Review: Vinyl Reissues of Billy Joel Albums

Everyone thinks of Jimmy Stewart as a sanitized "oh gosh" icon of apple-pie Americana, but when you look at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there. The voyeur and the sexually obsessive freak he played for Hitchcock are obvious examples, but even his George Bailey in that allegedly saccharine but actually coal-dark holiday classic It's a Wonderful life is scary and intense for most of the film.

Billy Joel may be the Jimmy Stewart of pop. He's the piano man who sings songs your Jagger-phobic mom thought were nice, but if you look closer at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there, none of whom are ever more disturbed than the singer. Who's creepier: the pot-smoking, nose-picking, masturbating subject of "Captain Jack" or the curtain-twitching voyeur who sits in snide judgment of that kid's every move? Joel also does the Rear Window bit in other sneeringly judgmental tracks like "Movin' Out", "Big Shot", "Los Angelenos", and "Angry Young Man", on which he seems to be addressing a mirror. So the guy may have often sounded like McCartney on a particularly sunny Sunday, but a lot of Joel's work could go toe-to-toe with Elvis Costello's in terms of bitterness.

Review: 'Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the 'Video Nasties' Panic of the 1980s'

When home video took off in the early eighties, the main concern in the United States was that videotape enthusiasts would start recording copyrighted films and programs off of TV. In Great Britain, the main concern would be that they'd go on murder rampages. 

What followed was the so-called Video Nasty panic, which not only plopped a very, very silly term into the British lexicon but also spawned a great song by The Damned ("Nasty") and one of the best episodes of "The Young Ones" ("Nasty"), which also happened to feature The Damned singing that great song ("Nasty"). 

Review: 'All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words'

According to its press release, Peter Brown and Steven Gaines's All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words is "A LANDMARK ORAL HISTORY ON THE BEATLES" (their caps). 

There are several problems in that last sentence: 

A) Only 20% of All You Need Is Love consists of The Beatles' own words (The Beatles being Paul, George, and Ringo, but not John). The other words are supplied by Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Boyd, Maureen Starkey, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, "Magic" Alex Mardas, and twenty or so others in or around The Beatles' circle.

Review: 'It Rose from the Tomb'

It's kind of funny that, in his new book It Rose from the Tomb, Peter Normanton expresses surprise that TwoMorrows was interested in publishing a book on the history of horror comics, considering that this would not be the first horror-centric book that comics-centric publisher has published (if you have not checked out Mark Voger's Monster Mash, you need to get it together, Daddy-O!) and that horror is so integral to comics history. It's the main reason why kids devoured funny books in the fifties and why the comics code shut them down. Marvel and DC were known to dabble in horror, and it was the life's blood of E.C. and Warren. And because even the chintziest horror comics were outlandishly visual and vivid, horror comics is the perfect theme for one of TwoMorrows' visual and vivid volumes.

Review- Alice in Chains' 'Jar of Flies' 30th Anniversary Vinyl

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'

Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities. 

When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.

Nico finally got the chance to fully express herself and her harmonium on The Marble Index. Frazier Mohawk, who co-produced the album with former-Velvet John Cale, reportedly said that he made sure it didn't push too far beyond the thirty-minute mark because he was afraid that listeners would start killing themselves if subjected to any more of her ghoulish dissonance. 

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Live at the Wiltern'

2003 was a big year for The Rolling Stones. That was when the group turned forty, released their very first career-spanning greatest hits album, and went on an international tour that became the second most profitable one in history at the time (The most profitable? Their own Voodoo Lounge tour of eight years earlier). 

Review: 'Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976'

There have been so many books about The Who that it only makes sense that, sixty years after the band's formation, a new entry in their library would be almost unbelievably specific. The very title of Edoardo Genzolini's Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976 announces its specificity. That is not a mistyped conjunction; this book does not track the years 1968 through 1976, when The Who were pretty much the greatest live band in the world. Genzolini's only covers two years in The Who's history, and not conspicuously auspicious ones either. 1968 was the first year The Who did not release an LP since their beginning, and the few singles they managed to squeak out in '68 are often dismissed as novelties made by an out-of-touch band desperate for fresh material (I'm not one of those dismissers though, largely because the zany "Dogs" is one of my faves). In 1976, they were touring their most troubled album, the virtual suicide-note The Who By Numbers, with rapidly deteriorating intraband relationships and a rapidly deteriorating drummer with just two years left in the world.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971'

*It's been twenty months since the release of The Rolling Stones Singles 1963 - 1966, and though that set's press release promised the inevitable sequel would arrive in 2023, vinyl reissues of the Stones' U.S. LPs were apparently ABKCO's main concern that year. In 2024, the label has wasted little time in finally making good on that 2022 promise. 

So, now The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971 has finally arrived to compile eighteen singles representing the time period that I, for one, insist was the Stones' most creatively fertile. While they are usually lauded for sticking to their rudimentary rock and blues guns, I will forever insist that they were at their most exciting and vibrant when grooving with sitars, Mellotrons, dulcimers, synthesizers, John Paul Jones, and John and Paul. 

Review: Wings' 'Band on the Run' 50th Anniversary Set

If there's a word that sums up Paul McCartney's work-approach with The Beatles, that word could be "perfectionism." That was one of the things that drove his band-mates up a tree when he insisted on take after take of things like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", although the cutesiness of those songs surely rubbed John, George, and Ringo the wrong way too. So it was a shock when McCartney began his solo career by bucking that perfectionism, if not the cutesiness. McCartney was a homemade, one-man-band record full of non-songs and only intermittent flashes of his perfect song craft, "Maybe I'm Amazed" being the most obvious example. If RAM suggested that the perfect old Paul was back, then Macca continued to confound with an album of jams with a new band called Wings, which he then followed with a Whitman's sampler of nutrient-free confectionary experiments he titled Red Rose Speedway.