The cover of Frank Zappa’s 1983 album, ‘The Man From Utopia’ featuring the artwork of Tanino Liberatore.
 
Tanino Liberatore, (born Gaetano Liberatore) may be best known to music fans for his association with Frank Zappa. The two became friendly after Liberatore created a cyborg version of Frank for the futuristic cover of Zappa’s album, The Man From Utopia (1983). Liberatore named his illustration of Zappa, Frank Xerox—a hat-tip to his fiendish Frankenstein comic character RanXerox, a revered reprobate and the subject of a long series of Italian comic strips, comics and graphic novels dating back to 1978 created by Liberatore and Stefano Tamburini. Here’s Liberatore from a 2012 interview on meeting Zappa in Italy while he was in town doing shows in Naples and Rome in 1982:

“I was at the Naples and Rome concerts where nothing special happened. After the Naples concert, we went dining together to discuss the cover. In the beginning, it should have been a six pages comic strip, but the project was later reduced. Since I don’t like covers with a lot of details or messages, and I prefer a strong drawing to leave a powerful impact, I proposed to draw the front cover according to my approach, leaving to him any decision concerning the back cover. Frank accepted. So in the back, I drew the promoters who worry only about sniffing cocaine, The Pope, the gal who let Zappa know about RanXerox.”

The “gal” Liberatore is referring to was a journalist for the Italian magazine Frigidaire, early publishers and supporters of RanXerox. Her illustrated image even appears in the apocalyptic crowd scene on the back cover of The Man From Utopia, where she is depicted topless, thrusting a copy of Frigidaire above her head. The journalist, only identified by her first name Valentina, played a crucial role in Zappa’s awareness of Libertore, who went into detail about his first encounter with Zappa leading to the infamous album cover:

“And he just saw RanXerox, at least that’s what they told me, he threw out the girl and took what was his Italian handyman, who was from Rome, Bassoli (Italian rock journalist Massimo Bassoli, the editor of Tutti Frutti magazine and friend of Zappa’s), and he told to track me down because he wanted to talk to me because he liked the characters. Then Bassoli found us, it was me and Stefano (Tamburini ), at the Excelsior in via Veneto, we went to his room, where there was his bodyguard, a huge black man, and a few people. And he came out: ‘Hey, Liberatore! After Michelangelo, you are the greatest Italian artist!’ And he believed it, he didn’t say it to piss me, on the contrary. And this was the first impact. Frank Zappa was one of my myths, also because the myths that I had were more musicians than designers, apart from Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Finding myself there in the presence of his holiness, even if records had come out at the time that I didn’t like so much.”

 

A photo of Tanino Liberatore (left), Stefano Tamburini (right), watching Frank Zappa (center) flip through the copy of Frigidaire featuring RanXerox. Image source.
 
As usual, Zappa was far ahead of the cool curve, and it would be about five years before Ranx flipped the lids of adult-oriented comic fans in the U.S. when he showed up in the July 1983 edition of Heavy Metal. As a nearly life-long comic/graphic novel fan, I first became aware of Liberatore and Ranx by way of Spanish comic MAXX, when Ranx appeared on the cover of the January 1986 issue. Initially, Liberatore’s artistic interest was firmly rooted in architecture before he decided to take up illustration for print advertising in 1975. He would meet Tamburini a few years later, and “RanXerox,” the first iteration of RanXerox, would violently spring to life.

Sadly, Tamburini, a hugely respected graphic artist in his own right, would pass away entirely too young, just months before his 31st birthday in 1986. Liberatore would abandon RanXerox and comics for years until he revived his mechanical antihero in the 90s as a character in books by Jean-Luc Fromental and Alain Chabat. His work has also been featured in Hustler, Métal Hurlant, and thankfully, several books, including La Donne (2012), and the soon-to-be-released Ranx: The Complete Collection due in June of 2020, containing his vicious, unsettling, and (at times) confusing illustrations. After the initial shock of seeing Liberatore’s work for the first time 34 years ago (at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square), the impact of his wild style has not diminished. And, if you are not familiar with his work, it will likely have the same effect on your eyeballs as well. That said, with a few exceptions, many of the images in this post are NSFW.
 
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The back cover of ‘The Man From Utopia.’
 

A sketch by Liberatore for the back cover of ‘The Man From Utopia.’ More can be seen here.
 

A sketch of Zappa by Liberatore.
 

Another sketch of Zappa by Liberatore.
 
More after the jump…

Japanese poster for ‘The Song Remains the Same,’ 1976
 
True or false: The performances from The Song Remains the Same, the concert film that supposedly documents Led Zeppelin’s 1973 Madison Square Garden shows weren’t actually filmed at Madison Square Garden?

Mostly true!

It’s not exactly a secret but it’s neither something that seems to be widely known by the general public, or even most Led Zeppelin fans for that matter. Now I’m not trying to imply here that Led Zeppelin didn’t even play Madison Square Garden for three nights in late July of 1973, because of course they did and The Song Remains the Same‘s original director, Joe Massot (Wonderwall) was there with a camera crew trained on them when they did. This much is not being disputed.

The problem was, as the group and their manager Peter Grant found out only after they’d fired Massot from the project, is that he’d gotten inadequate—practically unusable—coverage that wouldn’t sync properly or cut. Some great shots but nothing that could be used to create an edited sequence.

Grant brought in Aussie director Peter Clifton, the guy they probably should have hired in the first place, to see what could made from this mess, but the initial prognosis looked pretty grim until Clifton suggested reshooting the entire running order of the Madison Square Garden show on Madison Square Garden’s stage… recreated at Shepperton Studios in England!

Everyone assumes they’re watching the group at MSG, but in reality what we are watching (for the most part) is Led Zeppelin rocking out on a soundstage in Surrey, southeast of London. Without an audience.
 

 
On a playback screen, the band could watch themselves in the earlier footage—keeping their movements and positions in roughly the same general areas—and play along to the MSG soundtrack. So what we mostly see in the finished film are Clifton’s close-ups and medium distance footage of the band members shot at Shepperton, but intercut with Massot’s footage of the trappings of MSG, wide shots, shots framed from behind the band towards the audience and so forth.

Once you know all this, it’s screamingly obvious what was shot where.

Complicating matters for Clifton, John Paul Jones had recently cut his hair short (he’s wearing a wig in the Shepperton footage) and Robert Plant’s teeth had been fixed since the New York City shows the year before.

Jimmy Page spilled the beans in the May 2008 issue of Uncut Magazine,

“I’m sort of miming at Shepperton to what I’d played at Madison Square Garden, but of course, although I’ve got a rough approximation of what I was playing from night to night, it’s not exact. So the film that came out in the ‘70s is a bit warts-and-all.”

This little known behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Song Remains the Same is barely touched upon in some of the major books about Led Zeppelin—but in Chris Welch’s 2001 biography Peter Grant: The Man who Led Zeppelin, the story is told in greater detail, finishing thusly:

As far as Grant and Zeppelin were concerned, the movie song had ended. But they left behind smouldering resentments among the filmmakers and a few puzzles for movie buffs. Says Peter Clifton: “If you look at the credits they wrote something very interesting. ‘Musical performances were presented live at Madison Square Garden.’ It was somewhat ambiguous because the film was obviously done somewhere else!”

When he was asked about the provenance of the ‘live’ shots of Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, Peter Grant did admit that they had indeed shot some material at Shepperton studios, recreating the same stage set while the band donned the same clothes they wore at the actual gig. “Yes, we did,” he said. “But we didn’t shout about the fact.”

See for yourself:
 

A photo taken by Clay Geerdes of author and Cockette Fayette Hauser wearing a homemade grass skirt ensemble.

The catastrophic effect of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has hit anyone working in the gig economy incredibly hard. Book tours over the years have become big business for authors and independent bookstores hosting author events in support of newly released literature. Many authors, set to embark on Spring/Summer book tours, have had to scrap their plans, with some publishers even holding back on releasing their books. Thankfully, this was not the path chosen by drag trailblazer Fayette Hauser, she of the pioneering gender-bending performance troupe The Cockettes. It is my great privilege to be able to share a bit about her glittery, LSD-drenched book, The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy—a magnificent 352-page volume detailing the three-years the Cockettes conquered San Francisco and turned the drag community on its magnificently wigged head.

As Hauser recounts in the book, she was “rendered speechless” by a hit of strong acid at a party and soon found herself sitting on the floor only able to sit upright with help from the wall behind her. During this voyage, Hauser became acutely aware of the individuality of the people surrounding her to the point where she was not able to recognize their gender or her own. The year was 1968, and the Summer of Love had led masses of people to detach themselves from modern conformity, liberating their ability to express themselves freely. Eventually, The Cockettes would pave the way for others, whether gay, straight, bisexual, or pansexual, with their provocative performances and their communal way of life by living by the term “Gender Fuck.” And if you’re wondering what exactly is “Gender Fuck,” it made sense to go directly to the source, Hauser herself, to help define this very direct description of a person not identifying as exclusively male or female:

“The term Gender Fuck emerged as many of our descriptive phrases did, in an Acid flash! This term, gender fuck, became a way of describing our look, which was highly personalized, very conceptual, and without gender boundaries. We wanted to mystify the public so that the onlooker would declare, ‘What Is that? Is that a boy or a girl?’ We wanted to open people’s minds to the terrain between the tired gender binary models, which were much too mentally binding and boring as well. We unleashed that open space in between. We explored the fluid nature of the Self, which led to the term Gender Fluid. I think we succeeded in opening that Pandora’s Box of multi-dimensional, organic self-expression through body decor.”

In 1968, after graduating with a BFA in painting from Boston University, Hauser, a New Jersey native, moved out to San Francisco. Soon she would form a collective with like-minded, free-spirited people, and the Cockettes would officially begin their reign in 1969—specifically on the stage of the Palace Theater in North Beach on New Year’s Eve. The ever-growing troupe would first communally inhabit a grand Victorian-style home on 2788 Bush Street and then, after a fire rendered the home uninhabitable, a building on Haight—one of San Francisco’s most notorious streets. There was also a home known as The Chateau on 1965 Oak Street, where members of The Cockettes spent their time devising their next performance, creating costumes and personas, and tripping on LSD. The Cockettes took so much acid that they would often become non-verbal. This would lead to other forms of communication by way of personal adornment using makeup, clothing, and anything else that would convey the silent message emanating by the troupes’ diverse members, including 22-year-old Los Angeles native Sylvester James Jr., soon to become R&B disco queen Sylvester. Before his short stint with The Cockettes, Sylvester was a part of a group called The Disquotays—a performance collective comprised of black crossdressers and transgender women.
 

Sylvester during his short time with The Cockettes. Photo by Clay Geerdes. Unless otherwise noted, all photos provided to Dangerous Minds are for exclusive use.
 
The Cockettes’ performances were the be-there affair for all the counterculture chicks, dicks, and everyone in between. When director John Waters touched down in San Francisco to show off his 1969 film Mondo Trasho, the screening landed the director in jail for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. The film made its debut at the Palace Theater where The Cockettes performed their knock-out drag shows on the regular. At the time, Waters was not aware of The Cockettes, but that would quickly change for the director as Divine would end up performing with the Cockettes as “Lady Divine”—one of the first times would be in the first annual Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant at the Palace, where Divine played the pageant host, Miss de Meanor. In addition to confessing to the Tate/LaBianca murders, Divine would lead the other participants in the show (Miss Conception, Miss Shapen, Miss Used, and Miss Carriage) in a tournament to the death, where the queens had to fight with their fists for the coveted crown.

Divine would go on to win the ‘The Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’ in 1971. The following year, during The Cockettes’ last official show (another ‘Miss de Meanor Beauty Pageant’) at the House of Good, John Waters wrote a speech for her to read onstage, described by Cockette Scrumbly as “brilliant”. As the idea of Divine reading a speech written by John Waters is everything, I asked the director if he was willing to share any memory he had of this drag-tastic moment, and he very kindly responded with the following:

“To be honest, I’m not sure a written copy of that speech even exists in my film archive at Wesleyan Archive, and if it did, it would be word-slash-words that only I could understand. I do remember it was punk-ish (before the word) in a hippy venue that was bizarrely the Peoples Temple church, that was rented for the occasion after Jim Jones and gang had moved out. Divine ranted about following hippies home, eating sugar and killing their pets, or some such lunacy. I do still have the poster hanging in my SF apartment. I’m glad Scrumbly remembered it because I always did too. Quite a night in San Francisco.”

 

A flier advertising The Cockettes’ last show featuring Lady Divine.
 
The Cockettes intermingled with, as you might imagine, lots of famous people who were intrigued by the troupes’ anything-goes take on drag and life. Author Truman Capote called the Cockettes shows “the only true theater.” Alice Cooper, who once jumped out of a cake surrounded by The Cockettes for a PR stunt dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper,” was a frequent guest at the Haight-Ashbury house. And then there was Iggy Pop. When Iggy and The Stooges were recording Fun House in 1970, the then 23-year-old Iggy would start each studio session by dropping a tab of acid (as noted in the book Open Up and Bleed). The band decided to take a break and head to San Francisco for a weekend, playing a couple of shows at the Fillmore with Alice Cooper and Flamin’ Groovies. The first show on May 15th was attended by most of The Cockettes, who bore witness to Iggy on stage clad in the tightest jeans possible and long silver lamé gloves. Iggy was already a sweetheart of the gay community, and as Cockette Rumi Missabu recalls, Iggy distinctly gave them the impression he was “playing just for them.” Following the show, Iggy would become a regular guest of The Cockettes.

In the 2002 film, The Cockettes, Cockette Sweet Pam confessed that the collective “almost brushed their teeth with LSD,” to which Fayette would add, “contributed to the emphasis of flashy costumes.” Although the use of acid was the norm for the Cockettes, their art, sexual autonomy, and fierce expressions of individuality all contributed to the creation of High Drag. And, thankfully, the world would never be the same.

 

Cockette Wally in full regalia. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockette John Rothermel Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 

Cockettes’ Dusty Dawn and Wally in pearls. Photo by Clay Geerdes.
 
Much more after the jump…

Black Sabbath in 1977.
 
Kind of like when Van Halen toured with Black Sabbath, when AC/DC teamed up with Sabbath to open shows during the twelve-date European leg of their Technical Ecstasy Tour, they were a formidable, almost impossible act to follow. Many accounts would boldly state AC/DC was regularly blowing Black Sabbath off the stage. However, AC/DC also experienced technical difficulties early in the tour. At a show on April of ‘77 in Paris, a bunch of AC/DC’s new gear explicitly purchased for the tour malfunctioned, including equipment exploding on stage mid-set (noted in the book AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be). The band lost it and trashed the stage, stopping the gig twenty-minutes in. This would be the catalyst causing tensions between the bands to rise. On many occasions, AC/DC would leave the stage in such a state of disarray, it would take Sabbath longer to get set up. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with some of the members of Black Sabbath. Especially Geezer Butler. But not everyone in AC/DC was on Sabbath’s last nerve.

Bon Scott took the tour as an opportunity to rekindle his friendship with Ozzy (also noted in AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be), as the pair shared common interests like checking out local brothels and the love of booze. Bon was often found hanging out in Sabbath’s dressing room, a bold choice given the strained relations between the bands. But it probably had everything to do with Sabbath having better party favors. On April 21st, 1977, everything would come to a head by the time the tour rolled into Lund, Sweden, and depending on who you chose to believe, Ozzy may have prevented Geezer Butler from going stab-happy on Malcolm Young. Let’s start with an account of the incident from the late Malcolm Young given during an interview with the guitarist in 2003:

“We were staying at the same hotel, and Geezer was in the hotel bar crying into his beer. He was complaining about being in the band for ten years and told me, ‘wait ‘til you guys are around ten years. You’ll feel like us.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I was giving him no sympathy. He’d had many too many (drinks), and he pulled out this silly flick knife. As luck would have it, Ozzy walked in and says to Geezer, ‘You fuckin’ idiot, Butler—GO TO BED!’ Ozzy saved the day, and we sat up all night with him.”

 

An image of AC/DC on stage in Lund, Sweden prior to getting kicked off the tour later that evening. Image source.
 
Usually, Ozzy the Friendly Drunk was the one causing problems by going missing and presumed dead, or getting arrested, but this time we maybe get to thank Ozzy for making sure things didn’t get out of hand between his pal Geezer and Malcolm Young. Geezer Butler has addressed this story many times over the decades. In an interview in 2016 he again gave his side of the mysterious knife-pulling incident with Malcolm Young in Sweden. When the tour arrived in Oslo, Butler made a bee-line to the nearest store to purchase a “flick-knife” (similar to a switchblade), which were banned for sale in England. Here’s Geezer’s account of his run-in with Malcolm Young:

“No, I didn’t pull a knife. I always had flick-knives when I was growing up because everybody used to go around stabbing each other in Aston (Butler’s birthplace in Birmingham, England). Flick-knives were banned in England, but when we were playing Switzerland, I bought one. I was just flicking it when Malcolm Young came up to me and started slagging Sabbath. I was just playing with the knife. I was really excited to get one again. I was having a drink and flicking my knife—like you do—and he came over and said: ‘You must think you’re big, having a flick-knife.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And that was it. Nobody got hurt.”

Hmmm. No Ozzy to the rescue? No flick-knives vs. drunken-fists brawling? In the book AC/DC FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the World’s True Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, it was alleged that Malcolm started throwing punches at Butler. I would not want to cast doubt on Butler’s version of the story. And the fact is, after the stop in Lund, AC/DC exited the tour prior to its conclusion, forcing Sabbath to cancel the last four dates. Still, I can’t help but think of his arrest in Death Valley, California in 2015 for punching a “drunken Nazi bloke” in the mug. Sure, he was drunk just like in 1977, but we all know punching Nazis is a forgivable act of well-deserved violence. It should also be noted the man Geezer attacked has told an entirely different version of the story, but stopped short of denying he was a Nazi. Geezer isn’t allowed to talk about the incident anymore because he had to sign an NDA and pay, in his own words, “the git” off. So what really happened in Lund, Sweden? Most of us probably prefer Malcolm’s “Ozzy saves the day” version, but I’m not as far to say Geezer Butler’s version isn’t the truth. Mostly because it’s pretty clear he does not fuck around when being fucked with.
 

Audio of Black Sabbath performing “Gypsy” from ‘Technical Ecstasy’ in Lund, Sweden, April 21st, 1977.

 
Over the years, record label Three One G have released brutal and nasty tributes to Queen and the Birthday Party where avant garde noise makers like Melt-Banana, Cattle Decapitation, Weasel Walter, SSion and Some Girls lovingly massacred the catalog of these two beloved bands. Now the label is turning to Chelsea Wolfe, Daughters, Mike Patton, Metz, and many others and setting them loose on the songs of The Cramps.

The Cramps, of course, covered a whole lotta songs themselves, and their music is perfect for a project like Really Bad Music For Really Bad People. There’s even a Cumbia-style Cramps interpretation by Sonido De La Frontera, and Panicker’s contribution is a distorted electronic dance take on “I’m Cramped.”

The compilation marks the 100th release by Three One G Records. It will be available digitally as well as on limited edition vinyl. Order here.

Have a listen after the jump…

A very happy looking Frank Zappa, age fifteen, posing next to his winning illustration for the California Division of Forestry in 1955.
 

“The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting, literally, for other arts, figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to but a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”

—Frank Zappa quoted in The Real Frank Zappa Book (page 140).

Before he illustrated the winning entry for an annual poster contest held by the California Division of Forestry, the then fourteen-year-old Frank Zappa, a 9th grader at Grossmont High School in San Diego, had spent some good portion of his youth drawing. The story behind Zappa becoming interested in drawing is about as Frank Zappa as you might imagine. Here’s more from Frank on that:

“I had some basic interests in art, and since I was a kid, I was able to draw things. So I saw a piece of music, and I drew a piece of music. I had no idea what it would sound like or what was going on in it, but I knew what an eighth note looked like – I didn’t know it was an eighth note. I started drawing music and that was it.”

Zappa kept a sketch scrapbook as a teenager and also enjoyed entertaining his younger sister Candy by creating illustrations for her. Three years after winning the poster contest, Zappa would win another state-wide art contest for his abstract painting “Family Room,” this time sponsored by the California Federation of Women, and the Hallmark Greeting Card company. In the press clip announcing Zappa’s win (featured in the book Cosmic Debris: The Collected History and Improvisations of Frank Zappa), he was described as a “highly versatile” young person who had no plans to “confine” his artistic interests to painting. It was also noted that the young Zappa was writing a book. When asked if either art or literature were in the cards for his future, his answer was “music.” Zappa was now seventeen and already playing in a band called the Blackouts and was fully engaged in music lessons and musical composition. Before his graduation from high school, Frank was given the opportunity to conduct the Antelope Valley Junior College orchestra, who performed two of Zappa’s original compositions, “Sleeping In A Jar,” and “A Pound For A Brown On A Bus” (noted in the book, Frank Zappa FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Father of Invention).

Getting back to Zappa’s art, the majority of images in this post are of work Zappa created from the mid-‘50s to the mid-60s. If you’re a fan of Zappa, you’re likely aware he created early collage-style showbills for Mothers of Invention gigs. The very cool artwork of a young Frank Vincent Zappa follows.
 

A sketch from Zappa’s high school scrapbook.
 

An illustration by Zappa for his kid sister Candy, “A Day at the Beach.” This image was published in her 2011 book, ‘My Brother Was a Mother: Take 2.’
 
Much more of Frank Zappa’s youthful artwork, after the jump…

 
Conduct a casual poll of the hardy troops that make up the KISS Army as to their favorite KISS songs; I’d wager you’ll hear a lot more votes for “Strutter,” “Detroit Rock City,” “Rock and Roll All Nite,” or, hell, even “Lick It Up” than you will for Peter Criss’ 1976 ballad “Beth.” KISS fans don’t exactly know what to do with “Beth,” a syrupy piano number (with flute!) about puttin’ in those long hours in the studio that was the biggest his KISS ever had, clocking in at #7 on the Billboard Singles chart. No other KISS song ever cracked the top 10 until 1990’s “Forever” (which I wouldn’t be able to hum for you on a bet).

Director Brian Billow of Anonymous Content brought the song’s backstory to life in 2013, with a short script by Bob Winter, an advertising creative director based in Miami, that asks the compelling question, “But what of Beth’s side of the story?”

As with any undertaking like this, the trick is nailing the details. Beth’s colorful frock and wood-paneled kitchen accurately capture a certain 1970s je ne sais quoi that permits “Beth,” however brief, to be placed honorably alongside Boogie Nights and Almost Famous and The Last Days of Disco and 54 and all those other movies about the 1970s that came out in the late 1990s. The concept of KISS laying down tracks in full costume is just the right preposterous touch—but then again, maybe it isn’t that preposterous. This picture comes from the Destroyer sessions—the same album that “Beth” is on!
 

 
For the record (the movie has no credits), Criss is played by Steven Olson, and long-suffering Beth is played by Lilli Birdsell.
 

 
The Cult’s “Ressurection Joe” single came out at the end of 1984 and sonically it’s the midpoint bridge between their Dreamtime album of that autumn and what would come a year later with their more “classic rock”-style longplayer Love, the album that broke the one time goth rockers into the big leagues.

AllMusic.com’s Ned Raggett called the “Ressurection Joe” single:

“... a queasy, nervous, and frenetic combination of aggro epic and swampy funk, which remains an undeservedly forgotten highlight from the early ‘80s, topped only by the dramatic sweep of the later “She Sells Sanctuary.”

I’d have to agree. It’s easily one of their best, most memorable songs but it’s also one that fell through the cracks for many fans more into their later harder-rocking albums like Love, Electric or Sonic Temple but less aware of the tribal/goth ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’ squat punk of their earlier incarnations as the Southern Death Cult and later just Death Cult.
 

 
Here’s the video for “Ressurection Joe” with Ian Astbury playing a voodoo-y Dickensian snake-oil salesman—his look pinched from Christopher Lee’s character in 1958’s Corridors of Blood named—ahem—”Resurrection Joe”—who is clearly up to no good. It says on the Wikipedia page that this video was unknown until the mid-90s when it was released on the VHS home video collection Pure Cult: The Singles 1984-1995, but I seem to recall that MTV was running this fairly regularly at the time when Love was first charting.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
A version of this article first appeared on Night Flight’s website in November 2015.

“I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THIS IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Absolutely bizarre…”

That was R. Stevie Moore’s response in 2013 when I asked him about his knowledge of an obscure LP containing fantastic studio recordings he had made forty years earlier.

Moore, as many of you probably already know, is a pioneer in home recording and an early champion of the lo-fi aesthetic. He’s also a beloved cult figure and considered by many to be the godfather of indie rock. His best songs combine the pop hooks of Lennon and McCartney with the avant-garde stylings of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. In 1976, Moore, who had already been self-releasing his solo material on cassette, put out his first full-length LP, Phonography, which was issued on his own label, Vital Records. To date, R.S.M. has racked up more than 400 releases and has written thousands of songs.

Even with this huge catalog, Moore would have typically known what had been made available, but this was not the case with the aforementioned studio recordings. In 1977, this material was included on a self-titled LP credited to a fictitious group called Hotgun. The album was released by Guinness Records—a notorious tax shelter label.
 

The Warhol-meets-Lichtenstein cover art for ‘Hotgun.’

In the mid 1970s, some savvy individuals identified a section in the U.S. tax code in which investments in sound recordings could qualify for a reduction in taxes. Situations varied, and the entire process was fairly involved, but essentially, this is how it worked.

The owner of a record label would solicit potential investors to license (or lease) a master sound recording from them, which would then be turned into an album. The program outlined by the label focused almost entirely on the tax benefits, rather than profit from the venture itself.

Generally, the label wasn’t even a record company in the traditional sense, and was established solely to market master recordings. Once an investor signed on and forked over their cash—ranging from a few thousand dollars to five figures—the label would take responsibility for overseeing the project. An essential undertaking for the label was having the master evaluated by an appraiser, one who was willing to place an inflated market value on the recording. There was much in the way of smoke and mirrors here.
 

The striking cover art of ‘Time to Give’ by Felix Harp on Guinness Records.

For the next step, tapes were turned over to the packager, who was in charge of putting the finished product together, which included having the artwork created and pressing up the vinyl in a limited run of 1,000 copies.

Somewhere in the album’s credits was the name of an individual or company listed as the copyright holder. These are the names of investors. Though investors didn’t actually have any copyrights related to the recordings, there had to be documentation that they did in order to take advantage of the tax benefits.

At the final stages, the packager placed the completed product in stores. The packager was also responsible for marketing, though, in reality, there wasn’t any serious attempt to promote these records. Most of the LPs that did arrive in stores just sat in the racks, as few knew they existed. It’s believed that large amounts of records were warehoused or destroyed, which is why many tax shelter albums are so hard to come by.

When the LPs invariably didn’t sell, the master recording was written off by the investor as a failed venture, using the inflated appraisal—which went as high as seven figures—as the basis for claiming a loss come tax season.

Though the label, like any other business, could write-off expenses, their much larger slice of the pie came when they leased a master recording, earning thousands of dollars per transaction.

Two of the labels with the most known releases are Tiger Lily, which was operated by Morris Levy, the notorious owner of Roulette Records, and Guinness. The albums these labels released, many of which are now quite rare and sought-after by collectors, are commonly referred to as “tax scam records.”
 

The self-titled Bloodsuckers album on Guinness.

Much more, after the jump…

The Beatles by Guy Peellaert

Animation director Chuck Braverman won an Oscar in 1974 for Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, his 14-minute animated history of the Beatles and their preeminent place in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. It’s a celebration of Beatlemania that is moving, amazing and inspiring.

I saw this three times when I was a kid. It used to come around once a year in the mid-70s as part of a weekend matinee movie “roadshow” that was four hours of Beatles films for $4. Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles at Shea Stadium and Japan ‘66 were some of the other films I recall seeing, but the clear highlight of the show each time was Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, which used footage of the group combined with flashy pop art photo-montage animation. Trust me, this was a pretty astonishing thing to see at the time. Produced by Apple (who else could have gotten all the rights to this material?) and Braverman Productions, it aired on TV one time on Geraldo Rivera’s late night ABC program Good Night America (also where the “Zapruder Film” was first seen on television in 1975).

It’s a seriously cool film, but for whatever reason, it’s practically disappeared off the face of the earth. One of the few places you can actually still rent a 16mm print is at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. (They’ve got quite a few cool things in their collection.)

A minor footnote to this film’s history is that it was picked apart for clues to the whole dumb “Paul is Dead” theory at the time. Braverman also made the opening montage to the dystopian sci-fi cult favorite, Soylent Green.

It’s a pity that the only complete version I could find of this marvelous little Oscar-winning film is so washed-out and tatty looking, but it’s the best I could do, so be grateful for small miracles. You’ll have to mentally “restore” it in your mind as you watch. Do watch it full screen as well, there’s a lot going on.