The Afghan Whigs and Black Love

In 1993 The Afghan Whigs had a hit with Gentlemen, the frank and somewhat frightening triptych through the desolation of a relationship, based on true events in the life of Greg Dulli, the singer and leader of the band. It was venomous, it was vulnerable, it was bravely candid. The line "I've got a dick for a brain and my brain will sell my ass to you" followed Dulli around for awhile in the press. Some called it honest, some called it misogynistic. You have to keep in mind, this was the early nineties, when Alternative navel gazing was the order of the day. The Whigs waving their dicks around like that then was pretty brazen. Not to mention that sonically, they were an onslaught of groove in the age of sludge.

It's perhaps ironic they probably wouldn't have gotten signed to a major label or gotten Gentlemen anywhere on the Billboard chart without Mtv airplay, their video was aired on 120 Minutes, which existed because of the Alternative movement. True for lots of very disparate artists.

So Black Love was the followup album, and where the previous album was intensely personal, this one was a crime novel set to music. The album sounds like Film Noir looks, and is cast full of strings and bombast. Check it out here.

And I said all that to say this-
Summer's kiss is over, baby.

SHINDIG!

In 1965, Pop was Shindig, and Shindig was beyond everything like it. The creation of host Jimmy O'Neill and Sharon Sheeley, Shindig beamed the Rock and Soul Revolution directly into America's living room every week. The performances were recorded live (as in, unlike American Bandstand, no lip synching), the backing band was hot, the dancers were not (can't win them all), and everybody who was anybody made the scene. Howlin' Wolf wasn't going to make it on Ed Sullivan. Shindig was a whole other creature.

Without any further ado:

Paul Gulacy and Shang-Chi: Master of Kung-Fu

Paul Gulacy was Steranko's heir apparent at Marvel in the 1970s. He's best known for a stellar run pencilling with Doug Moench as writer on Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung-Fu. Shang-Chi was essentially Bruce Lee's character from Enter The Dragon, a Monk-like martial artist working anachronistically and perhaps somewhat against his will as a secret agent. The added twist was that he was the son of Fu Manchu, the original pulp yellow peril.

Manchu was already an ancient character at that point, known from novels, films, and radio. Marvel owned the comic rights for a fleeting moment, and born from that was this cutting edge storyline, casting Shang-Chi as a noble warrior at odds with his father's cruelty.

Kung-Fu was all the rage at the time, it would've been very easy for Shang-Chi to have been an unremarkable flash in the pan, just there to cash in on a temporary craze. But what elevated the character beyond being a fad was Gulacy's art. It's like watching a movie unfold across a printed page. Click to enlarge the images here, they absolutely speak for themselves.






You can find more at Gulcy.com, the website of the man himself.

The Breeders at the Fair

They will always be best remembered (if at all) for Cannonball. That was hot, but my favorite is this one. I can't think about any State Fair anywhere ever without thinking of this tune.

Both are from the album Last Splash. Perfect summertime tunes, driving with the windows down and one arm out the side.

UK Punk Rock History Books

They don't sell too many books in Hot Topic, so unfortunately, kids who get the urge to shave their heads into mohawks or prance around in bondage trousers probably don't know who they're even emulating. They've got Punk Rock style displays in Sears, now. It's weird, but if you know anything at all about Malcolm McLaren, it's absolutely subversively appropriate. Here's how I know.

Punk Diary
Dates don't lie, and George Gimarc did his homework so you don't have to. Punk Rock was a movement and is now history, history which is flawlessly represented here in a witty package that is a must for anyone who wants to know what they're talking about when they talk about Punk.


England's Dreaming
Not only is this the single authoritative book on the social climate that created as well as the ins and outs of the culture of British Punk Rock, but also the best timeline based discography of the Rock&Roll that preceded Punk that I could imagine. I owe much of who I am today to discovering this book at age 15, it's an indispensable guide to music everyone should hear before their 21st birthday.


Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
Lydon will blow the mind of any misfit kid navigating adolescence. He certainly did mine. There was no greater example in my world of the glorious freedom in being yourself, and I never thought about peer pressure ever again after reading this as a High School Freshman.

Nick Ashford

Tough week for the lyricist half of Great American Songwriting teams.

Nick Ashford has died. Most famous by name recognition as one half of Ashford and Simpson, husband and wife who had a hit or two under their own names, but my favorites are the duets they wrote for Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell. The world lost a little bit of guiding light.

Leiber and Stoller

Sad news that Jerry Leiber has died. That's him standing in the picture. He was the lyricist.



Leiber and Stoller were true and great original Rock & Roll poets, rivaled in the 50's by only Chuck Berry. Whenever you hear someone allege that Elvis Presley stole Hound Dog from Big Mama Thornton, they clearly missed yet another, deeper lesson in the great cross cultural American experiment- that song was written for hire by two Jewish kids in New York.

Smokey Robinson shared an excellent anecdote somewhere, in which one of his friends on the block said words to the effect of "Man, these Leiber and Stoller brothers who write these Coasters songs are tough!" To which Smokey replied, "I do not believe that 'Lieber' and 'Stoller' are 'brothers,' yet they are, indeed, quite tough."

Just a couple of fantastic characters who gave a priceless contribution to the 20th Century. Jerry will be missed.

Picking a favorite? Oh, it's hard to say. There truly were so many. You name a song you love from 50-65, chances are solid it was L&S. But for me? Might be this.

Jim Steranko on Star Wars

Jim Steranko used to have a magazine called Comicscene, which was then Mediascene, which was then Mediascene Prevue, and then just Prevue. He got a very early and very exclusive look at The Empire Strikes Back that illustrates the magazine's might. You can read the highlights here.

Max Bemis and Alive With The Glory Of Love

Hey, do you like Say Anything?

Yeah, no, not the movie. The band.

It's perhaps unfortunate that Max Bemis named his band after his favorite movie. It's not like that's a particularly obscure flick or something. He might as well have called it Star Wars.


But whatever. He created this great song about his maternal grandparents, who managed to survive the Holocaust. If you were ever in love as a kid and managed to blot out whatever was happening in the outside world through your underdeveloped brain's lack of empathic understanding, it's not hard to imagine there were probably at least one boy and girl who were so into each other that the gas chambers didn't seem like all that big a deal. And, in a way you're kind of not supposed to acknowledge, that's beautiful.

Don Newton's Captain Marvel

Click to enlarge the sly satire.

Don Newton was an extremely talented comic artist who never got his due. Here you can read about his sad relationship with CC Beck. Click on the button that says -appropriately enough- "CC Beck." While you're there you should check out the rest of his work, it's all brilliant.

Jerry Lewis and the Nutty Professor

Jerry Lewis gets a lot of flack, and by and large, he probably deserves it.

But in 1963, he gave the performance of his life as the greatest over the top arrogant asshole ever as Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor. The ultimate "chicks dig jerks" story, in which the titular mild mannered putz Professor invents a serum that turns him into Mr.Hyde in pomade and velvet.


It's been asserted that Buddy was based on Jerry's ex comedy partner Dean Martin. I don't buy it. Dean was way too easy going and benevolent by every anecdote both onstage and offstage. Buddy's more like Frank. But one rumor is, he was created in the image of the vastly underrated Buddy Greco.

While we're on the subject of Dean and Jerry...

The Unseen Elvis Presley

Phil Noto

My friend Officer Matt turned me on to Phil Noto today. Speaks for himself, doesn't he?

Foxy Shazam

Some friends are way into this group and I had to check into it because I love the name. Turns out, I love the band, too. I initially said "It's like Freddie Mercury had a Garage Band" but that doesn't really make sense. This is not like anything I've heard before and I dig the shit out of that, only made better by watching rock critics trip all over themselves trying to put it in a box. "Post Hardcore Emo with Classical influence?" C'mon. Zappa said it best: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

So I'll leave it with a quote from frontman Eric Nally from their website:

"When I listen to a Foxy Shazam record I think of Evel Knievel, Bruce Springsteen, my childhood, Van Morrison, my old friends from high school I don’t talk to anymore, Elton John, the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and beyond, Iggy Pop and my first kiss. One of my favorite things to do when listening to my music is to close my eyes and picture a crowd of six million people all chanting "Foxy! Foxy! Foxy!" The lights go out and my band walks on stage. It gives me goose bumps. It all makes sense to me. When you listen to our record, think of your favorite things and it’ll make sense to you as well."

And the original Foxy Shazam, Mary Marvel:

Matt Kindt and Revolver

Nothing I've seen has summed up the apocalyptic jitters specific to the 21st century quite as well as Matt Kindt's Revolver. The main dude somehow flip flops every other day between a city torn apart and facing death, destruction, and anarchy vs. a regular, soul crushing, doldrum existence, and finds that he might prefer living in the terrordrome. It's a work that explores a great taboo: Cataclysm is exciting.

Crashsite, Suck.com, and Ye Olde Internet

I talked my folks into buying a Gateway 2000 and getting AOL in or around '95. They're pretty frugal, I don't quite recall how I got them to do it. I probably duped them into thinking it would help with my homework. Which I quit doing immediately after.

The internet gave me an eye hole into the world outside of Fern Creek. I'm not just talking about the mind bending, soul warping pornography. I'm talking about the appeal of cynical twentysomethings on impressionable teenagers. And this was back before everybody had a webpage. No, in those days, in order to even get your picture someplace you had to have a real camera, take a picture, have the film developed, scan a photo with a scanner, and have a domain to put it up. Nobody I knew personally could do any of that, even getting pictures developed wasn't an easy thing for a kid to do. being a narcissist used to be extremely difficult.

It used to be that in order to have your meanderings on the net someplace you had to either have a webpage for some fucking reason that was constantly "under construction" or you were being paid by someone to be all Gen X and disaffected in public.



One such was crashsite.com. Don't bother going there now, it's now one of those nowhere spaces on the web you get when you accidentally type the wrong thing in the address bar and risk spyware uploading itself into your shit. But in 1995 it was cracking.

You can see a picture of one of their promos here, where a guy with some connection to what used to be a webpage about being a degenerate has apparently grown up to be the kind of person who puts pictures of his kids in his opulent home on the open internet. Times change, right? The comments there function as a reunion spot of sorts.

Crashsite would have features on making potato cannons, underage drinking, mail fraud, any number of petty crimes. The main dude was a guy called Mark Driver, he would write about barfights with old men and how to survive on 5 bucks a day. You can click his name to get a bead on what he's up to now. I thought this guy was super cool. Now, I think I was a kid who was looking up to the wrong people. Maybe I'm just sore. I e-mailed Driver an article that got published in my school newspaper about how cool I was, and I never heard back. But I did get a T-shirt in the mail.

Although Crashsite isn't as sharp as I remember it, my other favorite website circa 1998 still holds up.

Suck.com was some super snarky shit, maybe a bit too smart for it's own good. If Crashsite was Beavis and Butthead, Suck was Daria. Half way through most articles my eyes start to glaze over due to the fatal combination of cynicism and verbosity. There's only so much piss you can drink before you're ready to put your attention elsewhere. Say, Salon.com , which Suck took constant cool kid potshots at.

So why is Suck still worth it? It's all down to a little Wednesday ritual called filler.




Poly Ester wrote and Terry Colon drew this weekly bite size bit of woe, which made the regular "everything is shit" attitude of the site somehow fun. Among other things, Poly showed me it was OK to talk like an old man. I had a crush. When she would have articles about her dating troubles, I'd imagine that if she were just to meet me everything would be allright, because a gawky 18 year old with a pompadour from Kentucky was the answer to all her jaded twentysomething troubles. I also had to just guess that she was attractive based on her cartoon. The closest I got was having an e-mail I sent in run on the page. Very big deal at the time, even if I was basically embarrassing myself.

What happened to suck? Well, they went on vacation in June of 2001 and never came back. This was back before information flowed the way it does now, it was just gone. Maybe after 9/11 the things that used to suck didn't seem so bad anymore.




So where's Poly now? Turns out she writes TV reviews for Salon. Here's hoping she's happy and healthy and less rhetorically and existentially miserable.

The Vacant Lot

From the short lived mid 90's Comedy Central sketch show The Vacant Lot

Hell Up In Harlem

THIS is airing the classic and action packed Hell Up In Harlem, the sequel/re-imagining to the poignant Black Caesar. The first was a much better film by almost any measuring stick, except that it ends tragically. Harlem, on the other hand, is a pure badass soul brother powerhouse action flick. Fred Williamson could play a Hell of a hero, and in this, he's all boisterous Id, tearing the shit out of all the enemies who got the best of him the first time around. Catch him if you can.

Louis CK

"When I was first divorced, I started dating younger women, and it was really exciting. But after a while I was like, This is just dumb. You date someone younger and it's...limited. There's no future in it. And as far as just going out and getting laid, that kinda got tired for me very quickly. It's just—it's very intimate. You're letting her right into the middle of your life. You see someone and you're like, She's really hot, I want to be naked with her. And then you're naked with her and you're like, Jesus, she's in my fucking room and we're naked. The idea of that—of just fucking somebody—became silly to me."

That's from an excellent article from GQ this month on Louis CK.

The Surrealistic Hilarity Of Professional Wrestling

"To those who believe in the beauty of professional wrestling, nothing needs to be said. For those who don't appreciate wrestling, nothing could be said to change their minds."
~ Vince McMahon


Bonus Adam West Bat-Insanity




And then, there was Andy Kaufman.

The Killer

Wednesday Comics

This is the point of the summer where we're all pretty much over it. It's been too hot for too long, we're tired of our summer clothes and long for jacket weather. All the big, explosive movies have come out. Ready for Fall.

But around this time a couple of years ago, there was something special to look forward to every single Wednesday. DC Comics recruited a bunch of stellar talents, let them loose on characters both obscure and well known, and put them to work in a format that had never quite been attempted before.


It came folded up like a conventional newspaper. Once you unfurled it, it was like the big, full color, Sunday comics. Only on each giant sheet, we got a single page a week from 15 big stories, told in serial format. Usually with a cliffhanger on each page.

It was fun, it was new, it was retro, it was perhaps the greatest experiments with sequential art in recent memory.



Read more about it here.

Buy the incredible, oversize compendium here.

Jim "The King" Brown

Elvis Vs. AC/DC


Elvis impersonators like to be called "Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs)." If they were all as solid as Ireland's Jim "The King" Brown, I'd call them whatever they would like. Learn all about him here.

For God and Country- Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo

Not usually Salisbury Snake's beat, but this in depth story from the New Yorker about the Bin Laden mission is something every American should read.

As always, a heartfelt thanks to the service men and women who, and never kid yourself into thinking this is not the case, keep us all safe, secure, and free. Hat's off to each and every one of you.