A funny clip from last nights South Park episode -
Stan's Dad is showing Stan how he produces music.
The comments on this clip have fallen into two distinct views
Trey Parker and Matt Stone can still hit a nerve.
It's 1982 and the world is still very worried about the evil that rock and roll is to young fans. Well, the world according to TV evangalists Paul Crouch, Jan Crouch, and Paul Crouch Jr. who laid their case to an audience of mugs like minded worriers that the devils music was most certainly evident and present in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven".
Armed with his trusty tape recorder spinning the tape backwards Crouch Jr took them through the whole sordid business. Be it some 11 years after the original record was released.
This backwards claptrap trick of the ear, but not that tricky, had been going on since the days of The Beatles.
32 years later in 2014 uploader clemtinite" discovered the real truth.
If Alro Guthrie ever had anyone to thank for his success, apart from the fans who bought his music, it would have to be the "narcs". He's spent a whole career telling funny stories and singing songs about his dealings with them, but as he says here
"I'm good now" so obviously no further problems with the Officer's.
If anyone represented the freewheelin' hippy of the 60's it had to be Arlo. His classic song/narration of "Alice's Restaurent" was born out of a shared belief with a million kids held in the grip of the all too real possibility that at any time they could be sent to fight in Vietnam.
And if anyone views the American 60's heady idealism with a snear of ridicule and cynicism they should imagine themselves in a similar position.. the very real possibilty of army conscription. So when a million teenagers take their views and respond in all the visible and imagined ways for freedom from the establishment then the 60's hippy is not just born out of a trend, rather more, it could just have been your last party, and for many it was.
Quite how Arlo made it through the years to be still singing his songs and telling his stories completely unscathed by it all is no small miracle in itself. Maybe he was just one of the lucky ones. Whatever it was, the decades have passed and he's never sort out the spotlight or often appeared in the press. He's what you might call a tradtional troubadour.
And happiest in front if his audience. They still pack out to see him.
This is one of his funny rambling stories in which he thanks the narc's and then leads the band into "Coming into Los Angeles". A timeless tune and some sharp lead playing by his band. One such, is his son Abe playing the keytar (you'll get it when you see it) who plays it just like it has 6 strings. The film is probably taken around the late 80's.
Lemmy Kilmister as an Agony Aunt? An unlikely scenario you might well think, but in 1994 a Canadian rock TV program persuaded Lemmy to cooperate for just that purpose and the widely perceived wild man of metal answered letters sent in by young viewers of the day. Bet the program makers thought they'd get some wild man metal answers to outrage the good folk in Canada. How wrong they were.
In what today might be described as one camera podcast footage, the noticeably younger looking Lemmy, (it was 20 years ago), sets about the thorny issues of teenage anxt with some very funny remarks and what might have surprised the recipients of the advice at the time, a genuine compassion to the problems that they lay before him. One of them a particularly delicate nature for a teenager is handled so well it would be hard pushed to see how anyone else could have advised anything more appropriate.
As the uploader said "the middle one (letter) was so sad and he was so lovely about it and so heartfeltly honest, genuine and sincere"
It's true, Lemmy has always been a man of the people.
Nicely dug out by Ron Kretsch at Dangerous Minds
At 4pm this afternoon it was announced Rik Mayall had died. So far there has been no additional information of the causes. Rik was 56.
He'll forever be associated with the early 80's Comic Strip alternative comedy that exploded the image and ideas of traditional stand-up and one liner comedy routines that had existed for so long on television.
Mayall and his comedy partner Ade Edmondson first came to notice at London's Comedy Strip with a completely off the wall anarchistic comedy routine called The Dangerous Brothers and from there were picked up by Channel 4 television to produce the similarly anarchic 'The Young Ones', about a group of disparate and contrasting student characters, aptly named after the very safe early 60's pop hit by Cliff Richard. The final joke on that was they later produced their own send up of the song which also became a hit. One or two of them could actually play a bit.
Then after the huge success of the Young Ones, Mayall and Edmondson et al went on to produce a series of one off Comic Strip films taking the rise out of most of the 80's establishment and culture. It was only a matter of time before their ridiculous parodies turned to rock and roll when they made 'The Bad News Tour' (picture above, Rik Mayall on far right). A completely fictitious rock band, not unlike Spinal Tap in concept but done with their usual street anarchy style. If Spinal Tap had seen and parodied the 70's American and UK rock band culture then Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson and co hit the mark perfectly with their 1987 post punk rubbish rock band touring the country in a clapped out transit van.
Here is an extract from one of the Bad News Tour series. In it Bad News perform their version of Bohemian Rhapsody and then are filmed discussing their rubbish contract with Rik reading out the fine details to the confused band, followed by an hilarious on location promotional shoot.
RIP Rik Mayall. You'll be really missed.
Before you know it the years move by and you get one of those moments when you think "wait a minute was that really 20 years ago?"
It happened just recently when BBC2 ran a series of shows on the anniversary of it's BBC2 channel. Of course that was a lot longer than 20s years ago, but the series looked at many of the success' the channel had in Music, Arts and Comedy over the decades. And there were many moments over it's 50 years, some surviving well, some slipping into bygone.
Then a face comes up that instantly brings a recollection so vivid it seems only like yesterday you saw it. But you realise it's 20 years since that face and those words were last heard.
It's 20 years this year the American comedian Bill Hicks passed away.
To hear his acerbic and sharp observations of a world 2 decades ago in such clarity they could have been made yesterday was both a joy and a shock. Because it seemed like nothing had changed. It was still a world just like Bill had called it.
Hicks had been successful in the UK for many years, more so than his home land at the time, and his audiences reveled in his stand up shows. Seen often on the small screen here he was the closest comedian we ever saw in the UK who could be compared to the likes of Lenny Bruce.
In Bill Hicks we heard rock and roll as comedy probably for the first time.
And that's why he's being written about here. Bill Hicks you are fucking missed.
This is not exactly the usual remit here but it does have sound and visuals and it is bizarre enough to include this post into the occasional avant garde series.
So this bit of jiggery pokery is a channel on youtube called Webdriver Torso.
What or whoever started this channel began on March 7, 2013. Since then some 77,389 videos (and rising) have been uploaded, each of which lasts just a few seconds, usually anything between 6 and 11 seconds seems to be the average.
Each video is a sequence of abstract slides in red and blue squares against a white background lasting a second or less each before it changes to the next arrangement of shapes . As they run through the sequence each one is numbered, eg. slide 001 etc etc. With each slide in the sequence there is a tone. The tone varies in pitch as the sequence runs. The uploaded file is always called Aqua.flv but given an abstract title for identification on upload in upper and lower case letters, like a secure password would have.
And that's it.
Due to the shear volume of these videos people have been trying to figure out what the dickens are they're actually for, if anything. Some say it might be to "test the performance of an upload" (in other words it belongs to YouTube).
Likewise "it's plausible that this is the very tool used to automate the uploading of the videos to YouTube".
Some say it looks curiously like a modern counterpart to the mysterious "numbers stations" of the cold war, (transmitted by spies).
And others have said "tmpAjbadK is the best one so far". And "I prefer tmp6iw RA". (ha)
So is it a network passing information? Is it an artists installation? Is it a new concept album? Is it here because it's here?
Here's The Webdriver Torso channel with all it's red and blue squares. Go and have a look and guess for yourself.
Now, here for your delight and contemplation is the rock and roll of "tmpwxm2CP ".
In 1984 Frank Zappa's live album title asked the question "Does Humor Belong in Music?" We know the answer. These days it would be easier to ask is there any humour in music? Thought of any yet? It's thin pickings.
Was a time when there was quite a bit of humour in rock and roll. But it just faded away over the decades. Maybe humour just became uncool in music for some. A reflection on todays fucked up times.
One of the great humourists in UK music for decades was Viv Stanshall, maybe lesser known overseas, but an ever present wit on UK radio and TV, and you could say a fairley wild eccentric since he first appeared with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band in the 60's. In many ways his madcap impersonations and theatricals summarised as much about "the swinging 60's" as any fashion or trend of the day. It was the unabandoned sense of freedom to do anything different and ask questions later. Stanshall's sense of the absurd was second to none.
'The Bonzo's' as they were effectionately called had a one off hit pop record (produced by McCartney under a pseudonym) and their albums 'Gorilla' (67) and 'The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse' (68) were in many a student record collection for many years after their first release.
It was also the Bonzo track "Death Cab for Cutie" written by Stanshall which played a guest role in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1967 which put them all into video pop history.
The Bonzo's finished in 1970 but Stanshall went solo with his many projects of madcap humour for decades later until in 1995 he fell asleep presumably from a certain amount of intoxication and died in the fire that subsequently broke out in his flat.
Here's the late legendary DJ John Peel, who's BBC radio show often featured a guest spot of Stanshall, explaining why there was... well only one Vivian Stanshall.
And below that the Bonzo's early 45 taken from 'Gorilla', "The Intro and The Outro" which had obviously inspired Mike Oldfield to include Stanshall in the memorable and similar voice over for Tubular Bells.
We have to thank uploader Mr Grady Smith for this video "Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013".
He has isolated lyrics in mainstream (nu) country music for the year. If you'd like replace this style with most other mainstream pop, rock, metal or rap, the lyrics may alter but the formula will not. We are now waist deep in the crap.
Let's hope it's 'Vive la difference' for 2014.
It should be said right off we have every respect for the band (and here is a link to their site as a way of compensation) but at times we all know when it comes to playing live no matter how good the idea was at the time you can end up straying quite unintentionally into the world of Spinal Tap.
So was the occasion when Serbian death metal band 'The Stone' played a Berlin open air festival in 2005 and the resultant preparation at the start of the gig was put into er...action.
What was that cameraman thinking.
Like all ageing rock bands reuniting is a constant theme, Spinal Tap last reformed in 2009. Nigel Tufnal (Christopher Guest) during a recent interview (The Guardian) spoke about a possible Tap reunion,
"We get asked to do shows on a regular basis. But what I will say is that we're in the midst of talking about something for next year..."
Here's Nigel discussing Joe Satriani.
Hasn't everyone wanted to work in a record store at some time in their lives. The perfect job. Endlesss music, the touch of vinyl, the in depth knowledge, the first pick for the collection, the latest, the greatest...
and then there's the public.
As the revelers of the mid summer summer solstice at Stonehenge are packing their druid bags for another year we'll celebrate the festival of the sun with a tribute to the road crew of Nine Inch Nails who thoughtfully laid on their very own 'Stonehenge' moment as a surprise for the band.
Watch for the bass players reaction as the guitarist encounters the magnificence of the moment.
Mick cavorts and prances wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, but Keef spies a problem off stage in the form of a berserker fan about to make his grand entrance. Fortunately Keef is well prepared for such eventualities and in an apparent well practiced maneuver, as quick as a ninja he delivers the coup de grace with the solid end of his axe. Job done he picks up the mark and continues the verse to Satisfaction. Mick looks aghast at the whole sorry affair.
As usual.
In 1974 US Comedy Central series, TV Funhouse produced this bizarre cartoon parody of Black Sabbath. The 'brummy' (Birmingham) accent of our heroes obviously gave the voice-over actors a real headache with Ozzie ending up having a touch of 'scouse' (Liverpool) and the rest sounding well.. deranged posh with a touch of cockney London (which they weren't).
The plot has the band going on holiday in Hawaii to unwind after a tour.
Contains scenes of nudity... and a dog.
Ladies and Gentlemen we give you..
the worst band in the world performing Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon'.
It's now 18 years since the ex-Bonzo Dog front man Viv Stanshall died, and it's more than clear his brand of care free humour and devilment has never been replaced. Which is rather an indictment of just how original the man was as well as the sorry lack of biting satire and imaginative risk taking in music today.
This month has seen the re-release of his solo album 'Men Opening Umbrellas' originally released in 1974 and his debut LP. For anyone not having heard or seen his wicked brand of quintessentially English humour, like a rock Monty Pythons on LSD he produced some seriously off the wall comedy aligned with a clever ear for referencing music from a myriad of pop styles to old world vaudeville. He was an intelligent artist and comedian and at the same time appeared verging on the insane. He railed against the establishment, the media and the music business with equal delight and delivered it in an irresistible cultured English upper class voice.
Here he aims derision at the whole radio personality world. A subject most worthy of ridicule.
If you want to explore Viv some more try his archive click here