A wonderful first-hand account of the 1969 Palm Springs Pop festival by my friend, the great rock ‘n’ roll photographer Heather Harris.

The Palm Springs Pop Festival, April 1, 1969, a music event a tad bigger quantitatively than the more celebrated Monterey Pop Festival of the same era although smaller by many triple digits than the later that summer Woodstock, was peopled by some eight thousand strong in drug-fueled hippie-dancing young souls. It was my first time attending a show that blocked off the front of the stage from the audience or photographers like me. I was as determined then as I am now to get good live shots, so I just tore down the chicken wire, entered the rarified area and took the following photo of The Flying Burrito Brothers, (left to right the legendary Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, Chris Ethridge and Sneeky Pete) all accoutered in their infamous custom Nudie suits, Gram with cannabis leaves and pills, Sneeky with pterodactyls etc. I only got this one shot of The Burritos because suddenly eight thousand people rushed forward to join me and I was terminally jostled from any further photography. It was uncomfortable amongst the new surging throngs, it was cold in the desert night air, the two bands we wanted to see had canceled, we’d seen the remaining other acts before, and my friend was starting to get drugsick, so we left. But apparently those pushing stagewards continued in their spirit of surging and mobbing, and eventually rioted throughout tony Palm Springs all the way to the Taquitz Falls park. It was one of the first instances in failure of concert crowd control ending in rioting, quite some months before Altamont, and I, dear reader, may be responsible for its inception. Later I would find access to stage photography limited by far more than chicken wire fencing, instead by micro-managing control freaks associated with the acts, and that has proven in long run a far more formidable obstacle to good photography than any 8,000 person riot behind me.

 

(C) 1969 Heather Harris
 
Myself, I adore The Flying Burrito Brothers. So much so that I had their brilliant pedal steel player, the late Sneaky Pete Kleinow play on the first Medicine record. Here’s a great clip of them lip-syncing the first song from their first album :

 
HOW I STARTED A RIOT 41 YEARS AGO WHILE PHOTOGRAPHING GRAM PARSONS AND THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS (fast film blog)

 
Difficult to tell from the box cover, but like the real thing, it certainly hints at it! Gaga goo goo!
 
Via Oh No They Didn’t! where you can also see the back cover.

The great Igor Stravinsky was born this day in 1882. Although it’s nearly impossible to imagine it happening now, this man’s music once caused riots when performed for audiences not prepared for the radical dynamic shifts and sheer exuberant sonic violence. Of course by now all of these elements have been well absorbed into the public expectation of what orchestral music is supposed to be, but at the time this stuff was an absolute affront to human decency! Below is a complete performance by the man himself conducting his epic Firebird suite sometime in the late 1950’s.

 
It’s with heavy hearts that we come upon news of the death at 56 years too-young of Funkadelic guitarist, writer and arranger Garry “Diaper Man” Shider.

As a teen in the late ‘60s, Shider first linked up with the visionary funkateer George Clinton at a barber shop in his native Plainfield, NJ where Clinton rehearsed his doo-wop group the Parliaments. He joined Clinton’s guitar section in 1971 and ended up writing and performing on some of Parliament Funkadelic’s classics, including “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Cosmic Slop.” Unlike many of his peers, Shider was able to smoothly navigate his bluesy, psychedelic style over the insistent thump of most of the Funkadelic repertoire.

He’s also the guitarist who’s stuck with Funkadelic’s exhausting touring schedule the longest.

Let us remember him in his 20-year-old glory here in a promo for his best-known composition (on which he sang lead), dressed in trademark diaper and Roman centurion-style cape with feathered shoulder shells.  

 
Another couple of rarities from Beatles producer George Martin. He collaborated with Maddalena Fagandini on these two songs, Time Beat and Waltz in Orbit, the A & B sides of a single released on the Parlophone label. They were released under the pseudonym “Ray Cathode.” Fagandini, who was a part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, worked alongside Delia Derbyshire on Doctor Who sound effects. This would have been recorded mere weeks before Martin met the Beatles in 1962. (Audio for Time Beat is here)
 
Bonus clip: The Beatles appear on Doctor Who in 1965. Imagine jumping into a time machine and getting to see the Beatles! Sadly this scene only appears on British Region 2 DVDs:
 

 
When Bob Marley’s family called on the legendary singer’s childhood friend Alan Greenberg to film his funeral in 1982, it’s worth wondering whether Greenberg knew that he’d end up widening the scope to make one of the iconic films about Jamaica.

Shot by Werner Herzog associate Joerg Schmidt-Reitwein, Land of Look Behind seems to almost float across the island, touching down in both impoverished rural badland areas and the crowded setting of Kingston for the superstar’s stately final rites. Backed by the Kerry Leimer’s unlikely ambient score and featuring performers like Gregory Isaacs and Mutabaruka, Land… is a rich document of the places, faces, and voices of a Jamaica coming to terms with its lagging economy and post-colonial future.

Former Cabaret Voltaire member Richard H. Kirk sampled many bits of the film’s various monologues to populate In Dub: Chant to Jah and Live in the Earth, the electro-dub albums he made in his Sandoz guise.
 

 
Get: Land of Look Behind [DVD]
 
Download: K. Leimer’s score for Land of Look Behind [MP3]
 
Get: Sandoz in Dub - Chant to Jah [CD]

 
A wicked little nugget of psych guitar noise in the form of this 1967 single out of Syracuse, New York. As good a candidate for first shoegaze record as any other I’ve heard. What a fabulously fucked up sound !

 
“let me have some ssssSSPEEeeeed!”
 
thx Robert Chrysler !

 
As James Spooner’s 2003 documentary Afro-Punk has shown, the black/punk marginalization continuum is as old as punk itself, and only scene demography has obstructed its full flowering. Indeed, its [anti-]institutional roots can be traced as far back as the early-‘80s establishment of the Black Rock Coalition in New York City by Vernon Reid and Greg Tate.

With this excellent video, veteran Baltimore MC Labtekwon plunks down a chit into the sweepstakes, positing punk as just another spot for forward-thinking hip-hop to grind. His dude-tacular flow seems a hat-tip to Mike Muir’s campy victim monologue in Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized,” and his new album NEXT: Baltimore Basquiat and the Future Shock is forthcoming.
 

 

 
Although it sounds like a string of non-sequiters, America’s favorite poet, under the hilarious pseudonym Heins Hoffman-Richter, was behind this 1974 quasi-experimental music record. And y’know what ? It’s not half bad as far as quasi-experimental music goes !
via Weirdo records:

Subtitled: Symphony for Tape Delay, IBM Instruction Manual, & Ohm Septet. Rod McKuen‘s label Stanyan put out this exploito/fake avant-classical record, and since Stanyan basically was McKuen, you can bet your bottom dollar that Rod himself did the cut & pasting here. Big chunks of samples from Raymond Scott’s ‘Soothing Sounds For Baby’, feedback, tape echo, sound effects from the local beach, etc. Liner notes & track titles just scream of Rod’s writing.

 
Looks like Hula hoop girl has some competition.
 
Thanks, Marc Campbell!