Review: 'B-Side'

For every hit that makes it onto the radio or Billboard's Hot 100, there's something more obscure happening on the other side. It might be a piece of tossed off trash, but it might also be of exceptional quality ("Rain"), a chance to throw a less prolific band member some royalty cash ("The Inner Light"), or an excuse to get inspiredly loony ("You Know My Name [Look Up the Number]"). Some B-sides are even better than their smash A-sides... at least that's my stance on all those Beatles flip sides I referenced in the previous sentence. 

Andy Cowan pays long overdue homage to flips in his new book B-Side. He runs through more than 500 of them, each chronicled with a brief paragraph on the particular song's history and appeal. Since he only discusses one B-side per artist, he casts a very wide net. I'm not sure if any music listener is eclectic/devoid-of-personal-taste enough to want a book that discusses The Who, Engelbert Humperdinck, Artie Shaw, Can, Frankie Avalon, The Sex Pistols, Shania Twain, N.W.A., Vangelis, The Pixies, Adele, Perry Como, PJ Harvey, Moby, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Human League, Megadeth, Vanilla Ice, and Echo and the Bunnymen, but if such a person exists, this is the book for them (kudos, though, for including Zacherley!). 

Since most readers probably won't qualify and will want to zip to their favorite eras or artists, Cowan's decision to organize his book alphabetically by song title might prove a bit frustrating. But the concept is still nifty, and he does discuss such Psychobabble approved gems as The Stones' "Child of the Moon", Prince's "Erotic City", The Who's "Heaven and Hell", R.E.M.'s "Ages of You", XTC's "Dear God", Hendrix's "51st Anniversary", Sly Stone's "Everybody Is a Star", Small Faces' "Just Passing", and The Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby". I also like that he digs deep for some groovy oddities, such as The Syn's "14 Hour Technicolor Dream", The Creation's "Through My Eyes", and Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum CLeaner".

I did learn a few things, such as the apparent fact that the screaming at the beginning of "Child of the Moon" is that of producer Jimmy Miller and not Mick Jagger and that a certain naughty word I always assumed I was mishearing in Syd Barrett's "Candy and a Currant Bun" is, indeed, the naughty word in question. But without question this book's biggest revelation is the parade of A-Sides that started life as B-Sides, such as Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula", Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock", The Doobie Brothers' "Black Water", Bill Withers's "Ain't No Sunshine", Dionne Warwick's "Alfie", and Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry". Who knew? Sometimes, though, these matters are down to the fact that Cowan is English, and A's and B's sometimes flipped across the pond, so for him, The Kink's "Who'll Be the Next in Line" is a B-side.

And since I'm sure you're wondering, the Beatles B-side Cowan selected is "Revolution".

Review: 'Hosted Horror on Television: The Films and Faces of Shock Theater, Creature Features, and Chiller Theater'

In 1957, Screen Gems released a package of 52 horror films produced between 1931 and 1947 to local television stations across the U.S. The "Shock Theater" package arrived with a suggestion that stations might want to employ a host to introduce and comment on the pictures. Every Monster Kid knows what happened next. Vampira popped up on KABC-TV in LA. Roland (soon to be Zacherley) did the same on WCAU in Philadelphia. Chicago's Marvin, San Francisco's Terrence, Indianapolis' Sammy Terry, New Orleans' Morgus, Nashville's Dr. Lucifer, Cleveland's Ghoulardi, Pittsburgh's Chilly Billy, and many others who adopted bizarre, high-camp personas to introduce Lugosi and Karloff pictures followed. Droves of kids too young to see The Invisible Man first time around finally got a chance to revel in James Whale's outre humor. Forry Ackerman fed that love with Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, as did The Munsters and Aurora's line of macabre model kits.

The horror host phenomenon was so widespread and influential that it's just waiting for someone to write a terrific book about it. Bruce Markusen's Hosted Horror on Television is not the book because it doesn't really attempt to be. It's basically a critical survey of some of the films that appeared in "Shock Theater" and the later packages "Son of Shock Theater", "Creature Features", and "Chiller Theater". Markusen's specific discussions of the packages and the horrors who hosted them come in fitful bursts that spark the book to life whenever they interrupt his fairly insightful yet wordy critiques. 

I Was a Late-Generation Monster Kid

My room would be fuzzed with that vague purple that comes right before the sunrise. I’d be exhausted, because it was 6 AM and little kids need their rest, and because I’d been toiling away in school all week long, probably learning to print or gluing elbow macaroni to paper plates or whatever else it is you do in school when you’re five or six. I don’t remember how old I was exactly, because I can’t find any information about when “Groovie Goolies” aired at 6:30 AM (or was it 6:00 AM?) on Saturday Mornings in the late-seventies/early eighties, but man, do I remember that sickly feeling of trying to fight myself awake every Saturday morning so I could creep downstairs to the still-dark den to take in those cornball Burbank-by-way-of-Transylvania jokes and groove along to those bubble gum pop songs as sugary as the Frankenberry cereal I’d scarf after the closing credits.

Track by Track: 'Spook Along with Zacherley'

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ve been taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.

Like most American families, mine spent Christmas with the usual choir of vinyl carolers: Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole, and since my dad loved Rock & Roll as much as I do, Phil Spector’s stable of stars. Most American homes, however, had no annual carols for my favorite holiday. Mine did though. As soon as my mom had affixed the final cardboard jack-o-lantern to the living room windows, I was begging my dad to take his yearly trip down to the basement and brush the cobwebs off an old record called Spook Along with Zacherley.

Review: Zacherely in 'Horrible Horror: The Special Edition'

As a Netflix subscriber, I probably shouldn’t poop on the conveniences of the Internet age. As a retro geek, nostalgia nut, and middle-aged guy, I still can’t help but pine for those days when I’d walk out the door with friends and walk to our local seedy video shop to rent some crappy movie in the pre-Blockbuster © eighties. On the back wall of those holes cramped with shelves stacked with bulky VHS boxes (the tapes were always safe from shop lifters behind the counter) was the real junk: the B-horror and science fiction flicks with the most garish covers in sight (the most garish of all belonged to the porno tapes kept behind a curtain in their own closet-sized section).

Review: 'The Z Files: Treasures from Zacherley's Archives'

When I was a kid, my dad would creep down into the basement and unearth his copy of Spook Along with Zacherley every October 1^st, which then served as our household Halloween carols for the rest of the spooky season. I was born too late to actually have seen Zach’s act on the classic monster movie showcase “Shock Theatre” or the Rock & Roll dance party “Disc-O-Teen,” but the record was all I needed to get him. The photo of him in frock coat and cadaverous make up on the cover. The silly songs about the Transylvania P.T.A., a Ring-a-Ding Orangutaun, and the return of Frank and Drac he crooned in a very un-Rock & Roll bass-baritone. As a devotee of “The Munsters,” “The Groovie Goolies,” and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the corny songs resonated with me even though I never got the chance to see the Cool Ghoul step on screen in the middle of Dracula’s Daughter to explain that the burns he got while dragging the Count from a funeral pyre prevented him from attending a cocktail party in his honor. Since TV archiving wasn’t super meticulous in the early sixties, I’m still unable to see much footage of Zacherley in action. Fortunately, there’s The Z Files: Treasures from the Zacherley Archives to provide a bit of a simulation.

Published last year, Richard Scrivani and Tom Weaver’s book collects a King-Kong’s ransom of choice artifacts from Zach’s personal collection. There’s a complete script of his Dracula’s Daughter show (which admittedly doesn’t read as well as it probably played on screen). There are scripts for three of his WOR-TV shows (ditto). These are neat, but I really loved the weird miscellany leading up to these major pieces: a stereotypically hyperbolic juvenile delinquency article about some kids who broke into a mausoleum to steal a skull for their Zacherley Club House, the angry letters from “Shock Theatre” viewers who didn’t appreciate his intrusions on their favorite movies, a letter from the New Jersey Television Broadcasting Company warning Zach’s cameramen to stop zooming in on the dancers for “bust” and “fanny” shots, an article about a Zacherley impersonator who’d been arrested for public drunkenness, and so on and so on. There’s also a good selection of B&W Zach pics, several of them displaying sweet-faced John Zacherle without his ghoulish get up. Apparently, there is also an accompanying DVD in the works, which hopefully will include whatever surviving footage there is. Until that emerges from the crypt, The Z Files fills the gap well.

Psychobabble’s 2011 Wish List

1. Island of Lost Souls on DVD

Generally considered the greatest adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls (1933) has never received an official US DVD release for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The reason certainly can’t be lack of interest since this is one of the most demanded unavailable horror classics. Rumors abound that Universal, Paramount, and Criterion have considered releasing the film, yet we’re still stuck with inferior VHS copies if we want to thrill to Charles Laughton as Moreau, Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law, and Kathleen Burke as Lota the Panther Woman. The wait for this DVD has been a torture worthy of the House of Pain.



2. The Best of the Cool Ghoul

May 4, 2009: Psychobabble Presents… Frankenstein A-Z

By the late ‘40s the original Universal Monsters were growing a little tired. While the “monster rally” pictures House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) were loads of fun, the creatures (Wolf Man, Dracula, and the Frankenstein Monster) were basically depicted as parodic ghosts of their former sinister selves. So the Powers That Be at Universal Pictures had the stroke of genius to pair their most monstrous properties with their most hilarious comedy duo in a film that put an official end to the golden age of Universal Horror while sparking off a successful string of Abbott and Costello Meet… (insert monster) films. None of those subsequent movies was as frenetically hilarious and dementedly delightful as the first. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) finds Bud and Lou going snout to snout with Universal’s most terrifying trio, and the one-liners (Larry Talbot: “Every night when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf.” Costello: “You and twenty million other guys.”) come fast and fabulous. Notably, this picture marks the second and last time Bela Lugosi would ever play Dracula in a feature film.

Of the nine novels Christopher Bram has composed, none has garnered more attention than the one originally published as The Father of Frankenstein. That’s largely because the book was adapted into a major motion picture as Gods and Monster (a considerably better title) in 1998, winning director and writer Bill Condon an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation and scoring star Ian McKellan slobbering reviews and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Frankenstein director James Whale. The book and film focus on