Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly er, Doris) were a bloody-mindedly brilliant 80’s German post-punk band/ performance art concern, part of the self-styled Geniale Dilletanten movement (along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!) if you will. As a seemingly central tenet, manipulation of expectations is the rule, extending most fantastically to their 1984 release “Chöre & Soli” which consists not of conventionally playable records but rather a set of 8 miniature colored plastic discs and dedicated player. The sound content is limited to mere seconds per side, as befits the original use of the devices: the internal voice boxes of “talking” dolls. Needless to say these things are now rare as hen’s teeth. Anyone have a spare ?
Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s leading scientist on climate issues speaks out with the full truth about global warming. His new book is titled Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. One day there will be statues in honor of James Hansen. Let’s just hope they don’t end up like the Statue of Liberty did in Planet of the Apes. Dr. Hansen is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
I recently acquired *cough, from Demonoid, cough* a quadraphonic version (i.e. 4-channel) of The Worst of Jefferson AIrplane and their Volunteers set in 4-channel audio as well. Originally released during the heyday of Quad (which was approximately 1974 to 1976) on 8-track and reel to reel tapes (for the more discerning audiophile) these rarely heard versions of some of the Airplane’s best-loved songs are phenomenal. As a very hardcore fan of the band since I was a kid, I really got off on hearing something new in the music I was already so very, very familiar with. On Volunteers, three—count ‘em—three songs are totally different from the album versions. Not different mixes, but substantially different versions which would have been lost to history due to the outdated format. (Although they were included on the excellent Jefferson Airplane Loves You box set, these tracks sound way better in their original quadraphonic glory, not bounced down to stereo. Hey Fredrick has a completely different lead vocal, Volunteers is totally different, I think it was even recorded on a different day from the original, and The Farm is also a lot different).
But the best song of all to hear in Quad was Lather. It sounds fantastic and there is an incredibly cool Philip Glass-style ostinato that Grace Slick is doing on the piano that has never been clear and audible in any version of this song I’ve ever heard before (and lord knows the JA catalog has been released in as many crappy permutations as their RCA label mate, Elvis’s catalog, has). It’s always been there, you just couldn’t hear it like this.
It’s fascinating for me to see the (rapid) flowering of an audiophile underground in Bit Torrent land. Anonymous professional and amateur audio engineers are buying up the original Quad tapes from the 70s on Ebay, restoring and refurbishing their old quadraphonic gear and then transferring these old tapes to Pro Tools, and then into DVD ISO files that you can burn with Toast. The ones made from the reel to reel tapes are by far the best, but even the ones made from 8-tracks are still pretty cool to hear, even in a lower fidelity.
Why doesn’t the music industry (specifically a label like Shout Factory, who would do the best job) look into what people are obviously quite interested in on the torrent trackers—especially the Russian ones— and get some ideas of what they still might actually purchase on disc (i.e. multi-channel versions of classic rock albums). A few of the original Quad mixes have actually been put out on DVD-A or SACD, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (amazing) as well as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (also amazing). For the most part, however, they only see the light of day on torrent trackers via these inspired hobbyists.
But back to the Jefferson Airplane. Below is an odd lip-sync’d performance of Lather from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Who else would on television then would have let Grace Slick get away with this?!?!
Whenever the discussion of a “favorite” movie comes up, my eyes glaze over. I’ve seen so many films that when pressed, exactly none of them stand out as a particular favorite. Not one. But when the favorite album question gets asked, Nick Cave’s first post-Birthday Party solo outing, From Her to Eternity comes immediately to mind.
To say that this album was a significant soundtrack to my ill-spent youth is a bit of an understatement. I listened to this record obsessively. I was a huge Birthday Party fan, but From Her to Eternity absolutely captivated my imagination. It was the most intelligent, most literate, most criminally insane rock music I’d ever heard, a quantum leap past everything else that was happening at the time. At the tail end of the post punk era, when once great bands—like the Psychedelic Furs, PiL and Ultravox to name but three—had lost their mojos in disheartening ways, Nick Cave became the standard bearer of intellectual cool in my late teen years. Talk about a dangerous mind, I thought Nick Cave was the baddest motherfucker alive.
True story: For the better part of 1983 and all of 1984, I lived in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. Today it’s a trendy area, but then it was anything but gentrified, its residents consisting of mostly poor West Indian immigrants, dreadlocked rastas and a small subset of squatters and junkies from all across the globe. I loved it there. One night I was exiting the Brixton tube station with my friend Sam when we were accosted by none other than Nick Cave, looking very much worse for wear, who politely asked us if we could direct him to where he could find some smack, please. (In truth, Cave didn’t ask “us,” he asked Sam, who looked all gothy and weird while I looked like what I was, a preppy, 18-year old American kid. He wasn’t addressing me at all, I was just standing there.)
Sam kindly pretended not to know who Cave was—oh we knew—just shook his head no and kept going. When we walked up the stairs and out of the station, he turned to me and said “That’s the second time he’s asked me that.”
I have always prided myself on my ability to be at the right place at the right time…
Cut to 1986. CDs had been on the market for a couple of years, but at that time it was still all stuff like Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Phil Collins that got released on the format. I was stomping around New York City with a Sony Walkman clamped to my ears and I was slowly beginning to understand the concept of hi-fidelity audio. I was curious about CDs, but there wasn’t that much there to lure me in just yet. Finally things I cared about started slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t until Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If Kicking Against the Pricks on CD could sound even better than it did on the cassette version I’d been listening to, then sign me up.
The first 3 CDs I bought were Kicking Against the Pricks, Nancy Sinatra’s The Hit Years comp and the first Psychedelic Furs album. Later that day, eager to hear more of this newfangled digital audio, I bought Marc Almond’s Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, Julian Cope’s World Shut Your Mouth and John Zorn’s Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown.
Cut to December 2009. Since about 2002 I had been buying multi-channel SACD and DVD-A audio discs, but since I had only a stereo system—a really good one, I should add—I was just able to listen to the two channel versions of some of my favorite classic albums, but never the 5:1 mixes. Once again it was hearing that the Nick Cave catalog was coming out, remastered and in 5:1 that caused me to get antsy about upgrading the audio gear to a surround system. I’d managed to keep a lid on my once unparalleled ability to buy massive amounts of CDs for a good 3-4 years now and my lovely, but financially cautious wife, agreed to loosen the pursestrings for a major refurbishment of the home entertainment electronics.
Since it would be ridiculous for me to “review” an album I’ve already told you at the outset is probably my top, top favorite record, I’ll spare you the middle-aged fanboy rhapsodizing and instead concentrate (mostly) on the matter of the “Okay, I already own this CD, do I need to buy it again?” equation. In my case, in the past, I have purchased the album, the audio cassette and the CD of From Her to Eternity. The CD has always sounded amazing, how much better could it get?
Mute Records has been redoing certain major artists’ back catalogs (Depeche Mode, Can, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) with significant sonic upgrades in recent years. They do a consistently great job and these audiophile editions are quite good value for the consumer, especially ones with the high end audio systems to fully appreciate what’s on offer. It’s these consumers who are, let’s face it, just about the only dependable audience left anymore for the purchase of actual discs and it’s good business for Mute to cater to them. Aside from the new King Crimson releases (which sound amazing), Mute’s refurbishment of the Nick Cave catalog is one of the few major efforts in the audiophile arena, at least for pop music, this year or last. Jazz and classical see quite a few SACD, DTS and DVD-A releases each year, but the rock and pop category fewer and fewer. The pop marketplace seems largely to have abandoned the space. Even the Stones and Dylan SACDs have been replaced now with standard “red book” CDs. Considering that the Stones SACDs can rarely be found for less than $80 these days, used, it shows, once again, how short-sighted most of the record industry is. Then again it is the record industry, isn’t it? Visionary business practices are hardly what we’ve come to expect.
Which is what makes the Mute Nick Cave reissues all the more worth savoring. To answer the question posed above, are they worth buying even if you already own them on CD, the answer is a strong yes. They did a fine, fine job on these reissues, each one a 2 disc set, consisting of the album on a regular CD to play in the car or rip to iTunes, and a DVD with fantastic multi-channel versions of the album, in both Dolby 5:1 and DTS. As objects, they’re quite sweet to unwrap. Each of the albums comes in an ultra glossy gatefold sleeve with intelligent liner notes by Amy Hanson and graphics faithful to the original releases, but better. There is a multi-part documentary spread out over the span of the catalog called Do You Love Me Like I Love You directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Key members of Cave’s orbit, well-known fans and writers—everyone but Cave himself (and Anita Lane)—are interrogated under harsh lighting not unlike a forensics video. Watching this film before listening to the music really whet my appetite to hear it afresh.
For an album that had always sounded so amazing, no matter what format, the improvement in sound quality would have to go some way, by my own personal subjective standards, to move the needle much on my jaded audiophile reviewer’s scale. When I got to the choice of which surround mode to listen in, I chose the Dolby 5:1 because it generally sounds better to me than DTS.
Simply put, the immersive aural experience of the multi-channel version of From Her to Eternity—supervised by Mick Harvey from the original recordings by Flood—blew my doors off. To stand inside the violent maelstrom of sound that is the Bad Seeds, with Blixa Bargeld’s anarchic slide guitar in that speaker, the skull-cracking thwap of the drums coming from behind, the rumble of Barry Adamson’s bass in the subwoofer, and hear it like you were in the studio with them, is something awesome and fearful to behold. The album is heavily percussive—whether the drums, piano, vibes or the guitars—there is a lot of banging on this record. If anyone knows how to record percussion, it’s Flood (who subsequently worked with U2 and Depeche Mode). The extra channels of audio give even more room ambiance and “air” around the various instruments. Far greater nuance is achieved here than would be possible in a stereo mix. The album is rife with moments where a sonic crack appears in the proceedings, and something crawls into your ear for a split second before scurrying off into the floorboards. Listening to From Her to Eternity in multi-channel caused me to think of the way Stockhausen often used a moment of dissonance to capture listener’s attention, although I doubt he was an influence here.
The real test came for me with the final song, A Box for Black Paul. An enigmatic narrative about the final resting place for a Baudelaire-esque character, when someone asks ‘what’s your favorite song?’ this one, like the album it’s from, comes in at my #1 spot. It’s the final tour de force on an album consisting of one wildly uncompromising tour de force after another. I stood in the middle of the room, in the multi-channel “sweet spot,” as it were, and listened. A Box for Black Paul is not a piece of music that anyone could listen to casually. It was stunning, exquisite. The sustain on Cave’s piano and the close-mike recording of his vocals truly sounded like you were in the room with him during the performance. By the time its nearly ten minutes long running time had elapsed, I was limp, exhausted and exhilarated.
And that brings me to my final point about the new version of From Her to Eternity and why it is worth acquiring this edition even if you already own the admittedly already great sounding earlier CD. Although I stated at the outset of this essay that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what my favorite album was, it’s not something that, after 26 years, I pull out and listen to all that much. By offering the consumer such a rich package, the documentary, the extra tracks, the substantial liner notes, it achieves what releases of this sort should achieve, and that is to say, it allows the deep fan the chance to really immerse themselves in the music again and to hear it with fresh ears, like the first time they heard it. I must have played this album 30 times all the way through since I got it and when you can hear new things in music that is meaningful to you personally, this is a fun, great thing and actually worth supporting with your hard earned dough. I find it pretty difficult to get a hard-on for buying a regular CD anymore—I don’t care who it’s by—but I do find myself actually returning to the record stores and Amazon these days to look for multi-channel releases. If the record industry gets smart and starts to look at Mute’s quality repackaging of its major artists back catalogs as a model to emmulate, maybe just maybe, they’ll coax more middle-aged rock snobs like myself back into the record stores. I wouldn’t bet on that happening or anything (!) but Mute should be singled out and commended for actually giving music fans a real value for their money.
In the coming weeks I’ll be discussing the rest of last year’s Nick Cave releases leading up to the releases of Tender Prey, The Good Son and Henry’s Dream by Mute this spring.
Second installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is here.
Happy 2010! We’re starting off the new decade right with the first installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part two will be posted next week.
Although for myself, I can’t even comprehend not liking Bette Midler—for me it was love at first sight—I am told that she is an acquired taste; and one that my darling wife—who has great taste in music and everything else, I hasten to add—has not acquired. This morning, I was blasting her first LP, The Divine Miss M from 1972 while Tara was running errands—I haven’t heard it in years—and it simply knocked me out. Produced by Barry Manilow, Ahmet Ertegun and the Grammy-award winning producer Joel Dorn, with a crack set of session musicians and back-up singers like Cissy Houston and Melissa Manchester, The Divine Miss M is nothing less than the unveiling of a very major talent on the world, as Midler’s 40+ years at the top of her profession attest to. She didn’t write any of the songs, but trust me, she owns them all. She’s one of those people who just oozes talent and concerning the quality of her voice and its incredible power, well, she belongs in that smallest circle of all singing, all dancing, all acting diva divas, like Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and the great Broadway talents like Ethel Merman. She’s got the lungs, no two ways about it.
This morning I was poking around the Internet reading about Bette Midler’s early career and there are a lot of interesting things I discovered, especially for those of you reading this who think of her more as the Midler-of-the-road songstress of From A Distance, than the raunchy, brassy young broad she started her career as.
The short story is that she was a talkative Jewish chick with a BIG personality who grew up in a mostly Asian neighborhood in Honolulu, who was probably dying to get out of there from an early age. She moved to New York in 1965 at the age of 20 and by 1967 she was playing the small role of Tzeitel in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof, with Zero Mostel, Maria Karnilova, Bea Arthur and other notables.
Midler really came into her own, however, in the cabaret of the Continental Baths, a pioneering gay bathhouse where gay and straight culture mixed in the 70s. An Aretha Franklin album hit Midler like a bolt from the blue and she decided to become a singer, mixing campy classics like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Leader of the Pack” with her wacky thrift store fashion sense, quirky personality and dirty jokes. A friend suggested that she might want to consider launching her unconventional stage show at an unconventional place and so Midler took up a residency at the Continental Baths, playing next to a waterfall to an audience consisting of bath house patrons wearing nothing but white towels around their waists and “chic” straight couples looking for an unusual night out.
It was here that Midler’s brassy “fag hag” persona (“I am the last of the truly tacky women”) took shape and it was imperative that she do everything she could to capture the attention of the Continental Baths clientele: after all, there was basically a Dionysian orgy going on all around her. When Midler opened her mouth, the orgy parted like the Red Sea. Her musical director for her formative years was the aforementioned Manilow, who would perform, it has been said, wearing only a towel himself, as he sat at his piano.
While this underground residency was going on, Midler was performing regularly on mainstream talkshows like David Frost’s, Merv Griffin’s and even the super straight (but unfailingly sweet) Mike Douglas’ show. Where her star really rose, though, was when Johnny Carson took Midler on as a sort of protege. She appeared on The Tonight Show quite regularly for 18 months and opened for Carson in Las Vegas. By the time The Divine Miss M came out, she was already a known quantity and Midler went on to win a Grammy that year, the album selling nearly a million copies.
Bette Midler is an important figure in the history of gay rights in this country. Not for any one thing that she did, more for what she stood for. When her show came to town, it was an excuse for her gay fans to come out in force, dress up and get their freak on, at a time there would have been few opportunities to do so in most American cities. With her big personality and “trash with flash” Midler became a rallying point for young gay men of the 70s, not in a political sense, but a cultural sense, Midler injecting sassy gay sensibilities into the mainstream via her megawatt talents.
Here are links to some clips of the Divine Bette performing at the Baths. Considering the scarcity of consumer video cameras at that time, it’s a wonder that any visual records of Midler’s performances there exist at all, but here they are, thank you to the glory of YouTube. The best two clips, “Marahuana” and “Fat Stuff” are not embeddable. “Fat Stuff” has a lot of stage banter. (I liked one of the YouTube comments: “Wow, this was back when you had to be talented to have a career!” Too true, too true…)
Short news story on Midler and the Continental Baths:
Betty Davis is one of the lost greats of 70s funk, but if there is any justice in the world her music will one day be as revered as it deserves to be. This woman was outrageous, sexy and she had mad musical chops! Originally a successful fashion model when she met trumpeter Miles Davis, Betty Mabry, as she was then known, traveled in circles that included Jimi Hendrix, The Chamber Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone. In 1968 she married Davis, but the marriage lasted just one year, breaking up, it was rumored, because she was having an affair with Hendrix (which she has always denied). In his autobiography, Davis credits Betty for opening his ears to the new possibilities inherent in the music of Sly and Jimi, and she inspired his music from Filles De Kilimanjaro (Mademoiselle Mabry is a tribute to Betty, obviously) to Bitches Brew (the title again alleged to reference Mlle. Mabry, albeit by then in a less flattering light).
After her divorce from Miles, Betty recorded two albums in the early 70s with crack backing musicians like Larry Graham, Merl Saunders (Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt), Neal Schon (Santana/Journey) and members of Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, even the young Pointer Sisters singing back-up. Davis was the original “nasty gal” creating the blueprint for suggestive “outrageousness” well-trod by today’s female chart toppers. One of her songs, the sexually forthright If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up was so controversial that the NAACP condemned her.
Then she recorded another great record of hard funk in 1975 called Nasty Gal, but sadly, she never really caught on. There’s no good reason for it, but luckily her reputation has risen again in recent years due to reprints of her albums by Seattle-based label, A Light in the Attic Records, who recently released her recorded in 1976 but shelved ever since album, Is It Love or Desire.
(When I met my future wife, she had a Betty Davis CD in her car stereo. As a man who puts “good taste in music” approximately third on the list of what makes a woman attractive, I can assure you I was impressed).
When I was growing up, I could read the Village Voice in the local library and fancied myself “up” on what was going on in New York, at the age of 14, even though I had never been anywhere even close to the island of Manhattan. Having said that, if I wasn’t exactly an expert on New York City per se, I was at least an expert on each and every issue of the Village Voice. (And you can tell a lot about a city from its alt weekly, let’s just say. Reading between the lines = very easy with the Village Voice. True now, and true then.)
A great website I just discovered called Zamboni has files of a few of the Warhol programs for streaming and download. Other shows are knocking around out there, too. Many famous faces here including Halston, Pee-wee Herman, Debbie Harry and John Waters.
Part 2 of my interview with Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor, the legendary Firesign Theater. In the 60s and 70s, The Firesign Theatre’s smart, anarchic—and decidedly psychedelic—“theater of the mind” was embraced by the era’s counterculture. Their mind-bending humor paved the way for Cheech & Chong, Saturday Night Live and The National Lampoon. www.firesigntheatre.com
Charles Ludlam and Black Eyed Susan in Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, 1971. Photo by Leandro Katz
A fine book came out a few years back, 2002 to be exact, about the great American absurdist dramatist, Charles Ludlam. Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman is certainly one of the best books I’ve read this decade and I wanted to tell you about it. I feel it’s a book that deserves a far wider audience than it originally got. Even though it tells the story of a very particular person and of a very particular “scene”—in this case Ludlam and his gender-bending Off Off Broadway troupe of drag queens, druggies and bohos—like a biography of say, Andy Warhol, the canvas is so widescreen and cinematic that it tells the tale of an entire era, not just the story of one man and his orbit. Ludlam’s story—which Kaufman spent a decade researching, interviewing over 150 people who knew the playwright—is simultaneously the history of Off Broadway theater in the late ‘60s to the late ‘80s, it’s also the story of pre and post-Stonewall gay life, the anecdotal histories of certain types of “only in NY” culture vultures and media mavens and, of course, the life of the complex and exasperating force of nature that was Charles Ludlam, a self-created character if ever there was one.
Charles Ludlam should in many ways be seen as the American Moliere. He was the proprietor, creative genius, task master and (one of) the star attraction(s) of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, who called a small theater at One Sheridan Square—at Seventh Ave, where a street sign commemorates Ludlam’s memory—their home for many years. For several years, I lived a block away. I only actually saw two Ludlam shows—The Mystery of Irma Vep (I still have the Showbill) where Ludlam and Everett Quinton played all the characters, male and female, their frenetic costume (and gender) changes part of the play’s berserk charm, and Salammbo, where Ludlam played the high priestess of the Moon, surrounded by muscle men. The play also featured live doves and an extremely obese naked woman—she had to be 400 lbs—with massive breasts and… leprosy. It was absolutely outrageous. Imagine a mutant cross of Shakespeare, early John Waters, Flash Gordon serials and Arsenic and Old Lace and you’ll kind of be in the right ballpark.
A few years later, in 1987, Ludlam was dead of AIDS. When a theatrical company shuts down, theater being what it is, there is usually not much left over to remind us that its performances ever existed. It’s an extremely ephemeral art form. You’d think that there might be some videos of Ludlam and the Ridiculous showing up on YouTube, but so far, nothing. Which is not to say that Ludlam has been forgotten, far from it: His plays are performed with ever increasing regularity on college campuses and several scholarly works have been written about his 29 plays and influence on American culture (Bette Midler and the original cast of SNL, are two examples, according to Kaufman’s book). When Ludlam died, his obituary made it to the front page of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from another appreciation from the TImes:
To be Ridiculous is to be a step beyond the Absurd. Ludlam defined his form of theater as an ensemble synthesis of ‘‘wit, parody, vaudeville farce, melodrama and satire,’’ which, in combination, gives ‘‘reckless immediacy to classical stagecraft.’’ That recklessness led some people to misinterpret his work as anarchic. It was spontaneous, but it was also highly structured - and always to specific comic effect. Though Mr. Ludlam was a titanic Fool, he was not foolish. He knew exactly what he was doing, whether the object of his satire was Dumas, du Maurier, the Brontes, Moliere, Shakespeare, soap opera or grandiose opera - or himself.
I first encountered him in performance 17 years ago when he was playing ‘‘Bluebeard’’ far Off Broadway - with a beard like blue Brillo and a diabolical glare in his eye. This was a distillation of every mad-doctor movie ever made. In his role as Bluebeard, he said, ‘‘When I am good, I am very good. When I am bad. . . ,’’ and he paused to consider his history of turpitude. Then he concluded, ‘‘I’m not bad.’’ As hilarious as ‘‘Bluebeard’’ was, it gave no indication of the body of work that was to follow it. Almost every year, sometimes twice a year, there was another Ludlam lunacy on stage. As a critic who reviewed almost all of his plays, I must say that Ludlam was always fun to watch and fun to write about. His flights of fancy could inspire a kind of critical daredevilry, as one tried to capture in words the ephemeral essence of Ridiculous theater.
Looking back on our debt to him, one remembers his rhapsodic, hairy-chested ‘‘Camille’‘; the Grand Guignol vaudeville of ‘‘The Ventriloquist’s Wife,’’ in which he spoke both for himself and for his back-talking dummy, Walter Ego; ‘‘The Enchanted Pig,’’ a helium-high hybrid of ‘‘King Lear’’ and ‘‘Cinderella’‘; ‘‘Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde,’’ a Molieresque send-up of minimalism; ‘‘Galas,’’ with Mr. Ludlam as the title diva. The range ran from ‘‘Corn,’’ a hillbilly musical, to ‘Der Ring Gott Farblonjet,’’ a three-Ring Wagner circus. There were also sideshows - a Punch and Judy puppet theater in which he played all 22 characters, and ‘‘Anti-Galaxie Nebulae,’’ a science fiction serialette.
‘‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’’ (in 1984) was a tour de force, a horror-comedy in which he and his comic partner, Everett Quinton, quick-changed roles in a scintillating send-up of ‘‘Wuthering’’ and other Gothic ‘‘Heights.’’ For Ludlam, ‘‘Irma Vep’’ became a breakthrough of a kind. The first of his plays to demonstrate a broader, popular appeal, it has been staged by other companies, in other countries as well as in America’s regional theaters. Not all of Ludlam was equal, but his batting average was extraordinarily high -as author, director and actor.
His acting was, of course, his most noticeable talent. As a performer, he unfailingly enriched his own work, as he charted a chameleonesque course, specializing in satyrs, caliphs and fakirs - as well as playing the occasional damsel. He was also an expert teacher of theater, as I discovered some years ago when, over a period of several months, I took an acting workshop with him. In these intensive sessions, we studied and practiced physical, visual and verbal comedy. He was most informative about what he did on stage. For example, he thought of his body as a puppet; through his imagination, he pulled his own strings.
I think it’s safe to say that all four of us here at Dangerous Minds are big Julian Cope fans. Jason and I are HUGE fans and I have loved The Teardrop Explodes and followed Cope since I was a teen. The guy’s as cool as anyone’s ever been, he doesn’t care what you think about him and he can write the best guitar riffs since Ray Davies. I’ve seen him in concert four times, read all of his books and I interviewed him once around the time Peggy Suicide was released, in 1991. He was a fascinating guy to talk to, full of energy, his mind wandering off in every direction at once. My guess is also that he was probably pretty stoned that day!
My friend Wm. Ferguson and I met the Arch Drude at the Island Records offices near Tower Records in lower Manhattan. During the interview Cope told us about the mystical experience he had that led to his vision of the earth dying that inspired Peggy Suicide’s somewhat bleak environmentalist message. I recall that we discussed a certain book about Helena Blavatsky which he and I had both read and he compared the physical sensation of his mystic moment to the first time a pubescent boy masturbates, not quite pleasurable and very confusing, a sort of mental orgasm felt in the brain. I asked him if he felt conflicted about bringing a child into a world—his wife Dorian was then pregnant with their first daughter—that he so obviously thought was terminal. He paused and said, “Well, yeah the world is fucked, but it’s not THAT fucked that it can’t be saved, certainly. We’ve got to try.” I then voiced my own skepticism about bring new life into the world—I was 25 at the time—and he said something that I will never forget and have repeated to friends expecting children several times: “If people like you and I stop having children, we’ve ceded our world to the idiots. All intelligent people should have as many babies as possible to prevent all the thick, ungroovy Christians from taking over.”
When we were leaving, I mentioned in passing that I’d seen the infamous Hammersmith Palais show of his first UK solo tour in 1984, a concert that saw Cope performing a bloody act of self-mutilation. During the encore of Reynard the Fox, Cope snapped his mike-stand in half and proceeded to rake the jagged edge across his chest, back and stomach drawing lots of blood and generally freaking out the entire audience! Up until the very end it had been a slick, professional rock show. A girl standing near me puked when she saw what he had done. It cemented Cope’s reputation as a Syd Barrett-like acid casualty.
Cope laughed sheepishly and pulled out his wallet. “Well, you’ll appreciate this: Whenever I’m feeling like I am fucked in the head, I pull out this picture—” it was of a bloodied Cope from the concert I’d seen “—and I remind myself that however fucked up I think I am I am still not THAT fucked!”
And with that he was off. It’s often said of Cope that he’s the last of a dying breed or something to that effect. Not true. This implies that there were more like him, but Julian Cope’s a one off. All hail the Arch Drude!
Above, Julian Cope, tripping on LSD during a Top of the Pops performance of Passionate Friend. Read about this experience in Cope’s own words here.
THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant is Gen’s latest work, published by Feral House (and edited by Dangerous Minds own Jason Louv). It’s been produced in a high-quality, strictly limited edition of 999, signed copies, each with a 2-hour DVD of GP-O related video rarities, some directed by Derek Jarman and Peter Christopherson. Order yours here.
For the first time in a very long time, an interview with Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor, the legendary Firesign Theater. (Jan 8 & 9, 2010 shows in Whidbey Island, Washington, see www.firesigntheatre.com for more information)
Back in my Z Channel days, no actor seemed to show up more often—or was more welcomed by me—than England’s late great Oliver Reed. In his 40-year career, Reed made nearly 100 films ranging from The Brood, The Devils, Tommy, Burnt Offerings, to the film that killed him (in a Maltese pub, of course), Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
I think even as a kid, I was able to identify Reed’s onscreen appeal. It’s the same element missing from so many of today’s career-focused actors: joy. Reed loved performing, loved having an audience. As might be expected from the man who once famously said, “My only regret is that I didn’t drink every pub dry and sleep with every woman on the planet,” Reed loved life, loved living it, and he clearly planned to squeeze from it every possible drop of pleasure, pinball wizards and haunted houses be damned.
Even “King of Cool” Steve McQueen proved no match for the Oliver Reed lifeforce. The story goes that McQueen flew to London to discuss a project. Putting business aside for a bit, the pair went on a marathon pub crawl which resulted in Reed vomiting on McQueen. The project was never consummated.
Fortunately, we have all those many great films to remember Reed by. But now, thanks to YouTube, we can revisit some of his more memorable small-screen performances. Reed was a frequent, frequently drunk, guest on television both here and in the UK.
In a testament to the saccharine and stage-managed nature of our current talk show landscape, witness below as Reed gropes feminist writer Kate Millett on British TV’s After Dark. Thanks to After Dark’s supplying of Reed with a “booze buffet” before and during taping, what starts out as a sober-minded discussion on militarism, masculine stereotypes, and violence to women, soon devolves into something else:
And that’s just the mesmerizing endpoint to an escalating, tour de force Reed workout you can watch in its entirety here: I, II, III. But even on the dog-and-pony circuit this side of the Atlantic, Reed was no more willing to dilute his behavior. His face-off with David Letterman follows below:
. One day there will be statues in honor of James Hansen. Let’s just hope they don’t end up like the Statue of Liberty did in Planet of the Apes. Dr. Hansen is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
box set, these tracks sound way better in their original quadraphonic glory, not bounced down to stereo. Hey Fredrick has a completely different lead vocal, Volunteers is totally different, I think it was even recorded on a different day from the original, and The Farm is also a lot different).
comes immediately to mind.
was the baddest motherfucker alive.
, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If 
, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is 
from 1972 while Tara was running errands—I haven’t heard it in years—and it simply knocked me out. Produced by Barry Manilow, Ahmet Ertegun and the Grammy-award winning producer 
, but sadly, she never really caught on. There’s no good reason for it, but luckily her reputation has risen again in recent years due to reprints of her albums by Seattle-based label, 
.
by David Kaufman is certainly one of the best books I’ve read this decade and I wanted to tell you about it. I feel it’s a book that deserves a far wider audience than it originally got. Even though it tells the story of a very particular person and of a very particular “scene”—in this case Ludlam and his gender-bending Off Off Broadway troupe of drag queens, druggies and bohos—like a biography of say, Andy Warhol, the canvas is so widescreen and cinematic that it tells the tale of an entire era, not just the story of one man and his orbit. Ludlam’s story—which Kaufman spent a decade researching, interviewing over 150 people who knew the playwright—is simultaneously the history of Off Broadway theater in the late ‘60s to the late ‘80s, it’s also the story of pre and post-Stonewall gay life, the anecdotal histories of certain types of “only in NY” culture vultures and media mavens and, of course, the life of the complex and exasperating force of nature that was Charles Ludlam, a self-created character if ever there was one.
was released, in 1991. He was a fascinating guy to talk to, full of energy, his mind wandering off in every direction at once. My guess is also that he was probably pretty stoned that day!
. 