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R.E.M.’s Mike Mills on ‘Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee’
03.07.2014
10:53 am
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Mike Mills
 
This happened: while the pioneering band R.E.M. were transitioning from weird-people fame to normal-people fame, their bass player Mike Mills was booked to appear on Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee. Hosted by former Joey Bishop second-banana Regis Philbin before he morphed into his final form as the launching pad of a billion “Is that your final answer?” jokes and sidekicked by Kathie Lee Gifford, a woman so oppressively chipper she became a national punchline in her own right, Live! was a daytime talk show geared toward the dwindling sedentary-housewives-at-home-all-day demographic.

R.E.M., at the time, had leveled up from college-radio darlings to for-real arena rock stars, thanks to the albums Green and Out of Time and the improbable global success of the single “Losing My Religion.” (I worked at a record store at the time, and I once retrieved a copy of R.E.M.’s full-length debut Murmur for a yuppie who asked if we had “their first album.” He was baffled—he wanted Green, and had no idea the band had been releasing music for ten years. Among normals, he was far from alone.) But their newfound popularity aside, even in the wake of the Nevermind deluge, there was a real frisson to a band known for moody music and challenging, cerebral lyrics (snobs: feel free to nerdfight about “Shiny Happy People”) to make inroads to the gleeful wide-eyed vapidity of daytime talk.
 

 
This is messed up: I actually saw this when it was broadcast. I have no idea what I was doing at home during the day in February of 1992. I have no idea what class I was blowing off. I have no idea why the TV was even on at all, let alone why it was on the channel that broadcast Live! of all things, but there it was. Odds are good I was baked. And I when I caught the words “R.E.M.” and “Mike Mills” coming out of the mouth of Regis fucking Philbin, I was transfixed. Mills has always seemed a good-natured guy, so he responded with aw-shucks aplomb to the banal interview questions—seriously, high school newspapers ask bands how they got their names, so it’s a shame Mills couldn’t inform them that the band had previously been called “Cans of Piss.” But then, surely in defiance of some publicist’s grave warning of certain doom, Mills does a marvelous acoustic rendition of “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville,” a song from their second LP Reckoning, which was eight years old at the time. Surely a small army of American homemakers dropped their cheesecake and drove straight to the mall to buy it. Right?
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Ramones on ‘Regis and Kathie Lee’

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.07.2014
10:53 am
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‘Breakin’ New York Style’ instructional video supplies the ultimate Reagan-era workout
03.06.2014
04:48 pm
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Breakdancing
 
I love everything about this video. The crude beats, the graffiti visual style, the simple instructional raps…. If you can do all of the moves they demonstrate, you are either in peak physical condition or well on the way to it. Just watching it wears me out!
 
Breakin' New York Style
 
Your sherpa in Breakin’ New York Style, which was released in 1984, is one “Lori Eastside,” who is best known for playing “Nada” in Allan Arkush’s remarkable and hectic 1983 satire Get Crazy. She has since transitioned into the fine art of casting; she assisted with the casting of The Wrestler, the Karate Kid remake, The Reader, and many others. But back in the day, she could throw down some beats and do a cartwheel that would kick your ass.

Here’s a supplemental guide to breakdancing that’s unrelated to Breakin’ New York Style (as far as I know). You can use it to sharpen your moves or brush up on your breakin’ lingo, such as “Juice,” which denotes “what you got when you’re a VIP—and that’s clout, the privileges, the status!”
 
Breakdance moves
(full size)
 
Watching this video is a welcome trip down memory lane, but it’s also a reminder why breakdancing didn’t really last: you have to be in tip-top shape to even think about doing it!
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.06.2014
04:48 pm
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Shake your booty to a musical track built around Jeff Goldblum’s weird laugh
03.06.2014
02:49 pm
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Jeff Goldblum
 
For decades now, Jeff Goldblum has been one of our most interesting leading men—wait a minute, leading man? Is he a leading man? Is he a character actor? Both? Well, whatever the fuck he is, he was perfectly cast in The Fly and his acting choices and line readings are always worth a gander, akin to being the thinking person’s Nicolas Cage (if not vice versa).

His status as “blockbuster helper” was solidified in the mid-1990s when he appeared in two of that decade’s highest-grossing movies, 1993’s Jurassic Park and 1996’s Independence Day. Goldblum’s signature moment came in the former movie when his character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, asks Drs. Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) whether they “dig up dinosaurs.” Receiving a tittering non-reply, Malcolm engages in a “knowing” laugh, which has a kitten’s aggressive purr mixed in, for no good reason other than to emphasize his unsavory and unctuous role as the movie’s reality principle (“Life, uh… finds a way”).

Some genius going by the name FLIPSH0T (actually Mikey Diserio of Melbourne, Australia) has put together a track with the completely apt and memorable title of “Hahahrawrrahaha.” FLIPSH0T took that ridiculous burst of incomprehensible bonhomie and generated a pretty sultry dance beat around it.
 

 
As far as the video below goes, please do NOT watch it all the way through—Jeff Goldblum laughing in a loop for 10 minutes has been clinically proven to induce diarrhea, schizophrenia, pleurisy, rickets, phlebitis, scurvy, and gout. You have been warned!
 

 
via Internet Magic

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.06.2014
02:49 pm
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Watch ‘Roadie,’ 1980 movie about rock’s hardy stevedores, with Meat Loaf, Blondie, & Alice Cooper
03.06.2014
12:45 pm
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Roadie
 
Alan Rudolph’s career is a bit of a puzzlement. Once a protégé of Robert Altman, Rudolph in his own movies seldom managed to master Altman’s art of turning a seemingly chaotic melange of overlapping dialogue into a pleasing whole. His first movie, Welcome to LA (1976), was a kind of downbeat version of Nashville, only lacking the focus Altman was able to achieve. Roadie came soon after, and it blends the music-centric perspective of Welcome to LA with something a lot like The Blues Brothers, Smokey and the Bandit, Car Wash, et al.

Roadie is intermittently an exasperating hubbub but is ultimately a pretty entertaining flick. Rudolph and co. (one of the writers is Zalman King, né Lefkowitz, who would later bring you the soft-core classics Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries) were fortunate indeed to have Meat Loaf in the title role—Roger Ebert thought they should have let him loose more often, but “Mr. Loaf,” as The New York Times once memorably called him, is still a pleasing cinematic presence even in repose.
 
Roadie
 
Mr. Loaf plays the part of Travis W. Redfish, a small-town trucker/inventor whose life is changed by the happenstance breakdown of the truck conveying shifty manager Ace (Joe Spano) and virginal groupie (you read that right) Lola Bouillabaisse to Austin for a must-see gig by Hank Williams, Jr. With his handy inventor’s know-how, Travis (now smitten with Lola, whose stated goal in the movie is to meet Alice Cooper) repairs the van and joins the merry, coked-up band for the rest of the tour, which will later meet up with Cooper, Blondie, Roy Orbison, and multiple Grammy winners Asleep at the Wheel.

The musical selections are memorable indeed. Hank Jr. plays his then-recent hit “Outlaw Women,” Orbison gives “The Eyes of Texas” a whirl, and Blondie gamely covers Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” complete with cowboy hats and Clem Burke’s DayGlo neckwear. (I didn’t know that Blondie ever played that song; turns out, the Roadie version is included on the 2001 reissue of their sublime 1979 album Eat to the Beat.) We also get a little bit of Alice doing “Only Women Bleed” and “Road Rats” as well as a larger chunk of “Pain.”

Speaking of the Blues Brothers, no sooner had I formulated that comparison in my mind than—there they are!—Jake and Elwood (not played by John and Dan, tho’) sneaking around a hotel just before some plot nonsense in which cocaine gets mixed up with a package of Tide detergent. Blondie also gets into a huge brawl with a septet of interracial midgets, the backup “dwarves” to the presumed main attraction, “Snow White.”

The YouTube video has French subtitles, which are mildly annoying, although it’s a positive boon when a line like “That’s right, honey—I’m jailbait!” gets rendered as “Exactement, cheri. Je suis mineure.” Art Carney is wasted as Travis’ pop at home, and Ebert’s right that the movie really should have put more focus on the music (complete performances, perhaps?) but what’s there is still an enjoyable mess.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.06.2014
12:45 pm
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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge visits ‘The Pharmacy’
03.06.2014
11:08 am
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Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times…

This week cultural provocateur Genesis Breyer P-Orridge visits The Pharmacy…

—Genesis discusses William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and the “Cut-Up”

—Brian Jones’ ghost visiting Psychic TV in the studio.

—The rise and fall of Throbbing Gristle.

—Gen’s relationship with Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and the unrealized plans the two had when Curtis died.

 

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist:

Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall
Who? - The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Three Girl Rhumba - Wire
Intro 1 / Party Machine - Rx / Bruce Haack
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part One
William S. Burroughs on Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs / Sun Ra
Just Like Arcadia - Psychic TV
Collapsing New People - Fad Gadget
Totally Wired - The Fall
Intro 2 / Computer Love - Kraftwerk / Rx
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Two
Adrenalin - Throbbing Gristle
Definitive Gaze - Magazine
Sensoria - Cabaret Voltaire
Intro 3 / Neuschnee - Rx / Neu!
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Three
Interzone - Joy Division
Just Out of Reach - The Zombies
Levitation - The 13th Floor Elevators
Intro 4 / Freedom Dub - Rx / Linval Thompson + the Revolutionaries
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Four
Brian Jones on Bad Publicity - Brian Jones
Godstar - Psychic TV
2000 Light Years from home
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview Part Five
Intro 5 / Ravah - Rx / Mr.Pharmacist on Sitar
Mr.Pharmacist - The Other Half
Station ID - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

 
You can download the entire show here.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.06.2014
11:08 am
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All That Jazz: Echo and the Bunnymen tear it up, live on Spanish TV, 1984
03.06.2014
10:38 am
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This took a little digging. Echo & the Bunnymen’s appearance on the Spanish music TV program La Edad de Oro is one of the great documents of the band at its height, the 1984 tour supporting their breathtaking and majestic masterpiece Ocean Rain. However, and maddeningly, every complete copy of it I’ve found online has a horrible and persistent sound glitch starting at about the 35-minute mark. It’s really bad, like deal-breakingly so, see for yourself if you like, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
 

 
The videos in this playlist from YouTube user kigonjiro aren’t the prettiest available, but those sound problems are FAR less present. Also, it’s broken down into a playlist that eliminates the interview segment (it’s at 11:30 in the above link if you want to watch it), which can be grating to sit through if you don’t speak Spanish. Which is fine, nobody in 1984 ever expected English-speaking audiences to see this. But the playlist format neatly segments everything and cuts out the dross.

One last thing before we get to the music—one of the reasons I so adore this show is that the stage setup gives the cameras better shots of the drummer then are usually seen in live videos, and the Bunnymen’s Pete de Freitas (RIP 1989) is just on fire here. But the whole band’s performance is great too, their energy is up, and singer Ian McCulloch is spot-on throughout.

1. The Cutter
2. The Killing Moon
3. All That Jazz
4. Do It Clean
5. Villiers Terrace
6. My Kingdom
7. Silver
8. All My Colours
9. Heads Will Roll
10. Thorn Of Crowns
11. Never Stop
12. Crocodiles
13. Rescue

 

 
More Echo & The Bunnymen after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.06.2014
10:38 am
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Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto, Buzzcocks and Magazine in vintage punk doc ‘B’dum B’dum’ from 1978
03.06.2014
09:50 am
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buzzspirscra.jpg
 
Punk history on the installment plan…part one

The Buzzcocks had to be quick because they didn’t know how long they would last. That’s what Pete Shelley told Tony Wilson over tea and cigarettes in this documentary B’dum B’dum from 1978.

Made as part of Granada TV’s What’s On series, B’dum B’dum follows the tale of the band Buzzcocks from formation to first split and the creation of splinter group Howard Devoto’s Magazine.

Shelley met Devoto at Bolton Institute of Technology in 1975. Shelley responded to an ad Devoto had placed on the student notice board looking for musicians to form a band. The pair clicked and started writing songs together. Then they wanted to perform their songs, so they sought out other musicians to play them (Steve Diggle, bass, and John Maher, drums), and hey presto, Buzzcocks.
 

 
Part two…

The influence had been punk and The Sex Pistols, but Devoto found punk “very limiting” as “in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff”:

“...Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in really…

“I think that punk rock was a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness, and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with the process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands—in a world, most probably after religion.

“My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols, and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something which really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical Sixties.”

 
buzwilsheldevoson.jpg
Pete Shelley, Tony Wilson, Howard Devoto during the making of ‘B’dum B’dum’ 1978.
 
The Buzzcocks recorded and released the “massively influential” Spiral Scratch a four track EP, which contained the Shelley/Devoto songs “Breakdown,” “Time’s Up,” “Boredom,” and “Friends of Mine.”
 
Parts three to five with Shelley and Devoto, plus full Buzzcocks concert, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.06.2014
09:50 am
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The true story of why John Lennon nicknamed Eric Burdon ‘The Eggman’
03.06.2014
09:34 am
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johnmmt
 

Among the surreal imagery, Lewis Carroll references, and fanciful wordplay in The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” is the mention of the Eggman. This has long been known to refer to The Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, who was given the nickname by John Lennon. According to Bob Spitz in The Beatles: The Biography Lennon bestowed the nickname in “a reference to a 1966 orgy he attended with Eric Burdon, who earned the nickname for breaking raw eggs on girls during sex.”

However, it turns out that the commonly told tale is actually 180 degrees off. The fabled egger Burdon was actually the eggee. (There is a technical term for the raw egg paraphilia, but I can’t find it and can’t face another list of fetishes.) 

ericb
 

Burdon set the record straight in his 2002 autobiography, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, co-written with Jeff Marshall Craig:

It may have been one of my more dubious distinctions, but I was the Eggman - or, as some of my pals called me, ‘Eggs’.

The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl.

“Go on, go get it, Eggman,” Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hook-like nose as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.

John Lennon standing in for Burdon as the Eggman:

 

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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03.06.2014
09:34 am
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Bollywood Chubby Checker from 1965 delivers fantastic Hindi ‘Twist’
03.05.2014
04:13 pm
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Mehmood Ali was a quintessential Bollywood mutli-hyphenate; regarding the movie under discussion here, Bhoot Bungla (“Ghost House/Haunted House”), Mehmood (as he was credited) co-wrote the movie, produced the movie, directed the movie, starred in the movie, and, as is obligatory for a Bollywood star, performed at least one of the indelible musical numbers. One task Mehmood didn’t undertake was music supervisor, which is a good thing because the incomparable R. D. Burman had that task quite in hand.

The song is called “Aao Twist Karen,” although I’ve also seen that last word rendered as “Karein.” It sure as heckfire appears to be a cover of Chubby Checker’s 1961 smash “Let’s Twist Again.” I was going to make a joke in the headline that the Bollywood version of Chubby Checker could stand to be a good deal chubbier, but you know, the original wasn’t all that chubby! My favorite bit of this video comes when the two trumpeters aim their instruments at Mehmood’s crotch. You heard me. Go watch (You can see all of Bhoot Bungla here)
 

 
Thank you Kathryn Metz!

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.05.2014
04:13 pm
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On Missing Persons, Frank Zappa, and women in rock: Dale Bozzio speaks
03.05.2014
11:52 am
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Missing Persons were an acutely ‘80s band, made up of former Zappa sidemen who heard the siren call of the New Wave and crafted compellingly icy and anxious music. Drummer Terry and singer Dale Bozzio (a married couple), guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, and bassist Patrick O’Hearn met during the recording sessions for Zappa’s masterpiece, the epic rock opera Joe’s Garage, and were encouraged to form Missing Persons by Zappa himself. The representative early single “Mental Hopscotch” gained a ton of well-deserved attention for their debut EP. (Crate digger advisory: used vinyl copies of that can still be found fairly cheaply. I’d recommend giving it a listen. I still have mine from when I was 14, it holds up.)
 

 

 
Despite its collective musical chops, the band’s focal point was the kitschy but high-octane outer space sexuality of singer Dale Bozzio. As a former bunny at the Boston Playboy Club, Bozzio was comfortable flaunting her figure, and had a penchant for performing in things like plexiglass bikinis and bubble-wrap jackets, foreshadowing Lady Gaga’s costumery by decades. Her outlandish appearance far outpaced contemporaries like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, which made Missing Persons a darling of MTV, which in turn propelled their debut LP, Spring Session M to chart HUGENESS. The band continued past its initial burst of inspiration, though—their follow-up, Rhyme & Reason, was less musically exciting (perhaps the element of surprise had worn off), and it failed to crack the Top 40. 1986’s Color in Your Life fared even worse. Commercial failures and tension in the Bozzios’ marriage finally doomed the band. Cuccurullo went on to further success as Andy Taylor’s replacement in Duran Duran, and Terry Bozzio returned to high-profile session work.
 

 
Dale, however, has lately gone the “featuring” route, having yesterday released Missing In Action by “Missing Persons featuring Dale Bozzio.” Missing Persons is missing a lot of people—Bozzio is the only member from the original lineup to appear on the album, but casual fans are probably unlikely to care, as to most people she was the band. Her performance on the single “Hello Hello” is actually quite good. Her voice has lost a lot of flexibility (that’s not a criticism, age does that, so it goes), so all the idiosyncratic hiccuping accents she used to pull off aren’t to be heard here, but her singing has retained expressiveness and gained depth. The music, composed by latter-day Yes member Billy Sherwood, feels like it’s trying a bit too lazily to sound conspicuously early ‘80s. It would have been so much cooler if she’d hired someone like Trans Am to write the music, honestly.
 

 
Bozzio spoke illuminatingly about her life and career at last year’s Scion Music(less) Music Conference, and as it turns out, she’s a terrific storyteller, and seems like a hell of a cool lady. The whole interview is good, but for the impatient, there’s a kinda cute Hugh Hefner story in part 1, GREAT Zappa stuff in parts 2 & 3, and Missing Persons’ origin story is in part 4.
 

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.05.2014
11:52 am
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