Laurie Bird

Two-Lane Blacktop is considered by some to be one of the best American movies ever made.  Esquire magazine ran a cover article on the film calling it their nomination for movie of the year in April 1971, well before it's July 7 premier that year, and they even published the entire script in their magazine.  A shot of Two-Lane Blacktop actress Laurie Bird appeared on their cover. 

To this day, the movie has attracted a cult following and has been described as "an existentialist road movie that has more in common with ambient acid westerns/wild west mythologies and nihilist art and disillusioned poetry than typical 'fast car chase' movies."   But good luck seeing the movie now, though.  It's not streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Xfinity, and repertory cinemas are a thing of the past.  We'll just have to take people's word for it regarding the film, I guess.   

Laurie Bird, who had a striking resemblance to the child actress Hayley Mills, apparently delivered a memorable performance in the movie.  She also appeared briefly in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (above) playing Paul Simon's girlfriend, who was taller than her on-screen boyfriend (it's funny because Paul Simon's short). The set must have been interesting for her and Simon, because in reality she was actually Art Garfunkel's girlfriend.  

In 1979, Bird committed suicide by overdosing on Valium in the New York apartment she shared with Garfunkel.  But if you ever saw the 1980 film Bad Timing starring Garfunkel and the fabulous Theresa Russell, you'd be deeply, deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the notion of a female suicide in Garfunkel's apartment, even if the film is fiction.  Talk about bad timing - Garfunkel was filming Bad Timing when Bird killed herself, which must have affected his performance during that film's horrific suicide scene. Garfunkel was deeply affected by Bird's death, saying, "She was beautiful, in a lonesome, haunted way, and I adored her. But I wasn't ready for marriage and she was not very comfortable being Laurie. She wasn't happy with herself. Her mother committed suicide at 26, and so did she."  

Bird also appeared in the 1974 film Cockfighter, later re-released as Born To Kill, because who could imagine trouble promoting a film called Cockfighter?  A Roger Corman production, it was the only film he said he ever lost money on.   Three films, including one cult favorite, and then suicide by overdose and that was it for Laurie Bird.  RIP, sweet princess - we hardly knew you.

Still, film critic Michael Atkinson wrote in his book Exile Hollywood (2008) that Bird "made more of an impression, left more of a synaesthetic presence, than many actors do in a career." Writer/musician Tim Kinsella's novel Let Go and Go On and On (2014) is subtitled Based on the roles of Laurie Bird, and in the foreword, he writes, "This book by no means intends to convey any truth beyond one possible solution to the puzzles of her life and work."

Bird also influenced Natural Snow Buildings  One of the many albums they released in 2008 was titled Laurie Bird, and had a drawing of her face on the cover.  NSB reportedly improvised the songs on the album onto a 2-track recorder in August 2007 at their hometown of Vitre in Brittany in northwestern France. Pressing was limited to 100 copies, and, online, used copies of the CD now go for $65.

Song for Laurie Bird is the first and main cut on the album, clocking in at a whopping 46 minutes, the longest so far in their discography (don't worry - the record won't stand for long).  The drone begins in NSB's "pretty," pastoral mode, with shimmering layers of repeated guitar figures and finger-cymbal and wood block percussion seemingly droning on forever as the track takes it's own sweet time to flow along and build up ever so slowly. But after about 35 minutes, the percussion gets more insistent and pronounced, the layers get denser and heavier and by the end, NSB are clearly in their Moonraiser/Sundowner "menacing" mode, with noisy dissonant instruments wailing and squonking and feeding back beneath the sheets of sound.  

Cockmotherfighting, the second track, is clearly a tribute to Bird's performance in Cockfighter, It jumps right out at you with a harsh and confrontational tone at first, but in less than a minute, the bells and drums rise to the top of the mix and it basically becomes one of their drum circle numbers, albeit over what sounds at times like a swarm of angry bees. Wordless vocals rise to the top the mix by the end of the track.  What all this has to do with Cockfighter I haven't the foggiest, as I've never seen the movie.

Orisha's Lament, the third and final track, seems to have little to do with Bird.  Orisha are spirits sent by higher divinities in the African Yoruba tradition for the guidance of all creation and to guide humanity on how to live and be successful on Earth.  Like the closing portion of Song for Laurie Bird, NSB are again in their menacing Moonraiser/Sundowner mode and the overall impression created is one of  danger and malignant evil.  The track would make a good soundtrack for a slasher flick, especially for an "inside-the-head-of" scene.

So what does Laurie Bird represent in the NSB discography?  With only three songs, some consider it to be an EP, but it clocks in at 1¼ hours and fills a full CD, so it's equally arguable that it's an LP.  Whichever the case, the lesson of Laurie Bird (the CD, not the woman) appears to be that only a year or so past the release of cult favorite The Dance of the Moon and the Sun, even as record labels were assembling the "outtake" sessions from that record to assemble a 6-CD box set, NSB had already moved on to another sound, not exactly drone metal but a heavier, denser form of drone than the pastoral folk-drone of TDotMatS (which in turn replaced the post-rock of Folk Ghosts and The Winter Ray).  Laurie Bird, containing equal measures of both, sounds like the transition record from NSB's folk-drone period to their noise period.

Restless innovators, NSB were writing yet a third chapter in their songbook (so to speak).