jim henson

"I wasn't fond of what was going on with the teen magazines. I wasn't objecting to it, I was just uncomfortable with it. It seemed like the seedier side of show biz to me. I thought, 'Why are they doing this? This is a good thing you got going here; the shows are good, the scripts are good, the people are good.'

"The woman who ran Sixteen magazine would come around the set all the time with a camera hanging over everybody. I kept thinking, 'What a weird job.'

"So one day a friend of mine came in and he said, 'I was just in the supermarket and went to the magazine section. Do you know how many covers of teen magazines you were on?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Every single one.'
-- Mike Nesmith (via 'Mike's Mansion' at Emily & Heather's MONKEES inc.)

(click on cover to enlarge image)
























































































This piece ran in the April 1967 issue of 16 Magazine, right at the height of Monkeemania.

A couple of the pertinent dates in the article appear to have been 'cleaned up'; Other sources show the date of Michael Nesmith's marriage to Phyllis Barbour to be June 27th, 1964, with his first son Christian being born on January 31st, 1965.

Also of interest is the wedding photo in which Mike's mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, appears standing to the right of her son.
As we are all so well aware, she was the enterprising secretary who invented Liquid Paper in 1951.

When Bette passed away in 1980, the half of her Liquid Paper fortune that didn't go to Mike went to fund the Council on Ideas, a "think tank devoted to exploring world problems".
The council convenes biennially at a facility in New Mexico, and is administered by Bette's Gihon Foundation, a private philanthropic organization with a governing board of trustees headed by Mike.

See also:
- 'Think Diffident', a Wired Magazine article about Nesmith and the Council on Ideas.

- A bit more about Mike's first wife, Phyllis Barbour Nesmith at GLEEB.

- A detailed Nesmith bio page at the Rhino Records website.

- Excerpts from the biography 'Total Control: The Monkees' Michael Nesmith Story' are available for reading online at Google Books.

- WildeImages, a celebrity photo gallery site by Nurit Wilde, a former Nesmith companion and mother of his son, Jason.

The Steampacket were a brief footnote in the early career histories of several influential British musicians who went on to bigger and better things.

Singer Long John Baldry formed a version of the group in the early 1960's as a sort of soul R&B revue, with vocalists rotating from
back-up to lead during a set, according to their strengths.

By 1965 the group consisted of:

Long John Baldry - vocals
Rod Stewart - vocals
Julie Driscoll - vocals
Brian Auger - organ
Vic Briggs - guitar
Richard Brown - bass guitar
Micky Waller - drums

There wasn't much for any of those vocalists to do during this instrumental recording, I suppose...

Listen to: The Steampacket (featuring Brian Auger) - The In-Crowd (click for audio)

One highlight of The Steampacket's brief tenure was touring in 1965 as an opening act for the
Rolling Stones. They broke up the following year.

Due to contractual obligations with different managers and different record labels, the group never recorded any official releases, just a handful of rehearsals and demos that were later issued when
Rod Stewart was approaching the height of his fame.

See also - - A video clip at YouTube featuring Long John Baldry's vocals and billed as 'Brian Auger's Trinity'; The Steampacket performs 'Lord Remember Me' live at the Richmond Jazz and Blues Festival in 1965. It was shown in the US on the show 'Shindig Goes to London'.

I was all set to start scanning and posting this cool old Dell Four-Color comic book for you, one with art and stories by Jack Davis.

- - But the pleasant discovery that someone else had already beaten me to it fit in even better with my agenda on this lazy New Year's day.

Please follow the link to Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine.

Pappy has just about the whole issue available there for your reading pleasure!













































Illustrator and comics artist Jack Davis had continued working for MAD comics (and eventually MAD Magazine) after most of the other EC titles had folded in 1955.

'Yak Yak' was apparently an experiment by Dell Comics to test the waters for a humor magazine, as many other publishers were doing at the time with their own knock-offs of the MAD formula.
It appeared around the same time in Davis' career that his artwork had started showing up in film posters and record jackets, in advertising and on the covers of more 'grown-up' magazines...

See also:
- A few images from the 2nd issue of 'Yak Yak', published in 1962, posted at Pequenas Imagens

- A Jack Davis gallery at American Art Archives