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Nina Hagen’s ‘Nunsexmonkrock’: Greatest (and weirdest) unsung masterpiece of the postpunk era?
02.02.2022
02:06 pm
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Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era.

I’ll take it even further: To my mind, it’s on the same level as PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Or The Dreaming by Kate Bush.

There I’ve said it.

Make no mistake about it, artistically NunSexMonkRock is a monumentally important recording.

It’s also something you can buy used for a single penny on Amazon. There is no mention whatsoever of the album in Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. The Allmusic review of NunSexMonkRock is but a single sentence. The Quietus doesn’t give a shit about it, nor does The Wire. In fact, there is almost nothing of any substance written about the album online anywhere. Hardly any music blogs have ever deigned to even mention it. Google the title, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

That doesn’t mean that NunSexMonkRock doesn’t have its hard-core passionate admirers—there are dozens of Amazon reviews and almost all of them are five-star raves—but we’re talking about something that was obscure 40 years ago when it came out. Even if you could easily pick it up at the local mall then—and for a while there, you could—few did. I would imagine that most people who have discovered the charms of NunSexMonkRock since it was first released have done so primarily because they saw it in a $1 bargain bin and it looked weird so they picked it up. (Every used copy of NunSexMonkRock on vinyl is pristine, it’s virtually guaranteed.)
 

 
Luckily for both of us, you don’t have to take my word for any of this, I can make my case for the epic holy/demonic genius of NunSexMonkRock with the music itself—thanks YouTube—which is neither wholly punk, nor rock, nor opera, nor really anything even remotely recognizable as any previously known genre of music. Already a category of one, NunSexMonkRock appears to have no obvious influences either. Reliable adjectives fall by the wayside when you are confronted with such an anarchic artistic anomaly. Because it’s so very much out on its own peculiar limb, it’s completely timeless. (Musically at least, but lyrically Hagen makes a cryptic prophecy about the then leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who up and died the year the album came out.) NunSexMonkRock could have been recorded 40 years ago, yesterday, or a thousand years from now and it just wouldn’t matter.

The album inhabits a territory so utterly exotic and unclassifiable that the creator herself would never again venture that far out. NunSexMonkRock is a zany, oddball, sexy, freaky as fuck and totally revolutionary masterpiece of modern music. At the center of this evil maelstrom is Hagen’s multi-layered, multi-octave and gymnastically operatic voice, a unique hybrid of Maria Callas, Zarah Leander, Yma Sumac and Mercedes McCambridge doing the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist...

Rolling Stone called NunSexMonkRock the “most unlistenable” album ever made. Au contraire. It’s an incredibly weird album, let there be no doubt about THAT, but once you’ve gotten over the initial shock, NunSexMonkRock is as catchy as hell. “Most unlistenable”? Although that sounds like a dare I personally would be willing to take Rolling Stone up on, it’s not even remotely true.
 

 
Nevertheless(!), let’s ease into it, shall we, and start off with what is probably NunSexMonkRock‘s most accessible number, the unstoppable riff-driven rocker “Born in Xixax” that leads off side two of the album. This features the great Chris Spedding on guitar. Tell me this riff isn’t as good as “All Day and All of the Night” or “Jumping Jack Flash.”
 

“This is Radio Yerevan and this is the news…”

Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2022
02:06 pm
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A long, rambling blog post about my Nico obsession (+ some astonishing, seldom seen TV performances)
01.21.2022
08:12 am
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“I’m very interested in murder.”—Nico, 1970

Via an intense David Bowie fandom, and also from being an avid reader of CREEM magazine, I discovered the work of the Velvet Underground at a very young age, like ten or eleven. I bought one of their albums without ever hearing it, because I just knew it was going to be good. I had no trouble figuring out what the songs were about, the subject matter of “Venus in Furs” or “Waiting for the Man” was well understood by me. (I was not in the least an innocent child.) In the mid-1970s Velvet Underground albums were not difficult to come by in my backwater West Virginia hometown—unlike Iggy, whose albums had to be mail ordered—and post VU solo efforts from Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale could easily be found in the cut-out bins of white trash department stores, usually in the form of 8-track tapes. These sold for 99 cents!

One of these 99 cent 8-tracks that I picked up—which I still own—was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. This inscrutable album presented me with a puzzle that I had to solve: Why do people like this? (Little did I know then that almost everyone hated it.) I played it endlessly AND ON HEADPHONES in an effort to figure out what it was. Eventually—I think—I did. The same could not be said of Nico’s The Marble Index. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try hard I promise you, I must’ve played it a hundred times at least—I simply could not wrap my brain around that album. In other words, ‘Metal Machine Music? Hey, no problem,’ but The Marble Index was just a bridge too far for my pre-teen mind. Obviously it’s not an album for everyone to begin with but especially not for a little kid who only the year before was listening to James Bond soundtracks and “Little Willy.” I finally gave up trying and never did get to the bottom of it.

The Marble Index flew completely over my head.
 

 
HOWEVER, when The Marble Index came out on CD in 1991, my fulsome familiarity with it some fifteen years earlier allowed me to “get it” instantly as an adult and from that moment on, I stand in utter awe at what I think, echoing both John Cale and Lester Bangs, is perhaps the greatest work of European avant garde classical music of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a staggering, absolutely unprecedented work of genius. It’s a visionary masterpiece. It comes out of precisely nowhere. (The bowels of Hell?) It is of no musical tradition or recognizable genre. It doesn’t seem to have been influenced by anything and there’s nothing else that it can be likened to. The Marble Index is a singular artistic achievement. The best way to describe it to the reader who has not heard the album is to compare it to someone creating a ghostly new language from scratch. It really is that individual. A desolate psychic territory where no one else has ever ventured, before or since. And frankly why would anyone want to?

Nico’s music can be too weird, even for weird people.

*****

There’s only one way to listen to Nico’s music and this is at an absolutely ear-splitting volume so that it sounds like you’re in a Gothic cathedral in Hell and she’s a strident, fifty foot tall Valkyrie, her voice declaiming right into your face like storm winds. This is music that absolutely demands your attention. It is decidedly not something to put on in the background, it really needs to overpower you for a full appreciation of what’s on offer. Nico’s music will never click for most people, but when it does, as The Marble Index‘s producer Frazier Mohawk put it, it’s “a hole you fall into.” I fell in pretty deep. 

Recently, for weeks on end, months even, I was playing Nico all day, every day—my wife is a good sport—and although I’m not doing that quite as much as I type this, her albums are still close at hand in my speed rack. During my Nico fever, I reread Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young’s archly drawn memoir about the distinctly unglamorous side of touring with the junkie diva during the final years of her life, Richard Witt’s excellent biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, rewatched Susanne Ofteringer’s engrossing Nico:Icon documentary for the tenth time (at least) and then I bought You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico, a new book by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
 

 
A commonality of all these books, and this is true of the movie as well, is that there is scant information about her songwriting or the actual recording of her albums. Very little about where her music came from or what inspired it. How it seemed to have been born fully formed very soon after her acquisition of a harmonium. The vast distance between the chamber folk of Chelsea Girl and everything that came after it. Nowhere can one read in depth about her creative process. What we do know almost always comes from John Cale, but even his accounts mostly dwell on the mechanics of making the recordings and of how he had to work around a wheezing, frequently out of tune harmonium (you can often hear Nico pumping its foot pedals) and her unconventional vocals. (Note the difference in her singing style from Chelsea Girl to The Marble Index which came out the following year. When Nico is singing her own songs, and not those written by others, only then do we hear how absolutely astounding her voice was. She had to be the one writing for that most idiosyncratic of vocal instruments, as no one else was capable of doing it for her.)

It’s known that Nico was an avid reader of the classics, with Nietzsche, Wordsworth—The Marble Index‘s title comes from a line in Wordsworth’s poem “Memories of Cambridge’’ where he describes a statue of Newton—and Tennyson being her favorites. Tennyson’s verse was perhaps her biggest lyrical influence with his pronounced melancolia and subject matter of kings and queens, medieval legends, and mythology. Nico’s cryptic lyrics evade elucidation, and her committed performance makes them seem even more mysterious. The entire package—including, of course, John Cale’s absolutely apocalyptic arrangements—has a remarkable purity. There is nothing else, nothing in all the world of music, that sounds like Nico’s so-called Marble Index trilogy (which includes 1970’s Desertshore and 1974’s The End…, both also with Cale.)

*****
 

 
The Inner Scar, or by its French title, La Cicatrice Intérieure, is an obscure art film from 1972 that Nico made in collaboration with her lover, film director Philippe Garrel, who was then considered a sort of cinematic Rimbaud. It was released in 1972. Although Garrel is credited as the director (the film itself has no credits) he has gone on record as saying it was entirely co-authored with Nico. In fact, she wrote all of the dialogue, much of it in two languages—she speaks French, German and English in the film—that Garrel himself couldn’t even understand.  The soundtrack is all her music and she is on screen for almost the entire time. (No other film directed by Garrel, either before or since, looks, or is anything even remotely like The Inner Scar.)

The Inner Scar is a truly weird and remarkable film but what strikes me the most about it is the sheer bloody mindedness of it all. The willpower it would have taken to make something like it happen on a low budget. The film, which has only 20 shots for the entire length of it, was shot in some seriously remote locations in Death Valley, Sinai, and Iceland. The tracking shots are LONG and in the days before Steadicam was invented this meant laying dolly track and in this case that meant laying track—and lots of it—in fucking Death Valley where it can get to be 120 degrees! Or on icy, freezing cold tundras. There is one spectacular—and obviously Godard-inspired—tracking shot where the unnamed sheep herder (Garrel) starts walking, and walking, and walking until he eventually arrives right back at his starting place. Imagine how much circular track and how large of an area it would have taken to create that sequence, seen in the below clip. All of the equipment, the crew, the trucks were on the inside of the track. It’s absolutely ingenious. How two junkies organized such a globe-spanning and logistically complex production is a miracle to begin with, but wherever did they score dope in Death Valley?
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.21.2022
08:12 am
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Luke Haines: Psychedelic wrestlers & Xmas tree decorated with portraits of every member of The Fall
07.09.2021
12:01 pm
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Pic via @Bob_Fischer
 
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’ latest album is Setting The Dogs on The Post Punk Postman.

I asked the artist a few questions via email.

Is this your first solo art exhibit?

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.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.09.2021
12:01 pm
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The Loudest Band in the World: The epic story of Motörhead gets the graphic novel treatment


The cover of the upcoming graphic novel, ‘Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World’ due in September 2021.

When it came time for author David Calcano to pen the graphic novel take on Motörhead’s illustriously loud, 40-year career, he, the folks at Fantoons, and illustrator Mark Irwin (fittingly a former art director for Heavy Metal magazine), took the project very seriously. You may recall that Calcano has authored various other music-related graphic novels on artists such as Billie Holliday, and a few eclectic coloring books featuring Frank Zappa and Marillion (!). Calcano’s latest graphic novel, the 144 page Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World, (due on September 7th, 2021), begins Motörhead’s debaucherous story with Lemmy (as it should) back when Kilmister was working as a tutor/instructor at a horse riding school in North Wales. At the time, the teenager and soon-to-be-hellraiser thought working with horses was what he would do for a living. It was, after all, according to Lem, a great way to “get along with women.” To back up this legend about the legendary Lemmy, here are a few shots of Lem and his horse friends.
 

Lemmy: “I used to ride horses a lot, there wasn’t much music then, rock and roll and that sort of thing.” Image via Twitter.
 

Lemmy’s former Hawkwind bandmate Dave Brock also recalls Kilmister’s fondness for horses. The photo above shows Brock alongside Lemmy sitting on a “spirited” horse named “Dynamite” at a ranch in Kansas. This photo is so metal it makes my hair hurt.
 
Thankfully, after his ears were exposed to artists such as Little Richard and Elvis (specifically the jam “All Shook Up”), Lemmy’s work with horses was history, though equines would continue to be a part of his life, for nearly all of his life. Here’s a look at some of the illustrations from Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World which wouldn’t be complete without a few panels of Lemmy clutching a large bottle of his beloved drug of choice, speed, and a naked chick. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
HT: Metal Injection

Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.14.2021
04:45 pm
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Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy: Fifty years ago The Cockettes turned drag upside down


A photo taken by Clay Geerdes of author and Cockette Fayette Hauser wearing a homemade grass skirt ensemble.

The catastrophic effect of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has hit anyone working in the gig economy incredibly hard. Book tours over the years have become big business for authors and independent bookstores hosting author events in support of newly released literature. Many authors, set to embark on Spring/Summer book tours, have had to scrap their plans, with some publishers even holding back on releasing their books. Thankfully, this was not the path chosen by drag trailblazer Fayette Hauser, she of the pioneering gender-bending performance troupe The Cockettes. It is my great privilege to be able to share a bit about her glittery, LSD-drenched book, The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy—a magnificent 352-page volume detailing the three-years the Cockettes conquered San Francisco and turned the drag community on its magnificently wigged head.

As Hauser recounts in the book, she was “rendered speechless” by a hit of strong acid at a party and soon found herself sitting on the floor only able to sit upright with help from the wall behind her. During this voyage, Hauser became acutely aware of the individuality of the people surrounding her to the point where she was not able to recognize their gender or her own. The year was 1968, and the Summer of Love had led masses of people to detach themselves from modern conformity, liberating their ability to express themselves freely. Eventually, The Cockettes would pave the way for others, whether gay, straight, bisexual, or pansexual, with their provocative performances and their communal way of life by living by the term “Gender Fuck.” And if you’re wondering what exactly is “Gender Fuck,” it made sense to go directly to the source, Hauser herself, to help define this very direct description of a person not identifying as exclusively male or female:

“The term Gender Fuck emerged as many of our descriptive phrases did, in an Acid flash! This term, gender fuck, became a way of describing our look, which was highly personalized, very conceptual, and without gender boundaries. We wanted to mystify the public so that the onlooker would declare, ‘What Is that? Is that a boy or a girl?’ We wanted to open people’s minds to the terrain between the tired gender binary models, which were much too mentally binding and boring as well. We unleashed that open space in between. We explored the fluid nature of the Self, which led to the term Gender Fluid. I think we succeeded in opening that Pandora’s Box of multi-dimensional, organic self-expression through body decor.”

In 1968, after graduating with a BFA in painting from Boston University, Hauser, a New Jersey native, moved out to San Francisco. Soon she would form a collective with like-minded, free-spirited people, and the Cockettes would officially begin their reign in 1969—specifically on the stage of the Palace Theater in North Beach on New Year’s Eve. The ever-growing troupe would first communally inhabit a grand Victorian-style home on 2788 Bush Street and then, after a fire rendered the home uninhabitable, a building on Haight—one of San Francisco’s most notorious streets. There was also a home known as The Chateau on 1965 Oak Street, where members of The Cockettes spent their time devising their next performance, creating costumes and personas, and tripping on LSD. The Cockettes took so much acid that they would often become non-verbal. This would lead to other forms of communication by way of personal adornment using makeup, clothing, and anything else that would convey the silent message emanating by the troupes’ diverse members, including 22-year-old Los Angeles native Sylvester James Jr., soon to become R&B disco queen Sylvester. Before his short stint with The Cockettes, Sylvester was a part of a group called The Disquotays—a performance collective comprised of black crossdressers and transgender women.
 

Sylvester during his short time with The Cockettes. Photo by Clay Geerdes. Unless otherwise noted, all photos provided to Dangerous Minds are for exclusive use.
 
The Cockettes’ performances were the be-there affair for all the counterculture chicks, dicks, and everyone in between. When director John Waters touched down in San Francisco to show off his 1969 film Mondo Trasho, the screening landed the director in jail for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. The film made its debut at the Palace Theater where The Cockettes performed their knock-out drag shows on the regular. At the time, Waters was not aware of The Cockettes, but that would quickly change for the director as Divine would end up performing with the Cockettes as “Lady Divine”—one of the first times would be in the first annual Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant at the Palace, where Divine played the pageant host, Miss de Meanor. In addition to confessing to the Tate/LaBianca murders, Divine would lead the other participants in the show (Miss Conception, Miss Shapen, Miss Used, and Miss Carriage) in a tournament to the death, where the queens had to fight with their fists for the coveted crown.

Divine would go on to win the ‘The Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’ in 1971. The following year, during The Cockettes’ last official show (another ‘Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’) at the House of Good, John Waters wrote a speech for her to read onstage, described by Cockette Scrumbly as “brilliant”. As the idea of Divine reading a speech written by John Waters is everything, I asked the director if he was willing to share any memory he had of this drag-tastic moment, and he very kindly responded with the following:

“To be honest, I’m not sure a written copy of that speech even exists in my film archive at Wesleyan Archive, and if it did, it would be word-slash-words that only I could understand. I do remember it was punk-ish (before the word) in a hippy venue that was bizarrely the Peoples Temple church, that was rented for the occasion after Jim Jones and gang had moved out. Divine ranted about following hippies home, eating sugar and killing their pets, or some such lunacy. I do still have the poster hanging in my SF apartment. I’m glad Scrumbly remembered it because I always did too. Quite a night in San Francisco.”

 

A flier advertising The Cockettes’ last show featuring Lady Divine.
 
The Cockettes intermingled with, as you might imagine, lots of famous people who were intrigued by the troupes’ anything-goes take on drag and life. Author Truman Capote called the Cockettes shows “the only true theater.” Alice Cooper, who once jumped out of a cake surrounded by The Cockettes for a PR stunt dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper,” was a frequent guest at the Haight-Ashbury house. And then there was Iggy Pop. When Iggy and The Stooges were recording Fun House in 1970, the then 23-year-old Iggy would start each studio session by dropping a tab of acid (as noted in the book Open Up and Bleed). The band decided to take a break and head to San Francisco for a weekend, playing a couple of shows at the Fillmore with Alice Cooper and Flamin’ Groovies. The first show on May 15th was attended by most of The Cockettes, who bore witness to Iggy on stage clad in the tightest jeans possible and long silver lamé gloves. Iggy was already a sweetheart of the gay community, and as Cockette Rumi Missabu recalls, Iggy distinctly gave them the impression he was “playing just for them.” Following the show, Iggy would become a regular guest of The Cockettes.

In the 2002 film, The Cockettes, Cockette Sweet Pam confessed that the collective “almost brushed their teeth with LSD,” to which Fayette would add, “contributed to the emphasis of flashy costumes.” Although the use of acid was the norm for the Cockettes, their art, sexual autonomy, and fierce expressions of individuality all contributed to the creation of High Drag. And, thankfully, the world would never be the same.

 

Cockette Wally in full regalia. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockette John Rothermel Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockettes’ Dusty Dawn and Wally in pearls. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 
Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.11.2020
12:06 pm
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Knives Out: When Ozzy (maybe) stopped Geezer Butler from stabbing Malcolm Young of AC/DC in 1977


Black Sabbath in 1977.
 
Kind of like when Van Halen toured with Black Sabbath, when AC/DC teamed up with Sabbath to open shows during the twelve-date European leg of their Technical Ecstasy Tour, they were a formidable, almost impossible act to follow. Many accounts would boldly state AC/DC was regularly blowing Black Sabbath off the stage. However, AC/DC also experienced technical difficulties early in the tour. At a show on April of ‘77 in Paris, a bunch of AC/DC’s new gear explicitly purchased for the tour malfunctioned, including equipment exploding on stage mid-set (noted in the book AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be). The band lost it and trashed the stage, stopping the gig twenty-minutes in. This would be the catalyst causing tensions between the bands to rise. On many occasions, AC/DC would leave the stage in such a state of disarray, it would take Sabbath longer to get set up. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with some of the members of Black Sabbath. Especially Geezer Butler. But not everyone in AC/DC was on Sabbath’s last nerve.

Bon Scott took the tour as an opportunity to rekindle his friendship with Ozzy (also noted in AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be), as the pair shared common interests like checking out local brothels and the love of booze. Bon was often found hanging out in Sabbath’s dressing room, a bold choice given the strained relations between the bands. But it probably had everything to do with Sabbath having better party favors. On April 21st, 1977, everything would come to a head by the time the tour rolled into Lund, Sweden, and depending on who you chose to believe, Ozzy may have prevented Geezer Butler from going stab-happy on Malcolm Young. Let’s start with an account of the incident from the late Malcolm Young given during an interview with the guitarist in 2003:

“We were staying at the same hotel, and Geezer was in the hotel bar crying into his beer. He was complaining about being in the band for ten years and told me, ‘wait ‘til you guys are around ten years. You’ll feel like us.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I was giving him no sympathy. He’d had many too many (drinks), and he pulled out this silly flick knife. As luck would have it, Ozzy walked in and says to Geezer, ‘You fuckin’ idiot, Butler—GO TO BED!’ Ozzy saved the day, and we sat up all night with him.”

 

An image of AC/DC on stage in Lund, Sweden prior to getting kicked off the tour later that evening. Image source.
 
Usually, Ozzy the Friendly Drunk was the one causing problems by going missing and presumed dead, or getting arrested, but this time we maybe get to thank Ozzy for making sure things didn’t get out of hand between his pal Geezer and Malcolm Young. Geezer Butler has addressed this story many times over the decades. In an interview in 2016 he again gave his side of the mysterious knife-pulling incident with Malcolm Young in Sweden. When the tour arrived in Oslo, Butler made a bee-line to the nearest store to purchase a “flick-knife” (similar to a switchblade), which were banned for sale in England. Here’s Geezer’s account of his run-in with Malcolm Young:

“No, I didn’t pull a knife. I always had flick-knives when I was growing up because everybody used to go around stabbing each other in Aston (Butler’s birthplace in Birmingham, England). Flick-knives were banned in England, but when we were playing Switzerland, I bought one. I was just flicking it when Malcolm Young came up to me and started slagging Sabbath. I was just playing with the knife. I was really excited to get one again. I was having a drink and flicking my knife—like you do—and he came over and said: ‘You must think you’re big, having a flick-knife.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And that was it. Nobody got hurt.”

Hmmm. No Ozzy to the rescue? No flick-knives vs. drunken-fists brawling? In the book AC/DC FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the World’s True Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, it was alleged that Malcolm started throwing punches at Butler. I would not want to cast doubt on Butler’s version of the story. And the fact is, after the stop in Lund, AC/DC exited the tour prior to its conclusion, forcing Sabbath to cancel the last four dates. Still, I can’t help but think of his arrest in Death Valley, California in 2015 for punching a “drunken Nazi bloke” in the mug. Sure, he was drunk just like in 1977, but we all know punching Nazis is a forgivable act of well-deserved violence. It should also be noted the man Geezer attacked has told an entirely different version of the story, but stopped short of denying he was a Nazi. Geezer isn’t allowed to talk about the incident anymore because he had to sign an NDA and pay, in his own words, “the git” off. So what really happened in Lund, Sweden? Most of us probably prefer Malcolm’s “Ozzy saves the day” version, but I’m not as far to say Geezer Butler’s version isn’t the truth. Mostly because it’s pretty clear he does not fuck around when being fucked with.
 

Audio of Black Sabbath performing “Gypsy” from ‘Technical Ecstasy’ in Lund, Sweden, April 21st, 1977.

Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.07.2020
11:48 am
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Blondie show ends in a riot before it even starts, and cherries were to blame?
12.10.2019
07:24 pm
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Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol.
 
On December 8th, 1977, Blondie were set to make their first appearance in Brisbane, Australia. But the show didn’t go on as scheduled, and it would become known as the only show the band would be forced to cancel. In Australia, Blondie’s first record, Blondie was a huge hit, and fans were rabid as they waited at Her Majesty’s Theater, a former opera house, for the band to take the stage. And, as the title of this post indicates pretty clearly, that never happened. Here’s the story about how Debbie Harry’s alleged overindulgence on a fruit close to my heart, cherries, resulted in a good-old-fashioned punk rock riot.

As the story goes, the turnout for the show was about 1200 strong. After waiting around an hour for the show to start, drummer Clem Burke came out on stage to personally apologize to the crowd, letting them Blondie wouldn’t be able to play because Deborah Harry was “ill.” The cause of Harry’s illness was blamed on the singer eating too many cherries, and was apparently so acute a doctor was dispatched to the theater to treat the ailing singer. Ray Maguire, the band’s road manager, would later make a curious statement supporting the cherry-theory:

“In New York, we don’t see very much fruit, but out here, we’ve been going mad on it. I think that Deborah just had a few too many cherries over the last few days.”

I don’t know about you, but I had no idea there was some sort of fresh fruit crisis going on in New York in the 1970s. Anyway, after apologizing to the crowd, Burke was loudly booed and pelted with an object thrown by someone in the audience. As bottles and cans started to fly at the stage, Burke made a hasty exit while local Brisbane punk band The Survivors (known initially as Rat Salad, just like Van Halen) were begging show promoters to let them play. Some attendees started to leave while a group of five tried to get on stage and ended up throwing their fists at members of Blondie’s road crew. The fisticuffs continued backstage as crew members battled to eject the punchy fans, a few who were arrested by the police.

Meanwhile, other angry ex-Blondie fans somehow managed to remove a huge iron gate and iron bar from the premises and using their makeshift weapons to try to bust open the door. They were eventually able to hurl the iron bar over an opening at the top of the door, where it nearly landed on top of fans trying to leave what was pretty much a riot in progress. A riot attributed to an unnamed, unemployed twenty-year-old youth and three minors charged with willful destruction of property. The youngsters were tried in Children’s Court.
 

An article in the Telegraph describing the riot at Her Majesty’s Theater.
 
In a fantastic twist to this story, Australian writer and culture vulture Clinton Walker (author of many books, including the incredible biography on Bon Scott, Highway to Hell: the Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott) literally had a front-row seat when the riot began and, according to Walker, his pal Bob Farrell (later of the band Laughing Clowns) was one of the kids who stormed the stage. In Walker’s account of the riot, cherries were perhaps not to blame for Harry’s illness, but instead the ingestion of potent Australian heroin. The acclaimed author admits it was a “scurrilous” thing to say, but confirms it to be very much a part of the mythology behind the cancelation of Blondie’s first gig in Brisbane. Walker was also at the poorly attended make-up show ten days later on December 18th at Her Majesty’s Theater, where the band concluded their set by smashing up their instruments. Nice.
 

Blondie live at CBGB’s in May of 1977.

Posted by Cherrybomb
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12.10.2019
07:24 pm
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Ho-Ho-NO: ‘Quiet Beatle’ George Harrison invites the Hells Angels over for Christmas, 1968


George Harrison posing on a Triumph motorcycle in 1972.
 
Beatle George Harrison was a profoundly fascinating cat and a mass of contradictions. Despite being known as the “quiet Beatle,” Harrison could prove to be anything but. A deeply spiritual man, Harrison believed he had led a previous life. He brought his Beatle bandmates to Northern India to become better acquainted with transcendental meditation in 1968. Later that same year, gentle George invited members of the Hells Angels to the offices of Apple after meeting a few of them getting high on Haight Street in San Francisco.

Rolling Stone founding editor David Dalton wrote about the entire affair. When Harrison met two Angels, Bill “Sweet Willie Tumbleweed” Fritch, the leader of the SF Hells Angels in the mid-60s, and Frisco Pete (Pete Knell), he extended an invitation for them to visit him in London, and attend a Christmas party at Apple Corps headquarters. Since you can’t ride a chopper all the way to London from San Francisco, the Angels’ spiritual advisor (yep), Peter “Monk” Zimmels (formerly a Buddhist monk on the run after deserting his gig with the U.S. Navy), went to concert promoter Bill Graham for travel cash.

Graham was already in deep with the Hells Angels and had received four death threats (noted in the book The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label) including bullets fired into his office at the SF Fillmore by the infamous motorcycle gang. So when Peter the Monk arrived at the Fillmore to talk to Graham, his negotiation tactics revolved around the promise to “remove” the bullets in exchange for a $1,000 bucks so the Angels could go party with the Beatles in London. Graham coughed up the cash quickly, and a bunch of Hells Angels and two of their motorcycles would soon be on their way to see their pal, George. In anticipation of their visit, Harrison sent out a memo on December 4th to Apple Corps, letting them know a dozen members of the Hells Angels would be guests at Apple Corps’ Savile Row offices:
 

 

Now the notion Harrison was concerned about the Hells Angels visit is pretty apparent, as he ominously reminds Apple staff to not allow the bikers to “take control” of Savile Row—to say nothing of their plans for Czechoslovakia, which is over 800 miles away from London. Once they arrived, only two of the Angels actually made it through customs, Frisco Pete and Tumbleweed, along with an assorted group of hangers-on. When they arrived at the party, they were expecting to hook up with George, who would later whisk them away to his massive mansion. Once Harrison showed up, he gave the motley group a tour of Apple and then vanished, leaving the staff at Apple to deal with his guests. At the party, John and Yoko were dressed as Ma and Pa Christmas while a giant 43-pound turkey took its time cooking. All the while, Hells Angels, being Hells Angels, along with their jet-lagged entourage, consumed tons of booze and smoked hash. A completely blotto Frisco Pete, blind from drink and suddenly hungry, lurched into the main party room and screamed at John Lennon, “What the FUCK is going on in this place? We wanna eat!”

Pete’s announcement sucked all the air out of the room as everyone waited to see what was going to happen next. This is the part of the story when fists start flying. Because it ain’t the holidays until someone gets punched.

According to The Zapple Diaries, journalist Alan Smith responded to Pete’s demand for grub, politely asking the biker to “have a little consideration.” This got Smith punched in the face by the angry, drunk, high and hungry biker, sending him across the room where he crumbled into a pile on the floor. Now Pete turned to Santa Lennon and screamed the following:

“You got more fucking food in that kitchen than there are people, and it’s all locked up, and those two fucking broads upstairs tell me I’ve gotta wait until 7:00 just like everybody else! There’s a forty-three-pound turkey in that kitchen, and I want some of it now!!!”

 

A photo of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Apple artist Mary Hopkin at the Apple Corps Christmas Party in 1968.
 
After Lennon told Pete it wasn’t “cool” to be hungry, Peter Coyote (Frisco Pete’s multi-talented actor/director/friend, who had spent the flight from California to London injecting himself with methamphetamine and B12 to help “cure” his hepatitis), intervened telling Lennon to take a seat. It was now time for Apple’s administrative director Peter Brown to materialize and deliver this soliloquy (via The Zapple Diaries) to Frisco Pete in an effort to chill out the volatile situation:

“Now listen, Pete, we have every intention of feeding you, and I apologize for the delay, but I was hoping you could appreciate the kitchen staff have been working since 9:00 am, and they’ve been under considerable pressure. We’re waiting for the caterers to finish laying the tables, and it shouldn’t take more than another ten minutes, and then we can all go downstairs and gorge ourselves to death, but please, I beg you, be patient.”

Amazingly, Brown’s very English entreaty didn’t get him whomped in the face; it instead, quite surprisingly, sent Frisco Pete back to his clan, who were still imbibing and salivating in the other room. As promised, ten minutes later, the downstairs boardroom opened, and because he was hungry and presumably all out of fucks to give, Frisco Pete grabbed a turkey leg and started eating it caveman-style. The rest of his entourage invaded the room and devoured the entire dinner, including the fancy wine it was served with. Then, since it ain’t really a party until somebody pukes, several of Harrison’s not-so-angelic guests barfed on the carpets due to overindulgence. The bikers would stick around Apple, sleeping wherever they wanted, including George’s office, until, a few days into their invasion, Harrison finally asked if they would be “moving all of their stuff” out tonight. The biker contingency was caught off guard, still thinking Harrison was their buddy, causing someone in the group to ask George if he “dug them or not.” Harrison’s very “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” response was allegedly as follows:

“Yin and yang, heads and tails, yes and no.”

Apple Corps president Neil Aspinall witnessed the showdown, recalling that Harrison’s quizzical comment left the bikers speechless. To illuminate what George was trying to say, he chimed in with, “You know, BUGGER OFF!” which wasn’t lost on Tumbleweed and Frisco Pete, and the group left without further incident.
 

 
The trailer for the 2017 documentary ‘The Beatles, Hippies and Hells Angels: Inside the Crazy World of Apple.’ Narrated by Peter Coyote.
 
With thanks to the wonderful Martin Schneider.

Posted by Cherrybomb
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12.05.2019
12:48 pm
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David Hershkovits’ ‘Light Culture’ pot podcast will give you a contact high
11.25.2019
02:52 pm
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It seems like in every circle of friends there’s at least one person who’s an inveterate weed snob. The one who can always be relied upon to spark up a joint of the good stuff. If you happen to know me, well, I’m that guy, but I have friends who are “that guy” as far as I’m concerned (nearly all of my close friends are heavy, heavy stoners). One of them is David Hershkovits, the former co-founder, co-editor/publisher (with Kim Hastreiter) of New York City’s long-running style bible PAPER magazine. Since selling PAPER David has embarked on a new enterprise, his Light Culture pot-themed podcast which is presented by Burb Cannabis in Vancouver. I asked him about it via email.

How long have you been a pot smoker?

David Hershkovits: I’ve been an off and on (but mostly on) pot smoker for 50 years. More off when my kids were born. Plus, I periodically take month-long breaks. What’s great about pot — among other things — is that you CAN stop if you have to.

So why a weed podcast? Beyond cannabis, what’s the mission of the show?

David Hershkovits: I find the Light Culture podcast a natural continuation of what I’ve been doing for all of my professional life. When I sold PAPER Communications two years ago, divesting myself of PAPER magazine, papermag.com the website with a huge social media presence, and an experiential marketing division, I was looking to stay in the game. I’d been fascinated by podcasts as media and saw Light Culture as a great opportunity to keep on playing in my favorite sandbox of pop and politics. So when I joined the Vancouver-based cannabis company Burb as a consultant, we landed on launching a podcast to connect the brand with a community that bridges cannabis past, present and future. Socially, politically and economically cannabis touches on so many issues right now. It’s an industry still early enough in its evolution to be shaped into something progressive, aware of its social justice implications, counter cultural legacy and responsibility to the disproportionately black and Latino communities who have taken the brunt of the War on Drugs. As a long-time advocate for decriminalization, I want to be part of the conversation.

Who have some of your guests been?

David Hershkovits: My guests have included Fab Five Freddy Brathwaite, a renaissance man of hip hop who paints, directs, acts, produces. We spoke on the occasion of Grass is Greener, a Netflix documentary that goes into the history and culture of the plant, especially as it relates to music and the creative impulse.  With Vanessa Lavorato of Bong Appetit we spoke about food and cannabis and women’s evolving role in the culture.

It’s all too obvious where one finds cannabis culture in California—just walk outside and take a good whiff—but where do you find it in New York?

David Hershkovits: Cannabis culture is alive and well in NYC, not only on the streets where vaping and puffing proliferate and people are willing to spend to get the best shit, legal or otherwise. It spans all demographics from skate to art to foodies on the hunt. Secret clubs catering — and selling — to cannabis connoisseurs are opening as well. In a recent survey New York was named as the largest consumer of Cannabis world-wide. So there!

What is the legal situation there? Is it a state law or a municipal ordinance?

David Hershkovits: The legal situation today is that the police have been asked not to make arrests for small amounts, tickets can be written but no one is going to jail if all you’re carrying is for personal use. Still sucks, though. New York City feels like the (un)stoned age compared to Cali.

What about the dispensaries that are popping up around New York? Are they good?

David Hershkovits: Nah, I don’t use dispensaries. I’m fortunate to know who I know which means that I only smoke the best shit.

Danny Fields: David and Danny talk about the wild days of New York when weed was everywhere and Danny was a confidante of all the young dudes from Lou to Iggy to Joey and Nico.

Joe Murray aka “AJ Sour Diesel” — great story about New York in the 90s when Deadhead kids in high school were hanging out in Wetlands, scoring the best weed in the city and then going to on establish Kind Bud — Sour Diesel.

More ‘Light Culture,’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.25.2019
02:52 pm
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The Family Acid takes a psychedelic look at the Golden State in ‘California’


 
After the Grammy Award-winning success of their exquisite Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition box set Ozma Records, the imprint founded by bOING bOING’s David Pescovitz and his business partner Tim Daly, are back with a gorgeous coffee table art book celebrating the Golden State.

The Family Acid: California takes a trip with Roger Steffens, a name instantly recognizable to reggae fans, as Steffens is known worldwide as one of the foremost historians of Jamaican music and a biographer of Bob Marley, in addition to being an NPR interviewer and DJ. He’s also a traveller who has had a camera in one hand (a joint in the other) as he’s spent the past five decades seeking out the psychedelic, the eccentric, the outlandish and the transcendent:

Roger Steffens is an intrepid explorer of the fringe but he’s also a family man. He met his wife Mary under a lunar eclipse in a pygmy forest in Mendocino, California while on LSD. Soon after, they conjured up a daughter, Kate, and son, Devon. Family vacations took the foursome up and down the West Coast, from the gritty glam of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to reggae festivals in Humboldt, fiery protests in Berkeley to the ancient redwoods of Big Sur and the wilds of Death Valley. Along the way, they’d rendezvous with like-minded freaks, artists, musicians, and writers, from Bob Marley and Timothy Leary to actor John Ritter and war photographer Tim Page, the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now.

They’d take in the wonders of nature—hallucinatory sunsets, expansive mountain vistas, the dreamlike haze engulfing foggy mountain roads. And, of course, the adults would occasionally lose their minds in psychoactive celebrations of creativity, freedom, and hope. Set and setting were everything.

This book is a collection of snapshots taken between 1968 and 2015 during Roger, Mary, Kate, and Devon’s freewheeling adventures across the visionary state they call home. Think of it as a family album belonging to a very unconventional family.

Some of the photographs have appeared on The Family Acid Instagram feed, but the lavishly-published The Family Acid: California contains hundreds of full-color images, most never seen before, with detailed captions and an original essay by Roger Steffens. Pre-orders of the 192-page book come with a limited-edition photo print on perforated LSD blotter paper (undipped, sorry!), 6.25” x 10”, and signed on the verso by Roger Steffens. The blotter print is available with the book at a special package price or separately.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The blotter paper print.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.08.2019
09:35 am
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