“Harvey,” dear friend of The Modern Madcaps has taken the best fliers he’s designed for the band and turned them into an limited edition art book. It’s an art school project he did, at a school halfway across the country, but he brought a copy home for break and was passing it around at the Bullfinch.
Funny to see these images shorn of their informative text—all the “9:30 sharp”s and “$2 pitchers” and “big 7-inch release.” “Dirtiest thing I ever wrote, Katnip konfessed when we inkwired; “Seriously, it got me in trouble with [bandmate] Audrey’s mother.”

We find we miss the calligraphy as much as we miss the local content. And we miss neither of those attributes as much as we miss the band itself. The big reunion show is Friday at the Bullfinch. “It’s not actually a break period at any of our schools,’ kwoth drummer Katnip when we kalled him for news. He’s one of two band members who’re still in high school. “It’s just the weekend that worked best for all of us. When we asked if the Modern Madcaps might ever release any other recordings (seven-inch or otherwise), he only purred.

Mar slept over. On the floor. With a mouse, it turns out. Next time, she says she’ll use the bed. Could I have planned this better?

Gorman Bechard, the novelist/filmmaker whose work I have covered extensively over the past couple of decades (!) for the New Haven Advocate, is bringing his new documentary about one of the most important bands in his life, The Replacements, to the indie film festival circuit this month.
Color Me Obsessed debuts at the Gasparilla International Film Festival, followed by screenings at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 2 and the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival on April 15.
Color Me Obsessed is distinctive because while it features a number of international celebrities raving about the band, it doesn’t actually contain any footage of, or recordings by, The Replacements themselves. I haven’t had an opportunity to discuss this with Gorman, but one of his collaborators on the project, my old friend Dean Falcone, told me over lunch last week that the overriding concept of the doc was always to keep the band unseen and unheard, and to tell their story as if they were gods. Works for me, as my own “Rock Gods” serial on this site might attest.

In other Gorman news, I notice that his most recent fiction feature, Friends (With Benefits) has been picked up for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” section, which has the potential to expand its audience a whole friggin’ lot. Friends (With Benefits) was filmed in and around New Haven, culminating in a local-band scene at Café Nine. The New Haven Advocate offices nearly won a supporting role, a deal I helped broker, only to have the opportunity for cinematic inmmortality scuttled by higher-ups concerned that the filmmakers might get in the way of the workers. (They would’ve, but we would’ve got a cover story out of it!)

Coat the Spoon was booked, then unbooked, then booked again, at Hamilton’s. Since an underreported but apparently very consequential raid at the club a couple months back, a new policy was effected: No bands with overt drug references in their name. Turns out the Word Police have been hallucinated. “Coat the Spoon” has nothing to do with, say, cocaine use. “It’s from a cookbook!,” swears singer Cody—not to mention a partial pun on his name. We asked him to produce the evidence, and he did—a jar of homemade lemon curd stirred by his own grandmother, who added this written testimony:
Beat five egg yolks. Grate and squeeze several lemons. Add the juice/zest to the eggs with one-quarter teaspoon salt, two cups sugar and a stick of butter. Cook in a double boiler, stirring often, until it thickens enough to [TAH DAH!!!] coat a spoon.

The band itself stirs the pot pretty fiercely. Cody divulged that a festival gig last summer had thousands streaming away from the mainstage headliners to see the Coat the Spoon on the second stage. We’ve seen the photographs; it was indeed an impressive turn-out, not one you could credit to a mere drug (or breakfast delicacy) reference.

Dirty Lenny and Mezuzah Juan at the Bullfinch, where the patter-rants should be as interesting as the songs themselves… Snot on Suede and Play for the Nurse party down at Hamilton’s… The emo-friendly “A-Muse-Sick” festival comes to D’ollaires with Bark for the Rich Man, Fault Lies With the Manufacturer and Come is a Verb. Who named that festival—same guy who named the bands?…

Gar is right! I saw a mouse run down the shelf and shove through the bars just as I opened the door to what we now call “the mouse room.” The other mouse is still missing.

Joe Staton’s the new artist on the Dick Tracy comic strip. I wore a tattered “E-Man” T-shirt for decades in his honor. E-Man was part of a new breed of irreverent superheroes, and was all the more outstanding for being published by the Connecticut-based Charlton Comics. The bulk of Charlton’s output was highly derivative of the mightier comics publishers, so E-Man’s sense of self-parody really stood out.
I also dig Staton for being one of the artists who really understood the “new look” concept that Archie Comics experimented with in its digests over the past few years. This was an attempt to bring more realistic artwork and more contemporary teen-trauma situations to the Archie line. Unlike some of the other artists, who were too keen to transform the established characters, Staton realized that a middle ground was required between the Archie archetypes and these 21st century updates. His drawings were shadowy and detailed without losing their looseness, their crucial cartoonishness.
So I’m keen to see where Joe Staton (in league with writer Mike Curtis) takes Dick Tracy. Already the pace is faster, the tone lighter and the drawing style rounder than what the newly retired Dick Locher. Locher worked with the strip’s creator Chester Gould in the 1950, and has been its guiding force since the early ‘80s—even when he relinquished the drawing of Tracy to Jim Brozman a couple of years ago, Locher still steered the storylines, and Brozman aped Locher’s style in the artwork.
For me, Staton’s zipping the strip right back to the freshness it had just after Chester Gould retired, when the brilliant Max Allan Collins was writing it and Rick Fletcher was drawing its newfangled punk rock and second-generation flatter-top villains.

By Artie Capshaw

We first saw them play as the Argonauts. Turns out that name was taken, and they had to change it. Then, for one show each, they became The Rock Pirates, The Punk Pirates, The Jack Tars, The Buccaneers, The Buckos and The Infringers.

Uh, that last one? “We looked up ‘pirate’ in the thesaurus,” explains the band’s scurrilous cap’n, Jay Mason, “and once you get through all the old seafaring terms, it’s all about copyright infringements.”

But even The Infringers was taken. For an act that wants to be seen as scoundrelly thieves, this one can’t seem to lift a good moniker.

So last night at the Bullfinch, Mason and his mates simply stormed the stage unannounced. How piratical can you get?

Well, you can slash and terrorize and drive the crowd wild with swashbuckling savoir faire. Which is what these, ahem, corsair-inspired musicians (we gotta get these guys a name) did with aplomb. Buckled our swashes all right.

Never underestimate the power of an orchestrated full-band power-chord leap in the air. Even the drummer took part.

Never deny the power of a fist-pumping sing-along. These guys had one which forced loud chants from poseurs whom we’ve never before witnessed opening their mouths at the Bullfinch before.

Never question the advice to quit while one is ahead. Eight short songs and gone. Literally out the door and into the van. (Cap’n Jay skulked back later for payment, we’re told.) The air of mystery smells sweet. Since they were in disguise, we still don’t even know exactly who the rhythm section was. We’re pretty sure the guitarist is that guy from Don’t Step on That Beetle; if so, we never gave that soul act enough respect.

Another surprise—a horn section for the last song. Just the last song. Who holds back a horn section for nearly the whole set, just for the shock effect of that first blast? This band does, enlisting marching-band misfits from the college on the hill and schooling them in stomps and struts.

Finally, all hail the dinky old-school electric keyboard. From its humble casing emerged sounds that mimicked the roar of thunder, the crash of rocks, the warbles of mysterious sirens, one forceful note at a time.

In our short time at the Rock Gods desk, we have not had much time to get jaded. We are astonished at the variety and vivacity of our small city’s scene. Great new bands, we proclaim, are being created every week. We can scour the clubs, colleges, closets and law offices of this empire for eons and continue to turn up new treasures on a frequent basis. (And we are not without standards!)

But, we pause to genuflect, these rock pirates, these kings of the c-chord, these picaroon loons, these new jackies, these triumphant tars, these amiable bluejackets, these

Consider us boarded and raided. A new flag flies on our mast.

Big weekend plans: Perry and Patetics tonight at the Bullfinch, with The Kapusta Kids… World’s Strongest Ant and Public Eye at Hamilton’s, keeping the covers crowd covered… and the better-than-they-sound Rock Mississippi at D’ollaire’s, with even hotter up-and-comers J. Burlington Gearshift….

Gar(who may be hallucinating) is convinced that the mice are escaping at night and running back into the cage when they hear us coming.

Archie: The Best of Dan DeCarlo (IDW, $24.99)
Archie Firsts (Dark Horse, $24.99)
The best archivist and anthologist of old Archie comics remains Archie Comics Publications itself. The companies digests and trade paperbacks are affordable, variety-filled and plentiful. But the Archie company has also recently been granting reprint rights to some of the best coffe-table-book compilers in the comics realm.

Dark Horse and IDW not only seize on whole different eras for their 25-buck collections of Archiana, they’re distinct in how they present the comics as well. The main similarity is how loosely they play within their narrow themes.

Dark Horse offers Archie Firsts—Featuring the First Appearances of Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Archie. Seems an easy enough dictum, until you realize that those five characters’ debuts are all covered with a mere three adventures. (Archie, Betty and Jughead are all accounted for in the very first, and oft-reprinted Archie story from Pep #22.) Rather than extend the theme into future Archie eras—digging up the debuts of Moose Mason, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Josie & the Pussycats or Veronica’s cousin Leroy, for instance—the Dark Horse compilers decide to stick in the 1940s, which means several stories each from the first issues of later titles in the Archie series: Archie’s Pal Jughead (which began in 1949 and continues to this day, though it’s changed issue-numbering schemes a few times), Archie’s Rival Reggie (also 1949; the title changed to Reggie & Me and eventually expired in the 1980) and Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica (1950, after they’d been core members of the Archie establishment for nearly a decade).

Archie Firsts’ packaging is elegant—the crisp orange dust jacket can be removed to reveal a “Riverdale High School” insignia emblazoned on the book itself—but the pages are meant to mimic (in a sturdier, cleaner, archival-quality manner) the cheap newsprint on which these stories were originally printed.

Archie—The Best of Dan DeCarlo goes the slick route. The back cover of this 150-page Volume One states that “each of these wonderful pages has been reproduced from Dan DeCarlo’s original art and faithfully re-colored to match its look when it was originally published.” No little ink-dots here and yellowed backgrounds here—it’s all so pop-art clean, on blindingly shiny paper, that you might think you’re looking at a collection of Archie comics’ front covers rather than their insides.

Let’s hope there are several more volumes, since everything here is from a period in the late ‘50s and ‘60s when the great DeCarlo (who served Archie for half a century) didn’t change his style a whole lot. Personally, I think the covers and stories designed in the 1980s are hugely underrated in Archie fan circles, and there’s a wealth of extraordinary (and groovy) ‘70s material besides.

Volume One has a whole lot of stories where very little happens, just some well-scripted chat, and how DeCarlo delineates the mundane is what gives this book its oomph. While Betty and Veronica hold their endless debate about Archie’s inadequacies and their own needs, they change their clothes, indulge in daydreams, and move theatrically around rooms. It’s during this period that DeCarlo began to develop his signature filmic style of placing supporting characters (more often than not, nameless bystanders) in the foreground of the comics panels. The way he fluidly switches angles and horizons is mesmerizing. But DeCarlo’s peripatetic drawings complement rather than just animate the equally amazingly casual crafting of the words these dizzy teens are spouting. The scripts to all but two or three of the 26 stories here are by Frank Doyle. He was as important a figure in the cultural endurance of Archie as was DeCarlo, publishers John Goldwater and Michael Silberkleit, editor Victor Gorelick or anyone else involved in these characters during the 20th century. It would be fairer to title this series “The Best of Dan DeCarlo and Frank Doyle.”

My shelf of Archie hardcovers has expanded by several inches in just the last few months. I still buy the digest reprints and the new comics avidly, and I think that the neatest reprint packages of the past few years are the CD-Rom compendia of “Bronze Age” Archies (and Jugheads and Betty and Veronicas—a decade’s worth of each title per disk) put out a few years ago by GIT Corp. But these hardcovers are well worth the expense. It’s nice to have someone validate your tastes so lavishly and lovingly, whether the urge is nostalgic or art-restorative. As later collections should reveal (it’s a ’70s catchphrase), Everything’s Archie.

We wrote earlier about a doctor, a lawyer and an indian chief who’d started a band. OK, so it was a lawyer, a newsstand manager and a record store employee. Well, they’ve enlisted a drummer (alternate occupation unknown) and booked a gig next Thursday at Hamilton’s, under the name The Illegal Briefs. We blew this act’s cover when we overheard them rehearsing a few times in the legal offices of saxophonist “Flint” Gennessee, Esq. We didn’t think they could sue us or anything, but we didn’t know how they’d feel about being written about before they were “ready,” even in a column that was really about something else. (The spirit of community, duh.) So we didn’t tell them. Turns out they were thrilled, got a boost from folks walking into their businesses and complimenting them, and took all the attention as a sign that they should be playing out. No need to thank us. Just go see The Illegal Briefs next Thursday at Hamilton’s (Why not the Bullfinch? More lawyers drink at Hamilton’s.) Two acoustic acts open: Wye & Ott Echo and Scot Slaw…

Tonight: Godgi Goodeen and Art Mad at the Bullfinch… Fortune in My Misery at Hamilton’s… County Anselm (for the holiday) at D’ollaires. Drink green…