RIP Les Paul (1915 – 2009)

Les Paul (1915 – 2009)

RIP Les Paul, 94, American guitarist and inventor. In 1954, Les Paul commissions Ampex to build the first eight track tape recorder, at his own expense.

“Country Living” recording above related to Les Paul via an “Ampex + Jahsonic” Google search.

Jahsonic is interested in the “recording studio as a musical instrument.”

“Disco Sucks” @30

On this day 30 years ago in 1979, Disco Demolition Night heralded the last days of disco.

Disco started in small nightclubs in American urban centers in the early seventies with imported records such as “Soul Makossa.” During the 1970s disco steadily increased in popularity reaching a high point with Saturday Night Fever in 1977.

This was followed with a homophobic, racist backlash two years later when rock music fans started to consider disco culture — with its perceived drug-fuelled sexual promiscuity — silly and effeminate, and objected to the idea of centering music around an electronic drum beat and synthesizers instead of live performers.

Another (more masculine) subculture, punk music, arrived on the scene.

Parodies of disco music became common. The backlash was epitomized in Chicago by the riotous Disco Demolition Night.

Nile Rodgers, guitarist for the popular disco era group Chic said “It felt to us like Nazi book-burning, This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco’.”

There was never a focused backlash against disco in Europe.

Now, for the first time on this blog: local news coverage of this Dionysian moment.

Lee Hazlewood @80

“Some Velvet Morning“.

click to play

Lee Hazlewood @80

Lee Hazlewood (9 July 1929 – 4 August 2007) was an American musician best-known for “These Boots Are Made for Walkin“[1] and “Some Velvet Morning“.

“Some Velvet Morning” is WMC #347

“These Boots” is WMC #348

RIP Tom Wilkes (1939 – 2009)

RIP Tom Wilkes (1939 – 2009)

Rare poster to the Monterey International Pop Festival

Tom Wilkes (born July 30, 1939 – June 28, 2009) was an American art director, designer, photographer, illustrator, writer and producer-director.

He won a Grammy Award for the Who’s “Tommy”[1]. He was also known for designing the cover art for hit albums by artists like Neil Young (Harvest[2]), George Harrison and the Rolling Stones (Flowers[3], Beggars Banquet[4]) and many more.

In 1967 Wilkes was the art director of the Monterey International Pop Festival. He created all graphics and printed materials for Monterey Pop, including festival’s psychedelic poster[5].

tip of the hat to http://themusicsover.wordpress.com.

RIP Drake Levin (1946 – 2009)

RIP Drake Levin (1946 – 2009), 62, American guitarist (Paul Revere & the Raiders), cancer.

“(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”

Drake Levin (August 17, 1946 – July 4, 2009) was an American musician who performed under the stage name Drake Levin. He was best known as the guitarist for Paul Revere & the Raiders.

Paul Revere and the Raiders is an American rock band that saw enormous mainstream success in the second half of the 1960s and earlier 1970s, best-known for hits like “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)“[1] (1971), “Steppin’ Out”[2] & “Just Like Me”[3] (1965), “Kicks”[4] (1966) (ranked #400 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time) , “Let Me”[5] (1969), and “Hungry“[6](1966).

see also(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone, garage rock, Nuggets

I know that it is probably sacrilege to some of you but here is a blasphemous version of “Indian Reservation” by German disco band Orlando Riva Sound:

“Indian Reservation“

RIP Allen Klein (1931 – 2009)

RIP Allen Klein, 77, American businessman, Beatles and Rolling Stones manager, Alzheimer’s disease.

Allen Klein poses with Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at a fictitious “contract signing”, 1969.

Allen Klein (December 18, 1931 – July 4, 2009) was an American businessman and record label executive. His career highlights included having such celebrated clients as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Many of his famous clients eventually turned against him, however, and he became involved in acrimonious legal battles with them. At one time he owned the rights to Chilean director Jodorowsky’s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain and as a form of retribution refused to show them during 30 years.

Allen Klein also produced a trilogy of spaghetti westerns starring and written by Tony Anthony copying Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name persona. A Stranger In Town and The Stranger Returns and The Silent Stranger. Klein and Anthony also collaborated on the film Blindman featuring Ringo Starr as a Mexican bandito.

A second reminder: I’m having fun at my Tumblr account. I draft these posts there and post anything I find which hasn’t (or not extensively) been blogged about by others.

RIP Karl Malden (1912 – 2009)

RIP Karl Malden (1912 – 2009)

Click for sources

Carroll Baker in
Baby Doll (1956) – Elia Kazan [amazon.com]
image sourced here.

Karl Malden is personally best-remembered for his portrayal of vulnerable and gullible chumps. The epitome of the weak character is the naive cuckold in Baby Doll.

Baby Doll is a 1956 film which tells the story of the childlike bride of a Mississippi cotton gin owner, who becomes the pawn in a battle between her husband and his enemy.

The movie was written by Tennessee Williams and was based on his one act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. It was directed by Elia Kazan.

The film is credited with both the name and originating the popularity of the babydoll nightgown, which derives from the costume worn by Baker’s character.

The Catholic Legion of Decency succeeded in having the film withdrawn from release in most U.S. theaters because of their objections over its sexual themes. The movie was banned in many countries like Sweden, due to its allegedly exaggerated sexual content. The film was also condemned by Time, which called it the “dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited”.

Baby Doll is World Cinema Classic #110

PS In one of my other favorite performances he plays a blind man in The Cat o’ Nine Tails (Dario Argento) in which he reminded me of the blind mother in Peeping Tom. There he is quite different from the chump stereotype.

Stonewall riots @40

Stonewall riots @40

From the New York Times of June 29, 1969:

HUNDREDS OF YOUNG MEN WENT ON A RAMPAGE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plain-clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homo-sexual clientele.

Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them in investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.–New York Times, June 29, 1969[2]

The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York City police officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police.

Except for Illinois, which decriminalized sodomy in 1961, homosexual acts, even between consenting adults acting in private homes, were a criminal offense in every U.S. state at the time the Stonewall Riots occurred: “An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years—or even life—in prison. In 1971, twenty states had ‘sex psychopath‘ laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and [in] seven states they could be castrated.” (Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter, p. 15) Castration, emetics, hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were used by psychiatrists to attempt to cure homosexuals through the 1950s and 1960s.(Katz, pp. 181–197.)(Adam, p. 60.)

Subsequent nightclubs, such as The Sanctuary, often billed as the first modern DJ-led nightclub of New York, epitomized the post-Stonewall era, “when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police.” –Peter Braunstein

RIP Sky Saxon (1946 – 2009)

RIP Sky Saxon, 63, American, a minor rock musician known of his work with The Seeds has vanished from the firmament of 20th century music. Saxon enjoyed his floruit in the 1960s, his success was limited to North America.

Sky “Sunlight” Saxon (1946 – June 25, 2009) was best known as the leader and singer of the 1960s Los Angeles garage rock band The Seeds, and his hit single “(You’re) Pushin’ Too Hard” (1965).

The Seeds‘  raw and abrasive energy and simple, repetitive lyrics came to exemplify the garage rock style of the 1960s. Other notable recordings include “Mr Farmer” (1967), “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” and “Two Fingers Pointing on You,” which was included in Psych-Out, directed by Richard Rush in 1968.

“Pushin’ Too Hard“, released in 1965 as a single, is a musical composition by The Seeds, dealing with teenage angst about an unfaithful girl. “Lying girls” was a common theme of garage rock compositions.

Garage rock is a raw form of rock and roll that was first popular in the United States and Canada from about 1963 to 1967. During the 1960s, it was not recognized as a separate music genre and had no specific name. In the early 1970s, some rock critics retroactively labelled it as punk rock. However, the music style was later referred to as garage rock or ‘60s Punk to avoid confusion with the music of late-1970s punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash. The garage rock revival can be traced to the early 1970s, following the release of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 in 1972.

pHinn has more clips [1]

RIP Michael Jackson (1958 – 2009)

RIP Michael Jackson (1958 – 2009)

Thriller (1982) – Michael Jackson [Amazon.com]

I’ve mentioned Michael Jackson twice[1][2] on this blog, once when I was amazed by his choice of footage in “They Don’t Care About Us“[3], and once when I did the obituary of James Brown when I mentioned that Brown’s “rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson”.

Jackson was the embodiment of things gone awry as the result of mediated fame in the 20th century, when he was catapulted from child prodigy[4] to natural freak[5].

With more than 100 million albums sold, Thriller (1982) is the bestselling album of all time and is iconic in the history of 20th century popular music, where he is the natural heir to Elvis Presley. Beyond both dying from an abuse of prescription drugs, parallels beween Presley and Jackson are numerous (Graceland/Neverland). Lisa Marie Presley, for a short time married to Jackson in the nineties wrote at the time of Jackson’s death that he knew “exactly how his fate would be played out” and feared his death would echo that of Elvis Presley.

Jackson dies, long live Jackson.

Shinehead’s reggae version of “Billie Jean.”

Here he is reincarnated in Shinehead’s reggae version[6] of “Billie Jean.”[7]. But one of the earliest samples of “Billie Jean” was in 1983, when Italian studio project Clubhouse mixed Steely Dan’s “Do It Again” (1981) with “Billie Jean” as the “Do It Again Medley with Billie Jean“[8] .
*Daryl Hall has claimed that Michael Jackson admitted to copying the bassline from “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)“[9] in his song “Billie Jean“.

PS. For those of you who miss the Jahsonic old style of haphazard blogging about anything he finds, please check Jahsonic’s microblog[10] at Tumblr.