Rock Gods #350: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Bolstered by tales of bands who wore fake mustaches and used phony names to get back into clubs from which they’d been banned, the sleazy ensemble Whorse snuck into Hamilton’s (from whence they’d been banished for starting a riot or an orgy, depending on who you ask) disguised as… a refrigerator. A new cooler had just been delivered to the club, and the huge cardboard box it came in was still near the bar next to the stage. Whorse—all four of them—piled in when nobody was looking, sat in there drinking and smoking for hours, then seized the moment. When TroJam took a break from their hours-long set, Whorse leapt out, grabbed the other band’s instruments, and performed a scatalogical new composition “Broken Through.” It actually should’ve been called “Broken Tooth,” because that’s what Whorse leader Paul O. ended up with when a melee broke out among the returning TroJam, the poised-to-strike Whorse and the Hamilton’s management. Bad week for TroJam, still reeling from the nervy Minnie incident last week.
Tonight: White rappers Crumpin DFox and
Kingle Candle at the Bullfinch. Say it ain’t so… Italian Bomb and Muzzarelli at Hamilton’s for (you guessed-a right) Italian Nite… An Evening With Farm Table at D’Ollaire’s…

Riverdale Book Review

Subscribers like me don’t get to choose which alternate covers they’re going to get, and I’m largely held off from buying multiple copies of the same comics just to get the cooler covers. But a bunch of very nice alternates are on sale right now at the Archie website for 99 cents each, so I snapped up a groovy Josie and the Pussycats cover drawn by Chrissie Zullo for Life With Archie magazine #33. Many of those variant covers, like this one, have nothing to do with the contents of the issue—Josie, Valerie and Melody do not in fact show up at Veronica’s corruption trial, nor at Jughead’s Choklit Shoppe. Such randomness can be annoying for lay-readers, but at least the Archie company is a lesser offender than DC, which does things like put Harley Quinn on the covers of dozens of books in which she does not appear.
Still, the question remains: if Josie & the Pussycats are popular enough to drive at least three variant Archie covers (this Zullo one and two by Fiona Staples), and Valerie’s affair with Archie has fueled a multi-issue continuity collected in two separate graphic novels, why haven’t the Pussycats characters been granted their own comic again?

Metamorphoses

Charleston Chew Chocolatey Nougat Hot Cocoa K-cups
Klondike Mint Chocolate Chip—The Candy!
Ben & Jerry’s Candy Bar Pie Ice Cream
UV Candy Bar Vodka
3 Musketeers Marshmallow with Milk Chocolate (Whipped Up, Fluffy Chocolate with Marshmallow Taste)
Crunchy PB Max Snickers Flavor
Cadbury Caramello Ice Cream Bars
Jolly Rancher Popsicles
50gr Hydro Herbal Hookah Shisha Dr. Pepper Flavor Molasses Sheesha. That’s how it’s described on Amazon, but it’s actually a faux-Pepper soda flavor called “Dr. 23.” Fake Dr. Peppers are legion—there’s an excellent list of them at https://fakedrpepper.wordpress.com/?s=Dr.+23, though it misses Dr. 23 and one of my favorites: the Soda Club syrup Dr. Pete.
Angie’s Holidrizzle Candy Corn Kettle Corn

I’ve tried several of these. The Klondike Mint candy is an abomination, a rare example of turning an ice cream treat into a candy bar rather than vice versa. The Charleston Chew cocoa is more flavor than substance, and by nature of it being cocoa must change the candy bar’s ratio of nougat to chocolate. Cadbury ice cream bars of any kind are a superior product; within that rarefied plane, I prefer the regular milk chocolate kind to Caramello. Jolly Rancher Popsicles have the readymade tang of popsicles that have been in the freezer too long and picked up flavors of other foods. Candy Corn Kettle Corn is as ghastly as it sounds.

Rock Gods #349: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

Minnie, the fetching tambourinist for the TroJams, was a little out of her head Sunday at Hamilton’s and seemed to vainly announce from the stage that a beauty contest would forthwith be held, and the contestants would be herself, Junie Jumper of He-Ven and the Venus half of the duo Venus Penis.
Minnie insists she was misunderstood. She’d been at a wedding that afternoon, heard a stirring rendition of “For the Fairest,” and was in fact inviting the other two women (whom she insists she “worships”) onstage to sing along. But her improvisatory intro created dischord instead of harmony. Someone threw an apple. Rambunctious members of the crowd started catcalling their votes for fairest. Whatever the next song was going to be was ruined. And none of the women—who’d all been at that same wedding, that very afternoon—are speaking to each other. Some scenesters are prophesying a power struggle that could alter the territorial club universe as we know it. Some think that it will blow over like the guitar solo from “Sea Nymph.”
We’re inclined to believe Minnie. In the TroJams, she’s known as “the smart one,” the one who’s had the most to do with the band’s increasing regional fame. In any case, this battle is not over.

Tonight: George Streetsign at the Bullfinch, solo acoustic… The String Sillies at Hamilton’s. It’s a private bash for the classical music department at the college on the hill, but it shouldn’t be hard to crash… The Crimes of England and Utopia of Usurers arrive at D’ollaire’s on their “How to Help Annexation” tour. Best booking that club has had ever. Almost worth the high ticket price…

Riverdale Book Review

Super Graphic—A Visual guide to the Comic Book Universe is a collection of ingenious charts and graphs by Tim Leong which lay out facts about various graphic-adventure worlds in a way

I’m curious about where Leong got his data for some of these charts, but am more curious about why Archie Comics is so underrepresented. True, Archie characters have always stood out for their aberrant normalcy and nonsuperheroic powers. But there is over 70 years of history there that can organized in numerous fascinating ways. Leong devotes only chart exclusively to Archie interests, and chooses a dubious theme: “Archie’s Ample, Awesome, and Awful Alliteration.” The concept, apparently, is that a statistically significant number of characters in Riverdale have alliterative names: Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Dilton Doiley, Waldo Weatherbee, Moose Mason… Yet as the chart shows, many other Archie characters, major and minor, do not suffer from the same alliterative affliction: Reggie Mantle, Veronica Lodge, Midge Klump…
When I start to think of other comic companies, Archie seems positively diverse, namewise. In Metropolis alone, there’s Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Kitty Kowalski. Lucy Lane, Lori Lemaris, Mister Majestic, Mr. Mxyzptlk and Streaky the Supercat.

Scribblers Music Review

Beans on Toast, “New Orleans Honeymoon.” Cutesy British pop tune in the Wreckless Eric/ Jonah Lewie vein. Low-key vocals and jaunty folk tune, not so ingratiating until the great brass arrangements kick in. Beans on Toast’s new album The Grand Scheme of Things is due in March.