I love me some surly Lou Reed. The interviewer is WBCN’s Bill Boggs.

Watch and discuss among yourselves.
 

 
Two of the most exciting live performances by a rock band that I’ve seen were Killing Joke at New York’s Peppermint Lounge and Limelight in the 80s. Intense, powerful, transcendent, Killing Joke’s influence has been long and deep. Underrated but much loved by their fans, KJ are gods among men.

Here’s a fan-made video interview with Killing Joke’s lead singer and high priest Jaz Coleman. Plus, a live performance by Killing Joke in Munich, 1985.
 

 
Parts 2 and 3 of the interview and live performance video after the jump…

The Residents’ 1976 version of The Stones’ Satisfaction is nearly everything the better known version by Devo from a year later is not: Loose, belligerant, violent, truly fucked up. A real stick in the eye of everything conventionally tasteful in 1976 America. Delightfully painful to listen to thanks to Philip “Snakefinger” Lithman’s completely unhinged lead guitar and mystery Resident member’s menacing vocal, this is a timeless piece of yellow plastic.
 

 
Check the B-side and a demented live version after the jump…

 
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Here’s the late, great Joey Ramone doing a smashing job of singing the beautiful early John Cage piece The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs which is itself based on text by James Joyce. This comes from an Italian Cage tribute LP from the early 90’s that I was previously unaware of which also features a ton of other luminaries such as DM super-pal Ann Magnuson, David Byrne, Debbie Harry, John Zorn, etc.
 

 
Hear Robert Wyatt and Cathy Berberian’s versions of the same song after the jump…

 
Tokyo synth-pop band Polysics clearly take their cues from Devo, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Shonen Knife and Yellow Magic Orchestra, but they do it so well, who can argue with such inspired thievery.
 

 
More Polysics after the jump…

 
Rare Japanese documentary footage of The Dictators, Suicide, Bad Brains, Mink DeVille, James Chance, The Ramones and The Dead Boys at CBGB, 1978. The Plasmatics at Cbs 1980 from NYC cable show ‘Innertube’.  Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, also from Innertube, 1979, at Max’s.
 

 
Via this isn’t happiness

 
Métal Urbain were contemporaries of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Formed in 1976, the French punk rock group’s harsh and noisy sound was as aggressive—if not more so—than that of their English or American counterparts (with the exception of Suicide or The Screamers). Their lead singer, Clode Panik, sounded like a French version of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith.

The group’s second single, “Paris Maquis” was Rough Trade’s first record release and influential British DJ John Peel showed his support, but they never really made it and broke up in 1979. Métal Urbain’s sound has been a big influence on Big Black’s Steve Albini and The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Métal Urbain reformed in 2003 and toured the US. In 2006, Jello Biafra produced their album, J’irai chier dans ton vomi, in San Francisco.

Below, Métal Urbain lip-synching “Paris Maquis” on French TV in 1978:
 

 
After the jump, a performance of Métal Urbain’s Gallic synthpunk anthem, “Panik”!

 
Bold and brassy, cult figure Cherry Vanilla first came to the public’s attention playing a necrophilliac nurse in Andy Warhol’s freaky London stage play, Pork. Back in her hometown of New York City, she became David Bowie’s publicist during his Ziggy Stardust-era, working beside fellow Pork cast-member Leee Black Childers (who was the VP of Mainman, as Bowie’s then management company was called).

Later she moved to London, where RCA Records marketed her as “The First Lady of Punk.” Sting and Miles Copeland played in her backing band. Later, she went to work for composer Vangelis, running his US office, which she still does to this day. Cherry Vanilla’s memoir, Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla will be published in November by the Chicago Review Press. Lindsay Lohan would be a good choice to play Cherry in the film version!
 
Below Cherry Vanilla performs “The Punk” on Germany’s Music Laden television program in 1977:
 

 
During my guest blogging stint at Boing Boing in Spring of 2009, when I posted about the traveling exhibit of the unseen and unpublished William S. Burroughs/Malcolm McNeil graphic novel, collaboration Ah Pook is Here, I suspected that a publication of the work would be announced shortly thereafter. It’s taken a while, but Fantagraphics will finally be putting it out in 2011, as Carolyn Kellog reports at the Los Angeles Times:

The project began with a Burroughs-and-McNeil collaboration in the 1970s on the comic strip “The Unspeakable Mister Hart,” which appeared in the British magazine “Cyclops.” The magazine folded, and the two decided they wanted to turn their work into a full-length project—at the time, Burroughs was 56 and McNeil was 23. What they conceived was so new that they weren’t sure what to call the form, and settled on “a Word/Image novel.” They worked for seven years but never found a publisher.

Fantagraphics, which included some spectacular images from the book in its announcement, describes the story of “Ah Pook Is Here”:

John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control”—a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.

McNeil’s story of working with Burroughs on the project is sure to be interesting. “Fictional events in the text would materialize in real life. Very specific correspondences, not just similarities,” he told the website Big Bridge in 2008. “Such events might suggest that things are already in place and that with the right combination of words they can be made to reveal themselves ahead of time. That’s what Bill’s ‘Cut ups’ were about: ‘Cut the word lines and the future leaks out.’”

William S. Burroughs’ lost graphic novel coming in 2011 (Jacket Copy/LA Times)

Ah Pook is Here website (with samples of the artwork)
 
Below, Ah Pook Was Here in the form of a quite amazing short film made in 1994 by Philip Hunt, with Burroughs’ narration.