Public Image Ltd live at the Palladium, NYC, April 20, 1980 (photo by Rob Pistella via Fodderstompf)
 
I confess that I haven’t yet read Jah Wobble’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Geezer, though it’s been sitting on my desk for a month. If I’m apprehensive, it’s only because the last book I read with as promising a title was I, Shithead, and that turned out to be a disappointment because Joey Shithead only has nice things to say about people.

But Martin Scorsese’s name did jump out as I was turning the pages of Wobble’s book, trying to figure out why some paragraphs are set in italics (as below). I didn’t solve that mystery, but I did learn that Scorsese met with Lydon and Wobble about recording the soundtrack to Raging Bull. One can only begin to imagine what a different movie Raging Bull would have been with a soundtrack by Metal Box-era PiL in place of the one Robbie Robertson produced.

Wobble says Scorsese was in the audience at Public Image Ltd’s first New York show, the start of a two-night engagement at the Palladium in April of 1980. And suddenly they were having a showbiz meeting in Marty’s penthouse, and Marty was giving a manic reading of Harry Lime’s famous monologue from The Third Man:

Martin Scorsese was making a film, Raging Bull, and he wanted to have a meet in regard to us doing the soundtrack. I went to meet him with John. We ended up sitting in a penthouse apartment with Scorsese; because of the combination of my first-ever jet lag, speed comedown, booze and general tour weirdness, I was very spaced out (I think I must have had a puff as well). My memory is a bit hazy, but I seem to remember that John left soon after we arrived with some biggish geezer who worked for Scorsese. I don’t know where they went. They may well have explained where they were going, but in the state I was I in I probably just grinned inanely at them. So anyway, I was left in the apartment with Scorsese. I was very happy because the bloke was an absolute hero to me. Taxi Driver, as far as I was concerned, was a masterpiece. Paul Schrader wrote the incredible screenplay. Apparently, Schrader was brought up in a strictly Calvinist household, and didn’t see a movie until he was eighteen; he’s a very interesting bloke. The soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann is also something I never tire of.

Scorsese was a like a cat on a hot tin roof, just couldn’t sit still. He was jabbering away like crazy. I recall him beckoning me to the window. He pointed down at the people milling around on Broadway. (We were several floors up in a skyscraper.) He asked me if I would care if ‘one of those little “dots” suddenly stopped moving’. I immediately knew what he was on about; he was reciting Orson Welles’ speech from Carol Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, the one where Orson is on the Ferris wheel and goes on about ‘the Renaissance’, ‘cuckoo clocks’, ‘the Borgias’ and ‘Switzerland’. Basically Scorsese did a performance. He was very wired and his delivery was far more urgent and imploring than Orson’s. His face was no more than two feet from mine.

I certainly wasn’t disappointed with Scorsese, he more than lived up to any expectations that I had. To tell the truth I don’t like all his films but when I do I love them; Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, Casino, Last Temptation and Kundun are the ones for me.

I can’t remember how the encounter ended, but eventually John came back. I dimly remember Raging Bull being discussed, the storyline and all that. I don’t think they showed us scenes from the film or anything. I vaguely remember thinking that they weren’t really serious. Anyway, we never did the soundtrack for Raging Bull.

More after the jump…

Scene from Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 “Blood Feast”
 
This September horror and exploitation film fans mourned the death of the “Godfather of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Lewis, originally known as a producer of “nudie” pictures in the early ‘60s, became a horror trailblazer with 1963’s Blood Feast, considered to be the first “gore” film. That film about an Egyptian caterer who prepares a feast of human body parts became a drive-in sensation and was quickly followed up by the hillbilly splatter epic Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red, the story of an artist who paints in human blood.

Lewis continued to direct outrageous low-budget films into the early ‘70s, including the splatter classics The Wizard of Gore and The Gruesome Twosome as well as other types of non-gore exploitation fare such as the biker girl-gang flick She Devils On Wheels and the juvenile delinquency opus Just For the Hell of It. 

Lewis’ Blood Feast was completely ground-breaking for its time, bringing the Grand Guignol tradition of blood and guts to the screen, and setting the stage for the new era of splatter horror which didn’t really come into its own until the late ‘70s. The film’s villain, Fuad Ramses, was the original machete-wielding maniac.

An unbelievably jam-packed box set of Lewis’ films was announced by Arrow Video last July in a limited edition of 500 copies and despite the hefty price tag, I found myself pre-ordering the thing right away. I was planning to review the set upon release, not knowing that Lewis would die a couple of months later and that the set would actually completely sell out before I got my copy.

The full Shock and Gore set is truly a wonder to behold and I don’t really want to rub it in to our readers just how cool this out-of-print beast is. Though anyone who reads about this and just HAS TO HAVE ONE, can probably find one on the second-hand market. Be warned, they are selling for about double the original cost (as of this writing, there are copies on eBay for around $500).
 

The box is bigger than a human head.
 
There IS, however, a lighter version of the set, without the books and barf bags and poster reproductions, and fake eyeball, that just contains the fourteen films. It’s called The Feast and is still currently available for under $160.

I’ll tell you right now, the price tag is TOTALLY worth it if you are a fan. The fourteen films, Blood Feast, Scum of the Earth, Two Thousand Maniacs, Moonshine Mountain, Color Me Blood Red, Something Weird, The Gruesome Twosome, A Taste of Blood, She Devils on Wheels, Just For the Hell of It, How to Make a Doll, The Wizard of Gore, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya, and The Gore Gore Girls are all presented in the best transfers available with an insane amount of extra features including loads of bonus interviews and documentaries on Lewis’ career.

The death of Lewis in September makes this release all the more important, and one hopes that he died knowing so much love was going into a retrospective collection of his life’s works. I’ve only waded about a quarter of the way into these discs, but so far I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the transfers on some of these films which have always looked bad on video releases. Granted, some of the original prints are messed up beyond repair (lots of scratches on The Gruesome Twosome print, for instance), but on a film like She Devils on Wheels there’s a night-and-day difference between what I’d previously seen and the new transfer. I’ve watched that film a dozen times from a dub I had of the original VHS release. I always assumed the film had kind of a sepia look to it. No sir, this thing is in blazing Eastmancolor in all of it’s magnificently over-saturated glory. Watching that film on this set was like seeing an entirely different movie.

The Feast box is limited to 2,500 copies and hasn’t sold out yet, but I seriously wouldn’t sleep on this if you are a fan.

Continues after the jump…

 
Director Liam Young has dropped the trailer for “the first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners.” The movie, which is not feature-length, is some kind of a dystopic vision of the near future.

When you see the word scanners you might think of your supermarket’s checkout line but that’s not the most helpful example. If you have seen a blockbuster film in the past several years, then you have seen a movie that used laser scanners to create the effects. The technology, which commonly goes by the acronym LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), is in many ways analogous to radar; it is a remote sensing method that uses a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances). It is one of the building blocks of visual effects production.

Set in the Chinese-owned and -controlled “Detroit Economic Zone,” Where the City Can’t See is about an assembly-line worker who hacks a driverless taxi to find a place that’s not shown on its map. The evocative score for the clip comes from “Deep Breathing” by Shigeto.

Where the City Can’t See is set to premiere at Heart of Glass on November 12, where it will be played before a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
 

 
More after the jump…

Famille heureuse.
 
In one single day we upload more images onto the Internet than the total number of pictures produced during the whole of 19th century.

In one day—more pictures than a century’s worth of imagery. That’s one heck of a lotta selfies.

Our need for visual stimulus is relentless. We no longer view or experience imagery as previous generations did. The reverence with which some paintings or even photographs were once held is no longer relevant—we view indiscriminately, we consume continuously.

The French artist Coco Fronsac buys old discarded photographs from flea markets and turns them into Surreal works of art. Coco comes from a family of artists. Her grandparents Lucien Neuquelman and Camille Lesné were respected painters. Her parents met at art school. Coco attended art college in Paris before beginning her career as a painter, sculptor and creator of Surreal artworks from found photographs.

Coco takes each photograph—draws on it, paints over it and gives it a new life. If we cannot reclaim our past then we cannot understand our present. These photographs of people long dead, long forgotten have been abandoned, orphaned, thrown to the wind, sent for landfill. We no longer have any interest in them, their subject matter or the lives they lived. By turning these images into art, Coco reconnects the viewer’s relationship with the photo’s subjects. These reinvented images encourage the viewer to take a second look—to enquire about the subject matter and its history. Her intention is to bring people of different backgrounds together and rediscover the connections between us are far greater than the differences.

See more of Coco Fronsac’s work here.
 

Evidences spectrales.
 

Ectoplasmes.
 

Holidays on Mars.
 
More of Coco Fronsac’s work, after the jump…

“Side Tracks - 17 October 1964 - Detroit, Michigan” by Bob Dylan (via Halcyon Gallery)
 
Seeing both Bob Dylan and Vincent Van Gogh in the news this week reminded me of the last place I saw these guys together: in the wonderful world of song.

First there’s Robert Friemark’s “Vincent Van Gogh,” a ragged ballad about the painter’s life that Dylan and Bob Neuwirth sang in close harmony at some Rolling Thunder Revue dates. The song has a punchline that calls the seriousness of everything preceding it into question; I believe this is what you call a “shaggy-dog story.” Don McLean’s “Vincent” is scared of meeting Friemark’s number in a dark alley. I’ve cued up the Bobs singing “Vincent Van Gogh” midway through a three-and-a-half-hour recording of the May ‘76 stop in New Orleans here.

But more mysteriously, there’s the spectral Blonde on Blonde-era song known variously as “Spuriously Seventeen Windows,” “The Painting by Van Gogh,” “Definitely Van Gogh” and “Positively Van Gogh.” Under the latter title, it finally came out on last year’s massive 18-CD version of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. According to Clinton Heylin’s sessionography, Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton taped the only known rendition of this song in a hotel room in Denver just three days after Dylan finished recording Blonde on Blonde. Heylin sets the scene:

The only evidence we have of a possible direction, post-Blonde on Blonde, pre-accident, derives from two hotel room sessions with Robbie Robertson. That Dylan and Robertson were at this point blowtorching the candle at both ends—staying up late into the night, smoking a little (okay, a lot of) hash, and working on songs with a couple of acoustic guitars—is well-documented. Melbourne’s answer to Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Rawlins, wrote at the time of Dylan playing him “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” at six-thirty in the morning after a night of smoking hash, while actress Rosemary Garrett witnessed an even more extensive all-nighter just five days later:

I was able to listen to a composing session. Countless cups of tea . . . Things happened, and six new songs were born. The poetry seemed already to have been written. Dylan says “Picture one of these cats with a horn, coming over the hill at daybreak. Very Elizabethan, you dig? Wearing garters.” And out of the imagery, he and [Robbie] work on a tune and Dylan’s leg beats time with the rhythm, continuously, even when the rhythm is in his own mind.

Robert Shelton had already taped such a session in a Denver hotel room, three days after Dylan completed Blonde on Blonde (though he lacked the foresight to have enough blank tape, and ended up having to record all but one song of the thirty-five-minute session at 1⅞ ips—hence the poor quality). Though Dylan was anxious to play Shelton a couple of the songs he had just recorded—“Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the latter of which he seemed particularly proud of—Shelton also witnessed Dylan and Robertson working on some newer ideas.

The opening song, the lyrics of which revolve around a painting by Van Gogh, is the most listenable track because Shelton has not as yet knocked the speed of his reel-to-reel down to 1⅞ ips (from 3¾).

 
More after the jump…

 
“Wham! Bam! My cat ‘Splash’ rests on my bed. She’s swallowed her tongue while drinking all my whiskey.” That’s the nonsensical opening line to the 1977 radio hit “Ça plane pour moi” by Plastic Bertrand translated from French to English, however, the lyrics don’t seem to make any sense in either language. Widely considered a caricature of the punk era, the three-chord rocker “Ça plane pour moi” (which loosely translates as “This Life’s for Me”) became an anthem for a generation and remains a cult favorite to this day. However, over 30 years after its deranged pop insanity sold millions of copies around the world Bertrand finally admitted that he did not sing the vocals himself, nor indeed any of the vocals from the four acclaimed albums he released as Plastic Bertrand before vanishing from sight in 1982. So how’d this Belgian prankster pull a Milli Vanilli on the world and get away with it for so long?

In summer of ‘77, Belgian producer Lou Deprijck recorded “Ça plane pour moi” at the famous Morgan Studios in northwest London very quickly over the course of a single night. “Two hours in the studio followed by three hours in the pub next door,” Deprijck recounted. He sang the vocal track himself as a pastiche to the punk movement and an appeal to the pogo-pogo dancing punks he’d seen at nightclubs. Guitarist & engineer Mike Butcher remembers that to speed up the tempo, he did a little bit of tampering in the studio to recreate Johnny Rotten’s vocal style. “The song was recorded at a slow tempo and then accelerated afterward, that’s what gave it that particular sound.” John Valcke from the legendary Belgian pop rock group The Wallace Collection played bass and a local from the Belgian jazz and blues scene named Bob Dartsch played the drums. They were all pleased with the final product when it was complete, however, Lou Deprijck feared the song didn’t suit his particular style or persona.
 

 
A longtime friend of Lou’s, Eric Rie, knew a punk band Hubble Bubble whose 23-year-old drummer Roger Jouret fit the profile perfectly. Roger was fashionable and wore extravagant outfits that were tacky but picture perfect, to them it was as if he fell from the sky at the exact perfect moment in time. He sang terribly, however, most artists at the time were using playback during TV shows. Determined to get his song its due recognition, Lou Deprijck brainstormed a daring plan to form a partnership with Roger.  Roger Jouret was presented as the singer of the “Ça plane pour moi”, and thus Plastic Bertrand was born. “I went to London to buy him a jacket with zippers pierced with safety pins in Malcolm McLaren’s shop, the manager of the Sex Pistols” Deprijck recalls. “When I returned from vacation, three weeks after the album’s release, he was number one everywhere. Honestly, I never thought the song would trigger such a tidal wave. Looking back, I sometimes regret it.”

Keep reading after the jump…

The Cure circa 1980s.
 
Sadly I was too young to have had hung out at the mythical Allston, Massachusetts club “Allston Underground” back when it was open for a blink of an eye from 1980-1981. Had I been born five or six years earlier I would have been able to tell stories about seeing bands like Bauhaus, Mission of Burma, New Order and The Cure who all played a gig at The Underground during their first U.S tours.

The Cure made their way to The Underground on April 20th, 1980 mere hours before Robert Smith was about to celebrate his 21st birthday. And since you only turn 21 once Smith decided to rearrange part of the lyrics to “Seventeen Seconds” from “seventeen years/a measure in life’ to “21 years/a measure of life” which he then dedicated to Boston punks Mission of Burma with whom they were sharing the bill. When it comes to musical folklore I have to say that this little insight sent my brain off to conjure up images of what the rest of the night was like offstage for a newly legal drinking age Robert Smith on the loose with his Imaginary Boys and Mission of Burma on the streets of my beloved hometown. Another interesting twist to this story that made my day is that according to the meticulous Cure-focused site The Cure: The Multimedia Experience parts of the show were shot by a few local Boston art students. Which during my research for the story turned out to include omnipresent Boston videographer Jan Cocker. If (like me) you think this enviable story sounds like a page out of a die-hard Cure fan’s dream diary then I’m with you. And getting into a dreamy kind of mood is great preparation when it comes to the footage you’re about to see.

The videos include some editing and special effects which I actually found added another layer of mystique to this early moment and in The Cure’s long career. And for the record—Smith sounds absolutely incredible especially during the track “Secrets” from the band’s album Seventeen Seconds which was set for release the day after Smith’s birthday on April 22nd, 1980. I’m going to go out on a big fat limb here and say it’s safe to assume it was great to be Robert Smith during those three days. I’ve got footage of The Cure performing four songs at The Underground—“Grinding Halt,” “Subway Song,” “Accuracy” and “Secrets.” I highly recommend watching a few other videos shot at the show here as it includes a show-stopping version of “Killing an Arab” as it must be seen.
 

The Cure hanging out at the wood-paneled Boston, Massachusetts club ‘The Underground,’ April 20th, 1980.
 

A ticket for the April 20th, 1980 show at ‘The Underground’ in Allston, Massachusetts for The Cure and Mission of Burma.
 

‘Grinding Halt’ live on April 20th, 1980 at ‘The Underground’ in Allston, Massachusetts.
 
More Cure after the jump…

 
21 years ago, after a decade and a half as the bassist in legendary underground trios the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, Mike Watt released his first album under his own name, and it was a very big deal. Ball-Hog or Tugboat? saw Watt without a band for the first time ever, and so to compensate, Watt made the album with basically everyone. Almost 50 musicians guested on the LP, including members of Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Nirvana… Like I said, it was a very big deal.

With an all-star roster of players and a major label releasing it, the album got hyped to the moon and back, and the tour that followed attracted similar attention, as Watt’s backing band was made up of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Nirvana’s Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, less than a year after that band’s premature end in the wake of singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain’s suicide. And as if having backing musicians from two of the biggest bands in the world weren’t enough, those musicians’ new bands were Watt’s opening acts. Vedder was giving a guitar assist to the superb band Hovercraft, who were led by Beth Liebling, Vedder’s wife at the time. The other opener was a brand new concern featuring Grohl, Smear, and members of Sunny Day Real Estate, who went on to do quite well despite adopting the preposterous name “Foo Fighters.”

While video of the tour can be found if you dig long enough, there was, inexplicably, no live album ever made of that touring lineup. That’s about to be rectified at long last with the release of Ring Spiel Tour ‘95. The album is a document of the tour’s stop at the Metro in Chicago, and is scheduled for release on November 11.

One of the album’s tracks is a song that Watt has been playing since his childhood—“The Red and the Black” by Blue Öyster Cult. The lineup is Watt on bass and vocals, Vedder and Grohl on guitar, and SunnyDay/Foo’s William Goldsmith on drums. It’s DM’s pleasure to preview that cut for you today, and we got an earful from Watt about Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, the Ring Spiel tour, and “The Red and the Black.”

The whole idea of Ball Hog or Tugboat was OK, I was gonna make this record using my own name so you know who to blame. The idea was “what does the bass player do?” Is it like right field in little league? There’s something about the bass—are you trying to be fake lead guitar or are you the tugboat?

All these guys on the record, I didn’t practice with them, really. The metaphor was kinda the wrestling ring—that’s why the live record is called Ring Spiel. The only guy I really practiced with was Nels Cline. I just had cats come in. My theory was if the bass player knew the song, anybody could come play drums, or sing, or play guitar, you know what I mean? If the bass line drops out the whole tune falls apart, it’s that fundamental. But it can lead to a lot of openness in collaboration because it has limitations the leave a lot of room for other cats, and once you get them on board with their parts then you can feel it. The whole thing is you set things in motion. I get my part together, but I don’t realize the song, I want it kinda unfinished so the collaborators come in. That’s what I was testing out 21 years ago making Ball Hog or Tugboat.

“The Red and the Black” is very intense, very emotional to me. Basically it’s the older Blue Oyster Cult song “I’m On The Lamb But I Ain’t No Sheep” from the first album, but just the last riff, and some A&R guy told them just to do that lick for a whole song! It’s about a guy running from the Canadian Mounties, their uniforms are red and black. So me and d. boon knew it from Tyranny and Mutation, that second album, we played it as boys, 13 years old. We learned to play on that song, it was our primer. Almost every band I did played it. I got to play it with Bloom and Buck Dharma a couple years ago!

 
Continues after the jump…

A German movie poster for the 1965 film ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’
 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!

Russ Meyer’s 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! features a rogue gang of go-go dancers who decide to set off into the desert in search of mayhem, money and men to mercilessly mess with… and as the title suggests kill. While the best thing about this movie is clearly its karate chopping star Tura Satana, a close runner up would be the German movie posters and lobby cards for the film. The German marketing materials are about as far-out as the film itself.

When I ran the words “Die Satansweiber von Tittfield” through Google Translate it didn’t exactly make sense. And sadly the strange but appropriate sounding word “Tittfield” seems to be there solely for our amusement, like “Boobsville” or something.  I love seeing powerful women beating the crap out any man who gets in the way of them having a good time, don’t you? It’s a sentiment echoed by Meyer himself in an interview from 1998. The then 76-year-old director was touring around the world in support of a re-release of FPKK when he was asked for his opinion regarding the film’s remarkable ability to keep attracting audiences 30-plus years after its initial release:

It’s a little puzzling. Most of my films have women who have large breasts. It’s not that the girls are completely lacking in accouterments there, but… I suppose they like the idea of the women kicking the shit out of the men. More than anything else, I think that’s the reason it’s done very, very well.

It might also have something to do with the snappy and highly quotable dialogue. With lines like “Easy baby! You’re almost a fire hazard!” or “I never try anything, I just do it” or “Women! They let ‘em vote, smoke and drive - even put ‘em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!” how can you go wrong?

Much like the film itself (and everything else in Meyer’s long shapely body of work) some of the images in this post are NSFW. I’ve also included a few U.S. lobby cards for the film that contained images from the movie that were too great not to share.
 

A German lobby card for the 1965 film ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’
 

 

 
More ‘Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!’ after the jump…

 
No word yet on this year’s Descendents annual Christmas sweater, but that doesn’t mean no news at all. On the heels of the band’s new album Hypercaffium Spazzinate, the band introduced a coffee of the same name for the boutique roasters Dark Matter. Now, as if to produce the ideal buzz under which to listen to their records, they’ve made a beer with that coffee. San Diego’s Mikkeller Brewing has introduced “Feel This,” which is named for a song from the new LP, and is being introduced during San Diego Beer Week festivities this Friday.

The brew is a 7.3 % coffee IPA—evidently the Descendents didn’t get the memo about deep-pocket douchebags migrating their allegiance to sour beers this year—but the news release was unclear as to whether 7.3% was the coffee content or the final brew’s ABV. Mikkeller’s brewmaster Bill Batten, an old punk himself, offered the following comment:

Having grown up in the punk rock and skate punk scene, it was an honor to be given the opportunity to create a beer for the Descendents to celebrate their recently released album. While doing this collaboration we got an opportunity to meet the Dark Matter boys and learn about their coffee process.

More after the jump…