Mick Ronson might be considered the #1 Spider from Mars. He certainly will go down in history as one of David Bowie’s chief collaborators and one of the people most responsible for the glam sound.

Ronson worked on several of the core albums of Bowie’s early period, including most obviously The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as well as The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and Aladdin Sane. He played on All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople and Transformer by Lou Reed, on which he was also a producer. In 1974 Ronson released his first solo album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue on which appeared the Elvis cover “Love Me Tender” and “Growing Up and I’m Fine,” co-written by Bowie.

“All the Young Dudes,” “Perfect Day,” and “Walk on the Wild Side” are just a few of the legendary songs Ronson was significantly involved with. He also worked with Bob Dylan and Morrissey. Sadly, Ronson passed away of liver cancer on April 29, 1993, at the age of 46.

Beside Bowie: The Story of Mick Ronson is a new documentary produced by Emperor Media Production in association with Cardinal Releasing Ltd. It was directed by Jon Brewer, who has also produced movies on B.B. King and Nat King Cole. Today it popped up unceremoniously on Vimeo.

The movie features interviews with Angie Bowie, Lou Reed, Tony Visconti, Ian Hunter, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, Roger Taylor of Queen, and Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. Bowie’s comments are uniformly delivered in voiceover.

As David Bowie once said, “As a rock duo, I thought we were every bit as good as Mick and Keith, or Axl and Slash. Ziggy and Mick were the personification of that rock and roll dualism.” Watch Beside Bowie before it gets pulled.
 
More after the jump…

 
Here’s something completely useless and yet… I still want one: a red eject button that takes the place your vehicle’s cigarette lighter. Who uses their car’s cigarette lighter these days, anyway? I can’t imagine many. Do they even make cars with lighters anymore?

Since I have an older model car, I’d love to have one of these eject buttons. It’s a dumb gag for sure, but I’d feel like a total supervillain—or maybe even James Bond—as I made my passengers really nervous.

The eject buttons sell for $13.99 here. According to the listing, the button fits most lighters.

 

 
via Pee-wee Herman

 
Shelflife. The books you keep tell the story of your own life.

Clearing out boxes of books and personal belongings of lives once lived, I unpacked a whole bookshelf’s worth of Pan paperbacks neatly stored by their author and genre. I could recall the where and when of each book’s purchase and first reading, and of the best could well remember their stories back to front. There were a few of the books I read before age thirteen or so when I had a passion for picking up movie tie-in books and novels that had made thrilling and sometimes controversial films. These were bought new, most secondhand. Some were chosen solely because a favorite actor had starred in the film and was featured on the cover (the usual suspects of Oliver Reed, Peter Cushing, Sean Connery, and Michael Caine), or because they were dark tales of nightmarish horror or strange speculative science-fiction. No matter the reason, these books were keys to new worlds and passions.

Everyone knows Penguin. They publish classic lit and high-end middle-class novels about those things people discuss over lattes. Pan books were thrillers, pulp novels, movie and TV tie-ins, romances, some classics (Bronte, Trollope, Dickens), and best of all the dare to read alone horrors. Everyone read Pan. Because Pan books were always a guaranteed great read.

After Enid Blyton, Capt. W. E. Johns and Geoffrey Willans, the author I probably read most, until I got hip to Ian Fleming, Ted Lewis, and Algernon Blackwood, was probably John Burke. He was the guy who wrote all the big movie tie-ins like A Hard Day’s Night, The System, and the fine set of stories that started me off seeking out his books The Hammer Horror Omnibus with its tales of The Gorgon, The Revenge of Frankenstein and The Curse from the Mummy’s Tomb.

Pan Books was started by a former World War One flying ace, Alan Bott in 1944. Bott believed in enjoyable reads available for all. He focussed on paperback books the public would enjoy which might bring them back to the brand for more. Pan had an impressive roster of authors. It ranged from Agatha Christie to Leslie Charteris, Edgar Wallace to Jack Kerouac, Anthony Burgess to Nell Dunn, and so on. If it was a good and entertaining read then any author could end up inside of a Pan cover—which is not a bad quality control.

There are too many classic Pan covers to share, so I stuck with the ones from the box I had opened, which will probably tell you enough about me…
 

 

 
More Pan covers for Kerouac, Burgess, Fleming and more, after the jump…
 

Artist Zoë Mozert painting actress Jane Russell for the iconic image used for the 1941 film ‘The Outlaw.’
 
Zoë Mozert was not only one of the most well-known pinup model painters of her day, she was also a pinup herself and her work and image have appeared in hundreds of magazines and on film posters. Though there was no shortage of female models willing to pose for her, Mozert often used herself as a subject and why not? Mozert was gorgeous—the perfect embodiment of the quintessential blonde bombshell—and her successful modeling career helped to fund her art school education at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design. Mozert would later head to New York City to start her long career as an artist.

Mozert’s work was unquestionably on par with her male peers. She would go on to become part of an exclusive all-girl artist “club” that included two other prominent female artists—the creator of the “Coppertone girl” Joyce Ballantyne and Pearl Frush whose photo-realist paintings broke sales records due to their popularity. In the early 30s, Mozert’s work was everywhere including ads for popular products like Kool Cigarettes and Dr. Pepper. She scored a lucrative long-term contract with Brown & Bigelow, who in the 1940s were the largest publisher of calendars in the world.

Mozert would also work as an artist for Warner Brothers where her art was used not only for movie posters but for props that appeared in the films themselves. Her artwork associated with two films that would add more noteworthy credits to Mozert’s expansive resume: the poster artwork for Carole Lombard’s 1937 film True Confessions and the notorious image of Jane Russell for the 1941 film The Outlaw. The sessions with Russell were thankfully photographed for prosperity (pictured at the top of this post).

I’ve included a mix of Mozert’s stunning work as well as a few photographs of the artist in action below. Some are NSFW. Just like Jane Russell and a gun.
 

Mozert’s portrait of Jane Russell that was used for the movie poster for ‘The Outlaw.’
 

 

The gorgeous and talented Mozert modeling for fellow pinup artist Ed Moran.
 
More after the jump…

 
You can file this one under “something you don’t see every day.” On May 29, kung fu master Ye Hongwei pulled a rather larger helicopter that was attached to his penis for 33 feet. Ye originally only wanted to pull the helicopter for 26 feet but I guess he found some extra strength down there. Why you ask? Why not, I say to that.

Ye is a new world record holder for pulling such a large object with his genitalia. Apparently he was “given his world record certificate by officials representing the World Record Academy.”

Here’s what Ye had to say for himself after the successful stunt:

I don’t know why I struggled in the beginning. I felt a bit nervous and unsure.

Ye ended his statement by saying, “I will continue practicing so I can break new records in the future.”

Lesson learned: Never give up on your dreams.

Below, footage of Ye pulling seven cars with his penis and then the helicopter.

 
More after the jump…

 
For decades, Paul Major has been collecting and selling the strangest records ever pressed on vinyl. Much of what was initially known about many a wonderfully weird LP was due to his mail order catalogs, in which he described the obscure garage rock, psych, and often beyond-classification albums he had for sale. He’s tracked down many of the outsiders who made singularly great, private (a/k/a vanity) pressings, leading to authorized reissues.

Anthology Editions has just released Feel The Music: The Psychedelic Worlds Of Paul Major. The book contains images from his ‘zine-like catalogs, vintage flyers, photos, as well as album art and his assessments of those way-offbeat LPs, many of which are quite rare. Major has loads of great stories, including accounts of meeting some of the eccentrics behind his favorite records.

We’ve put together a collection of tunes and cover art from twelve oddball albums, with Major’s commentary from the pages of Feel The Music.
 

Jr. and His Soulettes – ‘Psychodelic Sounds’ (HMM Records, 1971)

A pinch-yourself, this-record-can’t-really-exist level of amazing. An 11-year-old guitarist and his three sisters who are even younger grooving it out with funky swirling go-go organs, primordial drums and titles like “Thing, Do the Creep” and “Mama Love Tequila.” They’re so tight and loose they sound like they’ve been playing together for decades!

 
Much much more after the jump…

Photo: Sara Driver

Before his landmark feature Stranger Than Paradise etched his name into the indie-cinema firmament, Jim Jarmusch was a student and a musician in NYC during that crucial late-‘70s period that incubated punk and No-Wave, and spent part of the early ‘80s playing in the Del-Byzanteens, and in Dark Day with fellow Ohio expat and DNA founder Robin Crutchfield. In recent years, Jarmusch has returned to active music making, releasing the albums Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, The Mystery of Heaven, and Apokatastasis in collaboration with minimalist composer and lute player Jozef van Wissem.

Jarmusch has also been playing rock guitar as a member of SQÜRL, with producer/composer Carter Logan on drums, and sound engineer Shane Stoneback creating loops and arrangements. Fittingly, their music is often cinematically spacious, with droning passages that most readily recall bands like Earth, Growing, and Boris. Originally named Bad Rabbit, the band was formed to contribute music to Jarmusch’s film The Limits of Control. Their 2009 EP of the same title was the band’s first release, and after changing the name to SQÜRL, they continued to release EPs almost exclusively—a good idea for this kind of music, really, the shorter format keeps excesses in check. Jarmusch had this to say on the matter four years ago in The Quietus:

We like EPs because the length of a 33rpm 12” LP is an arbitrary thing that was developed by commercial concerns. How much can fit on that piece of vinyl. In a way, that’s becoming as out of date as feature-length films, which were also arbitrarily designed for a certain number of screenings in a theater per day. So it was 90 minutes to 120 minutes, the average for a while. Those things are now gone in the digital age. They’re passé. I don’t think in the future people are going to care if a film is 10 minutes or four hours. It’s going to be what is it that they’re interested in. Feature-length films and LPs are still a nice form, but they were kind of arbitrary.

Having released EPs with the get-to-the-point titles EP #1, EP #2, and EP #3, SQÜRL released Only Lovers Left Alive in 2014, another collaboration with Van Wissem, and another Jarmusch film related release. Last year saw Live at Third Man Records, a full-length that included surprising covers of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Elvis’ “Little Sister.” Today, they’re announcing the forthcoming release of yet another EP, featuring three new compositions, and two remixes—one each by Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe and Föllakzoid. The title is EP #260. When we asked “Huh?”, Jarmusch provided us with this:

Contradictions embraced: Although SQÜRL’s music is anti-mathematic, SQÜRL loves mathematics. We love the Fibonacci numbers. And magic numbers. Perfect numbers. Bell numbers. Catalan numbers. 260 is none of these. It isn’t a perfect number, and not factional of any number. It’s not even a regular number. 260, though, is the number of days in all Mesoamerican calendars. The Mayan calendar. The Tzolkin calendar. 260 is also the number of days of human gestation. (Orangutans also). 260 also has an elliptical connection to the dark rift; a series of molecular dust clouds located between our solar system and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. And although not a magic number, 260 is the magic constant of the magic square investigated by Benjamin Franklin, and part of the solution to a famous chess problem; the n-queens problem for n=8. 260 is also the country code for Zambia. And the US area code for Fort Wayne, Indiana.

It’s Dangerous Minds’ pleasure today to debut the first track to be released from EP #260, “The Dark Rift.”
 

A photo of a young Robert Englund aka “Freddy Krueger” from the ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ film series giving Paul Newman a run for his money sometime in the early 1970s.
 
You may not always agree with everything I write about here on DM but one thing is for sure—actor Robert Englund was a super-fit surfer/actor back in the in the 1970s who appeared in films alongside Jeff Bridges, Charles Bronson, Richard Gere, Sally Field, and Henry Fonda. Now let that sink in for a few minutes before you say the words “no fucking way.” 

It’s actually pretty easy to express disbelief about this revelation. Mostly because Englund—an experienced and classicly trained actor—spent so much time in front of the camera in heavy makeup and prosthetics as “Freddy Krueger.” Englund was only 37 when he took on the iconic character in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, and he was still quite the looker when he embarked on the career-defining role that would make him a massive star. But most people don’t really think about that kind of thing when it comes to Robert Englund because for nearly twenty years he spent most of his time looking like his face was melting off while slicing up sleep-deprived teenagers on the big screen. However, during his days doing theater in the 60s, and the films he appeared in during the 1970s, we got to see a much different version of Englund, sometimes shirtless and gorgeously brooding in early publicity stills where he looks remarkably like a young version of the late Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. Once I got to digging around for images of Englund in his younger days, I couldn’t stop because the more I searched, the more I found and the more fascinated I became with Englund’s pre-Freddy Krueger life.
 

Robert Englund or Layne Staley of Seattle band Alice in Chains? It’s hard to tell but this is, in fact, one of Robert Englund’s head shots taken during his regional theater days in the late 1960s.
 
Englund honed his acting chops doing regional theater around California as a child, something he continued to pursue all through high school. After three years as a student at UCLA, he left California to study at the Meadow Brook Theater in Michigan where he would perform in classic stage productions written by Shakespeare and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. In 1974 Englund would appear in his first big Hollywood role in the film Buster and Billie with actor Jan-Michael Vincent. A few years later and with nine films already under his belt, Englund would audition for the role of “Lance B. Johnson,” the reluctant soldier and LSD-dropping surfer in Apocalypse Now. According to Englund, who was born in 1947, he was told that he was “too old” for the role and the casting crew sent him across the hall to read for the role of Han Solo in Star Wars where he was told he was “too young looking.” Englund headed home and after drinking a bunch of beer he got in touch with his friend Mark Hamill and ended up being one of a few of Hamill’s young actor friends who suggested that he go try out for the park of Luke Skywalker. The rest is history as they say. Englund has done more than his fair share of films (almost 50) and it is that kind of rigor that helps separate the wolves from the pack in this game.

Full disclosure: I’m an unabashed fan of Englund’s, and bonafide horror film junkie to the core and this discovery was sort of like winning the horror-nerd lottery for me. I mean, the images of Englund, a native of Glendale, California, waiting for a wave along with fellow surfer and screenwriter Dennis Aaberg during some downtime on location for the 1978 film Big Wednesday (which is fantastic in case you’ve never seen it) is everything. As are images of Englund from his appearance in director Tobe Hooper’s 1976 film Eaten Alive (which is also pretty great), where he plays a womanizing lothario named “Buck” with a tanned, chiseled physique. Zowie. If all this sounds awesome and unbelievable to you then I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this unexpected trip down memory lane by way of Elm Street.
 

Englund (pictured first in this photo with the baseball hat on) headed out to catch some waves during a break in shooting the film ‘Big Wednesday’ in 1978.
 

FREDDY CAN SURF!
 
More after the jump…

 
When I saw Danzig play the Ritz in 1989 (with White Zombie opening), it didn’t cross my mind that I’d be writing about Glenn Danzig’s political beliefs nearly 30 years later.

I definitely didn’t think that anyone would be seeking his take on President Donald Trump.

But here we are.

Danzig was in Los Angeles over the holiday weekend for the Blackest of the Black Festival, which was held at Orange County’s Oak Canyon Park. He granted a reporter named Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times an interview, in which he spoke out in favor of Donald Trump’s so-called travel ban, which would have the effect of restricting hundreds of thousands of travelers from entering the United States without any evidence of wrongdoing. Here’s what he said:
 

It’s really not a travel ban. When you walk into the country, we want to see who you are and what you’re doing. Well, when I go to every country right now, they look at me and they see whether I can come in or not. And I’ve been turned away from Canada and other places before. Where’s my protest? Where’s my parade?

 
Leave aside the unspoken premise that the United States is not already scrutinizing all visitors to the country (absurd). What makes this comment all the more baffling is that one of the crooner’s most famous songs is based on criminal misbehavior in a foreign land. Danzig hails from Lodi, New Jersey, and the Misfits song “London Dungeon” was based on an incident in 1979 when the band was on its first U.K. tour. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits, James Greene, Jr. writes:

On December 2, Glenn and Bobby [Steele] tried to alleviate their hotel-based boredom by attending a Jam concert at London’s famed venue the Rainbow. Outside the concert hall, a group of skinheads began harassing the duo. Things quickly escalated. Somehow Bobby slipped away in an attempt to find some authorities; Glenn stayed behind, arming himself with a broken bottle. When police eventually did arrive they arrested Glenn and Bobby for disturbing the peace. The Misfits spent two nights in Brixton jail, an experience that birthed one of the group’s most solemn and memorable dirges.

“I just turned to Glenn [in the cell],” recalled Steele in 1993, “[and] said, ‘We should make a song about this called “London Dungeon.”’ We were like sitting in this cell, it was like ten feet perfectly square, you know, solid painted walls, it was real echoey in the room ... and we were just like slapping the beat out on our legs and humming ... it sounded so cool ... [and] Glenn took it from there.”

 
Danzig might dispute that he didn’t really do anything wrong on that occasion, and was unjustly incarcerated. Which might give him a little pause on the propriety of prejudging people who almost certainly haven’t done anything wrong or possess any ill intent towards the U.S.A.

In an attempt to show his supposedly liberal bona fides, Danzig made a problematic comment about Planned Parenthood as well:
 

I might be conservative on some issues, and some issues I’m really liberal. I’m pro-abortion and I’m pro-Planned Parenthood. But I don’t think Planned Parenthood should be selling baby parts like a chop shop in Brooklyn, OK?

 
This claim has been debunked so often it’s gotten tedious.

Hey, I’m so old I can remember when punk rock dudes would be ashamed  to spout right-wing talking points…......

Here’s “London Dungeon,” in which Danzig’s songwriting talent (and not his politics) is enough brighten anyone’s day:
 

 
via Stereogum
 

 
“Skinner” is the mononym of a self-taught and quite gifted Oakland muralist/illustrator who works in lysergically vivid and intricately detailed style that at once evokes underground comix father figure S. Clay Wilson, punk skull purveyor Brian Pushead, and the violent imaginings of Mike Diana, rendered in the eyebleedy colors of the psychedelic poster era. Metal fans will know his work from his INSANE covers for Mastodon’s Once More ‘Round the Sun and Alexisonfire’s Dog’s Blood, apparel designs for High on Fire, Mastodon, and Skeletonwitch, and an awesome poster for the Melvins documentary Colossus of Destiny. His work was collected in the book Every Man is My Enemy.

Skinner has recently begun an art video series for the entertainment company Super Deluxe titled, fittingly, “Drawing with Skinner.” The first episode, released last month, featured Skinner drawing and chatting with the trippy and eccentric hip-hop producer The Gaslamp Killer. The new episode, released yesterday, features as Skinner’s guest Melvins singer/guitarist Roger “King Buzzo” Osborne. The episode begins with Buzzo protesting that he’s never painted, but paint he does—an abstraction emblazoned with the slogan “KILL FOR DRUGS.” While the two are painting, they talk about creative processes, dish dirt on who sucks to work with, and generally just have a fine time yakking, and the eavesdropping is worthy. Skinner, however, was nervous about working with a hero, confessing on his Facebook page:

The thing about the show that I have learned, is that every one is totally aligned with the vibes of the guest. You will see that it’s sort of the beauty of the thing. I also am totally learning as I go. I’m letting the show organically unfold and rolling with it. I also was kinda nervous because I’ve been a super fan of Buzz and the Melvins forever. I also know that his particular brand of contrary type punk antagonism that I love so much could possibly be something I’d come to face one day!