I just read the sad news that the great Irish vocalist Cathal Coughlan has died. The frontman of both Microdisney and Fatima Mansions was 61 and died in the hospital after what was described only as a long illness. He was one of the very finest vocalists of his generation.

I am a really huge fan of his music. Microdisney’s “Mrs. Simpson” is a desert island disc for me, and his unjustly ignored solo record Black River Falls is one of my top favorite albums of all time. (It’s the album I wish Scott Walker had made instead of Tilt. Yes, it’s really that good and you should go stream it now.)

During the course of the past few years, I’d become friendly with Cathal over email. Not that long ago I sent him a copy of Nico and Phillippe Garrel’s film La Cicatrice Intérieure, which he seemed highly amused by. We were planning to meet up in London in late Summer. Now that will never happen. I’m glad I got to tell him how much I love his music.

The world of music has lost a truly great talent. RIP Cathal Coughlan.
 

“Black River Falls”
 

“Payday”
 

“Witches in the Water”
 

“Are You Happy?”
 

“Mrs. Simpson”
 

“Singer’s Hampstead Home”
 

Microdisney on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ in 1985, doing two of their best songs, “Loftholdingswood” and “Birthday Girl.”

 
The Leeds band Girls at Our Best! were only around for a couple of years in the early 1980s, but they left behind some solid tunes, including one of the finest songs from the post-punk era.

The story of GaOB! begins in 1977, when singer Judy Evans and guitarist James Alan met while attending art school. Alan was in a punk outfit called SOS, which Evans eventually joined. The group morphed into another act, the Butterflies, a purposefully pretty name that was a response to all the negative and/or nasty monikers from the punk period. The Butterflies got some notice and had at least one high profile fan in Sid Vicious, but broke up as the decade was coming to an end.
 

The cover of the first Girls at Our Best! single.

Evans and Alan started Girls at Our Best! simply to document the songs they were writing, but Rough Trade Records heard one of the tracks, and they encouraged the duo to put out a 7-inch. In April 1980, the GaOB! debut, “Getting Nowhere Fast” b/w “Warm Girls,” was released via their own label, Record Records, which was distributed by Rough Trade. “Getting Nowhere Fast” was named NME’s “Single of the Week,” and made the top ten of the UK indie chart, but Girls at Our Best! wasn’t exactly a band; it was still just Evans and Alan. So, with high demand for a second 45, a bassist and a drummer were brought into the fold.
 

 
After their second 7-inch, Girls at Our Best! signed with Happy Birthday Records. The label put out a couple more GaOB! singles, as well as what ended up being the group’s lone full-length, Pleasure, in October 1981 (a pre-fame Thomas Dolby plays synth on the record).

In late ‘81, GaOB! headed to America for a brief tour, which did not go well. Seemingly no one knew about the band—they even had a Spinal Tap-like experience when nobody showed up for a record store appearance—and they grew increasingly tired of each other. Girls at Our Best! called it a day in 1982.
 

 
“Getting Nowhere Fast” is a perfect post-punk song. Possessing a killer, angular guitar riff, and a propulsive bassline, the defiant lyrics speak to the emptiness of capitalism, the passiveness of the masses, and the feeling that your failing life isn’t what you signed up for. After two exhilarating minutes, the number ends in an abrupt, dramatic fashion.
 
Much more, including DM premieres, after the jump…

 
“A report in 2019 revealed that Queen Elizabeth II and her family cost the British people £67 million per year,” says grateful subject Andrew Liles, introducing his elongated version of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” The monarchy is a sweet deal for Britons, since the royals put on the occasional horse show starring Tom Cruise to thank the common people for expending their lives in toil so that their betters may luxuriate among jeweled combs and Sèvres tea services.

Now, Liles has found a musical way to tell the royals “you’re welcome” for the generalized misery that supports their year-round debauch: extending Her Maj’s favorite Pistols choon from a length of about three minutes to 45, one for each year since 1977. In all likelihood, this is the very melody she will be humming this morning while she consumes a year of your wages for breakfast.

Unfortunately, there’s still no future, but on the bright side, there’s a lot more of it!
 

Laibach’s new album ‘Wir sind das Volk (ein Musical aus Deutschland)’

Laibach’s latest project, a musical theater production based on texts by the German playwright Heiner Müller, has been staged in Berlin, Klagenfurt, Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Hamburg. As Laibach’s early work was not enthusiastically greeted by authorities in post-Tito Yugoslavia, so Müller, whose New York Times obituary described him as an “independent Marxist,” was banned for years from the East German stage. Indeed, the director of one of his early plays was rewarded with a trip to the coal mines.

Müller’s association with Laibach dates from 1984, when the group composed music for a Slovenian production of his Quartet. Laibach and Müller met in Berlin the following year, and he suggested that they collaborate; but though he apparently did use Laibach’s music in one of his stage productions, the collaboration did not come to pass before Müller’s death in 1995.

More than twenty years later, prompted by a suggestion from Anja Quickert, the head of the Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (International Heiner Müller Society), Laibach renewed their collaboration with the dramatist. As Laibach explains its approach to creating Wir sind das Volk in the press release:

We followed Heiner Müller’s own strategy of cutting and rearranging the material, taking his text and putting it into another context, rebooting it with music, in order to drag the audience into it or alienate them from it. Music unlocks the emotions and is therefore a great manipulative tool and a powerful propagandistic weapon. And that’s why a combination of Heiner Müller, who saw theatre as a political institution, and Laibach, can be nothing else but a musical.

Laibach kindly answered a few questions about Wir sind das Volk and related matters by email.
 

Photo by Valter Leban

Speaking in Dresden in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye proclaimed: Wir sind ein Volk! What is the difference between this assertion and Laibach’s Wir sind das Volk?

Laibach: Wir sind das Volk is a more general slogan and Wir sind ein Volk is a more particular one. When East Germans demanded the change of policy and reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, one of the slogans of the protesters at the time was Wir sind das Volk—“We are the people”—which meant that it is the people who will decide, not the authorities. When the wall between the two countries actually started to crumble, the slogan on both sides of the wall quickly changed to Wir sind ein Volk—“We are a people, one people, one nation, one state…” In this spirit, in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, speaking of the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, proclaimed Wir sind ein Volk!, which, of course, in the context of South and North Korea, means that they are one nation, violently divided in the Korean War and which, in a certain perspective of time, should be again reunited, just like Germany was.

Please tell us about the production of Laibach’s posthumous collaboration with Heiner Müller. Why, for instance, does the album open with the figure of Philoctetes?

Back in 1984 we contributed music for Heiner Müller’s Quartet, a play that was presented at the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana, directed by Slovenian director Eduard Miler. This was at a time when Laibach was officially forbidden in Slovenia and Yugoslavia, and we were grateful to Eduard Miler for being brave enough to include Laibach in this theatrical piece, performed by the national institution. A good year later, in February 1985, we met Heiner Müller by coincidence in Berlin, where we had a concert at some festival, and it turned out that he was very enthusiastic about Laibach and he also proposed that we collaborate on one of his upcoming theatre productions. Unfortunately, that did not happen (in the meantime we were invited by another legendary theatre and artistic director and in fact Heiner Müller’s fierce opponent, Peter Zadek, to work the score for Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1987—and perform in it—staged at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg), but we were told that Heiner Müller had apparently used some of our music in a theatre production that he worked on. Heiner Müller passed away in 1995 and only a few years ago, in 2019, we finally received an invitation from Mrs. Anja Quickert, the head of Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (H. M. Society), proposing a project based on Heiner Müller’s texts, to be premiered and performed at the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatre in Berlin. The premiere of Wir sind das Volk—Ein Musical nach Texten von Heiner Müller was held on 8 February 2020 and more shows followed after the pandemic. At this point something like 10,000 people have seen the musical, in spite of the epidemics.
 

The poster for ‘Wir sind das Volk’

Heiner Müller is one of the most prominent post-WWII German playwrights, writers, and intellectuals, and one of the main protagonists who radically practised the denazification of Germany and ruthlessly led German Volk through the purgatory of collective guilt. Our ‘musical’ speaks of this process of denazification, but also about Heiner Müller personally, about his observation of his own life in the postwar reality of this country, divided by the Cold War. He was very fond of German national traumas as well as of the time of German patriotism and this is the topic in most of his writings. The texts and songs for the musical were selected by Anja Quickert, who also was the dramaturge and director of the show. The musical opens with an extract of Müller’s interpretation of the Philoctetes, the tragedy where he dramatizes the state’s predicament as it finds itself adopting inhumane methods in order to achieve a humane future for its citizens. In presenting the state’s point of view, Müller boldly challenges Sophocles (Philoctetes) and Gide (Philoctète), who focus their plays on the individual, not the state. Müller’s radical rewriting of the myth negotiates the question of belonging: exclusion and inclusion in a society that wants to destroy the “other” and destroys itself by tolerating only an ability to function. In the part of the text that we are using in the musical, Müller is actually talking about his own childhood traumas and that is why this text stands at the beginning of the album as well.

We hear so much about populism in politics these days. Who are the people, and what do they want? As Freud might have asked, Was will ein Volk eigentlich?

People are the suppressed majority that occasionally smells the power of victory and then they want it all.

At least one reliable source reports that Russian propaganda is simultaneously insisting that Ukrainians are racially inferior to Russians and denying that Ukrainians have a distinct nationality. If citizenship in the NSK State is not based on language, nationality, ethnicity, or race, what are the criteria?

Possession of at least one Laibach album and a good sense of humor, especially when inferiority and superiority complexes are in question. For all else we are quite flexible.
 

‘Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi)’ by Gottfried Helnwein (via Denver Art Museum)

How does Laibach’s approach to working on theatrical productions (Krst pod Triglavom-Baptism, Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra) differ from its usual working method? Do any principles of Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre’s work persist in Laibach’s approach?

We approach each project in a completely different way. We don’t have any creative platform or templates to use either for theatrical productions or as ‘usual working method.’ Composing is always different because most of the time we work with a slightly different combination of people, and we therefore adapt to a common operating model. Within the theatre projects it is also important who initiates it, who leads or directs it. For these productions we create the material in communication and collaboration with directors, and we try to adjust to their ideas and their vision of how the music and sound should function, as much as we can. It is true, however, that usually it is best that producers and directors give us a totally free hand for the best results.

Is it possible to express one’s personality in Schlager music or Volkslieder without ruining the performance? For instance, giving voice to the German national character seems to suit Heino so well because he only uses emotions as signs of filial piety. “Folk music” in the US these days, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of people crying about their hurt feelings.

They really do it in pop and rock music too, there is a lot of ‘crying’ and trading in emotions in pop and rock music tradition. In principle we do not see much difference between pop-rock music and Schlager music or Volkslieder in Germany. In the context of the German national character, Heino, who deals with emotions perfectly, as well as Kraftwerk, who actually took a lot of their inspiration from Volkslieder and Schlager music—their versions are not contaminated by emotional hyperinflation. In America, on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine popular music—with the exception of hip hop and rap—without such emotional exploitations… What would Presley, Prince, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton or Taylor Swift (etc., etc.) be without their hurt feelings? 

Singing in 1985, U.S.A. for Africa proclaimed: “We Are the World.” Is Laibach the world, too?

We are Africa and the Universe.
 

 
In July 2019, we told you about the marvelous seventies rock ‘n’ roll band, the Hollywood Stars. The occasion was the emancipation of their shelved 1976 LP recorded at the famed Sound City studio. The album, appropriately titled ‘Sound City,’ is about to be released on vinyl for the first time, so we’re reposting our profile of the group. It’s been lightly edited.

The Hollywood Stars were managed by Kim Fowley, and their songs were recorded by the likes of KISS and Alice Cooper, yet the band wasn’t widely heard in their time. They released one LP, which failed to make an impact, while superior recordings of theirs remained in the can for decades. An exceptional, previously unreleased Hollywood Stars album is about to come out, and Dangerous Minds has the premiere of one of the fabulous never before heard tunes on the disc. We also have a new interview with an original member of the group.

In 1973, mover and shaker, huckster, and jack-of-all-trades, Kim Fowley, had a vision for starting a west coast version of the glam band, the New York Dolls. Fowley quickly assembled a group of Southern California musicians, and the initial lineup of the Hollywood Stars was in place before year’s end.
 

 
The Stars immediately made a splash with their live show, gigging frequently at the legendary Whisky a Go Go. It wasn’t long before they were signed to Columbia/CBS Records. Around this time, Fowley exited as manager. Sessions for their first LP included such strong material as “King of the Night Time World” and “Escape,” but after new A&R at Columbia came in, the album was abandoned, and the band was dropped. The recordings came out nearly 40 years later as Shine Like a Radio: The Great Lost 1974 Album.
 

 
By the end of ’74—just a year after they formed—the Hollywood Stars were no more.
 

 
They did give it another go in 1976, though, with guitarist/main songwriter, Mark Anthony, also now their lead singer. The revived unit were soon in the Sound City studio with producer Neil Merryweather. They then signed with another major label, Arista Records, who wanted them to re-record what they had done at Sound City. Though the band were frustrated, as they had a completed album they were pleased with, they agreed to start from scratch with a different producer. The subsequent sessions didn’t go well, with Mark Anthony overdoing it in the studio. Though the group preferred the Sound City tapes, the Arista recordings were put out in 1977. Anthony soon left for a solo career, with the Stars continuing for a short period before breaking up once again.
 

Album cover for their debut full-length; note the marquee in the background.
 
After 43 years, the Hollywood Stars album produced by Neil Merryweather is being released as Sound City. The band is back, too, with an upcoming show at their old stomping grounds, the Whisky a Go Go.

Dangerous Minds recently interviewed Hollywood Stars drummer, Terry Rae.

When did Kim Fowley pitch the Hollywood Stars concept to you? Were you immediately sold on the idea?:

Terry Rae: The first time Kim pitched me on the idea was at Capitol Records Studios. He came to see the band I was in at the time, the Flamin’ Groovies, recording some demo tracks. I was initially surprised with his Stars pitch because he had been instrumental in getting me together with [founding Groovies guitarist] Cyril Jordan in the first place.

We talked again at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. Kim explained his plan and promised to be personally involved in every aspect. What he was laying out began to make sense on a practical level. The Groovies were based out of the Bay Area, so if I was going to fully commit to that band, it would mean moving out of my apartment in Hollywood. I didn’t really have the cash to relocate, and my heart wasn’t in leaving.
 
Much more, after the jump…

 
The following is an excerpt from the liner notes to Riches to Rags, by Bob Mehr, the NY Times best-selling author of Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.

The work of The Replacements’ co-founder and legendary lead guitarist, Bob Stinson has been well chronicled since his tragic passing in 1995. In addition to the expansions of The Replacements catalog, Stinson’s post-‘Mats work – in the prog-psych band Static Taxi and his collaborations with punk vet Sonny Vincent in Shotgun Rationale – have all been collected and anthologized. But unaccounted for in that discography is the time Stinson spent as Bleeding Hearts’ lead guitarist. 

Although Stinson’s shadow looms large over the history of the band, Bleeding Hearts were the brainchild of singer, songwriter, and guitarist Mike Leonard. Raised in suburban Minneapolis, Leonard cut his teeth on the punk rock of The Clash. By his late teens he’d become a skilled guitarist with a Rolling Stones obsession (and a magnificently exaggerated Keef-style coif to go along with it).

After moving to uptown Minneapolis, the then-21-year-old Leonard launched Bleeding Hearts in 1990 as a trio initially, with drummer Bob Herbers and bassist Rob Robello. Leonard was eager to expand the fledgling band into a two-guitar lineup, but finding the right player proved tricky.

“We went through about four or five guitar players in a short span,” recalled Leonard. “The last guy we had decided to leave the band when his car caught on fire after a show with his guitar and amp in it. I guess he took it as a sign to quit.”

A habitué of The Uptown bar, Leonard made the acquaintance of one of its other regulars, Bob Stinson. “I was at The Uptown five nights a week then, and Bob was hanging out there too,” he said. “I struck up a conversation with him. Actually interrupted him telling a joke—I told the punchline.”

At the time, Stinson—many years removed from The Replacements—was still in the midst of a long run with his group Static Taxi. “Static Taxi was very much Bob’s thing musically,” said Leonard. “It was all his favorite stuff: Yes and Steve Howe and psychedelic Beatles elements—that’s what his heart was really into, and which didn’t have a home in The Replacements.”

“Bleeding Hearts were actually more like The Replacements, more like a classic rock ‘n’ roll band. Since we were admittedly influenced by The Replacements, I figured why not have Bob Stinson play guitar? When I approached him about playing with us, he agreed.”

Stinson arrived at Bleeding Hearts’ practice space with his Fender Quad Reverb in tow, several sheets to the wind. “We started playing together, but it was total cacophony,” recalled Leonard. “The whole time we’re playing, Bob keeps saying, ‘You guys should get Jamie Garner to play guitar.’ At first, we’re like, ‘No, Bob, we want you.’ But after about an hour of this cacophony, we were like, ‘Uh, Bob, who’s this Jamie Garner guy again? Can you introduce us?’”

Stinson did just that, connecting the band with Garner, a vet of Twin/Tone Records outfit The Leatherwoods. Garner, a skilled player in his own right, joined Bleeding Hearts and spent much of the next year playing with the band. “Jamie was great, a phenomenal guitar player who took us up a couple notches,” said Leonard. But by the end of 1991, Garner had decided to move to San Diego and Bleeding Hearts second guitar slot was open once again.
 

Photo: Dan Corrigan
 
This time, Stinson—at loose ends after the breakup of Static Taxi—approached Leonard about joining the band. “Bob saw us one or two times, and he decided he wanted in,” said Leonard. “This time I was a little bit skeptical, but he was determined to play with us.”

At the time Stinson was living with his mother and stepfather, on the other side of town from Leonard. “It was the dead of winter and he trudged from way down on East Lake Street to where I lived over on West Lake Street,” said Leonard. “It was freezing outside, and he was wearing a light windbreaker and no hat or gloves. By the time he got to my apartment his face was red and frozen.”

“But we sat down and played guitars and he learned every one of our songs in a single sitting. He could be a really quick study. We banged out all the tunes and he came up with some embellishments that worked perfectly. Came up with all these cool harmonized guitar parts. I think he was happy to join the band and start playing around again. We were almost trying to resurrect him in a way too; he’d been written off by a lot of people by that time.” 

Leonard also made the generous, if perhaps unwise, move of inviting Stinson to come live with him. “I had this sense that the only way I’d be able to keep him in check was if he moved in with me,” said Leonard. Exactly ten years younger than Stinson, Leonard took on the role of a younger brother as well as caretaker. The two played together daily, roughhoused like little kids, rehearsed with the band five times a week, and listened to music the rest of the time.

“Bob had these stacks of speakers that he brought with him. And he’d just crank his music so loud,” said Leonard. “Bob would be dissecting the very first ten seconds of like an Urge Overkill song or something. Needle dropping it over and over again. He would analyze a one minute section of a song. He really heard music microscopically.” 

By this point, Bleeding Hearts were about to welcome a new drummer in Pat McKenna. Stinson —who, by this point, knew how to sharpen a band—would help fine tune the group.

“Bob really was like a musical savant. He would show the drummer how to do little detailed parts; he would come up with really good basslines,” said Leonard. “He was a weird talent. In a way, he couldn’t tell you what he was doing at all—like what scale or what chord he was playing. But then I’d come home and he’d be jamming along to Yes records, playing ‘Roundabout’ note for note. He just had an uncanny ability.” 

In early 1993, the band began doing pre-production for their first album. Stinson’s old friend and guitar successor in The Replacements, Slim Dunlap, would help prep the band at its rehearsal studio. “Slim came over and recorded some songs,” said Leonard. “He was always looking out for Bob, helping out however he could.”

A couple months later, in March of 1993, Leonard enlisted Twin Cities engineer Tommy Roberts—leader of the band Fauna—to cut a session with Bleeding Hearts at Terrarium Studios.

The recording was done mostly live, and found Stinson not only working in tight six-string tandem with Leonard, but adding other musical flourishes, like the bongos at the end of “Gone,” and the memorable whistling that starts “Imagination.”
 

Photo: Dan Corrigan
 
With half of a record complete, Bleeding Hearts seemed to be a band poised on the cusp of some kind of breakthrough in 1993. The Replacements’ former manager Peter Jesperson had picked them as a band to watch in the local alt-weekly City Pages, and they played a triumphant show opening for Tommy Stinson’s new band Bash & Pop at the 7th Street Entry, in what was an emotional reunion for the Stinson family. 

But behind the scenes, Bob was suffering, dealing with a combination of his own escalating mental and substance abuse issues—and reckoning with his son Joey’s health problems, as the infant had been diagnosed as a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. “That really affected him. He’d talk about it but it was very hard on him,” recalled Leonard. “I think that drove him into a dark place.”

A professional complication in the band’s career came with a SPIN story that was published in the summer of 1993. Stinson, who’d been off the national radar since leaving The Replacements seven years earlier, had agreed to a feature interview in the magazine thinking it would help boost Bleeding Hearts profile. But the piece would instead focus on Stinson and his troubled Replacements’ past, painting him as a lost and wasted figure, while Bleeding Hearts were dismissed almost entirely. “We thought that was going to be a door opening for us, but it almost felt like a door closing,” said Leonard.

The story concludes in the liner notes—by Bob Mehr, author of the New York Times bestseller Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements—from Riches to Rags, the long-lost album by Bleeding Hearts.

 
THEY’VE DONE IT AGAIN. The crate-digging maniacs behind the legendary Brown Acid record series—Lance Barresi of Permanent Records and Daniel Hall of RidingEasy Records, by name and reputation—have compiled yet another stellar compilation of proto stoner metal and heavy rock obscurities.  For this, their fourteenth trip to the seemingly bottomless fuzz box well of the late 60s/early 70s, they’ve assembled such unknown hard rockers as Harrisburg, PA’s own The Legends (featuring a pre-Edgar Winter Group Dan Hartman and his brother Dave); there’s the Moogified Mijal & White (“runaway oscillators and modular synths spurt and sputter over some Tommy James & The Shondells bubblegum garage psych”); the San Francisco Trolley Co. (“13th Floor Elevators meets the MC5”); and West Virginia’s Blue Creed, not a real band but a studio entity funded by coal miner & songwriter Bill Rexroad. Their (his?) song “You Need a Friend” might be my favorite track from this installment. Dig the sound of his guitar amp stuck inside of a metal oil drum! And then there’s Transfer, described as a proto-punk “mashup of the Velvet Underground and The Flamin’ Groovies.” Their number, “Play It Cool,” is about smoking weed.

These and many more heavy rock obscurities in Brown Acid: The Fourteenth Trip. Have a listen below. Out on 4/20, because of course it is. Order vinyl here.
 

This is the shot available as a limited edition print
 
Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like Creem. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.

Bud Lee’s estate, which oversees and manages his archive, has begun releasing limited edition, hand-numbered archival prints of Lee’s work as a way of raising funds to preserve his extensive archive of images and help realize special projects, including a planned monograph of his work. The second print in this series—the first was an amazing portrait of Al Green—which is only being made available for one week only, is a spectacular image of Iggy lying prostrate among the audience at Ungano’s. You can purchase a print HERE.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.
 

Photo by Claude Gassian

For much of the 1980s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were on the outs. The pair were feuding about the direction the Stones’ music would take. Jagger wanted to modernize the band’s sound, while Richards wanted to stick with the blues rock formula which had already worked—and worked very well for them indeed—for the past three decades. Subsequently, new music by the Rolling Stones was not forthcoming for several years, and the 1985 sessions for the desultory Dirty Work album were notably strained, with Jagger putting his vocals over the finished instrumental tracks apart from the rest of the group. It was rare that all five band members were ever in the studio at the same time.

Signed as a solo artist on the back of the Stones move to Columbia-CBS Records—something the rest of the group was initially unaware of—Jagger produced She’s the Boss in 1985 alongside a star-studded cast of musical luminaries that included Bill Lasswell, Sly & Robbie, Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers, Herbie Hancock and Pete Townshend. Richards was pissed about what he saw as Jagger’s lack of commitment to their band. When Jagger refused a tour to promote Dirty Work, choosing to concentrate instead on his solo career, things between the Glimmer Twins deteriorated even further.

Restless at the lack of musical activity, Richards worked as a bandleader on director Taylor Hackford’s Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, assembling a supergroup for two concerts that included Eric Clapton, Etta James, Linda Ronstadt and Berry’s longtime songwriting partner pianist Johnnie Johnson. The drummer for the band was a young musician by the name of Steve Jordan who had played in the Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman house bands. Richards and Jordan got along great musically—Jordan had already performed on Dirty Work—and formed the X-Pensive Winos for the purpose of recording Richards’ first solo album, the well-received Talk is Cheap, and a support tour (documented on the Live at the Hollywood Palladium, 15 December 1988 album.)
 

Steve Jordan and Keith Richards in 1992, photo by Claude Gassian.
 
The X-Pensive Winos were put on hold when bridges were finally mended between Jagger and Richards prior to the Rolling Stones induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in early 1989. The tour in support of the Steel Wheels album was their biggest to date, seeing the Stones trekking all over the globe and raking in around $200 million. When the tour ended, Richards, feeling creatively energized, set about writing songs again with Steve Jordan that eventually became 1992’s Main Offender album.

For Main Offender the X-Pensive Winos added guitarist Waddy Wachtel to the group. Wachtel, a musical sideman of some renown who has worked with the likes of Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Warren Zevon, Bryan Ferry, and Jackson Browne, was brought in to co-produce the album with Richards and Jordan, and he co-wrote four of the albums songs with them. Main Offender was critically acclaimed, and featured some fantastic performances, but just barely made the bottom rungs of the US album charts. The subsequent tour, however, was a big success, but the X-Pensive Winos were put on ice again when the Rolling Stones regrouped for the Voodoo Lounge album and the $320 million grossing world tour of the same name.  The Winos would eventually return in 2015 for the Crosseyed Heart album.

Today marks the release of the Super Deluxe 30th anniversary edition of Main Offender from BMG. The box set is presented in a unique art book format with the album pressed on “smoke” color vinyl. Main Offender has been newly remastered under the supervision of Steve Jordan. Also included is the Winos Live in London ’92 album (exclusive to this set) and an 88-page book with never-before-seen photos, and a packet of reproduction promo materials.

CLICK HERE TO WIN A FREE COPY OF THE MAIN OFFENDER SUPER DELUXE BOX SET FROM BMG.

The 1992 music video for the “Wicked As It Seems” single.

Dennis Bovell, Mark Stewart, and Gareth Sager (photo by Chiara Meattelli)
 
On Y in Dub, released digitally last year, producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell MBE and the Pop Group revisit every track on their 1979 Radar Records album Y and single “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” creating looking-glass complements to the originals that seem long overdue. In advance of the album’s vinyl release on April 8, Bovell gave Dangerous Minds a tour of Y in Dub‘s vast, echoing mental space. 

If you can cast your mind back to when you first encountered the Pop Group, what was it about them that made you want to work with them? What were your first impressions of the band?

My first impressions of the band were that, here was a bunch of budding young musicians who could handle jazz riffing and were also into, not tuneful singing, but meaningful lyrics, you know. I think to say something is better than to be beautifully in tune and saying nothing. I applauded their militancy and their approach to music in general, their likes and their dislikes. And in fact, later on in life, Bruce Smith, the drummer, joined Linton Kwesi Johnson and me with the Dub Band.

I wanted to ask about that too, because I think the Pop Group and Linton Kwesi Johnson co-headlined a number of shows together, right?

Absolutely.

Can you tell me about that? Were you at the controls ever for the Pop Group—

No, no. I had worked with both of them, and then by that time I was, like, more in the studio person than being out on live gigs, because by then, I had had it with live gigs, to be honest, you know: the confusion, the lack of organization, the long traveling hours and then being expected to perform like a circus flea, you know, I’d had it with that by then, and they hadn’t! So they were about to experience that, while I was about to crawl back into the studio with my normal self, work at my own pace.

Are you maybe ten years older then they are? They were quite young when they recorded this.

They still are quite young. [Laughter] I never really thought about how much older I was than them, but I guess that made them listen to me as the producer.

Nowadays, when I listen to the original record, but also this dub set, it strikes me that they were such young people—I think Mark was still a teenager.

I think he was about seventeen or something, yeah.

But the music in a way—I know what you’re saying about everything not being perfectly in tune—but at the same time the music is kind of sophisticated.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t sound to me like a bunch of young people playing.

Well, a lot of people said that about Coltrane. [Laughs] He was never on time, he was never in tune, but he was genius.
 

 
So how did you approach this dub set of Y?

First of all, we made sure the tapes were still playable, were still audible, and then we passed them over from analog to digital files. File by file, right? Each file: the kick drum file, switch it over, the snare drum—the whole recording. And then we went into a digital room with a young lad called Dave McEwen, and he kind of helped us to put them on a digital level where I could actually revisit each channel and have full control over it, as it were.

So I had the files transferred to digital files, and so we could manipulate them on the Pro Tools level. And then we put them in a computer and then sent them back onto an analog desk, right? So I was just using the computer to synchronize the files, but when the files came back, they were coming back to an analog desk, and I was equalizing them as I felt for that room, for those speakers, and giving the right amount of delay, et cetera, just to kind of take us back into the analog age, but using digital files.

More after the jump…