U2 in LA; Philip Glass; Rick Baker's creature clearance

Listen 24:00

U2 begins a string of five shows at The Forum on its Innocence + Experience Tour; a new work by Philip Glass is being premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic; Special effects and makeup master Rick Baker (far right) is auctioning a career's worth of monstrous creations.

U2 in LA; Philip Glass; Rick Baker's creature clearance

U2 begins a string of five shows at The Forum on its Innocence + Experience Tour; a new work by Philip Glass is being premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic; Special effects and makeup master Rick Baker (far right) is auctioning a career's worth of monstrous creations.

U2 begins a string of five shows at The Forum on its Innocence + Experience Tour; a new work by Philip Glass is being premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic; Special effects and makeup master Rick Baker (far right) is auctioning a career's worth of monstrous creations.

U2 kicks off LA shows trying to prove they're still relevant and not a nostalgia act

You either know U2's music, or it showed up on your Apple device. They're back on tour, and Tuesday night, the band performed the first of five shows at the Forum in Inglewood.

Instagram U2 embed

The last time they performed in the Los Angeles area, they were at Pasadena's Rose Bowl in 2009. They're out to prove something with their new tour.

"Bono, by his own definition, is a very competitive guy, and I think he views this tour's setbacks as a challenge," Randall Roberts, pop music critic for the L.A. Times, tells the Frame. He was at Tuesday night's show.

They still command enough interest to play five shows, which are almost all sold out. But there's still the spectre of the bad publicity from that iTunes release, when their "Songs of Innocence" album magically popped up in music libraries everywhere.

"They can buy their own ubiquity because we've heard these new songs... whether you wanted to or not," Roberts says.   

Here's one of them, which they frequently open their shows with:

"Even though it's [a] really, really energetic, catchy song, it does kind of feel like you're hearing [an] Apple logo song," Roberts says. "It's the way we hear it at this point, because they're so connected with Apple."

The tour's highlights, according to Roberts

• The good: "Beautiful Day," a great anthemic rock song
• The bad: New material, part of tour which made the fans respond a little less excitedly than they do to the older stuff embedded in their memory
• The set up: The speakers were suspended over the audience and it sounded great all over. The Forum is an oval, and the show was set up with two different stages at both ends, with a catwalk in between
• A second visit after these shows? Roberts says it's definitely happening

Philip Glass explains how he scores films and continues creating at 78

Composer Philip Glass says his work is defined by a lifetime of collaborations. He's one of the world’s leading composers of contemporary music. His singular sound has been heard in operas, movie scores and symphonic works.

Glass’s unique sound, focused on complex repetition of motifs, has most often been described as “minimalist.”

When The Frame recently reached him by phone in Portland, Glass defined his style for us.   

"When people say, 'what kind of music do you write,' I say, 'well I write theater music,'" Glass says. "Now, what do I mean by that? I've written 25 operas, I've written 30 films, I've done 20 or 30 dance scores. I mean, if you look at it, what I'm doing is I'm working in the collaborative art forms — which include text, movement, image, and music. I've written 10 symphonies, but that's a small part of what I've done. I work with dancers, I work with filmmakers, I work with poets, so that my music has been informed very much by the people I work with, and people I've grown up with."

Day jobs even after success — until 42

Almost every artist has a period in their life where they have to have a day job to make ends meet, and Glass has plenty of his own — including a moving company, working as a plumber and serving as a cab driver.

"My day jobs lasted until I was almost 42, but that's very normal — and that's true, by the way, for people in Amsterdam, and in London. And basically, in any of those cities, the chances are that the waiter or the cab driver or the person cleaning your house, perhaps, they could be a writer, could be a poet — well you know, in L.A., that would certainly be true."

Glass was still driving a cab when his opera "Einstein on the Beach" premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera House.

"That wasn't the end of my cab driving days. You know, fame and fortune, they only are linked together poetically. They very rarely happen at the same time. Or, at least in the part of the music world that I'm in, you can become very famous and never make a big living."

Glass says that the United States are an arts powerhouse, exporting music, films and books all over the world.

"That doesn't mean that the artists are getting paid very much. And when I was a young man, I didn't count the days [until] I would have to stop my day jobs, because I wasn't sure I would ever stop them."

The turning point

Glass says that the moment when he first felt like a successful composer came when he was 30 years old — 12 years before he stopped his day jobs.

"Now, why was I successful? I was writing for my own ensemble, I was touring. I was in the Northwest, I was actually in Los Angeles, I think, in 1971, at Royce Hall. I wasn't making a living — what I did, my jobs were itinerant jobs. They came and go as I needed them, so I would come back from a three-week tour of either Europe or America, I had lost money on the tour, I would go back to whatever my day job — if I had a moving company with my cousin Gene, we would go back to work, and within two or three months, I had paid off the debts, and I was ready to go on tour again."

Despite losing money touring, he'd begun to build a crowd that cared about what he did.

"Starting at 30, I had an audience, I had a little record company, I had a publishing company — I got a lot of bad reviews, but I got some good reviews too. But the main thing was, is I began to have a public. By 1974, I rented Town Hall in New York City and I did a concert of my own there, and sold it out. By 1979, I sold out Carnegie Hall. Those halls, I rented, and we sold the tickets."

How Philip Glass scores a movie

Scoring a film can often be about telegraphing emotion to an audience, telling them, "Here is how you need to feel at this very moment." Glass says that he tries leaving movies behind, not watching them more than a couple of times and creating a certain distance between the music and the images on screen.

"For me, the spectators have to make the connection with the film. And they make it, primarily, very often, emotionally, they'll make it through the music. This is, one of the things that we as composers can do, besides just setting up the emotional stage, so to speak, but there's another very important part."

That part, Glass says, is what he calls "articulating the structure of the film."

"Sometimes, films can be very complicated. A good score can walk you through it so that you don't get actually mixed up. I remember when I first saw the movie, 'The Hours,' it was a very complicated story."

Glass scored the film, with three interlocking stories about different women in different time periods.

"The thing that held it together, finally, was the score. The score was like a big blue ribbon that I wrapped around the whole thing and tied it together. Now, I'd like to leave room for the spectator to find their own place in the experience."

That room for experience is what separates a film score from advertising, Glass says.

"Let's put it this way: If someone is selling you a car on television, and you listen to that music, that's a commercial jingle of a kind. Now you're not supposed to think about anything, you're supposed to come away thinking, 'I got to go buy that car.' That's all that music is supposed to do, right? If you take the same strategy and try to put it in a film, it becomes impossible to watch the film, because the music is telling you too much — more than you need to know. What you really need to do, is to leave the audience the space to understand the film in the way that becomes personal for them."

That distance between seeing a movie and composing for it is an important part of Glass's process.

"I don't really tell people all my secrets, I don't know why I should tell you — but I do it by looking at the film, but mostly writing the music from memory."

What set Philip Glass apart

Glass writes in his memoir that he noticed something odd about the way he hears music that wasn't common before his compositions.

"I seem to have had a knack for writing music that someone hasn't heard before. Of course, that doesn't mean it becomes accepted right away. In fact, for a long time, I was part of a changing music world that the rest of the world caught up with, and I wasn't the only one. I knew 10 or 20 composers who were not writing in a conventional modernistic musical style, and at first, music critics wouldn't even review us, because we were so far off the map."

The secret to getting noticed: time.

"We actually had to wait for a generation of music critics to die — which, of course, they eventually did — and the younger group came along, and they began writing about it, and that's really what happened."

Glass offered his thoughts on how he achieved what he did in his career.

"The deal is, how do you become a successful composer? For one thing, you better live a long time. Take care of yourself, watch your diet, exercise, don't do too much drugs, don't do too much of anything, and you stay busy."

How Glass continues to create and how he defines creativity

After an epic career, Glass says he still gets nervous when his work is performed. His latest composition, “Concerto for Two Pianos,” has its world premiere this week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, played by the Labèque sisters.

"Two wonderful pianists, who I haven't actually met yet, but they've been playing my music for the last four or five years. And I wrote it for them, and I wrote it for the L.A. Philharmonic, which has now become a young orchestra, a very good orchestra — I played with them a number of times, and it's a very good band. So I'm writing for an orchestra I know, for an audience — in a way, I think I know the audiences in L.A. now. But this is a piece that no one's heard yet, and I've barely heard it myself. Let's put it this way — I can't play the whole piece on the piano, because it's for two pianos and an orchestra."

Now Glass is 78 years old, keeping busier than ever. He says that other people keep him going at it.

"With performers,  interpreters, writers, artists. You know, creativity is not confined to just the artists. I mean, people who cook can be creative, people who make clothes are creative. Creativity is anytime we take the world and, with our own hands, we make a change in it, we make a change in the world. That's what interests me, and it can come up anywhere."

Glass’s “Concerto for Two Pianos” will be performed May 28 and 30 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. His opera “Hydrogen Jukebox,” with a libretto by Allen Ginsberg, is being presented by the Long Beach Opera on May 30 and June 6-7.

'Monster Maker' Rick Baker prepares to retire from film biz and auction off career-spanning creature collection

In the music video for "Thriller," Michael Jackson leads a group of 30 or so zombies in an epic choreographed dance in an industrial part of Los Angeles.

Jackson was a huge fan of the 1981 film "An American Werewolf in London," so he wanted his next video to be essentially a short film where he’d turn into a monster.

“I said I'd rather not turn him into a werewolf. I think it'd be cooler if we turned him into some kind of cat, feline kind of thing," said Rick Baker, the special effects artist hired to turn Jackson into a...were-cat of sorts. "I wanted to put whole bunch of monsters in it, but that turned into being a whole bunch of zombies and doing the dance.”

Baker worked with Thriller director John Landis on "An American Werewolf in London," and he was brought on to transform Jackson.

But you’ve likely seen a lot more of Baker’s work, without even realizing it.

Since the early ‘70s, he’s been responsible for some of the most iconic creatures and special effects in Hollywood, from "The Gremlins" to the apes in the 2001 Tim Burton "Planet of the Apes" to an army of alien bug creatures for the "Men In Black" franchise. Not to mention his work in classics like "Star Wars: Episode IV" and the 1976 version of "King Kong" starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges.

In total, Baker’s been nominated for 12 Academy Awards and has won seven. But despite considerable success, he is now retiring from show business.

With long white hair pulled back into his trademark ponytail, Baker is soft spoken with a kind face and demeanor that belies the often ghastly creatures he creates.

But he’s also known for creating animatronic apes for films like "Mighty Joe Young" and "Gorillas in the Mist." For the latter film, Baker created incredibly lifelike gorilla suits that could be spliced in with real gorilla footage in the film. At the time, audiences had no idea they were puppets.

Until last year, Baker maintained a 60,000-square-foot facility in Glendale called Cinovation Studios, where he designed, molded and stored his designs. He employed a small team of likeminded makeup artists and designers.

Warning: The following video contains profanity

But as the industry began to increasingly favor computer effects over practical effects, like makeup, Baker found himself maintaining a space the industry no longer needed. He also had to lay off his staff.

Baker sold the building in 2014, and started the long process of finding a home for the various masks, animatronic gorilla heads and puppets he’s amassed over the years. He recently hired a company called The Prop Store to help him auction off the majority of his collection. The auction will take place at the Universal City Hilton on May 29. 

Now, much of Baker’s life’s work is locked up in The Prop Store’s storage facility in Chatsworth, each piece waiting for its new home. The whole process seems bittersweet for the man commonly referred to as “Monster Maker.”

Baker says will continue to make monsters, only it will be on his terms this time (

).

Prop Store: Rick Baker Auction Catalog by scprweb