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Siouxsie Sioux: The Martha Stewart of punk rock
01.04.2011
04:24 am
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Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie share their recipe for marzipan bees on British children’s TV show The Wide Awake Club in 1986.

A baby seal, a skull tipped walking cane, the water phone, marzipan bees and a hacky sack playing fool in the background, it’s all quite surreal. Imagine watching this in the morning after a night of no sleep….which is exactly what I’m doing right now.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.04.2011
04:24 am
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Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
01.03.2011
07:12 pm
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A new documentary about folk singer and activist Phil Ochs:There But for Fortune has its theatrical premiere this week in NYC, on January 5th at the IFC Center before a wider release rolls out during the course of the month. Dangerous Minds pal Michael Simmons reviews the film at Huffington Post. Here’s an excerpt:

The late Phil Ochs, one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the 1960s on a rarified perch with Dylan, Joni and Cohen, wasn’t a household name but he was big enough to have affected a lot of people. Director/writer Kenneth Bowser’s powerful documentary of his life is called Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune and it’ll tweak your empathy gland while breaking your heart. Hopefully it’ll also wire and inspire the viewer to go out and demand that America live up to its self-image as a nation of people who care about others. Among the many onscreen friends and troublemakers who tout Phil’s complicated genius are Sean Penn, Paul Krassner, Ed Sanders, Van Dyke Parks, Abbie Hoffman, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow, and Tom Hayden. Brother Michael Ochs (who also produced), sister Sonny, and daughter and activist Meegan Ochs provide the most personal insights.

Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, Phil fused JFK-inspired New Frontier idealism and his natural musical ability and it led him to the guitar and New York City 1962 where folk music and left-wing politics created an army of singing rebels. Phil had a fluid, Irish tenor voice with a perfect vibrato and wrote prodigiously. The songs were ripped from the headlines, as they say, addressing the civil rights struggle (“Here’s To The State Of Mississippi”), Vietnam (“White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”) and U.S. imperialism (“Cops Of The World”). Two of his classics—“I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and “The War Is Over”—became anthems of the anti-war movement. He also had a razor sharp sense of black humor as heard in “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends,” his faux-upbeat examination of apathy’s victims.

If there was a cause and an event, Phil was there in a heartbeat. “Phil would turn down a commercial job for a benefit because the benefit would reach more people,” says brother Michael. We see scene after scene of the handsome, upbeat, stiff-spined troubadour singing truth to power and joyously quipping in period interviews. A charter member of the ‘60s counterculture (though not uncritical of its excesses), he helped create the Yippies with friends Hoffman, Krassner and Sanders, Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert. The Yippies’ plan for a Festival Of Life to contrast the festival of death at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago resulted in blowback by the powers that be and while the whole world watched, Windy City coppers ran amok, beating heads in, spilling buckets of blood and mocking dissent in the greatest democracy in the world. Like many, Phil was devastated. “I guess everybody goes through a certain stage of disillusionment and decides the world is not the sweet and fair place I always assumed and that justice would out,” reflected a bitter Phil after Chicago ‘68. “I always thought justice would out, I no longer think that by any stretch. I don’t think fairness wins anymore.”

Read more: Phil Ochs Lives! (Huffington Post)
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.03.2011
07:12 pm
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Great Moments in Sampling: Del tha Funkee Homosapien meets The Monkees
01.03.2011
05:21 pm
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I’ve been on a bit of a Monkees kick recently. The other day I was listening to Headquarters album—something I’ve not put on in years and years—and within seconds of the track “Zilch” starting, Tara and I looked at one another like “Hey, this is where the sample from “Mistadobalina” comes from!”
 

 
“Zilch” is a nonsensical, dada fugue composed and performed by all four Monekees. It begins with Peter Tork saying “Mr. Dobolina, Mr. Bob Dobolina. Mr. Dobolina, Mr. Bob Dobolina,” etc., before Davy Jones comes in with “Zilch. China clipper calling Alameda. China clipper calling Alameda,” etc., before Micky Dolenz comes in with “Zilch. Never mind the furthermore, the plea is self defense. Never mind the furthermore, the plea is self defense,” (which is a line from Oklahoma) and Mike finally joins in with “Zilch. It is of my opinion that the people are intending. It is of my opinion that the people are intending,” etc. Ultimately the four repeat these lines faster and faster until they break up in laughter.

The Monkees would sometimes sing “Zilch” as they entered a public performance. It was also used in one episode where they’re being interrogated by a police sergeant and a bit of “Zilch” is what they respond with.

Below, the video for Del tha Funkee Homosapien’s hip-hop classic, “Mistadobalina”:
 

 
The other samples used by Del tha Funkee Homosapien in “Mistadobalina” are “Pin the Tail on the Funky” by Parliament and James Brown’s “Stone To The Bone.”

“Zilch” is also referenced in the film Honeymoon in Vegas when “Bob Dobalina” is paged over a PA system.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.03.2011
05:21 pm
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Stanley Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings, Starring the Beatles
01.03.2011
01:38 pm
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Super Punch is currently holding a bizarre art-mashup contest of the Beatles meets Stanley Kubrick meets Lord of the Rings. There are some pretty humorous entries in the lot. Here’s a taste:
 
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Go visit Super Punch to view more entries and vote.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.03.2011
01:38 pm
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This Is Ska!
01.03.2011
03:05 am
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This Is Ska! is a fun film from 1964 featuring performances by Jimmy Cliff, The Maytals, The Blues Busters, Byron Lee and more. Plus, there’s dance lessons!

Shot on location at The Sombrero Club in Kingston, Jamaica.
 

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.03.2011
03:05 am
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Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ and me
01.02.2011
03:27 pm
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When I was a 10-year-old boy, in 1976, I read a review of Lou Reed’s then new-ish album, Metal Machine Music written by the great Lester Bangs in what was probably the very first issue of CREEM magazine that my innocent, unsuspecting and very religious mother ever bought for me:

When you wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of your life, Metal Machine Music is the best medicine. Because when you first arise you’re probably so fucked (i.e., still drunk) that is doesn’t even really hurt yet (not like it’s going to), so you should put this album on immediately, not only to clear all the crap out of your head, but to prepare you for what’s in store the rest of the day.

Speaking of clearing out crap, I once had this friend who would say, “I take acid at least every two months & JUST BLOW ALL THE BAD SHIT OUTA MY BRAIN!” So I say the same thing about MMM. Except I take it about once a day, like vitamins.

Here’s a link to Bang’s entire essay. As you read it, try to imagine what a precociously deviant 10-year-old kid made of it. Even if I really didn’t know exactly what Bangs was talking about, of course, this sounded like something I really wanted to get in on. The vague promise of some sort of “aural high” or sonic sensory derangement seemed very, very attractive to me, especially since there was virtually no way I was going to be able to get my hands on any real drugs at that age (That would take another two years or so).

As luck—or Satan himself personally intervening on my behalf—would have it, the very next week, I found a copy of Metal Machine Music on 8-track tape for 99 cents in a cut-out bin at a “Hills” department store in my home town of Wheeling, WV (I still have it, it may indeed be the oldest surviving personal possession of mine. I’d never part with it).

Metal Machine Music has been described as sounding like “the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator” by Rolling Stone. The Trouser Press said it was “unlistenable oscillator noise (a description, not a value judgment).” Most people have never even sampled the album and few have listened to it all the way through. Not me! I listened to this sucker over and over and over again with headphones, I might add, in an effort to, I guess, mostly just try to understand it, or to get to the bottom of what Reed was trying to communicate (In my defense, I will remind readers that I was ten at the time).

It’s such a curious beastie, this Metal Machine Music. For a child with rapidly solidifying tastes—by twelve, I promise you was I was an inveterate rock snob—this was a conundrum worthy of further, and deep, investigation, I felt. If Lester Bangs liked it that much, it had to be great, right? (Right?) There was also, as I was saying, the naive notion I had that it might be somehow psychoactive, or aid in blowing all the bad shit out of MY brain. (Here’s another quote from the Bangs piece that I know must’ve piqued my interest: “I have been told that Lou’s recordings, but most specifically this item, have become a kind of secret cult among teenage mental institution inmates all across the nation. I have been told further that those adolescents who have been subjected to electroshock therapy enjoy a particular affinity for MMM, that it reportedly “soothes their nerves,” and is ultimately a kind of anthem.”).

Who the fuck knows WHAT made me listen to the electronic wailing wail of sound that is MMM over and over again at the age of ten? But listen to it I did. Repeatedly.

There is one factor, unique to me I suppose, worth mentioning in this context, that probably made MMM a bit more palatable to me: My father toiled for nearly his entire working life at the central switching office at the C&P Telephone Company (part of the Bell system, before it got broken up in the anti-trust court). On the floor where he worked, there were hundreds of 12 ft high banks of humming and clicking electronic circuitry, I’m talking wall upon wall of this sort of machinery, but it was all “open” and sitting on, and bolted to, metal shelves. There was no casing around much of it to dampen the sound. Think of a library (in terms of how it was physically laid out), but full of the noisy, chattering circuits and switchers that made the old analog telephone system work (This machinery is what was put the old school telephone operators who connected your calls out of business in the 1960s, basically. I’m sure it’s all been 100% replaced by now with a waist-high rack of servers run by a small IT department).

The gear there chattered like robotic cicadas. It also reminded me of the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (audio link), the sci-fi classic often seen on late-night television in the 70s. Precisely because there were so many of these clicking, whirling, industrious little diodes and circuits, they made a particular “music” that wasn’t as harsh sounding as you might expect. It actually sounded kind of cool. Had I not had the experience of spending so much of my childhood in that office, I’m sure that MMM would have been much harder for me to take. The point of this digression is that I had some sort of a reference point that made MMM sound much less foreign to my ears than it would have otherwise.

Have you, dear reader, ever actually heard MMM, yourself? Most people haven’t, but then again, where would they have heard it? It was probably never played on the radio (except by smart-ass college DJs), probably has never been played at a discotheque (except by a particularly spiteful DJ) and unless the host wants to clear the place out, it’s probably never been played for any other reason at a party, either.

Here’s an excerpt. Turn it up, I dare you:
 

 
Perhaps the best way to approach MMM as a listener is to simply take Lou Reed himself at his word about the project, from the original liner notes. In them, he spells out quite openly what what MMM is supposed to be, and what his goals were for the piece, but few reviewers or fans at the time would have had ANY idea of what he was talking about. Try this on for size:

“Passion—REALISM—realism was the key. The records were letters. Real letters from me to certain other people. Who had and still have basically, no music, be it verbal or instrumental to listen to. One of the peripheral effects typically distorted was what was to be known as heavy metal rock. In Reality it was of course diffuse, obtuse, weak, boring and ultimately an embarrassment. This record is not for parties/dancing/background romance. This is what I ment by “real” rock, about “real” things. No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself. It is not meant to be. Start any place you like. Symmetry, mathematical precision, obsessive and detailed accuracy and the vast advantage one has over “modern electronic composers.” They, with neither sense of time, melody or emotion, manipulated or no. It’s for a certain time and place of mind. It is the only recorded work I know of seriously done as well as possible as a gift, if one could call it that, from a part of certain head to a few others. Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you. At the very least I made it so I had something to listen to. Certainly Misunderstood: Power to Consume (how Bathetic): an idea done respectfully, intelligently, sympathetically and graciously, always with concentration on the first and formost goal. For that matter, off the record, I love and adore it. I’m sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off.

One record for us and it. I’d harbored hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock, I was, perhaps, wrong. This is the reason Sally Can’t Dance—your Rock n Roll Animal. More than a decent try, but hard for us to do badly. Wrong media, unquestionably. This is not meant fo the market. The agreement one makes with “speed”. A specific acknowlegment. A to say the least, very limited market. Rock n Roll Animal makes this possible, funnily enough. The misrepresentation succeeds to the point of making possible the appearance of the progenitor. For those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush. Professionals, no sniffers please, don’t confuse superiority (no competition) with violence, power or the iustifications. The Tacit speed agreement with Self. We did not start World War I, II or III. Or the Bay of Pigs, for that Matter. Whenever. As way of disclaimer. I am forced to say that, due to stimulation of various centers (remember OOOOHHHMMM, etc.), the possible negative contraindications must be pointed out. A record has to, of all things Anyway, hypertense people, etc. possibility of epilepsy (petite mal), psychic motor disorders, etc… etc… etc.

My week beats your year.”—Lou Reed

In prose that would be quite obtuse to most people, but plain enough perhaps for his fellow speed-freaks, Lou lays out exactly what he was trying to do: make music that mirrored the physiological experience of having methamphetamine course through your nervous system. Metal Machine Music, is even subtitled, in case there are any doubters, “The Amine β Ring,” for Christ’s sake!

Reed also mentions in the equipment notes that the album was inspired by the harmonic possibilities inherent in La Monte Young’s Minimalist drone music. Young’s music was very, very difficult for the general public to hear at that time, pressed up on limited edition albums that numbered probably 1000 copies in total, if that. Even to really knowledgeable music fans of the day, there was virtually no way—as in none—to hear his music unless you like knew him personally or visited his “Dream House” audio installation in NYC (still there, by the way), so this reference would have fallen on mostly deaf ears at the time. John Cale played with Young’s Theater of Eternal Music prior to joining the Velvet Underground, as did original VU drummer Angus MacLise, so Reed would have been intimately acquitted with Young’s work, even if few others outside of avant garde music circles would have been. [You could also take the warning about the music causing epileptic seizures to reference the underground film, The Flicker, made by Tony Conrad, another alum of the Theater of Eternal Music]

The goal with MMM was to emulate Young’s long, drawn-out harmonic drones, but with manipulated guitar and microphone feedback. Apparently the way the sounds were derived was by leaning two guitars on amps facing each other and then the resulting feedback was manipulated through tremolo effects units, ring modulators and reverb units. This would in turn vibrate the strings. No one really “played” anything, but the whole thing seems to have been heavily manipulated. The results were laid down on 4-track recordings which were then mixed to stereo with strict separation—what you heard in the left speaker was not what you were hearing in the right and there was no overlap. It has a reputation for being ear-bleeding noise, but in actual fact, there is nothing truly atonal about it. Not saying it’s soothing either, but atonal simply isn’t accurate.

There was, however, a crucial difference in the intent of Young’s Minimalist drones and Reed’s “metal machine music.” Young’s music is something best listened to stoned on pot and lying down. Long, slow, sustained notes played on piano, brass, strings, various exotic instruments and via throat singing is pretty much what you get with Young’s work. Young’s once virtually unobtainable oeuvre—now easy to find all over the Internet—moves with the speed of molasses rolling down a glacier. Being high on cannabis is practically a requirement for appreciating the music, which almost seems to slow down time when paired with some herbal enhancement. Without pot, it would merely be annoying.

Not so with the frenetic swirling maelstrom of MMM. This was music made for speedfreaks by the undisputed king of the speedfreaks. MMM is, quite simply, no more and no less, than an attempt (and a very successful one at that) to mine the same territory (I’m tempted to say “vein”) as La Monte Young’s drone music, albeit filtered through the nervous system of one Lewis Allan Reed, replete with high pitch frequencies, pulses, squeals, squalls and sine waves.

In another important break from Young’s work, where almost nothing happens, MMM has shitloads going on at once. Lou’s brand of Minimalism was quite maximal, when you get right down to it.

And then there is the whole “Lou just did this to piss off his fans and/or his record company” debate. I don’t buy it. I imagine Lou Reed, pumped full of amphetamine, sitting in a recoding studio, twisting knobs and blissing out over what he created. Surely, there must have a level of mischievous “Look what I can get away” antics to be expected of Lou Reed, but as he later said of MMM, “I was serious about it. I was also really, really stoned.”

Hey, a lot of great art is made that way. And recall the part about it being “a gift” in Reed’s liner notes. To his mind, the gift he was offering his fellow speedfreaks was the ultimate head album of all time. Delusions of modern classical grandeur or amphetamine-fueled feedback noodling? It probably doesn’t matter all that much. No matter how you slice it, it was a ballsy move! But a “fuck you” to fans or to RCA? That doesn’t make much sense to me. And besides RCA even went to the extra expense of releasing the album in 4-channel quadraphonic sound.

In any case, after a few months with it, I stopped listening to my 8-track of Metal Machine Music without ever really figuring out whether or not it was any good. So that’s like 35-years ago. I’d see the CD in stores from time to time and contemplate buying it, but I never did.

Last spring with the various live Metal Machine Music performances by Reed and others, there was a rerelease of the quad version of the album on DVD and Blu-ray, so I decided to jump. Hearing MMM in multichannel surround sound seemed too intriguing of an experience to pass up.

Torben Sangild writing in The Journal of Music and Meaning explains, pretty well here, what I was looking for:

[T]here is the possibility of listening to it in more depth, discovering the variations in the stream of rumbling noises and screeching feedback sounds. The harsh feedback sounds are, of course, tones; some of them have a drone-like character, others swarm chaotically. There is no structure, but there is a texture with the drones as temporary points of orientation between traditional opposites - the expressionistic scream and the meditative mantra.

In the Blu-ray 4-channel quadraphonic version, with all of its high-pitched sonic frequencies able to be reproduced properly, listeners can now hear the work as Reed heard it himself in the recording studio. The wider berth of the four channels adds a sonic clarity that coaxes out a lot of the hidden sounds and adds an extra “spatial” element that the stereo version simply doesn’t have. The chaos envelopes the listener like an electronic blizzard. I found myself continuously walking around the room and listening to each speaker. It’s very cool. (If you are curious to hear it after reading this, and have a surround system, the only place you can get the multichannel version is at Lou Reed’s website).

Like Proust’s madeleines, standing there in my living room in Los Angeles, Metal Machine Music transported me back to my childhood and the noisy office where my father worked [Forgive me people, I just had to write that sentence, okay?]. I won’t deny that Metal Machine Music could described as a musical Rorschach blot and that you could project whatever you wanted onto it, but this could be said about a lot of “difficult” music and art. To my mind, Reed’s difficult opus deserves to stand beside work like Stockhausen’s “Kontakte,” John Cage’s “Fontana Mix,” Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique,” as well as the music of Throbbing Gristle that came in its immediate wake.  A hundred years from now, when no one remembers who Justin Bieber was, rock snobs will still be trying to figure out Metal Machine Music. It’s the 2001 of rock, a mysterious unapproachable monolith that to some extent, will always remain that way.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.02.2011
03:27 pm
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Captain Beefheart Symposium in LA with Gary Lucas, Matt Groening & Pamela Des Barres
01.02.2011
11:20 am
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Dangerous MInds pal Michael Simmons posted the following at the LA Weekly website. I know Brad Laner will be there! The date will be January 13th.

As the human race more and more resembles a high school production of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the departure of authentic nonconformos like Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) is conspicuous. Beefheart’s bucket kick on Dec. 17 was a big sinkhole; he took with him a half-century career of skid-row-sweet-chariot blues-rock, esteemed artwork and a scathing skewering of Squareworld. Former Magic Band guitarist-manager Gary Lucas hosts a Captain Beefheart Symposium tonight with live yap from Matt Groening, Pamela Des Barres, Stan Ridgway, Kristine McKenna and Bill Moseley. Rare footage of Cap ‘n’ band and a clip of David Lynch reading “Pena” from Beefheart opus Trout Mask Replica will be screened, along with slides of Van Vliet’s paintings and sculptures. Weba Garretson will recite “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” and Lucas—one of the greatest guitarists you may or may not have heard of—will demo singular Beefheartian musical concepts with help from his ax; he’ll also present unreleased audio tracks. Fast and bulbous!

The Echoplex, 1154 Glendale Blvd. L.A., CA 90026 (213) 413-8200

The Doc Blows Forward ‘n’ the Doc Blows Back (LA Weekly)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.02.2011
11:20 am
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Arthur Brown filmed by Nicolas Roeg at the 1971 Glastonbury Festival: Hellfire!
01.02.2011
04:34 am
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Arthur Brown’s monumental 1968 hit “Fire” overshadowed a career that consisted of far more than just one great song. In 1971, Brown formed a group called Kingdom Come and released a mindbender of an album called Galactic Zoo Dossier. The opening track “Internal Messenger” is an epic blast of thundering prog rock that melds perfectly with Brown’s hellfire bombast.

This bewitchingly bizarre clip from the 1971 Glastonbury Festival was beautifully shot by Nicolas Roeg and is available on import DVD here.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.02.2011
04:34 am
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Zappa gets grilled by Pennsylvania State Trooper, 1981
01.02.2011
02:32 am
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Zappa smoking the highly addictive drug tobacco.
 
In this video from 1981, Pennsylvania State Trooper Charles Ash discusses music and drugs with Frank Zappa at Manhattan’s Mayfair Regent Hotel.

The video was part of an anti-drug campaign developed for the Pennsylvania public school system. I’m not sure that Zappa’s comments about legalizing drugs is exactly what Ash was hoping for, but the Officer seems so pleased to be in Zappa’s presence he goes along for the ride.

Watching a cop in uniform telling Zappa “the LP you have out right now, ‘One Size Fits All,’ is a personal favorite of mine” is mildly jaw-dropping. Who are the brain police?

I’ve always found it ironic that Zappa was never into drugs and yet his 1966 debut album Freak Out! was a magnet for acidheads everywhere. How many teenyboppers burned that album’s cover into their retinal tissue while tripping on Purple Owsley?  It wasn’t until “We’re Only In It For The Money” that some hippies started to figure out that Zappa was satirizing the counter culture as well as “straights.” The joke was on everybody. “What will you do when the label comes off?”
 

  

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.02.2011
02:32 am
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Jim Morrison does his Bill Murray impression
01.01.2011
03:16 am
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The Lizard King has an epiphany and starts channeling Bill Murray…all the way from the future.

Great minds meld outside of time. Can ya dig pure unbounded joy?
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.01.2011
03:16 am
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