Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”
Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.
Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.
Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.
Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.
Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.
In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like CREEM. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.
Six years before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary but ill-fated 1975 attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune—the story of which was compellingly told in the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—there was another similarly ambitious and ground-breaking film project that, until recently, was largely unknown.
Saturation 70 was a special effects-laden science fiction movie starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Julian Jones, the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Unlike Dune, Saturation 70did actually make it into production and was shot, but never completed, then was forgotten and undocumented for over forty years.
The film was written and directed by Tony Foutz, who crops up in several music histories, usually described as a ‘Stones insider’, but was actually much more than that. His father, Moray Foutz, was an early executive at Walt Disney. The younger Foutz had his own equally fascinating career path, working in the mid-sixties as a first assistant director in Italy for Gille Pontecorvo, Orson Welles and Marco Ferreri – for whom he later wrote Tales of Ordinary Madness, the first film adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s work. His connection to the Stones came via Anita Pallenberg, who he met in Rome during the filming of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella at Cinecitta Studios in the summer of 1967. Through her, he also befriended Keith Richards.
In 1968, while staying at Richards’ Redlands estate, Foutz wrote a script entitled Maxagasm in collaboration with Sam Shepard, for himself to direct as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones, who were to star in the movie and produce an original soundtrack album for it. During pre-production for Maxagasm in Los Angeles, Foutz was tipped off about Integratron designer and space devotee George Van Tassel’s ‘Spaceship Convention’ at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree, an annual gathering of UFO abductees and alien enthusiasts. Foutz gathered up some friends to go and film documentary footage there, intending to use it as a way of testing out special effects he was planning for Maxagasm.
Gram Parsons at the piano in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, 1970. Still from the ‘Saturation 70’ promo reel (Anthony Foutz Archive).
On that trip were Gram Parsons (Foutz’s roommate at the Chateau Marmont), Michelle Phillips, Julian Jones and his mother, Linda Lawrence (Parsons’ then-girlfriend), rock photographer Andee Cohen, Flying Burrito Brothers roadie Phil Kaufman, and western character actor Ted Markland—known as ‘the Mayor of Joshua Tree’ for his role in popularizing the location as a retreat for the hip Hollywood set. (It was Markland who first took Lenny Bruce, then the Stones, Parsons and Foutz to the desert to imbibe psychedelics and sit under the stars, scanning the sky for UFOs.) Also along for the ride were cinematographer Bruce Logan and special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, both fresh off working on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.
Fired up his experience at Giant Rock, Foutz decided to incorporate the footage they’d shot into another feature film project, that came together as a kind of counter culture version of the Wizard of Oz, about a lost star child (Julian Jones) who falls through a wormhole into present day Los Angeles and tries to find his way back home, assisted by four alien beings—the Kosmic Kiddies—who wear clean suits to protect them from the pollution. (The title of the film referenced the level at which carbon monoxide in human blood becomes lethal.)
The Kosmic Kiddies, from R to L: Tony Foutz, Michelle Phillips, Gram Parsons, Phil Kaufman and Andee Cohen. Photo: Tom Wilkes
Saturation ’70 was shot in and around Los Angeles from October 1969 through spring of 1970 and included several spectacular set pieces: a surreal shootout between a Viet Cong soldier and an American G.I. in the aisles of Gelson’s supermarket in Century City (noted gun fan, Phil Spector, visited the set that day and stood on the sidelines to watch); a cowboy picnic on the Avenue of the Stars featuring country music couturier Nudie Cohn and a bevy of cowgirl cheerleaders; and a parade of Ford Edsel cars roaring through the City of Industry in a flying V-formation. He also filmed the Kosmic Kiddies roaming around the city in their clean suits and masks—inside them, Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Stash Klossowski de Rola (the son of painter Balthus) and Andee Cohen.
Seeing an opportunity for cross promotion with his music career, Parsons had the Flying Burrito Brothers wear the same suits on the cover of their second album, Burrito Deluxe (also named in honor of the working title for Foutz’s script, “Rutabaga Deluxe”). Parsons and Roger McGuinn were brought together to write songs for and score the soundtrack. Rolling Stone would report that McGuinn intended to use the Moog synthesizer he had acquired at the Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier.
Julian Jones and his fairy godmother
Once principal photography was complete, Foutz started working on the special effects sequences at Doug Trumbull’s Canoga Park facility, incorporating computer-processed visual effects Trumbull was developing there that allowed for graphic and textual overlays on pre-existing film images—a revolutionary idea at the time. Among the effects Foutz and Trumbull were working to create were propagandistic data clouds that floated in the sky (akin to the dirigibles later seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), towering skyscrapers made of television screens and dinosaurs roaming among the derricks in the Inglewood Oil Field near La Cienega Boulevard.
Skid Row Los Angeles, 1970. Not much has changed. Look closely at the signs.
However, before they could complete their work, funding for the film fell through, the producers abandoned the project and the entire project collapsed. All of the footage was subsequently lost apart from one five minute showreel cut to the Flying Burrito Brothers version of the Jagger/Richards song, “Wild Horses,” which Parsons had contributed to the writing of a few months earlier.
For years, existence of the film was little more than a rumour among Gram Parsons fans—a strange anomalous event in his short, gloried career—but now all the existing production photos have been dusted off for an upcoming book that recreates the film shoot, and the story of Saturation 70 can finally be told.
Preorder Saturation 70: A Vision Past of the Future ForetoldHERE.
Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played George Jefferson, was known to be a huge fan of prog rock, especially Gentle Giant, Nektar and Gong.
Hemsley collaborated with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7” (never produced). Hemsley also did an interpretive dance to the Gentle Giant song “Proclamation” on Dinah Shore’s 70s talkshow, that was apparently somewhat confusing for her.
But the best story, I mean the best story of all time, is the one told by Gong’s Daevid Allen about his encounter with the beloved 70’s sitcom star. Here is Allen’s verbatim tale as related to Mitch Myers (and originally published in Magnet magazine):
“It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought, ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’
I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’
Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.
We went up to the top floor and there was this big room with darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.
[My girlfriend] Maggie and I were really tired and went to our room to go to bed. The room had one mattress with an electric blanket and that was it. No bed covering, no pillow, nothing. The next day we came down and Sherman showed us a couple of [The Jeffersons] episodes.
One of our fans came and rescued us, but not before Sherman took us to see these Hollywood PR people. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Hemsley wants us to get the information we need in order to do these Flying Teapot billboards on Sunset Strip.’ I looked at them and thought they were the cheesiest, most nasty people that I had ever seen in my life and I gave them the runaround. I just wanted out of there. I liked Sherman a lot. He was a very personable, charming guy. I just had a lot of trouble with the people around him.”
Oi, if Daevid Allen thinks you’re weird, you must be a stone freak! (Like our pal, opera singer/actor Jesse Merlin. He met Daevid Allen in San Francisco and Allen said “Just look at him. He’s a perfect example of himself!” Coming from Daevid Allen, that’s the best compliment in the history of the world, isn’t it?)
Below, Sherman Hemsley as “George Jefferson,” dancing up a storm to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way”!
Via an intense David Bowie fandom, and also from being an avid reader of CREEM magazine, I discovered the work of the Velvet Underground at a very young age, like ten or eleven. I bought one of their albums without ever hearing it, because I just knew it was going to be good. I had no trouble figuring out what the songs were about, the subject matter of “Venus in Furs” or “Waiting for the Man” was well understood by me. (I was not in the least an innocent child.) In the mid-1970s Velvet Underground albums were not difficult to come by in my backwater West Virginia hometown—unlike Iggy, whose albums had to be mail ordered—and post VU solo efforts from Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale could easily be found in the cut-out bins of white trash department stores, usually in the form of 8-track tapes. These sold for 99 cents!
One of these 99 cent 8-tracks that I picked up—which I still own—was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. This inscrutable album presented me with a puzzle that I had to solve: Why do people like this? (Little did I know then that almost everyone hated it.) I played it endlessly AND ON HEADPHONES in an effort to figure out what it was. Eventually—I think—I did. The same could not be said of Nico’s The Marble Index. No matter how hard I tried—and I did try hard I promise you, I must’ve played it a hundred times at least—I simply could not wrap my brain around that album. In other words, ‘Metal Machine Music? Hey, no problem,’ but The Marble Index was just a bridge too far for my pre-teen mind. Obviously it’s not an album for everyone to begin with but especially not for a little kid who only the year before was listening to James Bond soundtracks and “Little Willy.” I finally gave up trying and never did get to the bottom of it.
HOWEVER, when The Marble Index came out on CD in 1991, my fulsome familiarity with it some fifteen years earlier allowed me to “get it” instantly as an adult and from that moment on, I stand in utter awe at what I think, echoing both John Cale and Lester Bangs, is perhaps the greatest work of European avant garde classical music of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a staggering, absolutely unprecedented work of genius. It’s a visionary masterpiece. It comes out of precisely nowhere. (The bowels of Hell?) It is of no musical tradition or recognizable genre. It doesn’t seem to have been influenced by anything and there’s nothing else that it can be likened to. The Marble Index is a singular artistic achievement. The best way to describe it to the reader who has not heard the album is to compare it to someone creating a ghostly new language from scratch. It really is that individual. A desolate psychic territory where no one else has ever ventured, before or since. And frankly why would anyone want to?
Nico’s music can be too weird, even for weird people.
*****
There’s only one way to listen to Nico’s music and this is at an absolutely ear-splitting volume so that it sounds like you’re in a Gothic cathedral in Hell and she’s a strident, fifty foot tall Valkyrie, her voice declaiming right into your face like storm winds. This is music that absolutely demands your attention. It is decidedly not something to put on in the background, it really needs to overpower you for a full appreciation of what’s on offer. Nico’s music will never click for most people, but when it does, as The Marble Index‘s producer Frazier Mohawk put it, it’s “a hole you fall into.” I fell in pretty deep.
Recently, for weeks on end, months even, I was playing Nico all day, every day—my wife is a good sport—and although I’m not doing that quite as much as I type this, her albums are still close at hand in my speed rack. During my Nico fever, I reread Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young’s archly drawn memoir about the distinctly unglamorous side of touring with the junkie diva during the final years of her life, Richard Witt’s excellent biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, rewatched Susanne Ofteringer’s engrossing Nico:Icon documentary for the tenth time (at least) and then I bought You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico, a new book by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
A commonality of all these books, and this is true of the movie as well, is that there is scant information about her songwriting or the actual recording of her albums. Very little about where her music came from or what inspired it. How it seemed to have been born fully formed very soon after her acquisition of a harmonium. The vast distance between the chamber folk of Chelsea Girl and everything that came after it. Nowhere can one read in depth about her creative process. What we do know almost always comes from John Cale, but even his accounts mostly dwell on the mechanics of making the recordings and of how he had to work around a wheezing, frequently out of tune harmonium (you can often hear Nico pumping its foot pedals) and her unconventional vocals. (Note the difference in her singing style from Chelsea Girl to The Marble Index which came out the following year. When Nico is singing her own songs, and not those written by others, only then do we hear how absolutely astounding her voice was. She had to be the one writing for that most idiosyncratic of vocal instruments, as no one else was capable of doing it for her.)
It’s known that Nico was an avid reader of the classics, with Nietzsche, Wordsworth—The Marble Index‘s title comes from a line in Wordsworth’s poem “Memories of Cambridge’’ where he describes a statue of Newton—and Tennyson being her favorites. Tennyson’s verse was perhaps her biggest lyrical influence with his pronounced melancolia and subject matter of kings and queens, medieval legends, and mythology. Nico’s cryptic lyrics evade elucidation, and her committed performance makes them seem even more mysterious. The entire package—including, of course, John Cale’s absolutely apocalyptic arrangements—has a remarkable purity. There is nothing else, nothing in all the world of music, that sounds like Nico’s so-called Marble Index trilogy (which includes 1970’s Desertshore and 1974’s The End…, both also with Cale.)
*****
The Inner Scar, or by its French title, La Cicatrice Intérieure, is an obscure art film from 1972 that Nico made in collaboration with her lover, film director Philippe Garrel, who was then considered a sort of cinematic Rimbaud. It was released in 1972. Although Garrel is credited as the director (the film itself has no credits) he has gone on record as saying it was entirely co-authored with Nico. In fact, she wrote all of the dialogue, much of it in two languages—she speaks French, German and English in the film—that Garrel himself couldn’t even understand. The soundtrack is all her music and she is on screen for almost the entire time. (No other film directed by Garrel, either before or since, looks, or is anything even remotely like The Inner Scar.)
The Inner Scar is a truly weird and remarkable film but what strikes me the most about it is the sheer bloody mindedness of it all. The willpower it would have taken to make something like it happen on a low budget. The film, which has only 20 shots for the entire length of it, was shot in some seriously remote locations in Death Valley, Sinai, and Iceland. The tracking shots are LONG and in the days before Steadicam was invented this meant laying dolly track and in this case that meant laying track—and lots of it—in fucking Death Valley where it can get to be 120 degrees! Or on icy, freezing cold tundras. There is one spectacular—and obviously Godard-inspired—tracking shot where the unnamed sheep herder (Garrel) starts walking, and walking, and walking until he eventually arrives right back at his starting place. Imagine how much circular track and how large of an area it would have taken to create that sequence, seen in the below clip. All of the equipment, the crew, the trucks were on the inside of the track. It’s absolutely ingenious. How two junkies organized such a globe-spanning and logistically complex production is a miracle to begin with, but wherever did they score dope in Death Valley?
National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra—probably best-known as Ian Faith, the irritable, incompetent manager of Spinal Tap—created the fucking funniest John Lennon parody of all time.
Technically “Magical Misery Tour (Bootleg Record)” isn’t a parody so much as it’s a pointedly vicious satire. Hendra used direct quotes from John Lennon’s infamous 1970 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jann Wenner (later published in book form as Lennon Remembers) for this hysterical bit.
At the time of Lennon’s Rolling Stone sitting he was undergoing Primal Scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov and he really let it rip, shitting on his own fans, Mick Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney and several others. All Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue did was handpick the best parts and arrange them into lyrics. Still as funny today as when it was released on the classic National Lampoon Radio Dinner LP in 1972.
Hendra does an absolutely boffo Lennon impersonation here, razzing the former Beatle’s very public bitching and moaning. The music’s by Christopher Cerf, it was arranged by Christopher Guest and that’s Melissa Manchester making a cameo appearance as Yoko Ono at the very end.
In his 1987 memoir Going Too Far, Hendra tells the tale of an FM radio disc jockey playing “Magical Misery Tour” for a visiting John and Yoko. Allegedly the color drained from Lennon’s face and he just got up and left.
I was trying to describe this thing last night to some friends over dinner, but I think you just have to see it… I posted this here a long time ago, but I think this merits posting again for those who missed it the first time around…
Behold the flyer for “The Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society” (Click here and here for larger, easier-to-read versions). Apparently this “society” was founded by a fellow named James J. Kagel of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Kagel is (or was) attempting to connect to others who share his fetish for, in his words, “jacking off” to photographs of beloved actress and comedienne, Mary Tyler Moore’s “beautifully curved, ever so shapely, silken, creamy smooth, seductive, velvety soft, long, lean, graceful, tantilizing [sic], erotic, sinuously sexy LEGS [...] (not to mention her lickable feet)!” End quote.
Kagel goes on to totally over-share about his fetish for MTM’s legs developed as a boy watching her on The Dick Van Dyke Show and her own eponymously-titled, long-running TV series. He mentions that he is “proud” to admit to masturbating to Moore’s gams—I, for one, believe him—and that his wife bears a “slight resemblance” in the face and legs department to the actress. He even asks members of The Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society to send him their own MTM leg fantasies! (I wonder how many people joined?!?! Furthermore, what would be the pleasure of sharing such fantasies with James in particular? He won’t judge you?)
You can pretty much tell that it was made with a type-writer, scissors and glue stick. I won’t describe any more of it, you’ll have to read it for yourself, but this truly had us ON THE FLOOR gasping for breath, laughing. This flyer is all kinds of wrong, but my god is it fucking hilarious. Even the oblivious, kooky sincerity of it is mind-bending in the extreme.
And then you have to wonder what Mary Tyler Moore herself thought about this when she saw it, because you just know that at some point, someone had to have shown this to her.
There also used to be a Yahoo Group called “MTM Legs” that’s “for your jacking pleasure.” It’s just gotta be the same fuckin’ guy. What the odds of two such insanely ardent masturbating Mary Tyler Moore leg fetishists existing in this space-time continuum? Whie it was going It had 155 members!
If you’re a horror movie fan, I think you’ll agree with the assessment that Scream (1996) is a top-notch meta horror-comedy. But did you know that it’s been accused of being a rip-off of an earlier film? It’s a motion picture that came out years before, written and directed by a creative filmmaker barely out of his teens. A movie that’s a love letter to horror films, but also plays with the genre’s clichés. Even the film’s title is a reference to a line of dialogue typically said in the run-up to bloodshed in horror pictures.
In the late 1980s, after making a number of short films, writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky penned the screenplay for his first full-length movie—an ambitious meta horror-comedy—in just five days. Soon he was recruiting investors, the final two being his parents, who mortgage their house. In the summer of 1989, with a relatively limited budget of $100,000, the filming of There’s Nothing Out There took place. Kanefsky was 20 years-old.
The film follows a group of high schoolers on spring break who travel to a remote house in the woods. After arriving at their destination, an extraterrestrial monster starts killing off the teens, one by one.
There’s Nothing Out There is a smart and self-aware film, using horror movie tropes and archetypal characters, and then spinning these elements in clever ways that act as commentary on the genre and advance the story. Kanefsky’s writing is impressive, and his direction is solid, as well. I was particularly impressed by a couple of inspired scene transitions.
At times the film is ridiculously silly, which is especially effective when embracing its low budget. Take the slimy alien, a being that resembles something you might see in a cheap sci-fi flick from the ‘50s. A mix of horseshoe crab, frog, and alligator, the creature also evokes the titular monsters in Alien (1979) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), plus a little of Belial from Basket Case (1982).
Every so often, the inanimate alien is thrown in front of the camera. In other moments, actors are obviously tussling with it to make it move, like you’d see in an Ed Wood movie. Fun stuff!
The most noteworthy character in the film is Mike, the horror film fanatic. A kind of stand-in for Kanefsky himself, Mike uses his knowledge to help save himself and others. He knows he’s in a horror movie.
Craig Peck (Mike) and Bonnie Bowers (Stacy) in a production still.
Released in 1990, There’s Nothing Out There was dead on arrival. Horror films had fallen out of favor with audiences, who also weren’t interested in a post-modern horror movie—yet.
Fast-forward a couple of years later: Kanefsky gave a copy of There’s Nothing Out There to a producer, who watched it and dug it. Over a lunch meeting, this producer told Kanefsky that he liked the film so much he was going to show it to his father. The producer’s name is Jonathan Craven; his father is Wes Craven. A few years later, the director’s Scream was released, a critical success that also did gang-busters at the box office.
Intriguingly, there are several similarities between these two meta horror movies. The one most cited is that the character Randy in Scream, who understands all the slasher film rules and uses them to protect himself and others, is very much like Mike in There’s Nothing Out There. The films explore horror movie tropes and archetypes in like-minded ways. Both are a balancing act between scares and laughs.
Is there any proof that the makers of Scream “borrowed” from There’s Nothing Out There? In a word: No. It’s possible that Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson was simply riffing on the same tropes that Kanefsky was. Williamson’s script was written on spec, with Dimension Films buying the rights. It took a while to find a director, and Craven only accepted after Dimension made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Williamson has said Craven had no interest in changing the script, so the director had no input there.
Scream often gets the credit for being the first motion picture of its type, but as far back as 1981, during the height of the slasher craze, Student Bodies parodied the subgenre. There’s also Return to Horror High (1987), and like There’s Nothing Out There, it’s a smart and funny meta horror-comedy, though I give the edge to Kanefsky’s subsequent work.
Scream has become a lucrative franchise—the 1996 original alone has grossed more than $170 million worldwide—with several sequels and a remake of the first film.
Rolfe Kanefsky, like many fans of his debut feature, has wondered if Scream was based off of his movie, but I see no signs of sour grapes.
Kanefsky’s a prolific writer/director with many credits under his belt, and he’s still at it (check out his IMDb). He’s written a book about his experience making There’s Nothing Out There, entitled Making Nothing at the Age of 20.
Ronin Flix has recently put out a fresh 2K restoration of There’s Nothing Out There on Blu-ray. The package has several commentary tracks, including a new one with Kanefsky and two of the film’s stars. The two-disc set also contains ten Kanefsky shorts from the early 1980s, including Just Listen, which is seen playing in the opening video store sequence in There’s Nothing Out There. Get all the deets and order the release through the MVD Shop; it’s also on Amazon.
This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.
(Authors note: This feature was meant to be accompanied by an interview with the artist Mark Wardel, but sadly, due to ill health, this has not been possible. We wish him the speediest of recoveries.)
Doubtless, there are naysayers who may wonder whether the world needs yet another book dedicated to David Bowie, a man whose many lives and multifaceted career have been exhaustively, though not always accurately, scrutinised over the past six decades. The Bowie shelf in the Rock and Pop Hall of Records is as prodigious as any, and it’s tricky to find a new angle on an artist who was a genre unto himself or discover any unexplored territory that hasn’t already been charted.
For the faithful, there remains a vain hope that his dutiful personal assistant, Corinne “Coco” Schwab, may one day share her memories of the man she devoted her life to. But, as the years pass, this looks unlikely to happen. Still, two new book releases underscore why Bowie remains such an endlessly fascinating and eternally elusive subject. A one-man cultural revolution whose protean influence impacted all the creative arts; whose sway cut across all strata of society: from gutter punks to members of European royalty.
For new/latecomers, David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980, by Jérôme Soligny, presents a comprehensive guide, concentrating mostly on the decade Bowie musically, artistically and creatively owned; when the release of a new album by him was treated as a cultural event. As a veteran journalist for the French music bible Rock & Folk, Soligny interviewed ‘the Guv’nor’ many times over the years, and, as a fellow recording artist, he developed a friendship not only with his subject but with Tony Visconti and Mike Garson, too, who both provide flattering forwards.
Soligny sets up each chapter with an authoritative opening salvo from the Duke himself regarding each era, and then, in a workmanlike fashion, proceeds to document the year each landmark album was recorded, as well as all the creative offshoots, groundbreaking spectacles and social-cultural shockwaves that sprung from them. He then hands things over to the musicians and cohorts, famous fans and influencers who contributed to or were inspired by them, in an oral history that fleshes out the details.
For long-time disciples, this is already well-trodden ground, but there are nuggets sprinkled throughout including several surprising revelations. For instance, the book claims the look of the Droogs in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was inspired by a photograph the director saw of The Riot Squad, the beat combo Bowie joined for a short-lived spell in 1967, which, if true, provides a neat slice of sartorial symmetry considering the Droogs inspired the early attire of Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars.
Hermione Farthingale, Bowie’s first great love, talks expansively about their time together and finally breaks her silence regarding the two bittersweet ballads he wrote about her on the Space Oddity album. Liverpool poet and Scaffold member, Roger McGough, is chuffed to learn that his poem, ‘At Lunchtime—A Story of Love,’ may have partially inspired ‘Five Years’. Ed Sanders is equally touched that Bowie was a Fugs fan and included Tales of Beatnik Glory in his list of 100 favorite books. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/11/david-bowies-top-100-books
We hear about the real-life inspiration for the feral ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.’ Donovan (who covered the Diamond Dogs cut, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me’) recounts the improbable time Bowie successfully negotiated with local union officials to allow the ‘Sunshine Superman’ singer to play a concert in Boston in 1974. Mary Hopkin admits she always hated the “twee” intro she sang on ‘Sound and Vision,’ but concedes it’s become “iconic” now. And there’s also a little more info regarding the momentous occasion when Major Tom touched base with Hendrix.
Charges of plagiarism (which Bowie freely copped to, outing himself as a “tasteful thief”) are given when the author highlights the glaring similarities between the Bowie-scored Iggy number, ‘Tiny Girls,’ and the late 60s French chanson, ‘D’aventures en aventures’ by Serge Lama.
But his further assertions that the main two-chord motif in Billy Swan’s ‘I Can Help’ inspired ‘TVC15,’ and the “Heroes” closer, ‘The Secret Life of Arabia,’ is derived from ‘Cokane In My Brain,’ by reggae artist Dillinger, are a stretch and sound far less persuasive.
On the critical side, Soligny’s Gallic-tinged prose can sometimes veer into the purple, and he issues several statements that beg to be disputed. For example, Bowie’s responses to Dick Cavett during his wired TV interview are most certainly not “gibberish,” as he contends, and describing Aleister Crowley as “The father of modern Satanism,” is equally questionable. (On that same subject, the two Only Ones tracks Soligny cites as “Crowley-inspired,” ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Whole of the Law,’ have, in reality, nothing to do with Old Crow himself other than their titles.) And, despite what’s written, ‘Look Back in Anger’ was never part of the setlist on The Glass Spider Tour.
But most egregious of all is his completely cockeyed claims that, between 1979-1984, Bowie left behind his “poster-boy image” and pointedly underplayed his physical beauty, and that the eighties “would not be his decade.” This flies in the face of the fact that in the wake of the huge commercial successes of Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance, Bowie only reinforced his status as the most glamorous pin-up on the planet, with an unprecedented, new-found popularity, bolstered by an entirely new generation of fans who’d come of age and latched onto his music, even though, unlike his previous work, both albums were now front-loaded with the best material.
One thing that will seriously disappoint the diehards is the photographic selection, as most will already be over-familiar with it, but that certainly isn’t true of David Bowie and Cracked Actor: The Fly in The Milk, a sumptuously illustrated behind-the-scenes account of the greatest rockumentary of them all.
Filmed by Alan Yentob for the BBC’s arts programme Omnibus, in August and September 1974, Cracked Actor remains a riveting study of Bowie as he breaks America wide open while performing in the guise of his elegantly wasted persona, Halloween Jack, during his celebrated Diamond Dogs Tour of that year.
Those familiar with the documentary will know the subtitle of the book alludes to one of the many quotable lines uttered by Bowie throughout the film. Asked by Yentob how he feels, submerged in the idioms of America, Bowie gazes down into the milk carton he’s holding and amusingly relates his situation to that of “a fly floating around in my milk. It’s a foreign body in it, you see, and he’s getting a lot of milk (chuckles). That’s kind of how I feel: a foreign body here, and I couldn’t help but soak it up.”
The idea for the book was suggested by the artist Mark Wardel to his co-author, Susan Compo, as a prequel to Earthbound, her 2017 study on the making of The Man Who Fell To Earth, which he contributed to. This made perfect sense considering one rapt viewer of the documentary was that film’s director Nicholas Roeg, who realized he’d found in Bowie the perfect entity to portray the lead in his next picture.
Wardel has been obsessed with the documentary ever since it was first aired, and the book showcases his portraits of Bowie from this era, which are as soigné and fierce as the man himself. It also boasts over a dozen never-before-seen concert shots, and the project was given a decisive boost when Yentob came on board and opened his archive up to them, revealing interviews and backstage scenes that never made the cut.
What you like is in the limo! Bowie captured by Mark Wardel.
For Bowiephiles the book is an absolute treat, and, among its many highlights is the full transcript of the combative TV news interview that opens the film, which not only confirms that the reporter, Wayne Satz, was even more dickish than the excerpt shown suggests, but underlines just how alarmed—and alarmist—mainstream America was by Bowie at the time. Mind you, as the book later details, some members of a BBC viewing panel were equally aghast, particularly after watching Bowie snogging a skull while embodying the Hollyweirdo-meets-Hamlet sleaze-meister from Cracked Actor.
One intriguing unused scene featured Bowie and Yentob watching a private screening of James Dean: The First American Teenager, in the presence of the film’s producer, David Puttman, and its director, Ray Connolly. Bowie saw definite parallels between himself and Dean, especially their shared sexual mystique, and was touched when Elizabeth Taylor told him he reminded her of her Giant co-star. And, in the documentary, she’s captured arriving at the Diamond Dogs concert in Anaheim, keen to enlist Bowie to play her leading man in the ill-fated dud, The Blue Bird. (Bowie would go on to model Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause garb and haircut during his epic, one and only appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1980, which brought the house down.)
A transcript is then shared of a remarkable conversation between Bowie and Puttman who relays how the actor James Fox recently quit the business having been dealt a personal blow following the death of his father. Bowie empathises and admits his own father’s passing had a similar effect on his career (which may help explain why he failed to follow up ‘Space Oddity’ with another hit for several years). Bowie then makes the bombshell claim that, back in the late 60s, he visited the Kray twins in Brixton prison, accompanied by Fox, who wanted to draw upon them for his gangster role in Performance.
Halloween Jack in profile, by Mark Wardel.
August provided a month-long break for the tour, during which Bowie decamped to Sigma Sound Studio in Philadelphia, to record the first sessions of what would become Young Americans. When the second leg of the tour reconvened in September, with a series of shows in Southern California, Bowie included a selection of his new Philly Soul-inspired songs that didn’t go down too well with some of the glam rockers in the audience.
Still, when he opened for a week-long residency at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, the show attracted a starry crowd, including such famous faces as Britt Ekland and Raquel Welch, who admitted to the press afterwards that she hoped to make a record with Bowie. The Dame’s teenage role model, Anthony Newley, also attended, accompanied by another Bowie connection, singer Peter Noone, but left his front-row seat midway through due to the racket caused by Earl Slick’s guitar playing! Nevertheless, he subsequently conceded that his former emulator was “…madly elegant and very, very original.”
Bowie floats out over the audience, sitting on the end of a cherry picker crane, as he performs ‘Space Oddity.’
Author Tosh Berman has written how his artist father, Wallace Berman, took him to see that LA show, where they sat behind the TV personality Steve Allen and his vivacious wife, the actress Jayne Meadows. And an impressionable 16-year-old Michael Jackson (and his brothers) attended on consecutive nights, where he witnessed a masterclass in showmanship, including Bowie’s take on the moonwalk (which dates back to the ragtime-era) and that leg waggle move (taught to him by tour choreographer and The Lockers dance troupe alum, Toni Basil) that he would appropriate a decade later.
Bowie with MJ and the Jackson family (and a bearded David Gest!) at the Jackson’s Hayvenhurst home in Encino. In the 2022 Janet Jackson documentary, it was revealed that Bowie generously offered Michael and brother Randy a snort from his coke stash, but they turned him down.
Though not often cited or discussed enough, Bowie would remain one of Jackson’s major influences throughout the rest of his life. During the eighties, he channelled the rock star’s otherworldly mystique and overhauled his milquetoast image in a studied effort to make himself an object of fascination, à la Bowie, even taking his ‘Jean Genie’ lyric about “sleep(ing) in a capsule” to heart. Then, for much of the nineties, he adopted Halloween Jack’s powdery pallor, dark suit and black Borsalino fedora look. One of Jacko’s biographers has even disclosed how the pop superstar kept a shrine dedicated to Bowie at Neverland. (Bowie performing ‘Panic in Detroit’ on the Diamond Dogs Tour. At the 1:35 mark, he does the leg waggle move that Michael Jackson copied a decade later.)
Halloween Jack’s orange-blonde ombré hairstyle and stylish wardrobe are really the first iteration and template for what would become Bowie’s greatest-ever look as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth and the Thin White Duke alter ego that followed. But as well as capturing his epicene beauty (during one interview Bowie looks disconcertingly like a proto-Princess Di) and the entrancing effect his music and stagecraft have on his audience, Cracked Actor also betrays the obvious signs of his drug use, although he actually appears more loaded when he’s on stage than when he’s off.
Halloween Jack’s orange-blonde ombré hairstyle was the template for what would become Bowie’s greatest-ever look as the Thin White Duke. Image; Mark Wardel.
You can taste the cocaine in his voice as he rasps through his repertoire. Curiously, back in 2008, a furtively filmed clip of Bowie huffing the devil’s dandruff from a baggie in his dressing room, mysteriously found its way online, but the authors haven’t been able to verify whether this is an actual outtake or if it was sourced from elsewhere.
But most dishearteningly for fans, the authors do confirm that the hunt for the missing Diamond Dogs concert footage, filmed by the BBC team, has gone cold since Yentob announced the search at a screening of the film in 2017. Adding an extra dollop of misery, they further reveal that all the footage from the Iggy Pop concert at the Santa Monica Civic in 1977, featuring Bowie on keyboards, and filmed by a professional four-camera crew, has gone missing, too.
Plans to bring the Diamond Dogs Tour back home to the UK proved too financially prohibitive, so when the documentary aired in January 1975, it was the only chance for Bowie’s British fans to see what he’d been up to since he left British shores, having only read about the extravaganza in the weekly music papers. Thanks to the film and the Young Americans album that followed in March, an entirely new subculture was born in Britain: The Bowie Soul Boy.
The documentary was trailed prominently in the Radio Times.
RCA ran an advert to promote ‘Cracked Actor’ and Bowie’s catalogue.
Wardel was seventeen when the film was transmitted, and one of that multitude of British Bowie fans whose life was changed irrevocably after watching him sing ‘Starman,’ albeit not the famous Top of the Pops version, but the performance given a month earlier when Ziggy and the Spiders appeared on Lift Off with Ayshea, a kids TV show broadcast in the Midlands and the North of England.
In June of 1978, the aspiring artist moved from his seaside home town on the Wirral to London and watched Bowie perform at Earls Court on his first night in The Big Smoke. With an impressive portfolio under his arm, he walked straight into a job at a design studio in Soho and became a portraitist to the alarmingly glamorous luminaries of the heavily Bowie-inspired Blitz Kids-New Romantic-Synth Pop scene. He palled around with Boy George and David Sylvian and earned some extra kudos from them due to the thank you letter he received from their hero in Berlin after Wardel sent him one of his pieces as a present. In the missive, Bowie proffered a couple of book recommendations: Brain of the Firm: The Managerial Cybernetics of Organization, by Stafford Beer and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by the Princeton psychologist, Julian Jaynes, which also made Bowie’s list of favorite books.
Wardel then gained some national prominence when he was interviewed about his artwork twice by Paula Yates on The Tube, once while Hazel O’Connor sat for her portrait.
In recent years, he has become as famous for his stunning Bowie masks. The V&A commissioned 300 of them for their blockbuster Bowie Is exhibition in 2013 and a set of six was purchased by the man himself:
Naturally, his work continues to pull in people from the Bowie vortex, and last year he crafted the cover for Dana Gillespie’s 73rd album. He was also recently interviewed by the songstress, during which he gave a summary of his work and life.
Artist Mark Wardel and one of his pieces.
You can order a copy of David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980here.
You can order David Bowie and Cracked Actor: The Fly in The Milk from Red Planet Books here.
And you can discover more about Mark Wardel’s creations here.
Messiah of Evil is an extraordinary, underseen horror movie from 1974. It’s a film that, despite its low budget and production issues, succeeded artistically. Blending gothic horror with H.P. Lovecraft, Messiah of Evil is, among other things, surreal, creepy, disturbing, terrifying, poetic, and most of all, mysterious. Though it does have a cult following and has received some praise, now, with its recent restoration, there’s hope that this art horror film will finally be discovered by a wider audience and receive the broader recognition it merits.
In 1971, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the script for Messiah of Evil in six weeks; the husband-and-wife team had recently completed a treatment for American Graffiti (1973). Messiah of Evil was budgeted for $100,000, and investors agreed to pony up that dough, but in the end, only $85,000 arrived. So, they had to make do. Huyck and Katz later learned the missing $15,000 was taken by a couple of folks as an investors “finder’s fee” and used to put new roofs on their houses.
Messiah of Evil was shot in Southern California in September 1971, with Huyck and Katz co-directing, though Huyck received sole credit. Once principal photography was complete, the filmmakers were shut out of the production. After various delays, Messiah of Evil was finally given a limited release in December 1974.
In Messiah of Evil, a young woman named Arletty comes to a seaside town to visit her artist father. But when she arrives she discovers he’s left, leaving behind words of warning about the community. Soon Arletty meets a trio of outsiders, led by Thom, a suave aristocrat with guru tendencies. Thom’s curious about the town’s folklore, which involves the pending return, after 100 years, of a “dark stranger”—a messiah of evil.
Shot in Techniscope, essentially a more economical version of Technicolor, Messiah of Evil is beautifully lit and photographed. The colors blue and red are prominent, and are often used together. This sort of use of color would be on display in a later, more famous horror film, Suspiria (1977).
The filmmakers were influenced by fine and pop art, the latter apparent in the wall paintings in Arletty’s father’s house.
Messiah of Evil brings to mind other meagerly budgeted horror movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that are also accomplished works: Carnival of Souls (1962), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973). It shares the most similarities with Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). In both films, the story is told from the protagonist’s perspective following traumatic experiences, and after being committed to a mental institution. Thus, the viewer is forced to question the realities being presented. Knowing this, the unsettling dream logic present in these films is enhanced. But in Messiah of Evil, is Arletty really an unreliable narrator? At the end of the film, we get a clue.
There’s no shortage of weird characters in Messiah of Evil, but the albino trucker, strikingly played by Bernie Robinson—in his only screen role—takes the cake.
A post-1960s malaise permeates the proceedings, personified in the undefined relationship between Thom, Laura, and Toni. Seemingly an allegory for the end of the hippie era, this apparent throuple (we never learn exactly what their deal is) symbolizes the death of the free love ‘60s—and now what?
The two most stunning segments, both involving deaths, are ripe for analysis. The first takes place in a supermarket, the second in a movie theater. The former is where we get our first look at the town “ghouls” in action, feasting on raw meat. The scene is surely meant to be a critique of consumerism, and this was years before Dawn of the Dead (1978).
In the theater scene, violent images are watched coldly by the ghouls. Is this a commentary on Americans passively watching footage of the Vietnam War on television? Like many aspects of this film, it is open to interpretation. This is, in part, because the intentions of those who finished the film are unknown.
Supermarkets and cinemas are places of comfort and safety, making the scenes all the more unnerving. Both characters are murdered and devoured by the ghouls with the lights on, which is certainly unusual in horror films. This is especially noteworthy in the supermarket, which is bathed in bright light.
Both segments have a great rhythm to them. The credited editor, Scott Conrad, had no relation to the original production, but it’s hard to argue with the choices he made for Messiah of Evil. Conrad would soon be editing Rocky (1976), and win an Academy Award for his efforts.
These scenes are astonishing, deserving of recognition as hallmarks in horror cinema.
What are these flesh eating ghouls? Zombies? Are they Possessed? Diseased? Members of a murderous cult? Do they have anything to do with the pending return of the dark stranger? They look like they are from another era, specifically the 1950s, a time in America typically viewed with rose-colored glasses. One of the possible themes of the film is that, beneath the veneer of small-town normalcy lies unspeakable horror that infects everyone, eventually.
Admittedly, the conclusion of the film is a bit of a letdown, specifically the dark stranger storyline, which is wrapped up very quickly; a more substantial scene was planned by Huyck and Katz but never shot, due to budget restraints. In the final minutes, we see that Arletty now has a facial scar. Curiously, its partially obscured by strands of her hair, and is often missed by audiences, rendered even less visible on the subpar print transfers that have circulated for decades on home video. But what does the scar indicate? Is it a sign that everything we’ve just seen, as told by Arletty, did happen? Like much of Messiah of Evil, this element is a mystery.
There are quite a few exceptional and interesting independently produced horror movies from the 1970s that are still waiting for genre fans to discover, and Messiah of Evil is certainly one of the best. It has its share of fans—those who know, know—a base that will surely grow by virtue of its fabulous new reissue.
In October, Messiah of Evil was put out on Blu-ray by Radiance Films. The film has been given the 4K treatment—and looks fantastic. Initially offered in a limited edition of 3,000 copies, it quickly sold out. But have no fear, another edition dropped this week. Get all details and pick it up via the MVD Shop; it’s also on Amazon.
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