Month: April 2017

A Shaggy Dog on a “Rainbow Bridge”: Calling in Jimi to Save a Movie From Itself

Rainbow Bridge
Directed by Chuck Wein—1971—125 minutes

Develop a rough idea for a film project, gather together some people to be in it, and then switch on the camera. While this may be a viable plan of action for first year film-school kids, it’s not usually recommended for a high profile project. But amazingly, the motion picture division of Warner Bros. greenlighted two such counterculture projects in 1970: the first was the stillborn documentary “Medicine Ball Caravan” the fascinating backstory of which was my first ever blogpost HERE. The other was the similarly fuzzy “Rainbow Bridge.” Of course, WB had just hit the hippie jackpot with the Woodstock film, which was a box-office smash and eventual Oscar winner for best feature documentary. But to think one could replicate that success without minimal effort was indicative that Hollywood hadn’t evolved its thinking about “youth movies.” When the producers of “Rainbow Bridge,” who included people involved in the management of Jimi Hendrix, saw what they had in the can after burning thru their initial $450,000 budget, they practically begged the legendary guitarist, already on board for the soundtrack, to appear in some specially-arranged concert footage as well. But it would not be enough to save it and the days of the flower-power genre were numbered.


Jimi Hendrix at the Rainbow Bridge concert in Maui, July 1970

“Rainbow Bridge” starts with a blank black screen and a deep important-sounding male voice telling us how the “New Young” are going to bring peace to our planet. Instead, all we get are the inconsequential wanderings of a bright but unremarkable woman named Pat Hartley, who we watch cavorting aimlessly around Los Angeles. Both Hartley and the director, Chuck Wein, were associated with the Andy Warhol Factory scene but what we end up with here is worlds away from the NYC demimonde. The story arc, such as it is, has Hartley flying to Hawaii, where the bumming around re-commences. She ends up at the Rainbow Bridge Occult Research Meditation Center and the inane pseudo-New Age babbling begins. I won’t bore you with the details, as you can bore yourself silly by checking it out yourself: the film is currently available in nine separate parts on YouTube. But a typical eye-roller is when one of the gurus claims he feels “heavy reincarnation vibes from everyone in this room. “ As if one go-around weren’t enough with this crowd. Primarily, “Rainbow Bridge” seems to exist is to confirm the suspicion that no matter how earnest the striving for enlightenment, communal life among the Sixties crowd were just as often marked by petty in-fighting and major dope deals.


Pat Hartley

An hour and twenty minutes of this seems like two lifetimes, so maybe the reincarnation angle isn’t far off. During this stretch, the only highlights have been a few Hendrix songs on the soundtrack (notably “Dolly Dagger” and “Ezy Rider”) played to the antics of a free-spirited Pat Hartley or the wave-catching activities of some surfing/meditating hash freaks. With two-thirds of the film gone, Jimi shows up to lend some much needed credibility to the proceedings. And some entertainment value, too: I enjoyed the scene where our rock star hero play acts a scene where Hendrix brandishes a rifle then shoots one of the self-proclaimed “wizards” from an upper floor window. Adding up that scene, the concert sequence and a stoned conversation he has with Wein and Hartley, Hendrix is only present for probably a little less than 25 minutes of this interminable movie.


This is about all you would need to see of the film. The man himself, playing and rapping back at the house.

But luckily for us in the Internet and home video age, the live performance can be picked out piecemeal from the rest of “Rainbow Bridge” which is more than can be said of the poor ticket-buyers during the film’s original (and brief) theatrical run.Because of the windy conditions that day on the slopes of Maui’s long-dormant Haleakala volcano, a lot of Hendrix’s set was deemed unusable but what remains is well worth seeing, at least in isolation. Accompanied by Mitch Mitchell on drums and Billy Cox on bass, he plays a vigorous set for the few hundred appreciative freaks who got word of the hastily-arranged free show. Highlights are “Voodoo Chile,” “Hear My Train a-Coming” and “Purple Haze,” the latter featuring one of the better displays of Jimi playing guitar with his teeth.


This is the trailer to “Rainbow Bridge.” Consider that a fair warning.

Contrary to the trailer’s claim, this was not exactly Hendrix’s last concert on U.S. soil (he played a gig in Honolulu a couple of days later) but anyone aware of the chronology knows the end is near for one of rock’s greatest icons. Hendrix has barely six weeks to live as we hear him talk of an out-of-body experience. The risky hedonism of a drug-suffused counterculture is of course not a subject to be reckoned with in a film such as this, making the “Rainbow Bridge’s” semi-documentary intentions a bit of a joke. At the end, we are stuck again with the sanctimonious seekers, meeting with a woman who claims to have met with some liberating space aliens and that they “approve of LSD.” Whereas once upon a time this may have elicited whispers of “oh wow” there are many more nowadays ready with a raised hand and quick riposte of “Bye, Felicia.”

My latest book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey is now available! And now you can try-before-you-buy, click on the link below to go to my author page and view a 30-page excerpt. http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html
Thanks! Rick Ouellette

A Cry in the (Amazon) Wilderness: My Life on the Worst Sellers’ List

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” British New-Wavers Tears for Fears slyly proclaimed on their 1985 hit of the same name. Of course, there is irony there: everyone knows that most people would be happy with just a fair shake in life. But even that modest expectation seems naïve today when so many “leaders,” whether in politics or business (and really, what’s the difference?) seem more intent on dominating than on leading.

“So glad we’ve almost made it/So sad they had to fade it” (Everybody Wants to Rule the World, written by Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes)

Never mind for a minute the actions of a certain U.S. president whose dingbat megalomania and all-consuming need for loyalty and adoration seems to bubble up from a bottomless pool of self-hatred that is dreadful to contemplate. So yeah, never mind it. But what about those global top dogs of high-tech, so admired for their paradigm-shifting innovations? Which brings us (well, me) to Amazon. Millions, if not billions, love the we-have-everything-quickly customer-centric giant. So in the bargain for this prevelant need for ever-optimized consumer convenience, Amazon can impunitively send traditional brick-and-mortar businesses into tailspin, evade taxes, treat their warehouse employees like indentured servants subject to clinically-tested psychological pressures (making for smashing magazine exposes) and shortchange content providers big and small. Especially small. There’s no irony when CEO Jeff Bezos wracks up these headlines:

How Jeff Bezos is Hurtling Towards World Domination (Newsweek)
A Quest to Rule the Universe? Bezos Expands His Rocket Plans (L.A. Times)
Or simply,
Jeff Bezos Wants to Rule the World (take your pick across the Internet)

The content provider issue is the one that involves me, though there are hundreds if not thousands of other indie authors with similar gripes. As I put my finishing touches on my second book, “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” last fall, I hinted in my postscript of the potential of rock music, especially through its visual recorded history, to keep the spirit of youthful idealism alive one’s whole life through.

So off goes my tenderly nurtured labor of love off to BookLocker.com, the print-on-demand publisher I had used on my first tome, “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film.” I try to steer would-be buyers of the book to them, a smallish and trustworthy mom-and-pop business that strikes the right balance between consumer and content provider, treating both fairly. It spreads the wealth around and puts a little extra something back in the pocket of the writer trying to make back their up front investment.

But let’s face it, Amazon is what people understand nowadays and many people will just go through them by force of habit. Imagine the dismay, when just a couple of months after being released the Bezos gang start listing my book as “Temporarily Out of Print.” Since “Rock Docs” is a print-on-demand title, this is categorically impossible.

So after a slew of emails between myself and the “Help” people at Amazon’s Author Central, I was told, with the same unnerving passive-aggressive certitude used by their CEO, that it was because they had no copies in their warehouse (and could we send them some at no charge), that the involvement of a third party slows down their preciously pursued turnaround times (even though BookLocker uses Ingram for printing, a reliably fast printer who even use Amazon shipping labels) and by the way, wouldn’t I be happier using their self-publishing services? Well, obviously I gave them a definitive No to that question, but while BookLocker gallantly play David vs. Goliath (they’ve already won one settlement against Amazon) my book take a predictable plunge in the latter’s ranking, down into the millions, a predictable predicament when the book is falsely claimed to be out of stock.

Before I go any further let me get to my main point (or plug). If you’re interested in my book (and if you’ve been visiting this blog you are probably in the target audience anyway) go visit BookLocker.com at the link below or a non-Amazon online bookseller, like Barnes & Noble at bn.com. Note that there’s a 30-page excerpt available at my BookLocker author page

http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

Let’s spread the wealth while there’s still some left to spread. The wife-husband team that operates BookLocker are a diligent home-schooling couple who have built a nice business for themselves. I can’ but help to think that Jeff Bezos would rather have them slaving away at one of his draconian warehouses than willingly let somebody dare be in the same business as him. Maybe he’ll prove me otherwise someday, rather than making collateral damage of hundreds if not thousands of indie writers.

“Help me make the most of Freedom and of pleasure/Nothing ever lasts forever,
Everybody wants to rule the world.”

Of course, this whole thing is indicative of a larger societal problem in the upper strata: the “we can do it, so we will” mentality, where no advantage will be left untaken and no admission of fallibility or wrongdoing is possible, ever. You know, I never had a lot of time for the therapy-session pop of Tears for Fears back in the Eighties. But I did always like this song and its image of a couple “holding hands while the walls come tumbling down” in the face of a callous world. With the passage of time it’s gotten only better and I found this recent performance pretty inspiring. Ironically in terms of this post, it was produced by Spotify, infamous for compensating musical artists micro-pennies on the dollar on their streaming service. Nevertheless, great job, guys—I only hope you got paid for it.