Regular readers will know that earlier this year I published a novel, Wildwood Exit, which is a noir/crime tale set at the New Jersey Shore (Wildwood and Cape May).
I reproduce here in its entirety a review of the novel that appeared in several venues online:
Continue readingThis is the first of a handful of reviews of books I received at Xmas. Ok, I’m late, but there’s a lot of people in my neighborhood who still have their Xmas decorations up.
This compilation comes courtesy of Dark Horse Books. full title: The EC Archives Weird Science Volume 4: Issues 19-22 and Weird Science-Fantasy 23-24.
The Introduction gives a nice potted history of EC (Entertainment Comics), which the casual reader may dimly associate with the early days of MAD magazine. The slightly less dimly aware will recognize the name of William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC and eventually MAD magazine.
EC’s origin goes back to William M. Gaines’ father, Maxwell C. Gaines, who founded EC as “Educational Comics” in 1945, featuring such titles as Picture Stories from the Bible (still being promoted in 1953 when the Weird Science issues reproduced here were published).
I particularly like the thorough ad copy below this image, right above the mail in coupon:
Wow, indexes. Serious stuff.
As Dana Jennings wrote in a NY Times article about the heyday of EC comics:
“EC’s glory (and gory) years were 1950-1955, when it mutated from Educational Comics to Entertaining Comics, stopped printing tame titles like Saddle Romances and Tiny Tot and shifted to Two-Fisted Tales and The Vault of Horror. In this new, skewed world, axes were rarely used to chop wood, and meat grinders weren’t for shredding beef. Buxom bombshells lounged on distant planets, cannibalism was a hobby, and the dead just didn’t know how to stay dead.”
How about a shout out to Dana! They could have used her at EC back in the 50s.
“Tales from the Crypt” was another EC title that might be familiar to many readers, if only through its video/film avatars. This type of not-Bible-stories content led to Congressional hearings in the 1950s, which featured exchanges like this:
Chief Counsel Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….
Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: I think so.
The hearings did signal the demise of EC as the comic book industry instituted the Comics Code Authority, with the sticker familiar to buyers of DC, Marvel and other quality comics. Here’s an example from my private collection (which consists of one Jughead and one Dagwood issue):
But by then the damage to the psyche of many adolescents (mostly male) had been done; and fortunately, the EC comics were reprinted over the years, prolonging the decline of western civilization that delights so many of us.
EC had their own seal, which promised what you really wanted to read:
There is also an enchanting Forward by Paul Tobin, in which he states: “Like most kids who grew up reading Weird Science and the rest of the EC comics, I naturally assumed that humanity’s number-one cause of death was irony.”
I immediately recognized Mr. Tobin as one of the great thinkers and writers of his generation.
Mr. Tobin goes on to explain that the writers of EC comics subscribed to “a rousing school of science wherein every action had a far greater and much more dire opposite reaction. Did you cheat on your date? She was going to turn out to be an alien with a taste for human flesh.”
There are six fully-reproduced comics in the collection. My favorite is the opening story, “Precious Years”.
The first frame sets the stage:
The set has a space-age-bachelor-pad-cum-glory-of-Rome vibe, and our hero is definitely not the skinny guy who has to send away for the muscle-building lessons. He may well like gladiator movies.
(BTW, that body-building ad with the beach scene of the weakling getting sand kicked in his face should have created an enormous stream of royalties for some talented cartoonist and/or writer.)
You immediately understand why this guy has had it. The scroll above the scene lays it out in fine fashion:
No solid-state stuff here; it’s all relays and servo-motors whirring away. We’re basically talking a mid-century-modern take on mind-blowing automation. Bonus point awarded for the word “specules”, which does not appear as a noun in the dictionaries I checked, including the OED, where it does appear as a verb meaning “to regard attentively”, but only in Middle English, a usage obsolete for over four hundred years. Alright, make that two bonus points.
Even getting out of his home is enough to drive a man – well, Martin, anyway – crazy. Although he does not seem bothered by the horned image on the lower door panel.
That “All Right! All Right!” has a Jack Benny ring to it, recalling a great radio bit:
Robber with gun: Your money or your life.
Jack Benny: (says nothing)
Robber: Well!?
Jack Benny: I’m thinking, I’m thinking!
I will not reveal how this story ends but rest assured irony ensues as Martin seeks a way out of his many-divorced-wife condition, in company with the type of woman (Jean) who makes sense to appear in this tale, attired as is Martin in sprayed-on clothing and striding in jutting profile. Did I mention that 90% of the readers were adolescent boys (or just eternal adolescents)?
Jean is damned if she’s going to be number 12!
As an added treat, there are five stories in this collection that were originally authored by Ray Bradbury, including “Surprise Package”, which is adapted from “Changeling”, a story originally published in 1949 in Super Science Stories. It has a noir flavor as exemplified by the opening frame:
Cigarettes, strychnine, hammer, gun . . . I like it. The original story had an ice pick instead of a gun, and wine crystals instead of a bottle, a nice you-are-reading-sci-fi signal. All writers must bow down to the image of the “elevator . . . floating up the iron throat of the house”. Masterful.
Another story, a sort of early meta-fictional assay, “EC Confidential”, actually features Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein (the lead writer at EC) as characters, who are called on the rug by their fictitious boss Phineas T. Fables, for creating comics that have predicted the future.
P.T., who is fat, bald and smokes a cigar – a proper publisher, in other words – has them dead to rights, though I admit I was not expecting an eerily askew treatment of transexual issues in the military (and I apologize for any insensitive handling of the subject here):
And when P.T. demands they sign loyalty oaths, the Future Shock shivers increased:
I’m not sure it’s irony, but in a big plot twist, flying saucers appear outside P.T.’s window, and aliens barge in and seemingly kill the entire EC Staff . . .
. . . but somehow the murdered staff are robot imitations, the aliens are Martians and the actual EC staff are the handful of Venusites (I would have thought Venusians, but what do I know) who escaped the Martians’ conquering slaughter long ago. I guess.
BTW, I love the aliens asking in their ellipsis-filled patois “Is . . . this . . . E.C. . . . .?”; and I don’t understand why Gaines did not say “Hell no, this is DC. We’re working on the latest Superman in the back room . . . EC’s over on Broadway, let me draw you a map (to DC headquarters, heh, heh!).”
The EC product most familiar to the broad reading public was, of course, MAD magazine, which began as a comic, under the direction of Harvey Kurtzman in 1952. Here’s an ad for MAD from the Weird Science archive collection:
MAD was wildly successful and led Bill Gaines to launch a sister publication, PANIC, under the leadership of Al Feldstein, which reportedly did not make Kurtzman happy. Here’s an ad for PANIC:
PANIC only lasted two years, and MAD continues to this day, perhaps the most influential magazine on comedic/satiric artists in history. But that’s a story for another day.
The Weird Science compilation is recommended for those who . . . well, you know who you are.
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An excerpt from my (unpublished) novel, BRENDA’S GREEN NOTE, is featured in the August 2024 edition of The Write Launch => BRENDA’S GREEN NOTE: EXCERPT.
BRENDA’S GREEN NOTE follows a young woman with synesthesia who harnesses her ability to see sounds as colors to become a key player in the vibrant music scene of the 1960s in Philadelphia.
At age eight, Brenda Canavan realizes that nobody else sees a C# as a pulsating green blob. As a teenager, she is taken under the wing of an avant-garde instructor/composer, who brings her into his world of mind-blowing electronic music installations. Brenda soon makes the leap to working the sound board for rock shows, where her sound/color synesthesia becomes an asset, no longer an aberration that she hides. She fixes equipment, sorts out freaked-out would-be rock stars, befriends a few groupies and even punches out an irritating band manager—while becoming the favorite of a domineering local promoter who recognizes her talents.
When Brenda experiences a severe shock from a balky fuse box, her synesthesia vanishes. Within weeks, her father dies and Brenda descends into a deep depression. Unsure when or if her gift will return, Brenda is forced to find a new path to fulfillment, in a world that has been drained of the color that so animated her spirit.
Enjoy!
And….
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Maybe a year after I was gifted Mind over Matter: The Story of Fortune Records (see my review here), I received another Detroit-focused recording history book, this one from Wax Hound Press, tomorrow brings memories – detroit’s first underground record company, by Craig Maki, a pocket-sized, 100-pager on what may be Detroit’s first record company, Universal Recording Studios.
The books cross paths as The York Brothers, a country duo from Kentucky who made their way up U. S. Route 23 (the “hillbilly highway”) to Detroit in the late 1930’s, recorded their most infamous hit, “Hamtramck Mama”, in 1939 for Universal Recording Studios and the song was released under various Universal-related labels. Ten years later, Fortune Records released the same recording, which became a hit again and in fact was available through the 1960s. “Hamtramk Mama” was a bawdy country song, and Fortune mined that vein significantly over the ensuing years.
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Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien) often spoke of Joyce in the Cruiskeen Lawn pieces he penned for the Irish Times from 1940 through the late 1950s. In one titled “J.J. and Us”, collected in The Hair of the Dogma, he bemoans the recent Penguin edition of Dubliners (ca 1956), which repeatedly refers to Finnegan’s Wake; the inclusion of the apostrophe he puts down to “negligence or ignorance”.
This mispunctuation really got under Myles’ skin, as evidenced by another column wherein he blasted an article in The Bell that consistently used the erroneous apostrophe: “That apostrophe (I happen to know) hastened Mr Joyce’s end. To be insensitive to what is integral is, I fear, not among the first qualifications for writing an article on Mr Joyce”. (The Best of Myles, Penguin Edition, p. 239).
Take that, you inserter of inappropriate apostrophes!
In “J.J. and Us”, Myles reserves stronger words for a misplaced comma in the story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, as rendered in the same benighted Penguin edition of Dubliners:
“But what words have we for this thing, on p. 128?:
Mr Lyons sat on the edge of the table, pushed his hat towards the nape of his neck and began to swing his legs.
‘Which is my bottle? he asked.
‘This, lad,” said Mr Henchy.”
“That comma after ‘this’ – have we a word for it? Yes: BLASPHEMY”
I checked a copy I have (Modern Library, 1969) and the comma was in its rightful place. This edition had corrected text by Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellman, who would be the right boyos, as Myles might say. Whether Penguin originated this error, I will leave to folks who have studied all that.
O’Brien was a great admirer of Joyce and spun out fancies in his column that he and Joyce were in the same drinking circle (impossible as they were twenty years apart in age and Joyce was long gone from Dublin by the time O’Brien was getting plastered at the Scotch House), a circle that seems to have only existed within Joyce’s own texts.
When the Scotch House, O’Brien’s unofficial office to which he would repair (in Joyce’s Uncle Charles fashion) when his bureaucratic duties of the day were done (early, as I understand it), was to be sold, O’Brien (Myles, that is) unleashed a torrent of nostalgia in a Cruiskeen Lawn piece (“Black Friday”, also in The Hair of the Dogma) that is straight out of the world of “Counterparts”, a story in Dubliners, where he styles Joyce as the character O’Halloran. :
“There we were in a lump, all in strong body-coats, myself in the lead – Henry James, Bernard (‘Barney’) Kiernan, Hamar Greenwood, Meflfort Dalton, the Bird Flanagan, Jimmy Joyce, Harvey Duclos and MacCredy the cyclist, all heading into the Scotch House for hot tailers of malt, with a clove apiece thrun in to take the smell off our breaths. I remember cuffing a young fellow selling flags in connection with some ‘rag’ and being reminded by Joyce (who at the time called himself ‘O’Halloran’) that the da, Gogarty, was an important man.”
A bit later in the column, Myles quotes “Counterparts” verbatim and insists that he is Farrington, the clerk at the center of the story, who, in Joyce’s words is wed to a “a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.”
Myles variously defended, satirized and lied about Joyce (claiming he had met him on various occasions, all apparently untrue). He even included him as a character in The Dalkey Archive though, to my taste anyway, there was little bite or humor in it, his talents by then flagging.
Anthony Cronin, in his excellent biography (No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien), notes that “The figure of Joyce hung over his life like a sort of cloud from which the apocalyptic vision could come or had come. Like all revelations, it was resisted, distorted and, in part, rejected; but there was no disguising the fact that it had been vouchsafed”.
It’s been two Xmas’s since I was gifted this tome which has rarely left the office reading table.
Mind Over Matter: The Myths and Mysteries of Detroit’s Fortune Records by Billy Miller and Michael Hurtt is a sprawling 500+ page, hardbound, well-illustrated history of legendary Fortune Records.
I’m only going to say this once: if you are a fan of Detroit music and its history – buy this book.
James Marshall, in his review on pleasekillme.com, enthuses about ” . . . the incredible body of knowledge, both historical, and mythological, found in this 552-page hardcover treatise on everything great to be found in postwar American popular culture. [The book] is the Rosetta Stone of rock’n’roll, and the greatest and most important book on popular music to be published in this century…maybe ever.”
Well, why not?
Fans of R&B/soul tend to get excited about Fortune Records. Their first big R&B hit was “Village of Love” by Nathaniel Mayer and The Fabulous Twilights (1962). It reached the top 10 in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and can still be heard on oldies stations, at least in the Philadelphia area (and one hopes, in Detroit).
But at the top of the Fortune R&B catalog was Nolan Strong (often with The Diablos), pictured here:
Strong was known for such hits as “The Wind” (1954) – later covered by many other groups, most notably The Jesters – and “Mind over Matter” (1962). Here’s the latter, an amazing mix of cha-cha style R&B and hard-edged guitar (check out the riff at around 1:80 that sounds suspiciously like the opening of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”, as well as a song on Hackney Diamonds):
R&B zealots will also be familiar with Andre Williams, of “Jailbait” fame (or infamy), who had a long career with Fortune. Other lesser known artists included The Royal Jokers, The Five Dollars, The Larados and The Montclairs (whose single “Golden Angel” on Hi-Q, a Fortune subsidiary, was discussed in a prior post).
Both of these songs have a primitive, undubbed sound that characterized the Fortune oeuvre, which was mostly recorded on a single-track Ampex tape machine, with just a few microphones.
Both “Mind over Matter” and “Village of Love” were composed by Devora Brown, an aspiring writer of poetry, prose and songs who co-founded Fortune in Detroit in the early 1940s with her husband, Jack Brown, an accountant. Before Fortune Records, they established Trianon Publications to try to place her songs with Tin Pan Alley publishers, without any success. So they started Fortune Records and made their first record in 1946 at the Vogue recording facilities on Eight Mile Road in Detroit: Jane (Sweet as Summer Rain)/Texas Tess Down Texas Way, with vocals by Russ Titus backed by Artie Fields and His Orchestra.
What followed over the next thirty years was a slew of records and styles, with a heavy dose of country, rockabilly, R&B, blues, jazz, gospel, polka, Gypsy czardas – you name it, they recorded it, and with little fuss about the process. This was not a Motown assembly line of gleaming, polished parts. This was whoever showed up at their legendarily dirt-floored studio, and played, if not live, then with minimal mixing and dubbing. Whereas Motown provided slickly packaged perfection, with not a note out of place, Fortune delivered a more raw product that reflected the diverse ethnography of the many musical artists pounding the pavement in Detroit, looking for someone to hear what they had to say. The dross from Fortune was real dross, but the gems were heard in their own voices and styles.
The book reflects Fortune’s crazy patchwork of genres and styles in its construction, with over 1500 photos and illustrations, 96 interviewees and an eleven-page discography with over 500 entries. A typical page looks like this:
About half of the discography is country/hillbilly music. Who knew this was such a hot scene in Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s? But it was, with a steady stream of pickers and singers making their way up US Route 23 – the Hillbilly Highway – to work in the auto plants and play in the clubs. Among these were the Davis Sisters, not sisters at all, but one of whom was Skeeter Davis, the former Skeeter Penick, pictured below on the left, next to Georgia Davis.
Georgia was not the original partner of Skeeter in the Davis Sisters. That was her younger sister, Betty Jack, who died in an automobile accident in 1953, after which Georgia took her place. (Note: h/t to Craig Maki for pointing out the error in the original post that misidentified Georgia as Betty Jack in the picture above).
The Davis Sisters made a few sides for Fortune before going on to bigger things. Here’s a Devora Brown tune they recorded in 1952: Jealous Love:
You can (and should) dig into the vast Fortune catalog via YouTube (here’s a playlist put together by Roy Hayes), but I’ll share one that I’ve been playing the heck out of for a while, “That Old Heartbreak Express”, by Buster Turner and His Pinnacle Mountain Boys” (1956):
You weren’t anybody in Detroit country music if you didn’t have a band with a cowboy-sounding adjective/noun sobriquet, like Earl Songer and his Rocky Road Ramblers, Randy Hankins and his Melody Wranglers, Sonny Sexton and his Musical Westernairs, and of course, Mr. Turner and his PM boys.
A Fortune specialty was bawdy country and R&B songs, including the York Brothers legendary “Hamtramck Mama”. Here are said brothers:
“Hamtramck Mama” was a risqué hillbilly tune, originally recorded by the York Brothers in 1939 as the first release by Universal Recording Studios in Detroit. Universal created the recording for the Marquette Music Company, which had recently completed the transition from supplying coin-operated player pianos to saloons, hotels and restaurants, to the new generation of jukeboxes. Originally, the record was only sold to jukebox operators and was a huge hit. (At this time, the majority of record sales were to jukebox operators).
Within a year, the Hamtramck mayor and council members tried to ban the record, which of course led to increased sales. (Hamtramck is a suburb of Detroit – now completely enclosed by the city). The recording was re-released on the Mellow and Hot Wax labels in the early 1940s; and the same recording was released by Fortune in 1949.
(Note: Craig Maki gives a detailed history of the early days of record production in Detroit, including the genesis of Universal Recording Studios, in his book tomorrow brings memories, which I will review in a subsequent post.)
Here’s the record that caused all the ruckus: lock up the women and children!
Throughout the 1950s, Fortune continued to mine the risqué vein with additional releases and in 1961 compiled the best (?) of the bunch onto their first long-player, The Original Skeets McDonald’s Tattooed Lady Plus Eleven Other Sizzlers. The song list included “Hamtramck Mama” and such epics of off-color wit as “Let Me Play With Your Poodle”, “She Won’t Turn Over For Me” and “Griddle Greasing Daddy”.
This type of raunch became a staple of Fortune records across hillbilly, R&B and Blues genres, resulting in some unusual distribution partners and the occasional run-in with the decency-protecting authorities:
There’s much, much more to the crazy quilt of the Fortune story. Making appearances are Vassar Clements, Kenny Burrell, Doctor Ross the Harmonica Boss, a bunch of gospel artists and ensembles, Mitch Ryder and a very odd group, The Utopias, pictured below.
Were they Pre-Goth? Too weird to make it? Or not weird enough? You be the judge – here is their attempt at a Shangri-Las-style saga of teen pregnancy, “Sally Bad” (1966):
You might be surprised to learn that the lead singer of this band was male. David Lasley founded The Utopias with his sister Julie and recorded “Sally Bad” when he was eighteen and she was fifteen. Singing backup with The Utopias on the B-side of “Sally Bad” (“Welcome (Baby to My Heart)”) were the Jones sisters – Brenda, Shirley and Valorie – ages 6 to 10. The sisters were daughters of Mary Frazier, who had recorded a gospel EP for Fortune. As Lasley recalls. ” . . . I’d . . . knock on Mary Frazier’s door to get the Jones Girls . . . and walk them like three and a half miles . . . to the studio and sit and sing with them . . . The Browns would give us a dollar . . . and ice cream. We were just a bunch of hippy kids, R&B hippies. Some of our stuff was kinda out . . . like the Shangri-Las but . . . more like poetry meetings with music”.
The Jones sisters became the Jones Girls, who hit the top 10 on the R&B charts in 1979 with “You Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else”. The Girls also sang backup with Lou Rawls, Teddy Pendergrass, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and Tower of Power.
David Lasley eventually joined the cast of Hair in 1970, went to New York and began a long career as a back-up singer for such artists as Luther Vandross, Chic, Sisters Sledge, Dusty Springfield and The Ramones. According to Miller/Hurtt, “. . . at one time his voice could be heard on thirteen of Billboard’s top twenty-five songs”. He wrote several songs for Bonnie Raitt and worked with James Taylor for many years.
Did I mention that Fortune released a trio of Hungarian/Gypsy recordings? There was a substantial Hungarian immigrant community in the Delray section of Detroit with a lively entertainment scene as the ladies above would suggest.
The Browns hooked into that scene to record LPs by Arthur Rakoczi (aka Artie Nelson) and Julio Bella in 1964 .
Did Berry Gordy and Motown release any Gypsy violin records? I thought not.
The book is full of such unexpected digressions into the history of Detroit and the many communities that made music there. It is truly a labor of love. Billy Miller, who did not live to see the book published, was a founder of Norton Records with his wife Miriam, a label that has done amazing work in reissues of Rock’n’Roll, rockabilly, R&B and other genres. Michael Hurtt is a writer, musician and historian who lives in Detroit. Fans of Detroit music history owe these two a lot for the dedication it must have taken to put this volume together.
My next post will be about a logical companion volume to Mind over Matter, a slim pocket-sized book about Detroit’s first underground record company: tomorrow brings memories by Craig Maki.
Acknowledgments:
All pictures and illustrations are from Mind Over Matter.
Details on the release of “Hamtramck Mama” and related events have been based on part in material in tomorrow brings memories by Craig Maki.
Here’s an article on the classic Philly Soul hit up now on the Soul Source | Rare and Northern Soul Music website – just click on link below:
Ain’t Nothin But a House Party on Soul Source
What can be said that has not already been said about James Whale’s masterpiece, Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935)? Anyone likely to want to see it surely already has. So I will go light on the summary here, and focus more on the fascinating people involved in the production. Hopefully, this will provide the reader with a handful of tidbits to drop into conversation to impress friends with what a horror movie bore you are.
At the end of Frankenstein (Universal, 1931), the Monster had been assumed dead in the fire at the windmill. (In the original ending, Henry also died when thrown from the windmill by the Monster. However, Universal decided they wanted a more upbeat ending and added a coda where Henry is being nursed back to health).
Surprise! The Monster is discovered alive, kills a couple of incidental villagers, visits a blind hermit, and more mayhem ensues.
Henry is visited by his old mentor, Dr. Pretorius, played in gloriously camp style by Ernest Thesiger. Henry is trying to stay out of the Monster game, but Pretorius, who has created a few homunculi (small human type things) is itching to enlist Henry to create a spouse for the Monster. Henry says no but Pretorius, by now with Monster in tow on the promise of setting him up with a date, has the Monster kidnap Elizabeth (Henry’s wife), and Pretorius uses her as a hostage to compel Henry to comply.
Continue readingWhat can be said that has not already been said about James Whale’s masterpiece, Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935)? Anyone likely to want to see it surely already has. So I will go light on the summary here, and focus more on the fascinating people involved in the production. Hopefully, this will provide the reader with a handful of tidbits to drop into conversation to impress friends with what a horror movie bore you are.
At the end of Frankenstein (Universal, 1931), the Monster had been assumed dead in the fire at the windmill. (In the original ending, Henry also died when thrown from the windmill by the Monster. However, Universal decided they wanted a more upbeat ending and added a coda where Henry is being nursed back to health).
Surprise! The Monster is discovered alive, kills a couple of incidental villagers, visits a blind hermit, and more mayhem ensues.
Henry is visited by his old mentor, Dr. Pretorius, played in gloriously camp style by Ernest Thesiger. Henry is trying to stay out of the Monster game, but Pretorius, who has created a few homunculi (small human type things) is itching to enlist Henry to create a spouse for the Monster. Henry says no but Pretorius, by now with Monster in tow on the promise of setting him up with a date, has the Monster kidnap Elizabeth (Henry’s wife), and Pretorius uses her as a hostage to compel Henry to comply.
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Joel E. Turner - Fiction and Other Things 