Legendary rock journalist, performer, novelist and countercultural gadfly since the 60s, Mick Farren discusses his newest book, Speed-Speed-Speedfreak (Feral House). Elvis Presley, The Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, the Beatles, Hank Williams, the Manson Family, Jack Keroauc, Johnny Cash, JFK, Adolph Hitler: all of the above were, at one time or another, to put it bluntly, speedfreaks.
 

 
In 1956 hipster humorist Lord Buckley appeared on TV game show You Bet Your Life hosted by Groucho Marx. This was a meeting of two brilliant minds and it’s hard to believe that it actually occurred on network television. But, Buckley was so underground that the viewing audience was clueless as to who he was. While he’s rather low-key on the program, he still manages to slip some of his bebop prose into the mix. The ‘housewife’ Buckley’s teamed up with is a pretty cool broad herself. In contrast to the two contestants, Groucho comes off a bit square.
 
As an added attraction, I’ve included a rare clip of Buckley’s appearance on TV’s Club 7 circa 1949.

 
more Buckley after the jump…

Photo source: redteam
 
I took some home movie footage shot in San Francisco in 1968 and added some music to it. The result: punk rock hippie shit!
 

 
Vice online has a terrific piece on ‘Redsploitation’ movies.

Somewhere in the grey area between the noble savage and the savage-savage lies the Redsploitation film. These gems of schlock cinema feature Natives getting off their knees and kicking white ass all over the West.

For the whole scoop on really pissed off Indians in the movies check out the Vice website.

 
more vengeance after the jump…

 
Beatnik double bill, Village Sunday and an excerpt from Jazz Is My Religion. Both short films feature beat poet Ted Joans, a fine wordslinger who never got the recognition he deserved.

Village Sunday is narrated by Jean Shepherd, a New York radio personality who was known for his offbeat humor and Zen-like observations about life.

 
Jazz Is My Religion after the jump…

 
Klaus Nomi died 27 years ago today.

I met Klaus in the fall of 1977 in the lobby of the Cinema Village after a midnight screening of Eraserhead. We struck up a conversation about the movie and immediately hit it off. Wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, black lipstick, black eye shadow and jet black, slicked back, widow-peaked hair, Klaus looked like an elegant punk vampire. But, despite his dramatic appearance, Klaus was low-key and somewhat shy. I don’t know why we hit it off, but we did. He invited my girlfriend and I over to his apartment for the following night. He told us he was a pastry chef and wanted us to taste his creations. We readily accepted.

The next night when we arrived at Klaus’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, he greeted us at the door wearing a chef’s apron. The smell of fresh baked pastry filled his small but impeccably neat home. We ate his delicacies and swooned. They were delicious. And while I felt comfortable in his presence, I also felt as if Klaus was not of this planet. There was something strange and alien about him, but benignly so. Klaus was an unusual being…which he would soon confirm.

While my girlfriend and I sipped wine, Klaus excused himself and disappeared into his bedroom. After about 15 minutes or so, he reappeared with a theatrical flourish in semi-drag, looking like a diminutive Diva: face made-up and wearing a red satin robe. He walked over to his stereo equipment, put a record on the turntable and started singing to an instrumental backing track, some kind of opera. He was stunning. His voice was sublime. I was witnessing something very special. His performance also explained why there were so many photos and paintings of Maria Callas in his apartment.

Later that night I told Klaus that I wanted to help him develop as a performer. I encouraged him to take the next step. The first thing I suggested was that he get a guitar and learn some basic chords. Singing to backing tracks was fine, but he needed to write original material and try to bridge the gap between high culture and rock and roll. I really believed he had the potential to be a star. I invited him to come to some of my band’s rehearsals and try his hand at singing with a rock group. It wasn’t a good fit, but it did loosen him up and point him in a direction that he would later follow.

One day Klaus called me and asked me to help pick out an electric guitar. I was thrilled. He was going for it.  We went to Manhattan’s music district and after several hours of shopping around, Klaus settled on a dark blue Fender Jaguar. He bought it and we went back to his pad and I showed him some basic chords. It didn’t take Klaus long to get the hang of E,A and D. When I left, he was already humming the beginnings of a song.

I never heard from Klaus again. No phone calls, nothing. I made a few attempts to contact him, but with no success. The next and last time I saw him was on Saturday Night Live singing back-up with Joey Arias behind David Bowie. Klaus was on his way to brief stardom. I felt sad to have lost my connection to him, but happy that I had managed to contribute in some way to his development as an artist.

Klaus died of Aids five years after I met him. He was the first person that I knew to die of the disease. Tragically, the first of many.

A few months ago I asked Joey Arias about the blue Fender Jaguar. Was it still around?  Joey told me it had been sold after Klaus’s death. I was disappointed. I would have liked to have bought it myself as an Earthly memento of a friend who seemed to be visiting from another world, a world that perhaps he’s returned to.

Cold Song is a powerful live performance filmed after Klaus was well into his illness. The second video is Klaus and Joey at work and play at Fiorucci in 1979.
 

 
Klaus at Fiorucci after the jump

 
In celebration of their 50th anniversary, Dr. Martens has been commissioning musicians to cover songs by other artists. I’ve seen a bunch of the videos for the project and this one released today by N.A.S.A (deejays Squeeky Clean and Zegon) is at the top of the class. They do justice to the Max Romeo reggae classic Chase The Devil. Legendary musician and videographer Don Letts directed the video.
 

 
Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower, was a hugely popular and tragic sixties French pop star who in reality never existed. She’s the creation of conceptual artist, and former art director of New York Magazine, Josh Gosfield. He’s done an astonishingly convincing job of documenting a life that never was, through photo-shopped pictures, a mock documentary, a video shot by Jean Luc Godard (not), newsclippings and fictional biographical ephemera.

We see her Gypsy family’s escape from Bulgaria, her affair with her stepbrother, her first guitar, her rise up (and fall down) the charts,  the car crashes, funerals, love triangles and the murder trial. All this played out in a garish media spotlight before the insatiable eyes of her public.

I was initially fooled by Gosfield’s elaborate hoax and went looking for information on the French chanteuse, including checking Amazon for cds, only to discover that I’d been had.

Gosfield has included fictional quotes from icons of the era, including this one by Norman Mailer from a nonexistent Esquire article.

As Norman Mailer wrote, in a 1974 Esquire story:

Could this Black Flower with a voice like Piaf have guessed that when she bloomed into a teenage singing idol for post-war European youth, and later became the Continental fashion icon and sexy French pin-up girl on the bedroom walls of the hippest kids, that the future would strangle her dreams of normalcy, like the protagonists in one her romantically fatalistic songs? No, of course not. Because the characters of Greek tragedies are always the last to know their fates.

Here we a have Gosfield’s perfectly realized faux Jean Luc Godard video and the trailer for the documentary.

Check out Josh’s website and be prepared to be amazed by the depth of detail and work that went into creating his pop fantasy.
 

 
More photos of The Black Flower and the documentary trailer after the jump…
 

 
My mother is French and in my early teens I lived in Cannes and Paris. I developed a love for French rock and rollers - Sylvie Vartan, France Gall, Johnny Hallyday and, above all others, Francoise Hardy.

I had a Philips portable battery operated record player upon which I would play Hardy’s 45s non-stop, taking the player with me wherever I went like a prehistoric Walkman. I couldn’t be without her. She was my first teenage crush.

I’d sit on the beach at Cannes, smoking Gauloise cigarettes (which got me high) and listen to Tous les garçons et les filles and Le premier bonheur du jour for hours. It was just me and Francoise on the Riviera watching the thin line separating the blue Mediterranean from the perfect blue sky.

I had yet to discover The Beatles. American rock, with the exception of Chuck Berry, didn’t interest me. Francoise was my pop culture goddess. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. Well, actually, there was one record that I would allow to share the turntable with Francoise: The Lonely Surfer by Jack Nitzsche, a song with an almost Zen melancholy about it, spinning off into the void.

The year of my romance with Francoise and Gauloise and melancholic surfers was 1963. It was September and Hardy was scheduled to play in Cannes. My mother had bought me a ticket. For weeks I could think of nothing else but seeing my goddess perform. On the day of the show, I was dressed to impress in my pegged pants, loafers and turtle neck. I was ready for love. We ascended the steep marble steps of the concert hall and arrived at the ticket booth to be greeted by my worse nightmare…the show had been canceled! I was heartbroken. My mother and I walked back to our apartment building in total silence. I was beyond myself with disappointment. I felt as though I had been stood up on my first date. I felt shunned, abandoned. I suddenly understood the electric yearning in the twang of Nitzche’s lonely guitars. I was the solitary surfer, crashing against waves of youthful despair. Oh, Francoise, why, why?

I carried the torch for my Gallic lover until the following month when the trivialities of young love were washed away on November 22, the day Kennedy was assasinated. Things changed after that. Innocence was gone. I discovered Bob Dylan and soon The Stones, The Beatles and the rest. Eventually I moved back to the States and Francoise Hardy became a fading memory. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that my crush was revived and I found myself buying every vinyl record I cound find of hers. And to this day, Francoise is my eternal teenybopper flame, the beatnik princess of my dreams.

Here are three clips of Francoise (one she sings in Italian). Two have not been readily available on the internet, the other has been seen my millions. I present them to you in all their pristine glory.
 

 
more loveliness after le jump…

Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry vs.The Beatles Let It Be.

I’m a big fan of mashups and this one by Brazil’s DJ Faroff is nicely done. Bravo.

Faroff will be spinning at the monthly ‘Bootie’ mashup party at Echoplex in L.A. on August 21.