Is it possible to simultaneously love and hate something this much?

I suppose you can look at Clipart Covers as a totally valid use of Comic Sans.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
The person who uploaded this video gave it the title of “EPIC Drum Solo FAIL!”

I think they’re sorely mistaken. This should be called “EPIC Drum Solo WIN”!

The show must go on!
 

 
(via Barstool Sports)

 
Rich Jones, of Gun.Io, says one of his hobbies is “liberating government documents using Freedom of Information Act requests.”

He’s done just that, by obtaining the full FBI profile of Wu-Tang Clan member Russell Tyreese Jones aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

From Gun.Io:

Some gems include:

• “The WTC is heavily involved in the sale of drugs, illegal guns, weapons possession, murder, carjacking and other types of violent crime.” [p5]
• Connections to the murder of Robert “Pooh” Johnson and Jerome “Boo Boo” Estrella. [p6]
• Connection to murder of Ishamael “Hoody” Kourma. [p13]
• A shoot-out with the NYPD. [p15]
• Arrest for felony possession of body armour. [p16]
• Connections to the Bloods Gang. [p17]
• Found in possession of large bags full of paper currency. [p40]
• Details of his being robbed and shot while staying in the Kingston projects. [p45]

 
Last year, I read Barney Hoskyns’ excellent history of the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, Hotel California (thank you Paul Gallagher!) and through its pages, I ducked into a folk-rock rabbit hole that I’m not even close to wanting to move on from. In this past year the albums in the speed rack have been by CSNY (especially the “Y” but David Crosby’s godlike If I Could Only Remember My Name, in particular), the Byrd who could not fly, Gene Clark (I simply cannot get enough of his No Other masterpiece. If it was chocolate, I’d eat it until I got sick, then keep eating), Judee Sill, The Flying Burrito Brothers and the criminally overlooked Michael Nesmith.

The other thing I’ve been listening to recently is 70s Pink Floyd. I mention all this by way of trying to impart that I was quite ready to receive what Jonathan Wilson’s Gentle Spirit album has to offer.

Although Jonathan Wilson has become quite the critical darling in the UK—his debut album Gentle Spirit ranked #16 on Uncut’s year end best of list and #4 on MOJO’s—his profile is much lower in his native US. Wilson was also Uncut’s 2011 New Artist of the Year, but I haven’t even seen a review on Pitchfork yet.

I can’t imagine that it will be too much longer before Wilson’s fellow countrymen start to catch up to his prodigious talents. Wilson is “the new king of Laurel Canyon” (although he now lives and works in Eagle Rock). Prior to his almost instantaneous critical acclain in England when Gentle Spirit came out in August, Wilson was a much in-demand perfectionist music producer who records everything on analog tape (the recording studio equivalent of a master guild craftsman in these days of Pro Tools). He knew exactly how to make whatever “classic rock” sound he wanted to before this album came about (it took four years to record) and the results are familiar-sounding—and notably “authentic”—but still wholly original performances.

I’m not one to go in much for top ten lists, but if I did Gentle Spirit would certainly be in my top five albums for 2011, if not my top two (Not coincidentally, the other album, by J. Tillman (Fleet Foxes), was produced by Wilson, but it’s not out until May, so more on that later).

I’ve pushed Gentle Spirit repeatedly on all of my rock snob friends. Wilson is a musician’s musician. The real deal. Guys like David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Robbie Robertson, Elvis Costello and Graham Nash all want to buddy up to Wilson, hoping some of his magic rubs off on them. The great Roy Harper invited Wilson to perform at his 70th birthday bash in November at the Royal Festival Hall.

Did I mention that I really, really love this album?

Trying to describe music in words is like doing a sketch of a novel, but Wilson’s guitar can exhibit the inventiveness and precision of Stephen Stills or the fiery, almost architectural lines of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, often in the same song. It’s been said that his music sounds like CSNY jamming with Pink Floyd and this is, I think you’ll agree, quite an accurate description. Another way to get your head around Gentle Spirit is that it often sounds like a “Southern California” version of Radiohead.

Exhibit A, the music video for “Natural Rhapsody” directed by Michael Graham:
 

 
And here’s the one that will really slay you, “Desert Raven,” which will be forever stuck in your head before it’s even finished playing.
 

 
Even back then, Freddie Mercury looked like a rock star.  Brian May, Roger Taylor and a young John Deacon looked as if they wanted to be rock stars. Almost forty years on, this video of Queen from 1973 is still impressive, and shows why they were so successful.

“Liar” was Queen’s second US single release in 1974, taken from their eponymous 1973 debut album release. Originally titled “Lover”, the song was written by Freddie Mercury in 1970, when he was still Farrokh Bulsara. The track was a favorite of Queen’s early live shows, is noted for its use of Hammond organ and its backing vocals from bass player Deacon.

This footage of Queen was shot at Brewer Street, along with a version of “Keep Yourself Alive” for promotional purposes in 1973, but a different version, shot at BBC studios, was used instead.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Bonus track “Keep Yourself Alive” from same video shoot, after the jump…
 

 
Sad to hear that Black Sabbath guitarist, Tony Iommi, was diagnosed with the early stages of lymphoma.

From Billboard:
 

Iommi, 63, is currently working with his doctors to determine the best course and “remains upbeat and determined to make a full and successful recovery,” a statement said.
 
In November, the group—Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward—announced album and tour plans. While the statement does not indicate whether live dates will be affected, the band continues to write and record their first album in over three decades. Rick Rubin will produce the group’s comeback album, which is expected to be released in fall 2012 through Vertigo/Universal.
 
The metal pioneers are scheduled to headline Download Festival, which will take place between June 8-10 in Donington Park, England.

Here’s hoping he makes a full recovery. Iommi’s autobiography, Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, was published in late 2011 by Da Capo Press.

Below, Black Sabbath in their evil prime on regional Yorkshire Television. Shot in Paris in 1970, the group plays songs from their first album and Paranoid.
 
 

 
Via The Daily Swarm

 
Here’s a little curio from the BBC’s back catalog, an episode of the early 80s pop music quiz show “Pop Quiz’, featuring Morrissey and Phil Lynnot on opposing teams, presided over by uber-cheesey radio DJ Mike Reid (I’m loving his shirt). Phillo seems quite relaxed and in good spirits on this program, while unfortunately the same cannot be said for Steven Patrick “Life Of The Party” Morrissey. From the Slicing Up Eyeballs blog:

In an interview with The Face published in July 1984, Moz said, “‘Pop Quiz’ was unbearable. I realized it was a terrible mistake the moment the cameras began to roll. … I just squirmed through the program. I went back to my dressing room afterwards and virtually felt like breaking down, it had been so pointless. I felt I’d been gagged.”

Oh dear. Life is just so fucking hard for poor old squirming Moz. 
 
Pop Quiz, featuring Phil Lynnot, Morrissey & Kim Wilde pt 1:
 

 
After the jump Pop Quiz, featuring Phil Lynnot, Morrissey & Kim Wilde, pt 2…

 
In this footage shot by the Maysles brothers on December 6, 1969 for the film Gimme Shelter, The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead wait for a helicopter on a pier in San Francisco to take them to the Altamont Speedway.

Jagger, in not so sympathetic devil-mode, foppishly preens and sashays like rock royalty, much to Jerry Garcia’s amusement, while attempting to force an unyielding Charlie Watts to bestow a kiss upon a groupie’s forehead. As Jagger continues to egg Watts on, Charlie responds with the classy retort “Love is much more of a deeper thing than that.. it is not flippant, to be thrown away on celluloid.”

Later that day, the whip would come down.

This footage never appeared in the final cut of Gimme Shelter. It did eventually turn up on DVD as part of the Get Yer Ya Ya Yas Out boxset.

Michael Azerrad has written an insightful piece on The Gimme Shelter outtakes on his blog.
 

 
As you are no doubt already well aware from multiple postings on your Facebook wall, David Bowie officially became a senior citizen today.

I have to admit that I was saddened by reading what The Guardian’s killjoy, Alexis Petridis, had to say about this milestone:

It’s a cliche when a rock star reaches 65 to mention the time when it didn’t look like they’d make pensionable age, but with David Bowie who marks the milestone on Sunday, it’s almost unavoidable. Look at a picture of him in the mid-70s, when he was ravaged by cocaine, living off a diet of red peppers and milk and so paranoid that he apparently kept his own urine in a fridge lest persons unknown steal it: this is not a man destined to make old bones.

It wasn’t just the drugs: there was something about the intensity with which he worked during that decade - the scarcely-believable ten-year creative streak that begins with the 1970s The Man Who Sold The World and ends with the 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super-Creeps – that suggests an early demise. Someone that burns that brightly probably isn’t going to burn for long.

Under the circumstances, it’s hard to begrudge him his ongoing semi-retirement: he last made an album in 2003, and for the best part of a decade has made only sporadic public appearances, the odd special guest spot here and there. It was precipitated by emergency surgery on a blocked artery, and lurid rumours about the state of his health have abounded ever since.

Ouch. The idea of a world without David Bowie (even if he’s not in the public eye much these days) is something I’ve never really contemplated. Thanks a bunch, Guardian, for ruining my morning!

Well, if you’re in a more celebratory mood, you can trawl through the Bowie-related back items here on Dangerous Minds. I daresay our Bowie posts here gather up some of the very best Bowie-related multi-media you’re going to find out there.

In England—well, in Brixton at least—they’ve put him on the currency, a proper tribute for a local lad (insane).

And here’s an oblique treat, a very different take on “Golden Years” as performed by Peter Glaze and Jan Hunt on the BBC childrens show, Crackerjack, in 1976:
 

 
Thank you Paul Gallagher, for that crazy clip…

 
One of the defining moments of my life was when I picked up the debut album by The Fugs in a People’s Drug Store in Falls Church, Virginia in 1966. And when I say “picked up” that’s exactly what I mean. I didn’t even have to listen to it. All it took was picking up the album and looking at the cover to have my 15-year-old mind scrambled forever. A grainy black and white photograph of five scruffy-looking hippies holding musical instruments standing among rubble in front of an ancient looking brick wall somewhere in NY City’s East Village was not your usual teenybopper rock and roll imagery. If parents didn’t want their daughters to marry a Rolling Stone, they wouldn’t want them within 20 square miles of a Fug. This was punk rock in beatnik drag. Ten years later The Ramones would release their first album with a similarly New Yorkish cover. I stared at The Fugs with the awe of a kid coming upon a creature from outer space.

Of course, I bought the record (along with a copy of the first Mothers Of Invention album, Freak Out) and went home and eagerly put it on the turntable. The rest, as they say, is history. The Fugs were the hippest thing I’d yet encountered on vinyl. Their mix of the sacred and the profane, poetry and street talk, beauty and coarseness, was intellectual and spiritual manna for my hungry teenage brain and heart.

I wanted to be a part of whatever world The Fugs existed in so I ended up taking a bus to New York City and immediately went to The Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders’ bookstore, Peace Eye. There I began my serious Beat education, thumbing through the pages of books by Michael McClure, Alexandra David-Neel, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, the whole underground scene…and it was still relatively underground at the time.

(While writing this I’m listening to the hugely underrated Fugs’ psychedelic/folk-rock masterpiece It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest .)

As much of a Fugs fan as I was, what eventually really knocked me out was Ed Sanders’ prose and poetry. He had a Whitmanesque/Blakean vision and bardic style coupled with gutter humor that bridged the heavens above and the mud below. He could undercut literary pretense with the foul-mouthed rants of a heavy-maned hillbilly cranked up on a ten dollar bag of crystal meth. His beatnik/hippie sensibilities were the foil to his truckstop cowboy skepticism. In other words, Sanders knew how to yin his yang, keeping the whole beautiful cosmic mess balanced between words of worship and the laughter on the tongue of a drunken whore. Within his howling vowels and clanging consonants, Sanders located that strange geography where the mythic mingles with tabloid headlines and TV commercials, where Jimmie Rodgers knocks back cheap bourbon while staring at the reflections of Isis and Ra in the bottom of his shot glass.

Drink up oh mighty yodellers and scribblers who praise the Dharma. The truth that envelopes us all and sends us squealing like delirious pigs into the arms of unbearable bliss is upon us like an ambergris-scented robe made of the pubic hair of two thousand and twelve Aztec virgins. Get naked, now! Or get the fuck out!

Yes, Ed Sanders was my guru of the gobble grope, my slum God of the Lower East Side, the dopethrill psychopath who pointed the way to a place where there is no shame in the flesh, the fuck or the flame that ignites the holy sacraments of the good lord Ganja. With Sanders as my shamanic guide I became a full-fledged member of the skin flower army, bravely facing the future with my hair flapping in the wind, a flag made of a million love tendrils.

That was then, this is now. And it is with great pleasure that I share with you good news indeed. The almighty Fug and editor of “Fuck You: A Magazine of The Arts,” has published a new memoir, Fug You, that covers his early days as a peacenik, poet, rabble rouser and musician in New York during the Sixties. It’s a great read full of fascinating anecdotes, essential counter-culture history, downtown bohemia, wrangles with the law, appearances by hundreds (yes, hundreds) of Sixties’ icons including Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa, Kenneth Anger, The Velvet Underground and tons of photos, images and manuscripts from his archives.

Unlike many a chronicler of those stoned days, Sanders has kept his wits about him. This isn’t a wobbly sentimental journey. The writing is sharp, witty and full of precise detail and facts. Of course, who would expect less of the author responsible for one of the best (and darkest) non-fiction books on the Aquarian Age, The Family. Sanders has always shown an abiding respect for form and tradition, even when fucking with them. Fug You is not only a personal history, it is history in the big sense. It is one of the few books that deals with the hippies and the counter-culture from the inside that doesn’t read like an amnesiac trying to reconstruct a past life or a brain-addled Deadhead recalling the time he caught the clap in a crash pad in the Haight as he desperately tries to keep his drool cup from toppling off his beer gut. Or worse, those guilt-ridden confessionals by former junkies who used to play in hair bands. Sanders doesn’t sound like an old fart spinning tales or pathetically trying to revive the good old days.

What kept Sanders interesting from the very beginning is still very much in operation in this new book: the clarity of his bullshit detector and his irreverent take on virtually everything, including himself. Which is not to say he doesn’t care about things in a deep sense, he does. He just approaches life with a Zen perspective knowing that getting overamped over shit ain’t gonna change a thing. He continues to be a revolutionary with a sense of the ridiculous. His strategy has always been to see the absurdity in the horror show and to shine a cosmic light on it. We see the Fug and Abbie Hoffman style of revolutionary theater echoed in today’s Occupy Movement. When The Fugs went to Virginia to levitate the Pentagon in 1967 not everybody was laughing, but they were certainly paying attention.

“You ask about my philosophy, baby, yeah? Dope, peace, magic gods in the tree trunks, and GROUP GROPE, BABY!”

The book ends in 1970, so I’m hoping this is the first in a series. More than four decades after I first encountered him, Sanders is still manna for my hungry brain.

Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is available here.

Here’s a little video mashup of some vintage film footage with selections from Sanders’ ode to rednecks, hippies and the trailer parks of absolute reality, Sanders’ Truckstop.

1. “Jimmy Joe, The Hippybilly Boy”   2. “Maple Court Tragedy”     3. “Heartbreak Crash Pad”     4. “Banshee”     5. “Plaster Song”     6. “Iliad”