Happy Birthday Jim Steranko

This year’s annual Scorpio birthday tribute goes out to comics legend Jim Steranko. Along with Neal Adams, Steranko brought a maturity to comics in the late Sixties that completely changed the way people saw comic books, Adams with DC’s Deadman in Strange Adventures comics and Steranko in Marvel’s Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Jim Steranko brought graphic style in a medium that was still mostly stuck in exaggerated, cartoony caricatures. Steranko’s art style brought comics into the Swinging Sixties, incorporating elements of Pop Art, colorful psychedelia, and cinematic images mostly influenced by Mario Bava films (ref. Black Sabbath, Danger: Diabolik, Blood and Black Lace, etc.).

A Jim Steranko comic book cover leapt off the stands every month; no other comic on the newsstand even looked like his or even came close. Steranko’s first work for Marvel was Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., a poor cash-in on the James Bond spy movie craze featuring a post-war Sgt. Fury with a few of his Howling Commandos on board (Dum Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones). The series was barely breathing oxygen providing support to the superior Doctor Strange in Strange Tales Comics. Steranko originally drew layouts for Jack Kirby in the series but eventually took over the art reins, then taking over the writing reins from Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, gaining complete control over the series and taking it places not seen in comics at the time.

One of the best examples of Steranko’s graphic genius is the legendary cover to Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4, often imitated to the point of even The Simpsons comics doing a tribute to the cover. In addition to Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Steranko blew minds with his work on Captain America, X-Men, and a cover for The Incredible Hulk that has to be seen to be believed!

A new Steranko comic release in 1967-68 was as eagerly anticipated as a new Beatles single, in that it heralded an exciting new way of seeing things. A lot of other kids must have agreed with me because they were some of the fastest selling comics to fly off the stands. It took me years to score Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 because it instantly sold out on release.

Jim Steranko, born November 5, 1938 in Reading, Pennsylvania, grew up working in carnivals as a fire-eater, magician, and later resorted to burglary. He also got heavily into playing guitar in various local bands. After a period of commercial art, Steranko moved over to illustrating several short-lived superhero series for Harvey Comics.

Steranko’s legendary work for Marvel gave him artistic control that included splash pages in the middle and end of the comic, sometimes even taking up two pages, unheard of at the time. He also colored his own comics, a first at the time. All this artistic freedom eventually came to a head when Marvel big kahuna Stan Lee began heavily editing Steranko’s previously untampered work,creating major friction between the two men.

Steranko’s next move was to start his own publishing company Supergraphics, which produced the Steranko History of Comics in 1972, one of the earliest academic studies on the history of comics. By the 1980’s he published Prevue Magazine, an aggressively heterosexual movie magazine that always managed to plug in a few photos of Sybil Danning and Steranko clutching some hot, new young blonde action movie starlet.

Jim Steranko was inducted to the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2006, and continues to this day to be a major influence in comics art. Like a Sam Fuller film, Henry Moore sculpture, or Captain Beefheart album, once you’ve seen a Jim Steranko comic you know you’ve seen something incomparable and unforgettable.

Bill & Peggy & Rudi & Camille & Track Lighting

One of the most infamous mixed media ménage-a-trois collaborations of the past fifty years was the brilliant work by jazz photographer William Claxton, his wife/model Peggy Moffitt, and genius designer Rudi Gernreich. Their work together has been documented well through the decades, notably in “The Rudi Gernreich Book”, edited by Claxton and Moffitt and also in Claxton’s short film “Basic Black”. So it was absolutely thrilling to attend the mixed media presentation of their work titled “The Total Look” at West Hollywood’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at the Pacific Design Center.

The show had something for everyone: fashion, photography and dance: Moffitt started out as a dancer, and struck many modern dance poses in her modeling. It was the ultimate mixed media presentation; the ground floor had “Basic Black” playing on one screen with a slide show playing Claxton photos of Moffitt decked out in Rudi’s stunning designs on the other. On the upper floor were original and replicas of Gernreich designs dressed up in mannequins around the room. Seeing his mod fashions in the flesh complimented the great Claxton fashion photography that framed the walls around the room.

All three worked in perfect synthesis with each other, with Claxton’s photography capturing Moffitt’s expressiveness lending elasticity and shape to even the most abstract outfits designed by Gernreich. While Gernreich’s designs were amazing and dynamic enough to be modeled by any top model of their day, Peggy Moffitt added an extra dimension to his more geometric designs by ramping up the angularity in her dance poses.

Genreich’s designs have an almost architectural quality to them: cone shaped helmets, the infamous topless bathing suit, mask-like hats that cover half the face; some of them can be viewed in the modeling scene in “Blow Up”, along with Ms. Moffitt herself. He was the ultimate designer, endlessly inventive with shapes, patterns, and printed fabrics. The ingenuity of his designs displayed in the upper showroom were rich in color, composition and shape, a true inspiration for anyone even remotely interested in fashion design. I will definitely return to “The Total Look” before it closes in late May.

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Camille Rose Garcia had an exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery to mark the release of her remarkable interpretation of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, “Snow White” (out now via Harper Design Books). The acrylic paintings were strikingly colorful and rendered in her inimitable style, vertical cascades of color running down the pieces like unholy stalactites in a Technicolor cave.

Her rendition of the legendary characters was priceless: The Seven Dwarfs looked like a cross between E.C. Segar’s Jeep and a pack of hairless possums. Even Snow White looked kind of out of it in these pieces; the exhibit had a nightmarish, otherworldly quality. The Prince who saves Snow White is rendered by Garcia as some kind of bizarre-looking gigolo. I liked the part where she’s poisoned in her bed with her name written on it like some kind of coffin.

I haven’t seen her book on Alice In Wonderland, but all the same I highly recommend “Snow White”. As long as she’s doing Disney remixes, maybe Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty will be next.

BTW, Michael Kohn Gallery, you might want to check what year you're living in before you print up posters. I mean really.

Christopher Milk

If there was ever a footnote in music history that was as large as an elephant it would probably be Christopher Milk. A band that never really attained stardom, much less major attention, they were still deep in the pocket of the glam scene in Los Angeles in the early Seventies.

Christopher Milk was largely the invention of John Mendelssohn, notorious critic for Rolling Stone Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Creem Magazine. He gained a good deal of his notoriety by panning bad hippie bands like Led Zeppelin at a time these bombastic, over-indulgent monsters were at the peak of their popularity. Regardless of whether these bands sold out arenas or not, Mendelssohn, representing L.A.’s largest newspaper, would tell us these bands were bunk. You could call it punk journalism before there was a name for it. It was debatable as to who garnered more hate mail, him or Lester Bangs.

John Mendelssohn’s love of all things mod and freakbeat wasn’t a solitary passion. If anything, there was a quiet explosion of people and bands from the West Los Angeles area at the time who were rabid followers. In 1971-1972 there was the Mael Brothers, who formed Halfnelson, eventually Sparks, rock critic Harold Bronson, co-founder of Rhino Records located down the street from the UCLA campus and other mod misfits in addition to the Christopher Milk project.

All these maniacs embraced bands like The Move, The Yardbirds, pre-“Tommy” era The Who, The Kinks, Bonzo Dog Band, Small Faces, Hollies, Procol Harum, pre-Ziggy David Bowie, solo Syd Barrett and a host of others. It was an exciting antidote to the Jethro Tull-Blood Sweat & Tears mind rot that was happening at the time.

Mendelssohn often wrote in Phonograph Record Magazine about his band Christopher Milk, announcing a 7” EP release on United Artists Records, with a gatefold cover and lyric sheet, no less. It was available only through mail order. I think the whole thing cost $1.00, so I jumped at the opportunity to score this puppy.

When I got the record I was pleasantly surprised. The songs were cool and the band played pretty well, especially on songs like “Basket Case”, “Just A Cop”, a sort of gay “X-Offender” (“…to you he’s just a cop but to me he’s Mister Right”), the sublime “Hey Heavyweight”, and one of my favorite titles ever, “There’s A Broken Heart For Every Rock & Roll Star On Laurel Canyon Boulevard”.

A few months later I was watching my favorite teen beat cable access show (KDOC-TV Anaheim) and who should be lip-syncing to their new record but Christopher Milk! Surly Ralph Oswald the guitarist played piano and sang “There’s A Broken Heart” and John handled vocals on “Hey Heavyweight”. I was thrilled to see them on TV right after The Little Rascals (hosted by Stymie Beard!).

John kept writing reviews and not much was heard from the band for awhile until the Fall of 1972, when a new album was released on Reprise Records titled “Some People Will Drink Anything”. The cover looked cheaper than the UA release and the songs were more eclectic, including a Bonzo Dog-influenced cover of “The Locomotion”, a Procol Harum sounding tune called “In Search of R. Crumb” among others.

The album wasn’t really bad but it was so derivative it was almost a game of “Play The Influences”. It seemed kind of disappointing especially since bands like Halfnelson, Roxy Music and Lou Reed’s “Transformer” were all coming out at the same time. It sounded aimless pitted against everyone else. Too bad.

The album, like the band, faded into the ozone. My next run-in with the band in some form was 4 years later when I bought a microphone advertised in The Recycler and the man selling it was C. Milk drummer G. Whiz. He was living in some communal hippie house right by The Hollywood Bowl. When I mentioned Christopher Milk he seemed polite but uncomfortable. The impresssion I got was that the band just sort of fizzled out. But John sure as hell didn't.

A year later (1977) my friend Rich D'Andrea told me he was playing bass in a band called The Pits fronted by John Mendelssohn. I said, "WHAT???? He's got a new band? When are you guys playing?"
Well, they were doing a show at The Starwood and I got on the guest list and John was back to crooning great songs, no Christopher Milk stuff but new tunes like "Hollywood Can Be Cruel" and "You're The Pits".

The Pits maintained a C. Milk-type mod sound but with an aggressive metallic approach, very much like another new band that had just played The Starwood, Cheap Trick. They even opened with the ultra-heavy "Hello Susie" by The Move. I thought The Pits were terrific.

The Pits didn't really last long after a handful of shows - Rich left to play with Gary Valentine & The Know, etc. Wherever John may be I hope he knows that he produced some fun records and bands that may not have been genius but were at the very most solid entertainment. That counts for a lot in my book, and it would be great to see the complete Christopher Milk recordings re-released on CD sometime soon.

The Burden of Being Eric Burdon

When I was a little boy I didn't know much about sex but the minute I heard "Boom Boom" by The Animals I thought it was the sexiest song I'd ever heard. I didn't know it was a heavily tarted up version of a John Lee Hooker song, all I know was that I felt the vibe the band projected, and I felt pretty funny all over at the time. "House of The Rising Sun" was their biggest hit, a very jazzy reading of an old Leadbelly folk tune that completely transcended the sharecropper fields by Eric Burdon's East End working class Angry Young Man voice. It definitely didn't end there!

"It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" were further raw slices of intense Albert Finney-style anger served by Mr. Burdon set to the jazziest organ in British rock. (Rod Argent of The Zombies was more classical than jazz to my ears). When Burdon drops to a baritone when he sings "I don't need your sympathy" in "Inside Looking Out" it gives me chills. His reading of Donovan's "Hey Gyp" makes more sense than the original, altering the original's "I don't need you sugar cube" to "I don't need your Cadillac, long, shiny, cool and black", pouring out more sex again. And let's not forget recalling his first sexual experience in "When I Was Young", "She was brown and I was pretty green".

Making the transition from Mod groovers to Psychedelic explorers has always been rough terrain for some bands (The Kinks, The Zombies, etc.) but for others like The Who it was a slam dunk. The Animals really took to psychedelia with sometimes hysterically bad results. Ironically, though it's really entertaining kitsch! "A Girl Named Sandoz" is a love song to acid with some tasty vibes, but then there's the cringe-worthy "San Franciscan Nights" with it's silly spoken introduction urging one and all to move to Haight-Ashbury. No matter how bad the lyrics Burdon sings with so much conviction you almost want to believe everything he sings. But common sense tells you not to.

"Winds of Change" is one of his name-drop tunes, where he tells us about the history of music, "Frank Zappa zapped...The Mamas and Papas knew where it's at". I'm not making this shit up! At least he roll calls jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Cozy Cole, so he's not just playing pop favorites. But the roll call continues with "Monterey" with it's Big Girl Lost in The Bigger City music stolen from The Mothers of Invention's "Call Any Vegetable" (Zappa produced an Animals album, so maybe he okayed it). The roll calls got sillier: "Hugh Masakela's music was black as night...His Majesty, Prince (Brian) Jones smiled as he moved through the crowd...Even the cops grooved with us".

If there's one thing that's unimpeachable about Burdon, it's the soulful sincerity of his music whether he's crooning a cool bluesy number like "Club A Go-Go" or goes tropical in "White Houses" ("you better get straight") or goes Disney African on us with "Spill The Wine". Whether he's at the top of his game or playing the migraine hipster Eric Burdon is never boring.