At the end of March, the writer Séb Doubinsky should have been traveling across America giving readings from his latest novel The Invisible. Picture him in a busy, crammed bookshop wearing a plaid shirt, leather jacket with steel-rimmed glasses and neatly-trimmed beard. He sits at a table with a pile of books to his left, a glass of water to his right, the audience in front. Some sit in chairs, some stand around the edges with arms folded, heads tilted, all listening to Doubinsky’s strong, clear voice. There are questions then a long-line of bright-eyed readers waiting to shake his hand, take pictures, and get their copies signed.

In another reality this all happened. Turn the page, there’s someone at the back, leaning against shelves laden with bright, clean paperbacks asking:

What is your earliest memory?

Sébastien Doubinsky: My earliest memory is actually a patchwork of scenes from my childhood in America, between 1966 and 1968. I can see myself playing with my favorite toys, which were rubber Mattel astronauts, watching black-and-white Spiderman cartoons sitting upside down on the sofa, riding in my father’s dark blue huge station-wagon, going to Space Needle’s fun park and having a blast… Very vivid memories, in color, which have certainly influenced the very way I write, like Pop Art—or rather Anti-Pop Art, as Rosenquist called it—and Punk well, much later.

But a virus stopped all this. Doubinsky is in lockdown at his home in Denmark. If anyone could have seen such a deadly pandemic coming then it was him. He had already written about a similar outbreak in Absinth—the story of the Apocalypse with ancient Gods attempting a new order, the publishing of a new gospel according to Jesus (“Burn all churches”), and an outbreak of Ebola that claims the lives of the President and the Vice-President. There’s hope for us yet! Doubinsky saw it coming.

What the Corona crisis taught us: all useful people are underpaid and all useless people are overpaid and decide who will live or die.

Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him, in some unfathomable way, arachnid powers of strength and agility to jump great heights, climb walls, and have a tingling spider sense that alerted him to danger. At some point, most kids want to be Peter Parker, but then they give up on their imagination and subscribe to another’s imposed order.

August 1963, copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #3 were in bookshop carousels when Sébastien Doubinsky was born at a Parisian cinema. Spidey was fighting a new enemy the “grotesque Dr. Octopus.” Doubinsky’s parents had been watching a Hollywood western. They never saw the end of it. Celebrating the birth of a son was more important. Arriving at a hospital, Mother and child were doing fine. Father then found some work in America. Doubinsky spent his early years growing-up in the States watching TV and marveling at the unchanging blue sky. What’s your earliest memory? “I already answered that.”

Back in Paris, Doubinsky discovered a copy of William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded while visiting his Aunt’s apartment on the Avenue René Coty. It was a weird looking book with a weird sounding title. Doubinsky sat down and read it. He was blown away. He might not have understood it but he knew he loved it. He had discovered his superpowers.

When did you first think seriously about becoming a writer and why?

SD: It’s rather a difficult question to answer, as there were many stages in this decision—at least until it became a rationally formulated one. I come from a very intellectual background, culturally mixed (Jewish and Catholic, but both my parents were leftists and radical atheists) and extremely open to other cultures. What’s more, both sides of my family had been very active in the French Résistance during World War Two, and I therefore inherited quite a strong human-rights ethic. All this to say that literature was not a passive element of my upbringing, but was seen as a powerful object that could serve the best or the worst causes, and that it was important.

Growing up I loved poetry, and for a long time wanted to be a poet (but also a painter, until I discovered I was colorblind…) but little by little, prose seeped in and took more and more space. I began to write some short stories in my late teenage years, but still not really considering dedicating myself seriously. The tragedy that sealed my writer’s fate was the suicide of my beloved cousin Bruno, then, like me, 20 years old. He had introduced me to punk and New Wave—especially The Cure, Bauhaus and all the darker stuff—and in his last note, he told me I should carry on writing “my great stuff.” That’s when the weight of words and the responsibility attached to writing hit me like a runaway train. That’s the day I really became, in my eyes, a “writer.”
 

 
More from Sébastien Doubinsky, after the jump…
 

 
Afrofuturism—the term was coined by Mark Dery in a 1993 essay titled “Black to the Future” where he mused about Black science-fiction and art—is a genre agnostic aesthetic philosophy at the intersection of the African diaspora, technology, sci-fi, fashion and what comes next. Whatever that will be. The great Sun Ra is the spiritual godfather of Afrofuturism, his infinite worldview as well as his intergalactic person are the very personification of what the word stakes out. George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic is very Afrofuturist. Rammellzee is very Afrofuturist. So are Wu Tang Clan, MF DOOM, Grace Jones, Janelle Monáe, Lee “Scratch” Perry, FKA twigs, Detroit techno music and Jimi Hendrix. Author Samuel R. Delany is certainly an Afrofuturist and so was Octavia Butler. The Black Panther movie was hella Afrofuturist. I think you must get the gist of it by now.

Visionary photographer Gerald Jenkins’ exquisite new coffee table book, It’s After the End of the World is a fantastic exploration of Afrofuturism, in image, and in text provided for Jenkins’ project by Darius James, Jake-ann Jones, Carl Martin, Little Annie, Michael Gonzales and Norman Douglas. It’s one of the most exciting and impressive things I’ve seen in ages, a truly unique, very personal and vibrant statement. Aside from the quality of the work, it’s an exquisite publication, befitting what is inside its covers, that will look fantastic sitting in your living room. The book is very much an objet d’art itself, 344 glossy pages bound in a sturdy green hardback cover with a black and gold book band. I could say more, but the images, and the artist, can speak for themselves.

Jenkins describes It’s After the End of the World as:

“... a picture novel study of the human spirit in the fantastic and magical and the human soul in the metaphorical and physical”

I asked Gerald Jenkins a few questions via email.

Dangerous Minds: What’s your background?

Gerald Jenkins: In 1985 I was a nightclub DJ and attending a film and TV course in Australia. The Residents toured their 13th Anniversary show and I took some pictures which made me change direction and pursue photography. From there I became a freelance photographic assistant and started my own practice in 1990, instigating two projects. One being musicians’ portraits backstage and the other on Australian indigenous cultures. The indigenous project was a harrowing experience which alienated me from many aspects of Australian society. I exiled to Madrid in Spain in 1999 but soon realized it could only be a temporary solution. In 2001 I moved to London and concentrated solely on my portraiture of musicians backstage.

What inspired It’s After the End of the World?

Gerald Jenkins: I first met the Sun Ra Arkestra in 2003 and began discussing theories on indigenous practice with several members. Theories of time and space which I decided to explore further. Researching Sun Ra and his philosophies was the catalyst and I have been working with the Arkestra themselves in parallel to this completed book since 2009.

Was the work in the book done specifically for this project?

Gerald Jenkins: Yes. I was working in isolation. Aside from about ten pictures in the book I conceived the images in solo.

How did you go about selecting the writers you collaborated with? They’re all such unique—and very specific—voices.

Gerald Jenkins: Initially I only had poems and quotes by Sun Ra, and I was in discussion with KainThePoet to include handwritten lyrics to his piece “Black Satin Amazon Fire Engine Cry Baby” from the album The Blue Guerrilla. My publisher Art Yard suggested I contact Darius James, which I duly did and from there Darius and I devised the structure to include commissioned prose for all the individual chapters. Darius was initially in direct contact with the various writers instructing them in the chosen themes, and I had created layouts of the individual chapters that the writers were given in order to respond to. The written texts are crucial to the work and have been immeasurable in terms of transforming the message. It was easily the greatest enjoyment, personally, to have these brilliant texts accompany my pictures and transform the perception of content.

It feels like the vision that you explore in the book was prescient. How does it feel looking out your window and suddenly it IS after the end of the world?

Gerald Jenkins: It’s a perplexing thought but I’m going to quote Sun Ra’s mentor Alton Abraham on this.

It is the world we currently live in that is a myth.

Alton states “We had studied the prophecy of the pyramids, the earth stopped back in the thirties, ‘round 1933 I think. After the year 2000: ‘It’s After the End of the World don’t you know that yet?’ This would explain why the spirit of the people is in disarray, because the leaders haven’t taught them properly. They’re teaching from tradition.”

You can order It’s After the End of the World directly from the artist here.

“Ancient Black”

“Don’t You Want to Know The Greater Mysteries of the Universe?”

“Jupiter Way, with Jodie Turner Smith”

“Misfortune’s Wealth”

More after the jump…

 
Director John Hillcoat (The Road, Lawless, The Proposition) made his 1989 feature debut with the gripping prison drama Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead, which contains a brief, but unforgettable appearance by Nick Cave. It’s a really amazing film, but one that is sadly little-known outside of Australia (and extreme Nick Cave fanboys—admittedly I saw Ghosts… almost alone, at its sole midnight screening in NYC.)

Perhaps it is a misconception, but due to the worldwide popularity of films like Chopper and the classic camp TV of the women-in-prison soap opera Prisoner: Cell Block H,  I can be forgiven, I hope, for assuming that Australians, on the whole, are a bit obsessed with criminals, violent crime and incarceration. I guess it’s in their blood, so to speak. (I kid, I kid, Aussie readers! Please don’t kill me!) Loosely based on the life and writing of Jack Henry Abbott—the psychotic murderer turned literary protégé of Norman Mailer turned psychotic murderer once again—and research done with David Hale, a former guard at an Illinois maximum security prison, Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead features a cast of real-life ex-convicts, former prison guards and tough-looking motherfuckers they found in local Melbourne gyms. This film is realistic. Scary realistic. HBO’s Oz is a day spa in comparison.
 

 
Narrated by a (fictional) former prison guard, Ghosts… takes place deep in within the bowels of a maximum security prison, somewhere in the Australian outback. The place is an incessantly humming, fluorescent-lit nightmare. Due to outbreaks of violence, there has been a three-year lockdown that is still ongoing. The tension is palpable, the place is a claustrophobic, concrete Hell that no sunlight penetrates, a hatred and resentment-fueled bomb with a very short fuse just waiting to go off.

As events transpire, the viewer begins to see that the prison authorities are actively trying to provoke the prison population, and that they are pitting the guards against the inmates, preying on both to escalate the violence in order to crack down on the prisoners ever harder and to justify building a fortress even more fearsome, inescapable and “secure.”
 

 
Ghosts… has layers of unexpected meaning. Although the script (co-written by Hillcoat, Cave, one-time Bad Seeds guitarist Hugo Race, Gene Conkie and producer Evan English) tells a reasonably straightforward tale of the prisoners—captive in a high security fortress that escape from seems impossible—versus the authorities who manipulate them into chaos, there’s a wider allegorical message of the power dynamic inherent in Western capitalism: Conform. Do exactly what we tell you to do, or there will be consequences. Like this high security Hell on Earth.

Michel Foucault would have most certainly approved of Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead, I should think.
 

 
Although contrary to the way Ghosts… was marketed, Nick Cave is onscreen for just a very short appearance about an hour into the film, but having said that, it is a cinematic moment of pure genius. Cave plays Maynard, a violent psychotic who paints with his own blood. Maynard is an absolute fucking lunatic, deliberately brought in by the prison authorities to make an already bad situation much, much worse. His psychotic ranting and raving riles up the situation into complete murderous chaos. Although he is seen just briefly in Ghosts…, it is Cave’s Maynard who lights the bomb’s ever present fuse.

Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead is extraordinary film, as as bleak and as uncompromising a work of art as I have ever experienced, it might be difficult for the squeamish to sit through. Once seen, it can never be forgotten.
 

Japanese poster for ‘The Song Remains the Same,’ 1976
 
True or false: The performances from The Song Remains the Same, the concert film that supposedly documents Led Zeppelin’s 1973 Madison Square Garden shows weren’t actually filmed at Madison Square Garden?

Mostly true!

It’s not exactly a secret but it’s neither something that seems to be widely known by the general public, or even most Led Zeppelin fans for that matter. Now I’m not trying to imply here that Led Zeppelin didn’t even play Madison Square Garden for three nights in late July of 1973, because of course they did and The Song Remains the Same‘s original director, Joe Massot (Wonderwall) was there with a camera crew trained on them when they did. This much is not being disputed.

The problem was, as the group and their manager Peter Grant found out only after they’d fired Massot from the project, is that he’d gotten inadequate—practically unusable—coverage that wouldn’t sync properly or cut. Some great shots but nothing that could be used to create an edited sequence.

Grant brought in Aussie director Peter Clifton, the guy they probably should have hired in the first place, to see what could made from this mess, but the initial prognosis looked pretty grim until Clifton suggested reshooting the entire running order of the Madison Square Garden show on Madison Square Garden’s stage… recreated at Shepperton Studios in England!

Everyone assumes they’re watching the group at MSG, but in reality what we are watching (for the most part) is Led Zeppelin rocking out on a soundstage in Surrey, southeast of London. Without an audience.
 

 
On a playback screen, the band could watch themselves in the earlier footage—keeping their movements and positions in roughly the same general areas—and play along to the MSG soundtrack. So what we mostly see in the finished film are Clifton’s close-ups and medium distance footage of the band members shot at Shepperton, but intercut with Massot’s footage of the trappings of MSG, wide shots, shots framed from behind the band towards the audience and so forth.

Once you know all this, it’s screamingly obvious what was shot where.

Complicating matters for Clifton, John Paul Jones had recently cut his hair short (he’s wearing a wig in the Shepperton footage) and Robert Plant’s teeth had been fixed since the New York City shows the year before.

Jimmy Page spilled the beans in the May 2008 issue of Uncut Magazine,

“I’m sort of miming at Shepperton to what I’d played at Madison Square Garden, but of course, although I’ve got a rough approximation of what I was playing from night to night, it’s not exact. So the film that came out in the ‘70s is a bit warts-and-all.”

This little known behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Song Remains the Same is barely touched upon in some of the major books about Led Zeppelin—but in Chris Welch’s 2001 biography Peter Grant: The Man who Led Zeppelin, the story is told in greater detail, finishing thusly:

As far as Grant and Zeppelin were concerned, the movie song had ended. But they left behind smouldering resentments among the filmmakers and a few puzzles for movie buffs. Says Peter Clifton: “If you look at the credits they wrote something very interesting. ‘Musical performances were presented live at Madison Square Garden.’ It was somewhat ambiguous because the film was obviously done somewhere else!”

When he was asked about the provenance of the ‘live’ shots of Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, Peter Grant did admit that they had indeed shot some material at Shepperton studios, recreating the same stage set while the band donned the same clothes they wore at the actual gig. “Yes, we did,” he said. “But we didn’t shout about the fact.”

See for yourself:
 

 
This is a segment from my Disinformation TV series that originally aired late nights on UK television’s Channel Four network in 2000 and 2001. This and many more bits from the series are streaming at Night Flight Plus. Get a full year membership for $29.99 ($10 Off) for a limited time with discount code: DANGEROUSMINDS.

Night Flight have posted another segment from my old British Disinformation TV series—which was on the Channel 4 network way back in 2000 and 2001—the one about “space mercenary” Rocket Boy, a quirky individual who apparently believed himself to be a superhero (half cat/half human) and who fronted a noise rock band in Los Angeles, also called Rocket Boy. He was never, ever out of character, as far as I could tell the few times I was around him. He always wore a cape, a plastic helmet and carried a kiddie toy “ray gun.”

He was kind of like a real-life version of the Martian that Bugs Bunny meets.

I am Rocket Boy, space mercenary of the universe!

I ‘stroy world and planets.

I kill people and blow up their heads.

Just a-cause you pay me the most doesn’t mean that I obey you!

I saw his band play once in a dive bar in downtown Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The “musicians” just made great/terrible noise while Rocket Boy screamed. All of the music in this piece is his own recorded material.

He also made a bizarre cameo in a porno film. It’s difficult to imagine anyone (besides him) getting off on it (and you’ll never think of cream corn the same way ever again, so be warned). I heard that he passed away a few years back.

In the clip below—one of my favorites from the series—directed by Brian Butler and shot and edited by Nimrod Erez, Rocket Boy goes head-to-head with his landlord and upstairs neighbor, Captain Art of the LAPD’s San Pedro police force. Rocket Boy lived in Art’s basement and as you’ll see, they just never got along…
 

 
Watch more Disinformation on Night Flight Plus, the only place to watch original episodes of the cult 1980s series Night Flight. Get a full year membership for $29.99 ($10 Off) for a limited time with discount code: DANGEROUSMINDS.

A photo taken by Clay Geerdes of author and Cockette Fayette Hauser wearing a homemade grass skirt ensemble.

The catastrophic effect of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has hit anyone working in the gig economy incredibly hard. Book tours over the years have become big business for authors and independent bookstores hosting author events in support of newly released literature. Many authors, set to embark on Spring/Summer book tours, have had to scrap their plans, with some publishers even holding back on releasing their books. Thankfully, this was not the path chosen by drag trailblazer Fayette Hauser, she of the pioneering gender-bending performance troupe The Cockettes. It is my great privilege to be able to share a bit about her glittery, LSD-drenched book, The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy—a magnificent 352-page volume detailing the three-years the Cockettes conquered San Francisco and turned the drag community on its magnificently wigged head.

As Hauser recounts in the book, she was “rendered speechless” by a hit of strong acid at a party and soon found herself sitting on the floor only able to sit upright with help from the wall behind her. During this voyage, Hauser became acutely aware of the individuality of the people surrounding her to the point where she was not able to recognize their gender or her own. The year was 1968, and the Summer of Love had led masses of people to detach themselves from modern conformity, liberating their ability to express themselves freely. Eventually, The Cockettes would pave the way for others, whether gay, straight, bisexual, or pansexual, with their provocative performances and their communal way of life by living by the term “Gender Fuck.” And if you’re wondering what exactly is “Gender Fuck,” it made sense to go directly to the source, Hauser herself, to help define this very direct description of a person not identifying as exclusively male or female:

“The term Gender Fuck emerged as many of our descriptive phrases did, in an Acid flash! This term, gender fuck, became a way of describing our look, which was highly personalized, very conceptual, and without gender boundaries. We wanted to mystify the public so that the onlooker would declare, ‘What Is that? Is that a boy or a girl?’ We wanted to open people’s minds to the terrain between the tired gender binary models, which were much too mentally binding and boring as well. We unleashed that open space in between. We explored the fluid nature of the Self, which led to the term Gender Fluid. I think we succeeded in opening that Pandora’s Box of multi-dimensional, organic self-expression through body decor.”

In 1968, after graduating with a BFA in painting from Boston University, Hauser, a New Jersey native, moved out to San Francisco. Soon she would form a collective with like-minded, free-spirited people, and the Cockettes would officially begin their reign in 1969—specifically on the stage of the Palace Theater in North Beach on New Year’s Eve. The ever-growing troupe would first communally inhabit a grand Victorian-style home on 2788 Bush Street and then, after a fire rendered the home uninhabitable, a building on Haight—one of San Francisco’s most notorious streets. There was also a home known as The Chateau on 1965 Oak Street, where members of The Cockettes spent their time devising their next performance, creating costumes and personas, and tripping on LSD. The Cockettes took so much acid that they would often become non-verbal. This would lead to other forms of communication by way of personal adornment using makeup, clothing, and anything else that would convey the silent message emanating by the troupes’ diverse members, including 22-year-old Los Angeles native Sylvester James Jr., soon to become R&B disco queen Sylvester. Before his short stint with The Cockettes, Sylvester was a part of a group called The Disquotays—a performance collective comprised of black crossdressers and transgender women.
 

Sylvester during his short time with The Cockettes. Photo by Clay Geerdes. Unless otherwise noted, all photos provided to Dangerous Minds are for exclusive use.
 
The Cockettes’ performances were the be-there affair for all the counterculture chicks, dicks, and everyone in between. When director John Waters touched down in San Francisco to show off his 1969 film Mondo Trasho, the screening landed the director in jail for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. The film made its debut at the Palace Theater where The Cockettes performed their knock-out drag shows on the regular. At the time, Waters was not aware of The Cockettes, but that would quickly change for the director as Divine would end up performing with the Cockettes as “Lady Divine”—one of the first times would be in the first annual Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant at the Palace, where Divine played the pageant host, Miss de Meanor. In addition to confessing to the Tate/LaBianca murders, Divine would lead the other participants in the show (Miss Conception, Miss Shapen, Miss Used, and Miss Carriage) in a tournament to the death, where the queens had to fight with their fists for the coveted crown.

Divine would go on to win the ‘The Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’ in 1971. The following year, during The Cockettes’ last official show (another ‘Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’) at the House of Good, John Waters wrote a speech for her to read onstage, described by Cockette Scrumbly as “brilliant”. As the idea of Divine reading a speech written by John Waters is everything, I asked the director if he was willing to share any memory he had of this drag-tastic moment, and he very kindly responded with the following:

“To be honest, I’m not sure a written copy of that speech even exists in my film archive at Wesleyan Archive, and if it did, it would be word-slash-words that only I could understand. I do remember it was punk-ish (before the word) in a hippy venue that was bizarrely the Peoples Temple church, that was rented for the occasion after Jim Jones and gang had moved out. Divine ranted about following hippies home, eating sugar and killing their pets, or some such lunacy. I do still have the poster hanging in my SF apartment. I’m glad Scrumbly remembered it because I always did too. Quite a night in San Francisco.”

 

A flier advertising The Cockettes’ last show featuring Lady Divine.
 
The Cockettes intermingled with, as you might imagine, lots of famous people who were intrigued by the troupes’ anything-goes take on drag and life. Author Truman Capote called the Cockettes shows “the only true theater.” Alice Cooper, who once jumped out of a cake surrounded by The Cockettes for a PR stunt dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper,” was a frequent guest at the Haight-Ashbury house. And then there was Iggy Pop. When Iggy and The Stooges were recording Fun House in 1970, the then 23-year-old Iggy would start each studio session by dropping a tab of acid (as noted in the book Open Up and Bleed). The band decided to take a break and head to San Francisco for a weekend, playing a couple of shows at the Fillmore with Alice Cooper and Flamin’ Groovies. The first show on May 15th was attended by most of The Cockettes, who bore witness to Iggy on stage clad in the tightest jeans possible and long silver lamé gloves. Iggy was already a sweetheart of the gay community, and as Cockette Rumi Missabu recalls, Iggy distinctly gave them the impression he was “playing just for them.” Following the show, Iggy would become a regular guest of The Cockettes.

In the 2002 film, The Cockettes, Cockette Sweet Pam confessed that the collective “almost brushed their teeth with LSD,” to which Fayette would add, “contributed to the emphasis of flashy costumes.” Although the use of acid was the norm for the Cockettes, their art, sexual autonomy, and fierce expressions of individuality all contributed to the creation of High Drag. And, thankfully, the world would never be the same.

 

Cockette Wally in full regalia. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockette John Rothermel Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockettes’ Dusty Dawn and Wally in pearls. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 
Much more after the jump…

Black Sabbath in 1977.
 
Kind of like when Van Halen toured with Black Sabbath, when AC/DC teamed up with Sabbath to open shows during the twelve-date European leg of their Technical Ecstasy Tour, they were a formidable, almost impossible act to follow. Many accounts would boldly state AC/DC was regularly blowing Black Sabbath off the stage. However, AC/DC also experienced technical difficulties early in the tour. At a show on April of ‘77 in Paris, a bunch of AC/DC’s new gear explicitly purchased for the tour malfunctioned, including equipment exploding on stage mid-set (noted in the book AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be). The band lost it and trashed the stage, stopping the gig twenty-minutes in. This would be the catalyst causing tensions between the bands to rise. On many occasions, AC/DC would leave the stage in such a state of disarray, it would take Sabbath longer to get set up. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with some of the members of Black Sabbath. Especially Geezer Butler. But not everyone in AC/DC was on Sabbath’s last nerve.

Bon Scott took the tour as an opportunity to rekindle his friendship with Ozzy (also noted in AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be), as the pair shared common interests like checking out local brothels and the love of booze. Bon was often found hanging out in Sabbath’s dressing room, a bold choice given the strained relations between the bands. But it probably had everything to do with Sabbath having better party favors. On April 21st, 1977, everything would come to a head by the time the tour rolled into Lund, Sweden, and depending on who you chose to believe, Ozzy may have prevented Geezer Butler from going stab-happy on Malcolm Young. Let’s start with an account of the incident from the late Malcolm Young given during an interview with the guitarist in 2003:

“We were staying at the same hotel, and Geezer was in the hotel bar crying into his beer. He was complaining about being in the band for ten years and told me, ‘wait ‘til you guys are around ten years. You’ll feel like us.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I was giving him no sympathy. He’d had many too many (drinks), and he pulled out this silly flick knife. As luck would have it, Ozzy walked in and says to Geezer, ‘You fuckin’ idiot, Butler—GO TO BED!’ Ozzy saved the day, and we sat up all night with him.”

 

An image of AC/DC on stage in Lund, Sweden prior to getting kicked off the tour later that evening. Image source.
 
Usually, Ozzy the Friendly Drunk was the one causing problems by going missing and presumed dead, or getting arrested, but this time we maybe get to thank Ozzy for making sure things didn’t get out of hand between his pal Geezer and Malcolm Young. Geezer Butler has addressed this story many times over the decades. In an interview in 2016 he again gave his side of the mysterious knife-pulling incident with Malcolm Young in Sweden. When the tour arrived in Oslo, Butler made a bee-line to the nearest store to purchase a “flick-knife” (similar to a switchblade), which were banned for sale in England. Here’s Geezer’s account of his run-in with Malcolm Young:

“No, I didn’t pull a knife. I always had flick-knives when I was growing up because everybody used to go around stabbing each other in Aston (Butler’s birthplace in Birmingham, England). Flick-knives were banned in England, but when we were playing Switzerland, I bought one. I was just flicking it when Malcolm Young came up to me and started slagging Sabbath. I was just playing with the knife. I was really excited to get one again. I was having a drink and flicking my knife—like you do—and he came over and said: ‘You must think you’re big, having a flick-knife.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And that was it. Nobody got hurt.”

Hmmm. No Ozzy to the rescue? No flick-knives vs. drunken-fists brawling? In the book AC/DC FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the World’s True Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, it was alleged that Malcolm started throwing punches at Butler. I would not want to cast doubt on Butler’s version of the story. And the fact is, after the stop in Lund, AC/DC exited the tour prior to its conclusion, forcing Sabbath to cancel the last four dates. Still, I can’t help but think of his arrest in Death Valley, California in 2015 for punching a “drunken Nazi bloke” in the mug. Sure, he was drunk just like in 1977, but we all know punching Nazis is a forgivable act of well-deserved violence. It should also be noted the man Geezer attacked has told an entirely different version of the story, but stopped short of denying he was a Nazi. Geezer isn’t allowed to talk about the incident anymore because he had to sign an NDA and pay, in his own words, “the git” off. So what really happened in Lund, Sweden? Most of us probably prefer Malcolm’s “Ozzy saves the day” version, but I’m not as far to say Geezer Butler’s version isn’t the truth. Mostly because it’s pretty clear he does not fuck around when being fucked with.
 

Audio of Black Sabbath performing “Gypsy” from ‘Technical Ecstasy’ in Lund, Sweden, April 21st, 1977.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Did Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler put a curse on a thief who stole Tony Iommi’s guitar?
David Lee Roth and Ozzy Osbourne’s insane ‘cocaine challenge’ of 1978
‘Anyone here tonight ever had gonorrhea?”: AC/DC’s dirty autobiographical version of ‘The Jack’
Glamtastic footage of AC/DC *before* Bon Scott
Photos of AC/DC live at CBGB’s in 1977

 
This is a segment from my Disinformation TV series that originally aired late nights on UK television’s Channel Four network in 2000 and 2001. This and many more bits from the series are streaming at Night Flight Plus. Get a full year membership for $29.99 ($10 Off) for a limited time with discount code: DANGEROUSMINDS.

In January of 1999, I started to put together the pilot episode of what would become a two series run of a show produced for Britain’s Channel 4 called Disinfo Nation if you lived in the UK, and Disinformation in the rest of the world. The very first day of shooting was such an outrageous experience that it was really never topped during the subsequent two years of production, 24 zany months that saw me going to fetish clubs, listening to the sounds of plants communicating and “investigating” behind the scenes of various ludicrous conspiracy theories.

A film and video producer I knew by the name of Chica Bruce—well known around New York for her work on Yo! MTV Raps—had become an aficionado of the “Montauk Project” conspiracy theory book series and when she heard about the TV pilot order I’d gotten from Channel 4, she strongly encouraged me to do a segment on her new obsession. I thought this was a good idea, having read several of the Montauk Project volumes myself, books I considered to be mind rot at its absolute finest. (It has been said that the Montauk Project books inspired the Stranger Things TV series.)

Chica had become acquainted with the key players in the conspiracy, as well as several “Montauk experiencers,” as she put it, disturbed young men who had “feelings” that they too were a part of the nefarious goings on at a disused Air Force base on Long Island. How this generally occurred, she explained to me, is that they would read the Montauk Project books and their own repressed memories of working on the project would resurface. There were more than ten “Montauk Boys,” but fewer than twenty. Chica, a very attractive woman, was apparently the sole female traveling in such a circle, for reasons that would soon become pretty obvious. She scheduled interviews with two of the main Montauk players—and possibly a third—during a weekend shoot on Long Island. I also planned to interview Chica herself and have her show me around the site of the former Montauk Point Air Force base. I found her innocent willingness to buy into the obvious tall tales these clowns told added an entirely new layer to the story I wanted to tell. Chica could put herself through metaphysical logic loops that would have left someone with a less hardy appetite for weirdness feeling dizzy. Having a photogenic character like her to play off Jabba The Hutt-like Preston Nichols and Stewart Swerdlow—an effete goateed married man who told me on camera that he was sent back in time to assassinate Jesus Christ—was pretty perfect.

I always endeavored to present the conspiracy theory material with a completely straight face. I was heavily influenced by Chris Smith’s classic American Movie and the films of Christopher Guest. I wanted to make “real” mockumentaries. The goal was to produce something that lived up to a conceit of a title like Disinformation (meaning a mixture of truth and lies used as an information smokescreen) and the show’s cheerfully snarky tagline: “If you’re not wondering if we made this stuff up, we’re not doing our job right.”

The idea was to force the audience to ask themselves if it was real or if it was scripted—several times—during the course of each show. For that to work, it had to seem like I believed it, too, no matter how preposterous or insane what the subjects were saying was. I also had to convince the interviewees that I bought into their reality, too.

I hit upon my interviewing style on the first day and it really worked for me: I’d ask extremely detailed questions, designed to elicit extremely detailed answers and then I’d have plenty to work with in the edit room. But there was an additional, less obvious psychological benefit to this approach. Here’s an example of what I mean by that: In the case of my interview with Preston B. Nichols, I went through every single page of his totally crazy books and instead of asking broad questions like “So tell me about your involvement with the Montauk Project…” I’d ask something more along the lines of “How were you recruited for your first job on the base or did you apply for the job? Was it a friend or a family member who told you about the job? I guess I’m a little unclear about how you found yourself there in the first place” and then he would be obliged to clarify it for me.

I’d follow that up with “Did you have to pass any sort of top secret security clearance before you started work there?” and I would drill down from there.

You see what I was doing, demonstrating a better than usual familiarity with the backstory—I’d clearly done my research, which showed respect—but not getting it quite right so he’d be obliged to correct me on a small detail. I was a TV guy slickster in an expensive suit on his turf, so it was imperative that I disarm whatever nervousness or intimidation my persona presented him with and get him on my side from the very start or I wasn’t going to be able to get the sort of footage I needed. This little trick—and the fact that I can keep a straight face with the best of them—worked wonders for me.
 

 
Preston Nichols’ home was a tiny old house that looked extremely incongruous among the million dollar McMansions that surrounded it. As we drove closer and saw the weed-covered yard and modified school bus in the driveway, it became obvious to us that we were indeed in the right place. Nichols lived there with his father, a morbidly obese old fellow who watched football perched on a La-Z-Boy® recliner. He reacted to the crew and myself like Gollum would after being exposed to light for the first time in years. He was so fat that it was hard for me to tell if he had any bones. He didn’t even bother moving as we tried to set up around him and he passed gas frequently, in front of us, without any shame.

Their home was one of the filthiest places I’ve ever seen and a huge stack—and I do mean huge, there were at least 500 cans—of Spam (yes, the processed meat product) sat piled in one corner, stacked neatly on a wooden palette. Semi-eaten cans, with spoons stuck to them, were seen all over the place, as if it was all the pair ate. Directly from the can. There was junk everywhere. The bathroom was a rusty, pissed-covered scandal. The toilet seat had been cracked completely in half and then put back together with several rolls of thick cellophane tape. Preston wore a sweatshirt that had dried food and Spam gravy spilled all over it. It was not pretty and he smelled real bad, too.

Although he was obviously quite suspicious of me—and not without good reason, of course—I got exactly what I needed from the interview (Except for one thing: Preston’s dead mother had constructed a memorial shrine to the actor Yul Brynner, an entire wall of framed photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine articles next to the massive pile of Spam. Afterwards, in the van, I asked the cameraman if he’d gotten some good shots of it, but alas he had not, thinking it had nothing to do with the story. No Spam pile, either.)

Next up was Stewart Swerdlow, a curious fellow who told me in great detail, not only of his involvement with the project, but of his time spent in federal prison for a crime he told me that he’d been brainwashed to commit. I also met his new wife who explained that she’d been introduced to him while he was in prison by a psychic who told her that Stewart was her soul mate, and soon afterwards she divorced her husband for him. Stewart himself, as you will see, admits ruefully that he’d been “manually deprogrammed” by Preston Nichols, as he quite self-consciously alludes to this incident during the interview.

Lastly there was Chica Bruce herself, valiantly trying to convince me that I had not seen what I had just seen with my own two eyes—that Preston was a fat fibber/closet case using conspiracy theories for ulterior motives and that Stewart being a blatant New Age con man (He was purveying “color therapy” at the time and offered to “do my colors” for a discount. I passed). I did an interview with Chica and then she took me on a tour of the decommissioned air force base (now a state park).

As we walked around the park—it was fucking freezing—she kept asking me things like “Don’t you feel that? C’mon man, you don’t feel ANY like inter-dimensional weirdness going on here? NOTHING?”

“No, sorry, I ‘feel’ nothing.”

Chica was earnestly looking for the Montauk Project conspiracy. There was a conspiracy all right, just not the one that she was looking for…

With this background, have a look at “The Montauk Project”:
 

 
Watch more Disinformation on Night Flight Plus, the only place to watch original episodes of the cult 1980s series Night Flight. Get a full year membership for $29.99 ($10 Off) for a limited time with discount code: DANGEROUSMINDS.

 
Over the years, record label Three One G have released brutal and nasty tributes to Queen and the Birthday Party where avant garde noise makers like Melt-Banana, Cattle Decapitation, Weasel Walter, SSion and Some Girls lovingly massacred the catalog of these two beloved bands. Now the label is turning to Chelsea Wolfe, Daughters, Mike Patton, Metz, and many others and setting them loose on the songs of The Cramps.

The Cramps, of course, covered a whole lotta songs themselves, and their music is perfect for a project like Really Bad Music For Really Bad People. There’s even a Cumbia-style Cramps interpretation by Sonido De La Frontera, and Panicker’s contribution is a distorted electronic dance take on “I’m Cramped.”

The compilation marks the 100th release by Three One G Records. It will be available digitally as well as on limited edition vinyl. Order here.

Have a listen after the jump…

A very happy looking Frank Zappa, age fifteen, posing next to his winning illustration for the California Division of Forestry in 1955.
 

“The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting, literally, for other arts, figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to but a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”

—Frank Zappa quoted in The Real Frank Zappa Book (page 140).

Before he illustrated the winning entry for an annual poster contest held by the California Division of Forestry, the then fourteen-year-old Frank Zappa, a 9th grader at Grossmont High School in San Diego, had spent some good portion of his youth drawing. The story behind Zappa becoming interested in drawing is about as Frank Zappa as you might imagine. Here’s more from Frank on that:

“I had some basic interests in art, and since I was a kid, I was able to draw things. So I saw a piece of music, and I drew a piece of music. I had no idea what it would sound like or what was going on in it, but I knew what an eighth note looked like – I didn’t know it was an eighth note. I started drawing music and that was it.”

Zappa kept a sketch scrapbook as a teenager and also enjoyed entertaining his younger sister Candy by creating illustrations for her. Three years after winning the poster contest, Zappa would win another state-wide art contest for his abstract painting “Family Room,” this time sponsored by the California Federation of Women, and the Hallmark Greeting Card company. In the press clip announcing Zappa’s win (featured in the book Cosmic Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa), he was described as a “highly versatile” young person who had no plans to “confine” his artistic interests to painting. It was also noted that the young Zappa was writing a book. When asked if either art or literature were in the cards for his future, his answer was “music.” Zappa was now seventeen and already playing in a band called the Blackouts and was fully engaged in music lessons and musical composition. Before his graduation from high school, Frank was given the opportunity to conduct the Antelope Valley Junior College orchestra, who performed two of Zappa’s original compositions, “Sleeping In A Jar,” and “A Pound For A Brown On A Bus” (noted in the book, Frank Zappa FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Father of Invention).

Getting back to Zappa’s art, the majority of images in this post are of work Zappa created from the mid-‘50s to the mid-60s. If you’re a fan of Zappa, you’re likely aware he created early collage-style showbills for Mothers of Invention gigs. The very cool artwork of a young Frank Vincent Zappa follows.
 

A sketch from Zappa’s high school scrapbook.
 

An illustration by Zappa for his kid sister Candy, “A Day at the Beach.” This image was published in her 2011 book, ‘My Brother Was a Mother: Take 2.’
 
Much more of Frank Zappa’s youthful artwork, after the jump…