That wasn’t the case: it was a collaborative effort between myself, Gene and David Crosby. In later years, Gene started to fantasise that he wrote the whole song. I was in love with his saxophone playing: all those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.Īt the same time, Gene Clark had some chords and a vague melody, which went into the more regular structure of Eight Miles High. It had a recurring phrase, dee da da da, which I picked up on my Rickenbacker guitar and played some jazzy stuff around it. There was one Coltrane track called India, where he was trying to emulate sitar music with his saxophone. By the end of the tour, Coltrane and Shankar were ingrained. It was the only music we had, for the whole time on the bus. But I had some blank tapes so recorded the Coltrane albums, along with some Ravi Shankar, and took them on tour. I had just picked up a cassette recorder – it was such a new thing, you couldn’t buy any tapes to play in it. Makes me think of mashing ice cream.We were on a tour of America, and someone played us the Coltrane albums Africa/Brass and Impressions. "Silicone," Russ believed, "spoils the fun," although he was later forced to relax his vigilance. She was from Sweden, was as famous a model as Obermaier, though not in French Vogue, and was all real. She possesses a matched set of expensive breasts.ĭo not confuse this Uschi with my old pal Uschi Digard, the Russ Meyer supervixen from the late 1960s and early '70s, although like Obermaier, she became a diamond merchant and jewelry designer. It seems doubtful that Jagger would come sniffing around Berlin without a bodyguard, but if you see Uschi in this movie, you may sympathize. But he is getting married and observes, "Seems like we're always meeting at the wrong end of the stick." Nice line. She breaks up with Keith Richards but later meets him by accident on a Mexican beach, and they find they're still in love. The story of Uschi's life would not easily support depth and thoughtfulness, especially not with the amount of weed around. This is not a role for an actress who radiates intelligence, like Tilda Swinton. If Uschi Obermaier comes across as shallow and heedless, well, maybe she was. It has few human insights, and those of the most obvious kind. Now what can I say about this biopic? Well, it's deliciously dumb and reasonably well-made, for starters. Later, she pouts, "But I think it was real for him." Uschi, opposed to marriage, is told by Dieter that the ceremony "isn't really real," and going along with it is like a favor. He offers to throw them a wedding and does, with a brass band, horses, elephants, costumed dancers and all you can eat. In those carefree years, lots of hippies were drawn to India, and so are they, using a newspaper headline to convince a maharaja they are a prince and princess. Uschi has seen photos of him cavorting with African dancers, responds to his invitation to see the world, travels by bus with him for, I dunno, several years, it seems. Though her modeling is accepted by the commune as a source of funds, they don't think she's really sincere in her worship of the cause, nor is she.ĭavid Scheller is more interesting as the real-life Dieter Bockhjorn, who ran a nightclub in Hamburg, which he often closed to throw wild parties for his friends. He's not comfortable with her celebrity and she's not happy to be lectured at. That he and Uschi are "in love" is, I think, an ideological decision. As Rainer Langhans, the real-life leader of a Berlin commune, Matthias Schweighofer reflects a quality I noticed in a few '60s leftist radicals I knew: He's like a strict, scolding mother, lecturing those in his charge to correct their flawed ideas. Avelon has a face for the role that is maddeningly unrevealing sometimes she pouts, sometimes she's happy, sometimes she's pensive, sometimes she's out to lunch. The movie presents the surfaces of Obermaier's life but never lets us understand who she was. Natalia Avelon plays Uschi with a disdain for bras and blouses, her radical boyfriend has more hair than Angela Davis, her playboy boyfriend leaps about with the frenzied excitement of a fortysomething hippie, and the impersonators of Jagger and Richards sometimes look a little like the real thing, in the right shadows, at certain angles. Critics have pretty much hated this film, although some have been kind ("Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made," Andrew O'Hehir, Salon).
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