We live in an age in which the urge to combine one’s desire to self-administer sexual pleasure and one’s obsession with an addictive pop culture artifact can easily be gratified, no problemo.

In other words: Stranger Things dildo? Yup, Stranger Things dildo.
 

 
The good people at Bad Dragon unveiled their new “Demogorgon” model of imitation penis on October 20, and it might be the only dildo ever to come with its own teaser video with no sexual angle whatsoever, as well as a highly produced six-minute commercial lovingly shot with all the 80s goodness you could ever muster. They even made sure to include Spielbergian forest flashlights right out of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

The closing credit sequence features various “making-of’ clips of the actors in action, also surely a rare occurrence for a dildo commercial. The cast includes the intriguingly named Elise Brillig and Katsuri Epsilon. You can be certain that a tri-colored royal mesh trucker hat was included among the wardrobe effects.

The base price of the Demogorgon is $55 and comes in a large variety of colors, including Demogorgon’s Natural, Demogorgon’s Signature, Ectoplasm, Sinister Pumpkin, and Salted Caramel Blondie. Most of the styles come with an additional charge of $10 to $20.
 
Promo videos after the jump…....
 

A shot of Mary (pictured on the left) and Madeleine Collinson on the set of Hammer’s 1971 film ‘Twins of Evil.’
 
Before twin sisters Madeleine and Mary Collinson appeared in Hammer’s 1971 film Twins of Evil, they would become the very first twins to pose for Playboy magazine as the “Misses October” for the October 1970 issue. According to Madeleine, the occurrence of twin births was incredibly common for their family noting that nearly every woman in the Collinson clan had given birth to twins “one time or another.” In fact, Madeleine and Mary’s mother, a former model, would later give birth to a second set of twins.

Madeleine Collinson was apparently a big fan of horror films which made her a natural fit to play Frieda Gellhorn, the “evil” twin in Hammer’s 1971 film Twins of Evil. Her sister Mary would play opposite her twin as the demure, virginal Mary Gellhorn. The sisters had just arrived in London two years earlier from Malta, where they did some modeling in their early teens as well as a few television commercials. Mary would be the first to leave Malta and head to London followed by Madeleine when they were just seventeen. They were instantly hounded by photographers and filmmakers hoping to capitalize on the twins’ unique good looks. Success came quickly to the twins and after being invited to attend a party in London to hang out with other European movers and shakers they met Victor Lownes—Hugh Hefner’s right-hand man and Playboy’s managing director. According to London high-society mythology, Lownes convinced the girls to move into his mansion in London and then sent them off to the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago to meet Hef and pose for the magazine. As I mentioned previously, the twins would earn the distinction of being the very first set of twins to ever appear in Playboy. Over 800 photos of the girls were taken for their Playboy spread, a new record when it came to photoshoots for the magazine.

Madeleine and Mary would appear in a handful of other films though it would be their joint appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson followed by their roles in Twins of Evil that would make them a hot commodity. Most if not all opportunities that were presented to the girls involved them appearing together, not as individuals. This scenario was less than appealing to the twins, and in 1972 both Madeleine and Mary moved to Milan and removed themselves from the limelight ending their brief but spectacular brush with fame. I’ve posted photos of the gorgeous twin sisters in character from Twins of Evil (though only Madeleine played a vampire chick in the flick), and a few shots from their appearance in Playboy, making it safe to assume much of what follows contains nudity and is NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

A photo taken at the opening of the very first Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960.
 
The first Playboy magazine hit the shelves in 1953 and in 1960, the late Hugh Hefner opened what would be the very first Playboy Club in Chicago. Other clubs would quickly emerge in more than twenty locations including Boston, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles, as well as more elaborate Playboy Club Resorts which you could visit in Jamaica and Manila. Entrance into the various clubs would run a member $25 a year for which they would receive a special key that when presented to a designated “Door Bunny” would get them inside. The clubs were designed to emulate the “Playboy lifestyle” projected by Hefner, though that’s not what initially ignited the vast existence of Playboy Clubs. The actual inspiration for the clubs began with an article in Playboy published in 1959 that detailed the goings-on at the historic Gaslight Club in Chicago’s River North area. The club was the brainchild of Burton Browne who modeled the club around the “Gay 90s” (aka the “Naughty Nineties” or the decade beginning in 1890) a debaucherous period where creativity and libidos ran wild.

Like Hefner’s future Playboy Clubs, entrance to the Gaslight required a key. Naturally, Hef was already a member of the Gaslight Club as it featured his favorite thing—half-naked women with large breasts everywhere you looked. According to Victor Lownes III, the executive of HMH Publishing Company (which would later become Playboy Enterprises in 1955) he recalled that the article received over 3,000 letters from readers of Playboy inquiring as to how they too could join this exclusive club. This set the wheels in motion for Hefner who knew how to recognize an opportunity, though at the time his vision for his Playboy-themed clubs didn’t include expansion beyond Chicago. When the doors to the fledgling club opened, it employed approximately 30 girls between the ages of 18-23 who were said to be “single, beautiful, charming, and refined.” It also somehow qualifies the old saying that people really did read Playboy articles. At least they read one in 1957. And that’s a fact. 

As you may have already assumed, and much like Hefner’s storied, celebrity-studded events at the Playboy Mansion, Playboy Clubs were frequented by Hollywood’s elite, such as Frank Sinatra. The Playboy Resorts featured entertainment from acts like Sonny & Cher, Melba Moore, and Sinatra’s pal and Playboy Club regular, Sammy Davis Jr. The first Detroit club which was located right across from a church attracted prominent members of that city’s vibrant jazz scene. Even Detroit’s mayor at the time Coleman Young (who held the position for twenty years starting in 1974), was an honorary member of the Playboy Club.

The St. Louis location regularly hosted comedy acts like George Carlin, Flip Wilson, Joan Rivers and Steve Martin. One of the more creative locations was opened on Lake Geneva in Wisconson that featured a ski slope, chairlift and according to former Bunny Pam Ellis, a DJ booth known as the “Bunny Hutch” where Bunnies would spin records while a bubble machine and disco ball set the mood. Most if not all of the girls at Lake Geneva lived in the “Bunny Dorm” which Ellis says was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. If a girl didn’t live in the dorms, a car would be sent for them to their home to bring them to work where they could also eat for free. Ellis looks back on her time at Lake Geneva’s Playboy Club with fondness—especially the fact that she met her husband while she was DJ’ing in the Bunny Hutch.
 

Frank Sinatra hanging out at the Playboy Club in Las Vegas back in the day.
 
I had been working on this post for a while and had just started to get some words committed to “paper” when Hefner passed away on September 27th at the age of 91. Given that somewhat unexpected event, I held off on finishing it until today as I wasn’t crazy about having DM readers think that capitalizing on the death of someone as well-known and controversial as Hugh Hefner is something we aspire to. However, I do, like so many people, look back with fondness to a time where girls in bunny tails and ears were as glamorous as the movie stars that cavorted around the same clubs with them. Below I’ve posted a huge collection of photos taken inside and on the grounds of various Playboy Clubs including some rarely seen images from the Lake Geneva location that were kindly provided to me by Adam Levin with the help of Christina Ward of Feral House.
 

Bunnies on top of a locally made tractor at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club in Wisconsin. Photo courtesy of Adam Levin.
 

Bunnies having fun at Dunn River Falls in Ochos Rios, Jamaica in 1972.
 

New York 1960s.
 
Much more after the jump…

 
Early on in the most recent episode of HBO’s The Deuce, which is set in New York City in 1971, Vince Martino (one of the two twins played by James Franco in the show) is looking to get the Hi Hat, the new mobbed-up bar in the Times Square area that he runs, a little more publicity. So he asks the show’s most prominent gay character, a bartender who works for him named Paul Hendrickson (Chris Coy), whether he has seen to it that the establishment has been listed in all of the “bar guides.”

It’s already been established that Vince wants to extend a welcoming hand to the city’s burgeoning post-Stonewall homosexual community, so it’s not a huge surprise when he also adds, “The gay one, too? What’s it called, ‘Michael’s Stick’?” The bartender clarifies that the magazine is actually called Michael’s Thing and suggests taking out an ad, too—the rates aren’t bad for a half-page.

Michael’s Thing—what’s that? Well, it turns out that, just as The Deuce suggests, Michael’s Thing was an essential weekly guide to homosexual life in New York City that literally lasted decades but (in retrospect) seems like it went kind of unheralded. It’s very difficult to find more than a handful of covers online (this for a magazine that ran for well over a thousand issues), and similarly, there is also pretty much a black hole in terms of information about it on the Internet. Most of the images I was able to find are tiny, too. There’s just very little information out there about Michael’s Thing, and that seems a shame.

The most pertinent piece of information I’d like to know is—who was Michael, anyway?

A playwright named Doric Wilson (Now She Dances, The West Street Gang, Street Theater) who was artistically active in New York during the 1970s and 1980s comes to the rescue, with a blog post he wrote about Michael’s Thing in 2011. Sadly, it appears that he wrote his account less than a month before his death. In 1974, Wilson had been instrumental in founding TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), which was a theater company dedicated to gay themes—according to Wikipedia, the first such entity; it’s still in existence.

It turns out that the “Michael” of Michael’s Thing was named Michael Giammetta. Here’s a chunk of Wilson’s tribute to the publication, without which, believe me, there’d be virtually nothing out there about it:
 

Michael Giammetta published Michael’s Thing between 1970-2000 as a guide to cultural and social happenings of the GLTB community. It was the one of the main and most reliable sources of information. It also was a handy guide to the most important institutions of the early days of liberation, the gay bar. The covers of Michael’s Thing may have featured pretty boys almost in their all together but inside the focus was theater, dance, cabaret. They were all there, all the early voices of what would become queer culture. Freeman Gunter was an excellent critic. There are careers in the arts still going full force that began thanks to his taking notice of them.

Mandate magazine was started as an “out” version of After Dark in the early 1970s. It featured some of the early stars of GLBT photography, John Michael Cox, Jr., Jürgen Vollmer, and first and foremost, Roy Blakey. Under the editorship of John Devere, it contained thoughtful reviews covering all of the arts, and essential articles on the emerging gay liberation movement. John Devere’s coverage of the protests surrounding the filming of Cruising is still a high-water mark of gay journalism.

 
Today it seems almost unexceptional that there would be a prominent gay weekly guide in New York City, but as Wilson reminds us, things weren’t so cut and dry in the 1970s: “It was an era when publications like New York magazine dismissed the culture coming from the queer community with a sneer and a snicker. The New York Times refused to even use the word ‘gay,’ and only mentioned our community if the article was derogatory.”

What’s clear is that Michael’s Thing was not just a city guide for queers—it was also a bona fide news outlet that catered to a specific demographic very well, with good reporting and top-notch arts coverage. It’s interesting how much the cover design changed over the years—I count five different treatments for the name of the magazine.
 

1972
 

May 1976
 
Much more after the jump…....
 

A digital illustration by Waldemar von Kozak.
 
Waldemar von Kozak lives and works in Russia as a freelance artist. His art is reminiscent of work produced by Robert Maguire whose illustrations were published on the covers of over 600 pulp novels starting in 1950. Like Maguire, Kozak’s illustrations are boldly colorful and often feature bodaciously-endowed gorgeous women in various stages of undress.

After finishing his education at Tver Art College in Central Russia, Kozak received a degree in Graphic Design and ended up focusing his talents on digital illustration. Kozak’s work has been used to advertise everything from booze to projects for large corporations looking for a way to visually engage their clientele. Kozak once mused about his desire to put out a book containing his eye-popping, often confrontational illustrations, which I am happy to report he did last year. You get the fully customizable, digital-only publication for $25 bucks over at Kozak’s official website where he also has some of his choice prints for sale.

I’ve posted a salacious selection of Kozak’s NSFW work for you to check out below.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Album artwork by Benjamin Marra for the 2017 compilation ‘Warfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmares.’
 
Comic artist Benjamin Marra‘s pulpy, outlaw artistic style has been used by notable publications such as The New York Times and another comic book company you might have heard of, Marvel. Several of Marra’s books have been published by Seattle comics institution Fantagraphics. In an interview Marra gave to The Comics Journal he discussed one of his most common themes of his work—his raw depiction of violence. Like so many of us, Marra was profoundly influenced by films he saw as a youth, though he steered clear of violent scenarios in his artwork because they scared the shit out of him. So, he began to include images bad stuff happening into his work in the hope that he might someday be able to conquer his fear. Well, it worked, and I’m thrilled because Marra’s art is kind of like a grindhouse film full of bikers and badass chicks battling it out in a grim neon netherworld.

Based in Brooklyn, Marra went to Syracuse University where he studied illustration, and then later for a time at SU’s art program in Florence, Italy. He received a B.F.A. from Syracuse and followed that up with an M.F.A. in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Marra still spends time at the Manhattan institution where he somehow finds the time to teach the in the Visual Narrative program. Marra publishes his far-out comics through his own company, Traditional Comics. There he puts out comics that are aligned with the kind of core values a real outlaw would be ready to die for, such as imposing your will upon the world, sex (and there’s lots of it in Marra’s illustrated world), drugs, gambling, and adhering to a personal code of justice that believes in vigilantism which provides for the right to exact revenge whenever you’ve been done wrong.

I first became aware of Marra after seeing the slick album art for a compilation series put out by the Numero Group in 2017, Warfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmares (pictured at the top of this post). However, some of you might be familiar with Marra’s balls-out 2010 comic that featured a gun-toting New York Times Op-Ed columnist, The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd, or perhaps his contributions to the Henry & Glenn Forever series. Marra always seems to be putting out a new low-brow, day-glow piece of work and a quick look at The Comic Book Database revealed that his latest venture (with Fantagraphics) is a groovy-looking series called All The Time Comics with three different insane-looking storylines which you can see here.

I’ve posted some cool examples of Marra’s work below which are NSFW. Much like Marra himself.
 

 

Marra’s poster for the 2016 re-release of director Takeshi Kitano’s 1989 film, ‘Violent Cop.’
 
More after the jump…

‘Les Aphrodites.’
 
We’re in Paris of the 1920s: a world of cheap hotels, low-rent dives, darkened rooms, the hiss of gas lamps, the smell of cigarettes and sex, eau de cologne, grubby bedsheets, prostitutes, lovers, women, men, alcohol, opium, and unfettered hedonism. This is the world Frans de Geetere depicted in his erotic etchings for a variety of scandalous books published during the decade. One such volume was Jean de Gourmont’s romantic novel La toison d’or (The Golden Fleece), a tale of two young lovers’ difficult and torturous relationship. De Gourmont described de Geetere’s illustrations as:

‘...displaying a rare erotic talent, [that] show miraculously and without insulting precision the aura of sensual mysticism I too had sought in which to bathe my ideas and my dreams’.

De Gourmont’s book is long forgotten, but de Geetere’s etchings continue to resonate with succeeding generations who find his work “sombre and disquieting, infused with a miasma of conflicted sexuality and existential dread.”

Frans de Geetere was born François de Geetere in Oudergem, a suburb of Brussels, in 1895. He studied art at the Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He hated his tutors’ insistence on classical representations in art and quit college in 1915. His friend, the rich, debauched libertine Harry Crosby later described this act of rebellion as being “whipped into a flame of hatred by the frescoes his father compelled him to paint in the neighboring churches.” He took a job whitewashing houses. He was nineteen, no longer at college, and eligible for conscription into the Belgian army to fight in World War One. He fled to the Netherlands, which was neutral during the conflict, and worked as a porter at the William Arntz psychiatric hospital in Utrecht. He found this work dispiriting and at times deeply disturbing. However, this together with the daily newspaper reports of fighting across Belgium and France, focussed his ambition to succeed as an artist. He changed his style from naive colorful depictions of fantasy and imagination to dark, brooding, portraits of the patients at the psychiatric clinic. During this time that de Geetere also met the woman who became his life partner, artist May den Engelsen.

The couple lived on a two-masted houseboat called the Marie-Jeanne. After the war, they decided to steer their boat along the canals to Paris. It was a slow leisurely journey during which the couple drew and painted and used a small printing press to publish their work. They arrived in Paris in the early 1920s berthing their boat at the Quai de Conti near the Pont Neuf, in the very heart of the city. They were to live here for the next five decades.

In Paris de Geertere and den Engelsen fell in with a group of rich hedonistic bohemians. It was a world of parties, sex, drugs, and orgies. The Marie-Jeanne became a “symbol of free-floating morals”:

...conveniently moored at the heart of the world’s cultural capital, the Marie-Jeanne became a hippy sanctuary long before hippies were invented. Avant garde artists Tamara de Lempicka and Kees van Dongen were regular visitors, as were American emigré millionaire and publisher Harry Crosby and his beautiful and inventive wife Caresse. During the late 1920s and early 30s Harry and Caresse became intimate with Frans and May, sharing art, poetry, partners, beds and experiences with drugs

Crosby was a notorious millionaire spendthrift who was as famous for publishing works by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, as he was notorious for his life of sex and drugs. He eventually died in a murder-suicide pact after losing all his money in the Wall Street Crash.

De Geertere played hard and worked harder. He supplied illustrations for books of cult literature and erotica like La toison d’or (1925), Les Aphrodites (1925), Arthur Rimbaud’s Les stupra (1925), Les Chants de Maldoror (1927), La légende des sexes (1930), and his self-published volume Spasmes (1930) which he described as depicting love-making, sex and the orgasm as filled with:

...anxiety, violence and spasm, for this is undoubtedly true poetry. I do not care to please people who imagine love as sexual kindness, and its representation as the sign of genteel rendezvous.

De Geertere’s work has lasted because it was created through a synthesis of great technical talent and considerable personal experience. These are not pictures of imaginary figures but real women and men engaged in carnal acts in small darkened rooms where the gas light flickers and there’s a dank smell of sex and sweat. By the early fifties, De Geertere’s work fell out of favor as erotica was replaced by glossy pornography. He returned to painting bright colorful pictures as he had done in his youth and spent his freetime flying kites.
 

‘A Prostitute and Her Client.’
 

‘Marthe.’
 
See more erotic etchings, after the jump…

 
The question is often asked by our dear readers as to why some images are pixelated on social media? “We all got nipples,” they might comment on a post or “I’ve seen nudies before” they might add. Well, yes, of course. But social media is not really that open or user-friendly and never has been. We all might be grown-up about things that may shock or trigger others, but it only takes one turd in the pool for swimming to be canceled or one Mrs. Carmody for an account to get shut down.

Artist provocateur Giulia aka @scientwehst knows this only too well as she has had her artworks pulled and her accounts shut down after some busybody was offended by her erotic collage. I believe being offended is good for the soul. If you are offended then you’re learning something new and increasing your intellectual scope rather than narrowing it down to a rather grotty clogged artery that is on the verge of causing fatal cardiac arrest.

Giulia thinks “Social-media society is not a public, democratic space,” and we should stop treating it as such.

These white-tech bros dictate in their swivel chairs what we can share and how we can manage our platforms. They create a facade of openness, while exploiting us and profiting from our data and content. We are not protected because social-media has been privatized. Social media companies serve as an arm to our government’s agendas… Our government is also inherently sexist… Sexism still thrives in social media society… Let’s all connect the dots.

Giulia is a 27-year-old artist from Florida, who currently resides in Brooklyn. Growing up she felt uncomfortable about her body image. She wanted to be tall and skinny coz that’s what magazines and TV and movies and adverts sold as the perfect female form. This anxiety carried on into her twenties until one day, “about 2–3 years ago, [..] I started to say, ‘fuck this shit! I will never have this type of body, and I’m going to embrace the softness that is me’.” Her view now is “fuck a beauty standard: just be you.”

Out of this rethinking, Giulia started making collages in which she placed architectural pictures of various buildings, churches, and interiors over images lifted from porn and glamour mags. The results were provocative, some might say shocking yet certainly powerful and erotically charged. Sex it seems is everywhere but especially in our minds.

Follow Giulia on @scientwehst.
 

 

 
More of artist provocateur Giulia’s pin-ups, after the jump…
 

 
Launched in 1962, Ralph Ginzburg’s Eros was the kind of magazine that targeted the kind of man who actually did read Playboy for the articles. Ginzburg managed to publish four provocative and fascinating issues of Eros before the federal authorities, which were run by Robert F. Kennedy at the time, invoked the Comstock Act and arrested Ginzburg’s ass.

If the run of Eros were a nug of marijuana, one might be tempted to croak the words “really good shit,” with deep respect. Eros was a somewhat literary version of the “ribald classics” section of Playboy transmogrified into its own title, but there was actual ground-breaking political stuff in there too. “Devoted to the joys of love and sex,” Eros was daring and often hilarious in its content and incredibly forward-thinking in its design, which was the purview of Herb Lubalin. Flip through a copy (actual issues are rather pricey) and you’d have a hard time coming up with a reason that these layouts couldn’t have been executed in 2015. Indeed, from a “look and feel” perspective Eros reminds me most of the travel magazine Afar. Few did more with a serif than Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin.

The content was bold and wide-ranging. Ginzburg ran fiction by Ray Bradbury, Guy de Maupassant, and Mark Twain; a photo series by Garry Winogrand; an antique patent submission for a male chastity belt; a profile of Frank Harris; and psychosexual meditiations on John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe (uhhh, published separately: few knew that they were sleeping together yet).

The early to mid-1960s were a mixed bag for the judicial oversight of what at the time was called smut. William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was banned in 1962 but vindicated in 1966. The tale of Eros, however, is a darker one. Ginzburg, who had once written a history of erotica under the amusing title An Unhurried View of Erotica, could hardly be accused of indulging in “mere” sexual titillation, and yet he was still sentenced to five years and fined $42,000 for using the U.S. Postal Service to deliver copies of the fourth (and ultimately final) issue of Eros as well as a newsletter called Liaison and a book called The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity. Even from the perspective of more than five decades later, one can feel the heady rush of sending those materials around as if they were regular goods.

There was a racist tinge to the prosecution—one of the features in that fourth issue was a series of photographs by Ralph M. Hattersley Jr. depicting a black man and a white woman in a state of aesthetically pleasing undress. The judge in the case asserted that the pictures “a detailed portrayal of the act of sexual intercourse,” although this was patently false. The case hinged on the appearance of prurience—in other words, since it was promoted as appealing to “erotic interest,” then it fell under the category of “pandering,” and therefore whatever additional social value the material could be said to possess would be outweighed by the sexual content.

Ginzburg ultimately spent eight months in prison for publishing Eros.

We are grateful to graphic designer Mindy Seu, Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, and the Internet Archive for posting every single page of Eros’ four-issue run. If you’re an editorial geek such as myself, it’s difficult to tear one’s eyes away from these gorgeous, intelligent layouts, nor chuckle at the stimulating topics under consideration. Below you can feast your eyes on some choice spreads and single pages.
 

 

 
Much more Eros after the jump…...
 

Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant back in the day, perhaps recalling some good times at Chat Noir in 1973.
 
I haven’t really thought about Led Zeppelin in a while, so the other day I started poking around looking at photos of the band taken back in the early 70s (don’t judge). It was one hell of a rabbit hole where I came across an infamous shot of Zeppelin taken by photographer Bengt H. Malmqvist in Stockholm in 1973. The photo in question featured the members of Zeppelin watching a couple have sex on top of a table displaying their gold records. The bizarre image was part of a larger series attributed to Malmqvist containing 56 black and white negatives, one set of photos and two contact maps which were up for auction in 2010—though it’s unclear if they ever sold. The photos of Zep taken by Mr. Malmqvist were shot inside Chat Noir—one of Stockholm’s premiere sex clubs, and according to the auction site Bonhams, Malmqvist was the only photographer allowed to shoot the event.

The Chat Noir itself was the epitome of what one might imagine a high-end sex club to be like. The establishment prided itself on being “classy” by offering what they described as a “luxury” sex experience which would routinely feature female stars from Stockholm and other locations around the world, and even some sort of sexy “wizard” which according to folklore about Chat Noir was especially popular with Japanese businessmen. The club, considered at the time to be one of Stockholm’s most glamorous, was also a popular site used by the Swedish sex film industry and several movies were shot on there including Anita: Swedish Nymphet. That film came out the same year Led Zeppelin was welcomed by the club to receive four gold records from Metronome Records in honor of their record sales. True to form, the whole salacious event was orchestrated by the band’s manager, the notorious Peter Grant. 

Below, a few of the images from Zeppelin’s infamous visit to the Chat Noir, plus a full page account of what went down that night that was published in a Swedish magazine in 1973.
 

Robert Plant and a friend at the Chat Noir, 1973. Photo by Bengt H. Malmqvist.
 

Jimmy Page, (allegedly) Pamela Des Barres, and John Bonham hanging out at Chat Noir in 1973. Photo by Bengt H. Malmqvist.
 
More after the jump…