In June 2004, Dave Davies suffered a stroke as he was exiting a lift, in BBC’s Broadcasting House.

Suddenly the right hand side of my body seized up and I couldn’t move my arm or leg. Although I didn’t lose consciousness, I couldn’t speak. Luckily my son Christian and my publicist were there, so they carried me outside and called an ambulance.

Though he had warnings signs - waking up one morning to find he couldn’t move his right hand or speak when he opened his mouth - and was examined by a doctor, nothing indicated the imminence of his stroke. As Dave later wrote in the Daily Mail in 2006:

I was told I’d had a stroke - or, in medical terms, a cerebral infraction. An ‘infarct’ is an area of dead tissue and there was a patch of it on the left side of my brain - the bit that controls movement on the right side.

The doctors told me I had high blood pressure and that this was what had caused the stroke. They thought I’d probably had high blood pressure for at least ten years….

...Two weeks after my stroke, I finally plucked the courage to pick up my guitar. I held it across my lap, pressing on the strings. I could feel everything but the hand itself was virtually immobile.

I knew I was going to have to work very hard if I was to get better, and I started using meditation and visualisation. I thought if I could visualise myself running, walking and playing the guitar, it might prompt my brain to remember how I used to be.

It took Dave 18 months of physio, determination and hard work, to get “about 85 per cent back to normal”.

I believe my stroke was meant to happen to slow me down. I’d like to write and male films and start a foundation where I can help people be more spiritual…

...For now I appreciate my slower pace of life. I feel I have discovered an inner strength which I know will see me through any adversity.

Made in 2011, Julien Temple’s pastoral documentary Kinkdom Come is a touching portrait of the other half of The Kinks, Dave Davies.

Opening with Davies in the wilds of Exmoor, where he revels in the desolation and the quiet, Temple’s film moves through Dave’s life story, examining key moments in his childhood, his career as guitarist with The Kinks, his openness about sexuality, his (some would say torturous) relationship with his brother Ray, and the damagingly high cost of that all of his fame, success and position as “iconic Sixties figure” has cost him.

Throughout, Dave comes across as an honest, gentle soul, slightly lost, beautifully innocent, almost ethereal, as if he is a visitor from some other galaxy.
 

 
Originally named The Debutones, England’s The Liverbirds (aka The Liver Birds) moved from Liverpool to Hamburg, Germany in 1963 where they became a popular band on the Star-Club circuit. Although they never became big stars their contribution to rock and roll is historically significant in that they were the first serious all-girl rock band to play their own instruments and do it on the same turf as male rock n’ rollers.

“Girls with guitars? That’ll never work”. John Lennon.

Well, it did work for The Liverbirds who managed to record two albums, achieve a Top 10 hit in Germany with their single, “Diddley Daddy,” and last four years before splitting up in 1967.

Pamela Birch - guitar/vocals, Valerie Gell - guitar/vocals, Mary McGlory - bass guitar/vocals, Sylvia Saunders - drums.
 

 
Dirty Duck (aka Down And Dirty Duck) released in 1974 was a low-budget attempt to cash-in on the success of Fritz The Cat that manages to stake out its own turf in the X-rated cartoons featuring anthropomorphic animals genre. Directed by Charles Swenson and featuring the voices and music of Flo and Eddie, as well as Aynsley Dunbar, Don Preston and other members of The Mothers Of Invention, Dirty Duck is to Daffy what Charles Bukowski is to Ogden Nash.

From The Deuce:

Willard Eisenbaum (Voiced by Howard Kaylan) is a day-dreaming insurance worker who thinks he’s about to have the day of this life when he expresses his love to a fellow worker. When Willard’s intentions fail to materialize, he’s told by his boss to investigate an insurance claim from the elderly Martha (Lurene Tuttle). When Martha suddenly kicks the bucket during Willard’s visit, her will says that the one who causes her death (Confirmed by a Ouija board) will have to overlook her duck…Make that a grown, talking Duck! (Voiced by Mark Volman) Within seconds, both Willard and The Duck are hitting the streets, brothels, and tons of indescribable locations to get laid. By the time the film ends (Which is rather quickly) Willard will appear to be in love…But with whom? Or What?”

Within the raunchy confines of Dirty Duck’s universe lurks many pop culture references, including several that conjure up the spirit of Frank Zappa.

There are a few Zappa references peppered throughout the movie. For one, the duck is roughly the same character that Jeff Simmons morphed into in 200 Motels. At one point the main character and the duck are lost in the desert, and the duck is explaining how he came to be a duck. He says he used to be a TURTLE, but that wasn’t too happening, so he got some advice from his MOTHER and he just sort of FLO’d from there. If by any chance these references are too subtle for the more chemically aided members of the audience, at this point a cartoon version of Frank Zappa’s grimacing visage is looming over the entire scene, having just risen like the sun over the horizon. Hereupon Willard says: “Oh, Eddie, you have GOT to be kidding”, in reference to Zappa’s song Eddie Are You Kidding?.  Later, 200 Motels is specifically namedropped. It’s almost as if this movie is a sequel to 200 Motels, sans Zappa involvement.” P. Neve

“You can’t do this to me! I was at Woodstock in ‘69. I saw “200 Motels”! I know who I am!” Dirty Duck.

Its not surprising that Dirty Duck evokes 200 Motels. Both films were produced by Murakami-Wolf Productions, who also produced the Harry Nilsson flick The Point.

Dirty Duck is a foul fowl so be prepared for some freaky, offensive and politically incorrect humor. This is one fucked-up duck. 
 

 
Vice editor Rocco Castoro interviewed the 85-year-old Magus of American cinema, Kenneth Anger at the ritzy Cicada restaurant in downtown Los Angeles:

VICE: Looking back at the films of the silent era, the way they were shot and cut make it seem like everyone was snorting massive lines right up until the director yelled, “Action!”

I find film style reflects it, particularly the Mack Sennett [the director largely responsible for the popularity of slapstick] comedies. And my research proves that they were taking cocaine. You can see a sort of hyper-influence there.

VICE: There are lots of tales that make reference to “joy powder” in Hollywood Babylon, which makes it seem as innocent as taking one of those 5-hour Energy shots. Another phrase you use in the book, in the first few pages, is the “Purple Epoch.” What is that? It sounds nice.

That was when there were very talented people who also had extravagant tastes and money. It was the 1920s, a reflection of the Jazz Age. And the Hollywood version of that was pretty wild.

VICE: Another topic you cover early on in the book is the circumstances surrounding the death of Olive Thomas, which is perhaps the first instance of “Hollywood scandal” as we know it. You write, and it’s long been rumored, that she was very fond of cocaine, which was apparently a fatal flaw when combined with alcohol and ingesting her husband Jack Pickford’s topical syphilis medication.

She was one of the earliest beautiful stars to die in grim circumstances. And so her name became associated with lurid [behavior]. Things going on in Hollywood.

VICE: Her death also seemed to pull the wool from everyone’s eyes. Olive Thomas’s image was so sweet and pure. It caused Hollywood’s reputation to snowball into something far darker than how it was previously perceived. People must have thought, “If Olive’s doing it, everyone else must be too.”

There were other ones too, like Mary Miles Minter [who was accused of murdering her lover, director William Desmond Taylor, at the height of her success]. She was a kind of version of Mary Pickford [Jack Pickford’s sister], but the great stars like Pickford were never touched. These scandals swirled around, but there were certain stars that weren’t implicated in any way by this sort of thing.

 
Here’s a lovely b&w mega-photo post of Kate Bush as a charming and spunky young lady. It’s pretty evident that she was a fairly fully-formed version, even then, of who the world would come to know.

I simply adore every photo posted. What a face!

Photos are by Kate’s eldest brother, photographer and author John Carder Bush.

 

 
More of a young Kate Bush after the jump…
 

 
Shit, another legend bites the dust.

On the surface Dick Clark looked about as hip as Dick Nixon and as a kid I thought Clark was somewhat dubious as a purveyor of youth culture, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate his massive contribution to rock history, particularly when he went out on the limb and booked edgy acts on American bandstand, including Pink Floyd Public Image, Captain Beefheart, Bubble Puppy, Love, and X.

Here’s something I’d never seen before and I think it demonstrates just how on top of the rock scene Clark could be. Pink Floyd on American Bandstand
 

 
The anniversary of Dick Shawn’s death was yesterday (April 17) and I had intended to share this then, but there’s been so many posts about people dying here on Dangerous Minds that I held off. But fuck it, I love this video too much to sit on it. And any mention of Shawn is better than none at all, even if it is in the context of his dying. And Shawn’s dying, sad as it was, was also totally surreal - much like the man himself.

From Wikipedia:

In a stand-up routine in San Diego in April 1987 he was portraying a politician, saying “if elected, I will not lay down on the job.” Then he fell face-down onto the stage. The audience thought it was part of the act and laughed, but after a few moments of silence, someone came onstage, checked him out, and called into the audience for a doctor. Shawn had suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead.

Even as he was receiving CPR on stage, the audience was not sure whether it was part of the act or not, but they began to leave after paramedics arrived. Most of them were unaware that he had died until they read the notices in the morning’s paper.

Here’s Shawn as the tripped-out beatnik Lorenzo St. DuBois in the movie The Producers. The song “Love Power” is kinda punk, ain’t it?

And I give a flower to the big fat cop,
he takes his club and he beats me up.
I give a flower to the garbage man,
he stuffs my girl in the garbage can.
And I give it to the landlord, when the rent comes ‘round.
He throws it in the toilet and he flush it down.
It goes into the sewer with the yuck running through her,
And it runs into the river that we drink.
Hey world, you stink!

Shawn was a “hipster” before the term became a dirty word.
 

 
While no one will mistake this for a historic meeting of the minds, it does have its odd charm. The Marshall McLuhan of punk Billy Idol chats with Timothy Leary about rock n’ roll, cyberspace and computers. “Pretty deep,” Joey Ramone observes while Television (the band) let old skool technologies like drums and guitars do the talking.

ABC In Concert, 1993.
 

A young Ice-T by Glen E. Friedman

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap, Ice-T’s upcoming big budget performance documentary about the legends of rap has been generating a huge buzz since its Sundance premiere.

Dangerous Minds pal Glen. E. Friedman says:

“This is going to be the biggest documentary of all time! I saw it, I know!”

Something from Nothing: features Chuck D, Dana Dane, Ice Cube,Kanye West,  Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, KRS-One, Afrika Bambaataa, Common, Anthony ‘Treach’ Criss, Doug E. Fresh, Rakim, Joseph Simmons, Cheryl ‘Salt’ James, Big Daddy Kane,  MC Lyte, Marley Marl,  Kool Keith, Darryl McDaniels, Melle Mel, Nas, Q-Tip and many others.

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap is in theaters on June 15th.
 

The Mojos
 
Confessions of an unrepentant garage rocker:

I was living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The year was 1964. I was thirteen. Beatlemania was running wild and millions of kids across the USA were buying cheap Japanese electric guitars, drum kits, and forming garage bands. My dad bought me a set of Kent drums at Sears and I formed a group called the Continentals. We covered tunes by The Beatles and The Stones, of course, and had a set list that included “Louie Louie,” “I Got My Mojo Workin”, “Shout,” “Hang On Sloopy” - a couple dozen three and four chord rockers. We played at local firehouse dances, supermarket openings and, along with groups like The Mojos and The Ascotts, the Princess movie theater’s Saturday morning kiddie show.  We actually performed songs live as opposed to lip-syncing to some Four Seasons or Jan and Dean tune. We were the real fucking deal.

I had a moptop and it got me into trouble at school, where the rule was no hair over the ears and bangs had to be the width of two fingers above your eyebrows. I broke the rules on a consistent basis. A pattern I would follow my entire life. One day I was sent home for wearing madras pants to school. Those were some fucking slick slacks. But, when all the other kids were wearing Gant shirts and Weejun loafers, my madras pants were an affront to the refined sensibilities of the pre-yuppie status quo of the early 60s. In those days, high school had a caste system composed of longhairs, straights, jocks and greasers. I was a longhair. And greasers hated the longhairs. But I dug the greasers. Cause they were rockers. We were fellow parishioners in the church of rock and roll. It took a woman to help me discover this. Her name was, and I’m not bullshitting, Rhonda.

The Continentals were working the crowd before a screening of a cartoon marathon at the Princess. We were tearing through “Eight Days A Week”, “Not Fade Away” and “Gloria,” working up a sweat under our matching lime-green Nehru jackets, as the audience of pubescent teenyboppers bobbed their heads and swayed in mystical union with the almighty power of rock and roll. I felt like Elmer Gantry with drum sticks. We finished our set, took our bows, and walked off the stage.

As I made my way up the isle to the concession stand, there she was: Rhonda, a greaser goddess from the planet Maybelline. She had a jet-black beehive that defied gravity. Marie Antoinette had nothin’ on this home girl. Rhonda’s do was sculptural: a follicle wonderland where Antonio Gaudi and The Ronnettes sniffed hairspray and dreamed of Mayan pyramids. Rhonda had the fairest skin, the pinkest lips and the palest blue eyes I had ever seen. She was graceful and tall and moved with a slow serpentine stroll. She was way out of my league. This was woman in all her archetypal majesty – Shakti with a serious wighat. To my amazement, she was smitten by me. She said she liked the way I played the drums and she leaned over and gave me a kiss that tasted of lipstick and cigarettes. My knees buckled and I felt for the first time that rock and roll was more than music, it was supernatural.
 

The Princess theater is now a church. But in its own way, it always was.
 
This 1967 film footage of a Battle Of The Bands at Pierre Van Cortlandt Junior High School Gym in New York captures that tectonic time when thousands of suburban garages all across America shook, rattled and rolled.
 

 
Thanks to Rick Watson