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‘You are the Crown of Creation’: Jefferson Airplane, 1968
12.03.2011
08:23 pm
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The Jefferson Airplane do “Crown of Creation” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968.

“In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds.

In loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.”

You have to hand it to the Smothers, what other TV show in 1968 would have allowed Grace Slick to sing the above lyrics, wear black-face and give the “Black Power” salute (as she does at the end of the song)? Such an insane thing to do! Considering what a political hot potato that show was for CBS at the time, it’s odd that THIS number passed by the censors, don’t you find? What were they thinking? What was she thinking? (And what did the rest of the band think???)
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.03.2011
08:23 pm
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Lou Reed: Live at the Bottom Line, 1983
12.03.2011
07:14 pm
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Lou Reed. P.M. - Pre-Metallica. A Night with Lou Reed, his performance at the Bottom Line, New York, from 1983.

Track Listing:

01. “Sweet Jane”
02. “I’m Waiting for the Man”
03. “Martial Law”
04. “Don’t Talk to Me about Work”
05. “Women”
06. “Waves of Fear”
07. “Walk on the Wild Side”
08. “Turn Out the Light”
09. “New Age”
10. “Kill Your Sons”
11. “Satellite of Love”
12. “White Light/White Heat”
13. “Rock & Roll”

Look out for an air-guitaring front row fan around 51.48 - a portent of things to come A.M.? (After Metallica?)
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ and Me


 
A little more from Lou, after the jump….
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.03.2011
07:14 pm
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Vintage ad for Hip Pocket Record earrings
12.03.2011
04:38 pm
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I wonder if they stretched your earlobes? Seems a bit heavy, eh?

(via KMFW)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.03.2011
04:38 pm
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Lou Reed/Metallica video directed by Darren Aronofsky
12.03.2011
04:36 pm
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Director Darren Aronofsky, whose films Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan oozed visual style, can’t do much to polish the turd that is Loutallica. Grainy black and white, super slo-mo and lens distortion create a nightmarish quality that is undercut by the song’s ludicrous heavy handedness, ending up more silly than spooky.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.03.2011
04:36 pm
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Behead the Currency: Alan Moore on OWS and why THIS generation has to do something NOW
12.03.2011
02:30 pm
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In one of the best interviews with him I’ve read in some time, comics mage Alan Moore offers his views on the future of publishing, Occupy Wall Street and that sad tosser Frank Miller. He also comes up with an extremely appealing idea for wresting control back from the bankers and plutocrats: Change the currency!

Mull that over for a second, won’t you?

What do you think needs to change in our political system?

Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.

In the sixth issue of Dodgem Logic, I remember doing an article and I was trying to think of possible ways in which our society might be altered for the better. I’m not saying that any of these ways would necessarily be practical but it’s important that we try to think these things through. It’s probably more important now than it ever has been. There is a sense that we don’t have an infinite amount of time to get these things right.

With politics at the moment seemingly determined to keep ploughing on their same destructive course because they can’t think of anything other to do, when we’re facing the possibility of an economic apocalypse, of potentially an environmental apocalypse, we don’t necessarily have an infinite amount of time. I think that since our leaders are not going to address any of these problems then we really have no choice than to attempt to wrest the steering wheel from them. If they’re aiming at the precipice with the accelerator pedal flat to the floor, then we don’t have any other choices left. Do it now, in this generation, because we don’t how many more there’s going to be.

The economic problem is a strange one…

Economics is always strange. You’re not talking about anything that’s actually real. Researching a chapter for Jerusalem, I read a couple of books on economics to see if I could get my head around the facts of the situation. I was astonished when I found out the value of derivative bonds, in 2008. These are bonds that have a value in themselves that were once connected to a real thing, there might have been a bond made for the sale of a herd of sheep, but that can be sold on and they gain in value. The notional value of the world’s derivative bonds was in the region of sixty trillion. Exactly ten times the economic output of the entire planet, which is around six trillion. That means that the gap between what economists and what the world’s economic forces and the banks thought they had to play with and what actually existed was fifty-four trillion. That would seem to me the depth of the hole we are in.

So something has to be done about that. I would suggest beheading the bankers, but while it would be very satisfying and would cheer us up, it probably wouldn’t do anything practical to alter the situation. Behead the currency. Change the currency, why not? It would disempower all the people who had bought into that currency but it would pretty much empower the rest of us, the other ninety-nine percent.

The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 1: Publishing and Kindle (Honest Publishing)

The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 2: The Occupy Movement, Frank Miller, and Politics (Honest Publishing)

Via Jay Babcock’s Twitter feed

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.03.2011
02:30 pm
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Hail Satan! Anton LaVey action figure
12.03.2011
01:10 pm
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Here’s a handmade Anton LaVey action figure by Etsy seller Stexe. This mini-LaVey holiday stocking stuffer sells for $80 at Stexe’s Etsy shop.
 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.03.2011
01:10 pm
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Ticketmaster to ‘refund’ booking fees for all customers from 1999 to 2011
12.03.2011
09:28 am
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More tales of music industry corruption and sleazy insider wheeler-dealing, with an outcome that is a major poke in the eye to the some very greedy bastards. And it’s more than likely that you, Dangerous Minds reader, could directly benefit.

If being a fan of Pearl Jam taught me anything (it was a looong time ago I swear), it was that TIcketmaster suck. They have monopolised the sales of event tickets in the States and made it very hard for bands and promoters to regulate their own pricing and promote independent gigs. Well, now Ticketmaster has been forced to “refund” all its “handling fees” to all of its customers from 1999 up to this year.

Huffington Post reports: 

As the result of a class-action lawsuit, the ticket-pushing behemoth is going to be handing out $1.50 per ticket (up to 17) to everyone who used the site between October 21, 1999 and October 19, 2011. Those who chose the UPS shipping option will be getting a little bit more back: an additional $5.00 credit per order.

It seems Ticketmaster’s processing fees were deemed deceptive because they did not clearly state that Ticketmaster was profiting from them.

According to Business Insider, Ticketmaster will continue to have these fees, but must clearly label them as profit on their site.

Good news! However, I put the word “refund” in quotation marks here because, as some of the commentators on the HuffPo story have pointed out, Ticketmaster are not giving their customers money back, but money off their future purchases. And to a limit of just 17 transactions, maximum.

So while it looks good on paper, in effect every customer who used Ticketmaster is only due a $26 credit note. Unless you used UPS shipping to receive your tickets, in which case you could be due up to $85 in credit, which is quite tidy. But you still need to return to using Ticketmaster to get any value.

But still. Fuck them. It’s great that their very dodgy dealings have been called out in public for everyone to see. And as I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m pretty confident that a high percentage of our readership here at DM will have booked tickets through Ticketmaster at least once over the last twelve years (and very likely more than once at that). So Ticketmaster owe you - get on ‘em!

Thanks to Teamy.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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12.03.2011
09:28 am
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Major anti-piracy campaign accused of pirating its soundtrack
12.03.2011
08:38 am
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The anti-piracy group BREIN has been accused by a soundtrack composer of not having permission to use his work in their well known “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-downloading campaign. The image above is a still from the infamous advert, which has been satirised heavily (most famously by The IT Crowd). 

You couldn’t make this shit up. Well no you could - but no-one would believe you. Which is why Melchior Rietveldt, the Dutch musician whose work was used on the huge international ad campaign after it was commissioned for a only one-off screening, wore a wire to record the conversations he had with his national royalty collection agency Buma/Stemra. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his music was used without permission (in a bloody anti-piracy campaign, of all things) Mr Reitveldt was then told by a representative of Buma/Stemra, Jochem Gerrits, that the issue could be resolved if Gerrits was given a 33% share of the possible million-Euro-plus pay out that Rietveldt was due. In effect, a bribe.

Via Torrentfreak:

It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.

However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.

The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).

The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.

Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.
Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.

In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.

Unbelievable! I hope Mr Rietveldt rinses these bastards for everything they’ve got. Here’s the original BREIN anti-piracy advert:
 

 
Thanks to Paul Shetler.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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12.03.2011
08:38 am
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Little kids singing David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’
12.03.2011
04:00 am
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I was so uplifted by Tara’s post of the little kids at The Sullivan School singing “Judy is a Punk” by The Ramones that I went to their Youtube site and found this sweet take on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.03.2011
04:00 am
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‘House of the Rising Sun’ played by old computer equipment
12.02.2011
07:30 pm
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YouTube user bd594 says, “For this video I recorded each instrument separately with a decent stereo mic and I also used a mixer to adjust the audio levels. I would like to point out that absolutely no sampling or audio effects were used.”

Enjoy!
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Animals: House of the Rising Sun

Thank you, James!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
07:30 pm
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Ken Russell’s visually dynamic ‘Lisztomania’ from 1975
12.02.2011
05:39 pm
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Franz Liszt once said:

‘Truly great men are those who combine contrary qualities within themselves.’

He could have been talking about the late, great Ken Russell, who mixed contrary qualities in his films, perhaps most brilliantly in his bio-pic on the composer, Lisztomania.

Russell had this incredible ability of presenting the truth of an artist and their work, while abandoning any pretense towards biographical realism. In 1975, he captured this perfectly with Lisztomania, presenting Liszt as the equivalent of a pop idol, with his screaming fans and over-indulged libido, in an intelligent, multi-layered imagining of the composer’s life, while using reference points from Charlie Chaplin to rock and roll, comic books to literature, philosophy to the horrors of Nazism.

At the time of its release, Russell described his process of making the film:

‘My film isn’t biography, it comes from things I feel when I listen to the music of Wagner and Liszt, and when I think about their lives.’

Lisztomania is a Pop Art movie with a Punk Rock sensibility - released the same year as Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, and The Rocky Horror Show, on the cusp of the Sex Pistols formation.

I recall how the Observer Magazine ran a color spread on Lisztomania, in eager anticipation that then 48-year-old l’enfant terrible, Mr. Russell, had re-invented cinema with his marriage of pop stars and classical music - Roger Daltery as Liszt,  Ringo Starr as the Pope, Paul Nicholas as Wagner - all surrounded by icons of Elvis and Pete Townshend. Of course, when the film was released, the critics recoiled in horror, and ran screaming for their mothers, or shared smelling salts in the back row of the cinema, to keep them from fainting.

Lisztomania is like no other movie, it is an art work that demands repeated viewing to pick through the cinematic and cultural references, and to appreciate the workings of the creative mind behind the camera. Ross Care in Film Quarterly said of the film:

‘Ken Russell is an intuitive symbolist and fantasist, a total film-maker who orchestrates his subjects in much the same manner that a composer might transcribe a musical composition from one interpretative medium to another (as, for example, Liszt himself did with certain works by Wagner and Berlioz and other composers of the period).”

Starring Roger Daltery as Liszt, Sara Kestelman as Princess Carolyn, Paul Nicholas as Wagner, and Ringo Starr as the Pope. Look out for (LIttle) Nell Campbell, Rick Wakeman, Georgina Hale, Murray Melvin and an uncredited, Oliver Reed.

Read Ross Care’s article on Lisztomania here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Original photo-spread for Ken Russell’s ‘Lisztomania’, from 1975


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.02.2011
05:39 pm
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Scott Walker is pissing himself, should win a special political Darwin Award!

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This is THE BEST: Hapless Wisconsin governor Scott Walker wants people who protest his administration to pay for their First Amendment rights! He even wants them to post a bond in advance. I thought Walker’s big hero was union-buster Ronald Reagan? Turns out it’s Il Duce!

This fuckin’ guy is—clearly—on an all out political suicide mission. How else could one possibly process the following news, as reported yesterday morning in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel?

Move aside, Herman Cain, it’s Scott Walker who is the real “Andy Kaufman” of the Republican party:

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration could hold demonstrators at the Capitol liable for the cost of extra police or cleanup and repairs after protests, under a new policy unveiled Thursday.

The rules, which several legal experts said raised serious free speech concerns, seemed likely to add to the controversy that has simmered all year over demonstrations in the state’s seat of government.

The policy, which also requires permits for events at the statehouse and other state buildings, took effect Thursday and will be phased in by Dec. 16. Walker administration officials contend the policy simply clarifies existing rules.

State law already says public officials may issue permits for the use of state facilities, and applicants “shall be liable to the state . . . for any expense arising out of any such use and for such sum as the managing authority may charge for such use.”

But Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School, said the possibility of charging demonstrators for police costs might be problematic because some groups might not be able to afford to pay.

“I’m a little skeptical about charging people to express their First Amendment opinion,” he said. “You can’t really put a price tag on the First Amendment.”

Well, this fascist doofus already has: $50 an hour per member of the Capitol Police, or whatever it costs for freelance security, plus clean-up details!

I mean… WHAT?!??! This is laugh-out-loud hilarious for this idiot-faced goober to think he could get away with this! Of course it’s only had the effect of incensing the unions... and REALLY turning off the people who were undecided about Walker!

My god is this man a loathsome buffoon… but more power to ‘im, I sez!

Give Walker enough rope and he’s going to take down the entire Republican party in the state with him! This stiff won’t even be able to back-peddle away from this in any way, shape or form. He’s so screwed it’s just… superb!

Bonus douchebaggery: Tonight Walker is going to light the Christmas tree in the WI capitol that was put up with prison labor instead of hiring union workers. Let’s hope that tonight Walker enjoys his first—and last—time lighting the tree,

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
03:47 pm
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Judy is a Punk: Kindergartners channel Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone
12.02.2011
03:41 pm
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The kindergartners at the Sullivan School look like they’re having a damn good time singing “Judy is a Punk.”
 

 
Thank you, Lepus Rex!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
03:41 pm
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A video guaranteed to put a smile on your face
12.02.2011
02:18 pm
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At first I was like, “Oh noes, this is going to be depressing.” And then I was like, “Oh, wow!”
 

 
(via The Daily What)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
02:18 pm
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This is hardcore: Jarvis Cocker talks Pulp at Glastonbury, 1995
12.02.2011
02:10 pm
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Photo by Rankin

DM pal Rod Stanley, editor-in-chief of Dazed & Confused magazine (who is getting married tomorrow, congrats Rod!) recently interviewed the world’s last proper rockstar, Jarvis Cocker, about the moment when Pulp triumphed at their legendary show at the Glastonbury festival in 1995.

Dazed: I watched you play in 1995, when you replaced the Stone Roses at Glastonbury… I remember you walking out on to the stage and taking a photograph of the crowd – do you still have that photo?

Jarvis Cocker: I don’t even remember taking it. When we played there, we were added to the bill very last-minute so we had to camp on site. The night before, I had real trouble sleeping because I was so nervous… and there are these photographs of me there with this haunted look. So, I wish I did have that photograph. There are certain things of that night that are burned into my memory, I can remember going on and I can remember the end, but the middle bit has just been erased.

Dazed: There were a lot of those fisherman hats in the crowd … John Squire had broken his arm… and there was a kind of “impress me” atmosphere – but you won them over. Was that gig an affirmation? You had been together for almost 15 years as a band at that point.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah it definitely was, especially that particular concert, because the thing that changed things for Pulp was that ‘Common People’ was a big hit – that had happened in May, and we played Glastonbury in June. So, I think it was the first show we’d done since we had become popular… and it was quite a moment because everybody sang along, and you realized that you’d crossed over into a different kind of world. As you say, they weren’t throwing the Reni hats at us. Or stones, or roses… I think they threw more roses than stones.

Dazed: I saw you again at Glastonbury, 1998, when you headlined the main stage on the Sunday night.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah… very wet.

Dazed: Absolutely mud-soaked. And you congratulated everyone for staying, shouting “You… Are… Hardcore!” And got pretty much the biggest cheer from any audience ever.

Jarvis Cocker: I’m always impressed by audiences… I’m such a poof I would just go home. Especially on Sunday, you know what Glastonbury can be like, it’s a psychic obstacle course – and if you’re wasted and wet and been there for three days and haven’t slept very much, you would be well in your rights to go home. So, the fact that people were still there, I was just grateful.

Read the rest at Dazed Digital.

Below, Pulp achieve lift-off at the Glastonbury Festival, 1995
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
02:10 pm
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