Director Frank Henelotter is best known for his classic cult films Basket Case and Frankenhooker, but a lesser-known film he made between those two is his masterpiece.

That film, 1988’s Brain Damage, is truly one of the most original horror films of that decade. The psychedelic horror film centers around Brian, a young man who comes into contact with a centuries-old, penis-shaped creature named Aylmer that injects him with brain-altering chemicals (seemingly sort of a highly-addictive cross between a hallucinogen and Ecstacy) in order to use him as a host to procure victims to feed his ravenous appetite for human brains.
 

Aylmer, the parasite, speaks with his host, Brian.
 
While Brian is high on the drugs injected into the base of his skull by Aylmer, the parasite is able to use him to obtain new prey. The entire affair is absurd, bordering on campy, but never falling into the Troma-trap of being overly self-aware and intentionally “bad on purpose for yuks.”
 

Aylmer preparing to make an injection of go-juice.
 
The horror genre thrived in the 1980s, but one could divide that decade in half and see two very distinct arcs in the genre. The first half of the decade was utterly dominated by the slasher films that came in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th‘s success. Public interest waned a bit in these types of films by the mid-point of the ‘80s, and you began to see more comedic elements entering the horror genre for the last half of the decade.

The second half of the ‘80s gave us the humor-tinged horrors of Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator, Street Trash, and House. Freddy Krueger, one of the most horrific screen villains of all time in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street became a cornball one-liner machine in the subsequent Elm Street sequels. I’m not personally a huge fan of comedic horror, but some of them really get the formula right, and Brain Damage is one of those transcendent titles.

In fact, I’d personally rank Brain Damage right up there with Re-Animator and Street Trash as the three best, most “must-see” horror/comedy films of the 1980s.
 

Brian learns the trials and tribulations of being controlled by a centuries-old dick-shaped drug-administering brain-eater.
 
Brain Damage is a clever, witty, gory film with one of the most entertaining horror villains of all time: the wise-cracking, phallic, parasitic, singing brain-eater known as Aylmer (or also “Elmer,” as he is referred to in the film). The creature, incidentally, is voiced by beloved TV horror host, John Zacherle.
 

“Shock Theater” host, John Zacherle, voices the evil Aylmer.
 
The film is also a not-so-subtle allegory about the horrors of drug addiction with Aylmer continuously taunting Brian as he struggles to “get clean.” 

More after the jump…

A rare photo of a young Nick Blinko of Rudimentary Peni

“The religious and the macabre are a big part of my personality… there wouldn’t be much left without them”—Nick Blinko of Rudimentary Peni

The release of the Sex Pistols’ angrily anthemic “Anarchy in the U.K.” was responsible for more than just the much-needed attitude adjustment of rock music in the mid-1970’s. All across Great Britain thereafter, young punk bands began to take the anarchist mantra for more than just its shock value. Anarchy became a personal creed, with ideals espoused in the lyrics, performances,  imagery and most importantly lifestyle of the new anarcho-punk movement (animal rights and veganism didn’t come from nowhere, folks). Among these anarcho-originators were legendary groups like Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Subhumans, Poison Girls, Omega Tribe, Zounds, Chumbawumba, and my personal favorite, Rudimentary Peni.

Rudimentary Peni was formed in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire by lead singer/guitarist Nick Blinko (credited as “mouth-guitar-pen” with “pen” referring to his role as the illustrator of their record covers), bassist Grant Matthews, and drummer Jon Greville. Matthews came up with the name (“When I was at school studying biology, we were told that in the fetal stage the clitoris is a rudimentary penis.”) Considered dangerously demented by some, Rudimentary Peni’s music was fast-paced, loud, angry, and essayed lyrical themes of anti-establishment and anti-church sentiments along with the dark, macabre trappings of a proto form of deathrock (as heard on their full-length debut Death Church and 1988’s brutal Cacophony which was written about the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft).

Since 1980, Rudimentary Peni has maintained a deliberate shroud of mystery, having toured only briefly and given few interviews. There are very few existing photos of the group. Instead, album covers and imagery were emblazoned with Blinko’s twisted pen-and-ink artwork that has since outlived itself as more than just a band asset.

Previously diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, Blinko’s artwork offers insight into an aberrant, paralyzing world of mental health and disorder. Similar to the dismal work of the band he fronted, these pieces are dark, disjointed, and unearthly depictions of death, destruction, and emptiness. As a result, Blinko’s uniquely bleak talent is celebrated within the outsider art community and his work is part of the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has published three books—The Primal Screamer in1995, The Haunted Head in 2009, and Visions of Pope Adrian 37th in 2011. (Blinko was apparently convinced that he was the actual pontiff during one of his forced stays in a psychiatric hospital in the mid-90s.)

Here’s a brief biographical description of Nick Blinko quoted from Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives by Colin Rhodes:

In the case of British artist Nick Blinko (b.1961), who has in the past been hospitalised, the need to make pictures is stronger than the desire for the psychic ‘stability’ brought by therapeutic drugs which adversely affects his ability to work. His images are constructed of microscopically detailed elements, sometimes consisting of literally hundreds of interconnecting figures and faces, which he draws without the aid of magnifying lenses and which contain an iconography that places him in the company of the likes of Bosch, Bruegel and the late Goya. These pictures produced in periods when he was not taking medication bring no respite from the psychic torment and delusions from which he suffers. In order to make art, Blinko risks total psychological exposure.

That explains just how far out he’s willing to go for the sake of his work. True dedication, both impressive and sad. As his representative, London-based art dealer Henry Boxer said of Blinko:

“He compromises his sanity to produce his art.”

 

 

 
More after the jump…

An eye, a nose, a mouth, a cup, a bell, a drill…....

In 2002, after more than a decade of quiescence, London’s legendary punk group Wire abruptly reappeared on the scene, looking as vigorous as ever. They unveiled the first two sections of Read & Burn online, which ended up being combined into the CD release Send a year later. At the time, the reunion was seen as a temporary matter, and the band in fact played a “farewell” at the Barbican in London in 2003—this event was titled “Flag: Burning,” which tells you something of Wire’s motivations at the time. (I’ve seen them twice since then, so so much for farewells.)

Read & Burn 01 featured “I Don’t Understand” and “The Agfers of Kodack,” two songs that have become concert staples for Wire ever since, which is significant insofar as it’s quite evident that they dislike singing material from Pink Flag over and over again.

In 2005 Wire released a live album and DVD called The Scottish Play: 2004, which perversely documented not only Wire’s show at the Tramway Theatre in Glasgow in 2004 but also the Barbican appearance from the year before, meaning that a significant portion of the material had nothing to do with Scotland or 2004. (Needless to say, the shows had precious little to do Macbeth either.) 
 

 
It was still a canny title, however, because the performances, some of which used a stage design by British designer Es Devlin, were “theatrical” and “play-like” in a way that few rock performances had ever been. As Graham Lewis explained to Pop Matters last year of the Barbican event, “The set consisted of four large mirrored cubes across the front of the stage on to / in to which lighting and projections were made. The individual members inhabited a box each.”

This was far from the spontaneous and sweaty rock experience of countless clubs anywhere, and if you’ve seen Wire’s effective yet undemonstrative live shows, it’s not surprising that Wire might be the band to accept such a bold challenge in their live presentation.

Famously, Kanye West was inspired by the footage to contact Devlin for his 2005 Touch the Sky tour, and she’s been much in demand by major pop stars ever since. I didn’t know it at the time, but I saw her conceptions for U2’s Innocence + Experience Tour a couple of years ago. Devlin’s experiences working with Wire were recently featured on the Netflix documentary series Abstract.

Watch after the jump…

 
Hippies make the best capitalists. They are the passive-aggressive masters who use their artificial sense of moral superiority to sell you shit you don’t need. You know the kind of shit. Shit, they claim that will save the planet, or feed your soul, or flow in tune with your karmic wholewheat astrological aura, kinda thing.

In a survey I’ve just made up at random, 99.9% of all hippies are capitalist bastards. Take The Young Ones for example. Here was a household consisting of four students from four very different backgrounds. There was a punk called Vyvyan, a radical-leftie-progressive-socialist-Cliff Richard-fan called Rik, a mature student-cum-yuppie-businessman called Mike, and a hippie named Neil. There was also rumored to be a fifth roommate, but we don’t talk about him. Now, you might think out of this small group that the punk or the mature student would go on to make the most money and have say, a pop career that sold literally dozens of records across the world and lasted for days if not weeks. But you’d be wrong. It was, in fact, Neil the hippie who saw the potential in marketing his miserable lentil-stained life and selling it on to an unsuspecting public.

And very, very successful he was at this, too.

It all started, you see, when Neil the hippie (aka the divinely talented actor Nigel Planer) recorded what some might describe as a kind of “novelty record” called “Hole in My Shoe” in 1984. Planer had astutely chosen to cover a song, which in many respects, captured aspects of Neil’s miserabilist, psychedelic personality. The song had originally been a hit for the rock band Traffic in 1967.

Planer used a little help from his friends to record his single. He collaborated with Dave Stewart, a prog rock keyboardist with bands like Uriel, Egg, and National Health, and singer Barbra Gaskin. Stewart, not to be confused with the other Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, had scored a UK #1 with Gaskin on their cover of “It’s My Party” in 1981. Neil/Nigel’s “Hole in My Shoe” reached #2 on the UK charts. Its success led Planer, Stewart and Gaskin to go one further and record Neil’s Heavy Concept Album.
 

Neil sings ‘Hole in My Shoe’: Today the 45rpm record, tomorrow the 33⅓.
 
Neil’s Heavy Concept Album was the most splendid spoof LP since, well, The Rutles in 1978.

This was a concept album that paid homage to the, er, “concept” of a concept album, but didn’t actually have any real concept other than the unifying character of Neil who riffed on a variety of surreal adventures (a trip down a plughole, a meeting with a potato, a movie advert, and reading a poem to his plant) and singing a few classic, beautifully-rendered songs.

The whole album brilliantly parodied the musical form of those trippy conceptual albums released by progressive and psychedelic bands during the sixties and seventies. From the early musings and backward guitars of the Beatles, through Gong (Pip Pyle plays drums on the record), King Crimson, Pink Floyd, the Incredible String Band and a hint of Frank Zappa. The front cover mimicked that of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request album, while the back, in red with liner notes and four images of Neil, copied the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but instead of a guaranteeing a splendid time for all, Neil offered that:

A heavy time is guaranteed for all.

 
More heavy concepts, after the jump, man…

 
It’s difficult to reconstruct for a typical member of the NYU’s Class of 2019 just how fucked up the NYC subways were in the 1970s and 1980s—indeed, much of Manhattan was an undisguised war zone. Sure, many have “heard” about this on some level, but when you’re perambulating through today’s clean and spacious Union Square station, you’re not likely to be reminded of Bernie Goetz, are you?

Bernhard Goetz made national headlines when (almost certainly as an entirely calculated act) he blew away four would-be muggers on the downtown 2 line in December of 1984. The white Goetz was held up as a national hero because he “fearlessly” entered the dangerous NYC subway system and seriously wounded a quartet of black guys with malice aforethought. The word vigilante was suddenly on everyone’s lips; Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels were a related icon of the time. The Clash even sang about them.

All of this is to explain why, when he decided to commence a project of documenting the city’s subway, photographer Bruce Davidson felt the need to outfit himself as if he were about to go into battle, complete with brass knuckles, a jackknife, pepper spray, combat boots, and an army jacket. That’s just what you did then! Davidson’s pictures eventually became the landmark book Subway. 

Late last year saw the publication of a book that can honorably be placed alongside Davidson’s—I refer to Willy Spiller’s Hell on Wheels, which includes the Swiss photographer’s subway-related output from the 1977-1984 period. Sturm & Drang Press brought out the book last year in a limited edition; they promptly sold out, which means that prices for the volume have become rather inflated.

These photos are a reminder of an era when two art forms were finding their footing in the city—that is to say, graffiti and hip-hop. The relative lack of a bourgeois and “safe” culture on the subways meant that the outlaw accoutrements of aerosol cans and boom boxes were permitted free rein.

And yet, these pictures do not actually document violence or really anything dangerous. Many of the photos seem like they were taken during the sultry summer, and (as is always the case in New York) you have dissimilar people seated side by side and (in many instances) enjoying the environment for the opportunities it provided to lounge and chat and people-watch.

As Tobia Bezzola has written of Spiller’s subway photographs,
 

His charming chutzpah is the root of the extraordinary quality of these photographs. It seems only logical that this wildly colourful underground performance appeared highly exotic, fantastic and often bizarre to the eyes of this young greenhorn just arrived from the innocent city of Zürich, Switzerland.

 
Anyone who finds our sanitized world dispiriting will surely find succor in these vivid and interesting pictures.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....

Two ‘Apache’ dancers hanging out in a cafe in Paris in 1938.
 
I’m going to roll the clock back to my earliest recollection of seeing what was essentially a version of the “Apache” dance that was featured on, of all things one of the original installments of the Popeye the Sailor cartoon series that I saw on TV as a child during the 1970s. The short in question was the seventeenth ever produced, in 1934, called “The Dance Contest.” In it Popeye and his gangly girlfriend Olive Oyl enter a dance contest which of course Popeye’s nemesis Bluto attempts to disrupt. When Bluto finally gets his chance dance with Olive he recklessly and abusively hurls her around—much in the style of an Apache dance. Naturally, Popeye is having none of that and after downing a can of his famous spinach, he takes over the lead dancer role with Bluto who he then essentially beats to a pulp while his famous theme plays out in the background. The cartoon itself, as you may recall, was already notoriously violent so it made perfect sense to incorporate one of the most popular and viciously aggressive dance crazes of the time into its storyline. But all of that would have gone over the head of pretty much any kid watching the show several decades later and it wasn’t until I was conducting my very important “research” for this post that I actually realized that the old-timey cartoon was riffing on what some referred to as the “Dance of Death” or the “Dance of the Underworld,” aka, “the Apache dance.”

If you are not familiar with this style of dance then it’s important to note that female dancers played a pivotal part in creating the savage scenarios in the dance by helping to develop its complicated choreography. The word “Apache” was derived from a name given to members of Parisian street gangs who were formerly known as “no goods.” After a particularly heinous crime involving the murder of a man who was found with his face, nose, and neck pierced with several women’s hat pins, the news reported the story with the headline “Crime Committed by the Apaches of Belleville.” From that point forward, the dance, its dancers, as well as teenage hooligans (who were often one and the same) became synonymous with the name. The earliest known appearance of the Apache was in the 1900s, perhaps as early as 1902. Like many dances, it is thematic in nature with storylines involving arguments between two lovers or perhaps a prostitute and a john. There were full-fledged stage productions involving complexly choreographed dance numbers. Dancers, especially amateurs, would often break bones and sustain other injuries during the heated and violent routines. Some routines were so egregious looking it was difficult to tell if something wasn’t actually going very fucking wrong while everyone sat back swilling booze, smoking cigarettes and watched. The craze dominated Paris for nearly 30 years and would also be featured in several films including one from the wildly popular Charlie Chan series, 1935’s Charlie Chan In Paris.

LIFE magazine wrote a rather extensive piece on the Apache dance craze/culture in 1946, and interviewed female dancers regarding their feelings about the dance. They said they “liked being thrown around,” which at face value appears to describe an act of domestic violence, only set to a jazz soundtrack. Which brings me to another important distinction about the Apache—it’s not just the ladies who get roughed up. No. In the Apache, the female dancers also get to gracefully kick the shit out of their male counterparts. So you see, everyone wins when they do the Apache dance at one point or another.

I’ve posted some gorgeous images of Apache dancers hanging out around Paris as well as some incredible footage from Charlie Chan in Paris featuring an Apache dance scene with actress Dorothy Appleby that you just have to see. I’ve also posted that Popeye the Sailor short I referenced at the beginning of this post because, well, why not?
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
While it may be a stretch to say that the Trashmen invented punk rock, with 1963’s “Surfin’ Bird” they were very clearly one of the earliest bands to capture its snotty, anarchic spirit. The song has been a rallying cry for hip weirdos ever since. It was even the voice of a singing asshole in John Waters’ magnum opus Pink Flamingos. Pee-wee Herman belted it out on the soundtrack of Back to the Beach. It’s also been covered by dozens of bands, including The Ramones, the pre-Stooges Iguanas, and even German thrash metal giants Sodom. The Cramps basically owed their entire career to the song.

There is no way to sit in silence when “Surfin’ Bird” comes on the radio. You will scream along and probably flail around the room, flapping your arms like a big dumb ostrich. That song could start an all-night party at a funeral. The bird remains the word, even after all these years.
 

Pee-wee heard about the bird back in 1986

But what do we know about this mutant anthem, really? Well, for one thing, The Trashmen didn’t write “Surfin’ Bird.” It was a mash-up of two Rivingtons’ songs, 1962’s “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” and its sound-alike follow-up, ‘63’s “Bird is the Word.” The Trashmen never even heard the original. They actually nicked it off another local Minneapolis band called The Sorensen Brothers. The Trashmen version was even louder and wilder, and once DJ Bill Diehl heard it, he encouraged the band to record it. They did, and the word-of-the-bird quickly spread, eventually getting the band to number four on the Billboard charts and ensuring their place in Freak Heaven forever.
 

The unlikely granddaddies of punk: Trashmen in 1964

But here’s the thing. The Trashmen initially attempted a rock n’ roll swindle, stating that they wrote the song themselves. The ‘63 single credits Trashmen singer/drummer Steve Wahrer as the composer and by the time the song was racing up the charts, he was happy to take the credit. Eventually, the Rivingtons got a lawyer and worked it all out but by then the world moved on to other dance crazes.  While “Surfin’ Bird” remained the Trashmen’s biggest hit, they had a fistful of ‘em as the decade wore on, including “Bird Dance Beat”, “Peppermint Man” and “Whoa Dad”. None of ‘em were as good as “Surfin’ Bird,” but what could be?
 

The little-known follow-up to “Surfin’ Bird.”
 
After the jump, the greatest thing you’ll see this week, I promise…

via Pinterest
 
When you’ve worn out The Purple Knif Show, do not cry. Just keep adjusting the dial until you tune in to Radio Cramps again.

In 1984, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach were the guests on a BBC Radio 1 show that was apparently called Collectors’ Choice and hosted by veteran DJ Kid Jensen. They brought a short stack of singles and the secret teachings of all ages. Unlike many broadcasts of this kind that turn up on the webs, this one includes all the records Lux and Ivy selected for the show, perhaps because safeguarding Marvin Rainwater’s copyright is not the RIAA’s most urgent concern.

The interview is an education. Lux makes the case (well, asserts) that Link Wray is the “first progressive rock guitarist” and Ivy explains why the names of some East L.A. bands start with “Thee.”

Threatening to answer Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” with a single of their own called “Rockabilly Jean,” they diagnose the problem with our modern American sounds:

Lux: I hope that somehow people will forget about this “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones” and get back into the history of rock ‘n’ roll, and get back into the simplicity of it, and the stripped-down, rock ‘n’ roll, nuclear warfare, over-the-topness of what it was when it first started, because there’s just something missing today. Everybody’s either out for their career, or something, making pop music, or making really involved musical things, you know, and rock ‘n’ roll is just so simple and so direct, it doesn’t seem like there are very many people who have a handle on understanding what that is.

Kid Jensen: Many people who would agree with you would regard rock ‘n’ roll as disposable, though. They would say it’s there to be listened to, two-minute records, that’s it. Throw it away.

Lux: Well, but they’re disposable people, though, so it doesn’t matter.

Kid Jensen: ‘Cause you obviously cherish these old records.

Lux: Oh, yeah. These are magic items, these records.

The DJ set:

Cannibal & the Headhunters “Zulu King” (3:10)
Thee Midniters “Jump, Jive, and Harmonize” (9:24)
Andre Williams “Pass the Biscuits Please” (14:23)
Marvin Rainwater “Hot and Cold” (21:37)
Starlites “Valarie” (26:59)
 

 
It was a night in May 1978 that would change the life of an Australian man named Barry Charles irreversibly. He was 28 at the time. While visiting New York City, he visited the Mineshaft, a “notorious fuck bar of the seventies and eighties” as he called it in an article he authored in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services in 2003. The Mineshaft, located at 835 Washington St., was a legendary leather bar that was the inspiration behind William Friedkin’s 1980 movie Cruising.

At the Mineshaft, he saw a man in a bathtub—and twenty other men lined up, ready to pee on him. The idea excited him so much that he instantly became the next volunteer to enter the tub. When he got back home to Sydney, he was frustrated that the clubs he frequented did not have the “watersports” facilities that he now craved. At Signal, Sydney’s first leather bar, Charles realized that he could use the shared urinal, universally known as a “trough,” in the men’s room.

It is at this point that we can begin to refer to Charles as Troughman. Troughman started by crouching down and leaning against the urinal but (as he wrote) “it becomes easy to let myself go completely and, no longer kneeling or crouching, I lie right down in the urinal.” To Vocativ he stated that “I just got straight down there and started getting pissed on. It was instant rapport. These guys were all into the leather and S&M scene and they were right up for it straight away. And the bar management didn’t mind. They thought it was great fun.”

In 1998 Kellie Henneberry made a short film called Troughman about Charles. In it Charles/Troughman says, “I’m really into piss,” and adds that “being pissed on” is “my particular specialty.” He continues:
 

I do it because it’s a sexual turn-on for me, something that really excites me. I discovered it by accident. I didn’t even know that it existed, and then I walked into this club and it was happening. People were doing this, and I wanted to do it! And when it happened for the first time, it just opened all these amazing doors of sexual excitement.

 
More after the jump…

The Monks in front of the Top Ten Club in Hamburg, Germany

Third Man Records have announced an amazing upcoming release: Five tracks recorded by fabled mid-60s avant-garage punks The Monks (often stylized as just ‘monks’) around the same time as their final single “Love Can Tame The Wild” in early 1967. The lead-off number “I’m Watching You” gets its world premiere here today, courtesy of the label.

The other four tracks on the Hamburg Recordings, 1967 EP were laid down at a studio located on the premises of the Top Ten Club, one of the early rock ‘n’ roll venues in Germany where the young Beatles played one of their famed Hamburg residencies. But these songs aren’t just some forgotten cast-offs, they are as vital and as punchy as everything else the Monks recorded.

Over email, I asked Monks bass player Eddie Shaw about the session and got this extraordinary reply, which I hope our readers will find as interesting as I did:

THIS WAS THE LAST RECORDING SESSION before the Monks broke up…

Between late 1965 until the Fall of 1967, we had four different engagements at the Top Ten Club—located on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. It was the same club the Beatles worked when they first came to Hamburg. Each booking was for a month. We performed 9:00 pm to 3:00 am, seven nights a week, with a two-hour afternoon matinee on Sundays. Life in Hamburg, as we knew it, revolved around the tough St. Pauli district and the intense hours onstage. In fact, our first month’s booking, as Monks, was in the Top Ten Club and almost two years later, our next to last Monks’ booking was in the same place. The audience in the club was made up of people who liked the Beatles and people who liked the Monks. The Beatles sang nice songs and the Monks sang “I Hate You But Call Me.” Tony Sheridan, who recorded “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean” with the Beatles, was there many nights, in front of the stage, shouting at us and telling us how much he hated us. When we were there, the club was packed every night.

During our last month at the Top Ten Club,  Ricky Barnes, the club manager, surprised us by revealing a window, on a side wall of the club, with a recording studio control room behind it.  “I also produce recordings,” he said.“Do you guys want to do some tracks?”  Being astonished by this news—and as our contract with Polydor had just come to an end—we agreed. Polydor was putting pressure on us to soften our style saying, “Soft Rock is the future.”  At this point, after many months of constant touring (sometimes performing in three different towns a day)  we were tired and beginning to disagree with each other. As many groups do, we felt the pressure of writing and performing songs—“Monk Style”—that were beyond the pale of what groups normally played.  And now a couple Monks hinted they wanted to go home.

With Ricky Barnes’s encouragement,  we agreed to make one last recording effort, this time writing the songs in a more predictable style, a bit softer, trying to fit in with the mainstream tastes of the day.  We had just begun to ignore our monks’ costumes, as well as grow out our hair, getting rid of the tonsure. Even as we were scheduled to go to Asia in two months, there was a feeling among us that the Monks might be coming to an end.

For a couple of mornings, after work—after 3:00 am—I had my amp set up in the tables area, where customers usually sat. At this hour, we were tired and a bit handicapped from the activities of the night - drinking between sets, taking the little pills that “Oma” (“Grandma”) provided so we could stay awake. She worked in the men’s restroom and, in the Beatles bios, they called her “Mom.”

We recorded until about seven or eight in the morning. On the second session, Dave, tired and in bad shape, vomited on the floor during one of the songs. That’s when Ricky Barnes stopped the tape and called me into the control room. “It’s time to call it quits,” he said and he took the tape off the machine, put it in a box and handed it to me. Two months later, a couple of days before going to Asia, the Monks disbanded.

Surprisingly, the tape reappeared a couple of years ago, and is now being released by Third Man Records. I was very happy to learn it still existed. One odd thing about it—there is a missing vocal track on one song, “Yellow Grass,” a tune about the gritty life we lived in Hamburg. I don’t know what happened to it and it doesn’t matter.  It’s good to know the tape still exists. Hearing the recordings for the first time in many years, there were a few mistakes on a couple of tracks, which I helped correct in the mix, but overall it didn’t seem to be in real bad shape. Yes, the songs (all about relationships in Hamburg) are done in a softer style, but then they also are a significant piece of the Monks’ history. Dave played guitar instead of banjo, and I did a trumpet part on two songs while Gary played bass.

“I’m Watching You” was not recorded in the Top Ten Club.  It was recorded earlier in February, at the Polydor Studios with the two songs on our last single recording, “Love Can Tame The Wild” and “He Went Down To The Sea”. It was not released, but does illustrate how the minimalist uberbeat style of the Monks was changing to accommodate Polydor Record’s requests for softer rock.
 

“Onstage at the Top Ten Club on a normal night with the audience keeping their heads down in reverent rockness.”

Ben Blackwell oversees vinyl record production at Third Man Records in Nashville and had this to say about the upcoming release:

“I’m Watching You” turned up first, as Gary Burger had actually obtained it as part of the collection of one of the Monks’ old managers who’d recently passed away, Walther Niemann. Gary visited Nashville a few years back and I showed him around, taking him to the pressing plant where they were coincidentally pressing copies of Black Monk Time when we walked in. After a solid time spent together, he pulled out a CD and played me “I’m Watching You” and I was gobsmacked.

From there Third Man worked very hard to try and coordinate a release of that song on a 7” but it just wasn’t meant to be. After Gary’s passing, both Eddie and myself asked his widow, Cindy, to see if there were any Monks tapes around. Eddie very clearly remembered all the details, song titles, lyrics, everything having to do with the sessions. After a bit of time, Cindy was able to find a couple of reels that contained multiple mixes of the songs that are now featured on the Third Man release. The tapes themselves were clean and we really didn’t have to go through any significant restoration process.

I still can’t believe we’re actually releasing a Monks record.

Listen to “I’m Watching You” after the jump…