Review: Rolling Stones-'Bridges to Bremen'

Only the most deluded fan would argue that The Rolling Stones’ were at their most vital in 1998, or that their most recent album—Bridges to Babylon—was one for the ages. Still, there’s always something to be said for catching a band of the Stone’s magnitude live, and they certainly put on a polished show. Granted, polished rock isn’t too electrifying, but the band still had their moments even at the end of the fifth leg of their Bridges to Babylon tour. Just when I was ready to nod off while watching the new Bridges to Bremen DVD, the Stones slammed into a vital version of “Paint It Black” that woke me right up.  

Review: 'Retro Fan' Issue #5

Next month will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and this month marks the first anniversary of Retro Fan magazine. To commemorate both events, Retro Fan is devoting much of its fifth issue to all things spacey. Yes, the pop cultural legacy of the actual Apollo 11 crew gets its own two-page article, but the big draw of issue 5 is undoubtedly its cover boy. Mark Hamill sat down with Glen Greenberg for a 15-page interview—well, maybe interview is the wrong word since Greenberg rarely gets to do much more than slip in the occasional “Right, right” or “[laughs].” Mostly he just steps aside to let the always-delightful Hamill expound on his work and legacy as Luke Skywalker. Before you start drooling for big revelations about Episode IX, be aware that the interview was actually conducted back in the summer of 2017 before The Last Jedi had even been released. Though bits of it were apparently included in an article Greenberg wrote for TIME Magazine for Kids, this is the first time the unabridged interview is being published. Fortunately, it is being published in Retro Fan, which means that a slew of boffo color photos of Hamill-centric memorabilia accompany the interview.

Other spacernalia featured in issue 5 includes a feature on astronaut-toy line Major Matt Mason, an article about the alien-abetted Greatest American Hero and an interview with star William Katt (who was also a frontrunner for the role of Skywalker), and a groovy12-page history of seventies sci-fi series Jason of Star Commander that got a pretty big squeal of “Hey…I totally forgot about that... I used to love that!” from yours truly. You know an issue of Retro Fan is worth its salt when it elicits that reaction.

Review: 'Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present'

While solo artists and swinging groups ruled fifties rock radio, bands took over in the sixties. All across America and elsewhere, quartets of pimply kids gathered in basements and garages to bash out two or three chords. This new home grown-rock movement was underway well before The Beatles arrived.

Seth Bovey traces the origin of the garage band phenomenon so crucial to the development of Rock & Roll in his new book Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present. His approach is original, eschewing usual suspects such as Chuck Berry and Elvis to argue that the grungy guitars of Link Wray and Duanne Eddy—and factors such as the exposure TV gave such artists, a new wave of cheap guitars imported from Japan, and the general DIY spirit of mid-century America—set the stage for garage bands.

Bovey then traces the genre’s evolution starting with The Fabulous Wailers before touching on everyone from The Kingsmen to Paul Revere and the Raiders to The Sonics to Dick Dale to The Knickerbockers to The Chocolate Watchband to The 13^th Floor Elevators, while also looking beyond the usual American boys to discuss all-female groups such as The Pleasure Seekers and The What Four and international combos such as Los Bravos, Q65, and The Spiders.

As his book’s subtitle indicates, Bovey also strides beyond the garage band golden era of the sixties to see how the movement subsequently remained active with the rise of garage-focused ’zines such as Who Put the Bomp, the Nuggets and Pebbles comps, punk, the much publicized garage revival of the early ’00s that gave us The White Stripes and Strokes, and most importantly, how contemporary bands such as The Black Lips, Thee Oh Sees, and The Incredible Staggers are keeping the garage lights on—though with very little influence in America, where Rock & Roll is dead as Dillinger.

The only trouble with Bovey’s format is that garage rock is a cornerstone of six decades of Rock & Roll, but his book is only 170-pages long. So his storytelling is a bit too fleet footed, and since he skims over several of the quintessential garage bands—particularly Question Mark and the Mysterians, The Seeds, and The Standells (who grace this book’s cover but aren’t even mentioned in its pages!), Five Years Ahead of My Time can’t really be called “definitive.” Yet because Bovey is more concerned with following the origins and evolution of garage rock than name-checking important bands, his book remains a satisfying pocket history of a crucial strain of Rock & Roll.

Review: Miles Davis's 'The Complete Birth of Cool' on Vinyl

Two years before releasing his debut LP, Miles Davis participated in the first of three sessions that would ultimately be compiled onto Birth of the Cool in 1957. These sessions were groundbreaking both because they featured Davis at such an early stage of his career and because of the way his nonet (which included such luminaries as Max Roach, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, and John Lewis) reimagined bop with the kind of classically-tinged polyphony that would be key to Davis’s work moving forward. A big-band sensibility that would not always be evident in that extremely varied work is also apparent.

The recordings still sound like the product of a fully-realized, completely seasoned, utterly forward thinking artist. Davis’s signature, smoldering sunset sound that would beat in the heart of future projects such as Porgy and Bess and Sketches in Spain is already evident in pieces such as “Moon Dreams” and “Darn That Dream” (featuring vocalist Kenny Hagood). That Davis was just 22 when these sessions began is unimaginable.

Before the 1957 release of the eleven-track Birth of the Cool, eight numbers from the nonet’s sessions were released as 78rpm singles and then on a 10” LP called Classics in Jazz: Miles Davis in 1954. In 1998, Capitol further expanded the 1957 album with thirteen live numbers from a couple of gigs at NYC’s Royal Roost recorded for radio broadcast in September 1948 with primitive audio quality but somewhat hotter playing than the sublimely cool and controlled studio sessions. 21 years later, that double-CD set is making its double-vinyl debut via Universal Music with excellent liner notes and nice sound culled from the original session tapes.

Review: 'Blue Velvet' Blu-ray

Having begun his career as a pure avant gardist with challenging yet emotionally rich films such as The Grandmother and Eraserhead, David Lynch took an unexpected turn into the mainstream when he made the historical melodrama The Elephant Man and the space opera Dune. With his next feature, Lynch found the perfect balance between his most outré ideas and the more traditional storytelling that would make him America’s most popular surrealist. Nevertheless, Blue Velvet still split audiences, with some finding his S&M noir deeply compelling while others finding its extreme scenes of sexual sadism repelling.

As is usually the case with Lynch’s films, plot is secondary to style, world-building, and unfiltered emotion, but Blue Velvet is one of his more traditionally sensible stories despite odd elements such as the severed ear that draws clean cut college boy Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the seedy underworld in which repulsive thug Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) kidnaps the husband and child of nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) as leverage for forcing her into humiliating and violent sex acts.

Review: 'Swamp Monsters'

Swamps are nature’s haunted houses. They are oozing, rank, shadowy spots, and who knows what lurks beneath their black, algae-shrouded waters. A cottonmouth? An alligator? Or something worse?

Because of their superficial creepiness, swamps have been among the favorite alfresco settings for horror-comics creators since the form’s inception. IDW’s latest pre-code horror comics anthology collects tales of frogmen, alligator women, and other beasts and blobs that emerge from bogs to scare and devour folks. Like all horror comics devoid of vault and crypt keepers and old witches, the tales in Swamp Monsters are pretty second rate (and it doesn’t help that I just finished rereading all my old EC comics before plunging into Steve Banes and Craig Yoe’s latest compilation), but as is always the case with these collections, there’s still a lot of fun to be had.

The stories in Swamp Monsters stand out most when they differ radically from the kinds of things EC published… and that difference is not a lack of quality. Basil Wolverton’s “Swamp Monster” (Weird Mysteries #5) has the look of an Underground Comix comic published 15 years ahead of schedule. The genuinely sad “I Am a Thing” (Out of the Night #12) takes the novel tack of seeing things from the misunderstood monster’s POV. EC’s tightly plotted tales sharply contrast whimsically weird and delightfully meandering stuff like “It Won’t Come Back Until Midnight” (Web of Mystery #16), “Demons of the Swamp” (Mysteries #3), “Nightmare Flight” (Baffling Mysteries #10), and “The Winged Spectres of Dismal Swamp” (The Beyond #5), which features demonically possessed people trapped inside of butterfly wings or something. At their worst, the stories in Swamp Monsters are outrageously amateurish, such as the mercifully brief “The Evil Eye” (Adventures into the Unknown #39). At their best, they are as intoxicatingly strange as a midnight trudge through the bayou.

Review: 'The Man Who Laughs' and 'The Last Warning' Blu-rays

In 1927, German director and art director Paul Leni moved to Hollywood where he began making pictures for Universal starting with the comedic old dark house prototype The Cat and the Canary. With that film, Leni proved his merits many times over by taking a plot as hoary as Cane and Abel and zapping it to life with some of the most inventive and audacious film tricks ever slapped across the screen. The picture was a hit and signaled the beginning of a fruitful relationship between Universal and the German expatriate.

Sadly, Leni’s unexpected demise in 1929 meant that relationship would not be as fruitful as expected, but he did manage to make three more films for Universal before succumbing to sepsis. The first of those, a Charlie Chan picture called The Chinese Parrot, is lost, but The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning are very available and now making their Blu-ray debuts thanks to Flicker Alley.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus' Limited Deluxe Edition

1968 was a transitional year in which psychedelia gave way to the British Blues Boom, pop stars metamorphosed into rock stars, the sharp style of Swinging London frumped into patchwork hippie fashions, and the vitality and optimism of the sixties began slumping toward the seventies’ rude awakening. There is no better visual document of this brief yet pungent turning point than The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus. To celebrate the release of Beggars Banquet, which critics love to paint as a big comeback album following a “misguided” foray into psychedelia, The Rolling Stones put together a rag-tag big-top show for the small screen featuring buddies such as Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, and The Who, as well as a couple of circus acts.

Review: 'The Women of David Lynch: A Collection of Essays'

Like almost all artists worth discussing, David Lynch is highly controversial. Some viewers praise his ability to place you in an unsettling, beautiful, transcendent, and completely realized world. Others dismiss him as a purveyor of weird for the sake of weird. He has also split viewers in terms of his treatment of women. Some feel that the way he portrays women is complex and ultimately empathetic. Many others have dismissed him as a misogynist who gets off on forcing his female characters to suffer.

This particular issue has continually resurfaced since the release of Blue Velvet 33 years ago and on through the debut of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks just a couple of years ago. The argument regarding Lynch’s treatment of women is so pervasive that Scott Ryan decided to devote an entire issue of his Twin Peaks ’zine The Blue Rose to the women of David Lynch. Ultimately, he has devoted an entire book to that subject. Since Ryan is a man, he is not the most qualified writer to dive into this sensitive topic, and he very wisely keeps a low profile in The Women of David Lynch. Instead he cedes control to thirteen women to explore such topics as Dorothy Valens’s role in Blue Velvet, the roles of non-white women in Twin Peaks, and the roles of all of the female characters in The Elephant Man. There are also interviews with Mädchen Amick of Twin Peaks and Charlotte Stewart of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, which provide firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a woman in Lynch’s world.

Most of the authors who contribute to The Women of David Lynch lean toward a more positive assessment of his treatment of women. They believe that he is generally intent on presenting a realistic idea of what it is like to be a women struggling through a patriarchal society. Understandably, the writers who tackle his treatment of non-white female characters are less forgiving, particularly Melanie McFarland, who is the only writer who is very emphatically not a fan of Lynch’s work. However, even she admits that it’s all a matter of interpretation as she cites other women writers who continue to admire Lynch’s work. Lynch is certainly an artist who demands active interpretation from those who take in his often confounding and troubling work.

As much as I love that work, I am one of those fans who is often troubled by the ideas behind his dreamy/disturbing imagery, and I found it very enlightening that many of the women of The Women of David Lynch found some of Lynch’s more controversial characters, such as Dorothy Valens and Mary X of Eraserhead, worthy of empathy and praise. I guess it does come down to interpretation, though just as a guy like Scott Ryan is not the ideal assessor of Lynch’s treatment of women, a guy like me is not the best assessor of the conclusions of the women who contribute to The Women of David Lynch. I can say that several of these writers confirmed some of my negative assessments, but some challenged them for the better, helping me to gain a more thorough appreciation for work I already loved with definite political reservations. While a couple of the more experimental essays didn’t work for me at all (one is written in the parlance of a Facebook post complete with excessive all caps and “LOLs”; another briefly reviews each of Lynch’s features from the pov of a misogynistic murderer on acid), most of these essays are accessible and enlightening, though I’m sure this particular issue will continue to be debated as long as people continue to study the work and women of David Lynch.

Review: 'Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film'

From his decision to adapt the scandalous Lolita to the world-annihilating cynicism of Dr. Strangelove to the unflinching anti-storytelling of 2001 to the horrific physical and psychological violence of A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick made a career of shocking viewers. He seemed to save up his most unrelenting succession of shocks for what turned out to be his final film. Kubrick’s decision to film a lengthy orgy extreme enough for U.S. censors to demand its actions be obscured with digital censors was shocking. That the film required an excruciating 18 months to shoot was shocking. The way the long, long, long awaited film from the man many rated as cinema’s greatest living artist baffled, repelled, and bored many viewers was shocking. Kubrick’s sudden death shortly after completing the first cut of Eyes Wide Shut was the biggest shock of all.

Even if you are among those viewers who loathe Eyes Wide Shut, the shocking nature of its making may still compel you to read Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams uncover new shocks that enrich the story of an already labyrinthian film. Although I knew that the film gestated in Kubrick’s mind for a long time, I was surprised that it did so for as many as 40 years. Kolker and Abrams imply that Kubrick’s obsession with bringing Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle to the screen may have infused much of his earlier work, including Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining (Kubrick annotated his copy of Stephen King’s novel with ideas for scenes that seem straight out of Schnitzler’s), and unproduced projects such as Burning Secret and Laughter in the Dark. Though there is a lot of humor in the finished product (particularly in its oft-misunderstood orgy sequence), I was also surprised by the wealth of evidence that Kubrick seriously considered adapting Traumnovelle as a comedy, and that he’d considered casting Woody Allen and Steve Martin in the lead role and communicated with Terry Southern about writing it.

While I noticed at least one exaggeration (Kolker and Abrams called the Eyes Wide Shut shoot history’s longest, but the 12-year shoot of Boyhood and the 5-year shoot of Eraserhead easily beat its 18 months), the book is well researched (materials include Kubrick’s personal faxes and notes he made on scripts and in books) and doesn’t oversell its conclusions. I’m not sure if it will spur Eyes Wide Shut haters to reevaluate the film, but Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film will give them some fresh insight into the seemingly impenetrable mind of Stanley Kubrick.