Alan Rudolph’s career is a bit of a puzzlement. Once a protégé of Robert Altman, Rudolph in his own movies seldom managed to master Altman’s art of turning a seemingly chaotic melange of overlapping dialogue into a pleasing whole. His first movie, Welcome to LA (1976), was a kind of downbeat version of Nashville, only lacking the focus Altman was able to achieve. Roadie came soon after, and it blends the music-centric perspective of Welcome to LA with something a lot like The Blues Brothers, Smokey and the Bandit, Car Wash, et al.

Roadie is intermittently an exasperating hubbub but is ultimately a pretty entertaining flick. Rudolph and co. (one of the writers is Zalman King, né Lefkowitz, who would later bring you the soft-core classics Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries) were fortunate indeed to have Meat Loaf in the title role—Roger Ebert thought they should have let him loose more often, but “Mr. Loaf,” as The New York Times once memorably called him, is still a pleasing cinematic presence even in repose.
 

 
Mr. Loaf plays the part of Travis W. Redfish, a small-town trucker/inventor whose life is changed by the happenstance breakdown of the truck conveying shifty manager Ace (Joe Spano) and virginal groupie (you read that right) Lola Bouillabaisse to Austin for a must-see gig by Hank Williams, Jr. With his handy inventor’s know-how, Travis (now smitten with Lola, whose stated goal in the movie is to meet Alice Cooper) repairs the van and joins the merry, coked-up band for the rest of the tour, which will later meet up with Cooper, Blondie, Roy Orbison, and multiple Grammy winners Asleep at the Wheel.

The musical selections are memorable indeed. Hank Jr. plays his then-recent hit “Outlaw Women,” Orbison gives “The Eyes of Texas” a whirl, and Blondie gamely covers Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” complete with cowboy hats and Clem Burke’s DayGlo neckwear. (I didn’t know that Blondie ever played that song; turns out, the Roadie version is included on the 2001 reissue of their sublime 1979 album Eat to the Beat.) We also get a little bit of Alice doing “Only Women Bleed” and “Road Rats” as well as a larger chunk of “Pain.”

Speaking of the Blues Brothers, no sooner had I formulated that comparison in my mind than—there they are!—Jake and Elwood (not played by John and Dan, tho’) sneaking around a hotel just before some plot nonsense in which cocaine gets mixed up with a package of Tide detergent. Blondie also gets into a huge brawl with a septet of interracial midgets, the backup “dwarves” to the presumed main attraction, “Snow White.”

The YouTube video has French subtitles, which are mildly annoying, although it’s a positive boon when a line like “That’s right, honey—I’m jailbait!” gets rendered as “Exactement, cheri. Je suis mineure.” Art Carney is wasted as Travis’ pop at home, and Ebert’s right that the movie really should have put more focus on the music (complete performances, perhaps?) but what’s there is still an enjoyable mess.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Led Zeppelin roadie (1971-74) TELLS ALL!!!!

 
Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times…

This week cultural provocateur Genesis Breyer P-Orridge visits The Pharmacy…

—Genesis discusses William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and the “Cut-Up”

—Brian Jones’ ghost visiting Psychic TV in the studio.

—The rise and fall of Throbbing Gristle.

—Gen’s relationship with Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and the unrealized plans the two had when Curtis died.

 

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist:

Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall
Who? - The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Three Girl Rhumba - Wire
Intro 1 / Party Machine - Rx / Bruce Haack
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part One
William S. Burroughs on Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs / Sun Ra
Just Like Arcadia - Psychic TV
Collapsing New People - Fad Gadget
Totally Wired - The Fall
Intro 2 / Computer Love - Kraftwerk / Rx
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Two
Adrenalin - Throbbing Gristle
Definitive Gaze - Magazine
Sensoria - Cabaret Voltaire
Intro 3 / Neuschnee - Rx / Neu!
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Three
Interzone - Joy Division
Just Out of Reach - The Zombies
Levitation - The 13th Floor Elevators
Intro 4 / Freedom Dub - Rx / Linval Thompson + the Revolutionaries
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Four
Brian Jones on Bad Publicity - Brian Jones
Godstar - Psychic TV
2000 Light Years from home
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Five
Intro 5 / Ravah - Rx / Mr.Pharmacist on Sitar
Mr.Pharmacist - The Other Half
Station ID - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

 
You can download the entire show here.

 
This took a little digging. Echo & the Bunnymen’s appearance on the Spanish music TV program La Edad de Oro is one of the great documents of the band at its height, the 1984 tour supporting their breathtaking and majestic masterpiece Ocean Rain. However, and maddeningly, every complete copy of it I’ve found online has a horrible and persistent sound glitch starting at about the 35-minute mark. It’s really bad, like deal-breakingly so, see for yourself if you like, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
 

 
The videos in this playlist from YouTube user kigonjiro aren’t the prettiest available, but those sound problems are FAR less present. Also, it’s broken down into a playlist that eliminates the interview segment (it’s at 11:30 in the above link if you want to watch it), which can be grating to sit through if you don’t speak Spanish. Which is fine, nobody in 1984 ever expected English-speaking audiences to see this. But the playlist format neatly segments everything and cuts out the dross.

One last thing before we get to the music—one of the reasons I so adore this show is that the stage setup gives the cameras better shots of the drummer then are usually seen in live videos, and the Bunnymen’s Pete de Freitas (RIP 1989) is just on fire here. But the whole band’s performance is great too, their energy is up, and singer Ian McCulloch is spot-on throughout.

1. The Cutter
2. The Killing Moon
3. All That Jazz
4. Do It Clean
5. Villiers Terrace
6. My Kingdom
7. Silver
8. All My Colours
9. Heads Will Roll
10. Thorn Of Crowns
11. Never Stop
12. Crocodiles
13. Rescue

 
More Echo & The Bunnymen after the jump…

Iva Toguri D’Aquino
 
The Tokyo Rose is one of the more ingenious and chilling bits of psychological warfare in human history. During World War Two, in an effort to unnerve American GI’s and lower morale, the Japanese broadcast an English-language radio show hosted by a rotating roster of female voices. “Tokyo Rose” was the generic moniker given (by Americans) to all the announcers, but the most famous voice (and probably the one you hear in the broadcast below) was that of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, an American who had the misfortune to have been caring for a sick aunt in Japan when the war broke out. After the war, she was arrested and convicted of treason—apparently being a prisoner of war was no excuse for making a radio show. She wasn’t released until 1956.

The format of the show was actually pretty brilliant; in between coy “updates” on the war, (and insinuations of Japan’s impending attacks), Tokyo Rose would play the hits of the day. The show was incredibly popular among American serviceman. Rumors circulated that she possessed insider knowledge of American military actions. Some said she named specific servicemen as recent captures in her broadcasts—this is completely unsubstantiated, of course, and popular opinion is that the myth of Tokyo Rose flourished in the bewildered minds of her targets. And it that sense, the program was a complete success; Americans did overestimate the power and knowledge of Axis Japan.

Similar programs were employed by other Axis countries, including the insidious Lord Haw Haw in Germany, but none quite had the eery charm of Tokyo Rose, whose sweet voice and romantic tunes belied a brutal war.
 

 
Bonus: I’ve also included the grotesquely racist piece of American propaganda, Tokyo Woes. The 1945 Bob Clampett-directed Warner Brothers cartoon was only intended for viewing by the US Navy. Nothing sells war quite like racism and the promise of a hero’s welcome after a quick and easy victory.
 

 
Punk history on the installment plan…part one

The Buzzcocks had to be quick because they didn’t know how long they would last. That’s what Pete Shelley told Tony Wilson over tea and cigarettes in this documentary B’dum B’dum from 1978.

Made as part of Granada TV’s What’s On series, B’dum B’dum follows the tale of the band Buzzcocks from formation to first split and the creation of splinter group Howard Devoto’s Magazine.

Shelley met Devoto at Bolton Institute of Technology in 1975. Shelley responded to an ad Devoto had placed on the student notice board looking for musicians to form a band. The pair clicked and started writing songs together. Then they wanted to perform their songs, so they sought out other musicians to play them (Steve Diggle, bass, and John Maher, drums), and hey presto, Buzzcocks.
 

 
Part two…

The influence had been punk and The Sex Pistols, but Devoto found punk “very limiting” as “in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff”:

“...Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in really…

“I think that punk rock was a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness, and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with the process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands—in a world, most probably after religion.

“My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols, and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something which really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical Sixties.”

 

Pete Shelley, Tony Wilson, Howard Devoto during the making of ‘B’dum B’dum’ 1978.
 
The Buzzcocks recorded and released the “massively influential” Spiral Scratch a four track EP, which contained the Shelley/Devoto songs “Breakdown,” “Time’s Up,” “Boredom,” and “Friends of Mine.”
 
Parts three to five with Shelley and Devoto, plus full Buzzcocks concert, after the jump…

Among the surreal imagery, Lewis Carroll references, and fanciful wordplay in The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” is the mention of the Eggman. This has long been known to refer to The Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, who was given the nickname by John Lennon. According to Bob Spitz in The Beatles: The Biography Lennon bestowed the nickname in “a reference to a 1966 orgy he attended with Eric Burdon, who earned the nickname for breaking raw eggs on girls during sex.”

However, it turns out that the commonly told tale is actually 180 degrees off. The fabled egger Burdon was actually the eggee. (There is a technical term for the raw egg paraphilia, but I can’t find it and can’t face another list of fetishes.) 

Burdon set the record straight in his 2002 autobiography, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, co-written with Jeff Marshall Craig:

It may have been one of my more dubious distinctions, but I was the Eggman - or, as some of my pals called me, ‘Eggs’.

The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl.

“Go on, go get it, Eggman,” Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hook-like nose as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.

John Lennon standing in for Burdon as the Eggman:

 
I live in Los Angeles and believe me when I tell you that I had not heard a single peep about that new Jesus movie—Mark Burnett and Roma Downey’s Son of God—because, well, they don’t really market religious films here. In a city festooned with billboards for every damned offering large or small, good or bad that the industrial entertainment complex has in store for us, I think they figured that religious films aren’t for we West Coast heathens; that it’s a waste of money even bothering trying to, er, convert us, even for a big budget picture like Son of God. I can’t imagine Fox spent too much money marketing the film in NYC, either.

Nope, I only heard about this religious blockbuster after the fact, when all of the rightwing blogs like NewsMax, Breitbart and WorldNutDaily were crowing about how Jesus nearly kicked Liam Neeson’s ass in the box office boffo sweepstakes over the weekend. Go Jesus! (Is there anything, and I do mean anything, more pathetic than “rooting” for a movie, let alone pulling for the founder of Christianity to beat the crap out of a formulaic Hollywood action flick? Nothing, right?)

All this goofiness caused me to recall the cheerfully blasphemous “Son-O’-God Comics” that ran in a few 1970s issues of National Lampoon magazine.
 

 
In the Lampoon version of the New Testament’s central figure, “Benny Davis” a nerdy failure-to-launch boychick still living with his parents in Brooklyn, says the name “JESUS CHRIST!” (but not in vain) and transforms (ala Captain Marvel) into a muscular WASP super-hero version of Jesus with a six-pack, cape and halo, ready to do battle with Catholicism, Islam, the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, the Antichrist and even Bob Dylan.
 

 
The occasionally recurring strip was written by Sean Kelly (who would go on to become the founding editor of Heavy Metal magazine) and Michel Choquette, and (mostly) drawn by well-known comics artist Neal Adams, a “Silver Age” illustrator who worked on Batman for DC and a gazillion other comics.
 

 
I would be remiss in my duties writing on this topic without at least quickly mentioning how underrated National Lampoon is in terms of that magazine’s amazing and ground-breaking art-direction. If you consider that the 20th century will be looked upon as the golden era of the printed page, to my mind, the Lampoon’s Design Director, Michael Gross and Art Director David Kaestle created the most creatively free-wheeling and conversely the most detail-oriented magazine design on the planet. What they brought to America’s premiere countercultural humor magazine was an exacting eye for authenticity. If you were going to parody or satirize popular culture, it needed to actually LOOK LIKE the things you were referring to, or the joke would be lost. That was more or less a new idea at the time. In my opinion, the four years that Gross and Kaestle worked on National Lampoon is THE high point of art direction for a monthly print publication. Everyone always points to the the George Lois-era Esquire as the pinnacle of graphic design in magazines—and it’s great stuff, don’t get me wrong—but the Lampoon was even better, had more nuance and yet Gross and Kaestle’s work rarely gets the credit it deserves.
 

 
You can find out everything you always wanted to know about “Son-O’-God Comics” at Dial B for Blog.

 
Okay, listen up, because this is one of the single best things that I have ever posted here on Dangerous Minds. I’ve waited for a good version of this to get uploaded to YouTube since we very first started the blog and now that’s finally happened. There have been over 17,000 items posted here and THIS, as I see it at least, is one of the very, very top best of all those various things…

What am I talking about? It’s called Way USA, a pilot for a punk/comedy travelogue that was done for MTV in 1988 and hosted by the silver-tongued—and absolutely fucking hilarious—Tesco Vee of The Meatmen. It was directed by Peter Lauer (although it’s missing from his IMDB page), then a staffer with MTV’s graphics department who has since gone on to direct dozens upon dozens of major television shows that you have seen, including Strangers with Candy and Arrested Development.

The copy I had was acquired working at the post production house where it was edited. I’m not 100% sure that it even aired on TV. Although Way USA was produced at a time before MTV aimed its content squarely at teenagers, it still seems a little racier than I recall them ever getting back then. (It says at the end that there was one done in Niagara Falls as well, but I have not seen that.)

So, yes, Way USA is a punk/comedy travelogue that begins when Tesco sells his soul to the Devil (in the form of East Village lounge crooner Craig Vandenberg, here billed as “Tony LaVentura, the Adonis from Paramus”) for a good time traveling across America in opulently sleazy style.
 

 
First stop, it’s “Charm City—that ‘s Baltimore—and what trip to Baltimore would be complete without making a pilgrimage to the Pope of Trash, John Waters? Naturally Tesco checks that one off his list as well as visiting the notorious red light “Block” district, eating two dozen eggs at a diner with an “all the eggs you can eat” policy, an S&M session with the late plus-sized greeting card model Miss Jean Hill (her segment is a stone classic), visits strip clubs, a crime blotter news reporter, a faith healer/exorcist and does various other things around “the hairdo capital of America,” as Waters so lovingly puts it.

In the late 80s, I’d show my VHS copy of Way USA to anyone and everyone who visited me (people used to do quaint things like that back then). I was really keen on it and thought it was absolutely groundbreaking and hilarious (it’s aged very well). I’ve seen it so many times that as I was watching it just now, I started to realize HOW MANY of Tesco’s lines (or slight variations thereof) I use ALL OF THE TIME. And I’m not talking about a few of them, there must be 100 things he says in this half hour show that I regularly say to this day. For example, last week, sitting across from someone about to tuck into an appallingly unhealthy meal, I deadpanned “If your heart stops, I’ll kick you in the chest.” I got this from the eggs scene, which I haven’t seen since like 1990 probably, yet still quote.

In an alternate universe, Way USA would have made Tesco Vee a huge TV celebrity. Seriously folks, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. If more people knew about Way USA twenty-five years ago, if would probably be as revered today as Heavy Metal Parking Lot or the Butthole Surfers’ Entering Texas are.
 

 
Two more things: Way USA was shot on Super 8 film, so if it looks a little “soft,” this is actually the way it was supposed to look. This is, in fact, a very clean upload. However, the sort of jarring “commercial breaks” (Kembra Pfahler clad only in red bodypaint singing and swearing, a Roy Rogers spot, Tesco in San Francisco) included here have nothing directly to do with Way USA and I think come from The Devil’s In The Details, a DVD that Tesco Vee sells on his website. It’s pretty clear what’s from the show and what’s not from it, but you’ll see why I mentioned it, it would be confusing if you were seeing it for the first time otherwise. (As for the cable access footage of Kembra—who is a good friend of mine, I must ask her what that’s from!—and a few other things in the added parts, I’ll give the obligatory NSFW warning).
 

 
Mehmood Ali was a quintessential Bollywood mutli-hyphenate; regarding the movie under discussion here, Bhoot Bungla (“Ghost House/Haunted House”), Mehmood (as he was credited) co-wrote the movie, produced the movie, directed the movie, starred in the movie, and, as is obligatory for a Bollywood star, performed at least one of the indelible musical numbers. One task Mehmood didn’t undertake was music supervisor, which is a good thing because the incomparable R. D. Burman had that task quite in hand.

The song is called “Aao Twist Karen,” although I’ve also seen that last word rendered as “Karein.” It sure as heckfire appears to be a cover of Chubby Checker’s 1961 smash “Let’s Twist Again.” I was going to make a joke in the headline that the Bollywood version of Chubby Checker could stand to be a good deal chubbier, but you know, the original wasn’t all that chubby! My favorite bit of this video comes when the two trumpeters aim their instruments at Mehmood’s crotch. You heard me. Go watch (You can see all of Bhoot Bungla here)
 

 
Thank you Kathryn Metz!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Meet The Bollywood Beatles
Maximum Bollywood mega-mix: Bombay Elvis meets Parliament Funka-Delhi

 
What’s your budget for occult-related artifacts? Well, it probably needs to be a lot bigger, because some gorgeous vintage photos from the 1922 Swedish/Danish documentary, Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages are up for auction. The opening bid was $2,000, and the lot is expected to go for somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000.

For the uninitiated, Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages is only a “documentary” in a very abstract sense. Intrigued by the Malleus Maleficarum—a 15th century German guide to witch and demon identification—director Benjamin Christensen depicted the occult hysteria of the Middle Ages by actually portraying the delusions and superstitions themselves. So instead of a movie made up entirely of inquisitions and trials and executions (which, to be fair, are certainly scary), he delivered a motion picture depicting mental illness, satanic masses, baby killing, sex with the devil, broom rides, the seduction of clergy and all manner of cinematic evil. The film was once banned in the United States.

I highly recommend you watch it, and I also highly recommend the 1968 William S. Burroughs-narrated version I posted at the bottom. The film was originally silent (obviously), but whatever score might have been played at a screening couldn’t be any creepier than hearing William S. Burroughs’ nasally voice over psychedelic jazz and electronic noises. Plus, the Criterion Collection version is 104 minutes long, whereas the Burroughs version is 77 minutes, since a narrator eliminates the necessity of title cards.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages was the most expensive Swedish film ever made at the time, and it shows. There are lush, eery sets, clearly created with careful attention to detail, and the early special effects are haunting, even in our cynical CGI-laden present day. The cinematography is also very sophisticated, using odd angles and unsettling close-ups. It’s absolutely gorgeous, a true fantastic horror—disturbing, violent, and sometimes sexy—pretty much everything you want in an occult documentary, no? To give you a taste, some of the lot is below, (the first four are larger sized, the others are smaller photos).

But really, watch the movie. In the dark.

Oh, and buy me these photographs. I need them for apartment ambiance whilst summoning the dark forces
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Thank you, Eric Bradley!