Cast photo of Hee Haw, with Jimmy Riddle up front in overalls

Eefing is one of those things I encountered a few times in my childhood and immediately buried in my subconscious, knowing there was no way I could explain it to anyone without older Appalachian-raised family members. If I had to give a brief description, I’d probably go with “a hundred-year-old Appalachian vocal music technique of percussive gasping, hiccuping, and fart noises.” Praise Jesus, we now have YouTube, and you can just press play and hear for yourself!

Below is a supercut of the absolute f’ing master of eefing, Jimmy Riddle, spliced and remixed, creating a sort of surreal intensity. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
 

A longer version of Jimmy’s description of eefing can be found here.

Jimmy enthusiastically eefed it up on many an episode of the redneck-themed variety show, Hee Haw, the only secular television my evangelical grandparents watched when I was growing up, besides sports and daytime soap operas. (Hee Haw was, ironically, primarily created by two Canadians and a New York Jew.) Jimmy’s accompaniment (and indeed the only accompaniment I’ve ever really seen with eefing), is usually the manual percussive slaps we call “hambone.”

In 1963, in one of the weirder moments American ethnomusicology, a black singer named Joe Perkins apparently became enamored of hillbilly eefing, and released a novelty single featuring Jimmy’s talents. “Little Eeefin’ Annie,” with its “Uncle Eeef” flipside, was actually a minor hit. (Alvin and the Chipmunks released “Eefin’ Alvin” that same year.)

Below you can hear and see Joe Perkins perform “Little Eeefin’ Annie” on a local Nashville R&B show called Night Train, which aired from 1964 to 1967. The program was made by black producers for black audiences, and videos like this one capture how receptive black audiences actually were to hillbilly music, a fact that often goes overlooked in our popular narratives of music history. The second song Perkins performs is also weird as hell. It’s called “Runaway Slave,” and it’s a love song that uses chattel slavery as a romantic metaphor (Nobody could ever accuse the guy of playing it safe!)
 

 
Lest you get impression that eefing is a noble art form, denigrated by the rednecksploitational Hee Haw money men, but held in solemn reverence by Appalachian people, let me reassure you, I spent a large portion of my childhood with my Appalachian grandparents, and on the rare occasion we encountered eefing, it was intended to evoke laughter.

What I’m saying is, eefing is… an acquired taste, and no one will think you a classist cultural chauvinist if you can’t make it all the way through the supercut. And no one will be offended if you laugh at it, either.

Hambone, however, that shit is deadly serious!

 
The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party is fast becoming one of the most annoying rites of American whiteness, but lately, thanks to one of your favorite bands, you can give that new tradition the finger. If you have to go to one, why not go in your Descendents Christmas Sweater Sweatshirt?

GOOD NEWS DESCENDENTS FANS! You guys have been asking for it, and now we have it! We are proud to present the 2013 Holiday Sweater. The Descendents started this craze a few years ago and you guys cant get enough! As always, these are only here for a limited time so grab one while you can! Happy Holidays!

They’ve been making these for a few years now, but this year, they’re taking pre-orders so that fewer fans get shut out of these limited items. You can order yours from Kings Road.

Now rock out.
 

Bob Marley
 
I can’t place my finger on exactly why I find these ‘shopped age progression portraits—by Sachs Media Group and photo restoration and manipulation company Phojoe—so unsettling. But I do.

Poor Jimi! He looks worse than Keith Richards! And apparently had Dennis Wilson lived, he would look exactly like Glenn Frey does today. That sucks!

You can view a lot more of these at Sachs Media Group.
 

Dennis Wilson
 

Janis Joplin
 
More freaky portraits after the jump…
 

 
The late Stiv Bators is equally well known for his leadership stints in pioneering rust belt punks The Dead Boys and trans-oceanic glam/goths Lords of the New Church, but in between those bands, Bators briefly attempted a career as a pop singer, more or less in the “Paisley Underground” vein.
 

Was every L.A. rocker issued a Rickenbacker back then?

That effort began in 1979, when he recorded a remake of the garage-pop gem “It’s Cold Outside” as a single for Bomp Records. This choice may have been an overt nod to Bators’ Northeast Ohio roots - the song was written and originally recorded by The Choir, a precociously popular band of Cleveland teenagers who would go on to form the much more successful Raspberries in 1970. Check out Bators’ version and compare with the original.
 

Stiv Bators - “It’s Cold Outside”
 

The Choir - “It’s Cold Outside”

Stiv positively nailed the song, did he not? The sound is as far from The Dead Boys’ tuneless glory as it is from the Lords’ preening Batcaveisms, but still, he was really great at it. This poppier phase, though brief, lasted long enough for him to make the album Disconnected, also on Bomp. Though it leans a hair more towards punk rawness than the single’s overtly jangly pop-psych, Bators continued to prove his mettle as an interpreter of garage classics with a fantastic cover of the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night.”
 

Stiv Bators - “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”
 

 
The entire album is worth a listen. Much of it was written by Blue Ash refugee Frank Secich, and it comprises some of Bators’ most accessible work, including great tracks like “A Million Miles Away” (not the contemporary Plimsouls song) and “I Wanna Forget You (Just The Way You Are).” And while you’re listening, get a load of this review of the LP comparing Bators to Tom Petty!
 

Stiv Bators, Disconnected, full LP
 
Bonus: enjoy “Stiv-TV,” a wonderful full-length interview from 1986.
 

 
MAD magazine was at the absolute height of its circulation in the mid 1970s—north of two million of each issue hit the newsstands then—so it was no surprise that television executives wanted in on the action. ABC ordered a pilot for an animated MAD series, but shelved it due to the “adult” humor and apparently because they didn’t want to piss off their bread and butter. Dick DeBartolo (“MAD’s maddest writer!”) said of the ill-fated pilot (eventually aired as a one-off “special” apparently) “Nobody wanted to sponsor a show that made fun of products that were advertised on TV, like car manufacturers.”

In the MAD TV special, the viewer is treated to on-screen adaptations of the work of Don Martin, Al Jafee, Antonio Prohias, Dave Berg and Mort Drucker. I’d rate this as “good” not “great” but it is interesting to see how MAD translated to the small screen and given a chance to develop, it could’ve been a classic of the era. Certainly it’s a fuck of a lot better than their terrible 1980 film, MAD Magazine’s Up The Academy, which is SO EGREGIOUSLY AWFUL that MAD publisher William Gaines actually paid $30,000 to have the MAD name taken off it (a bargain) before it started airing on cable!
 

 
The Quebec-based Le Guide Restos Voir appears to be something like the Zagat guide of Francophone Canada. This year Guide Restos is proud to issue their 18th edition; to celebrate the occasion and to promote the 2014 edition, they have issued a series of sexually suggestive posters in which tasty morsels of food are photographed to resemble certain highly interesting body parts. (The concept is based on a pun involving the idea of “18+.”)

These posters made me smile , which was presumably the idea.
 

 

 

 

 
via ufunk

 
I first discovered the amazing 1976 BBC documentary Princely Toys—about the incredible antique automaton collection of a man named Jack Donovan—on an art film tracker with the description “creepy toy documentary.”

That seemed too good to pass up and I’m glad I didn’t. Princely Toys is an unexpected pleasure and, yes, it’s a little creepy (check out the animated smoking monkey doll dressed as Napoleon in the beginning or the doll hacking a woman’s bloody torso with a butcher knife) but mainly it’s just… really neat. The soundtrack is probably from a music library, but it’s a suitably weird synth-based Muzak-y sort of affair that fits perfectly with the dimly-lit footage of Donovan’s superb 19th century animated doll collection.

There’s next to no information about this doc online. After his death, much of Jack Donovan’s unique collection was apparently acquired by the York Automata Museum, and after that closed down, sold to a Japanese collector.
 

 
Man, I just can’t get over these close-up shots of individual snowflakes by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov. Each one is a work of art by Mother Earth herself. Simply stunning.

Apparently no two snowflakes are alike—with the exception of nano-snowflakes—which makes every one of these photos ever more special.

Macro photography at its finest, IMO. 

 

 

 
More snowflake goodness after the jump…
 

 
Chronology is the damndest thing. Everybody knows the fantastic scene in This is Spinal Tap in which the band commissions a Stonehenge set but mistakenly asks for a model of 18 inches instead of 18 feet, which tiny replica then finds its way into a real Tap concert—even though nobody has informed the band’s members of the mixup beforehand.

That gag was first presented to the public on March 2, 1984, when the movie was released. A year earlier, in August 1983, Black Sabbath (one of the primary sources for Spinal Tap) released Born Again (October 1983 in the U.S.), one of their most poorly reviewed efforts. The second track on the album is a brief instrumental called “Stonehenge”—and on their 1983 Born Again tour, Black Sabbath hilariously had to shelve a Stonehenge stage concept because the scenery was much too big to use—someone had misinterpreted the requested foot measurements as meters, making all of the pieces roughly nine times too large (remember your volume calculations in high school geometry?).

It’s tempting to conclude that Spinal Tap nicked the gag off of this real-life precursor. But there are problems with this theory. For one thing, Black Sabbath’s North American tour didn’t start until mid-October 1983, and the incident with the Stonehenge set didn’t occur until around October 21, when they hit Montreal. It seems unlikely that they hadn’t finished principal photography on This is Spinal Tap by then (the project had already been kicking around for a while), and nothing about the Stonehenge gag suggests a rush job—a full song was composed, a live rendition was recorded, and so forth.

But that’s not all. When This is Spinal Tap was much closer to the pitch stage, Rob Reiner and his three principals, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer (who did the bulk of the writing), put together Spinal Tap: The Final Tour, a 20-minute rough cut of the movie that they could show to financiers as an example of what the end result would look like. This footage dates from 1981 or 1982—well before Black Sabbath released Born Again—and the Stonehenge bit is there pretty much in its entirety.

So it’s all a complete coincidence—one of those uncanny examples of art anticipating life.
 

 
While we’re on the subject, let’s see what the members of Black Sabbath had to say about the Stonehenge incident. By the time of Born Again, Ozzy Osbourne was long gone, and Ronnie James Dio had quit the band after the previous album, Mob Rules. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were still in the band, and they actually wanted to release the material under a different name, but label considerations forced them to stick with the name Black Sabbath. They recruited Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan to do the vocals, but he quit the band after the tour. Original drummer Bill Ward, now newly sober, had sat out Mob Rules but returned for Born Again; it was the last Sabbath studio album Ward would play on.

According to a 1995 interview with Geezer Butler, this was what happened with the Stonehenge stage set:
 

Jeb Wright:  There is also a part of the movie Spinal Tap that concerns Geezer Butler – or so I have been told.  The idea of Stonehenge being too small actually came from Black Sabbath’s idea to make a Stonehenge stage set for the Born Again tour that was too large.  My source gave you the credit for the whole mistake.

Geezer Butler: It had nothing to do with me.  In fact, I was the one who thought it was really corny.  We had Sharon Osbourne’s dad, Don Arden, managing us.  He came up with the idea of having the stage set be Stonehenge.  He wrote the dimensions down and gave it to our tour manager.  He wrote it down in meters but he meant to write it down in feet.  The people who made it saw fifteen meters instead of fifteen feet.  It was 45 feet high and it wouldn’t fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it the storage area.  It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into.

JW:  Where is Stonehenge now?

GB:  I last saw it on the docks in New York on the same tour.

JW:  So somewhere these things are around.

GB:  They were probably thrown into the Atlantic Ocean.

JW:  One day a futuristic society will find them.

GB:  They will think it is Atlantis.

 
So wait—Sharon Osbourne’s dad was probably responsible for the mixup, which must mean that the part of Jeanine Pettibone in This is Spinal Tap is basically Sharon Osbourne, right? I don’t think I had put that together before.

In an interview in Mojo magazine in December 1994, Gillan largely confirms the story but says that the whole Stonehenge idea was Butler’s, which Butler obviously denies (see above):
 

We were up at a company called LSD (Light and Sound Design) in Birmingham, and the lighting engineer asked if anyone had any ideas for a stage set. Geezer Butler suggested Stonehenge. “How do you envisage it, Geezer?” asked the engineer. “Life size, of course,” replied Geezer. So they built a life-size Stonehenge. We hired the Birmingham NEC [National Exhibition Centre] to rehearse in and they couldn’t get these bloody things in there. We opened in Montreal and Don Arden had hired Maple Leaf ice hockey stadium for a week, so they shipped the set over there and could still only get a few of those damn stones up, one each side of the stage, one behind the drums and two cross-pieces.

 
According to Gillan, there were further misadventures involving dry ice and (as in the movie) a dwarf:
 

Then we hear this horrendous screaming sound—they’ve recorded a baby’s scream and flanged it—and suddenly; we see this dwarf crawling across the top of Stonehenge, then he stands up as the baby’s scream fades away and falls backwards off this 30 foot fibreglass replica of Stonehenge onto a big pile of mattresses. Then dong, dong—bells start toiling and all the roadies come across the front of the stage in monk’s cowls, at which point War Pigs starts up. By now we can see the kids are either in stitches or wincing in horror.

After spending 40 grand a day to achieve all this, someone had economised by not actually trying out the dry ice in the afternoon run through. So as I stride confidently towards my prompt book, not even knowing the first word of the song, I’m suddenly shocked to see a chest-high cloud of dry ice is berating me to the front of the stage. So there I am after this big opening, kneeling down, swatting the air and trying to read me line, popping my head above this cloud every now and then. Someone shouted “It’s Ronnie Dio!”

 
Butler thinks the original Stonehenge plinths are in the Atlantic Ocean, but I found a reference online to the effect that “the design company LSD (Light and Sound Design) ... still have the model in their possession. At one point, it was going to be donated as an auction prize for a children’s charity, but since it was touring around rock museums all over the world as part of an exhibition, this never happened.”

Is this true? Did anyone reading this ever see a tour at a “rock museum” that included the original Black Sabbath model of Stonehenge?
 
“Spinal Tap: The Final Tour,” part 1:

 
More after the jump…

 
Abraham Zapruder shot the most famous home movie in history. He was the man whose 26 seconds of film footage captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963.

It is the only known film of the entire assassination.

In an interview with Jay Watson, program director with WFAA, an ABC news affiliate, Zapruder described the events he witnessed.

“As I was shooting, as the President was coming down from Houston Street making his turn, it was about a half-way down there, I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side, like this…

“Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn’t say, it was one or two, and I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything, and I kept on shooting. That’s about all, I’m just sick, I can’t…”

Watson responded by saying that this “pretty well expresses the entire feelings of the whole world.”

The report moves on to videotape of the President’s body arriving at Parklands Hospital, after which a photograph of the Texas School Book Depository is shown and discussed in relation to the shooting. The report ends with news of the arrest of a suspect.

Here, in less than six minutes, is a concise distillation of the events that have obsessed America for 50 years.
 

 
H/T ABC News