Test Dept, the industrial group that invented the “Stakhanovite Sound,” will mark the 100th anniversary of October 1917 with a festival at London’s Red Gallery. Along with the live premiere of material from Test Dept’s new album Disturbance, the lineup includes live performances by Puce Mary, Hannah Sawtell, Kris Canavan, Disinformation, Prolekult, and Fuckhead, and DJ sets by Trevor Jackson and Nina. There will also be installations, film screenings, talks, and an exhibition of Test Dept artifacts called Culture Is Not A Luxury!

The only industrial outfit explicitly committed to socialism—at least, none of the others worked with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir or wrote about Comrade Enver Hoxha—Test Dept promises to bring historical perspective to the nightmare we are living through. From the press release:

[T]he festival explores how one hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, which unleashed radical artistic forces that sought to build an idealistic new society, the current socio-political climate is also engendering a need for a profound shift in governance. As such, Assembly of Disturbance invites you to join an assemblage of artists to consider the prevalent and pressing intersection of art and activism, challenging and disrupting the current state of affairs in Britain, and beyond.

More after the jump…

 
With a nickname like “the Red Rocker” and a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, could the Clash have mistaken Sammy Hagar for a left-wing militant? No. But by the time David Lee Roth dismissed the Clash as too serious for rock and roll, the man who would succeed him in Van Halen had already left his mark on the punk group, like a time-traveling vandal.

Writer Greil Marcus heard some of the Clash’s second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, in the studio, and he was disappointed by Sandy Pearlman’s production of the finished record. Not only was it thin, but Pearlman had neutered the best song to cover up its debt to Sammy Hagar, Marcus wrote:

Mick Jones had picked up the central, explosive guitar riff of “Safe European Home,” the album’s strongest song, from the live version of Sammy Hagar’s “I’ve Done Everything for You,” on the radio constantly as the band worked in San Francisco. Pearlman erased the riff from the final master, fearing it would sound like a cheap cop, and thus erased the voice of the tune.

The riff may have been erased, but the resemblance between the two songs is unmistakable, and can never be unheard.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, sadly passed away in July of this year. In researching a different topic related to Romero, I stumbled across a short but informative interview with the director that appeared in SFGate in 2010.

In this interview, Romero discusses getting his start in filmmaking, working for Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame.

Romero describes Mr. Rogers as “the sweetest man [he] ever knew,” and the first person who ever trusted him to shoot film. According to Romero, most anyone working in film in Pittsburgh got their start with Mr. Rogers.

Remarkably, according to Romero, Mr. Rogers had seen both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead and enjoyed them both. On Dawn of the Dead Mr. Rogers remarked: “It’s a lot of fun, George.”

But, most mind-blowing to me was the revelation that Romero had originally wanted to cast Betty Aberlin (“Lady Aberlin” from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—MAJOR childhood crush) as the lead in Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately, Mr. Rogers was not keen on the idea.

According to Romero, “he wouldn’t let me use Lady Aberlin.”

More after the jump…

 
Although John Lennon and Yoko Ono were undoubtedly two of the very most famous and talked about people of 1969, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was no slouch in the worldwide fame department himself. And so it was an inspired pairing indeed, organized by the Canadian Broadcast Company, when the peace-promoting Beatle and his avant-garde artist wife met up with the celebrated intellectual and author of The Medium is the Massage and Understanding Media on December 19th.

Lennon and Ono were in snowy Toronto doing press to bring attention to their “War is Over” billboard and poster campaign. Huge posters and billboards had been posted in twelve countries proclaiming “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” The campaign was launched in the major cities of New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Helsinki. There were over 30 roadside billboards put up in Toronto alone and a large billboard hung next to the US Armed Forces recruitment office located on New York’s Times Square.
 

 
McLUHAN: “Can you tell me? I just sort of wonder how the ‘War Is Over,’ the wording… the whole thinking. What happened?”

JOHN: “I think the basic idea of the poster event was Yoko’s. She used to do things like that in the avant garde circle, you know. Poster was a sort of medium, media, whatever.”

YOKO: “Medium.”

JOHN: “And then we had one idea for Christmas, which was a bit too vast, you know.”

YOKO: “We wanted to do it.”

JOHN: “We wanted to do it, but we couldn’t get it together in time.”

YOKO: “Maybe next year.”

JOHN: “And to do something specifically at Christmas. And then it got down to, well, if we can’t do that event…”

YOKO: “We did this.”

JOHN: “...what we’ll do is a poster event. And then how do you get posters stuck all around the world, you know. It’s easier said than done. So we just started ringing up and find it out. And at first we’re gonna have… we had some other wording, didn’t we, like, ‘Peace Declared.’ And it started up, there’s a place in New York, where you can have your own newspaper headline, you know. There’s a little shop somewhere in Times Square. And we were wondering how to, sort of like, get it in the newspapers as if it had happened, you know. And it developed from that. Well, we couldn’t get the front page of each newspaper to say war was over, peace declared or whatever.”
 
Much more after the jump…

 
Walter Becker passed away last weekend. I’ve been listening to Steely Dan a ton all summer long, so the loss hit a little harder than usual. The news elicited the usual round of condolences and encomiums from fans across the world, a group that included one that maybe Becker’s fans weren’t waiting for as much. Michael McKean, lately killing it in Better Call Saul and of course (as David St. Hubbins) the lead singer of the world’s most preposterous heavy metal band, Spinal Tap, reminded his Twitter audience that Tap and the Dan did indeed once cross paths:
 

A dollop of Walter Becker genius. Tap asked him to write a little something technical re BREAK LIKE THE WIND & he did. pic.twitter.com/DX8XPz4Oo3

— Michael McKean (@MJMcKean) September 3, 2017

 
Michael McKean is probably the most musically gifted of the Spinal Tap guys—remember, he was once briefly a member of an actual band, namely the Left Banke, and his father was one of the co-founders of Decca Records. So on some level it makes sense that he would be the one to think of including Walter Becker in Spinal Tap’s 1992 album Break Like the Wind in the form of some silly-ass “technical notes.” That album was quite a star-studded affair, in fact, featuring the contributions of Jeff Beck, Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriani, Slash, and Cher. I’m betting McKean was on the phone a lot that year.

Becker’s notes make up one “panel” of the fold-out lyrics sheet on the CD release. You can see a picture of the whole shebang on the Australian CD release. The entirety of Becker’s account of “the astonishing Crosley Phase Linear Ionic Induction Voice Processor System” runs exactly four paragraphs, in which space Becker earnestly touts the invention of one “Graehame Crosley” which functions by “measuring “the flow of ionic muons” from the singer’s vocal output, for which the singer is obliged to “wear on his person a number of small balance plates which will offset the fields created by various inanimate objects on his body at the time of the recording.” The duly muon-measured vocal stream, in the case of this album, was then captured on “the huge BBC 16 channel cassette recorder which the band had schlepped over from David’s home studio.”
 

 
Not surprisingly, Becker absolutely nails the particular tedium and self-importance familiar to anyone who has perused such technical accounts on album liner notes, but was careful to sprinkle in a few unmissable gags to get the sought-after chuckles from Tap’s fan base. But this would not be a Steely Dan story if there weren’t some grousing and bad feeling somewhere. In the April 1992 issue of Metal Leg, the exhaustive Steely Dan newsletter that existed from 1987 through 1994, Becker wrote an account of submitting those “technical notes” to the Tap crew. His primary contact was “Mike McKeon” (sic), and according to Becker, Spinal Tap wanted Becker’s text primarily for use “in a throwaway fashion, more as a design element than anything else”—which seems rather unlikely when you think about it, you don’t go to Walter Fucking Becker for the equivalent of musical lorem Ipsum text. But Becker was “perhaps erring on the optimistic side insofar as a good outcome was concerned” because the Spinal Tap guys pared down Becker’s text somewhat, indeed omitting an entire paragraph dedicated to an account of dealing with the Crosley System’s inability to deal with a vocalist who had previously undergone a brass kidney transplant (this being Derek Smalls).

Having his text fucked with in this manner seems to have really set Becker off, who tetchily informs Metal Leg that by being able
 

to set the record straight, I feel that I may yet snatch victory from the clutches of disaster, especially since your circulation may well exceed the sales of the doleful Tap disc, once we correct for the high percentage of non-readers or remedial readers in the ranks of Tap purchasers, many of whom bought the CD by mistake anyway, thinking it was either a) an actual heavy metal album, or b) funny.

 
Whoa! All you angels up there in heaven, do make sure to not get on Walter Becker’s bad side!

It could be that this minor conflict, such as it is, explains Becker’s noticeable omission from the album’s list of thanked people (the five guest musicians mentioned above all got thanked).
 
Much more after the jump, including Becker’s original, unedited submission to Tap…....
 

 
There’s an axiom I have about life which states “If it looked good on David Bowie then it’ll look shit on you.”

The obvious example was that daft craze for Bowie pants in the late 1970s early 1980s around Bowie’s Thin White Duke phase. These narrow-waist, wide-thighed yet tightly tapered at the ankle trousers looked the biz on the Main Man but let’s be honest they looked utter shit on everybody else. They were like giant incontinence trousers for men. It was a mere hop and skip to imagine the gallons of urine slopping around inside each pant leg when seen on wannabe cool guys up town on a Saturday night.

Another fine (and let’s be honest probably the best) example was the car crash of a hairstyle known as the Mullet.

Bowie popped up with one in the early 1970s when he was doing Aladdin Sane and singing “Life on Mars.” Bowie looked cool. He looked exotic. He looked taboo. But when the very same hairstyle was sported by various hairy soccer stars and bland TV personalities a decade or so later in the 1980s, it was like inmates from the Bide-a-wee care home for the criminally attired had escaped.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “the Mullet was “coined” by the Beastie Boys (really?) in their song “Mullet Head” in 1994. But I’m not sure this is correct as I recall the term being used with abandon during the 1980s in the UK.

The mullet was a strange welding together of two different hairstyles—usually a flat top or feather cut on top with long rat’s tails at the back. It was an aberration, sure, but it is an aberration that still persists to this day like knotweed in gardens. Here for your delectation and education is a small selection of the hairstyle every sensible person should avoid at all cost.
 

David Bowie—the only person who can sport a mullet and not look stupid.
 

Y’see what I mean…
 

English soccer star Chris Waddle seemed to have this hairstyle longer than his playing career.
 

 
More of the hairstyle that time forgot, after the jump…
 

Mark Mothersbaugh at the Bottom Line, NYC, 1978 (Photo by Sheri Lynn Behr)
 
You know the junkie truism about chasing your first high? For me, the record-shopping equivalent of the initial drug rush was turning over the Pixies’ import-only “Gigantic/River Euphrates” single and finding the Lady in the Radiator’s song from Eraserhead listed on the back. Their actual arrangement of “In Heaven” was not particularly inspired, as I found out when I got the CD home, but that didn’t diminish the thrill of the moment of discovery. What a miraculous world this must be!

As I subsequently learned during years spent hunched over record bins, trying to swindle the plane of gross matter out of another peak experience, Tuxedomoon and Bauhaus had covered “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” years before the Pixies did. But they were all playing catch-up with DEVO, who obtained permission to perform the song from both of its writers during the very year of Eraserhead‘s release.

Peter Ivers and David Lynch co-wrote “In Heaven”; that’s Ivers’ voice singing the song in the movie. Ivers was the genius musician who recorded for Warner Bros. and Epic and hosted New Wave Theatre before he was murdered in 1983. His life is the subject of a book by Pixies biographer Josh Frank, who writes that Lynch and Ivers met with DEVO in Los Angeles in 1977 after the group expressed interest in performing their song. At Lynch’s favorite restaurant, Bob’s Big Boy, Jerry Casale recognized the Ivers in DEVO and the DEVO in Ivers:

Like Devo, Peter was always testing people, always playing, performing his one-man guerrilla theatre for whomever happened to be there. Had they met in Akron, Peter undoubtedly would have been part of Devo. Lucky for Peter, Casale thought, he wasn’t in Akron.

But he would be with them, at least in spirit, from now on: Devo would bring Peter’s song with them on tour, making it a staple of their live act. Whenever possible, Peter would come to the shows and cheer them on.

As lunch wound down, Casale asked Peter to transcribe the song. Among his friends, Peter was known for his crisp, meticulous handwriting, especially when writing out music. He would crouch over the page, with the concentration of a second-grader taking his first handwriting test. Peter grabbed a napkin from the booth at Bob’s Big Boy, and, temporarily shutting out everything else in the room, wrote out the chords and the words to “In Heaven.” He handed the napkin to Jerry as Lynch polished off his coffee and drew a last, long slurpy sip of his Silver Goblet.

Casale told Frank that DEVO played “In Heaven” every night on their 1979 tour. “Booji Boy came out, we played it on little Wasp synthesizers, and he sang ‘In Heaven.’” In this undated bootleg from that tour, Booji Boy prophesies the future. He tells how one day, DEVO will come back to jam some subsonic frequencies and “we’ll all shit our pants together.” Later, when the hour is ripe for murder, DEVO will return to “kill all the normal people.”

Listen after the jump…

 
For those of us who worship at the altar of art and creativity, the career of Sister Corita serves as something like a proof that exciting and bracing art can come from any source. Another way of stating this is that if Sister Corita had never existed, the art-heads of the 1960s might have been obliged to invent her. Sister Corita was a peace activist, a nun, and a pop artist of considerable stature—all at the same time.

The woman who would later become known as Sister Corita was born Frances Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1918, which incidentally means that she was 45 years old on the day that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed. Her large family moved to Los Angeles when she was young, where she would find educational mentors in a Catholic community of liberal nuns, namely the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart Order. They encouraged her to pursue art. In the 1950s she came upon an old silk screen at the art department of Immaculate Heart College and the wife of a Mexican silk-screen practitioner taught her how to clean and use it.

Her career can be said to have begun then; despite impressive productivity, however, it took about a decade for her work, which incorporated textual elements from the very start, to come into full maturity. The debt that Sister Corita owes artists like Andy Warhol and Peter Blake is evident everywhere, but it should be emphasized that the work of those two men lacked moral and spirital components that came to Sister Corita quite easily. When she zooms in on a package of Wonder Bread with emphasis on the words “Enriched Bread,” it’s almost impossible not to think of Jesus Christ. Warhol’s work has a moral element, for sure, but he wouldn’t have been as likely to meditate on the words wonder, enriched, and bread in the same way. (Warhol was only interested in one kind of “bread”: money!)

In 1967 she said, “I started early putting words into my prints, and the words just got bigger and bigger.” That year the Morris Gallery in New York hosted a show dedicated to her prints. By this time she was a “card-carrying” member of the peace movement; she was quoted as saying, “I’m not brave enough not to pay my income tax and risk going to jail, but I can say rather freely what I want to say in my art.”

After a lifetime of association with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she resigned from the order in 1968, in part because of the unusual demands her sudden celebrity had brought. It’s fascinating to watch her work get progressively darker through the 1965-1970 period. I marvel at the sheer balls it would take to put together a red, white, and blue canvas with the words assassination and violence prominently represented and call it American Sampler—I just know I don’t have them!

For a good overview of her work, by all means do consult Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita by Julie Ault. The Corita Art Center has a terrific collection of her images as well.
 

For Eleanor, 1964
 

Mary Does Laugh, 1964
 
Much more after the jump…...
 

 
Okay, okay, perhaps that title is just a little bit disingenuous, but it’s still “close enough for government work,” as the old saying goes.

So no, Frank Zappa didn’t actually bring his rockin’ teen combo to fictional Riverdale High School, and no, this isn’t from Archie Comics either, it’s a National Lampoon parody by Michel Choquette from the September 1970 issue. But it’s probably exactly what would have happened had The Mothers of Invention roared into town.

Betty and Veronica probably would have gotten VD, too.

If you click on the images you’ll get to larger, easier-to-read versions.
 

 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
Who doesn’t need an inflatable black coffin, right? I know I do. I’m not sure if this is meant for a goth pool party or if it’s just an inflatable coffin cooler for absinthe drinks. According to the description, it can be used as a buffet or used on a floor, packed with ice to keep food or beverages cool. Apparently it can hold up to 60 12-Oz cans.

It’s being sold on Horror-Shop.com for $28.95.

I actually found the same item on Amazon for $17.49 here.