‘Mother’s Little Helper.’
 
Like. Love. Ha-Ha. Tweet. Share. Post. Walk. Don’t Walk. Keep to the left. Turn clockwise. Open lid carefully. Mind the gap. Wash hands after use. Keep out of the reach of children. At times it seems our lives are dictated by a series of commands and demands that tend to infantilize, curtail our thought, and generally make us, you know, uh, dumb.

American Brian McDonald is a mixed media artist whose work engages the viewer in questioning this ever-increasing noise that fills our existence.

My artwork is driven by a need to make sense of the world around me, which I see as fragmented, contradictory, and anxious. I seek to capture the cartoonishness that runs through American society wherein the individual is not only bombarded by an excess of information, choice, and rampant consumerism but is also in a constant state of wanting more.

He makes beautiful, funny, clever, playful pictures that are part painting and part collage.

Flotsam from this perpetual cycle of consumer pop culture is woven into my paintings, embedding the figures in an intricate web that suggests the non-stop movement of the mind, as well as the depth, complexity, and interconnectedness of life.

His paintings hint towards Dada and early works by David Hockney (We Two Boys Together Clinging) and Andy Warhol (Dick Tracy, Before and After) but with a singularly delightful sense of humor. He says the big influences on his work are “music, cartoons, and dreams” and he is “fascinated with their spatial, temporal and structural components,” which he sees “as analogous to contemporary consciousness.”

He creates his pictures “primarily with layers of paint and collage that are woven together to create a dense network of relationships ripe with narrative possibilities.”

By using disparate and often ambiguous imagery, the flow of ideas is disrupted, meaning is subverted, and logic is obfuscated. My work becomes infused with an elusive visual poetry that seeks to inspire viewers to make their own connections based on personal associations.

Based in San Francisco, McDonald originally studied languages (French and Italian) at university in California and Venice before considering a career as a writer. But that wasn’t what he wanted. He then tried furniture-making but that wasn’t the right fit either. It was only after attending painting classes that he found something that left him “hooked,” something that made him feel he was “making magic.”

It’s like when I hear a particularly beautiful piece of music or read a really great book, or experience any kind of work that deeply resonates with my being… it touches something inside of me, and I almost feel like it’s a connection to God, in a spiritual and not a religious sense.

McDonald has exhibited his work in group shows since 2002 and as a solo artist since 2003. See (or better buy) more of his work here.
 

‘Pecking Order.’
 

‘Tweet Storm.’
 
More super-duper pictures, after the jump…
 

The Runaways and their bad motorscooters.
 
It has been a while since I’ve put together a mega-post full of images of rock stars engaged in activities such as hanging out at the beach, playing records, or roller skating. This time around I’ve managed to cull photos of rock royalty with their motorcycles—or just posing along with a sweet Harley Davidson or classic Triumph. Much like a motorcycle, the idols in this post are synonymous with badassery—just like weathered battle jackets, dirty leather, and doing 60mph on a tight curve.

In January of this year I wrote a post about the time Judas Priest vocalist/motorcycle enthusiast Rob Halford challenged Queen’s Freddy Mercury to a “motorcycle race” after he saw Freddy glamming it up with a bike in the video for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Halford was miffed at Mercury for using the bike as a prop and wanted him to prove he was man enough to ride one. If there is one thing I believe we can all agree on, it is the following: Rob Halford and Freddie Mercury are both quantifiable badasses, and they both look great in leather chaps. I’ve posted photos of other musical luminaries you’d expect to appear in this post such as Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, members of Led Zeppelin, life-long biker Sly Stone, and Marc Bolan because, in general, Marc Bolan loves riding on top of things. And just so you know there are a plethora of photos featuring cool girls getting their bad-motor-scooting on such as Françoise Hardy, The Runaways (pictured at the top of this post), Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, and the great Doro Pesch of Warlock. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!
 

1975.
 

KISS, mid-70s.
 

Sid Vicious.
 
More motorcycle madness, after the jump…

A young Anthony Perkins looking very much like a teen idol on the cover of his 1958 jazz record, ‘From My Heart.’
 
Anthony Perkins is so well-known for his portrayal of Norman Bates, the cross-dressing killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that it often eclipses the fact Perkins was an exceptionally talented actor and had experienced success before playing the role which has often overshadowed his large body of work. Prior to 1960 Perkins had been busy working in television, since the age of 21, while appearing shoulder-to-shoulder in films with cinematic legends like Sophia Loren, Gary Cooper, Lee Van Cleef, Audrey Hepburn (whom Perkins serenaded in the 1959 film Green Mansions), and another infamous future horror icon, a young Betsy Palmer—the fictional mother of hockey-mask slasher Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th. During this time—specifically in 1956—Perkins made an appearance on NBC’s Goodyear Television Playhouse which required the actor to sing. The portrayal got Perkins an offer of a record contract with Epic, which he accepted. So yeah, I’m here to tell you Norman Bates knew how to swing like Sinatra, baby. This is a fact.

While it’s true Perkins scored a bonafide Top 30 hit with “Moonlight Swim” a single released in 1957,  unfortunately his musical career never really went anywhere commercially except number 24 on the Billboard charts the same year. Much like the determined Norman Bates, the actor wasn’t deterred and released three albums over the course of two years. So you know, I’m not here to poke fun at the fact Anthony Perkins (who, as a singer, went by Tony Perkins) for making a bunch of mellow jazz pop. I really dig his obscure contribution to musical culture as well as the image of Perkins kicking out the feel-good jams in a recording studio in Hollywood during the 1950s. And, as it turns out, he’s a very talented vocalist with legitimate emotive skill and range. Of course, all this makes sense as Perkins spent his fair share of time on the stage throughout his career. Perkins, as many of you may know, is also the father of excellent alt-folk rocker, Elvis Perkins.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention there are a number of songs in the elder Perkins’ catalog which become alarmingly sinister-sounding (especially lyrically) if you consider they are being crooned out by the future Norman fucking Bates, such as “Accidents Will Happen,” “The Prettiest Girl in School,” “Why Shouldn’t I,” and “Why Was I Born.” I’ve posted a few tunes by Perkins for you to ponder below. You will never be able to look at Psycho the same way again, that’s for sure. I also included some choice photos of Perkins as a preening pop star, and a black and white clip of Perkins performing “If You Can Find Me, I’m Here” on the television show Evening Primrose in 1966, which is pretty much golden.
 

Perkins in the recording studio sometime in the 1950s.
 

Tony Perkins on the cover of his single “The Prettiest Girl in School”/“No No No. It Isn’t True” showing us a little Norman Bates in the face in 1958.
 
More after he jump…

Photograph by Erin Norris
 
There’ll never be a reunion tour, and there’ll never be a fancy box set of rarities and non-album tracks, but Jonathan Fire*Eater had a brief, important run as an attention-getting band in New York City, just a few years before the formidable Brooklyn scene of the early 2000s coalesced. The lead singer and primary songwriter for the band was Stewart Lupton, who sadly passed away of unknown causes over the weekend at the age of 43.

When they were an active band it was their fate to be resented, and as soon as they stopped existing it was their fate to be sorely missed. Jonathan Fire*Eater would probably have been a bigger deal in the eyes of posterity if they had emerged a few years later than they did. The band consisted of five young men who had met at a fancy prep school in Washington, D.C., who relocated to the Lower East Side in the very last moment that it would be considered a sketchy neighborhood. In the event, they signed to the brand-new Dreamworks SKG label for “a million-dollar three-record deal,” according to Carl Swanson’s article about the band, which appeared in the New York Observer right after they broke up in the summer of 1998. Three members of the band, Paul Maroon, Walter Martin, and Matt Barrick, would team up with Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer from the Recoys to become the Walkmen, which put out several quality albums.

Jonathan Fire*Eater’s trick was to foreground slippy, atmospheric percussion and employ the guitar sound primarily for rhythmic or modal effects. The prominence of the electric organ in their sound ensured associations with garage rock, but they were really an art rock band influenced by the Velvet Underground, even as Lupton’s vocals frequently channeled Mick Jagger. Lupton was one of the few people in the world who had could get away with writing rock lyrics that invited descriptors like “dripping” or “drenched.” It was self-consciously “poetic” material about decadence and discord, vignettes of excess. Some examples:
 

And if I fly first class on a 747
Oh I got magazines and gin
I read a clubber’s guide baby to Berlin
Oh I can see the glaciers and the dorsal fins
Out here on the tundra
There ain’t no thunder
The ink-spot sky pulling me under
Under we go
(”Bipolar Summer”)

Are you married to an unfaithful world
Where you carry the flags if they come unfurled?
Are you locked into a projection booth
That shows the films of your troubled youth?
(”Everybody Plays the Mime”)

Come a-hither come a-hither to me under the canopy
Pull the sheets up high another milky sky
There are oranges and bananas and coffee with cream
Try to be patient now while your brother tells his dream

I remember a storm and a picnic by the lake
I remember the mess a little anger can make
I eat my breakfast like the food at a wake
Like a little lamb
(From “A Night in the Nursery”)

 
The band was a bit famous for a while, but often in contexts that foregrounded the unlikelihood of their ever securing mass acceptance, which gave the whole project a quixotic feel. They opened for Blur and Pulp and Suicide and made Dreamworks pay for some necessary dental work required by their manager, Walter Durkacz, who was once a DJ at Danceteria. I remember in the 10th anniversary issue of Time Out New York, it was revealed that the worst-selling issue the magazine had ever put out was the one with them on the cover. This was a very Jonathan Fire*Eater sort of factoid.

The rest of the band were drinkers—haunts included the No Tell Motel, Mars Bar, and Max Fish—but Lupton was into heroin; the rest of his all-too-short life would be defined mainly by his valiant attempts to get clean.

Continues after the jump…

“I’m in love with eternity . . . I don’t care about how many changes that go on, as long as it keeps going on.”

—Ornette Coleman

In 1965 a bohemian American expat in Paris named Tom White shot an almost silent B&W art film “happening” titled Who’s Crazy? His movie depicted the inmates of an insane asylum who are being transported somewhere by bus when they are able to escape to a farmhouse where they frolic, eat, dance, prance, primal scream, make a mess, pull faces, drip candle wax on each other, light stuff on fire and generally “act out” and get their Vietnam-era freak frenzy on, plus there is a kangaroo court enacted at one point. And a wedding. If this sounds like what a Living Theatre production of King of Hearts might have looked like should they have attempted one, well you’re in the immediate ballpark already as the inmates were in fact played by actual members of the Living Theatre, then living in exile in Europe while their married leaders Julian Beck and Judith Malina did a stint in prison back home in America for tax troubles. White’s film was screened at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and Salvador Dali was reported to have loved it, although the Becks hated it, telling White that his film did not represent the Living Theatre’s “energy vector.” (“Well they would think that, wouldn’t they?” I can almost hear you saying under your breath.)

Who’s Crazy? never found any sort of distribution and was forgotten for fifty years, with just one extant 35mm print stored in White’s garage when it was rediscovered in 2016 by Vanessa McDonnell, a programmer at Brooklyn microcinema Spectacle. Since then the film has screened at Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archives and been written about in the New York Times.
 

 

“To be a man, whatever a man is… There is something that is very important about being a man. And it’s not necessarily your honesty, or your philosophy; but it has more to do with you being able to get away with what you can do and someone else saying, ‘Well that’s him.’”

—Ornette Coleman

But White’s oddball film is not really our topic here, it is the film’s remarkable soundtrack, which was improvised in Paris by Ornette Coleman and the two other members of his trio—David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on percussion, the same musicians who accompanied Coleman on his classic Golden Circle albums. In 1966 Ornette Coleman would have been considered perhaps the most far-out of the furthest-out avant garde jazz musicians of that era (and long past it) and in the mid-1960s he was on a creative hot streak that had been going on for quite some time. He met White while touring in France and agreed to do the soundtrack for Who’s Crazy? The trio improvised some nervous and beautifully chaotic music whilst watching the film as it was screened for them in the recording studio.  A young Marianne Faithfull sings lyrics written especially for her by Ornette “Is God man? Is man God?” in a track titled “Sadness.”

But Coleman’s music—released as bootlegs in the late 70s and a Japanese CD in the early 90s—was not the only ancillary result of Tom White’s pre-hippie art film: English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine made his own short film, titled David, Moffett, and Ornette, about the soundtrack recording session. The film is an amazing treat, by far the most intimate portrait we have of this giant of jazz at the height of his powers. Comparable to being able to watch the master painting in The Mystery of Picasso or indeed the footage of Miles Davis and his Quintet similarly improvising as he watched Louis Malle’s film noir, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (“Elevator to the Gallows”) unspool, we get to SEE a great musical genius at work and in Ornette’s case we see his fingers on his violin and piano (yes piano, an instrument Coleman never played on any album) and his lips on his horn. You get to see him THINK and it’s absolutely an extraordinary thing to be able to witness.

Ornette Coleman: The Atlantic Years deluxe 10-LP vinyl box has just been released by Rhino. Enter below to win.
 

 
During 2016 and 2017, a bootleg label, Mad Hatter Records, put out five Van Halen vinyl releases that featured previously uncirculated live material from the late 1970s. The LPs were only available in super-limited quantities. How limited were they, you ask? At the most, twelve copies were offered for sale, and as little as nine. Van Halen fans FREAKED OUT when digitized versions of these LPs were recently posted online.

The earliest show was recorded in 1978 during their first trek, when Van Halen was brand spanking new. There’s a 1979 rehearsal for the tour supporting their second record, and three stereo soundboards (!!!) from that outing. This is a young and hungry Van Halen, and they were never better on stage than during this period.
 

 
The 1978 recording was captured on April 3rd at a Wichita club called Pogo’s. The set is filled with songs from their first album and also includes a tune that can’t be found on any of their official albums—a cover of “Summertime Blues.” They open with the punk-metal number, “On Fire,” and it’s a burner, for sure; Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing is positively sick. When EVH plays his groundbreaking “Eruption” solo, you can tell the audience is stunned into silence.

Much more, after the…er… jump…

 
YouTube user Bruno S. has taken a lot of killer TV footage of Seventies bands and cleaned up the sound and picture. (Listen, for instance, to his Captain Beefheart live at Beat-Club.)

I particularly like what Bruno S. has done with Can’s appearance on WDR’s Musik Extra, recorded in January 1977, a few months before they ceased to exist as a live band. It’s the five-piece lineup that played Can’s last shows: Jaki Liebezeit on drums, Michael Karoli on guitar, Holger Czukay on tapes and effects, Irmin Schmidt on keyboard and Silver Surfer jacket, and Rosko Gee on bass. Music does not get much better than their jam on “Dizzy Dizzy,” the first track from Soon Over Babaluma, and “Don’t Say No” is pretty good, too.

Bruno S. omits the interview Can gave Musik Extra.
 

 
Mean-spirited? Perhaps—okay, alright, sure, it’s downright nasty—but it’s also hilarious and surreal. I think it’s a masterpiece, personally. It’ll make you laugh, it will make you cry. I was a mess!

Jerry Lewis is still big in France, you know…

(Runs away)
 

“Why is Johnny Carson?”

Free Time, a series on New York City’s public TV station WNET, devoted its October 14, 1971 broadcast to Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and Jonas Mekas’ performance of excerpts from Ono’s “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park.” The title was significant. It had been the name of a short story she published in the student newspaper at Sarah Lawrence, and it was very close to the name of her first musical performance in 1961. And then there was Grapefruit (“The greatest book I’ve ever burned”—John Lennon), Yoko’s small-press, limited-edition book of instructions from ‘64, reprinted by Simon & Schuster and stocked, I imagine, in every B. Dalton and Brentano’s in ‘70 and ‘71.

Shortly before this aired, the New York Times reported Free Time was about to return in a “new format.” Perhaps this meant more bohemian, radical fare; another episode from around the same time featured Allen Ginsberg with Bob Dylan, Peter Orlovsky, and Gerard Malanga. All I really know about the show comes from former WNET president James Day’s description in The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television:

[The] original concept was an open studio—anyone with the desire to be seen and heard would be welcome to drop in—but that gave way to the more practical concept of a thrice-weekly, late-night (10:30 P.M. to midnight) live show with a minimum of structure and maximum of provocation. Abbie Hoffman “moderated” a panel on the press; the consuls general of India and Pakistan debated the war in Bangladesh; and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda aired their unpopular views on the Vietnam War. The show’s tissue-thin budget produced lots of talk: open-ended discussions by Bronx street gangs, New York cabbies, black film producers, women writers, domestic help, telephone operators, and other denizens of a world rarely glimpsed on the tube. [...]

On one memorable evening, Free Time featured the spiritually inspired films of Yoko Ono, including a film consisting only of the movements of a fly on the nipple of a woman’s breast. The attention to the film was broken, however, when her husband John Lennon put in a surprise appearance, set up a ladder, and invited the studio audience to join him in “flying” off the top rung. One hapless “bird” sustained a broken arm.

Several of the broadcast’s pieces—the peeking, the flying, the wrapping—are straight out of Yoko’s 1967 performance in Liverpool. The flying routine (which goes from the 12-minute mark to about 15:40) does not develop quite as Day remembered it. The startling thing is that the broken arm comes early; long after the ladder topples, people are lining up to jump into John’s arms. “Every one a winner,” he says, as he tries to catch them. “Except the one.”

If PBS was still like this (i.e., live, unpredictable, insane, morally instructive, revolutionary), I might even contribute money during the pledge drive. But when they were hard up, it seemed “Dr.” Wayne Dyer was always bloviating, and I was always donating my scorn. How much scorn gets you the tote bag?
 

 
Tom Adams is an artist best-known for his cover artwork for books by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Kingsley Amis, and John Fowles during the 1960s and 1970s. He also produced posters for the likes of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Soft Machine and album covers for Lou Reed and Iron Maiden. You may not know the name but you will certainly recognize one of the many book covers he has designed, in particular, those for Christie and Chandler.

Adams’ covers for Christie’s classic whodunnits? were usually painted as collages that featured key scenes (and sometimes clues) from the book. These paintings were macabre, unsettling, and very often surreal. Adams continued this style with his covers to Chandler’s novels where two or three storylines are woven into one dream-like image. Lou Reed was such a fan of Adams’ Christie covers, he asked him to provide a painting for his self-titled debut solo album.

Born in in Providence, Maine, in 1926, Adams studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then Goldsmith’s College where he graduated with a diploma in painting. Adams went onto work on a variety of comics including Eagle where he wrote and illustrated Regimental Histories. In 1958, he co-founded a design company producing murals for various institutions and then furniture for the likes of Harrods. In 1962, he was asked to design the cover for Christie’s A Murder is Announced, which led to Adams designing covers for Christie’s back catalog. However, it should be noted that Adams’ covers for the UK print run differ considerably from the US editions. UK publishers Fontana allowed Adams free reign to create his own designs. PocketBooks in the US commissioned Adams to produce only one scene for the cover. Prints of Adams “alarmingly realistic’ covers are available here.
 

 

 

 
More dark and disturbing covers, after the jump…