In 1978 RSO Records released this one-off single featuring ex-Manfred Mann singer, Paul Jones, crooning over adult contemporary pop arrangements of the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” and The Ramones’ “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.” The “Radio 2 style arrangements” of these songs were considered a piss-take of the original punk motif, but hold their own as legitimate musical expressions of the light pop sound of the day. As punk may have been a reaction to the “soft rock” of the ‘70s, these Paul Jones covers can be seen as a meta “taking it back,” with tongue, we assume, planted firmly in cheek.
He did them HIS way.
We’re reminded of Pat Boone’s excellent 1997 album, In a Metal Mood—an artifact intended to have some fun sucking the shock out of a rough-and-tough genre, but with an end result that is interesting and well-played within it’s own musical idiom. Not merely a cranked-out goof, it’s clear a great deal of detail-oriented work went into the production of these covers, and particularly with “Pretty Vacant,” we get an insight into what great pop songsmiths the Sex Pistols actually were. One gets the feeling there’s nearly as much homage here as ballbusting.
The Ramones cover is slightly less interesting, mostly due to the sarcastic “out of touch old man” lyric changes in the intro, but the remainder of the track, especially the choruses, have a VERY late-‘70s-terrible-era Beach Boys feel. If you enjoy that sort of thing either ironically or legitimately, you may be impressed with the competence of its arrangement. “Pretty Vacant” is the hit here, though, with its James Taylor-ization of Rotten’s nihilistic lyrics.
June 14, 1979: trumpet player Ross MacManus, father to Declan Patrick MacManus—better known to his fans as Elvis Costello—defends his poor, persecuted son against charges of racism in a letter to Rolling Stone that they actually published. In case you’re wondering, this was after Elvis got punched in the face by Bonnie Bramlett at a Holiday Inn bar in Columbus, Ohio for calling James Brown a “jive-ass n*gger” and Ray Charles a “blind, ignorant n*gger”. Macmanus the elder was apparently either unaware of the incident, or preferred to ignore it, defending only Elvis’ use of the phase “white n*gger” in “Oliver’s Army.”
For his part in that little incident, Elvis didn’t really apologize, saying he was drunk, and that “it became necessary for me to outrage these people with the most offensive and obnoxious remarks I could muster to bring the argument to a swift conclusion and rid myself of their presence.” (Sure dude, whatever.)
Now I’m not sure if Elvis Costello ever actually held racist views, or if he was just being a snotty-ass, petulant, drunk little shit who thought it subversive to use racial slurs—though I don’t really care because I don’t expect Elvis Costello to be smart or politically sophisticated, I just want to hear “Pump it Up”. I do find it hilarious that a nearly 25-year-old man has his daddy writing lame apologias for him to Rolling Stone…
FIRST OF ALL, MAY I thank you for the review of my son’s LP (“Elvis Costello in Love and Way” RS 287). It is the most perspicacious of all the reviews in any paper (and I have the cartoon of “El” framed on my wall!). “Oliver’s Army” is an important track for me, and your reviewer, Janet Maslin, so quickly picked up on the “white n*gger” significance. My grandfather was an Ulster Catholic, and as a child, I lived in an area where bigotry was rife. So we are those white n*ggers.
This brings me to the disturbing reports that I have seen branding Elvis Costello as a racist. Nothing could be further from the truth. My own background has meant that I am passionately opposed to any form of prejudice based on religion or race. And El’s mother and I were both branded as hotheads and Marxists or anarchists.
So you can see that we don’t have any chic, white liberal attitudes (and El has publicly despised the latter many times). This is the water that Elvis has been born and bred in, and he swims in it as naturally as a goldfish. His mother comes from the tough multiracial area of Liverpool, and I think she would still beat the tar out of him if his orthodoxy were in doubt.
Given the Cramps’ love of trashy Americana and vintage monster movies—witness their adoption of Cleveland’s legendary schlock-horror TV host Ghoulardi—it perhaps isn’t so surprising to stumble across this fabulous photo spread they did for The Face in the July 1980 issue. Give The Face credit: The Cramps had been bouncing around for a while but their only LP to that point, Songs the Lord Taught Us, had come out in May. The pictures repurpose lines from the Cramps’ song “Voodoo Idol,” which didn’t even make it onto an album until a year later, when their I.R.S. debut Psychedelic Jungle came out. The cover of the issue had Bryan Ferry on it, and the same issue also had items on Ian Dury, John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Not bad.
The title of the photo essay (?) is “Tales from the Crypt,” which of course calls to mind the comic book series that inspired the band’s creeptastic logo. The photographs were by Alain de la Mata, who went on to produce some interesting movies a couple of decades after this shoot, and the series of pictures was “scripted and performed by the Cramps,” which is certainly an unusual credit. “The Underestimator,” whose Tumblr I spotted these on, speculates that these marvelous pics may have been taken during the “Garbageman” promo video shoot at the Shepperton film Studios, in Middlesex, UK.
This remarkable laundry label got posted to reddit/imgur yesterday, where it made quite the impression. It seems to have been made in “SINGAPURA,” which perhaps provides a clue as to WTF is going on with this tag. It’s either a prime instance of Engrish or a prime example of in-your-face branding, but probably it’s a little of both.
Here’s the text:
HEY BAE
EACH PIECE OF OMIGHTY
CLOTHING IS MADE WITH A
SHIT LOAD OF LOVE
PLEASE HANDLE WITH AS MUCH
LOVE AS YOU WOULD WITH
A 7INCH D***
HANDWASH IN COLD WATER
MILD DETERGENT
FLAT DRY
NO BLEACHING OR SHIT’S GON
BE FUCKED FOR REAL
HAND OVER TO MAMA IF YOU
LAZY AS SHIT
WWW.O-MIGHTY.COM
MADE IN SINGAPURA
So many questions! You’re censoring “dick” but not “fucked” or “shit”? Is it necessary to wash 7-inch dicks a certain way? Do 5-inch dicks get a specialized sanitation regimen or (perish the thought) bleaching? Egad!
If you go to WWW.O-MIGHTY.COM, it gets a little clearer what is going on. The website looks like it was designed around 2003 with some kind of out-of-the-box Microsoft HTML package, the animated sun in the sky gives you the finger (and, hedging his bets, the peace sign too) and the typical bodysuit, presumably “made with a shit load of love,” says “LICK ME” or “TITS TITS TITS” or something classy like that.
American Nazi sympathists were certainly not unheard of during the Third Reich, but it can be shocking to see how established and organized they could be. Camp Siegfried was a bucolic bit of land in Yaphank, New York, a sleepy Suffolk County hamlet in eastern Long Island. It was established as an actual American Nazi summer camp in 1935 by the “Friends of New Germany”—an organization that became the German American Bund (American Nazis) just a year later in 1936. Many similar camps existed across the U.S. throughout the 1930s—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were all home to large Bund camps. As you’d expect, the “campers” were a reactionary German Americans, vehemently opposed to socialism, unionism and even the reforms of The New Deal.
Publicly, the Bund behaved as if their American citizenship was not in conflict with their Germanophilia and Nazism, even flying the stars and stripes above the Nazi flag at their camps. In a stunning feat of rationalization, they argued that George Washington was actually the “first Fascist.” These gestures did little to assuage the fears of authority; the eerie, militarist images you see here were mostly taken by the NYPD, who was keeping a close eye on all Nazi-affiliated activity, and for good reason. In ‘39 the Bund led a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden that attracted roughly 20,000 Nazis and about 80,000 others. About 200 socialists attempted to disrupt the rally and the ensuing riots were met with 1,745 policeman—more cops than had ever been utilized for a single event in NYPD history.
Camp Siegfried was (finally) forcibly closed in 1941, when Germany formally declared war on the U.S. and allegiance to Hitler was no longer protected as free speech. Bund leader and naturalized citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn was imprisoned for tax evasion and embezzling from the Bund (they never wanted to prosecute him, the charges were apparently just an excuse to attack the organization). Without their camps or their leader, and facing increasing animosity from Nazi-hating Americans, the Bund withered.
More weird scenes from Camp Siegfried after the jump…
Lee Ving, the leader of the notorious L.A. hardcore band Fear, recently appeared on Harper Simon’s forthrightly-titled online talk show Talk Show for a lengthy and often amusing interview. Ving made himself an infamous figure in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by baiting audiences with utterly brazen homophobia and misogyny, both on Fear’s lyrics and its onstage banter. Their albums The Record and More Beer remain classics because of and despite those problematics, since depending on your particular bent, Ving was and is either a steadfast champion of fully speaking one’s mind come what may, or an immature prick who took a smug delight in senseless punching down. It should probably come as no surprise that Ving himself is of the former opinion…
Surely you’ve seen A Band Called Death by now, right? If not, you seriously need to get on that. Though it seems to have expired from Netflix streaming (booooo), it’s still available to subscribers on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime (and it’s only like $3 for non-Prime Amazon streaming). If you’ve missed this story somehow, the film relates the saga of the Hackneys, three young African-American brothers in Detroit, MI, in the early ‘70s, whose family band eerily predicted the back-to-basics hard rock ethos and sound of punk by a couple of years, and yet they remained entirely unknown to the world until the discovery of their excellent self-released 7” made them a 21st Century cause célèbre among record collectors.
The rediscovery of Death brought forth some marvelous fruits—Death’s lost LP For the Whole World to See was released to justifiable acclaim in 2009, and the band’s vaults were emptied with the releases of the collections Spiritual Mental Physical and III, and an album of new material by the reconstituted and re-energized band (minus guitarist/visionary David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000), titled N.E.W., is due later this month. And the discovery had generation-spanning effects, in that the three sons of Death’s bassist/singer Bobby Hackney have, rather symmetrically, formed a family band called Rough Francis.
As the documentary reveals, younger Hackneys Julian, Urian, and Bobby Jr. had NO IDEA their dad and uncles had ever been in a hard rock band, only finding out after Chunklet blogged MP3s of the lost single. They retrieved the Death master tapes from their father’s attic and formed their own band to play those songs, copping their name from the pseudonym used by their late uncle David on his last recording. It’s tempting to indulge in cynicism and presume the band to be coattail-riders, but Rough Francis became an original band in its own right, purveying a tight, headstrong and effective post-hardcore sound that harnesses an energy all the band’s own. They released an E.P. in 2010, and the album Maximum Soul Power last year. Next week, their new single, “MSP2/Blind Pigs” will be released on Riot House, and it’s Dangerous Minds’ extreme pleasure to debut “Blind Pigs” for you today… right after the jump.
Peter Lorre almost succeeded in disguising himself when he appeared on panel show What’s My Line? in 1960. As his voice was always instantly recognizable, Lorre answered his inquisitors’ questions by a simple “hm-hm” or “uh-huh” sounds. However, one question about a new movie proved his undoing and Lorre was unmasked as “a sad-eyed, innocent villain.”
Lorre was promoting his latest movie Scent of Mystery, which starred Denholm Elliott, Beverly Bentley, Diana Dors and Paul Lukas. The film was the first “Smell-O-Vision” feature (“First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!”) that offered audiences the thrill of scratching ‘n’ sniffing various aromas off the back of a card at key moments during the movie’s screening.
Some of the smells available for sniffing were roses, apples, wood shavings, lemon, tobacco, perfume and garlic. Apparently there was no stench of fart or glue—that would come later with John Waters’ “Odorama” feature Polyester in 1981.
‘Scent of Mystery’ soundtrack CD booklet with Smell-O-Vision scratch card.
Lorre seemed quite pleased with the finished result, saying he did not normally promote movies but this was something rather special. Scent of Mystery was written by cult writer Gerald Kersh, who rarely wrote anything dull. The film was eventually re-released without “Smell-O-Vision” as the mundanely titled Holiday in Spain, which some reviewers thought only made the movie rather surreal:
... the film acquired a baffling, almost surreal quality, since there was no reason why, for example, a loaf of bread should be lifted from the oven and thrust into the camera for what seemed to be an unconscionably long time…
At Babylon Falling I stumbled across this remarkable full-page image of countercultural satire at its sharpest and most dangerous. Fifteen trading cards for the “Outlaws of Amerika,” featuring radical rock stars like Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver and Huey Newton and less known figures like Cha Cha Jimenez and Roger Priest. This image has been variously attributed to The Chicago Seed and the Black Panther publication Lumpen. According to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, the BAMN Anthology from Penguin claims that it was created for the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
However, according to this listing on abebooks, it definitely appeared in the “Second Birthday Issue” of RAT Subterranean News, March 7-21, 1969. (This reddit thread gets this information substantially correct but blows the year.) Whether it appeared anywhere before that, I can’t say.
The artist was Lester Dore, who went by the nickname “Wanderoo” (you can barely read his signature at the bottom). The All-Stars are classified into “Social Deviants,” “Third World Revolutionaries,” and, in a single instance, “Native Americans.” The cards wittily use icons such as a raised fist (protest), a bomb (use of bombs), an M-16 (violence), a tomahawk (Indians’ rights), a marijuana leaf (drugs), an electric chair (outlaw is on death row), and an ohm symbol (resistance). On the right hand side, in small print, it reads “Save a complete collection ... If sent with a Wanted Poster or reasonable facsimile thereof, good for: a wig, a complete set of phony I.D., and am M-16.” On the bottom it reads, “Wait for the second series of Amerikan Outlaw Trading Cards ... You may be next!!!” The logo on every card is “KOPPS,” a play on Topps, which had well-nigh monopolistic control of the baseball card market for many years until rival companies entered the market in the 1980s.
(In case you are wondering, yes, Afeni Shakur is Tupac‘s mother.)
(Click below for a larger version of this image.)
More of Amerika’s outlaws, class of 1969, after the jump…
I can’t think of a better way to spend an hour and twelve minutes than listening to roughly a hundred Thin Lizzy guitar solos (and two keyboard solos), spanning twelve albums, meticulously edited together into a nice, tidy package of unbridled awesomeness. Truly, this is one of those “this is what the internet was made for” cases—a gift for all mankind!
I’ve just played this thing through in its entirety three times in a row and am currently in the process of burning it to a CD for every road trip I ever make EVER, and I’ll be damned if I don’t plan a party just to have this as the soundtrack.
In one fell swoop, we get all of the epic Thin Lizzy soloing, 1971 to 1983, from guitarists Eric Bell, Scott Gorham, Brian Roberston, Gary Moore, Snowy White, and John Sykes, as well as two keyboard solos by Darren Wharton.
...And of course the bass playing of Phil Lynott, pictured here in a DEVO costume, because whynott?
This mix is not presented in chronological order, but rather in a manner aesthetically chosen for maximum flow. From the upload’s “liner notes,” we see that the mix is laid out to start with a bang, and then take the listener through three more crucial periods of the band’s playing:
00:00 Peak Period 1979 - 1980 (maybe not the best LPs, but the best solos)
12:36 Early Years 1971-1973 kinda Psych Prog Power Trio-ish
36:13 Twin Guitar Harmony Attack Developments 1974-1977
1:00:44 Heavy Metal End Phase 1981-1983
Perhaps as interesting as the megamix itself, is the fact that it was put together by none other than former4AD label artist, His Name Is Alive‘s Warren Defever. The bedroom dreampop experimentalist began in the late ‘80s, was signed to the 4AD label in 1989, and remained on that label for 13 years. Since parting ways with 4AD in 2002, Defever has worked as a producer, mastering engineer and remixer for artists including Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Iggy and the Stooges, The Gories, Destroy All Monsters, Low, and Ida. He has recorded His Name is Alive records since 2006 for his own Silver Mountain label. The Thin Lizzy solo superedit was constructed by Defever as a method for inspiring the playing on 2014’s His Name Is Alive album, Tecuciztecatl. According to Defever in a recent chat with Dangerous Minds:
Me and Dusty were attempting some harmony guitar solos while recording our new album, Tecuciztecatl, and put it together as a study guide to practice along with.
Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive and Thin Lizzy megamix fame.
We asked Defever about the layout of the edit, which does not follow a chronological order. According to Defever:
I spent more time trying to figure out how to arrange it conceptually than actually editing. It quickly became clear that going in chronological order or reverse chronological order would leave the most familiar solos buried in the middle of the seventy minute piece. It also became clear that just presenting every solo in the order they occurred on the records would not flow well, but presenting the solos within each record together would be easy because of the consistent sound quality, style and era. I broke them down roughly into four eras - peak period, psychedelic early years, twin guitar developments and heavy metal end phase.
I was a big fan of His Name Is Alive in the ‘90’s and I have to admit I’d kind of forgotten about them until now. Thankfully, this Thin Lizzy mix also reintroduced me to Defever’s work and their excellent new album,Tecuciztecatl, which is totally worth your attention.
But for right now, you’ve got the next hour and twelve minutes of your life planned out.
The solo megamix is available on soundcloud or via Defever’s Youtube upload here:
