Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo’s Facebook presence is pretty typical working cult musician stuff, tour dates, concert photos, personal snapshots, yadda yadda. (I’m fond of his fishing pics.) But a couple of days ago, Melchiondo posted a confession long kept secret, about boosting an iconic guitarist hero’s equipment for a recording. So the name drops don’t lose anyone, Josh Freese is known for his drumming in Devo and A Perfect Circle, and Sim Cain and Andrew Weiss were in Rollins Band.
 

I think enough time has passed where I can finally tell my favorite Ween story of all-time.

The businesses and the people involved have long since closed their doors and moved on for good and hopefully the people involved (and Carlos himself, if it comes to that) will have a good sense of humor about this story.

In 2003 Ween released our album “quebec” on Sanctuary Records. We worked on the album for 2 years in our beach house in Holgate,NJ, a rented house in the Pocono Mountains of PA, the garage behind Aaron’s house in Pt. Pleasant, PA, my upstairs guest room, and finally Andrew Weiss’s living room in NJ. We also worked at Water Music in Hoboken, NJ and Graphic Sound Studios in Ringoes, NJ. It was not a great period in our personal lives, Aaron was going thru a divorce and I was partying way too hard myself—it was some dark shit. The record is one of my favorites, but it is a depressing album lyrically. It was not an easy record to make either, as evidenced by the amount of places we worked, trying to find the right environment. There are demos available online that I posted where you can hear the process at work, we racked up our normal batch of like 6 dozen songs or more before whittling it down to what was finally released, 15 tunes.

I am a huge fan of Carlos Santana. He is one of my favorite guitarists of all-time. He is playing better these days than ever before in my opinion. His music is more radio friendly, for sure, but as a guitarist he has aged like a fine wine. Only Neil Young, Prince, and a small handful of others can make that claim as they become members of the AARP.

We were working in Andrew’s living room on the song “Transdermal Celebration”, our drummer Claude Coleman had just gotten into a horrific car crash and left us w/o a drummer for the recording and ensuing tour. Eventually it worked itself out where the record took so long to complete that Claude made enough of a recovery to do the world tour with us supporting “quebec.” In the meantime though, even though Claude had played on some of the demos, drumming on the album was left up to me, Josh Freese, and Sim Cain. “Transdermal Celebration” had been recorded 3 times by this point, with a drum machine, with Claude playing drums, and the final take on the album which features Josh Freese. It was the eventual single from the album. So, we’re in the middle of this session and I get a phone call from my roadie (nameless) who also worked for a backline company (nameless) that supplied amps, drums, lights, etc. to bands touring in the Northeast. My roadie told me that Carlos Santana’s equipment (including his guitars) had arrived via a trucking company that night at their depot. Carlos was recording an appearance on “Good Morning America” the next morning and his equipment was to be delivered to the set in NYC in a few hours.

What needed to be done was immediately clear to me, I had an opportunity to play the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” through Carlos Santana’s amplifier and guitar. I had one shot at it, it meant taking a hard disk recorder to a storage space where all of Carlos’ stuff was sitting in transit. I arrived at 2am. We (very carefully) unpacked his equipment and set up his stage gear and in one take I recorded the guitar solo for “Transdermal Celebration” (the one that appears on the album, playing thru Carlos Santana’s guitar, pedalboard, and amplifier. The whole thing took 10 minutes and we were terrified we were going to get caught. A lot of people would have lost their jobs. We got the fuck outta there really fast after that. So the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” was played thru all of Santana’s shit in what resembled an early morning bank heist or something……….

Of course a story like this requires visual proof, so here it is. Don’t tell anyone about these please.

-Dean Ween 6/14

 
Gotta love the cheeky “Don’t tell anyone about these please,” on a public post to a fan page with thousands of followers. I’m guessing the solo in question is the one that starts at about 1:53.
 

 
And here are some photos as evidence of the caper:
 

 

 

 
Lest anyone assume Mr. Santana’s gear was treated disrespectfully (you know, apart from being handled without his knowledge), Melchiondo adds this postscript:
 

an afterthought: regarding the Carlos post, i’d like to add that we handled his equipment as if it were the Mona Lisa. We photographed the way his roadie had his cables wrapped and positioned and put everything back exactly as it was found. The whole process was over as quickly as it happened. Also, the respect that I have for Carlos and the depth, spirituality and stamina of his playing is held by me in the highest regard. I am not just a fan of Carlos, I am a believer and follower of everything he has done, and yes that includes the pop singles. I felt it was important to have this be known, there is no one I hold in a higher regard. Also, I have a lifetime of experience of handling equipment, as did the other person involved, it wasn’t two drunk buffoons manhandling a legend’s gear, the furthest thing from it. I think it’s important to clarify that. -DW

 

 
Melchiondo’s new band, The Dean Ween Group, debuted in Baltimore in March, and they will be touring this summer. Dates are listed at his web site.

 
An “axe murder” that was captured on Google Street View has been solved by police.

The images which were spotted on Street View appeared to show a young man with an axe in hand, standing over his lifeless victim on a cobblestone street in Edinburgh, Scotland. The killer then leaves the scene of the supposed crime.

Police were asked to investigate the photos after a complaint had been made by a Google user, leading to several reports about the “murder” online. The police soon discovered the murder had in fact been a hoax staged by two mechanics: garage boss and “murder victim” Dan Thompson, 56, who owns Thomson Motor Co in Giles Street, Edinburgh, and his colleague Gary Kerr, a 31-year-old mechanic, who stood over the prone Thompson with a pickaxe handle.

These two men had decided to pull the prank after spotting the Google Street View camera car approaching their place of work, as Thompson told the Edinburgh Evening News:

“By complete fluke I saw the Google car coming along the road but it had to loop the block so I had one minute to rush back inside the garage and set up the murder scene. There are pictures of men on Google flashing their bums but we thought we would be more classy.

“It seemed like the obvious thing to do so I threw myself on the ground and Gary grabbed a pick-axe handle from the garage.”

 

 
The pair staged the “killing” in August 2012, and had forgotten about it until the images went live in late 2013. This was when a colleague mentioned he had seen the prank on Street View. However, their colleague wasn’t the only one who spotted the “killing,” as police eventually turned up at Thomson’s garage.

Two uniformed officers came down to the garage to interview us. They were treating it seriously at first - I was mortified because we didn’t want to waste police time.

“We explained to the police what we had done and they thought it was hilarious.”

Kerr also told the Edinburgh Evening News that they may have plans to repeat their hoax:

“I think Google do it every four years so we’ll have to think of something even better for next time.”

I suppose the only concern is how long it took the police to respond to a possible axe murder?
 

 

 
Via Edinburgh Evening News

 
Sweet Jeebus, I don’t even know where to begin with this ‘cause it’s so far out there. Fifty-four-year-old Gary Dudek of of Wallingford, Pennsylvania has been charged with allegedly stealing human skin and tampering with records. He’s accused of stealing skin grafts from Mercy Philadelphia Hospital between November 2011 and July 2013 and no one was the wiser! The hospital says he stole more than $350k’s worth of human hide between those years.

According to investigators, Dudek worked as a sales representative for Organogenesis, a Massachusetts-based regenerative medicine company, between September 2006 and September 2013. Police say he was in charge of managing accounts for Mercy Hospital’s bio-science department and that he also supplied the hospital with skin grafts.

Due to his position, Dudek had an “open purchase order” which allowed him to order the skin grafts whenever he wanted. However, police say Dudek made several unauthorized purchases, and Mercy never received the grafts, leading the hospital to lose an estimated $357,000.

Officials say Dudek was caught twice on surveillance cameras allegedly stealing skin grafts and transferring them to his car. Yikes!

Dudek’s lawyer Eugene Tinari said in a statement that, “the issue should be a civil court matter and that the hospital has yet to prove his client did anything wrong.”

Dudek is out on bail.

According to investigators, “they don’t know what Dudek did with the skin or the motive behind the alleged thefts.” 

I don’t think they really wanna know, either…

 
Via NBC Philadelphia and Arbroath

 
When you set nostalgia aside, it’s pretty clear that Hanna-Barbera cartoons mostly sucked ass. Of course, in their ‘60s heyday, they produced some durable classics like The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, and my childhood favorite, Top Cat, the theme song from which will be my walking-out music if I’m ever a guest on a talk show. But come the ‘70s, they were mostly churning out it’ll-do halfassery like The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo.

But even their greatest stuff was cheap as hell, often pushing limited-motion animation techniques so far that they’d become distractingly bad. Ever wonder why Yogi Bear had a collar and a necktie with no shirt? That was to create a straight line behind which artists could animate just the characters’ heads and keep everything else in the frame static, because cheapness. Same deal with Betty Rubble and Wilma Flintstone’s necklaces. Pretty much every character design had some variation on that tactic. Which would be forgivable if HB weren’t already so notorious for their “hey, didn’t they walk past the same rock like three times already?” approach to backgrounds. The reality is, they were grinding out product, and while they ground out some inspired product early on, they were ultimately still just an animation mill.

So when Decaying Hollywood Mansions’ Facebook page turned up this 2007 Secret Fun Spot roundup of INCREDIBLE Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! background paintings, my jaw bounced off the floor a few times. The artistry on display in these gorgeous and gloomy scenes of abandoned and mysterious places is remarkable, certainly beyond what I was equipped to really appreciate when I was little. It kind of makes me want to have a look at those old shows again.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Henry Rollins has had one fascinating life. He was in one of the most important punk bands of all time, he played Vanilla Ice in a music video, he has been the voiceover actor for Infiniti, he had a talk show on IFC, he had a small part in Jack Frost.....

In the 1980s Rollins also produced a full album by Charles Manson for SST, which would have made the noted psychopath and cult leader, who wanted to bring about a race war, labelmates with Bad Brains. The release of the album, entitled Completion, was cancelled due to safety concerns. Only five copies of the album were ever pressed; two belong to Rollins and the other three apparently are Manson’s.

In December 2010, Rollins participated in an event at the Echoplex in Los Angeles to benefit the Santa Monica radio station KCRW in which he played a variety of ultra-rare tracks, including a live rendition of “Pay to Cum” from the second show Bad Brains ever played, the first-ever Fugazi demo (“Waiting Room”), several Black Flag rarities, and one of the songs from the Manson album Rollins produced for SST. When he played the track—the title of which has, to my knowledge, not been made public—Rollins joked, “I can hear you all listening to your hair grow.”

In 2008 Rollins told the NME of the correspondence with Manson that led to the recordings:
 

“He wrote me a letter out of the blue once and he said, ‘I saw you on MTV and I thought you were pretty cool’.

“So we corresponded a few times in 1984; I’d just tell him about what we were doing with our new record and he’d send back semi-lucid responses.

“He made references to The Beach Boys stealing his ideas, which sounded like sour grapes, and told me to tell everybody else to take care of wildlife. That must have been the old hippy in him talking.”

Rollins outlined that he was very young when he started corresponding with Manson—who was sentenced to life in 1971 for the infamous Manson Family Murders which took place two years earlier.

“At the time I was very young and having him write me letters made me feel very intense and heavy,” he said. “I’d always know I’d have a letter in my PO Box from him because the woman behind the counter at the post office would give you this awful look.

“His letters would always have swastikas on them so they were easy to spot.”

 
According to a 2010 article in The Guardian, “A lawyer representing Manson wrote to SST, asking them to help complete and release a collection of Manson’s songs. Then as now, Manson was serving a life sentence for his role in the Tate/LaBianca murders. ... Rollins agreed to produce the songs but a string of death threats forced SST to call off the project.”

In the mind of almost everyone, Manson is first and foremost a homicidal lunatic. It’s quite clear that in his own mind, Manson is first and foremost a musician. During his detainment before his 1971 trial, Manson was “very anxious for his music to be heard” and enlisted his friend Phil Kaufman to get his music released. Indeed, an album called Lie: The Love & Terror Cult was released on March 6, 1970. As recently as 2010-11 Manson has released two albums of folk music on Magic Bullet Records called Air and Trees. Here’s “Gas Chamber,” a track from Air.
 

 
These Russian bad boys identify their criminal status, loyalty to their clan, their addiction, or length of imprisonment by sporting a particular tattoo.

For example, a snake around the neck signifies drug addiction; stars on collar bones, or epaulettes on shoulders denotes rank and criminal authority; the Madonna and Child (one of the most common) can mean loyalty to a clan, a sign for good luck or to ward off evil, or that this particular gangster has been in jail for a very long time.

There are also those that are personal, names tattooed across knuckles, a ring on a forefinger means “rely on no one but yourself.” Tattoos on fingers can also denote speciality (the thieves cross on middle finger), a tattoo on third finger means has served full sentence from beginning to end, while one on the pinkie means “dark life,” someone who has spent a lot of time in solitary confinement. The skull and crossbones, gun, knife or the letter “K” mean killer.

These images from the forthcoming book Russian Criminal Tattoo Police Files.
 

 

 

 
More tattoos after the jump…
 

 
You may not know the name Graham Stark, but you will certainly recognize this stony-faced comic actor from the dozens of British movies in which he appeared, such as the second Inspector Clouseau film A Shot in the Dark, Alfie, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, The Magic Christian, and Revenge of the Pink Panther. Stark also provided voices for The Goon Show, and regularly featured in TV comedies like The Benny Hill Show and Sykes. When he died last year, at the age of 91, Stark was described as an actor who was frequently cast in supporting roles, but never quite achieved stardom:

“Stark moved on the periphery, appearing in nearly 80 films, often as the fall-guy or put-upon sidekick.”

He was also described as “a close friend of Peter Sellers,” his confidante, who had been best man at all four of Sellers’ weddings.

Stark was regarded in the film world as Sellers’ sycophantic sidekick, who would do anything to brown nose his famous friend. The character actor John Le Mesurier once said of their relationship:

“Graham Stark is the only man in London with a flat up Peter Sellers’s arse.”

Some of the strange things Graham Stark did to appease his friend Sellers have been well documented in various biographies, most assiduously by Roger Lewis in his superb The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (the UK edition not the anemic US version). In this massive volume, Lewis detailed how Stark “had fetched and carried for his pal,” and:

had been so devoted to him, indeed, he’d even allowed Sellers to lock him in the boot of his car, on the pretext of getting him to locate the source of an annoying squeak.

An article Lewis wrote, ten years after Sellers’ death in The Daily Telegraph, he joked about their odd relationship, explaining how:

As a reward for his services, Stark used to be given Sellers’s discarded cameras or hi-fi equipment. He had parts in the Pink Panther films. He was best man at various Sellers weddings, and was taken on holiday to Paris and New York. Stark was the one constant element in Sellers’s zig-zag life, and he didn’t object when Sellers dressed him up as Hitler and had him parade along the Hong Kong waterfront, where he ran into a party of Jewish tourists.

 

 
Instead of “laughing along with this,” Stark had his lawyers send a letter threatening legal action:

...three days after the article was published, I received a ferocious letter from Carter-Ruck. Well, not a letter exactly. A declaration of war. “It is untrue that Peter Sellers and/or Blake Edwards talked to our client excitedly of a new penis-enlarging ointment and went to enormous trouble organising a mail-order address in Copenhagen, whence a confederate sent our client a tub of rancid garlic butter.”

Carter-Ruck continued: “Due to the gravity of the allegations our client will require a Statement in Open Court and accordingly proceedings for libel will immediately be issued.” The name and address of my solicitors was demanded, who could accept service of a writ. As, only the previous year, Carter-Ruck had checked a manuscript of one of my own books for defamation, and had charged me £2,415 for the privilege, I suggested that they serve the writ on themselves. (Not my exact wording by any means.)

Lewis “couldn’t take any of it seriously – the paranoid overreaction; the disappearance of common sense and smug pomposity of the legal profession; the sanctimony; the Kafkaesque nincompoopery.” The legal process dragged on for several years, even going to the Court of Appeal. But these actions revealed a far more troubling, and horrific side to Graham Stark.

In August 1990, Lewis and the paper’s lawyers received a letter from a Mrs Shirley Cheevers:

Mrs Cheevers said that “Graham Stark had to creep away pretty smartish with his tail between his legs” when her friend’s niece, then a minor, had visited the actor in a television studio, where she’d gone in a group to watch a recording. Stark “picked her up and showed her a good time”. When she went back to boarding school, her widowed mother “was horrified to discover a pile of letters from Stark, giving in great and obscene and graphic detail descriptions of what he was going to do to her next holiday and what he had done to her already.”

Her family took the documents to a firm of solicitors, Tatton, Gaskell & Tatton, who were ready to take Stark fully to task, but “her mother felt she could not cope with it all and drag her daughter into it anymore”. Stark got away with just a warning and an injunction to keep clear of the schoolgirl. Mrs Cheevers concluded: “None of them has ever forgotten this incident. It has coloured their lives in one way and another ever since.” (It says a lot about the Sixties that no one thought to go to the police.)

Richard Sykes decided to investigate. “I do not have any great hopes,” he said, “but it is worth a try.” By October 1990, however, he had located the child’s surviving family in Hove, East Sussex. Her aunt wrote: “I confirm that my niece was made a Ward of Court in 1967 following our discovery of very explicit correspondence from Graham Stark, including one called The Lesson … The whole episode was a dreadful shock and affected all our lives for a very long time. My niece was corrupted both physically and mentally by this awful man.”

Lewis was incredulous that this was the same man who was attempting to punish both himself and the newspaper for presenting him as:

“contemptible, sycophantic and self-debasing parasite who had willingly allowed himself to be humiliated and treated as a stooge by Peter Sellers, in return for the latter’s patronage and largesse”

Which was surprising considering the number of defense witnesses, including Spike Milligan, film producer Roy Boulting, writer Wolf Mankowitz, presenter David Jacobs and scriptwriter Frank Muir, who all agreed that Stark was “a creepy, humourless sleazeball and hanger-on.”

As Lewis goes onto explain, the child’s aunt had discovered an incriminating stash of letters sent by Stark to her niece, which detailed the actor’s obscene desires for the child:

From the set of a film he was making at Shepperton called Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford, in which he portrayed a police sergeant, Stark wrote: “You will be taken to the bedroom where you will strip in front of me … You will put on the black nylon stockings and the very high-heeled shoes … Needless to say under no circumstances will panties ever be worn and I will be able to see your adorable——whenever I wish … I shall arrange to have a car bring you down to the studios for the day.”

Other (much more explicit) material pertains to sado-masochistic scenarios involving corsets, instructions for the child to “parade in front of Bobby “without your panties on” – who was Bobby? – and practical arrangements about dates and phone numbers. Then there’s the contract that Stark wished her to sign: “I hereby sincerely swear that from this day forward I intend to give my body willingly to my lover GRAHAM STARK to do with as he pleases … Should at any time he wish other people to be present to look at me I will not protest.” And so on and so forth.

As Lewis points out, it has taken until the recent exposure of the horrific child and sex abuse scandals involving BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, which was only investigated after his death, for the police to take an interest and action over the long list of allegations from the 1960s and 1970s against celebrity sex abusers. So far, these have included another BBC presenter, the convicted Stuart Hall and most recently the PR guru Max Clifford, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his indecent assaults on women and girls.

As is becoming apparent celebrity abuse of women and children is far more common than ever supposed. It was only after his death that comic actor Arthur Mullard was revealed to have raped his daughter when she was thirteen, and groomed her as his “sex slave.” The past may be a “another country” but there still appears to have been a willfully perverse and utterly unacceptable attitude towards sexual abuse amongst generations of men during the sixties and seventies, and no doubt beyond.

Read Roger Lewis’s full article “The stark truth about Peter Sellers’ sidekick” here.

 
South African artist Steven Cohen has been found guilty by a French court of sexual exhibitionism after dancing with a rooster tied to his penis in Paris.

Mr. Cohen was arrested last September, after being seen performing a dance in a square beside the Eiffel Tower, while wearing a corset, stockings, platform shoes, a feathered head-dress, made from a stuffed pheasant, with his penis attached to a rooster. He was jailed for 10 hours, interrogated and had to give a DNA sample and undergo psychiatric evaluation. Though prosecutors had requested a $1400 fine, the criminal court imposed no penalty on Mr. Cohen, as there had been no formal complaint and the artist had not engaged in a sexual act with the rooster.

After the verdict, Mr Cohen said:

“I think the victim is art. I’m not saying I’m going to, but my desire is to complete what was incorrectly halted by the authorities. I’m frustrated because it’s almost like being found guilty but not being punished. It’s like saying, ‘We are right but we are not going to do anything to you,’ which for me is a double injustice.”

As for the rooster, Tricoire (or “Frank” as Mr. Cohen named him), it is now in a chicken coop living “a totally happy life in Normandy.”
 

 
Via Arbroath

 
An Ottawa man by the name of “Popadick” (yeah, you heard me) was arrested Tuesday at Riverside Ottawa Park for indecent exposure.

According to reports, since April 14th police had been receiving reports of “a balding white male exposing himself at Mooney’s Bay Park, a Rideau River park just north of the Ottawa International Airport.”

On Tuesday at around 9 a.m., police were again alerted by reports of the man exposing his genitalia to strangers along a park pathway.

Officers in the area were dispatched to the park, where they arrested Donald Popadick, 62. Charged with Indecent Act and Mischief, he is due for a Wednesday court appearance.

News Releases - Ottawa Police Service> Ottawa Police charge Ottawa man with Indecent Act and Mischief http://t.co/WkwWWZvLkj

— Sgt. Iain Pidcock (@SgtIainPidcock) April 29, 2014

I’ll admit I’m kinda curious to see a mugshot of this “Popadick” guy. So far, Ottawa police haven’t posted one yet.

As a side note, this quote from the Canadian National Post had me in stitches:

The name Popadick remains quite rare in Canada. As per a countrywide telephone directory search, only three households carry the name “Popadick,” all of them within a few hours’ drive of Ottawa.

Why did they feel obliged to add that, I wonder?

Morgue, man with floral tattoo, 1945
 
Back in 2001, photographer Merrick Morton—who also happens to be a reserve LAPD officer—came upon a massive archive of Los Angeles Police Department crime scene and evidence photos which had been hidden for decades in a huge storage facility in downtown LA. The photos were buried among 150 years of police records in cardboard boxes.

When it was discovered that some of the boxes contained decomposing cellulose nitrate negatives, a serious fire hazard, the Fire Department recommended that all the negatives be destroyed. The team lobbied for the archive to be only selectively destroyed and their efforts paid off; some boxes of images were determined to be unsalvageable and destroyed, while the remaining images were sent to a cold storage facility where they reside today.

Around one million photos have been unearthed so far and choice selections, presented by Fototeka, will be exhibited at Paramount Pictures Studios from April 25-27 in Los Angeles.

Detail of two bullet holes in car window, 1942
 

Shoes, arm, and knife, 1950
 

Victim’s feet hanging off bed, 1934
 

Detail of bullet holes in screen, 1930
 

Onion field reenactment, 1963
 

Bank robbery note, 1965
 
Via Feature Shoot