Category: Frankie Valli

Covering Bobby Z

Musing about the May birthdays of musicians, particularly musicians whose work I own, I noticed that any number of them covered Bob Dylan songs. Not a surprise there; Dylan’s put out over 40 albums.

What WAS a little surprising was that I couldn’t find the May birthday songs I own on YouTube; I’ve just started to expect it.

I first looked for the pair of songs from Pete Seeger’s We Shall Overcome album, a live 1963 recording. Pete did A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Who Killed Davey Moore; nope. Instead, here’s Paths of Victory

Then I sought out Poor Immigrant by Judy Collins from my beloved Who Knows Where The Time Goes album; no such luck. Here’s Judy singing Like a Rolling Stone

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons perform the amazingly goofy Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, which simply must be heard to be believed. Not there. I foiund, though, the Jersey Boys doing Queen Jane Approximately

I DID discover live versions of a couple songs: Stevie Wonder performing Blowin’ the Wind

Not found on the Billy Joel YouTube channel, but otherwise available is his version of To Make You Feel My Love

Finally, some Dylan doing Dylan; I couldn’t find Seeger doing Davey Moore, but here’s a version by Bob himself.

Happy birthday, Bob.
ROG

ROG

SCATHING BOOK REVIEW: Fred Hembeck’s TNCEHAO


Fred Hembeck is my friend. We were friends back in my days at FantaCo. After a long hiatus, we’ve been friends in my period of blogging. So now that I’m reviewing his book, THE NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS, I feel that I should especially tough on his compendium.

Item 1: it’s not in color. Of course much of it was not in color in the first place, and it IS 900 pages for 25 bucks. (Truth is, if that page of the X-Men which was used as an insert in Hembeck #2 WERE in goldenrod, I think I would have suffered flashbacks from my days doing mail order at the ‘Co.)

Item 2: those CBG pages, which were hard to read at 11 X 17 are even harder to read at 8 X 10.5 or whatever it is. Strange though – I’ve been reading Hembeck’s work for so long (30 years!) that it’s not the problem I thought it’d be.

Item 3: it doesn’t have the Marvel and DC copyrighted stuff. Hey, if this is a big success, don’t you think Marvel will want to follow the trend and package the Fantastic Four Roast, those Marvel Age pieces, that book in which Fred destroys the Marvel universe (what IS the name of that comic book?), et al., all in one piece.

Item 4: it’s not paginated. That IS tricky, but I suppose that’s why God created the bookmark.

Item 5: in the introductory page to the last section, the village of Saugerties is MISSPELLED! Shocking!

Ah, who am I kidding? I love this book. I started reading the introductory sections first. I was TRYING to bypass the stuff FantaCo published in the early 1980s, but I found myself stopping to read some of the framing stories, such as when bride of Hembeck Lynn Moss meets Bud Abbott and Elvis Costello. Or the time when Fred was going to blow off FantaCo for a mysterious benefactor. I also got to re-remember the wordless story Fred did with Bill Mantlo.

I’ve had the book almost a month and I’d be lying if I said I had read even half of this tome. But I’m happy to have it, for I can usually pull it off the shelf and read six or eight pages at a time between other duties.

So, despite my savage criticisms, go to your local comic book store, book store or the website of artiste himself and get it!
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To make up for that brutal review, a short piece featuring one or two of Fred’s favorite performers:

ROG

ROG
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