From Mick Middles’ 1994 documentary on The Fall’s early years.

I nearly spit out my coffee when I watched Mr. Smith’s spot-on impersonation of Courtney Love.

I don’t think the perpetually drunken Mancunian elf-lord had much love for Los Angeles, either.

 
With thanks to Xela Ttun!

Jello Biafra as the president of the United States in Lovedolls Superstar, occupying an empty office adjacent to SST/Global, 1985. Photograph by Jordan Schwartz
 
After the recent release of We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California, a compendium of the landmark 1980s ‘zine, co-creator David Markey answered a few questions for Amber Frost. (You can read my previous review here.)

AF: How did you go about compiling the essays (and essayists) for the book? I’m sure people have spread out quite a bit since the 80s.

Markey: By simply looking at the subjects in the photos, thankfully we were in touch with a lot of them. A few had moved to far away lands, some remained close friends; people that we’ve worked with on various projects over the years. Facebook came in handy with tracking a couple of them down.

AF: When you first started We Got Power! Did you have a concept that you were documenting a movement at the time?

Markey: We were definitely inspired by what was going down. 1981 was just one of those years, there was a collective energy going on. It was an incredibly dense time for music and bands in Southern California. Looking back on it, it was actually a very eclectic scene. It just wasn’t one kind of music really, but it all came together out of a necessity.  Whether you were Fear or the Suburban Lawns; The Descendents or The Gun Club.

AF: There’s a bit in the Cameron Jaime essay that really stuck with me:

I remember realizing as a punk (right around the 2000s), I wouldn’t have reduced my identity to “rage”, but that others did. Do you think there was a cognitive dissonance between how the kids identified themselves at the time and how music history has come to perceive them?

Markey: You have to go back and look at the environment of the early eighties in Los Angeles. At the time, you were fighting the tide by being into this music and scene.  You were asking for trouble in a way, even if that was not necessarily your intent. 

Many were threatened by this music.  The local media went out of their way to paint this scene as violent and destructive. This lead to the now infamous anti-punk episodes of the popular TV shows “Chips” and “Quincy.”

Daryl Gates’ LAPD too had it in big time for the punks, and also the Baby Boomers who had a stranglehold on the music business at the time. Not only that but rednecks in Cameros, who seemed to enjoy yelling “Devo” at us. 

I think maybe we saw all this and decided that humor was the great equalizer. I think it’s better to get someone to laugh and hopefully that will lead to some sort of enlightenment, rather than beat someone over the head with some heavy handed political agenda.

Left to Right, Greg Ginn, Henry Rollins, and Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag, SST Phelan office, on Phelan St. in Redondo Beach. Photograph by David Markey.
 
AF: “Punk is dead” has been bandied about forever. What do you think when reviews of the book start out with lines like, “In 1979, punk was over . . . but by 1981, hardcore was born.”?

Markey: That line was actually penned first by our editor, Ian Christe.  It was great working with him. I think his input to the project was invaluable. I actually considered it “Hardcore Punk”, as we were definitely informed by the Class of ‘77 which had already came and went. We were the next generation of LA Punk.

I think we were maybe trying to expand on what was considered “punk”.  Which you know for many just was a style, a look. A Mohawk. A safety pin through the cheek.  I think perhaps we were trying to go deeper than the surface, the cosmetic.  We were trying to bring it into our lives in a more meaningful way. I wasn’t about wearing manufactured “Anarchy” T-shirts, but I understood how important “no rules” was, especially when there became a more strict definition within the scene itself.

AF: The aesthetic for We Got Power! Is a visual staple for ‘zines at this point- the collages, cartoons, type/image balance, etc- what were your visual inspirations at the time?

Markey: I had done Xerox publications prior to this as a kid with a neighborhood newspaper. I used an electric typewriter and Letra-set rub-off letters. I also think this is where the mazes and word puzzle games were coming from. As a kid I was really into Mad Magazine and early Saturday Night Live. I loved movies like Harold and Maude and Kentucky Fried Movie.

AF: There’s an editorial in the first issue that ends with “Yes, it is true, people with long hair can share the “punk attitude”. The scene is reserved for no one. Everyone is eligible. Everyone counts”. Was “punk policing” much of an issue? Did the scene struggle with exclusivity?

Markey: I recall the first gig I went to, an X show at the Santa Monica Civic, and getting harassed for my hair length by a group of Huntington Beach Skinheads. Jennifer (Jordan’s sister and also a collaborator on the ‘zine) got a big wad of gum in her hair at a Starwood Tuesday night punk show.  There were all sorts of punk politics going on at the time.  Some of which were ridiculous and hypocritical. I think we did our best to diffuse this.

AF: A lot is made of the political context of hardcore, and while bands like The Dead Kennedys were explicitly political, a lot more were implicit. Do you think the scene as a whole had a political consciousness?

Markey: There were overtly political bands but lot of it was about personal politics, like how much someone’s dad sucked, or how lousy it was to be hit in the head with a LAPD baton. I recall at the time people being pretty cynical to all the Anti-Reagan material that was proliferating.  But easy-targets aside, I’d say Reagan made Hardcore possible. There was a lot of humor as well.

The Minutemen, Grandia Room, Hollywood, CA, 1982. Photograph by Jordan Schwartz.
 
AF: What do you think of the trajectory of DIY culture since the 80’s?

Markey: I guess it went from some kid in a bedroom working on a fanzine or some hardcore band’s cover art, to some graphic artist who maybe grew up admiring that aesthetic, who took the idea and turned it into a Nike Ad.

I was DIY before I ever heard the phrase being bandied about. For me it was a necessity. There was just no other way for this stuff to happen. No one else was going to do this work for you. And the key thing for me was, it did not seem like work at all. It seemed like fun.

AF: What did you anticipate the punk developing into at the time? How do you think that compares to what it has become?

Markey:  I just loved the music, and I watched it spread nationally through fanzine culture and various independent record labels, many founded by bands themselves. Then the nineties kicked in, and that showed the direct influence of the American 1980’s underground within the mainstream.

I am not sure if any of us as teenagers had any sort of long term vision of where this would all go. It just sort of went through the changes that it went through. We may have joked about it. But the good thing was many of these previously under heard and unappreciated bands had the attention of more people than ever.  There is always time for rebellion and kids carving out their own way of doing things.  In fact, it’s needed now more than ever. I can only hope this will inspire.

Thanks David, for talking with us, and thanks to Bazillions Points Books for facilitating this and putting out We Got Power!. I can’t possibly recommend it enough for anyone interested in the history and trajectory of punk and DIY.

 

“Youth of America Unite! The rear of the Punk Shack during demolition. Local anti-punk surfers crossed out our Black Flag graffiti as part of an ongoing war. A year or two later, these same culprits would cut their long surfer hair and don Suicidal Tendencies shirts.” Photograph by David Markey

Photo via Chris Holmes on Instagram

Rumor has it that it was not—as the crowd certainly seemed to think—Daft Punk who were DJ’ing at Maroon 5’s elaborate Halloween party the other night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but rather Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Chris Holmes of Ashtar Command in costume as Daft Punk.

Both men were at the party, I saw them myself: Chris Holmes was dressed as a skunk (skunk rhymes with punk… is that a clue?) and Thom Yorke was seen circulating around the grounds—a huge carnival-themed production in an actual graveyard in Los Angeles where the likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks and two Ramones are buried—wearing a Dickensian-looking tramp get-up.

If this is true, I commend these gentlemen for their beyond-the-call-of-duty dedication to this priceless, multi-leveled Halloween gag. I’m guessing that Daft Punk must have been in the crowd—perhaps dressed as Thom Yorke and Chris Holmes—laughing their asses off.

Second place for best costume should go to Maroon 5’s Mickey Madden who was dressed as Skrillex. His costume was so good that my friends and I thought that it was Skrillex dressed as himself.

Via The Daily Swarm
 

 
Further explorations of the best music of 2012.

Cody ChesnuTT’s The Headphone Masterpiece is one of my all-time favorite albums and I’ve been patiently waiting (10 years) for his follow-up. Well, this past Tuesday Cody delivered a new record, Landing On A Hundred, and while it’s a departure from the innovative lo-fi eccentricities of Masterpiece it is no less wonderful. The new album is more easily categorizable - solid soul and funk - and therefore may end up reaching a larger audience. I hope so. ChesnuTT is keeping alive the flame set by cats like Gil Sott-Heron, Al Green and Oscar Brown Jr. He’s the real fucking deal.

Lyrically, it sounds like ChesnuTT has exorcised some of the demons that haunted his past. Perhaps that’s why the new stuff is less whacked-out than the old - and I miss some of that wackiness - but whatever is keeping ChestnuTT alive and well is more important than what was fueling his wilder proclivities. 
 

 
It’s that time of year when I start going through my music collection and try to decide on my favorite songs and albums of the past twelve months. There’s still a couple months left in 2012 and new stuff is surfacing all the time. Releases by U.S. Girls, Cody ChesnuTT, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, Tame Impala and Diamond Rings are freshly in heavy rotation on my turntable and car stereo. Overall, I it’s been a very good year for music. The lists will come later.

Right now, I’m really digging the new wavy sound of Diamond Rings. The project of young Canadian John O’Regan, The Rings sound like music made right around the time O’Regan was born in the early 1980s. If you you’re a fan of OMD, Depeche Mode, New Order and Pet Shop Boys, you’ll probabably dig Diamond Rings’ uncanny talent for replicating the sound and feel of those days when synth pop met goth and we were all just too pretty for words. The album is Free Dimensional and you can buy it here

O’Regan, with his John Sex hairdo and Klaus Nomi fashion sense, is being dimissed by the hipster presss as some kind of retro act for teenyboppers. But I say ignore the mouthbreathers at Pitchfork, Paste and the rest of those sad little men whose lust for life is confined to a firm grip on the toggle stick while navigating through the sexless realms of Skyrim.

Diamond Rings is fun music you can dance too and would have felt perfectly at home pumping through the speakers of the Mudd Club. You can catch them at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin on November 2.

Here’s two tracks from Free Dimensional.: “Everything Speaks” and “Put Me On.”

The video contains nudity and throbbing blobs of color.
 

 
The clues may have been there all along, as to Gary Glitter’s sexual predilections. His lyrics claimed he was the man who “put the bang in gang” and asked if we wanted to touch him there.

Now, m’colleague Tara McGinley has uncovered this incredibly creepy version of Glitter’s 1973 hit, “Do You Wanna Touch Me”, which has been slowed-down 10 times by scorzonera, to reveal its full chilling horror.

Play Loud.

Happy Halloween.
 

 
With thanks to Tara McGinley!
 

 
43 punk and power pop rockers from the late 1970s and early 80s for your Halloween listening pleasure. Plus, a bunch of cool horror and exploitation movie trailers!

Don’t Spit on Me - Snuky Tate
Making Room For Youth - Social Unrest
I Didn’t Get It - The Saucers
Teddy Crashes Blonde Dies - The Sinatras
On Whom They Beat - Sadonation
Walking Out On Love - Paul Collins
Pretty Please Me - The Quick
Let’s Shake - Teenage Head
Move It On Over - The Wild Giraffes
Senseless - The Real Kids
Out Of Order - The Skinnies
Gimme Gimme Some - The Skunks
Problem Child - The Slugs
Head Over Heels - The Upstarts
Strike Three - 63 Monroe
Tell Me The Rules - Sorex
Break The Ice - The Scruffs
When I Was Younger - The Shivvers
Working On The Roof - Sgt. Arms
Let Me Take Your Photo - The Speedies
Run My Life - The Rattlecats
Can’t Tell You Anything - The Romantics
Something On My Mind - The Speedies
We Were That Noise - Shock
Nothing Special - Schematic
Killing Machine - The Sins
Never Should Have Told You - The Slugs
Drunk And Disorderly - The Shirkers
Till We Die - The Shreds
Violent Days - Screaming Sneakers
Nothing Of My Own - The Victims
It’s Not Right - F Models
The Break - The Penetrators
Kids Gonna Do It - 391
Social Circle - UXA
Black Haired Girl - The Alley Cats
Kill Me - Roger C. Reale and Rue Morgue
Burn It Down - The Suicide Commandos
Chop Up Your Mother - The Sic Fucks
Cheap Tragedies - Randy Rampage
One Step Closer - Stranglehold
God Is Dead - Heart Attack
This Is Rock And Roll - The Kids

Definitely not suitable for work.
 

 
Anne Pigalle says ‘enough is enough’ to Lady Gaga, over the pop diva’s alleged copying of the fabulous chanteuse’s celebrated image.

Ms. Pigalle tells Dangerous MInds that she will be posting a series of comparative photographs that will highlight apparent similarities between her own celebrated and idiosyncratic style with Lady Gaga’s recent make-overs. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but nothing beats originality.

Now, judge for yourself, as we post a selection of these pictures.
 

 
More from Pigalle/Gaga, after the jump…
 

 
And believe me, you’ll be glad you did!

Andy Votel is one of the UK’s most renowned crate diggers and DJs, as well as boss of the Finders Keepers record label.

Last year Finders Keepers printed up a limited run of a mix compilation called Hindi Horrorcore, which, as the name would suggest, compiled the best of Bollywood’s creepy film score music. The mix was given away free with Finders Keepers purchases, and this year Votel has kindly uploaded the full mix for punters who missed out the first time round.

Yes, we are fans of niche, Halloween-themed mixes here at DM, and this one is a beauty, taking an old trope (“spoooky sounds”) and giving it a fresh twist that will appeal to fans of obscure psyche rock, world music and film soundtracks.

There is no track listing for the mix, but there are some names connoisseurs of Bollywood music will recognize. This is taken from the CD’s Discogs page:

Subtitled: “From The Bollywood Bloodbath: the B-Music from the Indian horror film industry”.

“A bewitching hour of pre-vamped vintage Hindi horror from the Desi-Dracula’s music cabinet featuring rare tracks from Bappi Lahiri, R.D. Burman and Sapan Jagmohan” - butchered by resident werewolf Andy Votel. Available with all orders over £25 from the Finders Keepers webshop.

Get this mix now, before it disappears like a vamp in the daylight, from this link.

 
About the hand of George Clinton:

George Clinton’s hand has been cloned by the artist Marc Sokpolie also known as Zwazi. We made polyurethane copies from the silicone mold.

All the detail is there, all the veins, skin creases, pores, in fact we had to sand down the fingerprints slightly because we don’t want to get too private!

The hand has a built-in USB flash drive in the detachable index finger. The base of the hand has an embossed ‘George Clinton’ logo and a serial number. We started at nr. 2, because nr. 1 is George’s own right hand, which he’s not going to sell! The USB flash drive comes exclusively with the documentary entitled: “The Silence in Between” by Mark Limburg of Stone Film.

Put the hand on a bookshelf, or on a shelf with all your Parliament/Funkadelic records, where it will radiate the highest FUNK potential possible… remember it’s the closest you can get to George… If you don’t have a backstage pass!

I’m not sure how I feel about this. You can purchase Dr. Funkenstein’s digits at George Clinton’s Hand for € 60.00.
 

 
Via Nerdcore