The concept behind Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a set of 115 cards with elliptical imperatives designed to spark in the user creative connections unobtainable through regular modes of work, is now a commonplace. Every Barnes & Noble sells kits for breaking writer’s block—hell, you can even buy them in the form of playing dice with questionably useful words like “REDEEM” and “TRAP” on them. In 1974, when the original Oblique Strategies set was developed, it was a more radical intervention with roots in Eastern philosophy.

In his college years Eno was fascinated by the Fluxus movement. Oblique Strategies was almost certainly inspired by George Brecht’s 1962 Fluxus work “Drip Music”:
 

George Brecht produced this thing called “Watermelon” or “Yam Box” or something like that. It was a big box of cards of all different sizes and shapes, and each cards had instructions for a piece on …  All of the cards had cryptic things on them, like one said, “Egg event—at least one egg.” Another said, “Two chairs. One umbrella. One chair.” They were all like that, but the drip event one said, “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into them.” That was the score, you see. I did a simple one which won an award.

 
Meanwhile, Peter Schmidt, a German composer and painter, had recently finished a project involving 64 paintings inspired by the I Ching.
 

Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno, London, ca. 1977
 

The cards had instructions like, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” and “Remember those quiet evenings.” Here are some (not all) of the original cards. Both the cursive and the block print are Eno’s handwriting.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Sets of the cards have been available since the 1970s. The first four editions are out of print and collector’s items (and priced to match). The 5th edition is currently available from Eno’s website for £30 (about $50). In 2013 a limited 6th edition of 500 numbered sets were available but quickly sold out.

The following account comes from Brian Eno: Visual Music by Christopher Scoates:
 

Unlike the Fluxus scores that Eno had used years earlier, which were essentially directives for performance, the Oblique Strategies cards were idea-generating tools and tactics designed to break routine thinking patterns. While born of a studio context, Oblique Strategies translated equally well to the music studio. For Eno, the instructions provided an antidote in high-pressure situations in which impulse might lead one to default quickly to a proven solution rather than continue to explore untested possibilities: “Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

In fact, while producing David Bowie’s album Heroes (1977), Eno and Bowie used Oblique Strategies on the song “Sense of Doubt.” They each picked a card but didn’t reveal its content. “It was like a game,” Eno recalled. “We took turns working on it; he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next. . . . As it turned out they were entirely opposed to one another. Effeciively mine said, ‘Try to make everything as similar as possible,’ and his said ‘Emphasize differences.’”

 
1977 “Sense of Doubt” video directed by Stanley Dorfman and reworked by Peter Wachsman:
 

Brian Eno discusses the Oblique Strategies cards with Jarvis Cocker in a 2010 BBC Radio 6 interview:
 

 
via William Caxton Fan Club (i.e. John Darnielle’s Tumblr)

 
From the first moment I heard Pere Ubu’s “30 Seconds Over Tokyo/Heart of Darkness” single in the mid-70s I was hooked. Their debut long-player The Modern Dance confirmed their place in my head as one of the most exciting and unpredictably weird bands on the planet. I wasn’t certain as to what I was listening to I just knew it went places that few rock bands at the time had the balls to go. In the wildness of their sound there were indelible hooks that made the complexity and delirium still quite accessible to someone, like myself, who had little patience for something that people might term “art-rock.” And front-man David Thomas was a mountain of manic energy that seemed to on the verge of blowing its lid like a meat volcano.

Pere Ubu took its name from “Ubu Roi,” the mad king protagonist created by the French absurdist playwright, novelist and poet Alfred Jarry and, like Jarry, the band deranges our senses in order to force us to see things anew or destroys and re-arrange them in bizarre new sonic shapes. The end result is that the listener is thrown off-kilter and one’s attention is heightened in order to regain some sense of balance. The music cannot be ignored. It engages and brings you into the moment.

In the mid-90s Thomas formed David Thomas and two pale boys (Keith Moliné and Andy Diagram), a self-described “avant-garde traditional folk music from the future performed with post-dance technology” trio that continues Thomas’s exploration of the outer edges of music. Their doctrine is a riff on the Zen teaching that the best way to control your horse is to give it an open field.

Self-expression is evil. The 2pbs engage in “spontaneous song generation.” Everybody knows what a song is. It’s no great mystery. The freedom of jazz in its heyday was based on the strictness of the blues structure. Rules provide freedom. After a verse comes a chorus. Everybody knows what a chorus has to accomplish. It can, therefore, be invented, on the spot, with confidence. Countless nanoseconds exist—more than enough time—for musicians to organize themselves so as to deliver the Good Stuff (structure, focus & dynamics… poetry, vision & passion), and avoid the Bad Stuff (tedium, indulgence & predictability). Our rule: a song must have 3 things. You got 3 things you got a song.

Back in the day when MTV actually offered its viewers the occasional cool musical experience, Thomas and his pale pals performed on a 1997 episode of Alternative Nation and it was mindblowingly good.
 

 
Pure pleasure to be found in this B&W multi-camera recording of Blondie in 1979, just prior to the release of their fourth album, Eat to the Beat.

Set list
Dreaming
One Way Or Another
Hanging On The Telephone
Look Good In Blue
Youth Nabbed As Sniper
Pretty Baby
Slow Motion
Sunday Girl
In The Flesh
Man Overboard
Heart Of Glass
11:59
Rip Her to Shreds
In The Sun
X Offender
I’m On E
Kung Fu Girls

The show was taped at the Asbury Park Convention Hall on July 7th, a home-state crowd for Jersey girl Debbie Harry, who was raised in Hawthorne. Check out her “Lolita” heart-shaped sunglasses.
 

 
There’s always a first time for everything and this is the very first time that The Rolling Stones unveiled their then brand new “Sympathy for the Devil,” on London Weekend Television’s Frost on Saturday program, hosted by the late David Frost, in 1968

Although this is but a live vocal sung to a backing tape, the Stones manage to set a distinctly evil tone to the proceedings. Put yourself in mind of the average person watching British television on a Saturday night in 1968. This must have seemed downright frightening!
 

 
Mr. Bungle were a ‘90s avant-garde rock band that carved out a bizarre niche somewhere between Naked City and Frank Zappa with their second LP, Disco Volante, a wild, unpredictably genre-jumping headfuck. Because their debut LP was, though definitely weird and twisty, still more of an identifiably funk-metal record, the band held a large appeal to proggy dude-bro music fans whose thirst for eccentricity outpaced what Primus were prepared to offer. If that’s the reputation by which you know the band, and that turns you off, I get it, but I’d encourage giving Disco Volante a fair hearing.

The band were able to pull off such aggressively uncommercial music on Warner Bros. Records partly because the early ‘90s were such an indulgent, lucrative period for the industry, but also because of the band’s singer. Mike Patton had achieved a measure of clout in his other job as the frontman for Faith No More whose The Real Thing album and its single “Epic” had become hits. But though Mr. Bungle’s debut came after Faith No More’s success, Bungle was Patton’s first band, formed in 1985 when its members were still in high school.

Their high school talent show has turned up on YouTube. They go here by the name “Bister Mungle,” because, well, high school boys are just that hilarious.
 

 
Amazing how many elements of the band’s later notoriety are already in place here, especially the unabashed zaniness and the genre-hopping.

Remarkably, members of this goofy kid band would go on to play in a huge number of bizarro rock and avante-garde outfits. Apart from Faith No More, the versatile Patton has been a member of the experimental metal band Fantomas, founded Ipecac Records, and collaborated with artists as diverse as John Zorn and Dillinger Escape Plan. Indeed, the man’s discography is too prohibitively long to go into here. Bassist Trevor Dunn is also all over the place, having played in Fantomas, Tomahawk, his own Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and even The Melvins. And Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance has long helmed a heavy-friends side project called Secret Chiefs 3.

The band’s name came from “Lunchroom Manners,” a short educational film that found a measure of cult status when Pee-wee Herman screened it during a performance that was taped for an HBO special. Here it is…
 

 
It’s a 1974 TV commercial for David Live and it’s pretty goofy. It’s but 30 seconds long, so there’s not a lot more to say about it other than it’s pretty goofy.
 

 
Okay then…

Here’s a better one from earlier that same year, for Diamond Dogs. The sultry voice-over here is by Cherry Vanilla, Bowie’s then publicist at his MainMan Ltd. management company. She probably produced it, too, as she came from a Mad Men-era Madison Avenue advertising background before Andy Warhol beckoned.
 

 
The great Civil Rights-era “High Priestess of Soul,” Nina Simone was born on this day in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. Simone was one of the 20th century’s greatest—and most controversial—musicians, calling for armed and violent revolution by Black people so that African Americans could form a separate state. She was made to feel quite unwelcome in Nixon’s America and disappointed by the revolutionary and political movements she had been associated with, became a citizen of the world. “America had betrayed me, betrayed my people and stamped on our hopes,” she told interviewers. “No way am I ever going to go back there and live. You get racism crossing the street, it’s in the very fabric of American society.”

When Simone did finally return to the US, in 1985, she was immediately arrested for tax evasion (she had refused to pay taxes as a protest against the war in Vietnam). She died at her home in France in 2003.

In this utterly extraordinary footage of Nina Simone performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 (“the Black Woodstock), she does her powerful song “Revolution,” of which John Lennon said in 1971:

“I thought it was interesting that Nina Simone did a sort of answer to “Revolution.” That was very good — it was sort of like “Revolution,” but not quite. That I sort of enjoyed, somebody who reacted immediately to what I had said.”

I think her idea of what sort of revolution was called for and his were quite a bit different. He was in the bag, so to speak, for peace. Simone wasn’t.

And now we got a revolution
Cause I see the face of things to come
Yeah, your Constitution
Well, my friend, it’s gonna have to bend
I’m here to tell you about destruction
Of all the evil that will have to end

[...]

Singin’ about a revolution
Because were talkin’ about a change
It’s more than just evolution
Well you know you got to clean your brain
The only way that we can stand in fact
Is when you get your foot off our back

If you want to see all of the jaw-dropping footage of Nina Simone at the Harlem Cultural Festival, they’ve pieced together her entire set over at Arthur.
 

 
Plastics were a short-lived, but highly influential, Japanese New Wave band that recorded between 1979 and 1981. Their sound was similar to The B-52s, but if you grafted a little of The Sugarcubes on for good measure. They often sang in English and did a killer cover of “Last Train to Clarksville.” Talking Head David Byrne was responsible for getting their demo tape to the manager of The B-52s.

They released two American records on Island and both are absolutely delightful (and easy to find cheap on vinyl).
 

“Good”
 

“Diamond Head”
 
More Plastics after the jump…
 

 
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…

Gregg writes:

If you do not know who John Cooper Clarke is you probably should…

Some call him a “performance poet,” others a “punk poet.” Clarke was often found reciting his rapidfire verse in unlikely places, whether it was in the burlesque bars of 1970s Manchester or opening for the likes of Joy Division, The Fall, The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and New Order. The man made quite an impression on audiences with his trademarked spiky black hairdo black suits and Ray Ban Wayfarers, resembling a mid 60s Bob Dylan or Keith Richards at his decadent “elegantly wasted” best/worst.

But by the early 1980s, Clarke’s radio went silent. With his vagabond friends—Beat poet Gregory Corso and Nico (who Clarke roomed with during this period)—Clarke traversed the dark Manchester underworld of drug addiction. Ultimately John Cooper Clarke came out on the other side of this darkness, revived, renewed and more prolific than ever… Now come listen in on my phone conversation interview with the Punk Poet Laureate and “Bard of Salford,” John Cooper Clarke here in the Rx…

 
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
Miss Judy’s Farm - The Faces
Alright - The Groop
Intro 1 / I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore - Rx / The Young Rascals
John Cooper Clarke Interview Part One
Qui est in , Qui est out - Serge Gainsbourg
I Wanna Destroy You - The Soft Boys
Get In The Groove - the Mighty Hannibal
Sha la la la Lee - The Small Faces
Honey Hush - Jonny Burnette + the Rock n Roll Trio
Intro 2 / Blow Up - Rx / The James Taylor Quartet
John Cooper Clarke Interview Part Two
Evidently Chickentown - John Cooper Clarke
Dead Moon Night - Dead Moon
Digital - Joy Division
Summer Wine - Lee and Nancy
Intro 3 / Restless - Rx / the Cobras
John Cooper Clarke Interview Part Three
Femme Fatale - The Velvet Underground and Nico
Pair of Brown Eyes - The Pogues
Baby I Love You - The Ronettes
Intro 4 / There is No Satisfaction - Rx / Manfred Hubler & Siegfried Schwab
Outro

 
You can download the entire show here.

Below, Ten Years in an Open Neck Shirt, a documentary about John Cooper Clark:

 
In 1967, apparently imitating Remco’s successful Beatles dolls of 1964, Hasbro introduced a cute-as-the-dickens line of “Show Biz Babies,” featuring several popular musical acts of the moment, including The Monkees, The Mamas and the Papas, Herman’s Hermits, and the Spencer Davis Group.

The packaging of these adorable dolls is a delight, as you can see here. Every doll came with a “groovy 33 1/3 record” that “tells all about” the personality whose doll was inside the package. Even better, every doll “bends into swinging poses,” which is an album title waiting to happen. In addition, wasting no square inch, the back featured an “autographed photo” like this one:
 

 
There were 12 dolls in all: all four Monkees, all four members of the Mamas and the Papas, and an additional ad-hoc quartet made up of Bobbie Gentry, Spencer Davis, Mitch Ryder, and Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits. On eBay, the dolls routinely fetch about $100, with the Nesmith model reaching as high as $250 on at least one occasion.
 

 

 

 

 

 
More dolls plus two of those “groovy 33 1/3 records” after the jump…..