H.R. takes flight
There are folks who think H.R. flipped his wig a long time ago. That may be true - but if this is what being crazy looks like, I’ll have a hit.
H.R. is making the rounds to drum up some excitement for the terrific new Bad Brains documentary, A Band in DC.
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Dangerous Minds interviews H.R. about new film ‘Bad Brains: ‘A Band In D.C.’
CBS chat show “Sunday Morning” presents an hour long interview with Patti Smith conducted by journalist Anthony Mason. This was broadcast earlier today and it’s quite wonderful.
Patti sings “My Blakean Year” and “Grateful” and talks about her life. Mason does a good job of asking the questions and Smith is relaxed and open.
Thanks to Marty Weinstein.
Punk may be long dead, but the interest in its music, ideas and artifacts continues.
Recently over at the Independent, writer Michael Bracewell introduces a selection of photographs by Simon Barker, a former member of the legendary Bromley Contingent, the group of original Punks that included Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, Jordan, Bertie “Berlin” Marshall, Tracie O’Keefe, and Billy Idol. Barker was a participant and witness to some of the key events during the 14 months, in 1976 and 1977, when Punk changed everything - as Bracewell explains:
[Barker’s] photographs share with Nan Goldin’s early studies of the New York and Boston sub-cultures of the 1970s, a profound and joyously audacious sense of youth going out on its own into new freedoms and new possibilities.
In this, Barker’s photographs from this period capture a moment when the tipping point between innocence and experience has yet to be reached. The model and sub-cultural celebrity Jordan, for example, is photographed as a self-created work of art – her features resembling a Picasso mask, her clothes more post-war English county librarian. The provocation of her image remains untamed and unassimilated, nearly 40 years later; and within her surrealist pose there is the triumph of art made in the medium of sub-cultural lifestyle.
Barker/Six was a member of the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’ of very early followers of The Sex Pistols and the retail and fashion work of McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Other members would include the musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, and the writer Bertie Marshall, then known as ‘Berlin’ in homage to the perceived glamour and decadence of the Weimar republic. Originating from suburbia, but all determined to leave its security as soon as possible, the Bromley Contingent became the British sub-cultural equivalent, in many ways, of Andy Warhol’s notorious ‘superstars’ – volatile, at times self-destructive or cruelly elitist, but dedicated to a creed of self-reinvention and personal creativity.
It is this creed, as opposed to the swiftly commercialised music of punk, that Barker’s photographs from the period anatomise so well. At once intimate and forensic, austere and camp, documentary and touchingly elegiac, these photographs capture a milieu experiencing a heroic sense of being outsiders – a condition that has always been the privilege of youth, and which has long claimed many victims in its enticing contract with the thrill of taking an oppositional stance.
Read the whole article and see more of Simon’s photographs here.
Simon Barker’s book Punk’s Dead is available here.
Poly Styrene
The Banshees: Steven Severin, Kenny Morris and John McKay
With thanks to Derek Dunbar
More punk memories after the jump…
Wessex Sound Studios 2003.
The Clash and The Damned were both recording at the legendary Wessex Sound Studios in London when this video was shot.
The Damned were working on Machine Gun Etiquette while The Clash were doing the same for London Calling.
The clip captures Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies, Joe Strummer, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones and producer Guy Stevens enjoying themselves during some downtime.
I believe the footage of Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies in the beginning of the video was shot by Mick Jones.
James Chance, one of the most iconic players of NYC’s “No Wave” scene, married the avant garde improvisational free jazz of Ornette Coleman to jagged, angular funk riffs that were straight out of James Brown, creating a squalling brand of chaotic jazz-punk-funk unlike anything that had been heard before. Chance and his band, The Contortions were one of the most unique groups gigging around New York from the mid 1970s until the early 1980s. James Chance and The Contortions also performed as James White and The Blacks, but it was essentially the same group of musicians.
Seen here, Chance and The Contortions perform at Max’s Kansas City in 1979. Another great clip from Paul Tschinkel’s long-running Innertube NYC public access TV show. He’s got to let his vast archive escape one day. It’s a treasure trove of the punk and post-punk era of NYC music. There’s obviously nothing else like it.
“Somebody told me you people are crazy! But I’m not so sure about that; you seem to be all right to me.”—Lux Interior
On June 13, 1978 The Cramps gave a free concert at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa. It is, simply put, one of the single greatest rock and roll moments ever captured on videotape (in this case, on a half-inch open reel Sony Portapak by Joe Rees and his Target Video outfit). Also on the bill were The Mutants from San Francisco.
One hundred years from now this video will be as iconic as The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But enough description, HIT PLAY AND WATCH IT, ALREADY!
Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard meticulously recreated this event (and the video itself) as an elaborate art project at the ICA in London in 2003. Forsyth and Pollard’s “Cramps” also performed in front of an audience comprised of psychiatric patients in their “File under Sacred Music” re-staging of the infamous 1978 gig.
A blood poet of the highest order, Harry Crews has died of neuropathy at the age of 76.
Crews wrote in a style that was at once brutal and beautiful, baroque and as ordinary as dirt. Within a single sentence he could be both tender and terrifying. His novels were populated by freaks, outlaws, burn-outs and lost souls who wandered through trailer parks, bayous, dive bars, sideshows and the long lonely highways of the deep south. Possessed of a gothic sensibility, dark humor and hard-edged grittiness that put him in the company of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski and Flannery O’Connor as well as hardboiled writers like Jim Thompson, Crews was capable of transforming the rot of reality into something so rich with life that even death had to laugh.
Punk rockers gravitated to Crews because he was a badass who managed to find a medium through which to articulate his anger, despair and lust. Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon created a band called Harry Crews as an homage to the writer. They harnessed the energy of his books and transformed it into the only kind of music that could handle it - blistering hard rock.
Crews was one of the major influences on my writing, right up there with Bukowski and Raymond Chandler. I f you haven’t read him, I recommend starting with The Knockout Artist, All We Need Of Hell or Scar Lover. Once you’ve started up with Harry you won’t stop until you’ve read him all.
More Crews after the jump…
Illustration by Kristian Hoffman
Club 82, at 82 East 4th Street in New York’s East Village, was a well-known “high class” drag club of the 50s and 60s where the likes of Walter Winchell, Elizabeth Taylor and Errol Flynn could be seen. Down on its luck in the 70s, the space was transformed into a glam-rock club and later a disco.
In this clip, the New York Dolls, in drag (save for Johnny Thunders), perform “Pills” at Club 82 on April 17, 1974. I’m presuming this was shot by Bob Gruen, but I’m not sure.
San Francisco’s Flipper were one of the most unique hardcore bands to come out of the Bay Area, or indeed to spring out of any US city’s punk scene. Their slow, sludgy, THICK bass-led sound made them seem extra heavy—much more heavy metal than any mere heavy metal group—and would influence The Melvins, Nirvana (who were huge boosters of the band) and the entire “Stoner Rock” genre.
Flipper’s live shows were utterly insane and intimidating. A pal of mine back in the early 80s suggested that the ultimate drug cocktail for a Flipper show was to sniff glue and smoke Angel Dust. Although I personally never tried that, I think he was probably correct. On record you only got half of the Flipper experience, live you got the whole thing pounded into your skull like a spike.
I first discovered the joys of Flipper via a friend who had secured (against all odds, I grew up in West Virginia) a copy of their “Love Canal/Ha Ha Ha” single in 1981, which I then got my own hands on (and have to this day). Their disturbed, demented and deranged “Ha Ha Ha” is something I used to stick on mixed tapes all the time, especially ones that I’d hand over to friends about to take a road trip telling them “Don’t listen to this one until late at night.”
I recall seeing Flipper co-bass player/singer Will Shatter stumble into the Odessa Diner on Avenue A one night in the mid-80s, looking like he’d gone to Hell and come about halfway back. I was eating with my friend Hillary—who actually knew him—but he was in such bad shape that she opted to leave him in peace to shove his eggs into his face. Shatter was dead not long after that of a drug overdose, and two more members of the band would also fatally OD over the years..
Bruce Loose has apparently appeared on-stage with a cane and heart monitors when the band has reformed in recent years. Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic was a member of Flipper from 2006 to 2008.
Below, is Target Video’s document of Flipper’s May 29, 1981 opening set for Throbbing Gristle at San Francisco’s Kezar Pavilion. At a certain point Loose’s bass breaks, and Genesis P-Orridge lends his axe so the show could go on. Set list: “Shine,” “nothing,” “Low Rider,” “one by one,” “Hard Cold Old World,” “Life.”
It used to be that you could only read about some legendary concert, but sometimes there was a video camera present and actual records, not just memories, of these shows are starting to surface. Witness The Jesus and Mary Chain’s infamous Sept. 9, 1985 performance at Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London. The group played six songs for twenty minutes and then fucked off, prompting the audience to destroy their equipment and rip down a lighting rig.
I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain both before and after this show. When I saw them in London, they were an uneasy combination of crap and brilliance, whereas by the time I saw them at what I believe was their first American show, at The World discotheque on 2nd Street in NYC, their stage show had become something like… Godzilla destoying a city. For the show at The World, they had the biggest, brightest, whitest flash pods aimed directly at the audience’s retinas and no other lighting source. It was as loud as fuck and they simply destroyed the place. Maybe it was the LSD I’d taken, but they seemed to have improved quite a lot in those months since I’d first seen them perform and I left a convert.
You can watch the full pre-Psychocandy set: “Just Out of Reach,” “Inside Me,” “In a Hole,” “You Trip Me Up,” “The Living End” and “Crack’d” on Slicing Up Eyeballs, but the quality is basically shit. Better to go directly to the sixth clip to see a bit of the crowd rioting at the end.