A sculpture of actor Adrian Edmondson in character as Vyvyan Basterd from the UK cult televsion series, ‘The Young Ones.’
At Toy-Con in London in 2020, one of the exhibitors was UK sculptor, artist, and toymaker Mike Strict, who we can all thank for making our mid-80s dreams come true by sculpting up figures based on the unforgettable characters from the UK sitcom The Young Ones. Only twelve episodes exist of The Young Ones, but the impact the show made is still felt by its dedicated fan base to this day. Strict chose to create three sculpts/figures of fictional Scumbag University undergrad students Vyvyan Basterd; an angry heavy metal fan and medical student, played by Adrian (Ade) Edmondson; Rick, a sociology student and genuinely unlikable make-believe anarchist, played by the late Rik Mayall; and Neil Wheedon Watkins Pye, the lentil-loving, suicidal hippie played by Nigel Planer.
Usually, Strict is a strictly one-off kind of toy/figure/sculptor, but this time he did create more than one of his Young Ones figures, sold at Toy-Con. It’s not clear how many Strict made, but what I can tell you is that it appears they were all, rather unsurprisingly, sold. However, that does not mean you are out of luck if this is exactly what your collectible collection is missing, as Strict does accept commissions. At Toy-Con, his Rik, Vyvyan, and Neil figures sold for $75 USD—something to keep in mind if you’re going to try to acquire one. Much of Strict’s work is dark and creepy (YAY!) and includes nods to horror films. So if you’ve ever wanted a play-set based on the 1973 film The Wicker Man starring Christopher Lee, then Strict is your man. Or, perhaps you’ve been pining away for a sculpted diorama of Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, featuring their iconic image of a man in a hat caught in the crosshair of a weapons scope. Because, yeah, Strict made one of those in 2019.
Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”
Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.
Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.
Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.
Uncanny Island, the very first solo art exhibition by musician and author Luke Haines is on at the Eston Arts Centre through the end of the month. Should you find yourself in North Yorkshire, you should drop by and check it out.
The exhibit features Haines’ psychedelic visions of British wrestlers from the 1970s and early 80s (echoing his 2011 concept album 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s) and a Christmas tree festooned with ornaments bearing the likeness of everyone who was ever in the Fall. (The band had 66 members during Mark E. Smith’s five decade run, in case you were wondering.)
Luke Haines: Yep. First solo exhibition. I’m pleased it’s in the north—away from curators and the dull art people.
Tell me about the Fall Xmas tree?
I’d painted a MES bauble for a friend’s Xmas present. The obvious next stage was to paint every member of the Fall, but I had no reason to embark on such a futile endeavour. Then the artist Neil McNally asked me if I wanted to have an exhibition. It was then that I realized it was time for the Fall Xmas tree.
I know that you’ve described your work as outsider art in the past, but with the Lou Reeds, the Hawkwind paintings, the Maoist Monkees—and of course the psychedelic wrestlers which refer to your own album—it seems more like you’re doing something more akin to “rock snob art”? How do you see it?
My stuff is more like sitcom art. I tend to do the same thing: put popular or unpopular culture figures in absurd situations. Like putting Hawkwind in a balloon carrying esoteric knowledge (The North Sea Scrolls) back to their squat in Ladbroke Grove. If Hawkwind actually did this the world would be improved immeasurably. In the show there are a couple of paintings depicting wrestlers having diabolical fever dreams about It’s A Royal Knockout. I’d like to do a whole art show about It’s A Royal Knockout. Maybe a straightforward reenactment.
How often are you asked to comment on the art of Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr or Paul Stanley?
I think that worrying about pop stars inflicting their art on an ungrateful world will be the least of our problem post covid. There will a tsunami of ‘lockdown art washing up. It will all be terrible.
Mark E Smith Xmas tree bauble
The Fall Xmas Tree in situ.
Fall Xmas Tree (detail)
Liver Sausage (Mark “Rollerball” Rocco)
Brian Glover
Dickie Davies
Eston Arts Centre, 176 -178 High Street, Eston, Middlesbrough, TS6 9JA.
‘Long live the new flesh!’ A digital design based on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film ‘Videodrome.’
Outside of the fact that he is a talented artist with a deep love of classic 60s, 70s, and 80s horror, unfortunately, I do not know, nor was I able to dig much up on self-professed “comic enthusiast, music freak, horror lover, and videogame collector” Nache Ramos. But here’s what I do know. Ramos is based in Alcoli (or Alcoy), Spain where he has been a graphic designer and illustrator for over a decade. His art has been used to decorate snowboards made by Wi-Me Snowboards, and for Australian snowboard company Catalyst. In 2018, he won a Guns ‘N’ Roses contest which asked fans of the band (via Twitter), to create artwork based on their 1987 album Appetite for Destruction. Other than well-deserved accolades for his submission, I’m not sure what Ramos got as a prize, but I suppose gaining exposure to G’N'R’s 6+million Twitter followers is very much a good thing. This was also the same year Ramos moved from using traditional artistic mediums to creating his work digitally. This brings me to Nache’s nostalgic interpretations which infuse the look of old-school comic books with Ramos’ love of science fiction and horror films he grew up with.
Like any horror fan worth their VHS collection, Ramos digs the films of director John Carpenter and has created several digitally designed homages to Carpenter’s films in vintage comic book style. Others include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (pictured at the top of this post), Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Richard Donner’s bone-chilling 1976 film, The Omen. If this all sounds good to you (and it should), Ramos also accepts commissions via his Instagram. You can also pick up very reasonably-priced prints of Ramos’ super-cool fictional movie posters on his Red Bubble page. I myself picked up Nache’s take on Videodrome. Scroll on to see more of Ramos’ fantastic faux-vintage comics.
“Discovering the Firesign Theatre is worse than trying to get into Frank Zappa for the first time.”
Anyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows that this is obviously not a place to read, you know, rock journalism. We don’t tend to review things, either. You’ll find scant “criticism” here. I see Dangerous Minds more as a repository of enthusiasm. We write about stuff we enjoy, in the hopes that our fervor will be contagious. “Here is this great thing, you should check it out” is more or less the editorial policy. We almost never write about things we hate. “Hey, smell this, it smells like shit.” There’s no point in that. We’re digital prospectors, panning for gold, not crap.
I’m certain that we’ve introduced our readers to new things that they, in turn, have become evangelists for over the decade plus since DM launched, because you tell us so in the comments. In many ways a DM blog post is like a conversation you might have in a record store. I see it that way. I’ve even had several small record label owners contact me and tell me that they’d put out this or that reissue of an obscure album that we had covered. And that’s fun for us to hear.
So if you are someone who has ever benefited from being introduced to something here that you developed an unhealthy obsession for, pay attention to this, won’t you? This is one of the best things, ever.
I discovered the Firesign Theatre when I was a ten-year-old in 1976, via a long forgotten nationally syndicated radio program called The Comedy Hour which was 60 minutes of short bits from comedy records that were interspersed with bursts of radio static, as if the station was being changed between each selection. It came on Sunday nights at 11pm, right after The King Biscuit Flower Hour, at least on the radio station that I heard it on, Pittsburgh’s WDRE 105.5 FM. The first time I listened to that show, they played an excerpt from the first Firesign Theatre record, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, a section known as “Beat the Reaper.” This sketch involved a mock game show where contestants are injected with a fatal disease and have to guess what it is from the symptoms to win the life-saving antidote. If the contestant’s self-diagnosis is incorrect—sorry—they are sent home to die.
I had never heard anything like this. It made my young brain cells stand up to attention the same way hearing “Space Oddity” had the first time I’d heard that.
At the end of the show a zany announcer would tell you who you’d been listening to in a rapidly delivered cascade of names: “On tonight’s Comedy Hour, you heard Lenny Bruce, Albert Brooks, Nichols & May, Franklyn Ajaye, Beyond the Fringe, Moms Mabley, Robert Klein, George Carlin, the Conception Corporation, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Phyllis Diller…” etc., etc., and then he listed Firesign Theatre. I recognized this name since there were several Firesign Theatre albums selling for $1 each in the comedy cut out section of the local National Record Mart. Within a matter of days, I convinced my mother to buy me one titled, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.
I instantly became obsessed with that album. I would listen to it over and over again, often with headphones, trying to wrap my 10-year-old mind around it. I listened to Dwarf—and the other Firesign Theatre records—as much as I listened to any musical album. In fact, 45 years later, due to the innate musicality of the work, I still have large chunks of it committed to memory. In this, I am not alone, as there are probably several thousand other people (99% of them upper age bracket baby boomers) who can also recite Firesign Theatre albums as if they were Shakespeare. Dwarf begins with a sermon about food from a demented televangelist broadcasting from a biplane, which crashes. The scene pulls back and it’s a guy watching TV. He’s hungry and looking around for something to eat, but comes up short. He starts talking back to the manic TV evangelist who then starts talking back to him and eventually food comes through the TV screen. The channel changes abruptly. After that there is a This is Your Life-type program with elderly actor George Leroy Tirebiter, and then it morphs into a teen movie play-within-a-play starring a younger Tirebiter called “High School Madness.” Things were going just fine for the students of Morse Science High until their school vanishes, stolen by their rivals, those bullies at Communist Martyrs High School. Porgy Tirebiter and his loveable sidekick Mudhead investigate… you get the idea (hopefully).
Here is a very good description of Firesign Theatre, taken from the pages of Stereo Review magazine, way back in 1993. (Firesign has always been popular with audiophiles.)
A self-contained four-man comedy troupe of writers/actors whose medium was the audio record, they created brilliant, multi-layered surrealist satire out of science-fiction, TV, old movies, avant-garde drama and literature, outrageous punning, the political turmoil of the Sixties, the great shows of the Golden Age of Radio, the detritus of high and low culture (James Joyce meets the found poetry of used-car pitch men) and their own intuitive understanding of the technological possibilities of multi-track recording. Their thirteen albums for CBS, recorded in various group permutations between 1967 and 1975, reveal them to have been at once the Beatles of comedy, the counter-cultural Lewis Carroll, and the slightly cracked step-children of Kafka, Bob and Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Stan Freberg, Samuel Beckett and the Goon Show.
And as you’ll hear when you play the album you now hold in your hands, they were also far ahead of their time, not just of it. In fact, while most self-consciously “hip” comedy from the late Sixties or early Seventies is as dated now as love beads and black-light posters (listened to Cheech and Chong lately?) The Firesign Theatre, satire - which dealt from the beginning with such unexpected subjects as the implication of cable network narrow-casting (“UTV! For You, the Viewer!”) or New Age pseudo-philosophy (one of their albums was called Everything You Know Is Wrong) - today seems eerily prophetic. In particular, the futuristic vision of Los Angeles - sprawling, fragmented, fear-ridden, multi-cultural, both low rent and high tech - that threads throughout their “oeuvre” (in particular their 1970 masterpiece, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers) is not only as poetically detailed as anything in Raymond Chandler, but chillingly on the money in 1993.
Firesign Theatre started to assemble during 1966 at KPFK, a freeform stereo FM radio station in Los Angeles, which was then a very new thing, during Peter Bergman’s “Radio Free Oz” show. Phil Austin and David Ossman worked at the station and would appear on RFO, while Philip Proctor, an actor friend the “Wizard of Oz” (Bergman) knew from Yale, was invited to join a bit later. The name refers to the fact that all four were born under fire signs in the zodiac, and to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. The late night Radio Free Oz show was so popular—and they were regularly gigging in Hollywood’s folk and rock clubs—that they were quickly offered a record contract.
There are four undisputed “classics” in the vast Firesign canon, all recorded between 1967 and 1971, titled (in order) Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (which includes their most famous creation, “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”), Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, and I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. Their first album was recorded in the same CBS radio studio where The Jack Benny Show was taped using vintage microphones and sound effects. By the time of their second record they were using 16-track tape machines in the studio, constructing tightly assembled radio plays with extremely creative sound effects and spatial cues that suggested time travel, watching something at a domed planetarium, being on a people mover, getting into a car where the inside is bigger than the outside and so on. These four records are the ultimate presentation of their unusual artform—literature as much as performed comedy that’s been carefully sculpted in a recording studio—but there are at least 20 other albums, dozens upon dozens of hours of live performances recorded onstage and during their radio shows, and TV and film work. Dear Friends, a 1972 released two record compilation of the best of their syndicated radio show of the same name is also considered to be a classic Firesign album, but being culled from live radio, it’s less elaborately constructed, and more spontaneous and improvisational.
These five albums represent the cream of the crop and they are all masterworks of surrealist “theater of the mind” sci-fi counterculture comedy. There was nothing else like them, and the sole thing I can think of to compare them to would be the Monty Python albums. Firesign Theatre were often called “the American Monty Python,” but this comparison would stop at the Python albums, as Firesign were a strictly audio proposition for the most part, and certainly during their late 60s/early 70s golden years. [They are actually much more akin to lysergic Goon Show, of which all four of the Firesign Theatre were fanatical fans. In fact, Peter Bergman wrote some TV comedy sketches in London with Spike Milligan in the early 1960s.]
A key element to appreciate in Firesign Theatre is how multi-leveled their humor is. For instance, in their famous “Nick Danger” piece, they constantly drop in references to Beatles lyrics such as Danger describing his old flame, Betty Jo Bialosky, who used several aliases—Melanie Haber, Audrey Farber, and Susan Underhill—but “everyone knew her as Nancy” or creepy butler Catherwood walking out of earshot singing “I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink.” If you had never even heard of the White Album, these jokes were no less funny, but if you were really in on it, you knew how densely-layered all of this was. “Joycean” is an adjective often employed to describe Firesign, an observation no doubt inspired by the way Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses was put into the mouth of manic used car salesman Ralph Spoilsport in his weird rap at the very end of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. The relationship of Firesign Theatre to James Joyce’s work is not glib, or overstated. I like to think of the classic FT albums in the same way I regard Joyce’s published books. When airchecks of their (some thought lost) radio shows were collected in the essential Duke of Madness Motors book, I saw this as being analogous to discovering a full trunk of the avant-garde modernist Irish bard’s notebooks. A hundred years from now there will still be graduate students studying the multiple levels of meaning in Joyce and in Firesign Theatre albums.
Did I mention that Firesign Theatre is comedy for smart people? I can’t imagine a dummy even being able to make heads or tails out of it, let alone thinking it was funny. Comedy is almost always made by intelligent people, but theirs was the most intellectual comedy ever made, by some measure. Fifty years later, with all of the comedy that’s washed under the bridge since then, not a single thing—seriously nothing—compares to what Firesign Theatre created. It’s just that distinctive. Their artform cannot be duplicated. Theirs is a uniquely American artform, one that is recognized by the National Registry, and it is theirs alone. Their archive is now housed by the Library of Congress.
Regrettably it’s not that easy to convince people—and I’m talking about one-on-one with friends of mine—to want to get into 50-year-old comedy albums. No one seems to have the attention span. They think it will be dated, but for the most part Firesign Theatre exists in a much more hermetically-sealed and self-referential space than most comedy. There are very, very few outdated cultural references (even in the radio shows), nods to topical events or names that would fail to ring a bell, and 98% of it is as fresh today as it was in 1971. Comedy usually ages very poorly, but this is not the case with Firesign Theatre. A bright 20-year-old armed with an occasional look at Wikipedia would get the vast majority of the jokes, no problem. (As a testament to the long shelf life of their work, there was a fairly recent-ish weekly show of vintage Firesign Theatre radio on WFMU, during drive-time even. It’s evergreen material, I promise you.)
Over the years I have attempted to attract so many converts to the genius of Firesign Theatre, and almost always I have failed. I tend to send out this short clip, of Phil Proctor utterly destroying the rest of them in “The Chinchilla Show.”
[Peter Bergman told me that crazed scenario which I hoped you listened to above, came out of Phil Proctor’s head almost completely spontaneously! The rest of them were just trying to keep up with him. Phil is still like that, btw. When I first met him he told me the story of how he was made an honorary “Kentucky colonel” by the governor of the state while he was attending the Kentucky Derby, and within a matter of two minutes, I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.]
I was able to convince my wife to listen to the four classic Firesign Theatre albums when heavy snowfall saw us (literally) stuck at home for two days, unable to leave. We got high, turned the lights down and listened. She enjoyed all four and told me that she was glad she’d been exposed to it (which was amazingly gratifying to me, I must say.) My other trick is whenever someone is passing through town during a road trip, I’ll burn them some Firesign on a CD-r and tell them not to listen to it until after it’s dark.
The back of the ‘How Can You Be in Two Places at Once’ album cover.
Sadly, my enthusiastic entreaties have invariably fallen upon deaf ears. Most people suppose it’s some sort of 1940s radio show that I am trying to get them to listen to. “Firesign Theatre? Sounds like some old-timey thing.” With others it’s the attention span thing, not enough hours in the day to listen to an hour (gasp!) of spoken word. It recently occurred to me to compare Firesign’s vast oeuvre to podcasts. These days, everybody is always listening to their favorite podcasts, at the gym, in the car, cooking, whatever, they’ve all got a podcast going on in the background. Why not think of the Firesign oeuvre as the greatest comedy podcast ever made?
Well, you’re in luck as all of the major (and much of the minor) works of Firesign Theatre are streaming from the exact same sources as that weekly true crime thing you always listen to. Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple Music, all of them are pumping Firesign Theatre directly into your home. The four (or five) classic albums are super easy for you to listen to. Just a few clicks away from where you are reading this…
If any of this has sounded tempting to you, I suggest listening, preferably in the dark, or better still in the dark with headphones on, and stoned as fuck. If not then Firesign is perfect during your commute. Or when you are painting or doing the gardening. The point is that you MUST PAY ATTENTION or you will be lost. Immediately. You cannot multitask. You can’t surf the internet. You can’t be on Twitter or texting. If you don’t pay attention, not only would it be confusing, it would be annoying. I suggest starting where I did, with Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. Or maybe with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye.” After that listen to Electrician, the album-length Bozos and the Dear Friends radio show compilation.
For more advanced Fireheads, there’s a brand new release—the first on vinyl in 35 years—titled Dope Humor of the Seventies. The handsomely designed two-record set—produced by longtime Firesign Theatre associate, my pal Taylor Jessen—includes 83 minutes of material, with a further hour or so that can be downloaded online, or streamed at all of the usual places. The collection was culled from their Dear Friends, Let’s Eat and The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour series, and there’s an insert with excellent liner notes that begins with the (absolutely true) statement I quoted at the start: “Discovering the Firesign Theatre is worse than trying to get into Frank Zappa for the first time.” Yes, it might seem daunting that there are well over 100 hours of Firesign Theatre to wade through, but if you think of these albums and radio shows the same way you think about podcasts, and you start with what I suggest, you might just discover something that you’ll obsess over for the rest of your life. I reckon that a high percentage of you who have read this far will be wondering “where has this been all my life?” unless you are already a Firesign Theatre fan, of course,
Seriously, just spark one up, turn out the lights and listen to this. Do it. Do it now…
National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra—probably best-known as Ian Faith, the irritable, incompetent manager of Spinal Tap—died yesterday. He’d been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2019 and was 79. Hendra was an author, one of the creators of Spitting Image and he even opened for Lenny Bruce at the Cafe Au Go Go.
He also did the fucking funniest John Lennon parody of all time.
Technically “Magical Misery Tour (Bootleg Record)” isn’t a parody so much as it’s a pointedly vicious satire. Hendra used direct quotes from John Lennon’s infamous 1970 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jann Wenner (later published in book form as Lennon Remembers) for this hysterical bit.
At the time of Lennon’s Rolling Stone sitting he was undergoing Primal Scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov and he really let it rip, shitting on his own fans, Mick Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney and several others. All Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue did was handpick the best parts and arrange them into lyrics. Still as funny today as when it was released on the classic National Lampoon Radio Dinner LP in 1972.
Hendra does an absolutely boffo Lennon impersonation here, razzing the former Beatle’s very public bitching and moaning. The music’s by Christopher Cerf, it was arranged by Christopher Guest and that’s Melissa Manchester making a cameo appearance as Yoko Ono at the very end.
In his 1987 memoir Going Too Far, Hendra tells the tale of an FM radio disc jockey playing “Magical Misery Tour” for a visiting John and Yoko. Allegedly the color drained from Lennon’s face and he just got up and left.
Although its, uh, cultural cachet, I suppose, has fallen in recent decades, a doofy poem called “The Desiderata of Happiness” used to be something that you’d see on the walls of doctors’ and dentists’ offices, at your grandmother’s, a great aunt’s house, or maybe in the very home that you yourself grew up in, during the 1960s and 70s. (At one point the hippies even adopted it.)
You don’t see it so often today, but it’s still around. Now that you’ve had your attention called to it, the next time you see it (normally as a varnished wooden wall plaque in a junk shop) you’ll remember this post (and wince).
Here’s an example of the proto-New Age almost meaningless wisdom you will find in “The Desiderata of Happiness”:
You are a child of the universe,
No less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
“The Desiderata of Happiness” was written in 1906 by a lawyer named Max Ehrmann, but it was unknown during his lifetime. Its slow burn to popularity began in the 1950s when a Baltimore pastor printed it up in some church materials. The poem’s advice to be humble, live a clean and moral life and to even have respect for dipshits (it doesn’t use that exact term, of course) seems simplistic even by Forrest Gump standards, but for whatever reason this thing struck a chord with the public. (You can read more about its history at Wikipedia).
In 1971, a “groovy” American radio talkshow host by the name of Les Crane (once married to Gilligan’s Island‘s Tina Louise and considered by some to be the original “shock jock”) narrated a spoken word/musical version of the poem (avec gospel choir), that reached #8 in the Billboard charts and won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Performance of the Year. It was on the British pop charts for 14 months.
The following year, a parody version titled “Deteriorata” was created by the National Lampoon’s Michael O’Donoghue, Tony Hendra and Christopher Guest (The words were Hendra’s, the music is Guest’s) released as a single and on the classic Radio Dinner album. Melissa Manchester sings on the record. The humorously ponderous reading was handled by Norman Rose, who was THE voice over announcer of the era. You’ve also heard his voice in Woody Allen’s Love & Death and The Telephone Book.
There are a few then current references in the song that might need some context for listeners almost fifty years later: The line about your dog’s diet refers to a TV dog food ad which wondered, “Is your dog getting enough cheese in his diet?” The “Remember the Pueblo” bit refers to a rightwing bumper sticker rallying cry about the capture in 1968 of the USS Pueblo by North Korea. “Do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate” was a phrase employed on government checks. And again, bear in mind that narrator Norman Rose would be the equivalent to say, Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones reading it today.
Years later, Les Crane was asked about “Desiderata” and said “I can’t listen to it now without gagging,” adding that he preferred the Lampoon’s piss-take. Eventually the parody became better known than the original hit record due to frequent spins on the Dr. Demento radio show. Below is the original version, Les Crane version:
A nineteen-year-old Phil Lynott photographed for Irish magazine Women’s Way in 1969.
In 1969, Thin Lizzy vocalist Phil Lynott was already singing with his fourth band, Orphanage, following his dismissal from the band Skid Row (featuring guitarist Gary Moore). Lynott was pretty laser-focused on making rock and roll his primary profession from a very young age after forming his first group, Black Eagles—a cover band, and his second, Kama Sutra, when he was fifteen. In 1969, during his short time with Orphanage, from which Thin Lizzy would soon spring, he was interviewed by one of the most popular women’s magazines in Ireland at the time, Women’s Way, for a column called “Beat Up” by journalist Heather Parsons. During his youth, Lynott had gone through more than his fair share of difficulties. His father was absent, and the young Lynott was subjected to relentless racially-motivated verbal attacks because of his mixed heritage. The racism was so bad in Manchester that Lynott’s mother Sarah sent him off to live with his grandparents in Dublin. All of these experiences, as well as others, made a deep impression on Phil, which he articulated in the interview in a rather profound way. Here are a few of the insights he shared with Women’s Way when he was just nineteen and about to become the biggest rock star in Ireland, and later known worldwide as the charismatic, cock-sure vocalist for Thin Lizzy. Let’s start with my favorite moment from the interview, when Phil was asked what he disliked the most:
“I’ll tell you what I dislike the most of all—those superior types who look down on any girl who hasn’t got the same views. What right does anyone have to be so critical? We’ve all got our own lives to lead and different ideas on how to do this. The place money has in people’s lives annoys me too. Okay, I know it’s essential, but at the moment it’s all-important to too many people. Another thing is social injustice. No. I’m not going to say anything about racial discrimination because people just say, ‘Oh, another coloured fella with a chip on his shoulder. Take all the things Bob Dylan writes about though—housing problems, people starving and dying, wars. I sometimes get very frustrated because I feel so strongly about these things and can’t do anything about them. I’d like to put all the oppressors into the oppressed position.”
If you just high-fived your laptop screen, congratulations. You, my friend, are on the right side of history along with Phil Lynott. Here’s a little more from Phil on the desire to have a child and be a good father, unlike his own father:
“Do you know what else I’d like to do? Adopt a kid. Now, why can’t single people do that? I’d like a kid, and I’d be good to him and look after him and give him a good life—better than he’d have in an orphanage. No pun intended!”
Of course, since this is a nineteen-year-old burgeoning rock star we’re talking about here, Lynott does give some insight into the stuff you’d expect a nineteen-year-old dude to be interested in. Such as girls with strawberry blonde hair, cars (especially if they are “kinky”), and not being the marrying type because he’s too much of a “flirt.” (He would marry Caroline Crowther eleven years later on Valentine’s Day.) You can read the entire interview here.
Phil Lynott giving a spoken-word performance of the song “Shades of a Blue Orphanage.” Lynott wrote the song as a tribute to his grandmother Sarah who raised him with her husband, Phil’s grandfather, Frank. It is taken from the television special ‘Me & My Music’ recorded in 1976 (but broadcast in 1977).
Lemmy and his trusty Rickenbacker bass and his pal Wendy O. Williams with her chainsaw. These marionettes were made by Canadian artist, Darren Moreash of Darrionettes.
If there is one thing I have learned as a contributor to Dangerous Minds for the last seven years is this—you can always count on the members of this collective to bring things to your attention that you perhaps did not know existed. I’ve done this many times myself here, including when I wrote about the fact an anatomically correct GG Allin marionette exists, poop stains, and all dubbing him the “Masturbator of Puppets.” I still get a kick out of that wordplay because I am, as far as you know, a fifteen-year-old boy. Also, my DM colleague, the always intriguing Paul Gallagher posted about these gorgeous marionettes fashioned after rock and roll royalty last summer, and boy, did you all dig that (as you should).
Anyway, as people do, I recently spent too much time scrolling through my social media feeds and looking at old photos of Alice Cooper from the early 70s and BOOM. Suddenly there was a photo of Alice holding an Alice Cooper puppet by its little paddle control that pulls its strings, and the search to find out more began.
This brings us to Canadian artist (and stand-up metal fan, I might add) Darren Moreash—the self-dubbed “Geppeto” of Harrietsfield, Nova Scotia. And Moreash’s efforts have brought him good fortune. Apparently, when he was still dating his soon-to-be wife, he gifted her with an Alice Cooper marionette. In 2012, Cheap Trick used puppets Moreash made in their images for their video “I Want You For Christmas.” Of the countless marionettes Moreash has produced during his lifetime, he has been able to gift them to many of his childhood heroes like Lemmy Kilmister and Stan Lee.
Now, I have to say that my kid went through a phase when he was a little kiddo, during which he became quite enamored with marionettes. And I gotta say, they were a lot of fun to play with once you got the hang of making them move the way you wanted. If I had known about Moreash during that time period, I would absolutely be the proud owner of a David Bowie marionette that I would lie to people about, telling them it’s really for my kid. In the past, Moreash’s marionettes have been auctioned off for charity fetching as much as $500. Anyway, as it’s the photos you came here for so, I’ll stop jawing so you can keep scrolling and see some of Moreash’s marionettes. If you are curious, yes, it does appear that you can get in touch with Moreash and have one of his wooden creations for your very own, such as his latest, a marionette in honor of the Bernie Sanders mitten meme. More info on that, here.
Feel the BERN!
Booji Boy!
Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO wearing his red energy dome.
Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman.
Peter Gabriel.
Many more of Moreash’s marionettes after the jump…
Every year around this time, Westgate Gallery‘s poster concierge extraordinaireChristian McLaughlin drastically cuts prices for his annual Black Xmas 50% Off Sale.
Anyway, my pal McLaughlin, a novelist and TV/movie writer and producer based in Los Angeles, is the maven of mavens when it comes to this sort of thing. You couldn’t even begin to stock a store like his if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the first place, and if you want a quick (not to mention rather visceral) idea of his level of deep expertise—and what a great eye he’s got—then take a gander at his world-beating selection of Italian giallo posters. Christian is what I call a “sophisticate.”
He’s got a carefully curated cult poster collection on offer that is second to none. His home is a shrine to lurid giallo, 70s XXX and any and every midnight movie classic you can shake a stick at. But why would you want to shake a stick at a bunch of movie posters to begin with? That would be pointless. And stupid.
The Westgate Gallery’s Black Christmas 50% off sale sees every item in stock at—you guessed it—50% off the (already reasonable) normal price. All you have to do is enter the discount code “BlackXmas2020” at checkout and your tab will be magically cut in half.
The selection below is only a very tiny sliver of what’s for sale at Westgategallery.com.
