Legendary funk saxophonist and band leader Jimmy Castor, of The Jimmy Castor Bunch - the sample source for a huge amount of hip-hop records - died today in Las Vegas of causes that are “currently unknown.” Sad news. Castor is best known for the evergreen breakbeat classic “It’s Just Begun,” “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” which was a huge hit for The Jimmy Castor Bunch in 1972 and “The Bertha Butt Boogie.” Here’s an excellent clip of the band performing “It’s Just Begun” live on TV (apparently the show is called Soul School), and tearing the roof off that sucker:
Forget The Beatles and The Stones, the sixties was really about “Two Ton” Tessie O’Shea vs. Sing-a-Long Pianist Mrs. Mills.
These two giants of British Music Hall slugged it out during the 1960s and 1970s, each selling shed-loads of records, making top-rated TV shows and performing sell-out concerts across the globe - from Las Vegas to The Wheel-Tappers and Shunters Club - in a bid to be top Light Entertainment Star.
Celebrated ukelele and banjo-player, Tessie O’Shea debuted with The Beatles on the same legendary Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 - their appearance drew the largest audience in the history of American television at the time. It also made both international stars over-night. Though Welsh-born O’Shea was already a star of stage and screen back in Blighty (cast in plays by Noel Coward), her performance on the Sullivan Show guaranteed her a highly successful career on US TV and in Hollywood, making such films as The Russians Are Coming and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Mrs Mills was signed to the same label as The Beatles, Parlophone, and rubbed shoulders with the Fab Four at the Abbey Road Studios, where they both recorded. Mrs Mills was also for a time under the same management as The Stones. While Mrs Mills was arguably a bigger star in the UK, with a dedicated following across Europe and Australia, she never took off in the States as Tessie O’Shea did. However, Mrs Mills did release over 50 albums in 20 years, all of which were best-sellers. No mean feat.
I liked Mrs Mills, but preferred Tessie, who had an infectious twinkle and jolly sense of glee. Here, then, is “Two Ton” Tessie, decked out in a Dolly-Parton-wig and what looks like the living-room curtains, serenading an audience (that looks straight out of Michael Caine’s Get Carter) with a paper bag. From the bizarre Wheel-Tappers and Shunters Club.
A new and as-always fun and functional project from New Orleans genius musician/inventor, Quintron. It’s really a beautiful idea, especially the rain drop trigger. In my perfect parallel universe every home would come equipped with this set of devices.
And why the hell not? Here are some classic clips from Soul Train that are guaranteed to make you feel good, and maybe even get up and shake your ass!
You know, with all the Seventies-related posts here on DM, it’s good to remember that the decade was not all about white boys with guitars (though some of the clips below are from the early 80s too). These dancers are hot as hell - without resorting to showing acres of flesh - and isn’t it nice to see people actually interacting with each other when they dance?
Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes “Bad Luck”
After the jump, Kool & The Gang, Rufus & Chaka Khan, Marvin Gaye, Trussell and Yellow Magic Orchestra…
The sound quality is a bit rough and the picture rather watery, but there are still plenty of interesting things going on in this ‘lost’ interview with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Russell Senior from 1995.
Recorded during Pulp’s first tour of Spain, the interview was conducted by writer and poet, Bruno Galindo, who asked Jarvis & Senior about the band, their career, their lives, the success of the album Different Class, and easy-listening music.
While my co-conspirators here at Dangerous Minds are asleep or away for the weekend, I like to slip in a little something that might be met with disapproval if they were around… in this case, a mash-up. While there are those among us who find mash-ups played out, I still find joy in a well-constructed and imaginative melding of often incongruous elements into something that coheres in novel or humorous ways, expanding upon the original sources, resulting in a fusion that can be lesser or better than the sum of its parts or their equal. A really good mash-up can become a beautiful thing of its own, transcending its sources and finding a sonic identity of and beyond its sources.
In “Whole Lotta Sex Machine,” I think the combination of Led Zeppelin and James Brown creates some genuine heat and it is sure as shit entertaining. This has been around for a couple of years as an audio track (in fact its appeared on DM in the past), but last year DJ Eric ILL added a video mash-up to the audio mix by Fissunix.
Vocals: James Brown - “Sex Machine”
Guitar riff : Led Zeppelin - “Whole Lotta Love”
Drum loop: Run DMC & Aerosmith - “Walk This Way”
Footage shot somewhere in Canada (Toronto?) for Much Music TV in 1981 features a pissed-off Iggy Pop talking trash with a male heckler in the audience.
“You have tits. You have tits. You have little tiny tits with little pink nipples.”
“Fuck Bowie. You’d like to wouldn’t you?”
“You’re a pecker from the woods.”
Pop instructs the film crew to turn their cameras off and the screen goes blank.
Lynda Carter’s rock and roll fantasy from her 1980 TV special Encore.
I find this an almost perfect collision of pop culture iconography that could have only existed in the era of spandex, platform shoes, disco balls and hairspray - twixt the end of the punkish 70s and the dawning of the gloriously absurd 80s.
Fifty years ago today Ernie Kovacs died in a car accident. He was 43-years-old. A tragic end for a hugely talented artist.
Kovacs elevated television comedy to a fine art. Innovative, subversive and diabolically funny, he created a surreal style of humor employing cutting edge visual techniques and envelope pushing irreverence that influenced a wide range of TV shows from Saturday Night Live and SCTV to Sesame Street and Monty Python.
In this six minute compression of cine-semiology, Kovacs pays homage to film noir classics such as Touch Of Evil (the tracking shots), Psycho, Asphalt Jungle and Night In The City with a hint (as I see it) of Jean Genet and Godard. The soundtrack is Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” and it creates a beautiful sense of dread.
This first aired in 1961 and it still seems fresh today. The highly-stylized sets, feral cat, dead-eyed baby dolls and hallucinatory effects have the eerie dreaminess and sense of camp that David Lynch, the Kuchar brothers and Kenneth Anger would explore years later.
No telling where Kovacs would have taken his art had he lived. Sadly, it came to an end on a dark street in Los Angeles on January 13, 1962 when Kovacs lost control of his car while allegedly attempting to light one of his ubiquitous cigars.
