A Wonderful Little Documentary

I think it must have been Trouble from This Is the Modern World, on WFMU who led me on this pathway, but when I looked over her play list that I’d been listening to, I didn’t see anything from Vivian Stanshall.  I believe it was a track from “Men Opening Umbrellas, Ahead.” That caught my ears and had me examining things.   That solo album of his, from 1974 turns out to have Traffic and as listed on the credits the band includes, “unidentified West Indian taxi driver - bass guitar”, as well as an “unidentified West Indian taxi driver's friend - drum kit.”   I just spent some time trying to find the seminal track but I’ve come up short.  (I couldn’t leave it alone and looked it up on to the “WFMU+ playlist of some seven hundred videos and there I found that I’d posited “The Question” which is not on said album but must have somehow lead me there.)

And one thing leads to another.  Soon I was sorting through more and more of Mr. Stanshall’s oeuvre, where I found the intriguing album with the members of Traffic and remembered that he was part of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band where Neil Innes had also gotten his start.  I recalled that they were odd and funny and that’s about it, so I dug around a bit.  There was a wonderful little documentary about the man: “From the Canyons of His Mind: Vivian Stanshall.”  I am not usually one to ever watch much of anything video related for very long, but I was wonderfully sucked in and spent the next hour (awake!) watching him and his friends describe his odd progression through life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ymcdUA6g4

Considering him a circular child with a rather stiff, square father, the sea-side carny upbringing.  The videos though, of him with googly-glasses, dancing with statues and crooning with that surprisingly inviting, lush Elvis-like tenor, won me over, rather quickly.  Why hadn’t I considered him before?  Indeed, I had.  I’ve seen and made my kids see The Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” more than a few times.  Viv and Bonzos are the ones singing “Death Cab for Cutie” in that scene where John’s the waiter, I believe, and serves heaps of pasta to Ringo’s auntie in the dream sequence. 

And where the hard boppers were all done in with smack, Viv seems to have relied a bit too much on booze and tranquilizers that made performing, creating, living increasingly difficult.  He and his wife and daughter lived on a house boat on the Thames, . . . that sank.  And though the film didn’t speak to it, he must have died shortly before, in an electrical fire which broke out in his home in Muswell Hill, (the neighborhood where Ray and Dave Davies grew up) in 1995 at the tender age of fifty-one.  I shared the documentary with a few friends and family who I suspected might enjoy, just like I’m sharing it with you now.

Tuesday, 05/07/19