When I mentally tally up all the shows I’ve seen in my lifetime, I think the band I’ve seen the most times is/was Pussy Galore. I must have seen them playing around New York City anywhere up to twenty times in the 80s, including once in what seemed like a squat in the East Village (with Richard Kern’s band, The Blacksnakes) where everyone was given a tab of acid when they walked in with the admission fee. I confess to taking mine (The handbill, below).
 

 
Pussy Galore were the band with the heaviest GROOVE I’d ever experienced, an almighty LOUD GROOVE, that moved entire audiences as one piece. They were what I’d call a body band. You really felt them in your gut. Their shows were normally so loud that you were helpless to resist that fucking insane GROOVE. You and everyone else in the room. The drum kit was embellished with a gas tank and trash cans. It was quite a yowling racket they made.

But Pussy Galore never got even close to capturing their live sound on record. It was always a tinny approximation of what their live shows sounded like and their albums were annoyingly low-fi and deliberately annoying at that. Nihilistic ear bleeders, their albums were. I could never play their records. But live it was a totally different story. They almost bordered on funky live!

The Xtrmntr blog has a neat Pussy Galore rarity and that is the cassette only ironic cover version they made in 1986 of every song on Exile on Main St., with just 550 copies produced. I bought mine at the legendary East Village fanzine store See Hear (I lived down the block and stopped in there frequently, almost on a daily basis, for years. I’d often see Thurston Moore who seemed to show up there as much as I did). Apparently Pussy Galore got a cease and desist letter from the Stones’ lawyers and it became an instant collector’s item. Now, of course, in this age of consumer enlightenment, you can download it all over the Internet.
 

 
Below, the “Maximum Penetration,” a Pussy Galore video compilation that came out in 1987. I always thought this was better than any of their albums.

1. Pig Sweat 2. White Noise 3. Just Wanna Die 4. Nothing Can Bring Me Down 5. Biker Rock Loser 6. Constant Pain 7. Rope Legend 8. Pussy Stomp 9. NYC: 1999! 10. Cunt Tease 11. When I Get Off 12. Get Out 13. Pretty Fuck Look 14. Trash Can 15. Die Bitch 16. Spin Out 17. Kill Yourself 18. No Count 19. Fuck You, Man 20. Alright [Cut]

Jon Spencer (guitar, vocals); Julie Cafritz (guitar, vocals); Kurt Wolf (guitar); Neil Hagerty (guitar); Bob Bert (drums)—you’ll notice that there was no bass player. Pussy Galore were a distinctly trebley band
 

 
Considering what they were all about, The Fugs are one of those 60s groups you don’t expect to find many vintage clips of on YouTube. What TV station or network would have allowed THEM to be beamed into unsuspecting living rooms? Answer: A Swedish one! (Perhaps one where no one employed there spoke any English? Actually the clip is subtitled, so this wasn’t the case).

As you watch this clip from Swiiisch—especially the parts with Ed Sanders’ rap about being into “astral perversion” and getting sucked off by ring-tailed fruit bats, when they sing “Super Girl” or hell, any of it—try to picture what sort of conniption fit Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover would have had if this had run on American television. I mean, there’s no way, but imagine if that did happen.

The Fugs would have been put in jail, probably. It would be interesting to read what their FBI file said about this television appearance.

The YouTube poster has the year as 1966, but that’s obviously incorrect as Tenderness Junction, which came out in 1968, is referred to as “our new album.” The also play “Crystal Liaison” which is from the album after that, It Crawled into My Hand, Honest.

Dig Tuli Kupferberg’s ultra rad(ical) go-go dancer moves.
 

 

 
Part II is here.

 
From the Dangerous Minds’ archives:

Doc Marten meets Dean Martin in Billy Idol’s plodding version of ‘White Christmas,” which has all the appeal of a Christmas stocking full of steaming reindeer shit.

The musicians backing him sound like a German wedding band after an afternoon of knocking back steins of hefeweizen at the local beer garden. It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing and these cats couldn’t swing if they were hanging from a lamppost in a hurricane.
 

 
A Christmas standard sung by Mr. Pop.
 

 
Feverishly prolific New York graf-based expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 52 today. That fact jars us because of the inevitable Peter Pan myth that accompanies the premature death of any young artist in any discipline.

Though I hate to pursue it, does it depress us to imagine a middle-aged JMB? Would he be still cocooned and slickly dressed, and now entrenched and heavily sponsored downtown, or maybe bugged-out HR-from-Bad-Brains style, redolent in gray dreads, pursued often and obtained for the occasional commission in order to keep up his paranoid existence in who-knows-where?

Of course, Basquiat’s influence dwarfs the downtown New York art scene in the way that he embodied the New York mix of hip-hop, post-punk, and fashion. But our culture also tends to rely on him in an unspoken way as a kind of purified representation of redundant cliches like doomed youth, avant-garde blackness, and the price of fame. We do best to remember each of those features as part of him—and separately, we do best to remember Basquiat as Basquiat.

In that spirit, we draw your attention to Tamra Davis’s excellent documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, kindly uploaded to YouTube for the budget-minded…
 

 
Thanks to the excellent musician Aybee Deepblak...

 
Sassy Lou Reed interview shot during the Sally Can’t Dance/Rock & Roll Animal phase in Australia, 1974.

Reed is clearly having fun toying with the reporters on the topics of drugs (he’s all for them), transvestism (sometimes) and what he spends his money on (drugs).
 

“Look what fear’s done to my body!”

This 1980 Rockpalast concert from Magazine must’ve been shown again recently on German television. I snagged a high quality copy of this just last week from a torrent tracker and now it’s on YouTube, I see, with not that many views, either.

The Magazine we see here includes Barry Adamson on bass, Dave Formula on keyboards, drummer John Doyle and of course bandleader/frontman Howard Devoto, but original guitarist John McGeoch, whose strikingly original guitar lines were such a major part of the band’s sound, had by then departed to join Siouxsie and the Banshees. He was replaced for Magazine’s 1980 world tour by Robin Simon of Ultravox, who is on deck here and no slouch on the guitar himself.

This is a pretty amazing concert—these guys were tight—and must be the most substantial record of Magazine performing live during their classic era. If you love Magazine like I love Magazine, then this hour long concert is going to make you very, very happy. Watching the great Howard Devoto captured in his youthful prime here singing his darkly literate songs of icy alienation, violence and non-conformity is a revelation.
 

 
Via La Cumbuca

 
On August 9 1979, German punk diva Nina Hagen caused what was dubbed “the scandal of the year” on the Austrian youth culture TV talkshow Club2 when she demonstrated several optimal positions for female masturbation.

The (fully-clothed, sorry!) action takes place towards the very end, just after the hour and 28-minute mark, when she gets into a heated argument about female orgasms with one of the guests. I don’t speak German, but it’s pretty clear for all to see who loses the debate and it’s not Nina!

The guy sitting next to her is Ferdinand Karmelk, the father of her daughter, German actress Cosma Hagen. The duo perform a sort of unplugged version of NunSexMonkRock‘s “Future is Now,” here.

The host of the show was was obliged to step down over the incident.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Pre-punk Nina Hagen in East Germany, 1974

 
Airing from 1985 to 1992, Club MTV was primarily branded to showcase acts like Milli Vanilli, Paula Abdul, and MC Hammer, rather than The Dead Milkmen. The program was shot in the cavernous confines of the massive Palladium nightclub in New York City (now NYU dorms). You can’t get a more “late 80s” location than that.

Watching The Dead Milkmen lip-synch for a show modeled after American Bandstand is a little awkward, but even as VJ Downtown Julie Brown intros them as a “college radio” band breaking into “the mainstream,” you can tell everyone’s having a good time, making the most of a strange pairing.
 

Hell of a tattoo.
 
Johnny Thunders hangs onto a cross while singing the Rolling Stones’ “I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys” (written by Andrew Loog Oldham). Shot by Paul Tschinkel at Irving Plaza in NYC, 1981.