“I don’t really call myself a painter…I draw. So I draw my pictures, and then sometimes I paint them in, and sometimes I don’t. I’ve been doing this always, I’ve just never shown anybody. My drawing is like my meditation.
As a child, Stevie Nicks and her family never spent much time in one place. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, the Nicks family would move from Arizona to El Paso, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, making it difficult for Nicks to form long-term friendships. At the age of fourteen, while attending Arcadia High School, she met a girl who would change her life, Robin Snyder. Nicks would call her relationship with Snyder as the “only friendship she ever had.” Snyder would accompany Nicks on tour with Fleetwood Mac as her personal speech therapist. Nicks’ herself credits Snyder with helping her develop and maintain her resonating and unique vocal style:
“She (Robin) taught me how to sing. She taught me how to use my voice.”
The Nicks family would continue to move around, and she would end up meeting Lindsey Buckingham while she was a senior, and he a junior at Atherton High School in California. They would become an item and, in 1973 released the album Buckingham Nicks, a critical flop. But the pair’s fledgling effort was enough to give them visibility, and by 1975 they would be part of a newly revamped Fleetwood Mac. As the story of Fleetwood Mac’s combustible union is well told, let’s simply describe this romantically turbulent period of FM as just that. The band would persevere and produce the emotionally charged album Rumors, and later Tusk. Nicks would soon begin work on her first solo record, Bella Donna. They were doing boatloads of blow and enjoying their collective fame. When Bella Donna was released in July of 1981, it was an instant smash. This was also the year she found out her best friend, Robin, then 33, had been diagnosed with leukemia. She was also six months pregnant, and expecting her first child with her husband, Kim Anderson. Unwilling to terminate the pregnancy to undergo a more aggressive treatment, the baby would be born (by induction) three months prematurely. Robin would die two days later. Completely torn apart by grief, Nicks would marry Robin’s widower three months after Robin’s death, only to file divorce papers three months later.
According to Nicks, prior to Robin’s diagnosis, she had never drawn, much less painted anything. Following Robin’s death, Nicks would start drawing, initially, to help process the pain of her friend’s unimaginable passing. In 1981 she would create a piece specifically for her, “Robin-Rhiannon,” and more would follow. Nicks completed “Robin-Rhiannon” for her bedridden friend so she would always have something to look at when she was unable to be there.
In 2001 Nicks briefly spoke about her artwork, which she has continued throughout the decades, and of the possibility of putting out a coffee table book full of her illustrations and paintings. Until Stevie determines the world is ready for such a treasure chest, we can all treat our eyes to some of the work done by a young Stevie Nicks and her self-described “angels.”
“Robin-Rhiannon” (1981).
“Rhiannon,” another angelic piece by Nicks inspired by her friend Robin in 1982.
Clean cut, All-American crooner Gene Pitney was a massive star in the 1960s—and remained popular in Europe long after that—but, oldies radio aside, he is all but forgotten today in the country of his birth. Pitney possessed one of the most distinctive male voices of the 60s, a high-pitched, quavering vibrato that made his songs of unrequited love and losers promising to prove themselves to their women particularly moving.
Starting off as a songwriter—Pitney wrote “He’s a Rebel” for the Crystals and “Hello Mary Lou” for Rick Nelson—and recording engineer, Pitney racked up an impressive string of sixteen top forty hits. Along with but a small handful of American performers (Roy Orbison, Beach Boys, The Supremes) Gene Pitney not only survived the British invasion, but practically became an honorary member of it. In fact, he played piano on the first Rolling Stones album. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reciprocated by gifting him with “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” a top ten hit in Britain and the first hit song they would write together. (Pitney also had an affair with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, who allegedly said he was the “best lay” she ever had. She also called Pitney pompous and a “complete asshole” in her autobiography.)
In 2002, Gene Pitney was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He died in Cardiff, Wales in 2006 after a performance there. If you’re interested in a good “greatest hits” collection, you can’t go wrong with Rhino’s Gene Pitney Anthology 1961-1968.
For nearly sixty years, Belgian artist Jacques Charlier has been active in art in one form of another, and that includes music. In the 1980s, he put out two intriguing avant-pop albums that were only available on cassette. While those tapes have been rarely heard, there’s a new archival release that will hopefully shed light on his sensational songs.
In the 1970s, Charlier began playing a custom-made guitar treated with effects, and recording on a four-track. For Musique Regressive (1984) and Chansons Tristes (1987), Charlier added synthesizers, a drum machine, as well as occasional vocals (becoming more prominent on the second album), to create exciting, minimalist pieces that display the influence of many genres: synth pop, post-punk, rock, ambient, experimental electronic music, rockabilly—you get the picture.
A Jacques Charlier 45 of vintage recordings has just been released, a joint effort of the Séance Centre and Musique Plastique labels. Featuring the previously unavailable, enchanting dark wave number “Kiliwatch,” and backed with the curious, atmospheric blues track “Loulou,” from the Musique Regressive tape, the single is limited to just 150 copies, and is only available via the websites of Séance Centre and Musique Plastique. The record is a preview of a forthcoming Jacques Charlier compilation that will contain additional unheard material.
Much more after the jump, including a 1979 TV appearance of Jacques Charlier with his custom guitar…
Before Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud during the summer of 1938 in London, the great Surrealist artist had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to meet the revered psychoanalyst at his consulting rooms in Vienna. Dali had lacked the confidence to knock unannounced on Freud’s door and instead had wandered the cobbled strasse holding “long and exhaustive imaginary conversations” with his idol. He had also fantasised about bringing Freud back arm-in-arm to his room at the Hotel Sacher, imagining the great psychoanalyst “clinging to the curtains” while he babbled freely about his dreams, his sexuality, and his fears.
Dali had spent his teens and early twenties reading Freud‘s works on the unconscious, on sexuality and The Interpretation of Dreams. His inability to meet the psychoanalyst in Vienna suggests Dali was in some way terrified of Freud, as if this grand examiner of human behavior was capable of seeing straight through him like a believer might feel when coming face-to-face with God.
When Albert Einstein met Freud in 1927, it was a meeting of equals. Two men who were pioneers in their chosen professions yet who had no understanding of what the other did or why it was important. Einstein later said Freud knew as much about physics as he did about psychoanalysis and claimed he could not understand the point of analysis at all. When offered to be psychoanalyzed by the great headshrinker, Einstein had refused stating he preferred to remain in “darkness” about his own motivations.
Freud fled to London from Vienna after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. He had heard of how the Nazis had burned his books, but dismissed the seriousness of their actions by saying:
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.
His nonchalance was bluster. When there was a sudden rise in anti-semitic attacks in Vienna, Freud quickly made preparations to flee the country. He arrived in London in April 1938.
Because of their interest in dreams and the unconscious, it may have seemed obvious that Dali and Freud would have made natural friends, but Freud’s taste in art was strictly traditional and he was wary of the Surrealists after a run-in with André Breton in 1921.
Breton was deeply enamored with Freud’s work and had been inspired to develop a technique of “spontaneous” writing to give free expression to unconscious thoughts and desires. Unlike Dali, Breton had the confidence to turn-up unannounced at Freud’s door and thrust his genius on the great man. Freud was not impressed. His lack of enthusiasm caused Breton to later dismiss Freud as nothing more than a “general practitioner…an old man without elegance” working away in his shabby consulting rooms.
Despite this, Breton still credited Freud with pioneering work into the unconscious imagination in his Surrealist manifesto in 1924:
Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.
Dali did not have a manifesto, but he did have a painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus which he wanted to show Freud. The meeting between the two men was organized by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was also exiled in London.
Dali was just thirty-four. Freud, nearing the end of his life, was eighty-one. Dali arrived with his wife Gala and the art collector Edward James, who carried The Metamorphosis of Narcissus under his arm.
Dali was intimidated by the “father figure” Freud. His conversation was nervous and stilted. Freud asked if all Spaniards looked like him? If they did, then this might explain the Spanish Civil War. Freud’s joke fell flat. Dali later wrote that he wanted to be seen “a kind of dandy of universal intellectualism,” and be treated as an equal. As if showing his credentials, he presented Freud with a magazine that contained an article he had written about paranoia. Freud barely looked at it. Trying to interest him in the article, Dali explained;
...it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent.
Freud just stared “with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge.”
Then Dali revealed his painting, to which Freud said:
...in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious…
Dali was unsure what Freud meant and took his comment as criticism.
While small chat was exchanged between Freud, Gala and James, Dali began sketching. He suddenly saw Freud as a gastropod:
Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!
Dali’s drawing of Freud is now at the Freud Museum.
Dali thought his meeting with Freud a failure, but days later, Freud wrote Stefan Zweig:
I really have reason to thank you for the introduction which brought me yesterday’s visitors. For until then I was inclined to look upon the surrealists – who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint – as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol), cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.
Zweig never showed Freud Dali’s sketch of him, fearing the picture looked more like a skull than a snail.
Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali (1969) is a made for television documentary that captured the artist in fine fettle as he delighted in performing for the camera. Dali is seen indulging in his trademark mix of showman, clown and serious artist, hammering out a tuneless miaow on a cat piano (Dali associated pianos with sex after his father left an illustrated book on the effects of venereal diseases atop the family piano as a warning to the dangers of sexual intercourse); or sowing feathers in the air, as two children follow pushing the head of a plaster rhinoceros; or, his attempt to paint the sky. Directed by Jean-Christophe Averty, with narration provided by Orson Welles.
The subject of this post, Italian artist Paolo Girardi, is also a survivor, if not a warrior.
In a lengthy interview with the rock/metal oriented Bardo Methodology (#3), Girardi spoke about his childhood and the abuse he was subjected to at the hand of his own father, who would punch and kick his son. He would force Paolo into the sport of wrestling, and the experience initially had Girardi reliving his father’s systematic abuse. According to Girardi, as his father lay dying in 2007 he took the opportunity to tell his son he had “never done anything good in his life.” This final interaction would send Girardi off to prove his not-so-dear-old-Dad wrong. Later that same year, he would win a Bronze medal in the Freestyle Wrestling Nationals in Naples, Italy. His dedication to wrestling would work in tandem with his commitment to painting, a pursuit he had invested himself in during the 1990s, painting and creating artwork for local metal bands. By 2011 he was able to sustain himself financially with his art.
As of 2018, the self-taught Girardi has churned out delightfully blasphemous artwork for more than 100 albums, including Washington State bands Black Breath and Bell Witch, Power Trip (Dallas, Texas), and Italian black/death metal band Blasphemophagher. Aside from Girardi’s contributions to their music catalogs, his clients also have another thing in common; they are all completely fucking metal. And metal bands are the only clients Girardi, a former fresco builder, takes on. Girardi himself is the epitome of old-school heavy metal—he still wears t-shirts from his favorite bands (when he isn’t shirtless of course), has a few tattoos, drinks beer, and lives by the mantra that (the band) Manowar is his “religion.” Which, as long as wearing loincloths isn’t mandatory, seems like a lot more fun than swallowing the bilge of conventional religion.
If you’re a dedicated headbanger, you’ve likely seen Girardi’s work before. If not, then please prepare your eyes for the NSFW, super satanic work of Paolo Girardi.
Girardi’s cover artwork for ‘Slaves Beyond Death’ from Seattle band Black Breath (2005).
The cover of ‘Meditate to Kill,’ the 2013 album from French band Stav.
On January 21st, 1979, Blondie found themselves in a strange predicament. Canadian megaband Rush (R.I.P. Neil Peart) needed a last-minute opening act for their sold-out show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia—most likely New Jersey’s early-glam metal band Starz, or perhaps the opener from the previous night, Georgia band Stillwater had to cancel. It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that the unlikely pairing of the New York New Wavers and the Canadian rockers wasn’t what Rush fans were expecting that night, and they let Blondie know this the minute they walked out on stage.
Blondie had played the Spectrum before, opening a show for Alice Cooper in the summer of 1978. This gig also started off on shaky ground for Blondie as they were greeted by boos as well as one Cooper fan shouting “Boo Blondie off stage…they’re PUNK!” The crowd kept jeering Blondie, but, according to people at the show, by the time they ripped into their second song, the audience was hooked, and they finished their set, incident- and heckling-free. For some reason, Rush fans were not as well behaved as Alice’s (which seems weird in its own right, right?). There are several first-hand accounts posted by fans who were there, telling the story of what happened that night at The Spectrum, describing Deborah Harry getting pelted with glow sticks and more. And it wasn’t pretty like Deborah Harry. Not even close.
The Spectrum was packed to the gills with around 18,000 rock fans waiting to see their idols perform jams from their sixth album, Hemispheres. Blondie took the stage in front of a standing-room-only floor, and the audience immediately started to boo them. Ignoring the haters, they started their set. By the second song, objects were steadily flying at the stage. At one point, Harry leaned into the crowd during “One Way or Another” and was slapped by dozens of glow sticks.
I first became aware of the British pop-punk band the Flys by way of Superchunk’s 1990 cover of “Night Creatures.” Though obviously a stellar tune, it was many years before I actually heard the Flys. When I finally did, I discovered they had many other awesome songs. Recently, a collection consisting of their entire catalog, along with previously unavailable material, was put out. As this release is the definitive Flys compilation, it seemed like the right time to share some of my favorite tracks.
Up first is “Me and My Buddies,” taken from the Flys’ debut, A Bunch of Five, a DIY EP that came out in December 1977. The song is one of two numbers from the record that, surprisingly, didn’t appear elsewhere, as it’s got loads of punk energy and a super-poppy chorus. Another highlight of the EP, “Love and a Molotov Cocktail,” would be repurposed as the first Flys single for EMI Records in January 1978. Both songs were written and sung by Flys leader, Neil O’Connor.
“We Don’t Mind the Rave” opens their debut album for EMI, Waikiki Beach Refugees, out in October 1978. If Steve Harley and the Jam had ever collaborated, it probably would’ve sounded like this.
Though I had recognized the driving “Don’t Moonlight on Me” is catchy, I didn’t realize the song rose to the level of earworm status until I started waking up in the middle of the night with its chorus playing in my head.
When Patti Smith first met Judy Linn they were two young artists just starting out on their careers. It was one-nine-six-eight. Smith was a poet, born in Chicago, then raised in New Jersey. She’d worked in a factory, had given birth to a daughter in ‘67, given her up for adoption, moved to New York, where she met a young man called Robert Mapplethorpe.
Linn was a photographer, born in Detroit, who had come to New York to study at the Pratt Institute. She showed great promise, a natural flair, a real talent. She graduated with BFA in 1969.
After they met, these two young women worked together, collaborated, daydreamed, conspired to change the world. Some people set themselves goals. Write them down. Make a plan. Put the plan into action. Linn took photographs of the movies she and Smith created in their heads. It was the start of making their dreams real.
They were living in Chelsea Hotel. Linn was making money taking pictures for papers and magazines. Smith was working in a bookshop supporting Mapplethorpe.
Linn photographed Smith “because she was taking photographs of everything.”
I was eager to be Judy’s model and to have the opportunity to work with a true artist. I felt protected in the atmosphere we created together. We had an inner narrative, producing our own unspoken film, with or without a camera.”
We were two girls with no one to please.
Linn and Smith chose props and clothes to create their pictures. Some looked posed. Some look like they captured a moment of spontaneous intimacy. Unselfconsciously caught off-guard. Each picture presents an image of emotional truth. We’re in that moment with them, wondering what happens next. Here’s where their future began.
More of Judy Linn’s photographs of Patti Smith, after the jump…
It’s too bad words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘epic’ have been so overused by excitable film critics, because Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an actual epic masterpiece that is going to dominate the filmscape for decades.” - New York Asian Film Festival
“Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”—Film Four
Japanese auteur Sion Sono’s extraordinary 2008 film Love Exposure (“Ai no mukidashi”) is the epic—yet still whimsical—story of Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima), the “king of the perverts.” Yu is the ninja master of the “up skirt” photograph. After his mother dies, Yu’s father becomes a Catholic priest. He insists that his son confess his sins to him. Yu, a good boy, has nothing really to confess so he just makes stuff up that his father doesn’t even believe. Eventually he falls in with a new crowd and soon his transgressions are a bit more… sinful. Still, Yu himself is not aroused by his own panty shots and lives an otherwise chaste life as he patiently awaits the arrival of his one true love. He’s only “sinning” for the sake of his relationship with his father.
Yu loses a bet and he is obliged to dress as a woman and kiss a girl he likes. As the boys are goofing off, they come across a young girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), who is about to be attacked by a gang. Yu is instantly smitten with the beautiful Yoko and—still dressed as a woman—he jumps into the fight and together they kick the gang’s collective ass. To fulfill the conditions of the bet, Yu kisses Yoko who begins to think she is a lesbian and crushes hard on Yu’s disguise of “Miss Scorpion” (an obvious nod to the 70s Japanese women in prison Female Convict Scorpion film series) Yu believes he has finally met his one true love… and she thinks he’s a woman!
Yu then finds out that his father the priest has a new girlfriend and will be leaving the priesthood to marry her. Guess who his new step sister is going to be?
The entire first hour of the film—the title card appears 58 minutes in—is but a prologue, setting up what’s to come. The Aum Shinrikyo-like cult religion, the gory violence and the explosions all happen later…It’s a pretty epic love story as far as they go. Trust me, you have never seen THIS film before (or anything else even remotely like it). But you really need to.
I’d recommend Sono’s loopy masterpiece (and it is a masterpiece) to anyone with a taste for unusual world cinema, which is not to say it’s esoteric in any way, because it’s not. Love Exposure is a real crowd pleaser. It’s an event! It may run for four hours, true, but it felt like two, trust me, don’t be intimidated by the length. Even if someone doesn’t love it as much as I do, surely they would appreciate it. It’s such an unusual cinematic experience. And it’s great fun. When it was over, I was sad there wasn’t more. When’s the last time you felt that way about a four hour film? Feel that way about Ben Hur or The Irishman?
A trailer for Sino Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ with English subtitles. I can’t say that it’s successful at getting the film’s point across, but that would just be impossible.
It didn’t take but a minute after the film had ended for me to jump online and try to buy the film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t exist as such, but aside from a bit of Beethoven’s “Symphony No.7 in A Major” and Ravel’s “Bolero” the entire four hour film’s soundtrack consists of three amazing songs by the long running Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku (“The Wobbling Empire”). These same three songs are played over and over and over again. After four hours, they are drilled into your DNA for life.
Although I personally had never heard of them before, Yura Yura Teikoku were around from 1989 to 2010. They are one of the very few “underground” groups in Japan ever to become a major commercial act. They almost never played outside of Japan, and were, and still are, criminally obscure outside of their homeland. I’ll try to describe their sound, but it’s sort of pointless as Yura Yura Teikoku cover so much territory from song to song. They’re intense, but they’re melodic. At times the trio—who describe their own music simply as “psychedelic rock”—sound like Can crossed with Phish. Or early Flaming Lips doing a spaghetti western theme. Other times they remind me of a 60s garage rock band like The Sonics, but the next song will sound like Lloyd Cole. The one after that sounds like the lovechild of Neu! and the Grateful Dead. Or even the Ventures channeled through Ennio Morricone or a combination of Pink Floyd with The Blow Monkeys! Suffice to say, they are all over the map musically, from heavier riff-based guitar rock to prettier tunes that would make a great soundtrack for a picnic on a sunny day. From hard-rock workouts that will crush your head to things that you would whistle along with. Black Sabbath to Burt Bacharach on the same album, if not the same song.
The one area of commonality that nearly ALL of Yura Yura Teikoku’s music has—trust me, because I’ve been positively gorging myself on it lately—is that their songs posses a quality that make them sound uncannily familiar. The three songs featured so prominently in Love Exposure are especially adept earworms. Have a listen to my new favorite band, Yura Yura Teikoku. Chances are that they might become your new favorite new band, too.
Even if you don’t know the Chiffons by name, if you have spent any time with oldies radio, you’re surely familiar with some or all of the girl group’s hits, which include “One Fine Day,” “I Have A Boyfriend,” and “He’s So Fine” (the latter spent four weeks at #1 in the spring of 1963). The Chiffons were certainly popular for a period, but then the British Invasion happened in early 1964, and the hits dried up. In an attempt to get back on the charts, a bold Chiffons record was produced, one that combined an established formula with the sound of the future.
“Nobody Knows What’s Goin’ On (In My Mind But Me)” was written by Brute Force (born Stephen Friedland), who was working with the Chiffons’ producers, the doo-wop group the Tokens (they’re best known for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”). “Nobody Knows” is a big production, with brass and strings, and features an arrangement that’s both dramatic and fantastic. This song of defiance was released as a single in May of 1965 on Laurie Records, and slowly worked its way up Billboard’s Hot 100 chart that summer, before eventually stalling at #49 in August, rendering it a minor hit.
“Nobody Knows What’s Goin’ On (In My Mind But Me)” is an astonishing blend of the girl group genre with a style of music that had yet to take root: psychedelic. Ultimately, the track wasn’t just an attempt to bring the Chiffons up to date with what was happening in popular music at that moment, but a step forward—it was ahead of its time. It’s a wonderfully strange song that frequently sounds somewhere between dreamy and haunting.
The Chiffons did have a final hit with the more conventional, Motown-like, “Sweet Talkin’ Guy,” which made the Top 10 in 1966.
Performing “Nobody Knows What’s Goin’ On (In My Mind But Me)” on a TV show (possibly Shindig!):
Miming the song in the 1966 film Disk-O-Tek Holiday:
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