Another challenge for The Green Hornet! This was kind of my Holy Grail among superpulp paperbacks for a few years (a position now held by the elusive Blackhawk novel by William Rotsler, or cheaply priced copies of Ron Goulart's Vampirella novels). I passed up a chance to buy it in 1978 at a collectibles shop in Brockport (read "passed up" as "cash-strapped college freshman conceded he couldn't spare the cost of a collectible paperback"). I don't remember where, when, or how I finally assumed ownership of a copy of this coveted prize. I may have received it as a gift from my pal Fritz, who definitely scored me a set of Green Hornet playing cards, or I may have located a copy on one of my many used bookstore burrows. The Infernal Light and one other tie-in to the 1966 Green Hornet TV series--a hardcover juvenile novel called The Case Of The Disappearing Doctor--were the first Green Hornet novels ever published. Well, I guess you could count the three Green Hornet Big Little Books published in the early '40s, but given the character's massive popularity on the radio, one wonders why there was never a Green Hornet pulp magazine. My specific memories of both The Case Of The Disappearing Doctor and The Infernal Light have grown as cloudy as the asphyxiating fumes from The Green Hornet's gas gun, but I believe I was disappointed by the former and relatively satisfied by the latter. Three Green Hornet prose anthologies have been published within the last decade or so, but no more full novels as of yet.
I liked The Dead Boys. The Cleveland punk group was never quite among my very favorites, but I bought both Dead Boys LPs (Young, Loud And Snotty and We Have Come For Your Children) and particularly liked their songs "All This And More" and "3rd Generation Nation." Later on, I quite liked the first album by The Lords Of The New Church, with former Dead Boys lead singer Stiv Bators. In between The Dead Boys and the Lords, Stiv Bators briefly tried his hand at power pop, with Frank Secich from Blue Ash adding genre credibility and punch on guitar. The overt power pop moves were downplayed a bit by the time of Bators' 1980 album Disconnected, but were on full display in the two non-LP Bomp! singles that preceded it. All four of these sides are incredible, but even the sheer splendor of "The Last Year," "Not That Way Anymore," and "Circumstantial Evidence" must yield the crown to Stiv's cover of "It's Cold Outside." The 1967 original by The Choir (who were essentially the roots of The Raspberries pre-Eric Carmen) is a garage pop classic, and I think I heard it on a Pebbles collection before I heard the Stiv Bators version. But man, Stiv's cover just POPs, with aggressive drums and slashing guitars propelling a track which I consider one of the defining singles of power pop.
Writer Otto Binder was a key figure in science fiction and comic books from the '30s into the '60s. Binder is best known for his Adam Link series (credited to Eando Binder, a pseudonym originally shared by Otto and his brother Earl Binder) and his extensive resumé of work in comics. Binder was one of the most prolific and important contributors to the adventures of the original Captain Marvel, and later made significant innovations to the Superman mythos, including the introductions of The Legion Of Super-Heroes, Brainiac, Supergirl, Krypto, Jimmy Olsen's signal watch, and the bottle city of Kandor. It pains me to note that Binder displayed no affinity whatsoever for Marvel Comics' '60s style in this 1967 Avengers novel, which I picked up in the dealers room at New York's Super DC Con in 1976.
I've long promised a complete blog post about my all-time # 1 rock 'n' roll crush Suzi Quatro, and we're getting closer to that. No, really. For now: this was nowhere near my first Quatro record, but it was probably the first Quatro record I ever heard. The lovely Suzi appeared on a 1975 episode of a British rock 'n' roll TV show called Supersonic, carried in New York by WPIX and available via the magic of cable TV for this lovestruck fifteen-year-old in the Syracuse suburbs. Suzi lip-synced "I May Be Too Young," but I didn't catch the song's title, initiating my fruitless search for a mythical Suzi Quatro song called "Little Susie From Baton Rouge" or "I'm Just Waitin' For You" or whatever the hell it might be called. To make matters worse, it was a non-LP single, so its identity remained a mystery even after I started accumulating Quatro's albums. I finally, finally tracked it down as a 45 purchase at Jack Wolak's much-missed Knuckleheads in the early '90s. I still didn't know the title of the song I'd heard nearly two decades before on Supersonic, but an eager spin on the home turntable confirmed that my search had finally reached its end. (Then, of course, I got it again on a Suzi Quatro CD anthology, and ultimately sold my 45 to Ronnie Dark, host of the fab radio show The Wax Museum With Ronnie Dark. Fickle? Not me, man. I'm still true to you, Suzi.)
Yeah, my copy of this novelization of the 1966 Batman movie is signed by the film's star, Adam West. The benefits of being a good citizen. West appeared in costume at a car show in Buffalo in either '86 or early '87. I was already freelancing for Amazing Heroes, Comics Collector, and Comics Buyer's Guide, so I wanted to set up an interview with West, but it was not to be. It was still a thrill to meet 'n' greet the one TV star that had the most impact on the development of my pop culture sensibility. I think I'd picked up the paperback on a visit to my once and future homeland in Syracuse, at Twilight Book And Game Emporium on North Salina Street, a great store run by my friend Bob Gray. I don't know if the pseudonymous Winston Lyon is the same "Winston Lyon" (aka William Woolfolk) who had ghost-written the previous Batman novel Batman Vs. 3 Villains Of Doom.
I sometimes claim to have had a love/hate relationship with The Knack, but I never really disliked them, and I occasionally liked them a lot. I must have purchased this single before I got around to buying the Get The Knack LP; it would have been unusual for me to buy a single if both sides were on an album I already owned. Either way, this picture sleeve of the lovely Sharona herself was certainly a factor. I also picked up the "Good Girls Don't" single, which didn't have Sharona on the sleeve, but featured a radio edit of the familiar album track (with the lines "Wishing you could get inside her pants" and "Until she's sitting on your face" replaced by the less-rude "Wishing she would give you just one chance" and "Until she puts you in your place"). "That's What The Little Girls Do," an album track on Get The Knack, was my favorite Knack cut at the time, though it's since been replaced by "Your Number Or Your Name."
I adored superpulp paperbacks in the mid '70s, grabbing as much as I could of the pulp adventures of The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, The Spider, Operator 5, The Lone Ranger, Tarzan, Conan, and whatever other grim avatar of justice could be found in bookstores or on drug store spinner racks. I accumulated 'em far faster than I could read them--there are many I bought over forty years ago that are still awaiting my attention--but they don't expire, and I'm still adding to the stack. I devoured the first two volumes of editor Byron Preiss' Weird Heroes anthology immediately upon their publication in 1975. I was a fan of what Preiss was doing, both here with this "New American Pulp" and also his digest-sized graphic novel series Fiction Illustrated. The second volume of Weird Heroes was like an all-star shindig to me, with stories by Philip José Farmer (whom I knew from Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life), Ted White (who wrote my cherished Captain America superpulp paperback The Great Gold Steal), and comics veterans Steve Englehart (then at Marvel, later to write the definitive Batman serial in Detective Comics) and Elliot S! Maggin (one of my DC Comics Fave Raves, later to write a pair of terrific Superman novels), with illustrations by Steranko, Esteban Maroto, Ralph Reese, Tom Sutton, and Alex Niño. I didn't know writer Charlie Swift or artist Stephen Fabian at the time. The big star attraction for me was my favorite writer Harlan Ellison working with my favorite artist Neal Adams on Ellison's character Cordwainer Bird--The Shadow's nephew! TRIPLE PLAY! For all that, this was probably the final Weird Heroes I owned in the '70s, though I much later tracked down all of the six subsequent volumes and Preiss' own Guts, a full-length novel continuing with his character from the first Weird Heroes book.
After The Sex Pistols collapsed, this first single by John Lydon (the former Johnny Rotten) and his post-Pistols group Public Image, Ltd. was intriguing and captivating, and it seemed a good sign that I would enjoy the music of PiL nearly as much as I'd revered the Pistols' "God Save The Queen" and "Pretty Vacant." There was an announcement that PiL would play a 1979 or early '80 date at a Syracuse club called The Slide-Inn, a former disco where I'd seen 999, David Johansen, and The Flashcubes, but if that date was ever really booked in the first place, it never happened. I woulda traveled across glass to see that. Nothing I ever heard of PiL's music after the debut single ever appealed to me a fraction as much as this song, "Public Image," which could have been a Sex Pistols track as far as my ears were concerned. Still love it. I should check further, to see if there is anything else in the PiL canon that might appeal to me more than "Death Disco" or "This Is Not A Love Song."
Here's one of those superpulp paperbacks I own but haven't read yet. Armageddon 2419 A.D. reprints the original Philip Francis Nowlan pulp novel that later served as the basis for the first science-fiction comic strip, Buck Rogers. Like Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future novels, I fear this may be something I should have read when I was much, much younger. I think I snagged my copy at The Book Warehouse, a former warehouse on Syracuse's North side that was filled with old books and magazines. I lived within walking distance of The Book Warehouse when I moved back to Syracuse in 1987, and it was a frequent stop for me until it finally closed years later. It was my source for so much cheap backdated print, from rock 'n' roll reference books and comics retrospectives through old Playboys, countless novels, crossword puzzle collections, children's books (for my wife, a teacher), and lotsa pulp. Man, the sheer mass of James Bond (by Ian Fleming and John Gardner), John Irving, Mickey Spillane, Ellery Queen, Max Allan Collins, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Alan Brennert, et al. I scored at The Book Warehouse...! We are fortunate to still have a few terrific second-hand booksellers in Syracuse, and Books End and Books & Melodies (both on James Street in Eastwood) remain my go-to book shops. Still miss The Book Warehouse.
It's a slight puzzlement to me that I don't have any recollection of Paul Revere & the Raiders from when I was a little kid in the '60s. I know we used to watch Where The Action Is! occasionally, so I must have seen the Raiders there. I later knew their only # 1 hit "Indian Reservation," but knowledge and appreciation of the freakin' motherlode of the Raiders' splendid '65-'68 recordings wouldn't come until my deeper dive into the wonder of the rockin' pop of the '60s when I was a teen in the '70s. 45s of "Him Or Me--What's It Gonna Be" and "I Had A Dream" were, I think, my first Raiders records, purchased from my friend Jay (along with "Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl" by The Barbarians). I was not immediately impressed. That would change. And how!
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Our new compilation CD This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 4 is now available from Kool Kat Musik! 29 tracks of irresistible rockin' pop, starring Pop Co-Op, Ray Paul, Circe Link & Christian Nesmith, Vegas With Randolph Featuring Lannie Flowers, The Slapbacks, P. Hux, Irene Peña, Michael Oliver & the Sacred Band Featuring Dave Merritt, The Rubinoos, Stepford Knives, The Grip Weeds, Popdudes, Ronnie Dark, The Flashcubes,Chris von Sneidern, The Bottle Kids, 1.4.5., The Smithereens, Paul Collins' Beat, The Hit Squad, The Rulers, The Legal Matters, Maura & the Bright Lights, Lisa Mychols, and Mr. Encrypto & the Cyphers. You gotta have it, so order it here.
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