My All-Time Greatest Albums, part one 

When music publications tossed out their All-Time Greatest Albums lists, it was a fun read and a good timewaster, the top of the list heavily weighted with the usual suspects of classic rock legend and radio playlists: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, along with the obligatory, sometimes begrudging nods to black music (Marvin Gaye, Sly), punk (Clash, Sex Pistols) and grunge (Nirvana). 

Often, before drifting off at night, I’ll draw up my own list of greatest albums and it’s utter predictability is boring enough to put me right to sleep: “Okay, tonight #1 goes to Pet Sounds and we’ll drop Revolver to #2, something from Neil Young should be at #3 … and … and … zzzzzz.” 

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Remember How Great, Volume 1 and 2

These were my mother’s records, issued in 1961 and 1962. If you’re familiar with the Now That’s What I Call Music series (the McDonald’s hamburgers of music with billions sold), its roots, and that of all compilation albums, start here. 

Available at the time for $1, plus 10 Lucky Strike cigarette packs (not to mention countless trips to the doctor, the hospital and finally hospice), this commercial for the records clocks in at 1:26, practically the equivalent of a half-hour long infomercial by 1961 standards. 

What worked best for the albums was the range of music, from vanilla pop standards to soundtracks for a drive through Harlem. Nearly everything on the two volumes is from the 1940s and 50s, although this version of St. Louis Blues by Louis Armstrong on Volume 2 was recorded in 1929. It has an intensity that totally changed my mindset of Armstrong as that harmless guy with the trumpet and the handkerchief on Ed Sullivan. In my late teens I played this over and over. 

What else was on Remember How Great? Tequila by the Champs, Jumpin’ Jive by Cab Calloway, The Tennessee Waltz by Patti Page, a slice of Wonder Bread that I inexplicably liked -- and that I later realized was the inspiration behind Neil Young's underrated The Old Country Waltz.

When my mother moved, the records disappeared before I could make off with them, but they’re all over eBay, leading me to think that this series was a fairly big seller. I’m also sure that if everybody owned a stereo like the one belonging to my parents, with its needle resembling a roofing nail, they all survive with plenty of pops and crackles.

More to come.

The Perfect Day: February 1, 1964 

In this exercise, we go back in time, and using an old issue of TV Guide as our map, navigate our way through 24 hours of New York City television. 

Clowny and Claude

February 1, 1964 is a Saturday, so the morning is taken up by cartoons, ancient reruns and that perennial 7:00 a.m. favorite, Modern Farmer. At 9:00 we find an hour of cartoons on WOR Channel 9 hosted by Claude Kirchner. I don’t recall if this was a daytime version of Kirchner’s early evening show Terrytoon Circus, which used to open with his puppet sidekick Clowny bursting through a paper-covered hoop and ended with Clowny telling us kids that it was time for bed – at 7:30? Even as a child I scoffed at Clowny’s brazenness! 

At 1:00, it’s American Bandstand under whose listing TV Guide tells us, “Next week Bandstand moves to the West Coast,” casually downplaying another crack in an ongoing seismic shift, the ending of the East Coast’s television dominance. American Bandstand had been based in Philadelphia since 1956, where it aired live each weekday and established itself as television’s #1 teen hangout, many of its regular high school-age dancers popular enough with viewers to receive more than 500 fan letters a week. In 1963, the show cut back to Saturday afternoon and Dick Clark, with an eye toward revving up his own career, then took the show to Los Angeles where it ran until 1989 as Clark tried his luck acting before building his empire of game shows, specials and “rockin’” New Year’s Eve broadcasts. 

But maybe Clark outsmarted everyone but himself. Consider this. The Beatles landed in America that Friday, Feb. 7 to play the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday. Two days later they traveled by train to Washington, D.C. and gave a concert at the Washington Coliseum. Imagine if Bandstand was still in Philadelphia and Clark convinced Brian Epstein to stop in Philadelphia for a taped interview and maybe a song or two. Epstein would have understood that Bandstand was a perfect venue and that Clark would be much more simpatico with the band than the New York press, who seemed more concerned with questions about their hair. It could have been a landmark moment in Beatlemania and rewarded Clark with a much hipper legacy. 

At 2:00 we switch over to college basketball on NBC Channel 4, Princeton vs. Penn, to watch Bill Bradley, a superhuman sophomore averaging 30 points a game for Princeton. Remarkably, this is the only college basketball game broadcast on this day. Today, on an average Saturday there can be up to twenty college games available to view from noon to midnight even if you only have basic cable. 

After the game we have our choice of a special, New Jersey School Budget, or the last 30 minutes of a roller derby match between the San Francisco Bay Bombers and the New York Chiefs on Channel 11. Guess what we’ll choose? 

Late afternoon brings with it Jungle Jim on WNEW Channel 5, followed by Sandy Becker. At 6:30 it’s Clay Cole’s teen party on WPIX Channel 11, where the guests are the unlikely Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows – unlikely given Steverino’s long-standing condescension toward teenage pop music. 

Our choice at 7:30 is between the Jackie Gleason Show and Hootenanny. Not unlike Dick Clark, Gleason is also seeking greener pastures – or in his case greener putting greens – and will move his show from New York to Miami, where it will start airing in September. Hootenanny was a variety show cashing in on a campus folk music craze fueled by acts like Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio. Unbeknownst to Hootenanny’s producers, it – and traditional folk music’s popularity among the young – has about one week left before Paul McCartney kicks off All My Loving on national TV the following weekend. Hootenanny gets cancelled in June, replaced by Shindig. We’re choosing Gleason here, if only to see Frank Fontaine’s “is he supposed to be drunk or just really slow” Crazy Guggenheim routine. 

Between 8:30 to 9:30 we drop in on a couple of movies already in progress, Son of Sampson on Channel 9 and The Monster From the Ocean Floor on Channel 11. At 9:30 we switch over to Hollywood Palace on Channel 7, with its uninspiring lineup of host Donald O’Connor, Buddy Greco and Buddy Hackett “doing his Chinese waiter monolog” according to TV Guide. You know, when he wraps a rubber band around his head to make his eyes look “Asian” and transposes his “R’s” and “L’s” as in “flied lice.” It manages to be both offensive and unfunny. 

Hollywood Palace never had the panache, the feeling of Broadway sophistication or the caliber of guests that Ed Sullivan pulled. Too often it featured performers whose best days were behind them, out-of-work actors and animal acts. After Sullivan introduced the Beatles, then had them back three times this month, Hollywood Palace staggered about with guests like Van Johnson, Betty Hutton and Gloria Swanson. It took until late April for the Palace to book its first British Invasion act, second-stringers Chad & Jeremy, and finally got up to speed that summer by having the Rolling Stones on, only to have them mocked on-camera by host Dean Martin, who was clearly in an “I’m a bigger star than these creeps’ll ever be and I don’t give a shit what I say about them” mood. 

At 10:30 we watch a rerun of Car 54, Where Are You, before moving on to the news. Les Crane comes on at 1:15 a.m., interviewing New York Congressman John Lindsey, who is on his way to running for mayor of New York City and, with his youthfully handsome looks, possibly filling some spot in the public’s heart and mind left vacant only three months earlier by JFK’s death. 

The old guard is clearly beginning to fade and give way to the new -- Lindsey, Lennon and McCartney, Los Angeles. But at this point we’re just content to stare at the screen while the Late Movie, followed by the Late Late Movie, flicker by.

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.

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. 

What made Marvel different, mostly, from the competition, but the key difference was that Marvel’s books were breathlessly plotted so that each issue built upon the preceding issue. There were connections between the characters and sometimes footnotes, annotating events that might have happened last month or two years ago. 

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. 

But I kept following leads. My father took me and my sister to Wehman Brothers, a storefront on Main Street that sold new and used books, old magazines and comic books. A combination hoarder’s paradise and firetrap, lorded over by a cigar-smoking old school book dealer, we waded through piles of well-worn comic books. Archie. Archie’s Pals ‘n Gals. Archie’s Joke Book. Archie and Me. Little Archie. Archie’s Mad House. Life with Archie. At least my sister was happy. 

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.