Everything would look better if it were made in the ‘90s, right? No? Nostalgia for the heartwarming simplicity of early technology has, in recent years, had many of us reimagining what our lives would look like if certain present day inventions or creations had existed just a decade prior. You may recall the tongue-in-cheek parody commercial on “The Facebook” that came out a few years ago. Presented in late night television “friend-helping-friend” format, the ad explores the hypothetical, crude components of the social media platform pre-DSL, pre-selfies, even pre-Cambridge Analytica.
 

 
Retro-nerd YouTube channel Squirrel Monkey has captured the very essence of nineties-style “new technology” videos with its latest presentation on the online movie platform, Netflix. Founded just two years after the spoof is intended to take place, in 1995, the video is a how-to introduction to streaming movies through the website. Obviously, things would have been much different back then and this video does a pretty excellent job of capturing the nuances of the not-so-distant past. In a nutshell, in order to watch your favorite films online, you will need a fast computer (Windows ‘95 preferable), a reliable dial-up connection, and have to sign up to receive their Welcome Package, an homage to the free AOL CD-ROMS that littered the decade. But after everything is said and done, don’t expect to “Netflix and Chill” at ease. As you would probably predict, the quality of the stream would either be indistinguishably slow, or it would take nearly half the day to load!
 
Watch Squirrel Monkey’s ‘Streaming Netflix movies in 1995’ after these stills:
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Cheap, nasty, gruesome, and revolting, blah, blah, blah. And these were just the good points of Eerie Comics’ gory publication Weird which ran for 69 issues between 1966 and 1981.

The brainchild of “gun-toting” publisher Myron Fass and editor Carl Burgos who “ground his axe against the entire comics industry,” Weird rehashed pre-code comic strips with violent, shocking, blood-splattered tales of Frankenstein’s monster, “Sewer Werewolves,” “Flesh-rippers.” and the “Horrorama of Squirming Demons and Vampires.”

Taking its lead from EC’s Tales from the Crypt and Warren’s Creepy, Weird eschewed any pretence for good taste and decorum and aimed straight at the teenage jugular. It literally chewed the face off its competition with nasty, badly-drawn tales of the most gruesome excesses—cannibalism, torture, murder, and sordid occult rites. If there is a need to show evidence that brutal horror does not corrupt innocent minds, then may I present Exhibit A.: Weird.
 

 

 

 
More cheap ‘n’ nasty horror covers, after the jump…
 

 
We here at Dangerous Minds have written about a LOT of peculiar and astonishing auctions. Just from memory: Elvis’ pill bottles (twice), Marilyn Monroe’s hair and her pelvic x-rays (separately), John Lennon’s school detention records, a motorcycle from Easy Rider, a guitar destroyed by a member of the Misfits, claymation figures from a Zappa video, Alice Cooper’s prop guillotine, the actual Maltese Falcon… The list goes on for quite a while, but we may have reached the apotheosis or nadir of weird specificity today: coming up for exhibit and auction next month are celebrity apartment doors.

The Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues is one of the great landmarks of New York City’s rapidly disappearing Bohemian culture. Built and opened as a co-op in 1884, and re-opened as a hotel in 1905, it has served both short and long-term residents, and its register of long-timers is basically an absurdly long list of incredibly accomplished people in the worlds of letters (Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, basically all of the beats), music (Iggy Pop, Cher, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and the Chelsea Girl herself, Nico), and visual art (Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Rivera, Robert Crumb). Madonna photographed her infamous Sex book there. Sid (maybe) killed Nancy there. Andy Warhol famously made a really long, formally experimental film about its residents, and if you get a chance to see it screened as was intended do not pass it up.

There’s a Jon Bon Jovi song about it too. Can’t win ‘em all.

Even if seemingly everyone who’d ever been awesome in the 20th Century hadn’t lived there, it’d be an architectural treasure, and it’s been closed (except to long-term residents, obviously) for several years for long-needed renovations; it’s supposed to re-open later this year. Those years of renovation are where we come around to the forthcoming auction: specific doors known to have belonged on the rooms of various notables are going on exhibit on April 5th at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery (529 W. 20th, so basically a stone’s throw away from their original home), and they’ll be auctioned off by Guernsey’s on April 12th. Doors verified to specific individuals so far include those of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe,  Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. More may be identified as research into the doors’ provenance continues, according to Guernsey’s:

Through exhaustive research, roughly half of these large wooden doors can be traced to the iconic individuals who lived behind them. And although the research is continuing, it is expected that some doors can only be confirmed to be from the Hotel without a more precise personal connection. But even in those cases, owning a piece of Chelsea history is significant. Indeed, behind these doors lived the talented and famous (and infamous like Sid Vicious), where the Hotel served as home, workplace, artist’s retreat, hideaway, and love nest for the hippest, most talented, and most outrageous.

The doors are being consigned by one Mr. Jim Georgiou, a one-time Chelsea resident who took it upon himself to rescue the artifacts. Per his instruction, a portion of the proceeds from the auction will benefit City Harvest, a pioneering food-rescue non-profit (Mr. Georgiou himself once suffered a period of homelessness and hunger). If the prospect of owning a hero’s apartment door appeals to you but you can’t be in New York on April 12th, absentee bidding will be conducted on liveauctioneers.com and invaluable.com. Good luck to all who plan to bid.
 

Andy Warhol
 

Humphrey Bogart
 

Bob Marley
 
More doors after the jump…

 
We learned a lot from the insane Quincy Jones interview from a couple weeks back. To recap, and this is all according to an unfiltered 84-year-old Quincy Jones, the Beatles were notoriously bad musicians, Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor were lovers, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana killed JFK, and… Jones once dated a twenty-four-year old Ivanka Trump. Probably the greatest reveal of them all, however, was about Michael Jackson, whom Jones worked with as the pop star’s producer.

Immediately into the interview, Quincy declares Jackson to have been “as Machiavellian as they come,” alleging that he would steal material from other artists for his own personal gain. More specifically, Michael Jackson supposedly stole the riff from Donna Summer’s “The State of Independence” for his smash hit “Billie Jean.” Vangelis and Jon Anderson from Yes originally wrote “The State of Independence,” which was covered and popularized by Summer the following year. Quincy Jones arranged an all-star cast of guest vocalists for the newly revamped track, Michael Jackson being one of them.

Bizarrely enough, “Billie Jean” wasn’t the only song with supposedly “borrowed” material intended for Jackson’s 1982 best-selling album, Thriller. In the early eighties, Quincy Jones discovered a song that he felt could work well for Michael Jackson’s upcoming record. That track was “Behind the Mask” by Japanese electronic synthpop pioneers, the Yellow Magic Orchestra. The song was originally a synth instrumental written for a 1978 Seiko quartz wristwatch commercial. YMO later re-recorded the track, with lyrics written by British poet Chris Mosdell and vocals performed by songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto using a vocoder. The song appeared on Yellow Magic Orchestra’s highly influential 1979 record Solid State Survivor in Japan, and their ×∞Multiplies album in the US and Europe.
 

The first version of ‘Behind the Mask,’ recorded for a Seiko wristwatch commercial
 

The classic, album version of ‘Behind the Mask’ by Yellow Magic Orchestra
 
Jackson liked the “Behind the Mask” and agreed to record his own version of it during the Thriller sessions. With Sakamoto’s permission, additional lyrics and an extra melody line were added to Jackson’s version. The new lyrical content turned the focus to Jackson’s girlfriend, who he felt would often hide her emotions behind a symbolic “mask.” Conceptually, this was much to the contrary of the original YMO version, which contained a discordant thematic approach to “the mask.” Lyricist Chris Mosdell had this to say about the adjusted context:

“When Michael Jackson took it, he made it into a love song about a woman. It was a completely different premise to me, I was talking about a very impersonal, socially controlled society, a future technological era, and the mask represented that immobile, unemotional state. But hey, I let him have that one.”

 

 
Michael Jackson’s “Behind the Mask” was an anticipated smash hit and made the final cut for Thriller. A royalties dispute involving YMO’s management and Sakamoto, Mosdell, and Jackson ended up preventing the track from getting released. It wasn’t for another 28 years that a reworked version of “Behind the Mask” would be released…

More after the jump…

Prunella Gee as Eris in ‘Illuminatus!’ (via Liverpool Confidential)

In 1976, the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool mounted a 12-hour stage production of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. It was a fateful event in the life of the show’s set designer, Bill Drummond, for reasons he’s detailed in the Guardian: for one thing, it was in connection with Illuminatus! and its director, Ken Campbell, that Drummond first heard about the eternal conflict between the Illuminati, who may secretly control the world, and the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs, who may be agents of chaos disrupting the Illuminati’s plans. (Recall that in Illuminatus!, the MC5 record “Kick Out The Jams” at the behest of the Illuminati, as a way of taunting the Justified Ancients—or so John Dillinger says.)

Before they were known as the KLF, Drummond and Jimmy Cauty called themselves the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, appropriating the name for the eschaton-immanentizing hip-hop outfit they started in 1987. Over the next few years, they seized the pop charts and filled the airwaves with disorienting, Discordian hits, until a day came when you could flip on the TV and find Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By The JAMs,” or Martin Sheen narrating the KLF’s reenactment of the end of The Wicker Man.
 

Bill Drummond in Big in Japan, live at Eric’s (via @FromEricsToEvol)
 
After the Liverpool run of Illuminatus!, Drummond rebuilt his sets for the London production, but he suddenly bailed on the show, walking out hours before it was to open. I guess he missed the nude cameo appearance Robert Anton Wilson describes in Cosmic Trigger, Volume I:

On November 23, 1976—a sacred Discordian holy day, both because of the 23 and because it is Harpo Marx’s birthday—a most ingenious young Englishman named Ken Campbell premiered a ten-hour adaptation of Illuminatus at the Science-Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. It was something of a success (the Guardian reviewed it three times, each reviewer being wildly enthusiastic) and Campbell and his partner, actor Chris Langham, were invited to present it as the first production of the new Cottesloe extension of the National Theatre, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.

This seemed to me the greatest Discordian joke ever, since Illuminatus, as I may not have mentioned before, is the most overtly anarchistic novel of this century. Shea and I quite seriously defined our purpose, when writing it, as trying to do to the State what Voltaire did to the Church—to reduce it to an object of contempt among all educated people. Ken Campbell’s adaptation was totally faithful to this nihilistic spirit and contained long unexpurgated speeches from the novel explaining at sometimes tedious length just why everything government does is always done wrong. The audiences didn’t mind this pedantic lecturing because it was well integrated into a kaleidoscope of humor, suspense, and plenty of sex (more simulated blow jobs than any drama in history, I believe). The thought of having this totally subversive ritual staged under the patronage of H.M. the Queen, Elizabeth II, was nectar and ambrosia to me.

The National Theatre flew Shea and me over to London for the premiere and I fell in love with the whole cast, especially Prunella Gee, who emphatically has my vote for Sexiest Actress since Marilyn Monroe. Some of us did a lot of drinking and hash-smoking together, and the cast told me a lot of synchronicities connected with the production. Five actors were injured during the Liverpool run, to fulfill the Law of Fives. Hitler had lived in Liverpool for five months when he was 23 years old. The section of Liverpool in which the play opened, indeed the very street, is described in a dream of Carl Jung’s recorded on page 23 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The theatre in Liverpool opened the day Jung died. There is a yellow submarine in Illuminatus, and the Beatles first sang “Yellow Submarine” in that same Liverpool Theatre. The actor playing Padre Pederastia in the Black Mass scene had met Aleister Crowley on a train once.

The cast dared me to do a walk-on role during the National Theatre run. I agreed and became an extra in the Black Mass, where I was upstaged by the goat, who kept sneezing. Nonetheless, there I was, bare-ass naked, chanting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” under the patronage of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, and I will never stop wondering how much of that was programmed by Crowley before I was even born.

 

Robert Anton Wilson (via John Higgs)
 
In 2017, 23 years after they split up, Drummond and Cauty reunited as the JAMs. Instead of a new chart-burning house record, they released their first novel…

More after the jump…

 
Scene: A medical facility in California, December 1960. Dr. Oscar Janiger, a research professor at the University of California-Irvine, carries out a series of investigations into the impact of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide 25, or LSD to you and me, on the creative processes. Janiger enlisted a variety of artists, writers, and actors as test patients, tasked with discovering the drug’s potency. Among those who signed-up for the trials was an artist named Burt Shonberg who had two sessions with Janiger. During his first session, Shonberg received an injection of 100ml of LSD. This led him to see a hidden structure to the universe where “Humanity is literally hypnotized by the Dream Reality of momentum caused by life (meaning external influences).”

There is an illusion of movement in life which is not the truth. This all relates to so-called time. Time is motion—is evolution. One might say that the Big Criminal in all this is identification. To be apart from the form is the answer to real vision—consciousness. To be awake is to be really alive—to really exist.

March 1961: Janiger carries out a second experiment with Shonberg upping the dose of LSD to 150ml. At first, the artist didn’t think the trip was working but suddenly he was propelled into an experience that led him to believe he had left the clinic and had witnessed an undiscovered world where giants danced in the sky. He quickly understood that this “psychedelic experience” could “possibly reach to actual magic and beyond.”

There are, of course, certain things that one experiences in the transcendental state that are not possible to communicate in the usual way, so new types of parables would have to be created to get the message through. These discoveries I refer to could be insights or revelations into various aspects of the world we live in, nature, the mind itself, the universe, reality, and God.

The experiments radically altered Shonberg and his approach to painting. He continued his own experiments with LSD which eventually led him to believe he was, in fact, a living embodiment of Baphomet—“a divine androgyne, a unification of light and darkness, male and female and the macro and microcosm,” or Aleister Crowley’s pagan, pre-Christian deity, or “the Devil in all his bestial majesty.”
 

‘Waking State Consciousness’ (1965).
 
Burt Shonberg was born on March 30, 1933, in Revere, MA. He had a talent for art and started his artistic studies before enlisting in the U.S. Army. After his discharge in 1956, he continued his studies at the Art Center of Los Angeles. He had interest in the occult, UFOs, and horror movies, in particular, Frankenstein’s monster which was a suitable avatar for his life and work as a creature made from disparate elements with no understanding of his true significance. His paintings drew various admirers including Forrest J. Ackerman who signed him to his talent agency and introduced him to the film world. He gained respect and began painting murals for a selection of hip nightclubs and coffee houses including Theodor Bikel’s Unicorn Cafe, the Purple Onion, the Bastille, Cosmo Alley and Pandora’s Box, eventually opening his own venue Café Frankenstein in 1958 at Laguna Beach, CA, where he decorated the walls and windows with startling imagery of his favorite movie monster.

As his reputation grew, Shonberg started a relationship with Marjorie Cameron—widow of the notorious rocket pioneer, occultist, and Crowley-devotee Jack Parsons. Cameron believed she was Babalon incarnate and initiated Shonberg’s interest in magick and the occult. Together they started an artist’s colony called ERONBU—a name composed from “camERON+BUrt.” But Cameron was a “Lady Macbeth figure, with hooks in Burt that penetrated deep,” and their relationship was doomed to failure.

His mural work drew the attention of independent movie-maker Roger Corman who hired Shonberg to paint the family portraits for his film version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher starring Vincent Price. Corman and Price (an avid art collector) were deeply enamored of Shonberg’s work, which led to more movie, magazine, and album cover commissions in the sixties and seventies.
 

Vincent Price in front of two of Shonberg’s portraits for Roger Corman’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’
 
Biographer Spencer Kansa was hipped to Burt Shonberg when writing his biography of Marjorie Cameron. Kansa is an acclaimed novelist, writer, and outsider maverick who is ideally positioned to write the first major biography of Shonberg, Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.

Spenser Kansa: I discovered Burt’s work while I was researching my biography of Marjorie Cameron, Wormwood Star, in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s. I knew they’d been lovers but I got to meet two of Burt’s chums who raved about him and showed me some examples of his incredible artwork. And the more I got to know about him, the more I realized I just had to chronicle his life story once the Cameron biography was completed.

DM: Why do you think Shonberg is important?

SK: Firstly, he’s the pre-eminent psychedelic artist of the 1960s. Plus he’s an intriguing figure who straddles a mid-century cultural nexus that encapsulates the rise of alternative religions, the UFO phenomenon, the Beat Movement, the popularity of monster movies, sixties counterculture and psychedelia. 

DM: How did he meet Marjorie Cameron?

SK: My educated guess would be that they probably met at the Unicorn, L.A.’s first beatnik-era coffeehouse, which stood next door to what became the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Burt designed its décor and menu and Cameron was known to frequent the place, as well as the bookshop upstairs.
 

‘Self Portrait’ (1958).
 
DM: What was Shonberg’s relationship to drugs? How important were they to him?

SK: His mural work was often quite time-consuming and laborious, and amphetamines helped fuel the necessary energy he needed to complete such undertakings, without losing his concentration. He would stay up for days at a time working on pieces, and his speed usage helps explain why he was so industrious and prolific. His use of hallucinogens, firstly, peyote then LSD, sparked his inner visions, and on canvases like “Seated Figure and a Cosmic Train,” he captured his transcendent state in such a moving and powerful way that many of his contemporaries, who’d also experienced such altered states, instantly related to it. Also, it’s important not to forget that he was able to translate onto the canvas, not only the occult and Crowley-inspired themes he’d been exposed to by Cameron but some rather weighty metaphysical concepts, particularly those deriving from his deep interest in Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way system.
 
More from Spencer Kansa talking about Burt Shonberg, after the jump…

 
I’ve never been a huge fan of comedic horror, but there are three movies (all from the ‘80s) that I think got the formula unquestionably right: Street Trash (1987), Brain Damage (1988) and the best one of all, 1985’s Re-Animator.

Re-Animator, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, Herbert West - Reanimator, has stood the test of time and maintains a solid cult following. It spawned two sequels, Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator and even an outrageously campy (and extremely bloody) musical, directed by the film’s creator, Stuart Gordon. Arrow Video has recently released some absolutely incredible special edition Blu-rays of both Re-Animator  and Bride of Re-Animator that get my highest recommendation. You can tell a lot of love went into those reissue packages.

You can also tell a lot of love went into the newly announced Re-Animator action figure which will be released by NECA this summer.

The set contains an eight-inch retro-style action figure of Herbert West as well as a bottle of reagent, a bloody shovel, Rufus the (un)dead cat, and Dr. Hill’s undead head in the metal tray.

NECA’s official announcement indicates that the clothed figure will come in resealable clamshell packaging.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Re-Animator action figure. Amok Time put out a 3.75 inch Herbert West figure a couple of years ago which is still available. It’s not nearly as cool as this one though:

 

 
More after the jump…

The 1980s encapsulated in one photo.
 
If you remember the eighties, you were probably there. Big hair, bad music, and terrible fashion. Or was it so bad?

This was the decade when no one dominant musical trend dictated the terms—as say the Beatles did in the sixties or as heavy metal, prog rock or punk did in the seventies. Pop culture atomized into many different groups and subcultures. New wave, new romantics, punks, mods, goths, emos, hip-hop, rap, and eventually acid house and rave—which symbolically broke music down into euphoric repetitive beats with little reference to song, substance or subtlety.

Everything was considered equally valid, equally worthy, equally saleable, yet completely disposable.

Pop music was a teenage rite of passage; an entertainment business that vied with rudimentary computers and video games for attention. The revolution was no longer about class war it, was televised concerts to raise money to feed the world and discussions about what kind of trainers to wear. There was nothing to fight for. Affluence was king, feigned poverty was chic (ripped jeans for $100), gangster culture fashionable, and existential angst labored under a ton of makeup and hairspray. The eighties were all about dressing up and having fun which is kinda borne out by these photographs of youngsters from the decade.
 

Does my hair look big in this?
 

It’s all about… me.
 

The pained look of teenage angst.
 
More teenage fashion victims (and a few fashion victors, too) after the jump…

‘Crânerie n°2’ (2012).
 
Till Rabus is a Swiss artist who uses his work to ask questions about our existence. His paintings suggest it is no longer possible to solely rely on Descartes’ proposition “I think therefore I am.” We are more complex. We are what we do and what we have. Rabus fills his canvases with the detritus of our existence—discarded toys, plastic bottles, used condoms, garbage sacks—and asks how these objects represent us and what these objects say about our relationship to the world.

Rabus often “eradicates any signs of human presence in his paintings.” When he does paint the human form it is cropped or presented as a collage of limbs and movement engaged in a sexual act. These images relate to pornography and how intimate personal moments can become so overly objectified with their original meaning lost.

Rabus is the son of two artists. Born in 1975, he originally trained as an engraver of pocket watches before gradually moving towards a career in painting. His style developed more fully after he saw an exhibition of work by American Pop Artist James Rosenquist in 2004. Rosenquist had earned his living as a billboard painter. He went on to paint collages of consumer goods, iconic film stars and politicians on large canvases in a powerful graphic-style that helped define much of Pop Art.

Another influence is British artist Sarah Lucas who uses found objects to create sculptures such as “Au Naturel” (1994) which consisted of a mattress, a water bucket, melons, oranges and a cucumber, or “Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab” (1994) which were used to suggest a female form.

With his paintings, Rabus collects together the various artifacts he intends to depict. Once composed as an image he takes a digital photograph which he then uses as the basis for his pictures. Rabus has been described as:

...a hyperrealist with a keen eye for the beauty of banality. His subject matter ranges from fast food to porn, but all his works refer to, and are firmly based in Art history. … These playful pieces celebrate the seductive surface and almost convince the viewer to disregard their darker themes such as overconsumption, objectification and the steady dilution of local culture into global uniformity.

The resulting paintings are beautiful, surreal, make reference to art history, and strangely disconcerting as they ask more than they answer. See more of Till Rabus’ work here.
 

‘Cadavre exquis n°1’ (2016).
 

‘Cadavre Exquis n°2’ (2016).
 
Much more after the jump…

 
Around 1974, Alice Cooper fully morphed from a group’s name to that of a solo artist. While Cooper’s fellow bandmates moved on to various solo ventures—guitarist Michael Bruce working on the album In My Own Way and drummer Neal Smith recording Platinum Gods—Cooper planned his own solo extravaganza Welcome to My Nightmare set for release in 1975. He was drinking heavily and getting a “buzz on” with the likes Harry Nilsson, Micky Dolenz, Keith Moon, John Lennon, and lyricist Bernie Taupin. This little group of legendary drinkers was known as the “Hollywood Vampires” due to their nocturnal drinking habits at bars and clubs along Sunset Strip in L.A. Being slightly inebriated might explain how Cooper became involved with a space-age rock opera called Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6.

The title alone should have been fair warning that this might be a tad sub-par compared to his own classic work but something or someone—if only Cooper could remember exactly what or who?—led the singer to sign-up for the starring role as Flash Fearless. Perhaps it was the host of big name artists who were also happily roped into the project like the Who’s John Entwistle, who played bass on every track; or maybe boozing buddy Keith Moon who had a minimal speaking role as pirate Long John Silver; or perhaps Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues who played guitar; or maybe Elkie Brooks formerly of Vinegar Joe who (rather confusingly) sang vocals as both Flash’s crew member/girlfriend Dulla and head of the evil Zorg Women; or maybe Eddie Jobson of Roxy Music, or Jim Dandy, or Frankie Miller (who didn’t appear on the US album version), or Bill Bruford, or Kenney Jones, or Maddy Prior, or any of the highly respected talents who gave their name and time to the album.

Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 was the brainchild of Canadian songwriters/musicians Steve Hammond and Dave Pierce with contributions from Bonnie Pierce, Rick Jones, and Terence Hillyer. The musical was a parody of those 1930-style film serials like Flash Gordon. Pierce had been toying with the idea of a space-rock musical since around 1970 when he was writing songs in Canada with Rick Jones. Described as a “nostalgic musical of the 24th-century,” Flash Fearless   “follows the soft-porn adventures of a spoof 1940s sci-fi superhero, Flash Fearless, on a planet inhabited by a race of Amazons, the Zorg Women’ who keep men enslaved and milked them for their seminal fluid. The story seemed a neat fit to the mood of the time with the hit musical The Rocky Horror Show, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Glam Rock, the spoof sex movie Flesh Gordon, and even the Who’s star-studded misfire production of Tommy with the likes of Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart in the cast.
 

 
Flash Fearless and the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 was recorded in London and Los Angeles (Cooper’s tracks) in 1974 and released to much fanfare in 1975. This included a full-color comic strip published in the NME. Entwistle described the album to Melody Maker as “a breath of fresh air in rock music.” Fuck knows what the Ox was breathing in before but this wasn’t fresh air. It was great talent and production in search of good material. The album bombed.
 
More of Alice Cooper, John Entwistle and ‘Flash Fearless,’ after the jump…