American Beauty Actor Returns After Addiction Hiatus

Funny thing to write, ‘addiction hiatus.’ But when talking about actor Wes Bentley, who was so captivating as Chris Cooper’s son in the still-outstanding American Beauty and who is now so open about his descent into post-fame alcohol and drug dependancy, there really is no other way to describe it: he took a hiatus.

Bentley recently opened up to Patrick Healy of the New York Times as he launches into an Off Broadway play, Venus In Fur. Publicly opening up about addiction and the resulting career struggles is a courageous move, and one that is becoming increasingly common, as witnessed by the success of Dr. Drew’s two-headed television monster, Celebrity Rehab/Sex Rehab, as well as the original cable addiction phenomenon, A&E’s Intervention.

Bentley was interviewed a few weeks before his Times’ sitdown by TheaterMania. In this interview, Bentley answers the questions surrounding his seclusion following American Beauty by saying, in regards to the roles he was offered:

“I’m not trying to be self-depracating about where I was then – I think I could have done a lot of those roles well enough, but I didn’t want to do them just well enough and I didn’t want to be a marketing tool. It was between me and Tobey Maguire for Spider-Man and it just didn’t feel right for me. The Four Feathers, which I did, felt more right.”

Not to nitpick, but Spider-Man “didn’t feel right”? Talk about a $50-million dollar addiction.

As well, Bentley is a key figure in the documentary film My Big Break, a film from Tony Zierra which first started filming in 1996 and tracked the lives of actors who were roommates with Zierra: Bentley, Chad Lindberg, Brad Rowe, and Greg Fawcett.

Bentley also comes from a religious family: both his parents are United Methodist ministers, and his brother was a youth minister in Kansas. But he ‘abandoned’ spirituality in his youth, and Healy does not dig any deeper as to what effect this may have had on his addictions. His IMDB profile notes that, following American Beauty, he was offered prominent roles in Monster’s Ball, Queen of the Damned, and Pearl Harbor, but ended up being cast in none of those films.

Choice clips:

The remarkable ‘plastic bag’ scene from American Beauty.

Trailer for My Big Break:

A preview of his work on the stage in Venus In Fur:

Paul McCartney Almost-Confirms iTunes Move

Will they, or won’t they? It’s been a while since there’s been this much music biz speculation – the most recent brouhaha in regards to the release of the posthumous Michael Jackson concert video comes to mind – but everyone (or is it just journalists?) wants to know: will The Beatles catalogue ever be available on iTunes?

In the latest issue of Billboard (headlined, rather exceptionally, “The Beatles 2.0″), Executive Editor Robert Levine interviews Sir Paul about Rock Band, The Beatles catalog, and other pressing topics. But if you stick with the interview right up to the last utterance, this, to me, would seem as good a confirmation as any that the group’s music will crop up on the music service.

Asked point-blank by Levine about iTunes, McCartney explains that the band has taken a round-about way of making their music available for download due to a “logjam” at EMI, and that, yes, it will eventually be available on iTunes. Direct from Billboard.com:

“That originally was mentioned a number of years ago and we all sort of said we’d look at it. But there was a logjam with the people who took over EMI-there were some aspects of the whole thing that they became nervous about. So we’re just waiting. Meantime, as you say, it’s kind of interesting, because virtually the same kind of thing is going to happen with “Rock Band”-you’re going to be able to download albums from that. We bypassed the logjam-not really intentionally. But one day I think that it’s natural that it will be on iTunes.”

Death Can’t Stop Him

You know a singer must mean it – meaning, as The Oblivians sang years ago in “Live The Life”: ‘you’ve got to live the life that you sing about in your songs – when he asks his doctors to increase his defibrillator trigger’s heartbeats-per-minute from 192 BPMs because 192 is the rate at which one of his bands’s tunes rises, and the singer’s defibrillator was triggered because his heart rate reached 192. This caused him to nearly die on stage. True story! The doctors kindly obliged, and the trigger rate now rests at 200 or so.

The singer is Aaron Lazar, and his band, The Giraffes, were featured in a recent New York mag profile. It’s worth a read as it describes in painful detail Lazar’s not just near-death experiences, but actual death experiences, and how his heart condition will affect the rest of his life, including, most importantly, his life as singer of this punk-metal band. Pretty riveting reading, and I’ve a whole new appreciation of Lazar.

Fiery Furnaces Rhythm Bros. Branch Out

Sebadoh was one of the bands that ushered indie rock into my life. The results of this usher-ence are mixed, but Sebadoh stuck with me. The triumvirate of Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock, Bubble & Scrape and Bakesale still stands pretty tall. Those first two records’ mixture of Eric Gaffney’s confusion/brilliance (Gaffney still rocks an Angelfire Web site) with Lou Barlow‘s stark renderings of his psyche are still excellent records, and after Gaffney was replaced on Bakesale by Bob Fay, Jason Lowenstein‘s intense songwriting came to the fore, great riff-driven numbers that signaled an emerging, perhaps more grounded talent in the band.

The reason for this long preamble? Lowenstein has a new band out now, Circle Of Buzzards, a hard-hitting duo with Bob D’Amico. These two talented cats have recently cut their teeth as the rhythm section of the latest Fiery Furnaces incarnation, having played with the band since 2005.

COB features Lowenstein’s songs, these kind of pop-metal tunes that are raised up a notch by Jake’s emotive and unique vocals. D’Amico is the other highlight in this group: his syncopated, strong grooves keep things lively and solid.

Free Jazz

I’ve been immensely enjoying some jazz lately – something I don’t know much about – but I think the period that turns my crank the most must be the hard bop/free jazz/improv era between the late 50s and I guess the early 1970s? Although I’ve heard one Brantford Marsalis Quartet LP, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and it’s fairly stunning, and it’s from 1991, so these delineations based on date are arbitrary…

I’ve been able to download full, classic albums from this period – ultra-rare and out-of-print albums – for free from the Web. I would like to personally thank those people who are making these albums available for their hard work and dedication to the wonderful music of this period. That is all.

A Few Words on CMJ

I live in New York City, and right now the College Music Journal – simply, CMJ – music festival is in full throttle. This festival gives the stage to “imminent breakouts and moder-day heroes” and features, this year, 1,100 bands, according to the Times.

And yet, I don’t plan on attending a single show, conference, panel discussion, or party. Why? Well, I can blame reason #1 firmly on the shoulders of my ten-month-old son. If I could take him to some CMJ shows, I could – but I really fear that he is still too young. I’m sure he’d just try and stand on everything anyhow, and try to stick all of the cable running from guitar amps and sound systems into his mouth – his oral fetish is ongoing – and that just wouldn’t be right.

I’m hoping one day that, if he does get interested in music, that he does play CMJ, which would be a big thrill for me. Of course, as much as I’d like to gently guide him in the direction of music, there is no telling what will interest him as he gets older. I mean, CMJ is full of hundreds of bands with thousands of musicians and their various hangers-on, and how did they all go from babbling, sleep-deprived babies to being musicians at CMJ? Some of them – like I did – came to music independently of parental intervention, though with a healthy push from my cousin Matt, who insisted I hear Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits from which I can still strum all the chords to School’s Out and I’m Eighteen (I recommend you check out this super-raw performance from 1972, fyi. Come to think of it, I think Matt was 18 at the time – probably, 10 years my senior.

Others – I was reading about Neneh Cherry recently, and her stepfather being Don Cherry, how could she not be a musician – find music through pedigree. Still others do it as a rebellion, and others by accident, where music kind of falls into their life from the margins but soon becomes the central part of their life.

Where will my little guy fall? Music is without a doubt the most exhilarating thing to happen to me in my short life, and I mean both playing it and listening to it. Will this truism grip my son as well? Will be perform at the Underage Festival in London – restricted to kids 14-18 – or even want to attend? Curious questions.

I’m going to set a goal, then, of trying to hit the festival next year. I’ll do it for him.

Machine Music, in Two Parts

I came across some Thomas Dolby footage on YouTube recently. How’d I get there? Well, I was writing about new Dolby 3D audio technology (Dolby the tech company, not Mr. Thomas) being developed for virtual worlds and online games, and I got to thinking, what happened to Thomas Dolby? Then of course I wikipedia-ed him, and I read all this interesting stuff about him (aside from him basically inventing the ringtone) getting his break in the music biz by playing the synth on some of Foreigner’s biggest hits in 1981 – namely, Urgent, and Waiting For A Girl Like You – and using the money he earned from these gigs and tours to seed his first LP, The Golden Age of Wireless, which had the hit She Blinded Me With Science, which, incidentally, doesn’t really stand up so well over time.

YouTube contains all sorts of live footage of Dolby from the 80s as well as now. I came across a fairly recent concert from Chicago where he is performing solo. He plays the song The Flat Earth, a favorite composition of mine, from his most compelling record, The Flat Earth. He is wearing a camera on his head, which gives us a birds-eye view of how he puts his music machines into motion. First, he starts up the anxiety-inducing keyboard intro. Then, he programs in live drum sequences, and then he plays a bass part on the keyboard, then the melody and chorus, and then he sings the verse. I’ll let the video do the talking, if you’re so inclined:

I think this Dolby track speaks to a certain golden age (sic) of synth-centric compositions – when the push of new technology met head on with pop sensibilities and a flair for the over-dramatic.

I was also investigating the Sacrum Profanum Polish music festival from this year that featured Kraftwerk playing three sold-out dates in Krakow. There is some footage floating around on YouTube as well, and it’s interesting to look at in comparison with the Thomas Dolby footage. The most apparent difference is in the lack of movement on Kraftwerk’s part. For Man Machine, four figures stand behind tables dressed in tight leather outfits, and laptop computers rest atop the tables. The lyric to the song is projected on a massive screen behind the band in the classic red, black and white color scheme of most of Kraftwerk’s visuals. Footage for The Robots shows a wider visual palatte, as the quartet is not on the stage. Robots stand on the stage in front of the laptops. Here’s footage from Man Machine: