CD REVIEW: JACKALOPE-SALTIER THAN EVER (Challenge, France)

In anticipation of Jackalope's upcoming performance at the CBGB Lounge May 8th, ritualistic I got hold of this CD of theirs just to check out how they hold up in a studio setting as opposed to in the flesh 'n all. Actually I caught these guys on an earlier cybercast sometime last year or the year before or something like that and enjoyed what I heard, and thought a CD of theirs would make a fine addition to the various CDs I have in my collection from a number of groups that have played the Lounge's Sunday (and soon-to-be-Wednesday PM as well!) avant/freestyle music series. If I must get fetishistic (?) about things like this like I do with various obsessive/compulsive modes in my life, then what better than to categorize/document a truly vibrant scene that is happening in the here and now rather'n thirty years back which is nice and all, but more or less daid as a doornail which doesn't mean it shouldn't be studied under a microscope, but then again since this is happening AS WE SPEAK it's a lot easier gathering information about this stuff plus you don't have to get your hands dirty!!

Anyway, Jackalope are a trio consisting of John Abercrombie on guitar, Loren Stillman on saxophones and Bob Meyer on drums. And sure, there are a whole slewwa these gtr/horn/drums aggros that have been playing around in jazz most notably at clubs such as CBGB or one of their next door performance spaces for quite some time, but Jackalope ain't yer typical BLUE HUMANS blast-it-all-out freespatter noisetwist threesome nohow! They're not even Tertiary Trio (scroll down for a review) let alone Storm (ditto) or whatever other avant gtr trio you can think of offhand. No, Jackalope are much smoother'n those aforementioned noisebusters and they should be considerin' that they have none other than John Abercrombie at their helm.

You may remember Abercrombie as this seventies-era jazzguy who was really big on the ECM label with their sorta chamber/snooze avant gardeities transmorphed into gnu age paradiddles music that certainly didn't thrill me to the quick the way various other seventies music did during those fun and cheap days. Other'n a few early avanties of worth in the ECM catalog (Circle's PARIS CONCERT and the Marion Brown thingie) not much that Swedish label put out has interested me. (Of course, I'm not talking about such worthies as a 1961 Jimmy Giuffre 3 offering I never heard, but I am talking about all those records with the sweet and lilting front covers featuring out-of-focus snapshots of wilting petunias and the like.) Heck, I even picked up a Jack DeJohnette's Directions album from '76 with Abercrombie on guitar last August whilst in the state of New York and played side one to general yawns before the turntable broke (no foolin'!), thinking that Abercrombie's entire career must've been nothing but stodgy fancy "jazz" guitar pickings custom made for people who hold it in on purpose because they can't use a strange toilet, and you can BET that this disque in question has been filed to the back probably ne'er to be unleashed from the collection again lest I need to use it for some future reference, which I doubt.

But you gotta admit that a lotta things that fall within the cheap gutter magic o' CBGB have a certain dinge rubbed off on a lotta the performers there, and perhaps this is why Jackalope surprisingly don't sound like Terje Rypdal and Bjorn Blorklyndnyl playing soft and schmoozy paens to puff pastry with a sound so clear that you'd swear they were chumming it up in your own personal sauna. Taking a cue from the avant/chamber innovator of it all Giuffre, Jackalope plays it experimental and brainy true, yet its also kinda tough'n funky even with Abercrombie eliciting yummy gtr-lines (kinda like what Jim Hall mighta sounded like had he developed on the style used on that Gunther Schuller Third Stream elpee done with Ornette back in '61) while Meyer does a nice blues/free playing that sounds like Billy Higgins as Stillman plays in a pre-Jarman/Mitchell-style closer to Ornette when he was on Atlantic. "Skippy" is how I referred to it in the magazine last issue and I think it still applies here.

These guys even sound original on their cover of Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin's "Long Ago And Far Away" (and frankly, I don't care for all them "respected" songwriters of the far past at all unlike some of you probably do, but here they sound like they might as well be Ornette fans for all I know!) plus the originals aren't any slouch either, with titles such as "Convolution," "Skin," "Chicken," and "On The Loose" proving that Jackalope's slumming around in the confines of the Bowery certainly has rubbed off on their musical acumen as well as toughened 'em up a bit as well!

My fave here hasta be the closer, "Shades of Grey" which, although written by Stillman, is nothing but double-tracked Abercrombie playing this medieval-meets-outer-space melody that reminds me of some of the solo Sun Ra things on clavinet that have the same introverted crunch on my fragile being. Sniff blubber!

Actually, Jackalope sound a lot more in-groove on this CD than when I tuned them in at the CBGB Lounge way back when. Then they seemed more restrained, sparse/spacey, freer and perhaps had more in common with ECM 1971 than that label's regrettable gnu age success story days. And although this ain't a Sonny Sharrock barn-buster jazzrock slamfest worthy of MONKEY POCKIE BOO it doesn't mean it's totally worthless. It's a proverbial sleeper that'll make a good bargain bin find for you in a few year's time, or if you're rich try snatching it up on ebay cheep like I did. And it's a pretty good avant-trio offering even if the label (Challenge) ain't the same one that released all those great surf/garage singles back inna sixties!

BOOK REVIEW: MAINLINES, BLOOD FEASTS AND BAD TASTE; A LESTER BANGS READER edited by John Morthland (Anchor, 2003)

Nothing special.

Admittedly, I'm the last rock scriber of noble lineage to get hold of and actually read this relatively recent collection of Lester Bangs wordage both previously-published and not-so, but this gross overlooking by the promotional powers-that-be wasn't always the case. In fact, back in 1987 this humble rock fan was actually deemed IMPORTANT enough in the hotcha writing world to have wrangled a flesh-and-blood hard-covered FREE COPY of the first Lester Bangs posthumous collection of his notoriously caustic reviews, articles, interviews and general musings that was entitled PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG, a book that had me jumping for the proverbial joy given that author Bangs' ashes were only a close-range five years old at the time of this tome's publication and at least """I""" was still operating on full-tilt seventies rockscribe modes thanks to the pow'r and energy Bangs had laid out as a shining path for manic rock fanatics like myself. But alas, those days are long gone, and while this "rock critic" (to use a term so unkindly laid upon me by a rival member of a different blogstream) has fallen to the rock bottom of mainstream/underground pariahdom since those halcyon days of promotional gravy trains and gimmees of all sorts, in many ways so has the spirit and verve of Lester Bangs also sunk to the deepest part of the rock world sea.

Sheesh, you know things are bad (and have been for nigh on eighteen years) when pullsillanimous pipsqueaks the rank (and I do mean rank!) of Chuck Eddy are repeatedly bombarded with either the tag of "The new Bangs" or are derided for being Lester ripoffs. Hell, they're all (talking general rock critical writings of a variety of sorts) a buncha fakes if you ask me. In fact (talking from my thirty years of conscious rockism) there really hasn't been a good scrap of rock writing in the world outsides a few high points here/there (and dare I say from the end of my own medulla flowing through my fingers onto my keyboard?) in ages, or at least since Bangs himself became as fitting a case of "era's end" as John Kennedy's own Dallas swan song. But then again, the whole rockwriting/underground/fanzine scene just ain't what it used to be one bit. Way back when there were tons of these snotrag screeching suburbanite slugs all writing about the same Iggy/Lou/Sky scene with maybe a bitta Zappa thrown in or perhaps some other more mainstreamish poster child just so's the hippies in charge didn't throw 'em into any communes for whole grain punishment, and these kids wrote about their sick rock & roll fantasies in their own fanzines with titles like TEENAGE WASTELAND GAZETTE and DENIM DELINQUENT and best of all they got away with it and perhaps got written about by the likes of Bangs or more likely his onetime editor Greg Shaw which musta reaped the millions for these young and forgotten bigtime wannabes who in fact maybe did get some of the glory long-deserved via the pages of such respected periodicals as PHONOGRAPH RECORD MAGAZINE or even CREEM, which at that time was Bangs' own personal child whether Barry Kramer knew it or not.

But, as they say, "that was then and this is now," and now is a pretty far cry from then when rock criticism is nothing but pampered prissy preening and direct copying of hypesheets mixed with the right dash of sanctimoniousness and a new age smirk that would even make Alan Watts do a few tumbles in his Buddhist grave. I've always been known to pick on THE VILLAGE VOICE but maybe at one time they were a fine exception especially when inundated with the snideness of Bangs (along with a buncha other long-goners like Lauren Agnelli and Richard Meltzer). Under the tutelage of a wide array of terminal losers ultimately ending with the Saccharine Poster Boy hisself Chuck Eddy, the VOICE has tumbled into such a sick, slank abyss that can (believe it or not!) make a New York Politics/liberal chic hater like myself wince even more than I had in the already winceable eighties! I mean, even the offerings of Mike Saunders and Tim Ellison that have appeared in the VOICE's pages have not been their tippy-top (or even mediocre) best, and I really LIKE the whole two of 'em a lot so it PAINS me to say this!

And I gotta say that even a lotta Bangs' last-days writings for that honored New York weekly and other places doesn't quite come up to par, but whether that was due to the "times" (new wave transmorphing into "gnu wave"), the fact that Bangs had Robert Christgau for an editor, or just that Bangs was milking his creative juices for all they were worth and was headed down the same path of questionable critical acumen as his acolytes is all open to debate. Personally I think it was all THREE things that make the latterday Bangs not quite as tasty as the earlier breed (despite a few juicy moments), but throw in his oft-rumored heroin abuse and maybe you too can just see why I feel this way.

Still, MAINLINES... does have its moments of fine early rock scribedom. The v. early unpublished writings on Warhol/Kennedy and the DRUG PUNK fragment read a lot better than about a thousand other teenage beatnik attempts after illicit readings of Burroughs, and I'm even talkin' about those kids who had the wherewithall to craft eloquent paens to their dark desires a la Bill yet remained firmly esconscend in their real-life enclaves. The early Bangs of ROLLING STONE remains of interest as it seems as if his tastes at the time were an odd teetering between cheap trash underground Amerigan concerns and mainstreamish mulch in order to impress the "big guys." And it's nice to have more of that VOICE stuff available so's I don't have to rely on trips to the microfilm dept. at the library anymore. Having read a good hunk of these reviews/interviews/screeds in their original form at the time of publication or at least at the time of mental impact (roughly 1979-1987) does tend to take some of the oomph away, but if you're a first-timer you may be enthralled. Like I was at one time.

But still, there seems to be a strange dank quality to all this hoopla. Like I said, when the first Bangs comp arrived I devoured it like a demon hanging on every word the deceased chronicler of Amerigan fun gunch had laid down. Nowadays, with all of the reek that Bangs (unconsciously?) wrought on the rock writing scene (which is so diseased that I wonder if it really still exists), maybe I should rethink any laurels I've laid upon the man's memory. At one time Bangs represented the best in the whacked-out, boho hipster snoot stench garagebandfanzinefastfood scene...nowadays that whole sorta gonzo creed has devolved to a point where the founder of the whole kitten kaboodle (Hunter S. You-Know-Who) did a self-snuff as perhaps a perfect cap on a way-of-life and belief that seems about a "meaningful" to whatever it used to stand for as a buncha watered-down New York critics meandering over music and attitudes they wouldn't've have given the time of day to only two decades earlier.

It's still a fine read for the information (and Bangs can soar when he's writing about something you care about), but I've said it before and I'll say it again...my favorite "rock critic" of all time remains Wayne McGuire. At least he knew enough to get out of the way before the tide of mediocrity swept over everything in sight.

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And while we're at it, a hearty BLOG TO COMM welcome back to Dave Lang, who just returned from a month in Vietnam and from the looks of it survived the ordeal with flying colors. Of course we at BLOG TO COMM don't approve of people, no matter how pinkish their political complexion may be, supporting repressive communist governments, but we sure are glad that the man has survived the ordeal without being thrown into a re-education camp and forced to sing "The imperialist is a paper tiger/Long live the noble revolution of Ho Chi Minh" to a clanky Amon Duul beat. Hope you enjoyed your time in the Worker's Paradise Dave, and hopefully you avoided the wily ways of the local female population, NOT because of any rare and incurable diseases you could have picked up, but really, haven't the Vietnamese people suffered enough???

CYBER-AGE CHENANIGANS

Well, at least I didn't promise you a review of the Dom Minasi Trio show at the CBGB Lounge last night. Tried tuning in, and all I got for my troubles was a jerky picture that played for about fifteen seconds (if lucky) before stopping to buffer on and off ultimately kicking me off en toto. Plus there was no sound at all...out of curiousity I checked the goings on at CB's Gallery (some theater performance featuring a woman standing on a table) to see how they were faring and got a comparably smooth picture but just a buzz for sound, while the goings on at CBGB proper (some sorta hardcore thingie) had sound and a smoothly running pic, but that too would stop for buffering after a few seconds or so.

At least it was fun watching Minasi and group set up. Minasi (who reminds me of the guy who played Murray the Cop on tee-vee's THE ODD COUPLE) was dressed very casually and did his own roadie work which I think is cool. Also present were a string bassist and drummer, and like a typical jazz musician Minasi sat on a metal folding chair the whole time he played, at one point switching to an acoustic twelve-string guitar. I wish I could tell you what the thing sounded like, but if you're interested there's a song featuring the trio available on Minasi's own website that comes complete with guest saxist Joe Giardullo (scroll down to the March 14, 2004 listing on the "gigs" page and, as they say, click away!). Recorded at an earlier CBGB Lounge gig, Minasi and band sorta remind me of what Jim Hall woulda sounded like had he gone full-tilt into the avant garde and decided to form a group under the heavy inspiration of the AACM. Perhaps now is the time to give Minasi more than a li'l nod of the hat, especially given the years of obscurity the guy unfortunately hadda wallow in.

HOW CAN YOUR HEART STAND IT...YET ANOTHER HIGH SIX!

As I've said before, while another blog out there in "notice me!" land thinks it's all fine and dandy to give you top five lists for the day/week/year/whatever, me here at BLOG TO COMM goes the extra mile to give you MORE than just a "high five," mainly a "HIGH SIX" of my top fave raves for whatever span of time I so deem desirable. Of course, you (skeptics) may think the whole kitten-kaboodle middle-class suburban faveraves fall short of the "Real Life Top Ten" that enlightened industry/socio-political wonks like Greil Marcuse and Archie Smith used to give up in the pages of THE VILLAGE VOICE back in the eighties (and perhaps later...I wouldn't know, or care), but look at it this way, since when has anything the VOICE written about or championed outside a few fine music reviews have anything to do with "real life" anyway???

1) A WHOLE BATCH OF CD-Rs sent to me by Dee Pop

You may remember Dee Pop as the fellow who used to man the drum chair in the Bush Tetras back in 1980 or so, but since then he's been involved in a whole slew of musical activities, the best known by far being not only as the drummer/percussionist for a variety of free jazz/improv groupings but as the "curator" of the Sunday nights (and starting in April, Wednesday nights) "freestyle" avant garde jazz series at the CBGB Lounge. I tune into their cybercasts as often as I can and brave the technical glitches (brought on by my having to use a phone line 'stead of a cable setup) in order to see these shows live and as they happen, and maybe if you still have a shard of old-time juvenile wild-eyed love for this sorta still-going-strong chicanery maybe you should too, since this gig seems to be the only really exciting thing happening on the New York Underground as we speak, not counting perhaps one of the old-time sixties/seventies hangers-on making a rare appearance at either of the CBGB-related clubs hovering on the Bowery.

Anyway, as to the CD-Rs...only played a few of 'em so far, but what I have played is rather impressive. The "Unified Theory of Sound" CD-R was guffed up so it doesn't play as smoothly as one would like, but this set-up with jazz scenesters Jameel Moondoc, Matt LaVelle (also of the fine Morcilla) and Wilbur Morris amongst others reminds me of the late-seventies Loft Jazz coming outta Sam Rivers' digs only evolved another twenty years. The sampler CDs also gave a good overview of what's going on these days in improv land...naturally Pop hadda slip a Bush Tetras track on but I can forgive him for the free plugging, but the rest ranges from "eh, it's OK" (Beat Circus) to pretty inspiring. Highlights include Susan Alcorn's moody steel playing, Borah Bergman and Dee Pop's avant-impressionistic "Round Midnight" (w/Bergman on piano, and I thought he was a trombonist!) Dom Minasi (a sixty-plus avant guitarist who has remained rather under-the-covers all these years, and who will be playing the CBGB Lounge with his trio tonight...hopefully a review will be posted tomorrow!) with his string-laden DDT + 2 reminding me of...the Dixie Dregs (?!?!?!), and more things that'll pop into my mind as soon as I give these disques a few more spins. (Like Gary Lucas' solo take of "Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro" followed by Abdullah Ibrahim's take of the same number, and even Noistet, who're playing next week, did a couple good avant jazz cool things as well!)

The Hanuman Sextet CD-R rec'd at the Lounge last 12/19 was also fine, a good compliment to their release on Rent Control which was one of last year's highlights, at least if you ask me. And oh yeah, Jessica Jones was entertaining enough, but there's nothing special on her disc to zone me to a higher elevation or anything like that. And as for the rest...well, I will be getting to it sooner or later, but gee, I dunno if I'm just that anxious to listen to a CD with a cover pic of a mouse with an abnormal growth on its back (Sound on Survival)! I mean, didn't we get enough of that demented gross-out "aht" back in the eighties via the post-Throbbing Gristle crowd, not to mention the Swans???

2) Tertiary Trio-TITLE GOES HERE CD-R (Rent Control)

Not too sure if this one should be on my "HIGH SIX!" since I do have some qualms about it, mainly how it seems more "improv" and less free jazz and doesn't quite gel the way other guitar/sax/drums outfits like Storm or John Abercrombie's Jackalope do, but I find these Rent Control releases satisfactory despite the cyborg coolness which didn't mar other Rent Control offerings like Idiophonic, but seems to dampen things here. Still, I played this one about five times since arrival last Monday so maybe I do find it engaging on some level I'll probably comprehend in twenty year's time. Group features Andy Haas (Hanuman Sextet) on saxophone, Don Fiorino on guitar, and Paul Corio on drums.

3) GUNSMOKE

While TV Land plays it safe (as usual) and constantly reruns the latter, tamer episodes of this long-lived (19 years!) western, other cable nets (boooo!) run the better-executed 'uns from the program's earlier and infinitely superior years. The Hallmark Network had been airing the earliest half-hour version that was later broadcast under the name of MARSHAL DILLON on Saturday afternoons but they moved those to 6:30 in the morning, and I don't get up that early unless I'm going to be shot at sunrise! Too bad, because the very early GUNSMOKEs are the best, especially with the Sam Peckinpaugh-penned sagas which still seem to stir something feral inside of you. However, the premium Western Channel has the still-cool early-sixties shows on Saturday and Sunday afternoons (directly opposite TV Land's running of the newer, color/colorless ones), and whenever the satellite people feel generous enough to give us a free weekend every few months or so you can bet I'm tuning in to see what Matt and Chester are up to. Like most early-sixties television, there's a fine, mystical quality to these shows which on one hand were trying to be artistic and pleasing to the high-brow yet on the other still realized that they weren't meant to be snobbish since they were being aimed at guys in undershirts with cans of beer in their sweaty palms. A delicate balance, but tee-vee knew how to pull it off at the time despite what Newton Minow thought. The one about the arrogant businessman who ignores the pleas of a nice, middle-aged couple in a sandstorm (his thoughtlessness ultimately resulting in the woman's miscarriage), later on swindling and eventually murdering the husband, had a strange, dream-like effect that one would have seen on THE TWILIGHT ZONE at the same time. Speaking of GUNSMOKE, are any of you readers familiar with the English comic strip based on the program called "Gun Law"? I'd like to get an anthology of those strips, especially since the ones I've seen come off as if Peckinpaugh had directed the show in the seventies complete with the raw violence and nudity he put into such flicks as THE WILD BUNCH and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (a film which Dr. Fredric Wertham saw and actually counted the murders!). Any help would be appreciated, but totally unexpected.

4) HOT WACKS BOOK XV...THE LAST WACKS

Just taking a trip back through bootleg history thinking about how cool record buying was at one time before disco, STAR WARS, CDs and generally light musicianship kinda tore a big chunk outta my life! When yer sixteen, taking a gander at them xerox-insert covered wonders in the outta-the-way record shop bin going for a relatively affordable $4.99 a pop (an extra buck for the deluxe covered ones) was just another big part of GROWING UP along with looking at the import and cutout sections, and honest-to-goodness I can't see how the kidz of today can stand living in a world not only without great afternoon rerun tee-vee to rush homework over to but sans all the good, healthy stuff that made a man outta me like record shops and junk food (without the guilt of hearing day in and day out about just how bad it is for you). I still recall the instant surprise I got finding the Frank Zappa/Captain Beefheart CONFIDENTIAL boot at the White Wing Records shop in Hermitage, snapping it up immediately upon eyeballing. I consider this one of the smarter things I've done in my life, and so should you too.

5) COMSTOCK LODE #8 (fanzine)

Since there aren't that many good new fanzines coming up over the horizon these days, I have to settle on getting some old ones and here's one I've missed out on back when it originally was being published. I've heard about COMSTOCK LODE before since it had quite a reputation about it, and in fact still have this Red Crayola songbook which reprints a very in-depth Mayo Thompson interview that originally appeared in COMSTOCK LODE's pages. I probably would have bought it at the time, but let's just say that distribution was pretty sparse, sorta like another fanzine I know! Anyway, as you'd gander COMSTOCK LODE was a publication of odd-to-Amerigans dimensions...about thirteen-inches high and eight-and-a-half wide and in many ways it resembled a lotta the other English fanzines not only of then but now such as BUCKETFULL OF BRAINS and PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE. Contents seem to straddle both BRAINS' punky concerns and TERRASCOPE's psychedelic leanings, with #8 featuring not only a brief, typically skewered interview with Roky Erickson but very informative pieces on Peter Stampfel and Robert Wyatt. Plus, the Bridget St. John article reminded me that I still have to listen to the CD-R of her Jon Behar burned for me! A pretty enlightening fanzine, and certainly one that shouldn't have left the boards as quickly as it did.

6) VOCELLI PIZZA

People think that because I'm a wop-a-dago I automatically like Eyetalian food. Wrong again, sweetie. Actually, I can take or leave the stuff being force-fed that swill ever since I was a li'l toddler, but on occasion I do get a hankerin' for some macaroni or ravioli (which I never had as a kid since it wasn't around inna part of Italy where my ancestors came from!) amidst my cravings for Chinese and Mexican food. Anyway, there's this new pizza place that opened nearby called Vocelli's and although their prices are pretty high (though I've seen much higher!) they do have some good things to eat for sale such as their sandwiches and especially pizza...now the red-sauce variety o' pie ain't anything that special, but I really go for their spinach/garlic "specialty" pizza with not only less-than-generous hunks of the green leafy stuff (they should use about twice as much!), but mushrooms, onions, tomato slices and smegma-like blobs of feta cheese (!) amidst the mozzarella and a white garlic sauce! And it's all really good-tasting on their better-than-usual chewy crust, but the real reason I like this one is because it reminds me of the Ripp's Special sandwich one can find at Tommy's restaurant in Coventry/Cleveland Heights. Although it had a boho-hippie image for quite some time, Tommy's (located between the two record shops I wrote about in this earlier posting) is (presumably, haven't eaten there in quite some time despite having the chance last November) a pretty decent place to chow down if you want some Spinach pie, falafel, carob shakes and of course the aforementioned Ripp's, which has cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, sunflower seeds, onions and other goodies I can't remember between pita. And yeah, you may think this is purely sissyfood hippychow unfit for your not-so-acquired tastes, but Crocus Behemoth didn't. In fact, when Jim Jarmusch (!) interviewed Crocus for THE NEW YORK ROCKER during Yuletide 1976 part of that interview took place in none other than Tommy's! I still wonder what the man called Behemoth ordered that day, and I'm afraid this bit of pertinent information is forever lost to history.

CD REVIEW: ARCH HALL JR. AND THE ARCHERS-WILD GUITAR! (Norton)

Good thing this Cee-Dee arrived when it did...y'see, I'm just not getting enough of a boss 1959-1963 fix in my life, and all of those LEAVE IT TO BEAVER reruns and COMBAT discs just aren't enough for me to osmose into those great times of high-energy TV and low-quality lunch meat. Neither are my early Marvel reprints nor a steady Hostess Twinkies/Yoo-Hoo diet helping matters much, and even a cruise down the main drag can't elicit any cool 1962 energies a'stirrin' in my soul like they should. (Of course, if the strip still had alla them old drive-ins with the George Jetson-styled early-sixties space age designs and used car lots and mini-plazas like it usedta then maybe my 40+-year urges'd be satiated for once! But who knows if I can really go home again!) So it's grand that the wonderful people at Norton Records sent me a copy of this 'un or else I'd probably go nuts and start drooling over 1969-1973 gulcher...LANCELOT LINK! NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR!! PAUL LYNDE!!!

An Arch Hall Jr. disque certainly is something that people like me have been waiting for ever since the Norton folks (who remain who else but Billy Miller and Miriam Linna) printed that hotcha story on Arch and his films way back in one of those eighties issues of KICKS (a fanzine that was one of the bigger influences on my BLACK TO COMM...please don't hurt them!!!). Believe me, that saga of a kid who was more or less tossed into the teenage idol whirlpool by his father and all he hadda show for it were a buncha good zilch-grade films and a short-lived singing career was just something that appealed to my pre-hippie funtime Amerigan sense of cheepniz, and soon after that missive hit the stands I was on the search not only for videos of Hall's flicks (which got dubbed for me usually at low speed on cheap VCR's which I didn't mind considering that most of the people who first saw these films on TV probably saw them in worse quality via some distant UHF station) but for his recordings that were hopefully available via the vast array of reissues that were beginning to clog the collections of a lotta anal-retentive compulsives like me. Naturally a few of Arch's single sides (one actually released on STEVE ALLEN's label if you can believe that!) did pop up on a variety of those great sixties samplers that I was buying up (and reviewing) a decade back, and come to think of it, the Norton people had a hand in those too which might make one think there was something a li'l shady going on, but if you ask me, all I gotta say is they sure knew how to MILK a long-gone teenage-idol wannabe for all he's worth!

Anyway here's an actual Arch Hall Jr. CD. It's got a whole buncha stuff from singles, films, live gigs, and to top it off a lotta classic dialogue between tracks kinda like the PULP FICTION soundtrack, but at least Hall's flicks weren't film geek pretentious with lotsa swearin' to boot! What you do get is about eighty minutes of boss music, all them cool lines that should be spouted off by YOU in group situations just like people trying to be hip at gatherings always do that "pucker up and blow" routine, 'n not only THAT but we also get a whole buncha live recordings tagged at the end, most of 'em from a Drive In appearance in Pensacola during the hot month of December, 1962 even if the definitive book notes tell us that it was freezing cold that night Arch and band took to the stage! (And you can just see the kiddies in front in their jammies on the swings and jungle jim, complete with mittens 'n overcoats weaving and bobbing while Arch and band belt out "Suzie Q"!!!)

You'll probably be disappointed in Arch and the Archers if you think this is gonna be a wild and raving Northwest-styled screamfest or at least something Ralph Neilsen or Link Wray woulda whipped up. But don't...Arch Hall is still the master of great early-sixties fun and games not only on his pleasant, steady-rocking single sides and film tracks (which include the eerie theme to EEGAH recorded with an organ borrowed from Arch's mom!) but live and in action where he trots out a lotta the current top forty (Ricky Nelson...) and does 'em his way! Not only that, but the wacky between-song patter (including a spot where WILD GUITAR co-star Nancy Czar interviews Our Hero onstage!) is worth the price of admission, and it all holds up better'n not only all of the lesser aspects of what was going on at the time (pre-packaged teen idols with little verve, budding folkies...) but ranks well with the best stuff from that musical era that everybody seems to love putting down despite all the evidence to the contrary (the Tornados, early Beach Boys...).

And, as is expected from Norton's high quality stable, the whole thing comes with a nice li'l booklet complete not only with the usual rare snaps and informative bits of trivia (like, did you know that one of Hall's Archers was none other than Dobie Gray of "In Crowd" and "Drift Away" fame???), but it also comes with that smooth and underappreciated writing style courtesy of none other than Miriam Linna herself. Being a fan of Ms. L's style for quite some time I've always wondered why the lady never made it "big" on the rock scribner circuit especially since her work for fanzines and other mags has always seemed so tippity-top notch in a world where "aspiring" rock writers ("critics" and otherwise) seem to be more or less doing a written version of the act commonly known as "felching." The answer to this query came to me only recently...the ONLY reason Miriam Linna never "made it" as a pro writer is because she's good! And in a world of flaccid alternative rock and Quinlanesque big hypes that never do go anywhere, is there really any room for good writing in the current "rock" scene?

With a package like this who can go wrong? It's only February, but this one just might tie the Chinaboise CD for best archival dig of 2005! Geddit??? GET IT!!!!!

BOOK REVIEW...COMIX, A HISTORY OF COMIC BOOKS IN AMERICA by Les Daniels (Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971)

I've mentioned this book in a variety of outlets over the past twennysome years. It is a tome that had a major effect on me, not only because it was one of the first places where I got to read a detailed rundown on the whys and wherefores of comic books and just what they meant to an overweight pre-pubescent pariah of dago extraction, but because it was published at a time (and read at a time) when said pariah had discovered comic books as an inexpensive (fifteen then twenty cents, less for old ones at the garage sales) means of entertainment that one could easily get obsessive over. So, to be gosh-it-all honest about it, I would consider COMIX to be one of the few books that has made a lasting impression on me and I'd also consider it a downright influential read as well, up there in shaping my being along with LEFTISM REVISITED, INTELLECTUALS and THE MAD READER amongst material a little less, er, heady. Besides, this book is at the top of the pile in my bedroom and every time I have to head to the porcelain throne to do something I prefer not to mention in such high-class company, I have to grab something to read in order to get my mind off the fact that there's brown smelly stuff popping outta my hiney and this book just always happens to be handy enough. It's not like I always have the time to go searching for other reading material, especially when the Sorbitol is starting to kick in...

Anyway, this book (which was part of FUSION magazine's attempts at starting a STONE-styled publishing company along with Peter Guralnik's [hope I got the spelling right] FEELS LIKE GOING HOME and the dead rock star obit NO ONE WAVED GOODBYE) gives us a pretty good, not detailed or anything like that history of the Amerigan brand of comic book (you'll hafta look elsewhere for a Euro histoire which sure could be used by old timey comic fans like me!) and to beat all, it was written by a guy who is pretty knowledgeable about his subject matter and comes off like some grown-up kid that once went to school with Beaver only it's ten years later and he's a hip longhair now but the years of comic mania are still deeply inbred in his suburban soul. It's a fan to fan talk we're getting here, and given how many comic book histories and general studies since could range from brilliant to downright term paper dull, we gotta be thankful that this book (perhaps due to its rock mag connections?) reads as hip/snot smoothly as some of the better early-seventies Golden Age of Rock Criticism pieces that I've tried to emulate for the past twennysome years!

After giving a brief-yet-packed history of Amerigan comic strips, author Daniels launches head-first into the early days of comic books, mainly in praise of the DC line and their stellar efforts along with the other early publishers and their high-quality wares (most notably those of who else but Quality Comics who not only had the top-notch Plastic Man but the Spirit...nothing on Timely/Atlas/Marvel here since they get their own chapter later on). It's pretty snat stuff since it gives us that feeling of just what superheroes of all stripes meant for the ever-growing pre-adlo kids who made millionaires out of pulp publishers once on the brink of ruin. The book goes on, covering all of the basic stops ("Dumb Animal" comics, EC, the Comics Code, the post-Code oversized comic book/magazines...) in that aforementioned style that could also be well-used in a punk rock or local horror host history making COMIX perhaps one of the better historical reads (for "our" gulcher) extant.

Sure you get the author's personal views injected into just about everything, but I don't mind even if I disagree with him not only because of his swift style, but the fact that Daniels is right most of the time. Por ejemplo, very little is written about the Archie Comics Group and their contributions to the industry, and what is written's less-than-complimentary (perhaps due to MLJ head John Goldwater's fierce rivalry with the groundbreaking EC line as well as his role in helping establish the infamous Comics Code Authority, which is deftly taken apart along with spearhead Dr. Fredric Wertham in its own chapter), but I find that perhaps a minor aberration alongside the lack of space given to some of the Silver Age publishers like Gold Key, who maybe shoulda gotten a li'l space just for effort but didn't probably because Daniels just wanted to cut the gristle outta his saga.

And yeah, you get the obligatory gaffes that one comes to expect from these otherwise accurate studies (such as Daniels' confusing of the Fantastic Four's arch-enemy Dr. Doom with the first Marvel Silver Age hero Dr Droom, something which I took as truth until comic historian Larry Boyd [hey, get in touch!] corrected me years later), but I can't complain otherwise. I can't even complain about Daniels' now-patented tying in of Dr. Wertham's anti-comic book crusade with "McCarthyism" and the middle-class values of the "fifties" (booo, hisss!). But even then, Daniels is adept enough to know that Wertham was your garden variety liberal and even states it, and in many ways this book is written in the hip collegiate libertarian style that one could still find on the left in the seventies before it all went down the tubes towards posthumous LBJ deification, and it's perhaps this attitude which makes COMIX such a nice, smooth, breezy read.

The fact that this book stops at 1971 with chapters on Marvel (and their move towards more "relevant" material) and underground comix putting a lid on things is fantastico, because (at least for me) the early-seventies of comic bookdom was right at the end of at least my classic Golden Age of Comics Reading period. The mainstream of comics became a little too pretentious (again, at least for me) due to the new move towards liberalization of past modes, and if it weren't for the Marvel sci-fi/horror reprints of the 20-cent era I probably wouldn't've been buying comic books at all. I mean, whereas The Man of Steel was once a force of might and good beyond the trammels of an increasingly-sick society, by now he was giving the Teen Titans patented, paternalistic homilies on racism and sexism in the pages of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which shoulda changed their title to THE WEAK AND THE SIMPERING after publishing "The Thing That Destroyed a Town" (and it wasn't the monster on the cover I'll tell ya...it was YOU and ME!). Anyway, I still get a charge out of COMIX, for believe-it-or-leave-it but that's MY culture, MY civilization, and who knows, it might be yours too.

(just a reminder that) THERE ARE STILL PLENTY OF BACK ISSUES OF BLACK TO COMM AVAILABLE AND AT REASONABLE PRICES TOO! SO WHAT'CHA WAITING FOR, A GOLDEN INVITATION OR SOMETHIN'?

To be frank about it, I need the money. You can't buy records, old fanzines, desperately-needed stereo equipment and tasty Chinese takeouts (that's takeaways for you English readers) with merely a highly-regarded rockism reputation! I also need all the space I can get for those records, fanzines and stereo system that fewer back issues piled up in my closet, den, basement, crapper etc. would give me, so if you would (pleasepleasePLEASE) send your orders to Christopher Stigliano, 714 Shady Ave., Sharon PA 16146-3149 USA, and make your payment out to me and not the magazine, I'd be a happy man. Postage is FREE inna USA and Canada, though elsewhere send $5.00 in US funds for the first ish and an additional $2.00 per rest.

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PHFUDD #11-Hey, I found a few copies of this once-gone and forgotten issue (back when the mag was wrestling under a totally different name I had to change due to adverse publicity!) in a box with a whole slew of VILLAGE VOICE rejection slips! Just kidding, but I do have a few mags to sell you that not only feature cover-boy Jamie Klimek and his Mirrors (complete with the usual rare photos and flyers and ads and junk like that), but live VON LMO photos at Max's Kansas City with Lou Rone mugging it up for the camera (plus a Rudolph Grey chronology!), Sonny Sharrock, Jeff Dahl and Powertrip, a live Styrenes photo taken by ME (which accounts for its fuzziness!), Birdhouse (remember them?), the Standells and some live Rocket From the Tombs snaps with lyrics that should cause your heart to be racing by now. Also included is the enticing article entitled "Is There No End To Those Pesky Chuck Eddy Rumors?" which, as we know, is still as relevant today as it was in April/May 1988 when this issue originally came out. Since this is a rarity, I'm asking $10.00 each, and no frowning!

PHFUDD #12-This one features a cover story on the Droogs, who at the time had released this wowzer of a "Great American Rock & Roll Album" (in the tradition of BACK IN THE USA, ONE KISS LEADS TO ANOTHER and HALF MACHINE LIP MOVES...no kidding!) entitled KINGDOM DAY, as well as a piece on Peter Stampfel and the Bottlecaps, the new glut of Detroit '60s hard rock exhumations coming out of France, and Electric Eel lyrics accompanied by pictures that may still be "rare" even to this day! There's also a query about Detroit rock legend Sirius Trixon as well as a reprint from an old CBGB listing as to what the Vanessa Vickers Duo with Billy Ficca (of Television, natch!) that were playing at that famed club back in the spring of '75 sounded like! I've been curious for years and did find out that there was a pianist with the same name working the cabaret (!) circuit who put out a CD a few years back so that might be her, but she has since died, so if anyone has any information (even Billy Ficca seemed to shrug the whole thing off saying that it was just a gig he did two nights at CBGB, neglecting to give us any information as to how the thing started up or what they sounded like!) how about letting me know for history's sake. This is getting to be a rare one, and I need the money so...$10.00 each!

BLACK TO COMM #14-The first issue with the new and improved name features part one of the Ron Asheton interview, a nice though could be much better given all the information discovered since piece on the Deviants, an article on Peter Laughner's Cinderella Backstreet and the Seeds. Oh, there's also a piece on Charlemagne Palestine written by someone or other, and it can all be yours for $5.00 a pop!

BLACK TO COMM #16-This one has the Rudolph Grey interview. some reprints of Peter Laughner things I copped out of old issues of ZEPPELIN and elsewhere, more Electric Eels lyrics with a pic, Laughing Hyenas and of course tributes to the recently departed Lucille Ball and Jim Backus. The first, cruddy version can be had for $2.50, though the better take will cost an extra buck ($3.50 in case you can't add).

BLACK TO COMM #17-The first of the "big" isssues has a cover story/interview with Scott Morgan and Gary Rasmussen from the old Scott Morgan band, also inside's an interview with Borbetomagus' Donald Miller as well as one with Maureen Tucker, not to mention pieces on Fish Karma (who I liked until hearing his overly-preachy kiss kiss moosh anti-gun song entitled "God Bless The NRA"), the Dogs (from Detroit, not the French ones or the Flamin' Groovies for that matter!), Rocket From the Tombs (with loads of old photos and the like, some never seen before or since!), the top 25 of heavy metal, METAL MACHINE MUSIC, a piece on the then-new proto-punk reissues and archival digs of the day and the usual reviews and news. Buy a copy for $7.00.

BLACK TO COMM #19-Just found a few of these niceties with my Miriam Linna interview plus one done with Jeff Clayton of Antiseen, not to mention the Pink Fairies, Czech Underground Rock (Plastic People of the Universe, Umela Hmota...), Lester Bangs (unpublished photos too!), NUGGETS, the Shangs, a history of proto-punk fanzines, lotsa old TV stuff and of course the regular departments. This is the first ish to really dig into a lotta the anti-youth fascism mentality so popular in rock circles these days, so sissies beware!!! Since this is getting rare you can have one of these soon-to-be collector's items for $8.00 each if you can believe it! A real steal deal!!!!

BLACK TO COMM #20-This has a Mick Farren (Deviants) interview, a talk with Roky Erickson (!), a Craig Moore (the Gonn!) interview, the Seeds, Richard Meltzer, a retrospective on the DENIM DELINQUENT fanzine, the New York Dolls, an old Adny Shernoff (Dictators) interview done by Greg Prevost in 1978, a Harriet Nelson obituary, loads on old TV shows and the like and of course the usual stuff that makes Dave Lang a hot and bothered honorary marsupial. Buybuybuy for only $8.00 each!

BLACK TO COMM #21-A VON LMO cover story and interview grace this ish, as do interviews with Metal Mike Saunders, Brian McMahon (Electric Eels) and rockabilly star Ronnie Dawson, plus you can read much-desired items on the Trashmen, Velvet Underground and Hawkwind like I knew you would! And all you'll have to do to get it is seperate yourself from $8.00 and send it all to me!!!

BLACK TO COMM #22-The printers (and myself to a degree) messed this one up but it became one of my biggest sellers anyway! Cover story features Alice Cooper, and there's also things on Steve Mackay (Stooges), Umela Hmota in Josef Vondruska's own translated words, a lengthy BACK DOOR MAN history (one of SEVEN...ha ha! Just kidding, J-y!!!), Jymn Parrett telling us his version of the DENIM DELINQUENT story, the Planets (NYC version), the Sidewinders (Boston version), a warped krautrock history entitled "Krautrock: The Final Solution to the Aryan Question!" and the usual gunk. Plus this one comes with a CD with a hand-decorated by memeME cover numbered and all, featuring Carnal Kitchen (Steve Mackay pre-Stooges!), Umela Hmota, Umela Hmota 3, Dom (post-UH), Rockin' Blewz (early Metal Mike Saunders!), Backsnider (Mike Snider's old band), Milk (early-seventies Cleveland proto-punk glam), Moving Parts and more! If you want it, I have some, but not as many as before so in order to make up for past losses...$15.00 EACH!

BLACK TO COMM #24-This issue's cover feature's a nice interview with Doug Snyder of not only Sick Dick and the Volkswagens fame (the NYC no wave band from the late-seventies lower-Manhattan ka-BOOM!, not the nineties group with the same moniker!) but the Doug Snyder/Bob Thompson DAILY DANCE album which has achieved legendary status long ago, plus there's an interview with the Dogs (Detroit) and Greg Shaw, a piece on the old CAN'T BUY A THRILL fanzine and the usual feature-length reviews and the like. $9.00 gets you one!

BLACK TO COMM #25-The latest, 162 pages brimming with such goodies as a New York City Scene history (featuring interviews with Max's Kansas City's Peter Crowley and Ruby Lynn Reyner from Ruby and the Rednecks plus pieces on coverboys the New York Dolls and VARIETY scene-booster Fred Kirby), an interview with J. D. King (Coachmen, comix) plus one with guitarist Lou Rone, who would probably be best known to you as leader of the early CBGB-era band Cross as well as one-time guitarist for both Kongress and VON LMO, the Screamin' Mee-Mees, Simply Saucer rare photos, family tree and gigography, rare fanzines of the Golden Age (and more), tons of book and record reviews (which make up the bulk of this ish!), plus a CD with live Simply Saucer 1975, the Coachmen, The Battleship, Ethel with David Nelson Byers and Ruby and the Rednecks. I think it's the best issue so far and if you wanna find out for yourself, send me $10.00 if you order this one with any assortment of other issues, but if you buy it on your lonesome send me an additional $2.00...outside the immediate area add more!!!!

IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO TODAY...

Anniversaries and notations of the passing of time usually go ignored in the BLOG TO COMM sphere of things, but I feel that this little piece of historically-significant news is important enough to send your way. Yes, thirty years ago today, Rocket From The Tombs recorded their demo tape (to be broadcast on local hippie rock station WMMS-FM a week or so later) in a Cleveland loft they shared with the Electric Eels and another band whose name never was revealed to me and OK, maybe that's not exactly a "noteworthy" moment in rock history if you're the kinda guy who continues to believe the old-line ROLLING STONE anti-garage credo rant (you know, "technology + ultra-fast playing + artistic aspirations - energy and motion = hot get-high music!"), but for fellers like me who swear by trash aesthetics and groups playing awful rackets in their basements, well a day like today is worth celebrating just as much as the Fourth of July or St. Swithin's Day so please excuse me if I get a little frothy over the whole thing.

After all, considering what Rocket From The Tombs did that evening thirty years ago and how inconsequential it may have seemed at the time, the IMPACT of this against-the-tide thrust can still be felt lo these thirty years later. This was not just an act of some nth-string rock 'n roll band in Cleveland who had the audacity to play original material making a demo tape...it was true rock 'n roll insurrection at a time when rock had pretty much settled into a comfy chair and was taking a nice li'l nap, and everybody seemed to approve of this new old fogey image! Putting all the "givens" together ("given" this was being done in Cleveland Ohio which never really had a keen interest in the "underground" talent that was coming out of its garages, "given" that this was a band that was still trying to find its bearings, perhaps unsure of not only itself but its future, "given" that two of the biggest p-rock exponents of the late-seventies were to spring from Rocket's soon-to-be-ruptured loin...) the recording of these numbahs was, in the long run, a much bigger STRIKE for the cause of rockism than I'm sure anyone involved would have believed way back when, and perhaps we should celebrate this anniversary in the only way we know how, mainly by blasting your Rocket recordings while osmosing their ultimate timlessness, their raw glory and (best of all) that loud, distorted drone...

I thought I'd also take this opportunity to give a brief disseration on just how much underground rock has evolved, or perhaps devolved in the three decades since Rocket laid their stellar playlist to two-track. Obviously there have been many changes...in the mid-seventies for all intent purposes underground rock (whether it be "punk" in the classic CREEM sense or garage bands or street rock for that matter, though "underground" seems to be the best all-enveloping term to use for this at-times uncategorizable music) was pretty much on one hand a dead and buried issue, yet on the other a sound waiting to be born. Really. The majority of kids, even the kinds who'd be listening to the end results of Rocket's bold initiatives these days, weren't even aware that such a thing as underground rock existed. The sad state of not only AM/FM radio but the rock press made sure to that, with a heavy emphasis on the more tiresome aspects of "pop music" of the day being pushed over and over again on an audience that didn't really have any options. If it weren't for the likes of Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer dropping dead-group names into then-current prose, not to mention BACK DOOR MAN's noble efforts, who woulda known that ANYTHING had existed, let alone was happening in the there and then!!! The last bold punk uprising of the early-seventies, most notably the New York glitter putsch of the Dolls, resulted in two poorly-selling albums and a quick and perhaps indecent burial as high school USA merely yawned. There were rumblings of a new New York scene via Television and a few scraggly bands that perhaps CREEM would drop mention of here and there, but that was still a good two years away from coming to full bloom glory. As for what would be considered a real "alternative" to the overpowering progressive music and stadium rock (not to mention quickly-dying AM pop), what was there other than some old Velvets/Stooges/MC5 albums, NUGGETS, a few import chestnuts re. Can and Neu!, and maybe a lotta memories of what coulda been had the buying public not have been so brain-washed as to prefer buck-toothed folkies and fancy-pants hairweaved British pansies to the REAL THING, if you know what I mean.

But oddly enough, there was a movement growing, clandestinely developing without other parties knowing about it, all seemingly with the same hard-edged intent and guttural growl based on the same old Velvet Underground/Stooges axis (with whatever you could throw in) that may not have seemed like much in 1975, but looked more or less like an EXPLOSION a few years later when suddenly all of these bands (or their members in new bands) became aware of each other and the word spread via NEW YORK ROCKER articles or perhaps even a li'l word o' mouth for that matter. True there was Rocket From The Tombs in Cleveland, but there was also the Imperial Dogs in El Lay, Death (with James Chance) in Milwaukee, Umela Hmota in Prague, Simply Saucer in Hamilton Ontario, MX-80 Sound in Bloomington Indiana and probably a few hundred more who will be documented and perhaps digitized in the not-so-distant future. A hundred years from now rockologists will be categorizing and flow-charting the whole bunch of 'em perhaps laboring under the impression that all this musical rabblerousing was a calculated and studied plan-of-attack. Not quite...it was just a buncha people armed to the teeth with not only rock gear but unbridled ambition, bared-wire intensity and healthy record collections who didn't know better, or if they did really couldn't care less.

Flash forward to TODAY, where not only have there been thousands of rock groups playing under the "vague rubric or alternative music" (copyright 1985 Robert Christgau), but the vast majority of them have taken the original impetus/thrust and watered it down into a non-sound that really doesn't speak for the suburban TV-watching spoiled brat mid-Amerigan tub that I grew up being. After spending the eighties going through all of the new underground movements that sprang up once the original seventies punk (or dare I say "new wave") period seemingly died out (garage revival, hardcore...) on and on up through the newer offshoots and treks into endless chasms of boring musical possibilities, I passed through the nineties feeling mighty cheated seeing what was once an unchecked THROB reduced to plain collegiate slop. Whereas the underground was once a mad, driving impulsive music, it had become the new mewl for a type of person and ideal that I didn't want much, if anything, to do with. Whereas this music (at least throughout the seventies) was custom-made for the suburban teenage Beaver Cleaver or his dope-fiend counterparts, now it seemed as if the same overly-wrought flower-pressing doom-laden ban-the-bomb crowd that was so adverse to this sort of "juvenile" chicanery at the outset had now taken punk to their hearts, and gave it the anti-motion, anti-drive and anti-life credo that these spiritual zombies seem to thrive on. James Taylor and Carole King with a Velvets-beat...big deal!

Which is one good reason why, save for thirty/forty-year-old classics continuing to get heavy BTC airplay, the only modern musical acts lighting my buttocks nowadays are the new post-Rallizes Denudes Japanese underground bands like Uptight and LSD March, not to mention the exciting avant garde jazz/improv aggregates playing at the CBGB Lounge on Sundays...at least these groups haven't forgotten their roots while heading for new vistas that seem about as uncharted as the ones the Byrds reached for on FIFTH DIMENSION almost FOUR decades back which is something I can't say about the whole bunch of constantly pushed amerindie/college groups that seem to be considered the haute new item amongst people who usually do know better (but not this time!).

Oh yeah, as for Rocket From The Tombs...I think I'll pass on spinning their demo tonight. Don't want to throw myself into a cataleptic fit, and besides, I gave up on all the ritualistic music playlist obsessions of my youth (like just having to spin, no ifs ands or buts, WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT every New Year's Eve) long ago!

A HIGH SIX!

1) Can-EGE BAMYASI CD (Mute/Spoon)

Gosharootie, it's hard to swallow the fact that it's been twenty years since I first read Hot Scott Fischer's review of this classic krautrockschpiel that not only originally appeared in a 1973 issue of the infamous PHONOGRAPH RECORD MAGAZINE, but got me all hot and bothered about getting a copy of this classic rockismkampf stomp into my sweaty clams. Fischer's then-twelve-year-old epic was one of those fine pieces of rockscribedom that just seemed to snugly fit in with the Golden Age of Rock Criticism (roughly 1969-1981), with Our Hero making Can's quintessential endeavor out to be the perfect distillation of early-Velvet Underground explorations mixed with Stoogian madness (which would figure given how none other than Lester Bangs said that Fischer once played him some Can and then beamed approvingly about how much better they were than the Stooges themselves!). EGE BAMYASI still holds up lo these many years later, despite the load of subpar/human rock vultures in the music and critical realms who have reduced Can and their works to just another hip-slapping "influence" on the alternative rock gravy train. I mean, it was cool when we heard that Sid learned to play bass listening to Can records back in in 1977, but having every just out-of-the-basement "alternaindie" group covering Can tracks in the nineties and singing their praises as we speak pretty much ruined my tastes for more than a few things!

2) COMBAT! SEASON ONE CAMPAIGN II DVD

These are the burned copies Paul McGarry made for me that I mentioned a few posts back. I've said enough about this stellar early-sixties intensity-laden series in a earlier missive, but to add just a li'l lemme say that the additional episodes that I've eyeballed are very good in their own right as well. (The one where a bitter Frank Gorshin accepts a Silver Star under false pretenses [that Star deservingly going to his now-deceased pal, played by Joseph Campanella who can now be heard doing the voiceovers on the Dumont-era Bishop Sheen reruns on EWTN] seemed to strike a doom-laden chord at least with me.) Only the episode about a frog boy who wants to join the US Army and ends up killing Ted Knight as a friendly Nazi (and how long have you MARY TYLER MOORE-haters yearned for that???) tended to waiver a bit, but given COMBAT's track record I'm sure we can accept a few misfires just like we did with NAKED CITY and even THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Still it's nice seeing something that extols the legend of the tough guy before we hadda go see Burt Reynolds get sodomized by a buncha hillbillies in DELIVERANCE and all of that seventies manhood trashing that's been going around ever since.

3) UNDERGROUND FILM by Parker Tyler (Grove Press, 1969)

Here's a book that I usedta love reading at the library back when I was a teenbo mainly because it seemed so "daring" and "controversial," and since I was starting to pay attention to film as "aht" at the time, the information given on the avant garde origins of the underground seemed more than necessary to this pimple-popping pusfarm even if Tyler's book is about as obscure as you can get. Caveat: in case you're wondering why author Tyler spends a lot of his time writing about such people as Andy Warhol, Charles Henri Ford (with whom Tyler wrote the sickie novel THE YOUNG AND THE EVIL way back in the thirties) and Charles Boultenhouse, it's because the whole lot of 'em were lovers! Well, at least UNDERGROUND FILMS was written long before it coulda been categorized into a gay/lesbian/transgendered histoire like everything else with Lavender Mafia sensibilities in it these days!

4) Chinaboise-THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD CD (Gulcher)

Don't wanna go overboard squawking about this 'un, but as of 2:18 PM on February 16, 2005 this is the best proto-punk reish of the year. Music that oddly enough frames the great underground era sounding just as fresh at the end of it as it did in the beginning.

5) Freedomland-YIA YIA'S SONG CD-R (Rent Control)

Still one of my favorite groups now habituating the Sunday night (and soon to be Wednesday nights as well!) freestyle avant garde shows at the CBGB Lounge. Old hands Daniel Carter and William Parker hook up with new hands David Hofstra, David Sewelson and Dee Pop creating a free jazz spew that utliizes the seventies new thing of the former and dollops on a lotta a downtown no wave punk attitude of the latter making the music about as storm-front clashing as it was in the sixties when Tony Williams' Lifetime and the MC5 were mixing and matching the same influences coming up with new vocabularies in jazz, rock and (dare I say) beyond... Highly reminiscent of the better seventies avant/co-ops like Air and the Creative Construction Company, and hopefully more than the same few VILLAGE VOICE types will be willing to pay attention to the music this time out.

6) HUMBUG #'s 10 and 11 (Humbug Publications, 1958)

These are the last two issues of Harvey Kurtzman's second post-MAD publication (the first, TRUMP, was ditched by publisher Hugh Hefner after only two issues while the third, HELP! managed an impressive five year run), and the only two to be of MAD magazine-sized proportions. Ten has the brilliant Soviet-styled FLASH GORDON spoof entitled "Flyashi Gordonovich" illustrated by Jack Davis complete with imitation Cyrillic lettering as well as a lotta great Cold War jokes that still grab me (for example, the Soviet Dale isn't a sexy gal in a clingy outfit but some hulking sterotypical female Russian ox in a uniform---hey, I like the OBVIOUS just as much as everyone else!). However, there seems to be too much text and little downright comic material in this ish, and that's one thing that I believe just might have led to HUMBUG's premature downfall after only a year of publishing. The last issue does have Bill Elder delineating a Japanese monster movie spoof entitled "Randan," but what makes this one a "getter" is the TRUMP reprint material used to pad this swan song out including Davis' "Rin Tin Tin" sendup worthy of the classic MAD comic book days plus Elder's "L'l Ab'r," which not only puts the "Li'l Melvin" spoof he drew for PANIC to shame both artistically and especially story-wise but thanks to Kurtzman's brilliant abilities ranks with those great early MAD comic strip take-offs like "Starchie" and "Bringing Back Father" for mind-twisting laughs and impeccable mimicry. Too bad the mag had to die out (Kurtzman seemed to see the end coming or at least I get that impression from his opening schpiel in #11, where he also notes how the ex-MAD contributors' names were getting edited out of the newer reissues of the Ballantine MAD paperbacks, probably out of revenge more than anything!)

Speaking of those old MAD paperbacks, I bought a bunch of 'em up cheap at this remaindered book shop in Greensburg Pennsylvania a few weeks back and really enjoyed reading 'em all over again even if these things have been reprinted, repackaged and reprocessed ad infinitum/nauseum. Not only are they nice to have around just for "old time's sake" but it's especially pleasant reading these stories without being reminded of just how "bad" the fifties were via a load of horrid anti-anti-communist commentaries that seem to permeate a lotta the more-recent MAD repros, usually written by the "Castro-taught-the-Cubans-to-read!" apologists in order to educate today's lumpen and limpen youth of supposed past evils. Why are these leaden and falsified lectures always preached at us by people who, if anything, are the total embodiment of upper-class elitist youth pamperdom extant?!?!?! Well, I guess they hafta do something between workshops! Blah!!!

mini-posting!

The fact that the "Windows Media Player" kept stopping to buffer every minute or so before totally kicking me off (me having to go back on and on seemingly ad infinitum in the hopes that maybe one time the program would stay on long enough for me to enjoy things) during last night's Freestyle Avant Garde Jazz show at the CBGB Lounge meant that I didn't get to digest the talent playing at that sainted space the way I would've liked to. From what I could discern...Aylet Rose Gottleib was slightly interesting though too middle-eastern World Music for my personal tastes (I found it mildly pleasant though), while Morcilla with Matt Lavelle cooked with great late-seventies avant-tension (and the weirdest electric piano sounds I've ever experienced!) making me long for a release in the hopefully near future. It's very interesting hearing some of these new avant garde jazz acts who seem to be consciously tossing totally mid-class punkisms into their overall makeup, making this music (at least to me) even more meaningful to my everyday existence than the music of today from whence punkisms have naturally developed! I mean, why should I spend money on a Franz Ferdinand CD when I can get many more thrills out of a Freedomland one???

Anyone interested in obtaining two out of print and hopelessly unobtainable back issues of BLACK TO COMM are advised to go here and here, and while you're at it BID on these collectible fanzoonies as soon as you can! It's not everyday that these old, obscure BLACK TO COMMs (well, one of 'em is actually the old[er] PFUD! if you can believe it!) are made available to the general public, so rather than pester me for back issues you know you're not going to get (especially after certain people slobbered all over me and begged for such rarities, then started calling me names on their blogs!), why don't you just bid on these items and take your chances like a MAN! Believe me, both of these issues are highly desirable (at least in some small circles) and rare...so rare that in fact even I don't have one of these issues in my own collection! Not only that, but if you bid on these fanzines and boost the price up to ridiculous heights, you're also boosting my ego and pride along with it...and can you think of a better way to make your faverave blogmeister a happy man that by paying $79.58 for a magazine you coulda bought for two bucks only fifteen years ago?