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.
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.
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| Davids Gilmour, Bowie and Crosby |
Rascalmania
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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
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.
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.
Origin stories
With mythologies so pervasive, every reader of a Superman or Batman comic book started at the same point of common knowledge, like beginning each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Everyone could recite Superman’s backstory: Krypton. Explosion. Rocketship. Ma and Pa Kent. Clark Kent. Metropolis. Daily Planet. Glasses. Lois and Jimmy. Lex Luthor. Same with Batman. Parents murdered. Rigorous training. Wayne Manor. Gotham City. Batmobile. Robin. Joker.
It made for easy entry and helping matters more was that Superman and Batman, all DC Comics for that matter, were not serialized. Each issue was self-contained, every first page a new day for the characters.
When I bought my first Marvel Comics off the newsstand in late 1964 (Avengers #10 and X-Men #8), the Marvel Age of Comics -- as proclaimed by Stan Lee -- was only in its third year, having started with Fantastic Four #1 in November, 1961.
Unless you were in at the very beginning, you had to piece together the origins and histories of the characters. It was uncharted territory. As a new recruit, I needed a map, namely back issues.
Once a comic book reached its month-long shelf life at Charlie Fein’s candy store, it mysteriously disappeared, seemingly gone forever. So I began following up on rumors of other kids in the neighborhood who supposedly had older Marvels that maybe I could trade other comics for, buy (as cheaply as possible) or borrow just to read.
I kept a mental spreadsheet of who owned what. Jimmy, over on Willow Street, and Teddy on Pine Street had a few old Marvels. Pat on Spring Valley Avenue had issues of Spider-Man going back to #1 that he inherited from a cousin. Billy, a couple of houses up the street from me, owned Marvel Tales #1, which reprinted the origins of six Marvel heroes. I don’t think any of them cared as much as I did, but they wouldn’t budge.
A new kid in my grade named Steve came over one day and brought some of his comic books. His parents were divorced and his mother, much younger and blonder than anyone else’s mom, dropped him off and met my father to assure her an adult would be present; he was apparently so overcome by Steve’s mom that as she drove away, he let out a wolf whistle that could be heard blocks away. Steve soon moved away.
There was Richie on Elm Street and Billy on Fairmount Avenue, both a year older than me and owners of impressive comic collections. Billy had an older sister who was a Little Miss America finalist at Palisades Park. She pretty much ignored us. Richie talked back to his mother constantly. Acquaintances forged more out of necessity than anything, I didn’t care much for either of them.
Louie the Barber, who always had some beat-up old war comics
along with the newspapers and Life magazines for his customers to read while
waiting, let me go through his garage, a graveyard of stacked newspapers.
It was a final, desperate effort. After an hour of digging around, all I had to
show for it was newsprint-dirtied hands. And a couple of beat-up old war
comics.
The revolution will be televised
Fast-forwarding through a VHS tape from 1987, I came across an accidentally taped episode of the syndicated Top 40 show Solid Gold, featuring the soft-rock dream team of Amy Grant and Peter Cetera. Amy Grant was crossing over from Contemporary Christian music (as Billboard calls it) and Peter Cetera was staking a claim as a solo artist after fronting the rock band Chicago since the early 70s. We’re not talking Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell here. The song is a drippy ballad, Cetera’s hair blow-dried to tousled perfection as he looks into Grant’s eyes selling the lyrics.
Among many, Cetera’s band Chicago was a sellout from the start. Underground bands weren’t supposed to hit the top 10 with the depressing regularity that Chicago did – it’s something that undid the Doors’ reputation for some – and it was particularly loathsome for Chicago after it included this note on its second album: “We dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. And the revolution in all of its forms." A paper revolutionary at best, it’s no surprise that Cetera wound up a preening pop star. Who knows where Jim Morrison might have landed if he’d lived, someone who once allowed himself to be profiled by 16 Magazine?
Cetera and Grant’s performance on Solid Gold was followed by this commercial for Jordache Basics:
One other symbol of the counterculture that seems to have not so much lost its profile as misplaced it, is the raised fist. Used in leftist social movements for more than 150 years as an anti-fascist gesture, America took notice when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during their medal ceremony at the 1986 Olympics.
Although for Smith and Carlos, the fists were a “human rights salute,” it got adopted by the Black Panthers as its logo, representing black power. Later, in blaxploitation movies, you’d see Bernie Casey walking through the ‘hood casually greeting other black men with a raised clenched fist. You saw it often following George Floyd’s murder. Unity, strength, resistance.
Then, on Jan. 6 news cameras caught the despicable Josh Hawley awkwardly flashing a raised fist to the horde gathering in front of the Capitol, an image that he quickly turned into a fundraiser, putting it on coffee mugs that sold on his website. Someone on Hawley’s staff surely used the word “iconic” in selling him the idea.
It commemorates when a politician with a $200 haircut urged on
a bloodthirsty mob dressed for a tailgate party outside the Ninth
Circle of Hell, the one Dante reserved for Treachery, to fight the power. Maybe
he would have seemed more believable if he ditched the expensive suit and wore
Jordache Basics.
September songs, part five
This entry covers the top ten songs of September 1968, based on a cumulative ranking of each song that hit the top ten that month (10 points for a #1 ranking, 9 points for #2, etc.).
SEPTEMBER 1968
There was something for everyone on the charts in 1968. Don’t
care for the samba of Fool On the Hill when it came on the radio? Sit
tight and chances are Deep Purple’s Hush would follow right after it. If
you’re someone who needs to categorize into genres, the September top ten
offers uplifting blue-eyed soul, a country story-song, flowing easy listening,
horny pre-teen bubblegum and biker rock, and that’s just the first five songs.
Not to mention three cover versions as well.
Hey Jude entered the charts on Sept. 14 at #10, then settled into the top spot for nine weeks – from the end of summer to Thanksgiving. This was a record with a buzz: the Beatles’ first release on their own label, Apple Records; more than seven minutes long (in the context of 1968, 15 seconds less than MacArthur Park); and word that during the long fadeout Paul utters either “bloody hell” or “fucking hell” when he hits a bum note on the piano. (With headphones, you can only make out “hell”).
This was the first year that albums outsold singles, 192 million to 187 million, leaving record companies to release singles that did little on the charts since everybody bought the album. For this month, here’s what could be found on Billboard’s Hot 100: Deep Purple’s Hush, Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, the Who’s Magic Bus, Moody Blues’ Tuesday Afternoon, the Stones’ Street Fighting Man, Chamber Brothers’ Time Has Come Today, Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Big Brother’s Piece of My Heart, Vanilla Fudge’s You Keep Me Hangin’ On and Jimi Hendrix’ All Along the Watchtower. If you play the longer album versions of Iron Butterfly and the Chambers Brothers, that’s a solid two hours of programming on any classic rock station.
Maybe the only time the producers of Mad Men slipped
up with the soundtrack was in an episode that took place in 1968. Don Draper
and few others from the agency visit a hip Hollywood party where Don gets
zonked smoking hash and the music playing during the party is … Harper
Valley PTA? Unless, of course, the idea was to draw a subtle parallel
between the private lives of the employees of Cooper Sterling and the citizens
of Harper Valley.
