I’ll be the first to admit that this may be a new all-time low for Dangerous Minds. So sue me.
GG’s tormented soul lives on in the parallel world of the Internet to haunt the likes of Simon Cowell.
On a side note: I was at Allin’s last gig at The Gas Station on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1993. It was truly total pandemonium. My girlfriend and I were among the hundred or so people who followed GG, who was wearing only a gloppy veneer of shit, as he scurried down Avenue B. It was without question the punkest thing I’d ever seen and perhaps the saddest.
Love him or loathe him, the guy did manage to walk it like he squawked it.
Richie Teeter of The Dictators has died at 61. Cause of death has not been reported but he was battling cancer.
The Dictators were punk pioneers and one of the seminal rock bands to come out of New York City in the 1970s. Teeter joined the group in 1976 and played on their albums Manifest Destiny and Bloodbrothers. He left the group in 1979. Later, he joined Twisted Sister for a brief stint in 1980.
Dictator front man Handsome Dick Manitoba and keyboardist/bassist and songwriter for the group Andy Shernoff reflect on their friend and bandmate Teeter:
SAD SAD news: Former Dictators drummer, Rich Teeter passed away today.
Besides being an excellent drumer and singer, Rich was one of the sweetest guys I ever met.
He had an amazing disposition, and was impossible to hate. He was “one of those guys” who was always even keeled. Even when he wasn’t …..he WAS!…
Listen..I got lots of shit to talk about people in my life, but I don’t now, nor have I ever had a bad word to say about Rich Teeter. A sweet, sweet, gentle man, who I am proud to have called bandmate, and pal. Rest in Peace, DEAR RICH….” Handsome Dick Manitoba
When Richie Teeter joined the Dictators he was a few years older and already married, which instantly made him more mature than the group of nihilistic, knuckleheads that recorded “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy.” Suddenly we had a responsible guy who could keep a beat, sing like a bird and provide a solid foundation that never wavered.
When the music business snubbed our first album I was determined to write songs that would allow me entrance into their exclusive club … naively assuming I actually belonged there. Richie’s voice and rock-hard drumming upped our game and provided the sheen that enabled The Dictators to finally garner some radio play.
I wouldn’t say he totally embraced The Dictators lifestyle but we bonded over our intense love for all things music. Richie was way more accepting than me, appreciated everything from anarchic British punk to wimpy pop to German prog-rock. His taste was so genuine and authentic that I wouldn’t even make fun of him when he listened to Genesis. He wasn’t concerned with trends; he just honestly loved an amazingly wide assortment of sounds.
My last communication with Richie was his request for a vinyl copy of the Dictators compilation “Everyday is Saturday.” Unsurprisingly, he told me he had given up on CD’s and was only listening to music on vinyl. I knew he was going through treatments for esophageal cancer but his ‘gonna beat it’ attitude disguised the difficult stage he was really at.
Richie was quite possibly the nicest guy I ever met which makes it even more depressing to acknowledge that he is the first member of the expanded Dictators family to pass away. We beat the odds for so long but time’s relentless march takes no prisoners… it was great to know and play with you my friend, we won’t forget.” Andy Shernoff
In this live clip from 1977, Richie sings “Hey Boys.”
In 1977, King Crimson founder Robert Fripp—who left the world of music in 1974 when he dissolved the group—moved to NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen (later the Bowery) and immersed himself in the city’s punk and “new wave” music scene. Inspired by New York’s frantic energy and wanting to combine the new sounds he was hearing with “Frippertronics,” the droning tape loop system he had developed with Eno, the final product was his solo record, Exposure.
The ambitious Exposure is one of the ultimate art-rock documents of late 70s New York, a classic album that sadly seems to have fallen through the cracks for many music fans. It’s a brilliant and underrated missing link between what was to become King Crimson’s next incarnation, the “Berlin trilogy” of David Bowie and Brian Eno (and indeed Fripp and Eno’s own collaborations), Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and believe it or not, Hall and Oates!
That’s right Exposure was meant to be seen as the third part of a loose trilogy that included Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel’s second album (both produced by Fripp). Daryl Hall’s management threw a wrench in the works, concerned that Hall’s decidedly more esoteric solo material might confuse his fan-base expecting catchy, “blue-eyed soul” AM radio-friendly pop tunes and that this would harm his commercial appeal. Additionally, they insisted that Fripp’s own Exposure album be credited as a Fripp/Hall collaboration. As a result, Fripp used just two of Hall’s performances on the album, recording new vocals by Terre Roche and Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill.
Sacred Songs didn’t come out until 1980 and sold respectably well. Both albums include the snarling buzz-saw rave-up, “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette.”:
The first voice you hear in the “Preface” is Eno’s and the voice before the phone starts ringing is Peter Gabriel’s. The vocal however, is obviously Daryl Hall, but not as we’re used to hearing him. Fripp later described Hall as the best singer he’d ever worked with and compared his musical creativity to David Bowie’s. High praise indeed.
Another highlight on Exposure is Peter Gabriel’s amazing performance of his “Here Comes the Flood,” perhaps the best version of the many he has recorded: Gabriel disliked the orchestral arrangements for the song on his first album, considering it over-produced. He did a different version on Kate Bush’s Christmas TV special in 1979 and still another on on his Shaking the Tree greatest hits collection. The rendition heard on Exposure is sparse, haunting and moving. I think it’s one of his single greatest vocal performances. Eno, Fripp and Gabriel are the only musicians on this track:
In 1985, a remixed “definitive edition” of Exposure was released and finally, in 2006, a remastered 2 CD set came out on Fripp’s own label with the original 1979 album and a second disc containing yet a third version of Exposure with bonus tracks including the Daryl Hall vocals as originally intended.
Below, a promotional video for Exposure. Not a lot happens here, but in the context of 1979, this would have seemed absolutely futuristic. I’m assuming that this was shot by Amos Poe (director of Glenn O’Brien’s cable access show TV Party) or else Blondie’s Chris Stein:
After the jump, Robert Fripp being interviewed Wayne’s World-style on NY cable access in 1979.
On November 13, 1984, The Gun Club were shot live onstage in Madrid for a legendary Spanish television series called La Edad de Oro. The show features stellar performances of “Sex Beat,” “The Lie,” “Bad America,” “Death Party,” “Walking With the Beast,” a cover of CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle” and several other Gun Club classics. I saw them play at The Electric Ballroom in London just a few weeks before this was shot and I’ve always thought of it as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen (It was my 19th birthday. There was only one person in the joint that night more fucked up than I was, and that honor would have to go to Mr. Jeffrey Lee Pierce hisself who managed to get completely shit-faced at the bar while the opening act, The Scientists, played their set. During the show JLP fell off the stage and landed on me. Neither of us felt any pain, I can assure you).
Watching this Madrid show today, it jibes pretty well with my memory of the London show. Jeffrey Lee is even wearing the same outfit. Holy shit were they amazing during this line-up. Who can deny that they were one of the greatest rock and roll outfits, ever? I mean, if you don’t like The Gun Club, you’re just… stupid.
Check out this epic version of “Death Party.” Pay attention to Kid Congo’s guitar shenanigans at around the 4:30 mark. How fucking cool is this motherfucker? I was watching this wishing that I could be him! And Patricia Morrison on bass? What more could you ask for?
Aside from homegrown Spanish performers (including Pedro Almodóvar’s glam-rock parody group Almodóvar & McNamara) La Edad de Oro broadcast some incredible (sometimes complete) live concerts from Lou Reed, The Smiths, John Cale, Culture Club, Marc Almond, Violent Femmes, Grupo Sportivo, Psychedelic Furs, Nick Cave, Dream Syndicate, Aztec Camera, Paul Collins’ Beat, The Durrutti Column, Tom Verlaine, Elliot Murphy, Alan Vega, Cabaret Voltaire, John Foxx, Echo & The Bunnymen, Killing Joke, Divine, Spear of Destiny, Johnny Thunders, Tuxedomoon (twice!), The Residents, China Crisis, Lords Of The New Church and Mari Wilson. The series was cancelled abruptly after a quite incredible 90-minute show with Psychic TV that was seen as an outrageous affront to the sensibilities of a Catholic country.
Eventually many of these shows escaped from the vaults (in perfect digital quality, struck from the master tapes) and ended up on various torrent trackers as “The Stolen Files.” They are totally worth looking for!
A powerful performance from The Jam, recorded in Paris in 1981, and originally shown as part of the French TV series Chorus (presented by Antoine de Caunes, no less). Here The Jam thunder through:
It’s a fine selection of songs, which highlights The Jam’s musical progression from the influence of sixties Mods, through Punk to New Wave and onto Paul Weller’s distinct political commentary with “Eton Rifles”. Excellent stuff. Mind you, it’s still hard to believe Tory PM and professional nincompoop, David Cameron was naive enough to claim he had a great liking for “Eton Rifles”, during a radio interview in 2008. However, the Eton-educated Cameron’s admiration for the song did not impact on his politics, something Paul Weller picked up on:
“Which part of it didn’t he get? It wasn’t intended as a jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.”
The song reached number 3 in the U.K. in November 1979, and was the beginning of The Jam’s dominance over the charts until 1982, when guitar bands were replaced by Blitz Kids, and synthesizers.
During their 5 years of recordings, The Jam brought an edge to pop music by fusing musical ambition to strong Left-wing conviction, which wouldn’t happen on such a similar scale until Pulp in the 1990s, and the likes of which are very much required today.
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.
BBC news program Week In, Week Out covers the the heroin problem in Wales. Your host: John Cale.
The director of the documentary, Nick Skinner, talks about making the film with Cale:
The world I explored with John Cale was much darker. In the rundown post-industrial towns of South Wales, and the backstreets of Cardiff and Swansea, we came in contact with a the dark side of drug use. Teenagers shooting up because their mates do it, because there’s nothing else to do, because they are blocking out the pain of an abusive past. Adults trapped in a downward spiral of drugs, crime, prison and more drugs.
CBS chat show “Sunday Morning” presents an hour long interview with Patti Smith conducted by journalist Anthony Mason. This was broadcast earlier today and it’s quite wonderful.
Patti sings “My Blakean Year” and “Grateful” and talks about her life. Mason does a good job of asking the questions and Smith is relaxed and open.
Punk may be long dead, but the interest in its music, ideas and artifacts continues. Over at the Independent, writer Michael Bracewell introduces a selection of photographs by Simon Barker, a former member of the legendary Bromley Contingent, the group of original Punks that included Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, Jordan, Bertie “Berlin” Marshall, Tracie O’Keefe, and Billy Idol. Barker was a participant and witness to some of the key events during the 14 months, in 1976 and 1977, when Punk changed everything - as Bracewell explains:
[Barker’s] photographs share with Nan Goldin’s early studies of the New York and Boston sub-cultures of the 1970s, a profound and joyously audacious sense of youth going out on its own into new freedoms and new possibilities.
In this, Barker’s photographs from this period capture a moment when the tipping point between innocence and experience has yet to be reached. The model and sub-cultural celebrity Jordan, for example, is photographed as a self-created work of art – her features resembling a Picasso mask, her clothes more post-war English county librarian. The provocation of her image remains untamed and unassimilated, nearly 40 years later; and within her surrealist pose there is the triumph of art made in the medium of sub-cultural lifestyle.
Barker/Six was a member of the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’ of very early followers of The Sex Pistols and the retail and fashion work of McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Other members would include the musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, and the writer Bertie Marshall, then known as ‘Berlin’ in homage to the perceived glamour and decadence of the Weimar republic. Originating from suburbia, but all determined to leave its security as soon as possible, the Bromley Contingent became the British sub-cultural equivalent, in many ways, of Andy Warhol’s notorious ‘superstars’ – volatile, at times self-destructive or cruelly elitist, but dedicated to a creed of self-reinvention and personal creativity.
It is this creed, as opposed to the swiftly commercialised music of punk, that Barker’s photographs from the period anatomise so well. At once intimate and forensic, austere and camp, documentary and touchingly elegiac, these photographs capture a milieu experiencing a heroic sense of being outsiders – a condition that has always been the privilege of youth, and which has long claimed many victims in its enticing contract with the thrill of taking an oppositional stance.
Read the whole article and see more of Simon’s photographs here.
Simon Barker’s book Punk’s Dead is available here.
Poly Styrene
The Banshees: Steven Severin, Kenny Morris and John McKay
The Clash and The Damned were both recording at the legendary Wessex Sound Studios in London when this video was shot.
The Damned were working on Machine Gun Etiquette while The Clash were doing the same for London Calling.
The clip captures Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies, Joe Strummer, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones and producer Guy Stevens enjoying themselves during some down time.
I believe the footage of Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies in the beginning of the video was shot by Mick Jones.
James Chance, one of the most iconic players of NYC’s “No Wave” scene, married the avant garde improvisational free jazz of Ornette Coleman to jagged, angular funk riffs that were straight out of James Brown, creating a squalling brand of chaotic jazz-punk-funk unlike anything that had been heard before. Chance and his band, The Contortions were one of the most unique groups gigging around New York from the mid 1970s until the early 1980s. James Chance and The Contortions also performed as James White and The Blacks, but it was essentially the same group of musicians.
Seen here, Chance and The Contortions perform at Max’s Kansas City in 1979. Another great clip from Paul Tschinkel’s long-running Innertube NYC public access TV show. He’s got to let his vast archive escape one day. It’s a treasure trove of the punk and post-punk era of NYC music. There’s obviously nothing else like it.
“Somebody told me you people are crazy! But I’m not so sure about that; you seem to be all right to me.”—Lux Interior
On June 13, 1978 The Cramps gave a free concert at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa. It is, simply put, one of the single greatest rock and roll moments ever captured on videotape (in this case, on a half-inch open reel Sony Portapak by Joe Rees and his Target Video outfit). Also on the bill were The Mutants from San Francisco.
One hundred years from now this video will be as iconic as The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But enough description, HIT PLAY AND WATCH IT, ALREADY!
Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard meticulously recreated this event (and the video itself) as an elaborate art project at the ICA in London in 2003. Forsyth and Pollard’s “Cramps” also performed in front of an audience comprised of psychiatric patients in their “File under Sacred Music” re-staging of the infamous 1978 gig.
A blood poet of the highest order, Harry Crews has died of neuropathy at the age of 76.
Crews wrote in a style that was at once brutal and beautiful, baroque and as ordinary as dirt. Within a single sentence he could be both tender and terrifying. His novels were populated by freaks, outlaws, burn-outs and lost souls who wandered through trailer parks, bayous, dive bars, sideshows and the long lonely highways of the deep south. Possessed of a gothic sensibility, dark humor and hard-edged grittiness that put him in the company of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski and Flannery O’Connor as well as hardboiled writers like Jim Thompson, Crews was capable of transforming the rot of reality into something so rich with life that even death had to laugh.
Punk rockers gravitated to Crews because he was a badass who managed to find a medium through which to articulate his anger, despair and lust. Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon created a band called Harry Crews as an homage to the writer. They harnessed the energy of his books and transformed it into the only kind of music that could handle it - blistering hard rock.
Crews was one of the major influences on my writing, right up there with Bukowski and Raymond Chandler. I f you haven’t read him, I recommend starting with The Knockout Artist, All We Need Of Hell or Scar Lover. Once you’ve started up with Harry you won’t stop until you’ve read him all.
Club 82, at 82 East 4th Street in New York’s East Village, was a well-known “high class” drag club of the 50s and 60s where the likes of Walter Winchell, Elizabeth Taylor and Errol Flynn could be seen. Down on its luck in the 70s, the space was transformed into a glam-rock club and later a disco.
In this clip, the New York Dolls, in drag (save for Johnny Thunders), perform “Pills” at Club 82 on April 17, 1974. I’m presuming this was shot by Bob Gruen, but I’m not sure.
“I’m only five foot one.” Unless he’s laying on his stomach and then Iggy’s five foot two.
This excerpt is from a longer film shot at the Olympia in Paris in 1991 by legendary photographer and video director Tim Pope, who directed the notorious “Sex Dwarf” video for Soft Cell.
Pope describes watching the film footage with Iggy:
“I was the first person to watch an Iggy show with Iggy. He resembled a pert bird with tiny specs perched on his nose and wearing a japanese, blue dressing-gown. He asked me if he had taken his clothes off in the show. He had forgotten. I told him he did and he looked (I thought) a little genuinely embarrassed about being bare-arsed.”
Nothing embarrassing here. Shit, Iggy could crowd surf without the crowd.
San Francisco’s Flipper were one of the most unique hardcore bands to come out of the Bay Area, or indeed to spring out of any US city’s punk scene. Their slow, sludgy, THICK bass-led sound made them seem extra heavy—much more heavy metal than any mere heavy metal group—and would influence The Melvins, Nirvana (who were huge boosters of the band) and the entire “Stoner Rock” genre.
Flipper’s live shows were utterly insane and intimidating. A pal of mine back in the early 80s suggested that the ultimate drug cocktail for a Flipper show was to sniff glue and smoke Angel Dust. Although I personally never tried that, I think he was probably correct. On record you only got half of the Flipper experience, live you got the whole thing pounded into your skull like a spike.
I first discovered the joys of Flipper via a friend who had secured (against all odds, I grew up in West Virginia) a copy of their “Love Canal/Ha Ha Ha” single in 1981, which I then got my own hands on (and have to this day). Their disturbed, demented and deranged “Ha Ha Ha” is something I used to stick on mixed tapes all the time, especially ones that I’d hand over to friends about to take a road trip telling them “Don’t listen to this one until late at night.”
I recall seeing Flipper co-bass player/singer Will Shatter stumble into the Odessa Diner on Avenue A one night in the mid-80s, looking like he’d gone to Hell and come about halfway back. I was eating with my friend Hillary—who actually knew him—but he was in such bad shape that she opted to leave him in peace to shove his eggs into his face. Shatter was dead not long after that of a drug overdose, and two more members of the band would also fatally OD over the years..
Bruce Loose has apparently appeared on-stage with a cane and heart monitors when the band has reformed in recent years. Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic was a member of Flipper from 2006 to 2008.
Below, is Target Video’s document of Flipper’s May 29, 1981 opening set for Throbbing Gristle at San Francisco’s Kezar Pavilion. At a certain point Loose’s bass breaks, and Genesis P-Orridge lends his axe so the show could go on. Set list: “Shine,” “nothing,” “Low Rider,” “one by one,” “Hard Cold Old World,” “Life.”
It used to be that you could only read about some legendary concert, but sometimes there was a video camera present and actual records, not just memories, of these shows are starting to surface. Witness The Jesus and Mary Chain’s infamous Sept. 9, 1985 performance at Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London. The group played six songs for twenty minutes and then fucked off, prompting the audience to destroy their equipment and rip down a lighting rig.
I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain both before and after this show. When I saw them in London, they were an uneasy combination of crap and brilliance, whereas by the time I saw them at what I believe was their first American show, at The World discotheque on 2nd Street in NYC, their stage show had become something like… Godzilla destoying a city. For the show at The World, they had the biggest, brightest, whitest flash pods aimed directly at the audience’s retinas and no other lighting source. It was as loud as fuck and they simply destroyed the place. Maybe it was the LSD I’d taken, but they seemed to have improved quite a lot in those months since I’d first seen them perform and I left a convert.
You can watch the full pre-Psychocandy set: “Just Out of Reach,” “Inside Me,” “In a Hole,” “You Trip Me Up,” “The Living End” and “Crack’d” on Slicing Up Eyeballs, but the quality is basically shit. Better to go directly to the sixth clip to see a bit of the crowd rioting at the end.
As journeyman guitarist, Kid Congo Powers has played alongside of three of the most outrageous and notorious front-men of the post-punk era: The Cramps’ Lux Interior, Nick Cave, and of course, his longtime collaborator in The Gun Club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Two of these men are dead, the third is very lucky he isn’t… Kid Congo Powers has also added his Satanic magic to the mix collaborating with Jim Thirlwell, Lydia lunch, Die Haut, Annie Anxiety, Julee Cruise, and The Swan’s Michael Gira.
Currently living in Washington DC, Kid’s writing a memoir of growing up in Los Angeles and the early years of that city’s nascent punk scene. The gunslinger guitarist claims he gets more done in the staid, uptight District of Columbia simply because there’s not a lot to do there.
Dangerous Minds caught up with Kid Congo Powers after he and his crack band, the Pink Monkey Birds (named after a line in David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” song) played a right rave up on the stage at Waterloo Records’ parking lot in Austin, TX during the SXSW festival. The Pink Monkey Birds sound is a spicy gumbo of 60’s Chicano rock, Booker T. and the M.G.s, bad LSD trips and seedy psychedelic go-go romps. They even threw in a couple of Cramps and Gun Club favorites.
As the bandleader, Kid is an engaging and charismatic front-man. The Pink Monkey Birds are Kiki Solis on bass; Ron Miller on drums; and Jesse Roberts on second guitar. Their latest album is called Gorilla Rose. If they come to your town, GO SEE ‘EM, they put on a fine show.
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and Peter Gabriel’s second album (both produced by Fripp). Daryl Hall’s management threw a wrench in the works, concerned that Hall’s decidedly more esoteric solo material might confuse his fan-base expecting catchy, “blue-eyed soul” AM radio-friendly pop tunes and that this would harm his commercial appeal. Additionally, they insisted that Fripp’s own 
. If they come to your town, GO SEE ‘EM, they put on a fine show.