Still alive, if sometimes just barely. Today's ramblings, a weirdly random discovery of two almost 50-year old rebel songs thanks to a song which is not a rebel song, a great old fanzine cover by a true living legend of comics, a quick look at one of my favourite comedy podcasts and by far my favourite current TV show as it enters its final season.
There's been a lot of talk about this next song.. maybe a little too much talk. This song is not a rebel song... this song is "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
For some reason that always cracks me up (I think it's regularly mocked on the "Never Not Funny" podcast by Jimmy Pardo, and might have been joked about on "U Talkin' U2 To Me?" by Adam Scott Aukerman, but my amusement at it definitely predates both of those) . So I decided to do an internet search for "Is Sunday Bloody Sunday a rebel song". Not sure what I expected to find, but I did not expect to find out that John Lennon had a song called "Sunday Bloody Sunday" from 1972, shortly after the actual January 30 "Bloody Sunday" of that year, and a decade before the U2 song. For a few seconds I wondered if I was the last person to find out that U2's song was a John Lennon cover, but quickly found out that it was a completely different song that I had never heard of before. And I give thanks that I found out about this in 2019, because a few years ago it probably wouldn't have been so easy for me to listen to it.
And hey, guess what? Rebel song!
You anglo pigs and scotties
Sent to colonize the North
You wave your bloody Union Jack
And you know what it's worth!
It's a bit of a mess in the production, lots of Phil Spector and Yoko Ono and all that entails, but I like it, and can dream of a more stripped down version.
And the revelations keep coming as I found out that, surprisingly, Paul McCartney was there even before that, and eschewed all subtlety on his position with "Give Ireland Back To The Irish".
Tell me how would you like it
If on your way to work
You were stopped by Irish soldiers
Would you lie down do nothing
Would you give in or go berserk
I think we're going to have to go with "rebel song" for this one as well. Also, like just about anything by McCartney with Wings from the that era, over-produced mess of a song, but still pretty cool and you can feel the heart of a good song underneath all the layers.
So this was kind of a cool day, in a musical discovery sense.
Nice issue of the long-running fan magazine, founded in the early 1960s by Jerry Bails and by this time edited by Mike Tiefenbacher and Jerome Sinkovec. Besides some news and letters there's a good history of Gold Key comics with a long list of their publications, a short comic story and a long amusing interview with Jim Warren on his company (with a rebuttal by Marv Wolfman). I especially like Warren's referring to Stan Lee as "Mr. Presents", which I do sometimes (not sure if I picked it up from here or somewhere else. I'm thinking maybe Roz Kirby called him that once somewhere).
If somehow you've gotten this far without knowing anything about what happens on the show, definitely start checking it out now.
And that's a wrap for this time. Coming up, more on some of the long-running serialized comics I'm reading (including a few new ones added to the mix), more random comics pulled from the boxes, maybe some other stuff.
