Review: 'The Rolling Stones Unzipped'

There's no question that the audio side of The Rolling Stones was always their most crucial facet, but they probably would not be quite so legendary if not for their visual one. Much imagery is inextricably twined up with the band: Charlie's natty suits, Keith's pirate costumes and arsenal of flash yet functional guitars, Mick's lips and the ubiquitous logo they seemingly inspired. The Rolling Stones Unzipped is a lavish tribute to that iconography. The big hardcover showcases not only the band's garb and gear but also their handwritten lyrics, pages from Keith's 1963 diary that reveal he was always really self-congratulatory, and perhaps most charmingly, Ronnie's needlessly artful but utterly delightful handwritten/hand-designed set lists of the band's rehearsals.

However, the garb and gear shots are what really carry Unzipped. Mick's wardrobe of the sixties is truly spectacular. The grenadier jacket (by M&N Horne) and gorgeous waistcoat/ruffled silk shirt combo (by Mr. Fish) he wore in 1965 were outrageously individual choices from a time when The Beatles still wore matching uniforms. His outfits start sucking in the seventies with an overabundance of gross unitards and sub-Elvis jump suits, but they tighten up again in the late eighties and nineties with sharp frock coats. Charlie, of course, always looked fab, but his wardrobe is unfortunately underrepresented, and there's nothing at all from the closet of the always well-attired Brian Jones. However, there are some nicely crumpled pieces from Keith Richards' bedroom floor. There are also some choice pieces of equipment, such as the tabla set Charlie banged on Their Satanic Majesties Request and the bizarre toy drum set that packs such a wallop on "Street Fighting Man".

Unzipped is also notable for complimenting the pics with all-new commentaries from Jagger, Richards, Wood, and the recently departed Watts. The most substantial chunk of text is Anthony DeCurtis's nutshell history of the band, which does include a few head scratchers. He claims the Stones found psychedelia "silly" and "confusing," completely ignoring the head-long plunge they took into it with Satanic Majesties, their own prodigious LSD consumption, and the spaced out interviews Mick and Brian gave to the underground press during the acid era. He mostly ignores the band's pre-Beggars Banquet work, but calls the embarrassingly dated and antiseptic Dirty Work "possibly the most underrated album of the Stones' career" that "finds the band at its rawest and most rhythmically charged." Take another listen to "Back to Zero" and get back to me, Tony.

There are also essays from various guest stars, such as Martin Scorsese who assesses the Stones on film, Anna Sui and John Varvatos on their fashion sense, lips-logo designer John Pasche (who drops the A-bomb that he was only paid 50 quid to design that logo that has been pasted on a multi-million dollars worth of merch) on their graphic design, and Buddy Guy (who offers an ever-so-slightly and utterly justifiably begrudging nod to the Stones for introducing white America to blues artists mainstream DJs were too racist to play) on their relationship with the blues. All in all, Unzipped is a very plush, surprisingly eye-opening package, not unlike the Stones' musical body of work.

Review: 'Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror' Updated Edition

This year marks 90 years since Universal Studios became synonymous with horror by plopping both Dracula and Frankenstein into theaters. To commemorate that momentous event (and the 80th anniversary of The Wolf Man), Michael Mallory has updated his 2009 book Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror. Apparently, no changes have been made to the book's main text, which features synopses and a bit of background information on Universal's monster movies, including less celebrated pictures such as Night Monster and Monster on the Campus, and profiles of significant players from Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaneys Sr. and Jr. to director James Whale, makeup magician Jack P. Pierce, and perpetually shrieking character comedienne Una O'Connor. Short bios on Gloria Stuart and Elena Verdugo imply that these actresses, who died after the book's first publication, are still with us. 

The main changes are in a new introduction from Jason Blum of new horror manufacturer Blumhouse Productions and a 15-page coda mostly focused on Blumhouse/Universal's 2020 update of The Invisible Man. Oddly, there's nothing about Universal's other revivals of classic monsters both successful (1999's The Mummy and its sequels) and considerably less so (2004's Van Helsing, 2010's The Wolf Man, 2014's Dracula Untold). 

Still, it's worthwhile to have Universal Studios Monsters back in print. Serious fans may not learn much from Mallory's text, but the copious B&W and color portraits, stills, posters, and behind-the-scenes snaps of the most recognizable faces since Santa Claus are spectacular. With the additional material, there's also some neat fan art to complete a visually arresting package.

Review: 'Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia'

Prince was always an enigmatic artist. Check out the mass of speculations he unloads in "Controversy", a song written before he was even a house-hold name. Because it was sometimes hard to find the human behind all his supernatural abilities and purple sex-E.T. persona, reading testimonies from the people who had close encounters with him is always enlightening. Prince often isolated himself, but he could also be generous and disarmingly goofy. His tireless work ethic and the devotion he poured into his own music are legendary, but he was also a music fan and went out of his way to reveal his devotion to such seemingly unlikely artists as Squeeze and Suzanne Vega.

This is the Prince Paul Sexton aims to reveal in his new book Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia. Across seventeen short chapters, Sexton pulls back the veil on specific incidents in Prince's life as told by the people who knew him well, or in Vega's case, had a less intimate brush with him. There's a chapter on the note Prince sent to her to proclaim his love of "Luka". There are more revealing chapters on how Prince stepped out of a troubled home life to live with bassist and friend André Cymone, how he mentored protégés such as the Family, remade himself as a Jehovah's Witness on the recommendation of Family Stone bassist Larry Graham, and how he and engineer Susan Rogers (who also pens the foreword) called out any co-worker asleep on the job by photographing them with a giant toy penguin. 

Details such as these do not provide a full biography. Rather they round out existing biographies with additional details about Prince's background, beliefs, tastes, and personality. Because Prince was such a visual artist, a dazzling selection of photos of Prince defying gravity multiple times or jamming with Ron Wood, as well as images of his stage outfits, guitars, handwritten notes, and personal Bat-a-rang, further fill in the funky gaps.

Review: 'Peppermint Trolley Co.' Vinyl Reissue

Redlands, California's Peppermint Trolley Company had one wild resume. After getting their start as Mark V in 1966, brothers Danny and Jimmy Faragher formed a light baroque-pop act very similar to Too-era Left Banke. The group made appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies and Mannix, backed Sammy Hagar on his 1967 duo-debut with Samson and Hagar, and cut the original version of the Brady Bunch theme song! (Their voices were later replaced with the kids'.)

The recordings they made as The Peppermint Trolley Company are no less interesting. Along with that late-Left Banke sound that dominates their self-titled 1968 LP, there are flashes of hard psych in "Beautiful Sun", which melds the Who of "I Can See for Miles" with the Who of "Bucket T." and vocal scatting straight off a Manhattan Transfer record. "I Remember Long Ago" sounds like S.F. Sorrow-era Pretty Things stripped of their menace. Among the love songs and tunes about how nice bells sound, there are gently delivered but firm-minded criticisms of war, religion, racism, capitalism, and simple-minded patriotism. Their detractors may dismiss them as bubblegum, but The Peppermint Trolley Company were hardly mindless. "Fatal Fallacy" takes the light experimentation of the rest of the album too far with its meandering structure, dissonance, and lack of a strong melody, but the rest is so breezy, pretty, and imaginative that I think you can forgive the guys one over-reaching folly. And since it's appears at the end of Peppermint Trolley Co., it's super easy to skip.

As reissued on vinyl by Out-Sider Music with Guerssen, Peppermint Trolley Co. mostly sounds superb despite a somewhat off-center spindle hole that doesn't affect the sound. Oddly, only the single "Baby, You Come Rolling Cross My Mind" sounds like it was taken from an inferior source. The rest of the record sounds like the PTC cut it last week. As usual for Guerssen, the package includes a spiffy color insert with extensive liner notes.

Review: 'The Wicker Man: The Original Soundtrack Album' on Transparent Yellow Vinyl

What The Rocky Horror Picture Show is to glam, The Wicker Man is to Wyrd folk, that quaint and creepy strain of Olde English acoustic music that conjures images of Maypole reveries and pagans in animal masks. Robin Hardy's enchantingly eerie 1973 film is the paragon of folk horror pictures, and Paul Giovanni's outrageously bawdy and outrageously beautiful songs such as "Gently Johnny" and "Willow's Song" are as integral to the spell it casts as "Time Warp" is to Rocky Horror's. Any fan of Hardy's film would not be caught in a flaming wicker man without a copy of its soundtrack album. 

A Wicker Man soundtrack album first arrived via Trunk Records 25 years after the film's theatrical debut. The tracks on that version were pulled directly from the film's soundtrack, and though the disc was very complete (right down to the inclusion of lots of sound effects and dialogue bits), the sound quality was hardly optimal. It was not until 2002, when Silva Screen Records paraded out the original master tapes for eleven tracks, that The Wicker Man really sounded up to snuff on CD and vinyl. A clutch of the most essential pieces of music not found on the original master tapes were included as pulled-from-the-film bonus tracks on both editions.

Unfortunately, those bonuses are absent from Silva Screen's latest reissue of The Wicker Man: The Original Soundtrack. Like each reissue since 2013, only the pristine-sounding eleven from the original masters are present. That means you don't get the mesmerizing version of Robert Burns's "The Highland Widow's Lament" that opens the long edit of the film, but you do get such outrageously bawdy and outrageously beautiful things as Giovanni's "Gently Johnny", "Fire Leap", "Corn Rigs", "Maypole", and the utterly spellbinding "Willow's Song", which contains some of the rudest lyrics that do not resort to expletives. You get the voices of Giovanni, stars Christopher Lee and Diane Cilento, and Lesley Mackie subbing for Britt Ekland on "Willow's Song".

Britt, however, does appear in all her own bawdy glory on a newly designed inner sleeve complete with libretto. The gatefold still features conductor Gary Carpenter's notes from Silva Screen's 2002 edition of the soundtrack, but the design of it and the front cover are new. So is the use of transparent, yellow vinyl, which has a well-centered spindle hole and is pretty quiet. The music sounds as warm and unsettlingly inviting as ever. 

Review: 'Dune' Blu-ray

Dune was the one major outlier when I first fell in love with the films of David Lynch. I hated it. Although I could not honestly say I completely understood Eraserhead (even though I totally said that), complete comprehension didn't matter when it came to such a purely experimental piece. That I didn't understand the byzantine plot of Dune mattered more since it had the bones of a completely conventional film. It is a space opera like Star Wars. It has a hero's journey. There are clearly defined good guys and bad guys and laser guns and made-up planets and giant monsters. Perhaps I was also offended that an ARTIST such as Lynch had played on the blockbuster field at all. That Lynch, himself, had completely disowned the film because producer Dino De Laurentiis insisted on a rather ruthless edit justified my serious Dune aversion and made me feel I didn't need to work to love it as much as I loved Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Fire Walk with Me, and every other non-Dune picture Lynch made.

And yet, I still returned to Dune every few years. And it got a little better each time I watched it, while certain other Lynch movies (The Elephant Man, Lost Highway) drop in my estimation each time I revisit them. After multiple viewings—and still never having read the entirety of the Frank Herbert novel on which the film is based—Dune's plot seems so lucid I feel like a dum-dum for not understanding it upon my first viewing. While it seemed to sorely lack Lynch's experimental verve all those years ago, I now can't understand how I didn't always recognize how far-out Dune is, with its disconcertingly fascistic hero and disgusting, pustule-plagued villain, who at one point, tries to force a captive to milk a cat duct-taped to a rat. I mean, did Lynch ever even devise anything weirder than that?

Review: 'The Vinyl Series Volume Two'

With its joyous mélange of ska, reggae, soul, and Spencer Davis Group, the theme of Chris Blackwell's The Vinyl Series: Volume One could be summed up as "Mod Party." Volume Two is a little harder to pin down. On first blush, Blackwell seems to have gone down more of a singer-songwriter alley this time, what with its very personal tracks by Cat Stevens ("Lady D'Arbenville"), Nick Drake (the sublimely somber "River Man"), John Martyn (somber ode to pal Drake "Solid Air"), Jimmy Cliff (lovely "Many Rivers to Cross"), and even Traffic (Dave Mason mumbles "Feelin' Alright" like he's playing to his chest in a coffee bar). 

So then where does Free's Classic-Rock-101 staple "All Right Now" fit in? Or The Heptones' group-effort "Book Rules" or Toots and the Maytals' extroverted "Pressure Drop"? And is it a true singer-songwriter song if the singing and songwriting are split between two individuals, even (formerly) married ones such as Richard and Linda Thompson? And what about that woozily exuberant Mariachi band on "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight"? Nick Drake never used one of those.

Perhaps Blackwell's theme is "terrific songs from the Island Records archives," which is valid enough from a guy with such fine taste. Each of these songs is a classic, and though "All Right Now" does sound out of place, hearing it sandwiched between the Thompsons' night-on-the-town gem and Cliff's soul-stirrer make it sound fresher than it does between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foreigner during a musty Classic Rock Radio Rock-Block. 

As mastered by Alex Abrash, The Vinyl Series: Volume Two also sounds pretty fresh. Cat Stevens thumping the hollow body of his acoustic and The Heptones' bongos sound almost disquietingly present on flat, quiet vinyl. I wonder what the theme of Volume Three will be...

Review: 'Paul McCartney: The Stories Behind the Songs'

Mike Evans's new book probably should have been called Paul McCartney: The Stories Behind Some Songs. With the title Paul McCartney: The Stories Behind the Songs, I assumed the book would go through the entirety of McCartney's substantial post-Beatles body of work, explaining the inspiration behind well-documented hits like "Silly Love Songs" and obscurities like "Monkberry Moon Delight". Instead Evans mainly focuses on the hits, first providing a very swift and general overview of a given album before zooming in on one or two of the more popular songs contained therein (as well as some stand-alone singles, such as "Another Day" or "Wonderful Christmastime"). 

I guess digging deep into songs McCartney usually admits were inspired by nothing more than a decent-sounding yet nonsensical rhyme might not have been too edifying. Evans might not have been the guy to do it either since he is so awed by McCartney's talent. A fair yet critical sort is the ideal chronicler of a catalog that is way better than many critics would have you believe but pretty rich in toss-offs too. Look, I enjoy "Magneto and Titanium Man" as much as anyone, but I'd hardly describe its slight comic-book lyric as "rock solid storytelling" as Evans does. On the odd occasion the author seems to criticize a song, he rarely owns that criticism, prefacing it with phrases like "Some critics believe..." Granted, this book is not called Paul McCartney: Picking Apart the Songs either, but since Evans does offer some personal judgments, his fairly one-track view of McCartney's Wings and solo work is worth noting.