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New ‘visual history’ book celebrates 50 years of the Residents! Sneak peek and exclusive premiere!
12.15.2021
05:18 am
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‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.15.2021
05:18 am
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Best album of the year: Scott Lavene returns with ‘Milk City Sweethearts’
12.05.2021
12:51 pm
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All photos by Andrew Leo Photography

Way back at the start of 2020, I already knew that I’d probably end up naming Scott Lavene’s second album, Milk City Sweethearts, as my top album of 2021—just as I named his Broke my favorite album of 2019—because I’d heard nearly every song on the album in demo form long before it was released. The demos sounded like finished songs, and as my long-suffering wife will attest to, I played the shit out of those demos. Over and over and over again, for like three or four months straight. (Luckily she liked them, too. “That fucking love song about amphetamines is now stuck in my brain forever,” she told me.)

Milk City Sweethearts—out now on vinyl and streaming in all the usual places—is a damned fine album. There are no weak songs on it. It’s all killer, no filler, but certain numbers do still stand out. Lucky for you, I’ve posted it below. There is no obstacle whatsoever between you and hearing what I think is just… the very finest example of an up & coming singer-songwriter making music today. I get it, you’ve never heard of the guy, nevertheless I am not wrong. If you like the likes of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Squeeze—or Father John Misty—you will, I am absolutely certain of it, find much to love in Scott Lavene’s music. Maybe even scroll down and play it as the soundtrack to reading the rest of this post? You won’t regret it.

And it’s not just the music, because he is also a wonderfully charismatic performer. It is impossible not to be charmed by his (often quite elaborate) music videos and easy to imagine The Scott Lavene Show turning up on television one day. Sketch comedy, celebrity guests, a little song and dance… He’s that sort of “old fashioned” performer. You don’t encounter his particular brand of talent much these days, you just don’t.

So yeah, Milk City Sweethearts is my very, very favorite album of the year (the runner-up is Cathal Coughlin’s terrific Song Of Co-Aklan). I think you should hear it. And if you like it (what’s not to like???) you should tell all your friends. Scott Lavene, at this point in his career, is still very much a word-of-mouth sort of artist, so please spread the love and maybe follow him on Twitter?

What more can I say? Time for me to give Scott a chance. I asked him a few questions over email. Below you will find an embedded a Spotify playlist, and several of Scott’s latest videos, including the premiere of “The Toffee Tickler,” directed by the very talented Ryan Anderson, who often collaborates with Lavene.

As you don’t have an obvious fit with the same pop charts that recognize Dua Lipa, BTS or Olivia Rodrigo, how do you and your label go about promoting your music? What is the strategy?

The strategy is mainly banging on closed doors. Sending emails to radio and bloggers and magazines. Sending hard copies of the album when they show up. We have distribution which helps get the record in shops. For this album we had funding for some PR but they did pretty much nothing so we just rely on word of mouth. But, since the pandemic it seems i’ve got more of an audience as more people are coming to my shows and we’ve sold more pre orders. It’s growing. People that like my music really really like it.  Broke wasn’t really doing much until Dangerous Minds found the record so we just crack on and wait for the little breaks. 

Where do you see yourself fitting in?

I’m not sure I fit in anywhere. Everyone I get compared to is from the 70’s. I think of myself as an old fashioned songwriter though I’ve been added to a couple of post punk playlists so I guess I’m also that, which is ok as it’s a bit of a thing at the moment. But, oh my do I love writing ballads. I’ve written a new album that I’m hopefully going to record soon and it’s more of the same odd stories and trying to make pop songs out of mental health problems. Then after that I’m going to make a whole album of ballads. Big stinky, cynical, weepy ones. I guess I don’t want to fit in. A lot of my heroes just made what they liked and didn’t fit in anywhere other than in their own worlds and that’s what I’m aiming for, invites into my delicious environment of bad love and misfits.

Well I have noticed that nearly every single time that I’ve pestered someone to have a listen to what you do—and they actually listen—you make an instant convert. I sent a link to “The Ballad of Lynsey” to a arch rock snob friend of mine and his immediate reply was “You’re right, this guy is some kind of genius.” Bart Bealmear, one of the writers at Dangerous Minds heard about you first via that post I did about you in 2019, and he told me that his wife and also his mother-in-law became big fans of Broke as well. It seems to me that anytime someone with good taste is exposed to your music, you gain a new fan.

Yeah. It seems that when people get it, they really get it. And they get it bad. These are the people that make it all worth it, that make me think I’m not just churning out shit. I’m terrible at networking and getting in people’s faces. I just can’t be bothered, and I’m shy. But, anyway, I feel successful. There was a time when i thought I might not play again. Plus, I’ve made some great music in the last few years, music I’m proud of, music that’s taken years of living to make. Teenagers, the middle aged and oldies buy my records. I love it.
 

 
I think tenacity is the key and that you’ll just have to keep plugging away, and producing new music and eventually the fans will find you, and then they’ll have an deep back catalog to discover. You’re like a one-man version of the Go-Betweens, but eventually people did catch on to them. I think it will happen for you, I really do. Your music is just too good. Now what about your publishing? I can easily imagine your stuff being used in TV and movies.

A one man version of the Go-Betweens is my new favourite compliment, thank you. I think I’m getting better. I thought I’d never write an album like Broke but Milk City Sweethearts is better yet and this next one I’m working on is going to be amazing. And yes, I’ve got a new publisher. A small but great one based in Newcastle called Wipeout Music. They’re working away on that side of things so we’ll see. It used to be called selling out but fuck that. If it means I haven’t got to get a normal job for a while then I’ll sell out in a flash. However it would be ironic to make advertising money from a song called “Broke.”

Much more with Scott Lavene after the jump, including the premiere of his latest video, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.05.2021
12:51 pm
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The Electric Prunes’ 4th LP is a rock opera no original members play on—and it’s surprisingly good
12.02.2021
10:09 am
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Electric Prunes 1
 
In the mid 1960s, the group Jim and the Lords inked a deal with producer Dave Hassinger’s production company. After a name change, the first Electric Prunes 45 was released. Their next two singles, 1967’s “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” and “Get Me to the World on Time,” are excellent examples of American psychedelic pop/rock, and both were Top 40 hits. Those tunes were written by outside songwriters, and so was much of the Electric Prunes’ self-titled debut album (1967), as Hassinger only permitted two group compositions on the LP. While the band successfully lobbied to have more of their own material included on album #2, Underground (1967)—and it’s a better record—there were no hit singles from it, and the LP didn’t do much in the marketplace. Things were about to change for the band in a way none of them could have foreseen. 
 
Electric Prunes 2
 
For the third Electric Prunes record, the trio of Hassinger, Prunes manager Lenny Poncher, and noted producer, arranger, and composer David Axelrod came up with the idea for the group to record an album of Axelrod’s compositions. The LP would combine classical and religious music with psychedelic rock. Once in the studio, the band was slow to pick up the material, as most of them didn’t read music. The pace of the learning curve wasn’t to Axelrod’s liking, so another group, the Canadian outfit the Collectors, was brought in, along with session musicians. In the end, the actual Electric Prunes only play on side one of Mass in F Minor (1968), though a few members, including lead singer James Lowe, appear on all the tracks. The album—a rock opera in which all the lyrics are sung in Latin—is a mixed affair. It’s certainly odd and obtuse. The opening number, “Kyrie Eleison,” is the highlight and the record’s best-known song, as it later appeared in the film Easy Rider (1969) and on its soundtrack. It’s the only track on the album lacking any orchestral accompaniment.

Following the album’s release, the Electric Prunes broke up. Though their moniker lived on.
 
The Electric Prunes 1
 
The Electric Prunes’ name would continue to be used on subsequent LPs, despite the fact the no original members remained. Which brings us to album number four.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Bart Bealmear
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12.02.2021
10:09 am
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DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale talks about his new music videos and the vertiginous pace of de-evolution!
11.24.2021
06:07 pm
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Gerald V. Casale and Josh Freese in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” directed by Davy Force

With the human species seemingly hurtling toward the center of a body-pulping, dream-pulverizing vortex, Dangerous Minds sent one of its bubble-eyed dog boys from the recombo DNA labs in the Valley for a briefing from Jerry Casale. DEVO’s chief strategist, film director, songwriter, singer, and bassist shed light on our dire predicament as few others could. He also discussed his new solo music video, “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” and revealed his plans for its upcoming 3D sequel, “The Invisible Man,” news that is balm for our awful hurt. A lightly edited transcript follows.

How was the tour, from your point of view? One of the high points of my year for sure was seeing DEVO again.

Where did you see it?

At the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in LA.

You know, that’s an amazing amphitheater. It’s kind of a replacement for the wonderful amphitheater we had that we used to love playing at, that was ripped apart for Harry Potter rides?

The Universal Amphitheatre.

Up in Universal City. So this one kind of approximates that in architectural style, in the stage, in the sound, so, yeah, good venue. They don’t have their management together, that’s for sure. It’s overbearing; in these COVID times, they had so much security going on, it was like warring kind of TSA factions or something. But I thought the show went pretty well.

Well, for a guy like me, Jerry, I guess it’s the closest thing I have to a religious ceremony in my life, that Booji Boy, no matter how many times he dies, keeps coming back to sing “Beautiful World.”

[Laughs] It was hardly a tour, however. It was three measly shows. So, yeah.

I know. I wish there had been more—

Me too.

—but I’m grateful for what I get.

Well, if it were up to me, there would be a lot more.

Is that across the board, in terms of recording and touring and all that stuff?

Of course, of course. I mean, obviously, I founded the band, and I remain as excited and true to the concepts and principles of the collaboration and the experimentation as I was in 1977.
 

DEVO in the lab, 1979 (via DEVO-OBSESSO)
 
Dean Stockwell just died, and I know he was an early champion of the band, so I wanted to ask about your relationship with him. But I also wanted to ask about this weird phenomenon that DEVO seems always to have been, like, one degree of separation from the Black Mountain poets, and I think of Dean Stockwell as being part of that too, since he was friends with Robert Duncan. So if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Where do we start there? First of all, with Dean Stockwell, he was part of a group of kind of the outsider artist, [Topanga] Canyon people. I mean, he had been with Toni Basil, they were close friends with Neil Young, Dennis Hopper—there was a whole little universe of people there, actors, musicians. So when Toni Basil came to see us play at the Starwood in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles, and converted, flipped out, she turned Dean and Neil Young on to us. And they, in turn, became very excited and became advocates, and, you know, insisted that we appear in Neil’s movie.

Neil was in the process of that movie [Human Highway] that kept morphing in terms of what it was, and what the message was, and who would act in it, and what the plot was, and we were involved in scenes in that movie early on, and many of the scenes that were shot were then jettisoned, because the whole idea of the movie changed, and it went on for another two years. And that culminated with us doing this vignette inside the movie of being disgruntled nuclear waste workers in Linear Valley, which was a fictitious valley in the film, and we were singing “It Takes a Worried Man” while we loaded leaky barrels of nuclear waste onto the truck and took them to the dumpsite. And that was an idea I’d thrown out that Neil liked, and he gave me his crew, basically, he let me direct that sequence. He gave me the funds in the budget to do a loading dock set, and used his truck—he actually owned that truck—and he made us the uniforms and the custom helmets with the breather packs that went into our noses.

So it was fantastic shooting 35 millimeter film, doing this whole thing that I thought was going to appear intact inside the movie. But of course, no; it was then decided upon some kind of editing whim to chop it up and make it a through line, and keep coming back to it throughout the movie, so it really made no sense [laughs]. But the movie made no sense. It’s an amazing piece. Certainly had a lot of talent behind it and a lot of budget behind it.

What’s funny is, although this never happens, the subsequent re-editing, re-editing, re-editing, new director’s cut, new director’s cut—the last thing that Neil ever did to it was actually the most cohesive and the best, and worked the best. And he also collapsed the movie so it wasn’t some sprawling, two-hour bit, you know, it was concise. And it just suddenly made more sense [laughs], believe it or not, which never happens when people go back and rework something over and over, they keep going down a rabbit hole. But I actually liked it, and I got to speak at a couple of these screenings he had where there were Q&A from the audience about the making of it. So yeah, it was great.
 

DEVO shine as nuclear waste workers in Neil Young’s ‘Human Highway’ (via IMDb)
 
Back to the Black Mountain thing. It started with a poet, Ed Dorn, who had come to the Black Mountain school, he was a poet that liaised with all those poets that were famous at that time, from City Lights—

Ferlinghetti?

You know, like what was his name, somebody Giorno…

John Giorno.

John Giorno; of course, Allen Ginsberg; all these poets. And they had been part of this cadre of people of like-minded sensibilities that started as Beats, basically, in the Sixties. And Ed Dorn became a professor of poetry, English lit, at the University of Boulder, and he had gotten a, whatever it’s called, a guest professorship at Kent State University on the heels of the killings at Kent State. So he came in the following fall on a visiting professorship, set up in a house off-campus.

And immediately, you know, all the academics and hipoisie intelligentsia that were outsider people at Kent State—‘cause it was a tight-knit group of people who didn’t fit into the MBA, fraternity scene, right? We were the artists, we were pursuing fine art programs, pursuing MFAs in English literature and so on—we, of course, gravitated to Ed Dorn, he was a great guy. And Bob Lewis and I, who was an early colleague and, pre-DEVO the band, had, with me, created these DEVO concepts of de-evolution, and I had been applying it to visual art and he had been applying it to poetry, we hung out with Ed in 1971, ’72, and we were spewing all these theories to Ed, and Ed found us completely entertaining, you know, like, these strident kids think they reinvented the wheel. The ideas weren’t foreign to him at all. So he would say, “Oh, if you think that, here, read this!” and “Oh, well by the way, so and so said this!” And he just egged us on.

So he gave us the ammunition. And then Eric Mottram came in that following year from Kings College in England, and he had been friends with all these people, and he had been teaching their works at Kings College in England, and he was a quote “lefty” intellectual. And he brought in people like Jeff Nuttall, who had written Bomb Culture.

So it was just this big lovefest of wonderful ideas and concepts, where you’d been thinking things, other people across the world had been thinking things, and there was this beautiful synchronicity, right? Who knew this could happen at Kent State University? And half of the reason it happened is ‘cause of the killings, and the reaction to the killings, and people banding together, like as a survival tactic, against this pending fascism and Nixonianism. So there’s a long, convoluted answer to your short, concise question.
 
MUCH more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.24.2021
06:07 pm
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Barry Adamson: Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars
11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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Photo of Barry Adamson by Mark David Ford

Multihyphenate musician-soundtrack composer-photographer-filmmaker (and former Bad Seed and member of Magazine) Barry Adamson has now added “memoirist” to that list.

Certainly no moss is growing under the feet of the Moss Side, Manchester-born Adamson. His incredibly evocative, highly detailed and sometimes frankly shocking autobiography, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars was recently published by Omnibus Press, he’s got a new digital EP, Steal Away, just out and has completed a soundtrack for an upcoming documentary about London’s legendary arthouse cinema, the Scala Cinema.

Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars is an extremely well-written book, one of the best things I’ve read in ages. And I would be remiss in my duties here not to inform the reader that Adamson is either playing on, or created no fewer than six albums that would easily be in my top fifty: The first three Magazine albums, the first two Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums, and his own soundtrack for an imaginary film, Moss Side Story.  The man is a living legend.

I asked Barry Adamson a few questions via email.

First, your memory! How are you able to recall such vivid details about your life? It’s extraordinary!

Thanks! Some things are best forgotten, as the saying goes but throughout most of my life I’ve collected snapshots and angles on my own and the lives of others and stored them, committed them to memory like an archive and I never knew why but perhaps now I do. I thought everybody did this and I think to some extent they do. The amount of people I’d say I was writing a memoir to and then suddenly, they would find things stored away in there own archive. There’s also the noir style which helped me put them into a particular context as well.

There’s a very cinematic quality to so many of the anecdotes recounted in the book. Will you be developing this material further, say, writing a script?

I’ve not thought about that but sometimes, borrowing from Dennis Potter, the scenes in the book become ‘film-like’ to almost thrust the sense of that cinematic quality. I needed (in the same way I do with music) to be able to clearly visualise each sentence, so maybe that’s a factor in how the book’s overall filmic structure formed. It was a gamble to try and write it that way but one I think that paid off.

As far as autobiographies go, this one is a very, very nakedly revealing memoir indeed. I don’t get the sense that you’ve held much of anything back. What made you decide to do this?

I put myself as the central character in my life and decided that if it were a film or perhaps a novel, then you would see all the sides of this character; their challenges, struggles, conflict (on many levels) and light and dark and crap decision making and sitting with him throughout the story, so, difficult as it was at times and I make no bones about it, it really was, I knew that holding back would weaken ‘the story’ and that the filmic arc that I wanted to create around those first thirty years of my life could flatten out to a possible blandness which I didn’t want.

You’ve done a soundtrack to a documentary about London’s legendary repertoire moviehouse, the Scala. I’ve been there a few times myself. One time I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and I was the only one in the cinema when it started, but by the time it was over several homeless people had camped out around the room. It seemed like a fairly sleazy place, did it widely have that reputation?

Well, for me, it was a place of refuge where you were fed this… art, art that you didn’t come across anywhere else. Sleazy. Yes. Glamorous. In it’s own way, yes. The all-nighters were events like no others and the fact that those films imprinted themselves so ferociously into my brain is to me, a sign that what was happening there was something special. Interesting that you remember so clearly what film you saw and the homeless scenario. I was possibly one of them!

Below, the video for “The Climber,” the lead track from the new Steal Away EP

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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‘Scum’: Nick Cave gets his revenge
10.28.2021
03:17 pm
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When Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds finally played the Ritz in New York City during their Your Funeral… My Trial tour, it was a makeup date, rescheduled for a Sunday in February, after an earlier, sold out Friday show the previous October had been cancelled at the very last minute. On that night, when I got to the venue, there was a large crowd of people dressed in black standing in the street outside. Mick Harvey sat atop a huge cube of equipment covered by a tarp. I asked him “What happened?” and he shrugged and threw his hands up. “We don’t know where Nick is.” (The answer, it was later revealed by the Village Voice, was that Cave had been busted copping dope in Harlem and was then sitting in jail. This was in the days before cell phones, and I am reasonably sure that Mick was fearing something far worse might have happened.)

The rescheduled date came some weeks after the end of the tour and the Sunday show was poorly attended, so it was easy to get near the stage. I stood directly in front of Cave’s mic stand. Now, I don’t want to imply that Nick Cave has mellowed out over the years—because he really hasn’t—but my favorite era of Cave’s work is from Mutiny! through Kicking Against The Pricks. “Junkie Nick Cave,” in other words. It was thrilling, almost scary, being so close to someone so seemingly unhinged and angry. Some of it didn’t necessarily seem like an act. His stage presence was fearsome and impressive, in a Keith Richards “elegantly wasted” meets Antonin Artaud sort of way. Larger than life. Cave wore a blue velvet tuxedo with a ruffle collar shirt and cuffs and he looked dead cool. His performance was so energetic and so physical that it appeared to me that heroin must have exactly the opposite effect on him that it has on most people. Or maybe he had just taken a different sort of vitamin? I don’t know, but I will say this, when the band walked offstage, the house lights stayed off, awaiting their reappearance for an encore. They stayed off for nearly ten minutes and when Cave finally staggered back onstage, his eyes were absolutely bloodshot red and he looked and acted very, very high. It seemed obvious what had caused the delay.

If I haven’t gotten the point across that this was one of the very best concerts that I’ve ever seen, it absolutely was. Cave was then, and still is, the best frontman of our time—and this was an incarnation of the Bad Seeds that included both Blixa Bargeld and Kid Congo Powers—but in the first decade of his career, he was more intense, more dangerous, more… fucking evil, basically. Today’s Nick Cave is more akin to a rambunctious revival preacher, but back then he just seemed homicidal. But, you know, in a good way.
 

 
On the way out I purchased the tour program, a black and white glossy fold-out poster with a green flexi disc attached to the front. The song, titled “Scum,” was an incredibly vitriolic and outrageously spiteful diatribe that was clearly directed towards one person, that person being an NME writer who Cave had briefly been flatmates with named Matt Snow. 

A sample lyric:

He was a miserable shitwringing turd
Like he reminded me of some evil gnome
Shaking hands was like shaking a hot, fat, oily bone.

Here’s another:

His and herpes bath towel type
If you know what I mean
I could not look at him, worm

OUCH!

Here’s how it ends:

I think you fucking traitor, chronic masturbator,
Shitlicker, user, self-abuser, jigger jigger!
What rock did you crawl from?
Which, did you come?
You Judas, Brutus, Vitus, Scum!
Hey four-eyes, come
That’s right, it’s a gun
Face is bubble, blood, and, street
Snowman with six holes clean into his fat fuckin guts

Psychotic drama mounts
Guts well deep then a spring is fount
I unload into his eyes
Blood springs
Dead snow
Blue skies

One needn’t wonder how Nick felt about his former flatmate, does one? Apparently what had ticked him off was a lukewarm review.

Imagine what it must feel like to hear yourself immortalized in song? But THAT song? Oh dear…

Well, apparently Matt Snow took it all in stride, and even thought if was funny, At least this is what he told the Guardian in 2008:

In 1980 my old school buddy Barney Hoskyns was writing for NME and wanted someone to go to gigs with. I became his plus one. The Birthday Party (an early band of Cave’s) were just fantastic, incredibly exciting, wild and feral, and we became part of their scene, which consisted of hanging out, playing records, doing drugs and drinking. I had a straight job and by night morphed into a nocturnal creature. It was an exciting scene to feel vicariously part of. It felt like you were living through a Velvet Underground song. I remember Nick [Cave] setting his hair on fire with a candle: everything was part-Baudelaire, part-Keith Richards. But by 1983 the Birthday Party had broken up and Nick was forming the Bad Seeds. He and his girlfriend Anita were asking for somewhere to crash for a while, and the pair moved in with me. He was still doing heroin but he was discreet. He was a good housemate. It was funny because he was always nagging Anita about her diet, yet he was shooting up! They moved down the road and we lost touch.

I raved about his From Her To Eternity album in NME but then, in a singles review, happened to drop in that the forthcoming - second - Nick Cave album “lacked the same dramatic tension”. A year or so later I found myself interviewing Nick formally for the first time. He kept me and the photographer waiting for hours. The PR was very jumpy. I got a very unusual interview. I asked him what the problem was and he said, “I think you’re an arsehole” and mentioned that he’d written a song developing this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green seven-inch flexidisc called “Scum.” I think it’s one of his best songs, and very funny. Like Dylan’s Mr Jones, I’d rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius’s scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. My wife to be was a big Nick Cave fan—“Scum” is “our song.”

And there you have it. 
 

 
“Scum” is included on the first volume of B-Sides & Rarities, a 3-CD set of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ er… b-sides and rarities, which has now been joined by a sequel, B-Sides & Rarities Part II, a 2-CD compilation that features previously uncollected tracks from the years 2006-2019. Both sets together comprise a special limited edition seven record vinyl box set, which you can enter below to win.

Listen to “Vortex,” a previously unreleased song featured on Vol II.
 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.28.2021
03:17 pm
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Lucky 13: Stream the latest installment of ‘Brown Acid’ featuring long lost heavy rock from the 1970
10.28.2021
10:21 am
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There must be some mythical and hidden cache of chukka-chukka hairy hard rock one-offs from the 1970s, because how else to explain that there is yet another installment—lucky 13!—of the (obviously) long running Brown Acid series. I mean, where do they find this stuff? Or does it find them? And by them, I mean arch crate digging maniacs Lance Barresi—co-owner of the Permanent Records stores in Los Angeles and Chicago—and RidingEasy Records label head Daniel Hall.

Where other archival series like Nuggets and Pebbles eventually got tapped out, Brown Acid is still going strong with their Thirteenth Trip, which is chock full of  long-lost, rare, and unreleased hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal tracks from daze gone by.  And they license these songs legitimately and actually pay the artists (who, I would imagine are somewhat bemused to be getting paid for nearly never-heard songs recorded 50 years ago.)

Here’s a stream of the entire thing, featuring never famous names like Dry Ice, Bacchus, Orchis, Good Humore and Max (who were originally called Dawn before Tony Orlando’s lawyers put a stop to that.)

Brown Acid: The Thirteenth Trip will be available to buy on vinyl and CD from RidingEasy Records on October 31. All treats, no tricks…
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.28.2021
10:21 am
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‘Trouble Boys’: The song that ignited the Replacements (with a DM premiere)
10.19.2021
10:38 am
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Replacements 1
 
In late 1979, when the Replacements first got together, they started out as many bands do—playing cover tunes in the basement. They worked up songs by Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, the Who, the Ramones, Slade, the Kinks, and others, including Dave Edmunds. They rehearsed several times a week, and it was during one practice session, after finishing up a particularly inspired rendering of the Edmunds rocker “Trouble Boys”—a number the troubled members of the Replacements could collectively related to—the foursome realized that they had something. 

The moment is chronicled in Bob Mehr’s indispensable biography of the group, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements (2016).

During one weeknight rehearsal, as they tore through a version of Dave Edmunds’s “Trouble Boys,” they took the song’s twanging rhythm and gave it a screaming thrust. “There’s trouble boys all around me,” howled [Paul] Westerberg as he and Bob [Stinson] traded lead and rhythm back and forth, while Chris [Mars] and Tommy [Stinson] battered away at the beat.

When the last note rang out and the song was over, there was silence. Looking at one another, they realized, as Paul would recall, “that we had fallen in together.”

 
Sorry Ma back cover
 
Though “Trouble Boys” was a pivotal song for the Replacements and was played live numerous times by the original lineup, it hasn’t appeared on a Replacements release. That’s about to change, as a live version has been included on Rhino Records’ pending 40th anniversary deluxe edition of the band’s dazzling debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Out October 22nd, the four-CD/one-LP box set features a whopping 67 previously unreleased tracks (!!!) among the very generous 100, in total. Among the formerly unissued are studio demos, outtakes, alternate takes and mixes, and basements recordings. There’s a sprightly new live album that was captured for a radio broadcast, though only part of the show aired. Given the impudent title of Unsuitable for Airplay – The Lost KFAI Concert: Live at the 7th St Entry, Minneapolis, MN, 1/23/81, the disc contains otherwise unissued originals and covers (“Trouble Boys” among them), as well as songs that would later turn up on their debut LP. The punk-inspired Sorry Ma has been freshly remastered, while the vinyl, christened Deliberate Noise – The Alternate Sorry Ma, replicates the original running order, replacing the album versions with a selection of the demos and alternates. A most-excellent twelve-by-twelve hardcover book, with rarely seen photos and liner notes by Trouble Boys author Bob Mehr, is also included. Overall, this is a truly superb set and an absolute must-have for ‘Mats fans. Order your copy through Rhino’s online store or via Amazon.
 
Replacements 2
 
Rhino’s exclusive web bundle has a reproduction of the self-deprecating flyer from the 7th St Entry gig, a repressing of their first single, and more goodies. Get all the details here.
 
Deluxe 2
 
Dangerous Minds is pleased as punch to present the premiere of the fiery live rendition of “Trouble Boys” from the Unsuitable for Airplay CD on the deluxe edition of Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash.
 


 
Two other songs from the show are streaming online: Sorry Ma opener, “Takin A Ride” and the album’s ballad—concerning the notorious Johnny Thunders—“Johnny’s Gonna Die,” that then segues into a cover of the Heartbreakers’ “All by Myself.”
 

 

 
Rhino has put out three new Sorry Ma videos, including an animated work for the snarling “Shutup.”
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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10.19.2021
10:38 am
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Doll-size versions of serial killers, slashers and super creeps
10.11.2021
04:06 pm
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Twisted Tug’s doll-sized version of Sid Vicious. It sold for $700.
 
Twisted Tug’s, an artist studio out of San Diego, California specializes in creating “one of a kind edgy art collectibles,” such as horror props, eerie original conceptions and designs, and, as the title of this post indicates, dolls. But not the kind of dolls you might get for your uncool niece—unless of course, she prefers bad guys (and girls) to Barbie. All joking aside, Twisted Tug’s dolls, which are crafted from vintage ventriloquist puppets (YIKES!), are true collector’s items and have garnered praise from their famous fans, including director James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious, and most recently Malignant). Another distinction Twisted Tugs’ dolls is that they are true works of art – and true works of art do not come cheap. Tug’s spot-on doll-version of hatchet-loving Annie Wilkes from the film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery (as played by actress Kathy Bates) sells for $800. Though some consider works of art created in the image of infamous serial killers as poor taste, the fact is the market and fanbase for such things has been around as long as serial killers themselves. Homicidal sicko John Wayne Gacy started painting and sketching while waiting for his execution by lethal injection. Later, many of his works of “art” would be displayed in galleries and at auction would sell for several thousands of dollars, and in one instance, $20K (noted in the 1990 book Murder Casebook, Investigations into the Ultimate Crime, Vol. 4, Part 54, Orgy of Killings (Murder Casebook) by Marshall Cavendish). So while you might not like it, there are plenty of people who dig things that exist in a realm completely removed from what is generally considered an acceptable standard.

Getting back to Twisted Tug’s’ dangerous dolls, yes, you can purchase them, though TT sadly does not take commissions. For more information on how you might obtain one of Twisted Tugs’ insidious dolls, feel free to drop Tug’s a line here. Now, as it is October, the time of year when we celebrate all things grim and gross, let’s take a look at some of the inhabitants of Twisted Tugs’ equally twisted world.
 

Twisted Tug’s Annie Wilkes (as played by actress Kathy Bates) in the 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, ‘Misery.’
 

A frozen version of Jack Torrance (played by actor Jack Nicholson ) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film ‘The Shining.’
 

Zelda Goldman (played by actor Andrew Hubatsek) in ‘Pet Sematary’ (1989).
 

Madison Mitchell (played by actress Annabelle Wallis) in James Wan’s 2021 film ‘Malignant.’
 
Many more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.11.2021
04:06 pm
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‘Babooshka’: Hilarious Tik-Tok trend with a Kate Bush soundtrack
09.30.2021
09:32 am
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Longtime Dangerous Minds contributing editor Martin Schneider sent me this hilarious clip with the quip:

TIL that the Youngs have turned Kate Bush’s “Babooshka” into a TikTok meme.


I hope Kate Bush has seen this!

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.30.2021
09:32 am
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