Let’s get one thing clear before we go any further - this new Madonna single is AWFUL. It’s really is so terrible that I’m gonna call “Girl Gone Wild” Madonna’s Showgirls moment: it’s so bad, it’s good!

And that’s why this video is just perfect.

You’ll have seen the footage before, no doubt, as Tara posted it a few weeks back in its original form: “Skeletons Having Sex On A Tin Roof” by Orphic Oxtra. It works even better here, as Madonna’s insipid, wannabe-edgy lyrics (“girls just wanna have some fun” - er, okay) are juxtaposed by that cheerful-slash-insane-looking dancing lady. The overall half-assed vibe of the song’s production fits the video’s green-screen ethos like a glove. Madonna will have to go some way to top this with the official video.

Also, just for the record, no “808 drums” were used in the making of this song:

Madonna “GIrl Gone Wild” [Official Music Video - NOT!]
 

 
Thanks to Sharon Needles and Matthew Rothery.

 
The angular industrial stomp of Houston’s Indian Jewelry has much in common with the sonic depravities of Faust, Suicide and fellow Texan weirdos the Butthole Surfers. Their live shows are seizure-inducing whirlwinds of evil, stroboscopic energy and throbbing power electronics delivered with the force of being hit by a Mack truck, but by all accounts, bandleaders Erika Thrasher and Tex Kerschen, a happily married married couple with a newborn baby girl, are two of the nicest and most well-adjusted people around who also happen to make ear-splitting rock and roll drones for a living.

Indian Jewelry is currently out on their “Expect Delays” tour in the Western region of the United States.

Is it true that you never rehearse? How does that work, do you all go into some sort of hypnotic mind-meld before you walk onstage?

Not exactly, we have rehearsed before, but it didn’t go well. Now we rely more on a technique we call ‘just try to listen to the song on your own time and then go for it.’

Are you two the new Kim and Thurston? How does your daughter like touring?

The new Kim and Thurston?  We’re not even the new Sonny and Cher. But if Kim and Thurston were forever lost in a steaming subtropical strip mall of a city, if Kim and Thurston were a little slow on the draw and didn’t get along that well with others, if musicality was completely out the window, social climbing was altogether forbidden, and Thurston had to use a stepladder to reach the books on the high shelves… then maybe we could draw a likeness.

We do tour with our infant daughter, and she has seen almost every graffiti-ridden alleyway in the US and she’s barely seven months old. She gets five adults fawning on her day and night. She hates the carseat but she loves the constant attention.

You must play in Austin a lot, what are the things that people just in town for the festival shouldn’t miss?

We’re from Houston, not all that far away, and here’s what long experience has taught us: All this talk of “beer” and “barbecue” is a throwback to the Bush dynasty; before their reign Austin was a wilder, freer, more psychedelic place. So go veggie (or at least Tex-Mex) and seek out the more illicit realms of pleasure. That is to say, that, like everyone else you’ll find us in line at Tamale House!

Where will you be playing during SXSW?

Playing our showcase with Future Blondes and Lumerians Saturday the 17th at the Iron Bear. That and a party via Austin Psych Fest at the SpiderHouse sometime on the 15th.

This raw, single-shot video from Chris Musgrave was recorded at an Oakland CA underground venue that must remain un-named to protect the complicit. Black out the room, then turn up the volume to make-believe you were there.
 

Austin street art. Photo credit: Mirgun Akyavas
 
Greetings from sunny Austin, TX. Well at least it’s supposed to be sunny today and tomorrow, but never mind that persistant pouring rain, Dangerous Minds will be covering the SXSW music festival all this week. I got in last Thursday and Marc Campbell and I have been roaming around Austin trying to take it all in and report back about a little of what’s going on here. It’s a loud, colorful food truck-strewn chaos of a city right now, that’s for sure. Every single square inch of Austin seems to have some sort of corporate branding.

I’ve eaten some great food, seen some amazing films and soon enough the music part of the festival wil start. In the coming days, we’ll be bringing you movie premieres (Small Apartments with Matt Lucas and Johnny Knoxville, the epic new Bob Marley documentary, the charming Grandma Low-Fi, the Bad Brains doc and many more), interviews with Indian Rope, Cloud Nothings, Daytrotter’s Sean Moeller and some “unplugged sessions” that have been scheduled with Jonathan Wilson,Father John Misty, Jenny O, Bee vs. Moth, Madi Diaz, Chelsea Wolfe, Poor Moon and the premiere of a new music video from Bay Area druid spacerockers Lumerians.

Click here to see Mirgun Akyavas’ photo gallery of Austin street art.

More music and film coverage at Tap Into Austin 2012.

 
The world’s first computer generated pop promo? Possibly. “Camoulflage” was a single released by the late Chris Sievey (a.k.a Frank Sidebottom) in 1983, on his Random Records label. Sievey had started programing on his Sinclair ZX81 Home Computer, and included on the B-side of his single, the data (in audio format) for 3 programs to run on the Sinclair ZX81. All of the programs were written by Sievey himself, but most intrestingly, one of the programs was an animated video for the song “Camouflage”. Now, more than thirty years later, here is “the first ever real-time home computer generated pop video.”

For more details on the making of the promo, check soundhog09 notes here.
 

 
With thanks to Tom Law
 

 
Early B&W video footage of Bruce Springsteen performing “Growin’ Up” at Max’s Kansas City on August 10, 1972.
 

 
David Bowie happened to be there that night and this is what he had to say about the then unknown Boss’s performance:

“So this guy is sitting up there with an acoustic guitar doing a complete Dylan thing. My friend and I were about to leave when he started introducing a band who were joining him on stage.”

“The moment they kicked in he was another performer. All the Dylanesque stuff dropped off him and he rocked. I became a major fan that night and picked up Asbury Park immediately.”

In 1973 Bowie recorded “Growin’ Up” as part of the Pin Ups sessions. The song didn’t make the cut, but it would see Bowie record the very first Bruce Springsteen cover. Two years later, during the Young Americans sessions, Bowie laid down a soul version of Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to be a Saint In The City” with the Boss in attendance for the mixdown at Philadelphia recording studio, Sigma Sound.

Below, another song recorded at Max’s that same night (actually the set’s opening number), “Henry Boy.”
 

 
Via Max’s Kansas City

 
OK, enough of the hating between the rockers and the disco-freaks! This ain’t the damn 70s, so why can’t we all just get along? In love, peace and some sweat-drenched bell bottoms? Besides, there is a big crossover between these two supposedly “opposing” genres.

About five or six years ago, at the height of both nu-disco and the Italo revival (and while I was releasing music under the name Trippy Disco), I found myself playing more and more vintage disco records with crashing power-chords and wailing axe solos. Because of the “sell out” accusations that these kind of records attracted at the time (from both camps) it’s a side of disco that’s been neglected, even though I love those sounds. So, I decided to put together an hour’s worth of my favourite disco/rock records, and, lo, the ‘Skool Of Rock’ mix was born.

I decided not to feature anything too “New Wave” or post-punk as the disco influence on those sounds was already very obvious, though I did get to slip in a few acts who would technically be classed as “disco” but who dipped into “rock” now and again (Edwin Starr and Giorgio Moroder, for instance.) And accordingly, there’s also the obligatory disco cash-ins by some of your favourite rock acts (Queen, Bowie, ZZ Top.)  Besides that, there are some real gems here, including the Patrick Cowley remix of Tantra’s “Hills Of Katmandu” which is one the most “fuck yeah!” fist-pumping disco anthems of all time.

So, you might love this mix, you might really hate it, but either way here it is: 
 

 
Tracklist:

ELO “Don’t Bring Me Down (Trippy Disco Re-Edit)”
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL “Fortunate Son”
ROCKETS “On The Road Again”
EDWIN STARR “The Rock”
CHILLY “For Your Love”
KISS “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”
TANTRA “Hills Of Katmandu (Patrick Cowley Megamix / Automan Edit)”
LED ZEPPELIN “Whole Lotta Love (Acapella)”
MATERIAL “Bustin’ Out”
ZZ TOP “Legs (Metal Mix)”
GIORGIO MORODER “Evolution”
MACHO “Not Tonight (Dimitri From Paris Re-Edit)”
SKATT BROS “Walk The Night (Album Version)”
QUEEN “Another One Bites The Dust”
DAVID BOWIE “Stay”
WINGS “Goodnight Tonight (Trippy Disco Re-Edit)”

You can download the ‘Skool Of Rock’ mix here.

BONUS!

David Bowie performing “Stay”, live on Muzikladen, Bremen 1978:
 

 
Many, many books have been written about disco, and I have read a whole bunch of them (including more well known works like Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro, Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco by Daryl Easlea and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night by Anthony Haden Guest) but still nothing comes close to matching Tim Lawrence’s exhaustive yet entertaining Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-79.

For those of you who still believe that disco was nothing more than an music-industry creation dreamt up in a backroom by a bunch of coked-up suits and sold to passive, gullible consumers too high to know it was an empty fad (here’s looking’ at you, Em!) then you need to get your hands on this book. That goes for anyone else with an interest in the disco genre, particularly those who know the basics of the story but crave more. Because, believe me, it’s all here.

Lawrence is a lecturer at the University of East London and a renowned writer on dance music and culture. He has in the past published books on the avant garde/disco composer and performer Arthur Russell (Hold On To Your Dreams; Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene 1973-1992) and most recently added the introductory foreword to Voguing And The House Ballroom Scene of New York City, 1989-92. But to me, at least, Love Saves The Day is still his best work. From his website:

Opening with David Mancuso’s seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s - from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.

Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin - as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music’s tireless engine.

TIm Lawrence may not have lived through this era, but his book is phenomenally well-researched and features interviews with all of the remaining key players, sketching the very earliest days of the movement: from David Mancuso’s Loft parties to Francis Grasso mixing records at the Sanctuary as far back as 1970 (the first dj ever to do so), from Nicky Siano opening The Gallery while still a teenager in 1972 to Steve Ostrow’s gay/mixed Continental Baths (home not just to performances by Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, but also the venue where future legendary djs Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles cut their teeth.) all the way up through the decade to the opening of both Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage.

Love Saves The Day IS exhaustive (perhaps too exhaustive for disco newcomers) and while it can act as a great reference for fact-checkers, it’s also an entertaining read that spares little detail of the complicated drug-and-sex lives of these people. This was an era of radical social change and these folks (and this music) were right at the forefront of those changes. The first chapter of Love Saves The Day is available to read in full on Lawrence’s website, and it focuses on David Mancuso, the man whose Loft apartment-cum-dance-space gave birth to disco culture and who, to this day, remains the beating heart of “real” disco. It also makes clear the connection between hippie culture of the 60s and the emerging gay/black/female-centeric dance culture of the 70s:

When it came to public venues Mancuso’s preferred to go to the Electric Circus, which opened in June 1967, and the Fillmore East, which opened in the spring of 1968. Both of these psychedelic haunts were situated in the East Village — the Electric Circus was located in an old Polish workingman’s club on St. Mark’s Place, the Fillmore East, in the words of the New York Times, on “freaky Second Avenue” — and both hosted live entertainment 1. “I went to the Electric Circus at least once a month,” says Mancuso. “Everybody was having fun and they had good sound in there. It was very mixed, very integrated, very intense, very free, very positive.” The Fillmore East showcased some of his favourite artists. “I heard Nina Simone perform there. I went with my friend Larry Patterson. The Fillmore East would often be noisy but that night everybody was very focused. She was wonderful.”

Mancuso didn’t just go to the Fillmore East to listen to music. “That’s where I also first heard Timothy Leary. He gave a series of lectures backed by the Joshua Light Show.” The ex-Harvard academic was already an important figure for Mancuso, who had first taken Sandoz when he was twenty and the drug was still legal. An early trip coincided with a snowstorm (“each flake was like a universe”) and ten tabs later he came across Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which argues that psychedelics can provide a shortcut to enlightenment. “The book blew me away. It became my bible and I started getting involved with him.” The young acolyte met the acid guru at his LSD (“League for Spiritual Discovery”) headquarters in the West Village, went to his Technicolor lectures and became a regular at his private parties. “People were tripping but the parties were more social than serious. There was food and music. I knew we were on a journey.”
Mancuso’s personal voyage took a vital turn in 1965 when he purchased the key to 647 Broadway, just north of Houston, for two hundred dollars.

Like Soho, NoHo (as the north of Houston area was nicknamed) had historically functioned as a manufacturing district, drawing on New York’s immigrant population as its low-wage workforce, and when industry relocated to the cheaper terrain of New Jersey and beyond New York’s artists moved in, delighted to exchange their cramped Upper East Side apartments for a range of stunningly expansive lofts. The influx triggered off a sophisticated experiment into the relationship between art, space and living that apparently excluded the likes of Utica-born Mancuso, but he quickly established himself as a key player within this creative population, intent as he was on reintroducing art back into the party. “Everyone loved my space,” he says. “There might have been a hundred people living like this so it was very new. A lot of people would just come and hang out there. There were all sorts of activities going on.”

Some of these activities were influenced by Leary. “I would organise these intimate gatherings where we would experiment with acid,” says Mancuso. “There were never more than five of us when we did this. One person would take nothing, another would take half a tab and the rest would take a whole tab. It was all very new and we took it very seriously. We used The Psychedelic Experience as our guide.” Leary also had a bearing on the decoration of the loft space. “I built a yoga shrine, which I used for yoga and tripping. In the beginning it was three feet by five feet and it eventually grew to fifteen feet by thirty feet. As you walked into the loft you were immediately drawn to this area. It was gorgeous.”

Music — which was similar to LSD inasmuch as it could function as a therapeutic potion that “de-programmes” the mind before opening up a mystical trail that culminates in spiritual transcendence — was also introduced into the equation. “Leary played music at his lectures and parties and I went in the same direction. I bought a Tandberg tape recorder so that I could play tapes. The Buddha was always positioned between my two speakers.” That was the perfect position from which to hear the homemade compilations, which drew on a diverse range of sources and were structured to complement the hallucinogenic experience. “I made these journey tapes that would last for five hours. They drew on everything from classical music to the moody blues. They would start off very peacefully and the reentry would be more about movement, more jazz-oriented. Somebody might get up and start dancing around the room at some point, although they weren’t dance sessions.”

...and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

I can’t stress enough how good this book is, and how anyone with an interest in disco, underground culture or the 70s should try and track down a copy. It features some invaluable dj playlists from specific spots and times, which act as a checklist for a whole world of great, under-valued music, but besides that, it’s just a great read. I dip in and out of it all the time, and still find amazement and amusement after many readings, so I guess it would be pretty fair to say that Love Saves The Day is my bible. 

You can find a copy of Love Saves The Day on Amazon.

 
A powerful performance by The Flaming Lips - St. Louis, Mo. 1987.

Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, and Richard English.

Songs:

“One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning”
“Just Like Before”
“Prescription: Love”
“With You”
“Charlie Manson Blues”
“Unplugged”
“Staring at Sound / Everybody’s Talking at Me”
“Scratchin’ The Door / Who Do You Love / A Day in the Life”

This band soars on huge metallic wings.
 

 
Springsteen at The Apollo on March 9 with Ben Stiller, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the mosh pit.

Is The Boss singing “Waiting On A Sunny Day” with any hint of irony in front of his well-heeled audience? The sun shines for all or none at all.
 

Sanders wearing his ‘Talking Tie’
 
Ed Sanders read/sings his poem “Henri Matisse” while playing his inventions the ‘talking tie’ and fingersynths. Lovely.

From founding the band The Fugs to opening the Peace Eye Bookstore and publishing Fuck You and The Woodstock Journal, Sanders has been a high caliber wordsmith and shit stirring provocateur. A big inspiration to me and many of my generation.
 

 
In this interview from 1975, interviewer Harold Channer gives a crash course in how not to conduct an interview. Lord, I wish he’d shut up. But it’s worth watching for those moments when Sanders gets to speak.