Looking like the cast members from a “Bizarro World” episode of The Love Boat, the upcoming Gutterdämmerung brings together the talents of Slash, Josh Homme, Lemmy, Grace Jones, Iggy Pop, Justice, Henry Rollins, Slayer’s Tom Araya, Volbeat, Mark Lanegan, Nina Hagen and Jesse Hughes.

The film is set in a world where God has saved the world from sin by taking from mankind the Devil’s ‘Grail of Sin’…..the Evil Guitar. The Earth has now turned into a puritan world where there is no room for sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.

From up on high in heaven a “punk-angel”, Vicious (portrayed by Iggy Pop), looks upon the world with weary bored eyes. Behind God’s back, Vicious sends the Devil’s guitar back to earth and sin in all its forms returns to mankind.

An evil puritan priest (Henry Rollins) manipulates a naive girl to retrieve the guitar and destroy it. On her quest to find the Devil’s Grail Of Sin, the girl is forced to face the world’s most evil rock and roll bastards. Throughout her journey, she has a rival in the form of a rock chick determined to stop her from destroying the instrument.

I can’t say if this is any good or not, but how bad could it be with THIS cast?

Gutterdämmerung is a film/live concert hybrid concept from Belgian-Swedish artist Bjorn Tagemose. Read more about Gutterdämmerung‘s rock show/immersive cinema experience at the official website. On November 12th in London, exclusive scenes of the film will be first shown with Henry Rollins and Jesse Hughes live on stage. There will be a Q&A with the film’s creator Tagemose alongside Rollins and Hughes.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Danceteria was arguably the most influential and important club in New York City in the 1980s. Any musician who mattered played there, and it was featured prominently in the movies Desperately Seeking Susan and Liquid Sky. I spent a little while going through this intriguing collection of Danceteria flyers, and came upon the following names: the Fleshtones, Madonna, Sonic Youth, Marc Almond, Sade, Alien Sex Fiend, the Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Gene Loves Jezebel, Diamanda Galas, Beastie Boys. On December 16, 1982, A Certain Ratio played Danceteria with Madonna opening—she was at the time employed as the club’s coat check girl. It’s a place with that sort of pedigree.
 

 
The two main figures at Danceteria were Rudolf Pieper and Jim Fouratt. Pieper was German, and it’s his accent you hear in the crazy commercial embedded below, in which he calls himself “the head bimbo of Danceteria” and supports Esperanto as the language of the club and claims to oppose the inclusion of a Belgian ethnic group called the Walloons unless they “dress fabulously,” of course. Oh, and “exiled Latin American dictators have free admission here, every night.”
 

 
John Argento, who was instrumental in the club’s move from West 37th Street to 21st Street in 1982, says, according to Trey Speegle’s blog, this about the commercial:
 

What can I say? Low budget, public access TV… Rudolf does the voice over, reiterating long standing door policies such as ‘Latin American Dictators get in for free’…’Walloons only if they’re dressed fabulously.’

I remember him doing the voice over in the fourth floor DJ booth… I believe the soundtrack was from the movie La Dolce Vita. A difference of opinion then, the choice of music looks like the right thing to have done now.

 
One might ask, why would a club that was as successful as Danceteria was at that time even bother with a commercial? Why would they need it? Jim Fouratt, who was the talent booker for the club, remembers it as “a nightmare of lies and intimadation [sic],” in effect an effort to displace Fouratt’s role in the club as well as other ventures like Interferon, which failed. Here’s Fouratt’s account, typos included:
 

I was sent this commercial for Danceteria .. it comes from an ugly period. I had been locked out of the club on 21st and my average normal business accounts were frozen because my business partner had accept the offer of Alex Delorenzo of the son of mobster and real estate mogul offer to work with his protege John Argento who he had invested over a million dollars into a failed club that was to replicate the Original Danceteria . It ws called Interferon. (good grief) .It failed . Delorenzo called me and I brought putting to the meeting . I forgot the history of putting Germans and Italian together (sorry) , Argento and Delorenzo’s son-in-law had cleared a block of rent regulated tenants in the East 50’s so Delorenzo could raze and build. They had used every kind of intimadation to frighten the hell out of the tenants. Delorenzo wanted to reward them and Argento said he wanted to open a club on 21st in a building Delorenzo owned (it was a dead street at the time). He did . It failed We made a deal and one of the points was Argento was not to be involved .; Delorenzo wanted to protect his other business realtons and insisted Argento be icharge of all the day deliveries .. including liquore , napkins, etc the cash items and the cleaning and removal of the trash. We agreed once it was agreed the Argento would have nothing to do with the club other than his janitorial job I sued Delorenzo for contract violation (yes sued Godfather like business family ) and sued Rudolf for fiduciary betrayal.. it ws a nightmare for six years . This commercial was to establish Rudolf as Danceteria honcho.. he had been telling people I had AIDS .. and that is why I wasn’t there . The real reason was greed .. i was told I was paying talent too much money .. and the club when I was they was a hige hit. Trust me I would neve have approved a commercial .. we did nto need it ..and my door policy insured a fabulous safe mix of people and my bookings were the best in the universe (ok hyperbole) ... this is nto the place to go into just what a nightmare of lies and intimadation .. but since this video has turnes up ... I wanted to put it in context… and no i did not nor do have AIDS or am I HIV +. ...

 
Golly! Who would have thought that such an innocent-seeming and campy commercial could have that kind of darkness behind it?

It was edited by Danny Cornyetz, who went by the name Dee Cortex. Experience some primo 1980s oddness below:
 

 
via Trey Speegle

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kim Gordon’s video love letter to Danceteria, early 1980s
The legendary X-rated Butthole Surfers show at Danceteria

 
For a large swathe of the UK’s population, life in the swinging sixties was not all miniskirts, psychedelia and Beatle wigs—it was hard dismal work, poverty, unemployment: a life crammed in overcrowded slums, with few amenities or pleasures. This was true for many who lived in the country’s former industrial heartlands—Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow—the war damaged cities that were being slowly gutted and replaced by equally oppressive concrete tower blocks and uniform housing schemes in new towns.

In 1968, photographer Nick Hedges was hired by housing charity Shelter to document the “the oppressive and abject living conditions being experienced in poor quality housing in the UK” in order to “raise consciousness about the extent of unfit living conditions and to illustrate, in human terms, what the real cost of bad housing was.”

Hedges arrived in Glasgow to find it a “devastating city,” full of grim deprivation and brutality—on his first night he witnessed two youngsters rob a blind beggar of his takings. Hodges began by photographing the tenement slums of the city’s Gorbals area—once the most populated district—before heading north and west to the equally overcrowded Maryhill, where an army garrison had been kept until the 1960s as a force against any possible communist revolution. Hedges then photographed East Kilbride—one of the many new towns built after the Second World War to deal with the slum clearances—the movement of people out of places like Anderston, Gorbals and Maryhill to a better life in specially built towns. Hedges also photographed tenement life in Edinburgh, where many of the poor where decamped in the 1970s to Wester Hailes.

The wrecking ball of the 1960s and 1970s did little to ease poverty and unemployment, but it did start a new decade of house building for those in direst need. Hedges photographs powerfully document the reality of tenement life for many Scots during this era, and the endemic poverty that affected their lives, as Hedges writes:

The thing about people living in slum housing is that there is no drama…it’s about the absolute wearing down of people’s morale in a quiet and undemonstrative way.

An exhibition of Nick Hedges’ photographs for Shelter, Make Life Worth Living, is currently showing in Edinburgh till 31st October.
 

 

One day I travelled around Glasgow’s charming, ancient underground railway to Cessnock, and walked down to the Govan shipyards. I found a children’s playground in the shadow of cranes, running down to the edge of the Clyde.

Nick Hedges

Glasgow tenement backs 1970

They are the grimmest environment that I’ve encountered. This has something to do with the size of the stone used in their construction, the entry to them through the cave like entrances, the deep and dark stairwells and the relentless pattern of streets.

Nick Hedges

Father and children Gorbals tenement 1970

Sisters sharing a chair in a Gorbals slum tenement 1970

Mr and Mrs C lived with their large family in what was virtually a derelict flat in one of the last Gorbals Tenements. “There’s nothing now that you can get angry about. You’ve said it all before”. Two of the elder girls in the family. One was unemployed, the other about to leave school with no prospect of a job

Nick Hedges

 
More of Nick Hedges powerful photographs, after the jump…

 
If you want to get your Eighties on with your home décor, why not this Patrick Nagel faux fur throw blanket? It’s a Huf x Nagel collaboration. Apparently the blanket can fit a queen size bed and sells for $80.00 + shipping.

 
And if an Eighties-themed blanket isn’t enough, here are some Patrick Nagel socks to keep your feet warm and stylish during the cold winter months.

Get socks here
 

Get socks here

via The World’s Best Ever

Dick Cheney as the devil tattoo (with the Microsoft “Zune” symbol showing through his head. This tattoo belongs to this guy).
 
I’ve really got a pretty sweet treasure trove of eye candy for you today here on DM. In my downtime, I have to admit one of my guilty pleasures is perusing the Internet for images of tattoo art. As much as I love how getting inked has been elevated to a high art form over the past few decades or so, I’m also a sucker for the folks that end up with terrible renditions of Looney Tunes characters or message tattoos with forever typos like “no regerts.”
 

Former Prime Minister of the UK, Margaret Thatcher as an ice cream cone tattoo
 
Some of my favorite tattoo whoopsies are of the ever popular Chinese fonts that are picked at random from a tattoo flash book by an unwitting client. I’ve had many a good Simpsons-flavored “HA-HA’s” seeing someone who was under the impression that the cute symbol on their arm said “friendship.” However, when translated properly actually advertises that you are “bad looking, ugly or unclean.” Ah, linguistics. Live it, love it, and for fuck’s sake learn it before you get a tattoo involving words.
 

Saddam Hussein portrait tattoo. Ironically, during his reign, Hussein was known to imprison tattooed Iraqis as he believed tattoos were an “imitation” of western culture
 
In many cases, I was not surprised when I Googled a particular despots name along with the word “tattoo” and found not one, but many different varieties of ink-jobs that ran the gamut from A+ for execution to F for why???. Of course, it makes perfect sense that a former Soviet Army soldier might be sporting a Stalin tattoo on his back. Gulag prisoners from the past would also get the portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin tattooed on their chests in the hope it would protect them from firing squads.

But why would anyone ever put a tattoo of Dick Cheney on their body? Is it an accurate depiction of Mr. Cheney? Sure. But it’s also a strong chick repellant (and people in general repellant for that matter). Despots, dopes and Dicks may come and go, but tattoos are (almost always) forever.
 
Heinrich Himmler, Sarah Palin, the Ayatollah Khomeini and more fun tattoos after the jump…

 
Today marks the anniversary of DEVO’s 1978 appearance on Saturday Night Live, which really put the band on the mainstream’s radar and set them on the road to becoming, for better or worse, actual rock stars. The few years immediately after punk were an indulgent period in which to be trailblazers, and DEVO certainly benefitted from that audience shift towards openness to new ideas, but while SNL was known for taking some artistic chances with their musical bookings, DEVO were not initially of any interest at all to the show’s producer Lorne Michaels, and it took some maneuvering to get them on.
 

 

Ad found on DevoObsesso

Last summer, at a DEVO public art unveiling in the band’s hometown of Akron, OH, bassist Jerry Casale spoke frankly about the behind-the-scenes machinations that finally got them the slot on SNL that they had so coveted:

We had been sending videotapes to Saturday Night Live since 1976, after we did the Truth About De-Evolution ten minute movie, and we thought “Dan Aykroyd will get us on the show, John Belushi’ll get us on the show!” And we kept sending it with letters, and I’m sure it just went in a trash bin. These people were big time, and I’m sure they were thinking “Who ARE these weirdos?” So it was me not wanting to take no for an answer, and I just kept it up.

When we were interviewing managers, and we met Elliott Roberts, who was Neil Young’s manager, he said two good things—“I don’t want a piece of your publishing,” and “I don’t want you to sign a deal, we’ll shake hands and you give me 30 days notice when you say it’s over and I’ll give you the same.” I said “That’s great, but there’s one thing you gotta do! You have to get us on Saturday Night Live, and you have to make them let us show a piece of our movie.” And he goes “Oh my GOD.”

And he did it, because he dangled Neil Young as bait, saying “You’ll take these guys, Lorne—Lorne did NOT care about DEVO—and we’ll get you Neil Young. And then he dropped the bomb about the film, and that was almost a deal breaker. But it all worked out, and we went from playing in from 200-300 people a night to 3,000-5,000 people a night. We had to stop the tour and re-book it after Saturday Night Live.

The band’s association with Neil Young continued to bear fruit, notably in the form of the 1982 film Human Highway. But here’s that SNL appearance, introduced by the episode’s host, Fred Willard, and shared by PB user jwdoom.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
DEVO becomes public art, streets of Akron, Ohio are overrun with Booji Boys
DEVO, Blondie, Talking Heads, Klaus Nomi on ‘20/20’ segment on New Wave, 1979
‘Satisfaction’ shootout: DEVO VS the Residents VS the Rolling Stones (spoiler: the Stones don’t win)

 
One would hope by now that Kelley Deal is well past “the other one” syndrome. In the mid ‘80s, she was offered the drum stool in the Pixies when her sister Kim joined as bass player, but opted for a computer programming career. Years later, the latter Deal formed the Breeders as a side band with Throwing Muses’ Tanya Donelly, and when Donelly bailed to form Belly, Kim brought her twin sister back into music as lead guitarist, despite her novice status with that instrument. That inexperience proved to be no demerit; the thusly-reconstituted Breeders made the stone classic album Last Splash and the indelible single “Cannonball.”

After cleaning up from a drug bust that put the Breeders on ice for a while, Deal found plenty to do. Her eponymous band the Kelley Deal 6000 released a couple of fine albums in the mid ‘90s (and became slightly infamous for a cover of Boyd Rice’s “Total War”), then she formed the Last Hard Men with Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin, the Frogs’ Jimmy Flexion, and—I shit you not—Sebastian Bach of Skid Row. She’s been back in the Breeders fold in the 21st Century, mostly with no side projects to speak of, but in 2012, coincident with the reunion of the Breeders’ Last Splash lineup, she also released a single with R. Ring, a new band with Mike Montgomery of the Cincinnati post-rock band Ampline. (GOHIO!)
 

 
R. Ring have been quietly putting out small releases of noisy indie-pop for a few years. There’s been little hype and no LP yet, but their debut 7” was followed quickly by a fun cover of DEVO’s “Mr. DNA” and a 4-song EP. This year, the duo is contributing a song each to two split 7”s, one with Murray, KY’s grimy reverb-psych superheroes Qualibones, and one with the justly revered Detroit noise rockers Protomartyr. Their song on the latter record is what concerns us today. it’s called “Loud Underneath,” and it’s our pleasure at DM to debut that video today.

Animated by painter and video artist Cy Gavin, the video’s imagery was inspired by the Paul Klee painting “Pavillion.” As he relates it himself:

When Kelley told me that Paul Klee’s journals inspired some of the lyrics, I also looked to Klee for inspiration. I found his painting “Pavilion” really captivating, so I used this highly stylized painting as a starting point to create an imaginary space. I was also told some of the lyrics were about sex—not having it and then finally having it. I wanted to find a way to show that anticipation. I had been staring at the computer and trying to write, so began seeing the blinking cursor as representative of a pulsing and excited anticipation of a moment of truth.

I wouldn’t have picked that up, about the cursor—the first association that hit me when I watched the video was side-scrolling platform games. By the way, if that image in the video of the knitted cross-section of a human head looks familiar to you, you’re clearly a regular DM reader—our Martin Schneider wrote a feature about that object’s creator Emily Stoneking just a little over a week ago.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cuddly and gross knitted dissection specimens
Kelley Deal, Kristian Svitak and Mike Montgomery cover Devo’s ‘Mr. DNA’

 
In an effort to weaponize the psychological effect of terrifying sounds to break the morale of our enemies, the Air Force began work, in 1964, on “Pyrotechnic Harassment Devices,” or PHDs.

It has been scientifically proven that human screams contain unique acoustic properties that are highly effective in triggering the brain’s fear center, and the Pentagon wanted some of that ju-ju.

Essentially the PHDs were bombs that would create the sound of horrific human screams in an effort to scare the hell out of our foes. The idea being that if you can break the mind of your enemy, you can break him in battle. One imagines the unnerving effect of hundreds of screams on the front-lines would be similar to that of the infamous Aztec Death Whistle.

Joseph Trevithick, writing at the fantastic military blog, War is Boring, details the the idea behind the weapon:

“This device is an air deliverable unit that generates noise over a six hour period to harass, by generally upsetting enemy troops and thus lowering their efficiency for fighting,” technicians at the Air Force Armament Laboratory explained in their final report. “By dropping a number of units around an enemy group under attack, the PHD may cause general confusion.”

The Air Force hired a company called Special Devices, Inc. to build the prototypes. At first, the flying branch hoped that the pods would boom, bellow and shriek out gunshots, human and animal screeching sounds and the clanging of industrial machinery. Engineers recorded a host of specific samples to analyze, such as people firing .30- and .45-caliber guns and male and female screams.

The recordings also included a “neutral scream” consisting of a mix of the male and female versions and the cries of elephants and panthers, according to the official report. But after experimenting with a variety of mechanisms, Special Devices could only build pods that spewed out shots, whistles, whines and other white noise.

Ultimately the devices were not deemed practical: “There appears to be no way to make a pyrotechnic scream simulator with satisfactory characteristics for the PHD unit,” lamented the engineers. The idea of a “scream bomb” was looking less and less plausible.

Unable to come up with a practical scream generator, speaker boxes were built that could broadcast any recorded sound. Cargo planes were to drop these “screeming meemies” into enemy territory as a sonic disruption.

The box-shaped Screaming Meemie consisted of five major components. The primary element was the siren, which generated what was described as a “warbling tone,” plus four loudspeakers—one for each side of the box.

The siren could be set to function continuously or intermittently. The battery could keep it running for 12 hours.

There was a self-destruct and booby-trap function. The 25-pound high-explosive charge would detonate if someone pushed the device over or tried to open it, or if the battery dropped below a certain level.

 

The guts of the Screeming Meemie. Visible is (1) the audio system, (2) the dummy high explosive charge, (3) the battery pack, and (4) aluminum cushion. Air Force photo
 
It seems the military had switched gears from scaring the enemy to death with blood-curdling screams, to annoying them to death with a “warbling tone.” Ultimately, these tests were also ineffective, and the Screaming Meemie project was abandoned in 1967 when the Air Force cancelled its requirement for a “noise-making weapon for psychological warfare.”
 

A Screaming Meemie in position to be dropped from a C-47. The black arrow points to where the static line connects to the aircraft. Air Force photo
 
Still, the idea of using noise to disrupt the enemy had not been totally abandoned. Military troops have famously used blasts of loud noise and music against Manuel Noriega and David Koresh. Recently the band Skinny Puppy made headlines with a lawsuit against the US Government for using its music as psychological warfare “torture music” against the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Perhaps there’s still room for research and development on a bomb that screams at the enemy…

or perhaps one that blasts dubstep…

Just wait for the drop.

Via: War Is Boring 

 
I’ve been thinking of how to get across my extreme enthusiasm for the new Dungen album Allas Sak all day and I can’t quite figure out how to express it the way I feel it. Perhaps the “ALL CAPS” emphatic approach? Might work because I FUCKING LOVE THIS ALBUM. Or I could tell you how I’ve probably played Allas Sak from start to finish at least 200 times since I got the promo CD back in September. It might even be more than that. Perhaps a lot more! No seriously, I have played the shit out of this album.
 

 
There’s the fact that, if push came to shove, I’d definitely put this one on my Desert Island Discs list. After less than two months, Allas Sak has become one of my top ten albums of all time, effortlessly (and permanently) joining such classics as Abbey Road, L’histoire de Melody Nelson, Uncle Meat, Bitches Brew, Court and Spark, Led Zeppelin III, Sticky Fingers, Alice Coltrane’s World Galaxy and The Basement Tapes. I’m dead serious. This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. This year or ANY year. And it’s even sung in Swedish. I have no idea what they’re singing about, but that matters not in the least. The music of Dungen is like having gold poured into your ears.
 

 
There is no doubt in my mind that Allas Sak is a musical masterpiece. In a perfect world, Dungen would be selling like Adele or Beyoncé. That might be slightly farfetched to expect for a Swedish psychedelic progrock jam band, but then again the music is simply that good. That instantly classic. I can imagine people who don’t even like music that much, or own that many albums, falling in love with Allas Sak. It’s just that fucking amazing.

I kinda feel like a teenager raving about his favorite group, but having read me ranting and raving this far, don’t you just want to hear the music? Good plan!

First off, to hear Allas Sak in its glorious entirety, you can listen to this YouTube playlist. Pay careful attention to “Franks Kaktus,” track 4.

And here’s a brand new exclusive live performance for Dangerous Minds readers, courtesy of Mexican Summer Records. Dungen performing “Sova” live at Trädgården. Directed by Valerie Toumayan
 

 
One of the key moments in the maturation of any young wiseacre is the first time he or she sees Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’ve seen it 4 or 5 times for sure, and my appreciation for it has only grown over the years (I used to prefer Life of Brian, but I’ve reversed that).

There’s a new Blu-Ray edition of the movie that comes with, ahem, “catapult packaging and rubber farm animals,” and on it apparently, the fellows unearthed some Terry Gilliam animations that didn’t make the final cut of the movie, and then someone, probably Eric Idle, cajoled the visionary director of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys to free-associate over the footage.
 

 
The most meaty section of the featurette, which is embedded below, is “Terry Gilliam Introduces His Lost Animation Reel,” in which Gilliam somewhat morosely walks the viewer through some of this footage—that “moroseness” is halfway a kind of bit in the usual Python register of hifalutin silliness, but it’s also part and parcel of what seems to be an ingrained “Pshaw” sort of modesty or general inability to be impressed with himself, you know the kind of thing. Of watching the action unfold, Gilliam muses that “it sure beats me sitting talking about animation, something I know nothing about anymore.” After giving credit to the two women who were actually responsible for creating these lush images, Gilliam blurts, “I was the guy that just cut out the terrible little characters and pushed them around.”

Gilliam reveals that the Holy Grail animations were based on a book called Illustrations in the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts, which title doesn’t exist in Internet terms so perhaps Gilliam is misremembering the title. In any case, anyone who’s glimpsed the Book of Kells or other “illuminated manscripts” done by monks centuries ago will see the resemblance. At one point he plays a silly little song about King Arthur by Neil Innes that was also rejected from the final cut.
 

 
Gilliam points out that most of his animated bits really are about violence, but since the process of filming the stop-motion animations is so back-breakingly time-consuming, all the “action” takes place off-screen or, in this case, inside a snail’s enormous shell. He whines about not being compensated for this voice-over work, and pretends to prefer the idea of Python fans just sending him money directly, to the following address—but of course does not divulge that. (Naturally, right after that you hear the voice of Idle supposedly forking over some cash, complete with clinky gold coin sounds.) That leads to Gilliam in mock dudgeon: “I’m a famous film director! I don’t have to sit here talking to you people, who foolishly paid money for the same old crap!”
 

 
Hat tip to Henry Owings!
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
1966 psychedelic Life Savers TV commercial by Terry Gilliam ?
Elvis Costello and Terry Gilliam shill for Philip K. Dick