I promised DM readers I was gonna dig up some cool international rock and roll and here’s something ultra-groovy: Rocka-hula-billy from German pop star Conny (Cornelia Froboess).

In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, Conny had a string of hit records and starred in the German equivalent of Beach Blanket Bingo style films. She’s still alive and working.

The stylized sets and eye-popping Technicolor in the following clips from Holiday in Honolulu and Blue Jean Boy  recall the live action cartoons of Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It).

Conny comes on like a female Eddie Cochran boppin’ in a teenage galaxy in some swingin’ universe all its own. Dig it!
 

 
Philip K. Dick’s third wife Anne R. Dick has written “a biography dressed as a memoir” called The Search for Philip K. Dick which has just been published by San Francisco press Tachyon. Anne and Philip were married for only five years but it was a very vital period in Dick’s evolution as a writer. As poet Jack Spicer said in regards to his own Muse (and this could certainly apply to Dick) “the Martian kept rearranging the furniture in his head.”  In Dick’s case, the Martian was moving at the speed of sound.

Any new book on Dick is an event as far as I’m concerned and this one looks to be a significant contribution to the understanding of one of America’s most underrated and least understood writers of major distinction.

The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize.

The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.

“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”

Read the NY Times piece on The Search For Philip K. Dick here. And to purchase it click here.

 
Get it while it’s hot: “Who’s Who” by Ian Leino. FOR SALE TODAY ONLY!

Via The Daily What.

 
Before there was Alice Cooper, Rocky Horror, Dr. John the Nightripper, The Cramps or Sabbath, there was Screaming Lord Sutch.

On June 16, 1999, David Sutch was found hanged at his home in London. For his friends and fans the world over it was a terrible and unexpected blow. Sutch’s obsession with horror movies and the macabre was well known, an integral part of his image, but it was strictly for laughs. If he had a dark side he kept it well hidden. True, he had been suffering from depression in recent years, especially since the death of his mother, but no one expected this surprise ending: dead by his own hand at the age of 59. Sutch was well loved by his many friends. He was a household name in Britain—practically a national treasure. He was to make a highly anticipated headlining appearance in Las Vegas at Halloween, only a four months away. Surely he had everything to live for. Lord Sutch in 1969 But when clinical depression wraps its dark cloak around a man, he’s completely alone. Tragically now, he’s gone but not forgotten. David Sutch will be remembered for many things. His colourful, larger than life personality was a fixture of the British political landscape as well as the entertainment world. Certainly his amazing recorded legacy ensures his place in rock’n'roll history in perpetuity: the wild rock’n'roll and horror sides he cut with Joe Meek, the demented mid-‘60s gems like “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “All Black and Hairy”, the proto-psychedelic “The Cheat”, the hard rockin’ Heavy Friends - for someone supposedly with no discernible musical talent he sure made some great records. And if you make great records you live forever.

Read a fascinating and funny interview with the Lord at Ugly Things.

Here’s a documentary from 1964 of which there is little information to be found on the Internet. It’s filled with wonderful footage of Sutch performing live and that’s enuff for me.
 

 
Parts 2 - 4 after the jump…

 
Here’s the first in a series of obscure (at least to me) international rock and roll videos that I’ll be sharing over the course of the next few months. I hope you enjoy them.

Hungarian band Bergendy formed in the late 1950’s as a jazz group and went through a bunch of personal and artistic changes through the 60’s and 70’s. When these two videos were made, the band, fronted by Demjen Ferenc (the man with the exploding hair-do), were playing a poppy mix of rock and latin-tinged funk with a some oompah and little bit of Queen thrown in. Bergendy and Ferenc are still recording and performing.

Nothing groundbreaking here, but the videos are an interesting window on Hungarian pop culture and the flesh-flecked shores of Lake Balaton.
 

 
Glasgow has a wealth of graphic artists who illustrate for Marvel or DC or their own imprints, like the Hope Street Studios or Kev Harper, the major talent behind Scheme Comix. The reason Glasgow has such an array of artistic talent, so the story goes, stems from the influx of American comics during the fifties, sixties and seventies, which were carried as ballast in the cargo ships that unloaded their goods along the docks of the River Clyde. The ballast was unpacked and then split into packages of comics sold across the city in kiosks and book stalls to eager kids.

For me, it Spiderman halfway-up a skyscraper fighting the Lizard, aka Dr Curt Connors (issue 76, fact fans) that turned me on to the power of graphic art. A few words can easily create a fictional world - ‘The cellar in the castle was dark and gauzed with cobwebs, the only light came from a flickering candelabra that limned the shape of a coffin, on the flagstone floor, its lid askew, and the white of old flesh glimmering inside.’  But to illustrate such a world takes time, dedication, patience and considerable talent. When I first bought these comics, I’d often skip the words just to pore over the fantastic illustrations, frame-by-frame, by the likes of Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr. The excitement and sheer bloody joy these artists inspired is akin to that achieved by Kev Harper with Scheme Comix.

Just a few years ago, when still a student at Glasgow’s College of Building and Printing, Kev Harper put out the first Scheme Comix:

My original idea was to do a ‘zine which was purely for the love of doing it so the first issue featured two strips, one by myself and the other by a classmate who I sort of pressured into contributing, I printed them up on a photo copier and then left them in pubs, record shops, comic shops basically anywhere they’d have the best chance of being picked up.

I’m lucky enough to know some very talented people so Scheme quickly became a show case for our comics & illustrations. My main strip at the time was Deadbeat74 which was a shameless attempt at trying to be the Glasgow Harvey Pekar and that’s how it carried on for I think it was 6 issues and then it just kind of got sidelined until this year when I decided to re work the idea and put out a new issue (numbered issue #1) as part of my degree in digital art.

Scheme Comic # 1 contained several different strips: Joe King, Future Detective which plants a Chandleresque P.I. in a sci-fi landscape, reviews have described Joe King as “excellent” and “an enjoyable pulpy read.”  Next up is, Space Kittens 1,2,3,4! follows the adventures of an all-female space crew, which has been parised for its “great artwork and witty lines.” While Dining with St Peter, is “a delightful” stand off between two beings with super powers and Break on Through: A Journey Beyond the 4th Dimension! has been described by Comic Bookbin as:

...a story with a fantastic twist that wouldn’t be out of place on The Outer limits or Armchair Theatre. Once again, Kev Harper gives us inspired visuals to feast on and T. Bye gives us a story to give us goose bumps.

The final tale, Tijuana Bible co. is the adventures of two drifters on the road. Scheme Comix takes the form of a traditional UK comic, with many different story lines; but it does in the style and with the ease of the very best US comic.

What are your influences?

I’ve always loved comics but recently the whole medium seems obsessed with being “dark” and ultra violent which in my opinion is a hangover from people trying to emulate Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns for the last 20 years. For me unless it’s in books such as Hard Boiled or Preacher it’s just boring so with Scheme Comix I wanted to try and make it a Sci-Fi anthology that was fun like the early issues of 2000 AD used to be. So I started looking at things like the original Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy comics and trying to come up with ideas that would be adventurous and entertaining so out of that came the Joe King: Future Detective strip.

The biggest problem for me is that even though I can just about string a simple story together I’m in no way a writer but like I’ve already said luckily I know some very talented people so with some gentle persuasion I got the excellent Cramps inspired Tijuana Bible Co. by the equally excellent Sharon Irvine and Dining with St.Peter by David Walker, who came highly recommended to me and did not disappoint. Along side them I managed to get some top editorial work from Louise C. Davis (then Gordon) and some help from the guys at Root Creative, that’s when it all really came together

What sort of response has Scheme Comix had?

So far, touch wood we’ve had nothing but excellent feedback from all our reviews particularly from a personal point of view for the Space Kittens 1234 strip which was inspired by a Glasgow based punk band I used to go see (I have to shout out a big thank you to Penny and Shona for getting behind it) but I’m pleased most by the response from everyone who has bought a copy of Scheme Comix.

Kev has proven he is a major talent, who can draw with the best of them, and with such talent at the helm, Scheme Comix has a great future ahead.
 

 
More from Kev Harper’s ‘Scheme Comix’ after the jump…
 

 
A Harry Smith double bill.

The first video is Harry smoking a joint while talking with Patrick Hulsey in New York City in 1999.

In the second video, East Village raconteur, animator, videographer and pop culture archivist M. Henry Jones of Snakemonkey TV recalls and recreates the initial thrill of discovering Harry Smith’s work.
 

 
Unemployed Man and his trusty sidekick, Plan B (who was forced out of the workplace for being too expensive to insure by his former employer) have a word with the “Hero in Chief” in a panel taken from Erich Origen and Gan Golan’s The Adventures of Unemployed Man graphic novel.

Obama better have a fuckin’ Plan B is all I can say…

 
‘Manchester’s famous mopheads.’

Okay, you assholes, keep your filthy hands off my rock and roll!

 
Inspired by vintage fashion and sci-fi magazines, cook books and advertisements, collagist and animator Jean Lecointre created a bunch of indescribably hilarious short films for French TV called ‘Turkish Delights’ and ‘Oasis More Fun’. If you dig pastry porn, the noirish world of palmiers and psychotic fruit, you’ll love this.
 

 
More weirdness after the jump…