Happy Halloween From Mickey!

 A Halloween Mash-Up I made years and years ago just for fun, combining the wonderfully spooky images from the 1929 Mickey Mouse short "The Haunted House" and the groovy beats of Jumpin' Gene Simmons "Haunted House". 

I always "saw" the images of the Mickey cartoon whenever listening to the Gene Simmons Halloween classic, and one day decided, what the heck, let's actually put that down onto video!

Though crudely edited, I think the two mesh together perfectly and I always dig it put for the season!!!

Haunted House

by

Jumpin' Gene Simmons

I just moved in my new house today

Movin' was hard but I got squared away

Bells started ringin' and chains rattled loud

I knew I'd moved in a haunted house

Still I made up in my mind to stay

Nothin' was a-gonna drive me away

When I seen somethin' that give me the creep

Had one big eye and a-two big feet

I stood right still, and I did the freeze

He did the stroll right up to me

Made a noise with his feet that sound like a drum

(Say, you'll be here when the mornin' come?)

Say yes, I'll be here when the mornin' come

I'll be right here, and I ain't gonna run

I bought this house, now you know I am boss

Ain't no haint gonna run me off

In my kitchen my stove was a-blazin' hot

The coffee was a-boilin' in the pot

The grease had melted in my hand

I had a hunk of meat in my hand

From out of space there sat a man

On a hot stove with the pots and pans

"Say, that's hot" I began to shout

He drank a hot coffee right from the spout

He ate the raw meat right from my hand

Drank a hot grease from the fryin' pan

He said to me "Now, you better run"

(And don't be here when the mornin' come)

Halloween House

 From facebook, a vintage house for sale that gives off some wonderfully autumn Halloweeny vibes!

Such a beautiful old place, bet it holds some wonderful stories within its walls....

A Wonderfully SPOOKY Video: Bat For Lashes: "What's A Girl To Do?"

 My first introduction to the amazingly moody works of musician Natasha Kahn, better known as the haunting BAT FOR LASHES was when this wonderfully spooky music video of hers was shared with me of her awesome song "What's A Girl to Do?"

A dark and seemingly abandoned stretch of road and a young girl riding home on her bicycle is already an unnerving setting, add in some silent creatures with animal faces cavorting about doing bike tricks as they wordlessly follow her...

MAN, what a RIVETING video, one that made me feel the unease of spooky situations as a kid, and what an INCREDIBLE song!!! I had to go out and seek the whole album "Fur and Gold" afterwards and dug 'em all! Thinking about it recently, I realized it was a PERFECT video for the Halloween Season!!!

Some Disneyland Nostalgia

I've only been to Disneyland twice, once when I was child in the 70's, and once in 1990 at the height of my Disney mania. At the time, Disney was only starting the beginnings of what would be called the "Disney Renaissance" which started with the surprise success of "The Little Mermaid" in 1989. Thus a trip to the "happiest Place On Earth" was, though still crowded, more like a regular amusement park before becoming the global behemoth we know nowadays.

Didn't  really realize how much it had changed til I came across a photo I took on my 1990 visit of the (then) iconic Disneyland sign on Harbor Boulevard(with banners celebrating its 35th anniversary hanging off the light posts!), and then wanted to see what it looked like today...

Went onto Googlemaps, and what a shock- not only had the signage completely disappeared, but Disneyland itself seemed to have turned into more of a fortress than an amusement park! Used to seem so easy to walk over and get in...now it looks like you have to go through security clearance! 

The Disneyland Resort sign entrance about a half a block down the street. Is this meant to replace the Disneyland signage from before? Everything so unrecognizable now....

As eclectic alt group They Might Be Giants once sang,  "Time is marching on, and time...is still marching on!" Really nostalgic for those childhood days....

Snoopy Gets a Retouch

 Awhile ago toy manufacturers Memory Lane had a wonderful Charlie Brown figurine promotion for “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” , and I grabbed up as many of them as I could get! For the first few years I displayed them in their boxes, but soon thereafter took them out to properly pose them on my shelf (right on top of my Complete Peanuts HC series), where they've sat since!

With the Halloween Season upon us, I thought it time to take them down and give them a little dusting and cleaning off to more properly display them for the Holiday. However, when I took them down, I was horrified to find that the head of the Snoopy figure had yellowed considerably. For some reason the head was molded from a softer vinyl than the rest of the body, and with the heat and humidity in my house, over time had become a concerning brownish tone.

Now, as  someone who is also a fan of those old Kenner Star Wars action figures, the white vinyl  of these toys are prone to discoloring over time, and there are many tutorials on how to restore them back to a more whitish color, with suggestions of Baking soda, UV lighting, and Hydrogen Peroxide soaks.

After watching a few videos (including one where they restored an entire X-Wing toy), I decided that Hydrogen peroxide was the best bet, and, taking out a full bottle of the stuff and an old Jelly jar, upended poor old Snoopy into the mix, and, as per instructions, left him out in the sun for a two-week treatment!

How did it do? Well, we just pulled Charlie Brown’s favorite beagle out of the drink, and, after letting him dry off in the sun, did a thorough examination and found that it did reduce the amount of yellowing by a small degree... 

It's not back to real whiteness, but when you compare the before and after side by side, you can see that this is still an improvement on the sorry state from before!

Reinstating a now brighter Snoopy back onto the shelf, it looks like my holiday display is all set for Halloween !

Tis the Season!!!

PS: Argh, I just noticed that after dusting all of the figures off, when I put Schroeder's piano back, I put it facing the wrong way!!! Gonna have to FIX that...he can't play Beethoven from THAT end of the piano, no matter HOW talented he is!

The "With the Beatles" Cover Problem

"With The Beatles" 1963

 I remember seeing the cover of the Beatles “With the Beatles” as a kid and hating the spacing of the members’ faces. I thought some ad exec had taken cut-out heads of John, Paul, George and Ringo and had laid them on a black background with little to no care or idea how to arrange them in any kind of symmetry, and instead just stuck them all willy-nilly!

John’s head was big, George was OK , Paul was small, and Ringo looked tacked on at the last minute! So uneven, and  I remember thinking if I was the one to lay the cut-out heads, I would have placed them like THIS:

 

See? Oh! So Nice and EVEN! HAHAHAHAHA

LOLOL, what the young me did not realize was that those were NOT cut-out heads of the Beatles, but an actual single PHOTO with the members of the Beatles in black turtleneck shirts posing against a black background, a fact I only discovered when I finally got to see a copy of the original photo in detail:

With it all lighted up properly like this, you can clearly see the silhouettes of the boys' shirts, their arms and shoulders, explaining why their faces were at such uneven positions! NOW it all made sense!! With this detail, I can finally see what a great cover it is, and for one HELL of a GREAT album, besides!!

Sergio Mendez 1941-2024

Just heard the news today that brilliant musician Sergio Mendez has passed away. As some of you know, his seminal 60's band BRASIL '66 is one of my all-time favorite artists, especially their early output (and even some of their 70's releases like BRASIL 77 as well!) 

 Though not any kind of jazz or Brazilian music fan by any stretch, as a kid growing up one of my favorite albums to play from my parents' record collection was Antonio Carlos Jobim's 1967 album "Wave", an album that I feel represents Jobim at his very best (and of which I've talked about here)!

Years later while working at Tower Records, I had a boss whose favorite artist was Jobim and Brazilian music in general, and besides suggesting other terrific Jobim albums (Tide and Stone Flower just to name a few), he asked me if I knew of Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66.

Well, I'd heard of Sergio Mendez, mostly because of his 80's hit "Never Gonna Let You Go", but had not heard of this Brazil stuff at all! Hoping to rectify that at once, he showed up at work the next day with something for me: a CD copy of Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66's Greatest Hits!

I promised to get right on listening to the album as soon as I got home, and what a joy that turned out to be! The collection opened with the awesome "Mas Que Nada", a song that I kind of always knew in the back of my head but never thought about what it was or who sang it. SO! THIS was Brasil 66!!!

But the hits didn't stop there! From that point, track after track I was hit some of the grooviest tunes: With a Little Help from My Friends, Like a Lover, Pretty World, The Look Of Love, etc,  til that Greatest Hits package became one of my favorite go-to discs! And from there I ventured further into their back catalog with EQUINOX and FOOL ON THE HILL, and over time have managed to get just about every release of theirs, including CRYSTAL ILLUSIONS which may be my all-time fave album from them!

My Brasil 66/Sergio Mendez CDs

Brasil 66 Albums I managed to obtain!

Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66 has always been a reliable fave to pick out again and re-explore, and I had JUST been going through their catalog once again when I heard the news of Mendez's passing. A truly great artist who will be missed!

The Mystery of Led Zeppelin's "In Through the Out Door" LP Cover

     

 The year was 1979 and both Led Zeppelin songs "Fool In The Rain and "All My Love" were being played at regular rotation on the radio. Music sounded great, but we all HAD to wonder about the LP the songs came from. The album was called "In Through the Out Door" and what made it stand out was the fact that the entire album was wrapped up in brown paper so you could not see what was on the cover! 

Was it something offensive like profanity on the cover? Something ultra-violent and bloody, or -gasp- overtly SEXUAL? We didn't know,  and the only way to find out was to purchase the thing!

BUY IT I did, and going home and unwrapping it, I didn't know WHAT to expect- but the last thing I could have foreseen was what I saw- a very plain (yet very noir-ish) black and white photo of a nattily dressed man  in white outfit and hat at a bar, burning a letter with a lighter.

EH? THIS was the cover they didn't want anyone to see? Was this depicting some controversial political thing or something? I just didn't get it!

At my father's workplace, there was an older guy working there who was a musician and a great source of rock n roll information to my burgeoning early rock-n-roll dabbling, and I made sure to ask him about it the next time I saw him. "Say, why did Led Zeppelin wrap the In Through the Out Door album with brown paper?" He though about it and shrugged, saying "I think they did it just to be artistic." Well, that wasn't the answer I'd hoped for, but with little else to go on, left it at that!

Some weeks later and I was at my friend Jason's house and his sister has also bought the album. We pondered the many reasons why they might have covered up the LP ( sex, violence, profanity) but it wasn't until I sat back and looked at his sister's copy of In Through The Out Door...and realized something was off! It was the same depiction of the man in the bar burning the photo...but THEIR copy was shot in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT viewpoint from the picture on MY copy at home!

"HEY! I shouted, "My cover is different from yours! Say, I bet  there must be a dozen different covers, and they covered it so you wouldn't know which one you got til you bought it and unwrapped it!" Turning the album around, I realized even the BACK cover was different from mine! This gimmick HAD to be the reason for the wrapping!

Running to that guy at my Dad's workplace the following week, I told him of my discovery, but he didn't quite believe me. "Why would they do that?" he countered, hinting I must be imagining things, but I insisted my copy and my friend's copy were different. "I know," I told him-"Next week, bring your copy and I'll bring mine and we'll compare and see if they're the same!"

Of course there was a chance that his copy and mine might be the exact SAME versions and I wouldn't have proven anything, however, when he brought his LP in, it TOO was drastically different from mine, showing once and for all that the variant covers (Such a new novelty at the time!) was really a thing!

In all there were 6 variations of the albums, each depicting the viewpoint of one character in the barroom, a fact I didn't discover til I saw the complete photos in the "In Through the Out Door" Guitar Songbook. What a cool concept from the geniuses at Hipgnosis!

And of COURSE, the MUSIC itself was a masterpiece, with not only the aforementioned tracks All My Love and Fool in the Rain, but the groovy "South Bound Saurez", the down-home contry kickin' "Hot Dog" and the epic synthesizer masterpiece "Carouselambra", the latter of which remains one of my BIG faves from the band.

As drummer John Bonham died after this release, In Through the Out Door became the band's last official album to be released, with only the odds-n-ends leftovers for "CODA" to follow. A strong album perfectly closing an awesome run!

A Man Could Lose Himself in London: "You're In a Bad Way" by Saint Etienne

 

 Saint Etienne were part of the huge wave of “Alternative Music” in the 90’s, and of all their many hits, my favorite MUST be “You’re In A Bad Way” off their terrific album :”So Tough” back in 1993~

From the first time I heard the song (on the awesome MTV Alternative music program “120 Minutes”) I fell in love with the song-The song was so CATCHY, the video was so KITSCHY, and WOWWW the lead singer was so GORGEOUS! 
The next day at work my co-worker had already purchased the album that the song came from, and we spend all evening listening to it as we worked! Besides being just as groovy as I remembered, the lead-in to You’re in a Bad Way on the CD was a snippet of dialog where some gent says, “Of course London’s a big place…It’s a VERY big place, Mr. Shadrack…a man could lose himself in London. Lose Himself. LOSE Himself. LOSE…HIMSELF…IN LONDON!!” This was just a TERRIFIC opening, I thought, and I always included it whenever I put "You’re In A Bad Way" onto Cassette compilations I made for myself and friends.

For years as I enjoyed the song, I never knew where that bit of talking came from,a dn it wasn’t until years and years later and the arrival of Youtube where  somebody uploaded a clip from a 1963 film called “Billy Liar” that I FINALLY got the source of those now-classic lines!

The scene detailed Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher in the office of his boss, the aforementioned “Mr. Shadrack”, where he practices a speech he’d been rehearsing. Simply mesmerizing to watch the clip and the way the dialog just flows into the “lose yourself in London” lines so effortlessly!!

 Years later, in the advent of burned CD compilations and Ipod playlists, I tried to recreate my old cassette mix with CDs, and was horrified to find out that the Billy Liar dialog was cut in half between "You’re In A Bad Way" and the previous track for “Avenue”.  So unless I included “Avenue”, the song started with only the very last line of “Lose himself in London!”

I didn’t know what to do til I turned to my friend Saburo, who managed to record the track for me with the entire passage intact by recording the snippet at the end of Avenue and the body of You’re in a Bad Way and then ripping a brand new MP3 of the song! Yatta!

Just the other week, I was putting together another CD collection, and while setting up the track lists for the burner, saw that Saburo had written in the MP3 track info:

“Of course London’s a big place…It’s a VERY big place, Mr. Shadrack…a man could lose himself in London.

Lose Himself. LOSE Himself. LOSE…HIMSELF…IN LONDON!!”