While no one will mistake this for a historic meeting of the minds, it does have its odd charm. The Marshall McLuhan of punk Billy Idol chats with Timothy Leary about rock n’ roll, cyberspace and computers. “Pretty deep,” Joey Ramone observes while Television (the band) let old skool technologies like drums and guitars do the talking.

ABC In Concert, 1993.
 

A young Ice-T by Glen E. Friedman

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap, Ice-T’s upcoming big budget performance documentary about the legends of rap has been generating a huge buzz since its Sundance premiere.

Dangerous Minds pal Glen. E. Friedman says:

“This is going to be the biggest documentary of all time! I saw it, I know!”

Something from Nothing: features Chuck D, Dana Dane, Ice Cube,Kanye West,  Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, KRS-One, Afrika Bambaataa, Common, Anthony ‘Treach’ Criss, Doug E. Fresh, Rakim, Joseph Simmons, Cheryl ‘Salt’ James, Big Daddy Kane,  MC Lyte, Marley Marl,  Kool Keith, Darryl McDaniels, Melle Mel, Nas, Q-Tip and many others.

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap is in theaters on June 15th.
 

The Mojos
 
Confessions of an unrepentant garage rocker:

I was living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The year was 1964. I was thirteen. Beatlemania was running wild and millions of kids across the USA were buying cheap Japanese electric guitars, drum kits, and forming garage bands. My dad bought me a set of Kent drums at Sears and I formed a group called the Continentals. We covered tunes by The Beatles and The Stones, of course, and had a set list that included “Louie Louie,” “I Got My Mojo Workin”, “Shout,” “Hang On Sloopy” - a couple dozen three and four chord rockers. We played at local firehouse dances, supermarket openings and, along with groups like The Mojos and The Ascotts, the Princess movie theater’s Saturday morning kiddie show.  We actually performed songs live as opposed to lip-syncing to some Four Seasons or Jan and Dean tune. We were the real fucking deal.

I had a moptop and it got me into trouble at school, where the rule was no hair over the ears and bangs had to be the width of two fingers above your eyebrows. I broke the rules on a consistent basis. A pattern I would follow my entire life. One day I was sent home for wearing madras pants to school. Those were some fucking slick slacks. But, when all the other kids were wearing Gant shirts and Weejun loafers, my madras pants were an affront to the refined sensibilities of the pre-yuppie status quo of the early 60s. In those days, high school had a caste system composed of longhairs, straights, jocks and greasers. I was a longhair. And greasers hated the longhairs. But I dug the greasers. Cause they were rockers. We were fellow parishioners in the church of rock and roll. It took a woman to help me discover this. Her name was, and I’m not bullshitting, Rhonda.

The Continentals were working the crowd before a screening of a cartoon marathon at the Princess. We were tearing through “Eight Days A Week”, “Not Fade Away” and “Gloria,” working up a sweat under our matching lime-green Nehru jackets, as the audience of pubescent teenyboppers bobbed their heads and swayed in mystical union with the almighty power of rock and roll. I felt like Elmer Gantry with drum sticks. We finished our set, took our bows, and walked off the stage.

As I made my way up the isle to the concession stand, there she was: Rhonda, a greaser goddess from the planet Maybelline. She had a jet-black beehive that defied gravity. Marie Antoinette had nothin’ on this home girl. Rhonda’s do was sculptural: a follicle wonderland where Antonio Gaudi and The Ronnettes sniffed hairspray and dreamed of Mayan pyramids. Rhonda had the fairest skin, the pinkest lips and the palest blue eyes I had ever seen. She was graceful and tall and moved with a slow serpentine stroll. She was way out of my league. This was woman in all her archetypal majesty – Shakti with a serious wighat. To my amazement, she was smitten by me. She said she liked the way I played the drums and she leaned over and gave me a kiss that tasted of lipstick and cigarettes. My knees buckled and I felt for the first time that rock and roll was more than music, it was supernatural.
 

The Princess theater is now a church. But in its own way, it always was.
 
This 1967 film footage of a Battle Of The Bands at Pierre Van Cortlandt Junior High School Gym in New York captures that tectonic time when thousands of suburban garages all across America shook, rattled and rolled.
 

 
Thanks to Rick Watson

 
In Kill Your Idols director Scott Crary attempts to find some connection between No Wave bands of the late 1970s like Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Suicide and Swans with contemporary post-punkers Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars and others. The link is too tenuous to stand up to close scrutiny, but the movie is fascinating none-the-less for its exciting archival footage and compelling interviews with New York City’s avant-garde old guard. Listening to Lydia Lunch’s bilious rant about rock and roll’s new breed of hipster bands as a “pandering bunch of mama’s boys” who are “desperate to have their music used in the next car commercial” is a hoot. As are similarly contemptuous critques from Lee Ranaldo and Arto Lindsey.

Contrasting the newer bands with their older influences hits a resonant chord when DNA’s Lindsey describes the 1970’s NYC scene as an era when “we didn’t have a whole industry selling us back to ourselves.” This is the significant difference between creating and re-creating. In their self-consciousness, the new bands lack the vision, fearlessness and recklessness that no-wave’s pioneers brought to the mix every time they stepped on stage. It is impossible to replicate the “shock of the new.” Nothing seems dangerous anymore because everything has been radiated in the pasteurizing glow of our retro-obsessed culture. Rock and roll is disappearing up its own asshole. It wasn’t always this way. With every note, No Wave hit the self-destruct button. Gone. This doesn’t mean that the new groups aren’t good - I love Yeah Yeah Yeahs - but trying to find the link between them and the original no wavers is like trying to find fingerprints on water.

Update: The numbnut who uploaded Kill Your Idols pulled the movie from their Youtube channel. If you have a Netflix account, it is available to stream here.
 

 
British media is reporting that Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees is in a coma in a London hospital.

From the Coventry Telegraph:

BEE Gees star Robin Gibb is fighting for his life after contracting pneumonia in his battle against cancer. The 62-year-old singer’s family have been keeping vigil at his bedside at a hospital in Chelsea, west London.

Robin had surgery on his bowel 18 months ago for an unrelated condition, but a tumour was discovered and he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and, subsequently, of the liver.

It had been thought his cancer was in remission as early as last month, but the latest deterioration in his health coincides with reports of a secondary tumour.”

In this live footage shot in 1974 in Australia, Robin’s angelic voice is in full flower.
 

 
Five years ago today Don Ho ascended in a spiraling cloud of tiny bubbles to the great luau in the sky.

Here’s the master of mellowness covering Peter Gabriel’s “Shock The Monkey” from the album When Pigs Fly and The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” on The Conan O’Brian Show in 1995.
 

 
My favorite Don Ho tune after the jump…

 
John Candy as Gil Fisher, the fishin’ musician, is paid a visit by The Plasmatics in this wonderful bit from SCTV circa 1981.

This predated John Lurie’s Fishing with John TV series by 10 years. Goes to show you just how ahead of their time the crew at SCTV were.

Watch as Wendy O. Williams blows up things real good.
 

 
Hippies meet electro-house in this re-mix of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way.”

This song has been re-mixed to death since its release in 1993 but I dug this 2012 version by dj Mick M. from Bangkok, Thailand enough to put together a video of archival hippie footage from the Sixties using the mix as a soundtrack.

If there’s anything beyond sonic/visual pleasure to be had from this mash-up it’s the knowledge that no matter how much things change a good rock riff is immortal and raves existed way before ecstasy hit the scene.

In “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” Kravitz does a pretty good job of recycling Hendrix so coupling the song with a bunch of dancing hippies works for me. And Mick’s re-mix takes the whole thing into a pop culture meta-sphere where we are in a constant spin cycle. 
 

 
Skateboarding the mean streets of Manhattan in the 1980s - the concrete Banzai Pipeline.

Along with the Bones Brigade, that’s Christian Hosoi in there with the green hair, along with Dave Hackett (acid-dropping off a semi truck), Ian Frahm (ollieing up onto the wall at the Brooklyn Bridge banks - big trick at the time) and some other NYC locals.

Some great shots of NYC as these urban skafarists ride the wild turf.
 

 
Tadanori Yokoo is one of the world’s foremost graphic designers, considered to be in the same league as Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. He is also often compared to Andy Warhol and Peter Max.

Yukio Mishima said of him in 1968:

“Tadanori Yokoo’s works reveal all of the unbearable things which we Japanese have inside ourselves and they make people angry and frightened. He makes explosions with the frightening resemblance which lies between the vulgarity of billboards advertising variety shows during festivals at the shrine devoted to the war dead and the red containers of Coca Cola in American Pop Art, things which are in us but which we do not want to see.”

 

 
In the sixties, Yokoo made some amazing animated pop psychedelic shorts (with insane soundtracks), here’s “Kachi Kachi Yama” from 1965:
 

 
After the jump, two more great animated shorts by Tadanori Yokoo…

Dylan, Warhol and Elvis, photo by Nat Finkelstein

Famous visitors and “beautiful people” with “star potential” who visited Andy Wahol’s Factory studio in the 1960s were often shot for Warhol’s “screen tests,” his silent “parodies” of the Hollywood studio system. No one was really auditioning for anything, it was just an excuse to run a single reel of 16mm film through his Bolex camera and engage someone in a staring contest with it, one they normally lost (after a minute or so of trying to look “cool,” the mask was normally dropped and the simple portraits become quite revealing). The two and a half minute reels were then slowed down and printed.

Some of the more notable subjects included Italian model Benedetta Barzini, model/actrress Marisa Berenson, poet Ted Berrigan, Salvador Dalí, Donovan, Marcel Duchamp, Mama Cass, Allen Ginsberg, Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, Baby Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, actress Sally Kirkland, Nico, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, photographer Francesco Scavullo, Edie Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, artist Paul Thek, Viva and Mary Woronov

When Dylan stopped by the tin-foil covered Factory, he is alleged to have taken an immediate dislike to Warhol and the “phonies” of his entourage. It has long been suspected that the spitting lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone,” in part, describe Dylan’s feelings about Warhol—was he “the diplomat on the chrome horse”?—and how he felt about the artist’s perceived exploitation of Edie Sedgwick, who Dylan was at one point romantically involved with (and who was his muse for some of Blonde on Blonde).

After the screen test was shot, Dylan grabbed a large silkscreen (as “payment”) that Warhol was going to give him anyway and headed for the door (before allegedly strapping the canvas to the roof of a station wagon). Such was his dislike of the artist that he later traded the piece to his manager, Albert Grossman, for a couch. That silkscreen, “Double Elvis,” is now part of the permanent collection at MOMA.

Here’s Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein’s account of what happened:

“Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis. Bobby gave Andy short shrift. Shooting and plundering finished, the Dylan gang headed for the door, me and my Nikon on their heels. They left as they had entered…‘Bobby the Waif’ emerging as ‘Robert the Triumphant’. They departed having tied the Elvis image to the top of their station wagon, like a deer poached out of season. Much later, Bobby told me he’d traded the Elvis (now worth millions) to his manager Albert Grossman for a couch!”

 
The Beatles’ original bass player Stu Sutcliffe died 50 years ago today. Does that make some of you feel old? It does me.

The Compleat Beatles is a very fine documentary on the band that Mr. Sutcliffe quit in order to pursue a life devoted to painting, a life which sadly came to an end when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 22.

He wasn’t really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn’t a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass. We taught him to play twelve-bars, like “Thirty Days” by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learned. He picked up a few things and he practiced a bit until he could get through a couple of other tunes as well. It was a bit ropey, but it didn’t matter at that time because he looked so cool.” George Harrison.

Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, 1984’s The Compleat Beatles is chock full of fantastic archival footage of the Fab Four and interviews with the band as well as George Martin, Marianne Faithful, Lenny Kaye, Billy Preston and Brian Epstein.

The Compleat Beatles was released on VHS and is out-of-print. It’s never been released on DVD. This is sourced from a laserdisc and looks very good indeed.
 

 
Excellent documentary Stuart Sutcliffe, The Lost Beatle after the jump…

 
Sadly, Slade got lost somewhere in the mid-seventies. A car crash, a tour of the U.S.A., and misunderstood movie Flame, saw the band lose much of their following to Punk, Queen, Heavy Metal and Disco. A shame, as Slade were a far greater band than the critics and even the fans allowed them to be. Here, for no other reason than it is a fan-bloody-tastic cover, is Slade’s version of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Wild” - the final track from the classic Slade Alive! album - as performed live on Pop Shop from 1971.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Slade: Proto-Punk Heroes of Glam rock

 
Bonus track ‘Hear Me Calling’, after the jump…
 

 
Hippie-exploitation paperbacks bring a smile to my face for a number of reasons:

1. Rarely do the hippies on the book covers look under 30. They look like illustrations from stagmags of swingin’ suburbanites.
2. Hippies are doped up and super-horny 24/7. Watch out!
3. Hippies buy their fashions from the “youth in revolt” section of the Sears catalog.
4. When they’re not covering their bodies in goofy slogans and day-glow butterflies, hippies are busy raping and pillaging and at least one in every rampaging gang looks like Frank Zappa.
 

 
More sex-happy hippies after the jump…

 
Glamorous crate-digger Veronica Vasicka is the “musical detective” behind the Minimal Wave record label. She discovers and then promotes/advocates for the work of criminally overlooked, mostly European, underground musicians of the DIY late 70s/80s bedroom experimental synthpop scene, and exposes it to a new generation.

The genre, dubbed by New York-based Vasicka herself, is an electronic twin of the indie-rock “low-fi” movement and dates back to a time when synthesizers and 4-track home recorders were coming down in price and in the hands of more and more people (“Warm Leatherette” by The Normal—recorded by future Mute Records head, Daniel Miller on a $150 Korg 700S synthesizer in his apartment using two tape decks—would be emblematic of this sound). The music was often never even pressed on records, instead circulating on cassette tapes.

Veronica Vasicka’s East Village Radio show (she’s one of the co-founders) provided the initial focus for her archival endeavors, but soon her proclivities for turning up the rarest, most obscure tracks, led to her passion becoming a business and a career. Vasicka’s latest compilation, Minimal Wave Tapes 2 was recently released in conjunction with LA-based Stones Throw Records, best known for being the home to Madlib and MF Doom’s Madvillainy team-up.

Dazed & Confused’s Tim Noakes asked her some questions:

D&C: Do you regard yourself as an archivist or a musical detective?
Veronica Vasicka: A musical detective, for sure. A lot of the music was lost to particular places and locations. There’s a band called Aural Indifference from Melbourne in Australia on The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume 2. He only made 30 copies of that tape, just 30 copies! I met his girlfriend by accident and it was such a surreal coincidence the way it happened. He went home and found a copy of the original master-tape in his parents’ basement and brought it to my show on East Village Radio. He was shocked anyone knew about it. In some ways it is such a small world as the people that have been collecting this stuff are connected, so in this underground way the connection already exists. Once people know what you are into, then they will make recommendations.

D&C: Are you surprised at how this sound has caught on?
Veronica Vasicka: Yeah, especially because it is kind of like outsider music, and with outsider music you never know how the public will respond. It’s important not to think too hard about it, to just go with my intuition for this kind of band or project, and that is what I have been doing since the beginning: going with what I think needs to be heard.

Not everyone, apparently, is all that happy about seeing their work from three decades ago come back to haunt them:

D&C: What do people think when you get in touch and say, ‘I want to put out a record you made 30 years ago’?
Veronica Vasicka: The general reaction is, ‘How the hell do you know about my music?’ or, ‘You really want to release that?! The music that I didn’t take seriously?’ Or, ‘Do what you want with it.’ Sometimes these artists don’t want to take it further and don’t want their music to be out there beyond the format that it’s in because it’s a reminder of a time that was maybe not the best in their lives. It just happens sometimes – they didn’t push it at the time so why would they want to push it now? It happens.

D&C: When this music first appeared there was massive unemployment and financial ruin around the world, and we are seeing the same again these days. Do you think bleak times foster the most radical musical creativity?
Veronica Vasicka: Yes, there is certainly a parallel between what was happening economically during that time, the late 70s and early 80s, and what came out of it in terms of music, what people created during that time of struggle. I also think that’s another reason why people are attracted to this music once again, because we are living in a similar economic climate. I think there is a connection there. Great music and creativity always emerge out of times of struggle.

D&C: Do you ever feel like you are living in the past?
Veronica Vasicka: No, I feel like I get obsessed with the past sometimes but in this case the music wasn’t given a platform in the past – yes, it was made in 1982, but how many people actually heard it? Not many. It just existed in a vacuum. I don’t feel like I’m living in the past, the music was just made there. The music was fully realised but its existence and purpose in this world was incomplete and so I am completing it.

Read more at Dazed Digital, plus they’ve got an exclusive Minimal Wave mix from Veronica Vasicka.
 
Hard Corps performing “Dirty” at The Fridge in Brixton in 1986, one of the tracks from Minimal Wave Tapes 2
 

 
More Minimal Wave after the jump…

 
While the 1987 BBC documentary The Confessions Of Robert Crumb lacks the intensity and insight of Terry Zwigoff’s masterful Crumb it is still an invaluable introduction to one of the world’s most fascinating and enigmatic artists. Fans of Crumb will find it short on revelations but initiates should be charmed.

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Crumb was way ahead of his time when it came to toppling sacred cows and shattering taboos. Discovering his comix as a teenager in the late Sixties was one of those formative events that fucked me up for life…in a good way.

“My role is that of a reporter.” – Mike Wallace on the debut of The Mike Wallace Interview
 
With the death yesterday of TV journalist Mike Wallace at age 93, we’ve already seen many remembrances of him as the man who—along with producer Don Hewett—created the American institution we know as 60 Minutes in the tumultuous American year of 1968. It’s impossible to short-change Wallace’s 38-year legacy as both gate-keeper of that show and pioneer of the “gotchya question” interview technique that defines much of our current news media landscape.

But it behooves us to also have a good look at the man’s stint as the host of The Mike Wallace Interview, the spartan and penetrating late-night program that broadcast nationally from 1957 through 1960. Wallace was 18 years into a broadcast career (mostly as a radio announcer and game show host) as he launched the show based on Night Beat, a similar and more groovily-named program he’d hosted locally in New York a couple of years earlier. During the show’s tenure, he brought a fascinating array of folks to the American public eye, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Eric Fromm, Lily St. Cyr, Aldous Huxley and many others.

Besides its solid bookings and now-surreal-seeming live-ads for its benevolent sponsor Philip Morris, TMWI distinguishes itself with a bare-bones visual setting to focus viewer attention on the substance of the personalities interviewed. Dare I say the only two journalists I can think of who’ve truly adapted the show’s black-background format with similar grace and talent are Charlie Rose and Dangerous Minds’ own Richard Metzger.

Do yourself a favor and check out the digitized collection of interviews from the first two years of the show that Wallace donated to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Meanwhile, here’s Wallace throwing down with a 54-year-old Sal Dali on death, religion, politics and the fact that “Dali is contradictory and paradoxical in any sense.”
 

 
After the jump: more Wallace vs. Dali…

Kinkade’s D.U.I. mugshot gets the Kinkade treatment

Shlockmeister artist Thomas Kinkade, self-proclaimed “Painter Of Light,” has died at the age of 54 of natural causes.

Dying at 54 doesn’t seem natural to me. Heart attack? Maybe. Despite his sanctimonious veneer, Kinkade was a boozehound with anger issues and a fat fuck so it is possible his heart attacked him.

Hugely popular among Christians, many of his paintings depict religious themes that border on self-parody, Kinkade claimed to be a devout Christian, but his behavior often mimicked that of another deeply religious celebrity, Mel Gibson.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that some of Kinkade’s former colleagues, employees, and even collectors of his work say that he has a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers. The Times further reported that he openly groped a woman’s breasts at a South Bend, Indiana sales event, and mentioned his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.” In a letter to licensed gallery owners acknowledging he may have behaved badly during a stressful time when he overindulged in food and drink.

In 2006 John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion (“about six years ago”) Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting “Codpiece! Codpiece!” at the performers. Eventually he was calmed by his mother. Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.” On 11 June 2010, Kinkade was arrested in Carmel, California on suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol.”

Well before Kinkade became a multi-millionaire selling his kitsch paintings, he worked as a background artist on Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta’s animated film Fire And Ice. In a 2008 New York magazine interview, Bakshi took an affectionate swipe at his old employee:

That son of a bitch! Kinkade was the coolest. If Kinkade wasn’t a painter, he’d be one of those cult leaders. Kinkade came into my office with James Gurney when I was looking for background artists [for Fire and Ice]. He’s a good painter, and he did a spiel. He made all these deals. How he went out and did what he did is beyond my understanding now. He’s very, very talented, and he’s very, very much of a hustler. Those two things are in conflict. Is he talented? Oh yeah. Will he paint anything to make money? Oh yeah. Does he have any sort of moralistic view? No. He doesn’t care about anything. He’s as cheesy as they come.”

Kinkade (far right) working on Fire And Ice. Photo via James Gurney.
 

 
Here’s a fascinating documentary on the making of Fire And Ice. Featuring art spun from the darker side of Thomas Kinkade.
 

 
In May 1968, The Small Faces caused outrage by promoting their latest album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake with a parody of the Lord’s Prayer:

Small Faces
Which were in the studios
Hallowed by thy name
Thy music come
Thy songs be sung
On this album as they came from your heads
We give you this day our daily bread
Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d.,
Lead us into the record stores.
And deliver us Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
For nice is the music
The sleeve and the story
For ever and ever, Immediate.

The English press were filled with banner headlines and letters from Angry of Milton Keynes, and Slough, and Lower Perineum. Guitarist and lead singer, Steve Marriott blamed the mad men who’d devised the campaign:

“We didn’t know a thing about the ad. until we saw it in the music papers. And frankly we got the horrors at first. We realise that it could be taken as a serious knock against religion. But on thinking it over, we don’t feel it is particularly good or bad. It’s just another form of advertising. We’re not all that concerned about it. We’re more concerned in writing our music and producing our records”

It was not as damaging as John Lennon’s bigger than Christ quote, but that was probably because The Small Faces never really cracked America - though they left fingerprints with “Itchycoo Park”. The failure to crack America was a major shame, for out of all the bands that came out of that sixties pop revolution, The Small Faces were amongst the best, most accomplished and fun.

The following month on Friday June 21st, The Small Faces appeared on the BBC arts series Colour Me Pop - a fore-runner to The Old Gray Whistle Test - where they performed (mimed) most of their album. This and performances by The Move and The Moody blues are all that remains of the interesting catalogue of artists (from Zappa and The Mothers, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Free and even Gene Pitney), that appeared on Colour Me Pop, which were all wiped on the say-so of high level BBC intelligence.

Here then is The Small Faces, Steve Marriott - vocals, guitar, Ronnie Lane - backing vocals, bass guitar, Kenney Jones - drums, Ian McLagan - keyboards with guest Stanley Unwin performing extracts form their classic album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, on Colour Me Pop.

01. “Song of a Baker”
02. “Lazy Sunday”
03. “Happiness Stan”
04. “Rollin’ Over”
05. “The Hungry Intruder”
06. “The Journey”
07. “Mad John”
08. “Happy Days Toy Town”
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

If You Think You’re Groovy: The Amazing Soul Rock Sound of P. P. Arnold

 
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein interviewed by the very nearly hip Pierre Salinger, former press secretary for President Kennedy, on TV show 20/20 in March of 1980.

This is surprisingly good for network TV. Some cool live footage. Chris discusses his nervous breakdown after binging on LSD.

Among the many interesting aspects of Pierre Salinger’s career was the fact that he stuck to his guns after declaring “If Bush wins, I’m going to leave the country.” George W. won and Salinger moved to France.
 

 
Part two after the jump…