Der Musikladen was a West German television program running from 1972 to 1984, and one of the most diverse music-performance shows ever to grace the international boob-tube. It showcased an incredible array of artists, from Motörhead to Pat Boone to Ray Charles to Blondie. There’s a kind of low budget “fuck it” attitude that goes along with European variety TV that tends to promote a very pluralistic consumption of pop culture (plus it looks like, in the 70s and 80s at least, that they took what they could get).

However, in my opinion, the true legacy of Der Musikladen has nothing to do with their varied musical line-ups. No, the absolute best part of any episode was the go-go dancers, who simply cannot dance for shit. Yes, these Teutonic beauties are captivating, enthusiastic and totally charismatic, but their total lack of skill is mesmerizing. A dearth of coordination, the absence of any semblance of a symmetrical chorus line, and a general awkwardness is the essence of their charm. They literally appear to just be fun girls in skimpy outfits who maybe had a bit of schnapps before the show. Here are some of my favorite segments:
 

 
Above is a 1984 performance, and one of the last episodes ever broadcast. The ladies are dancing to Patto’s “Black and White.” Not to be confused with the English jazz-rock band from the 70s, this Patto is a duet of a white German and a black American rapper and the song is a sort of ham-fisted attempt at a rap-version of “Ebony and Ivory,” (which was already pretty ham-fisted to begin with). Needless to say, the track and the dancing are both pretty damning indictments of Germany’s ability to interpret hip-hop in a way that doesn’t make you shudder. But look how cute and happy the girls look in their leotards!
 

 
Admittedly, this 1978 segment is a much better use of their talents. First of all, the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant” is a disco track, which is kind of their wheelhouse. Second of all, at least this particular line-up of women has some moves… or at least one move, anyway. Before you get too excited about the brunette knowing a step or two, notice they’re using those bitchen’ video effects to disguise the fact that they’re literally using the same footage over and over again. It’s maybe 20 seconds of dancing that they used weird zooms to stretch over an entire song. But who cares! Look at that hilarious weird shimmy the blonde woman does at 1:30!
 

 
And here we have some of the most incongruous choreography and costume choices known to god or man. This 1981 performance of Status Quo’s “Lies” suffers from somewhat the same problem as before: weird visual effects does nothing to disguise the fact that there are basically three poorly performed moves in the entire routine. The difference here is that the song is a Nick Lowe-style country influenced rocker, and it’s three and a half minutes long. That is two minutes longer than any go-go dancing segment should be, with the added confusion of a song that really doesn’t take well to go go dancers.
 

 
Let’s go out with a bang, shall we? Talk about, talk about, talk about CRAZY EYES, a confusing outfit, lip-syncing, and at 2:12, she even does “The Robot.” I’m out.

 
A gargoyle on a 13th century Scottish abbey has become an Internet sensation due to its resemblance to the creature from Alien.

Paisley Abbey was originally founded in 1245, and rebuilt in the early 1300s, and the recent “discovery” of an Alien-like gargoyle has inspired considerable media speculation about the sculptor’s extraterrestrial influences. 

However, following pictures of the Alien-gargoyle appearing on-line and in news reports, it has been revealed that the Abbey had some renovations in the 1990s, which included many of the original gargoyles being replaced.

Minister of Paisley Abbey, the Reverend Alan Birss suspects that one of the stonemasons involved in the renovation may have been having a bit of fun.
 

 

 
Jean E. Hill, the actress and greeting card model best known for her role as murderous maid Grizelda Brown in John Waters’ Desperate Living has died. She was also seen in his Polyester and A Dirty Shame.

A message posted on her Facebook page read:

I am very sad to announce that Jean Hill has passed away. She struggled with her health for a long time and put up a good fight. She was the most sincere, bluntly honest, loving and funny person I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. I will miss her. RIP Miss Jean Hill

One of Grizelda Brown’s best lines in Desperate Living is something I’m fond of saying in certain situations:

“I am sick of listenin’ to your bitchin’. The next time you feel a fit comin’ on, go outside and bitch. Bitch at the air. Bitch at the trees. But don’t bitch at us!”

I change the last line to “me” of course.

Miss Hill and her bodacious ta-tas were a frequent sight in novelty stores like Spencer Gifts throughout the 1980s. I met her once and she was a larger-than-life delight in every way.

Below, Grizelda is caught stealing, setting off an unfortunate chain of events…
 

 
Via one of Miss Jean E. Hill’s biggest fans, Douglas Hovy

 
There’s never a time when I’m not in the mood for some Serge Gainsbourg. Histoire De Melody Nelson is always in my speed rack next to the stereo. I’ve listened to it 10x more than any Rolling Stones album. Whenever I can’t decide what I want to listen to, I listen to that album or Forever Changes or Sly Stone or Neil Young. I’ll never get sick of it, but my wife probably is…

Of course, Histoire De Melody Nelson is famously known for being a collaboration between Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, the great composer-arranger who is often referred to as ‘the David Axelrod of France.’ When Universal Music Group put out the expanded Histoire De Melody Nelson (I really highly recommend it, especially if you’ve got a 5.1 surround hook-up, it’s absolutely insane to hear that instrumentation all around you) the idea of hearing some outtakes from this classic had me salivating, but the other day I stumbled across something at the NowAgain records blog (it’s been posted there since 2008) that’s even better:

I’ll never forget the phone call from The Heliocentrics’ Malcolm Catto when he asked me if I’d ever heard of this promo-only 7-inch “La Horse.” Of course I hadn’t, and he went on to describe in vivid detail this track, composed by Serge and his long time arranging partner Jean-Claude Vannier that stood not only as one of Serge’s best instrumental releases, but also his rarest. The record was released by Serge’s publishing company, Hortensia, around the time of the release of the film, as a promotional-only item to be given to theater goers.

A few years and missteps later (including one in a Parisian flea market, when the Euro was worth about a dollar, when the going rate for the record was about 900 E), I finally scored a copy from a collector based in, of all places, Oxnard. This one hasn’t left my box in years, and I DJ it out constantly. The banjo break is a bit hokey, but whatever – the film [a Jean] Gabin feature, took place in the countryside, so I guess Serge was just shouting out the hicks. Who cares? It follows one incredible drum break, doesn’t it?

Oh, one last thing: that cover is a “paste on…”

The banjo break is awe-inspiring!

Oh and “La Horse” = heroin.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Histoire de Melody Nelson: Serge Gainsbourg’s psychedelic orchestral rock opera

 
Whenever I think of Siouxsie & the Banshees my mind naturally wanders to clogging… in tap shoes, in a belly dancer’s outfit.

 
Via Arbroath

 
YouTuber arfmoochikncheez swears that the “redirection approach” with his crying daughter works 90% of the time. I don’t have a kid yet, but I must remember, “kiss the eggs.” That’s a good one.

 
Via reddit

 
As NPR’s show “The Record” reported last year, a massive collection of important American folk music recordings is now available on the Internet for anyone to enjoy:

Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It’s part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection—long before the age of the Internet.

Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the ‘90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren’t quite sure how to tackle the problem.

“We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible,” says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the ‘80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.

“For the first time, everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our website,” says Fleming. “It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”

Most of the archive consists of audio recordings, and they’ll keep any music ethnographer busy for quite some time. Starting in the late 1970s, however, Lomax incorporated video recordings into his researches, and they’re available too.

Below are two remarkable videos from the collection.

Dennis McGee, “Vous M’avez Donne Vôtre Parole (You Gave Me Your Word),” (Eunice, Louisiana, 1983):

 
Belton Sutherland, improvised blues (Canton, Mississippi, September 3, 1978):

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Amazing footage of blues legend Son House
The only film footage of blues/folk legend Leadbelly
A nitty gritty and poetic documentary on the Mississippi blues

 
In 1983 James Urbaniak was 19 years old and attending community college and living in Marlboro, New Jersey, in Monmouth County. Like a lot of smart younger males at that time, he absolutely worshiped David Letterman, whose Late Night talk show had debuted the previous year. In February of that year he secured a ticket to attend a taping of the show; he was really excited about it.

During the monologue Letterman attempted to tell a joke he had tried and failed to tell in the previous night’s monologue, and ended up flubbing it a second time. When Letterman commented that he had screwed it up two nights in a row, the future Dr. Venture cried out, “Can I try it?”—and Letterman, making a snap decision he’d be far less likely to make on his CBS show, The Late Show, agreed. “Jim” Urbaniak bounded down from the audience, and the rest is history—really, really inconsequential history.

Here’s a cute animated video from Vulture/UCB Comedy in which Urbaniak tells the story:
 

 
I fully endorse all of Urbaniak’s musings about the chintziness of the Late Night aesthetic and the much less unbuttoned comedy found on Letterman’s CBS show. According to Splitsider, the guests that night were “Andy Kaufman and wrestler Freddie Blassie; Alba Ballard and her costumed birds; and Marv Albert and his sports bloopers.” That might be a little bit of an in-joke; that’s pretty much a concocted ideal memory of what every show was like.

As it happens, I also attended a taping of Late Night with David Letterman, and I was also 19 when I did so. The year was 1989, and the guests were Bob Hope, Melanie Mayron and Robyn Hitchcock. I restrained myself from attempting to hijack monologue duties, however.

This is probably as good a place as any to inform you about his new podcast Getting On with James Urbaniak.

Here’s the actual clip of Urbaniak telling the monologue joke on Late Night in 1983:
 

 
Via Splitsider

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
David Letterman checking out Cher’s bum (1987)

 
On July 12, 1979, the schedule called for a twi-night doubleheader between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. The Tigers took the first game 4-1 on the strength of a Tom Brookens triple in the second inning that drove home Jerry Morales for what would prove to be the winning run (boxscore). As it turned out, the second game never got played, resulting in a forfeit by the home White Sox and a sweep of the doubleheader for the Tigers.

Thing is, an anti-disco riot broke out in between the two games. A large collection of disco LPs was detonated in an explosion—this part was planned—but it tore a large hole in the outfield grass and eventually turned into a bonfire. The game was attended by many thousands of disco-hating baseball fans—actually a lot of them probably didn’t care much about baseball—a good percentage of whom would take the field during the insanity. It’s one of the most memorable promotions that baseball ever threw.

The director of promotions at that time was Mike Veeck, son of Bill Veeck, longtime owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and the White Sox. Bill Veeck was a genius deployer of gimmicks, including, when he owned the Browns, the stunt of hiring a midget named Eddie Gaedel to lead off a game in August 19, 1951, for a guaranteed base on balls. Mike’s decision to host a Disco Demolition Night would prove every bit as memorable.

Wikipedia supplies some background:

Chicago disc jockey Steve Dahl was fired from local radio station WDAI on Christmas Eve 1978 when the station switched formats from rock to disco. The 24-year-old DJ was subsequently hired by rival album-rock station WLUP, “The Loop.” Sensing an incipient anti-disco backlash and playing off the publicity surrounding his firing (Dahl frequently mocked WDAI’s “Disco DAI” slogan on the air as “Disco DIE”), Dahl created a mock organization called “The Insane Coho Lips,” an anti-disco army consisting of his listeners. According to Andy Behrens of ESPN, Dahl and his broadcast partner Garry Meier “organized the Cohos around a simple and surprisingly powerful idea: Disco Sucks.”

According to Wikipedia, the capacity of Comiskey Park at that time was only 44,492, yet estimates of the crowd that night range from 50,000 to 90,000. (As with the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, the number of people who claim to have been in attendance is probably several hundred thousand by now.)

An air of menace permeated the first game:

Tigers outfielder Rusty Staub remembered that the records would slice through the air, and land sticking out of the ground. He urged teammates to wear batting helmets when playing their positions, “It wasn’t just one, it was many. Oh, God almighty, I’ve never seen anything so dangerous in my life.” ... Mike Veeck later remembered an odor of marijuana in the grandstand and said of the attendees, “This is the Woodstock they never had.”

Tigers outfielder Ron LeFlore said afterward, “It seemed like there was kegs in every aisle of the ballpark that night, you know, because everybody was drunk.”

Attendees would pay an admission fee of 98 cents (!) provided they brought at least one disco LP with them; Dahl would then destroy the pile of recordings in an explosion. (Many people got into the park without paying, however.) Dahl took the field in an army jeep wearing an army helmet to lead his anti-disco “army” and led the crowd in a rousing chant of “Disco Sucks!” “This is officially the world’s largest anti-disco rally!” cried Dahl to the crowd. And then things totally got out of hand.

The detonation scattered the broken album shards all over the outfield. Several thousand disco-haters took the field, some of them carrying banners with slogans like “LONG LIVE ROCK & ROLL.” The explosion quickly became a bonfire, and there was at least one similar fire in the upper deck of the stadium. Reportedly, 39 people were arrested (looking at the footage, that figure seems remarkably low).

Here’s a great little documentary from ESPN about the mayhem:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Maestro’ - a film about the Paradise Garage and the birth of Disco culture
Walter & Sylvester: The Reverend & the Disco Queen

Iggy Pop and Bon Scott chatting backstage Whiskey in LA. 1977 Photo by Jenny Lens.
 
Fukushima leak is ‘much worse than we were led to believe’ - BBC News

Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity because ‘trolls are getting more aggressive’ - Raw Story

Quitting Facebook? New device will electrocute you if you log on - The Daily Dot

The confidential memo at the heart of the global financial crisis - VICE United Kingdom

Christian Swingers: A new dating site for ‘devout Christian couples who still want to have an active love life and share it with another, in good faith!’ - Christian Nightmares

Researchers find mother beetles eat young that beg too much - Phys.org

In case you were wondering, this is what it looks like when you make a cat statue out of butter - BuzzFeed

Oh, it’s just Peter Dinklage hula-hooping in a gay bar in Canada - Dlisted

France calls for ‘force’ over Syria chemical arms - TheLocal.fr

Piloting a drone with Google glass - ANIMAL

Now you can get cosmetic fat injected into your old-lady hands - Jezebel

Climate change deniers live in ignorant bliss as seas keep rising - LA Times

“We all know that rabies causes hydrophobia—but it is interesting to see what a physical aversion to water actually looks like.” - YouTube via reddit

1912 Eighth Grade Examination for Bullitt County Schools - Bullitt County History

The Justice Department will sue Texas over the state’s voter ID law and will seek to intervene in a lawsuit over the state’s redistricting laws - AP

A team of archaeologists from UK, Denmark, Germany and Spain have found evidence of the use of spices in European cuisine around 5,000 BC. - SCI-News

N.J. attorney general agrees to pay $425K to mentally disabled man beaten by N.J. State Police troopers - NJ.com

Children who display hyperactivity, inattention and conduct problems at the age of three are at risk of worse academic outcomes when they are 16 - Bristol

DOJ wants Bush, senior cabinet members exempt from Iraq War trial - RT

Wood frogs can survive winter temperatures that freeze up to two-thirds of the water in their bodies - Science Mag

Below, Brazilian robbery attempt goes hilariously wrong: