As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a total nut for Alice Cooper. But Alice Cooper, the band. The solo Alice? Eh, not so much.

The “classic” Alice Cooper albums I can play over and over and over again. I played them obsessively when I was a child and I still play them a lot today (especially Billion Dollar Babies). There was one year—1986 to be exact—where I pretty much only listened to four things: James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (don’t laugh, they’re fucking awesome) and Alice Cooper. To the exclusion of all else.

From Pretties for You through Easy Action, Love It to Death, Killer, School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies, Alice Cooper could do no wrong in my eyes. Those albums are perfect (well maybe not the first two, but they do have their perfect moments.)

Muscle of Love is basically a shit album. There’s a reason why it was in the cut-out bins so soon after it came out. It’s a weak record and the band split after it.

Then comes solo Alice. Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, Lace and Whiskey... and the singles for fuck’s sake, Alice Cooper was singing ballads! Sensitive ballads. Even if I do have soft spots for “Only Woman Bleed,” “I Never Cry” and “You and Me,” this was AM radio lovey-dovey stuff that could have been written by David fucking Gates coming from the coal-eyed ghoul with the snake ‘round his neck who’d given the world “Black JuJu,” “Dead Babies” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”!!! What gives?

Although I thought it was great when I was a kid, Welcome to My Nightmare is a really mediocre album. I listened to it recently and the only things I liked were the title song, the aforementioned sappy ballad and the one number that really rips on that album “Cold Ethyl,” which is absolutely fucking amazing. It’s tame, slick and uninteresting. Even backed by Lou Reed’s stellar Rock & Roll Animal band, these albums are a pale, pale version of what preceded them.
 

 
Now having said all that, I can forgive the lapse in musical quality and still enjoy “The Nightmare,” a late-night 1975 TV special that aired on ABC’s Wide World in Concert on its own terms (or at least on the terms that I first saw it on, as a wide-eyed nine-year-old Alice Cooper fanatic up well past his bedtime). It’s basically an extremely campy “rock opera” type treatment of Welcome to My Nightmare (itself a bit of a concept album to begin with, with a guy trapped in a bad dream he can’t escape from) with Cooper, Vincent Price (who is featured on the album prominently) and a variety of dancers, including Alice’s future wife, Cheryl. The former “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the more mainstream-friendly, Muppet Show-appearing Alice was still a lot of fun at this point—for at least for a little while longer—so enjoy!
 

 
There’s something in celebrities ‘fessin-up about how they became clean and sober that has replaced the witch trials as popular entertainment. Once it was naming familiars and butt-sex with the coven, now it’s mea culpa on Oprah, with tie-in book and a ten-minute-work-out DVD. (Of course, the conspiracist might take this just a wee bit further by pointing out the date of the first Salem witch hanging was June 10th, 1692; while Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on June 10th, in 1935.)

To be frank, I’m not too impressed by hoary old tales of some star’s drink and drug excess, as I don’t think it important, especially in today’s culture of such ubiquitous and casual drug use. Haven’t we all been down that rabbit hole numerous times before, and all lived to tell the tale?

Of course, once it was novel and even considered revolutionary, but now drug taking is as commonplace as a franchise outlet. Blogs send out their hacks stoned or tripping to interview the dull and unwary, while our favorite TV chefs are exposed by trial to have allegedly snorted their way through the housekeeping money. (The most scandalous part of that last tale was not the alleged drug use, but the fact nearly a million dollars goes missing and nobody thought it important enough to investigate? How the 1% lives, eh?)

Of course, there has always been an element of pretend machismo in how many grams, pills, and shots one can take—like those would-be-writers who once daily stood wreathed in cigarette smoke at the end of the bar, downing pint-after-pint-after-pint, short-after-short, as if alcohol consumption were some Herculean challenge. Ah, we’ve all been there—no?

Dennis Hopper was there in spades. By all accounts he should have died from his excessive indulgence of drugs and booze. He didn’t. He went briefly mad instead, and ended-up in a mental hospital, where it is claimed Hopper was exhibited as a (barely) walking “Just Say No” advertisement (One can imagine the scene.)

Then Hopper got clean and sober and told everyone about it. You could say he switched his addiction for self-gratification to an addiction for work, acting in virtually every film, TV show, and video game he was offered. His aim was to be a grown-up, and provide for his family. This meant acting in a lot of duff films, such as playing King Koopa in Super Mario Brothers.

After seeing Super Mario Brothers, Dennis’ son Henry asked his father, “Why did you do that?” Dennis smiled and replied, “To buy you shoes.” Henry didn’t smile back at his father, “I don’t need shoes that badly,” he said.

It must have been galling for the clean and sober Hopper to see so many ill-conceived and poorly written movies get made (no matter the size of the pay-check), especially as he had tried for many years to make his own movies when he was under-the-influence. I know which ones I prefer.

In 1994, Dennis Hopper was the focus of this documentary for the BBC series Moving Pictures. It’s a star-studded, access-all-areas program, richly informative with a great central interview with Hopper, who happily ‘fesses up to just about everything.
 

 
Just how good a year for music was 1968? Consider this list of albums from that year:
 
The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
The Beatles, The White Album
The Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
The Band, Music From Big Pink
The Zombies, Odessey And Oracle
Janis Joplin, Cheap Thrills
Sly & The Family Stone, Dance to the Music
Cream, Wheels of Fire
Joni Mitchell, Song To a Seagull
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For the Money
Jeff Beck, Truth
Pink Floyd, A Saucerful of Secrets
The 13th Floor Elevators, Bull of the Woods
The Monkees, Head
Can, Delay 1968
The Doors, Waiting for the Sun
Jefferson Airplane, Crown of Creation
Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Twain Shall Meet
Harry Nilsson, Aerial Ballet
Iron Butterfly, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
 
If those titles hold any appeal to you at all, then you are definitely going to enjoy Tony Palmer’s stunning 1968 documentary All My Loving, which purportedly was made as the result of a gauntlet that John Lennon and Paul McCartney threw down to Palmer (whose films before that had—a bit like George Martin—focused on classical music), to make an hour-long movie that captured the state of the music world in 1968. What makes the movie work, quite aside from Palmer’s adventurous editing style, fondness for tight closeups, aural brio, and impressionistic chops, is the palpable sense that something really interesting was happening in society—crucially, before the post-Altamont, post-Manson hangover had set in. It was a perfect moment for a documentary of this kind. The musical personages in the movie, many of them legends, are treated as very interesting pop stars but not much more than that, and that relative impartiality is essential to what makes All My Loving so good.

It’s difficult to overstate how wonderful All My Loving is. Stylistically, it suggests an experimental movie produced by 60 Minutes (or the English equivalent, anyway). In other words, it’s loose in form but stentorian in tone (but never unsympathetic to the youth movement). The amount of astonishing footage that Palmer managed to cram into a mere hour boggles the mind. Palmer appears to have access to just about anyone he wanted, so we get brief statements or conversations with Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Eric Burdon, Frank Zappa, Manfred Mann, Pete Townshend, George Martin, and so on. With the possible exception of Zappa, Burdon’s the most articulate of the bunch, pointing out the similarities between taking LSD and doing a stint in Vietnam.

The movie features truly scintillating performances from Cream (“I’m So Glad” and “We’re Going Wrong”), The Who (“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand”), Pink Floyd (“Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”), Donovan (“The Lullaby of Spring”), Jimi Hendrix (“Wild Thing”), the Animals (“Good Times” and “When I Was Young”). There is some utterly fantastic close-up footage in which The Who destroy their instruments at the end of a gig at, of all places, the Peoria Opera House as well as some similar footage of Jimi Hendrix just shredding the entire concept of rock and roll right in front of your eyes. ALL of the performance footage is remarkable.
 

 
There are also some amusing interviews with a “sleazy” music publisher with a pencil mustache who by rights should be named Monty Python (his name is actually Eddie Rogers) and a self-confident “jingle executive” from America named Jim West (motto: “Selling Spoken Here”) who explains how to use advertising techniques to con teens into coming to see the Mona Lisa. There are a handful of other British music industry types who are barely identified and don’t have to be—they’re the local color. They also get some frankly inane comments of the dismissive variety from none other than Anthony Burgess.

Palmer made dozens of documentaries from the 1960s onward, and they cover a fascinating range of personalities, including Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Rory Gallagher, Peter Sellers, Liberace, Hugh Hefner, Leonard Cohen, and on and on. He codirected 200 Motels with Frank Zappa. The governing tone of All My Loving is one of indulgent “concern,” of investigating a “problem” to be “solved”—we hear about the deafening volume of the new music and the possibly shallow values of the kids and so forth. There’s some startling imagery from Vietnam thrown in as well—never forget Vietnam. This movie goes all over the reservation to evoke 1968—and succeeds.

With its big, messy crescendo, the end of All My Loving somewhat resembles 2001: A Space Odyssey and “A Day in the Life,” and, to Palmer’s credit, the ending, which rapidly shows the breathtaking variety of images we’ve seen over the previous hour (scored to “Be-In (Hare Krishna)” from Hair), works marvelously. Set aside some time for All My Loving. You won’t regret it.
 

 
via Beatles Video of the Day

 
Eat the Document was intended to be a TV documentary on Bob Dylan’s 1966 European tour, produced for ABC Stage 67, a prestigious showcase for musicals, documentaries, original teleplays and short films (everything from a rock musical scored by Burt Bacharach and Hal David to a doc on Masters and Johnson to “Skaterdater”), but the network rejected it for being “incomprehensible.” The film captures the madness of that tour and was shot by D. A. Pennebaker, who’d also made Don’t Look Back, the documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour. Pennebaker’s version was called “Something Is Happening.” The retitled Eat the Document was cut by Dylan himself with Howard Alk, but the network still didn’t want it.

Eat the Document wasn’t seen at all until the early 70s when it was screened at New York’s Academy of Music and the Whitney Museum. Shitty bootleg copies have floated around for decades (I had one that was barely watchable) but in recent years a super clean digital copy has been seen on torrent trackers, and occasionally on YouTube. Dylan was, and is, alleged to hate it, which is why you should probably watch this sooner rather than later. There’s always a bit of Whac-A-Mole going on with Eat the Document there, I’ve noticed.
 

 
In the film we see Dylan tired, jamming with Johnny Cash, onstage with The Band (then still called The Hawks) writing songs with Robbie Robertson and wearily dealing with members of the media. Some of the infamous footage of Dylan riding around in a limo with John Lennon (Lennon claimed Dylan had gotten him high on heroin beforehand) is also seen in the film.
 

 
Thank you Glen E. Friedman of New York City!

 
For those of you not watching Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe yet, I highly, highly suggest it. It’s damned good TV. Smart, dumb and bust-a-gut funny.

Here Brooker goes off on a brilliant rant detailing our obsession with celebrity fuckwit Justin Bieber.

“Just another nauseating, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth pop weasel hammered into the global consciousness like a nail of frozen piss through a cabbage.”

Did Shakespeare, Milton or Joyce ever say anything as poetic or funny? No. No, they did not.

That is one impressive ‘death stare’ she’s flinging at Provincial Paddy there, ain’t it?

In their first European television appearance since they were released from Russian prison, Irish talkshow host Brendan O’Connor interviewed Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, managing to make himself look like—this is so, so easy—a complete twat. They can’t even—indeed they do not tryto —hide their exasperation at his astonishingly witless questions.

To begin with the Saturday Night Show presenter repeatedly refers to the formerly imprisoned feminist activists as “girls.” It goes (rapidly) downhill from there and ends when he asks them what they think about Madonna and if she is a “freedom fighter, like them”!

They so clearly think O’Conner is an asshole. Even Graham Norton would have been a better choice to interview them!

The “girls” will be in New York this week for an Amnesty International event.
 

 
In 1979, John Lydon made an unexpected appearance on the goofy Jukebox Jury television panel show. His fellow panelists included Joan Collins and Elaine Paige!

“What sort of music do you personally enjoy?”

“Decent.”

The expression on his face (see above), sums up perfectly, I feel, what most Brits probably think about Noel Edmonds, the host of Jukebox Jury ....
 

 
IMDB lists this hour-long session of Michael Caine teaching some students the art of film acting as being produced in 1987, but I have a hunch it was recorded a few years earlier. For one thing, aside from Alfie (1966), the acting exercises lean heavily on two movies that would have been very current in, say, 1984: Educating Rita and Deathtrap. Also, I think I remember seeing this on Bravo (yes, kids, there once was a time when Bravo had almost entirely highbrow, high-quality programming) earlier than 1987, although I could be wrong about that.

Noted non-actor Howard Stern has said of this documentary, “I watched the video and had my doubts ... I thought a lot of what he said was horseshit, but halfway through the movie I thought: The son of a bitch is right!”—so you know it has to be good. Howard Stern says so!

The appearance of this video on YouTube warmed my heart. It’s a pleasure to see such detailed evidence of Caine’s mastery of movie acting.

The most famous bit from this documentary is when Caine demonstrates a couple of key tips about closeups in the movies: “If I keep blinking, it weakens me. But if I’m talking to you, and I don’t blink, and I just keep going, and I don’t blink, and I keep on going, and I don’t blink, you start to listen to what I’m saying….” 
 

Michael Caine—not blinking….
 
Caine’s very charming and tells a number of illumating stories along the way. One of his memorable bits is a story about George Cukor telling Jack Lemmon that the best movie acting is simply doing “nothing.” It’s startling to see him explain a point by doing some lines from the scene we have just seen the student actors doing. No disrespect to them, but it’s quite amazing how different and how much better Caine’s versions are! And you can also see decided improvement in the students’ performances as the hour goes on. Unfortunately, I don’t recognize most of the young actors—two of them apparently became regulars on strictly-for-U.K.-audiences Coronation Street and EastEnders. I did recognize Celia Imrie from a few U.K. mysteries; I don’t remember her from Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace but I congratulate her on landing such a lucrative gig.

This video is available on Amazon as a standalone DVD or as part of a six-DVD product called BBC Acting Set. The other five classes (also available as individual DVDs) are Simon Callow’s Acting in Restoration Comedy, Janet Suzman’s Acting in Shakespearean Comedy, Brian Cox’s Acting in Tragedy, Jonathan Miller’s Acting in Opera, and Maria Aitken’s Acting in High Comedy. Furthermore, Caine also published a book on film acting, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making.
 

 
[*Look, if you’re going to post something like this, WHY NOT give it a jaunty Upworthy-worthy click-bait title?]

It used to be that we Americans only knew British television via Monty Python, Doctor Who and Masterpiece Theatre. UK TV was kinda classy compared to American television. Except when it wasn’t, but we didn’t get those sorts of misfires over here. Here we got Upstairs, Downstairs. Brideshead Revisited. The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

There are a lot of completely demented UK TV shows that most Americans have probably never heard of, but that now can be found on torrent trackers and YouTube.

Take for instance the short-lived Spike Milligan sitcom Curry & Chips from 1969. Milligan—never a man known for his racial sensitivity to begin with—donned blackface to play “Kevin O’Grady” (or as he is also called on the show “Paki Paddy”) a “foreigner” from Pakistan who says that he is Irish.

The producers claimed the show was supposed to combat prejudice—and that it was the English characters who looked the dumbest—but essentially the series relied upon… unvarnished racial abuse for the laughs. “I’m with Enoch!” is but one unfunny punchline the studio audience chortles along to. Milligan’s “Irish” character says he left Pakistan because of “the wogs.” It just gets worse from there.
 

 
Have a look for yourself, this is the full first episode of Curry & Chips:
 

 
Curry & Chips was cancelled after just six episodes, but it still fared far better than Heil Honey, I’m Home! a severely misguided 1990 attempt to get a few laughs out of the notion of Hitler and Eva Braun moving in next door to a Jewish couple, The Goldensteins.

Hilarity ensues!

Or does it?

Heil Honey, I’m Home! has but a single decent idea (one used to far better effect in Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place) and this is the conceit that the series was a “long lost” American sitcom from the 1950s. The show begins with a card reading:

To most people the name of TV executive Brandon Thalburg Jnr. merits no more than a three word footnote in the annals of American Situation Comedy.  Yet it was Brandon who, some years ago, sought to break new ground when he commissioned the series Heil Honey I’m Home! under the billing ‘not so much a sit com, more a hit com.’ Unfortunately, neither Brandon nor the series were heard of again. Until now!

A chance discovery in a Burbank backlot has revealed the lost tapes of: Heil Honey I’m Home!. Tapes that we believe will vindicate Brandon’s unsung comic vision.

Hey, not so fast on the posthumous vindication, there. It starts to suck right after the above words leave the screen (yes, I just gave away the best part). Even the title sequence is fucking terrible, they couldn’t even get that right, and the eponymous catch phrase is surely the worst of all time and will never, ever be topped for its abject shitness.

All in all, Heil Honey I’m Home! just stinks! Writing at Splitsider, Matt Schimkowitz said the show was the “Holocaust meets The Honeymooners” and that gets it about right. Imagine the fucking pitch meeting!
 

 
Don’t get me wrong, Nazis can be funny, just ask Mel Brooks (or Mitchell and Webb), but Heil Honey I’m Home! is plain awful. It was killed after only one episode aired, but there were seven more in the can. If The Day The Clown Cried ever gets released after Jerry Lewis dies, Heil Honey I’m Home! would probably make a good opener on a Nazis comedy double feature.

Here’s Heil Honey I’m Home! in all of its… er, glory.
 

 
Dangerous Minds has checked in on English actor/comedian/musician Adrian Edmondson before, to talk about The Idiot Bastard Band, his group with Bonzo Dog/Monty Python habitué Neil Innes, and his beloved BBC comedy The Young Ones, on which he played the insane and violent postcard-punker archetype Vyvyan Basterd. But we’ve only given passing mention to his fine band The Bad Shepherds, and that’s just absurd. The band’s specialty is Celtic folk covers of classic punk, though songs like Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” and Kraftwerk’s “The Model” have found their way into the repertoire. They’ve released three albums worth of such interpretations, 2009’s Yan, Tyan, Tethera, Methera!, 2010’s By Hook Or By Crook and last year’s Mud, Blood & Beer.
 

 
Given Edmondson’s history in comedy, you could be forgiven for assuming this was a joke band, an inversion of the tired old novelty punk covers trip. But before you leap to conclude that, hear Edmondson out in these excerpts from an excellent recent interview with Outline Online. 

The whole mechanic of taking on cover songs is a huge mantle for you to take on; has there ever been a song that’s been too difficult, that’s wriggled away from you, that can’t be tamed?


Oh, hundreds of ‘em. Loads of ‘em. Yeah, we try loads of stuff and what we do probably represents about a quarter of what we try to do. It’s not that we don’t like the ones that don’t work, it’s just we haven’t found a way of doing it. We generally take the songs completely to pieces and then put them back together again without thinking about the original and try and find instrumentation for them. Primarily they fall down on lyrics because I’m a middle-aged man and they’ve got to suit my age, and most folk and most punk songs surprisingly do because they’re surprisingly adult in content, most of the punk canon, y’know. They were written by people who were really thinking; they’re not just solipsistic, selfish kind of ‘ooh, I’m in love, I’m not in love’ songs. They’re about social commentary and social protest and things like that and it’s very exciting. But some songs, for example, we’ve tried a few songs by The Damned and none of them worked because they’re all – and I don’t mean this to deride The Damned but they’re all just a bit childish when you take them to bits and you read the lyrics without thinking about what the music’s about. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t go anywhere. We tried moving up the years as well thinking there must be a load of stuff in the 80s with Tears for Fears and OMD and stuff like that, so we scoured through those and tried to work on that and again, that kinda falls short, lyrically. It’s too childish. I mean, they’re brilliant, original things but they don’t fit the ethos of our band; they don’t become folk songs.

What is it about those genres that seem to lend themselves so well?


Because they’re forgotten songs and people all imagine that that sort of era is full of jumping up and down, shouting and spitting and it didn’t mean anything apart from anger in the performance. They’re disastrously wrong; they’re some of the most complex songs. The idea that all punk songs are three-chord wonders is completely erroneous. There are vastly complicated chord sequences and tuning in some of the songs we play.

The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The U.K.”
 

The Clash’s “London Calling”

After the jump, Motörhead’s “Ace Of Spades” and more…