Tonight’s lecture in Boston by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, authors of the superb RTB Book: Recording The Beatles, was as much fun as seeing Stephen Colbert last year! Two hours flew by as Brian and Kevin told their informative and entertaining stories, presented slide shows, and played recordings to demonstrate some of the techniques that were used by The Beatles. In this video clip they explain how they met. Sorry about the dark picture:
Note: As requested by Kehew and Ryan, I won’t post anything with Beatles music.
I’ll post more about tonight’s lecture on Wednesday, when Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan will be at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York, where The Beatles made their legendary first American appearance. Thank you, Audio Engineering Society for putting on this lecture — with free admission — and thanks to the Boston Public Library for the auditorium.
Today, Charles M. Schulz would have been — yikes! — 86. Twenty years ago, there was a series of Peanuts animated cartoons called This is America, Charlie Brown. I’ve seen most of them and they’re a very good introduction to American history. Unfortunately, the videos are out of print, but they’re available on Netflix. I have some of them on good, ol’ LaserDisc, including “The Mayflower Voyagers”, five minutes of which you’ll find on the embedded video player. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
Before falling deathly ill in New York, I had a good time at the comic book convention called The National: Big Apple Con. Mark Evanier was there, and he hosted several panels. I’ll feature one of them in an upcoming post.
After last year’s show, I mentioned an art dealer named Mike Burkey, who runs his business under the name Romitaman, for comic book illustrator John Romita Sr. I had said Dennis and I would probably be doing some business with him “in the near future.” Well, it turned out to not be so near, but business has been transacted.
Twenty years ago, I was at a comic book show in Boston where Stan Lee was the guest-of-honor. (This week Stan was honored at The White House.) Carol and I had been married only six months, we’d bought our first house, along with a new car to replace Carol’s 18-year-old Plymouth Valiant, so money was very tight. But I couldn’t resist buying two pages of original pen-and-ink art for $60 each. They were from The Amazing Spider-Man #50. The header was scanned from the panel on the right.
In comic book circles this issue is famous for the story “Spider-Man No More!”, which provided some of the inspiration for the second movie. I kept one page and gave the other to Dennis for his birthday that year.
Last year, Dennis mentioned to Burkey that we owned those pages, and Mike declared that he “had to have them,” because he was trying to reassemble all of the original art to ASM #50. Through email and phone calls Burkey made each of us an offer, and last weekend we let the pages go for significantly more than $60.
A portion of the proceeds was donated to comic book artist Gene Colan and his wife Adrienne, to help cover their medical bills. Gene was extremely ill earlier this year, and thankfully he’s feeling good enough now to travel to California next month to attend a tribute in his honor at the Cartoon Art Museum.
This morning on the BBC World Service I heard (while writhing in agony from my ailment) our blogging friend Brian Sibley talking about Mickey Mouse’s 80th birthday. There’s audio of Brian talking about Mickey, that’s a bit different from what I heard this morning, at this link. And over at this link, Brian has an essay about the significance of the mouse, all these years later.
