On July 4, 1975, the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm staged its highly media-savvy “Media Burn,” in which a revamped Cadillac would crash, Evel Knievel style, through a wall of flaming television sets in the parking lot of the Cow Palace sports arena and entertainment venue.

It was the perfect mix of Yippie-style anti-establishment protest and avant-garde art of the Nam June Paik type. According to a speech given by “Bill Ding” before the staged crash, “fifteen hundred man hours” had succeeded in transforming a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible into a preposterous “Phantom Dream Car” with an elongated hood and a massive tail fin with a video camera embedded inside. What made the event so distinctive, and perhaps utterly American, was the media circus Ant Farm managed to instigate around the event.

Scheduled to coincide with the country’s 199th birthday, “Media Burn” was larded up with a healthy dose of patriotic folderol. The overriding metaphor of an epochal space launch accentuated the general feeling of ridiculousness (this was actually a Cadillac crashing into a bunch of TV sets, remember), complete with a star-spangled tarp to cover the “Dream Car” before the event and a special appearance by John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated twelve years earlier, complete with Secret Service detail and presidential open-air limo. In the car, the Ant Farm “dummies,” as they were labeled, were wearing space-age outfits right out of the The Day the Earth Stood Still.
 

 
The act of destroying a bunch of TV sets was intended as a comment on our media age, but Ant Farm didn’t stop there—the entire afternoon was conceived as a mock media phenomenon, complete with self-important press releases and the issuing of “legitimate” press credentials, in an effort to sucker S.F. news outlets into covering the event. (It totally worked.) As the press release winkingly stated, “MEDIA BURN is NOT open to the public”—yet several hundred people did show up, and programs and hot dogs were happily sold to spectators.

One half-expects DEVO to show up halfway through and play “Jocko Homo” or something. “Media Burn” was so thoroughgoingly conceived that it almost precludes commentary. It’s enough to watch and enjoy it.
 

 
via Internet Magic

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Good Morning Mr. Orwell: 1984 live TV experiment with Cage,Ginsberg,Dali,Paik,etc

 
I’ve never really been a huge Jethro Tull fan—I’ve always liked them just fine on a “greatest hits” level, and I’ve owned some of their albums purchased at garage sales when I was a tyke—but I was 11 when Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols came out, so “prog rock” was not really something I grew up on. It was something to be avoided. I respected them, liked certain songs a lot (“Bungle in the Jungle” was one of the earliest singles I ever bought) but from a safe, skinny tie and Ray-Ban-wearing distance.

In the past five years, though, I’ve started to listen to Jethro Tull through downloading quadraphonic (4 channel) bootlegs of Warchild and Aqualung that popped up on the Demonoid torrent tracker. I’m willing to listen to anything once in multi-channel and Tull’s classic albums were recorded especially well and the quad mixes of these albums were fun to listen to. Some 70s quad mixes were little more than doubled-up stereo afterthoughts and were pretty conservative sonically, but some performers did it right, like Jethro Tull, who perhaps did it the very best. I fanned out from there into some of their other albums.

Then I started to notice that new 5.1 Jethro Tull releases remastered by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree (who has been reworking the King Crimson catalog and is now also turning his attention to Yes and XTC) were starting to come to market and I picked up his Aqualung, which is damned good. Then yesterday I got a copy of the Wilson remastered Benefit—a Tull album from 1970 that I’ve (mostly) never heard before—and I’ve played it like ten times in the past 24 hours. It’s fucking killer and I am glad that I have “discovered” it, but honestly, since I don’t care what you think about Jethro Tull, why should I expect you to care about what I think about them? The issue of whether or not Jethro Tull are any good has been long settled and isn’t up for dispute and this isn’t a review as such. More like PSA for audiophile rock snobs.

What I would like to tell you fine people, is what a great value the Benefit
“collector’s edition” is, and praise the project’s producer Steven Wilson for yet another job well done. Wilson’s name on something these days is the gold standard as far as I am concerned. Hell, I’d buy something I wasn’t even particularly interested in just because he was involved in it with the expectation that I’d come to like it (For instance, Yes I normally don’t give a shit about, but the idea of hearing them in 5.1 surround and mixed by Steven Wilson, well all of a sudden that’s a very attractive proposition to me).
 

 
It’s not like I’m listening to Benefit “anew” after decades of living with it—I just got it yesterday, as mentioned above—but I am hearing it with fresh ears and it’s a product of remarkable quality and maniacal attention to detail. Wilson returned to the multi-track masters, did the slow bake process that needs to happen to older analog tapes with the iron oxide flaking off, and once the vocal and instrumental tracks were laid off to digital, went back to the same (or similar) vintage processors as would have been used in studios at the time to add EQ, phasing, reverb and double tracking consistent with the original mixes. In the CD booklet, Ian Anderson credits Steven Wilson with painstakingly removing technical glitches, amp buzz, stray noises and the analog hiss between musical notes, all the while retaining the original balance, but causing the music to sparkle in comparison to previous versions. In his notes about the process of restoring and remixing the album, Wilson wrote that he hopes fans who have lived with Benefit for 40 plus years wouldn’t even really notice what he’d done.

All in all, I’d rate this package an A. The music’s great, the surround mix is positively eargasmic and the price is right (you can buy the Benefit three disc set discounted to around $20 on Amazon). The reason that I’m not giving it an A+ is simply because they put the 5.1 and hi resolution stereo transfers on a regular DVD instead of a Blu-ray. It’s worth mentioning that Steven Wilson’s Yes and XTC remasters do come with a Blu-ray. This is what the folks who buy (as in purchase, as in who don’t download it for free, as in who spend money in record stores) physical media releases like this one WANT, but it’s not a fatal flaw and hopefully future labels who hire Wilson for his own special brand of ace reissues, will listen to him next time. I’d be willing to bet a finger that he argued for a Blu-ray instead of a standard DVD but was over-ruled by someone in the accounting department because it would have added another 17 cents to the per price cost of manufacture. Note to that accountant: the Warner Music Group would sell more of these suckers if there was a Blu-ray component here. It’s one of the main criteria that I, for instance, look at when doing the mental calculation of “do I want to buy this or download it?” Just sayin’, record industry. You might want to listen to your customers, the ones you still have left.

Or just listen to what Steven Wilson is telling you people. He’s the man!

“With You There to Help Me” performed in 1970. This is Benefit‘s lead-off track and in the 5.1 mix, it becomes a swirling thing of almost celestial beauty. I’m obsessed by this song. This live version here is simply stunning.
 
More vintage Jethro Tull after the jump…

 
For the past several years, WCSB 89.3 FM, one of Cleveland By God Ohio’s toweringly excellent college radio stations, has thrown an extremely cool Halloween party. They’ve hit upon a winning formula for booking it: the headliner is invariably a beloved classic punk band - past bill-toppers have included The Dickies, The Avengers, and The Angry Samoans. Second on the bill would often be a classic Cleveland underground band reunited for the occasion, then the rest of the bill would be filled in with contemporary worthies. It’s free of charge, and always a very popular night out, with the best, brightest, and weirdest of CLE’s freak-scenesters doing their best to outdo each other in insane costumery and irresponsible drinking.

So OK, I wasn’t present for this, so some of the “specifics” of this post are cobbled from Facebook reportage shared by party-goers during and after the event. If I screwed up any of these pieced-together details, that’s all on me. This year, the party apparently got too popular. After the venue had already hit capacity, there were still hopeful revelers lined up around the block, waiting hours to get in, in costume, in frigid Ohio winter weather. This could be due to the booking of The Dead Milkmen. That band famously went, in a mere 5 years, from being the smartass Philadelphia maestros behind THE surprise underground hit album of the ‘80s with Big Lizard in My Backyard to the 120 Minutes darlings who came astonishingly close to achieving actual mainstream success with Beelzebubba and Metaphysical Graffitti. This would have been a hotly anticipated show even if it wasn’t an admission-free bacchanal. BUT - in Cleveland there always seems to be a “but” - right before they were to take the stage, the power went out in much of the city’s Near-West Side, including the newly-chic Gordon Square neighborhood where the party was being held. The Milkmen attempted a drums-and-a-capella singalong to mollify the capacity crowd - some of whom, being, you know, punks and everything, had reflexively jumped to the conclusion that the police had shut off the power to stop the show and were getting all pissed off - but it really didn’t work, and sadly, the theater was cleared out.

But for all their bird-flipping, wiseass posturing, The Dead Milkmen are clearly some damn cool guys:

Hello Loyal Listeners,

As you all probably know first-hand or have heard, the Gordon Square community of Cleveland was hit with an untimely and unfortunate power outage in the Gordon Square and Ohio City neighborhood on November 2 just before The Dead Milkmen were to take the stage at the 2013 WCSB Halloween Masquarade Ball at the Cleveland Public Theater – something WCSB and The Dead Milkmen felt completely terrible about for everyone involved.

The Dead Milkmen being class acts drove themselves and their equipment up to the WCSB studios and did their ENTIRE SET (encore included) live over the CSB airwaves for the entire city to enjoy. They even stuck around and answered some questions after their inspired performance.To make sure no Dead Milkmen fan missed out on this historic (and odd) evening, we have extracted the audio and posted it here for all to enjoy.

The whole set is posted here. Enjoy.
 

If you don’t love this, I don’t want to know you.

 
Tales of vampires have existed for millennia, but the idea of the vampire as we understand it today comes from late-17th and early-18th-century Europe where oral traditions told of vampires as revenants of evil beings, including suicides and witches, who preyed on the living.

Of course, the most famous vampire is Count Dracula the undead nobleman created by novelist Bram Stoker who spent seven years researching European folklore and vampire stories before writing one word of his classic tale. Yet Dracula was not the first fictional vampire: there had been Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla in 1871, which was the tale of a lesbian vampire who preyed on young women; before this James Malcolm’s Varney the Vampire (1847), a grisly “penny dreadful” that became a best-seller; and at the beginning was Vampyre, a story written by Doctor John Polidori during a madcap summer spent with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, which also inspired the creation of Frankenstein. That must have been one hell of a vacation.

Part of Dracula‘s great allure is the historical association with the bloody Transylvanian Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia or “Vlad the Impaler.” In the documentary Dracula the Great Undead, the ever-watchable Vincent Price traces the true story behind one of fiction’s greatest characters. As our host, Price is his usual charming self, and makes this documentary a delight to watch.
 

 
Fearing typecasting, Tim Curry notoriously shied away from discussing the role he’s most famous for—“Dr. Frank N. Furter” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He never did the fan conventions. Even at the late date of 2010, when fellow cast members Barry Bostwick and Meatloaf guest-starred on “The Rocky Horror Glee Show” episode of Glee, Curry still wanted no part of it, which is what makes this B&W interview shot in 1975, the week the film was released in Britain, so fascinating

This is probably the sole extended interview on video that Curry has ever given on the subject of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He tells interviewer Mark Caldwell of the role’s physical demands, of reprising Rocky onstage in Los Angeles at The Roxy and how he tried to make the character more “evil” for the film version. When asked near the end if there would be a Rocky Horror sequel, Curry firmly deadpans “Not with me in it.”

In recent years, Curry, who had a major stroke in 2012, has been more open to talking about Rocky Horror.
 

 
Good gawd, there are so many choice quotes from this that I don’t even know where to begin. The LSD-induced poetry just goes… on. “You know what I mean?”

“Nothing really matters. That would mean something’s wrong.”

“I don’t play that game they’re playin’ out there,
runnin around, lookin for bullshit,
whatever they’re trying to sell on TV.
You know that’s a bunch of garbage,
now your head is all fucked up,
every time you look in the mirror, and
you don’t know who to blame.
You think it’s something to do with you.
That’s the saddest part of it all.”

“LSD or just fuckin’ being alive in general, goddammit, I dunno…
it’s fucking awesome.
It’s hard to tell anymore.”

Seriously, maybe this guy is on to something here,—reddit loves him—perhaps even ready to start a whole new religion. I’m ready for this. I’ve been waiting.
 

 
Via reddit

Rod Hull and Emu on EBC1, the “Emu’s Broadcasting Company”
 
Novelty comedians, prop comics, ventriloquists…. they’re an odd lot, and none of them was ever quite as pulverizingly effective as “Rod Hull and Emu,” as the act was invariably known. Rod Hull was a gangly Australian who landed in the UK in the early 1970s and for a few years was one of the most famous and successful comedians in Britain. (Americans of a certain age might recall Hull and Emu from The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, a short-lived 1974 Saturday morning kids’ show on CBS.)

The act was an imitation of those animal trainers that constantly appear on The Tonight Show—Hull had a massive emu puppet in a trick jacket with a fake arm such that his actual arm (always his right arm) could play the part of the bird. It’s not overstating it by much to say that the essence of Rod Hull and Emu was that “they” would show up on a talk show and in short order the bird would run riot over everything on the stage set.

At their best, Rod Hull and Emu were achingly funny, as only a specific kind of orchestrated anarchy can be. I can’t really think of an act like it. Here’s a clip that’s extremely famous in the U.K., of Rod Hull and Emu absolutely laying waste to the set of Parkinson in 1976—Michael Parkinson is the approximate equivalent of Johnny Carson in Britain, so the impact of this appearance could hardly have been greater. (Later in the show, fellow guest Billy Connolly got in a great ad-lib: “If that bird comes anywhere near me, I’ll break its neck and your bloody arm!”)
 

 
There’s more of that on the Internet—if that video doesn’t make you want to seek out more, then I don’t know what else to say. In 1994 Snoop Dogg was on a TV show in the U.K. and Snoop appears to have slapped Hull or the like after Emu did its usual thing—the video is frustrating because the director cut away from the main part of the action at the pivotal moment, but you can at least see Snoop being very wary, bordering on annoyed, in the moments leading up to the scuffle.

At a minimum we can say that the Rod Hull hit upon a brilliant comedy novelty idea and executed it flawlessly. A fair number of people describe Hull as shy and mild-mannered in real life (albeit a ladies’ man and not without ego), and it’s totally clear that this mildness was essential to the act, mainly in the form of Hull’s feigned inability to “control” Emu and his wispy apologies after Emu’s attacks. The inherent unpredictability of an animal intelligence, which Hull mimicked and exploited to perfection, is also a big part of the giddy fun—it’s not too much to say, I think, that the illusion was effective enough that viewers had a tendency to ascribe agency to the stupid bird.

Few acts cry out for pop psychoanalysis like Rod Hull and Emu. I suspect that the normally diffident Hull hit upon a wonderful way to express his darker impulses—in ways that Hull himself may not fully have understood or at a minimum probably didn’t anticipate. You could almost say that it was an exquisite form of split personality. Hull was heard on many occasions blaming Emu for his lack success in other areas of showbiz. He resented his own comic creation.

Hull’s life story is surprisingly full of incident and drama, and the 2002 Channel 4 documentary A Bird in the Hand is pretty interesting, if a bit long on emotional pandering.
 
A Bird in the Hand, Part 1

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Sandals full of dogshit: Channel 4’s ‘The Word’ ft L7, Hole, Stereolab, Snoop vs Emu & more

 
This Pavarotti and Friends special from 2002 was actually a benefit for Angola, and while it was performed and filmed in Modena, Italy, it got some pretty big international names. Andrea Bocelli was obviously there (the other really, really famous opera singer), as well as Grace Jones (cool!), James Brown (wow!), and Sting (eyeroll). And out of all those weird pairings Luciano and Lou is still the weirdest, but honestly, I’m so happy this exists. I love opera, and I love that Lou made a daring choice with the song.

Maybe the execution is a little unwieldy, but really, the song is a perfect choice for Pavarotti! Dramatic delivery, romantic swells—the song is perfectly primed for operatic pathos. Plus, Pavarotti’s stage makeup here could totally hold its own to glam-era Lou Reed. That brow pencil work is some expert-level shit.
 

 
Is it fair that a band like Tricot, out of Kyoto, might garner extra attention simply because they’re Japanese women pursuing math rock? The flip side of the same coin would be that math rock is a wee bit testosterone-heavy, right? Is that even true? I couldn’t say for certain, but it certainly seems like a distinct possibility. Marnie Stern is the only female math rocker I can think of, but it’s not like I know that much about it.

In any case, while Tricot may win the PR buzz game by incorporating female vocals in a language incomprehensible to most American ears, it can equally well be seen as the kind of innovation that math rock needed to absorb. I’ll be neither the first nor the last writer to offer the idea that they sound like Don Caballero crossed with Shonen Knife, but that combination does sound tantalizing, no? To my ears, Don Cab has a wild streak that allows them to stray wherever they want to go, whereas Tricot has not developed that level of artistry yet—they’re merely pretty damn adept. (In other words, Tricot’s songs sound too much alike.) 

Tricot has recently released a long-player called THE—people used to ask whether the term long-player makes any sense in the post-CD era, but vinyl’s back again, so I guess it’s OK! Tricot appears to take its math rock identity pretty seriously, as evidenced by their having named one song after the vernacular equivalent of pi—“3.14.” (On the new album, they’ve got another one called “99.974.”) 

The band has a way with the high-concept video as well. “Oyusami (Night)” is the one I like best, as the quartet deploys its math-rockery all over a baseball diamond—without giving anything away, the day/night dynamic in the video suggests that they believe in the power of clutch, although it’s equally possible they think baseball is a dumb boys’ thing.
 
“Oyusami (Night)”

 
via Fluxblog

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Awkward, hilarious interview with Steve Albini

 
For those seeking confirmation that all ad men are wankers, should look no further than this viral advertisement for a sports drink that has just been banned by UK’s Advertising Standards Authority.

The ad for protein drink “For Goodness Shakes,” features various men apparently “doing something” in public places. The ad was sent out as an embedded video in a marketing email, which asked the question: “What’s going on here?”

The money shot for this thigh-slapping innuendo was the final tag-line:

“We shake for you ... the protein shake without the shaker.”

The ASA investigated the ad after receiving a complaint that it was likely to cause widespread offense.

The drinks manufacturer My Goodness, claimed the ad was just a humorous take on an old comedy routine, and that the video was intended for “sports-interested adult males.” [Is this a euphemism?—Ed.]

The ASA had concerns that the video alluded to the hand shandy and included a sequence that suggested a man had splooged all over a woman’s back.

The advertising authority has banned the ad, and told My Goodness not to produce any more ads with similar content in the future. (Fnar, fnar.)
 

 
Via The Guardian