“This is British amphetamine psychosis music and if you don’t like it you can fuck off and listen to your Iron Butterfly albums”—Mick Farren onstage with the Deviants in Toronto, 1969

 
Although I’d generally sworn off binge drinking by my mid-20s, there was one (and only one) person who I would happily consent to get shit-faced with whenever the call came. Mick Farren, the legendary counterculture rabble-rouser, rocker, music journalist, TV columnist, poet, sci-fi novelist, etc., etc. ... could drink. A lot. And he could drink it very, very quickly. Out of, I guess respect, or at the very least wanting to synch up our respectives buzzes, whenever Mick was on the other end of the phone line suggesting a “refreshing beverage or two”—20 refreshing beverages was far more likely—I would always say yes, knowing full well that the next day wasn’t gonna be pretty. Mick was good company and as you might expect, quite the barstool raconteur. He and I got along great. Our political leanings were very similar. Mick had no qualms about stating his belief that certain people could be improved with a bullet and I don’t disagree. His aggressive polemic in the NME and Trouser Press had a huge influence on me during my formative years. I never got tired of hearing his stories and I was a good audience for him. I really adored Mick. He was my kinda guy.

We’d almost always meet at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax—within walking distance for Mick, who did not drive thank god—smoke a joint in the parking lot and then head for the bar in the middle of the older section of the market. In my entire life I have never seen anyone neck a pint faster than Mick Farren. It was impressive. I never attempted to seriously keep up with him. That would have been foolhardy, if not simply impossible and anyway I really wasn’t interested in achieving real-time liver damage. If on average we’d meet and hang out for around three hours, Mick would drink about eight beers every 60 minutes. And he’d have to take a piss constantly. Luckily (?) my own bladder is ill-equipped for heavy drinking, so we’d carry on conversing at the urinals and walking back and forth from the men’s room. That would happen at least three times an hour. Anyone reading this now who’s ever met Mick for a drink knows this drill well.
 

 
One afternoon when we met at the Farmer’s Market, Wayne Kramer was playing a set there and we sat at the bar talking about music. Mick wondered if I’d ever heard any of the Deviants’ albums. Of course I had. “The third one is the one I like. It’s easily the best,” I told him.

“IT IS NOT!” he replied, his voice rising an octave. “We were exhausted, creatively and of each other, by then. We couldn’t even come up with a decent title, hence Deviants #3!”

“No way. The first two were far too derivative of the Fugs and Zappa. The third album is definitely the best one. And it’s got that fantastic cover.”

Mick looked dejected. “I really wish you wouldn’t have said that!”

“Why?”

“Because I had very little to do with that album! I quit the Deviants—or they quit me, I suppose—right after it came out.”
 

 
To be candid, I wasn’t wrong. Deviants #3 is obviously the best Deviants album. Perhaps not Mick Farren’s best album—that would be the unhinged Mona The Carnivorous Circus recorded with former Pretty Things drummer Twink and Steve Peregrin Took (Marc Bolan’s ex-partner in Tyrannosaurus Rex) soon after his departure from his band. But with Mick out of the way (he wasn’t really a musician so much as he was a poet/spoken word performer/ranter) the other Deviants became the vastly superior Pink Fairies, so this wasn’t really such a bad thing for rock and roll. Still, Deviants #3 has a lot going for it. The group’s malevolent, amphetamine-fueled freakbeat is tight, evil and scary sounding and Farren’s familiar themes of social unrest, disreputable characters and apocalyptic street fighting took matters quite a bit further OUT than almost any other band of the late 60s (think Stooges, MC5). Here’s a sample lyric: “We are the people who pervert your children, lead them astray from the lessons you taught them.” Imagine if the PR campaign that posed the question “would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone” was asked instead about having a Deviant as a son-in-law? None of this was a pose for these dirty, rotten scoundrels. They really fucking meant it. The Deviants were the first anarchist rock band in Britain. They lived and snorted their politics.

Fifty years after its original release and Mick’s withering opinion of it aside, Deviants #3 is a monster of an album—a minor masterpiece of the psychedelic era, even—and has aged quite well. Real Gone Music have done a quality rerelease of Deviants #3, the first time the album’s been available on vinyl for many a moon. The special black and white “nun’s habit” pressing is in a limited edition of 1000 and the mastering is particularly good. All that and one of the single best album covers of the rock era. I rate this a must-own.

On September 20th, 1969 the Deviants played the third free rock festival held at Hyde Park that year (the first featured Blind Faith and the second was the Stones performance after the death of Brian Jones). Also on the bill were Soft Machine, Quintessence, Al Stewart and the Edgar Broughton Band. This would be Farren’s final performance before he was sacked from the band.

Italian movie poster for ‘Profondo rosso’ for sale at Westgate Gallery
 
Every year around this time, Westgate Gallery‘s poster concierge extraordinaire Christian McLaughlin drastically cuts prices for his annual Cruel Summer 50% Off Sale. Why that’s almost half off, even…

Anyway, my pal McLaughlin, a novelist and TV/movie writer and producer based in Los Angeles, is the maven of mavens when it comes to this sort of thing. You couldn’t even begin to stock a store like his if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the first place, and if you want a quick (not to mention rather visceral) idea of his level of deep expertise—and what a great eye he’s got—then take a gander at his world-beating selection of Italian giallo posters. Christian is what I call a “sophisticate.”

He’s got a carefully curated cult poster collection on offer that is second to none. His home is a shrine to lurid giallo, 70s XXX and any and every midnight movie classic you can shake a stick at. But why would you want to shake a stick at a bunch of movie posters to begin with? That would be silly!

The Westgate Gallery’s Cruel Summer 50% off sale sees every item in stock at—you guessed it—50% off the (already reasonable) normal price. All you have to do is enter the discount code “CRUEL2019” at checkout and your tab will be magically cut in half.
 

’The Pit’ aka ‘Teddy’ (Canada, 1981)
 

‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 

Rare Japanese ‘Sisters’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 

‘Pets’ poster for sale 50% off at Westgate Gallery
 

Jess Franco’s ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ (France, 1976)
 
Many, many more after the jump…

 
The ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll band the Hollywood Stars were managed by Kim Fowley, and their songs were recorded by the likes of KISS and Alice Cooper, yet the band wasn’t widely heard in their time. They released one LP, which failed to make an impact, while superior recordings of theirs remained in the can for decades. An exceptional, previously unreleased Hollywood Stars album is about to come out, and Dangerous Minds has the premiere of one of the fabulous never before heard tunes on the disc. We also have a new interview with an original member of the group.

In 1973, mover and shaker, huckster, and jack-of-all-trades, Kim Fowley, had a vision for starting a west coast version of the glam band, the New York Dolls. Fowley quickly assembled a group of Southern California musicians, and the initial lineup of the Hollywood Stars was in place before year’s end.
 

 
The Stars immediately made a splash with their live show, gigging frequently at the legendary Whisky a Go Go. It wasn’t long before they were signed to Columbia/CBS Records. Around this time, Fowley exited as manager. Sessions for their first LP included such strong material as “King of the Night Time World” and “Escape,” but after new A&R at Columbia came in, the album was shelved, and the band was dropped. The recordings came out nearly 40 years later as Shine Like a Radio: The Great Lost 1974 Album.
 

 
By the end of ’74—just a year after they formed—the Hollywood Stars were no more.
 

 
They did give it another go in 1976, though, with guitarist/main songwriter, Mark Anthony, also now their lead singer. The revived unit were soon in the Sound City studio with producer Neil Merryweather. They then signed with another major label, Arista Records, who wanted them to re-record what they had done at Sound City. Though the band were frustrated, as they had a completed album they were pleased with, they agreed to start from scratch with a different producer. The subsequent sessions didn’t go well, with Mark Anthony overdoing it in the studio. Though the group preferred the Sound City tapes, the Arista recordings were put out in 1977. Anthony soon left for a solo career, with the Stars continuing for a short period before breaking up once again.
 

Album cover for their debut full-length; note the marquee in the background.
 
After 43 years, the Hollywood Stars album produced by Neil Merryweather is being released as—appropriately enough—Sound City. The band is back, too, with a upcoming show at their old stomping grounds, the Whisky a Go Go.

Dangerous Minds recently interviewed Hollywood Stars drummer, Terry Rae.

When did Kim Fowley pitch the Hollywood Stars concept to you? Were you immediately sold on the idea?:

Terry Rae: The first time Kim pitched me on the idea was at Capitol Records Studios. He came to see the band I was in at the time, the Flamin’ Groovies, recording some demo tracks. I was initially surprised with his Stars pitch because he had been instrumental in getting me together with [founding Groovies guitarist] Cyril Jordan in the first place.

We talked again at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. Kim explained his plan and promised to be personally involved in every aspect. What he was laying out began to make sense on a practical level. The Groovies were based out of the Bay Area, so if I was going to fully commit to that band, it would mean moving out of my apartment in Hollywood. I didn’t really have the cash to relocate, and my heart wasn’t in leaving.
 

 
Much more, after the jump…

 
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, the seminal collaboration between Brian Eno, his brother Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois was recorded as the score for what ultimately became For All Mankind, the landmark, Oscar-winning 1989 feature documentary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The music was made in 1983 when director Al Reinhart was still calling the work-in-progress “Apollo.” It would take Reinhart nearly a decade to sort through six million feet of 16mm film related to the moon mission and then enlarge the individual frames to 35mm. The film features footage of the landing with real-time commentary, as well as the Apollo astronauts sharing their recollections of the momentous events surrounding it.

Now the original album has been expanded with additional material and remastered by Abbey Road’s Miles Showell. The music from Apollo has been used to great effect elsewhere, making it familiar to millions. Danny Boyle seems especially fond of it, using the Apollo music in Trainspotting,  28 Days Later, and during his opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics held in London.

But what’s with the pedal steel guitar? Have you ever wondered about that? New Scientist magazine interviewed Eno in 2009 when his moon music was performed at London’s Science Museum and here’s what he said:

Why is there pedal steel guitar in the Apollo composition?

When director Al Reinert approached me about doing the Apollo music – which ended up in the 1989 film For All Mankind – he told me there was music on the moon shot. Every astronaut was allowed to take one cassette of their favourite music. All but one took country and western. They were cowboys exploring a new frontier, this one just happened to be in space. We worked the piece around the idea of zero-gravity country music.

Now you know. The eleven new tracks on Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks finds the brothers Eno and Lanois working collectively again for the first time since the original sessions in 1983. It will be available on July 19 as a 2XLP 180 gram vinyl release in a gatefold sleeve, as a limited numbered 2CD edition with 24-page full color hardcover book, standard 2CD edition, special digital edition with exclusive cover art and a standard digital edition.
 

 
In 1922, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland was published in the Criterion magazine. It was read by no more than a handful of people. The poem was then republished in book form in a limited edition of 450 copies. Within a decade, The Wasteland was considered one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century and its modernist influence continues to this day.

In December 1977, the sound of the future arrived when a two-piece band called Suicide released their self-titled debut album to little acknowledgement or fanfare except from a few astute record critics in England. The American press mostly reviled it. Record buyers ignored it. Yet, within a decade, Suicide was considered one of the most important and influential album releases of all time.

Suicide consisted of Martin Rev (keyboards) and Alan Vega (vocals). This thirty-something musical pairing of radical mavericks stripped down rock ‘n’ roll into its constituent parts and reinvented it as a new, pulsating, minimalist, electronic sound with a reach that would shape and influence music from synth to techno for decades to come.

There was nothing comparable to this debut release which is why so many rock critics failed to grasp what had just happened.

Now, over forty years on, Suicide’s debut album is set to be re-released by Mute/BMG as part of their Art of the Album series.

In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Martin Rev discusses his life and work and the making of one of music’s greatest albums

Tell me about your childhood, what it was like, and what were your first musical influences?

Martin Rev: I think I was a fairly happy child as far as possible, you know, with all the ups and downs. I was very lucky to have the family I did. We all played music as it turned out, non-professionally. My brother played, was given lessons. My father played. My mother played, she had lessons as a young girl so she played in the home. They wanted their kids to definitely learn music. My father was one of the most distinctively talented musicians I’ve ever heard in my whole life. He played song after song on a guitar or a mandolin. Never read or studied a note. He was incredible that way. So, it was a musical family. That added to the richness of my childhood.

Otherwise, it was all the usual growing pains and doubts and dreams. It was a fairly lucky period to grow up in between war kind of thing. After World War Two and before Vietnam. America had probably reached its pinnacle of affluence. That whole generation for a while, well, a couple of generations, felt an incredible sense of future potential that anything could happen or be done and the whole future was wide open with possibilities.

A little different than it is now. There wasn’t the pessimism or the awareness of the dark clouds behind the covers as there is now. There was an optimism—even though I didn’t buy all that the country was selling even as a kid. I was a bit of radical rebel already as a teenager. But there’s no complaints there, it was what it was. I was lucky to be given room and the opportunity to discover music which was something I could be thankful for, you know, every day of many lives because there’s nothing else I’d better do.

I grew up hearing all the great songs coming off the radio as a kid. I was bitten, smitten by them as so many kids my age were.  The golden era of rhythm and blues, American rock ‘n’ roll. There was all the rhythm and blues groups at the time, there was the Paragons, the Gestures, Little Richard, Mellow Kings, Danny and the Juniors, the Silhouettes. I mean you can go on and on but a lot of them had only one great song and a few of them had many—the Flamingos, the Students, these were the groups that were really happening. That was the music of the times. That’s what did it.

Were you buying records at this time?

MR: There was 45s. There really wasn’t the album, there wasn’t FM radio. The price of a 45 then was 45c to a dollar. You could buy them easily and some people kinda got into collecting them so when there were parties, things like this, in people’s basements, there was always a couple of people there who had great collections who would be the ones who would spin the records all night.

When did you first consider the possibility of a career in music?

MR: I got serious about music about ten or eleven. At eleven I started figuring out the songs I was hearing on the radio on piano. I started improvising around that time or soon after like boogie-woogie and improvising towards jazz. I think about by twelve, I was pretty much set on making music my life. That’s the way I felt then and still do.

I just wanted to play and make music. I just saw myself as playing live. I envisioned it as a beautiful way to play in clubs and meet girls. That’s a typical thing when you’re twelve or thirteen. The vision of coming off a bandstand in a nightclub and how attractive that could be to girls. I guess the idea of whoever I have evolved into as an artist took shape and form over the years after that but I guess it was all there innately at that time. I just wanted to play, everything around me was great and exciting to me—rhythmically, vocally. I started hearing jazz a couple of years later and I just wanted to learn how to play that stuff and play in bands. I didn’t think much of recording until a little later.

When I was about fifteen, I started playing in little rhythm and blues groups doing one-nighters and things like that. Musically it was ecstatic. The agony and the ecstasy. The agony, it wasn’t difficult except in the economic sense. It was just finding a way to make ends meet and have the time to be free to make music which meant everything

What happened next, how did you meet Alan Vega, and when did you decide to form Suicide?

MR: I left home when I was eighteen. I was married with kids when I was twenty. I met Alan soon after that when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two. I was still very much totally involved in my own artistic evolution, you might say, as Alan was as a visual artist. We were totally dedicated which we both had in common. No risk factor at all. No future factor but to just evolve and create in our fields.

Alan had decided soon before I met him that he had to perform as a visual artist. That was after seeing Iggy Pop and the Stooges play in New York for the first time.

I had my own group called Reverend B when I met Alan. I was doing certain shows in the city. It was a very avant garde, free improvisational group that used electronic keyboard ‘cause that was the only thing available. You had to borrow it, there weren’t a lot of other keyboards in the venues we played.

Alan was working, well, not working but living, he was given the keys to the Museum of Living Artists which was a large loft that was designated for a co-op gallery of artists who did shows on a co-op basis like every month or two. He had the keys to that and that’s where we met. Because both of us were so much in that same place of total dedication. We were the only ones left there at night and talking and playing and thinking about art and music and trying to survive. We were the last ships in the night, so to speak, and we started thinking about putting something together.

Alan at that time was at a crossroads in his life because he was living with friends and he’d just separated from his wife of several years and he didn’t have a place to live either so he was living in the Museum itself. We were both pretty much in that same place and that space was keeping us off the streets. Although I was a little better advantaged at that point because I had a place to go but it was a good travel. Once I would get on the train and go up there that was the end of the night.

How did you come up with Suicide’s powerful distinctive sound?

MR: I think some of it is visceral, it’s just something that’s part of your fingerprint that is given to you by nature the way you approach music.

When I think back, if I was doing a show as a teenager in a jazz band say, as soon I saw the certain facility, it could be any kind of band, I played with a certain kind of an energy and certain kind of commitment. I always did.

Also, as an early teenager I started working in these resorts in the summer playing dancing—older people dancing—square stuff, but the way I played it was like they’d dance like crazy and they’d come over to the bandstand and say, “What the hell was that?” They were going around in circles the way I saw it. And that was kind of the way I am, the way I approach music, my energy. I am involved when I am inside music.

As far as Suicide for me was to work with the potential of electronics in terms of performance. Putting devices together, combining them, I mean really cheap, small inexpensive stuff. But I heard the potential. I heard what that was in terms of a total open frontier and that was a direction and everything I was going into that direction created a certain energy and then rediscovering my roots which was rock ‘n’ roll which was so innate because I was born into it before—it wasn’t something I could analyze it was just the music of of my time as a child. Coming back to that essential force or energy that made it work for me then and still did when I listened to certain things that appealed to me. One can analyze as a certain basic energy and rhythm which is the driving force that made rock work for us. Little Richard a perfect example of many. But able to do that now in a way that was totally fresh to me. Exciting because to me it wasn’t repeating what was done, it was finding a new way to express something that universal energy and drive.

I guess I was printed with a lot of that energy maybe from rock ‘n’ roll too and something who knows maybe ancestral, familial.

What were Suicide’s first gigs like?

MR: I think our first show was at the Museum of Living Artists, if I’m not mistaken. I was playing drums. There was three of us. I don’t think there were that many people there, enough to play the gig.

Alan said after that first Museum gig let’s go to the Ivan Karp OK Harris Gallery. Alan actually had very unexpectedly landed a room to show his sculptures in a group show by Ivan Karp. This was one of the really major galleries of the day, now downtown in Soho.

We always thought where can we go next to get a gig where nobody knows us and there’s very few places to play. Now a lot of the clubs from the sixties were closing, the whole scene is closing down, otherwise they’re too big like the Fillmore, they’re never gonna put us in. By 70-71, it began to feel like a transition as well. The sixties had kinda tapered off. The whole period of Haight-Ashbury, St. Mark’s Place, that was so incredibly vibrant in the sixties, was now starting to fade a bit like any other movement or form of thought. You had kind of a limbo period. Of course, I didn’t register all of that in detail, I was too involved in just me and my life and not that economically, theoretically safe anyway at that point. It was still a vibrant city to me.
 

Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev.
 
 
More from Martin Rev and Suicide, after the jump…
 

“That basketball was like…a basketball to me”
—Basketball Jones

“Basketball Jones” was a song/routine/character from Cheech & Chong’s 1973 Los Cochinos (“The Pigs”) record. The original album cover had a secret compartment where you could see how they smuggled pot, sandwiched in their car door. I bought this LP at a garage sale when I was a child just starting to get into comedy albums. I only half understood the idea of what “drugs” were at the time, I’m pretty sure, so I can’t imagine that a Cheech & Chong album made much sense to me at such a tender age. But I loved the routine “Basketball Jones” by Tyrone (as in “tie your own”) Shoelaces & Rap Brown Jr. H.S. and would go around singing the musical part of it like ten-year-olds do.

The song is about teenage Tyrone and his love of basketball sung in a falsetto voice by Cheech Marin. It’s catchy as hell, but small wonder, dig the backing band: George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Carole King, Nicky Hopkins, Tom Scott and Billy Preston. Ronnie Spector, Michelle Phillips and The Blossoms with Darlene Love were the backing cheerleaders’ voices.

Cheech Marin:

“George Harrison and those guys were in the next studio recording, and so Lou (Adler) just ran over there and played (it for him). They made up the track right on the spot.”

Producer Lou Adler:

“That was a wild session. I probably called Carole (King) and told her to come down, but with Harrison and (Klaus) Voormann—I didn’t call and say come in and play. Everyone happened to be in the A&M studios at that particular time, doing different projects. It was spilling out of the studio into the corridors.”

The song itself was a parody of “Love Jones” by the Brighter Side of Darkness. Having a “jones” btw, is a slang for having an addiction to something.

The “Basketball Jones” animation is by Paul Gruwell and was made in 1974. This cartoon has also made some impressive Hollywood cameos over the years, in Robert Altman’s California Split (which was never released on VHS due to Columbia Pictures refusing to pay royalties on the song, Altman had to cut the music—but not the animation—for the DVD); Hal Ashby’s Being There (it’s what Chauncey Gardiner is watching in the limo); and in the 70s underground comedy Tunnel Vision. It was even parodied in a 2011 episode of The Simpsons (”A Midsummer’s Nice Dream”) guest-starring Cheech & Chong.
 

“Basketball Jones”
 
More after the jump…

Rob Loonhouse on stage with Iron Maiden at the Music Machine with his trusty homemade cardboard guitar.

“Oh no, I don’t bother with frets…It’s supposed to look like a guitar, but it’s not really supposed to look like a real guitar.”

—Rob Loonhouse on his handmade cardboard guitars in 1981

When Rob Loonhouse (born Robin Yeatman) started rubbing shoulders and banging heads with bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, he was gainfully employed as a wedding photographer. The photographer-by-day had a not-so-secret life which made him somewhat of a minor celebrity, or at least oddity. Loonhouse would frequent pubs and clubs in London including NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) haven, The Soundhouse, and its sister backroom club The Bandwagon, where he would bust out his best air guitar routine. His pioneering performances would eventually become like competitions featuring “homemade imitation guitars” made of cardboard (or “hardboard” as coined by Loonhouse). His claim-to-fame is backed up further by two UK journalists, Pippa Lang and author Garry Bushell in his 2010 book Hollies: True Stories of Britain’s Biggest Street Battles, where he also identifies Loonhouse as the originator of the “new circle of hell that is air-guitar playing.”

According to Loonhouse, the idea to make his cardboard guitars was the result of a throw-down which would decide who the “Headbanger of the Year” was. At the time, Loonhouse was still air-guitaring it when he was approached by another local who had made his own Gibson-style guitar, and wanted a chance to compete. Loonhouse knew he had to up his game and went home to make his first cardboard guitar, described as “very rough.” In Loonhouse’s own words, his guitars were only supposed to look “like” guitars, not actually look like “real” guitars, and if your head is spinning like mine, the faux guitarist went into a bit more detail regarding the evolution of his DIY cardboard guitar collection:

“I’ve got three at home right now, a (Flying) V, a twin-neck (Flying) V, and an inverted (Flying) V which I made especially, which is a bit of a flop really. In all, I’ve made about a half a dozen, getting progressively better all the time.”

 

Rob Loonhouse and former Iron Maiden vocalist Paul DiAnno.
 
Former Iron Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton remembers Rob’s air-guitar competitions before he started making his cardboard axes and was widely photographed with the band during the early 80s, on stage with his trusty fake guitar in full headbanging mode. He was also featured on an episode of UK pop culture television show, 20th Century Box that, in part, attempted to define the NWOBHM as anti-woman with some help from comments by Loonhouse, such as:

“You find very few women down in the front actually headbanging. They are actually quite content to stand in the back and listen to the music.”

Later in his rather extensive interview, Loonhouse was asked another leading question by the BBC as to whether women make “good headbangers.” This time, Loonhouse lived up to his last name a little bit more with his puzzling answer—an analogy involving manual labor: 

“It’s difficult really, you know because many women just don’t have it in them, you know. There’s very few women digging holes in the road. Maybe that’s one of the reasons there’s very few women headbangers.”

Now before we tear into Loonhouse’s words of wisdom, which I’m sure got him laid all the time, it’s safe to say he is merely equating true heavy metal fans to tough, (mostly) manly roadmenders, or ditch-diggers. Of course, Lemmy Kilmister’s gal-pal Wendy O. Williams would probably have a few choice words for Loonhouse, as would the members of Girlschool, Betsy Bitch, Doro Pesch, and others. However, Loonhouse has historically been recalled not as a headbanging misogynist, but as a fun-loving goofball who managed to air-guitar his way into the good graces of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. And again, to be fair to Loonhouse, one of the goals of the piece was to perpetuate the myth that heavy metal lyrics were anti-woman and that heavy metal shows were no place for a girl.

Loonhouse’s first claim-to-fame (after his air-guitar accomplishments of course) was a photograph he took of Iron Maiden on the band’s first album, with vocalist Paul DiAnno, The Soundhouse Tapes. Loonhouse’s next big break would be his appearance in Judas Priest’s 1980 video for “Living After Midnight” directed by Julien Temple. In the video, there are several nods to air-guitar playing and even drummer Dave Holland has some fun hitting an imaginary drum kit hard during the thundering opening to the song. People in the audience are seen holding up cardboard guitars. Loonhouse wraps up the video by thrashing his cardboard Flying V” outside Priest’s tour bus. Later in 1980 Loonhouse’s inverted Flying V would appear on its own in another video directed by Temple, “Breaking the Law,” where it is played in a bizarre scene by a bank security guard. Previously, Loonhouse had been credited with the role of the bank security guard, but it clearly isn’t the cardboard guitar god, though the inverted Flying V is undoubtedly Loonhouse’s unique weapon of choice.
 

Loonhouse shredding the shit out of his cardboard Flying V.
 
Loonhouse was just 23 at the time of the 20th Century Box show, and described himself as not having the time to become a “really good guitarist.” But this wasn’t a bad thing in Loonhouse’s mind, as later in 20th Century Box, he happily mused being a headbanger was a “lifelong thing” and he was going to make a business out of being a “headbanger” because that was what he was “good at.”

Continues after the jump…

 
Marc Bolan said that from an early age he felt he was different from everyone else (don’t we all, dearie…). He believed, like say Churchill, he was born to do something momentous with his life. Something that would have a lasting importance, where his name would be known a hundred years after his death. He claimed when he was a child he didn’t feel like any of the other kids. But how he knew what these kids felt is a moot point. However different Bolan felt from everybody else, he sincerely believed it was in his fate to succeed.

Strange superstitions and odd beliefs the supernatural have caused some mythologizing around Bolan’s life and young, tragic death. This, in large part, has been inspired by the singer’s own words and writing. We all know the story of how Bolan idolized James Dean. This hero-worship led the Bolan’s first manager, Simon Napier-Bell to jokingly suggest he could imagine Bolan dying in a car crash just like Dean, but in a Rolls-Royce rather than a sports car. To which Bolan replied a Rolls-Royce wasn’t his style, a Mini was more in keeping with his image. Two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, Bolan was killed when the Mini his partner Gloria Jones was driving hit a metal fence. A bolt from this fence smashed thru the windscreen, hit Bolan in the head and killed him. The car then crashed into a tree where it came to a halt. The car’s number plate was FOX 661L, which led some fans to suggest this tragic event had been predicted by Bolan in the lyrics to his song “Solid Gold Easy Action” when he sang about “picking foxes from a tree” and sang about a “Woman from the east with her headlights shining.”

Then there was Bolan’s long-held and frequently mentioned belief that he would die young like some poet-artist. Or, the time during the recording in Germany of the (much under appreciated) album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow when Bolan claimed he saw the ghosts of a dead Jewish family who had perished during the Holocaust. This deeply troubled the singer and gave him an overwhelming sense of death. Not long after, he quit Germany never to return.

Of course, Bolan often embellished the events of his own life. He once claimed he had a met a wizard in Paris during the 1960s who had shown him how to use the power of occult magic to achieve his ambitions. This meeting became the basis for one of Bolan’s early singles “The Wizard.” Napier-Bell later suggested this “wizard” or “magician” was nothing more than a stage conjuror who showed Bolan how to do a few card tricks. Whichever version was true, it’s fair to say there was always something otherworldly about Bolan.

He was born Mark Feld on September 30th, 1947, in Stoke Newington, east London. His Jewish father was a truck driver and his mother worked at a local street market stall. Bolan was named after his uncle Mark, who had been brutally murdered during the war by an army sergeant called Patrick Francis Lyons. Surprisingly, at a time when murder meant the death penalty in England, Lyons received a ten-year jail sentence for the lesser charge of manslaughter. Bolan was well-aware who he had been named after. In part it inspired him to do something with his life. At the same time, it gave him a sense of great sense foreboding that maybe for all his possible future success he might in some way be cursed—as he later claimed “all rock stars are cursed.”

Bolan was the younger of two brothers. He was by all accounts spoiled by his mother and was given anything he wanted. One day, on a trip with his Mother to the cinema, to see Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the young Bolan discovered his future destiny. He was to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. 

The Girl Can’t Help It starred Jayne Mansfield (who also died in a bizarre, occult-tinged, road accident) and Tom Ewell. The movie featured a whole roster of rock ‘n’ roll stars like Little Richard, Gene Vincent, The Platters, Fats Domino, and Eddie Cochran. It was Cochran who caught Bolan’s attention. The eleven-year-old Bolan quickly formed a band, well a duet, and managed to blag his way into playing at the 2i’s Coffee Bar—“birthplace of British Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

At fifteen, Bolan was expelled from school for “bad behavior.” But he knew academic qualifications weren’t a requirement to graduate as a rock ‘n’ roll star. He was clocked by photographer Don McCullin who photographed Bolan and his Mod mates for Town magazine. This gave Bolan a brief career as a model for fashion catalogs looking tough in sharp suits for the flash Mod-about-town. But he still chased his dream of a successful career in music. He signed up as a folk singer, changed his name, and became half-Bob Dylan, half-bohemian pixie poet. He was spotted by manager Napier-Bell who suggested he join up-and-coming band John’s Children as “their Pete Townshend.” It was a brief but revelatory experience. Throughout his life, Bolan adapted elements to his personality from characters out of movies or comic books to shape his own persona. From the battling Mighty Joe Young to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. From John’s Children Bolan learned how to perform on stage. He then learnt a different approach to stage craft from watching Ravi Shankar perform cross-legged sitting on a rug next to a tabla player. It led him to form Tyrannosaurus Rex. Bolan played his guitar cross-legged on a rug next to a bongo-playing Steve Pergerin Took.

Bolan wrote ethereal songs about nothing much in particular where words were used for their sound rather than their meaning. Tyrannosaurus Rex was championed by DJ John Peel, who considered the band “revolutionary.” It was short-lived infatuation. Peel later denounced Bolan’s naked ambition for fame describing the singer as “a hippie with a knife up his sleeve.” Ain’t no pleasin’ some folks… However, producer Tony Visconti recognized Bolan’s immense talent from the beginning stating in an interview with the Guardian in 2015 that what he saw in Bolan:

...had nothing to do with strings, or very high standards of artistry; what I saw in him was raw talent. I saw genius. I saw a potential rock star in Marc—right from the minute, the hour I met him.

Tyrannosaurus Rex arrived at a time when students were rioting on the streets of Paris and an anti-Vietnam demonstration almost became a pitch-battle between protestors and police outside the American embassy in London. Peregrin Took was more far radical than Bolan. He wanted to take the band in a more political direction…
 
More Marc and Gloria, after the jump…
 

 
Sharon Osbourne came up with the idea for Ozzfest after her Prince of Darkness husband got snubbed from playing Lollapalooza in ’96. The most reputable touring festival of its kind, Ozzfest would reach peak popularity in the new millennium, with break-out artists of the hard rock and heavy metal persuasion. It’s safe to say that bands like Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Disturbed, and Rob Zombie wouldn’t have achieved the same mainstream success if Ozzfest hadn’t riled up the head-banging degenerates of every American suburbia it blared through.
 
You are probably familiar with the work of Penelope Spheeris, most recognized for directing such films as Wayne’s World, Suburbia, The Little Rascals, and the groundbreaking underground music documentary series, The Decline of Western Civilization I-III. Spheeris is also regarded for the infamous films she declined to direct, This is Spinal Tap and Legally Blonde among them. Her refusal was due to other commitments, and in 1999, it was because of Ozzfest.
 
After releasing the third (and final) installment of The Decline, with its focus on Los Angeles gutter punks of the late-nineties, Spheeris was soon onto a new cultural phenomena, heavy metal in middle America. During the summer of 1999, the Ozzfest roadshow appeared in 26 cities throughout North America, headlined by the original lineup of Black Sabbath—their final “farewell” tour of the nineties reunion (before the next one). On the bill were soon-to-be household names of the burgeoning hard rock and nu-metal scene, including Rob Zombie, Slayer, System of a Down, Primus, Godsmack, and Static-X. And joining them to document the journey was Penelope Spheeris, directing a picture later unknown to many titled: We Sold Our Souls for Rock ’n Roll.
 

 
Envisioned with the same anthropological eye and creative brilliance that executed The Decline, Spheeris left no rock (or roll) unturned on her quest for the cultural core and essence of such a bizarre evolution within the early-internet age. Throughout the film, reckless and inebriated fans are pulled aside, musicians are questioned of their long-term relevance, and anti-satanist picketers are given the opportunity to sound even more insane. Not to mention, there are glimpses of Sabbath jamming backstage, a groupie’s tour of the Slayer tour bus, grotesque sideshow demonstrations, topless bull riding, bonfires, fights with security, and… Buckethead. Remember that scene in The Decline II when Ozzy cooks eggs? Well, in this one, we witness him pissing in the bushes of his Beverly Hills mansion. In just two years, the Osbourne family antics would gain mainstream notoriety, all thanks to MTV.
 
If the documentary had seen a wide release, I imagine it would have been as important as the other Decline films, due to like-minded outsider examination of such a raw subculture. Spheeris’ honest depiction of such a puzzling, yet beautiful, societal abnormality is truly mind-blowing and worth the attention, regardless of your take on the music. Licensing issues prevented the film from making it anywhere else besides YouTube, so I recommend that you watch ASAP before it gets pulled down.
 
Relive the glory (and madness) of Ozzfest ’99 below:
 

 
With 40+ years of groundbreaking musical activities under their belts, it only seems right that hugely influential British art-rockers Wire should (finally!) receive the feature documentary treatment. And who better to give it to them than lifelong Wire megafan Graham Duff, the writer/director/actor best known for creating the Johnny Vegas cult favorite sitcom Ideal. 

Duff and producer/co-director Malcolm Boyle have set about creating the definitive cinematic portrait of Wire, and the film, still in production is entitled People in a Film:

“We’ve already shot serious in-depth interviews with all the members of Wire, including original guitarist Bruce Gilbert who has given the movie his blessing. And we also filmed Wire writing and recording their new album at Rockfield Studios in Wales. It’s fascinating to see how the band work together. Lots of harmony, but quite a lot of friction too.

It seems ridiculous there hasn’t already been a documentary about them. So we want to make something which mirrors the strange and often surreal world of Wire. They really are a unique proposition. Their intensity is only matched by their often silly sense of humor. Who else but Wire would perform a gig inside a row of cubes? Or employ a support band to play their entire 1977 debut album in full, so that they don’t have to?”

Duff and Boyle are currently looking for investors to help them finish the movie. “We’ve just launched a crowdfunding project to fund the recording of the last batch of interviews and edit the final film.  One of the things we want to do is come out to the US and shoot interviews with Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins.”

If any band deserves a documentary it’s Wire.  If you want to find out more about how to help get People in a Film finished, follow this link to the crowdfunding site.