I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-A-Book-Review Dept

RICK JOHNSON READER: TIN CANS, SQUEEMS AND THUDPIES

We now take a brief pause in “normal” programming, because I can’t believe I haven’t plugged this book on the web-psych or inter-blob or whatever it is yet. (Actually I can believe it, because I’m so absent-minded that compared to me, the average disgraced politician caught with his/her hand in the honey-jar up to the shoulder-blade who “can’t remember anything” under questioning, comes off like notoriously detail-retentive Rolling Stones archivist Bill Wyman by comparison. (Tell us again Unkey Bill, what - or whom - did the Stones’ 3rd base roadie have hanging out of his nose during breakfast on June 7th, 1965.)

The squeaky screed below explains what the book, whose title is hanging over this post like the proverbial iron butterfly, is all about. It’s my review from the Amazon website. They probably think they own it or something, and boy, is one of us in for a big surprise. I just stumbled across it when I was trying to stop them recommending ultra-violet sheep tuners and Buffalo Springfield seat-covers to me every time I go to their verblungen website. I’d kind of forgotten I’d written it, and I’d just been re-reading the book and thinking I needed to plug it here anyway, so here it is. I’ll do a tune-up version with backing harmonies later on, but this ought to trouser the cleft area until then.

If you want this book - and anyone retaining a vague semblance of activity in the pulse area should want it - you can get it from Amazon.com. You can probably get it from other places as well, but it’s one of those self-published U-haul jobs, and it would probably be easier to find a reliable tyre-stockist in the Sahara Desert, or physically isolate the dairy component of a Milk Arrowroot biscuit, as it would to find it at the source. I’ve had no problems getting multiple (or single) copies from Amazon, so go raid a buddy or spouse’s credit card today!

In the unlikely event I’ve clicked the correct button here, what follows next is the review.

There are a few handfuls of folks who read CREEM magazine back in the late 70s/early 80s who think this guy was one of the best music reviewers/pop culture decoders/plain old 20th Century humourists in the history of the world and portions of Cleveland.

Rick Johnson’s gone now, and it seems rugged that he didn’t get recognition even fractionally commensurate with his talent and originality during life, but at least there’s finally a collection of his work available to remind us how good he was, during the cold Johnson-less years to come.

I should also mention, because Ranger Rick probably would at around this point - lest the tight formal-hire collar of funeral atmosphere choke us into pious reflection - that the funniest thing in the book is probably when his former editor mentions the time Rick was so wacked out, he not only fell down his own stairs, but continued right on and fell down his neighbours’ stairs as well.

Rick Johnson had a unique use of language, and I mean completely unique to the point where sometimes it seemed like he’d invented Esperanto in reverse. Rick retained file cards full of lines from TV and advertising to wield out of context (and yet strangely perfectly IN context) in reviews of albums that never knew what hit them. He used typeface, punctuation and all other print medium tools as weapons; and had the greatest, most genial take on the whole pop/mass culture “flow” - TV, movies, celebs as dingbats, music, packaged supermarket foods, video games, whatever. It was all the same to Ranger Rick, and it seemed like it was all fun.

What this book contains is a handful or two of his CREEM articles, and a large amount of stuff he wrote for some sort of free press type publication (I think) called the Prairie Sun. Although any dyed-in-the-wool Johnson fan would love a well-chosen comp of the CREEM work (or just ALL of his stuff that appeared in CREEM to cut down on thinking time) there’s a bonus here for people that have been hoping a book of Rick’s material would come out eventually.

Basically unless you lived in the area covered by the Prairie Sun, you never saw this material before, and it includes prime Reeek era “stand-up reviewing” stuff from the late 70s/early 80s. There’s some earlier stuff too, which tends to be a little more earnest/conventional but has its moments, and it’s interesting to see the guy’s style develop.

Most of the book is album reviews, and if you’re thinking why on earth would someone want to read curling discoloured album reviews from the previous century, then you don’t know Reeek. No-one who remembers being unable to restrain themselves from laughing out loud reading vintage CREEM issues on public transport will have any doubts whatsoever.

In addition to telling us important musical knowledge, eg how Peter Frampton’s voice and guitar sound like “two extremely tired waitresses complaining about a particularly obnoxious customer”, the Johnson material here takes on a lot of the subjects previously mentioned, including packaged foods, video games, and the more disposable end of television, which were trademark Johnson subjects.

There are a couple of nice xtra surprises, in that we find out (if we already didn’t know, and we-being-me didn’t) that Rick Johnson was a sport nut, and there’s some of his writing about sport - still in the trademark all-over-the-shop-and-surrounding-county style - which I’m not sure he ever did for CREEM. You’d think reading anybody’s old baseball season previews from a previous century would have all the relevance - not to mention innate dullness - of a comprehensive Brady Bunch Variety Hour retrospective, but even the introductions to these pieces have more gags than the Annual Bondage and Discipline Retailers Dinner-Dance.

Another is a real nice and somewhat ahead of its time piece on some of his fave trashy movies, well before certain sections of the publishing industry became dedicated to woodchipping entire jungles in the name of “psychotronics”.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough if you: took in a lot of music and popular culture in the 70s-thru-now; ever heard of “Ranger” Rick Johnson; or would just care to fall into a pile of writing by one of the most distinctive and original written humourists ever.

If you (a) tend to the humourless, (b) are a sobersides, (c) have certain sensitivities to language and what they hilariously call on television “adult themes”, then you don’t want this book.

Everyone else of grown-up newspaper buying age qualifies.

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