Steven Tyler’s mugshot from 1967
In 1967, Steven Tyler was busted for for pot possession in Yonkers, New York. He was 18 years old and it was the Summer Of Love.
Via Cherrybombed
In 1967, Steven Tyler was busted for for pot possession in Yonkers, New York. He was 18 years old and it was the Summer Of Love.
Via Cherrybombed
Forty years after his death, George Jackson continues to reflect different things to different people depending on their ideologies and experiences.
To some, Jackson was a renowned author, Marxist, and activist truth-teller who brought the injustices of the American experience in and out of prison into harsh light as the once-vibrant ‘60s faded to a disillusioned and bloody end.
To others, he was a career criminal and prisoner turned violent radical whose acts and incitements brought misery to many and resulted in the kind of revolutionary martyrdom now worshiped by Islamicists and Tea Party extremists.
In a society that both thrives on a fundamental class-based inequality and manages to keep its prison population of 2 million over 40% black, Jackson remains a figure of some relevance, however legendary. Perhaps the best way to get a picture of the man is to read his words in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
On the ideological side of things, here’s George Jackson - 40 year commemoration, a video produced by Jonathan Jackson Jr:
After the jump: George Jackson in context, and Bob Dylan’s salute to the man…
Figure skating to Robert Johnson’s “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom.” This may be the whitest version of the song ever recorded in any medium.
There ain’t no ice in hell, but if there were, this is what the Ice Capades might look like down there.
Artwork: Brandt Hardin.
During the 1960s Ken Russell flourished as a director of television documentaries for the BBC. Single-handedly he advanced the genre, creating a hybrid form of drama-documentary—the biopic. This was first seen in his remarkable film on Elgar in 1962—which was later voted the best single documentary of the decade. In collaboration with a young Melvyn Bragg—who acted as screenwriter—he produced The Debussy Film starring Oliver Reed in 1965—which is arguably the single most influential drama-doc of the past 50 years as it reinvented the drama doc as a film within a film—a template later copied,developed and stolen from by innumerable filmmakers. Then came the the understated film on Delius Song of Summer in 1968, before finally and most controversially making his farewell film for the BBC Dance of the Seven Veils A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the life of Richard Strauss 1864-1949. Russell’s film infamously depicted the German composer of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as a Nazi, which outraged critics, lead to questions being raised in the British Parliament, and was eventually banned.
A young Ken Russell on the balcony of his apartment in Bayswater, late 1959s.
Russell’s visually brilliant and intuitive style of film-making was a long way from the kind of straight documentaries made by his contemporaries—including John Schlesinger, whom he had replaced at the BBC. Then ‘biography’, as Joseph Lanza explained in Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films, was:
...more like strict documentary. There was no place for metaphors or speculative drama. The network’s purists felt such tactics were synonymous with the kinds of exaggeration [the Futurist artist] Henri Gaudier championed and that Russell longed to create. So Russell kept a humble exterior while secretly plotting to subvert the BBC’s codes of propriety.
“Ken was different in every way from what he is now,” Russell’s BBC boss Huw Wheldon reflected in the early 1970s on working with Russell in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. “To start with, he was virtually wordless. He was shy and quiet. Quiet in every way: his clothes, his haircut, his countenance. A little watchful, but silent and completely modest. I couldn’t make head nor tail of him, partly because he wouldn’t help me. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.”
Russell’s first short film for the BBC’s Monitor series was Poet’s London - an effective evocation of John Betjeman’s poetry. This was quickly followed by Guitar Crazy on the rise of guitar music; Portrait of a Goon, a look acclaimed comic and scriptwriter, Spike Milligan; and a profile of dance legend, Marie Rambert and her ballet company. Then in 1960, during a summer break from the series, Russell wrote, directed and produced his first full-length documentary film, A House in Bayswater.
A scene from ‘A House in Bayswater.’
In An Appalling Talent - Ken Russell, film writer and critic, John Baxter described Russell’s film as ‘...ostensibly a protest at the razing of tall old buildings to make way for office blocks…’
‘Beginning as a systematic representation of Bayswater as a hive of creative activity - his chosen terrace houses a painter, a photographer, a ballet dancer and ex-pupil of Pavlova, a retired lady’s maid who pines for the affluent USA of the Twenties, and an odd but lively landlady - the film changes tone as both artists reveal themselves as tedious poseurs, and Russell’s sympathy swings towards the old people, sustained and enriched by the past. The dancer, leading her willing, wispy pupil through a two-woman show hazed in memoriesof better days (“My next solo is one I did on Broadway in 1929 and I am wearing the same costume”) is faded but not absurd, the maid’s images of New York have the insouciant fever of Scott Fitzgerald, and the concierge who sells her junk to the photographer for props, offers bumpers of sherry as rent receipts and cultivates toadstools and deadly nightshade in the garden with a philosophical “They might come in useful” celebrates the indestructible eccentric. The last Cocteauesque image, of the dancer and her little pupil battling in slow motion against a windy torrent of streamers and balloons (to be recalled in the 1812 episode of The Music Lovers) holds the promise of immortality for all those who survive and, above all, keep faith.’
Russell at the Steenbeck with legendary BBC producer Huw Wheldon looking over his shoulder.
A House in Bayswater is a beautiful piece of documentary-making, which slowly develops towards a memorable finish. What isn’t revealed is that the fact this was this house in Bayswater was Ken Russell’s home during the 1950s.
I have lived most of my life in rooming houses, and shared apartments, and run-down hotels, where there is great comfort in anonymity and company amongst strangers, and understand Russell’s nostalgia for a life that is being slowly removed, as cities are carelessly gentrified. Watching it in the month when New York’s Chelsea Hotel announced its demise, only reinforced how much of our shared environment is now monetized for the benefit of a few. This is apparent in Russell’s film, as the film details the lives and hopes of the tenants, connected by a house that was planned for demolition—to be replaced “by a soulless office block. Thankfully, this never happened and the house stands to this day.”
Previously on Dangerous Minds
The Book, The Sculptor, His Life & Ken Russell
Ken Russell’s banned film: ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’
It’s Sunday and time for some fire and brimstone. In other words, a good ol’ revival meeting.
Pastor Tommy Bates is in the house!
I detect of bit of racial stereotyping when the braying Bates tells the little Hispanic kid that, with the Lord’s help, he won’t grow up to be a drug addict, a convict, or some kind of, hold on to your hats, entertainer! Neeeeverrr.
At the end of the clip, Pastor Bates’ partner, who is using a small Black girl as an armrest, asks the penetrating question “wouldn’t you like the Holy Ghost to come on you like that”?
Via Coginate
Phil Lynott statue on Dublin’s Grafton St (toy monkey not included)
You’ll have seen the other Thin Lizzy posts that we’ve put up on DM by now, right? Big up to Paul and Marc for the Phil Lynott-loving that has been going on here - Lizzy are an under-appreciated band, who to my knowledge never really broke through in America. Of all the rock act Ireland has ever produced though, Thin Lizzy are by far the best, and most of that legacy rests with the cool, charismatic and incredibly talented Phil Lynott himself.
The Phil Lynott Story goes further than other Thin Lizzy-based docs to explore Lynott’s background, from his teenage mother’s escape from the work houses of wartime Northern England to Phil’s growing up as a black man in the vastly white1960s Dublin, and from his fledgling career as a psychedelic folk-rocker to his post-Lizzy years and his decent into heavy drug use and eventual, untimely death. It’s a fascinating story, packed to the gills with drama, drugs, scandal and lots of great music. It would make an amazing biopic, but who would play Phil?
This BBC-produced documentary is essential listening for anyone with a vague interest in rock’n'roll - you don’t need to be a fan to find this fascinating. But if you are a fan and don’t know the full story, be prepared to be amazed at some of the anecdotes and the background information supplied by Lynott’s incredible mother Philomena. Here’s a little bonus too - a video for the Lynott solo single “Old Town” (co-produced with Midge Ure and one of the greatest synth-pop tracks of all time IMO) with Phil strolling around early 80s Dublin and fooling around on his native Grafton St and Ha’Penny Bridge:
Phil Lynott - “Old Town”
The Phil Lynott Story Part 1
Parts 2-7 after the jump…
Previously on DM
‘Bad Reputation’ excellent Thin Lizzy documentary
Thin Lizzy: Live Rock Palast 1981
Have access to a cat and a scanner? Then you too could join the party at The Cat Scan! Please note - no kittehs were harmed in the making of this post.
“They were convicted for being young, goth, Wiccan metalheads at the height of the Satanic Panic. Today they walk free.”
For those of us who have been following the plight of the “West Memphis Three,” Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, from the time we were first introduced to their victimization in the gut wrenching documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the news of their release from prison is a bitter sweet turn of events for three kids who were convicted of the crime of being different in a witch hunt that makes the American judicial system seem absolutely medieval.
If you’re not familiar with the “West Memphis Three” case, go here and catch up on it.
The “Three” are free, but the case is hardly closed. I expect there will be revelations about this obscene miscarriage of justice emerging in the very near future. Arkansas’ legal system is clearly trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, which is hard to do when the media is all over it and with high profile supporters like Eddie Vedder and Patti Smith on the case, and I seriously doubt that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are going to let the motherfuckers who sent them to prison off the hook. In addition to having their lives completely destroyed, it looks to me like these cats still got some major issues with having to plead guilty to be freed (who wouldn’t?) and with 18 years behind bars I’m sure they have plenty of energy to settle the karmic score. Rock on brothers!
Update 8/21: Press conference with Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley.
The fact that after 18 years on death row and in solitary confinement Echols managed to keep his sanity amazes me. Damien’s wife Lorri needs to be given a huge amount of credit for standing by and fighting for her man as does Jason’s sacrifice of his fight for exoneration so his friend could be freed.
