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Cover Star: Poptastic covers of vintage British TV comic ‘Look-In’

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Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV.

In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by anyone with a TV set; and ITV, or independent television, which was financed by advertising.

Look-In was ITV’s kids comic or teen magazine. It contained a mix of cartoon strips based on popular ITV broadcast shows like Benny Hill, Man About the House, Kung Fu, The Six Million Dollar Man, Sapphire and Steel, Freewheelers, and Catweazle. There was also sports, puzzles, crosswords and plenty of pictures and pullout posters of pop stars like Marc Bolan, Debbie Harry, David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, Slade, David Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Roy Wood and so on.

If memory serves, the very first issue of Look-In contained a free, cut-out and make your very own TV studio which featured the set, presenters and a camera from ITV’s hit kids show Magpie—rival to BBC’s more mild-mannered Blue Peter. Perhaps my interest in TV started then? Who knows. Look-In was a strangely appealing magazine, for it always contained something of interest—whether a pop star interview or favorite comic strip, or just the double-paged regional listings for the week. I lived in Scotland which meant watching local programming like Knot-Tying from Drumnadrochit or Haggis Farming from Pittenweem, while the rest of the country enjoyed Captain Scarlet or Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Look-In also had fabulous cover artwork featuring portraits of pop stars, DJs, and actors as painted by Arnaldo Putzu. These covers made the magazine instantly recognizable and iconic. A bit like Richard Bernstein’s covers for Andy Warhol’s Interview which followed in 1972. Putzu had a career painting movie posters, most notably for the Carry On films and Get Carter. His paintings were featured on the cover of Look-In until the 1980s when they were sadly and unimaginatively replaced with photographs.

Look-In lasted from January 1971 until March 1994 and here’s a small selection of the cover artwork from the 1970s to early eighties.
 
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More poptastic covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.22.2020
09:08 am
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Blondie show ends in a riot before it even starts, and cherries were to blame?
12.10.2019
07:24 pm
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Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol.
 
On December 8th, 1977, Blondie were set to make their first appearance in Brisbane, Australia. But the show didn’t go on as scheduled, and it would become known as the only show the band would be forced to cancel. In Australia, Blondie’s first record, Blondie was a huge hit, and fans were rabid as they waited at Her Majesty’s Theater, a former opera house, for the band to take the stage. And, as the title of this post indicates pretty clearly, that never happened. Here’s the story about how Debbie Harry’s alleged overindulgence on a fruit close to my heart, cherries, resulted in a good-old-fashioned punk rock riot.

As the story goes, the turnout for the show was about 1200 strong. After waiting around an hour for the show to start, drummer Clem Burke came out on stage to personally apologize to the crowd, letting them Blondie wouldn’t be able to play because Deborah Harry was “ill.” The cause of Harry’s illness was blamed on the singer eating too many cherries, and was apparently so acute a doctor was dispatched to the theater to treat the ailing singer. Ray Maguire, the band’s road manager, would later make a curious statement supporting the cherry-theory:

“In New York, we don’t see very much fruit, but out here, we’ve been going mad on it. I think that Deborah just had a few too many cherries over the last few days.”

I don’t know about you, but I had no idea there was some sort of fresh fruit crisis going on in New York in the 1970s. Anyway, after apologizing to the crowd, Burke was loudly booed and pelted with an object thrown by someone in the audience. As bottles and cans started to fly at the stage, Burke made a hasty exit while local Brisbane punk band The Survivors (known initially as Rat Salad, just like Van Halen) were begging show promoters to let them play. Some attendees started to leave while a group of five tried to get on stage and ended up throwing their fists at members of Blondie’s road crew. The fisticuffs continued backstage as crew members battled to eject the punchy fans, a few who were arrested by the police.

Meanwhile, other angry ex-Blondie fans somehow managed to remove a huge iron gate and iron bar from the premises and using their makeshift weapons to try to bust open the door. They were eventually able to hurl the iron bar over an opening at the top of the door, where it nearly landed on top of fans trying to leave what was pretty much a riot in progress. A riot attributed to an unnamed, unemployed twenty-year-old youth and three minors charged with willful destruction of property. The youngsters were tried in Children’s Court.
 

An article in the Telegraph describing the riot at Her Majesty’s Theater.
 
In a fantastic twist to this story, Australian writer and culture vulture Clinton Walker (author of many books, including the incredible biography on Bon Scott, Highway to Hell: the Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott) literally had a front-row seat when the riot began and, according to Walker, his pal Bob Farrell (later of the band Laughing Clowns) was one of the kids who stormed the stage. In Walker’s account of the riot, cherries were perhaps not to blame for Harry’s illness, but instead the ingestion of potent Australian heroin. The acclaimed author admits it was a “scurrilous” thing to say, but confirms it to be very much a part of the mythology behind the cancelation of Blondie’s first gig in Brisbane. Walker was also at the poorly attended make-up show ten days later on December 18th at Her Majesty’s Theater, where the band concluded their set by smashing up their instruments. Nice.
 

Blondie live at CBGB’s in May of 1977.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Gigerstein’: The extraordinary guitar that H.R. Giger designed for Blondie’s Chris Stein
‘What is it?’: Björk, Blondie & the story of the fish from Faith No More’s infamous video for ‘Epic’
Blondie: Live on German TV from 1977
Debbie does Mick: Blondie performing The Stones’ ‘Obsession’, 1977
Debbie Harry covering The Ramones 27 years ago

Posted by Cherrybomb
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12.10.2019
07:24 pm
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‘Make Me Tonight’: Listen to Debbie Harry’s isolated vocal for Blondie’s ‘Atomic’
09.04.2019
06:51 am
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A song that lasts more than a generation connects with the listener on an emotional level, an infectious tunefulness that anticipates a moment of approaching joy. Blondie have an impressive back catalog of such songs. From “Sunday Girl,” “One Way or Another,” “Picture This,” “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” “Call Me” all the way up to their more recent (and perhaps less well-known) tracks like “Mother,” “Fun,” “China Shoes,” “Long Time,” and “Doom or Destiny.”

Blondie have been blessed with a maverick mix of genuine talent as both musicians and songwriters and one of the all-time best frontpersons in the business.

It was their unique, utterly joyous sound that hooked me first. No doubt, I would have been instantly smitten (and most likely punished by the parish priest with one Our Father and three Hail Marys) if I’d first seen Harry tease and sashay in that promo for “Denis.” But it was the sound of Blondie that thrilled me first. Clem Burke’s drums, Chris Stein’s guitar, and Debbie Harry’s vocals. And let’s not forget Gary Valentine (bass), Jimmy Destri (keyboards), Frank Infante (guitar), Nigel Harrison (bass). Who all together they made music that will last for decades more than their three or four minutes of play.

Take a song like “Atomic” written by Destri and Harry who were originally trying to do something like “Heart of Glass” and then gave “it the spaghetti western treatment” with a little hint of what sounds like Dean Parrish’s Northern Soul classic “I’m On My Way.” Before that, according to Harry, “it was just lying there like a lox.” Add to this Burke’s pulsating drums, Harrison’s driving bass line, and Stein’s razor sharp guitar riff and you’re on target for a hit.

Then there comes the cherry on the top—Harry’s god-like vocals.
 
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Her lyrics are minimalist. The same four or five lines repeated over and over. In Cathay Che’s biography on the singer Platinum Blonde, Harry said she composed the lyrics while the band were playing the song, She was just “scatting along,” riffing, trying to figure out what to sing. The lyrics could have been banal but they suggest a deep sexual yearning, a burning desire, which may or may not relate to Harry’s own early life. Well, at least her lyrics make me think that maybe so as she once explained about her sex hungry teenage years in an interview with Victor Bockris for High Times:

I was really oversexed. Really charged and hot to trot. Later on, when I got my driver’s license, I used to drive up to this sleazy town near Paterson [NJ] and would walk up and down this street called “Cunt Mile.” I would get picked up by and make out with different guys in the back seats of cars to get my rocks off because I was so horny and couldn’t make out with anybody from my own town.

O, to have lived in that little sleazy town back then.

“Atomic” from Blondie’s classic Eat to the Beat album was released in February (UK) and April (US) 1980, where it topped the UK charts and made the Top 40 Billboard Charts in the States. I often feel that Harry has never quite had the respect she deserves as a singer or as a pioneering front woman who “was saying things in songs that female singers didn’t really say back then,” as Harry explains in her forthcoming autobiography Face It:

I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.

Or as author and journalist Paul Burston once remarked, “Everybody wanted [Debbie]. You either wanted to fuck her or to be her.”

Though obviously tempted by one of those suggestions, I personally wanted to listen to Debbie Harry.
 

Blondie—isolated vocal ‘Atomic.’
 
Listen to Debbie Harry’s isolated vocal for ‘One Way or Another and ‘Call Me,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.04.2019
06:51 am
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Brian Eno, Debbie Harry play movie soundtracks on ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell’s internet radio show
06.28.2018
08:18 am
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The March 3, 1979 issue of ‘Record Mirror’
 
Last summer, I posted clips from MrDeMilleFM, the new internet radio venture of former Stranglers singer and guitarist Hugh Cornwell. It’s devoted entirely to movies and their music, and it’s fun. Hugh’s got specials on William Wellman, John Frankenheimer, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame and Steve McQueen; he’s got interviews with Ken Loach, John Sayles, John Altman, Peter Webber and David Puttnam. Behold his mighty hand!

Since that time, two episodes of Cornwell’s old internet radio show, Sound Trax FM, have surfaced in the MrDeMilleFM archive. These will interest DM readers, because Hugh’s guests are Brian Eno and Debbie Harry, playing and talking about their favorite movie music.

Among the records Eno spins during his 80-minute visit with Cornwell are Samira Tewfik’s “Hobbak Morr,” the source for “A Secret Life” on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “I’m Deranged,” the immortal track from Bowie and Eno’s Outside that David Lynch took as the theme for Lost Highway. Speaking about which, Eno praises the still unreleased album-length improvisation he and Bowie recorded at the beginning of the Outside sessions:

In a room together, we played for 72 minutes a kind of suite, really, which he improvised the singing over, and it turned into this amazingly complex and interesting story which finally became something called “Leon,” which sort of became the backbone of the album Outside. But the original improvisation, which I listened to not very long ago, is absolutely incredible! You think: How could anyone do this without having a plan in advance?

 

 
Debbie Harry’s episode is too short at 47 minutes, but she brings along the best song on the Performance soundtrack and talks about working with David Cronenberg on Videodrome and John Waters on Hairspray.

Tracklists and the shows, after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.28.2018
08:18 am
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Kellogg’s Corn Flakes art project featuring David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed


 
Like three of the four members of Talking Heads, Bobby Grossman had been studying at the Rhode Island School of Design before vamoosing down to the Big Apple to take part in the punk/no-wave creative revolution occurring in the mid-1970s. Grossman quickly became a familiar face at CBGBs and the Mudd Club. Grossman would make his mark in the realm of photography; he took lots of photos of famous people that are a useful resource to this day. 

Early on Grossman became friendly with André Leon Talley, who later become a big muckety-muck at Vogue (you might remember him from The September Issue), as well as Richard Bernstein, who over the years would execute almost a dozen covers for various Grace Jones releases and also did the familiar purple and yellow cover of New Order’s “Fine Time.”
 

Self-portrait by Bobby Grossman
 
According to Richard Boch’s The Mudd Club, Grossman was “the official TV Party photographer,” referencing Glenn O’Brien’s au courant anything-goes cable access TV show of the era. O’Brien also had Warhol connections; Warhol had included O’Brien, a graduate of Georgetown, as a part of his circle because he was looking to replace the speed addicts in his orbit with “clean-cut college kids.” In any case, Grossman was a familiar part of the vibrant NYC hijinks of the late 70s and beyond.

Warhol, whose most famous works had involved boxes of Brillo and cans of Campbell’s Soup, was certainly not unconscious of the iconic status of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as well. While not as well-known as the Brillo boxes, each of these still fetches a pretty penny on the auction circuit:
 

 
Before arriving in New York and meeting Warhol himself, Grossman cribbed a page from the master and concocted a special punk rock version of an all-American box of Corn Flakes. As Grossman told Noah Becker about the project in 2009:
 

I photographed a number of friends eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The idea originated at RISD when I took a Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed and put it on a box of German Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Later on when I moved to NYC I did a series of Corn Flake photo sessions.

 
Grossman has said that the idea “originated in 1974 while listening to Sally Can’t Dance.”

I think the impact of putting a noted New York drug addict and chronicler of the city’s “underground” types on the cover of Wheaties, then and now reserved for only the most wholesomely successful of athletes (obviously the best-known such sportsman would much later become Caitlyn Jenner), is somewhat lost on us today. There’s a picture of Warhol himself holding one of Grossman’s Lou Reed Kellogg’s boxes, which you can see at the top of this post. Here’s a closer look:
 

 
The Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box in the 1970s featured the words “die originalen” in cursive script just underneath the name of the product, obviously signifying that this was not some ersatz imitation but the real McCoy just like Americans consumed with their morning orange juice. 

Then Grossman hit upon a related but different idea, which was to take pictures of prominent New York bohemians and rock stars doing a hokey pose while holding a bowl of Wheaties…

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.28.2018
10:31 am
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Amusing vintage outsider art of Debbie Harry done by a teen fan
08.15.2017
10:09 am
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Debbie Harry and one of writer/blogger Toby Weiss’ illustrations of Harry that was done by Weiss in 1979.
 
I’ve said it before a thousand times—I love my job here at Dangerous Minds. And today that fact is especially true as I will be sharing a few choice vintage illustrations of Debbie Harry done by one of her teenage superfans.

Posted on her blog M.E.L.T., St. Louis-based writer Toby Weiss chronicled her devotion to the fabulous Ms. Harry by revealing a handful of her charming illustrations of the pop icon that she did between 1979 and 1983. Here’s a little bit from Weiss concerning her adoration of all things Debbie Harry:

“I’d never experienced anyone like her; she was so beautiful and powerful and talented that she seemed more like a comic book hero. Everything I needed to know about life, sex, fashion, and music, I looked to Debbie. And because American media was now as infatuated with her as I was, it was easy to get all the advice I needed.”

Fantastic. Weiss’ adorable, self-described “teenage scribbles” of Harry below.
 

June, 1979.
 

November, 1979.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.15.2017
10:09 am
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H.R. Giger body paints Debbie Harry for album cover and video—behind the scenes
07.12.2017
01:57 pm
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In the spring of 1980, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie met H.R. Giger at a party at the Hansen Gallery in New York City, which was showing an exhibit of Giger’s Alien paintings. Giger was actually on his way back from Los Angeles, where he had just received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in recognition of his groundbreaking work on the movie. Giger later gave the following account of the meeting:
 

There I was introduced to a very beautiful woman, Debbie Harry, the singer of the group Blondie, and her boyfriend, Chris Stein. They were apparently excited about my work and asked me whether I would be prepared to design the cover of the new Debbie Harry album. I found both of them immediately likeable; so I readily agreed and was greatly pleased to be allowed to create something for such an attractive woman, although I had never heard anything from the group. This was due to the fact that I was more interested in jazz.

 
It was a heady moment for both sides of the equation. Alien had launched Giger to a whole new level of fame, while Blondie were still riding the crest of the new wave they had done so much to define; their fourth album Eat to the Beat had come out a few months before. But Harry and Stein were getting tired of being in Blondie.

Harry and Giger don’t seem particularly similar as artists, but as is well known, they did end up collaborating on the album cover for Harry’s first solo album KooKoo, which came out in 1981. KooKoo, unfortunately, was not a rousing success, and much of the reason for the disappointing outcome was the unsettling cover art, which showed the face of a regal and unmistakably Giger-esque Harry impaled by four large spikes. Here is a picture of Giger with the early concept art:
 

 
Giger said that the idea of the metal spikes derived from a medical procedure he had recently undergone: “Since I had just had an acupuncture treatment from my friend and doctor, Paul Tobler, the idea of the four needles came to me, in which I saw symbols of the four elements, to be combined with her face. I submitted the suggestions by phone to Debbie and Chris. They liked the idea and, in addition, they commissioned me to make two videoclips (music videos) of the best songs.”

The image was disturbing enough that advertisements featuring the image were banned by British Rail, and they weren’t the only ones. One might say that the public really didn’t want the era’s reigning sultry pop-disco queen to enter the scary and forbidding world of Giger’s art, but Harry and Stein have never exactly been afraid to take a risk, so the die was cast on that, for better or for worse.
 

 
After the album came out, Stein and Harry penned an article for Heavy Metal (which was already intimately familiar with Giger’s work) about working with the artist. In the piece, which is called “Strange Encounters of the Swiss Kind” and is coauthored by Harry and Stein, the following observations are registered:
 

Giger is an industrial designer, which is very apparent to you the moment you step into his home. Even something as alien-looking as his chairs is structurally sound. The Alien creature—with its McLuhanesque quality of being the machine as an extension of the organic—makes sense biologically. The face hugger, with its air sacs, isn’t just decorative. Giger’s work has a subconscious effect: it engenders the fear of being turned into metal. It’s awesome—the work of an ultimate perfectionist, a true obsessive.

 
Much more after the jump….....

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.12.2017
01:57 pm
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Debbie Harry in 1980 TV ads for Gloria Vanderbilt jeans


 
Until the mid-70s, the only kinds of blue jeans anyone really wore were Levis, Lee or Wrangler. Then came designer jeans like Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt.

To take on the big three jeans companies, these upscale upstarts needed cutting-edge celebrities to flog their togs: Calvin Klein famously used Brooke Shields and Natasha Kinski in his memorable advertising campaigns. Gloria Vanderbilt’s teen line, “GV Jr.” by Murjani had style icon Debbie Harry of Blondie for the spokesmodel.

In the first one, you’ll notice Lounge Lizard John Lurie on sax and Harry saunters past some SAMO wall tagging (SAMO was the graffiti name used by a young Jean-Michel Basquiat). Eagle-eyed No Wave trainspotters will also notice Mudd Club co-founder Anya Phillips and James Chance as they watch this over and over again…
 

 
Another Gloria Vanderbilt jeans commercial with Debbie Harry after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.26.2017
01:19 pm
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Punk rock knitting: These cult figure sweaters are easily the most amazing sweaters money can buy


Kraftwerk sweater by by Amimono Horinouchi
 
I’m not the sort of person to really care all that much about, or even notice, expert knitting or “crafting” or embroidery or anything remotely like that. This very sentence will probably mark my first time using the word “felted” and it might very well be the last. I’ve got no business being in a Hobby Lobby. I’m not putting it down, but it’s not my area of interest.

That was until I saw the jaw-dropping sweaters made by Amimono Horinouchi, a 49-year-old knitwear artiste based in Tokyo. THIS is where my own esoteric interests hit the Venn diagram with wool sweaters hard. When I saw the Kraftwerk sweater, my eyes practically bugged out—they’re all so amazing: Debbie Harry, Ramones, Bowie, YMO—but what could possibly top that insane Kraftwerk sweater???

And then I saw the one on his website of Throbbing Gristle-era Genesis P-Orridge and was completely and utterly floored.

Amimono Horinouchi‘s knitwear might be “fashion,” but it is also art.

According to his Etsy page, which has prices in dollars, the bags sell for less than $200, and the sweaters go for about $600 which I think is a great bargain. He also takes commissions and will even do a sweater of your beloved dog or cat. I’d love to see him working in large tapestries. Incredible!

Follow Amimono Horinouchi on Twitter.
 

Genesis P-Orridge
 

Debbie Harry
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.27.2016
12:27 pm
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Debbie Harry covering The Ramones 27 years ago
10.24.2016
09:16 am
Topics:
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What we have here is some ultra-rare footage of Debbie Harry performing the Ramones classic “Pet Semetary,” a song which was written for the Stephen King movie adaptation of the same name. This performance from October 23, 1989 was part of Debbie’s Def, Dumb, and Blonde solo tour. The Ramones original had been released five months earlier on their Brain Drain album and had become one of their biggest radio hits. The song has since become a staple of Blondie’s live set.

Though there’s nothing particularly unusual about Debbie Harry covering the Ramones—they were pals and CBGB compatriots, this clip is remarkable for the quality of the performance and the fact that, for a Ramones song, it sounds an awful lot like it should have been a Blondie song.
 

 
Debbie’s cover here was recorded at The Roxy in Los Angeles. Though the framing and video quality makes it difficult to verify who exactly is in Debbie’s band here, information online suggests that she had been touring around the same time with a lineup of Chris Stein (guitar), Leigh Foxx (bass), Carla Olla (guitar), Suzi Davis (keyboard), and Jimmy Clark (drums). The image and sound quality here is less than stellar in this rare footage, but the band rocking hard.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Blondie bombshell Debbie Harry’s awkwardly awesome late-night disco-diatribe against nuclear power

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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10.24.2016
09:16 am
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The secret teachings of rock ‘n’ roll: Ancient Debbie Harry calendar proves time is an illusion!
07.01.2016
09:35 am
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Sometimes better late than never isn’t just better: It’s amazing! In this case, late is now and it’s very cool!

The Official 1983 Debbie Harry Calendar is current and could in fact be re-named “The Official 2016 Deborah Harry Calendar.” It has been 33 years since this calendar was published and while fashion and Debbie have changed, the dates of the days have not. Call it a miracle, if you will. All I know is that this is a very special gift from the goddesses who rule the realms of timelessness. The number 33 is powerful beyond all numbers. Click here to have your frontal lobes seared like a mound of sweetbreads.

Time is an illusion. We live in the eternal now, now. The Official 1983 Debbie Harry Calendar is proof that time is more than just a series of numbers lined up like soldiers marching off to war. It’s an infinite spiral going in two directions at once. A Busby Berkeley extravaganza choreographed to a rock ‘n’ roll beat. Science has impenetrable explanations for this time loop thing but I don’t want to hear about it. This calendar is magic. Try as they might, mere scientists can’t clarify the mysteries of time and space in ways that trigger the flippers in the pinball machine of our souls. The Official 1983 Debbie Harry Calendar is a totem, the stuff of shamans, poets, and seers like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. As a high school dropout, I may be unaware of how these things work, but I’m on the side of the mystic, don’t rain on my parade. The spirits of Aleister Crowley and Lobsang Rampa will kick your cynical asses. And how do you explain the fact that I discovered this preternatural artifact, this time machine of sorts, on Debbie Harry’s birthday!?!

I am beyond ecstatic. My whole body is a tingling dust devil of motile spores. Can science find an equation for that?!

Fuck math. Let’s dance! The new wave is the now wave.

Impress your friends. Print copies and put them in your wallet or your disco bag. Who knows, the numbers may change at the stroke of midnight, 2017.

Levitating lovers in the secret stratosphere
I am still in touch with your presence dear

 

 
The rest of the year after the jump…

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Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.01.2016
09:35 am
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Debbie Harry dominates DEVO in the funny pages of Punk Magazine, 1978
06.08.2016
04:56 pm
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At the start of 1978 Blondie had released its self-titled debut album and was about to put out its sophomore follow-up Plastic Letters; the band’s masterpiece, Parallel Lines, would be recorded in the summer and released in the autumn. Meanwhile, Akron’s DEVO had been bouncing around with sublime creativity for several years, but their mind-blowing debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was still several months off.

Still, the two staples of smart American pop music were apparently well known enough even at that moment, such that PUNK magazine could feel it worthwhile to commission a silly comic strip involving the two bands, featuring photographs as the panels, as in the fumetti form often seen in Italy and also, as it happens, in frequent use by National Lampoon right around this time. 

The title of the strip was “Disposable DEVO,” and the plot was rife with the “devolutionary” concepts that DEVO’s own name made so famous.
 

 
The comic appeared in issue #12 of Punk Magazine, which came out in January 1978. Chris Stein took the photographs. In the strip “a malfunctioning android cleaning lady” played by Debbie Harry attempts to sweep away a pile of humanoid debris (i.e., DEVO) only to find, against all expectation, that the five identically outfitted “zeroids” are actually capable of feeling sensations (pain).

You can actually buy this issue for a mere $75 (it’s also available on Amazon for a bit less)—or read “Disposable DEVO below. (You can do both, too.)
 

 
via Post Punk Industrial
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
New Wave: Debbie Harry wanted to remake Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ with Robert Fripp
The Great DEVO Cat Listening Party of 2010

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.08.2016
04:56 pm
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Long live the New Flesh: The making of David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’
04.29.2016
09:09 am
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Videodrome, which came out in 1982, probably freaked me out as much as any movie ever has, when I caught it on cable TV a year or two after its release at the age of 13. In fact, I turned it off halfway through—it was just too much—but I ventured back a week later and watched the whole thing in morbid fascination.

It was the last of the films David Cronenberg made in his concentrated early “body horror” period, that stretch when he was establishing himself as an absolute master of intellectual schlock. Not that he ever abandoned that terrain at all—Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and Crash were still to come—but his next project was a comparatively commercial Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone, and it wasn’t too long before he’s adapting David Henry Hwang plays and making movies about Jung.

After the thrilling, entropic run of serious mindfucks between 1975 and 1982, consisting of Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome—leaving out the racecar drama Fast Company to make a tidier chronology—there was a period in which Cronenberg’s actual personality and his public persona were quite out of sync.
 

Just a normal day in the Cronenberg universe…..
 
In real life, Cronenberg was a thoughtful, mild-mannered dork, but he was perceived as an insane freak, since cinephiles hadn’t had much access to seeing Cronenberg himself yet. The 1980s would bring The Fly and Dead Ringers, which would cement Cronenberg’s reputation as a filmmaker with a rare power to unsettle.

Today we think of him as this genial old guy who makes striking but somewhat conventional dramas like Eastern Promises or Maps to the Stars, but there was a time when even Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker quite accustomed to a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, was actually frightened to meet his Canadian colleague!

In an interview that appeared in David Breskin’s wonderful collection Inner Views, Cronenberg commented:
 

I’m aware there are apparent contradictions, like the well-known Marty Scorsese thing: after I met him, he said in an interview that he had been terrified to meet me, though he had wanted to meet me. This is the guy who made Taxi Driver and he’s afraid to meet me! This is a guy who knows from the inside out that there’s a complex relationship between someone who makes films and his films. But he still was taking the films at face value and equating me with them, and the craziness he saw in the films, and the disturbing things he saw in the films, he felt would be the essence of me as a person. And so he was amazed to meet a guy who, as he later said, “looked like a Beverly Hills gynecologist.” And I was not anything like he thought I was going to be.

 
So that’s the context in which James Woods says, in Mick Garris’ look at the making of Videodrome, that Cronenberg’s was “one of the strangest minds I’ve ever encountered.” The fact is, Cronenberg’s sensibility has been tremendously normalized over the last generation, and it takes a mental effort to recall a time when Cronenberg was fucking dangerous and ultra weird.

To be fair, Woods was in the middle of making a movie in which his character, Max Renn, develops a kind of vagina into which he can insert a videotape and basically acts out the narrative laid out in David Bowie’s “TVC15” when he crawls into the cold glass of his cathode-ray tube…..

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.29.2016
09:09 am
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‘The biggest thing since World War III’: Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, and Iggy Pop talk ‘Rock and Rule’
04.12.2016
12:25 pm
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The 1983 animated rock and roll movie Rock and Rule was a failure at the box office but found its audience on cable TV a couple years later. Produced by the Canadian animation studio Nelvana, the movie is a sci-fi rock and roll allegory between good and evil, pitting a rock band of cute mutants called the Drats against an ageing, Mephistophelian rock star/sorcerer named Mok who is intent on securing a special voice capable of unleashing a powerful demon from another dimension who will make Mok immortal. Rock and Rule had a similar look and feel to Heavy Metal, which came out in 1981.

Heavy Metal, true to its title, used music by Blue Öyster Cult, Journey, Grand Funk Railroad, Nazareth, Sammy Hagar, and, er, Donald Fagen, and similarly, Rock and Rule benefited from the contributions of Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire as well as Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie.

Nelvana released a 25-minute promo documentary about the making of the movie.  “Making of” documentaries of animated movies always have the potential to be dreadfully dull (due to the exacting and painstaking process involved), but in this case, since the subject matter of the movie is so much about rock and roll itself, it’s only appropriate to feature a lot of interviews with the musicians, which is the strategy adopted here.

Interestingly, both Maurice White and Chris Stein separately offer the perspective that they like writing music for movies because the overall artistic direction is already decided. Producer Michael Hirsh notes that Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were good choices as musical contributors because it was so exceedingly likely that they would give so much of themselves to the project.

Lou Reed, composer and singer of “My Name Is Mok,” had this to say about the movie’s heavy:
 

I felt very positive towards Mok because there are many things to work with, with him, I could identfy with him up to a point, but he was—the way he looked, the things he said, the kind of things he believed in, there were a lot of ways I could relate to that, and even though I don’t necessarily think that way I could really bite into his character and become that way with him, you know, and make him live and breathe like a real person.

 
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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.12.2016
12:25 pm
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When Debbie Harry wrestled Andy Kaufman, 1983
04.04.2016
10:05 am
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Caitlan Clarke, Andy Kaufman and Debbie Harry,1983

Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap was a 1983 Broadway play that starred Debbie Harry as “Tanzi,” Caitlan Clarke as “Tanzi” and Andy Kaufman as the “referee.” Debbie Harry and Caitlin Clarke had to alternate in the lead role of “Tanzi” because of the strenuous nature of the wrestling.

Apparently the play didn’t do too well, though. Despite its success in London, Teaneck Tanzi closed on Broadway after just a single performance.

From a 2007 Gothamist interview with Debbie Harry:

What can you tell us about your Broadway debut alongside Andy Kaufman in Teaneck Tanzi?

The Venus Flytrap? [Laughs.] Well, it was a very interesting little musical play. At the time, way back in the beginning of the ‘80s, Chris [Stein, co-founder of Blondie] and I were very big wrestling fans and we used to go to the Garden all the time because we had a friend who did all the promotion there and she would get us ringside seats. We had a great time and started going to wrestling many, many years before Cyndi [Lauper] starting hanging out with Lou Albano. So then all of a sudden I got this script and I thought it could be really fun. So we did the show for about three weeks in previews, downtown in a nice sort of loft space Off Off-Broadway. And it was great; the audiences were loud and everybody was shouting at the wrestlers just like a real wrestling match. And then they decided they were going to open it on Broadway and it opened and closed almost instantly! So I guess it was a little bit premature for Broadway.

 
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More after the jump…
 

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.04.2016
10:05 am
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