Psychedelic Rock, Blues Rock, Acid Rock, Psychedelic Pop, Spoken Word | Sophomore album by The Doors; released September 25, 1967.
A humbling amount of good singles from this record.
This will be The Doors’ highest-ranking entry on my 60s-list. I didn’t go out of my way to exclude their debut self-titled — most critically acclaimed — album from the list, it got very barely cut. If it wasn’t for the “Outliers-list” I made after 1969’s shortlists, as a backup/compensation, then The Doors (1967) would have been a low-ranking entry, somewhere in the #91-#100 ballpark. I say all this, to say, that I consider this band’s first three albums, quite possibly the all-time greatest three-album run ever in music. From The Doors to Waiting for the Sun (1968), Jim Morrison and co. just had everything locked down. The highlight of that, is this album. If they aren’t the greatest of all time in this category, at least very few other bands have ever matched the density, the amount of awesome poetry and dope song-ideas especially just as they got started.
But Strange Days is the best. It’s the most wildly thematic, mysteriously cohesive and probed to feel the more rewarding out of the big first three, in my years of knowiong them. Also I don’t know why this is exactly, but it’s just always been easier to throw on than the other two, in times when I wanna ease myself into a Doors-mood.
Right away we’re bethrust into this insistantly chaotic atmosphere with these Manzarek-laces on the keyboard, knowing really just what chord to strike at each moment for maximal effect. It is already hard to imagine that this is The Doors’ first year as an estabished band! There’s such good intuitive work to every little thing you might listen for! I guess I could compare these entrances to superhero-movies. Keyboards’ command, and Jim Morrison’s own… I don’t even know what to call it when he steps in saying straange daayys have foouund uuss. Yeah, I guess superhero movies are good enough at doing dramatic entrances, to kinda compare.
You’re Lost Little Girl used to be in constant rotation around the time Strange Days first found me. It has just always come across to me as this very conscientiously dark moment and just felt like a pivotal beat in the album’s plot/story. Y’know. Addressing someone so specifically, further bringing home the lyrics’ point of adding a counterpart which is really the characterization of somebody lost, needing help. So eclipsing is Jim’s language in these poetic lyrics, that the image comes across right away. A character is created, without pinning her down any more than a poetic description of her innermost turmoil. This song’s lyrics are as interesting as a story themselves, as they are as a preset for the what more there is to come.
Love Me Two Times is the hit, and catchy enough to distinguish itself as the radio-song from the album at face-value. The bridge is a specific highlight of this song and rightfully takes its’ place as the culmination of all the other things this more loose, more infectious number, was already great at.
Manzarek wrote Love Me Two Times inspired by both The Doors going on tour, and soldiers going to Vietnam. The theme is sex as a way to survive, find stability in strange times. The need to be ”loved two times” before going away. To merely use numbers in the command for love kind of implies a commodification of love. ”Just two times before I go” makes it sound much more like something is ordered, than genuinely desired. Sex is just the quick fix, resembling love enough, to keep a man’s head straight and keep him relaxed, focused, almost as if he’s loved. But the love is commodified because these expressions of it are meaningless. They’re quick. He’s gone away; his life’s too strange at this moment, to ever stay for love.
Unhappy Girl seems to be addressing the same female-receptient as You’re Lost Little Girl, with a narration that has more pointed things to say.
“You were locked in a prison of your own device“
Let’s think about that, being unhappy, and being lost. What’s the real and virtual difference between the two? I think someone lost is someone at a more serious crossroads within themselves, but they’re most likely just further down the same path as someone unhappy, is. That’s at least the best kind of answer I could think, to my own questiont here. But… isn’t it all the same? Isn’t it all a part of a time in one’s life — Strange Days, this album so potently calls itself — marked by unlikely events that leave the internal life — however expansive, depending on the person — …rocked.
The guitar-notes are particularly well-picked for the song. In the last chorus, especially, as Jim throws out the most thought-provoking lyric (I think) of the whole song:
“Don’t miss your chance to swim in mystery”
This song is more to-the-point, and it’s over sooner.
That notion thrown out there, about swimming in mystery… well, it’ll be a stage-set for the next song which is a truly esoteric affair… but in its demanding roughness and poetry, it’s also inviting towards an acceptance, of what this album stands for as a narrative — what Strange Days means.
I am, of course, talking about none other than the weird spoken-word track Horse Latitudes.
Horse Latitudes has a wonderfully specific meaning to its’ name pulled from real life history. Horse latitudes are ocean regions between 30 and 35 degrees latitude, which tend to contain calm waters and light winds.18th Century sailors would throw horse soverboard when they sailed into these latitudes in order to lighten the load on a more harsh wind to travel with.
And I’ve gotta say, I’ve always been — adverse to everybody, it seems — loving this song. So many people consider it a “jumping the shark” moment — even people that otherwise love Strange Days — that they take it as a moment when the sophomore masterpiece’s quality dipped for the sake of Jim just soloing around with verses haphazard of haphazard imagery he’d conducted in some past fever-dream.
But I think it’s more of a “jumping the horse“-moment. I think that a song like this — short interlude like this which without pretense tries to be nothing else but poetry — is so clearly taken from disturbed states Jim must’ve been in when he wrote his first rhyme-book… only this song’s strangeness pins the whole album down as their masterpiece. Because it shows the commitment to an overall message. All the while, Horse Latitudes is perfectly mysterious in a Doors-way.
Moonlight Drive is another cut just eagerly ringing with hit-potential. The piano-phrases with their minor note-clusters come to bring the song near each chorus, with a great resurgence in their gravity… to a real point of emotional tension that radiates. But more than anything, this song I think is the choice catchy tune from Strange Days. While at the same time, perfectly mysterious in a Doors-way.
I really don’t think I need to add any personal note or anecdote or anything of the like about People Are Strange. It is such a famous, known, famously deep song that I think, just the announcement that this is my flyaway-choice for best track… probably says a lot about me on its’ own. About the kinds of places I’ve been to, in my own strange days of the past.
“People are strange When you’re a stranger Faces look ugly When you’re alone”
Such a connection I personally draw between the two, that My Eyes Have Seen You and I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind are both kinda on this album to set the stage for the epic closer When the Music’s Over. It wouldn’t be the first time this band did something like that when sequencing an album — as a matter of fact it’s pretty much a play-by-play follow-up to the self-titled debut album where so many shorter songs, stood where they stood in order to ramp up a fitting mood for digesting the mostrous final song, The End.
What’s a more perfect thing to ponder, for a musician, than “when the music’s over”? I mean it’s like the phrase “at the end of the day” to a storyteller. I think it might be a cliche phrase but it’s only because there’s so much weight to the ultimate question it presents, by a creative person’s creative work.
So common of a feeling, that it being a cliche… doesn’t stop it from being a glorious name to a glorious closing-track of a glorious album named Strange Days. Given that I personally think a lot of Strange Days’ contents are about a creative person’s drives and things which occur in their life… how they take it in… their drives and such… I just don’t think there could be a better ending!
Let’s circle back to the first thing I said in this review. That I think this is the best album. Well, I used to think it was Waiting for the Sun for quite a long time. Actually I’ve held that album as #1 in this category, longer than Strange Days. Although I ranked Waiting for the Sun lower than Strange Days in my 60s-list, I still wouldn’t snap my jaw in half out of sheer shock if somebody said that Waiting for the Sun was the best. Or if they said the self-titled was, for that matter! I have formed something of a personal interpretation about Strange Days’ narrative. I think in similar ways to WFTS (which I highlighted when I wrote about that record, earlier in this list), Strange Days has an overarching poetic narrative to it. I think it’s telling a story, which is one about an innocuous kind of time in a creat person’s — not just that; any person with a habitually bubbling mind — life. Told specifically as a story with all kinds of characters in it that are addressed or told stories in-perspectives-of. Poetically shifting through those motions, it comes together in a very very clear way that’s not so abstract after fevrish revisits to the record, but actually more pointed when you play it over again. It’s close, but out of all Doors-albums, Strange Days improves with replays the most.
Jim’s expressed desire about how before “falling into the big sleep”, he wants to hear the “screams of a butterfly”… I think that, in the poetic language I just discussed, says it all about what kind of a story this album’s been meaning to tell. All I can really say about it, to pick it any further-apart from here, is just to conclude that this really works.
“When the music’s over, turn off the light, turn off the light…”
Additional notes
In a 2012 article for The Quietus, Swans-frontman Michael Gira talked about this record in a list of his personal favorite albums: ”Another one that shaped my DNA with the aid of illicit substances! Just a beautiful voice, beautiful production and it has When the Music’s Over on it, which is a masterpiece. A great performance – I don’t know how many overdubs it has opn it, probably none! There’s a very early use of synthesizer on there at one point. In retrospect, I think Jim Morrison’s pretty corny, but it works with the music, and to be blessed with a voice like that is an act of God.
As is well-known, Jim Morrison named The Doors after the 1954 book The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. The book itself is a philosophical essay, told by an author experiencing mescaline-trips.
The Doors of Perception meanwhile, takes its title from a phrase in William Blake’s 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In John Densmore’s 1991 biography, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors, he recalled: ”[Morrison said] ’Yeah, I feel really good about this one. It just came to me all of a sudden […] in a flash – as I was sitting up there on the ridge looking out over the city.’ His eyes were wild with excitement. ’I scribbled it down as fast as I could. It felt great to be writing again.’ He looked down at the crumbled paper in his hand and sang the chorus in his haunting blues voice”.
“A fiest of friends, ‘Alive!’ she cried“ Alive, She Cried later became the second Doors live album, obviously named after this lyric.
“Persian night babe See the light, babe Save us Jesus Save us“ A reference to the birth of Jesus Christ in the Bible. ”Persian night” refers to the wise men who were often referred to as The Magi. The Magi were a priestly caste originating from Persia.
Jim Morrison wrote the poem that became Horse Latitudes when he was in high school, and saw a paperback cover of horses being thrown off a boat. The song quite poignantly expresses their anxiety. The anxiety of being forcefully thrown into wide open sea, into something new… the next thing you know, you’re at-sea without a raft. Probably don’t even know how to swim. Probably have never even been taught how. Remind you of anything…? Like being 14-22 and suddenly in this emotionally confused state that you don’t know how to navigate? Like having your strange days?
One of the odd sound effects of Horse Latitudes were created by dropping a coke bottle in a garbage can, beating coconut shells on a tile floor, and having people scream inside a studio.
Moonlight Drive was one of the songs The Doors used on their demo; the same one that they played for an Elektra-executive that got them their record deal.
I had pages upon pages of trivia written/compiled for this album back in September 4, 2017 where I wrote a report about it for another project of mine. My computer crashed inexplicably on that day, wiping away all of it JUST as I was done and ready to save my progress. I talked about everything, about how this album’s innovations of studio-technology made it close to the Pet Sounds/Bitches Brew-tier in terms of pure influence on musicianship at the times. The huge machines the studio dragged in just to make every sound as complete as possible. The kind of unsung genius of Strange Days. But since I was so fucking upset at my computer that morning, I still refuse to write that trivia. It was a day that will live on in infamy.
In the Sopranos’ episode Meadowlands (S1E4), Dr. Melfi’s date references (and misquotes) the song People Are Strange, when describing his feelings of isolation after getting assaulted by a police officer.
When the Music’s Over appears in the Sopranos-episode The Blue Comet (S6E20)
I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind appears in the Miami Vice episode Back in the World (S2E10).
Love Me Two Times appears in the Cold Case episode Forever Blue (S4E10), and the pilot episode of Aquarius.
Moonlight Drive and People Are Strange appear in the Cold Case episode Metamorphosis (S7E14).
A lot of great lines were written for The Sopranos. There’s 86 episodes, and when I originally printed this project’s work sheets… I initially just thought there would be three, maybe five key quotes to put up per episode. That went out the window quick.
As soon as I had the idea of counting down all episodes from worst to best in my opinion, I knew that a part of that would have to be a countdown of this show’s greatest quotes. There’s 86 episodes, a good chunk of them ended up with ten or more contenders for a list that considers the greatest lines ever. Making a top-100 was difficult. But as selective as this list is… as good, it comes out.
These are my top-100 quotes of all of The Sopranos! (There’s gonna be some stats to snack on at the end of the article).
#100 “I’ve known you since you were a kid, Tone. Frankly, you got a problem with authority. This attitude of yours… it’s a lot of what’s made you an effective leader. But we all got flaws, even you. Seven deadly sins, and yours is… pride.” -Silvio Dante, All Due Respect (S5E13)
#99 “You’re late!” “Well tomorrow I could be on time, but you’ll be stupid forever.” -Paulie Gualtieri & Ralph Cifaretto, Army of One (S3E13)
#98 “Listen, Livia, what you don’t know could fill a book.” -Junior Soprano, House Arrest (S2E11)
#97 “You either deliver that prick to my door, or I will rain a shitstorm down on you and your family like you’ve never fucking seen.” -Johnny Sack, Long Term Parking (S5E12)
#95 “If you’re gonna lie to me at least tell me there’s a broad in the car wants to tongue my balls.” -Junior Soprano, Second Opinion (S3E7)
#94 “I DID-DENT!” -Christopher Moltisanti, Whoever Did This (S4E9)
#93 “Federal Marshalls are so far up my ass I can taste Brylcreem.” -Junior Soprano, Toodle-Fucking-Oo (S2E3)
#92 “If you were anybody else — anybody — you’d a had that intervention right through the back of the head!” -Tony Soprano, The Strong, Silent Type (S4E10)
#91 “It’s always with me.” -Tony Soprano, Pilot (S1E1)
#87 “Fuck you want, a boutonniere?” -Junior Soprano, Made in America (S6E21)
#86 “Isaac Newton invented gravity ’cause some asshole hit him with an apple!” -Christopher Moltisanti, Walk Like a Man (S6E17)
#85 “One night around then, I had this dream. My pops’ 100th birthday, even though he’d been dead for years. The whole family’s there, grandkids, everybody. He’s wearing one of these gold paper-crowns like a… anyway, I give him his present. This malicuous box, ribbons. He opens up, then looks at me. This gaze, of absolute disappointment. There’s nothing in the box. So he hands it back to me. ‘Go fill it up’, he says. ‘Come back when I’m 200’. “So go for it, Carmine. Fulfill that part of yourself.” “We have this ritual at my house for years, our kids are in boarding school. Every night I come home from work, strip down, jump naked in the pool. Nicole brings me a scotch and water, we sit, relax a little bit, I go up to bed, the air conditioning. She brings me a light dinner on a tray. One night during all that fighting with John, I come home, I’m exhausted, so tired, so tense I skip the pool. I go right upstairs, flop on the bed, Nicole comes up with the drink and she says ‘darling, I think it’s time you took a rest’. I say ‘yeah, I’m gonna, we’ll take a vacation’, she says ‘that’s not what I meant. I don’t want to be the wealthiest widow on Long Island. I want you to quit, now’. I’m not ashamed to say this, but she made me cry. That wonderful, loving woman. That dream with my father with the empty box, it wasn’t about being boss. It was about being happy.” -Carmine Lupertazzi Jr. & Tony Soprano, Stage 5 (S6E14)
#84 “Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this!” -Tony Soprano, I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano (S1E13)
#83 “So if you love me, stir my eggs.” -Christopher Moltisanti, Pie-O-My (S4E5)
#82 “Here’s some standard operating-procedure: stay the fuck away from Tony Soprano. Shut the fuck up, and listen. It’s over. Capische? Over and done. You call, or go anywhere near him or his family, and they’ll be scraping your nipples off these fine leather-seats. And here’s the point to remember: my face is the last one you’ll see. Not Tony’s.” -Patsy Parisi, Amour Fou (S3E12)
#81 “I am here! I have things to say!” -Carmela Soprano, Whitecaps (S4E13)
#80 “Everybody knows you’ve been the biggest fucking cuse-hound around for the past 4-5 years. Your midlife-crisis, you’d fuck a catcher’s mitt.” -Christopher Moltisanti, Irregular Around the Margins (S5E5)
#77 “Carmela could you please shut the DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR” -Tony Soprano, Pie-O-My (S4E5)
#76 “What’d that fag want?” “Jesus Christ, Tony, everybody’s a fag to you. Maybe you’re a fag, you ever thought of that?” “Can I help it if I know one when I see one?” “Oh really? What are the signs? Education, culture?” “Sucking a guy’s cock usually tips me off.” -Tony & Carmela Soprano, Sentimental Education (S5E6)
#75 “Rage, Anthony, is a big loud flaming distraction, from feelings that are even more frightening.” -Jennifer Melfi, Funhouse (S2E13)
#74 “Ten years you thought about Janice? There are men in the can better-looking than my sister.” -Tony Soprano, Big Girls Don’t Cry (S2E5)
#73 “I’ve seen that sitting in a chair-thing.” “Come on. People sit in chairs.” -Janice & Bobby Baccalieri, Soprano Home Movies (S6E13)
#72 “My advice, we go get our joints copped, and tomorra, the words’ll come blowin’ out your ass.” -Paulie Gualtieri, The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti (S1E8)
#71 “You got any thoughts?” “What else do I have left?” -Tony & Junior Soprano, He Is Risen (S3E8)
#69 “When my time comes, tell me: will I stand up?” -Paulie Gualtieri, Remember When (S6E15)
#68 “I had one of my Coach Molinaro-dreams.” “Oh, were you unprepared as usual?” “Yeah. As usual.” -Tony & Carmela Soprano, The Test Dream (S5E11)
#67 “You strong-armed me, using the only weapon you have: your pussy.” -Bob Wegler, Sentimental Education (S5E6)
#66 “You’ll never leave your wife […] She might leave you, but you’ll never leave her. Despite your mothering, you made one good decision in your life vis-á-vis women. You’re not gonna throw that over. Your own selfishness is too strong to let that happen.” -Jennifer Melfi, The Telltale Moozadell (S3E9)
#65 “Those who want respect, give respect.” -Tony Soprano, The Knight in White Satin Armor (S2E12)
#63 “He’s an emotional wreck, Tony!” “So seeing a pair of tits is gonna send him over the edge?” -Carmela & Tony Soprano, Walk Like a Man (S6E17)
#62 “Let me give you a little advice. In my business, I see girls come and go. So I know. Time, is the great enemy. You got a very short window. It’s not good to get too hung-up on any one thing. On the other hand, something new always comes along. I’ve seen it a million times. It’s called Passages, y’know the book.” -Silvio Dante, The Knight in White Satin Armor (S2E12)
#59 “Sometimes what happens here is like taking a shit.” “Okay. Although I prefer to see it as more like childbirth.” “Trust me. It’s like taking a shit.” -Tony Soprano & Jennifer Melfi, Unidentified Black Males (S5E9)
#58 “Some day soon, you’re gonna have families of your own. And if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments — like this — that were good.” -Tony Soprano, I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano (S1E13)
#57 “The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” “What the fuck are you talking about?” -Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano, Cold Cuts (S5E10)
#56 “What do you wanna talk about?” “Fucking Dick Barone.” “Well as long as the two of you are happy.” -Tony Soprano & Richie Aprile, Bust Out (S2E10)
#55 “…But if he had dragged me out of my car, and beaten me up, would I be saying ‘gee, I shouldn’t have tried to park my car’?” -Elliot Kupferberg, The Weight (S4E4)
#54 “They’re dropping like fucking flies.” “It’s all that charcoal-broiled meat you people ate.” “Nobody told us ’till the 80s!” “I’m kidding, ya fuck.” -Junior & Tony Soprano, Proshai, Livushka (S3E2)
#53 “It’s my fault. All my decisions were wrong.” -Tony Soprano, All Due Respect (S5E13)
#52 “Amazing thing about snakes, is that they reproduce spontaneously.” “What do you mean?” “They have male and female sex-organs. That’s why somebody you don’t trust, you call a snake. How can you trust a guy who can literally go fuck themselves?” “Don’t you think the expression would’ve come from the Adam and Eve-story? When the snake tempted Eve to bite the apple?” “Eh, snakes were fucking themselves long before Adam and Eve showed up, T.” -Paulie Gualtieri & Tony Soprano, The Telltale Moozadell (S3E9)
#51 “Your kids, though… it’s like when they’re little, and they get sick. You’d give anything in the world to trade places with them, so they don’t have to suffer!” -Tony Soprano, Walk Like a Man (S6E17)
#50
“Mother of Christ, is this a woman thing? You ask me who I feel, I tell you how I feel, and now you’re gonna torture me with it.” -Tony Soprano, The Happy Wanderer (S2E6)
#49
“I fucking knew it!” “No you didn’t fucking know it! I just told you!” -Mikey Palmice & Junior Soprano, Boca (S1E9)
#48
“I’ve fucking had it.” “With what?” “Everything.” -Junior & Tony Soprano, Calling All Cars (S4E11)
#47
“YOU’RE FLEXXXXXIIIIINNNNNGGGGG!” -Richie Aprile, House Arrest (S2E11)
“Grab a sandwich and we’ll talk later… I mean, you’re staying over, right?” -Tony Soprano, Isabella (S1E12)
#40
“Anthony Jr. might have stumbled onto existentialism.” “Fucking internet.” -Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano, D-Girl (S2E7)
#39
“WELL MAYBE I NEED TO THINK! YOU EVER THOUGHT OF THAT?! YOU FAT FUCKING SCUMBAG!” -Christopher Moltisanti, Long Term Parking (S5E12)
#38
“Every fucking Superbowl the D.A. grabs a few popcorn headlines! Here, ga’head. Last year I made bail so fast my soup was still warm when I got home.” -Silvio Dante, Army of One (S3E13)
“I’m 46 years old. Who am I? Where am I going?” -Tony Soprano, Join the Club (S6E2)
#35
“You say sign, I sign. You tell me to take a crap on the deck of the Queen Mary, an hour later they’re hosing it down with disinfectant.” -Junior Soprano, Second Opinion (S3E7)
#34
“What, your father never cut off anybody’s pinky?” -Tony Soprano, Fortunate Son (S3E3)
#33
“T… Anything else?” “My ear hurts.” -Silvio Dante & Tony Soprano, I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano (S1E13)
#32
“You see I never could please my mother.” -Tony Soprano, Made in America (S6E21)
#31
“One of my therapists was a woman.” “Too bad you didn’t get all your talking done with her.” -Valentina La Paz & Tony Soprano, Two Tonys (S5E1)
#30
“Rich man and poor man got the same wedding-anniversary. Every year they meet on Madison Avenue when they’re shopping for their wives. So the poor man says ot the rich man, ‘what did you buy your wife this year?’ Rich man says ‘I got her a huge diamond ring and a brand-new Mercedez’. Poor man says ‘why’d you get her both for?’. Rich man says ‘so if she don’t like the diamond ring, she can bring it abck on the Mercedez and still be happy’. Rich man says ot poor man, ‘what did you get your wife this year? He says ‘I got her a pair of slippers and a dildo’. Rich man says ‘what’d you get her a pair of slippers and a dildo for?’. Poor man says, ‘if she don’t like the slippers she can go fuck herself!’.” -Tony Soprano, From Where to Eternity (S2E9)
#29
“OHHH I HAD NO IDEA I WAS SO TENSE!” -Paulie Gualtieri, Rat Pack (S5E2)
#28
“Puss… I loved that cocksucker like a brother. And he fucked me in the ass.” -Paulie Gualtieri, …To Save Us All from Satan’s Power (S3E10)
#27
“Janice?” “She’s been wonderful through all this. Connected with Bobby Jr. and Sophia, made dinner at the house…” “Janice?” “She’s a pretty good cook.” “Since when? Everybody steers clear of her food.” “Nah… she made lasagna the other night… delicious.With sweet sausage along with the beef. I thought Karen’s was good, but…” “Sweet sausage? In little pieces? And a layer of basil-leaves right underneath the cheese?” “That’s right.” “That’s Carmela’s lasagna!” “Fuck you talking about! You always think the worst of everybody, Junior.” “Well fine. Enjoy your lasagna. Just don’t come running to me.” -Junior Soprano & Bobby Baccalieri, Pie-O-My (S4E5)
#26
“You’re five fucking time-zones behind your own ass.” -Silvio Dante, Boca (S1E9)
#25
“I’m glad you caught that, Alexandra. Very observant. The sacred and the propane.” -Carmine Lupertazzi, Jr., Stage 5 (S6E14)
#24
“Hope comes in many forms.” -Jennifer Melfi, Pilot (S1E1)
#23
“We worry so much sometimes it feels like that’s all we do. But in the end it gets washed away. All of it, just washed away.” -Carmela Soprano, Cold Stones (S6E11)
#22
“You really skeeve the human body, don’t you?” “You like it so much? Let me ask you a question: why do pissing shitting and fucking, all happen within a two-inch radius?” “Everybody asks that, Paulie, there’s no answer to it.” “They’re all sources of pleasure though.” “GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!” -Vito Spatafore, Paulie Gualtieri & Christopher Moltisanti, Sentimental Education (S5E6)
#21
“Poison ivy? He wants to know if it still itches.” -the psychic, From Where to Eternity (S2E9)
#20
“You got any idea what my life would be worth if certain people found out I checked into a laughing academy?” -Tony Soprano, Isabella (S1E12)
#19
“You’re not gonna believe this. He killed 16 Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.” “His house looked like shit.” -Paulie Gualtieri & Christopher Moltisanti, Pine Barrens (S3E11)
#18
“You don’t understand.” -Tony Soprano, Army of One (S3E13)
#17
“You’re both every angry.” “Yeah you must’ve been at the top of your fucking class.” -Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano, Another Toothpick (S3E5)
#16
“The old man’s whistling through the what-field? […] Oh, he’s a bushman of the Kalahari!” -Tony Soprano, Boca (S1E9)
#15
“You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” -Bobby Baccalieri, Soprano Home Movies (S6E13)
#14
“Go shit in your hat.” -Junior Soprano, Where’s Johnny? (S5E13)
#13
“My uterus got pierced.” “Both of them?” -Adriana La Cerva & Christopher Moltisanti, Watching Too Much Television (S4E7)
“That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery of God, or whatever you wanna call it. And why we’re given the questionable gift of knowing we’re going to die?” -Jennifer Melfi, Denial, Anger, Acceptance (S1E3)
#10
“Did you offer my nephew anything?” “I’m a registered nurse. Not maid.” “Did you offer him an aspirin?” -Junior Soprano & Branca, Calling All Cars (S4E11)
#9
“Who says there is [an answer]? That’s what being a boss is. You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it’s smooth, sometimes you hit the rocks. In the meantime, you find your pleasures where you can.” -Junior Soprano, He Is Risen (S3E8)
#8
“But should that be a source of shame? That when the desperate struggle for food and shelter is finally behind us, we can turn our attention to other sources of pain and truth?” “Pain and truth? Come on! I’m a fat fucking crook from New Jersey!” -Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano, Calling All Cars (S4E11)
#7
“All due respect, you got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one. Every decision you make, affects every facet of every other fucking thing! It’s too much to deal with, almost. And in the end, you’re completely alone with it all.” -Tony Soprano, All Due Respect (S5E13)
#6
“When’s the last time you had a prostate-exam?” “Hey, I don’t even let anyone wag their finger in my face!” -Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano, Pax Soprana (S1E6)
#5
“Leave the fucking cheese there! Alright? I love fucking cheese at my feet. I stick motherfucking Provolone in my socks at night, so they smell like your sister’s crotch in the morning!” -Silvio Dante, The Happy Wanderer (S2E6)
#4
“Listen, Guido–“ “MY NAME IS CLARENCE!” -Don Hauser & Paulie Gualtieri, Boca (S1E9)
#3
“Hey, I remember every blowjob I ever got. How about you? You remember your first blowjob?” “Yeah, of course.” “How long did it take for the guy to cum? Hehehehehe” -Paulie Gualtieri & Silvio Dante, Toodle-Fucking-Oo (S2E3)
#2
“Hi, this is Detective Mike Hunt, Beaver Falls Pennsylvania Police Department. Do you have a son, Peter Paul?” “Oh my God, what happened?” “It’s alright, ma’am, but I’m afraid he’s in a little trouble. We found him in a public men’s room in LaFayette Park. I don’t know how to put this delicately… he was sucking a cub-scout’s dick.” “What? No! It’s a mistake!” “Ma’am, I wish that was all, but I’m afraid we had to have emergency-surgery performed upon arrival at headquarters after disovery of a small rodent in the rectal passage.” “Oh my God!” “A gerbil, ma’am. Uh, the county does not cover medical procedures deemed caused by criminal sexual activity — section 4, paragraph 15 — we’ll need an insurance-number.” -Ralph Cifaretto & Nucci Gualtieri, Whoever Did This (S4E9)
#1
“I’m not saying there’s nothing out there, but to not live your life? What the fuck are you gonna do?” -Tony Soprano, Made in America (S6E21)
Some last stats, for fun:
THE CHARACTER WITH THE MOST ENTRIES:
Tony Soprano — 44 entries
Jennifer Melfi — 13 entries
Junior Soprano — 12 entries
Paulie Gualtieri — 10 entries
Christopher Moltisanti — 9 entries
Silvio Dante — 8 entries
Carmela Soprano — 6 entries
THE SEASON WITH THE MOST ENTRIES:
Season 1 — 19 entries
Season 3 — 18 entries
Seasons 5 and 6 — 17 entries (tie)
Season 4 — 15 entries
Season 2 — 14
THE EPISODE WITH THE MOST ENTRIES:
Boca(S1E9) — 5 entries
2-way tie: I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano(S1E13) & All Due Respect(S5E13) — 4 entries
8-way tie: Isabella (S1E12), The Telltale Moozadell (S3E9), Army of One (S3E13), The Weight (S4E4), Calling All Cars (S4E11), Sentimental Education (S5E6), Walk Like a Man (S6E17) & Made in America (S6E21) — 3 entries
This article was written to celebrate 60 entries completed out of 86.
Join me next time, as I write about The Ride (S6E9)!
I rank the 86 episodes of The Sopranos. #27 is Members Only, the first episode of Season 6. The greatest season-premiere episode in my opinion! It’s named after a jacket Gene Pontecorvo wears, what can I say?
INFLUENCES
“GOD FUCK IT ALL!” That line and the way Junior delivers it near the end of this episode when Tony comes by, never leaves my head. Just the way it sounds, so sincere. I say it so often in my own thoughts or just aloud when I’m doing some shit and nothing seems to go right. It covers a wide array of emotional subsets adjacent to frustration!
Well well well well well well well. Say whatever you want, but I do believe that there is a thick deliberacy in the fact of this episode showing Tony being so constantly indulgent. Eating so much. Eating excessively expensive stuff in excessive ways. Paying a lot of attention to that, is the best way into understanding just how much Members Only is gradual buildup to the disastrous fall at the end. Three times Tony visits the same Sushi-restaurant where he pays $40 for a piece of fish that just flew in first-class. He makes crass jokes about just how much he’s enjoying himself, gets his wife only mildly upset when he once visits the place without her, and this is after he bought her a car on an impulse… that she now goes around showing to housewives that are not doing as well as she is. You know how in drama it’s an effective way to kill an antagonist — probably advice that every storyteller has heard at some point — when you first show them at their absolute worst, most gluttonous or sinful right before you kill them off? Well I believe quite firmly that the Sopranos-version of abiding to that good-faith rule, was to have Tony eat so much sushi that he has to barf and hold out from belching for a second, in the middle of eating, just so he can continue stuffing his face — and then in the end he gets shot. Really watch this episode next time paying attention to what a great slew of takeaways there is to have in just the mere contrast-work of how well Tony is doing versus how poorly Gene Pontecorvo is doing. These scenes and Gene’s scenes are pretty much always placed right next to each other in the eisode’s succession.
Exhibit A: Nori’s favorite: a spicy shrimp-roll… Tony sometimes fantasizes about this place during sex, which Carmela just finds ever-so-amusing for him to say right in the middle of their dinner.
Exhibit B: apparently the eel is delicious, or at least that’s what is alleged in a second eating-scene. We deliberately play this scene in immediate succession to the one where Gene and his wife deal with their initial shock of their dreams not coming true afterall. Their Florida-prospects are trashed with great indifference by Tony, and they’re talking about how Tony isn’t answering, like he forgot about the whole thing. Gene says let him process it but the wife sees through it. Oh, did I mention Carmela gets a luxurious new automobile right after she and Tony indulgently process that first-class fish again? Yeah apparently she needs it, just so they can both get safely home in one piece.
Exhibit C: (again) RIGHT after Christopher uses Gene’s hopes and dreams to get him to do a dirty risky job for him just because he can, he’s the heir of Tony and his graces are as good as Tony’s… we cut to Tony now munching alone in the same sushi-place, stopping to burp so he can keep on eating.
It’s not the eating itself that’s the offense… it’s just placed so well in every single spot of this episode’s linear progression of the desperate Pontecorvo-storyline, that it has to say something. Eating isn’t an affront, maybe even the indulgent manner in which Tony does it, isn’t… But it is played for a dramatic counterbalance to just how poorly Gene is doing, and how easy it would be for Tony to help the guy out if he had the time — from indulging — the give a care. And mind you, it takes all the way until the end of the episode to even realize how severe all of it was. Sushi’s nice and tasty though. From the writers, it’s such a good choice for the food to use for these scenes because anybody who likes sushi and eats it now and then (not me, I hate sushi) will tell you that this isn’t even food that you’re supposed to stuff your face with. This isn’t lasagna or pastafazzool, it’s a delicacy that’s supposed to be taken in for the samples of a variety of unique flavors. Tony just can’t help himself. This is just the way he is. By the food being sushi, the story gives this across in a subtle way.
Another interesting aspect of Christopher/Gene’s dynamic that we briefly see — it is abundantly clear that Christopher is way-ahead — when you consider that the two men were made on the same day in Fortunate Son (S3E3)*. But the dichotomy between that only gets showcased this one time, shown extremely clear… is deep. The level of difference-in-power only is that deep because of Tony being related to Christopher. Christopher’s a captain — a position Gene is prospectful of maybe happening in the next two years if he keeps working hard and outdoing himself; and that was just what he said to his disappointed wife; that means it’s the absolute most he could hope for in his wildest dreams, and he said it so he could sound as optimistic as possible in that situation — and not to mention Christopher has no real intention of getting a good word out to Tony if Gene goes and whacks Teddy Spidorakis. Tony in all likelihood doesn’t even know who Teddy Spidorakis even is — he’s up on his ivory castle indulging on whatever new expensive whim he just got interested in, living his best life. Christopher simply needs to get rid of this guy, and due to how high-up he is, probably believes to be above killing him himself. He knows about Gene’s request and knows this is a situation he can abuse. All it would’ve taken for Christopher to make this move would have been just to hear how desperate Gene was. Our Chrissy is indeed getting more street-smart and savvy than ever before. He’s come a long long way from hijacking Comley-trucks and running away from Junior’s retaliations with Brendan Filone. Just goes to show what good it can do to wise up and get your act together! Get more focused! Oh, what? Christopher never did wise up? He was always stupid and this predatory instinct is no reflection of intelligence, only of a manipulation-skillset? Christopher also committed his most irredeemable act of his life two episodes ago, and he’ll never feel fulfilled in his life after letting Adriana die? But mom! He’s being such a good gangster!
Right after Gene does whack Teddy Spidorakis, Tony gets up on a scale. He doesn’t quite like how much it says he weights, so he takes his pants off… I swear, Terence Winter is an irreplaceable piece of what makes every little nuance of world come across this-well. This is such a fucking brilliantly written episode full of important and interesting stuff to take in. Full of detail. Ah!
Exhibit D: Gene comes back from killing Teddy Spidorakis. We close up to his face, which has a couple blood-splatters on it he didn’t notice. He wipes it on a map-book. We establish two things at the same time, fast and easy: Gene has a hard time looking into mirrors, which is a pretty general thing for a man but could be a way into reading some internalized deep guilt/trauma cocktail, that I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve for what he did. It happening so fast, though, puts the message across in just the right way that this mortal sin is just another one of things that you simply just have to do for indulgent, gluttonous people such as your lumbering beast of a boss. This fast wiping of Gene’s face, then ends and we cut to Carmela rubbing her luxurious new car in Ginny’s face.
*Regarding their being made on the same day, Ron @ Sopranos Autopsy had an interesting proposition: maybe the black bird in the window really was a bad omen just like Christopher had feared… but for Gene and not him. Gene, who wasn’t looking at it. You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?
So Tony’s indulgence isn’t an offense or an affront, straight-out. It’s a work of contrast to his misunderstood, bleeding men. Life isn’t fair, I’m not the first person to say that; I’m not even the first person to say that today at 1:30 o’clock in the afternoon. It’s a widely known fact. What this episode does, with all those things I mentioned in that list of my findings, is that those who have got it good, those that indulge when their men are bleeding… don’t only show a harmful example, but enable such a lack of reflective living, to prosper.
Tony never did anything bad to Gene in this episode, not really, and Gene was in a downward spiral whether he’d get to move to Florida or not. Members Only‘s constant imagery of Tony stuffing his face, isn’t there to tell you “overeating is the devil” or anything dramatically applicable like that. It’s just here… to show you some things.
FUN FACT, in Talking Sopranos’ 67th episode, addressing Members Only, Michael Imperioli asked from his good ole buddy Steve Schirripa, what was his favorite Sushi-place in existence. Reluctant, Steve agreed to Michael’s first proposition, but then admitted, that he is not, a fan, of Sushi.
In the podcast, Steve called this one of the best opening-episodes for any season and I agree with him. I think it’s the best, as a matter of fact.
Steve was also adamant at at least three points of his recap, that Gene should have never told Tony about the amount of money he inherited. Never! Never! Never! Did the people hear it in the back?! Never!!
Before starting Season 6 for my 9th time (nice) I remembered that Members Only was a particularly indulgence-theme’d episode. It was dinner-time for me too coincidentally, so I went into the episode warming up a nice hot plate of ham-temptation with kebab, a little Pringles just in case cravings wouldn’t end there, water and soda to wash things down, and a grape long drink just because I had a busy day that day, and deserved a little bit of a buzz in the end of my evening. I’d been watching over my nephews all morning and afternoon.
Terence Winter won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for this episode.
The hesitancy of David Chase to even do a sixth season (he actually had no plans to go beyond a fourth), was touched upon by Chase in a 2002 TV Guide interview for ”Sopranos Companion”: ”Tony Soprano, guys of his ilk, they’re not very reflective people, they don’t do a lot, in reality. So there’s only so many stories, so much depth that you can impart to a character like that and still stay true to realism. Plus, it’s just my personality. I can’t stand solving the same problem over and over again.”
The episode begins with a wonderful Spoken Word/Dub track, Seven Souls by Material, playing over a montage that — not-unlike the It Was a Very Good Year-montage in Guy Walks Into a Psychiatrist’s Office… (S2E1) — shows us in plain, intriguing, slow and a little bit sexy details, how these characters are doing right now.
Where everybody is now, at the start of a new season.
Perhaps the thematically most significant bit of that opening-montage was how it itself opened. Agent Harris’ new partner — assigned to him via his transferral into the anti-terror department of the FBI — says the very first line of the season.
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Ron Goddard
Sopranos Autopsy‘s Ron mused that Dwight Harris’ barfing in the opening-scene was – among the plenty other things it represented – a precursor to this season’s recurring heavy emphasis on physicality. ”We will see numerous scenes of illness, convalescence, farting. Characters will constantly step out of scenes to go take a piss. Tony’s body has become a ponderous mass. Vito Spatafore will radically transform his body, and his son Lil Vito will later radically reinvent his physical persona (as well as ”bodily” vent his frustration in the school shower). […] After [the] evocative, almost ethereal montage, Members Only becomes quite physical again, culminating finally with a shot to Tony’s (and the viewer’s) gut.”
Season 6 is more luxury-themed, more bodily-function-themed than all of its’ predecessors, all of which are things that set it apart and make it feel more “new” in more than just the sense of… of being actually the newest. Sidenote: it’s actually amazing what a time of technological advancements The Sopranos came out in. It didn’t run for even a full decade, yet the first season was commercially sold on VHS, whilst the last season was High Definition-supported.
Tony’s digging up some money at Junior’s backyard, that his uncle said he had buried in there from some gig in the 1970s. Tony has sweat on his head and urgent questions on his mind, to which he can only get vague allusions to Pussy Malanga still being alive, and other discrepancies as answers. Junior’s mental state is not doing all that well — notably, he’s at a much worse state than when Livia was back in 46 Long (S1E2) when Tony saw it necessary to have her move into a retirement community.
That is gonna be a topic Tony and Melfi go over in this episode’s key therapy-scene.
The episode landed into this scene with the ending of the Material-song, and that was especially tasteful because of just what the last line of the song was. “Number seven is Sekhu, the remains”. Junior is the remains right now, at this stage of his life. I didn’t take it as The Sopranos‘ writers having fun at Junior’s expense — or the expense of Alzheimer’s disease — but Terry Winter definitely is having fun with his material. Junior’s neighbor looks at Tony working that shovel, looks on and on very suspiciously and Tony just asks, if they had voles on their yard as well?
Phil is seeing Johnny Sack at the can.
A rather current-situation-establishing scene in all that it contains, but a key bit of conversation is when Johnny and his cigarette ask Phil and his pissy scowl, about how he’s doing with Tony, ever since the fallout with Tony Blundetto and Phil’s brother Billy back in Long Term Parking (S5E12) and All Due Respect (S5E13). “You asked me to bury the hatchet, John. I’m doing it out of respect for you.” All-in-all it’s a pretty Machiavellian move from Phil. That’s something people forget about Phil — he looked close to heroic for all o fhis appearances in this season’s first episode! For the biggest pain-in-the-ass for all of the final episodes of this show, it’s quite the forgotten bit of Phil-history.
Gene Pontecorvo comes to the backroom of the Bada Bing with some gifts for Tony and a bold proposal. He’s inherited two million dollars from his deceased aunt and thinks this is ample opportunity to move down to Florida and get bitten by bugs that are as big as his fist.
Tony initially relents:
At the end though he says that he’ll think about it, and needs some time to decide what he’ll say.
“What’re you gonna do?” Is said by Tony, to Gene here when the latter goes into detail about how much his aunt meant to him. It has become quite the catchphrase for Tony ever since Proshai, Livushka (S3E2) (okay probably not really because everything about everybody isn’t always about their mothers, but the show’s at least shown it that way). Tony repeated the phrase all along the memorial-proceedings for his own mother who died in that episode. The reason this all sprung into my mind, and I thought it was interesting was because Proshai, Livushka was also the episode where Gene Pontecorvo first appeared in. We are reminded of this very important past episode, of that habit of Tony’s, just as pressingly as we are about whether Tony really felt like it was a nursing home or a retirement-community after all. He’s uncertain about his uncle, perhaps not thinking or wanting to think about the possible severity, and the eating might be acting as a self-distraction, just like reverting back to talking about his mother, might be.
I believe in all those takes myself, but what’s a more abstract thought I had about all this rich connectivity, is that this episode might still have some kind of a spirit of The Test Dream (S5E11) still lingering. In that, Tony’s subconscious might be getting him out of thinking about life’s unfortunate inevitabilities because the fact remains HE’S NOT PREPARED!
Gene comes home knowing probably on more levels than one, that this is not gonna happen, but it’s important to him that he not disappoint his wife so gravely. At least not until Tony has definitively said “no”.
There’s a whole scuffle between Gene and his dope-addict son who they don’t now yet is a dope-addict. But they know he has a history; they know he’s being suspicious about who he spends his time with.
Gene breaks a bowl.
All the people portraying Gene’s family-members only appear in this episode, and this is the only scene where they all appear together. Two interesting facts about these actors, that I found out from IMDB:
The actor playing Gene’s son is five years younger than Gene’s actor, and 11 years older than Gene’s woman, his fictional mother.
Gene’s daughter Ally was played by Grace Van Patten, daughter of Tim Van Patten the staff director.
“40 dollars for a piece of fish that just flew in first-class? I think we’re more than lucky.” Tony Soprano
Out in Brooklyn, Hesh Rabkin and his nephew get assaulted by Gerry Torciano’s peeps, for them thinking they’re trying to expand on Gerry’s turf wehn they were really out there just to spend the evening.
It’s pretty bad. They try to set the car on fire with a burning newspaper to the gas-tank and the nephew gets run-over by a passing car on-accident.
Made men of the Soprano-family congregate in front of Satriale’s.
Phil Leotardo stops by, talks all-cousin-ly to Vito and Tony and Christopher share some thoughts about the Shah of Iran.
Agent Harris stops by as well and introduces Ron, his new partner. In terms of setting alone, this scene is wholly similar to the iconic ending of House Arrest (S2E11) where people mainly just lounged around, some people they knew, walked by, and it felt like a pretty unassuming moment.
Vito makes a remark to Gene Pontecorvo about a Members Only-jacket he’s wearing — insinuating that it’s gone out of style, by asking “how long you been wearin’ that?” And no, I’m not gonna touch on those fan-theories that some of you thought this writeup was going to really focus on.
Tony gets a call from Hesh, and he and Chrissy stop by the hospital and hear the full story of what went down last night in Brooklyn. It’s a pretty serious setting, but gets in a funny moment when Christopher asks “chinks did this?” and Hesh gets mad.
Carmela and Hugh are talking with a building-inspector at the site of the spec-house. Her investment, for her future, which Tony agreed to pay for so they can get together peacefully in Long Term Parking (S5E12).
There’s a pretty funadmental issue about the house. Turns out Hugh has invested-on and used a building-material on the foundations that isn’t approved by the state’s current policies. The project is put on an indefinite halt.
Tony, Carlo, Christopher, Silvio, Vito and Paulie have dinner at Vesuvio.
“Artie! Oh! Menus!” Paulie Gualtieri
It’s a surprisingly quotable affair. I bet a lot of people who it’s been a long time for — since their last rewatch of the whole series — don’t even remember that this many quotes came just from a simple dinner-scene at Vesuvio, in the sixth season’s opener.
“Where do ya get this bread? The bread-museum?” Silvio Dante
“What the fuck is it? I can’t catch a fucking break?!” Tony Soprano
Things are headed forward in a very dynamic fashion!
In an alternate world, where III had come out after The Sopranos and not the other way around…
Sooo this episode was third of the way through, and the biggest immediate threat to Tony’s future — Raymond Curto — just up and dies. Well, the biggest one that we the audience were prepared for anyway. He was going to testify to the contents of his recordings from important Soprano-family meetings. That literally would’ve been it, and now — blissfully ignorant of Raymond’s budding friendship with Agent Grasso — Tony just goes around kicking rocks because his luck is just so lowsy. I don’t know if there was a greater intention ever, with the character of Raymond, but he added his own amount to the world as a sceniccharacter and was a good figure of a looming threat, with just how co-operative he was with the FBI ever since Season 3. Now they can’t take any of his evidence to court because he’s not alive to back it up. Tony was this close — he had not been questioning his oldest capo at all along the years, this all would’ve been totally left-field. And it was left-field, but in other ways. I don’t know if Terry Winter just had this crazy idea and asked David Chase if he could kill off Raymond Curto in this episode, and David who’d forgotten about the whole guy, was just like “sure sure, go ahead”. I don’t know if that’s how it went down. Most likely it’s not. But if I found out that this was exactly what happened behind the scenes when determining Raymond’s fate, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Because aside from tying up that loose end — which, unlike Valerie and the cut to black, actually necessitated some closure — it also helps Members Only in starting to garner this feeling of unpredictability.
Raymond’s funeral is a respectful and decent affair. People from New York even, come over.
“Stand-up guys like that, they’re a dying breed.” Rusti Millio
“Dick Barone died?” Christopher asks from the guys out in the back, and this was a sentiment shared by us the fans as well. Barone had been a recurring character since Pilot (S1E1) and just up and died off-screen between seasons. This unpredictability’s really forming into a pattern…
“You ever think what a coincidence it is that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease?” “You gonna make that same stupid joke every time that comes up?” “Sorry… Everything’s so fucking morbid.” “There’s a man lying dead over there!” Christopher Moltisanti & Tony Soprano
Tony gives AJ a speech about why he should watch his back with friends that do low-life shit, and not extend too many olive branches to people that are not related to you. It’s an Italian family-centric conservative mindset, yeah, and I guess in enough time anybody could poke a hole in the logic and list all these exceptions, but here in the context of Tony speaking to AJ it’s very sound advice and something Tony believes in, truly, respectfully.
He’s just got no idea how ironically the sentiment is later gonna ring. This is a brilliant twisting-the-knife storyline, when you consider this speech, Tony’s altruistic behavior towards Junior and… …cazzata malanga.
Later Tony’s in therapy. Talking about his uncle, the aforementioned altruism he’s been showing in this one regard lately, what it might relate to as far as old, buried memories are concerned…
“…By putting her into a lovely retirement community?” “It’s a nursing home!” Jennifer Melfi & Tony Soprano
Alan Sepinwall noted in The Star-Ledger an ironic reversal between seasons 1 and 6 in regard to Corrado’s attempt at Tony’s life: in season 1, Livia urged Junior to move against Tony out of anger at being put in a retirement community, but at the shocking end of this episode Corrado is able to take a shot at Tony only because he refused to put his senile uncle in a nursing home. It’s even acknowledged here out-loud by Tony himself — maybe not even to mark how ironic it is, but to further press the point that being more reflective in your thinking, could’ve saved Tony from this shooting.
.
The boys come up to visit Anthony the lord of the lenses, Ginny Sacrimoni’s brother who’s a formal connection to John directly, in business-matters… for as much as Johnny can run things from the big house.
They’re looking like an accomplished pack of gentlemen.
Whoopsie daisy, or something like that, is what Tony says when he realizes — having already picked a pair that he likes — that he left his wallet back in the car. Poor thing!
It’s not shown here, but Christopher expresses interest in Ginny Sack’s car, which is going to be sold at a good price because the Federal Government are freezing the Sacrimoni-family’s assets because of John’s ongoing trial.
Anthony and Ginny come to visit Johnny, talk to him about sugar and spice and everything nice and how Christopher wants that car. At this point I gotta commend some character-consistency we see. John’s pride and resentment of Christopher the young man who he just last-season said should still wait in the car — who now seems like the only person that can take that car off his hands for a ridiculous prize which alone would hurt Johnny’s pride. But hearing the mere name Moltisanti… Vincent Curatola expresses all this with nothing else but a poignant frustrated gaze.
Christopher Tony and Vito wait at the Bing, Phil arrives with Gerry and they’re here to talk about the Hesh-incident.
“Oh! Finally! Was starting to grow mushrooms outta my ass.” “There’s an image.” Vito Spatafore & Phil Leotardo
Three shots.
Gene takes three shots at Teddy Spidorakis, close-range inside a restaurant.
Three.
Locations-manager and David Chase’s personal assisant on The Sopranos, Jason Minter revealed in episode #59 of the Talking Sopranos-podcast, that another song was gonna be used for this episode’s opening montage, instead of the William Burroughs-track which David Chase had wanted to use as early as the pilot. It was a live version of Blondie’s song Dreaming. Dreaming does appear in the episode, it’s playing from Gene Pontecorvo’s car radio when he’s driving back home from Boston
The next day Gene wants to talk to Silvio about the Florida-thing and Silvio has an answer. It is a very plain no.
“Well can I talk to Tony about it?” “I wouldn’t bother him, he’s out on a new boat.” Gene Pontecorvo & Silvio Dante
This episode is a fucking masterstroke in pulling audience-sympathy for a new focus-character. The structure alone aids it so much in that. The disparity of the Pontecorvo-family and Soprano-family seems like something we’ll explore a lot. Members Only manages to walk up to that feeling. It’s been captivating so far, and we yet again wonder how these writers were able to do this so quick. Or at least I am.
Then we get to Stugots II (what happened to the first Studots is still the most debated mystery of this whole thing. Right up there with what happened to the Russian, did Ralphie kill the horse, is that really Vito in the bakery-scene in The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti (S1E8), and what was the Chinese Godfather’s offer that they couldn’t understand). Just before cutting to this luxurious-looking golden hour shot of the boat, Silvio said to Gene that he shouldn’t bother Tony who’s out on a new boat. While out on the boat, Tony gets bothered by someone else. Janice! It’s the Junior-matter once again!
Tony reluctantly — loudly — volunteers to go look after Knucklehead Smiff because if you don’t do it yourself it never gets done!
This is a perfect time to mention this short deleted scene from this episode, that I really really liked when I saw it.
Carmela and Angie eat at Vesuvio.
Angie Angie… I love that she got to be the one to bring Carmela right back down from this new high-horse of success. And I love that she got to do it just by being her; just by merely being in the trajectory we’ve seen her in so far. Despite what this world has been trying to do to you, angie. They can’t touch you now.
“You bought that [car] yourself?” “The accountant says I’m better off owning it outright.” Carmela Soprano & Angie Bonpensiero
She really might be my favorite character of this show. Like the one I like the most. Maybe perseverance is just appealing to me and that’s that. How much of a beacon of the light of perseverance she embodies. Everybody’s having their downfalls in this show except Angie. Everybody’s had that nail pounded into their coffin that says they’ll never get redemption… except Angie.
Just something I thought about while reading Sopranos Autopsy‘s recap of this episode: Isn’t it just ever-so-clever that of all the things that this episode showed us had progressed into new states in the 21 months since the last episode’s airing (Carmela’s great progress on the spec-house, Janice and Bobby’s new daughter, etc.) the person’s progress that ended up being the most important, was actually one that the opening montage didn’t show us? Angie’s great new financial success? The biggest thorn on anybody’s (Carmela’s) side. And it only wasn’t a part of the opening montage, because she’s not a part of this world anymore. She has put her head down, started working without asking Tony Soprano for anything, and simultaneously spread her wings!
Which is a great segue, I think, to this one shot that is of a literal dead-end.
This shot has always struck me as the most encapsulating image of Members Only, the surprising and shocking season-opener — my favorite season-opener! So emblematic of how the final season is gonna feel/has already began to feel! So dark! Season 6, we’re here!
You know what I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately? Because of this show. Specific aspects of one’s life, social life more than other kinds. Tony has all these relationships, his actual friends and his friends from the Family, his family which extends to his uncle, sisters. Social factions of a person’s life. This episode pulled the shocker of the year circa 2006 with its’ ending, and that surprise got basically all of its’ mileage from the episode itself treating Tony’s social factions as less stressful than usual, more pleasantly regular. Sure he had his dilemmas with Junior and Livia, and spoke out about them but it never felt as pressing as when he’s actively stressed out by either senior-member of the family. I don’t know, I think about Tony’s social factions and can’t help compare them to my own. Got my siblings, their friends, my parents, friends, classmates, people at work. With all of them it’s a little different, how we get on day-to-day. How I’m sitting here after having spent the day with my amazing nephews, and it’s just a day in the life. Something I’ve been thinking lately. I’m currently on a tangent, don’t even know if I’m going anywhere with this. But that’s good. Each faction of a life just contributes something different and specifically interesting to it. Now that I’ve lived in my current apartment for the last two years — I actually started this very project on the first days of living here — my thinking about about all my social factions, has become compartmentalized in a more cemented way. I don’t know.
For something to happen like Tony’s uncle shooting him, after that his factions — family, fmaiglia, work-acquaintances… this is something that stops the life of everybody around Tony for a while. People that are connected to him in different ways, for different amounts of time… they all share in having a degree of worry about his survival. And everybdoy would have people worried about them in a situation like Tony’s gonna have for the next two episodes, it’s just that the guy we’re following is Tony Soprano. We’re acquainted with the people he’s acquainted with. We know him so well we know the people around him. Chase’s decision to have Tony get shot as early as this — with a whole season ahead — was smart because we know he doesn’t die then and there. Something is gonna happen, and something is going to be made out of him falling into a coma. But what is that gonna be like without Tony out there doing the things he did?
It’s not gonna be a death, and the people watching know that. I used to be puzzled especially on my first viewing, as to why they would do a story of Tony getting shot in the stomach, in the last season’s first episode. It’s such a weird place, it’s such a low-stakes situation, I used to think. I was wrong. Something is gonna happen. But what is it gonna be like without Tony out there in the world doing the things he did? Being the dancing bear for us that he is. Just what is the void that he leaves behind him, and what does it mean for the SopranoWorld? What does it mean to go through a transformative experience? What does it mean to change — to essentially leave a part of you forever out of your life, however big or small? Isn’t that what death — in these fictional confines and their purposes — is? Just simply to change? Furthermore, these questions wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t get the Kevin Finnerty-storyline. If we never got to see through something that is even more profound than Tony’s own eyes… what is probably out there waiting for him.
Which people out of all his social factions, are going to start burying him already?
We see what his son would have done (and did, even if Ronald Zellman wiped the deed out of existence). We got a glimpse into a world without Tony, but the sentiment will still be just as pressing in the last 9 episodes of this show as it will be throughout this coma-saga: You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?
This episode ends in two highly dramatic climaxes:
Gene has had enough.
Tony cooks some pasta for Junior, who in his derangement thinks his nephew is Pussy Malanga.
Shoots him in the gut.
“CAZZATA MALANGA!” Junior Soprano
I don’t really have closing-words for this recap, but my writeup for Join the Club (S6E2) will be a good place to go if you want me to immediately follow up the events of this writeup. I’m still really proud of everything that I pulled together for the first coma-episode’s analysis. The second one, Mayham (S6E3) is gonna be in this countdown’s top ten.
Also, not enough people acknowledge the possible theory (yes, I’m finally talking about theories!!) that Junior was just still mad at Tony for those jokes about eating pussy in Boca (S1E9) and thought Tony was taunting him because he’s been smelling like Sushi all week long.
In the original broadcast of this episode, no previews for the next episode were shown in order to keep the aftermath of Tony’s shooting a mystery.
Tony calls Junior Knucklehead Smiff.
Vito asked Agent harris if he’d lost weight using the Atkins diet.
Gene, in his proposition to retire, cites the precedent set by real-life mafia boss ”Joe Bananas” (Joseph Bonanno), who ran the Bonanno crime family from 1931 to 1968.
The movie Junior watches is the 1957 Stanley Kubrick film Paths of Glory.
Tony jokingly says he’ll get J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the prank calls Junior is convinced Pussy Malanga constantly makes. Hoover is an interesting yet obvious reference for Tony to make in his joke, given that he was the first Director of the FBI in the Bureau’s history.
Thanks to Tomasso Mori from Sopranos Duckposting for the Godfather III-crossover meme sopranosoutofcontext @ Instagram for that picture of Tony with subtitles. Chris Maccaviti from The Sopranos – This Thing of Ours for the “did this asshole use pine” meme and Michael McDonough from Sopranos Duckposting for the meme about good times had with Gene.
Baroque Pop, Psychedelic Pop, Jazz Fusion | Sophomore album by David Axelrod; released October 1969.
Stay tuned ’til the end for a very special feature, a whole book that came along with my friend Filip’s order of the Songs of Experience-LP. It’s pretty rare stuff, in that I couldn’t find it anywhere online, Filip told me about the existence of such a thing one day last autumn and this writeup is thus dedicated to him. Silly twat that he is~~
“An anthology of awareness after birth … based on the 18th century poems of William Blake.”
“Logically, a redux of Song of Innocence with a sinister bent. The Jazz incorporation is more apparent here, the subtlety matched.“ –RateYourMusic-user Clockwork1
I still remember those times, it was simpler and though it might’ve not felt like it, more innocent really. And I alluded to this already when I reviewedSong of Innocence (1968) earlier in this countdown, but back in 2017 I had a small circle of internet-friends that I garnered from music-roups (friends I still keep in-contact with) with similar niche-tastes and even more similar curiosity for music-discovery. In 2017, for us, David Axelrod’s first two albums were a cool insider-thing to know about. I think we even first heard about Axelrod through a cool guy who had a short but influential tenure in the group chat, before leaving. He makes beats for one of us, who’s a rapper, these days.
It’s fun to think back to. It’s also fun that the experience of listening to Songs of Experience, keeps thoroughly updating with time.
It starts playing, and right away, throws up the first thing to make me think back to how I’ve always admired the whole album for its’ sheer art of arrangement. The first two drum-strikes are enough to throw me into this captivating high flight of fancie. Steady rhythm on the opening-track carries us to a string-section that just tells such a story and it’s just… all impressive. Palatable with a sleek exterior, but impressive.
Even more specifically the amazingness rains in from high and low notes’ contrast-work, mostly carried across by the strings in the first act of the song. It all just displays such command, I kinda circled back there to the point of that point of “art of arrangement”, but what’s even more, is that The Poison Tree is almost shockingly progressive on top of everything else it accomplishes!
And there ain’t nothing more whistle-inducing than that ol’ tune A Little Girl Lost! This song is such a lifelong favorite. So classy. Those little clangs just… well, I’d hate to use this expression again but they really tell a story so poignantly that it can’t be ignored. Just such an immediate, palpable snese of feeling and scenery. And when it goes to those choruses, those strings assist this ascension to a heavenly delight of a center-melody.
London is a track that I would — with its’ short runtime and all — call iconic without hesitation. Even though this album didn’t reach that much fame, it feels and sounds in every distinct facet, like it should’ve — like it still did somehow. It’s… strange, it makes me believe so much, suspend the ol’ disbelief that much. Even the short song is packed stock-full of meaningful feeling.
“Swingin’ sex music for your sixties bachelor pad. And look, there’s already a girl in a crochet dress and a creepy shirtless dude on the cover! This album pretty much does all the work for you.” –RateYourMusic-user merton
The Sick Rose builds up an incredible effect with its’ high-lingering, almost musique concréte-sounds before a melodic opening — also taking its time — into this… I’m tempted to say “worldbuilding” because it really isn’t far from being the case. Everything’s been so epic by this point, and will continue in such a state. By this point this album’s already started feeling like it is building up something singular, something like a world of its own each time you hear it all. After this, it won’t even be a challenge to maintain that feeling which is so self-contained. Like it is the only thing of its’ kind. It’s not; calling Song of Innocence similar to this (despite some gaps in tone and the implementation of experimentation) is not untrue in-principle at all. Nevertheless, Experience putting this effect on so deliberately, is always a beautiful thing to hear. It rewards a curious mood.
That song also has this wonderful compounding effect to it with drums — so often utilized by the album as a frontal, driving thing amidst its’ progressions of the more sweeping kind — really only assisting from the back of the mix. Coming across, playing across so slowly and patiently, that it’s… well, it giving way to this string-section is nothing short of epic even if “epic” is an overused word. Y’know, it being overused kinda ceases to matter when you face art like this — music like this — that refedines its’ meaning once mo’. The last bridge of The Sick Rose always plays to me as a special kind of highlight inside the song. Just a relaly special portion!
All in all The Sick Rose is just a perfect display of every assorted great talent that has been at-play thus far, and it flows so easily it’s, for some reason, easy to even overlook when you come back for yet another revisit of this wonderful, compact, plainly perfect Psychedelic Jazz Fusion-packáge. But it is brilliant, and stands out by virtue of signaling a turning point for the album’s more reflective first half, to a more bitingly serious second one. A welcome change in these tides.
The School Boy. Fittingly, this song touches me right in that place in my brains where I keep my memories of when I was a child, walking to shcool in the mornings with a backpack full of books and pencils. One of those innocuous and unassuming years of my life that I have barely any memories of. I wasn’t quite in any role yet. It wasn’t a new school, I think, these memories might be placed somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd grade. But I wasn’t bullied yet, wasn’t bullying anybody yet, there were no supposed power-structures within the class like we’d later get used to; there were no expectations for the world yet. There were ways to spend time, some you liked, some you didn’t, some people you liked, some you didn’t. You were able to express all of it. Some times on those walks I would feverishly check and check my backpack, make sure I had everything in it or even had it on. I’m talking 5-7 times of just taking it off my back, stopping for a sec to be absolutely sure I had everything in that backpack.
And that’s just what the first acoustic melody-lines make me think of.
That’s just before yet again wonderful string-sections, fucking buhrilliant progressions, take over again. It’s incredible what this album can still do to me, what it can kindle just as quickly, as it can ramp things up to cinematic highs.
There’s so much I wish I could say — that I wish I could radiate… it’s hard to describe that instinctual urge, but it’s a big part of why I write books at all. That instinct… it’s like the universe, is relaying things to me, it is letting me hear. Just that simple phrase on that acoustic guitar. The dextrous complexity in the sheer sensation, when those guitars come back after this song’s highest peak. After the fact. The same phrase, but as an afterthought~
The Human Abstract is more of the same, but I know you know, that when I say “more of the same” in any context/frame that addresses this album rightchea… I mean it to say that it is soaringly epic, fantastical and grand. This is those adjectives, in a packaging that’s distinctly winding, patient, and… lastingly effective.
This short piano-exit on the song, comes in to reprise the amazing main-melodies, and is just a chef’s kiss man. Probably goes down as the most memorable moment of Songs of Experience.
If not for…
…The Fly.
The Fly is my favorite song on this album. Play a game where you get to fly, see a movie where somebody is glying, see a dream where you or someone else is flying, or go on a flight… listening to this song — in all its’ soaring grandeur, but with a brooding quality in there somewhere — would make all those experiences equally, just come to life. I fucking love this song. One of my favorite songs of the entire decade. Has to be top ten.
It’s such a moment of COMING ALIVE.
A Divine Image as a closer is distinctly, decisively strange. It is an authoritively instantaenous, if uncomfortable, final notion to this thing that has spoken a certain kind of language with most of the prominent cinematic undertone, but still kept things relatively easy and palatable in their presentation. No more though. When you revisit this album, it makes all worldly sense for it to end this way. Why? …I’m not sure.
Additional notes
Interesting little bit of radio promo:
My brilliant friend Dakota wrote a beautiful review of this record on RateYourMusic:
The same riff, sampled from The Human Abstract, into Stem/Long Stem of Endtroducing….. (1996), also appears on the (in my opinion, superior) Cops ’n’ Robbers Mix included in DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing-remix album, Excessive Ephemera (2005). I really needed to mention that because that remix is actually my favorite DJ Shadow track, behind only Building Steam with a Grain of Salt.
credit: White Noise Records’ Facebook-page.
THE BOOK Thanks, Filip.
WHOSAMPLED
The Human Abstract. Sampled on Midnight in a Perfect World and Stem/Long Stem/Transmission 2 by DJ Shadow, Justice (Brotherhood & Understanding) by Pete Rock.
A Divine Image. Sampled on Centurion by Earl Sweatshirt, Brainstorm / P.S.K. (No Gimmicks Remix) by Lord Finesse, Take ‘Em to War by Kool GRap, Return of the Loop Digga by Quasimoto,Mind Your Business by La Coka Nostra and Cargo Planes by Curren$y.
The Fly. Sampled on Mind Your Business as well. Sampled on Last Day by The Notorious B.I.G..
The School Boy. Sampled on State to State by No I.D., Sleeping Ute (Remix) by Nicolás Jaar and Far Away by Busta Rhymes.
I rank the 86 episodes of The Sopranos. #28 is Army of One, the finale of Season 3. Named after a motivational anecdote said by Major Zwingli, who can’t stop smoking cigarettes enough for one meeting about prudence and discipline.
INFLUENCES
This was one of the two episodes watched by Samuli Leinonen, one main-character of my 2016 book Ice Road. The scene I depict him watching in that book, is the one where Tony and Ralphie talk about Jackie Jr. in that car. What is to be his fate. I highlight the line “more important than a particular decision is that it happens in a timely fashion. Chapter 14, where Samuli has to make a tough decision, is called The Timely Fashion.
“Why be an army at all?” Carmela will ask Zwingli right after the Major’s pompous line. Timely, since America is actually at war in the year this episode’s set in, and a close friend-family just in this episode, loses their son to street-violence. Jackie Jr. isn’t many years AJ’s senior, and no matter how, the boy’s parents are liable to project something harmful onto their son, before it’s over.
First it’s hitting him from saying something smart. Not saying the slap itself wasn’t deserved, but it came in-lieu of Tony overreacting because he was subtly reacting to another son-figure of his, sliding off the rails uncontrollably. Being half-present in your own kid’s life could’ve brought this on, too, y’know. But I’ll talk plenty about that later in this writeup.
This obsession with sending him to military-school. Again, more subtly a reaction to how disastrous the Jackie Jr.-situation is. Tony thinks he’s running out of time to set AJ straight because he’s run into such a dead-end with Jackie. Jackie is now as good as dead, and Tony somehow thinks this reflects to AJ who hardly even knew the kid.
That forceful “I told you so”-look at AJ, when they were lowering Jackie Jr.’s casket and AJ’s crime actually never was anything more than stealing test-results. I get that Tony might think he “knows everything there is to know” about slippery slopes in life right now, but that’s just a reaction to seeing this Jackie Jr.-thing coming. He can nigh admit to ever giving his approval that the kid dies. Again, I can’t help but think that being more active in AJ’s life would give Tony the perspective he needs to assess his son’s simultaneously-occurring issues with reasonable levelheaded relativity.
The moment that finally does give Tony the perspective: AJ is pushed so fucking far by his parents’ projecting and obsessions, that he has to endure a panic attack (to the sincere defense of Tony, he didn’t know AJ had attacks). Nevertheless this works perfectly as the dramatic conclusion of AJ’s arc this-season. The Sopranos‘ drama really excels the most when nobody’s explicitly at-fault, but the bad thing happening is something everybody could have prevented with just a little less selfishness. It’s almost a rule of thumb for the show, and something that’s gonna prominently feature in most of the 27 episodes that are yet to be written-up at this point of The Soprano Onceover. AJ’s panic-attack is when Tony finally gets the perspective he needs. In this moment, he realizes AJ is not the same as Jackie Jr.. He’s a Soprano.
Finally, when Tony and Carmela’s attempts to keep Meadow calm during the decadent hypocritical display at the funeral of the boy she loved… when she slips away finally, the parents eventually have nobody else to be intrusive and controlling over, other than AJ.
And to be fair to that last point, I think there’s a progression. Intrusive and over-protective is always gonna be better than literally forcing one’s son to military school. Not to mention, whatever urge Tony and Carmela will possess to hold AJ tighter and closer from now on, they’re just gonna forget in due time. Like they do with all their whims and wishes regarding their son. You saw it time and time again in Season 3. You know what? The further I think about it, AJ actually is going to be better off after Season 3!
I write a lot of The Soprano Onceover‘s AJ-stuff from a point-of-view that’s pretty unpopular. And when I say that, I mean a pro-AJ point of view. Without a doubt, this kid is the most hated character of the whole show. Without a doubt, more than half of the hate he receives from fans, is because they see their own flaws in AJ. And not the “cool flaws” Tony or his friends have, but the cringey flaws a teenage-boy has. I’ve been doing this thing recently where I have some old photographs printed. You know, from when I was like 16 or 17, from that time on, I’ve saved most of the significant photographs I’ve taken Probably because I had the hunch all-along that I’ll eventually compile a photo-album. So I’m ordering them physically, so I can fill a nice leather-sleeved photo-album. Actually the idea came just from getting a photo-album in Christmas 2021 and needing to fill it. But it’s a fun pastime. One thing I absolutely have learned through the process of filling that photo-album, scrolling through old pictures and videos… …Is that 16-year-old Jani is a way cooler guy in my own memories, than I really actually ever was.
Tony Soprano is just like the usual Sopranos-viewer in one key-way: his constant projections to himself and to his immediate surroundings, help him escape having to acknowledge that he’s not a fearless badass that hops out of bed every morning in an un-wrinkled suit and rampages through the world while always looking cool and tough, using nothing more than God-given talent to make great strategic decisions and score beautiful women half his age.
Consequentially, this is exactly the simple-minded image of Tony, that the AJ-hating demographic of Sopranos-fans hold in their headcanon the most. It’s a whole mess. I’m glad I get to talk about it in this writeup.
Sopranos Autopsy proposes that the title of this episode was very deliberate. It says the U.S. army slogan that stood for the shortest time (just from 2001 to 2006, whereupon it was replaced after it was seen as supporting notions of anti-core mentalities), ”Be an army of One”, points to the ideas about individualism and community which ”reside at the heart of this hour”. The first of such metaphors is Jackie playing poker at Ray-Ray’s hideout; whereas Meadow’s scrabble-board in Pine Barrens showed how stupid he can be, him trying to move his pawn more than two spaces seems to reflect his eagerness to get ahead in the Mafia without really understanding how it works. AJ’s turning point – the point that causes him to go into panic in front of his parents, making them reconsider their approach with him – happens while he’s suffocated by the uniform, in a way. The uniform is a big symbol of loss-of-freedom.
Here’s a great video essay about this episode:
I found that the observations Kyle Entertainment made about audience-relationships with various characters’ moral alignments, were especially hitting. I hardly ever post Sopranos-video-essays into The Soprano Onceover out-right, because to keep it a buck with you, most of them simply aren’t good. I watch them all the time. Most of them repeat obvious things and make observations which just depend on the things that basically the loudest character in any given scene, had said the loudest, and I just personally find that a gross undermining of subtext. The Sopranos gets so much mileage from its’ tone which is like dependent on there being succinct subtext. Most of what is good about The Sopranos, is in the things that characters’ behavior actually says about them, and how we can go into this loop of examining our reactions to it. And that takes leg-work to analyze and come to your own personal conclusions of. And that work is fun. Never skip leg-day.
I mean, I’ve personally got a crummy left knee, but I try to keep up with the others.
Alright, folks. I don’t think anybody’s lived under a big-enough rock not to know that yes, that is Michael K. Williams playing Ray-Ray, the guy who takes Jackie Jr. in to bunk for a few days in his home with his little daughter and him. Williams had an important watershed role as Omar on The Sopranos‘ peer show on HBO, The Wire. Most of you know that already. His acting-in other shows and movies is far too extensive to just start listing here, but I guess Ray-Ray fittingly is the role that resembles his most famous one the most. And you just know that from my years of being a fan and engaging in fan-communities… that every single possible joke about this similitude has been done to death for me. Still, Ray-Ray’s a really interesting fella. In an earlier writeup on The Soprano Onceover I pontificated on whatever his relationship with Jackie Jr. might have been. He doesn’t seem to be much older and his daughter being 5-6 could fit within that time-frame. Ray-Ray seems like a really salt-of-the-earth guy, kind of an embodiment of a character who makes the most of life day-to-day. No-doubt his housing Jackie and other people that need to lay low for a while, is done as a means to help raise his daughter as a single dad. You don’t get a lot of people like Ray-Ray in The Sopranos.
Paulie’s moving his ma to the Green Grove Nursing Community. Taking after Tony in his choice for retirement-home. His mother’s reaction is quite poles-apart from how Livia took to the place back in this show’s first episodes. I noticed that in this conversation, the shots of Nucci crying and Paulie saying consoling words to her , were shot separately. You can see it if you pay attention to how “regularly” Paulie holds Nucci in those shots which only show Nucci’s face — and how they both face-forward — but when Paulie’s saying his lines, his body is turned towards her, and he’s looking down. Which suggests a different kind of standing-together. My guess is this happened because it took too long to get those lines out from Nucci’s actor, so Tony Sirico had to do his separately and then it was cut together, but like I said, that’s only a guess because this whole detail was just something I paid attentionto now as I started writing this writeup. Nevertheless, any episode that gives Paulie extra-airtime and a richer storyline, is in good favor with me.
There’s another unassuming scene of Tony and Carmela, sitting at the kitchen-table not doing really anything. They sit at exactly the same positions as they did in the unassuming ending of The Telltale Moozadell (S3E9) where the topic once again was Jackie Jr., and where once again, Tony intentionally left key-things unsaid. It’s really cool that they made a whole short scene and interaction so closely modeled after that atmospheric, Ben E. King-scored ending-scene. Makes it feel like that moment matters, and connects things subtly. Much more subtly, this visual connection’s also here to nudge that this episode is going to deal with Jackie Jr. a lot.
Paulie, Silvio and Ralphie sit down. The reason for this is Paulie — with a whole new set of financial worries, with his ma’s moving into the home-community — wants a big cut from a robbery Ralphie’s crew has recently pulled off, that Paulie gave important information about.
Vito calls Ralphie and in one of the most amazing phone-conversations (I’ve not made one such list, but if I did, #1 in that category would involve Ralphie as well and it would be from almost a season later) describes some forest-creatures that he’s not even looking at, just making up as he goes, and Ralphie’s answering him like he’s Tony. Who wants to talk to him. It’s really funny. It ranked pretty well on me and Aki’s list of this show’s funniest things. I don’t remember where exactly, but it was just outlandishly silly and fascinating at the same time, and is a really lasting comedic moment just ’cause of how situational it is.
The whole field of being a writer is so interestingly diverse, that’s why I’ve always liked it. Some people’s jobs include writing clickbait-y articles like “26 Amazing Facts About These Child Stars That Will Make You Want to Sodomize Your Cat” and other people’s jobs include writing hilarious stuff like this into serious situations, while keeping things grounded enough that what you’re writing, doesn’t feel like a parody of itself.
It’s endlessly funny to think about. Writing is truly a king’s errand.
Tony gets a call from Jackie who’s got a head full of sweat and no way out of his situation. He tries telling Tony where he is, and Tony cuts him off saying “I don’t wanna know”. That line is much more important to Tony’s single-episode arc in Army of One than you probably even realize.
Tony doesn’t wanna know. He doesn’t wanna consider himself — after Jackie will eventually die for what he did in Amour Four (S3E12) — a part of this course-of-events in any way. Even being a person who gave the killer the necessary information. Even having that necessary information. That would give way to ambiguity, as to whether or not Tony slipped it out to the killers. Why doesn’t Tony want to do any of these things? It’s clearly not for any humane considerations that consider the well-being of this punk kid who made a huge mistake. It’s because even knowing that it happened beforehand, even being any part of it in even any ambiguous way whatsoever… would make Tony act different when Meadow will eventually confront him about it. If he knows nothing, down the line he can tell his daughter that he didn’t do anything to get the boy killed and not technically be lying when he does. This is how deep Tony Soprano’s pathology runs. He’s still within a frame of mind about the Jackie-situation, where he still can categorically deny that… well, Tony puts this best two seasons later.
“Every decision you make, affects every facet of every other fuckin’ thing! It’s too much to deal with, almost.”
It’s all incredibly tense and effective drama. People say that Jackie Jr. kind of overstayed his welcome in Season 3, that his storyline clearly lacked in payoff in-relation to how much screen-time he demanded; compared to the quickly established, quickly culminating and incinerating storylines around it in Season 3. I’m not against that position at all, but I think it was rewarding that Jackie’s real dramatic conclusion was the finale. The ending-conflict of the whole season. Because driving things to this point, really makes us consider some things about Tony Soprano and his whole family that we had never considered before. Jackie Jr.’s death matters so much that eventually building this episode around it, was absolutely the way to go.
“You were forgiven!” “Well think about it. See if you can figure out the difference.” Jackie Jr. & Tony
Tony has to talk to Ralphie immediately after this whole thing. Driving both men to the meeting, Vito and Furio take a walk together as they wait. Inside the car, Tony tells Ralphie that the kid tried calling him last night, and that more swift decisions are demanded.
Just a personal thing I want to note about this car-conversation — this was the very scene that Samuli watched in Ice Road — this line from Tony, “more important than a particular decision is that it happens in a timely fashion”… this one has been paraphrased in this awful motivational quote-image where it says “a wrong decision is better than indecision -Tony Soprano”. It’s awful, ugly Members Only-fanboy-shit, and anybody who paid attention could tell that Tony never said those words at all. It’s usual, though. Boomers and other creatures alike will make up some shit that sounds cool and put a fictional tough guy’s image over it, because they’re weird. That’s nothing to get antsy about, is it? Why am I antsy about it, then?
Well because that line is something Carmela actually will say! She’s gonna have a line in Whitecaps (S4E13) — an episode that can be considered her crowning achievement as an actor, by the way — that goes “more is lost by indecision than wrong decision“. And the boomer-males who all wear sunglasses in their Facebook profile-pictures, all hate Carmela and can’t wait to call her the biggest hypocrite out of the whole show (hilariously). What got me antsy, is that these guys unreasonably, almost dogmatically, hate Carmela for purely existing, that even when she says something that could be attributed to a cool tough guy-quote picture that they enjoy, they remember it as something Tony says. Because men are cool, not women.
It’s not so serious to me, just annoying. That felt really nice to unload! Thank God I decided to do this blog. Where else am I gonna get to ever complain about something that-specific again? Ha.
The Newark field office of the FBI, are hard at work again trying to brainstorm new ideas to take down Tony.
“What about Soprano?” “Well we had that lamp-problem…” Agents Grasso & Harris
Boss-man Cubitoso has a brilliant new idea, however. Going the undercver-route, through somebody that has never really been challenged and is just naïve enough to persuade into cooperating. Adriana La Cerva.
“Let me put it this way: how big can you make your hair?” Frank Cubitoso
Them FBI-boys aren’t out of tricks quite yet!
Ray-Ray and his daughter teach Jackie some chess. Jackie goes outside to walk somewhere and fucking gets shot in the head by Vito and dies.
The most ridiculous gun ever used in this show, might I add.
Another staging-thing I learned:
Right before Vito shoots Jackie, we get a succession of short shots — arranged to make out a frantic mood for us, scored by the silence enough to make the pop of the gun even more significant. It’s an expertly-directed bit, and John Patterson who directed all season-finales until Season 6 — before his passing — deserves big shoutouts for it. But, only one of those shots follows Jackie from behind his back. And if you notice, in that shot Jason Cerbone walks a really straight line. Super-straight, like he’s been instructed to do so. That’s because when they shot those shots, the pile of snow directly ahead of the actor, already has the fake blood on it. They didn’t want the camera to catch it, and the shots where Jackie walks are shot to prevent us seeing it ahead-of-time.
The symbolic similarities in the arrangements of their final shots, when you compare Jackie Jr. to Chip and Dale from last season — which the fan-community does like to do — could tell a lot of things. Jackie Jr. in his last shot (excluding the funeral, which is no longer about his death anyway, but about this show that the Soprano-famiglia puts on) is made to look really small, insignificant almost. At least that’s the association I have; might be just a personal thing. But I think that notion carries over to something. Army of One really isn’t about Jackie at all. It’s about Tony and the family and the people close to Jackie — who never really cared about the kid at all — wanting to feel better about themselves even despite the fact that Jackie’s mistake from the previous episode, marked him for death and most people attending the kid’s funeral, know it. The hit is carried out quickly, and is just a pop in the middle of silence, and the rest of the episode doesn’t focus on that at all. Everybody’s just focused on their future. It’s worlds-apart from the death of Pussy in the last season-finale. That one had impact. This season’s earlier episodes were almost haunted by the event, and as recently as …To Save Us All from Satan’s Power (S3E10), Pussy was on everybody’s mind (teehee) enough to make for a major-storyline out of him. Jackie Jr.’s death only has impact on Meadow and the Aprile-family, who actually cared about him. The immediate family doesn’t even attend the afterparty, and Meadow is so offended by it that she runs into traffic. No. Tony and everybody else are just looking for ways to keep on going, business as usual, and not feel bad about killing a 22-year-old out of mob-enforced necessity.
How sinister is Ralphie talking on the phone with Ro all-casual while Vito returns to tell him it’s done? Rosalie’s child is dead.
Tony walks into the backroom of the Bada Bing. Christopher’s leaving, and Paulie demands a sitdown about the robbery-business. Tony looks into the fridge… …and he sees… …something devastating.
“I’ve been dreaming of that fucking Lo Mein all the way the fuck over here. Now who came in here and ATE MY SHIT?!!!??!” Tony Soprano
It’s enough to make even Paulie startled. It’s horrifying.
And here was Tony, just last night… …life really isn’t fair, is it?
Tony had to leave that meeting with Paulie to come back home, where he’s found out that AJ has been permanently expelled from school following his stealing of the test-results.
Rightfully, Tony’s upset:
He has a legitimate position.
“Sucks to be you”, says AJ after Tony’s scolded him about all the work he has to do, and how profoundly disappointing this is.
As much as I laid it down at the beginning of this writeup, how unfair this episode’s circumstances end up being for the Soprano-boy… the smug spoiled brat really got what he deserved here. There’s just certain things you don’t do or say, and this really was a situation where nothing else could’ve helped bring him down to earth from whatever power-trip he thought he was having.
Yes, parenting is a complicated matter to discuss. I try not to take either party’s side too much when I onceover all the issues Tony has with his son in this show — he has particularly many of those in this season alone, and I think Season 3 has a lot of its’ thematic foundation built upon the dynamic — still, more often than not the case is that neither the parents nor the children were right or wholly wrong. If raising kids can only be given one adjective to describe it, then that adjective is complicated.
In my opinion that slap was well-deserved.
He blaringly expressed that he does not have an iota of interest or sympathy for what his parents go through because of him and his stunts, and being almost grown alone should inform you with enough of a sense of responsibility, that you don’t say stupid shit like “sucks to be you” in situations like this.
See how brilliantly this show in all its’ dramatic entanglement, makes us instinctively choose sides with how powerful the material is, but then doubt the side we’ve taken right after? As a television-show, it’s perfect drama.
Later in the night Tony and Carmela are discussing schools they’re considering for AJ.
One of the options they’re considering, is particularly scary. Even more scary, are the news that Carmela gets when Rosalie Aprile’s sister calls her from Ro’s house-phone. Jackie Jr. has been shot dead in the housing-projects at Boonton.
That screengrab is AJ’s real reaction to the news that this guy not much older than him, that he knew, just died. You can see the vulnerable state he’s in. Carmela has to go, so AJ only looks over at his father. Tony gives him the most blameful “I told you so”-eyes. Frankly, it’s just chilling.
AJ calls Meadow with the news.
Alright, let’s fucking talk about it.
Army of One is an episode that while playing with us and the alignment of our delevoped sympathies from three excellent seasons, also questions the protagonistic nature of the main man himself. Despite what Tony is feeling, his is in full, complete, agreed-upon acceptance of the rampant hypocrisy that marred the burial-ceremony but most-viciously, will haunt the afterparty at Artie’s. Tony actually expresses some guilt for what ended up happening to Jackie Jr., you can read it from his face in many scenes, especially the one where he’s in therapy with Melfi talking about it for the first time since it happened. We’re not sure if by Season 4 he’s just completely moved the whole issue to the sidelines — because God knows it never gets mentioned by him again, even when he has dreams of confesisng all of his most shameful deeds. (except once in No Show (S4E2) but I feel like excluding that instance from my statement because it’s defensive instead of feeling regretful or responsible from a sincere place) The what if-questions of this kid’s fate are very likely pressing on Tony’s mind because A) he’s going through a hard time with his actual son, and B) he was the last one Jackie Jr. ever called for help. No matter what kinds of guilt he’s categorically cleansed himself of, he can’t ever deny that. Regardless of that, whatever smidge of sympathy we might have been able to detect from him in his more private scenes where there’s less eyes looking upon him, any possible guilt gets diluted. It gets diluted by this whole culture of being close to one another, crying with each other and patting each other (and yourself) on the back about how it wasn’t your falt even when it totally was. Here, on Army of One, the sympathy Tony and the rest of the main-cast have gained from us, is put to the first substantial test. Think about it: can you name a more despicable thing than killing a young man, in his early twenties (I’m three years older than Jackie when he died and I’m still really young), for doing an almost-irredeemable thing under mistaken guidance from your own guy — Ralphie; yet another person Jackie trusted as a fatherly figure, a man of advice and resources — and then not only showing up to the kid’s funeral, but leading the charge of sad faces throughout it, lying to your daughter who loved this boy, and in the end making the whole occasion just about yourselves and a song everybody seems to enjoy? I know that’s a mouthful, but there aren’t many more despicable things than that, are there? Everybody accepts it, Meadow — who actually cared for this young man that died — is disgusted by it and gets painted a villain and a nuisance by the general consensus of the after-party. And the audience. What little Meadow has to say about this whole occasion, sums it up perfectly: This is such bullshit. The ending and the moment of Junior’s performance fading into end-credits, compliments this sentiment in a clever way. The songs continuously shift, looking like Junior is now singing a silly teen pop song, like he’s singing a– it doesn’t matter what he decides to sing after Ungrateful Heart. It doesn’t matter what he sings. It doesn’t matter what is going on, as long as these people can gather together around it and feel good about themselves in the aftermath of leading a fucking kid down a path that killed him.
I say all of the above, to say: what a brilliant ending to a season like this one. Not as edge-of-your-seat as Tony and Junior finally breaking into an all-out gang war, or as Pussy getting killed and sleeping with the fishes for being a rat. But precisely the ending that this season needed. Gathering all these people together that we’ve learned to care about , build sympathy for… gathering them all together in a room, and making us reevaluate our relationship to them, one at a time as each one — to their personal varying degrees — projects a reaction to this high-performance occasion. Remember how I said earlier that Army of One was never about Jackie Jr. at all? You can pick any character on the mafia-side of things in that room, or anyone who lives off of it — essentially everybody except the Bucco’s — and even though that person might not have been directly responsible for Jackie Jr. dying and thus isn’t taking part in the most blaring hypocrisy, they’re still a part of this cozy, entertained and full crowd sharing this camraderie in an event that is about everything else but that. Throughout my notes for Season 3 — there’s three episodes left I still haven’t written about — I’ve pointed out time and time again how it’s obvious that nobody gives a shit if Jackie Jr. lives or dies, and here’s where it becomes important. I went all-writeup without taking a stance on whether what he did was wrong or not — he was, obviously — but this is just a viewpoint that I don’t see enough dialogue in the fan-community, having.
All-season-long, people accepted his stupid lies about going to school not because they were convincing, but because it was comfortable to do so. That way they won’t have to involve themselves too much. And now he’s dead.
In the therapy-scene when Tony says “him we’re sending to military-school”, he says it like it’s just the toughest, coolest thing in the world to do. Gandolfini’s own confidence obviously carries it home as effectively as it does, but what I found interesting about this huge emphasis on how tough military school sounds to Tony, is how this episode explores masculinity, male upbringing. Tony seeks these absolute answers, where if you do A and B and do them just right, Z will come like a bottle from a machine. Z in this case being, Anthony Junior becoming a man. Which we have no idea what Tony might mean by. He said himself that AJ attending military school only became something he thought about, when Janice showed him a brochure about the place. So this place really isn’t about something Tony’s always wanted to do, or a dream of turning AJ into a man. He just thinks right now that it is. It’s just another case of fleeting expectations for your boy who has no idea, by this age, what it is that his parents even want from him. And how could you ever expect to fulfill such dangling expectations of masculinity, from a man who lives two lives himself? He has moments of legit instability, and seeks dangerous relationships with women, projecting his emotions all over the place because he’s never dealt with them. We saw it in the third episode of this season how Tony consciously made the decision to set Jackie Jr. right himself. In the first two episodes they weren’t even in talking-terms with each other. This whole thing is an utter farce. Makes me remember a nice quote from the most quotable episode of this entire series, Boca (S1E9):
“Why do you, Anthony Soprano, always have to be the one to set things right?”
Tony really had no reason other than a sudden personal whim to even take on this fatherly role for Jackie Jr.. And now he’s dead. AJ’s less-immediately-dangerous storyline in Army of One to me is a constant reflector of that notion.
Carmela opens curtains to bed-ridden Meadow’s room and with sunshine from the window, flashes her out of sleep. Which is a callback to Isabella (S1E12) in which she does the same to Tony. So there’s more connective tissue between this episode and that one, besides being the episodes my character watched in my book. Huh. Actually, thinking deeper into that, it might’ve been a subconscious choice to have those two episodes be the two episodes where such rude awakening is shown. Ice Road started with a depressed man waking up and climbing out of bed. Maybe there’s some kind of link there that I wasn’t aware of when writing, huh. But that’s enough of that!
Here Meadow lets it be known that she has her suspicions about Tony’s involvement. She knew what kind of people Jackie hung around with. “Look at everyone we know“.
Tony and Carmela have a talk with Major Zwingli, after AJ had one privately. I have no notes personally about this scene, just an interesting thing I saw in Sopranos Duckposting that I want to bring up now. The conversation itself happened a long time ago — in a now-deleted incarnation of that Facebook-group — and I wasn’t a part of it so I didn’t think to interject questions, but anyways, there was a meme showing Zwingli’s face and a guy called Seth commented with “As a recovering alcoholic, I fuckin love that scene”. Somebody answered, asking “What scene is this referring to?” Seth said “when Tony and Carm meet with the headmaster of the military academy where they want to send AJ.” He said that apparently “The guy drops about 10 AA catchphrases in 5 minutes”. I would’ve loved to hear what all those ten were, apparently this is true and I find this immaculate amount of detail just, stunning.
“The corps, the corps, the corps”, Zwingli recites a short and sweet speech from history. Ron @ Sopranos Autopsy was really onto something about this. It’s possible that the core in Junior’s song is an intentional tie-in to the corps which is the subject of Zwingli’s speech to AJ. ”Corrado’s mobster community and Zwingli’s military community share several characteristics. They are insulated and prochial, and both are shaped by the Strict Father model. By injecting foreign voices into the final scene, Chase criticizes and undermines the insularity of the mob community. I think it’s a great take on why this Italian song was the driver into the strange medley right before this episode rolls into its’ end-credits, and would support my own notion of course, of Tony’s attempt at Strict Fatherhood, being on trial all-throughout season three.
However, a 2005 interview (Dying to Belong) includes a take from David Chase, on foreign singers: ”That singing thing is about how all over the world people engage in pure sentimentality. Everyone loves a good cry. And I don’t mean to denigrate funerals or death. It also has something to do with entertainment, filmed entertainment. Music can be used so manipulatively. And Junior, who is the most selfish character in the cast, is pouring his heart out. Didn’t mean a thing. Just to wallow in the moment… Pop music is so abused and overused, manipulated and employed in the service of the devil. It was to give the audience a laugh about how they are being manipulated everyday.”
Tony and Carmela argue later that night. All the talk with Zwingli did, was divide the couple’s opinions even further from one another.
“HE THINKS THE WORLD OWES HIM A LIVING!” “What could have given him THAT bizarre idea!?” Tony & Carmela Soprano
Jackie Jr.’s memorial is a horrifically sad affair.
Except for all the guys making football-bet calls in the backseat where they think people won’t hear them. And since they probably thought it would be a more packed house, they decided for that exact reason to make those calls in there. But it isn’t packed. Far from it. And besides Meadow and the Aprile-family, nobody in there really cares or cared. He’s dead, and they’re just choffing at the bits to move on with life.
Janice Soprano is potentially the most honest person here, because at least she’s clear about not giving a flying 747-fuck. She just walks upstairs and hands Cozzarelli her Christian Rock-demo. She’s been working on music all-season, and gets a Janice-worthy finale to her season in this short scene .
In the hallway Christopher come to Tony, to talk. Saying how the Jackie-situation was handled right, and that Christopher was wrong to say he doesn’t love Tony and that he understands better now, what Tony’s going through. Tony shuts all that down.
Paulie joins Christopher and Tony at a sitdown outside. It’s a very memorable scene. Calling it legendary, wouldn’t be a stretch.
Paulie talks about the progress in his mom’s living-arrangements:
“It’s the most expensive nursing home in the state.” “It’s a retirement community!” Paulie Gualtieri & Tony Soprano
Ralph arrives, and admittedly Paulie’s a little peeved that the cocksucker has been ducking his reaching out for days now — only agreeing to it once Tony wants to see him about it.
“You’re late!” “Well tomorrow I can be on time, but you’ll be stupid forever.” Paulie Gualtieri & Ralph Cifaretto
It made me laugh out loud when Paulie said that Little Paulie was ready to go to the Morristown-heist. “The car never came. They left him standing outside like an asshole!” I don’t know why, but that made me spit out my drink. Just the word-choice there. Like an asshole. I think it’s just because I find the way some English curse-words are said, really funny.
As those two quotes above predicted, this meeting turns out to be a whole mess. Tony for all intents and purposes, rules against Paulie giving him a minuscule cut of the profits, Furio walks over there and slips in some fish-ice with his cane. It looks bad, how he comes down. As somebody who had a pretty devastating fall a year ago — hurt my knee pretty long-term — I felt what Fures was going through. The sitdown just has to end right then and there. In a way Furio’s accident came at a convenient time for boss-Tony and consigliere-Silvio, because Ralphie and Paulie would’ve been able to just go on and on and on about this robbery all day and all of the night, and for all intents and purposes it had already been settled.
Tony, if this sitdown had gone on any further.
Adriana meets agent Deborah Ciccerone at a mall shopping for memorial-outfits. As a Sopranos-blogger I would not be doing my duty if I didn’t inform anybody that might not have known, that Lola Glaudini wasn’t the original actor chosen to play Ciccerone (or Danielle from Whippany), but it was a pretty young dark lady by the name Fairuza Balk. As it stands this is pretty much common information in Sopranos-communities, but how often do I get to treat you with deleted scenes, huh? Here’s this whole scene played by Balk and Drea De Matteo:
Don’t let this video’s thumbnail misinform you; she did good. The only reason Balk bailed (or should I say BALKED AWAY) from this role, was that Ciccerone’s character was coming back next season, and she couldn’t commit to coming back at the time.
Tony sees a Dr. Fried commercial on his home-TV and says “hey I know that guy”, pointing at his screen. Fried was one of the poker-players in The Happy Wanderer (S2E6) as well as Amour Fou (S3E12). Dr. Fried, if you didn’t remember, is a prick-doctor. That little silent exchange of looks between Tony and Carmela right after Tony says “imagine that, needing an operation like that.” I love it. Just for the pettines from Carmela. And how light but still heavily intended that pointed look, is.
AJ comes downstairs in his uniform, Carmela encourages him, Tony threatens him, he has a panic attack, now he can’t go to the military-school.
Was there any importance in prefacing this scene, of Tony’s fatherly expectations finally driving his male heir up the wall, with a conversation which implies that Tony’s got a small penis? I don’t think so, really. I think it was set up this way simply because it’s funny and leaves a funny thought in your head, if you think about it that way. The Sopranos relishes in a lot of bathroom-humor and dick-jokes and stuff like that on the low and I think this was just one of those cases. On the other hand, it is fun to consider that the way this scene was written, says a lot. Perhaps of the futility and misguidedness of Tony Soprano’s attempts to make anybody more of a man. He just ends up projecting his un-confronted feelings into flakey expectations to his son-figures, and they all end up making stupid decisions and suffering because of it, not to mention constantly feeling like they’re not good enough. “Toxic masculinity” is such a buzzword these days, and I don’t want to evoke it in my writings any more than I have to — because I have sincere sympathy for men who have yet to find peace within themselves — but what all of toxic masculinity, in a vast majority of cases, springs from is feeling inadequate due to expectations placed upon you. Here Tony is, just instilling that sense into young men’s mind all over the place throughout this season. I don’t say any of this to say Tony’s less of a man. I couldn’t take anything away from his masculine, dominant, imposing and manly attraction he just simply possesses. What I’m saying is that a man can be masculine, dominant, imposing and rampaging through life, and still not know the first thing about making somebody else a man.
Tony’s in therapy again, rightfully upset that the school never told him and Carmela of the panic attack which AJ had suffered in the final scene of Fortunate Son (S3E3).
I really liked this episode’s way of showing the passing of a few days (without a titlecard like they did in Nobody Knows Anything (S1E11)) with just a throwaway-comment that was a segue in a bigger comment. Tony just mentions to Melfi that since the time AJ had his panic attack (mind you, this was the last scene we saw before Tony was in therapy) they’ve gone to a prediatrician and talked to folks at the school about AJ’s earlier instance of panic. This explains to us without literally explaining, that enough time has passed and Jackie’s funeral is coming. It usually takes something like a week. I just thought this was a really cool, hands-on way to skip four days within the story. Maybe because I’m a writer it jumps out to me so much. I just always respect when a show is able to say “FOUR DAYS HAVE PASSED IN THE STORY” without… without saying “FOUR DAYS HAVE PASSED IN THE STORY”. you know?
But to the therapy-scene — the discussion is much deeper than that.
“When you blame your genes, you really blame yourself.” Jennifer Melfi
I don’t think AJ’s arc in Season 3 was all that wild, definitely not one that demanded very much attention in the grand scheme of things. But what I’ve noticed from the added amount of screentime compared to earlier seasons, is that he is clearly in the age right now where he’s taking all this in. Really listening to the things going on around him. Robert Iler is brilliant in depicting this in nothing more than attentive facial expressions. And Tony has let some things slip out in AJ’s presence in this season, most notably in Pine Barrens (S3E11) when he yelled “is there any way the package could’ve survived?” to Paulie over the phone. AJ’s habit of testing his limits definitely reached a peak in all the stunts he pulled in this episode, and it’s absolutely right the season-finale would attack this in a main-plot. There is a feeling that the son-character is gaining importance in the story. There’s been many sons doing through many significant things in Season 3, and something recurring throughtout it is that AJ just doesn’t draw that much attention from Tony, when he’s quiet and not doing anything. When he’s in this increasingly vulnerable state of having to realize things about his dad. It’s all really fascinating territory for the story to cover. That’s not to say with any certainty, that his stupid stunts lately are a direct result of facing any family-realities. It’s still ambiguous enough to not be sure if he’s reacting to what it means to be a Soprano, quite yet. What is true, however, is that the fan-community’s hatred of this character is WAY over the top. He’s a KID. The same way Jackie Jr.’s funeral episode is more about everybody else making themselves feel better, AJ also acts out because he doesn’t have the right idea of what lines to cross and which ones not to. He’s obviously got a great indifference about consequences, which is hereditary. But when he acts out, Tony’s idea of discipline is to search for an absolute answer, to make A and B into Z as swiftly as possible, without — I don’t know why I want to continue with this metaphor — …without following through the whole alphabet. This is not how you raise a son. Sorry. For however annoying Carmela might come off, she hits all the marks in her assessments of AJ’s situation; her lapse of judgement, deciding to try it Tony’s way, is justifiable too because she feels just as helpless seeing the tragedy Rosalie is going through. Tony in this episode, keeps making Jackie‘s fate out to be a horrific what-if scenario for if AJ doesn’t get his act together. But therein lies the biggest hypocrisy. Tony’s lifestyle and circle — if not Tony himself — is directly at-fault of Jackie’s death.
“You don’t understand.” Tony Soprano
Jackie Jr.’s burial takes place outdoors. First there’s some mafioso-shenanigans, with Paulie and Junior running, Junior almost ditching Bobby, Silvio getting arrested…
“Every fucking Superbowl the D.A. grabs a few popcorn-headlines! Here, ga’head. Last year I made bail so fast my soup was still warm when I got home.” Silvio Dante
And basically all the big powerful men of this station just get all the spectacle for themselves. Not to say this is a part of any pattern I’ve been discussing so far, where people just pat each other and themselves on their individual backs as well as their collective back. I don’t think anybody wanted to get arrested and have to run (even if it’s embarrassing). It’s just a funny coincidence. Maybe even calling out the audience‘s manner of being so quickly amused by silly mafioso-antics that thei momentarily forget how emotionally severe this gathering is in itself.
Jackie’s caskets begins to get lowered.
Rosalie screams with the agony of a flaming spear piercing through her heart as she somehow still must stay alive and functional through the burn, hurt, and pounding pain. This screen-grab is etched into my mind. It takes for me to just see it and I start getting emotional.
Her daughter can’t help crying when she hears the piercing scream of her mother’s un-diluted pain. Meadow can’t help but cry, too, and she’s on the other side of the formation standing, hearing it still as clearly.
Watching this episode and taking notes for when I’d write about it, this point made me cry. It made me get a tear again when I heard it again, as I wrote this. And I’m not a person who cries. Don’t say that with pride or shame, it’s just a lifetime of getting told “deal with it”, and that whatever emotion I might ever be having, is just stupid and I just don’t understand the full capacity of what I’m sad about. That’ll happen when you have Asperger’s syndrome and don’t know how to communicate every single nuance as a child. It’s just… It’s refreshing sometimes, to me, not gonna lie. TV-moments that are so painfully and helplessly sad, that they make me cry. They remind me I am human. Family visit-episodes on Survivor are a big one. I absolutely relish crying at those.
Just thinking about it now, ugh… Maybe it even reminds me of a couple years ago, when two of my old friends died, one a few months older than me and one a few months younger than me. A month apart from each other. Both from hard living, both suddenly. They didn’t know each other or even associate with the same people, one’s life just came to an end in October 2018 and one’s in November 2018.
I still want to talk about that screengrab of Rosalie breaking down in front of Jackie’s coffin: I think that wider shot of the funeral itself, where the highways are full of traffic in the background and the noise of it clutters the soundscape of this scene which should be more moody in how it sounds… all of that serves to tell the same message I have been gathering from Army of One all alone. All these guys getting arrested by the Feds, running away from the Feds, just as everything’s getting ready to start, is just as much of a clutterance on the mood as are the noises of traffic in the back. We, along with Tony and others coming to this funeral like the hypocrites they are, don’t care much about the contents of the proceedings themselves. We’re just attending. Junior contradicting his past assertions from two seasons ago about how running is embarrassing, and Silvio serving that Fed a plate of verbal cold cuts, are more interesting to us, than walking into the funeral of this kid we spent so much time with. The same people who thought Meadow was the villain of this episode, couldn’t wait after those arrests to just see this whole funeral-thing be over. So we’d get back into rooting for Tony and his crew. I’d be an asshole if I claimed I haven’t felt like this, watching this episode in the past, but I don’t view this exactly as “Chase calls out the audience for taking part in the same hypocrisy”, exactly. There’s an element of that apparent here, but it’s just to comment on that “gathering-together” phenom which the songs at the end will have fun with later.
I think that traffic-noise and that decision to use that highway so prominently in the shot, speaks to that point in a big way. I’ve been going on and on about what a hypocrite Tony is because it’s important to stress, that Army of One sees him at the climax of his hypocrisy… But I’m somebody who has enjoyed watching this episode for eight times already. I ranked it among my favorite Sopranos-episodes and consider myself thoroughly entertained every time the episode ends. Am I really any better?
Yes I am. I didn’t partake in a 22-year-old getting murdered. But it’s still nice to think that. Because when you do, you realize that these people are never gonna change. That pathology isn’t gonna wear off and no matter how close to home this life’s consequences are — how dispassionate and vile they get — Tony and everybody in the life alongside him is gonna find a way to just make themselves feel better about it. The worse the offense, the more you need to lie to yourself.
Meadow and Jackie’s sister Kelli go to the kitchen to fix up some drinks on this black day full of Autumn-sun. One says to the other, what both must be thinking:
“He was killed by some fat fuck in see-through socks. Take your pick, they all look alike.” Kelli Aprile
Meadow does something unprecedented, however, and takes her dad’s side; the side of his whole criminality infact. It’s because some mutual friend is a third party there and Kelli said too much and Meadow didn’t like it. She’s starting to show a new side, here — briefly however — where she kind of becomes an answer-robot the same way her parents feared back in Proshai, Livushka (S3E2). Back then Tony was dying to find ways to bame Noah for that, but now it’s suiting his purposes and defending him so he will not have a problem with it.
Memorial service at Vesuvio’s
Honestly, this is the scene I’ve been waiting for all-writeup. I’ve brought it up many times. This is where it’ll end, again. This is the second time a season will end in Vesuvio, and a third time it will end in some kind of getting-together where the stakes are reasonably low.
First Tony meets with Junior who’s about to go on trial, but who has beaten his stomach-cancer.
“I’ve been farting into the same sofa-cushion for the last 18 months.” Junior Soprano
You know, I should try using that line one day, if Finland ever re-opens its bars and restaurants.
Very interestingly, Junior makes special mention of his intentions to “stop and smell the roses”. The show probably isn’t trying to do any heavy-handed foreshadowing for what will happen in Members Only (S6E1) yet, but I’m sure that Chase must’ve had this particular line in his mind when he came up with that plot-development for that episode* because “stopping to smell the roses” is something that Tony will keep repeating after Junior shoots him in that episode, and he barely scrapes it back to life from his coma after getting shot. By Junior. The same person planting that “stop and smell the roses” seed right now.
*Members Only (S6E1) is actually gonna be the very next entry in The Soprano Onceover after this one.
Outside Vesuvio, the “Johnny Sack plays Paulie like an oboe” storyline begins.
Ralph, internally: “STELLLAAAAAAA!!!!”
Inside, an interesting ironic bit: In Vesuvio, we hear Ralph say the punchline of the famous joke about a guy who doesn’t want to be healed by Jesus because he doesn’t want to lose his disability payments. The person getting the biggest kick out of this is Janice, who we’ve known to live off fake disabilities in the past.
It… Might be a little bit of a triggering thing for Tony to say to Meadow, “don’t laugh.” I dunno, this-Onceover I seemed to pick up from her expressions that that was the exact comment which really set her on that path to destroy the facade of this gathering. And I mean, hwo obnoxious is that for Tony to say to Meadow, as if she’s somehow in the wrong — as if she’s not the only one here that actually cared about the person they’re supposed to be mourning…
Junior steps up and starts singing Core ‘Ngrato, ladies and gentlemen!
…That, coupled with just how emotional a day this is for Meadow, and how Kelli Aprile’s words are still lingering in her mind… how could she not have acted out the way she did?
“THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT!” Meadow Soprano
So after Meadow’s done storming out, Tony takes AJ close and keeps an arm over the boy’s shoulder. They’re not gonna have two kids rebelling against them and against this hypocrisy beautiful sendoff. It’s like such an encapsulation of how the girl’s earlier line acted as a sort of prophecy. On her way to this gathering, in the car with Carmela, she said that what Tony and Carm are gonna get from this is another excuse to be intrusive and controlling. Be quiet and stand still, AJ, while we enjoy Junior’s performance.
Junior keeps singing.
Stand still, AJ. And another strange thing I picked up on now, from watching how Edie acts in that bit as well as the whole get-together… Carmela is conflicted about this hypocrisy internally, and those facial expressions give it all away when you really pay attention. It’s probably because she started thinking about things she takes for granted — rather than any serious atempt to come closer to personal responsibiltiy for what kind of a man and what kind of a lifestyle she promotes for the sake of comfort — but that can be just as hard-hitting in a time like this.
Junior keeps singing.
Carmela might be thinking if all her decisions have been wrong. You can see it in her face that Meadow’s words from back there in the car, are in her head now. It doesn’t take a smart person to realize whose point-of-view is more valid when it comes to raising a kid — someone who was just a kid themselves and relates, or someone who’s supposed to be a grown-up and still acts out from his traumatic childhood. Not to say Tony is a bad parent. He isn’t. He just doesn’t pay enough attention to AJ, and that is why his expectations get confused. And with how much Season 3 focused on this relationship and these expectations… we also saw a whole lot of times when Tony could’ve been more proactive with AJ, but simply chose not to.
Junior keeps singing.
One of the lines on Core ’Ngrato is ”you don’t think about my pain” which ties into the numerous times somebody has had a line along this season in-particular, about pain being a source of amusement. It makes sense in a second way, too, given that season three pretty much was recognized by everybody at the time as the most violent season of The Sopranos. There was actually a lot of criticism back then that this show is heading into a hopelessly violent direction. I still think Season 3 was the most violent season, when it’s all said and done.
It makes sense in a third way too, because none of the characters present here — once Meadow has left and gone back to New York — care about who or what this memorial is supposed to be about.
Establishing the events as occurring in late January, 2001, is the Super Bowl that’s referenced throughout this episode between Baltimore and the Giants.
Thanks to Kevin Brown from Sopranos Duckposting for that picture of Vito’s hilarious gun and Liam Meredith from Sopranos Duckposting for Tony with the Devils-cap. and John Weems from Sorpanos Duckposting for the Metallica-crossover-meme. The other three I wish I could credit but I saved them such a long time ago that I don’t remember where I got them from. I’m talking back in a time when I didn’t keep score of who to credit and when in this meme-credits-section.
Psychedelic Folk, Singer/Songwriter, Psychedelic Rock, Folk Rock, Folk Pop | Third album by Donovan; released August 26, 1966.
Donovan’s beginnings were two kind of admittedly goofy albums, What’s Bin Hid and What’s Bin Did (1965) and Fairytale (1965), which even I was kinda iffy about. Didn’t end up getting a good rating from me, but subsequent familiarity with Donovan’s work of the more psychedelic nature, did help me see how the roots of these ambitions were always in-play even back there. Potential is a strange thing, sometimes you see it and sometimes you don’t. Even back when hearing those albums for the first time, having my doubts and seeing whatever potential I could… I did admittedly overlook how prominently Donovan was authoring the music himself. Despite the music not landing for me, I could appreciate the effort, and how different everything attempted to be — and was — from anything else put out in 1965.
That being said, all of that made Sunshine Superman just all the more special as an artistic emergence of-sorts. It’s still the most popular Donovan-album, and on it Donovan just blew everything wide-open, in terms of where his sound and content could go. An almost kind of shocking emergence from the shadows where he used to make silly niche Folk Pop-records, into the spotlight — hitting it big with the definitive LSD-album of the Free Love-era.
All this evolution happened in less than a year.
One statement that I’ve made about Sunshine Superman before, is that it’s “the LSD-album to end all LSD-albums”. It was back when I reviewedFor Little Ones (1967) for this very list, and needed to give some background-context so as to why Donovan’s topics seemed to go through such a strong shift in such a short time. Back then I promised Sunshine Superman was gonna come on pretty late in the countdown, and now here we are, it’s pretty late in the countdown now.
It’s a collection of Donovan’s most-iconic songs, the songs that I feel he should most-pointedly, be repeatedly applauded for coming up with everything they do, everything they say and everything they inspire. It’s 60s to-the-core, but even more especially, one of the major signals of the late-60s getting started.
The late 60s — 1967 to 1969 — are what everybody means when they say “the 60s”, and this album was doing late-60s things before 1967.
Sunshine came softly through my window one day!
The opening bass-lines of the title track say it all. And then those distant inviting sounds find a better way to elaborate on that. If the bass opened up the stage, this in a similarly quick instant, expanded it. It all tells we’re about to plunge into a big, expansive experience. One that was inspired unapologetically, by something mind-expanding for the creative person. “We’ll do it in style”, Donovan announces!
“California Sunshine” was a street-name for LSD at the times.
“Sunshine came softly through my a-window today…”
Sunshine Superman is probably the most memorable melody of its’ parent-album. Maybe, I get that there’s contenders. Season of the Witch is the most famous one, The Trip most infectious. Anyways, for me the anchor-melody’s always been right here in the title-track, while the other two have been (deservedly) what I just call “the hits”. Anyway, the first time I heard the Sunshine Superman-melody was from Gábor Szabó‘s cover, from his album Bacchanal (1968) which was a guitar-jazz (“gypsy-Jazz”) covers-album. In 2020 when this list’s research was heavily underway, this late-nineties-formed Psych Rock band that I like, called The Asteroid No. 4, released an amazing album called Northern Songs. On it there was this great, groovy infectious tune called No One Weeps that for such a long time had me confused where it’d gotten the seeds for its’ main-riff from. It was a great heureka-moment for me to realize the germ of that dittie was all the way back here! In the Sunshine Superman-melody! And because Szabo laid it down in such an angular way in his cover, that was the bridge for me to realizing this connection. I felt like a bit of a detective.
It wasn’t many reviews ago, when I first said some album or something it did/excelled at, “encapsulated a spirit of the 60s” that I imagine when I think about this decade as a creative time. I obviously don’t want to over-use that sentiment — because then you’d think that one of this list’s main points was that there was a singular spirit to an entire era and everybody in it, when that would oversimplify the matter. …Even if detecting what I’d consider a spirit is admittedly one of the things that helps albums land very high on this ranking. Donovan’s Legend of a Girl Child Linda, the one named after Donovan’s wife, Linda — the way Donovan’s own voice just decatoes, goes high and low in this rich emotive manner, along with the fucking wonderful lyrical imagery which takes a small detour into what For Little Ones is gonna largely be about… it all captures some spirit, if not a singular one of the 60s as a time f great expression, great new ideas, great new meditations and relationships with nature and flow… if not that, then some spirit at least.
Because this track is just as long as it needs to be! It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t as long and as repetitive as it is in its’ current incarnation. With all that it has, it’s able to stand out the way that it is and it’s able to have the emotion to it that it does — but also the ambiguity… I think it’s a perfect case of a song finding out, just for itself, what it truly means to stay for the duration of your welcome.
“On hillside of velvet The children lay down And make fun of the grown-ups With their silly frown”
If there’s one word that describes Three King Fishers the best, it’s mystery. Not mysterious, but a mystery in and of itself.
The Raga-touches in the bridge that drives it to the end, really seal that. On top of being a nice effect on their own; I would see myself loving just a song full of this, truly.
Ferris Wheel is all that ambiguity, all that mysteriousness, but with a really longing, lonely way of coming through. It helps the winding chords of the progression just kick. Very effective as just a mood-piece, and of course there’s other ways of experiencing the song than just that.
Season of the Witch deserves all the status and acclaim it gets, deserves being recognized as that one Donovan-classic, or just a guitar-classic. That’s how well it struck gold. The way the echo-y guitars bring the thing in, on its’ own, warrants that classic-status (and I say this while attesting that this isn’t even a top-3 favorite song of mine from the record), but then as it shifts into a bass-sound, that’s just a one last chef’s kiss. Musical purity.
“We spoke of a common kaleidoscope And the pros and the cons of Zen”
The Trip is as 60s of a song as 60s-songs get. I think about this deep-cut from Donovan’s magnum opus in the same breath as I think about icon-status songs of the era, such as Buffalo Springfield‘s For What It’s Worth; just, songs that are emblematic of the time and really caught the essence of the psychedelic sixties as it floated in the air. This is so sixties! It’s a quick fix almost, for when I wanna hear just something that embodies the time and the scene! I mean listen to that chorus alone, man! It’s so catchy, so good, so psychedelic, so expanded, soo much of everything.
Guinevere seems to be just Donovan’s gentle carriage of emotive notes over a winding tone which still bares some mystery to it — with all this it seems to be fitting for an album-closer. A collision, for a lack of a better word, of all Sunshine Superman‘s greatest ideas.
But it isn’t the end. There’s still something that it builds up to.
The song The Fat Angel and its’ chorus-refrain of “fly, Jefferson Airplane, get ya there on time” just easily becomes something you think of, right away, when you think of the psychedelic era’s beginnings. The notion occurs because Sunshine Superman is as powerful as it is. Even if you didn’t know why Donovan’s singing one of this third album’s sing with most hit-potential to them, and calling out another psychedelic band in the lyrics, by-name… it still sounds like a call, a beckon, for the late 60s’ drug-addled exploration — but even more importantly, the wonderful creative atmosphere — to come, to manifest, to become!
And Celeste just might be the birth of Blue-Eyed Soul as a whole. That special, magical Irish lyrically fragmented but all the more magical, emotionally grabbing, pulling and ultimately healing type of Celtic Rock Music.
Later in the countdown you’re gonna hear more of that.
But this… this might just be a precursor and boy let me tell you, when these strings come in I easily get to thinking about everything that’s happened in my life that has brought me here and made me who I am and feeling all kinds of thankful and nostalgic and mwah. What a song to end on!
Additional notes
Donovan said in a 2005 interview with the AV Club: ”Season of the Witch was kind of prophetic. It was anticipating the bust, so it was a dark song for that reason. It was a chilling sound to come from me, and I didn’t know where it was coming from at first. Now it has become a seminal jam song, for three decades now, of all kinds of bands. Why? You know, Al Kooper is saying that it changed his life. It certainly changed my life. I was told that when I discovered the riff and sang the song to myself at a party, I played it for seven hours. There’s something kind of ritualistic about it. Maybe it is the first kind of Celtic-rock thing I was doing, a rediscovery of our roots in Britain, which of course became the British sound.”
”When in should come-a my dream woman / She got sequins in her hair / Like she stepped out of, of, of a Fellini film” Evoking Italian filmmaker Maestro Federico Fellini was decidedly perfect because Fellini is known for blending fantasy with reality, but also crossing the line to pornographic material. When Donovan went to look closer – as later lines in this verse of The Trip narrate – the whole dream-scene of his dream woman disappeared immediately, as it was just a hallucination and he was really the only one there.
Guinevere was the wife and Queen of King Arthur the historical figure.
There was a remarkable genius.com annotation for the Season of the Witch-lyric “Many sights to see“: ”The sights outside the narrator’s window are a metaphor for the lively events of the decade. When this song was released the 60s, a decade marked by its timeless music, unbounded creativity, massive progressive leaps forward and unfathomable political unrest was already in full swing. This decade gave us the Civil Rights Movement, the ”Flower Power” movement, Free Love, the Space Race, the assassination of JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnamn War, Star Trek: The Original Series, Doctor Who, James Bond, Spider-Man, Woody Allen, The Graduate, The Prisoner, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, James Brown, Motown, Underground Comics, the Manson Family murders and… the ever-looming threat of nuclear annihilation. Many sights to see is an understatement.”
Promotional film for the title track (1966):
Donovan wrote Bert’s Blues by way of an apology for his friend and prominent Folk-musician Bert Jansch. He explained in a 2011 interview with Mojo Magazine: ”Bert was going out with Beverley (Kutner, nee Martyn) at the time, and for a brief while I was part of the triangle, although not in the way Bert thought I was. I wrote the song because I felt bad, as I loved Bert. It also captured everything I was concerned with at the time: jazz, classical, medieval troubadour and folk.”
At the time of writing Celeste, Donovan was questioning the value of the Pop life. ”When we made A Boy Called Donovan, we went where we were told”, Donovan said to Mojo in 2011. ”Celeste has the line, ’Here I stand, acting like a silly clown’, the spring of success was already over and the critics were slamming me. I was beginning to question it all.”
Writer Grant Morrison referenced the song Sunshine Superman in an issue of Animal Man by creating Sunshine Superman, an African American version of Superman who was a member of the Love Syndicate of Dreamworld, from a world based on the drug culture of the 1960s. Sunshine Superman and his world were wiped out by the Crisis of Infinite Earths, only to be brought back by the Psycho-Pirate before fading away again. Sunshine Superman returned for a brief, non-speaking cameo in Final Crisis #7, in an army of Alternate Supermen. There was a story going around that Donovan had dated Sue Lyon at this time while he was in an on-off relationship with his future wife Linda. She left him after Donovan had slipped LSD into her drink.
A lot of bands use Season of the Witch in the soundchecks of their performances due to how much improvisation its’ structure allows for. Apparently, Led Zeppelin in particular were known to do this as they were prepping.
Donovan said in a January 2005 interview: ”Season of the Witch continues to be a perennial influence because it allows a jam – not a 12-bar or Latin groove, but a very modern jam. Led Zeppelin used to warm up every day to it on the road during the soundcheck. It makes me very proud that I’ve created certain forms that other bands can get off on, to explore, be experimental, or just break the rules.”
In 2010 Season of the Witch was used in an ad for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.
It plays during a pivotal scene in the 1973 George Romero film Season of the Witch, which tells a story about a conservative Catholic woman who gets drawn into 70s occultism.
Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin – working as a session-musician at the time – played lead guitar on the track Sunshine Superman.
Originally, the Sunshine Superman single was subtitled For John and Paul.
In the music video for Beatles’ A Day in the Life you can see a closeup of Sunshine Superman playing on a spinning turntable.
The title track was used in the 2010 ”Snow Trip” television commercials for the Honda Accord.
The title track was Donovan’s only single to reach #1 on the Hot 100.
A cover version of The Fat Angel was recorded by Jefferson Airplane for their 1968 live album Bless Its Pointed Head.
Donovan said in his 2011 Mojo Magazine interview, that writing about ”tiny oceans in the sand” on Three King Fishers ”referred to being one with the world.”
Season of the Witch. Covered by Mike Bloomfield (1968), Richard Thompson (2008), Vanilla Fudge (1968), The Pandamonium (1966), Suck (1970), Joan Jett & the Blackhearts (2004), Lou Rawls (1969), Terry Reid (1968), Julie Driscoll (1967), Lana Del Rey (2019), Karen Elson (2010), Julee Cruise (2011), Dr. John (1998), Hole (1997), Sam Gopal (1969), The Sea Urchins (1993), Luna (1996), Jenny Devivo (2000), Pesky Gee! (1969), Masked Marauders (1970), Jellyfish (2002), The Strangelings (2007), Marble Phrogg (1968), Mundy (1996) and Heretix (1989)
Sunshine Superman. Covered by Gabor Szabo (1968), Gianni Pettenati (1967), Jewel (1996), Hüsker Dü (1983), Mel Tormé (1970), Enoch Light (1967), The Sugarman 3 (1998), and Lonnie Smith (1970).
Season of the Witch appeared on The Blacklist’s episode Ivan Stepanov (S8E17), The Simpsons’ episode Rednecks and Broomsticks (S21E7), American Horror Story episode The Sacred Taking (S3E8), Criminal Minds’ episode Nanny Dearest (S8E21).
Pop Rock, Psychedelic Pop, Progressive Pop, Art Pop | Eleventh album by The Beatles; released September 26, 1969.
Singles:
Bloomsbury Auctions sold these unused photographs taken on Abbey Road April 25th, according to an article by The Guardian from 2014:
It’s a milestone for my blog just as it is for any serious blog about 60s-music, to reach the last Beatles-entry. I said that just for all the people expecting Fab Four to take up half the spots in this list’s top-10. Sorry, but I’m no Rolling Stone Magazine!
But more seriously though, in my writeup for Revolver (1966) pretty early on, I already went over why there’s just two albums by them here, how exclusivity affects The Beatles the same way it affects Bola Sete, for example. So there’s no need to talk about that again. Rubber Soul (1965) and The White Album (1968) were contenders for getting placements, but it didn’t turn out that way and that’s just the way the sun rises.
Anyway, Abbey Road is the last thing George, Paul, Ringo and whoever that fourth guy was, came together to write and record. So by-proxy of The Beatles being The Beatles, it was a major cultural event. Let It Be (1970) came out a year after after, but it was recorded as Get Back in a series of… interesting sessions. There are plenty books’ worth of knowledge about the story, but what none of those stories have ever doubted, is that Abbey Road is the last hurrah. It’s the end.
And what a fucking singular thing, for the world’s (still) biggest band to go out with!
Furthermore the consensus seems to be — judging from interviews after the fact — that none of the band-members minded putting this record together in each others’ company, despite it being clear as day that all Four had grown up so much that growing apart (to varying degrees between one another), was inevitable. It’s even been reported as some of the last fun that the four men had together. And I can see it. There’s exceptional brainstorming by George, John, Ringo and whoever that fourth guy was, individually and as a collective. Debatably, everybody has their finest moment here just before the curtains close. As much as every band-member comes together with some of their brightest musical ideas ever, there’s also the hive-mind, working together to craft what could be viewed as a presentation of examples of highly unlikely, elevated contrasts and juxtapositions between ideas. Between songs. This is Abbey Road. The combined hive’s excellence is what informs this album’s identity.
This is a righteous tribute to everything that The Beatles had learned throughout a life so far.
What’s a kind of well-known fact about Come Together, is that that unassuming sound staging the central groove, is actually a recording John Lennon whispering “shoot me” on a loop. It’s an artsy move, that doesn’t have to necessarily be elaborated-upon beyond what you take it as, but it’s interesting how this track works the same way in creating this quirky yet nocturnal effect for you, before and after you find out that that’s what he says in that part. It’s still every bit as quirky, every bit as hyper-aware how to use simplicity-in-structure to be that effective.
Fun story, because I’m probably not gonna have another place to tell this:
Come Together was a song I felt some kind of urge to use — I have no idea in what ways — on my book Ylipurema (2015). That’s a book with 40 chapters on it, split into four acts all equaling in on ten chapters. I’d heard a Michael Jackson-cover and some other one, and I felt like they all did the original song justice, further-complimented the mood of the original song so much that just the variety they offered there… somehow felt as if it complimented my whole idea with that book’s structuring. And the book started with four main-characters aimlessly wandering into the same direction as each other. And there were four acts. And there are four Beatles. There’s some kind of perfection that I associate with the number 4, and Abbey Road as an experience just seems to help me get closer to the root of that highly subjective conclusion.
Abbey Road has been in my life (in big or small ways) for almost a decade — actually I’ve known it the longest out of any albums in this list — and with that, it’s eventually gonna be full of memories.
There’s something about Something! …I had to. But there really is. It’s brilliant, in the way that… well the music video closes in on the reason, really intimately. It’s really providing this feeling where you don’t need a lot to express a complicated thing, idea or feeling.
The Beatles have come such a long way, as a band but yet again also as people living their lives! Every single one has found love by this point. They began their careers singing about love, they blew up singing about love, they invaded the American mainstream and got a fanfare-phenomenon named after them, singing about love. And now here they are, all of them, in this love song feeling out all these passionate words George Harrison wrote and sung on Something. It flew away as the best love-song in the Fab Four’s entire catalog. A deserved finale, to a storied seven years of making love-songs and discovering one’s self.
It’s exciting to even think about now. As much for the whole group as for everyone as an individual. It’s an exciting time, and these four wives would be the women that the public now most closely associates to John, Paul, George and that fourth guy, whoever that was.
You’re probably reading this review because you’re reading through my series of 60s-albums’ reviews. You probably noticed that this high in the list I review these things track-by-track. That probably makes you wonder, what about the most polarizing/infamous Abbey Road-track of them all?
My answer to that is that I love Maxwell’s Silver Hammer! It’s a song that doesn’t make me think too much. Abbey Road generally makes me think about a lot of stuff, about a lot of memories and about what a pivotal album this is for the world’s most celebrated band. But they wouldn’t be The Beatles if they didn’t make at least some songs which I don’t have to think too hard about — that are just simply catchy.
“Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical Science in the home”
At seventeen when I first listened to Abbey Road in its’ entirety, I was a less mature version of myself than I am right now. I guess that much is apparent, but I said that, to say: I used to really think back then that Something and Oh Darling! were two interchangeable songs. And I feel quite silly about that now! Those two songs’ approaches at tone alone is so night-and-day, even if I didn’t know George wrote the former and Paul the latter, I would still guess that two different songwriters from this collective, were in charge. Because there is just such individuality to both songs, even despite them both being about the same thing.
And, you know, just thinking about Abbey Road, this thing is so damn super famous that it’s kind of a description of itself. You tell somebody about a famous thing, they might not know how famous it is, they ask, and you answer “it’s like Abbey Road-famous” and then they immediately get serious about the topic of discussion. This might even be the most famous album I’m reviewing for this list.
Ever since being a young chap and discovering Abbey Road, the record has been a part of my life in big and small ways throughout various phases of life that come and go like tides. One of those definite rises was the summer of 2018, when me and the family went on a fun cottage-trip for a week. There was other fun stuff that happened that year, too, but that week was just simply the highlight of my infatuation with Abbey Road. I still smoked that summer, so a lot of my private music-listening moments, was when I was having a cigarette outside, listening to stuff I liked and reflecting. A summer-habit — one that those reflective breaks endorsed, no matter how much I’d deny that at the time — was fucking up my sleep-schedule. It’d gotten fucked up, good and proper, right before that cottage-trip so I actually had to spend the first day there napping until I called it a night sometime in the afternoon. Woke up in the middle of the first night there unable to sleep, thought “cool this is a change to rewatch The Departed (2006) and there’s a lake in the backyard, where I could go to sit and crab a chair and smoke in solitude”. The weather’s nice, warm, wind doesn’t have punch to it, there’s natural night-life out on that lil’ body of water. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and Octopus’ Garden were on big rotation and I could not have thought of two more fitting songs for those smoke-sessions alone, lighting up another one just for the hell of it and just because there’s no hurries. Looking out into the water, and thinking thoughts. Grand thoughts.
Fun story:
For a long time after discovering the song, I actually had a really badly distorted mp3 of I Want You on my phone. I’d ripped it off YouTube, back when people could actually upload songs there, and with my listening of Abbey Road feverishly intensifying throughout summer ’18, I of course had to get all my favorite-tracks into the phone’s library, listen to them with the Rocket Player… and that (unbeknownst to me) unnecessarily muddied version of She’s So Heavy was the song I thought to be “canon”, for a long long time. It was only after that vacation-trip, buying Abbey Road because at that point I needed to, that I found out that what’s considered a canon-version of I Want You, is actually way cleaner than the song I’ve gotten used to. I liked the muddy version. It was so… Muddy. It’s because I Want You broke so many conventions already, was so repetitive and edgy already that for it to have a way “poorer-sounding” recording-quality than the rest of the tracks, somehow made sense to me all those years ago so much that I didn’t even question it. It’s the longest song on this record, and not counting some short parts of The Long One, the one with least lyrics. It’s a really unique song, really cool and it goes without mentioning that the fact it not only works but shines in-conjunction with Octopus’ Garden and Here Comes the Sun, is plainly genius.
The more I listen to I Want You (She’s So Heavy) the more un-hinged and passionate it comes off to me. It’s placement in this tracklist is so intuitively right. Y’know, for an album that has so much story and interesting context to it, this whole thing is self-contained in its’ achievements and I still find Octopus’ Garden-I Want You to be one of the most singularly amazing song-to-song transitions ever. They come together so well, even though they kind of shouldn’t. Is it deliberate usage of contrasting tones? A mental link between how simplistic but wildly creative both songs are in each point of their making? Honestly I don’t know which is stronger about it. All I know is, it works. That’s something that I find myself saying a lot about Abbey Road.
Here Comes the Sun is a masterpiece.
It’s the greatest song off this album. It is such a masterpiece and so distinctly the best track off this album, that I don’t think anything I’m gonna say about it — critically or introspectively — is quite gonna cut it, but luckily I’ve written a log-entry type of writeup about it one very hopeless day in a major depressive episode I had in 2014. Before I had my diagnosis. When I was very very sure I’d just gone crazy and there was no need to go to a doctor or burden anybody with just how fucking awful I was unable to stop fucking feeling. And then it was just a morning, when I don’t even remember if I’d slept. I’d prayed (hopelessly) for sunshine that day, and less than an hour later it came. I’m not gonna post that writeup here because it’s a part of a “personal book” I wrote at 17. I still don’t feel like it’s a positive story, despite having the phrase “miracle from God” in it. A lot of my writing, my thinking, back around that time, whenever I wanted to be positive about anything in life, came off as if I was trying to scream positive assertations in a way that’s akin to screaming in a cave that was sound-proof to the outside but the same people who made the walls sound-proof, didn’t mind to drop in one singly lowzy torch or lantern.
But be that as it may, the sun did come up that morning. Strangely, 8 years after the fact, I still love Here Comes the Sun and I see much more fulfilling sunrises out my window on many, many days.
Because might not pose itself to any answer for any music-fan-dialogue, but it does take on the role of the thing to counter these usual comments by contrarian Beatles-skeptics. You know the usual sentiment. That they “only got famous for writing simple ditties”. This song is unashamedly, unapologetically simple and gets all of its’ mileage out of that fact. The lyrics are straight-forward, simple and immediate. The cliches have a completeness about them. Because is a great example of when simplicity, works.
You Never Give Me Your Money is a nice continuation from that, and atmospherically the winding beginnings take what Because put down, and the song’s progressions do a lovely job of taking that to a pretty cinematic high.
Talking about those memories of that summer cottage-vacay, I talked about what grand memories I’d formed with I Want You and Octopus’ Garden. What I didn’t mention was that Sun King was actually the song I played the most in there. Something about that hot summer, about that song and how the two just simply go together, came over me and it felt amazing in such a singular way, that I just didn’t want anything added to it when Sun King played.
On their own, I find little to write home about in Mean Mr. Mustard or Polythene Pam, but the two songs are once again two examples of unlikely successes in sequencing. They go together far better than they should, in-conjunction.
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window is Beatles’ ability for catchiness — and later in the career, smooth progressions — exemplified succinctly within a very quick moment. In that effect, it encapsulates the things Abbey Road as a whole, is best at.
George and Paul switched their roles for She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, with Paul playing guitar and George bass.
A love story. The rest of Abbey Road‘s tracks from here on in reach the same levels of extravaganze and leave The Big One (alternative title for the second side) feeling unforgettable. The End to the end of The Big One. It’s the end of the love story.
It is speculated that on The End – the closing-track of the last album they ever recorded as a band – The Beatles went all in with repeating ”love you” as a self-aware nod to the fact they pretty much got all their fame from singing love songs. They’ve actually used the word more than 600times in their career.
“And in the end The love you take Is equal to the love you make”
Here Comes the Sun and Something both have an average score of 4.5/5 on RateYourMusic (track-ratings for the album; exclusive to see if you’ve subscribed). Both of the aforementioned songs were written by George Harrison.
Me and friends of mine did an adorable adaptation of this cover-photo back in 2016.
In case you’re wondering, I’m Paul in this picture.
EMI Studios was renamed Abbey Road studios in honor of this album.
Halfway through recording in June, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in a car-accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
Abbey Road was the first Beatles-album not released in mono at all.
Production: the Moog synthesizer prominently used for this record, was introduced by George Harrison to the rest of the band. Harrison acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound.
Producer John Kurlander, who assisted on many Abbey Road-sessions, later found success on the Lord of the Rings-soundtracks by Howard Shore.
Come Together was an expansion of Let’s Get It Together, a song John Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary’s California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan.
A rough version of the lyrics of Come Together was written at John and Yoko’s second bed-in event in Montreal. As the Vietnam War raged in 1969, the married couple held two week-long, publicized “Bed-ins for Peace” as nonviolent protests.
Of writing Come Together, John Lennon said (on All We Are Saying by David Sheff): ”The thing was created in the studio. It’s gobbledygook; ComeTogether was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, Come Together, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”
George Harrison was inspired to write Something during a White Album session, when he heard labelmate James Taylor sing the song Something in the Way She Moves from James Taylor (1968).
Tapes of the Let It Be-sessions reveal John Lennon giving George Harrison some songwriting-advice during the composition of Something.
Something was John Lennon’s favorite song from Abbey Road, and Paul McCartney said once that he considered it the best song George had ever written.
Frank Sinatra once commented that Something was “the greatest love song ever written”.
Here Comes the Sun was written by George in Eric Clapton‘s garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. YouTuber FabFourArchivist made a video with great, concise telling of the creative process.
Of writing Here Comes the Sun, George Harrison said in his autobiography (I, Me, Mine): ”Here Comes the Sun was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: Sign this and sign that. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to slag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go and see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote Here Comes the Sun.”
Because was inspired by John listening to Yoko Ono playing Beethoven‘s Moonlight Sonata on the piano. He recalled he was “lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play … Suddenly, I said, ‘Can you play those chords backward?’ She did, and I wrote ‘Because’ around them.”
Mean Mr. Mustard was written during The Beatles’ 1968 trip to India.
The song Polythene Pam was originally intended for The White Album, but didn’t get there – getting subsequently saved by its inclusion in the The Long One.
Among unreleased material for Abbey Road was the Harrison song All Things Must Pass, which was included on All Things Must Pass (1970).
The original title of Sun King was originally a longer one – Here Comes the Sun King – but it was shortened after George later brought in his song Here Comes the Sun.
Of the hodge-podge of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese words near the end of Sun King, John Lennon said: ”When we came to sing it, to make them different we started joking, saying ’cuanda para mucho’. We just made it up. Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, so we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something. And of course we got ’chicka ferdi’ – that’s a Liverpool expression; it doesn’t mean anything, just like ’ha ha ha’. One we missed: we could have had ’para noia’, but we forgot all about it. We used to call ourselves Los Para Noias.” (source)
The Beatles got the idea of using reverb for Sun King from hearing Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross.
Shortly after the album’s release, the cover became part of the “Paul is dead” theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumor, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. Paul McCartney parodied this album too, in his 1993 live album Paul Is Live.
In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the Abbey Road cover and a caption: “If they can, why can’t you?”
Fiftieth anniversary editions of the album were released on 27 September 2019. Presented with new mixes in stereo, 5.1 surround, and Dolby Atmos, expanded with previously unreleased session recordings and demos, the anniversary releases include a four-disc set, three-LP vinyl set, a two-CD set, a limited-edition picture disc, single CD and LP releases, and digital and streaming. In promoting the huge rerelase, The Beatles’ YouTube channel premiered a music video for Here Comes the Sun in its’ 2019 remix.
John Lennon has said he hates Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, and Ringo Starr has said that the session for that song was the worst session ever.
”Studied pataphysical science in the home” Pataphysics is a surrealist concept invented by playwright Alfred Jarry popularized by his play Ubu Roi. It is described as ”the science of imaginary solutions.” It’s not a science and its’ practitioners are proudly frivolous, being to science what Pastafarians are to religion. This sort of nonsense was keeping with The Beatles’ sense of humor, thus the reference.
“Painting testimonial pictures” = explaining something with a lot of unnecessary adjectives (English expression at the times).
“When we were recording Oh! Darling I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I’d been performing it on stage all week.” –Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology (2000)
“Oh! Darling was a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it.” –John Lennon, Playboy Magazine interview (1980)
The idea for Octopus’s Garden came to Ringo Starr when he was on comedian Peter Sellers’ boat in Sardinia in ’68, on holiday with his family after having temporarily left The Beatles during the recording of The White Album (1968); tensions in the group-dynamic had been rising. Ringo ordered fish and chips, but the waiter mistakenly gave him squid, a first time for him, and he said of it, ”it was okay. A bit rubbery. Tasted like chicken.” The captain then told Ringo about how octopuses travel along the seabed picking up stones and other shiny objects to create gardens with ’em. Ringo found this inspiring.
Seven tracks from this album have had more than half a million total listeners according to music-tracking app last.fm: Come Together (+1 million total listeners), Here Comes the Sun (+887k total listeners), Something (+833k total listeners), Octopus’s Garden (+602k total listeners), Because (+587k total listeners), Oh! Darling (+570k total listeners), Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (+504k total listeners).
These are two cool YouTube-videos about Abbey Road that I just simply had to include in this writeup. Trust me, I would’ve come up with a good segue between the two if I coulda.
I bought this pack of mints from the nearby pharmacy just because I saw it sitting there, and wanted to include a picture of it on my Abbey Road-writeup:
Come Together. Sampled in 45 songs, notable among them being Frame of Mind by Evidence, Numb by Gary Clark Jr., The Noisy Eater by The Avalanches, Anything Goes by Onyx, and Oscillating Diamonds by Dan Deacon. Covered 166 times, notably by Michael Jackson (1992), Aerosmith (1978), Robin Williams (1998), The Brothers Johnson (1976), Diana Ross (1970), Arctic Monkeys (2012), Soundgarden (1990), Eurythmics (2005), Syl Johnson (1970), The Supremes (1970), Gary Clark Jr. (2017), Ike & Tina Turner (1970), Roberta Flack (2012), The Meters (1992), Herbie Mann (1970), Joe Cocker (2007), George Duke (1970), Godsmack (2012), Count Basie (1969), Willie Bobo (1971), Gladys Knight & the Pips (1975), Michael Hedges (1987), Sarah Vaughan (1981), Rick Wakeman (1997), and Taj Mahal (2011).
Here Comes the Sun. Sampled on Daydreaming by Massive Attack. Covered on 195 different songs, notably by Leo (2017), Nina Simone (1971), Ghost (2010), Sheryl Crow (2007), The Beat Bugs (2018), Paul Simon & George Harrison (2007), Nick Cave (2002), George Martin (1998), Riot (2002), Richie Havens (1970), Belle & Sebastian (2008), Kenny Vehkavaara (2013), Sérgio Mendes (1975), Yo-Yo Ma & James Taylor (2008), Jeremih (2017), and Timo Tervo (1986).
Something. Covered 183 times, notably by James Brown (1973), Musiq Soulchild (2002), Norah Jones (2016), Isaac Hayes (1970), Frank Sinatra (1980), Joe Cocker (1969), Sarah Vaughan (1981), Bloodstone (1973), Booker T. & the M.G.’s (1970), Andy Williams (1971), Tony Bennett (1970), Paul McCartney & Eric Clapton (2003), Diana Ross (2008), Perry Como (1970), George Harrison (1971), Neil Diamond (2014), Martha and the Vandellas (1970), Willie Nelson (1986), Bobby Womack (1970), Alphaville (2003), Chet Baker (1970), Count Basie (1969), Bobby Vinton (1970), Elvis Presley (1973), Carmen McRae (1970), Percy Faith (1970), Chet Atkins (1970), Jerry Vale (1970), Dionne Warwick (1970), Hugo Montenegro (1970), and Johnny Mathis (1970).
Because. Sampled on Because by Evidence. Covered on 86 occasions, notably among which being Iiro Rantala (2015), Alice Cooper & Bee Gees (1978), Elliott Smith (1999), Gary McFarland (1969), Percy Faith (1970), and Al Di Meola (2013).
I Want You (She’s So Heavy). Sampled on Slice of Your Pie by Mötley Crüe, We Can Work It Out by The Four Seasons, Heroine by Yelawolf. Covered on 36 occasions, notable among which being by Coroner (1991), Eddie Hazel (1977), Bee Gees (1978), and Blue Öyster Cult (2012).
Golden Slumbers. Covered on 48 occasions, notablky by Ben Folds (2002), and Bee Gees (1976).
Oh! Darling. Covered on 68 occasions, notably by Florence & the Machine (2009), John Pizzarelli (1999), Huey Lewis (1995), Roberta Flack (2012), Models (1987), The Cooltrane Quartet (2010) and Jussi & the Boys (1979).
You Never Give Me Your Money. Sampled on Carry That Weight by The Beatles (same album). Covered on 22 occasions, notably by Sarah Vaughan (1981), Booker T. & the M.G.’s (1970), and Herbie Mann (1974).
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Covered 34 times, notably by Steve Martin (1978), Vesa-Matti Loiri (1974), Popeda (1989), and Mikko Kivinen (2008).
Sun King. Covered by Bee Gees (1976), Booker T. & the M.G.’s (1970), Percy Faith (1971).
Mean Mr. Mustard. Sampled on Inanimate Sensation by Death Grips, covered by Booker T. & the M.G.’s (1970).
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. Covered on 27 occasions, notably by Joe Cocker (1969), Ike & Tina Turner (1972), Ray Stevens (1970), and José Feliciano (1970).
Altogether whosampled documented 910 times an Abbey Road track has been covered since the time of release. This is far-and-wide the biggest total for an album I’ve ever seen.
IN MEDIA
Golden Slumbers appears on the Simpsons episode Lisa’s Pony (S3E8).
Surf Rock, Space Age Pop | 10th album by The Ventures.
Pickwick Records’ reissue, 1978.
Penetration / Solar Race, this album’s only single.
Surf Rock was one of the key things that got me into this couple-years-long project all about the 1960s. Of course, discovering Jazz-albums from the enormous canon of the era was also a top-shelf priority, but I guess what you could call this is a more “private priority”. Good ol’ Surf Rock from the space age, wherein it experienced a very focused, concise little golden age. I knew going in that that was gonna be a plus. Why did I know that? Because I knew (The Ventures) In Space before going in.
I looked for specifically the best Surf Rock had to offer. I’d have considered it a minor failure in my travels if that wasn’t one of the things I’d come away with. It turns out that I did. The best Surf Rock had — the finest melodies, most consistent playing staying true to the genre’s aesthetic sensibility — was all over The Lively Ones‘ 1963-album Surf City. So why did I rank that album below this one? Because In Space is somehow even better than the best, in a way. It’s Surf Rock performed at a high level, but it’s also like a soundtrack. It achieves that much in terms of atmosphere — enough to be confused for a soundtrack; a fucking stellar one. Just off of knowing In Space, I already had the preexisting notion — not challenged through my findings, if I may add — that 1963 was the shining year of this little subgenre of Pop/Rock music. I knew that just off of knowing In Space. It’s such an entity that it goes even beyond what I imagined the criteria for “perfect Surf Rock” shall be.
This was one of the first albums in which the group played the new Mosrite guitars instead of their traditional Fender instruments which they started recording with. The one in here us a Sunburs-model from around the time.
Out of Limits is a straight classic. It’s performed here in this key iteration by The Ventures, with a sharper note the main-phrase revolves around. A more high-key note inviting a tension. This melody… The Ventures weren’t necessarily pioneers in anything they did in their early years, and got famous for, but just like laying down these definitive iterations of evergreen melodies from the 50s/60s turn, Out of Limits stands out with the help of a small choice. One that makes this melody belong to The Ventures. I don’t think I need to hear another band’s version of the song, because this’ere’s such a standalone take on it.
This is an ageless melody. It has that written all over it.
If you listened to this album, put it on to read this review better or whatever, just put it on some time ago, ’cause you were interested in this interesting-looking rather short Surf Rock record… if you did that, and the first tack jumped on and you got no idea where you recognize that riff from… Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
He Never Came Back‘s catchy, guttural tone at the guitar makes this a righteous groovefest despite not really doing much with bass-portions. The guitar-lines themselves go for such interesting sounds and are catchy enough, hook-y enough on their own, to be background music for good unpredictable times such as surfing. It’s reflective and cinematic enough to feel like a soundtrack to a sunset, you see. All this, while the choice of tone itself, is a counter to those high notes that gave Out of Limits all of its distinctive character, just back there.
So it is clear from the first two tracks already, that we’re dealing with an album that’s quite aware of its own direction.
Moon Child is another cinematic outing revolving around incredibly flashy melody — perhaps even stronger in this regard than the great tracks before it. Guttural guitar stays pretty much in-line with the previous track’s ambitions, but the high notes are here to have interplay with it; very exhaustively. A good time; cinematic. And then the vocalization comes in and just, brings it all home.
It’s quite an event really.
All these songs so far, all this feeling of movement ramped-up until this point, wa skinda asking for a more wayning omment, and as much is provided by Fear. Fear answers the call for a more subdued turn in the tracklist’s overall mood, but also answers the cinematic preset of atmosphere which In Space so expertly laid down.
You know, there was a time — around my 2nd, third, 4th times listening to this; I downloaded it right after the first time — one time in culinary school’s hand-arts-class (which we had to take a course of as mandatory), where I realized I wasn’t sure. I’d actually gotten so immersed in whatever little thing I was gluing together in that class, that as I listened to this album twice-over from my earphones, and got so effectively hooked by everything the first 4 or 5 tracks did… I wasn’t sure if this takeaway, of complete impenetrable consistency, was just an illusion brought-on by immersion. I was debating this album’s rating at that point, somewhere in the 9.5/10-10/10 ballpark. Of course that confusion about how it should be rated is cleared up now, but that thought to me — and that I still remember that debate within myself — stand to me as proof of just how effective a job, this album truly does in hooking in any listener with just its’ first few tracks.
Exploration in Terror continued everything this album was great at already. Simply, succinctly.
War of the Roses offers a more intense moment to this narrative which is overarching.
The Bat kicks so much ass, man. It moves ahead with this confidence with the same dynamic nature, using guttural tone-choice to great effect and seems to also move with the awareness that In Space really doesn’t have to establish anything else about why it’s great, anymore. It could go on autopilot — despite the fact that it doesn’t — with what a specific kind of ear-candy it is, among other things. But no, instead it stays edgy and — especially considering the times they were in — experimental. Thoroughly.
Penetration is strong enough on its’ own as a Rautalanka-piece, that for me to have even heard it from one of my dad’s Rautalanka-CDs in his car as a kid, wouldn’t be a surprising thing for me to find out at all. Either/or, the riffage of it is so nostalgic in a way that feels ingrained within my receptive senses of music, vibrations and nostalgia. Whether I’ve heard it prior to hearing this album or not. In my dad’s car or a movie. This record’s songs have all been bops, have all been thoroughly catchy on their own, but they never made me consider that “man I’ve heard this song from one or multiple places, because there’s now way it could sound this familiar otherwise” quite like this one does, whenever I go on a long bout without thinking about revisiting this record. That can happen; I’ve known this album for half a decade.
The band, or the people of Dolton Records maybe, did notice this song’s power as well because on the album’s cover, this song’s title (along with Out of Limits) reads in a taller font than the title of the record itself. This album has clearly being marketed off of the strength of these two cuts that had significant hit-potential. And when I listen to them again and again, after all these years, it’s still no wonder.
The fast pace emassed yet again gets a proper break to it on Love Goddess of Venus, a more romantic outing than the other reflective moment earlier-on with He Never Came Back. It feels like the story has moved on, fast. But just like that track, this one was just really needed. There’s really proper structure going on here. It all sounds so epic as a Surf Rock-album. I’m glad that “cinematic” is accepted as a word that you don’t really have elaborate on when you use it to describe something, because this sounds so cinematic. It sounds so much like it’s reaching these levels of greatness that just “following the Surf-guidebook” (so to say) wouldn’t even consider. The highs and lows of In Space, all seem to come together to embrace that core value of it.
Solar Race is… well, Solar Race is a solar race. This album’s winding towards closure and reaching higher and higher.
It seems peculiarly specific of me to even say this, but man am I glad that this thing decided to close out with a cover of the Twilight Zone theme. That TV-show must’ve been the peak of artistic ambition in the field of television at the time — at least it was a show that was kind of sold on its’ writing taking risks. Retrospective takes on it by critics, at least confirm that people think as much now. To end out on a vibe that’s borrowed from a clear and unambiguous cultural staple of the time, drives the last screw in about In Space being not just a product, but a reflection of the early sixties, sonically. A musical encapsulation, of the spirit of the era. So much more than just Surf Rock.
Additional notes
Space was the place of interest in the early 60s. It’s even considered The Space Age, and that’s why (The Ventures) In Space was called Space Age Pop. The fascination is such a part of that decade’s identity, that without something pinning that fascination down into something as simple as experimental Surf Rock… it might go missed how profound it was, and how it spoke of a (in 1963, still merely brewing) spirit. The pioneer-spirit. The fondness of vastness of space, the need for exploration, the escape from life’s familiarity (and some views still pertaining in the early 60s that nobody was duly fighting yet)… the youth was on the rise. The Telstar satellite was the greatest symbol for the early 60s space-obsession; the era’s now referred to as The Space Age in American music-history. Telstar even had a song – fittingly, a Surf-Rock song – dedicated to it in ’62, when first images of its’ launch got released to the public. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s website says of the satellite in 2012: ”This week, the Museum recognized the 50th anniversary of Telstar, the first ”active” satellite (one that can receive a radio signal from a ground station and then immediately re-transmit it to another) and the first technology of any kind that enabled transatlantic television transmissions. In 1962, both accomplishments generated intense interest, excitement and commentary. Telstar was, at once, a technical, political, and cultural happening, providing impetus to the world of globalized information we take for granted today.” Quite simply… the Telstar represented people taking a giant step towards getting closer to one another, and was a beautiful thing for that almost as much as for how much important, meaningful dialogue it must’ve inspired.
I rank the 86 episodes of The Sopranos. #29 is From Where to Eternity, the 9th episode of Season 2. The first — and highest-ranking — episode written by Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher. The hour picks up immediately after the events of Full Leather Jacket (S2E8).
INFLUENCES
This weekend — the very same weekend I began to write this writeup — I had the most unforgettable dance of my life so far. I was playing Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul(1966) from the speakers and simply had to ask for her hand, when My Lover’s Prayer came on. She gave it to me.
Michael Imperioli, along with obviously being the main writer of this episode, also came up with the title of it. The genesis of this episode was an idea that Christopher would overdose, and along with it Imperioli presented his ideas and outlines to David Chase, who said he did have plans of Christopher getting shot this season — that Imperioli’s ideas would work there.
Michael didn’t – as writer of this show usually would – come onto the set as a producer yet. On the later four episodes that he wrote, he did do that job, but not here. He told this in Talking Sopranos.
The song Angel Baby by Rosie & the Originals, was Michael’s own idea for a music-cue. David Chase made the decision to include the Otis Redding song here instead. On Talking Sopranos, Imperioli concurred that David had made the right choice.
So here we are! Imperioli’s writing-contributions to the show were something that, summized together, should be called well-flowing above everything else. I knew right from first seeing this episode, for the purpose of taking writeup-notes, that this would be his top-entry. His first job as a writer among this incredible alum of writers, was also his emergence in other ways. There’s things here — themes, allusions, callbacks — which remain strong all the way to the final season of the series. They remain a memory all the way up until that time. From Where to Eternity is nothing, if not memorable.
Here’s how all Imperioli-penned episodes ranked in The Soprano Onceover:
It was in the Talking Sopranos-episode for Marco Polo that Steve Schirripa asked Michael why he didn’t continue writing for the show in its’ sixth and seventh seasons. Michael refused to elaborate or answer. To be honest, I like that. Not every bit of personal information has to be public knowledge for public consumption. My blog wouldn’t gain anything by me knowing the answer to that question anyway. Point is, Michael’s a great writer who had total command of The Sopranos‘ complex set of tones, and did an amazing job writing five episodes for the series.
Alright so the thing that has become most-immediately identifiable with From Where to Eternity, is that it opens up with an immersive shot of the insides of the hospital — where the last episode left us; which is kind of a rare thing for episodes of The Sopranos to do — and of course the immaculate soundtrack to it that is Otis Redding’s My Lover’s Prayer from his 1966 masterpiece Complete & Unbelievable. I really can’t say enough nice things about Otis. He’s my favorite soul-singer of all time. At the same time as I write and post these Sopranos-articles, I’m also doing another series of my top 100 personal greatest albums of the 1960, (cleverly) titled Jani’s 60s-List. Otis has three entries in that list, making him one of few artists to score that much. Complete & Unbelievable is his second one, and will appear somewhere in the top-20 of that countdown. The way these timelines align, I’ll probably put out this writeup before that one but still, the interconnectivity between my two projects feels important to note here. Especially since it is 2022 as I’m writing this from notes that I took in 2020, and this is the year when both of these series’ will end.
In my humble view, From Where to Eternity successfully pulled off what is nothing short of impossible; immortalizing a song that had already became immortal, decades ago. Re-immortalizing. My Lover’s Prayer was one of Otis’ most-famous before this and had its share of usage in the medias, but the way this episode becomes scored by it, made it impossible for any fan of the show to hear this amazing ballad and not link it to the strong feelings of worry and affection, closeness in times of turmoil, that this episode offers in its very intimate way. Such a sentimental thing it is Help me make this– no, Jani, you’re gonna sing the whole song if you keep up.
By the way, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the writeup for another special feature by Ryan Wilson from Ryan Wilson Sopranosposting! I last featured one of his magnificent shitposts back in my writeup for Meadowlands (S1E4).
The first thing to point out, since it’s seen so early in the episode, is that yes indeed the show has a different actress playing Christopher’s mother than they eventually would have. Maria Leone‘s Joan Moltisanti first appeared over a season later in For All Debts Public and Private (S4E1) and yes, indeed, this is a different woman playing Christopher’s mother, screeching that she wants her son’s shooters to fooken’ suffer. A lot of people probably expected my writeup of this episode to very quickly address that little fact about this episode. Now I have. How did I do?
CUE MY LOVER’S PRAYER
Silvio telling Adriana, “if anybody can make it through something like this, it’s Christopher”, is a brooding bit of foreshadowing, for what is to become Adriana’s fate late in this show, Silvio is gonna say basically the exact same thing to Adriana in Long Term Parking as he’s tricking her with him to the woods.
Paulie stone-walls some Federal agents who try to fish for some information about who it was that manuged the get the drip on Christopher.
This bit in the episode’s early moments made me reflect back on just how well this show picks their extras. The entirety of the interaction that is had between these Feds and Tony, Pussy and Paulie, is immaculately well-performed, down to the last hue. The expressions’re so real, so credible that you kinda don’t give a second thought to them, but if you stop and think about it, The Sopranos rarely if ever misses in this area either. I mean, that faintly guilty look in Pussy’s eyes, coloring his expression more for us who know how close he really is with the Federal Government at this point of the story… that’s how particular it gets. Ya gotta love it.
Janice and Richie arrive at the waiting room, and Janice has to immediately start going on about something in order to seem like the most important person in the room.
“Hey! You gotta pray!!” “We are! Jesus…” Janice & AJ Soprano
Devastation is all up in the air, as all key members of the family and famiglia are there at Christopher’s side. Richie Aprile, however, has promised that he only come around if he finds out something about Bevilaqua’s whereabouts. Yes, it is finally that time of the season where Matthew Bevilaqua got what he wanted, ever since his first outing in Guy Walks Into a Psychiatrist’s Office… (S2E1). He’s finally become important.
“Start talking!” Paulie gemands in the middle of Richie lighting a ciggie. “Back the fuck off” says Richie as if Paulie didn’t matter at all. Oh an. Oh man. I’ve seen this show my share of times by now, and at this point I don’t spend too much time anymore, longing for alternate realities where certain fights and other confrontations could’ve happened just for the sake of being more entertaining in that moment… but man, how cool would it have been to see Richie and Paulie actually get mad at each other here and start fighting? Two of the most hard-headed old-school mobsters. I bet the other three would wanna see it too, they wouldn’t even try to stop them because they’re sure Paulie would win, until Richie pulls a wine-bottle opener from his jacket or something like that. It would have been nothing short of a spectacle!
Richie does know somebody who knows where Matthew’s hiding. Turns out the kid wasn’t very good at keeping a secret when he chose his hideout. Who would’ve thunk it? A guy named Quickie G is who they’ll have to see, for the lowdown on Chip Matthew.
Before the first hospital-sequence wraps up, Carmela talks with Gabriela Dante. Mr. Soprano hears a troubling story she’d heard from somebody. About a married man whose goumar had gotten pregnant with his kid, and decided to keep it. This upsets Carmela so much that she just can’t read Memoirs of a Geisha at-peace the following night.
The following night:
Carmela confronts Tony about what possible consequences his extramarital affairs — the couple’s one-sided polyamorous relationship — could entail. What harm it could do to the family, what shame an unwanted child could bring.
She brings up Tony’s Russian whoowah who she still knows he’s seeing. She knew about this all the way back in this season’s beginning, which was only shown through expressions and little hues through scenes that the married couple shared together.
Tony’s peeved at the mere suggestion that he should get snipped if he wants to keep seeing Irina. It’s scary, yes, and seems like an unnecessary risky operation to go through. Not to mention, Tony has been careful! He quickly proclaims that!
“Hey I had her tested for AIDS! What do ya think I am?!” Tony Soprano
Man, it’s operatic how the first act of this episode plays out. Redding’s heart-wrenching ballad being the score to major dramatic events going on, is so delicious I’m glad they used it as much as they did. It totally separates this episode from all the rest. There is nothing else like this. It’s a similar effect that Tindersticks’ Tiny Tears had on Isabella (S1E12), and what Living on a Thin Line by The Kinks will have in University (S3E6). A moment where this becomes especially potent, is the scene where Carmela first brings up the vasectomy-idea to Tony. My Lover’s Prayer starts playing again in the middle of the scene, just as we are shown Carmela storming out of bed… we’re then shown the waiting room of the hospital where Adriana is finally getting some rest amidst her worrying, and we’re kinda guided in our expectations to think that what’s gonna follow is just a bunch of moodboard shots that go together with the classic Soul-song and make a lingering dramatic atmosphere. But it doesn’t. Half a minute into the camera scrolling through the room, we see the biggest dramatic event of the whole hour. Christopher’s heart stops and everyone gets in his room quickly. Amazing dramatic usage of music. Unparalleled by pretty much anything I’ve seen on TV or movies. And a lot of things that come close to it in that regard, can honestly be found in The Sopranos itself. There’s just so much to it, that could be picket apart.
Tony and Carmela get a call about what had happened.
Tony and Carmela make it back to the hospital in the middle of the night and hear that Christopher survived, but was clinically dead for a minute there.
Adriana’s the one in-need of consolation the most out here:
“Positive vibes only.” Pussy Bonpensiero
I don’t know if you knew this or not, but this episode is actually where that popular phrase was born in.
Carmela goes into a silent room to pray in desperation. For her family, for the ones she loves, for all the misguided ways of living. It weighs heavily on her in this scene. Alone, where nobody could see, is where she needs to be. God is who she needs to reach out to in her most urgent need for salvation from the ramifications of a sinister life.
And some people still walk around with the impression that Carmela is “only religious when it suits her“… Here’s a hint: just because Tony Soprano says it, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Her concerned prayer is now the score of muted scenes around the hopsital’s halls where Christopher is being operated-on, and everybody visiting there is staying awake, consoling those that need it. From one Lover’s Prayer to another, this episode changes soundtracks .
The next morning Hesh Rabkin is there and when he speaks in detail about last night’s operation with a doctor, Paulie listens and presents an astute question:
“What the fuck are you two talkin’ about?” Paulie Gualtieri
Christopher, in the meantime, has woken up. He’s requested specifically that he see Tony Soprano and Paulie Gualtieri, and tell them about something. A vision of hell that he had in his near-death experience.
The conversation here where Christopher tells Tony and Paulie about his hell-experience, and outright-mentions the 3 o’clock thing, is the most blatant usage of the 3 o’clock motif we see. Now, I don’t know what 3 o’clock actually means. Well, Michael Imperioli has explained the genesis of it, that it came from a real-life encounter with a spirit that predicted he would play a killer on TV and become famous and successful… it was a great story, and the way he recounted it in the podcast was chilling. Also rewarding, because the podcast is over on the day I’m writing this article and I really got a lot of information and behind-the-scenes factoids from it that I otherwise wouldn’t have. And light-tone’d listening for walks and washin’ dishes. Good times, all in all. Although Steve Schirripa thinks he is WAY more interesting than he really is. But this is far from the only time that 3 o’clock has meant something significant. This is far from the only time that this specific set of circumstances has meant something significant. David Chase knows what 3 o’clock means for The Sopranos in the grand scheme of things. Early into Talking Sopranos, Michael said that he knows what it means from David’s side, but will never say it. A popular belief about the meaning is that it’s a preminition of how Tony will get killed in the final scene of Made in America (S6E21). The guy in a Members Only-jacket could be coming out of the bathroom to Tony’s right — at Tony’s 3 o’clock — in the very same moment when the screen goes black. That is what people believe about the ending. That’s all I’ll say about this episode’s connectivity to Made in America, though. The series-finale will rank very highly in The Soprano Onceover and I’ll say what I have to say about it, when it’s time.
For now though, Paulie is already morbidly curious about what this Hell-vision was all about. He goes to the hallway, asking Silvio what time the Mikey-hit was.
Poison Ivy was the name of the #5-entry of me and Aki’s list of Top 110 Funniest Things to Happen on The Sopranos (2015). That video contained clips from I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano (S1E13) and then these scenes of Paulie getting paranoid… which ended in one of the most bizarre sequences this show’d ever had. You’ll see what I’m talking about very soon, I won’t even have to announce it when we get to the scene that I consider to be this episode’s peak of strangeness. What makes it even more perfect than it already is, is that what finally sets Paulie off at the end of this brilliantly strange storyline, is an unwittingly-provocatively said line, “Poison ivy?… He wants to know if it still itches…” This episode is the first real Paulie-showcase of any degree that this show ever did, Michael Imperioli was eager to get to write a major story for Paulie and it really shows. I’m especially giddy about this episode because of that particular reason. Paulie is my favorite character.
ONE OOF MADONN SCENE Tony and Melfi on Hell
This scene. This speech. This dialogue.
All this leads to Tony finally letting out his real feelings about the severity of Christopher’s situation.
This scene has been dissected to death, repeated on YouTube countless times by countless people who’ve created montages and tributes. Fans who can’t get enough of The Sopranos years after they’ve finished watching it (go figure). But it reveals an interesting dynamic, actually. Tony is very believable when he says that Christopher isn’t the type that deserves hell. There’s a kind of comfort in that. Matter of fact, he’s so believable in his stating that, that we don’t even spend the majority of this scene discussing the validity of this statement he so sternly believes. Most of it is spent on Tony justifying his own being, his own actions and lifestyle. But Tony is honest here, for how honest he can be. An interesting angle to think about this from is also Tony is the one guiding Christopher into this path of sin. Decadence and decay. Big Nothing. So Christopher won’t be the one going to hell. This is just a reflection of Tony’s own world-view that he can’t shake, that the world revolves around him. In Season 5 Christopher famously says that Tony is “the guy I’m going to hell for”. And of course they will have gone through a lot more by that point of the story, but it’s interesting how subtly this conversation, and the things Tony says in it, show us how deep his center-of-the-world-attitude runs. Christopher is so close to him that he doesn’t see his decisions as his decisions on even this deep level where this confessional comes from. He sees his son-figure’s path of life as an extension of his own and it’s really fascinating to me, how apparent that becomes just from listening to Tony talk about Christopehr when he’s reall concerned about him. Even as he likens himself and Christopher to soldiers in any loosely-defined meaning of the word, he is subconsciously excusing himself from fully acknowledging Christopher’s free will (Tony’s determinism, which this one lovely Sopranos-video-essay dove into and I dove deeper into in my Join the Club (S6E2)-writeup). Why doesn’t Tony — deep down — want to fully acknowledge Christopher’s free will? I believe he — on the same very real level where this speech came from — is afraid of such a thing existing at all.
“That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you?” Jennifer Melfi
The runtime-mark of this episode went from 18:18 to 18:19 right at the same second as Paulie’s little clock — which he was staying awake to hold in his hand — went from 2:59 to 3:00. This is a preminition! The number 18 is so prominent in the episode’s runtime at this second because it was predicting that some day, somebody will write a blog-post about the episode! Somebody who lives in a country where 18 is the legal drinking-age! In case you didn’t notice, I was being ironic! a.
Paranoid, Paulie hears a sound outside and jumps up. Michelle the goumar wakes up — fun fact: Paulie will actually still mention this groumar in To Save Us All from Satan’s Power (S3E10) indicating that their affair was long! — and this has to be handled now. It’s built heavy into the scene that Paulie has been doing quirky shit like this for days and working himself up. Even his wings are messed up.
Michelle goes into a story about a strange three o’clock occurrence. I love the way the next cut just happens, right after Paulie hears the boring and overly-detailed story of Michelle’s 3 o’clock wedding mishap. Giving a few seconds of screen-time to Paulie taking it in, we’re cutting to see him come up to Christopher’s room at the hopsital. And I’m pretty sure this succession of events was close to being in real-time*. Paulie didn’t waste a second. He needed to get to the bottom of this paranormal event ASAP. *I exaggerated. Of course Paulie took due time to get the wings right before going out.
At Christopher’s room, he rattles the hospital-bed, waking him up and transparently lying that he was tidying up the place right in the middle of the night. What’s even funnier than the lie itself here, is that Paulie gets away with it because Christopher is so drug-addled. The lie didn’t even have to make sense.
Paulie must know more!
“You didn’t go to Hell! You went to purgatory, my friend!” Paulie Gualtieri
“The heat would’ve been the first thing you noticed! Hell is hot. That’s never been disputed by anyone!” Paulie Gualtieri
Melfi and Elliot have a therapy-session, where Melfi is distraught by heavy emotions from having suddenly taken a stance against Tony, with this vulnerable state her patient is in and everything. And now that she mentions it, it was kind of distasteful. If not, at least un-professional. Nobody goes to a therapist to get confronted when they’re fearing for the life of a relative.
“I’m living in a moral never-never-land with this patient!” Jennifer Melfi
Puthy and Thkip meet at a parking lot in a secluded place.
It’s observable how “business as usual” this has become for Pussy by this point.
After Pussy leaves the conversation with Thkip at that empty parking lot, we’re treated to a wide shot which a bridge takes a big portion of. This of course continues the show’s habit of bridges symbolizing death or disaster that is looming. The bridge also looks shadow-drenched, working in-contrast with hwo bright and sunny the whole scene otherwise looks. And look. Even if this choice of setting, scenery and time of day from the production-department, didn’t have that overt symbolic meaning to it… the way it looks is still undeniably effective.
I have no segue for this point, but– There’s a mention of a peppers & eggs sandwich in this episode — the second one of the series. Third time will be at Another Toothpick (S3E5), and the first time was in Boca (S1E9). I don’t know if this is a favorite sandwich of Chase’s, but apparently something about this type of sandwich was important enough to name a soundtrack-CD after it (My Lover’s Prayer obviously made it to the CD). Boca is ranked higher than this episode by me and that was the first time, chronologically, that such a sandwich was mentioned. –I have no segue out of this point either.
Christopher’s mom comes to see him, after which enters Carmela, who’s so happy that Christopher had a vision of heaven and prayed and has decided to change his ways. But it turns out what Tony had told her last night, was a total lie. It was Hell Christopher saw. At first, yes this makes Carmela look a little bit naïve but I think that takeaway’s quicky squashed when you sympathize for what a vulnerable state she is in. We just saw it in her prayer. What this whole dialogue shows, is just how easy lying to his wife, comes to Tony. Carmela’s concerns were right. Tony’s pathological tendencies — which only begin with how easily he lies — are something that her husband is absolutely not careful enough with. This lie, that Tony had told Carmela off-camera, that Christopher saw Heaven instead of Hell, was just a lie of convenience. Tony must’ve known that Carmela would find out that it was a lie. He just lied to her so he could keep sleeping tidy.
As if it wasn’t enough that these two main-stories intertwined this-handily here, there’s also a hilarious tie-in to the Poison Ivy-storyline in this scene: Carmela nevertheless quickly accepts that Tony just lied to her because that’s what Tony will do. But then the last line of this was “or maybe it was purgatory, I don’t know.” It’s like one last reference to the Paulie-hilarity that’s been going on. Like this episode was being aware in this moment of what a goldmine it was dealing with by giving Paulie Gualtieri this-much airtime. It always makes me crack up.
This Paulie-storyline works for such comedic effect, and adds lots of levity but not as much as to deviate from the major tensions of the hour. It’s still consistent to the story being told. This is also the first time that Paulie is this-prominent in a single episode, which is a good thing that will start happening more often. I think Paulie’s character, with his old age and such, was a perfect communicator for the Christian guilt-side of this gangster story, which makes sense for the world that all these characters live in — being Catholics, the bulk of them. I believe Paulie is the only one of the mobsters that believes in God. But more about that, and his religiosity and him acting as the “Catholic heart” of the mob-world… in my upcoming writeup for The Ride (S6E9). That episode’s coming up three entries from now, actually.
Carmela comes home.
He and Tony have one more heated conversation about the vasectomy-idea.
“Isn’t it a sin, to undo the good work He’s done?” “You should know, you make a living of it.” Tony & Carmela Soprano
It’s understandable. Carmela’s still affected by that last example of how easy it is for Tony to lie.
What isn’t understandable, is the thing Tony does when AJ walks in and just happens to drop a dish on the floor. Being that the theme of who is wrong, who is right runs almost as deep in From Where to Eternity as does faith and faithfulness, it’s only fitting that potentially the most irredeemable thing Tony ever does, happens in the episode too. And I’m not talking about the Bevilaqua-murder. I’m talking about when he says “I’m supposed to get a vasectomy when this is my male heir?”
Tony can go sit on a cactus for saying that — doing that — to his son. You never ever ever say to your child that they’re un-wanted. That is how mental disorders begin.
Paulie wakes up in the middle of the night again, waking up Michelle’s kids. He still hasn’t found his peace with his friend’s paranormal event.
Michelle recommends that Paulie go see a psychic. Let me just say, thank you Michelle. That was a great thing you did.
Pussy meets with Quickie G, the source Richie Aprile told them about. He says Matthew is up near the place where George Washington once lived.
Paulie sees the psychic!
Pictures of this scene alone will do more justice to it in this recap, than my own words could~
“Poison Ivy?… He wants to know if it still itches…” Psychic
FUCKING QUEERS!
You know what’s most-incredible about this absolute historic meltdown Paulie has? This took me a number of viewings to notice. He didn’t scream that one last thing to the people attending the psychic-session. The people he tried to rally against this satanic black magic and sick shit(!) He didn’t scream to them that they’re fucking queers(!) He screamed that at those ghosts behind his back, that the psychic was talking to.
Fun fact. Henry Bronchtein (assistant director of every episode of the show, main director of this one and three others) said in this episode’s audio-commentary that the psychic’s house was a house that the set-department built. They’d used that set many many times, sometimes as a hotel room. He didn’t remember all the things that place had been.
And for good measure, here’s Paulie at the psychic but with Laura Palmer’s Theme from Twin Peaks.
Paulie and Tony talk at the backroom of the Bing. Paulie has to pour up a drink — that he can’t even bring himself to drink — he’s so anxious.
“There’s no denying it. I’m dragging a bunch of fucking ghouls around me.” Paulie Gualtieri
Tony has a refreshing stance about Paulie’s whole recent superstition/paranoia-bit. He really sees no point in it. Where the fuck was this psychic when they could’ve used him to find out this Bevilaqua-kid’s whereabouts, all-last-week?
“…He deals only with the dead.” Paulie Gualtieri
That was such a great quote squarely for the way Tony Sirico delivered it, that’s the whole reason I wanted to do that walk-up to it and put it in quotes.
“If you were in India you’d go to Hell for [eating steak]” “I’m not in India. What do I give a fuck?” Tony Soprano & Paulie Gualtieri
It’s clear to everybody probably, but I must iterate it once: Tony Sirico is thjis episode’s MVP in my opinion.
Tony brings an apology-pizza to AJ’s room, and the gesture works and cheers up the boy. It was extremely called-for, and the speech that Tony gives to the boy, isn’t “perfect” but it’s abundantly clear that he has thought a lot about what he’s going to say and how he’s going to say. That he does care. And this says — more than any explanation of why he said what he said; no explanation will ever justify that — that he really did not mean it. Healing can begin. Carmela comes to the door to watch the wholesome moment.
It’s a beautiful scene.
After it’s over, Tony hears from the phone that Quickie G’s information is good and they have a definitive location on Matt Bevilaqua.
Tony’s also delighted to point out that oh it’s close to the house where George Washington once lived.
I think that the actual point in time, when Tony changed his mind about the vasectomy-issue, was when he was preparing to leave, to kill Bevilaqua. This one lingering shot where he’s putting a shirt on and stops to visibly think. This episode does a great job in extending the length of certain shots, expressions and such that will become more important. I think what lulled us into that particular visual messaging From Where to Eternity is so good at, was all those lingering shots of people in the hospital during the opening-minutes. After those cinematic moments you kind of expect this episode to tell a lot of its’ story just visually. Tony looked Carmela right in the face, when in the middle of the night a fateful work-call came, and he had to go kill Dale. He had to lie straight to Carmela’s face when she asked what was going on, not because he was going to go cheat on her, but because he doesn’t want to let her know he’s about to murder somebody. Tony knows Carmela can’t be sure what to make of this, and Tony’s face is shown an extra second here as his lie is more transparent than his lying for Carmela tends to usually be — this is a particularly emotional issue to him, to get this right. Whereas his goumars, really are not. There’s a guilt Tony feels from that; not lying itself, but the fact that Carmela has to live with a kind of uncertainty regarding Tony, in large part because of his long-running habit of cheating… which is what made her bring up the vasectomy-issue in the first place. I think that’s what Tony’s agreeing to the proposition (a little later) means. I think he’s noticing the fragility of all this double-life business, even if it comes naturally to him. Also, Carmela has to deal with thoughts and hypotheticals day-to-day that are far more scary than a vasectomy would be to Tony.
“Cut Furio loose, three’s a crowd.” Tony says to Pussy. He wants to do this.
They go and do this.
For these first moments of Matt Bevilaqua’s death-scene, in a way it passes us sufficiently, that in this scene Pussy is actually looking at his own future, when he has to step up and shoot the pleadin’ and explanatin’ Matthew too, along with Tony. It’s quite potent.
I love how that wraps up the earlier Pussy-scene’s concerns. I love how that connects to Carmela’s line about how Tony makes a living… …How that connects to people in this episode praying for life, undoing life, seeking reassurance for their life, living through moments where a prayer is all they could depend on. And then there’s this little squeek’s little begging for “mommy!” Something that will ring in Tony’s head in the next episode, Bust Out (S2E10).
It is all just incredibly gripping drama to behold.
One of the best tension-extensions this show has ever pulled off is in the Bevilaqua urder-scene, where they go on a whole diatribe about what kind of Fanta there’s available in the Snack Bar. It’s so good that you assume it out of the scene, but it really turned into the stuff of legend. Mob movies of the past were famous for extending their murder-scenes, and the sensibility for that has definitely been taken, by this show, from the great works of the genre that preceded it. But no other bit of Gangster Media could’ve pulled off this big a bit of dialogue right before a murder. Dialogue that is so trivial that it becomes important for being so memorable. Again, Sopranos didn’t pioneer moves like this in scenes like this, but sure as shit perfected it.
ALSO, cool cut from the image of Matthew dead, to the outside-view of the parrish Paulie is visiting. Their compositions highlight each other in a match-cut-kinda way, speaking out From Where to Eternity‘s symbolic language. Faith and decay.
Paulie sees a priest, reporting his spiritual disappointments of late. His religiosity has been dutifully stricken by this voodoo nonsense Hell-magic sick shit, and these fucking queers. He demands an explanation for why he wasn’t protected.
“But irregardless… I should have immunity to all this shit.” Paulie Gualtieri
“It’s too late,” Paulie has to conclude before leaving. Priest-man’s answers to his pressing questions have left him even more dissatisfied than he was when he started. “You left me defenseless.
On his way out Paulie looks at Jesus who looks on with his eyes closed.
Tony and Pussy are out having steaks after murdering Matthew.
Not likely a coincidence that Tony and Pussy’s restaurant scene is filmed in the actual Duke’s Stockyard Inn in New Jersey, which is an Irish bar. Christopher’s near-death experience also happened in an Irish bar. If it’s not a case of this episode referencing itself, it’s at least a tasteful choice of filming location.
“Rich man and a poor man, they both got they same wedding-anniversary. Every year they meet on Madison Avenue when they’re shopping for their wives. So the poor man asks the rich man, “what did you buy your wife this year?” He says “I bought her a diamond ring, and a brand-new Mercedes.” Poor man says, “why’d you get her both for?” Rich man says, “if she doesn’t like the diamond ring, she can bring it back the Mercedes and still be happy”. Rich man says, “what’d you get your wife this year?” He says, “I got her a pair of slippers and a dildo.” Rich man says “why’d you get her a pair of slippers and a dildo for?” “‘Cause if she doesn’t like the slippers, she can go fuck herself!” Tony Soprano
Pussy regaining his credibility in Tony’s eyes by participating in a murder with him, is the start of a really shameful, dark, slippery downward-slope for his character and anyone who was a fan of his before this. For the rest of his arc in Season 2, we see him lose pretty much any and all honor he once had, in front of our eyes, trafically fast. And while no one catches him or holds him accountable for his pathological lies which are told via excellent storytelling to spin completely out of control… he still kinda gets what is coming to him. But the audience will definitely see the worst of him for the rest of Season 2. And I’m actually excluding Funhouse (S2E13) from that statement. The things he does in that episode before his inevitable dead, are all probably not excusable but regular anyway. No, the peak of Pussy losing all possibility for redemption will be in this season’s penultimate episode The Night in White Satin Armor (S2E12). But more on that will be in that episode’s writeup, later when I’ll discuss that. Spineless will be a good word to use, I suppose, with Pussy’s back-problems and whatnot. I was being ironic again!
Tony comes home and sits at the bed next to Carmela. He says he’ll agree to the vasectomy-bit.
He also says he’s not gonna continue cheating on her.
“If you’re not gonna believe me… then fine.” That line’s delivery from Gandolfini has some kind of a magic to it. It rings in my head from time to time, just the way he pronounces it.
Tony and Carmela proceed then, to make love.
I said this episode was rich with symbolism, didn’t I? This is the very very last image of it. CUE MY LOVER’S PRAYER
Season 2’s endings are habitually brilliant, and the show absolutely peaked in that regard in the year 2000. This episode’s no exception. The ending-scene — love-scene between Tony and Carmela — bookends the operatic episode by bringing Otis back for another go-round. Fun fact: this is the first time Tony and Carmela have sex in the show. The loving hands of the married couple, locking into one another as the camera smoothly pans just an inch to the right to give us a full view of Virgin Mary on the nightstand… adds up to a nice visual connector to help elevate this irregular cliffhanger that is thematically climactic in the episode. It also connects Carmela and Tony’s domestic dispute to the absolutely most hilarious storyline of the whole season. Paulie’s. Some could even say it’s the funniest, and I wouldn’t disagree. I mentioned something about this episode’s way of giving some extra hanging-time for images that are important for scene-to-scene connections. Well that happened when Paulie exited that parrish-man’s office and on the hallway took his sweet time to look at the Jesus and Mary-statues at the vestibule. In terms of symbolism, it just gives this last bit of reassurance of a feeling, that there is something watching over all that is happening in this world. These lives in their regularness. That something might be abstract, might be outright hilarious, insensible, concerning, but I believe it will be loving if we choose the way of love. My lover’s prayer. I have been Jani Ojala, and this has been an incredibly rewarding episode to write about.
In Tony and Melfi’s discussion over whether or not Christopher or Tony deserves hell, Tony’s two examples of people that do, are Adolf Hitler the Nazi Party leader and Pol Pot the leading member of the Cambodian communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997 who made the country a one-party rule and had a history of doing heinous acts as leader.
Tony also references the Italian diaspora the large-scale emigration of Italians from Italy, which has occurred twice in history, around 1880 and at the turn of the next century. It really only ended in the 1940s, and the unification of Italy was a big reason for it happening. He says that the Carnegie and Rockefeller families needed them as ”worker bees” to build their cities etc.
Carmela is seen reading Memoirs of a Geisha, the historical fiction novel by Arthur Golden, in bed in this and several succeeding episodes.
Thanks to Mike Joseph Czulinski from Twin Peaks Logposting for the edit of Paulie with Laura Palmer’s Theme and Ryan Wilson from Ryan Wilson Sopranosposting, once again.
Film Score, Lounge, Bossa nova | 22nd album by Piero Umiliani.
Score to the 1969 Italian-German detective film Blonde Köder für den Mörder [Death Knocks Twice], directed by Harald Philipp. In it, a wealthy businessman, Francesco Villaverde, who suffers from mental issues, strangles Mrs. Ferretti, the beautiful wife of another businessman, on a beach after they make love. The murder is witnessed by two criminals who then blackmail Francesco’s wife to get some property they desire from her. Two private eyes try to prove that Francesco murdered the woman on the beach, so they use a young blonde (the daughter of one of the detectives) to pose as bait for Francesco to kill.
An obscure soundtrack to an obscure Italian-German crime thriller from just the end of the decade. (And not a very critically lauded thriller either). One may think we’re in the deep waters now, since my top-25 included something this-unusual. It’s the top-25 and I’m taking notes for these reviews at half the speed (2 reviews per week, instead of the usual 4) just so I can get into as much detail as I really want to, for the final quarter of this countdown. One may think that for me to rank this record above Pet Sounds andRevolver, not to mention include it when I didn’t include The Velvet Underground & Nico or The Doors… that “obscure” is gonna be the name of the game as my 60s-List enters its’ final phase. But that’s not true. My #1-pick will be a very usual one, unsurprising once you see it, but especially for people who know me and know what music I like.
No, obscurity isn’t gonna be the name of the game but the reason Death Knocks Twice has a prestigious #24-spot, has nothing to do with how well-known it is. It has everything to do with the album itself, doing everything right.
This is the highest-ranked soundtrack-album on this list.
It’s a soundtrack that I am just endlessly enthralled by, without-fail every time that I put it on. It begins with a melody that… the first real rushing sense it gave me — gives me now — is “why haven’t I heard this melody before, exactly this melody and exactly in this way?” It’s so perfect to suit anything in a movie that aims for a suspenseful effect. A really distant sense of nostalgia made me crave this motif, but the album fulfills that craving with many reprises as it goes on. The thing about that which is fantastic, is that along this album it always happens with a different idea involved.
A melody good enough to rival the first glorious thing I heard, comes right after in Continuità. A delicious mixture of that Italian kind of sophisticated stop-and-go, fused together with a Brazilian (Bossa nova) sense of exoticism. Yet another melody that has just this monstrous reach. It’s good in various ways and will be instantaneous to anybody throwin’ it on. Not as many people have heard this album as they should have.
Perfect ingredients combine once agian in Stutterer. The song leaves a wild impression for something that is less than two minutes short. That applies to a lot of tracks here, but this one’s just the first to get me to marvel at that. How each chosen tone is savored melodically. It’s got a really dynamic usage of its’ arsenal, in the piano and horns coming together in a way that… did I already use the word “savory“?
This record’s act of spinning the main motif has its’ first real inclination in the cut called At Present, which is a much more haunting, dour, brooding reprise of the main theme. Taking it a little bit slower, revelling in its’ atmospheric strengths, like a strong chapter in a thrilling story; one whose events are very to-the-point.
Trappola Sentimentale is another one of those rhythmic affairs, with a steady melody to counter a rendition of the main-theme right after it. This album switches really dynamically from melodic affairs to rhythmic ones and then back, and this short track is that in a capsule.
I love these two things working the way they work in-conjunction because when I revisit La Morte Bussa Due Volte overall, it shines as quite the refresher. Refresher of this palpable suspense whose relaxed moments are just as intuitive, and almost kind of set you up to expect that weight of feeling. As effective as any reprise.
The follow-up itself is a reprise, and as such pretty provocative stuff. It breaks down into this wayning middle-section that wasn’t a part of the initial promise but works joined-at-the-hip as a part of the main theme. It’s an unexpected moment, but from the overall mood and tone and how it’s been setting its’ tracks, it does feel at this point of the overall-tracklist, like just the thing to try.
Crystal is unadulterared piano-glory packaged into song. Once again a two-minuter, it’s one of the things with the heaviest emotional inclinations thrust upon you to just feel this suspense and just remember it. The strings in the back feel like they, in their way, force a sense of nostalgia about all that is happening melodically. They’re there to be a backing, a platform for piano to tell this short tale of wistfulness through quite the selection of exotic, lush particular notes. It is, as a music reviewer might say in a music-review, devastatingly beautiful.
Hearing the main-theme with lyrics for the first time — with English lyrics, for the first time — is quite an event in the second half of the tracklist. …this woman’s voice is just the right one for it. The singer can’t hide the fact this is not native language, and that accentuation adds a hint of unfamiliarity that’s beneficial for the general eerie feeling the soundtrack shoots for.
But these lyrics, and how they pack in this stanza of “yes that’s right I’m right in front of you. This is me. Everything you’ve done. The ruled, staring back at the ruler. I’m the scorned. I’m all that it cost. The personification. Can you look at my face?”
It’s really something.
The extract coming right after “My Face” is a really extravagant affair. Sounds like a distraction; something that in its’ background-winds’ provided elevation of the pretty standardized lead-horns… really set a stage for those… it all effortlessly reaches a level of flight-of-fance, and it’s such an effective afterthought. Especially when it wasn’t an afterthrought again. Alas, it goes into a very Ennio Morricone-flavored reprise with a smooth but careful transition once again. You know, the order in which IT unfolds has altered. Singaling overall progression and a cumulative effect.
The Consequence-reprise happens to — if you play that side-by-side with Concession — seem like it grew into that. Into this lone-flute interpretation of the main-melody. Brief passages, piano-embellishes that are anything but light… easy on the ears but serious. You see the main-melody as saxophone begins to approach it, going into a much more wistful direction after the fact. Once again there is a lot going on, and once again the simple credits-music of the movie is handled with care, and a new twist involved. Simple additions, that make it all feel oh-so-layered.
Man, I keep telling myself that I’m not a big fan of vibraphones in Jazz (talked at greater length about it in the review for Idle Moments by Grant Green which placed one spot below this), but To Seek, man… First of all what a name for a song! But secondly, the way the vibes begin, really sets the main-thesis of this song, so to say, melodically. …And then comes into a countering piano-riff. It’s just the right mix. Nothing else would have worked, no other pairing — countering — of instruments would have said as much as what this song says right now, as it is. Nothing to change here, at all.
By the time we get to Bob and Helen, we can easily observe that this soundtrack is not shy about having some occasional fun with itself. The seriousness of the foundation, the impaccable striking melodies. In that way I love this album, and in that way I think it has a very special ending for such a grand sweeping musical narrative. Not special as in the brooding nature and serious feeling culminating into some train-wreck you can’t turn your eyes away from, but… it takes a turn with intuitive timing, and starts to have more fun, leaving a fun memory as well as aftertaste, suddenly but in a welcome way.
No better possible way for this thing to go out, than that vocal version of the main theme, My Face, but this time in Italian. No better way. Truly.
Additional notes
Umiliani was born in Florence, Tuscany. You only need to look up the shoresiode views of Tuscany, to understand how the sound itself – all over this Italian composer’s Bossa Nova flights-of-fancy – turned out so authentic. Photorealistic, even. This world sometimes is a small place. We come across similar serene, beautiful and moving inspirations. I listen to cuts like Continuita and Trappola Sentimentale, and this connectivity is clear to me.
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