Johnny “Guitar” Watson, who took his stage name from the campy Joan Crawford western Johnny Guitar, was a highly influential soul, blues and funk guitarist whose career began in the early 1950s. Watson attacked his guitar strings so hard (“stressified on them,” as he put it) that he would often have to replace them during a performance. Listen to his 1954 number “Space Guitar” and tell me this isn’t the most crazy, sci-fi advanced guitar playing that was done in that entire decade. The man is beating the shit out of his guitar here. He’s also pioneering the use of feedback and reverb as well:
Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Frank Zappa were known to be aficionados of Watson’s innovative guitar technique and showmanship. In a 1979 interview, Zappa stated that Watson’s 1956 song “Three Hours Past Midnight” was his favorite song of all time and “inspired me to become a guitarist”:
Watson’s “Gangster of Love” was covered by Steve Miller and referenced, too, in Miller’s AM radio classics “The Joker” (“Some call me the gangster of love”) and “Space Cowboy” (“Some call me the a gangster of love”; “Is your name “Stevie ‘Guitar’ Miller?”)
In the late 1960s, Watson’s slick soulster style pompadour hairdo gave way to a new look: fedoras, gold teeth, bell-bottom suits, platform shoes, huge sunglasses and flashy jewelry. Watson dressed like a pimp and acted like a pimp and according to Sam Cooke biographer, Peter Guralnick, Watson was an actual pimp (because it “paid better” than music!).
The mid to late 1970s was the time of Watson’s biggest fame. He died in 1996 while touring in Japan.
This 45-minute performance on the German TV series Musikladen from 1977 absolutely tears the roof off the mother. His band is insanely good, too.
“A very large poem handwritten by Captain Beefheart on the back of a concert poster, signed “Don Van Vliet ‘75,” with a drawing of a foot surrounded by musical notes. This is the most extraordinary Beefheart item we’ve seen, and the letter of authenticity from music writer and label executive Bill Bentley explains it all: “In 1975 I interviewed Captain Beefheart at the Armadillo World Headquarters for the Austin (TX) Sun. Beefheart was appearing there with Frank Zappa’s band, recording a live album (Bongo Fury.) After the interview I asked Captain Beefheart to draw me a picture, since he was doodling as we spoke. He got a poster from another Armadillo show and on the back quickly wrote out this poem. The words flowed out of him spontaneously. He signed it and handed it to me, and then took it back. He added at the end, “Progress is Channel No. 5 on the rocks,” and then drew a foot around those words with notes circling it. He called it his “footnote.” As I got ready to leave, I started to fold the poster. He said very loudly, “No!” He took it from me and rolled it up before handing it back, and said “Some day you’ll thank me.” He didn’t want me to crease the poster, knowing it would adversely affect the value. We ran the poem along with the interview shortly after in the Austin Sun.” Written on the back of an Armadillo poster for the band Greezy Wheels, 11 1/2” x 17 1/2”, in very good plus condition with some tape pulling around the edges and a missing bit of paper on the top right edge. Unique. With our written lifetime guarantee of authenticity.”
If you’re like me, you can’t resist a good piece of moral panic red-baiting propaganda, especially when it’s directed at a social phenomenon that seems so chaste by today’s standards. As luck might have it, I recently came across the 1974 opus, The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music, by the good Reverend David A. Noebel.
Evangelical tracts denouncing rock ‘n’ roll, especially as related to either homosexuality or “race mixing,” aren’t hard to find if you scour antique shops in middle America, but as something of a connoisseur of the genre, I have yet to find a piece of literature that so succinctly combines the collective fears of old, white, crazy, Christian dudes. David Noebel, ordained in 1961, started his illustrious career with the above pamphlet, Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles. He saw the rise of Beatlemania as the result of Communist indoctrination via hypnosis (yup, just like the title), a thesis he developed more thoroughly in his 1964 book, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music, the Communist Master Music Plan. The book transitioned from The Beatles to folk artists, focusing on Bob Dylan, his colleagues, and their earlier influences. This is at least slightly more understandable, when one considers the political leanings of the folk movement, frequently with explicit anti-racist, pro-labor lyrics.
The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music however, synthesizes all of his previous work, citing children’s records, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll as being part and parcel to some elaborate integrationist, free-love, Communist conspiracy. As a rock ‘n’ roll propaganda collector, I’m used to trudging through a lot of this stuff, and the majority of it is incoherent ramblings—the sort of thing you’d read in a madman’s personal manifesto. Noebel is compelling because he’s intelligent, coherent, and well-researched, despite being absolutely paranoid and utterly mad. Aside from some inconsistent use of the Oxford Comma, he has a clear, if discursive thesis: rock ‘n’ roll is turning kids into gay, Communist, miscegenators.
Some of his “evidence” is fascinating. For example, Alan Freed’s “payola scandal”—who was paying him to play all those rock ‘n’ roll records to unsuspecting teenagers? Communist record companies invade the airwaves by bribery, infecting the youth with music that is ““un-Christian, mentally unsettling, revolutionary and a medium for promiscuity.” He cites psychological studies, sociological statistics, numerology, etc. to scientifically “prove” the moral degradation incited by popular music, causing everything from sky-rocketing “illegitimate” birth rates to sexual rioting. Lots of sexual rioting. The appendices are incredibly dense and well-cited.
What follows his strange assessment of rock ‘n’ roll is an (actually, semi-accurate) account of the American Left, including some background of the American Communist Party and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Then of course, Noebel posits that folk artists were inspiring the youth to instigate a race war. He believed acoustic musicians like Malvina Reynolds (her “Little Boxes” is the theme music to Weeds) and Pete Seeger were instructing white students to join with “radical groups of Negro racists” so that they might revolt and achieve racial dominance in America. The weirdest part of all this is that by 1974, integration was (at least, on paper) complete. The folk artists who were most explicitly leftist or Communist weren’t a particular focus of pop culture, The Beatles had already long been broken up, and he never quite explains how these two very distinct fanbases are somehow connected (except that they’re obviously both very Communist). One can only imagine the lovely psychosis that The MC5 would have brought him.
Noebel is still living today, and I recommend checking out his extensive collection of YouTube videos and blog, if you’re looking for a laugh. These days, he’s much more on the “Obama’s a Socialist” train and decrying “Warmism” (Noebel’s evocative name for climate change) than he is into denouncing rock ‘n’ roll. Hell, even Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. Still, his older words bring an odd comfort, when we read his treatise on rock ‘n’ roll, comparing it to a children’s record that supposedly contained subliminal messages only audible when the record is played in reverse; “the noise that many of our youth call music is analogous to the story tape played backwards. It is invigorating, vulgarizing, and orgiastic. It is destroying our youth’s ability to relax, reflect, study, pray, and meditate, and is in fact preparing them for riot, civil disobedience, and revolution.” Dear god, I hope so.
Roxy Music own the stage at the Musikladen studios, as they showcase 3 songs from For Your Pleasure, and one from their self-titled first album.
There is a book to be written on how Roxy Music are a key component to so many teenage evolutions (my own included), and the touchstone for so many bands, from Chic to Siouxsie and the Banshees. There’s also a major tome to be written on Bryan Ferry, that suave, sophisticated, cool-as-fuck genius who progressed through so many musical styles yet always maintained essentially true to his own vision.
Add to that the fact Roxy’s music is a fresh and as vital today, as it was forty years ago.
Track listing:
01. “Do the Strand”
02. “Editions of You”
03. “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”
04. “Re-Make/Re-Model”
The Looters. Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Ray Winstone, and Paul Simonon. Photo: Caroline Coon.
Here’s a little something from the DM archives:
These are fictional music groups or solo acts that were created for film or TV. Some are quite excellent.
1. The Mosquitoes - “Gilligan’s Island”
2. Android - “Buck Rogers In The 25th Century”
3. The Looters -“Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains”
4. The Flowerbuds - “Carry On Camping”
5. Drimble Wedge And The Vegetations - “Bedazzled”
6. Steven Shorter - “Privilege”
7. The Bugaloos - “The Electric Company
8. Tom Monroe - “SCTV
9. The Queen Haters” - SCTV
Their 2012 reunion tour is getting praised up the yinyang and their stature has deservedly grown to legend status since they broke-up back in 2001, so it seems like as good a time as any to visit At The Drive-In during the year in which they were peaking, crashing and burning, all at the same time.
Here’s a live performance in Germany from 2001. The venue is small (Zwischenfall club, R.I.P.). The camerawork and sound is excellent. At The Drive-In…in your face.
Here’s a very cool documentary about mods that aired on French TV show Seize Millions Des Jeunes in March of 1965. Includes live performances by the Who as well as interviews with the band and their managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.
You may have seen segments of this documentary on Youtube over the years, but this one is complete and has subtitles. If you want to own it, buy the Blu-ray version of the newly and beautifully restored Quadrophenia. While I’m not a big fan of the movie, Criterion deserves accolades for doing a brilliant job (along with the Who) of polishing the sound mix (in its original stereo and a fresh 5.1 version) and cleaning up the original film elements and transferring them to digital. The results are stunning.
GRIMMS was a like a collision between a busload of musicians, a van full of comics and a mobile library. As Supergroups go, GRIMMS was certainly the most original, literary and possibly hirsute, with their mix of poetry, music, comedy and theater.
“I don’t know what attracted the Scaffold to the Bonzos; we were incredibly anarchic, which was probably something shared by the Scaffold as well. Hence Grimms, this leap in the dark.”
We all know about the genius of The Bonzos, so let’s jump to The Scaffold, that strange hybrid pop band made up from John Gorman (who would go onto star in the children’s show Tiswas, and its adult counterpart OTT with Chris Tarrant and Alexei Sayle in the 1980s), Mike McGear (Paul McCartney’s brother), and poet Roger McGough, who had been one of the 3 Mersey Poets, and was a member of The Liverpool Scene. The Scaffold had chart success with their novelty records “Thank U Very Much”, “Lily the PInk” and “Liverpool Lou”, the last recorded with Paul McCartney and Wings
Liverpool Scene was the Liverpool Poets: McGough (works include Summer With Monika, After The Merrymaking), Brian Patten (works include Little Johnny’s Confession and Notes to the Hurrying Man) and Adrian Henri (The Mersey Sound), and musician Andy Roberts.
GRIMMS changed shape over the years as band members left, moved on or lost hair. These were quickly replaced by hats, wigs and some very special talents, including Keith Moon (The Who), Jon Hiseman (Colosseum), Michael Giles (King Crimson), John Megginson, Gerry Conway, David Richards, Zoot Money, and future Rutles John Halsey and Peter “Ollie” Halsall.
Their first album Grimms was a lucky bag of comedy, poetry and music released in 1973, which included Innes’ songs “Humanoid Boogie”, “Short Blues” and “Twyfords Vitromant”, which was followed later the same year with Rockin’ Duck and in 1975 their final album the 5 star Sleepers.
Unlike most list documentaries today (which miss out on such diamonds as GRIMMS), the seventies was an incredible time of experimentation and risk-taking. In 1975, around the release of Sleepers, the BBC (gawd bless her and all who fail in her) produced a strange series called The Camera and The Song. It was like a collection of early pop promos, with a film-maker interpreting songs by different artists - some good, some bloody awful. Into this mix came GRIMMS, and here are 2 clips from the show (opening titles and songs) featuring the genius talents of Neil Innes and co. Lovely!
More from GRIMMS plus bonus track ‘Backbreaker’, after the jump…
A couple of years ago Dangerous Minds featured a Velvet Underground/Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell mashup that resonated with a lot of our readers and eventually went viral. The guy that did that mashup, joeypropeller, has created something new that shares some of the haunting ambient quality of his Velvets/Gaye project. Propeller’s blending of Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love” and Booker T and The MGs’ “Green Onions” isn’t all that crafty or gimmicky, it’s just kind of cool and eerie - an opium dream of sexy funk. And by pitch-shifting Summer’s vocal, the whole thing sounds like it’s being beamed in from another planet.
Okay, this is an excellent way to end the workweek: A tribute to Paul’s Boutique by DJ Cheeba, DJ Moneyshot and DJ Food.
3 years in the making, 3 DJs working with over 150 tracks to recreate one of the seminal sampling albums of all time, at last Cheeba, Moneyshot and I can reveal ‘Caught In The Middle Of A 3-Way Mix’. Our tribute to the classic Beastie Boys album ‘Paul’s Boutique’ remixed and re-imagined from all the original samples plus a cappellas, period interviews and the Beasties’ own audio commentary from the reissued release.
See a list of all the samples used after the jump…
, by the good Reverend David A. Noebel.
. The book transitioned from The Beatles to folk artists, focusing on Bob Dylan, his colleagues, and their earlier influences. This is at least slightly more understandable, when one considers the political leanings of the folk movement, frequently with explicit anti-racist, pro-labor lyrics.
