So a new controversy is raging, or at least getting into gear, regarding Michael Moore’s latest doco “Sicko” . How terribly convenient it is for Big Mike and his distributors that George and the lads have decided to look into the legality of his recent trip across the drink to Cuba. If I’d been in charge of marketing for Big Mike’s latest flick I don’t think I could have planned it better.

Sarcasm aside I suppose it’s time to hoist my trucker cap up the For-Big-Mike flagpole or the Against-Big-Mike one. Truth is I wish there was a third flagpole: the Kind-of-OK-with-Big-Mike Flagpole.

All his targets are good ones and I agree with many, if not all of his conclusions, but it’s his methods which concern me. Indeed I think his methods, and what he omits as well as includes, frequently offers abundant ammunition to his detractors and those whose heads he wishes to put on a stake. I remember watching The Big One and feeling a strange sense of sympathy for all the multi-national companies he was gunning for as he tried to ambush them. Continuously, it seemed, he appeared unannounced outside some factory gate and demanded that Joe The Security Bloke organise an interview with the Top Man right now! And, after a few moments of a phone call to the Top Man’s secretary, during which it was possible that Joe The Security Bloke’s job was on the line, Joe The Security Bloke was obliged to tell Big Mike and his crew to take a hike – remarkably Top Man didn’t have a floating slot in his schedule for intinerant doco makers and actually had work to do thank-you very much.

Cut to Big-Mike in front of the factory gates saying, “There you have it – big business doesn’t care!” Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you ask me. He didn’t truly get to argue with big business, he just banged petulantly and without announcement on it’s door and then acted shocked that the CEO’s wouldn’t take tea with him.

(Big exception was Phil The Nike Bloke who invited Mike up to his lair, listened to his questions, made a lot of sense and was even generous enough to hand Big Mike a check which, if I recall correctly, kind of took the wind out of Big Mike’s sails).

They tell me Big Mike is not a nice man and he’s certainly no oil painting either but he does raise issues we need to discuss carefully and at great length and for this he must be honoured and celebrated. I just wish that, for all his bluster, he was a little more careful about not handing his opponents lots of rope to wrap around that rather large neck of of his.

Sicko opens, if Mike gets his way, on June 29th.

“One quarter of the (Iraq) war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next seventy-five years.” Charles M. Young – The $2 Trillion War – Rolling Stone, Dec 28th 2006

At such a time, the biggest mass shooting in American history, I have, once again, to ask this simple question: How many innocent people need to die before we all take a look at the gun laws in this country and see sense?

Ian Wallace died today. As well as being a wonderful chap he was a world class musician and I got to know him last year when he played on 8 songs that are now deeply embedded in the DNA of Callback. His credentials are remarkable – he played with everyone from Dylan to CSN, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, King Crimson…and, incredibly, me.

The first time I visited him at his house I stopped on the staircase and gawped at a photograph taken from backstage looking over the shoulders of a large band to a massive outdoor arena packed to the gills with fans. “What’s this?” I asked. “That’s me at the back playing with Dylan in the stadium in Nuremburg where Hitler used to hold his rallies. But what’s really cool is that it’s packed with 80,000 German kids who all have their backs turned to where Adolf used to stand and rant, and they’ve all paid to watch this Jewish guy sing and play his guitar!”

Yes. That’s pretty damn cool.

In a funny kind of way life is like a gig. All too soon it’s over and after a brief wave at the fans you’re whisked off-stage to an awaiting bus before you’re driven off into the night. I don’t know where Ian’s next gig is but I am quite sure that, as he steps up to his kit, there will be another huge audience, with their backs turned to the devil, eagerly waiting for Ian to count the band in.

You can find that photograph, and plenty of others, on Ian’s website at: www.ianrwallace.com

I’m mid-way through my ride along PCH this morning when who should overtake me but David Zabriskie. Wow! How cool is that? I was still basking in the glory of riding the same piece of tarmac as the current US time-trial champion when, on a slight hill, another rider flashed past me.

Now, it’s one thing to be overtaken by a rider half your age who’s worn the coveted Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France and won stages in all three grand tours, but it’s another to be overtaken by a guy who’s obviously a few years older than me…and only has one leg!

Pride comes before a….OUCH!

After 21 years in Hollywood I have become a might jaded by what goes on here but this morning brought a surprise: ice on the sidewalks.

The radio woke me up with the news that Moscow’s Red Square is amazingly snow-free and so warm today that even ice-making machines can’t keep the water cold enough for ice-skating to take place. Then I stepped outside my garage to go for my early-morning ride and there was thick ice on the sidewalk – occasionally it dips to freezing up in the Hills but down here in the flats? Never.

After my ride, as I grumbled to myself about climate change, I loaded up my bathroom with bog paper after yesterday’s late-night shopping trip. As I unpacked the ecologically sound bathroom tissue I found this quote on the side of the packet from the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.

…and to think the white men who invaded America and viciously destroyed these people and their lands had the nerve to call them savages.

When you do whatever it is that I do people like to give you stuff and sometimes the stuff people give you is their latest piece of work and this can lead to all sorts of problems.

Once an acquaintance gave me his new film to watch – a film that he’d written, directed, shot and starred in. It was absolutely, embarrassingly awful. I lied and told him it was “not bad.” When he sent me his second film I lied again and told him that I had so many reels and screeners to watch that I wouldn’t have time to watch his movie. He was righteously pissed off and concluded that I’d gone all Hollywood and had no time for the little people any more. Was this better than him knowing the truth that I thought his work sucked and I didn’t want to waste another 90 minutes of my life on him or his dreadfully feeble, self congratulatory film-making attempts?

On Friday I shot an Alka Seltzer spot and we hired a guy called Gilbert to be in the commercial. It was only the second time we’d worked together so you can imagine my horror when, at the end of the shoot, Gilbert approached me with a DVD entitled Frank & Cindy and said: “I’d like you to have this. It’s a documentary about my Mom and Dad. He’s a drunk and she’s a…” (can’t remember what he said about her now, probably because I’d already started tuning it out.)

Cut to Sunday morning and I’m transferring .omf files into my pro tools so I can work on my own movie. It’s tedious and dull work and involves watching many green lines inching slowly across the screen as various files go from A to B. As I was so completely, utterly bored I decided to pop in Gilbert’s movie thinking, “Another piece of crap I feel obligated to watch.”

(If you’re thinking “curmudgeon!” right now, that’s OK.)

But Gilbert’s ‘piece-of-crap’ was mezmerizing. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Within five minutes the file transferring had taken second place to watching Gilbert’s movie. The story is in many ways heartbreaking and may be summarzied as: Hollywood blonde marries loser musician who descends into alcholism while she struggles to pay the bills, keep herself on the straight and narrow, and keep custody of her son. But what emerges is that Gilbert seems to love his crazy, charismatic parents with a fierceness and compassion that I can’t easily describe, accepting their many failings, and has the confidence to simply ask them to discuss with him episodes in their lives which are so painful that nearly any other family on the planet would do anything to change the subject.

It’s really quite an extraordinary piece of work. Thank-you Gilbert for the gift of your DVD and I’m more than glad I took the time to spend 73 minutes out of my life to watch the film you’d made of your life.

You can read more about Gilbert and his Mom & Dad at www.bionicfilms.com and I understand Frank & Cindy will be featured on This American Life on NPR quite soon.

“The pain of endeavour is better than the pain of regret.” – Alastair Humphreys – round the world cyclist.

If I were to say The Hunter was probably the first Free song I ever heard you could say I was technically lying on two counts: 1) it wasn’t a Free song at all as it was written by Booker T and his MG’s and 2) when I learned to play it in my first band, Ten Ton Tears, I was taught the riff by our guitar player who idolized a band that was still struggling to make a name for itself.

When All Right Now was released the next summer I was disappointed – the solo didn’t have enough twiddly bits in it: Kossoff’s guitar work wasn’t like my heroes – Jimmy Page and Rory Gallagher – it was heartfelt and soulful . At that time my rule for guitar solos was quite simple: the more notes per bar it contained the better it was; space, feeling, texture, technique were words that meant nothing to me then.

And then I saw the band play live. Thanks to a long-forgotten support act named Junkyard Angel who over-stayed their welcome and an unrealistic curfew I only saw about 20 minutes of Free’s show that cold night but I was mesmerized: Paul Rodgers’ voice was full of power and suggested he’d had lots of gratuitous sex with lots of eager women which I found fascinating; Paul Kossoff, who I was amazed to find was the son of a famous religious broadcaster, leaned back against his Marshall stack and played so loud that the speakers made his hair move. Neither Simon Kirke or Andy Fraser made much of an impression that night but maybe that was because of the young woman standing beside me who was obviously about to wet herself such was her focus on Mr. Rodgers’ nether neighborhood.

In those 20 short minutes I discovered what soul was. When I subsequently bought their Live album, a recording with all kinds of problems including a guitar that doesn’t work during their most famous song, I studied its every nuance and was struck by the holes and spaces in the music they played. Their simple grooves were so elegant and tight that you could hear the beats echoing around the packed halls in which the record had been taped. What I discovered later was that they were a rock band who played with soul and achieved the ultimate accolade when Wilson Pickett covered not one but two of their songs.

They were also terribly young to be playing music with such force and passion and when they first broke up, with four or five albums under their belt, some of them were still only 21 years old.

They weren’t however perfect. Their lyrics were consistently dreadful. The opening lines of their signature song : “There she stood on the street, smiling from her head to her feet…” is by no means their worst moment, but it encapsulates the essential ingredients of what Free’s music has always represented for me: longing, yearning and sex.

I got my copy of Free “Live at the BBC” yesterday and within seconds I was trasported backwards to that sweaty 20 minute gig only now it’s all tinged with time and knowledge and sadness. Paul Rodgers’ has gone showbiz and sings with Queen, Kossoff’s life descended into heroin hell and he famously died somewhere over the Atlantic in his airplane seat, Fraser is HIV positive and Simon Kirke’s drumming on that Isle Of Wight footage I have of Mr. Big is the most heavenly six minutes of skin-pounding I have ever seen on film.

They were brash, they were young, they were full of ‘the blues’, they were the guys having the sex I wasn’t, they were loud and they were playing music for a living. Wrapped up in a record they were everything I ever wanted to be and I will never tire of hearing them play those same songs over and over.

You’ve all heard All Right Now on the radio a thousand times. If you want to hear rock with a big wedge of soul check out Mr. Big. If you want to hear 4 young men ripping a theatre apart check-out The Hunter. And if you want to experience that longing and that yearning I was talking about listen to Be My Friend. The studio versions are good enough but hunt down FREE LIVE! and I hope you will be transported like I was that night in the 70’s.

Years ago I shot a movie which had an opening scene set in some hot, sweaty South American jungle location. The white guy, an errant archeologist, is running from some dusky Mayan natives who are pissed off because he’s stolen a precious jewel from them.

Which is is why I found myself on December 24th (almost shortest day of the year) in a dusty field in the Valley with the white guy archeologist actor guy and six even whiter and rather plump stunt guys playing the Mayan natives. It’s difficult to say what we needed more of – the dark-brown skin-lotion to make the stunt guys look vaguely dusky or the green spray-paint to make the few sorry trees and bushes in the field look even slightly verdant. Needless to say all we had was a small pot of the former and two cans of the latter.

When we’d broken the ice off the puddles I was ready to make it all look like a jungle and shoot the thrilling opening chase scene. Needless to say I failed. I went home and cried – it was the most miserable Christmas I ever had.

Last night I went to see Apocolypto. No green paint required – Mel Gibson actually was in a rain-forest, a real one, lucky bleeder. And his ‘Mayan’ actors weren’t balding, chubby white folk either – they actually looked the part: savage, noble, frightening. As I watched Mel’s minions running hither and thither I realised that having the right location, lots of time and credible-looking talent isn’t enough. You also need to know what you’re doing – and Mel certainly knows what he’s doing: Apocolypto is as exciting as 2 hours in a dark room gets.

So, if I’d had all Mel’s toys, would my chase scene have been better? A bit maybe, but not much. I was still learning back then and one of the big lessons I came away with that day is that a six foot 200 pound Irish guy with red hair and sneakers doesn’t look like a Mayan native no matter how much brown goop you put on him.