Never been released on DVD, Tougher Than Leather (1988) directed by Rick Rubin and starring Rubin, Run DMC and The Beastie Boys is a weird blend of blaxploitation, tongue-in-cheek farce and home movie. I like its don’t-give-a-fuck sloppiness - kind of like Scorsese on a glue-sniffing bender. Plus, it manages to insult virtually every race, creed and gender on the planet.

With Slick Rick, Russell Simmons and Richard Edson.
 

 
If you think you’ve seen all the footage there is to see of the mighty MC5, check out Leni Sinclair and Cary Loren’s short film “Kick Out the Jams.”

Sinclair was married to MC5 manager and revolutionary poet John Sinclair (author of Guitar Army) and organized the infamous John Sinclair Freedom Rally (headlined by John Lennon and Yoko Ono) when he was imprisoned ten years for two joints. She was active in the Artists Workshop, which evolved into the Trans-Love Energies commune, which then in turn became the White Panther Party. Cary Loren was a founding member of “anti-rock” art rockers Destroy All Monsters along with Jim Shaw, Niagara and the late Mike Kelley.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Sinclair conducted by Ken Shimamoto:

One hears and reads all sorts of things about the Trans-Love house and the different roles of men and women there…from a contemporary standpoint, it sounds very traditional. Can you comment on that?

Leni; It might look like that in retrospect, because that was before the advent of feminism, but as far as living in that situation, the women did not feel oppressed or second-rate. I mean, women didn’t pick up instruments and try to play and try to be in the band, but as far as the atmosphere at the time, we all considered ourselves equal in the endeavor. We were revolutionaries; there was no hierarchy like the males up here and the women down there. At the time, we all felt that we were contributing equally to this effort we were involved in, whatever it took. I’ve heard some things…that “the women were on the floor, scrubbing the floor.” That was a lot of hokum. Everybody pitched in, everybody did their chores and their work. We had it tightly organized. Childcare was shared, kitchen duties were shared, everything, except for playing in the band.

In fact, I wrote an article one time in the newspaper, in the Ann Arbor Sun, I think, about “cock rock” and the criticism that was starting to appear about “cock rock” guys with guitars. And my thesis was, there’s nothing wrong with that; the only thing wrong is that women have to start learning to play, too, and getting up there.

And that happened in the ‘90s.

Leni: I didn’t say it, but “Let’s have cock-rock and pussy rock” (Laughs)

When John was imprisoned in 1969, did the Five renege on a promise to help you out financially while he was in prison?

Leni: I don’t really know if there had ever been a promise. Nobody knew that John was going to go to jail, and I don’t think that he ever had any discussions prior to going to jail to see what would happen. Everybody just figured he would get an appeal bond and be out on the street in a matter of days, or maybe weeks. Well, that didn’t happen, and the MC5…first, they severed their relationship with J.C. Crawford, which we all felt was a big mistake, because J.C. was almost a sixth member of the band, he was almost an integral part. So when they fired him, we had kinda bad feelings about that, and then when they brought in Jon Landau as a manager, of course we had bad feelings about that. The financial part was…I don’t really know. ‘Cause no promises were made, John never had a written contract with the band or anything like that. It was on the honor system.

But I do know that after John went to jail, there were about 17 of us who had spent the last two years doing nothing but working for the MC5 and making them a success, never taking any money for ourselves, just room and board. All of a sudden, John is gone, and we have no money coming in. Our phones got cut off just at the crucial point when we needed to make some publicity and let people know John was in jail. We had no way; we had no phones and we were just begging for food. My mother-in-law and father-in-law helped us out like they usually did, but it was devastating for awhile. And there was probably hard feelings thinking that the MC5 should have kept John on as a manager, even if he was in jail. People told them otherwise, other people told them John would be a hindrance, because now he was too hot to handle. John was now too much of a political figure. So they said no, better get rid of John Sinclair and the revolutionary image. Which was a mistake, I think we all agree. Because they lost whatever they had going for them, they kinda got lost after that.

What did you do immediately after that?

Leni: Well, I was pregnant with Celia and we had a child, and we had to organize to make a living and we had to organize the John Sinclair freedom movement.. We kept it together by hook or by crook, and the person who’s most responsible for all that is Dave Sinclair, John’s brother, who took over the financial management of this whole shebang. The Up became the house band for the revolutionary White Panther Party wing (Laughs). They were no MC5, but they could kick it out, and so we kept it going like that. So for the next two and a half years, we were just continuing without the Five, focusing our energies on getting John out and continuing to organise.

Do you know about the Bentley archive? When John and I broke up, I had a whole roomful of all the things that I’d collected since I came to this country—all the fliers, all the magazines, all the books we published. We published, at one time, four magazines, and put out about twenty books of poetry, most of them mimeographed by hand. I’m a pack rat, so I saved every last scrap of paper, every memo, everything. So when we broke up, we donated our collection of stuff to the Michigan Historical Library, which houses the papers of the governors and the supreme court justices of Michigan and all that. And so they have the John and Leni Sinclair Papers…a huge amount of materials, and people come from far and wide to study the ‘60s now. It’s at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Sinclair is also an accomplished photographer who has snapped iconic shots of many a Motor City madman and documented important events in rock and roll and counterculture history. She has taken photographs of Iggy and The Stooges, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg among many other revolutionary counter-cultural luminaries of the 60s and 70s.

Leni Sinclair’s new book, with famed poster artist Gary Grimshaw, is titled Detroit Rocks! A Pictorial History of Motor City Rock and Roll 1965-1975.
 

 
Honey Boo Boo goes off the chain when that go go juice starts runnin’ around her brain.

“Dolla makes me holla.”

When Boo Boo’s done, you might want to check out The Clint Eastwood RNC remix and see what a lifetime of drinking go go juice will do to your brain.
 

 
Via Live Leak

 
Filmmaker and musician, Don Letts was working as a DJ at the Roxy club in London in 1977 when he filmed most of the punk bands that appeared there with his Super 8 camera. Letts captured a glorious moment of musical history and its ensuing social, political and cultural revolution.

Letts decided he was going to make a film with his footage, and had sold his belongings to ensure he had enough film stock to record the bands that appeared night-after-night over a 3 month period. Eventually, he collated all of the footage into The Punk Rock Movie, which contained performances by the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Generation X, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Eater, Subway Sect, X-Ray Spex, Alternative TV and Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. There was also backstage footage of certain bands, and Sid Vicious’ first appearance with the Sex Pistols, at The Screen On The Green cinema, April 3rd, 1977.
 

 
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Fritz Lang explains how his meeting with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Mad Man of Nazi propaganda, made him flee Germany the very same day.

Director of Metropolis and M, Lang had been called to see Goebbels over his undisguised attack on Hitler in his 1933 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse - which the Nazis had banned. Instead of the expected interrogation and inevitable incarceration, Doctor Goebbels offered Lang the unexpected position of Head of the National Socialist Film Studios. Goebbels explained that both he and Herr Furher hoped the director would accept. Goebbels then offered his advice on the ending of The Testament of Dr Mabuse, which he had found unsatisfactory. Instead of Mabuse going mad, it would have been better if the mobs had destroyed him with their wrath.

It’s a good story, even if the facts don’t add up. One that’s worth retelling - just to hear Lang build up the dramatic tension with his powers of descriptive narration.
 

 
Vaughn Bode emerged from the 1960s/70s underground comic scene to become a major influence on New York City’s graffiti artists. His distinctive style (which owed a bit to his friend R. Crumb and Disney Studios) was also the touchstone for his pal Ralph Bakshi’s animated film Wizards.

There’s very little video or film footage of Bode, so this clip from the 1974 Toronto Comic Con is a real treat.

Bode, who died in 1975 at the age of 36, lived a life that became as phantasmagorical as some of the fictions he spun in his comic strips. A biography seems long overdue. I found this short bio I See My Light Come Shining by Bob Levin informative and fascinating.
 

 
You see, the eighties wasn’t all about big hair, lip gloss, Boy George and Miami Vice. No. It was also the heyday of that redoubtable cabaret duo, Victor and Barry.

Victor Ignatius MacIlvaney and Barry Primrose McLeish, and their theatrical organ, the Kelvinside Young People’s Amateur Dramatic Art Society (KYPADAS), were the masterly comic creations of drama students Alan Cumming (Barry) and Forbes Masson (Victor). Together they traveled across the world (and Glasgow) entertaining audiences with their witty repartee and hand-carved selection of songs.

These ditties included such memorable sweetmeats as “Kelvinside Man” (Kelvinside is a small enclave in the West End of Glasgow, a sort of twee Greenwich Village, where your fruit is a yam, and you buy fish from a van); “Marks & Spencers” - V & B’s favorite department store; and the painful rivalries of showbiz, “We Knew Her So Well”.

This tartan twosome were a musical Julian and Sandy, whose unstoppable success led to the release of their best selling (well, in Kelvinside, and parts of Bearsden and Milngavie, anyway) debut recording cassette, Hear Victor and Barry and Faint. By way of introduction to this fabulous twin-set of talents, here is Victor and Barry singing “Kelvinside Man”.
 

 
Bonus clips, plus ‘Hear Victor and Barry…and faint’, after the jump…
 

 
Here’s the new video for “Big Steam,” a great solo single from Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller made available on vinyl from Good Road Recordings. The clip was directed and edited by Boston-based Will C.

Mission of Burma are in Texas this weekend (Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton tonight and Antone’s in Austin on Saturday), then hitting the Midwest Sept 26 - 29 (Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Madison and Chicago).

I was lucky enough to be in attendance at the “final” Mission of Burma gig in 1983 when they opened for Public Image Ltd. at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island. The venue itself should have been condemned, it’s one of the crappiest, shittiest places I’ve ever stepped foot in—a tetanus shot should have been given with each ticket purchase—but man what an intense double bill.
 

 
Over a decade ago, Travis Stewart, aka Machinedrum, stumbled on a bootleg of Boards of Canada performing at the Warp Records 10th Birthday Party in 1999. The last unnamed track BOC played that night was a mystery to Travis, who thought it:

‘quite possibly one of my favorite things they have done and really is a shame it never came out’

Fast forward to 2012, and Travis/Machinedrum has now made his own version of this unknown Boards of Canada track, as he explains:

I decided to take this bootleg recording and re-produce it for fun. Using the recording I laid new drums over the existing drum patterns (almost 100% accurate to original), replayed some synth parts and the bassline. The only thing I didn’t try to re-create was the original vocoder parts and some random samples so I used the original bootleg recording for that. I was tempted to make a shorter 4-5 minute version but I figured I should preserve the original piece in its intended length.

This is the finished result and it is quite incredible.
 

 
Original bootleg of BOC performing at Warp party, after the jump…
 
With thanks to John Kowalski and Glenn McQuaid
 

 
Is this the greatest goofiest song ever written? I think it very well might be. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you obscure ‘60s pop-psych combo World of Oz performing their semi-hit “The Muffin Man” on Beat Club in 1968.

I’ve been putting this on mixed tapes and CD for over 25 years. That there is a video for this number warms my heart.

Have a muffin now and you won’t forget it… ever.