In Kill Your Idols director Scott Crary attempts to find some connection between No Wave bands of the late 1970s like Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Suicide and Swans with contemporary post-punkers Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars and others. The link is too tenuous to stand up to close scrutiny, but the movie is fascinating none-the-less for its exciting archival footage and compelling interviews with New York City’s avant-garde old guard. Listening to Lydia Lunch’s bilious rant about rock and roll’s new breed of hipster bands as a “pandering bunch of mama’s boys” who are “desperate to have their music used in the next car commercial” is a hoot. As are similarly contemptuous critques from Lee Ranaldo and Arto Lindsey.

Contrasting the newer bands with their older influences hits a resonant chord when DNA’s Lindsey describes the 1970’s NYC scene as an era when “we didn’t have a whole industry selling us back to ourselves.” This is the significant difference between creating and re-creating. In their self-consciousness, the new bands lack the vision, fearlessness and recklessness that no-wave’s pioneers brought to the mix every time they stepped on stage. It is impossible to replicate the “shock of the new.” Nothing seems dangerous anymore because everything has been radiated in the pasteurizing glow of our retro-obsessed culture. Rock and roll is disappearing up its own asshole. It wasn’t always this way. With every note, No Wave hit the self-destruct button. Gone. This doesn’t mean that the new groups aren’t good - I love Yeah Yeah Yeahs - but trying to find the link between them and the original no wavers is like trying to find fingerprints on water.

Update: The numbnut who uploaded Kill Your Idols pulled the movie from their Youtube channel. If you have a Netflix account, it is available to stream here.
 

 
British media is reporting that Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees is in a coma in a London hospital.

From the Coventry Telegraph:

BEE Gees star Robin Gibb is fighting for his life after contracting pneumonia in his battle against cancer. The 62-year-old singer’s family have been keeping vigil at his bedside at a hospital in Chelsea, west London.

Robin had surgery on his bowel 18 months ago for an unrelated condition, but a tumour was discovered and he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and, subsequently, of the liver.

It had been thought his cancer was in remission as early as last month, but the latest deterioration in his health coincides with reports of a secondary tumour.”

In this live footage shot in 1974 in Australia, Robin’s angelic voice is in full flower.
 

 
Five years ago today Don Ho ascended in a spiraling cloud of tiny bubbles to the great luau in the sky.

Here’s the master of mellowness covering Peter Gabriel’s “Shock The Monkey” from the album When Pigs Fly and The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” on The Conan O’Brian Show in 1995.
 

 
My favorite Don Ho tune after the jump…

 
John Candy as Gil Fisher, the fishin’ musician, is paid a visit by The Plasmatics in this wonderful bit from SCTV circa 1981.

This predated John Lurie’s Fishing with John TV series by 10 years. Goes to show you just how ahead of their time the crew at SCTV were.

Watch as Wendy O. Williams blows up things real good.
 

 
Hippies meet electro-house in this re-mix of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way.”

This song has been re-mixed to death since its release in 1993 but I dug this 2012 version by dj Mick M. from Bangkok, Thailand enough to put together a video of archival hippie footage from the Sixties using the mix as a soundtrack.

If there’s anything beyond sonic/visual pleasure to be had from this mash-up it’s the knowledge that no matter how much things change a good rock riff is immortal and raves existed way before ecstasy hit the scene.

In “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” Kravitz does a pretty good job of recycling Hendrix so coupling the song with a bunch of dancing hippies works for me. And Mick’s re-mix takes the whole thing into a pop culture meta-sphere where we are in a constant spin cycle. 
 

 
Skateboarding the mean streets of Manhattan in the 1980s - the concrete Banzai Pipeline.

Along with the Bones Brigade, that’s Christian Hosoi in there with the green hair, along with Dave Hackett (acid-dropping off a semi truck), Ian Frahm (ollieing up onto the wall at the Brooklyn Bridge banks - big trick at the time) and some other NYC locals.

Some great shots of NYC as these urban skafarists ride the wild turf.
 

 
Tadanori Yokoo is one of the world’s foremost graphic designers, considered to be in the same league as Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. He is also often compared to Andy Warhol and Peter Max.

Yukio Mishima said of him in 1968:

“Tadanori Yokoo’s works reveal all of the unbearable things which we Japanese have inside ourselves and they make people angry and frightened. He makes explosions with the frightening resemblance which lies between the vulgarity of billboards advertising variety shows during festivals at the shrine devoted to the war dead and the red containers of Coca Cola in American Pop Art, things which are in us but which we do not want to see.”

 

 
In the sixties, Yokoo made some amazing animated pop psychedelic shorts (with insane soundtracks), here’s “Kachi Kachi Yama” from 1965:
 

 
After the jump, two more great animated shorts by Tadanori Yokoo…

Dylan, Warhol and Elvis, photo by Nat Finkelstein

Famous visitors and “beautiful people” with “star potential” who visited Andy Wahol’s Factory studio in the 1960s were often shot for Warhol’s “screen tests,” his silent “parodies” of the Hollywood studio system. No one was really auditioning for anything, it was just an excuse to run a single reel of 16mm film through his Bolex camera and engage someone in a staring contest with it, one they normally lost (after a minute or so of trying to look “cool,” the mask was normally dropped and the simple portraits become quite revealing). The two and a half minute reels were then slowed down and printed.

Some of the more notable subjects included Italian model Benedetta Barzini, model/actrress Marisa Berenson, poet Ted Berrigan, Salvador Dalí, Donovan, Marcel Duchamp, Mama Cass, Allen Ginsberg, Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, Baby Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, actress Sally Kirkland, Nico, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, photographer Francesco Scavullo, Edie Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, artist Paul Thek, Viva and Mary Woronov

When Dylan stopped by the tin-foil covered Factory, he is alleged to have taken an immediate dislike to Warhol and the “phonies” of his entourage. It has long been suspected that the spitting lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone,” in part, describe Dylan’s feelings about Warhol—was he “the diplomat on the chrome horse”?—and how he felt about the artist’s perceived exploitation of Edie Sedgwick, who Dylan was at one point romantically involved with (and who was his muse for some of Blonde on Blonde).

After the screen test was shot, Dylan grabbed a large silkscreen (as “payment”) that Warhol was going to give him anyway and headed for the door (before allegedly strapping the canvas to the roof of a station wagon). Such was his dislike of the artist that he later traded the piece to his manager, Albert Grossman, for a couch. That silkscreen, “Double Elvis,” is now part of the permanent collection at MOMA.

Here’s Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein’s account of what happened:

“Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis. Bobby gave Andy short shrift. Shooting and plundering finished, the Dylan gang headed for the door, me and my Nikon on their heels. They left as they had entered…‘Bobby the Waif’ emerging as ‘Robert the Triumphant’. They departed having tied the Elvis image to the top of their station wagon, like a deer poached out of season. Much later, Bobby told me he’d traded the Elvis (now worth millions) to his manager Albert Grossman for a couch!”

 
The Beatles’ original bass player Stu Sutcliffe died 50 years ago today. Does that make some of you feel old? It does me.

The Compleat Beatles is a very fine documentary on the band that Mr. Sutcliffe quit in order to pursue a life devoted to painting, a life which sadly came to an end when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 22.

He wasn’t really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn’t a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass. We taught him to play twelve-bars, like “Thirty Days” by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learned. He picked up a few things and he practiced a bit until he could get through a couple of other tunes as well. It was a bit ropey, but it didn’t matter at that time because he looked so cool.” George Harrison.

Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, 1984’s The Compleat Beatles is chock full of fantastic archival footage of the Fab Four and interviews with the band as well as George Martin, Marianne Faithful, Lenny Kaye, Billy Preston and Brian Epstein.

The Compleat Beatles was released on VHS and is out-of-print. It’s never been released on DVD. This is sourced from a laserdisc and looks very good indeed.
 

 
Excellent documentary Stuart Sutcliffe, The Lost Beatle after the jump…

 
Sadly, Slade got lost somewhere in the mid-seventies. A car crash, a tour of the U.S.A., and misunderstood movie Flame, saw the band lose much of their following to Punk, Queen, Heavy Metal and Disco. A shame, as Slade were a far greater band than the critics and even the fans allowed them to be. Here, for no other reason than it is a fan-bloody-tastic cover, is Slade’s version of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Wild” - the final track from the classic Slade Alive! album - as performed live on Pop Shop from 1971.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Bonus track ‘Hear Me Calling’, after the jump…