Here you’ll find William Burroughs having dinner with Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger; Grace Slick and Janis Joplin playing-up for the camera; and the usual suspects backstage at concerts. There are also a couple of fun video clips, including a chat-show meeting between Alfred Hitchcock and James Brown. It’s a bit like Us or Hello! Magazine with a degree in Pop Culture, and you can see more here.
Say what you will about Facebook but the fact that I can befriend life long heroes such as Zappa/Beefheart LP sleeve designer / visual muse Cal Schenkel and get a glimpse of his middle-of-it-all perspective is a wonderful by-product of selling out my privacy to gawd-knows who, really. Cal was gracious and generous enough to allow me to share these marvelous snapshots he took in 1968 at Zappa’s Laurel Canyon compound, known as The Log Cabin which once stood at the corner of Canyons Laurel and Lookout. The basement jam session here was also well documented in John French’s recent book as well as Bill Harkleroad’s Lunar Notes, which I quote here in order to give a small sense of what we’re looking at:
It turns out Frank was trying to put together this Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus thing, which The Stones later put together without him. I don’t know how many Rolling Stones were there at the time, but Mick Jagger certainly was, as were The Who and Marianne Faithfull. She was so ripped she was drooling - but what a babe - I was star struck! It was funny because Jagger really didn’t mean a whole lot to me at that point. I’d played all their tunes in various bands. To me he really wasn’t a signer - he was a “star”. But when I actually met him, all I can remember thinking is, “How could you be a star? You’re too little!” ....I ended up in this jam session in a circle of people about six or seven feet apart and we’re playing Be-Bop-a-Lu-La”! Done was to my immediate left wearing his big madhatter hat and to his immediate left was Mick Jagger and right around the circle all these people were playing, Frank included. So I’m jamming with these guys almost too nervous to be able to move or breathe. I started to ease up after I noticed that Jagger seemed to be equally intimidated. Then we went into Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ & Tumblin’” and a couple of blues things and that was it. It was such a strange experience - somehow just out of nowhere I’m down in Hollywood meeting Frank Zappa and this whole entourage of famous people like Jagger, Marianne Faithful [sic] and Pete Townshend. What an audition! There I was 19 years old and I’m very taken with these big important people.
Don Van Vliet and Mick Jagger
Marianne Faithfull
FZ and Miss Christine
More photos and a link to Cal’s online shop after the jump…
The campaign to Save the 100 Club continues apace with support from a host of rock musicians including Mick Jagger, who came out in support of the campaign earlier this month saying:
There’s a real need for these places - they have a connection with the past. And what is important is that you have places where bands can cut their teeth and places of a certain intimacy and size, that new bands can experiment in. There aren’t that many great places in London, or indeed any city, that you can say that about.
Jagger isn’t the only legend offering his support, Ray Davies of The Kinks has said:
Simon Cowell should underwrite the money needed to save the 100 Club, that would be a real payback. The amount of money he takes out of pop music he could put some back in. I’‘m very concerned about the 100 Club, The Kinks played there and it’s such an iconic venue we shouldn’t allow things like that to close down. Everything is being overrun by the chain stores and the conglomerates and it such a pity that the 100 Club has to suffer like that.
Other musicians including Mick Jones and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie have also spoken out against the possible closure, while Brian Travers from UB40 said:
It feels like live music is being pushed out of our cities to make way for car parks and duplex apartments. You are not on your own, all over the UK small live venues are being closed down. Just last November in Birmingham, the city’s premier live music venue The Rainbow was threatened with closure as well as noise abatement orders because a private property company had built downtown duplex apartments for the upwardly mobile who now don’t like the sound of downtown and wanted to turn it into a haven of peace and tranquility, live music being the first noise they wanted to mute.
This is a much bigger issue than just a noisy musicians being told to turn down the volume, this an all out attack on the UK’s finest export, music. If we are not careful our culture will be irreversibly damaged. As you have quite rightly said pretty soon there will be no where left for young bands to learn their craft.
Steve Diggle from The Buzzcocks said:
The 100 Club is as important as St Paul’s Cathedral!
While Frank Black from The Pixies has pledged £100,000 to the campaign and Liam Gallagher wrote a letter in support saying the 100 Club is “very rock n roll” and that its a shame as he “fancied playing there with the mighty Beady Eye.”
Save the 100 Club organizer, Jim Piddington tells Dangerous Minds that £150k has already been raised, but more is needed if they are to reach the target of £500k. A fund-raising gig is to be held at the venue on Thursday, 25 November, headlined by Specials guitarist Roddy Radiation and the Skabilly Rebels, and a line-up that also includes Chas Hodges, and a selection of “very special guests” who “are also expected to join the bill”.
If interested in attending the gig or in Saving the 100 Club please check details here.
Keith, well we all know about Keith Richards’ appetite for destruction, with a particular emphasis on smack, but Mick, too??? From the NME:
Mick Jagger’s former partner Jerry Hall has claimed that he regularly used heroin in the 1970s.
Hall, who has four children with The Rolling Stones frontman and split with him in 1990, says she managed to wean him off the drug.
Telegraph.co.uk reports that Hall wrote in her new autobiography: “Mick had told me he took LSD every day for a year in the ‘60s. He also admitted he was smoking heroin. I was disgusted. I told him I couldn’t see him if he took drugs, saying, ‘Go away and don’t come back until you’re straight’. He succeeded – he had amazing will power.”
Jagger himself has previously remained secretive about his use of heroin, denying that the drug was his when it was found by police at his Chelsea home in 1969.
Sir Mick, thus far, has made no comments on Hall’s claims.
Tattoo You? More like “fuck you” if your names happen to be Ronnie, Charlie and Bill!
Business Insider asked former Windows head, Brad Silverberg how he and his team got the Rolling Stones song “Start Me Up” for use in the company’s marketing campaign for Windows 95. What transpired makes for a rather amusing tale:
The Stones are a Corporation, with Mick as CEO, Keith as COO. Their business happens to be music. Those two make decisions. The other band members are essentially employees.
The Stones had not licensed their music for TV commercials. Mick was reluctant to license the song to us because of “artistic purity.” But Keith apparently has a higher burn rate than Mick, or not as good as an investor. He told Mick he could use the money and ultimately convinced Mick to do the deal. At the same time, the Stones were at a low point in their career and looking to become relevant again, and Win 95 looked like it could be a big hit and give them a helpful association and visibility.
The final version of the song was delivered for the commercial. We noticed though that it was not the studio version, but rather a more recently recorded live version. We pushed back and got the familiar studio version. The reason we got the other version was some of the band members in the newer version were more recent, and Mick/Keith got much higher royalties for themselves from that version than the studio one. Nice try. But it was tense till the very end.
Since we at Dangerous Minds have previously found ourselves marveling at his film Performance, it only makes sense to salute the wonderful English filmmaker Nicolas Roeg on this, his 81st birthday.
Check out Steve Rose’s great interview in the Guardian with the oft-aloof and prickly director (from which I paraphrase this post’s title), and for heaven’s sake check out the man’s films. He’s currently working on a screen adaptation of Martin Amis’s book Night Train.
Here’s a cool overview, with five themes spotlighted, by the excellent film video-essayist Hugo Redrose.
No one, I repeat no one, can amuse themselves quite like Sir Mick Jagger, seen here at the World Cup, enjoying himself as no one else can! With Bill Clinton and Katie Couric making cameo appearances. Some of these are laugh out loud funny, but not really at Mick’s expense, either. Strange that. He’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash and don’t you f’ing forget it!
After a couple of drug-bust-heavy years off the road, the Rolling Stones were at a few turning points as of July 5, 1969. Their back-to-basics Beggars Banquet album signaled the end of the rainbow dream of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and a return to a therapeutic blues mode that would last them long into the ‘70s. Most importantly, guitarist Mick Taylor of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers had replaced a drug-soaked Brian Jones, and Jones had been found drowned in the pool of his Sussex home two days before their previously booked free performance in Hyde Park. The Stones decide to go on with the show. As shown below, Britain’s leading independent Granada Television was there.
Granada put the biggest rock concert in England’s history to that point (250,000 people, with Woodstock planned for a month later) into context by chatting with the band, the fans and members of the amazingly efficient Kent chapter of the Hells Angels. Unfortunately, the Stones’ next huge concert would demonstrate that the Kent Angels neglected to exchange notes with their West Coast brothers about how to best secure a large crowd…
Please note: Live Video seemed to be the only free video site that’s hosting the full documentary. Unfortunately, the user experience after the jump is less than optimal—the video just starts and buffers a lot. It seems best to just pause the screen and let it load before playing. Please remember that it’s free, and that for best results you can buy the DVD by clicking the link below.
Much like a TARDIS, a Borges short story, or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg‘s 1970 film, Performance, is far bigger on the inside than its outside might indicate. Starring Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, and with its primary action confined to that of a London flat, Performance manages to explore, in its uniquely heady and hypnotic way, such notions as gender, identity and madness as a function of creativity.
In fact, it feels at times like there’s so much going on within Performance‘s 105 minutes, in terms of philosophical scope and ambition, movies like The Matrix or 2001: A Space Odyssey seem almost puny in comparison.
And much like the London flat itself, Performance is a movie to lose yourself in. Since my preteen exposure to it via the Z Channel, I must have watched it a good dozen times. Nevertheless, the film continues to surprise me. Disorient, too.
Part of this was due, no doubt, to the alchemical editing of co-writer/director Donald Cammell, who sadly, took his own life in ‘96. Cammell’s ultimately tragic life and career is certainly deserving of its own post at some point, but, in the meantime, what follows is Part I of an absolutely worthwhile 3-part documentary on the making of Performance and the controversy that’s dogged the film ever since its release 30 years ago. Links to the other parts follow below.
What follows below are a pair of newly uploaded Rock Music Exposed clips from YouTube channeler, Triplexity, and were apparently culled from the two-part ‘89 documentary, Hell’s Bells (which, to my knowledge, remains in VHS-only exile).
The intro, clip 1 of 36 (!) and found here, lays out the Hell’s Bells agenda, “to help people understand the big picture, peel back the veneer of pop culture, and gaze into the bedrock of truth that lies beneath.”
Since it also hopes to serve as, “a wake-up call, an alarm warning of the fire raging just down the hall,” you can bet your salvation its earnest-but-porny-looking narrator means a “Christian truth.” I know, sounds like a snooze. We’ve seen—and smirked—at this kind of crap on numerous occasions.
But readers of Dangers Minds might find far more compelling the below clips, 12 and 13. In them, Hell’s Bells puts under the Christian magnifying glass Kenneth Anger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary and The Beatles.
Genius funny account of a guy who waited on Mick Jagger in a Seattle toy store:
One of the nice parts of the job was getting to meet the celebrities that shopped there. The biggest of those was Mick Jagger. It was during the Stones?
Beautiful, erotic, phantasmagoric, the films of Kenneth Anger are a national treasure. Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Marianne Faithfull, Anton LaVey, and a parade of other 60s luminaries collaborate on this selection of short films. They range from rich mystical imagery and visual essays of psychedelic color to insider documentary footage of bikers and a glittering love letter to early black and white film. Bring blankets, picnic dinner and drinks for the lawn. Please join us under the stars for this very special screening with one of our most legendary filmmakers.
Sunday, July 19th
Hollywood Forever Cemetery
6000 Santa Monica Blvd (at Gower)
Gates 7:30 pm movie 9:00 pm
$10 donation tickets available at gate
Parking available inside
, which I quote here in order to give a small sense of what we’re looking at:
