How the below clip escaped inclusion in my previous post on the stupendously great British actor (and even greater talk show guest) Oliver Reed is UTTERLY beyond me!  So, with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (?!) as his backing band, here’s a relatively coherent Reed taking The Troggs standby, Wild Thing, out for a spin.  Oh, and please watch to the end.  The Reedster makes a hysterically inappropriate comment regarding his Women In Love costar Glenda Jackson.

 
Inspired by Richard’s post about Blondie, I had to hip you all the Debbie Harry’s psychedelic 60’s band The Wind in the Willows.  Their sole album released on Capitol in 1968 is a patchy affair, but definitely does contain some lysergic classics, including the above.  A search for the lost band also procured this oddity down below.  Not too far off from her work with The Wind in the Willows I must say.
 

 
The first of these delightful video clips of Brazilian jazz genius Hermeto Pascoal has been circulating wildly amongst music fans for a while now, and for good reason. It’s one of the most lovely and entertaining bits of musical performance you’re ever likely to see. The other clips are equally fun: Hermeto playing his beard (!) and various dental tools. What’s not to love about this guy? Not to mention his role on Miles Davis’ wicked Live-Evil LP. A true creative master !
 

(via Wooster Collective)

(Via i am blog.)

John and I wrote She’s Leaving Home together. It was my inspiration. We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It’s a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well.

While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents’ view: ‘We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.’ I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there’s the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”, they weren’t real people.

The Daily Mirror story that inspired She’s Leaving Home was about Melanie Coe, then aged 17. Wild child Coe snuck out of her parents comfortable North London home in February of 1967. She was pregnant and afraid of what her mother might do, but had not run off with the father of her unborn child—or “a man from the motor trade,” for that matter—rather with a croupier she’d met. They shacked up for a week before her parents found her. She later had an abortion.

But here’s the weird part: three years earlier Coe had actually met Paul McCartney when he was the judge of a miming contest that Coe won on Ready, Steady, Go! Coe mimed to Brenda Lee’s Let’s Jump The Broomstick and Macca gave her the award. Winning the contest meant Coe would be a dancer on the show for an entire year.
 

Watch human brains ‘doin’ it’ to a catchy little tune.

(via Nerdcore)

(Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984)
 
How to now make sense of that master of the dark tableau, Joel-Peter Witkin?  Unlike some photographers whom I seem to have an ongoing fascination with (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin to name a few), Witkin came along in the ‘80s, and I’ve hardly paid attention to him since.  His images, though, continue to startle and provoke—as does the rigor with which he makes them.

With his relentless focus on freaks, deformity, and the ravages of the flesh, Witkin’s obsessions back then overlapped a bit with ‘80s David Lynch.  In fact, you could easily plop the Eraserhead baby into a Witkin still-life.

My entirely spontaneous—and possibly reductive—theory as to why Witkin peaked in ‘80s?  AIDS was peaking, too.  The horror of what the body was capable of was, sadly, all too apparent everywhere.  Witkin perhaps was simply channeling that dread.

The photographer’s own version of what sparked his obsessions is as fitting as it is notorious:

It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived.  We were going to church.  While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help.  The accident involved three cars, all with families in them.  Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand.  At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars.  It stopped at the curb where I stood.  It was the head of a little girl.  I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it—but before I could touch it someone carried me away.

To hear, and see, more of what makes photographer Joel-Peter Witkin tick (including an account of his initiation into sex with a pre-op transexual), check out the following segment from Vile Bodies, a ‘98 Channel 4 documentary made on the body and the “crisis of looking.”  A link to Part II of Witkin’s segment follows at the bottom.

 
Joel-Peter Witkin Vile Bodies Part II

 
I just did a quick search and to my surprise, none of us has ever posted about the magnificent spacerock maelstrom that is the Hawkwind sound. One of rock’s longest running groups, Hawkwind has always stood outside of any particular era or fashion. With their statuesque dancer Stacia Blake, a pioneer of onstage nudity (who often appeared buck naked except for body paint) and lyrical contributions from Michael Moorcock, there was noting even remotely similar to what Hawkwind was doing onstage in the early ‘70s. It’s apropriate probably, to compare them to the Grateful Dead, an act that was more about the live experience than the albums.

A big influence on groups like the Psychedelic Furs, the driving sci-fi metal drone of Hawkwind would eventually give rise to one of the heaviest combos of all time, when bassist Lemmy Kilmister would leave the group—after being arrested for possession of speed—and form Motorhead. (Lemmy once told me personally that speed did what cocaine is supposed to do. So now you know!).

Below is a mind-twisting live performance clip, originally shown on Top of the Pops in 1972 of Hawkwind performing SIlver Machine with the lovely Stacia in tow.
 

 
For some time, bizarro auteur David Lynch has paid the bills by directing quirky/beautiful television commercials for products like Clear Blue home pregnancy tests, Gucci perfume and Nissan’s Micra. (He directed a particularly odd one for cigarettes.) Now Lynch is back with “Lady Blue Shanghai” a 16-minute short for Dior with French actress Marion Cotillard making mysterious moves around Shanghai locales searching for a glowing purse. All the (in)famous Lynchian touches are there, with the addition this time of John Galliano’s stunning art direction.

Translation: It’s a weird little film. The House of Dior is getting double its money’s worth by funding this project: every hip blog on the planet—including this one—will race to post about the latest from David Lynch. This is a good thing, of course. How else would these diversions get funded?