Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song written by Eric Carmen
Performed by The Raspberries

No one wrote more brilliant songs about music than Eric Carmen, so I always felt strange hearing him on the radio in the eighties with movie soundtrack love songs. I always wanted to grab the nearest person and explain to them that this guy had done some of the greatest pop music since the Beatles. I was young and brash and did not appreciate whatever had led from Go All the Way to Hungry Eyes, let alone Overnight Sensation to Make Me Lose Control. Of course, the explanation is probably right there in front of me.

I will come right out and say that Starting Over, the last Raspberries album, is one of the greatest rock albums. Keep in mind that it was released a year before Born to Run. The band only released three albums before that, populated with a lot of great music, but the cohesion of the commentary on the music business makes Starting Over a complete experience that few groups accomplished.

The Raspberries get cited for creating power pop (just listen to Party’s Over for all your cowbell needs) while the Ramones were busy giving birth to punk music by this time, so the disconnect was there with disco ready to pounce. Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency and the Raspberries recorded Rose Colored Glasses– maybe Starting Over is about more than just the music business… Radio DJ’s were telling us that they played the right kind of music for us which only made things more fractious. In a world with far fewer media outlets, we could not envision the breakdown in the common cultural voice that was to come.

Cry should have been the Love Yourself of its day. Hell, just listen to Cry whenever you want to listen to Justin Bieber. The Raspberries were accused of being too smooth for good old fashioned rock. (Cleveland mods was their style, doing a take on The Who and that lot). What a phenomenal breakup song…

Great googlymoogly, don’t you just want to play air drums along with I Don’t Know What I Want? Is this song like listening to every Van Halen hit at once? Then there’s All Through the Night and Hands on You which probably presented challenges to any radio station looking to comply with FCC rules. Makes you wonder how Go All the Way ever became a major hit – although word of mouth can always work miracles. Besides, it sounded just enough like Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey and that was a song about something or other.

Let us now praise fabulous vocals– something got lost in the last twenty years or did musicians just stop wanting to harmonize? Throughout the album, that piano sound, too, it just kills me. It’s what brings me back to Horowitz and Gould, but to find it again in pop music… Starting Over was the swan song for the Raspberries, an ode to what was lost and what was gained. Not a lot of art looks forward while learning from the past.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 281 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Comic Strip created by Walt Kelly

Back when every house had the newspaper delivered, the literate kids always turned to the comics first. Kinder newspaper editors put the comics on the last couple pages, sometimes hidden amid the classified ads (if you don’t know what those are, then think of Craigslist (no relation), but for people with really good eyesight or a handy magnifying class). Of course, you never read all the strips because some were just too boring when the weather was nice and you needed to get back outside. Mary Worth, Judge Parker… these had extended plots and dealt with themes of little interest, like marriage and such. The strips that drew a kids eye fit into two categories: simpler lines (not badly drawn, just less cluttered) or rich with unusual images. Think Peanuts and Prince Valiant.

Pogo certainly had unusual images with all the talking animals, but it was so beautifully drawn that a child could easily mistake it for a strip aimed at adults (which it was) and skip right over it. The themes ranged from slapstick to politics of the day, so there was that whole unreliability of the content for the youthful reader. Then, the language was unexpected, requiring reading out loud sometimes just to figure out the sense of it, much like a first pass at Huckleberry Finn. Worst of all, Pogo was gone from the papers by the time I was out of elementary school, so I remember the characters vaguely and the general setting from those halcyon days, but nothing like Peanuts or Dick Tracy.

So I came to Pogo late, by way of old paperback collections. For me, Pogo feels like the quintessential American comic, an art form to which others lay claim, but feels like it could only come to fruition in the United States. Comics just feel like the sort of thing that would come out of the nineteenth century melting pot that needed new ways of communication that would bring people together.

Funny animal strips had been around for a while when Kelly left Disney and tried his hand at creating his own characters. The ensuing years brought an increasing politicization to the Okefenokee Swamp and its denizens, but they always managed to mark baseball season and Christmas. Their finest gift however was spreading common sense in a fine brew of humor. Cloaked within the doings of the possum, alligator, owl, turtle, skunk,…. a kid could learn a lot.

Kelly continuously pushed the boundaries of lettering and storytelling, working within a medium that is more restrictive than virtually any other that I can think of. Space constraints as well as editors frequently dropping panels on Sundays made the writing a nightmare.

Fantagraphics made a big splash years ago publishing the complete run of Peanuts in order. Then they tried to do the same with Pogo, but ran into numerous delays because many of the strips had been lost. They announced their predicament to the world and somehow, blessedly, they found what they needed.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 282 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Charles Dickens

Depending on the circles you run in, someone somewhere along the way probably has asked you what your favorite movie is. It may have been akin to asking what sort of music you listen to as shorthand for taking your temperature to see whether your idea of cool jibed with the questioner’s idea. Or it may have been a way to start a debate at an otherwise boring moment. I have been there. I may even have asked the question. And let’s be clear that it is not a question to ask if you cannot answer it. I usually took the film wonk’s easy way out and said Citizen Kane, a movie that truly blew my mind when I saw it the first time, but I can now say that about a lot of films. The thing is that the same question so rarely gets asked about books. People will ask what you’re currently reading or if you have read anything interesting lately or if you have read the current “it” book, but rarely what your favorite book might be. And it is a stumper. I have only heard the question asked a handful of times and just a couple times it received an answer. As for me, I fell into the dodging-the-question camp. I had not read Martin Chuzzlewit at the time.

Dickens wrote a lot, so if you like Dickens, you can parse him out over your lifetime. I first heard of John Irving doing that (probably apocryphally and maybe it was John Cheever or John Updike…) and it has always seemed like a good plan, so I have not read all of Dickens, but you probably haven’t either. Those that I have read I like a lot and Martin Chuzzlewit translates best to the modern world for me. Dickens had recently returned from a tour of the United States and had a lot to say about what he had seen. He was also carrying some lingering anger over being ripped off by American publishers as we were the China of the day as far as copyright goes. The middle section of the novel includes an extensive telling of the adventures of the younger Martin Chuzzlewit in our hemisphere. (Note that the book is the tale of the older Martin Chuzzlewit seeking an heir and the younger doing everything in his power to be disinherited, though much more comes into play as always.) Dickens’ critique of a land where everyone seeks their fortune may seem unfair, but he didn’t see it as unfairness. He didn’t bring down the country and he highlighted issues that merit attention.

Dickens was capable of remarkable humor- a central villain of the piece is named Pecksniff. If you can read the first three pages of the book and not get a laugh, then I admit that it may not be for you, but I confess to a certain sadness for you.

Apparently you can use favorite books for just the same purposes as favorite films. Really, you should not be afraid of standing near me at parties.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 283 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.