With Summer coming to end, it’s probably time to trade in your deflated Motörhead beach ball for some Motörhead playing cards. They’re $8.99 at the band’s online store. 

(With thanks to Cherry Bombed)

 
photo by Lance Loud, courtesy of Kristian Hoffman
 
Another pristine wonder from mid-70’s Dutch TV ! It’s DM patron saint Brian Eno miming his lil’ heart out to the rockin’ non -LP single “Seven Deadly Finns”. Makes my day, how about yours?
 

 
via Doom and Gloom From The Tomb

 
John Lydon must get fed up being asked the same olde questions year-after-year by interviewers who should know better. Just see how many interviews over the past thirty years have kicked-off with rumors of a Sex Pistols reunion, as if Lydon has done nothing since the summer of 1977, and then ask whether he’s still Punk and why isn’t PiL any good?

Understandable, therefore, that Lydon is often contemptuous of those who pose such dumb questions.

That said, I sometimes think Lydon’s aggressive behavior stems from a genuine shyness, as he displays a set of tics and mannerisms consistent form his first appearance on Bill Grundy’s infamous swearfest. You’ll recognize them - the mumbling, the staring, the dismissal of questions with the word “Next” - all used to deflect the more personal probing. Oo-er.

We can see examples of both here in this short interview with Jonathan Ross, from his chatshow The Last Resort in 1990.

It begins with Lydon antsy as Ross reels off cue card questions about The Sex Pistols. Lydon is dismissive, which is interesting in light of the Pistols reunion later in the decade.

When questioned about the rumors of a reunion for £6million, Lydon says he wishes such offers would be given to him direct. Even so, he wouldn’t reform the Sex Pistols at any price.

“I would never repeat myself. And I think everybody knows that about me. You may not like me, but at least I am damned honest.”

He is harsh on Sid Vicious, defending his comments as honesty.

“When you start messing with heroin, you’re kissing goodbye to your life, and good riddance too.”

Fair commnent, but I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde that sometimes honesty is not the best policy, and the truth is never simple.

As for Malcolm McLaren he is dissmissed as “an imitation alcoholic”.

He lightens up about his brief acting career in the Harvey Keitel film Order of Death, going on to tell how he was offered “the ratty little git” in Drugstore Cowboy, a part he would have taken but couldn’t because of commitments. Shame for it would have been interesting casting.

The end cuts off just as Lydon gives a 4-word summing up:

“Life first. Money second.”

A nice thought, which reminded me of Picasso’s line about wealth: how it was always best to be rich enough to live poor. O, that we should be so lucky.
 

 
Bonus clip of Lydon interviewed by Margenta Devine from Network 7, from 1987, where the same questions about Sex Pistols, Punk and what he’s been up to all come to the fore. Lydon sticks to his honesty and having fun routine.
 

 
Bonus interview with Lydon from ‘Network 7’ in 1987, after the jump…
 

 
Sweeeet - In preparation for his upcoming US tour, king of the boogie Dam Funk has made his forthcoming InnaFocusedDaze EP available as a free download. The 10” vinyl of InnaFocusedDaze will be released through Scion A/V in October, when Dam goes out on the road with his band Master Blazter - tour dates and more info on the EP can be found on the Stone’s Throw website. You can download the EP here, and just in case you need to be reminded of just how cool this cat is (he really IS king of the boogie) here’s a video for the EP’s lead track “Forever”:
 

Mudhoney. Photo by Bob Whittaker from Everybody Loves Our Town
 
Rock And Roll Always Forgets. Chuck Eddy.

Back in the Seventies, before I moved to New York City, my link to Gotham’s punk scene was the music section of the Village Voice. I pored over the club ads to see who was playing at CBGB’s, Max’s, Club 82 and the half dozen other joints where a new movement was percolating. Seeing the names of bands like The Cramps, Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie in big block letters and reading reviews by Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs were transmissions to my rock and roll heart. The Voice was, at one time, a great place to go for music writing, particularly regarding underground and genre-busting bands. It was seeing CBGB’s ads every week that compelled me in 1977 to pack my band up in a van and drive 2000 miles to play the Monday audition night at the infamous Bowery dive, the Mecca of rock and roll misfits.

Chuck Eddy didn’t arrive at the Village Voice until the 80s, but he maintained the Voice’s tradition of covering many bands that were off the mainstream map, but he also went against the grain and covered massively popular groups in genres that the Voice often shunned. Eddy was good to go when it came to heavy metal, hip hop, disco and bubble gum pop like Debbie Gibson and the Bay City Rollers. While some of Eddy’s subjects may have lacked danger, his writing was always edgy and opinions fiercely independent. Eddy took risks. And unlike the academic and overly serious Christgau, he was fun to read. And he still is.

Rock And Roll Always Forgets is a collection of Eddy’s reviews and essays published by Duke University Press and it’s a mother-lode of vibrant writing that captures the passionate energy of having a long-term love affair with America’s most unruly and pervasive art forms. If rock and roll is a woman, Chuck Eddy is her fuck buddy.

Flying Saucers Rock ‘N’ Roll. Jake Austen, editor.

There’s probably a book to be written about the link between Mad Magazine and punk rock and if anyone could write it it would be Jake Austen. A pop culture junkie, with a jones for weird and off-beat stuff, Austen is an archaeologist of the sublime and the silly, the divine and the demented, from the phosphene glow of teen dance shows and American Idol to the hidden and musty corners of rock and roll’s bargain basement. For 20 years, he’s been editing one of the few genuinely essential ‘zines, Roctober, and Austen knows his shit when it comes to rock and roll’s wayward history.

Flying Saucers Rock ‘N’ Roll contains ten fascinating, bittersweet and often very funny interviews with “unjustly obscure rock ‘n’ soul eccentrics” that will delight fans of Nick Tosches’ Unsung Heroes Of Rock And Roll. Both books share a love for the slow-to-die dreams of a handful of hardcore survivors of one of the most unforgiving industries in the modern world, the music industry.

If you never heard of The Fast, Guy Chookoorian, Sugar Pie DeSanto and Zolar X, or if you have and are wondering what happened to them, Austen, along with his intrepid co-writers, will take you to a place where the music still matters and fame is as elusive as a dildo in a nunnery. 

Some of the artists interviewed in Flying Saucers Rock ‘N’ Roll only have themselves to blame for the fuck-upped decisions or lifestyle choices they made, while others played by the rules and ended up in the same netherworld that separates struggle and success. But no matter what path these folks took, they walked the walk and never looked back.

Everybody Loves Our Town. Mark Yarm.

Mark Yarm’s oral history of grunge, Everybody Loves Our Town, is a big (567 pages), messy, mesmerizing and vital blast of rock and roll energy, much like the music it chronicles.

I’ve never been a fan of the Pacific Northwest music scene of the 1990s. Lord knows I’ve tried. Most of my friends whose musical tastes I trust were knocked out by Nirvana’s Nevermind when it was released in September of 1991. I didn’t get it. The same held true for Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and the rest. It all sounded like sludge rock for stoners to me. Maybe I would have dug it if I smoked dope. Whatever the case, I was totally in the minority, but I’ve always felt that it’s my problem. Not the bands’.

By the time grunge fashions were appearing in display windows at Macy’s, the scene was teetering on the brink of just becoming another passing rock trend. When Kurt Cobain blew his brains out in 1994, “grunge” staggered and fell face first into a pile of decaying flannel and empty glassine bags of heroin. The myth and hype were blasted into oblivion along with Kurt’s head. But, the music survived.

Yarm’s book made me want to seek out the music of some of the bands that never ascended to the heights of Stone Temple Pilots or Alice In Chains. Bands like the U-Men and The Screaming Trees and to re-visit Skin Yard,  Mudhoney and Dead Moon. And I just pre-ordered the upcoming Nirvana boxset. Knowing more about these bands, in all their screwed-up glory, made a cynic like me reconsider their roles as fearless rock and roll rebels.

Everybody Loves Our Town captures a moment in time when a bunch of kids living in desolate rural areas and soul-deadening suburbs of Oregon and Washington turned to music for liberation. It’s the same old story going back decades, but it’s a story that I could particularly relate to. I grew up in the South when the only way out for a smart creative teenager was the military, running away, drugs or rock and roll. I took the latter three options.

The “grunge” movement was, in its infancy, comprised of a few dozen outsiders who lived, played, got stoned, fought and often fell in love with each other. It was an incestuous scene with booze, THC and heroin providing both inspiration and destruction. That for a few years, this collection of longhaired slackers and punks managed to re-animate a dying music industry is almost as heroic as it was unexpected. Mark Yarm’s deeply immersive book lets the front lines of this rock revolution speak for themselves and it is never less than enthralling.  I can’t imagine a better book to turn your head around if you didn’t “get’ grunge. It did mine.

 
And speaking of nude rock stars...

It was announced today that R.E.M. broke up. Truth be told, I thought they broke up years ago, so that tells you what I know, but the timing was curious, coming as it did as Michael Stipe decided to post naked pictures of himself looking like a meth-head denizen of one of those sleazy motels on Sunset Blvd.

What gives? I’ve read that these shots are supposed to be some sort of “art project” but it looks more like pics from a Craig’s List ad or his Grindr profile, doesn’t it???

See much more of Stipe’s NSFW “pipe” at BuzzFeed.

 
I found this by accident yesterday. Strange isn’t it? Ron Raffaelli, the rock and erotica photographer shot this peculiar portrait of a naked Jimmy Page with his guts hanging out, at Page’s specific request. The blonde in the shot is Miss Cynderella, one time member of the GTOS and briefly the wife of John Cale (before he caught her fucking Kevin Ayers, but I digress).

Raffaelli recollects:

“After touring with the band I became very close to them, and on a long flight from London to New York, Jimmy Page told me about a recurring dream he had. In this dream Jimmy falls from the concert stage into the flailing arms of a sea of screaming fans. he is stripped of his clothes and forced to have sex with many beautiful groupies.

Dream? Sounds more like his waking life back then, but this was 1969, maybe the legendary Led Zeppelin debauchery hadn’t gotten into full swing yet? Via Dark Elf:

Thus it came to be that in December of 1969, Raffaelli set up a photo shoot at his studio for Jimmy to turn his dream fantasy into a fully realised photographic image.

“I had an assistant go down to the butcher and get these entrails,“recalls the photographer, “and they smelled like crazy! So I insisted they be kept in a can out on the back porch of my studio for the early morning shooting, and we weren’t going to bring them in until we had to because of the smell. Page came in with this model, some groupie that was hanging on to him at the moment.

I don’t remember her name, it was ‘Moonbeam’ or something… [the model is Cindy Wells, aka Miss Cynderella, from the GTOs] and I had the private set ready so there was no one there but him and me and this model. They stripped down and I got them all posed and everything and I said ‘ok, I am going to bring in the…uh..entrails,’ and by now the sun had come up and and it was heating them up so they were warm . I put them on him and got it all posed, but I’m looking through the camera and I’m thinking, ‘it just looks like I poured those entrails on his stomach, it doesn’t look like there’s a gash or anything.’ It just didn’t look convincing. And he’s laying there and she’s laying there and the stuff is beginning to get ripe and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve gotta think quick.’ So I run out to the kitchen and look in the refridgerator and there was my answer. I had a nice jar of strawberry preserves!

“I quick grabbed a long spoon and mixed ‘em up and they had the right redness and consistency, with little specks and everything. it had the right look to it like it might be the inside of a turned-out open wound. So I took these cold, cold preserves- and I give Jimmy a lot of credit, he must really have wanted the picture- and put them all around the entrails on his stomach. And I know from the expression on his face and the contortions that his body was going through that this was not a comfortable situation!

“I originally shot it in Black & white and gave Page a 16X20 print, and I also shot color at the same time that I just developed and rolled up into a ball and stuck into a drawer and hadn’t looked at until I decided to put it up on my website this year.

My agent met Jimmy in New York last year and explained that we have this material and that we were intending to sell it and he didn’t have any objections to it. It’s bizarre, but I would never consider it a controversial picture by any means, it’s just bizarre and reflects a bizarre state of mind that he was in at the time. I’m sure he looks back at it and goes, ‘Oh my God, what was I thinking?!’”

I’ll bet he does!

 
There was a time when Nation of Ulysses was the most influential underground rock band in the world. It may not have been for a very long time, and it may have been 20 years ago, before Nirvana took punk aesthetics into the heart of the mainstream, but for a while it seemed like everyone who heard or saw this band just couldn’t shut up about them. It’s not hard to see why Nation of Ulysses drew such cultish adulation - they were always about much more than being a simple band. They had a defined visual aesthetic that drew more from jazz and Soviet art than hardcore. They spoke politics. They worse suits. They described themselves in statements that by today’s standards would spell career suicide for a rock band:

We’re not only a political party, but also a terrorist group. The imperative started with the recognition of the colonialization of youth culture by youth imperialists and the establishment. It was initially formed as a response to that, but now we’ve broadened our breadth to encompass a complete destruction of the American legacy. We understand the workings of oppressions big and small.
...

At the time [they formed] was Ulysses Speaks your primary medium?

Yeah, we were mostly just proliferating literature and bombing buildings, and then we realized the medium of noise not only creates a perfect cover for our organization but it also creates a camouflage for maniacal riotous behavior and provides a context for acting like an idiot and going beyond the structures of everyday behavioral codes. When you see a show, everybody is jumping up and down screaming—if it’s good—and that’s because they’ve been allowed to step outside the boundaries of regular behavior. We want to go one step further. It’s absurd behavior—dancing is incredibly absurd—and we want to take that one step beyond, and that’s why we have so much violence on stage; we’re trying to bring it to the next level. We’re fighting a war there in the room…the room that we took over.

Since you began this mission, have you become more optimistic that you can effectively utilize the facade of populist entertainment to convey the party message?

Yeah…our message is visual, it’s aural, and it’s olfactory. Our message couldn’t be progenitated properly just with sound. We see the whole idea of music as a sound phenomena as really bogus and an idea which has only taken root since the proliferation version of recorded medium, like records. Before then, nobody would have ever thought, “this is only attacking my ears”, because there’s always a visual side to that whole phenomenon. We’re into the true experience, and that’s why the whole idea of music has really aligned us. What we’re wearing on stage and the way we move on stage has just as much to do with the idea that we’re getting across as the sound that we’re putting forth.
...

Have you been able to stir up as much antagonism as you might have hoped for?

Yeah, you know - the old order; people who sense the dissolution and the proliferatrion of new ideas. There’s a Kill Ulysses conspiracy - It’s called the Kill Ulysses National Workers Socialist Party; they’re just trying to destroy us. Rock and Roll is trying to destroy us.

From The New Puritan ReView, 1991 - read the whole interview here.

Still, for all the word-of-mouth hype that surrounded Nation of Ulysses in their brief but dazzling career, for kids like me who lived in the sticks their music was harder to come across than hen’s teeth - another situation that seems impossible by today’s standards. Back in the days when you had to travel to a big city and visit a specialist record shop in the hope of picking up an import 7”, it was easier to find releases by Ulysses’ UK adherents like Huggy Bear than it was the band’s own originals. Thankfully, the hardcore NoU fan base still exists and has been doing a pretty good job of disseminating footage and material on the internet, ensuring the band’s legacy will live on and attract more fans. Sure, Nation of Ulysses weren’t the first punk act to adhere to hardcore left-wing politics, or to have a well defined look and outlook, but no-one did it with this much goddam style: 

Nation of Ulysses “Introduction/Spectra Sonic Sound” live 1991
 

 
OK, so the audio quality in that clip was pretty poor, but it gives you an idea of what their shows were like. Plus, I do love that washed out, third-generation VHS-copy look. Here’s another clip of NoU live from 1991 (minus suits):

Nation of Ulysses “A Comment on Ritual” live 9:30 Club, 1991
 

 
You can now buy the Nation of Ulysses back catalog direct from Dischord.
 
After the jump, even better quality footage of NoU live in DC circa 1991, including a further 30 minutes of that 9:30 Club show above (in color)…

 
The irrepressible Keith Moon goes apeshit on the short-lived American TV program the Rock Music Awards in 1975.

Roger Daltrey and Ann-Margret are receiving some kind of award for Ken Russell’s Tommy. Perhaps for being a steaming pile of shit.

Thanks to our friends at Bubbling Over for finding this wacky bit of Moon mania.
 

 
Interviews with Television are few and far between. Here’s one which aired a few months ago on MTV Brazil

There’s an amusing bit where a visibly pissed-off Tom Verlaine responds to a clip in which a member of Gang Of Four condescendingly describes CBGB and the Seventies New York City rock scene.

The guy doing the interviewing is Chuck Hipolitho of Brazilian punk band Forgotten Boys. He’s clearly thrilled to be in the presence of musicians he obviously loves but the band is about as warm and fuzzy as a school of Coney Island white fish floating down the East River during the dead of winter. Comeon guys, give the kid some love.

Tom Verlaine, Billy Ficca, Jimmy Rip and Fred Smith together again. When’s the tour?

Paging Richard Lloyd.
 

 
Part two after the jump…