If you have a spare fifteen whole minutes, you could do worse than check out the new short film John Was Trying to Contact Aliens on Netflix about John Shepherd, a guy who has spent 30 years beaming out obscure music to aliens, constructing a homemade SETI project based at—and taking over—his grandparents home in rural Michigan. We shot the breeze with director Matt Killip.
Dangerous Minds: Firstly, how did you come across John Shepherd, the subject of your new short film on Netflix?
Matt Killip: I first saw a picture of John in the book Messengers of Deception by the UFO researcher Jacques Vallée. The same photo is in my film: John is seated in front of a large bank of UFO tracking machines in a living room, with his grandma next to him doing her knitting. I immediately wanted to know more about this image—what was going on here?
Luckily I was able to track John down and make contact. When I heard about the circumstances of his personal life I started to realize his story could make a beautiful film. A while later I found some footage of John broadcasting the band Harmonia into outer space. It turned out that John was broadcasting loads of music that I love into the cosmos: Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Terry Riley, Gamelan music from Indonesia, free jazz, loads of reggae and dub ... It was an amazing playlist—in effect a cosmic radio station broadcasting music for aliens.
DM: He’s quite amazing, playing music into deep space for aliens to come across and make contact. But most people would maybe have a dream of doing this, whereas John takes over his grandparents house to actually do this!
Matt Killip: Ha! Well, John is completely self-taught, he built many of the machines you see in the film himself. He has an incredible technical mind, a deep love of physics and, in particular, electricity. He spent a lot of time hunting in scrap yards and military auctions with his grandfather, who was a machinist and also helped him build some of the equipment. The radar John built was sitting on a tower made out of a scrapped ski lift! But I don’t really explore the science behind what John was doing in my film. I was afraid of getting slowed down in technical details when I was most interested in the fundamentally romantic idea of contact: this search John had for something beyond him.
DM: Yes , he seems to be on a romantic quest of some kind, to ‘make contact.’
Matt Killip: I know a lot of people might view John’s project as quite eccentric but I would encourage everybody to think about it another way: we are on a planet, that’s part of a galaxy, one of billions with an infinite number of other suns and planets. We don’t know what else is out there ... Why wouldn’t you try to make contact? John was using music as a sign—or even a gift—to other consciousnesses.
DM: You pack a heck of a lot into fifteen minutes.. It has the three act structure of a feature film… in fact it is better than many feature films I’ve seen…
Matt Killip: Thanks!
DM: What are the challenges of keeping a film short? Were you tempted to make it as a feature doc?
Matt Killip: I just wanted to stick to the core of the storytelling. Originally there was a whole section about UFO culture, but I cut it out to make the story flow better. Also, I’ve only made short format films, so maybe I’m a little scared of making a longer one…
DM: Your earlier films are pretty bonkers. There’s one about teenage backyard wrestler and horror filmmaker Ronny Long, and another about a guy who arranges microscopic creatures onto slides in psychedelic patterns. What’s the connection?
Matt Killip: I’m think I’m drawn to people who have found ways to escape everyday reality into other worlds. I’m really sympathetic to that impulse.. I share it to a certain extent, but I’m lacking the obsessive drive needed to see it through. It’s a very singular vision that allows Ronny the teenager to keep creating for his own pleasure, or John to broadcast music for 30 years, never knowing for sure if anyone could hear it.
DM: Tell me more about Ronny. (Full disclosure - I met Ronny Long when he visited the UK to hold an exhibition at the Horse Hospital in London. Ronny is as great as you would imagine from watching Master of Reality.)
Matt Killip: I’ve always loved wrestling for the characters and story lines, it’s like a kind of folk theatre. In the early 2000s my interest led me to Ronny Long’s website “Texas Boneyard Wrestling.” Ronny had started a horror-based wrestling federation in his backyard in the suburbs of Dallas. It was a really elaborate affair and so much thought and effort went into it. He was fifteen at the time. After speaking with him I realised that wrestling was only part of Ronny’s story—he was obsessed with Bigfoot and cryptozoology, was continuously drawing and painting and had been making abortive attempts at horror movies for several years. He was burning up with this stuff. His output was enormous and it seemed like he was compelled to create these things. He was not getting support or encouragement from anywhere—certainly not from school—but he was just off, creating these worlds. I really love that about him.
DM: Are you still in touch with Ronny?
Matt Killip: Still in touch… These days Ronny is still drawing and painting. He also records a wild talk show in his basement.
DM: I really love his paintings of Bigfoot.
Matt Killip: As a nine-year-old kid he really believed in Bigfoot. They are him. He has something of an outsider quality to him. And yes, his paintings are amazing.
DM: And The Diatomist?
Matt Killip: I love nature and have made several shorts that could be considered in some way nature films. In the case of The Diatomist, I came across an extraordinary image of an antique diatom arrangement. I couldn’t quite believe that these beautiful microscopic sculptures were actually tiny sea creatures, completely invisible to the naked eye.
In general I get tripped out by the extraordinary variety to be found in the natural world. Looking through books on moths, beetles, mushrooms or lichen, the multiple different forms, related but always changing, are completely amazing to me. It’s as close to a religious experience as I can get. Diatom arrangements completely embody that sublime feeling. After more research I discovered that there was one man, Klaus Kemp, keeping this Victorian art form alive, so I immediately got in touch with him. Klaus is undoubtedly obsessive, but it’s a beautiful obsession. He is practicing an artform that embodies Darwin’s phrase: endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
DM: The films all seem to end in a cosmic way, with the humans somehow part of a great cosmos.
Matt Killip: I guess we are all trying to find our place in the cosmos. It’s just….. there’s a good quote by Carl Sagan… here it is … “The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question - the search for who we are.”
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt makes music that is right for our time. Challenging. Difficult. Powerful. Brilliant. That kinda thing.
Plague covers the planet. Cities shut down. Rioters loot and burn. Welcome to the New Normal. Put on your mask and shop this way.
There’s gotta be a way out. Maybe Marquardt’s music offers one?
I was supposed to talk with Marquardt sometime in June. Or was it July? The days merge. One day is much the same as the next—under a lockdown that gave me one hour-a-day outside (for exercise) and one trip (only if really, really, really necessary) to the store for essentials. Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt could be one of those essentials. He’s not to everyone’s taste I know but his music is important and relevant. Especially today.
We should have spoken together in June or July but then his nephew was shot dead on the streets. An horrific tragedy. What can you say? I sent condolences. Waited. Waited. Didn’t know what else to do. Looked back on what I’d once written:
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt is an American musician who lives in Germany. He has been making music since he was six-years-old. He started by writing songs or “texts” and “melodies” as he describes it before taking an interest in House Music in his teens. Sean began DJing, before moving from Chicago to Berlin, where he started singing and playing guitar with metal bands. It was in Europe that he began his interest in electronic music.
With a desire to balance both his love of electronic with metal, Sean produced drone, ambient and noise recordings, developing his own distinct form of “Accidental Guitar Music.”
“Accidental Guitar” is a holistic and grounded concept that includes three main aspects. The first of these is the creation of sounds and sound worlds by combining the guitar with distortion effects – a type of “routing” or “mapping” technique where the musician does not lose himself, however, but instead works in a deliberate manner with the tools available to him. The second dimension of “Accidental Guitar” is improvisation—an approach that Cooper Marquardt has chosen, systematically rejecting predetermined choreographies and all forms of rehearsal or planning. This applies not only to live performances, but also when making recordings in his studio. Finally, the third dimension to this concept is the specific situation that the musician encounters when playing: the atmosphere and setting, the persons, conditions and moods present in the space in question lead to a contextualisation of his music.
Sean has released over 500 recordings as solo artist, collaborative artist, or just playing on someone else’s tracks. He has performed across the world. Gigged. Toured. Played the festivals. When I approached him before to ask some Q&A he preferred to “create [an] article without using the question and answers normal modus of operation.”
Yeah, I know.
He wrote and said he wanted to do the same again and I should contact a guy called Nicholus. It’s a bit like speaking through an agent, or maybe a medium, or just selling myself to do PR—which ain’t what my job entails. If you push to be interviewed then you should be available to be interviewed—it’s a business—otherwise you’re just playing games and after all this was the second time Marquardt had opted out.
Who knows? Maybe it’s me? I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t even talk to me…and I promised to write myself every week too…
“Woman with absinthe glass, Moulin Rouge” by Jeanne Mammen (early 1900s).
“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.”
—a quote from artist Jeanne Mammen from the only interview she would ever do during her career, with art historian Hans Kinkel, 1975.
Described as “artistically gifted” at a very early age, Jeanne Mammen’s family would move from her birthplace of Berlin to Paris when she was five. She immersed herself in French literature—especially that of the great Romantic novelist Victor Hugo and the poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1907, at the age of seventeen, Mammen and her sister Adeline attended Académie Julian. The Académie Julian was an artistic refuge, especially for women who were allowed to enroll and where they had access to nude male models as subject matter. This is important as other art-centric schools had been slow to admit women into their institutions. If they did, women were not allowed to participate in painting or life study classes with their male counterparts.
Jeanne and Adeline would move on to Brussels to continue their studies. Then to Rome, where they attended both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (aka “The Scuola Libera del Nudo,” or “free school of the nude,” for the teaching of life-drawing). The sisters would return to Paris in 1912 only to be forced to flee the city with their family. Unfortunately, their successful merchant father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was labeled a “foreign enemy” and all of the family’s possessions, including their home, were confiscated. By 1916, the Mammen family was impecunious and living in Berlin doing any kind of work they could collectively find to keep financially afloat. After some time, Jeanne and her sister were able to afford to rent a studio apartment. The small apartment would eventually become a place Jeanne seldom left and where she would bring her observations of Berlin to life. Her work was widely published in magazines, as well as her writing. She was finally, once again, financially secure. But as 1933 and WWII loomed, Mammen would once again find herself out of work, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. Here is another quote attributed to Mammen’s lone interview on how she managed to keep creating despite the Nazis’ best efforts to stop her and other artists whom they categorized as “degenerates”:
“With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’ period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”
Influenced by artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, Mammen seemed to embrace Figuratism as early as 1908, painting in this style for approximately six years before her work became more aligned with Symbolism. A wildly prolific artist who worked in various mediums, including watercolor, Mammen’s muses included members of Berlin’s queer community, a plethora of women, and vivid interjections of religious imagery and symbolism. Following the conclusion of WWII, Mammen would allegedly tell her longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, that “the ruins of Jeanne can be found in the ruins of Berlin.” After seven decades of creating artwork that still refuses to be defined by a singular artistic description, Mammen would pass away in Berlin at the age of 86. Mammen’s long career and artwork have been the subject of a couple of books including Jeanne Mammen: Paris – Bruxelles – Berlin (2017), Jeanne Mammen The Observer: Retrospective, 1910–1975 (2018). Her work is also featured in Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic: From Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen (2018).
Images spanning Mammen’s impressive career follow.
Five years ago, we told you about the marvelous documentary, ‘Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be’. At the time, the doc could only be seen on the film festival circuit, but recently it’s been made available on streaming platforms for the first time. As my last viewing had been years ago, I recently watched it anew via Amazon Prime. I was reminded that director J. Elvis Weinstein did an incredible job presenting Michael’s truly amazing life, and the film was a joy to see again.
Below is a slightly revised version of our 2015 post concerning ‘Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be?’.
*****
Musician/actor/satellite radio DJ Michael Des Barres has worn many hats over his decades-long career. As a vocalist, he’s fronted such acts as the Power Station, filling in for Robert Palmer on their lone US tour (with a high-profile appearance at Live Aid), and the highly underrated Somebody up There Likes Me, a neglected LP that deserved better. His biggest success (in the form of royalties) has been as songwriter, having co-penned “Obsession,” a worldwide hit for ‘80s synth-pop act Animotion. In addition, he’s a talented character actor, best known for his recurring role as TV villain Murdoc on MacGyver. His versatility is acknowledged in the title of the fabulous documentary, Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be?. Dangerous Minds got in touch with the director of the film, J. Elvis Weinstein, and asked him some questions via email.
How did you come to know Michael’s work?:
J. Elvis Weinstein: The first time I came to know Michael as a musician was when he joined the Power Station, but I recognized him from TV roles at the time. I was a TV junkie as a kid. He lived in my head as a trivia question for many years. I’d always notice him in TV and movie roles.
The many faces of Murdoc.
How and when did you approach Michael about making a documentary about him? Was he open to the idea or did it take some convincing?:
J. Elvis Weinstein: We met several years ago working on a TV series, me a as writer/producer, he as a cast member. We spoke about writing a book and even did some interviews at the time, but it never materialized. Then a few years ago, we ended up guests on the same radio show and I mentioned we should have done a documentary instead of a book. There was instant agreement; we were shooting within three weeks.
What drove you to make the documentary?:
J. Elvis Weinstein: I knew that there was a great story to be told and that there were things I could learn for myself from telling it.
Michael appears open and frank during the interview segments in the film. Were you surprised by anything he told you? One of the things I learned from watching the film is that Silverhead was really Michael’s project and the other members were hired guns—I never knew!:
J. Elvis Weinstein: Michael was very generous in his willingness to examine and re-examine his life as honestly as possible through this process. I think he realized very early on that I wasn’t striving for a sensationalistic telling of the story but rather a very human one.
As for surprises, I don’t have any specific ones that jump out. While Silverhead were hired musicians, they quickly became a very collaborative and tightly knit band. Michael was very much the leader, but the sound evolved from the players.
A fan shows Michael some love during a Silverhead gig, 1974.
I also learned that Michael and his ex-wife Pamela (Miss Pamela of the GTO’s) met on the set of a movie (the still unreleased Arizona Slim). It’s really interesting to see some of their first interactions captured on film. What do you make of their relationship, then and now?:
J. Elvis Weinstein: I think the thing that is the coolest about them is the relationship they’ve cultivated since splitting as a couple. The respect, warmth, and love they maintain for one another as friends and parents of a great son is a lovely example for everyone.
If you are a big “rock” fan of a certain age—and American—you almost certainly grew up reading CREEM magazine. I sure did. I loved CREEM. The magazine was one of the first indications to my young mind that there was a much bigger, much badder and much cooler world outside of my dingy hometown. I read every issue until I memorized the articles. It informed my foundational musical tastes more than any other influence, and by some margin. Even the way I write.
The very first time I bought CREEM was the March 1975 Lou Reed cover. I spotted it in a downmarket hillbilly grocery store in Wheeling, WV. It looked weird and interesting. Certainly it stood out on the newstand of the era. I was a nine-year-old kid who’d only recently moved on from Planet of the Apes and James Bond movies after hearing “Space Oddity” on AM radio late one night and having my mind completely blown. I knew there was some connection between David Bowie and Lou Reed, but that was about it. What made me decide to spend my weekly $1 allowance on the magazine was the title the author, Lester Bangs, had given that cover story: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves (or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake).” I found this very intriguing and mysterious. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. What’s a death dwarf? And why was Lou Reed a famous one?
That legendary encounter between Reed and Bangs is today something studied at universities, an iconic bit of rock lore and a classic piece of gonzo journalism. It had a tremendous hold on my not-so-innocent young imagination. It might have been the first thing I’d ever read that made drugs seem really cool. It also made me want to talk—and write—just like Lester Bangs. As a literary stylist I put him on the same level as Kurt Vonnegut, that’s how much I liked what he did. Plus Bangs had tremendous taste in music. If he championed a group or performer, I had to hear it, even if that meant—in the case of the Velvet Underground or the Stooges—doing yard work for my parents and neighbors until I could save up enough money to buy German imports via Moby Disc, an LA-based record store that advertised their mail-order business in CREEM. (My mother had to get money orders from the post office for me to do this. It would take four to six weeks to get the album, but if you were in a rural area, this was your only option back then. If anything it goes to show the lengths someone would go to purchase as-yet-unheard music that Bangs had rhapsodized about. His prose was so good and evocative that I just knew—I was sure of it—that if he was enthusiastic about something, I was no doubt going to love it, too. Lester never let me down, not ever, not once.)
I discovered so many things via CREEM: Obviously Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Patti Smith, MC5, the New York Dolls, Ramones, Sex Pistols, the Clash. Yeah, CREEM really warped me, but in a good way. Had I not found it when I did, who knows, I might have gone on to become a respectable adult.
It should come as no surprise then, reader, that I heartily enjoyed the new documentary, CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine. The briskly-paced, well art-directed film was produced by JJ Kramer—son of CREEM publisher Barry Kramer—and directed by Scott Crawford, who made 2014’s Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC, 1980-90. It’s a real family affair—they had access to everything—but not in a way that pulls any punches about some of the complex personalities involved. You get the viewpoint of many of the insiders who were actually there (including Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus and co-producer Jaan Uhelszki) and several notables who weren’t, but who were greatly influenced by the gang of misfits who produced the magazine (Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers tells the charming tale of realizing that CREEM had moved their offices to his Michigan hometown and riding his bike over there only to see Alice-fucking-Cooper on his way out the front door!)
This is a really great time capsule pop culture piece and a film that needed to be made just for history’s sake, but it’s not merely a nostalgia stroll for old men. A young person watching this doc, especially in the context of what’s happening globally, sees the birth of a scene and how it was the sheer force of Barry Kramer’s personality that initially birthed it, but also how CREEM became this strange attractor of such bright-burning talent. If you read between lines (of speed, coke or “green”—some of you will hear that dog whistle) the takeaway, dear young people of 2020 is that if you want your own scene, you gotta start it yourself.
An alternate image for Alice Cooper’s album ‘Killer.’ This image was also used for a calendar that came along with the record.
In the May 6th, 1972 issue of Billboard, there’s an amusing story about how a controversial poster of Alice Cooper (pictured above) ended up plastered on a “staff only” door in the White House during Richard Nixon’s administration. Allegedly, someone at Warner Bros., Cooper’s label at the time, had a pal (described as a “semi-longhaired fellow”) who worked at the White House. The W.H. staffer’s rocker friend would send him care packages full of records and other Warner-related stuff including a poster of Alice Cooper hanging from a noose covered in fake blood. The image was an alternate for Cooper’s 1971 album Killer and also appeared on a nifty Alice Cooper calendar for 1972, included in the record. The staffer then took the poster and stuck it on a door at the end of a “staff only” corridor in the W.H., presumably until it was discovered and burned by one of Tricky Dick’s dicks.
Did this really happen? One can only hope, as Bob Regehr, one of Warner’s greatest assets in the 70s and 80s, was Cooper’s champion and likely had everything to do with the circulation of this fantastic piece of folklore. Regehr was instrumental in signing acts like Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, and Laurie Anderson. Back in the day, Cooper had Regehr in the first spot in his Rolodex, and for their next act to keep Killer on everyone’s mind, they devised a plan to throw an elaborate party in Cooper’s honor. And when I say “elaborate,” I really mean “deranged,” which makes more sense since this was 1971 and Alice Cooper was involved.
But before we get to the party to end all parties, there’s a little twist as to why the party was dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper.” According to another Warner executive, Stan Cornyn, he was part of a conversation about Killer with Joel Friedman, Warner’s head of distribution for the U.S., and Regehr, who was heading up Warner’s Artist Relations. When Cornyn heard Friedman say, “Alice Cooper! Her record is doing great!” he and Regehr dreamed up the idea of Cooper “coming out” to the world during a star-studded, debaucherous party. And that’s precisely what happened—because it ain’t a real party until the gorilla suit rented for the occasion goes missing during the festivities, never to be seen again.
Held at The Ambassador Hotel, the hotel staff did not know any of the details behind the “coming out” party to be held in their Venetian ballroom. Here’s the wording on the invitation:
“You and a guest are cordially invited to attend the summer season debut of Alice Cooper, to be held at the Venetian Room, Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, the evening of Wednesday, July 14th, 8:30 PM to midnight. Formal dress or equivalent costume is requested, but hardly mandatory.”
The details of the party were left to Dennis Lopez who had plenty of experience throwing unforgettable bashes all over San Francisco for legendary drag troupe The Cockettes. Cooper was known to spend time with the Cockettes whenever he came through S.F., as Cooper dug their “gender fuck” vibe, and likewise, the Cockettes dug Cooper’s over-the-top showmanship. Advertised as a “formal dress” kind of ball, many guests did arrive dressed to the nines. Inside the Venetian Room, an orchestra was in full swing. After guests were greeted by a Cockette dressed in a gorilla suit, more Cockettes (many with beards, beaded gowns, and headdresses) threw red roses as approximately 500 party goers entered, including Randy Newman, various Beach Boys, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Because it’s not a fucking party until someone sticks their dick in a plaster mold. Other members of the Cockettes were dressed as cigarette girls offering up cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. In addition to the orchestra, Elsie May, aka T.V. Mama (a former backup singer for James Brown), and her “stoned-freak out soul band” ran through a few numbers before T.V. Mama (a lady of “ample” proportions) stripped down to her undies and performed topless. But what about the guest of honor, Alice Cooper?
The Mental Experience sub label of Lleida, Spain-based Guerssen Records has a knack for finding some seriously outré stuff. They take long forgotten—and some never recalled—material from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and give it new life for adventuresome listeners who are insatiable for something “new” to listen to. The label’s oddball connoisseurship—and the lengths they go to to uncover this stuff—exceeds what most reissue units dabble in. Their latest project is Clear Memory by Bomis Prendin—the name of a member, and of the band, like Alice Cooper—originally released in 1984 on 50 handmade cassettes.
Bomis Prendin’s Clear Memory is the sort of group/artist/album one used to find out about on the late Mutant Sounds blog. Or perhaps the infamous Nurse With Wound list, which they’re on. It’s experimental and it’s very, very obscure. Bomis Prendin describes themselves as “the band that put the harm in harmony, and the odious in melodious” and they’ve been at it—continuously at it—since the late 1970s, some of them playing together before that. The Washington, D.C. “noisicians” collective made hours and hours of weird recordings, very little that’s been released in corporeal form, although you can find a lot of their material for download on the Free Music Archive. When they did release their insane music, it was sometimes on flexi-discs, sometimes on bespoke cassettes or CD-Rs.
The Bomis Prendin sound is that of homemade industrial-noise-psych-pop-experimental. It’s quite striking. The press materials compare them to Faust, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Olivia Tremor Control and the Residents, and yes, that seems about right. It’s worth mentioning that Bomis Prendin were contemporaries of all these bands, even if only Nurse With Wound noticed at the time.
Beyond popular longevity, the subversive nature of the classic rags-to-riches story-song has helped it achieve a unique place in country music and American culture at large, where “Fancy” is simultaneously an anthem for the country music establishment—and the very artists the industry has historically shut out.
To wit, Reba McEntire performed “Fancy” as the highlight of the 2019 Country Music Association awards show. Reba’s performance was meant to “celebrat[e] legendary women in country music,” a theme chosen to acknowledge if not explicitly address the industry’s well-documented sexism problem.
At first blush it seems strange that a proud sex worker’s anthem is one of the most cherished and enduring songs in a genre typically thought of as conservative. But take a moment to examine the tradition of country songs celebrating all manner of Saturday night sins and you realize that’s only true if “conservative” is just a euphemism for systematically denying women, queer artists, and people of color equal opportunity for mainstream success.
Reba’s CMA performance opened with The Queen Of Country primly poised in the center of an illuminated labia-shaped tunnel. The icon peeled two layers of costumes off and flung them to the floor off as she unspooled the familiar tale of a young girl whose mama encouraged her to escape poverty by selling sex with the famous line, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they’ll be nice to you.” By the time Fancy got herself a Georgia mansion and a New York townhouse flat, Reba was stripped down to a tight red sequin pantsuit, the audience berserk with applause.
Reba McEntire performing “Fancy” at the 2019 CMA Awards
When you see that kind of performance, you really can’t blame people for thinking that “Fancy” is Reba McEntire’s song. After all, McEntire has been performing it at every single concert since releasing her version on 1990’s Rumor Has It. She wanted to record it even earlier than that but her former producer Jimmy Bowen feared it’d sully her reputation. “Oh no,’” he told her. “You don’t need to be singing about a prostitute.’”
It was not, however, the biggest song of Bobbie Gentry’s career.
It was the summer she turned 27 when Gentry flew to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to make a record steeped in the swampy, soulful sounds she heard on New Orleans radio stations while growing up on her grandparents’ farm in Mississippi.
Just two years earlier, Gentry’s smash hit debut, Ode to Billie Joe had transformed her from an unknown musician into an international star. She followed Ode up with The Delta Sweete, a concept record about life in the South. It’s considered a masterpiece today but didn’t meet sales expectations back in 1968.
Gentry was unbothered.
“No one bought it,” she said, “But I didn’t lose any sleep over it.”
Nonetheless, Gentry proceeded to release several soft-focus radio-ready pop records that felt unduly influenced by businessmen looking for another jackpot. Then in 1969, Gentry decided to shake up the status quo and return to her roots by heading to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to cut a record with legendary producer Rick Hall.
Gentry’s decision shook up her brand and the recording industry at large. According to Andrew Batt, who compiled and engineered The Girl from Chickasaw County: The Complete Capitol Masters, Fancy shifted the status quo by marking the first time Capitol Records worked with an outside producer.
Batt, who interviewed Hall for the essay accompanying the Bobbie box set, says Hall asked Gentry if she’d write a narrative song like “Ode in the Billie Joe” to function as the centerpiece of the record, which is otherwise stuffed with carefully curated covers.
Two weeks later, Gentry delivered “Fancy.”
“Fancy” showcased Gentry at her best—writing character-driven narrative story-songs exploring themes resonant with her own life through vivid vignettes set in the rural South of her early childhood.
Like all great literature, “Fancy” translated Gentry’s experiences and observations into fictional elements to create a uniquely compelling tale that holds a fundamental truth about humanity more than the sum of its parts. It was also deeply subversive to write a story about an unapologetic woman who seized her power through sex work in an era when women weren’t even allowed a credit card without a male co-signer.
The most obvious way Fancy’s story echoes Gentry’s life is the rags-to-riches storyline. Born into poverty and raised on her grandparents’ farm, Gentry headed to California when she was 13 years old to live with her mother and stepfather, a journey referenced in “Chickasaw County Child” but obscured in her official Capitol biography at the time in which she was presented, as Gentry dryly noted, as if she “just sort of arose out of a swamp fog and appeared on television.”
Another resonant theme between “Fancy” and Gentry’s life was the essence of the mother-daughter relationship. Gentry’s earliest teenage gigs were duo performances with her mother, a beautiful and talented woman with creative aspirations stunted by her circumstances.
Gentry’s mother encouraged her daughter’s success and in return, Bobbie fulfilled her mother’s dreams.
Bobbie at the Grammy Awards, 1970. Courtesy Andrew Batt / bobbiegentry.org.uk
In the summer of 1969, the girl raised on a Mississippi farm without electricity arrived in Alabama on a personal jet.
“Of course we all couldn’t wait for her to come in! I mean, it was Bobbie Gentry,” laughs musician Clayton Ivey, who played keys on the track in a session and was gracious enough to tell me about it. “She was pretty way ahead of her time, put it that way. Bobbie did her thing and it was a smash, man.”
Ivey says it didn’t take long to nail the take. Bobbie played “Fancy” on her parlor guitar for Rick Hall and studio musicians and they cut it to tape.
“She knew what she wanted,” says Ivey. “She did not sit in the corner. She didn’t get involved, she was involved. You know what I’m saying?”
“Fancy” only climbed to number 28 on the charts but it brought Gentry critical respect and a new persona. The innocent barefoot girl in a white tee-shirt and blue jeans presented on Ode to Billie Joe was replaced by Bobbie’s self-portrait—a grown woman in a tight red dress split clean up to her hip, elegantly poised with a cigarette, daring you to try and get one over.
The men at Capitol did indeed try just that. There’s never been an official story, but talk to enough people and you get the sense that a new slew of suits at Capitol weren’t keen to promote the opinionated lady who wanted something uncommon for a woman: credit for her work.
Bobbie Gentry’s career includes a long list of accomplishments without credit, either from a studio or in the culture at large. For example, Gentry recorded “Ode to Billie Joe” with a guy named Bobby Paris who then brought the tape to Capitol, where Jimmie Haskell’s strings were added on top during sweetening sessions. The original 45 only gave producer credit to the men involved.
When she pursued hosting a TV show in the late 1960s, American media executives advised Gentry that a woman simply couldn’t carry a program. Undeterred, Gentry became the first woman to host her own show on the BBC—where she was denied credit as co-producer.
We may never know the final straw in the disintegrating relationship between Capitol and Gentry but after Fancy, Gentry made one final record—which includes an explicit farewell to the industry—abruptly cut all ties to the record business, and headed to Las Vegas to reinvent herself once again.
Though Gentry’s Vegas period is mostly forgotten, it was more than twice as long as her Capitol career and arguably even more successful. Gentry’s elaborate stage productions broke records for earnings and attendance.
In the early 1980s, Gentry managed one seemingly final act of reinvention when she vanished from the public eye altogether without ceremony or announcement.
We never did get to see the “Fancy” screenplay she co-wrote, or the Christmas play, or the project about homelessness she mentioned to family in the 1980s.
Gentry just never appeared or performed in public again.
It’s ironic that “Fancy” was the highlight of the 2019 CMA awards show meant to celebrate legendary women in country music, because Bobbie Gentry wrote “Fancy” as a cynical commentary on her experiences as a woman navigating the male-dominated music business, according to former colleagues I interviewed while researching Ode to Billie Joe, my book that tells the story of Bobbie Gentry’s career through the prism of her debut record.
“‘Fancy’ is my biggest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it,” Gentry told After Dark magazine in 1974. “I agree wholeheartedly with that movement and all the serious issues that they stand for—equality, equal pay, daycare centers, and abortion rights.”
Once Gentry was completely in charge, she used her stage show to expand lyrical meditations on women and work and more deeply engage and subvert societal ideas about gender and class. On stage, she performed exaggerated representations of femininity to expose it as a social construct in a way not unlike what Dolly Parton does with her persona. She’d come out on stage swinging around a stripper pole inside a gilded birdcage for one number then perform in drag as Elvis Presley the next. For her Elvis homage, Gentry would wear a sparkling white pantsuit and slicked-back hair to perform a whiplash medley of Elvis songs, strutting across the stage with exaggerated masculine swagger, hair coiffed into a pompadour, painted lips pulled back a snarl.
Never afraid of scandal, Gentry doubled down on the salacious plotline of “Fancy” by instructing the band to play a few bars of “House of the Rising Sun,” the blues song about a New Orleans brothel, as a prologue to “Fancy.”
She also added a coda. The music would swell a key higher to ramp up tension after the final line in the recorded version. Then Bobbie, in Fancy’s signature slinky red gown, would toss a boa over her shoulder and belt, “If I did it again, I’d do it the same! My name is Fancy, and I’m not ashamed! My name is Fancy!”
Gentry sauntered off stage with her head high, hips swinging like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. As she exited the stage, all the audience could see was one final bullwhip snap of her boa before the stage went black.
The thing about subversive art is that contains a secret message that stirs echoes within a select few.
While the mainstream industry can see itself reflected in the way “Fancy” flaunts the American dream of self-made material success—that is, after all, the story they sell to artists and audiences—outsiders instinctively understand that it’s Fancy’s response to her circumstances, her unapologetic transgression and defiant joy, that is the center of the song.
“I think it resonates with anybody who’s ever felt suppressed by their circumstances,” says Orville Peck, the queer country crooner known for maintaining anonymity by donning a series of fringed masks ranging in vibe from the Lone Ranger to something delightfully kinkier. “It’s almost like if ‘Fancy’ had to be told through a story now, it could just as easily be told through the tale of a trans kid in Harlem or a small town in the South.”
Peck, a “Fancy” fan since the first time he heard Reba sing it on the radio when he was around 12 years old, started playing it live last year.
Orville Peck performs “Fancy” in Brooklyn, 2019
Recently, he announced he recorded the track and will be releasing it on his forthcoming Show Pony EP, out August 14.
“Fancy” feels like a natural fit for Peck, a former indie-rock drummer whose persona echoes the classic singing cowboy of yore, except now it’s 2020 and this lone gay rider is scanning the frontier searching for home in a genre burstingwith queer talent who, all too often, remain marginalized.
Like Reba, Peck thought about “Fancy” a long time before finally doing it. He wondered if he had the artistic right to sing it and worried about whether he should change the pronouns.
“I have massive respect for the history of country music … [and] a huge affinity at a very young age for a lot of the female voices in country because they wrote from more a marginalized place than a lot of the male writers, at least in that era,” says Peck.
Eventually, Peck decided to honor and deepen the song’s subversive powers by changing one word.
In the original lyrics, Fancy looks in the mirror after putting on the red satin dancing dress her mother bought for her and sees a woman where “a half-grown kid had stood.”
“I say, ‘staring back from the looking glass stood a woman where a half-grown boy had stood’ because I defiantly try to make it equivalent of what I think Fancy’s story might have been in this day and age,” says Peck, shifting the character’s transformational journey from escaping poverty to one of a transgender or gender-nonconforming person finding their true gender expression. “It’s still about the ongoing struggle of people being suppressed by their circumstances.”
Peck’s homage to “Fancy” arrives amid an ongoing re-assessment of Bobbie Gentry’s trailblazing career. In addition to my work and the box set, which sold its first run out immediately, Gentry’s BBC performances were compiled for a special Record Store Day release in 2018, the same year indie-rock band Mercury Rev released a tribute album called The Delta Sweete Revisited.
Even more treats are on the way: A remastered and deluxe edition of Gentry’s original The Delta Sweete will be released on July 31.
The overdue recognition of artists like Gentry coincides with a powerful movement.
Led by women, queer musicians, and Black performers, both artists and fans are speaking out and demanding equal opportunities in country music. They’re calling on the country music establishment to face its sexist, homophobic, and racist history—and changing country music and American culture with it.
At its heart, that’s what “Fancy” is all about: transformation.
Before sending her out into the world to survive on her own, Fancy’s mother gave her a locket inscribed with “To Thine Own Self Be True.”
That message, in turn, is what Bobbie Gentry gave to us—the inspiration to write our own story—self-righteous hypocrites be damned.
This story is dedicated to Don Bradburn, Bobbie Gentry’s longtime collaborator and choreographer. Rest in peace, Don.
Visual artist Jesse Draxler—who has worked with Nine Inch Nails, Daughters, Zola Jesus, Alexander McQueen and many others—has put together a new collaborative art project with the likes of Chelsea Wolfe, Greg Puciato, Trentemøller, Jaye Jayle, Ghostemane and more, called Reigning Cement.
Draxler gave each of his co-creators a set of 34 soundscape elements to assemble in any way they wanted. These recordings are industrial noises found in Draxler’s LA neighborhood and each artist was given the very same sonic toolbox to work with. Concurrently, Draxler created a visual component to go along with each of the tracks, which are incredibly varied. Reigning Cement pairs a 100-page book of Draxler’s art, photography and collage work with the audio portion of the project (see below for flipbook video).
Today we’re premiering the music video for Chelsea Wolfe & Ben Chisholm’s contribution to Reining Cement, a song titled “Valerian.”
Draxler comments:
“When submitting this track, Chelsea briefly mentioned how the lyrics are an ode to her relationship with Valerian root and its effects on sleeping habits and insomnia. With the video we wanted to echo this notion to create a morphing and echoing sleep-scape, straddling the line between dream and nightmare. The video was created by myself and Rizz (of the band VOWWS), while the footage of Chelsea was kindly given to us by herself”
Reigning Cement is released on Draxler’s Federal Prisoner label, on September 4, 2020.
Above, the video for “Valerian” by Chelsea Wolfe & Ben Chisholm.
Exploited Body’s track, “Your Stoic Gaze Changes States Of Matter,” provides the soundtrack for a flip-through of the ‘Reigning Cement’ book.
As we told you last month, Third Man Records is about to unleash the last show ever played by the original lineup of the Stooges. Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970 will be released on LP and CD on August 8th, 50 years to the day the gig took place. Tapes labeled “Goose Lake” were recently discovered in a Michigan farmhouse, and it turns out they contained the legendary Stooges gig, which was a soundboard recording, to boot. Not only that, Live at Goose Lake shatters a widely held myth surrounding the show.
For years, Stooges frontman Iggy Pop has said that bassist Dave Alexander was fired following the Goose Lake Festival gig after he “froze” on stage and didn’t play a note, an account at least one other band member corroborated. As the story goes, Alexander was so nervous before the Stooges’ set—which would be in front a massive crowd of more than 200,000—that he got drunk, smoked a ton of hash, and snorted an unknown substance, rendering him incapacitated by showtime. Circulating video of a two-minute clip of the band playing “1970 (I Feel Alright),” seems to support this, since no bass can be heard, and there aren’t any clear shots of Alexander, as the footage is edited to largely focus on Iggy. Although Alexander is indeed missing in action for a good chunk of “1970,” he can be heard during the song on the Live at Goose Lake recording, and is audible on every track on the disc. Alexander’s instrument does come and go, though, so it’s possible he did stop playing now and then, and that’s what Iggy—himself out of his mind on drugs—noticed during the show.
Photo: Charlie Auringer
At the time of the Goose Lake appearance, the Stooges’ second album, the indispensable Fun House, was about to come out. The band’s setlist mirrors the order of the LP, except “Down on the Street” and “Loose” are flipped (the record company suits thought the former was a stronger opener).
Dangerous Minds is thrilled to present an exclusive preview of Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970, an absolutely incredible, mind-blowing version of “Fun House.” As on the Fun House LP, the group is joined by saxophonist Steve Mackay for the number, which, incidentally, begins with Dave Alexander’s bass line.
