The Legend of Leigh Bowery is a brilliant documentary about a brilliant man.
Directed by Charles Atlas, the film covers Bowery’s life and times from his suburban beginnings in Sunshine, Australia, to his fame on London’s club scene in the 1980s and his success as one of the most influential and daring fashion designers in the past thirty years.
The Legend of Leigh Bowery has incredible archive footage and excellent contributions from Michael Clark, Sue Tilley, Michael Bracewell, Richard Torry, Donald Urquhart, Damien Hirst, Boy George and Leigh’s wife, Nicola Bowery.
AC/DC’s official exhibition Family Jewels has opened at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, where it will be on show until February 2012. The exhibition will then move on to America.
Its the first time this band approved exhibition has left Australia, and Scotland was considered the most obvious place to bring the show as there are strong links between the country and the legendary band. AC/DC’s founding members Angus and Malcolm Young were born in Glasgow, while the late, great singer, Bon Scott was born in Kirriemuir - also know for its gingerbread.
The exhibition contains over 400 items celebrating 35 years of one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands. From photographs, programmes, tour posters, tickets plus personal memorabilia, letters, song lyrics to rare stage costumes, including one of Angus Young’s school uniforms and Bon Scott’s last leather jacket. This is all interspersed with 3 hours of live concert footage, video clips, interviews, which all details the history of AC/DC.
This is a major one-off exhibition and a must-see for AC/DC fans as well as for those interested in popular culture. Check details here and pictures here.
Record producer, historian, DJ, musician and sonic archaeologist Andrew Sandoval—who has worked with The Kinks, The Zombies, Elvis Costello, Love and many others, as well as producing the Grammy-nominated Where the Action Is! box set—discusses his work with the Monkees reissues, the amazing new Criterion version of Head and the future of the box set and the reissues market. Andrew’s radio show is “Come to the Sunshine” on Luxuria Music.
I attended Austin City Limits this year but somehow managed to miss Terrence Malick shooting footage with Christian Bale for a new film project.
Like most Malick projects, there is much mystery surrounding this film, virtually nothing is known about it, but that’s not surprising considering how private Malick is both in his personal and professional life. Seeing Malick in public is about as rare as seeing a white rhinoceros in Times Square.
Bale and Malick share similarly high standards in what they put on film so this has the potential to be very special. Malick’s last film Tree Of Life wasn’t perfect but what it lacked in narrative coherence it made up for in pure cinematic glory. No matter what Malick shoots you know its going to be extraordinary looking and occasionally consciousness-raising. How that translates to footage at a rock festival has me intrigued.
One thing that is known for certain about the movie is it ain’t the new Batman.
On September 19th, 1973, Gram Parsons, Flying Burrito Brother co-founder, briefly member of The Byrds and one of the founders of “country rock” died in a desert motel room in the Joshua Tree Inn at the age of 26.
Below, one of the very few clips you can find of the Flying Burrito Brothers with Parsons. Even if they are just lip-synching, it’s still great to watch him in action.
I’m digging these Supremes and Tiny Tim candles by Los Angeles-based artist and rock photographer, Vicki Berndt. They’re available for purchase on Vicki’s website or over at her Etsy page.
Jefferson Airplane perform “Watch Her Ride” on a 1968 episode of the Perry Como TV show.
You got to give Como credit for going out on a limb here. I’m sure his television audience was gagging on their peanut brittle as they watched these damn hippies bobbing in some kinda bubbly lower intestinal weirdness.
“What is that stuff they’re floating in Fred?” It looks like beatnik poop. Put more foil on the rabbit years Fred. Somethin’ ain’t right!
“Star,” an Italo-disco version of Bowie’s “Starman” produced by Claudio Mingardi, manages, in my opinion, to improve upon the original by flavoring it with 80s synth effects and vocoder - cheesy futurism that works the song into an electronic vibe that suits lyrics like “Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase/That weren’t no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive.”
Images: Mission Mars and Fassbinder’s visionary Welt am Draht .
Early color footage of The Beatles, from November 20, 1963. The fabs were on a 6-week tour of the UK and Ireland, when British Pathe caught up with them at the ABC Cinema, Manchester, filming them backstage and perfroming “She Loves You” and “Twist and Shout”.
Hard to remember it now, but it was well into the 1980s before VCRs were commonplace in America life. I lived in lower Manhattan at the time and there were very few video rental stores there. The only ones I can recall are Kim’s Video (originally sharing space with a dry cleaner, then several locations, now down to one again) and the New Video mini-chain, now a DVD distributor. By mid-decade the “tape trading underground” was starting to organize itself (aided by the then burgeoning zine scene) and an unlikely character named “Dan the Record Man” became a key node in that machinery.
“Dan the Record Man” was probably in his mid 50s when I met him, but he was in such terrible shape that he looked far older. He was a classic example of what eating SHITTY FOOD 24/7—in his case dirty water sauerkraut and mustard slathered hot dogs sold by street vendors outside of the Canal Street flea market where his stall was located—could do to a human body. My god did he just reek of poor health and future strokes and heart attacks, but he was a super cool old guy who had been a dancer on Hullabaloo and knew everything about music and had records so rare it made my head spin. Case in point he had copies of The Great Lost Kinks Album as well as the live Yardbirds LP and the novelty record “Stairway to Gilligan” both which Led Zeppelin’s lawyers had yanked off the market. Once he knew you were “cool”—he was really paranoid—he’d pull back the black curtains covering the top shelves in his overstuffed corner booth and show you the bootlegs (there were thousands) and the real treasure he had, the bootleg videos.
Dan had EVERYTHING you ever wanted or could ever want. And if he didn’t have it, he could get it for you (he scored Nancy Sinatra’s TV special for me as I recall). Tapes were $20 and he’d do trade if you had something really good, but in keeping with his Gollum-esque character, you had to have two really good things in order to get one of his really good things for free. Those were his rules and you could fuck the fuck off if you weren’t prepared to play by them. Old school record collectors out there will feel me when I say: you did play by his rules. Otherwise you were cut off from so much illicit bootleg goodness.
Every once in a while you could surprise Dan with something incredibly rare. At the time I knew Dan, I was working in a digital video studio that did Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film transfers. On one occasion, photographer Robert Frank booked time to make a film transfer from his little seen documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American Tour with the title Cocksucker Blues. The Stones had an injunction against Cocksucker Blues being screened (unless for charity) because, well, it was a fairly decadent and at times quite unflattering portrait of them, let’s just say. The staff were told that under no circumstances could we make our own copies of what Frank was coming in to transfer. Yeah right! So, uh, this friend of mine, yeah this friend of mine, made copy, a copy of which I then traded to Dan, for, as I recall, a live video of David Bowie’s “Heroes” tour from 1978 and Bowie’s “1980 Floor Show” performance from The Midnight Special. Whenever I saw a bootleg of Cocksucker Blues, I would always look to see if it was a generation or two (or ten) away from the one I traded to Dan. Over the decades, most of them were my copy’s progeny (I can tell by a warble in the opening credits) although this has changed in recent years as a far better version has surfaced on DVD and torrent sites.
In any case, my rambling anecdote about the VHS tape trading underground of the late 1980s is because I wanted you to know that the legendary Cocksucker Blues documentary has been posted once again by some kind soul for viewing on the Internet. My 25-year-old copy is NOT the parent of this version, which looks pretty good (Note: The film was shot on Super-8 film to begin with, so it’s never going to look much better than this. You can find torrents for a great looking DVD version all over the place).
