I have no clue who this acapella gospel group is or where this video footage comes from, but I’d like more. This snip of a song simply isn’t enough to digest Larry’s (that’s what I’m callin’ him, because he just looks like a Larry to me) low C-note capabilities.
It’s like he’s singing in slow motion!
In 1967 and 1968 the Beatles were feeling ambitious. They founded Apple Records. They also started a division called Apple Films run by an associate named Denis O’Dell who had been instrumental in getting A Hard Day’s Night made. Apple Films was more successful than people remember—it released the Beatles’ 1967 TV movie Magical Mystery Tour, the theatrical Beatles releases Yellow Submarine and Let it Be, 1972’s The Concert for Bangladesh, and a few others, including the 1974 John Hurt cult movie Little Malcolm and the T.Rex concert film, Born to Boogie, which was directed by Ringo Starr.
One of the projects the Beatles were interested in pursuing—particularly John—was a Beatles adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
In 2002 Paul McCartney ran into Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson at the Academy Awards and told him of the Beatles’ plans. Jackson told Wellington’s Evening Post newspaper, “It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage but he didn’t like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it.”
CNN reported at the time:
John Lennon wanted to play the grasping, thieving creature Gollum in a 1960s Beatles version of the “Lord of the Rings,” New Zealand movie director Peter Jackson told Wellington’s Evening Post newspaper.
—snip—
George Harrison was to play the wise wizard Gandalf who advises the hobbit Frodo in his quest to destroy the evil golden ring at the center of the epic tale of good versus evil, one of the most popular books of the 20th century.
Ringo Starr was to play Frodo’s devoted sidekick Sam, while Lennon would take the part of the hobbit-like creature that tracks the heroes throughout the story, trying to get his hands on the powerful ring
Mockup of a fake—yes, fake—soundtrack for a Beatles/Kubrick Lord of the Rings movie
Notice there’s no mention of who Paul would have played. Some sources say he would have played Frodo. To direct, The Beatles wanted to get either David Lean or Stanley Kubrick. According to Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes, John wanted to play Gandalf.
According to Walter Everett’s 1999 book The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver Through the Anthology, Apple Films also wanted to adapt Lennon’s two books (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works) as well as produce some kind of vehicle for the model Twiggy.
Why Tolkien’s animus towards the Fab Four? It’s not entirely clear, but Matthew Schmitz at First Things does point out the following:
In a 1964 letter to Christopher Bretherton, Tolkien complained about “radio, tele, dogs, scooters, buzzbikes, and cars of all sizes but the smallest” making noise “from early morn to about 2 a.m.”
“In addition,” Tolkien wrote, “in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable.”
We don’t have the Beatles Lord of the Rings movie, but we do have the inevitable YouTube mashup—here’s a bunch of LOTR footage matched up to a big chunk of Side 2 of Abbey Road.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
A lovely J.R.R. Tolkien documentary from 1968
John Lennon, Car Salesman
It’s difficult to make sense of the news today that Penguin Books in the UK have dropped the publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which was supposed to be available for sale next Monday, but, hey, it’s easy to speculate…
Penguin claim that no review copies were printed, which seems quite odd to me as a former publisher, because lead times for magazines tend to be 90 days and the pre-retail marketing period leading up to a big book’s street date can take from six to nine months.
It’s being reported that “a last-minute content disagreement between Penguin Books and Morrissey has caused the venture to collapse.”
If it was “last minute,” there WOULD obviously have not only been review copies printed up, they’d have had tens of thousands of finished copies on hand for Monday, too.
Maybe it wasn’t so last minute, after all, but what’s the reason for it? When there’s a lot of money at stake, as there would be with something like this, usually the publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate a famous author.
Morrissey’s autobiography? That would sell like hotcakes the world over.
There has to be something hot in it. Morrissey has a long history of making controversial statements. I wonder what’s in it that caused Penguin to drop it? None of the reports mention WHY it was dropped. That’s got to be the interesting part…
Anyone got a digital copy?
UPDATE: The whole thing is an Internet hoax. It seems to have started on a Morrissey fan site and then got picked up at MOJO and Pitchfork. It seemed fishy with no Amazon listing. You can read more about this at The Atlantic Wire.
In happier news for Mozz fans, his new concert DVD, Morrissey 25: Live From Hollywood High shot at back in March, will be released on October 22. Here’s the trailer:
Via MOJO
Brought to you by artist Christopher Keelty.
This footage is preposterously entertaining. It was 1981, the Clash were supporting Sandinista! The Clash had booked eight gigs at a nightclub called Bond’s Casino in Times Square in May and June of 1981—Richard has already written about that legendary stint in considerable detail.
(In related news, a comprehensive Clash box set dropped this week. The Clash: Sound System, designed by Paul Simonon to resemble an old-school boom box, contains the Clash’s first five U.S. releases—The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Sandinista!, and Combat Rock—three discs of rarities and outtakes, a DVD with videos, live material, and previously unseen footage by Julien Temple and Don Letts, and lots of other fun trinkets and doodads.)
Anyway, while they were in New York, they paid a visit to The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. If you’re into the Clash and you haven’t seen this, you are in for a treat.
During the interview, Joe Strummer keeps fooling around with a cute teddy bear, but, very much in the manner of an impatient fusspot dad, no-nonsense Tom keeps taking it away from him. The band decide to affix stickers all over Tom’s body and then Joe puts a “Have a Nice Day!” plastic bag over his head. Then they debate the ins and outs of squatting. I’m making it sound silly, but somehow all this happens and they also manage to answer Tom’s questions about vacant youth and so forth with a good mixture of seriousness and silliness, and it all happens in under nine minutes.
After the commercial the Clash entertains the crowd with vital performances of “The Magnificent Seven” and “This Is Radio Clash.” While the band is doing “This Is Radio Clash,” Futura 2000 is seen spray-painting text all over the back wall and there’s generally an undercurrent of controlled mayhem throughout.
This is must-see stuff.
The interview section is here:
Don’t neglect the performances of “The Magnificent Seven” and “This Is Radio Clash” after the jump….
As the radical writer and journalist, Jessica Mitford described it in her second volume of autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict, the American Communist Party (“like any good organization”) required information from its members for their “forms and charts.”
There were forms for new members seeking data on Class Origin, Age, Extent of Marxist Reading, Activity in Mass (meaning non-Party) Organizations; there were forms for dues payments and Monthly Sustainers; there were even forms for requesting temporary withdrawal from activity.
This information was the basis for conclusions, criticisms and campaigns organized by the Party. It was useful, but all too often the data ended up the desks of the F.B.I.
Not long after Mitford joined the Party in San Francisco, a new form was requested. This was at a time when various rival factions were edging each other for power. One faction (or “factionalists” as Mitford called them), wanted more proletarians (in other words people like themselves) at the top of the Party. This group insisted that the new form should list the occupation and class of Party members’ antecedents. This was a touchy subject for the upper class Mitford, when considering her privileged forebears.
Her grandmother, for example:
There were stories about her, of course, the usual family legends; that out of fastidiousness she refused to touch any coins until they had been scrubbed clean and polished by the footmen; that she had once laid a booby trap for King Edward when, invited by Grandfather to stay at Batsford, he had brought his current mistress along and disapproving Grandmother had arranged for strings of slop pails to be placed strategically each night between the bedrooms of King and mistress…
But how to describe her “occupation? Union? Class?” It was difficult enough to be politically circumspect about the relatives, but how would Mitford describe herself? A co-worker suggested that she call herself as an “Intellectual”:
An amusing idea, I thought, remembering the scorn in which intellectuals were held by my parents, but that would hardly solve the problem. I had noticed that the term intellectual was used loosely, to say the least, in the Party, probably because to be bourgeois but intellectual like Lenin, Engels, Marx, was OK, whereas to be bourgeois tout court was not.
Recalling that her father had a gold mine in Canada, and that her grandfather’s Japanese gardens at Batsford was a tourist attraction, Jessica “fleetingly” considered listing them as “Miner” and “Gardener” respectively.
Domestic would do nicely for all three females, I reflected (for they were a domestic lot in the adjectival sense), and for my mother’s father, who owned a yacht, Sailor.
Thankfully, the possible embarrassment was avoided, as Mitford was “absolved” from completing the form, so long as did all in her “power to overcome the handicaps of birth and upbringing.”
Jessica Mitford was a heroine to the likes of Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling, who had been inspired by “Decca” after reading a copy of her first volume of autobiography, Hons and Rebels , at the age of fourteen. Rowling also named her daughter after the author.
Here, we can see why Mitford, the radical campaigner, writer, journalist, and essayist, was such an inspiring character, in this interview with award-winning, investigative journalist, John Pilger, on The Outsiders, from 1983.
If I am to judge the product purely on the quality of the music and how much I enjoyed it, I would be obliged to give the new box set Live at the Academy Of Music 1971 by The Band a 5/5. It sounds really good. The performances are nothing short of incredible. It blew my doors off.
The four CDs and one DVD are encased in a nice glossy hardback cover with slick embossed lettering, short essays and color photos. It’s a nice thing to hold in your hands and it got me listening to The Band again. Box sets are good that way and I reacted in the expected Pavlovian slobbering fanboy way.
Oh children, believe me when I tell you that I can rhapsodize about The Band and this is them at the height of their powers, playing their hearts out over the course of a four-night stint at the old Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York, the cavernous venue that would later become the Palladium nightclub, the set of Club MTV and is now… NYU dorms! They were accompanied by a crack horn section arranged by Allen Toussaint that gave their Civil War folk rock a Stax Volt swing. Bob Dylan even showed up for the encore of their New Year’s Eve set and performed four numbers with them.
The recordings of these shows are what became the Rock of Ages album, a 2 LP release from the summer of 1972. That album went to #6 in the album charts and is considered by many to be one of the greatest live albums ever recorded.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to all of the box yet, but the 5.1 surround, mixed by Bob Clearmountain is quite good and discs 3 and 4 with the raw “you were there” soundboard mixes from New Year’s Eve are also pretty cool. But why anyone would require seven of the same songs from the first two discs to be repeated—well same performance, with a different, more immediate, less hi-fi mix—on discs 3 and 4 is beyond me. The 5.1 mix is the same songs (minus the Dylan numbers) from the first two discs with no hi res stereo file. There are only seventeen unreleased tracks here. Most people who would want this already have Rock of Ages and in fact may have purchased it in multiple formats. There have already been several CD versions.
The problem with reviewing this box is that I like the music, I like it a lot, but it’s so repetitive that the idea of asking fans of The Band to plunk down $109 (Amazon discounts it to $73) and expecting that they’ll do it seems frankly insane to me.
What gives?
The initial Amazon reviews have been nothing short of brutal, slamming Robbie Robertson for ripping off his biggest fans and decrying the repetitive nature of the box set. They’ve got a point!
What I can’t believe is that the 5.1 mix is just a (lossy) Dolby file on a DVD and not an HD DTS version on a Blu-ray disc. For audiophiles, this is a massive turn-off and although this seems to be news to the major labels, they’re the ones still buying those round shiny silver things that you can hold in your hand. Don’t get me wrong, I like Bob Clearmountain’s mix, but I’d sure like it a lot more on a Blu-ray disc! It sounds great, but it could sound a lot better. I’d rather have that better version, especially at this price point.
It stands to reason that the majors would want to appeal to the people—cater to them, kiss their asses—who would *actually buy* what basically amounts to three versions of Rock of Ages by giving them some value for the money. Even those intelligence-insulting Pink Floyd box sets with the drink coasters and Pink Floyd marbles had the surround audio portion on Blu-ray discs. They overlap in the material here, too, is simply so shameless, that you just have to laugh. At either $109 or $73, it’s not a good value for the money.
By comparison, the upcoming Van Morrison Moondance box set has 4 CDs and a high-resolution 48K 24 bit PCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound mix on a Blu-ray and this will sell for $56. I reckon that this is still too high of a price to ask when everyone knows that each and every song on those 4 CDs would fit onto the Blu-ray. I think a $35 list price for an expanded catalog classic that’s been plundered for profits over and over again is where the multi-generational sweet spot is.
Fact is, if I was given the option of buying classic albums on Blu-ray, with either a 176/24 version of some album I love or a 5.1 surround mix (or preferably both) and the list was $35, I’d still be buying the same amount of music that I bought in 2004. But I’m not offered that option or if I am, it’s not at that price point and I get stuck with a bunch of stuff I don’t want, like a “Dark Side of the Moon” scarf… Go much over $35 and you lose me as a customer.
But this is hypothetical, because seldom does what the accountants at the labels think will sell and what the fans want overlap, it’s just that obvious. Many people have excellent audio-visual equipment in their homes and a desire for quality software products to enjoy on their electronics, but the labels never even attempt to engage these consumers. It’s so completely ass-backwards that it’s… annoying.
There are some rays of hope. For instance Panegyric’s upcoming XTC and Yes reissues done by Porcupine Tree’s Steve Wilson—who has previously worked his magic on the King Crimson catalog—feature a CD and a Blu-ray disc combo with hi-res audio, 5.1 surround mix and music videos. There’s also a CD/DVD version that will sell for about $25; the Blu-ray/CD pairing goes for around $30.
DING-DONG, this is the perfect formula. I can’t see why the big labels don’t get that. The majors need to look at what Steve Wilson is doing—and no one else but Steve Wilson—and get him to advise them so they stop falling on their faces so hard each and every time they put out these sorts of releases! DO WHAT HE DOES. HE GETS IT. COPY HIM. When they let bean counters and marketers make these decisions they make them based on faulty assumptions of what record buyers and fans want. Steve Wilson? He knows what I want!
In the case of The Band box, the blame for the list price should probably be laid at the feet (or the ego) of the producer, Robbie Robertson. As one Amazon wag put it, there’s only so much ore in that mine. I expect Robertson understands what he means by that. Anyone paying full retail for this box would. The Band’s vault has simply been plundered too many times. The high list price of Live at the Academy Of Music 1971 turns off the most ardent fans and insures that no new ones will be coming aboard. That’s a shame.
Don’t get me wrong, what’s on the discs, well, it’s fine. It’s magic. It’s like having gold poured into your ears. It’s The Band at their very best.
But it’s overpriced like crazy and I gotta call it like I see it. If this was a Blu-ray disc with the Clearmountain 5.1 mix in HD DTS and a high res stereo mix, plus the soundboard mix as an extra, at a $35 or under price point, and I’d be raving like a lunatic telling all of you to run out and buy it.
Not to be a buzzkill(!) here are four songs (“Time to Kill,” “The Weight,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Up on Cripple Creek”) from The Band performing live at The Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh on November 1st, 1970.
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Below, Rodan perform “Everyday World of Bodies” live in Athens, GA, 1994:
There’s no denying that Rosemary’s Baby is one of the scariest and creepiest movies ever made. The first time I saw it, I was up “late” with my mother, who was waiting for my father to come home from a night shift, and it was on TV. I don’t know how old I was—young—but even if I didn’t exactly get what was going on, I certainly got the gist of it and that was enough for it to be, well, fucking frightening.
The whole friendly old people and Satan routine was a new one in screen horror and when you throw in those primordial maternal fears of a pregnant woman, holy shit is that film intense. Rosemary’s Baby is an evergreen movie masterpiece. It’s a film for the ages and will still be watched as long as the human race exists. It’s a perfectly cut cinematic diamond.
This fascinating time capsule piece “Mia and Roman” was made soon after the film had wrapped production—this isn’t a made for DVD extra produced decades later—and features tons of behind-the-scenes footage. Polanski discusses how supreme attention to the smallest details are of paramount importance to him as a director and describes how he likes to watch the actors block out their scenes without any suggestions from him before he decides where to place his camera.
We also see Polanski driving race cars and fencing. Farrow lists all of the animals she has in her menagerie and spouts some “love and peace” stuff that she’d learned hanging out at the ashram with the Maharishi and the Beatles. Farrow says that she and Polanski just “groove together” and he (very sincerely) praises he professionalism as an actress to the hilt.
Krzysztof Komeda’s haunting score for the film is used throughout. Komeda would die from a head injury not long after completing work on Rosemary’s Baby.
Don’t ask…
And now for my second TIL (“today I learned”) moment (the first was that whole Ronnie James Dio being the singing cartoon frog thing): Apparently there is a subculture (what else would you call it?) of Christian balloon animal performers. They will come to your kid’s parties, Bible camp, Sunday school, nursing home, whatever, and they will tell a Bible story, with a colorful “twist”—make that several!!—that will delight both young and old alike.
Or some bullshit. In any case, yes, there are professional Christian balloon twisters. It seems like an odd ambition to me, but you can buy books and DVDs about it and some of the more established Christian balloon performers are even giving away some of their classic material for newbies who want to spread “the good word” through the art of balloon twisting. If that’s what you’re into.
Tilda Swinton as the balloon Mary
Swamp Thing?
I said don’t ask…
Moe Howard died for somebody’s sins but not mine…
Life-sized!
Nice try?
Thank you kindly, Psychcomm!