Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played George Jefferson, was known to be a huge fan of prog rock, especially Gentle Giant, Nektar and Gong.

Hemsley collaborated with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7” (never produced). Hemsley also did an interpretive dance to the Gentle Giant song “Proclamation” on Dinah Shore’s 70s talkshow, that was apparently somewhat confusing for her.

But the best story, I mean the best story of all time, is the one told by Gong’s Daevid Allen about his encounter with the beloved 70’s sitcom star. Here is Allen’s verbatim tale as related to Mitch Myers (and originally published in Magnet magazine):

“It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought,  ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’

I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’

Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.

We went up to the top floor and there was this big room with darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.

[My girlfriend] Maggie and I were really tired and went to our room to go to bed. The room had one mattress with an electric blanket and that was it. No bed covering, no pillow, nothing. The next day we came down and Sherman showed us a couple of [The Jeffersons] episodes.

One of our fans came and rescued us, but not before Sherman took us to see these Hollywood PR people. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Hemsley wants us to get the information we need in order to do these Flying Teapot billboards on Sunset Strip.’ I looked at them and thought they were the cheesiest, most nasty people that I had ever seen in my life and I gave them the runaround. I just wanted out of there. I liked Sherman a lot. He was a very personable, charming guy. I just had a lot of trouble with the people around him.”

Oi, if Daevid Allen thinks you’re weird, you must be a stone freak! (Like our pal, opera singer/actor Jesse Merlin. He met Daevid Allen in San Francisco and Allen said “Just look at him. He’s a perfect example of himself!” Coming from Daevid Allen, that’s the best compliment in the history of the world, isn’t it?)

Below, Sherman Hemsley as “George Jefferson,” dancing up a storm to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way”!
 

 
After the jump, Gong on French TV, 1973.

 

Alan McGee has shared this gem with Dangerous Minds - Joe Strummer’s original lyrics for “London Calling.”

LONDON CALLING

THE NEWS OF CLOCK NINE
RETUNE YOUR RECEIVER FOR THE LONDON SIGN

LONDON CALLING TO THE FARAWAY TOWNS
NOW THAT WAR IS DECLARED AND BATTLE COME DOWN
LONDON CALLING TO THE UNDERWORLD
COME OUT OF THE CUPBOARD ALL YOU BOYS & GIRLS
LONDON CALLING NOW DON’T LOOK TO US
ALL THAT PHONY BEATLEMANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST
LONDON CALLING SEE WE AINT GOT NO SWING
‘CEPT FOR THE RING OF THAT TRUNCHEON THING

THE ICE AGE IS COMING The Sun is zooming in
ENGINES STOP RUNNING & The WHEAT is Growing THIN
THINKING NUCLEAR ERROR, BUT I HAVE NO FEAR
LONDON IS DROWNING - AND I LIVE BY THE RIVER

LONDON CALLING TO THE IMITATION ZONE
FORGET IT BROTHER, AN GO IT ALONE
LONDON CALLING UPON THE ZOMBIES OF DEATH
QUIT HOLDING OUT - AND TAKE ANOTHER BREATH
LONDON CALLING - AND I DON’T WANNA SHOUT
BUT WHEN WE WERE TALKING - I SAW YOU NODDING OUT
LONDON CALLING - SEE WE AINT GOT NO HIGHS
EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE WITH THE YELLOWY EYES

The lyrics are still as potent as when they were first written. Alan was given this piece of rock history by the song’s co-writer Mick Jones, and says, ‘Some people have the Bible, we had The Clash.’

 
Promo for ‘London Calling’, after the jump…
 

 
If you haven’t heard, there’s a new Julian Cope book coming out and even compared to his other incredibly worthwhile publications (The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European, extensive studies of Britain’s and Europe’s ancient stone circles megalithic sites, the classics Japrocksampler and Krautrocksampler and his hilariously honest autobiographical accounts of the Liverpool punk scene and his own rock stardom in Head On and the follow-up, Repossessed) this one looks like a complete motherfucker.

It’s 768 pages to lose yourself in and discover new things. A signed, deluxe edition of 250 will come with three CDs. Here’s the description from the publisher, Faber & Faber’s website:

Julian Cope’s Copendium is his re-imagining of a useful canon of popular music, which is set to become required reading. It’s available initially in a limited and highly collectable edition (see below) - with a standard edition due in November 2012.

Copendium comprises a collection of album reviews and themed track samplers that lay out an alternative history of the last six decades of popular music, written by the visionary musician, antiquarian and musicologist. The result is a feast of obscure and neglected masterworks; Krautrock, motorik and post-punk, stoner and doom metal, occasionally even jazz, spoken word and hair metal.

Julian Cope is the perfect guide to this novel terrain: impeccably informed, passionate, insightful and deeply funny.

The fact is, for many people—and I am very definitely in this camp, myself—a musical recommendation from Julian Cope is practically a decree to get your hands on something, the same way it was when Lester Bangs wrote about The Stooges, Lou Reed or The Clash. Cope’s wild-eyed passion for convincing you, his reader, that you need, nay MUST have this deep rock and roll epiphany that he has had and that some obscure or overlooked album is a very real and necessary shamanic rite of passage, is, for me, frankly irresistible. The quality of his prose is second to none (I detect the influence of Bangs, yes, but also John Sinclair or Mick Farren in his more polemic essays) and he’s just got fucking phenomenal taste.

Truly, there is no better guide, none, to the hidden history of the last six decades of music, both popular and otherwise, than Julian Cope. Over the years, I have been turned on to so much amazing, life-enhancing, life-changing music that I feel like I owe him a heartfelt public thank you. Has anyone written as passionately about music since the death of Lester Bangs, than Julian Cope? Not one writer comes to mind.

It was via Cope’s Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker compilation that I first heard of Scott Walker, for instance, inspiring at least a ten-year long Scott Walker obsession for me. And it was Cope’s brilliantly written assessment of Miles Davis’s “difficult” electric phase of the early to mid-70s that saw me dive deeply into those funky waters (and a year-long period where I listened to practically nothing else—my neighbors must have hated my fucking guts!).

Hell, I first picked up on Faust due to Julian Cope (this alone calls for more than a public thank you—perhaps naming a child after him?). The Taj Mahal Travellers? Never heard of ‘em before Japrocksampler, now I am obsessed with their music. I could go on and on.

In fact, here’s something that I was turned onto just this very morning via Cope’s writing on his Head Heritage website. My introduction to Ash Ra Tempel came via their Seven Up collaboration with Timothy Leary. It’s not an easy thing to listen to (the band and Leary were tripping on LSD when they recorded it) and is something that I filed away with my collection of Timothy Leary memorabilia (not my CDs), probably never to listen to again, frankly. I was not interested in hearing more. However, this morning I came across this essay, from 2000:

Ash Ra Tempel’s first two LPs had taken the metal of Detroit to heights not even considered by the MC5 or the Stooges or even Funkadelic. Sure those groups had got close on stage. But Ash Ra Tempel got it on record. While the collective Detroit obsession with the Outer-spacings of Sun Ra and the free-jazz innervisions of John Coltrane had been tamed beyond recognition by the American record industry, Ash Ra Tempel suffered no such disappointment. And those searching for the fulfilment of the Detroit promise need have looked no further than Ash Ra Tempel in 1971. There’s a part of Iggy Pop’s autobiographical I Need More in which he writes (p.17) about the early Stooges sound thus:

“...I’d play this sort of wild Hawaiian guitar with a pick-up that I invented, which meant that I made two sounds at one time, like an airplane…using 55-gallon oil cans which I got from a junkyard and rigged up as bass drums, I home-made a drumset. For drumsticks I designed these semi-plastic moulded hammers. Scotty beat the shit out of these cans; it sounded like an earthquake – thunderous… It was entirely instrumental at this time, like jazz gone wild. It was very North African, a very tribal sound: very electronic. We would play like that for about 10 minutes. Then everybody would have to get really stoned again…But what we had put into 10 minutes was so total and so very savage – the earth shook, then cracked, and SWALLOWED ALL MISERY WHOLE.” (my capitals)

Music that Swallowed All Misery Whole…

In the first two Ash Ra Tempel LPs, Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, they had captured on record All that Iggy Pop had promised Could Be but, because of Record Industry Hang-ups, had been unable to deliver. And this music which could Swallow All Misery Whole reached into the core of each musician who played in Ash Ra Tempel and pulled out, still wriggling, the cosmic conger eel of white light which so few artists ever capture in the Moment of Recording.

For years, I had drooled over that description in I Need More. I’d shown many friends that passage – I had bored them with it. And all the time Ash Ra Tempel had already done it in 1971… But it was not without a price. The first LP was by a Kosmische power-rock trio of gargantuan size. The 20-minute opening track “Amboss (Anvil)” was all of Iggy Pop’s above description and more. Sure it was a fucking cosmic freakout. But it was played by Renaissance Man and Cosmic Man at the same time.

Fuck Jim Morrison’s ridiculous “Renaissance Man of the Mind” description.
That was just an excuse to be a fat slob.
That was just an existentialist knee-jerk.
No. No. No.

These freaks were fit. Superhuman. Superman.

They were here to go. But all in good time. And they had staying power over 20-minute tracks. On “Amboss”, Klaus Schultze plays drums like a hundred drummers. He’s not twice as powerful, he’s a hundred times as powerful. Hartmut Enke, the spiritual leader of the band, hits his Gibson bass the way only a giant could: the huge extra-longnecked she-bass was courted, cajoled and ultimately goosed into action by this huge handsome freak they all called The Hawk. And Manuel Gottsching plays blues like Clapton, but right alongside pre-emptive Keith Levene white noise and egoless as Lou Reed’s Live 1969 rhythm guitar freakouts. The interplay is so intuitive that frequently it’s impossible to hear the instruments — you just hear the Music. And the LP was housed in yet another of Ohr Records’ extravagant packages — a centrally opening gatefold with an Ancient Egyptian exterior, a freaky occult gematriac interior, and a tragically beautiful Head poem that began: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness staring hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

After the jump, hear “Amboss” by Ash Ra Tempel…

 
Well, it’s actually a recycled photo that’s been making rounds on the Internet for a while. Apparently no one will ever be able to escape this image…

“In his new ad for PETA, Morrissey continues his crusade for animals and asks you to help eradicate the animal overpopulation crisis by spaying and neutering your companion animals,” PETA said on their website.

Below, an outtake I found from the cat-on-the-head photo shoot.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Heaven Knows He Was Miserable Then: Morrissey’s first postcard to a pen-pal from 1980

Via BuzzFeed

 
The first pro-shot footage of The Stone Roses performing together in 16 years has appeared on You Tube. Taken from their concert at Benicàssim International Festival, Spain, on July 14th, 2012, when the Roses give a rousing version of “I Wanna Be Adored”. And while Brown, Squire and Mani may have aged well, the drummer Reni looks like he is auditioning for Rab C Nesbitt.
 

 
With thanks to Stevie McGuire
 

 
Dangerous Minds exclusively premieres the Solar Bears’ superb remix of David Douglas’ “California Poppy”.

Since their stunningly brilliant debut She Was Coloured In, John Kowalski and Rian Trench, aka Solar Bears, have been exceedingly busy, as John told DM:

‘Rian has been recording other bands for the past year including I Am The Cosmos and we have been travelling a great deal.

‘Most recently, we have recorded our second album called Supermigration at Rian’s studio in Wicklow. It features 13 brand new songs and is more hard hitting than our debut, mainly because of playing live more. We have been experimenting with new styles and treatments.

What’s next?

‘Getting a release date and continuing to write to see what else we can come up with. You can hear tracks off the second lp in our recent Boiler Room set.

Here’s the premiere of Solar Bears remix for David Douglas’ “California Poppy”. Douglas released Royal Horticultural Society an ‘impeccably, produced and arranged’ EP last month, with the ‘hazy sun-drenched’ “California Poppy” as opener. David Douglas shares his name with the 19th century Scottish horticulturist, who traveled across North America collecting and itemizing seeds from plants and trees. This is superb music for the head, inspired by the famed botanist, and brilliantly remixed by Solar Bears, and will be available from September.

Check here for music by David Douglas and here for Solar Bears.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Video for David Douglas’ ‘California Poppy’ and bonus Solar Bears track, after the jump…
 

 
This is raw video of an interview from the early ‘90s with Devo co-founder Jerry Casale that was intended to be used in a documentary on the band that was, as far as I know, never completed. But the footage as it is still serves as a wonderful history of Devo and an entry into the brilliant mind of Casale.

The fact that you can’t hear the questions being asked of Casale doesn’t diminish the interview in the least. It’s full of fascinating insights and anecdotes detailing the genesis, rise and continued success of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s truly visionary bands. Casale delivers all of this with wit and sharply observed truths about the art and business of pop music.

Spud-boy Casale is one very intelligent potato and this video should be mandatory viewing in high school art classes (if they still exist).

Unfortunately, there’s about six minutes missing from the interview that contains some musical content that was disallowed by Youtube for licensing reasons. If that situation changes, I will update this article.
 

 
Clearly a labor of love by a fan who adores Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Greek director Nicholas Triandafyllidis’ I Put A Spell On Me manages to transcend the sort of cinematic mash note that directors who are too in awe of their subject tend to create. This documentary is the kind of testament Hawkins deserves - a solid and well-rounded film that features insightful interviews and great live performance footage. It’s unbelievable that no one thought of telling Hawkin’s tale before 1999, the year Triandafyllidis began filming his movie.

Documenting Hawkins’ tour of Greece, Triandafyllidis manages to capture Hawkins in full force and it’s hard to fathom that only four months after this concert footage was shot Hawkins would die of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 70.

Over the years the song “I Put A Spell On You” has sold over 18 million copies. But Hawkins never received any money for the tune because of the kind of dirty dealing that we’re all too familiar with when it came to record companies and how they treated Black artists. Arguably one of the most influential and pioneering figures in rock ‘n’ roll, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins never got his due. This documentary is a small step in the right direction in bringing attention to a legend. Too bad he wasn’t around to see it.

Jim Jarmusch, Bo Diddley and Eric Burdon add their invaluable perspective to the film.
 

 
Art: Drew Friedman

 
Ian Dury and The Blockheads with Dr. Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson play solid set at the Palace Theater in Paris, 1981.

The always sartorially and satirically sharp Dury looks like he’s channeling a combination of Bryan Ferry and Jack The Ripper in this fab bit of musical history.
 

 
This mash-up is from 2008, but I just discovered it and dig its sexy spookiness. It was produced by Wax Audio and Reborn Identity, the guys behind the Mashed In Plastic project.

David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti: “The Pink Room” (from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me)
AC/DC: “The Jack”
Dead Can Dance: “Dawn of the Iconoclast”