Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post continues my never-ending story of The Everlasting First, recalling my first exposures to a comic book character, two rockin' pop groups, and a popular toy line: Hellcat, the Hollies, Holly and the Italians, and Hot Wheels.
Of the four, the Hollies have had the most enduring impact in my world. The Hollies' song "I Can't Let Go" earns a chapter in my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1); I haven't shared that chapter on the blog, but I did make a video talking about it (as discussed here and seen here). Very early drafts of GREM! also included a piece about my first Hollies LP, The Very Best Of The Hollies, but that was removed from the book's blueprint quite some time ago.
I still love Holly and the Italians, of course. We just played Holly Beth Vincent's new single "Hey Boy" a couple of weeks back on This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio. And I also wrote this little bit about her 1982 collaboration with Joey Ramone, covering a Sonny and Cher classic:
"Starting around 1980 or so, I began telling everyone within earshot that the Ramones should cover the Sonny and Cher staple 'I Got You Babe,' and rope in Blondie babe Debbie Harry to serve as Joey Ramone's duet partner. It seemed a natural prospect to me, especially given that guitarist Johnny Ramone had already played a similar folk-rock riff on the Ramones' cover of the Searchers' 'Needles And Pins.' I was a visionary! Sort of. This 1982 single credited to the one-off Holly & Joey was the closest manifestation of that vision, with Holly Beth Vincent playing the Cher to Joey's Sonny, backed by Holly's own group Holly and the Italians. A friend of mine was amazed and enthused that I'd predicted it as closely as I had, even though it really wasn't all that close at all. When I interviewed Joey for Goldmine in 1994, he told me he really wanted to work with Holly again. When I was briefly in touch with Holly Beth Vincent a few years back, I shared with her what Joey had said, and she immediately broke off all contact with me. Oops? Maybe I'm not quite the visionary I fancied myself to be."
As much as I adored my Hot Wheels cars when I was kid, nowadays I find I don't play with them anywhere near as much as I used to. Pfft. This maturity thing is way overrated. Even in my dotage, though, I would jump at a chance to buy a trade collection of the Hot Wheels comics produced by DC in the late '60s and early '70s. These were solid comics, with some stunning artwork by Alex Toth (and a little by Neal Adams), and they would be well worth preserving.
It would be beyond the scope of this blog to reproduce those Hot Wheels comics here, but I did include representative pages from all six issues in my 100-Page FAKES! blog series, which imagined a bunch of 1970s DC Comics 100-Page Super Spectaculars that never were. The Hot Wheels material was spread out to appear in my 100-Page FAKES! editions of Detective Comics # 449, Detective Comics # 451, Adventure Comics # 444, Detective Comics # 452, Adventure Comics # 445, Detective Comics # 453, Adventure Comics # 446, Detective Comics # 454, Adventure Comics # 447, Detective Comics # 455, and Detective Comics # 456. This places the heroes of Hot Wheels alongside Batman, Aquaman, and other DC characters. Rightly so!
Finally, I don't really have anything at all to say about Hellcat, but I'll repeat that I liked her as written by Steve Englehart in The Avengers. Nonetheless, Hellcat, the Hollies, Holly and the Italians, and Hot Wheels are all on equal footing in The Everlasting First. Those introductions serve as the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.
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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl
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