...And While We're on the Subject....

After showing you my yearbook from 1984 which I had plastered Cyndi Lauper on the cover, here is my "personalized" book-cover for my 1985 yearbook!

Guess you can guess what my favorite MOVIE was during that time!

Found My Old High School Yearbook from 1984

 You know when you got your yearbook at the end of the year- before you'd start passing it around to get 'em signed by your classmates, you had to "personify" it so you could keep track of which one was yours! Everyone used stickers, markers, etc, to be able to identify theirs, and this was mine!

Guess who my favorite artist was in mid 1984?

A Long Sought After Treasure!

 I've always been a HUGE fan of MAD magazine; ever since first getting turned on to a "Mad Fold-In"  in elementary school I've collected as many issues as I could get ahold of and have never looked back!

Over the years I've managed to track down a bunch of issues, including some very early issues- my earliest copy was issue 37 from waaaay back in 1958(!), but one thing that I've always wanted to have was one of the original first 23 issues.

As some of you may know, MAD magazine started out as a comic, yes, a EC Comic title in fact, alongside such notorious titles as Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories, and didn't turn to magazine format until issue 24!

Mad would occasionally reprint facsimile copies of those issues in Super Specials, but I really wanted a real one, ANY one, for my collection! 

Among them was  a cover I'd always liked, featuring Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland Tenniel illustration on the cover, and I recently found someone selling a copy for VERY reasonable amount!

Getting it in the mail recently, it is simply BEAUTIFUL and SUCh a SIGHT to behold! And yanno, the inside stories? Some of them I'd already had in some of those aforementioned facsimile issues, including a big fave, a spoof of Gasoline Alley! Such a surprise!

(Funny, the issue it was in had a completely different cover though!) 

Now, these issue are pretty pricey, and I have no expectation of "completing the set" as it were, but I'm entirely happy to at least own one of the original 23 in my collection!

Love & Rockets, Vol.IV, #13

 
 Still eking along after all these years. As I'm mostly buying my copies straight from Fantagraphics, they can get pretty expensive per issue, what with shipping and all. But they do offer alternative covers, etc, so that's a plus.

Farewell to a Rock LEGEND!

 Sad to hear of the passing of Guitar Legend JEFF BECK today.

There and Back, Wired, Blow By Blow, Rough and Ready...He had some of the most killer albums out there!!! At 78 he was still out there playing!

An Album Display Shelf

 Had some extra wood from a project laying around and thought I'd make a display frame for some of my classic albums! I mean, the best part about collecting these LPs are looking at them, and it makes a nice addition to my CD corner!

So many albums have such beautiful covers that it's a shame to store them with only the spines to look at- will be occasionally rotating and changing out these LPs to keep things fresh!

Oblivion Song, Vol.6

 It has been over four years since I first began the epic image comics series "Oblivion Song", the story of a man named Nathan Cole caught between two worlds, and just tonight i finished reading the series last amazing arc!

The series started out as a man jumping back and forth between the two worlds, trying to save the people who have slipped to the alien side, but slowly turned into a dramatic tale of epic proportions as it becomes a story of war against an alien race who are hellbent on using the timeslipping tech to invade out world and take over!

Lots of twists and turns, and strangely short and sweet as compared to other works of Robert "Walking Dead" Kirkman!

Saga, Vol.10

 After the deaths of so many key characters in the last story arc, the new chapter was off to a rough start, and after two issues and losing interest fast, I really lost my fascination with this strip and no longer felt it was worth it to trudge into the comic shop each month to pick up each issue. So from that point on, i would begin only collecting the trades, and this is the first of them, collecting issues 55-60.

Love & Rockets, Vol.IV, #12

 Still eking along after all these years. As I'm mostly buying my copies straight from Fantagraphics, they can get pretty expensive per issue, what with shipping and all. But they do offer alternative covers, etc, so that's a plus.

Mary Fahl: Can't Get It Out of My Head

 Mary Fahl album of classics performed with her own special brand of magic! Wonderful renditions of songs I already know and love- and quite a few songs I'm hearing for the first time, like  the Judy Collins song "Since You Asked" and the haunting Richard Thompson song "The Great Valerio"!

The cover of Neil Young's "Don't let It Bring You Down" is a particular favorite, heartfelt and haunting!

An Intriguing New Sci-Fi Series: "Severance"

 Was greatly recommended by my friends that I should catch the new Apple TV+ Series "Severance" and at two episodes in, it is a barrage of compelling situations and set-ups that has me on the edge of my seat trying to figure out just WHAT is happening!

Was told to go in blind without any prior knowledge of the show, and it has been delicious trying to piece together  what is happening by the minute clues they give us...VERY excited to see where this one goes!!!

Memories of A 70's TV Theme Song Fan

I guess like most kids from my generation, we grew up obsessed with TV show theme songs and me and my brother would use our rickety old tape recorder, pressed up against the built in TV’s speaker to save as many as we could to tape!

The recording were always of so-so quality, so when I saw this album on the shelves at my local Woolworths’ called "THEMES FROM HIT TV SHOWS", I wasted NO TIME blowing my allowance on it...imagine my surprise when I found out that NONE of the songs were from the actual TV show and were all sung by "The Pop Singers and Orchestra" D'OH...

These recordings were of questionable quality and was a sad substitute for the “real” versions, though I remember their version of “One day At A Time” had this interesting twangy guitar middle section and a second verse which I STILL think of whenever I hear the song now!

This was not the first time I’d been burned by bogus artists re-doing songs I wanted- I remember getting an album called “Disco Duck Dance Party” which featured a whole collection of the then current hits-  The Hustle! That's The Way I Like It! etc, all for one low price!! When I got home of course, the singers were NOT Rick Dees or ANY of the original artists but some knock-off versions…why did I fall for these?!

 LOLOLOL! 

My Mom HAD to rub it in, clucking her tongue and saying, “I TOLD you those weren’t going to be from the Television!” and the album was eventually put away to collect dust! 

It wasn’t tilI was already in college that a proper “TV Theme Song” collection came out in the form of TeeVee Toon’s “Television’s Greatest Hits" series, which used (for the most part) the original tracks from the original show openings, with only a few remade exclusively for the LP!

Man, me and my friends would listen to those LPs all the time and even sing along with ‘em, it was filled with such wonderful memories!Of course nowadays one can go straight to youtube and watch the openings, endings, and even in some cases the entire episodes and even seasons of shows at the touch of a button! Man, young aficionados have no IDEA how easy they’ve got it!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch the opening credits to MAUDE again….!

A Japanese-Jazz-Fusion Throwback Gift!

The other day I was talking to a co-worker about some of the lite-jazz music I liked and mentioned liking Hiroshima's "East" album back in the day. He said, 'You Like Hiroshima? I got something for you!" The next morning I come to work and he presents me with this stunning gift: A copy of Hiroshima's first album signed by all the members of the band!! WHOAAA!

Seems his Mother was friends with one of the women in the band (he has long since forgotten who) and she'd gotten the copy of the signed album then! It had since then been passed on to him, but as he didn't know Hiroshima much, it mostly sat in a box along with all of his other old LPS.

I, of course, begged off accepting such a grand gesture, only telling him i wanted to take pics of it, but he insisted, knowing it would be in possession of someone who really cherished it!

Ahhh, time to break out that album and give it a spin!!!

PS: I was so excited when he gave me the LP and showed it proudly to everyone, but all my other co-workers had no IDEA who Hiroshima was until I said, "They're the ones who did the "Hawaiian Electric" song, and then they all went "OH YEAHHHH!!!!"   So funny to think that  an innovative Jazz band with such a long career and catalog is only known by most people for that one song!

The Beatles "Get Back"

 

Just wrapped up the Peter Jackson Docuseries "Get Back" and though I liked Jackson's take on the original Michael Lindsay-Hogg Let It Be Footage a lot, I cannot conceive of a casual Beatles fan getting into this show!

I would say that you had to at LEAST know most of the songs and lore of the Beatles for most of this stuff to have any real meaning or interest... I mean, "I've Got A Feeling" and "Don't Let Me Down" are some of my favorite songs from the Beatles but even I was  getting tired of hearing it rehearsed for the umpteenth time over 8 hrs, LOL!

Still, LOTS of treasure in here, LOTS of insight into the inner workings of the band and a great many revelations about some of the songs, especially ones that became tracks on their subsequent solo releases after the band broke up that I had No IDEA started off as Beatles songs!

As someone who always had a bad feeling after watching Let It Be, it was nice to see a bigger picture that showed that there was more than the dark parts of this moment in their lives, and wrapped up on a positively POSITIVE note to boot!!!

And just think, even at this seemingly "low" point in their careers, "Abbey Road" was still to come !!!

A Ghostly Halloween Coincidence

As some of you may know, I've been a huge, huge fan of October Project since first hearing their debut album back in 1993. I had strolled into Tower Records one night and perused the Listening station to check out some new music. As a big enthusiast of Halloween and all its spooky fun, the cover of October Project's debut album instantly caught my eye with its almost archaic looking photo of a little jack-o-lantern faced ghost on the side of a road, Trick Or Treating at dusk...

That piqued my interest enough to give the album a listen, and it just took one minute of lead singer mary's Fahl's haunting vocals and I snatched that album up and they'd go on to be one of my most enduring favorites.In fact, Mary Fah STILL retains a high place as one of my favorite artists even now!

The cover of that October Project album always looked like one of the shady tree-lined back roads of Manoa to me, especially this one stretch of road which I always thought of when listening to them: I tried to make it easier for you to see what I mean by changing the color to the image to sepia and croppin it a bit...can you see the vibe I mean?

In any case, I ALWAYS got an October Project vibe driving through the groves of that street.

So a few nights ago, I'm driving down that long stretch of road, and looking up the road, I see this little blob glowing in the dark...

What WAS that? Getting closer to the yard,  I have to laugh out loud because it was a little GHOST, and right near the place where I'd always imagined that jack o lanterned trick or treater to be!

This had to be the most WONDERFUL coincidence ever! I tell you, it tickled me Halloween heart! And now, every evening I go home, I try to drive by that yard, just to see the ghost while it's still up!! Happy Halloween, everybody!