Tonight On THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO

Hey, what's in the water around here lately? Last week, TIRnRR served up new music from long-time Fave Raves The Grip Weeds, and marveled that their new album Trip Around The Sun may be their best one yet. This week, the latest album from the incomparable P. Hux arrived in the ol' in-box, and great googly-moogly, This Is The One sounds like it could be P. Hux's best one yet. The pop gods grin goofily upon us! That's enough excuse for us to name P. Hux as this week's Featured Act, giving you the joyous opportunity to immerse yourself in the splendor of both old and new P. Hux tunes, alongside our irresistible blend of whatever the hell it is we do. I think it involves The Kinks. And The Grip Weeds. And P. Hux! We got a radio show. Involve yourself: Sunday night, 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at Spark! WSPJ-LP 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/

Faces On The Wall

My first rock 'n' roll posters were hand-me-downs, but they were choice hand-me-downs. When my sister went off to college in 1970, I assumed possession of her Beatles posters. These painted portraits of your John, your Paul, your George, and your Ringo remained on my wall while I was in middle school and high school, and left North Syracuse with me when I commenced my own rock 'n' roll matriculatin' in the fall of '77. The posters served me well on one occasion in '76 or so, when WOLF-AM's Beatles Weekend offered a free Beatles LP to the first caller who could correctly identify the color of George Harrison's eyes. A glance at the poster, a sprint to the phone in the kitchen, a hastily-dialed call to The Big 15 so I could blurt out BROWN!, and a copy of the Help! album was mine.



I also remember my sister having a Dylan poster--my first conscious exposure to Bashful Bobby Dylan's name--but I think she must have taken that one with her on her journey to higher education. 'Sfunny, because I remember much later mentioning Mr. Dylan to one of the guys in my dorm suite in the Spring of '78; my suitemate glanced up at my Beatles portraits, and asked me which one was Dylan.



Although I plastered my walls with graven images in high school and college, I had relatively few commercial posters. In college, my cherished Beatles posters shared wall space with LP inserts (from the White Album, from The Beach Boys' Endless Summer, from a collection of movie sound bites by The Marx Brothers, and from records by The Heartbreakers, The Runaways, etc.), promo materials, maybe some comics art, Flashcubes gig flyers, magazine pages (including a poster ripped from a Bay City Rollers fan mag), a Molson Golden Ale poster, and a few Playboy centerfolds. The promo items--posters and flats--mostly came from Brockport's Main Street Records, which offered such bonus bounty in its handy-dandy Free With Purchase! bin. Decorating was easy!



And I did pick up a few commercial posters along the way. I believe I got my KISS poster from my college friend Fred, who had outgrown KISS and wanted nothing further to do with the group. I bought a couple of posters upstairs at Syracuse's Economy Bookstore, one featuring my boys The Sex Pistols and one starring my presumed future spouse Suzi Quatro. There was an awesome Batman poster I wanted, but never quite got around to buying. I did get a Suzanne Somers poster at Gerber Music; that was sorta puzzling, because although she was certainly cute, I didn't have any particular thing for her, nor for her sitcom Three's Company. Why a Suzanne poster, instead of, say, a Farrah Fawcett? No idea.




After college, I don't recall ever putting up many posters in my apartments. I really wanted to get a poster of The Monkees circa the time of resurgent Monkeemania in '86, but never saw one I thought appropriate. Now, decades later, I have but a few posters on my wall. There's a Frank Miller The Dark Knight Returns poster framed in my office, staring down a great framed Ramones poster I received as a gift. But that's it, other than the framed two-page spread from my Goldmine interview with Joan Jett (autographed by Ms. Jett herself) and the framed artwork from Rhino Records' Poptopia! CDs, which Rhino gave me as a thank-you bonus for writing the liner notes to the '90s Poptopia! disc, plus a few small items (a picture of Syracuse University basketball great Gerry McNamara, an autographed picture of Red Grammer, my Ramones wall clock, and a wall hanging my sister gave me decades ago, which reads A Creative Mind Is Rarely Tidy). That's the sum total of wall decorations in my office at home.



I still have those same Beatles posters. They're a bit tattered now, certainly worn, rolled up in a drawer because there's no longer any point in even trying to flatten them or do a better job of preserving them. George Harrison's eyes are still brown. The Pistols, KISS, and Suzanne Somers sheets are long gone; even Suzi Q has moved on. The Beatles remain. John. Paul. George. Ringo. Dylan must have been on holiday that day.

I still regret never buying this one for my dorm room wall.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

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. 

My Illegal Records

My introduction to the concept of bootleg records was an ad in the tabloid pages of The Buyer's Guide To Comics Fandom around 1976 or so. Before that, I may have known that bootlegs existed, but this was the first time I'd ever encountered concrete evidence of that. The very idea that there might be practical availability of unreleased recordings by The Beatles intrigued me and enticed me beyond all reason.

But it took me a while to actually get a bootleg to call my own. The first one I recall seeing was a Beatles boot I spied on the rack at a record store in a Cleveland mall over Christmas break in late '77/early '78.  I have no recollection whatsoever of what the Beatleg was nor what it contained; my funds were limited, so I bought a couple of 45s instead ("Father Christmas" by The Kinks and "(It's Gonna Be A) Punk Rock Xmas" by The Ravers). My first bootleg acquisition was a different Beatles boot, The Deccagone Sessions, which was a mix of Decca audition tapes, BBC tracks, and things like the audio track from the "Revolution" video and "Some Other Guy" live 'n' distorted at The Cavern. I bought it at (I think) Syracuse's Desert Shore Records in the late spring or summer of '78.



I loved it!



My next bootleg was either a live Beatles boot called Youngblood or The Sex Pistols' Spunk, an ace collection of the Pistols' demos. There was an Elvis Costello & the Attractions bootleg called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, and a New York Dolls boot called Dallas '74. In the early '80s, I snagged a copy of Tails Of The Monkees, a picture disc that purported to be a collection of live Monkees recordings but really contained in-concert performances by Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart. A subsequent Monkees boot called Monkeeshines served up some TV performances, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee vinylized the group's little-seen TV special, and an awful bootleg called Live In Los Angeles attempted to preserve the on-stage reunion of Michael Nesmith with his former prime mates Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, and Peter Tork in simply wretched, inaudible sound quality.




I never really accumulated all that many bootlegs, but I had a few. I had a handful of titles of (at best) questionable legitimacy by The Sex Pistols and The Flamin' Groovies, plus a boot of The Beatles' almost-released Sessions. I had some live boots by The Ramones, and my favorite among those was Blitzkrieg '76, a Boston live radio performance that included the fab song "Babysitter;" other than a mention of "Babysitter" in an issue of Creem, this was the only evidence I ever encountered that The Ramones used to include "Babysitter" in their live shows. A 1989 visit to Berkeley netted me used copies of The Beatles' Christmas Album and Paul McCartney's Back In The USSR, both of which I presumed were bootlegs, though I suppose it's possible that one or the other could have been legit (and underpriced).

I also had a few bootleg live cassettes: The Flashcubes (my only long-form Flashcubes document for a very long time), KISS, The Bangles, The Replacements, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Thunders, The Flamin' Groovies, perhaps some others that I've forgotten. There were some Beatles sessions on cassette, too. On CD, I had The Beatles' Get Back and another copy of The Beatles' Christmas Album, and a Pandoras disc of dubious legality.



Nowadays, of course, there's no challenge in getting most of this formerly-illicit material. What was once the stuff of bootlegs can be found on legitimate releases as bonus tracks, or on vault-raids like The Beatles' Anthology sets and The Monkees' Missing Links. And everything's all on YouTube anyway. But I still remember the allure of bootlegs, the thrill of scoring secret music you couldn't get just anywhere. You couldn't beat the bootlegs.





TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

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. 

100-Page FAKES! presents: RIMA THE JUNGLE GIRL # 2

100-Page FAKES! imagines mid-1970s DC 100-Page Super Spectaculars that never were...but should have been!



Our previous 100-Page FAKES! edition of Rima The Jungle Girl # 1 filled its reprint selections with tales starring various female leads from the DC archives. This time out, we're also mixing in a little bit of space opera to complement Space Voyagers, the Alex Niño-drawn series that appeared as Rima's backup strip. Specifically, I wanted to bring in the first appearances of Captain Atom (the Joe Gill-Steve Ditko hero DC acquired from Charlton Comics) and Ultra the Multi-Alien, the indescribably goofy character that ran briefly in mid-'60s issues of Mystery In Space.

For the rest, we raided the vault to score a vintage Phantom Lady story (originally published by Fox, but here presumed to be part of DC's purchase of the character from Quality Comics), the debut of Angel And The Ape, and another adventure starring Lady Danger, the undeservedly obscure character who ran as one of Wonder Woman's backup strips in Sensation Comics in the late '40s. That left just enough room for four pages of hijinks starring Sheldon Mayer's Scribby and The Red Tornado. Rima drawn by Nestor Redondo, Phantom Lady drawn by Matt Baker, and Angel O'Day drawn by Bob Oksner contribute to a gorgeously spectacular collection.

Rima the Jungle Girl in "Flight From Eden," Rima The Jungle Girl # 2 (June-July 1974)
Phantom Lady (untitled), Phantom Lady # 13 (August 1947)
"Angel And The Ape," Showcase # 77 (September 1968)
Scribbly & The Red Tornado (untitled), All-American Comics # 45 (December 1942)
Lady Danger in "The Needle In The Haystack!," Sensation Comics # 87 (March 1949)
Captain Atom in "Introducing Captain Atom," Space Adventures # 33 (March 1960)
"Ultra The Multi-Alien," Mystery In Space # 103 (November 1965)
Space Voyagers in "The Delta Brain," Rima The Jungle Girl # 2 (June-July 1974)

Everything here is copyright DC Comics Inc. The Phantom Lady and Captain Atom stories are now public domain, and I betcha the Lady Danger stuff is, too. We're throwing in the four-page Scribbly and Red Tornado as fair use; the rest can only be shown here in representative pages. I share the whole package with my paid subscribers. I love all of these 100-Page FAKES!, and this one is fun 'n' frolicsome, I think. To the jungle!

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

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. 

COVER GALLERY