Review: 'Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of The Rolling Stones'

Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why was one of the very first books about The Beatles I ever read. It’s a track-by-track analysis that really opens up the unconscious brilliance of Lennon and McCartney by exploring their songs from a music theory basis while never fumbling into off-putting academic speak. Riley examines their performances and production strokes with equal keenness. It is enlightening, unpretentious, and iconoclastic (certainly Riley must have been one of the first writers to actually challenge the quality of some of The Beatles’ best-loved works, including Sgt. Pepper’s). I read Tell Me Why right around the time I was first becoming obsessed with The Rolling Stones. Naturally, I started dreaming someone would write such a book about those guys too.

Non-Review: 'The Beach Boys in Concert'

When I agreed to write The Who FAQ for Backbeat Books I knew there would be one unfortunate side effect of the joyous occasion: I’d no longer be able to review the publisher’s books. This made me a little sad because I’ve enjoyed reading several of their titles in the past. Plus I love getting free stuff. Nevertheless, I figured it would be a conflict of interest or some other ethical issue to continue reviewing Backbeat’s titles after I started working for them, so I stopped requesting review copies.

Despite my resolution to be a good, ethical boy, I still received an unsolicited copy of a new Backbeat title called The Beach Boys in Concert. I assume this was either because Backbeat's publicist is not aware that I'm writing a book for Backbeat or it's a really subtle way of letting me know I've been fired. In any event, I read and enjoyed Ian Rusten and John Stebbins’s book, so I figured it would not be unethical to at least give it a little shout— not a “review”… that would be very naughty—but a shout, like when you shout at a fellow employee, “Good job!” I assume people with actual jobs do that sort of thing.

Rusten and Stebbins give a thorough view of 50 years of Beach Boys concerts, not just listing dates, venues, and when available, set lists, but providing a more colorful portrait of the shows with excerpts from period concert reviews and recollections from early Beach Boy David Marks, backing musician Daryl Dragon, fans in attendance, and others. I found the reviews particularly enlightening: I was surprised to see how early on the critics had grown tired of Mike Love’s jackass stage act (although at a performance on December 28, 1966, Love did manage one genuinely funny quip amidst a career of painful groaners). It’s a good summer read.

Newly Unearthed David Lynch Video Interview from 1979!

In 1979, Tom Christie was a student at UCLA. On assignment for his television production class he interviewed a young cinematographer named Frederick Elmes and a young filmmaker named David Lynch. Lynch had just released his first feature: a little romantic comedy called Eraserhead. 34 years later, Christie has posted his interview on a little romantic comedy called The Internet, and it is an utterly fascinating time capsule. This is a rare and valuable opportunity to see Lynch discussing his most perfect film upon its release, giving a few tantalizing insights on its making and meaning, and reacting to a few reactions from critics. We also see the wildly varying reactions of an audience exiting a midnight screening at the Nuart cinema. Some find Lynch "inane." Others admit to having already seen Eraserhead eight times. Elmes says a couple of things too.

This is completely necessary viewing for Lynch fans and can be watched here.

Cult Club: 'The Man from Beyond' (1922)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Harry Houdini the escape artist is legendary. Houdini the movie star is less celebrated. This may be due to the poor state of the four features he made: the first two, 1919’s The Grim Game and 1920’s Terror Island, are apparently missing reels. Perhaps it is also due to the quality of the surviving films. I cannot speak of Houdini’s final film, 1923’s Haldane of the Secret Service, which I have not seen. The Man from Beyond, the film he wrote and starred in the previous year, I have.

What initially drew me to this movie, in which Houdini plays a man unfrozen after 100 years in a block of ice, was the simple curiosity of seeing the guy in action. The thing is, there isn’t a ton of action in The Man from Beyond. The set up, in which a pair of explorers chip Howard Hillary (all of Houdini’s feature-film characters share his initials) out of his chilly tomb, goes on for an eternity. When he’s out, he only performs a single escape. Those who paid their four cents, or whatever a movie ticket cost in 1922, to see a film starring Harry Houdini must have been disappointed by this dearth of the man doing what he was famous for doing. They were probably further disappointed that he slips from his straight jacket in an extremely long shot that gives no indication of the artistry behind the escape. It’s the kind of thing any old actor could have accomplished with no greater special effects than a few poorly fastened buckles. His subsequent shimmy up a rope and out the window of a prison-like asylum is more impressive, but nothing any reasonably athletic stuntman couldn’t have done. In short, there isn’t much of what made Houdini HOUDINI in The Man from Beyond.

Houdini's tiny, blurry escape.

What there is is a surprisingly effective supernatural love story. Before becoming trapped in ice, Hillary was in love with a woman named Felice Norcross. After his revival, he finds the spitting image of her just as she’s preparing to wed the nefarious Dr. Trent. By far-fetched coincidence, this woman’s name is Felice too, but her surname is the more appropriate Strange. Not yet knowing that he’d spent a century in hibernation, Hillary insists that Felice is his girlfriend, and she gets some serious déjà vu pangs. This is when Hillary ends up getting carted off to the asylum. With his escape comes the most exciting portion of the film as he and Felice hustle to spring her dad from Trent’s clutches. There’s a decent bit of fisticuffs and a nice climax in which Hillary and Felice almost pop over Niagara Falls. In the end, there is talk of how Felice Strange is the reincarnation of Felice Norcross, who makes a ghostly appearance in the film’s most overt special effects shot.

Even with Houdini’s climb from the asylum and the Niagara Falls incident, it is the love story that most resounds in The Man from Beyond. Houdini and Jane Connelly give effective performances as the multi-generation-spanning couple (Connelly is particularly impressive, so I was surprised to see that her only other credit on imdb is an uncredited role in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.), and the appearance of Norcross’s apparition makes for a quietly transcendent epilogue. This ending is all the more poignant because within four years, both Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly would suffer early deaths. 

 Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly

I may have heightened that poignancy a bit with my choice of soundtrack, and Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love—with its sweeping romance, eeriness, and side-long concept about a man who freezes to death after falling overboard only to be reincarnated at the last minute—was an appropriate choice (Bush had her own fascination with Houdini, to whom she paid tribute on her previous album The Dreaming).

Despite its flaws—its slowness, its paucity of great escapes—The Man from Beyond was still worthwhile viewing for its romance and for the very reason I checked it out in the first place: the opportunity to see Harry Houdini move and breathe, the chance to see history come to life.

Review: 'The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones'

The cover of The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones announces the book as “An anthology of the best writing about the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” and Sean Egan as editor. This isn’t really accurate. In fact, half of this book’s mammoth 500-plus pages are filled with Egan’s newly written record-by-record critique/history of The Rolling Stones, making him far more than a mere editor and his book far more than an anthology of previously published pieces. There is an entire book authored by Sean Egan alone shuffled in with the magazine articles he culled from 50 years of Stones history. It’s a cool format telling a very linear tale lacking any obvious holes. We get Egan as our tour guide through every phase of the band’s career, and the various articles as authentic period perspectives of those phases. As will always be the case with this sort of thing, I did not agree with a lot of the author/editor’s assessments (he’s particularly hard on Rolling Stones No. 2, Between the Buttons, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” and Let It Bleed), but I appreciated his appreciation of the Stones’ pop and psych periods, which most critics tend to dismiss outright. He even caused me to reevaluate Out of Our Heads, which I usually think of as a lesser effort.

Egan is as thorough with his article selections as he is with his own look at the Stones’ long career. There are management-sanctioned hype pieces from the band’s early days, interviews both enlightening and rambling, concert reviews, portraits of each Stone whose name is neither Jagger nor Richards, career retrospectives, and a fluffy blog piece that brings the band into the twenty-first century. There’s even an uncomfortably insightful hoax from a journalist who happens to be named Bill Wyman but presumably never touched a bass guitar.

The one problem is that much like the Stones’ deathless career, The Mammoth Book is a bit too mammoth. There are a few too many reminders of the band’s decline after the seventies, both in Egan’s sneering criticisms of every album after Some Girls (he has a point with most of them, though we do disagree on the best and worst tracks from this later period) and the abundance of articles that backload his book. But there’s a lot to dig before the long, slow depressing downfall starts setting in around page 350, and if nothing else, The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones would be worth the cover price for an 80-page—80-page!— interview with Keith that appeared in abridged form in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. Now that’s mammoth.

Review: 'Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons'

Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons compiles twenty-two interviews David Ensminger conducted for such landmark ’zines as Thirsty Ear, Maximumrocknroll, and yes, his own Left of the Dial. My interest in his book was sparked by the inclusion of a chat with The Damned’s Captain Sensible, so I was slightly disappointed when I saw how brief that conversation was and how many post-first wavers were featured in Ensminger’s anthology. My disappointment melted when I realized how fine an interviewer our host is and how insightful and articulate his selection of punk icons is.

Left of the Dial offers a fascinating range of experiences from such subjects as The Dils’ Tony Kinman, a first waver who lays out a near academic history of Rock & Roll, and Minuteman Mike Watt, who offers a harrowing account of the illness that nearly killed him. The diversity is impressive too as we get perspectives beyond the white, hetero dudes who constitute the prevailing punk stereotype to dig the experiences of what it’s like to be Latino (El Vez of The Zeros), female (Kira Roessler of Black Flag), gay (Gary Floyd of The Dicks), or black (Freak Smith of Beefeater) in the scene. Ensminger is a good interviewer too, respectful of his subjects but not afraid to call out the somewhat prickly Shawn Stern of Youth Brigade about the apparent weakness of the 1992 comeback record Come Again or query Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records on her sometimes-criticized business practices. Best of all is a riveting mini-oral history of San Francisco’s Deaf Club, an actual gathering place for hearing-impaired patrons to feel the beat from such performers as X, The Dils, Dead Kennedys, and a performance artist who’d receive an enema on stage.

My only gripe is that Ensminger could have oriented the reader better by indicating exactly when his interviews took place. It was a little jarring to be reading along only to discover that 9/11 had just taken place or Bush had just invaded Iraq. But that’s a pretty minor quibble about a selection of interviews so readable that I guess they now qualify as timeless.

Review: 'The Hidden World Revealed ' by The Three O'Clock

When MTV hit in the early eighties, and all you needed was a single digit to finger a Casio-keyboard and an industrial-sized can of Aquanet to become a superstar, a small sect of L.A. bands rejected the latest styles to worship at the pointy boots of The Beatles, The Byrds, and Syd Barrett. Michael Quercio gave this movement a name: the Paisely Underground. His band, The Three O’Clock, helped define the sound with other groups such as The Rain Parade, The Dream Syndicate, and the most successful one of the lot, The Bangles.

What set these bands apart from the pseudo-psychedelics of groups such as The Dukes of Stratosphear (aka: XTC in disguise) and Naz Nomad and the Nightmares (aka: The Damned in disguise) is that they didn’t strive for utter authenticity. Their embracing of synthesizers and up-to-the-minute production values resulted in a sound that can be instantly placed in the eighties even as it pays reverent tribute to the sixties. That totally groovy sound is represented among the tracks familiar and otherwise on The Hidden World Revealed, Omnivore Recordings’ new Three O’Clock anthology.

Newbies will get turned on by infectious bubblegum classics such as “With a Cantaloupe Girlfriend,” “Jet Fighter,” and “All in Good Time,” with its tinkling, early-Rick Wright-style piano fills. The faithful will dig into the oddities, such as a B-side version of the Latin hymn “Regina Cæli” that begins like a meditative Pet Sounds homage before exploding into a Hurdy Gurdy Man wall of sound. A demo of “Jennifer Only,” cut when The Three O’Clock were still called The Salvation Army, sounds like a bit of raging pre-punk noise piped in from Liverpool’s Cavern Club circa 1962. Despite some overtly eighties-synthesizer arches, “A Day in Erotica,” presented in an alternate version, is the purest psychedelia in the collection, with its warped mid-section sound collage. As a starting point into the strange world of The Three O’Clock—where everything always sounds slightly sped-up and romantic partnerships with fresh fruit are not out of the question— The Hidden World Revealed does a fine job. The demos, alternate versions, and rare single sides make it valuable to those who’ve already ventured down into the Paisley Underground.

Farewell, Richard Matheson

 His work helped launch Steven Spielberg's career, was a staple of "The Twilight Zone," and essentially birthed the modern notion of the zombie (the swarming variety versus the voodoo one). Richard Matheson was one of horror and sci-fi's greatest yarn spinners, as I covered a couple of years ago in this piece written in honor of his 85th birthday. This very brief tribute marks a sadder occasion as Richard Matheson died yesterday at the age of 87. So pop Duel or "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" into the DVD player or give I Am Legend a long-overdue reread tonight in celebration of the many shudders the man gave us during his remarkable lifetime.

Cult Club: 'Dragonslayer' (1981)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Sound cinema’s first half century had no shortage of magicians, from the Kong-conjuring Willis O’Brien to his greatest protégé Ray Harryhausen, from the filmmaking team that brought L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to the screen to the one that realized Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. Of course, no name was so consistently responsible for dazzling fantasies as Walt Disney. Beginning with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney seemed to effortlessly role out fairy tales tailored for children but with enough pure artistic craft and cinematic scope to enthrall parents too. The trend continued beyond Walt Disney’s 1966 death with such box office breakers as The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, and The Rescuers. The latter film was released in 1977, and we all know what happened that year. Suddenly, cartoons would not be good enough for young filmgoers. Adaptations of old fairy tales and talking mice wouldn’t be either. The new generation would require high-tech hardware and state-of-the art effects. The name Walt Disney would instantly seem as though it was echoing from a quainter past. The name George Lucas was roaring in from the future.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives'

Is there something inherently wrong about taking anything as visceral as Rock & Roll and holding it up to an academic analytical lens in the same way one might examine the literature of Goethe? I’m not sure, but that’s exactly what editor Helmut Staubmann does in his introduction to The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives, using Goethe as a touchstone to lead us into the discussions that follow. With a career as rich and a cultural impact as powerful as that of The Rolling Stones, maybe it isn’t out of line to dig deeper than “Good beat; you can dance to it.” Keith Richards may believe it’s only Rock & Roll, but Mick Jagger has certainly plotted his work, career, and public persona as deviously and carefully as, say, Federico Fellini, and no one would take an academian to task for subjecting 8 ½ to sociological analysis.