Montreal, check it out! With Malcolm Fraser and Steve Balogh I will revive
the improvised song-poem tradition of Vancouver band July Fourth Toilet,
creating songs on the spot from lyrics brought in by the audience! This is following a terrific doc on song-poems!
OFF THE CHARTS: THE SONG POEM STORY + Live Song-Poems!
Jamie Meltzer | É.-U. 2003 | 54 min.
23 SEPT, 18h00, FILM BOX
(Quartiers POP – 3450 St-Urbain, 3rd Flr)
with live song poems from Robert Dayton and Friends!
Like a warped fun-house mirror, the song-poem industry has run
parallel to the mainstream music business for close to a century; it’s
estimated that over 200,000 song-poems have been recorded since 1900.
The genre’s durability can be traced to three of our deepest American
desires – to be in show business, to get rich quick, and to share and
express our deepest feelings. We meet several of the “songwriters” –
from an elderly woman to a young African-American man to a small-town
Iowan with big-time dreams – each of whom has been in the “business” for
awhile, churning out odd compositions that cover the waterfront of
American obsessions, from Jesus to genitalia, from politics to Elvis. We
also meet the producers (often known as song-sharks) who hold out the
tantalizing promise of fame to their eager customers, and the has-been
musicians who sit in studios, day after day and year after year,
interpreting some of the weirdest lyrics ever written. Through fellow
musicians and his son, Ellery Eskelin, one of the most eloquent fans of
song-poem records, we learn about the life and tragic death of the man
aficionados consider the greatest song-poem interpreter of all time,
Rodney Keith Eskelin. Using a variety of stage names, this would-be
classical composer brought an eerie beauty to many of the song-poems he
recorded before ending his career and life by jumping onto a Hollywood
freeway. Off the Charts is a fascinating look at one
of the strangest subcultures in our American landscape.