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Unseen and unpublished illustrated letters sent to Libby Gausden-Chisman and Jenny Spires between 1962-1965, as Syd was finding himself as a painter and a musician.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

 

 
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…
 

Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt by Mildred Klaus.
 
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt makes music that is right for our time. Challenging. Difficult. Powerful. Brilliant. That kinda thing.

Plague covers the planet. Cities shut down. Rioters loot and burn. Welcome to the New Normal. Put on your mask and shop this way.

There’s gotta be a way out. Maybe Marquardt’s music offers one?

I was supposed to talk with Marquardt sometime in June. Or was it July? The days merge. One day is much the same as the next—under a lockdown that gave me one hour-a-day outside (for exercise) and one trip (only if really, really, really necessary) to the store for essentials. Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt could be one of those essentials. He’s not to everyone’s taste I know but his music is important and relevant. Especially today.

We should have spoken together in June or July but then his nephew was shot dead on the streets. An horrific tragedy. What can you say? I sent condolences. Waited. Waited. Didn’t know what else to do. Looked back on what I’d once written:

Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt is an American musician who lives in Germany. He has been making music since he was six-years-old. He started by writing songs or “texts” and “melodies” as he describes it before taking an interest in House Music in his teens. Sean began DJing, before moving from Chicago to Berlin, where he started singing and playing guitar with metal bands. It was in Europe that he began his interest in electronic music.

With a desire to balance both his love of electronic with metal, Sean produced drone, ambient and noise recordings, developing his own distinct form of “Accidental Guitar Music.”

“Accidental Guitar” is a holistic and grounded concept that includes three main aspects. The first of these is the creation of sounds and sound worlds by combining the guitar with distortion effects – a type of “routing” or “mapping” technique where the musician does not lose himself, however, but instead works in a deliberate manner with the tools available to him. The second dimension of “Accidental Guitar” is improvisation—an approach that Cooper Marquardt has chosen, systematically rejecting predetermined choreographies and all forms of rehearsal or planning. This applies not only to live performances, but also when making recordings in his studio. Finally, the third dimension to this concept is the specific situation that the musician encounters when playing: the atmosphere and setting, the persons, conditions and moods present in the space in question lead to a contextualisation of his music.

Sean has released over 500 recordings as solo artist, collaborative artist, or just playing on someone else’s tracks. He has performed across the world. Gigged. Toured. Played the festivals. When I approached him before to ask some Q&A he preferred to “create [an] article without using the question and answers normal modus of operation.”

Yeah, I know.

He wrote and said he wanted to do the same again and I should contact a guy called Nicholus. It’s a bit like speaking through an agent, or maybe a medium, or just selling myself to do PR—which ain’t what my job entails. If you push to be interviewed then you should be available to be interviewed—it’s a business—otherwise you’re just playing games and after all this was the second time Marquardt had opted out.

Who knows? Maybe it’s me? I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t even talk to me…and I promised to write myself every week too…
 

Photograph by Bert Loewenherz.
 
More after the jump…

 
Five years ago, we told you about the marvelous documentary, ‘Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be’. At the time, the doc could only be seen on the film festival circuit, but recently it’s been made available on streaming platforms for the first time. As my last viewing had been years ago, I recently watched it anew via Amazon Prime. I was reminded that director J. Elvis Weinstein did an incredible job presenting Michael’s truly amazing life, and the film was a joy to see again.

*****

Musician/actor/satellite radio DJ Michael Des Barres has worn many hats over his decades-long career. As a vocalist, he’s fronted such acts as the Power Station, filling in for Robert Palmer on their lone US tour (with a high-profile appearance at Live Aid), and the highly underrated Somebody up There Likes Me, a neglected LP that deserved better. His biggest success (in the form of royalties) has been as songwriter, having co-penned “Obsession,” a worldwide hit for ‘80s synth-pop act Animotion. In addition, he’s a talented character actor, best known for his recurring role as TV villain Murdoc on MacGyver. His versatility is acknowledged in the title of the fabulous documentary, Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be?. Dangerous Minds got in touch with the director of the film, J. Elvis Weinstein, and asked him some questions via email.

How did you come to know Michael’s work?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: The first time I came to know Michael as a musician was when he joined the Power Station, but I recognized him from TV roles at the time. I was a TV junkie as a kid. He lived in my head as a trivia question for many years. I’d always notice him in TV and movie roles.
 

The many faces of Murdoc.

How and when did you approach Michael about making a documentary about him? Was he open to the idea or did it take some convincing?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: We met several years ago working on a TV series, me a as writer/producer, he as a cast member. We spoke about writing a book and even did some interviews at the time, but it never materialized. Then a few years ago, we ended up guests on the same radio show and I mentioned we should have done a documentary instead of a book. There was instant agreement; we were shooting within three weeks.

What drove you to make the documentary?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I knew that there was a great story to be told and that there were things I could learn for myself from telling it.

Michael appears open and frank during the interview segments in the film. Were you surprised by anything he told you? One of the things I learned from watching the film is that Silverhead was really Michael’s project and the other members were hired guns—I never knew!:

J. Elvis Weinstein: Michael was very generous in his willingness to examine and re-examine his life as honestly as possible through this process. I think he realized very early on that I wasn’t striving for a sensationalistic telling of the story but rather a very human one. 

As for surprises, I don’t have any specific ones that jump out. While Silverhead were hired musicians, they quickly became a very collaborative and tightly knit band. Michael was very much the leader, but the sound evolved from the players.
 

A fan shows Michael some love during a Silverhead gig, 1974.

I also learned that Michael and his ex-wife Pamela (Miss Pamela of the GTO’s) met on the set of a movie (the still unreleased Arizona Slim). It’s really interesting to see some of their first interactions captured on film. What do you make of their relationship, then and now?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I think the thing that is the coolest about them is the relationship they’ve cultivated since splitting as a couple. The respect, warmth, and love they maintain for one another as friends and parents of a great son is a lovely example for everyone.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
If you are a big “rock” fan of a certain age—and American—you almost certainly grew up reading CREEM magazine. I sure did. I loved CREEM. The magazine was one of the first indications to my young mind that there was a much bigger, much badder and much cooler world outside of my dingy hometown. I read every issue until I memorized the articles. It informed my foundational musical tastes more than any other influence, and by some margin. Even the way I write.

The very first time I bought CREEM was the March 1975 Lou Reed cover. I spotted it in a downmarket hillbilly grocery store in Wheeling, WV. It looked weird and interesting. Certainly it stood out on the newstand of the era. I was a nine-year-old kid who’d only recently moved on from Planet of the Apes and James Bond movies after hearing “Space Oddity” on AM radio late one night and having my mind completely blown. I knew there was some connection between David Bowie and Lou Reed, but that was about it. What made me decide to spend my weekly $1 allowance on the magazine was the title the author, Lester Bangs, had given that cover story: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves (or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake).” I found this very intriguing and mysterious. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. What’s a death dwarf? And why was Lou Reed a famous one?

That legendary encounter between Reed and Bangs is today something studied at universities, an iconic bit of rock lore and a classic piece of gonzo journalism. It had a tremendous hold on my not-so-innocent young imagination. It might have been the first thing I’d ever read that made drugs seem really cool. It also made me want to talk—and write—just like Lester Bangs. As a literary stylist I put him on the same level as Kurt Vonnegut, that’s how much I liked what he did. Plus Bangs had tremendous taste in music. If he championed a group or performer, I had to hear it, even if that meant—in the case of the Velvet Underground or the Stooges—doing yard work for my parents and neighbors until I could save up enough money to buy German imports via Moby Disc, an LA-based record store that advertised their mail-order business in CREEM. (My mother had to get money orders from the post office for me to do this. It would take four to six weeks to get the album, but if you were in a rural area, this was your only option back then. If anything it goes to show the lengths someone would go to purchase as-yet-unheard music that Bangs had rhapsodized about. His prose was so good and evocative that I just knew—I was sure of it—that if he was enthusiastic about something, I was no doubt going to love it, too. Lester never let me down, not ever, not once.)

I discovered so many things via CREEM: Obviously Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Patti Smith, MC5, the New York Dolls, Ramones, Sex Pistols, the Clash. Yeah, CREEM really warped me, but in a good way. Had I not found it when I did, who knows, I might have gone on to become a respectable adult. 

It should come as no surprise then, reader, that I heartily enjoyed the new documentary, CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine.  The briskly-paced, well art-directed film was produced by JJ Kramer—son of CREEM publisher Barry Kramer—and directed by Scott Crawford, who made 2014’s Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC, 1980-90. It’s a real family affair—they had access to everything—but not in a way that pulls any punches about some of the complex personalities involved. You get the viewpoint of many of the insiders who were actually there (including Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus and co-producer Jaan Uhelszki) and several notables who weren’t, but who were greatly influenced by the gang of misfits who produced the magazine (Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers tells the charming tale of realizing that CREEM had moved their offices to his Michigan hometown and riding his bike over there only to see Alice-fucking-Cooper on his way out the front door!) 

This is a really great time capsule pop culture piece and a film that needed to be made just for history’s sake, but it’s not merely a nostalgia stroll for old men. A young person watching this doc, especially in the context of what’s happening globally, sees the birth of a scene and how it was the sheer force of Barry Kramer’s personality that initially birthed it, but also how CREEM became this strange attractor of such bright-burning talent. If you read between lines (of speed, coke or “green”—some of you will hear that dog whistle) the takeaway, dear young people of 2020 is that if you want your own scene, you gotta start it yourself.

Recommended.

CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine is released Friday, August 7, on digital and in theaters. 
 

An alternate image for Alice Cooper’s album ‘Killer.’ This image was also used for a calendar that came along with the record.
 
In the May 6th, 1972 issue of Billboard, there’s an amusing story about how a controversial poster of Alice Cooper (pictured above) ended up plastered on a “staff only” door in the White House during Richard Nixon’s administration. Allegedly, someone at Warner Bros., Cooper’s label at the time, had a pal (described as a “semi-longhaired fellow”) who worked at the White House. The W.H. staffer’s rocker friend would send him care packages full of records and other Warner-related stuff including a poster of Alice Cooper hanging from a noose covered in fake blood. The image was an alternate for Cooper’s 1971 album Killer and also appeared on a nifty Alice Cooper calendar for 1972, included in the record. The staffer then took the poster and stuck it on a door at the end of a “staff only” corridor in the W.H., presumably until it was discovered and burned by one of Tricky Dick’s dicks.

Did this really happen? One can only hope, as Bob Regehr, one of Warner’s greatest assets in the 70s and 80s, was Cooper’s champion and likely had everything to do with the circulation of this fantastic piece of folklore. Regehr was instrumental in signing acts like Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, and Laurie Anderson. Back in the day, Cooper had Regehr in the first spot in his Rolodex, and for their next act to keep Killer on everyone’s mind, they devised a plan to throw an elaborate party in Cooper’s honor. And when I say “elaborate,” I really mean “deranged,” which makes more sense since this was 1971 and Alice Cooper was involved.

But before we get to the party to end all parties, there’s a little twist as to why the party was dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper.” According to another Warner executive, Stan Cornyn, he was part of a conversation about Killer with Joel Friedman, Warner’s head of distribution for the U.S., and Regehr, who was heading up Warner’s Artist Relations. When Cornyn heard Friedman say, “Alice Cooper! Her record is doing great!” he and Regehr dreamed up the idea of Cooper “coming out” to the world during a star-studded, debaucherous party. And that’s precisely what happened—because it ain’t a real party until the gorilla suit rented for the occasion goes missing during the festivities, never to be seen again.

Held at The Ambassador Hotel, the hotel staff did not know any of the details behind the “coming out” party to be held in their Venetian ballroom. Here’s the wording on the invitation:

“You and a guest are cordially invited to attend the summer season debut of Alice Cooper, to be held at the Venetian Room, Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, the evening of Wednesday, July 14th, 8:30 PM to midnight. Formal dress or equivalent costume is requested, but hardly mandatory.”

The details of the party were left to Dennis Lopez who had plenty of experience throwing unforgettable bashes all over San Francisco for legendary drag troupe The Cockettes. Cooper was known to spend time with the Cockettes whenever he came through S.F., as Cooper dug their “gender fuck” vibe, and likewise, the Cockettes dug Cooper’s over-the-top showmanship. Advertised as a “formal dress” kind of ball, many guests did arrive dressed to the nines. Inside the Venetian Room, an orchestra was in full swing. After guests were greeted by a Cockette dressed in a gorilla suit, more Cockettes (many with beards, beaded gowns, and headdresses) threw red roses as approximately 500 party goers entered, including Randy Newman, various Beach Boys, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Because it’s not a fucking party until someone sticks their dick in a plaster mold. Other members of the Cockettes were dressed as cigarette girls offering up cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. In addition to the orchestra, Elsie May, aka T.V. Mama (a former backup singer for James Brown), and her “stoned-freak out soul band” ran through a few numbers before T.V. Mama (a lady of “ample” proportions) stripped down to her undies and performed topless. But what about the guest of honor, Alice Cooper?

Continues after the jump…

 
The Mental Experience sub label of Lleida, Spain-based Guerssen Records has a knack for finding some seriously outré stuff. They take long forgotten—and some never recalled—material from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and give it new life for adventuresome listeners who are insatiable for something “new” to listen to. The label’s oddball connoisseurship—and the lengths they go to to uncover this stuff—exceeds what most reissue units dabble in. Their latest project is Clear Memory by Bomis Prendin—the name of a member, and of the band, like Alice Cooper—originally released in 1984 on 50 handmade cassettes.
 

 
Bomis Prendin’s Clear Memory is the sort of group/artist/album one used to find out about on the late Mutant Sounds blog. Or perhaps the infamous Nurse With Wound list, which they’re on. It’s experimental and it’s very, very obscure. Bomis Prendin describes themselves as “the band that put the harm in harmony, and the odious in melodious” and they’ve been at it—continuously at it—since the late 1970s, some of them playing together before that. The Washington, D.C. “noisicians” collective made hours and hours of weird recordings, very little that’s been released in corporeal form, although you can find a lot of their material for download on the Free Music Archive. When they did release their insane music, it was sometimes on flexi-discs, sometimes on bespoke cassettes or CD-Rs.
 

 
The Bomis Prendin sound is that of homemade industrial-noise-psych-pop-experimental. It’s quite striking. The press materials compare them to Faust, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Olivia Tremor Control and the Residents, and yes, that seems about right. It’s worth mentioning that Bomis Prendin were contemporaries of all these bands, even if only Nurse With Wound noticed at the time.
 

 
More after the jump…