‘n’ roll ditch digger
and tango enthusiast Tav Falco (he of the indomitable, unapproachable Panther
Burns) is a sleazy art photography hustler who deals in used motorcycles on the
side. Brownsville Station guitarist and rock ‘n’ roll historian Cub
Koda is the ringleader of a strange highway gang. And just when you get confused,
in steps Detroit soul screamer Nathaniel Mayer with a few elegantly simple observations
about the story line. He thoughtfully narrates from the luxury of his apartment,
the picture of relaxed tranquility—cigarette in one hand, rocks glass in
the other, framed wolf painting on the wall (they don’t call him Nay Dog
for nothin’)—only to be disrupted by his inner city neighbors hollering
at him from the street below. It’s truly brilliant.
“I really needed to talk with everyone to some degree and try to get their
interest
in it,” Rose says of his musical heroes. “I sat down with Otha and
his family and talked to them about it years before we did it. They had their
concerns about it and they also had their lack of interest in it and yet their
interest in it. But they were fantastic to work with.”
The idea to cast Iggy Pop as Penny’s beloved grandfather came, as a lot
of them did, during a trip down South. “I had written the outline of the
screenplay in my head from living in Detroit and then having recently moved to
New York. But I wanted to see what taking a trip would do to flesh out my outline
before turning it into a script. So I bought a used car and drove to Detroit
and started this journey. I brought a tape recorder and notepads because I wanted
to see what the actual landscape was like. At the time I had never been to Memphis,
never been to New Orleans—I had spent a little time in Alabama—but
I’d never been down that way really. While I was down there, it all of
a sudden hit me like a ton of bricks: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we
got Iggy Pop to play the grandfather?!’ I was half joking because it’s
ludicrous, even more so at that time—we’re talking ’88 or ’89—to
think of Iggy Pop as a grandfather. He was probably barely middle-aged. But it
could be plausible because there’s a certain demographic of Americans that
are grandparents in their forties and fifties.”
Rose first tried to float his script through Pop’s manager, but found the
quickest way between two points is a straight line. Mutual friends had introduced
him to the Fluid, who wanted him to shoot their next music video. “I was
talking to them and they said, ‘How’s your movie project coming?’ I
said, ‘It’s going fine. We ran into a dead end trying to get Iggy
Pop to play the grandfather but I never really expected it to happen anyway.’ They
said, ‘We’ve met Iggy Pop, we know where he lives, he doesn’t
live very far from where you live. We know his exact address. You should drop
your screenplay off with his doorman.’”
The plan worked. “Two days later I got a call back from Iggy saying, ‘Can
we get together? I’d like to talk to you about this.’ He was genuinely
excited about it and what’s more he had read the screenplay all the way
through and knew it and was into it. He said, ‘I wanna do this. Let’s
do it.’”
Pop’s enthusiasm seems to have been shared by everyone involved, particularly
Collins, who not only starred in the film but acted as remote recording engineer
and contributed to the soundtrack. “Mick was one of the first people cast,” Rose
says of his old friend. “I’ve been talking to him about this for
well into a second decade and he’s been with it from the get-go. Which
kind of surprised me initially because I didn’t know what I was doing when
I decided to do it. Casting African spirits is something I knew next to nothing
about; in fact, African spirits I knew next to nothing about. It was a feeling
that I had and I kept learning more and more about it.”
One of the things he discovered was that such spirits aren’t only widely
worshipped in West Africa, the Caribbean and South America, but in the United
States as well. “It’s an amazingly huge part of American culture,
it’s just hidden. But those spirits are worshipped wherever there are people
that come from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not to mention a hell of a lot
of Europeans are touched by them too. Growing up a white Midwestern middle class
person, I never knew anything about it. The people I grew up with knew absolutely
nothing about it. Yet, I have been strongly affected by it right through Bo Diddley
and his amplifier having seven African spirits conveyed through it as claimed
by him. Fact? Fiction? Who cares? Bo Diddley is powerful and that music has changed
my life. It’s changed our culture. It’s America, it sells trucks.
For all we know it’s fuelling the Iraq war. It shouldn’t be, but
who knows?
“I grew up with an older brother who taught me all about the New
York Dollsand
the MC5 and Bob Seger and Mitch Ryder, all these great white rock ‘n’ roll
bands. And I had no idea that many of their influences were from African-based
people right in our own backyard. For instance, I didn’t know that the
New York Dolls were covering the Cadets with ‘Stranded In The Jungle.’ For
the longest time I never knew that (the MC5’s) ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ was
a Ted Taylor song.”
As a teenager Rose began asking questions. “Why do the Rolling
Stones have
to teach me about Chuck Berry? Why is it that I have to be told John
Lee Hookeris cool by Eric Clapton? America’s the big market for rock ‘n’ roll
and all these European bands that emulate so much of the music that was created
in the Midwest of the United States between New Orleans and Detroit—it’s
not exclusive to that region but there’s a strong concentration of it right
there. It’s a direct result of the slave trade, the great migration north
following the emancipation of slaves and the industrial revolution…right
up to making automobiles in Detroit and creating jobs for people.”
Rose’s interest in his hometown, its people, its culture and its music
led to a lifelong fascination with musicians like Eddie Kirkland and Doctor Ross,
Southerners who moved north and whose music was strongly affected by the whirring
of assembly lines. Detroit’s mythic Fortune Records—for which Ross,
Kirkland, Mayer and many others recorded—is a touchstone in the film, as
Penny remembers her grandfather taking her to its crumbling studio as a little
girl.
Just as Rose had to travel south—in a kind of reverse northern migration—to
seek the true roots of the Detroit that he’d come to love, so too do the
characters in his film.
“That’s what these three young adults are doing; they’re traveling
south for one reason or another. The girl is doing it to find her grandfather
who was originally from Mississippi but came to Detroit like so many did to work
in the auto plants. He retired so he went back home. It’s a complicated
story but people’s lives are complicated, they’re very interwoven.
And that’s what this thing is, it’s a Creole movie.
“To me that’s a big part of what this story is about, even though,
if you
ask me, I don’t know what that movie is, I really don’t. It’s
not a voodoo movie and yet it is, it’s not a rock ‘n’ roll
movie and yet it is, it’s not a drama and yet it is, it’s not a fact
and yet it is and it’s not a fiction and yet it is. That’s a big
part of what I like about it.”
Rose didn’t plan it this way, he says. Wayne County Ramblin’ was
made more on feeling than anything else. “Feeling, perception, insecurity,
strength, confidence. One of the things I hope it conveys,” he concludes, “is
confidence in an insecure world.”
Record companies take note: He’s still looking for someone to put the soundtrack
out!!
For more information go to www.waynecountyramblin.com.
Return to Previous Page
Subscribe to offBeat and receive a FREE JazzFest CD!
To order by phone with a Visa, MasterCard or American Express please call Toll Free Outside New Orleans: 1-877-944-4300, Monday-Friday, 10 am - 5:30 pm, Central time.
©2009, OffBeat, Inc. | offbeat@offbeat.com
Site Designed by dzign@datatv.com
|