Far Out There: Character Soundtracks - Maziham (Patreon)

What’s this? I bet you thought I’d finally run out of Far Out There Character Soundtracks, didn’t you? Surely there couldn’t STILL be more playlists left for obscure secondary characters, right? Well, I’ll have you know… you’re ALMOST right. I mean, there’s still am absurd number of playlists sitting in my iTunes folder right now, but at this point most of the remaining ones are either dedicated to characters who haven’t officially debuted in the comic yet, or are just half-finished nubs held in waiting for the next time I’ve gotta draw up some new characters and need inspiration. If nothing else, we’ll at least hit the end of the new Nitpicker playlists by this Summer, and we’ll at long last have to start some kind of new Far Out There blog series. BUT TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY!

But yeah, Maziham. One half of the Xafri Twins. I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a real soft spot for these two that extends beyond how fun they are to draw. I dropped the name “The Xafri Twins” in a page years before I went and drew a pair of twin sister nitpickers, and had totally forgotten about what would otherwise seem like a totally deliberate piece of foreshadowing. That kind of cosmic convergence shouldn’t go wasted, dang it! As far as this recent crop of Nitpickers go, Maziham and Mahizam have some of the most direct connections between their chosen musical genre and their physical appearance. Admittedly, Mahi’s leather & denim look might be a bit more immediately obvious than her sister’s, but when I tell you I was specifically basing Mazi’s look on a combination of Mick Jagger and just about any member of The Strokes, it should all click into place… or maybe not, because I wound up not including any Strokes songs on this playlist. But several of the other early 00s garage bands made it on, and even more of the 60s/70s bands they all so desperately wanted to be.

Yes, Maziham is a Garage Rock fanatic, identifying heavily with a genre so obsessed with grit and swagger and coolness and the meticulously maintained appearance of not caring about appearance at all. Seriously, I tried to design that shaggy mop top of hers to look like she’d spent hours getting the EXACT “just rolled out of bed” vibe she wanted… and that’s BEFORE you look at her twin and realize Mazi’s hair is naturally huge and curly. Just getting it straightened out in the first place has got to be a mammoth undertaking, but if that’s what it takes to feel cool, then so be it. Cos yeah, Maziham’s whole soundtrack is all about feeling cool. It’s bursting with bluesy swagger and cocky guitar riffs and a gritty lo-fi atmosphere. Basically, every one of these songs is the sort of song a movie plays when the toughest, baddest, all around awesome character bursts through the doors of some dive bar in slow motion and just owns the place. That’s how Maziham sees herself in her head at all times… or at least how she WANTS to see herself. Like most people who work really hard at looking cool to others, I’m sure Maziham is actually a DEEPLY insecure person and this is all an act to compensate. Heck, that's probably a big reason why she’s still joined at the hip to her sister. She wouldn’t be able to cope with that big scary world out there without the one constant in her life still around.

But enough meaningful discussion of the inner workings of the characters in this comic, let’s ramble on about old songs! Just in case the Mick Jagger namedrop earlier didn’t tip you off, Maziham’s soundtrack is dominated by The Rolling Stones, with the spaces in between filled with songs that WISH they were The Rolling Stones to one degree or another.  And while I normally try to avoid hitting the really iconic, familiar songs too hard in the soundtracks, there was really no avoiding it here. Maziham’s playlist starts off with “Gimme Shelter” and ends with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” probably the two best known Stones songs that aren’t called “Satisfaction.” Even if you THINK you don’t know these songs, I could just say “You know, the song from that one scene in ____” and ramble off movie titles until I hit one you recognized. Martin Scorsese alone has used them so often that he probably owes Keith Richards a supporting role credit in a movie somewhere. Comparatively speaking, the other two Stones songs here (of a grand total of four) aren’t as well known, though “It’s Only Rock And Roll (but I like it)” remains a fairly steady Classic Rock radio staple. It’s got more of an ironic, self aware feel than the fully committed swagger of “Gimme Shelter” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” so it packs slightly less of a punch, but in context it still works. Least familiar to the average listener will be “Midnight Rambler,” which already has a strike against it for being just an album track off Let It Bleed rather than a single, and that’s BEFORE you discover that I swapped out the studio version with the live version from Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! Then again, the Hot Rocks greatest hits compilation uses the live version too, that’s where I heard the song first, so maybe it is the “definitive” version at this point. Either way, all these songs SOUND like they should accompany big, dramatic action movie entrances, whether they actually have been or not.

The rest of the 60s/70s era songs cover pretty much all ends of the notability spectrum, even as they all have pretty much the same Garage/Blues Rock vibe. Far over at the obscurity end is “When The Night Falls” by British group The Eyes, who nobody had even heard of when they were actively releasing singles. And that’s a shame, because “When The Night Falls” straddles the line between the Blues revival and Mod craze enough that it really deserved to be at least a minor hit at the time. Obscure at least in this hemisphere is our obligatory Japanese band: Speed, Glue & Shinki, who contribute “Ode To The Bad People.” It’s a fairly stereotypical ode to hippy dippy countercultural peacefulness… that, like most such songs, becomes unintentionally hilarious when you know how much the band all hated each other. “Ide To The Bad People” is probably the sloppiest song on the whole soundtrack, but it’s the kind of drunken, careless sloppiness that still works in the song’s favor. As an overall performer, Dion is fairly well known in Oldies radio land, but “Daddy Rollin’ (in your arms)” is widely remembered only as the B-side to the better known “Abraham, Martin & John.” And that’s an even bigger shame, since this atypically gritty Blues song totally SHOULD be an iconic highlight of some movie soundtrack.

Moving further up the notability index, we have The Small Faces with “Wham Bam Thank You Mam,” a big, brash rocker that REALLY deserves to be known for more than giving David Bowie an idea for a lyric several years later. While this is technically the only Small Faces song on the list, we do still have a pair of spinoffs elsewhere on the soundtrack. More obvious of the two is The Faces, who were basically just The Small Faces picking up some members of The Jeff Beck Group after lead man Steve Marriott left (and dropping the “Small” part because new guys Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood weren’t short enough for the joke to work anymore). Continuing my out of character streak of picking fairly well-known songs, The Faces contribution here is their one Classic Rock staple: sleazy trash anthem “Stay With Me.” As for the departing Steve Marriott, however, he shows up again with the band he left The Small Faces to form: Humble Pie. While best remembered today as “That Band Peter Frampton Was In Before He Became A Solo Star,” Humble Pie were regarded as a supergroup back in the day, and they’re once again represented by their biggest radio hit: “30 Days In The Hole.” Both songs sound like the perfect soundtrack to a barroom brawl, which makes them perfect fits for this soundtrack.

Taking a modest step further up the notability rankings, but a HUGE step up in historical reputation, we have a pair of tracks by guitar god factory The Yardbirds. While none of their Eric Claption-era songs made the cut here, the Jeff Beck version of The Yardbirds gets represented by the classic “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” …which basically turns up twice, since the OTHER Yardbirds song here, “Stroll On,” is literally just their arrangement of “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” only with new lyrics. They recorded “Stroll On” for a movie appearance after some kind of rights issue came up with using the original, though I don’t even pretend to know how that works. Historically, “Stroll On” is a huge deal because it’s one of only two songs The Yardbirds recorded with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on dual lead guitar, before Beck abruptly quit and left Page as the band’s only gunslinger. It’s also a huge deal for this soundtrack thanks to my well-established love for a nice reprise, so of course I’d jump at a chance to include an acknowledged classic twice (and before you ask, no, the Aerosmith cover was never under consideration).

Most of the artists discussed so far have followed The Rolling Stones’ lead in being very British, but the last of the classic band included here are very American, which is fitting since pretty much all the building blocks of the Garage Rock sound of American origin. What’s more, this particular band probably had just as much of an influence on the turn of the millennium Garage revival as The Stones did, even if they never had anywhere near the same commercial success back in the day. I’m talking, of course, of Detroit’s own The Stooges (well, actually Ann Arbor’s, but that doesn’t sound as good.) Iggy Pop & co. also make two appearances on this soundtrack, with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Down On The Street” from their self-titled debut and Fun House respectively. Sure enough, both these songs actually HAVE been used in a lot of films over the years, and “Down On The Street” especially sounds exactly like the musical forewarning that something bad is about to happen. That’s not intended as a snarky segue into all the Punk and garage bands that have cited The Stooges as an influence, but it would totally work as one.

The ACTUAL segue I’m gonna use is the Detroit origin, which also happens to be where The Go come from. One of the many Garage Rock revival acts to spring up at the tail end of the 90s, The Go never managed to attain the same level of mainstream success as other Detroit bands like The White Stripes… which is surprising, considering that Jack White was actually IN The Go when they recorded their debut album Whatcha Doin’. They turn up twice on Maziham’s soundtrack, with “Meet Me At The Movies” and “Keep On Trash”, the latter of which White co-wrote. Actually, upon reflection, it feels a bit odd that The White Stripes themselves don’t turn up on this soundtrack anywhere, but they always had a bit too much of a nervy, artsy streak to fit the boozy Blues of the rest of these songs. Nobody could ever accuse The Black Keys of having that problem, which is probably why they’re right behind The Stones for having the most songs on this soundtrack. “Set You Free” and “Hard Row” both show up from 2003’s Thickfreakness, plus “10 A.M. Automatic” from the following year’s Rubber Factory. Really, though, I could just cite all the movies and commercials that these songs have been in, because they really are right up there next to the Stones’ tracks in mass media omnipresence. Seriously, virtually every YouTube posts I found of “Hard Row” has some kind of Sons of Anarchy imagery on it. The Black Keys are pretty much the epitome of “tough guy soundtrack” in the modern age, so how could Maziham NOT have them all over her soundtrack.

And looking back over this blog just now, I realize I nearly forgot to mention one more song: “Souljacker part 1” by Eels. While most critics wouldn’t lump Eels in with the Garage Revival, 2001’s Souljacker definitely found main man E tapping into the zeitgeist, even if the results are a lot darker than the rest of the sounds of the trend. But then, what else could you expect from a man who was literally cosplaying as The Unabomber at the time?

So there you have it! A detailed musical portrait of a character who has yet to appear in Far Out There for more than a dozen pages! Man, I really REALLY need to get back on a two page a week schedule…

(Look at me mentioning a YouTube tidbit up in the main body of the blog instead of saving it for down here at the end! Don’t I realize there’s a STRUCTURE to these things? No, but seriously, this one wasn’t as hard to put together as I was afraid it’d be. One of the unspoken benefits to me preferring to pick more obscure songs for these playlists is the fact that the copyright bots tend to be a lot lest strict about people reposting them. The Rolling Stones, even at their most obscure, are still sufficiently well known that finding posts of stuff like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” outside of the region locker YouTube Music ones was a bit of a chore. Actually, though, the hardest thing was sorting through all the LIVE videos. I mean, I know The Stones have been touring for ages and ages and all that, but WOW there were a lot of non-studio versions of their songs floating around YouTube. Even the official music video versions of “It’s Only Rock And Roll” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” had live audio instead of the official recordings. Still, I managed to track down posts of the right versions without too much browsing. Now, the REAL trick was finding the right version of “Wham Bam Thank You Mam” …because what I consider to be the “right” version is apparently not what everybody else thinks. The version I have, taken off of a collection of Immediate Records singles, is apparently a notably different mix than the ACTUAL single, because most of the posts have a much cleaner, more organ driven version than what I’m used to. Now, most of the time I’m specifically looking for the cleanest, most high-quality version of these songs that I can find, but in this one case, I actually greatly prefer the messier mix, and had to do a LOT of scrolling to finally find somebody who’d posted the version I know best. It didn't help that there's also a very different demo version of the song in circulation, so most of the "alternate version" posts I found were of the demo rather than the different mix. But there’s one more bit of admin to cover here. See that picture up top? Not sure where you’ve seen it before” That’s because you haven’t! The Xafri Twins have made so few appearances so far, with so few pictures of them so far, that I just didn’t like any of them enough to use as the banner image. So brand spanking new pictures for both the twins that you’ve never seen anywhere else! Can’t say I never do anything for Patreon!)

Maziham's YouTube Playlist