Review: 'Steve Miller Band Ultimate Hits'

The Steve Miller Band made some of the most simplistically pleasurable hits of the seventies.  Yet Steve Miller’s career is a complicated wad of contradictions. Before becoming a superstar for making zillions with conservative pop like “The Joker”, “Jet Airliner”, and “Take the Money and Run”, he was a cosmic bluesman in the West Coast underground scene. He became a major superstar despite being almost completely faceless. Although his songs have shamelessly ripped off Cream, Joe Walsh, The Mamas and the Papas, Free, and even himself (“Fly Like an Eagle” recycles the riff of 1969’s “My Dark Hour”, and “Take the Money and Run” recycles everything but the lyrics of 1969’s “Kow Kow Calculator”), the songs somehow transcend that issue. In other words, listening to “Rocky Mountain Way” doesn’t really scratch the same itch that “The Stake” does. Despite the fact that his music doesn’t even have the emotional core of hits by similar seventies megastars such as Fleetwood Mac and Elton John, those songs have connected with millions of people. Seemingly everyone born before 1975 has had the original Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974-78 in her or his record collection at some time.

The interesting thing about the new compilation Ultimate Hits is how it attempts to sort through those contradictions. The set attempts to put a face on Miller by beginning not with his hits, but his personal history and voice. It begins with a short audio clip recorded during his childhood in which an older relative tells him he has a great voice and will find great success with it (the tuneless “la la las” that follow drop a hilarious punch line on the clip). Next up is a live version of “Gangster of Love” that begins with three minutes of Miller’s personal monologue on a background that is actually quite extraordinary: his godfather was Les Paul, who taught Miller his first few chords, and T Bone Walker continued that education.

After those four minutes of speech that effectively humanizes the hit machine, we get into a semi-chronological trip through the early psychedelic blues (though much of it is presented in live versions from later in his career), hey-day hits, slightly new wavey eighties period, and more recent recordings that forces listeners to hear beyond the 1974-78 radio-focused compartmentalization of the old Greatest Hits. Miller does not emerge from this set on the same level as the most individual artists of his generation, nor even as potent as Fleetwood Mac or Elton John—he’s too dependent on the musical ideas of others and too emotionless for that—but it does draw a more complete portrait of the real human behind the hits than any previous compilation. And more importantly, “The Joker”, “Jet Airliner”, “Take the Money and Run”, and the rest are still pleasing to hear forty years on.

Review: 'David Lynch: The Art Life' Blu-ray Review

David Lynch the filmmaker has been the subject of such documentaries as Toby Keeler’s Pretty As a Picture and Jason S.’s Lynch 1 and Lynch 2. These films were fascinating opportunities to watch Lynch work despite his notorious reluctance to explain the meanings behind his cryptic works. Lynch has also shied away from talking about his personal life aside from a few stock stories, such as his disturbing sighting of a naked, battered woman when he was a child and the violent nightmarishness of his time in Philadelphia. These tales primarily serve as all the explanation he’ll give about the inspirations behind Blue Velvet and Eraserhead respectively.

Director Jon Nguyen and cinematographer Jason S.’s recent documentary David Lynch: The Art Life manages to finally dig deeper into the artist’s origins. Jason S. had apparently been living with Lynch since making Lynch 1 in 2007, allowing him greater access to Lynch’s work, thoughts, and trust. The fruit of this is a revealing story that goes well beyond the stock ones. We learn that Lynch was not just an “Eagle Scout,” as his Twin Peaks-era bio read in full. He also went through a phase as a Bobby Briggs-style J.D., drinking and causing trouble with a bad crowd. He has discussed his parents in stock stories about Donald Lynch’s habit of walking to work in his “ten gallon hat” every day and Edwina Lynch’s refusal to allow her son to use coloring books since she thought it stifled true creativity. In The Art Life he goes beyond those stories to discuss a dad who was deeply disturbed to witness his son’s approach to art that sometimes involves rotting plants and dead animals and a mom who encouraged her son’s creativity but withheld more physical affections. Some stories, such as one involving a neighbor named “Mr. Smith,” are too painful to tell, and he leaves them hanging and elliptical like so much of his film work.

Those films do not get much attention. Lynch’s “pre-professional” movies The Alphabet, The Grandmother, and Eraserhead are discussed briefly, leaving the focus more on his work as a painter and sculptor. His artworks can be very revealing regarding his film work, though. Those who were captivated by Twin Peaks: The Return will be thrilled to see how much of his non-filmic artwork reflects imagery from his recent 18-hour film.

The opportunity to watch Lynch create such works is invigorating too. They are three-dimensional pieces very much in the physical realm, and he creates them using thick, almost alive materials, grabbing and pulling them and spreading them on boards with his hands. I personally found Twin Peaks: The Return to be the most stimulating piece of art I’ve encountered since Lynch’s previous film, Inland Empire, in 2006. Watching him create is equally stimulating. So is hearing him speak. Lynch’s awkwardness and reluctance as a speaker is well known, but that somehow also makes him a mesmerizing communicator, and his is the only voice we hear in the film.

David Lynch: The Art Life comes to blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The film looks great, making the deliberately Lynchian booth from which he speaks (Ribbon mic. Green trees. Red light) pop off the screen. Of course, it is the less pristine footage of him as a child and teenager, his parents, and behind the scenes footage of his early films that is most electrifying. This disc is oddly short on supplements for an installment in the Criterion Collection, especially considering how much outtake footage Jason S. must have accumulated over ten years, but an interview with director Jon Nguyen makes the main feature even richer and more revealing.

Stones Release Promo Video for Another 'Satanic' Track

Not without cause, the Rolling Stones have a reputation as misogynists, but a new promo for their lovely "She's a Rainbow" culled from the band's least misogynistic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, is a "celebration of women through the ages from all walks of life." This promo by Lucy Dawkins and Tom Readdy of Yes Please Productions follows on the heels of the company's recent new promo for "2000 Light Years from Home", also created to promote the 50th Anniversary Edition of Satanic Majesties. 

View the "She's a Rainbow" clip on Vevo here, and keep your fingers crossed that a promo for "Citadel" or "Gomper" is currently in the works.

Review: 'The Lost World (1925)' Blu-ray

No movie has been more influential on the still-popular giant monster genre than King Kong, and no movie was more influential on King Kong than Harry O. Hoyt’s 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. A band of adventurers journey to a mysterious jungle where they encounter a menagerie of stop-motion dinosaurs that menace and fascinate the folks. They manage to bring one of the giant creatures (an Apatosaurus, not a giant gorilla) back to the big city (London, not NYC) where it runs amok on a major monument (London Bridge, not the Empire State Building). There’s even an amorous primate who only has eyes for the leading lady.

One of the big differences between The Lost World and King Kong is that the characters are motivated by love rather than the thirst for fame and glory. Lloyd Hughes’s Ed Malone joins the expedition because his completely caring and not at all sociopathic fiancé will only marry him if he has had strange adventures that involve risking his life. Bessie Love’s Paula White gets on board because she wants to save her father who had been marooned in the lost world during a previous expedition. This makes the characters more likable than King Kong’s cast of misogynistic butt heads. Jules Cowes’s servant in black face is painful to watch—you can’t expect to watch a silent-era jungle picture without at least one extremely offensive characterization—but the film is sweet as a whole despite the dangers posed by a leering ape man (his toothy makeup suggesting that The Lost World was influential on another key horror classic: Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), a fire-spewing volcano, and those prehistoric beasties.

And let’s not get too hung up on our human cast, because it’s clear who the real stars of The Lost World are. Allosaurus, apatosaurus, edmontosaurus, triceratops…oh my! While primitive compared to the more polished stop motion in Kong, the special effects of The Lost World— which include work by Kong’s main animator, Willis O’Brien— remain a joy to behold.

The film itself is also more of a joy to behold than it has been in eons since much footage seemingly stranded in the cinematic lost world has been recovered. Once only available in a meager and allegedly less-than-coherent hour-long cut, the film is now basically back to its original length (apparently, only a cannibal sequence remains missing). The restoration looks great on Flicker Alley’s new blu-ray release of The Lost World. Some sequences are pretty scratched up, but most are relatively clean and some are downright pristine, which is good news for a near 100-year-old movie, half of which has spent most of that time in limbo.

Flicker Alley gives this landmark release its due respect with a bestiary of bonus features. There are nine minutes of “deleted scenes,” though these are more like animation tests that find the various dinosaurs simply going about their business rather than anything that expands the narrative or action of the film. The most fascinating bits of this bonus involve brief stills of the animators in shot setting up the dino models. There are also two complete short films with animation by Willis O’Brien. The cooler of the two is the completely animated, nine-minute R.F.D., 10,000 B.C., a sort of Flintstones precursor in which prehistoric people tool around in dinosaur-drawn carts. There’s also the thirteen-minute Ghost of Slumber Mountain, in which a guy encounters a ghost, a giant bird, and more dinosaurs during a camping trip. Most historically significant is five minutes of O’Brien’s legendarily incomplete film Creation. This is the footage that got him the King Kong gig. Audio commentary by film historian Nicholas Ciccone, an image gallery, and booklet essay round out a lovingly assembled package.

New Promo Video for Stones' "2000 Light Years from Home"

As part of the promotion for the new 50th Anniversary Edition of The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, Yes Please Productions has created a new promo for that album's masterpiece (and my personal fave Stones song) "2000 Light Years from Home". The animation is inspired by/based on the album's inner gatefold and has more than a whiff of Terry Gilliam's signature work. Watch it here:

However, if you are disappointed by the lack of Mick Jagger in druid headdress, you can always check out the track's original promo vid here:

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of The Rolling Stones''Their Satanic Majesties Request'

In his liner notes to last year’s Rolling Stones in Mono box set, David Fricke wrote that Their Satanic Majesties Request “is no one’s favorite Rolling Stones album of the 1960s.” Loyal Psychobabble readers know that I take great issue with that conclusion. Not only is the Stones’ one concentrated trip into dizzying psychedelia my favorite Rolling Stones album of the 1960s, but it is also my favorite Rolling Stones album, period. I find it endlessly more alluring than the album to which it is endlessly compared: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I do not see it as an aberration as so many critics do. I do not dismiss it as nothing more than a stepping stone to the Stones’ “peak” period of 1968-1972. I see it as the peak.

If Fricke had done a little research, he might have concluded that I’m not completely alone in this opinion (one of my favorite defenses of the album is a blog comment left by Captain Sensible of my favorite punk band, The Damned). Still, it is not a particularly popular opinion, so when I saw the press release for a multi-disc, fiftieth anniversary edition of Their Satanic Majesties Request, I literally gasped. My delight turned to disappointment when I saw that the four-disc package was to contain remasters of the original stereo and mono mixes spread over two LPs and two hybrid SACD/CDs and nothing else. This struck me as a major missed opportunity considering how much fascinating material could have been appended to this set. There are a few outtakes, such as the winding instrumental listed on bootlegs as “5 Part Jam”, the Procol Harum-esque “Majesty Honky Tonk”, and the bluesy (though less interesting) “Gold Painted Nails”. The Satanic sessions also produced such interesting items as takes that really showcase the Mellotron in “Citadel” and “2000 Light Years from Home”, early acoustic takes of “Jigsaw Puzzle” and “Child of the Moon” (though some estimates place these tracks in the Beggars Banquet era), and most revelatory of all, the fifteen-minute jam that was ultimately edited down to create the two versions of “Sing This All Together” on the completed album. The period single “We Love You” b/w “Dandelion” and its sundry sessions and alternates (including the famed “Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Blue” demo of “Dandelion”) could have also found a place in a truly deluxe Satanic Majesties Request.

That is not the edition we received though, so let’s look at what is here instead of what isn’t. Mastering was not performed through an analog process but with Direct Stream Digital, which is very faithful as far as digital processes go. Compared to 1967 stereo vinyl and 2002 stereo SACD/CD release, this remaster is louder though not brick walled, with pleasing high ends and much more dynamic bass. That bass could get a tad overpowering at times on punchier tracks such as “Citadel” and “2000 Man”, but it sounds good overall and didn’t give me a headache. To my naked ear, the mono vinyl sounds identical to the one included in the Rolling Stones in Mono set so I’ll assume that the CDs are the same too.

The heavy-duty packaging is a major improvement over any version of Satanic Majesties since the original release. This fiftieth anniversary edition is the first since the mid-seventies to restore the 3D, lenticular cover, though the image is slightly bigger yet also slightly cropped compared to the original. While the low-quality, misproportioned, 2D cover included in The Rolling Stones in Mono held a plain, white inner sleeve, the deluxe set reproduces the clouds-on-a-red background sleeve of the original release for the mono LP and a blue version similar to the front-cover border for the stereo disc. Unfortunately, it’s a tight fit and a bit of a chore to get the vinyl in and out of the sleeves.

The big, unexpected boon of this set is Rob Bowman’s essay in the booklet slipped inside the gatefold. There are no apologies in this essay. No dismissals. Bowman treats Their Satanic Majesties Request like the psychedelic royalty it is, providing history, a track-by-track analysis, and some truly valuable nuggets of trivia that answered some of my own questions about the pinging sounds on “Citadel”, the weird backing vocals on “She’s a Rainbow” and other behind-the-scenes details. I could read an entire book of this stuff (get cracking, Rob). The booklet also contains some very groovy photos of the Stones trying on their wizard costumes and constructing the fantasy tableau on the front cover.

So while this might not be ideal as a “deluxe” edition of Their Satanic Majesties Request, it’s a very nice fiftieth anniversary re-release, and really, I’m just grateful that this thing exists at all. Spotlighting Their Satanic Majesties Request with any kind of special edition will hopefully draw more attention to it, win some new fans, and make opinions like David Fricke’s even more inaccurate and irrelevant.

'The Old Dark House' Coming to Blu-Ray This Halloween Season

The Old Dark House is one of Universal's best and most underrated horror films of the 1930s. It's the movie on which director James Whale really started exploring the humor that would blossom in his twin masterworks The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein, and features a killer cast that includes Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, and Melvyn Douglas. 

This October 24, Cohen Media Groups will give this underrated picture its due with the first Blu-ray presentation of The Old Dark House. No word on the bonus features yet, but a 4K restoration of this ooky, kooky classic is reason to start celebrating now. Have a potato!

Review: Deluxe Edition of Chris Bell's 'I Am the Cosmos'

In the mid-seventies, Chris Bell was messing with hard drugs and Jesus and exploring his own music apart from Big Star. Like Third/Sister Lovers, Bell’s new music was troubled, sometimes preachy, sometimes a sheer mess, and almost always lovely. Although he was working with Geoff Emerick, who’d engineered so many of Bell’s beloved Beatles records, the production rarely reflected the Fabs’ polish—“Get Away” being a particularly defiant mass of echo-chamber noise. However, the melodies were consistently enchanting even as the songs were as eclectic as the jumbled production approach. Bell whipped up some bleary psychedelia (“I Am the Cosmos”), spare intimacy (“You and Your Sister”), crashing Rock & Roll (“I Got Kinda Lost”), and burbling bluesy funk (“Fight at the Table”). Bell’s recordings amounted to the finest marriage of Rock and religion since George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, another chunk of poppy testifying that even an old atheist like me can love.

Sadly, Bell only got the chance to release a mere single from his clutch of recordings before he died in a late-1978 car crash. The rest would not release until Rykodisc’s 1992 collection I Am the Cosmos. Seventeen years later, Rhino expanded that 15-track disc to a 27-track deluxe edition with tracks by Bell’s pre-Big Star groups Icewater and Rock City and numerous alternate versions and mixes of his solo material. Now Omnivore Recordings is expanding it further (though losing the Icewater and Rock City tracks, which Omnivore recently reissued on a comp called Looking Forward: The Roots of Big Star) with a double-disc edition of I Am the Cosmos. The new additions include more alternate mixes, which often strip away most of the electric instrumentation to reveal simpler, cleaner renditions, and a couple of good instrumentals. These extras are nice but not as essential as the missing Icewater and Rock City tracks. Nevertheless, the core album remains an ecstatic listen in any format.

Review: 'The Comic Book History of Comics'

The history of comics told in comic format is such a simple concept that it seems deceptively obvious, yet there’s little that’s simple about that history and little that’s obvious about The Comic Book History of Comics. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book (which collects a previously published six-issue comic series) is how much stuff writer Fred Van Lente crams into its 150 pages, tracing the history of storytelling through pictures all the way back to prehistoric cave paintings through the first political cartoons to “The Yellow Kid” to cinematic animation to the superhero era to the congressional inquiry on the effects of comics on juvenile delinquency to the pop-art sixties and finally ending with the underground comics of the seventies. Within this story is genuine drama as Max Fleischer and Walt Disney vie for the crown of animation king and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko clash.

Van Lente’s storytelling has a definite perspective, and one that may rankle comics freaks as he sneers at some of the medium’s more revered figures (Stan Lee; William Gaines) while taking an unfashionably even view of the man who may be its easiest-target villain, noting the numerous accomplishments of Fredric Wertham that have nothing to do with that guy’s dopey crusade against comic books. Most welcome is the isolated profiles of a number of women in the comics industry since women are generally shut out of this story’s primary arch for the usual patriarchal reasons.

Ryan Dunlavey’s artwork is sometimes a bit too cutesy for my tastes, but I liked his outlandish tendency to fuse creators with creations, as when he imagines Disney as a mutant man-faced Mickey Mouse, and there are some clever visual references and in jokes. The cutesiness also gets downright subversive when Dunlavey depicts beheadings, lynchings, and Adam West and Frank Gorshin yucking it up at an orgy.

Review: 'Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction'

So you just took a nice leisurely ride in the front seat of a shopping cart and successfully fooled your mom into buying you a box of teeth-rotting Fruit Brute. Things have been going pretty well during this supermarket outing. But then, just as you’re about to leave, you catch sight of a young girl’s face absolutely bulging with terror as she peers through a tiny die-cut window. What could be destroying this child’s nerves? As your mom rummages in her handbag for a ten-cents-off Palmolive coupon, you pull the cover open and are assaulted by the terrifying image of that girl in the arms of some sort of skeleton-faced demon.