This is the moment Paul McCartney met comic book hero Jacky Kirby in 1975. It was at the Forum, Los Angeles, where McCartney and his band Wings, were booked to play three concerts. This was Macca’s first time back in LA since touring with The Beatles. Wings had just released Venus and Mars, which contained the track “Magneto and Titanium Man”, a song inspired by Marvel’s X-Men created by Kirby and Stan Lee. The pair met backstage at the Forum, where Jack presented Macca with a line drawing:
Then around the corner came Paul. “‘Ello Jack, nice to meet you.” Jack gave Paul and Linda the drawing which they thought was “smashing.” Paul thanked Jack for keeping him from going bonkers while they were recording the album in Jamaica. It seems that there was very little to do there, and they needed to keep their kids entertained. Luckily, there was a store that sold comics, so Paul would go and pick up all the latest. One night the song “Magneto and Titanium Man” popped into his head. The thing about Jack was that within a few minutes you felt as if you were best friends, so Paul too was soon laughing it up with Jack as if he had known him for years.
Fashion, tribalism and a sharp suit. BBC documentary “The Street Look” connects fashion to pop music and back again. We proclaim our allegiance to the music we love in the clothing we wear. I’ve run through the whole gamut. My girlfriend says I’ve got more shoes than any man she knows: from winklepickers to creepers to sandals and Pumas, to cowboy boots, Beatle boots and leopard skin loafers. I’ve always been a fashion shapeshifter and it’s always been in relationship to whatever new social/cultural scene I feel a passion for. I like to wear my colors. It’s a declaration of what I believe in. Suit up and get ready to rock and roll.
In the late 70s, I started a company called Shady Character. I sold skinny ties and wraparound shades to stores that in turn sold them to kids in towns like Laramie, Wyoming and Brownsville, Texas - places where there wasn’t a punk or new wave scene but kids wanted to align themselves with the movement. I really wasn’t doing it for the money, much to the chagrin of my partners, I was doing it because I wanted to provide kids with a freak flag to fly, a uniform in the rock and roll army. A groovy pair of Italian wraparounds can change the world for a 17 year old in a town without pity.
Maura Johnston and Christopher R. Weingarten of the Village Voice have put together their list of the 20 worst pop songs of 2010. No 1: “Hey Soul Sister” by Train. Whether or not you agree with their list, you’ll find mucho laughs in some of their scathingly over-the-top descriptions of the songs they loathed. Nothing like disgust to bring out the best in a rock writer.
Here’s an example of the literary heights and lows that Johnston and Weingarten achieve in their all-out assault on music that gets them pissed off:
The chorus is jacked from an even worse place. “Hey Soul Sister” is an orgy where bad ideas trade STDs, and the most syphilitic brain-fart stumbled in drunk from a Smash Mouth show. (For those of you who arrived late, Smash Mouth was a band from the late ‘90s that was formed when a soul patch met cake frosting. Their wikki-wikki scratching and dorkpie hats did to music what blood-soaked clowns do to the dreams of sleeping children.) Listen to “Hey, Soul Sister” a few times and you’ll inevitably be reminded of the “whistling solo” from the Shrek house band’s inescapable “All Star.” From Smash Mouth, Train picked up an earworm that burrowed into society’s asshole, laid 4.7 million iTunes eggs, and gave birth to a grey cloud of banality that covers the Earth.
And just think: When your shitty kid marries someone you violently disapprove of 20 years from now, this song—with its references to blowjobs and songs that were ground into the ground before the kid was a twinkle in your eye—will serve as the couple’s first dance. As you watch your offspring and new in-law twirl around the dance floor, you will reach for a glass of Champagne Loko (President Kid Rock won’t try to ban the stuff until he’s up for re-election in 2032) and wonder how everything went so, so wrong.”
To see the list of 20 crimes against pop music and read more scorched-earth reviewing go to the Voice website here.
Train doing their big hit on the Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Sad to report that the “Ivory Queen Of Soul” Teena Marie has died at the age of 54 of what appears to be natural causes.
Marie made her debut on the legendary Motown label back in 1979, becoming one of the very few white acts to break the race barrier of the groundbreaking black-owned record label that had been a haven for black artists like Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five, the Supremes and Marvin Gaye.
The New York Times obituary for Marie can be read here.
Jimmy Savile has been a pop culture icon in England since the early 1960s when he was a host on BBC TV’s “Top Of The Pops,” NME Awards presenter and Radio One deejay. Savile’s pimpalicious fashion sense, platinum page boy, monumental cigar and ego converge in a larger than life character that is both charming and a wee bit appalling.
Jarvis Cocker presents his top ten rules for making the perfect television pop show. Rule number 8: Get Jimmy Savile. From British TV series “Favouritism.” As Savile blows hard, Cocker is like a sail in a hurricane.
Alison Van Pelt’s oil on canvas portraits look like giant faded and scratched Polaroids. Or in the case of her paintings of William Burroughs, the Shroud Of Turin.
It terrified the audience on its first transmission in 1968—not surprising as its author, M. R. James, was the master of ghost stories, who re-invented the genre with his tales of the supernatural. Whistle and I’ll Come to You starred Michael Hordern, and was produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, the former star, along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, of Beyond the Fringe. Miller had already made his mark directing The Drinking Party, The Death of Socrates and Alice in Wonderland for the BBC before making this classic chiller, one described as:
A masterpiece of economical horror that remains every bit as chilling as the day it was first broadcast.
Parts 2 and 3 of ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ after the jump…
While many of us are taking back those unwanted Christmas presents, or donating them to our favorite charities, here is a superb, hand-crafted gift - a steampunk Etch-A-Sketch, made by Reddit user halokitty for a friend.
Nothing on here is hot glued or slapped together. The screen is vaccu-formed to give it that old-timey bulbous look. The outer wood frame is custom built, painted, and wet-sanded to give it that gloss. The inner brass frame was laser cut. All the bits and pieces come from old machines and fittings. Nothing came from Home Depot. Some of the hoses and valves came from a 1902 boiler we just removed from our basement. Everything is made to fit and screwed or bolted in place. We were going for a grown up version of those old activity centers for toddlers- lots of levers and knobs and toggles to mess around with. Also, it still fully functions as an Etch-A-Sketch. Circles, however, are still a pain in the ass.
The best advice on writing is to write about what you know, and few writers have done this as well as Harry Crews, author of The Gospel Singer, Childhood and Scar Lover. He’s a legendary figure with a brave and exceptional literary voice. The playwright and author, Max Frisch once wrote, “A writer never betrays anyone but himself.” By that he meant a writer never reveals anything in his writing but himself, and this is true of Crews, a man who has revealed his heart, mind and soul as a brilliant writer.
I decided a long time ago—very long time ago—that getting up at four o’clock to start work works best for me. I like that. Some people don’t like to get up in the morning. I like to get up in the morning. And there’s no place to go at four o’clock in the morning, and nobody’s gonna call you, and you can’t call anybody. Back when I was a drunk, at least in this little town, there’s no place to go buy anything to drink. So it was just me and the writing board.
“So, I write until eight or eight-thirty, then I go over to the gym and work out on the weights for a couple hours, then I go to the karate dojo and, as a rule, spar with a guy who consistently whups my ass. It’s point karate—we’re not going full force, we don’t wear pads on out feet and hands, but—even then—when you’re just touching a guy, and you think a guy’s gonna move one way and you kick, and he doesn’t move that way, he moves the other way, he moves right into your kick, you can get hurt. Well, not hurt bad, as a rule. Maybe bloody a nose or something like that. But you can end up pretty sore.
“Then I come home, eat a light lunch, then just go straight back to the thing. I might work till three o’clock . . . there comes a time of diminishing returns. You’re just jerking yourself off thinking you’re doing some good work, then you go back to it the next day and you think, ‘Oh, my God,’ and you have to throw away two or three pages. But the way I do it—I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anyone doin’ it quite this way.
“I write on a great big square board. sit in a big overstuffed chair with this board on my lap, put a legal pad on top of that and write long hand. After that’s done, at some point I run it through a typewriter that’s older than I am—but it’s a beautiful machine, great action, huge keys, I love it—and then when I get through with that, I put it through the computer to revise, which is the only thing . . . I dunno . . . the only thing a computer is good for is to revise. Because, as you very well know, none of us need to go faster, we all need to go slower. I first among them.
“But the computer is a godsend for revisions. I don’t quite understand how we did it before we had the computer. I seem to remember a lot of tape and scissors.”
“If you’re crazy enough to read yourself, and almost no writer reads his own novel once he finishes it. He never looks at it again. I’ve never read a novel of mine, a whole novel that I did, after it’s published. Never. Why would you?”
“Graham Greene—you’ve probably heard me quote before, because god knows, it’s true—“The writer is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.” There it is. There it is. Nah, you write things and write things—write a book for instance—and write and write and write and write and write, and you know, it’s not—every writer writes with the knowledge that nothing he writes is as good as it could be. Paul Valery: “A poem’s never finished, only abandoned.” The same thing with a novel. It’s never finished, only abandoned. I’ve had any number of novels where I’ve just at some point said to myself, well, unless you’re going to make the career out of this book—spend the rest of your goddamn life chewing on it—you might as well just package it up and send it on to New York. Go on to something else. Because between conception and execution there is a void, an abyss, that inevitably fucks up the conception. The conception never gets translated to the page. It just doesn’t. I don’t think it ever does.
I think [Gustave] Flaubert kept Madame Bovary for nine years. Took him nine years to write it, well, he didn’t write it all in nine years. He could have written it in nineteen years, and he would still have felt the way he felt, and that was that it was a fine piece of work, but it was not as good as it could be. Same old same old.
