January 11–18, 1996

second season|movies

Georgia On Their Minds

Jennifer Jason Leigh and John Doe talk about "bad" singing, useful drugs and their new movie Georgia.

By Margit Detweiler

Los Angeles. Sitting at a reporter's roundtable for the movie Georgia with ten or so movie critics, John Doe looks perturbed. The critics are asking Doe — leader of the seminal L.A. punk band X and an actor in the film — how he got Jennifer Jason Leigh to sing so badly.

"You didn't encourage her to be bad?" asks one reporter.

"No," said Doe, with a bit of belligerence in his voice, "I encouraged her to be simple. And not to try to be desperate. Because if she was simple the desperation would come out."

As Sadie, the firebrand punk-rock, drunk and drugged-up singer in Georgia, Jennifer Jason Leigh's version of the Elvis Costello song, "Almost Blue" was simply moving. Watching her solemn performance, I was reminded of a scene in Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost of down and out junkie Chet Baker covering the same song. It's likely Sadie saw the film, too: her schtick is a pastiche of many tragic rock and roll faces. Sadie covers other people's music and pilfers styles and patter, ripping off everyone from Van Morrison to Janis Joplin to her own sister Georgia.

Mare Winningham, as plain and WASPy Georgia, is the polar opposite of her sister. Blessed with pristine pipes and an Emmy Lou Harris grace, Georgia's got the successful career Sadie always wanted. But Sadie never seems jealous.

"I love my sister!" screams Sadie during a cover of her sister's song to a barroom filled with only a few people. "She's the single person I'll miss when I leave this earth."

A line, by the way, swiped from Janis.

Although the movie deals with a range of issues (sibling rivalry, the expression of passion), what struck me most about it was its insights into music, particularly the questions it asked about what determines "original" music and the way audiences and critics have reacted to what they think is "good" singing.

Obviously, "good" is a relative term.

A lot of people aren't fond of Courtney Love's growling, vocal throttle. Or Liz Phair's flat, jaded croon. Or even going back to the punk era, X's Exene Cervenka's high-flying screeches as she harmonized with John Doe. (Though certainly male singers — from Joe Jackson to the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten to Liam Gallagher from that morose Brit-pop band Oasis to every punk band that ever was — have gotten away with a range of off-key styles.)

Some of Leigh's performances are grating and a few are magnificent. She's reminiscent of a punky Exene in a growling "Sweet Jane" duet with Doe, and she's desperately emotional on the 11-minute Van Morrison cover, "Take Me Back."

"The whole idea of singing well or singing badly in key or out of key is bullshit," says John Doe. "Singing is about communicating a message."

So how would Doe rate Leigh as a communicator?

"Two big thumbs way up."

Though Leigh says she worked on her own to develop a style, Doe rehearsed with Leigh for two weeks up in Seattle. Leigh, who had never performed in a band before, says performing live was as exhilarating as acting.

"It was so much fun. Music is similar to acting in that you can really lose yourself," says Leigh. "I grew up singing around the house. Both my sisters had really glorious singing voices so when you're surrounded by that kind of sound you don't really hear your own voice. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized I couldn't sing, that I had a really mediocre gift."

Sadie hardly has a glorious voice. But mediocre? Sadie's spitfire, raspy and wrangled singing style is ten times more fun to watch and listen to than Georgia's airy, passionless, albeit pretty folk. The film agrees: while her superstar sister gets three songs (including a duet with sis) on-screen, Sadie gets 13.

But Georgia's got the professional edge: she writes her own songs (as penned in real life by Winningham, who has had a minor singing career of her own — she gigged once at the Chestnut Cabaret), and she's also the more mainstream and widely accepted.

Sadie's enamored of rock and roll — hooking up with blues legend "Trucker" (as played by Jimmy Witherspoon), missing her cue when she sings with him because she's so in awe. You could argue that since she doesn't have the raw talent, she aligns herself with fame to give herself purpose.

"Sadie has no sense of herself in many ways, so she's always stealing from people," says Leigh. "But the thing that I didn't even know until I saw the movie is that the more she tries to emulate whoever she's singing, the more Sadie she becomes. Every time she does it she becomes more grounded."

But Sadie does have talent as a singer. At least I think so.But I seem to be alone in this room of critics (though at every one of her performances in the movie, there are always a few rabid Sadie fans screaming and cheering).

So far it seems Miramax is on the fence as well — they haven't decided whether or not they'll put out a soundtrack.

Though Georgia is about much deeper issues than the way an artist makes it, it details the music "scene" better than almost any fictional film I can recall.

It perfectly captures several vibrant music scenes in Seattle: grungy rock, highbrow singer-songwriter, rootsy blues, and country (as played by Seattle band Ranch Romance). We watch as John Doe, Sadie and crew struggle from gig to gig, from frat party to bar mitzvah to bowling alley (although this band headed by Doe is a little too tight and entertaining to be believed as an unsuccessful band).

The subtleties are exquisite — the way Georgia and Sadie's styles both clash and merge when they duet on Georgia's song, "If I Wanted" (not to mention the contrast between Georgia's Lands End frumpwear and Sadie's raccoon-eyed makeup and tattooed hands).

Georgia's focus on Sadie's drug abuse, forever rampant in the rock and roll world, is a little heavy-handed. But as John Doe says, "I think the music industry is more self-destructive than in this film."

Sadie's rarely without her bottle of Jack Daniels, and she shoots up (we assume) in the bathroom at her sister's house. Leigh said she ate string cheese for dinner, dieting down to a dangerous 89 pounds in order to play Sadie at her worst.

John Doe's real-life insights into why drug and alcohol abuse have been so prevalent in the music industry opened the eyes of many sitting around the table in this swanky Beverly Hills hotel.

"Musicians who get [success] really fast and don't receive happiness from it, or don't feel like they deserve it, often turn somewhere else," says Doe. "They don't realize that happiness or satisfaction comes from within. "

So why are drugs so predominant for a lot of musicians?

"Because there are lots of times with nothing to do. And all those other reasons. You feel like you're not worthy or worth [the success] or you're searching for something. As a kid from the '60s, when I took drugs, it was to see the other side and to find out how much bullshit this society was really about. Once you smoke weed, you realize it. And there's no turning back from that realization. I don't discourage drug use, I encourage education. So that you know what you're getting into when you're going there. Cause if you say don't do it, people are going to do it."

Doe, who says he still drinks occasionally, says (to the gasps of a few reporters) the creative process is initiated after the high wears off.

"You're incredibly fragile after going out on a night drinking. All the little connections in your brain work differently, you feel far from the ground and that's where you have to be in terms of the creative process. I've never written a song while I've been high, but afterwards, when I'm sober. But that's in the past, I don't really do that anymore."

But excess does not necessarily lead to the house of wisdom for everyone.

"People would see Barfly and go out and use it to justify their alcoholism. I'm totally against that. For 9/10 of the world it's nothing but destruction of their soul, of their spirituality. You have to keep changing things. Sometimes you could drink and take drugs and it would work for you, then after you're 35 years old it probably doesn't, then you start becoming an alcoholic. And you no longer get inspiration out of it."

As the film captures some true-to-life scenes from the music biz,there's also a real-life relationship between Leigh and Winningham.

Leigh, who co-produced Georgia with her mother, screenwriter Barbara Turner, says the story isn't particularly relevant to her relationship to her sisters, but to her adoration of Winningham. The two met at a ritzy arts summer camp (Winningham could afford it, ironically, because she went on The Gong Show and won $500) when Winningham was 17 and assigned to watch over 14-year-old Leigh's bunk.

"Mare was the best actress in the camp and had this beautiful voice," says Leigh. "She would sing to us these songs that she wrote. And I still remember all the lyrics to the songs. She was our hero. Listening to her sing still makes me cry."

And listening to Georgia makes Sadie cry.

Leigh sounds like she might root for the Georgia-lovers in this room, but I'd take Sadie's desperation over Georgia's peaceful easy feelings any day.

Georgia opens at the Ritz Bourse on Fri. Feb. 12.