Word: tonking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such simple materials and a plot line that stretches toward the horizon as direct and uncomplicated as an old county trunk blacktop, Clint Eastwood has fashioned a marvelously unfashionable movie, as quietly insinuating as one of Red's honky-tonk melodies. It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys. As both actor and director, Eastwood has never been more laconic than he is in this film. If it reminds...
...down-and-out dad, the savvy offspring and the car trip through the South, all set against the dusty backdrop of the Great Depression-it worked for Ryan and Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, why not for Clint Eastwood, 52, and his son Kyle, 14? In Honky Tonk Man, opening at Christmas, Eastwood plays an itinerant musician heading cross country to try for a shot at the Grand Ole Opry. "Kyle plays my nephew in the film," says he. "I demoted him from son, but he's still enjoying it." So apparently is the star. Eastwood plays...
...nowhere for them to live. And there's a guy who plays trumpet on the wharf whenever anything romantic happens. And there's also a piano on the wharf (and another in, of all places, Doc's laboratory) so that Mac can liven up spontaneous parties with his honky tonk jazz. And everyone speaks in cliches, and the sky is always purple and torrid like one of those sea scenes from Woolworth...
...group earlier on their current American tour are gone; Ron Wood and Keith Richards started every number in the same key. But what is left is a raunchy gruffness: stinging solos bashing into bass and drums; sixth and seventh Stones Ian Stewart and Ian MacLagen banging out their honky-tonk keyboards, oblivious to the rest of the band; Jagger demonstarting graphically just what you do with brown sugar...
...that most people listening to them today either can't remember or never knew in the first place where these guys actually came from. As Dalton quickly proves, you can't understand the group unless you're aware of a history that goes back beyond "Brown Sugar," beyond "Honky Tonk Woman," into the murky period before "Satisfaction" was even an embryonic riff ringing from Keef's Stratocaster...