Pop Culture from an Alternate Dimension

       There have been compilations of songs from The Police before, but I noticed they tend towards only songs by Sting. What if the other two lads got their chance to shine? Here is a collection of music written by Copeland and Summers no songs that they wrote with Stingo. I had initially wanted to include Andy Summer's love song "Sally", but just like "Baby, You're a Rich Man" by the Beatles was put together from two separate pieces written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, "Be My Girl" by Sting was put together with "Sally".       Hear songs by the drummer and guitarist here:  THE POLICE Greatest Hits Copeland & Summers - YouTube

           In 1988 the Traveling Wilburys released their first album Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 . The group consisted of George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan. In 1990 they released Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 . What about 1989? Roy Orbison had died before Volume 1 was released and Bob Dylan was busy, but the other Wilburys were working with another rock idol of theirs: Del Shannon. To make a volume two I compiled songs from Del Shannon's Rock On! (which was co-produced by Jeff Lynne), Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever (which was produced by Lynne, Petty and Mike Campbell), Jeff Lynne's Archair Theatre and George Harrison's Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 .      I open the album with Del's "Walk Away" which was written by him, Tom and Jeff. Next is "I Won't Back Down", written by Tom & Jeff, with Tom, Jeff and George all playing and singing. Third song is "Cockamamie Business" from George. Following is "I...

       This would be a follow up to the 1982 Eagles album from an alternate reality that I posted in December. For this I chose four songs from Don Henley's 1984 album Building the Perfect Beast , four songs from Glenn Frey's The Allnighter , one song from Timothy B. Schmit's Playin' It Cool , and one from Joe Walsh's The Confessor . For Henley I only wanted to use songs that he helped write so I didn't use "All She Wants to Do Is Dance", despite it being a huge hit. I wound up choosing "The Boys of Summer", "Not Enough Love in the World", "Sunset Grill" and "Land of the Living". Frey's supplied "Sexy Girl", "Smuggler's Blues", "Living in Darkness" and "New Love". From Schmit I pulled "Something's Wrong" which has Don Henley on drums & backing vocals and Joe Walsh on guitar. Speaking of Joe, like Henley, I wanted to choose a song Walsh wrote. I pic...

       I recently started going through my original posts and added playlists. When I got to The Eagles album No Fun Aloud I wanted to re-do the package design. The songs remain the same.      What if the Eagles kept putting out records after  The Long Run ? For this I chose "I Found Somebody", "Party Town", "All Those Lies" and "I Volunteer" from Glenn Frey's 1982 album  No Fun Aloud.  From Don Henley's 1982 album  I Can't Stand Still  I chose the title song (with harmony vocals by Timothy B. Schmit), "Long Way Home" (with backing vocals by Schmit),  "Nobody's Business"  (with Schmit   on bass) and I had to include "Dirty Laundry", not only was it huge in the charts but it has Schmit doing backing vocals and bass, as well as Joe Walsh doing a guitar solo. In place of Glenn Frey doing a cover of the oldie "Sea Cruise" I put in Timothy B. Schmit cover of "So Much in Love" from the ...

       Here is another in the "what if Jeff Lynne let other members of E.L.O. have their compositions on the albums" series. This week I reconfigured the 1981 album Time. In 1981 E.L.O. bassist Kelly Groucutt was recording his debut album, Kelly, with other ELOers Richard Tandy, Bev Bevan and Louis Clark. From that album I grabbed "I'll Cry Tomorrow" and "Sea of Dreams". 1981 also saw the release of an album of "production music" called Building Tension. Half was by John Cameron and the other half by our own Louis Clark. I pulled "Unease" from there.        To make room for these I removed three songs from the original album; "Another Heart Breaks", "The Lights Go Down" and "Hold on Tight". Although that last song is a banger, it doesn't seem to fit the album. In this alternate reality it would still be released as a single, so the "coffee achievers" would still have their anthem.      I u...

       I've used Spinal Tap before on this blog (Loving Large, The Fantastic 80s, The Singing Sixties and The Namesake Series of audiobooks) and to honour their new movie, I present SHARK SANDWICH, the album with the two word review. The front cover is the from the movie, the band photo was taken by Bob Gruen at CBGB's and the back illustration and design is by me.      To make a playlist I used "Sex Farm" from the This is Spinal Tap soundtrack and "Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" which can be found on their Back From the Dead album. I also used two songs from other heavy metal parodies: "Drink Till I Die" by Bad News from the series The Comic Strip Presents and "Black Moon" by Strange Fruit as seen in the movie Still Crazy. Two more songs from actual 1980 albums: "Close Encounters" by Hilly Michaels and "Ear in the Snow" from Atomic Rooster (which once had Ric Parnell, of Spinal Tap, as a member. Two more songs sup...

       With talk of a new James Bond, I thought it was time to do another "man who would be Bond". Last time I talked about American James Brolin auditioning for the part, this time it is New Zealander Sam Neill. Roger Moore yet again did not want to return to the role. Producer Michael G. Wilson, director John Glen, Dana and Barbara Broccoli were impressed with Neill's screentest and wanted to cast him , however Albert "Cubby" Broccoli disagreed. Pierce Brosnan was also considered but didn't get the part until 1995's GoldenEye.       The theme song could have been different as well. Instead of a-ha, it was almost Pet Shop Boys. Sam Neill as James Bond - Screentest (1986) The Living Daylights 1987 - Alternative Title Sequence With The Pet Shops Boys Rejected Theme. - YouTube

  In July of 1987 ABC aired a movie based on Will Eisner's comic The Spirit. It starred Sam J. Jones as the title character and Nana Visitor (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) as love interest Ellen Dolan. Trivia: 28 years later the two actors appeared in Seth MacFarlane's  Ted 2 . The sidekick in the comics was a racial stereotype called Ebony, in this production he was renamed Eubie and played by Bumper Robinson. The movie leaned more towards camp, as was the way comic productions were handled then. It was meant to be a pilot, with more episodes already written, but was never picked up. Who knows, if the series was picked up it might have been a more accurate representation of Eisner's work than the Frank Miller movie. Preview Clip | The Spirit | Warner Archive

            A popular post I did last October was from an idea my friend Stefan had of what if Stars Wars used popular music from the time on the soundtrack. Since this weekend is May the Fourth AND Stefan's birthday, I present his choices for an alternate soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back . Empire Strikes Back soundtrack - YouTube and for his birthday, why don't you check out the first book he put out on Kindle: Amazon.com: My Own Personal Chamber of Horrors eBook : Boales, Stefan: Kindle Store

  In the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap , David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) says he listens to classics on tape read by actors with the same last name as the authors. I designed what I thought the ones he mentioned would look like if they existed, plus I added one of my own.

       This post is similar to the Genesis album I put together last November. Roger Waters left Pink Floyd to become a solo act. David Gilmour took the role of leader and the band continued. Feel free to make any comparisons between Roger Waters and Petere Gabriel. To put Waters back into Pink Floyd I chose "Home" and "The Tide Is Turning" from Waters' 1987 album Radio K.A.O.S. as well as "Going to Live in L.A.", the b-side of "Radio Waves" and "Get Back to Radio", the b-side to "Sunset Strip". From Pink Floyd's 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason I pulled "Signs of Life", "Learning to Fly", "One Slip", "On the Turning Away" and "A New Machine parts 1 and 2". https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajFcUf9F4Qc6b5W1gJTDYiYE&si=XraQwYeblpbx_Jm_

        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...

  I started this blog on the 20th of May 2023 so here is a bonus post. Years ago, my co-worker Stefan and I were talking about "what if the Beatles stayed together". One thing led to another and when we went home, we each started going through our albums deciding which songs from the lad's solo albums we would choose. We met up again at work and compared notes. We made copies of the "albums" but I had to take it one step further so I designed covers for all of them. My computer has crashed since then and I lost all of my work. I still have the physical copies of the two make-believe albums shown above. I wasn't going to use them on this blog since there are many talented people already sharing their versions on the web but for my anniversary I thought I would share some of the first "what if" album covers I designed.

       The Brothers Gibb started performing as pre-teens. They had hits in the '60s, '70s and '80s. They played a variety of music but when they got the A-side to the Saturday Night Fever  soundtrack they were practically the face of disco and by that time there was disco backlash in the U.S. They did solo efforts but still wrote songs together. For this 1984 imaginary album I used Barry Gibb's Now Voyager , Robin Gibb's Secret Agent  and the soundtrack Maurice Gibb wrote for the Rutger Hauer movie A Breed Apart . It includes three songs written by all three brothers. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajGKz-QgUlenWc0ca8y_zKsV&si=SL96-He9lugUOm3Q

  E.L.O.'s 1983 album Secret Messages was the last to feature Kelly Groucutt before he was let go. In fact he doesn't appear on all of the songs. Also in 1983 his album Kelly was released in the U.S. It was recorded over a couple of years and included Bev Bevan on drums, Richard Tandy on keyboards and strings arranged and conducted by Louis Clark. Secret Messages was originally planned to be a double album so I made it two albums. The first is this one. What if Lynne allowed songs written by Groucutt on the album? I included the songs Groucutt performed on and tried to make it more of a "rocker". "Bluebird", "Take Me On and On", "Four Little Diamonds", "Train of Gold" and "Rock 'n' Roll Is King" are from the original Secret Messages album. "No Way Out" and "Endless Lies" are bonus tracks on the 2001 CD release of Secret Messages. "The Bouncer" was the B-side to "Four Little Di...

 Peter was the first to leave the group and The Monkees had to find a way to carry on....Sorry, wrong quartet. Even though Kiss has had a lot of members, some whom have been in the band longer than Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, there is something about having the original four together that excites the Kiss Army.  These songs are picked from the Kiss album Hot in the Shade and Ace Frehley's Trouble Walkin' which had Peter Criss on backing vocasl. Both albums had the song "Hide Your Heart", co-written by Paul Stanley. From Trouble Walkin' I chose the titular song, "Back to School" and Ace's version of "Hide Your Heart" for some extra Peter and Ace. The remaining songs I split between Gene and Paul. It seems like the competition between them would ensure of that. Critics have said that at 15 songs Hot in the Shade is a bit bloated. For this version I pared it down to the standard 10 songs total. KISS Hot in the Shade with Frehley and Criss - Y...

 Since a new Indiana Jones movie is coming out I think it is good time to revisit the first one. However this is the one that almost was. Most people know Selleck was originally cast but there were a lot of changes before it was finally filmed. The synopsis on the back of the DVD cover above will cover some of them. I first heard about Toht's mechanical arm when I got the book "Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Illustrated Screenplay and page 87 had a storyboard drawing of a very different Toht than we know today.  The illustration I used for the front cover is from an old Playboy and I believe Joann Daly is the artist.

 The last album of new material The Police put out was Synchronicity in 1983. It was not meant to be their last though. In July of 1986 the trio planned on recording another album. It not only didn't happen but all three members of the band say a new album is unlikely. Here then is an album that might have been. I chose songs from Sting's "... Nothing Like the Sun", Andy Summers' "XYZ" and a track by Stewart Copeland from the Wall Street soundtrack. In choosing the songs I picked mostly Sting songs as I presume that is how it would have been. Andy Summers performs on two of Sting's songs: The Lazarus Heart and Be Still My Beating Heart so I had to choose those. I eliminated the cover of Jimi Hendrix' Little Wing because I believe it would have sounded different if Summers and Copeland performed on it than how Sting did it. This is what I think the CD booklet and tray card would look like. The Police XYZ - YouTube