I am a man of many enthusiasms, and one of the things that I am, for certain, the MOST enthusiastic about is Firesign Theatre, the legendary psychedelic “Beatles of Comedy.” I’ve been a lifelong Firesign Theatre freak, having discovered them at a very young age. Oh yeah, I was totally obsessed with Firesign Theatre. Often called America’s Monty Python, they’re better described as America’s acid-drenched answer to The Goon Show. I’d listen to their albums with headphones on, in the dark, practically memorizing them. Studies have shown that young minds exposed to surrealism develop better critical thinking skills and I can honestly say that my own mind was rewired, permanently, by my extreme Firesign Theatre fandom. My love for them is a part of my very identity.

Having said all this—and I have complained about this before—Firesign Theatre is an extremely difficult thing to try to get other people interested in. The reaction tends to be rather muted in most cases. Fifty-year-old comedy albums and radio shows? The assumption is that it must be something like Fibber McGee and Molly or The Great Gildersleeve. Or that it must be dated.

It’s neither.

The Firesign Theatre created extremely complex “theater of the mind” comedy albums that were—unavoidably for obvious reasons—in the form of radio plays. Their comedy is multi-leveled, chock full of puns and time travel. It’s not dated as it exists in a self-contained, self-referential Firesign universe of their devising. In the same way someone can study James Joyce for a lifetime and never tire of it, Firesign Theatre holds a similar place in my life and in the lives of many others. When you meet a fellow Firehead, you become instant friends. And then you’ll both start slipping Firesign references into your conversations. (For a really amazing look at the now almost forgotten cultural importance of Firesign Theatre during the 60s and 70s, from Ivy League dorm rooms to the foxholes of Vietnam, listen to this NPR show. Trust me, it’s fantastic.)

All of this is a preamble to informing you, dear friend, that there is a major new product available at the Firesign Theater website. Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom is a book/DVD rom put together by their archivist and historian, my esteemed pal Taylor Jessen, who deserves a fucking Grammy award for this production, and for all the detective work that he’s undertaken to locate so many long thought lost tapes of the group’s work.

For Firesign fans, THIS IS AN EVENT. Live at the Magic Mushroom collects the fully-scripted plays that the group performed at a Venture Blvd. coffee house which were also broadcast on Peter Bergman’s Radio Free Oz show. These mythical performances have nary been heard in more than 50 years (a few turned up on torrent trackers) and they are a sheer delight. The weekly shows were all written, performed and taped while the group was working on their second release, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. You might assume that they were wood shopping material for that album, but this is not the case and there is almost no overlap at all, although they did debut the changing TV channels device used throughout their Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers album during the Magic Mushroom run.

To a Firesign Theatre fanboy like m’self, these plays are absolutely the Holy Grail of Firesignania. They occupy a space just below the classic studio albums and a little bit above the Dear Friends/Let’s Eat radio series. Firesign on radio was always planned out to a certain extent, but most of it was improvised with the Four or Five Crazy Guys sitting at their mikes looking at each other across a table. The Magic Mushroom plays were tightly scripted and so are more of a piece with their record releases. In other words there are hours of some of their very finest material in the offering of Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom. The collection comes inside of a full color 48-page paperback book. Includes all eleven of the surviving Magic Mushroom plays, plus original promos and the 10/29/1967 episode of Radio Free Oz (“The Bridey Murphy Come As You Were Halloween Party.”)

I asked fab Taylor Jessen some questions via email.

What are the Magic Mushroom plays?

The Magic Mushroom plays were a dozen or so half-hour radio plays that the Firesign Theatre performed between October 1967 and January 1968 live in front of a club audience at the Magic Mushroom Club on Ventura Blvd., Studio City, simulcast on Peter Bergman’s radio show Radio Free Oz on KRLA-AM, Los Angeles. The subject matter of the plays ranged from Arthurian adventures to sword-and-sandal epics to Mexican jungle adventures to an ERPI Classroom Films movie of the 1950s to a pirate musical to a Sherlock Holmes parody to a proto-Dwarf channel-surfing epic.

Were the Magic Mushroom plays, in fact, “lost”?

With the exception of “Exorcism in Your Daily Life” and “The Séance”, not only were they all lost, they still are. No masters exist for any shows but those two. There was a collection of open reel tapes documenting the complete Radio Free Oz from the beginning of the Magic Mushroom Play era in October 1967 to the end of January 1968, and every one of the reels with the plays on them was ripped off by persons unknown. We do not expect to recover them. For the most part this box set was built out of audio sources that came from home recordings of the plays made by fans, some of whose names we know, some of whom remain anonymous. Meanwhile the play “The Last Tunnel to Fresno” is truly unknown in any complete audio form - a few minutes of it survived on tape and the audio quality is so horrifically bad we didn’t include it on the box set, even as a supplemental extra.

How long did it take to find them all?

Leaving aside “The Séance”, it took me just a couple of hours to find them all around 2001 when the first bootlegs hit the Internet and I downloaded them all (as many of us did; anyone who goes looking for torrents of Firesign rarities can still find many of the same sources I did). The difference between those bootlegs and what you’ll hear on the box set is the hundred or so hours I spent cleaning up the audio.

You always have crazy stories about the lengths you’ve had to go to locate a certain Firesign tape—like trawling through a shed that had fallen victim to a mudslide—did anything like that happen when you were trying to track the Magic Mushroom tapes down?

Sadly there was no climactic discovery that lead to the creation of this reissue; exactly the opposite was the case. I simply gave up on the idea that we’d ever find better copies of the material, and concentrated on trying to make it all sound acceptable.
 

Above, Firesign Theatre at the Magic Mushroom, 1967.
 
Purchase Firesign Theatre Live at the Magic Mushroom here.

‘Wierdo.’
 
Scot Sothern grew up in a photographic studio. His old man photographed weddings and portraits. He told him: When you take a portrait of the bride you gotta see her with the same love the groom has for her. It was a lesson Sothern never forgot.

Sothern worked around the studio. He started in the dark room then ended up taking wedding photos. He was expected to take over the family business. Sothern wanted to be a writer or maybe an artist like Andy Warhol.

It was the late 1960s. A time of revolutions. Sexual, social and political.  Sothern quit home in Springfield, Missouri and headed for Southern California looking for teenage dreams of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll. He wasn’t making it as an artist. He wasn’t making it as a writer. Instead of giving up Sothern thought “fuck it, I’ll do whatever I want.” He started taking photographs. Kids making out at the skating rink. Working guys drinking at a bar. White working class people on the periphery. But no one was interested.

In the 1980s, Sothern documented the junkies, winos, and hookers. He followed his “hard-on.” He photographed his subjects with the same love a groom felt for his bride. He shot with a flashbulb or used sunlight. Nothing else. He showed his father his work. He liked the composition, the lighting, the power. The subject matter not so much. His brother thought he was “degenerate”. Sothern’s work said as much about his life as it did about the women and men he was photographing. He wrote the down their conversations. A short story of their lives. Still no one took an interest.
 

From ‘Low Life.’
 
1990: Sothern has motor bike accident. He stops taking photographs. He starts writing. But no one’s interested. He returned to photographing the people most politicians want to forget. The poor, homeless, and fucked-up.

It took 40-years for Sothern to get established. 40-years of rejection slips, and sorry this ain’t our kinda shit letters. In 2010, John Matkowsky at the drkrm Gallery in LA put on Sothern’s first solo show Lowlife. At the age of 60, Sothern had arrived.

Over the past decade, Sothern has exhibited across the USA and in Europe. He has published several books and launched a parallel career as a writer. This month, These Days will exhibit two major Sothern exhibitions under the title Generations: Sothern’s earliest personal photographs, Family Tree 1975-1980, and his most recent body of work, Identity both of which “explore time, change, and the multi-directional evolution of America.”
 

 
Tell me about your new exhibition ‘Generations’?

Scot Sothern: Well, Generations consists of two different bodies of works. The Family Tree photos were shot nearly fifty years ago and I think the original impetus was all about making my photography something more than portraits and snapshots. I was still in my twenties and mostly running wild, with little respect for the societal norms. I decided the best way to rationalize my lifestyle was to call myself an artist.

The other half of Generations, Identity, comes from looking for something new and wearing my politics on my sleeve. America has changed to a very different place since the Family Tree series, a lot the good of the Baby Boomer generation has decayed or was merely a delusion in the first place. A lot of things got fixed but in general America is fucked-up. I’m inspired by anger and I find I am inspired by younger generations of people who are reclaiming the identities that had been previously been kept in the closets.
 

‘The Fonz.’
 
More from Scot Sothern after the jump…

 
I awoke this morning to the extremely sad news that our friend Howie Pyro had passed. The rocker, cultural historian, DJ, founding member of D-Generation, bass player in Danzig, and frequent Dangerous Minds contributor, had a liver transplant last year, but then sadly caught COVID just when everything seemed like it was on a (TBH very unexpected) upswing in his health. I was just thinking about him yesterday and made a mental note to write and wish him well. Then this.

But the best thing of all, in a collection with literally hundreds of thousands of amazing and astonishing items, was his banana ashtray, but I’ll tell Howie tell you the story himself, in this Dangerous Minds post from 2017. RIP Howie Pyro, you will be missed.

It was fifty years ago this week that the future began with the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and his banana. The destruction and rebuilding of rock ‘n’ roll music as it then existed commenced. This was all taking place even though only a few people knew about it at the time. The right few, as always. I have to think that anyone reading this knows the history of the Velvet Underground so I’m not going to rehash it here.

In the thirty years since Warhol’s death, the human race has bought and sold more “Andy” than Andy himself could possibly have dreamed of and more. Much more. Too much even. Year after year there are more Warhol books, toys, giant banana pillows, clothing lines, shoes, Andy Warhol glasses, movies, action figures (or maybe inaction figures, this being Warhol), pencils, notebooks, skateboards—literally everything ever! There’s been more most post mortem Warhol merchandising than for practically anyone or anything you can name. These days, probably even more than for Elvis, Marilyn or James Dean who had head starts.

Warhol and his entourage were infamous speedfreaks—speedfreaks with cameras, tape recorders, and movie gear who talked a lot and didn’t sleep much—and his every utterance was recorded, long before museums, historical posterity and millions of dollars were the reasons.

With the advent of the Warhol Museum, Andy’s every movement, thought, and influence has been discussed, dissected, filed and defiled ad nauseum. Every single piece of art he ever did can be traced back to an original page in a newspaper, an ad in the back of a dirty magazine, a photograph, a Sunday comic, or an item from a supermarket shelf and they’ve ALL been identified and cataloged.

Except for one.

Just one.

Probably the second most popular of Warhol’s images, standing in line right behind the Campbell’s soup can, is the banana image found on the cover of the first Velvet Underground album. Thee banana! But where did it come from? Everything else was appropriated from somewhere. What about this one?

I KNOW where it came from and I have known for around thirty years. Oddly enough it only just now occurred to me (when I looked up Warhol’s death date) that I found this thing, which I am about to describe, mere weeks before Andy’s untimely demise.
 

 
I grew up in the sixties and I’ve loved the Velvet Underground since even before the advent of punk. And I love Andy Warhol, too. Just look at my Facebook profile photo. I have shelves of books on Warhol and all things Velvets and have amassed quite a collection of Warhol and Velvets rarities. My favorite book of all time is Andy Warhol’s Index from 1966, a children’s pop-up book filled with drag queens, the Velvets, 3-D soup cans and even a Flexi disc record with Lou Reed’s face on it with a recording of the Velvet Underground listening to a test pressing of their first LP. The one with the BANANA.
 

The author’s Facebook profile pic. Duh.
 
Andy Warhol’s number one right-hand man in the sixties and the person who turned the Factory silver (among many many other things including being the primary photographer of the Factory’s “silver years”) was Billy Name (Linich). An online comment described him this way:

You can’t get more inside than Billy Name in Warhol’s Factory world. In fact he lived in the Factory - and to be more specific he lived in the bathroom at the Factory - and to be even more specific he stayed in the locked bathroom without coming out for months (years?).

 
And so to quote this definitive “insider” Billy Name on the history of the banana:

...bananas had been a Warhol theme earlier in the Mario Montez feature film Harlot mostly as a comedic phallic symbol. In the general hip culture, Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” was going on [mellow yellow; roast banana peels in an oven, and then roll and smoke them]. The high was called “mello yellow.”

The specific banana image Andy chose came from I know not where; it’s not a Chiquita banana or Dole fruit company, because Andy’s banana has ‘overripe’ markings on it, and the fruit companies use whole yellow bananas on their stickers. Anyway, Andy first used this particular banana image for a series of silk-screen prints which he screened on white, opaque, flexible, Plexiglass (sort of like 2 feet x 5 feet). First an image of the inner banana “meat” was screened on the Plexi in pink, and then covered by the outer skin screened on and cut out of a glossy yellow sticky-back roll of heavy commercial paper (ordered from some supply warehouse). Thereby each banana could be peeled and the meat exposed and the skin could be replaced a number of times, ‘til the sticky stuff wore out. Naturally this was intentionally erotic Warhol-type art.

When thinking of a cover for the first Velvets album, it was easy for Andy to put one of his own works on the cover, knowing it was hip, outrageous, and original and would be “really great.” Andy always went the easy way, using what he had, rather than puzzling and mulling over some design elements and graphics for cover art that don’t really work. His art was already there, hip, erotic, and cool. The Plexi silk screen art definitely came first, in 1966. The album came out in ‘67. I do not recall any other design being thought of or even considered. The back of the album cover was a pastiche amalgam of photos from Andy’s films, Steven Shore, Paul Morrissey and myself and was messy and mulled over too much.

 

 
So here we are on the fiftieth anniversary of The Velvet Underground & Nico and its mysterious banana cover art, and I felt that I have held this secret for way too long. I always wanted to use this in a book or something but it never happened.

This thing was hanging on my kitchen wall for three decades, in New York and LA and is now in secured storage for reasons which are about to become obvious. This is how I found it: One day in the mid 80s I was cruising around the Lower East Side aimlessly—as I had done most of my life up to that point—running into friends, looking at stuff people were selling on the street, stopping into Manic Panic, Venus Records, St. Marks Books, and any junk shops that caught my eye. There was one on Broadway that I had never seen before right down the street from Forbidden Planet and the greatest place ever, the mighty Strand Book Store. I went in and there was a lot of great stuff for me. I found some old records, a huge stash of outrageous and disgusting tabloid newspapers from the sixties which I kept buying there for a couple months afterward, and some cool old knick-knacks. I knocked into something on a crowded table full of junk and heard a big CLANG on the cement floor. I bent down to pick it up. It was one of those cheap triangular tin ashtrays that usually advertised car tires or something mundane. I picked it up (it was face down) and when I turned it over I was surprised to see…THE BANANA!!

It was an ad for bananas printed on a cheap metal ashtray.
 

Don’t you like a banana? ENJOY BANANA. Presented by WING CORP. designed by LEO KONO production”

 
I thought wow, this is cool! But over time I realized that I had quite literally stumbled across a true missing link. I figured I’d use it for something big one day, but I never did. UNTIL NOW. Ladies and germs, Andy Warhol and Velvet Underground fans and scholars, without further ado I bring you THE MISSING LINK! A true Dangerous Minds mega exclusive! (As Jeb Bush would say “Please clap.”).

A primitive, pounding Moe Tucker drumroll please for the reveal of THEE BANANA…
 

 
Absolutely bananas, right?

I figured by now that there’d be at least some sort of information on this out there, as I honestly I haven’t looked in ages. But when I was reminded of the fiftieth anniversary of the album being released this past “Sunday Morning,” and took that silly Facebook profile picture it dawned on me. THE BANANA ASHTRAY, my own unique piece of Warhol and Velvets history!!! I spent two or three hours really scouring the Internet yesterday and there isn’t one word about it. No “banana ashtray.” No “Wing Corp,” no “Leo Kono production,” either. Nothing!

So now that I, Howie Pyro, have released this top secret banana, I hope all of you mellow yellow types out there in your yellow velvet uniforms go wild seeking out the info we need! So all you femme fatales, skip one of all tomorrow’s parties and run run run to find some heroin for all your European sons while waiting for your banana man, man.

Stay mellow, stay yellow and don’t slip on any banana peels (slowly, see?). Over and out. Warhol Museum, you know how to reach me…

(To read the comments left on the original post, go here.)
 

 

Enjoy an early classic Warhol film ‘Harlot’ (aka ‘Mario Banana’) starring that icon of perversion Jack Smith and Mario Montez.

 
The following is an excerpt from the liner notes to Riches to Rags, by Bob Mehr, the NY Times best-selling author of Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.

The work of The Replacements’ co-founder and legendary lead guitarist, Bob Stinson has been well chronicled since his tragic passing in 1995. In addition to the expansions of The Replacements catalog, Stinson’s post-‘Mats work – in the prog-psych band Static Taxi and his collaborations with punk vet Sonny Vincent in Shotgun Rationale – have all been collected and anthologized. But unaccounted for in that discography is the time Stinson spent as Bleeding Hearts’ lead guitarist. 

Although Stinson’s shadow looms large over the history of the band, Bleeding Hearts were the brainchild of singer, songwriter, and guitarist Mike Leonard. Raised in suburban Minneapolis, Leonard cut his teeth on the punk rock of The Clash. By his late teens he’d become a skilled guitarist with a Rolling Stones obsession (and a magnificently exaggerated Keef-style coif to go along with it).

After moving to uptown Minneapolis, the then-21-year-old Leonard launched Bleeding Hearts in 1990 as a trio initially, with drummer Bob Herbers and bassist Rob Robello. Leonard was eager to expand the fledgling band into a two-guitar lineup, but finding the right player proved tricky.

“We went through about four or five guitar players in a short span,” recalled Leonard. “The last guy we had decided to leave the band when his car caught on fire after a show with his guitar and amp in it. I guess he took it as a sign to quit.”

A habitué of The Uptown bar, Leonard made the acquaintance of one of its other regulars, Bob Stinson. “I was at The Uptown five nights a week then, and Bob was hanging out there too,” he said. “I struck up a conversation with him. Actually interrupted him telling a joke—I told the punchline.”

At the time, Stinson—many years removed from The Replacements—was still in the midst of a long run with his group Static Taxi. “Static Taxi was very much Bob’s thing musically,” said Leonard. “It was all his favorite stuff: Yes and Steve Howe and psychedelic Beatles elements—that’s what his heart was really into, and which didn’t have a home in The Replacements.”

“Bleeding Hearts were actually more like The Replacements, more like a classic rock ‘n’ roll band. Since we were admittedly influenced by The Replacements, I figured why not have Bob Stinson play guitar? When I approached him about playing with us, he agreed.”

Stinson arrived at Bleeding Hearts’ practice space with his Fender Quad Reverb in tow, several sheets to the wind. “We started playing together, but it was total cacophony,” recalled Leonard. “The whole time we’re playing, Bob keeps saying, ‘You guys should get Jamie Garner to play guitar.’ At first, we’re like, ‘No, Bob, we want you.’ But after about an hour of this cacophony, we were like, ‘Uh, Bob, who’s this Jamie Garner guy again? Can you introduce us?’”

Stinson did just that, connecting the band with Garner, a vet of Twin/Tone Records outfit The Leatherwoods. Garner, a skilled player in his own right, joined Bleeding Hearts and spent much of the next year playing with the band. “Jamie was great, a phenomenal guitar player who took us up a couple notches,” said Leonard. But by the end of 1991, Garner had decided to move to San Diego and Bleeding Hearts second guitar slot was open once again.
 

Photo: Dan Corrigan
 
This time, Stinson—at loose ends after the breakup of Static Taxi—approached Leonard about joining the band. “Bob saw us one or two times, and he decided he wanted in,” said Leonard. “This time I was a little bit skeptical, but he was determined to play with us.”

At the time Stinson was living with his mother and stepfather, on the other side of town from Leonard. “It was the dead of winter and he trudged from way down on East Lake Street to where I lived over on West Lake Street,” said Leonard. “It was freezing outside, and he was wearing a light windbreaker and no hat or gloves. By the time he got to my apartment his face was red and frozen.”

“But we sat down and played guitars and he learned every one of our songs in a single sitting. He could be a really quick study. We banged out all the tunes and he came up with some embellishments that worked perfectly. Came up with all these cool harmonized guitar parts. I think he was happy to join the band and start playing around again. We were almost trying to resurrect him in a way too; he’d been written off by a lot of people by that time.” 

Leonard also made the generous, if perhaps unwise, move of inviting Stinson to come live with him. “I had this sense that the only way I’d be able to keep him in check was if he moved in with me,” said Leonard. Exactly ten years younger than Stinson, Leonard took on the role of a younger brother as well as caretaker. The two played together daily, roughhoused like little kids, rehearsed with the band five times a week, and listened to music the rest of the time.

“Bob had these stacks of speakers that he brought with him. And he’d just crank his music so loud,” said Leonard. “Bob would be dissecting the very first ten seconds of like an Urge Overkill song or something. Needle dropping it over and over again. He would analyze a one minute section of a song. He really heard music microscopically.” 

By this point, Bleeding Hearts were about to welcome a new drummer in Pat McKenna. Stinson —who, by this point, knew how to sharpen a band—would help fine tune the group.

“Bob really was like a musical savant. He would show the drummer how to do little detailed parts; he would come up with really good basslines,” said Leonard. “He was a weird talent. In a way, he couldn’t tell you what he was doing at all—like what scale or what chord he was playing. But then I’d come home and he’d be jamming along to Yes records, playing ‘Roundabout’ note for note. He just had an uncanny ability.” 

In early 1993, the band began doing pre-production for their first album. Stinson’s old friend and guitar successor in The Replacements, Slim Dunlap, would help prep the band at its rehearsal studio. “Slim came over and recorded some songs,” said Leonard. “He was always looking out for Bob, helping out however he could.”

A couple months later, in March of 1993, Leonard enlisted Twin Cities engineer Tommy Roberts—leader of the band Fauna—to cut a session with Bleeding Hearts at Terrarium Studios.

The recording was done mostly live, and found Stinson not only working in tight six-string tandem with Leonard, but adding other musical flourishes, like the bongos at the end of “Gone,” and the memorable whistling that starts “Imagination.”
 

Photo: Dan Corrigan
 
With half of a record complete, Bleeding Hearts seemed to be a band poised on the cusp of some kind of breakthrough in 1993. The Replacements’ former manager Peter Jesperson had picked them as a band to watch in the local alt-weekly City Pages, and they played a triumphant show opening for Tommy Stinson’s new band Bash & Pop at the 7th Street Entry, in what was an emotional reunion for the Stinson family. 

But behind the scenes, Bob was suffering, dealing with a combination of his own escalating mental and substance abuse issues—and reckoning with his son Joey’s health problems, as the infant had been diagnosed as a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. “That really affected him. He’d talk about it but it was very hard on him,” recalled Leonard. “I think that drove him into a dark place.”

A professional complication in the band’s career came with a SPIN story that was published in the summer of 1993. Stinson, who’d been off the national radar since leaving The Replacements seven years earlier, had agreed to a feature interview in the magazine thinking it would help boost Bleeding Hearts profile. But the piece would instead focus on Stinson and his troubled Replacements’ past, painting him as a lost and wasted figure, while Bleeding Hearts were dismissed almost entirely. “We thought that was going to be a door opening for us, but it almost felt like a door closing,” said Leonard.

The story concludes in the liner notes—by Bob Mehr, author of the New York Times bestseller Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements—from Riches to Rags, the long-lost album by Bleeding Hearts.

 
THEY’VE DONE IT AGAIN. The crate-digging maniacs behind the legendary Brown Acid record series—Lance Barresi of Permanent Records and Daniel Hall of RidingEasy Records, by name and reputation—have compiled yet another stellar compilation of proto stoner metal and heavy rock obscurities.  For this, their fourteenth trip to the seemingly bottomless fuzz box well of the late 60s/early 70s, they’ve assembled such unknown hard rockers as Harrisburg, PA’s own The Legends (featuring a pre-Edgar Winter Group Dan Hartman and his brother Dave); there’s the Moogified Mijal & White (“runaway oscillators and modular synths spurt and sputter over some Tommy James & The Shondells bubblegum garage psych”); the San Francisco Trolley Co. (“13th Floor Elevators meets the MC5”); and West Virginia’s Blue Creed, not a real band but a studio entity funded by coal miner & songwriter Bill Rexroad. Their (his?) song “You Need a Friend” might be my favorite track from this installment. Dig the sound of his guitar amp stuck inside of a metal oil drum! And then there’s Transfer, described as a proto-punk “mashup of the Velvet Underground and The Flamin’ Groovies.” Their number, “Play It Cool,” is about smoking weed.

These and many more heavy rock obscurities in Brown Acid: The Fourteenth Trip. Have a listen below. Out on 4/20, because of course it is. Order vinyl here.
 

This is the shot available as a limited edition print
 
Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like Creem. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.

Bud Lee’s estate, which oversees and manages his archive, has begun releasing limited edition, hand-numbered archival prints of Lee’s work as a way of raising funds to preserve his extensive archive of images and help realize special projects, including a planned monograph of his work. The second print in this series—the first was an amazing portrait of Al Green—which is only being made available for one week only, is a spectacular image of Iggy lying prostrate among the audience at Ungano’s. You can purchase a print HERE.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.
 

INT.  LACK-LUSTRE RECORDING STUDIO SUITE, IN LOCAL STATION ‘RADIO ZIDER’. BUILT IN ‘80s, STAINED BEYOND REPAIR IN SHADES OF ‘COFFEE & CREAM’.  SOMEWHERE IN THE WILD, WILD, WEST, OF SOMERSET, 2022. DISSECTED SPLIT SCREEN SHOT. STUDIO GLASS BETWEEN RECORDING BOOTH AND CONTROL ROOM RUNS VERTICALLY DOWN THE MIDDLE. IN THE CONTROL ROOM IS A TV SCREEN THAT CLINGS TO THE WALL BRACKET WITH ½ ROLL OF DUCT TAPE AND A WING AND A PRAYER. IT ROLLS 24/7 WITH PRE-RECORDED MUSIC VIDEOS/SHOWBIZ & CELEBRITY GOSSIP. MARK STEWART’S MIC IS PERMANENTLY ON.  SA 1 & SA 2’S ARE OFF, ALTERNATING TO ON, WHEN STATED.  NIGHT.

MARK STEWART (Peter Pan of THE POP GROUP), casually dressed in one of his band’s T-shirts emblazoned with the title of their track “She’s Beyond Good and Evil’ and a ‘man/cash/bum’ bag round his waist. He stands,  one side of the glass in the recording booth.  He grapples to familiarise himself with his new, temporary studio surroundings (courtesy of his insurance company), after having been forced to evacuate during a flood, from his usual state-of-the-art studio of choice – in the Hamlet of EVANELPUS. Excited, in anticipation of hosting a transatlantic call with (Filmmakers RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON & NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS), he is committed to creating a convivial atmosphere for his 2 guests and collaborators.  Radio Zider’s Producer is on extended leave (again).  In his absence, his 2 frazzled Sound Assistants (SA 1 & SA 2), deputise, behind the desk in the control room. SA 2 (Millennial) irascible, dressed in ‘street gear’, stands twiddling his knobs. SA 1 (Gen Z) lacks confidence by comparison to his slightly senior colleague, dressed in ‘smart casual’, he sits perched on edge of seat, neck craned, firmly focused on TV screen. With their once high-hopes of high-earnings now jaded and putrid pallors further faded, they no longer consider sharing personal details such as their names with their Manager’s clientele, necessary. 

MARK STEWART: Russ, Nik, OK, we’re ready to roll and in control again now.  Sorry about that, few technical issues there.  I blame the scrumpy.  The locals can’t get enough of it. “Let’s start at the very beginning…” So, joking aside, I’m stoked to be catching up with you. Having now had the pleasure of working with you both twice – firstly on your film Rip It Up And Start Again and secondly on the making of the video with myself and my collaborators – Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire, Wrangler) and Eric Random (Nico and The Faction) – which accompanies my new single Cast No Shadow (taken from the forthcoming album VS).  For context, I should add that Cast No Shadow was made in response to Rip It Up + Start Again, which in turn, you both made in response to Simon Reynold’s 2005 book of the same name.  The film boasts a wealth of material previously unearthed, which is a credit to yourselves and your contributors – of which there are too numerous to mention here – so will instead just urge people to go and explore, follow the links.  It’s a real treat to turn the tables – as a Clairvoyant might say – and conduct a Directors’ Q&A with you both.  You’re busy, I know, so I’ll try to butt out and stay on-piste.  Here’s a starter for 10, to both of you: What was your personal mission statement prior to embarking on this journey, in your joint creation of the rarified gem that is your Post-Punk documentary film –  Rip It Up + Start Again?

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: The era was pointedly anti-star, and if there is ever going to be a comprehensive view of this era as a whole, then that should be the approach.  The central character of this film is the Zeitgeist itself.  There seemed to be one, across the world, and we are letting the artists of that time show us its source and shape, its sound and flavour.  Also, many of the best acts put out a record or two and it was over… It was an ocean of artists, not an Olympic pantheon… a constellation of daring sorties rather than a field of careerists. Once “stars” inevitably did emerge, you then have New Wave.

MARK STEWART: Truth. Russell?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: We wanted to do a film where the protagonists themselves are given time to tell it from their perspective – and to follow their leads on what and who was important from inside the scene(s).  Though there was no formal ‘movement’, it’s surprisingly and hearteningly clear that there most definitely was this Zeitgeist, stretching from the rust belt in America, through the grey 70s of the UK, and on to culturally reconstructed Germany.  It ended up being an incredibly fertile and diverse field.

MARK STEWART: What was Post-Punk for you at the time ‘78 onwards?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I came to London in early 1979 and immediately fell in with a disparate bunch of filmmakers and musicians.  At that time we’d all been shaken up / inspired by the energy of punk, though not necessarily fully convinced of its longevity, or its ability in purely musical terms to go the distance.  Nobody called it post-punk at that time, obviously, in fact I don’t think I even heard the term until Simon’s book came out in the mid 2000s.  But there was new music coming out week after week – as singles – no albums yet – all by new artists, basically people you’d never heard of.  It was very pure in some cases and I think that’s what grew into the post-punk envelope, but there were a lot of chancers, hopping on the punk bandwagon, and many musicians who were pretty decent, but not really coming up with anything radically new – just embellishing their previous style with a bit of spikiness.  I’d put some people I really liked in that group, like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Graham Parker or bands like Dexys and the Specials (though I think these latter did break out into something fantastic, later on, with ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘In The Studio’).  I even had a few singles by The Police!

But I was much more interested in the very spare and odd sounds that were coming out from Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, The Pop Group, Rip, Rig & Panic, The Cure (yes – they were a key band at the start.  ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ was a real landmark work). The Fall would require a whole interview of their own, as I am a fanatic, so for now will just say ‘Hex Enduction Hour’.  There was a gap between the first Public Image single (stunning) and the first major label album by one of the ‘new bands’ (which might have been Go4’s ‘Entertainment!’?) when everything was just 7” singles.  There was no real hierarchy, and you didn’t know who anyone was, or where they came from anyway.  Just lightning blasts from every direction:  Skank Bloc Bologna, Health & Efficiency, She Is Beyond Good & Evil, At Home He’s A Tourist, Transmission, Map Reference. It’s really an embarrassment of riches crammed into a two year period.  When bands did get their albums out, there were some stunning things like ‘Y’, ‘Deceit’, ‘Odyshape’, ‘154’, ‘Dub Housing’ or ‘The Modern Dance’, and ‘Kangaroo?’ by Red Crayola.  And, The Slits’ ‘Cut’.  Then ‘Metal Box’ was another huge poke in the eye from PiL, who didn’t do much, but what they did do, was impeccable.

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: In retrospect, I can see that my affinity for what came to be known as “post-punk” began – as a kid growing up in Detroit – as a fascination with the Sixties outsiders, such as Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Zappa/Captain Beefheart, as well as the glam futurism of Bowie, Roxy Music and Eno. This same set of artists (name-checked repeatedly in these interviews) set me up quickly to absorb the fast changing worlds of Wire, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, and Talking Heads/Eno, the dark romance of Joy Division and the Virgin Prunes, the dub-noir of A Certain Ratio and “Metal Box”, the scabrous No Wave New Yorkers, and the Teutonic electronica of D.A.F. and… and here I think you have to include Kraftwerk and Suicide, pre-post-punkers in full stride with the rest of the kids…

MARK STEWART: Breathe fellas breathe. What do you see as major acts carrying on the post-punk tradition these days? Russell?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I’m too out of touch these days to do more than sound like a diligent Guardian reader. Nowadays – in the middle of another fashion wave, there’s a few bands I rather enjoy, like Yard Act or Dry Cleaning.  (Wet Leg were amusing – mainly for their name, actually, and some decent songs, but they seem too curated already.) And I’m sure Fontaines D.C. will go somewhere, not least because for every bit I love, there’s a bit I find too close to U2.  But still. Interestingly (or not) there was a conscious or subconscious influence on dub in almost every ‘original’ post punk band, but as far as I can tell, none at all in any of the new ones.  That stream of influence seems to be absent. Curious.  But you hear its lack immediately.  I don’t have much of a background in dub, and what I do know was brought to me via post-punk bands in the early Scrits, the Slits, the Pop Group, or A Certain Ratio. Once the initial scenes had matured, I kept noticing that the best and most fascinating bands of all seemed to secretly source Post-Punk: Sonic Youth, Pixies, PJ Harvey, through to late 80s and 90s, and acts like Portishead, Massive Attack and Bjork.

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: My Bloody Valentine ‘Isn’t Anything and Loveless’, Tricky ‘Maxinquay’ and ‘Pre-Millennium Tension’, the Pixies ‘Doolittle’, Stereolab ‘Dots and Loops’, Broadcast/Focus Group ‘Broadcast and the Focus Group Examine Witch Cults of the Radio Age’, Aphex Twin ‘Selected Ambient works Vols 1 and 2’, Boards of Canada ‘Geogaddi’ and ‘A Beautiful Place Out in the Country’,  the Focus Group ‘Hey Let Loose Your Love’, Laurel Halo ‘Quarantine’, P J Harvey ‘To Bring you My Love’ and ‘Uh Huh Her’, Burial ‘Burial’ and ‘Untrue’, Demdike Stare ‘Elemental Parts 1-4’, Meat Beat Manifesto ‘Satyricon’. Record labels: Ghost Box Hyperdub, 4AD.

MARK STEWART: Choice stuff cool. What do you think of / how do you define a D.I.Y ethos?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: There’s something about young people and music being separated by heavy fire doors in the mid-seventies.  Punk, and then Post-Punk, was the movement from watching to playing, but in 1975 there wasn’t much of a path forward for beginners and all their inventiveness and enthusiasm.  I think you (Mark) said to us: ‘it was easier to imagine becoming a footballer than a musician’. Well, Punk dropkicked that one out of touch. 

MARK STEWART: Ha, I’m hardly George Best.

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: I’d say that D.I.Y starts with whatever you find lying around – not just in terms of the actual instruments: guitar, bass, drums, voice – but also musical form: pop singles, bits of funk, school hymns, doggerel, your parents’ jazz records, what you heard coming out of shops on the high streets in the cities, etc. etc. and under all of that, the fact that you didn’t need to be a musician to be mad about music. The next step being, ultimately, some idiots had to make a record and get it distributed, without being millionaires. Was it Desperate Bicycles? Or Buzzcocks? Or Swell Maps? Or Factory Records sampler? Scritti Politti’s ‘How to…’ liner notes? I don’t think you can separate out all those strands – everyone did it on a shoestring, crappy jobs, a few quid stuck away, living on the dole, or in a squat.

I remember there was an awful lot of talking. A lot of reading and a lot of debate.  Not only about politics, but film, photography, art, personal identity, sexuality, as well as music. Cheap housing.  One thing that emerged naturally from that lo-life is that bands tended not to have leaders – there were certainly some very strong personalities – but it’s hard to think of any solo ‘stars’.  And a lot more women formed or joined bands.  Certainly not a 50/50 parity, but way more than say pub rock or glam prog bands of just a couple of years before.  Punk was somewhere between.  Not just as ‘sexy singers of Top Of The Pops’ either: I’ve noticed a weird propensity for female bass players: Tina Weymouth, Gayle Advert; Gina Birch; Tessa Pollitt, Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, Sara Lee…

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: Forget Mark Perry’s “Here’s three chords, start a band”- Wire showed me “Here’s ONE chord, build a new world!” Apply that idea to everything!

MARK STEWART: Yeeeeeeesssss!  What is ‘messthetics’?

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS: As a kid in Detroit, somehow that term didn’t trickle down to me, until the whole era was over… I will defer to Russell’s able verbal skills.

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON: The main difference between D.I.Y and ‘messthetics’ is that the first in an inventiveness born from necessity.  Whereas the latter is an applied philosophy, whatever your means.  This Heat, for example, could make a piece from bashing bits of sheet metal and pipes (Metal) or use a 24 Track console, but play the desk with faders (24 track loop), or they could equally use a home-made cassette sampler (6 cassette machines tied together, playing pre-recorded loops, and put through a small mixer) to introduce a random tapemix as a random instrument.  Allow the faults and the unpredictability to shine through.  Have resolute non-musicians on stage.  That would be ‘messthetics’.  Keeping the rough edges and not drowning under heavy production gloss.  [There’s a close parallel in filmmaking, too: those years spent trying to do things for zero money meant everyone had to be able to do everything with at least a minimum degree of competence – people just became ‘filmmakers’.  Video promised to level all that even more, but in the end, it didn’t: you can now spend millions of a video production with a massive crew.  The Danish ‘Dogme 95’ movement were very post-punk, and a lot might be learned from adapting their commandments to music.  There’s probably a book to be written somewhere in there about manifestos too.]

MARK STEWART: Sorry I can’t provide you with any of the luxuries that the BBC provide their Desert Island Discs guests – and I will deviate from their format, by stating no explanations or apologies please, when now, finally, I ask you both: What’s your post-punk playlist?

RUSSELL CRAIG RICHARDSON:
Gang of Four: At Home He’s A Tourist
Scritti Politti: Skank Bloc Bologna
The Pop Group: She Is Beyond Good and Evil
This Heat: Health & Efficiency
Public Image Ltd.: Poptones
The Fall: New Puritan
Wire: Map Reference
Joy Division (sorry, I’m from Manchester): Love Will Tear Us Apart
Pere Ubu (off Modern Romance): The Real World
Instant Hit – The Slits
The Void – The Raincoats
Shack Up – A Certain Ratio
10.15 Saturday Night – The Cure
Eugene – Essential Logic
The Milkmaid – Red Crayola (off Kangaroo?)
Private Armies – Viv Goldman
Alphaville – The Monochrome Set
You – Delta 5
It’s Obvious – Au Pairs
Leave the Capitol – The Fall

NIKOLAOS KRATRANIS:
Definitely 2 lists, here – UK and US perspectives.
This Heat – 24-Track Loop
Cabaret Voltaire – Eddie’s Put, Loosen the Clamp
Wire – Our Swimmer
Young Marble Giants – Eating Noddemix, Choci Loni
The Contortions – Dish It Out, Almost Black
DNA – Egomaniac’s Kiss
Rosa Yemen – Rosa Vertov
Swell Maps – Let’s Build A Car, Midget Submarines
Ike Yard – Night After Night
Suicide – Radiation, Cheree
D.A.F.: – Ein Bisschen Krieg, Osten Währt am Längsten.
Byrne & Eno – America is Waiting, Mountain of Needles
The Fall – Impression of J Temperance, New Face in Hell
Ultravox – My Sex
Talking Heads – Warning Signs, Cities, Not Seen
Public Image Ltd. – Poptones, Public Image
Pere Ubu – I Will Wait, The Book Is On The Table.

MARK STEWART: Thanks fellas, respect. it’s been a gas.  Over and out.
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Photo by Claude Gassian

For much of the 1980s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were on the outs. The pair were feuding about the direction the Stones’ music would take. Jagger wanted to modernize the band’s sound, while Richards wanted to stick with the blues rock formula which had already worked—and worked very well for them indeed—for the past three decades. Subsequently, new music by the Rolling Stones was not forthcoming for several years, and the 1985 sessions for the desultory Dirty Work album were notably strained, with Jagger putting his vocals over the finished instrumental tracks apart from the rest of the group. It was rare that all five band members were ever in the studio at the same time.

Signed as a solo artist on the back of the Stones move to Columbia-CBS Records—something the rest of the group was initially unaware of—Jagger produced She’s the Boss in 1985 alongside a star-studded cast of musical luminaries that included Bill Lasswell, Sly & Robbie, Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers, Herbie Hancock and Pete Townshend. Richards was pissed about what he saw as Jagger’s lack of commitment to their band. When Jagger refused a tour to promote Dirty Work, choosing to concentrate instead on his solo career, things between the Glimmer Twins deteriorated even further.

Restless at the lack of musical activity, Richards worked as a bandleader on director Taylor Hackford’s Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, assembling a supergroup for two concerts that included Eric Clapton, Etta James, Linda Ronstadt and Berry’s longtime songwriting partner pianist Johnnie Johnson. The drummer for the band was a young musician by the name of Steve Jordan who had played in the Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman house bands. Richards and Jordan got along great musically—Jordan had already performed on Dirty Work—and formed the X-Pensive Winos for the purpose of recording Richards’ first solo album, the well-received Talk is Cheap, and a support tour (documented on the Live at the Hollywood Palladium, 15 December 1988 album.)
 

Steve Jordan and Keith Richards in 1992, photo by Claude Gassian.
 
The X-Pensive Winos were put on hold when bridges were finally mended between Jagger and Richards prior to the Rolling Stones induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in early 1989. The tour in support of the Steel Wheels album was their biggest to date, seeing the Stones trekking all over the globe and raking in around $200 million. When the tour ended, Richards, feeling creatively energized, set about writing songs again with Steve Jordan that eventually became 1992’s Main Offender album.

For Main Offender the X-Pensive Winos added guitarist Waddy Wachtel to the group. Wachtel, a musical sideman of some renown who has worked with the likes of Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Warren Zevon, Bryan Ferry, and Jackson Browne, was brought in to co-produce the album with Richards and Jordan, and he co-wrote four of the albums songs with them. Main Offender was critically acclaimed, and featured some fantastic performances, but just barely made the bottom rungs of the US album charts. The subsequent tour, however, was a big success, but the X-Pensive Winos were put on ice again when the Rolling Stones regrouped for the Voodoo Lounge album and the $320 million grossing world tour of the same name.  The Winos would eventually return in 2015 for the Crosseyed Heart album.

Today marks the release of the Super Deluxe 30th anniversary edition of Main Offender from BMG. The box set is presented in a unique art book format with the album pressed on “smoke” color vinyl. Main Offender has been newly remastered under the supervision of Steve Jordan. Also included is the Winos Live in London ’92 album (exclusive to this set) and an 88-page book with never-before-seen photos, and a packet of reproduction promo materials.

CLICK HERE TO WIN A FREE COPY OF THE MAIN OFFENDER SUPER DELUXE BOX SET FROM BMG.

The 1992 music video for the “Wicked As It Seems” single.

Dennis Bovell, Mark Stewart, and Gareth Sager (photo by Chiara Meattelli)
 
On Y in Dub, released digitally last year, producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell MBE and the Pop Group revisit every track on their 1979 Radar Records album Y and single “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” creating looking-glass complements to the originals that seem long overdue. In advance of the album’s vinyl release on April 8, Bovell gave Dangerous Minds a tour of Y in Dub‘s vast, echoing mental space. 

If you can cast your mind back to when you first encountered the Pop Group, what was it about them that made you want to work with them? What were your first impressions of the band?

My first impressions of the band were that, here was a bunch of budding young musicians who could handle jazz riffing and were also into, not tuneful singing, but meaningful lyrics, you know. I think to say something is better than to be beautifully in tune and saying nothing. I applauded their militancy and their approach to music in general, their likes and their dislikes. And in fact, later on in life, Bruce Smith, the drummer, joined Linton Kwesi Johnson and me with the Dub Band.

I wanted to ask about that too, because I think the Pop Group and Linton Kwesi Johnson co-headlined a number of shows together, right?

Absolutely.

Can you tell me about that? Were you at the controls ever for the Pop Group—

No, no. I had worked with both of them, and then by that time I was, like, more in the studio person than being out on live gigs, because by then, I had had it with live gigs, to be honest, you know: the confusion, the lack of organization, the long traveling hours and then being expected to perform like a circus flea, you know, I’d had it with that by then, and they hadn’t! So they were about to experience that, while I was about to crawl back into the studio with my normal self, work at my own pace.

Are you maybe ten years older then they are? They were quite young when they recorded this.

They still are quite young. [Laughter] I never really thought about how much older I was than them, but I guess that made them listen to me as the producer.

Nowadays, when I listen to the original record, but also this dub set, it strikes me that they were such young people—I think Mark was still a teenager.

I think he was about seventeen or something, yeah.

But the music in a way—I know what you’re saying about everything not being perfectly in tune—but at the same time the music is kind of sophisticated.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t sound to me like a bunch of young people playing.

Well, a lot of people said that about Coltrane. [Laughs] He was never on time, he was never in tune, but he was genius.
 

 
So how did you approach this dub set of Y?

First of all, we made sure the tapes were still playable, were still audible, and then we passed them over from analog to digital files. File by file, right? Each file: the kick drum file, switch it over, the snare drum—the whole recording. And then we went into a digital room with a young lad called Dave McEwen, and he kind of helped us to put them on a digital level where I could actually revisit each channel and have full control over it, as it were.

So I had the files transferred to digital files, and so we could manipulate them on the Pro Tools level. And then we put them in a computer and then sent them back onto an analog desk, right? So I was just using the computer to synchronize the files, but when the files came back, they were coming back to an analog desk, and I was equalizing them as I felt for that room, for those speakers, and giving the right amount of delay, et cetera, just to kind of take us back into the analog age, but using digital files.

More after the jump…

‘KILL HIM!’: ‘Wormwood’ on stage (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

The new Wormwood box set, the latest installment in Cherry Red’s pREServed series of Residents reissues, runs to nine CDs etched with nearly nine hours of music. Not quite James Earl Jones Reads the Bible territory (sixteen CDs, nineteen hours), it nevertheless presents the Residents’ 1998 biblical epic at a scale appropriate to the form. Perhaps God, sufficiently enraged by humanity to send plagues, pestilences, fires, and hurricanes, has also seen fit to unleash this mighty flood of scriptural content, which makes the meager 203 minutes of the Charlton Heston Presents the Bible four-DVD set look like a positive insult to the Almighty.

Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible, by one count the Residents’ twenty-third album, draws most of its lurid tales of rape, incest, and murder from the books of the Old Testament (though they also give us a Judas who understands betraying Jesus as his divine calling, as well as a five-and-a-half-minute instrumental based on Revelation). There are surprising takes on familiar stories—the same chapter from the Book of Daniel that inspired Johnny Cash to write “Belshazzar” moved the Residents to write “God’s Magic Finger,” and “Bathsheba Bathes” gives a decidedly less pious take on David than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and songs based on tales few other songwriters have dared to tell, like Jael pounding a tent peg into Sisera’s skull while he sleeps.

Though Wormwood boasts more circumcisions than any rock record since Saccharine Trust’s Surviving You, Always, not to mention the winning contributions of Molly Harvey and Carla Fabrizio, it has never been my favorite Residents album. But listening to this box set has given me a new appreciation of the size and ambition of the Wormwood project, and how fruitful this period was for the group. In context with eight discs of supplementary material, the original album comes to seem like a preliminary sketch for a sprawling creation that kept the Residents busy for about four years, and included some remarkable work.

The Residents do not, of course, grant interviews, but I was able to contact Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, and Richard Anderson, who oversees the pREServed series at Cherry Red Records, and subject each of them to a battery of haranguing and hairsplitting questions about matrix numbers, obi strips and session dates. Choice excerpts follow. I should mention that Richard drew my attention to a Residents compilation LP that had escaped my notice called Leftovers Again?!, issued for Record Store Day last year. It starts with a concentrate of the legendary, unreleased early recording Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and proceeds through material from the Residents’ tape archive throughout the Seventies. Much of the LP consists of “RDX” (as in “redux,” I believe) mixes, new presentations of the original recordings of beloved Residents songs that often feature sounds from the multitrack tapes that didn’t make the final mix.

The Residents, 1998 (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

 
As it happens, I was in the audience at the beginning of the tour in Boston, so I didn’t really realize how much the material evolved and changed after that. Could you talk a little bit about how the show changed when it went on the road?

Well, you know, Residents stuff usually does change. They do albums and then—maybe this is typical of a lot of artists, I don’t know—but it’s kind of like, when somebody writes and records something, in a lot of ways that’s just a kind of first, brief glimpse into the material, and then as they start to perform it, they find out more and more what they feel like it wants to be, and more how it works, and particularly how it works in front of an audience. So honestly it’s kind of an unpredictable path that it takes, many times.

Another example: when they were doing the Cube-E tour, which was like ten years earlier, you know, the second half of it was all Elvis songs, and one that just really came to life so much in performance was “Teddy Bear.” You know, Elvis sang it as such a light, upbeat pop song, and the Residents just felt like there were all these really incredible, almost like S&M undertones in it, and that then really came out in terms of the performance. So it’s kind of typical, I think, in a lot of ways with them for these things to change.

Part of being in front of an audience, maybe, seeing what works and what doesn’t?

Exactly. What brings out the attention and reaction of an audience makes a lot of difference.
 

‘Mr. Skull Superstar’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
There are a lot of things I learned reading the liner notes to this box set. I guess [show opener] “Nober” was only played in Boston and then dropped from the set.

I’m not really sure what the thought was behind that, at this point. Maybe they felt like it was a little too long or a little too slow of a way to get into the set, and they felt like they needed something that grabbed the audience’s attention more? But, like I say, you’re reminding me of something I’d long forgotten about, really.

Well, in the Fillmore show—maybe you can help me sort out the chronology, here, Homer, I think the Fillmore show came before the tour?

Yeah, I think so. I think everything was put together in San Francisco at the Fillmore, and then they took it on the road.

The live version of “KILL HIM!” towards the beginning of that is really a fierce piece of music.

Well, I think that was one of the stronger pieces from that show and from that album.

Did that show have the big gamelan orchestra?

It had the gamelan in San Francisco, yeah. And then I think they came back later and did some shows at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and I think they brought the gamelan back for that again, too. But once again, it was a long time ago, and while I’ve been through the box set, I haven’t actually revisited and listened to all that stuff again. So you’re more up on it and more familiar with it at this point than I am.
 

A Resident (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
If you can remember, then, maybe you can talk about the origin of the project. Did the Residents read the King James Bible, or how did the project come into being?

Well, they were looking for a project, and for the Residents, often they start with some kind of a concept. Things can work in different ways; sometimes they just start recording, and the concept finds itself in that process. But often, they would like to try to find a concept first, and I don’t remember exactly where the idea of the Bible came from, but when it came out, it was like instantaneously: “Yes! Yes! The Bible!”

You’re looking at a bunch of people who all were, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants growing up in the South, and they moved away from that; almost needless to say, they’re not really that religious. But they started seeing the Bible as so much of the underpinnings of Western culture on so many levels, and the more research they did with it, the more true that became. There’s just a million things in terms of so much of our laws, and morals, and stories, even people’s names, people that you run into on a very common basis. You find out, this woman’s name is Ruth; okay, well, that comes from the Bible. And there’s so many like that, it then became a very fascinating subject to explore and then dig into.

And I think particularly, once again, so much emphasis over recent culture has been put on the New Testament, which is Jesus, and love, and all that. But the really meaty stuff is the old stuff. That’s what really got them excited.

I remember wondering at the time if the Residents ever felt overwhelmed by the heaviness of the material. It’s not like the Residents’ material is always happy, but this is just like unrelieved rape, murder, God wants more foreskins—

Yeah, mountains of foreskins. Yeah, right, exactly. I think they were kind of blown away by a lot of it, honestly. But once again, that just reinforced that decision to be moving in that direction, using that as content for their music.

When they were choosing the stories, were they looking for anything in particular? Was it the stories that jumped off the page?

They did research. One of the things they weren’t necessarily aware of—it’s obvious, I guess, when you think about it, but they weren’t necessarily aware of it—you know, what we call the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, and it’s kind of ironic in a way that you can have these ideological conflicts between Christians and Jews when they all kind of base so much of their religion on the same writing. But there was a book that they found that was written by a rabbi. I’ve had reasons, for interviews like this, where I’ve wanted to name that book and I have not been able to locate it. I even looked on Amazon at one time trying to find it, I don’t know if it’s still in print or not. But this rabbi went through all of these Old Testament stories and brought out the deeper meaning in so many of them, so much of the stuff that was buried or kind of glossed over. In a lot of ways, that was probably the primary source of a lot of the material that they chose.
 

Detail from an early print on the ‘W***** B*** Album’ label (via Discogs)
 
Well, you mentioned that the Residents aren’t super-religious, but there does seem to be a preoccupation—I mean, not exclusively, the Residents’ catalog is so huge—but it does seem that the theme of religion comes up. At the end of that Mole Show video, there’s the joke Penn Jillette tells that one of the Residents told him, “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ?” Do you have any idea about the context of that joke?

I know exactly what you’re talking about: “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ? To get to the other side.” And it’s one of those kind of jokes that, it’s funny on so many levels, once you stop and think about it? I certainly remember that, but I’m drawing a blank trying to think of what the origin of it was.

You know, another thing that was inspiring to them in terms of the Wormwood choice is, the Residents in general are not especially political, but this was around the time that the religious right started, the very beginning, I think, of it starting to become a political force. Which now, God, has turned into who knows what, but certainly not positive from my perspective or the Residents’.

But there’s so much hypocrisy involved in that. You know, I went to the Methodist Church when I was young. I think of so much of what the rhetoric and the dialogue and the content was, and it was so much about love and inclusion at that time, and they pretty much stayed away from politics. And it’s gone so far away from that. I think that the Residents, in some ways, were kind of delighted to pull out these weird, dark Bible stories, to kind of put it in the face of the religious right that would just as soon pretend that stuff didn’t exist.
 

via residents.com

This was the end of a period of not touring for the Residents. I wonder what their sense of being on the road was—there’s that funny version of the Grand Funk song [“we’re coming to your town, we’re gonna worship it down”]. But there’s a sense in which it’s the most traditional form of American show business to go on the road with a bunch of Bible stories. Do you have any insight into how they felt about that, or if they perceived themselves as participating… it’s not that far from a kind of revival show.

Well, yeah, in a way, I can see what you’re talking about. It’s almost like it’s an anti-revival show.

Yeah.

But in a way that kind of doubles back on itself and becomes sort of the same thing. They really weren’t seeing, I don’t think, that much implication in it. That Boston show, as I remember, there were people that protested that. There were maybe a handful, very few, instances of something like that. But from the Residents’ point of view, other than to their fans, they consider themselves to be fairly invisible, and consequently don’t warrant that much attention from the culture at large. So they never really had any sense that that would garner that much attention. And for the most part it didn’t, really. They’ve done other things, the whole Third Reich ‘n Roll stuff, whatever; it got a little outrage here and there, but on the other hand, it was pretty much ignored.

It seems like some of the outrage comes up in Berkeley. [Jim Knipfel’s liner notes mention that a Wormwood date in Berkeley was suddenly canceled.]

Well, and that’s where it came up for Third Reich ‘n Roll.

At Rather Ripped, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, Rather Ripped was one of the first stores to really push and promote the Residents’ music, and it was the fifth anniversary of the store, and they said, “Okay, you can have the window of the store, do whatever you want to.” And they did [laughs] and Berkeley wasn’t happy with it! They were kind of shocked, I think, in a way. What’s fascinating to me is, I suppose it’s not so much the power of the swastika and Nazi imagery, it’s more that it still resonates so loudly within the culture, and from my point of view, and I think the Residents’ too, more so now than it did in the mid-Seventies, which, if you think about it, seems kind of strange. But we’re in strange times.
 

‘Fire Fall’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
I know the Wormwood DVD I have is from Germany. Jim Knipfel mentions a show at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Is there a video of that, too?

I don’t think there is. The most notable things about that to me was, one—I mean, the Residents were thrilled to play Las Vegas, but at the same time, what was notable was how few people showed up for the show. The Residents are not really a Las Vegas kind of an act. It wasn’t a mistake from their point of view, they were thrilled to be there, but I think, from the promoter’s point of view, if you think about it, the Residents are not the kind of act you go to Las Vegas to see.

But the other thing was that Penn and Teller came to the show, and they loved it, they just totally flipped out, they thought it was great.

I seem to remember the Residents appearing—maybe Penn and Teller had a variety show around that time?

Well, they’ve had a couple of three variety shows. There was a [video] that we put out for the Residents called The Eyes Scream. It was kind of an early best-of, in a way, but then [Penn and Teller] would do segments in between the videos to kind of glue it together.

I think there was maybe one show that the Residents and Penn and Teller did together in San Francisco?

Yeah, I’m trying to think which one that was. It was the end of a tour. It would either have been the 13th anniversary show or Cube-E. I remember it was a Bill Graham show, it was a big show.
 

‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’

I love the Residents’ A Sight for Sore Eyes book, and I notice it’s hopefully titled “Volume One.” Are there gonna be more volumes, as far as you know?

The plan is three volumes, and I know that this one has done pretty well. So that should guarantee at least Volume Two [smiles], we’ll see from there. Everybody around here is extremely happy with it. As the keeper of the visual archives, I worked with Aaron [Tanner] pretty closely, and really enjoyed working with him and thought he did a fantastic job.

Do you ever come across stuff in the archives that’s surprising to you, doing this kind of stuff, or is it all pretty familiar to you?

I’ve run across stuff that I haven’t seen for a long time, that can surprise me: “Oh, I kept that!” [Laughs] I used to say that all the Residents’ imagery neatly divided up into two twenty-year segments. Well, now, it’s a lot closer to a twenty-year and a thirty-year [segment]. The first twenty years was all analog. I went digital with Photoshop and those tools in the early to mid-Nineties, so there’s not as many interesting artifacts.

I always tell people, if you are a production artist trying to create things that have to be reproduced, digital tools are fantastic. If you like the weird, old, crazy artifacts that got spun off one way or another through analog work, well, you don’t really get that very much anymore. Like so many things in life, there’s an upside and a downside.

I have a cabinet right over here with photographs in it, and a lot of those have never been digitized. Sometimes, I can find myself going back and looking for something, and that’s what can really surprise me—that picture got made, or that picture got made. Because, like I say, a lot of that stuff has never been digitized.

I’ve donated a lot of the Residents’ analog tape archive to the Museum of Modern Art, and at some point, I expect to be donating all of this film stuff, and I’m hoping that I can talk them into digitizing all of it so I will actually have it all in that form.

It must be a massive amount of stuff at this point.

It’s a lot. It’s a lot of stuff, yeah.

‘Burn Baby Burn’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

 
It just happened that it was originally going to be six, then seven, then eight, then nine [discs], because people reached out to Carla Fabrizio, and she ended up coming up with a whole disc’s worth of extra stuff, and also Hardy would ask this guy Chris Kellas to record shows, and he recorded the [two-disc] Wormwood at the Fillmore show. That was kind of a late addition, so it kind of leapt from six to nine discs at the very last minute, actually.

And it was particularly interesting because the Fillmore show is different to the tour. It was just the album, whereas obviously for the tour they wrote a whole load of other songs.

And there’s the gamelan orchestra.

Yeah, right. I think the idea behind it, and with all of the box sets, really, is to show [how] these Residents live projects tend to evolve. They seem to do like a couple of dress rehearsals in San Francisco, figure out what was right and what was wrong about it, change it for the tour. So the idea for each of those is to, in a perfect world, I suppose, play them almost chronologically: demos, first live show, later demos, album, tour, whatever it is. Wormwood’s a strange one, obviously, ‘cause they went back and re-recorded the Roadworms thing in the middle of a tour.

So they themselves weren’t huge on the album; for some strange reason, they put the album out, and immediately decided to write loads more songs, and then re-record it whilst they were on tour. So it’s a strange project in the first place. In the early 2000s, Hardy talked about revisiting it and completely reworking it, and then nothing came of it, so this is, I suppose, the extension of that idea. It just grew and grew.
 
More after the jump…

 
This one-off David Bowie aluminum saucepan will run you $611.78. The only person I can conceive of who would use such a thing is the Maid of Bond Street (you know the fancy ones who drive around in chauffeured cars?) and even she threw a side-eye toward this exorbitantly-priced piece of glam rock cookware.

The person behind this 2020 creation is Japanese artist and graphic designer Teru Noji, a graduate of the Vantan Design Institute in Tokyo. Noji has lived and worked in Arles, France for the last dozen years, and cites the work of renowned Japanese psychedelic artist Tadanori Yokoo as his biggest influence. Exactly what inspired Noji to etch an image of Bowie (pictured with his astral sphere created by make-up artist Pierre La Roche) on the bottom of a 20 x 20-cm aluminum pan is a mystery. All I know is that it is the only one Noji ever made and you can buy it over at the online shop for the Bowie Gallery which is physically located in Totnes, Devon, UK.

As for the pricey pan, well, I’ll let the images of it speak for themselves. Cooking with Bowie! It’s a thing.
 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘I’m gonna kill you, Tin Man!’: Axl Rose’s knuckle-brawl with David Bowie over a girl, 1989
1970s glam rockers Cuddly Toys cover ‘Madman’ a song written by David Bowie & Marc Bolan
Beautiful images from David Bowie’s least favorite film role, 1978’s ‘Just a Gigolo’
David Bowie, Dennis Hopper and/or Dean Stockwell bring blow to Iggy Pop in a psych ward, 1975
Heartfelt letters written by a young David Bowie (and some of his youngest fans)
Intergalactic pimp: Donny Osmond dresses as ‘David Bowie’ and covers ‘Fame’ in 1976
Intimate photos of David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly & more from the set of ‘Labyrinth’

Stickers featuring Nick Cave in his famous ‘Suck My Dick’ t-shirt.
 

“It’s the obsessive and dangerous end of granny-core. Fetishistic and deranged.”

—Nick Cave describing his newly launched Cave Things online store in 2020.

Nick Cave’s online store Cave Things has been offering up material possessions designed by Cave since 2020. This is good news if you, like us here at Dangerous Minds, are all about all things Nick Cave. Why use boring old No. 2 pencils when you can use Nick Cave’s Sex pencils? While I’m not sure when I might actually need to use a pencil these days if I had to, Nick Cave’s Sex Pencils would be the ones I’d want in my collection. If Satan is more your speed then Cave’s red Devil pencils with printed quotes by Cave on them should be more than evil enough for you. Do you still have hair and are in need of a fashionable comb? Look no further than Cave’s specially-designed Warren Ellis’ “Pure Exploitation” comb, named for Cave’s long-time contributor, the multi-talented Warren Ellis. There are so many ultra-cool items in the Cave Things store, from small delights like Nick Cave stickers (!!!), greeting cards designed by Cave, a dog sweater modeled after Nick’s famous “Suck My Dick” t-shirt, and even wallpaper with Cave’s illustrations of The Hyatt Girls. If you’re not familiar with The Hyatt Girls, here’s Cave explaining them to one of his fans via his Red Hand Files site:

“Just so that everyone knows what we are talking about, The Hyatt Girls are a group of beautiful and very naked women who live in my imagination and perform pornographic acts with each other, provided I stay at a Hyatt Hotel. For years I have drawn them, to the best of my ability, on the hotel’s notepaper whenever I have stayed at a Hyatt.”

Of all the covetable things in Cave’s store, if I had the money to blow, I’d be proudly wearing one of two necklaces designed by Cave—his eerie Red Hand chain and charm (in honor of his 1994 single “Red Right Hand”),  or his “Little Nick” necklace and charm, featuring a shirtless Cave flexing. So let’s take a look at some of the cooler Nick Cave things that could now be yours. You can see everything in the Cave Things shop here.
 

Little Nick charm (comes with necklace). Extra Cave points for the red right hand detail. $122 USD.
 

Devil pencils.
 
More Nick Cave merch, after the jump…

 
Since much of Renaldo & The Loaf’s work experiments with time, it makes a funny kind of sense that, on 2017’s Gurdy Hurding, the duo picked up right about where they left off with 1987’s The Elbow Is Taboo. Perhaps, like all the tapes they’ve run backwards over the years, their music really does borrow from the future. In the early days especially, they liked to play songs unsinging themselves, the sound of speech sucking itself back up through the lungs to its point of origin in the brain. And wouldn’t it be wonderful, inhaling song and speech out of the environment into your nervous system?

You would be unlikely to mistake Renaldo & The Loaf’s music for someone else’s. The sound, an emergent property of Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf’s decades-long musical friendship, is entirely homemade, but ingeniously fitted together and sturdily constructed—each song a miniature feat of engineering, built to last. “Primitive modernism,” Ralph Records called it in 1981, announcing the release of Songs for Swinging Larvae.

So while the timbres and harmonies can be bracingly unfamiliar, Renaldo & The Loaf’s songs teem with earworms, and probably brain- and spineworms, too. In fact, let me take this opportunity to recommend that the songs themselves be classified and studied as new zoological discoveries. (These days, when I listen to Klanggalerie‘s pristine and greatly enlarged editions of the Renaldo & The Loaf catalog, I often picture the menagerie of intergalactic pilgrims in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame.”)

Alex Wroten’s excellent new documentary 23rd Century Giants, out March 8 on Blu-ray and streaming platforms, tells how two teenage Tyrannosaurus Rex fans from Portsmouth became the weirdest band on Ralph. Along with Renaldo Malpractice and Ted the Loaf themselves, the documentary collects testimony from the Cryptic Corporation’s Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and the late Hardy Fox; the visionary director behind Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae video, Graeme Whifler; veterans of the Ralph and T.E.C. Tones labels, and patient recipients of my adolescent correspondence, Tom Timony and Sheenah Spece; album illustrators Poxodd and Steven Cerio; and DEVO archivist Michael Pilmer, among others.

Some highlights follow from my recent conversation with director Alex Wroten and the two learned rotcods.

Renaldo & The Loaf, 1982 (courtesy of Well Dang! Productions)

Under the Lights

 
Is this the first time the two of you have been in front of the camera very much, Brian and David? The “Backwards Film Study” that’s in there seems to come from the early Eighties—

Brian Poole (Renaldo Malpractice): Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? [Laughs]

Well, I’ve just seen the little bit that’s in the documentary. I’m looking forward to seeing the full thing on the Blu-ray.

David Janssen (Ted the Loaf): That’s it. It’s only very short, that’s all there is.

Brian: Basically, yeah. Three minutes, that’s it!

David: And no, we’re not really used to being in front of the camera much. There’s that three-minute thing; there’s, I suppose, the filming we did for the “A Convivial Ode” video…

Brian: And that’s it, really, isn’t it?

David: I mean, unintentionally, the stuff that was filmed live. I mean, that was just, someone happened to film it, so we weren’t really conscious of being in front of a camera.

This is the Vienna show you’re talking about?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose Alex’s documentary is kind of the longest we’ve ever been under the lights of movie cameras.

Brian: Yeah, that’s right. But of course, we didn’t have to do makeup or anything like that, or costumes. [Laughs]

Alex Wroten (director, 23rd Century Giants): Well, not totally true, ‘cause there’s the part where you’re wearing the glasses [designed by Poxodd], so you did a little costumes.

David: And the masks.

Brian: In answer to your question, no. We’re really not used to being the center of attention, if you like. There have been stills done. Up in the Eighties and that, we did sort of go into a studio and have some photos done of us, but apart from that, no. In fact, the material that Alex asked for—I mean, obviously, as the documentary was coming to fruition and that, he wanted to say “What visual material do you have?” And it was a very, very useful thing looking through the archive, which, fortunately, I’ve got it here, our stuff, because I haven’t moved house, and it’s just here. So I was able to find quite a lot of stuff, but, you know, there’s some creative stuff that Alex had to do in the film to illustrate certain things, let’s say.
 
More after the jump…

 
Today we’re privileged to premiere a wonderful new single and video from Negativland’s The World Will Decide concept album, which asks if actual reality reality is really still superior to the reality created by the Internet, computers and artificial intelligence.

Negativland‘s Mark Hosler sent along the following message:

Perhaps you’re on your way to work, listening to the gently calming sound of NPR to thoughtfully take in the morning news.  Or perhaps you’re so extremely online that you can’t even remember your last commute, and you’re actually listening to “Anything Else,”  the latest single from Negativland’s most recent album THE WORLD WILL DECIDE.  This video, directed by Ryan Worsley with visual animations by SUE-C, is filled with the kinds of questions that can help you remember. Based on a cassette recovered from band member Don Joyce‘s apartment after his death in 2015, this totally unedited conversation has been set to aggressively pleasant music written and performed by Negativland, and brought to a broadcast-ready state by their special musical guests: Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, Star St. Germain, Kris Force and Jackie Gratz on strings, and Drew Daniel on drum programming.  Whatever the real answers to these questions are, you might want to text ahead.  You’re going to be a little late to the office.

 
Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock is one of the single most ground-breaking and far-out things ever recorded and it deserves to be considered a great—perhaps the very greatest—unsung masterpiece of the post-punk era.

I’ll take it even further: To my mind, it’s on the same level as PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Or The Dreaming by Kate Bush.

There I’ve said it.

Make no mistake about it, artistically NunSexMonkRock is a monumentally important recording.

It’s also something you can buy used for a single penny on Amazon. There is no mention whatsoever of the album in Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. The Allmusic review of NunSexMonkRock is but a single sentence. The Quietus doesn’t give a shit about it, nor does The Wire. In fact, there is almost nothing of any substance written about the album online anywhere. Hardly any music blogs have ever deigned to even mention it. Google the title, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

That doesn’t mean that NunSexMonkRock doesn’t have its hard-core passionate admirers—there are dozens of Amazon reviews and almost all of them are five-star raves—but we’re talking about something that was obscure 40 years ago when it came out. Even if you could easily pick it up at the local mall then—and for a while there, you could—few did. I would imagine that most people who have discovered the charms of NunSexMonkRock since it was first released have done so primarily because they saw it in a $1 bargain bin and it looked weird so they picked it up. (Every used copy of NunSexMonkRock on vinyl is pristine, it’s virtually guaranteed.)
 

 
Luckily for both of us, you don’t have to take my word for any of this, I can make my case for the epic holy/demonic genius of NunSexMonkRock with the music itself—thanks YouTube—which is neither wholly punk, nor rock, nor opera, nor really anything even remotely recognizable as any previously known genre of music. Already a category of one, NunSexMonkRock appears to have no obvious influences either. Reliable adjectives fall by the wayside when you are confronted with such an anarchic artistic anomaly. Because it’s so very much out on its own peculiar limb, it’s completely timeless. (Musically at least, but lyrically Hagen makes a cryptic prophecy about the then leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who up and died the year the album came out.) NunSexMonkRock could have been recorded 40 years ago, yesterday, or a thousand years from now and it just wouldn’t matter.

The album inhabits a territory so utterly exotic and unclassifiable that the creator herself would never again venture that far out. NunSexMonkRock is a zany, oddball, sexy, freaky as fuck and totally revolutionary masterpiece of modern music. At the center of this evil maelstrom is Hagen’s multi-layered, multi-octave and gymnastically operatic voice, a unique hybrid of Maria Callas, Zarah Leander, Yma Sumac and Mercedes McCambridge doing the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist...

Rolling Stone called NunSexMonkRock the “most unlistenable” album ever made. Au contraire. It’s an incredibly weird album, let there be no doubt about THAT, but once you’ve gotten over the initial shock, NunSexMonkRock is as catchy as hell. “Most unlistenable”? Although that sounds like a dare I personally would be willing to take Rolling Stone up on, it’s not even remotely true.
 

 
Nevertheless(!), let’s ease into it, shall we, and start off with what is probably NunSexMonkRock‘s most accessible number, the unstoppable riff-driven rocker “Born in Xixax” that leads off side two of the album. This features the great Chris Spedding on guitar. Tell me this riff isn’t as good as “All Day and All of the Night” or “Jumping Jack Flash.”
 

“This is Radio Yerevan and this is the news…”

Much more after the jump…