David Crosby meets the Avengers

David Crosby reads or pretends to read Avengers #22, which hit the newsstands in September 1965. Best guess is that this a publicity shot of some sort, with the comic book used as a prop and taken right around the time that Mr. Tambourine Man was a hit. A somewhat similiar image of fellow Byrd Roger McGuinn reading Superman #181, which came out the same month, also exists although it's been tough to track down.  

A freak flag flies at half-mast

David Crosby, it seemed, spent the last decade on some sort of national apology tour, expressing his endless regrets for how his hardcore drug habits sabotaged CSN, along with several personal relationships, for being a smug douchebag when he was with the Byrds, for saying things about Neil Young’s then-girlfriend Darryl Hannah. It’s a long list.

It’s tough to make excuses for who you are and while Crosby could be an egotistical, unrepentant hedonist with no filter, he was one of the great singer-songwriters of the era and somewhat of an icon. Possessing a voice that blended well with others, but could soar on its own, his singing was effortless, in the same vein as a Willie Nelson. Remarkably, all those years of abuse had no ill effect on his voice. We saw him perform at a solo show in 2015, and his 73-year-old voice had held up incredibly well.

Also on stage that night were his uncensored opinions, as he trashed Kanye West, “He can’t write, sing or play” and Trump, “an intelligence-free zone.”

Like his personal life, Crosby’s songs had a freeform feel. Everybody’s Been Burned and Eight Miles High, for which he’s listed as a co-writer, were Byrds songs that didn’t follow any rock songwriting conventions. Same with Déjà Vu and much of the current stuff he’s cut over the past couple of decades. Miles Davis thought enough of Guinnevere to cover it.

As for his status as an icon, Dennis Hopper claimed to base his character in Easy Rider on Crosby. In the anthemic Almost Cut My Hair, Crosby offered up these two deathless lines: “I feel like letting my freak flag fly” and “It increases my paranoia/Like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car” – who hasn’t had that feeling driving down the highway, stoned or not? Smart-ass 1980s punk rockers The Dead Milkmen made Crosby the punchline of The Thing That Only Ate Hippies – it eats Stills and Nash but spits out Crosby. Millennials, the type who tend to revere jam bands, saw him as a benevolent but toasted Grandpa Walton. The Croz.

Two other thoughts.

Crosby’s father Floyd was a Hollywood cinematographer and while he worked on High Noon and won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1931, by the mid-1960s he was working mostly B-movies, including nearly all the Annette and Frankie “beach” flicks.

How much of Jim Morrison’s animus was fueled by his father, a career Navy officer and in command at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, an incident which lit the fuse for the Vietnam War? How similarly strange for Crosby – although admittedly not on the same level – to be working in an L.A. recording studio on Eight Miles High while his father was a few miles away figuring the best way to light How to Stuff A Wild Bikini?

Secondly, after he was released from a Texas prison in 1986 on narcotics and weapons charges, and kicked the hard stuff, Crosby went on a creative tear, a second wind that had him performing with bands of much younger musicians, releasing four albums of mostly new material, collaborating with such unlikely bedfellows as David Gilmour and Donald Fagan, touring several times with Stephen, Graham and Neil – at least before the latter two stopped speaking with him – and being fairly active, and filter-free, on Twitter. 

He may have been in a rush, living on somewhat borrowed time with a transplanted liver and other health problems, to redeem himself for his past sins and to recapture a talent that appeared to be all but lost. His may be one of the great comeback stories ever. 

Davids Gilmour, Bowie and Crosby

 

Rascalmania 

It wouldn’t have been too far a stretch, around 1967 and 1968, to call the Rascals the American Beatles. They had a knack for writing R&B songs with rock arrangements, scored nine Top 20 singles including two all-universe hits in Groovin’ and People Got To Be Free, then pushed themselves stylistically with Once Upon A Dream, an eclectic album that tried hard, but only proved that the American Beatles couldn’t assemble an American Sgt. Pepper, before band politics busted everything apart. By the early 1970s, the Rascals were done. 

During the final months of last year, I had Rascals on the brain after reading Felix Cavaliere’s autobiography Memoir of a Rascal, noting that Felix and Rascals guitarist Gene Cornish were playing in nearby Morristown, N.J. during a brief East Coast tour and with the death of the band’s drummer Dino Danelli on December 15. 

In Memoir of a Rascal, Felix comes off as a great guy in need of an editor. It’s a book that carries with it all the downsides that accompany self-published efforts: lousy photographic reproduction, some tortured sentence structures and numerous typos, reading more like a verbatim transcription of someone speaking into a tape recorder. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any interesting stories. Felix was studying medicine at Syracuse University when he made a deal with his father to take a shot at being a professional musician for one year with the promise that if didn’t work out, he would return to school. He quickly got a gig playing keyboards for Joey Dee and the Starlighters, toured Europe and had a new career. Soupy Sales came up with the band’s name (originally the Young Rascals to avoid any confusion – and possible legal action – with an outfit popular in the 1930s and 40s known as the Harmonica Rascals). One can also assume from the book that a primary reason why the band broke was Eddie Brigati, who shared lead vocals and songwriting credits with Felix and who comes off as sometimes confused, ornery and obstinate. 

I passed on Felix and Gene’s tour not because of COVID concerns – certainly we could just wear masks in the theatre – but because I just felt it could never match up to all the good vibes I felt after seeing all four Rascals during their multi-media reunion in 2014. (Something only I’m interested in, but this wasn’t the first time some form of the Rascals played just a few miles from my home. In 1966, the band played concerts at the Fox Theatre and at the Bergen County Technical High School, both in Hackensack, the latter hosted by Zacherle who apparently spent some of his downtime that day fittingly walking around the cemetery across the street). 

Dino’s death wasn’t unexpected – Gene revealed in an interview promoting the Morristown show that he was in hospice. A flamboyant and powerful drummer, not unlike Keith Moon of the Who (whom, according to Cavaliere, learned how to twirl his drumsticks mid-beat from Dino), for Groovin’ he stepped away from his drumkit to steer the song’s Latin rhythm on the congas. He was a vastly underrated drummer and a talented artist. He built this collage out of found objects and dime store junk for the cover of Once Upon A Dream. It remains one of the coolest album covers ever: 

Some 40 years now since the Rascals broke up, it’s probably safe to say that we’ll never get any of the “product” that other artists that have been around as long, or less, keep bombarding the market with: the inevitable reunion album, archival live concerts (did anyone tape the Rascals performing at the Fillmore West or with a symphony orchestra at the old New Jersey Performing Arts Center?), expanded versions of albums marking their anniversaries, the five-CD box set with outtakes and alternative versions. 

Just in case someone opens the vault – if there is a vault – I’ve got some cash saved up in an envelope hidden in my sock drawer. But I’m not holding my breath.

 

Marvel pin-up pages revisited

The Great Playground Debate that raged over which comic book company was “better” – Marvel vs. DC – sometimes ended in a tie, but one advantage the Marvel faction always had was Marvel’s full-page pin-ups, published randomly and always an unexpected surprise when you turned the page to discover one. 

Marvel began publishing these little extras early on with a Thing pin-up page in Fantastic Four #2 in 1962. They kept at it until around 1966 when their appearances grew increasingly intermittent. Today, nearly all the Marvel pin-up pages have been collected into a single book, Marvel Masterwork Pin-Ups, published in 2019. And as someone who (very carefully) removed the pin-up pages and taped them up to my bedroom wall, it’s a wonder having them together and intact in one place. Many have an undeniable charm, some today seem slightly surreal.

The pin-up illustrations are mostly action poses, often with somewhat 

goofy and random inscriptions “written” by the characters. We find Sue Storm, in Fantastic Four #10, signing with someone’s idea of feminine handwriting, “Love and Kisses to my wonderful fans – Sue.” One of the weirder pin-ups has Cyclops, shooting something beyond the borders of the page with an optic blast above a “Sincerely Yours, Scott Summers.” (Cyclops’ real name). 

Sub-Mariner poses among artifacts he’s dredged up from the seas including a prehistoric fish, mounted on a wall like a prize trout. The handy nearby caption reads, “Fossil fish of species thought to be extinct for millions of years – vanquished by Sub-Mariner in uncharted deeps (sic).” Why exactly Namor, self-proclaimed protector of the oceans, would be “vanquishing” a prehistoric fish rather than protecting it is anybody’s guess. 

Although not strictly pin-ups, the book also features the rogue’s gallery pages from the first two Fantastic Four and Spider-Man annuals, one-pagers featuring FF and Spidey villains, drawn by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The text for the Hate Monger noting his death at the end of Fantastic Four #21 is pure Stan Lee: “There’s enough nutty hatred rampant today without anyone else trying to make a career of it.” The page for Sandman surely sent nine-year-old me to the dictionary to look up “habitual” and “incorrigible.”

Possibly as a way of introducing them to new readers are the pages dedicated to non-super-powered supporting characters: Foggy and Karen from Daredevil, Alicia Masters (with a very neatly written, “My sincerest affection to you all”). 

The book closes with a series of pin-ups that fall outside the range of the Silver Age. Barry Smith’s Medusa pin-up from 1969 has the ornate look and feel of a concurrent Fillmore West concert poster. The book ends its twenty-year journey with John Byrne’s homage with a series of Fantastic Four pin-ups from 1983 and ‘84. 

I doubt if any comic book companies continue the pin-up tradition today, although modern comic book covers, most of which feel more like pieces of illustrative art or movie posters, and featuring varying styles, exist as pin-ups on their own. I’m sure nobody is tearing the covers off the books and taping them on a bedroom wall, however.