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". 

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. 

Entwistle couldn't quite boast the same thing, considering the extraordinary quality of Pete Townshend's Empty Glass, but I feel pretty comfortable calling Entwistle's solo debut, Smash You Head Against the Wall, second best. Here is a deep dark lake creepy crawling with The Ox's cynicism, macabre humor, multi-instrumental prowess, and quirky way with melody, as well as his often overlooked "is it me for a moment" sensitivity. Dig the melodies of "What Are We Doing Here?" and "Ted End". They are liable to draw tears.

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.

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"). 

But the whole Video Nasty thing wasn't all rockin' tunes and hilarious TV. People's homes were raided by British authorities. Video collections were confiscated. Video store proprietors and private collectors were arrested or detained. Lives were seriously upended. Heinous crimes committed by heinous criminals were blamed on Chucky and Rambo. 

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.

B) All You Need Is Love is not an oral history. An oral history interweaves carefully selected quotations and anecdotes from numerous sources to tell a chronological story. All You Need Is Love is a collection of unedited transcribed interviews, complete with every "uh" and "um."

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

Grunge took over the early-nineties rock scene more on the strength of its refreshingly unvarnished sound and relatably sullen attitude than because its purveyors wrote great songs. There were a few exceptions. Kurt Cobain is the obvious numero uno, but Mark Lanegan was a great writer too. 

The Alice in Chains guys took a little longer to achieve the right balance between their sound and songs, but they were dropping some pretty strong ones by the time they put out Dirt in late 1992. However, it was 1994's groundbreaking Jar of Flies EP on which Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell's writing fully matured. As a lyricist, Staley had already been laser focused, specifically on the heroin addiction that was wracking his body and mind, but the subtler approach to his problem he took on Jar of Flies served his songs particularly well. 

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.

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. 

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.

Psychobabble's Favorite (and Not So Favorite) Monkees Songs...161 of Them Ranked!

A list of The Monkees' best-loved songs will inevitably be a cartload of the obvious topped with the usual suspects. "Daydream Believer". "I'm a Believer". "Last Train to Believer". Etcetera. That is not what follows. 

The Monkees were the first band I fell in love with, but it was not the big hits that caught my attention. It was the group's pervasive weirdness, which tends to get steamrolled in discussions of how cute, sweet, bubblegum, and ersatz they were. If The Monkees were the unadventurous, pre-fab, teeny-bopper bait they'd been accused of being for much of their career, I would never have paid them much mind. But that image is bullshit, although it does seemingly hold true for some of the songs that appear down at the bottom of this list, which is limited to their first-phase work (I refuse to ever listen to Pool It, if only out of respect for the band). 

These are very personal choices, hence the title of this post, and I'll do my best to express my reasoning, which will likely cause Believers to smash a piano with a sledgehammer while Nes, dressed as Zappa, conducts.  

Here they come...

Review: 'The Terror'/'The Little Shop of Horrors' Blu-ray

Jack Nicholson is a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army who tracks ghostly Sandra Knight to Boris Karloff’s decrepit castle. 

It took two writers to compose a script that clearly just instructed, “Jack walks down hall and opens door” for pages and pages on end. Roger Corman commissioned that script for no other reason than to get his every penny’s worth from the sets he used for The Raven and take advantage of the three extra days Karloff agreed to make himself available. 

Review: 'Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely'

Joe Maneely is not as well known as, say, Steve Ditko or Jack Davis among comics connoisseurs. He didn't get a chance to be. After ten years of work with Atlas Comics, Maneely died in an accident on a train at the age of 32. 

One cannot help but ponder what might have been when viewing one of the roughly 3,500 pages of artwork he produced in his brief career. 215 of them are anthologized in Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely. He was apparently game for any assignment, working on sci-fi, horror, medieval, old-west, war, humor, romance, and (aging least successfully, of course) "yellow-peril" stories (a-hem).

12 Monkees Covers

I have a music project called The Space and spent the last couple of weeks recording a dozen Monkees covers. 

I posted them on YouTube here, or you can check out individual tracks with the following links:

Review: 'The Devil's Partner'/'Creature from the Haunted Sea' Blu-ray

 

In 1958, director Charles R. Rondeau followed up his first feature, The Littlest Hobo, with a low-budget horror/mystery picture in which a strange young man, who apparently can't sweat, drifts into a small town after his grubby Satanist uncle croaks. Soon various animals begin killing the locals while the nephew gets himself a sweet deal working at a gas station. 

No rational person would include The Devil's Partner on a list of classic horror movies, but it's reasonably well made with an effectively creepy lead performance from Ed Nelson (who most might remember from his regular role on Peyton Place, but those more likely to dig this flick will recall from the "Valley of the Shadow" episode of Twilight Zone), a tight little script, a fair dose of originality, and one genuinely creepily shot scene in which a horse stomps a rummy.