Category: Music

Summer in the City

Opposed as Dick Cheney reportedly is to Donald Trump’s version of the Republican Party, they share a pathological sadistic streak. Cheney limited his torture to foreign adversaries during a war, but Trump has no such reservation. Cracking the heads of civilian American citizens is fine with him.

It will be interesting to see if the Washington, D.C. crackdown helps or hurts tourism in the nations’ capitol.

Trump says Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland are Blue Cities, referring to their Democratic populations. But of course what he’s really saying is they’re Black Cities, referring to their racial mix.

Ya gotta admire a record that features both an autoharp and a jackhammer.

HELP! Pythons!

When starting this bloggy, with its 19th anniversary coming up on 9/5, I added a gallery section that is no longer working. The first thing I put in there were scans of a fumetti (photo comic) from the May, 1965 issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s HELP! magazine.

Not to be confused with the 1965 Beatles movie HELP! that had not yet been named when the January, 1965 issue of HELP! was published.

HELP! #22, January 1965 – Airbrush photo editing by Terry Gilliam

“Christopher’s Punctured Romance” starred John Cleese as a man with an unhealthy interest in his daughter’s Barbie doll. It starts on page 17.

Terry Gilliam started at HELP! when Gloria Steinem — yes, her — was leaving. Gilliam was the art director at HELP! when he met John Cleese in New York, and “Christopher’s Punctured Romance” was the result.

When Gilliam followed Cleese to England, he recruited Robert Crumb to be his replacement. Crumb arrived just as HELP! publisher James Warren was shutting it down.

I first heard about this amazing sequence of events from Harvey Kurtzman at a Boston NewCon, in 1975 or ’76. Maybe Denro remembers better than I do.

Feels So Gone

Denro says there’s yet another music death! It’s Chuck Mangione?!

The radio station where I worked had an Adult Contemporary format. Which meant that “Feels So Good” was in “heavy rotation” on the playlist. I heard it several times each day, every day, day after day.