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Laid Bare John Gilmore | music by Skip Heller Not every book publisher gets the opportunity to release a record. With Laid Bare, the relationship between author John Gilmore and Amok has evolved in a new and exciting direction. This first Amok CD brings together longstanding mutual interests in hard-boiled fiction, soundtrack music, the underside of Hollywood glamour and true crime literature. This is John Gilmore's words and also his story. The specter of the Black Dahlia, the archetypal doomed would-be starlet hangs over the entire proceedings. A tragic lodestone, she guides the young Gilmore through the labyrinthine netherworlds of his fabled birthplace, Hollywood. Laid Bare captures the Santa Monica-and-Western squalor that has seemingly always surrounded the klieg lights of the movie premiere with the occasional brutal murder popping up as the sporadic punctuation of the deranged rollercoaster of Hollywood life. Laid Bare is a haunting, soulful evocation of the existential stirrings kept deep within by those who would play the games tbat the pursuit of fame requires. It is the strangely recurring shards of doomed 20th Century myths that emanate in spirals throughout this project that give it a seductive eeriness: Black Dahlia, James Dean, Charles Manson, Janis Joplin, Lenny Bruce, and Ed Wood. Tearing away the shrouds of gauzy, sappy myth, Gilrnore's truth is unflinchingly brutal and therefore ultimately liberating no matter how ugly it might get.
Skip Heller and his musical collaborators have evoked all the tension, dread, and transcendent moments of the desperate attempt to embrace the dream of Hollywood that Gilrnore's words convey. Composer/writer Skip Heller has handled with staggering aplomb this ambitious project of weaving together excerpts from three Gilmore books and scoring each one with completely original music. As a secnnd-generation Angeleno, it gives me a great pride to present this audio chunk of unrelentingly bleak L.A. decadence and sweaty anxiety.
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| amokbooks.com 2005 | ||||||
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Cover Notes: "People ask me about the self-destructive elements contained in my work - the characters; whether real or fictional. I can only answer that it's part of an energy, a force of human energy that walks a line like a tightrope over life and death. The material in this CD does that - walks a line between life and death. There's a nervous erratic energy, the jazz itself captures that quality. People looking for a truth, straddling desperation and desolation and seeking, if blindly at times. It's a story about seeking. The work I did on the book Laid Bare was a search, on my own part a seeking venture to understand more. I learned things about myself from revealing, from laying bare what I did know and feel and experience. The CD represents what the book deals with. The music composed brilliantly by Skip Heller - brings a shining run of noir jazz; there's great verve and intensity to the score and with strong fleeting moments of a modern Three Penny Opera. I find Mack the Knife and the various characters in Three Penny Opera peeking through the words and music, the same human qualities and conditions inherent in the people I write about. Skip Heller has reached in musically to the psychology and emotions of the individuals and has been able to present it bubbling and blowing up. It's a kind of unfolding of human experience, of elements I find exciting and challenging, forming the basis of the work I am interested in, and at the same time the colors and textures erupt from the culture that holds us prisoners - that holds us suspended." – John Gilmore 2000 Reviews: top of page |
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