LEON RUSSELL PERFORMING IN A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON

Watch the trailer here.

Down home

This long suppressed, now released film is so personal in style and so redolent of its period of the mid-Seventies and of the filmmaker's style (for good or for ill) that it's more a document than a documentary. It features concert footage of the singer, songwriter, arranger, keyboard artist and band leader Leon Russell in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Anaheim, California, and footage of recording sessions in Nashville and at his Tulsa, Oklahoma recording studio making the album Hank Wilson's Back. But that bare bones information conveys nothing because the heart of the film is its atmospheric and wholly sui generis Les Blank sidebar footage that delivers overlapping, suddenly interrupted dialogue, as in a Robert Altman film; and this was the era of Altman and of drugs and men with whiskers and long hair. Leon Russell had an ample supply of both, and does to this day.

Blank (who died in 2013) likes the colorful down-home detail, a youth smiling as he says he might drown, an old couple reminding the camera that Leon comes from Oklahoma; a man being arrested and led away by two cops, and a suited guard informing the film crew, "Gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that you are in a restricted area." Immediately after this comes a shot of a snake trapping a baby chick, and then a small skyscraper being demolished and sinking into itself. Sometimes the piling on of one thing after another seems a bit too much. Do we need another parade? How many drunken or stoned ramblings about the meaning of life are necessary? And the following of a tour and a personality is much more memorable and coherent in D.A. Pennebaker's classic Bob Dylan film Don't Look Back. But then the sheer unpredictability and kookiness grabs you; and there are great Nashville and Tulsa recording sessions. Leon Russell is a wonderful performer who loves to perform and can inject a lot of juice into any song he sings. One just wishes this were a less unflattering portrait of him when not singing, and that the film offered a few more guidelines of where we are and a bit more background information.

In part of the film a beardless and short-haired Willie Nelson is performing on the same stage with Leon Russell, singing and looking very happy. They had had a hit together, and Russell was in high gear. This film has no instructional voiceovers, but if we look into musical history we learn that Russell got an early start in music in Tulsa as a youth, then was active as a studio musician in Los Angeles and played with the "Wrecking Crew," the backbone of so many recorded hits in the Sixties. He worked his way up in live gigs from sideman to solo artist, and 1971 was a very busy year for him. He played with Bob Dylan. At first he seems to have been a relatively colorless but highly adept studio pro. Wikipedia tells us in his career Russell "faded into obscurity" in the Eighties and Nineties, but in his career has performed "with artists as varied as Jan & Dean, Gary Lewis, George Harrison, Gram Parsons, Delaney Bramlett, Ringo Starr, Doris Day, Elton John, Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, the Byrds, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, the Ventures, Willie Nelson, Badfinger, Tijuana Brass, Frank Sinatra, the Band, Bob Dylan, J.J. Cale, B.B. King, Dave Mason, Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker and the Rolling Stones." We do not learn any of that here.

So, a mysterious and adept and chameleonic artist. But Russell's own distinctive style is almost breathtakingly atmospheric. He plays and sings with a down home style of blues and gospel and rock, bluegrass and country and funk, and whatever it is he gives it a heavy almost ironic overlay of exaggerated southernness to his accent and intonation, as if he had just been brought in from the hills or from down on the Bayou.

Due to Russell's long period of filling in for others, and equally long period of obscurity, there are relatively few film records of him. Hence the importance of A Poem Is a Naked Person, and the film itself being brought out of obscurity. It is an artifact and a gem, and it is being justly celebrated as such since its recent theatrical release in the US began, following up on its June 2015 reappearance in restored form at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin in March.

A Poem Is a Naked Person, 90 mins., shot 1972-74, debuted 1974 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Digital 2K scan of the film (originally shot in 16mm) by Les Blank Studio 2015 first shown at SXSW 16 March 2015; also at AFI and BAM in June; theatrical release at Film Forum, NYC 1 July 2015; other cities follow, Landmark Opera Plaza San Francisco, Landmark Shattuck, Berkeley 10 July; special showings at Opera Plaza 9 July with Leon Russell and others.


JIM FRANKLIN'S SWIMMING POOL MURAL IN A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.