Word: comical
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...near-bonus comic, fully titled "Pistolwhip Presents: Mephisto and the Empty Box," has little to do with the larger work, though it seems to take place in the same universe. A man's wife disappears into a magician's box when the magician dies onstage. Awash in confusion and grief, the man begins studying the tricks and putting on his own show in hopes of creating her again. At $3.95 it makes for a nice introduction to these guy's unique style, if ponying up $14.95 for the 120-page book seems too much too soon...
...dozen other soloists and groups were giving them voice. The godfather of this strange, beautiful new creature was Atlantic?s co-founder, Ahmet Ertegun. And his adopted family was a handsome one indeed. In the late ?50s he had the top of the pops: ballad group (The Drifters) and comic group (The Coasters), R&B shouter (Ray Charles) and Sinatra heir-apparent (Bobby Darin...
...local R&B hits. One of these was Leiber and Stoller?s "Smokey Joe?s Cafe." A lurking melodrama in the "Hernando?s Hideaway" fashion (but written a year before that Broadway tune), it?s sung by L&S? L.A. discoveries the Robins. It features an almost maniacally comic attack by lead singer Carl Gardner. The vocal could have come right off the Chitlin Circuit of black vaudeville; imagine Mantan Moreland as a great belter. The production is full, clear and incorrigibly boppin?- Leiber and Stoller, out by the Pacific, showing the Atlantic boys how it?s done. Ertegun...
...Leiber?s parodies - "aural cartoons," Donald Clarke calls them - were also social criticism; they sounded black but could apply to alienated whites too. Stoller?s uptempo bluesy charts (usually 12-bar blues) found the ideal blend of honking sax solos by King Curtis and the singers, who had distinct comic personality: Gardner?s lead tenor in a vaudeville vibrato of fear and trembling, Bobby Guy?s smart-guy growl (a nastier version of the Ray Charles tout-voice), Dub Jones? mindshaft bass delivering the cool catchphrases (as parent: "You better leave my daughter alone" and "Don?t talk back...
...featured player. Nothing against Fonda, who still has the most wickedly flirtatious mouth of any Hollywood actress. But Chinese action stars have succeeded with the American public only when their co-stars are African-American. Jackie Chan had his one big U.S. hit, Rush Hour, with the black comic Chris Tucker; the love interest in Romeo Must Die was the hip-hop thrust Aaliyah...