Cookies, “Music for Touching.” If Carole King were born in a garage rather than in the Brill Building, she’d be belting this peppily impatient love song. What in lacks in melody, it makes up for with power chords and keyboard oomph.
All posts by Christopher Arnott
For Tomorrow We May Die: Diary of a College Chum #252
Mar’s family is taking me in for the holidays.
Riverdale Book Review
Archie and the gang have an ongoing relationship with things magical and supernatural. Sabrina, sure, and the zombie book. But also, every Christmas, manifestations of a real, live Santa Claus and his devoted elf Jingles.
Lesser known in the Archie Christmas universe is Sugar Plum, a female fairy who hangs around with Betty & Veronica. She helps trim Veronica’s massive Christmas tree, “straight from the forests of Norway,” in Betty and Veronica Double Digest #217 (December 2013). That same digest features a Sabrina story, “When Cows Fly,” featuring still more elves, plus some Santa-assisting sorcery so that reindeers (and cows, and whales) can fly.
Rock Gods #302: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Cool new pop act Quiescent Frozen Confections popped up unexpectedly during a set by cofounding bassist/ vocalist Trish DeLish and did two tunes: the catchy “Pop One” and the even catchier “Pop Two.”
An hour later, giddy with glee from how well the hit-and-run gig had gone, QFC tried to get lightning to strike twice by interrupting headliners Sour Patch. Something did strike, and they got burned.
Sour Patch drummer Kent Cantiglionessi erupted, beating back the interlopers with incessant booms and crashes while singer Chimmy Accione chided the all-woman band with remarks that many took to be sexist and offensive. Accione apologized later in the set, but not in a manner which struck onlookers as sincere. Afterwards, he simply said, “Dude, don’t even pretend you’d do different.”
Trish is sheepish about the dis. “We should’ve quit while we were ahead,” she avers. “Like, two or three vodka tonics ahead. We felt strong, and we got knocked back down to size. It’s what happens in bars a lot. It just doesn’t happen to bands on the stage.”
Quiescent Frozen Confection’ s remorse has stalled their long awaited full set debut. It has, strangely, gotten them a couple offers to crash other bands’ sets. “One was a joke, we think. But the other’s for real.” If you DON’T want a QFC incursion during your band’s set, you might want to notify the bouncers.
Tonight: The Pop Sickles and The Sore Bays at the Bullfinch… The Bertollis, Italian family reunion bash (open to the public) at Hamilton’s. Lots of wedding-type covers… An Evening with Lemoncello at D’ollaires, with nary an original member of that once-tart, now jaded-by-fleeting-fame outfit…
Songs to Stand to
We got our Christmas tree. Finally had to retire our decades-old metal stand, due to rust. Found a plastic stand at a tag sale. Aired it out outside in the rain. It appeared not to leak. Then we got the tree, thrust it in the stand, did all the screwy and wiggly things one does, and poured water into it. Seems like I poured into the wrong hole. In any case, the floor was all wet and an investigation of the waterholding properties of the stand is underway.
Found myself humming REM while messing with this stand, in the place where I live.
1. “Stand!,” Sly and the Family Stone. (Exclamatory mark is part of the title.) Greil Marcus writes poetically of Sly and the Family Stone in his classic tome Mystery Train. A cover version of this “Stand,” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers closed the great independent-spirit flick Pump Up the Volume.
2. “Stand,” REM. Though the video’s really more about jumping. “The season is calling,” it says. Hence the Christmas tree stand.
3. “Stand by Me,” Ben E. King.
4. “Not Afraid,” Eminem. “Not afraid to take a stand,” that is.
5. “Stand,” Donnie McClurkin, a God song by a popular gospel singer.
6. “Who’s Gonna Stand Up,” Neil Young. Released just this past September. “Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?” (I really should do a list of “gonna” songs one of these days.)
7. The Stand, Original Television Soundtrack, W.G. Snuffy Walden. Out-of-print album of music by the ubiquitous TV-show composer, who was expressly summoned by Stephen King to do the score for this creepy plague miniseries. (Walden currently scores King’s Under the Dome series.)
8. “Stand,” Lenny Kravitz. “You’re gonna run again.” (I really should do a list of “gonna” songs one of these days.) From the Black and White America album, 2011.
9. “Get Up, Stand Up.” This 1973 composition, part of the first wave of reggae consciousness in the U.S., was apparently the last song ever performed live by its co-author, Bob Marley, on tour in Pittsburgh in 1980.
10. “Stand and Deliver,” Adam Ant. In their new book Mad World—An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defiined the 1980s, Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein argue that Adam Ant’s “theatricality, and the sense of community in his calls-to-arms struck a massive chord.”
11. “Stand With Hillary,” country song produced by the Stand With Hillary PAC for the former First Lady/Senator/Secretary of State’s presumably impending 2016 White House run. “Learnin’ hindsights always right.” Shoulda used Lenny Kravitz’s “Stand” instead (“You’re gonna run again.”)
12. Rascal Flatts. More stand country, with a literary tilt: “Life’s like a novel with the end ripped out.”
13. “Stand By Your Man,” Tammy Wynette. The ultimate country stand.
14.“Stand in the Rain,” Nightcore.
15. “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Ann Peebles.
16. “Stand by You.” The song Chrissie Hynde regretted recording, until she was told by some other sell-out ‘80s star how it touched people.
17. Oasis, “Stand by Me.” “Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday…”
18. One Direction, “Stand up.” “Oh oh oh oh, so put your hands up. Oh oh oh oh, ‘cause it’s a stand up.”
19. Willie Alexander, “Taxi Stand Diane.” 1984 EP by the Boston music scene legend.
20. “Loo, loo, loo, loo, looloo loolooooooo.” Otherwise known as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” sung wordlessly by those who’d just recently called Charlie Brown a blockhead, when they have second thoughts about a sincere little Christmas tree he purchases in the A Charlie Brown Christmas. Linus Van Pelt’s blanket warms the Christmas tree stand. “All it needed was a little love.”
Bonus tracks: Brylanehome Musical Rotating Christmas Tree Stand. $21.99 from amazon.com. “Plays 8 holiday songs as it spins, to display a 350 degree view of your artificial tree.”
Scribblers Music Review
Steve Adamyk Band, Dial Tone.
The Steve Adamyk Band is a punk band from Ottowa, and that Canadian part is significant. They sound as if they’ve learned punk from their fathers’ record collections. They play classic Ramones/Buzzcocks-speed punk. There are a few harmonies and chant-alongs and abrupt chord changes, but all within the realm of straight-ahead no-nonsense mainstream punk rock. They are very good at assimilating this now decades-old style. The production style on this album even sounds old-school, like the way traditional studios would clean up raw punk sounds for public consumption. Something honest and rough occasionally sneaks through this good-natured cleanly delivered Canadian punk, though however happily I can listen to this album over and over, it refuses to captivate me with any original thoughts. This may be the band you’d want on tour to get the crowd moving for a more distinctive headlining act. They are standard-bearers, even if the standards they bear are original tunes that sound remarkably derivative. Really trying to mix my admiration for The Steve Adamyk Band’s remarkable grasp of early ‘80s punk sounds with the fact that I find the songs themselves unmemorable. Great background music for headbanging while typing, however.
For Tomorrow We May Die: Diary of a College Chum #251
Pulling together a downpayment, but can’t find a room to rent.
Riverdale Book Review
Got Afterlife With Archie #7 in the mail the other day.This is one of those comics that may already have fallen off the radar for those who saw it simply in terms of the sensational press release that greeted the release of its first issue.
Yes, it’s an Archie comic that’s not for kids. My daughters understand that without having to ask. There’s no curiosity. They get that it’s not for them. But they also get that there are grown-ups like me who’ve been reading Archie all their lives. There are Batman comics for them, and others for me. They get that. Those are those out there in the world who want to make some big shallow deal out of the fact that there’s an Archie comic not for kids, but those folks should really read Afterlife With Archie and they’ll see how well it works. The storyline’s only gotten stronger after the initial shock of seeing the teens of Riverdale (and their pets) devour each other. There are Lovecraftian underpinnings that have emerged in the saga. The early issues was threatening to become one very long chase scene.
Though it could be said to take place in a separate, realist-yet-supernatural Archie universe, where the inhabitants of Riverdale are more sexually aware and more psychologically unstable, Afterlife With Archie is nonetheless full of respect for the Archie legacy. It doesn’t create new characters, populating its horror tales with established Riverdale citizens major and minor. I’m actually surprised that, given the relentless and consistent doom and gloom that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has applied to Afterlife With Archie for seven severe issues now, that Riverdale cult figure Jinx Malloy and his perpetual dark cloud of disaster have not made an appearance yet.
Afterlife With Archie book that continues to grow, and apparently continues to be successful. It’s been repackaged in book and magazine formats and has inspired another dark-humored adult-oriented Archie title, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. This is not a one-off, or a gimmick. It’s not like Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl Psycho Killer self-parody book. It’s an ongoing adventure with style and merit. It may have come late to the now-largely-passed zombie trend that saturated the early 2010s with blood, but it has deserved to live beyond that passing phase and build its own grisly teen death story in its own sweet time.
Rock Gods #301: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
The Performacnes (so named due to their bad skin) have standards; they just don’t let them get in the way of a good show. So when there was a series of disruptions during their set Thursday at the Bullfinch, they kept playing and kept playing.
Even though the disruptions were power outages.
Some electrical storm, huh? We thought the block was going to explode. But nobody wanted to rush out into the street either. And while we all recalled the common wisdom that a car was the safest place to be in a storm, we were fuzzy on the details.
So we stayed at the Bullfinch and drank, while the persistent Performacnes strummed and drummed regardless of whether electricity
There was the added percussion and harmony of the crowd groaning en masse every time the lights dimmed, then cheering when they went on again. There were rumors of a back-up generator, it really felt as if we, as a group, were powering the powering the room with our raucous ale-stoked energy.
The most consistent electrical vibe, however, came from that tireless band, who played those electric guitars and bass hard, even when it seemed futile. There was just this continuous four-chord clang raising and lowering through the night, but staying on beat.
How were we when the lights went out? Lit.
A Kat Who Dopes Like a Man
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which ran its last original installment 70 years ago, may be one of the timeliest, most topical comic strips running today. For several months now in daily installments found on the Comics Kingdom website, a series of strips from 1937 essentially show the effects of legalization on a small community. The commodity is not marijuana or cocaine or multivitamins some wondrous new pharmaceutical compound but Tiger Tea, and the denizens of Coconino County have been dancing around it (sometimes literally) as if it were magic.
This has been a year where a long-illegalized drug has been legalized in several states. The Tiger Tea sequence, which originally ran just a few years after the end of Prohibition and which also seems to invoke contemporary consciousness of hallucinogens and psychotropic drugs, illustrates both the wonders and foibles of drug use. Herriman shows Tiger Tea users transformed. But he also renders many of these transformations ridiculous or otherwise lamentable. Where would he stand on legalization and governmental regulation?
The Tiger Tea strips comprise what has arguably been called the Krazy Kat strip’s only longform serial adventure, though this odyssey is regularly interrupted for quick-gag and dance interludes. Tiger Tea references are made on-and-off for some ten months, with well over half of the strips in that time period daily strips directly dedicated to the Tiger Tea scenario. The plot is simple: Coconino small-businessperson Mr. Meeyowl’s catnip business is going under, so the ever-generous Krazy helps by seeking out a new drug he Meeyowl can sell. She discovers Tiger Tea, a mysterious brew which makes those who drink it feel like jungle cats.
But while there are plenty of strips which involve this miraculous potion solving an immediate problem, Tiger Tea never becomes an essential element of Krazy Kat the way, for instance, spinach is used in the Popeye animated cartoons or Felix the Cat utilizes his everpresent bag of tricks. Krazy Kat remains a fluid, changing landscape where the only necessary prop is a brick.
The key Tiger Tea strips were gorgeously anthologized, on paper pulped from hemp, a few years ago by ace comics historian/packager Craig Yoe, with an introduction by one of my idols, Paul Krassner. The book, published in January 2010 by IDW, disappoint some Krazy Kat obsessives since it did not contain every single Tiger Tea strip extant. But it’s beautifully and cleanly laid out, and focuses on the idea that George Herriman was making some sort of committed and provocative statement on drug use in America.
For the record, I don’t smoke pot or do any other drugs, and while I was once a serious drinker, I haven’t even done that since 2001. What I am is a Krazy Kat fanatic. It’s been a pleasure to experience the Tiger Tea sequence as Herriman intended it, in daily installments with long digressions, thanks to Comics Kingdom. It’s made me see the series for the sprawling, uncentered saga it is. But it’s mainly revealed itself to me as incisive social commentary that I wish more cartoonists could practice with such subtlety and style.