Like three of the four members of Talking Heads, Bobby Grossman had been studying at the Rhode Island School of Design before vamoosing down to the Big Apple to take part in the punk/no-wave creative revolution occurring in the mid-1970s. Grossman quickly became a familiar face at CBGBs and the Mudd Club. Grossman would make his mark in the realm of photography; he took lots of photos of famous people that are a useful resource to this day. 

Early on Grossman became friendly with André Leon Talley, who later become a big muckety-muck at Vogue (you might remember him from The September Issue), as well as Richard Bernstein, who over the years would execute almost a dozen covers for various Grace Jones releases and also did the familiar purple and yellow cover of New Order’s “Fine Time.”
 

Self-portrait by Bobby Grossman
 
According to Richard Boch’s The Mudd Club, Grossman was “the official TV Party photographer,” referencing Glenn O’Brien’s au courant anything-goes cable access TV show of the era. O’Brien also had Warhol connections; Warhol had included O’Brien, a graduate of Georgetown, as a part of his circle because he was looking to replace the speed addicts in his orbit with “clean-cut college kids.” In any case, Grossman was a familiar part of the vibrant NYC hijinks of the late 70s and beyond.

Warhol, whose most famous works had involved boxes of Brillo and cans of Campbell’s Soup, was certainly not unconscious of the iconic status of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as well. While not as well-known as the Brillo boxes, each of these still fetches a pretty penny on the auction circuit:
 

 
Before arriving in New York and meeting Warhol himself, Grossman cribbed a page from the master and concocted a special punk rock version of an all-American box of Corn Flakes. As Grossman told Noah Becker about the project in 2009:
 

I photographed a number of friends eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The idea originated at RISD when I took a Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed and put it on a box of German Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Later on when I moved to NYC I did a series of Corn Flake photo sessions.

 
Grossman has said that the idea “originated in 1974 while listening to Sally Can’t Dance.”

I think the impact of putting a noted New York drug addict and chronicler of the city’s “underground” types on the cover of Wheaties, then and now reserved for only the most wholesomely successful of athletes (obviously the best-known such sportsman would much later become Caitlyn Jenner), is somewhat lost on us today. There’s a picture of Warhol himself holding one of Grossman’s Lou Reed Kellogg’s boxes, which you can see at the top of this post. Here’s a closer look:
 

 
The Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box in the 1970s featured the words “die originalen” in cursive script just underneath the name of the product, obviously signifying that this was not some ersatz imitation but the real McCoy just like Americans consumed with their morning orange juice. 

Then Grossman hit upon a related but different idea, which was to take pictures of prominent New York bohemians and rock stars doing a hokey pose while holding a bowl of Wheaties…

Keep reading after the jump…

David Yow and Steve Albini on the set of ‘Duelin’ Firemen’ (via Bogart9)

The video game Duelin’ Firemen would have blown minds if it had been released in 1995. Think the Jodorowsky Dune of games. Much of the cast is straight out of the pages of Mondo 2000 or Fiz: Rudy Ray Moore, Rev. Ivan Stang, Mark Mothersbaugh, Timothy Leary, David Yow, Steve Albini, the Boredoms, Terence McKenna, Buzz Osborne, and Tony Hawk all had parts to play.

But unlike other worthy computer games that were actually produced in order to suck away vital months of my adolescence, such as DEVO’s Adventures of the Smart Patrol and the Residents’ Bad Day at the Midway, Duelin’ Firemen never passed from becoming into being. All that remains is a seven-minute trailer and a seven-inch record with David Yow on one side and the Boredoms on the other, both embedded below. From 23 years ago, here’s Rev. Ivan Stang’s account of the shoot:

12.21.1994- Run-n-Gun! filming
by Reverend Ivan Stang

I’ve been in Chicago for the last week, and although I took the modem with me, I never had time to plug it in. I was being an actor in a CD-ROM interactive video game called DUELIN’ FIREMEN being produced for the 3D0 system by a group of SubGenius filmakers and computer animator/vr programmers called Runandgun. It’s a combination of multiple-choice filmed scenarios and v.r. game situations, all taking place in Chicago while the entire city burns to the ground. I have played two roles in it so far—first an evil Man-In-Black and second, Cagliostro the evil 1,000-year old Mason whose spells started the fire. What sets this game apart from anything else I’ve ever seen is the TOTAL MIND-RAPE HILLBILLY SPAZZ-OUT STYLE of it. It makes Sam Raimi look like D.W. Griffith by comparison… makes Tim Burton look like Ernie Bushmiller. It is sick, twisted, weird and ‘Frop-besoaked like nothing on earth. It stars Rudy Ray Moore aka DOLEMITE as the main fireman with cameos by Tim Leary, Mark Mothersbaugh, Terrence McKenna, David Yow of Jesus Lizard and all manner of local Chicago freaks and jokers. (YES! I spent the week WORKING with DOLEMITE. We DO BATTLE in a scene and you get to “PLAY” us in the game section. Now is that cool or what. Of course, you’re probably too SOPHISTICATED to even KNOW who Rudy Ray Moore IS!!! (None of the crew did, although the winos outside the set recognized his VOICE.)) The real stars are the animation, fx and sets. It’s like a LIVING-SURREAL CARTOON from the mind of a CRAZY MAN (in this case, director Grady Sein). The Runandgun crew are like this commune of crazed hillbilly technoids. I had the time of my life. The game won’t be finished till July ‘95, though.

Stang

 

 
The trailer’s quality reminds me of the way videos looked on the screen of my Macintosh Performa during the late Nineties, except that back then they were about the size of a matchbox. What I’m trying to say is: prepare your mind and body for ugly fat-pixel video…

Watch after the jump…

 
During exactly none of the at least 20 Jesus Lizard shows I saw over the course of the ‘90s did I ever imagine that their frontman/moaner/howler-monkey-in-chief David Yow would have a career afterlife as Jimmy the simpleton janitor. But life’s weird.

Since the Jesus Lizard’s demise and in between its occasional reactivations (and a sojourn as a member of Qui), Yow has shifted direction to graphic arts and acting. He’s published books and appeared in films and music videos (someone please remake Corrupt and cast Yow in either lead role already please and thank you), and his latest project combines acting with that version of “singing” that’s his and his alone. He’s a guest vocalist for two songs on the new Dumb Numbers album, Dumb Numbers II, and the star of their new video.

Dumb Numbers is a recording project of Australian (now Los Angelean) filmmaker Adam Harding, who uses a Delaney-and-Bonnie-ish heavy friends approach to music making, recruiting his many, many collaborators from the ranks of the musicians with whom he’s made connections as a videographer. This includes not only Yow, but members of Sebadoh, Cows, Warpaint, Melvins, Dinosaur Jr., Best Coast, and Einstürzende Neubauten. Harding neatly avoids a too-many-cooks scenario, and the music coheres really well. It’s difficult to pigeonhole his sound, though certainly ‘90s underground rock figures heavily in the mix. Stoner rock, doom, post-metal, and shoegaze are all clear influences, but Harding goes in more for hooks and pop structures than those genres, occupying the huge sonic space of a band like Isis while avoiding the ponderousness that can sometimes submerge that sort of music.

Which brings us back to Jimmy the janitor. David Yow starred as the character in 2012 for a Harding-directed video by the band Useless Children. The following year, Yow would direct the first Dumb Numbers video, “Redrum,” from the band’s eponymous debut album. And now, Yow has, as mentioned above, joined Dumb Numbers as a guest vocalist on two songs from the band’s second album, and in the new video, released just yesterday, “Unbury the Hatchet.” It follows Jimmy through his surreal daylong failed attempt to go to work—with a wonderful derail to a veterinary clinic waiting room populated with grown men in animal costumes.

Yow and Harding were kind enough to take some time to talk with Dangerous Minds about the video and their collaboration.

DM: OK, I know both of you have directed videos before, which one of you directed “Unbury the Hatchet?”

Adam Harding: I did, I directed, shot and edited it. I had directed a video for a band in Melbourne called Useless Children back in 2012. That was the first thing that David and I ever worked on together, and we just had such a blast making that video, and it was the first appearance of the character “Jimmy.” Jimmy is based on a real person. When I lived in Australia I worked at a printing factory, and Jimmy was the janitor there. He was a simple fellow, and he wasn’t the best janitor in the world but he was a really lovely guy. He didn’t talk much but we bonded over music—I had a boombox and he would kind of get into whatever music I was playing. This was in the mid-‘90s. I played the first Folk Implosion record a lot, and he would dance with his broom and shake his butt. He’d headbang to Sepultura.

David Yow: [laughing] How old was Jimmy?

Harding: He would have been in his early to mid-50s then. So this character is based on Jimmy, and we did this Useless Children video with David doing the character. And over the last four years, often David would do something Jimmy-like to make us laugh, so we had a long time to come up with ideas for Jimmy. It was really really fun to be able to do that finally.

DM: OK, so David, this is obviously not someone you’ve had an opportunity to meet, so how did you develop the character, and what does performing the character mean to you?

Yow: Adam has explained to me about Jimmy. When we shot the Useless Children video, I had done some acting job earlier that day where I’d put grey in my temples, and we just kept that in there, and that became part of it to me. Also he wears a coverall uniform with a badge with his name on it, and just putting on the coverall was helpful in becoming someone else. Adam had described that Jimmy was affable, a really nice guy, not a bad bone in his body, very simple. He doesn’t worry about too much. He might be sort of mentally retarded, and with both of these videos we’ve done, he doesn’t say a word except to talk to his mother in the morning, and you don’t hear him. I’ve been doing a lot of acting in the last few years, and it was really easy to slip into that simple place where Jimmy lives.

Harding: And you put the coveralls on and your belly comes out.

Yow: I’m fat now!
 

Harding and Yow in “Unbury the Hatchet”

DM: Is the narrative based on anything about the actual Jimmy? Where did that come from?

Harding: It really wasn’t. I can’t remember which ideas came first. At all. I wanted my buddy Bobb from Best Coast to be in it, and he has this kind of bunny-tough persona he does, he has this old dirty bunny costume that he wears when he does solo shows. I wanted Bobb to be in the video, and from there came the gorilla costume, trying to incorporate those. I knew I wanted Jimmy to be going to work and never getting there.

Yow: And just so you and the rest of the world know, the Gorilla is Matt Cronk from Qui.

Continues after the jump…

 
There’s a short film coming out that stars two legends of Texas punk. David Yow (of Scratch Acid, the Jesus Lizard and lately—have mercy!—Flipper) and Gibby Haynes (of the Butthole Surfers, blessèd be their name) have top billing in this good-looking black-and-white picture. This could be my generation’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and I hope I don’t have to wait too long to see it.

Directed by Peter Bolte, who previously cast Yow in his 2013 feature All Roads Lead, Walden Pink appears to be a tale of existential dread. Here’s the synopsis from the Victoria TX Indie Film Fest, where the movie will premiere on March 20:

Walden Pink sits disheveled on a park bench as the world drifts by him. The rest of his day is met with one unfortunate confrontation after another by the likes of religious proselytizers, process servers, angry bartenders and abrasive barflies. These conversations only distract him from finding a peace and clarity to this repetitive and draining existence. Just as Walden’s day began, his day ends seated on a park bench in a state of bitterness and self-loathing.

In the trailer below, Haynes’ character first tries to rouse Walden (Yow) from his catatonia by singing a visionary interpretation of Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” Why does Gibby not have a podcast, a SiriusXM channel, or a sheaf of optical fiber cables wired directly into my brain? And where is David Yow’s Oscar® or Golden Globe®, Hollywood? Just whom exactly is one supposed to blow to get things done during the Kali Yuga?
 

 
On Halloween night of 1998, Shellac and David Yow of Scratch Acid/Jesus Lizard fame indulged their silly side, pretending to be The Sex Pistols for a set of scorching music. The location was Lounge Ax, the legendary venue on 2438 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago that had been pummeling audiences with awesome music since 1987. (It closed in 2000; you might remember it as the venue in High Fidelity where John Cusack first meets Lisa Bonet.)

The first performers were Ms. Fits, an all-female Misfits cover band. During their set, Shellac’s Steve Albini stood right in the middle of the audience “to loudly support” the openers, who were facing “a tough crowd.” The middler, Sixto, featured members from Seam and Dis—they’re still active, at least judging by their bandcamp page.

When the crew put up three microphones for the final set, a rumor briefly flared up that this was going to be a Big Black reunion. What the audience got was a lot more special than that: Shellac with David Yow as a spot-on Johnny Rotten doing most of the songs off of Never Mind the Bollocks. Bob Weston was Sid Vicious, Todd Trainer was Paul Cook on drums, and Albini was Steve Jones.
 

 
An attendee of the show submitted the following account:
 

David Yow stalked onto the stage, in full 1970’s-era Johnny Rotten attire to the letter. Bleached and spiked hair, psychotically glaring at the audience, the whole nine yards. He’d done his homework on this one. He was followed by the three Shellacs, with Steve Albini doing his best Steve Jones in vinyl pants (!) and a red doo-rag on his head. Bob Weston *was* Sid Vicious, in spiked black hair, mesh shirt (with scratches and scars visible underneath), glassy-eyed, and an impressively bloody IV bandage on his arm. Only Todd Trainer seemed to buck the whole Pistols image. I mean, he could have found one of those big sweaters or something. Paul Cook had style too.

Anyway, they ripped into “Holidays in the Sun”, and that set the tone for the evening. Yow had Rotten’s nasal Brit accent down pat, even in song. He pulled the whole thing off so well, I tell ya. Weston kept coughing up “blood” and running into things. Steve’s guitar sounded kind of sloppy, but I don’t think Jones could have done it any better. Between songs the band taunted the audience in mock cockney accents, Steve asking if there were “any PAA-ties about”. The audience responded by throwing chunks of a dismembered jack-o-lantern at the band.

The setlist was confined to material from Never Mind the Bollocks, including “Bodies”, “Submission”, “Anarchy in the U.K.”, and closing with “God Save the Queen”. Yow seemed to remember the words to them better than he remembers the words to Jesus Lizard songs.

Yow ended the evening by asking, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and the band walked offstage, barely an hour after they started. For a long time, nobody left. The house lights came up and nobody left. Todd Trainer started taking his drum set apart and people booed. It finally registered that that was the evening, that they weren’t going to get anymore, and they weren’t getting any Shellac songs.

 
As attendee Andy Larson wrote ten years later to the day, “steve albini said something like ‘does anyone know where there’s a party about?’ in a british accent—and i believe only that. walking up lincoln ave. after the show i passed bob weston (sid vicious) and said ‘hey—great show’ and he said “right” in a british accent.”

There’s no video of the show, and scarcely any pictures—at least on the Internet. The b/w shot above is the only one I could find. There is, however, fairly good audio, which you can download here in flac format.
 

Setlist:
1. Holidays In The Sun
2. Bodies
3. Pretty Vacant
4. Seventeen
5. Sub-mission
6. New York
7. Anarchy In The U.K.
8. God Save The Queen

 
The poster for the show was done by Illinois gig poster legend Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine. The poster run had a limited run of only 100 pressings, which combined with the specialness of the gig makes this an extremely hard-to-get item.

 
Yo Gabba Gabba isn’t the only kid-vid with indie rock crossover appeal—the wonderful Pancake Mountain was started in 2004 by Scott Stuckey (yes, he’s one of those Stuckeys) as a public-access show, and is now being produced by PBS Digital. Hosted by puppet Rufus Leaking, the show has had guest appearances from music luminaries like Tegan & Sara, Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire, Ian McKaye, George Clinton, M.I.A., St. Vincent—this could go on forever.

While older episodes remain available on DVD, the show’s YouTube channel is a bit disappointingly sparse, given the show’s history of amazing guest appearances. However, just hours ago they uploaded an insane cooking segment with David Yow of the Jesus Lizard. Watch and learn, good people.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
David Yow talks to Dangerous Minds about ‘The Jesus Lizard: Book’
Cat Scratch Jesus Lizard: David Yow channels his inner B. Kliban

 
Last week, when we spoke to David Yow about his forthcoming Jesus Lizard: Book, he completely neglected to mention to us that he had a second book in the works. A book of cat drawings, and just about all of them groaner puns. Through his publisher, Akashik Books, Yow said:

I love cats. Always have. The only time I didn’t have a cat was a brief hell in Chicago where I lived in an apartment whose landlord didn’t allow them. At that place, I had a life-sized cardboard cutout of a cat which I named Toody. I also love wordplay. I’m the only adult I hang out with who still gets a kick out of puns. I make up palindromes. I used to write songs and poems (these days, I leave that for the songwriters and poets); in this book of cat-pun drawings, I have made a concerted effort to come up with ideas that range from really funny to really amusing. The entire litter of animals in this book are line drawings that are ‘coloured in’ with photographic textures, and each cat is dropped into a photographic setting. Yep, that’s the truth.

 

Catatonic
 

Cat Burglar
 

Cat Nip
 

Cat-O-Nine Tails
 
Et cetera. There are many more of these to be seen at Yow’s web site. And that’s the only place you’ll be able to see them for awhile. The book won’t actually be out until next summer.

It’s charming that he thinks people will like pictures of cats, but frankly, I’m skeptical. Who the hell buys cat stuff?

Below, fan-made video for Scratch Acid’s “Cannibal” (NSFW)

 
Previous, More Previous

 
David Yow has been a very productive fellow lately. On the heels of a well-received Jesus Lizard reunion a few years ago, the plainly reinvigorated singer/bassist/actor/designer has released a fantastic solo album, Tonight You Look Like a Spider. The album is difficult to unconditionally recommend to fans of Yow’s past bands (TJL, Scratch Acid and Qui) - not that it’s bad, mind you. To my ears, at least, it’s extremely cool stuff. It just delivers entirely different kicks than Yow’s fans are accustomed to. There are lengthy prog instrumentals, moments reminiscent of Scott Walker’s idiosyncratic later albums, passages of computer-generated speech a la “Fitter Happier,” and some pieces that are just so completely unglued as to exist beyond simple classification, but Yow’s famous torture-victim-screaming-through-a-ball-gag vocal stylings are not to be found in any abundance on Spider. There’s a great deal there to enjoy if you clear your mind of ANY expectation of experiencing the concise, visceral gut-punches the Jesus Lizard delivered.

But fans who still crave the Jesus Lizard thrill machine’s kinetic and oft-imitated signature sound aren’t left in the dark. Yow’s label, Joyful Noise, announced the impending release of a lavish coffee table book/7”/CD/DVD set devoted to the Jesus Lizard. In keeping with the band’s unbroken habit of four-letter titles, the book is called Book. (I asked Yow if the book would have happened at all had “book” not been a four-letter word. His answer was a laugh, followed by a swift and unequivocal “No.”) It’s impossible to properly review, as the release date is months away, so we went straight to the source and spoke to David Yow about what’s in it and how it came to be.

Johnny Temple from Girls Against Boys, who runs a publishing company called Akashic, approached us/me, probably over three years ago. I initially didn’t have much interest in doing a book. I didn’t see much point in it, seeing how long we’d been broken up. But the impetus was just Johnny asking us if we wanted to do it, and the more we talked about it, the more I thought, OK, this could be worthwhile.

One thing that was very important to me was that there have been a few things that have come out since we broke up that I didn’t have much hand in the design on, and with this, I just said “Well, I’m designing the book, I don’t trust anyone else to do it and I won’t like it if they do.” I designed it and had Henry Owings [Chunklet] help with the layout. There are bios, written by all four of us. Mac’s (McNeilly, drums), Duane’s (Denison, guitar) and mine go from childhood up to Jesus Lizard days. David Sims’ (bass) is more informational about the kind of stuff he’s interested in as far as recording. He also wrote a lot of notes about each of the recordings.

There are contributed written pieces by a whole lot of folks - two of them in particular I think make the book worthwhile alone. Mike Watt wrote a piece that is so Dada/Beatnik/Abstract poetry that you can’t even tell exactly what he’s saying. It’s sort of like looking at an abstract painting and saying “I’m not sure I know what that is, but I sort of feel like it’s this.” Also, Alex Haacke from Einstürzende Neubauten wrote a particularly good piece. Albini’s in there. There’s tons of photos, a recipe of mine, and David Sims kept an exhaustive list of every single show we played, so that’s in there, with who was on the bill, the date, the venue, and whether we opened or headlined. That part’s really kind of cool, it’s fairly small type and takes up several pages. It’s a lot of fuckin’ shows!

I would love for Book to be a tombstone, but with the recent Scratch Acid and Jesus Lizard re-enactment tours I’ve learned to never say never. It’s possible that there will be more Jesus Lizard shows. We’ll see.

Book comes with my endorsement. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t honestly mean it - it’s a worthwhile thing. It’s pretty cheap too, considering how big and heavy it is, I think it’s like $18-$20. [Per Akashik, retail for the regular edition sans pre-order goodies will be $24.95, though it’s a bit less on Amazon - RK] It’s a good book. It’s conceivable to me that somebody who didn’t even give much of a shit about the band could find it worthwhile and interesting.

While the plain old book Book is due out in March, the pre-order version claims a mid-December ship date, and for $80 comes bundled with Yow’s Spider CD, a DVD containing 5 videos for that album’s “Opening Suite” by directors Adam Harding, Tim Rutili, Jared Varava, Todd Adam Phillips, & Jennifer Lynch (yes, David’s daughter), and a 7” signed by all four original band members, featuring never before released recordings of the JL songs “Fly On The Wall” and “Elegy,” recorded by John Loder at Southern Studios.

 
And if you’ve never seen the man in action, good lord, watch some Jesus Lizard where they excelled most - in concert.
 

The Jesus Lizard - Thumbscrews - 2009 from David Yow on Vimeo.

Previous Kretsch-on-Yow action on Dangerous Minds

 
Via Travis Michael Keller at the always illuminating Buddyhead:

Henry Owings (of Chunklet Magazine fame + http://www.chunklet.com) posted this video on Facebook and wrote this along with it… “This bands just sounds like a David Yow fronted Girls Against Boys doing Joy Division”

Nailed it.

Yow is touring with the reconstituted Girls Against Boys (new album next week) to mark the release of his first solo album, Tonight You Look Like a Spider, which has already achieved a level of infamy for having a limited run of its initial pressing released encased in concrete. The notorious ex frontman for Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard, and Qui talks about how his album came to be on Joyful Noise Recordings’ blog:

[Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton] is an extremely industrious and good looking man. He grabbed me violently by my dry and flakey shoulders and screamed at the top of his carbon flavored lungs, “YOU’RE MAKING A SOLO RECORD AND I’M PUTTING IT OUT WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!”

So yeah I’ll just shut my damn yap now so you can watch the thing.
 

 
Attention good people of Los Angeles, this weekend marks the opening of David Yow’s solo art exhibit. Yow, best known as the front man for confrontational noise-meisters, The Jesus Lizard (and before that, Scratch Acid) will be showing at the DIY Gallery, 1549 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026. You can see an online selection of his paintings and digital work at his website. I love this one.