Hey everyone, it’s lucky episode 7 of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour. Dig the dream logic inherent in this latest batch of selections from musical nerdiac Brad Laner and his bottomless well of miniature personal epiphanies. There is nearly too much sonic goodness packed into this one 70 minute session. Please enjoy in moderation.
BPeople - “Whether to Worry”
Moonshake - “Coward”
Bubble Puppy - “Thinking About Thinking”
Slapp Happy - “The Drum”
Betty Harris - “There’s a Break in the Road”
Os Mutantes - “Desculpe, Babe”
John Lee Hooker - “Tupelo”
Chris and Cosey - “Raining Tears of Blood”
This Heat - “Health and Efficiency”
Kate Bush - “The Dreaming”
The Beach Boys - “‘Til I Die (Alternate Mix)”
Kim Jung Mi - “Towards The Sunlight”
Dennis Parker - “Like an Eagle”
Heléne Sage - Frissons Dans La Cochlee
In 1981 Wendy was arrested for obscene conduct during Plasmatics shows in Milwaukee and Cleveland. The authorities found her nipples guilty of some kind of criminal act. Here’s a brief clip of her discussing her legal hassles with New York TV newscaster Jack Cafferty . Williams was ultimately acquitted of any legal wrongdoing in both cases. She avoided any future dustups with the cops by covering her nipples with electrical tape.
Cafferty is currently a conservative talking head on CNN.
The newscast begins with a clip of Wendy driving an exploding Cadillac into the Hudson River.
Last month in London, it was announced that the legendary 100 Club was to close after sixty-eight years of promoting live music in the same location at 100 Oxford Street. The venue was originally a restaurant called Mack’s, and live music first played there, when British jazz drummer, Victor Feldman’s father hired the venue for a regular Sunday night showcase, to promote the talents of his sons and their bands. Gradually word spread of a new jazz haunt, and it soon became the hot spot for British servicemen and visiting American G.I.‘s. Amongst the early performers to play at the venue were Glen Miller, Ray McKinley, Mel Powell and Peanuts Hucko.
By 1948 the venue was called the London Jazz Club and it was the centre for Jitterbug, Swing and then Be-Bop as well as promoting new forms of music. The Feldmans then gave up ownership and the Wilcox brothers took over the now thriving club. In the 1950s, the lease changed hands again and it was taken over by Lyn Dutton, agent for popular jazz trumpeter, Humphrey Lyttleton, who renamed the venue to the Humphrey Lyttelton Club, giving Lyttelton residency. The club scored a major coup when Louis Armstrong played there in 1956, and it later became the venue for Trad Jazz throughout the 1950s.
With the arrival of The Beatles in 1963, British music changed, and the club was given over to the next generation, and renamed the 100 Club. The policy was still the same - a venue to promote new music. Soon the 100 Club was spearheading the R’N'B scene with Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and B. B. King all taking to the stage, along with new acts such as Rod Stewart, Alexis Korner, Julie Driscoll, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and The Animals. The rise of Beat music brought in The Who, the Kinks, The Pretty Things and The Spencer Davis Group.
The success of the Sixties was but a memory by the 1970s began, as the club struggled through a variety of work-to-rule measures and energy black-outs enforced by the government of the day. This all changed when the 100 Club launched the first festival of Punk:
On Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st September 1976 the 100 Club was host to the first ever Punk Rock Festival. Seen for the first time, certainly in London, on the 100 Club stage were the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie & The Banshees the Buzzcocks the Vibrators and Subway Sect. No one outside of a select few had heard of any of the them and all of them were unsigned. The Melody Maker’s opening line of its review stated ‘The 600 strong line that stretched across two blocks was indisputable evidence that a new decade in rock is about to begin.’ It was to be one of the most famous events in the club’s history. The Punk festival of ‘76 also had an enormous effect on music in general. It changed the club’s fortunes and its image indefinitely. As no other venue wanted to put on Punk at all, it stayed at the club on and off for the next eight or nine years incorporating its second wave with bands like U.K.Subs, G.B.H., ADX, Peter & the Test Tube Babies, The Exploited and Discharge. The 100 Club is still the spiritual home of the Punk movement.
At the same time the 100 Club was also promoting Reggae, with Steel Pulse and The Might Diamonds, and Northern Soul, with Terry Callier, Doris Troy, The Flirtations and Tommy Hunt.
In 1980s, African Jazz / Township Music became the focus for the club:
Julian Bahula, the distinguished African drummer, decided to run a regular Friday night featuring authentic African bands. Many of the musicians he employed were political refugees isolated from their South African homeland because of the apartied laws and were members of the outlawed A.N.C. The weekly Friday nights became a whole movement for change and with the pulsating music on offer a whole new genre in the 100 Club‘s history was born. Great African musicians like Fela Kuti, Marion Makeba and Hugh Masekela appeared on the Friday night bill as did Youssou N’Dour, Thomas Mapfumo, Dudu Pukwana and Spirits Rejoice. It ran for almost ten very successful years until the release of Nelson Mandela, then the change in the political climate in South Africa meant the cause was over.
1992 was to see the start of the biggest era in popular music at the club since 1976. The club was once again going through a lean spell when a chance phone call from concert promoter, Chris York, inquired whether the club would be interested in showcasing one of his new bands. The band were called Suede and in September 1992 they kicked off the club’s successful period in Indie music.
Over the next four years Oasis, Kula Shaker, Echobelly, Catatonia, Travis, Embrace, Cornershop, The Aloof, Heavy Stereo and Baby Bird would be just a few of the names to play the club and right up to the present day, the club has seen gigs from Semisonic, Toploader, Muse, Shack, Doves, JJ72, Jo Strummer, Squarepusher, Ocean Colour Scene and The Webb Brothers.
Now, the venue that has been at the heart of new music in the U.K. since 1942 is about to close, and a campaign has been set up to Save the 100 Club. As the club has been in difficulty for a wee while (for various reasons), £500,000 has to be raised by November. If you are interested in saving the 100 Club or have a spare half-million to spend or just ten quid, then get in touch and be part of history.
If the money is raised, the club will stay open as a non-profit organisation, with its new owners being the donors. A Board of Trustees would be democratically elected by the donors to run the venue, and “your donation would entitle you to an equal say in these decisions, whether you are able to pay £10.00 or £10,000.” the ultimate aim is:
..restore the venue as a place where new bands can develop and existing bands can continue to thrive.
Look at it this way, if the 100 Club shuts down, your venue could be next.
Without a place for musicians to play live, the future of music will be in the hands of the karaoke-singing, bastard children of Simon Cowell’s X-Factor and American Pop Idol. Hyperbole aside - seriously. The choice is ours which way it goes.
Bonus Clips of The Sex Pistols and The Clash after the jump…
35 years and still rocking, Motorhead has indeed become an institution. Who woulda thunk they’d be doing TV commercials for beer in 2010.
From the Kronenbourg website:
On October 4th 2010, we took Lemmy and his band Motörhead to a French bar. Here, inspired by the laid back atmosphere and a slow, cold Kronenbourg 1664, they played their legendary manic song, The Ace of Spades, at half the normal speed.
In the late 1970s, while Dudley Moore was off starting his career in Hollywood, Peter Cook entertained himself and a new generation of fans by hosting one of British TV’s first Punk Rock music shows, Revolver.
Produced for ATV by famed impresario, Mickey Most (best known for producing Herman’s Hermits, Suzi Quatro and Jeff Beck) Revolver had Cook introducing acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who all played live in front of a studio audience. There was also a twat of an in-house DJ, but the less said about him the better. Of course, there was the occasional roster of crap record company acts, but this was the 1970s, when there were only three TV channels in the UK, and the national anthem ended proceedings every night on two of them. It was a new style of program-making, chaotic, rude, funny and at times required viewing - as the BFI explains:
Revolver‘s most innovative element was designed to evoke the confrontational atmosphere associated with punk gigs. Peter Cook was invited to guest on the programme on the strength of the notorious Derek and Clive recordings, which shared with punk a kind of adolescent, deliberately puerile nihilism. In the guise of the seedy manager of the rundown nightclub rented out to the TV company, Cook would appear on a video screen, sneering at the acts and antagonising the studio audience. One guest, Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, recalled Cook distributing porn magazines, which he encouraged audience members to hold up during sets to put off the bands. Not surprisingly, Cook’s contribution is better remembered than that of nominal host Les Ross.
For all its punk credentials, the show’s music policy was often bewildering - appearing alongside the likes of X-Ray Spex, Ian Dury and Siouxsie and the Banshees were Kate Bush, Lindisfarne, Bonnie Tyler and the avowedly anti-punk Dire Straits.
Revolver‘s engagingly chaotic presentation makes it perhaps an ancestor of Channel 4’s controversial The Word (1990-95), but in 1978 it drew critical derision and failed to impress ITV managers. Unpromoted and buried in a late night Friday slot (ironically the exact post-pub slot in which The Word thrived), the series was starved of an audience and was pulled after just seven editions.
Bonus clips of Siouxsie and the Banshess, The Jam, and more, after the jump…
William Eggleston is one of America’s most important and influential photographers, who “secured color photography as a legitimate artictic medium for display in galleries.”
This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of color photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to color photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color.” Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.
Michael Almereyda is director of the film William Eggleston and the Real World (2005).
Before the artist Ming Wong re-located to Berlin in 2007, he decided to learn German by immersing himself in the country’s culture. The result was a 10-minute performance tape, where Ming learnt the lingo from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, loosely autobiographical film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Believing that one of the best ways to get insight into a foreign culture is through the films of that country, the artist has adopted one of his favourite German films as his guide, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) by Fassbinder, about a successful but arrogant fashion designer in her mid-thirties, who falls into despair when she loses the woman she loves.
Putting himself in the mould of German actress Margit Carstensen in the role of Petra Von Kant - for which she won several awards - the artist attempts to articulate himself through as wide a range of emotions as displayed by the actress in the climactic scene from the film, where our tragic lovesick anti-heroine goes through a hysterical disintegration.
With this work the artist rehearses going through the motions and emotions and articulating the words for situations that he believes he may encounter when he moves to Berlin as a post-35-year-old, single, gay, ethnic-minority mid-career artist - i.e. feeling bitter, desperate, or washed up. („Ich bin im Arsch”)
With these tools, he will be armed with the right words and modes of expressions to communicate his feelings effectively to his potential German compatriots.
Since then, Singapore’s foremost artist Wong has continued with his examination of “the performative veneers of language and identity, through his own World Cinema,” going on to use Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life to question ethnicity and identity.
Life of Imitation was commissioned by the National Arts Council for the Singapore pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Re-staged at SAM with a new design and additional works, it will thereafter tour other cities.
Re-inventing a Hollywood drama on racial identity by Douglas Sirk, the film — set up with two screens showing the same film simultaneously — evokes a peculiar sense in the viewer.
The film’s main protagonist are a black mother and her mixed race daughter who denies her mixed origins and pretends she is white. Initially denying her visiting mother an intimate meeting, she eventually breaks down in her mother’s arms.
Through the powerful images and execution of concept, Wong also attempts to erase the different ethnicities by having three male actors from three ethnic groups in Singapore take turns playing the black mother and her mixed-race daughter, with the identity of each actor changing after each shoot.
This year, he re-visualized, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema in the work called, Devo Partire, Domani (I Must Leave, Tomorrow). The title is taken from one of the few lines spoken by Terence Stamp in the film, whose arrival into the home of an upper class Milanese family, alters their lives.
Produced by Napoli Teatro Festival Italia 2010 and Singapore Biennale 2011, Devo Partire. Domani is a 5-channel video installation inspired by the cult arthouse 1968 Italian film ‘Teorema’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini. In this work the artist plays every character of a bourgeois Italian household which goes through an identity crisis after the visitation of a mysterious Stranger.
Ming Wong has adapted the story to contemporary times and to the setting of Naples. Entirely filmed on location, the work makes extensive use of the Neopolitan landscape - including the Scampia drug ghetto, the failed industrial desert of Bagnoli, the volcano of Vesuvius, the archeological museum and the vibrant streets of Naples – to offset the attempts by the Singapore-born artist to pass off as archetypal Italian characters inhabiting these genuine spaces. Ghosts of the past revisit their lives; statues of Gods come alive. Visions of an apocalyptic future, references to Italian cinema and cinema history enter the picture, recalling not just Pasolini’s work but also his persona and legacy.
Ming Wong will be speaking at the BFI’s Afterimage event, in London, on 6 November, and then taking part in the Myths of the Artist Symposium at the Tate Modern London on 20 November.
Bonus clips from Ming Wong, Petra von Kant, plus interview after the jump
Dressed like a cross between Ed Grimley and Quentin Crisp and looking surlier than Joan Crawford with a wire hanger up her ass, Bowie has never appeared less like a rock star than in this woefully executed video. The song ‘Be My Wife’ is from Low, one of the only Bowie albums I actually like, but this really stinks.
Never in the history of the world have the merchants of obscenity, the teachers of unnatural sex acts, had available to them the modern facilities for disseminating this filth. High-speed presses, rapid transportation, mass distribution: all have combined to put the vilest obscenity within reach of every man, woman, and child in the country.
Perversion For Profit, narrated with lascivious zeal by news reporter George Putnam, is a 1965 propaganda film bankrolled by savings and loan criminal Charles Keating. The film was part of Keating’s fervent anti-porn crusade. In 1969 he was appointed by Nixon to the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Among his many targets were Gays (who he wanted imprisoned), Russ Meyer, Playboy and Oui magazines, the Ramada Inn for offering adult entertainment on cable TV, Larry Flynt, and virtually anything on two legs that possessed any form of sexual energy. “Keating kept a large supply of pornographic examples in his law offices in Cincinnati, to show to any visitors who seemed skeptical about the nature of the problem.”
This same type of rot and decay caused sixteen of the nineteen major civilizations to vanish from the Earth. Magnificent Egypt, classical Greece, imperial Rome, all crumbled away not because of the strength of the aggressor, but because of moral decay from within. But we are in a unique position to cure our own ills: our Constitution was written by men who put their trust in God and founded a government based in His laws. These laws are on our side. We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity. And, in this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil. We must save our nation from decay and deliver our children from the horrors of perversion. We must make our land, ‘the land of the free’, a safe home. O God, deliver us, Americans, from evil.”
It’s amusing to watch Putnam rail about porn while the camera lovingly pans across photos of gloriously stacked gals in girly magazines. Fucking hypocrites.
Steven John Bator (a.k.a. Stiv Bators) and his Dead Boys blammoed out of the post-steel paradise of Cleveland and landed in New York’s East Village to help jump-start the punk movement in the bowels of clubs like CBGBs. Soon after the Boys broke up in 1979, Bators formed the post –punk supergroup Lords of the New Church with the Damned’s Brian James and Sham 69’s Dave Tregunna.
That was the band Bators was riding in 1983 when L.A. artist Jeffrey Vallance—who’d scored a miraculous gig as a host of MTV’s underground music showcase (yeah, something like that actually once appeared on MTV!!) The Cutting Edge—grabbed him to “debate” the head of the Southland’s Last Chance Rescue Mission, whose name happened to be, yes, the Reverend Dr. Hands.
As you’ll see, Bators took the path of least resistance, but this segment stands as a fun, somewhat campy artifact of the other side of the Reagan ‘80s. Seven years later, Bators will have become a literal dead boy at 41 after getting hit by a taxi in Paris.
He would have turned 61 years old today.
Bonus clip after the jump: the Dead Boys give CBGB’s the “Sonic Reducer” in ‘77…
Slimy, Sarah Palin-endorsed, goon-squad hiring Republican Senatorial candidate from Alaska, Joe Miller’s got some s’plaining to do. It seems that Miller, who thinks Social Security, Medicare and jobless benefits are “unconstitutional” forgot to add that he meant only when other people receive them, not Joe himself! What will the Teabag weenie people think of this hypocritical fuckwit now?
Apparently, when a correspondent for Wonkette asked Miller a question about exactly what percent “disabled” he was from his military service—for which he would presumably recieve benefits—Miller promptly freaked out:
Looking away from your correspondent, Miller yelped to no one in particular, “We’ve gotta go!” He then pointed to his wife and said, “Let’s move!” The Millers hustled to the back of the vacant strip mall office next to the pizza place and surrounded themselves with campaign staffers.
He needn’t report or declare this income. What are the disabilities for which Joe Miller receives tax-free payments? A Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis should concern voters more than say, hearing loss.
Yet when asked, Joe Miller froze for a moment and then fled like a guilty child.
Nicely! It’s fascinating watching this tool’s candidacy implode.
Who would be dumb enough vote for this clown, now? The more we know about Joe Miller, the more craven he appears. Yuck.
Joe Miller Runs Screeching From Simple Question (Wonkette)
