Laurie Anderson performs with a ‘pillow speaker’ in her mouth
Delightful short clip of Laurie Anderson performing a song with a “pillow speaker” at the School of Visual Arts graduates commencement ceremony.
Thank you kindly Ken Switzer
Delightful short clip of Laurie Anderson performing a song with a “pillow speaker” at the School of Visual Arts graduates commencement ceremony.
Thank you kindly Ken Switzer
Favorites of the Manchester alternative and electronic undergrounds, SIlverclub are releasing their debut album in a few weeks, and in the meantime are giving away a free, four track EP featuring one of the album’s highlights, the brilliant track “Your Headphones.”
Subtly reminiscent of Manchester’s golden age of danceable alternative pop, without being your typical retro-based cash-in, Silverclub have been slowly building a legion of fans with some excellent past singles and and a steady stream of quality live gigs.
I already have Silverclub’s debut album on promo, and it’s excellent, highly recommended for fans of quality music regardless of genre. “Your Headphones” is one of the album’s definite highlights, a shimmery wash of gorgeous synths and summery harmonies underpinned by what could almost be a “baggy” beat. It’s a tune about the sheer joy of music that thankfully manages to joyously brilliant in its own right.
You can listen to, and pre-order, Silverclub’s eponymous debut long-player from the website SIlverclubuk.com. In the meantime, here are the band themselves playing “Your Heaphones” live at London’s Saatchi Gallery a few months ago, and below that, the link to download the Your Headphones EP for free. It’s worth it.
Silverclub “Your Headphones” (live)
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Silverclub: the sound of Manchester 2012
Legendary Chicago-based guitarist Pete Cosey, best known for his avant-garde playing as a Miles Davis sideman in the early 70s, has died at the age of 68, as reported by the Chicago Reader:
Cosey was a key session musician at Chess Records in the 60s, appearing on sides by Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Rotary Connection, and Etta James, and he worked with the great Phil Cohran in the latter’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble. He’s probably most famous, though (to the extent that he’s famous at all), for his mind-melting work with Miles Davis in the early 70s: he played on the trumpeter’s heaviest, most electric albums, including Agharta, Pangaea, and Get Up With It. After Davis broke up the band in 1975 and went into semi-retirement, Cosey was never able to build the solo career he so richly deserved. He used his guitar like an abstract expressionist painter, creating thick, richly textured solos with fierce rhythmic power, dazzling colors, and nonchalant violence. He continued to appear on records here and there, including Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock and an album with Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata, but he always seemed to be planning his own next project, which never quite materialized.
Cosey’s distinctive guitar comes in at the 5 minute mark:
Bob Egan’s PopShots blog has a wonderful deconstruction of Neil Young’s iconic After the Goldrush album cover. In the above shot, you see the image in context, where it was shot at Sullivan and 3rd Street, just off Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village.
After Egan’s exhaustive coverage was posted on his blog, Young’s archivist Joel Bernstein, who took the shot, wrote in with his recollection of the shoot, as well as sending in the original, uncropped photo with Graham Nash standing to the side:
“The photo was not “a mistake.” I saw the small, old woman coming towards us down the sidewalk, was intrigued, and wanted to catch her passing Neil. The mistake, to me, was that I had in my haste focused the lens just past the two figures, closer to the fence than to Neil’s face. That was the original reason why I made a small-sized print and solarized it; to help with the apparent sharpness. But the solarization in this case added a somewhat spooky dimension to the image, which Neil took to immediately.”
Read more at PopShots
Photo by Joel Bernstein, 1970
After an onstage meltdown in Vancouver last year led to a spell in an Arizona rehab facility, Ween’s Aaron Freeman told Rolling Stone yesterday that the band is no more:
For most of his life he’s been Gene Ween, the nimble-voiced frontman of one of rock’s great genre-hoppers – but Aaron Freeman is finally ready to put his alter-ego to bed. “It’s time to move on,” Freeman told Rolling Stone from his home in New Jersey. “I’m retiring Gene Ween.”
So does that mean the end for Ween, the band that Freeman formed with high school friend Mickey Melchiondo (a.k.a. Dean Ween) in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the mid-Eighties?
“Pretty much, yeah,” says Freeman. “It’s been a long time, 25 years. It was a good run.”
Freeman, who released his solo debut Marvelous Clouds earlier this month, says there’s no animosity towards his bandmates or Melchiondo, who he met in the eighth grade. He says the pair are still on speaking terms, even though he’s been contemplating the decision for the past eight years.
“For me it’s a closed book. In life sometimes, in the universe, you have to close some doors to have others open,” says Freeman. “There’s no, ‘Goddamn that such and such!’ For me, I’d like to think it’s a door I can close finally.”
Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) left the following message on his Facebook wall:
“This is news to me, all I can say for now I guess.”
My two favorite Ween songs, from their “difficult” album, The Pod.
“Dr. Rock”:
“Captain Fantasy”:
Big Time filmed at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater and the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, is like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain. Directed by Chris Blum and written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, Big Time makes use of minimal sets and simple disguises to create a wildly evocative musical that draws from elements of vaudeville and burlesque. A truly unique vision from the always inventive Mr. Waits.
When the film was released in 1988, the press notes (grappling for some reference point) described it as a mix of…
[...] avant-garde composer Harry Partch, Howlin’ Wolf, Frank Sinatra, Astor Piazzolla, Irish tenor John McCormack, Kurt Weill, Louis Prima, Mexican norteno bands and Vegas lounge singers.
Tom Waits: organ, vocals
Michael Blair: percussion, bongos, drums
Ralph Carney: clarinet, horn, sax
Greg Cohen: bass, horn
Richard Hayward: drums
Marc Ribot: guitar
Long out of print on VHS (used copies are fetching a couple hundred bucks) and never released on DVD, it’s a treat to find Big Time in its entirety on YouTube. Dig it while you can.
Scotch had a string of Italo-disco hits in the early-to-mid 1980s. Manlio Cangelli was the mastermind of the band, which included playing synths, programming drum machines and composing the smash hit “Disco Band.”
While “Disco Band” is a more than serviceable dance floor filler with a decent hook, the video is another beast all together - a WTF slice of videotape that seems to have been concocted by Laurie Anderson and The Marx Brothers on crack.
The great French choreographer Roland Petit’s “Pink Floyd Ballet” saw the group performing live onstage in 1972 and 1973 with the dancers of Le Ballet de Marseille, Petit’s company.
Oddly, the original idea for the ballet was to do a version of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past!
Quotes taken from various sources about the experience and sourced by the Moicani blog:
Nick Mason: “But nobody read anything. David did worst, he only read the first 18 pages.” [Miles]
Roger Waters: “I read the second volume of Swann’s Way and when I got to the end of it I thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m not reading anymore. I can’t handle it.’ It just went too slowly for me.” [Miles]
Later Petit wanted to do A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Nick Mason: “Proust has been knocked on the head.” [Miles]“Originally he was going to do a complete program: a piece by Zinakist, a piece by us, and a new production of Carmen. I think he has now decided to do just two pieces — Zinakist’s and ours — which has meant doubling the length of the thing we are going to do.” [Miles]
Nick Mason [February 1972]: “We haven’t started work on it yet. We’ve had innumerable discussions, a number of lunches, a number of dinners, very high powered meetings; and I think we’ve got the sort of storyline for it. The idea is Roland Petit’s and I think he is settled on the ideas he wants to use for the thing so I think we’re going to get started. Ballet is a little like film actually. The more information you have to start with, the easier it becomes to write. The difficulty about doing albums is that you are so totally open. It’s very difficult to get started.” [Miles]
Roger Water and Nick Mason discussed the experience in retrospect, in 1973:
Roger Waters: “The ballet never happened. First of all it was Proust then it was Aladdin, then it was something else. We had this great lunch one day [4 December 1970]: me, Nick and Steve [O’Rourke]. We went to have lunch with [Rudolph] Nureyev, Roman Polanski, Roland Petit and some film producer or other. What a laugh! It was to talk about the projected idea of us doing the music, and Roland choreographing it, and Rudy being the star, and Roman Polanski directing the film and making this fantastic ballet film. It was all a complete joke because nobody had any idea of what they wanted to do.”
Interviewer: “Didn’t you smell a rat?
Roger: “I smelt a few poofs! Nobody had any idea — it was incredible.”
Nick Mason: “It went on for two years, this idea of doing a ballet, with no one coming up with any ideas. Us not setting aside any time because there was nothing specific, until in a desperate moment Roland devised a ballet to some existing music which I think was a good idea. [Referring to the winter ‘72-‘73 performances] It’s looked upon a bit sourly now.”
Roger Waters [still on about the 4 Dec lunch]: “We sat around this table until someone thumped the table and said, ‘What’s the idea then?’ and everyone just sat there drinking this wine and getting more and more pissed, with more and more poovery going on ‘round the table, until someone suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev started getting a bit worried, didn’t he? They talked about Frankenstein for a bit — I was just sitting there enjoying the meat and the vibes, saying nothing, keeping well schtuck.”
Nick: “Yes, with Roland’s hand upon your knee!”
Roger: “And when Polanski was drunk enough he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to end all blue movies and then it all petered out into cognac and coffee and then we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what happened after we left, Nick.” [Miles]
Dave Gilmour: “In fact we did that ballet for a whole week in France. Roland Petit choreographed to some of our older material . . . but it’s too restricting for us. I mean, I can’t play and count bars at the same time. We had to have someone sitting on stage with us with a piece of paper telling us what bar we were playing…” [Miles]
“The Pink Floyd Ballet” has been performed all over the world since its debut. Aside from the Pink Floyd, Petit also worked with Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent, David Hockney, Jean Cocteau, Rudolf Nureyev and artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Roland Petit died last year at the age of 87.
The videos below were shot on November 22 and 26,1972 and January 12,1973 at Marseille Salle Valliers, France and Le Palais des Sports de la Porte de Versailles, Paris for various French TV networks. Dig how fluent David Gilmour is, seen suavely speaking French here with a passable accent.
Neil Young at the “Rock am Ring” festival in Germany on May 18, 2002. Good quality with very good sound. Enjoy two and a half hours of Mr. Young. And Booker T. and The MGs!
Neil Young—vocals, guitar, harmonica
Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro—guitar, backing vocals, piano on “Helpless”
Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn—bass guitar
Booker T. Jones—hammond organ
Steve ‘Smokey’ Potts—drums
Astrid Young—backing vocals, piano on “Quit” and “She’s a Healer”
Pegi Young—backing vocals
Larry Cragg*—additional bass guitar on “Let’s Roll”
Part two after the jump…
Last week, after I lamented that I’d never seen any good concert documentation of the Allman Brothers in their prime, DM reader Amanda_B_Reckonwith made my day with this footage of the Allmans playing their epic jam “Whipping Post” at the Fillmore East on September 23, 1970. This was about seven months before their classic At Fillmore East
This is a pure pleasure, seeing the best blues-rock band America ever produced improvising at their all time peak. “Whipping Post” begins in 11/4 time, almost placing the Allmans—for one song at least—into some sort of quasi Southern-fried Prog Rock continuum. The version that appears on At Fillmore East
The group is Gregg Allman, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks, and Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson. Their pal Tom Doucette sat in on harmonica and percussion during this set.
After the jump, more Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East…