As the airwaves become flooded with the deafening clamor of mindless chatter revolving around the death of Whitney Houston, I hope the voice of the woman herself isn’t drowned out.
This clip from the TV series Silver Spoons features 22-year-old Houston singing her first top ten hit “Saving All My Love For You” and it’s gorgeous.
Today is Gene Vincent’s birthday. And while the film I’m sharing to commemorate this date is hardly an uplifter, it is a touching testament to Gene Vincent’s devotion to his art and fans.
In 1957 Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula had sold two million copies and he was an International star. But his meteoric rise was followed by tragedy and tough times in the 1960s. While he continued to record and tour with some success, particularly in England, by the mid-60s his music career was as battered as his body.
Gene Vincent: The Rock And Roll Singer documents Vincent’s British tour of 1969. Working with a pickup band and playing dingy clubs and small halls at “the rough end of the music biz,” the film follows Vincent and his loyal crew as they struggle to make enough money to get from gig to gig. There’s a sad beauty in the whole mess.
In addition to the financial problems of the tour, Vincent was suffering debilitating pain from a 1955 motorcycle accident and the taxi cab collision that killed his fellow passenger and friend Eddie Cochran in 1960. As we watch Vincent perform in front of his adoring fans, you can practically feel his exhaustion and see the hurt behind his determined smile.
Less than two years after this documentary was filmed, Vincent was dead of a burst ulcer. He was only 36 years old.
Sweet Gene Vincent.
A trippy alchemical potion of a movie, Space Is The Place inhabits an alternative reality that could only exist in the Afrodelic cosmology of Saturnian jazz priest Sun Ra.
Directed by John Coney in 1974, the movie is a hybrid of B-grade sci-fi, Blaxploitation flix (on shrooms), the films of Kenneth Anger and surrealist head trips like El Topo and the electric western Zachariah.
In the film, as in life, Sun Ra is the quintessential outsider and space is a metaphorical Eden for this much put upon black man. The plot is threadbare, involving villainous pimps and dealers, Black Panther avenger protagonists, local nightclubs, pool halls, cat houses, and, of course, an Outer Space Employment Agency that Sun Ra sets up after coming to Earth from a faraway planet. To recruit a new colony, he espouses racial freedom through Egyptian epigrams, Stockhausen-like jazz and a spirit filled Rocket Ship. Of course, Ra is challenged by establishment agents and a supreme villain, the Overseer (Ray Johnson), who lures impressionable black men away from Ra’s brand of truth with the vices of sex and money. Ra preaches against decadence and hits a nerve when showing the pimp and his followers that they are no different than the White Man (Nixon, here) they rage against. Ra promises a land of racial harmony and social justice lies within the Milky Way’s stars, and who are we to argue?” - Alfred Eaker
The cinematic equivalent of one of Sun Ra’s free jazz improvs, Space Is The Place is all over the cosmic map so it helps to find that Zen spot where you just lock into the frequency and go with the flow. As Sun Ray instructs, get in tune with the universe.
“The people have no music that is in coordination with their spirits. Because of this, they’re out of tune with the universe. Since they don’t have money, they don’t have anything. If the planet takes hold of an alter destiny, there’s hope for all of us. But otherwise the death sentence upon this planet still stands. Everyone must die.” - Sun Ra
Set your controls for the heart of the Sun Ra.
An all-out, 15-minute-long aural assault by Can on Ege Bamyasi’s “Spoon,” here turned into an epic jam ala “Sister Ray” during the Can Free Concert at the Cologne Sporthalle on February 3, 1972 (Available on DVD
Fun fact: “Spoon” was the theme tune to a popular German crime drama titled Das Messer (“The Knife”).
Via Exile on Moan Street/Other People’s Props
Frank Zappa makes a 1978 appearance on Make Me Laugh, an awful looking game show hosted by Bobby Van. Zappa nearly wordlessly promotes his then new Sheik Yerbouti
You can clearly tell that he hated every second of this.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux
French Leatherette Mix.
French post punk, new wave, metal, funk and punk.
01. “Extase” - Mecanique Rythmique
02. “Torso Corso” - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
03. “Il Ne Dira Pas” - Etienne Daho
04. “Aere Perennius” - Docdail
05. “Victoires Prochaines” - Seconde Chambre
06. “Electrique Sylvie: - Modern Guy
07. “Pepper Drums” - P.A Dahan & Mat Camison
08. “Sandie Trash” - Les Olivensteins
09. “Burger City” - Casino Music
10. “Detective” - Medikao
11. “Chercher Le Garcon” - DJ Shell
12. “Man Of Time” - Kas Product
13. “Jungle Soho” - End Of Data
14. “Wanda’s Loving Boy” - Poni Hoax
15. “Des Poi Sur Moi” - Masoch
The Specials in concert at the Colchester Institute, January 21st 1980. Recorded as part of the Beeb’s series Rock Goes to College (boy, they must have struggled with that title), this is Coventry’s Magnificent 7 at their best.
Track listing:
01. “Do the Dog”
02. “Monkey Man”
03. “Rat Race”
04. “Blank Expression”
05. “Rude Boys Outta Jail”
06. “Doesn’t Make It Right”
07. “Concrete Jungle”
08. “Too Much Too Young”
09. “Guns of Navarone”
10. “Nite Club”
11. “Gangsters”
12. “Longshot Kick De Bucket”
13. “Madness”
14. “You’re Wondering”
Previously on Dangerous MInds
This 1971 video of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band captures the group at their zenith, powering through a set comprised of several numbers from the then new Lick My Decals Off Baby
Taped on January 15, 1971 at WABX TV Studio in Detroit for the Detroit Tube Works program.
1. When Big Joan Sets Up (0:00)
2. Hair Pie Bass Solo (6:23)
3. Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop (6:42)
4. Flash Gordon’s Ape/Marimba Solo (8:48)
5. Bellerin Plain (9:11)
6. Instrumental for Foot and Fingers (13:00)
Crappy versions of this have been bootlegged for decades, and parts of it appear on the Grow Fins
Neil’s gear.
Neil Young appearing at last week’s Dive Into Media conference expressed his distaste for MP3’s in no uncertain terms.
Young, the perennial music purist, said that while modern music formats like MP3 are convenient, they sound lousy.
“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years,” Young said. “We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”
It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
Young proposed that fans stage a grassroots movement to demand higher-quality audio. “Occupy audio!” he urged.
Here’s Young talking about digital recording with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka.
Shot in 1975/76 during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Bob Dylan’s four epic vanity production, Renaldo And Clara, is a pretentious hodgepodge of disconnected vignettes shot through with occasional moments of musical brilliance. But even staggeringly good performances of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Tangled Up In Blue” can’t save this bloated folly flung from the depths of Dylan’s gargantuan narcissism.
A commercial bust when it was first theatrically released, Dylan later cut the film by almost two hours, leaving mostly concert footage, and even then audiences stayed away in droves.
In describing the making of Renaldo And Clara, Dylan said “a third is improvised, about a third is determined, and about a third is blind luck.” The improvisation part is clearly apparent and I imagine that the determined part is an allusion to the musical performances. But the last ingredient, the “blind’ thing, is what seems to have really driven the film…and blind ain’t good in a visual medium.
While a few critics compared Renaldo And Clara to French surrealist films like Les Enfants Du Paradis (must be Dylan’s mime make-up), I see absolutely no poetry or magic in the movie. I’m a Dylan fan and over the years I’ve repeatedly tried watching R&C with all the mercy and love I can bring to it. But it has yet to reveal any hidden genius to me. Are there readers out there who see something in this that I don’t? I’m open to having my mind changed. Really.
Anyway, here’s Renaldo And Clara in its uncut shambolic glory. It looks beautiful. Much better than the bootlegs I’ve seen in the past.