For Those About To Rock

Paulson makes 'People v. O.J.' worth watching

Sarah Paulson appears as prosecutor Marcia Clark on the FX show "American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson." (FX photo)

With only the season finale left, my latest pop culture obsession is FX's “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.”

I didn’t expect to like this series. I didn't think there were depths left to plumb.

I didn't see all the tendrils that spiral out to the modern day, the way it helped spawn reality TV and gave us the Kardashians. It's astute in noting the racial divide between the police and the people given the Black Lives Matter movement.

What's made it compelling is that in addition to a puzzling nostalgia for slow, white Bronco chases, the Ryan Murphy-created series has developed the courtroom players into rich, three-dimensional people.

The show aims for factual, down to the placement of props and clothes worn, but takes fictional liberties, too, such as the departure of prosecutor Bill Hodgman (Christian Clemenson) or the most recent episode’s meltdown between prosecutor Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown) and defense attorney Johnnie Cochran (Courtney B. Vance).

But perhaps the character — and, appropriately, the real-life figure — who benefits most from revisiting the “trial of the century” is prosecutor Marcia Clark, played by Sarah Paulson.

It’s difficult to single out one actor or actress in an ensemble that includes Cuba Gooding Jr. as Simpson, John Travolta as defense lawyer Bob Shapiro and Nathan Lane as defense attorney F. Lee Bailey among other familiar faces, but Paulson’s work on “American Crime Story” is exemplary. It’s an engrossing performance that deftly balances the ferocity required to try a double-murder with sympathetic moments that flesh out her character.

“She delivered the feelings on the inside so beautifully, with so much nuance,” the real Clark told New York magazine earlier this year.

In another interview with Vulture, Clark showed surprise that the show delved into that balance.

“It's a murder trial and it's not a dinner party,” she said. “At the end of the day, at the end of the trial, I was in a lose-lose position. If I go soft-voiced and, you know, very ladylike, they call me a cream puff and say, 'She's not up to the task.' I go in and I'm tough and I'm strong and I'm a b----.”

Although having such a capable actress play Clark’s role helps, Murphy and the other writers behind the show have offered a much more sympathetic perspective of Clark than there was when the trial unfolded. One episode, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” put the spotlight on Clark, showing a system and a trial beating her down so that even her hairstyles were matters of national debate and discussion.

Going through a divorce at the time of the trial, the episode shows Clark dealing with that battle in addition to finding a schedule to take care of her children and just the general sexism of her job.

But time and the show have warmed up to a viewpoint on Clark as a feminist heroine. In fact, the show made this claim unabashed in its most recent episode.

“Women who work in male dominated-professions, I think, are tougher than most,” said Judge Lance Ito (Kenneth Choi), cutting to Clark in case viewers didn’t pick up the subtlety. Ito was speaking of his wife, who was the subject of a recorded tirade by a witness, Officer Mark Fuhrman (Steven Pasquale).

The lens changed focus, shifting to Darden just behind her then cutting quickly back to Ito to finish his thought. “And if they are successful, they are almost always targets for this kind of treatment,” he said before the angle switches back again to Clark, seated at the table.

It was the show laying bare its agenda, but it's provided a fresh view on a trial and a moment in time that ripples out to today.

Although – spoiler alert – the trial did not end in Clark's favor, the real Clark has gone on to a new career as a crime fiction writer.

With the verdict remaining in the season finale set to air Tuesday, much like the process to get there, it won't be the outcome that is amusing, but the journey there that makes the show worth watching.

Thanks to performance's such as Paulson's, it's been a slow, white Bronco journey worth revisiting.

Trailer for the season finale:

Show review: Joanna Newsom at The Fox Theater, 3.27.16

OAKLAND — Joanna Newsom pens swirling fairy tales of songs, but her gig Sunday at Oakland's Fox Theater sent me down a different rabbit hole.

Seeing Newsom and her band perform her songs, which include sprawling, 10-plus-minute epics such as "Emily" and "Have One on Me," was more like meditation.

It was easy to be present when she began weaving tales in front of a majestic backdrop of a cloudy forest drenched in blues and purples. But it was easy, too, to feel my mind wander, wondering if her birthplace of Nevada City affected her song craft (or at least her choice of backdrop) or how a harp is tuned.

But then her songs, which often shift with little warning, would jolt into a different section, pulling me back to the present again.

Or maybe my mind was just that busy.

It was hypnotizing to watch her play her trademark harp. At the end of "Cosmia," her right hand plucked a repetitious rhythm while her left hand accented it with bold moves across the instrument. She finished by triumphantly pulling her hands away as the harp gently rocked back to the floor.

Her performance, much like her songs themselves, didn't lack for complexity. The dense material leaves a lot to explore.

Touring in support of October's Divers (right), her first LP in five years, Newsom’s set plucked generously from her four-album catalog. It showcased her journey as a songwriter, juxtaposing the expansive, loquacious "Emily" from 2006's Ys with the comparatively brisk "Anecdotes" from Divers. The latter condenses Newson's flourishes and fancies of a decade ago into a tight package, delivering just as many quirks in half of the time.

"Anecdotes" also highlighted the growing role of piano in Newsom's arsenal as she moves away from the harp as her lone instrument. She played both on the song, in addition to tickling the ivory on the bulk of the songs from Divers.

The show closed with help from Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold, whose brisk 20-minute opening featured all new material save for "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song." He provided vocals on the final three songs of the night, his honeyed croon pairing with Newsom’s nasal quiver surprisingly well on “Time, As a Symptom.”

The Easter Sunday gig approached being a hometown show for Newsom, who grew up more than three hours away in the Sierra Nevada foothills. She estimated “40 percent” of the audience was family members, but also joked that she’s “not a mathematician.”

If that made her nervous, it didn't seem to show. Newsom was confident throughout her 105-minute show, leading the audience down the rabbit hole song after song.

Setlist

01. Bridges and Balloons
02. Anecdotes
03. Divers
04. Emily
05. Waltz of the 101st Lightborne
06. In California
07. Sapokanikan
08. Leaving the City
09. Have One on Me
10. Peach, Plum, Pear
11. Cosmia
12. Time, As a Symptom (with Robin Pecknold)
13. Good Intentions Paving Co. (with Pecknold)

Encore
14. Baby Birch (with Pecknold)

Show review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Oracle Arena, 3.13.16

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform "Dancing in the Dark" Sunday at Oracle Arena in Oakland.

OAKLAND — Bruce Springsteen described The River as a coming-of-age album Sunday at Oracle Arena.

Springsteen, that firebrand of heartland rock who never lost his working-man touch, penned the record's songs in his 30s. He revisited the album in its entirety during Sunday's marathon gig that fell 10 minutes shy of 3.5 hours.

"I don't want to fade away," sang Springsteen on the album's "Fade Away."

At 66, he doesn't perform like someone who will. The Boss seemed ageless Sunday, dancing, pointing, jumping, gyrating and grooving until the end. At the conclusion of "Hungry Heart," one of the biggest hits from The River, he crowd surfed from a runway-sized second stage back to the main platform.

Impossibly, he longer the show went, the stronger he seemed to grow, feeding off of a jubilant crowd.

"Do you have anything left, Oakland?" Springsteen asked more than three hours into the show before launching into a reading of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" that turned into a tribute to late saxophonist Clarence "Big Man" Clemons.

A double album, The River filled the show's first two hours, including kicking off with "Meet Me in the City," an outtake from the LP included in last year's deluxe reissue of the record.

The River is frontloaded with its high-octane material, saving more of its contemplative ballads for side two. This left the first hour feeling barnstorming and second hour a touch slower.

Coming in the door knowing the album would be played in full sacrificed surprise, but lost none of the vitality that makes the group such a monster live.

The River showed its strengths as well as its weaknesses. "I'm a Rocker" has not aged well, needing Springsteen to ham it up with the crowd to distract from the overpowering synth.

But much of the record's themes stand tall, even though Springsteen wrote them half a lifetime ago. While the title track arrived as an in-progress tale of woe, Springsteen delivers it now as an old man yearning for happier times.

While The Boss used every trick in his bag throughout the night, including lofting his ax across the stage to to the guitar tech after "Cadillac Ranch" as well as pulling up audience members to sing and dance on "Growin' Up" and "Dancing in the Dark," when the E Streeters were called upon, they shined, too.

Guitarist Nils Lofgren never uncorked a jaw-dropping solo, but he found the complimentary colors to make "Two Hearts" and Patti Smith’s ”Because the Night" pop. Jake Clemons, who took over sax duties for his uncle, ran from the back riser to jam with Springsteen at center stage multiple times.

There were transcendent moments, such as the hard-charging final hour and 20 minutes, which rapidly moved from one song to another. The Boss’ intense shouting counted the band in each time. That energy made up for the swoon and croon balladry of The River’s second half. There were sweet moments, too, such as Jake Clemons and Springsteen fist bumping after trading solos on “Badlands.”

Springsteen made the night personal by telling the stories behind the record and some of its songs, introducing “I Wanna Marry You” by saying its about imagining an entire life with a stranger in a crowd. He said in that moment, we always imagine it being the best possible version of that dream, never with the fights and hard moments of reality, which drew a laugh.

"It's an old crowd out there,” Springsteen said. “I can tell by how people laugh at that. They're laughing at the pain.”

It’s a feeling Springsteen tapped into with The River that still resonates 36 years later, especially on its haunting title track, which locks its characters into the fate his protagonist from “I Wanna Marry You” can’t imagine.

For a coming-of-age album to still evoke such emotion — and that The Boss and the E Street Band can deliver it with such passion — after 36 years says as much about how people age as it does the songs themselves.

Setlist

01. Meet Me in the City

The River
02. The Ties That Bind
03. Sherry Darling
04. Jackson Cage
05. Two Hearts
06. Independence Day
07. Hungry Heart
08. Out in the Street
09. Crush on You
10. You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
11. I Wanna Marry You
12. The River
13. Point Blank
14. Cadillac Ranch
15. I’m a Rocker
16. Fade Away
17. Stolen Car
18. Ramrod
19. The Price You Pay
20. Drive All Night
21. Wreck on the Highway

22. Badlands
23. Prove it All Night
24. Lonesome Day
25. Candy’s Room
26. Because the Night
27. She’s the One
28. The Rising
29. Thunder Road
30. Growin’ Up
31. Born to Run
32. Dancing in the Dark
33. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
34. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
35. Shout

Martin architect behind Beatles’ sound

George Martin works with The Beatles at Abbey Road studio in London during Beatles for Sale sessions in 1964. Martin died Tuesday at age 90.

To call the late George Martin “the fifth Beatle” is unfair.

This isn’t because the famed British music producer, who died Tuesday at his home in England at age 90, isn’t good enough for that title, but that it is insufficient.

So let’s try this: Without Martin, there would be no Beatles, at least not as we think of them.

The enterprising British producer inked the Fab Four to a deal for a penny per record, setting forth a series of events that will lead to future music students studying the three B’s – Beethoven, Bach, Beatles.

We will remember The Beatles as the brightest stars in rock and roll. Martin was the “big bang” for that constellation.

Former Beatles bassist and singer Paul McCartney called him “a true gentleman and like a second father” Wednesday while also announcing a tour that stops April 13 at Fresno’s Save Mart Center.

Nigel Godrich, producer for Radiohead, Beck and McCartney, among others, told NPR that Martin “invented the job” of record producer.

In musical terms, we will recall Martin as an architect as well as a risk taker. As The Beatles took a sharp left turn from shaggy haired, Merseybeat pop rockers into psychedelic experimentation, it was Martin who helped sculpt their creative, drug-fueled lunacy into something tangible.

His fingerprints are all over many of The Beatles’ classic songs, including the decision to add strings to “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby” as well as keep “Strawberry Fields Forever” treading in mellow, hallucinogenic technicolor instead of being a big rocker.

A trained pianist and oboist, Martin brought his skills to bare in bringing the practical musical knowledge to their zany ideas. When McCartney and John Lennon dreamt of colossal swells of sound on “A Day in the Life” to close the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (left), Martin engineered and arranged the orchestral madness, getting musicians to frantically climb the scales of notes.

On “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the Revolver-closing slice of experimentation that signaled their descent into psychedelic rock in 1966, Lennon expressed a desire to sound like Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain. Martin concocted special, rotating cabinets for the speakers to capture the sound of his vocals, leading to their distorted effect. The track’s also filled with other Beatles’ zaniness — tape loops, reversed tracks, the song’s trademark noise that sounds like an angry seagull.

It’s all the more impressive when considering Martin did this in era before computers. There was no ProTools. No Audacity. No GarageBand. Martin made things happen live and used the limited studio trickery of the day. On Lennon’s “In My Life,” Martin knew he couldn’t play the piano solo fast enough, so instead he slowed down his tempo and the key so that the tape would produce the proper result when played at double speed.

Things that today’s producers achieve with a touch of a button were ideas that Martin accomplished through hours of work. His influence on generations of producers and musicians after him is almost too difficult to put into words.

Martin changed music on a global scale not just by introducing us to The Beatles, but by shaping and molding their sound, especially once they ceased touring after a 1966 at what was once San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

If we take anything from the life work of Martin, it’s to say yes in the face of a challenge. It’s to figure out a way to do it, rather than not even trying.

If he hadn’t even tried, music today would be a lot different.

Edit 3.12.16, 10:13 a.m.: Clarified Martin's role in "Revolution 9."

Show review: Prince at Oracle Arena, 3.4.16

Prince performed for more than two hours Friday at Oracle Arena in Oakland. (Courtesy photo)

OAKLAND — Dig, if you will, a picture of Prince, in all of his purple glory, playing solo Friday in the middle of Oakland's Oracle Arena.

For more than two hours, The Artist captivated thousands in a triple-encore show, using only the instruments named in his Piano & a Microphone tour stop.

Can you, my reader? Can you picture this?

For a single musician to hold the attention of the audience for an arena hosting thousands is no easy feat, but it’s not as though the legendary musical chameleon is unequal to the task. Even as someone in the cheap seats, Prince made it easy to forget he was working alone thanks to his massive back catalog, fiery enthusiasm and a few video screens overhead.

Playing solo gave His Royal Purpleness the freedom and spontaneity to take the show wherever his whims carried him. That was apparent early when he bounced from “Rocknroll Loveaffair,” a standout from December’s HitnRun Phase Two (right), to one of his earliest smash hits, “Little Red Corvette,” from 1999.

In the second hour, after a blistering run of hits including “Cream,” “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” and “Raspberry Beret,” he jumped to deeper cuts such as “Starfish and Coffee” and “Paisley Park.”

Several times, Prince chain smoked one song into the next, only taking breaks to strut, dance and lift the crowd higher. During “Kiss,” he called on the audience to sing the hook while he prowled the square stage in the center of the arena and showed off his footwork.

He brought the arena to its feet at the end of the second encore with "When Doves Cry" from his magnum opus, 1984’s Purple Rain. With the backing bass beat piped in from his keyboard sampler, Prince stood at the mic and howled, but invited the crowd to "sing it, Oakland” when arriving at the chorus.

Perhaps best or better known for his sizzle as a guitar player, the setting gave Prince the chance to strip some of his most endearing hits down to their essentials. He did so without losing their panache.

“I Would Die 4 U,” an uptempo synth pop gem, could have suffered in transition to being simply Prince and his ivory keys, but he sold it, pounding out the rhythm and making the chorus soar.

More intimate numbers worked as well. “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” managed to make the arena intimate despite its fragility.

It’s difficult to imagine many other musicians pulling off such a setup. But this is Prince. The Artist is a mythical, unpredictable persona. The man announced Friday’s show – nearly a sellout – Tuesday morning.

That's how he likes to operate. Fans never know what he will do next. When fans were held in Oracle Arena's concourses until the stated 9 p.m. start time, one concertgoer was overheard saying, "He's Prince. He does whatever he wants."

No one gets to four decades with that level of unpredictability without having the tools to back it up. So if anyone is equal to the task of playing all by his lonesome in a crowded Bay Area arena and pulling it off exceedingly well, Prince proved he's the purple-clad man for the job.

Setlist
According to Prince Vault

01. Wow
02. Somewhere Over the Rainbow
03. Somewhere Here on Earth
04. Baltimore
05. Rocknroll Loveaffair
06. Breakdown
07. Little Red Corvette
08. Dirty Mind
09. I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
10. The Ballad of Dorothy Parker
11. 4
12. Controversy
13. I Would Die 4 U
14. Baby I’m a Star
15. Purple Music
16. Dear Mr. Man
17. Cream
18. Waiting in Vain
19. If I Was Your Girlfriend
20. How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore
21. Raspberry Beret
22. Starfish and Coffee
23. Paisley Park
24. Sometimes it Snows in April
25. Purple Rain
26. Black Sweat
27. Kiss

Encore One
28. Diamond and Pearls
29. The Beautiful Ones
30. A Place in Heaven
31. Venus de Milo
32. Condition of the Heart
33. Under the Cherry Moon
34. Nothing Compares 2 U
35. When Doves Cry

Encore Two
36. Free Urself

Encore Three
37. Thieves in the Temple
38. It
39. I Wanna Be Your Lover
40. Do Me, Baby
41. Adore

Edit: Updated setlist 4.26.16 at 8:19 a.m. PDT