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.
 

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…

‘KILL HIM!’: ‘Wormwood’ on stage (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

The new Wormwood box set, the latest installment in Cherry Red’s pREServed series of Residents reissues, runs to nine CDs etched with nearly nine hours of music. Not quite James Earl Jones Reads the Bible territory (sixteen CDs, nineteen hours), it nevertheless presents the Residents’ 1998 biblical epic at a scale appropriate to the form. Perhaps God, sufficiently enraged by humanity to send plagues, pestilences, fires, and hurricanes, has also seen fit to unleash this mighty flood of scriptural content, which makes the meager 203 minutes of the Charlton Heston Presents the Bible four-DVD set look like a positive insult to the Almighty.

Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible, by one count the Residents’ twenty-third album, draws most of its lurid tales of rape, incest, and murder from the books of the Old Testament (though they also give us a Judas who understands betraying Jesus as his divine calling, as well as a five-and-a-half-minute instrumental based on Revelation). There are surprising takes on familiar stories—the same chapter from the Book of Daniel that inspired Johnny Cash to write “Belshazzar” moved the Residents to write “God’s Magic Finger,” and “Bathsheba Bathes” gives a decidedly less pious take on David than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and songs based on tales few other songwriters have dared to tell, like Jael pounding a tent peg into Sisera’s skull while he sleeps.

Though Wormwood boasts more circumcisions than any rock record since Saccharine Trust’s Surviving You, Always, not to mention the winning contributions of Molly Harvey and Carla Fabrizio, it has never been my favorite Residents album. But listening to this box set has given me a new appreciation of the size and ambition of the Wormwood project, and how fruitful this period was for the group. In context with eight discs of supplementary material, the original album comes to seem like a preliminary sketch for a sprawling creation that kept the Residents busy for about four years, and included some remarkable work.

The Residents do not, of course, grant interviews, but I was able to contact Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, and Richard Anderson, who oversees the pREServed series at Cherry Red Records, and subject each of them to a battery of haranguing and hairsplitting questions about matrix numbers, obi strips and session dates. Choice excerpts follow. I should mention that Richard drew my attention to a Residents compilation LP that had escaped my notice called Leftovers Again?!, issued for Record Store Day last year. It starts with a concentrate of the legendary, unreleased early recording Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and proceeds through material from the Residents’ tape archive throughout the Seventies. Much of the LP consists of “RDX” (as in “redux,” I believe) mixes, new presentations of the original recordings of beloved Residents songs that often feature sounds from the multitrack tapes that didn’t make the final mix.

The Residents, 1998 (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

 
As it happens, I was in the audience at the beginning of the tour in Boston, so I didn’t really realize how much the material evolved and changed after that. Could you talk a little bit about how the show changed when it went on the road?

Well, you know, Residents stuff usually does change. They do albums and then—maybe this is typical of a lot of artists, I don’t know—but it’s kind of like, when somebody writes and records something, in a lot of ways that’s just a kind of first, brief glimpse into the material, and then as they start to perform it, they find out more and more what they feel like it wants to be, and more how it works, and particularly how it works in front of an audience. So honestly it’s kind of an unpredictable path that it takes, many times.

Another example: when they were doing the Cube-E tour, which was like ten years earlier, you know, the second half of it was all Elvis songs, and one that just really came to life so much in performance was “Teddy Bear.” You know, Elvis sang it as such a light, upbeat pop song, and the Residents just felt like there were all these really incredible, almost like S&M undertones in it, and that then really came out in terms of the performance. So it’s kind of typical, I think, in a lot of ways with them for these things to change.

Part of being in front of an audience, maybe, seeing what works and what doesn’t?

Exactly. What brings out the attention and reaction of an audience makes a lot of difference.
 

‘Mr. Skull Superstar’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
There are a lot of things I learned reading the liner notes to this box set. I guess [show opener] “Nober” was only played in Boston and then dropped from the set.

I’m not really sure what the thought was behind that, at this point. Maybe they felt like it was a little too long or a little too slow of a way to get into the set, and they felt like they needed something that grabbed the audience’s attention more? But, like I say, you’re reminding me of something I’d long forgotten about, really.

Well, in the Fillmore show—maybe you can help me sort out the chronology, here, Homer, I think the Fillmore show came before the tour?

Yeah, I think so. I think everything was put together in San Francisco at the Fillmore, and then they took it on the road.

The live version of “KILL HIM!” towards the beginning of that is really a fierce piece of music.

Well, I think that was one of the stronger pieces from that show and from that album.

Did that show have the big gamelan orchestra?

It had the gamelan in San Francisco, yeah. And then I think they came back later and did some shows at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and I think they brought the gamelan back for that again, too. But once again, it was a long time ago, and while I’ve been through the box set, I haven’t actually revisited and listened to all that stuff again. So you’re more up on it and more familiar with it at this point than I am.
 

A Resident (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
If you can remember, then, maybe you can talk about the origin of the project. Did the Residents read the King James Bible, or how did the project come into being?

Well, they were looking for a project, and for the Residents, often they start with some kind of a concept. Things can work in different ways; sometimes they just start recording, and the concept finds itself in that process. But often, they would like to try to find a concept first, and I don’t remember exactly where the idea of the Bible came from, but when it came out, it was like instantaneously: “Yes! Yes! The Bible!”

You’re looking at a bunch of people who all were, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants growing up in the South, and they moved away from that; almost needless to say, they’re not really that religious. But they started seeing the Bible as so much of the underpinnings of Western culture on so many levels, and the more research they did with it, the more true that became. There’s just a million things in terms of so much of our laws, and morals, and stories, even people’s names, people that you run into on a very common basis. You find out, this woman’s name is Ruth; okay, well, that comes from the Bible. And there’s so many like that, it then became a very fascinating subject to explore and then dig into.

And I think particularly, once again, so much emphasis over recent culture has been put on the New Testament, which is Jesus, and love, and all that. But the really meaty stuff is the old stuff. That’s what really got them excited.

I remember wondering at the time if the Residents ever felt overwhelmed by the heaviness of the material. It’s not like the Residents’ material is always happy, but this is just like unrelieved rape, murder, God wants more foreskins—

Yeah, mountains of foreskins. Yeah, right, exactly. I think they were kind of blown away by a lot of it, honestly. But once again, that just reinforced that decision to be moving in that direction, using that as content for their music.

When they were choosing the stories, were they looking for anything in particular? Was it the stories that jumped off the page?

They did research. One of the things they weren’t necessarily aware of—it’s obvious, I guess, when you think about it, but they weren’t necessarily aware of it—you know, what we call the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, and it’s kind of ironic in a way that you can have these ideological conflicts between Christians and Jews when they all kind of base so much of their religion on the same writing. But there was a book that they found that was written by a rabbi. I’ve had reasons, for interviews like this, where I’ve wanted to name that book and I have not been able to locate it. I even looked on Amazon at one time trying to find it, I don’t know if it’s still in print or not. But this rabbi went through all of these Old Testament stories and brought out the deeper meaning in so many of them, so much of the stuff that was buried or kind of glossed over. In a lot of ways, that was probably the primary source of a lot of the material that they chose.
 

Detail from an early print on the ‘W***** B*** Album’ label (via Discogs)
 
Well, you mentioned that the Residents aren’t super-religious, but there does seem to be a preoccupation—I mean, not exclusively, the Residents’ catalog is so huge—but it does seem that the theme of religion comes up. At the end of that Mole Show video, there’s the joke Penn Jillette tells that one of the Residents told him, “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ?” Do you have any idea about the context of that joke?

I know exactly what you’re talking about: “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ? To get to the other side.” And it’s one of those kind of jokes that, it’s funny on so many levels, once you stop and think about it? I certainly remember that, but I’m drawing a blank trying to think of what the origin of it was.

You know, another thing that was inspiring to them in terms of the Wormwood choice is, the Residents in general are not especially political, but this was around the time that the religious right started, the very beginning, I think, of it starting to become a political force. Which now, God, has turned into who knows what, but certainly not positive from my perspective or the Residents’.

But there’s so much hypocrisy involved in that. You know, I went to the Methodist Church when I was young. I think of so much of what the rhetoric and the dialogue and the content was, and it was so much about love and inclusion at that time, and they pretty much stayed away from politics. And it’s gone so far away from that. I think that the Residents, in some ways, were kind of delighted to pull out these weird, dark Bible stories, to kind of put it in the face of the religious right that would just as soon pretend that stuff didn’t exist.
 

via residents.com

This was the end of a period of not touring for the Residents. I wonder what their sense of being on the road was—there’s that funny version of the Grand Funk song [“we’re coming to your town, we’re gonna worship it down”]. But there’s a sense in which it’s the most traditional form of American show business to go on the road with a bunch of Bible stories. Do you have any insight into how they felt about that, or if they perceived themselves as participating… it’s not that far from a kind of revival show.

Well, yeah, in a way, I can see what you’re talking about. It’s almost like it’s an anti-revival show.

Yeah.

But in a way that kind of doubles back on itself and becomes sort of the same thing. They really weren’t seeing, I don’t think, that much implication in it. That Boston show, as I remember, there were people that protested that. There were maybe a handful, very few, instances of something like that. But from the Residents’ point of view, other than to their fans, they consider themselves to be fairly invisible, and consequently don’t warrant that much attention from the culture at large. So they never really had any sense that that would garner that much attention. And for the most part it didn’t, really. They’ve done other things, the whole Third Reich ‘n Roll stuff, whatever; it got a little outrage here and there, but on the other hand, it was pretty much ignored.

It seems like some of the outrage comes up in Berkeley. [Jim Knipfel’s liner notes mention that a Wormwood date in Berkeley was suddenly canceled.]

Well, and that’s where it came up for Third Reich ‘n Roll.

At Rather Ripped, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, Rather Ripped was one of the first stores to really push and promote the Residents’ music, and it was the fifth anniversary of the store, and they said, “Okay, you can have the window of the store, do whatever you want to.” And they did [laughs] and Berkeley wasn’t happy with it! They were kind of shocked, I think, in a way. What’s fascinating to me is, I suppose it’s not so much the power of the swastika and Nazi imagery, it’s more that it still resonates so loudly within the culture, and from my point of view, and I think the Residents’ too, more so now than it did in the mid-Seventies, which, if you think about it, seems kind of strange. But we’re in strange times.
 

‘Fire Fall’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
I know the Wormwood DVD I have is from Germany. Jim Knipfel mentions a show at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Is there a video of that, too?

I don’t think there is. The most notable things about that to me was, one—I mean, the Residents were thrilled to play Las Vegas, but at the same time, what was notable was how few people showed up for the show. The Residents are not really a Las Vegas kind of an act. It wasn’t a mistake from their point of view, they were thrilled to be there, but I think, from the promoter’s point of view, if you think about it, the Residents are not the kind of act you go to Las Vegas to see.

But the other thing was that Penn and Teller came to the show, and they loved it, they just totally flipped out, they thought it was great.

I seem to remember the Residents appearing—maybe Penn and Teller had a variety show around that time?

Well, they’ve had a couple of three variety shows. There was a [video] that we put out for the Residents called The Eyes Scream. It was kind of an early best-of, in a way, but then [Penn and Teller] would do segments in between the videos to kind of glue it together.

I think there was maybe one show that the Residents and Penn and Teller did together in San Francisco?

Yeah, I’m trying to think which one that was. It was the end of a tour. It would either have been the 13th anniversary show or Cube-E. I remember it was a Bill Graham show, it was a big show.
 

‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’

I love the Residents’ A Sight for Sore Eyes book, and I notice it’s hopefully titled “Volume One.” Are there gonna be more volumes, as far as you know?

The plan is three volumes, and I know that this one has done pretty well. So that should guarantee at least Volume Two [smiles], we’ll see from there. Everybody around here is extremely happy with it. As the keeper of the visual archives, I worked with Aaron [Tanner] pretty closely, and really enjoyed working with him and thought he did a fantastic job.

Do you ever come across stuff in the archives that’s surprising to you, doing this kind of stuff, or is it all pretty familiar to you?

I’ve run across stuff that I haven’t seen for a long time, that can surprise me: “Oh, I kept that!” [Laughs] I used to say that all the Residents’ imagery neatly divided up into two twenty-year segments. Well, now, it’s a lot closer to a twenty-year and a thirty-year [segment]. The first twenty years was all analog. I went digital with Photoshop and those tools in the early to mid-Nineties, so there’s not as many interesting artifacts.

I always tell people, if you are a production artist trying to create things that have to be reproduced, digital tools are fantastic. If you like the weird, old, crazy artifacts that got spun off one way or another through analog work, well, you don’t really get that very much anymore. Like so many things in life, there’s an upside and a downside.

I have a cabinet right over here with photographs in it, and a lot of those have never been digitized. Sometimes, I can find myself going back and looking for something, and that’s what can really surprise me—that picture got made, or that picture got made. Because, like I say, a lot of that stuff has never been digitized.

I’ve donated a lot of the Residents’ analog tape archive to the Museum of Modern Art, and at some point, I expect to be donating all of this film stuff, and I’m hoping that I can talk them into digitizing all of it so I will actually have it all in that form.

It must be a massive amount of stuff at this point.

It’s a lot. It’s a lot of stuff, yeah.

‘Burn Baby Burn’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

 
It just happened that it was originally going to be six, then seven, then eight, then nine [discs], because people reached out to Carla Fabrizio, and she ended up coming up with a whole disc’s worth of extra stuff, and also Hardy would ask this guy Chris Kellas to record shows, and he recorded the [two-disc] Wormwood at the Fillmore show. That was kind of a late addition, so it kind of leapt from six to nine discs at the very last minute, actually.

And it was particularly interesting because the Fillmore show is different to the tour. It was just the album, whereas obviously for the tour they wrote a whole load of other songs.

And there’s the gamelan orchestra.

Yeah, right. I think the idea behind it, and with all of the box sets, really, is to show [how] these Residents live projects tend to evolve. They seem to do like a couple of dress rehearsals in San Francisco, figure out what was right and what was wrong about it, change it for the tour. So the idea for each of those is to, in a perfect world, I suppose, play them almost chronologically: demos, first live show, later demos, album, tour, whatever it is. Wormwood’s a strange one, obviously, ‘cause they went back and re-recorded the Roadworms thing in the middle of a tour.

So they themselves weren’t huge on the album; for some strange reason, they put the album out, and immediately decided to write loads more songs, and then re-record it whilst they were on tour. So it’s a strange project in the first place. In the early 2000s, Hardy talked about revisiting it and completely reworking it, and then nothing came of it, so this is, I suppose, the extension of that idea. It just grew and grew.
 
More after the jump…

 
Since much of Renaldo & The Loaf’s work experiments with time, it makes a funny kind of sense that, on 2017’s Gurdy Hurding, the duo picked up right about where they left off with 1987’s The Elbow Is Taboo. Perhaps, like all the tapes they’ve run backwards over the years, their music really does borrow from the future. In the early days especially, they liked to play songs unsinging themselves, the sound of speech sucking itself back up through the lungs to its point of origin in the brain. And wouldn’t it be wonderful, inhaling song and speech out of the environment into your nervous system?

You would be unlikely to mistake Renaldo & The Loaf’s music for someone else’s. The sound, an emergent property of Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf’s decades-long musical friendship, is entirely homemade, but ingeniously fitted together and sturdily constructed—each song a miniature feat of engineering, built to last. “Primitive modernism,” Ralph Records called it in 1981, announcing the release of Songs for Swinging Larvae.

So while the timbres and harmonies can be bracingly unfamiliar, Renaldo & The Loaf’s songs teem with earworms, and probably brain- and spineworms, too. In fact, let me take this opportunity to recommend that the songs themselves be classified and studied as new zoological discoveries. (These days, when I listen to Klanggalerie‘s pristine and greatly enlarged editions of the Renaldo & The Loaf catalog, I often picture the menagerie of intergalactic pilgrims in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame.”)

Alex Wroten’s excellent new documentary 23rd Century Giants, out March 8 on Blu-ray and streaming platforms, tells how two teenage Tyrannosaurus Rex fans from Portsmouth became the weirdest band on Ralph. Along with Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf themselves, the documentary collects testimony from the Cryptic Corporation’s Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and the late Hardy Fox; the visionary director behind Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae video, Graeme Whifler; veterans of the Ralph and T.E.C. Tones labels, and patient recipients of my adolescent correspondence, Tom Timony and Sheenah Spece; album illustrators Poxodd and Steven Cerio; and DEVO archivist Michael Pilmer, among others.

Some highlights follow from my recent conversation with director Alex Wroten and the two learned rotcods.

Renaldo & The Loaf, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)

 
Is this the first time the two of you have been in front of the camera very much, Brian and David? The “Backwards Film Study” that’s in there seems to come from the early Eighties—

Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice): Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? [Laughs]

Well, I’ve just seen the little bit that’s in the documentary. I’m looking forward to seeing the full thing on the Blu-ray.

David Janssen (Ted the Loaf): That’s it. It’s only very short, that’s all there is.

Brian: Basically, yeah. Three minutes, that’s it!

David: And no, we’re not really used to being in front of the camera much. There’s that three-minute thing; there’s, I suppose, the filming we did for the “A Convivial Ode” video…

Brian: And that’s it, really, isn’t it?

David: I mean, unintentionally, the stuff that was filmed live. I mean, that was just, someone happened to film it, so we weren’t really conscious of being in front of a camera.

This is the Vienna show you’re talking about?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose Alex’s documentary is kind of the longest we’ve ever been under the lights of movie cameras.

Brian: Yeah, that’s right. But of course, we didn’t have to do makeup or anything like that, or costumes. [Laughs]

Alex Wroten (director, 23rd Century Giants): Well, not totally true, ‘cause there’s the part where you’re wearing the glasses [designed by Poxodd], so you did a little costumes.

David: And the masks.

Brian: In answer to your question, no. We’re really not used to being the center of attention, if you like. There have been stills done. Up in the Eighties and that, we did sort of go into a studio and have some photos done of us, but apart from that, no. In fact, the material that Alex asked for—I mean, obviously, as the documentary was coming to fruition and that, he wanted to say “What visual material do you have?” And it was a very, very useful thing looking through the archive, which, fortunately, I’ve got it here, our stuff, because I haven’t moved house, and it’s just here. So I was able to find quite a lot of stuff, but, you know, there’s some creative stuff that Alex had to do in the film to illustrate certain things, let’s say.
 
More after the jump…

 
Today we’re privileged to premiere a wonderful new single and video from Negativland’s The World Will Decide concept album, which asks if actual reality reality is really still superior to the reality created by the Internet, computers and artificial intelligence.

Negativland‘s Mark Hosler sent along the following message:

Perhaps you’re on your way to work, listening to the gently calming sound of NPR to thoughtfully take in the morning news.  Or perhaps you’re so extremely online that you can’t even remember your last commute, and you’re actually listening to “Anything Else,”  the latest single from Negativland’s most recent album THE WORLD WILL DECIDE.  This video, directed by Ryan Worsley with visual animations by SUE-C, is filled with the kinds of questions that can help you remember. Based on a cassette recovered from band member Don Joyce‘s apartment after his death in 2015, this totally unedited conversation has been set to aggressively pleasant music written and performed by Negativland, and brought to a broadcast-ready state by their special musical guests: Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, Star St. Germain, Kris Force and Jackie Gratz on strings, and Drew Daniel on drum programming.  Whatever the real answers to these questions are, you might want to text ahead.  You’re going to be a little late to the office.

 
Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era.

I’ll take it even further: To my mind, it’s on the same level as PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Or The Dreaming by Kate Bush.

There I’ve said it.

Make no mistake about it, artistically NunSexMonkRock is a monumentally important recording.

It’s also something you can buy used for a single penny on Amazon. There is no mention whatsoever of the album in Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. The Allmusic review of NunSexMonkRock is but a single sentence. The Quietus doesn’t give a shit about it, nor does The Wire. In fact, there is almost nothing of any substance written about the album online anywhere. Hardly any music blogs have ever deigned to even mention it. Google the title, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

That doesn’t mean that NunSexMonkRock doesn’t have its hard-core passionate admirers—there are dozens of Amazon reviews and almost all of them are five-star raves—but we’re talking about something that was obscure 40 years ago when it came out. Even if you could easily pick it up at the local mall then—and for a while there, you could—few did. I would imagine that most people who have discovered the charms of NunSexMonkRock since it was first released have done so primarily because they saw it in a $1 bargain bin and it looked weird so they picked it up. (Every used copy of NunSexMonkRock on vinyl is pristine, it’s virtually guaranteed.)
 

 
Luckily for both of us, you don’t have to take my word for any of this, I can make my case for the epic holy/demonic genius of NunSexMonkRock with the music itself—thanks YouTube—which is neither wholly punk, nor rock, nor opera, nor really anything even remotely recognizable as any previously known genre of music. Already a category of one, NunSexMonkRock appears to have no obvious influences either. Reliable adjectives fall by the wayside when you are confronted with such an anarchic artistic anomaly. Because it’s so very much out on its own peculiar limb, it’s completely timeless. (Musically at least, but lyrically Hagen makes a cryptic prophecy about the then leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who up and died the year the album came out.) NunSexMonkRock could have been recorded 40 years ago, yesterday, or a thousand years from now and it just wouldn’t matter.

The album inhabits a territory so utterly exotic and unclassifiable that the creator herself would never again venture that far out. NunSexMonkRock is a zany, oddball, sexy, freaky as fuck and totally revolutionary masterpiece of modern music. At the center of this evil maelstrom is Hagen’s multi-layered, multi-octave and gymnastically operatic voice, a unique hybrid of Maria Callas, Zarah Leander, Yma Sumac and Mercedes McCambridge doing the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist...

Rolling Stone called NunSexMonkRock the “most unlistenable” album ever made. Au contraire. It’s an incredibly weird album, let there be no doubt about THAT, but once you’ve gotten over the initial shock, NunSexMonkRock is as catchy as hell. “Most unlistenable”? Although that sounds like a dare I personally would be willing to take Rolling Stone up on, it’s not even remotely true.
 

 
Nevertheless(!), let’s ease into it, shall we, and start off with what is probably NunSexMonkRock‘s most accessible number, the unstoppable riff-driven rocker “Born in Xixax” that leads off side two of the album. This features the great Chris Spedding on guitar. Tell me this riff isn’t as good as “All Day and All of the Night” or “Jumping Jack Flash.”
 

“This is Radio Yerevan and this is the news…”

Much more after the jump…

 
Telefís—the Irish Gaelic word for television, pronounced Tele-feesh—is the name of a new musical collaboration between Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions) and producer/musician Jacknife Lee (who’s worked with everyone from Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera to REM, U2, and Modest Mouse). The pair are aiming to update the synthpop duo paradigm with an album titled a hAon, which translates as “the first” or “#1” in, you guessed it, Gaelic. After February 11 you can stream the album at all the usual places, and the vinyl version will be in record stores on March 4. They’ve also been churning out videos at a rapid clip which you can sample at the Telefís YouTube channel.

Prior to the release of the album, Telefís teamed up with Jah Wobble for a series of collaborations. Their latest is a dub version of their earlier alliance, “Falun Gong Dancer.” I asked Cathal Coughlan for a statement about the video and this is what he sent me:

Near Dublin, the Capital City of the Irish Empire, a select group of religious tyrants are gathering together in a specially-constructed TV studio to create a media presentation which will end the Permissive Society of the 1960’s for once and for all. Meanwhile, in distant London, a group of smartly-dressed working emigrants from the Irish mainland assembles in order to socialize in a convivial environment. This is a place where they will not be derided for their manners and speech, which while both are imbued with a grace and elegance, are not shared in common with the majority of the host city’s population. An outbreak of set-dancing occurs, sending the dance floor into a controlled and courtly frenzy.

The music filling the space is the “Donkey’s Gudge Dub” version of the song “Falun Gong Dancer,” by the Irish expatriate group Telefís, a version heavily featuring the bass stylings of Jah Wobble, himself a son of the Irish diaspora in London. Jah Wobble is one of the most distinctive instrumental voices to have emerged in this neck of the woods since the punk era, a ferment which drew him into highly distinctive work with Public Image Ltd., the Invaders of the Heart, and a host of diverse and adventurous projects.

In fact, coincidentally, given the title of the tune, the dancers in London soon take a break from the dance and enjoy a psychotropic snack in the form of “donkey’s gudge” cake, a strange concoction originating in the homeland, on this occasion fortified with some of the mind-bending fungi which grow on nearby Hampstead Heath. After this, the dance assumes a supernatural glow, and the dancers are watched jealously via a Russian satellite link by the theocrats in Ireland.

Composure is retained by all, but Jesus the lights look peculiar, and why is that man’s elbow in three places at once? His elbow is the Holy Trinity, of course!

The debut Telefís album “a hAon” (“the first”) will be released on February 11, 2022. The vinyl version of a hAon will be released on March 4. Preorder here.
 

Pink Floyd circa 1967.
 
Ten years ago, upon the passing of Dick Clark, a long-time contributor to Dangerous Minds Marc Campbell homaged Clark by posting footage of Pink Floyd’s appearance on American Bandstand. As Campbell pointed out, Clark would select acts for Bandstand and his choice of Pink Floyd in 1967 demonstrates how far ahead of the musical curve Dick Clark was. Now, with a hat tip to another long-time contributor for DM, Ron Kretch, let me treat your eyes to newly colorized footage of Floyd dreamily miming along to their third single “Apples and Oranges” on stage at ABC Studios in Burbank (or perhaps ABC Television Center studios as an intrepid DM reader has noted), California on November 7th, 1967.

Before we get to this nothing short of glorious colorized footage, I’d like to touch on the fact that it took nearly a year of work to recreate this moment and it shows. A YouTuber based in Sweden known as Artist on the Border has been creating their own visual representations of Pink Floyd for the last two decades. The colorization adds a dream-like appearance to the members of Pink Floyd who had just arrived in America for the first time a few days before their appearance on American Bandstand. So stop whatever it is you were doing and let the colorized chill of Pink Floyd wash over you. Also, beware the colorized version of Syd Barrett may give you a hell of a contact high. In the event the footage below becomes unavailable, click here to view it on YouTube. 

Pink Floyd’s performance of ‘Apples and Oranges’ on American Bandstand, 1967.

 
This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.

Is David Bowie’s musical legacy really only worth half that of Bruce Springsteen’s? This was the first thing that sprung to mind when I read the news earlier this week concerning the financial deal inked between the Bowie Estate and Warner Chappell Music, which handed the rights to the Duke’s back catalogue, including the “lost album” Toy released this Friday (on the eve of what would’ve been his 75th birthday), for the modest sum of $250 million, 50% less than The Boss received for his songbook from Sony. If accurate, these figures only confirmed what I’ve long suspected: America never really deserved Bowie.

Trawling back through the tsunami of US press coverage that broke out in the wake of his devastating death six years ago, it’s all too apparent that the Special Man remained a spiky and alien presence in the American psyche; an outlier who was never fully embraced into the mainstream bosom of a country that had fascinated him since boyhood. Bowie is conspicuous by his absence from the Kennedy Center Honors and it remains a mystery as to why, as a self-confessed gridiron fan, he never performed at the Super Bowl halftime show.(1)

His championing of bisexuality and use of dramatic make-up early on in his career certainly handicapped him in what remains a far more puritanical country than most in the West. But while it’s true he never had the same commercial clout in the US as he did in the UK, Europe, Australasia and Japan, his influence on popular music and culture in general—and the States in particular—dwarfs not only coevals like Elton John and Rod Stewart, but those colossi that went before him such as The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and Elvis, and he continues to wield a transgenerational appeal like no other. Every four-year cycle in music over the last five decades has thrown up a whole new crop of Bowie-inspired clones and imitators, most recently with the arrival of the K-pop androgynes.

So while his passing was publicised far and wide Stateside, there was a definite lack of depth in analysing his all-encompassing significance. Time and again, obituary writers failed miserably to hit the milestones of his accomplishments, especially his crowning achievements: that astonishing sequence of albums he made between 1970-1983 that remains the greatest run of albums in pop music history, during which he revolutionised how rock music was presented on stage, on video and album covers. Or the fact that many sub-genres of popular music simply wouldn’t exist without him—from Glam Rock, Punk and New Wave to Synth-Pop, Art-Rock and Goth.

Putting to one side the fact that none of his classic albums from the 70s were even nominated for a Grammy, let alone won one (Bowie never put much stock into such award ceremonies anyway, and the Grammys have always been a notoriously middle-of-the-road organisation with a sketchy reputation for presenting awards based not on merit but backroom deals), and the surprising fact, for many, that Blackstar remains his only album to reach the top of the Billboard Chart, the American eulogies were often marred by faulty chronology, lazy clichés, and serious omissions. For instance: other than a sole mention by Tamron Hall on NBC’s Today Show, Bowie’s persona of Halloween Jack was MIA from Bowie’s roster of dramatis personae, quite an oversight considering that it was while performing in that incarnation—far more than Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane—that broke Bowie big in America, seeing him selling out arenas on the critically and commercially acclaimed Diamond Dogs tour of 1974. While in a widely syndicated paragraph that appeared in USA Today and other newspapers, readers were told that Bowie’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and his Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 were among the “few major honors bestowed on Bowie in his lifetime,” because whoever dreamt up with those lines couldn’t be bothered to read the Wikipedia page dedicated to the list of trophies he garnered over the years.(2)

Another egregious example was the truly abysmal write-up in the New York Times, where John Pareles found it fit to mention inconsequential factoids such as how ‘Under Pressure’ was sampled by Vanilla Ice while failing to cite Pauline Kael—acknowledged as one of the finest film critic of her time—who hailed Bowie’s presence in The Man Who Fell To Earth as “the most romantic figure in recent pictures.” 

While the journalist Bill Wyman chose his Bowie remembrance for Vulture as the moment to argue that Bowie had not written a major song since 1980 and to dismiss Low and Heroes as “overrated.” Though he did profess surprise that not one of Bowie’s landmark long-players of the 1970s made it into Robert Christgau’s annual Top 10 Pazz and Jop poll for the Village Voice, which aggregated votes from most of the leading American music critics at the time.(3) This only reinforced how completely out of step many American music critics were with Bowie’s fleet-footed manoeuvres during his Imperial Period. Some, like Lester Bangs, were openly hostile, but if you fancy a giggle, you should read up and see some of the forgettable dreck they did praise at the time, in his stead.

Furthermore, as most of the obits were penned by men of a certain vintage (Tara Bahrampour at the Washington Post was a rare exception), Bowie’s physical attributes, such as his shattering beauty, through all his guises, as well as his status as one of the major sex symbol’s of the 20th-Century, were barely touched upon; neither were all the beguiling sides of his prismatic personality. Indeed, the picture painted of Bowie as the High Priest of Glam was so overstated in the coverage it ignored the fact that, for the vast majority of his career, Bowie comported himself not like a polysexual vampire from Mars, but as the quintessential suave English gentleman, or “the Cary Grant of Rock” as his sometime sideman Adrian Belew once memorably dubbed him. Accounts of the mesmeric power of his stillness on stage and screen were also only sparingly touched upon, as were illustrations of the intellectual heft of his work, or how his stage name has become an adjective and byword for an artist or any creative work deemed to possess magical, supernatural qualities.

Some American fans were also rightfully miffed that there was no official tribute paid to him by President Obama. (So much for the so-called “Cool President!”) (4) While it’s true Bowie remained a British citizen, his status was that of a global icon who’d lived in America, off and on, since 1974, permanently since 1995. And with millions of American fans, it would’ve been more than fitting for the president to say a few words or release a statement. But Obama wasn’t the only high profile political snub.

During the ‘90s, Bowie and Iman stumped for the Clintons. They were in attendance at the Democratic Convention in 1992 and were pictured in the company of “Bubba” several times since, yet no encomiums were forthcoming from him or his wife either. Actually, I could find no plaudits penned by leading Democrats at all; whereas in stark contrast, Bowie was praised by then-Republican presidential candidates John Kasich, Rick Santorum and, most notably of all, Donald Trump, who described Bowie as “a great guy” and “a great talent.” Bowie even wormed praised from right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who conceded that Bowie was a “supremely talented rock ‘n’ roll crooner,” although the porcine bloviator couldn’t resist a jab at Bowie’s sylphlike frame.

Considering that, in the second half of his life, Bowie appears to have settled into a broadly Social-Democratic position on the political spectrum, it’s ironic that the most intelligent and insightful homages to him came not from left-leaning publications but from conservative periodicals, particularly the National Review, where, in a frank admission, Carl Eric Scott wrote: “Bowie mattered. And social conservatives, part of the reason he mattered is that he was our opponent. A classy, beautiful, intriguing, attractive, articulate, and poetically potent opponent, but all the more damaging to our vision of the good life because of those qualities.” Liberal outlets, meanwhile, whittled on endlessly about Bowie’s influence on transgenderism, a questionable claim, and something he scoffed at when the subject was raised with him in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia in 2002.

Which brings us onto the biggest Bowie slight of them all to occur during this shiva period. Although some of the US cable channels scrambled to put together tribute programmes dedicated to him, none of the network TV channel schedules were altered to accommodate his legacy or mark his passing, providing yet another example of how irrelevant traditional media outlets have become. However, 60 Minutes, the country’s flagship news magazine, did finally run an unaired profile of Bowie that they produced back in 2003 to promote the forthcoming Reality album and tour. But what was billed as a belated celebration for a cultural icon lasted all of three minutes—right at the end of the programme! And to add further insult, they consigned some extra footage, that could and should have been broadcast, to their website. The programme-makers not only squandered the opportunity to pay a substantive salute, but they provoked an unnecessary backlash that was completely self-inflicted.

Notes:

1)Of course, it’s possible that, like the Crown Honours Lists in the UK, Bowie was offered such enticements but discreetly turned them down.
2)This page is also missing several other notable achievements including Bowie’s award for Best Male Singer in the British Rock and Pop Awards of 1980; the Berolina Award for Commitment and Service to Berlin 1987; the World Music Legend/Outstanding Contribution to Music Award of 1990, and Bowie’s designation as the Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century voted by the British public for the BBC’s Icons TV show in 2019.
3) Hunky Dory did in fact make the top 10, but only just, by taking the final spot. The Pazz and Jop poll went AWOL between 1972 and 1973, but although Christgau personally bestowed a solid B+ rating on both LP’s, there’s little confidence that either Ziggy or Aladdin Sane would’ve made it into the Top 10.
4) The Clinton Library Twitter account did release photographs of Bowie visiting the Clinton White House in 1995. One reason for the silence from the Obamas may have been due to comments made by Iman to Parade magazine back in 2009, in which she stated: “Mrs Obama is not a great beauty,” which garnered headlines, although her following remarks put that opinion in context: “But she is so interesting looking and so bright. That will always take you farther. When you’re a great beauty, it’s always downhill for you. If you’re someone like Mrs Obama, you just get better with age.” If this was indeed the cause for the absence of a presidential panegyric, then it suggests pettiness in the extreme on behalf of the First Family. When the subject of Bowie’s death was raised by the White House press corps, Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, admitted he wasn’t sure whether the president was a Bowie fan but opined: “There are a number of people all across the globe who have talked about how they had been inspired by (Bowie’s) life and his work… there’s no denying the impact of his contribution to art and music and film.”

A live vocal performance of “Heroes” on TOTP in 1977