The Book I Read

I’ve been on a Talking Heads kick lately, mainly because I’ve been reading This Must be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20^th Century by David Bowman. Bowman, you may recall, was the astronaut who turned into a space fetus at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I don’t know how he managed to write the book. But he did. It’s compulsively readable, if a little snarky and glib. Sometimes the best thing an author can do is get out of the material’s way, and that is something that Bowman refused to do. As I said, though, the book is pretty darn readable and it’s motivated me to listen to a lot of stuff I haven’t heard in years.

Including The Name of this Band is Talking Heads, a double live album that came out in 1982. Today I loaded up the digital versions of the last two sides—played by the extended, funky version of Talking Heads—and listened to it as I walked.

I remember when the album came out. I was a senior at a big university in Los Angeles. I saw the band twice on the tour they did to promote the live set, once at the Greek Theater in Hollywood and once at the Hollywood Palladium. The day after the Greek Theater show I exchanged notes with the reporter from the Hollywood Reporter (where I worked at the time) who reviewed the show. “It was like a religious experience,” I said. “Exactly!” she replied.

I think I had seen The Name of This Band in the stores but didn’t have the money to buy it, because I remember calling up radio station KROQ to request the live version of “The Great Curve,” my favorite Talking Heads song. I thought the live version would be incredible.

A man with a British accent answered the phone. “KROQ,” he said. “This is Aynsley Dunbar.”

The name rang a bell, but it was a pretty faint one. I think I knew he was a drummer. I later learned he had played with pretty much everyone, including Frank Zappa, Ian Hunter, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Journey. Those first four credits would have impressed me; Journey not so much. Journey was one of the bands I felt duty-bound to hate, along with groups like REO Speedwagon, Rush, Loverboy, and their ilk. I thought it was all music for brain-dead frat boys. I gave Rush some grudging respect because Geddy Lee, that hoser, had appeared on the Bob and Doug Mackenzie album. The rest of them, though, were too mainstream for my newly acquired too-cool taste in music.

“Could you play ‘The Great Curve” from The Name of this Band is Talking Heads?” I asked Dunbar, who was answering phones at KROQ as some kind of publicity gimmick.

“Great band,” he said. Then he asked if I knew who he was. He sounded pretty affable. “I’ve heard of you,” I said, tentatively. I hated then and still hate now to confess ignorance. He told me about some of his credits. I’m not sure if he mentioned Journey.

It was right around then that I reviewed a Journey concert at the Rose Bowl for the Hollywood Reporter. Of course, I hated the band on principle, so I hated the concert. I sat way up in the bleachers and it struck me that everyone else in my section was as bored as I was. Plus, I thought singer Steve Perry, visible to me in closeup on the big video screens above the stage, looked less like a rock-and-roll singer and more like Dustin Hoffman. I dutifully mentioned all this in my review, which apparently pissed off the band. Their manager called the music editor at the Hollywood Reporter to complain, so she banned me from reviewing for a time.

I had another Journey experience in California around then, when I went to a party at the invitation of a friend of a friend. It was at an apartment in Riverside. The only people I knew there were the people I had come with, and the guy who had invited us. As the night went on I became more and more bored and more and more belligerent. Finally I decided to take over the stereo, which was easy to do because the host kept it behind his bar. I could easily block anyone from approaching the turntable. One persistent party-goer kept insisting I put on a Journey album. “No. No Journey,” I decreed. Instead I put on Weasels Ripped my Flesh by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

That did not go over so well.

The funny thing is, Aynsley Dunbar had played with both Journey and the Mothers (although not on Weasels Ripped My Flesh).

I wish I had known more about him when he answered the phone. He seemed like he was up for a chat, and I would have liked to ask him about working with Zappa and Bowie and Ian Hunter. One album I bought in California that I really liked was Hunter’s All-American Alien Boy, and Dunbar plays on that. They say ignorance is bliss, but usually it’s just something that makes you want to kick yourself later.

I still don’t like Journey, despite the use of one of their songs at end of the final Sopranos episode. And I think the studio version of “The Great Curve” is better than the live one.

Come to think of it, I don’t think KROQ ever played my request, anyway.

Naked Outlaws

As I trudge around the neighborhood listening to the music that plays for me and me alone, I miss the times when music was much more a shared experience. I listened to it with friends, sitting around a dorm room or driving around in a car. Sometimes we argued about the album selection or grumbled because someone always had to hear his music, but music was something you listened to with other people.

I was really reminded of that this morning when “(Nothing but) Flowers” from the Talking Heads album Naked came on.

I was living in studio apartment in Washington when the band released that album in 1988. It was the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day and my brother and my friend Bill had come down to visit. We made the pilgrimage to the big Tower Records store down by George Washington University, where I bought a copy of Naked. On vinyl. At the time I was fighting a strenuous rear-guard action against CDs, which I felt were overpriced and overhyped. (I was right on both counts.) I did not have a CD player.

Anyway, the three of us were pretty big Talking Heads fans, so we headed back to my apartment to play the album. My brother and I had also bought a bottle of mescal, so we removed the worm so we could cut it in half and share it. Yum! Mescal turned out to be a good choice of liquor to accompany an album filled with Latin-American influences. I was especially taken by “(Nothing But) Flowers,” with its chiming South American guitars and lyrics about chocolate chip cookies and 7-11s. It sounded great then, so upbeat and happy and funny, and it still does now. Every time I hear it I flash back to that studio apartment, listening and laughing with Charlie and Bill without a care in the world, just excited to have a new Talking Heads album and a whole weekend of fun and music stretching out ahead.

When the song ended this morning the silence let me hear the quiet hiss of the sleet that had begun falling shortly after I started walking. Then the Outlaws started up and obliterated all outside sound with the country rock of “There Goes Another Love Song.”

You can’t get much more of a communal musical experience than you get with a really good rock concert, and one of the best live shows I ever saw was when the Outlaws played the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine, with Molly Hatchet opening. (The civic center’s handy list of past events tells me the show was on December 9, 1979.) I was a sophomore in a college about 30 miles from Portland at the time so I bought a ticket and decided to hitchhike down to the show with a fun-loving freshman named Webb. We filled a goatskin with screwdrivers to sustain us and we hit the road, thumbs outstretched, with plenty of time to spare in case finding a ride proved difficult.

Before we knew it a carload of attractive young women stopped and offered us a ride. They were also going to see the Outlaws that night. Crammed into the backseat with a couple of them, Webb and I exchanged wide-eyed looks of blissful amazement. To our great disappointment, though, the experience did not turn into something fit for Penthouse Forum. The girls simply dropped us off in Portland and waved goodbye. We had hours to go until showtime, with no money and nothing to do. The screwdrivers were starting to slow us down, too. So we stopped by a hotel just up the street from the civic center, crawled under a table in a deserted banquet room, and crashed.

We still had time to kill when we woke up, so we were sitting in the hotel lobby trying to figure out a game plan when a guy in a chauffeur’s livery came through the door and approached the desk. “I’m going to be picking up the Molly Hatchet band around 5:00,” we heard him tell the desk clerk. “Can you tell me how to get to the Cumberland County Civic Center?”

“Sure. Just pull out of the driveway, turn right, and go about 50 yards. It’s just down the street.”

The driver chuckled. “Right. Where is it really?”

“I’m not kidding,” the clerk replied. “It’s just down the street. You can see it out that window.”

The driver looked pained. “You telling me I drove all the way from Cape Cod to drive a band 50 yards down the street?”

“I guess so,” the clerk said.

Webb and I looked at each other. Molly Hatchet were someplace in the hotel, and surely partying their brains out. I wasn’t a big Hatchet fan, to be perfectly honest, but this sounded like the perfect opportunity to party with some real rock and rollers. “We should find them,” I said. Webb agreed.

We figured all we had to do was check out the hotel floors one by one until the sounds of smashing furniture, blasting music, and high-pitched Rebel yells guided us to the right room. No doubt the band would be glad to have us join the party. They’d offer us bottles of Jack Daniels to guzzle, and we’d flirt with the groupies, hot Southern girls in tube tops, tight cutoff shorts, and cowboy boots with names like Daisy and Loubelle. Maybe Webb and I would help hoist the TV set onto the windowsill so a band member could send it plummeting four stories to the ground. Come showtime we’d stagger, hooting and hollering, down to the lobby with the band. “Y’all come with us!” they’d bellow. “We’re making you honorary Hatchets!” We’d all cram into the limo, the driver still fuming in the front seat. “Get us to the Civic Center,” I’d order, “and make it snappy!” We’d all howl with laughter.

Well, we tried, but every floor of the hotel was as hushed as a church, with nary a Rebel yell to be heard anywhere. Maybe the band had consumed too many screwdrivers. It happens.

Anyway, we eventually made our way to the civic center. The place was packed and buzzing with excitement. As a cartoon chracter would say years later, it also smelled like Otto’s jacket. Some people were tossing Frisbees around the big hall, and a few people had even brought beach balls that bounced and soared from section to section. Webb and I pushed our way slowly through the people standing on the floor until we were right up near the stage. At one point I was so tightly mashed in by the crowd that only the toes of one foot touched the ground. But it was a big, happy mass and we were all having a great time together. Eventually we even ran into the girls who had picked us up—and once again, nothing happened.

The passage of time has dimmed the details, but I know Molly Hatchet—no doubt refreshed by their quiet afternoon at the hotel—played an energetic set that included “Gator Country,” “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” and “Dreams I’ll Never See.” Then the Outlaws, with their triple lead-guitar attack, came onstage and blew the roof off the joint. I’m sure they played “There Goes Another Love Song” and “Hurry Sundown” and closed with an epic version of “Green Grass and High Tides” with all the amps turned up to 11. I’m equally sure that at some point thousands of people in the crowd held flaming Bic lighters up high over their heads and howled with delight.

Thinking about all this as I walked put me in a pretty good mood despite the grim gray weather, and then “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers started playing and my mood improved even more. I may have even done a joyful skip like the one Charlie Brown does after he decides he’s going to decorate his little tree all by himself. I don’t have any specific “Roadrunner” related memories; It’s just a great song. It’s also about how music ties us together, even if you’re driving around alone with just the radio to keep you company.

 It helps me from being alone late at night
It helps me from being lonely late at night
I don’t feel so bad now in the car
Don’t feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
That’s right.

Turns out that you’re never alone when you have the right music playing.

Music for Ski Trails

A few weekends ago I went skiing with my own personal soundtrack. Standing on top of the local ski mountain, with a brilliant blue sky over my head and bright white powder beneath my skis, I adjusted my headphones under my hat and fired up the iPod. I picked the soundtrack to 2001 for my first selection and I had to laugh with delight as the opening notes of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” echoed in my ears. It was perfect. I stood atop the slope and watched other skiers go zipping away below me and the portentous music made me feel like Elvis about to step out on stage—or like a man-ape about to club an adversary to death.

The rest of the album worked perfectly. The ominous, mysterious notes of Ligeti’s compositions turned the white tails into the setting of science fiction movie, and the “Blue Danube” provided perfect accompaniment on the chairlift as I watched skiers carve their graceful sine curves into the powder on the tail alongside.

Later I took my personal soundtrack along for some night skiing. Night skiing is surreal enough on its own. The bright lights, white snow, and dark trees and sky transform the world into high-contrast black and white, something as unnatural as a movie. It seemed only right to add a soundtrack to this ski noir world. I found that the music I played altered my mood and the rhythm of my skiing. I made slow, sweeping turns as I listened to Aaron Neville croon “In the Still of the Night” (from the Red, Hot and Blue collection) but all of a sudden I turned aggressive when the Plimsouls come on with “In this Town” or Lou Reed played “Rock and Roll” (from Live in Italy). Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime” was delightfully incongruous on a cold chairlift, while the otherworldly Frippertronics from the Robert Fripp-produced Sacred Songs by Daryl Hall made me feel edgy and paranoid as it accompanied me up the chairlift into the darkness. When George Jones sang “These Days I Barely Get By” I took it as a commentary on my skiing ability.

Just as I pulled up to the lift and settle d into the chair with a bump, the iPod began playing “This Is the Day” by The The, from the 1983 album Soul Mining. It’s a wonderful song, one that even managed to survive its use in an M&M commercial. Despite the uplifting sound of the chorus (“This is the day/Your life will surely change”), it’s not really an optimistic song. Listen closely and you’ll get the sense that even if your life does change, it probably won’t be for the best.

 You could’ve done anything if you’d wanted.
And all your friends and family think that you’re lucky.
But the side of you they’ll never see
Is when you’re left alone with the memories
That hold your life together like glue.

 As I sat on the chairlift, alone, on a night when I chewed over the memories that each song from the iPod conjured up, those lines felt appropriate.

I was very disappointed—even a little angry—the first time I heard “This Is the Day” being used behind images of anthropomorphic hard-shelled candies cavorting with their chums in a commercial. From what little I knew about Matt Johnston, the man behind The The, I got the impression that he was a somewhat acerbic, anti-commercial kind of guy, the last person you’d expect to shill for a candy giant. It’s not as jarring as hearing a cruise line use Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” as a plug for wholesome family fun, or Jaguar using the Clash’s “London Calling” to sell luxury automobiles, but it comes close.  I guess there are no sacred songs anymore.

Summer Breeze?

Christmas trees litter the curbs like fallen soldiers from the holiday wars. It’s 2010 and we’re hip deep in the bleak season, the frozen weeks that stretch out before us, flat and eventless, after the big celebrations. It’s the time for post-holiday depression, when the daily routine returns with a vengeance to slap you right in the face with a big fistful of reality.

Now, I like winter as much as the next guy, but it’s cold out today. My shoulders ache from the clenched-up tenseness until the act of walking begins to warm me up. Which is why I laugh out loud when I hear the Isley Brothers play “Summer Breeze.” This was originally a lighter-than-air hit by Seals and Crofts back in the 1970s, but the Isleys—well, the Isleys kick it in the ass and give it a soul infusion, ending it with one of Ernie Isley’s thrilling, soaring guitar solos. I remember being knocked out by their version when I bought my vinyl Isley Brothers collection (Forever Gold) way back when, but I haven’t heard the song in a long time. It more than lives up to my memory—especially that guitar solo. It warms me right up.

Mother Lode

I’m ringing out the old year by doing a massive overhaul of my iPod’s contents. For Christmas my best friend gave me a 500 GB external hard drive that contained all the music in his collection, plus thousands of songs from two other friends. I have no idea how many songs there are in all, but it certainly numbers in the thousands. It’s like finding an entire record store—a quirky one—tucked away under the tree.

I’ve spent the last few days trolling through the files trying to figure out what I need to add first. The hard drive includes tons of stuff that I have on vinyl and cassette but not in digital format, so I added things from the Swimming Pool Qs, the Housemartins, XTC’s Skylarking and a slew of songs from the great cowpunk band Rank & File. One library contains dozens and dozens of TV theme songs, so I put on “The Rockford Files” (I had purchased the single when it came out) and a version of the glorious and glamorous theme from The Avengers. There’s stuff I’ve always wanted but never owned, including The Modern Lovers. There aren’t many songs that can get me pumped the way “Roadrunner” does. I’ve found tons of individual songs that I’ve always liked but never owned, including “Do You Want to Hold Me” by Bow Wow Wow and “Digging Your Scene” by the Blow Monkeys. The only digital version of Frank Zappa’s “Montana” that I had was the single version, which ditches the guitar solo (!).I finally have the song in all its string-bending glory.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Of course, adding new songs to the iPod means ditching some old stuff. I feel bad whenever I purge something from the iPod. It’s like laying off a loyal employee. How can I diss Stevie Wonder by dumping Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life? Well, I made up for it a little bit by adding Talking Book. A friend had loaned me his copy of Nick Lowe’s two-disc Quiet Please and I had loaded all 40+ songs on the iPod, but now it’s time for someone else to use those megabytes. In this case some are now eaten up by some songs that Lowe produced for his then-wife Carlene Carter, and some more to the Brian Eno/John Cale collaboration, Wrong Way Up, an album I previously had only on a cassette buried in a box in my furnace room. Oingo Boingo’s Nothing to Fear stepped aside to make room for Danny Elfman’s So Lo. Just to make sure I don’t get hopelessly mired in nostalgia, I also threw on some Arctic Monkeys. I’ve heard very little of their music, but I get the sense you have to know them if you want to claim any shred of hipness. Or maybe that was three years ago. At my age I’ll take whatever hipness I can stumble across.

I added Pictures on a String by a band called the Comateens. They were a trio—two guys (brothers) and a girl—and I interviewed them for the little rock magazine I edited in Boston. That must have been around 1984 and I really enjoyed their quirky dance rock. The next night the band was playing at Bates College in Maine and they told me they didn’t know anyone up there, so I could add as many people to the guest list as I could find. I put the call out to family and friends in Maine and I drove up with Fred, a guy I knew from high school who was living near Boston at the time. We all had a great time, and my contributions to the guest list made up a disappointingly large percentage of the audience. Well, the losers at Bates didn’t know what they missed. I fell asleep on the drive back, with my knees jammed up against Fred’s glove compartment. That’s where he kept his tape deck but rather than wake me up, he listened to the same tape all the way home. That struck me as a truly selfless act. (It also reminds me of a Steven Wright joke, in which he told how he once drove across the country with only a single tape to listen to. “I can’t remember what it was,” he said.)

I also added a great Isley Brothers collection. I have a “best of” collection on vinyl, but nothing iPod-capable. Now I do. I’ve always loved “That Lady” and its soaring guitar solos. To me it’s the quintessence of the 1970s. I particularly recall one early morning when I was in the car with my father and my brother on the way to go duck hunting. It was cold outside, it was brutally early, but the car was warm and I was half asleep in the back seat as we headed through the darkness down to the coast, tires humming hypnotically on the blacktop. On the radio, fading in and out of the static like something from a fever dream, I heard “That Lady.” I think of that every time I hear that song.

That was a long time ago—back when we lived in an analog world. Times sure have changed.

Happy Digital New Year!

Kirsty MacColl, 1959-2000

I first heard Kirsty MacColl on the late, great WHFS back in Washington. This was back when it was still a family-owned station and they played lots of great stuff you weren’t likely to hear elsewhere.

The two MacColl songs they played then were the singles “He’s on the Beach” and “A New England.” I loved them both. They had chiming guitars and strong pop hooks, with soaring vocals and snappy arrangements. Eventually I tracked down copies of the two singles at a used record store in Silver Spring, but I wanted more. I found a collection of her early stuff at Tower Records, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. It didn’t have the same poptastic arrangements as the two singles. And then Kite came out.

Kite (1989) remains one of my desert island discs. It’s as close to perfect as an album gets. Each song is a gem. Most of them are Kirsty’s own tunes, which create a portrait of a slightly acerbic exterior that hides a vulnerable, wounded heart within. On a few of the songs the vulnerability doesn’t even both to hide–it’s right there in the open. Kirsty could spit in your eye with the best of them on songs like “Innocence,” “No Victims,” and “15 Minutes,” but on a song like “Mother’s Ruin” she could break your heart. The production, by her then-husband Steve Lillywhite, is pop nirvana. Guitarist Johnny Marr (ex-Smiths) provides plenty of the chiming guitar I like, and Lillywhite multi-tracks the vocals until they became a Kirsty choir. That’s especially true on “Days,” her cover of the Kinks song. It starts somewhat quietly but builds in spectacular fashion as the song swells into a chorus of heavenly Kirstys. Fans of stripped-down production should look elsewhere but for me Kite is a rich and wonderful treat for the ears.

MacColl followed up Kite with more excellent albums–Electric Landlady (1991), Titanic Days (1993) , and the Latin-tinged Tropical Brainstorm (2000)–but in my opinion none of them were as good as Kite, although Electric Landlady came close. Kirsty also sang backup vocals for a variety of artists, including Talking Heads, the Smiths, the Wonder Stuff, and the Rolling Stones. She sang on one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time, the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” I still get chills when she comes in on that song, dueting with Shane McGowan and exchanging barb for barb. “I could have been someone,” McGowan proclaims. “So could anyone,” she retorts, her voice shining and cutting like a bright razor blade.

The reason I’m writing this today is because it’s the ninth anniversary of Kirsty MacColl’s death. She died on December 18, 2009, while on vacation with her children in Mexico. They had been scuba diving in an area off-limits to motorboats when a boat nonetheless came through. Kirsty managed to push one of her children out of the way before the boat struck and killed her. 

I was at work on the day I heard the news. I remember feeling a shock as though I had been hit in the gut. It was so sudden, so tragic, so unnecessary.

The boat belonged to a wealthy Mexican businesman. He said an employee of his had been driving. The employee served some jail time; the fat cat did not. After the accident Kirsty’s mother launched a campaign to reopen an enquiry, but I just learned today that she ended the fight two weeks ago once the Mexican government declared the case officially closed. You can find more about the case and her fight at www.justiceforkirsty.org.

I had one chance to see Kirsty MacColl play live. She appeared at a club in the Washington area–I think it was the Birchmere–and my wife and I had tickets. But on the day of the show my very young daughter came down with a strep throat, so we stayed home. A friend of a co-worker came all the way to our house in the suburbs to buy our tickets, taking the Metro and then trudging the rest of the way through a grim winter’s day. He later called me to say thanks and tell me it had been a great show. I regret missing it but I’m sure that Kirsty, who died trying to save her children, would have understood.

While walking today I played the four of her songs I had loaded on the iPod. I listened to “Walking Down Madison” from Electric Landlady, and then three songs I had recently purchased from iTunes, “A New England,” He’s on the Beach,” and “Please Go to Sleep.” The last song, the B side from “He’s on the Beach,” is really just extended version of the long, mostly instrumental passage that ends the extended version of the A-side. The addition of a sad and haunting violin passage behind Kirsty’s multi-tracked non-verbal vocals makes it a melancholy piece of music. It was the perfect thing to listen to on this sad anniversary.

Comical Adventures

It’s cold as ice . . .

No, that doesn’t mean I’ve been listening to Foreigner. It just means that winter has arrived. On a couple of days this week I shifted my walk to the afternoon—on Wednesday because the snow had turned to rain and Thursday because I just couldn’t get motivated to get out in the morning. Afternoon walks are just fine, though, especially in the winter when the western sky is tinted the color of wheat and flocks of ducks fly down the creek, with the setting sun turning their underwings orange as they bank.

For me this is comic book weather. It reminds me of the times back in the seventies when I would walk through wintertime Augusta, Maine, on my twice-weekly rounds to buy comic books. I was a pretty serious comic-book collector throughout high school and I must have amassed thousands of them. At first I kept them in little stacks on a little metal shelf in my bedroom. Eventually they began taking up more and more room in my closet. At some point I put them in big steamer trunks. I sold one trunkful to finance my move to Washington, D.C., in 1985. Just a few weeks ago I sold my copy of Fantastic Four #1 on eBay for $510. I had purchased it when I was in high school for $25, but the price was low because someone (not me, I hasten to add) had clipped the muscle-man ad from the inside front cover.

Back then the two newsstands in Augusta received their new books and magazines on Wednesdays and Fridays. During the temperate months I rode my bike to the newsstands to see what had come in, but in the winter—on days like yesterday and today—I made the circuit on foot and felt the bite of the cold winter air in my lungs as I clomped around town in my winter boots. First I’d head downtown to Depot News, a rundown place on the edge of downtown that doubled as the city’s Greyhound station. It smelled of cigars and even in the 1970s it felt like something from a black-and-white film. Sometimes I’d reach Depot News before they had put their new arrivals out, so I’d continue my hike up the hill in the direction of the State Capitol building to State Street News. It didn’t have the same downtown vibe as Depot News but by the time I got there they usually had their comics out.  I’d make my purchases and complete the circuit by walking across the Memorial Bridge, up the long hill past the high school, and back home.

I read Marvel comics almost exclusively. Superhero comics were okay, but I preferred horror and science fiction titles. My two favorites were Man-Thing and Tomb of Dracula. Man-Thing, in fact, was the comic that sparked my collecting mania. One summer day I read one of his adventures in the comic Adventure into Fear and I thought it was pretty cool. I decided I would keep this comic book and my collection began to grow around it.

The Man-thing was a swamp creature, a mindless, shambling monstrosity of muck and mire that had once been scientist Ted Sallis. He had big red eyes, three root-like growths that formed his face, and powerful ape-like arms. The comic often called him “macabre,” a great word. Man-thing lived in the Everglades, which happened to be a nexus of realities where parallel dimensions met and bizarre things often happened. Unlike his D.C comics counterpart Swamp Thing, the macabre Man-thing could neither think nor speak, but he could respond to emotions, especially fear. It was best not to fear the Man-Thing, because whatever knows fear burns at the Man-thing’s touch.

It was a strange comic, switching back and forth from somewhat ham-fisted morality tales to surreal otherworldly adventures (one of which introduced the cult character Howard the Duck). I was either oblivious to or just ignored the somewhat ribald nature of the name (made even more obvious in the jumbo spin-off comic, Giant-Sized Man-Thing).

Tomb of Dracula was even better. Written for most of its run by a guy whose name was really Marv Wolfman, it spun a complex saga of gothic horror, with Dracula himself a complicated central character. He was evil, no doubt about that, but he also had a beleaguered nobility about him. Best of all, he was illustrated by the Gene Colon, one of the great comic-book artists. Colon had a very fluid way of drawing—as though gravity ebbed and pulsed in ways that stretched his characters and panels in all directions. It was a bold and dynamic style that worked to great effect in other Marvel comics, especially Dr. Strange and Daredevil. I though Colon was at his best in Dracula, in part because of the fine inking by a guy named Tom Palmer. Colon drew the pencil sketches and Palmer would add the depth with his inks, and you could always tell Palmer’s work. He made other illustrators look good, too, but he and Colon made a perfect match.

I was in horror comic book heaven when Dracula teamed up with the title character from another comic I liked, Werewolf by Night. The match prompted me to take pen in hand and write to Marvel. Imagine my delight weeks later when I received a postcard telling me that my letter would appear in Tomb of Dracula #22 (and so it did). I guess that must have been my first published writing. I still have the postcard and I keep it tucked inside the comic book.

After I sold the Fantastic Four on eBay I took out my bins of comics and went through those colorful pieces of my past. Strangely enough, though, I found I lacked the patience to actually read any of them cover to cover. I never felt guilty reading them when they were new, but now I feel I should be tending to more important things. I guess that’s one of the burdens of growing up.

Yesterday I kept the iPod on shuffle as I walked through the cold, wintry neighborhood. Nothing really grabbed me until I heard “One Fine Day” from the David Byrne/Brian Eno CD Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. It fell just short of inspirational, but it did lift my spirits considerably. As I made my way up the final hill a school bus stopped at the top and disgorged a couple of kids, who ran down the hill toward their waiting mom. One of them stopped to pick up a big chunk of frozen snow crust and went running down the sidewalk with his prize clutched in his bare hands—I assume he wanted it because it was a really big chunk of frozen snow crust, something that was cool in more ways than one. You value things differently when you’re a kid.

Greatest Song Ever?

The other day I was trudging around the neighborhood and I just couldn’t find a song that interested me. I felt like a pitcher shaking off sign after sign. A song would pop up and I’d give the iPod a shake and try the next one. This happened time after time. And these are songs I’ve hand-picked, so I like them all. But on this day nothing worked for me.

Then the iPod came up with “You’ll Never Know” by the Primitons, and I knew I had found the right music to bring me back home.

Set the Wayback Machine for 1985, Sherman. That’s the year Boston’s Throbbing Lobster Records released the Primitons’ self-titled seven-song EP. The Primitons were a band from Birmingham, Alabama, with some strange names and a great sound. Mots Roden played guitar and sang, and Leif Bondarenko drummed and played, yes, accordion. I’ve read that Roden is Swedish, although his name sounds like something from a science-fiction novel. I’ve also read that the band evolved out of a Birmingham act called Jim Bob and the Leisure Suits. Stephanie Truelove Wright wrote the lyrics. A guy named Brad Dorset was in the band too, although I don’t know if he played guitar or bass. [Note: See Brad Dorset's comment on this post. He did play bass, and a mighty fine bass it was, too.] Mitch Easter produced. He had co-produced R.E.M.’s early albums (with Don Dixon), so it’s no surprise that the Primitons share some musical elements with Athens’ favorite sons, like a penchant for quasi-jangly pop music with interlocking vocals.

Most likely the Primitons would never have entered my musical horizons had I not written an article about Throbbing Lobster for a then-new music magazine called Spin. Its publisher and editor was Bob Guccione, Jr., the son of the man behind Penthouse magazine. At the time I was editing a tiny, obscure rock/entertainment magazine in Brighton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. The magazine must have received promotional materials about Spin for somehow I got in touch with them and they assigned me to do a story about Throbbing Lobster. The label was the baby of Chuck Warner, an enthusiastic and energetic young guy (actually three years older than I was at the time) who got his start selling mail-order records. Throbbing Lobster had some decent bands, and Warner had released some really good compilations called Let’s Breed and Nobody Gets on the Guest List.

I recently stumbled across my file for that article and stared in shock and horror at what I found. I wrote the thing on a typewriter, for one thing, and I made Frankenstein-like drafts by cutting up my old attempts into pieces and taping them back together in different order until I got things where I wanted. It’s the opposite of the way William S. Burroughs achieved chaos with his cut-and-paste technique. I struggled to find coherence. I don’t know how I ever managed to finish the thing, but eventually I sent it off to Spin and waited anxiously to see it in print.

By the time it did, I was living in Washington, D.C., and working near Capital Hill. On my lunch hour I would make my way through the jungle-humid DC heat, past the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court, to a newsstand on Pennsylvania Avenue to see if the magazine had arrived. If it hadn’t, I trudged back to work, disappointed and sweaty. Finally the magazine arrived. Keith Richards was on the cover, and my article was near the back. It bore some resemblance to what I had written, although the editors had decided, on their own, that the Blackjacks song “(That’s Why I Always) Dress in Black” must have been Johnny Cash cover. It wasn’t, and I recall my mortification when I realized that everyone back in Boston would think the mistake was mine. I called Chuck Warner and left a message on his voicemail that it was not my fault.

Anyway. I survived, and I was still on the Throbbing Lobster mailing list later that summer when the mailman brought a cardboard box with two records—an EP by Boston band O Positive and Primitons.

[Note: After further reflection, I believe the second record in the box was Claws, the third Throbbing Lobster compilation. O Positive's Only Breathing came out later. It is a wonderful record, though. I guess I'll have to retrieve it from the record closet and give it a spin one of these days.]

I honestly can’t recall my first reactions to the Primitons record. I probably liked it fine. I know I liked the O Positive record and I’m sure I liked getting free records in the mail. I guess Primitons grew on me as I came to appreciate its perfect guitar-oriented pop, and its two achingly beautiful ballads (“City People,” with some strong R.E. M influences and terrific harmonies, and “She Sleeps”). It also had a small dose of dose of black humor in “You’ll Never Know.” (Sample lyric: “You’ll never know what to do/If Jesus or the atom bomb break through” Or is it “Jesus saw the atom bomb break through”?)

 “You’ll Never Know” is excellent, but it just sets things up for my favorite song of them all, “Stars.” It opens with a great, grinding guitar lick, and then the drums come in, and finally a propulsive bass line kicks grabs the song by the scruff of the neck and give it a boot. (You could almost say the bass makes the song, but it’s all great. Trust me.) The lyrics, I guess, are about how the transformative powers of love can lift you from the mire and disappointment that you’ve made of your life after the calendar pages spin by and you find you’re still stuck in a dead-end existence in your old home town.

 Nothing left to burn but the bridges that we’ve spanned.
24 years go by, no changes planned.
Nothing changes overnight, but I think I can
When I’m with you.

 It’s one of the few that songs that I can start all over again as soon as it’s finished.

Primitons never became available on CD—at least not until I handed my vinyl copy to my friend Bill, who had our friend Mike convert it to digital files. I loaded it on the iPod recently with a giddy sense of anticipation, and I swear that on the next morning walk “Stars” sounded so great and inspirational and inspired it brought tears to my eyes.

The Primitons released another album, Happy All the Time, in 1987. I remember the great delight I felt when I found it at a record store on Connecticut Avenue in Washington one day. (I later found the Reivers’ Pop Beloved at that same store. I don’t think I bought anything else there, but I owe the place a huge debt of gratitude.) Happy All the Time doesn’t quite reach the heights attained by the first EP, but it’s another superb album, especially “You Are Learning,” which almost achieves the same passionate pop transcendence of the earlier work.

So, is “Stars” the greatest song ever recorded? Right now it is.

[Note: I see that Chuck Warner still has vinyl copies of the Primitons ep available through his website.]

Spacing Out

Today I took the ultimate trip. I listened to the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey as I walked around the neighborhood.

I’ve had the soundtrack album on vinyl for years. It used to belong to my friend Bill, but when we were in high school—maybe even earlier—I talked him into trading it to me. I can’t remember what I traded—maybe a Fantastic Four poster. In any event, he’s resented it ever since. I can’t say I blame him.

However, Bill was willing to let bygones be bygones and he recently brought some of my albums up to Maine to our mutual friend, Mike, who had the apparatus necessary to convert them into MP3s. I’ve put some of the songs on my iPod, including 2001.

Today I stepped out the door listening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” better known as “The Theme to 2001.” It sounded great in all its brassy pomp and magnificence, although the pops and hisses betrayed its vinyl origins and made it sound like music heard in front of a crackling fire. Even with the pops the compositions by György Ligeti remained as mysterious and otherworldly as they were the first time I heard them. “The Blue Danube,” the background music to the scene where the Pan Am shuttle docks with the rotating space station—perhaps my favorite scene from any movie ever—still sounds so rich and lush it could have been recorded on velvet.

I didn’t see 2001 on its first release in 1968. I had to wait until a re-release sometime around 1974, when I was 13 or 14. I was home sick from school on the Friday it opened and nothing would persuade my parents to let me go that night. I cajoled, I begged, I pleaded, I sulked, to no avail. Bill and I had to go on the next night. His sister drove us. I can’t pretend we understood the movie, but we did a good job parroting things we had read about it on the way back, just to prove to his sister that we did.

I’ve seen 2001 a lot since then. I saw it at Boston’s old Nickelodeon Theater, in an auditorium at the University of Southern Maine, and at a repertory theater in Los Angeles. I saw a special 25^th anniversary screening at the huge Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and I saw the last remaining Cinemax print at the IMAX theater of the National Air and Space Museum. That was disappointing, because the print, pieced together from several Cinemax prints, had faded terribly. But I did see a nice new print at the American Film Institute Theater at the Kennedy Center, and even later a gorgeous 70mm version, once again at the grand old Uptown. I’ve seen 2001 on television, on VHS tape, and on DVD. Just a few weeks ago a friend showed me a little bit of his Blue Ray version. I will have go back and watch the whole thing. It looked amazing.

When we were living in Washington, my wife and I even put a little bit of dialogue from 2001 on our answering machine message. It said, “Welcome to voice print identification. When you see the red light go on, would you please state in the following order: Your destination, your nationality, and your full name. Surname first, Christian name, and initial.” One day our rather ditzy landlady called and left an anxious message saying she didn’t see any red light and didn’t know what to do.

I love 2001 so much because it creates a sense of awe and mystery. I’ve never been able to look at the night sky the same way since seeing the movie. Somehow this film, shot inside film studios, captured the sense of how cold and vast our solar system is, and how insignificant we are in comparison. It is the anti-Star Wars. There are no explosions, no lasers, no sound in the vacuum of space. Nobody uses the Force. And although director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke fell quite short in their predictions of the future, their alternate-world 2001 feels like it’s the way the future should have been. Kubrick has often been described as cynical about human behavior, but a 2001 with moon bases and rotating space stations and routine flights into orbit and beyond seems incredibly optimistic today.

Science fiction geek that I am, I think the Jupiter-bound Discovery, looking like a huge vertebrae floating through space, is also a pretty cool spaceship.

Plus, there’s Discovery’s HAL 9000 computer, the greatest serial killer in movies. True, he murdered a mere four people (astronaut Frank Poole and hibernating scientists Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminski), which one of today’s cinematic psychopaths would do before the opening credits. But Hal was both creepy and sympathetic. He killed because his human controllers had programmed him to lie about the mission’s true purpose. And then, just before his own consciousness was snuffed out, Hal discovers his own, for lack of a better word, humanity. “My mind is going,” he tells David Bowman as the only surviving astronaut disconnects the computer brain’s higher functions. “I can feel it.”

I can feel it.

When Hal, always in the same bland voice (provided by a Canadian actor named Douglas Rain), pleads with Bowman not to disconnect him it’s chilling and sad. “Stop, Dave,” Hal says as Bowman disconnects piece after piece of his mechanical brain. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave.” Dave doesn’t stop.

Hal also gets the movie’s funniest line. (Okay, the movie’s only funny line.) It comes when Bowman makes his way through the ship to disconnect the errant computer. “I can see you’re really upset by this Dave,” Hal says, his emotionless voice as smooth as pudding. “I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.” If it weren’t for his inherent psychopathology, Hal might have found a job in a human resources department.

I once met 2001’s author, Arthur C. Clarke, in, of all places, Saudi Arabia. My aerospace magazine had sent me there to cover an astronaut conference. Sir Arthur was one of the speakers. Before one session I nerved myself up to approach the great man and give him a copy of a poster the magazine had done depicting all the people who had flown into space. He was very gracious and pleasant to me. I wish I could have remembered more about what we said, and I wish I had thought to point out that astronauts Poole and Bowman should have been on the poster, too. (Not to mention Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminski.)

So it was a joy to listen to the music from the soundtrack this morning. With those odd, cosmic sounds filling my ears, everything I saw became freighted with significance—the squirrel running across the sidewalk in front of me, the stop sign that came closer with each step before vanishing from my field of vision, the side of a house that I suddenly realized looks like an upside-down face. The “Gayane Ballet Suite,” which plays in the movie as Frank Poole jogs around the Discovery’s circular centrifuge, played in my iPod whileI trudged up a steep hill. It’s a beautiful and melancholy piece of music that perfectly captures the isolation and loneliness of a months-long mission to Jupiter.

The music cast such a spell, in fact, that when I got home I spent five minutes on the porch saying, “Open the pod bay door, Hal,” before I realized how futile that was. I entered through the emergency airlock instead.

From That Moment On

Ask me what my favorite Frank Sinatra song is and I’ll probably say “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the version from Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. It’s an easy pick. The song’s a classic Cole Porter tune with a great Nelson Riddle arrangement. The Milt Bernhart trombone solo near the end kicks in like a musical afterburner to really give things a boot. Frank nails the vocal with the practiced ease of an artist at the top of his game. This is the Sinatra/ Riddle team working at its peak.

There are times, though, when I’ll tell you my favorite Sinatra song is one I heard as I walked this morning. “From This Moment On” is a cut from A Swingin’ Affair! It’s another Cole Porter song, and another superb Nelson Riddle arrangement. This one steps off nice ’n’ easy with some swirling flutes that lead into the vocal. Then things start to gradually build. The band picks up intensity, saxes and trumpets riffing off each other, trombones providing their own counterpoint, drums and bass pushing everything along, piano tinkling away in the background, and Frank just surfs along on top of the arrangement. The whole thing just sweeps you up and takes you along for the ride. Fingers feel an irresistible impulse to start snappin’. Near the end the rhythm section drops away and Frank and the horns keep things percolating for a few bars, and then everyone jumps back in for the finish. By this time I figure Frank had his eyes closed, head tilted back, arms stretched out, as he headed into the home stretch. Pure bliss. I sometimes think that if I could sing like that my life would be perfect. But Frank could sing like that, and he was a mess. So go figure.

I often see Songs for Swingin’ Lovers cited as Frank’s best work. For my money, A Swingin’ Affair! has it beat. The song choices are better overall, and the album swings harder. The CD version even includes “The Lady is a Tramp,” which is about as quintessential as Frank gets. It is, in a word, oke.

In a way I grew up with Sinatra. My father is a big fan and I can especially remember hearing Come Fly With Me played at the house when I was a kid. The album also had a great cover, a painting of the jet-setting Sinatra after disembarking from a TWA Constellation, snap-brim hat slightly askew as he gestures jauntily with the thumb of one hand and grasps some feminine digits that extend from off-cover with the other.

I never really fell under the spell of Sinatra myself until I attended college in Los Angeles. I remember exactly how it happened. Late one afternoon I was sitting on the roof of my apartment building, listening to KROQ on a radio and watching airplanes off in the distance descending into LAX as the evening sky turned the color of an orange popsicle against silhouetted palm trees. KROQ was a ground-breaking “new wave” rock station at the time, but this afternoon the DJ played “Come Fly With Me,” and that was it. The next day I headed off to the strip of used record stores along Fairfax Avenue and found a copy of the album. Thanks, KROQ.

At first I approached Sinatra somewhat ironically, liking the Joe Piscopo aspects of his singing, the “cats and “jacks” and “broads” and all that surface stuff. What can I say? I was a callow 21-year-old. But gradually, as I listened to the music, I discovered Sinatra as the great artist he was and always will be.

I started buying more albums, some of them the cheap reissues Capitol released in the early 1980s. The label routinely dropped songs from these new versions to save money, probably to make pressing them cheaper. A Swingin’ Affair! originally had 15 tracks, so some genius in marketing decided to leave three of them, including “Night and Day,” off the re-release. Insanity! That’s like trying to save a few pennies by leaving the meat out of the spaghetti sauce.