John Cleese would spend hours finessing a script—choosing the right word, or considering where best to place a comma for greatest comedic effect. His writing partner, Graham Chapman preferred to sit quietly, listening, smoking his pipe, and from time-to-time suggest an idea that would often turn an average sketch into something extraordinary. One such example, was Chapman’s inspiration to insert a dead parrot into some old material that led to the writing of one of Monty Python‘s most famous routines.

The “Dead Parrot Sketch” developed out of something Cleese and Chapman had previously written for a one-off special called How to Irritate People. Produced by David Frost, How to Irritate People was a collection of sketches introduced by Cleese, and co-starring Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Michael Palin, Connie Booth, Gillian Lind and Dick Vosburgh. The programme was notable for being the first time Palin worked with Cleese and Chapman, a year before they created Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as Palin explained in Bob McCabe’s biography of Chapman, The Life of Graham:

‘...that was the first time I’d ever worked with John and Graham, as an actor, and that was very much like a miniPython, except that I wasn’t writing with Terry [Jones]. I was an actor with their material, but we changed it a little bit in rehearsal and we’d really enjoyed doing that, even though the end result had not been successful, largely due to problems with recording.’

The show appears never to have been shown on British television, but was aired in the US on January 21st, 1969. The programme contained elements of material later used on Python, in particular the “Car Salesman” sketch, which eventually became the famous (Dead) “Parrot Sketch.”

The “Car Salesman” was more than a piece of creative comedy, it was an idea suggested by Palin, and based on his own dealings with a less than scrupulous garage owner, as Cleese explains:

‘..that was based on a man called Mr Gibbins, which is Helen [Palin’s] unmarried name. And Mr Gibbins ran a garage somewhere in Michael’s area, and Michael started to tell me about taking his car in to Mr Gibbins if there was something wrong with it, and he would ring Mr Gibbins and say, “I’m having trouble with the clutch,” and Mr Gibbins would say, “Lovely car, lovely car.” And Michael said, “Well, yes, Mr Gibbins, it is a lovely car, but I’m having trouble with the clutch.” “Lovely car, lovely car, can’t beat it.” “No, but we’re having trouble with it.” “Well, look,” he says, “if you ever have any trouble with it, bring it in.” Michael would say, “Well, I am having trouble with it and I have brought it in,” and he’d say, “Good, lovely car, lovely car, if you have trouble bring it in,” and Michael would say, “No, no, no, the clutch is sticking,” and he would say, “Sign of a quality car, if you had a sticky clutch first two thousand miles, it’s the sign of good quality,” and he was one of those people you could never get to take a complaint seriously. And Michael and I chatted about this, and I then went off and wrote a sketch with Graham about a man returning a second-hand car…’

The sketch has Chapman, as a Jacques-Tati-like customer, dealing with Palin’s furtive car salesman.
 

 
More on the metamorphosis of the “Dead Parrot Sketch,” after the jump…
 

Poster art: Kilian Eng.
 
Of the dozen or so films I’ve seen so far at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin there are two that actually enter the realm of unrestrained awesomeness that I associate with the word “fantastic.” Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity are head trips that leave one in a state of elation and hope. Both are pure cinema, head trips that take you to places you knew might exist but never thought you’d actually encounter.

Even though Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary it weaves a story as compelling and dramatic as any narrative film. And it is imbued with the magic of its subject: the fiery and brilliant Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Jodorowky’s El Topo was a life-changing film for many of us who saw it when it was released in 1970 and it continues to inspire awe in generations of audiences since. I have spent over four decades turning people onto the movie, either through rare underground screenings, bad bootlegs or the lovely remastered digital versions released in the past ten years. Giving someone a Blu-ray of El Topo is the electronic equivalent of placing a hit of Owsley on their tongue. Jodorowsky is all about changing your mind…in big and profound ways.

It was Jodorowsky’s dream to make a movie version Frank Herbert’s Dune that would give you the acid experience without the drug. Until now, I could only imagine what a trip that might have been. But thanks to Pavich’s wonderfully insightful and skillfully executed film, the Jodorowskian mindfuck has been unleashed like a tsunami of particularly psychotropically potent melange.

Jodorowsky’s Dune chronicles the herculean efforts of Jodorowsky and a crew of extraordinary collaborators as they attempt to create a film version or riff on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel. It’s a story that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating. You feel Jodorowsky’s pain in not being able to bring to fruition “the greatest film never made” while at the same feeling the buzz of the passion fueling Jodorowsky’s vision. In addition, by deftly animating Jodorowsky’s storyboards, director Pavich gives a glimpse into what might have been. These scenes may be the closest we’ll ever get to acutally seeing Jodorowsky’s sci-fi epic.

For me, Dune will be the coming of a god. I wanted to make something sacred, free, with new perspective. Open the mind!”

The journey of Dune involves a collection of “spiritual warriors” who, despite not arriving at the end of their destination, ultimately managed to alter cinema forever. H.R. Giger, Moebius, Dan O’Bannon, Michel Seydoux, Chris Foss and countless others infiltrated pop culture through a trajectory mapped out in the alchemical forces generated by one of the great magicians, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

While it may never have been embedded in silver nitrate, in many ways Jodorowsky’s Dune has had a life that transcends celluloid. It moves through the ethers waving an invisible wand over the theater of our minds. Its influence is incalculable. Pavich’s film makes a case that virtually every science fiction made since the mid-seventies has borrowed or stolen ideas, design and visual concepts from Jodorowsky’s plans for Dune.

Jodorowsky’s Dune won the Audience Award at Fantastic Fest and Best Documentary. It will be released in early 2014.

I had an opportunity to meet director Frank Pavich and we talked about his film. What was intended to be a conventional interview became a lively rap session in which we both sang the praises of our hero. I normally don’t inject myself into an interview to the degree I do here, but I couldn’t help myself. Frank and I are kindred spirits and we were both on a Jodo roll.
 

 
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 manner.

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. 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 of Live at the Academy Of Music 1971 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. There’s no high-res stereo file, either, just one encoded at 448 kbps/48kHz. For audiophiles, this is a massive turn-off and although this seems to be news to the major labels, they’re the ones who are 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. Me, I’d rather have that superior 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 back 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 high-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, I’d be raving like a lunatic telling all of you to run out and buy it. Now.

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.
 

 
The following is an exclusive extract from Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, a superb new book by Daniel Rachel published this month by Picador. Inspired by Paul Zollo’s seminal Songwriters on Songwriting, Rachel has managed to bring together a truly impressive ensemble of British tunesmiths, including Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, Mick Jones, Robin Gibb (why the hell not!) and Johnny Marr, among others. The results are hugely enjoyable, and the mind veritably boggles imagining the kind of cajoling and legwork Rachel must have put in to coax this rich and eclectic ensemble out of their country piles—not least the notoriously taciturn, the notoriously notorious Jimmy Page…
 
Daniel Rachel: Do you have any introductory thoughts about songwriting?

Jimmy Page: I know what my contribution is and I know how that kicks off in the early stages. Coming from the guitarist’s point of view, I’ll start with the music first. That’s the essence of the key ideas and then I’ll work on those. Sometimes I’ve written the lyrics myself. For example, on the first Led Zeppelin album I had a number of things where I had the chorus, like ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ . . . well, that line gets repeated a number of times so there’s not a lot of lyrics in that (laughs). ‘Good Times Bad Times’ I wrote the chorus. I had the music for it and I was writing for this thing that was going to be put together for the band. The whole thing on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ is recognized by John Bonham’s bass drum, isn’t it? Initially I had a sketch for it and then Robert supplied lyrics to the verses. I was very keen on concentrating on the music, and whoever I was going to be working with, for them to be coming up with lyrics. I didn’t think that my lyrics were necessarily good enough. Maybe they were in certain cases, but I preferred that very close working relationship with whoever was singing, whether it be Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers or David Coverdale. The starting point would always be coming from the music, whether I had written that acoustically or electrically.

Daniel Rachel: It’s very noticeable in your music how song structures seem far more classical than pop in their construction.

Jimmy Page: Well, very much so, because I had very much the view that the music could set the scene. One of the things that you’ll see in the Led Zeppelin music is that every song is different to the others. Each one has its own character; musically as much as lyrically. For example, ‘Ten Years Gone’ or ‘The Rain Song’, which has got a whole orchestral piece before the vocal even comes in. So yes, it was crafted in such a way that the music was really of paramount importance to setting the scene and most probably inspired the singer, in this case Robert, to get set into the overall emotion, the ambience of the track of what was being presented, and then hopefully inspire him to the lyrics.

Often we just had working titles. A good example of this and how it would change and mutate was ‘The Song Remains The Same’ leading into ‘The Rain Song’. The original idea I had for that was an overture—as ‘Song Remains The Same’ is—leading into an orchestral part for ‘The Rain Song’. I had a mellotron and I’d worked out an idea—John Paul Jones did it much better than me—coming into the very first verse. If it’d worked that way there wouldn’t have been any vocal until the first verse, you would have had this whole overture of guitars and then into the orchestral thing that opened up into the first verse. But as it was, when we were rehearsing it then it actually became a song; the structure changed, there was another bit put in and then Robert started singing.That wasn’t a bad idea to have an overture, a whole musical segment that took you into ‘The Rain Song’, but it worked out really well as it was (laughs). Whatever it was you were constantly thinking all the time about it.

Daniel Rachel: Writing in movements was a very unusual step to take as a songwriter, considering Led Zeppelin was preceded by predominantly verse, chorus structures to suit the three-minute single format.

Jimmy Page: Although I’ve already said on the first album there were some choruses there, it got to the point where some of the things didn’t have what you’d call the hook. The reason was we weren’t actually writing music that was designed to go on the AM stations in the States at the time. You had FM, that were called the underground stations, and they would be playing whole sides of albums. Well, that’s a dream, isn’t it?—because people are going to get to hear—it’s not necessarily a concept album—the whole body of work that you’re doing on one side of an album and on the other. That was really a nice way to be able to craft the music into that. It was going to go like that anyway, but it was just really useful. The essence of the contents of these albums was going contraflow to everything else that was going on, and again this was intentional. Whereas on Zeppelin II you’ve got ‘Whole Lotta Love’, on Zeppelin III . . . with other bands it’d be something very close or reflective of if they’d got some sort of hit, and we just weren’t doing that. We were summing up the overall mood and where we were on that musical journey at each point in time.

Daniel Rachel: Did you write songs in sections and then join together collated ideas?

I worked very much in that way. I’d be working at home on various ideas and when we were working on something in a group situation I’d think, ‘Oh, I know what I’m going to put in this,’ if you hadn’t already put it together. Some things, I had them really mapped out, and other things—this is as the group goes on—would be on the spot. ‘Ramble On’ and‘What Is And What Should Never Be’: I had those structures complete.

Daniel Rachel: Can you explain how a riff comes to you?

Jimmy Page: A riff will come out of . . . this whole thing of do you practise at home and all that. Well, I play at home and before I knew where I was things would be coming out and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever. At that stage it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else. If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting then I’d work and build on it at home. ‘Rock And Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether. We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play—just as you do sometimes, because we were recording—this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’’ from Little Richard and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’—I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head – ‘Let’s do this.’ It was really quick to do and we could write like that.

Get yourself a copy of Isle of Noises right here
 

 
Below, Jimmy Page gets his Chopin on at the ARMS Concert:
 

 
On Friday the 13th, those Masters of Horror, Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid released the second season of their excellent, radio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale.

Tales… follows in a similar tradition to E.C. Comics Tales from the Crypt, or those wonderful portmanteau horror movies produced by Amicus Productions in 1960s and 1970s, Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum and Vault of Horror.

Glenn and Larry were inspired to create Tales… after listening to an old Boris Karloff radio drama during a long, rainy drive along the east of coast of America.

Larry is the brains behind Glass Eye Pix and has been hailed as a latter-day Roger Corman. His long list of films (several award winning) as producer, director and writer, includes Beneath, The Last Winter, Stake Land, and Bitter Feast. So prolific and successful a film-maker, it’s suffice to note that Fessenden was inducted into the Fangoria Hall of Fame in 2011, and was honored as Total Film‘s “Icon of Horror” the same year.

By comparison, Glenn is just starting out, but don’t be fooled, for Irishman McQuaid is the young and impressive talent behind the excellent I Sell the Dead and more recently contributed one of the best segments, “Tuesday the 17th” to the hugely enjoyable compendium horror film V/H/S. Together Fessenden and McQuaid have created a thrilling and superlative radio drama series with Tales From Beyond the Pale.

The first season was produced over the winter of 2011, and was made available to download in Fall 2012 . What makes Tales… so successful, is the high level of production values Fessenden and McQuaid bring to each drama. As curators they bring together the best writing with the best of acting talent. Writers include Kim Newman, Ashley Thorpe, Joe Maggio, Simon Barrett, Jeff Buhler, and of course, Fessenden and McQuaid themselves. While the tales are performed by Sean Young, Ron Perlman, Vincent D’Onofrio and James Le Gros.

The first season of Tales… proved such a hit, that Fessenden and McQuaid produced a second series, but this time each drama was recorded live, in front of a studio audience.

Glenn McQuaid: “Last October we had a chance to put on a few new Tales…, and we thought it would be a new challenge to put them on live, as opposed to doing them in the studio. We basically booked this place for a month, where once a week we would put on a double-bill of Tales….

“What made it different, I suppose, was the chance to do it live. We also invited new collaborators into the mix, like Kim Newman, Simon Barrett and Clay Mcleod Chapman. Basically, it was a really great chance to get back in the saddle and get some new content out there.”

Larry Fessenden: “We wanted to pull back the curtain on the process on what is ultimately destined to be audio entertainment. We didn’t hesitate to have the director on-stage, even rushing over to an actor and whispering in the ear, ‘Speed it up a bit,’ or….”

Glenn McQuaid: “...Falling apart!”

[Laughter]

Larry Fessenden: “Glenn was helping out the Foley guy [sound FX], and doing footstep sounds. It was a fun thing to watch, because you really got a fun sense of the process.

“Another thing I always say, as an actor you really need to be relating to the microphone, not to your fellow actors, which is the traditional way of performing. In this case, each individual performer is in some way intimate with the sound environment and their microphone. All of this is fun to observe when watching the process unfold, and that was sort of the premiss of the evening.”

Glenn McQuaid: “I think having that much activity happening with various actors, technicians and Foley artists. Once we’re rolling time flew by and the job was a a joy. I was always a nervous wreck prior to each evening, you know, that didn’t get easier. It was a bit of a roller-coaster getting back into theater, which I hadn’t done since I was in my teens. It was an awful lot of fun, and it was good getting into that environment, which gave it an edge.”
 

Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid recording ‘Tales…’
 
More thrills from Larry and Glenn, after the jump…