Joe Roifer & friend. Apt. 9E, Turner Tower. 135 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, June 20, 1978
 
In 1976 a woman named Dinanda H. Nooney became interested in Brooklyn, while working as a volunteer for George McGovern’s short-lived presidential campaign (he had lost to Nixon in 1972, of course, and he soon found that the Democratic Party wasn’t interested in a second attempt). Two years later, she used the connections she had made in order to undertake a survey of the borough. Along the way, she got more interested in the people living in some of the homes she was researching, and she began to ask permission to do portraits of families in their homes. Many of these sitters referred other potentially willing subjects to her.

The results of these efforts are nearly six hundred gelatin silver prints of Brooklynites in their abodes, and they are stunning. In 1995 Nooney gave the collection to the New York Public Library, and you can now see the photos on the NYPL website. You can even see them broken out by neighborhood if that floats your boat.

For many of the homes shown here, there are other photos in the collection as well, so be sure to poke around the collection. I can’t get enough of these pictures, I’ve been looking at them all day. 
 

Jerry & Linda Schick. 188 Washington Ave., Fort Greene, Brooklyn, June 10, 1978
 

Russell McCombs. 315 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, June 23, 1978
 

Fran Orans. 4715 Surf Ave., Coney Island, Brooklyn, August 5, 1978
 

Bernice & Beresford Sealy. 145 Maple St. Flatbush, Brooklyn, February 13, 1978
 

Dr. Robert L. Leslie. 140 Lincoln Rd., Flatbush, Brooklyn, November 10, 1978
 
Plenty more of these fantastic Brooklyn interiors after the jump….

 
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page turned 70 today. Looking at recent pictures of the man, it seems within the realm of occult possibility that the maestro made a Faustian bargain to retain his good looks into his old age (Actually considering the amount of debauched mileage Page’s body has been put through over the decades, Dorian Gray is perhaps a more appropriate fictional name to evoke.)

Look at that unlined face. For a guy his age, he looks great, but for a guy his age who lived through the excess of Led Zeppelin, it’s doubly impressive. Look at Keith Richards for contrast. In the footage shot at the O2 Arena Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007 (and later released as the incredible Celebration Day), Page was every bit the guitar-wielding marauder of his younger days.
 

 
I had the great pleasure of meeting Jimmy Page once. He’s a very elegant dude, and very friendly, putting me immediately at ease with the information that both his wife and a friend had gifted him with my Book of Lies occult anthology for Christmas that year. I’m not going to pretend like that wasn’t a thrill… because it was.

The unused Jimmy Page score for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising:

 
“Train Kept A Rollin’” with The Yardbirds.

 
In August of 1991, a month before Nevermind was released, and when hair metal was still pretty much the only thing on the radio that bore any resemblance to rock, a tiny indie label called No.6 Records released a compilation of guitar instrumentals called Guitarrorists. It featured names that would be familiar only to resolute undergroundists at the time, but many of them would soon find mainstream attention—these guitarists were members of bands like Afghan Whigs, The Butthole Surfers, The Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and other, less immortal bands that would nonetheless experience some success within a few years of the comp’s release. And it should go without saying that a lot of it is fantastic.
 

 
Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne’s “I Want to Kill My Brother: The Cymbal Head” is an insane, noisy, and dynamic journey through Coyne’s very strange mind:
 

Wayne Coyne - “I Want to Kill My Brother: The Cymbal Head”

Big Black/Rapeman/Shellac guitarist and Nirvana recording engineer Steve Albini’s contribution “Nutty About Lemurs” sounds unsurprisingly abrasive and, well, very very Albinilike.
 

Steve Albini - “Nutty About Lemurs”

A big curveball on the album is “A Little Ethnic Song,” by Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis, which sounds nothing like the first thing you thought when you read his name. And it’s really wonderful.
 

J. Mascis - “A Little Ethnic Song”

Tom Hazelmeyer never became a household name playing guitar for Halo Of Flies, but as big boss man at Amphetamine Reptile Records, he shaped the sound of the ‘90s bludgeon-rock underground as much as anyone. He’s lately turned up on the rock radar again, guesting on guitar with the Brisbane band No Anchor. His Guitarrorists contribution is the skin-flaying “Guitar Wank-Off #13.”
 

Tom Hazelmeyer - “Guitar Wank-Off #13”

Interesting for how far this selection sticks out from the crowd, and for how lovely it is amid the sea of distortion that is much of the comp, here’s “I Really Can’t Say,” by Kathy Korniloff from Two Nice Girls, a folk-rock band from Austin, notably loud-and-proud out lesbians at a time when that kind of openness was still highly unusual, and far riskier than it is today. They broke up in 1992, but scored some college radio love with a gem of an anthem called “I Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer.” 
 

Kathy Korniloff - “I Really Can’t Say”

Lastly, though there are contributions on the CD from all three guitar-wielding Sonic Youths, only one of them seems to have found its way online. Here’s an appropriately stark fan video for Lee Ranaldo’s pensive acoustic solo “Here”:
 

Lee Ranaldo - “Here”

 
Indianapolis’ We Are Hex have constantly been creeping up to the verge of something bigger for far too long. Formed in 2007, their reputation grew steadily, and the excellence of their live shows grew with it. Their 2010 12” LP Hail the Goer positively slayed, and a single released on Jack White’s Third Man label in 2011 brought them to the attention of “all the right people,” and then… nothing.

There were rumors that the guitar player had joined a cult. There were rumors of serious but unspecified health problems. And then atop all that, their studio got robbed and they were left without instruments or recording gear. No more We Are Hex. “Indefinite hiatus” was the explanation proffered, but in band-land, that’s like a restaurant hanging up the “closed for renovations” sign: it typically means that someone’s in denial about being out of business.

Their indefinite hiatus, however, became finite in 2013, when the reconstituted band released the “Lude Newdie Animals” single and toured again. I went to see the live show—of course I did, what else do you do when a favorite band you never thought you’d see again suddenly announces tour dates—and they completely killed it.

No description of their sound I’ve ever read or conjured has done them proper justice. P.J. Harvey’s name gets dropped a lot, the long shadow of goth is definitely hovering over this band, and they bring the obtuse angles of post-punk and the abrasions of ‘90s underground rock to the mix too, but you really have to hear it to get it. And as they’ve just released a new video for the song “Tongues,” here’s a fine opportunity. I threw in a few older ones too, after the jump, because why not. Enjoy.
 

”Tongues”
 
This way to more We Are Hex…

 
In October Paul Gallagher brought Dangerous Minds readers an early peek at the provocative promotional materials for Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier’s five-plus-hour movie in two parts, of which a shortened version (only four hours long) was released in Denmark and the United States on Christmas Day.

The posters featured attention-getting pictures of upwards of a dozen of the film’s actors, unclothed and in character (one assumes), in a pose suggesting sweaty post O bliss. The cast—and the posters—feature actors prominent and not-so-prominent, among them Uma Thurman, Christian Slater, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In this image you can see all of the posters all kind of jammed together:
 

 
A little before the Christmas release of the film several Danish film critics, all or most of whom can be presumed to like it, decided to use the necessity of promoting the Bodil Awards—Denmark’s equivalent to the Oscars—to pay homage to the movie by staging a bunch of orgasmic photographic portraits of their own!

The text in the poster reads, “This is what Danish film critics look like when they are enjoying good movies. . . . They are coming to the Bodil Awards. Are you?”

 

 
In a statement, Denmark’s National Association of Film Critics said, “Some may think that we all just sit in our ivory towers, looking down on the film landscape with critical eyes, having no fun at all. But just like anyone else, also we can be excited by great movie experiences—and we are not afraid to share the excitement with all of you!”

And then just a few days ago, several prominent Polish film critics banded together and did the same thing.
 

 
We in the United States of America await our own titillating posters with A.O. Scott, Harry Knowles, Dana Stevens, Rex Reed, Manohla Dargis, and J. Hoberman doing their best O-faces.

After all of those pics, I’m ready for a cigarette ...
 

 
Thank you Michał Oleszczyk!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Coming soon: Stars show their sex faces for new Lars Von Trier film

Photo by Christine Navin

Lillie Jayne aka Admiral Grey is a composer, writer, actress, performance artist and the mesmerizing lead singer for Weasel Walter’s New York City-based Cellular Chaos.

The details are a little sketchy. A petite blond in a flimsy sundress has lost her shoes as she wraps herself around a Boojum tree as a cyclone devastates Baja, California. The truck she was traveling in to escape the storm had been swept up in a flash flood and sent careening through the rapids. Quick thinking propelled her through the open window. After four hours of pounding rain and thrashing winds, she releases her grip from the fragile branches and begins the long journey back to town. Battered and bruised, the white tornado known as Admiral Grey has just stared down a tropical hurricane and somehow weathered the storm undaunted.

Lydia Lunch: At what age did you realize you were born to perform? And what was your first performance?

Admiral Grey: My first performance was in kindergarten at Catholic school. A boy and I got picked out to be Leo and Leona the lion in the school nativity musical. I had one phrase to sing that finished with an extended-note ‘ROAR.’ I took my performance very seriously, and there was a great crowd reaction. I was proud, but a little taken aback and embarrassed by all the fuss everyone made – all I did was go out and do what I was supposed to do and do it well.

My first rock performance was at 14 singing Janis Joplin songs with a band at a talent show at school, at full force, fully inebriated and in full Pearl-era regalia - oh good god people didn’t know what to make of that. I’m glad I wasn’t beat up. Although it probably would have been great to get in a fight that night.

Lydia Lunch: What books or music inspired your young psyche and pushed you forward toward recognizing your calling as a performer?

Admiral Grey: At first, T. S. Eliot, a book of Hemingway’s lost half-written poems, searching - I was a bit obsessed with Rimbaud, young, with laser-sharp eyes wide open and a filthy romantic heart.. And of course I thought I was him reincarnated because we had the same birthday. Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the confessional poets…Speaking of confession, growing up Catholic, with all of its inherent pomp and ceremony, hugely formed me - my sense of performance, my sense of reverence and need for ritual. My sense of opulence - the Catholic church is so opulent and pagan, and so am I.

Henry Miller was another filthy romantic philosopher, and he too thought he was Rimbaud.The art, writings and sad story of Zelda Fitzgerald because of her frustrated and suppressed genius and ultimate disaster – as girls grow up it’s easy to get lost and pushed away from one’s talents and passions especially if your interests lie in a wide range of arenas and you don’t know how to live and act like everyone else. Marguerite Duras, as an intellectual and brilliant writer and uncompromising person. Obsessive workman-like writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, DH Lawrence – Nietzsche. And Genet, Artaud, Camus… E.M. Cioran, Joan Didion, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski. Then there’s all of the current writers, too - right now, George Saunders is just destroying me. I went through a childhood phase of historical western and war books, and I continue to love history and non-fiction. It’s important to keep in touch with the scope of humanity.

Musically, discovering Frank Zappa was huge. I lived in a culturally isolated area with relatively strict parents. Of course hip-hop and R&B were huge growing up in the New York area. And renegades like Nina Simone and Jacques Brel. Joni Mitchell’s stubbornness as an artist as her work and career developed and got more esoteric and also as a woman, consistently staying single and taking on new lovers with each artistic phase and being open about it, was very bold and inspiring to someone like me who couldn’t picture having children. The Janis Joplin in Concert LP influenced me deeply, especially about pushing boundaries in performance and music.

Lydia Lunch: What historical figures do you most relate to?

Admiral Grey: Queen Elizabeth the first, which also happens to be my Christian name.  She was hyper-intellectual, spoke several languages, read several books a day and translated texts for fun, found time for creative and sporting pursuits, led powerful armies through battle and England through arguably the most intellectually, financially and artistically prosperous time as the most powerful country in the world, refused to marry, and never got assassinated even though that was a daily threat and intent of many for her entire life. And she did this all 450 years ago. Cleopatra before her was very similar and I am in awe of these people.

Lydia Lunch: What´s the zone like that you get into on stage? Are you conscious of what´s going on in the audience? Do you disappear into a hypnotic time warp where the music teleports you into the nightmare scenarios that your words paint?

Admiral Grey: Yes, and no. Since I’ve performed my whole life I almost always hover on the precipice of that fugue-state, although occasionally I slip straight in…I need to consistently check in with the audience, to give and receive from them, as it is truly something we are all doing together… it’s almost like hunter-survivor mode, with heightened senses and strengths and capabilities and very quick reaction times.  Plus a bit of ancient storytelling, and gospel hour. Sometimes I black out momentarily.

Lydia Lunch: What´s the difference between staging a piece for theater and playing live rock music?

Admiral Grey: Theater, to me, is choreography. It’s perfecting each moment and rehearsing it and rehearsing it until it bores you to tears – and then in performance, finding a way within that choreography to trick your brain into feeling and believing that all of that is happening for real, for the first time, and letting it be spontaneous, while another part of your brain makes sure that you hit all of the marks. That’s exactly what I like my bands to be like, though I don’t think it has to be that way. To rehearse so that the material is ingrained, so that one part of your brain can help you hit the marks while in performance you can free yourself to dance on the edge of mayhem and disaster throughout the performance. The trained unconscious part of your brain secretly holds your hand through the performance while the front of your brain thinks it’s going apeshit.

Lydia Lunch: Are there any classic plays you would like to stage?

Admiral Grey: I’d love to stage a Genet play.

Lydia Lunch: How do you blow off steam when you´re not on stage?

Admiral Grey: Performance is definitely my idea of blowing off steam, but when I am not working obsessively on my myriad projects…I love making things with my hands. My room is a bit of a tree house in a loft and it has grown into a sort of installation. And I like to cook and eat and drink and spend intimate, real time with people I love, of course. And I need a certain amount of extreme physical activity, so if I’m not performing I need to find ways to do that, in whatever regimented or bonkers ways I can without dying or getting pregnant. And I also need to run away and be alone, very alone.

Lydia Lunch: What´s it like working with Weasel Walter?

Admiral Grey: Oh, man. Well, let’s just say I feel very lucky to have him in my life. We enjoy the same things, we like to work in the same way, we enjoy music in a lot of the same ways, we enjoy making music together and performing with each other and touring together, and we have a deep mutual love and respect and trust that everyone should be lucky enough to have with a collaborator. Just a total blessing that we ended up working together. I feel lucky obviously as well to have him as a friend because he is solid as hell. And we laugh, at each other and with each other, all of the time, which is of the utmost importance.

Lydia Lunch: Any aspirations, premonitions or prophesies for 2014?

Admiral Grey: This year my biggest project is composing the music for and performing in a theater piece that I’m collaborating on with The Nerve Tank, a great experimental theater group in New York. It’s called “The Maiden” and is based on the myth of Persephone. It has already been very inspiring developing it. I want Cellular Chaos to release a new album and I want to finally release an album and videos of my solo work. I want to get the funding and team for a very ambitious absurd three act musical play that I have written and that has been sitting on the backburner for too long now. I want to not die, which is a great feeling to have.  I want everyone I love to be happy and healthy. And I’d like to collaborate with you.

The new full-length Cellular Chaos LP out now on ugEXPLODE.

Cellular Chaos on Facebook. Lydia Lunch’s website.

Below, an entire Cellular Chaos set taped at Death By Audio, Brooklyn on July 13 2013. Cellular Chaos are Admiral Grey: vocals, lyrics; Weasel Walter: guitar abuse; Kelly Moran: bass; Marc Edwards: sci-fi drums

 
What a bizarre piece of “history” this is…

“Dylanologist” AJ Weberman is infamous to Bob Dylan aficionados for being the obsessed stalker who Bob Dylan physically assaulted in 1971.

Here’s what Weberman told Rolling Stone about the time Dylan beat him up:

“I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker. . . . I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever fucked with his wife, he’d beat the shit out of me. A couple of days later, I’m on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me.

“I turn around and it’s like—Dylan. I’m thinking, ‘Can you believe this? I’m getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan!’ I said, ‘Hey, man, how you doin’?’ But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He’s little, but he’s strong. He works out. I wouldn’t fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. He gets up, rips off my ‘Free Bob Dylan’ button and walks away. Never says a word.

“The Bowery bums were coming over, asking, ‘How much he get?’ Like I got rolled. . . . I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some fucking lawyer. That was the last time I ever saw him, except once with one of his kids, maybe Jakob, and he said, ‘A.J. is so ashamed of his Jewishness, he got a nose job,’ which was true—at least in the fact that I got a nose job.

Weberman, a marginal figure in the Yippies, picked through the Dylan family’s trash (he calls his stinky style of sleuthing the science of “Garbology”) and staged demonstrations (with the “Dylan Liberation Front,” the students of his “Dylanology” classes) outside of their MacDougal Street brownstone.

I’ve posted here before on this character, at length, so I will refer you to “Tangled Up in Dylan: The twisted tale of AJ Weberman” from 2012.

In any case, this 1969 video of Weberman going through what he claims to be Dylan’s garbage is completely and utterly ridiculous.

At one point, AJ claims to have found a syringe. After a while, a Caribbean woman who lives in the building comes out and starts to berate him for this audacious invasion of privacy. She then informs him that Dylan has moved out.

He is genuinely surprised to hear this—you can tell from the look on his face—and doesn’t believe her. Later in the video she tells him that she knows that he brought his own prop garbage, as there was nothing in the trash cans earlier! She saw him bring three bags from the corner she tells him, and stash them in the bins. Weberman tries to deny this at first, but in the face of her relentless opposition, he finally opts to come clean and promptly blames the back-up garbage on the producer, John Reilly!

All this while videotape rolls… Oy vey!

He actually falsified Bob Dylan’s garbage—including the supposed discovery of a hypodermic needle—for the camera? How twisted is that? You can see how outraged Dylan’s former neighbor was by that in particular. She really lets this asshole have it. As she walks away from him, she reminds him once again that Dylan doesn’t even live there anymore and here he is bringing in bags of garbage and claiming they’re his!
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Tangled Up in Dylan: The twisted tale of AJ Weberman

 
Business Insider has unearthed the business card of Chen Guangbiao, one of the wealthiest men in China and, recently, an aggressive suitor to purchase The New York Times.

The card is a masterpiece of understatement. You should consider Chen’s approach when you make up your next batch of 100% recycled kraft cardstock business cards. Consider putting “New York City’s Bravest Firefighter” or “Canada’s Most Esteemed Biochemical Researcher” on there. “Moral Leader” is a can’t-fail phrase you should work in as well.

Here’s what Chen’s card says:
 

Most Influential Person of China
Most Prominent Philanthropist of China
China Moral Leader
China Earthquake Rescue Hero
Most Well-known and Beloved Chinese Role Model
China Top Ten Most Honorable Volunteer
Most Charismatic Philanthropist of China
China Low Carbon Emission Environmental Protection Top Advocate
China’s Foremost Environmental Preservation Demolition Expert

 
Donald Trump’s business card is a model of restraint by comparison:
 

 
One of the major facets of Chen Guangbiao’s identity is his charitable efforts. Here’s a picture of the humble businessman Chen doing something charitable:
 

 
In the first sentence of their bio on Chen Guangbiao, the China.org.cn Wiki refers to “his high-profile but questionably motivated charity drive.” Hmmm.

Below is a recent Chinese news report about Chen, in which he displays his customary modesty, according to the subtitled translation:
 

Chinese billionaire Chen Guangbiao often set the world on fire by selling the air, smashing Japanese cars and taking part in a variety of high-profile charity events. On Christmas Eve 2013, Chen Guangbiao carried 16 tons of one-hundred-dollar bills (about 1.4 billion) using a Dongfeng truck to propagate a so-called economic census in a temporary assembled studio. After showing off the money, he disclosed he would negotiate the takeover or equity participation of U.S. Media The NewYork Times in the US.

FYI, that’s Cassandra Peterson AKA “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” in the background with the pasties

I’ve been on a Rickie Lee Jones bender for the past week—I don’t want to can’t listen to anything else at the moment—and I was poking around on YouTube for clips of her (not even her official YouTube channel has that much good stuff, sadly. And what’s up with there being not even a single decent version of the “Chuck E’s in Love” video on YouTube?). Expect a Rickie Lee Jones megapost here sometime soon…

I was also looking around for information about why she and Tom Waits split up. There is a lot of conflicting information about their iconic soulmate boho pairing on the Internet (surprise, surprise) and the version of the story I’d always heard, and thought was true (that she revealed her junk habit to him and he left for New York the next day and never spoke to her ever again) turned out to be apocryphal. Whereas Jones has reluctantly told her side of the story—she must get damned tired of being asked about a former boyfriend from over 30 years ago—Waits has been more tight-lipped about what went down between them.

This 1979 interview with Waits, taped at the Shryock Auditorium in Carbondale, Illinois, sheds some light on their relationship—among other topics, like Waits’ famous lasagna (“talked about all over town”), how you should never play pool with a guy named “Fats” and the exhaustion of incessant touring—which was then ongoing. He alludes to something without actually saying it, but the message is pretty clear when he’s talking about how she’s doing. (For those of you reading this who are too young to remember, Jones had a reputation in the early part of her career as the Amy Winehouse of her day, an image she struggled to shake for a long time after it had ceased to be in any way accurate.)

There’s a great moment when the interviewer, Phil Ranstrom asks “I was reading an article from Rickie Lee Jones, she was saying you have become that person…you became that character you talk about in your songs through living it, through having to live it as an artist.”

Waits: “She’s right! It’s a dangerous business, y’know?…It’s kind of like a photographer going to a wedding and ending up married…You’re bound to get a little on ya, if you go poking your nose down the wrong street. As far as being a character in my stories, in my songs, I remain in all the stories, but at the same time I think the creative process is like gumbo, it’s a combination of imagination, experience and memories.”

Ranstrom also asks Waits “Who is one historical figure you would have liked to be?” Waits thinks about this for a moment, then eventually comes up with “Castro maybe?” He then adds STP racing CEO Andy Granatelli (who died last week at the age of 90) to that short list.

Note: The longer version of this video can be seen at the Media Burn website (it autoplays, so I can’t embed it here). The part where Waits speaks about Jones isn’t in the YouTube clip below, but starts at approximately 9:16 during the Media Burn clip.
 

 
This probably qualifies as one of the least original ideas for a post I’ve ever had—a full-length nationally broadcast interview with one of the most magnetic rock stars of the twentieth century—but what the hell: this is darn good footage and it deserves to be part of the Dangerous Minds archive one way or another. It’s John Lennon’s appearance on The Tomorrow Show hosted by Tom Snyder, which, according to The John Lennon Encyclopedia by Bill Harry, was taped on April 8, 1975, and was aired on April 28, 1975. Tom Snyder is as idiosyncratic and dorky as ever, but this is an awfully good conversation, such as it is, full of the charm of Lennon engaging with an interviewer who at least isn’t dumb and is fully focused on the topic at hand—you could do a lot worse.

Snyder himself, in 1980, avers somewhat tentatively that this seems to be the last television interview Lennon ever gave. That claim, while surprising, has not been strenuously challenged, at least not in my nugatory attempts to research the issue. Lennon more or less dropped out of sight in 1975, and if he felt like not giving TV interviews to support his album Double Fantasy, which had come out in October, then so be it. It’s useful to remember that he didn’t do any live shows either—for his last concert, you have to go back even farther, to 1974. The man was semi-retired.

In 1975 one of the topics that was consuming John Lennon was his lengthy legal problems with the U.S. Immigration Service, which had gone to some lengths to block John and Yoko’s attempts to establish residency in the United States. Lennon’s attorney, Leon Wildes, appears late in the telecast and explains that the U.S government’s issues with Lennon obscurely stemmed from the days of Watergate,when Strom Thurmond passed a memo to Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell or some such.

(True story: My dad briefly worked as a journalist in DC in the early 1970s, and he was present at a press conference John and Yoko held about their immigration case around 1972 at the National Press Club—actually, if anyone has any documentation of that event, I’d be awfully interested to hear more about that. My dad was a jazz nut and, while glancingly impressed by the idea of seeing a Beatle give a press conference close up, he didn’t give it all that much thought.)

It’s apparent that the immigration case was a pretty big topic in the media at the time, and in fact it was settled in Lennon’s favor a few months later, in October. Of course the irony, that Lennon fought so hard to live in the city in which he would be killed at the early age of 40, is awful to contemplate.
 

 
This video is actually a rebroadcast of the interview that was aired on December 9, 1980, and I’m sure many of you out there don’t need me to tell you the significance of that date. Of course, John Lennon was shot and killed the day before, and Snyder introduces the 1975 interview and then interviews music journalist Lisa Robinson and producer Jack Douglas, who worked on Imagine and Double Fantasy (which was then quite a new album, and also the first John Lennon album in five years). The 1975 footage is of course presented in the light of this horrifying tragedy, and it’s interesting to hear Robinson’s and Douglas’s thoughts—Douglas in particular is understandably very emotional about having lost his dear friend. It strikes me that, in our current era, you would never see interviews quite like this after an event like the sudden death of a major star, today you’d have a lot of talking heads weighing in and everyone would somehow be angling for top dog on the subject, and there’d just be a lot of spin. This isn’t to say that Robinson and Douglas didn’t know they were on TV or weren’t choosing their words carefully, but it just seems a lot less mediated, they were invited to give their thoughts, and they did so in a relatively unfussy way.

As for Lennon himself, it’s wonderful to be reminded of the intelligent charm of the man—shit, I’d love to hang out with that guy for an hour or two. As much as Lennon “signified” and no matter how grandiose his political or artistic of philosophical concepts could be, at bottom he was a witty, cheerful, sassy, sarcastic Liverpudlian with a lot of sensible and sharp ideas in his head. Snyder several times mentions Lennon’s humility—that doesn’t quite seem like the right word but I understand entirely what Snyder meant by it. Lennon spent his entire adult life as the object of unremitting adulation, praise, and (if you will) love, and something in him inevitably saw the preposterousness in it—as I’m sure all the Beatles did after a few months of Beatlemania. Listen to Lennon address the idea of a John Lennon anti-drug PSA; if anyone understood the limits of celebrity advocacy, it would surely be John Lennon. He figured kids would say, “Well who the hell are you to say I shouldn’t smoke pot?” and he was surely dead right about that.

As for the rest of the interview, be sure to tune in. Snyder might get on your nerves but even Lennon says himself that he’s a fan! Lennon’s thoughts on the breakup of the Beatles, the absurdity of Beatlemania, his affection for New York, his admiration for reggae, none of it is groundbreaking or new, but it’s still well worth a look.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Yoko Ono’s plea for gun control expressed in one image: John Lennon’s blood-splattered glasses
John Lennon’s school detention sheets go up for sale
The Clash take on Tom Snyder, armed with a teddy bear, 1981