Still uncertain which edition of Archie Meets Kiss I need to buy—the trade paperback for a reasonable $10, of the hardcover with the bonus 30 pages of what-exactly for 20 bucks more. I am not of the Kiss Army; on the contrary, I am a charter member of the ever-growing civilian “Kiss Was Never Cool” brigade. But I do think the band is well suited to comic books, from the Marvel ones in the ‘80s to this one now.

In its original conventional comic-book form, the Archie/Kiss match-up was so popular that I missed an entire issue of the four-part series and was unable to find it anywhere. The storyline is full of missed opportunities—The Archies and Kiss are both in it, plus there’s even a panel showing Josie & The Pussycats turned into zombies, yet there’s almost no mention of music. Instead, it’s one of those far-out interplanetary adventures which don’t sit very well in the Archie universe, even with Sabrina the Teenage Witch as conduit. I would much rather have seen a battle of the bands, with “Sugar Sugar” finally getting its due as the spiritual forebear of “Christine Sixteen.”

Switched bedrooms with Mar. Best sleep I’ve had in days.

Last column, we misused the word “anachronism.” Some grammarian pals at the college on the hill corrected in such a snotty manner that their Wite-Out went up our nose.

What the spell-checkers din’t know if that we were deliberately punning on The Anachros, which was the band the Formal DeHydes descended from. So we may brandish our creative license, surely.

Guitar-wielding comedian Advanced Heel has his first-ever solo headlining set Sunday at the Bullfinch. “I’ve never headlined before, on purpose,” Heel swears. “I know how weird what I do is.” Yet one of his radio rants is catching on at college radio and he wants to be “prepared.” Heel’s not the first to test such waters at the Bullfinch. If you can stand a doule-sized set of strummed comedy, which follows an aggressive set by Size 14 Shoe, stick around, and shout catchphrases such as “And then I hated…” or “Set me loose…” or of course the fast-rising “Dial me down!”

 

Only 5 Minutes (which never is) opens for One Use at the Bullfinch tonight. Nothing funny there at all… Hamilton’s has Grape Beverage and Jerky Gift Box, European and Jamaican dance covers respectively… An Evening With Nero Kwik at D’ollaire’s. Didn’t he just have that one hit, on his only album? What the hell kind of evening is that?…

My “Spring Theater Preview” cover story for the New Haven Advocate is here.

My peek into the bean bag chair room at Rubber Match (for Daily Nutmeg) is here.

My meditation on the importance of Gag Jr.’s Corner (also for Daily Nutmeg) is here..

New Haven Theater Jerk has a bunch of new entries, plus theater calendar updates, here.

Got an email that last week that Bruce McCall was in the “Artist Spotlight” at the online New Yorker Store, which sells quality reprints of the magazine’s covers and cartoons. I’ve been a McCall fan since he helped define the National Lampoon style of detailed parodies which were conscious of the style and importance of every element of the thing being lampooned.

McCall didn’t draw funny luxury cars, he drew them in the context of car catalogues and the hopes and dreams of bygone days. His contribution to the full-bodied National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody was that most essential of taken-for-granted elements, the supermarket advertising circular. McCall’s gags were extreme—the market was named SwillMart, it sold “rubber meat”—but contained within realistic trappings. He was parodying not just stupid culture stuff but the brochures, magazines, and ads which delivered them.

Now he uses New Yorker covers to spoof magazine covers. He works in traditional styles common when there were a zillion other lit/culture mags on the newsstand. You often have to study a McCall cover to get the joke—it’s not an automatic or clear realization, the way nearly all magazine covers are meant to be.

He seems to be good for four or five New Yorker covers a year. I miss his prose writing, having enjoyed his elaborate multi-page works for the Lampoon and his sensitive yet sarcastic memoir of his Canadian upbringing Thin Ice. He still writes, but is lucky to get the New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs slot even two or three times a year.

I know he’s older, and I see from the internet that he’s working on a children’s book and other things. But I wish the “Artist’s Spotlight” was a little broader.

In any case, the light’s shifted. This week’s “Spotlight Artist” at the New Yorker store in Charles Barsotti, a talking-dog and “little king” cartoonist without a satirical or parodic bone in his body. All hail Bruce McCall!

…from Jughead With Archie Comics Digest Magazine #69, July 1985.

Surprise!

Noise Annoys

Fair Despair

Eat Treat

Keen Scene

The Injured Party

Nap Flap

Breath Taking

View from the Pop

Wide Birth

Help Un-Wanted

Top Secret

Trap Flap

Bowl Goal

Dense Sense

Guess What’s for Lunch?

Dream Scene

Cycle Saga

Dynamite

Anything to Help

Anything She Wants

Hark Bark

Trash Flash

That Fabulous Face

Follow the Girls

Watched Watchers

In Good Hands

Well Read

Pet Parade

Food Monster

Clock Yock—or Are You Tense, Tired, All Wound Up?

Droppin’ In

Scheme Scream

No Horse Sense

All Washed Up

Impulse

Birds of a Feather

Easy Does It

Ham on Wry

Cool Rule

…and Eerie Ear

 

“View From the Pop” is a word puzzle contained within an image of Archie’s father’s head.

If you’re curious what the mystery is in the Li’l Jinx story “Guess What’s for Lunch?,” it’s that a puppy dog has been stashed in Charley Hawes’ picnic basket.

Started a letter to whatever government agency is in charge of household heating. Fell asleep writing it.

That new dollar store on Main Street, The Buck Stops Here, is good for more than chocolate covered peanut cravings. When rockabilly dfrummer Jimmy Joe Bob Buck of the Hair Straighteners had a transportation mishap—his mom drove his drums to the wrong town—he improvised by rushing to said cheap-goods emporium and loading up on flower pots, metal cans, snow saucers and anything else that would hold a beat.

His sticks were giant novelty pencils, tassels still attached.

Considering how many proper drum kits JJBB has already trashed in his short, meteoric (more like typhoonic) career, it’s amazing that most of this one survived the furious set.

When a pot could not suffice, Jimmy simply pounded the floors and walls. A soundman’s nightmare, but a rock fan’s demented dream. (Being juiced on high-chemical dollar-store soda pop definitely helped.)

Plans have already been hatched to deliberately send Mrs. Bob Buck on more wild goose chases whenever her son is gigging near a dollar store.

 

At the Bullfinch: Singer/songwriter Kera Premium, who will later sing along with mammoth college choral ensemble Sleek Luxurious… Four Bottles at Hamilton’s, which is what you’ll need to imbibe before they sound good. Kidding, guys. Three’s plenty… D’ollaries has The Formal DeHydes, garage insanity from France (or so they c’est). Best booking there in ages; a pity it’s such an anachronism for the club…

My weekly highlights column for the Daily Nutmeg is here.

http://dailynutmeg.com/2012/04/09/this-week-in-new-haven-april-9-15/

1. Cheap Trick. I heard the band do this in a concert at the Orpheum in Boston well before a different  live version was released on their Found All the Parts EP in 1980. It blew my mind. Cheap Trick often did covers, but to actually do a Beatles song at the time was significant. This was the apotheosis of the  Power Pop movement, and it was considered far cooler to do fairly obscure covers of British bands or ‘60s garage acts than actually acknowledge the band to which every single Power Pop band owed its largest debt. It’s also a riff that fit Rick Nielsen’s wild-yet-precise live playing style perfectly. (Cheap Trick, of course, went on to work with John Lennon in 1980 and, in 2010, cover Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirely with orchestral backing.)

2. Nancy Sinatra. Instead of guitars, the riff is handled first by a brass section, then by a chorus of go-go dancers. And she growls it like “Boots.”

3. Otis Redding. He uses horns too. And seems genuinely perturbed to have “found out.”

4. The Fleshtones. Soaring instrumental rave-up, one of many uncanny Fleshtones recreations of a ‘60s Northwest frat party soundtrack.

5. Jimi Hendrix. On the BBC Sessions. Strips it down to garage essentials: “Can you hear me now?

6. Ramsey Lewis. The pianist attacks it in a manner similar to his biggest pop hit, “The In Crowd.”

7. Yellow Magic Orchestra. Messes with the Beatles timeline and does it in a psychedelic “Strawberry Fields” style.

8. Capital Gain. A consummate try-something-a-little-new local band cover for the largely extraordinary Boston Does the Beatles double-album in 1988.

9. Mongo Santamaria. The horns take the riff again, with a cha cha beat and an active dialogue among keyboards, saxophone and trumpets.

10. Daniel Ash. The riff and beat becomes the Goth undercurrent of a downbeat confessional.

11. Mae West. She acts it to the hilt, actually becoming the Day Tripper herself: “I’m a big teaser/I took him half the way there.” Produced by the great tin pan alley scholar and ukulele popsmith Ian Whitcomb.

12. Booker T and the M.G.s. Unending delights. The guitar part comes out from under the riff and plays a transformative blues solo. The rest of the band vamps on the basic melody, as a unit.

Tied for 13: Sham 69 and Bad Brains. Inventive live versions that nonetheless share a “guess you had to be there” vibe.

Five Worst: James Taylor, Anne Murray, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, Lulu, Type O Negative.