Uncanny Island, the very first solo art exhibition by musician and author Luke Haines is on at the Eston Arts Centre through the end of the month. Should you find yourself in North Yorkshire, you should drop by and check it out.
The exhibit features Haines’ psychedelic visions of British wrestlers from the 1970s and early 80s (echoing his 2011 concept album 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s) and a Christmas tree festooned with ornaments bearing the likeness of everyone who was ever in the Fall. (The band had 66 members during Mark E. Smith’s five decade run, in case you were wondering.)
Luke Haines: Yep. First solo exhibition. I’m pleased it’s in the north—away from curators and the dull art people.
Tell me about the Fall Xmas tree?
I’d painted a MES bauble for a friend’s Xmas present. The obvious next stage was to paint every member of the Fall, but I had no reason to embark on such a futile endeavour. Then the artist Neil McNally asked me if I wanted to have an exhibition. It was then that I realized it was time for the Fall Xmas tree.
I know that you’ve described your work as outsider art in the past, but with the Lou Reeds, the Hawkwind paintings, the Maoist Monkees—and of course the psychedelic wrestlers which refer to your own album—it seems more like you’re doing something more akin to “rock snob art”? How do you see it?
My stuff is more like sitcom art. I tend to do the same thing: put popular or unpopular culture figures in absurd situations. Like putting Hawkwind in a balloon carrying esoteric knowledge (The North Sea Scrolls) back to their squat in Ladbroke Grove. If Hawkwind actually did this the world would be improved immeasurably. In the show there are a couple of paintings depicting wrestlers having diabolical fever dreams about It’s A Royal Knockout. I’d like to do a whole art show about It’s A Royal Knockout. Maybe a straightforward reenactment.
How often are you asked to comment on the art of Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr or Paul Stanley?
I think that worrying about pop stars inflicting their art on an ungrateful world will be the least of our problem post covid. There will a tsunami of ‘lockdown art washing up. It will all be terrible.
Mark E Smith Xmas tree bauble
The Fall Xmas Tree in situ.
Fall Xmas Tree (detail)
Liver Sausage (Mark “Rollerball” Rocco)
Brian Glover
Dickie Davies
Eston Arts Centre, 176 -178 High Street, Eston, Middlesbrough, TS6 9JA.
Rufe Davis was an American actor, singer and “imitator of sounds.” He was best known for his “rural” comedic radio act, “Rufe Davis and the Radio Rubes” during the 1930s, for being a co-star along with Hoot Gibson, John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers in dozens of Hollywood B-Westerns and for his role as “Floyd Smoot,” the train conductor of the “Hooterville Cannonball” on the 60s CBS TV comedy series, Petticoat Junction.
Davis’ rendition of “The Old Sow Song” was his musical calling card for obvious reasons and something that those of us of a certain age might remember from a popular 60s kiddie record made by Mel Blanc and others called Bozo And His Pals (which is where I first heard it—and loved it—as a tyke), although it was originally released as a 78rpm record many years before that. The same song was also given away as a cardboard record in cereal boxes. His version of the song was probably what kept the song alive in the 60s and 70s, and even beyond, but there was another famous version that we’ll get to in due course.
Maybe you heard “The Old Sow Song” from one of your grandparents singing it to you? They might’ve heard it in a vaudeville theater. It might also be something that was passed down from long before that, an actual working class English folk song. I’ve also seen it described as a Yorkshire farmer’s song. It’s claimed by Scotland and Ireland, too. One of the earliest recorded versions was one done in 1928 by Albert Richardson. It was also recorded by Cyril Smith and Rudy Vallee, as well as by opera singer Anna Russell. Novelty songsmith Leslie Sarony did his hit version of “The Old Sow Song” in 1934. Apparently John Ritter performed the song on Three’s Company but sadly I could find no clip of this. According to YouTube comments, Hee-Haw featured more than one rendition of “The Old Sow Song.”
Perhaps many of you learned “The Old Sow Song” at summer camp or grade school, where I am guessing it can still be heard to this day, since children’s songs with farting noises never truly die. This evergreen sing-a-long is up there with “Bingo was his name-o” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” but neither of them has blowing raspberries as an integral part of the song. Can you imagine what the sheet music must’ve looked like?
I’m truly delighted that a vintage visual representation of “The Old Sow Song” exists. I don’t have an exact year for the clip, but it’s described as a “talkie” or “soundie” in the descriptions of the various uploads which might indicate that this was an early sound film, and yet there is a Hitler reference, so I think it might be a bit later than the uploaders think. Maybe an early kinescope?
I high recommend taking any—and all—drugs that you have handy before hitting play. If Rufe Davis’s face doesn’t turn green and if time doesn’t seem to bend like taffy and come to a complete standstill while you watch this, then you clearly haven’t taken enough drugs. So take more.
The cover of the upcoming graphic novel, ‘Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World’ due in September 2021.
When it came time for author David Calcano to pen the graphic novel take on Motörhead’s illustriously loud, 40-year career, he, the folks at Fantoons, and illustrator Mark Irwin (fittingly a former art director for Heavy Metal magazine), took the project very seriously. You may recall that Calcano has authored various other music-related graphic novels on artists such as Billie Holliday, and a few eclectic coloring books featuring Frank Zappa and Marillion (!). Calcano’s latest graphic novel, the 144 page Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World, (due on September 7th, 2021), begins Motörhead’s debaucherous story with Lemmy (as it should) back when Kilmister was working as a tutor/instructor at a horse riding school in North Wales. At the time, the teenager and soon-to-be-hellraiser thought working with horses was what he would do for a living. It was, after all, according to Lem, a great way to “get along with women.” To back up this legend about the legendary Lemmy, here are a few shots of Lem and his horse friends.
Lemmy: “I used to ride horses a lot, there wasn’t much music then, rock and roll and that sort of thing.” Image via Twitter.
Lemmy’s former Hawkwind bandmate Dave Brock also recalls Kilmister’s fondness for horses. The photo above shows Brock alongside Lemmy sitting on a “spirited” horse named “Dynamite” at a ranch in Kansas. This photo is so metal it makes my hair hurt.
Thankfully, after his ears were exposed to artists such as Little Richard and Elvis (specifically the jam “All Shook Up”), Lemmy’s work with horses was history, though equines would continue to be a part of his life, for nearly all of his life. Here’s a look at some of the illustrations from Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World which wouldn’t be complete without a few panels of Lemmy clutching a large bottle of his beloved drug of choice, speed, and a naked chick.
A few days ago, whilst idly wasting time on the internet, I googled some images of 70s horror vixen/Bond girl Caroline Munro. As you do. Anyway an image of her with huge 80s hair (and Gary Numan!) caught my eye. That led me to a 2019 Guardian article that touched upon a musical project from the mid-1960s, from when she was just a teenager, that might be of interest to our readers.
The story goes that a photograph of Munro taken when she was 16 won the Evening News’ Face of the Year competition which had been judged by David Bailey. Fame beckoned, and so did an offer to make a pop record:
In 1967, Munro, who had sung in her church choir, released her first single, a breathy ditty called “Tar and Cement,” recorded at Abbey Road. Her backing band was Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, better known as Cream, alongside the future Yes guitarist Steve Howe. She remembers Baker driving her up the Mall in an open-topped Jaguar to the photoshoot; an image in keeping with the Austin Powers-ish tang of her life at this time. But it’s the B-side, This Sporting Life, the 70-year-old Munro sings to me today over coffee. “‘I’m getting tired of hanging around / Think I will marry and settle down / Because this old night life / This old sport life / Is killing me.’ I was only 16, just out of convent school when I sang that. It was ridiculous, really. I didn’t know anything about living a sporting life.”
The session was produced by Mark Wirtz, then coming off the hit of Keith West’s A Teenage Opera. It’s not bad at all!
The single’s A side, “Tar and Cement” is also pretty decent:
Bonus, “Pump Me Up,” the song Munro cut for Gary Numan’s Numa label in 1984. It’s really a pity there’s no music video for this song.
The Guardian referred to artist/musician Drew Mulholland as “the putative godfather” of the psychogeographic rock movement. Mulholland’s idiosyncratic compositional techniques (for that is the right word) include “sampling” the atmosphere of a particular location and incorporating this resonance/mood/memory into his soundscapes. Formerly trading under the name Mount Vernon Arts Lab, he has staked out a territory between psychogeography and hauntology, inspired by séances, Cold War architecture, desolate places and the occult. Mulholland has collaborated with the likes Isobel Campbell, Sonic Boom, Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, Adrian Utley from Portishead and Barry 7 of Add N to (X). He has also worked with Coil, which… makes a lot of sense!
The subject of Mulholland’s latest project is a strange bookstore recalled from childhood. It sounds like the evil twin of Brian Eno’s On Land or the soundtrack to the infernal rites of a 19th century secret society and comes in a slickly published, limited edition object d’art record jacket from the Library of the Occult label. (If you are interested in a physical copy on vinyl, you should act quickly as they are nearly all sold.) His Patreon account can be found here and you can contact him about the creation of original music pressed onto a bespoke handcrafted record made just for you. Or for someone else.
Messer’s stood across from my Aunt Nan’s flat in Glasgow, and was a mixture of borrowing library, second hand bookshop, newsagent, and tobacconist. Even in the early 70s it was a place outside time, dark, musty, and seemed to have a personality, a very special atmosphere. I also remember they had a print of Francis Barrett hanging above the door. A copy of Witchcraft and Black Magic by Peter Haining, with paintings by Jan Parker, was my Aunt Nan’s first purchase from there, and her excitement showing it to me coupled with those images and her taking me over to the window in order for her to point the location of Messer’s out to me all seemed like a dozen firecrackers going off in my head at once.
So it was an actual, real shop?
Absolutely, it was at 624 Alexandra Parade in Dennistoun opposite Wood Street until the mid 1970s.
How did you create the sounds of ectoplasmic formation heard on the album? Actually let me ask that in a different way, what was the original “input” source material that you manipulated? Describe your working methods. You often begin with field recordings, right?
Yes, field recordings are my basic ingredients whether it’s recording the locations used in The Wicker Man, the ambient sounds in the Anatomy Museum at the university, or a 1930s statistical analysis calculating machine. The location is fundamentally important to the work, from them the ideas spring. For Messer’s Circulating Library I went to its former location and recorded inside the deli that is there now and also the approach to it at different times of day. Then once I’ve catalogued those sounds I get to work and see what they suggest, including titles. The “ectoplasm formation” was made of a few elements from the recordings but the main reasons they work is varispeed and processing, and especially as a secondary consideration the manipulation of reverbs.
Painting by Jan Parker
I have to say that it does sound genuinely scary, as if you’ve captured the peak moment of some infernal occurrence. It’s got a genuinely evil vibe, not a corny horror movie vibe. How do you achieve that? What is that sonic quality that makes these pieces so intense?
I think it must be the reverbs, it/they take those sounds…somewhere. You may well believe that you are controlling them but I think that’s the point where something else kicks in. That’s the time the titles usually suggest themselves, too. ‘‘Horror Hee Black Pods,” “Marshe Benediction,” and “Fierce Chemistry” all came that way on this album. What I’ve learned is to totally immerse yourself in the sound and completely trust your instinct
I never regarded it as ‘‘evil’’ per se, however my introduction to Messer’s was through the feeling I got being around my grandma’s kitchen table when she was reading the leafs, pondering coincidences, or predicting the future, and of course Jan Parker’s paintings did terrify and intrigue me in equal parts… so many questions there. So I always connected the Haining book and the lo-fi occultism in the back kitchen with the sense and atmosphere of the shop, which I always found to be pleasant, welcoming, and an adventure. It was all about atmospheres.
That was great fun, I was giving a talk during the Alchemical Landscape conference at Cambridge and the next morning I naturally started wandering around making recordings (which were released earlier this year). Being a complete Syd fanatic, I, of course, had to pay my respects at his boyhood home on Hills Road. When I got there the gardeners had just finished work and lots of detritus was still lying on the path so I collected some and glued them onto card, cut it into a 7’’ circle, played it on my turntable, and recorded it. Afterwards I ground down what was left of the leaves and twigs and added their dust into the paint I was using back at Corpus Christi College to create a abstract painting. Which I still have.
I realize now that it’s just the same process I use for creating sounds, using an artefact from a relevant location.
Author Joseph Lanza is an expert’s expert on some of the more enigmatic corners of popular and unpopular culture. In numerous books he’s written about Muzak®, long forgotten crooners, obsessive film directors like Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, bland pop songs, the history of cocktails, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Possessing an expertise on matters from Mantovani to Leatherface, Lanza’s work is quirky and unique. His latest book, Easy Listening Acid Trip: An Elevator Ride through Sixties Psychedelic Pop (Feral House) covers a musical genre that most people have no idea even existed.
It’s bound to send prices skyrocketing on Discogs for this kind of stuff. Like all of his books, it’s a fun read.
I asked Joseph Lanza some questions over email.
In your books, you display an erudition about obscure popular culture, and you seem to have staked out a territory, where others have feared to tread. How did you become interested in, and an expert on, elevator music and pop orchestral cover versions of psychedelic hits?
I’ve been curious about this kind of music since my high-school days. While listening to the garden-variety rock and pop along with my peers, I was also fascinated by the easy-listening instrumental FM station that my parents often kept on in the background. They seemed to be broadcasting phantom orchestras and choruses that covered many current songs, and I remember being amazed to hear the Ray Conniff Singers do a version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” Though their vocals were engineered to be more background than foreground, the song seemed all the more haunting with its references to old-time movies and ghosts. Its subject matter was close to the ideas and images in Roger Corman’s 1967 movie The Trip, which helped to introduce LSD themes to the masses. The Conniff recording has a spectral appeal that, for me, brought out this message more than the original record.
In college, I would listen to recording artists like Nico by day, and at night, I’d turn on the local elevator-music station. It sounded like tunes from a parallel place, and I liked this. At the same time, I recall standing in a bank line, hearing similar music from the ceiling speakers, and seeing what looked like a thermostat dial on the wall; it was really a Muzak volume setting.
Can I assume that you mainly listen to this sort of music?
I’ve collected a lot of this music through the years and listen to it much of the time. But I also like sixties pop and folk rock by Donovan, The Searchers, and even the echo-drenched ballads produced by Joe Meek. Peer Raben’s music to the Fassbinder films is also appealing, and Raben had expressed Mantovani’s influence in some of his work.
What is it about this sort of fare that captured your attention?
It played almost everywhere, in different places, and it attracted me more with the passing years. I wondered about the people and the studios that put these sessions together. This music was not the product of some indifferent machine but by reputable session players who also did backgrounds to some pop albums and Top 40 songs. Vinnie Bell is one example. He contributed to Muzak sessions but also played his “water guitar” on Ferrante & Teicher’s “Theme to Midnight Cowboy.” The term “elevator music” has accumulated pejorative connotations, but it’s ultimately a positive term. It’s music that, like an elevator, floats in the air, often between destinations: airports, hotel lobbies, and malls And it triggers sometimes-ambiguous emotions. In the late ‘40s, Muzak and the Otis Elevator Company ran an ad in Time magazine, showing happy elevator passengers, and touting how, thanks to “Music by Muzak,” “the cares of the business day are now wafted away on the notes of a lilting melody.” This gives the term an historical context. And in the late sixties, at the height of the “counterculture” and political violence, easy-listening tunes like Paul Mauriat’s “Love is Blue” played on the same Top 40 stations that also played the Doors and Jefferson Airplane. During my research for the book Elevator Music, Brad Miller, who’d engineered and produced the early Mystic Moods Orchestra albums, told me that they were also popular among Bay Area youth. He claimed, “the pop music at that time was trying to provide more texture as opposed to the usual electric rock bands.” The psychedelic appeal was not like a Jetsons-inspired vision of the future but a melancholic gaze into the past that often revived old sounds from the British music hall, American vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. This helps explain why easy-listening (with its emphasis on traditional melody) and psychedelia formed an uncanny merger. Even the Rolling Stones took the time to go back to their European roots with ditties like “She’s a Rainbow.”
Have you met many others who share your interest in this most specific of musical genres, or are you a bit of a lone wolf?
In 1984, when Muzak celebrated its 50th Anniversary, I contacted the company and got a folder full of information about its history. Later, as I started writing Elevator Music in the early ‘90s, I was meeting and talking with several programmers who had worked at Muzak. I also had extended conversations with some who had programmed for easy-listening instrumental channels, or the so-called “Beautiful Music” stations, which were among FM’s most popular formats. Then, going into the ‘80s, the format gradually ceded to “Adult Contemporary,” which replaced Percy Faith, Ferrante & Teicher, and the Hollyridge Strings with the likes of Neil Diamond, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand. We got blasted with “foreground music” and were eventually robbed of a musical background.
Today, I am far from being a “lone wolf” in liking this music. You can go to YouTube and type in “Muzak Stimulus Progression,” “easy-listening instrumental music,” or any particular recording artist like Paul Mauriat or Franck Pourcel, to find many fans leaving messages about how they like these recordings and miss their presence in public places or on the home hi-fi. Some reminisce about a long ago and far away time when such sounds permeated the malls, shopping plazas, and supermarkets during their childhoods.
Who do you find are the greatest practitioners of the easy-listening acid cover version genre?
My favorites are the Hollyridge Strings, especially their albums of songs by the Beatles during the Sgt. Pepper years. Their versions of “A Day in the Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” are heavenly, and they even had the gumption to play an echo-redolent, orchestral cover of “I am the Walrus.” Both David Rose and the Johnny Arthey Orchestra did great versions of Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven.” As early as 1965, both Rose and James Last record released their interpretations of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Are there any particular numbers in the Spotify playlist you compiled that you wanted to comment on?
Spotify did not seem to have many of the tracks I wanted, but among the ones I did find, the 101 Strings’ version of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” is a favorite because it got released not long after Scott McKenzie’s original 1967 hit. It reinforces that fascinating contrast between background and foreground. The Percy Faith Strings provide a mellifluous take on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” A wild card in the bunch is the Shadows’ “Wonderful Land” from 1962. Its combination of spacey surf guitars with Norrie Paramor’s lush orchestra foreshadowed the easy-listening psychedelia that would emerge just three years later. The same applies to James Last’s version of “Telstar.” Into the ‘80s, the Wallis Blue Orchestra provided an intriguing tribute to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Though many associate it with the early ‘70s glitter era, the song fits more in the last gasps of the psychedelic years because Bowie released it in 1969, around the time we landed on the moon. Major Tom is floating in space, but his mind is on returning to a home he’ll probably never see again. As an easy instrumental, even without the lyrics, the song’s mood seems even more wistful than on the original. That’s how I appreciate easy-listening psychedelia in general.
I loudly declared singer songwriter Scott Lavene’s 2019 album Broke to be my top favorite album of that year, and even though it’s not out yet, his upcoming album is already in my top two of 2021 (the other being Cathal Coughlan’s superb Song Of Co-Aklan). The title of his new one is Milk City Sweethearts, but you can’t buy it until mid-September (pre-order vinyl here.) It’s really good. I reckon it’s even better than the first one and that’s a tall order.
There have already been three new videos produced for the album and we’ve got the first two for you below. I asked Scott Lavene some questions via email.
The song was supposed to be for a theatre show I was almost part of, but it didn’t work out so it ended up being the first song I wrote for the album. It’s based on a friend of mine who was once a very pretty man but is now lost to the deep. I often see him, thinner and more ragged each time, cycling around town. I’ve fictionalized him for the sake of the song. Really, “Nigel” is about damaged people finding comfort within each other.
Your Lou Reed tribute?
I wrote the song in a different key. It was a bit more shouty. Then, after playing around with it one night I recorded the demo in a more relaxed key and spoke the vocal which felt better. And yes, a bit more Lou Reed. Also it mentions standing on corners which is very him. I mean, sub consciously I’m probably always trying to make a Lou Reed tribute and maybe this song is the closest I’ve got. Accidentally, of course.
”Lord of Citrus” starts out sounding a bit Beefheartian. Were you listening to the good Captain when you were writing your upcoming album?
I’m never far from the Captain. I was listening to a lot of stuff. Mainly 80s alternative music but also Brain Eno’s first couple of albums and ESG. The intro to “Lord Of Citrus” was a bit of a happy accident. I played the guitar to the intro in the ‘wrong’ key but it sounded so bloody right.
Your videos are always so well done on an indie budget. What’s the story with the excellent new animated video?
Well, it’s a guy called Ryan Anderson. He’s a fan and we started a back and forth and a mutual admiration for each other’s work. His Instagram animation was so good, the early stuff is just very twisted and right up my alley. I asked him if he could splice a few pieces together and he just made me a video. First for last year’s “Lover” and then I knew I wanted him to do a couple more for the album even though we have virtually no budget. He’s a sport and completely wonderful. I’d get him to every video if i could but they’ll definitely still be a couple of videos of me pissing about. Luckily I like making my own videos. It’s a challenge to do them for no money and with limited equipment.
In 1993, I attended an extremely curious Easter Sunday “church service”—I use that term loosely—along with a motley crew of congregants assembled in downtown Los Angeles. Dr. Gene Scott, the mad minister of America’s low watt TV stations, presided over this occasion. I convinced a British friend of mine—who had never heard of him or seen his show—to go with me because I thought that it would be totally hi-larious, a veritable laff riot... but we’ll get to what really happened soon enough.
Dr. Gene Scott was the utterly unhinged UHF television evangelist who grew in fame (and apparently fortune) during the Reagan era with his berserk, conspiratorial lunatic rantings that occasionally—only very occasionally—mentioned Jesus or had some sort of what most people could agree was “religious” content. Mostly he talked about UFOs, gambling on horses and his much-hated ex-wife. I first became aware of him on WPGH, a Pittsburgh market UHF station. He must have purchased late night airtime from them and from a number of other channels around the country. As the 1980s wore on, Gene Scott became very, very hard to miss on cable: If you were flipping channels, depending on the time of day, the guy might be on as many as five of them simultaneously. He continuously boasted of being broadcast in South America, South Korea, and the Caribbean and that in America, he was on, somewhere, during each hour of every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks out of the year.
Now that’s a lot of TV, you might be thinking, and you’d be right, but Gene Scott could talk. And talk and talk and talk. Like a speedfreak can talk. And smoke cigars. And stare directly into the camera, refusing to “preach” unless the donations started to roll in. When Scott’s show first came on, it was extremely low budget. Often—very often—Scott’s show would consist of him sitting in a chair on a bare studio floor with a chalkboard behind him, holding a stack of index cards. He would pretend that on each of these cards was written the sum of a very large donation that had just come in over the telephone and he would rattle them off, rapid-fire, and throw the cards over his shoulder as he did so. Scott would have you believe—although it was an obvious lie—that he was getting a thousand dollars, not twenty bucks, not even $100, but a thousand dollars—if not more—from each and every caller!
In a flat monotone, Scott would say “Dallas, TX—$1000. Portland, OR—another $1000. Phoenix, AZ, a donation of $3000—see they aren’t CHEAP in Phoenix like they are in Portland an’ Dallas—Scranton, PA—that’s $4000 from Scranton. Maybe I will preach after all…” and so forth and so on. He would often claim five figure donations several times an hour. To hear him claim even that a $100k donation had just come in hot off the wire was not unusual in the least. What did the IRS make of all this, I wonder?
It was patently obvious that Scott was lying, but even if the threadbare set and the absurd amounts of the supposed donations he was claiming didn’t clue you in immediately, the band who “appeared” (after he’d ask for a “little tinkle on the keyboards”) were from another show entirely, like he had purchased stock footage from another low watt religious broadcaster. Or something. He would pretend they were in the studio with him, even though they obviously weren’t. The phone bank operators that he cut away to, they, too, were from something else entirely, but he would pretend they were in another room, or just down the hall. It was absurd. He would have no interaction with them, because, of course, no interaction was possible! Scott was crazy enough to think that no one would notice, but everyone did. I’d guess that he had no more than three or four crew members to begin with—when Scott’s show first came on, it was extremely low budget—but his operation seemed to grow pretty quickly. Eventually he hired an actual band, a bigger studio, and real phone operators. Maybe that was a real $1000 donation from Omaha?
Gene Scott would berate, belittle, bully and bark at this viewers with extreme contempt and tell them that they weren’t deserving of his “teachings.” When he did deign to “preach,” he did a variant on the trick that Glenn Beck uses to browbeat his lowbrow listeners: Scott would take his blackboard and scrawl something across it that was supposedly written in Greek, or Hebrew or Arabic and then using that as a starting point he’d go off on a long-winded diatribe that most often had absolutely nothing to do with that or with anything else. He could start off going into the etymology of a word like “jubilee” and then veer off into an impassioned rant about why women should not wear pants. In one memorable program Scott asked his audience if they were any “more tired” this year than they were last year. He couldn’t exactly hear them, of course, but assumed the answer to be “yes” and concocted a ridiculous fantasy about radio waves emanating at the Tropic of Cancer that were making everyone docile, sleepy and compliant.
Once night, I vividly recall him saying something along the lines of “The government wants to have me killed. Because I know too much. If you want me to LIVE so I can come back here to tell you more about this IMPORTANT INFORMATION tomorrow night that nobody else has, then you need to send me money TONIGHT so I can protect myself!”
The following show, Scott appeared with two vicious-looking, growling Doberman Pinschers and the “D” volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He read off the various things trained Doberman attack dogs were capable of (like ripping your head off, etc) and after each one, he would nod affirmatively, look directly into the camera and say flatly “My dogs can do that.”
Dude was a showman, but Dr. Gene Scott was also undoubtedly the most out-of-his-mind person who had EVER been on television up to that point on a regular basis. I didn’t watch his show every night, but I did watch it frequently enough. I’d usually flip between early Letterman and Scott’s ranting and raving. He was mesmerizing.
Another distinguishing characteristic of Gene Scott’s enigmatic TV preacher shtick was that he always sported different kinds of hats, like a pith helmet, a fisherman’s cap, cowboy hat or a sombrero. On more than one occasion he wore a handkerchief tied in four knots like a Monty Python “Gumby,” with square Johnny Rotten sunglasses. One night he would have long hair and a beard, the next night, the beard was gone and his hair short again. Soon after that, he’d have a new mustache. His glasses changed a lot, too. Sometimes he’d even wear two pairs of eyeglasses at once. Point is, every night he would look totally different.
If you watched his show regularly, the first thing you—or anyone, really—would wonder would be “Who would give this incoherent, incomprehensible crackpot their money?” The second thing you would notice, especially if you’d been gone for a while, was how rapidly his production values continued to rise over the years. Obviously people were sending him money. But who were they?
I was about to find out. I called the RSVP number listed in an LA WEEKLY ad for Scott’s church and before I could politely inquire about tickets, I was yelled at by a woman with an accent who identified herself as “Doc’s assistant.” She GRILLED ME about WHY I wanted to attend that Sunday’s service. I wasn’t prepared for how aggressive she was but managed to (perhaps) convince her that I just wanted to check it out and that my request for entry was an innocuous one.
It was obvious that she was trying to tamp down any potential disruption of the Easter Sunday service and that it had happened before. She was hardcore and deeply suspicious of me, it was quite apparent.
So as I mentioned at the top of this article, I planned to go to see Gene Scott with a friend of mine, and that she had never heard of Gene Scott and had absolutely no idea what she was in for, only, as I promised, that it was going to be extremely amusing. So on Easter Sunday, at the appointed time, we showed up at the United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles at 927 S. Broadway.
Twenty years ago, downtown Los Angeles was only barely starting to become gentrified and the stark human horror the area was then known for has been gradually moved east since that time. The South Broadway of 1993 was strewn with trash blowing around like tumbleweeds and we had to dodge zombie-like crack heads to get there. I assumed that the United Artists Theatre would just be some shithole where Scott taped his low rent hijinks.
Au contraire! In fact, this was not just any old United Artists Theatre, it was THE United Artists Theatre that was built by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. It’s an incredibly opulent movie house—one of the greatest in Los Angeles—a Spanish Gothic masterpiece with marble floors and brass accents. Flanking the stage there was an amazing gold thread embroidered tapestry curtain dating from when the Theatre originally opened, depicting scenes from famous silent movies with a big UA logo when the curtains were closed. My memory of the tapestry is that it was around 50 ft tall. Even in the late 1920s, something this elaborate, and this size, would still have cost over $100k.
I couldn’t believe that Gene Scott owned this building.
Before we could poke around for more than a single minute, we were warily greeted—if that’s the right word for it—by the woman on the phone who identified herself as “Doc’s assistant.” She was a mean-faced, middle-aged Korean lady and she sternly told us not to whisper to each other, not to fidget, not to do anything that would break his concentration or disturb “Doc” in any way, not to go to the bathroom and don’t dare yell something or else we’d be in “big trouble!”
After that stern warning, she told us that these two security guards would take us to our seats. They did and then they sat right down on either side of us!
The service started soon enough. The stage was huge and a large group of musicians, the sort you might see at the Grand Ole Opry, walked on and started up on a Statler Brothers-sounding hymn. Then they started to build the suspense for “Doc” who soon arrived onstage with diamond-encrusted sun glasses, an expensive black suit, and cowboy boots. He was greeted like he was Elvis. Exactly like he was Elvis.
Scott immediately sat down on a chair, crossed his legs and lit up a cigar. His opening remarks had to do with marrying a couple in Saratoga, where he’d gone to watch his horses race, the day before. They were sitting in the front row and he made reference to the fact that they’d both been committing adultery behind the backs of their previous spouses and he laughed about it, like it was all a big joke to him. His congregants laughed too, but in a nervous sort of manner.
Like “Doc’s assistant,” most of his congregation, more than half, were Asian and then the next largest group was a mix of what can only be described as cowboy hat-wearing rednecks and their families, a “type” that you do not get in Los Angeles, but that you would see in Texas maybe. Hispanic cowboys, too. There were also several members of the audience who didn’t fall into either of those disparate camps, Asian or cowboy, but who appeared to be people who’d come in from local homeless missions. And us. We were probably the most conspicuous people there, in a sense. She and I were the ones who stood out.
After some decidedly non sequitur preaching, the proceedings went right off the surrealism scale when “Doc” announced—by grabbing a mic, pulling it close to his lips and saying this in a way that you could tell it was a sort of anticipated catchphrase of his—that it was “Offerin’ Time!”
The entire audience jumped to their feet and started waving sealed tithing envelopes around, like they were on the fucking Price is Right or something. It was super tweaked. I wasn’t about to give a dime to this nut, so I merely sealed an empty envelope and stuck it in the plate when it was passed to me.
When the raucous “Offerin’ Time!” settled down, Doc preached a lil’ more and then he asked for a “tinkle” on the keyboards. A tinkle, he laughed, for “a piss ant.”
The audience roared!
Huh? What? Yes, I said a piss ant. The band struck up the tune and led an enthusiastic audience singalong to a ditty called “Kill Some Piss Ants for Jesus.” You probably think I’m pulling your leg, but I’m not. Go directly to 10:13 in the below video.
“Kill Some Piss Ants for Jesus”
After this he made another nonsensical Easter-themed point and then he announced that there would be a SECOND “Offerin’ time!” This one transpired with the same jump up and down, wave your envelope around mania as before! I mean, wouldn’t most people just split their entire intended donation into two envelopes? Why were they so EXCITED about it? Did he get noticeably more money with two collections than one? Perhaps he did. Perhaps his congregation simply were that stupid. This was—strongly—the way things appeared.
All I know is that by this point, we’d had it. It was such an incredibly deflating encounter with a teeny-tiny segment of the human race that neither of us had known existed an hour before. These people were brainwashed by NOTHING WHATSOEVER—at least Scientology gives you a little pop psychology. Gene Scott offered his flock not a damned thing, just piss ants, supposedly biblical jabberwocky and two opportunities to give him money in less than one hour! Was L. Ron Hubbard ever that blatant?
The entire thing was bonkers, barking mad, paranoiac, you name it, but I can’t exactly say that it was the fun, fun, fun time I’d promised my friend it would be. In fact, it was probably one of the single most depressing things I have ever witnessed in real life. These people were devolved, the types you might see at a Trump rally but with less intellectual focus. To sit among them was not the cheeky good fun I anticipated. It was just sad, demented and frankly horrifying.
My friend took the lead and told the security guard, “Look, we have to go. Let us out of here, I’m not feeling well, I think I’m going to throw up.” The sea parted immediately with that line, but before we were out the door, Doc’s assistant was running out of the auditorium behind us, demanding that we stop, come back and report to her immediately! Her attitude was a joke—-like she was Ilse Koch or something—and we told her to go fuck herself and left.
We barely said a word in the car. We went to an outdoor café for lunch and hardly said a word to each other there either. After an experience like that one—watching cud-chewing fools being parted from their money by a megalomaniac master grifter who didn’t even have to try—we found that there was nothing much left to say.
The Dr. Gene Scott we meet in Werner Herzog’s 1981 film ‘God’s Angry Man’ is comparatively sane juxtaposed to the nutsoid Gene Scott of just a few years later.
The dialogue in this mid-80s TV comedy sketch reflects exactly the sorts of things that Scott said every single night on his show. There is almost no exaggeration here, none. This is what he said and the way he acted. Nearly everyone in America would have recognized this as a parody of Gene Scott at that time.
Some Dangerous Minds readers will immediately recognize the names of Ferrante & Teicher, the prodigiously talented dual piano purveyors of the easiest easy listening who sold 90 million albums in their five decade career, but those readers will be of a certain age or else crazed crate diggers.
I asked my wife, who has deep knowledge of all kinds of zany things, what the names “Ferrante & Teicher” meant to her and she said “Nothing” (we were even listening to them at the time). Most people under 45 will draw a complete blank when that question would be posed to them. However, those of us north of that age will likely recall the “grand twins of the twin grands” from various light entertainment TV programs in the 60s and 70s and our grandparents record collections. The pair was primarily known for their dexterously executed two piano mind-meld arrangements of popular classical music pieces, film themes and Broadway show tunes. They were a huge draw on the “pops” classical concert circuit. Along with the likes of Peter Nero and Arthur Fiedler, they produced the whitest, most inoffensive music ever made—which isn’t to say that they weren’t great, because they were really quite extraordinary musicians.
Before becoming the of the biggest selling instrumental acts of all time, Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher were classically trained pianists who met at Juilliard. The pair started out doing John Cage-influenced “prepared piano” pieces (sticking cardboard between keys, laying metal bars across them, using glass mallets and so forth) and used a lot of studio manipulation, operating in the Joe Meek/hi-fi demonstration territory a little bit, too. Some of their early material, as heard on mid-1950s albums like Soundproof, Blast Off! and Soundblast sounds like, I dunno, an Eisenhower-era version of Tangerine Dream (Isn’t that description intriguing? I’m proud of that one…).
When the duo signed to United Artists in 1960 it was suggested to them that they might want to record some movie themes and their career instantly took off with their version of the theme from Billy Wilder’s classic comedy, The Apartment and their stirring rendition of the “Theme From Exodus” (which made it to #2 on the singles chart). Many people might have assumed back then that Ferrante and Teicher were a gay couple because of the dressing alike “twins” nature of their two piano shtick (they were neither related nor twins), but the matching mustaches, horn-rimmed glasses, pompadour toupees and the bargain basement Liberace tuxedos were just a part of the act. Both were married at least once and had kids.
I expected that Ferrante & Teicher would have had some sort of critical re-appraisal, like Esquivel did during the whole “lounge” craze—they’re awesome!—but that never happened. It’s kind of strange considering HOW LARGE of a flea market and four-for-a-dollar record store bin footprint they left behind. Imagine a warehouse with 90 million albums in it. A lot of their records are still floating around. Why haven’t young people with ironic facial hair discovered Ferrante & Teicher? Why haven’t more of their songs been sourced for obscure break beats? Why have virtually none of their 150 albums ever been released on CD?
To add insult to injury, there’s precious little about Ferrante & Teicher on the Internet, their website has hardly been updated since they died and they have almost no presence on the torrent trackers. At least there are several choice clips of them on YouTube, doing what they did best.
A great example of their more avant-garde earlier work, the gorgeous, Martin Denny-esque “African Echoes”:
Amazing, right?
I have a special memory of Ferrante & Teicher because I actually went to see them in concert on my first real “date,” believe it or not, when I was in the 8th grade, with the young lady who would end up being my girlfriend throughout much of my teen years. Perhaps it’s an event recalled decades later with particular fondness because it was such an auspicious night in my young life, but I would honestly have to say that it was one of my peak concert going experiences, too, it really was. The show was held in an intimate outdoor amphitheater and I still have a strong sense memory of being there, where we were sitting relative to the stage, the humidity that night, the lightning bugs and how dazzling, virtuoso and telepathic their piano playing was.
“Is it right to be obsessed with looking at terrible things and sharing them with other people?”
—Dario Argento
I feel like these words of director Dario Argento are a part of my job description here at Dangerous Minds. Over the years pretty much every DM contributor has brought to light a vast array of car-crashy-can’t-look-away content. On more than several occasions, DM has highlighted the work of both Argento and the Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci. Today, the films of both directors collide with the strange, ever-expanding world of action figures. If you’re into collectibles and giallo, you know that a very creepy version of the deranged puppet from Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) exists. Sculpted by the very talented Charlie Lonewolf, only 25 of the officially licensed figures were made. You may also know that Argento opened the Profondo Rosso Horror store in Rome in 1989. It’s full of every kind of Argento-related memorabilia that you could shake your favorite razor-sharp stabbing knife at. According to a person who visited the museum, there were also Argento-centric “action figures” on display.
As I sadly haven’t yet been to what sounds like the happiest place on Earth (to me anyway), this mention of the existence of such action figures sent me on a quest to find them. And find them I did.
Artist Luca Bartole has made all of our nightmares come true by creating a line of custom, handmade action figures based on characters in films directed by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. The collection includes 3.75-inch versions of Argento and Fulci as well as Fulci in character as Inspector Carter from the film Demonia (1990). Others include the hatchet-wielding Marta Manganiello (played by actress Clara Calamai) from Profondo Rosso, Jennifer Corvina (played by actress Jennifer Connelly) from Phenomena (1985), and the unfortunate Father William Thomas (played by actor Fabrizio Jovine) from Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (1980). Are these the same action figures displayed at Argento’s museum? Who knows? What I do know is if you’ve always wanted to have your own pocket-sized figure of Dario Argento, now you can.
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