As the whole damned planet knows by now Germany slaughtered Brazil during their semi-final match yesterday. Lots of Brazilians were losing their shit and crying. I’ve never really understood the extreme emotional response some people have over their team losing (or winning). Perhaps I’m just not enough of a sports fanatic and I simply don’t get it?

Either way, there’s a website dedicated to Brazilians with serious cases of the sads over their epic loss to Germany.

 

 

 

 

 

 
via Sad Brazilians

 
Oh, lawyers. You gotta love ‘em.

In 2002, Jeffrey Baldwin of Toronto died of starvation at the age of five after severe abuse at the hands of his grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman. The grandparents were convicted child abusers but Jeffrey and several siblings were still handed into their care by a children’s aid organization after concerns arose that the parents were abusing their children. Jeffrey and a sister were locked in a bathroom for days on end, where they were forced to live in their own filth. Court testimony revealed that Bottineay and Kidman were interested in custody of the two children for the government checks they would collect. Jeffrey died of starvation on November 30, 2002. Kidman and Bottineau, were convicted of second-degree murder in 2006.

According to Wikipedia, Jeffrey’s case led to significant changes in policy by children’s aid societies in the granting of custody of children to relatives.

In happier days, the boy was a Superman fan who was even photographed wearing the classic uniform. According to his father, Richard Baldwin, “He wanted to fly. ... He tried jumping off the chair. We had to make him stop. He dressed up [as Superman] for Halloween one year. … He was so excited. I have that picture at home hanging on my wall. He was our little man of steel.”
 

 
A Toronto resident named Todd Boyce was so moved by this story—revealed in a long delayed inquest into the death earlier this year—that he started an indiegogo crowdfunding project to create a statue for the poor boy. The project had an initial goal of $25,000 (Canadian dollars), but raised in excess of $36,000. Noted Ontario sculptor Ruth Abernethy has completed the sculpture but it is now at a foundry waiting to be cast into bronze. The sculpture features Baldwin wearing his favorite garment—a shirt with the famous Superman logo.

The City of Toronto sought assurances that the monument would not violate any copyright laws before granting Boyce’s request to have the monument placed in Greenwood Park, near where Jeffrey grew up.

According to the Toronto Star, DC has denied the request.
 

DC’s senior vice-president of business and legal affairs, Amy Genkins, told Boyce in an email that “for a variety of legal reasons, we are not able to accede to the request, nor many other incredibly worthy projects that come to our attention.”

DC declined to comment.

 
Boyce feels that the Superman aspect was a crucial part of the bronze monument, which will include a bench: “I’m sort of empathetic to (DC’s) point of view on this, but I feel very strongly that the image of Jeffrey is so powerful. It’s the image of a vulnerable boy dressed up as the most invulnerable character in the universe. So I just feel like there’s something lost if we change it.”

Reluctantly, Boyce is going to have the “S” on the statue changed to a “J” for Jeffrey.
 

 
Via The Beat

 
Although for some, Legend, the best-selling anthology of Bob Marley’s music originally released in 1984, is their gateway drug into the world of reggae music, most hardcore reggae fans would have no use for the album at all. Frankly I’m one of them. Legend, to me, is (with the exception of a few tracks) the blandest of the bland, on par with Phil Collins or Billy Joel. But there is a reason for that… a pretty interesting reason that I’ll get to in a minute.

I think the matter has long been settled, though, on Legend‘s status as an all-time classic album—it’s sold well over 27 million copies worldwide and continues to sell another 250,000 copies annually in the United States alone—and the occasion for this post isn’t to bestow (inflict?) my opinion of it upon you or anything. That reason would be UMe’s new 30th anniversary edition of Legend which came out yesterday, as remastered in stereo and 5.1 surround by producer Bob Clearmountain, one of the best in the business.

I may have just stated that I’m rather lukewarm about Legend, but holy shit does this sound amazing (Thankfully UMe issued the anthology on a Blu-ray disc (along with a CD) and not just a regular DVD). If you are already fan of the collection, I’d have to say that this rates a “must buy.” Hearing Marley’s music—even the inoffensive selection on Legend—opened up into the wide sonic vistas that the multi-channel format allows for, Clearmountain’s surround sound revisioning of these songs is quite remarkable. If you already own Legend on vinyl or CD (or both) you won’t feel like a chump at all for buying it again. Like I say, it’s pretty impressive on the audiophile level, almost like hearing these songs for the very first time.

In many respects, the song selection of Legend provides the listener with a misleading notion of what Bob Marley was all about. Where were all the songs about hunger, survival and ghetto uprising? Aside from “Get Up Stand Up,” where’s the militant Marley represented?

It turns out that the militant side of Bob Marley is how Island Records owner Chris Blackwell originally wanted to memorialize his friend, but the man he handed the job of making Legend happen to—Island’s UK manager Dave Robinson (co-founder of the Stiff Records label)—had a different vision: Robinson wanted to sell Bob Marley albums—boatloads of ‘em—to white people.

Of course Bob Marley was a worldwide superstar during his lifetime, but he wasn’t a platinum-selling artist (Exodus sold about 650,000 copies in America, 200,000 in Britain). The track selection on Legend was made very carefully and justified by focus groups along the way to appeal to just about everyone and offend no one.

In “The Whitewashing of Bob Marley,” the fascinating cover story of this week’s LA WEEKLY, writer Chris Kornelis describes how Marley’s music came to be sold to the suburbs:

It’s not that Bob Marley didn’t have white fans when he was alive. Caucasian college students in the United States - particularly those around Midwestern schools, including the University of Michigan, Prevost says - constituted a large percentage of his fan base. But for the compilation to meet Robinson’s lofty sales goals, those students’ parents had to buy the album, too.

Robinson had a hunch that suburban record buyers were uneasy with Marley’s image - that of a perpetually stoned, politically driven iconoclast associated with violence. So he commissioned London-based researcher Gary Trueman to conduct focus groups with white suburban record buyers in England. Trueman also met with traditional Marley fans to ensure that the label didn’t package the album in a way that would offend his core audience.

Less than a decade before violence and drugs became a selling point for gangsta rap, the suburban groups told Trueman precisely what Robinson suspected: They were put off by the way Marley was portrayed. They weren’t keen on the dope, the religion, the violent undertones or even reggae as a genre. But they loved Marley’s music.

“There was almost this sense of guilt that they hadn’t got a Bob Marley album,” Trueman says. “They couldn’t really understand why they hadn’t bought one.”

Legend may be a “tame” “lite FM” version of Bob Marley, but nearly 30 million albums later, who can quibble with any of it? And trust me, the new 5.1 surround mix of the album will blow your doors off and make you want more… The more militant stuff, but I’m sure that’s to come.

Below, Bob Marley accepts the UN Peace Medal at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, June 15, 1978.  You will probably want to turn on the subtitles.

 
In December of 2010, I visited the Andy Warhol Enterprises exhibit then being held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was an excellent full-career retrospective, loaded with rare goodies, and generously tilted toward his early, pre-Factory commercial work, which I prefer to his more famous silkscreens (commence calling for my skull on a pike, I don’t care). But as much as I was enjoying the early books and the blotted-ink drawings of shoes, I was surprised by a trip down amnesia lane that came at the end of the exhibit, a video installation of one of Warhol’s last projects, the show he produced and co-hosted (with Debbie Harry) for MTV called Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes. The name of the show referred to Warhol’s famous quip “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Episodes of the program were actually 30 minutes in length. #themoreyouknow
 

Warhol with Debbie Harry, dressed by Stephen Sprouse.
 
I was an arty kid, so I knew perfectly well who Warhol was (some of my friends only learned of his existence from that show, believe it or not), and so I never missed it. Though it wasn’t too hard to catch them all—as the series was prematurely ended by Warhol’s 1987 death, there were only five episodes, the last of which was mainly a memorial. But while it was on, it was glorious. Although the program featured lots of marquee names, befitting Warhol’s obsession with celebrity and celebrities, it also highlighted NYC downtown fashion, art, and music phenomena. Mind-expanding stuff for a midwestern kid, and stuff which would have otherwise been entirely inaccessible, since Warhol’s previous television ventures, Fashion and Andy Warhol’s TV, were limited to NYC cable.

And unless you visit the Warhol Museum or a traveling retrospective, the program itself is now pretty well inaccessible. Few things have been more damnably hard to find streaming than episodes of 15 Minutes, and to my complete bafflement, the Warhol Museum store doesn’t offer a home video. Much of what little can be found is fuzzy VHS home recordings, but it gives an adequate taste of how deep the show could go—and remember, this was on MTV.
 

 
It gets a good bit better with this clip of Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes taking the viewer on a tour of Manhattan nightclubs The Palladium and AREA (note future Twin Peaks actor Michael J. Anderson as the garden gnome.)
 

 
KONK were an amazing dance-punk band of the era. You may recognize the drummer, Richard Edson, an original member of Sonic Youth, and co-star of the Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise.
 

 
This Ramones interview ends with a live, not lip-synced, performance of “Bonzo Goes To Bitburg.”

 
The last bit footage I’ve found is a jaw-dropper—an interview segment with a 21ish, pre-fame Courtney Love!
 

 
This is a guest post from Chicago-based writer Graham Rae

What would you call an edgy Australian comedian who viciously riffs on the humor inherent in Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, how much women hate anal sex, ‘suicide watch’ toddler childcare, and gun lover delusions, amongst other things? If you’d said sick, you’d be right. If you’d said funny, you would also be right. If you’d said Tony Abbott, the Aussie prime minister, you would have been wrong, but your guess would have been humorous and interesting. And if you had said Jim Jefferies, who is on tour right now, you would have most definitely been right.

I’ve been following the Antipodean anarchist’s comedic career since I first caught his angry firecracker jokestorm HBO special I Swear to God in 2009. His surreal, caustic, searing, pained, yet somehow charming wit and comedic topic evisceration – the uselessness of pandas, the useless of religion, the uselessness of shoving a faulty vibrating egg up your rear end for sick G-spot kicks – made me an instant convert to his wildly warped worldview, and just plain cracked me up. I’ve written here and there about him elsewhere. Utilize the information-finding-facilitating contemporary electronic hocus-pocus magic of Google and be enlightened as to what I said, if you care to.

Following his work over a few years has been very interesting. That period of time has basically encompassed his moving from London (where he lived for a few years) to Los Angeles to further his comedy career, and the slow steady inescapable intrusion of American material into his set as he absorbs this country, its existential codes and practices, its amorphous popular culture, and just plain insanity and bizarreness. I have seen him live in Chicago a few times, and it’s been illuminating to see the way he sees the country, trying to come to terms with it, and the way he makes comedic fodder out of its demented headscratcher alien ways. A previous set I saw contained sporadically entertaining skits about his left-field search for movie stardom in Hollywood, some of which, of course, made it into his FXX series Legit which, when I think about it right now, he did not mention once when I just saw him on Friday 6/20/2014 at the Vic Theater in Chicago.

His all-new (from the last time I saw him a couple of years ago) newest set contained lighter – and heavier – subject matter than frivolous star gossip about his cult hit show, wherein he plays himself looking after a man with muscular dystrophy, Billy, and Billy’s alcoholic brother Steve. He did do some scathing Hollywood-ripping riffs, but his central topic of conversation – guns and gun control – was a far from easy topic to address, especially for a foreigner. See, that’s the central thing about America – if you’re not from the country (like me – I’m Scottish) and criticize it, some inbredneck goon will always just tell you to love it or leave it, as if life were so simple. So immigrants tend to keep our gripes quiet around the indigenous populace, but say things we would get lynched for in private, far from prying uncomprehending burning local ears. Which is why I doubly respect Jefferies taking on the difficult subject matter he does. He knows he is foreign, and thus his opinion will automatically be discounted by the unthinking redwhitenblueball xenophobes in the audience, but he still goes for broke anyway, at the risk of alienating his audience whilst making them laugh at the same time.

Telling a crowd something half of them don’t want to hear in a foreign accent, no matter how much the American ear loves it, and its owner, is always a risky move, and it’s something that, to me, Jefferies pulls off brilliantly. I mean he can, of course ultimately say that he’s just joking, but you can tell that beneath his aw-shucks-mate veneer there is a deadly-serious-upon-occasion artist with a good brain saying something important and profound, attacking the material from a different angle than the usual tired and tiresome left-right-wrong insoluble dichotomy this country has depressingly rutted itself into. Guns and gun control are a fierce-and-boring-and-pointless mass debate subject, and any right thinking country would have gotten a handle on it years ago, and never mind the terrifying, citizens-as-acceptable-collateral-damage constant massacres by maladjusted well-armed psychopaths. Sometimes it takes a different perceptive perspective – like, say, making an audience laugh at gun owner delusions about ‘self-defense’ whilst systematically destroying their usual braindead be-a-hero, stop-a-massacre tropes with logic and elegance and incontrovertible authority.

Sometimes it just takes a foreigner to point out the nose on somebody’s face when they can’t see it themselves.

Any immigrant staying here is choosing to do so, unlike the native populace born here, which is why our/their voice deserves to be heard. I mean, they could leave, but they choose to stay and slog and fight it out, frowning and feeling for the seemingly insoluble societal hieroglyphs American presents you with at first…then getting a handle on them…then oftentimes rejecting them wholesale as the illogical, sanity-and-intelligence-insulting trash they are. Every immigrant to every country in the world does the same personal cultural x-ray and comes back with their own take on the places and faces in front of them. Jefferies is dealing with material, like gun massacres, he clearly does not want to have to deal with, and nor would any sane person, but he is having to grapple with it and draw his own conclusions because it’s unfortunately in his and our face constantly. So his mockery and conclusions are societally conscious, well-informed (this man does his fucking research, trust me), and well-thought-through. He cares enough about the country that sustains his career, and houses his child, to want to try and help, even if it is through the sometimes-too-easily-dismissed medium of adult comedy.

And all obvious immigrant-self-projection aside, that’s the hook here: this is genuine adult comedy, and never mind the increasingly redundant arsefucker jokes he does to please the unlaid whooping drunks in the audience. This is an adult man addressing serious topics of current weight and heft and import, shining an illuminating light on them…and making people laugh at the same time. He can say this stuff and get away with it paradoxically because he is a foreigner, and is appealing to the masochistic American others-hate-and-verbally-beat-us-so-we-must-be-shit side of this country’s strange mercurial psyche…and he’s also just a comedian, so hey, these are the jokes, folks! His from-a-different-career-stage sleazy sex stuff (to me, that is – of course it’s what he’s known for, and has made his name performing) satellites his serious material and draws fire away from it like aircraft flak, but in the end hopefully he has still made somebody go home from one of his shows and think. Because you do get people who are curious to know how their world looks from an alien perspective, and that view can be quite informative and shocking sometimes.

And quite hilarious too. Let’s not get too prickish and pretentious about it. What I very much enjoy about Jim’s work now, both on stage and in Legit, is him being a foreigner in America and how he deals with it. I can totally relate to all the accent hassles he undergoes, the pronunciation of words (‘garage’), being clueless about certain topics, and just dealing with the average friendly American animal in general. He says things I have genuinely thought and said myself. It’s a real tonic to hear somebody else come away with stuff you thought only you had thought or said, and you realize how universal the immigrant experience is, no matter if you’re in Los Angeles or Chicago, as I am. Jefferies ‘jokingly’ (read: completely openly and honestly) dripping contempt on American exceptionalism is something I love in him. Talking about how a lot of Americans go on about this being a ‘free’ country, he said “And what? The rest of us are just walking around in chains?” I was actually laughing as I typed that, picturing his shackled-foot shuffle he put on, because I have said the exact same thing myself. I mean, there is not one single thing that you can do here that you couldn’t do in Scotland, except get killed far easier in a gun massacre, I suppose, or pee on the White House, or commit suicide by jumping into the Grand Canyon dressed in a scuba outfit.

Just having this man to articulate inchoate immigrant fears and confusions and angers at how horribly America treats itself is just such a breath of fresh air. Talking about guns, he said of the mindset he would be inculcating in some of the audience: “I know what’s going through your head right now in a loop: ‘Go back to where you came from. Go back to where you came from.’ And my answer to that? No. I like it here, I pay my taxes.” That assertion of equality in the face of an often-alienating country and culture is a valuable thing. I had a bitch of a supervisor in a job tell me to go back where I came from, and there is no more vicious and shitty thing you can say to somebody. Then again, you could say that you killed somebody’s pets and it was fun, or you fucked their wife and she was shit in bed, and that would be worse, probably. It’s all relative, I suppose. And Jim’s clearly scared of getting shot for his gun material, which is why he had that happen in Legit. Let’s just hope life doesn’t imitate art quite that closely.

Speaking of relatives, what is also interesting about Jim’s American experience is his newish fatherhood to his 18-month-old son Hank, which has to be the quintessential American name, a fact that tells you something in itself. It was always going to be interesting to see how somebody as angst-laden and degenerate and wasted and idiosyncratic as Jefferies was going to respond to fatherhood, and judging by the material he did about it in his set, the answer is he’s doing good and bad, just like any other new dad without an instruction manual. The girlfriend who bore him Hank, Kate Luyben, used to be a top model (“But I didn’t get the model years,” Jefferies noted bitterly), and plays the hooker in Legit whom Billy visits at the end of the first series. The comedian said he didn’t want to hear her stories about his woman “licking Madonna’s muscular vagina” in a foursome and such, so it sounds like he’s working some of his relationship out with her onstage, or just using it as a mass catharsis-inducing fuck-all-women bitching session, which is what some of his more extreme misogynistic material is for the guys in the audience, or it is for me at least, like he’s some sort of dysfunctional sexual shaman or something. You take it for what it’s worth, and how far you want to run with the joke tells you more about yourself than the comedian onstage. Suffice to say, his woozy daddy experiences will be providing some merriment for years to come (both myself and my good friend Charlie I was with could relate, both being fathers, with Charlie’s kid the same age as Jim’s), and if there is any kind of break-up between the comedian and the mother of his child the bitter misogynistic comments will peel the paint off the walls and make the audience cringe and laugh in shock even more than they already do. So much to potentially look forward to!

Or maybe not. Jefferies made clear on his 2010 DVD Alcoholocaust that he was having to give up drinking because he was literally shitting blood. He was drinking last Friday night, ordering drink after drink onstage and, by the looks of his pale, sweaty complexion after the show, he’s been up to other things as well. It’s a damned shame, because he seemed to be doing well. I suppose being away from the missus and kid must give him a great deal of freedom to just go as apeshit as he wants when he is on tour, with no fatherly duties to attend to, no chance of dropping the baby on his head if he’s drunk and changing a nappy (or ‘diaper’ to Americans) or something. I was going to just say hiya at the end of the show, but there were literally about 150 people in a line waiting to meet him, a number vastly larger than that at any previous show of his I had seen, so I didn’t bother. Legit has clearly raised his profile a lot, and he played in Chicago to a sold-out 1000-punter show. So it would be a real shame to see the man lose it and trash himself at this interesting stage of the USA-life games. After all he still has a lot of sacred American cows to get mad cow disease from, and a lot more living to be done with the wee man, whose growing pains and adventures we want related to us onstage at regular growth spurt intervals. Sober up, Jim, for fucksake. You’re too old for this stupid, played-out shit. Think of your son. Think of your blood-decorated stools. You’re not in the UK anymore. You should have left that nihilistic drinking style behind with those doggone limeys, who all drink to excess. After all, you’re an American now…

…aren’t you? 

This is a guest post from Graham Rae

Below, Jim Jefferies on Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show:

 
Crazed fandom is a very weird phenomenon. For whatever complex reasons, fame—a concept which barely existed 150 years ago—is a very powerful thing and people can act mighty strange when confronted with it or in the presence of someone well-known. I attended the premiere of the movie version of the Hairspray musical. After I’d parked the car, it became difficult to get anywhere near the theater itself as there was such a dense crush of fans, tightly packed and blocking the way in every direction. As I finally got across the street from where I needed to be, every time a celebrity would arrive, there would be a ton of flashbulbs going off and loud squeals of delight from the crowd. When Christopher Walken strolled down the red carpet, I watched as five young Black girls, all preteens, went completely bonkers for him, even crying and sobbing! Christopher fucking Walken. I kid you not. Does that make any sense? Not really, but that’s just what a brush with fame does to some people…

At the Sheffield Doc/Fest a few years ago, I went to a panel about documentaries that examine obsessive fandom. The participants were Jeanie Finlay, who directed the upcoming documentary on Orion, the masked Elvis impersonator; Lucy Robinson, lecturer on modern British history at the University of Sussex; Nicholas Abrahams, co-director with Jeremy Deller of The Posters Came from the Walls about Depeche Mode fans behind the Iron Curtain; and Daisy Asquith, a Bafta-nominated documentarian who made Crazy About One Direction for Channel 4. During the discussion, Asquith described her experiences getting death threats after One Directioners felt they’d been portrayed poorly—“insane” might be the word I’m looking for—in her film. I made a mental note to watch the doc, which she woefully mentioned was posted all over the Internet, when I got back to Los Angeles.

Admittedly the One Direction phenomenon had already gone from the UK version of X-Factor to Madison Square Garden before I’d ever even heard of them. A few years back, an old friend of mine emailed me from MSG where she had taken her then 9-year-old daughter and I googled them. Apparently they were massive. More massive than massive. As big as the Beatles. I’ve still never heard or know any of their songs, but then again I’m not exactly in their target demographic am I?

Which is not to say that this film wasn’t of great interest, because it’s fucking fascinating.

At the beginning of Crazy About One Direction the viewer is teased with what’s to come, including a glimpse of some homoerotic 1D fan fiction featuring the group’s Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles. The subset of Directioners, as their fans are known, who obsess about Louis and Harry getting jiggy with it are called “Larryshippers,” a portmanteau of both of their names, “relationship” and “worship.”
 

 
In case you’re wondering why the teen fans of an ostensibly heterosexual boy band would fantasize about the objects of their own sexual yearnings getting off with each other, this is pretty much the norm for a predominantly female phenomenon known as “slash fiction.” Captain Kirk makes tender love to Mr. Spock. Starsky fucks Hutch, and so forth. There is just no other girl there with Harry and Louis, because THAT BITCH would spoil the fantasy. How actively the band’s management and crack public relations experts might exploit this, or if it began and remains an organic fan phenomenon is difficult to say, but there was much reporting on the (false) rumor that several dozen Larryshippers had killed themselves after watching Asquith’s television documentary (Google #RIPLarryShippers).

The film features an amusing scene of what is literally a pack of Directioners who have managed to get past hotel security and knock on a door they believe Harry Styles is sleeping behind. He’s not, as they soon find out via Twitter (each member of 1D have over ten million Twitter followers) leaving these feral middle class teenage stalkers deflated because their Harry doesn’t even know that they exist. I pondered watching that scene what would have had happened had he been there and opened the door. Probably Styles being ripped apart like a piece of chicken by these daddy-funded she-wolves.

Imagine what it’s like to be one of literally millions of girls who believe that they are going to marry Harry. I’m sure it gets quite fierce in the competitive trenches of 1D fandom. One girl says she wouldn’t want to date one of them because of Twitter bullies: “I wouldn’t like girls telling me to die and stuff.” Because they would! Now imagine what it was like to be Taylor Swift who famously dated Harry Styles and wrote “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” about him. These girls loathe her. The abuse she must have absorbed for that!
 

 
After Channel 4 aired Crazy About One Direction, much online hatred was directed also towards director Asquith via her Twitter account. Additionally some of the fans who appeared in the film, especially the Larryshippers and the more stalkery girls, were singled out for insults and death threats for misrepresenting 1D fandom. They take it quite seriously, apparently. I’d better quit while I’m still ahead…
 

“The problem with Facebook is we compare everyone’s highlight reel to our behind-the-scenes.”

While this is perhaps the most depressing video I’ve seen in quite some time, it kind of speaks volumes when you realize it probably has considerably more than a little truth to it. Yeah, it’s been exaggerated for entertainment purposes, but I’ve often wondered to myself if all my Facebook friends are really leading these exciting lives while I’m just some boring, unadventurous (but content) bump on a log. I mean, do they really eat at five-star restaurants every single night? Do they really have the world’s most perfect children or the “I’m so fucking in love I’m going to shove it in your face!” relationship? This video attempts to show you the hard “truth” with what your Facebook pals are really up to.

Facebook can be depressing because everyone else’s lives are better than yours… But are they really?

 
h/t reddit

 
Marty Lott aka Jerry Lott aka “The Phantom” was born near Mobile, Alabama in 1938 and moved to Leakesville, Mississippi during infancy. He played country music on stage at school which progressed to playing country and western at Paynas Furniture Store in Lucedale, Mississippi. Jerry started entering and winning local performing contests which led him to start touring. It all changed in 1956 for Marty and so many others, when Elvis Presley came along, opened his eyes and charged his soul with rock and roll.

“Love Me” was written in ten minutes and recorded in Mobile at Gulf Coast Studio in the summer of 1958. It is one of those rare, lust-filled, psychotic explosions that, in one minute and twenty nine seconds, packs more punch than most punk records did and is considered by many to be the wildest rock and roll song ever recorded. It had to wait until the new decade to see a release.

Lott told Derek Glenister:

“I’d worked three months on the other side of the record. Somebody said, ‘what you gonna put on the flip-side’ I hadn’t even thought about it. Someone suggested I wrote something like Elvis ‘cause he was just a little on the wane and everybody was beginning to turn against rock ‘n’ roll. They said, ‘See if you spark rock ‘n’ roll a little bit’... so that’s when I put all the fire and fury I could utter into it. I was satisfied with the first take, but everybody said, ‘let’s try it one more time’. I didn’t yell on the first take, but I yelled on the second, and blew one of the controls off the wall.”

“I’m telling ya, “it was wild. The drummer lost one of his sticks, the piano player screamed and knocked his stool over, the guitar player’s glasses were hanging sideways over his eyes.

 

 
Lott, known at this time as The Gulf Coast Fireball left Mobile for Los Angeles to shop his master tape around. On a truly bizarre impulse he followed Pat Boone to church one Sunday morning and convinced him to give the tape a listen. It was Boone’s idea to rename Lott The Phantom, even agreeing to issue the record on his own Cooga Mooga label. Eventually Lott signed a contract with Boone’s management but the single of “Love Me” b/w “Whisper Your Love” was released on the label Boone recorded for—Dot Records in 1960, packaged in a nifty picture sleeve, normally reserved only for the really big stars here in the States.
 

“Aahh, uhh, let’s go! Uhh
Press your lips to mine
And whisper I love you
Gotta have chance that lasts
To do the things we wanna do
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me
You set my soul on fire
Every muscle in my body’s burning with desire
Baby kiss me do
Make me know you’re mine
Love me with desire
Oh honey, this is fine
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me
Aahh!
I want you to be my bride
My heart’s a runnin’ wild
Got to make you mine
If just for a little while
Don’t hesitate, I can’t wait,
Love me, love me, love me, love me…”

 

 
Sadly in 1965, Jerry’s wife took her own life, and shortly thereafter, in 1966, while still attempting to tour, The Phantom was involved in a near fatal auto accident in York, South Carolina. After his car tumbled 600 feet down a mountainside he was left paralyzed below the neck. Lott continued to write songs, but never recorded again. He passed away on September 4th,1983 at the age of 45.
 

 
Ever the rock ‘n’ roll purists The Cramps chose the song to be one of the first ones they learned, going so far as to make a flyer that they put up around New York City before they ever even played their first gig proclaiming “LOVE ME” featuring the baleful gaze of Cramps guitarist Bryan Gregory.
 

 

The Cramps play “Love Me” at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978

A new generation was introduced to the likes of The Phantom in the late 70’s/early 80’s through this and many European (i.e. bootleg) rockabilly compilation LPs. Fanzines like Kicks, which later morphed into Norton Records and Kicks Books were the first in America to dig deep and write about The Phantom.

As usual, rock ‘n’ roll in its purest form is always discovered 50 years too late by those who wish to use the music to sell stuff. I got an email requesting the cover of the “Love Me” single last week from a music supervisor working for an advertising agency. He couldn’t tell me who, but “Love Me” by The Phantom was going to be used in a huge ad campaign and they needed the artwork for the iTunes download that they will be making available in conjunction with the ad. It was just announced that the song would be used in the latest Southern Comfort campaign. More money will be earned, hopefully by a family member of Lott’s (though I highly doubt it), by the use of this song in this ad than Jerry Lott probably made in his entire music career. It just seems odd the way they used it, like I’m watching TV with the sound down and listening to a record.

I think I need a drink.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who was that masked man? ORION: The Man Who Would Be King

 
Francis Ford Coppola was not the first choice to direct The Godfather, Paramount Studios wanted Sergio Leone, but he turned it down to concentrate on his own gangster movie Once Upon A Time in America. Next up was Peter Bogdanovich but he also knocked it back as he was working on What’s Up, Doc?. Coppola was eventually approached by producer Robert Evans, who wanted an Italian-American to direct the film.

As Coppola later recalled in an interview:

The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn’t like the cast. They didn’t like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn’t like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn’t at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I’d ever get another job.

 

 
Coppola was considered a risk. He had made five movies, only one of which was a hit. He was also in debt to Warner Brothers from an overspend while producing THX 1138.

Paramount were still skeptical about Coppola’s ability and kept a standby director ready to replace him. The first argument between director and studio came over casting. Coppola had drawn up his own list of possible contenders, which the studio was also set against, in particular they did not like Coppola’s suggestion of Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier for Vito Corleone.
 

 
Coppola wanted the world’s greatest actors for the main role, but the studio didn’t want Brando because he had a bad reputation for delaying film productions; while Olivier was supposedly too ill to film and turned the offer down.

Who the studio wanted was Ernest Borgnine, as he had the mix of rough-and-ready, and seemed like the kind of “family man” an audience would identify with.
 

 
For Michael Corleone, Coppola wanted (then mainly unknown) Al Pacino, but the studio wanted a name, a hit name like Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal.

Michael was a good, strong role, and it attracted Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and James Caan to audition for the role, but Coppola threatened to quit unless Pacino was given it. The studio eventually conceded on the agreement that James Caan was cast as Sonny Corleone.

Again the lure of box office names led to considering Paul Newman and Steve McQueen for the role of lawyer Tom Hagen, but that eventually went to Robert Duvall.
 

 
Other stars who went up for roles include Anthony Perkins who auditioned for Sonny, while Mia Farrow auditioned for Kay. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro tried out for Michael, Sonny, Carlo, and Paulie. He eventually played the young Vito in The Godfather Part II.

This is Coppola’s original cast list, which contains many of the names who eventually appeared in the film.
 

 
Via Retronaut, FuckyeahDonCorleone and Julia Segal

 
A stenciled Crass drumhead is going up for auction as part of Sotheby’s rock and roll memorabilia event. The estimate is that it’ll go for between $15,000 and $20,000. The “Presley to Punk” auction will occur on June 24. When I saw this, I have to admit, the collector in me swooned.

It’s a pity that this will probably just end up in some rich asshole’s house instead of in an anarchist museum or some place like that. At least I hope that it’s Penny Rimbaud himself who’ll be getting the money for this (it appears that he signed it recently). If anyone deserves to cash in on their past in this way—I really mean this—God bless them, it’s Crass. No one’s selling out here, they’re just clearing out the garage!

The auction also has some amazing signed items from The Beatles, one of Sly Stone’s vests, a jacket worn by Jimmy Page, several drawings and paintings by Joni Mitchell, as well as guitar straps worn by Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. A naughty comic strip from a young Jim Morrison and a semi-pornograpic collage made by John and Yoko for Elton John’s birthday in 1975. Several gold records belonging to Mick Jagger, even the Grammy presented to Johnny Cash and June Carter for “Jackson.” There are 145 items in all being auctioned off.
 

Sly Stone’s beaded vest, as seen during his infamous stint as co-host of The Mike Douglas Show.
 

Crosby, Stills & Nash by Joni Mitchell
 

Gary Panter’s original rendition of The Screamers logo

Thank you Luhuna Carvalho!