Before I even started watching The Passing Show - The Life & Music of Ronnie Lane, I knew about the man’s money problems. Growing up, the only Ronnie Lane songs I knew were the few I’d heard on Pete Townshend’s Who Came First and Rough Mix, collaborations that had only occurred because Lane had approached Townshend for money. Instead of giving him cash, Townshend asked Lane if he had any songs. It turns out he did: “April Fool,” one of his best, not to mention “Annie” and “Nowhere to Run.” And they made a superb album together with Charlie Watts, Eric Clapton, John Entwistle and a bunch of other dudes.
Anyway. The Ronnie Lane documentary explains the source of those money problems. (a) Lane spent most of his Faces-era earnings on a mobile recording studio (in an Airstream, no less) and (b) he abandoned the Faces abruptly in 1973 when he felt the band had lost its soul. According to the film’s interviews with Pete Townshend, whose hangdog face, stubbly beard, cockney accent and bleak perspective make him seem like a character from Bleak House, Ronnie Lane didn’t make a “brass farthing” from his first band the Small Faces and not much more from the Faces. But, according to Townshend, if he’d stuck around with Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Kenney Jones, et al., he would have made himself a “nice little rockstar existence” from publishing. Very practical, but not Ronnie Lane’s style.
He lived, instead, on a ramshackle farm with his new wife, her kids, their kids and a ragamuffin group of hippies grilling sausages on fire-heated pans outside of caravan trailers. Shirtless, drinking something called ‘barley wine’ from tin mugs and yawning and scratching their heads with cigarettes in their fingers. Then he formed a band called The Slim Chance, appeared on Top of the Pops a few times dressed like a hobo, wrote some songs, was diagnosed with MS, moved to Texas and died in Colorado.
In spite of some strange interviewees, including his stepdaughter, who’s shot sitting on a desolate moor holding a prostrate nine year-old, The Passing Show fails to inspire a pathetic, Crumb-like gloss. (I think it’s shot on VHS.) Nevertheless, it’s far and away better than Shine a Light, the Martin Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Stones. What could have been low-key and spare turned out to be kind of hyped-up and (God, I hate to use the word) masturbatory. Mick Jagger preening in his hotel room and belittling the concert’s set designer, Ron Wood aping around the stage and hugging Hillary Clinton’s mother like one of those smarmy dudes in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, and Martin Scorsese lapsing into complete Woody Allenization as he moans and groans and slaps his forehead over where to place his cameramen because those pesky Stones won’t decide on a set list!
I know. This is a total waste of time. But, maybe it was the charm of the Ronnie Wood documentary, which chronicled a Mod-era British rockster who didn’t sell his soul, didn’t cut a single with Babyface, didn’t make an over-hyped concert movie for the Clinton Foundation, and figured out how to fry eggs on an open fire and wear neck scarves and three-piece suits and make something called barley wine without a stove that made it so interesting and real. You felt bad for the guy, but you felt great. Like Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner, he suddenly stopped at the finish line and stared at the establishment while the rich kids sprinted past him and won the race.
No. Ronnie Lane wrote beautiful songs and stayed true to himself. A mixture of rhythm & blues, American folk, Scottish and English traditional music, rock & roll and polka, his music was not arena-ready but it continues to have an earthy grit and an undying charm.
All in all, he was a soulful classic-rock songwriter up there with Steve Winwood, Ray Davies and Van Morrison.
Good night.
Riding the release of Waylon Forever–an eight-song CD featuring the vocals of Waylon Jennings backed by his son Shooter Jennings and the .357’s–Shooter’s drummer Bryan Keeling is interviewed by Modern Drummer.
Joe Oesterle and Tim Cridland’s new travel guide 
Seeing that this is a travel guide, my only regret is that there are no specific Nevada destinations Operation EMU enthusiasts can visit. The Stribling Valley and Shrouded Rock, where most of the novel’s action takes place, are tucked away deep inside Nellis Air Force Base if they even exist at all.
Republicans trying to justify the last eight years have reached a new level of desperation, comparing President George W. Bush to the comic-book hero of America’s No. 1 film.