Magneto and Titanium Man

While there’s a rather obvious connection between comics (“sequential narratives”) and motion pictures, the connection between comics and popular music is less obvious. Although it’s unusual to see a reference to comics invoked in the context of popular music, this article, on Esoteric’s new SERVE OR SUFFER hip hop album, reveals some interesting connections between the two media. One of the earliest explicit connections I remember between comics and music, revealing that the two could come into confluence, was Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Magneto and Titanium Man,” from VENUS AND MARS (1975), a sort of ekphrastic attempt at a comic book. The music on Esoteric’s new album may not appeal to everyone, but it is interesting to see a concept album focused on the idea nonetheless.

In the 1960s, there was perhaps a closer connection to rock culture and the so-called “underground“ comics of the time--the cover of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s CHEAP THRILLS, for instance, was drawn by R. Crumb. Some years later, John Byrne would create the Silver Surfer illustration used on the cover of Joe Satriani’s album SURFING WITH THE ALIEN; a webpage of album covers drawn by comic book artists can be found here. So far as I’ve been able to discover, the first rock band inspired to take its name from a comic book was Suicide. According to Simon Reynolds (Rip It Up and Start Again, p. 143) the band took its name from the title of a Ghost Rider comic titled “Satan Suicide,“ “an issue of [Alan] Vega’s favorite comic book.” In 1979, Marvel Comics released a comic book (pictured) based on the characters in Alice Cooper’s FROM THE INSIDE (1978). The typographic design for The Cramps’ name was inspired by EC Comics’ Tales From the Crypt (EC Comics’ influence can also be seen in the cover of the Alice Cooper comic).

I’ve assembled below a playlist with references to comic characters. I’ve listed The Jam’s version of Neil Hefti’s “Batman Theme,” which has been covered many times over the years; it’s interesting that all the rock songs that I could find with comics references appeared after the Batman TV series premiered in January 1966.

A Rock Comic Con:
Donovan – “Sunshine Superman,” Sunshine Superman (1966)
The Kinks – “Johnny Thunder,” The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
The Beatles – “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (“So Captain Marvel zapped him right between the eyes”), The Beatles (1968)
T. Rex – “Mambo Sun,” (“I’m Dr. Strange for you”), Electric Warrior (1971)
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – “Sergeant Fury,” The Impossible Dream (1974)
Paul McCartney and Wings – “Magneto and Titanium Man,” Venus and Mars (1975)
The Jam – “Batman Theme,” In The City (1977)
Suicide – “Ghost Rider,” Suicide (1977)
XTC – “Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me),” Black Sea (1980)
Joe Satriani – Surfing With the Alien (album of instrumentals), 1987
Prince – “Batdance,” Batman (1989)
Crash Test Dummies – “Superman’s Song,” The Ghosts That Haunt Me (1991)
Spin Doctors – “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues,” Pocket Full of Kryptonite (1991)
Esoteric vs. Gary Numan – “General Zod,” Pterodactyl Tubeway (2007)

Soft Rock

Perusing the used record bins in the local Goodwill Store the other day, I came across the worn, tattered cover (no LP inside) of a K-Tel compilation album consisting of “Soft Rock” hits, issued in 1975 or thereabouts. I don’t remember all the songs listed on the back cover, but I do recall the album including, for instance, Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” Three Dog Night’s “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain,” Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston,” Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You,” and America’s “Tin Man.” Since coming across that old album cover, I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “Soft Rock,” its features and characteristics.

What the phrase “Soft Rock” refers to, musically speaking, is very elusive. I don’t recall hearing the term prior to the mid-70s, when compilations of the K-Tel kind (pictured) began to be heavily marketed and sold through television advertisements. Obviously “Soft Rock” is feminine-coded as opposed to the masculine-coded “Hard Rock,” thus linking “Soft Rock” to the “Singer/Songwriter” tradition, also feminine-coded (Carole King, James Taylor). “Soft Rock” suggests that there’s something about the contents of the K-Tel album that fundamentally distinguishes it from other forms of rock, rather like “light” sour cream is different in some basic way from “regular” sour cream, or “fat free” Half and Half from regular Half and Half. If, by analogy, “Soft Rock” is different from “normal” rock in the same way fat free Half and Half is different from “normal” Half and Half, then presumably it refers to rock music purged of some feature of “normal” rock that is perceived as pernicious or “unhealthy.” Of course it is much more complicated than this (based on list of songs I remember being on the album, I would say that Soft Rock is characterized by traditional romantic themes, for instance), but as a rhetorical gesture, perhaps it is enough to understand what it, at least in part, refers: as a phrase peculiar to the 1970s, “Soft Rock” means, this music ain’t that 60s “free love” and “got to revolution” crap. As opposed to being “raw,” Soft Rock is “cooked”—that is, it has so-called “high” production values, medium tempos, orchestrations (“strings”), pop-like melodic hooks, and lyrics focusing on traditional romance (and heartbreak): “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Laughter in the Rain.” And while the designation is rife with problems (as Simon Frith and others have pointed out), the general consensus at the time, as I remember, was that Soft Rock was commercialized rock—an accusation bolstered by the aggressive marketing of K-Tel albums, among other sorts of compilations, on TV. The K-Tel compilation albums of the 1970s are the antecedent of the “Now That’s What I Call Music” series of CDs currently found in stores and on-line.

In fact, the phrase “Soft Rock,” rather like that of “Garage Rock,” represents the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation. “Garage Rock,” as a term, didn’t exist until 1972, thanks to Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s NUGGETS anthology, in which the value and significance of aspiring rock musicians rehearsing in their parents’ garage was reinterpreted as “authentic,” that is, non-commercialized, rock. The same principle applies to the history of “Punk Rock.” “Punk,” as a term used to describe the culture gathered around a particular type of rock music, had no musical application until around 1975. Immediately afterward, the word “punk” gained currency, people identified themselves and their culture with the term and they started stitiching together a history, memorializing certain figures that came before them and ascribing to those figures their own desires--which those illustrious predecessors could not have fully known. Thus, some historiographers memorialize the MC5 and The Stooges as punk precursors, while others memorialize the Velvet Underground. The narratives that grew up around punk are, in effect, reinterpretations of the past, establishing predecessors on the analogy of the pilgrims who settled America, who sacrificed for a future they could not have fully known or understood. To refer to, say, The Byrds or The Beau Brummels as “Soft Rock” would have made no sense in the mid-60s; the term can only make sense in retrospect, as a consequence of the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation.