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Mike Patton performs in his pajamas with Faith No More on MTV’s ‘Da Show’
11.02.2017
07:52 am
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Faith No More, early 1990s.
 
Da Show was a blink-and-you-missed-it program on MTV hosted by Doctor Dré (not to be confused with Dr. Dre of N.W.A) and Ed Lover of Yo! MTV Raps fame. It was best described as a kind of variety show that would welcome timely guests and musical acts including a rather epic appearance by Faith No More on December 26th, 1990. 

It’s been said that Faith No More was the only metal band to ever appear on the short-lived show and man, did they ever fucking bring it and then some to the studio’s tiny stage and live audience. After the band spits out a blistering version of “Epic,” Dré and Ed Lover crash the stage so Ed can do his famous(?) “Ed Lover Dance.” Following that Dré and Ed stick around on stage while Faith performs “Edge of the World,” a downtempo number from their 1989 album The Real Thing. This is yet another bizarro time capsule from the 90s that I had no idea even existed until today and the nine-plus minute video is well worth watching as the then 22-year-old Patton delivers a more than solid performance on this long-forgotten show. Patton in pajamas for the WIN!
 

Faith No More performing “Epic” and “Edge of the World” on the ‘Da Show.’
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.02.2017
07:52 am
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The Replacements get drunk (surprise!) on MTV, 1989
04.28.2017
01:00 pm
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Shortly after the release of Don’t Tell a Soul in 1989, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson of the Replacements consented to an interview with MTV’s Kurt Loder. I’ve noticed that a few people are suffering from the misapprehension that the Replacments had gotten sober around this time—this video should be enough to convince anyone that this was not the case.

Westerberg and Stinson are funny and charming as fuck and don’t take a damn thing seriously. Loder’s first question involves the band having taken a “new direction” on the latest album—invoking “Gepetto,” Westerberg blurts “Well, we’re ‘mature’ now…..” while pantomiming his nose growing by three feet.

While Loder is inordinately interested in topics that retrospectively seem entirely uninteresting—music videos, the joys of residing in California, sampling, and how the 1980s will stack up in the annals of music history—Westerberg and Stinson ain’t buying.

The ‘Mats had long enjoyed an informal competition with R.E.M. ever since opening for the Athens indie rockers on a mini-tour in the summer of 1983—and this competition was quite mutual, Peter Buck paid close attention to the Replacements’ releases. In Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, Bob Mehr reports that Westerberg was initially relieved that Don’t Tell a Soul was so much better than Green, but R.E.M.‘s album rapidly hit gold while sales of Don’t Tell a Soul never got off the ground. Westerberg makes a crack to the effect that apparently only “half the people who bought the last one” chose to plunk down their cash for Don’t Tell a Soul.

More of the ‘Mats, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.28.2017
01:00 pm
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The Melvins mind-melting first ever television appearance from 1995
02.14.2017
01:20 pm
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An early shot of Washington State fuzz kings, Melvins.

Sound FX was a short-lived show on the FX Network back in the mid-90s. Its greatest claim to fame was when it had the honor of hosting the Melvins’ very first national television appearance in 1995.

This clip features the band absolutely slaying “Revolve” from their eighth album Stoner Witch in front of an audience that clearly has NO idea what was happening on stage or how to handle it. It’s an awesomely awkward experience from beginning to end as during the performance the show rolled a bunch of Melvins’ factoids on the screen to hip their viewers to the band. Such as the fact that none of them drink or do drugs—and even featured an artist sketching the band while they played.

But things get really uncomfortable when the band and King Buzzo sit down with one of Sound FX‘s hosts—and future host of the reality series Survivor—Jeff Probst who was tasked with interviewing the band. The trio had just released Stoner Witch which Probst carelessly describes as more “user-friendly” than other records their catalog. Yeesh. The entire affair is highly amusing to watch as the Melvins quite literally roll all over Probst and his silly questions and then thankfully take the small stage again and murder out a version of “Goose Freight Train.” Nice. The fifteen minutes of footage is ready for you to watch below.
 

The Melvins’ first national television appearance on the FX Network show ‘Sound FX’ in 1995.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
This Melvins rehearsal tape from 1985 features drummer Dale Crover’s pissed-off mom
That time it cost Bill Maher $1,700 to insult the Melvins

Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.14.2017
01:20 pm
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Nostalgic glass bongs for people of a certain age
11.14.2016
10:11 am
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It’s not like these are the most beautiful bongs my eyes have ever laid on, but I do however, find them dumbly hilarious in a nostalgic way. When I saw the MTV-themed Beavis and Butt-Head bongs I certainly did laugh out loud. They’re ridiculous. The bongs are by an artist named John de Fazio.

The Ren & Stimpy bongs are good, but I much prefer the craftsmanship of the Beavis and Butt-Head ones.

There are no prices for the bongs. I’m not even sure if they’re for sale.


 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.14.2016
10:11 am
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Who was that mysterious middle-aged bald guy that appeared in like EVERY early ‘80s MTV video?
08.17.2015
10:15 am
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When MTV first debuted in 1981, few people believed in the fledgling network and its concept of airing music videos 24 hours a day. Their launch was plagued with technical problems and the station itself was starved for content.

MTV co-founder, Les Garland, details the shaky beginnings in a New York Post interview:

There was some fear, because we didn’t get the instant distribution some people thought we would. We used to hear, from cable operators and advertisers, “nobody’s gonna watch music on television 24 hours a day. That’ll never work.” Heard it from people in [our own] management, too. It was closer to touch-and-go than people realized. There were threats of pulling the plug.

Given the newness of music videos, the channel had only around 250 to choose from at the beginning.

One demographic that may have been initially counted out, but who undoubtedly contributed to the success of early MTV, was elementary through high-school-aged kids who had loads of free viewing time on their hands. Kids who would end up spending hours a day obsessing over this new medium—a medium which moved so much faster than what they had been used to seeing, having grown up on network television. MTV ushered in the age of ADD.

I was one of those captivated kids, and what a fascinating time it was to become “musically aware” with this brand-new, content-starved format repetitively pumping-out clips from whatever handful of (mostly new wave) acts that were forward-thinking enough to devote the time and energy to shooting videos. Suddenly bands you would NEVER hear on the radio, were appearing on TV screens nation-wide and the kids were eating it up.

In those early days of obsessive MTV viewing, I began to notice this one guy. This one middle-aged, balding, bespectacled man. This one guy who was conspicuous for his squareness among pretty boy rock stars and hot models. This one guy who seemed to be in like EVERY freaking video. Was he a video director inserting himself Hitchcock style into his clips? Was he a record label president? Was he the bands’ coke dealer? Who the hell was this guy?
 

 
And so, for more than thirty years this man has been in the back of my head as “that ubiquitous middle-aged ‘80s video bald guy.”

I was recently tooling around You Tube, watching the video for Haircut 100’s classic hit “Love Plus One” and had my memory jarred. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “there he is!” “There’s that guy! The headmaster from the Bonnie Tyler video! The guy who struts down the street next to Joan Jett! The dad from the Squeeze video! The shaky-handed martini-drinker from the Billy Joel video! WHO IS THIS GUY!?”
 

 
This being 2015, and having the luxury of google and the Internet, I went to work searching for something, anything on this mystery man. Amazingly, I turned up nothing—except for other people asking the exact same question: “Who is the guy in every early ‘80s video?” 

So, next I contacted Nick Heyward of Haircut 100—because, again, we live in the future and you can just instantly access ANYONE. I sent Heyward a photo and asked “do you remember who this guy is?” Heyward replied almost immediately:

He was the wardrobe guy/actor/extra. Nice chap. Pop was a closely-knit family in those days.

There was a lead, but not much. Searches of “‘80s music video wardrobe guy, bald” turned up nothing.

From there, I took my quest to MTV’s Mark Goodman, to see if he had any inside information. Goodman responded: “No clue who the dude is but pretty funny you spotted him. You must have lots of free time!” So, great, childhood icon, MTV’s Mark Goodman, thinks I’m a total loser.

Subsequent sleuthing started to reveal a connection between the various videos that the pervasive bald guy was appearing in: a production company called MGMM.

MGMM was THE go-to company for music video production in the early ‘80s—mostly because they were one of the first companies to specialize in it. The company’s partners Brian Grant, Scott Millaney, Russel Mulcahy, and David Mallet were essentially the top directors in the burgeoning field. Their content DOMINATED early MTV, which, as we noted earlier, was quite sparse early-on. The most ground-breaking, iconic, most memorable music videos of the first three years of MTV were by-and-large all produced by MGMM. So the clues began to come together. Could the mystery middle-aged bald man be a costumer for MGMM?

Attempts to contact former partners of MGMM went mostly unanswered, but someone from David Mallet’s production company did get back to me with a name. That name was “Michael Baldwin.” Finally! A name to go with the pate!

Mallet’s company did not wish to comment any further or give additional information—and of course there’s stuff I’m still dying to know. Was it a goof among the production to have him turn up so often, or was it simply a matter of being short-staffed for extras? How many videos did he appear in? I know of at least 20. Were there more? Unfortunately, I can’t ask Baldwin himself—his Facebook page indicates that he sadly passed away due to an illness in October of 2014.

Baldwin was indeed a costumer, and an accomplished one at that. His website displays some stunning examples of his work, and clearly it was what he should be remembered for rather than his myriad of video cameos. That website is well worth a visit for Baldwin’s audio commentary on the gallery photos of his designs. He did a lot of work in the early ‘80s dressing pop stars, and obviously dressing sets with himself. But his work goes all the way back to the early ‘60s. He was even responsible for costumes on the Rolling Stones famous train-wreck Rock and Roll Circus. The guy had an impressive career outside of his bit parts in music clips.

As much as is left still unanswered, at least we can finally answer the question of “Who is that ubiquitous early ‘80s music video bald guy?”

His name is Michael Baldwin.
 

 

 
More Michael Baldwin than you can shake a stick at, after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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08.17.2015
10:15 am
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MTV and Danny Fields visit New York City’s punk rock landmarks
03.03.2015
09:01 am
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Iggy Pop and Danny Fields by Brigid Berlin

Danny Fields has been a driving force in rock and roll as a band manager (The Stooges and The Ramones), journalist, disc jockey, A&R man, author and champion of New York’s punk rock scene from the beginning in the mid-seventies onward. A documentary about Fields, Danny Says, will premier at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin.

In this video from 1994, Fields takes MTV’s Tabitha Soren on a tour of some of New York City’s seminal punk rock clubs, including CBGB and Max’s, and some historic musical landmarks like Electric Lady studios and The Ed Sullivan Theater.

As someone who practically lived at CBGB and Max’s in their heydays, Danny Fields was an omnipresent source of rock and roll energy and enthusiasm, as essential to the scene as the musicians, club owners and booking agents who helped make the scene happen. 
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.03.2015
09:01 am
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Dr. Timothy Leary, MTV VJ
02.27.2015
08:55 am
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In 1987, Dr. Timothy Leary paid a visit to MTV to be a guest VJ. He had a few more IQ points than some of their regular contributors. It’s a treat to hear him set up the video for Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”:

Now this is a real heavy one—I don’t know what this means. It has something to do with the third world and the exploitation by the first world and our hopes that the third world will get behind the camera and start becoming part of the cybernetic age. I don’t know. Watch it and make up your own mind. It’s a good tune.

Leary also talks about playing percussion on “Give Peace A Chance,” shows off some early CGI in the video for “Hard Woman” from Mick Jagger’s unloved She’s the Boss, and shares his thoughts on Nancy Reagan’s drug policy. It ends with a spectacular Ike and Tina Turner rendition of “Proud Mary” that’s worth sticking around for.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.27.2015
08:55 am
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Morrissey talks to nobody on MTV, 1985
11.26.2014
09:27 am
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I can hardly think of a better format for a Morrissey interview than this: in 1985, MTV’s monthly weirdomusic program IRS Records Presents the Cutting Edge put him in a room alone with a camera and a pile of envelopes each containing a one-word topic, like “fashion,” “money,” “music,” and so forth. The Smiths’ vocalist simply opened the envelopes and expounded the topics given therein (and it’s a goddamn shame none of those envelopes contained the names of any bands he disliked). The results are, unsurprisingly, classic Morrissey. Would it surprise you to learn that he thinks every art form he can name is a dying art, and that the greatest art form is the one he happens to be known for? Of course it wouldn’t.

Allowing that this was probably sourced from someone’s VHS dub of the broadcast, it looks like even by 1985 standards that that was kind of a shit video camera in there with him—the whole thing has the hazy and noisy feel of old surveillance footage. The entire video was broken up into several segments and spread out through the broadcast, but what’s here just contains the edited-out Morrissey segments. Bafflingly, the beginning is labeled “Part 2,” and there’s a lot of needless overlap between the two parts. I’ve set it up to play here in the proper order without the loads of overlap. The alternative was to post a ghastly looking and sounding screen-shot video.
 

 
The rest after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.26.2014
09:27 am
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on ‘MTV Live ‘N’ Loud,’ 1997
11.11.2014
08:55 am
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In 1997, around the release of The Boatman’s Call, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds taped an episode of MTV’s Live ‘N’ Loud. Since Boatman was a significantly more sedate record than its predecessor, Murder Ballads, the “Loud” part of the title maybe wasn’t such a hot fit for the band’s music at the time, but the broadcast nonetheless featured a superb short set, shot in low-key black and white, of four Boatman songs, plus “The Carny” from 1986.

This MTV taping came less than a year, mind you, after Cave declined his nomination for an MTV music award with one of the funniest refusals of all time. (His problem wasn’t with MTV per se, but with competitions in the arts, though he has plenty of other awards, so who knows what was really up.) The jaw-dropping passage “MY MUSE IS NOT A HORSE AND I AM IN NO HORSE RACE AND IF INDEED SHE WAS, STILL I WOULD NOT HARNESS HER TO THIS TUMBREL—THIS BLOODY CART OF SEVERED HEADS AND GLITTERING PRIZES” would, in a better world, be immortal. The letter is still published in its entirety on Cave’s site, and also here on Dangerous Minds, so if you wish to read it at either of those places, knock yourself out, the video will still surely be here when you’re done.

Here’s the set list with rough start times if you want to skip to something:
00:21 “Into My Arms”
05:02 “Brompton Oratory”
08:51 “West Country Girl”
11:46 “Far From Me”
17:46 “The Carny”
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.11.2014
08:55 am
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Beck, Thurston Moore, and Mike D’s ridiculous jam on MTV, 1994


 
Mass culture machines love the status quo—a salesman, after all, is fattest and happiest when he knows what’ll sell and how to sell it. So when a sudden zeitgeist shift catches them with their pants down, it can be illuminating to watch them try to pull them back up. When the reset button got pushed in the early ‘90s and cult figures whose worldviews revolved around aggressive abnormality suddenly became the new rock royalty, things could get pretty damn funny.

One noteworthy moment was when Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore guest hosted MTV’s late night alternaghetto 120 Minutes. In the 1980s, that show featured some legitimately outré artists, but by 1994 watching that show was no longer significantly different from listening to commercial radio. Because of Moore’s untouchable underground bona fides, featuring him injected a fresh dose of off-the-path credibility into that show, and his interview with the then newly-rising Beck was pretty hilarious. Watch it here, it’s worth a few minutes of your life.

But weirder still is this bit of insanity from the same broadcast—Moore, Beck, and the Beastie Boys’ Mike D collaborating on a noise jam. This is what happens when you let the freakshow into the big tent—Dada in mass media. Rigoddamndiculous.
 

 
Hat-tip to Mr. Rob Galo for this find.

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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10.31.2014
12:57 pm
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Vintage MTV: ‘Punks and Poseurs: A Journey Through the Los Angeles Underground’
08.21.2014
12:29 pm
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This kid.

Knowing firsthand that MTV didn’t always totally suck asswater really dates you. When I have occasion to mention how, once upon a time, that justly-reviled network actually played some seriously cool shit, I half wonder if I’m coming off like my grandma used to when she talked about the Great Depression. But it’s true, even before long-running bones thrown to the weirdos like 120 Minutes and Headbanger’s Ball found their footing, MTV broadcast stuff like IRS’ The Cutting Edge and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, which often rivaled even the USA Network’s mighty Night Flight for genuinely informative freak-scene value.

One jaw-droppingly excellent MTV show was the one-off special Punks and Poseurs: A Journey Through the Los Angeles Underground. A big mover behind its production was Charles M. Young, who, as sad fate would have it, passed away this week after a standoff with a brain tumor. He’s the guy at the beginning of the video, speaking with early VJ Alan Hunter, and while he looks for all the world like an unreconstructed Little River Band fan, don’t be faked out by appearances. Young was one of the first mainstream music journalists to take punk’s aesthetic merit as a given, and for that, we owe him a debt of gratitude. May he rest in peace.

At its core, “Punks and Poseurs” is a narration-free concert film, but it’s cut with terrific interview footage that explores the changing nature of punk, from insider and outsider perspectives. There’s a lot of great footage with writer/performers Pleasant Gehman and Iris Berry, torpedoing the influx into the music scene of neophyte phonies who just didn’t get it, explaining title of the program. (After this first aired in 1985, a bunch of the new waver/Durannie chicks at my high school—which is to say all the girls who were trying their suburban Ohio best to look like Gehman and Berry—started calling everyone “poseurs,” which was pretty funny.) There’s also a hilarious interview with employees at a store called “Poseur,” which sold punk fashions and accessories—people had to get that shit somewhere before Hot Topic forever banished punk to the mall, no?  Also keep an eye out for the kid giving a primer on how to fashion liberty spikes with Knox gelatine.

The performance footage mostly focuses on excellent, high-energy sets by The Dickies and GBH —the latter of whom were quite radical by MTV’s regular programming standards (and British, contra the program’s subtitle, but the concert took place in L.A., so whatever, I guess). There’s also an early glimpse of the excellent and still active Italian hardcore band Raw Power. I harbor serious doubts they’ve ever been spotted on that network again.
 

 
Many thanks to upstanding journalist and total fucking poseur Mr. Erick Bradshaw for this find.

Previously on Dangerous Minds
‘Way USA’: Sleazy punk comedy travelogue is the greatest cult video you’ve probably never seen
The time Ian McKellen jammed with the Fleshtones on MTV in 1987
Debbie Harry, Ramones, Nick Rhodes, Courtney Love and more on MTV’s ‘Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes’

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.21.2014
12:29 pm
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The time Ian McKellen jammed with the Fleshtones on MTV in 1987
07.02.2014
08:57 am
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Last week, we told you about the short-lived MTV series Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, a brilliant and unimpeachably hip NYC countercultural olio that the famous pop artist curated and co-hosted for the music network before its final descent into full suck. I combed the Internet for videos from that show in an effort to be as comprehensive as possible. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you how many hours I spent looking, actually. But despite all that effort, OF COURSE I missed something brilliant, and lucky I am that an attentive reader clued me in.
 

 
Just before they set off on their Fleshtones Vs. Reality tour in 1987, NYC’s Fleshtones—a great band who’d combined early psych cool, surf-rock twang, R&B swagger, and shitloads of cheeky, high energy fun—taped two segments for Warhol’s show. This confluence of personalities was a perfectly natural one—Fleshtones singer Peter Zaremba was in Warhol’s orbit going back to the days when he lived in a loft across the street from Warhol’s Factory, and he was, at the time, also the host of his own MTV program, the excellent IRS’s The Cutting Edge. (It’s such a damn shame The Fleshtones never really took off big—back in those days, Zaremba seemed to me like such an unfuckwithable ambassador/avatar of cool.) The band first did a madcap lip-syncing of their song “Return of the Leather Kings.”
 

 
And while that was great fun, it’s the second segment they taped that should be far, far better known than it is. In it, the band jams while Ian freakin’ McKellen recites a Shakespearean sonnet. It’s my good fortune that the reader who tipped me off to this happens to be the man who literally wrote the book on the Fleshtones, Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, music writer Joe Bonomo. (Among other works, Bonomo also wrote a dandy 33 1/3 on AC/DC.) I quote here from Sweat, page 256:

The pairing with McKellen was fantastic: as the actor dramatically recited Shakespeare’s “Twentieth Sonnet,” the Fleshtones accompanied him in the background, creating ambient psychedelic music. The kind of marriage of high and low art prized by Warhol, the union provided all concerned with kicks. The guys invited McKellen down to the Pyramid with them after the taping, and he gladly came along for some alternative East Side divertissement. (When the performance was released the next year on the Time Bomb compilation, the Fleshtones were able to enjoy one of the more notable songwriting credits in recent pop history: “Zaremba / Milhizer / Spaeth / Warren / Streng / Shakespeare”.)

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.02.2014
08:57 am
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Andy Warhol, wrestling fan?
05.19.2014
02:59 pm
Topics:
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“I’m speechless. I just don’t know what to say.”

At some point during the 1980s, it made sense that MTV would try do something to take advantage of the pop culture juggernaut that was the World Wrestling Federation and some perceived rock/wrestling crossover that probably just boiled down to Cyndi Lauper’s dad being played by Captain Lou Albano in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and little else.

“The War to Settle the Score” was a series of WWF matches with a storyline that involved Albano, Lauper and her manager David Wolff (I won’t bother to explain it in detail, but Albano was a manager and Wolff and Lauper are trying to steal clients.) “Rowdy” Roddy Piper got pissed off about the whole MTV connection and this brought another “feud” into the storyline, but also in real life.

Piper was disqualified from the championship match against Hulk Hogan and a brawl erupted.  At one point, Cyndi Lauper, who had rushed the ring with Mr. T to support Hogan, was kicked in the head.

Since the event was live, MTV had cameras set up backstage to interview Hogan, Lauper, Mr T and Albano afterwards, but Andy Warhol apparently opened the wrong door and was pulled into an impromptu interview with “Mean Gene” Okerlund.

You’ll notice that Okerlund refers to the Pope of Pop as a “one of the greatest wrestling fans” at the end.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.19.2014
02:59 pm
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Video Killed the Radio Star — but who killed it first?


 
It’s one of the most widely known bits of pop culture trivia—when MTV launched in August of 1981, the very first music video it showed was the prophetic “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a popular single from the Buggles’ Age of Plastic LP. That alone made the cutesy synthpop novelty into the stuff of unforgettable legend, but the telling of the legend typically excludes the song’s origins. Multiple versions of the song predated the one we all know. Buggles Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes had been members of Bruce Woolley & The Camera Club, with whom they originally wrote and recorded the song. There were multiple single versions, like this much more revved-up take on the song than we’re used to:
 

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” US single
 
This more polished version was the UK single:
 

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” UK single
 
And here’s a live version from 1979, after the Buggles’ version had become popular:
 

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” live, 1979
 

 
The Camera Club was quite an incubator for talent. Thomas Dolby was an early keyboardist for the band, and Horn and Downes famously and incongruously went on from the Buggles to join Yes. Later still, Horn became the producer/architect of the radical early work of Art of Noise, while Downes stayed with Yes’ guitarist Steve Howe in the massively successful prog/pop supergroup Asia. Other Camera Club members went on to play in Re-Flex and The Soft Boys, but Woolley himself remained a mostly behind-the-scenes talent as a producer and songwriter, though he has maintained a performance and recording profile—as a theremin player! The man’s CV is actually quite enviable, with credits that include Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, plus film music for Caddyshack, Toys, and Moulin Rouge.

Motion footage of Woolley in performance is maddeningly elusive—ironically, and kind of comically, no video seems to exist of the original version of “Video Killed the Radio Star.” But on that hunt, I found this clip from 2004—evidently only the Buggles’ second ever live performance of the song, featuring Horn, Downes, and Woolley, plus the original backup singers from the ‘70s single, who still sound just absolutely terrific.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.31.2014
12:04 pm
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Killer interview: Henry Rollins shoots the shit with Jerry Lee Lewis, 1995
09.09.2013
12:29 pm
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Rollins and Lewis
 
It’s always a treat to see Henry Rollins interviewing anyone, even more so when it’s one of the early architects of rock ‘n’ roll. Hank’s hosting skills are exceptional. Clearly a fan, he’s very proficient in the relevant rock history, and he knows how to keep an interview interesting. But Jerry Lee Lewis? I mean, hey I love Jerry Lee Lewis’ music, but Jerry Lee Lewis is just as well-known for being a dirtbag as he is for his amazing music.

I don’t expect Rollins to give a damn about petty ethics, of course, but he’s a man with a reputation for being just a teensy bit self-righteous and rigidly moral. It’s weird to watch him interview an artist who very publicly married his 13-year-old cousin, as if there’s not a giant pervy elephant in the room. (And before you go all cultural relativist on me, cousin-marrying was not more common in the south than anywhere else in the US, and while marriages average younger in poorer communities, I can assure you, an adult marrying a 13-year-old would still be considered fucking creepy by every old redneck I know.)

Still, Lewis has great stories about Sun studios, and intergenerational rock ‘n’ roll kibitzing is always a fascinating thing to watch.
 

 

Posted by Amber Frost
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09.09.2013
12:29 pm
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