“We’ve become a nation of peeping toms,” says Thelma Ritter to James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). It’s an ironic comment in light of the events that follow—as well as offering a critique of the voyeuristic nature of cinema. Stewart plays L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies a photographer laid-up with a broken leg in his Greenwich Village apartment. He is attended to by his nurse (Ritter) and then his girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly). Stewart spends his time spying on his neighbors watching their lives unfold. He becomes obsessed with one neighbor, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who he soon suspects of being a murderer.

Based on the short story “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window is considered by some critics as Hitchcock’s “greatest film”—“possibly his most clever, his most ingeniously organized and poetically suggestive,” as John Fawell described it in his book Hitchcock’s Rear Window:

Rear Window offers an example of Hitchcock’s art at its best, when the batteries were really charged, when form and ideas, entertainment and art, all synchronized in a particularly harmonious whole.

Hitchcock considered Rear Window (along with Psycho) to be one of his most successful experiments in “pure cinema.”  The “possibility of doing a purely cinematic film,” was part of the reason Hitchcock had been attracted to Woolrich’s story, as he told French New Wave director François Truffaut:

You have an immobilised man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.

[Soviet film director Vsevolod] Pudovkin dealt with this, as you know. In one of his books on the art of montage, he describes an experiment by his teacher, [Lev] Kuleshov. You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

In the same way, let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of an open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man!

Indeed Woolrich’s story suggested many of the set-pieces contained in Hitchcock’s movie—from being focussed on the central character’s point of view, to his observations of the neighbors across the way. Woolrich’s biographer, Francis M. Nevins, considered the film as “simply a translation of the story’s material in visual terms.” He also described Woolrich and Hitchcock as “soul brothers” (though author and director never met) claiming both were haunted by their Catholic upbringing and shared a sense (as Nevins puts it) of “humans as creatures trapped in the habits of their existence.”

Rear Window was shot entirely at Paramount Studios, where the set of an enormous apartment block for Stewart’s neighbors was built that (as Truffaut described it) offered “intentionally or not… an image of the world.”  Hitchcock agreed:

It shows every kind of human behaviour—a real index of individual behaviour. The picture would have been very dull if we hadn’t done that. What we see across the way is a group of little stories that, as you say, mirror a small universe.

This fine selection of photographs shows Hitchcock on set directing James Stewart and Grace Kelly in one of cinema’s greatest voyeuristic thrillers Rear Window.
 

 

 

 
More behind-the-scenes photos from ‘Rear Window,’ after the jump…

 
Mark Lester’s 1985 film Commando, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is arguably the greatest action film of the ‘80s—or more arguably “the greatest film of all time,” depending on how many drinks you’ve had.

Commando brought us one of the most unusual villains in action cinema, “Bennett,” played by ultimate ‘80s bad guy, Vernon Wells, who was previously known for his portrayal of “Wez” in The Road Warrior and “Lord General” in Weird Science.
 

The transition from playing “Wez” to playing “Lord General” was quite a stretch.
 

The Bennett character is Wells’ most notorious role, due to the fact that he seemed such an improbable foil for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “John Matrix.” Any discussion of Commando usually leads to a discussion of Bennett’s look, which was described by Andy McDermott in Hot Dog Magazine as “Freddie Mercury Casual.”

His silver mesh tank top, worn with a belt over, black leather pants, bike chain necklace and pornstar mustache give him more of the appearance of a Tom of Finland character than your typical action antagonist.
 

Commando costuming director’s inspiration for Bennett’s look?
 

Perhaps it’s the character’s visual presentation, or something more, that has caused speculation for 30 years over Bennett’s sexual orientation—whether or not he was homosexual, and whether or not he was secretly in love with John Matrix.

IMDB devotes an entire section of their Commando FAQ to an examination of Bennett’s sexuality. Much of this discussion is fueled by McDermott’s Hot Dog article:

McDermott goes on to argue that whilst Bennett always calls Matrix by his first name, suggesting affection and familiarity, Matrix always calls Bennett by his surname, suggesting distance. This leads him to hypothesize that perhaps Bennett was kicked out of the unit by Matrix, because Matrix discovered that Bennett had become sexually attracted to him; “all he wanted was a little love, and instead he got fired. No wonder he’s mad.” McDermott also attaches great metaphorical significance to Matrix’ line at the end of the film, “Put the knife in me. Look me in the eye and see what’s going on in there when you turn it. Don’t deprive yourself of some pleasure. C’mon, Bennett. Let’s party.” The image of one man putting something in another man and then turning it, McDermott argues, has obvious homosexual connotations. He also points out the significance of the fact that Matrix’s knife is bigger than Bennett’s, thus causing “knife envy” in Bennett, prompting him to attack his “love/hate object”. McDermott also comments on the irony inherent in the fact that although Bennett seemed to be in love with Matrix (and presumably wanted to have sex with him), it is Matrix who penetrates Bennett at the end of the film, albeit with a steel pole in the chest. Which probably wasn’t what Bennett had in mind.

 

“What’s wrong, Bennett? Can’t take the pressure?”
 
McDermott’s article sums up the character’s vibe thusly:

Bennett is a walking, talking, stereotypical embodiment of the macho, puritanical Reagan era’s utter terror of homosexuality, gripped with the fear that the slightest chink in the masculine armor will instantly result in a trip to the YMCA and a purchase of a pair of chaps and a tube of KY jelly.

Commando director Mark Lester, however, flatly denies that Bennett is gay, stating in the DVD commentary:

I don’t know what people are saying when they say that to me. He seems to me like the most macho soldier or person you could think of.

Others who worked on the film have suggested that they aren’t so sure. In the 2007 DVD featurette, “Commando: Let Off Some Steam,” screenwriter Steven E. de Souza mentions that “the wardrobe on Vernon Wells has led to a lot of conjecture that Vernon had a crush on Arnold’s character,” and Commando co-star Rae Dawn Chong is upfront about the homosexual undercurrent:

They’re like lovers. The outfit they had on him, I mean, HELLO, he looks like one of the Village People. Arnold is the ideal, and you know, if you can’t be it and can’t love it, you want to kill it. That really confusing sexuality comes through and it manifests in violence.

 

 
The Wookie Wednesday blog chimes in on the debate:

There’s plenty to point to that suggests that Bennett and Matrix had a relationship deeper than friendship. For example, this line: “I really love listening to your little pissant soldiers trying to talk tough. They make me laugh. If Matrix was here, he’d laugh too.” The part of the quote in bold is delivered by Bennett with a sigh, as if he was a lovesick teenager.

In the film’s climax, Bennett warns Matrix: “I’m not going to shoot you between the eyes, I’m going to shoot you between the balls!” Is it reading too much in to think that Bennett may have wanted to destroy the one part of Matrix’s anatomy he was most upset over being denied?
 

“I’m going to shoot you between the balls!”
 
We recently had a chance to sit down with Vernon Wells, Bennett himself, and ask some burning questions about his Commando character.

Wells tells us that he was originally rejected for the role, but was called back in from Australia, six weeks into Commando production, as a replacement. He further explains that, with the production being under-the-gun, he was not afforded a proper costume fitting and that his costume was a bit small for him. We’re not sure that that explains the leather daddy look, but it might explain why he appears a bit out of shape—the clothes were ill-fitting!

On the topic of being in shape, we noted that many have suggested Wells seemed a bit mis-matched against the massive Schwarzenegger, an insinuation which Wells quickly dashed, claiming he was “perfectly matched” against his opponent. He relates a story about the beginning of Commando shooting where he was holding back in rehearsals and Schwarzenegger suggested to producer, Joel Silver, that Wells was “a bit of a wuss” and that he was no good for the character; but when the cameras rolled, Wells gave a performance so maniacal, stating “I was virtually up his butt with this knife,” that Schwarzenegger recanted, telling Silver, “nevah give him a real knife!”
 

“The first scene I did was where I had him tied to the table and had the knife to his throat, telling him what I wanted to do to him… and we did the scene and I was virtually up his butt with this knife…”
 
We asked Wells if Bennett had a first name, because THAT’s a thing we’ve always wanted to know: “I’m sure he did but nobody ever told me.”

Curious about character motivations, we asked what the motivation was behind Bennett’s wardrobe. Wells diplomatically replied that Bennett “liked to be different” and was an “individual” and his dress reflected that. When asked if Bennett may have been a Freddie Mercury fan, Wells speculated that Mercury was looking down on Bennett, shaking his head and saying “oh my God.”
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Hajime Sorayama’s porny futurism is one of those 1980’s aesthetics that is somehow simultaneously hilarious yet incredibly impressive. The cheeky pin-up “gynoids” are so sleek and gorgeous—but so utterly ridiculous—it’s difficult to tell if the work is actually fetish or satire or some combination of both—although his years illustrating more “conventional” fetish art for Penthouse and Playboy suggest some interest in niche lusts. When asked last year in an interview about some of his favorite work, Sorayama replied:

I do have a few, actually. Penthouse started to run the section called “Great American Pissing Contest” after it published the image of a woman pissing on an expensive sofa. When the big Canadian distributer stopped importing that issue of Penthouse because of excessive S&M scenes, a movie director who is also my friend blessed me by saying, “Congratulations, country boy! You became famous.” This was decades ago…

In that light, doesn’t “cheesecake robot” sound kind of tame? Sorayama’s gynoids have had a cult following since his 1983 book, Sexy Robot (yes, it’s actually called that), but although he continues to produce cyber-smut (his latest, Sorayama: XL came out in 2014), it’s not often you see his work displayed. San Francisco will soon lucky enough to host an exhibit of prints that spans his entire career (with some for purchase), at Fifty24SF Gallery starting April 4th.
 

 

 
More sexy robots after the jump…

 
A few months ago, I was on some music geek forum boards and one of the posters mentioned that he’d bought an audiophile download of Stan Getz’s Big Band Bossa Nova album, a 1962 recording that was arranged and conducted by a guy named Gary McFarland.

And then another poster chimed in about how this Gary McFarland fellow was once a HUGE presence on New York’s fledgling FM jazz stations in the mid-60s. How if it wasn’t music by McFarland under his own name they were playing something done in collaboration with the likes of Getz, Gábor Szabó, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Hodges, John Lewis, Bob Brookmeyer, Lena Horne, Zoot Sims, Anita O’Day or Bill Evans. The guy’s point was that McFarland’s style of Latin-tinged orchestral jazz got lots and lots of radio airplay, at least in the New York/Long Island area, but then… you never heard from him again. The guy didn’t seem aware that McFarland had died young—a mysterious death at the age of 38 in 1971—until he read that very thread and discovered why the music stopped.
 

 
Gary McFarland was an impressive character, a charming, handsome, almost impossibly suave, ascot-wearing James Bond/Hugh Hefner/Dean Martin-like slickster with a great head of hair. McFarland was jokingly referred to by friends as an “adult prodigy” as he showed little interest in music until a stint in the armed services, after which he attended Berklee School of Music for a semester before moving to New York. He achieves some notice working with Gerry Mulligan, and with The Jazz Version of “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” album in 1961. From there his career as a composer/arranger sees a fairly meteoric rise before his life comes to a shocking end less than a decade later, just as he was moving in the direction of scoring motion pictures and Broadway.

Like many—no doubt most—of you reading this, I had never heard of Gary McFarland before, but I found the thread intriguing and clicked over to YouTube to see what I could find. There I found some delightful soft samba Beatles covers (”Get Back” “And I Love Her” “She Loves You” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) and “More” (see what I did there?) often featuring vibraphone and vocalised with “ba baya” style scat singing. (Apparently McFarland had a difficult time memorizing lyrics… problem solved!). I found his incredible song cycle, The October Suite performed with Steve Kuhn, and plenty of other things.

I also read an interview with Love’s Johnny Echols who indicated how much McFarland’s Soft Samba album influenced Da Capo and Forever Changes! (Listen to “Orange Skies” after you hear some of McFarland’s material, the “ba baya” influence becomes quite obvious!)
 

 
I’m one of the world’s consummate crate diggers… and a fanatical Arthur Lee fan… HOW had McFarland’s work escaped my notice?

In any case, my appetite whet, I set about immediately picking up any and every project I could nab that Gary McFarland had a hand in. The torrents trackers offered little help, Amazon didn’t have much either, most of McFarland’s work is still trapped in vinyl, but they did have… a documentary about him!

Continues after the jump…

 
Locals who live in Celoron, N.Y.—Lucille Ball’s hometown, btw—are mad as shit at a life-size Lucille Ball statue erected there in her honor. The bronze statue sits sadly at the Lucille Ball Memorial Park in Celoron.

Lucy fans think it’s a disgrace to the legendary actress, comedian, model, and TV studio executive. Residents want the statue to either be remade, recast or removed entirely. Looking at it, I can’t say I blame them.

There’s a Facebook page called We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue. The man who started the page wants to remain anonymous but told Yahoo, “I think it looks like a monster. That is just my opinion,” he said. “When you see it at night, it is frightening.”

I’d probably crap my pants if I saw this thing at night.

Celoron Mayor Scott Schrecengost told the Jamestown Post-Journal that it would cost a lot of money — between $8,000 and $10,000 — to have the original artist recast the statue, which was unveiled in 2009.

Schrecengost told the newspaper that he has no interest in using taxpayer dollars to fix it. Instead, a fund has been set up to raise the money, according to the daily newspaper.

The artist, Dave Poulin, has remained silent on the issue. I believe Mr. Poulin has got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Update: The We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue page on Facebook writes:

I would urge anyone who would like to donate money for another statue to NOT donate to the City of Celoron so the same artist can “repair” this. Please wait until another Kickerstarter or GoFundMe account is set up where we can get a NEW artist and a NEW statue. Again… Please do NOT donate money to the City of Celoron to fix this.

 

 
Images via We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue

 
Frida Kahlo’s marriage with husband Diego Rivera was non-traditional, to say the least. Scandalous stories of their sex lives usually center on Frida’s bisexuality or Diego’s infidelity (however libertine they may have considered themselves, she was most certainly not okay with him sleeping with her sister), but Frida also had a lesser-known, incredibly intense affair with Spanish painter José Bartoli. He inspired over 100 pages of adoring, sometimes quite erotic love letters, all of which he kept, and the entire collection is now up for auction.

Kahlo and Bartoli met in New York, when a 39-year-old Frida was enduring spinal surgery, one of the many painful medical treatments she received throughout her life to deal with the debilitating chronic injuries sustained in a bus accident at the age of 18. The letters are desperately passionate, with Frida’s physical pain and emerging morphine use fevering her words, her desire for health and vitality entwined with her desire for Bertoli. Her marriage was predictably unhappy at the time of correspondence, and she found herself doubting her talent and unable to work. The thought of Bertoli brought her both longing and relief.

Not all of the letters are published, but the auction house has published excerpts and a synopses of Kahlo’s life at the time. Here are some of the more stirring parts.
 

“Bartoli—last night I felt as if many wings caressed me all over, as if your finger tips had mouths that kissed my skin. The atoms of my body are yours and they vibrate together so that we love each other. I want to live and be strong in order to love you with all the tenderness that you deserve, to give you everything that is good in me, so that you will not feel alone.

“From the little bed where I lay I looked at the elegant line of your neck, the refinement of your face, your shoulders, and your broad and strong back. I tried to get as close to you as I could in order to sense you, to enjoy your incomparable caress, the pleasure that it is to touch you…. if I do not touch you my hands, my mouth and my whole body lose sensation. I know I will have to [imagine you] when you are gone.”

apart from love-making I know there is something indestructible and positive that unites us. It gives me equal pleasure to kiss you, to make love, to listen to you, to look at you, to watch you sleep, to know your inner life…. Let me tell you how I delight in retaining in my senses your caresses, your words, how I feel full of an interior light when I hear you say to me, ‘my Mara, my dove, my Tehuana.’

My Bartoli-Jose-Guiseppe-my red one, I don’t know how to write love letters. But I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty. I would like to give you the prettiest colors, I want to kiss you…[I want] our dream worlds to be one. I would like to see from your eyes, hear from your ears, feel with your skin, kiss with your mouth. In order to see you from below [I would like] to be the shadow that is born from the soles of your feet and that lengthens along the ground upon which you walk…. I want to be the water the bathes you, the light that gives you form, [I wish] that my substance were your substance, that your voice should come out of my throat so as to caress me from inside.… in your desire and in your revolutionary struggle to make a better human life for everyone, I [want to] accompany you and help you, loving you, and in your laughter to find my joy

If sometimes you suffer, I want to fill you with tenderness so that you feel better. When you need me you will always find me near you. Waiting for you always. And I would like to be light and subtle when you want to be alone.”

It was the thirst of many years contained in our body…. Forgive me if all these things that I write are perhaps for you stupidities, but I believe that in love there is neither intelligence nor stupidity, love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain. You know, my sky, you rain on me and I, like the earth, receive you. Mara”

 
Via The Observer

 
Honestly, would you expect anything less from Mark E. Smith after watching this hilarious short video? I mean, really? That’s how the magic is made, right?

If you turned this video into a drinking game and took a shot of whiskey every time Mr. Smith said “fucking”... you’d be on the floor, smashed to the gills, in 1 minute and 38 seconds.

Kevin and his assistant just go with the flow. When you sign on to work with Mark E. Smith, I think this is pretty much exactly what you expect it’s gonna be like. I’m sure if Smith turned out to be a nice guy it would be… disappointing.

 
via WFMU on Twitter

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
For H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday: Mark E. Smith reads ‘The Color Out of Space’
Mark E. Smith As A Mancunian Jesus
Mark E. Smith: A Guide to Writing
Mark E. Smith: A brief tour of Edinburgh
The Fall’s Mark E. Smith does his Courtney Love impersonation, 1994
‘Becoming a hermit solves nothing’: The Fall’s Mark E. Smith writes Tony Friel, 1977
Kicker Conspiracy: Mark E. Smith reads football scores in his inimitable Mancunian drawl
The Wit and Wisdom of Mark E. Smith
The Pint-sized Mark E. Smith: Coming to a bar near you

 
When I was a child, summer holidays meant Jimmy Cagney movies on TV: White Heat, The Public Enemy, G-Men, Each Dawn I Die, Angels With Dirty Faces and so on. Cagney never looked like he was acting, he became whatever character he played, which explains why he was once asked, “Well, did you turn yella that time you went to da electric chair?”

Orson Welles once told chat show host Michael Parkinson that he thought Cagney was “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” I tend to agree with this—as no doubt did Marlon Brando and Stanley Kubrick who were both major fans of the brilliant, diminutive Irish-American.

Like many of the characters he played, Cagney was tough. He was born into a poor working class family in New York’s Lower East Side in 1899. He worked hard, held down several jobs, and was always ready with his fists should the need arise. His fighting skills were such that family, friends and neighbors came to Jimmy to knock out any troublemaker. But Cagney was also disciplined and assiduous. He was a vaudevillian, a song and dance man first and foremost, who learnt his trade working up through chorus lines and repertory companies before being spotted by Al Jolson in a play with Joan Blondell and cast in a movie Sinners’ Holiday. Cagney went to Hollywood for three weeks’ work, but ended with a legendary career that lasted over 31 years.
 

 
I’ve been reading his autobiography Cagney By Cagney (which I recommend) and in amongst his tales of career, family, early left wing politics—he was considered a communist because of his support of the unions, and was the target of a planned Mafia hit until actor and friend George Raft put a stop to it, though he switched allegiances to Reagan in the 1980s—his deep love of the country and concern for the environment and his fine talent for anecdote, Cagney revealed his liking for writing poetry. To be fair, some of it is okay—funny, amusing, enjoyable—but then there are those poems—like the one on the passing of friend Clark Gable—that maybe should have stayed in the bottom drawer:

The King, long bled, is newly dead.
Uneasily wore his crown, ‘tis said;
Quite naturally, since it was made of lead;
On those who gathered about his throne,
Y-clept Mayer, Mannix, Katz, and Cohn
He spat contempt in generous doses,
But whatever he gave, they made their own.

Unhappy man, he chose seclusion,
To the unremitting crass intrusion
Of John and Jane whose names meant dough
To Louie, Eddie, Sam, and Joe.

This is a small slap to the Hollywood producers “who controlled his destinies.” Cagney hated the exploitative nature of the Hollywood system.
 

 
Cagney began writing in his Broadway days in the 1920s—“a habit triggered by reading Stephen Vincent Benet’s magnificent John Brown’s Body.” He was also influenced by William Blake and Robert Burns, who gave “food for thought” for when he tired of Hollywood and Hugh Kingsmill’s Anthology of Invective and Abuse, which inspired his putdown of a Tinsel Town ass-kisser:

Where once were vertebrae is now a tangle,
From constant kissing at an awkward angle.

Throughout his autobiography, Cagney dipped into one of poems whenever he felt like it. Though he claimed few of his verses were ever written down, he had “quite a number stored in [his] memory.” These ranged from:

A pheasant called in a distant thicket,
And lovingly my old friend said,
“I hear you, I hear you.”
And he loved that bird, till he gunned him dead.

To:

A lady spider met a fella
And made all haste to date him;
She loved him with a love sublime,
Up to and including—
The time, when in ecstasy,
She ate him.

Of course Cagney was just enjoying himself—relishing the pleasure of words. But his poetry often dealt with serious issues, like the poem he sent to the Irish Times under the pseudonym Harley Quinn on the damage industry was doing to the environment:

You want to see the Shannon like the Hudson
Or the Liffey just as filthy as the Seine?
Bring in the arrogant asses
And their garbage and their gasses—
The pollutants plunging poison down each drain:
Killing everything that’s living
For which nature’s unforgiving,
And the punishment will certainly fit the crime.
Where man, the creeping cancer,
Will have to make the final answer
As he smothers ‘neath his self-created slime.

 
More on Jimmy Cagney and his poetry, after the jump…

 
Happy Birthday, Mike Ness! Somehow you still have a career after all these years! Also, congratulations on still being alive—sadly, two of the members of Social Distortion featured in this video have left the planet.
 

RIP Dennis and Brent.

What we have here is some killer 1983 rehearsal space footage of Social Distortion performing “Mommy’s Little Monster” from the album of the same name which was recorded for a Flipside Video Fanzine. 

This song, included in the excellent 1982 documentary Another State of Mind, was an introduction to hardcore punk for thousands of kids of a certain age who witnessed it on the classic USA Network Nightflight TV series, and it remains a concert staple for Social Distortion, despite their radical departure from the hardcore punk sound of the first LP.
 

“The Creeps (I Just Wanna Give You)”

This clip is a crucial reminder that dudes with spiky hair and eyeliner will always be cooler than dudes in vests and fedoras. Not to knock what Social Distortion has become, but… actually, yeah, I’ll go ahead an knock what Social Distortion has become—a sort of fakey Americana band for dudes who used to be skinheads—but now have pompadours and dice tattoos—and their Bettie Page-banged girlfriends with rollerderby arms and polka dotted dresses…

Continues after the jump…

Arthur Lee and Jimi Hendrix, 1969
 
Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee met in 1964 or 1965 at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, where singer Rosa Lee Brooks was recording Lee’s song “My Diary.” Lee claimed the session was Hendrix’s first time in a recording studio, though it seems likely Hendrix had already cut “Testify” with the Isley Brothers.
 

 
The two men remained friends, and on St. Patrick’s Day 1970, after Love finished a European tour, Hendrix joined the band in London’s Olympic Studios. There, Lee says Jimi and the band all ate mescaline (or “Huxley’s hooch,” as we used to call it in the San Fernando Valley). From Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book Of Love—The Authorized Biography of Arthur Lee, here are Lee’s recollections of the Olympic session:

Boy, did we have fun at the Olympic recording studio. The band and Jimi all took mescaline. Although they didn’t know it, I was as straight as Cochise’s arrow. Somebody had to steer the ship. [...]

One of the ways I got Jimi to do the session in the first place—or how I got his attention, anyway—happened one night at the Speakeasy. He and I arrived together. The guy at the front door told me I could come in but Jimi couldn’t. When I asked him why, he said that Jimi had been fighting in the club on an earlier occasion and they didn’t want that happening again. So I told him that Jimi was cool, the entourage that was with us was cool, and I didn’t think any fighting would be going on that night. He finally agreed. I said to Jimi, “Look, man, neither one of us is going to be around much longer, anyway; so while we’re here, we might as well do something together.” When I said that, whatever we were talking about, or he was thinking about, just seemed to stop and I had his full attention. He really went into some deep thought as he looked at me from across the table. He was looking into my eyes and I knew he could only be thinking about our early deaths.

The session went completely differently from the way I was used to recording. I thought it was to be a private session. I don’t remember telling anyone to come, except the band; but, to my surprise, there were people all over the place. There were girls I’d never seen before and faces popping out from where you would least expect a person to be. I was in a state of shock, but Jimi said, “It’s OK, let them stay.” More than once, Jimi thought we were done and went to pack everything up. Then he would come back into the studio while we were playing and say, “What key?” Once, when we were learning a song I wrote, called “Ride That Vibration,” Jimi came walking back in during the middle of it. He asked me, “What did you just say in that song?” I said, “Ride the vibration down like a six foot grave / Don’t let it get you down.” Then he said, “I gotta go; it’s getting too heavy.” He called a cab, took [drummer George Suranovich’s] girlfriend, and was out the door. George just looked at me as if to say, “That’s Jimi.” After a while, Jimi came back and suggested that everyone jam, and were my band members ever happy!

On that session in London, we managed to lay down a few tracks, among them “E-Z Rider,” “The Everlasting First,” and a jam that I would later add lyrics to. Jimi sang on “E-Z Rider.” I gave the master reel to [Blue Thumb Records president] Bob Krasnow. He never gave it back. At the time, I wondered if someone was filming us, although I never saw a camera. I found out, in the early 90s, they had been.

Back in the studio, it was almost daylight, so I signaled to H to start wrapping it up. I don’t think Jimi was ready to quit, but it had been a long night for me. The tour we were doing was over with; I just wanted to get back to Studio City in California. As we were walking out of the building, Jimi asked, “Where are you going?” I said, “Man, I gotta get back to LA; to my woman, dogs, and pigeons.” Jimi said, “Come here, I want to show you something.” We walked back inside the studio. He pointed to his guitar case on the floor. Then he opened it up. I thought he had a stash in there, but as he stood up, he pointed to it again and said, “This is all I have.” I couldn’t figure it out at first, but then it hit me. He was telling me that the white Stratocaster guitar in the case were his only possessions. I felt kind of sad for him.

 

 
Of the three songs Hendrix cut with Love at Olympic, only “The Everlasting First”—the single from Love’s False Start album—was officially released. The other two songs, Hendrix’s “Ezy Rider” and the jam “Loon,” surfaced on an acetate that turned up on eBay in 2009.

The music, after the jump…