FieldsEdge

FMF 2008, Day 2

by JIM CARCHIDI
    Two down, one to go. Another day at Florida Music Festival... but this day was different. The Police were in town. Even though I had seen them in Cleveland with my Ohio family, The Booths, I had to go. This time Elvis Costello was the opening act!

    Elvis was in usual form - Kicked Ass! Rocking through hits like Pump It Up and Watching The Detectives as well as introducing some songs off his new album. Oh, and Sting joined him onstage for Allison. Yep, don't see that every day, do ya?

    Later, Sting would take back the stage with Stuart and Andy. Simply said, they gave an amazing performance. Where the Cleveland show was more energetic and fast-paced, the Orlando show was stylized with a lot more audience involvement and banter. Andy Summers seemed to be the force behind this performance, with a lot of stand out riffs, spotlight solos and a take-charge blistering lead into So Lonely for the 2nd encore, even before Stuart and Sting came back onstage. Also, Sting grew a beard. The Connery-esque look seemed to suit him.

    "Are you ready to sing, Orlando?" he asked early in the show. We were.

    A moody, coffeehouse atmosphere opened the show as blue strobes lit Sting and Andy Summers, sitting at opposite ends of the stage with Stuart Copeland at the drums. A deep, soulful rendition of Bring On The Night left me completely in awe. Jazzed up versions of Walking On The Moon, Voices Inside My Head and Roxanne played well against the faster pace of Next To You, Demolition Man and Driven To Tears. Conspicuously absent was Synchronicity 2 and Walking In Your Footsteps, but no one seemed to mind. After all, all the shows can't be alike.

    The fact that this show was part of the official "farewell tour", as announced last week, did carry an unwanted weight. But it lightened as the evening went on. The crowd of 12,000 was wrapped around their finger.

    My big-name-diversion took me from the indi-festival that continued only a few blocks away, but where there's a will, there's a way... especially when the show ends at 10:30! That's right, I managed to fit in 2 amazing FMF shows after The Police finished their set, making for a truly memorable night of music. Local favorite Matt Butcher put on a great show at BackBooth with a smooth country/folk-y style all his own. Then, new guys on the block Big Jef Special rocked the newly renovated Cheyenne Sallon just a couple blocks away. More country, with a dirty southern rock feel.

    OK, I'm done typing. Check out the updated FMF Photo Gallery - sorry, no Police or Elvis photos. I didn't carry that kind of clout this night (hence the long review for filler). More FMF fun coming tomorrow.

Florida Music Festival, Day 1

by JIM CARCHIDI

Another year, another massive music celebration in the streets of Orlando. I don't get to do concert photography as much as I used to, but FMF is always a must. The first night of FMF '08 had its ups and downs. Shows began late, and, with a very tight schedule in venues that are spread out over several blocks, late starts equal missing some bands. One punk band I really wanted to check out, The Runnamucks, began on time! Unfortunately, I missed them because the club doorman said they would be 30 minutes late. The ups, however, more than made up for the slight inconveniences. I got to hang out with my old pal, Orlando Sentinel Music Writer Jim Abbott -- we covered the local concert scene, as a team, for three years. I buddied up to some amazing artists at the FMF Rock Walk (where I was also an exhibitor) and, of course, saw some incredible shows. Check out the photo diary and stay tuned for more FMF '08 coverage in the days to come!

Florida Music Festival Rock Walk: Jim Rocks!

The 2008 Florida Music Festival starts this week, and Field's Edge co-founder Jim Carchidi will be there again, of course - but the big news this year is that Jim's been invited to exhibit some of his photos in the Rock Walk!

Jim talks a bit about shooting concerts over the years in this column by Orlando Sentinel music writer Jim Abbott.

His photography was a big reason we started Field's Edge in the first place, so this seems as good a time as any for a massive link-fest to the photo galleries Jim's put together:
General collection number one
Monday Night Football intro concert
The 501st Legion and Star Wars Weekends at Disney World
BB King and his Blues Club opening
Eric Clapton in concert
Two galleries from Daytona Beach's annual Bike Week
Some interiors and still life shots
Megacon 2007, galleries one and two
Megacon 2008
Munnys and more Munnys
Phil Noto art shows one and two
Aerial shots from an open-cockpit plane ride

 

Star Wars 2: Retro Boogaloo

By JOHN BOOTH

"Star Wars 2!" screams the cover banner, "Inside scoops!"
Thing is, this issue of Warren Presents: Empire Encounters Comix is dated November, 1980, about a half-year after The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters. That's right: This is a look back at a look back at an errant vision of the future. Glad to clear that up.

No matter: Under the cover-your-ass umbrella of "The article you are about to read could have been published in FM (Famous Monsters) more than a year ago," Empire Encounters printed what had been presented to the magazine in early 1979 as the "final synopsis" of the sequel to Star Wars. Boba Fett leading stormtroopers, a Rebel attack on "Vader's stronghold," Chewbacca and Han captured by Imperial forces. Fun and bizarre speculation, plenty of black-and-white stills and hokey captions - "No matter how icy the ground, this pair never gets cold feet!" beneath a shot of C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Hoth ice caverns. (They even recycle the "Luke Before You Leap" line they used two years before. Nice.)

There are the now-familiar quotes from George Lucas about the whole saga spanning three trilogies and forty years; and short interview blurbs from Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams and Mark Hamill and Irvin Kershner.

And then, of course, there are the ads for sci-fi goodies, from new Star Wars guys - including a page of some of my favorites - to snap-together Star Wars  vans and glow-in -the-dark light switch covers. (Not to mention a spiffy spot touting the never-out-of-style Warrior's Battle Jacket!) The full-color ads are eye-popping, and I love seeing the Empire logo in different colors and cut-and-pasted to fit within different ad layouts.

Empire Encounters was another of my early 1990s finds in the comic shops of Northwest Ohio, and it's as fun to flip through as ever.

P.S. Thanks to the crew at Slashfilm for the inclusion on Page 2!

In My Day, Kids Had Pizzazz!

By JOHN BOOTH

Could the April 1978 issue of Marvel's "Pizzazz" be more absolutely full of my childhood era's pop goodness? The cover alone has Darth Vader, Mr. Spock and a Close Encounters alien hanging out together, and a teaser list that includes UFOs, KISS and Frampton. (I admit, I was in early elementary school, so rock music wasn't in my circle of interests yet. Still, KISS held kind of a bizarre fascination from an image standpoint.) Ads inside feature the COMP IV - I remember my uncle getting this game and being enthralled by it - a sweepstakes in which you could win a 19-inch Sony Trinitron Color TV and an Atari Video Computer System! (Yeah, that's right - in my day, we didn't even call it the "2600" yet. It was just an "Atari" you upstart whippersnappers.) And who could forget PDQ chocolate and strawberry milk mixes?

You got your word puzzles presented by the likes of Thor and the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, your obligatory Star Wars Fan Club entry form, the chance to buy a KISS pendant for a mere $3.95 (with a wallet-sized photo of the band - "Yours to keep and enjoy for years to come"), and a three-page full-color installment of the Star Wars comic stories written by Archie Goodwin. This one's a slice from "Caverns of Mystery!" and it rocks if you enjoy your lightsabers and droids and stormtroopers with a side of bizarro alien Children of the Corn kids under the spell of a pink-and-purple entity under a glass dome.

Color scans of the fun are here - enjoy! And if you missed last week's trip back three decades, you're not out of luck: Star Quest Comix lives.

Deus Ex Comica, Part 5

Deus ex Comica, an exploration of the impact of comic book pop culture on a personal level, returns with part five. Here, Field's Edge contributor Adam Besenyodi sings the praises of trade paperbacks and all the glory therein.

A Retrospective in a Flashback, wrapped in a Time Warp

By JOHN BOOTH

Back in the early 1990s, when interest in Star Wars was starting to bubble back to the surface with Timothy Zahn's novels and the Dark Empire comic series and Steve Sansweet's book about the original toy line, I used to make the rounds of several comic and collectible shops in Northwest Ohio just poking around and seeing what would turn up. Among my regular stops was a comic store in a strip mall in Toledo run by a guy who was the closest I could imagine to a real life version of Doc Brown from "Back to the Future": wore a long trenchcoat all the time, kind of wild-eyed, messy haired, flapped around the store excitedly looking for stuff among the piles of seemingly disorganized boxes.

I'm pretty sure that's where I bought my copy of Warren Publishing's "Star Quest Comix," dated October, 1978. Eighty-two pages of black-and-white science-fiction tales - but the reason I bought it was for the "STAR WARS REVISITED" banner splashed across the top of the front cover.

You've gotta love it: A ten page spread of photos and quizzes anchored by a feature titled "Dark Sith Lord Darth Vader - Badnik or Merely Misunderstood?"

The section leads with this beaut:
25 TIMES! Between them, that's how many times 2 self-styled "Star Wars-aholics", Kris & Deb, have drunk in the heady wonders of Lucas' lallapalloosa of a moom pic!

It's tough to tell, at times, what might be a typo, and what's pure wonderiffic  cheese born of fandom. Groaners galore! ("Luke before you leap, landspeeder!" "...C-3PO, as usual, 'steels' the show.")

The ads hawk everything from Star Wars toys to bedsheets to iron-on T-shirt transfers, along with other sci-fi loot like back issues of Famous Monsters magazine, Close Encounters of the Third Kind goodies, and Super 8mm home movies of Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner and Iron Man.

I left Northwest Ohio fifteen years ago. I'd be surprised if any of those stores are still around, and even more surprised if there are still any undiscovered gems like this issue of Star Comix hidden in stacks of dusty boxes. Sometimes I wonder what happened to my version of Doc Brown.

Want to go back in time? Check out these scans from "Star Quest Comix," and have a nice trip.

Greatest Hints: How Michael Stanley Almost Made Cleveland Famous

In April 2007, Field’s Edge contributor Adam Besenyodi attended Experience Music Project’s annual symposium designed to bring together academics, writers, performers, and other music lovers into a common conversation at the Pop Conference in Seattle, Washington. There, he presented this paper on the role the civic image of an artist’s hometown plays in their attempt at national stardom, focusing on late ‘70s and early ‘80s Cleveland and the Michael Stanley Band. Field’s Edge presents Adam’s project here as this year’s Pop Conference gets underway. Enjoy Greatest Hints: How Michael Stanley Almost Made Cleveland Famous.

 

Remembering Star Wars: Part XII

By JOHN BOOTH

Twelve years old, and I find out Return of the Jedi is going to open on a freaking school night?!? No matter: Mom & Dad are persuaded, my little brothers are packed up in the van, we go pick up my pal Mike and we're off for a night of waiting in line, eating mall food, geeking out, and seeing a movie in an atmosphere like no other. A saga ends as it should: Hot Dogs, Orange Julius, and Jedi: Best. Opening Night. Ever.

Deus Ex Comica, Part 4

The fourth installment of Field's Edge contributor Adam Besenyodi's Deus ex Comica is here! In this entry of his exploration of the impact of comic book pop culture on a personal level, Adam looks at Marvel: Ultimate Alliance on the Wii and fakes his way through the lingo.