Tonight brings a special guest post from Dangerous Minds pal, main Medicine man, and one of my dear childhood friends, Mr. Brad Laner:

Crass has always been one of my favorite bands.  While mostly known for their brilliant iconography and lyrics, media pranks, and communal origins/existence, I think they made tremendously creative and musically interesting records.  Drummer/lyricist Penny Rimbaud‘s drumming in particular is like none other I can think of.  The man managed to work a bizarre martial uh…march feel into nearly all of their material, and therefore made Crass sound like no other “punk” band before or since.

I recently picked up Rimbaud’s autobiography, Shibboleth, and while there is precious little about the actual music, it’s a fun and informative read.  An early moment finds teenage Jeremy Ratter (the future Mr. Rimbaud) crossing paths with The Beatles on Ready Steady Go.

As unlikely as that sounds, it’s thankfully preserved for all time on the YouTubes:

It also must be mentioned that Crass created the greatest lost feminist manifesto/concept album ever in 1981’s Penis Envy.  I’d be hard pressed to come up with another band that was able to so beautifully marry great heaping mouthfuls of bitterly angry lyrics to almost jubilantly inventive music.

Bonus I: Crass’s Nagasaki Nightmare (fan vid)

Bonus II: Crass’s Bata Motel (fan vid)

 
I’m not sure exactly what kind of digital voodoo LiveFeedVideoImaging applies to their historical footage, but the clarity of the following clips is pretty astounding.  In clip one, from ‘57, Billie Holiday performs Fine and Mellow from the Seven Lively Arts episode, “The Sound of Jazz.”  To compare and contrast the resolution, you can check out the extended YouTube clip here.

 
Even more amazing—in terms of clarity, anyway—is the following brief Beatles clip from ‘63’s Royal Variety Performance:

I’ve been listening to the music of Neil Innes a lot this week as I’ve been writing and as always, enjoying his work immensely. It’s a feast. Truly he is one of the best pop songwriters we have, a chameleon of musical styles from the earliest stages of his career. Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, psychedelic rock, Beatles pastiches to reggae, there’s nothing he can’t do. As Innes gets older, his genre hopping songwriting gets even better, something that can’t be said of all—or even many—of his Sixties contemporaries. Sadly, although he is undeniably a musician’s musician, Innes will never be recognized as such. Why? Because he’s funny, too.

Since I was a wee lad I’ve been been a fanatical fan of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the wonderfull zany group of Dada art school rejects featuring Innes and “ginger geezer” front man Vivian Stanshall (more on Viv another time, of this I can assure you). I discovered them listening to the Dr. Demento radio show when he played their cover of Hunting Tigers Out in “Indiah” (I heard Noel Coward and The Mothers of Invention for the first time during that same show, three life-long obsessions launched that fateful evening). I ran right out and spent my allowance on The History of the Bonzos, a two LP set with a glossy booklet filled with insane photographs and a history of the group. I loved every single song on it. Still do.

The Bonzos were beloved of all the really heavy rock groups of the Sixties and they opened for The Who, Led Zeppeln and the Kinks. Eric Clapton was a huge fan. Paul McCartney produced their only hit, I’m The Urban Spaceman (under the name Apollo C. Vermouth) and they made a guest appearance in the Beatles’ TV special Magical Mystery Tour as the band in the strip joint playing Death Cab for Cutie (and yes, this is where the band got their name). If someone hasn’t heard their seminal albums Gorilla, The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, Tadpoles or Keynsham (my favorite) they really don’t know as much about Sixties music as they think they do, it’s just that simple. It’s like never hearing Captain Beefheart or The Velvet Underground and thinking you’re clever, a glaring and unforgivable cultural blind spot, sez me.

I’ve gone out of my way for three decades now hunting down Bonzo Dog Band related bootlegs, especially video. There wasn’t a lot of it about until a few years ago when the DVD of Do Not Adjust Your Set was released. DNAYS was a hip Sixties tea-time kids show, beloved of children and parents (think Pee-wee’s Playhouse from an earlier era). It starred pre-Python Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (Terry Gilliam did animations for the show). The Bonzos were the primarly musical performers and members of the group appeared as extras in the comedy sketches. DNAYS was thought lost for many years when the ones that were released on DVD were re-discovered. Now there is a terrific amount of “new” Bonzo material for fans like me to feast on much hat has been uploaded to YouTube.

After the breakup of the Bonzos, Neil Innes continued his association with his former DNAYS co-stars by appearing and writing material for the final 1974 series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the series after John Cleese left (only Innes and Douglas Adams were ever given writing credits outside of the six Pythons during the show’s history). Innes appears in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as the minstrel and singing his memorable Dylan parody, Protest Song (“I’ve suffered for my music and now it’s your turn…”) in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Post-Python, Innes and Eric Idle created the wonderful Rutland Weekend Television series (think Brit version of SCTV) and Innes went on, solo, to The Innes Book of Records, a more musical oriented comedy series.

And of course there was The Rutles in All You Need is Cash, Idle and Innes’ adroit parody of the Beatles. Innes went on to a number of childrens shows in the 1980s and 90s such as Puddle Lane. He tours solo and with others and has reformed the Bonzo Dog Band for a reunion concert (with luminaries like Britwits Stephen Fry and Paul Merton filling in for the late Vivian Stanshall). A film has been made about Innes’ life and career (and featuring many of his famous friends) called The Seventh Python, which is now playing the film festivals circuit to great reviews.

Bonus Clip of George Harrison performing The Pirate Song on Rutland Weekend Television (hilarious)

Neil Innes Official Website

Neil Innes on Twitter

 
At least once a year, I find myself watching the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore version of Bedazzled, a film I find both uproarious and poignant in equal measures.  Peter Cook, playing perhaps the most charming devil figure in cinematic history, strikes a deal with hapless fry cook Dudley Moore: seven wishes for Moore’s soul (seeking reentry into heaven, Cook’s working his way to a hundred billion of ‘em).  The humor is dry (Cook walks in during a Moore suicide attempt and says, “I do hope this isn’t an awkward moment.”), the direction comes via Singin’ In The Rain‘s Stanley Donen.

 
The Cook-Moore comedy partnership started in England in the early ‘60s with Beyond The Fringe, and then went on to reach even greater absurdist heights with Not Only…But Also.  Many of those early clips have migrated over to YouTube, but just today I stumbled across a Not Only… clip I’d never seen before (above), one claiming to be part of a “prize-winning documentary made for Idaho television.”

In it, Cook and Moore perform their faux Beatles diddy, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” a song described by the 365 Days Project thusly:

The story goes that a few DJs played the record, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” claiming that it was an unreleased Beatles’ track, or else an advance from their forthcoming, highly anticipated masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s.”  True or not, the song managed to sneak its way on to several Beatles bootlegs throughout the 1970s, convincing many more that it was an authentic outtake.

In a letter from December of 1981, Moore offered a bit of insight: “Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a reference to drugs.  The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles.  But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us!”

But what really sticks with you is how perfectly this song captures the lollygaggery of the wondrous hippie fantasy machine that was the late 1960s. Its sparse instrumentation, with distant shimmering pianos, screaming babies, and jangly, seagull-like guitar effects set it apart from other psychedelic satires, but it goes further still.  Its inviting lyric is more genuinely hallucinogenic than much of what has been labeled “psychedelic” throughout the years.

Don’t miss the “surprise” guest that pops up at the end.  Below you can watch Peter Cook, whom Stephen Fry called “the funniest man who ever drew breath,” singing the Bedazzled theme song.

 
Cook-Moore: At The Psychiatrist

Cook-Moore: At The Art Gallery

Cook-Moore: At The Doctors

The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we’ve all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It’s highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. So the question—the only question, for the Beatles are hardly an unknown quantity—is simply are these new versions worth it? Are they that much different? Should people who’ve already bought these albums umpteen times buy them again? I’ll try to answer that question here for those of you who still might be on the fence.

 
While my video game muscles have long since atrophied (I was always more a pinball man), and I reach for my Revolver only rarely these days, I read every word of the NYT’s While My Guitar Gently Beeps, which describes the enormous effort that went into pulling off The Beatles: Rock Band.  Beyond its account, though, of welcome, surviving Beatles-Yoko Ono-Giles Martin d?ɬ©tente and their drive to capture as fully as possible what it’s like to play with the Fab Four, there’s some fascinating speculation in there as to the future of music. 

As McCartney himself muses in the end, “In 10 years?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ time you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll be standing there, and you will be Paul McCartney.  You know that, don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t you?  You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll have a holographic case, and it will just encase you, and you will be Paul McCartney.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù  Sounds good, Sir Paul.  But will I be able to be George, too? 

The trailer for the game follows below.  It’s directed by the Gorillaz’ visual muse, Peter Candeland.

 
Daniel Radosh in the NYT: While My Guitar Gently Beeps

Maybe we should add a new “WTF?” category:

NASA started to beam the song towards the North Star, 431 light years from Earth at midnight GMT on Monday, drawing congratulations from former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who mused that it marked “the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”

But today’s New Scientist asks whether such signals could expose us to the risk of attack from mean spirited aliens.

Beatles space broadcast ‘risks alien attack’

Thank you Mister Mark Jordan of London, England!