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From the world’s queerest record label: ‘Homer The Happy Little Homo’
10.13.2010
09:17 pm
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A strange little ditty from an even stranger record company. Homer The Happy Little Homo was released on Camp Records sometime in the early 1960’s. Here’s a brief history of this obscure novelty label:

Almost nothing is known about the mysterious 60’s record label Camp Records. They released an album and 10 45 rpm records of gay parody songs, most done with effeminate voices. I believe they were issued in the early 60’s, as they all appeared in an ad in the gay magazine Vagabond, dated 1965. The address on the album record jacket was PO Box 3213, Hollywood, California, and it credited all selections to Different Music Co, Hollywood.
   The artists singing most of the songs were uncredited, or with names obviously made up, like Byrd E. Bath and B. Bubba, but one name stands out, Rodney Dangerfield. That name credited on one of the songs, and possibly another. This would have been very early in Dangerfield’s career, as his website bio says he decided to devote his career to comedy at age 40, which would have been in 1961. But I don’t think it was the comedian we know; just a prop name used for the release. Dangerfield disclaims any knowledge of it.
   A second album released on the label was called “Mad About the Boy.” It was filled with mostly well-known Broadway and cabaret songs that were originally sung by women. This album kept the pronouns intact, making them very gay. They were done in lounge style, without a campy approach…in other words, done “straight.” The liner notes state: ‘The primary reason for doing this album was to prove that good songs could and should be sung by everyone. Gender should not be the determining factor as to who should sing what.’ The notes later say that the male soloist and other artists on the album are well-known ‘Hollywood, TV, and screen personalities’ but ‘we are not at liberty to reveal true names.’ I have no idea if all this is true, or simply hype. The album probably came out in 1964 or 1965, as it pictures on the back all the previous releases of the label. And it is also advertised in the 1965 issue of Vagabond (see more, below), so I believe it was the last record they released.
JD Doyle

The video features some record sleeves from Camp.
 

 
Thanks to Queer Music Heritage.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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10.13.2010
09:17 pm
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Birthday boy Lenny Bruce on Playboy’s Penthouse, 1959
10.13.2010
05:17 pm
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Speculating on how an 85-year-old Lenny Bruce would be celebrating his birthday today is as fun as it is pointless.

But it’s pretty easy to guess that edgy comedy’s patron saint would not have been able to stretch out casually on TV for 25 minutes in conversation with a legendary publisher and lifestyle creator like the Hef.

That’s what happened in 1959 on the first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, Hugh Hefner’s first foray into TV, which broadcast from WBKB in his Chicago hometown. This was the first mass-market exposure of the erstwhile club-bound Bruce, and its high-end hepness set the tone for the show’s two-season run, which featured a ton of figures in the jazz culture scene.

Of course, the dynamic between the eloquent snapping-and-riffing Long Islander Bruce and the perennially modest Midwestern Hefner is classic as the comedian covers topics like “sick” comedy, nose-blowing, Steve Allen, network censorship, tattoos & Jews, decency wackos, Lou Costello, integration, stereotypes, medicine and more.
 

 
Part II | Part III | Part IV

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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10.13.2010
05:17 pm
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The first two Pere Ubu single A sides (1975-76)
10.13.2010
04:28 pm
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As requested by our own Tara M., here’s a quick Pere Ubu post. You really can’t go wrong with anything they released in their first incarnation (‘75-‘79 or so) but these first 2 7” A sides are total rock classics by any sane person’s standards (of rock). I personally spent many teen hours thrashing about in suburban bedrooms with my pals to these deathlessly perfect monster jams. True American masterpieces.

 
More Ubu after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Brad Laner
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10.13.2010
04:28 pm
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The Beat Generation and the Tea Party
10.13.2010
02:22 am
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“I think I’m going to puke.”
 
Blowhard asshole Lee Siegel continues to thrash around in the low end of the journalistic cesspool with this utterly idiotic essay in the New York Times comparing the Beat Generation to the Tea Party movement.

The counterculture of the late 1950s and early 1960s appears to be everywhere these days. A major exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s photography just closed at the National Gallery in Washington. A superb book, by the historian Sean Wilentz, about Ginsberg’s dear friend and sometime influence Bob Dylan recently made the best-seller list. “Howl,”  a film about Ginsberg and the Beats, opened last month. And everywhere around us, the streets and airwaves hum with attacks on government authority, celebrations of radical individualism, inflammatory rhetoric, political theatrics.
In other words, the spirit of Beat dissent is alive (though some might say not well) in the character of Tea Party protest. Like the Beats, the Tea Partiers are driven by that maddeningly contradictory principle, subject to countless interpretations, at the heart of all American protest movements: individual freedom. The shared DNA of American dissent might be one answer to the question of why the Tea Partiers, so extreme and even anachronistic in their opposition to any type of government, exert such an astounding appeal.

Comparing the sexy, druggy, life embracing, progressive culture of the beats to the fascistic, xenophobic, racist, fearful and life-negating Tea Party is absolutely absurd. It’s like comparing fucking to a case of serious blue balls.

The following comment by Siegel not only posits an idiotic argument, it’s morally disgusting:

the Tea Partiers’ unnerving habit of bringing guns to town-hall meetings would have repelled the Beats. But William S. Burroughs fetishized guns, accidentally killing his wife while trying to shoot a glass off her head. Violence, implicit or explicit, comes with the “beaten” state of mind. So does theatricality, since playing roles — and manipulating symbols — is often the first resort of people who do not feel acknowledged for being who they really are.

What the fuck does Burroughs’ wife’s death have to with “manipulating symbols” or some kind of identity crisis?

Read the entire steaming pile of bullshit here.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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10.13.2010
02:22 am
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Happy Birthday Aleister Crowley!
10.12.2010
10:20 am
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The eccentric English mage, poet, painter and gourmet rice chef would be 135-years-old today if, um, he could like live forever or something…

I’m often asked “Where is a good place to start reading Crowley?” and this is a difficult question because you have to read, pretty much, all of it to make sense of any of it. Going down the Crowley rabbit hole is comparable, I think, to being a scholar of James Joyce (or Ezra Pound) because achieving a proper understanding of the subject takes years, decades even (and then what are you going to DO with all that knowledge, anyway?). But one source that I will point curious folk to is the late Tim Maroney’s excellent “Introduction to Crowley (in Five Voices)” which I published in my Book of Lies anthology in 2004.

Below, Kenneth Anger’s short film documenting several of Crowley’s paintings, “The Man We Want to Hang.”
 

 
Update: Today is also Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Is it a mere coincidence that the Darwin-denying, Left Behind actor shares a birthday with the Great Beast???

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.12.2010
10:20 am
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‘An Hour With Pink Floyd’: Live TV Performance, 1970
10.10.2010
02:20 am
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1970 Pink Floyd performance for San Francisco public TV Station KQED.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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10.10.2010
02:20 am
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D.M.C.‘s heartfelt tribute to John Lennon
10.09.2010
01:37 pm
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From the heart.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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10.09.2010
01:37 pm
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The true story behind classic gangster movie ‘Get Carter’
10.03.2010
07:20 pm
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“You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full time job. Now behave yourself.”

It’s Michael Caine as Jack Carter, intimidating a small-town gangster, Cliff Brumby, in the 1971 film, Get Carter. Within seconds Carter has shown Brumby, played by future TV soap star Bryan Mosley, who’s boss - a quick karate chop and Brumby’s on his knees. That’s what Carter does. He’s a hardened criminal, a killer, and now he’s back home to find out who murdered his brother.

Taken from the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, Get Carter changed modern crime fiction. Firstly, it created a new genre British Noir; secondly, it kicked in the French windows at St. Mary Mead, and replaced the anaemic Miss Marple with the harsh reality of professional criminals, and the brutality of their lives, from which every succeeding British crime writer has taken their cue.

Lewis was born in Manchester in 1940, and raised on Humberside. He showed skill as an artist and as a writer, and attended Hull Art School. In 1965, his first novel All The Way Home, and All Through The Night was published. Lewis then worked as animator on The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, before writing Jack’s Return Home. He wrote a further seven books, including two more Jack Carter novels, and the classics Plender, Billy Rags and GBH. He died too soon, too young, almost forgotten in 1982. What a fickle fucking world we live in.

Jack’s Return Home was in part inspired by a real-life killing that took place during the height of the swinging sixties.

In August 1967, criminal Angus Sibbett bullet-riddled body was found in his Mark Ten Jaguar under Pesspool Bridge, County Durham. Sibbett was a bag man involved in extortion and collecting slot machine money.

Sibbett was employed by notorious, North-East gangster Vincent Landa, a man considered “more important than the Prime Minister”. Sibbett worked with London criminal Dennis Stafford and Landa’s brother, Michael Luvaglio.  Luvaglio had no previous convictions but Stafford, who went under an alias, had served a seven year sentence for possession of a firearm and had notoriously escaped from Dartmoor and Wandsworth prisons eventually fleeing to Newcastle, where he set up a company which was a front for fraudulent activities.

When Sibbett was discovered creaming off Landa’s takings - pocketing £1,000 a week - he was killed.

It seemed an open-and-shut case.  The police came after the gang. Landa fled the country, while Stafford and Luvaglio were arrested for Sibbett’s murder. But both men claimed their innocence, however, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to gaol.

Stafford believed he was charged because of his previous activities whilst on the run in Newcastle, and has since stated, “If it had not been for me, Michael would never have been charged.”

While Luvaglio has said: “When I was arrested, the police told me that I only had to say that Stafford had left me for a while that night and I would go free.”

In hindsight, the whole case seemed like a fit-up as the evidence against both men was flimsy to non-existent. Importantly eye-witness statements and forensic evidence, which could have cleared both men, was ignored.

On that fateful night, Sibbett was to meet Stafford and Luvaglio in The Birdcage nightclub in Newcastle. Eyewitnesses vouched for both men, apart from a period of 45-minutes around midnight - the time Sibbett was murdered.  This 45-minute window proved crucial, as the police claimed Stafford and Luvaglio had left the nightclub, driven 16 miles, pushed Sibbett’s vehicle off the road, then pumped 3 bullets into him, before returning to the club.

In 1967, even in a souped-up cop car, traveling at full-speed, lights flashing, it wasn’t possible to do what was claimed. But it didn’t matter. Luvaglio and Stafford were set for punishment. It was a warning to any other London criminals (most notably London’s notorious Kray twins) against moving their operations north.

Stafford served 12 years but always insisted his innocence, claiming a Scottish shooter committed the crime. This was confirmed in a TV documentary by John Tumblety, who said on camera that he in fact had driven the real murderer back from Pesspool Bridge to the Birdcage club and that man was neither Luvaglio nor Stafford.

In May 2002 Sibbett’s slaying (now renamed The Get Carter Murder) made news when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Home Secretary had kept Dennis Stafford in jail longer than was necessary and ordered £28,000 compensation to be paid.

To this day, both men continue to campaign to clear their names of the crime they didn’t commit

In Get Carter the film’s slot machine king was played by playwright, John Osborne, whose character Cyril Kinnear, lives in Dryerdale Hall, Durham, the very building Landa used as his gangland HQ.

In 2002 Landa said :

“The two (Stafford & Luvaglio) men were wrongly convicted and the evidence was incorrect. If they were tried today they would never have been found guilty. It was a political trial. The Home Office had suffered at the hands of gangs like the Krays and the Richardsons and they stepped in to smash what they thought was an organised crime ring.”

These aren’t the only characters Lewis adapted for his novel, and later the film. Property developer Cliff Brumby was a hybrid of Newcastle City councillor, T. Dan Smith and architect John Poulson. Both men were notorious in the sixties, and were later found guilty of bribery, corruption and giving backhanders to MPs and councillors in order to have shoddy building plans passed.

The pair destroyed most of Newcastle and built cheap concrete housing and offices. At the trial, the judge said that the scandal “now couples corruption with the north east.” So far reaching were their underhand activities that Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling resigned over the scandal.

Smith was accused of infiltrating councils across the North of England and corruptly forcing them to give business to architect John Poulson. Smith used £500,000 of Poulson’s money as bribes. Smith ruled with an iron hand and was described as a “demagogue”. He ended his life championing pensioners’ rights from the 14th floor council flat in a block he had built.

Incredibly Get Carter was not a box office hit on its first release. This was in large part down to the stupidity of the critics who described the movie as “soulless and nastily erotic…virtuoso viciousness”, a “sado-masochistic fantasy”, that “one would rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it.” Of course, since then Get Carter has been rightly reappraised by a younger generation who have hailed Michael Caine’s chilling and utterly compelling performance as Carter, which has led to the movie being described as a classic of modern cinema and arguably the greatest British crime film ever made.   
   

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.03.2010
07:20 pm
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David Bowie: ‘It’s not the side effects of the cocaine’ (or was it?)
10.01.2010
06:28 pm
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Spurned on from a rumor Publishers Weekly overheard at the Frankfurt Book Fair, David Bowie’s website has confirmed that he’ll be publishing a coffee table book cum object d’art called Bowie: Object.

Bowie: Object is a collection of pieces from the Bowie archive, wherein, for the first time, fans and all those interested in popular culture will have the opportunity to understand more about the Bowie creative process and his impact on modern popular music.

Bowie: Object features 100 fascinating items that give an insight into the life of one of the most unique music and fashion icons in history. The book’s pictorial content is annotated with insightful, witty and personal text written by Bowie himself.

Designed by Barnbrook, Bowie: Object is simply and boldly designed and each of the objects is photographed in a clean, contemporary style.

Below is one of the objects that they strongly hint will be in the book, a Kirlian Photographic Device that Bowie was given by Dr. Thelma Moss at the Dept. of Parapsychology, UCLA, in 1975. There was a picture of it contained in the Station to Station tour guide memento. If the aim of this book is to show Bowie’s impact, not only on music, but culture in general, then this is a very good example.
 
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Why you ask? To give you a personal (and very small) example of the multitude of ways David Bowie has influenced little old me, when I was 10 years old and Bowie was the guest on Dinah Shore’s afternoon talk/variety show, he was able to invite Dr. Moss on as a guest as well. Moss demonstrated the ability of the Kirlian device—a high voltage electric field “camera”—to basically take snapshots of plant and human “auras.” Because Bowie was fascinated by this wild new science of Kirlian photography, then, hey, so was I and—this is true—I built a home-made version of the Kirlian Photographic device for a grade-school science fair!
 
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It was made with a battery, a wood base, some wires, a metal plate and used 2” by 2” film, which was placed under the plate, and sent a jolt via the battery to expose the film. Now, granted, at that age, I wasn’t testing the “before and after” side-effects of snorting cocaine on my aura (see above) like Bowie was—-I used leaves and my thumbprint—but still, you can see clearly in this stupid example of how I, a little kid at the time, saw David Bowie as this like, larger than life cultural avatar of the newest and coolest things around. I must say, I’m really looking forward to this book!

And if you haven’t heard, there is a brand new, just released massive 5 CD/3LP/DVD collector’s box (two different ones, actually) of Bowie’s monumental 1976 album, Station To Station, including the much-bootlegged “Nassau Coliseum ‘76” show from that tour and a new 5:1 surround remix of the album.
 
Below, A shit hot version of Station to Station’s “Stay” performed on Dinah! in 1976.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.01.2010
06:28 pm
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D.A. Pennebaker shoots Timothy Leary’s wedding, 1964
09.30.2010
07:27 pm
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A few days ago, I posted here about disco singer Monti Rock III, the first queen I ever saw on TV when I was a kid, and I mentioned that he had not really crossed my mind in a very long time… then coincidentally, yesterday, Robert Coddington, Nelson Sullivan’s archivist (who I wrote about here), gave me a copy of a short film by D.A. Pennebaker titled You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You. Who should turn up in this obscurity? Well, Monti Rock III, that’s who, then working as a celebrity hair stylist (he did the bridal party’s hair). A young Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass) and jazz great Charles Mingus also turn up in the film.

And Mrs. TImothy Leary? Well, after divorcing the High Priest of LSD—their marriage lasted about a year—the high fashion model then known as Nena von Schlebrügge married Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. Their daughter, actress Uma Thurman, was born in 1970.

Here’s how Pennebaker describes the Leary nuptials:

This movie is something of a mystery. Timothy Leary was getting married to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it.  Blackwood took me downtown to meet Monte Rock III who was singing at Trudy Heller’s but who was also a very pricey and off-the-wall hairdresser and was in fact going to be doing the bride’s hair.  Nena’s brother, Bjorn, known as the “Baron” was a friend of the Hitchcock’s, as was I, and the idea of going along and filming the wedding seemed not unwarranted. I’ve always wanted to film someone getting married.

So we drove up in Monte Rock’s ancient Buick, Diane Arbus, an editor from Vogue whose name I can no longer remember, and of course Monte Rock, his fingers covered in rings. Close behind, Proferes and Desmond filmed us as we drove, up the Taconic and through the gates of the Hitchcock mansion.

There were Hitchcocks and friends and relations of Hitchcocks, the Baron and his court, a score of models, and Charles Mingus playing a lonely piano. Even Susan Leary fresh out of jail.  It was indeed an amazing wedding, and for all I know, an amazing marriage, although someone later told me it was over before I’d even finished editing the film.

After Nena divorced Leary she married a Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman and her daughter Uma is Uma the actress.  Dick Alpert became his own guru, Baba Ram Dass and achieved a sainthood of his own.  Monte Rock III left Trudy Heller’s and went out to Hollywood and became famous for his line in the John Travolta movie, Saturday Night Fever, when as the disco DJ he exclaims, “I love that polyester look.” Charles Mingus got thrown out of his loft and sadly perished, and in time the Hitchcock house itself burned down, or so I’ve been told.  The mystery is that we never filmed anyone actually getting married.

D A Pennebaker, 1964, 12 min., b&w

 

 
Part II after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.30.2010
07:27 pm
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