This 20 minute mood piece composed of clips from films by or about David Lynch plays out like one long extended epiphany. Lovingly put together by Richard Vezina.
Music : Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch : Questions In A World Of Blue, The Pink Room, Into The Night, Mysteries of Love
Vocal : Julee Cruise
Films:
Inland Empire, Mulholland Dr., The Straight Story, Lost Highway, Fire Walk with Me, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, Blue Velvet - Mysteries of Love: Documentary
Here’s some fabulous 1970s footage of the New York Dolls performing, talking and hanging out. Directed by one of rock and roll’s great photographers and chroniclers of the New York music scene Bob Gruen with his partner Nadya Beck.
70 minutes of indispensable, demented, glorious punk rock history.
The young, the bad, the beautiful.
Update 12/30 5:30 central time. MVD Entertainment Group went from offering this for free to suddenly charging a $2.99 rental free. This happened within the past few hours. They must have seen the traffic Dangerous Minds was sending them and decided to profit it from it. Which is fine. But it wasn’t my intent to send people to a site where it was going to cost you money to see this video. It’s certainly worth $2.99 to rent, but still…
Texan drag sensation Christeene Vale is back and she’s durtier than ever. “African Mayonnaise” is taken from her upcoming album Waste Up Knees Down - and while she may not be crawling out of a butthole a lá the video for “Bustin’ Brown”, I think there’s some sort of commentary going on here. I’m not sure exactly what but I guess it has something to do with life in modern, late-capitalist America?
I am your new celebrity
I am your new America
I am the piece of filthy meat
That you take home and treat to yourself
I don’t feel like there’s been a drag act this out-there (and hence exciting!) in a looong time, and I await her full length album with glee (no, not the stupid show). We’ll be doing our best to get an exclusive interview with Christeene for DM, or even better her “handler” Paul Soileau, so keep your eyes and ears peeled.
But for now, just check out the video. “African Mayonaise” is good. No, it’s better than good, it’s great - I’d say it’s Christeene’s best video yet. As she rides roughshod over some nasty synth horns and slick dubstep beats, we see some real world reactions to this, ahem, unusual character, including getting chased out of a mall by a cop on a Segway, being heckled by Christians and being assaulted by a member of the Church Of Scientology. You GO girl!
DM readers, if you’re looking for a way to spend that Christmas money burning a hole in your pocket, I have a really good suggestion for you: Turn-On, Groove-In, Rock Out! The Barry Richards TV Collection Vol. 1 put out recently on DVD by Resurrection Productions. I don’t recommend it lightly, I recommend it very highly. It’s a great value too, with nearly three hours of primo rock-n-roll footage that had been stored in a garage for years, unseen. For a certain type of rock snob, this 2 disc set is heaven.
To be honest, I never heard of Barry Richards, but the DVDs provide instant context for his fascinating four-decade-long career in broadcasting: Richards was a well-known rock jock and concert promoter in the Washington DC metro area in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and he also hosted a number of “free form” TV shows on local UHF TV stations. This 2 disc set is packed to the gills with clips from these shows, featuring an amazing early Alice Cooper performance (they do “Black Juju,” which is THE Alice Copper song, I personally would want to see them perform live, you might agree with me), Richie Havens, Little Richard, a fantastic set from Muddy Waters, Jamul, Humble Pie, The Bob Seeger System, Crow, Rory Gallagher, The Illusion, Fats Domino/The Byrds and Tommy Bolin’s first band, Zephyr. Along with the musical performances—always live, never lip-synced—were goofy, innocent segments taped with local high school students and long forgotten acts like comedian “Uncle Dirty” and Iron Jaw Samson, a fellow who ate light-bulbs. There are also 2 hours of audio only segments with the Beatles, Flash Gordon actor Buster Crabbe, comedy troupe The Ace Trucking Company (where Fred Willard got his start) and others.
What’s so amazing about these vintage performances (aside from the music itself, of course) is the journey from the wholesome B&W 60s era segments to the more, um, decadent era of the 70s clips. It’s pretty insane to see how quickly American teenagers grew out their hair (and beards) and took up pot smoking, and that happens pretty much right before your eyes with The Barry Richards TV Collection Vol. 1. (Just as quickly, the disco era takes over and Richards goes on to Studio 78 his disco show (which is not included here).
Sean Bonniwell lead singer and songwriter for The Music Machine has died of lung cancer at 71.
Dressed all in black, with each member wearing one black glove, The Music Machine appeared like dark lords against the backdrop of the day-glow Sixties. And in songs like their big hit “Talk Talk” their sound was hard-edged, oozing a punk attitude, that would later influence groups like The Ramones and The Dictators.
Sean Bonniwell’s career with The Music Machine only lasted two years. He later formed a group called The Bonniwell Music Machine before selling the name to his record company to be released from his contract. A solo album followed in 1969 before he retired from the music scene for good. He briefly returned to recording in 2006 when he laid down some tracks with L.A. neo-garage band The Larksmen.
For a band that only released one album and had just a couple of hits, The Music Machine left an indelible mark on rock music and it is Bonniwell’s intense presence and tough guy baritone that I’ll most remember.
Here’s the situation
And how it really stands
I’m out of circulation
I’ve all but washed my hands
My social life’s a dud
My name is really mud
I’m up to here in lies
Guess I’m down to size
To size
Bonniwell may be out of circulation but he’ll never be down to size.
Rüdiger Nüchtern’s short film Amon Düül II Spielt Phallus Dei dates from 1968 and is a single camera documentation of the Krautrock legends performing the title track from their soon to be released first album. This is the earliest known footage of the band, who perform in a studio in Munich against a wall with psychedelic projections, with shots of a sunrise, sunset, clouds, trees and the German countryside added in.
The personnel here are Christian ‘Shrat’ Thiele (bongos, vocals) Peter Leopold (drums), Dieter Serfas (drums), John Weinzierl (guitar), Falk Rogner (organ), Chris Karrer (violin, guitar) Renate Knaup (vocals) and Dave Anderson (bass).
Although the film, which apparently was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1972, is in crappy condition, it’s worth watching (once) if you’re a fan of the band.
For America, the misunderstanding was over the lyrics. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Get Down” was assumed to be a nudge-nudge reference to oral sex, tied-in, perhaps, to the coincidental release of sex film, Deep Throat.
‘...very British and to me the girl in “Get Down” is behaving like a dog - she’s jumping up on him, so “get down!”’
That’s his story, and he’s, you know. Though he did admit, if it had been about oral pleasures, then:
‘...we should sell 10 million and put it on the soundtrack of Deep Throat.’
Top of the Pops resident dance troupe, Pan’s People understood the song perfectly and reflected it in their innocent interpretation. With such a literal approach, the mind boggles how the girls would have choreographed the song if it had been about blow jobs.
Genesis performing their epic, seven-movement progressive rock sonata “Supper’s Ready” onstage at Shepperton Studios in 1973.
“Old Michael went past the pet shop, which was never open, into the park, which was never closed, and the park was full of a very smooth, clean, green grass. So Henry took off all his clothes and began rubbing his flesh into the wet, clean, green grass. He accompanied himself with a little tune - it went like this…”
In a sense, this is the ultimate example of what they did during the Peter Gabriel era. There’s a detailed Wikipedia page about this song, which took up almost all of side two of their Foxtrot album.
Sad to hear that Jim “Motorhead” Sherwood, one of the original Mothers of Invention (atonal saxes, nasal noises, tambourine, vocals), died on Christmas day, at the age of 69.
... was a member of Frank Zappa’s original Mothers of Invention. He appeared on all the group’s early albums, up to and including Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970), as well as on Zappa’s solo disc Lumpy Gravy. He later performed with the Grandmothers, a group of musicians who had accompanied Zappa during different phases of his career.
Born in Arkansas City, Kansas, Sherwood first met Zappa in 1956 when both of them were attending Antelope Valley high school in California. Sherwood was in the same class as Frank’s brother: “Bobby found out that I collected blues records and he introduced me to Frank, and Frank and I sort of got together and swapped records.”
At the time, Zappa was already in a band called the Blackouts, but this soon disintegrated. Then the brothers moved to Ontario, California, and started a new band, the Omens, which also included Sherwood. He would regularly jam with Zappa in a string of different groups, and eventually, in 1964, the Mothers. The following year, the band signed a recording contract with MGM records, and set about the lengthy process of recording their first album, Freak Out!, with producer Tom Wilson. At the time, Sherwood was not a fully fledged member of the band, which changed its name to the Mothers of Invention. He described his role on Freak Out! as “just making sound effects on some of the songs”.
After the album’s release in June 1966 on MGM’s Verve label, the band went on tour, then in November that year took up a six-month residency at the Garrick theatre in New York, during which they played 14 shows a week. Sherwood was working for the band as equipment manager and roadie, and sometimes operated the lighting during the Garrick shows. These were a bizarre mix of music and performance art, featuring puppet shows and interludes when the band would pelt the audience with fruit.
It was when the Mothers made their first trip to England, in mid-1967, that Sherwood was finally hired as a full-time musician. It was the band’s vocalist and percussionist Ray Collins who gave Sherwood the nickname “Motorhead”, through his love of working on cars and trucks and motorcycles: “He said ‘it sounds like you’ve got a little motor in your head’, so they just called me Motorhead and that seemed to stick.”
Sherwood contributed on baritone and/or tenor saxophone, and sometimes percussion and vocals, to Absolutely Free, We’re Only in It for the Money, and the doo-wop album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, taking in the Zappa solo album Lumpy Gravy en route. Zappa disbanded the original Mothers of Invention in 1969 for financial reasons and what he perceived as public apathy, but Sherwood appears on the albums Uncle Meat, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, recorded before the split but released subsequently.
This is The Beach Boys’ so called lost concert from March 1964. The line-up includes Brian Wilson, and in a 20 minute set, The Beach Boys rip through a selection of 9 superb songs, including tracks from their freshly released album, Shut Down Vol 2.
These are: “Fun Fun Fun”, “Long Tall Texan”, “Little Deuce Coupe”, “Surfer Girl”, “Surfin’ USA”, “Shut Down”, “In My Room”, “Papa Oom-Mow-Mow”, and “Hawaii”.
