Back in 1990 Pianist Aki Takahashi commissioned many of the world’s leading experimental music composers to re-interpret songs by The Beatles for her to perform on an album amusingly titled Hyper Beatles
Bonus: A performance of Alvin Lucier’s Nothing Is Real which was originally composed for Hyper Beatles.
As far as I’m concerned you can never get enough Grinderman. Here’s a searing performance of the song ‘Grinderman’ at The Cannery Ballroom in Nashville, Nov. 19, 2010. Fucking A!
Excuse me while I go eat some peyote.
Via EOM
There are precious few clips of current Dangerous Minds Radio Hour featured heroine, the late Judee Sill
More Judee after the jump…
AGGRO - That’s what Joe Hawkins and his mates were looking for, with their shaven heads, big boots and braces. Football matches, pub brawls, open-air pop concerts, hippies and Hell’s Angels all gave them chances to vent their sadistic violence. SKINHEAD is a story straight from today’s headlines - portraying with horrifying vividness all the terror and brutality that has become the trademark of these vicious teenage malcontents.
Richard Allen was a Canadian-born writer who could churn out pulp novels as regular as drunks take beer shits. In the early 1970’s, he got a gig writing novels about skinheads for New English Library. He eventually spewed out 17 of em. His first novel ‘Skinhead’ struck a chord with British skinheads and his teenage gangster novels became hugely popular. His stories of the biker, mod, teddy boy and Oi! culture of 70’s Britain became an essential, yet darker and less fashionable, part of London’s punk culture. While The Sex Pistols and The Clash were ultimately a bunch of hippie idealists, the skinhead scene was working and non-working class anger tied to racial resentment and a sense of destiny lost. The Two-Tone bands entered the scene and built a bridge between the cerebral revolution of the punkers and the racial paranoia of the skins. The baldies racist inclinations were defused by their love of reggae, ska, and rock steady. Skinhead moonstomp.
Update: Paul Gallagher reports that “in the 60s and 70s skinheads were black and white - though the movement was hijacked by some members of the National Front (extreme right Nazi organization). Trouble with Allen’s books was their painting skins in a sometimes negative light. Ska and Two Tone records reclaimed skinheads in the late 70s through The Specials and Madness, etc.”
Check out this solid documentary on Richard Allen and the legions of kids for whom he was the voice of their disenfranchisement and anger anguish.
Parts 2 - 7 after the jump…
The Brat mashes up David Bowie performing ‘Fame’ on Soul Train with Booker T’s ‘Potato Hole’ and I like it. That Hammond B3 adds some serious soul sauce to Bowie’s classic.
David’s performance of ‘Fame’ on Soul Train is not commercially available and that’s a drag.
I promised DM readers I was gonna dig up some cool international rock and roll and here’s something ultra-groovy: Rocka-hula-billy from German pop star Conny (Cornelia Froboess).
In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, Conny had a string of hit records and starred in the German equivalent of Beach Blanket Bingo style films. She’s still alive and working.
The stylized sets and eye-popping Technicolor in the following clips from Holiday in Honolulu and Blue Jean Boy recall the live action cartoons of Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It).
Conny comes on like a female Eddie Cochran boppin’ in a teenage galaxy in some swingin’ universe all its own. Dig it!
Tom Waits has teamed up with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to record two tracks for a special fundraiser. Released November 19th, Preservation Hall Recordings pressed up a 504 piece limited edition, hand-numbered 78 rpm vinyl record, with a special edition that also includes a 78 rpm record player. Proceeds will benefit the Preservation Hall Junior Jazz & Heritage Brass Band and outreach program:
Mr. Waits traveled to New Orleans in 2009 to record two songs with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for the critically acclaimed project Preservation: An album to benefit Preservation Hall and the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program, “Tootie Ma Was A Big Fine Thing” , and “Corrine Died On The Battlefield”. Originally recorded by Danny Barker in 1947, these two selections are the earliest known recorded examples of Mardi Gras Indian chants.
The two tracks will now be packaged in a special limited edition 78 rpm format record, each signed and numbered by Preservation Hall Creative Director Ben Jaffe. The first one hundred records will be accompanied by a custom-made Preservation Hall 78rpm record player as part of a Deluxe Donation package. The remaining four hundred and four will be available as a standalone record for the Basic Donation package.
This special limited edition recording will be made available in two different tiers, based on the level of donation: Deluxe Donation Tier: $200 – Limited Edition 78rpm record featuring Tom Waits & The Preservation Hall Jazz Band AND a custom-made Preservation Hall 78 record players – and Basic Donation Tier: $50 – Limited Edition 78rpm record featuring Tom Waits & The Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
The items can be ordered here.
Via The End of Being
Presented here, for no other reason than I simply can’t get this song out of my head... Marvelous rocksteady classic from Marcia Griffiths, one of the standout cuts—indeed it is thee title track—on the essential Feel Like Jumping: Best of Studio One Women
Griffiths, known as “the Queen of Reggae” was a member of the I-Threes, the female trio of backing vocalists who toured and recorded with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Her 1976 song “Electric Boogie” holds the record for the best-selling reggae song by a female vocalist and is the soundtrack to the popular late 80s line-dance craze, “The Electric Slide.”
It didn’t take long after his death in 1997 for the indomitable spirt of Fela Kuti, Afrobeat legend, political revolutionary, musician, composer and performer, to rise again. His singular musical cross-pollination of African drumming, Bitches Brew-influenced jazz rock and James Brown-influenced guitar funk has gained cultural currency in the past decade far beyond what he achieved in his lifetime.
The wildly popular Broadway musical about him, Fela! (directed and choreographed by the great Bill T. Jones, and financed in part by Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith) has been nominated for 11 Tony Awards and was recently visited by First Lady Michelle Obama. The upcoming Beyonce Knowles album is said to be heavily influenced by Kuti’s Afrobeat sound.
Below, a fascinating documentary on Fela Kuti titled Music is the Weapon. This intimate 1982 film was directed by Stéphane Tchal-Gadjieff & Jean Jacques Flori.
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s passing yesterday evoked many tributes to the man as a member of influential electronic acts Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Coil. But we haven’t heard quite enough about one of his best solo projects, Threshold HouseBoys Choir.
Both live and on the guise’s single proper release, Form Grows Rampant, THBC basically comprised Sleazy backing his own video of various rituals at the Vegetarian Festival in southern Thailand’s Krabi Town (12 hours from his adopted home of Bangkok) with an abstract soundtrack that drew on the many field recordings he made in the city. Christopherson’s infamous fascination with the young active male body is clear in this work. But many of the problematics surrounding the European gaze that typifies exotica seem mitigated somehow by the late composer’s intimate audio-visual treatment.
Overall, Christopherson’s work helped create a literary, psychotropic aesthetic that synthesized aspects of outside sexuality, technology, and ritual magick, bound by a wry sense of humor. THBC brought that angle to a highly personal level, and will stand as an evocative late moment in the man’s prolific career.
More from Form Grows Rampant after the jump…