One hard piece

Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson on the set of “Five Easy Pieces.”

Bob Rafelson, who was one of the producers of “Easy Rider” and co-wrote the story for and directed the classic 1970 film “Five Easy Pieces,” died at home of lung cancer in Aspen, Colorado on Saturday.  He was 89 years old.

It’s hard to put into words what those two movies meant back at the time they were made, but prodded by Rafelson’s death, I’m going to try.

Both movies were about what might be best called questing, going looking for something and not finding it.  They seemed to sum up the 60’s at a time when they weren’t even over.  Young people had started to believe that the world belonged to them if they’d only reach out and grab it.  The music was a part of it.  Songs didn’t just play on the car radio or boom through your cool stereo speakers that you bought but couldn’t really afford.  The music – the lyrics, the beat, the guitars, all of it -- spoke to you in a language only you understood and told stories it seemed as if only you could understand.

But despite the feeling we had that the world was ours for the taking, there was a sense very early on that it was all an illusion. “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces” almost perfectly captured that feeling.  The classic plot summary of “Easy Rider” is that Wyatt and Billy, a couple of hippies who have just completed a lucrative cocaine deal, go looking for America on their motorcycles and what they find of it at first dissatisfies and disappoints them and then kills them.  In “Five Easy Pieces,” Bobby, a classically trained pianist we are given to understand could have had a brilliant career, has given it up to be an oil field worker outside of Bakersfield, California.  He’s not looking for America, but for himself – who he is, and what and who can satisfy him.  He doesn’t find either, and at the end of the movie jumps in a semi-truck headed down the highway and leaves his waitress girlfriend getting a cup of coffee in a roadside diner.

Summing them up like that, the movies’ plots sound self-indulgent and silly, and they were.  They became hits because so were we.  We thought we saw ourselves in Wyatt and Billy and Bobby.  They were playing out a dream that was in the air we thought we shared – a dream of the open road, gambling it all on an illegal drug deal and hitting it big and taking the winnings and using them to show “the man” how we could beat the system and make it work.  Then “the man” in “Easy Rider” proves who was really in charge by killing the dreamers and the dream.

“Five Easy Pieces” is more complex and nuanced, but it plays with the same dream, that you can throw it all away and leave the straight world and make a new world of your own if you just keep moving.  The movie is grandly depressing because Rafelson caught almost perfectly how it wasn’t working, none of it – our contempt for the straight world, our sense that we could beat it at its own game, our illusion of superiority when there was really nothing to justify feeling superior about anything.

Rafelson appears to have excavated his own life in the celebrated scene in the diner where Jack Nicholson, playing an impatient Bobby, plays a cruel verbal trick on an apparently ignorant waitress and when she doesn’t go for it, he sweeps everything from the table and gets up and leaves.  As a talented, impatient young filmmaker trying to get straight Hollywood to go along with his hip ideas, Rafelson got into a screaming argument with Lew Wasserman, the famous powerbroker who had practically invented the agency business in Hollywood and was by then running Universal Pictures, and when Wasserman didn’t “get it” according to Rafelson’s lights, with a sweep of his arm, he wiped everything off Wasserman’s desk onto the floor and was escorted by security out of the building.

It's embarrassing today to look back at Rafelson’s diner scene and realize that what we saw as rebellion was just a tantrum thrown by a privileged rich guy.  Taken at the time as evidence that the straight world, represented expertly by Lorna Thayer as the waitress, didn’t “get us,” we bathed in the lazy luxury of contempt for her reflexive rule-making and demand for obedience.  But what comes through in retrospect is the waitress’s nobility in the face of Nicholson’s patented arrogance. 

There is nuance, as well, in Bobby’s steeply tilted relationship with Rayette, the waitress who aspires to be a country singer played with knowing vulnerability by Karen Black. Bobby, obviously more educated and intellectually acute than Rayette, hides her away in a motel on the mainland when he goes to visit his upper-crust family on an island in Puget Sound.  When she runs out of money at the motel and shows up unannounced at the house, there is an awkward scene at a dinner table as a friend of Bobby’s family obviously ridicules her.  Bobby defends her, but his defense is colored by his scorn for his own family as privileged and clueless about the “real” world Bobby has been inhabiting in his rebellion against his family and his upbringing.  Bobby’s affections lie with the unattainable Catherine, played with icy panache by Susan Anspach, a talented pianist under the tutelage of Bobby’s brother. After a sexy flirtation, she rejects him as incapable of love, and he leaves, not understanding at all the truth of Catherine’s observations about him and clearly frustrated to be stuck with Rayette, who even he knows loves him unconditionally.

His abandonment of her at the truck stop diner was seen by audiences in 1970 as a logical and defensible act by a young man rebelling against a country, not to mention a family, that failed to appreciate him for who he believed he really was.  But Rafelson imbued Rayette with such humanity and tenderness that you can’t help taking her side even as the movie pushes you to identify with Bobby, the sensitive and pained seeker.

It's not possible, of course, to know what Rafelson thought he was saying in that final scene, or in the tender scene just before it when Rayette sings to Bobby in the car before they reach the truck stop.  Rafelson was known in the industry as a tough guy who didn’t suffer fools gladly, to put it mildly.  I met him a few times in Aspen at the bar in the Hotel Jerome in the early 70’s with Hunter Thompson, who I had known for some years by that time.  Hunter was a tough guy who didn’t suffer fools gladly either, and the two of them made for a difficult, not to say combustible, combination. 

I remember being in the car with Hunter one time and he was playing the Grateful Dead’s “New Speedway Boogie” on a tape deck.  When the song’s first lyric played, he hit stop and said something like, “That’s it, right there.  Those are the best lyrics ever written.”  I thought at the time, what the hell is he talking about?  The lyric goes, “Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack/If you’ve got nothing new to say.”  It was a couple of years later I was in the Jerome Bar with him and Rafelson, and I got it.  Neither of them wanted to hear from you unless you had “something new to say,” and Rafelson appeared just barely tolerant of my eager attempts to contribute to the scene.  The lyric spoke to Hunter’s and Rafelson’s impatience with the rest of the world that couldn’t keep up with them.  Both of them were really, really good at something – Hunter as a writer, Rafelson as a filmmaker – but it wasn’t enough. 

It was what “Five Easy Pieces” was about:  nothing was enough.  Bobby was really, really good at the piano, but it wasn’t enough.  Rayette was really, really good to him, but she wasn’t enough.  The woman he thought was good enough for him wouldn’t have him.  That was the reflexively negative world talking, the world that despite its rewards of fame and money and the magic of living in a place like Aspen, wasn’t enough for Rafelson or for Hunter, either.  Both men were preternaturally pissed off for no apparent reason, because the reason was concealed inside of them. 

There is a longing in “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces” that can be found in Hunter’s best work as well.  It’s as if they had something at one time and it got away from them.  In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Thompson gives away the loss within him when he writes, “That, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

What was left was heartache.  It suffuses both of Rafelson’s movies and the best of Hunter’s work.  In “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” there’s a passage early in the book where Hunter describes picking up a hippie hitchhiker on his drive to New Hampshire to begin covering the ’72 campaign.  She’s on her way to visit a boyfriend who’s living in a chickencoop in a commune.  “It’s five or six degrees above zero outside, and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her.  ‘I guess it sounds crazy,’ she explains. ‘We don’t even sleep together.  He’s just a friend.  But I’m happy when I’m with him, because he makes me like myself.’”

“Jesus, I thought,” Thompson continues.  “We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples…The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the Coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover:  a whole culture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.”

These are words of regret from one of the creators of the “Acid Era.”  Hunter was present for the Trips Festivals run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in La Honda, California, in the mid-60’s when acid was still legal and they, and others, thought it might save the world.  The Grateful Dead was the house band for the Trips Festivals.  It was the end of the era of the Beats – Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarity in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” drove the Prankster’s bus, “Furthur,” – and the dawn of the hippies.

Hunter once warned me to stay away from acid.  He said, “You’re already close enough to the edge as it is.  If you look over the lip, you’re not going to be able to handle what you see down there.”  The crest of the wave he described in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” turned out not to be a crest at all.  It was the edge, and from the time of the Trips Festivals, Hunter had been gazing into the abyss.  He was one of the saddest people I’ve ever known.   

We don’t prepare ourselves for heartbreak and loss when we’re in our 20’s, just as we don’t prepare ourselves for addiction and alcoholism when we’re drinking and taking drugs.  Sometimes that lack of preparation produces art like “Five Easy Pieces” and both “Fear and Loathing(s).” 

Hunter Thompson scribbled “no more fun” on a piece of paper before he shot himself in the head with one of his famous handguns in 2005 at age 67.  Bob Rafelson died Saturday at 89.  Both men were giants.  The world is a lesser place without their depressed, angry genius.