It’s been five years since Sacred Bones put out limited-issue box set reissue of the Eraserhead soundtrack, complete with tons of extras, the newly released track “Pete’s Boogie,” and so forth.

That product came in three pressings, all of which together totaled a good deal less than 3,000 copies, and today you’re lucky if you can score any of them for fifty bucks….. eighty is more like it. So if you’re looking to expand your LP collection with some primo and fucked-up ambient works composed by David Lynch and the movie’s sound designer, Alan R. Splet, you’ll be happy to hear that Sacred Bones has another pressing coming up this summer—this time on super-evocative silver wax.
 

 
Just as the earlier pressings did, this “limited deluxe edition” will include a 16-page booklet, three 11-by-11-inch prints, and a limited-edition Peter Ivers 7-inch A-side of the single “In Heaven” with an Ivers recording, “Pete’s Boogie,” as the B-side. As DM readers no doubt remember, Peter Ivers was a very interesting fellow who was one of the guiding spirits behind the legendary Los Angeles TV show New Wave Theater but was unfortunately murdered in March 1983. As stated above, he composed “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song),” by far the most popular music from Eraserhead that was ever covered by the Pixies (and Tuxedomoon).

The release date is June 16 and you can pre-order it on Amazon right now for $39.98. This is some of the creepiest “music” ever recorded, so get on it!
 
More after the jump…

 
One fateful afternoon thirty years ago, NYC-based jewelry designer Alex Streeter was working in the backroom at his eponymous store in Soho. Two gentlemen entered the shop and approached the artist, identifying themselves as the art directors for Alan Parker’s then-in-production supernatural thriller Angel Heart. They then proceeded to tell Streeter that they felt he was, in fact, the strangest jeweler in town, and hired him on the spot to create a distinctive collection in silver to be worn by the film’s stars, Robert De Niro and Charlotte Rampling. Thus, the famous, or perhaps infamous, Angel Heart Ring, a pentagram in an amber orb held aloft by two rams—and soon to become Streeter’s signature work—was born.
 

 
One memorable scene in Angel Heart sees De Niro’s sinister character slowly rolling a boiled egg on a plate as Mickey Rourke’s character stares at his amazing ring. Since the film’s release in 1987, Alex Streeter‘s impeccably carved and beautifully-crafted jewelry has been worn by the likes of Jimmy Page, Steven Tyler, Axl Rose, Madonna, Kirk Douglas of The Roots and Marilyn Manson and seen in the pages of fashion bibles the world over. But it’s not just rock stars who covet his fine craftsmanship, it’s people wanting to feel like a rock star—or a sorcerer perhaps—who are attracted to his singular, occult-inspired handiworks.

Alex Streeter‘s work obviously isn’t for everyone, but for those who are attracted to it, it can be an obsession. But did they chose to wear his work, or did his work chose them to wear it?

It’s probably a little of both.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the ring’s creation, Alex Streeter has designed a new stamped, limited collector’s edition of the Angel Heart Ring. It’s a thicker version of the classic setting, complete with limited edition details, including the trademark Alex Streeter logo and “XXX” stamping on the inner ring.This limited edition setting will only be available through March 6th, 2018 before being discontinued.

Today April 26th—to celebrate Alex’s birthday—is the annual sale at AlexStreeter.com and AngelHeartRing.com. For one day only you take 30% off with the code “ALEXBDAY” at checkout.
 

Amber Angel Heart Ring
 

Side view
 

Ewaka Red Angel Heart Ring: Hand-created stone in a solid sterling silver setting.
 
More of Alex Streeter’s exquisite jewelry after the jump…

 
Originally referred to as “slam dancing,” moshing began to take form thanks to the chaotic environment of hardcore punk in the early 1980s. The DC and Southern California scenes featured bands like Bad Brains and Black Flag who brought a new level of energy and attitude to your average rock gigs. Instances like the Circle Jerks’ appearance on the Decline of the Western Civilization I or Fear‘s noteworthy performance on Saturday Night Live might have been the mainstream’s first glimpse at the sport. Now you can’t go to see (most) concerts without seeing a mosh pit. 

Love it or hate it, much of the fad can be attributed to the musical diversity of the 1990s. Not only was hardcore punk many stages evolved by now, but metal had also fully blossomed and gone mainstream. We also had rap-rock, grunge, industrial, and nu-metal dominating the charts. The mosh was now more than just an act of aggression. It was a movement. And stage diving and crowd surfing were now a “thing.”

Suddenly, the pit became dangerous. People started getting hurt. like in the circle pits at Woodstock ‘99. Thrashers at Lamb of God shows. The so-called Wall of Death at Ozzfest. Parents got concerned. And then (naturally) the media got concerned.too. Today we are able to revisit these reactions on the Internet with some hindsight.

After the jump, explore some 90s newscasts that depict a dangerous world of aggression, injury, and a mosh pit…

 
In 1992 Kaitsu Software, in what seems to have been the only game they ever put out, released a game for the Commodore Amiga using as its protagonist the greatest and drunkest frontman in rock history, Lemmy Kilmister.

Yes, Motörhead finally had its own video game.

Unfortunately, Motörhead was far from a great game. It was a bit derivative and it lacked any music by Motörhead, which seems like something you’d definitely want to have. It was one of those side-scrollers where you beat up your foes as you move from panel to panel. The game was heavily inspired by Golden Axe, a popular Sega franchise that had been delighting gamers since 1989. However, the gameplay of Motörhead was pretty good and it had a healthy dose of humor to enhance the experience.
 

 
In the game, Lemmy awakens from a bourbon-induced blackout to learn that his bandmates have been kidnapped. He has to progress through a series of music-related levels in which he must vanquish foes representing various genres (goth, country, acid house, rap, karaoke). In the “Nashville” level there’s a character who looks suspiciously like Dolly Parton, and the goth sequence, called “Enter the Morgue,” has a character who just might be mistaken for Robert Smith. Here’s an account of Lemmy’s capabilities, described by Mark Winstanley in the (mostly positive) review of the game that appeared in the January 1993 issue of Amiga Power magazine:
 

Lemmy can punch, headbutt, swing his guitar or use halitosis attacks, always assuming he’s loaded up on cockles or Jack Daniel’s first. By collecting magical Motörhead talismans he can unleash a devastating musical chord or summon up helpful demons, ranging from a tasty lass who distracts his opponents for a bit, up to WWF’s very own ‘Undertaker’, who just plain kills everyone.

 
It’s true: the game absolutely does literalize the metaphor of guitar-as-axe—indeed if you play the game that’s about 80% of what you’ll be doing, whacking people with a guitar. And yes, there is a feature where Lemmy knocks out his enemies by merely breathing on them! Amazing.

Between the levels you can scoop up power-ups or something on a vehicle, which is generally a motorcycle but in one instance Lemmy is perched atop a tractor! Another time (after the karaoke level) instead of his usual “hog,” he rides a bright red motorcycle clearly based on the one in Akira.
 

An amusing array of graphical elements from the game. My favorite bit is the “glug glug” icon which is the most Motörhead video game thing EVER.

Interspersed between the main levels are easier minigame modules—one of them is a copy of Root Beer Tapper called “Beer Frenzy” in which Lemmy is obliged to scamper all over a barroom lapping up brewskis. Drive responsibly, kids! 

More ‘Motörhead’ the video game, after the jump…

 
In 1981, Madness the greatest septet since The Magnificent Seven—no, not that crappy remake, the original with Yul Bryner—starred in their very own feature film Take It or Leave It.

Now, Take It or Leave It is not the catchiest of titles I know, but one, I suppose, that reflects the band’s attitude to whether you like their music or not….or even if you like this movie. Or not.

Thankfully—nearly everyone in the whole wide world loves them some Madness so this film could have been called Pig Fuckers from Hell and millions would still have queued to catch a glimpse of their heroes. Mind you, I suppose that’s not really saying much as millions would probably queue to go and see a film called Pig Fuckers from Hell even if Madness had nothing to do with it, or at least watch it on their laptops—I know I would.

And don’t go by that Nouvelle Vague-looking poster above, the original poster was the Nutty Boys draped with reels of shiny celluloid and surrounded by cans of film all against a dazzling red background—which probably gives a better flavor of what this film is all about.
 

The original movie poster.
 
Anyway.

What is this thing all about?

Well. If you’ve ever wondered what’s it like to be in a band or ever considered the strange quirks of fate and character that bring together a group of disparate talents to form a band in the first place, then this film will answer your questions.

Take It or Leave It is a very likable comic docudrama that tells the story of seven individuals who manage to come together through trial, error, hard work and ambition to form a band called Madness. Rather than have some young look-alikes play the band members, Madness step up to the mark and play themselves from earliest beginnings in 1976 to all-out success in 1981.

It looks almost like a documentary and includes some exceptional footage of the boys playing gigs in local pubs and clubs with quite a few tracks that haven’t been or were not released until very recently. The story as such is a series of episodic scenes telling the story of Chris Foreman, Lee Thompson, Mike Barson, Suggs, Dan “Woody” Woodgate, Mark Bedford, and Chas Smash—the fine bunch of wayward characters who together make up Madness. There was a script of sorts but there was also a fair bit of ad-libbing. Some of these scenes were true and some were not—like Chris didn’t work at the post office but it kinda felt right and is a funny scene. The acting gets better as the movie goes on and by the end, I was thinking, their acting is so much better now than at the beginning that this is where maybe they should have reshot the first part of the film.

But wait.

The acting’s not the important thing here. What is important about Take It or Leave It is that it’s probably the best music film ever made about being in a band. It’s like a cinéma vérité counterpoint to that seventies rock classic Flame which starred Slade. Both of these movies presented a side to the music business too often excised at the script stage or removed by producers during the edit. Add into this fine mix an album’s worth a classic Madness tracks, then the whole thing is a bit of a joy to watch.
Watch Madness in ‘Take It or Leave It,’ after the jump…

 
The back story of Britain in the fifties reads like the checklist for a Star Wars script. The war is over, the Empire is dying and the New World Colonies are slowly taking over. Many British pulp sci-fi writers had only to look out of their windows at the bomb-torn urban landscape to find inspiration. Just like George Orwell who used his knowledge of the everyday world of rationing, deprivation, and squalor in 1948 and a little of his time working at the BBC in Room 101 to color his novel 1984.

There were—to put it simply—two schools of thought in sci-fi at the time: write about what you know (or more likely your obsessions) as seen thru the prism of science-fiction, or write space age fantasies about exploration of the stars and seeking out new worlds and life forms as a topical metaphor for contemporary tropes about empire, war, and civilization. 

Both of these were pretty much the mainstay of a whole range of short-lived British science-fiction magazines that flourished between 1950-56. These wonderfully lurid-covered magazines featured work by John Rackham (aka John T. Phillifent), Volsted Gridban (aka E. C. Tubb) and Vargo Statten whose name became the masthead for one popular sci-fi magazine of the day later retitled to the British Science Fiction Magazine. Statten was just one of the many pseudonyms used by the prolific writer and editor John Russell Fearn, who together with Tubb and Phillifent produced the bulk of work for Britain’s golden years of science-fiction magazines before these ‘zines were sadly snuffed out by the flood of comics, movies, and television programs from the USA.

Afterwards, Fearn continued to write sci-fi and crime novels. Tubb became famous for his space opera Dumarest of Terra and writing a series of novels based on Gerry Anderson’s Space 1999. Phillifent went onto write a library of sci-fi novels and a few novelizations for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Most of the covers featured below from Vargo Statten, Tit-Bits Science Fiction and Scion publishing are the work of the brilliant artist and illustrator Ron Turner who supplied artwork, illustrations and comicstrips for Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Daleks.
 

 

 
More gorgeous British sci-fi covers, after the jump…

Card #15: Introducing ‘Jones’

Two premises. Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien is one of the most terrifying movies ever made. And the primary audience for trading cards during that era was preteens.

Ergo, there aren’t any trading cards for Alien.

Not so fast.

Surprising as it may seem, Topps did make trading cards for Alien. It seems safe to say that Topps may have gotten the contract for the job in the wake of the incredible success of Star Wars, and was attracted by a connection to an ambitious sci-fi space epic, without realizing that the actual movie in question would be rated R and indeed, give adults nightmares. (In the U.K. Alien received an X rating.)

Not many movies this cool ever got trading cards. If only they had made cards for Videodrome..... Or even The Shining, even if we did highlight this recently made retro set a year or two back.

Fun to see H.R. Giger himself featured in card #47. I’d hazard a guess that the Alien card series was the only one ever marketed with an image of, to quote the medical professional who chimed in about the subject on this page, “a gangrenous rectal sphincter,” as you can see here:
 

 
The back of the cards featured text descriptions placed within a gorgeous image of an egg:
 

 
The set also included stickers, which looked pretty cool:
 

 
Here are a few of the cards, followed by a picture of the packaging:
 

Card #8: Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt)
 

Card #9: Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver)
 
Much more after the jump…........

Salvador Dali providing direction to Playboy photographer Pompeo Posar and a Playboy Bunny in Cadaqués, Spain in 1973.
 

“The meaning of my work is the motivation that is of the purest – money. What I did for Playboy is very good and your payment is equal to the task.”

—Salvador Dali on his collaboration with Playboy in 1973

For his photo shoot for Playboy magazine, Salvador Dali, long-time Playboy photographer Pompeo Posar, a gaggle of Playboy Bunnies and a giant egg headed to Cadaqués, a seaside town in Spain near where Dali lived in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town. The event would turn the sleepy village upside down during the shoot and local Dali-devotees would wait outside his home so that they could pay homage to the Surrealist by chanting “Master! Master!” whenever he left the residence to go to work under the blistering hot Spanish sun.

Working closely with Posar, Dali created a few sketches of his vision for the shoot which ultimately ended up including a giant egg, an equally fake large snake, various collage images that ran the gamut from a Coca-Cola bottle to Renaissance-style architecture, and of course, Playboy Bunnies cavorting around wearing little to nothing because this is Playboy magazine we’re talking about. Dali—who was 69 at the time—ran the shoot like the master that he was and residents of Cadaqués would watch the artist’s every move from the hills surrounding the location.

The final photos live up to Dali’s provocative, boundary-pushing style, and are gorgeously bizarre to behold. I’ve included a few of Dali’s preliminary sketches that detail part of his artistic vision for the shoot and many others including the master at work, as well as the finished product that appeared in the December 1974 issue of Playboy.

Pretty much all of them are NSFW. But you hate your stupid desk job anyway, don’t you?
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
In the mid-1980s, Jim Reardon was at the highly regarded Character Animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, and one of his student projects was a remarkable mashup of the Charlie Brown universe and the Sam Peckinpah universe—all of it undertaken with what must have been a deep affection for both worlds. The four-minute film’s title is “Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown,” an obvious reference to Peckinpah’s 1974 movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

The short is presented as the commercial for a “heartwarming holiday special” featuring the Peanuts gang. So the Great Pumpkin places a bounty on Charlie Brown’s head, which causes an immediate death spiral into ultraviolence. All of the familiar characters (Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, etc.) attempt to assassinate Charlie Brown, until finally the hero is forced to take matters into his own hands, grabbing a machine gun and mowing them all down.

The second half of the short is truly a bloodbath, and definitely Reardon has Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch on the brain most of all. Peckinpah was known not just for violence but most of all for lush slow-motion sequences focusing on the carnage, and “Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown” certainly has several of those. The moment when Lucy nips Charlie Brown in the shoulder is a direct callback to a sequence from The Wild Bunch involving William Holden’s character Pike Bishop.

Reardon’s short, which is in black-and-white, is a little crude by professional standards, but for a student project it’s incredibly effective and engaging. “Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown” is dense, somewhat akin to MAD Magazine, with references covering everything from Popeye and Travis Bickle to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Godzilla. The closing zinger, spoken in Arnie’s trademark accent, is “Happiness is a warm uzi,” a remarkably canny mix of the strip’s treacly motto “Happiness is a warm puppy” and John Lennon’s memorable ditty “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” 

“Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown” also owes a debt to the old Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly in the bomb Lucy creates to dispose of her football-kicking buddy.

Based on the strength of this short—one imagines—Reardon was quickly hired by John Kricfalusi (later of Ren and Stimpy fame) as a writer on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. Later on he would be a supervising director for seasons 9 through 15 of The Simpsons  and co-wrote the script for WALL-E.

Watch it after the jump…

 
L.A.‘s hip-hop/punk/metal mutants, Ho99o9 have their debut album United States of Horror set to drop on May 5th via the band’s own imprint Toys Have Powers (distributed via through Caroline) with the dynamic title track (and more) produced by David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio.

The band consists of the partnership between theOGM (Jean) and Yeti Bones (Eaddy) and Ho99o9’s very modern melding of punk, rap, and Crass-inspired political militancy (and grand sense of graphic provocation) has been described by The New York Times as “slow subwoofer-abusing hip-hop, death metal, thrash, wriggly synthesizer tones, punk, post-punk, some splotches of pink noise…” and that sounds about right to me. Everything I’ve heard by these guys so far has been utterly amazing—Ho99o9 feel more “now” and more in tune with the times to me than any other act I can name—and the new song/video for “City Rejects” is no exception.

Ho99o9’s upcoming US tour starts on May 17th in Santa Ana, CA and finishes up June 11th in Miami. The 20 date tour will include a hometown stop at LA’s Echoplex, Chicago, Toronto, DC, Brooklyn and more. Then they’re doing the European festivals after which I expect they’re going to be fucking huge. Absolutely massive.
 

 
Here’s a link to a landing page where Dangerous Minds readers can download “United States of Horror,” “City Rejects” and their Crass-inspired art-zine for free.