In turn-of-the’80s Chicago, Trouble Boys guitarist Don Hedeker and the accomplished poet Lydia Tomkiw forged a romantic and creative partnership when they married and formed the band Algebra Suicide. They announced their existence to the world in 1982 with the 4-song 7” E.P. True Romance at the World’s Fair, and the title song earned the honor of inclusion on Trouser Press’ Best of the American Underground compilation the following year. The E.P. set the formula for the band’s entire 12-year career: Hedeker would play dreamy, unchanging guitar lines (I wonder if Lungfish were fans) over a simple drum machine pattern while the admirably advanced wordsmith Tomkiw cooly and astutely riffed on romance, culture, alienation, and death, delivering her recitations in tones that could have approached the snideness of the Waitresses’ Patty Donahue were Tomkiw’s delivery not so immaculately dry.
 

 
The band’s live performances were minimal but memorable. Taking a cue from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, they dressed all in white and played side-by-side in front of a screen, immersed in projected art. The time I saw them, Hedeker was even playing a clear lucite guitar, allowing just that much more of the projected material to engulf him. Frustratingly, I’m unable to locate any motion footage of the band performing in that manner. Can you just trust me that it was freakin’ cool?
 

 

 
The band released several EPs and cassettes between 1982 and 1987, when RRR Records released the LP/CD The Secret Like Crazy. It was a best-of, but new fans could be forgiven for thinking it was their debut album, and it serves as a singular and definitive statement of the band’s most vital period. But though it’s essential, it’s out of print. Fortunately, Dark Entries came to the rescue of the fans and the curious in 2013 by releasing Feminine Squared, a compilation whose content overlaps Secret’s by enough to forego the crate-dig, and it’s bundled with a live DVD of excellent quality.

A 1992 European tour for the album Swoon produced tensions that ended Tomkiw and Hedeker’s marriage, but the band continued until the 1994 release of Tongue Wrestling. Tomkiw released a solo album, Incorporated in 1995, enlisting musical assists from smartass Midwestern art punks Sosumi, Pigface’s Martin Bowes, and Legendary Pink Dot Edward Ka-Spell, but that was her last musical release. She continued to publish poetry until her death in 2007.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Stream ‘World of Rubber’ by ‘80s electronic post-punks Second Layer, featuring members of The Sound

 
I love movie soundtracks. The best films usually have awesome scores (which is part of what makes them extraordinary), so whenever I really dig a particular flick I almost always NEED the soundtrack. I used to scour the used LP bins, searching for soundtracks that I wasn’t even sure existed—keep in mind this was pre-web, before you could easily look up such information. I’m not a “vinyl only” guy, but the size of LP packaging (especially if it’s a gatefold sleeve) seems to go hand in hand with the larger-than-life images projected on a movie screen. I’m especially drawn to horror scores from the ‘70s and ‘80s, when greats like John Carpenter and Goblin were creating amazingly frightening works that stand on their own as incredible pieces of music.

These days, there are a number of independent record labels that specialize in putting out vintage soundtracks on vinyl, but one label clearly stands out from the pack, and that is Waxwork Records. The label issues stellar, creative packages, complete with new liner notes, high-quality jackets, and thick pressings on colored vinyl that often reference the movie itself. New album artwork is also commissioned for every release, with Dave Rapoza of Marvel Comics creating the images for Waxwork’s latest: an expanded edition of the soundtrack for the cult classic The Warriors (1979). Barry De Vorzon’s spooky, pulsating synth rock score—complete and on vinyl for the first time—sounds fantastic. Like many Waxwork releases, it’s going fast, with the colored vinyl editions, including a deluxe package, already out of print.
 

The Warriors

In just a few short years, Waxwork has put together an impressive discography of 21 titles, many of which surely required a ton of legwork to secure the rights for. Perhaps their biggest coup was landing the original soundtrack and the complete score for the monumental Taxi Driver (1976). Penned by the legendary Bernard Herrmann—arguably the greatest film composer ever—the dreamy jazz pieces are synonymous with the film. As Martin Scorsese writes in his liner notes: “You can’t pull the images and the music apart. There’s no point in trying.”
 

Taxi Driver

Waxwork currently offers a subscription service, in which subscribers are the first to get their hands on five different titles—plus loads of other of goodies—including the previously unavailable soundtrack for the ‘80s slasher, My Bloody Valentine.
 

 

First looks at Waxwork’s ‘My Bloody Valentine’ package

More on the MBV release in a bit. First, I had a bunch of questions for the co-founder and CEO of the label, Kevin Bergeron, which were asked via email.

When did you start Waxwork Records? What was the impetus?

Kevin Bergeron: Waxwork Records launched in January 2013. The label was started out of necessity, really. I had played and toured in punk bands for many years, and I truly enjoy being in a recording studio and then pressing vinyl. Playing in punk bands for years is good conditioning for running your own business. You learn a lot on your own. There’s lots of discovery and character building skills you acquire that you just can’t learn anywhere else. I live in New Orleans, and it’s a very poor city where not very many people are motivated to do much of anything. I knew that when my last band split I wanted to continue working, putting out music. I was seriously broke, but I really went for it and started Waxwork with a lot of intensity and attitude. I knew that I didn’t have a lot to fall back on. Before Waxwork, I was a cremator at a mausoleum and after that a student majoring in biology. Just depressing stuff. I needed to make music in some form and put it out. I walked away from everything else, and started Waxwork with my partner, Suzy Soto. We pushed very hard, and still do now, over three years later.
 

Rosemary’s Baby

How do you think that Waxwork stands out from the pack of other labels that specialize in vinyl-only pressings of vintage movie soundtracks? And why exclusively vinyl?

Kevin Bergeron: Waxwork’s releases are the most deluxe, definitive, and true to the way the audio was originally intended to be heard. We seek out the original master tapes. We work from those tapes because they’re the very first recorded source of the soundtracks that we release. Like, those tapes were in the studio with the performers, recording everything in real time.

I use this example often, but it’s very true: If you hold up a Waxwork release in one hand and a record from a different label in another hand, you’re going to realize quickly that a Waxwork release is of better quality. That a lot of thought, time, effort, and man hours went into creating it. That it’s worth your time. Worth owning. That’s how we stand out, at least, amongst the other record labels specializing in soundtracks. Waxwork isn’t a hobby for us, or something that we divide up our time with something else. We exclusively run Waxwork. So, we put a lot of effort into everything.

Why vinyl? Because it’s the sexiest way to listen to music. With a decent stereo set up, it sounds the best to me. It’s a really fun, interactive way to experience recorded music, as well.
 

C.H.U.D.: “Toxic Waste Puddle” vinyl

Much more after the jump, including an exclusive listen to two side-long tracks from the My Bloody Valentine set…..

 
Orange County isn’t known for exporting cultural phenomena that DM readers love—or should love—but damned if stoner rock band Fu Manchu doesn’t belong on at the top of that short list.

Fu Manchu has been plugging away since the early 1990s, having churned out 11 memorable albums from 1994 onward. Their best album is probably 1997’s The Action Is Go—it clocked in at #26 on Metal Storm’s list of the “Top 100 Stoner Metal Albums”—but it’s the band’s 2000 release King of the Road that catches our interest today.
 

 
As Ned Raggett pointed out in his complimentary Allmusic review of the album, King of the Road may have seemed like just another stoner rock effort, but the album does cohere as an homage to van culture and the devil-may-care freedoms that are (by this time) practically synonymous with the advent of the automobile:
 

In as much as there’s a theme to King of the Road beyond the basics of driving, drugs, and that demon rock & roll, it’s driving—there’s a reason why the cover and internal art features a slew of great ‘70s-era photos from a massive van rally. The one shot of the fully leather-covered interior of one mobile love nest, complete with black curtains, about says it all. Then there’s the megachugging title track (“King of the road says you move too slow!”), “Hell on Wheels,” “Boogie Van,” and so forth—call it a concept album that doesn’t waste time with elves and yogis.

 
As the capper to the album, Fu Manchu reached back two decades for a particularly infectious anthem celebrating—if indeed it does—liberty American-style, to wit DEVO’s hit “Freedom of Choice,” which came off the Akron band’s terrific 1980 album of the same name.

The selection is all the more fitting when you realize that DEVO’s video for that song was every bit as much a tribute to skateboard culture as the cover of Fu Manchu’s The Action Is Go......
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
DEVO ‘busking’ on French TV, 1980

Jerry Dammers: the father of Two Tone records
 
Two Tone was a specifically British, or more accurately English, musical genre that came out of punk and ska in the late 1970s. The roots of Two Tone can be traced back to the arrival of West Indians to England—the so-called “Windrush Generation”—under the British Nationality Act of 1948. This act gave British citizenship to all people living in Commonwealth countries and full rights of entry and settlement in the UK. With the arrival of these Commonwealth citizens came ska and reggae music, which was slowly adopted by the white working class.

Most youth music is exclusive—it’s old versus young; hip versus square; mod versus rocker; slacker versus yuppie; black versus white. Few musical genres are totally or even try to be totally inclusive—there is a built-in snobbishness that comes with the package. The osmosis of ska and Afro-Carribean culture into the white British culture pointed a way towards a truly inclusive musical genre—Two Tone. It was, as Two Tone singer Pauline Black once said, “an experiment waiting to happen.”

During the 1960s, Skinheads took ska as their own—but the growing racism of the skinhead movement led to their ostracization. Reggae replaced ska—but the skins hated reggae’s laid-back, spliffed-up vibe. Skinheads became suedeheads. Popular music moved onto glam rock, heavy metal, and prog rock. Then punk arrived in 1976. A new generation of youngsters saw that the means of music production could be theirs.
 

Two Tone pioneers The Specials.
 
Jerry Dammers was a young musician in Coventry. He had been a fellow traveler in various youth movements—a hippie, a skinhead, a punk—but his first love was ska. Dammers took the energy of punk with the rhythms of ska and created a new genre of music known as Two Tone—an inclusive, socially aware, “danceable earfest.” Dammers formed the Specials AKA with like-minded youngsters and the best of local talent. The Specials pioneered Two Tone music. They got a record deal that allowed Dammers to set up his Two Tone record label. Its first release was The Specials with “Gangsters” on the A-side and Pauline Black and the Selecter—a band made up in the studio—on the B-side. Dammers quickly signed up the Beat (a.k.a. the English Beat), London band Madness, Bad Manners, the Bodysnatchers and even Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

Two Tone’s iconic black and white label design (an image created by Dammers that was loosely based on a photograph of Pete Tosh from the Wailing Wailers) was a standard for the fans’ style—a mix of Rude Boy and Mod—baggy suit, white shirt, black tie, and porkpie hat. Two Tone brought black and white together and although The Specials could sometimes be didactic—they sent out a political message that united the young.

The whole story is well told by those at its heart and from those who were most influenced by it in Two Tone Britain—a thoroughly enjoyable documentary that makes you realize what at its best music can achieve. (The video embedded below looks suspiciously unavailable, but we assure you, as of the time of posting, you can click on it and watch it!)
 

The marvelous cover for the first hardcover edition, 1969
 
For those who enjoy their realities getting fucked with, there’s no better writer for that than the great Philip K. Dick, and among his many unsettling works, his novel Ubik is held in unusually high esteem.

Ubik is about a mission to a moon base that includes Joe Chip, a technician who works for Glen Runciter’s “prudence organization,” and 10 cohorts. The mission ends in a fatal explosion, but who lived and survived that explosion is a puzzle the book never quite reveals.
 

 
It’s a bewildering mindfuck of a book, featuring routinized space travel, psychics and “anti-psychics,” a character who can alter reality by traveling to the past, and a mysterious (and mystical) product called Ubik (same root as “ubiquitous”) that comes in a spray can and serves as a slippery metaphor for God itself.

One brilliant aspect of the book is the devilishly ambiguous ending—as Dick’s wife Tessa wrote,
 

Many readers have puzzled over the ending of Ubik, when Glen Runciter finds a Joe Chip coin in his pocket. What does it mean? Is Runciter dead? Are Joe Chip and the others alive? Actually, this is meant to tell you that we can’t be sure of anything in the world that we call ‘reality.’ It is possible that they are all dead and in cold pac or that the half-life world can affect the full-life world. It is also possible that they are all alive and dreaming.

 
Ubik was selected for inclusion on Time magazine’s list (compiled in 2010) of the 100 greatest novels in the English language written after 1923. As Lev Grossman wrote in Time, “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.”

A few years ago a Deviant Art user going by the handle martinacecilia created three alluring posters advertising the benefits of Ubik, using a retro style and adapting “mostly vintage ads of Coca-cola.”
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Okay, so I’m going to have to keep this post spoiler-free for all you Game of Thrones fans who haven’t seen the latest episode yet. All I’m going to do is park this delightful Hodor door stopper right here without explanation and let you all know it’s available on Etsy for $25.00. You can get it here.

I’ve found other Hodor door stoppers (featured below) but I have no idea if they’re available for purchase yet.

Oh cool, I've found a great new door stop for the house!!! #GameofThrones #hodor #hodoorstop pic.twitter.com/OKBXZSaHKt

— Aaron Itzerott  (@AaronItzerott) May 24, 2016

 
via Nerdcore

“Patriot,” an oil painting by Fred Einaudi
 
According to an interview from 2013, artist Fred Einaudi once took one of those bullshit “career day” quizzes in school, which duly spat out the galling result that he was a good candidate to someday be driving a bus for a living. Thankfully, Einaudi, who was already voraciously drawing monsters by the time he was in the second grade, didn’t follow that line of advice; thanks to the encouragement of his high school art teacher, a man named John Robinson, he followed his true calling, painting.
 

“The Chocolate Donut”
 
After giving art school a try for a year, the San Francisco-based Einaudi dropped out, preferring to draw inspiration from artists like American painter Andrew Wyeth. He was driven by a need to create “pictures out there that don’t exist and which you have a need to see.”

Einaudi’s images feel distinctly like foreshadowing when it comes to the plight our planet is currently undergoing with respect to the rising global temperatures—many of them deliver a one-two punch to the gut as they lead the viewer to ponder a time in the future where humans will be forced to exist in a world that is very different than the one we are currently collectively destroying on a daily basis.

That said, I am not only a fan of Mr. Einaudi’s gorgeously grim art, but also that he gave zero fucks about his “assigned” career path and instead followed one that he was clearly destined for on his own terms. More of Einaudi’s gloomy and ominous paintings follow, many of them delightfully NSFW.
 

“The Mermaid”
 

“Buttonmaker”
 
Many more of Einaudi’s grim masterpieces after the jump…...
 

 
God bless the human magpies, for without them, finds like this wouldn’t come to light: Erna “Shelly” Hammer, an erstwhile DJ for the once-mighty Z Rock chain of heavy metal radio stations (under the name “Shelly Steel,” because evidently “Hammer” was somehow an insufficiently metal surname on its own…?), is exhibiting her collection of metal and alt-rock t-shirts, ranging in vintage from the early ‘80s to the mid ‘90s. In her lifetime of collecting, she’s discarded very little—what’s on display is a fraction of what she’s kept from her many years as an avid concertgoer, and from her time on the promo gravy train.

This is a good place to mention that this has been been a good week for vintage metal tees—Craig “The Human Clock” Giffen posted an amazing bit of pop culture archaeology (formatted in an amazingly archaic HTML style) endeavoring to catalog all the t-shirts spotted in Jeff Krulik’s classic short documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot. By all means, take a minute to check it out, this post’ll still be here when you get back.

If you happen to be in Northeast Ohio, you can see these shirts on display in a show called “You Are What You Wear” at poster artist Derek Hess’ eponymous gallery through mid-summer. They aren’t being offered for sale piece-by-piece, but when she talked with us about her, um, wardrobe archive, Hammer implied that selling them off in a single lot for the right sum wouldn’t be out of the question.
 

 
Hammer: The first real rock shows I went to, I was 15, and this guy I worked with at this diner first took me with him and his friends to see Aerosmith, and then a few months later, Kiss. I was in awe. I didn’t really get to go to too many more shows until I was driving, so I mail ordered shirts, whatever I could get.
 

 
Hammer: I had an awful lot, but I wore them—you can see some of them are pretty beat up, stretched, over-laundered. I bought them to wear, there was no intention of collecting. The only ones I got rid of were when I moved, I got rid of a bunch that were promo when I worked in radio, for bands I didn’t really care about. I got rid of a whole crate! All of the shirts from bands that meant something to me, I hung on to.
 

 
Hammer:  I never thought about selling them. When I got asked to do the exhibit, I was even skeptical about that, I asked “do people really want to look at a bunch of shirts?” and they assured me it would be cool. But there’s always a price on everything, you know. And eventually, after turning 50, it’s normal to want to start downsizing. So they could be for sale. But there’d still be one or two I’d have to hang on to.
 

 
Hammer: The one thing I love about shirts, it’s kind of like a club. When you see someone in a concert shirt by a band you like somewhere, especially if it’s a remote place where you don’t expect it, you feel a brotherhood or sisterhood with that person you know saw the same show as you did—they’re conversation starters!
 

 
More after the jump…

 
An interesting cinematic footnote to the Clash’s time spent in New York City in the early 1980s—while they recorded their sprawling three-record Sandinista album—is their “blink and you missed ‘em” appearance in Martin Scorsese’s dark classic The King of Comedy.
 

 
Apparently both Scorsese and Robert De Niro were huge Clash fans and saw them during their famous series of seventeen concerts at Bonds International Casino in Times Square during May and June of 1981. Aside from the band going out to bars a few times with the director and actor, it’s mentioned in several Clash biographies—and several about Scorsese, too—that Gangs of New York was originally something he envisioned for the group!
 

 
Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon and some of their cohorts—sometime manager Kosmo Vinyl, singers Ellen Foley and Pearl Harbour and filmmaker Don Letts are credited in The King of Comedy as “Street Scum.”

Here the are in action, take a look:

 
Tomorrow evening large numbers of U.K. viewers are expected to tune into what is being hyped as a startling documentary on Channel 4 called Secret Life of Human Pups. The documentary is about a fascinating subculture of men who have a secret predilection for dressing up as dogs in their spare time, including the donning of special plastic dog outfits, sleeping in cages, eating dog biscuits—they especially adore going out for walks on a leash, or on a “lead” as the British term it.

This morning, on a talk show called This Morning on ITV, British viewers received a sneak preview of the documentary’s content when a fellow named Tom, who likes to dress up as a Dalmatian named Spot, appeared for an interview with a close friend and former fiancée named Rachael. To put it mildly, the program has provided many Britons with a juicy fodder for water cooler conversation.

Tom is a sound and lighting technician in everyday life, and he has spent more than four thousand pounds—that’s nearly $6,000—on his canine accoutrements. Tom has a custom-made rubber suit and a dog crate that he uses for his nighttime slumbers. He says, “It doesn’t look comfortable, but you can curl up in different ways, there is more space than you think.”

According to the documentary, as many as 10,000 “secret pups” live in the United Kingdom. Many of them insist that the practice is not sexual in nature but is rather a response to stress in daily life, a reversion to a simpler state of being. As Tom says, the practice is “an obsession and an escapism. It would be a very boring life if there was no puppy play.”

Baffled viewers took to Twitter to express their befuddlement—and also to register their skepticism that the practice has no sexual component. One woman named Kirsty tweeted: “I’m sorry but him saying it isn’t a sexual thing is lying! It’s extreme bondage gone weird.”

One man quoted only by his puppy name Dynamo, commented, “A lot of them work in high pressure jobs and control a lot of people, they are CEOs and it is a way for them to express themselves in a way they can’t as a human.” Another fellow who becomes a rottweiler named Chip says “When I am not running around on all fours I work in catering.”

After the documentary airs tomorrow night, you can expect a whole new round of office conversation to start up again.

More after the jump…