Bluegrass singer and social activist Hazel Dickens has died at the age of 75.
Hazel Dickens made a difference. Born into a family of miners in Mercer County, West Virginia, Dickens was a fierce defender and advocate of the rights of women, miners, the poor and the oppressed. The songs she sang came up out of her own experience living in coal mining communities and later, when she moved to Baltimore and Washington,D.C., struggling to survive in urban environments that were strange and forbidding to a young woman raised in the mountain hollows of Appalachia.
Ms. Dickens grew up in dire poverty in West Virginia’s coal country and developed a raw, keening style of singing that was filled with the pain of her hardscrabble youth. She supported herself in day jobs for many years before she was heard on the soundtrack of the 1976 Oscar-winning documentary about coal mining, ”Harlan County, U.S.A.”
Her uncompromising songs about coal mining, such as “Black Lung” and “They Can’t Keep Us Down,” became anthems, and she was among the first to sing of the plight of women trying to get by in the working-class world. She was a key influence on such later singing stars as Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss and the Judds.”
Dickens was the first woman to receive the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Merit Award.
This is an excerpt from the documentary Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song directed by Mimi Pickering. The songs in the clip are the powerful and moving “Mannington Mines” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.”
These cleverly Photoshopped album covers are pretty funny. I had to do a double take because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on… I think my favorite is “I Don’t Like Me Either.”
All images are from the devious and NSFW website Twisted Vintage.
Fans of modern indie rock might recognise the name Seb Thompson. Apart from being an incredible drummer and a production powerhouse, he is a founder member of Trans Am and also drums for Ian Svenonious’ excellent Weird War. He now has a new solo project called Publicist that does away with rock stylings and goes straight for the disco jugular.
Publicist is essentially a one man band, that features electronics programmed by Thompson, vocodered vocals, and live drumming. Though still a pretty new concern with only a couple of singles under the belt (including “Momma” featuring vocals from Svenonious, and last year’s Keep It Off The Record 12”) even at this early stage it looks and sounds great. This shouldn’t be a surprise to Trans Am or Weird War fans, as it’s obvious from those groups how talented Thompson is. For me it’s great to see him directly expressing the electronic dance elements audible in Trans Am.
There’s not much info floating about on Publicist so far, but you can see and hear more at his MySpace (*spit*). Publicist is making a live appearance tonight at Brooklyn’s Zebulon, and for an idea of how fun that will be watch this live clip:
Patti Smith plays dress-up for a pirate-inspired photo shoot by Annie Liebovitz in the London studio where the latest Johnny Depp pirate movie is being filmed for Disney. The shoot took place last September.
In the video, Patti makes the connection between rock and rollers and pirates and manages to look like both.
Morrissey gave a very rare interview to John Wilson on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row yesterday, to promote the release of The Very Best Of Morrissey, on April 25th in the UK and May 3rd the US.
In the interview, Morrissey discussed the forthcoming album, the legacy of The Smiths, his work as a song-writer, his thoughts on British Prime Minster, David Cameron‘s disclosure that he was a “major Smiths fan”, and also had time to mention his, as yet, unpublished autobiography, which he has just finished writing and would like to see published as a Penguin Classic.
I don’t know the exact provenance of these positively gorgeous stock film clips of the nearly-mythical Sunset Strip area in our beloved city that have been popping up in the last day or two via the Vintage Los Angeles FB group and Youtuber dantanasgirl. What an incredible treat, though. The building on the right in the first clip that bears the words Come to the Party would shortly become the Whisky a Go Go and further down the road Largo would become The Roxy. Certainly two of the more significant and beloved locations for my musical up-bringing! My Grandparent’s house was mere blocks from here, so these images really tweak some early childhood memories as well. Oh, internet….
Iggy, Scott Asheton, Mike Watt, James Williamson and a fucking orchestra play “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in tribute to Ron Asheton at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on April 19.
The sound is shit but the camera is so thrust into the meat and bone of Iggy’s performance that the end result is exhilirating and the bad sound actually starts to sound perfect. Distortion transcended.
I just thought I’d put up a few under-viewed clips of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark performing on Top Of The Pops in the early 80s—why the hell not? I know we have a few fans lurking out there amongst the readers (and writers) and these could do with a few more views. I have a confession to make though—OMD pretty much passed me by until very recently. I dunno why that is to be honest. Maybe it’s the glut of other early synth bands from the same period whose back catalogs I was more urgent to check out. Maybe it’s my vague hazy childhood memories of the band being that they were not particularly cool. Maybe it’s the connections I can see now between OMD and the haunted Ariel Pink/John Maus sound casting the band in a new light. Whatever. I don’t wanna question it too much. I just wanna enjoy:
OMD - “Souvenir” (live on TOTP)
OMD - “Messages” (live on TOTP)
After the jump “Genetic Engineering”, “Joan Of Arc” and “Maid Of Orleans”
The Godz first album, Contact High, rearranged the furniture in my head when I first heard it back in 1966. I was 15 years old and had never heard anything so fucking weird in my life. The Godz’ hypnotic, electronic, cowboy ragas and high lonesome mantric wails sounded like Hank Williams, Sun Ra and The Fugs being wok-fried in the Mongolian barbecue of absolute reality. Their subversive drone was immortalized on vinyl a year before The Velvet Underground’s debut, which leads one to wonder if VU picked up on The Godz twisted vibrations.
The liner notes for Contact High are worth reading in their entirety. They capture a very specific place and time in rock and roll’s ascension:
“THIS IS THE GODZ’ TRUTH: two sides of eight original tunes by four New Yorkers who don’t give a good God-damn whether you dig it or not. They are human, alive, and hot in the blood, creating their own song, forging their own sound with a beat like an elephant’s heart. They are that way because they hold honesty dear, and have no need for arrogance.
By name the GODZ are blond Jay Dillon, 24, a psaltery player by choice and a graphic designer by trade; Larry Kessler, 25, a sometimes craps dealer, dishwasher and itinerant record salesman. Record salesmen also are Jim McCarthy, 22, guitarist, harmonica and plastic flute player, and drummer Paul Thornton, 26, who never played that instrument before this date. To all of them, musical instruments are but so many vehicles by which they express all they cannot consciously define in any other way. Now if all this stops you, don’t read further and for GODZ’ sake don’t buy this record album.
But if you want to hear about love and the lack of it by victims unashamed, about hate and too much of it in the world, or the passion of these realistic young men who know dream can be another name for nightmare, then you can say these are your kind of people and make it stick. For it is a new, honest, emotion laddened telling-it-like-I-feel-it kind of music, which is, really, the only kind of music this country has produced, and is, therefore, very American, Lyndon Johnson and the critics notwithstanding.
The GODZ in short are hip and wise to the ways of the world, its put-ons and all of that. They don’t dig Mom’s apple pie and I’ve never seen them in church on Sunday. They stand in the margin of life and that is where their music is, and this is what they offer you in this, their first recorded album.” Marc Crawford.
Contact High was followed by Godz 2 in 1967 and The Third Testament in 1968. All three albums blend a proto-punk rawness with alt-jazz and deranged country weirdness into something that still sounds as adventurous and irreverent as it did back in the sixties.
The Godz opened up the field of possibilities for rock and rollers, expanding our notion of what rock is. But I’m sure they’d never claim that. It doesn’t sound fun enough.
In this rarely seen (until now) video, legendary experimental film maker Jud Yulket shoots The Godz in their Manhattan apartment in 1966. The silent 8mm footage was overdubbed with the band playing an extended medley of two of their songs, “Lay In The Sun” and “Come On Girl Turn On,” and some improvised jamming. The music track has never been released on vinyl or CD. Sloppy but evocative, this is not The Godz at their musical best but it does take you back to a time when space was the place and rock and roll was vital mojo in a shaman’s trick bag.
“Radar Eyes” from Godz 2 is edgy psychedelia with some seriously sinister overtones. Cooler than punk and twice as deadly.
Dangerous Minds pal Chris Musgrave shot and directed this extraordinarily intimate music video for a song called “Paper Wings” by newcomer Hannah Moriah. This is my first exposure to Hannah and her music and I’m duly impressed!
Listening to Hannah Moriah sing is both mesmerizing and disconcerting. Hannah’s voice is haunting and carries a delicate tone with note subtleties that at times are but a whisper. Her high register is captivating. Hearing its fragile inflection will have you expecting a break in tone, but it stays true throughout. Angelic and elegant, her vocals seem aged beyond her years. She drops to a smokey resonance while ending a word, setting a mood for what could be the end of the world or the soundtrack to a dreamscape. The perfect companion to a David Lynch film.
I’ll buy that. Chris promises another video is on the way soon. Not to sound like Ed McMahon or anything, but I think we’ll be hearing a lot from this talented young lady in the future! (That did sound just like Ed McMahon, didn’t it?)
