This concert footage of Janis Joplin and The Kozmic Blues Band, her smokin’ hot, soulful as fuck, Stax-influenced backup group, was shot in Frankfurt, Germany on April 12, 1969, capturing the hard-living vocalist at the top of her game as a performer. Despite the fact that the 27-year-old Joplin was said to have been shooting close to $200 worth of heroin into her arm each day—even in 2012 dollars, a $200 a day habit is quite a lot of heroin, I shudder to think what $200 bought back then—she’s going full-tilt Tina Turner in this amazing performance. This European tour was on support of Joplin’s I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! album.

Before it gets to the music, there’s a bit of “looking back” reminiscing from some old German guys you won’t care about and some interview footage that is translated into German, obscuring what she’s saying for the most part (I was amused by the male German voice-over guy like laughing whenever Janis laughed, to indicate wryness).

The concert footage starts at about 22 minutes in and it’s truly dazzling.
 

 
An all too brief extract from Sean Connery’s Edinburgh, a promotional documentary for the ancient Scottish capital, directed by Murray Grigor and starring the city’s most famous milkman.

This wasn’t Connery’s first documentary, back in 1967 he presented, produced and directed a brilliant (and rarely seen) documentary called The Bowler and The Bunnet, which examined the political tensions between the workforce (“bunnets”) and the employers (“Bowler hats”) at Fairfield’s shipyard on Glasgow’s River Clyde. Scripted by Cliff Hanley, the film revealed Connery’s natural mastery of documentary film-making, and it is only a pity that he didn’t continue to make similar films on other social and political issues.

Perhaps, with the imminent referendum on Scottish independence, Connery may yet return to make a documentary on the future of Scotland?
 

 
Reg Presley, frontman of The Troggs, died today. The cause was cancer. He was 71.

In remembrance of Reg, I’d like to share something from the Dangerous Minds archives: Hilarious, profane and oddly sweet, this is The Troggs Tapes, the sound of a band struggling to get it just right.

Among musicians, the The Troggs Tapes is the gold standard of rock and roll memes. As band members Reg, Dennis, Tony and Ronnie desperately try to nail a take of a song, they progressively melt down, bickering, ranting, and collectively uttering more “fucks” than Tony Montana in Scarface. The tapes are claimed to have been a source of inspiration for This is Spinal Tap.

Here’s a groovy unattributed anecdote which, whether true or not, illustrates the mythology connected to this iconic recording;

Ron Wood was doing some studio work with Bob Dylan and over the course of the gig played Dylan the “Troggs Tapes”. Not unnaturally, Dylan thought they were very funny.

It turned out that Troggs singer Reg Presley was working in an adjacent studio making a demo for a commercial.

When Wood discovered this, he approached Dylan all excited, saying “Remember that guy on the tape I played you? Well, he’s next door right now!”

Dylan says, “Really?! Wow, I gotta meet him. You gotta introduce me!”

So Ron Wood takes Bob Dylan next door to find Reg disconsolately fumbling with a bass guitar.

Dylan, by way of introduction, says “Hey, I didn’t know you played bass, man. How long you been playing bass?”

Reg looks up and with a deep sigh says, “All fuckin’ afternoon, mate, all fuckin’ afternoon”.

Larry Page has posted a transcript of The Troggs Tapes here.

Here’s one of my favorite bits:

Ronnie: Whether you think so or not, that is a number-fucking one, and if that bastard don’t go, then I’ll fucking retire! I fucking do!

Dennis: I think it is a good song. I agree, it is a good song.

Ronnie: But it fucking well won’t be unless we spend a little bit of fucking thought and imagination to fucking make it a fucking number one. You gotta put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard, you know…..

 
Filling in for an AWOL Keith Richards (who had visa problems at the time, stemming a then-recent drug bust in Toronto), Frank Zappa reads “The Talking Asshole” routine from William S Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The occasion was the Nova Convention, a three-day celebration of Burroughs’s work that took place in New York City in early December of 1978.

Others on the bill at the Nova Convention included Patti Smith, Robert Anton Wilson, Brion Gysin, Laurie Anderson, poet John Giorno, Timothy Leary, Philip Glass, John Cage and author Terry Southern, who can be heard at the beginning of the clip, introducing Zappa.
 

 
If you would have told me back when I was a defiant teenage post-punk fanboy—clad in Doc Martens and a black trench coat festooned with badges of PiL, The Residents, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and Throbbing Gristle—that one day I’d go through quite a long “phase” (as my wife calls my penchant for perhaps slightly over-exuberant musical enthusiasms) for the type of music that I HATED MOST when I was a kid, the laid-back, singer-songwriter sounds of the Southern California folk-rock, I would not have believed you.

I’d have (truly) been horrified. To me, there was nothing worse than The Eagles (maybe just “Southern rockers” like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Molly Hatchet) and anything that even vaguely smacked of the So Cal sound was shit to my ears.

Part of it was really getting into Neil Young (which for me happened in 2002, only after I first read Jimmy McDonough’s masterpiece of biography, Shakey, a book I’ve re-read twice in the past year alone), The Flying Burrito Brothers and Joni Mitchell, and then it sort of spread out slowly from there. A lot of it also had to do with our own Paul Gallagher sending me a copy of Barney Hoskyns’ excellent 2006 overview of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter/folkrock sound, Hotel California.

Hotel California‘s subtitle is “The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends” and aside from some of the aforementioned artists, the book also turned me on to the music of both Judee Sill and the Byrd who could not fly, the great Gene Clark. It’s a great place to dive in, a perfect roadmap through the Canyon sound.

I even found, to my surprise, that there were some Eagles songs I really liked. A lot.

It just goes to show. In any case, Hoskyn’s excellent book was made into an equally essential BBC produced documentary, Hotel California: L.A. from the Byrds to the Eagles, a highly entertaining account of the rise and fall of Laurel Canyon rock. It’s a must see and worthy of multiple viewings.
 

 
Here’s the guy that caused it all. A night of infamy for New Orleans and America’s favorite sport.

Edgar Allan Poe’s team won so I was happy.
 
Via The Frogman.

 
Nick Cave’s long association with Canadian/Aussie writer/director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, Lawless, The Road) dates back to when Hillcoate edited The Birthday Party’s “Nick The Stripper” video and Cave’s utterly unhinged performance in Hillcoat’s little-known 1988 prison drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead. Cave went on to write the scripts for both The Proposition and Lawless, and Hillcoat has directed videos for The Bad Seeds and Grinderman.

Their latest collaboration is the NSFW promo video for “Jubilee Street,” featuring Sexy Beast tough guy, Ray Winstone.

You can pre-order the upcoming Bad Seeds album, the band’s fifteenth studio outing, Push the Sky Away at Amazon. It’s set to drop in two weeks, on February 19th. A limited edition CD/DVD comes cased in a hardbound book bound in linen with 32 stitched-in pages of specially created visuals by artists Iain Forysth & Jane Pollard.

Later this month, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will be presenting Push the Sky Away in concert with the live accompaniment of strings and a choir at a series of already sold-out one-off shows in London, Paris, Berlin and Los Angeles.
 

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”—George Bush

Redditor ClaraRinker uploaded this image with the subject: “My 5-year-old came home with this assignment on Friday. Nearly stroked out trying to read it.”

ClaraRinker then wrote in the thread, “Dad brought it in this morning and showed it to the director, who wouldn’t tell him who wrote it but did say that the person responsible has a Bachelor’s in Education. Ahem.”

Oh dear…

Via reddit

 
On the fourth anniversary of the passing of the dearly beloved Lux Interior, I present The Cramps performing in Trenton, New Jersey in 1982 at the legendary City Gardens.

We’re always asked how long we can keep going. But it’s not really an issue for us. Besides, what else could we do? We must be among the world’s most unemployable people. If we hadn’t been in The Cramps, I can’t imagine the trouble we’d be in. We often find ourselves wondering about the difference between what we do and being locked up. It’s a pretty thin line. Rock ‘n’ roll is the greatest way for weirdos like us to find a purpose in life. In that sense, our goal has never really changed. We just want to carry on getting away with it. Not getting caught – that’s our only ambition.” Lux Interior, NME.

 
This is for the weirdos out there.
 

 
With the news that a five-member panel of the FCC are considering creating a series of super powerful free WiFi network across America, it’s to be expected that the corporate lobbyists for the $178 billion wireless industry are already working overtime to scuttle these plans.

Conversely, according to The Washington Post, there has been an equally aggressive push coming from tech giants like Google and Microsoft for free WiFi networks “who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor”:

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

In a country where Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer and doesn’t really even pay a living wage, this sort of monthly savings for what has become a necessity of modern life would seen quite attractive for the common man. The costs are surprisingly minimal, too.

But what of the poor, put-upon media barons who won’t be able to continue sticking the masses with a monthly cell phone bill? Should the management and stockholders of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Intel and Qualcomm be disallowed from skimming around a hundred bucks a month from the bank accounts of the average American?

Of course, the wireless telecom and cable providers are determined not to let this happen. In a January letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the architect of this ambitious plan, and a powerful member of the Obama inner circle, several major companies argued that the government should concentrate on selling the public airwaves to private business, and raising money for the US Treasury that way, rather than going with the free WiFi for all, option.

They would feel that way, wouldn’t that??? LOL.

Naturally, the Republicans are lining up behind this ridiculously blinkered, backwards “free market” approach. Who can forget watching the Tea party dolts who were against net neutrality—because someone on Fox News told them it was something “socialist,” I guess—and braying like buffoons for the privilege of being able to give more power to the telecoms, even if it would mean seeing their own monthly bills rise... because, um, THEIR FREEDUMBS were apparently at stake.

This is a different kind of free market entirely that we’re talking about, one that could alter American lives in profound ways, spurring great innovation and perhaps even unprecedented high tech job creation. The saying goes that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but free WiFi is already occurring in New York City and parts of Silicon Valley. In January, Google announced that it was providing free WiFi for NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood (where Google is headquartered in Manhattan). Soon that will extend to indoor fiber optic wiring as well. Google also rolled out high-speed fiber-optic Internet coverage recently in the Kansas City area, with download speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second. That’s pretty good. In fact it’s approximately 200 times faster than your home broadband connection. It’s not five times faster, it’s 200 times faster. (So much for innovation among the cable companies themselves, eh?)

Google’s blazing fast fiber optic service is beginning to draw hi-tech start-ups to Kansas City. Who would have thought that would happen a few years ago?

Furthermore, the major wireless carriers own far more spectrum than would even be necessary to provide public WiFi, and it would also improve their existing wireless networks for their own consumers. The only downside for this is for a relatively tiny group of stockholders. The benefits for Americans overall? Well, they seem limitless in terms of what can be imagined from 2013.

Designed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan would be a global first. When the U.S. government made a limited amount of unlicensed airwaves available in 1985, an unexpected explosion in innovation followed. Baby monitors, garage door openers and wireless stage microphones were created. Millions of homes now run their own wireless networks, connecting tablets, game consoles, kitchen appliances and security systems to the Internet.

“Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers,” Genachow­ski said in a an e-mailed statement.

He’s 1000% right. Although not seeing the economic benefits flowing upwards at first may discombobulate their tiny brains, how idiotic would even Republicans have to be not to see the logic of this decidedly free market approach? If they balk, they need to be reminded of what the earlier—but far more technologically limited, pre-PC, iPad and smartphone, of course—Reagan-era changes in the management of the public airways wrought for the economy.

This is a real us vs.against them situation. The fattest cats versus EVERYBODY ELSE. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. It’s an idea that’s time has come—IF NOT, WHY NOT—and I don’t think it’s going to go away until there’s free Wifi for all. The cat’s out of the bag and it ain’t going back in.