26 Soundtracks: Crime Story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is5ofSHZWTM

Crime Story: The Original Soundtrack

Full disclosure, I do not now or have I ever owned the soundtrack for the TV Show Crime Story. I know that one existed because I saw it in the stores several times, held it in my hands, but never bought a copy and when I finally had the money it was no where to be found. One of my friends even gave me a tape (now long gone) that was called Crime Story and claimed to have tracks from the show, but was not the soundtrack.

Strangely I can’t find ay real info on the soundtrack on the web, no track listing, no release date, or cover image, just the above You Tube clip of the shows opening credits with the 1986 version of the Del Shannon Classic Runaway. The original cut of Runaway is a high-energy rave up, a bit muddy but clearly a pre- Fab Four Frat Rock Classic. The Crime Story version is a clean, crisp, mournful and while there is sadness in the original the Crime Story version has element of a dirge in it. It’s more Endless Sleep than Double Shot (of my Baby’s Love).

As for the rest of the soundtrack, I’m not sure what’s on it. Most likely it’s a compilation of the tunes of the era, maybe a few forgotten tracks, maybe a few gems… but really it’s the fact that in 1986 I heard Runaway. It was that moment that I think I really became a musical archeologist. It was that event that sent me looking back beyond the pop gloss of 80s music to find that primal rumble of Rock and Roll that I craved. I recall listening to the oldies show that they used to have on the local top 40 Radio Station WIQB (which is long gone) and waiting to hear something as magical as Runaway.

I’m starting this year’s projected 26 soundtracks with Crime Story for two reason; first this films this month, Boiling Point and The Outfit are both Crime dramas, but also because it represents the discovery of something that has passed from the current mass continuous, just like the rest of the soundtracks that I am intending to write about. It’s only though looking back that we often come to understand where we have been as well as where we are going.

Next time: Pushing Daisies (Original Television Soundtrack) which is unique in that it will be the only other TV soundtrack I have slated to write about, and one of the few that is a musical score and not a collection of songs.

Essay Challenge:favorite TV- Homicide: Life on the Streets

Essay Challenge: My Favorite TV Show

Homicide: Life on the Streets

NBC: 1993 to 1999, plus a 2000 TV-movie that served as a de facto series finale

I was a follower of Homicide from the start. I have memories of seeing the very first episode, most likely the night that it premiered after the Super bowl. I had been a cop show fan for years, digging on the action, adventure and the righteous adrenaline of the big 80s glitzy TV Po-lease shows. It was great to see people with style and souls of steel take down the scum of the earth and put them out of the game, or at least that's what I think when I look back. In reality the cop shows that I watched; 21 Jump Street, Crime Story and Hill Street Blues were far from that dream of crime vanquished in the course of 45 minutes. They had heart, grit and a weight to them and in many ways set the stage for what I think of as the best show network TV has ever gambled on Homicide: Life on the Streets (H:LOTS)

From the word go Homicide was unlike anything that I had ever seen or anything that had come before. Based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by Baltimore Sun Reporter David Simon, the show was a tough sell to a public that was accustomed to hour long soaps featuring cops, neatly wrapped up stories, lots of car chases and shooting. Homicide down played the violence, sex, and chaos of what had come before, and dealt with the aftermath of those events. The show played up the grind, and the paperwork. It played up the dull moments, the humor and the horror of being a Murder Police. Working with people that you liked, that you didn't like, that you had to find a way to get along with.

The talent involved was heavy weight for TV standards at the time. This was at the start of the era when film makers started to see that their opportunities for interesting work had shifted from feature films to TV. Director Berry Levenson, and his crew brought in a ensemble cast of mostly unknown actors, but managed to attract high profile guest stars. They filmed in Baltimore and never hid the drab, depressing and often decaying city and the dull work of policing it. This was TV cop deglamorized.

I have viewed the series roughly three times, not every episode, but the bulk of it over the years. First when it aired, second when each of the seasons were released on DVD and finally in the years since the release of the last season on DVD. I have watched each time with an eye to what I missed the first time around, picking up little things, and themes. One thing I can say for the show is that it's both memorable and rewatchable in a way that many shows are not.

The most surprising thing to me is how much I recalled from the episodes from my first viewing. They resonated with me and were just that well written acted and produced. Their impacts precise and focused. From the funny, to the heart breaking to the bleak, the show was so well crafted that a little moment; The meeting of the mothers of a teenage shooter and his teenage victim meeting in
the waiting room and becoming friendly in Every mothers Son-- and I am tempted to anoint that episode as the greatest hour of TV ever about criminals and victims, if there weren't so many H:LOTS episodes that fit that bill-- resonates with the promise of connection and friendship, even as we know the tragic tie between them. It's only later that we see what we would all love to come to pass between these two women as a positive step, fall apart as reality steps in.

I knew on some level that H:LOTS was always not as much about the shooting, stabbing and killing as it was about how the job affects those who do it. It was about people who wander into chaos and have to pull some sort of order out of that tornado of destruction. The Homicide Detective has a job to do, in the middle of the intrusion of a new reality in the lives of people, and that fact makes the job not only harder, but all that much more draining. The reality is that men and women of the Homicide Unit live in a place where they have to work and dig and denigrate the loss of a life to see that justice is served if that life was taken from its owner. For too long TV made it look like fun, or exciting, it was H:LOTS that really brought even a little of the reality to light.

In hindsight I believe that the show really is about the journey of and the loss of faith and innocence of Detective Tim Bayliss. He starts the first episode as the new guy arriving in the unit. He's come off a plumb assignment on the mayor’s protective detail-- a favored son of the department brass. He's partnered with Frank Pembleton, the hot shot brainy loner of the unit. Frank is a master of the job, he's the smartest person in the unit, and he is also the most cold. He deals in facts, he keeps his distance from the human aspect of the job and the work. Tim on the other hand hasn't figured it all out. He's naive and some times far too human, he worried too much about the why of the crime, when a smart murder police would just move on to the next case.

Kyle Secor as Bayliss is one of only three of the squad that stuck around for all 7 seasons of the show, and is given the time and opportunity to not only grow but to descend, to have his view of himself questioned. He comes into the world of Homicide with a strong idea of who he is and what he is, only to have everything questioned. His sexuality, his capacity for good, and the darkness lurking in his soul. His childhood traumas are exposed his foibles and failures shown, in one episode-- The Documentary, he is shown at home drinking and entering his rest room with a porno magazine. He asks the film maker why he would include that scene, and in what might be the most revealing comment in the whole series the documentary maker answers "you're the hero of the piece, I had to show you honestly warts and all".

From a story telling point of view HLOTS was also willing to be innovative. Episodes focusing on not only the police but; the criminals, the victims, communities, organizations, and on long clod cases were all a part of the fabric of the show and often times the more memorable than other episodes. The willingness to bring in outside directors, Whit Stilman and Barbra Kopel, to think outside of the box was unlike anything that came before. The innovation extended to the hand held style of the show. It wasn't slick or glitzy; it was personal, flawed and occasionally disjointed-- kinda like life.

I also have to note the use of music in the show. A early standout and heart breaking scene where 'Hurt' by Nine Inch Nails plays as one of the members of the unit arrives home to find his wife has left with everything, the kids, the furniture, everything. Another montage of the unit rolling out on multiple and various murder scenes while a regga/blues tune blasts over a montage of fresh killings telling the story of the murders and mayhem. There were also the early multiple references to the Seattle Grunge scene, as suspects and victims are named after members of: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam. In Season 6 new Detective Laura Ballard arrives from Seattle and when asked why she left her response is "Grunge Died!"

When Patti Abbot proposed this project she said that often the essays in the book the idea came from turned out to be more about the writer than about the show. I thought about this as I was writing this essay, I think about what I have just written says about me, and how much of that do I really want out there. There is a darkness in me, I have had people comment on it before, and there is a wall around me that I use to keep that darkness partly hidden and in check. Maybe HLOTS was really about just that, the darkness and how we do or don't keep it in check. As a writer that is what I find my stories are so often about, control, safety, chaos, protection, reaction, LIFE.

If you would like to check out H:LOTS the whole series is out there on DVD. Here is a short list of Episodes that I recommend checking out:

"Gone for Goode"

"Three Men and Adena"

"Night of the Dead Living"

"A Many Splendored Thing"

"Every Mother's Son"

"The Gas Man"

"A Doll's Eyes"

"Heartbeat"

"Hate Crimes"

"Thrill Of The Kill"

"Prison Riot"

"The Heart Of Saturday Night"

"The Documentary"

"Finnegan's Wake"

Memorable Quotes and HERE

More H:LOTS on the web HERE

Unturning the Stone

For the last week or so I have been checking out the TV adaptions of Robert Parker's Jesse Stone novels. I have found them to be moody, engaging, and well produced. Tom Selleck shows restraint and professionalism as a small town police chief who is imperfect but doing his best to do his job and live his life. It is strange to see Selleck playing Stone after having recently revisited Magnum PI on DVD. Where Magnum was a fun pulpy romp, the issues and gravity of the Stone story lines tend more to abuse, small town power and the limits placed on those who enforce the laws in those communities. The setting for these films is breath taking and like any great noir plays as much a role as the characters who inhabit the landscape.

I have so far watched Stone Cold and Death in Paradise, and enjoyed both. I look forward to viewing the rest.

Filmography from Wiki

• 1. Stone Cold (20 February 2005)
• 2. Jesse Stone: Night Passage (15 January 2006) a prequel to Stone Cold
• 3. Jesse Stone: Death In Paradise (30 April 2006)
• 4. Jesse Stone: Sea Change (22 May 2007)
• 5. Jesse Stone: Thin Ice (1 March 2009)
  
• 6. Jesse Stone: No Remorse (2009)
  
• 7. Jesse Stone: Innocents Lost (2010)
  

If you walk though the Garden…..

Last night, late, too late, I finished it… the last page of The Wire. Yes I said page, because that’s what The Wire was a big sprawling, messy, entwined novel… that just happened to be shown on HBO, that just happened to be on film, and that for all it’s faults, and it had a few, was damn near the most perfect thing that has ever been on TV.

IT was the last episode of season five, and it was as real, as human, and as flawed as the world that it was depicting. It wrapped up the story of Detectives Jimmy McNulty and Freeman, of Cedric Daniels, and the rest…. But not always in the way that you would have thought…. Or wanted, it played out the strings, and it left the viewer with the start of the next round in the game, where the children become the adults, where the once young have inherited the mantel of leadership and fallen into the roles that they once simply looked up to. There was heart break, there was forgiveness, there was lies and there was dangling threads, but that’s life… as they said so many times in the show… Yo, it’s all in the game.

I will be revisiting the series I am sure, over the years, marveling at it’s truth, at is breadth, at it’s honest snapshot of our world, of our time at the moment that it arrived. I know that there are other shows that I will love, other’s that will aspire, but to me, until I see it, this was the best that TV, even if it was cable, ever had to offer, and I trust that years from now, others will discover it and understand.



The Body of an Americanby The Pouges
The Cadillac stood by the house
And the yanks they were within
And the tinker boys they hissed advicehot-wire her with a pin
We turned and shook as we had a look
In the room where the dead men lay
So big Jim Dwyer made his last trip
To the home where his fathers laid

Fifteen minutes laterWe had our first taste of whiskey
There was uncles giving lectures
On ancient Irish history
The men all started telling jokes
And the women they got frisky
By five o’clock in the evening - correction this line
Starts with by not atEvery bastard there was piskey

Fare thee well going away
There’s nothing left to say
Farewell to new York city boys
To Boston and pa
He took them out
With a well-aimed clout
He was often heard to say
I’m a free born man of the USA


He fought the champ in Pittsburgh
And he slashed him to the ground
He took on tiny tarantella
And it only went one round
He never had no time for reds
For drink or dice or whores
And he never threw a fight
Unless the fight was right
So they sent him to the war

Fare the well gone away
There’s nothing left to say
With a slainte Joe and Erin go
My loves in America
The calling of the rosary
Spanish wind from far awayI
’m a free born man of the USA

This morning on the harbor
When I said goodbye to you
I remember how I swore
That Id come back to you one day
And as the sunset came to meet
The evening on the hill
I told you Id always love
I always did and I always will

Fare thee well gone away
There’s nothing left to say
cept to say adieu
To your eyes as blue
As the water in the bay
And to big Jim Dwyer
The man of wire
Who was often heard to say
I’m a free born man of the USA