Review: 'It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music from the Original Soundtrack' on Vinyl

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip was special because of its willingness to acknowledge the failures of childhood. Its TV-special incarnation built on that specialness with the refreshing move to cast actual child actors in the roles of Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the gang, and Vince Guaraldi’s sophisticated yet whimsical jazz score. The elliptical arpeggios of “Lucy and Linus” can still launch a million memories for anyone who grew up watching Charlie Brown choose the scrawniest X-Mas tree on the lot or Snoopy battle the Red Baron.

Guaraldi’s soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was released in conjunction with that TV special in December of 1965. Our fellow Peanuts have had to wait a lot longer for the release of the soundtrack to the second most popular Peanuts special. Last year, Craft Recordings put out a CD soundtrack for It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Because original tapes of Guaraldi’s score were apparently unavailable, the disc consists of music pulled straight from the special’s soundtrack. That means audio fidelity is a bit weak and non-musical sound effects are often audible. Sometimes this enhances the mood, as when spooky groans and giggles intrude on the mysterious “Graveyard Theme” or Snoopy weeps along with Schroeder’s rendition of “Roses of Picardy”. Other times, incongruous plops and crinkles invade the music to baffle anyone who cannot remember the accompanying visuals well. Because many of these pieces are mere passing cues, they often fade out as soon as they fade in, and there is a great deal of repetition. Versions of “Lucy and Linus”, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”, “Charlie Brown Theme”, and “Trick or Treat” each appear three times, making for some pretty repetitious listening over the soundtrack’s skimpy twenty minutes.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music from the Original Soundtrack is now making its vinyl debut just in time for Halloween season. Because it is so brief, all seventeen short tracks are lumped on one side of the record. Side B is devoted to one of those vinyl etchings that are becoming increasingly common, much to the frustration of audiophiles who’d probably prefer that the music be spread over both sides so that the disc could spin at 45 rpms instead of 33 1/3. Of course, considering the lo-fi nature of this soundtrack, increasing its speed probably wouldn’t make much sonic difference.

Nevertheless, Guaraldi’s music remains an evocative, magically autumnal time machine to some of our happiest Halloween memories, so Craft’s soundtrack album is still a nice souvenir…though it’s no substitute for sitting down with the kids to actually watch Linus waste his Halloween sitting in a pumpkin patch like the blockhead he is.

Review: Reissues of Robert Pollard's 'Kid Marine' and 'Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department'

As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first, Robert Pollard was in a similar state of transition. In 1998 and 1999, he made his first hi-fi Guided by Voices albums, each with new line ups, each for different labels, and each with different critical consensuses (Mag Earwhig!: yay! Do the Collapse: nay!).

Bob’s all-new solo career was similarly unstable. He began it in 1996 with the promisingly haphazard Not in My Airforce, which he followed with the tight, almost uniformly terrific Waved Out in 1998. However, the possibility that solo Pollard might continue to progress fell apart with that same year’s Kid Marine. The music was not bad—a new backing band that would help him make the villainously underrated Do the Collapse provide polished performances— but the songs don’t display Pollard’s usual golden ear. The lack of structure can be expected from the guy who created all those fantastic fragments on Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The lack of hooks is much less forgivable. There are some pretty good songs, such as “Far Out Crops” and “White Gloves Come Off”, but there’s nothing in the realm of the previous albums’ “Psychic Pilot Clocks Out” or “Subspace Biographies” to anchor it. “Town of Mirrors” boasts a big shout-along chorus perfect for band/audience communion in concert, but that chorus isn’t very catchy and the rest of the track barely qualifies as a song.

Then the instability continued as Pollard finished out the century by collaborating with GBV’s newest MVP wingman, Doug Gillard. Multi-instrumentalist Gillard recorded the instrumental tracks for Pollard’s songs solo before passing the tapes back to the writer, who fastened his own weird words, melodies, and voice to them. The results are probably Bob’s best non-GBV work. Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department uncaps a flood of fabulous songs, many of which would become live GBV staples. Those thirsting for the hooks absent from Kid Marine had their needs well quenched with stuff like “Frequent Weaver who Burns”, “Pop Zeus”, “Do Something Real”, “Tight Globes”, “Messiahs”, and the rest of a bloody beautiful disc that ranks majestically alongside GBV’s early twentieth century work.

Both Kid Marine and Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department were available in limited vinyl editions twenty years ago, but those are hard to come by today. So GBV Inc. is reissuing both in newly remastered editions on vinyl, as well as in FLAC and MP3 formats. I only had access to the digital files, both of which are brick walled to the extreme.

Review: 'Elvira: Mistress of the Dark' Blu-ray

Someone should have given the Razzies a Razzie for nominating Elvira the “worst actress” of 1988 for her “acting” in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Firstly, Cassandra Peterson does no act in this film. She just delivers 90 minutes of her Elvira character and all of the sassy one-liners and double-entendres that come with it. Her performance requires no more acting than she was expected to bring to an episode of Elvira’s Movie Macabre.

Secondly, Elvira is awesome: as self-aware and self-possessed as Mae West, as quick-witted as Bugs Bunny, and as tough as Rosie the Riveter. Throughout Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, she dispenses with leering sexists, exposes the hypocrisy of conservative Little Town USA, and disperses her one liners with equal aplomb. Plus director and SNL-veteran James Signorelli does a fine job of playing Tim Burton-on-an-extremely-tight-budget and the script by Peterson and John “Jambi” Paragon piles on the one-liners so high that it’s fairly pointless to gripe about their quality. Also: Edie McClurg. If you don’t agree that Edie McClurg makes everything better, I don’t want to know you. Her performance during a scene in which a magic casserole transforms a church potluck into a Roman orgy is worth the price of admission alone.

Look, I’m not arguing that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is the Citizen Kane of horror comedies, but I will argue that it’s the best Elvira: Mistress of the Dark it can be, and a much more agreeable shot of retro-eighties fun than Top Gun, Sixteen Candles, Red Dawn, and a dozen other poorly-aged artifacts wrapped up in one, great, walloping cheeseball.

I’ll also argue that it may be somewhat pointless to gripe about the quality of RLJ Entertainment’s new Blu-ray edition of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. The image is on the soft and dull side with a palette that should pop like a bag of Skittles but looks a bit muted and grey; however, it’s very clean. Audio lacks range, hovering somewhere in the middle. Extras are non-existent aside from a trailer. Nevertheless, this is still a presentable and extremely affordable edition of a movie that is—I reiterate—not Citizen Kane. Diehards may hold out for a more luxurious edition, but this one will probably get the job done for most fans.

Review: 'American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944'

The lingering aftermath of the Great Depression, a rise in organized crime, and especially, the country’s entry into World War II ensured that the early 1940s was a tumultuous time for the U.S. With such grim business rushing around them, many Americans found solace in escapist entertainment, and few entertainment mediums exploded as comics did between 1940 and 1944.

A timeline of this period is like a checklist of the most important developments in comics. These brief five years saw the debuts of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Archie and his gang, Captain America, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, Plastic Man, The Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, Pogo (before moving to newspapers), and many more of comics’ most celebrated characters. While we’d have to extend the timeline back just a year or two to include the medium’s two-most famous heroes, we would not have to in order to account for such foes and friends as Robin, The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Alfred the Butler, Lex Luthor, Perry White, Clay Face, Hugo Strange, Scarecrow, and Two Face. This period also saw the first significant rumblings of a major backlash against funny books with Wonder Woman as the most frequent whipping-girl. Was there ever a more crucial half-decade for comics?

Interestingly, TwoMorrows Publishings’ American Comic Book Chronicles series has been issuing volumes for six years but is only now getting around to this key period of 1940-1944. Because so much happened during these years, the storytelling seems to rush through the material faster than a speeding bullet, but Kurt F. Mitchell and Roy Thomas actually make the tale reasonably thorough, reasonably critical, and politically sharp. Along with the cavalcade of legendary characters, the writers make room to name-check such forgotten oddballs as Supermouse, Kangaroo Man, super-witch Spider Widow, and Snowbird, the Strangler’s coke-addicted lackey. Mitchell and Thomas refuse to succumb to the thoughtless jingoism that defined so many of the comics of the era they cover. Like all volumes in this series, American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is also a gorgeous, hardcover package, swelling with tons of full-color art beautifully and authentically reproduced.

Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films'

Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.

The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.

Entries on films each follow a similar format with subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost starred in Phantom of the Opera in 1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun. It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019, especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of U2's 'The Unforgettable Fire' and 'How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb'

The Unforgettable Fire was the last album U2 made before they become the defining megastar Rock band of the eighties, and it is transitional in sound as well as historical purpose. The production and arrangements are generally lean in the spirit of the band’s first three albums, but they upped the level of fist-raised grandeur that would be their default setting in the years to come. With that came the aura of self-importance that Bono-haters find most off putting. Nevertheless, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” (an ode to Martin Luther King, Jr.) is still a pretty rousing anthem, and the beautiful title track (an ode to the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings) is even better. However, The Unforgettable Fire cooks hottest when U2 are ripping out stilettos like “Wire” and “Indian Summer Sky” with the punk intensity that made their debut album so awesome. If The Unforgettable Fire as a whole lacks the focus and consistency of Boy and War, it still delivers a healthy selection of U2 classics and only really loses the plot with the aimless, interminable, and atypically poorly sung “Elvis Presley and America”…and it certainly remains fresher and fiercer than the stardom-making but pretty boring Joshua Tree.

Review: Vinyl Reissues of 4 "Live" Paul McCartney Albums

(This post was updated on  August 2, 2019, to include details about Wings Over America)

Five years after The Beatles broke up—and nine after their final gig— Paul McCartney finally came to terms with his legacy and began performing songs from his Fab days again. The move thrilled audiences who finally got a chance to hear how never-performed favorites such as “Lady Madonna” and “The Long and Winding Road” might sound live. The Wings Over the World tour and its accompanying album (Wings Over America) and film (Rock Show) also made it clear that McCartney had the material, the chops, and the innate showmanship to be one of Rock’s greatest live acts. Sure all of his proto-hair metal “Oh yeahs!!!” were cheesier than the Velveeta factory, but all is forgiven when he starts pounding hell out of “Soily” or “Jet”. 

Universal Music is now reminding us of what a great ticket McCartney has been throughout the years with vinyl versions of four of his live discs. Naturally, Wings Over America leads this campaign, and it’s easily the best record here, collecting three LPs worth of great musicianship and showmanship with an emphasis on tracks from Wings’ two best albums: Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. McCartney’s willingness to share the spotlight with Jimmy McCulloch and Denny Laine, whose rendition of his old Moody Blues hit “Go Now” is as good as anything by the show’s main star, is charming and supports the argument that Wings really was an all-around good band and not just Paulie’s puppets.

As a show of support for the age of glasnost (“openness and transparency”) Gorbachev ushered in, Paul McCartney ensured that his latest album would be released in the Soviet Union. It was a live-in-the-studio recording of rock and roll classics he had already planned to put out in the UK with an album cover inspired by those that adorned rock albums bootlegged for the underground Russian market. He and a pickup band that included Mick Green of original British rockers Johnny Kidd and the Pirates fire through classics made famous by Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Wilbert Harrison, Sam Cooke, and Paul’s idol Little Richard intended as a sort of rock and roll primer, as was Mick Carr’s liner notes explaining the origins of each song. McCartney titled it Choba B CCCP, Russian for Back in the USSR.

 

As a historical document, the album is pretty interesting. The introduction of what could be the greatest artistic product of capitalist society to the communists is a charming project, and at age 46, Paul proved he could still rip it up pretty well…though one hopes the folks who bought this disc were inspired to root out the original versions of its songs. Choba B CCCP is best when not inviting unfavorable comparisons with original versions, as when Paul transforms Duke Ellington’s jazz-pop standard “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” into a chunky New Orleans-style rocker.

Review: 'Do the Right Thing' Blu-ray

It is absurd that as recently as the eighties there was no prominent African-American voice in Hollywood. Just months before that decade ended, Spike Lee finally snatched the megaphone with the film that made him a household name, and it did so without playing nice with the establishment. Lee presented a particularly sweltering day in Bed-Stuy where tempers rise with the mercury and ultimately boil over into murder and a racially charged clash at an Italian-owned pizzeria in a largely black community.

Lee casts himself as Mookie, an employee of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and the film’s focal point. Lee does a good job in front of the camera, though it is the rest of the outstanding cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Joie Lee, Richard Edson, Bill Nunn, Frankie Faisson, Robin Harris, Danny Aiello, and the especially electrifying Giancarlo Esposito) that really zaps it to life. Do the Right Thing still belongs to Lee, who not only turns in a provocative script, but also films it with unbridled imagination and energy, his camera zooming and tilting like an untethered falcon, his subjects staring down that camera to confront the audience directly, to muse about hate and love.

Review: 'Jon Savage’s 1965-1968: The High Sixties on 45'

In 2016, Rolling Stone writer Jon Savage began curating double-CD compilations for Ace Records in the UK. Each set was a sort of fantasy mid-sixties pirate radio playlist. His 1965 set mainly featured A-list rock and soul artists such as The Kinks (“See My Friends”), The Who (“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”), and The Supremes (“My World Is Empty Without You”), but there was also a sprinkling of more obscure luminaries such as Thee Midniters (“Land of 1,000 Dances Pt. 1”), The Spades (“We Sell Soul”), and Alvin Cash & the Crawlers (“Twine Time”). Each comp devoted to 1966 through 1968 followed a similar format.

To put all of these ace CDs onto vinyl would have required about twelve vinyl discs. Instead, Savage and Ace have opted to boil 192 tracks down to a sampling of 32 for a single, double-LP set. Although some of the big, big artists remain—Donovan with “Hey Gyp”, The Association with “Along Comes Mary”, James Brown with “Tell Me That You Love Me”, Gladys Knight and the Pips with “Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me”, Buffalo Springfield with “Mr. Soul”—Jon Savage’s 1965-1968: The High Sixties on 45 mostly spotlights the artists whose sides are less easy to find on vinyl. So while tracks by The Kinks (“Wonderboy”) and Aretha Franklin (“I Say a Little Prayer”) keep listeners oriented with familiar sounds, we can mostly concentrate on making some new discoveries, such as The Anglos’ infectious soul raver “Incense”, Norma Tanega’s quirky folk popper “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog”, Ray Sharpe and the King Curtis Orchestra’s dance hall anthem “Help Me (Get the Feeling) Pt. 1”, Freaks of Nature’s garage burner “People! Let’s Freak Out”, and Kak’s psychedelic shaker “Rain”. There are also some relatively obscure numbers by well-known artists, such as The Chiffon’s “Nobody Knows What's Going On (In My Mind but Me)”, The Everly Brothers’ “Lord of the Manor”, and Sly and the Family Stone’s (as “The French Fries”) “Danse a La Musique” (aka: “Dance to the Music” in French).

Yes, some obscurities remain in CD limbo (alas, there wasn’t room for The Birds’ “Leaving Here”, The Blue Things’ “One Hour Cleaners”, Blossom Toes’ “Look at Me I’m You”, Tintern Abbey’s “Vacuum Cleaner”, or Dave Davies’ “Lincoln County”), but if this groovy distillation sells well enough, maybe Ace will some day pull the trigger on that twelve-LP box set we’re really craving.

Review: 'What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time'

Reading Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why: The Beatles Album by Album, Song by Song, The Sixties and After at the unripe age of 15 quite literally changed my life. It didn’t just teach me that pop songs were worthy of deep analysis and the valuable lesson that even The Beatles’ mighty body of work is not critic-proof. It also set me on the path that led me to indulge in the analytical jibber-jabber I’ve been spouting here on Psychobabble for the past eleven years, as well as in my book The Who FAQ. So I was excited to see that Riley was involved in a new Beatles book.

However, I’m not really the audience for Riley and Walter Everett’s What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time. In fact, this book is directed at a very specific audience: college students. What Goes On is structured as a chronological Beatles primer, providing a basic look at their musical innovations and cultural influence complete with text-book style study questions (my fave: “How does Lennon’s quip at the Royal Command Performance illustrate the generation gap?” …oh, what would 23-year old Lennon have thought if he’d known his offhand wise assery would one day be studied in university classrooms?!?). More thorough analyses of select songs are very similar to the ones in Tell Me Why.

One aspect of What Goes On that could not have existed in Riley’s 1988 publication are the Internet videos referenced throughout the book that further illustrate the various subtopics, often with musical examples by a young drummer or Everett on bass or guitar (or in one screen-in-screen instance, both). Videos cover such specifically Beatle-focused topics as how Ringo’s drumming style differed from the prevailing styles that preceded him to such general musical theory concepts as an explanation of syncopation. I had a bit of trouble accessing them by typing the provided URL’s into my browser but had no trouble using the direct links provided Oxford University Press’ web site.

Now a middle-aged fart, I’m versed in music theory and Beatledom well enough to not need a book like What Goes On, but I do feel heartened by the idea of a new generation of young people discovering their music and the pleasures of delving deep into it in the kind of class that might employ this book as its main text. Happy studying, kids.