Nope! Nope! Nope!

According to the print at the top, “Mick Jagger invented the potatoes and franks; Charlie Watts added the beans.”

Damn you, Charlie!

This appetizing recipe is from the book Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen: The Scene-Makers Cook Book. Dozens of Nutty, Turned -on, Easy-to-prepare Recipes from the Grooviest Gourmets Happening (1967).

10 frankfurters
5 potatoes, or enough instant mashed potatoes to serve five
1 large can baked beans

Prepare instant mashed potatoes, or boil and mash the potatoes. (Use milk and butter, making regular, every-day mashed potatoes.) Cook the frankfurters according to the package directions and heat the baked beans.

On each plate, serve a mound of creamy mashed potatoes ringed by heated canned baked beans. Over all the top of this, slice up the frankfurters in good-sized chunks.

Here’s what the finished recipe looks like (ack!) via Dinner is Served:

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

David Lynch’s quinoa recipe video is as Lynchian as it gets!
 
h/t Kottke

 
GBVDB.com, one of the single most informative Guided By Voices fan sites online, has now been operating for ten years. In celebration, they’ve posted a GBV concert from the band’s Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes period, recorded at the still-extant Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge MA.

The band played alot of songs off the yet to be released Alien Lanes album that Bob mentions was going to be released in January 1995 on Matador. Alien Lanes didn’t end up getting released until 4/4/95. This show also confirms that the 11/2/94 show that was previously thought to be CBGB’s in NY was actually Providence, RI as Bob says “We were in Rhode Island last night. In Providence” during the 11/3/94 show. This show was recorded by Michael Train on a Sony D7 handheld DAT and a Sony external mic. The show was later put on CD using the D7 analog outs into a Marantz CD reecorder. These AAC files were ripped from the CD and are the current best source for this show.

Got all that? The link to the files can be found here.

If you’re feeling extra flashbacky to those long-gone days before GBV were a big deal, check out this old MTV Music News feature on the band just as they were beginning to draw national attention.
 

 
It has begun, as it does creepingly earlier every year - “The Holidays” are here. But in spite of the ecumenical plural, we all know that really just means “Christmastime,” the single most alienating time of year not to be a part of the majority. As a Jewish kid, this was the annual month-long reminder that I wasn’t really a member of The America Club, and as an atheist adult, it’s no less disaffecting. And in recent years, with bloviating jackass loudmouth discord-sowers like John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly ginning up the mass delusion that a “war” against the American hegemonic religion’s single most deeply penetrative auto-fellatiothon could possibly exist - in order to inflame the ignorant passions of Tea Party shitheads and sell books, because values - it’s become an unbearable time of breathless news reports about awful, AWFUL secularists mortally wounding the oh-so-persecuted majority by offering inclusive greetings at cash registers and ruthlessly denying them their totally unconstitutional City Hall creches.

Sometimes it’s enough to make me wish the “War On Christmas” were real and literal, if only just to see all the tacky plastic decorations get blowed up real good. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Inflatable Rudolphs on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

But as thoroughly obnoxious as the inescapable cultural takeover of chintzy display and mandatory cheer is for six goddamn weeks a year, it’s impossible to hate on everything about Christmas. Anyone who doesn’t love gingerbread, I’m not sure I want to know. Horatio Sanz’s wonderful Christmas song from SNL justifies that man’s entire existence. Thirsty Dog Brewing’s Christmas Ale is pretty awesome. And it should go without saying FUCK YEAH, RANKIN-BASS SPECIALS.

And music. Lovely, lovely music. Yeah, there’s a plurality of dreck in the Christmas song canon - wherever there’s an obscene pigpile of cash to be hauled in, you’re going to have plenty of dross to sift through. But babies, bathwater, something something - would you want to live in a world without the Bach Cantatas, the Hallelujah Chorus, or David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “The Little Drummer Boy?” You would not. Yeah, stuff like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Santa Baby” is horrid moneygrubbing hackwork that can go pound sand, but the older, more liturgically-slanted Christmas music encompasses some of the greatest musical craft of all time - it was inspired, after all, by someone’s idea of the divine.

Which brings us around to how punk stalwarts Bad Religion have joined Il Volo, Kelly Clarkson, and Susan Boyle in releasing a Christmas album this year. Though I’ve never been a super huge fan of the band’s fairly hidebound hardcore singalongs, I’m not one to hate on them, either, so this news intrigued me. The band’s lyricist and leader Greg Graffin is a man I’ve always abidingly respected - an outspoken atheist with iconoclastic left-wing views, absolutely one of rock music’s great public intellectuals. Would this be a powerful, stinging indictment of the Christmas-Commercial Complex I’ve spent a lifetime growing to despise? It couldn’t possibly be a lamely punked-up novelty covers album a la Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, could it? As it turns out, and much to my further curiosity, the track listing is loaded with reverential, traditional songs. So, um, HUH?

And so I listened. It immediately became clear that this would indeed be WAY better than a Me First type one-dimensional joke; Graffin’s expressively gruff voice is well-suited to the material. But still, the first half of the album actually alternates greatness with meh - the opener, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is really, really nice, but “O Come All Ye Faithful” sounds like a punk rock cover of that song conceived by any old random person with a rudimentary understanding of how punk rock is supposed to sound. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is propulsive, emotively forceful, and just plain old FANTASTIC, probably the best thing on the album, then “White Christmas” comes on and sounds exactly how you’re already imagining it if you’ve ever heard even one Bad Religion song.
 

Bad Religion - “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

Bad Religion - “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

It picks up. From the much more inventive than expected “Little Drummer Boy” to a straight but admirably executed take on “Angels We Have Heard On High,” the band’s energy never flags, the riffs’ catchiness holds the material aloft, and nothing disappoints. But the finishing move seems like a copout to me. It’s the twenty-year-old song “American Jesus.” A blisteringly ironic excoriation of that xenophobic, destructive, American-exceptionalist form of Christianity that any thinking human should rightly loathe, for sure, but still, heard it twenty years ago and it’s not really even slightly a Christmas song. Andy Wallace remixed it though, so yay?

So the Grinch in me leaves unsatisfied. Am I asking too much of this? Am I demanding that someone else’s album express my agenda? But given the intellects, histories and reputations of the members of this band, am I so wrong for wishing it had just absolutely killed my face off? In the end, it’s a much better than average collection of punk rock Christmas covers. I have every confidence that people who’re more FUCK YEAH about Bad Religion than I am will absolutely love this, and they probably won’t be the only ones. Its tracks will surely assume their rightful place on Christmas mix CDs for decades to come.

Here’s Bad Religion live, from a French television broadcast earlier this year.
 

 
The track was “Memorabilia” and I heard it nearly every time I was out in some club in the early 1980s. Between dances, there was small disagreement over the band’s name, who they were and where they came from. It varied depending who you talked to. Then came “Tainted Love” and suddenly everyone knew who they were: Marc Almond and Dave Ball of Soft Cell.

When this duo first appeared on Top of the Pops with their number one hit “Tainted Love” in 1981, the florid Wing-Commanders and Colonel Mustards of Tunbridge Wells thundered, “Who the hell is this woman? That can’t be a man, surely? I fought a war for this?” It certainly was a man, and those damned lucky blighters were watching Marc Almond give one of TOTP’s most memorable and thrilling performances.

Marc is the Poet Laureate of sleaze, and Dave its Schubert. Together they wrote songs that perfectly captured an underclass world of the disenfranchised, the sexually ambiguous, and the impoverished. 

When their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret came out on November 27th, 1981, I had to beg, steal and borrow a copy, and even wrote to Santa, bad Santa, for this delectable slice of vinyl. When it arrived, I played it endlessly. The NME may have hated it, but they were old, too old, and this was Year Zero for eighties music as far as I was concerned.

Just take a listen and you will hear why, as m’colleague Richard Metzger has previously written, Marc Almond:

”...is one of the truly great interpreters of song of our age. His distinctive voice, like Frank Sinatra’s, is instantly recognizable from the very first note.”

After Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing (arguably the UK’s first House record by a British band) came the richer and darker blooms The Art of Falling Apart and Last Night in Sodom, which only the most great and reckless talents could have produced. 

This documentary from the BBC series Young Guns traces the rise and fall of Soft Cell from student life in Leeds to the bright New York lights, and the seedy London back streets. Made in 2000, it has superb interviews form Marc Almond, Dave Ball, the band’s manager Stevo, and record execs.
 

Oz magazine no. 15, October 1968
 
I would imagine that in the late ‘60s it was the rare college dormitory or commune indeed that couldn’t boast at least a couple examples of the higgledy-piggledy masterpieces of Martin Sharp. In addition to designing the covers of Cream’s second and third albums, Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire, Sharp also produced many iconic psychedelic artworks featuring the images of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Donovan, among others. The cover for Disraeli Gears is routinely hailed as one of the finest album covers of all time—there can be little doubt that Sharp captured in visual terms the lysergic essence of one of the greatest psychedelic rock albums ever produced.

A native of Australia, Sharp was one of the people who established the legendary underground magazine Oz, contributing a great many memorable and cheeky covers. The magazine was founded in 1962, but in 1966 Sharp and editor-in-chief Richard Neville headed for London to start the U.K. version, which was considerably popular and influential. While in London, Sharp met a musician named Eric Clapton at The Speakeasy and ended up co-writing the Cream song “Tales of Brave Ulysses” with him. The song appeared on Disraeli Gears and was the B-side to “Strange Brew.” Sharp was flatmates in a sprawling London mansion with Clapton when he designed his Cream covers.

When one looks at his works, Sharp is one of the few psychedelic artists who doesn’t seem particularly hemmed in by the genre. His draftsmanship and artistic flexibility are impressive, as is his irreverent wit—just check out his treatment of the Mona Lisa for proof of that. His Cream album covers and his work for Oz seem like the work of the same person, and yet aren’t particularly alike.

Australian blogger Michael Organ has an excellent overview of his early career.
 

Martin Sharp, during the Oz years
 

Disraeli Gears
 

Wheels of Fire
 

Mister Tambourine Man, 1966
 

Max (The Birdman) Ernst, 1967
 

‘Exploding’ Jimi Hendrix poster, 1967

Below, Martin Sharp’s Street Of Dreams, a feature length impressionistic documentary on iconic weirdo Vaudevillian, Tiny Tim, and featuring Sharp’s designs at Australia’s Luna Park.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Rope Ladder to the Moon: Solo genius from Cream’s Jack Bruce
‘Rope Ladder to the Moon’: Jack Bruce creates his post-Cream masterpiece, ‘Song for a Tailor’

 
There’s a bit by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg that perfectly describes the sort of Kafkaesque nightmare that can only be shared between an audience and a performer. Hedberg was at a heavy metal concert when the band’s frontman demanded to know, “How many of you people feel like human beings tonight?” Hedberg enthusiastically cheered, not expecting the follow-up of “How many of you feel like animals?” The intended cue to cheer was actually the second question, but the comedian hadn’t anticipated that, thinking, “Yes, I do feel like a human. I do not feel like a tree.”

The embarrassment for this kind of public faux pas can be pretty bad; even the band tends to feel some fremdschämen for awkward fans. Nina Simone, however, manages to laugh off any tension during this 1987 performance of Be My Husband. But holy hell, the audience just cannot keep their claps on the offbeats! It’s baffling, but Simone maintains infinite patience, light-heartedly instructing the world’s most arrhythmic audience in her cheerful Franglais. (The recording, by the way, was made at the Vine St. Bar & Grill in Hollywood, and Simone, who later lived in France, may have just been brushing up on her language skills.)
 

 
For a version that will actually make you shiver, check out this performance from the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in 1965. Seriously, cleanse your palate.
 

 
It seems the controversial and ill-starred Black Flag reunion is already falling apart. Via Dying Scene:

Wow! Ron Reyes just posted a lengthy statement on Facebook announcing he has decided to leave Black Flag, stating he believes the band “fell very short indeed and the diminishing ticket sales and crowds are a testament to that.” You can read the full statement below.

It is unclear whether Black Flag’s new album What The…, which features Reyes on vocals, is still going to be released on December 13th via SST Records. If it does see the light of day, it will be the first album released under the Black Flag name since 1985′s In My Head.

That release date of the 13th seems like it may be a typo, by the way. Multiple sources, including the band’s official site, have the date as December 3rd.

Reyes originally joined Black Flag in 1979, after the departure of founding vocalist Keith Morris. After singing on some of the band’s classic material, including the pivotal “Jealous Again” EP (whereon his vocals were credited to the name “Chavo Pederast”), he quit the band mid-gig in 1980, perhaps a foreshadowing of his onstage ouster THIS time around:

On November 24th 2013 the last night of the Australian Hits and Pits tour with two songs left in the set Mike V comes on stage stares me down, takes my mic and says “You’re done, party’s over get off it’s over…” He said something else to me but it was a lie so I won’t repeat it here. So with a sense of great relief that it was finally over I left the stage and walked to the hotel room. They finished the set with Mike V on vocals.

“Mike V” presumably refers to Mike Vallely, the professional skater who has recently collaborated with Black Flag honcho Greg Ginn in the band Good For You.

Black Flag were never strangers to controversy, but their 2013 reunion has drawn HUGE fire from fans for trying to pass off what many have claimed is substandard music as worthy of the band’s name, and for designing one of the single most bafflingly terrible album covers in the history of life on Earth. Underscoring what’s coming to be perceived as Ginn’s utter debasement of his own legacy is the concurrent and far better-received reunion of many of his former bandmates under the name Flag, to which Ginn responded by partaking of one of his apparent favorite extra-musical pastimes, suing his former associates. That went about as well as the reunion seems to be going.

We at DM sincerely wish Reyes the very best of luck in his future endeavors. Here he is raging full-on back in the day, in a scene from The Decline Of Western Civilization.
 

Brian Jones at the Manger Motor Lodge in Savannah, Georgia
 
These incredible pictures of the Rolling Stones relaxing during their 1965 tour of the U.S. were found a couple of years ago at a flea market in Saugus, California, by a musician named Lauren White. They date from the first week in May 1965. The Stones had played the Academy of Music in New York City on the first of the month and did a brief tour of the South before heading back up north to Chicago. On May 4 they played the Hanner Gymnasium at Southern College in Statesboro, Georgia, and on May 6 they played the Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida. These pictures were taken right around that time.

To put it in perspective where the Stones were at this juncture, one month later, on June 6, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” would get its U.S. release (the U.K. release was later on in the summer). This is arguably one of the last moments that the Stones were not mega-superstars.

White suspects that the pictures were taken by a woman: “In a lot of the images, the guys are looking directly into the lens. It’s hard to get boys to be that vulnerable, especially in front of a camera. They are also sort of showing off. I think a girl is the only thing that could convince them to allow those kinds of shots. It’s hard to imagine a dude is evoking these intimate moments, but you never know.”

If you’d like to find a similar score, White says that her favorite flea markets in California are: “In Los Angeles, the Fairfax Flea Market, the Topanga Vintage Market and the Pasadena City College Flea Market. Rose Bowl overwhelms me. I also like the Alemany Flea Market in San Francisco.”
 

Mick Jagger, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Keith Richards, somewhere between Savannah and Clearwater
 

Bill Wyman, somewhere between Savannah and Clearwater
 

Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Charlie Watts, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Brian Jones, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Mick Jagger, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Brian Jones, poolside in Clearwater, Florida
 

Brian Jones, poolside in Clearwater, Florida

via Tombolare

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Rolling Stones interviewed in a Montreal motel in 1965
The Rolling Stones hanging out at Brian Jones’ apartment 1967

 
Italian designer Silvio Lorusso has hit upon a marvelous new design game that anyone who uses Photoshop can play. A few months ago he started a Tumblr called Content-Aware Typography in which he posted (and solicited from readers) images of iconic typography from famous movie posters, album covers, advertising logos and so forth after having deployed Photoshop’s “Content-Aware Fill” feature on them.

The point of it all is that the content-aware feature was never meant to be used on text—it’s used to fill in the space where the user has removed an object from an image. It does so basically by guessing what might be behind the object based on what is visible near the object and then covering it with visual snatches in a randomized fashion. If you’re talking about a forest or a horizon, it can work rather well. Text works in such a specific way that it reveals the content-aware process for what it is, a game attempt by an otherwise stupid algorithm to trick the eye through sheer repetition.

I like the Content-Aware Typography Tumblr so much because it does such violence to the words and visual elements while leaving the basic idea intact. You can usually guess what was originally there, after all. It also seems somewhat like a virus, as if something malign had gotten into our most recognizable icons and replicated itself without rhyme or reason, with an insatiable bent for visual real estate.

The images here don’t come from Content-Aware Typography; I asked a friend, Mark Davis, to generate a few for me (I don’t know Photoshop) and he did so with alacrity and élan. If you want to see more, by all means visit the original Tumblr. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via WXN&MLKN

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Odd photoshopped vintage LP sleeves
Eerie album covers with deceased band members photoshopped out

Bibbe and friend

Love him or hate him, Beck Hansen’s family tree is jaw-droppingly cool. Not only was his maternal grandfather Fluxus artist Al Hansen, his grandmother was actress and poet Audrey Ostlin Hansen, and his mother Bibbe Hansen was, among her many incarnations, one of Warhol’s youngest Factory “Superstars” as well as an artist, actress, and musician in her own right.

Not long before she appeared in Warhol’s 1965 films Prison and Restaurant at the age of thirteen, Bibbe was in a short-lived girl pop group with Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, called The Whippets.

Bibbe and Jan were twelve years-old in 1964 when they formed The Whippets in New York City with their friend Charlotte Rosenthal, using Whippet as their collective surname. The group formed when they met songwriter Neil Levinson one day while trying to panhandle for bus fare. The Whippets made one recording for Laurie Records, the Beatle-themed novelty single “I Want To Talk To You,” written by Levinson with the B-side “Go Go Go With Ringo,” written by Beatles zealot DJ Murray the K’s mother, Jean Kauffman. The song sold well enough in Canada to reach the pop charts. Any prospects of an ongoing music career were cut short soon after the recording session when Bibbe found herself in a state juvenile detention center.

Bibbe told Scram magazine the story of the group’s formation and brief life in 2005:

Charlotte Rosenthal, Janet Kerouac and I were all downtown street kids in 1964 New York City. While panhandling, we three met songwriter Neil Levinson (“Oh, Denise”) and hustled busfare from him. On the bus ride we fell to chatting. The Beatles had just come out big in the US and Neil had written a girl-song response to “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Would we be interested in hearing it? We met him later that day at Steinway Studios on 57th Street and together finished the lyrics and music for “I Want To Talk With You.” It was a classic girl group riff and we dug it. That same day we went to a half dozen record companies auditioning the song without any takers. As a last resort, Neil called Colpix label’s Don Rubin from a payphone. When Don said he would see us we ran all the way over to the audition. We sang the song and within the next couple days we were signed to Colpix and to DuLev Productions. DuLev was Levinson’s company with his partner, Steve Duboff. For the B-side Neil brought in pal Jean Murray (Jean Kauffman) who had co-written the Darin hit “Splish Splash” with Darin and her son, DJ Murray the K. Oh, that she only wrote us another “Splish Splash!” Instead it was the rather silly and insipid “Go Go Go With Ringo.” We loved the A-side but weren’t too wild about the Ringo song. Over the next few weeks we rehearsed daily, shopped for matching outfits and had 8x10 glossy promo pictures taken. At one point we were introduced to the group The Tokens who apparently were now 1/3 owners of our act along with Dulev (1/3) and Jean Murray (1/3). Our percentage was apparently not accounted for under this bookkeeping arrangement. Similarly, I have no idea how Don Rubin and Colpix were supposed to get their cut.

Within a few weeks we were recording. The record was pressed—at least dj copies. We got a box of these records to split between us. I believe it was released however briefly but nothing much happened with it. I heard our masters were sold to Laurie Records at one point. Later I heard we’d charted somewhere in Canada. Shortly before she died, Janet Kerouac told me her Rhino Records lawyers were looking into that and had found that we were owed a little bit of money. Apparently not enough to bother collecting from what I can tell.

The Whippets, “I Want To Talk To You,” 1964: