Review: 'The Who Hits 50!'

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only long-time Who fan who was initially perplexed, eventually exasperated, that the most over-compiled band in Rock & Roll was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with yet another compilation. I was exasperated because The Who’s discography in the U.K. and U.S. is in such a bad state. John Astley and Andy Macpherson’s radical remixes were an interesting experiment in the nineties, but they’ve been the only versions of The Who’s albums in the West for way, way too long. In 2011, Astley remastered those albums, leaving the original mixes intact, for Universal Japan. Finally, The Who’s back catalogue was in shipshape with excellent sound, cool bonus tracks, and respect to the albums we old-timers grew up hearing. A domestic release of these expensive Japanese imports was what I wanted for the fiftieth anniversary, not another greatest hits.

Review: 'The Worst of Eerie Publications'

Here’s some sleazy business: as editor of Eerie Publications during the post-comic code-era, Carl Burgos would just collect a bunch of pre-code comics from obscure titles and have his artists redraw them with new details. That those new details were often primitive splashes of blood or eyeballs squeezing out of sockets was even sleazier. Because these comics were published in black and white and sold on newsstands, the code didn’t get to mess with them, so they could be as nasty as Burgos wanted them to be. And he wanted them to be pretty nasty.

Review: 'DC Comics: A Visual History (Updated Edition)'

Last week I reviewed Matthew Manning’s Batman: A Visual History, which told the story of 75 years of dark knighting through perhaps every issue of DC Comics to feature The Dark Knight and his multitudinous co-stars. Manning patterned his book after another visual history he helped to write four years ago. DC Comics: A Visual History is at once more ambitious and less ambitious than its Batman-focused predecessor. It is more ambitious because it has to cover so many different titles, characters, and genres, and less because that plethora of themes means it can get away without being so exhaustive. Instead of the complete histories of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and the rest, we hit the major beats (no surprise that Batman and Superman still dominate).

Review: 'The Rolling Stones from the Vault: L.A. Forum (Live in 1975)'

Ronnie Wood got thrown right in the deep end when he joined The Rolling Stones in 1975. He had a lot to prove as the successor of Mick Taylor, the most classically accomplished musician ever to earn official-Stone status. That Keith Richards was in deep with addiction meant Ronnie had extra weight to pull on his first outing with the band, the Stones’ first tour of the U.S. in three years. With Jagger at center stage it wouldn’t be accurate to say all eyes were on him, but let’s face it, Ronnie had something to prove. Based on his work in the new “From the Vault” DVD, L.A. Forum (Live in 1975), he did a damn good job. Don’t get me wrong, Keith can still play, but he keeps an unusually low profile at this gig. When it’s his turn to step to the mic for “Happy”, he often doesn’t even bother to sing. The majority of the solos fall to Ronnie. When the band leans into “Fingerprint File”, it’s down to the new boy to play the funky bassline Mick Taylor handled on record. Bill Wyman sure couldn’t be expected to play it.

Ronnie stands out on Live in 1975, but he’s still upstaged by spotlight-snatching Jagger and even Billy Preston, who almost seems to be vying for bandleader at times. Kudos to control freak Mick for allowing the keyboardist so much leeway. Perhaps he realized he could use all the help he could get considering Keith’s condition. When the energy starts flagging during the center of this two-hour-and-forty-minute show (there’s an interminable version of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” that utterly fails to capture the recording’s propulsion), it’s Preston who gets it back on groove with performances of his “That’s Life” and “Outa-Space”. From there the Stones ride out the show with a Greatest Hits onslaught that never loses steam again, right up to the transcendent, show-closing version of “Sympathy for the Devil” that finds Mick leading a conga line of dancers and percussionists across the stage.

Not all of Preston’s contributions are stellar. He could have laid off his annoyingly squealing synth on several occasions. Yet he mostly shines in this show, and it’s cool to see a concert movie that isn’t solely owned by Mick for a change. We don’t see much of him, but Charlie Watts really makes his presence felt during this mostly powerful set too.

Eagle Vision’s new DVD release of the L.A. Forum gig sounds damn powerful too. The video is less spectacular, looking a lot like an old VHS bootleg complete with washed out bars running through the screen. The poor video quality actually didn’t do much to affect my enjoyment of this disc though. I guess a good concert is a good concert.

Review: Glyn Johns's 'Sound Man"

Glyn Johns isn’t a household name for anyone but the truest Rock & Roll obsessives. His c.v., however, will blow the most clueless cat’s mind. He has produced, mixed, and engineered recordings for The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Marianne Faithfull, Small Faces, Procol Harum, The Move, Traffic, Belly, Del Shannon, The Clash, and too many other artists to mention. While doing his most memorable work during the hedonistic sixties and seventies, he kept his head the whole time, preferring to fraternize with the era’s soberest players –Ian Stuart and Bill Wyman, for example—while putting in his hours with wild children like Keith Moon, John Bonham, and Keith Richards. Johns may be the only guy in the universe who could come away from a day’s work with Marianne Faithfull madly in love with the studio instead of her.

That clear-headedness is very evident in Johns’s new autobiography Sound Man. While his straightness may not always make for the most rocking and rolling reading, he has rubbed shoulders with so many greats that his behind-the-board perspective brings new angles to some old stories. Although he supports the theory that Mick and Keith were always really the producers behind their greatest hits, he admits to being impressed with Andrew Loog Oldham’s work on his first Rolling Stones session, though he doesn’t get too specific about what impressed him. Gear heads expecting a lot of production tips from one of the industry’s best might be disappointed. Johns aims for a broader audience and doesn’t skip over discussions of his most legendary gigs, such as capturing The Beatles during the tension-fraught Get Back sessions or working with Zeppelin on their debut. His minor recollections make these major stories worth retelling, as when he mentions that Paul McCartney wanted him more involved in the process than he was expecting or hilariously recalls showing off Led Zeppelin’s first recordings to Mick Jagger and George Harrison only to be met with confusion and disgust.

Sometimes Johns’s stories do elevate to the mythic level we expect from a Rock & Roll memoire. He reveals Bob Dylan’s plan to make a record with The Beatles and The Stones (!) and chillingly recounts how Small Faces’ manager Don Arden hired thugs to threaten him at gunpoint. Just as often he brings the myths down to earth, as when he describes The Rolling Stones’ utterly tedious recording process. Johns certainly pulls no punches. Pye Records’ A&R man Toy Hatch is “an unpleasant little shit with a massive ego.” The Stones’ “Sing This All Together” is “drivel.” Phil Spector’s version of Let It Be is “the most syrupy load of bullshit” he “ever heard.” So I guess what Sound Man lacks in Rock & Roll wildness it makes up for with a bit of Rock & Roll attitude.

Review:'The Batman Files'

Being the Batman is dangerous work. The dude may have survived uncountable scrapes, but his luck couldn’t hold out forever. He has even died on occasion (of course, no superhero in the comic book world stays dead forever…at least no one as popular as Batman). He thought Dick Grayson did an OK job as his temporary stand in, but not a great one. So Mr. Bats very thoughtfully collected all the information he believes is necessary to be him in a volume called The Batman Files. This over-sized, full-color paperback includes reams of Batman’s personal diaries, newspaper clippings about everything from the murder of his parents to the time Joker shot and paralyzed Batgirl and how he got that T. Rex in his trophy room, dossiers on associates and adversaries from Commissioner Gordon to The Riddler to The Mad Hatter, maps of Gotham, blueprints of the various Batmobiles and Batcopters, and other assorted Batmaterial you might need if you ever put down that damn bag of Doritos, get your ass off the couch, and don the cape and cowl so you can pick up where Bruce Wayne left off.

Review: 'The Doors: Feast of Friends'

In 1968, Jim Morrison's buddy Paul Ferrara accompanied The Doors on tour with his 16mm camera in hand. He shot some footage of the band on stage at the Hollywood Bowl and elsewhere, Jim rapping with an Evangelical minister, and babbling while abusing a grand piano backstage. After the tour, Ferrara cut the footage together and laid over studio versions of "Wild Child", "Moonlight Drive", "Five to One", and "Not to Touch the Earth", finishing the film with a sixteen-minute rendition of "The End" from the Hollywood Bowl. Feast of Friends screened at a few festivals, won an award, and then went missing only to show up on bootleg in the ensuing years.

45 years later Feast of Friends is receiving its first official release as a Blu-ray from Universal/Eagle Vision Entertainment. Doors fans will find quite a bit to interest them on this disc, though not necessarily in the main feature. A lot of the Feast of Friends footage has crept out in various forms through the years, and that version of "The End", which constitutes about a third of the film, can be seen in more meaningful context as part of the Live at the Bowl concert film. The extras on this disc, however, are an intriguing lot, with "Feast of Friends: Encore" consisting of 34 minutes of outtakes that provide a more satisfying glimpse of Morrison's talk with the minister and a fascinating peak at the recording of "Wild Child". If great live footage is what you want, check out The Doors Are Open, a British television documentary that attempts to link the band with some sort of political ideology (and fails since the guys in the group have nothing profound to say), but rips and roars with some really raw live renditions of "When the Music's Over" (a song I generally don't care for but kills here), "Five to One", "The Unknown Soldier", "Spanish Caravan", "Back Door Man", "Hello, I Love You" (with Ray Manzarek on lead vocals), and "Light My Fire" from London's Roundhouse. The songs are intercut with disturbing period footage of police brutality and pontificating politicians. Finally there's a live performance of "The End" recorded for Toronto television before The Doors really broke on through. It is tremendously riveting despite the band's self-censoring of the song's iconic Oedipal pantomime.

On the video front, Feast of Friends is the only feature that has really been subjected to a clean up. Significant blemishes are absent, but so is fine detail. The other pieces are fairly scratched up, but you won't care as much since they're so much more fun to watch.

Review: 'The World According to The Joker'

That Joker. He sure does get a bad rap, even though more than a few Bat fans, such as your humble reviewer (that means me), find him more fascinating than the ostensible hero of Batman comics, films, TV shows, etc. Well, the Clown Prince of you-know-what is finally getting his chance to tell his side of the story with a little help from ghost-writer Matthew K. Manning (who has been a very busy boy lately). 

Review: 'Scared to Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989'

The British punk movement of the late seventies was just the thing to flush out pop’s veins. But as brilliant as it was, punk had its limitations, and the genre’s most enduring acts—The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jam, etc.—quickly went in interesting directions that led them far from their lo-fi, two-chord origins when the eighties began.

At that very time, a new movement was born in Britain, one that picked up on punk’s minimalism and lack of fidelity, but didn’t necessarily share its sneering attack. If it was sometimes as nihilistic as punk, it was a lot more resigned about it. In years to come, this movement would be known as indie-pop and its guiding light that never goes out was The Smiths (who, like the original punks, absolutely worshipped The New York Dolls). While The Smiths’ influence is very detectable in many of the 134 tracks on last year’s Scared to Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989, and that title certainly seems to suggest a rather dour affair, you’d be wrong to think this box set was just a great, big, five-disc mope. In fact, there is a thrilling variety of styles and moods dancing inside this wonderful sampler. “Getting Nowhere Fast” by Girls At Our Best! is punk by any definition of the term. “The Jet Set Junta” by the divine Monochrome Set has a spaghetti western under taste and is as danceable as the best of sixties garage rock. Jane’s a cappella “It’s a Fine Day” is a defining example of twee. There’s psychedelia, Latin rhythms, hypno-noise, loungey crooning, jangling, jingling, and jostling.

The selection is also smart because while the point of sets like this is always to turn you on to obscure artists like Girls at Our Best! Grab Grab the Haddock, Close Lobsters, Gol Gappas, and Bad Dream Fancy Dress (who may win the best track award with their insane, genre-hoping freak show “Choirboys Gas [Hack the Cassock]”), there are enough familiar artists—The Jesus & Mary Chain, Josef K, Everything But the Girl, Pulp, Aztec Camera, Television Personalities, Primal Scream, Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, The La’s— to provide numerous paths in. Even cooler, most of these groups are represented by obscure early, demo, and live tracks, so there’s always something to discover.

The only knock against Scared to Get Happy is its allegedly innovative packaging, which requires you to pull required a visit to a YouTube video in order to figure out how to get the discs out of the damn box. Make sure you watch that video, kids, and be very, very careful. These are discs you do not want to scratch.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones from the Vault: Hampton Coliseum (Live in 1981)'

The Rolling Stones U.S. tour of 1981 will be familiar to a lot of people because it’s the one Hal Ashby documented in his concert film Let’s Spend the Night Together. Mick’s in his kneepads, neon, and cherry picker phase. Keith is off smack and looking pretty good. Stu’s behind the piano for his last time with the Stones. Tattoo You has just come out. The arenas are huge and the show is loooong. Ashby documented The Rolling Stones as they’d be from there on out. They were now crowd-pleasing pros far removed from the ragged marauders they were in their vital early years and even the punk posing of the much more recent Some Girls concerts.

But wait. Mick’s still affecting his Cockney stance and dropping politically incorrect (and stupid) asides about Turkish taxi drivers and fucking girls as cold as ice cream cones. The polished professionalism evaporates for a shambling run-through of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” that sounds like it’s about to disintegrate at any moment. A guy charges at Mick during the final song of the set—the ever-predictable “Satisfaction”—and Keith unpredictably whips off his guitar and beats the hapless intruder. It’s one of the last shocking moments in a career of many.

These wild moments were reserved for a show Ashby shot on December 18^th at Virginia’s Hampton Coliseum. Had he used that show instead of the other ones he used in Let’s Spend the Night Together, he would have had a much more exciting, much less rote movie on his hands. But you can now see all two-and-half hours of it on Eagle Vision’s new blu-ray Hampton Coliseum (Live in 1981), the latest installment of the Stones’ ongoing “from the vault” closet cleaning. Look, this isn’t Gimme Shelter or anything, but it is surprising to see the Stones putting on such a supremely watchable and listenable show at a time after a lot of fans believe the fire had gone out of the band. This release was kind of misrepresented three decades ago when some of its audio was pulled for the lackluster live album Still Life and a couple of the songs Ashby shot, “Going to a Go-Go” and “Time Is on My Side”, went into heavy rotation on MTV. Those are not among the best performances in this set, though it is very nice to see the guys dipping back into their past after spending so much of the seventies pretending the only record they’d cut before “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was “Satisfaction”. They’re clearly keener to play more recent things like “Let Me Go”, “Shattered”, and “Neighbors”, which are among the best performances here.

Hampton Coliseum (Live in 1981) presents the show with good sound, but the video quality is less impressive. Detail is minimal to the point that it almost looks shot on video (and for the record, some elements of the “Beast of Burden” performance must have been missing, because the movie suddenly looks like an ancient VHS tape for a few minutes). There are no extras aside from a booklet essay.