For a week in February of 1972 John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show and America was introduced to macrobiotics, experimental film, bio-feedback, Elephant’s Memory, Yippee prankster Jerry Rubin and Chuck Berry sitting yoga-style watching it all pass before his bemused eyes.

The footage of John and Yoko playing “Johnny B. Goode” and “Memphis” with Chuck Berry is all over YouTube. It’s not included here. The clips that I’m sharing have been less available ever since they went out of print. While not as musically historic as the footage of Berry and Lennon playing together, these conversations with John and Yoko are a charming and inspiring look at one of rock and roll’s great marriages. The love and respect between Lennon and Ono is palpable and you can feel the creative energy that is sparking between them. And their earnest enthusiasm in turning people on to new ways of treating their bodies and brains is testimony to John and Yoko’s continuing journey in raising consciousness, ours and theirs. Their message is refreshingly free of cynicism and rock star jadedness.

Mike Douglas seems genuinely engaged by John and Yoko.

We begin with day two of John and Yoko’s residency, February 16,1972.
 

 
Berry and bio-feedback after the jump…

 
Ivor Cutler was a poet, humorist, singer/song-writer, and performer, who was, by his own admission, “never knowingly understood.” Born into a Jewish middle-class family, in Glasgow’s south side, Cutler claimed his life was shaped by the birth of younger brother:

“He took my place as the center of the Universe. Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am and therefore as creative. Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull, I think.”

Being so usurped, the young Cutler attempted to bash his brother’s brains in with a poker. Thankfully, an observant aunt stopped him. As more siblings were born, another brother and two sisters, Cutler’s resentment lessened after he discovered poetry and music. When he was five, he discovered politics after witnessing the bare-foot poverty of his school friends, and aligned himself to the Left thereafter.

After school, he worked at various jobs before he settled as a school teacher, teaching 7-11-year-olds music and poetry. His work with children inspired and reinforced his own unique view of the world:

He recalled how, in an art class, “one boy drew an ass that didn’t have four legs, but 14. I asked him why and he said it looked better that way. I wanted to lift him out of his cage and put my arms around him, but my intellect told me not to, which was lucky, because I probably would have been sent to prison.”

In the 1950s, Cutler started submitting his poetry to magazines and radio, and soon became a favorite on the BBC. His poetry was filled with “childlike wonder of the world”, created through the process of “bypassing the intellect.” He was, by his own account, a “stupid genius,” , as the London Times explained

Such genius derived from his ability to view life from the opposite direction to that taken by society, and his ability to empathise with the implications of that viewpoint, as in his one-sentence poem: “A fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable.”

Cutler had a cult following of loyal fans, which included John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who cast him in their The Magical Mystery Tour film; DJ John Peel, who devotedly played Cutler’s releases; Morrissey and more recently Alan McGee and Oasis.

Ivor Cutler: Looking for Truth with a Pin was made shortly before Cutler died. The program has contributions from Paul McCartney, Robert Wyatt, Billy Connolly and Alex Kapranos, and is a fitting testament to the great man, who made life so much more fun. More interesting. More mysterious.

Admittedly, he might not be everyones cup of warmth, but as Cutler said himself:

“Those who come to my gigs probably see life as a child would. It’s those who are busy making themselves into grown-ups, avoiding being a child — they’re the ones who don’t enjoy it.”

I hope you enjoy.
 

 
More truth from Mr Cutler’s pin, after the jump…
 

 
Lee Harris is a playwright, poet, publisher and “foot soldier” of the UK’s counter culture. Born in Johannesburg in 1936, Harris was one of the few whites on the African National Congress, opposing segregation during the time of Apartheid, and was involved with the Congress of the People rally in Soweto in 1955.

Harris arrived in the UK in 1956, to study drama, after college, he had a small part in Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight and later worked in theater. 

A major turning point for Harris came on the 11 June 1965, when he first heard Allen Ginsberg at the decade defining International Poetry Reading at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

We turned up in our thousands to hear some of the best poets of the Beat Generation. When Allen Ginsberg stood up to read his poems you could feel an electric charge in the air. There he was, like an Old Testament prophet, with his long dark hair and bushy beard, his voice reverberating with emotional intensity. Never before in that hallowed hall had such outrageous and colorful language been heard…..Hearing Allen that first time was a revelatory and illuminating experience.

That event and his presence in London that summer, helped kindle the spark that set the underground movement alight in the mid-sixties.

Harris began to write plays with Buzz Buzz and then wrote the critically acclaimed Love Play, which was performed at the Arts Lab in 1967 - a highly important venue for alternative arts, founded by Jim Haynes, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono exhibited and David Bowie performed. It was during this time Harris became acquainted with William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Ken Kesey and toured with The Fugs.

Harris wrote for the International Times and in 1972 established the first “head shop” Alchemy in London on the Portobello Road, where he sold “paraphenalia” brought back from India and counter culture books.

“I’d started off in the West End before as an anarchist trader selling psychedelic posters in the late sixties you see because I did not know how to make a living. I ended up in the Portobello Road, making chokers, selling chillums, first because that was the in thing with beads.

I had traded at many festivals so it was natural for me and I started to be a sort of medicine head, with Tiger Balm, Herbs and I believed in cannabis as the ‘healing herb’.

It was here that Harris was famously prosecuted for selling cigarette papers. The shop was a focus for alternative culture, and it was here Harris began publishing underground ‘zines, including Jim Haynes, infamous drug-smuggler Howard Marks, and artist, journalist and activist Caroline Coon.
 

 
Part two of ‘Life and Works of Lee Harris’ plus bonus Lee Harris and the Beat Hotel, after the jump…
 

 
The Village Voice is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York City by digging up some articles from their archives. This one by Jack Newfield published on September 2, 1965 is so off-the-wall I had to share the whole thing with you. The notion of a mods and rockers confrontation in Flushing, Queens is more hysterical than historical. I don’t recall a single point in American pop culture where hip youth were separated by the mod/rocker divide. Newfield, in trying to equate American Dylan fans to the mods and rockers of Britain, is just plain full of shit. And the reference to Stalinists and Social Democrats is even more amusing in its absurdity. Did anyone buy this back in 1965?

Newfield had a reputation for being a bit of a sensationalist and he lives up to that rep with tabloidy lines like “It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit.” What was probably a relatively civilized event is depicted as some kind of rock and roll riot. Accurate? I don’t know. Funny? Yes. Newfield was a smart cat, but rock and roll was definitely not his beat.
 

At Forest Hills: Mods, Rockers Fight Over New Thing Called ‘Dylan’

Twenty-four year old Bob Dylan may have been the oldest person in the crowd of 15,000 that jammed Forest Hills Stadium Saturday night.

The teenage throng was bitterly divided between New York equivalents of Mods and Rockers. The Mods—folk purists, new leftists, and sensitive collegians—came to hear Dylan’s macabre surrealist poems like “Gates of Eden” and “A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall.” But the Rockers—and East Village pothead—came to stomp their feet to Dylan’s more recent explorations of electronic “rock folk.”

The confrontation was riotous. The Mods booed their former culture hero savagely after each of his amplified rock melodies. They chanted We want Dylan and shouted insults at him. Meanwhile, the Rockers, in frenzied kamikaze squadrons of six and eight, leaped out of the stands after each rock song and raced for the stage. Some just wanted to touch their newfound, sunken-eyed idol, while others seemed to prefer playing Keystone cops with pudgy stadium police, running zig-zag on the grass until captured in scenes reminiscent of the first Beatle movie.

The factionalism within the teenage sub-culture seemed as fierce as that between Social Democrats and Stalinists, and it began even before Dylan set foot on the wind-swept stage. Folk disc jockey Jerry White introduced from the wings, “The Fifth Beatle, Murray the K.”

The leading symbol of commercialization and frenetic “Top 40” disc jockeying was greeted with a cascade of boos. “There’s a new swinging mood in the country,” Murray the K began, “and Bobby baby is definitely what’s happenin’, baby.”

The teenage argot drove the Mods to even greater fury. But when the K added, “It’s not rock, it’s not folk, it’s a new thing called Dylan,” a united front of cheers filled the night.

After three introductions, Dylan finally emerged from the wings like a timid bird with a lion’s mane. The first half of his concert was devoted exclusively to the image-filled, heavily symbolic absurdist songs he was identified with before he unveiled his “electricity” at Newport last month. The Mods listened enraptured as he sang the familiar images: “She is a hypnotist collector/You are a walking antique” and “She can take the dark out of the night and paint the daytime black.”

A few moments later, hunched over, his long hair rippling in the breeze, Dylan mesmerized the Mods, half singing, half chanting, “The Gates of Eden”:

“I try to harmonize with songs the lonesome sparrow sings . . . at dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dream/With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

Then Dylan sang a long, new dream called “Desolation Row” that contained these two verses:

“All except Cain and Abel and the Hunchback of Notre Dame/Everybody is either making love or waiting for rain/Ophelia, she’s beneath the window, for her I feel so afraid/On her 22nd birthday, she’s still an old maid.”

“The Titanic sails at dawn/Everyone is shouting ‘Which side are you on’/Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower/While calypso singers laugh at them below them . . . “

But Dylan is like Norman Mailer: He never repeats himself or exploits his past. Just as Mailer has moved inevitably from Trotskyism to hipsterism to mysticism, so has Dylan grown from political protest to rock folk.

A four-piece amplified band (electronic organ, electronic bass, electronic guitar, and drums) backed Dylan up the second half of the concert. After the first rock song, the Mods booed Dylan. After the second someone called him a “scum bag,” and he replied cooly, “Aw, come on now.” After the third the Mods chanted sardonically, “We Want Dylan.”

It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit. But they should have been listening to the lyrics—they were as poetic as ever.

Perhaps in an attempt to show the Mods he wasn’t “going commercial” or “selling out,” Dylan performed a few of his earlier hits like “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” with a muted rocking beat. The message seemed to get through, and much of the Mods’ wrath subsided. And the Mods joined the Rockers in wildly applauding Dylan’s second new song of the evening (no title announced), which he sang while playing the piano standing up.

America’s most influential poet since Allen Ginsberg then sang his top-selling “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the factions divided again. The Mods booed, and during the last chorus a dozen teenagers charged the stage, exhausted police in slow-footed pursuit. Keeping his cool, Dylan finished the song, mumbled, “Thank you, very much,” and walked off without doing an encore, while kids and cops cavorted on the grass.”

Keeping in the tabloid spirit of Newfield’s article, I’m sharing the notorious Dylan/Lennon limousine footage from May 27, 1966 in which both musicians were reputedly drunk and/or tripping. Dylan certainly seems out of it. Lennon seems bemused. While we’ve previously shared a portion of this on DM, this is the long version. There’s an additional four minutes of footage that wasn’t included in this clip because it’s silent and consists mostly of Dylan looking nauseous and Lennon looking bored.
 

 
John, Paul, George and…Jimmie? It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it? But for ten days in 1964, Jimmie Nicol was one of The Fab Four, drafted in to replace Ringo Starr on The Beatles first world tour.

Starr had collapsed with tonsillitis, and rather than cancel the tour, producer George Martin decided to call in a temporary replacement - Jimmie Nicol, an experienced session musician, who had played with Georgie Fame and jazz musician, Johnny Dankworth, amongst others. Lennon and McCartney were fine with the idea, but Harrison was a bit shirty, and at one point threatened to walk off, telling Martin and Brian Epstein: “If Ringo’s not going, then neither am I - you can find two replacements.” It was soon resolved and within 24-hours of the initial ‘phonecall, Nicol was playing drums with the Fab Three in Copenhagen. He later recalled:

“That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was a fucking Beatle!”

The next leg of the tour was Australia and Hong Kong, and Nicol soon found himself at the heart of Beatlemania. Fans screamed his name, his photograph was sent around the globe, and he was interviewed as one of the band by the world’s press. Nicol later reflected:

“The day before I was a Beatle, girls weren’t interested in me at all. The day after, with the suit and the Beatle cut, riding in the back of the limo with John and Paul, they were dying to get a touch of me. It was very strange and quite scary.”

He also gave an inkling into The Beatles’ life on the road was like:

“I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them until I caught up with these guys.”

Ten days into the tour, Ringo had recovered and quickly reclaimed his place. Nicol was paid off by Epstein at Melbourne airport, given a cheque for $1,000 and a gold Eterna-matic wrist watch inscribed: “From The Beatles and Brian Epstein to Jimmy - with appreciation and gratitude.” It was like a retirement present. Within a year Nicol was bankrupt, owing debts of over $70,000, and all but forgotten. So much for his 15 minutes of fame.

“Standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Until then I was quite happy earning thirty or forty pounds a week. After the headlines died, I began dying too.”

Nicol went on to play with Swedish guitar band, The Spotnicks, but by the late sixties he quit pop music and relocated to Mexico. It was later claimed he had died, but as the Daily Mail explained in 2005, this was false:

At 66, his square-jawed looks have given way to grey jowls, the smile oblieterated by missing teeth. Anything that might remain of his Beatle haircut is tied back in a scruffy ponytail. But he still has his principles. Despite the lucrative rewards of today’s Beatlemania industry, he staunchly refuses to cash in….

It has even been reported that he died in 1988. This week, however, after a difficult search, I confirmed reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. One morning he could be foind visiting a building society, eating breakfast in a modest cafe, then returning silently to his London home. At this flat you could see sheet music through one window but no sign of any drums. He didn’t answer the door when I rang. If he got my messages about the new book, he didn’t reply.

When I eventually made contact, the conversation was predictably brief: “I’m not interested in all that now,” he said. “I don’t want to know, man.”

Here is footage of The Beatles’ tour of Australia and Jimmie Nicol’s time as the fifth Beatle - the Beatle who never was..
 

 
Rare clips of The Beatles on tour, plus Jimmie Nicol interview, after the jump…
 

 
John Lennon 24 Hours is a “rarely seen” BBC documentary following John and Yoko over five days in early December 1969. It’s an intimate and interesting film with some very fine moments - a few you may have seen before, but even so it’s well worth watching.

There’s a spooky moment for Lennon-philes at around 1 minute 20 seconds in part 3 (below), when Lennon reads out a letter from a concerned fan who wrote:

Dear Mr Lennon, From information I received whilst using ouija board I believe there will be an attempt to assassinate you. The spirit who gave me this information was Brian Epstein.

Enjoy!
 
John Lennon 24 Hours - Part 1
 

 
My favorite post-Beatles solo track by my hero. 30 years ago today I lost my innocence and became prematurely cynical about the world at age 14. John forever.
 

 
It’s the Kennedy moment for a generation, who know where they were, and what they were doing when they heard about John Lennon’s murder thirty years ago today.

I was woken from sleep, and half-awake, half asleep, the news was dreamlike, “John Lennon’s dead. He was shot.” It didn’t make sense, and three decades on, still doesn’t.

Lennon’s loss is immeasurable, for we are left with unfulfilled expectations. That said, Lennon’s creative work as a solo artist, but more importantly with The Beatles changed everything. John, Paul, George and Ringo were the most revolutionary and influential quartet since Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

To celebrate their revolutionary drive, here is “Revolution” deconstructed.

Lennon started writing “Revolution” in early 1968, when off on retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Arguably, it was the first real political song The Beatles produced, and was a considered move away from the lovable mop-top image, as Lennon explained:

“I thought it was about time we spoke about it [revolution], the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese war. I had been thinking about it up in the hills in India.”

1968: the Vietnam War, My Lai Massacre, Grosvenor Square demonstration, student riots in Paris, Rome and Brazil, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin start a bombing campaign, Russia crushes the Prague Spring revolt in Czechoslovakia, Martin Luther King assassinated, Bobby Kennedy assassinated. It was a hell of a year.

In May The Beatles recorded Take 1 of “Revolution”, a slow almost Blues-like number with Lennon singing his vocal while lying on the floor. During this recording Lennon included the word “in” at the end of the line “You can count me out” as he was undecided about supporting violent revolution. Even so, Lennon was keen to have this version released as the next Beatles’ single. McCartney, however, was against causing any controversy, and argued, along with Harrison, that the track was far too slow to be a hit. It was eventually released, with lots of overdubs, on the White Album

A longer version (Take 20), lasting over 10 minutes was recorded and begins with Lennon shouting “Take your knickers off and let’s go.” Yoko Ono can be heard on this track, saying “Maybe it’s not that,” to which Harrison replies, “It is that.” Parts of this were later incorporated into “Revolution No. 9”.

Lennon was still adamant about releasing a version of “Revolution” and a faster, more up-tempo version was recorded on 9 July. It begins with “a startling machine-gun fuzz guitar riff,” with Lennon’s and Harrison’s guitars prominent throughout. Their distinct fuzzy sound was achieved by plugging the guitars directly into the recording console, and then routing the signal through two microphone preamplifiers, almost causing the channel to overload. Lennon overdubbed the opening scream, and double-tracked some of the words “so roughly that its careless spontaneity becomes a point in itself.” This version of “Revolution” was released as the B-side to “Hey, Jude” in August 1968. Highly controversial at the time, dividing both Left and Right, “Revolution” is now regarded as one of the “greatest, most furious rockers” with “challenging, fiery lyrics” where the listener’s “heart immediately starts pounding before Lennon goes into the first verse.” Rock critic Dave Marsh included “Revolution” in his 1989 book of 1001 greatest singles, describing it as a “gem” with a “ferocious fuzztone rock and roll attack” and a “snarling” Lennon vocal. Who can disagree?
 
John Lennon - Vocals
 

 
More tracks plus bonus clips of The Beatles after the jump…
 

Photograph by Ted Streshinsky, “People’s Park Riots, National Guard and Protester”
 
John Lennon and The Beatles were synchronous with most of the pivotal points of my life in the sixties. They weren’t leaders, they weren’t my gurus, they were my companions, my spiritual allies on a magical and very mysterious trip. And John was the one I felt closest to. I could relate to his peace and love approach, but I also deeply felt his angrier side, his revolutionary spirit.

(The following is an edited excerpt from a rough draft of my memoirs)

The People’s Park situation had gotten out of control. Reagan declared Martial Law.

On May 29, 1969 John Lennon called the People’s Park protest organizers (UCB students) twice to offer his support. It was the day before a major march was to be held and there was a lot of tension in the air. The calls were broadcast on KPFA radio. Lennon’s exhortations to stay cool could be heard from radios perched on window sills throughout the city:

“There’s no cause worth losing your life for, there isn’t any path worth getting shot for and you can do better by moving on to another city. Don’t move about if it aggravates the pigs, and don’t get hassled by the cops, and don’t play their games. I know it’s hard, Christ you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be man, so
what? Everything’s hard. It’s better to have it hard than to not have it at all.

Entice them, entice them! Con them-you’ve got the brains, you can do it. You can make it, man! We can make it together. We can get it together!”

It was almost two weeks after Bloody Thursday, but the streets were still crawling with National Guard, cops in riot gear, and military tanks. It looked like Prague 1968. I was in the middle of it all. I decided to leave town. I was a peacenik and didn’t want anything to do with the violence that was erupting all around me, most of it instigated by jackbooted cops from Oakland.

My girlfriend Vicki and I were walking down University Ave. toward a freeway onramp when a cop car, sirens wailing, screeched up along side us and a bunch of bulls spilled out wildly waving their nightsticks and knocked us to the ground. They ripped the backpacks off our bodies and tore them open, scattering our stuff all over the sidewalk. Instead of bombs or guns or whatever the fuck they were looking for, they ended up with a few bags of granola, dried fruit and brown rice. As the cops were piling back into their car, a van pulled up to the curb and its longhair driver shouted for us to “get in, get in!”  We threw our backpacks and ourselves into the van and slammed the door shut.  This infuriated the cops. They leaped back out of their car and started slamming billy clubs upside the van as we sped off. The cops were out of their fucking minds, rabid Keystone Kops gone mad with the smell of hippie blood.

I decided not to leave Berkeley but to stay and join my neighbors in protest of the cop riot and the occupation of our city by Reagan’s goon squads. This was happening on my turf and I had to be involved. It wasn’t going away. And avoiding it was a chickenshit approach that I couldn’t live with.

On May 30th over 30,000 people (one third of Berkeley’s population) marched to People’s Park to save it from destruction. Vicki and I were among them. The National Guard and the cops were out in full force. But, they were outnumbered and overwhelmed. Young girls slid flowers down the muzzles of bayoneted rifles and a small airplane flew over the city trailing a banner that read, “Let A Thousand Parks Bloom.”

The park was surrounded by a fence. Inside the fence were hundreds of young Guardsmen. Outside the fence were thousands of peaceful protesters. Some of the Guardsmen looked terrified; others were smiling and flashing peace symbols. Community leaders and organizers were making speeches from a couple of flatbed trucks. Music played. At one point a bunch of us jumped up on one of the flatbeds, took off our clothes and started dancing. We were chanting to the soldiers inside the fence to “join us, join us”. Most of them looked like they were ready to leap the fence and do exactly that. Seeing a bunch of cute hippie chicks naked and offering their bodies to them was mighty tempting to those horny young guys, some of whom were actually UCB students who had joined the guard to avoid going to Vietnam. They knew they were on the wrong side of the fence. I later read that several of them did end up joining the protesters and were severely punished for having done so. The following week, a picture of me dancing nude on that flatbed truck appeared on the cover of the Berkeley Barb. Rocking out with my cock out!  Mao said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”  I had a different approach.

Two years later, People’s Park was resurrected. It exists to this day. Power to the people and their parks.

Here’s a wonderful video clip that includes John’s phone call to KPFA.

 
This is nothing too profound, in fact it’s rather goofy and quite amusing to see how giddy the two Johns are around each other, but I’ve never seen this before and have no idea as to its provenance. Anybody?

 
Bob Dylan’s handwritten letter of support for John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their travails with the U.S. Immigration Dept.

JUSTICE for John & Yoko!

John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to this country’s so called ART INSTITUTION / They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only can help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this mild dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass-media. Hurray for John & Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country’s got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!

Bob Dylan

Via Letters of Note

 
There is something about mash-ups that reminds me of the classic British children’s TV series Crackerjack, which ruled the winter airwaves from 1955-1984.

Crackerjack was broadcast live every Friday, from BBC TV Centre in London, and was a frenetic mix of sketches, games, quizzes and mini dramas (rather like pantomime), with each show opening with the lines, “It’s Friday. It’s five o’clock. And it’s Crackerjack!”  Christ knows what drugs inspired the genesis of this series, but its effect on viewers, its studio full of hyper-active kids, and the state of British TV since has been immense.

One of the highlights of Crackerjack was its mini-drama or featurette, where chart songs were re-interpreted by the show’s stars Peter Glaze, Ed Stewart, Jan Hunt, Leslie Crowther, The Krankies, Don Maclean and co. What usually happened was the tune of one hit had its lyrics changed to fit in with the drama’s narrative, one regular choice for this was Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

Mighty Mike’s mash-up of Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ made me think of Crackerjack, as the mix of preposterous rock vocal with, what comedian Iain Lee once described as “a nursery song for hippies,” would have sat easily within Crackerjack‘s format. Mighty Mike has been making these kinds of mash-ups for a wee while, and his site has a varied selection including Michael Jackson and Queen, Free and Madonna, Alanis Morisette and B.O.B.. Now, if only the BBC would bring back Crackerjack...but then again, perhaps not.
 

 
Bonus Mighty Mike mash-up and clip of ‘Crackerjack’ after the jump…
 
With thanks to Alistair Mcmenemy
 

 
Ten for Two: The John Sinclair Freedom Rally,  directed by Steve Gebhardt is a filmed document of the John Sinclair benefit concert held in 1971.

John Sinclair managed the MC5 and was the founder of The White Panther Party. His uncompromising radical political stance made him a target of the U.S. government. He was busted in a sting operation for selling two joints to undercover cops. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail. Musicians, politicians, artists and friends organized a rally to bring attention to Sinclair’s unjust sentence. It worked. Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional.

Ten For Two was produced by John and Yoko, who also perform in it, and features Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Leni Sinclair, David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders, Bob Seger, Archie Shepp, Bobby Seale, The Steve Miller Band, Commander Cody, Stevie Wonder and more.

The rally was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. John and Yoko came on at 3 a.m.

Why hasn’t this been released on DVD?  Rumor has it that Yoko owns the rights to the film and won’t release it. In the meantime, this funky video is all I’ve been able to get access to.

Here’s an in-depth article on the concert here.

Part 1 kicks in at the 15 second point.
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…

 
In The Conversation, Gene Hackman’s character, Harry Caul used an Ampex AG-350 and German-made UHER units to bug unsuspecting couples. The UHERs were similar to those used during the Nixon administration to bug the Oval Office. Bugging is more ubiquitous than we think, for example, though cinema may try and convince pay-phones are the best place to make that discreet call, they are regularly bugged by intelligence agencies. This was particularly true for the UK and Northern Ireland during the 1970s, when covert surveillance was carried out on paramilitary organizations, those of certain political affiliation, union leaders, Communist Party members and even John Lennon and The Sex Pistols. It therefore must have come as quite a shock to the powers that be, when it was disclosed MI5 had bugged the Prime Minister’s office, at 10 Downing Street, for 15 years.

Over at the Phantom Museum there is an impressive on-line collection of 117 reel-to-reel recorders and 50 microphones, plus an extensive history of reel-to-reel and recording advertising from the late 1800s to present day.

The Museum was established by Martin Theophilus, who has been involved in audio production since 1964, and now runs the multi-media company Phantom Productions. Theophilus says the on-line Museum, “is for people who want to look back and see how recording has evolved.”

In an interview with The Bastrop Advertiser, Theophilus explained:

...recorders were in use as early as 1877 but that the Edison Player, which initially sold for $20 (cylinders were 35 cents), was the first device available to the public. The Edison machine etched microphone vibrations into grooves on spinning wax cylinders. Historically, recorders have used wire, vinyl and other materials.

Theophilus said that commercial and private use of reel-to-reel magnetic tape to record sound, a technique first developed by the Germans during World War II, began in California in 1946 where two captured German machines were reassembled.

The vintage reel-to-reels in Theophilus’ collection were primarily used by singers, musicians and song writers who could not afford to hire professional recording studios.

Beginning in 1948, when portable reel-to-reel machines became available to cash poor artists, they used them to make demos. The demos were distributed to help the artists get jobs. By 1955, portable reel-to-reel recorders, such as the Ampex, reproduced a sound as good as the products of recording studios.

The Phantom Museum can be found here, and the vintage reel-to-reel, radios and recorders catalogs and adverts here.
 

 
Bonus images from the Reel-to-Reel catalog after the jump…
 

 
“Hey, Johnny, What are you rebelling against?”
“What’ve you got?”

It’s the famous riposte from Marlon Brando in The Wild One, a line that sent a tremor of fear through the British establishment. Strange to think now, but back in 1954,  The Wild One was considered such a serious threat to British society it was banned by the Board of Film Censors for 14 years.

You see, those thin-lipped, blue-pencil censors believed Marlon Brando and his band of slovenly bikers would give youngsters “ideas on how to brutalize the public.”  This was hyped response to the fact the film was loosely based on a real event, when a band of bikers took over the town of Holister in California in July 1947, during the Gypsy Tour Motorcycle Rally. Around 50 people were arrested, mainly for drunkeness, fighting, reckless driving, and disturbing the peace. Sixty people were injured, 3 seriously. Even so, it’s hard to see how the chubby Brando and his non-sensical mumblings could have inspired anyone into revolt.

Afterall, austere 1950s Britain, with its food rationing and shell-shocked, ruined cities, wasn’t Technicolor America, something John Lennon found out when he visited his local cinema to see Bill Haley and his Comets in Rock Around the Clock. Lennon had heard how riots and revolution were taking place at the film’s screenings. However, instead of seat slashing and fighting in the aisles, the nascent Beatle was dumbstruck to find his generation watching the film in silence.

If it did cause any rebellion, then it was a revolution in the head of a young English poet called Thom Gunn.

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt–by hiding it, robust–
And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

 
More on Thom Gunn and bonus clips after the jump…