I’m the guest on this week’s installment of the That Record Got me High podcast. I joined co-hosts Barry Stock and Rob Elba to discuss an album that I like to listen to a lot while I’m high, Jefferson Airplane’s lysergically-soaked 1967 longplayer After Bathing at Baxter’s. I think it’s one of the defining albums of the 1960s. I also think it’s an album that all too many people keep flipping past in the used record bins—dirt cheap Jefferson Airplane albums are ubiquitous in any American record store—and this is a shame. There’s quite a vast difference between the Jeffersons Airplane and Starship, but commercial dreck like “Play on Love” and the horrific ear-bleeder “We Built This City” has all but insured that the Jefferson Airplane albums are unfairly ignored. I wanted to try to rehabilitate their rock snob bona fides in my own small way.

One thing that I had intended to mention on the show but forgot about, is the album’s distinctive cover. It was drawn by underground cartoonist Ron Cobb who would go on to design the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars a decade later.
 

Front and back of a 1993 Topps ‘Star Wars’ trading card
 

Counter culture icon and Editor of Dangerous Minds (www.dangerousminds.net), Richard Metzger, dove into the psychedelic deep end of the pool to discuss a record that STILL gets him high: Jefferson Airplane’s darker, heavier follow-up to Surrealistic Pillow, “After Bathing at Baxter’s”. Coffee was consumed, minds were expanded, and by the end the Summer of Love felt more like a hazy hangover.

 
There are certain things you don’t know you’re missing in life until you’re exposed to them, right? EXP TV just might be one of those things. It’s got an aesthetic that hovers around the same territory as Everything is Terrible! and Vic Berger, it even reminds me of Mike Kelley’s stuff, but that’s only going to get you in the ballpark. Which is good enough, but you just have to click on the link and see for yourself. It’s a barrage of strange imagery and is really quite an inspired—not to say elaborate and work intensive—art project. And just in time for a pandemic. Bored with Netflix? Have enough Amazon Prime? Maxed out on HBO Max? You need to tune in, turn on and drop your jaw to the floor at what’s screening on EXP TV.

EXP TV the brainchild of Tom Fitzgerald, Marcus Herring, Taylor C. Rowley.  I asked them a few questions via email.
 
What is EXP TV? What should someone expect to see when they get there?

EXP TV is a live TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera from our site at exptv.org.  We stream 24/7.

The daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV.

What treasures would reward the loyal Video Breaks viewer?  Ventriloquist dummy sales demos, Filipino Pinocchios, LSD trip-induced talking hot dogs, Liberace’s recipe tips, French synth punk, primal scream therapy seminars, Deadhead parking lots, empty parking lots, Israeli sci-fi, scary animatronics, teenage girls’ homemade art films, Belgian hard techno dance instructions, Czech children’s films about UFOs, even Danzig reading from his book collection. And that’s all in just one hour!

We’ve been collecting obscure media for decades, but we’ve sorted through it all and cherry-picked the funny, the bizarre, the relevant, the irrelevant, the visually stunning, the interesting, the infamous, the good, the bad and the fugly.  We’ve done all that so the viewers don’t have to.  They get to kick back and experience the sweet spot without having to dig for rare stuff themselves or sit through an entire movie waiting for the cool part.

Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art.

Aside from our unique tone and deep crate of video materials, one thing that really sets us apart in 2020 is our format.  We are *not* on demand, we are *not* interactive—just like old TV!  You can tune in anytime and something cool will be on. 

That’s EXP TV in a nutshell.  It’s funny, it’s art, it’s music, it’s infotainment, it’s free and it’s 24/7.

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It’s 24/7?

Yes.

What does EXP stand for?

EXP stands for…experimental, expanded, experiential, expert, exploration, expressive, expounded, exposed, explained, expeditionary, unexpected, exponents, expatriot, expedited, expectorant, exposure, expelled, expendable, expensive, express, exploded, expired…EXP TV!

We have a little bumper on our Instagram @exp.tv that illustrates this

How much material did you have in the can, ready to go at launch?

We had been quietly working on the channel for over a year so we had quite a bit of material.  When the pandemic hit, we decided to launch early as a beta so people could have an alternative to the big streaming channels - something totally different.

In this modern world of all these different streaming platforms, it feels like you spend more time deciding what to watch than you do actually watching something.  We wanted to make something you could just turn on and leave on for hours—days even—and you’d be guaranteed to catch something interesting.  We basically just made the channel we wanted to watch.

Right now, we have about 60 hours in rotation and we are regularly adding new material—new Video Breaks, new episodes of our ongoing series, and hatching entirely new concepts for shows. Stay tuned for Kung Fu Wizards coming soon!

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Do you have themes? What are some of your more elaborate productions on the channel?
Our Nite Owl block has a roster of shows centered around specific themes.  A few examples include…

Pixel Power -  an homage to the early days of computer graphics.
Witches Brew - a tour through the history of witches on film.
Total News - a completely gonzo take on nightly news past and present.
Bollyweird - a huge compilation of the most “out there” Bollywood musical numbers.
Pomegranates - a survey of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, set to Persian psych music.
Underground USA - a continuing series archiving 80s alt culture.
Cosmonaut - our tribute to Soviet sci-fi.
Incredibly Strange Metal - exactly what it sounds like.
They Call Him Bigfoot - a search for Sasquatch in cinema.
Jamaica, No Problem - a crash course in Jamaican music culture.
The David Bowie Mixtape - The Thin White Duke’s glory years captured on film and video.
Our Star Wars Mixtape - Star Wars gone wild, gone weird, and gone wrong.
Cats - an exploration of cats in cinema and beyond.
Wow - a survey of psychedelic animation from around the world.
Mosaic - meditative compilation of short films from the world of fine art.
La Videotheque - French yeye music promo compilation.
Disco Odyssey - our series exploring the wild world of Italo disco and other dance music mutations.
And there’s so much more…

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Where do you mostly find stuff? Or maybe, how do you search for it?

We have been collecting video materials for decades. Years of VHS tape-trading, pouring through mom and pop video stores (RIP), even the internet!  It makes our day to stumble upon a Bulgarian sci-fi animation title we never heard of.  We love our work! Like a hip hop dj/producer is looking for the perfect beat, we’re always searching for that perfect “clip”, that magic moment, that video gem.
 

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What are some of your future plans for EXP TV?

The first priority is continuing to add more cool stuff to the site.  We’re looking forward to the time when there’s hundreds of hours of free entertainment. 

An unexpected but welcome side effect of our offbeat media expertise is that we’ve been getting work as creative consultants to dig up obscure clips and offer fresh takes on commercials and live events.  Last year EXP TV was hired to program the Red Bull Music Film Festival in LA, and we brought in cool guests like Sun Ra Arkestra, Man Parrish, Lady Bunny, and Earth.  Our mixtapes were the throughline of the fest. Some of our shows made it down to Austin Film Society and Music Box in Chicago. Having met as programmers at Cinefamily, our background is in public exhibition, but we’re interested in exploring new ways to subject the world to our perspective. We’ve been running the stream on Twitch and Periscope. Someday we want to take a bunch of old CRT TVs and use Raspberry Pi’s to make terrestrial TVs that you flip on and they only play EXP TV.  We think that would be a fun gift for local galleries and bars. 

We’re currently working on the EXP TV Apple TV app, but we wanna see EXP TV everywhere…we can see opportunities for our particular style of obscure video mixtapes as an HBO series or maybe even its own section on Netflix!
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In 1977, King Crimson founder Robert Fripp—who’d left the world of music in 1974 when he dissolved the group—moved to NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen (and then later a place on the Bowery) and immersed himself in the city’s punk and new wave music scene. Inspired by New York’s frantic energy and wanting to combine the new sounds he was hearing with “Frippertronics,” the droning tape loop system he had developed with Eno, the final product was his solo record, Exposure.

The ambitious Exposure is one of the ultimate art-rock documents of late 70s New York, a classic album that sadly seems to have fallen through the cracks for many music fans. It’s a brilliant and underrated missing link between what was to become King Crimson’s next incarnation, the “Berlin trilogy” of David Bowie and Brian Eno (and indeed Fripp and Eno’s own collaborations), Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and believe it or not, Hall and Oates!

That’s right, Exposure was meant to be seen as the third part of a loose trilogy that included Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel’s second album (both produced by Fripp). Daryl Hall’s management threw a wrench in the works, concerned that Hall’s decidedly more esoteric solo material might confuse his fan-base expecting catchy, “blue-eyed soul” AM radio-friendly pop tunes and that this would harm his commercial appeal. Additionally, they insisted that Fripp’s own Exposure album be credited as a Fripp/Hall collaboration. As a result, Fripp used just two of Hall’s performances on the album, recording new vocals by Terre Roche and Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill.

Sacred Songs didn’t come out until 1980 and sold respectably well. Both albums include the snarling buzz-saw rave-up, “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette.”:
 

 
The first voice you hear in the “Preface” is Eno’s and the voice before the phone starts ringing is Peter Gabriel’s. The vocal however, is obviously Daryl Hall, but not as we’re used to hearing him. Fripp later described Hall as the best singer he’d ever worked with and compared his musical creativity to David Bowie’s. High praise indeed.

Another highlight on Exposure is Peter Gabriel’s amazing performance of his “Here Comes the Flood,” perhaps the best version of the many he has recorded: Gabriel disliked the orchestral arrangements for the song on his first album, considering it over-produced. He did a different version on Kate Bush’s Christmas TV special in 1979 and still another on on his Shaking the Tree greatest hits collection. The rendition heard on Exposure is sparse, haunting and moving. I think it’s one of his single greatest vocal performances. Eno, Fripp and Gabriel are the only musicians on this track:
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
Like their masterpiece Eskimo, the story of the Residents’ new album starts with a cryptoethnomusicological discovery: in this case, the complete recorded works of an albino bluesman from western Louisiana named Alvin Snow.

Under the stage name “Dyin’ Dog,” the story goes, Snow cut ten agonized electric blues originals with his band, the Mongrels, before falling off the face of the earth in 1976. Whether the last straw was the death of his pet dog, the death of his elderly ladyfriend, or the death of Howlin’ Wolf, no one can say. Only these screams of rage and shame remain.

(There’s a mini-documentary on the Residents’ YouTube channel about Dyin’ Dog, and Homer Flynn of the Cryptic Corporation discussed the legend of Alvin Snow with us last December.)
 

The Residents’ new album, out July 10

Dyin’ Dog’s songs about sex, death, death, sex and death came out last year on a now quite scarce seven-inch box set released by Psychofon Records. On the new album Metal, Meat & Bone: The Songs of Dyin’ Dog, the Residents interpret the Alvin Snow songbook with help from the Pixies’ Black Francis, Magic Band and Pere Ubu alumnus Eric Drew Feldman, and other high-quality musical guests. The album also reproduces Dyin’ Dog and the Mongrels’ demos in full stereo abjection.

John Sanborn’s video for the Residents’ take on “Bury My Bone,” exclusively premiered below, is mildly NSFW. Then again, in time of plague, work itself is NSFW. And this is a blues song about a dog looking for a hole to bury his bone in, for fuck’s sake.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
Exclusive video and music from the Residents’ new album, ‘Intruders’

 
I’m a big fan of irreverent ‘60s pop band, the Turtles. This fabulous and underrated group doesn’t get much respect, but they had lots of great, catchy tunes, though they are essentially only remembered for two hits—“Happy Together” and “Elenore.” The latter song was the lead single from their brilliant, tongue-in-cheek concept LP, The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands (1968).

Following the massive success of the “Happy Together” single, which went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and the popular LP of the same name, the Turtles began planning their next album. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which the Beatles envisioned the record as a performance by an imaginary group, the Turtles came up with the ambitious idea of portraying not one, but twelve fictitious bands. In turn, these made-up acts would go up against each other in a comic “battle.” The project was the perfect vehicle to showcase the group’s particular brand of humor.
 

The Turtles appear as the bands in the album’s gatefold sleeve (click to enlarge).

For Battle of the Bands, the group recruited their former bassist and current Monkees producer, Chip Douglas, to produce the record. Each member of the Turtles, which included two lead singers in Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, would contribute material, but they would also seek assistance from outside songwriters to fill a few of the slots on the LP. Through Douglas, the Turtles had met Harry Nilsson, and the group asked him if he’d write the opening number. Credited to Nilsson and Douglas, “Battle of the Bands” functions just as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” did, perfectly setting the stage for what would follow.

For the next track, the Turtles (as “The Atomic Enchiladas”) emulated the Beatles on “The Last Thing I Remembered.” The psychedelic track begins with the sound of a harp, signaling to listeners that they’re headed into a dream. The group would satirize a number of genres on the record, including country (“Too Much Heartsick Feeling”) and bluegrass (“Chicken Little Was Right”), as well as other groups, like the spot-on Beach Boys sendup “Surfer Dan.” For this number they were billed as “The Cross Fires,” a nod to the Turtles’ previous incarnation, the Crossfires, who were a surf rock band. The Turtles even spoofed themselves on “Elenore,” though the song wasn’t originally meant to even be considered for the album—quite the opposite, really. Frustrated that their record label, White Whale, wouldn’t stop pestering the Turtles for another hit on par with “Happy Together,” Howard Kaylan penned what he thought was a ridiculous parody. I’ll let Kaylan take it from here.

I had gotten so pissed off that I had decided to show White Whale, once and for all, what dicks they were. So I took the song “Happy Together” and mutated it, just for Lee and Ted [the founders of White Whale]. Every time the melody took a cheesy turn, mine took a cheesier one. Then, to sweeten the deal, I threw in handfuls of pimply teenage hyperboles: “pride and joy, etcetera” was originally “fab and gear, etcetera.” “Your folks hate me” and “I really think you’re groovy” were meant to inflame the wrath of these L.A. lames and I couldn’t wait to sing this new ditty for the band, hear their cynical laughter, and forward it on to our slave-driving masters in the West. But instead, something else happened.

Everybody liked it! Humor? What humor? This just what we’ve been looking for! Chip was nearly orgasmic. We worked out the harmonies right then and there. Chip called the label to tell them that we had the hit they had been looking for. We came back to L.A. to cut “Elenore” at Gold Star and it was a monster hit, not only in America but in Canada, the UK, even Australia and New Zealand. (from Howard Kaylan’s autobiography, Shell Shocked)

So, there you have it. What was intended as a means to get their label to stop bothering them, ended up becoming one of the Turtles’ biggest and most-loved songs. 
 

Japanese picture sleeve.

“You Showed Me,” another hit from the album, was brought in by Douglas. It’s a tune the early Byrds had demoed, and at the time was unreleased. Written by Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn, the Byrds rendition is mid-tempo and sounds like the Beatles, circa 1964, while the Turtles take is much slower and has a ghostly quality.
 

Italian picture sleeve.

“Food,” about the joys of eating, is the most outrageous number on the LP. The middle section features “The Bigg Brothers” reciting their recipe for special brownies.

More Turtles after the jump…

 
Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) once said that “Heroes are made by the path they choose, not the powers they are graced with.” Artist Butcher Billy chose a path which eventually allowed him to use his superpowers to their greatest potential. Like all superheroes, Butcher Billy balanced a dual life of graphic designer by day, and iconographic pop artist by night.

Born in Brazil, Butcher Billy (aka Billy Mariano da Luz) started drawing pictures from the day he first picked up a crayon and waxed blank paper with art. He grew up in a world of unnerving political turmoil which he filtered through comic books, TV cartoons, and eighties pop music. He grew up and studied and became a graphic designer. But somehow creating art for others was not enough. In the quiet of the night, he started drawing pictures that revealed his true identity. Pictures of pop icons as comic book superheroes, movie stars as subversive heroes. Butcher Billy was born.

He started sharing his work online. His pictures were soon picked by sites like the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and of course, Dangerous Minds.

As a longtime admirer of Butcher Billy‘s artworks, I dropped him a line and he very kindly replied. Now in an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Butcher Billy discusses his background, his artwork, his inspiration, and his favorite artist.

Okay, let’s start with the easy ones: Can you tell me something about yourself? Where were you born? How did you get into art? When did you start drawing?

Butcher Billy: I was born in south Brazil in 1978. My childhood scenario was the last few years of a decades-long military dictatorship. Although the difference between that and a full democracy was hardly noticed by a six-year-old introvert kid, I do remember watching everything live on TV—the news reported rights movements, protests on the streets, military police everywhere. That ended up mixed with all the goodies the 1980s had to offer: pop music, blockbusters, Saturday morning cartoons, comics, fantasy books, video games etc.

So as much as I couldn’t understand, there was a sense that the world was going through uncertain, turbulent times—while also I was getting exposed to all these exciting new discoveries as a child. That dual feeling is something that I carried through life. It even reflects on my body of work now, in which you can often see two (or more) different concepts clashing.

I believe I started drawing as soon as I was able to hold a crayon with my own hands. I have always felt the need to express myself through art.

What happened next? What inspired you? How and why did you start creating your own artworks?

BB: My teenage years in the 90s were absolutely immersed in pop culture, while I observed the world going through all the changes in politics, religion, society, technology etc. So of course pop art caught my attention early on, for the use of popular everyday symbols, and comments on any of the aspects of society and human behaviour through irony and parody.

However, when the time came to go to college, graphic design ended up being my choice—the concept of becoming a full on artist as a way of earning a living was too subjective to me at the time (that clash of feelings again).

After college I worked for years as a graphic designer in ad agencies, becoming increasingly frustrated. That’s when I decided, just for fun, to start playing on my sleep hours with all of those early creative influences in cinema, music, comics, games, art, politics, religion, history etc. By releasing personal art projects online, I began to spread my name and ideas out there, until I felt secure enough to let go of everything and finally become an indie artist.

I wasn’t even thinking about working for brands. What I wanted was to create a body of personal work by developing my own ideas, without interference. And through that decision I indeed found that freedom, in which now I’m actually able to choose if I want to work for a brand or not, when I want, and only if it’s the right fit for me.
 

 
When/why did you take the name Butcher Billy?

BB: I still had an agency job as a creative director back in 2012 when I had my very first pop art series ready to be released. As I said before, I decided to do it as a way to just have some fun and relieve work frustration. I had a bit of a local rep in advertising, and as much as I didn’t have any ambitions on a side project, I thought it was important to create a persona to separate that from the corporate work I was doing, which was very different in concept.

So that’s how I came up with Butcher Billy—at first I thought it would be a great way to stay anonymous, and kinda worked initially. However, soon after when the artworks began to go viral, the fact I was using a pseudonym actually helped to make people even more curious about who that guy was. “Nobody cared about who I was until I put on a mask” (saying that with a ridiculous Bane voice)
 

 
What has the response been to your work?

BB: I try to achieve that state of collective mind where art communicates ideas all over the world, often without words, for people of distinct languages and cultures who understand the same message. In that aspect it’s always great to see how far an art piece can go when I release it on the internet—considering how different the concept of popular culture can be in some places.

Also spreading your own ideas and style means that people will approach and hire you because they want you to do your own thing for them. In that sense I’ve been invited to collaborate with brands from Japan, Scotland, EUA, England, France, Germany, Netherlands etc. Projects can be as different as TV series props, beverage packaging, movie posters, vinyl sleeves, book covers… I was even asked to design a pizza box for a record label, as merchandising.

Versatility is exactly what I aim for as a pop artist—I don’t want to be known as a t-shirt designer or whatever. I want to make art, and art that can be applied to anything.

It’s funny that my work seems to be a lot more recognized overseas. I’ve never been invited to exhibit in my own country. However, I had pieces showcased in cities all over the world like London, Dubai, Lisbon, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Birmingham, Chicago, Miami etc. Also I’ve had 2 art books released in France. Pretty sure that after I die they’ll hold an exhibition in Brazil—that’s how it works around here.

Who is your favourite artist?

BB: Hard to say! I admire so many people for different reasons—painters, designers, producers, musicians, directors, photographers, actors, activists, composers etc. But if I have to say just one, it would certainly be David Bowie. The man embodied everything, to the point of actually becoming art through his personas. He paid the price, and managed to remain down to earth. He also planned his own death to be an art instalment.
 

 
See more from Butcher Billy, after the jump…
 

Artist Nathan James’ distorted portrait of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
 

“I once read a thing from the liner notes of the Ramones album, Rocket To Russia. The author wrote that the genius of the band was, with songs like “Rockaway Beach,” their ability to make celebratory pop anthems by inverting rotten, nasty elements from their lives that were actually quite horrible in reality. With those paintings, I’m trying to explore just that.”

—artist Nathan James on defining the term “Pessimistic Pop.”

When London-based artist Nathan James was recuperating from serious back surgery in 2010, he used the downtime to rethink his artistic style. These ideas would be fully realized in his 2013 series “Creepshow.” Described by James as focusing on the lives of the “underclass, failures, perverts and slackers” instead of “beautiful, successful people,” not one of the galleries James was working with were interested in showing his evolved work. He was summarily dropped by his main dealer in London, and a German gallery that had offered to host a solo show stopped responding to his emails. In an interview from 2013, James revealed that in addition to a rather poor academic performance in high school and college, he also failed 11th and 12th-grade art. Mostly because he was too stoned to show up or was so stoned when he did show up, he learned little to nothing. Well, I’m sure that James’ high school art teacher Ms. Balford would be pleased to know the work of her former slacker/stoner student has been compared to George Condo. Condo is credited with the creation of the term Artificial Realism as well as the term “psychological cubism.” Artificial realism as defined by Condo is the realistic representation of that which is artificial,” which is how he described his unique blend of American pop art with traditional European Old Master style of painting. This is also very much in line with the kind of art Nathan James creates.

Many reoccurring themes run through James’ paintings, from glossy pin-ups to cartoon characters, including the curious inclusion of Mickey Mouse’s white-gloved hand. The appearance of Mickey’s hand in James’ work has caused fans to speculate perhaps, as a child, something bad went down between Nathan and the world’s most famous cartoon mouse. When dissecting James’ more current work, the artist has indicated he was inspired by personal experience pertaining to “co-dependence, jealousy, disappointment, and death,” themes we’re are all likely acquainted with, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. James’ also works in grim economic narratives in his paintings, which he pulls from his youth growing up in Kirkland Lake in Ontario, Canada witnessing the economy take a nosedive after the steel industry declined and eventually collapsed. This left the future artist free to explore the empty factories, now filled with their fair share of nefarious folks, and those left behind trying to figure out their bleak-looking futures. Another reason James’ work switched gears was in part inspired by the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-2008 and his realization that continuing on with his pop-art painting of Gil Elvgren-style pin-ups and such no longer reflected any kind of reality. If any of this sounds all too close to home right now, good. Keep on keeping your eyes open.

In 2016 James’ held his first U.S. solo show “Dark Matter” at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. The show featured works from his “Creepshow” series as well as another new series called “Faceless.” James posted a few new images on his Instagram in May, so hopefully, we’ll be seeing more from him as, thematically, the shit-show that is 2020 seems like a grim gift, inspiration-wise, for James. A girl can dream!
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
In the 1970s, British soccer had a bad reputation. It had a rap sheet full of gang fights, stabbings, riots, and murder. Football fans were labeled hooligans. Thugs who, according to some newspaper editors, were on the verge of taking over the streets and destroying society. No one was safe.

Most weeks the tabloids churned out tales of some aggro outside a stadium. The red tops were peddling fear. The public bought it. Once the news starts reporting on something, it becomes real.

These gang fights between rival soccer fans were mixed in with tales of skinheads, bovver boys, razor gangs, and thugs who dressed like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange out for a little bit of ye old ultra-violence. There was truth in the stories, but soccer violence wasn’t as widespread as often reported. Certain clubs attracted gangs who were more interested in a punch-up on a Saturday afternoon than watching the “beautiful game.”

To put it context, these were kids who had missed the mythical nirvana of sixties excess. The sex, drugs and so-called revolution of the swinging sixties only applied to about a few dozen people who were rich and famous and living in London. For everybody else, the sixties were dire, poverty-ridden, and filmed in black-and-white. Only American TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, and Lost in Space gave any hint there might be a better, more colorful world out there.

When the seventies arrived, for most of the public it was like suffering the biggest hangover after a party to which you had never been invited. Unemployment was on the up. Strikes were almost every week. Power blackouts meant kids lived by candlelight on whatever their mothers could spoon out of a tin. Under the new Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, a pompous condescending charlatan, politics was being removed from the grubby hands of the working class. Politicians despised the populace. Heath signed up to Europe and the world of white middle class technocrats and academics who would attempt to disenfranchise the working class and their so-called ignorant opinions over the coming decades.

The press were happy to go along with this. They tarred youngsters as ne’er-do-wells, thugs, hooligans, filthy little fuckers who should be sent into the army. Pop fans were deluded. Soccer fans were thugs waiting to kick your fucking head in.

Most of the people who thought this—politicians, journalists, religious leaders—wanted to crush the young. These people were mainly middle-aged ex-soldiers who had fought in the Second World War and returned to a country impoverished, in ruin, and held captive by rationing. The seventies soccer fan represented everything they feared—thuggish mobs ready for violence who if they were ever smart enough to get together might one day topple the establishment. Fat chance.

This was one way of looking at it. The other was how the fans saw it. Soccer was a release. A pleasure to be shared with passion. Something that made youngsters feel part of a community. Fans created their own fashions. Decked their clothes with players’ names, managers, and their club crests. They had their own beliefs. And their politics changed from xenophobic and racist to becoming supportive and champions of multi-ethnicity. White working class football fans had more friends from different ethnicities than any white male government or media broadcaster or board of directors.
 

 
Between 1976-1977, Edinburgh-born photographer Iain S. P. Reid documented fans of Manchester United and Manchester City. Reid had graduated in Fine Arts from Sunderland University. He then moved to Manchester where he was studying for his Masters in Fine Art when he picked up his Leica camera and started photographing the two sets of rival fans.

In 1978, an exhibition of his work was held at the Frontline Books, Piccadilly, Manchester. In his introduction to this exhibition, Reid wrote:

I worked on a series of portraits of football supporters. I was given a grant by the Arts Council to facilitate this project. As can be imagined, this caused a minor furore in the local Manchester press. I was infamous for a while. Most of the work was exhibited in 1978 in the Frontline bookshop, 1 Newton Street, Piccadilly.

The chief interest in the whole body of work was the way in which the football supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City used to dress and treat the whole match as if it were a carnival. Despite all press reports, there was very little violence, and the fans I found most helpful in assisting with the project. They were always aware of the angle I was taking with the work. I carried around copies of the photos I was going to be using to show them I was not exploiting them by misrepresenting them in any way.

In the late seventies, Reid moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he worked on an oil platform. He then became a social worker. He had a passion for helping others and spent his time working with drug addicts and the homeless.

Reid died in November 2000 from cancer. After his death, boxes of his photographs were discovered. These are now shared via a Facebook page, are available as art prints, and will be published in a book with 15% of profits going to a cancer charity. Reid’s photographs capture more of the joy and camaraderie of seventies’ football fans than all the tales of violence peddled by the media. See more of Reid’s work here.
 

 

 
See more of Iain S. P. Reid’s work, after the jump…
 

 
If anyone is having a cultural revival these days, it’s Lydia Lunch. It’s not like she’s ever gone away, of course, she’s as productive as ever, it’s just that she’s starting to… I don’t mean to say that she’s “going mainstream” exactly, but the writer, vocalist, musician, artist, photographer, and underground movie femme fatale’s profile has risen a notch, even two, of late. Recently an oral history of Lydia’s life and times was published, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, Nick Soulsby’s companion book to the upcoming Lydia documentary of the same name directed by Beth B. And she’s got a great new podcast, The Lydian Spin.

In the first eight minutes of episode 47, her “Protest Special,” Lydia goes to town on Donald Trump, training her trademark firehouse of fury and frustration on the worst person alive, who also happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

If words could kill…

The Lydian Spin‘s “Protest Special” brings together V.Vale and Marian Wallace of RE/SEARCH Publications; author/musician Eugene Robinson of OXBOW; filmmaker Eva Aridjis; and Weasel Walter in a special podcast to discuss the protests raging across America.

Enjoy!
 

 
There are many urban legends in rock and roll. One of them is that Stooges bassist Dave Alexander was fired after he showed up totally shitfaced for a gig at the massive Goose Lake rock festival in 1970. Alexander was alleged to have been too fucked up to stand, let alone play his instrument, so Iggy sacked him.

Sidestepping the matter of “wow, this dude was too messed up even for… the Stooges?”—did it really happen like that? Well, maybe not, according to an exciting new find coming to you soon from the heroic Third Man Records label:

The apocryphal tale of the Stooges performance at the Goose Lake festival has been told countless times over the past five decades. Bassist Dave Alexander, due to nerves or overindulgence or whatever you choose to fill in the blank, absolutely spaces in front of 200,000 attendees. He does not play a single note on stage. He is summarily fired by Iggy Pop immediately following the gig. Here starts the beginning of the end of the Stooges.

But what if that simply…wasn’t the case? What if you could prove otherwise? Well, it’d be the proto-punk equivalent of having an immediate, on-the-scene, man on the street report of all those folkies booing Dylan’s electric set at Newport in ‘65. Irrefutable evidence of what ACTUALLY went down.

Found buried in the basement of a Michigan farmhouse amongst other tasty analog artifacts of the same era, the 1/4” stereo two-track tape of the Stooges complete performance at Goose Lake on August 8th, 1970 is the Rosetta Stone for fans of this seminal band.

Not only is this the last ever performance of the original godhead Stooges line-up, but it is the ONLY known soundboard recording of said line-up. Playing the entirety of their canonical 1970 masterpiece Fun House, the sound, the performance, everything about this record is revelatory.

Would you believe that…Alexander actually DID play bass on this occasion? Or that, despite grievous failures on some songs, Alexander is damn solid on others? Especially on the bass-led songs “Dirt” and “Fun House”? Does Iggy provoke the crowd to tear down festival barriers? Did the powers that be pull the plug on the Stooges? So many questions are answered only to have more arise.

Released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the performance, Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970, is the rare release that literally rewrites the history of these Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees.

A heavy drinker, Dave Alexander died at the young age of 27 in 1975. He was name-checked a few years later in Iggy’s spoken-word intro to The Idiot’s “Dum Dum Boys”:

“How ‘bout Dave? OD’d on alcohol.”

 

 
The Stooges: Live at Goose Lake: August 8th 1970 will be released on August 7th. Pre-order here from the Third Man online store.
 

Iggy and The Stooges at their most primal prime, taped at the Goose Lake music festival in Michigan in 1970.