National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation review

Familiarity breeds contempt. That’s never truer than with family. Mix it with holiday stress and you've got tension bordering on combustible. Yet, even if plans go awry and everything turns to bedlam, Christmas gatherings make for our most joyous memories from childhood. So we honor tradition by joining together in a spirit of yuletide hell.

But hey, misery loves comedy.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is the third – and funniest – installment of Vacation movies to come out in the 1980s. The comedy from filmmaker John Hughes follows the madcap formula set by the previous Vacation films except in this film, the Grisswolds stay home and the annoying relatives vacation at their house. If The Breakfast Club was Hughes’s most angst-filled and teen-centered comedy, Christmas Vacation was his most slapstick and familial.

You gotta’ love Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase). If he risks giving his daughter hypothermia, picking out the “perfect Christmas tree” in the forest, it’s only because he wants to create memories for his family. Sure his good-hearted efforts always blow up like exploding sewage against a deep blue sky on Christmas night. But God love this sentimental fool – this most classic of goofball dads. He’s got a heart as big as the North Pole.

He relishes the 25,000 twinkling lights on his house. True, he causes a temporary power outage in Chicago, but you know, he put a lot of work into it. (Christmas Vacation took place in suburban Chicago, as did all Hughes’s films.)

Haven’t we all known a Griswold Christmas house? A gaudy, blinding, incandescent display of Christmas excess. In my hometown it was the house with psychedelic Christmas lights or the one with an iridescent American flag hovering over the baby Jesus. But maybe those people were showing the enthusiasm of a Clark Griswold.

If you don’t that, maybe you’re like Grizwold’s Grinch-like next door neighbors Todd and Margo Chester, played respectively by Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (prior to her work as Elaine on Seinfeld). They’re a cold, self-loving, Regan era, pretentious and most bah-humbug couple who disdain Griswold and his incorruptible Christmas cheer. (He accidently sends a Christmas tree flying through their window.)

Then there are the relatives – a comic mélange of older actors playing grandparents, aunts and uncles. (Of these veteran actors and actresses, only Doris Roberts is still living.) There’s the senile old aunt who puts her cat in a gift box and says the pledge of allegiance, when asked to say grace at dinner and the uncle who wears a rug on his head and falls asleep with a lit cigar in his mouth.

But the all out craziest character – can anyone who’s seen this movie not agree? – is Cousin Eddie. Randy Quaid truly brought something inside himself to this role. His mansplainin’ body language, trailer-chawed voice and commanding leisure suit scream Cousin Eddie.

We’ve all had a Cousin Eddie in our lives. In Christmas Vacation, he is the relative from the boughs of hell, the hick who shows up unannounced; parking a dilapidated RV that looks like it came from a survivalist camp next to your house. He and his family plan to stay a month. Oh and the family includes a Rottweiler -bloodhound mix named Snots who likes to get in the trash and go to town on your leg.

The interplay between Clark and Cousin Eddie makes for some of the funniest dialogue in a movie. The physical and situational comedy is complemented by great writing from John Hughes.

Examples:

"They had to replace my metal plate with a plastic one. Every time Catherine would rev up the microwave, I’d piss my pants and forget who I was for about half an hour.”

“You couldn’t hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant.”

“Shall I get you some eggnog, something to eat, drive you to the middle of nowhere, and leave you for dead?”

Cousin Eddie’s financial woes coincide with Clark’s own troubles. He’s counting on his Christmas bonus, but finds out at the last minute that his boss, Frank Shirley, played by Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill’s brother) hasn’t given bonuses this year. He’s a nicely comic bad guy, serving as a Scrooge-like character. With Christmas gone to pot, Clark gone a little psychotic (the scene of him punching the plastic Santa in his lawn may be the biggest belly laugh scenes of the movie) and a police car scene reminiscent of The Blues Brothers, the film reaches a comic pinnacle big as the polar express. The comic scenes in the last quarter of Christmas Vacation have been successfully copied in other films.

Released Dec. 1, 1989, Christmas Vacation capped off a decade in which its screenwriter John Hughes was king. A year later, Hughes’s other wonderful Christmas movie – his last truly great movie – Home Alone would be released. There would be a bit more film dabbling, but for all intents and purposes, he was retired. He died in 2009, another vestige of my youth gone.

In an otherwise lackluster decade of yuppie-like plasticity, Hughes wrote with truth, revealing in his teen movies, a feeling of empathy like no one had seen before in the genre. Yet, one also sensed a warm spot for family. He was a little like Clark Griswold. This artist who captured the zeitgeist of the ‘80s teenager so pleasantly, also kept within him a never gone nostalgia for his own 1950s’ and ‘60s childhood and adolescence.

Christmas Vacation was based on a story he wrote entitled Christmas ’59. The original Vacation movie was based on a story he wrote called Vacation ’58 – both of them written for the magazine National Lampoon – the same satirical outfit where comic geniuses like Chase and fellow Saturday Night Live alums Gilda Radner and John Belushi got their start.

In this story, Hughes tapped into something from his own life and yours. Life is too damned serious as we’ve been reminded again this holiday season, so get all the laughs in while you can. Surrounded by your idiosyncratic relatives, watching Christmas Vacation, you can’t go wrong.

One last thing

The older actors and actresses in Christmas Vacation came with impressive credentials, appearing in various films and stage productions over the decades. I was particularly interested to learn that Mae Questel, who played senile Aunt Bethany, was the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, Popeye's girlfriend, in cartoons dating as far back as 1931. Having seen her as an old lady, it was also neat to learn what a dish she was in her young days. Check her out in this musical number with Rudy Vallee, who was like the Elvis of the flapper set.

The Monkees - Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)

Written by Neil Diamond before he became big as a solo act. Nicely sung by Davy Jones. Sorry we lost him recently.

Sweet Caroline

Probably my favorite cover version of this classic song. Sung by Bobby Womack.

Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show live 1970

Evangelical groups tried to have this song banned because they thought it was disrespectful to Christianity. Fortunately, progressive Christian artist Johnny Cash didn't feel that way.

"Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" (Neil Diamond) review

To hear a Neil Diamond record of circa 1969-70 is to find Middle American peace sign, hitch-hiking, earth-in-balance transcendence. It’s a breaking through of the walls erected to place us all within categories and definitions.

Diamond’s serrated voice on vinyl of that era opens – like sweet blown grass – a window into what my mom would’ve been listening to at the time – somewhere in the cross-cultural bag of the Stones, The Band, Herb Albert & the Tijuana Brass, the Temptations -- in the kitchen of our little house beside a gravel road.

"Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show," the opening title track to Diamond’s 1969 album deserves a listen a listen on your turntable. Put aside the overplay this standard receives on the corporate world’s Oldies and Classic Hits station and hear the song with new ears. Listen to the entire album and put life in its circular perspective.

While none of the other tracks have the ’45 hit single appeal of the opening or its phenomenal closing track – “Sweet Caroline – taken as a whole, the album emanates a breezy, spiritually sound feeling befitting the up-and-coming singer-songwriter of the era --appropriate because Neil Diamond is not conventional pop. Or is he?

Depends on how you define pop music. If your definition is limited by a post-MTV era paradigm of machinery, manufacturing and imagery, then no – Diamond is not standard pop. However, if your understanding has been broadened by 60s era Wall of Sound, Wrecking Crew and the Civil Rights amalgamation of rock n’ roll, soul, pop and country, then Diamond and his band stand with the artists who molded commercial pop with a sense of craftsmanship.

As an ‘80s teen-ager I lacked historical perspective and dismissed Neil Diamond as some adult contemporary wimp liked by old people. Some of that, Diamond brought on himself. “Love on the Rocks.” What the hell is that? “Heartlight” from the E.T. soundtrack? Bland, corporate contrived and uninspired. Like some of the most multi-talented, yet non-purist artists – Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, Elton John – Neil Diamond became more about the name – the brand – than the artistry.

It was only in college during the early ‘90s, while listening to stuff like Sonic Youth, the Pixies, the Jesus and Mary Chain…that I learned Neil Diamond had relevance. That brings me to back to Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show. In January of 1969, after his last two albums failed to chart, Diamond left New York and went to 827 Thomas St. in Memphis, home to American Sound Studio and laid down tracks with the house band, the Memphis Boys. Guided by record producer Chips Moman, the band added a complementary musical groove to Diamond’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

While not as lauded as Stax’s Booker T. and the MG’s, the Memphis Boys were steady and steeped in southern traditions of gospel, soul, rock and country. Having cut his teeth on tunesmithing at New York’s Brill Building in the early 60s, Diamond’s lyrics and music at the end of the decade had the feel of his earlier catchy pop hits like “Cherry, Cherry,” but also revealed the growing introspection that would mark his early ‘70s work.

Bobby Woods played the gospel piano intro to “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” setting the stage for Diamond to enter hot and stoic, vocals steady. Starting soft and slow-ow, like a small earthquake and when he lets go-o, half the valley shakes. The song builds to a crescendo as he narrates a tale, straddling the line of fleshly pleasure and spiritual sensations. Diamond – with strong support from the band –pays homage to southern gospel tradition as only an East Coast Jewish boy, dazzled by the early sounds of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, can.


Tunes like “Dig In” and “Deep in the Morning” are sexy, grooving song with a blues edge driven by Guitarist Reggie Young and bassist Mike Leech. “River Runs, Newgrown Plums” features Bobby Emmons sputtering organ solo (like something traditionally out of a baseball park or ‘70s game show), which sounds a little dated, yet cool considering there’s nothing like it on the radio today. The solo gives the song a special spice. The song has the buoyancy of Diamond’s early hits and the line, “honey, it’s natural, I love you” is a classic Diamond-like lyric of that era. Diamond’s best line in any of the songs is “I’m a ten dollar dreamer” from the song, “Memphis Streets.” With fun lyrics about working the day shift and driving a ’59 Ford, this song – like many on the album -- reflect a young adult sense of freedom and abandon. In no less than three songs, he talks about going barefoot. Girls..God..himself…barefoot by the stream.

"You're So Sweet, Horseflies Keep Hangin' Round Your Face" is a fun parody of a corny country song. The lyrics invoking Kentucky moonshine, front teeth missing, county rodoes..would make this a fun one to sing verbatim from the dance floor of a bar as a band plays. "Long Gone" sounds more like country with accoustic rock guitar, absent parody.

Much of the album’s songs show restlessness, a longing to drift along the roads of America, aimless, carrying a few worldly possessions, while opening up to fresh love and life experience. While the world approaching 1970 was growing rapidly more urban and polluted, there seemed – in Diamond and other artists of the time – a reaching out for that something pure and authentic from the country.

In the ballad “Juliet,” Diamond signs of “wandering around a grown man, no more than a small boy.” The dichotomy is evident in lyrics throughout the album. There’s the youthful frivolity and desire for the road, alongside an underscoring knowledge that it’s not all it promises and the game is almost up. It’s like he sings in “Glory Road” – And I know glory road’s waiting for me, rest my load, now I know glory road won’t set me free. The song, with its Kerouackian references to Colorado, Wyoming, LA, Louisiana…hints at the loneliness Diamond would later explore in “I Am, I Said.”

“And the Grass Won’t Pay You No Mind” is the purest portrait of Diamond’s pop-rock lyricism and maturing song writing talents. An acoustic, country-folk-styled ballad, the song is earthy and poetic, capturing a still moment that had to resonate with young people coming of age in a world of noise and confusion. More than romantic love, the song was downright spiritual. Elvis Presley would cover “And the Grass Won’t Pay You No Mind” a few months later and I’m guessing it’s because he couldn’t resist the opening line, “Listen easy, you can hear God calling.”

Of course, Elvis would be all over Diamond’s smash hit of the year – “Sweet Caroline” – adding the pop-rock smash to his Vegas shows. Originally, not part of the album, its popularity prompted MCA to tack it at the end of side two. Good call. “Sweet Caroline” is a serendipitous work of pop transcendence, an enveloping arch over the waters of human kindness. Sung with confidence, it’s become Diamond’s signature song. Could we imagine Boston’s Fenway Park without it now?

Diamond wrote the song after seeing a picture in Life magazine of Caroline Kennedy riding a horse. Is that not appropriate?

Was not the entire era a musical Camelot?


Gateway Music

Elvis in Memphis -- After completing Diamond’s album at American Sound Studios, Chips Moman and the house rhythm section recorded this album with Presley and the result was artistic, commercial sophistication – “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds”... Soulful, poignant and muscular, this album – with the right mix of professionals – brought Presley back to his roots and rescued his career and talents from Hollywood kitschdom. Just as Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show prompts us to see Neil Diamond beyond the Desiree-like Vegas sequins, this album shows Elvis beyond ersatz soundtracks and Liberace bombast.

Dusty in Memphis – A must for any record collection. Like the aforementioned Presley and Diamond, Dusty Springfield’s career was lagging when she recorded in Memphis’s American Sound Studios. And like those guys, her career and talents were injected with new vigor. A British pop diva, she traveled across the pond to work with musicians who would fuel her work with a soulfulness they had lent to Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Tommy Cogbill, who helped produce and contribute bass lines on Diamond’s album played the classic, sexy bass intro we all know from “Son of a Preacher Man.” Without this white English girl’s homage to black soul music, we would have no Amy Winehouse or Adele.

Just look for music everywhere from these Memphis musicians and producers. Their handiwork crossed genres and decades – Gene Vincent, Carla Thomas, the Box Tops, Sly and the Family Stone, Tammy Wynette, B.J. Thomas…Chips Moman wrote “Luckenbauch, Texas" for Waylon and Willie. The list goes on and the hunt can only be a thrill.

Outside the box gateway
As a young man, Neil Diamond received a scholarship to be on New York University’s fencing team. No way, I can resist recommending one of my favorite books by one of my favorite all-time authors -- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield was manager of his prep school’s fencing team. Everyone in the world knows that, I’m sure.

"The Dream" review

Drew D. Hansen’s book, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation is a fascinating examination of King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Hansen presents the human story behind MLK’s spectacular address, rescuing the speech -- as King -- from their mythic pedestal.

King famously disregarded his notes that August day in 1963 when he came to the “I have a dream” portion of his speech, spoken spontaneously. Hansen shows, however, that King’s poetic words had been in his creative arsenal for some time. They were the products of references he had gathered over the years, variations of which he had already used in sermons before black church audiences in the South.

The most interesting aspect of Hansen’s book is the detective work he did in tracing the origins of King’s references. King’s writing and oratorical style was influenced by other theologians and poetry, but most of all, by the King James Bible.

Hansen lists several Bible verses, from which King drew allusions, in his famous speech. Psalm, Isaiah, Matthew…the speech drew from a rich array of scriptural sources. Hansen juxtaposes King’s metaphors with their Biblical sources. King quoted directly from Amos 5:24, with the words “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The “I have a dream” phrase could have been derived from several Biblical passages to a “dream” or “vision” in the Old Testament. But it also could have been lifted from things he had heard from people in his congregation, as well as from a religious vision King described having around the time of the Montgomery, Ala. Bus boycott in 1956.

“’I had a vision’ could easily have become ‘I had a dream,” Hansen writes.

The image of King delivering an emotional plea for interracial brotherhood upon the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is the defining moment of the Civil Rights Era. However, as Hansen shows, the iconography of the moment has led to a watered-down version of the Civil Rights Movement.

Today on MLK Day, politicians can point to the federal legislation that ended Jim Crow in the South and say King’s dream has come true. Mission accomplished. The mythology surrounding the “I have a dream” King glosses over his final years and the battles he didn’t win. Hansen reminds us that the full history isn’t so neat and tidy.

“Remembering King through the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech allowed the nation to tell itself a comforting, but inaccurate story about King’s legacy,” Hansen writes.

The Black Power moment sprang from growing discontentment with King’s philosophy of non-violence and interracial brotherhood. King’s successes in the South had not carried over into solving the more subtle effects of racism found in the inner city slums of cities like Chicago and Detroit. A new crop of African-American leaders mocked King for having a “dream,” while they were living a nightmare.

By the late ‘60s, King had broadened his mission, speaking out against poverty and the Vietnam War. Today, King’s vision of an age free of income inequality and imperialism remain the part of his dream that has been deferred.

Hansen places King’s dream in context. He acknowledges that in ways it remains unfulfilled, yet reminds us of the gratitude we should feel for the miracles that MLK and thousands of Civil Rights workers have helped accomplish.

“In just under a decade, the civil rights movement brought down a system that had stood essentially unaltered since Reconstruction,” Hansen writes. “King’s dreams of an America free from racial discrimination are still some distance away, but it is astounding how far the nation has come since that hot August day in 1963.”

Hopefully, this history will provide hope in the work still before us.