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‘This Time’: John Cougar Mellencamp is really in love with John Waters actress Edith Massey
06.03.2016
01:31 pm
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Long before he gained fame, Indiana-born and raised roots rocker John Mellencamp was already married and a father, just two weeks after graduating from high school in 1970. After two-years in a community college—and a stint with a New York Dolls-influenced glam rock group called Trash—for a period of about 18 months he travelled back and forth several times between New York City and his small town home of Seymour trying to get his foot in the door of the music business. In 1976 Mellencamp was signed by none other than the infamous Tony Defries, the flamboyant and ruthless manager of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and other outré performers (like electro chanteuse Annette Peacock). It was Defries who dubbed him “Johnny Cougar” thinking his German surname sounded too hillbilly.

In fact, the young Mellencamp had little choice but to go along with the name change which he saw for the first time already plastered across his Chestnut Street Incident album cover without his consent:

“I was totally unaware of it until it showed up on the album jacket. When I objected to it, he said, ‘Well, either you’re going to go for it, or we’re not going to put the record out.’ So that was what I had to do… but I thought the name was pretty silly.”

That’s rough! Imagine how pissed off the guy was holding his debut album in his hands for the first time and finding out he’s got a brand new—stupid—name? Mellencamp’s career survived Defries, and the name went from Johnny Cougar to John Cougar then to John Cougar Mellencamp before he settled on the name he was born with. Mellencamp was no overnight sensation. His first album flopped—selling just 12,000 copies—and ultimately he found himself on a record label that wanted him to be a middle-of-the-road pop songsmith like Neil Diamond.

It was during this time, a couple of years before his commercial breakthrough with American Fool that Mellencamp released the Steve Cropper-produced album Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did in 1980. That album featured on its cover, the artist posing with none other than John Waters’ star Edith Massey, who was also in the video for one of the record’s Top 40 singles, the charmingly goofy love song “This Time.”

Mellencamp told Rolling Stone in late 1980:

“I was looking for a typical heavy woman to convey a lower-middle-class way of living.”

More like desperate living, right? It looks like Edie got over the Egg Man?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.03.2016
01:31 pm
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A sackful of holiday greetings from Divine, Edie the Egglady & Miss Jean Hill (NSFW)
12.15.2015
09:11 am
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Here are the grand goddesses of John Waters’ Dreamland repertory company, Divine, Edith Massey, and Jean Hill, making spirits bright for the holidays in this collection of pin-up photos.

Though all three performers have sadly left this planet (Divine in 1988, Edie in 1984, and Jean Hill in 2013), their beauty and glamour lives on.

The majority of these photos were taken for novelty Christmas cards in the ‘80s—the sort you would have found at a Spencer’s Gifts back in the day.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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12.15.2015
09:11 am
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‘Pink Flamingos’ on acid

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A blast from DM’s past:

Babs Johnson and Edie The Egg Lady get psychedelicized.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”

Mr. Vader: “Do you believe in God?”
Babs Johnson: “I AM GOD!”
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.22.2012
03:51 pm
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In Praise of Edith Massey

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What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.

Along with Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce, Massey was a stock player in the Dreamlander universe, and a key contributer to that trilogy of Waters films I and many others consider particularly essential: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine.  Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled.  In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.

Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.

Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here).  The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:

 
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos.  That follows below:

 
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984.  That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:

 

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.07.2010
04:45 pm
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