“I met Judy on the phone. I was having a transatlantic conversation on the phone with a friend in London. I was in NY at the time, and Judy was in his studio. When I came to London in about ‘74 we became good friends. We were trying our best to get something going, we were both creative chicks… We both had ideas of sorts.

For two foreign chicks living in London, what is there really to do? So that’s why Rock & Roll! It was the obvious thing to do out of boredom. We thought about forming a band together. We worked on basic lyrics and melodies and things. But it was hard trying to find people who understood where we were coming from. At that time all the punks were suddenly beginning to appear. Everyone was into saying, “I’m a punk. I’m cool, I’m aggressive, we’re going to change it” and all this shit. ”—from an interview with Jon Savage in Search & Destroy #8

Even the most hardcore rock snob has probably never heard of Snatch. If they have it’s usually in connection with Brian Eno, who they recorded an amazing song about the Red Army Faction with in 1978 (“R.A.F.” was the b-side of the “King’s Lead Hat” single). I discovered them when the striking picture sleeve of “All I Want” jumped out at me as I flipped through a well-curated box of 45s at my friend Nate Cimmino’s apartment in the East Village in the mid-1980s. The cover, scuffed and reproduced poorly here, was really something, gold-gilded text and faux silk portraits of hottie punkettes Patti Palladin on one side and Judy Nylon on the other. The way the printing is done on it, it’s like one of those Virgin Mary clocks they sell in Tijuana. “They sound like The Shangri-las if they’d have been crack smokers, I think you’ll really like them!” he said enthusiastically.

Nate certainly knew my taste in music. I promptly spent the next few years searching in vain for their ultra rare records. Eventually I found them all. And they’re on the Internet now, of course, so you can check them out for yourself. There is not a whole lot written about them that I can find. They were two expat American girls living in London and Greg Shaw of Bomp Records released their first single in 1976. They recorded sporadically until 1980 and their singles and some demos were collected on a compilation album in 1983.
 

 
Judy Nylon moved to London in 1970 and was a part of the orbits of both Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols. She was pals with Chrissie Hynde and John Lydon and was probably Brian Eno’s girlfriend at some point (I think we can safely assume that “Back in Judy’s Jungle” is about her, possibly even about her snatch). In addition to Snatch, Nylon recorded (she does the female lead vocal on “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy”) and toured with John Cale and went on to make an album in 1982 with Adrian Sherwood and members of the New Age Steppers called Pal Judy. Patti Palladin worked with the Flying Lizards and later recorded an incredible album of cover song duets with ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders titled Copy Cats. This little-known album boasts some of the very best music Thunders ever made.

Judy Nylon is also credited by Eno as helping him accidentally “discover” ambient music:

“My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of eighteenth-century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record [Eno had just been released from the hospital and was bedridden]. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to my pieces at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.”

The Snatch compilation that originally came out in 1983 was reissued as a limited edition vinyl LP by Light in the Attic for this year’s Record Store Day.
 
More more after the jump…

Members of the dance troupe/cabaret L.A. Knockers getting ready to take the stage at the Playboy Club in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
 
I’ve learned many things here writing for Dangerous Minds—one that there is always more to a picture than meets the eye. Which is why I took it upon myself to find out more about mid-70s all-girl dance troupe/cabaret act, L.A. Knockers. Their act was a fan favorite in the Los Angeles club scene where you could find the girls performing at The Starwood, The Troubadour, The Comedy Store, The Matrix Theater, and the Playboy Club. The shows curated exclusively for the Playboy Club included a strange sounding sexed-up comedic version of a 1978 medley by The Village People, “The Women” featuring members of the Knockers dressed as John Travolta (in Saturday Night Fever mode), Dracula, Superman, King Kong and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. And that was just for starters.

The members of L.A. Knockers would grow through the dozen or so years they were together and they performed all over the country to packed houses, but most often in Las Vegas and Reno. Knockers’ principal choreographer Jennifer Stace would bring the dance-magic to the group as did choreographer, Marilyn Corwin. Corwin worked her disco moves with The Village People, for the movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and with Frank Zappa during some of his live performances. The Knockers caught the eye of Zappa, who, according to an article published in 1981 in Italian magazine L’Espresso, wanted to take the Knockers on tour with him, a claim that perhaps at first sounded like it had no legs, but it much like the Knockers, actually did. On New Year’s Eve in 1976, Zappa played a show at the Forum in Los Angeles which included members of the L.A. Knockers dressed like babies in diapers and white afro wigs. Hey, even Frank Zappa thought they were cool as fuck, which, without question, they were.

Any story worth reading must include a twist, and this is where the part about the Hillside Stranglers, the horrific serial killers and cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, comes in. Twenty-one-year-old Lissa Kastin, an original member of L.A. Knockers would become Bianchi and Buono’s third victim. In 1985’s The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, the author notes that Kastin was not “an attractive enough victim” for the degenerate cousins who were put off by her “health nut looks” and “unshaved legs.” In some true crime circles, Kastin would be referred to as “the ugly girl” among the Hillside Stranglers’ female body count thanks to a photo used by the newspapers—an image that looked almost nothing like the young, rising star.

Below are some incredible photos taken by Elisa Leonelli which lovingly chronicle the L.A. Knockers’ decade-plus career in showbiz as well as a compilation video of the troupe performing live which you simply must see. Some of the images which follow are slightly NSFW.
 

Original members of L.A. Knockers, Jennifer Stace (left), Lissa Kastin (RIP, center) and Yana Nirvana (right).
 

1978.
 
More after the jump…

 
Probably one of the most iconic rock album covers of the 1990s was Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate. The record, which was released on Sub Pop in 1994, came at a time when the exorbitant cash-grab of grunge music started to lose its momentum and feel stale. Newer, more challenging approaches to rock songwriting of the Pacific Northwest, such as indie, emo, and Riot grrrl, offered an earnest alternative to the commercially “alternative” music that popularized the region. Sunny Day Real Estate, who came up in the Emerald City during a time when Nirvana reigned supreme, wrote music that was pioneering and distinctive to the “second wave” of emocore and post-hardcore. Their debut record, Diary, is considered one of the most significant and celebrated genre-releases to date.
 

 
The cover and insert artwork for Diary was created by Washington painter, illustrator, and tattooer, Chris Thompson. Mixing cynicism with subtle irony, Thompson’s artistic contributions portray the everyday woes of human life, while amusingly depicted by smiling Fisher-Price “Little People” toys. Thompson lived with the Sunny Day guys while studying art at Cornish College of Arts and the “Little People” paintings were originally created for his senior thesis. Years later, Thompson collaborated with the band once more for yet another classic album cover, Sunny Day Real Estate’s 1998 comeback record How it Feels to Be Something On.
 

Sunny Day Real Estate - ‘How it Feels to Be Something On’
 
Chris Thompson describes his paintings as surrealist and inspired by one-liner jokes. There is no central meaning to much of his work, but rather he begins with a concept that he finds to be funny or odd. For the last twenty years, Thompson has been a tattoo artist around the Puget Sound region. He currently works out of 522 Tattoo in Lake Forest Park, Washington. He has continued to paint since those early days in Seattle and will occasionally show his work publicly.
 
Take a look at Chris Thompson’s surrealist artwork below.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Joseph Cavalieri is not your usual creator of stained-glass windows. Rather than produce images of Saints Jude, Francis, and Anthony, Cavalieri’s work has more often involved subjects like Gina Lollobrigida and the Incredible Hulk. He also has done a few works involving characters from The Simpsons.

A native of New York, Cavalieri is one of the more renowned practitioners of stained-glass works with pop subjects. His work has appeared at the Stax Museum and one of his patrons has been the movie director Morgan Spurlock. He studied at the School of Visual Arts, where he studied under Paula Scher and Milton Glaser. In 2010 he opened a glass studio in the East Village called CAVAglass Studios.

The same year he collaborated with the legendary comix artist Robert Crumb to produce a handful of marvelous stained-glass windows with familiar figures from Crumb’s work. In an email correspondence, Crumb rejected one image, of “the guy punching the girl’s head down into her body,” because “no one will like it.” He also told Cavalieri that he was “flattered that you’re making stain glass out of my stuff and hope you make some money off them!”

On the project, Cavalieri has said, “I am not reprinting his illustrations. I am placing them into gothic settings, and hand-painting each. He uses pen and ink on paper, and I am using paintbrush and enamel on glass. I’ve never done such precise work in my life. It’s probably similar to what a counterfeiter may feel.”

The work pops because it yokes together unlike elements: “I come from a graphic design background, and one thing I learned is if you put opposites together in an interesting way it draws attention to the work. . . . Comics and stained glass are good opposites.”
 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

 
When Hard Rain, Bob Dylan’s much ballyhooed NBC TV special aired on September 14, 1976, I was nine years old. I’d “discovered” Dylan earlier that year and owned his Greatest Hits album and the single of “Tangled Up in Blue,” which I thought was the greatest song ever recorded. I eagerly anticipated the night that a Hard Rain was a-gonna be broadcast.

However, Hard Rain just perplexed me. I was expecting something more… well, professional, I suppose, and this was really loose and informal, the exact opposite of a slick rock show. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t play his songs the “right way.”

I’d also been reading about how the Rolling Thunder Revue tour was supposed to have all of this crackling, joyous onstage energy and musical camaraderie among the musicians (Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, David Mansfield, Gary Burke, Roger McGuinn, Bob Neuwirth, Scarlet Rivera, Luther Rix, Kinky Friedman, Mick Ronson, Steven Soles, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth), but as you can see, the energy is downright subdued, barely a smile is cracked. By the time this performance was shot—May 23, 1976 at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado—the Revue seems to have run out of steam and the rain wasn’t helping matters. Roger McGuinn looks like he’s about to fall over and Bob just seems angry.
 

 
Only four of the eleven performances actually heard in the broadcast (“Maggie’s Farm”, “One Too Many Mornings,” “Shelter from the Storm” and “Idiot Wind”) were included on the Hard Rain live album released ten days before the special aired. Rob Stoner would later remark that Dylan had been “hitting the bottle all weekend” and speculated that the album’s sloppy “punk” energy was a result of that bender. The fact that Dylan and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Sara, had been arguing for the entire Colorado stay may have also contributed to what went down onstage (Watch him spit out “Idiot Wind. It’s easy to interpret this performance as a “fuck you” to her.)

More after the jump…

 
If you found yourself lining up for the abuse/rewards of Record Store Day last weekend, you might have noticed—and perhaps purchased if you did—a newly released album by the short-lived East-L.A. Latino psychedelic soul pioneers God’s Children called Music Is The Answer: The Complete Collection. This anthology is the first full-length release of some long lost 1971 recording sessions (eight never-before-issued tracks and six taken from long out-of-print 45s) featuring the incredible voice of “Little Willie G” (Garcia), once of Chicano garage-soul pioneers Thee Midniters. He was one of the three vocalists in God’s Children—along with “Lil’ Ray” Jimenez (another ex-Midniter) and Lydia Amescua—a mixed-gender, multiracial Southern California “brown-eyed soul” group who endeavored to make socially conscious music that spoke to young Latinos.

After Thee Midniters ended Lil’ Ray became a staff songwriter at Columbia Records in New York, working under Seymour Stein the future founder of Sire Records, but his family didn’t like life on the East Coast so he moved them back to California. He was performing in the Central Valley when Willie looked him up. The two former band members decided to work together again and brought in a teenage singer with a powerful voice—Amescua—who named the band. (“Because, well, we’re all God’s Children,” as she said.) Sisters Fawn and Stacy Rymal were added as harmony vocalists.

I must say, I was IN LOVE with this record—absolutely NUTS about it—from the very first song. To my mind God’s Children sound like a lowrider version of the 5th Dimension, or a Chicano Mamas & the Papas backed by War. Both of these comparisons are pretty valid as the session players happened to be some of the very same musicians who backed both of those legendary vocal groups—bassist Carol Kaye, guitarist David T. Walker, drummer Hal Blaine, percussionist Victor Feldman and (the already famous) Leon Russell on piano—as part of Phil Spector’s famed Wrecking Crew. They’re also backed by a 40-piece orchestra. Often when you get one of these “long lost” bands, the music tends to be on a low-fi “demo” level, but not this time. It’s (for the most part) fully slick and polished. Trust me when I tell you that this music will come as a revelation, even if you’re already a fan of Thee Midniters (Dig their classic community anthems “Whittier Blvd.” and “Chicano Power.”) For my tastes, this music is magic—instantly classic stuff.
 

Little WIllie G. and Lil’ Ray
 
Sadly such a promising group didn’t last long. The nearest they got to any level of success was with the song “Hey Does Somebody Care”—which was co-written by folk singer Linda Perhacs and Oliver Nelson—getting used as the theme music for an ABC medical drama starring Vince Edwards called Matt Lincoln. The A&R execs at their record label UNI tried to turn them from a socially conscious Latino hippie band into a smooth vocal group, even trying to tell them what sort of clothes to wear. This left them feeling defeated and the group fell apart. Garcia spent a year with the Bay Area Latin rock band Malo, led by Jorge Santana, Carlos’ brother, recording one album with them, 1974’s Ascención. Sadly, he became a junkie, addicted to heroin and cocaine, but a job at a Christian TV station saw him find religion and kick drugs in 1980. Since 1981 he’s had his own ministry and today performs as a sort of elder statesman of Chicano rock and roll. David Hidalgo of Los Lobos produced his Make Up for the Lost Time album in 2000 and he’s worked with both Ry Cooder and Los Lobos along the way. (Rolling Stone declared him “the best singer to come out of East LA.”) Ray Jimenez still works in his recording studio and Lydia Amescua was still performing and singing on stage until fairly recently.

Music Is The Answer: The Complete Collection is released by Minky Records on CD and the above-mentioned RSD limited edition vinyl. I highly recommend picking this one up—Amazon still has copies of the urine-colored (supposed to be “brown”—but it’s not) Record Store Day record for sale (as will many local record stores, I’d imagine)—but luckily you don’t have to take my word for it, as you can sample the entire album below.
 

‘The Three Million Case’ (1926).
 
The brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were two engineers who became famous as the artists and designers of some of Soviet Russia’s greatest movie posters during the 1920s. Together, the brothers produced hundreds of posters many of which have been sadly lost as they were intended to be used only once. Cinema was considered a key propaganda tool—a bit like the Internet is today—for keeping the largely illiterate union of socialist Soviet peoples on target for building the dream of a “New Worker’s Paradise.”

The brothers were the children of a Russian mother and a Swedish father. They kept their Swedish nationality until 1933 when they were forced to sign-up as Russian citizens. This was the same year Vladimir died in an automobile accident. Georgii continued to work as a designer and was responsible for organizing the displays on Red Square for the May Day celebrations of 1947. Their once ground-breaking and avant-garde style had become part of the established order.

Their background in engineering gave the pair an edge over other their designer rivals/comrades who still favored painting for their poster work. The brothers were greatly influenced by Constructivism and Dada, which inspired their use of montage, typography, and visual distortion in their work. They were involved in setting up a society for young artists, produced some of the posters issued for the May Day celebrations in 1918, and even exhibited artwork in Berlin. Yet, it was their movie posters which have had the longest and most far-reaching influence and subsequent generations and designers across the world.

Most of the following is the work of the brothers Stenberg—the exceptions being their collaboration with Yakov Ruklevsy (The Decembrists and October), Viktor Klimashin (The Death of Sensation) and Oil which is solely by Aleksandr Naumov. As a sidebar, these posters might all look dynamic and utterly thrilling but sometimes they are selling documentaries and training films—take for example the beautifully film noirsh treatment for a documentary on Cement.
 

‘Countess Shirvanskaya’ (1926).
 

‘The Screw from Another Machine’ (1926).
 
More revolutionary posters, after the jump…

 
A few days prior to their run of shows at Max’s Kansas City in July/August 1973, the Stooges arrived in Manhattan to rehearse. The band’s label provided a practice space in midtown, and tapes were made so Iggy and the boys could hear themselves. Years later, recordings were released, and they were a revelation—Iggy was absolutely on fire during these rehearsals. There are moments when his vocals are even more violent and unhinged than anything heard on the band’s studio LPs or their infamous live album, Metallic KO. Though the practice tapes lack the fidelity of those seminal releases, the intensity comes through all the same.

After a long delay, the Stooges third album, Raw Power was finally released in May 1973. The previous March, after clashes with management came to head, James Williamson was forced out of the group, but after the company dropped Iggy and the Stooges, he was welcomed back into the fold. The band also added a new member, Scott Thurston, to play piano and harmonica.

A number of friends attended the Max’s rehearsals, which were held at a studio owned by CBS Records. Natalie Schlossman, former head of the Stooges fan club, was there, as was original bassist, Dave Alexander, amongst others. With the impending high-profile dates, and as so many were watching, the Stooges gave it their all. At one point, Iggy got on top of the studio’s grand piano to cut a rug.
 

 
Recordings of the Max’s rehearsals appear on a number of archival releases, beginning with Rubber Legs (1987), the first in a string of quasi-legal albums comprised of previously unreleased Stooges tapes that flooded the market in the late ‘80s. In 2005, Easy Action Records put out the Stooges-approved boxed set of outtakes and such, Heavy Liquid (an abridged version was produced for Record Store Day last April). One of the six discs contains a Max’s show, as well as seven recordings from the Max’s rehearsals. All of the songs pulled from the practice tape were, at the time, newly worked-up tunes that, in the end, wouldn’t be formally recorded by the Stooges.
 

 
“Johanna” (later documented for the Kill City project) is particularly powerful. Said to be about a former girlfriend that got her kicks by playing mind games on the Stooges singer, the tape captures Iggy totally tortured, screaming his head off over a love he knows is toxic, but can’t quit.
 
Continues after the jump…

Artist Terry Minella’s sculpture of Brigitte Bardot (pictured on the left) and a photo of the real Bardot in a very similar bikini. I’m as confused as you are.
 
I know very little about the artist responsible for the sculpture featured in this post of one of the most famous blondes in history, Brigitte Bardot, but here’s what I do know. Terry Minella is a self-educated artist living and working in France specializing in photography and sculpture. Minella also notes he has a deep affection for cinema—especially vintage decades such as the 1950s, which Bardot ruled along with blonde peers Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Grace Kelly. In photos at least, Minella’s Bardot is nearly impossible to differentiate from the real actress/model/and singer during her heyday.

From what I can ascertain, Minella created various life-sized busts of Bardot then matched them up with a mannequin’s body. Minella also uses highly-specialized fake eyes created by Tech-Optics Eyes made of resin, glass, acrylics, and polymers giving them an ultra-realistic look. Minella’s faux Bardot is spot-on perfection, much like the actress herself. You can see more of Minella’s sculpture/mannequin mashups over on his Flickr page. I’ve posted photos of Minella’s Bardot sculpture below—some are slightly NSFW.
 

Another side-by-side shot of Bardot and the faux-Bardot in the same outfit.
 

 
More after the jump…

‘Death and the Maiden.’
 
Laurie Lipton has been drawing pictures since she was four years old. Her art serves as her “main means of communicating.”

When I sit down to draw a whole life time of experience comes into play…My imagery is the result of many associations, thoughts, feelings… I think in images…The creation process is the effort to communicate…not only to an “audience” but to myself. It serves an inner need. If I weren’t allowed to create, I believe I would become psychologically, perhaps even physically, ill.

Born in New York in 1953, Lipton was encouraged by her parents to develop her talents. She attended the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania, where she became the first person to graduate with a Fine Arts Degree with honors in Drawing. Unfortunately, Conceptual Art was then all the rage and Lipton’s art teachers told her “figurative work went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages.” Lipton disagreed. She bucked the trend for what was then considered fashionable and decided to stick to her own ideas about art and what she should draw. She skipped class and taught herself drawing by studying art books in the college library on artists like Vermeer and Goya.

After graduation, Lipton traveled around Europe visiting museums trying to figure out how to paint. But this proved more difficult. Instead, she developed her own unique style of drawing where she uses a charcoal pencil to minutely layer each picture with thousands of tiny marks or lines which are slowly built up to create a far more luminous and rounded image. This process takes months to achieve. The incredible detail in each picture can only be truly appreciated at first hand or by taking a magnifying glass over the surface of the paper.

Lipton’s work is often labeled “surrealist.” It’s a term she eschews, preferring to see her work as closer to medieval religious painting where she has replaced the icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary with iconography from the twentieth-century to tell her own personal story. More recently, this has included her response to the horrors of war, alienation caused by technology, and our “post-truth” world where everything washes over us like fiction and only the truly personal impinges on our reality. This has led to drawings such as Post Truth, Virtual Reality, and The Watchers. This last work, The Watchers, was inspired by the true story of a woman who was murdered in front of an apartment block, where not one of the occupants attempted to intervene to stop the killing or even contact the police—one resident turned up the volume on his television to drown out the victim’s screams. The picture opens like a double-door. The front shows a young girl peering through a set of blinds. Inside, the picture opens out to reveal the murder and the apartment block with its blind witnesses.

Lipton is a brilliant and extraordinarily talented artist and more of her work can be seen here.
 

‘Love Bite.’
 

‘Santa Muerte.’
 
More extraordinary drawings plus a documentary on Laurie Lipton, after the jump…