The Mr T Experience - "Spider Man" (live)

Sep 12 2018 · 3:50 PM

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Another Wodensdæg comes rolling around and once again in honor of the Word-Sower, Wight-Ferrier, and Unquenchable Desolater I present... well it's another video of my band doing a song. Doing so is on the schedule, so doing it must be done. As I've said before, it ain't much of a legacy, maybe, but it's the only one I've got. So here's another song from that show in Southampton UK, Summer of 1992, when we were just a baby. (It's the twelfth I've posted of the eighteen songs in the set, for those who want to keep track.) https://youtu.be/rCLPGgFGNNk We'd recorded this song the previous year and released it as one of the two B-side tracks on the more or less TV-themed "Love American Style" 7". Semi-ironic covers of TV theme songs is a long-standing tradition in punk rock, and we were doing our best to fit in to it, sort of. I say "sort of" because all of our such covers lacked the element of ridicule with which this type of thing was customarily presented. There was nothing snide about our versions of "Somebody Wants to Love You" and "Spider-Man." They're great songs and, though it sounds funny to put it this way, we were covering them to honor them rather than to mock them. For the sake of mining your childhood pop culture memories for material to make use of in this way, you could do far worse than to schedule your formative years to have occurred in the late sixties to early seventies like I did. Most pop culture commercial productions prominently included songs, real ones, and even the silliest and flimsiest of such programs often had music composed (and played) by people of immense talent. These guys knew what they were doing, song-wise, and growing up with this stuff in my head was, I fancy, a kind of inadvertent subliminal education in compositional and melodic structures. (Granted, this is stuff no one seems to care about any more -- just add it to the list.) The "Spider-Man" lyricist, Paul Francis Webster, was the guy who wrote "The Shadow of Your Smile", "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," and "I Got It Bad (and that Ain't Good)." The chances were pretty good that he'd do "Spider-man" right, and of course he did. (I am sorry to learn, however, that the folk tradition -- believed by me until looking it up on wikipedia just now -- that Charles Mingus played the bass on the original recording is false, at least according to wiki. That's gonna ruin my day, slightly, not gonna lie.) Anyway, this song and the Spider Man cartoon it introduced did loom quite large in my childhood. There was something about that rudimentary animation, the garish colors, and the dark city-scapes that really exercised my imagination. The brassy noir-ish minor-key music evoking the seamy city and its menacing underworld was entirely fitting and proper. I didn't recognize the silliness of it. I was a kid. It was deadly serious, and dark, and heavy. But, you know, now: I do. It doesn't make me love it any less as a song, but I have moved on from Spider Man, and long ago. Nothing is less interesting to me as an old guy than "super heroes." I am never tempted by any of the blockbuster super hero movies that seem to be the only thing Hollywood ever makes anymore. I don't think I've ever seen one, in fact. And when I'm in the midst of a group of middle-aged dudes talking earnestly and urgently about "the franchise" my eyes glaze over and my my brain goes to a different place. I can't, and I hope I'm using this phrase correctly, even. No disrespect meant to the "the franchise" people, and I fully encourage them to like what they like without apology or restraint. Let it all hang out. If there are stones to be thrown, I'm certainly the last who should throw them: I am pretty much 100% arrested development and frivolous hobby horses and looking backward, with this single super-hero exception. So yeah, if you like those movies great and maybe you're right about them. But I'm fairly confident that their music isn't as good as 1967. Nothing is. Be good to each other, my friends, because you're all they've got. #music #video #live #punkrock #Southamptonrulesok #superheroes #thefranchise #spiderman #cartoons #rockandroll #minds

The Mr T Experience - "Spider Man" (live)

MTX live at the Joiners Arms in Southampton, England, July 8th 1992, in front a few dozen shouting, sweating, vibrating teenagers, one of whom happened to have a running camcorder in his hand. It's pretty rough, but so were we, and it's probably the best live video document of that era of MTX as th...

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Message from Sounds Radical HQ Department of Messages: "This Friday, Mr. T Experience "Shards" Vol. 2 LP (1st pressing) on 180-gram cherry red vinyl and the Shards CD collection will hit stores. Don't miss out." https://www.soundsradical.com If you want the LP, our copies are gone and you'll have to hunt for it but I know interpunk.com will have a few. #music #product #rockandroll #punkrock #mtxforever #minds

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