1970 Pink Floyd performance for San Francisco public TV Station KQED.
 

 
From the heart.

 
Tomorrow night in Echo Parque with the incomparable John “Drumbo” French (pictured above in 1968) ! :

ECHO PARK FILM CENTER is proud to host MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) with JOHN “DRUMBO” FRENCH on SAT, Oct 9 at 1200 N Alvarado St. (at Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026, 213-484-8846, $5 admission

7pm - CROW’S MILK - Rare MAGIC BAND documentary film (2003, 50 minutes)
8pm - Interview of JOHN FRENCH by Gerry Fialka.
10pmish - Book signing and more film of MAGIC BAND live in concert (London 2003, 80m)

The public is invited to this engaging Gerry Fialka interview of JOHN FRENCH, who will address the metaphysics of his callings and the nitty-gritty of his craft. He revolutionized drumming with Captain Beefheart and recently authored the book entitled Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic.

FILM INFO: Nearly twenty classic Beefheart compositions are rejuvenated on stage by five of the finest musicians who ever performed in The Magic Band. The playlist ranges from storming versions of such crowd-pleasers as ‘Moonlight On Vermont’ and ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ to the intricate guitar work of ‘Evening Bell and the melodic ‘Alice In Blunderland’.
Especially interesting are the instrumental versions of songs such as ‘I Wanna Find A Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go’, ‘My Human Gets Me Blues’ and ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow’. Without Don’s voice, for Don is no longer performing, these compositions can be clearly heard as the mind and finger bending riddles they are.
The vocal parts in this Magic Band are taken by John French who comments “Don had a great lung capacity - he had a 50 inch chest. I have to breathe a lot harder and low frequencies take a lot more energy to push. I did a lot of training and exercise to get the most I could out of this puny 42 inch chest.”
This film of the London Shepherds Bush Empire concert in April 2003 (80 minutes) was directed by Elaine Shepherd who was also director of the BBC documentary ‘The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart’.
A second DVD ‘Crows Milk’ (originally titled ‘Like Bluegrass, Only Weirder’) is included in the package. This is a 50 minute documentary which follows The Magic Band rehearsals in California in February 2003, recording of the CD ‘Back To The Front’, the feelings of the band members about the project, rehearsals in London for the two 2003 UK concerts, plus concert and backstage footage from Camber Sands and Shepherds Bush. John Peel provides the narration.
There is also a short amount of recently found 8mm footage from John French’s home movie collection which shows Don sitting on a sofa and sketching and Don viewing a car in a garage while wearing a neck-brace and a ‘coolie’ hat. He had apparently had just had a crash in his other car which was a wreck. This material dates from the early to mid 1970s

 
Thx Cliff Martinez !

 
Over at The Quietus blog, they’ve got a fun feature where they ask musical luminaries like Nick Cave, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Mike Patton and Ennio Morricone what their favorite Miles Davis album is. Unsurprisingly, asking these iconoclastic fellas, the majority of the nods go to Miles’ incredibly far out 70s album (from Bitches Brew to Dark Magus basically), the ones that most jazz fans, and even staunch Miles Davis fans used to absolutely hate, but that have been reconsidered critically in recent years as the public caught up to them

For me, I started to get into this “difficult” spot of the Miles Davis catalog about ten-twelve years ago. I already owned Bitches Brew and Get Up with It (which features a incredible sidelong elegy to Duke Ellington, (“He Loved Him Madly”) improvised in the studio after Miles heard Ellington had died and cited by Brian Eno as the beginnings of ambient music) but it was A) getting a really good stereo system in 2002 and B) reading this amazing rant by Julian Cope about this period of Miles’ output that saw me really investigate the “horrible” racket Miles was making then. Wanting new music to listen to on my new toy, I bought Dark Magus, Pangaea and Aghartha in the space of three consecutive days. Once I started, I fell into a musical rabbit hole that I didn’t get out of for about a year or two later. I was not a very popular guy with the neighbors back then, I don’t think.

Not that I am saying anything here that hasn’t been expressed already in quarters like The Wire magazine, but if you ask me, the material that Miles Davis produced between 1970 and 1975 (when ill health and drug dependency forced him to retire for several years) is the absolute apex of his vast recorded output. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, Milestones, and many other earlier Miles Davis albums, but the ones I play loudest, most often and that I pay the most attention to, are the coke-out live albums, Dark Magus, Aghartha, Pangaea. These albums are… fucking unique and that’s putting it mildly. There is nothing else to compare them to, even remotely, in the history of modern music (Maybe Can meets Fela Kuti?)

With up to three electric guitarists (Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey and Dominique Gaumont), Miles on organ and electrified trumpet (run through a wah-wah pedal) and a rhythm section consisting of the insane, propulsive drumming of Al Foster, Mtume on percussion and the most amazing Michael Henderson on bass holding the whole thing together, holy shit, these performances are AGGRESSIVE. Julian Cope wrote about notion of continental plates shifting to get across the power of the Pangaea set (recorded live in Osaka, Japan in 1975 on the evening of the day that Aghartha was recorded) and I’d say that’s about right. Every instrument which isn’t soloing is placed in service of THE GROOVE—even the guitars can be seen as adding a percussive element to the overall wall of noise-funk effect. At the proper volume, it can plow you down like a Mack truck. Interestingly, from the midst of this dank, swirling sonic maelstrom, every time one of the musicians steps forward for a solo, it reminds me of the odd noises and “squiggly” sounds that seem to come out of nowhere in certain Stockhausen or Xenakis compositions, cutting through the soupy din (At one point on Dark Magus, a drum machine is pulled out and used like a machine gun).

This 1973 clip is a pretty scorching example of what Miles and his band was doing live at the time. It MUST be turned up loud for the proper effect:
 

 
Bjork-esque, Camille Dalmais, at one time the “guest vocalist” of French “new wavers” Nouvelle Vague, performed on that band’s innovative bossa nova-styled cover of the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” The song was used for the soundtrack of 2007’s Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez.

Here Camille, who incorporates burping and animal noises into her singing, performs the song live in Paris in 2008, taking it even further, with an acapella approach.
 

 
Why France loves Camille Dalmais (Times of London)

 
“Soul Dracula” by Hotblood, from 1977, offers a eurodisco take on the king of Vampires. I guess that… um, people were a little bit easier to entertain back then, eh?
 

 
Via PCL Linkdump

John Lennon has been dead for 30 years, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still on the case. On Wednesday morning a small pop-culture memorabilia shop in Midtown opened an 836-lot auction timed to what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday, which is Saturday. The prized item was a set of Lennon’s fingerprints made in 1976 as part of his application for citizenship. Minimum bid: $100,000. But after an hourlong standoff involving cellphone calls, faxes and meetings with an agent in a parked car outside the East 57th Street storefront, the F.B.I. served the shop — called Gotta Have It! — with a subpoena and seized the fingerprint card, which was made at a New York police station on May 8, 1976, and bears a signature and the name John Winston Ono Lennon.

Read the full article on the New York Times website here.

Thanks Joshua JKanizzle Cunningham

I want to hold your gland.
 
If Lennon hadn’t chosen music as his profession, he could have had a career as a comic actor. Here he is being a brilliant wiseass on Ready, Steady, Go.
 

 
Stale Metzger is the worst, isn’t it?

(How did I miss this one when I was picking covers from the Waxidermy gallery yesterday? Thank you Mark for pointing this out in the comments)

 
The most exciting fuckers on the planet right now. Upping the ante. Zeftastic!