Fascinating film about Leonard Cohen the poet/novelist and not yet folk singer of 1965. It’s strange to see him a) so young (he’s 31 here) and b) to see him being funny! Parts of his act back then was straight stand-up comedy. Leonard Cohen funny?

Informal portrait of Leonard Cohen. The film begins with Cohen delivering a comic monologue about his visit to a friend in a Montreal mental hospital. Later he is seen reading poetry to rapt audience and also alone, or relaxing with family and friends, walking the streets of the city, eating in a popular night spot, sleeping in his three-dollar-a-night hotel room, even taking a bath. His poetry readings are principally from “A Spice-box of Earth” and “Flowers for Hitler”. A press conference with Cohen and his friend Irving Layton forms a part of the film.

Filmed and recorded at various locations in 1964, released in 1965 by the National Film Board of Canada. Directed by Donal Brittain and Dan Owen, produced by John Kemeny. Black & white, 44 min.

 
Thank you Nicolae Halmaghi!

 
Last night when I stumbled across the Bob Dylan/Bette Midler bootleg on Vimeo, I saw that the poster, dagb (that’s all I know about him and I suspect he would like to keep it that way) had also uploaded One Man’s Week, the 1975 documentary about the late great British eccentric and Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band singer, Vivian Stanshall. Erudite—and alcoholic—Vivian is interviewed and seen working on his African-influenced album Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead.

If you’re a Bonzos fan, this is a little bit of heaven, I promise you.
 

 
For a quick overview of who Stanshall was and why you should care, I suggest watching this, first:
 

 
Interesting 2007 essay by Sean Wilentz from the Oxford American Magazine about the recording of one of the greatest albums of the last century, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. A couple of interesting quotes in the piece from actor-musician Kris Kristofferson, who at the time (1965) worked as a janitor in the recording studio where the album was made. Here Wilentz describes the scene when the epic Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was created:

The strangest Nashville recording dates were the second and third. The second began at six in the evening and did not end until five-thirty the next morning, but Dylan played only for the final ninety minutes, and on only one song: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He would later call it a piece of religious carnival music, which makes sense given its melodic echoes of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Unlike “Visions of Johanna,” though, this epic needed work, and Dylan toiled over the lyrics for hours. The level of efficiency was military: Hurry up and wait.

Kristofferson described the scene: “I saw Dylan sitting out in the studio at the piano, writing all night long by himself. Dark glasses on,” and Bob Johnston recalled to the journalist Louis Black that Dylan did not even get up to go to the bathroom despite consuming so many Cokes, chocolate bars, and other sweets that Johnston began to think the artist was a junkie: “But he wasn’t; he wasn’t hooked on anything but time and space.” The tired, strung-along musicians shot the breeze and played ping-pong while racking up their pay. (They may even have laid down ten takes of their own instrumental number, which appears on the session tape, though Charlie McCoy doesn’t recollect doing this, and the recording may come from a different date.) Finally, at 4 a.m., Dylan was ready.

“After you’ve tried to stay awake ’til four o’clock in the morning, to play something so slow and long was really, really tough,” McCoy says. Dylan continued polishing the lyrics in front of the microphone. After he finished an abbreviated run-through, he counted off, and the musicians fell in. Kenny Buttrey recalled that they were prepared for a two- or three-minute song, and started out accordingly: “If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ’cause we thought, ‘Man, this is it….’ After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”

The song came to life as swiftly as any of Dylan’s ever had, requiring only two complete takes.

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands took just two takes? WTF?
 

 
The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville

 
The always excellent Soul Jazz Records have released a new DVD, 135 Grand Street New York 1979, a rough-hewn documentation of the No Wave scene, by Ericka Beckman. Featured groups in the film are Theoretical Girls, UT, A Band, Rhys Chatham, Chinese Puzzle, The Static, Morales, Youth in Asia, Morales, Steven Piccolo and Jill Kroesen.  (In the mid-80s, I worked with Jill Kroesen, briefly, at a video post production facility in New York called Caesar Video Graphics. She was a really good designer as I recall).

Recently screened at the Museum of Modern Art and currently showing as part of Sonic Youth’s ‘Sensational Fix’ touring art exhibition around the world, the film has also screened before Glenn Branca’s most recent live shows in New York City.

In this documentary film, punk rock and non-musicianship fight it out with art world attitude. Garage band line-ups in varying degrees of musical destruction sit alongside post-everything poetry and cultural terrorism. Ericka Beckman’s film matches the rawness, minimalism and radicalism of the music - a fitting document and visual statement of new forms created out of New York’s anti-everything musical nihilism, circa 1979.

This film includes the only known footage of many No Wave bands of the period. It is a film about bands filled with painters, filmmakers, actors - and occasionally musicians - thriving and thrashing in the pulsating, vibrant post-punk world of New York where high art met low culture; where Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Wharton Tiers, Taro Suzuki and the others featured here made the connections between John Cage and Joey Ramone, between the questioning of art and ? and the Mysterians.

 
Thank you Steven Daly!

 
Text and photos culled from the Jet magazine (starts at page #22) where Cleaver discusses the philosophy behind his pants, which, to quote the former Black Panther Party leader, “are just the tip of the iceberg.”

It’s a fascinating read.  Cleaver goes on to describe his then-plan to open a finishing school for boys where they’ll learn, among other things, manners, how to dress, and how not to rape.  And here’s the text that accompanies B. Laner’s prior post:

Life is just a chain of daisies when you slip into (careful, now) these revolutionary hot pants – with their ever-so-daring accent provacateur – just unveiled by famous radical designer Edridge Cleaver of Paris.  They’re bad, they’re mad, they’re up front (but never out of sight)... and, of course, they’re for men only… REAL men… the three-fisted variety. ‘There’s no mistaking they are men’s pants,’ says M. Cleaver (seen here modeling a high-waisted two-tone pair of ‘Cleavers’ with side zipper and matching ‘appurtenance.’  ‘The pants that men wear now will be seen as girls’ pants after my models are sold.  And don’t forget…heavy on the starch!”

 
Eldridge Cleaver in Jet Magazine, 09.21.78

 
In light of Bradley’s penis pants post I’ve had several hipsters point out to me that Eldridge Cleaver was there first, and so he was. Lord have mercy.
 
thx Heather Harris And Deborah McElmeel !

 
Ringo Starr is saying “who cares” to the Vatican’s late embrace of The Beatles. Starr rolled his eyes at the Catholic Church, which praised the group and expressed forgiveness to John Lennon for his comments that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”

“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.

The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.

“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.

But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”

The Vatican doesn’t appear to be extending the same kind of olive branch to other popular bands, such as Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath and The Eagles.

In 1996, those groups were among several - including The Beatles - that Pope Benedict XVI warned youth against listening to when he was still a cardinal, claiming their music contained “subliminal” satanic influences.

Lennon’s full quote was “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” We suspect the late Beatle would feel the same about the Vatican’s volte-face as Starr does.
 

 
Ringo Starr tells Vatican to ‘Get Back’; dismisses effort to ‘forgive’ The Beatles (NY Daily News)
 

 
I dig this.

Cult figure Kim Fowley, record producer, rock impresario, songwriter and musician. Manager of The Runaways, Animal Man and the original Mayor of the Sunset Strip. “One of the most colorful characters in the annals of rock & roll.” Thrill to gossipy stories of Sly Stone and Doris Day; Sonny and Cher; Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin, Gene Vincent and more. Part 1

 
Fascinating! Speeches given during two evenings in 1974 and stitched together into a nine minute video. I had never seen any film or video of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch Jr. before and this is educational. For a guy thought of as a total crackpot (and I’m not saying he wasn’t) he comes off here much better than, say, Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. He’s at least thoughtful, not hyperbolic and he’s even somewhat intellectual. Certainly puts Glenn Beck into perspective, doesn’t he?

Thank you WIlson Smith!