INTO THE MYSTIC: Johnny Rivers of Dreams & An 'Extraordinary' Alt-History of Alan Moore
[A Bizarre Birthday Blast From The Present]
This is a random conglomeration of a couple different things I’ve been working on over the past few years that sorta either crystalized or got outta hand during a pre-sunrise Sunday coffee buzz the morning I forgot to turn the clocks back an hour. YMMV about whether profundities or prattling happens, dear reader, but you might enjoy the ride either way, or at least get some good music suggestions.
It started Sunday, November 7th, chronicling some recent weirdness—or at least my personal weirdness—surrounding singer/songwriter/guitarist Johnny Rivers, born in New York City, raised in Louisiana, and Christened the very Italian John Ramistella.
There’s something special about this guy. Can’t put my finger on it. But he’s a fascinating influencer on the fringe of a lot of subjects and places and people I’ve followed & researched in the pop music and pop culture scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Many places in Rivers’ winding career history, you find synchronicities & plot twist tributaries.
John Ramistella changed his name to Johnny Rivers following the marketing suggestion of the legendary/notorious Alan Freed. Freed was America’s most famous radio D.J. in the fledgling days of Rock’n’Roll, until he got skunked by the (literal!) pay-for-play payola scandal of the late 50s-early 60s (yet another subject that I’d like to write about in more detail someday; wiped out a ton of major cultural influencers, yet Dick Clark got to skate? WHY? You can probably guess why: He was the Whitest guy around!).
About the same time he changed his name, Johnny Rivers became acquainted with a fellow Bayou guitarist who played in then-popular Ricky Nelson’s (of Ozzie & Harriet fame) band. The guitarist took a song Rivers had written and suggested it to Nelson, who recorded it. Nelson invited Rivers up to L.A., where he got steady gigs as a studio musician. After a couple years, he started doing his own gigs and got popular locally—so popular he got a year-long contract to help launch the legendary/notorious Whiskey A Go-Go night club on Sunset Strip when it opened in West Hollywood in 1964.
The first Johnny Rivers singles were actually recorded live at Whiskey A Go-Go, not inside a studio, and the very first single made Rivers a nemesis of Elvis Presley. Elvis P. never forgave Rivers for turning the Chuck Berry rocker “Memphis” into a #2 hit in 1964 when Elvis couldn’t even chart it. To his dying day (or “dying day”?), Elvis P. would bitch and moan about Johnny Rivers. Decades later, Chuck Berry’s family asked Rivers to play “Memphis” at Berry’s funeral in 2017. He did.
Rivers next blockbuster hit was his signature song, “Secret Agent Man,” the U.S. theme from Patrick McGoohan’s excellent and ground-breaking British spy series of 2/3rds the same name, which was slightly more imaginatively titled Danger Man in the U.K. (where the song wasn’t used). Initially, Rivers only did it for the money, reluctantly, in 1965, and cut a minute-long TV credits intro. But the song, with its now-classic guitar riff, became so popular that an expanded version was crafted and cut live at Whiskey A Go Go in 1966. It hit #3, became a ubiquitous radio single that helped fuel the spy craze as it reached its mid-60s peak, and has been subsequently covered countless times.
After “Secret Agent Man,” Johnny Rivers’ career really took off. He had nine top ten hits and 17 Top 40 songs over the next decade, including the #1 smash “Poor Side of Town,” the 1966 follow-up single to “Secret Agent Man,” and his only song to reach Billboard’s pinnacle.
Johnny Rivers got so big in 1966, he was able to launch his own indie record label, Soul City Records. Soul City Records mostly featured Black artists, the most popular of which was The 5th Dimension. Later, super-creepy billionaire-in-exile David Geffen “helped” Rivers sell Soul City Records to Bell Records, which in turn was acquired by Arista Records (owned by Columbia Pictures at the time). No idea where all that stands now.
As he became increasingly popular, Rivers started taking more and more musical and political chances but the public followed less. He went psychedelic & anti-war for an album, then cut a well-ahead-of-its-time reggae record (not-so-imaginatively called L.A. Reggae), which featured his last blockbuster hit: 1972’s kinda gimmicky “Rockin’ Pneumonia & Boogie-Woogie Flu,” one of those guilty pleasures even legendary/notorious sourpuss and so-called “Dean of Rock Critics” Robert Christgau admitted liking.
Though he wasn’t selling like he did before, by the mid-1970s Johnny Rivers was so well-respected among the L.A. musical elite that he was able to snag Brian Wilson to sing backup vocals on his 1975 cover of the Beach Boys “Help Me Rhonda." It reached #22.
Johnny Rivers’ last Billboard hits came in 1977, as disco battled punk for the Zeitgeist, with the neither punk nor disco but instead dusky and romantic “(Slow Dancin’) Swaying To The Music” and a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s "Curious Mind (Um, Um, Um, Um,Um, Um).” (As a couple of you may know, my life and career would not be where it is today without the late, great Curtis Mayfield, who graciously gave me a rare and extensive interview in 1996 when I lived in Atlanta, which propelled me back into journalism and arts criticism).
In the early 1980s, Johnny Rivers accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord & Savior and the radio play stopped and so did the hits.
So I’ve been following Johnny Rivers’ career for a loooong time. I like his voice. I like his guitar sound. I like his evolving musical muse. I like his style. I had one of his Greatest Hits collections and thought I knew a decent amount about the guy. Not everything, certainly, but a lot.
And yet…and yet…about six weeks ago, YouTube tossed a suggested song my way from Johnny Rivers. It was a cover of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” I had never heard this take on the song before. I liked it. Not as good as the one that closes the first side of Moondance, because nothing is, but unique to Rivers' vocals and style + a good sax solo; similar yet different, an artistically worthy interpretation of the premier singer/songwriter of the past half-century’s original.
This was odd. Johnny Rivers did a cover of one of my very absolute favorite Van Morrison tracks and I’d been unaware of it for years? Strange! So I checked out the album it came from, and discovered, yikes, it came off a Johnny Rivers album I’d never heard of, called Slim Slow Slider. Which, not-so-incidentally, is ANOTHER Van Morrison song, the closing track from his stunning timeless Astral Weeks album, and used as both the introductory and closing tracks on Rivers’ 1970 album.
From there, it was quick jot down the Rivers’ rabbit hole. Cover after cover of Van Morrison songs….”Brown Eyed Girl,” “Wild Night,” “Songwriter.” How did I not know about any of these? How did I especially not know about Johnny Rivers covering “Into The Mystic,” a song I’ve sought out in every possible version?
[SUNDAY NIGHT EDIT: And it was here, as I rewrote the above paragraph, doing a bit of research into the hugely influential L.A. music/movie producer Lou Adler, that I learned today, November 7th, 2021, the day I wrote the majority of this material, is Johnny Rivers’ 79th birthday, which means I need to put this puppy to bed fast, because whatever’s going on here is bigger than I am, so let’s get real crazy, why not.]
Time for another swerve, maybe into a brick wall, but here we go: The whole pleasant creative weirdness and inexplicable discovery of Johnny Rivers covering Van Morrison (x5) reminded me of a similar “WTF?” personal plot twist that came a couple years ago, in 2019: The greatest writer in comic book history, British magician Alan Moore, released the bow-tied-tight finalé of his, uh, extraordinary League of Extraordinary Gentleman series, which is sort of a Justice League/Avengers pastiche, except much smarter & stranger (maybe too smart & too strange, for most people), and features classic heroes and villains of pop culture spanning centuries, from Alan Quartermain and Dr. Jekyll to Emma Peel and James Bond.
A bit of background before the plot twist: Twice a year, I make sure to do an online search for what snake-god worshipping Alan Moore (no hard feelings, Glycon!) is up to: Once around mid-summer right before San Diego Comic-Con, the other around Christmas. Both used to be (not so much, post-Covid-con) when top tier comic book/graphic novel titles would be released, and Mr. Moore is top-of-the-tops.
[BITTER ARTISTIC ASIDE: Top-of-the-tops, just a smidgen in front of culture-cancelled, metaphorically R.I.P.-ped Warren Ellis. Which brings me to a big “FUCK YOU” at the hypocritical transvestites at DC Comics (“Dead Company”?), the spineless cretins at Image Comics, the weak clout-chasing shrew army of untalented female hacks who bitterly attacked Ellis to destroy him, and most specifically the brutalist half-a-talent Scott Snyder, who was apparently the sell-out tipping point that pushed Warren Ellis’s career over the edge. Here’s a real Pro Tip: Scott Snyder isn’t worth the spit Warren Ellis should phlegm-illy expectorate in Snyder’s mouth. You’re a piece of shit, Scott; those of us who know, know: Removing Warren Ellis from the comic book writer’s playpen leaves more room for the vastly less talented. Like YOU, you insecure mean-spirited pussywhipped mediocrity, just another predictable drone among the incompetent SJW jerks who’ve destroyed the comic books industry.]
Anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah: Like QT (and all genius creatives), even when he fails, Alan Moore is more interesting than almost anybody else in his field/craft/art (except maybe Warren Ellis). So I always seek out his work. I even read (some) of Moore’s 1,000+ page 2016 novel Jerusalem, which I was really digging at first before it morphed into a stream-of-consciousness Ulysses-ian thingamajig that felt both showoff-y and beyond abstruse, but is probably an incredible work of literary genius that’s too esoterically intellectual for me to grasp (will you talk to me now, Mr. Moore? Please reconsider turning down my interview requests. Are you prejudiced against Christian magicians, hmmmm?).
Thus, in summer 2019, I did a search on Alan Moore and was puzzled to discover he’d come out of comic-book writing retirement to add one final flourish to his popular League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, called Tempest. In fact, he’d already done it. The six-issue comic book series debuted in July 2018 (first issue released 7/11, no less), and been published bi-monthly. All six issues had already been released, the storyline was now complete and about to be compiled into a deluxe hardcover graphic novel.
On one hand, I was thrilled by this entertainment information, but on the other I was mystified. As I did more searching, I found tons of coverage in the comic book trade press about Moore returning for one last epic go-round. There were mainstream stories stretching as far back as 2017, when the project was announced. Moore even gave an interview to The Guardian about it, I think, but that interview no longer seems to exist online, so who knows? Maybe he warned about Covid in it, maybe he made an oblique reference to the dead Queen (11/11!!), maybe I’m misremembering where the interview took place. Maybe it never happened in this reality timeline at all.
Anyway, the whole thing flummoxed me. How did I not know—for YEARS—that Alan Moore was working on and then putting out a sprawling, ambitious, high-profile return to comic books with a concluding story arc for the last of his multiple signature titles (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, etc.)? I had been doing Google and DuckDuckGo searches twice a year. I had been in comic shops a few times, before the really good one in San Diego unfortunately closed. I hadn’t seen word one about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest.
I called my brother in Florida, the biggest comic book geek I know personally: He didn’t know about it. I called my esoteric chef friend Paul in the Carolinas, not so much a comic book fan but a benevolent occultist and big Alan Moore aficionado: He didn’t know anything about it. I sent a few PMs around on Facebook to geeks and nerds I know, asking if anybody had heard of this thing. My resource pool was small but deep and not a single person was aware of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest. But now all these people wanted to read it.
What does this all meeeeeeeean? I have no answers, at least nothing that won’t make the vast majority of the planet, or at least the Western World, wanna toss me in the looney bin.
But here goes anyway.
I believe the very nature and fabric of our reality is changing, either altering or being altered. Maybe it’s being caused by our solar system shifting into a different quadrant of the universe. Maybe it’s because Earth is being sucked into a Black Hole (not that one). Maybe it’s being caused by the lunatics running CERN. Maybe this whole time/space thing has been a giant mind-fuck by aliens or extra-dimensional beings or Satan and we’ve been living in a 3D entertainment realm for 5D beings and it’s just about time to wrap things up and close down production.
Maybe it’s none of those things. I’m in way over my head [especially now that I’ve learned today is Johnny Rivers birthday] and have no answers about it. Won’t pretend I do. “I know nothing.”
But look around you. Don’t things feel…Apocalyptic? Doesn’t the very nature of reality appear to have been altered somehow? Don’t events and time itself feel like it’s all moving faster and faster? Don’t the polarization and polarity of who and what are Good and what and who are Evil seem to be coming into focus much more clearly? Aren’t all the masks coming off by seeing who keeps them on? Don’t you sense that we’re all going to be forced into making a big choice?
Maybe it doesn’t for you. But if you’ve made it this far, while we may not be on the same page, we’re probably at least reading the same book. Or Book?
And to that I say: “Into the Mystic”? Sure. Bring It On. Or maybe it’s already here.
