Anyone who’s ever given Ween’s 1991 album The Pod a good listen is aware that Dean Ween (real name: Mickey Melchiondo) is willing to try pretty much anything on the guitar, a quality that has permitted him to craft some of the most inventive and startling guitar solos of the last twenty-five years. Ween is famous for moving all over the musical map in their songs, and Dean Ween’s evidently endless ability to transform is a good part of the reason why.

Earlier this year Dean Ween appeared on the Internet show Guitar Moves, hosted by Matt Sweeney, and rapped for a while about his influences and revealed a key penis-related trick to being a good guitarist.

Before getting to all the intricacies of major seventh chords and minor sevenths and “F-sharp thirteenths” (!)—this in the process of explaining how he came up with the bed for “Mister Would You Please Help My Pony,” off of 1993’s Chocolate and Cheese—Dean copped to returning to two classic 1970s songs for inspiration over and over again: the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” (guitarist: Dickey Betts) from their 1972 album Eat a Peach and the title song off of Funkadelic’s 1971 album Maggot Brain (guitarist: Eddie Hazel).
 
Allman Brothers Band, “Blue Sky”:

 
Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”:

 
Ween fans will remember that Dean and Gene Ween (real name: Aaron Freeman) paid tribute to Funkadelic on Chocolate and Cheese in the form of the album’s fifth song, “A Tear for Eddie”—the “Eddie” in question being Eddie Hazel. In the episode of Guitar Moves, Dean also relates the experience of sharing an elevator with Dickey Betts when he was twelve years old—“it was like being in an elevator with Sonny Barger or something, from the Hells Angels, except worse, he was like green and pockmarked….”

For the most part, Ween made its reputation off its first three or four albums and then settled into a comfortable cult status for the last decade or so of its existence (the duo broke up in 2012). As a band that ventured dangerously close to “novelty act,” Ween was cannily able to secure a modicum of creative independence despite delivering five albums to major label Elektra over eight years, but they never quite garnered their critical due as a major contemporary act that produced literally dozens of jaw-dropping ditties.

There’s also a vague feeling that the quality of Ween’s output may have dropped off somewhat after their 1997 genius concept album The Mollusk, but I for one don’t agree. There are loads of gems to be found on White Pepper, Quebec, Shinola Vol. 1, and La Cucaracha.
 
Guitar Moves, episode 6:

 
Dick Van Dyke, who just yesterday walked away from a burning Jaguar unscathed on a Los Angeles freeway, may not be one of the first people you’d think of as cherishing such a unique and anarchic talent as Andy Kaufman, but in fact he was responsible for giving Kaufman’s career a significant boost.

Van Dyke and Company was an eccentric yet strangely charming entry on NBC’s 1976 schedule, a sketch show that featured none other than the Los Angeles Mime Company. (Credit the NBC executives for instinctively understanding the inchoate yearning for mime among the American people.)

As Bill Zehme reported in his 1999 book Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman:

[T]hey were in the process of creating an inventive variety series for Dick Van Dyke to be part of NBC’s fall telvision schedule. They decided without pause that Foreign Man had great possibilities and envisioned him in a running gag wherein he would interrupt and annoy Van Dyke week after week with eemetations and jokes and musical records and so they invited him to come perform his material for the star and writing staff and somehow he felt compelled to read aloud from The Great Gatsby at the outset of the meeting, which came at the end of a long day, which had the writers and Van Dyke shooting baleful daggers at the two producers throughout the recitation. … Foreign Man set aside the reading in order to weep and to play congas and to exude innocence and Van Dyke began to laugh—“Why I laughed I don’t know,” he would remember. “He was strangely psychological. He liked to lead you one way and then suddenly turn the tables around and make you angry. And then vice versa.”

—snip—

Van Dyke and Company … debuted September 20 and left the air due to low ratings on December 30 and won an Emmy award in the category of variety programming nonetheless. Tapings commenced in late summer and he was introduced in the first episode as pink-jacketed Mr. Andy, finalist in a Fonzie look-alike contest, placing second behind a strapping African-American fellow, about which he protested to Van Dyke—But he don’t even look like de Fonzie! I think you don’t like me you make fun of me because I am from another country! And to appease him Van Dyke grudgingly allowed him to do a song or joke so I can be on de television and every week thereafter he returned during moments most inopportune—but-but you said I could come back—to vex Van Dyke, who would angrily relent to each transgression, often humiliated in the presence of such guest stars as John Denver and Carl Reiner and Chevy Chase and Lucille Ball, who declared, “I know who this young man is—I’ve seen him on your show many times and I think he’s just sensational,” before she too stormed off in a mock huff.

So there you have it: Dick Van Dyke gave Andy Kaufman his first job as a performer on prime-time network television.

You can get a sense of the mime-y goings-on featured on the winsome and ill-fated Van Dyke and Company in this “Puppet Master” clip, which is a little raw but still well worth watching.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Andy Kaufman’s Midnight Special, from 1981
Sifting through 82 hours of Andy Kaufman’s private anti-comedy field recordings

 
There are few more interesting and innovative thinkers in the history of music than Harry Partch.

He serves as a kind of template for a restless, unorthodox, and distinctly American kind of genius: He invented a 43-tone musical system that many found (and still find) eccentric—but it worked. He was a hobo for a time, wrote popular songs under the pseudonym “Paul Pirate,” and set up a studio in a disused chick hatchery.

If nothing else, Harry Partch was a guy who got into the habit of thinking for himself. As The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross put it, “Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch.”

Partch invented a boatload of instruments to suit his unique musical system, with whimsical and awe-inspiring names like the Quadrangularis Reversum, the Zymo-Xyl, and the Chromelodeon. Among the well-known musicians Partch influenced are Danny Elfman, Glenn Branca, and most particularly Tom Waits. Beck, himself the grandson of freethinker and Fluxus member Al Hansen, wrote a 10-minute song called “Harry Partch” in 2009—Beck claims that it is consistent with Partch’s 43-note scale. Partch virtually invented the category of microtonal music, an area in which a cousin of mine happens to be a leading expert.

Partch was intensely interested in King Oedipus, William Butler Yeats’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In 1934 Partch met with Yeats in England and told him of his ideas for adapting it, and Yeats was quite enthusiastic about it. It took Partch 18 years after that meeting to realize his conception for King Oedipus. Around 1951 Arch Lauterer, a professor of speech and drama at Mills College, a women’s school in Oakland, wanted to mount an adaptation of the work, and worked with Partch to make it happen. Lauterer proposed putting the instruments on the stage, an idea with which Partch agreed with alacrity.

The following video is a report on that production of King Oedipus, which was performed on March 14-16, 1952. You don’t have to be too expert a listener to hear a precursor to Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits in the tonalities.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
A new report from the National Poverty Center (NPC) throws the disturbing trend of “extreme poverty” (as opposed to mere “deep poverty”) into stark relief: There are currently an astonishing 1.65 million American households (with 3.55 million children living in them) where each family member lives on less than $2 a day!

Mull that over for a moment. Half the country is near or below the poverty line already!

My parents operate a soup kitchen/food pantry out of their church and my mother has all kinds of sad stories about kids who will rip open packs of raisins and wolf them down like they’re feral and other kids who look like they’re dead behind their eyes. For many of the children who they see regularly, if it weren’t for subsidized school lunches and stops at more than one local church food pantry, they’d be starving. On the weekends, many of them probably do.

I should mention that this is in West Virginia, a state with super high, very persistent structural unemployment rates and a very, very frayed government social services network, one of the worst—and stingiest—in the nation. People think of West Virginia as being a backwards place, but you could choose instead to see it as a glimpse of a possible, even likely, future: Want to know what our increasingly predatory capitalist society will look like in another ten years? West Virginia looks like that NOW.

There are no jobs, the roads are full of potholes that can swallow a pick-up truck, the land has been raped by the coal companies’ mountaintop removal activities and your next door neighbor is all too happy to sell the fracking rights to his backyard to a multinational. Who cares what you think or if it fucks up your living situation? No one is going to turn away an offer that can see them turn into the next Jed Clampett. Who could blame them? I mean… get real.

West Virginia, rural Texas, the meth-head armies of the California desert, the vast tracts of uninhabited homes across the sun belt. There’s some ill shit brewing in this country.

Debra Watson writes at the World Socialist Website:

The report, published in Social Service Review, was authored by H. Luke Shaefer, University of Michigan, School of Social Work, and Kathryn Edin, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government. Measuring extreme poverty uncovers a further income stratification among those below the official poverty level. The sharply rising income inequality in the US has created in its wake a new phenomenon: massive numbers of US families that live in daily conditions once relegated the poorest of the poor in the economically underdeveloped world.

It throws light on particular aspects of the growth in inequality in the US that have not been examined in reports from the Census Bureau and other sources that compare income for different quintiles of the population. Some recent research has developed a category called “deep poverty” or a yearly income below half the official poverty line. Both these methods of research have revealed drastically rising inequality and the growth of deep poverty in recent years.

The researchers used the figure of $2 a day per person, the United Nations measure of poverty in developing countries. The official poverty line for a family of three would equate to roughly $17 per person per day averaged over a year. Deep poverty, below half the poverty line, would equate to an average of approximately $8.50 per person per day.

At $2 per person per day, the extreme poverty category examined in this report finds a family with virtually nothing to live on, or roughly 13 percent of what is considered official poverty. Social science researchers have estimated that it requires an income twice the Census Bureau’s official poverty level to actually support a family.

Counting food stamp benefits, now called SNAP, as cash only reduces the number of extremely poor households with children by half. The current food assistance benefit for a family of three tops out at $526. Since it only is available to families with income below 130 percent of the official poverty level, receiving the benefit does not bring any family to a livable income. If counted as the equivalent of cash income, the assistance actually would barely move a family in extreme poverty to deep poverty.

In addition, the SNAP benefit itself is facing serious cuts and even outright elimination for many poor families. In November, a family of three will lose $29 a month when the SNAP per person benefit allotment is cut as the federal government eliminates stimulus measures instituted in the immediate aftermath of recession. Five million people will be entirely cut off from SNAP benefits if limits in eligibility are imposed under plans to cut the program that emerged during discussion of the new Farm Bill this summer.

When Bill Clinton—no fan of welfare—was in office there were an average of 25.5 SNAP million recipients each month, but by the end of 2012, it was nearly twice that, at 47.5 million people.

The minimum wage is basically a slave wage, and everyone knows it. It works out to about just about half of what has been computed to be a living wage. You can work full-time and it’s still nowhere near close to providing for a life of basic dignity. Sure, no one’s forcing anyone with a whip to their backs to take a job that pays $7.40 an hour, but even when people are willing to work hard, and do, there’s often no way, as in none, for them to be able to make it work in this harsh, unsympathetic society.

And now the foaming at the mouth Republicans want to cut food stamps even more. The wishy-washy Democrats will undoubtedly let them get away with a little bit of it in the name of “compromise” (because they know, like the GOP knows, that the poorest of the poor seldom vote, so they’ll give on that).

Far from being Ronald Reagan’s “rising tide that lifts all boats,” in 2013 American-style capitalism is a raging tsunami of economic degradation, battering her own people against its rocks. If the news of millions of people in the richest country in the world living on less than $2 a day doesn’t shock you to your very core, what the fuck would?

Would it take a rash of childhood deaths attributed to malnourishment?

How many deaths of US children from severe malnutrition would be acceptable? Where then should society draw the line? Is allowing kids to suffer from brain damage and developmental problems okay or is that not okay?

It’s predictable that the most vulnerable are expected to bear the brunt of it. But for how long? An empty stomach breeds resentment. The GOP (and their complicit pals the moderate Democrats) seem intent on stoking the flames of class war. If they want to breed a class war mentality, they’re going about it in the right way!

Less than two dollars a day. How much lower can it go? (Hint: “To nothing” is not the correct answer)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
We’re screwed: How will we survive in a future without jobs?

How much longer can capitalism last when robots do all the work?

Hard Times Generation: Families living in cars
 

 

 
Robert Palmer, two-time Grammy Award-winning love addict caller-outer, can be heard briefly and inexplicably covering Hüsker Dü’s “New Day Rising” in the odd piece of Internet ephemera below. It goes by kind of quickly, and by midway through the clip Palmer’s band has morphed the tune into something else entirely, but it’s worth a listen if only because it’s so weird.

After giving myself a quick refresher course on Palmer’s career, because, frankly, I never really paid much attention to it, I could find no mention of any connection whatsoever between the two seemingly polar opposite musical endeavors.

If the guy who posted this thing is to be believed, it’s from a Palmer performance at San Diego State University in the spring of 1987.  Keep in mind that Hüsker Dü’s “New Day Rising” shows up brutally and gloriously kicking ass as the first track on the absolutely indispensable post-punk album of the same name released in January of 1985, the exact year that Palmer would release Riptide featuring the unfortunate classic, “Addicted to Love.” 

So I got to thinking.  Maybe Palmer’s next record, you know, the one he released after Riptide (whatever that was called)? Maybe that record would show a little change in Robert’s musical trajectory.  I knew it was unlikely, but, hell, if he was listening to Hüsker Dü, perhaps Palmer went a little punk? There was only one way to find out.

I was even willing to overlook the fact that “Simply Irresistible” showed up on the next release, Heavy Nova, in 1988.  Hey, everybody’s gotta sell records, right?  But, alas, any thought I might have entertained about Palmer veering even ever-so-slightly towards a more raw recorded sound quickly vanished. Heavy Nova is more terrible than I could have possibly imagined.  It’s just a bunch of islandy-sounding tunes with awful, smooth-jazz influenced bass lines flatulently slappity-slapping all over the place.  Shudder. 

 
There is proof, however, that at least one legendary noise band was listening to Robert Palmer at the time, as my wife reminded me while I was writing this piece.  Do yourself a favor and check out Kim Gordon performing a karaoke version of “Addicted to Love,” a track that appears on 1988’s The Whitey Album. The record was the result of a Material Girl-themed side project in which Sonic Youth became Ciccone Youth (referencing Madonna’s maiden name), threw in punk bass pioneer Mike Watt for a tune and then became Sonic Youth again. In the video, Gordon dances with a guitar in front of war footage while moaning off-key, droning snarls giving Palmer’s hit a sinister twist.

 
Pennsylvania’s right-wing governor drains public schools of basic funds—and the sickening details will shock you - Salon

Man ends up with fork stuck in penis after ‘unusual’ autoerotic act - Gawker

Dismemberment Plan’s Travis Morrison makes Gothamist a ‘90s playlist - Gothamist

US researchers say they have developed a more efficient way to produce a kind of ball lightning in the lab - BBC News

Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill Monday barring licensed therapists from trying to turn gay teenagers straight, making New Jersey the second state to ban so-called conversion therapy - AP

Goats lose their minds over a yoga ball - The Daily Dot

New electrolyte beer could prevent hangovers - psfk

Glenn Greenwald vows to release UK secrets after they detained his partner for 9 hours - Raw Story

Atheist home invaders haven’t got a clue: Supreme’s new ‘Stash Book’ - The World’s Best Ever

Bullshit jobs: why we’re not all working 4h days - Boing Boing

Listen: Kim Gordon’s new band Body/Head: “Actress” - Pitchfork

Humpbacks sing in unison to draw females - Science Mag

How shale fracking led to an Ohio town’s first 100 earthquakes - Phys.org

Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost - New York Times

In an attempt to better engage the youngest visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Torafu Architects created a special art gallery just for kids called Haunted House - This Is Colossal

Quadcopter Piloted by a Smartphone - Science Daily

This latest effort to close abortion clinics is the strangest one yet - Mother Jones

Revisit Futuria Fantasia: The science fiction fanzine Ray Bradbury published as a teenager - Open Culture

Amazing photo technique reveals water like you’ve never seen it before - Wired

Stroll through a huge walk-in vagina thanks to an art installation erected at the old Women’s Jail in Hillbrow, Johannesburg - Jacaranda FM

A four-year-old boy from California returned home from a family beach holiday with a rather unusual souvenir - a sea snail which hatched and grew inside his knee - Arbroath

Alex Band—lead singer of the band The Calling—was abducted this weekend while taking a stroll down a street in Michigan - TMZ

Where the hell are my goddamned adult Underoos? - io9

An Ohio man expected the gun safe he ordered online to be empty; but instead, he found $425,000-worth of tightly wrapped marijuana bricks inside - ABC News

The incredibly offensive letter sent to a mother with an autistic son - BuzzFeed
 

Below, Surrey Police provide an escort for more than 50 ducks during rush hour traffic:

Above, Eric Idle, looking like a member of the Cockettes (deliberately?) as “The Comparatively Good Fairy”

One of the least-known Monty Python rarities is “The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971,” a short advertising film that was made for the Birds Eye company’s internal use and then apparently locked away from the public eye (and probably the Python’s, too) until it magically appeared on YouTube.

It’s difficult to imagine what the Bird’s Eye brass would have made of the film back then, but the salespeople would have been delighted, I’m sure. It’s Glengarry Glen Ross meets Salvador Dali, minus all the swearing and macho angst.

“I like all my peas on the plate to be the same size.”

“Why?”

“Sheer stupidity.”

This is the most complete version of “the story they said was too uninteresting to be made” that’s out there.
 

 
In April of this year, YouTube user yadniel padron aguilera, presumably a Cuban citizen, posted three videos. All three videos are just raw footage taken by a single person, straight footage recorded without any cuts. There isn’t really any information about these videos—hardly any text was uploaded with them—but they add up, potentially, to a very interesting story.

At the very least we’re desperate to know more.

The first video, “Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Cuba,” uploaded on April 6, is 22 minutes long. It’s a fairly aimless attempt to capture some footage of the two married megastars as they make their way from a building to an automobile or vice versa. A few times in the video one can in fact see Jay-Z and Beyoncé walk from a building to a van or the like, surrounded by just teeming hordes of people. Mainly what the video is is a documentation of the thousands of devoted fans swarming the area in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. In a funny way it’s an unintentional commentary on the nature of fame.

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Cuba”:

 
The second two videos are dated April 10, and apparently document the same event—a very remarkable event indeed! The two videos bear the same title, “Beyoncé vs Hermann Nitsch,” and the one we’re going to call “BvHN1” lasts 8:05 and the one we’re going to call “BvHN2” lasts 5:30.

If you’re not familiar with the work of the notorious Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, suffice it to say that his Das Orgien-Mysterien-Theater arguably took Antonin Artaud’s concept of “the theater of cruelty” to its most extreme expression. (Everything about Nitsch’s work is extremely NSFW!! You have been warned! Your co-workers will think you are nuts if you are caught watching! It is recommended that the squeamish under no circumstances check out a Google Images search for “Hermann Nitsch.” Seriously. It’s very disturbing stuff.)

Both videos record a big chunk of what is unmistakably a Nitsch-style “action,” complete with naked people, dismembered animals, people wearing white clothes stained with what could very well be blood, unearthly music, people being crucified in some way, rampant abuse of fruits and vegetables, and a generally orgiastic atmosphere. When I say “Nitsch-style,” I am 99% certain that this is actually an event staged by Nitsch, but I’m not 100% certain. He was in Havana in the spring of 2012, but Beyoncé and Jay-Z were there in 2013.

Back to those Cuban videos: Despite the title, in neither video is there any overt physical appearance by Beyoncé (and at no point is any of her music played). Nevertheless, her name is mentioned in the titles of both videos.

Why is her name there? Why did yadniel padron aguilera decide to pair Beyoncé and Nitsch in this way? For more YouTube hits?

“BvHN1”:

 
“BvHN1” features pretty much straight footage of the bloody “happening” and little else. Stirring atonal modern music can be heard throughout, with occasional loud whistles that appear to dictate new events in the revelry. Mostly a group of perhaps 30 people spend most of the video frolicking among a bunch of fruits and vegetables and possibly some fluids that are more vital to life.

“BvHN2”:

 
“BvHN2” is clearly footage of more or less the same event, but in this one there are a bunch of tables everywhere, and it seems like it may be a preparatory stage for the other video, an earlier stage. It’s hard to tell.

But there’s something very striking about “BvHN2” as opposed to “BvHN1”—namely, there is a pretty tight clot of what must be a couple thousand people milling around not far from the tables. Furthermore, after about a minute it becomes apparent that LOTS of the people there are DOCUMENTING the ever-loving SHIT out of this event, quite possibly a human being at the center of the clot of people—in other words, perhaps they’re not documenting the “happening” as such, but an extremely famous onlooker or two? A whole bunch of people are holding cameras way over their heads to get pics of something, and there are even a couple of boom mics visible. Would a Nitsch “action” attract such attention? This seems dubious, but it’s still possible. Anything is possible… like I never, ever thought I’d be speculating about an apparent connection between Beyoncé and Hermann Nitsch!

“BvHN2” seems to bear some relationship to the massive throngs of people running around trying to get close to Jay-Z and Beyoncé in that first video. What else would draw so many people to what (in truth) most people would regard as a disgusting display of artistic excess?

I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that one of these things could very well be true:

Beyoncé Knowles, possibly with or possibly without her husband Jay-Z, attended a Hermann Nitsch-style action while they were in Cuba last April (or, in fact, this was an event staged by Nitsch himself as it appears).

Maybe a huge number of Cubans staged a bloody, entrails-enhanced Hermann Nitsch-style action as a kind of companion to or comment on Jay-Z and Beyoncé‘s visit to Cuba???

Both of these possibilities are incredibly amusing. There’s also the more mundane possibility that the uploader simply thought that adding her name to his footage of a Nitsch action would bring in more YouTube views. We just don’t know.

We need more information about this event. We certainly wish that Mr. yadniel padron aguilera were a little more forthcoming about the footage he uploaded. We’re counting ourselves utterly bumfuzzled.

If you know anything about this, please contact us!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Hermann Nitsch: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater 1970 (NSFW!)
Lady Gaga and Beyonce song remade by bored soldiers in Afghanistan

 
Is Breaking Bad the greatest television drama of all time? It’s hard to judge until the series actually finishes up on September 29, but it’s certainly in the running.

As everyone knows by now, the second half of the fifth and final season started last week, and all the Breaking Bad diehards will be tuning in every week to find out what happens to Walt/Heisenberg and the whole gang.

In August of 2011, while Season 4 was being aired, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences conducted a four-hour interview with the creator of the series, Vince Gilligan. In the interview Gilligan discusses his childhood in Virginia, his education at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his experiences working on 144 episodes of The X-Files, including the pivotal 1998 episode “Drive,” on which Gilligan first worked with Bryan Cranston, an experience that he later recalled when he sought an actor to play Walter White in Breaking Bad.

In Part 3, around the 52:55 mark, Gilligan discusses a pivotal moment in Season 1 that raised the stakes of Walt’s meth activities and put the moral burden on the audience in rooting for Walt.

Our fourth episode back in season one, I think, was a turning point for us, because up until that point I felt like it was enough that Walt wanted to make money for his family. In the early going my writers and I thought well, it’s just gonna be really hard to make enough money to leave his family before he dies of cancer. So maybe he’ll have an episode where he makes some money and it gets stolen or whatever. There’s mechanical setbacks we can come up with, the writers and I can come up with, mechanical setbacks that block him from his goal of having enough money to leave to his family.

One of the proudest things I am about the show is, early on, it was only the fourth episode of the first season, we were in the middle of the writer’s room talking about some mechanical setbacks Walt would face, and suddenly it kinda dawned us that we’re going about this the wrong way. Walt can’t just have setbacks in getting his money. So we actually went the other direction in this fourth episode. We had someone, this deus ex machina kind of a moment where this rich figure from Walt’s past comes to him and says, “I heard about your cancer. I heard about your problems. I want to give you money. I want to pay for your treatment. I want to make you whole. I want to make things good. You mean a lot to me. You’re a good person. You used to be my partner back in our PhD program. Let me do right by you.” In a sense deus ex machina—willfully so.

And at the end of that episode of TV, at the end of that hour, Walt turns this guy down out of pride, and he continues to cook meth. So it put the lie to all his protestations of, “I’m only doing this for my family. I’ve got to provide for them.” And that moment happens only four hours into the life of the series. At the time there was some concern we were giving up too much too quickly, we were making him too “bad” as it were, or we were making him less than sympathizable at too early a stage.

But I’m real glad we did that, because otherwise it would have been some Rube Goldberg device of the week of, “I really hate being a meth cook, but okay, I’ve got $90,000 now, that’s good. Oh shit! I left it by an open window, and the wind blew it away,” you know. It would have gotten more and more mechanical instead of deriving from an innate character trait that this character possesses, innate flaw that he possesses. That was like the proudest moment for me on the show, coming up with that, maybe. One of the proudest.

Part 3:

 
Parts 1, 2, and 4 after the jump…

 
Kurt Cobain was loud and proud expressing his admiration for The Raincoats when asked about his favorite music. Another all-girl band he championed was Shonen Knife. [Honestly, the guy seemed to have a lot of favorite bands]

Shonen Knife is a much-loved Japanese punk-pop trio that formed in Osaka in 1981. The original lineup was guitarist and vocalist Naoko Yamano, drummer Atsuko Yamano, and bassist Michie Nakatani. There have been several line-up changes over thirty-two years and Naoko is the only remaining original member.

Singing in English and Japanese, they write songs influenced by The Ramones and other early punk bands, surf music and garage bands, with catchy, sometimes silly, frivolous lyrics. They’ve written about cats, catnip, brown mushrooms, candy, sushi bars, mango juice, bison, banana chips and Barbie dolls. Their song “One Day of the Factory” appeared on a Sub Pop compilation in 1986. Early fans included Thurston Moore, legendary English DJ John Peel, and Redd Kross. Twenty alt-rock bands recorded a Shonen Knife tribute album (Every Band Has A Shonen Knife Who Loves Them) in 1989, but their American fame grew exponentially two years later.

Kurt Cobain saw Shonen Knife play in L.A. in 1991 and immediately became an enthusiastic fan. He told Melody Maker in September of that year:

We saw Shonen Knife and they were so cool. I turned into a nine-year old girl at a Beatles concert. I was crying and jumping up and down and tearing my hair out - it was amazing. I’ve never been so thrilled in my whole life. They play pop music - pop, pop, pop music.

He asked them to open for Nirvana on their nine-date 1991 UK tour shortly before the release of Nevermind. Not many people had heard of Nirvana at that point, but Shonen Knife agreed. Naoko Yamano described Cobain as being very quiet but friendly.

Naoko told Metroactive:

We toured with him twice in U.K. and U.S. One day when we were touring, he asked to me how to play the guitar chords of our song ‘Twist Barbie.’ So I told the chords to him. Then I heard that he played the song at Nirvana’s secret gig. I’m very proud of it, because he is a great rock artist.

Grohl endeared himself to Naoko’s sister Atsuko by acting as unofficial drum roadie and helping them to set up each night. While in the UK they recorded their first John Peel Session on BBC Radio

Shonen Knife signed to Capitol Records in 1992 and released Let’s Knife, their sixth album. They played the Reading Festival with Mudhoney and Nirvana that year. In December 1992 they joined Nirvana on their midwestern American tour.

In early 1993 Dave Grohl and Cobain enthused about Shonen Knife on MTV:

Dave Grohl: They went into their first song and everyone seemed sort of baffled…They won over the audience by the end of the night. Every show, people were like almost in tears.

Kurt Cobain: I was an emotional sap the whole time. I cried every night.

Dave Grohl: You couldn’t help it!

Shonen Knife performed on the Lollapalooza side stage in 1994, the year Nirvana had been scheduled to headline.

The original Shonen Knife line-up onstage in 1992: