Pop Culture from an Alternate Dimension

              The Velvet Underground only put out a handful of studio albums. The first two had the legendary line-up used for this album. The next two had Doug Yule in place of John Cale and the last had Doug Yule and no original members. This fictional album is primarily the Underground's primary singer Lou Reed's album Magic and Loss which he recorded in April of 1991. I chose two John Cale tracks. "The Cowboy Laughs at Round-Up" is from his soundtrack for Paris S'Eveille  and "The Queen and Me" from a 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album. The album from the Underground's drummer Moe Tucker provided an important track. Her album I Spent a Week There the Other Night  has the track "I'm Not" which features all four original members of the band together. I also included "Blue, All the Way to Canada" to get an extra helping of Sterling Morrison's guitar work. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajFjmNFcG4Yv-ZO-yYp1gpVl&

        I am going to be away from my drawing table for a while so I am posting this early.           22 Jump Street is one of the few movies where the audience stayed when the end credits started to roll. Over the credits were clips from 23 Jump Street , 24 Jump Street , etc. Any one of these fake sequels would be appropriate for this blog. I started working on one when I realized that if 21 Jump Street came out in 2012 and 22 Jump Street came out in 2014 then 27 Jump Street would be out this year. Nice bonus for all you Bill Hader fans as well.

        In early 1983 Freddie Mercury started working on songs for what would become his first solo album, Mr. Bad Guy . Brian May worked with some other musicians, such as Eddie Van Halen, for the EP Star Fleet Project . Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, was recording his solo album Strange Frontiers. Bassist John Deacon was collaborating with Man Friday & Junior Jive.       Taylor's album had Mercury contributing backing vocals on one song, May playing rhythm guitar on another song and Deacon on bass on a different song. I originally wanted to use all three songs for this unofficial Queen album but in their discography there were usually only three songs where Mercury was not the lead singer so I chose "It's an Illusion' (with Deacon) and "Man on Fire" (with May) from Strange Frontier . Since I had two from Taylor that left one for May: "Let Me Out". The rest of the songs are from Mr. Bad Guy except for "She Blows Hot and Cold" wh

  This might be my most esoteric post yet. The "what if" is two-fold: what if "Hard Knocks" was put on DVD and what if anyone remembered the show. It was a Showtime original series starring Bill Maher that aired from April to August of 1987. Chris Thompson created it after he co-created "Bosom Buddies" starring Tom Hanks for NBC. He went on to create "The Naked Truth" starring Tea Leoni for ABC and "Action", the wildly inappropriate and funny series starring Jay Mohr for Fox. Shout Factory released some of my favorite cult series on DVD so I figured after Bill Maher became famous with "Politically Incorrect" they would be the ones to give the show a second life. The series had one of the great all time opening themes: https://youtu.be/P_Cd4hpltzA?si=8VqI_nK4Uehp2HLL BTW, the cover art is by my friend Stefan Boales. He has written and drawn some great books for all ages available on Amazon Kindle. Check him out.