Word: singings
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This is comedy of the funny-peculiar bent, and not so much ensemble as communal. Like Sparrows Can't Sing, Joan Littlewood's delicious pub-crawl farce of the '60s, No Surrender flaunts too many characters, plotlets and reversals of mood but still manages to hold together splendidly. Thank Screenwriter Alan Bleasdale (whose elegy to Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", played the West End last year) for the film's wild pungency. He is ably abetted by a cast of vet actors and a few odd-jobbers like Rock Star Elvis Costello, who has a funny turn...
There's already a clamor to climb aboard. Waylon Jennings, who can still hang tough and sing true, recorded an Earle tune called The Devil's Right Hand on his new album, Will the Wolf Survive. At a recent date in a tony Chicago club, an upscale crowd got joyously behind the heavy beat and the Duane Eddy- style guitar rumble of Earle's band, even as they paid respectful attention to such back-against-the-wall Earle lyrics as "I hit the beer joints every Friday night/ Spend a little money lookin' for a fight/ It don't matter...
...still don't understand why it's that big a deal." Earle may be the man to bring about this kind of crossover, but it's a hard job that has frustrated such gifted performers as John Prine and Joe Ely. Still, Earle has strong qualifications. He can sing Springsteen's spooky, poignant State Trooper and make it his own. He looks like the guy one stool over at the truck stop, with a Peterbilt cap and a waistline that has seen a little too much barbecue, but he reads Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and points out that...
There were other bad times and two more failed marriages. One of Earle's sweetest tunes is a lullaby called Little Rock 'n' Roller, sung by a traveling musician to a faraway son. "That song was no fun to write, and it isn't any fun to sing," says Earle, who has a son of his own. "But I really needed to write it. It made me feel better...
Unlike some of the members of his administration, Pusey was always in favor of equal opportunity for women. One summer, he decided to allow women to sing in the Memorial Church choir. On a Sunday in the fall, soprano voices were heard, and it wasn't for days that anyone realized that women were singing. "We got away with that without anyone knowing it," Pusey laughs, attributing his liberal attitude toward women to his Midwestern origins...