Last night I watched The Story of Wish You Were Here, the new Blu-ray documentary release from Eagle Rock Entertainment about the creation of Pink Floyd’s landmark 1975 follow-up to their monster-selling Dark Side of the Moon album. I loved it, but then again, I’m one of those Pink Floyd fans who can hear the same damned stories repeated over and over again without ever getting bored of them. In truth, there is not all that much ground covered here that’s not been covered in past Pink Floyd documentaries, but it’s so well done that this is in no way an impediment to enjoying the film. It certainly wasn’t for me.
Wish You Were Here was released in September 1975, and considered by band members Richard Wright and David Gilmour,to be their favorite Pink Floyd album. The recording of the album seemed to be somewhat of a tortured affair for the band—Roger Waters has said several times that he felt like the group was exhausted, creatively drained and perhaps should have just broken up—but slowly a powerful album came together, inspired by the band’s debt to its tragic founder, Syd Barrett and the album’s lead-off cut, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The story of an unrecognizable Barrett showing up for an impromptu visit at the recording studio as the song was being mixed is a harrowing anecdote indeed. Several present broke down in tears at the sight of their old friend.
Also featured in The Story of Wish You Were Here are sleeve artist Storm Thorgerson of the legendary Hipgnosis design firm, Roy Harper who did the sarcastic vocal for “Have A Cigar” (many people assume this is Roger Waters, it’s not), Hollywood stuntman Ronnie Rondell (the “burning man” of the album jacket), backing vocalist Venetta Fields (The Blackberries) and others, including photographer Jill Furmanovsky who documented some of the sessions. Wish You Were Here recording engineer Brian Humphries also reveals some of the secrets of the master tapes at Abbey Road Studios, illustrating how certain sonic elements were constructed [for instance the shimmering “singing” wine glasses sound that opens the record, was reused from the aborted Household Objects recording sessions.
Little-known are the two music videos directed by Oscar-winning Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger for Debbie Harry’s 1981 solo album KooKoo (for which Giger also did the now iconic cover art).
“Now I Know You Know” was written by Harry and Chris Stein and produced by Chic’s resident geniuses, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. At the time of KooKoo‘s recording, sick of being “Blondie” and taking a year off from the band, Harry had dyed her signature two-tone bleached-blonde hair brunette and was pictured on the album cover with four spikes going through her head and neck (something inspired by Giger’s visit to his acupuncturist).
The video was shot in H.R. Giger’s studio in Switzerland, in it Harry cavorts around in a sexy black wig, with make-up and a body-hugging catsuit painted by Giger.
Another video was shot by Giger—and he’s in it, too, judging from the hairstyle of the masked male “magician” character—for KooKoo‘s first single, “Backfired,” but it’s pretty weak, actually.
Not going out tonight? Then stay in and enjoy over 2 hours worth of compilation footage of the Blizen Jazz Festival, from 1969. The concert includes performances by Deep Purple, The Move, Humble Pie, Shocking Blue, The Moody Blues, Soft Machine, Marsha Hunt, leading up to a joyous set by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
Here’s the listing as posted on YouTube in no particular order:
Shocking Blue - August 22, 1969
“Venus” + interview
Deep Purple - August 22 1969
“Wring That Neck”
“Mandrake Root”
Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - August 22, 1969
“Big Shot”
“You Done My Brain In”
“Hello Mabel”
“Urban Spaceman”
“Quiet Talks And Summer Walks”
“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”
“Canyons Of Your Mind”
“Trouser Press”
Taste - August 22, 1969
“Blister On The Moon”
“Sugar Mama”
Moody Blues - August 22, 1969
“Tuesday Afternoon”
“Have You Heard” (Part 1)
“The Voyage”
“Have You Heard” (Part 2)
Soft Machine - August 22, 1969
“Moon In June” + interview
Marsha Hunt & White Trash - August 22, 1969
Interview
“My World Is Empty Without You Babe”
Brian Auger & The Trinity - August 22, 1969
Interview
“Pavane”
“I Just Got Some”
Steve Shorter & Tilly Set - August 22 1969
“Move On Up”
Humble Pie - August 24 1969
“The Sad Bag Of Shaky Jake” /” I Walk On Gilded Splinters”
Life - August 24 1969
“Baby Please Don’t Go”
Blossom Toes - August 24 1969
“Stargazer”
The Move - August 24 1968
“Sunshine Help Me”
Roland and The Bluesworkshop - August 23 1968
Belgian TV - BRT
Various clips from this concert have appeared on the web over the years, but when placed altogether like this, it is a fab 2 hours. Enjoy!
For many years, our Uncle Chuck was an integral part of the band that truly brought the dark, paranoid rage of hardcore punk to the widest possible audience during the early ‘80s.
Within the milieu of formulaic punk rock, Black Flag were truly strange extraterrestrials coming directly from Planet Anger to you. And you’re a better person for it, so watch, learn and appreciate.
After the jump: Got it? Now watch Chuck put it into action with the Flag…
Dale Davis’ The Golden Breed (1968) is a classic surfing film with a soundtrack almost as famous as the film itself. Featuring San Fernando’s Davie Allen - who did the score for the awesome biker flick The Wild Angels - on guitar and a tubular horn section, The Golden Breed is a perfect blend of sound and vision and captures legendary longboard riders like Mickey Munoz, Nat Young, Mickey Dova, Barry Kanaiaupuni and Mark Martinson at a time when longboards were starting to fall out of fashion.
Longboards.
My mother bought me a Jacobs longboard when I was 13 years old. It cost $50 used and was almost 10 feet long. I weighed about 95 pounds and riding that board was like trying to ride a really pissed-off bucking bull. I was waaaay too small for the beast. When I was 29 I bought a Schroff shortboard and had the opposite problem. The stick was so light and fast that it would shoot out from under me and I’d end bouncing off the rocks in the shark-infested waters off of Montauk, Long Island. I ended up spending most of my time just sitting on the thing, nursing booze and cocaine hangovers while watching the smooth glide of dorsal fins off in the distance.
The Golden Breed was filmed in California, Peru, Hawaii and Mexico. Cowabunga crushers!
Berlin Super 80 is a compilation of 18 short movies shot in Super 8 by West German experimental film makers during the late 1970s/early 80s. Featuring music by Malaria, Reflections, Einstürzende Neubauten, Frieder Butzmann and Die Tödliche Doris. It’s a hit or miss affair with films that range from the brilliant to the banal. Well worth watching for the flashes of genius.
01. Brand & Maschmann: E Dopo? (1981)
02. Christoph Doering: 3302- Taxi Film (1979)
03. Markgraf & Wolkenstein: Hüpfen 82 (1982)
04. Yana Yo: Sax (1983)
05. Maye & Rendschmid: Ohne Liebe gibt es keinen Tod (1980)
06. Stiletto Studio,s: Formel Super VIII (1983)
07. Walter Gramming: Hammer und Sichel (1978)
08. Georg Marioth: Morgengesänge (1984)
09. Hormel/Bühler: Geld (Malaria Clip) (1982)
10. Notorische Reflexe: Fragment Video (1983)
11. Jörg Buttgereit: Mein Papi (1981)
12. Die Tödliche Doris: Berliner Küchenmusik (1982)
13. Butzmann & Kiesel: Spanish Fly (1979)
14. Manfred Jelinski: So war das SO 36 (1984)
15. Klaus Beyer: Die Glatze (1983)
16. Markgraf & Wolkenstein: Craex Apart (1983)
17. Andrea Hillen: Gelbfieber 1982)
18. Ika Schier: Wedding Night (1982)
A DVD of these films is available with a music CD of Berlin bands as part of a box set, available here.
Dangerous Minds pal, Los Angeles-based architect John Bertram, is sponsoring a new design contest at his Nabokov-obsessed blog, Venus febriculosa. This time, however, the contest is to create alternate art for Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist (in every respect) Music For Films:
Brian Eno’s album covers have always tended toward the interesting, (one or two I find exceptional, notably Music for Airports), and he was fortunate to count work by the brilliant artists Tom Phillips and Russell Mills among them. On some level, however, the covers have always seemed more intent on establishing Eno’s artistic, intellectual, and theoretical bona fides (and, especially with the earlier albums, his overall weirdness) than anything else. The cover for Music for Films, however, is radically different. Not so much designed as intentionally left blank, the chocolate brown Helvetica text is pushed to the extreme upper edges of the texture-less and indescribably beige cover (the same text layout was used to good effect for the Cluster collaborations After the Heat and Begegnungen). This apotheosis of neutrality avoided the plain brown wrapper look in favor of what in retrospect seems closer to the generic packaging popular in grocery stores in the late ‘70s (or perhaps a reference color from Interiors, Woody Allen’s beige-est Bergman-esque film, also from 1978). Importantly, the cover is not ‘conceptual’ in the way that Richard Hamilton’s design for The Beatles’ White Album is, nor has it the cool rigor and studied minimalism of any number of ECM or Factory Records covers that – brilliant as they are (and they are brilliant) – somehow appear positively baroque in comparison. Rather, music and cover co-exist nicely as a unit, the latter providing no commentary on the former (or anything else for that matter), simply existing as a visual analogue to the wordless music. It’s a nice conceit.
The contest will be judged by Geeta Dayal, staff writer at Wired.com and author of Another Green World; famed graphic designer and typeface maven, Frith Kerr; Medicine man and former DM blogger Brad Laner, who contributed to Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth album; Russell Mills, artist; illustrator and Eno collaborator on More Dark Than Shark and cultural critic Rick Poynor, who also collaborated with Mills and Eno on More Dark than Shark.
There are a lot of DM readers who are both graphic designers and Eno fans, so get your engines started. Deadline for entry is September 1, 2012 and the winner will receive $500 (and some additional Eno-related prizes that have yet to be announced.)
Tonight’s the night. Not only are the Stone Roses back, but they are back in their home town, their old stomping ground of Manchester, for shows at the enormous Heaton Park.
Am I going? Nah. I saw them last time round, mate, on their first round of comeback gigs for the Second Coming album, released five years after their debut. It was, in fact, the Roses’ first show in the British Isles since 1990, and it was… ok. As enthusiastic kids we were buoyed along by the thrill of seeing our idols, live and in person, and before anyone else. This was at the Irish festival Féile ‘95 in Cork city, which was a really great festival (despite someone dying), but looking back on the footage of the Roses now, well, that’s another story.
To my mind the Stone Roses are second only in influence on British indie after The Smiths. Well, third place, I guess, now that Joy Division have been elevated to being the pinnacle of everything guitar music could and should be. And what’s the connecting factor between all these bands? They’re all from Manchester. Yeah, the city I live in has defined indie-rock music for the last 30 years. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
Yes, there is a buzz here about the Heaton Park gigs, of course there is. But as with everything Manc, there’s also a sly element of piss-takery. Maybe it’s because some people don’t like the band, or maybe it’s fatigue at having to relive the “Spike Island” mythology all over again (Spike Island was a huge Roses stadium show that happened in 1990, and has gone on to become the stuff of urban legend, despite many people who were there decrying its status as the most important cultural event of a generation.) Or maybe it’s just a Manc thing. That’s what I’m going with.
So, speaking of piss-takery, here’s a very funny spoof clip of The Stone Roses talking about their reformation. You might need to be in on the joke for this to work fully, but there’s a lot of universal humour in here too. I mean, who doesn’t find the Manchester accent even just a little bit funny? This clip was written and created by Nico Tartarowicz, and also features the comedian Peter Serafinowicz impersonating Morrissey (and we’re big fans of Serafinowicz at DM.) So there’s that, too. Oh, and kudos for also laying into the ultimate talking-head-TV classic-rock-bore, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie:
After a series of massive hits in the early 1960s ( “Calendar Girl,” “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”) and a sharp career decline post-British Invasion, singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka staged an improbable comeback after Elton John signed him to his newly formed Rocket Records label in 1973.
“It had been like Elvis coming up and giving us the chance to release his records. We couldn’t believe our luck,” the future Sir Elton, a huge Neil Sedaka fan, said at the time.
The second album Sedaka released on Rocket Records was The Hungry Years in 1975. “Bad Blood,” the first single from the album was essentially a “call and response” style duet between Neil Sedaka and an un-credited Elton. The song’s lyrics basically essay two “bros” giving a third some hard-knock advice about a woman who is taking advantage of him. (Don’t expect that you’ll ever be hearing “Bad Blood” sung by two female contestants on Duets is all I have to say!)
“Bad Blood” spent three weeks at the top of the US singles chart in October and was certified gold. (The song would ironically be knocked off its #1 perch by Elton John’s “Island Girl.” I recall buying both singles as an Elton John crazy 9-year-old with my birthday money and playing both records until the grooves wore out).
Sedaka, now a very spry 73, and with his voice holding up perfectly, is still performing, including prestige gigs like the BBC’s “Proms in the Park” festival and a concert at Lincoln Center. When British comedian Peter Kay lip-synced a song of Sedaka’s, “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo?”, forComedy Relief in 2006, the song, as originally sung by Tony Christie and released in 1971, became a massive hit all over again, garnering a Guinness World Record for the “most successful UK single of the 21st century” (at least as of 2006, of course). The song can also often be heard at soccer matches.
(for which Giger also did the now iconic cover art).
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