Mel Brooks'gloriously tasteless 1965 comedy, with Zero Mostel's shabby producer and Gene Wilder's timid accountant hatching a plan to make a fortune from a sure-fire Broadway flop, Springtime For Hitler. Brooks' play-within-a-film structure is fiendishly clever, while Kenneth Mars' bug-eyed, paranoid Nazi playwright and Dick Shawn's way-out hippie Hitler steal the show. Superb.
Fifth solo outing for fiftysomething Nashville maestro MILLER'S MORE ILLUSTRIOUS work as guitarist/musical director with Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle has sometimes put his solo output in the shade. A pity, because there's much to discover in the Ohio native's back pages. Earle swears he's "the best country singer working today", while Robbie Fulks calls him country's only living auteur.
Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether an unshown TV special from '68 could capture, as the opening credits suggest, "the spontaneity, aspirations and communal spirit of an entire era" any more accurately than, say, Catweazle or Do Not Adjust Your Set, and regardless of whether you think Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed are the fulcrum points of a generation or just something that music critics of a certain age should learn to get over, the portents of this cryogenically preserved moment in rock time are undeniable. Look!
