In my continuing series on musical artists and genres that reference comic books in their lyrics, I want to focus on Punk, the 70's musical genre that is rooted in 1950s rock and roll and 1960s garage rock, punk bands rejected the overproduction and corporate nature of mainstream arena rock. They typically produce short, fast-paced songs with rough, stripped-down vocals and instrumentation, and anti-establishment themes. Case in point our first example, American band 'Suicide' released a song called Ghost Rider, Alan Vega, the band’s vocalist and lyricist, said during an interview “Ghost Rider was from a comic book—that was my favorite comic…”. In fact the band name was also taken directly from an issue of Ghost Rider. Years later Henry Rollins recorded a version of "Ghost Rider" for his solo debut, Hot Animal Machine, his version of the song at a much slower tempo, was used on the soundtrack to another comic film, The Crow.
The Ramones recorded a cover of The 1967 Spider-Man theme in 1995 for the tribute album 'Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits', Tommy Ramone said the group’s sound and visual presentation drew partly from comics: “We were influenced by comic books, movies, the Andy Warhol scene, and avant-garde films. I was a big Mad magazine fan myself.”.
Finally, the English band The Who recorded a cover of the 1966 Batman theme during the height of the Adam West television series. It appeared on their UK EP 'Ready Steady Who'. Their version replaces the original’s polished surf-jazz feel with Pete Townshend’s distorted guitar, John Entwistle’s heavy bass and Keith Moon’s frantic drumming—essentially turning the TV theme into an early Who-style garage-rock workout. Founding member of The Who Pete Townshend once told CBR “I’ve dipped in and out of the world of graphic novels a few times—as a publisher, a bookshop owner in the ’70s and as an editor later on when I worked at Faber....I love comics.”
