Review: 'Good Ol' Freda'

And so we’ve pored over Beatlemania so thoroughly that the only thing left to scrutinize is the band’s secretary. “Who would want to hear the secretary’s story?” Freda Kelly herself asks at the beginning of Good Ol’ Freda. Well, to answer her and any other skeptic, 660 Beatles fans, for starters. Good Ol’ Freda was made on their generous contributions to the film’s Kickstarter campaign. One fan even sold a single strand of George Harrison’s hair on ebay to earn $1,600 of the $58,000 ultimately raised. Well, there’s one story that hasn’t been told in any of the other Beatles documentaries.

Review: Edsel Records' They Might Be Giants Twofers

Saying that two nerdy dudes on guitar and accordion who sing ditties about night lights, President Polk, and imaginary rivalries between XTC and Adam Ant don’t sound like any pop group before them may provoke shrieks of “Duh!” However, John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants play with so many recognizable styles—country, garage rock, zydeco, psychedelia, sea chanty, reggae, new wave, soul, funk, new wave…you name it—that it’s still a shock to hear how little they sound like any artist before them. Like all truly visionary groups, plenty of pretenders would follow, but even after hearing a group like, say, Of Montreal, They Might Be Giants still sound totally individual and totally fresh.

After releasing two quirky albums on the indie Bar/None, They Might Be Giants signed up with great, big Elektra Records, which would put out their next four albums. Edsel Records, in conjunction with Rhino, is now packaging the quartet of major label releases as remastered, bonus-track appended twofers. These two double disc sets, which sound excellent, deluge the listener in nearly 100 tracks of wildly divergent styles that present many pleasures, though also a few problems.

We begin in 1990 with Flood the album that introduced non-cultists to the quirky work of They Might Be Giants with the big college radio/MTV favorite “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and the reasonably successful follow-up “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. This album is a kaleidoscope of genre pastiches and bizarre teacher’s pet lyricism (history, science, and civics lectures are all on the lesson plan). Great tracks dominate—the singles, the go-going “Twisting in the Wind”, “Particle Man”, We Want a Rock”, “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair”—though They Might Be Giants’ attempts to work in African-American forms don’t really work, especially when they try to marry heavy-handed social commentary to phony funk on “Your Racist Friend”. Lounge lizard crooning over awkward reggae makes “Hearing Aid” another track that might have been better as a bonus track, particularly since Flood offers the fewest bonuses. There are only three: the neat mallet-trembling of “Ant”, “James K. Polk”, which will make another appearance a few records down the road, and the atmospheric show-closer “Stormy Pinkness”.

Despite all the styles They Might Be Giants run through over nineteen tracks of Flood, noisy guitar rock is on short order. They made up for that in 1992 with Apollo 18. Though it lacks an indelible anchor like “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, and it’s grunge-era arrangements deprive it of Flood’s sonic diversity, Apollo 18 is another terrific album. The opening track, “Dig My Grave”, is as intense as these intellectuals ever got, but the strings provide early indication that predictability still isn’t on Flansburgh and Linnell’s to do list. The single “I Palindrome I”, “My Evil Twin”, the ’50s-ish “Narrow Your Eyes”, and “See the Constellation” are other stand out rockers, though esoteric weirdness has not been left out on the porch completely. The disjointed “Spider” weaves a retro-horror vibe, and the single “The Guitar” deconstructs conventional pop, leaving shards of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” among the debris (this number also reappears in three remixes among the bonus tracks, two of which are long, lousy club mixes).

The strangest stroke of Apollo 18 is a cluster of seconds-long mini-songs called “Fingertips”. This piece was intended to provide zillions of possible listening experiences to listeners comfortable with the “shuffle” button on their CD players. In a major blunder of an otherwise well thought-out repackage, Edsel has included all 21 mini-songs of “Fingertips” as a single track, so you won’t be able to try out the shuffle-experiment with this new disc. Drag.

Having given their music a big fuzz-pedal boost on Apollo 18, They Might Be Giants toured the album with a proper band and then went into the studio with one to cut their third disc for Elektra. While rocking harder distinguished Apollo 18 from Flood and served its first-rate songs well, the group sounds a bit like they’ve rocked themselves into a corner on 1994’s John Henry. For the first time, They Might Be Giants sound like they’re trying to sound like the classic artists who’ve influenced too many other bands before them (the greasy Faces country rock of “Unrelated Thing”, the Kinks music hall of “Extra Savoir-Faire”, the Who-like rhythmic abandon of “Out of Jail”, the Brian Wilson production touches of “End of the Tour”). The more conventional music of John Henry is matched with overly polished production. The less conventional tracks sometimes gasp for inspiration. The Alice Cooper-tribute/piss-take “Why Must I Be Sad?” is a good song but listing Cooper songs for an entire verse is not one of TMBG’s cleverest brain waves. That they’d even sing about Cooper—or cover The Allman Brothers Band’s “Jessica” in the same period (included among a weak crop of bonus tracks)—also indicate a lack of progressive ideas. While their jokiest ideas of the past were usually glued to listenable music, “O, Do Not Forsake Me” is not. As usual, there are still a number of really good songs—“Destination Moon”, “Thermostat”, “Subliminal”, “End of the Tour”, No One Knows My Plan”, “Out of Jail”—but John Henry is the work of a band that needs to huff some fresh air.

Cutting back on the overt weirdness and the sprawl may not have been every critic and fans’ idea of how They Might Be Giants should get their second wind, hence the unenthusiastic critical response to Factory Showroom (Allmusic.com gave it a mere two stars while The Rolling Stone Album Guide only improved on that score by half-a-star). This reaction reminds me of the near unanimous panning Guided By Voices’ similarly formula-breaking Do the Collapse received, and I think it’s nearly as unearned. While Factory Showroom is not as flawless as Do the Collapse (you read me right—it is flawless), it finds Flansburgh and Linnell serving up a series of superbly crafted pop and rock songs. “Till My Head Falls Off” and “Metal Detector” are two of their best big rock songs, and their cover of Cubs’ “New York City” is their most convincing blast of punk pop (the bonus track “Sensurround” is another top-notch rocker from this era). Oddly, the album’s most misguided track, the pale funk “S-E-X-X-Y”, was chosen as the single (it reappears in two different mixes, one of which is an interminable club one, at the end of this reissue). However, aside from that track and the equally misguided idea to muck up the otherwise good “XTC vs. Adam Ant” with pseudo-metal guitar noodling, Factory Showroom is full of good ideas and good songs worthy of reevaluation by the non-believers. Edsel’s new reissue is as good a place to get started with that as you’ll find.

Review: 'Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me'

In 1973, Big Star had their most significant coming out at a rowdy convention for rock writers (Lester Bangs and Cameron Crowe were among the attendees). A very apt event since the Memphis power poppers were always best loved by the critics. In a time when rock was all about big stadium bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Big Star’s concise, fresh-faced, jangly pop was at odds with popular tastes but a total balm to the professional music listeners chaffing beneath all the proggy bombast. Today it seems amazing that music so instantly accessible and timeless could have ever been unfashionable, but it’s at least one explanation for why Big Star never got to be the big stars they deserved to be.

Review: 'The Walrus & The Elephants: John Lennon’s Years of Revolution'

While the most popular image of John Lennon remains the peace-sign waving peacenik who sang “Imagine all the people living life in peace,” it has recently become more fashionable to call him out as a bully, misogynist, and rich hypocrite who sang “Imagine no possessions” and refused to take a firm stance on positive revolution.  What a lot of us commentators sometimes forget (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else) is that John Lennon wasn’t an image, he was a man, and a very complex one at that. Yes, at times he was a bully, a misogynist who sang “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man,” and a soft-on-revolution splash of cold water who tried to assure us “it’s gonna be alright” (it wasn’t), but as writer James A. Mitchell reminds us, John Lennon wasn’t always all those things. In the early seventies he worked hard on making amends for the rough man he’d been. After walking the middle of the road through much of The Beatles’ career, he decided to use his booming voice for more ideologically positive purposes, championing feminist principals as early as 1970’s “Well, Well, Well”; taking up with such high-profile activists as Jerry Rubin, Tariq Ali, and Bobby Seale; and moving from his plush Tittenhurst Park estate to a grubby apartment in Greenwich Village.

Review: 'Haunted Horror'

Chamber of Chills. Web of Evil. This Magazine is Haunted. Baffling Mysteries. None of these golden age horror comics enjoy the familiarity of E.C.’s Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, or Haunt of Fear, but they all share those books’ taste for ironic comeuppances and oozing creatures. They also suffered less high-profile but similar fates when the Senate Subcommitte on Juvenile Delinquency brought the whip down on horror comics in 1954. E.C.’s horror comics endured for a number of reasons. William Gaines bravely faced down the committee, which brought a temporary end to his comics but made him something of a celebrity, and rebuilt his empire with MAD Magazine. Then came the successful incarnations on screens big and small, guaranteeing Tales from the Crypt’s infamy among a lot of people who never even touched a comic book. And let’s not forget that the artists behind E.C.’s books were really, really amazing.

One will definitely recognize that Chamber of Chills, Baffling Mysteries, and the rest did not have illustrators of the caliber of Jack Davis or Graham Ingles (the oozing monsters are particularly poor looking), but they are still charmingly vile in their own ways. Take “The Constant Eye” (This Magazine Is Haunted… love that title!), in which the peepers of a dead man pursue the dude who offed him. Or “Black Magic in a Slinky Gown” (Baffling Mysteries), in which a spider woman takes revenge for all the squashed arachnids of the world. How about “Kill, My Minions of Death” (another fabulous title!) (Baffling Mysteries), which blends The Hands of Orlok and Frankenstein to shockingly gruesome effect? Let’s not even think about the necrophiliac sea creature of “Haunt from the Sea” (Journey into Fear)… it’s too horrible!

These horrible horrors are just a few of the stories Yoe Comics started compiling into a line called Haunted Horror in 2012. This is a really smart way to bring back lesser-known books that may not be able to sell as reissues on title alone. By skimming the cream of this creepy crop, horror comic freaks are not left wishing they were gazing at the Crypt Keeper instead.

Yoe has now compiled its first three issues of the Haunted Horror compilation into a sweet hardcover book of that same name. The full-color, partly glossy cover, with its groovy end papers depicting HH’s own ghoulunatics, contrasts the rough and ready presentation of these old comics. Unlike the E.C. Archives line that continues to drip out from a variety of publishers (the ball is currently in Dark Horse’s court with new volumes of Crypt and Vault now on sale and in the pipeline) there has been no attempt to recolor the original comics. They are printed on nice, course paper that makes it feel like you’re reading actual comic books. The Haunted Horror compilation also includes a couple of bonus stories that did not appear in its comic book form (one of which is presented in gorgeous pre-inked black and white) and an intro by horror comic geek supreme and Misfit Jerry Only.

The Mountain and the Meadow: The Day 'The Beatles' and 'The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society' were Released

November 22, 1968. The date arrived toward the exhausted end of a year that started with the United States taking a crippling blow in the Vietnam War with the Tet Offensive on January 30 and acting out in the most horrendous of ways with the My Lai massacre of March 16. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead a march through Memphis that would end with the death of a teenage boy and the injuries of sixty other people, and King, himself, would be murdered on April 4. On the 23rd, the cops would bring a violent end to a demonstration at Columbia University, and on May 6, student demonstrators in Paris would engage in their own revolutionary conflict against gas-grenade hurling officers. Andy Warhol shot on June 3. Robert Kennedy shot two days later to die on the 6. Protesters beaten by police in Chicago on August 28 and murdered by police and soldiers in Mexico City on October 2. And then on November 5, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States, ensuring many more dark days to come.

Review: 'Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece'

Violent, vibrant, and endlessly quotable, Reservoir Dogs knocked me out and psyched me up to see how Quentin Tarantino was going to top it, because if there was one thing I could tell from that audacious debut, it was that the director was just getting started. When word got out that Pulp Fiction was coming, I went into a state of hyper anticipation. When I finally got to see it in autumn 1994, it infected me completely. My best friend at the time and I didn’t just see the movie in the theater five times (which is more times than I’ve ever seen any other film in the theater during its first run); we wanted to be Jules and Vincent. Actually, I think we both wanted to be Jules. He was just too fucking cool. Like a little Fonzie. 

Review: The Beatles' 'On Air—Live at the BBC Volume 2'

The Beatles recorded 88 different songs for the BBC, the cream of which was released in 1994. The most thrilling thing about The Beatles Live at the BBC was getting to hear a plethora of songs they never put out on their proper albums, and it didn’t hurt that they rendered oldies such as “Some Other Guy”, “I Got a Woman”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Clarabella”, and “The Hippy Hippy Shake” with such excitement. Perhaps most significant of all was the release of “I’ll Be on My Way,” a pretty and wistful Lennon/McCartney original otherwise unavailable.

On Air—Live at the BBC Volume 2 gets closer to the bottom of the barrel, relying on a lot of material from Please Please Me and a lot already available on the first volume, only offering two otherwise unreleased numbers (the soppy standard “Beautiful Dreamer” and Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You” featuring the riff Paul copped for his bassline on “I Saw Her Standing There”), and no revelatory Lennon/McCartney rarities. Still, this is The Beatles’ barrel we’re talking about, which is a pretty good barrel. There are certainly some cool things to hear on On Air. There’s a version of “Words of Love” recorded fifteen months before it made its vinyl debut on Beatles for Sale. There’s a positively vicious version of “Money” (and am I hearing Lennon scream, “I wanna be free, bitch!” at the climax of the track?). There are also several of versions of big hits— “Please Please Me”, “From Me to You”, “She Loves You”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, an electrified “And I Love Her”—that were surprisingly passed over for volume one (which is receiving a remastering and rerelease in conjunction with its sequel). But what strikes me most about these recordings is the clear differentiation of instruments when compared to the (albeit less weedy) album versions. These recordings were the best ways to hear Paul’s bass work until Revolver. On a less musical note, there are also interesting Rubber Soul and Revolver-era solo interviews with each Beatle, their soberness providing a jarring counterpoint to the goofy clowning of the between-track banter elsewhere on On Air. I actually think this is the only time I’ve ever heard George address his role as the quiet one and Paul discuss his personal cultural renaissance that would so influence Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the following year.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall'

Having spent most of their career looking dour in T-shirts and jeans, Pink Floyd wasn’t the most photogenic of bands. Perhaps that’s why it has taken so long for someone to publish an image-heavy illustrated history of the band when there are already quite a number devoted to their brethren in The Beatles, Stones, Who, and Zeppelin. On the up side, they were always interesting to look at in their paisley garb during their most vital era with Syd Barrett and their stage sets were awe-inspiring enough in the later years to consume the eye.

Writer Hugh Fielder seems pretty consumed by those sets, spending quite a bit of time discussing the logistics of setting them up in Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall. Otherwise, his text is a broad-stroke history of the band. Fielder is definitely not writing for my fellow Syd cultists, summing up Syd’s albeit brief tenure in the band in about thirty pages and giving the bulk of his attention and accolades to Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. For the majority of the book, Fielder is not very critical of the music one way or the other, saving his album-by-album assessment for an appendix as safe as the rest of it. My favorite part was a two-page spread on the wacky Wizard of Oz/Dark Side connection. More fun side roads such as these would have been welcome.

Review: 'The Wizard of Oz: The Official 75th Anniversary Companion'

The 75^th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz won’t happen until late next summer, but Turner Entertainment Co. is so excited to see its property hit that milestone that it’s rushing several commemorative releases into the shops. The beginning of October saw the debut of a 3D Blu-ray of the film, and the end of the month saw publication of Jay Scarfone and William Stillman’s The Wizard of Oz: The Official 75^th Anniversary Companion. You can’t really blame Turner for jumping the gun since this movie has been stirring anticipatory excitement since before its 1939 premiere. Scarfone and Stillman’s book relates a pre-release frenzy the likes of which seems surprising in the pre-Star Wars age, let alone the pre-Internet one. The papers were abuzz with debates over whether the movie should be live action or a cartoon. The casting of Judy Garland was big news, as was the blond wig she was supposed to wear to make her look more like the Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s book. Baum’s fans were writing threatening letters to producer Mervyn LeRoy to ensure he didn’t stray too far from their favorite book.

All of this electricity indicates how ahead of its time The Wizard of Oz was, and few films still resonate with viewers of all ages as it does. Those dedicated millions will find much to tickle them in The Official 75^th Anniversary Companion, which compliments Scarfone and Stillman’s storytelling with choice artifacts from Turner Entertainment’s Oz archives. There’s a rare shot of Garland and Toto with Richard Thorpe, the director originally lined up to make the movie. There’s a copy of the agreement with uncredited director King Vidor stipulating that he would, indeed, receive no credit for his work on The Wizard of Oz. There are black & white and color shots of Garland in her inappropriately glamorous blond wig. There’s also a creepy shot of Ray Bolger in an early makeup that would have made him look more like the Wicked Witch of the West than the Scarecrow; several test shots of original witch Gale Sondergaard, who left the movie because she was too pretty; and production sketches, vintage advertisements, and images of funky old merchandise, such as Wizard of Oz Valentine cards and Wizard of Oz peanut butter. It’s all delightfully designed, finished off with a grab bag pouch containing a bookmark (very functional!), copies of the Witch’s death certificate and the hero’s rewards (Heart! Brain! Courage! Home!), a booklet of lobby card reproductions, a cardboard picture frame for displaying the character headshots included, and more.