Good day from rustic Horse Cave, Kentucky, USA.
Don’t have a lot to report, I’m afraid… been so busy engineering ballgames at the radio station that it hasn’t left a lot of time for stuffing pop culture stuff in my head. Haven’t even really been able to do any listening to music while walking… frigid here in KY over the weekend; it’s 26 degrees as I type this, cloudy skies. Some parts of the state have been seeing snow flurries, though I haven’t seen any here.
Am adjusting to semi-retirement and social security quite well, thank you, though it wouldn’t kill me to find a part time job that I could work 2-3 days a week doing graphics… I thought I had perhaps found one, local to me (less than 5 miles away, actually) but although I had a nice chat with the office/hiring manager when I dropped off my resumé, that was about a month ago and since then, despite being told they would call, I’ve heard nothing. Two follow-ups, and I got “We have your resumé and we’ll be in touch” twice. They don’t seem to have hired for the position, so I guess I’ll just have to hang loose and see what happens. It would be right up my alley; similar to my previous job but with a lot less stress. I did complete (well, as complete as it can be at this stage) a job for my friend, Nashville musician Ned Hill; he launched a Kickstarter to finance his next album and he tapped me to do the package graphics. He’s already met his initial goal but he will most likely add incentives, I think, so click the link and see what’s going on with it, whydoncha.
I’m still doing the occasional classic comics reread; in the past week I’ve gone through old Gold Key issues of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom and Magnus, Robot Fighter….stuff I read as a kid but other than a hardcover collection of Magnus stories, I haven’t read them in many years. I found them both quite enjoyable; the Solar stories were a curious blend of espionage and science fiction, pedestrianly drawn but tightly scripted. They didn’t even give Solar a supersuit until about 6 issues in, which looking at it today is rather refreshing after 50 years since of constant spandex. The hard sci-fi Magnus stories, of course, had that magnificent Russ Manning artwork and a genuinely gnarly view of a robot-dependent future; most issues also had a really good backup series called The Aliens, written and drawn by Manning as well, and it can be said to be as good as the lead feature. As a kid growing up, the local Ben Franklin Five and Dime had a spinner rack that only carried Gold Key comics until the early 1970s, when they started to stock select DC Comics such as Action, Adventure, Batman, Detective, Superboy feat. the Legion of Super-Heroes, and most notably The Brave and the Bold, all those wonderful Haney/Aparo Batman team-ups that sometimes even had team-up suggestions and letters by young wannabe comics writer/artist David Allen Jones of Horse Cave, KY in their letters columns. Anyway, for a long time it was the only place in town to get Gold Key books, and I bought (well, had bought for me) many issues of not only Solar and Magnus, but also Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the occasional movie & TV tie-in like Beatles Yellow Submarine, King Kong, or The Man/Girl from U.N.C.L.E. with backup Jet Dream and Her Stunt-girl Counterspies (a comic worthy of a column of its own; I believe it was inspired by James Bond’s “Pussy Galore”…had the one-shot collection of those stories, too) as well. Halcyon days.
Not a lot of current comics stuff, the only new one I read was the latest issue of Danger Street, in which the shifting kaleidoscope shards are still coming into focus. Not to spoil, but I do hate seeing the young Green Team guys getting whacked; of course, Tom King is writing them as arrogant young snots rather than the relatively benign rich kids that Joe Simon imagined them as.. and that’s logical, yeah, but sometimes I read this shit with 15 year old’s eyes.
Sometimes I get my curiosity piqued by checking out the posts on the venerable Scans Daily site; that happened to me this very morning with the latest Scarlet Witch series. These days, at least it seems to me, most Marvel comics (especially) are tailored to mirror their Cinematic Universe counterparts as closely as possible, which makes sense from a business standpoint but often gives me a weird vibe as a reader. I’m pleased to report that that’s not necessarily the case; while a lot of lip service is paid to Wanda’s relationship to the Vision and the loss of her two boys (which caused a lot of trouble in both universes) and other Avengers-related stuff, this one at least seems to be its own comic, with the portrayal of the Witch here less the waifish Elizabeth Olson and more the mature young woman that we’ve seen on and off over the decades (and yeah, there has been a LOT I’ve missed in the last 30 years). It’s more consistent with the Wanda that James Robinson gave us in his solid 12 issue run back in the mid-teens, which made me happy as I really liked his take. Anyway, here, the creators of record are one Steve Orlando, writer, who has done (after a casual glance at his Wiki page) a ton of comics that I’ve never read, and artist Sara Pichelli, whom I recall from the Abnett/Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy series, as well as skimming issues of Runaways. Basically, Orlando has given her the ol’ Madame Xanadu setup- she’s an occult expert who operates a shop in which troubled people can come in for help. One MCU concession is having the “Darcy” character on board as her store manager; in the films, although she was introduced in the Thor films, played by Kat Dennings, she did have a tangential role in WandaVision, so there’s the Scarlet Witch connection. She’s presented as much younger and a lot less voluptuous than Ms. Dennings here, and she provides Wanda with an interesting companion. I like how Orlando manages to capture the mix of regret and the desire to make good, having been through struggles and determined to help others. She’s not all weepy though, she has a dry sense of humor which helps to round out her character. Robinson did the same, mostly, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the best way to write her. There also seems to be, three issues in, a “guest of the month” format going on- issue 1, her bro Quicksilver, 2, the X-Men’s Storm, and in #3, another X-person, Lorna Dane aka “Polaris”, who has magnetism powers like her father (I guess, that’s how she was presented originally but there’s been about five decades worth of X-Men comics that I haven’t read), which makes her and Wanda stepsisters or something. Together they assist a tiny warrior from Subspace (named “Mardj”, as in “Simpson”, I suppose) in becoming an inspirational warrior and help take her planet back from invaders. Reminded me a little of last year’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow for no real good reason. Quite a lot of reach for three issues, huh. This is two SW series in a row that I’ve sampled and got interested in; what this means I don’t know exactly. Anyway, I liked.
Musicwise, I’ve just been skipping around from one artist to the next, one genre to another, without a real focus in mind. I’m in one of those moods where nothing really sticks. Last week saw the 50 year anniversary of an album that I love like a red-headed stepchild, T. Rex’s Tanx. I wrote one of my beloved rambling reminisces slash reviews of it on Facebook, and hey, since it’s mostly already written, here it is, repurposed for you presumed edification.
At some point in the height of T.Rexasty, infatuated with his new love interest Gloria Jones, and probably after doing an eightball of coke, Marc Bolan decided that his "T.Rex Sound" had grown stale and was becoming passé. 45-only singles "Solid Gold Easy Action" and "20th Century Boy" only made it, respectively, to #2 and #3 on the UK charts. US charts? Ha ha you're kidding, right? Anyway, all this caused Marc to decide a new sound was needed, and he decided to work in elements of soul music, as well as the shiny new toy Mellotron he had acquired, into the mix. He hit the studio, and the result is a strange, ragged, patched-together sounding set of songs that sounded "similar" to the previous two records, but a lot more haphazardly constructed and recklessly sung. The great Tony Visconti was on hand to do the production honors, as he had been for Electric Warrior and The Slider, but given what he had to work with, he must have felt more like a surgeon than a record producer.
Of course, 14 year old David Allen Jones of Horse Cave Kentucky USA, having discovered T. Rex via a used 8-track of The Slider, knew none of this. All he knew was that it was the current T.Rex record, and he wanted it. So he got it at that fabled record store at the Mall in St. Matthews in Louisville, and wound up getting mostly confused. The lyrics were still playful and random, like before, and the guitar/bass/drums mix was still the same, but really, it wasn't and I didn't know what to think at first. But, the inherent tunefulness persisted, Bolan couldn't help himself, and eventually many of these raggedy tunes ingratiated themselves in his brain, to the point where it became an LP that, when in a Bolan mood, he played almost as much as the two before it, and in an odd way, this ugly duckling record often sneaks into his top 50 (I really should get around to actually making that list) albums. Also, the record came with a cool poster of the, let's admit it, handsome Mr. Bolan posing on his knees with a toy tank suggestively placed between his legs. I'm surprised my parents let me keep that thing on the wall.
Opener "Tenement Lady" is a perfect example of the strangeness of this record. It starts out as a chugging, vaguely funky rocker, a song sung to a lady who lives in a tenement I assume (the album didn't come with the words, and once they did finally put the lyrics in the CD reissues, sometimes they didn't match up with the words I heard when I listened), and it's an acceptable, if low-key rocker, embellished by mellotron. Then abruptly the song grinds to a halt and Bolan's strummed acoustic guitar (and more mellotron washes) takes over as he sings about another mystic lady. It's such a puzzling way to construct a song, and the two grafted-together songs don't quite compliment each other. Next up is "Rapids", which begins with a little ratatattat of drums, then Bolan's fuzz-toned guitar plays a lick or two, and we're off to the races as a closed-mic’d Marc gives us a song about some sort of a family conflict, probably metaphorical, and it gives us the charming couplet "Your father said "clean out your toes rose and go and lick some uncooked meat'". Eventually, through all this, we get some fairly conventional rockers "Mister Mister" (lots of sax), "Shock Rock" (a commentary on Alice Cooper, it was thought), and "Country Honey". There are two really good songs on side one, though- "Broken Hearted Blues", one of those yearning ballads that Marc could pull out of his ear when he wanted, lots of sax, and the Disco-ish, a good 3 years before Disco became a thing, goofily titled "Electric Slim and the Factory Hen" which also features some great guitar noodling as it fades out by Mr. B.
This is already long enough, so I'll just mention the strangely but yet- really coolly titled "The Street and the Babe Shadow", what that means I don't know (and the lyrics don't reveal), so it's just some more Marc random poetry but it has a nice boogie swing beat and a killer sax solo that some thought David Bowie did, but it was really British woodwind stalwart Howie Casey that did the deed... "Highway Knees", another nonsense title but it's a really pleasant song that bops along nicely and features some more nice Bolan soloing on the mellotron-washed outro, and "Life is Strange", one of those reflective ballads like Electric Warrior's "Life's a Gas" and The Slider's "Spaceball Ricochet". It's nicely played and sung, I think, and Marc didn't always take the time to sing these songs nicely- he slurs his vocals a lot. Guess it sounded more "soul", I dunno.
Anyway, when it came out on CD, someone did us a real solid - they included a whole bunch of those singles from around this time that were successful in Britain but not here in the States- "Children of the Revolution", b-sides "Jitterbug Love" and "Sunken Rags", the great "20th Century Boy" and "Solid Gold Easy Action", and another b-side "Free Angel", a clutch of songs that's as good as anything on the Tanx record proper.
As it turned out, this record died in the US too, so Reprise dropped Marc, unbeknownst to me... i didn't realize it until I started seeing ads for T. Rex's next release in 1974, an album on Casablanca-home of KISS and Donna Summer-Records called Light of Love, which, as I came to find out, was the last two British T. Rex releases jammed together for release over here. None of them were hits, and Marc's decline was in full flower.
I’ll never think of this one as in the same league as Electric Warrior or The Slider, or even the self-titled first T.Rex proper album, but it’s very enjoyable in its own way and has grown on me over the years.
I’ve taken up enough of your time, thanks for reading if you made it this far. See ya next week hopefully.