INTERGALACTIC VIBES FROM THE CAPTAIN OF THE BOUNTY
Merrell Fankhauser is one of our truely great space cadets. He has been to the stars and has beamed back good vibes. Here is a great video of him in Maui, touch the screen and you will get a contact high. Listen to his music as H.M.S Bounty, Fapardokly, Mu, all brilliant. He is a legend and long may he orbit the earth.
Two dumb and wonderful amateur videos for two of the best songs by The Angry Samoans. I love the animation particularly. The artist should be proud. The first two LPs by the Angry Samoans are among the all time best US Punk records. I would love to have seen them in the day. They have reformed and seem pretty good but somehow you know it isnt the same. This is teenager music to the max! Both songs from the 1982 LP Back from Samoa. Here lies the fullblown joy.
Jeff Beck Group with Rod on vocals do a real wangin' version of The Temptations 1966 hit from an early BBC Saturday Club appearance in March 1967. These BBC sessions show just how seminal the Jeff Beck Group was. This is heavy rock well before Zeppelin. Rod later did the song with the Faces and a more soulful groove but here Jeff just lets rip. Not even on YouTube! Find the full BBC sessions for a limited time in the Big O audio archive or here. Turn it up real loud now.
A great rare film of the wonderful Byrds with McGuinn, White, York and Parsons. They still have the remnants of their mop tops but I don't think there were many haircuts for the next few years after this.
Another dope bomb from 1992 - When this video was made Tung Twista (now Twista) was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's fastest rapper - unfortunately the dude's lost his crown since then - great choon nonetheless! crank up tha volume!
One of my favourite Generation X songs. You can hear how much Tony James
loved Mott the Hoople but more than that it sort of captures the
feeling of being a kid roaming around in west London (even if he was a
Fulham fan). Here is some cool film of the band in the studio.
I've been looking for this Tommy Bolin documentary for a while. Anything about this smokin' hot way under-rated guitar legend is uber cool by me. I guess this means i'll have Teaser cranked up loud for the next week. Oh well, worse things can happen. ENJOY!
Paul Kelly has godlike status in Australia and has been churning out great rock n roll for decades. After making 18 LPs and receiving all sorts of awards and gold records he probably deserves a much better international reputation than he has and is well worth investigating for anyone who likes bluesy psychedelic rock and consistently well crafted songs. I just started listening to some of his tunes and got hooked. He hasn't really had too many off periods. This song came out in 1998 on the LP Words and Music. Maybe he is a little bit too salt of the earth for international stardom but you can't help thinking that if twerps like John Mayer can be so huge then Kelly should have his 15 minutes at least. You can find everything and more here. I really recommend it. There's a lot of really great stuff and i've still yet to hear a dud.
LOST CASSETTE MIX OF MASTERPIECE LP DOES NOT DISAPPOINT
Big up to White Trash Soul for posting what we had all heard about but never heard. The cassette mix of The Heartbreakers LAMF was long rumoured to be the definitive version. Many a time have i cast my eyes over the cassette rack in Oxfam praying for that eurika moment. I don't even remember seeing it around back in the day when I used to get Heartbreakers rarities off a mate who used to work for Track records. I still have a few promo copies of the Chinese Rocks 12" and my LAMF tee shirt disintegrated from one too many sweaty gigs but i never even caught a glimpse of the LAMF cassette. Who knew? Slowly the word got around that this little baby contained the holy grail of LAMF mixes, and yet even after LAMF revisited and the Lost 77 mixes there is still scope to be blown away by what is without doubt a far superior version.
Quality rockin blog White Trash Soul kindly offer a fuller explanation http://whitetrashsoul.blogspot.in/2012/09/the-heartbreakers-lamf-original-uk.html
I recommend their FLAC download of side one and side two. It simply warrents lossless listening but someother helpful mother has posted it on YouTube so put on you dancing shoes and
Johnny owned the Lyceum in 1984. First up he played in October 1983. Support was Jayne County who had just recently become fully Jayne. I remember he/she took its shirt off onstage to reveal some barely healed surgery scars. Jayne was great though. I can still hear her doing the spacey electronic riffs of Berlin from that night and of course "If you don't want to fuck me". Johnny was really on fantastic form, maybe one of the best shows i saw him play, pulling "little Patti muppet" on stage for Great Big Kiss and Peter Perrett for Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory. How great was it when less than six months later Johnny comes back with the original Heartbreakers. They should have rolled a red carpet down the Strand. This was the first time in a few years that the full line up had played.
Johnny and Jerry and Walter and Billy rocked righteously and a great night was had by all. Even so the strange thing was that in fact the October show was slightly better. Well that was my memory at the time although when they cleaned up the tapes and released it as a live album it sounded pretty damn good. Just goes to show what one's expectations were back then. JT could come out have a fix, fall asleep on stage and still blow away most of todays bands with time to spare. And now here we are in the digital age and there is film of the show on YouTube. I am still trying to spot myself and my pals in the crowd. I think everyone I knew was there. I'm sure I taped it myself too. Yes my war against the music industry had already begun.
Now someone is trying to sell a ticket stub for $20 on EBay and $100 for the October show. I never throw away ticket stubs now. Its just too late.
Housos. I fucking love Housos. Why doesnt the world love Housos? Its like fully fucked. This is the funniest show ever and its only really appreciated down-under. The main man is Paul Fenech who writes and stars. He has already done the same in Pizza and Swift and Shift Couriers, with almost identical cast. Housos is the funniest. See it online. Do it now!
Check out this trailer for one of the best episodes:
"I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION DESTROYED BY MADNESS ..."
I have developed a new found respect for Allen Ginsberg. I once went to hear him read at The Continental Divide in New York City only to walk out after he spent most of his time sitting cross-legged ringing bells and chanting Buddhist mantras. He just seemed like a twit who had become a self-parody. Now i like his poetry a lot and find him an interesting guy who was a catalyst for a lot of the other Beat artists. This post is even unintentionally timely in that Ginsberg has just been given the Hollywood treatment in the new movie Howl directed by Rob Epstein and with the poet dude played by James Franco. It is reported to be good. I recommend reading his letters. Amusing stories about trying to turn the Dalai Lama on to acid and such like. There is a big volume of complete poems too that I keep opening in bookshops intending to buy.
Here is the earliest recording of AG reading Howl in February 1956 at Reed College:
The Guv'nor straps up for the big session upstairs
The Guv'nor has left the studio. THE Guv'nor. Big Jim Sullivan. The dude who made the twang that rocked the world. Inventor of British rock and roll. Taught guitar to Richie Blackmore and Pete Townshend, persuaded Jim Marshall to make amplifiers ... any more credentials needed. Plenty on offer. Played on over 1,000 chart entries, over 50 number one singles from Frankie Vaughn to Alvin Stardust. John Barry's James Bond Theme, Dave Berry's The Crying Game, Michael Cox's Sweet Little Sixteen (a fab Joe Meek production that has you waiting for the searing solo every time), PJ Proby's Hold Me (the first UK record to use a fuzz box), Georgie Fame's Yeh Yeh the list goes on and on. (His website TRYS to list them all: http://www.bigjimsullivan.com/Pamra.html ). For years Big Jim was one of a handful of session guitarists who dominated the British pop music industry alongside Jimmy Page, Richie Blackmore, and Vick Flick. Big Jim's own work consisted of some unusual sitar-based records before he finally formed his own band Tiger in the 1970s. They had their moments but he was a session man at heart and when Page was blowing away the States with Zep, Big Jim was getting paid in Vegas dodging women's panties behind Tom Jones.
