Music Trivia for Comic Book Nerds

If you're into comic books like Marvelman and Fables, you'll know the name Mark Buckingham. He's an award-winning artist whose resume also includes Star Trek and Doctor Strange for Marvel, Hellblazer, Miracleman, Tyranny Rex, Ghost Rider 2099 and many other projects.  Neil Gaiman was the best man at his wedding.

In short, the man will never, ever have to pay to attend Comic Con.

Point of triva:  in 1986, he was a 19 year-old kid working at a studio called Aardman Animations. His regular job was fetching tea for clients and the crew.  But for one music video project, he served as a stunt double as the crew worked out various animation techniques.  He's also the guy with the sledgehammer who squishes the chicken.

You've probably seen the video, too.

(Via Bleeding Cool via Brent)

A Music Sign You Never See Anymore

I can't remember the last time I heard a flight attendant say "The captain has switched off the no smoking sign."  Or a saw a warning on a car's gas tank that said "Unleaded fuel only."

Mental Floss has a fun selection of signs and announcements we never will see again.  On that list is this.

Ah, quad.  It was all the range for a while in the 1970s when stereo manufacturers tryed to convince us that four channels were better than two.  But because you needed special quad apps (and, if you believed the salesmen, special quad turntables) to play your new quad LPs--and because there were a couple of competing non-compatible quad systems--customers balked.  

We would patiently wait until the 90s before we shelled out for surround sound, Pro Logic, DSP and THX.

A side note:  a Detroit station, WWWW-FM, actually experimented with quad broadcasts.  They failed.

Business Lessons We Can All Learn from Slayer

Ruth Blatt is a Michigan-based academic who looks at rock'n'roll in intersesting ways.  She just contributed this article to Forbes magazine.

The rock band Slayer’s act combines the gory visuals of horror movies, the content of true crime documentaries, the antics of shock art, and the precision of military missiles into fast and angry songs that have been loved by a loyal following for more than 30 years. The band’s best-known album, Reign in Blood, is widely considered to be a thrash metal masterpiece. That was back in 1986, but the band’s trajectory since then has hardly been one of decline.

They won two Grammy Awards, in 2007 and 2008, and their 2006 album, Christ’s Illusion, debuted at number 5 on the Billboard chart, their highest chart position ever. All this without getting played on the radio. What’s more, they have mostly kept the same team since their formation in 1981.

Last week the band suffered a blow with the untimely death of their guitarist and key songwriter Jeff Hanneman. To a casual observer, Hanneman was a top-notch guitarist and the writer of controversial songs such as “Angel of Death,” a detached but vivid description of the deeds of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

But those who knew him personally describe him as a laid-back Californian with a playful side. His label mate Stephen Harris, former bassist for The Cult and guitarist in The Four Horsemen, had not spoken to him for two decades.

In 2011, Harris, by then a medical student, asked him to sign one of his ESP signature model guitars for a patient. “I told him the guitar is for a kid who has a really hard time socially relating to people,” Harris told me, “But he can play every Slayer song note for note.” Hanneman was moved by the request and happily signed the guitar.

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Interviews with Two of the Biggest Promoters in the World

And they're both Canadian.  Both interviews were conducted by veteran music journalist, Larry LeBlanc, at this year's Canadian Music Week in Toronto.

The first is with Michael Cohl, the long-time Canadian promoter who saved the Rolling Stones from obscurity in the late 80s with the Steel Wheels Tour.

The second interview is with Arthur Fogel, the former manager of Martha and the Muffins who has ascended to the level of Global Touring for Live Nation.  He's the guy that convinced the Police get back together and who helped conceive the massive 360 Tour for U2.

More video from CMW 2013 can be found on a dedicated YouTube channel.

How a Screaming Wife and Two Men and a Dog Contributed to David Bowie's Success

Here's an interesting bit of Bowie hisotry from The Telegraph:

Any live performance by David Bowie these days would be met by thousands of screaming fans and rave reviews worldwide.  

But unseen footage from a 1972 concert suggests his fame was not always so assured, with an audience made up of his adoring young wife and "two men and a dog".

Video from the small concert, to be broadcast as part of an upcoming BBC documentary, shows a screaming Angie Bowie surrounded by just a handful of other fans as she looks up at a Ziggy Stardust performance.

Her support, it has been claimed, helped transform Bowie into a global phenomenon, as the world aligned with the “rock star” persona he adopted.

The footage is just one of the unseen clips from David Bowie: Five Years,which focuses on 1971, 1975, 1977, 1981 and 1983 as the “critical” moments of the artist’s career.

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