In August of 1985 San Francisco “cabaret no-wave” heroes Tuxedomoon took part in an interesting evening of entertainment presented by the Hamburg-based television channel NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk). The program was called “Video Night” and—possibly accidentally—sounds a hell of a lot like the program Night Flight, which cable subscribers in the United States could consume on the USA Network during the same period. Here’s a description of the “Video Night” courtesy of Der Spiegel (translation executed by yours truly):
 

In addition to art videos from New York and Tokyo, clips from classic Hollywood movies and amateur films, the filmmaker Marianne Enzensberger and the popular singer Marianne Rosenberg serve as moderators for several avant-garde acts. Among them are: the formation AGZ (Anarchist Rubber Cell) and the American act Tuxedomoon.

 
For some reason, after all of the scheduled programming was over, Tuxedomoon were obliged to take the stage in front of a largely empty hall and play a couple of tunes in the wee hours of the night, with the knowledge that the proceedings were being transmitted to TVs live. Bruce Geduldig and Steven Brown kicked off the curious performance with some gallows-humor banter, in a practice known to musicians the world over as “making the best of a bad situation”:
 

Geduldig: Let’s hear it for late-night TV! Ahhhhhh!
Brown: All right, is anybody still awake out there?
Geduldig: I’m sure somebody’s awake out there in TV Land.
Brown: Well.
Geduldig: There’s gotta be someone awake, Steven!
Brown: Well, I think, um. We’re, we’re called Tuxedomoon, and well, isn’t late-night TV great?
Geduldig: We’re just always saying hello. It’s like religion, you know. It’s like a new educational religion.
Brown: I don’t know if I’d go so far as that, Bruce, but myself….
Geduldig: I learned a lot, myself. I learned a lot tonight.
Brown: Well, I like to come home at four o’clock in the morning and turn on the TV and see something like this, myself….
Geduldig: This is nice for a change, isn’t it? I get tired of snow.
Brown: Well, I mean, Dallas isn’t on at two in the morning, right?
Geduldig: It’s an honor. This is an honor.
Brown: It’s an honor. Unfortunately, it’s snowing onstage.
Geduldig: Well, we’re going to go on blind faith, anyway. We’re just gonna do this, because we have faith that somebody out there is still awake.
Brown: Blind Faith couldn’t make it tonight…..
Geduldig: We know you’re awake.
Brown: Is anybody still awake out there? I hear an answer…. Hello, TV Land!
Geduldig: Well, we’re still here.
Brown: This is Hamburg calling, this is Hamburg calling. Hello world! Here we go….

 
Quick guide for younger readers: It was uncommon for TV to be broadcast at night until the widespread adoption of cable TV, and 1985 was still early days for that progression—this partly informs Geduldig’s mordant assumption that there really is nobody out there watching. “Snow” is what an old-school tube TV broadcasts if the unit is turned on but there is no active input—it’s a synonym for “static.” It’s what most TV channels would have played in the middle of the night. Dallas was a popular nighttime soap opera in America. Blind Faith was a British blues-rock combo featuring Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood, and Ric Grech that released an album in 1969.

There can be little doubt that Tuxedomoon really did make the best of it. Geduldig spends most of the first song, “Watching the Blood Flow,” swinging from a handy rope hanging down from the ceiling, while for the follow-up, “Reeding, Righting, Rhythmatic,” Brown consents to sing blindfolded. After the credits roll, the video jumps to their performance from earlier in the evening, which featured “Special Treatment for the Family Man” and “Hugging the Earth.”
 

 
Here’s the full page from Der Spiegel from July 22, 1985, featuring the “Video Nacht” writeup in the bottom-right corner:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Tuxedomoon’s video-art piece ‘Ghost Sonata’ is just the thing for these ‘burn it all down’ times

A painting by Jesse Edwards.
 
Artist Jesse Edwards came of age in Snohomish County, an idyllically beautiful area of Washington State about two hours outside of Seattle. Growing up Edwards spent time skateboarding and experimenting with graffiti to get his kicks. The experience of using spray paint led Edwards to explore the medium more intimately in order to learn how to manipulate it, ultimately succeeding in changing the texture and consistency of the paint. Proficiency with spray paint runs in Edwards family. His brother Travis, (aka Tred who has done jail time for his art) is probably the most well-known graffiti artist in Seattle.

Edwards’ experimentation paid off quite literally, and he was not only accepted to Cornish College of the Arts, but he also scored a partial scholarship to the school. The union between Edwards and higher academia was short, and he was kicked out after having a nasty word fight with one of Cornish’s professors. In an interview with the Seattle Times in 2010, Edwards revealed his only passion was to make “beautiful things.” This quote is quite compelling when you consider art—much like beauty—is determined by the perception and preference of the beholder. As it pertains to Edwards’ “beautiful things” you will either love them or, perhaps loathe them. One thing is sure, Edwards’ work is flush with old-world mastery and color pallets, though you’ll not be seeing any still life bowls of fucking fruit or portraits of frilly aristocrats dressed to the nines. Instead, Edwards’ subjects include representations of weed and drug culture, dick pics, porn, and the occasional amusing pop culture reference. In addition to painting, Edwards also excels at ceramics many of which were displayed for a time at the Museum of Sex in New York City where they fit right in.

I’ve posted a large selection of Edwards work below, much of it is very NSFW. Yay!
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Lou Miami was a punk rocker from Boston, Massachusetts. His band, the Kozmetix, played around locally, but rarely toured. They were regulars at popular night clubs like The Rathskeller (“The Rat”), The Channel, and the Inn-Square Men’s bar. The band formed sometime in the late-seventies and released two EP’s: Lou Miami & the Kozmetix in 1982 and Rituals in 1985.
 
Lou was a spectacle. His style was flamboyant and glam, with a touch of goth esotericism and a gritty punk demeanor. My favorite description of him is that he was “sort of a cross between Iggy Pop, Boy George, Devo and Helen Reddy.” I’d also throw in a little Richard Hell, Lou Reed, and Joey Ramone. Lou had an obsession with the allure of sex symbol and actress Jayne Mansfield - particularly her humor and rumored involvement with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. “The occult doesn’t have to be depressing,” Lou once said.
 

 

Lou Miami covers ‘Monster Mash’
 
Having opened up for The Cramps and spun heavily on Boston’s WERS 88.9fm and the short-lived (but influential) music video channel V66, the Kozmetix didn’t receive much notoriety outside of the Boston scene. Before MTV, Lou recognized pretty early on that video would be a tool to expose a band and display its concept. Lou took mime lessons from a former 1960s go-go dancer and found it important to be an “entertainer” while on stage. The Kozmetix created WAY more video “content” than most bands today, especially in a pre-iPhone, nearly pre-MTV era. They even made more than one video for certain songs.
 
The Kozmetix fizzled out of the local scene sometime in the mid-eighties, when it was believed that Lou had gotten into witchcraft up in Salem. He died of heart failure in Los Angeles in August 1995. Thank you for everything, Lou.
 
Get a taste of the fabled Lou Miami after the jump…

Fee Waybill on stage with The Tubes as his stage alter-ego Quay Lewd in 1975. His platform boots are eighteen inches high.
 
If the title of this post and affirmation of the importance of vocalist Fee Waybill (born John Waldo Waybill in 1950) of The Tubes sounds at all familiar, it is because this is precisely how Fee Waybill was addressed in the 1989 film, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Since I know you’re curious, the other two people included in this very important trio were Martha Davis of The Motels (because of course, she was) and the big man himself, saxophone player and long-running member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Clarence Clemons. Bill and Ted might not have been the brightest bulbs, but they were right to call Fee Waybill important. Because god dammit he was and still is and I’ve got pictures and live footage to prove it. Excellent.

Anyone growing up on MTV remembers The Tubes. “Talk to you Later” was in such heavy rotation it would have been impossible not to absorb the lyrics without even wanting to. Their early, proto-punk records were popular in the UK but didn’t really break through in the U.S., so as far as most MTV kids were concerned, The Tubes they saw on television didn’t exist before “Talk to You Later.” They had likely never heard of the band’s 1975 debut, White Punks on Dope. During their time in the 70s, they became known for their elaborate stage productions which stepped far beyond merely going to see a band, and more like live, interactive, improvisational theater with sick jams.

Then, you have Fee Waybill, taking it a leap beyond the beyond appearing in characters he created for the stage such as a BDSM fan, and a glam rocker called Quay Lewd. Waybill also dressed up like a crazed astronaut from time to time and a masked bad-dude. Others would follow, and Waybill’s revolving cast of characters would make regular appearances during Tubes’ shows for years and years. According to Waybill, Quay Lewd was an “amalgam” of “Rod Stewart, David Bowie, David Johansen, Robert Plant and all the quasi-homosexual glam-rock gay lead singers with platform shoes in the 1970s.”

In 1977 The Tubes played two highly praised totally gonzo sold-out shows at the Hammersmith Odeon with Wire. Both performances were recorded and released in 1978 as What Do You Want from Live. In addition to wanton appearances by Waybill dressed in bondage gear, Quay Lewd also came out to taunt the crowd. Journalist Paul Rambali reviewed the gigs for NME, including the following assessment which I think sums up what the fuck happened at the Odeon: 

“They (The Tubes) are not strictly a rock band, neither are they a show, a satire, nor a marriage of rock and theatre, (although they do admit early inspiration from the original Rocky Horror Picture Show). The Tubes are a spectacle like no other. They present a relentless two-hour onslaught of humor, outrage, parody, idiocy, music, and costume—a feast for the senses.”

 

Paul Rambali’s review of The Tubes gigs at the Odeon in 1977.
 
After the release of What Do You Want from Live, The Tubes returned to California to play a series of shows in San Fran and Los Angeles. After their crazed shows in London, Waybill decided to get even nastier on stage and added a large dildo to his Quay Lewd costume, which has always kind of reminded me of a cross between Wayne Country and Hedwig. Apparently, Cher was in the crowd and would later ask the band to play her Cher…Special (1978), which they did in the most bonkers way possible. The Tubes performed a medley of songs including 1975’s “Mondo Bondage” with Waybill and in bondage gear trying to get Cher to embrace her dark side. During the skit/musical number, another guest on the one-off special, Dolly Parton and her gang of gospel singers roll on in to save Cher’s soul, presumably from rock and roll. Also, since Rambali was kind enough to mention the link between The Tubes and Rocky Horror Picture Show, it seems like a good time to note Waybill took on the role of the deranged Dr. Frank N. Furter for a stage production of RHPS at the Barn Theater in Augusta, Michigan in 1999. Pictures or it didn’t happen? I got you covered, pals.

Classic images of Fee Waybill doing what he does best—you know, being one of the three most important people in the world, follow. Some are NSFW (which does not mean Not Safe for Fee Waybill). Lastly, if you happen to be in Irwin, Pennsylvania or Akron, Ohio, you can see the band live later this month.
 

Waybill on stage in BDSM leather. Fuck YES.
 

 
More after the jump…

Sketch of Sigmund Freud by Salvador Dalí (via Freud Museum)
 
If you visit London’s Freud Museum between now and next February, you’ll see an exhibition devoted to the meeting between Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud that took place there in 1938, when the house in Hampstead was Freud’s “last home on this planet.” The artist brought his recent painting “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” to show the doctor, and, he later claimed, took the opportunity to sketch the form of Freud’s skull d’après nature (from life).

Like many of the Surrealists, Dalí revered Freud as a towering genius who had solved the riddles of the dream, but Dalí‘s ideas about the shape of Freud’s head were all his own. As he tells it in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the actual meeting between the two men was preceded by a number of fantasy meetings that took place in Dalí‘s imagination during his visits to Vienna. When Freud escaped the Nazis in ‘38, arriving in Paris en route to London, Dalí was eating snails nearby in Sens, and his dinner was interrupted by a shocking epiphany about the involute form of Freud’s brainpan:

Several years after my last ineffectual attempt to meet Freud, I made a gastronomic excursion into the region of Sens in France. We started the dinner with snails, one of my favorite dishes. The conversation turned to Edgar Allan Poe, a magnificent theme while savoring snails, and concerned itself particularly with a recently published book by the Princess of Greece, Marie Bonaparte, which is a psychoanalytical study of Poe. All of a sudden I saw a photograph of Professor Freud on the front page of a newspaper which someone beside me was reading. I immediately had one brought to me and read that the exiled Freud had just arrived in Paris. We had not yet recovered from the effect of this news when I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extracted with a needle! This discovery strongly influenced the portrait drawing which I later made from life, a year before his death.

 

Dalí‘s ‘Freud à tête d’escargot’
 

‘Morphology of the skull of Sigmund Freud’: Dalí‘s sketch of Freud’s skull as a snail, ‘d’après nature’
 
Nadia Choucha will be giving a sold-out talk on “occult and psychoanalytical theory in the art of Surrealism” at the Freud Museum on Halloween. Below is the trailer for the ongoing exhibition “Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus.”
 

 
They are perhaps the most iconic few minutes of film in cinematic history—the “shower scene” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho. The segment continues to shock audiences, and film scholars have written about the brilliance of its construction and effectiveness for decades. It’s an astonishing, groundbreaking moment in cinema, yet this shower scene wasn’t the first of its kind. 

The 7th Victim is a 1943 cult film about a young woman named Mary, who, while looking for her missing sister, stumbles upon a satanic cult. The picture was produced by the legendary Val Lewton, remembered for the mysterious horror pictures he supervised in the 1940s.
 

 
Mary is portrayed by Kim Hunter, in her first film role. In one scene, as Mary is taking a shower, another figure walks in the bathroom. In a suspicious, not so vaguely threatening tone, this person encourages Mary to leave town. The scene is largely shot from behind Mary, as she faces the person through the shower curtain. The moment is made even more tense, as all we ever see is a strange shadow of the intruder.
 

 
It brings to mind the shadowy shots in the Psycho shower scene, in which the killer’s face is never seen clearly.
 

 

 
The 1958 film noir/exploitation movie, Screaming Mimi, concerns an exotic dancer, Virginia, who is severely traumatized after she is attacked while taking a shower.
 

 
During the opening minutes of Screaming Mimi, Virginia, played by Swedish model/actress Anita Ekberg, is bathing in an outdoor shower, when a man brandishing a large knife approaches her. Though the scene is clumsily staged, as viewers we recognize that, like Marion (Janet Leigh) in Psycho, Virginia is largely defenseless in the shower setting, which adds to the terror.
 

 
Of course, these previous shower scenes take nothing away from what Hitch accomplished in Psycho, though I can’t help but wonder if they influenced his most famous movie moment. Either way, the scene still makes us wary, from time to time, of taking a shower when home alone….
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Phantoms crowd the mind. Whether it’s Guy de Maupassant’s Horla—the thing out there—or the barbarous horde conjured by a demagogue, there’s always some chimera troubling a body, threatening to violate one’s personal sovereignty. One day, it’s trying to adulterate the mustard in your sandwiches; the next, it’s plotting to turn your mailman against you. Pretty soon, it will take control of your nervous system and make you do things you don’t want to do, until it’s speaking your voice for you and puppeteering your person like a meatbag marionette. And where will you be then?

The Residents’ creepy new album, Intruders, is all about doppelgangers, haints, obsessions and delusions. The band co-produced the album with Eric Drew Feldman, the former member of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and Pere Ubu, who is also credited as a guest musician, and Dangerous Minds has exclusive video about this record right here, plus the premiere of the album’s third track.

When I was a lad, the Cryptic Corporation—the team that has managed the Residents since 1976—meant Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, at least after their partners, John Kennedy and Jay Clem, absquatulated in ‘82. Flynn and Fox ran the company until 2016, when Fox retired. (Residents.com reports the sad news that Hardy is seriously ill; he has revealed that he was a founding member of the band and has been the primary composer of their music.) Flynn, or “Captain Doc,” still at the helm, introduces the Residents’ latest album in the exclusive video below.

Intruders will be released by Cherry Red Records tomorrow, October 19.
 

 
After the jump, hear “The Scarecrow,” in which a bereaved James Brown fan is sure he sees the Godfather of Soul’s former bathrobe on a roadside scarecrow…

 
It’s tempting to suppose that Basil Wolverton never drew even a single doodle that couldn’t elicit a “WTF?” from a random passerby. Wolverton’s manic and aggressively cracked images found a natural home at MAD Magazine, where he executed the notable May 1954 cover of the run, featuring the “Beautiful Girl of the Month,” with predictable results. An extreme approach such as Wolverton’s was bound to spark a passionate cult of admirers, but no less an authority than Jules Feiffer bluntly stated, “I don’t like his work. I think it’s ugly.”

In addition to MAD, Wolverton also found a patron in the Topps Company in the 1960s, which was primarily known for sports trading cards but also produced the Bazooka Joe strips and a wide variety of movie tie-ins and humorous products. Wolverton’s best-known series for Topps was the Ugly Stickers line, which looked like this:
 

 
It will be noted that the very name of the line seemed to embrace Feiffer’s critique as a positive good.

In 1968 Wolverton worked on a test project called “Hang-Ups,” which was to be a full-color gallery of grotesques in his scarcely imitable style. The project was overseen by a Topps manager named Bhob Stewart (sic), who later reviewed movies in the pages of Heavy Metal.

According to a Flickr user named Joey Anuff, the project was killed when it was tested by a focus group of Brooklyn schoolchildren. They loved them, of course, but swore up and down that there was no earthly way their parents would ever let the kids have them. And so Topps passed…...
 
See the entire test group after the jump…....
 

 
In the 1980s the BBC used to do this thing every now and then where they would take a day and dedicate like 15 consecutive hours of programming to pop music. The recurring program was called “Rock Around the Clock”; it’s surprisingly challenging to track down information about this practice, but at the same time it seems likely that a great many DM readers in the U.K. remember these so-called TV marathons quite vividly. These “Rock Around the Clock” events were pretty much a grab bag of whatever the BBC felt like tossing in there, in a manner that might remind American readers of Night Flight during in the same era. But having a bigger budget than Night Flight, the BBC would also provide a studio for live performances.

One of these “Rock Around the Clock” days was September 20, 1986. That day rock connoisseurs could enjoy, on BBC2, the musical stylings of a-ha, Stan Ridgway, Dire Straits, and the Housemartins. A decided highlight for sure was an in-studio appearance by Echo and the Bunnymen, during which they played “The Game” and “Lips Like Sugar,” neither of which would be released officially for several months.

In addition, Ian McCulloch and Co. recruited a singer with whom they’d toured North America in 1984, that being Billy Bragg, to assist on a cover of “Run Run Run,” off of The Velvet Underground and Nico.

“Run Run Run” was in the Bunnymen repertoire at that moment, as the gang were indulging their taste for classic rock somewhat. Their cover of the Doors’ “People Are Strange” appeared on the Lost Boys soundtrack a year later, and the 1988 12-inch of “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” featured a wealth of covers recorded at a gig in Gothenburg, Sweden: the three tracks were the already-mentioned VU cover, the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” and Television’s “Friction.” (You can also find the same three tracks on WEA’s Japan-only release New Live and Rare.)

According to Chris Adams’ exhaustive Turquoise Days: The Weird World of Echo & the Bunnymen, they also played part of the old Sinatra classic “One For My Baby,” but that section isn’t captured in this clip.
 
Watch for yourself, after the jump…...
 

 
When the legendary comedian Soupy Sales died in 2009, Alice Cooper issued a brief statement through his publicist:

Being from Detroit, I came home every day and watched Soupy at lunch. One of the greatest moments of my life was getting piefaced by Soupy. He was one of my all-time heroes.

Soupy Sales and a pie in the face have more to do with the Detroit of John Sinclair than you might guess. As “The Heart of Detroit by Moonlight” by the Destroy All Monsters Collective (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw) makes clear, Soupy’s TV image inhabited the same psychic space as Alice, the MC5 and Lester Bangs. Not only was Soupy’s anarchic spirit beloved of Motor City rockers, but his actual sons, Hunt and Tony, played in Iggy Pop’s band in the seventies. The Sales brothers were Iggy’s rhythm section on part of Kill City, all of Lust for Life, and the famous 1977 tour with David Bowie.

And the way Alice Cooper took a pie (cake?) in the face at the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival was central to the case for the Stooges’ greatness Lester Bangs made in the pages of Creem:

So there he was: Alice Cooper, rock star, crouched frontstage in the middle of his act with a faceful of pie and cream with clots dripping from his ears and chin. So what did he do? How did he recoup the sacred time-honored dignity of the performing artist which claims the stage as his magic force field from which to bedazzle and entertain the helpless audience? Well, he pulled a handful of pie gook out of his face and slapped it right back again, smearing it into his pores and eyes and sneaking the odd little fingerlicking taste. Again and again he repeated this gesture, smearing it in good. The audience said not another word.

 

 
Here’s the full 1979 episode of The New Soupy Sales Show where Alice takes another pie in the face, cued up to Alice’s bit. Soupy finds a bug in the backyard that can sing and play piano, and he figures he can make big money if he books the insect, Buggy, as the opening act on his buddy Alice Cooper’s upcoming tour. Perhaps remembering the early-morning audition at Frank Zappa’s house that gave him his own entrée into the world of showbiz, Alice drops by Soupy’s place and listens as Buggy tears up “Autumn in New York.” It’s sensational—a star is born! But how will White Fang, the meanest dog in Detroit, react to the sudden rise of this upstart arthropod?

Find out after the jump…