Review: 'It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s'

Poster art made the big leap from the purely commercial to the voguishly decorative in the mid-sixties when hippies started decorating their groovy pads with brain-blistering images originally intended to attract flocks to Dylan concerts or other assorted happenings. During this period, infamous counterculture magazine OZ gave birth to a poster business with the express intent of enticing flower children to wallpaper their dorms with affordable images from the likes of Martin Sharp, Roger Dean, and Heinz Edelman, in essence transforming graphic art into something more personal. Big O Posters hawked its wares from 1967 into the punk era, when decidedly un-flowery artists such as H.R. Giger got in on the fun.

It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s tells the story of the company, profiles nineteen of its most significant artists, and most importantly by a great distance, presents many of its posters and other artworks by the profiled artists in full color and at large scales. The art towers above all else both because it is outrageously striking by design and because much of the text is not that interesting. Roger Dean may have produced some truly iconic fantasy images, but he’s kind of a dull dude. The same is true of most of the graphic artists who often tell their own stories via dry interviews. There are a few exceptions when too much acid (David Vaughan), awful wartime experiences (Virgil Finley), or proximity to the infinitely more exciting pop world (Edelman, who designed Yellow Submarine seemingly against his will, and Sharp, who co-wrote “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and created some Cream album covers) intervene. Witchy Vali Myers is the rare artist in this book who makes for interesting text on personality alone, and not just because she’s the only woman who cracked its all-too-typical Boys Club.

But no one is going to pick up It Must Be Art! for its words. While some of the artwork is indescribably ugly (Brad Johannsen’s “Parson’s Crazy Eyes”) or tacky (pretty much everything by Robert Venosa), there’s also a lot of cool stuff in a wide variety of styles. The best of it captures psychedelia at its most garish without losing focus: Sharp’s intricate graphic designs, Dean’s prog dreamscapes, Ivan Ripley’s nursery décor, Rudolph Hausner’s bold and grim surrealism, Graham Percy’s tactile cuteness, Virgil Finlay’s pointillistic intricacies, Wayne Anderson’s mellow, gnomish fairy tales. There are also neat spreads devoted to Yellow Submarine and Giger’s Alien.

Review: 50th Anniversary Remix of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When Dylan emerged from his cocoon with John Wesley Harding in late 1967, he seemingly wiped away the psychedelic excesses he helped set in motion with Blonde on Blonde instantaneously. One of the first major new bands to define the Dylan-provoked “return to roots” movement was The Band. However, the group was never as simple as their Antebellum South image implied.

First of all, they weren’t really a new band—they’d been Dylan’s backing band and collaborators for well over a year—and only one member of the group hailed from the American South. The rest were Ontario boys. The music on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, similarly defies dismissive pigeonholing. While John Wesley Harding and the eponymous debut by Creedence Clearwater Revival— that other misleadingly located face of new Americana— are as stripped to the bones as Sgt. Pepper’s or Days of Future Past are lavishly over-dressed, Music from Big Pink is a complex production full of small details that bring its sepia-hued snapshot of a dead world to vivid life. Eerily echoed backing vocals or organ lines skid out of the deep background. Trippy, leslied guitar lines creak in the foreground. Most intricate of all is The Band’s gorgeous loose-weave harmonies.

These fine details have never popped more than they do on the new, remixed edition of Music from Big Pink. The original mix sounds flat in comparison, though the new mix retains the original’s warmth, crunchiness, and antique atmosphere. Mastering is significantly louder, though at least in its vinyl incarnation, it doesn’t sound excessively loud. That 180-gram vinyl edition is presented as a double-LP set with both discs spinning at 45rpm.

For its fiftieth anniversary, Music from Big Pink is also available as a CD Super Deluxe box set and a pink vinyl edition.

Review: 'Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices'

A mark of a band’s legacy is the number of books devoted to it. A cursory search on Good Reads yields over 2,500 results for The Beatles (no, I am not going to account for how many of those are reprints or song books—that’s still a lot of books). A search for Elvis Presley yields only about 850, but there would probably be a lot more results if I’d just searched for “Elvis” and he’d been the only guy who ever had that name. The Stones: about 1,000. Hendrix: about 450. The Grateful Dead: about 350.

The kind of widespread obsession that accounts for such numbers trails off a lot when you start searching for books about nineties bands. Yes, there are over 200 results for Kurt Cobain (again we have term issues here because a search for Nirvana would unearth more, but tons of fiction and spirituality books would muddy the waters), over 150 for Radiohead, and over 100 for Pearl Jam, but barely a handful for such major artists of that era as The Pixies, PJ Harvey, and Liz Phair.

In light of that, the fact that Guided by Voices have now been the topic of three books makes it seem as though they have a relatively decent legacy in terms of nineties indie rock. Matthew Cutter’s Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices is the book that brings the GBV bibliography up to three. In some ways, it feels like the first though. Jim Greer’s Guided by Voices: A Brief History and Marc Woodworth’s Bee Thousand (one of the very best entries in the dodgy 33 1/3 book series I’ve read) are both terrific, but they’re short and lean too much on both the collage-like nature of the band’s music and band involvement—Greer was in GBV for a while for Chrissakes.

Cutter is apparently a Guided by Voices insider, and there are extensive interviews with most of the major members of GBV’s vast cast of characters, but his book is the first proper, objective, anything-but-brief biography of the group. It may not be as formally thrilling as the other two books, but it is much, much more informative. And beyond normal fan interest in any beloved band, this really is a fascinating story completely unlike any other in rock. What other artist besides Bob Pollard achieved “fame” when he was nearly 40, has a discography of over 100 madly eclectic albums, or puts so much hand-crafted care into making and packaging them? Who else can drink like that? The lack of support Pollard received from all but his most devoted drinking buddies also makes Closer You Are an exceptional tale of overcoming adversity. By default, it is also the definitive Guided by Voices biography, and since it’s probably going to be a while before a Good Reads search for “Guided by Voices” or “Robert Pollard” yields 350 results, it will probably hold onto that honor for the foreseeable future.

Review: 'Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978'

DC comics was suffering in the late seventies. Some blamed it on the harsh winter of ’78, a period of incessant blizzards that prevented a lot of kids from visiting the newsstand. Some blamed it on DC’s publisher, Jenette Kahn, whose failed scheme to reinvigorate her company involved swelling page counts, cover prices, and titles. Keith Dallas and John Wells accuse unsympathetic distributors in the epilogue of their new book Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. However, they mostly stay out of the way, allowing quotations from reams of old articles and interviews to tell the story of a topsy-turvy period in comic history.

What we learn is that DC was not the only company in over its head. Golden-boy Marvel was too, only to be rescued from the abyss when it agreed to publish spin offs of a weird new sci-fi movie by the kid who’d made American Graffitti. However, the main focus is on DC, particularly Kahn’s planned “Explosion” that was to see 22 new titles hit the stands in a new longer format only to be cancelled at the last minute. The titles that were to be included in this infamous Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, where those titles ended up, and the reasons for that cancellation are major points of discussion.

There is also a lot of discussion of pricing and the business-side of comics publishing in this book, but all of those facts and figures are the least interesting thing about Comic Book Implosion. What’s more intriguing are the soap-opera drama, the bizarre and desperate ideas (an African-American superhero named Black Bomber whose secret identity is a white racist? Yow.), and the stray triumphs that emerged amidst the turbulence. We see the successful revival of the Teen Titans, the births of Black Lightning and Firestorm, the mania surrounding Superman: The Movie and its handsome star, and the ballyhooed bout between the Man of Steel and Muhammad Ali. And despite the initial failure of Kahn’s planned Explosion, she did a lot of good for DC, such as her cultivation of younger talent and new titles, her abolishment of lazy reprints, and her implementation of profit sharing.

Although Dallas and Wells did not conduct any new interviews for Comic Book Implosion, they culled their quotes from such a wide swath of sources, and from such an interesting line up of industry folk (including Kahn, Larry Hama, Neil Adams, Carmine Infantino, Archie Goodwin, James Warren, Muhammad Ali himself, etc.), that it doesn’t matter much. Yes, it makes for messy storytelling, but that’s basically the case with all oral histories. And Dallas and Wells’s refusal to editorialize allows us readers to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, who is lying and who is telling the truth, which makes for more involving reading. The cavalcade of photos and illustrations— which includes an 8-page, full-color spread—makes it fun.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s 'Greatest Hits'

In the year of such earthquakes as Revolver, Pet Sounds, Aftermath, Blonde on Blonde, and the dawn of Hendrix, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66— with their airy bossa nova rhythms, Bacharach/David covers, and tropical cocktail party atmosphere— must have seemed terribly unhip to the Now Crowd. Removed from any contemporary matters of what is or ain’t with it, Mendes’s jazzy pop remains eternally refreshing like a sweet island breeze. However, there is a certain power too as the group’s most famous song, “Mas Que Nada”, surges like an ice cream tidal wave, and the group’s cover of “Spanish Flea” picks up momentum that would have swept Herb Alpert out to sea.

Sadly, the latter is one of the tracks missing from Mendes and Brasil ’66’s 1970 Greatest Hits collection, though “Mas Que Nada” naturally leads the way, and essentials such as “Going Out of My Head”, a hip-swiveling cover of “Day Tripper (one of three Beatlesongs), a panoramic one of “Scarborough Fair”, my pick for the ultimate version of “The Look of Love” (sorry, Dusty), and Mendes’s own wonder “Look Around” are on board. Ideally, a couple of the more Muzak-leaning songs (I’m thinking of the non-hits “So Many Stars” and “Pretty World”) would have been trimmed to make way for grander stuff such as “Bim Bom”, “Watch What Happens”, and of course, “One Note Samba/Spanish Flea”, but no use crying over the line up of a nearly 50-year old comp. It’s still groovy.

(Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s Greatest Hits is now getting back in print on vinyl via Craft Recordings.)

Review: 'Twin Peaks and Philosophy: That’s Damn Fine Philosophy'

Appearing at a time when television’s greatest philosophical questions were “How will MacGuyver save the day with nothing but a wad of  gum and an enema bag?” and “Which toddler will fall on his ass this week on America’s Funniest Home Videos?”, Twin Peaks seemed like an intellectual breath of Douglas Fir-scented air. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series swam in the murky waters of metaphysics, synchronicity, duality, and other philosophical concepts, and these were not just set decorations for a show often dismissed as arbitrarily weird; they were central to its plot and purpose. So Twin Peaks is an ideal topic for Open Court Books’ Popular Culture and Philosophy series.

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Three U2 Albums

OK, so in 1987, U2 completed the transition from being a particularly successful college rock band that had not yet cracked the top ten of Billboard’s album charts to the biggest band in the world. The Joshua Tree went to number one in almost every major market in the world, U2 filled stadiums and dominated MTV, Bono became Rock’s hunky conscience, and so on and so on. Yet the edge of a band once edgy enough to deserve a member called The Edge had gone a bit blunt. The punky energy that made Boy and War so invigorating was softening into a sound more befitting top-forty radio, and by the time U2 released the bluesy, snoozy soundtrack for their major motion picture Rattle & Hum in 1988, they were as edgy as a beach ball. Yet they still sold millions of albums, so it is to U2’s credit that they then started fucking with their tried and true formula at the height of their popularity.

U2 wasn’t the first minister to marry Rock & Roll and club-based dance music (that kind of thing had already been happening in the Madchester scene for a few years), but they were certainly the biggest. So new recordings such as “Mysterious Ways” and “Even Better Than the Real Thing” sounded fairly radical when they commandeered the airwaves in 1991. Digging deeper into Achtung Baby, there were somewhat more out-there things such as the sensual “The Fly”, the surging “Acrobat”, and the pounding “Zoo Station”, all of which hinted at what U2 could really do when they let their imaginations go wild.

And that’s just what they did with their next album. Zooropa is divisive not only because Bono’s new yen for adopting obnoxious, ironic personas wore out some less-committed fans but also because the music is so weird. The thing is, U2 could do weird very, very well. If “Mysterious Ways” was a bit of a refreshing change after the tedium of “Angel of Harlem”, then “Numb” was a revivifying plunge in an icy stream, taking everything we came to know about U2—including Bono’s bombastic pipes—and wiping them away. That’s the most revolutionary cut on Zooropa, but the title track, the hilariously discofied “Lemon”, the trashy smash “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car”, and “The Wanderer”—starring guest vocalist Johnny Cash and guest instrument a twenty-dollar Casio keyboard—are just as far out. Bono’s withering perspective of contemporary life went down more pleasantly with a less hectoring tone and more humor. The only slight misstep is “Stay (Far Away So Close)”, but only because it doesn’t try to rise to the rest of the album’s level of experimentalism. 

Zooropa is one of the shiniest and most underappreciated gems in U2’s back catalogue, but it isn’t for everyone, and those who prefer Larry Mullen, Jr., without the drum machine accompaniment could take solace in The Best of 1980-1990, which gathers up choice tracks from U2’s pre-experimental career. Much of what made the comp is unimpeachable—“New Year’s Day”, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Bad”, “I Will Follow”, “The Unforgettable Fire”—and the Joshua Tree hits sound fresher when cut in among the more vital classics, but there is an over-reliance on Rattle and Hum that blunts the history. Because most of those songs were huge hits, they had to be included, but it would have been nice if some room had been made for minor singles such as “Two Hearts Beat As One”, “Gloria”, and “A Day without Me” to provide a more complete portrait of the early years— and because they’re great tracks.

Yet there are a few slight oddities to mix up the familiarity, most notably a good rerecording of the B-side “Sweetest Thing” (which actually ended up becoming a sizable hit in most of the world) and alternate edits of “New Year’s Day”, “Where the Streets Have No Name”, and “Bad”. The CD also included a hidden track and token obscurity— the title number and only representative of U2’s second album— though “October” is not much of a song.

Nevertheless, while you wouldn’t want to be without Boy or War, The Best of 1980-1990 still presents an adequate picture of U2’s first decade, and Achtung Baby and Zooropa certainly constitute the best of what came next, so these three albums are a pretty good trio to put forth together in a wave of vinyl reissues from Universal Music. Zooropa includes two bonus tracks—long, clubby, nearly unrecognizable remixes of “Lemon” and “Numb”—and The Best includes a bonus track from its Japanese edition, the relatively obscure Joshua Tree track “One Tree Hill”, which was released as a single in Australia and New Zealand. Each album arrives on double, 180-gram vinyl, and each is remastered with a reduction of the CDs’ brightness. 

Review: 'The Future Then: Fascinating Art & Predictions from 145 years of Popular Science'

For nearly a century and a half, Popular Science magazine has been keeping the world on top of the latest developments in science and technology. Despite its prestigious history, it ain’t always right, and that’s one reason why The Future Then: Fascinating Art & Predictions from 145 years of Popular Science is fun. This attractive, hardcover tome collects everyone of the quarterly’s covers in full-color cover, each one positing some sort of scientific prediction made in the name of the mag. The captions assess whether or not that prediction came true, and they do so with cheeky irreverence. How could you not have your tongue in your cheek when combing over such wild brain waves as underground ice cities, a robotic exoskeleton called the “man amplifier” that can turn anyone into a superhero, and mechanical racehorses constructed from taxidermied stallions? Amazingly, some of this wackadoo stuff actually came to pass (though much did not exactly endure). It’s also interesting to note the particular obsessions of each decade, with the forties depressingly focused on machines of war (and also depressingly, most of those predictions came to pass), the fifties focused on DIY projects for new homeowners, and the sixties focused on…err… James Bond.

But as I suggested, its factoids are just one reason why The Future Then is boss. The artwork is what really makes it a retro rush, as Popular Science’s painted covers look like they should adorn pulp novels for nerds. The magazine’s impressive roster of artists include Norman Rockwell and Reynold Brown, who’d really make a name for himself designing movie posters for such sci-fi classics as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Sadly, in the nineties, Popular Science discontinued its painted covers for sterile digital images, so the final sixty pages of The Future Then are not nearly as charming as the ones that precede them. It’s also tough to assess whether or not technology predicted so recently was a success or failure since it could still come to pass. So perhaps we should stay tuned for volume two, assuming that such quaint things as magazines, the ability to read, and life on Earth still exist in another 145 years. Have a nice day!

Review: ‘The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland’ Expanded Edition

The covers-laden Supremes A-Go Go was significant because it was the first LP by an all female group to top the Billboard charts, but a much greater musical achievement was The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland. With Where Did Our Love Go and More Hits, Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland completed the trio constituting the hit-single makers’ finest albums. The hits—brooding “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”; ethereal “Love Is Here and Now Your Gone”—are among The Supremes’ finest, and might be Motown’s first official acknowledgment of the psychedelic era. Many of the non-hits are nearly as wonderful. Di, Flo, and Mary are at their most ecstatic on the shoulda-been-a-hit “There’s No Stopping Us Now”, their most haltingly dramatic on “Remove This Doubt”, their most grindingly raw on “Going Down for the Third Time”. The other songs that weren’t made famous by other Motown artists are groovy too (only the slightly cornball “Love Is In Our Hearts” is a bit flimsy) and the redundant covers are kept to a relatively minimal three. So don’t be fooled by its generic title and cover. The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland is essentially The Supremes’ Revolver: eclectic, a bit dark, a bit trippy, but always colorfully inviting.

Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland is the latest Supremes album to get the expanded, double-disc treatment from Universal Music. Along with very good-sounding presentations of its mono and stereo mixes (no debate here: the mono mix buries the imbalanced stereo one, though the way the morse-code guitar line of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” flits from channel to channel in the stereo mix is pretty neat), there are numerous bonus tracks, the centerpiece of which is a live set at the Copa from May1967. Like the unlistenable second side of The Four Tops’ On Top, this set is one of Motown’s weird attempts to force a teen-oriented act to appeal to boring old people. The big band arrangements are very cabaret, as is the emphasis on show tunes and standards. The group’s biggest early hits are compressed into a medley and “You Can’t Hurry Love” is played at blinding speed, both suggesting that the Powers That Be wanted The Supremes to get the teeny bopper stuff over with as quickly as possible. It’s all so stodgy and stagy that a relatively stripped down “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” stirs visions of a horde of young punks crashing mom and dad’s cocktail party. Diana Ross was also suffering from a cold that shot her voice. Yet the recording is nicely polished and there is significant historic importance since this was the last concert the group recorded before the sad departure of Florence Ballard.

More musically valuable is the inclusion of the peachy single “The Happening” and its fine flip-side “All I Know About You” (though in odd mixes that allow the songs to peter out instead of fade), a powerfully orchestrated revision of “You’re Gone But Always in My Heart”, and a cool extended remix of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” along the lines of the remix of “Love Is Like an Itchin’ in My Heart” that stood out on last year’s deluxe A-Go Go. There are also two booklets worth of vintage press material, a new interview with Lamont Dozier, track notes, essays, an annotated timeline, and lots of period photos. A splashy package, indeed, but the original album in its mono mix remains the uncontested star attraction of The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland: Expanded Edition.

Review: 'Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with The Rolling Stones at Altamont"

Meredith Hunter. We all know the name Altamont and its associations, but too few know the name of the young man murdered at the hands of the Hell’s Angels at the infamous free concert staged at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969. His name is Meredith Hunter, and in Just a Shot Away, author Saul Austerlitz makes damn sure that we know that Hunter was not just some pawn in an event lazy writers love to use as the anti-Woodstock or as a pat conclusion to the sixties and its peace and love ethos. No biography of The Rolling Stones, the band that headlined Altamont (of course, you already knew that), fails to mention Hunter’s name, but I’ve never read one that gave a full, breathing profile of the man’s life. Even before his tragic end, it was fascinating, horribly troubled, creative, deeply complex. Hunter was raised by a schizophrenic mother whose piece-of-trash husband forced her into prostitution. Hunter was an artist. He was a juvenile delinquent. He was a druggie. He was a loving and devoted uncle and brother. He was a complete human being who lived a multi-faceted life despite its brevity. I never knew any of these things before reading Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with The Rolling Stones at Altamont, and that's what makes it such a gift. 

It is also a genuine horror story as Austerlitz describes the sickeningly unfolding events of Altamont with a masterful grasp of tone, detail, and character (though he is not above a few sloppy gaffes, the most egregious one I caught being his attribution of Paul Kantner’s on-stage barbs against the Angels to the wrong Jefferson Airplane guitarist: Jorma Kaukonen). We learn all the events leading up to the matter that ostensibly justified the Hell’s Angels’ attack. Yes, Hunter had a gun, but he only took it from his car after the notoriously racist biker gang had been beating on the crowd for hours, and if they were treating white people like that, what would they do to him? I can never defend possessing a gun under any circumstances, but simply having one in one’s possession hardly justifies being stabbed multiple times, having your head kicked in and stood on until your nose is left a smashed mess that makes breathing through it impossible. Apparently, the gun wasn’t even loaded.

While the Hell’s Angels are without question the villains of this story, the Stones have also often been criticized for fashioning the situation that put a bunch of scumbag, violence-addicted, racist, right-wingers in the role of security. Austerlitz not only repeats the truth that too few people know—the Grateful Dead’s camp were actually responsible for hiring the Angels—but also emphasizes the Dead’s cowardice in turning tail on an admittedly hellacious scene while the Stones met it head on in a vane attempt to settle the crowd. Without question The Rolling Stones were a great band, but they certainly never seemed heroic. As described by Austerlitz , their taking the stage at Altamont is probably the closest they ever came despite their ineffectualness. Their silence about Hunter immediately following the concert, however, was unconscionable.

But this isn’t the Stones’ story. To a small degree it is the Hell’s Angel’s story, but it is really the tale of a young, black man murdered by racist “upholders of the law.” Sound familiar? The contemporary relevance of this story is not lost on Austerlitz, who explicitly ties it in with the stories of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and all the other men who have become the victims of racial violence at the hands of cops and vigilantes. In writing of how the Hell’s Angels acted “out a parodic version of American freedom, where freedom itself was an amoral act, unkind and selfish” and “required tuning out the quiet voices that insisted on the inherent dignity of others, and amplifying the ones that demand that others respect yours,” Austerlitz perhaps inadvertently ties this story to the grotesquely toxic White House of 2018. For such reasons, I defy anyone with a conscience to read this account of a 49-year old crime without getting angry as hell today. As you can probably tell, I did, and for that, Just a Shot Away is not only a great piece of historical journalism but an enduringly vital and relevant one too.