Monthly Archives: January 2015

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Bacharach & David at the End of the Century

You know how many cool versions of Bacharach/David songs there are from the 1960s? Several zillion. From the ‘70s? Still oodles. From the ‘80s? Enough. The ‘90s? A severe drop-off, but those few are dark and distinctive:

• Back to Back Bacharach, Casino Royale (1999). A Herb Alpertian lounge go-go act. Irresistibly oddball, like a costume party put-on.

  • That’s New Pussycat, Various Artists (2000). Indie surf and punk acts turn Bacharach & David tunes into instrumentals that might have co-existed (in a different ‘60s genre) with the pop originals, but didn’t. There’s some brilliant interpretations here, from Connecticut’s own Mill Valley Taters doing “Walk On By” to two different versions of “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” by Deadbolt and Mummy the Peepshow.

• What the World Needs Now, Various Artists (1998). Power pop bands from the Big Deal label take the songs out for a spin. Splitsville’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” redrawn in a litany of pop styles from Merseybeat to ELO, is leagues beyond the rest, but The Absolute Zeros’ “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me is killer enough.

  • Meow, “This Guy’s In Love With You.” From the album Goalie for the Other Team (1995). Morose, droney reading of the classic. Dark and mysterious as the original, an inspired update for the early emo era.
Rock Gods

Rock Gods #322: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Noa & The Hark missed their Thursday Bullfinch gig a couple of weeks ago due to a ridiculous misreading of the calendar. They had even renamed themselves New and the Yeark especially for the occasion. They promise not to be late Monday for the next holiday gig they could finagle. They’ve been added to an already packed bill and will be going on at 5 p.m.

Why make room for them at all? Besides them being a fairly decent band, we mean, with shiny new equipment. They’re related to some high-and-mighties at City Hall or Town Meeting or somewhere. They’re ambassadors for town/gown amicability. They’re poster children for a cleaner club scene.

If they’d ever bother to show up.

Tonight: Bliss Kook at the Bullfinch, with a new drummer… Through With You, all break-up songs, at Hamilton’s… Undue Bill & the Money in the Banks, seedy R&B, at D’ollaire’s…

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

I’ve never had a problem with Archie as an adventure hero. The old Life With Archie comics were some of Stan Goldberg’s best work, and Pureheart the Powerful put a neat mythic superheroic spin on the mortal tribulations of the traditional Archie & the Gang. The R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. spy stories and the early Archies band inadvertently fighting crime were good-natured parodies of U.N.C.L.E. and Monkees. I even dug the “New Look” Archie stories of the late ‘00s, based on non-graphic Archie novels written by Michael Pellowski and published in the early ‘90s.

But there were some adventures Archie ought to have avoided. I speak of:

  • Archie’s R/C Racers, a global race of remote-controlled toy cars.
  • Archie’s Adventures in the Wonder Realm. “After hooking up Archie’s new console, Dilton’s invention brings the games to life by sending the gang inside! Little did he know they would end up trapped! Now it’s up to Archie to save them! Will he rescue them in time or its it ‘Game Over’ for his friends?”
  • Archie’s Weird Mysteries. Scooby-Doo made its TV cartoon debut in 1969, one year after The Archie Show ushered in a new era of kid-friendly Saturday morning programming. Thirty years later, in 1999, it was Archie who was beholden to Scooby-Doo. The comic book version of the series, drawn by Fernando Ruiz, never really found itself.
  • Archie’s Clean Slate. Some of Al Hartley’s longform Christian adventures were easier to take than others.
  • Dilton Doiley Dropout. What smart kids will do to be liked.
Music reviews

Scribblers Music Review

Bonnie “Prince” Billy makes an appearance on the eight-song alt-folk album Where In Our Woods by Elephant Michah. It’s an appealing thump-and-strum sound, laid-back but not calm. “Rare Beliefs”s starts with a quiet rumble and stays still, but not without menace. “Demise of the Bible Birds” may be the quickest and most sprightly of the eight songs, but even it has that drag-leg Tom Waits feel beneath its peppy instrumental sections and higher-register vocals. There’s a sad wail beneath this whole album that’s the very definition of “haunting.”

Rock Gods

Rock Gods #322: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

The Stage IIs were formed as the live band for a theater musical, and stayed together originally so they could play other musicals. Then they found clubs liked them too—at least clubs that could handle a nine-piece ensemble with several banks of synthesizers and endless percussive devices. SIIs did showtunes sets for a while, but got bored so they found some off-copyright scripts and started performing those with vibrant ambient musical accompaniment. Classical scripts, mostly, but also some really obscure 19th and early 20th century stuff. These worked best at college basement gigs, but spread anyway down the hilll to the Bullfinch, where on Thursday the Stage IIs presented Messalina’s Muse. It was an odd production, staged deliberately so that you could barely conmprehend the words.

Tonight: Sweet Tart Slush and Quirk Jeep at the Bullfinch, with free slush while it lasts… Greenbash and The Humarocks at Hamilton’s inevitably closing with “Close Your Eyes”…  Drolleries’ is jam-crazy, with Blu’s Shower Door and Oakman Wayne…

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

Observations from Archie’s Sunday Finest: Classic Newspaper Strips from the 1940s and 1950s by Bob Montana (IDW Books, 2012).

Reggie’s surname was once spelled Mantel, not Mantle.

Archie and Li’l Abner exist in the same universe. There are references to a Sadie Hawkins-type “patch dance” and Lena the Hyena.

Archie nearly coined a musical general three decades early: There’s a dance event called the “Hep-Hop.

Bob Montana apparently created the gesture where Miss Grundy gets so flabbergasted by her students’ behavior that her white bun hair-do flies off her head like a wig.

The Archie Andrews radio series, which ran on various networks for a decade, 1943-1953, has an effect on the Archie comic strip, as when the cartoon Jughead mutters “Boy-o-boy-o-boy” a la Harlan Stone on the radio shows.