War Horse: New from John Williams

It has been three years since John Williams scored a movie, and this holiday season brings us two new scores, both for films directed by Steven Spielberg: The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse.

War Horse, based on the same book as the currently running play on Broadway, is about a horse who's separated from his owner during World War I. The score is beyond lush and beyond rich. Many themes are woven throughout, from the mysterious yet beautiful opening track "Dartmoor, 1912" to the building drama and highly emotional crescendo of "Plowing." So much of this score is heartbreaking, and yet somehow celebratory at the same time.

Many of the tracks here are classic Williams, with a main theme as a base, with strings cross-crossing atop it, building emotion and expectation to a fever pitch, until he releases us in a fit of massive melodic seduction. Later, in "The Reunion," the horse's apparent return is scored with a loving tentativeness, seemingly as he and his owner meet each other again. (As of this writing, I have not seen the film.)

For those used to the John Williams of Star Wars and the like, you'll find a different composer here, one more along the lines of lush romantic scores like Far and Away and even The Terminal. Like those films, the score for War Horse contains lighter, almost amusing cues, as well as those that dive deeply into your heart. Williams is a master at using a single color, such as the piano, to present all one needs, and then using a layering spray of strings to punctuate the smile of a soul. There is yearning here, the true and powerful yearning of love set to melody.

For those, like me, who have anticipated a new Williams work, the drought is over. The wait for War Horse was well worth it.

Holiday Gift Guide: Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell With Black Sabbath by Tony Iommi

When it comes to rocker biographies, the 2011 winner is former Black Sabbath lead guitarist, Tony Iommi’s Iron Man (Da Capo). This is the whole package: Iommi is candid, engaging and celebrated and that’s exactly the right combo for this sort of book.

Though it’s Iommi’s autobiography, this is also the story of Black Sabbath, one of the most celebrated and seminal rock outfits of all time. And on this journey we take with him we discover that our wildest imaginings about sixties and seventies rock n’ roller behavior were only scratching the service. The biggest mystery of Iron Man soon comes to be: how did these guys manage to even live through these adventures, let alone finally get inducted into the rock n’ roll hall of fame.

Early on Iommi tells a story of waking up in a hotel room in Adelaide in 1971 with producer/manager Patrick Meehan and a girl.

Meehan went: “She’s dead.”

Oh, fucking hell, I thought, Christ, she’s dead. She’s dead!

I could see the headlines: “Girl found dead in hotel room with two guys.” I just thought: they’ll think it’s us!

Meehan went: “We got to get rid of her! We got to get rid of her!”

His idea was to throw her off the balcony and say that she had fallen off it. We were really high up. The thought of it now is absolutely frightening, but in my panic I went along with it. We got her to the balcony, we were trying to pick her up and then… she came round.

“Bloody hell, she’s alive!”

She was probably high on drugs, but, we could quite easy have just tossed her off of there and I would have become a twenty-two-year-old murderer.

“But your honor, she was dead already!”

I bet that girl doesn’t even know what happened. I’ll probably be arrested now. She will read this book and come out of the woodwork: “Yes, there he is!”

“It was Meehan! It was Meehan!”

This pace and verve as well as the sense of reckless endangerment of self and anyone who crossed his path at a certain time in his life permeates Iron Man. And somehow, even the worst stories, like that one, are a lark: youthful high-spirited high jinks aided by the sort of luck one never recognizes at the time.

Trashed hotel rooms, dismembered sharks and Ozzy Osbourne mooning everyone all the time (“I’ve seen Ozzy’s are more times than I’ve seen my own!”) Iommi writes with a sort of breathless intensity (and an awful lot of exclamation marks!) and we end up panting on the sidelines, just reading to catch up.

Despite the near-murder described above, Iommi is a likable correspondent and you don’t mind spending time in his presence for the duration of the book. If you only buy one rock biography this season, for so many reasons, it should be this one. ◊

Lincoln Cho is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in the Chicago area, where he works in the high-tech industry. He is currently working on a his first novel, a science-fiction thriller set in the world of telecommunications.

Art & Culture: Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm

Reviewed by David Middleton

Twenty years after Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s debut, Ten, Blender senior editor, Mark Yarm, delivers Everybody Loves Our Town (Crown), the perfect remembrance/celebration/recollection of an era that some would say never was and others say never left us. After all, as Yarm tells us early on, even the grunge label itself is entirely subjective:

We could argue forever … about what bands are grunge, because the label is entirely subjective. Are Alice in Chains grunge or heavy metal or both? Were 7 Year Bitch punk or grunge or Riot Grrrl? How about contemporary Canadian arena rockers Nickelback: Post-grunge? Neo-grunge?

But whatever grunge is -- or isn’t -- no one has ever examined it with as much depth and affection as former Blender senior editor Yarm does in Everybody Loves Our Town.

To create the book, Yarm conducted interviews with grunge’s key players and contributors: over 250 musicians, producers, managers, journalists, and many others. Even wives and ex-lovers have not been left out and Courtney Love appears in several places with startling -- though not always credible -- revelations.

If you remember grunge or, like Chuck Palahniuk offers in a blurb for the book, your “memories of the era [are] a little hazy,” Everybody Loves Our Town brings it back, in some ways larger than life: a moment in time when Seattle erupted as the center of the universe… and the music industry was never quite the same. ◊


David Middleton is art director and art & culture editor of January Magazine.