Review: 'Wake Me, Shake Me: New York City, the '60s & the Pop Youthquake'

Everyone who thinks that the world revolves around New York City should... wait, I'm not sure how to finish that sentence. Actually, a quick look at all the movies, TV shows, and books set in Manhattan alone (there are four other boroughs, you know!) kind of supports the idea that NYC is where everything is. And music? How many histories covering New York's punk scene or The Velvet Underground have there been? "A lot" is the answer.

Yet when considering what must be the most fertile period for pop music, the sixties, the New York City scene is often little more than a sidebar. While what was happening in London, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Fransisco is often portrayed as downright mythic, what was happening on the East Coast islands seems quaint and scattered, at least when you've finished swapping legends about Lou Reed and Nico. And Dylan doesn't quite count as he was actually from Hibbing, Minnesota, and his New York City phase was just one of many. 

Review: 'American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography'

In the sixties, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures was best known for pumping out a series of dopey beach party flicks, Roger Corman’s elegant Poe adaptations, and a gonzo slew of fab B-grade genre pictures. However, AIP was even more eclectic than that, distributing prestige foreign films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La Dolce Vita and films by Robert Altman and Orson Welles and trafficking in Mondo-style documentaries and borderline porno. In all, AIP and its subsidiaries had their talons in over 800 movies. With his new book American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography, Rob Craig attempts to catalog them all. This would be quite the project if Craig had merely tracked down all the titles and listed them, but he goes way farther than that with encyclopedia-like entries for each film, some of which fill entire pages. He covers interesting production details, describes plots, and offers personal critiques and a good deal of sub-textual analysis.

This is where American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography serves its most useful purpose, since the book mainly functions as a film guide. I can usually get a pretty good handle on how much a film-guide writer and I see eye-to-eye and how likely I will be to dig that writer’s recommendations. However, Rob Craig is a tough call. He’s generally politically astute, writes well, and loves many oddball movies deserving of love, but he’s too hell bent on iconoclasm, which is something he signals in an introduction that explicitly challenges notions that some films are or aren’t objectively good. That’s fine, but I can’t get on board with some of Craig’s kookier ideas. I agree with him that Peter Sasdy’s The Devil within Her is a lot of fun, but Craig’s conclusion that it is better than Rosemary’s Baby—a deliberately hilarious film he categorizes as “humorless”—is crazy (Polanski’s still a horrible person though). He thinks Starcrash is better than Star Wars (another movie he dismisses as “humorless) and can’t stand beloved character actor Dick Miller, yet he finds much to admire in crap such as the tedious Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the vile Cry of the Banshee, the inept and vile The Last House on the Left, and the shrill, painfully unfunny Comedy of Terrors, which he believes has “hilarious” dialogue. Who is this guy?

And wait ’til you read his entries on The T.A.M.I. Show and The Big TNT Show! He is merciless in his castigation of some of the sixties’ greatest acts, dismissing The Beach Boys as a “pathetic” boy band, deeming The Lovin’ Spoonful “bizarre,” trashing The Rolling Stones and The Byrds, and having little patience for James Brown, whose performance once inspired an entire movie theater audience to leap up in the aisles and dance (I was there). His chastising of the film’s use of some chaste go-go dancers as “perverted” is way more bizarre than anything the Spoonful ever did. Yet, I agreed with Craig in enough instances that I still managed to compile a list of films I’d like to check out on his recommendation. He certainly does a good job of making the movies he likes sound intriguing. Whether or not I enjoy them may be another matter.

Review: Joe Jackson's 'Summer in the City: Live in New York'

In August 1999, Joe Jackson performed at tiny Joe’s Pub in NYC, his voice and piano accompanied only by Gary Burke’s drums and Graham Maby’s bass. Considering the lack of guitar and the fact that the show took place amidst Jackson’s retreat from pop, one might assume the performance had some sort of jazz trio pretentions. But with Burke’s hard hitting and Maby’s trademark vicious attack, the set was pure Rock & Roll. It also formed the basis of a CD called Summer in the City: Live in New York released in 2000.

With Jackson looking back on his rocker days, it was appropriate that his original selections not only relied exclusively on the seventies and eighties, but that they also included oldies by The Beatles, Yardbirds, Steely Dan, and as the CD’s title reveals, The Lovin’ Spoonful (though there are nods to jazz in his covers of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and The Ramsey Lewsi Trio version of “The In Crowd”). Refreshingly, the covers and the punkish early cut “One More Time” retain all their thrust in this stripped down setting. This is in no small way due to the awesome Maby. With his 5-string bass, he supplies all the strings any Rock band could need as he adds some (in Joe’s words) “very deep bass” to “Fools in Love” and whips off a thrilling solo on “Another World”. All hail Graham.

Because it was recorded in the dedicatedly digital age, Summer in the City: Live in New York may seem an odd choice for the audiophile label Intervention Records (who’d previously reissued Jackson’s Look Sharp!, I’m the Man, and Night and Day), which normally goes to length to use a completely analog process in its reissues.* But even with only “high quality files” from the original DATs available, this double-vinyl release sounds superb with Maby and Burke rattling the floorboards and Jackson’s voice soaring over them with remarkable clarity on quiet 180-gram vinyl.

*Update: Shane Buettner of Intervention Records had the following to say about the process of mastering Summer in the City: Live in New York:

“I definitely specialize in 100% analog mastering, because so few labels do that. However, my ethos is to be truest to the master source. For this project there was analog tape, but as the master source was native digital, the digital sounded best and that’s what I used. In this case it’s important to note the HUGE impact of going from the 16-bits of the CD to the 24-bit source files we used. 24-bits is 256 times the resolution of 16-bits! In addition, the original CD had several dB of dynamic compression whereas we didn’t employ any.”

Review: Lovin' Spoonful Mono Remasters

Unlike their considerably more progressive cousins across the water, The Beatles, The Lovin’ Spoonful acclimated to the stereo format quite nicely in 1965. While Help! and Rubber Soul both found The Beatles’ vocals lazily panned away from their instruments to the extreme, Do You Believe in Magic was generally balanced and full. That does not mean the stereo mix was perfect—exhibit A being John Sebastian’s hard-panned lead vocal on “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” Both of the Spoonful’s other two absolute classic records—Daydream and Hums of The Lovin’ Spoonful—also contain one stereo track that commits this same crime (“You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” on the former and “Rain on the Roof” on the later). The overall stereo separation of those two albums is also more extreme than that of Do You Believe in Magic. Nevertheless, the stereo mixes are the ones that have remained in print.

Sundazed is now offering fans a couple of choices by reissuing the Spoonful’s three finest albums in mono, both on CD and vinyl. It goes without saying that “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”, and “Rain on the Roof” sound better on these discs than they do on any other CD in print, and not just because of their centered vocals. Sundazed has a rep for the warmth, clarity, and crunch of their reissues. Magic, Daydream, and Hums are no exception. That “crunch” is particularly noteworthy here since the Spoonful were one of the lighter major acts of their period, but rockers like “My Gal”,  “On the Road Again”, and “4 Eyes” kick professional ass (an unfortunate exception is “Summer in the City”, which ends up sounding like mud). Even softer pieces like their glorious cover of The Ronettes’ “You Baby” radiate power in this format.