City dweller, successful fella, worked in a bank as a clerk but he thought to himself, “I want to live a life that’s a lot less monetary.” So he taught himself to paint and draw and all his friends who saw his work said “Cor! You ought to take this up, seriously.”

And that, in the musical stylings of Blur, is a brief introduction to Artuš Scheiner (1863-1938), the quiet little white collar worker who gave up his career as a pencil-pushing, number-cruncher at the Financial General in Prague, to become one of Bohemia’s most successful artists and who produced a phenomenal amount of work during his seventy-five years.

Yet, for such an industrious and commercially successful artist, there is, perhaps surprisingly, little written, well, in English at least, about Scheiner other than he lived, he worked and he died, which is really quite fine as it means we get to concentrate solely on the work he produced.

In his twenties, Scheiner started selling comic illustrations to the local newspapers and magazines. He had taught himself how to draw and paint but kept his passion a secret in fear he would be ridiculed for having such high ambition. His early cartoons won him admiration and so encouraged, Scheiner soon progressed to working as an illustrator of folk tales, fairy tales, and children’s stories (like Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies). His main work was featured in a series of best-selling volumes of Czechoslovak fairy tales by the likes of Božena Němcová, Václav Tille, and Karel Jaromír Erben.

His work followed in the elaborate and highly detailed secessionist style popularized by the likes of Gustav Klimt. Scheiner’s illustrations were compelling in their bold, confident lines and strong use of color, and especially in Scheiner’s ability to make his drawings filled with drama, movement, and dark menace—an unsettling sense that something weird and strange is about to unfold.
 

 

 

 
More fabulous illustrations, after the jump…
 

 
In 1965, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Phil Lesh were in a Bay Area outfit called the Warlocks. (Quite astonishingly, the band that would become the Velvet Underground was also operating as the Warlocks at that exact same juncture.) The first show where the band performed as the Grateful Dead occurred on December 4, 1965, in San Jose, at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests.

The story of Jerry seeing the words “Grateful Dead” in a dictionary is a well-established part of Deadhead lore. Jerry saw the words in a dictionary and a sunbeam splashed on the page and the words on the page glowed in a beatific halo or whatnot.

Actually, here’s the story, as recounted in Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life:
 

It was sometime in November 1965, while the band and a few friends were sitting around Phil’s apartment on High Street [Seriously, people? High Street??] in Palo Alto, smoking DMT and thumbing through a gargantuan Funk and Wagnalls dictionary, that the group’s name was revealed (cue biblical trumpets!). As Jerry said in his oft-quoted 1969 description of the episode, “There was ‘grateful dead,’ those words juxtaposed. It was one of those moments, y’know, like everything else on the page went blank, diffuse, just sort of oozed away, and there was grateful dead. Big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination. So I said, ‘How about Grateful Dead?’ And that was it.” Later, he noted, “Nobody in the band liked it. I didn’t like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name and everyone else said, “Yeah, that’s great.” It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it,” he added with a laugh.

 
But haven’t you ever wondered just what kind of dictionary has an entry for “Grateful Dead,” anyway? It seems like an awfully weird term to stick in on the same page as gravel.
 

The Warlocks in action, 1965
 
There’s a pretty solid piece of reporting on the Grateful Dead’s official website that does a good job of explaining how this came about. It’s not a straightforward story, and (as befits the mindset of, say, a lexicographer) the details matter.

Some Grateful Dead fans did spend significant time trying to track down the dictionary that Jerry might have been perusing, but to no avail. And in fact the lack of any such dictionary popping up in these searches may have led to the rise of an alternate theory about The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which does in fact feature the phrase “grateful dead” as well—but had nothing to do with Jerry’s idea for the name, at least not directly.

As the Dead’s website tells it, a Deadhead named Kimball Jones finally found the elusive dictionary, which turned out to be the 1955 edition of The Funk and Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, Britannica World Language Edition:
 

Jones contacted the band’s office, providing photocopies of the entry and title page; images of those pages would eventually appear in The Official Book of the Deadheads, finally laying the question to rest. Jones donated his copy of the dictionary to the Grateful Dead Archive, where it is currently on display.

 
As the article asks later, “The esoteric nature of the entry, and its rarity, raise an interesting question: how did such a specialized entry come to appear in a popular dictionary?”

The reason “Grateful Dead” was in the dictionary derives from a woman named Maria Leach, who worked for Funk and Wagnalls and had made lexicographical contributions “in the fields of folklore and mythology” and was also “the editor of the company’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, which has the other appearance of the grateful dead as an entry. ... in a real way, Maria Leach can be considered the godmother of the Grateful Dead.”

One wonders if Maria Leach ever even heard of the Grateful Dead before her death in 1977, when she was in her eighties. It seems quite likely that a lexicographer who was publishing books in 1949 (the year that Funk and Wagnalls came out with Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend) would almost certainly, twenty years later, not even be aware of all those “younguns” with their loud guitars and such. In fact, Maria Leach was born in 1892 and attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, whose curriculum was largely shaped by the teachings of the Quakers, so you know, it doesn’t seem too probable.

Even more interestingly, her (quite substantial) bio on Wikipedia does not mention her considerable role in the naming of one of the biggest acts in rock and roll history. Her Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, which sounds utterly fascinating, can be acquired on Amazon for a surprisingly reasonable sum.) 

Here’s a scan of the 1955 edition of the dictionary, followed by the text of the entry (click on the image for a larger view):
 

 

GRATEFUL DEAD: The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune or saves his life. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the hero had befriended.(Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary).

 
There’s a book that was written in 1908 by Gordon Hall Gerould under the title The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story that relates to this myth—occasionally people buy it with the idea that it’s about the band, but it still is probably a rewarding read.
 
via Little Hippie
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Grateful Dead guide to dealing with a bad LSD trip

 
I am in love with this pagan portraiture series from photographer Henry Bourne—and frankly a little jealous! While we Americans are left with trace amounts of pagan iconography like Easter bunnies and Christmas trees (all retrofitted to modern Christianity, of course), in the UK, Celtic, Germanic, and early Christian rituals are still celebrated with weird costumes and face paint! I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve manage to avoid the hippie raver trappings of something like Burning Man—it all looks very “Leigh Bowery does the English countryside.” The amount of work that must go into these seems considerable.

The fascinating thing about these festivals and rituals is that people don’t really remember much about them, or even how old the traditions actually are. For example, the use of black face paint is said to be a reference to chimney sweeps—but that’s a somewhat modern profession—post-industrialization, actually. And one festival makes inexplicable use of reindeer antlers, but no one knows why. The whole thing seems to just be an excuse for (at least seemingly) normal people to do something avant-garde under cover of “tradition.” Bourne’s pagan series has been compiled into a book, Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore Portrait.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Black Sabbath, 1970
 
On this day 44 years ago, Black Sabbath played their first-ever show on U.S. soil. However, as the headline of this post insinuates, the actual location of the gig is some debate, depending on the sources you choose to believe.
 

Black Sabbath, London 1970
 
Riding high (quite literally) on the huge successes of their first two albums, Black Sabbath (released on February 18th, 1970) and Paranoid (released on September 18th, 1970), both Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne historically credit the location of their first U.S. show in their respective autobiographies as legendary Manhattan club, Ungano’s. In his 2012 autobiography, Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi recalls showing up to Ungano’s and was horrified at what a “shithole” the club was. Their roadie plugged their Euro gear into Ungano’s U.S.-only sockets and subsequently blew the club’s fuses. After a short unplanned pre-show intermission, the power went back on and Black Sabbath’s first gig was history. Or was it?
 

Black Sabbath jamming at Esby Gymnasium at Glassboro State College?
 
Other sources claim that the band’s first gig took place at Glassboro State College (now known as Rowan University) in New Jersey. And the story is quite similar to Iommi’s. Claims made by rock promoter Rick Green, the brother of Stu Green who with his brother ran Midnight Sun an influential music promotion company that started out in Pennsylvania in early 70’s, has been quoted as calling himself the “promoter” of Black Sabbath’s “first U.S. gig” at Glassboro. On the surface, it’s not hard to believe. The Greens booked everyone from Lou Reed and Alice Cooper to the Patti Smith Group at the historic Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, not far from Glassboro State.

In aninterview that Rick did in 1992 with The Philadelphia Daily News, he spoke about the gig in strangely similar detail to Iommi’s recalling that Sabbath blew out the power after plugging in their amps into incompatible sockets. This caused the gig to be rescheduled until the end of Sabbath’s inaugural tour. Hmmm. So what about Glassboro? Was it real, or was it just a bad memory? Here’s another version of the Glassboro story, according to an article from The Seth Man, a journalist who writes over at Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage. The post also cites Rick Green’s Daily News interview as a source, but includes more detail:
 

The band’s (Black Sabbath’s) passage through customs at Kennedy Airport in New York proved to be “a day-long trauma that left the group tired and humiliated,” causing them to be three and a half hours late for the gig. Finally appearing onstage at 1:00 in the morning, the power to their sound system cut out during the first song. It was fixed within a few minutes, but once they recommenced they caused a second power outage that not only knocked out their sound system but the power to the gymnasium, the campus and “...most of the power in the neighborhood. The street lights were out and there was darkness.” Appropriately enough, the date was Mischief Night: exactly half a year away from Walpurgisnacht on October 30th.

 

Black Sabbath, perhaps snapped during the Esby show
 
As I mentioned earlier, there are many resources, some trustworthy, that credit Glassboro as Sabbath’s first American gig, including British author Garry Sharpe-Young (specifically in the book, “Metal: The Definitive Guide”) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s timeline on Sabbath. I’ve even read accounts that seem legit that tell the tale of a young Ozzy Osbourne, allegedly so distraught during the Glassboro gig that he wandered off into a messy pile of tears in corner of Glassboro’s Esby Gymnasium (where the mythological gig was held), while shouting “I hate America and I want to go home!” Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that said article spelled Ozzy’s name “Ozzie” and also notes that Ozzy was 20 at the time, when he was actually 22. I’m probably nitpicking here, but for what it’s worth, I’d like to present another piece of this very weird puzzle.  Below is a strange show poster for the Glassboro show, supposedly created by promoter Rick Green’s little sister. The poster went to auction at Christie’s in 2007. The auction item’s bio states a bit of maybe-history noting that after the power went out during the first song, Sabbath wasn’t able to continue and the show was made up later at neighboring Montclair State University.
 

Black Sabbath show poster for Glassboro State College. Christies auction 2007.
 
So what to believe? In my mind, it’s hard to conceive that Tony Iommi’s recollection of Sabbath’s first gig would be incorrect. I mean, he was there, man. And despite the fact that it’s nothing short of a miracle that Ozzy remembers anything from those early days (although in his book “I Am Ozzy,” which I’m currently reading, he remembers a lot), the fact that he corroborates Iommi’s heavy metal history lesson just adds credibility to the show taking place at Ungano’s. So let’s put an end to this folklore once and for all. In the pages of the the Fall 1998 issue of Rowan Magazine the University historians took a look back at the many famous visitors they have hosted through the years such as Blondie, Elton John and Jane Fonda. The publication, that the University publishes itself, makes no mention of Black Sabbath. So there you have it. Black Sabbath’s first live U.S. show PROBABLY took place in a small, skuzzy club in Manhattan on October 30th, 1970, not some upper-crust college in New Jersey that was more accustomed to the stylings of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The END (or is it?).

 
In a genius move that combines martial arts spoof with his country’s long tradition of satirical theatre, Jamaican video man Simon “Sno” Thompson (a.k.a. Yosef Imagination) has dropped a third episode of the hilarious Konfu Dread series of short videos.

This one goes after the sad and dangerous skin-lightening trend that’s affected developing cities worldwide, from Mumbai to Lagos to Havana. Rooted in a nefarious twining of racial politics, latent colonial mentality and economic disadvantage, skin-lightening’s gone especially harsh in Kingston JA, which has seen wide use of a range of pills and creams with ingredients like mercurous chloride and hydroquinone (see the second video after the jump). Some also use Blue Power brand laundry soap—known as “cake soap”—in the folkloric belief that it lightens the skin, as well as keeping it cool in the sun.

Last fall, dancehall reggae superstar Vybz Kartel, ironically nicknamed “Di Teacha,” propogated the myth by releasing his tune “Cake Soap.” Its chorus—in which Kartel claims his skin “cool like mi wash mi face wit di cake soap”—caused enough controversy to motivate Kartel to admit that he does indeed lighten his skin:
 

 
In classic dancehall fashion, fellow star Kiprich took the tune’s rhythm and recorded an anti-lightening answer tune, which features a Jamaican mum ridiculing the craze and a chorus that notes: “Ya can’t get brown, ya coulda buy every cake soap inna town…”
 

 
Enter Konfu Dread. As previously featured on Dangerous Minds, Thompson’s production polished the natty martial artist’s street-level vibes in episode two. But for this edition, he takes it back to Kingston’s roads, as the Cake Soap crew goes after the Dread for using their treasured product for its original purpose—washing clothes.
 

 
After the jump: a Current TV segment about the serious health problems of skin-bleaching on top of the cultural concerns…