LSD-25 is a goofier than average drug scare flick produced in 1967 for the San Mateo Union High School District in San Mateo, California. The entire film is narrated by a tab of LSD - a device that Bunuel would have admired.
This one has it all: over-the-top freakouts, groovy fashions, a Satanic mass, trippy visuals and little known factoids like LSD makes kids “paint themselves green.” It also features an obscure Jonathan King tune called “Round Round.”
Strap yourself in and “join the mind expanding world where colors and sounds and smells and tastes and people all take on new dimensions and qualities.”
In the 1960s, surfing was exploding on both coasts. I know. When I was 14, I bought my first board for 50 bucks, a humongous 9.5 ft. Jacobs with a battered nose, and rode the wild surf of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Back then, the coolest things a young cat could be was in a garage band or a surfer.
There was a glut of sixties Hollywood surfing films in which stars like Fabian, Elvis, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello never got wet. And then there were the low-budget indie documentaries that featured bona-fide surfers like Ricky Grigg and Greg Noll riding real waves. Blue Surf-Ari was one of those films. Despite threadbare plots, cheesy voice overs and lots of footage of teenyboppers milling around waiting for something to happen, these flicks did deliver when it came to awesome wave action. What the low-budget surf films lacked in narrative, they made up in some dynamite footage of surfers shredding down the walls of bigass waves, shooting the curl and being battered by merciless bodies of water.
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?”
Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol superstar, actor, and omnisexual sex symbol immortalized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” as the hustler who “never once gave it away,” turns 62 today.
Below, the trailer for Little Joe, an upcoming documentary about the life and career of Joe Dallesandro, produced by his daughter, Vedra Mehagian, and directed by Nicole Haeusser.
Copping its title from an Allen Ginsberg poem, Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London is the quintessential cinematic pop explosion. This rarely seen 1968 documentary directed by Peter Whitehead captures a time when rock and roll was the most powerful force on the planet.
Beautifully shot, with a Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd supplying the soundtrack, it is perhaps the only true masterpiece of the period, offering a visually captivating window on the ‘in’ crowd. Revealing, often very personal interviews with the era’s prime movers - Michael Caine, Julie Christie, David Hockney and Mick Jagger - are interspersed by dazzling images of the ‘dedicated followers of fashion’, patronizing the clubs and discotheques of the day. As a trusted confidant of the Rolling Stones, who had filmed their first US tour, and a member of the inner circle, Whitehead was able to give an unusually free rein to his eye for detail.”
Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London is not currently available on video. This is from an out-of-print Japanese laserdisc. Dig it! It contains footage of the coolest human being to walk the earth: Swami Lee Marvin.
This is the moment Paul McCartney met comic book hero Jacky Kirby in 1975. It was at the Forum, Los Angeles, where McCartney and his band Wings, were booked to play three concerts. This was Macca’s first time back in LA since touring with The Beatles. Wings had just released Venus and Mars, which contained the track “Magneto and Titanium Man”, a song inspired by Marvel’s X-Men created by Kirby and Stan Lee. The pair met backstage at the Forum, where Jack presented Macca with a line drawing:
Then around the corner came Paul. “‘Ello Jack, nice to meet you.” Jack gave Paul and Linda the drawing which they thought was “smashing.” Paul thanked Jack for keeping him from going bonkers while they were recording the album in Jamaica. It seems that there was very little to do there, and they needed to keep their kids entertained. Luckily, there was a store that sold comics, so Paul would go and pick up all the latest. One night the song “Magneto and Titanium Man” popped into his head. The thing about Jack was that within a few minutes you felt as if you were best friends, so Paul too was soon laughing it up with Jack as if he had known him for years.
Fashion, tribalism and a sharp suit. BBC documentary “The Street Look” connects fashion to pop music and back again. We proclaim our allegiance to the music we love in the clothing we wear. I’ve run through the whole gamut. My girlfriend says I’ve got more shoes than any man she knows: from winklepickers to creepers to sandals and Pumas, to cowboy boots, Beatle boots and leopard skin loafers. I’ve always been a fashion shapeshifter and it’s always been in relationship to whatever new social/cultural scene I feel a passion for. I like to wear my colors. It’s a declaration of what I believe in. Suit up and get ready to rock and roll.
In the late 70s, I started a company called Shady Character. I sold skinny ties and wraparound shades to stores that in turn sold them to kids in towns like Laramie, Wyoming and Brownsville, Texas - places where there wasn’t a punk or new wave scene but kids wanted to align themselves with the movement. I really wasn’t doing it for the money, much to the chagrin of my partners, I was doing it because I wanted to provide kids with a freak flag to fly, a uniform in the rock and roll army. A groovy pair of Italian wraparounds can change the world for a 17 year old in a town without pity.
The owners of San Francisco’s Park Life gallery and retail store have been threatened with a lawsuit by multi-millionaire artist Jeff Koons. Jamie Alexander and Derek Song were selling a small plastic balloon dog sculpture that kind of looks like Koons’s balloon dog sculptures which kind of look like the balloon dogs clowns have been twisting and tying at children’s birthday parties since the 1920’s - 30 years before Koons was born.
Alexander and Song posted the following message on their website:
Park Life just received a very formal Cease and Desist Letter from Jeff Koons’ Lawyers calling for an “Immediate Cessation” of selling our Balloon Dog sculptures.
Wait, I’m confused, isnt his ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER based on co-opting other peoples work/objects????
So going forward, just so you know; Jeff Koons owns all likenesses of balloon dogs.”
Ironically, Koons has been sued repeatedly for copyright infringement for his use of…
[...] pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.”
A Koons balloon dog (of the smaller variety) will set you back several thousand dollars. The Park Life balloon dog was 34 bucks.
Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”
This, is of course a spirituality issue, religion is a different matter. As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it. (Don’t murder anyone, doesn’t get a mention till number 6.)
When confronted with anyone who holds my lack of religious faith in such contempt, I say, “It’s the way God made me.”
Grace slithers around the playhouse set like a futuristic vision of Maria Montez’s Cobra Woman as she sings a wonderful version of “Little Dummer Boy” on Christmas at Pee Wee’s Playhouse in 1988.
