A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic.
When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness.
The Beatles never really went away after their epochal breakup in 1970, but they continued to assert themselves with extra splashiness when the Beatles Anthology project landed. It began in 1995 with a three-part, six-hour documentary series on ABC and the first volume of a three-part, two-CD series of outtakes compilations. It continued the following year with the next two installments of the CD series.
At a time when traditional rock and roll had seemingly flat-lined, when old-guard bands like the Stones were simply going through the motions and punk seemed determined to burn the very notion of traditionalism to the ground, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were playing the kind of music the old-guard was playing when they were still new. Without any of punk's nihilism or politics, any of Cheap Trick's self-effacing irony, or any of the Boss's overcooked productions and song structures, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kept the purest essence of Rock and Roll alive while every artist was striding away from it like it was yesterday's rib roast.
The words "The Cure" invoke aural images of despair, of epic, majestic howls into some bottomless grey void. Yet Robert Smith often dismissed his own music as half-assed. He also insisted his band had crafted deliberate pop parodies so often that you might think he aspired to be Crawley's answer to Weird Al.
Everyone who says the drummer is the least important member of a band has never played in a band. They may not front the group (unless they're Dave Clark) or write the lyrics (unless they're Neil Peart) or play the solos (unless they're Keith Moon) or sing the songs (unless they're Micky Dolenz or Levon Helm or those guys from the Eagles and Grand Funk), but without a solid drummer, a band sounds like a dysfunctional mess.
No sensible person should expect some rock star to be the next Proust (clarification: I've never actually read Proust), but there is something we are justified in expecting: an accurate translation of the rock star's voice. This is particularly true if that rock star has an iconically distinctive voice. So I was pleased when Brian Wilson's I Am Brian Wilson was clearly written in the naive, not-especially-articulate, not-especially-focused but especially sweet voice we'd come to expect from Chief Beach Boy. Same goes for the very articulate, sweet-and-sour voice of Pete Townshend in Who I Am.
All written content of Psychobabble200.blogspot.com is the property of Mike Segretto and may not be reprinted or reposted without permission.
