A Japanese movie poster prominently featuring Sally (played by actress Marilyn Burns) for ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ 1974.
 
As we’re all in need of a good distraction right now, let’s momentarily escape into the cinematic world of hillbilly cannibals, as told by Tobe Hooper in 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. First of all, it’s that time of year again if you’re still keeping track of the current date or happen to remember what we used to use calendars for. For myself, a year-long dedicated horror film fanatic, I make it a point to re-watch my favorite horror films during October’s 31 days, and TCM ‘74 is always one of them. Like so many great movies, it was filmed under remarkably difficult circumstances—yielding agonizingly authentic performances from its cast. To say nothing of the athletic screaming and real injuries suffered by one of Leatherface’s targets, Sally, played by actress Marilyn Burns (RIP). Let’s begin this dusty, blood-filled journey through Texas with some of the things Burns was subjected to on the film’s set.

Marilyn Burns is one of cinema’s best known scream queens and was in her early 20s when she won the role of Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Burns had appeared in a few films before TCM, but, according to the actress, her scenes ended up on the “cutting room floor.” Shot in extremely isolated areas around Texas, Hooper’s goal of creating the isolation necessary for a killing ground to thrive was immersive. Filming began during the summer heat of 1973, where temperatures in the famous Texas Chain Saw house would reach 120 degrees. Actors would need to take a break from filming to vomit due to the heat enhancing the smell of rotting animal bones and carcasses. Outdoor temperatures were boiling into the 100-110 degrees region every day. Enter Burns, in one of the film’s many chase scenes, being pursued by 300lb, 6’4 Icelandic actor Gunnar Hansen (RIP) in full Leatherface gear, rumbling chainsaw in hand. To increase your blood pressure for this story, Hansen had never used a chainsaw in his life before he appeared in the film. The story of one of Sally’s more serious injuries on set while being relentlessly chased through the thicket by Leatherface, was revealed by Hooper in the Toronto-based newspaper Excalibur in 1974:

“She (Burns) had a few accidents on the set. After running through the thicket, she had to go to a plastic surgeon to have thorns removed from her breasts.”

 

An image of Hooper’s interview in Toronto newspaper Excalibur, March 27th, 1974.
 
So, as it pertains to Burns’ famous screaming in TCM, in this particular instance (and others in the thicket), Burns’ screams are all too real, and the blood on her shirt is largely her own. Talk about taking one for the team. Here’s another recollection from Burns about how she and the rest of the kids in the doomed van almost met their maker by messing around with gunpowder:

“It was real hot and miserable, especially when Ed [actor Ed Neal who plays the hitchhiker] came on and gunpowder had to explode, and we didn’t know what we were doing. They just put gunpowder on his hand and lit a match. We almost killed ourselves!”

Moving on to Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen probably suffered more than anyone else in the cast except for Burns. If you’re a horror nerd like myself, you probably know that Tobe Hooper required that Hansen’s Leatherface costume never be washed to ensure continuity. His smell would become intolerable to Hansen and the entire cast, adding to the oppressive feeling of decay and demise. Additionally, in nearly every case in the film (with the notable exception of Mary Church, Marilyn Burns’ stuntwoman), no stunt doubles were used. Hooper would film chainsaw segments in three stages—once with the real blade, another with just the chain “roaring” and a third with the clutch out (noted in the Excalibur article). So, let’s imagine the horror of being Gunnar Hansen, running through the dark, with a real, running chainsaw in his “Killing Mask” (one of three different masks worn by Leatherface depending on his mood). I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Lots, it turns out, including a one-take shot in the darkness with Burns and Leatherface where Hansen fucking tripped, sending the running chainsaw flying through the air. NO BIG DEAL.

For all his efforts, and after waiting nine months for his paycheck, Hansen, who wrote a book about his experience in the film, received a whopping $47.50 for his performance in TCM. The final insult would come from the media in his homeland of Iceland who were completely unaware of Gunnar’s participation in the film and gave the film a two-star rating. And since we were just discussing chainsaws, let’s find out more about how they contributed to Wayne Bell’s infamous “score.” And who better to talk about what that was like than the man himself:

“Pretty much my job was finding all the sound effects we needed, which often meant inventing ways to make them. You have to ask yourself, what does chainsaw teeth hitting a wheelchair sound like? How do you capture it? What we would now have a few effects editors, a background editor, and a Foley team do, I did it all myself back then. We didn’t do any post chainsaw. We made a point to capture what we needed while we were on set. Gunnar, the actor that played Leatherface, was a real team player – most of the production chainsaw you hear in the film was operated by Leatherface himself.”

Of course, there are other sounds throughout TCM, including noise made by kids’ toys—specifically of the musical variety such as cymbals, maracas, and the ever-popular xylophone. Bell also amusingly recalls “torturing” his Kay stand-up five-string bass doing anything they could to cultivate other creepy sounds to enhance the film. According to Bell, these additional sounds were recorded in a room in Hooper’s house, filled with all kinds of instruments. Any animal sounds heard in the film are credited to Bell’s father, a very talented animal sound imitator. Who knew? Fun fact! Any chicken sounds you hear are from actual chickens, not Bell’s pet-imitating Dad. Though no actual “soundtrack” exists for TCM, the original quarter-inch tapes do, and Bell has mused about the possibility of putting out a “LoFi, distorted, noisy and dirty” version of it someday. One final thing regarding the sounds you hear in TCM concerns the uneasy noise you hear during the opening and again after the film. Bell is very protective of the sound, which he describes as a “stinger” that he created that has become synonymous with TCM ‘74, and to date, he has never revealed how it was conceived or made. Kind of like the secret ingredient in a certain barbeque sauce.
 

Put on a happy face! Three of Leatherface’s masks. Image source for this and the following three images.
 

A candid shot of Burns traipsing through the thicket in the dark.
 

Another image of Leatherface pursuing Sally through the brambles.
 
Much more after the jump…

Photo credit Maryann Morris  

Far be it for me to say that Penny Rimbaud—novelist, poet, painter and co-founder of the mythical anarcho punk band Crass—missed his calling in life, but whenever I listen to him speak, I’m immediately put in mind of such great actors as Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris. My word does this fellow have a mellow bellow! And even if performing Shakespeare onstage wasn’t in the cards for this most radical of radicals, what about doing voice-overs for TV ads? He could’ve been rich!

But I don’t think it’s ever been money that motives our Penny, is it? But still… THAT VOICE.

Recently Rimbaud announced his new album Arthur Rimbaud In Verdun, out November 20th via One Little Independent Records, a series of poems set to music about his namesake, Arthur Rimbaud, witnessing the carnage of the battle of Verdun, where over 700,000 casualties were sustained by the French and German armies, with over 300,000 slaughtered and nine villages destroyed.

The work is described as: “a fiction constructed by Penny, out of interest as to the possible outcome, places the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (who died in 1891) at the historic and tragic battle of Verdun in 1916. The idea being that Penny found something to be explored in the possibilities of the young vagabond and his perception of such drastic events. Dark and vivid jazz-infused ambience is punctured by Penny’s spoken word lyricism painting pictures of the chaotic experience of World War 1.”

Rimbaud is joined on the recording by Evan Parker, Louise Elliott, and Ingrid Laubrock, all on tenor sax. You can preview “Part 6” below.

 
*Or something like that.

Whether or not you rank the Nicolas Cage starrer Mandy highly on your list of cinematic treasures, if you’ve seen the film, you must at least have a grudging respect for the absolute conviction the actors had for their roles, none more so than Linus Roache, who played crazy cult leader Jeremiah Sand. But Roache’s identification with Sand has gone beyond the confines of the film itself. In 2018 the actor assumed the character again for the release of two songs “by Jeremiah Sand” on Bandcamp, as part of the marketing effort for Mandy.

And now, the Sacred Bones imprint has announced an entire album “by Jeremiah Sand.” Lift It Down with liner notes by the late Genesis Breyer P-Orridge—someone who knew the ins and outs of being a cult leader—will be released on October 30th. It’s even coming out on 8-track tape? Yes, it’s even coming out on 8-track tape.
 

 
Here’s the elaborate backstory “bio” of Jeremiah Sand:

In 1974, Jeremiah Sand and his nascent cult The Children Of The New Dawn decamp LA for the Shasta Mountain region and Redding, CA. They set up shop, begin printing leaflets, hold gatherings and start growing their ranks through recruitment. Jeremiah and the Children are not necessarily an odd addition to Redding in 1974. Since the 1930s, psychonauts and spiritual seekers have been drawn to this area in Northern California under the shadow of the dormant volcanic cone of Shasta. By 1974, urban California hippies worn down by direct political engagement with state security forces have started drifting North and the towns along the border with Oregon state are filled with ad-hoc spiritual organizations, commune builders and lost souls. Jeremiah and the Children fit right in. A few years prior to assembling his flock, Sand had self produced and released an album of psych-folk that was unremarkable in almost every way, save for the unrelenting vanity and egoism on display in the lyrics. This early album is one of the only existing documents of Sand. The commercial failure of the album became the catalyst for Sand to leave Southern California and settle in a place where his “truth” would be “received by pure and open hearts”.  

By mid 1974, the Children have grown in rank and Jeremiah becomes obsessed with recording “his masterpiece”...a musical message to the world, communicating a “Truth” that only he has been given spiritual access to. This project becomes the central focus of the Children. His lieutenant Brother Swann overhears that there is a small recording studio just North of the city. He arrives one day at the reception with a large gym bag full of cash and instructs the owner to cancel all sessions on the books. The studio will now focus on one thing and one thing only: helping Jeremiah realize his vision. Tents and rough structures appear on the surrounding property as the Children make the studio and its grounds their new home. They hold recruitment meetings where Jeremiah evangelizes in between endless recording sessions. The owner and his staff begin to feel as though they’re being held hostage but the money is good and the Children keep paying. Overpaying.

This goes on for years. New members drift into the sessions. A disgraced professor from the Electro Acoustic Music program at Evergreen State arrives with a full Buchla system he’s “liberated” from the university, Jeremiah is entranced by it and for a few weeks the only sounds coming from the studio are blasts of atonal, corroded noise underpinned by ominous chanting. The mood changes. The town begins to turn against the Children. A few people have gone missing. Some teenagers. A studio engineer.

By the Spring of 1977, the entire session has broken down into hallucinogen and cocaine fueled chaos. Bad vibrations. One night in early March, after a particularly grueling mixing session, the producer and owner of the studio is startled awake by by an extremely agitated looking Brother Swann. Swann is sweating and wild eyed, casually holding a gun, explaining to the producer that “plans have changed” and that Jeremiah has “heard a calling and a Great Summons”. They are leaving. All of them. That night. Swann directs the producer to put the existing reels in a lock box along with a short 16mm film, lyrics, album art and scribbled notes. Swann tells the producer Jeremiah will be back to finish his masterpiece. It all goes in the box and it’s not to be opened until the Children return. They never do.

In 2018, wildfires rip through Redding, CA and burns it to the ground. Over a thousand of homes are incinerated. One rough structure north of the city is partially saved. There’s a massive concrete basement filled with smoke and water damaged recording equipment and in the back…a lockbox.  

No one knows who originally took the tapes out of the charred ruin of the studio but in a few months, a very strange album is making the rounds in the more esoteric circles of the underground. A long and confusing chain of custody ensues. A lost artifact of the transitional period between the late 60s and late 70s. A flawed and malignant sounding unfinished thing, clearly the product of a psychotically inflated ego and hubris. The album is by turns: amateurish, haunting, deranged, ridiculous and (for those attuned to these things) filled with crackling negative psychic energies. So much so that Light In The Attic flat out refuses to reissue it. Eventually, it lands in Caleb’s lap and Sacred Bones decides to restore the audio and give it a general release all in the name of preserving a historical document of a very weird place and a very weird time.

Like I said, you have to admire the courage of their conviction!

But they didn’t stop there. Recently they’ve “discovered” some “unearthed footage” of Sand that purports to have been “filmed by a cult member at Purple Mountain studios in the late ‘70s.”

Red’s not going to like this.

“Message From the Mountain”

 
I like to think of the infamous Brown Acid compilations as “Nuggets for heshers,” and we’ve got a preview of the upcoming installment.

Lance Barresi, of Permanent Records tracks down impossibly rare and practically unheard singles from the 60s and 70s for the series. He’s partnered with Daniel Hall of the Hermosa Beach-based RidingEasy Records, and the two have assembled now eleven volumes of the proto-metal, pre-stoner genre. Most crate-digging mavens would be tapped out by the fourth one, but not these guys. And unlike most such collections, everyone gets paid.

“I essentially go through hell and high water just to find these records,” Barresi says. “Once I find a record worthy of tracking, I begin the (sometimes) extremely arduous process of contacting the band members and encouraging them to take part. Daniel and I agree that licensing all the tracks we’re using for Brown Acid is best for everyone involved,“rather than simply bootlegging the tracks. When all of the bands and labels haven’t existed for 30-40 years or more, tracking down the creators gives all of these tunes a real second chance at success.

Brown Acid: The Eleventh Trip will be available on LP, CD and digital on Halloween, October 31, 2020 via RidingEasy Records. Pre-orders are available for digital (with immediate download of the first single) at Bandcamp, physical pre-orders at the RidingEasy Records website.

The politically charged 1969 track, “Dancing In The Ruin”—which sounds somehow kinda timely in 2020—by 7-piece band Debb Johnson features a full horn section playing wailing soul and acid rock crossed with Buddy Miles-style funk. Dig it below…
 

 
There’s an interesting publication listed on the Rocket 88 Books website: a book of Syd Barrett’s artwork produced in conjunction with Barrett’s family. It’s the first time that his art—as well as photographs taken by the Pink Floyd founder—has been cataloged in book form. The large format book also contains rare and unseen images of Pink Floyd taken during Barrett’s tenure in the band. Very few of Barrett’s original paintings that were created during his final quarter century are still extant. Syd would spend weeks working on something, he’d photograph the finished piece and then burn it.

According to the publisher, the Barrett book is organized into three sections:

Syd’s life in photographs – from growing up through to working and performing with Pink Floyd and his life as a solo artist.

Unseen and unpublished illustrated letters sent to Libby Gausden-Chisman and Jenny Spires between 1962-1965, as Syd was finding himself as a painter and a musician.

All of Syd’s existing work as a visual artist from 1962 until his death.

The book contains over 250 images. These include:

Over 100 completely unseen images and many more reproduced in fine art quality for the first time.

Over 40 artworks including: paintings, drawings, mosaics, collages, and sculptures.

Over 50 unseen photographs taken by Syd of his artworks, including: images of his “destroyed” works seen here for the first time, studies in preparation for his artworks, images of his work area.

Although it’s not cheap, it’s clearly the definitive volume on Barrett’s artwork and the website indicates that the stock is getting low. (The best Syd biography is Rob Chapman’s A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett. I highly recommend it.) Barrett will also contain commentary by Will Shutes, an expert on Syd’s visual output, and excerpts from diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, plus a listing and dating of all Barrett’s artwork known to have existed.

Some of Syd Barrett’s artwork follows. You can see much more at the book’s official website and at SydBarrett.com.

 

 

 
More after the jump…

Schenkel’s illustration of Zappa for the back cover of ‘The Frank Zappa Songbook.’
 

” If I were, to sum up, his meaning to music and art in this century, it’s as someone who opened new doors by experimenting with so many different things, expanded the envelope, and brought other types of music into Rock.”

—a 2010 quote from artist Cal Schenkel on how he thought Frank Zappa should be remembered.

Future long-time collaborators Cal Schenkel and Frank Zappa first met each other in 1966 when Schenkel was nineteen and hitchhiking around Los Angeles. In a “Dear Hustler, I never thought it would happen to me” moment, Schenkel was picked up by a jeep full of girls and dropped off at a studio where Zappa was recording his first record, Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention. According to Schenkel, his interaction with Zappa in 1966 was unremarkable, and by 1967, the budding artist was back in his hometown of Philadelphia. As you’re perhaps aware, Zappa was an accomplished artist in his own right—something I’ve written about here on Dangerous Minds previously. He also created early artwork and collages for The Mothers of Invention shows and artwork for their first album. In the midst of a six-month stint at the Garrick Theater in New York in 1967, the Mothers played two shows Tuesday through Friday and three shows on Saturday and Sunday. At some point, Frank decided it was time for him to turn over artwork duties to someone other than himself, and this is where Schenkel’s girlfriend at the time, Sandy Hurvitz, comes in. Hurvitz (aka Essra Mohawk) was then performing with the Mothers. When she heard Frank was looking for someone to become his “art engineer,” she immediately got Zappa and Cal together to look at Cal’s work. Zappa was into what he saw, and soon Schenkel, a self-taught artist, would be doing everything from creating artwork for Zappa’s musical projects to photographing the band, even living with the Zappas for a time. The two would work closely together, and often the artistic output would be based entirely on concepts initialized by Cal, then approved by Frank. Here, Schenkel gives some more insight into how he helped bring Frank’s “identities” to life:

“They were Frank’s identities, and he was in control of them, and I was really just satisfying these various concepts. I didn’t create his identities for him in terms of explicit concepts. But in terms of visuals, we worked off of each other. So it was a true give and take, with the understanding that he had the final say. It was very informal and open. It was important to him to have a complete approach to the packaging of himself and his music because he saw himself as a complete artist, from music to visuals.”

To say Schenkel’s work for Zappa helped perpetuate the myth and madness of Frank Zappa would be an understatement. For their first collaboration, and as the only employee of the Zappa art department, Frank had Cal create some artwork used for the Garrick Theater residency. He was also deeply involved in the theatrics for the grueling show schedule, which for Schenkel included filtering lights through melting plastic. Here’s a little more from Frank on the visual effects Cal helped create for the shows:

“We had visual effects that would snuff anything that anyone is doing today, but we were doing it in a 300-seat theatre. We would do all kinds of weird things in there, but you can only do it in a situation where everyone can see it.”

 

A poster for Zappa’s six-month stint at the Garrick Theater.
 
In addition to being Zappa’s go-to-guy for art, Schenkel was also a source of inspiration for Zappa’s jam “For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitchhikers).” Here, my friends, is The True Story of Calvin & His Hitchhikers as told by Cal Schenkel in 1984:

“My 39 Pontiac was in the shop & so I had borrowed a car from Frank. It was this 1959 white Mark VIIII Jaguar that used to belong to Captain Beefheart that Janet (Zappa collaborator and actress Janet Neville-Ferguson Hof), was using at the time. When it worked. You know, the one they slashed the seats in (but I don’t remember that). I just left Frank’s house & I’m stopped at the corner of Mulholland and Laurel Canyon Blvd, waiting for a red light to change when I notice these two hitchhikers, a hippie couple standing there waiting for a ride. The next thing I know, they are getting in the back of the car. I guess they must have thought I offered them a ride (I didn’t tell them to come into my car or motion them or anything—I wasn’t even thinking of it), so I ask them where they are going & they didn’t say ANYTHING! I drive down Laurel Canyon Blvd past the Log Cabin (the famed Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood owned by Zappa), past Harry Houdini’s, past the country store & into Hollywood. I get to the bottom of the hill, I was going to turn right. I kind of asked them, “look I’m turning right, do you want to get out here?” They didn’t say anything. They were just blank. I figured they were on acid or something. I just couldn’t communicate with them. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just continued on to my destination. When I get there, I said, ‘OK, this is where I’m going. Good-bye!’ They just stayed in the car & didn’t get out. So I parked the car, got out, and went up to my studio and started to work. I was working on the album cover for Uncle Meat. This is in my studio that was a dentist’s office over a hotdog joint on Melrose. Every once in a while, I’d look out of the window to see if they were gone, but they were still sitting in the back seat of the car. An hour or two later, I looked out the window, and I noticed they were gone. I thought, ‘finally!’ Then shortly afterwards, I saw that they were back! They went to the supermarket for a loaf of bread and lunchmeat and started making sandwiches in the back of the car. They were eating their lunch! Then they left.”

Another fun fact about the Jaguar Cal was rolling around in: Zappa gifted the nifty automobile to Janet Neville-Ferguson Hof for her birthday. Janet would complain it was always in the “shop,” and the last time she drove it (directly from being repaired at a garage), it blew smoke for three miles and then starting shooting flames through a hole in the floor where the stick shift had once been. Janet and her gal-pal Lucy (Miss Lucy of the GTOs), put out the fire with a coat before pulling over in front of the Whiskey A Go Go, where the jaguar completely burst into flames. It was later taken by someone Janet noted to be a “friend” of Motorhead Sherwood to “fix,” never to be seen again. A few of Schenkel’s lesser-known illustrations of Frank and some comic panels drawn by Cal featuring Zappa follow.
 

Here are images of eight original drawings of Frank Zappa by his longtime art director, Cal Schenkel, unused but intended for the ‘Uncle Meat’ album cover. Sold at an auction, the sketches were found by a former Warner Bros. art director, who, in 1976 while going through “job tickets” (envelopes containing everything to do with an album’s artwork), found them in one of the Zappa tickets for ‘Uncle Meat.’ The images were never used.
 

 

 

An illustration of Zappa by Schenkel for ‘The Frank Zappa Songbook’.
 

 
Much more Cal Schenkel, after the jump…

 
The other day I pulled out my copy of Human League’s classic 1981 album Dare and played it all the way through twice. I haven’t heard it in a while, and it sounded really good to me. 

Then I listened to a bootleg of Dare demos that I’d downloaded a long time ago, but had never actually played before that. The legend of that album, of course, is that after Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh (the musical ones) left Human League to form Heaven 17, this led frontman Phil Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright (who been doing the band’s lighting and projecting slides while they played) to recruit two teenage backing vocalists named Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley and to hire Ian Burden (who had toured with Human League Mk 1). Later Jo Callis, the former guitarist for Scottish new wavers, the Rezillos—who had to learn how to play a synthesizer sharpish—was brought in. Virgin insisted that Oakey’s new League needed a professional hand in the studio and paired them with producer Martin Rushent, who’d previously worked with the Stranglers, Buzzocks and on Pete Shelley’s “Homosapian” single, which is undoubtedly what sealed the deal. It was an inspired partnership, obviously, but I will say that I was surprised at just how far along—quite far indeed—most of the songs were before Martin Rushent became involved.

Continuing down that same rabbit hole, I read a (really great) article about the making of Dare on Electronic Sound magazine’s website and as a sort of coda at the end of the piece, mention is made of an obscure single that was recorded during Dare‘s downtime by the album’s engineer, Dave Allen and Jo Callis:

“We’d often finish sessions late and everyone would go home – apart from Jo,” recalls Dave Allen. “Jo was staying at the studio because he didn’t have anywhere else to go and after a while we had this idea to make a heavy metal ‘Stars On 45’ record. The beat isn’t difficult, is it? That took 10 minutes. And then it was, ‘OK, what songs have we got to do?’. ‘Smoke On The Water’, ‘Alright Now’, ‘Silver Machine’, ‘School’s Out’… It was a joy to get a guitar out and do a really terrible version of ‘Purple Haze’ over a ‘Stars On 45’ beat. It was relaxation.

“Martin came home very drunk one night when we were trying to do the middle eight of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and we said,’C’mon Martin, we need a mad toms solo like that Led Zeppelin song’, and so he played this brilliant freestyle Linn Drum tom tom solo. In the end, the medley was called ‘Bang Your Head’ and released as a single on Island. The band was called Terrible Lizard. We had a meeting with a guy who said, ‘How are we going to do the promo for this?’. Andy Peebles called it the worst record ever made when he played it on his lunchtime [Radio 1] show. I was very proud.”

Now obviously as soon as I read that, I searched to see if it was on YouTube and naturally it was, but other than a Discogs listing, just about the only information to be found about this zany heavy metal medley—which includes Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine,” Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and other headbanging classics—is what’s in the Electronic Sounds article.
 

 

An image depicting an attack by La Bête du Gévaudan, or The Beast of Gévaudan, a predator believed to be a werewolf in France in the mid-1700s.

So before you start to think I’ve completely lost my mind, you should know a 67-page academic paper on the history of killer lycanthropes or some sort of man-eating wolf exists. And, much like any reasonable person, you are probably ready to chalk it all up to storytellers spinning yarns about the messed-up hairy shit that happens when the moon is full. The paper cites a few historical examples of werewolf tall tales such as a story from Scotland about two children who were killed by a wolf in 1743. The problem here is that wolves had been extinct there since 1660. The French Werewolf Epidemic (1520-1630) was France’s version of Europe’s witch trials and executions, but with werewolves. For 110 years, 30 thousand people were accused of being werewolves, tortured in exchange for their confessions, or lack of admission of guilt and died at the stake. Of the many examples of accused werewolfery is of Jacques Rollet, dubbed the Werewolf of Chazes. Rollet lured a fifteen-year-old boy to the woods where he murdered and ate his body. When he was tried for his crime, he confessed to having done the same to other locals, specifically employees of the court system such as lawyers and attorneys. Rollet got the death sentence (like pretty much everyone else back then) but ended up in an insane asylum.

As it pertains to France, the country’s history with wolf-related mythology is long and rich with stories such as the La Bête du Gévaudan, or The Beast of Gévaudan, which for three years terrorized the area. The first attack occurred in April of 1764, and the victim, a young woman tending her flock of sheep, described her assailant as looking “like a wolf, yet not a wolf.” She survived when her sheep went into action, defending the teenage girl from the Beast. Two months later, another young girl, Jeanne Boulet, was attacked and killed by what the residents of Gévaudan thought to be a natural predator, given the fact Boulet was also tending a flock of sheep. Two more fatal attacks would follow within a matter of weeks, both young field workers, a girl, age fifteen, and a boy age sixteen. This would be the start of more than 100 documented fatal attacks in Gévaudan in which most of the victims were partially eaten. The residents of Gévaudan would take up arms, and large rewards were offered for the capture or killing of The Beast of Gévaudan. Experienced hunters and even groups of children would go out in search of the Beast and return with stories of battling a giant wolf (noted in the book Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast). One such incident describes the wolf attacking a group of young children, five boys and two girls in a bog where they were playing. The wolf preyed on the youngest of the group, an eight-year-old boy who he clenched in his massive jaws as the kids attacked the wolf with their make-believe weapons (in this time period, pretend bayonets), finally getting the animal/manimal to release their friend.
 

A woman trying to fight off The Beast.

 
Once the news reached the ears of Louis XV, he offered up his own bounty in exchange for the Beast’s head in 1765. After Marie-Jeanne Valet warded off an attack by the Beast while out on the countryside with her sister, Louis XV’s personal gunman (noted to be 71 at the time in The Beast of Gevaudan: La Bete du Gevaudan) went in search of the Beast with a few other men. In September 1765, François Antoine, King Louis’ right hand of the hunt, shot the “Wolf of Chazes,” which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.
 

The stuffed ‘Beast’ delivered to Louis XV.
 
Suddenly, the suspected werewolf killings stopped, only to start again in December and again in the summer of 1767. This inspired the local authorities to start using the term “monster” (a shape “contrary to nature”) to further describe the wild assailant with a penchant for decapitating its victims. Soon, Marquis d’Apcher, a wealthy local resident, took up the charge to hunt down the Beast. d’Apcher was able to shoot the Beast, and, according to legend, ended up entangled with the wolf. Finally, one of the guards on the trip with d’Apcher fired the kill-shot. The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf. They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767. Yikes.

So what was Beast of Gévaudan? As werewolves sadly don’t exist (BOO!), speculation as to what kind of animal the Beast was range from a hyena, or perhaps some sort of terrifying lion/wolf hybrid. Sorry if you were, like me, hoping for a medieval wolf-version of Oliver Reed creating all kind of mayhem around the French countryside

A few images of the fabled Beast of Gévaudan follow.
 

An illustration of the Beast as a wolf/lion hybrid.
 

The Beast as a hyena.
 
More after the jump…

 
Although I was informed by the press release that Outlaw, the 1970 album by Eugene McDaniels was a cult favorite, it was honestly not something I was familiar with. But if I was crate digging and spotted this, I can assure you, I’d have taken it home, not unreasonably expecting that what was in the grooves would match such an audacious record cover. Take a look. You’ve got a bearded McDaniels, “the left rev mc d” as he then called himself, in a cowboy hat, holding a bible. He’s joined by two women, one holding a machine gun, the other wearing an ammo belt. A human skull directly in the foreground reinforces the mood.

“What the fuck is this?” you may ask yourself? The answer may surprise you. First of all, this is a folk-pop album and McDaniels seems to be trying (successfully) at times to sound like Mick Jagger, and his band sounds like the Stones of Let It Bleed. Odd that a black man would apparently model his vocal performance on a white man who’d copped his singing from R&B singers, but it works. A bit convoluted perhaps, trust me he makes it work. One song reminded me strongly of an outtake from the musical Hair. It’s a weird album, but a very, very good one. It’s just next to impossible to categorize. It’s country-rock-funk-folk. It’s got a good beat throughout.
 

Eugene McDaniels performing at a benefit for Angela Davis in Washington, DC
 
Unsurprisingly, Outlaw‘s politics are radical and deeply held. The lyrics—if not the music—are in-your-face, up-against-the-wall stuff. It’s interesting to note that McDaniel started off as a Jackie Wilson-type singer. His first hit record was the soul standard “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and he worked with Snuff Garrett and Burt Bacharach early in his career. He’d also written the topical protest song “Compared to What” taking aim at Lyndon Johnson and his deeply unpopular Vietnam War, so Outlaw wasn’t completely out of the blue for the guy, but it was still unusual for just about ANY artist—Black or white—recording for a major label to affect such a radical image. Apparently, someone in the Nixon administration got wind of the track “Silent Majority” (“Silent majority / Is calling out loud to you and me / From Arlington Cemetery / To stand up tall for humanity”) and it was either Vice President Spiro Agnew or else Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff who personally called Atlantic Records to complain, asking them to stop working with McDaniels. 

Outlaw was produced by Grammy-winner Joel Dorn and arranged by William S. Fischer. Both had worked before with friends of McDaniels, like Roberta Flack (McDaniels wrote her “Feel Like Making Love” hit and other songs for the vocalist) and Les McCann and Eddie Harris (who turned his “Compared to What” into an electrifying jazz standard on their live Swiss Movement album in 1969). Their support is sympathetic to McDaniels’ goals, but you have to wonder what they made of such an almost deliberately uncommercial project. It’s one of those albums where you almost can’t believe it exists. I’m glad it does.

The Real Gone label’s 50th anniversary release of Outlaw comes in a neon red vinyl pressing limited to 700 copies. 
 

 
The Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band was one of the best, almost long-lost bands of the early 1970s. Six ace performers who spent their time busking on the streets of LA before winning over fans and followers across America. Yet, even with such success, the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band never reached the heights of fame and success they so richly deserved.

Here’s their story as told by Lil’ Orphan Ollie, trumpeter, drummer, and original founder of the band.

Rule #1: Form a Band.

It started out this way: A bunch of guys outta UCLA blasting Christmas carols on the streets of LA. It was holiday season and they wanted money to buy presents for Santa and booze for his reindeer. Lil’ Orphan Ollie was trombone player and chief ring leader.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I thought I’d get three of my buddies and we’d go down and play some Christmas carols at the shopping center. People weren’t working too much. We were just out of college, and my recollection is it was December 1971,

I called up all my trombone buddies, we had a long association of playing together at UCLA, there’s no competition for this, but we were probably the best trombone players in the country.

When you get out of school and you’re a horn player the only opportunity you have for some steady work is to go on the road with various bands—Buddy Rich’s Band, Woody Herman, Count Basie and Duke Ellington—big bands like that. So some of us got some road work some of us didn’t. I’d just got back from playing My first trip on the road was with Louie Bellson Big Band—he was really a dynamic drummer

I said we should go and play some Christmas carols. We did that. My wife was pregnant with our daughter but there wasn’t enough work for me so we left town.

That’s my line: I started the band and then left town.
 

 
Rule #2: Start playing.

While Lil’ Orphan Ollie and his family moved to northern California to find work, his buddies from college kept the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band going. The line-up was: Sgt. Charts, Dr. Mabuse DOA, Off the Wallie, B-flat Baxter and Buffalo Steve. Sgt. Charts started organising the band into four trombones and four saxophones. The band covered “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Beethoven’s “Ninth,” and covers of tunes by artists like the Beatles. Wherever they played they brought happiness and joy and a hat full of dollars.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and in the meantime I couldn’t keep the band from being contaminated with all these saxophone players and stuff. The trombone choir didn’t really exist for very long. They stated doing stuff on their own.

Sgt. Charts wrote and arranged music prolifically. He got the idea of doing a bunch of tunes like who’s going to write an abbreviated version of Beethoven’s Ninth for saxophone and trombones—that’s the kind of stuff Sgt. Charts would do.

They’d go up to the Observatory or Griffiths Park and play or let’s go over to the La Brea Tar Pits and put out a hat and play there.

I was up north with my family but it wasn’t working out up there and the band said, “Goddammit, you gotta come back and we’re going to do this thing.”
 

 
Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and came back. In the meantime they’d started to do some of this stuff and I thought they were nuts. Everyone kept saying, “Come on, you gotta come back.” And I was saying, “I can’t do all this stupid shit on the street. How are you gonna make any money? You gotta be out of your mind.” But I came back and did it anyway.

I was raised as a straight, legitimate horn player and I was real serious. A lot of my work was classical. The rest of it was all big band stuff. So, who was going to put on a bunch of costumes? But the fact of the matter was it came at the right time and the right place and it worked. Next thing we knew we were getting some media attention.
 

 
More from Lil’ Orphan Ollie and the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band, after the jump…