Review: 'My Name Is Love' by Darlene Love

If the cliché that great suffering makes great blues singers holds true, and the same could be said of great rhythm and blues singers, then there’s no wonder why Darlene Love possessed the greatest R&B voice of her generation. The daughter of an abusive mother uprooted from a liberal South Californian community to a racist Texas burg, a magnet for unfaithful men, and one of the many victims of Phil Spector’s huge ego and insidious business practices, Darlene Love’s mightily expressive voice can be heard on some of the biggest records of the sixties, both as a soloist and as in-the-shadows support to artists as diverse as Sam Cooke and Bobby “Boris” Pickett. Yet because her name so rarely appeared on the labels of these discs, she never received the acclaim she deserved. The bitterness such misfortunes brewed is evident in Darlene’s autobiography My Name Is Love, which often swells into outright nastiness.

Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest Singles of 1963!

Few artists were thinking in long-playing terms in 1963. Yes, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Dylan, and Spector all put out A-level albums that year. Everyone else was focused exclusively on the hit parade, and the competition was deadly. Along with the aforementioned artists, there were Smokey and Marvin and Roy continuing their lush, soulful onslaught. The Trashmen and Kingsmen made known the rumblings in many an American garage. The Stones, The Supremes, and The Ronettes made their first major statements, and the mighty Darlene Love belted out from more stunning discs than those that actually bore her name. Even Elvis managed to hang on while the new guard raged around him to release one of his last great discs. In a lesser year, any one of the following 45s could have been record of the year. But this is 1963, one of the greatest notches on the Rock & Soul timeline.

20. “Bossa Nova Baby” by Elvis Presley

In the year ruled by Motown, Phil Spector, and the Fab Four, the writing was well on the wall for the man who helped launch the Rock & Roll era so all those upstarts could have their shots. As recently as 1962, Elvis’s recorded output was still pretty consistent, if far poppier than the raw records of his electrifying early days. In 1963, he only managed two truly memorable sides. First up was the radical mood shifter “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise,” which John Lennon supposedly likened to a Bing Crosby record. More interesting was Leiber and Stoller’s frantic “Bossa Nova Baby.” With its freaky percussion, sudden Mariachi horn solo, and lead guitar work out, “Bossa Nova Baby” shined even as an unusually restrained Elvis sounded like a guest on his own record. The following year, he’d release the similar sounding “Viva Las Vegas,” which would be his last decent single until “Suspicious Minds” five years later.

19. “My Boyfriend’s Back” by The Angels

While the King of Rock & Roll no longer seemed capable of exuding Rock & Roll attitude, a trio of Jersey bad girls were putting out enough snarl for a dozen Elvises. The Angels sound anything but angelic as they purr sexy threats to a letch who hung around to bother the girls every night and say “things that weren’t very nice.” Sorry, sucker, but their beau is back now and you’re gonna get your ass kicked. Peggy Santaglia’s audible smirk as she tells her nasty admirer what’s coming to him lends the song a near sadistic tone, and when she loses control at the end of the record, she sounds like she’s going to dish out the punishment herself. “My Boyfriend’s Back” was apparently originally cut as a demo fro The Shirelles, but it’s hard to imagine those sweethearts working up as much switchblade edge as The Angels do on their slashing hit version.

18. “Pride and Joy” by Marvin Gaye

Speaking of sweet, was anyone sweeter than Marvin Gaye in 1963? Gorgeous to look at and hear, Marvin was a heart melter, and on “Pride and Joy,” he lets you know that you ain’t so bad yourself. Backing up Marvin on this cool cube of finger-snapping soul was a group who’d break out on their own a couple of months later with a hot hit you’ll find occupying the sixth spot of this list.

17. “Pain in My Heart” by Otis Redding

Review: 'Paul McCartney and Wings: Rockshow'

When The Beatles retired from the stage in mid-1966, venues were getting bigger but bands had yet to adapt to the changing nature of rock shows. They were all still twanging through inadequate amps and chirping over inadequate sound systems. What a difference a decade made. No more Beatles. No more weak equipment. No more fumbling with how to meet the challenge of entertaining a stadium of 60,000 people. 

Review: 'Horror Comics in Black and White: A History and Catalog, 1964 – 2004'

Like black & white photography or cinema, B&W horror comics have their highly partial fanatics. Comics historian Richard J. Arndt ranks among them, and his new book Horror Comics in Black and White: A History and Catalog, 1964 – 2004 gives his obsession with titles such as Creepy, Vampirella, Eerie, and Nightmare a neat outlet.

After a general history of the genre (not surprisingly, the writer emphasizes how the anti-comics congressional hearings of 1954 were still hovering over the horror comics industry a decade later), Arndt breaks down each chapter by publisher, providing specs, historical data, and a brief review of each individual issue. Horror Comics in Black and White is coolest when spitting out historical tidbits, such as the updates on which future artists (Iron Giant/Ratatouille filmmaker Brad Bird being one example) sent in fan mail. Arndt’s reviews tend to be fairly cursory, as when he deems the cover of Creepy issue #21 “probably the worse (sic) single cover Warren ever published on their comic magazines. Absolutely awful” without explaining why or what the cover depicted. Such teasing comments about the art and contents of these comics also made me wish Arndt’s book was a bit more generous with its illustrations. Still, even with its flaws, Horror Comics in Black and White is a worthwhile overview of a strain of horror comics that generally doesn’t get as much attention as its splashier color cousins. 

Review: 'The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond'

In his introduction to The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond, author Stephen Glynn describes his study as a two-faced, Janus-like creature hoping to both impart the cultural, social, and political implications of the movies he discusses and convey the “foot-tapping fun” that really is the pop film’s reason for being. In between his overly academic introduction and conclusion, Glynn does a bang-up job of fulfilling his wish. The British Pop Film may make you see new subtextual layers in old favorites such as A Hard Day’s Night and Yellow Submarine, which he subjects to a fascinating multi-faceted reading (Disney parody; jeering reaction to the wackos who burned Beatles records after Lennon’s insightful “more popular than Jesus” statement; etc.) appropriate to the film’s kitchen-sink aesthetic. It may put the implications of Performance, an atypical pop film he views as a surprising summation of many of the pop-film tropes that preceded it, and the ultimately self-defeating Pink Floyd: The Wall into clearer focus. It may also light a fire under you to see such relatively obscure films as the precociously satirical Expresso Bongo and Privilege, the first wholly “serious” pop film.

These kinds of studies of pop culture forms primarily created to turn a quid rather than make a profound socio-political statement (Privilege and Performance notwithstanding) sometimes say more about the analyst than the works being analyzed, but Glynn makes strongly convincing arguments. His organizational structure, which tucks each film into a timeline progressing through the “primitive” (the Cliff Richard and Adam Faith films), “mature” (the early Beatles films), “decadent” (druggy Yellow Submarine, Privilege, and the Rolling Stones films), and “historical” (That’ll be the Day/Stardust and the Who films), is a particularly neat way to show how these films built on and deconstructed each other.  Glynn also balances his analyses with well-researched historical backgrounds for each film, so the highly readable British Pop Film will be of interest to more than the semiotics crowd. I definitely dug it.

Review: 'Ride a White Swan: The Lives and Death of Marc Bolan'

The Marc Bolan sound is instantly recognizable, whether it is tucked in the arcane folk warble of a Tyrannosaurus Rex record or the slithery electric jab of a T. Rex one. Marc Bolan the man was harder to define. To some, he was an unlikable narcissist. To many others, he was an endlessly generous, eternally lovable fount of positivity.

Writer Lesley-Ann Jones’s Bolan-fan status can’t be questioned, and though her writing style is decidedly personal (she occasionally injects herself into the narrative, but never in an obnoxious way) she still fashions her compelling Ride a White Swan: The Lives and Death of Marc Bolan with reassuring balance. Jones does not whitewash the elfin wordsmith’s less admirable traits— which mostly stem from his massive, Mama-coddled ego—yet it’s still hard to step away from her biography with anything but love for the guy. That’s an impressive feat considering that his most obviously love-generating quality was his ability to make wonderful records, and Jones doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing Marc Bolan’s music in detail. Instead, she digs deeply into his rarely discussed Jewish background, his childhood as a weirdo outcast, his relationships with David Bowie and Gloria Jones, his hippie lifestyle and attitudes about sex and drugs, and most movingly, his incredibly tragic death and the awful aftermath soiled by greedy and clueless opportunists.

What we don’t get is a lot of ink about Marc’s band mates Steve Peregrine Took and Mickey Finn, which is either an oversight on Jones’s part or a comment on their superfluity in her subject’s life and art. And though Jones did an impressive job tapping the brains of many of Marc’s closest associates, including his love Gloria Jones and their son Rolan, I wanted more input from the man, himself. Alas Ride a White Swan is very short on vintage quotes from its main man. Consequently, Marc often seems as though he’s hiding behind a curtain, just slightly out of focus. In a way, this is an apt aspect of Ride a White Swan, since Marc Bolan loved to try on and discard personas, invent new myths for himself, and play the slightly hard-to-get Wizard of Odd while others obsessed over whether or not his unique lyricism was influenced by a learning disability or—most shockingly of all—he never actually read a single Lord of the Rings book! 

Twisted and Evil: The Influence of Classic Horror on ‘Star Wars’

“The scene where Anakin actually becomes Vader… it’s in the vocabulary of a time—of the 1930s and 1940s.”

-George Lucas, Starlog 2002

It’s always tempting to place pop fiction in a particular bag, and with its aliens, space ships, and interplanetary jaunts, Star Wars is usually dropped into the science fiction satchel. That’s fine for lazy critics, but the series has always been too much of a dabbler for its sci-fi status to ring totally true. Yes, George Lucas was clearly influenced by such items as Metropolis, Flash Gordon, and Dune. He was also profoundly affected by westerns (The Searchers), Samurai pictures (The Hidden Fortress), historical epics (Lawrence of Arabia), and fantasy (The Wizard of Oz). As the above quote indicates, classic horror also creeped into that yarn set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

The Star Wars saga made its most explicit reference to horror movies in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, when the Emperor plays Dr. Frankenstein by strapping the freshly mangled Anakin Skywalker to a lab table and transforming his protégé into a mechanized monster who lumbers forth like Boris Karloff. The movies “of the 1930s and 1940s” of which Lucas spoke are, of course, Universal’s Frankenstein franchise. Return of the Jedi even attempts to give the series’ nastiest villain a level of Karloff-style pathos by presenting Darth Vader as a conflicted creature. Inverting Karloff’s mute performance, the expressionless Vader conveys this new facet of his once wholly evil character via James Earl Jones’s voice.

David Prowse, the actor who embodies the dark lord, was limited by his bulky costume fitted out with a long, black Dracula cape. However, he did have a strong link to classic horror. Well, at least he had a link to a classic horror production company considering that 1970’s The Horror of Frankenstein and 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell are not two of Hammer Studio’s best products. In the latter film, the hulking Prowse co-starred with Peter Cushing, the actor who has played Dr. Frankenstein more than any other and whose gaunt, angular face is as iconically linked to Hammer as the studio’s logo. That face was always too unique to waste buried beneath mounds of creature make-up. As he did when playing the doctor, Cushing was still able to convey absolute monstrousness without the aid of so much as fake teeth when he played Grand Moff Tarkin, the unrepentant destroyer of worlds who keeps Vader under his thumb. In contrast to his portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein, there is not a wisp of humanity or conflict in Cushing’s work as Tarkin, making this his most evil role-- far more rotten than any he ever played in a pure horror picture.

Perhaps in an effort to link the prequel trilogy to the classic Star Wars trilogy’s links to Hammer, that studio’s other iconic face, Christopher Lee, was cast as the black-caped Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The character’s unfortunate baby-talk name is slightly ameliorated by his title, which reminds us of Lee’s most famous role, Count Dracula. The title also takes advantage of how Stoker’s vampire has forever transformed the very word “count” into a calling card of evil and monstrousness.

Star Wars dips deeper into the horror handbag and comes up with a menagerie of monsters distinct from the more typical egg-headed, big-eyed aliens common to outer-space fiction. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a classic of both science fiction and monsterrific horror, seems to have run a number of Star Wars’ creatures through its house of pain. The series is lousy with Wellsian man-beasts with names like Hammerhead, Walrus Man, Yak Face, Amana Man, and Squid Head. For the most part these overly on-the-nose names were coined by the folks at Kenner who had to come up with titles for their line of toys, and they have since been given less descriptive ones in the plethora of Star Wars novels and character guides. But a Walrus Man by any other name still looks like something that should be sunning itself on pack ice, just as Ugnauts and Gamorean Guards don’t look any less like hogs that recently hopped off mad Dr. Moreau’s vivisection table. Lucas’s dog Indiana directly inspired the beloved Chewbacca, a ringer for Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man. 

An actual wolf man of sorts also makes an appearance in the cantina scene of Star Wars, though this weird crossover was the result of too little time and not enough budget to create the exotic array of space creatures Lucas really wanted. In other words, the Wolf Man mask was simply handy. When Lucas fiddled with his film to make the controversial “special edition” of 1997, the one cantina patron he digitally replaced was the Wolf Man, perhaps because he felt that this creature was a step too far in paying homage to overly familiar horror icons. It may be worth noting that these animal aliens are almost never articulate like the creatures in the firmly sci-fi Planet of the Apes (the one exception is the fish-headed Admiral Ackbar, whose race being called “Mon Calamari” is probably the best joke in the entire Star Wars series), making their ties to the groaning, grunting, growling monsters of classic horror stronger.

The Star Wars series is speckled with other horror references, from the bounty hunters Zuckuss and 4-Lom, who apparently borrowed The Fly’s face, to the Jedis’ Dracula-like ability to bend weak minds to the Emperor’s Grim-Reaper cloak to the Blob-like Jabba the Hutt to the AT-AT attack, which plays like an onslaught pulled from some monster movie from 1950s U.S. or Japan (another horrory scene from an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back had Darth Vader feeding a flock of pet gargoyles at his Hellish compound). The series even features one legitimately creepy scene in which Luke Skywalker slips into a gloomy cave to confront a Darth Vader phantom, whose decapitated head explodes to reveal the nightmarish face of Luke, himself . It’s all part of Star Wars’ genre-smorgasbord, which may serve science fiction as the main course, but offers too many delectable side dishes to pass up.

Review: 'The Rise of the Vampire'

The title of Erik Butler’s new study is really misleading. The Rise of the Vampire suggests an origin story. Instead we get an all-inclusive history that takes wing with the first time the word vampire was put to paper in 1725 and the creature’s roots in Serbian folklore to the most contemporary depictions of the beast in pop fictions such as “True Blood” and Twilight. In between, Butler explores bloodsuckers in poetry, art, pop music, regional cultures, opera, religion, and politics along with the usual movies, TV shows, and books. He approaches the term “vampire” with smart elasticity, allowing off-genre works such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Murnau’s silent melodrama Sunrise to fit into the discussion as naturally as Nosferatu or Carmilla without setting off alarms that he’s overreaching. Interestingly, the same can be said of his strange theories, such as the case he makes for Quincey Morris being a vampire in cahoots with Dracula.

As a result, Butler manages to present this way over-analyzed topic with novel perspective and insight. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read another book that got into how singing is a sure-fire way to make a vamp lose its threatening potency, and it’s validating to read that Butler apparently squirms in his seat as much as I do when Spike starts crooning his power-ballad bullshit in the “Once More with Feeling” episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Peter Cushing

He was the gracious gentleman who played such vile creations as Dr. Frankenstein and Grand Moff Tarkin. He was the glaring, gaunt-face who embodied such noble fellows as Dr. Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes. Peter Cushing was one of the most versatile, committed, and skilled stars to thrill and charm horror fans. Yeah, you knew that already. So on the 100^th anniversary of his birth, let’s glare at twenty things you may not have known about Peter Cushing.

1. Peter Cushing’s grandfather Henry was an actor who performed with Sir Henry Irving in Faust at London’s Lyceum Theater. Irving’s manager was Bram Stoker, who’d one day write a certain novel that would be the source of one of Peter’s most memorable movies.

2. Collecting toy soldiers was one of Peter Cushing’s great enthusiasms, and he didn’t just keep them locked away in some glass cabinet. Adult Peter liked to get down on the floor with his toys and play with them!

3. Coincidentally, Peter Cushing’s first film role was in 1939’s The Man in the Iron Mask, helmed by James Whale, who directed Universal’s 1931 version of Frankenstein. Cushing was cast as a double for Louis Hayward in his dual role as Louis XIV and the monarch’s twin brother Phillipe. Whale also gave Cushing a small on-screen role as the Second Officer, which required him to learn fencing and nearly resulted in serious injury when he accidentally stabbed his horse with his spurs, sending the beast into a scenery-wrecking frenzy and leaving Cushing dumped on the floor of the set.

4. Early in his career, a future member of one of horror’s greatest teams appeared on screen with one of comedy’s greatest when Peter Cushing goofed around with Laurel and Hardy in 1939’s A Chump at Oxford.

5. Unlike that other creepy duo of Karloff and Lugosi, who never enjoyed a close relationship off screen, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee always remained great friends.

Review: 'The Best Film You’ve Never Seen'

As far as I’m concerned, hipping adventurous film goers to undiscovered gems is the most admirable thing a movie writer can do. Robert K. Elder takes an interesting tack in his new book The Best Film You’ve Never Seen by letting filmmakers chuck in their two cents. Their choices are as diverse as the directors Elder chose to interview. Kevin Smith, that maker of talky low-fi character comedies, discusses Fred Zinnemann’s historical epic A Man for All Seasons. John Waters gabs about Tennessee Williams while explaining why he digs Boom!, Joseph Losey’s critically and commercially disastrous adaptation of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.  Contemporary cult director Edgar Wright makes his case for the B-crime picture Super Cops. These were among my favorite entries in the book, not because of my feelings about these particular films—I actually haven’t seen any of them—but because these are some of the more articulate, well-informed, and fan-boy enthusiastic contributors. A few of my own favorite underappreciated and/or wrongly derided movies are discussed on these pages, but I’m not sure if Jay Duplass deepened my appreciation of Joe Versus the Volcano much and I’m sure that John Dahl was off base by instructing viewers to fast forward through the first twenty minutes of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Even when I felt that the interview subjects weren’t pulling their weight, Elder had so clearly done his homework on each film before conducting his interviews that he never failed to salvage each discussion with his own insights and trivial tidbits, making The Best Films You’ve Never Seen a consistently worthwhile read.