dan's jams - music reviews

Six CD's. And he has a book of the same name. So is this just an audiobook?

Heck no.

Bruce Campbell actually enlisted the help of friends and turned his book into more of an audio play, with character voicings and occassional sound effects and pulled this work into a long form story. It's a little odd for me to have this here amongst all of the rock albums that glorify the individual song, a 30 second to 10 minute work, because in it's entirety it clocks in at over 6 hours and there's no specific track to point to. There's no lead-off single, there's no deep album cut scorcher, there's no off-beat jam. In that way, it IS like an audio book.

I had the pleasure of picking this up without having any idea what it actually WAS, and as such, I was lulled into believing that it was entirely a humorous look at the world bruce lives in, feeling like he's on the edge of stardom and the edge of ruin in alternate breaths (but maybe a touch closer to ruin) and trying to inch closer to stardom, only to find his subconcious qualities always dragging him towards the semi-surreal world of "Ash", a character he played in the B-Movie-quality-with-A-Movie-production-values "Evil Dead" movies. As such, it's enlightening, entertaining, and if you don't know the reality of this story and are interested in it then STOP READING NOW. Go buy it, read it, whatever, and enjoy the romp.

If you are still reading, that means that you are taking upon yourself that I'm going to spoil it. Because I didn't know that this story is essentially fiction based in reality, like historical fiction, it all sounded entirely plausible. I really believed that it was a non-fiction account of his travails being possibly over-cast (sorry Bruce) in a big budget, star-studded movie and slowly helping devolove it into a hopelessly over-budget and B-Movie nuzzling travesty. Certainly his characterizations of first meetings with the producers of the movie "Let's make Love!", the A-List stars of the movie (Richard Gere and Renee Zellweiger), and even the cinematographer all smacked of so much "we're looking down our nose at you but your smarmy low-budget ways are campy but sometimes kinda cute and compelling" self-effacing unglamour that it really lent itself to the idea that the storyline was at least largely based in fact. It isn't. But I didn't realize this until I was cresting into the heart of Disc 6 and Bruce was covertly strealthing past Paramount Studios rent-a-cops and occasionally dramatically besting an old (faux?) actor-friend-turned-security-ogre-named-Lanny by fisticuffs, swordplay....hey...wait a minute. Swordplay? This wasn't real? YOU BASTARD. You had me. Well, well played. It was a let-down that it wasn't true, and I suppose maybe it was a little embarrassing, but that made the story that much more delicious.

It's a long story. If you now know that the story isn't a factual account, make the rating an 8. If you can't be bothered with 6 hours of a story, ignore this and go watch your summer sequels. But if you can hang on, it's a great story and it's filled with what I can only assume is a factual account of the movie business from his B-Actor standpoint. Thoroughly entertaining. Now i really want to see the B-Movie send up of