For many of us, 2016 has been an especially shitty year, an annus horribilis of epically epic proportions that began with the death of David Bowie (an especially low note for humanity, I think we can all agree on that) and went straight downhill from there, picking up speed before going SPLAT! like an egg on the sidewalk last week. My own personal year of unmitigated Hell had started a few weeks earlier, a year ago today in fact—November 16, 2015—when my good friend, the genius painter, architect and futurist inventor Paul Laffoley died at the age of 75.

Like many of Paul Laffoley’s friends and admirers, I was at least gratified to know that he’d died deeply satisfied with his life’s work, and the acclaim his visionary art had seen in recent years from major museums around the world, the result of tireless and heroic efforts on the part of his longtime gallerist Douglas Walla of Kent Fine Art in New York City. In May of this year, upon publication of the University of Chicago Press book The Essential Paul Laffoley: Works from the Boston Visionary Cell, I asked Doug if he’d found anything interesting when he was in Boston sorting through Paul’s belongings after his death:

He had always told me stories about time spent constructing violins. I was amazed to find one of his violins on a top shelf.  AND, perhaps most importantly, strewn amongst hundreds of boxes of bills and junk mail, I found about FIFTY handwritten journals of profound significance. I had been asking Paul for his journals for 20 years, and he had only found and gave to me about 6 or 7, five of which I gave to the Henry Art Gallery for publication in their book Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque.  I had no idea there were FIFTY journals along with voluminous notes and correspondence.  None were filed, or carefully segregated. They were just scattered among the vast piles of paper.

 

 
Turns out there were even more than that. These journals are now being made available to the public—starting today—via a newly launched website The Paul Laffoley Archive:

On the first anniversary of the death of Paul Laffoley, the Boston visionary artist and luminary, we have assembled and are launching today a second website documenting his written texts and journals. After Paul’s death, we discovered over 120 handwritten journals on Visionary Art,  Meta Energy, Dante, Dimensionality, Death-Life, Time Travel, and his naming of the Bauharoque period of history we are now experiencing. Not only was Laffoley a unique and dedicated artist, I believe he was an intellectual of great depth and curiosity. We hope that we have done Laffoley’s legacy justice by making his writings available to the public.

I’ve seen several of Paul’s handwritten (and nearly all of these were written out in longhand) essays in the past (one of the pieces posted on the new website was originally written for my Book of Lies occult anthology in 2003) and to have access now to ALL of his writing, I felt positively giddy clicking around it this morning. It’s a treasure trove of strange, challenging and mind-tickling ideas. You can crash land into any of these journals and be absolutely astounded by his dazzlingly erudite, cosmic, occult and scientific ideas. There are essays about the Symbolist movement; his plans for a working time machine; his ideas on the principles of Alchemy and much more. Most of the essays are presented as scans of his carefully formed and highly distinctive handwriting in PDF format.

Buy The Essential Paul Laffoley: Works from the Boston Visionary Cell on Amazon.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
It was just a year and a half ago that my colleague Ron Kretsch was lamenting that there appeared to be “no new music in the offing yet” from Jesus and Mary Chain, this while in the throes of a 30th anniversary tour of Psychocandy.

Well, Ron can guardedly commence a process of rejoicing, as this morning the following tweet appeared in the feed of Creation Records:
 

JAMC will drop their new record March 2017. ...............................on Warners of course!

— Creation Records (@creationrecords) November 16, 2016

 
In an interview with CBC Music yesterday, Creation Records’ co-founder Alan McGee confirmed that the Scottish band will be releasing a new album in March 2017. His exact words were: “New album coming. It’s coming out end of next March. It’s kinda enormous!”

Jesus and Mary Chain put out several albums between its legendary debut album Psychocandy in 1985 and Munki in 1998. In 2003 JAMC released Live In Concert on Strange Fruit, and just last year the band put out Barrowlands Live, a document from November 2014 of the 30th anniversary Psychocandy tour. 

More after the jump…

 
There’s something very alluring about secret codes intended to transmit a message of solidarity to a select few. Just recently in the wake of the presidential election, a significant number of people have adopted the practice of wearing a safety pin as a sign of resistance to President-Elect Trump and as a message of support to groups likely to be marginalized under a Trump administration such as African-Americans, Muslims, and women. Gee thanks, white people.

One example of this that I learned about recently was the Japanese practice of wearing militaristic propaganda in a way that only close friends and family would be in a position to notice—on ornate, specially designed kimonos. They were mainly reserved for inside the home or at private parties. Since the designs were often on undergarments or linings, a host would show them off to small groups of family or friends. These “propaganda kimonos” are called omoshirogara—denoting “interesting” or “amusing” designs—and were popular from 1900 to 1945, and for the first half of that period they had little to do with warfare.

For instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, many omoshirogara featured a bright consumerist future with gleaming art deco cityscapes and chugging locomotives and ocean liners. In the late 1920s, however, conservative and ultra-nationalist forces in the military and government started to assert themselves. In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and installed a puppet regime there, marking the start of a period of extreme militaristic nationalism and aggression as well as isolation from the West.

Norman Brosterman is one of the world’s foremost collectors of propaganda kimonos, and his website is a trove of arresting imagery. All of the kimonos depicted on this page come from his collection. He writes:
 

The Japanese tradition of pictures on garments took an insidious turn in 1895 and 1905 with the Sino-Japanese, and Russo-Japanese Wars, when kimono were first made with images of troops, cannon, and battleships. In the 20th century, kimono with a plethora of themes were produced – travel, sports, politics, fashion, and in the 1930’s, an outpouring of imagery of war. From 1931 and the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, until Pearl Harbor and the complete war footing it necessitated, Japanese propaganda in the form of clothing for men, boys, and more rarely, women, was produced and worn in Japan in support of the efforts overseas.

 
Here are some excellent specimens of the form:
 

This boy’s kimono with an image of a streamlined car.
 

This detail from a kimono from 1933 depicts the popular figures of “the Three Brave Bombers,” real-life soldiers who perished while laying explosives to clear out the enemy’s barbed wire defenses.
 
Many more remarkable kimonos after the jump…......

You can buy a signed replica of this jacket on Kenneth Anger’s website

After Kenneth Anger fired Jimmy Page from his long-delayed Lucifer Rising film project and then publicly bad-mouthed the Led Zeppelin guitarist during a bitchy press conference, the magus of cinema turned again to imprisoned Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil, who had been his original choice to record the film’s music. This was before the two had a falling out in 1969 and before Beausoleil was charged with the murder of music teacher Gary Hinman over a drug deal gone bad. He’d been in prison since 1970, but when he’d heard that Anger had sacked Page, Beausoleil contacted Anger to inform him that he had the means (and the latitude from a liberal warden at Tracy Prison) to be able to record the soundtrack.

The extraordinarily weird music Beausoleil produced with his Freedom Orchestra (which also included another imprisoned Manson Family member Steve “Clem” Grogan on guitar) matched Anger’s occult vision perfectly, producing a stunning masterpiece. Additional music recorded by Beausoleil and the Freedom Orchestra was released as a box set in 2005 as The Lucifer Rising Suite (Original Soundtrack and Sessions Anthology) and is highly recommended.

Yesterday some video appeared on Bobby Beausoleil’s YouTube channel of an astonishing live performance by the Freedom Orchestra at Tracy Prison contemporaneous to when they were actually recording the Lucifer Rising soundtrack. Some of what was performed here, I believe is exactly what we hear on the soundtrack. Last month, Beausoleil, currently serving his life sentence in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, had another bid for parole denied by the California Parole Board. He’s now 69 years old.

If you are a Kenneth Anger fan, prepare to have your fucking mind blown, after the jump…

 
Some drivers in parts of China are so fed up with tailgating high-beam users that they’ve resorted to using these freaky as shit rear window decals that are only visible when the high-beam is flicked on. The ghoulish decals feature images of ghosts, spirits and monsters from Eastern and Hollywood films.

According to reports based out of Jinan, police are ticketing folks who are using the creepy decals. (If you weren’t prepared to see a ghostly face staring right back at you, I could understand how these just might cause an accident.)

The makers of the decals swear you can’t see them at night and only when the high-beam headlights are used. I have no idea if this is true or not. Apparenlty they’re selling like hotcakes at rather inexpensive prices; between $3 - $18 here.

 

 
More after the jump…

 
At first glance Memo: How to be a Super Secretary may look like some jokey merchandizing for a Betty Grable movie. Closer inspection reveals this slim pamphlet to be a genuine guide compiled by “renowned typist and secretary” Olga Elkouri as to what bosses look for in their secretaries.

Sometime in the mid-1940s, Miss Elkouri traveled across America asking various high powered executives what qualities they desired most in their secretaries. This was more than just typing, dictation and, you know, being good at their job. These bosses wanted wanted to hire secretaries who dressed smartly, who had “pleasant dispositions.” Women who can “stay cheerful” even when their boss is “grouchy, work piles up, and everything goes wrong.” Women who “look beautiful over the telephone” who “listen with undivided attention” and keep their “boss’s desk and office neat…his calendar up-to-date, his desk supplied with sharp pencils, erasers and blotters and his pen filled.”

These secretaries were silent about their own troubles—always “fair and sunny” and ready to protect their chief “no matter how [they] feel.”

The more important an executive, the more gracious, considerate, and democratic he is. The same ought to be true of his secretary. Your job is so big you cannot afford to be haughty. Be indispensable…but don’t let on you think that you are!

~snip~

You hide your light.

If you originate a good idea, you give credit to your boss because you advance with him. You give credit to others when it’s due…sometimes when it’s not, just to keep them happy!

~snip~

You are loyal

You put the interests of your boss first…even above your own. You speak of him always, to everyone, in terms of respect…

You carry the torch…give him encouragement when he is feeling low…put up with his bad humor when he has to let off steam…make him feel he’s a pretty wonderful person.

Super secretaries must also avoid their boss’s pet peeves like chewing gum, wearing bobby socks, arguing, being too noisy, emotional or moody, and worst of all not being lady-like enough.

Published by the Remington Rand Corporation in 1945, there are now only two “known” copies of this pamphlet—one held by Denver Library, the other by Hagley Digital Archives. Who knows this may yet make a comeback as the kind of office advice required to work for our alt-right overlords?
 

 

 
More sexist tips on how to be a pleasant and pleasing to the eye office drudge, after the jump…

Hello in the early 70s.
 
If after reading the title of this post you just felt your heavy metal spidey sense acting up then congratulations. This means you already know that London-based glam rockers Hello were the first band to record the impossibly earwiggy jam “New York Groove” popularized by Ace Frehley of KISS on his 1978 solo record.

Getting together while still in their teens, dreamy denim enthusiast and Peter Frampton-esque frontman Bob Bradbury hooked up with drummer Jeff Allen (who also happened to be the sibling of Chris Cross, later the bassist for Ultravox), Keith Marshall and Vic Faulkner and Hello was born sometime during the year 1971. During the next few years the band would fall victim to a bizarre series of missed opportunities when it came to scoring a hit, though in 1974 the band reversed some of that bad luck and chalked up one in the win category with “Tell Him,” an Exciters cover. Then another lucky break came Hello’s way thanks to Russ Ballard, who in addition to his numerous songwriting and production credits scored a couple of hits of his own during his time with the group Argent, “Hold Your Head Up,” and “God Gave Rock and Roll to You.”

Before Ballard left Argent the band opened a few shows for KISS in 1974. Ballard left prior to the completion of the tour and ended up producing and playing guitar for Roger Daltrey’s 1975 solo record Ride a Rock Horse. Upon Ballard’s suggestion, the decision was made to master that record at Sterling Sound in New York. During his long plane trip from London, Ballard ended coming up with the phrase “I’m back in the New York Groove” which he would later work into “New York Groove.” While at Sterling, Ballard connected with Hello on the recommendation of his brother who had just seen the teens tear it up at a live gig. Hello recorded “New York Groove” which ended up breaking the Top 10 in the UK. Ace Frehley put his own twist on “New York Groove” and the song would help propel sales of Frehley’s solo record, the most successful of the four solo releases put out by the original members of KISS in 1978. The “New York Groove” single charted within the Top 20.

Hello would enjoy a short time in the spotlight even moving their base of operations to Germany (where audiences were digging on them more than in the UK) before calling it quits in 1979. Full disclosure—I LOVE all things glam rock and Hello is no exception to my cool rule. I’ve included four of Hello’s jams in this post which showcase the band performing (or lipsynching) “New York Groove,” “Tell Him,” “Star Studded Sham,” and “Love Stealer.” In other good news for your ears Cherry Red Records has just released a four-CD box set that contains pretty much everything the band ever recorded, 74 tracks in all. As Cherry Red said in their press release it’s a “long overdue” collection of great glam from the past that if you just might have missed.

Bob Bradbury still tours with the most recent lineup of Hello.
 

 

Hello doing ‘New York Groove.’
 
More Hello after the jump…

Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke looking a bit confused about how the band ended up on German music television program ‘Musik Convoy.’
 
As a frequent flier on the astral plane that is the Internet I never get tired of flipping through pages upon pages of YouTube in search of footage worthy of sharing with all you Dangerous Minds music fanatics. I cannot lie, I feel like I’ve hit the motherfucking JACKPOT today when it comes to these amazing clips that are also somewhat amusingly strange. And that’s because you are about to see musical gods like Nick Cave, Killing Joke, The Damned and Billy Idol lip-synching for their very lives back in the 80s on the short-lived German music television show Musik Convoy.

Musik Convoy was only on the air for a year but during that time they managed to get quite the cast of characters to “perform” on the show including a 1984 visit by The Cure who performed “Shake Dog Shake” with a beautifully disheveled Robert Smith, his signature red lipstick and hair askew. There are so many strange moments from the collection of videos in this post I just can’t pick a favorite. Like Nick Cave pretending to belt out an emotive version of “In The Ghetto” when you know—and he knows that you know—that he’s totally faking it. Or Billy Idol literally dancing with himself for two-plus minutes while miming “Eyes Without a Face,” or Robert Smith’s distinct indifference with his strange white microphone during another of the Cure’s appearance on the show. And since I’m feeling generous I also threw in twelve-minutes of the Ramones from Musik Convoy performing in front of a mostly solem, confused looking crowd of “fans” and soldiering through four songs: “Howling at the Moon,” Mama’s Boy,” “Wart Hog,” and “Chasing the Night.” I’ve said it before, the 80s were certainly full of fantastically weird times.
 

Nick Cave performing ‘In the Ghetto’ on ‘Musik Convoy,’ 1984.
 
More lip-syncing with the bad boys, after the jump…

 
I don’t expect that many people think of Phoenix, AZ, as a nerve center of punk rock. My go-to Phoenix bands have long been the Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, and The Feederz, but that’s been about the extent of my knowledge of that city’s contributions. Little did I know that it was a hub where a surprising number of crucial spokes met.

The Exterminators were a short-lived Phoenix punk band whose existence has long eluded the outside world. They existed only in 1977 and 1978 and never released a single note of music, but its members went on to play in The Germs (drummer Don Bolles), 45 Grave (bassist Rob Graves, Bolles), The Gun Club (Graves), The Feederz (singer Dan “Johnny Macho” Clark), and Mighty Sphincter (guitarist Doug “Buzzy Murder” Clark). The only known surviving documents of the band were a raw sounding and totally unheard cassette recording of a 1978 gig, and a few songs, among them “Bionic Girl” and “Destruction Unit,” which Dan Clark brought with him to the Feederz, and which appeared on their debut Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?. This gap in the historical record has been corrected: Slope Records, a Phoenix-based archival label with a local focus, has released Product of America, a brand-new recording of that 1978 material by the original band, minus the deceased Mr. Graves (RIP 1990, many punk points awarded for pseudonymous irony), whose spot has been filled by another Phoenix lifer, Cris Kirkwood of The Meat Puppets.

The album is a primal emission of toxic hate-noise, recorded quickly so as to preserve the younger band’s raw directness, though it’s being played by now-seasoned musicians almost 40 years after the fact of the songs’ creation (though when we chatted, Bolles wisecracked that just because he’s made a lot of music doesn’t mean he’s learned to play). It contains “Bionic Girl” and “Destruction Unit,” plus 14 other blasts of malice, with themes ranging from sexual depravity to nihilistic politics. Dangerous Minds was privileged to speak with Bolles and Kirkwood about the early Phoenix scene (such as it was), the formation of The Exterminators, and the circumstances that led to the release of Product of America.
 

 
Cris Kirkwood: The Exterminators were a band from about 77-78, and I never saw them when they were active. Derrick Bostrom, the Meat Puppets’ original drummer, was a lot more hip to the local scene, and once I started hanging around with him I became aware of things that had happened before I started playing. My first Phoenix punk rock show was this thing called “Trout-O-Rama” and one of the band’s was the Brainz, which was Doug Clark’s band, and he was “Buzzy Murder” in The Exterminators. He was friends with someone I’d gone to grade school with, and eventually I got to be friends with Doug and his brother Dan, who was “Johnny Macho” in The Exterminators. 

Don Bolles:There wasn’t really a punk scene at that time, just this band The Consumers, which I tried to be in but I wasn’t a good enough. I tried to start things in Phoenix but nobody else I knew was into punk, except Paul Cutler and David Wiley of The Consumers. I’d moved back to Phoenix from an unsuccessful foray to San Francisco, and I called Paul and David to see if anything was happening, and they said their bass played had been hit by a car, and I said “Well, I just got a bass. How about I come and jam out with you guys?” So I went to play with them, and those guys were GOOD. They had like 50 amazing songs, and they were super tight. But I was so terrible. One day I showed up for practice and they hid from me, and I could hear them snickering behind the kitchen door.

We started having all these other weird bands with all the same people. There was The Consumers, there was my band Crazy Homicide, and there were like five other people, and that was our “punk scene.” We started doing shows, and then I started hearing about this other band, and I was livid that I wasn’t in it. They were called The Exterminators and they were really young. They had done a show already and the cops had come. The Exterminators had covered themselves in Saran wrap and tinfoil and painted themselves, and this was at a pool party and there were police helicopters, and it was total chaos. They needed a a drummer, so I borrowed a drum set, which was tough, because nobody wanted me to use theirs because when I played drums I’d break them, but I dragged some drums over to this storage warehouse where they rehearsed, and they were like 14, 15 years old. I tried out with this broken stuff, and I guess it still sounded good because I was in the band. Then they lost their bass player, so I got Rob Graves to play with us. He had a bass, and their guitar player was this crazy kid, Buzzy Murder, and the singer was his brother, Johnny Macho. They were actually Dan and Doug Clark.

Kirkwood: There’s this guy in Phoenix, Tom Lopez, and he came up in the Phoenix punk rock scene, and he managed to get himself in a financial position to be able to start a record label, so he started Slope Records to kind of document the old Phoenix punk rock stuff that was happening. It was a part of his early experience and he was working on a record with Doug, who was in Mighty Sphincter. Tom was asking about the older stuff that had happened before, and Doug brought up The Exterminators as a sort of infamous band that had caught on to that whole thing early on.

Bolles: I didn’t know Tom, I moved out before he was old enough to actually meet people, I was 21 when I moved out of Phoenix. But Doug called me up and told me “this guy wants to put out an Exterminators album. Me and Danny and you, and Cris Kirkwood would play bass.” So I talked to Tom, who flew me out to Phoenix and put me up—in the fucking Clarendon hotel, which has a bust of the real Don Bolles, who was murdered there [Clarification: Bolles’ real name is James Giorsetti, he took his stage name from an Arizona journalist who was killed by a car bomb in 1976]—and I went and recorded all The Exterminators’ songs from back then. All the songs. We tried to do them as faithfully as we could. I had a tape of one of our shows. I had a rehearsal tape for a while but I lost it, probably in the ‘90s.

Kirkwood: A cassette still existed of an entire Exterminators show, from like ’78, and Tom had the idea of recording the songs, but Rob Graves, the bass player, is unfortunately no longer with us, so I was asked to play bass. Some of the songs are kind of Phoenix punk rock classics that had been recorded by other bands, so I knew them. With very little practice, we went into the studio—we had one practice day with the full band and on the same day we did a photo shoot—and it came up surprisingly cohesive. It was funny, Doug was like 15 when they had the band, and here we are, pretty seasoned players, doing this batch of youthful songs that had never been recorded, and now we’re these old farts taking a stab at them. It was a very fun, very fucking satisfying experience, and it came out well.

Keep reading after the jump…

Photo: Damien de Blinkk

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that there’s been a recent national (or even international) event so seismically disturbing that your entire worldview has crashed on the rocks of Reality Beach, a well-tended waterfront property under the maintenance of a bunch of mean-faced racist and xenophobic rich old white men in their 70s with much younger wives.

More than once, during particularly stressful times in my life, I’ve gone into a well-stocked record store to ask someone whose opinion I respected to recommend something by a non-mainstream artist who I might’ve missed, but whose work would blow my mind and draw me deep into its mystery, to move my head from the place it was in to someplace else. It almost doesn’t matter where. Makes sense, right? The power of music. A therapy of sorts. A diversion. A solace. A form of self-medication. Prayer, even.

Can’t be anything frivolous. It has to transport you. Change your mood. Change your mind. Transform you. It must be magical. Holy. It’s got to move you from here to there.

The “correct” response to my record store query might be something like “Well, have you gone through a Sun Ra phase yet?” “Do you have the Faust box set?” or recommending both of these Big Youth anthologies.

My prescription for what psychically ails you? Do take me up on this sage advice, I promise you my rock snob reader that it will work: Trials Of Eyeliner: Anthology 1979-2016, the newly released and truly magnificent 10-CD, 189 track anthology of the life’s work of Marc Almond.

Trials of Eyeliner, I reckon is one of the most essential box sets of the day, an all-killer, no-filler jam-packed to the bursting point celebration of one of our greatest living vocalists, a singular talent who will never be equaled or topped in the niche that he created for himself as the ultimate gay torch singer/diva. And this is the definitive study of Marc Almond’s work, chosen by the artist himself, with singles, deep cuts and unreleased numbers from his collaborations with David Ball in Soft Cell, the Marc and the Mambas/Willing Sinners/La Magia period with Anni Hogan, solo work and duets with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell, Jimmy Sommerville, Gene Pitney and PJ Proby. Packaged in a slick, glossy box with a copiously annotated hardback book, it’s a luxurious item, but one with a very reasonable price (around $80-90). Want something to lose yourself in musically? This is it.
 

Photo by Pierre et Gilles

I’ve been a massive Marc Almond fan for pretty much the span of his entire career, from the first Soft Cell album onward and I have to say that there are few disappointments, in terms of tracks not included on Trials of Eyeliner, although I can still think of a few dozen off the top of my head. These 10 CDs make a very, very clear—and as far as I am concerned unequivocal and definitive—musical argument that Marc Almond is one of the greatest artists of our age, a one-of-a-kind vocal talent who will probably be ranked alongside of Frank Sinatra, Nick Cave, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf and even Judy Garland by future generations of musical historians for a unique ability to breathe life, but also unutterable grief into a sad song. His decidedly homoerotic artform also compares to French poet and revolutionary Jean Genet, but I believe Marc Almond will ultimately achieve a stature far greater than Sartre’s “Saint Genet” as a pioneering gay artist of the 20th century when all’s said and done.

And I gotta say, I can only imagine what Marc Almond himself thought when he got his own copy of Trials of Eyeliner. He must’ve been fucking pleased. All in one place like this? It’s a staggering accomplishment.

Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite things on Trials of Eyeliner. Truth be told, I love pretty much everything on it.

The quintessance of Marc Almond’s artistry is on display here in his heart-breaking performance of Charles Aznavour’s “What Makes a Man a Man?”
 
Much more Marc after the jump…