Review: 'Videotapes From Hell'

If you take Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to 2017 here on Psychobabble, you may find that Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell was one of my favorite books of that year. Its abundance of images of sleazy, cheesy, outrageous horror paperback covers was the hook, but the anchor was Grady's writing, which was both informative and really funny, eagerly tapping into the goofy fun of those horrid novels that occupied check-out counter spinner racks in the seventies and eighties. 

Review: Yet Another 3 Motown Reissues

This month Elemental Music is wrapping up their long and fruitful Motown reissue campaign of 2025 with three lesser known titles, two of which are by a couple of the label's key artists and one of which is by one-hit-wonders The Undisputed Truth. That group's self-titled debut sports the recording with the longest legs on any of these three albums because The Undisputed Truth is the album with "Smiling Faces (Sometimes)". This stone-classic established a new strain of sinister soul that would reach fruition with the following year's "Papa Was a Rolling Stone", which UT would record and release before The Temptations had their hit. Ashford and Simpson's "California Soul" worked in a similar mode, though the majority of the album is comprised of covers of established pop hits, like "Aquarius", "Ball of Confusion", "Ain't No Sunshine", and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", that make the record feel a little like a throw-back to those covers-heavy Motown LPs of the sixties. Ultimately, what stands out most on the record is the heavy and sweet see-saw between Joe Harris's deep baritone and the lighter vibes of Brenda Joyce Evans and Billie Rae Cavin, The Undisputed Truth being the rare Motown act with male and female singers sharing leads.

Review: Stevie Wonder's 'Definitive Collection' on Vinyl

Stevie Wonder was one of Motown/Tamla's key pop hit makers in the sixties. When he followed a far more personal path in the seventies, he became the label's most innovative artist, while still racking up a slew of hits. 

However, there are precious few compilations that encompass both of these phases, at least for vinyl enthusiasts. In 2020, there was Number 1's, but that double-LP was slightly hampered by its concept. Indisputable classics like "Hey Love", "For Once In My Life", and "My Cherie Amour" didn't hit number one on any charts, so they weren't included. Strangely, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day", which did top the US R&B charts, weren't present either. Those errant number ones hadn't made the party for 2002's The Definitive Collection CD either, but the three aforementioned classics did. Maybe that's why The Definitive Collection became Wonder's biggest selling hits comp, and it's certainly why it's the one that's being reissued on vinyl this year. 

Review: 'Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1'

As we've recently seen right here on Psychobabble, the Star Wars universe continues to pump out more and more stuff, often at the expense of the original trilogy's sense of whimsy and fun. That's why S.T. Bende and Iris Compiet's new book Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1 is such a breath of fresh, Endor-scented air. This book is all fun and whimsy, a pseudo-space zoologist's (plus robot buddy) star-field book logging all the weird beasties populating Tattooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Jakku, Mandalore, and all those other far-flung locales. 

Review: 'Superman: The Definitive History'

It has been 90 years since writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster adapted their bald, hyphenated super villain Super-Man from an illustrated sci-fi pulp mag prose story into the spit-curled, milk-wholesome, unhyphenated superhero who is now more recognizable than Santa and Jesus put together, and a thousand times more powerful than either of those guys.

Review: 'Star Wars Encyclopedia'

Once nothing more than a single extremely, extremely popular space-fantasy flick, Star Wars soon expanded into a line of Marvel comics, then a funky TV holiday special, then a sequel, and then another sequel. Read-along records and Dixie cups aside, that basically brings us to 1983. Over the following four decades, what it means to be Star Wars would continue to swell, ultimately encompassing eight more feature films, numerous cartoons and live-action TV series, countless comics, novel series, and games, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It's only a matter of time before Guerra de las Galaxias: La Telenovela debuts.

Review: 'The Beatles 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono'

A big archival release from The Beatles is something that Beatlemaniacs have come to anticipate around this time each year, although what exactly the release might be has become harder to predict. For several seasons, we could count on big box sets devoted to specific albums. Then, last year, when fans were certain a multi-disc box set focused on Rubber Soul would be the thing, Universal Music zagged with expanded editions of the "Red" and "Blue" compilations. This year brings another somewhat unexpected release: vinyl reissues of The Beatles' first six American albums for the first time since the eighties.

I was actually expecting such a release for a while, ever since all of the Capitol albums (plus that one on United Artists) were put out as a CD box set in 2014 for the fiftieth anniversary of the boys' first trip to America. I'm a little surprised it took a decade to get the first half of those albums back out on vinyl, although this year does make sense as we've now hit the sixtieth anniversary of that first U.S. visit.

Review: 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out' RSD Colored Vinyl

After Brian Jones died, and a somewhat shaky stage-restart at his memorial concert in Hyde Park, The Rolling Stones properly mounted their first tour in nearly three years in November of 1969. These shows would not be without their problems, the infamous Altamont disaster being among them, but the Stones' U.S. tour was at least a triumph of performance. Culling fiery tracks from Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and the surrounding singles, as well as a few choice Chuck Berries and occasional side trips to earlier originals like "Under My Thumb" and "I'm Free", the Stones kept the material simple with the focus on Mick Jagger's cavorting and new-boy Mick Taylor's biting leads. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of John Cale's 'The Academy in Peril' and 'Paris 1919'

As the bringer of shuddering waves of viola and a general avant-garde spirit to the first two Velvet Underground records, John Cale may have seemed like the Velvet least likely to be poised for a solo pop career. Cale almost immediately confounded any such expectations with his debut solo album. Despite its disturbing cover shot of Cale in a clear mask fit only for the least convivial serial killer, Vintage Violence was a tribute to The Band's rustic yet tuneful Americana-as-seen-by-an-outsider slant. His subsequent sometimes lovely, sometimes cacophonous collaboration with experimental composer Terry Riley, The Church of Anthrax, reminded those listening to not get too comfortable. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Elvis Costello's 'King of America'

By the mid-eighties, there was trouble in the Attractions, although Elvis Costello wasn't quite ready to lop "and the Attractions" from his album covers just yet. So he put out King of America, which could rightfully be deemed his first solo album since My Aim Is True, as The Costello Show, even though the Attractions do back him on "Suit of Lights". Elsewhere his support is the American studio-group he unfortunately christened the Confederates.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Dantalian's Chariot's 'Chariot Rising'

Zoot Money's Big Roll band is one of those group's you read about a bit if you're into sixties British rock, but outside of the ephemeral live scene, their biggest contribution to rock was a certain young guitar-whiz named Andy Summers. Their music was fairly generic big-band British soul and blues in the vein of Manfred Mann, although Money's mildly hoarse soul shout was full of personality and Summers, of course, is no slouch when wielding an axe. 

Review: 3 More Motown Reissues from Elemental Music

As we reach the penultimate month of Elemental Music's year of Motown vinyl reissues we receive three rather different records. The earliest of these is one of Motown's courting-the-old-folks discs, although unlike the label's stodgier efforts in this arena, which tended to force The Four Tops or The Supremes to croon show tunes or corny standards, Marvin Gaye's When I'm Alone I Cry is something else entirely. In fact, Gaye had greater ambitions to be the next Nat King Cole than to be the next Smokey Robinson, so his heart was completely in this album. It's a genuine class act, marrying Gaye's classically fine voice with beautiful big band arrangements. This is a record that actually deserved to win over an older audience of discerning listeners. Moody and gorgeous.

Review: '501 Essential Albums of the 90s: The Music Fan's Definitive Guide'

 

"This is a book that's designed to start arguments." That's the way editor Gary Graff begins 501 Essential Albums of the 90s: The Music Fan's Definitive Guide, and really, it's the only way it could begin. Graff knows as well as anyone who has yet to even crack the cover of a book of this sort that there are going to be painful omissions and a fair share of painful inclusions. Even though I've written a book along these lines and know the pitfalls of doing such a thing all too well, I still allowed my teeth to grind at the absence of anything by Grant Lee Buffalo, Suzanne Vega, Throwing Muses, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, Shudder to Think, and quite a few other artists that I feel any guide that calls itself "definitive" can't do without. I also gagged at the inclusions of objectively crappy artifacts from the likes of Brian Adams, Meatloaf, Sponge, Bush, Britney Spears, Korn, and...well...I can really go on and on and on on that account.

Review: 'Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops'

History is written by the winners, and you can't have winners without plenty of losers. If we're talking about cinema, those losers are the over-budget, the ill-conceived, the box office disasters, the digitally-enhanced-cat-furred. Such films are the focus of Tim Robey in his new book Box Office Poison, which homes in on 26 flops that altered, or at least passed through, cinema history. His one criteria for inclusion was a film that earned significantly less than it cost. The causes of such failure are myriad. A movie might be the victim of over-complication and undercooked rabble-rousing (Intolerance), megalomania and depravity (Queen Kelly), too much boundary pushing for contemporary audiences (Freaks and Sylvia Scarlett), studio butchery and artistic inattention (The Magnificent Ambersons), outsized competition (Sorcerer, trampled by Star Wars), good-'ol artistic differences (David Lynch and Dino De Laurentiis at loggerheads over Dune), pure putridity (Nothing But Trouble, my personal pick for the worst movie ever made), shoddy special effects and shoddier pre-release press (Cats), or meddling maniacal stars and giraffes who stomp on their own dicks (Doctor Dolittle). 

Review: 'Blazing Saddles Meets Young Frankenstein'

Mel Brooks is widely and rightfully considered to be one of the giants of comedy cinema, although that reputation mostly hinges on just a few movies. Sure, a dedicated few may thump tubs for High Anxiety, History of the World Part 1, or even Space Balls, but if we're being honest, Brooks's screen rep is really down to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. Amazingly, the latter two films came out in the same year. Only Roxy Music used 1974 as well as Mel Brooks did. 

Review: Expanded Vinyl Reissue of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' 'Long After Dark'

Because their videos were staples in the early days of MTV, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers always had a vague new-wave whiff, even though they were really sixties-rock revivalists in the jangly Byrds/Love mode. They actually embraced some specific semblance of new-waveyness when experimenting with synthesizers on their first post-MTV LP, Long After Dark. The video for the synth-laced "You Got Lucky' even had a sort of futuristic Mad Max-on-a-budget feel. However, the foundation of the track was pure Arthur Lee-toughness, and that barely compromised rock and roll attitude flushed through the rest of the album, too. 

Review: 'Star Trek-The Illustrated Oral History: The Original Cast'

Star Trek-The Illustrated Oral History: The Original Cast is not the first oral history of that boldly going sci-fi archetype, but it's unique in that all of its quotes were pulled from a single source—Titan's long-running Star Trek Magazine— and that "illustrated" bit. This is a beautiful little book, illustrated with color photos of what could be TV's most splendidly vivid series. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Pete Townshend's 'Iron Man: The Musical' and 'Psychoderelict (Music Only)'

After The Who broke up, Pete Townshend seemed to want to distance himself from his old band's roiling and raw hard rock as much as possible, so he issued a series of slick LP musicals that ranged from the personal to the surprisingly impersonal. First up was a project of the former stripe, as White City was largely inspired by Townshend's experiences working alongside his then-wife in a women's shelter, and though it revealed its 1985 origins with its synthesizers and glossy production, there was still some bite in tracks like "Give Blood" and "Secondhand Love". With its themes of anger, shame, and fame, White City was nearly as personal a record as either of Townshend's two more Who-like ones that preceded it.

Review: 'The Name of the Band Is R.E.M.'

Unlikely as it was, the mysterious and insular R.E.M. became the biggest college rock band of the eighties, and one of the nineties' biggest bands of any stripe, so they've naturally been the topic of their share of biographies. Yet there's is a tough story to tell with the usual rock and roll salaciousness that pins cynical eyes to pages. Their story is suspiciously lacking in drug-crazed binges, intraband hair-pulling bouts, humiliating flops, and groupie abuse. R.E.M. were basically four nice guys who liked each other. One shouting match during the making of Monster and cutting Peter Holsapple out of the lucrative co-writing credits for "Low" was probably the most Mick-and-Keith things they ever did. Sure, Peter Buck did have that one well-publicized fit of air rage, but mostly he settled for strolling around town in his PJs and robe while tugging on a tallboy to get his ya-yas out.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of The dB's 'Repercussion'

The dB's got lumped in with the college rockers, but had they been around fifteen years earlier, they would have been a perfectly commercial pop band...albeit one who's best-known song tells the tale of a poor schlub who decides to end it all after his girlfriend not only dumps him but steals all his shit... well, all of it except for his amplifier.

Review: 'Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision' Vinyl Box Set

After recording their masterpiece, 1968's Electric Ladyland, the Jimi Hendrix Experience began to fall apart. Noel Redding's departure hardly halted Hendrix from getting right back to work though. He set up shop in his newly constructed Electric Lady Studios in NYC with Mitch Mitchell and new bassist/old friend Billy Cox to work on a funkier, less trippy batch of songs, including fierce items like "Dolly Dagger", "Ezy Rider", and "Room Full of Mirrors" and gorgeous ones like "Angel" and "Drifting". The bulk of the sessions stretched from late 1969 through August 1970. 

Review: 'Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush [Omnibus Remastered edition]'

Kate Bush seems to reveal so much of herself in her songs despite being more of a storyteller than a self-dissecting singer-songwriter. So much of her own intense connections to family, sex, love, and nature bleed through her tales of soldiers, ship-wreck survivors, ghosts, monsters, talking houses, and amorous computers. In reality, Kate Bush is an extremely private person, but the personal air of her music prompts a great deal of curiosity, empathy, and speculation in critics and fans alike.

Review: 'David Bowie: Rock 'N' Roll Chameleon'

Few rock stars are as suited to the kinds of coffee table bio cum discography divethat Quarto publishes on a semi-regular basis as David Bowie. He had a huge number of records and a huge number of looks. Few rock writers are as suited to penning this kind of book as Martin Popoff, who always brings the personality and humor sadly lacking in most boilerplate tomes of this type. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of 3 Motown Albums

This month Elemental Music continues its Motown vinyl reissue campaign it began back in May by releasing three pivotal albums from three pivotal artists. The label's most enduring male vocal group makes their debut. The label's superstar female vocal group undergo an image change. The label's pioneer innovator starts winding down his original pop hitmaker phase and gets his first number one pop hit. 

Review: 'Mind Games' by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

When critics and audiences refused to embrace the radical politics of 1972's Sometime in New York City, John Lennon shifted tracks and made a poppier, sunnier record in 1973. Despite being hunted by the Nixon administration, which sought to expel him from the country because of his views, Lennon seemed to be in a pretty good place. This is reflected in the love songs, sing-along calls for freedom, "I'll believe in everything until it's disproven" philosophies, and general good-humored silliness of Mind Games. 

Review: 'One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg'

Diana Rigg seemed to take the most gratification from her stage work, but her screen genre work was what made her an icon. Say the name and one is most likely to picture her as Bond's one and only bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Vincent Price's costume-changing coconspirator in Theatre of Blood, the ceaselessly scheming Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, or most probably, the karate-chop dishing Emma Peel of The Avengers.

Review: 'Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films'

Like horror, science fiction is a genre that can be tricky to define. Frankenstein is certainly a horror movie, but with the pseudo-scientific creation of flat-top Boris, it can also be classified as science-fiction. Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr. Pretorius creates creatures in a way more in line with "black magic," doesn't bother so much with the pseudo science. Whatever. They both qualify as science fiction in Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films even though Douglas Brode goes to some lengths to define the science-fiction film as any that makes some attempt to explain its weirdness scientifically. 

Review: 'American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond'

Okay, maybe I'm not the brightest guy in the world. The book is called American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond. But a title that references a band's most famous gig and album doesn't necessarily mean anything, especially when the back jacket copy and foreword don't clearly lay-out the author's agenda. So, as I read the first seventy pages of American Standard, I kept thinking, "Gee, Ross Warner is sure sprinting through Cheap Trick's career." He barely spares a word about the guys' pre-band years, barely a sentence on their formation, and—upon flipping forward to get a sense of what I was reading—barely a paragraph on their only #1 hit. That last bit was fine by me though. "The Flame" is a piece of shit.

Review: 'I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies'

Pet Sematary. Near Dark. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The Babadook. What do all of these movies have in common? They're scary. What else? They were all directed by women. 

For a lot of movie goers, even horror freaks, it's hard to name a lot more female-directed fear films than these, but there are actually quite a lot, and I'm not just talking about the explosion of them in the past fifteen years. During the early days of film, there were a number of silent films directed by women such as Lois Weber (Suspense) and Louise Kolm-Fleck (Die Ahnfrau). When the Hollywood sound era bullied to the fore in the thirties, women filmmakers were put out of business in America, but they continued to work elsewhere in the world. From the fifties through the eighties, a number of women directed exploitation films, largely because the guys producing such films, such as Roger Corman, figured that they'd just be happy to get the work and not expect the freedom or pay their male counterparts could count on. And as such injustices were finally addressed in more recent years, and digital technology democratized filmmaking in general, the number of horror movies directed by women positively exploded.

Review: 'Zowie!: The TV Superhero Craze in '60s Pop Culture'

Crashing into a Gilligan-and-Jeannie-populated TV scene too dumb to fully recognize how dumb it was, Batman dropped a big load of camp--distinct from Gilligan and Jeannie's kitsch--onto TV screens. Whether you were a hyperactive six year old or a hyper-hip sixteen year old, Batman had appeal, doing dual work as a sincere superhero adventure and a genuine and genuinely funny comedy at a time when such things simply didn't exist on American television. 

Review: Velocity Girl's 'UltraCopacetic'

When Maryland's Velocity Girl came shimmering out of Sub Pop with their debut album in 1993, Bob Weston's wall-of-noise production couldn't hide the gleeful melodism of the singles "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes" (and if this song doesn't automatically force you to picture Sherilyn Fenn in saddle shoes, you and I might have trouble relating to each other), the squalling "Pretty Sister" (my personal fave), or "Pop Loser", which is totally pop despite a lyric mocking those who sing la-la shit. And no group in that lo-fi scene had a singer like the opera-trained Sarah Shannon. Burying her clarion pipes way down in the mix couldn't hide that either.

Review: 'Ornithology: The Best of Bird' by Charlie Parker

As jazz evolved beyond hummable melodies tailored for dance halls and 78s, Charlie "Bird" Parker was right there pushing it into the freewheeling zone that would become known as bebop. Not that he couldn't play the game. Some of Parker's most memorable recordings were fit for juke boxes and barely set a toe past the three-minute demarcation. But what he did within those three minutes was something entirely new, even if he was sticking to simple, well-traveled blues progressions. The melodic riffs that ostensibly hold things like "Ko-Ko", "Donna Lee", and "Anthropology" together are remarkably complex. Without what most sensible folks might describe as tunefulness, Parker's work was pure musicianship and emotion, whether he was going for the joyful spot with "Groovin' High" or playing it dreamy and romantic on "Parker's Mood". 

Review: 'Forever Changes: The Authorized Biography of Arthur Lee and Love'

Love was the greatest American band of the sixties to never score a national hit. Arising from an LA scene that spat out superstars like The Byrds, The Doors, and Buffalo Springfield, Arthur Lee and company were widely regarded as the godfathers of the Sunset Strip. Jimi Hendrix admired Lee; Jim Morrison worshipped him. Even the Stones borrowed liberally from Love (although the reverse is true, too). Love’s first three albums, particularly 1967’s Forever Changes, are regarded as a triptych masterpiece even though each section is completely unlike the others. 

Yet Love has not endured as their contemporaries have because Lee refused to play the major label game. He hated flying and being jarred out of LA— where he lived in a castle, was regarded as royalty, and the mixed-race nature of his band wasn’t a major issue— so he refused to tour. His controlling, stubborn, angry, paranoid nature alienated many of the people who most wanted him to succeed. Eventually he became a serious coke addict who chastised his bandmates for their drug use. 

Review: 'Jim Henson's Imagination Illustrated' Updated Edition

Jim Henson was a restlessly creative guy, and like a lot of restlessly creative guys, he kept track of his endless flood of ideas in a notebook. Henson's little red one was filled with brief journal entries and marvelous sketches. It was in this book that he worked out ideas for Rowlf the dog, one of his earliest Muppets; commercial concepts; and other brainwaves. 

Review: Robyn Hitchcock's Memoir, '1967'

Anyone who's fallen under the spell of Robyn Hitchcock's tombstone surrealism should be more than a little intrigued by his foray into the memoir world. The guy can write. Not that you'll necessarily find as much story in 1967 as you will in, say, "Underwater Moonlight". 

As the title trumpets, the narrative stays firmly planted in that year of psychedelic whimsy that would so influence Hitchcock's perspective when he began putting out his own songs a decade later. In '67 he was an unripe 14 year old consigned to boarding school, so do not expect 1967 to be the usual rock and roll bacchanal. Even as far as British schoolboy stories go, there isn't much story here. Young Hitch goes to school, where he encounters a few eccentric instructors, as well as his meathead and groover peers, none of whom we readers ever get to know too well. Clearly much more significantly for the lad, he falls in love with the likes of Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Incredible String Band. Then he learns to play the guitar.

Review: Paul McCartney & Wings' 'One Hand Clapping'

After releasing Band on the Run and finally getting a gold star from venomous critics, including the most venomous critic of all (Lennon), Paul McCartney was hot to keep riding that wave of good will. So he rushed into the studio with Wings to follow up with a live-in-the-studio session of covers and songs he'd already recorded and released with his current band, as a solo artist, and with his old band featuring that most venomous critic of all (Lennon).

Review: 'The Future Is Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982'

Even though pretty much everyone loved it, Star Wars became an easy go-to villain for every dreary movie critic who'd come to complain that it ruined cinematic art by making special effects and bottom line far more important than story, complex themes, and characterizations. Nevertheless, it took a few years for the influence of George Lucas's film to really ripen. Aside from a few stray extravaganzas like Superman, Alien, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars influence was mostly manifest in grade-Z schlockers like Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars in the years immediately following the summer of '77. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of The Supremes' 'We Remember Sam Cooke' and The Temptations' 'I Wish It Would Rain'

Motown has long had a reputation for putting out fab singles in the sixties but not putting much effort into its long players until Berry Gordy finally gave artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder the freedom to mature in the seventies. That assumption is mostly unfair, and was probably started by people who never really gave many of the label's sixties albums a chance. So Elemental's decision to mount a Motown LP-reissue campaign is more than mere property exploitation. Reissues of some truly fantastic albums are on the way, and the first of which is The Temptations' I Wish It Would Rain. The final album the Temps made before transitioning to the funkier psychedelic soul that would define their early seventies work is remarkably consistent and remarkably good, with album tracks such as "Cindy", "Why Did you Leave Me Darling", and "I've Passed This Way Before" being every bit as good as the hits "I Wish It Would Rain" and "(Loneliness Made Me Realize) It's You That I Need", which are two of their best. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of 3 John Entwistle Albums

Much like George Harrison, John Entwistle was an excellent and unique songwriter in a band with songwriters who rank among the top-five rock songwriters of all time. Sometimes you just can't win, but Harrison at least deserved the last laugh when The Beatles split and he released what is arguably the best Beatles solo album of all. 

Review: 40th Anniversary Edition of Billy Idol's 'Rebel Yell'

It didn’t really matter what tube you were in. In the eighties, you could grok Billy Idol if you were a metal head, a top-40 fluff head, a new waver, or even a less dogmatic goth or punk, particularly if you’d been following Idol since his Generation X days. With his cross-over appeal, personal style that felt more like a personal brand (the bleached spikes; the leather wardrobe; the Elvis sneer), and a sound that was really more pop than anything else, Billy Idol could have been little more than generic “Rocker” for the eighties if he and his hits didn’t exude so much personality. 

Review: 'Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive'

Return of the Jedi has its flaws, but you can't say that the final episode of the original Star Wars trilogy doesn't look fab. The creatures! The costumes! The colors! Not to mention the tie-in merchandise. Perhaps of all the Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi best lends itself to one of those visual archive type books filled with photos and pasted-in ephemera. Star Wars is a much better film, but it's a bit too drab. Empire is even better, but its winter-wear costumes aren't as groovy and it's very light in the creature department. What Return of the Jedi lacks in storytelling and acting, it makes up for with squid heads, fish heads, speeder bikes, and golden bikinis. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Billy Joel Albums

Everyone thinks of Jimmy Stewart as a sanitized "oh gosh" icon of apple-pie Americana, but when you look at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there. The voyeur and the sexually obsessive freak he played for Hitchcock are obvious examples, but even his George Bailey in that allegedly saccharine but actually coal-dark holiday classic It's a Wonderful life is scary and intense for most of the film.

Billy Joel may be the Jimmy Stewart of pop. He's the piano man who sings songs your Jagger-phobic mom thought were nice, but if you look closer at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there, none of whom are ever more disturbed than the singer. Who's creepier: the pot-smoking, nose-picking, masturbating subject of "Captain Jack" or the curtain-twitching voyeur who sits in snide judgment of that kid's every move? Joel also does the Rear Window bit in other sneeringly judgmental tracks like "Movin' Out", "Big Shot", "Los Angelenos", and "Angry Young Man", on which he seems to be addressing a mirror. So the guy may have often sounded like McCartney on a particularly sunny Sunday, but a lot of Joel's work could go toe-to-toe with Elvis Costello's in terms of bitterness.

Review: 'Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the 'Video Nasties' Panic of the 1980s'

When home video took off in the early eighties, the main concern in the United States was that videotape enthusiasts would start recording copyrighted films and programs off of TV. In Great Britain, the main concern would be that they'd go on murder rampages. 

What followed was the so-called Video Nasty panic, which not only plopped a very, very silly term into the British lexicon but also spawned a great song by The Damned ("Nasty") and one of the best episodes of "The Young Ones" ("Nasty"), which also happened to feature The Damned singing that great song ("Nasty"). 

Review: 'All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words'

According to its press release, Peter Brown and Steven Gaines's All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words is "A LANDMARK ORAL HISTORY ON THE BEATLES" (their caps). 

There are several problems in that last sentence: 

A) Only 20% of All You Need Is Love consists of The Beatles' own words (The Beatles being Paul, George, and Ringo, but not John). The other words are supplied by Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Boyd, Maureen Starkey, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, "Magic" Alex Mardas, and twenty or so others in or around The Beatles' circle.

Review: 'It Rose from the Tomb'

It's kind of funny that, in his new book It Rose from the Tomb, Peter Normanton expresses surprise that TwoMorrows was interested in publishing a book on the history of horror comics, considering that this would not be the first horror-centric book that comics-centric publisher has published (if you have not checked out Mark Voger's Monster Mash, you need to get it together, Daddy-O!) and that horror is so integral to comics history. It's the main reason why kids devoured funny books in the fifties and why the comics code shut them down. Marvel and DC were known to dabble in horror, and it was the life's blood of E.C. and Warren. And because even the chintziest horror comics were outlandishly visual and vivid, horror comics is the perfect theme for one of TwoMorrows' visual and vivid volumes.

Review- Alice in Chains' 'Jar of Flies' 30th Anniversary Vinyl

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'

Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities. 

When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.

Nico finally got the chance to fully express herself and her harmonium on The Marble Index. Frazier Mohawk, who co-produced the album with former-Velvet John Cale, reportedly said that he made sure it didn't push too far beyond the thirty-minute mark because he was afraid that listeners would start killing themselves if subjected to any more of her ghoulish dissonance. 

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Live at the Wiltern'

2003 was a big year for The Rolling Stones. That was when the group turned forty, released their very first career-spanning greatest hits album, and went on an international tour that became the second most profitable one in history at the time (The most profitable? Their own Voodoo Lounge tour of eight years earlier). 

Review: 'Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976'

There have been so many books about The Who that it only makes sense that, sixty years after the band's formation, a new entry in their library would be almost unbelievably specific. The very title of Edoardo Genzolini's Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976 announces its specificity. That is not a mistyped conjunction; this book does not track the years 1968 through 1976, when The Who were pretty much the greatest live band in the world. Genzolini's only covers two years in The Who's history, and not conspicuously auspicious ones either. 1968 was the first year The Who did not release an LP since their beginning, and the few singles they managed to squeak out in '68 are often dismissed as novelties made by an out-of-touch band desperate for fresh material (I'm not one of those dismissers though, largely because the zany "Dogs" is one of my faves). In 1976, they were touring their most troubled album, the virtual suicide-note The Who By Numbers, with rapidly deteriorating intraband relationships and a rapidly deteriorating drummer with just two years left in the world.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971'

*It's been twenty months since the release of The Rolling Stones Singles 1963 - 1966, and though that set's press release promised the inevitable sequel would arrive in 2023, vinyl reissues of the Stones' U.S. LPs were apparently ABKCO's main concern that year. In 2024, the label has wasted little time in finally making good on that 2022 promise. 

So, now The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971 has finally arrived to compile eighteen singles representing the time period that I, for one, insist was the Stones' most creatively fertile. While they are usually lauded for sticking to their rudimentary rock and blues guns, I will forever insist that they were at their most exciting and vibrant when grooving with sitars, Mellotrons, dulcimers, synthesizers, John Paul Jones, and John and Paul. 

Review: Wings' 'Band on the Run' 50th Anniversary Set

If there's a word that sums up Paul McCartney's work-approach with The Beatles, that word could be "perfectionism." That was certainly one of the things that drove his band-mates up a tree when he insisted on take after take of things like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", although the cutesiness of those songs surely rubbed John, George, and Ringo the wrong way too. So it was a shock when McCartney began his solo career by bucking that perfectionism, if not the cutesiness. McCartney was a homemade, one-man-band record full of non-songs and only intermittent flashes of his perfect song craft, "Maybe I'm Amazed" being the most obvious example. If RAM suggested that the perfect old Paul was back, then Macca continued to confound with an album of jams with a new band called Wings, which he then followed with a Whitman's sampler of nutrient-free confectionary experiments he titled Red Rose Speedway.