Some time ago we linked to a fantastic story about death metal that ran at Slate, and now Slate’s photo blog has a post about a photographer, Alexandra Crockett, who has taken a lot of pictures of death metal musicians and their cats. Her new book is called Metal Cats
It’s the No. 1 bestseller right now in the Heavy Metal category.
Rachel Kushner’s novel about life in New York in the late 70s is really lively. Her protagonist lived on Mulberry Street in the late 70s, between Spring and Prince. I lived on Mulberry between Prince and Houston. This is a book with historical resonance for me, and dissonance when something is wrong, since Rachel Kushner most definitely was 10 years old when the action was going down.
Not much is wrong, but there is a subplot about a revolutionary group called the Motherfuckers that pushes credulity. A chapter is devoted to their “actions,” including robbing banks, that seem appropriately cool rather than outrageous. Except for this one action:
“Beat up a rock band from Detroit called the Stooges. Beat the shit out of them for not being tough enough, and having a reputation for intensity though it was unearned. The Stooges had played at a rock club on Second Avenue, and just after their set ended word spread that the band was piling into their limousine and heading off to Max’s Kansas City for dinner with rich people and celebrities. The crowd became enraged, dragged the singer and his bandmates from their limousine and forced them back inside the club. The Motherfuckers concentrated on pummeling the singer and then pissed on his satin pants. Which he was still wearing as he lay on his side, groaning. Not quite in the same way he had groaned and yowled onstage, trying to peddle his fake intensity to the young girls, among them Love Sprout and Nadine, Fah-Q’s and Burdmoor’s respective womenfolk. Fah-Q and Burdmoore crossed streams of urine over the body of the singer, and Burdmoore knew that brotherly pacts ended badly. But he was in it to the end. He was ready for badly.”
All this Wreckless Eric brouhaha is wonderful.
I so loved the punk movement. I was 25, and actually in London the week of the Stiffs Live. I remember getting on the Underground to go back to my Grandmother’s in Finchley and the punks who had been at the shows that featured Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads were on the same train.
Blue Mohawks-crap, any Mohawk on a white kid in the fall of 1977–and pierced tongues and such were still a little outrageous in the states where ELO and ABBA ruled. In fact Roxy Music, 801, The Tubes, and Queen were about as far as I could push the envelope before that fateful trip to London to visit my Granny and cousins for the first time on their turf.
What a great time I had! I remember sleeping on a boat hostile in Amsterdam with a bunch of other kids, and getting up in the morning to eat some yogurt and fruit and cheese (remember, I am in Holland) with Marshall Tucker’s “Can’t You See” blasting in the dining area.
As previously noted, that was the first time I heard the Sex Pistols: in the tub in my Granny’s home, listening to my Aunt Hedda’s tinny transistor radio, tuned to John Peel and Top of the Pops. “Anarchy in the UK” blasted out and life would never be the same for me.
I came home hungry, riding the new wave as it broke here, a pierced (yep, did my ear the first time right after I got back), tattooed (long story, but that was actually a couple of years earlier) ever the long-hair who still fit right into his Berkeley community.
I saw as many of the English and New York bands as they arrived as I could, and being near San Francisco, that was pretty easy to do, and it was cheap, too. $3.50 or $4.00 to see three bands at a great venue.
Anyway, Gene commenting on (I’d go the) Whole Wide World, that “punk opened things up” suggesting Eric would not have happened in 1972 is so dead on. But, with the Pistols and Malcolm McLaren and the Clash, all bets were off.
Never prior to John Lydon did any band ever seem to consider that there was the radical difference between singing harmoniously and being an effective vocalist had suddenly fallen away. In fact, I remember arguing similarly with my life-long friend Karen Clayton at the time about Elvis Costello. Karen called Elvis a lousy vocalist, and I noted that maybe he was a lousy elocutionist, but he was a great lyricist and voclalist.
Enter Ian Dury, and Sex and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll, a really wonderful song: funny, self deprecating, and yet brutally honest.
But, because Sex and Drugs… seemed more like a gimmick song, it was hard to take much else by the Blockheads seriously. In fact it was hard to take Sex and Drugs… seriously.
Too bad, because they were a pretty tight band, and if you know the song Sweet Gene Vincent, you know this to be true. Not just a great song that links the same attitude of Little Richard and Chuck Berry to that of the punks, the song moves to that place using Vincent–Mr. Be-Bop-A-Lula and maybe THE original punk–as a vehicle.
This version of the song is from the The Concert for Kampuchia, and joining in the Blockheads is the Clash’s Mick Jones, by the way. And, let me tell you, we are far from done with the subject.
In 2007 there was a challenge issued on the b3ta.com board for artists to render what happened outside the frame of popular album covers.
The results are many and some will make you laugh.
Nobody generates more facepaint. (click to enlarge)
Iconic.
This month my favorite TV network, TCM, is having their annual “31 Days of Oscar” leading up to the actual awards ceremony (to which I am fairly indifferent). During that span every film TCM shows has at least been nominated for an Oscar, and most have won at least one.
TCM is a treasure trove of cinematic brilliance, with the bulk of their offerings focusing on the heyday of the studio system in the 30’s and 40’s.
One of the standards in those movies was to toss in a song. Which is why in the middle of a dark and brilliant Noir film, like The Big Sleep, we see Lauren Bacall singing at a speakeasy operated by gangster Eddie Mars (he is to this film, sort of what Jackie Treehorn was to Lebowski).
So, this morning I was working with TCM on in the background when Howard Hawks’ (who also made The Big Sleep, and my favorite Screwball Comedy, Bringing Up Baby) Ball of Fire came on.
Written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the film is a great Screwball Comedy that deconstructs Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, placing the setting in Manhattan in the early 40’s, with Stanwyck playing the moll Sugarpuss O’Shea to Gary Cooper’s English professor Bertram Potts (Cooper is one of eight sheltered eggheads working on an encyclopedia).
A few other things:
Back to the movie, as part of the set-up, Cooper/Potts takes to the streets fearing his grasp of slang is already outdated, and happens upon O’Shea at a night club (he also goes to a ball game and gets some good slang there).
O’Shea is the singer at the club, and though her singing and the song are marginal, Gene Krupa and his big band are just deadly. So is the piano player and the guy who does the sax solo. Funny too, cos playing guitar was just a minor rhythm instrument, as you can see in most films of this ilk.
Anyway, Canned Heat et al all owe their boogie chops to this great scene.
And, just for fun, after the big number, Krupa and Stanwyck reprise the song with Krupa playing matchsticks instead of drumsticks.
There have been more than a few discussions about KISS and their music and what is real rock and roll since we started up here around nine months or so ago.
For the record, I have seen KISS live, in 1979, and they did little or nothing for me (though I did get some great photographs of the band).
However, as I am about a decade older than my two friends who are the biggest fans of the band I know–Steve Moyer and Scott Engel–I will admit that just age and experience had a lot to do with my indifference to the band.
I got the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks when they were new, and then a few years later I lived in the bay area when the San Francisco bands hit it.
So, one of the things at play here is that the bands we love and which form the basis for our likes and dislikes, make their impression during our adolescence and in that context, I was too old for KISS.
That said, I still don’t really think that much of them as a band, but I also know there are those who hated the Moody Blues when they were my favorites, and well, look how Bob Dylan was received when he plugged in. And, all Dylan was trying to do was keep his art growing.
Anyway, over the past week, KISS has come to my radar in a couple of odd ways.
First, the previously noted Mr. Engel invited me to come play miniature golf in Las Vegas when we were both there for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association Winter Meeting.
The kicker was this pee-wee golf course is dedicated to KISS. Which kind of makes me like them (I love miniature golf) and kind of hate them (how much shilling does Gene Simmons need to do?).
However, a few days after I got home from Vegas, Diane and I were snuggled in bed, watching the tube before we fell asleep, and the Road to Europe episode of Family Guy came on.
Now, as with the miniature golf, I have mixed emotions. On one hand, again, sigh, KISS all over the fucking place.
OTOH, we both love Family Guy.
And, this episode was particularly sweet with us finding out that Peter is proud of his wife Lois for “doing” KISS (we find out as an aside that she also did the Geils band).
How can you not like that?
The two pictures I’ve posted here are of famous rock bands back in the 80s that I found in a post at the Internet K-Hole. It seems that every few months babs posts a collections of snapshots from the 80s, mostly, of kids on skate boards, bands, kids at dances, kids surfing, an occasional nude, kids hanging, kids wearing band t-shirts, kids at the beach, kids with guitars, etc. The pictures are captionless, without context, sometimes adjacent ones relate to each other, but often they come from across the country at seeming random, certainly taken by different photographers, but they seem to tell one artful story, a memoir of a generation, about what it was like to be 16 and 20 and 24 back in the 80s.
If babs posted weekly, we’d get a lot less done.
Ht to dangerousminds.com.
