Photo: Austin Young; Make-up: Travis Pates

Usually when we get requests for Kickstarter, we have to say no because this entire blog would just be Kickstarter links, but Ann Magnuson’s “The Jobriath Medley: A Glam Rock Fairy Tale” project is different because they’ve actually already done most of the thing they want to raise money for, so you can just go online and buy it basically.

For years now, Ann has done a loving musical/spoken word tribute in her live cabaret shows to obscure 70s glam rocker Jobriath Boone (rock’s first out and out “fairy”) and recently she and longtime collaborator Kristian Hoffman have recorded it, with a small orchestra. The new project “combines good old-fashioned storytelling with extraordinarily pretty songs from Jobriath’s phantasmagoric catalogue. Think Mother Goose on LSD!”

Ann writes:

Kristian Hoffman and I both bought the Jobriath albums when they first came out in the early 1880s. Uh, I mean early 1970s. Me as a baby glam rock hillbilly hippie back in West Virginia, Kristian in his suburban enclave in Santa Barbara – where he would sometimes appear along with his best friend Lance Loud on the first TV reality show, AN AMERICAN FAMILY. (FYI: Lance also appears as a character in a pivotal TRUE story told in our glam rock fairy tale!). Oh, and Morrissey also bought the Jobriath albums when he was also a teenage glam-rock-groupie-budding-music-critic-future-rock-star in Manchester England England! (That’s a HAIR reference, by the way. Did you know Jobriath played “Woof” in the original L.A. production? You will when you hear The Jobriath Medley!) Morrissey would later reissue select songs from Jobriath’s two solo albums on the CD “Lonely Planet Boy”. But when we created The Jobriath Medley in 1996 we were unaware of the Morrissey connection (until that Japanese import showed up with the photo of The Moz holding the original Jobriath LP under his arm. A culturally significant moment that was quickly integrated into the text performed at the next live performance of The Jobriath Medley.)

“Grandma, tell me more about the 70s…”

Don’t worry kids, you’ll learn all about that decade of debauchery when you hear The Jobriath Medley! But suffice it to say that back in the early 1970’s everyone was blow, blow, blowing away in platform shoes, glitter eye make up, downing Quaaludes and red wine while being insanely & dangerously promiscuous as we dressed up in glad rags we found in thrift stores so we could emulate the movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s that we watched on The Late Late Show on TV. We were making like Liza Minnelli in CABARET (“divine decadence darling!”) and all we wanted to do was live our lives like we were in a Ken Russell movie!

Jobriath, just like David Bowie and Marc Bolan and Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls among many others, was one of those flaming creatures in the glam rock 70s who didn’t care what other people thought about them. Maybe they really were spacemen from Mars or androgynous aliens or strangers in a strange land OR just glorified hippies dressed up like Christmas trees…

With Kieran Turner’s fab documentary Jobriath A.D. (I loved it) turning a new generation of music fans on to Jobriath, there seems little doubt that Jobriath Boone will be “the Klaus Nomi” of 2012/2013, so jump on the bandwagon NOW and support Ann and Kristian’s DIY tribute to the lonely planet boy.

The Kickstarter page for “The Jobriath Medley” has a number of really great packages for any budget, from a digital download or CD all the way up to one of a kind paintings (Ann is quite expert in painting “fake Basquiats”—I mean to say that she’s fucking genius at it—and one of the packages offers a Basquiat-glam rock themed original artwork).

Dangeorus Minds readers will appreciate knowing that Sparks’ Russell Mael has contributed backing vocals to Ann and Kristian’s cover of Jobriath’s “I’maman.”

Read more about it on Kickstarter.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lonely Planet Boy: An interview with ‘Jobriath A.D.’ director Kieran Turner

Jobriath: Rock’s Fairy Godmother

Bongwater: The Power of Pussy

Below, Ann talks Jobriath:
 

 
Talk about giving your fans more than just a plain old music release…

One of (the, perhaps?) most influential albums from the whole mid-90s Wu Tang stable is getting re-issued at the end of next month with, yes, its very own chess set. Now THAT is good marketing.

Here’s an interview with the GZA himself, from the most recent SXSW, where he discusses performing with a band, lecturing at Harvard, science, the cosmos, sampling and actually drops the immortal phrase “Rock Sucks! Disco Lives!”:
 

 
It’s like being attacked by a giant swarm of Beatles.

1. Love me do
2. From me to you
3. She loves you
4. I want to hold your hand
5. Can’t buy me love
6. A hard day’s night
7. I feel fine
8. Eight days a week
9. Ticket to ride
10. Help!
11. Yesterday
12. Day tripper
13. We can work it out
14. Paperback writer
15. Yellow submarine
16. Eleanor Rigby
17. Penny Lane
18. All you need is love
19. Hello, goodbye
20. Lady Madonna
21. Hey Jude
22. Get back
23. The ballad of John and Yoko
24. Something
25. Come together
26. Let it be
27. The long and winding road
 

 
LjerkDiamondHeart has done a pretty fine job of sourcing various videos to cobble together the entire L7 performance at Rio de Janeiro (Hollywood Rock Festival) which took place in January 1993. Despite quality that ranges from good to just okay, this is a thrilling bit of music history.

00:00 - Deathwish
03:16 - (Right On)
06:12 - Scrap
09:00 - *Samba Song with Enter Sandman riff
11:00 - Slide
14:26 - Diet Pill
18:36 - Just Like Me
21:28 - *More spotlights
22:27 - Monster
25:43 - Broomstick
29:19 - Mr. Integrity
33:33 - Pussy
34:10 - Shitlist
36:58 - American Society
41:30 - Freak Magnet
44:58 - *Saltos with Smells Like Teen Spirit riff (guitar problems)
46:09 - Shove
49:48 - Pretend We’re Dead
54:04 - *Riff
54:51 - Fast and Frightening [two video sources]
57:42 - *Encore break
59:48 - Wargasm
63:48 - Everglade
66:38 - Till the Wheels Fall Off

Donita Sparks, Suzi Gardner, Jennifer Finch and Demetra Plaka kick ass!
 

 
Here’s a brand new mix created exclusively for Dangerous Minds. It features some of my favorite tracks of 2012 as well as some much-loved “oldies.” It’s 70 minutes long, so strap yourself in for a long ride…or just get up and dance.

‘Synchron City’ is where it all comes together.

She Brings The Sunlight - Richard Hawley
Dandelion - Baby Woodrose
Ode To Sad Disco - Mark Lanegan
Desert Raven - Jonathan Wilson
Cellophane - Ladyhawke
Fuji-san - Patti Smith
Down In The Woods - Richard Hawley
Bedazzled - Peter Cook
Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble
Shake A Tail - Big Wheel
House In Motion - Talking Heads
Unknown Mix - The Siren
Kas Product - Never Come Back
Hit Of Space - Human League
Abode Of The One - Anuradha
 

The Memphis production of Hair.

Here’s something special from the Dangerous Minds archives.

A couple of years ago, I went to the Broadway revival of Hair. It was dreadful. The faux good vibes and desperate attempts by the actors to replicate the look and mannerisms of the hippies of the sixties was about as real as the $20 Rolex watches being hawked up the block by Nigerian street vendors. When one of the actors mistook my long hair as an indicator that I’d be receptive to his attempt to dance with me during the audience participation part of the play, he was immediately repelled by my Charlie Manson impersonation. If looks could kill there would have been one dead plastic flower child on Broadway that night. Hair was the Summer Of Love had it taken place in Las Vegas instead of San Francisco. When the cast disrobed in the infamous nude scene, I was struck by how all of the female actors’ pubic hair was neatly manicured, trimmed and waxed. A perfect metaphor for how Broadway had tamed the unruly energy of the hippie movement.

I went to Hair out of curiosity. I’d never been able to sit through the movie in its entirety and when the play made its initial Broadway run in 1968 I, like most hippies at the time, was disgusted by the co-option and commercialization of hippie culture that the play and the movie represented. But, resistance was futile. Our underground movement floated belly-up to the surface of the mainstream where peace signs and smiley faces were being used to sell Polyester bell-bottoms, Pepsi-cola and Richard Nixon (“sock it to me”). Hair took the radical provocations of Julian Beck’s Living Theater and turned them into a groovy night for suburban squares, an opportunity to get close to hippie flesh without fear of catching the crabs or the clap, all set to a bombastic musical score that had about as much to do with psychedelia as Dr. Phil has to do with Dr. Leary.

In a city like New York where there were hotbeds of hippie culture in Greenwich Village and a dozen music venues to see great rock bands, from Cafe Wha to the Cheetah and The Fillmore, Hair seemed redundant. If you wanted to groove on some hippie shit go to St Mark’s Place and hit the rubber room at The Electric Circus, spend a few hours in Washington Square Park or Tompkins Square, watch the freak show from a table at Cafe Figaro on Bleeker Street. No need to go uptown and spend the big bucks on a Broadway play. But, take Hair out Manhattan and ship it down South and maybe, just maybe, you might actually rock some boats and squeeze something good out of the whole damn thing.

When Hair Came To Memphis is a documentary that softened some of my distaste for the play. Actually, my feelings for the play didn’t change. What changed was my feelings for the cultural phenomenon of the play and the life-altering impact that mounting a production of Hair in the Deep South had on the people involved in the production and on audiences willing to open up to the larger meaning and context that the play had taken on. The breaking down of racial barriers in the play is particularly profound considering the rampant racism that was still in the air even in an evolving metropolis like Memphis. Having Black and White kids interacting, hugging and kissing on a stage in Memphis in 1970 was in itself a huge affront to the status quo. Throw in the anti-war and drug elements and you’ve created something genuinely radical.

Performed at The University of Memphis, Hair created a shitload of controversy in the Bible Belt. Craig Leake who produced the documentary describes the atmosphere at the time:

This was still less than two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. There was a strong feeling of values in the community, namely Christian, mixed with a racial divide. This along with the sanitation strikes made a stew filled with hard feelings. A lot of people were sensitive to outsiders coming in and trying to change values and the idea of a foreign play, this being from New York, produced in the their midst caused alarm. I remember in my own family my aunt was very concerned about the play being shown here.”

The play was polarizing but it ended up being embraced by a large portion of the Memphis community.

The production itself still holds some U of M records, including the largest number of auditioners (over 400), the largest number of tickets sold in the shortest period of time (8,000 in 24 hours) and the largest amount of gross income obtained from any previous run of a single show ($23,000).”

This documentary did for me what the play failed to do: it got me high.
 

 
Parts two and three after the jump…

 
Of all the disco labels active during the genre’s golden age, very few match Harlem’s P&P records for cult status and obscure collectability (you see, I’m not immune to wanting great music!)

Founded by NYC in the late 70s by Peter Brown and Patrick Adams (hence the name P&P), the label was responsible for some of the era’s biggest dancefloor hits, songs that still get played out today, and have formed the backbone of many a modern track, even thirty years later.

P&P had a distinctive sound that is almost instantly recognisable. Very heavy on the drums and percussion, their productions were a direct progression from the raw funk of the early 70s. This was music that came from the street rather than the nightclub, and while it was rougher and tougher and a lot less slick than the bigger labels like Salsoul or Prelude, in terms of pure dancefloor funkability it matched them step for step.

P&P worked with many different artists, under many different aliases and with a dizzying array of off shoot labels, but the core songwriting (and playing) was always down to Adams & Brown, who would often knock out the work of entire band on their own, overnight, in the studio. To this day, Patrick Adams is one of the most respected back-room technicians (and commercial songwriters) working in the biz.
 

 
There have been a few different compilations of the P&P catalog before (most notably the Disco Juice compilations on Counterpoint Records, and an introduction to the label compiled the respected NYC DJ Danny Krivit) but this one is different. It is basically the ENTIRE output of P&P and associated labels, and stretches to an incredible 15 CDs. And, most surprising of all, at roughly $40/£20, it’s nowhere close to busting your wallet! That’s a hell of a lot of bang for your buck.

The set comes in MP3 download format, a 15 CD box set, and a deluxe box set that is a bit more pricey but includes bonus materials like liner notes, original promotional material, and two special 12"s for use with Serato or on normal turntables. UK readers can find the box set at decent dance music retailers like Phonica, while Stateside it seems like the MP3 and deluxe versions may not be out, but you can still get the CD collection via Amazon. It’s probably worth rooting around your preferred independent retailers for this, too.

I can’t recommend this set highly enough, especially for our readers who STILL linger under the misapprehension that disco was a commercial fad that sprung fully formed, shiny and covered in glitter, from the belly of the corporate beast. This is REAL disco, with its roots in the streets, the block parties and the underground clubs and bars. Here is one of my all time favourite disco tracks, ‘Out Of Work” by Jesse Gould, a socially aware disco record whose sentiment still rings very true 35 years later.
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After the jump there’s more great music from this incredible label, all of which is available on ‘Hits Hits Hits’...

 
Half Prodigy and half New Kids on the Block, nineties UK boy band East 17 (named after the postcode of their native Walthamstow, East London) were unlikely chart toppers and teenybopper heart throbs. They also possessed a likeable penchant for lurid catastrophe, courtesy mainly of front man Brian Harvey, whose escapades we’ll get to momentarily…

The group were cobbled together by Tony Mortimer, after a record company showed interest in his homegrown pop-rap paeans to raunchy sex, raving and world peace, but would offer him a contract only if he came back as part of a boy band. My abiding impression is that Mortimer went straight to a Walthamstow rave and recruited the first three drug dealers he bumped into. Certainly two of them, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell, were a riddling if thuggish presence over the following years, neither possessing obvious boy band looks or even singing/dancing abilities – their apparent remit to strike silly poses in the suggestive vicinity of keyboards.

While entirely in keeping with the group’s drug dealer aesthetic, third recruit Brian Harvey was also a good enough looker, mover and singer to qualify as the band’s front man – crooning Mortimer’s portentous but tuneful choruses and rubbing his muscles in a succession of improbably tall sock-hats. The band went on to have twelve top ten hits and sell an impressive 20 million records, mostly to young ladies almost certain to start smoking the very millisecond they hit thirteen.

But Harvey would prove himself something of a loose cannon, and in a 1997 radio interview made the unabashed assertion (elegantly inverting the usual boy-band shtick) that “drugs are cool” and that ecstasy could not only “make you a better person” but was “safe” – something Harvey could personally vouch for, he explained, as he had once boshed twelve pills in a single night. After the general laugher had died down, even the staunchest ecstasy apologists were questioning the wisdom of advocating such incautious indulgence to a basically pubescent audience. Questions were raised in Parliament! The tabloids erupted! Harvey was sacked!

Cue wilderness years for all concerned (the band, it transpired, couldn’t survive without their talismanic lout). Then, following a stalled attempt or two at a solo career, Harvey returned to the public eye in May of 2005 courtesy of a very strange incident indeed. “I’d been stuffing my face with jacket potatoes,” he later explained. “They were big. I put cheese on, then tuna mayonnaise and I ate the lot.” Shortly after this characteristically immoderate meal, Harvey decided to drive to a friend’s, and was just backing out in his Mercedes when he started to feel sick. He opened the car door to puke onto the roadside, and it was at this moment that he made a terrible mistake. “Instead of putting my foot on the brake, I hit the accelerator and it flew back. It must have hit four or five parked cars and thrown me out.” Harvey was subsequently crushed beneath the wheel of his own vehicle, sustaining horrendous injuries:

“The car went over my stomach and pushed it up into my lungs, both lungs completely deflated, my diaphragm was ripped and my pelvis was smashed in seven places. I don’t remember the ambulance or hospital. I just remember waking up three weeks later in intensive care with tubes coming out of me.”

The incident was a minor pop culture phenomenon in the UK, and it has long been my suspicion that its impact was partly due to its coalescing, deep in the national unconscious, with Harvey’s earlier drug boasts, which thanks to the accident placed ecstasy and jacket potatoes in a paradoxical dynamic whereby it was demonstrativelyimpossible to do too much of the recreational drug but all too easy to overdose on the vegetable.

In the wake of Harvey’s hospitalisation, reporters discovered that he had actually overdosed (on pharmaceuticals this time) earlier that year in an apparent suicide attempt, and speculated that he had run himself over on purpose. “If you were going to kill yourself you wouldn’t do it like this,” Harvey balked. Guess not, and his incredulity is easy to sympathise with, though it speaks volumes about his public image that he was even considered capable of such a cockeyed scheme. Ultimately, Harvey took it all in his philosophical stride: “You’ve gotta laugh,” he concluded, following a lengthy but full recovery.

My own low-grade but long-standing obsession with East 17 and Brian Harvey received recent refuelling when I found myself temporarily residing in Walthamstow. It’s the kind of dead-zone that has an entirely ironic online tourist board, and where people try and mug you in broad daylight (if you ignore them, they mostly lose interest). And so, when I came across the supposed street name where the potato accident occurred, I was excited, and headed there the following day with a fellow Harvey enthusiast and a raw potato.

I had anticipated ending up on one of Walthamstow’s more salubrious neighborhoods (presuming such a thing exists), and was instead confronted with a leafy jumble of sun-splashed estates – was Harvey, we wondered, still living in council accommodation in 2005 despite selling twenty million records? Impressive. We hung out a bit with the potato, ignored a couple of muggers, and noticed a single flash-looking motor. In the spirit of those oddballs who brought apples to the Apple store when Jobs died, we gently placed our potato beneath the car’s door and left.

Back at mine, I found myself sincerely hoping that Harvey had since moved, and that the posh motor hadn’t been his own – in which case our tender little tribute might easily be misconstrued as a strange and sinister threat…

Thanks to Amy Gwatkin!

 
It’s been, what, two-three days since our last Bowie-related post? Well fear not, here’s another… 

The gorgeous Ava Cherry was David Bowie’s mistress and lover during the mid-70s. She was one of his back-up singers, the Astronettes, along with the late Luther Vandross.  In the clip below, you can see her steal the show when Bowie was performing “Footstompin’” (which later got reworked into “Fame” with John Lennon) on The Dick Cavett Show in 1974. (Is it possible to be any hotter than this woman???) This is pretty much the moment where the Diamond Dogs tour gave way to his Young Americans Philly Soul obsession
 

 
In late 1973, an Ava Cherry album was planned and partially recorded with Bowie producing, but due to lawsuits with his-then manager Tony DeFries, the album was shelved for 22 years. The tapes that existed had some Bowie originals along with some oddly chosen covers from the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and Bruce Springsteen. What appears to be a semi-official release came out in 1996 as People From Bad Homes. The material was released again in 2009 as The Astronettes Sessions.

In truth, it’s not that great. I wish I could tell you it was some undiscovered gem of what Bowie called his “plastic soul” phase but it’s, at best, a curiosity for intense Bowie freaks. Her voice, sadly, is no match for her looks and fashion sense. The most memorable track is probably “I Am A Laser” which was later re-worked into “Scream Like A Baby” on Bowie’s Scary Monsters album in 1980. In this rehearsal recording, you can hear Bowie in the background leading the band and calling chord changes.

Note the rap and the line about her “golden showers.” (I wonder if “Golden Years” has a meaning that has hitherto escaped us?)
 

 
Here’s a couple of tasty new Patti Smith videos for you fans out there…and I know Dangerous Minds has a shitload of readers who have come to expect a healthy dose of Ms. Smith’s magic medicine on this site.

The interview from NY1 cable channel is an absolute delight. It’s a really smart overview of Patti’s history and the bard of Jersey really comes across as the spiritual force she has been and continues to be in rock n’ roll, literature and motherhood.

The second video is a performance at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Patti has her photographs on exhibit, and it features her son Jackson on guitar and daughter Jesse on piano. Together they do a righteously rocking version of “Gloria.”