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.

This piece, one of my favorites, focuses on the self-proclaimed “mind-controlled sex slave” of the CIA, “Brice Taylor” (not her real name) but actually did not make it to broadcast. “Brice” is the author of one of the craziest books I have ever encountered, Thanks For The Memories: The Truth Has Set Me Free! The Memoirs of Bob Hope’s and Henry Kissinger’s Mind-Controlled Slave in which she alleges being a victim of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, specifically something called “Project Monarch” which groomed “mind-controlled sex slaves” for rich and powerful people.

This was the SOLE piece, the only one out of all the shit I dropped in their lap for two years (“Uncle Goddamn,” Kembra Pfahler sewing her pussy shut, the extreme porn segment, etc., etc., etc.) that the Channel Four lawyers docked from the show. They were amazingly lenient with me for nearly everything—I cannot believe what I got away with, looking back on it—but this one could not be salvaged because British libel laws are such that you can’t knowingly publish a false claim or untruth, and the law is pretty cut and dry on this.

But weren’t her claims of making mother/daughter dolphin porn directed by Sylvester Stallone a little too preposterous to be believed? The fact that no one would believe any of it didn’t really matter, as corporate lawyers, they very simply just could not let this story run. None of it. I was so happy with the way that it had turned out that this seemed like a bitter defeat at the time, but it’s been seen elsewhere since.

The backstory behind this is that I contacted Brice Taylor via her website and told her about the British TV show and invited her to be on it. After an initially wary exchange, I suggested that we speak on the phone.

Her concern, she told me bluntly, was that I was going to make her look like a kook. I then proceeded to give her the well-honed standard rap that I gave to every kook I wanted to get on camera: “Brice, if I have video rolling and you are saying kooky things, look, I’m a television producer, so I’m probably going to use that footage, yes, but if when the cameras are on, you’re true to yourself, you’re poised, you stay on message and you’re satisfied when I leave that you didn’t embarrass yourself, no, I’m not going to go out of my way to make you look like a nut. How would that work anyway unless YOU give me the kooky footage in the first place? So just don’t act like a kook when you’re on camera, okay?”

AS IF, but that line of reasoning did seem to win her over a bit, although she still wasn’t convinced. I upped the ante: “Okay, what if we do the piece from YOUR point of view? In fact, aside from me asking you a question or two off-camera or something minor, the entire piece can be in YOUR voice—we can use the introduction to your book as the narration, it’s perfect, we’ll just mic you up and have you read it a couple of times—and you being interviewed on camera. You have my word that I will basically keep myself out of it. You will write the piece, how’s that?”

She was very definitely “in” after that and the very next day, the fearless cameraman and editor I worked with on the show, Nimrod Erez, one of the show’s producers Brian Butler, and I drove to a place in San Diego where she was staying (it was a gorgeous home in the hills that belonged to her therapist, who she also worked for doing some sort of New Age water therapy/memory retrieval thing that I didn’t really understand).

Upon our arrival, we were greeted by 6’4” retired FBI Special Director Ted Gunderson, a name well-known to fans of the most far-out variants of conspiracy theory. Gunderson, now deceased, but then about 75, was known for being an idiotic bigmouth who hounded the producers of shows like Geraldo! and A Current Affair for appearances. We were told that he was there to provide “security” for “the little lady” as he called her and he’d also invited himself to be on camera (something that she seemed to want, too) to bolster her bonafides. I was only too delighted to accommodate a blithering fucking idiot who would have a lower third (accurately) identifying him as a former FBI bureau chief! In the context of a show that didn’t want the audience to be able to tell if it was a put on, or real, this was a gift.
 

 
A few asides about Gunderson: One, he lived in Las Vegas (where he hosted a low watt radio conspiracy theory show) and brought along three framed photographs on his long-ass drive to San Diego. One was him with Gerald and Betty Ford. Another was of him with Ronald Reagan. The third was a portrait of John Wayne, just a regular studio promo shot, not even signed to him or anything. Listen to him speak in the piece. He thought he sounded like John Wayne and he wanted me to somehow connect him to the actor in my mind. Maybe I’d even compare him to John Wayne, he told me.

The second thing was that it was OBVIOUS—and I mean OBVIOUS—that Ted thought he was going to get laid. He followed “Brice” around like a male dog sniffing around a female dog’s ass. When I wanted them both on camera at the same time, she balked and took me aside to admonish me not to “make it look like we’re a couple.” She wasn’t into him, not in the least, but she wanted him there on camera to make her seem more credible.

With a guy like Ted there to buck up your credibility, you obviously ain’t got much to begin with! The best way to describe Gunderson is that he was like Jethro pretending to be a “double-naught spy” on The Beverly Hillbillies. At one point during his law enforcement career he oversaw 700 plus officers of the FBI’s Southern California bureau, and yet frankly, he’s one of the stupidest people I’ve ever met. Whenever someone asks me how he got into such a position, I tell them, “He’s big and he’s pushy.” (I’d run into him a few more times over the years, including when we interviewed him about Satanic cults for another spot on the show. He was a comic foil for me twice in the series.)

As the lights were getting set up, an anxious Brice asked me where the show would be seen and I told her what Channel Four was and I said “It’s network, not cable. One of the main channels over there” and explained that there were fewer television stations in the UK than in America and this caused her to perk up. “So you mean to tell me, like they’ve only got four or five TV channels? And that’s what everyone basically watches? Do you think the Queen of England watches Channel Four?”

I was confused about where she was going with this and I demurred “Well, yeah, I’m pretty sure, of course, that she’s watched Channel Four, yes…”

“OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! TED! TED! He says the Queen of England might see this show! Maybe I can get a message to her about my son!”

She turned to me, obviously cycling maniacally at this point: “So you really think the Queen of England will see this???”

Not wanting to dampen her instantaneous enthusiasm for the task we were about to embark on, I replied that if the Queen of England was up watching late night TV and flipping channels while the Duke of Edinburgh snoozed, then, yes, perhaps there was perhaps a certain mathematical possibility of that occurring… (!)

I don’t want to give too much away for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but we discussed beforehand that when I would feed her the question about the Queen, she would shift from speaking to me, to addressing the camera/Queen directly for some added dramatic oomph!

With the interview, the B-roll and the voice-over in the can, we decamped to Kinko’s to get color photocopies of her family photographs. Gunderson came with us, at one point comically showing off that he was packing heat to try to impress her, but by then it was obvious that she’d gotten what she wanted out of him (the drive from Las Vegas to San Diego is hardly trivial) and she started making “Well, I’ve got to be getting home now” noises to clue him in that he wasn’t getting any of that Project Monarch pussy anytime soon.

While the piece was being edited, I invited my pot delivery guy, a fat queeny dude (think “Cam” on Modern Family) to watch it. When it was over, he looked at me and said “You know you’re going to Hell, right?”

Perhaps he’s right, but at least I kept my word about letting Brice tell her own story, her way. Although the piece did not air on Channel Four as I’d hoped, when “Brice” got a VHS of the segment, she seemed thrilled and sent me a copy of her book inscribed with a thank you.

Over the years, when I’ve been invited to screen the Disinformation TV shows at museums and repertory cinemas, the most ridiculous question anyone has ever asked me about this piece—and it gets asked nearly every time!—is “How much of what she says do you think is true?”

Um…. how’s about none of it?

As a weird footnote to this piece, I’ve seen it passed around by various “believers” and “truth seekers” on Facebook and elsewhere for years, as if it’s an actual news piece, or a true documentary. Just last week it was seen on Twitter as a QAnon something or other. I felt like razzing this person for a moment, but soon thought better of it for obvious reasons!

And now, without much further ado, take it away Brice Taylor, mind-controlled sex slave of the CIA…

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.
 

 
Conduct a casual poll of the hardy troops that make up the KISS Army as to their favorite KISS songs; I’d wager you’ll hear a lot more votes for “Strutter,” “Detroit Rock City,” “Rock and Roll All Nite,” or, hell, even “Lick It Up” than you will for Peter Criss’ 1976 ballad “Beth.” KISS fans don’t exactly know what to do with “Beth,” a syrupy piano number (with flute!) about puttin’ in those long hours in the studio that was the biggest his KISS ever had, clocking in at #7 on the Billboard Singles chart. No other KISS song ever cracked the top 10 until 1990’s “Forever” (which I wouldn’t be able to hum for you on a bet).

Director Brian Billow of Anonymous Content brought the song’s backstory to life in 2013, with a short script by Bob Winter, an advertising creative director based in Miami, that asks the compelling question, “But what of Beth’s side of the story?”

As with any undertaking like this, the trick is nailing the details. Beth’s colorful frock and wood-paneled kitchen accurately capture a certain 1970s je ne sais quoi that permits “Beth,” however brief, to be placed honorably alongside Boogie Nights and Almost Famous and The Last Days of Disco and 54 and all those other movies about the 1970s that came out in the late 1990s. The concept of KISS laying down tracks in full costume is just the right preposterous touch—but then again, maybe it isn’t that preposterous. This picture comes from the Destroyer sessions—the same album that “Beth” is on!
 

 
For the record (the movie has no credits), Criss is played by Steven Olson, and long-suffering Beth is played by Lilli Birdsell.
 

 
The Cult’s “Ressurection Joe” single came out at the end of 1984 and sonically it’s the midpoint bridge between their Dreamtime album of that autumn and what would come a year later with their more “classic rock”-style longplayer Love, the album that broke the one time goth rockers into the big leagues.

AllMusic.com’s Ned Raggett called the “Ressurection Joe” single:

“... a queasy, nervous, and frenetic combination of aggro epic and swampy funk, which remains an undeservedly forgotten highlight from the early ‘80s, topped only by the dramatic sweep of the later “She Sells Sanctuary.”

I’d have to agree. It’s easily one of their best, most memorable songs but it’s also one that fell through the cracks for many fans more into their later harder-rocking albums like Love, Electric or Sonic Temple but less aware of the tribal/goth ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’ squat punk of their earlier incarnations as the Southern Death Cult and later just Death Cult.
 

 
Here’s the video for “Ressurection Joe” with Ian Astbury playing a voodoo-y Dickensian snake-oil salesman—his look pinched from Christopher Lee’s character in 1958’s Corridors of Blood named—ahem—”Resurrection Joe”—who is clearly up to no good. It says on the Wikipedia page that this video was unknown until the mid-90s when it was released on the VHS home video collection Pure Cult: The Singles 1984-1995, but I seem to recall that MTV was running this fairly regularly at the time when Love was first charting.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
A version of this article first appeared on Night Flight’s website in November 2015.

“I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THIS IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Absolutely bizarre…”

That was R. Stevie Moore’s response in 2013 when I asked him about his knowledge of an obscure LP containing fantastic studio recordings he had made forty years earlier.

Moore, as many of you probably already know, is a pioneer in home recording and an early champion of the lo-fi aesthetic. He’s also a beloved cult figure and considered by many to be the godfather of indie rock. His best songs combine the pop hooks of Lennon and McCartney with the avant-garde stylings of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. In 1976, Moore, who had already been self-releasing his solo material on cassette, put out his first full-length LP, Phonography, which was issued on his own label, Vital Records. To date, R.S.M. has racked up more than 400 releases and has written thousands of songs.

Even with this huge catalog, Moore would have typically known what had been made available, but this was not the case with the aforementioned studio recordings. In 1977, this material was included on a self-titled LP credited to a fictitious group called Hotgun. The album was released by Guinness Records—a notorious tax shelter label.
 

The Warhol-meets-Lichtenstein cover art for ‘Hotgun.’

In the mid 1970s, some savvy individuals identified a section in the U.S. tax code in which investments in sound recordings could qualify for a reduction in taxes. Situations varied, and the entire process was fairly involved, but essentially, this is how it worked.

The owner of a record label would solicit potential investors to license (or lease) a master sound recording from them, which would then be turned into an album. The program outlined by the label focused almost entirely on the tax benefits, rather than profit from the venture itself.

Generally, the label wasn’t even a record company in the traditional sense, and was established solely to market master recordings. Once an investor signed on and forked over their cash—ranging from a few thousand dollars to five figures—the label would take responsibility for overseeing the project. An essential undertaking for the label was having the master evaluated by an appraiser, one who was willing to place an inflated market value on the recording. There was much in the way of smoke and mirrors here.
 

The striking cover art of ‘Time to Give’ by Felix Harp on Guinness Records.

For the next step, tapes were turned over to the packager, who was in charge of putting the finished product together, which included having the artwork created and pressing up the vinyl in a limited run of 1,000 copies.

Somewhere in the album’s credits was the name of an individual or company listed as the copyright holder. These are the names of investors. Though investors didn’t actually have any copyrights related to the recordings, there had to be documentation that they did in order to take advantage of the tax benefits.

At the final stages, the packager placed the completed product in stores. The packager was also responsible for marketing, though, in reality, there wasn’t any serious attempt to promote these records. Most of the LPs that did arrive in stores just sat in the racks, as few knew they existed. It’s believed that large amounts of records were warehoused or destroyed, which is why many tax shelter albums are so hard to come by.

When the LPs invariably didn’t sell, the master recording was written off by the investor as a failed venture, using the inflated appraisal—which went as high as seven figures—as the basis for claiming a loss come tax season.

Though the label, like any other business, could write-off expenses, their much larger slice of the pie came when they leased a master recording, earning thousands of dollars per transaction.

Two of the labels with the most known releases are Tiger Lily, which was operated by Morris Levy, the notorious owner of Roulette Records, and Guinness. The albums these labels released, many of which are now quite rare and sought-after by collectors, are commonly referred to as “tax scam records.”
 

The self-titled Bloodsuckers album on Guinness.

Much more, after the jump…

The Beatles by Guy Peellaert

Animation director Chuck Braverman won an Oscar in 1974 for Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, his 14-minute animated history of the Beatles and their preeminent place in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. It’s a celebration of Beatlemania that is moving, amazing and inspiring.

I saw this three times when I was a kid. It used to come around once a year in the mid-70s as part of a weekend matinee movie “roadshow” that was four hours of Beatles films for $4. Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles at Shea Stadium and Japan ‘66 were some of the other films I recall seeing, but the clear highlight of the show each time was Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, which used footage of the group combined with flashy pop art photo-montage animation. Trust me, this was a pretty astonishing thing to see at the time. Produced by Apple (who else could have gotten all the rights to this material?) and Braverman Productions, it aired on TV one time on Geraldo Rivera’s late night ABC program Good Night America (also where the “Zapruder Film” was first seen on television in 1975).

It’s a seriously cool film, but for whatever reason, it’s practically disappeared off the face of the earth. One of the few places you can actually still rent a 16mm print is at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. (They’ve got quite a few cool things in their collection.)

A minor footnote to this film’s history is that it was picked apart for clues to the whole dumb “Paul is Dead” theory at the time. Braverman also made the opening montage to the dystopian sci-fi cult favorite, Soylent Green.

It’s a pity that the only complete version I could find of this marvelous little Oscar-winning film is so washed-out and tatty looking, but it’s the best I could do, so be grateful for small miracles. You’ll have to mentally “restore” it in your mind as you watch. Do watch it full screen as well, there’s a lot going on.
 

Self-portrait by Patti Smith, 1969.
 

“The first time I saw art was when my father took us on a trip when I was 12. My father worked in a factory, he had four sickly children, my parents had a lot of money problems, and we didn’t go on excursions often. But there was a Salvador Dali show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that included the painting “The Persistence of Memory,” and my father found Dali’s draftsmanship just astounding, so he wanted to see the show in person. So he dragged us all to the museum. I had never seen art in person before. And seeing paintings - seeing work by Picasso, John Singer Sargent - I was completely smitten, I totally fell in love with Picasso, and I dreamed of being a painter.”

—Patti Smith on her first exposure to art.

The sublime Patti Smith once described her drawings as the “merging of calligraphy with geometric planes, poetry, and mathematics.” While in her early 20s and living with artist/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel, the inseparable lovers would draw together side-by-side for long periods. Mapplethorpe would be a constant stream of encouragement to Smith, empowering her to keep creating despite the noise in her head telling her she wasn’t good enough. She would draw images of Mapplethorpe as well as his gorgeously aggressive X-rated photographs. In 1978, Smith and Mapplethorpe would sign on with New York art dealer Robert Miller who had just opened his art gallery on Fifth Avenue a year earlier. 1978 would mark the first time, at the age of 32, that Smith would show her original works of art alongside Mapplethorpe’s photographs—including a variety of his portraits of Patti. As I will never tire of hearing stories told by Patti Smith, here’s a bit more from the high priestess of punk on the wonderful thing that is “creative impulse”:

“The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can’t give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work. And that continuous exchange—whether it’s with a rock and roll song where you’re communing with Bo Diddley or Little Richard, or it’s with a painting, where you’re communing with Rembrandt or Pollock—is a great thing.”

Her artwork has been exhibited everywhere from New York to Munich, and in 2008 a large retrospective of Smith’s artwork (produced between 1967 and 2007) was shown at the Fondation Cartier pour I’Art Contemporain in Paris. In 2019, Smith’s illustrations were used for the album, The Peyote Dance, a collaboration with Smith and Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli). So, without further adieu, let’s spend some time perusing a few of Patti’s illustrations produced over the last four decades.
 

Self-portrait, 1974.
 

“Ohne Titel,” 1968.
 

Portrait of Rimbaud, 1973.
 
More after the jump…

   
I’ve been intending to write a long post about Bobby Conn here on Dangerous Minds for the past year. I’ve thought about Bobby Conn a lot in recent months, but never actually sat down and started typing any of it out until today. There’s a brand new Bobby Conn album, Recovery, and this is what finally gave me a deadline. It’s EASILY “the album of the pandemic,” but we’ll get to that, and why, later.

I present to you that Bobby Conn is the greatest marginal cult artist in America today. That a talent this brilliant has not been nationally heralded and respected widely is unforgivable. 

A bit more than two years ago I myself had little more awareness of “Chicago’s favorite Christian entertainer,” than the widely circulated and very puzzling YouTube clip of Bobby Conn performing “Never Get Ahead” on what is obviously a local cable access program for young viewers. Many of you reading this have no doubt seen this clip, which dates from the late 90s, as it’s had several bouts of being a viral video since YouTube first launched in 2005, and maybe even before that. Apparently it’s also been shown several times on MTV Europe as something along the lines of “the worst music video ever made.” (Because of this Bobby Conn is better known, and has a much bigger fanbase, in Europe than in America.)

One day, it was in Spring of 2018, for no reason I suddenly had “Never Get Ahead” playing in my head and I dialed up that video and watched it again. And then I watched it again, and again, marvelling at its uncomfortable brilliance and thought “I gotta look into what this guy is all about.” It wasn’t that it was a good song—it’s great—but more that I found the whole thing so very, very confounding and I wanted to know more. On the basis of this one piece of evidence, “confusion,” frankly, seemed the obvious reaction that most people would have when confronted by this scraggly little crackhead emoting like a demonic Al Jolson covering a Jackson 5 song and dancing his ass off while young children and early teen onlookers clap and awkwardly dance around him.
 

 
One detail of this video that I especially appreciate is how none of the kids are like “What is going on here? Who is this weirdo?” but are apparently quite genuinely enthusiastic about the flaming creature who’s just landed in their midst. The entire thing is unwholesome, but also a masterpiece of the vaguely sinister. Note that the X-rated lyrics were toned down for this appearance. (Here’s the original song.)

What did the rest of Bobby Conn’s music sound like, I wondered? I took the plunge and ordered his entire catalog from Amazon. There were five studio albums, a live CD and a few EPs. I didn’t pay more than $2 for any of them. The postage for each was more than it cost. It took me about nine or ten further months until I grabbed one off the pile and started listening in the car. The car was the perfect place to listen to Bobby Conn and give the music my full attention. Not a good soundtrack for multitasking, that’s for sure. I’ve listened to all of them in the car, for weeks, before listening inside. It was a winning strategy for me at least. The key thing is that you need both repeat listens—it won’t sink in on the first play for most people—and to pay close attention, because it’s music with a lot of tiny moving parts.

I began at the beginning with his self-titled 1997 debut Bobby Conn. This album is sometimes described as “no wave” or “post rock” and that’s not entirely offbase, but it’s also got the mutant pop/disco/soul “hit” of “Never Get Ahead” (a song metaphorically equating a male prostitute sucking off old men to getting ahead in the corporate world), the heavy metal bludgeoning that comes with “The Sportsman,” and “Who’s The Paul? #16,” a 13-minute-long musique concrète assemblage comprised of slowed down and layered snatches of Paul McCartney songs. “Axis ‘67 (Parts 1&3)” explains how Conn believes he is, or might be, the Antichrist prophesied in the Book of Revelation. And you can dance to it. It’s an album that’s impossible to pigeonhole, and that has no obvious influences other than the Jackson 5 (and maybe the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but don’t let that put you off). After a few back to back listens, I had a feeling I was going to become a big Bobby Conn fan. What an incredibly strong, and unique, but preposterously odd way to present yourself to the world. How much of it he was serious about and how much of it was purely a theatrical persona ala Ziggy Stardust was difficult to say. There was a very straight-faced quality about it all, knowing, arch and dripping with multiple layers of venomous irony.

Conn’s next album was 1998’s Rise Up!, an updating of the whole “protest music” concept for an apathetic generation not much interested in protesting anything. That this message was coming from a diminutive, falsetto-singing, apparently drug-addled rent boy with glitter eyeshadow, chipped painted fingernails and a shitty nylon tracksuit gave Rise Up! a particular “leper messiah” edge. Musically it was a massive step-up from the prior year’s effort—it was produced by Jim O’Rourke, who is all over the album—and marked the full-flowering of Conn’s musical collaboration with his future wife, violinist Julie Pomerleau, aka Monica BouBou. She’s on the first album but here takes a role that’s about equal to the name on the spine of the CD. He’s an amazingly inventive guitarist, as proven on his debut album, but with his “rock” prowess on that instrument augmented by her sophisticated strings and keyboards, there’s an immediately noticed slickness that Bobby Conn lacked. Here the sound becomes—all at once—a sleazy comingling of the essence of 70s and 80s AM radio hits, Prince, prog, riffy glam rock, Van der Graaf Generator and disco. A stand out track, the vicious “Baby Man,” tells the tale of a useless loser living off his girlfriend. It might be autobiographical, it might not be.
 

 
It could be accurately said that the Bobby Conn project was already in full bloom with Rise Up!, but the next album, 2001’s The Golden Age—also produced by Jim O’Rourke—is another big, huge jump up in quality. The lyrical fodder is still the same. Conn has said the album overall is about someone in his 30s still acting like he’s in his 20s, but paranoia, revolution, street drugs and male prostitutes (“I’ll be working on your street/ Missing half my teeth/ Give another gummy blowjob/ Get myself something good to eat.”) are still the dominant themes. The arrangements on this album are absolutely next level and it’s here that Conn and BouBou do something so unique and so perfectly realized that I can’t think of any other musical artist(s) who do this, or have done this particular thing, and done it so well.
 

 
What am I talking about? It’s how the music can smoothly shapeshift from a string-led Gainsbourg/Vannier-esque orchestrated passage to something that sounds like King Crimson (there’s often a strong hint of Robert Fripp in Conn’s guitar playing) and then have it change on a dime from there to a blaring horn section that sounds like it’s grafted straight from Frank Zappa’s Grand Wazoo album. For a few bars it will sound like Styx, then Arvo Part. Then it becomes alternately Prince-like, proggy, falsetto Chic disco-funk, and ends like an 80s power ballad.  This might, and often does, happen within the confines of just one song. In an interview, Conn described how the compositional structure of Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” had a big influence on his songwriting. Almost everything on the album is a suite of sorts. They pull this conceit off spectacularly well. The Golden Age is one of the most musically sophisticated pop albums I’ve ever heard, with some of the very finest musicianship, and it’s bursting with intelligence. I would easily rank it my favorite Bobby Conn release, and as one of my top favorite albums, period. Sadly this one isn’t on Tidal, but it is on Spotify. Start with The Golden Age. It’s probably worth mentioning that one day when I was playing it, my wife, who is 99% of the time totally indifferent—if not openly hostile—to what music I’m playing, asked me what I was listening to and added “This is absolutely beautiful.”

It is but it’s a lot other things, too. Here’s an excerpt from a quite informed Amazon review for The Golden Age by Bill Your ‘Free Form FM Print DJ.

If you grabbed your favorite 1970s and 1980s influences, wrote structured songs, and then both piled these influences both alongside and on top of the other, you would sound like Bobby Conn.

If what I just described sounds like an artsy mess, buy Golden Age and hear that Conn’s music is anything but. Take “Angels,” an early Golden Age track. Conn maintains a three or four chord structure through “Angels,” but breaks the arrangements down into tiny fragments. First the song sound like a basic guitar track, then classical sounding strings take over in the guitar’s place, then Conn’s voice takes “Angels” steering wheel. He can sound like Curtis Mayfield one second, Bryan Ferry the next, Tim (or for that matter Jeff) Buckley the next.

But Conn’s mastery hear is not wearing a lot of musical hats in ambitious suites. If I wanted that, I’d take out any good—or awful—70s progressive rock album and play the mandatory side long track.

NO! What makes Conn so compelling is that the songs work as songs—just like the Beatles or Brian Wilson or Steely Dan (and yeah, he references those guys too.) He is a master at screwing the tiny parts of his tracks together so each supports the other and makes a cogent, 3-5 minute rock and roll song

Not that you are going to absorb it, or even be able to process it right away. There is A LOT going on in each of his songs, and you have to play the numbers a few times and A) listen attentively—i suggest a notepad and a protractor or B)-keep playing it on a casual basis until it gets into your head, where it is going to stay for a long time.

Verdict = truth. Bobby Conn’s songs, as complex and as complicated as they are, tend to be serious earworms.

Conn released an album about every three years, then there was a gap of five years, and ultimately of eight years. All of them are super strong albums. There’s no such thing as a “bad” Bobby Conn song. Like with Momus or Luke Haines, some songs just stand out more than others, but they’re all good and of a consistently high quality. Sadly, I see little to indicate that any of these dazzling albums sold more than a perfunctory number of copies. I know of but two other Bobby Conn fans, one who told me that when he’d seen Conn play live there might’ve been more people onstage than in the audience. Aside from the “Never Get Ahead” clip, none of his YouTube videos have racked up a significant number of views. Spotify tells you exactly how many listeners an artist gets and it’s the same story there. It must be depressing as fuck to be this talented and also to still remain fairly obscure after decades of trying. I think the pervy prostitute persona and the multiple levels of irony might confuse, or repel a lot of people, but for fuck’s sake, this character is INSPIRED. The songs make more sense and are much more interesting coming from “Bobby Conn” the same way “Five Years” made more sense coming from Ziggy Stardust. (David Bowie himself was a Bobby Conn fan and invited him to perform in London when he curated the Meltdown Festival in 2002.)

I was worried that maybe he’d stopped making music. From 2012 to 2020, there was no Bobby Conn album, just the unjustly ignored “Hollow Men” single. I’d only just discovered one of the greatest unheralded American musicians of my generation, he had to make more albums, if only JUST FOR ME!

When I got the press release about a new Bobby Conn album a couple of weeks ago, I (literally) said “FUCK YEAH!” It wasn’t just the best “rock” news I’d gotten in quite a while, it was great news to get especially now, as we’re all hunkered down in this pandemic. Immersing myself in a NEW Bobby Conn album became my most important, soon-to-be-gratified short term goal.

But before I get to that, let me backup first and call your attention to the jaw-dropping music video for “Hollow Men,” directed by the notorious Bruce LaBruce. This is a work of high art, if you ask me, and I urge you to watch it with the volume up loudly and giving it your full and undivided attention.
 

   
Amazing, right? Not everyone’s going to pick up on the T.S. Eliot and Lohengrin references, of course, but others will. It really doesn’t matter and should have no bearing on your enjoyment of the piece if you do or don’t. This is one of the best Bobby Conn songs, not just in eight years, but ever. Coupled with the video, it’s the very quintessence of his art. (And let me remind the reader that when I say “his” I mean to include Pomerleau/BouBou’s contributions, which are significant.) Interesting to note that the druggy male hustler persona of “early” Bobby Conn has now been updated as a middle-aged pervert.

Much more Bobby Conn after the jump…

 
My old pal Tom Negovan is the proprietor of the Century Guild, a Los Angeles-based art gallery, publishing company, fine art print maker and private museum specializing in Art Nouveau & Symbolism. He has what I, and many other people, consider to be one of the most unusual art businesses anywhere in the world. His interests are esoteric to say the least, and his talents for finding rare gems makes him a sort of cultural cross-pollinator of the highest order. He’s also a musician and a filmmaker. 

I saw Tom last fall at a wedding in Los Angeles and he told me about a new project he was engaged in, a recut of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s lone foray into cinema, the ill-fated and critically savaged X-rated epic Caligula and suggested maybe there was something there for Dangerous Minds.
 

 
Last week he told me over email about an amazing discovery he’d made:

I’m sure you know the general story: Bob Guccione took control of the production of Caligula, fired the director, and edited something with no sense of plot whatsoever. We have all 96 hours of original camera negative and all the location audio, and we are editing these to conform to Gore Vidal’s original script. This new version that we are titling Caligula MMXX will bear no resemblance to the 1980 version. The footage is brilliant; Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell actually made a good movie but no one’s ever seen it! (Malcolm has been saying this for 40 years in interviews.)

We are finding tons of odd rarities in the vaults: promotional items, interviews, and over 11,000 set photographs, nearly all of which have never been seen before. Mario Tursi took most of them, and we are compiling the best of them into a book. (One of the other photographers was Eddie Adams who took that award-winning photo of the Vietnamese guy getting shot in the head.)

There was even a proposed Caligula toy line(!!) if you can believe that. A company named Cinco Toys pitched Guccione, who never met a deal he didn’t like, on them getting a license to do a line of action figures. Star Wars action figures were making millions and apparently they pitched him pretty hard for this. Caligula‘s budget was twice that of Star Wars. They made a handful of prototypes for action figures. They even went so far as to make a spec TV commercial to woo Guccione to let them do this, which is extra insane. They made it like he (Guccione) would be (star) in the commercial himself and had someone do a VO as if they were Bob. And there it was on the shelf with the various drafts of the script. There was a 3/4” tape and a VHS of the same commercial with Cinco labels. They also wanted to do Caligula jigsaw puzzles.”

Obviously I had to see that! I asked Tom if he’d post it on YouTube for Dangerous Minds readers to see it, too. 

Here it is, folks:
 

Actor Peter Cushing in a contemplative moment playing his war games with his minature models.
 

“Television is a rather frightening business. But I get all the relaxation I want from my collection of model soldiers.”

—veteran actor Peter Cushing explaining his love of model soldiers in 1958.

The 2004 biography about his life, In All Sincerity, Peter Cushing, is a revealing read about the actor who, by all accounts, was one of the most gracious and kind people to ever work in film. Regarded as one of the UK’s finest actors, Cushing cut his remarkable acting chops early in life and, at the same time, pursued his love of drawing and art. While Cushing was still trying to make his name in cinema, he sold scarfs he hand-painted himself. In addition to painting watercolors, Cushing held on to a part of his childhood, collecting and painting model soldiers and trains. His love of miniature models would last his entire life, during which the actor would amass over 5,000 individual models (not toys mind you) of soldiers, trains, trees and landscape, horses, castles, historically accurate battle gear and more. All of which he painted by hand.

A proud member of the British Model Soldier Society, Cushing used his models for formal gameplay in accordance with H.G. Wells as outlined in his book Little Wars (1913), and its companion, Floor Games, published in 1911. Known as “hobby war games,” the games would take hours to complete, and (according to Cushing) if played to the letter, approximately nine hours would be consumed by one war game. The British Model Soldier society was formed in 1935 by a group of fifteen, all-male members (Wells denoted in his book that the games were to be played by boys between the ages of twelve to one hundred), who would meet up at a pub. Cushing was so serious about his therapeutic pastime he engaged the services of Frederick Ping—a pioneer of model soldier art. Considered a master of the medium, nearly all of Ping’s figures were forged from scratch, and in addition to Cushing, his figures were revered by aristocrats and the well-to-do. Cushing would commission Ping to create soldiers for him, which he would, in turn, paint meticulously by hand. The only thing more intriguing than the man who played Dr. Van Helsing, Victor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who and Grand Moff Tarkin are the photos and television footage of Cushing with his massive model collection.
 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Footage of Peter Cushing showing off his miniature models and soldiers.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Peter Cushing: A moving interview on love and death with the ‘Gentleman of Horror’
Vincent Price & Peter Cushing: On location filming ‘Madhouse’ in 1974
‘Dracula 1972 A.D.’: Behind-the-scenes with Christopher Lee in ‘Prince of Terror’
‘Twins of Evil’: Meet real-life sexy sisters the Collinson Twins

 
Although it’s my own personal favorite B-52s release, the 1982 EP produced by David Byrne known as Mesopotamia is generally thought of as being one of their least successful records. At least it was critically savaged when it first came out, but to my mind it contains their very best work. The hiring on of Byrne, then at the height of his creative powers, I thought was an inspired move on the band’s (or label’s) part. Byrne introduced the polyrhythmic beats of Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the signature sound of the “tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia’’ to great effect. I was a big Talking Heads fan, and a far bigger B-52s fan, so hearing elements of the Heads’ “Afro-Eno-era” sound melding with the wacky racket of the B-52s was heaven for me as a teenage rock snob. Byrne took the B-52s sound to a different place, and I felt nicely expanded on their sonic palette. The B-52s obviously felt differently, as Byrne was fired before a complete album could be recorded (hence why only an EP of the sessions was released).

Seriously, you have no idea how often I played this record. It falls into the “soundtrack of my life” category in a big way. But what many fans of the group do not know is that there are three very different versions of Mesopotamia: The “classic” shorter US/Warner Brothers EP version; the extended mix version mistakenly(?) released in Germany and in the UK by Island Records; and the 1991 CD version, which basically mixed David Byrne’s contribution right out of the proceedings…
 

 
The first two B-52s albums are classics, and to my mind perfect in every way, but a third album in that same style would have probably been one too many. Byrne’s involvement, for many fans and critics, took the band a little too far away from their inspired amateur beginnings. Perhaps, but who else but Byrne was capable of coming up with such amazingly funky polyrhythmic grooves back then? And haven’t the B-52s always been about the beat? David Byrne was on fire at that time creatively and was simultaneously working on his masterpiece score for Twyla Tharp’s Broadway ballet The Catherine Wheel. I’ve read that the B-52s felt that his production made them sound too much like Talking Heads, but hey, what a valid direction that was for them! True, certain elements of their signature sound were diminished (Ricky Wilson’s Venusian/spy-fi surf guitar for one, and Keith Strickland’s drums were crowded out by a drum machine), but other elements (Wilson’s striking use of dissonance in his compositions) are given freer rein with different instrumentation (like the nearly atonal “No Wave” brass section and sleekly synthesized bass lines) than the B-52’s normally employed. And it’s a much darker, dreamier vibe for them, for sure. Their sound was nicely expanded upon by Byrne’s “dubbier/trippier/hip hoppier” production approach, if you ask me, but the B-52s didn’t ask me, and it was their call, ultimately.

Still why not release a special collector’s edition of Mesopotamia with the original longer David Byrne mixes and the known outtakes: “Queen of Las Vegas,” (see below), the original “Big Bird” and “Butterbean” (both recut for Whammy) and the pretty Fred Schneider sung ballad “Adios Desconocida” (which you can hear here). In any case, the longer, “alt” David Byrne version of Mesopotamia, unavailable now for 40 years and never released on CD can be downloaded all over the Internet (it’s not hard to find). I don’t hate the 1991 remix of Mesopotamia, but I’d never choose to listen to it over either of the other versions. Ever. ‘Nuff said.

An absolutely slamming live “Mesopotamia” from the Rock Pop Festival, Dortmund, Germany, 1983:

 
Much more after the jump…