For a while, I think Milk ‘n’ Cookies’ eponymous album was one of those records that rock snobs used to test the depths of one anothers’ esoteric knowledge. Though the band members definitely played for more famous outfits (bass player Sal Maida was in Roxy Music and Sparks, and even played on The Runaways “Waiting for the Night”), Milk ‘n’ Cookies’ fantastic combo of pop hooks and glam nastiness always takes a little digging to undercover. The band released one LP in 1975, and their seemingly counterintuitive “cutesy dirtbag” image apparently appealed to both teenyboppers and the crowds of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.

Despite a loyal New York following, their career was short-lived—when a single didn’t chart their second album was shelved. Members went different directions and Milk ‘n’ Cookies was no more, but the band has experienced a revival in recent years, even playing a reunion show in 2005 to awestruck power pop fans. You can hear a full-length live performance, recorded at CBGB in either 1975 or 1976, at WFMU, and this new (old) track is classic Milk ‘n’ Cookies—girly vocals, dirty guitars, and pumping beat. If you’re not down with Milk ‘n’ Cookies, get on it!

Brooklyn indie Captured Tracks will be releasing a three LP set of the 1975 Milk ‘n’ Cookies album with unreleased tracks, like the one below, “Nots,” later this year.
 

 
Via Noisey

 
Last week, DM brought you grindcore pioneers Napalm Death on children’s TV in the UK. Today, we bring you the kid-vid appearance of the utterly ridiculous Manowar, the single most over-the-top expression of every tacky masculinity-mythologizing hard rock cliché, kitchen-sinked into one band that does its best to always appear as though they’d just stepped out of a Frank Frazetta painting. They gave a performance and interview on Nickelodeon’s often admirably daring Livewire in 1983. (Nickelodeon really needs to offer a home-video compilation of all the musical guests on that show. I would buy that in a second.)
 

 
So here’s the thing: yes, Manowar are massively boneheaded. The whole berserker/Conan/I-kill-what-I-eat-and-I-eat-it-raw sartorial vibe stinks of trying too hard, and their musical output is merely B-minus power metal when they’re at their absolute best—if this is the sort of music you’re feeling, Dio’s Holy Diver does the job way, WAY better, so why settle? But dammit, I have a huuuuuge soft spot for wishfully grandiose heavy metal lyrics about how magnificent heavy metal is and how being a heavy metal fan is a man’s noblest calling. Seriously, what other genre outside of metal and hip-hop ever indulges in that level of self-glorification? Try to imagine an elderly Mississippi tenant farmer in 1931 signing about how it was super awesome to have the blues and live in soul-crushing poverty, and how anyone who didn’t was just a puny little half-man. That never happened. Here are some of the lyrics to “Gloves of Metal” from Manowar’s second album Into Glory Ride.

Hear the pounding army of the night
The call of metal summons us tonight.
And gather we on this site
To behold the power and the might.
We wear leather, we wear spikes, we rule the night.

Off with the lights, hear the screams
See the banging heads awaken to their dreams.
The sound of metal so loud it cracks the beams
Played by warriors called the Metal Kings.

A hero’s welcome for those who heed the call.
We are together, we are all.
With hands high fists fill the air
Against the world we stand.
Hands high forever we’ll be there.
Gloves of Metal rule tonight.

© Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

FUCK YEAH, GLOVES OF METAL RULE TONIGHT!
 

 
Livewire previously on Dangerous Minds:
Ramones drop some truth on a little know-it-all (a young Marilyn Manson?) on Nickelodeon, 1981

“Most American automobile horns beep in the key of F. Did you know that?

It’s true.”

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits has long been known as one of our great raconteurs. His comic timing is nigh unto perfect. And that voice. The one that was described in Rolling Stone as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” Tom Waits telling stories? I’m so there. Tom Waits is a truly great bullshit artist! The best.

I love Tom Waits, so how the hell did I not know he did a VH1 Storytellers? Well he did, back in 1999, and it’s as good as you would expect it to be. Better even. It’s a damned shame this has never come out on DVD (or what about Netflix streaming oh Viacom digital overlords?). The quality here is so-so, it was obviously taped off air onto a VHS tape, but I’m not complaining.

At Archive.org, some kind soul has posted the entire unedited set, more stories, more songs, but it’s audio only.

A special highlight, for me, comes at 25:20 when Waits growls “This is about the neighbor we all become…” when he introduces “What’s He Building?” from his then current album, 1999’s Mule Variations.
 

 
Bonus clip: Waits sings “The Piano Has Been Drinking” on Fernwood2Night in 1977:

 
Via Stupefaction

 
Melvins’ frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne guest DJ’d on Henry Rollins’ KCRW show last Sunday. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these two yap about music and life. Buzz describes his playlist as “musically schizophrenic.” I’m going to have to agree.

It’s definitely a fun listen. Hope you enjoy.

Set List

Albert King – Born Under a Bad Sign
Brainiac – Fresh New Eyes
Gang of Four – Paralyzed
Scientists – Set it on Fire
Judy Garland – Stormy Weather
The Fugs – I Want to Know
U-Men – Blight
Birthday Party – Fears of Gun
King Buzzo – Drunken Baby
Jimi Hendrix – Power of Love
Miles Davis – Black Satin
Tweak Bird – Spaceships
David Bowie – Quicksand
Bobby Darin – Beyond the Sea
Gun Club – Ghost on the Highway
MC5 – I Want You Right Now
Tom Waits – Bad as Me
Latin Playboys – Lemon ‘N Ice
Captain Beefheart – Glider
Bob Dylan – It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Buck Owens – Memphis

 
As we near the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death—the Nirvana leader killed himself on April 5, 1994—this morning the Seattle Police Department released two new crime scene photographs that give gruesome glimpses at his final moments.  His body was found on the morning of April 8, 1994 by an electrician named Gary Smith who had been hired to do some maintenance work at Cobain’s Lake Washington home. One photo shows Cobain’s wrist with a hospital ID bracelet, while the other shows his lifeless Converse-clad foot beside a box of bullets:
 

 

 
If you are of a certain age, it’s likely you’ll recall where you were when you heard the news. Thousands of grieving young fans in Seattle felt the need to be together to try to make sense of what had occurred. In “Stupid Club,” this fascinating short documentary from 1994, we meet several of them and it’s pretty interesting stuff, historically, sociologically speaking, whatever. Some of it’s sad, some of it is just goofy.

Worth noting is that the title “Stupid Club” refers to something that Cobain’s mother said in the wake of his suicide:

“Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club, I told him not to join that stupid club.”

Conspiracy theorists at the time—well, at least the ones not claiming that he had been murdered by Courtney Love—speculated that the “stupid club” his mother Wendy was alluding to is the “27 Club” of dead rock stars who never made it to to the age of 28 (Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson) but she was most likely referring to two of Kurt’s uncles, and a great uncle, who had killed themselves.
 

 
Thank you kindly, Reginald Harkema!

 
Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s friend/assistant/manager/svengali/whatever, was trying to figure out a way to release an Elvis album to which RCA, Elvis’ usual recording label, would own no rights. The problem was, contracts being what they are, RCA had exclusive rights to music released by Elvis. At some point he came up with a solution—release an “Elvis album” with no music! In 1974 Parker’s Box Car Records released the only LP it would ever release, an all-banter album with no songs at all called Having Fun with Elvis on Stage. And Parker owned the rights outright.
 

 
The album had two tracks, “Side A” (18:06) and “Side B” (19:00). Both sides consisted of a long succession of short, context-free snippets of Elvis talking on stage, introducing the next song and so forth. Since Elvis is seguing from this or that song, you get a lot of truncated audience clapping noises. If you are supposing that there is some rhyme or reason to the way the clips were put together, well then, you’ve overestimated the ingenuity of Col. Parker. Later RCA would release it as well; there is a CD release of it, billed as a “Special Extended Edition”—only who on earth would want this thing to be longer?
 

 
Understandably, Having Fun with Elvis on Stage has come in for its share of abuse. It’s made a lot of “worst records of all time” lists, sometimes even making the top slot. The generally gentle Allmusic.com gave it one star (there really was no other option) and wrote of it, “Some have called Having Fun With Elvis on Stage thoroughly unlistenable, but actually it’s worse than that; hearing it is like witnessing an auto wreck that somehow plowed into a carnival freak show, leaving onlookers at once too horrified and too baffled to turn away.” Ouch. And yet, that’s not unfair.
 

 
Some have compared Having Fun with Elvis on Stage to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but it’s nothing like that. You know the expression, “I’d pay to see that person read the telephone book?” Having Fun with Elvis on Stage is the rock music equivalent of that. Elvis was so immensely popular that people bought even this. It reached #130 on the Billboard charts and, almost incredibly, made it to #9 on Billboard’s Country Albums chart. The album had the (small) disclaimer on the cover “A Talking Album Only” but a good number of people didn’t notice, didn’t care, or were so enamored of Elvis that they enjoyed it anyway. Personally I think when people got home and put it on, they were pissed.

Here’s Side A, in full. I have to say, I’ll take 45 minutes of Paul Stanley’s banter any day.
 

 
In the early ‘80s, the USA had a minor collective shitfit about blurred gender divisions. The subject emerged into the mass consciousness almost out of nowhere—all of a sudden, three mainstream movies had cross dressing as their central themes, and Michael Jackson and other androgyny-friendly musicians were experiencing huge pop chart success. Obviously, genderfuck had been a part of rock culture for a long time—it was a decade earlier that David Bowie and Lou Reed made career moves of conspicuous bisexual posturing, and then of course there were the New York Dolls—but MTV pumping Duran Duran, Haysi Fantayzee, and the Belle Stars into millions of Midwestern living rooms newly wired for cable was an altogether different level of cultural penetration.

The appearance of artists like Annie Lennox, Dee Snider and Pete Burns definitely startled a lot of normals, but the figure who, all by himself, racked up by far the high score of shat Middle-American underpants was Boy George of Culture Club. He was such a harmless and goofy figure, but 30 years ago, a lot of people found him genuinely threatening. DM’s Martin Schneider recently made a well-deserved poke at the Midwestern response to Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers tour. As I was a teenaged Clevelander at the time, I can personally vouch for the truth of that piece. A lot of “grownups” fully lost their shit about Boy George.
 

I still don’t get what the big deal was.

Of course, the national news media had to explore the issue for baffled masses in grave danger of seeing the totally artificial social construct to which they were accustomed fall slightly apart on a superficial level. Leslie Stahl, for one, explored “The Feminization of America” on Face the Nation in 1984.
 

 
I love how “the feminizing of society” is illustrated with clips of men doing laundry and caring for infants. Who, WHO I ASK YOU, will save this degenerate civilization from the horror of fathers acting like parents? But as the segment continued, I found myself astonished that the discussion was civil, adult, and not completely trivializing. Megatrends author John Naisbitt offers some perfectly sensible if perhaps simplified insights, and then JERRY FALWELL of all people is genial, respectful, and, though obviously faaaaaaaar from progressive in his views, he’s not totally insane and hateful. The way he was towards the end of his life, I honestly expected him to do some bonkers shit like blame a tornado on Yentl. Imagine a similar conversation as it would happen on Hannity, McLaughlin, or The Five today, and weep for what we’ve lost in just 30 years.
 

 
Apologies, by the way, for the huge glitch in the middle of Falwell’s comments. Not that it’s likely they were illuminating or anything, but I did try to locate an alternate video, and turned up nothing. It’s probably not that great of a loss—in part three, Falwell predictably, and in scripturally unconvincing terms, goes on to defend the American post-WWII gender status quo as God’s eternal and ineffable will, and is called out on his blatant cultural and class biases by co-panelist/actual smartest person in the room Benjamin DeMott. But the most intelligent and moving comments in the whole segment come from Boy George himself. The insights he proffers in his one-on-one interview with Stahl remain relevant today, and fully make up for my disappointment that he and Falwell weren’t on the live panel together. I generally dislike the Internet’s abuse of the adjective “epic,” but god damn, THAT would have been a valid use.
 

“People paint to The Fall. They write novels to The Fall. The guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs wrote it… people like that. Strange people.”

Mick Middle’s low budget documentary about Mark E. Smith and The Fall was completed in 1994, but not seen until 2009 when it was made available as part of the Northern Cream DVD. 1994 was a good time to make a documentary about The Fall because at that point they’d been around enough to have gone through several incarnations—the group’s membership has been a revolving door since the beginning—including the Brix period of most of the 1980s when many feel Smith created his best music. That would include The Fall’s two collaborations with dancer Michael Clark. This is the period that I am the most interested in, so I thought this short film was a lot of fun.

Cigarette in one hand, pint in the other, the ever… charming Smith reveals how his father hated pop music, so there was never even a record player in the house until he was fourteen. When the kids at school talked about the Beatles and the Stones, he had no idea what they were going on about.

Asked if anything positive came of the “Manchester scene,” (i.e. The Smiths) Smith replies with characteristic bluntness: “Nowt.” He also slyly says that if you drink “out in the open” (in a pub) you “don’t become an alcoholic.”

When the interviewer asks Smith about the group’s fanatical American fans, particularly in California, he replies that “It’s funny, America… your’re talking about twenty countries there, in one country. Like the time we went to Cleveland and they hated our guts.” Smith says he thinks Los Angeles is the “most boring town in the world. The most boring city I’ve ever been to in my life.”

He just doesn’t know the right people here.

Fun fact: “Hip Priest” is used in the film adaptation of Silence of The Lambs, during the scene when Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) hunts down Buffalo Bill in his home.
 

Bonus clip: The twin drum attack of “Eat Y’Self Fitter” caused British DJ John Peel to claim that he’d fainted on air and had to be revived by his producer.

 
I have always thought Britpop was a bit like another famous British institution, the Carry On… movies. Both had likable and identifiable characters: Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey in the Carry Ons; and Damon, Jarvis, Noel and Liam in Britpop.

Both produced populist entertainment that was at once nostalgic and contemporary. The Carry Ons offered traditional music hall humor, poking fun at British institutions like the army, the National Health Service, education, unions and foreign holidays. While Britpop drew its influence from Sixties’ pop (Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks), and mixed it up with a punk rock swagger.

The Carry Ons came out of drab, gray, post-war Britain, while Britpop was more of a media construction, a handy (or possibly lazy) way to categorize the very disparate talents (Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Powder, The Boo Radleys, Menswear, Elastica, etc) that appeared during the drab, dull years of Conservative political rule during the 1990s.

Britpop was pitched as a nineties reinvention of the “swinging Sixties,” with two bands—Oasis and Blur—dominating the pop charts (much like The Beatles and Rolling Stones once did). There was a much publicized “fight” for the number one spot in 1995. Blur won with the single “Country House,” Oasis came in second with “Roll With It”—they may have lost the battle but Oasis eventually won the war.

If you have ever wondered what all the fuss was about, or why those days back in the 1990s were an exciting time to be young, British and full of hope for a better future, then this documentary Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop will explain all. It’s a wonderfully made and very entertaining film that brings together Noel and Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, 3D (Massive Attack), Louise Wener (Sleeper) and artist Damien Hirst, amongst others, to discuss, pontificate and reflect on why Britpop was arguably the last great musical movement from the UK—which says much, as it is now twenty years ago. If you haven’t seen this documentary, it is certainly worth seeing, once. Enjoy.
 

 
It was a clash of two future musical titans, New Year’s Eve, 1983 at New York’s legendary Danceteria.

Madonna, still the part-time coat-check girl at the nightclub, was chosen to open for, of all artists, The Smiths. This was the band’s first trip to the U.S. and they had just landed hours before. It was also on this trip that Morrissey worried about being thrown out of the band, and two days later Johnny Marr sweet-talked Sire Records’ Seymour Stein into buying him a new guitar: his iconic cherry red ‘59 Gibson ES-355.

 
According to Marr, the jet-lagged band paid very little attention to the girl opening for them, and he personally didn’t think very highly of her. Of course, Morrissey has said a lot nastier things about her over the years.

Johnny Marr on the night Madonna opened for The Smiths: