multiversal bandstand

The Batusi may be the most (in)famous of novelty dances inspired by comic book characters, but there were scores of others that never managed to register on the masscult consciousness. Here's a brief rundown of some of the more notable ones:

The Element Man - A visually exciting set of moves set this dance apart from the rest of the pack, but the fact that only those who had been exposed to the Orb of Ra could properly perform the steps kept it from achieving widespread appeal.

The Funky Robot - Easy to perform, with low rhythmic requirements, the Funky Robot's strengths turned out to be its greatest weakness. So easy that even one's super-dad could do it, the dance quickly became associated with polyester-addicted squares and new age family therapy sessions.

The Tula-Hula - A huge hit at Dr. Dorsal's Deep Sea Discoteque (sic), this five-fathom fad bit the dust when astronomical litigation fees (stemming from an unexpected migration of tiger sharks onto the dancefloor) forced Dorsal to shutter his doors.

The Kirby Shuffle - He's just one man! But he busts moves like a whirlwind! There ain't no stoppin' him! He's like a one man rave!

The Hypno Hustle - This interesting attempt to mix disco and subliminal indoctrination might have made a bigger impact if the required modifications to the club's PA system weren't as prohibitively expensive. Blame the Latverian glitter ball embargo of 1977.

The Roly Poultry - Hyped as the successor to the Macarena and The Ketchup Song dance, the Roly Poultry fad died a quiet well-deserved death within hours of its debut. This has not, however, stopped lesser DJs or drunken great-uncles from occasionally trying to resuscitate the abomination on the wedding circuit.

The Jeffetty John - A sad reminder of the scene's creative bankruptcy, in which the moves of past crazes are awkwardly linked together and given a veneer of "shocking" edginess. Arguments regarding its popularity on the dance floor rarely take into the downward spiral of insularity that has gripped the subculture over the past two decades.

Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 Dances (from The Exciting Wilson Pickett, 1966) - The Hokey Pokey is Dance #231. The Taffy Pull is Dance #879. The Cabbage Patch is Dance #666.

Trans X - Safety Dance (from On My Own, 1988) - Changing hands from one Canadian synthpop act to another.

he's out to get before he's got

He's one with Xenu now.
Isaac Hayes, the legendary Zen master of soul, funk, and cinematic bad-assitude, has passed away at the age of 65. He was the man who made "You shut yo' mouth!" a household expression, and therein lies the problem with eulogizing him.

The popcult resonance of Shaft and the film's Hayes-penned soundtrack has reached Pythoneseque levels of oversaturation in the past three-and-a-half decades. What ought to be appreciated as sublime aesthetic and historical achievements has been reduced to a facile macro employed by mayo-and-white bread fanboys and comedians looking to add a little funky flava into their clumsy attempts at humor. Does anyone want to guess how many times the theme to Shaft or "Chocolate Salty Balls" have been or are going to be spotlighted on the various music blogs in the recent past or immediate future?

Before South Park, before Shaft, before Hot Buttered Soul, Hayes and David Porter teamed up to write some of the finest tracks to come out of the Stax Records stable. Stax soul duo (and perennial AT faves) Sam & Dave were major beneficiaries of their talents, with Hayes and Porter penning such powerhouse hits as "Hold On, I'm Comin'," "I Thank You," and this gem, which has retained its luster even after years of rough handling and rougher reinterpretations...

Sam & Dave - Soul Man (from Soul Men, 1967) - Socially aware Memphis soul, written by masters, sung by the best, backed by both Booker T. & the MG's and the Mar-Keys, and served sizzling hot. If that isn't a recipe for pop music perfection, such a thing simply doesn't exist.

Adios, Truck. When you were hottest, you were the coolest.


When you were baddest, you were the best.

Issac Hayes - Main Title "Truck Turner" (from the Truck Turner OST, 1974) - Whether you're busting heads in a dive bar or busting moves on the dancefloor, you couldn't ask for a finer soundtrack than this.

can't help wondering where I stand

Today is something of a proud day for me, as a routine check of the referral logs has revealed that Armagideon Time is currently the #1 Google result for "how to tell if you are wasting your time on a man."

Eat my dust, Dr. Phil!

I suppose that celestial concordance of specific phrasing and keyword usage obligates me to address the problem in question. With mild power comes mild responsibility, after all. While I do not possess any fancy formal training or a string of high-falutin' degrees, I do have a modicum of empirical wisdom which can be brought to bear upon the matter.

According to the immortal Bard (in Sonnet 116, which was incorporated into our wedding vows):

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken

It sounds lovely and dreamy, but it's actually a load of horseshit. Horsehit that smells like roses, but horseshit nonetheless. True love is a paradox, a mutagenic constant that threads all manner of alterations and revisions around and about the ever-fixed mark of loyalty and affection.

In the initial goo-goo eyes phase, one's beloved can do no wrong. In the infatuation hangover phase, the little and not-so-little flaws begin to reveal themselves. Providing that the bonds of devotion weather the stresses of reality, things settle into a pattern of acceptance of your partner's less desirable quirks and the conscious or unconscious attempt to control your own. It's not a perfect process, nor does it immunize you from the occasional dust up, but there is a sense of "US" which overrides two distinct or oppositional "MEs."

Or she realizes that you're never going to quit being a prick and you realize that she's never going to ditch those pain-in-the-ass friends of hers, and you go your separate ways. It can be a tough call to make, but there's no point in prolonging things when it's clear that the two of you will never, ever be on the same page. It's best to face things honestly...and by that I mean "not screwing up a good thing because I'm a restless, self-absorbed shitheel devoid of any sense of honor."

It all comes down to my dad's advice on vice, a maxim that also applies to romance: "If it brings you more pain than pleasure, it's time to give it up."

The Daughters of Eve - Don't Waste My Time (from a 1967 single) - In Narnia, where garages are few and far between, it's called "wardrobe rock."

Grassella Oliphant - Get out of My Life, Woman (from The Grass Is Greener, 1967) - Exorcism through funk. The power of the groove compels you.

I am my ideal

I had a drama professor back in college who was a bit of a rogue, but an outstanding instructor nonetheless. For some reason presumably tied to departmental politics, he was the person who usually got tasked with teaching the foundation courses in Traditions of Western Drama or whatever the prevailing uni-speak is for "reading a shitload of old plays and discussing why they matter."

These were the mandatory courses that every aspiring thespian or playwright had to suffer through before passing onward and upward to the sexier, hands-on parts of the curriculum, but this professor had a knack for making us care about the plays discussed in class. More importantly, instead of conducting the class as a watered-down English Lit course, he approached the material with an accent on technical aspects over critical theory. (Which is how it ought to be for a theater arts class, but in my experience often not the case.)

"Significance" meant less to him than entertainment value, and when the time came to discuss the dreary naturalism of Strindberg, Ibsen, and the like, he came right out and stated "These are historically important plays. They are important works of literature. You should all be familiar with them. That said, I would rather sit through a community theatre Starlight Express than suffer through a Broadway production of Enemy of the People with an all-star cast."

Hardly a divine revelation, but it's one of those moments that has stuck with me over the years even as other, arguably more important parts of my college education have slipped from conscious memory. The idea that a tenured professor of literature with an impressive resume could step outside the ivory tower and make case for entertainment value in and of itself made me realize that I wasn't just gaming the system and wasting my time at college, humoring the unfortunately high number of insular or clueless instructors that viewed appreciation as a gnostic process, removed from the vulgarity of the masses. (Seriously. I had one professor who was shocked, shocked, to discover that fans of romance novels were not a monolithic block of uneducated bon-bon munchers.)

Or I should have taken it as a clear warning that my lateral thinking processes and poor sense of self-discipline were fundamentally at odds with formal academia. Honestly, if I had to do it all over again, I'd have gone to trade school to be an auto mechanic and kept with the autodidactic route when it came to the the study of humanities.

In any case, the complicated relationship between entertainment and art is something I've addressed quite a few times already on Armagideon Time, usually in reference to the medium of comics or music. Despite recurring assertions to the contrary, quality is a relative concept when it comes to something a personal as "art," and while it is possible to establish a hierarchy of aesthetic value on a macro level, the boundaries tend to blur with closer examination. As always, keeping a sense of perspective is the best course of action, and that's something which is most easily achieved by observing the widest possible vista instead of limiting one's experiences to a single strata, be it lofty peaks of "high art" or the vulgar sumps of disposable entertainment.

Which brings us to AIP's series of Beach Party movies, director William (the real-life Mr. Samantha the Witch) Asher's sybaritic counterpart to Roger Corman's stygian Poe cycle of technicolor exploitation fare -- the Eros and Thanatos of early 1960's drive-in theaters.

Pal Dorian has dedicated this week to the antics of Frankie, Dee Dee and the gang, and his analysis of the series hits pretty much covers all the salient points I could possibly make about their enduring appeal.

The jokes are pure corn, the surfing scenes are almost avant-garde in their rear-projected fakery, the original musical numbers are embarrassingly dire, and the hokey bacchanalia of the privileged white "teenage" characters occurs in a world completely isolated from what was going down in America's inner cities or over in Southeast Asia at the time.

As terrible and cheapjack as the Beach Party films are, though, I can't help enjoying them nonetheless, and no summer vacation would be complete without a Sunday afternoon viewing of at least one the movies. (This year it was Muscle Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo.) Chalk it up to nostalgia -- nostalgia for a childhood when the films were staples of weekend afternoon UHF programming, for the lame-but-quaint tropes of vintage sitcom-style humor, and most importantly for the reassuring presence of various guest-stars drawn from the stable of character actors (Paul Lynde, Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, et cetera) familiar to every heavy TV-viewing kid of my generation.

I wouldn't make a case that the films occupy a loftier cinematic position than, say, The Godfather, but I do know what I'd rather sit down to watch on a lazy summer weekend. Coppola's epic may masterfully dissect the nature of the American capitalism, but it does it feature lip-synched performances of either of these musical gems?

Stevie Wonder - Happy Street (from The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 4, 2006) - A swingin' soul celebration, as featured in Muscle Beach Party (1964).

The Kingsmen - Give Her Lovin' (from The Kingsmen, Vol. 2, 1964) - Ginchy garage rock, as featured in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).

Vacation 2008: Day 1 - Ain't gonna gamble

Witch Baby stops the world and melts with you.
The weather has entered devil's armpit territory, so I've decided to postpone my usual roster of Saturday chores and sequester myself in the air-conditioned bedroom along with a choice selection of books, music, and DVDs.

Yes, it's a tragic situation, but I'll just have to learn to live with this meteorologically enforced leisure time.

Sly & The Family Stone - Hot Fun in the Summertime (from Greatest Hits, 1970) - Eternally cool.

Giorgio Moroder - Too Hot to Handle (from From Here to Eternity, 1977) - What the Human League dared to emulate and the basis of Daft Punk's famous discovery.

The Minds - Hot (from Plastic Girls, 2003) - In which we discover the boiling point of raucous, hooky synthpunk.

till that day love led them astray

"If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Eh, it's nothing a little exceptionalism and a massive military arsenal can't fix, right?

Fred Hughes - Don't Let This Happen to Us (from a 1971 single, collected on Let's Boogaloo, Vol. 3, 2006) - The pinnacle of soul perfection.

The Avengers - The American in Me (from a 1979 12"; collected on The Avengers, 1983) - I'm angry because I still care.

the feeling that remains

I tend to get a bit apprehensive whenever I come across a comic purportedly aimed at "adult" or "mature" readers (unless it's a porn comic, in which case I just get incredibly depressed), as the material thus labeled very rarely exhibits any sense of sophistication or maturity. For every work that does meet the actual criteria, there are countless others whose idea of "adult" amounts to little more than the adolescent posturing of a junior high school kid, chock full of the hormonal angst and predictably "shocking" edginess one would expect from a thirteen year old boy who still thinks that Easyriders is a real porn magazine and Boone's Farm is quality hooch.

It's not a phenomenon strictly limited to comics, but the medium's endemic inferiority crisis means that many fans tend to grade on a curve, and material that would be seen hopelessly embarrassing or dodgy in films or prose writing has a better chance of being lauded as "cutting edge" or "groundbreaking" when applied to sequential art. This applies to superheroic fluff with delusions of grandeur as well as onanistic "indie" auto-bio nonsense -- there's more to being a grown up than dressing up in mommy's or daddy's old clothes and dropping some f-bombs.

My quest for suitable panels to use in Bahlactus's current "black and white" incarnation of Friday Night Fights has led me to revisit some of Marvel's magazine format titles from the 1970's. Apart from the Jack of Hearts appearances (in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, of all places), I hadn't flipped trough these books since 1985, when my uncle discovered Jesus and passed the bulk of his comics collection onto my brother and me. As I mentioned in this post, the more "adult oriented" aspect of the magazines' content fell within the lines described above, awkward half-steps ahead of what was already occuring in Marvel's regular titles in terms of sex and violence, and utterly tame by today's standards.

Well, except for the second half of Chris Claremont and Marshall Rogers's "Daughters of the Dragon" two-parter (from Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #33, February 1977) that is. I mentioned it briefly in last Friday's post, but the mindblasting WTF factor of the story deserves a detailed examination. If you thought, as I did, that Marada, The She-Wolf marked the slimy nadir of Claremont's storytelling tropes, just wait till you plunge headfirst into this sub-basement of sleaze.

Having thwarted the machinations of the sinister Bra-Snap Tong, the two-woman Ebony, Ivory, and Jade team of Misty Knight (being the "Ebony" component) and Colleen Wing (combining both the "Ivory" and "Jade") proceed to....

...hell, why not JUST let the RANDOM caps-heavy RECAP explain it FOR you?


Not only are the pair of private investigators ALIVE, but they've been treated to a scented bath and attended to by a entire harem of scantily-clad women!

Another typical evening at Mr. Bubble's bachelor pad.
The owner of the Evil Mastermind Day Spa^TM also happens to be the man behind the arms smuggling operation Knight and Wing busted up in the previous issue. In order to recoup his losses, he decides to sell the women into sex slavery, but not before offering them a taste of Afghanistan's finest...

You seem like modern gals. Ever have it in the ear before?
The ladies resist, but are trumped by a set of electrified bolas, as well as the layout of the arms dealer's secret lair, which was designed along the "random floating platform aesthetic" pioneered by the architectural firm of Ditko, Dormammu, and Strange.

The pair are chained to a wall and shot up with smack. In true Claremontean fashion, it's an experience that the characters learn to "reluctantly enjoy" and leads to this lovely expose of the horrors associated with drug addiction and the writer's personal demons...

This PSA has been brought to you by the Disturbing Fanfic Council.
...but just so no one gets the wrong idea or anything, Claremont makes sure that we're aware that Colleen Wing is a woman possessing great strength and dignity...

Yay, feminism!
Colleen is saved from the lecherous Dr. Hartmann by Misty. Apparently Hartmann was so preoccupied by his new twist on the "ass, gas, or grass" formula that he failed to notice he'd been tying off and shooting smack into Misty's cybernetic arm, which she uses to break free and crush the bad doctor's trachea.

Misty heads off to do some reconnaissance and find a means of escape, leaving the strung-out Colleen behind to exorcise the monkey from her back via zen meditation...or maybe not...

Greetings, programs!
But if no one is convinced it will work, why would Colleen make the attempt?

The Winehouse Kundalini
Oh, I see now. She's doing it for the fans.

While Colleen gains a deeper appreciation for the music of Lou Reed, Misty tangles with their arms dealing, slave trading captor, now sporting a kicky bondage harness ensemble and a pair of sword canes. She manages to hold her own at first, but the cards are stacked against her, as Claremontean story logic decrees that it must be Colleen who vanquishes the foe, thus mastering her physical and psychic adversaries through three pages of poorly blocked fight, exposition, and flashback scenes...

What a woman who's been proverbially ravished does et cetera, et cetera...
As for Colleen's smack habit? No worries there, true believers!

How? Well, when a lazy writer paints himself into a corner...
In a 1979 interview with The Comics Journal, Claremont stated that Misty's emotional support for Colleen was something that he'd have worked into the story even if had involved two male leads.

What I'm wondering is if he would also have kept the perfumed baths, sexual slavery, and disturbingly eroticized drug addiction aspects of the story if it had featured, say, Power Man and Iron Fist instead of Misty and Colleen.

The Boo Radleys - There She Goes (from the So I Married an Axe Murderer OST, 1993) - The members of The La's, who released the original version of this oft-covered favorite in 1988, claim that the song is not about heroin addiction. A shame, really, because I got a perverse sense of glee over the idea that the nauseatingly precious "Christian rock" outfit, Sixpence None The Richer, stumbled into covering a song about spiking the vein.

Curtis Mayfield - Pusherman (from the Super Fly OST, 1972) - No ambiguity here, just some superlative funked up soul.

The Insane - Chinese Rocks (from the "El Salvador" 7" single, 1982) - Written by Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell, recorded by the Heartbreakers, covered by a Wigan-based UK82 outfit, and purchased by me for a fiver from Looney Tunes in Central Square sometime in the fall of 1991.

Friday Night Fights: Sole Blade

During the strife of Sengoku period Japan, Lord Daigo strikes a bargain with the forces of darkness. In exchange for gaining temporal power beyond imagining, Daigo offers up his unborn child, whose body parts will be divided up between forty-eight demons.

The horribly disfigured infant is then, in proper Campbellian (Joseph, not Dave) fashion, placed in a basket and set adrift on upon a river. A kindly wise man discovers the child's basket on the river and raises the tenacious tot as his own. The child's adoptive father crafts prosthetic body parts, including a pair of arms which conceal a pair of sword blades, to replace the ones stolen by the demons, and aided by his natural tenacity and peternatural sensory powers, Hyakkimaru, as the boy is named, is able to function and fight as well as any able-bodied soul.

After receiving a tantalizing message from a mysterious voice from beyond, Hyakkimaru sets off on a quest to hunt down and slay each of the forty-eight demons, and by doing so, restore what was taken from him.

He also fights a pair of sandals possessed by the vengeful spirits of the unquiet dead...


It all happens in Dororo, the late "Godfather of Manga" Ozamu Tezuka's unfinished series from the 1960's. Though Dororo is one of Tezuka's lesser works, it still ranks light-years beyond the best efforts of most other creators, masterfully blending horror, humor, and action while managing to grapple with the requisite BIG SUBJECTS^TM (the consequences of war, what it means to be "human") common to Tezuka's stories.

The first English language volume of Dororo (in a handsomely-designed trade paperback format) was recently released by Vertical, Inc, and can be obtained here for a reasonable sum. A live-action Dororo film, which takes a few liberties with the source material, debuted in Japan in 2007, with sequels planned for release sometime this year and in 2009.

For those seeking a more interactive experience and willing to overlook shitty in-came camera problems, Blood Will Tell, Sega's 2004 offering for the Playstation 2, not only provides players the opportunity to indulge their inner prosthetic-using samurai, but also posits a possible conclusion to Hyakkimaru's unfinished story.

Animetal Lady - Dororo No Uta (from Lady Marathon II, 2002) - A heavy metal rendition (featuring former Pink Lady Mitsuyo Nemoto on vocals) of the theme to the 1960's Dororo anime series.

The Supremes - Bits and Pieces (from A Bit of Liverpool, 1964) - Yeah, the Dave Clark Five hailed from North London rather than Scouser territory, but why quibble? Geography has never been a strong subject for the American people.

I have mixed feelings about this Motown foray into British Invasion territory. On one hand, it's represents a historic convergence of the two major musical currents of the era; on the other, the material is presented too damn straight and would have benefited by more of the stylistic "wall of sound" flourishes that embodied the Motown sound.

(Viva Bahlactus!)

and so it was

Today is my 36th birthday. I'm not going to spend it composing a lengthy and involved post about the occasion.

Let Alex Chilton entertain you instead...

The Box Tops - A Whiter Shade of Pale (from The Letter/Neon Rainbow, 1967)

And a happy birthday to fellow 3/13 arrival Mike Sterling!

and the winners stand confused

Today I'm going to take a look at a rare treasure that manages to combine two of Armagideon Time's recurring obsessions -- Bay State parochialism and the immortal gloriousness that is Captain Marvel Adventures. For a couple of years in the early-to-mid 1940's the series ran monthly stories spotlighting various American cities. The tales took the form of rather anemic edutainment travelogues featuring bits and bobs of local color and call outs to various real-life local politicos or personalities under the guise of fostering a wartime spirit of national solidarity (by having a giant tree devour Akron's shopping district or corncob smugglers bedevil the inhabitants of Sioux Falls).

After stumbling across a few of these stories, I got to wondering if my own stomping grounds were ever shown any CMA lovin' and, sure enough, issue #40 (October 1944) of the series spotlighted my beloved Beantown in a story titled, "Captain Marvel and the Mayor for a Day." I'd like to apolgize in advance for the quality of the images. They were pulled from microfiche and my Paint Shop Pro (because I'm too lazy cool to learn Photoshop) wizardry could only do so much with the raw material I was stuck with.

The story begins with Billy Batson, boy radio reporter and Captain Marvel's alter ego, disembarking at North Station to attend a ceremony where the brightest high school student in the city will be awarded the honorary title of "Mayor for a Day." As Marvel's wisdom of Solomon would be useless in figuring out to to get to the Green Line concourse from Causeway Street, a local philanthropist has a car waiting to take Billy to the pre-brutalist nightmare version of Boston City Hall. (The gorgeous French Empire city hall building on School Street has been repurposed for commercial use.)

Upon arriving, Billy is introduced to a couple of members of the local broadcasting fraternity:

WEEI is still on the air as sports talk radio format station. Sister station WNAC eventually changed its call letters to WRKO, where it presently hosts a veritable smörgåsbord of ignoramus-friendly fare from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Howie Carr, Michael Savage, and Coast to Coast AM.

Inside City Hall, the ceremony commences, overseen by Mayor (and eventually Governor and U.S. Secretary of Labor) Maurice Tobin, for whom the Mystic River bridge and popular destination for the suicidal is named. (Mayor Tobin courteously took time out of his busy schedule of avoiding an indictment over his complicity in the Cocoanut Grove tragedy to attend the event.) The honor of Mayor for a Day is to go to the perky and WASPy Bob Wright, Boston's best student (by virtue of his parents' sending him to private schools though his K-8 years then suing the district in order to get him into the prestigious Boston Latin High School, as per the normal protocols).

Before privileged Bob can be sworn in, however, the festivities are interrupted by a member of the "De Boston Better Citizens League" (branches in Charlestown, Winter Hill, and South Boston), advocating for his own candidate for the honorary title, the not-at-all ethnically stereotyped wannabe Dead End Kid, Terry Mahoney:

When a call to the school confirms Terry's valedictorian status, Captain Marvel smells a big Hibernian rat and sets out to discover the truth. He also engages in a little sightseeing...

...swinging past the Bunker Hill Monument, commemorating both the Battle of Breed's Hill and Charlestown's need to overcompensate, and Fanueil Hall, where he drops a few hundred bucks on overpriced tourist junk.

Marvel's investigation reveals a low Chandlerian conspiracy involving stolen cigarette cases, destroyed records, and dastardly frame-ups. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, Billy dons a Scalley cap and an unexplicable faux Brooklyn accent (technical term: pidgin white ethnic-ese) to infiltrate the De Boston Better Citizens League, in a scene that reads like a Classics Illustrated version of The Departed:

Billy's ruse is detected (after he asks for a bottle of "pop" rather than "tonic") and the gangsters decide to get rid of him by tossing him inside a cement mixer, violating the local tradition of a point blank shot to the head or a severed aorta, followed by burial in a shallow unmarked grave in a brownfield by Tenean Beach. Billy escapes the slowly-rotating death trap by transforming into Captain Marvel, who makes short work of the thugs.

Marvel is able to see past the red herrings and false leads, and flies off to the Roxbury-Jamaica Plain frontier (free from attacks by escaped gorillas since 2003)...

...to confront the mastermind behind the fiendish goings-on in his cement factory lair and bring him to justice (after some hot superheroic action involving construction equipment, of course).

So what was the reason for trying to rig the Mayor for a Day results?

To nab a sweetheart no-bid contract for the mastermind's cement firm by taking advantage of a little known law which apparently grants the mayor unlimited powers. (The same law has been a cornerstone of current Boston mayor Tom Menino's nigh-eternal reign.) My own excessively elaborate plan to exploit for my own gain the archaic Boston statute forbidding bathing more than once a week also failed miserably.

Also, graft and corruption in the Bay State's public works arena? The Devil, you say!

Billy Butler - Boston Monkey (from The Right Tracks, 2007) - Jerry "Ice Man" Butler's younger brother was an exceptional Northern Soul artist in his own right, despite never getting the attention or chart success he deserved. It also didn't help that his material had been out of print or unavailable for decades. Here's a choice sample for your edification and enjoyment.

Also, how can you tell a Boston monkey from the more mudane variety? It's unable to figure out how turn signals work, it drops the r's from its grunts, and it wears a "YANKEES SUCK" t-shirt. (Just because it's facile doesn't mean it isn't true.)

Dream Syndicate - Boston (from Out of the Grey, 1986) - From the South Side of the Windy City to the West Coast haunts of the Paisley Underground, the bards sing their songs in celebration of the dubious virtues of this hard-bitten city of Bean and Cod. "The whole thing ain't gone down according to the plan..." Truer words about this place have never been sung.

the game he plays, he plays for keeps

Take one of the oldest gags in the comedic lexicon, add Samuel L. Jackson, and I think the result would go something like this:

(from Binky #79, June-July 1971
A little advice, Percy -- don't skimp on the gratuity.

(Yeah, I'm passing up on making any number of Sam Jackson jokes/references regarding this comic strip because I'm feeling lazy today. Feel free to make your own.)

Curtis Mayfield - Superfly (from The Very Best of Curtis Mayfield, 2000) - So damn perfect, in so many ways.

Albums That Meant Something - Part 3 - Tell the World About It

During the early to mid-1980's, my mom worked in the speaker assembly plant for H.H. Scott, one the of pioneering manufacturers of stereo components (long since absorbed into the Emerson brand). I'm sure I still have one of the company's promo t-shirts, emblazoned with the very classy tagline "SCOTT PUTS OUT" (front) "HIGH FIDELITY COMPONENTS" (back)" in a storage crate up in the attic somewhere.

One of the perks that came with the job was access to deep discounted audio gear, stuff that had either been discontinued, used as demo models, or experienced some minor cosmetic wear, and it wasn't long before everyone in our circle of family and friends were kitted out with H.H. Scott sound systems. Mine was the first big-ticket purchase I ever made in my thirteen years of life, and included a receiver, cassette deck, and two 40-watt speakers. I was too cheap to spring for a turntable at the time, which was foolish, but vinyl was already being seen as a dead, excessively care-intensive format. It was paid for via an installment plan, with cost (somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred bucks) deducted from my weekly allowance over a couple months.

The design of the components (which I still have a few packed away in storage) might appear quaint and retro by today's standards, what with the metallic faceplates, overuse of LED displays, and excessively tiny buttons (an over-reaction to the 70's standard outsized switches and knobs, I'd guess), but at the time I felt like I was on the cutting edge of home audio. (Well, apart from the lack of a CD player, but that technology was still in the early-adopter luxury phase.)

The act of sacrificing a significant portion of my weekly comics and videogame budget to acquire the system proved to be a decisive moment in terms of my listening habits. Previous to that, I had been a mostly passive music fan, mostly influenced by Top 40 radio (or video, technically, as programmed on V-66, a local UHF channel dedicated to music videos) and the inescapable hard rock/"ugly" metal fandom of my teenage peers. The music was just there, it wasn't anything I actively sought out, apart from the occasional must-have single or poorly-dubbed cassette copy of a "hot" LP made by a friend. (It's why I laugh about whines regarding the failings of digital formats; the sincerity of devotion inspired in my crowd by a muddy-sounding taped copy of Back in Black, complete with incidental household noise in the background, outstrips any of the professed, overly formalist appreciation by the audiosnob set.)

The problem was that I had pretty much outgrown my love of Ratt and Twisted Sister by my thirteenth summer, and as for the Top 40 charts...


...well, the less said, the better. (I did own a copy of Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, though.) Now before anyone starts bringing up the quite wonderful "alternative" rock scene happening at the time, I'd like to point out that it's penetration into my little corner of blue collar suburbia was virtually nil. It was possible to catch the videos for "Let's Go to Bed" or "How Soon Is Now" on V-66 (Maura, three years older and hipper than I, has an old VHS tape with the station's airing of The Damned's "Is It A Dream" on it), they had a hard time registering on the conscious when one is living in an environment where the musical spectrum ran the gamut from classic rock to pop metal.

Plus, there was the fact that my purchasing power was relatively small at the time. Buying a new release meant hazarding the bulk of my allowance on an untried quantity more than likely to consist of 80% filler to 20% killer. The bargain and cutout bins, stuffed to the gills with cheapjack compilations and greatest hits albums plaster with "Super Saver" or "Nice Price" labels made for safer bets with better returns. I initially dived in with no genre leanings to speak of, picking up remaindered K-Tel comps (Chartaction '83! Featuring Adam Ant, Frieda, and After the Fire!), sell-through classic rock albums (Zep, Steppenwolf, Cream), and retro-oriented soundtracks.

It was a purchase in the latter category that marked the other half of my transfomation into an active audiophile, specifically The Blues Brothers soundtrack, which offered an outstanding selection of covers and rerecordings of classic soul and R&B cuts. As I've stated in a previous post, even if the Ackroyd/Belushi tracks are pale imitations of the original songs, the album nonetheless offers an unparalled roadmap for the uninitiated to discover the real deal. Even though I rarely listen to the album these days, it's influence in shaping my musical tastes was immense and continues to this day.

Yet, for all that, The Blues Brothers soundtrack isn't this week's "Album That Mattered." That honor goes to an album that would be my first purchase directly inspired by the 1980 film, in which it appeared onscreen and two songs from it were heard, but not represented on the OST. It also turned out to be a major fucking hassle to find a copy of it in the local music stores; though once I did score one, it would end up being the definitive BGM for the lion's share of my teenage years. That album is The Best of Sam & Dave, a slightly abridged compilation of the legendary soul duo's singles and b-sides released in early 1969. (The CD reissue includes the omitted tracks plus a few more.)

The 8-track cassette of the album is shown playing in the Bluesmobile's stereo during the sequence in the film featuring the fateful traffic stop and lead-up to the extravagantly destructive mall chase scene, providing enough time for substantial portions of both "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and "Soothe Me" to be heard in the background.

Including a nod to Sam & Dave in the film was a no-brainer, as they, more than any of the other artists paid homage to, were the direct inspiration for Jake & Elwood Blues -- a pair of male soul vocalists with different yet complementary styles and a penchant for high-energy stage performances. (Both outfits were also backed by a roster of Stax Records' house musicians, including members of Booker T & The MG's.) The seamless interplay between Sam Moore's intense "southern soul" vocal stylings with Dave Prater's more Motown-esque delivery is simply glorious to hear, whether in a velvet-smooth and dreamy slow jam or in a thumping, backbeat-and-horn-driven uptempo number, and the pair performed both styles equally well (which wasn't uncommon among 60's soul artists, actually).

While I did eventually pick up the remainder of Sam & Dave's 1960's discography (as well as complete compilations of 60's Stax/Atlantic soul and R&B singles) in the months and years following, it's The Best of Sam & Dave I always seem to return to whenever I feel the urge to hear some exceptionally sweet soul music (though in terms of individual tracks, nothing will ever surpass Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood). Unlike most things from my junior high school days, it has remained immune to the crippling associations of adolescent stupidity that force me to avert my gaze when I look back on that period of my life.

And, honestly, there's no higher praise I could bestow.

Sam & Dave - You Don't Know What You Mean to Me - Seriously, how can you not love this stuff? Dig that opening, too, which showcases the duo's gospel influences.

This was my original song choice for the anniversary tribute post, but I reconsidered after I realized that Maura in all likelihood does know what she means to me. At least, I hope she does.

awake unto me

I've started playing Dark Crusade again, which does a pretty decent job at capturing the fun of playing tabletop Warhammer 40k while eliminating the problematic aspect of having to deal with real-life fans of the wargame. Or the scandalous cash outlay required to field a respectable army.

(When I got into the hobby in the late 1980's, you could get a blister of four models for five dollars. These days, a single model can set one back in the neighborhood of ten bucks. And I though polo was the sport of the obscenely wealthy...)

Edwin Starr - War (from War & Peace, 1970) - Contrary to what the song tells us, war is good for many things -- boosting support for an inept president, lining the pockets of defense contractors, generating business for the manufacturers of body bags and prosthetic limbs, and generally promoting an environment of state control that would not be tolerated in other circumstances. It's important to keep a fair and balanced attitude about these things, after all.

John Leyton - Beautiful Dreamer (from The EP Collection, 1995) - Britain's answer to Edd "Kookie" Byrnes (and member of Joe Meek's stable of pop singers) does a swinging take on a Stephen Foster standard.

Tuesday Weld - Are You the Boy? (from a 1960 single; collected on Ultra Chicks, Vol. 3, 1998) - Not The Real Tuesday Weld, but the real Tuesday Weld, the starlet who played Thalia Menniger in Dobie Gillis and the object of one of my hopeless retro-crushes (along with Ann-Margret and Melody from Josie and the Pussycats), here doing her best Shelley Fabares impersonation.

who do you think you are

Mikester's post on a book of pre-Crisis Superman trivia got me to thinking about the awesomeness that is Steve Lombard. A sportscaster and co-worker of Clark Kent's at WGBS-TV, Lombard was the Superman mythos' answer to "Flash" Thompson, an obnoxious jock adversary-slash-rival whose purpose in life is to make life difficult for the hero's civilian identity, thus providing a more readily reader-identifiable conflict than rampaging super-gorillas or old men dressed as carrion birds could.

I'd like to see Luthor try and get away with something like that. (Also, what's up with the perspective in that panel?)
The world was introduced to Steve "The Slinger" Lombard in the pages of Superman v1 #264 (June 1973; story by Cary Bates with art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson), where Lombard, then the star quarterback of the Metropolis Meteors, struts his stuff before the big game...

The Joe Namath/Austin Powers look never fails to wow the sexy ladies.
Lombard's deep thoughts are interrupted by a falling baby -- an astoundingly common occurrence in Metropolis, where the citizens have chosen to put their faith in Kryptonian intervention over child-proofed windows -- and he rushes to make the interception. He succeeds in saving the child, but alas...

I suppose they'll blame this on Bill Belichick, too...
Lombard passes out from the pain, and upon awakening discovers he has been taken to the laboratory of one of the many misguidedly overeager scientists that populated (73% of the total residents, according to the 1970 city census) Metropolis in those wild and woolly days. The scientist heals Lombard's bum knees with a highly experimental device that channels the sun's UV radiation. (No mention is made of what happened to the baby, but I'm sure the kid did just fine after being abandoned on a street corner.)

Unbeknownst to the doctor and patient, however, high levels of sunspot activity have led to an unusual side-effect -- the creation of an energy doppelganger of Lombard, which acting under the QB's subconscious commands, takes Lombard's place on the gridiron and single-handedly wins the title for the Meteors.

Lois Lane and Clark Kent are given job of conducting the post-game interview with Lombard, who is willing to take the credit for his doppelganger's victory. (Hey, there's nothing in the NFL bylaws forbidding substitutions by mentally controlled sunspot-generated duplicates.) After taking a shine to Lois, Lombard engages in some roughhousing with Clark so as to prove his status as Alpha Male and worthiness as a potential mate. Clark, on the other hand, does his best not to give into the impulse to backhand Lombard's vertebrae into trans-Saturnian orbit.

Isn't traditional masculinity grand?
Of course, nothing is ever cut and dried when dealing with physical manifestations of the Id, and while Lombard continues to work his overcompensating mojo on Lois, his other half rampages through the city. The creature's solar-based physiology plays havoc with Superman's own sun-powered abilities, leading to a standoff where the Man of Tomorrow has no choice but to turn to his own repressed feelings of rage in order to gain the edge.

If I were a psychologist, I'd be more than a little concerned about how Superman refers to his alter ego as a separate entity here.
Fortunately for all concerned, the creature is highly susceptible to commands shouted at it when clutched by the ankles, and flies off to harmlessly dissipate in the sun's chromosphere.

Get back, Johnny Unitas! Your mother's waiting for you!
His secret exposed, Lombard decides to do the right thing, and confess his duplicity (or is that "duplicasicity") on national television. Exposed, disgraced, and barred from his chosen profession, there's only one option left for Lombard...

For those generations born after the concept became extinct, this is what "taking responsibility for one's actions" looked like.

...a job in broadcast journalism.

Forget graphic violence and lewd content, fanboys. I got your "realism in comics" right here.
Thus began an illustrious decade-long career of bugging the shit out of Clark Kent, a career which was tragically cut short by the post-Crisis revamp of the Superman mythos. The back to basics approach of John Byrne's Man of Steel had no place for an obnoxious jock foil, and even as decades passed and subsequent creators reintroduced much of Superman's deleted backstory, their fixation tended to be upon nonsensical Silver Age Kryptonian trivia and the convoluted relationship between Lex Luthor and Last Son of Krypton rather than reestablishing Steve Lombard's presence in the franchise....

Steve likes to watch.
...until Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely saw fit to rectify that error in the pages of All-Star Superman with the glorious introduction of Ultimate "All-Star" Steve Lombard. Sporting some seriously broad shoulders, a Jheri-curl mullet, and a wardrobe inspired by the oiliest of 70's lounge lizards, Ultimate "All-Star" Steve Lombard, in light of the rationale behind the series, could be seen to represent the purest, most platonically ideal incarnation of what a Steve Lombard ought to be. Long may he reign.

Jean Knight - Mr. Big Stuff (from Mr. Big Stuff, 1971) - Proving once again that it's not the size that matters, but rather the technique.

The Freeze - Go Team Go (from Land of the Lost, 1984) - Boston hardcore's finest? I'd say "yes." (The band actually hailed from Cape Cod, which somehow makes them even cooler.)

the time is precious I know

A Monday holiday + a data rollover day + an already busy time of year at work + a workplace open house this afternoon = yet another minimal content post.

In the meantime, here's The Clash covering Booker T. & The MG's in a track whose title perfectly sums up my present circumstances.

The Clash - Time Is Tight (from Super Black Market Clash, 1994)

mocking voices ring the halls

Following on the heels of All Saints' Day comes All Souls' Day, because why should intercessionary figures and revered martyrs have all the fun? And so this day is set aside for honoring the "faithful" departed. In the byzantine metrics that govern one's place in the afterlife, these unfortunate spirits have brought a few venial sins too many to the express checkout to the Great Beyond, and have thus been directed to spend some time warming the benches in the spiritual waiting room known as Purgatory.

(Y'know, between this post and yesterday's, I've come to realize that there isn't much difference between discussing theology and discussing comic books...and I don't mean that in a way that ennobles the latter.)

Here are a couple of "soul-ful" tracks featuring vocals from the ranks of the departed. I'll leave the "faithful" qualifier for the individual listener to decide.

Joy Division - Dead Souls (from Substance, 1988)

The Blues Brothers - Soul Man (from Briefcase Full of Blues, 1978)

Halloween Countdown: October 25 – the colour out of sync

For today's installment of AT's Halloween Countdown, I bring you a fragment of nightmare culled from the forbidden grimiore of embarrassment that is the Weiss Family Photo Album:


Yes, that's your humble narrator in the middle, serving as a shocking reminder of the horrors associated with having an artist for a parent. I know my mom meant well, and it was a pretty innovative and well-executed costume, but it wasn't designed with a sense of awareness about how cruel eight-year-olds could be to a peer who shows up for the class Halloween party wearing a green dunce cap. Also, the issue of whether or not I wanted to go door to door on All Hallow's Eve dressed as a green crayon was never actually addressed amidst my mother's frenzy of creative inspiration. Dressing up in costume loses its luster when it's done under parental diktat. My little brother, dressed up as Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot, in the above photo, looks positively dignified in comparison.

Is it any wonder I've grown up to be a master of shirking obligations and avoiding mandates? Or that I can't even glance at a deluxe 64-color set of Crayolas without developing an odd facial tic?

Come to think of it, I can't think of any Halloween costume I ever wore as a kid that I actually liked, including the ones I came up with on my own. Part of the problem is the fact that it's cold up here in New England in late October, which leads to embarrassing costume compromises such as "Dracula in a Plaid Cardigan," "Chinos-under-Toga Julius Caesar" (I wanted to go as a Roman centurion, but again, mom had other ideas), or "Reluctant Green Crayon Wearing an Ugly-Ass Coat from Zayre's".

and look what it's done so far

I've been trying to reorganize my popcult archives these past couple of weeks, in hopes of wresting a modicum of order from the chaos borne of laziness and neglect. While I have made some progress, the process has gone slower than anticipated because I keep getting distracted as I rediscover things I completely forgot I had, like a complete run of taped episodes of The Muppet Show.

I know there are fans out there whose devotion to the series rivals that of the most rabid Trekkie, but my familiarity with the characters barely extends past the principal cast, and is mostly rooted in syndicated repeats watched in hour-long blocks on Sunday mornings sometime during the first Reagan administration. The show remains as fresh and entertaining to watch now as it did then, but what has really captured my attention while reviewing the assortment of episodes has been the roster of guest stars over The Muppet Show's five seasons. The show featured a truly unparalled collection of contemporary and veteran performers that provides an excellent glimpse into the the entertainment scene of late 1970's, as well as reaffirming my argument about the cross-generational awareness engendered in the young'uns of my era towards the character actors and comedians of yesteryear.

The wide-open nature of the list of Muppet Show guest stars (from Alan Arkin to Bob Hope to Linda Lavin to James Coburn) and the fact that nearly all guests participated in at least one musical number might lead one to reasonably expect a fair number of Golden Throat-worthy moments over the course of a hundred and twenty episodes. Such was the skill of Jim Henson and company at assessing the strengths and limitations of the guest performers, however, that those moments were few and far between, with non-musical oriented stars like James Coburn or Sylvester Stallone having the vocal weight carried for them by their colorful Muppet co-stars, or buried in the mix of comedic spectacle.

So rather than rake a few celebrities over the coals on the basis of performances from three-odd decades ago, here are some interesting (and offbeat) numbers lifted direct from the show. The sound quality may be iffy in places, but that's the nature of the game in dealing with old video recordings.

Twiggy - In My Life (from Episode #1.21; November 9, 1976) - Beatles covers are a tricky business, but the real "World's First Supermodel" (Sorry, Janice!) does a creditable enough job with this bittersweet ode to times past.

Lynda Carter - The Rubberband Man (from Episode #4.19; January 29, 1980) - Wonder Woman takes on The Spinners!

Debbie Harry & Kermit the Frog - The Rainbow Connection (from Episode #5.9; August 4, 1980) - "Union City Green"? Another one of those popcult artifacts whose discovery makes me think for a moment or two that all these years spent sifting the dustbins of history have been entirely worth the effort.