Greetings from south central Kentucky, the quaint little town of Horse Cave to be precise. What I intend to do with this is basically me copying being inspired by Warren Ellis and others’ newsletters, and letting you guys know, in case you’re interested, what I’m absorbing, be it comics, music, movies, sports, or other random effluvia.
One quick note: at some point, once I’ve managed to get my rusty writing motor in gear, I intend to make the stuff I publish subscription-only. I promise I won’t charge much, but I would like to make some coffee money with all this, anyway. If I can find a way to make my posts readable without subscription after a proper interval has passed, say a month, then I will.
So here we go.
I received 2 music bio-type and 1 movie-reference books for Christmas: Sly & The Family Stone: An Oral History, by Joel Selvin, and Procol Harum: The Ghosts Of A Whiter Shade of Pale, by Henry Scott-Irvin. I’ve yet to really get very far into the Sly book, which is basically interview quotes about the whole Sly Stone and the Family Stone thing from the beginning to current at the time of the writing. I have been reading the Procol pretty steadily, though I did kinda skip ahead to the chapters dealing with their albums post-Home. I’ll go back and start from the beginning; it’s just that 1970-1976 period is more interesting to me. I also got The Dr. Phibes Companion: The Morbidly Romantic History of the Classic Vincent Price Horror Film Series by Justin Humphreys, a very thorough and fascinating account of the filming of the Phibes films. Abominable is one of my favorite films, Rises Again not so much but it’s still enjoyable.
More recently, I made a discovery: Trini Lopez.
This was prompted by a Facebook conversation I had with Matt Pfefferkorn, who owns and operates a record store in Bowling Green, some 35 miles south of here. Mr. Pfefferkorn had a handful of Warner Bros./Reprise Loss Leaders in stock at the store, and he suggested I come down and check out what he had. The Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders are, in case you don’t know, a series of promotional records that WB/R made available for sale beginning in 1968, and continued to do so until the early 1980s. You can go here for a good overview. Ever since I had been buying records, I had often seen the advertisements, printed on the inner sleeves of WB/R releases, advertising these albums, which featured at least four sides of songs by the various WB/R artists of the day, and they only cost, in most cases, $2 for a double album. I was fascinated by them. I have had a roundabout history with these records; when I was a teenager I finally broke down and bought the first two, The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook and the The 1969 Warner/Reprise Record Show… then no others for a long time. Why, I can’t say exactly. Maybe I wasn’t immediately blown away by the offerings, maybe I had already acquired many of the songs by the artists I liked that were also featured on other releases, can’t say. Anyway, it would be the mid-80s before I dipped my toe in those waters again, and the occasion was my friend Greg Briggs had several of them in his possession, and while he wasn’t interested in selling them then, he did let me borrow them, and I made a cherry-picked 90 minute cassette which I listened to for a long time. When I ran across one in a used record store, which was rare, I’d get the occasional one. Eventually, 10-15 years later Greg sold me the copies he had left, and I was on my way. In fact, I bought four from Matt last week altogether… I thought I had a couple of them but it turned out I didn’t, I was just getting confused because of that good ol’ cassette.
Now… what has any of this got to do with Trinidad López III? I’ll tell ya. Mr. Lopez did over 30 albums in his career, the vast majority of them for Sinatra’s Reprise label. So it’s only natural that he would have tracks from his then-current records featured on the Loss Leaders. Which meant that I had seen his name often, listed with the other spotlighted artists, but nothing I had heard had made an impression on me. I had always pegged him for a Latin spin on the Sinatra/Sammy Davis Jr./Tom Jones type singers that were popular in the early-mid 60s, always on TV variety shows and such. They always wore suits, sang covers and standards, and sometimes headlined Vegas. I had not heard him on the radio. But for some reason, I got curious and decided to give him a listen, and it turns out I didn’t know nothin’.
In my never ending quest to find something interesting to listen to as I do my daily walk, I had Lopez' name in my mind and said "Screw it, let's see what's on Spotify". I chose his 1969 release entitled The Whole Enchilada, mostly because it had Donovan (!) covers on it and that really made me curious. Now, sometimes when singers of Lopez' ilk cover the groovy tunes of the swingin' 60s, well, it can be campfest at best or a cringeworthy disaster at worst. Much to my surprise, though, neither of these outcomes was the case.
The record was made up of uptempo, poppy treatments of a variety of songs, with some surprisingly gritty guitar work and Lopez was a fabulous vocalist. I was gobsmacked, as our Brit friends allegedly say. Even the Cream cover was well done. I mean, you can tell he was from the Sinatra/Dean Martin school in his approach, with a Latin flavor, but he gave these tracks a zest that really caught me off guard. Definitely a subject for further research, and now I find myself wanting to score some of those albums. You just never know sometimes.
After I wrote the above, I wrote this:
You may recall me posting a bit about Trini Lopez, a performer about whom I knew next to nothing about other than I had seen his name in the Warner Bros./Reprise Loss Leaders promotional album series most of my life. So I went to Spotify, cued up a couple of his albums, and was blown away by how good they were. This guy had interesting taste in covers, and could sing like a mother-well, you know.
And how I managed to NOT know much about him, or even really see him all that much growing up in the 60s and 70s like I did, really surprised me after I watched this documentary, My Name is Lopez, last night. He was all over the place- he did Carson many times, was on Hefner's Playboy After Dark (it's not like I watched that one at age 10), every TV variety show of the 60s and 70s, and films- the hombre was one of the Dirty Dozen, for chrissakes. The doc, which assays his rise from the ghetto to worldwide stardom, doesn't even pretend to be objective; it's clearly a valentine to someone everyone involved in the making of this thing clearly loves... though, in interview segments both old and new, he comes across as a super humble and likeable man. He also made Frank Sinatra, who gave him his first real break, a lot of money for his Reprise record label (Lopez says, tellingly, that he never called his boss anything but "Mr. Sinatra"), Lopez was also one of the first Latino rockers, helping pave the way for the likes of Richie Valens (although Richie released "La Bamba" first) and Los Lobos, to name a few.
It doesn't really proceed in linear fashion; the events it describes kinda skip around timeline-wise. Lots of interview clips, including a couple of his Dirty Dozen castmates like Jim Brown and Donald Sutherland. Dave Grohl is even in this, like he is everything these days. There's also a lot of footage of the "Gand Band", the late producer and his co-producer wife's lounge act, who backs Lopez in a current-day concert/onstage interview throughout (Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top even shows up to play with them at one point). One definite positive is that it has animated sequences by "Shag" which are pretty kewl.
Just goes to show ya, just when you think you've listened to everything and seen everyone entertainment-wise, somebody always seems to pop up.
Comics-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Tom King-scripted stuff, it seems… I was less than impressed with his chaotic take on Mister Miracle and only slightly more impressed with his Omega Men, but his Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow with art by Bilquis Evely just knocked my socks off. Basically a superhero/sci-fi adventure fantasy that repurposes True Grit, King took a longtime undercooked heroine, gave her depth as seen through the eyes of a POV character, and transcended both source materials to create what I thought was one of last year’s best series. Not that I read all that many others, but you get me. For the last year or so I’ve also been reading his take on another 70s DC character who’s been in and out of the public eye- Christopher Chance, The Human Target- setting him up in a murder mystery (his own murder thanks to a slow acting poison; yep, it’s D.O.A. with superheroes this time, and even more incongruously he provides as a supporting cast the good ol’ bwah-ha-ha Justice League of the 80s- you know, Fire, Ice, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, J’onn J’onzz, Guy Gardner, G’nort, etc., and it works very well. King writes it like Dashiell Hammett meets Gardner Fox meets J.M. Dematteis and I, for one, was captivated. It proves something I’ve long suspected: it’s sometimes not the character that ruins a story, it’s what’s done with him/her/it if done by someone who has a clue and the desire/commitment to make them interesting. Most recently, he’s attempting to do the same with an even more obscure set of players- the characters featured in the nine issues of a 70’s DC showcase-style series called First Issue Special. It’s called Danger Street, which of course refers to the Jack Kirby one-shot Dingbats of Danger Street, yet another group of oddball boys (cf. Boy Commandos, Newsboy Legion) who band together to fight crime or just goof off, we never knew because he only did that one issue. Some of the Special showcases were for older characters like Doctor Fate and the Creeper, some were new concepts like Joe Simon and Jerry Grandenetti’s Green Team and The Outsiders. Someone has killed a member of the Dingbats, and “Lady Cop” (an attempt at a Police Woman type series, issue #4) is trying to find out whodidit. This is only getting started, and there is a lot more going on than that (the frigging New Gods are even involved), but it’s still early so we don’t know exactly where it’s going. Despite some puzzling choices character-wise (Metamorpho and the Creeper in particular), it’s as involving as Human Target was, so I’m on board till the end.
I’ve also been taking advantage of a website that allows browsers to read comics online that have been scanned and archived; been working through classic old Marvel comics of the 60s. I’ve read a great deal of these, even owned a lot of them, but no longer really and it’s been ages since I’ve sampled some of these titles like Strange Tales, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Sub-Mariner, and The Avengers. I wish I could say that this has been a more enjoyable experience than it has; what I was captivated by at age 6, for example, is damn near unreadable in my winter years. Much of the art is a outstanding- a lot of these is the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Gene Colan and even Don Heck in their primes. But the scripting is all over the place, involving but my god the dialogue, much of it but not all by Stan Lee and the worst offender, Roy Thomas, well, it’s really making me alternately cringe and gnash my teeth. This is prime Marvel, the stone that started a revolution so to speak, but this has really stood out for me. I may devote more space to this later, because this thing has gone on long enough, I think.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, be good and be good to each other.