Podcasts about Russ Heath

Episode #555! Blazing Combat and Atlanta! We are finally back with a new episode! Fresh off his trip to Atlanta, Scott tells us all about it and some shops he might have visited. In 1965, publisher Jim Warren and writer/editor Archie Goodwin produced Blazing Combat magazine. Each black and white issue was illustrated by the top comic book artists of the time including Wally Wood, Gene Colan, John Severin, Alex Toth, George Evans and Russ Heath. Although only four issues were completed, all featured covers painted by Frank Frazetta. We check out Fantagraphics' Blazing Combat HC which features each issue and interviews with Warren and Goodwin. Definitely check it out!

Daimon's solo title ends with a fascinating mash-up of a story written for the more Marvel's mature black and white Curtiss magazines but was instead re-worked by unseen hands to make it suitable for the drugstore spinner rack. One scene was deemed too sacrilegious even for the magazine line. Check it out. Also: Our next is ep is THE FINALE! Fill out your ballot for chances to win BAM swag (you need not be present win a prize, by the way).  ANYONE AND EVERYONE CAN GET THEIR BALLOT HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/send-in-your-for-86833937 You can mail your ballot to us here: bronzeagemonsters@gmail.com Or read your votes into a voicemail: 971-220-5865 Or DM them to us on social media: Instagram/Threads: @bronzeagemonsters Blue Sky: @bronzeagemonsters.bsky.social Join our DISCORD server!: https://discord.gg/NcFaq9Ednq STORE: https://bronzeagemonsters.threadless.com/

"Fortress: Miami - Part Four: Razor's Edge" Written by Chuck Dixon, illustrated and coloured by Russ Heath, and lettered by Jim Novak.

"Fortress: Miami - Part Three: The Silk Noose" Written by Chuck Dixon, illustrated by Russ Heath, coloured by Phil Felix, and lettered by Jim Novak.

"Hammered" Written by Chuck Dixon, illustrated by Russ Heath, coloured by Phil Felix, and lettered by Jim Novak.

"Fortress: Miami" Written by Chuck Dixon, illustrated by Russ Heath, coloured by Phil Felix, and lettered by Jim Novak.

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

Episode 772-Jason interviews Richard J. Arndt and Steven Fears Our Artists at War - TwoMorrows Publishing - Part 2 - OUR ARTISTS AT WAR is the first book ever published in the US that solely examines War Comics published in America. It covers the talented writers and artists who supplied the finest, most compelling stories in the War Comics genre, which has long been neglected in the annals of comics history. Through the critical analysis of authors RICHARD J. ARNDT and STEVEN FEARS, this overlooked treasure trove is explored in-depth, finally giving it the respect it deserves! Included are pivotal series from EC Comics (Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat), DC Comics (Enemy Ace and the Big Five war books: All American Men of War, G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Our Army at War, and Star-Spangled War Stories), Warren Publishing (Blazing Combat), Charlton (Willy Schultz and the Iron Corporal) and more! Featuring the work of HARVEY KURTZMAN, JOHN SEVERIN, JACK DAVIS, WALLACE WOOD, JOE KUBERT, SAM GLANZMAN, JACK KIRBY, WILL ELDER, GENE COLAN, RUSS HEATH, ALEX TOTH, MORT DRUCKER, and many others. Introduction by ROY THOMAS, Foreword by WILLI FRANZ. Cover by JOE KUBERT. Buy it: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Artists-At-War-American/dp/160549108XSupport Our Patreon Unlock More C4FaP Bonus Content https://www.patreon.com/comicsfunprofit Kyle's RPG Podcasts: Encore of the Lost & Two Past Midnight @DorkDayPodcast https://www.dorkdayafternoon.com Shop Kowabunga's Exclusive Variants https://shopkowabunga.com/shop/ Donations Keep Our Show Going, Please Give https://bit.ly/36s7YeL Get on the Kowabunga (Deep  Discount Comics) FOC and Preorder list http://eepurl.com/dy2Z8D Thank You Shout Out to Our Patrons: Adam P., Eric H., Jon A., Andrew C., Bradley R., Aaron M., Darrin W., Dennis C., David D., Martin F.  Email us at: Comicsforfunandprofit@gmail.com - questions, comments, gripes, we can't wait to hear what you have to say. Follow us on twitter.com/ComicsFunProfit & instagram.com/comicsforfunandprofit Like us on Facebook.com/ComicsForFunAndProfit Subscribe, rate, review on itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word about our little comic book podcast. Listen To the Episode Here: https://comcsforfunandprofit.podomatic.com/

It's the Sea Devils in the second Silver Age Spotlight on Classic Comics. Take a dive and learn about this undersea team that seems to lend a bit inspiration to Marvel's Fantastic Four. Legendary creators Robert Kanigher and Russ Heath demonstrate that the Silver Age wasn't only about superheroes! You can follow the show @ComicsLloyd on Twitter or send an email to ClassicComicsMBL@gmail.com. You can find me on Twitter @MattB_Lloyd and at www.dccomicsnews.com where I write reviews and edit news stories. You can also check out my chapter in “Politics in Gotham: The Batman Universe and Political Thought.” https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Gotham-Universe-Political-Thought/dp/3030057755 And: “Black Panther and Philosophy: What Can Wakanda Offer the World?” https://www.amazon.com/Black-Panther-Philosophy-Blackwell-Culture/dp/1119635845/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2F69N3WJBZMF3&keywords=what+can+wakanda&qid=1642053514&sprefix=what+can+wakanda%2Caps%2C256&sr=8-1 Sea Devils Links Robert Kanigher on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kanigher Russ Heath on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Heath Roy Lichtenstein and Russ Heath https://www.muddycolors.com/2018/09/russ-heath-roy-lichtenstein/ Sea Devils Covers https://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/sea-devils Challengers of the Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challengers_of_the_Unknown --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comics-in-motion-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/comics-in-motion-podcast/support

Taking the Artist's Edition Index from print to the spoken word. This month I take a look at shipping changes, AE Index Poll April 2022, Out Of Print Sales March 2022, and reviews of George Pérez's Sirens: Pen & Ink No. 1 and Flesh & Steel. The Art of Russ Heath.

DIAL F FOR FLANGER is a comic chat show. Paul talks to active soldier RICH FULLAM about his military experience and his love for WAR COMICS, particularly those by GARTH ENNIS. Paul and Rich discuss in particular the ENEMY ACE: WAR IN HEAVEN 2 issue mini series by Garth Ennis with artists Chris Weston and Russ Heath. Check out the Weird Warriors Podcast with his buddy Max.   Please leave any comments right here or email Waitingfordoom@gmail.com Flanger out! Opening closing theme - Flatland - The Roy Clark Method

Episode 674 - Thanks to Our Patrons Jason Interviews Our Artist at War Creators - Richard J. Arndt and Steven Fears - Our Artists At War is the first book ever published in the US that solely examines War Comics published in America. It covers the talented writers and artists who supplied the finest, most compelling stories in the War Comics genre, which has long been neglected in the annals of comics history. Included are pivotal series from EC Comics (Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat), DC Comics (Enemy Ace and the Big Five war books: All American Men of War, G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Our Army at War, and Star-Spangled War Stories), Warren Publishing (Blazing Combat), Charlton (Willy Schultz and the Iron Corporal) and more! Featuring the work of Harvey Kurtzman, John Severin, Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Joe Kubert, Sam Glanzman, Jack Kirby, Will Elder, Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Alex Toth, Mort Drucker, and many others. Introduction by Roy Thomas, Foreword by Willi Franz. Cover by Joe Kubert. Twomorrows Publishing - Our Artist At War  https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1635Diamond Comic Distributors Order Code: JUL212065ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-108-0Support Our Patreon at Any Tier to Unlock More C4FaP Bonus Content https://www.patreon.com/comicsfunprofit Donations Keep Our Show Going, Please Give https://bit.ly/36s7YeL Get on the Kowabunga (Deep Discount Comics) FOC and Preorder list http://eepurl.com/dy2Z8D Email us at: Comicsforfunandprofit@gmail.com - questions, comments, gripes, we can't wait to hear what you have to say. Follow us on twitter.com/ComicsFunProfit & instagram.com/comicsforfunandprofit Like us on Facebook.com/ComicsForFunAndProfit Subscribe, rate, review on itunes, Spotify, Stitcher. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word about our little comic book podcast. https://comcsforfunandprofit.podomatic.com/ 

Are these the best American mainstream comics of the 1970s? If not, they're close to it, as the team supreme of Steve Gerber, Michael Golden and Russ Heath deliver a superlactive comic book. Scott Free is free of the New Genesis/Apokolops dichotomy, as he moves to California, takes on an amazing escape, fights a mysterious woman, and, oh yeah, starts to become a messiah. Amir and Jason rave about the brillance of these issues, and that passion makes for a really interesting 40 minute listen. We hope you enjoy it too! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/classiccomics/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/classiccomics/support

TEN-HUT! Fall in and feast your ears as your hosts Max and Rich discuss the very first issue of "Weird War Tales!" Featuring the work of legendary creators like Joe Kubert, Robert  Kanigher, Russ Heath, Bob Haney, and Irv Novick, you can't get off to a much better start than this...or can you?? Our Facebook Page is https://www.facebook.com/weirdwarpod Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/weirdwarpod Opening Music: "Behind Enemy Lines" by Rafael Krux from https://freepd.com/epic.php Closing Music: "Honor Bound" by Bryan Teoh from https://freepd.com/epic.php Podcast Banner and Icon Art by Bill Walko: http://www.billwalko.com/ and http://www.theherobiz.com/

Russ Heath is a local hotrodder and all around cool guy. He hosts his Youtube show "Rusty Duck Garage" where he shares all of his different car finds and projects. He has more cars than I can count and in this episode he shares all of the projects he's found himself with over the years. Noah @the_hotrod_kidGarrison @garrison_todd_fosterRuss @heath.russelRuss's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4nECJ0AM6QXfzd9_N7GG6w

Ed's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/edpiskor Jim's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jimrugg ------------------------- E-NEWSLETTER: Keep up with all things Cartoonist Kayfabe through our new newsletter! News, appearances, special offers, and more - signup here for free: https://bit.ly/3eFPJ7b --------------------- SNAIL MAIL! Cartoonist Kayfabe, PO Box 3071, Munhall, Pa 15120 --------------------- T-SHIRTS and MERCH: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/cartoonist-kayfabe --------------------- Connect with us: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cartoonist.kayfabe/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CartoonKayfabe Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cartoonist.Kayfabe Ed's Contact info: https://Patreon.com/edpiskor https://www.instagram.com/ed_piskor https://www.twitter.com/edpiskor https://www.amazon.com/Ed-Piskor/e/B00LDURW7A/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 Jim's contact info: https://www.patreon.com/jimrugg https://www.jimrugg.com/shop https://www.instagram.com/jimruggart https://www.twitter.com/jimruggart https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Rugg/e/B0034Q8PH2/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1543440388&sr=1-2-ent

Nicola Cuti had a creative carrier that spanned over 50 years. He wrote hundreds of horror stories for Warren Magazines Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella.  Nick was also the co-creator of E-Man published through Charlton Comics. In addition, he was created Moon Child, Starflake, and Captain Cosmos.  Nicolas Cuti left our world on Friday, February 21st 2020, after a battle with cancer.  This interview with Creator Talks took place on the evening of Friday, January 17th and Sunday morning, January 19th 2020.  During our interview, I learned how Nick first became a storyteller out of necessity as a young boy. Nick shares how he made his first break into comics with the story Grub and favorite horrors stories he wrote for Warren Publishing. What was it like working at Charlton Comics in the early 1970s and how did the development of E-Man come about with co-creator Joe Staton? We also talk about his cult sci-fi classic Spanner's Galaxy illustrated by Tom Mandrake.  Nick recalls many of the people he has the pleasure to work with including Louise Simonson, Russ Heath, Len Wein, Bernie Wrightson, Tom Mandrake and Joe Staton. Did you know Nick was an animation background designer for several major studios?  He reflect upon that period of his career. When I Kick Back With The Creator, Nick answers the questions I like to ask all my guests, including how Nick would want to be remembered.  Nick will have stories published in future issues of The Creeps and Warrant's new magazine Carmilla coming in November 2020.  Given the prolific story teller that Nick was, I hope there will be new stories of his published for years to come. Closing music is from Captain Cosmos. Please rate and review Creator Talks on Apple Podcasts More about science fiction writer Nicola Cuti

In honor of Veteran's Day 2019, DIGESTCAST is back with a look at DC SPECIAL SERIES #18: SGT. ROCK'S PRIZE BATTLE TALES, featuring stories by Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, Russ Heath, Mort Drucker, John Severin, Bob Haney, Archie Goodwin, and more! Join the conversation and find more great content: Leave comments on our DIGESTCAST website: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/digest11 Images from this episode: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/digest11-gallery E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Opening theme music by Luke Daab: http://daabcreative.com Be sure to use the hashtag #warcomicsmonth when discussing this issue online! Subscribe to the DIGESTCAST: Subscribe to DIGESTCAST on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/digestcast/id1193160057 Don’t use Apple? Use this link for your podcast catcher: http://feeds.feedburner.com/digestcast This episode brought to you by InStockTrades. This week’s selections: BRAVE AND THE BOLD BRONZE AGE OMNIBUS VOL. 1: https://www.instocktrades.com/TP/DC/BATMAN-BRAVE-BOLD-BRONZE-AGE-OMNIBUS-TP-VOL-01/SEP170411 EC ARCHVES FRONTLINE COMBAT VOL. 1: https://www.instocktrades.com/TP/Gemstone/EC-ARCHIVES-FRONTLINE-COMBAT-VOL-1-HC/APR083869 This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Thanks for listening! Remember, big things come in small packages!

Alex Grand and Jim Thompson interview the Prince of Comics, Howard Chaykin part 2 discussing his work on American Flagg, the Shadow, Time Square, Blackhawk, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Black Kiss, Cyberella with Don Cameron, his Television career including the 1990s Flash TV show, Legend with Russ Heath, Hawkgirl with Walt Simsonson, his Marvel career in 2012, Black Kiss 2, the controversy surrounding the Divided States of Hysteria, and finally his ode to comic history, Hey Kids! Comics! Should Batman fight crime wearing a ball gag? Find out here. Find out here. Music - Standard License. Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders, CBH Podcast ©Comic Book Historians. Thumbnail Artwork ©Comic Book Historians. Support us at https://www.patreon.com/comicbookhistoriansSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/comicbookhistorians)

Chief and Ben are back in the hot seat and boy howdy have we got a great show lined up this week. We're covering issues 22-24 of Marvel's G.I. Joe series and it's non-stop greatness from beginning to end. We bid a fond farewell to the fab Mike Vosburg on art and are treated to guest pencils by Russ Heath in issue 24. The Joes get some much needed R&R, there's a chase sequence straight out of Benny Hill and there's plotting afoot in Cobra HQ. Also, hear about Ben's 'other' podcast and rejoice in the fact that this could well be the last time you have to hear Chief talk about his phone!

JD and Len welcome Batman colorist RICK TAYLOR into the Complex to remember lost artists Russ Heath and Marie Severin, to celebrate the underappreciated José Luis García-López and root for Superman’s shorts! Take a listen and then feel free to comment below if you agree or disagree, or email us at CultPOPgo@gmail.com! To leave us a... The post CultPOP! 556 – GUTTER TALK – Remembering Greatness w Rick Taylor appeared first on CultPOP!.

JD and Len welcome Batman colorist RICK TAYLOR into the Complex to remember lost artists Russ Heath and Marie Severin, to celebrate the underappreciated José Luis García-López and root for Superman's shorts! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/black-tribbles/message

Hall of Comics Podcast return for Issue #28 - Superhero Bank Holiday & Invasion From Planet Wrestletopia A bank holiday this week! We bring our suggestions for a Hero and Villain bank holiday getaway for Challenge of the Week. We remember legends Marie Severin, Russ Heath & Gary Friedrich. We pull on spandex to review a brand new Indie Comic called 'Invasion From Planet Wrestletopia' Comics of the Week include - Action Comics, Punisher, West Coast Avengers, Darth Vader and many more. Intro Music - Silent Partner - Bright Future | Royalty Free Music - No Copyright Music | YouTube Music Download

Steve got a Mauler at JoeCon. And would you believe ONLY NOW, a full two months after the event, is it in his hands?! In honour of Joe tanks, the boys are pitting their favourites against Steve's Mauler in a battle that YOU decide the outcome of! Polls will be held on the GI Joburg Twitter page and Facebook group for the next five days, so listen to the podcast and get voting!    Also in this episode, we pay tribute to the late Russ Heath. Joe fans everywhere are indebted to this man. 

This week, we discuss Conan's new creative team, Russ Heath, the new Defenders comic, the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel postponed, Nightwing, Disney Play, Starman, and a bunch of listener questions.

On this episode we remember comic book legend Russ Heath.Oses recounts his visit to scare la 2018. while there he picked up Super horror #1.Hect helps us with a review of image comics' Crowded #1. as always we discuss the week's news'

This week the summer book club continues with 1982's The Untold Legend of the Batman by Len Wein, Jim Aparo and John Byrne. Also in this episode: our pal Marsha leads the (long overdue) public attack on ComicsGate, Marvel announces the creative team for the new Conan series, Dave pays tribute to Russ Heath, and Robert Downey Jr buys Chris Evans a car.

Paul and Al are back with an absolute truckload of news for you this time round, as they pay respects to Russ Heath, chew over the announcements of Uncanny X-Men, Marvel Knights 20, Conan the Barbarian, Best Defense, Riri Williams: Ironheart, Batman & the Outsiders and the Green Lantern, and chat through the creative shuffle on Return of Wolverine, Dark Horse losing the Buffy license, Aftershock comics' first-issue returnability, IDW losing another senior member of staff and Legendary Entertainment's option on My Boyfriend is a Bear, as well as reviewing Cold Spots and West Coast Avengers. The Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has no bananas. It has no bananas... today.

My Boyfriend is a Bear movie development, The Flash Season 5 casts contortionist Troy James, Conan the Barbarian returns to Marvel Comics, new Rick and Morty Season 4 teaser, Russ Heath passes away. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's issue we tackle the time-honoured tradition of war time propaganda!... err... I mean comics! From Sergeant Rock to the Haunted Tank. But first we talk about the latest in DC News!  Sponsored by Great Lakes Grooming Co.  Intro Music by Aaron Barry To ask questions for the next episode, or to continue the conversation online visit us here: On Twitter On Facebook  On Instagram On our Website Or send us emails at doctordcpodcast@gmail.com Make sure also to rate, review, and subscribe on iTunes! If you give us a five star review we will read it on an upcoming episode!   SHOW NOTES (courtesy of Josh Gill)   News & Notes (1:56) DC’s “Sink Atlantis” crosses over Aquaman and Suicide Squad (3:10) DC’s Young Animal line to end its current run (4:26) Tom King teases big things for Booster Gold (6:27) "Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Aquaman - Rage of Atlantis" trailer has been released (10:38) Pre-Flashpoint universe still exists (12:00) DC announces new Looney Toons cross overs (14:30) The mystery of Batman’s parents death finally explained (17:07) CW introduces Batwoman in this year’s Arrowverse crossover (19:19) Batman prequel series “Pennyworth” in the works (22:24) Doom Patrol series coming to DC’s streaming service (24:45) Gotham now not allowed to use the Joker   The Doctor’s Pulls (28:00) The Flash Season 04 (34:29) Avengers: Infinity War   War (49:12) The Haunted Tank (53:04) Why did the books that launched in the New 52 fail?  Is there room in Rebirth for Sgt. Rock and the Blackhawks? (1:01:41) Would war comics be popular inside the DCU? (1:04:22) Are readers missing out by not having war comics now? (1:09:22) Do you prefer the realism of artists like Russ Heath or a different style such as Joe Kubert? (1:12:28) Are there any classic or contemporary stories that hold gravitas? (1:19:31) DC war time or power metal? (1:27:00) What was your introduction in to war comics? (1:28:37) Who would you rather have on your side, Captain Blackhawk, Unknown Soldier, or Sgt. Rock? (1:32:14) What did you think of the New 52 Men of War? (1:34:01) How many characters from war comics made their way to superhero comics?  Are there any crossovers between the genres? (1:36:45) What are your thoughts on how solider or veteran characters are written? (1:44:48) How did propaganda change throughout the wars and have wars been reflected in more recent comics?   Characters, Teams, Places Atrocitus (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Axis Amerika Batwoman (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Blackhawk (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Blackhawk Island Blackhawk Squadron Captain Storm (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Comedian Crimson Avenger G.I. Zombie Gravedigger (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Haunted Tank Squadron John Stewart (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Lady Blackhawk (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Losers (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Prisoner of War Professor Pyg (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Red Lion Rip Graves Sgt. Rock (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Steve Trevor (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Thinker (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) Unknown Solider (Pre Flashpoint) (Rebirth) White Lions Reading Blackhawks Vol 1 Dark Nights: Metal Flash: Rebirth Justice League Vol 3 039 - Justice Lost Men of War Vol 2 Prez Vol 1 Prez Vol 2 Ragman Vol 3 Star Spangled War Stories Featuring G.I. Zombie Vol 1 Weird War Tales Vol 1 Media Avengers: Infinity War Battle Beast Flash (TV Series) Gamma Ray Grave Digger Jag Panzer Stormwarrior People Christopher Priest Gail Simone Joe Kubert Mike Mignola Russ Heath Tom King  

Greetings, pulpophiles! In this episode, Chris (@AceComics) and Reggie (@reggiereggie) step back into the "between pages" of comic books, known as Classic Comic Book Advertisements, the Return! First, they'll detail the history and innovations of GRIT magazine, despite never having seen a copy. Then, they discuss Joe Orlando and his unforgettable ad for Sea Monkeys, as well as the dark secret behind these "instant" aquatic life forms...and it's not that they aren't monkeys. Finally, the impressionable hosts talk about two-dimensional toy soldiers, the ads that enticed them, and the man who drew two of the most memorable ones, Russ Heath! It's an episode jam-packed with commercialism, and you won't even have to pay C.O.D. weirdcomicshistory@gmail.com facebook.com/cosmictmillhistory @cosmictmill weirdsciencedccomics.com chrisisoninfiniteearths.com weirdcomicshistory.blogspot.com search YouTube for "weirdcomicshistory" REFERENCE SITES: grit.com, boards.straightdope.com, thortrains.net, the usual suspects

Time Codes: 00:00:25 - Introduction 00:02:24 - Setup of interview 00:03:34 - Interview with Ger Apeldoorn 01:06:35 - Wrap up 01:08:17 - Contact us Just in time for the San Diego Comic-Con -- where he and Craig Yoe will be meeting with fans and signing books -- Ger Apeldoorn is on the show to talk with Derek about his new book, Behaving Madly: Zany, Loco, Cockeyed, Rip-off, Satire Magazines (IDW/Yoe Books). It's a beautifully produced work that highlights the many knockoffs of Bill Gaines's Mad that appeared between 1954 to 1959, attempting to capitalize on the kind of success the Usual Gang of Idiots enjoyed once the title changed to magazine format. These Mad wannabes appeared with such titles as From Here to Insanity, Cockeyed, Bunk!, SNAFU, Lunatickle, Who Goofed?, Thimk, Shook Up, Frenzy, Frantic!, Loco, Zany, and Nuts! You might think -- or thimk -- that these rip-offs would all be cheesy and subpar, but as Ger makes clear, these short-lived satire magazines included work from such comics legends as Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Howard Nostrand, Bob Powell, Ross Andru, Basil Wolverton, and Russ Heath. Derivative and second-rate? Perhaps. But the selections in Behaving Madly are no laughing matter. Well...actually, they are. Check out this great promo from Yoe Books!  

This week on View from the Gutters our topic work is: The Immortal Iron Fist #1-16 Story by???. Ed Brubaker & Matt Fraction, Pencils by???. David Aja, Travel Foreman, Derek Fridolfs, Tom Palmer, Sai Buscema, Russ Heath, Leandro Fernandez, Khari Evans, Kano Inks by???. David Aja, Derek Fridolfs, Tom Palmer, Kano, Victor Olazaba Colors by???. [???]

This week on View from the Gutters our topic work is: The Immortal Iron Fist #1-16 Story by…. Ed Brubaker & Matt Fraction, Pencils by…. David Aja, Travel Foreman, Derek Fridolfs, Tom Palmer, Sai Buscema, Russ Heath, Leandro Fernandez, Khari Evans, Kano Inks by…. David Aja, Derek Fridolfs, Tom Palmer, Kano, Victor Olazaba Colors by…. […]

Note: We like our language NSFW salty, and there be spoilers here...Face Front, True Believer! It's Christmas time children, so here comes Satan 'cuz we're a pack of heathens, obviously! Daimon Hellstrom is coming at'cha straight outta 1973 ahead of the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s! The brother of Satana debuted in Ghost Rider #1 before appearing in another 7 issues of that title plus 13 solo appearances in Marvel Spotlight and 8 issues of his first eponymous series! Not only do we discuss the early career of the future Hellstorm, but we also consider Satanism in general, the AMC Preacher series, and compare and contrast with other demonic characters with endless spoilers thrown about! We finally settle in on the ultimate issue of Son of Satan, one of the most sensational inventory stories of all time, with such scintillating art by Russ Heath it required we bother to post a gallery below! Excelsior!As you can tell, we love a fierce conversation, so why don't you socialize with us, either by leaving a comment on this page or... Friend us on FacebookRoll through our tumblrEmail us at rolledspinepodcasts@gmail.comTweet us as a group @rolledspine, or individually as Diabolu Frank & Illegal Machine. Fixit don't tweet.If The Marvel Super Heroes Podcast Blogger page isn't your bag, try the umbrella Rolled Spine Podcasts Wordpress blog.

Steve Dillon, Jason Pearson, the Walking Dead Season 7 premiere (spoilers begin at 22:43), Justice League #200 by Gerry Conway, George Perez, Brett Breeding, Roy Thomas, Carl gafford, Pat Broderick, Terry Austin, Jim Aparo, Tatjana Wood, Dick Giordano, Adrienne Roy, Gil Kane, Anthony Tollin, Carmine Infantino, Frank Giacoia, Brian Bolland, and Joe Kubert, TV-O-Rama: Supergirl, Arrow, and Flash, All-New Wolverine by Tom Taylor, Marcio Takara, and Ig Guara, Marvel Masterworks: Menace by Stan Lee, Bill Everett, George Tuska, John Romita, Werner Roth, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, and Joe Sinnott, Superwoman by Phil Jimenez, Emanuela Lupacchino, Matt Santorelli, Joe Prado, Ray McCarthy, Jeromy Cox, and Hi-Fi, Batman #9 by Tom King, Mikel Janin, and June Chung, Black Hand Comics Volume 2 by Wes Craig, Broken Moon by Steve Niles, Nat Jones, and Sanjulian from American Gothic Press, Star Trek: Boldly Go #1 by Mike Johnson, Tony Shasteen, and David Mastrolonardo, Descender by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, and a whole mess more!

In this episode, I'll be circling back to one of the main inspirations for this show, Steve Savage the Balloon Buster!  Despite the very few appearances made by this obscure DC war hero, some of the top names in comics worked on his feature, and it really produced some top notch genre stories.  Check out a recap of the Maverick Ace's very 1st adventure and,Download this episode HERE!Please scroll down to see images from this issue, and be sure to check out previous episodes of I'm the Gun on iTunes & Google Play!If you are a fan of DC war comics - I'd love to hear from you!  Email me at: imthegun@gmail.com, or hit me up on Twitter: @marksweeneyjrThanks for listening! Theme created using a sample of 'Shotgun' by Duran DuranIf you're so poor, Pa Savage, why you having young Steve shoot up all your damn money?!Top notch aerial action, courtesy of Russ HeathDead comrades tied to the wings - chilling

War comics legend Russ Heath joins regular writer Chuck Dixon for a story about Ice and Speed tracking a ruthless VC sniper known as The Ghost. It's all in The 'Nam #65, "The Gratitude of His People." As always, I take a complete look at the issue and this time around I'll be looking at June 1971.

War comics legend Russ Heath joins regular writer Chuck Dixon for a story about Ice and Speed tracking a ruthless VC sniper known as The Ghost. It's all in The 'Nam #65, "The Gratitude of His People." As always, I take a complete look at the issue and this time around I'll be looking at June 1971.

Zack Kruse joins us to talk about Daniel Warren Johnson and Space Mullet, Anaconda, the Appleseed Con (Mike Norton, Pete Bagge, Steve Ditko, Steranko, Tom Scioli, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Kyle Baker, Neal Adams, Seth Fisher, Adam Hughes, Art Adams, Dave Stevens, Alex Ross, Brian Bolland, Mike Zeck, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, Ed Piskor, Ryan Browne, Dave Wachter, and more), Showcase Presents: Sea Devils by Russ Heath and Robert Kanigher, Stan Lee, Jim Balent, Valiant's Unity by Matt Kindt and Dougie Braithwaite, IDW's Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott and David Tipton and company, Francesco Francavilla, Rick Remender and company's astoundingly good Uncanny Avengers, Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey's Moon Knight, Jonathan Hickman's Time Runs Out, Robert Kirkman, Manifest Destiny by Chris Dingess, Owen Gieni, and Matthew Roberts from Image, Nailbiter, Southern Bastards, Jodorowsky's DUNE, Saga, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and a whole mess more!

Ryan Browne (Blast Furnace, God Hates Astronauts) braves the murky waters of the 11 O'Clock wading pool to talk with us about Kickstarter, Mickey Rourke and Wild Orchid, G.I. War Tales #4 (Robert Kanigher, Russ Heath, Bernie Krigstein, Mort Drucker, and more), Isotope Comics and James Sime, Eduardo Risso and Carlos Trillo, Brandon Graham's Perverts of the Unknown and Pillow Fight, Robin Bougie's Cinema Sewer, Bedlam, The Manhattan Projects, effective sound effects, Hilary Barta, Jason Aaron, Rob Schrab's SCUD: The Disposable Assassin, Julian Lytle's Ants, Justified, American Horror Story, Tim Seeley and Masters of the Universe, SAGA, Sullivan's Sluggers, Jason Brubaker's reMIND, Mars Attacks! by Johns Layman and McCrea from IDW, Jeffrey Brown's Darth Vader and Son, Darwyn Cooke's Parker and Before Watchmen, Jordie Bellaire, and a whole mess more!

After raising our glasses to the life and work of the recently-departed Dwayne McDuffie, we retreat to our corners and begin this week's tag-team tussles with Chris and Jason taking on the landmark Alien Legion series from Marvel/Epic, and King DAP and I traipsing across Hal Jordan's mental landscape in J. M. DeMatteis and Seth Fisher's awe-inspiring Green Lantern: Willworld! Plus, we have plenty of time left to discuss B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs and Hellboy, creators we allow an occasional "pass" (Walt Simonson, Neal Adams, Todd McFarlane, John Byrne, John Severin, Russ Heath, Tony DeZuniga, Sal and John Buscema, and more), Warriors of the Shadow Realm, Godland, First Wave, Richard Starking and Elephantmen, American Vampire, The Dark Tower, and much more!

The Cult of Chaos reigns as we caterwaul through a seemingly-endless cascade of comics commentary, including Mike Norton's Battlepug and Young Justice, regina piles and hoarding comics, the war genre, Russ Heath, pole shifts, Jaime Hernandez (via Sidebar), Wandering Star by Terri S. Wood/Challender, Desert Island's Smoke Signal #7 (Charles Burns, Jim Rugg, Sam Henderson, Jordan Crane, Marc Bell, Bill "Zippy" Griffith, and more), Deadpool, Green Lantern, Marvel vampires, the first volume of Lives by Masayuki Taguchi and TokyoPop, Mahmud Asrar, Madame Xanadu and Amy Reeder, Mirage Mini Comics (Eastman, Laird, Bissette, Veitch, Martin, Jewett, Zulli, Lawson, and more), comic-themed and -inspired cartoons (Generator Rex, Young Justice, Symbiotic Titan, and others), the Captain America trailer, Weird Worlds, Who is Jake Ellis? from Image, Cinderella: Fables are Forever #1, the Omega Men, and a whole mess more!