Best-selling author Jacqueline Susann and Judy Garland at a 1967 press conference.
 
Judy Garland’s screen test for Valley of the Dolls. Re-blogging this from Billy Beyond, who writes:

After they fired her she took the costumes and performed in them at the Palladium in London. Go Judy.

The idea of casting Judy Garland as aging actress “Helen Lawson” in Valley of the Dools was pure genius, when you consider that Patty Duke’s “Neely O’ Hara” character was so obviously based on Garland herself. Not that Susan Hayward wasn’t great in the role, she was, but it would have been even better with Judy Garland.
 

 
After the jump, Patty Duke tells the story of Judy Garland getting fired from Valley of the Dolls... and her revenge!

 
Don’t we all in some way or another?

Via Lady Bunny

 
Today I lay before you two LPs by possibly the same artist (nobody knows for sure who these people are !) from mid-70’s Japan that I’ve long felt represented some of the strongest home-made psychedelic music ever made. I give you my ever-effusive compatriot, Eric Lumbleau of the mighty Mutant Sounds blog to illuminate further:

These mid-‘70s releases - by interconnected musicians about whom nothing is known - represent two of the highest peaks of Japanese psych-prog weirdness. Brast Burn’s Debon is an intricate con catenation of cascading sleigh bells and hand drums, windswept Himalayan acid atmospherics, bottleneck acoustic-guitar twiddle and Damo Suzuki-like mantric babble. All of the above is held aloft by a synthesist with a terminal case of pitch wheel woozies and is strategically embellished with outbursts of tumbling bass drums, spiraling flutes and recorders, and some exquisitly hallucinogenic electric guitar. Coming on like an eternal cosmic caravan, the whole damn thing is soaked in a higher-key music of the spheres vibe. Yes, Brast Burn are indeed the real goods, and they will suck you into a hypnogogic reverie. Karuna Khyal are, by contrast, an altogether more psychotic proposition, quite capable of inducing frontal lobe fatigue in those lacking a hardy constitution. Great monolithic slabs of damaged, half speed Beefheartian swamp dirge, replete with squawking, overblown mouth harp, collide with undulating waves of Throbbing Gristle-esque electronic distortion, as the group stridently trudge across your neuroreceptors and eroding your sanity. Attempting to reconcile the contents of those disparate dispatches is a losing game. If there ia any thread connecting these excursions, it’s in the mantrically intoned vocals that wend their way through both of these outings; though the volatility of the vocal delivery on Alomoni 1985 renders even these ties tenuous. Suffice to say, both of these forays into the outer reaches of sound are perched near the zenith of radical innovation.

It’s true, rock ‘em loud !
 

Brast Burn - Debon SIde One
 

Brast Burn - Debon Side Two
 

 

Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side One
 

Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side Two

 
Fantastic! Vintage interview with Dangerous Minds pal Mick Farren (seen here with ex-wife Joy) conducted by John Peel!

Here the legendary Mr. Farren discusses how “the authorities” would pressure printers not to deal with the International Times or the underground press as a means of suppressing it. Towards the end, he sketches out how an underground economy would work. What a thrill to see this. Imagine if rock stars today were this smart!

When Mick gets back to me about this interview (not mentioned in his autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette) I will update this post.
 

 
Via Blog to Comm

More Mick Farren on Dangerous Minds

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Circle of Life

(via The High Definite)

 
Ear-bleeding Christian music video about the Rapture. What would even be the point of trying to come up with something snarky to say about this idiocy (and off-key singing?)

Via Christian Nightmares

 
Something tells me this is going to cross over far beyond the 4-11 year olds market.
 

 
JD Samson is the girl with the coolest moustache in rock’n'roll. Today sees the release of the debut album by JD’s band MEN, Talk About Body on Iamsound Records. MEN are a three piece that combine the best in dance-pop and punk rock with a definite queer/feminist outlook. JD already has form in this area - she is a member of Kathleen Hanna’s post-Bikini Kill/riot grrrl electronica act Le Tigre, and last year she worked with Christina Aguilera on her ill-fated Bi-On-Ic album., which saw the “Beautiful” warbler trying to break out of her pop/soul niche but not quite succeeding.  Nice try though.

However, MEN is JD’s passion - they have been touring the globe for the past few years spreading their word to the masses from a beat up van, with just a laptop, a MicroKorg and two guitars, and collaborating with a host of different musicians and artists as they get their sound just right. This is from their Wikipedia page:

MEN is a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective that focuses on the energy of live performance and the radical potential of dance music. MEN speaks to issues such as trans awareness, wartime economies, sexual compromise, and demanding liberties through lyrical content and an exciting stage show.

It would be tempting to say that they are at the forefront of a new wave of electronic queercore, only that would distract from the music itself, something that JD has had to put up with a lot already because of her unique image. So let’s abandon all preconceived ideas for a little while and just get down to the sound of MEN: 
 
MEN “Be Like This (Live)”
 

 
More MEN and JD Samson after the jump…

 
Little Richard sings “Scuba Party” while frenzied go go dancers attempt to throw planet Earth off its axis with the sheer force of their hips. This is the highlight from the highly forgettable beach blanket dud Catalina Caper. For a few brief minutes Mr Penniman transforms this turd into gold.
 

 
January 30th was Richard Brautigan’s birthday. His writing had a huge influence on me when I was a young man.

I spent one summer in the late sixties living in a tipi in a ghost town in Northern California reading Brautigan and living off brown rice, rolled oats and Benzedrine. It was the rainy season. As I read In Watermelon Sugar, I felt as though I were made of those sweet volatile molecules so I avoided the rain and a nearby waterfall. I stayed nice and dry in the upside down cone I called my home.

I had a big bag of pot that I buried under the floorboards of a decaying dancehall in the ghost town. Rats ate the reefer. It killed them. I imagined the headlines in my imaginary newspaper: “Mice Murdered By Marijuana.” But they died happy. I found their rat corpses, plump and round, under the floorboards. They died with smiles on their faces. That’s the way I wanna die, I thought. 

I was alone that summer, just me and Brautigan and that deadly waterfall. Occasionally I would go to the nearby village where there was a church called The Church Of Tomorrow. Inside the church were beautiful young girls who gave me LSD. I would eat the LSD and make love to the girls, melting into them like watermelon sugar.

When I wasn’t reading Brautigan or fucking or eating brown rice, I would just stare at the sky for hours and watch the sunlight curl along my optic nerve and splash against my brain like a tiny cloudburst made of watermelon sugar.

Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads “One Afternoon in 1939” from her father’s book Revenge Of The Lawn. It’s a sweet video.