Fun, fun, fun cartoon music video of Richard Hell And The Voidoids “The Kid With The Replaceable Head.”

The version of “...Replaceable Head” used in the cartoon is the remixed and partially re-recorded version that appears on the Destiny Street Repaired album which was released in 2008, a reconstruction of 1982’s Destiny Street. The history of the record is an interesting one. In his review of Destiny Street Repaired, Bill Meyer gives us some insight to the album’s resurrection. Here’s an excerpt from Meyer’s article:

It took Hell five years to get around to recording a follow-up to Blank Generation. The Voidoids had been defunct for over a year and the man was soul sick, junk sick, and ready to give up the rock game. But he had some songs, a label ready to give him some money, a palpable need for that cash, and guitarist Robert Quine’s phone number, so in 1982 they pulled together a band — Hell on bass, Quine and the one-named Naux on guitars, Fred Maher on drums — to make one more record. Things went as planned for a week or two, but after cutting the backing tracks Hell lost his nerve and refused to come into the studio for a week and a half. According to Quine, he and Naux spent that time overdubbing every idea they’d ever wanted to try, which depending on your perspective turned the music into either “high-pitched sludge” (per Hell in the liner notes to the Spurts career retrospective) or the aforementioned glorious mess. After Hell finally dragged his sorry ass into the studio to finish the record, it sat in bad business limbo for another year before Line Records finally put it out.

Ever since then he’s expressed his disappointment with the result, and in 2008 Hell geared up to put it right by re-recording the vocals and lead guitars over rough mixes of the rhythm tracks.”

Hell brought in Bill Frisell, Ivan Julian and Marc Ribot to contribute to Destiny Street Repaired and the result was an album shocked like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster into new life. As Meyers puts it, the album is “more full and satisfyingly full-on.”

Despite the fact that overall there are fewer guitar tracks, the guitars are actually louder on Repaired than they are on the Line LP, and any record that showcases Ribot, Julian and Frisell in a rocking mood is nothing to ignore. The weirdly striated frequency spectrum of the original mastering job, which seemed as thin as mountain air in the higher frequencies, has been replaced by something much more full and satisfyingly full-on. And as a singer, Hell Mk 2008 manages to hit more of the notes with more force than his more desperate and debilitated self a quarter century earlier without going for any misguided notion of perfection.”

Bill Meyer’s entire review of Destiny Street Repaired can be read at Dusted.

Update 4/25: Meyer gives credit to German label Line Records for being the first label to release Destiny Street, which may be true for Germany but not the USA. In fact, it was released in the States on Marty Thau’s legendary Red Star records. In France, it was released by Celluloid. All in 1982. As to the source of the money for the making of the record, my bet is on Thau. I’ve e-mailed Marty and am waiting to hear back.
(Thanks, Mona).

Update 4/25: The always gracious Marty Thau responded to my questions regarding Destiny Street and its intriguing history:

“The Kid With The Replaceable Head (2008)” is available as part of the Richard Hell retrospective cd and can be purchased here.

Here are both versions;
 

 
Personally, I prefer the sludgy, raw basement sound of the original recording. The re-recorded version is a little clean with a slick sheen and the poppy background vocals up in the mix work against the punk Voidoid vibe. But, either way, it’s a great song and Richard Hell is undoubtedly a legend not to be messed with…unless he doin’ the messin.
 

 
The family home featured in H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Shunned House” is up for sale. Situated at 135 Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island, this south-facing house was built circa 1764, and offers: 

Original wideboard floors, period details, 1/3 acre landscaped garden, 4 terraced areas, pergola, koi pond, 2 car garage with potting shed

All of which can be yours for $925,000, details here.

Lovecraft’s story describes the mansion house on Benefit Street, as the building where Edgar Allan Poe:

...the world’s greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

Interestingly, it was a house in New Jersey that inspired Lovercraft’s tale, though 135 Benefit Street does have its own strange history:

Because of its policy of religious tolerance, early Providence had no common burying ground, no single place where everyone agreed to bury their dead. So, in accordance with the practice of the day, each family had a plot on their own land which served as a family graveyard. To us, this might seem a bit ghoulish, but it was just business as usual in colonial America.

Around the time of the Revolution, Back Street was widened and straightened and renamed Benefit Street, to relieve the heavy traffic along the Towne Street (now South Main) and to be “a Benefit for All.” The remains in all those little family plots were removed to North Burial Ground, then just recently opened. Allegedly, though, some of the bodies were left behind, and still remain buried here to this day. And, according to local legend, a Huguenot couple lived, died, and was buried on the site of #135, and were among the bodies that were missed.

When Stephen Harris built this house, his family fell on hard times. Harris was a well-to-do merchant in Providence, and owned several merchant vessels; it is said that a few of those vessels were lost at sea shortly after the completion of the house. This led to other financial problems. Mrs. Harris also had a hard time—several of her children died, and others were stillborn. (I was told by the current resident, who has done her own research into the house’s history, that there was never a live birth in the house.) Probably the most (melo)dramatic part of the legend, however, is Mrs. Harris’s descent into madness, and her confinement to an upstairs room. She was occasionally heard to shriek out the window of this room, but in French—a language she didn’t know. Where could she have picked it up? Dead Huguenots, anyone?

Read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned Room” here.
 

 

 

 
Thug Friends have dropped their new video, “Titties And Carrot Cake,” and I don’t know what to say other than I fucking dig it. Another awesomalishtic track from Really Real Nigga Shit Records.

Me and my homie TwiggyKix have come a long way since starting our rap group, Thug Friends, two weeks ago. (It hasn’t really been long at all, but fuck it #doe.) We’d like to thank everyone who has played a part in getting this done. WE LOVE Y’AAALLLLL, MAYNE! *wipes tear*… Alright, enough of that shit. Here’s the video. It’s Thug Friends, ho!

This diabolically funny parody of crunk rap from the mad geniuses at Made Monarchs is gonna go viral. Why? Because it’s not just funny, it’s a catchy as hell song and everybody loves titties and carrot cake.

When it comes to titty milk, I like mine slightly chilled and served in a shot glass.
 

 
Via Absolut-ism.com

Painting by Kirsten McCrea
 
Bluegrass singer and social activist Hazel Dickens has died at the age of 75.

Hazel Dickens made a difference. Born into a family of miners in Mercer County, West Virginia, Dickens was a fierce defender and advocate of the rights of women, miners, the poor and the oppressed. The songs she sang came up out of her own experience living in coal mining communities and later, when she moved to Baltimore and Washington,D.C., struggling to survive in urban environments that were strange and forbidding to a young woman raised in the mountain hollows of Appalachia.

Ms. Dickens grew up in dire poverty in West Virginia’s coal country and developed a raw, keening style of singing that was filled with the pain of her hardscrabble youth. She supported herself in day jobs for many years before she was heard on the soundtrack of the 1976 Oscar-winning documentary about coal mining, ”Harlan County, U.S.A.”

Her uncompromising songs about coal mining, such as “Black Lung” and “They Can’t Keep Us Down,” became anthems, and she was among the first to sing of the plight of women trying to get by in the working-class world. She was a key influence on such later singing stars as Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss and the Judds.”

Dickens was the first woman to receive the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Merit Award.

This is an excerpt from the documentary Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song directed by Mimi Pickering. The songs in the clip are the powerful and moving “Mannington Mines” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.”
 

 
Shot in 1925, Aurelio Rossis’ fascinating film diary of his trek into the Belgian Congo, In The Land Of Giants and Pygmies, has been restored from two stencil-colored 35mm prints found in a camera store in Lyon, France.

A time lost forever if not for this amazing footage.
 

 
Thank you Nile Southern!

 
Via MoveOn/Hat tip to Mark Szabo!

 
This documentary on Jean-Paul Sartre comes from the BBC documentary series Human, All Too Human,  which examined the development of Existentialism through the lives and work of three philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Beginning with Sartre’s notion that he only ever felt “truly free” under the Nazi occupation of France, the film examines Sartre’s development as a writer and thinker, exploring the difficulties he faced and his often contrary and changing beliefs - what his biographer Ronald Hayman described in 1986, as Sartre’s “thinking against himself by what Marxists call contradictions in the situation.”

Hayman concluded in Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre:

“His influence is still enormous, but it cannot be analyzed because it cannot be isolated. Particles of Sartre are in the blood that flows through our brains; his ideas, his categories, his formulations, his style of thinking are still affecting us. Ripples are still spreading from pebbles he threw into the water…

“...A major part of Sartre’s achievement rests on his courage and obstinacy in asserting that we are what we make of ourselves.”

 
Somehow how I missed this. Must have been because I was eating acid instead of watching TV.

The Hi-5 (Seth Evans, Jeffrey Comanor, Ted Barron, Vic King, Pam Robins) play “Did You Have to Rub It In” and get their hair cut on this episode of I’ve Got A Secret aired on March 7, 1966.

At first I thought the Hi-5 were a bunch of actors posing as a band, but no, the group were real and had a very brief recording career, releasing one single, “Did You Have To Rub It In,” on Vanguard Records.

And no, that is not Brad Laner on bass guitar.
 

 
These cleverly Photoshopped album covers are pretty funny. I had to do a double take because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on… I think my favorite is “I Don’t Like Me Either.”

All images are from the devious and NSFW website Twisted Vintage.
 

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Gallery of defaced LP sleeves