Sometimes it’s the more obscure tracks (relatively speaking) that I get off on the most from the Beatles catalog: Case in point, I tend to rank the non-LP Lady Madonna higher than some songs which are more overly familiar. But my favorite lesser-known Beatles song has to be Hey Bulldog, which was actually recorded during the filming for the Lady Madonna TV promo, a single that was supposed to provide a stop gap between albums whist the Fab Four went on a scheduled four-month long Transcendental Mediation retreat to India with the “giggling guru” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. We all know how that turned out.

Hey Bulldog is, in my never so humble opinion, one of the very best Beatles songs of all, but as it lived on the soundtrack for Yellow Submarine—only half a Beatles album technically speaking, although the George Martin symphonic music that comprises side two is, to my ears, utterly sublime—it’s from an album that most fans don’t tend to own. Furthermore, when the original US theatrical version of Yellow Submarine was released, they cut the song and it wasn’t until the 1999 remastered version came out on DVD, that the Hey Bulldog sequence was restored to the film’s running order.

Apparently the below video wasn’t completed until that release, either. Editors went back to the original Lady Madonna footage during the Yellow Submarine restoration process and found they were able to sync up the spirited Hey Bulldog performances up 30 years after the fact.

What fun it is to see this! According to Beatles engineer Geooff Emerick, the performance you see below is one of the last times the Beatles performed as a team, with each member bringing real enthusiasm to the task: “Paul’s bass line was probably the most inventive of any he’d done since Pepper, and it was really well played. Harrison’s solo was sparkling, too—one of the few times that he nailed it right away. His amp was turned up really loud, and he used one of his new fuzz boxes, which made his guitar absolutely scream,” he would later write in his book, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles.

Paul McCartney recalls “I remember (it) as being one of John’s songs and I helped him finish it off in the studio, but it’s mainly his vibe. There’s a little rap at the end between John and I, we went into a crazy little thing at the end. We always tried to make every song different because we figured, ‘Why write something like the last one? We’ve done that’. We were on a ladder so there was never any sense of stepping down a rung, or even staying on the same rung, it was better to move one rung ahead.”

I like the part when Lennon and McCartney are doing the whole dog barking thing and George Harrison looks over at them like they’re losing their minds.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
You Never Give Me Your Money: Metzger on the Beatles reissues

 
For a Catholic country that’s endured more coups in the past century than a Tea Party rank-and-filer can conceive of, Argentina seems to have come into its democratic own this week as it joined the other nine nations that have legalized same-sex marriage.

Andrés Duque’s great Blabbeando blog has provided great coverage, including some enlightened sport-star involvement in the issue and the segment below featuring baby-dyke blogstar Cumbio. In a report for Buenos Aires TV magazine Vertigo, homegirl and her camera crew walk right up to participants in an anti-gay marriage demonstration and starts engaging them, taking in a bunch of the usual insulting arguments against equality. But in a startling scene that you couldn’t imagine in a similar segment here in the US, she’s actually embraced and kissed by some of the maternal types among the evangelicals who insist on the old cliché that “it’s the sin, not the sinner.” Cumbio comes out of it a little annoyed, but notes later that they “didn’t treat [her] badly.”

Kinda refreshing, eh?
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: Federacion Argentina LGBT’s simple and powerful ad for marriage equality…
 

 
This photo is so wrong on so many levels, it staggers the mind. As if feeding your child Kahlua ain’t bad enough, check out the heavy artillery on the dresser. Anybody got this guy’s address?

 
Hard to believe that the British produced, cyber-punk series, Max Headroom actually appeared on American network television in 1987. Home Media reports,

“Max Headroom” starred Matt Frewer as a reporter whose mind is downloaded into a computer to create a virtual clone who exists in the digital world. Amanda Pays, Jeffrey Tambor and W. Morgan Sheppard also star in the series, which ran for 14 episodes on Cinemax and ABC in 1987 and 1988. Set in the near future, “Max Headroom” depicted a world of television run amok.

Using the medium it was satirizing, the darkly humorous and prophetic series warned of a future of media and corporate mind control that is right here and now. In a bizarre example of reality imitating art, Max Headroom became the corporate spokesman for the New Coke. “C-c-c-catch the wave!”

The complete Max Headroom series is being released on DVD by Shout Factory on August 10. 

In the video Paranoima, Max hooks up with Art Of Noise in “Happy Harry’s High Club”.
 

 
Come On Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners vs. LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out

This mashup takes two great songs to make a third, which is exactly what a great mashup does…and this is a great mashup. In addition to the sheer grooviness of the music, this video has something on its mind. Thriftshop XL, the cat behind the video re-mix, has this to say:

By selectively editing just a few shots over and over, the story of Kevin and Eileen becomes altogether more sinister. He and his friends harass her on the street daily, hold her against her will, even chase and catch her at one point. Meanwhile, in a darkened boxing ring, LL Cool J practices his uppercut.

Audio: DJ Lobsterdust

 
Today’s resurgence in black rock and Afro-punk has been accompanied by a boosted interest in obscure post-Hendrix black rock from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as shown by the rediscovery of Detroit bands like Death and Black Merda.

Elsewhere in the heartland, Cleveland’s late-‘60s soul and R&B scene (a role-call of which can be found in this bio for the Imperial Wonders) also boasted a clutch of guitar-centered rock bands, including the excellently named Purple Image. Rising from the 105th St. & Superior area (which took a big hit during the unrest resulting from the 1968 Granville Shootout), PI traded on a thumping, harder-than-Parliament psychedelic sound fortified by powerful group vocals and the two-guitar attack of Ken Roberts and Frank Smith. Unfortunately Purple Image’s excellent self-titled 1970 debut would be their one and only, becoming a rare black-rock nugget before it was re-released by the UK’s Radioactive label in 2007.

It would take another Midwestern black rocker to pick up the

but that’s another story…
 

 
Get: Purple Image - Purple Image [CD]

 
Rock and roll has it’s bizarro shooting stars. The weird and otherworldly Heinz Burt is one of the odder entries in rock’s “where are they now” files.

Heinz was the creation of producer Joe Meek, the Dr. Frankenstein of British pop. In an attempt to replicate the success of American rockabilly idols like Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent, Meek took a talent deficient German kid, peroxided his hair, stuffed him into a pair of winklepickers and put him in the recording studio. Meek thought he had found his Eddie Cochran (and rockabilly rent boy). After several recordings bombed , Meek and Burt finally snagged a top ten UK hit with an Eddie Cochran tribute song called Just like Eddie which reached number 5 in 1963. There was no second hit.

Meek, who had become a paranoid nutjob, went out with a bang in 1967 when he killed his landlady and then himself using a shotgun that belonged to Heinz.

In this 1964 video, Heinz, looking like an extra from Village Of The Damned, is joined by a guitar playing David Hemmings and Steve Marriot on drums.

Unnoticed by his headbobbing band mates, the bass player is quietly transforming into a werewolf.

 
Don’t do it, Ricky!!!
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
Summer means fun and what could be more fun than a hot Jamaican weekend with Hedo Rick.

Ladies, watch this and then thank me later!

The rippin’ and the tearin’, the rippin’ and the tearin’.

Merrill Womach is an American undertaker, organist and gospel singer, notable both for founding National Music Service,  a company which provides recorded music to funeral homes across America, and for surviving a plane crash that left him disfigured with third degree burns over most of his body. In his office is a crucifix made from the plane’s wreckage

I’m a sucker for an inspirational story of a man beating the odds, of overcoming insurmountable obstacles, a story of survival. My tears are easily jerked. Merrill Womach is my kind of hero, really. So, the melancholic nature of this video, seemingly totally at odds with its intent, strikes me as being, well, sad.

In this footage from the ‘70s, Merrill sings the ostensibly uplifting Happy Again to a room full of hospital burn patients. The song doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect. The depressed patients look like they’re seriously considering hurling themselves out of the hospital windows.