I sometimes think Stephen Stills gets short-shrift in an annals of rock history. Not that I feel sorry for the guy wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” who is generally regarded as one of the greatest living guitar players (Still is #28 according to a Rolling Stone poll), or who was/is a member of one of the biggest grossing rock groups of all time (CSNY, of course), it’s just that Stills made so much great music that’s seldom heard today and known mostly by middle-aged rock snobs, when that music should be as well-known as as the classic material he recorded with his fellow famous folk-rock compadres.
Case in point, the wicked double album Stills recorded with Manassas, with its rock, country, blues, bluegrass and Latin-influenced tunes. That album tears it up, but this live set, recorded in Germany in 1971 for the MusikLaden TV show is even better. It’s Stills at his very best—playing Jimi Hendrix-level guitar leads throughout—and what a band: Chris Hillman (The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Bros.), the great Dobro player Al Perkins, Dallas Taylor on drums, Calvin “Fuzzy” Sameul on bass, Paul Harris on keyboards and a very “Greg Brady”-looking Joe Lala on drums.
Listen to this one LOUD people. If you don’t groove on this, I jes’ cain’t help you (but I’ll continue to try. I’ll promise I will still try).
After the jump, CSN perform “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” at Woodstock, becoming musical legends in the process…
As I put together my annual worst Christmas songs list, I thought I’d give you a preview of things to come.
Doc Marten meets Dean Martin in Billy Idol’s plodding version of ‘White Christmas,” which has all the appeal of a Christmas stocking full of steaming reindeer shit.
The musicians backing him sound like a German wedding band after an afternoon of knocking back steins of hefeweizen at the local beer garden. It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing and these cats couldn’t swing if they were hanging from a lamppost in a hurricane.
Filmed during the Summer Of Love (1967) in the Haight-Ashbury, this groovy documentary features commentary from visionary poet Michael McClure, footage of The Grateful Dead hanging out at their Ashbury Street home, a visit to The Psychedelic Bookshop, The Straight Theater, scenes from McClure’s play The Beard and rare shots of the bard of The Haight, Richard Brautigan, walking through Panhandle Park in all of his glorious splendor.
Vaclav Havel died today at the age of 75. A former chain smoker with chronic respiratory problems, Havel had been in failing health the past few months and died at his weekend home in Hradecek in the northern Czech Republic,
Czech independence leader, artist and human rights activist, Havel was elected the first president of a free Czechoslovakia since 1948 on December 29, 1989.
A prominent force in the Velvet Revolution, a bloodless overthrow of the communist regime in in Czechoslovakia, which returned democracy to Czechs after fifty years of Nazi occupation and communist rule, Havel was the very definition of a man of conscience. Soft-spoken, humble, impish and possessing a healthy sense of the absurd, Havel was that rare leader who chose the power of inspiration over rhetoric and empty gesture. He was a revolutionary who recognized that artistic creativity was every bit as important as political dogma or ideologies. Without the humanizing force of literature, theater and music and an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, civilization is a hollow machine destined for spiritual starvation.
Himself a playwright, Havel was perhaps the only world leader who was closer to rock and rollers like Lou Reed, Frank Zappa and Keith Richards than politicians and bureaucrats. It is reputed that The Velvet Revolution was named after The Velvet Underground, whose music was made popular in Czechoslovakia by Prague’s radical avant-rock band The Plastic People.
Havel was a peacenik who somehow managed to navigate the treacherous waters of political power without losing his sense of perspective or soul.
Havel’s revolutionary message—which helped oust the world’s second strongest power from his country, but which Americans and in that moment the American Congress have not always been ready to hear—is that peace does not come by defeating enemies, it comes by making people free, governments democratic, and societies just. “The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.”
Today’s world, as we all know, is faced with multiple threats,” he said in 1993 in Athens, on accepting one of the countless honors he received. “From whichever angle I look at this menace, I always come to the conclusion that salvation can only come through a profound awakening of man to his own personal responsibility, which is at the same time a global responsibility. Thus, the only way to save our world, as I see it, lies in a democracy that recalls its ancient Greek roots: democracy based on an integral human personality personally answering for the fate of the community.
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness,” Havel told Congress, referring to a movement toward democracy, “nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe for which the world is headed—be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war, or by the danger that the absurd mountains of nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. This is actually far from being a final victory.”
Havel speaks at the Forum for Creative Europe in March of 2009.
Part two, plus a clip about how rock and roll figured into the Velvet Revolution, after the jump…
These clips are hard to find on the Internet and who knows how long they’ll last out there before the dark corporate forces wipe them from view. The teachings of the SubGenius are under relentless assault!
Devo’s appearance on Saturday Night Live on October 14, 1978 was a visitation from a rock and roll galaxy far far away and yet so near. It was as if aliens from another planet had created a concept of Earthlings based on old television transmissions they’d hijacked of industrial training films, Triumph Of The Will, episodes of Hullabaloo and Saturday morning cartoons and then spewed it all back at us in a digitized replication missing a few ones and zeros. It was an attempt at communication, not unlike Klaatu’s failed efforts in 1951.
I have a fear of flying. When I travel, I do it by car. One of the many joys of driving across the States is checking out local restaurants, junk shops and record stores. So having a GPS-based record store locator in my cell phone is an utterly cool app that I can get behind. The Vinyl District has created software for the iPhone and Android that will lead you to indie record stores throughout the United States and United Kingdom. And it’s free.
All you need to know about downloading the record store locator is at The Vinyl District’s website.
This is a great tool, not only for music freaks, but for the surviving record stores out there. Technology doin’ the right thing. Put some good karma in that irritating plastic rectangle in your pocket.
Swords, Sandals And Sex mixes international grooves, punk and psyche with ultra-groovy dance sequences from vintage sword and sandal (pepblum) flicks.
01. “That’s Where It’s At” - Van Morrison and The Holmes Brothers
02. “Mabala” - Fathili and The Yahoos
03. “Saman Doye” - The Black Brothers
04. “Negre Africa Dub” - Sly and Robbie
05. “Daughter Whole Lotta Suger Down Deh” - Jah Berry
06. “She Moved Through The Fair” - Jam Nation
07. “Teen Tonic” - Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier
08. “World Destruction” - Afrika Babaata and John Lydon
09. “Fever” - Jingo
10. “El Pescador” - Toto La Momposina and Sus Tambores
11. “Swinger” - The Third Rail
12. “Venetian Glass” - Infinity
13. “Jocko Homo” - Devo
14. “Human Fly” - The Cramps
Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh bookend some weirdo who wandered into a Boing Boing photo shoot.
As a hardcore Mighty Boosh fan, I am ashamed to say that I only just discovered this wonderful Pogo mashup of bits and pieces from the late great BBC comedy show, which may have been the funniest and most surreal thing to ever appear on the airwaves.
The title of the piece is “Zoo Zoo” and features Pogo’s trademark tight edits/cuts in which shards of dialog and soundtrack are transformed into seamless musical collages filled with quirky charm.
I am patiently awaiting a Mighty Boosh feature length film. Pleeeeeease.
”...and he said nobody cared…”: Ice Cube as Doughboy in Boyz N The Hood
What’s the best way to capture in video the spirit of a song like Lupe Fiasco’s late-20th-century-black-street-reality-cinema-surveying “Double Burger With Cheese” from his Friend of the People mixtape [download]?
Somebody figured it out over at beat cartel Dolobeats (and if it was proprietor/prolific beatmaker Dolo himself, I’m pretty fucking impressed): synch the song up to every goddamn movie clip that Lu casually references in the song.
This thing juxtaposes clips from such iconic films as Juice, Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, New Jersey Drive, Poetic Justice, Dead Presidents, South Central, Sugar Hill, New Jack City, Paid In Full and Colors.
“These are just a illustration / Of a few scenes that helped raise a generation…”
Although she’s celebrated as “the mother of punk,” the musical fruits of Nina Hagen’s early career sounded much closer to the tuba-led Bavarian oompah music of Heino than the scratchy, three chord thrash of The Slits. Which is not to say that the young Nina Hagen wasn’t the very embodiment of punk rock rebellion in Communist East Germany before anyone had ever heard of the Sex Pistols, because that is exactly what she was…
Raised by her mother, well-known film and TV actress Eva-Maria Hagen and her stepfather, dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann (who was a big influence on her political views and a big nuisance to the GDR), Hagen began singing professionally at a young age. Backed by her group, Automobil, her 1974 single, “Du Hast den Farbfilm Vergessen” (“You forgot the color film”) became a huge hit in the GDR and made Hagen a big star. The seemingly innocent-sounding lyrics (a girlfriend berating her boyfriend for not bringing color film on their vacation) were a subtle dig mocking the sterile, gray, Communist state. The fluffy-sounding ditty became one the most popular songs of 1974 and the double meaning of the comical lyrics was apparently well-understood by both the general population and the Politbüro elites.
In 1976, Wolf Biermann was stripped of his citizenship and refused re-admittance into the GDR after he’d played a TV concert in Cologne. When her mother left to join her husband, Nina claimed to be Biermann’s biological daughter. However, the thing that probably got her visa stamped stat was her threat to the authorities that she would become “the next Wolf Biermann.”
Four days later she was living in the West. I wonder how many people were thrown OUT of East Germany? That’s punk!
Below, 18-year-old Nina Hagen (and Automobil) singing “Du Hast den Farbfilm Vergessen” (“You forgot the color film”). There is a version with subtitles here.
