Not So Respectable

Ah, 2011. Another year, another deluxe reissue of a vastly overrated Rolling Stones album. Remastered, two discs, outtakes, extra tracks, and a “Super Deluxe” version with three discs, a book, and postcards, all for the low low price of $200. And who would hesitate even momentarily to shell out a small fortune to line the pockets of four men who are already multi-millionaires?

After sycophantically fawning all over Exile on Main Street last year – easily one of the three most overrated rock albums of all time – western music critics turned their obsequious hyperboles to Some Girls, the Stones’ flaccid, tedious, overwrought 1978 offering. Some Girls was the band’s fifth Stones-on-autopilot album in a row, and yet Stones fans, long in denial about Mick and Keith’s full-throttle descent into decadence and self-indulgence leaving them burned out and lacking anything remotely interesting to say, constantly point to it as the Last Great Stones Album. “Some Girls,” a friend of mine who owned a record store ruminated years ago, smiling at the mention of it. “The last great Stones album.”

Each and every one of us has bands that we simply cannot be objective about. We'll defend their horrible, uninspired latter-era work because our love for these wretches is so great, we’ll allow for the toll age and drugs take on men and women who once saved us during life’s darkest moments. This is perfectly acceptable behavior provided you’re willing to swallow your pride and admit that it’s more guilty pleasure than anything rooted in reality. A friend of mine once told me about his love for the Ramones’ Mondo Bizzaro. “Really?” I said. “You like that album?” He nodded, painfully. “I’m what you would call an apologist,” he said. I appreciated his honestly. In fact, I nodded right along with him, thinking about my love for AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock, not the first, second, third, or even eighth album I’d recommend to anyone wanting to know what AC/DC is all about.

But that doesn’t mean that a crappy album isn’t a crappy album. What would you recommend for someone wanting to acquaint himself with the Stones? Beggars Banquet? Fuck yes. Sticky Fingers? Certainly. Let it Bleed? Of course. Between the Buttons? Beats Some Girls anytime of the day. Hell, I’d loan you Satanic Majesties before Some Girls (if I even owned a copy; I don’t) to give you an idea of what made these guys great.

Some Girls, though, is shit. If I made five Stones mixes, not one song from Some Girls would appear on any of them. FUCKING DICK, you’re shrieking, WHAT ABOUT KEEF’S BEFORE THEY MAKE ME RUN? FUCKIN’ ROCKS, MAN. No, it definitely don’t, man. Production’s crap, Keith’s vocals are crap, and really, what the fuck ever, folks. This is supposedly the baddest of Keith’s badass lyrics, but there’s not much badass about a burned-out junkie who’s desperately still trying to convince you of his badassedness now that his band has lost all street cred. How badass can you be when your lead singer is Mick Jagger? Don’t fucking tell me Before They Make Me Run is badass, because there ain’t nothing – NOTHING – more badass than Sympathy for the Devil, Stray Cat Blues and Midnight Rambler, all of which were nine years in an increasingly distant past by the time of Some Girls.

Here’s what Joe Posnanski recently wrote about this year’s decidedly lackluster batch of Baseball Hall of Fame nominees:

“There’s something worth remembering: In baseball, in sports, in life, there is always downward pressure. Once you make some money, there’s the temptation to feel comfortable. Once you’ve proven yourself, you can lose your hunger. Once you’ve run into a wall, you don’t want to do that again. Once your arm starts hurting, you might throw with a little less enthusiasm. On and on and on, we all see it in our lives — downward pressure, the force to relax, back off, take the foot off the gas, and whatever other cliché you want. There are some people who never stop raging — and that has its own pitfalls. But by and large, those people, the ones who never stopped raging, are the ones in the baseball Hall of Fame.”

He could have been writing about the Stones, post Sticky Fingers. Finally becoming multi-millionaires in the early 70s brought that downward pressure upon Mick and Keith, and there was nothing interesting forthcoming in their songs beyond that. That they backed off and lost their hunger was evident on Black and Blue, an undistinguished album largely remembered today for its idiotically misogynistic advertising campaign. Interestingly, the departure of Mick Taylor and subsequent arrival of Ron Wood was the true onset of the Boring Stones, the beginning of what is in retrospect a parade of countless forgettable albums and tours from the once dangerous five-some turned harmless middle-aged stadium juggernaut.

I wish I could report that those musicians who took their foot off the gas are the ones we don’t celebrate, but strangely, it’s the creeps who play nice for the big labels and stop raging who are celebrated by wealthy industry parasites at the annual back-slapping fest known as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Shifting millions of units also helps, and Some Girls is still the Stones' best selling album. Jagger & co., naturally, showed up and accepted their statue when their turn came around, thanking an auditorium full of unimaginably rich, black-tie wearing industry drones for the dubious honor. How, exactly, does an event where only the rich and connected have access have anything to do with rock and roll?

It doesn’t. And neither do the Stones. That’s what no one gets anymore. I wrote last year that a palpable ennui courses through Exile on Main Street’s grooves. Beyond Exile – and especially on Some Girls – the Stones’ ennui is replaced by a bored contempt for innovation and exaltation, an indifferent capitulation to the most clichéd excesses and banalities of Rock and Roll’s mainstream artery. After Before They Make Me Run, Stones fanboys always point to Shattered as proof somehow that the Stones still had It. I direct you to the crucial missed opportunity at 1.50, where Ron Wood’s already dull lead, instead of exploding back into the verses, limps along unimpressively with help from a fucking synthesizer. Boring, boring stuff, and nowhere near the craziness of pre-’71 Stones. Hearing a poofter like Jagger warn that you have to be “tough tough tough” to live in Manhattan is embarrassing - for him - considering the real deal, in the form of the Ramones and The Dictators, had already been singing about life on mean streets of New York for years.

"We had this idea that we'd reinvigorate certain albums by finding other songs recorded in that time that would hold up," Jagger says, with respect to reissuing more old albums with extra tracks. "That sounded like a better idea than doing mindless compilations."

How much more mindless does it get than everything the Stones have recorded since Sticky Fingers?

Queen at 40, part III

QUEEN II (March 1974)

The answer, if you were an avid reader of Britain’s Record Mirror, was a resounding “no.” In his review of Queen II, writer Chris Poole mercilessly attacked the album as “the dregs of glam rock. Weak and over-produced, if this band are our brightest hope for the future, then we are committing rock and roll suicide.”

This was a half-truth, actually; over-arranged is more accurate. On Queen II the band discovered their stock in trade: MULTI-TRACKING. Layers upon layers upon layers of vocals and guitars, turning every song into a prog-rock epic. The band defiantly wore critical attacks on this approach as a badge of honor, and in so doing, began formulating the Queen aesthetic: we’re going to be as pompous and bombastic as possible, and don’t give a shit what the critics think.

That, as it turned out, was a good thing, building solidarity in the ranks, bringing the band closer together. What wasn’t good – and what Poole undoubtedly meant when he called the album “weak” – was the band’s ongoing, excruciating obsession with Dungeons and Dragons lyrics. Of the album’s eleven songs (and one is an instrumental), fully seven are mind-numbing excursions into JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is a damn shame, because Queen’s sound really takes hold here. Had Freddie written different lyrics to songs like Ogre Battle, The March of the Black Queen, and Seven Seas of Rhye – had he really written about something – history would view Queen II differently. Ignoring its lyrics (“The ogre men are coming out from the two-way mirror mountain, they’re running up behind and they’re coming all about; can’t go east ‘cos you gotta go south”), Ogre Battle is a grand, grand 70s metal song with a killer hook, tight-as-shit bass and drums, and superlative vocals from Freddie. After sounding somewhat hesitant on Queen, here Freddie pushes himself, finally truly confident of his range and tone.

Black Queen, Freddie’s obligatory bazillion-parts mini-opera, is beautiful stuff, replete with sublime melodies, soaring Queen harmonies and Brian May playing the beejeezus out of his Red Special. But along come the abominable lyrics, everything from “water babies singing in a lily-pool delight” to “the city of the fireflies.” It could have been brilliant. It really could have. The same goes for “Seven Seas of Rhye.” Fleshed out into a proper song here, it positively slays – that is, until you catch the line “I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours…,” and you slowly, reluctantly go back to the lyric sheet, and you realize that Freddie is once again hammering away, ceaselessly, nay, relentlessly, at his fantasy role-playing game motif. Seven Seas of Rhye is, in fact, where this Queen yin and yang of rocking music/shit-all stupid lyrics reaches its crescendo. At 2.47 it’s a crazed microcosm of what this band was capable of, a majestic blast of careening piano and slashing Brian May licks that landed the group their first top-10 single in England.

But then the “lords and lady preachers,” “privy counselors” and “shod and shady senators” show up, depriving Freddie of the Seven Seas of Rhye. Natch’. It’s enough to make you seriously wonder what the guy was getting at, and why - and yet, it gets worse. The album’s nadir is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, Freddie’s two minute, 41 second homage to Richard Dadd’s mid-19^th century painting Fairy Fellers’ Master-Stroke. A dense, unique work of art, Dadd later helpfully wrote a bizarre, 3,718 word essay/poem called Elimination of a picture and its subject - called the feller's master stroke, explaining each character in the painting. It is from this screed that Freddie lifted most of the lyrics for his song: politicians with senatorial pipes, a dragonfly trumpeter, and the tale’s arch-magician. Unlike Seven Seas of Rhye, Stroke’s music is cloy and grating, the kind of thing your fucked up friends – the ones who still game, even though they’re in their 40s – would force you to endure after tricking you into a weekend with the Society for Creative Anachronism. It hurts. Bad.

Nevermore is a short, pretty piano ballad about love lost, but is tainted again by prog rock lyrics. Speaking of love lost, Funny How Love Is is the first of seemingly hundreds of dull, pointless lyrics about love, falling in love, being hurt by love, looking for love, dreaming about love, etc., that Freddie and Queen would write for the next 17 years. It begins a troubling pattern for the band, a pattern that guaranteed Queen would never be taken seriously by snobby music fans of the real stuff: Queen lyrics are too literal. They're always literal. There’s nothing to ponder, no subtext, no layers, no poetry to songs like Funny How Love Is. The band weren’t incapable of writing something weighty, as they proved beginning on their next album. But all too often it seemed like Freddie’s blasé attitude towards Queen’s “disposable” songs was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe they worked so tirelessly on the music that the lyrics became the redheaded stepchild of the creative process?

American ex-pat Paul Gambaccini once said, "one reason why Queen were never taken seriously by the press in the pop world was that they were not leaders of a social movement. They didn’t stand for anything, except themselves. In that sense, which is normal in a person’s employment, they may have even seemed a bit egocentric."

Saying the band was "a bit" egocentric is being unduly kind. Queen was always about one thing: Queen. And you can trash them all you want for this blatant, gratuitous egocentricism, but I look at it this way: at least they were honest about their single-minded pursuit of money and fame, and at least they had the chops to back it up. They weren't trying to change the world, and they never, ever pretended that was their goal. They just wanted to play in a rock band and get laid. In that sense, these guys were the real deal. (More real than, say, Led Zeppelin - a band always counted amongst the great Rock bands - that always feigned profundity.) No pretenses, no kowtowing to the Lou Reed crowd. And the lyrics bear this out on every album.

But in a world of opposites and wide open spectrums, I embrace as much as I can. Sometimes, it's simply ok if a band's lyrics don't match up to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. They can't always. And what the snobs of the world won't admit is, they shouldn't always have to. And really, most don't. Even those that try. Sometimes it's the music itself that alters your life's trajectory, and lyrics are secondary.

The rest of Queen II, Side White (on the original vinyl, Freddie’s songs were all on – and this is some spooky shit – Side Black), consists of four May songs and one Roger Taylor song. With the exception of Procession, a short multi-tracked guitar instrumental, each one encapsulates the Queen II paradox: great music, spot-on performances, and a maddening lost opportunity with lyrics. Taylor’s song, The Loser in the End, is a poor man’s She’s Leaving Home, and is, thank God Almighty, one of two songs on Queen II not invoking castles, monarchs, fairies, or any other Lord of the Rings castoffs. Lyrically simplistic, it at the very least sports a nice melody, and was Taylor’s last warm-up before he came into his own on Sheer Heart Attack. Father to Son is May’s answer to Freddie’s March of the Black Queen, a long, multi-part epic that calls to mind John Boorman’s Excalibur. White Queen (As It Began)’s verses find Brian May laying down the kind of arpeggios that bands like Metallica would later lift for their 90s and aughts Metal Power Ballads.

Some Day One Day is the exception here, and is an object lesson in how production and arrangement can completely alter a song. Brian May is trying here, truly, and nearly delivers the goods in a non-D&D song about doomed love. The melody is beauteous, and the lyrics manage to approach something meaningful: "Today the cloud it hangs over us and all is grey - but some day, one day…" But the band's headlong rush into multi-tracking works against them in this one instance. Some Day One Day should be sparse - guitars, bass, drums, vox. Or even guitar and vox.

Queen II landed at number five in the British charts, but only eked it out to number 49 in the U.S. On the plus side, Roy Thomas Baker’s production, with an invaluable assist by engineer Mike Stone, is leagues beyond Queen. The first album’s cardboard drums are crisp and full here, and a lot of time was clearly taken with the mix – these guys sounded like a bona-fide band this time around. On the down side, Chris Poole may have been right; what’s the point of finding your sound and writing great music, only to round it out with vacuous lyrics about chalice quests? Whereas Queen sounded like a band struggling for identity, Queen II sounded like tremendous talent wasted. The next album, already being recorded and readied for release later that same year, would decide, finally: was Queen the Gary Gygax House Band, or a real band?

Queen at 40, part II

QUEEN (1973)

In the revisionist-history wave that has swept the Queen legacy since Freddie Mercury’s death, the band’s debut album emerged as a rock’n’roll mini-classic, and a harbinger of the greatness yet to come. The latter point is debatable, but the former isn’t, so let’s just get the truth out of the way here at the beginning: Queen, the band’s first album, recorded in late 1972/early 1973, and released in the summer of 1973, is crap.

Mostly, anyway. The first two songs, Keep Yourself Alive and Doing All Right (both written by Brian May), are undeniably great rock’n’roll, and unlike most of the rest of the album, are within acceptable rock’n’roll song lengths (around four minutes), and contain less than a bazillion parts.

But then begins Freddie Mercury’s harrowing three-song descent into a prog-rock game of Dungeons & Dragons: Great King Rat, My Fairy King, and Liar. The whole band’s unfortunate fondness for evil monarchs, fairies and seers atop moonlit stairs would infect their lyrics all the way through the first four albums, bringing an avalanche of harsh criticism from much of the music press. Which is not to say that music fans should care at all what music critics think, but how, as a Queen fan, do you convince skeptics to take Freddie seriously as he sings in a merry falsetto (preceded by Roger Taylor’s piercing falsetto shriek), “In the land where horses born with eagle wings, and honey bees have lost their stings”? Or how about this: “Someone has drained the color from my wings, broken my fairy circle ring, and shamed the king in all his pride.”

The third song of this unholy triumvirate, Liar, is easily the best, and gained some unexpected street cred when The Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, now over 40 and not caring anymore about keeping up punk appearances, confessed his love for the song, particularly Brian May’s guitar playing. In what would become a pattern for Freddie throughout Queen’s first three albums, Liar boasts about eight or nine parts, but May’s guitar is heavy and the riffs are plentiful, so lines like “I have sailed the seas, from Mars to Mercury” are a little easier to endure.

Most bizarre of all is Jesus, Freddie’s bafflingly straight take on Jesus’ birth and healing of lepers. With its choral-like chorus, the song is utterly incongruous on what is essentially a hard rock album, inspiring not so much critical rancor as confused head-scratching back in 1973: what kind of a band was this?

It was hard to say. The rest of the album’s songs – The Night Comes Down, Modern Times Rock’n’Roll, Son and Daughter, and Seven Seas of Rhye – are a mixed bag. Seven Seas of Rhye, at one minute, seventeen seconds, isn’t a song so much as a snippet of an idea Freddie was working on. The up-tempo Modern Times Rock’n’Roll, drummer Roger Taylor’s first contribution to the Queen oeuvre, livens things up a great deal, but Taylor would return to its theme – young, restless rebel gets laid a lot but wants to get out of this dull berg and rock – throughout his career, completely poisoning the well by the time of 1980’s buffoonish Rock It (Prime Jive).

The Night Comes Down is an innocuous, moderate-tempo 1-4-5 paean to innocent youth through the eyes of an angst-ridden Brian May, and Son and Daughter is May’s contribution to the burgeoning heavy metal sweepstakes, a slow, heavy aping of Zep/Sabbath that the guitarist abandoned by Queen II. Neither song is bad, but neither is anything other than filler.

Throw in a pretentious collage of band photos on the back cover, and you’ve got a debut that doesn’t set itself apart. In fact, the opposite can be said; with Freddie’s prog-rock lyrics and May’s heavy metal riffs, the band didn’t arrive with any sort of identity. They appeared, instead, to be latching onto whatever was currently in vogue, more intent on fitting in than establishing a unique, identifiable aesthetic.

But for the patient listener, there was something happening on Queen. Keep Yourself Alive has a great hook, tunefully unorthodox chord progressions, and an out-of-nowhere break in the middle with a crushing couplet (“Do you think you’re better every day? No, I just think I’m two steps nearer to my grave…”). Part gorgeous ballad and part exhilarating rave-up, the outstanding Doing All Right heralds Brian May’s arrival as a gargantuan force to be reckoned with, even more than Keep Yourself Alive. The rhythm section of John Deacon and Roger Taylor is tight, and throughout the album, Freddie’s vocals, even when singing about Dungeons and Dragons scenarios, are alternately brawny and soulful.

And really, Liar - lyrics aside - is gorgeous stuff. The riffs are equal to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and the outro, commencing at 5:38 and running 48 seconds to song's end, is transcendent, the beginning of ten year's worth of sublimely beautiful guitar playing by Brian May.

Clearly there was a lot of talent here, with enormous potential. The question, as Queen headed into 1974, was whether or not they could find their own way, and actually realize that potential.

Queen at 40, Part I

On September 15^th, 1982, Queen played the second of two nights at The Forum in Los Angeles, California. After the post-show party, the four bandmates and their road crew packed their bags and equipment and flew back to England.

What was already a long tour then got longer; despite having spent 57 days in North America, playing 33 dates in support of their latest album, they turned around and flew back to New York, honoring a commitment to perform on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

The next month found the group in Japan, playing dates into early November. At that point, tired of the schedule, and even tired of each other, the four bandmates decided to split up and clear their heads. It would be over a year and a half before Queen toured again.

And none of those three final tours – tours that took them all over the globe, raking in money hand over fist – would find the band back in America. No one knew it at the time, but Queen’s SNL performance was the last time the group played a live set in America.

America turned on Queen in 1982. The band that two years earlier owned the country after a few massively-selling albums and huge hit singles suddenly found themselves persona non grata, and engaged, too late, in some eleventh-hour damage control. First came the decision to release the Calling All Girls single in North America, in lieu of Staying Power, the single that went out to the rest of the world. Then came the curious decision to play Crazy Little Thing Called Love on SNL, a song not only not on the album they were currently touring and promoting, but a song that was three years old at that point, having been released as a single in October of 1979.

But the damage control failed. And although they thought they would posthumously and eventually win favor again in America, Queen largely ignored the U.S. from 1982 on, an ostracized band with zero respectability in a country still willing to make millionaires out of the likes of Journey and Styx.

***

The album Queen was touring in late 1982 was Hot Space, and it is the album that haunted the band for the rest of their lives. Americans embraced the disco/funk sounds of 1980’s Another One Bites the Dust because it had a great groove, and we were willing to cut some slack to the band that gave us Sheer Heart Attack and Bohemian Rhapsody.

But Another One Bites the Dust did strange things to Queen’s collective head. Maybe they took the song’s massive worldwide success as a sign that fans wanted more disco? That funky disco grooves were the wave of the future? It's hard to say. One thing that is indisputable: Americans took home Hot Space in May of 1982 and couldn't wait to get rid of it. Most didn’t even make it to side two, where at least some more Rock-sounding songs resided (including the aforementioned Calling All Girls), because side one was quite simply the end of the world: five jarring disco/dance floor songs, replete with synthesizers and godawful sound effects, seemingly gift-wrapped for a genre that was already long gone by that point.

The result was an album that stalled at #22, the first Queen album not to make the U.S. top 10 since 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, and the last to come anywhere near the U.S. top twenty. America’s love affair with Queen was officially over. It was bad enough pulling the sleeve out of 1980’s The Game to see Freddie Mercury with short hair and a brand new, stereotypically 70s-chic moustache. The guy who wrote Death on Two Legs was doing a permanent Glenn Hughes impression? But then, the capper: a disco album and the accompanying asinine video for the appalling Body Language single, featuring Freddie-As-Leatherboy, half naked sweaty dancers, and a shot of a woman's ass in a bathing suit, blasted by a firehose. These were the We Will Rock You guys?

Responding to the tidal wave of criticism following Hot Space’s release, Freddie somewhat disingenuously told fans at Milton Keynes Bowl that “it’s only a bloody record.”

He’s right: it is. And it also isn’t. Bands release a lot of records, and our favorite bands inevitably release duds at some point in their careers. And we put up with it because even our heroes have bad years. But they themselves don’t get this, allowing ego to overwhelm simple reality. Freddie insulated himself against critical vitriol by insisting, time and again over the years, that Queen’s songs were “utterly disposable… People can discard them like a used tissue.” But this was just an unconscious affirmation of his own profound insecurities. Whether Freddie and goons like Gene Simmons want to admit it or not, rock’n’roll is art. And Queen had a long history of writing and recording all sorts of good rock’n’roll.

However, it is not wholly inaccurate to say Hot Space wasn’t just a dud. It was, in fact, more like a bewildering misstep for a band that started life playing hard rock, and made guitar-driven Rock their bread and butter. Two years after Hot Space, bassist John Deacon showed up on the cover of The Works sporting one of the most ghastly-looking, worst-permed mushroom haircuts of all time. Why was this band – always bombastic and egocentric, but rocking nonetheless – suddenly trying so hard to look and sound so un-rocking, and playing disco/funk songs with tons of synthesizers?

Not a bad question, that. And as Hollywood Records re-issues the entire Queen catalog, perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning.

Goodbye, Honey Parker

The biggest con job life ever pulled on us is the utter gracelessness, the iniquitousness – the ugliness – of old age and death. If it’s true that death is the opposite of birth, not life, then I suppose perhaps there’s some balance to be found. Because despite the stern avowals of middle-American, mundane, Dockers-wearing, soulless, thoughtless dads in the lower 48 that childbirth is miraculous and beautiful, the truth is a little more unpleasant: childbirth is a bloody, ugly affair. Nasty fluids, torn skin, fecal matter, screaming… and people film this crap for posterity?

Such is the case with death.

It’s such a cosmic injustice, so patently unfair that we’re on the downhill slope by the time we hit our 40s – for a lot of us, there are still another 40 years to go – that I have an odd sympathy for people who believe in a higher power. How do you square such unfairness with your goals, your hopes? Unless you’re one of the chosen few who ages gracefully, who avoids debilitating health problems, then the aging process is one of diminishing returns. Wrinkled skin, sunspots, thinning hair, weight gain, poor eyesight and hearing, osteoporosis, walkers and wheelchairs, and then the ultimate indignity of memory loss, and a final few years at home or in a home, as the friends and family come around saying their goodbyes, the body shrinking, shriveling, and finally silently collapsing. Such damn ugliness.

Yet, for the majority of us, the psychic toll of aging is the more malevolent bugbear. Despite evolving intellectually to the point where we can split the atom, nearly wipe small pox off the face of the earth, and launch giant telescopes into space, brazenly peering into the face of god itself, we simply were not given the tools, the emotional resources to deal with the awareness of our own mortality. It’s a hard line to toe, balancing responsibilities with the need for spontaneity – trying to build a life – knowing that all this will be over sooner rather than later. The logical person, perhaps, would turn this knowledge around, use it as an excuse to work harder, construct a more solid legacy. Something to be proud of.

But humans aren’t logical. And more often this psychic toll brings a terrible sadness, a crippling paralysis in the face of approaching nonexistence, and finally, a distasteful irony: the towel is thrown in so early that years are spent wasted, years that – even though they constituted life’s final act – still could’ve been creatively fertile, if we’d just taken a little care with ourselves.

***

The L.A. Coroner estimates Yvette Vickers was dead for close to a year before neighbor Susan Savage, noticing the mail piling up in her mailbox on Westwanda Drive, above Hollywood, let herself into the aging actress’ modest home. Savage found a body that was, for all intents and purposes, mummified. In a full year, there was no one in the world who thought to check on Yvette and see how she was doing.

For those of us who grew up with a huge crush on this beautiful woman, it was a bitter, bitter pill to swallow that the floozy from Attack of the 50 ft. Woman, the bewitching blonde in the sexy dress who seduces William Hudson, died forgotten, with barely a trace of dignity.

But Yvette Vickers was not equipped to cope with growing old. The psychic toll was too much for the kid from Kansas City, MO, who at one point was directed by Cagney, and thought she was on her way to stardom. Instead, a short career consisting mostly of bit parts led to a different sort of immortality; she is remembered not by the general population, but by fanboys and sci-fi geeks for playing home wreckers in Woman and 1959’s Attack of the Giant Leeches.

An appearance in Playboy’s centerfold as the July 1959 Playmate of the Month failed to interest Hollywood producers, and Vickers' career frustratingly stalled. She married twice, and had numerous flings, most notably with Cary Grant, and settled into a career in real estate.

I suspect somewhere along the way Yvette realized she’d played her hand wrong, being a sex kitten to the stars instead of really working on her craft. Although she happily attended fanboy conventions in the 90s and 2000s, an undiagnosed mental illness, no doubt exacerbated by heavy drinking, made for a dark final act. Certain she was being stalked, and delusional that the conventions were cutting her off, Yvette drank hard, put on so much weight as to be almost unrecognizable, and systematically slammed the door on what few friends she still had. Her Benedict Canyon neighbors didn’t think to keep tabs on her. "We're all longtime neighbors here and we respect each others' privacy," said one. “Perhaps too much."

***

In a more perfect world, death would be easy, a peaceful thing. Maybe even poetic. But we are stuck on a planet short on perfection. And when someone you love goes out as badly as Yvette Vickers did, you have to remind yourself that death is so often an ugly thing, and when you think of Yvette, her free fall into the abyss shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind. Those final years were a small part of a longer journey, and even if she did play her hand wrong, it’s ok; we all do that at least from time to time, if not more frequently. And there was a time that this magnificent woman was young, beautiful, and seized our imaginations as we flipped through the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, or caught a midnight showing of Attack of the Giant Leeches. Her first appearance in Leeches – clad in sexy robe while seductively brushing her teeth, if such a thing is possible – is every bit as show-stopping as Lana Turner’s first scene in The Postman Always Rings Twice. I wish she could’ve been happy enough with that.

Facetious Fortunes

Like a rubber neck slowing down to a crawl as he passes a four-car pile up, pissing off everyone behind him who’s actually trying to get somewhere, just so he can get a serious look at the twisted, shattered bodies, I logged on to facebook last week to see what everyone was saying. There was a message from a friend of mine in Michigan.

“Did you hear which member of the Fantastic Four got killed off for good?”

“I didn’t,” I wrote back. “Who kicked the bucket?”

“The Human Torch,” came the swift reply, “saving Reed Sue and Ben from being trapped in the Negative zone...it comes polybagged!”

It’s hard to imagine people getting worked up in any way by yet another shameless ploy to generate sales – especially anyone over the age of 17 – but what the hell. I haven’t collected super hero comics for twenty years, so no biggie.

A couple of days ago I saw the article online: “Spider-Man Replacing Human Torch on new ‘FF’ Team.” In this new story arc, that’ll probably last about a year before even longtime fans can no longer bear the stupidity of it all, they’re no longer the Fantastic Four, they’re the “Future Foundation.” Whatever the fuck that is. They no longer wear cool costumes, they wear all white. And Spider-Man replaces the Human Torch.

In all white.

I feel sorry for writers at Marvel and DC nowadays. I really do. By the mid-1990s, comic book sales shrank to a trickle of what they were in the glory years of the 40s (and even the 80s), and since then, writers for the two industry giants have been tasked with dreaming up ever more outlandish, inane storylines in a desperate attempt to shift some units. That their gut instinct with this dilemma is always to kill off one iconic character or another is testimony to how few creative minds are at work here. We need higher sales. Ok – who do we kill? Aunt May…? Yeah, that may turn some heads… How about we kill the Phoenix? Kill Captain America? Kill Superman? Reveal that Spider-Man was a clone these last 20 years?

The floodgates to this kind of foolishness opened in 1992 when Superman “died” in DC’s “Death of Superman” storyline at the hands of the evil Doomsday, a cynical, absurd marketing drive that leaves me cold to this day. It laid the groundwork for subsequent “death” story arcs, all of which followed the same template as the Superman story: generate press – and sales – by announcing to the world you’re killing off a major character. Keep an inane “post-death” storyline running for a year, then bring back dead major character in a miraculous re-birth story.

The notion that DC would “kill” their franchise player, the most famous superhero of all time, the face of their company, the superhero whose debut comic was – and still is – the most valuable comic book of all time, was patently ridiculous. Yet, there it was, in 1992: The Death of Superman, a story arc that wound through all four Superman comics, climaxing in Superman (vol. 2) #75, where the Man of Steel “dies.” While thousands of thousands of people who weren’t even comic book collectors snatched up Superman comics and drove up sales, veterans of comic book fandom slowly shook their heads at the spectacle of it.

It worked. At least in the short run; DC’s coffers overflowed with greenbacks as Superman #75 sold out all around the world. It was a good time to be on the ol' DC payroll.

And then, a year later, Superman was back. He hadn’t died at all, of course, because DC needs to keep their doors open. The thing is, everyone with an IQ over 80 knew that DC had no intention of Superman “dying.” He had to come back, probably sooner than later, because he’s the most popular, famous, recognizable super hero in the world, and who gives a flying flip about the Reign of the Supermen anyway? So Superman was really alive and well.

But the damage his “death” and resurrection did to the industry lingers today. Many insiders – including Mile High Comics’ excellent Chuck Rozanski – have since pointed out that the industry tanked after Superman #75, in part because the hoopla surrounding Superman’s “death” drew in scores of non-comic book collectors who drove sales up for one month, thinking that if they bought one, two, even three copies of Superman #75, bagged & boarded it, and kept it in a vault for five months, they could then sell it for thousands of dollars. “…It became,” Rosanski wrote, “a common delusion for a while that you could make a fortune investing in comics. Greed, more than any other factor, is what inspired so many consumers from outside of the traditional comics worlds to chase after Superman #75.”

Bloody geniuses – that’s what happens with comic books, right? Isn’t it just like playing the stock market? Wasn’t Action #1 worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 in 1992?

And indeed it was, going by Overstreet estimates. There were, however, two factors these geniuses hadn’t taken into consideration: 1) Action #1 was 54 years old at that point, and 2) only a handful of copies existed.

Kind of different from Superman #75 in 1992. The problem with trying to sell your 10.0 copy of Superman #75 in 1993, less than a year after it was printed, was that there were 1,000,000 other 10.0 copies floating around out there, making it worth roughly its cover price. Which is to say, not much at all.

And so the greedy creeps who jacked up sales for one glorious month in 1992 went back to their lives, betrayed by the funny book industry, abandoning their grandiose get-rich-quick schemes of buying important comic books and then selling them a year later for obscene sums of money and retiring to the Bahamas. And those of us who’d been collecting comic books for years, even decades – the ones who did so out of love of comic books, love of our favorite artists and writers, love of the characters, a love that had seized us by the lapels as little boys, as we excitedly flipped though Spider-Man and Superman comics at the drug store, overwhelmed by the colors and characters – watched as the industry we’d loved for so long morphed into something that much more cynical and desperate, one where the bottom line was the only thing Marvel and DC cared about, and were willing to do anything to improve.

And no, I’m not that naïve. I’m well aware that the bottom line has always been everyone’s concern, from the days of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and Martin Goodman to Victor Fox and Bill Gaines, all the way to the present. But the “Future Foundation?” White costumes? How utterly clueless can you be about what attracted everyone to these characters in the first place? Spider-Man’s red and blue costume was a source of wonderment for me as a child. Now he’s wearing white? In the Future Foundation??

In a year’s time, when the Human Torch is resurrected and the original, way cooler costumes are back, I’m sure the folks at Marvel will be happy to tell us how many more books they sold, and how much more money they made than if they’d tried to think of a genuinely interesting story arc. Or maybe not. How much more of this shit can everyone take?

Hunt for the Sane People

Towards the end of Colm Kelleher’s and Goerge Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker, after the two men have spent 256 pages doing their damnedest to convince everyone that their studies of, amongst other things, UFOs, invisible beasts, Bigfoot, inter-dimensional doors, and ginormous, bullet-proof wolves on a remote ranch in Utah are in fact done under the scrutiny of true science – and you should be taking them seriously – they finally throw in the towel and wrap things up with a chapter entitled “Revolutionary Science.”

Up until this point they keep their bitterness in check, pausing only every now and again to criticize what they call “normal science,” and the mainstream’s propensity for not taking seriously people who insist they’ve had extraterrestrials probe their anuses. This criticism usually follows a particularly far-fetched episode in the book, like when one of their fellow “scientists” freaks out whilst watching a large creature crawl out of an inter-dimensional doorway, and skulk off across the ranch. At night. And the pictures they take don’t come out. And the creature leaves no proof it was ever there.

Typically at such points in the narrative, they remind the reader that even Galileo was considered crazy, so it’s bad form for any of us to consign their tales of telepathic ETs and blue, spherical UFOs to the This Is Total Rubbish file. At any rate, the “Revolutionary Science” chapter contains the following passage:

“People cannot help but wonder at the truth capacity of science if it completely denies the reality of a large number of their own experiences. Public opinion polls show that science and scientists are increasingly out of step with the people’s worldview.”

It’s hard to gauge the latter of the two sentences. You get the sense that they’re finally at their wits’ end and have decided, after staying up for 40 hours writing their book, fatigued and exasperated, to simply indict all of science for their inability to get anyone (outside of conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs) to take them seriously.

At the same time, you wonder if they have any idea how that one sentence so succinctly sums up the total insanity of the UFO/alien abduction/Bigfoot/Men in Black culture in America. It serves as a made-to-order bookend to Dover, PA Pastor Ray Mummert’s assertion that “we’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.” The Pastor was referring to proponents of evolution who, in 2005, succeeded in blocking the Dover school board from teaching intelligent design in science classrooms. Stephen Amidon wrote that the Pastor’s statement “cut straight to the heart of America’s culture wars.”

I wonder if the Pastor knows he has close allies in two men who spend their days hunting Bigfoots from Other Dimensions, and invisible monsters that stampede entire herds of cattle. One guy thinks the Earth is 4,000 years old; the other two think that Bigfoots do the bidding of “short, almost effeminate” ETs “with large eyes and blonde hair.” All three charge that The People – The Majority – know what’s right and best, and science, with its attendant educated, intelligent, elitist scientists is malevolently preventing us from knowing The Truth.

I suspect these three men are largely the reason John Adams didn’t trust the salt of the Earth to hold high positions in the government. I don’t know if it’s possible to point to a date in American history and say, here is where we began heaping scorn on our universities and people who actually know what the hell they're talking about, and pushing to have the uneducated and disturbed run our affairs, but Hunt for the Skinwalker, as entertaining as it is, proves that it’s not just whack-job fundamentalist Christians who employ this ideology.

"Scientists are out of step with the people’s worldview." The same people, I’m assuming, who can’t even name all the American presidents? The same people who think Barack Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen? The same people who are hunting lions to extinction as we speak? The same people who rape and mutilate each other in the name of the invisible man? The same people who think aliens crash-landed in New Mexico even though there are, at last count, five different crash sites? The same people who thought, once upon a time, that the earth was the center of the universe? The same people who are forever adding the word “of” after “myriad?” The same people who think “irregardless” is a fucking word?

It’s a slippery slope pointing to “the people” as the last bastion of truth in this world, because “the people” are completely and hopelessly full of fucking shit. That’s why experts are important. That’s why we go to the educated “elitists” when we need help; it’s why we go to a mechanic when our car breaks down, and not a file clerk, and why we go to a doctor when we’re sick, and not a freakin’ campanologist.

I’ve done my part. I haven’t procreated. I’ve ended the bloodline. A toast to me.

Good old American Bullshit

I am not going to make everyone roll their eyes by dredging up the predictable liberal response to Gabrielle Gifford’s near-assassination, and say that we need to ban guns, or at least ban certain types of guns and magazines.

Even I can see, after thirty years of watching this argument, that it is, at best, a losing battle, and at worst, the kind of unnecessary rhetoric that only inflames and agitates America’s sizeable population of right-wing conspiracy nuts who shriek hysterically about socialist liberals who want to destroy the 2^nd Amendment, and then stockpile eight tons of machine guns and bullets to fight off evil government agents who will use Black Helicopters to herd them into FEMA concentration camps. There is no other western nation so bafflingly obsessed with and fixated on guns than the United States. Mass shootings occur with what any reasonable observer would consider to be alarming frequency in this country, yet the typical NRA member’s response is, now see, if everyone packed, then the good citizens of our great country could simply fire back in these mass shooting situations, and everything would be hunky dory.

I am not going to attempt a rational debate with that mindset. If your solution to these kinds of ugly, ugly episodes is working to arm everyone to the teeth, and you can’t see what kind of even uglier trouble that invites, then count me out of the argument. You guys all load up and enjoy shooting each other; I’ll stay at home with the girlfriend, dogs & cats, and watch some cool movies. Knock yourselves out.

But truly asinine analogies deserve to be called out, such as the one espoused by Gun Owners of America spokesman John Velleco. Despite the carnage last weekend, the “Crossroads of the West” gun show convened outside of Tucson this Saturday and Sunday. Defending the decision to carry on with the show, Velleco noted that no gun law in the world would’ve stopped an individual as deranged as Jared Loughner, and the notion of canceling the gun show was nonsensical anyhow.

“It would be like if someone drove a car into a schoolyard,” he said, “and then you canceled a car show.”

So, for the record, my paranoid, obsessed-with-guns fellow citizens, there are certain flaws with that analogy. They’re so elusive and abstract as to be nearly indecipherable to the common layman – or Gun Owners of America spokesman – but I’ve got a bead on it. Dig it:

Guns and cars are different.

I shit you not. Wrap your head around this: cars are transportation, a way of getting you from point A to point B in a timely manner; guns are for destroying things.

A car can destroy things, for sure. It’s two tons of metal, and if it is mis-used, it can cause serious damage. It’s purpose, however, is to transport people and goods from point A to point B.

A gun’s purpose, on the other hand, is to destroy things. Whether it’s cans on a wall, a deer when you’re hunting, or your enemies in war, guns are designed to fuck shit up.

When some idiot gets drunk, drives his car through a storefront window and crushes two consumers shopping for underwear, an auto mechanic will tell you, Jesus, what a terrible perversion of what our automobiles are designed to do for us. These things aren’t built for destruction.

Conversely, when some idiot shoots his ex-wife with an AK-47, a gun expert will tell you, that gun did exactly what it was built to do. That’s precisely what an assault rifle does when it's doing its job: it obliterates whatever you shoot. These things are built to tear shit apart.

What’s insulting after all these years of the tired gun control debate is when a gun freak says “It would be like if someone drove a car into a schoolyard, and then you canceled a car show.”

Actually, no – it wouldn't be anything like that at all. Cars are for driving – guns are for killing. Very simple thing. Stop comparing the two as though they perform even remotely similar functions. The inability of gun freaks to cop to that simple logic betrays an unspoken admission on their part that they love these things that are, in fact, designed for violence and carnage. I wish I knew why they feel compelled to hide this admission and engage in subterfuge, but I don’t, so instead of the inane car analogy, why not just take the literal approach? “Yes, guns are used for fucking shit up, but we’re not going to cancel our show just miles away from where a nine year-old girl was mowed down. We love these damn things.”

A little honesty goes a long way, folks.