The Michigan Daily-Sunday, April 6, 1980-Page 5 Punk pop in Canton: Playing by numbers Spacek turns 'Coal' to diamonds By MARK COLEMAN "Oh, you missed the first band? Real loud and crazy, jumping around the stage and all. They weren't that good-not as good as Hall and Oates or anthing-but they sounded so nervous, man, everybody else started to gonuts, too. I don't know, I guess you'd call it punk rock." Call this music what you will, but clearly it's come a long way since the halcyon days of 1977. To be exact, it's come all the way to the Centre Stage Showcase Club in Canton, Michigan to assault the sensibilities of a paunchy ex- wrestler, girlfriend in tow, who've come to spend a standard Thursday evening By OWEN GLEIBERMAN Coal Miner's Daughter, based on Loretta Lynn's best-selling autobiog- raphy, has spunky humor and a real gutsy, low-down vitality. The opening scenes sweep you up into the tiny, tradition-bound Appalachian mining town of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky with such a bubbly energy and fine sense of surface detail that you just sit back and let the magic of movies transport you. You can tell that the filmmakers got their hands dirty-and loved every minute of it. This movie boasts such a simple, infectious love for its subject that you go out humming Loretta Lynn's songs and feeling like -you understand just what she's all about. Considering that Lynn is still alive and well and singing the songs that made her famous, the movie certainly takes enough liberties with its subect-it doesn't hide the "dirt." But so much money and talent have been lavished on bringing the story to the screen that they overload the thin, hackneyed Hollywood-bio genre. By the time Coal Miner's Daughter winds into its predictable second half, the writing (by Thomas Rickman) and direction (by Michael Apted) have become too preoccupied with sustaining the schematic,droad-to-success conceits that defined such stillborn film biographies as The Glenn Miller Story. Fortunately, the strained conventions don't straitjacket the backwoods poetry that's the movie's real subect; as lively and enjoyable as it is, Coal Miner's Daughter sometimes bursts out of its seams to be even better. WHOEVER DECIDED to film Lynn's story knew what they were doing: Coal Miner's Daughter has a knockout subject for a movie. Though some find the twangy, elemental honesty of country music too simple and naive, C&W musicians with national acclaim have had to wed the pure folk emotionaLism of their roots to the shimmering lights of pop-culture glory, and that makes them romantic artist- figures. Sometimes, the pop-culture side takes over and tarnishes that appeal, and you get Dolly Parton singing trashy pop hits on AM radio, exploiting everything that's sweet and mellow in her little-girl voice and leaving out the backwoods inflection. But Loretta Lynn never strayed that far from her roots, so Coal Miner's Daughter is a true "rags to riches" story. When a worn, bedraggled housewife stumbles up to Loretta after a show and says that when she sings, "It's like you're singing about my life," that's the populist magic of country music and, its stars; deep down (or so we try and believe), they're just like everybody else, and Sissy Spacek's Loritta is such a sane, spunkily likeable woman that we're convinced she's a real star even without the tired soap-opera melodramatics the movie eventually resorts to. When she catches her husband with another woman and throws a tantrum, the scene has been set up as the first brick on the road to an end-of-the-world, agonies-of-stardom nervous breakdown, but Spacek plays it with such casual toughness that it seems like just another of life's irksome ordeals. Spacek gives such a perfectly controlled performance that she's a joy to watch every minute she's onscreen. By now, though, that's hardly any surprise. In Carrie, she went from lame ugly duckling to glittering Cinderella, and here she's as convincing playing the 13-year-old Loretta who suddenly found herself hitched to a brawny back- country boy with big future plans as she is when Lynn proudly takes the Grand Ole Opry stage as a big-time country superstar. Spacek's physical appearance gives her some leverage; though the actress is nearly thirty, she looks about seventeen. But Spacek makes us feel like we're in the young Loretta's head, growing up in a poverty-stricken coal-mining village with creaky old shacks and square dances and a network of social rituals as central to the community's survival as it was to the tradition-obsessed Jewish peasants in Fiddler on the Roof. THE MOVIE is most exhilarating in the early Kentucky sequences, which have the look and feel of authentic ethnic drama. This is the dreamy, old- time-religion Americana that heard its cinematic death-knell with McCabe and Mrs. Miller but is still alive and flourishing in our imaginations. As Loretta 's father, Levon Helm (the drummer with the Band for fifteen years, and making his first dramatic appearance) mixes a few .drops of tenderness into a generally gruff demeanour, and his scenes with Loretta are intensely poignant. You wince with pain when he whips his daughter for staying out late, but at the same time it's this strict social and religious organization that holds the tiny community together. We miss the rich, religious earthiness of the coal-mining milieu in the second half of the movie, but Loretta's rise to stardom-often the most glib, foregone section of Hollywood-bio movies-has resonance, too; we see her singing her kids to sleep, adding some self-taught g'uitar, teaming up with a country band in a local pub, and finally landing a hit single and headlining a tour with friendly rival Patsy Cline, who's played by Beverly D'Angelo in a fine, comically world-weary performance. As Doo (short for Doolittle), Loretta's big, boorish husband, Tommy Lee Jones is alternately fiery and lunkheadedly tender, slapping Loretta around after their disastrous wedding night and then buying her a book on sex for newlywheds, pushing her to go on the road and hype her songs at two-bit red- neck radio stations and then standing by as a safety net when things get too mean. But Jones, fine as he is, never steals the scenes; he's there for Spacek to play off of, and their scenes together (and with their load of kids) have an easy-going familial warmth and fun- lovingness. ASIDE FROM -the conventional melodramatic mechanizations, the biggest problem with the latter half of the movie is the star's voice. Sissy Spacek (who did all her own singing) has a decent, tuneful vocal ability and a catchy sense of phrasing, but she's basically an average singer, and she needs to be better for us to believe is Loretta Lynn as a seminal country artist. Since I'm not a special Loretta Lynn fan, I wasn't bothered by discrepancies between Spacek's versions of classics like "Coal Miner's Daughter" and "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" and the originals. But while the numbers are generally effective dramatically (especially one Cline- Lynn thunderstorm duet with the two stars holding umbrellas), musically they're lackluster. , By the time Loretta suffers an onstage breakdown and rambles to her audience about how things just keep happening too fast, we, of course, can't help but recall Roriee Blakley's incomparpble performance in Nasville as a Loretta Lynn-based singer whose wily manager husband kept pushing her from hospital bedrooms to performances. But Blakley was an actual recording artist who wrote her own songs for the movie, and she brought to her numbers a shimmering performance energy that was part of her character; her renditions of "Tapedeck in His Tractor," "Dues," and "My Idaho Home" melted into Robert Altman's fabulous real-life crazy-quilt to create some of the most sublime moments in all of movies. SPACEK'S LORETTA is a strong, triumphant woman with a reverent sense of her culture and her roots, but that's never fully translated into the music. (The same problem-scarcely solvable in the case of most film biographies short of resurrecting the dead-marred The Buddy Holly Story, in which Gary Busey managed competent musical performances without a trace of Holly's rambunctious charm.) For a backstage view of an American artist, though, CoalMiner's Daughter 4turns the stories and characters from Loretta Lynn's songs into the kind of excitingly authentic American drama that's been woefully scarce in our most recent films. At its best, this movie doesn't simply stretch the limits of the star-bio format; it transcends them. And it's in those moments that Coal Miner's Daughter comes as close as possible to turning formula into myth. TONIGHT SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS TONIC (ELSA KAZAN, 1961) Seldom seen (even on T.V.), a sensitive view of adolescent love in a small town in the 20's. Prophetic for its candid treatment of the boy and girl. Glan- dular version of Andy Hardy? 7:0089:15 $1.50 atOLDA&D MONDAY: DARK STAR WEDNESDAY: THE BIG SLEEP GHT Daily Photo by MAUREEN O'MALLEY 999 English rockers 999 caught off guard while relaxing backstage after their show at the Center Stage on Canton. They are currently sweeping the., country in support of their recent album "Biggest Prize in Sport." at this wretched venue. They asked if I knew anything about the other groups, so I attempted to reciprocate: "Next on the agenda are the Dickies, one of the !'original' .wave of L.A. punk bands. So stupid they didn't realize their approach was outdated before they even began, the Dickies new album is somehow tuneful and fun almost in spite of itself. Rounding out the bill is 999, one of the foremost post-Pistols English punk bands. On record they exhibit so much restraint and balance people accuse them of secretly being a pop band. But the live show could be a whole 'nother story." MY NEW FOUND friend was right: this show was pure punk, circa 1980. The! Dickies follow the Ramone's doctrine to the letter by keeping things short, fast and dumb. The guitarist buzzed with the steadiness of chainsaws, the drummer rarely missed a sped-out beat, and naturally the bassist and keyboard player were. inaudible most of the time: Lead singer Fu Manchu established a friendly rapport with the crowd; if he substitutes "good time" for "blow job" in his rap he could make.it real big on television. He couldn't sing his way out of a wet Burger King Salutes the Olympic bag, but who cares? Any band that can make wimpoidsepics like "Sounds of Silence" and "Knights in White Satin" sound like Black Sabbath at 78 rpm is A-OK in my book. In fact they even do "Paranoid" for honesty's sake. True to their California roots, the Dickies offer a slick, well-paced show right down to the stage props. Even the musical loose ends seemed somehow calculated-one can't be in a real punk band and get too professional. Now this would all be as sterile as a castrated laboratory rat if the Dickies didn't possess a pervasive, self-deprecating sense of humor. For all their image calculation the Dickies convey a goofy verve and vitality that's irresistable. Like Mad magazine and Gilligan's Island, I enjoyed the Dickies not because I saw through the ruse, but because the brunt of their humor and attack lies within that transparency. If nobody in the audience cares how good these guys really aren't, who am I to complain? As soon as 999 stalked onto the stage, the frivolous atmosphere created by the Dickies dissipated in a hurry. These Englishmen mean business. Like the Dickies, 999 work within a rigidly well-defined style but manage to adopt it to their own uses quite effectively. Sure, they pack a punch of raw power but they are cunning enough to bend and twist it, shaping melodies around it and forging hooks through the heart of it. The sound comes out melodic and structured overall, but the group certainly isn't above shouting and flailing for emphasis. AS IF THEY needed to emphasize anything! 999 intimidated the audience through sheer physical presence alone; no small feat in a bar full of pseudo- punks, hippie greasers (only in Detroit) and a behemouth gestapo of eager-to- displease bouncers. Well, it isn't everytband that has a bass player who could pass as the mutant offspring of Kojak and Popeye and plays even tougher than he looks. No posing here; 999 righteously refused to tote the line for either the greedy club management (higher drink prices than usual, according to my friend quoted before) nor the neanderthal radio station that "promoted" the show. It's this commitment and honesty that set 999 apart from the rapidly multiplying number of punk rockers. "We get asked a lot about the violence in our music, but all we want is to get people to dance." And at their best ("Biggest Prize in Sport," "English Wipe Out") 999 throw this gauntlet down in an unequivocal, irresistable challenge. Lyrically they are not overly ponderous-hanging out with the crew, the boys in the gang et al, lots of camaraderie and uncompromising good times. And while they've channeled the forces of punk to fit their own musical needs, 999 are a band well aware of their heritage both in American punk (the intro to "Inside Out") and the English invasion (Nick Cash's Ray Davies style inflection) and delivery on :"Hollywood"). Through their tempered use of punk polemics, 999 develop a different kind of tension than one might expect from a punk band (like the Dickies) but when the pressure is released, better look out. Grinding out their FM-radio play hit "Homicide," 999 was joined on stage 'by a few hundred fans for a joyous, seemingly spontaneous rout. No fights, no broken glass, no trashed drum sets, just a bunch of kids having a great time. Call the music rock and roll: that's all one needs to know. CINEMA GUILD WITH YOU ALL YEAR _ 0CINEMAII presents GRANDE ILLUSION 7 (Jean Renoir, 1937) The great humanist of the French cinema directed what many consider to be the most moving film about war ever made. Two pairs of men become friends in WW1. The pair from the aristocracy realize that their way of life has come to an end, the other two find something which points to the future. (111 min.) ANGELL HALL 7&9 $1.50 Tu.sday: DAISIES (Chytilova) AaM Recording Artists SQUEEZEg ' -- . ._ '- - '4- a Y t . . ' 7- SUN. APRIL 13 - I - UMM - 'U W-7::mllo -- d- IGi1(y C