A sly, surly and sardonically funny Bob Dylan lays into Time Magazine correspondent Horace Judson in this scene captured by D.A. Pennebaker in 1965. This IS punk rock! John Lydon was 9 years old when this footage was shot. Bob went out on a limb when most pop stars played it safe. You know Lennon was paying attention.
Judson ended up writing a favorable piece on Dylan.
In-depth and fascinating, Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles charts the evolution of the Southern California rock scene of the sixties thru the seventies. Based on Barney Hoskin’s book of the same name, this is good stuff, whether or not you’re a fan of the lite psych/folk sound of L.A., Topanga Canyon and points West. Myself, I can do without The Eagles, CSN&Y and Jackson Browne, but The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, solo Neil Young and Joni Mitchell still tingle my spine.
Parts 3 thru 7 after the jump…
Having spent my early teen years in France, I was exposed to alot of French rock singers. Of course I was in love with Francoise Hardy and I owned a bunch of singles by Johnny Halliday and Sylvie Vartan. The Yé-yé scene was my scene. Michel Polnareff became a star after I left France but I was still following French rock close enough to appreciate his distinctive style, which was more Brit poppish and American West Coast hippie than his French peers.
English recording studios offered more advanced technology than Paris, so Polnareff went to London to record La Poupée Qui Fait Non. It was released in 1966 and immediately became a huge hit. Great French rock songs are rare and this one hovers at the edges of greatness.
La poupée qui fait non translates as ‘the doll who says no’.
She is a doll who says “no, no, no no”
All day long, she says “no no no no no”
She is, she is so cute
That I dream of her all night
She is a doll who says “no, no, no no”
All day long, she says “no no no no no”
No one has every taught her
That one can say “oui”
Without even hearing, she says “no no no no”
Without looking at me she says “no no no no”
However I would give my life
for her to say “yes”
However I would give my live
That she would say “yes”
But she is a doll, who says “no no no no”
All the day long she says “no no no no”
No one has taught her
That it’s possible to say “yes”
Oh no no no non no
no no no
She says no.
La Poupée Qui Fait Non has been covered by many artists, including Saint Etienne and Jimi Hendrix. This version by Mylène Farmer and Khaled is the loveliest in my opinion.
Hendrix does La Poupée Qui Fait Non after the jump…
In addition to being a smashing songwriter, singer and memoirist, Julian Cope has spent the past 20 years exploring and documenting Britain’s megalithic heritage: monuments, stone circles, hill forts and barrows. In this documentary made for the BBC, we follow Cope on his journey into the geography of the mystic, a place of ceremony and magic.
The documentary is a companion piece to Cope’s splendid, sadly out-of-print, 1998 book ‘The Modern Antiquarian’. Fortunately, for those of us interested in sacred places he curates a website and you can find it here.
Since launching in March 2000ce, the site has grown to be a massive resource for news, information, images, folklore & weblinks on the ancient sites across the UK, Ireland and Europe.
Watch parts 2-6 after the jump…
The recently deceased Tuli Kupferberg plays God in the wild 1972 underground film, Voulez-vous coucher avec God? made by Canadians Michael Hirsh and Jack Christie. A rare screening of Voulez-vous coucher avec God? will take place on November 14 at the Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. in Manhattan during a special celebration of celluloid Tuli called “Fug on Film.” Presented by Arthur.
J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice:
As strenuously druggy, anarchic, and blasphemous as it is, this 1972 feature might have been one of the many post–El Topo movies auditioned as a midnight attraction by the old Elgin Theater and might even have caught on. Instead, it’s having its belated local premiere this Sunday as part of Anthology’s tribute to Kupferberg, beat poet, Fugs founder, and Voice contributor (mainly in the form of letters to the editor).
Here, he plays Middle America’s worst nightmare: His God is an unkempt, hairy schmoozer, consorting with his female subjects in a vaguely Baghdadian crash pad identified as Hashish Seventh Heaven, while holding forth in a braying New York accent: “Give ‘em some of that blackface crap—we’ve got enough sexism,” he advises the filmmakers in between chants of “Oy, oy, let’s bomb Hanoi!” As cheerfully offensive as it is, the movie’s greatest outrage comes when God anoints a toothless derelict to run for U.S. president. (The same actor, identified only as “George,” doubles as the angel Gabriel—in which role he’s punished for dereliction of duty with a hot-oil enema.)
Slapdash, but not badly made, this exercise in Yippie vaudeville employs Claymation and television, as well as a bevy of naked houris, to hold one’s attention—although it does fall apart midway. End title delivered as a moon notwithstanding, the climactic gross-out is the mouse omelet prepared for George—a repast that only serves to burnish the genius of John Waters, whose Pink Flamingos (the movie in which Divine eats dog shit) was the Elgin’s midnight attraction for 48 weeks, from late winter 1973 to January 1974.
Over at the Village Voice website hip hop and rap aficionado Phillip Mlynar has put together a top ten list of some of the worst singing ever committed to disc by rappers. See and hear the whole list here.
In the first audio clip, Biz Markie and The Beastie Boys maul Elton John’s ‘Bennie And The Jets’.
The team’s attempt to tackle the Elton John number “Bennie And The Jets” originally appeared as a free flexi-disc with Grand Royal magazine back in the mid-‘90s. Brilliantly, at times it sounds like Biz has no idea what the original lyrics are, so instead he falls back on slurring syllables together as he blunders through the track.
In the next clip, Ol’ Dirty Bastard tears into The Foundations’ ‘Build Be Up’ with all the style of a pit bull attacking a chunk of raw meat.
The Hill blog reports that outgoing Florida Governor Charlie Crist is considering pardoning Jim Morrison for a crime that was most likely never committed.
In his last two months in office, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is considering a December surprise: a posthumous pardon for Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, for indecent exposure charges after an infamous 1969 Miami concert. In a phone interview with The Hill, Crist said “stay tuned” regarding the idea of a posthumous pardon for the singer who died in Paris in 1971. Crist said he won’t make the decision lightly, noting the many complexities surrounding the 41-year-old case. Numerous sound recordings from the show exist, for example, but Morrison’s defenders say none of the scores of photographs from the show prove the exposure charge. “We would have to look into all of that,” Crist said.
Archival footage of Morrison’s Miami trial (no sound).
Via The Daily Swarm
Dutch ersatz Merseybeat gone psych band Zipps grapple with the irksome Marie Juana with the aid of gratuitous harpsichord and quaint European xenophobia. Marie Juana, architect of the gods of my mind…. Huh ?
Thanks again, Clint Simonson!
Billy Carter was Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing redneck, alcoholic baby brother. An annoying presence in the 1970s with his frequent TV appearances (on shows like Hee-Haw and Merv Griffin’s talkshow) Billy’s trademark drunken antics—like taking a piss in front of news reporters—served as a constant and frightening reminder that we’d elected a president sharing the same DNA with this hillbilly idiot.
Until the 1979 “Billygate” influence-peddling scandal where Carter was given a loan of $220,000 dollars by the Libyan government, familial relations aside, his biggest claim to fame was “Billy Beer,” a dank, syrupy, shitty, moldy-tasting brew named after him, which he claimed not even to drink himself (Carter drank Pabst Blue Ribbon). At one point, idiotic beer can collectors were said to be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a can of the mythic “Billy Brew” until the seemingly never-ending supply of said beer cans—after all they made millions upon millions of these things—eventually burst this rather dubious speculative bubble!
As a young man I grew up in the South and I hated country music. That changed when I first started hearing songs from The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons solo work, all of which seemed to me to be quite different from the hillbilly shit I’d grown up around. The West Coast country vibe had a wide-openness about it that was more in tune with my Jack Kerouac inspired desire to hit the road…a road that was as much a metaphor for spiritual yearning as a slab of tar and concrete. Gram Parsons’ western music wasn’t solely about blue collar blues, booze and bad women. Parsons was a romantic in the traditional poetic sense, a seeker of beauty in the coarseness of everyday life. Yes, it was honky tonk music, but in Gram’s world the honky tonks weren’t violent dives of retribution, they were a kind of cowboy cafe society that weren’t far removed from the cafes of the French surrealists in Paris of the 1930’s, where absinthe was drunk instead of tequila.
This interview with Michael Bates in 1973 was Gram Parsons’ last recorded conversation. 6 months after the interview Parsons O.D’d on morphine and tequila in a motel on the edge of the Mojave desert.
Bate’s connection to Gram is almost accidental. In 1973—while he was the host of a CBC radio show in Ottawa, Ontario—Bate was on a road trip when he happened to spot Parsons’ beaten-up tour bus by the side of the Massachusetts Turnpike, 90 miles from Boston. He stopped and arranged an interview, which he says turned out to be the final recorded conversation with Parsons, who died that September from an overdose of morphine and tequila.
Gram candididly talks about Keith Richards and The Stones, bad dealings with The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and how Waylon Jennings had to walk around the block to smoke a joint during a recording session with Chet Atkins. In the beginning of the interview Parsons makes mention of being stuck in England and left penniless by The Byrds. Gram was fired by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman when he refused to join them on a South Africa tour as he was was opposed to apartheid. Some of his friends at the time thought Gram actually quit The Byrds so he could hang out with The Stones in London.
It’s Gram’s birthday today (Nov. 5).