An image depicting an attack by La Bête du Gévaudan, or The Beast of Gévaudan, a predator believed to be a werewolf in France in the mid-1700s.

So before you start to think I’ve completely lost my mind, you should know a 67-page academic paper on the history of killer lycanthropes or some sort of man-eating wolf exists. And, much like any reasonable person, you are probably ready to chalk it all up to storytellers spinning yarns about the messed-up hairy shit that happens when the moon is full. The paper cites a few historical examples of werewolf tall tales such as a story from Scotland about two children who were killed by a wolf in 1743. The problem here is that wolves had been extinct there since 1660. The French Werewolf Epidemic (1520-1630) was France’s version of Europe’s witch trials and executions, but with werewolves. For 110 years, 30 thousand people were accused of being werewolves, tortured in exchange for their confessions, or lack of admission of guilt and died at the stake. Of the many examples of accused werewolfery is of Jacques Rollet, dubbed the Werewolf of Chazes. Rollet lured a fifteen-year-old boy to the woods where he murdered and ate his body. When he was tried for his crime, he confessed to having done the same to other locals, specifically employees of the court system such as lawyers and attorneys. Rollet got the death sentence (like pretty much everyone else back then) but ended up in an insane asylum.

As it pertains to France, the country’s history with wolf-related mythology is long and rich with stories such as the La Bête du Gévaudan, or The Beast of Gévaudan, which for three years terrorized the area. The first attack occurred in April of 1764, and the victim, a young woman tending her flock of sheep, described her assailant as looking “like a wolf, yet not a wolf.” She survived when her sheep went into action, defending the teenage girl from the Beast. Two months later, another young girl, Jeanne Boulet, was attacked and killed by what the residents of Gévaudan thought to be a natural predator, given the fact Boulet was also tending a flock of sheep. Two more fatal attacks would follow within a matter of weeks, both young field workers, a girl, age fifteen, and a boy age sixteen. This would be the start of more than 100 documented fatal attacks in Gévaudan in which most of the victims were partially eaten. The residents of Gévaudan would take up arms, and large rewards were offered for the capture or killing of The Beast of Gévaudan. Experienced hunters and even groups of children would go out in search of the Beast and return with stories of battling a giant wolf (noted in the book Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast). One such incident describes the wolf attacking a group of young children, five boys and two girls in a bog where they were playing. The wolf preyed on the youngest of the group, an eight-year-old boy who he clenched in his massive jaws as the kids attacked the wolf with their make-believe weapons (in this time period, pretend bayonets), finally getting the animal/manimal to release their friend.
 

A woman trying to fight off The Beast.

 
Once the news reached the ears of Louis XV, he offered up his own bounty in exchange for the Beast’s head in 1765. After Marie-Jeanne Valet warded off an attack by the Beast while out on the countryside with her sister, Louis XV’s personal gunman (noted to be 71 at the time in The Beast of Gevaudan: La Bete du Gevaudan) went in search of the Beast with a few other men. In September 1765, François Antoine, King Louis’ right hand of the hunt, shot the “Wolf of Chazes,” which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.
 

The stuffed ‘Beast’ delivered to Louis XV.
 
Suddenly, the suspected werewolf killings stopped, only to start again in December and again in the summer of 1767. This inspired the local authorities to start using the term “monster” (a shape “contrary to nature”) to further describe the wild assailant with a penchant for decapitating its victims. Soon, Marquis d’Apcher, a wealthy local resident, took up the charge to hunt down the Beast. d’Apcher was able to shoot the Beast, and, according to legend, ended up entangled with the wolf. Finally, one of the guards on the trip with d’Apcher fired the kill-shot. The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf. They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767. Yikes.

So what was Beast of Gévaudan? As werewolves sadly don’t exist (BOO!), speculation as to what kind of animal the Beast was range from a hyena, or perhaps some sort of terrifying lion/wolf hybrid. Sorry if you were, like me, hoping for a medieval wolf-version of Oliver Reed creating all kind of mayhem around the French countryside

A few images of the fabled Beast of Gévaudan follow.
 

An illustration of the Beast as a wolf/lion hybrid.
 

The Beast as a hyena.
 
More after the jump…

 
Although I was informed by the press release that Outlaw, the 1970 album by Eugene McDaniels was a cult favorite, it was honestly not something I was familiar with. But if I was crate digging and spotted this, I can assure you, I’d have taken it home, not unreasonably expecting that what was in the grooves would match such an audacious record cover. Take a look. You’ve got a bearded McDaniels, “the left rev mc d” as he then called himself, in a cowboy hat, holding a bible. He’s joined by two women, one holding a machine gun, the other wearing an ammo belt. A human skull directly in the foreground reinforces the mood.

“What the fuck is this?” you may ask yourself? The answer may surprise you. First of all, this is a folk-pop album and McDaniels seems to be trying (successfully) at times to sound like Mick Jagger, and his band sounds like the Stones of Let It Bleed. Odd that a black man would apparently model his vocal performance on a white man who’d copped his singing from R&B singers, but it works. A bit convoluted perhaps, trust me he makes it work. One song reminded me strongly of an outtake from the musical Hair. It’s a weird album, but a very, very good one. It’s just next to impossible to categorize. It’s country-rock-funk-folk. It’s got a good beat throughout.
 

Eugene McDaniels performing at a benefit for Angela Davis in Washington, DC
 
Unsurprisingly, Outlaw‘s politics are radical and deeply held. The lyrics—if not the music—are in-your-face, up-against-the-wall stuff. It’s interesting to note that McDaniel started off as a Jackie Wilson-type singer. His first hit record was the soul standard “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and he worked with Snuff Garrett and Burt Bacharach early in his career. He’d also written the topical protest song “Compared to What” taking aim at Lyndon Johnson and his deeply unpopular Vietnam War, so Outlaw wasn’t completely out of the blue for the guy, but it was still unusual for just about ANY artist—Black or white—recording for a major label to affect such a radical image. Apparently, someone in the Nixon administration got wind of the track “Silent Majority” (“Silent majority / Is calling out loud to you and me / From Arlington Cemetery / To stand up tall for humanity”) and it was either Vice President Spiro Agnew or else Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff who personally called Atlantic Records to complain, asking them to stop working with McDaniels. 

Outlaw was produced by Grammy-winner Joel Dorn and arranged by William S. Fischer. Both had worked before with friends of McDaniels, like Roberta Flack (McDaniels wrote her “Feel Like Making Love” hit and other songs for the vocalist) and Les McCann and Eddie Harris (who turned his “Compared to What” into an electrifying jazz standard on their live Swiss Movement album in 1969). Their support is sympathetic to McDaniels’ goals, but you have to wonder what they made of such an almost deliberately uncommercial project. It’s one of those albums where you almost can’t believe it exists. I’m glad it does.

The Real Gone label’s 50th anniversary release of Outlaw comes in a neon red vinyl pressing limited to 700 copies. 
 

 
The Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band was one of the best, almost long-lost bands of the early 1970s. Six ace performers who spent their time busking on the streets of LA before winning over fans and followers across America. Yet, even with such success, the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band never reached the heights of fame and success they so richly deserved.

Here’s their story as told by Lil’ Orphan Ollie, trumpeter, drummer, and original founder of the band.

Rule #1: Form a Band.

It started out this way: A bunch of guys outta UCLA blasting Christmas carols on the streets of LA. It was holiday season and they wanted money to buy presents for Santa and booze for his reindeer. Lil’ Orphan Ollie was trombone player and chief ring leader.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I thought I’d get three of my buddies and we’d go down and play some Christmas carols at the shopping center. People weren’t working too much. We were just out of college, and my recollection is it was December 1971,

I called up all my trombone buddies, we had a long association of playing together at UCLA, there’s no competition for this, but we were probably the best trombone players in the country.

When you get out of school and you’re a horn player the only opportunity you have for some steady work is to go on the road with various bands—Buddy Rich’s Band, Woody Herman, Count Basie and Duke Ellington—big bands like that. So some of us got some road work some of us didn’t. I’d just got back from playing My first trip on the road was with Louie Bellson Big Band—he was really a dynamic drummer

I said we should go and play some Christmas carols. We did that. My wife was pregnant with our daughter but there wasn’t enough work for me so we left town.

That’s my line: I started the band and then left town.
 

 
Rule #2: Start playing.

While Lil’ Orphan Ollie and his family moved to northern California to find work, his buddies from college kept the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band going. The line-up was: Sgt. Charts, Dr. Mabuse DOA, Off the Wallie, B-flat Baxter and Buffalo Steve. Sgt. Charts started organising the band into four trombones and four saxophones. The band covered “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Beethoven’s “Ninth,” and covers of tunes by artists like the Beatles. Wherever they played they brought happiness and joy and a hat full of dollars.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and in the meantime I couldn’t keep the band from being contaminated with all these saxophone players and stuff. The trombone choir didn’t really exist for very long. They stated doing stuff on their own.

Sgt. Charts wrote and arranged music prolifically. He got the idea of doing a bunch of tunes like who’s going to write an abbreviated version of Beethoven’s Ninth for saxophone and trombones—that’s the kind of stuff Sgt. Charts would do.

They’d go up to the Observatory or Griffiths Park and play or let’s go over to the La Brea Tar Pits and put out a hat and play there.

I was up north with my family but it wasn’t working out up there and the band said, “Goddammit, you gotta come back and we’re going to do this thing.”
 

 
Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and came back. In the meantime they’d started to do some of this stuff and I thought they were nuts. Everyone kept saying, “Come on, you gotta come back.” And I was saying, “I can’t do all this stupid shit on the street. How are you gonna make any money? You gotta be out of your mind.” But I came back and did it anyway.

I was raised as a straight, legitimate horn player and I was real serious. A lot of my work was classical. The rest of it was all big band stuff. So, who was going to put on a bunch of costumes? But the fact of the matter was it came at the right time and the right place and it worked. Next thing we knew we were getting some media attention.
 

 
More from Lil’ Orphan Ollie and the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band, after the jump…
 

 
This is a guest post by Nicholas Abrahams.

If you have a spare fifteen whole minutes, you could do worse than check out the new short film John Was Trying to Contact Aliens on Netflix about John Shepherd, a guy who has spent 30 years beaming out obscure music to aliens, constructing a homemade SETI project based at—and taking over—his grandparents home in rural Michigan. We shot the breeze with director Matt Killip.

Dangerous Minds: Firstly, how did you come across John Shepherd, the subject of your new short film on Netflix?

Matt Killip: I first saw a picture of John in the book Messengers of Deception by the UFO researcher Jacques Vallée. The same photo is in my film: John is seated in front of a large bank of UFO tracking machines in a living room, with his grandma next to him doing her knitting. I immediately wanted to know more about this image—what was going on here?
 

 
Luckily I was able to track John down and make contact. When I heard about the circumstances of his personal life I started to realize his story could make a beautiful film. A while later I found some footage of John broadcasting the band Harmonia into outer space. It turned out that John was broadcasting loads of music that I love into the cosmos: Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Terry Riley, Gamelan music from Indonesia, free jazz, loads of reggae and dub ... It was an amazing playlist—in effect a cosmic radio station broadcasting music for aliens.
 

 
DM: He’s quite amazing, playing music into deep space for aliens to come across and make contact. But most people would maybe have a dream of doing this, whereas John takes over his grandparents house to actually do this!

Matt Killip: Ha! Well, John is completely self-taught, he built many of the machines you see in the film himself. He has an incredible technical mind, a deep love of physics and, in particular, electricity. He spent a lot of time hunting in scrap yards and military auctions with his grandfather, who was a machinist and also helped him build some of the equipment. The radar John built was sitting on a tower made out of a scrapped ski lift! But I don’t really explore the science behind what John was doing in my film. I was afraid of getting slowed down in technical details when I was most interested in the fundamentally romantic idea of contact: this search John had for something beyond him.
 

 
DM: Yes , he seems to be on a romantic quest of some kind, to ‘make contact.’

Matt Killip: I know a lot of people might view John’s project as quite eccentric but I would encourage everybody to think about it another way: we are on a planet, that’s part of a galaxy, one of billions with an infinite number of other suns and planets. We don’t know what else is out there ... Why wouldn’t you try to make contact? John was using music as a sign—or even a gift—to other consciousnesses.

DM: You pack a heck of a lot into fifteen minutes.. It has the three act structure of a feature film… in fact it is better than many feature films I’ve seen…

Matt Killip: Thanks!

DM: What are the challenges of keeping a film short? Were you tempted to make it as a feature doc?

Matt Killip: I just wanted to stick to the core of the storytelling. Originally there was a whole section about UFO culture, but I cut it out to make the story flow better. Also, I’ve only made short format films, so maybe I’m a little scared of making a longer one…

DM: Your earlier films are pretty bonkers. There’s one about teenage backyard wrestler and horror filmmaker Ronny Long, and another about a guy who arranges microscopic creatures onto slides in psychedelic patterns. What’s the connection?

Matt Killip: I’m think I’m drawn to people who have found ways to escape everyday reality into other worlds. I’m really sympathetic to that impulse.. I share it to a certain extent, but I’m lacking the obsessive drive needed to see it through. It’s a very singular vision that allows Ronny the teenager to keep creating for his own pleasure, or John to broadcast music for 30 years, never knowing for sure if anyone could hear it.

DM: Tell me more about Ronny. (Full disclosure - I met Ronny Long when he visited the UK to hold an exhibition at the Horse Hospital in London. Ronny is as great as you would imagine from watching Master of Reality.)

Matt Killip: I’ve always loved wrestling for the characters and story lines, it’s like a kind of folk theatre. In the early 2000s my interest led me to Ronny Long’s website “Texas Boneyard Wrestling.” Ronny had started a horror-based wrestling federation in his backyard in the suburbs of Dallas. It was a really elaborate affair and so much thought and effort went into it. He was fifteen at the time. After speaking with him I realised that wrestling was only part of Ronny’s story—he was obsessed with Bigfoot and cryptozoology, was continuously drawing and painting and had been making abortive attempts at horror movies for several years. He was burning up with this stuff. His output was enormous and it seemed like he was compelled to create these things. He was not getting support or encouragement from anywhere—certainly not from school—but he was just off, creating these worlds. I really love that about him.
 

 
DM: Are you still in touch with Ronny?

Matt Killip: Still in touch… These days Ronny is still drawing and painting. He also records a wild talk show in his basement.

DM: I really love his paintings of Bigfoot.

Matt Killip: As a nine-year-old kid he really believed in Bigfoot. They are him. He has something of an outsider quality to him. And yes, his paintings are amazing.
 

 
DM: And The Diatomist?

Matt Killip: I love nature and have made several shorts that could be considered in some way nature films. In the case of The Diatomist, I came across an extraordinary image of an antique diatom arrangement. I couldn’t quite believe that these beautiful microscopic sculptures were actually tiny sea creatures, completely invisible to the naked eye.

In general I get tripped out by the extraordinary variety to be found in the natural world. Looking through books on moths, beetles, mushrooms or lichen, the multiple different forms, related but always changing, are completely amazing to me. It’s as close to a religious experience as I can get. Diatom arrangements completely embody that sublime feeling. After more research I discovered that there was one man, Klaus Kemp, keeping this Victorian art form alive, so I immediately got in touch with him. Klaus is undoubtedly obsessive, but it’s a beautiful obsession. He is practicing an artform that embodies Darwin’s phrase: endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

DM: The films all seem to end in a cosmic way, with the humans somehow part of a great cosmos.

Matt Killip: I guess we are all trying to find our place in the cosmos. It’s just….. there’s a good quote by Carl Sagan… here it is … “The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question - the search for who we are.”
 

 
This is a guest post by Nicholas Abrahams.

Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt by Mildred Klaus.
 
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt makes music that is right for our time. Challenging. Difficult. Powerful. Brilliant. That kinda thing.

Plague covers the planet. Cities shut down. Rioters loot and burn. Welcome to the New Normal. Put on your mask and shop this way.

There’s gotta be a way out. Maybe Marquardt’s music offers one?

I was supposed to talk with Marquardt sometime in June. Or was it July? The days merge. One day is much the same as the next—under a lockdown that gave me one hour-a-day outside (for exercise) and one trip (only if really, really, really necessary) to the store for essentials. Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt could be one of those essentials. He’s not to everyone’s taste I know but his music is important and relevant. Especially today.

We should have spoken together in June or July but then his nephew was shot dead on the streets. An horrific tragedy. What can you say? I sent condolences. Waited. Waited. Didn’t know what else to do. Looked back on what I’d once written:

Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt is an American musician who lives in Germany. He has been making music since he was six-years-old. He started by writing songs or “texts” and “melodies” as he describes it before taking an interest in House Music in his teens. Sean began DJing, before moving from Chicago to Berlin, where he started singing and playing guitar with metal bands. It was in Europe that he began his interest in electronic music.

With a desire to balance both his love of electronic with metal, Sean produced drone, ambient and noise recordings, developing his own distinct form of “Accidental Guitar Music.”

“Accidental Guitar” is a holistic and grounded concept that includes three main aspects. The first of these is the creation of sounds and sound worlds by combining the guitar with distortion effects – a type of “routing” or “mapping” technique where the musician does not lose himself, however, but instead works in a deliberate manner with the tools available to him. The second dimension of “Accidental Guitar” is improvisation—an approach that Cooper Marquardt has chosen, systematically rejecting predetermined choreographies and all forms of rehearsal or planning. This applies not only to live performances, but also when making recordings in his studio. Finally, the third dimension to this concept is the specific situation that the musician encounters when playing: the atmosphere and setting, the persons, conditions and moods present in the space in question lead to a contextualisation of his music.

Sean has released over 500 recordings as solo artist, collaborative artist, or just playing on someone else’s tracks. He has performed across the world. Gigged. Toured. Played the festivals. When I approached him before to ask some Q&A he preferred to “create [an] article without using the question and answers normal modus of operation.”

Yeah, I know.

He wrote and said he wanted to do the same again and I should contact a guy called Nicholus. It’s a bit like speaking through an agent, or maybe a medium, or just selling myself to do PR—which ain’t what my job entails. If you push to be interviewed then you should be available to be interviewed—it’s a business—otherwise you’re just playing games and after all this was the second time Marquardt had opted out.

Who knows? Maybe it’s me? I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t even talk to me…and I promised to write myself every week too…
 

Photograph by Bert Loewenherz.
 
More after the jump…

“Woman with absinthe glass, Moulin Rouge” by Jeanne Mammen (early 1900s).
 

“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.”

—a quote from artist Jeanne Mammen from the only interview she would ever do during her career, with art historian Hans Kinkel, 1975.

Described as “artistically gifted” at a very early age, Jeanne Mammen’s family would move from her birthplace of Berlin to Paris when she was five. She immersed herself in French literature—especially that of the great Romantic novelist Victor Hugo and the poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1907, at the age of seventeen, Mammen and her sister Adeline attended Académie Julian. The Académie Julian was an artistic refuge, especially for women who were allowed to enroll and where they had access to nude male models as subject matter. This is important as other art-centric schools had been slow to admit women into their institutions. If they did, women were not allowed to participate in painting or life study classes with their male counterparts.

Jeanne and Adeline would move on to Brussels to continue their studies. Then to Rome, where they attended both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (aka “The Scuola Libera del Nudo,” or “free school of the nude,” for the teaching of life-drawing). The sisters would return to Paris in 1912 only to be forced to flee the city with their family. Unfortunately, their successful merchant father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was labeled a “foreign enemy” and all of the family’s possessions, including their home, were confiscated. By 1916, the Mammen family was impecunious and living in Berlin doing any kind of work they could collectively find to keep financially afloat. After some time, Jeanne and her sister were able to afford to rent a studio apartment. The small apartment would eventually become a place Jeanne seldom left and where she would bring her observations of Berlin to life. Her work was widely published in magazines, as well as her writing. She was finally, once again, financially secure. But as 1933 and WWII loomed, Mammen would once again find herself out of work, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. Here is another quote attributed to Mammen’s lone interview on how she managed to keep creating despite the Nazis’ best efforts to stop her and other artists whom they categorized as “degenerates”:

“With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’ period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”

Influenced by artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, Mammen seemed to embrace Figuratism as early as 1908, painting in this style for approximately six years before her work became more aligned with Symbolism. A wildly prolific artist who worked in various mediums, including watercolor, Mammen’s muses included members of Berlin’s queer community, a plethora of women, and vivid interjections of religious imagery and symbolism. Following the conclusion of WWII, Mammen would allegedly tell her longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, that “the ruins of Jeanne can be found in the ruins of Berlin.” After seven decades of creating artwork that still refuses to be defined by a singular artistic description, Mammen would pass away in Berlin at the age of 86. Mammen’s long career and artwork have been the subject of a couple of books including Jeanne Mammen: Paris – Bruxelles – Berlin (2017), Jeanne Mammen The Observer: Retrospective, 1910–1975 (2018). Her work is also featured in Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic: From Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen (2018).

Images spanning Mammen’s impressive career follow.
 

 

“She Represents” (1928).
 

“Two Women Dancing” (1928).
 
More after the jump…

 
Five years ago, we told you about the marvelous documentary, ‘Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be’. At the time, the doc could only be seen on the film festival circuit, but recently it’s been made available on streaming platforms for the first time. As my last viewing had been years ago, I recently watched it anew via Amazon Prime. I was reminded that director J. Elvis Weinstein did an incredible job presenting Michael’s truly amazing life, and the film was a joy to see again.

*****

Musician/actor/satellite radio DJ Michael Des Barres has worn many hats over his decades-long career. As a vocalist, he’s fronted such acts as the Power Station, filling in for Robert Palmer on their lone US tour (with a high-profile appearance at Live Aid), and the highly underrated Somebody up There Likes Me, a neglected LP that deserved better. His biggest success (in the form of royalties) has been as songwriter, having co-penned “Obsession,” a worldwide hit for ‘80s synth-pop act Animotion. In addition, he’s a talented character actor, best known for his recurring role as TV villain Murdoc on MacGyver. His versatility is acknowledged in the title of the fabulous documentary, Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be?. Dangerous Minds got in touch with the director of the film, J. Elvis Weinstein, and asked him some questions via email.

How did you come to know Michael’s work?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: The first time I came to know Michael as a musician was when he joined the Power Station, but I recognized him from TV roles at the time. I was a TV junkie as a kid. He lived in my head as a trivia question for many years. I’d always notice him in TV and movie roles.
 

The many faces of Murdoc.

How and when did you approach Michael about making a documentary about him? Was he open to the idea or did it take some convincing?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: We met several years ago working on a TV series, me a as writer/producer, he as a cast member. We spoke about writing a book and even did some interviews at the time, but it never materialized. Then a few years ago, we ended up guests on the same radio show and I mentioned we should have done a documentary instead of a book. There was instant agreement; we were shooting within three weeks.

What drove you to make the documentary?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I knew that there was a great story to be told and that there were things I could learn for myself from telling it.

Michael appears open and frank during the interview segments in the film. Were you surprised by anything he told you? One of the things I learned from watching the film is that Silverhead was really Michael’s project and the other members were hired guns—I never knew!:

J. Elvis Weinstein: Michael was very generous in his willingness to examine and re-examine his life as honestly as possible through this process. I think he realized very early on that I wasn’t striving for a sensationalistic telling of the story but rather a very human one. 

As for surprises, I don’t have any specific ones that jump out. While Silverhead were hired musicians, they quickly became a very collaborative and tightly knit band. Michael was very much the leader, but the sound evolved from the players.
 

A fan shows Michael some love during a Silverhead gig, 1974.

I also learned that Michael and his ex-wife Pamela (Miss Pamela of the GTO’s) met on the set of a movie (the still unreleased Arizona Slim). It’s really interesting to see some of their first interactions captured on film. What do you make of their relationship, then and now?:

J. Elvis Weinstein: I think the thing that is the coolest about them is the relationship they’ve cultivated since splitting as a couple. The respect, warmth, and love they maintain for one another as friends and parents of a great son is a lovely example for everyone.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
If you are a big “rock” fan of a certain age—and American—you almost certainly grew up reading CREEM magazine. I sure did. I loved CREEM. The magazine was one of the first indications to my young mind that there was a much bigger, much badder and much cooler world outside of my dingy hometown. I read every issue until I memorized the articles. It informed my foundational musical tastes more than any other influence, and by some margin. Even the way I write.

The very first time I bought CREEM was the March 1975 Lou Reed cover. I spotted it in a downmarket hillbilly grocery store in Wheeling, WV. It looked weird and interesting. Certainly it stood out on the newstand of the era. I was a nine-year-old kid who’d only recently moved on from Planet of the Apes and James Bond movies after hearing “Space Oddity” on AM radio late one night and having my mind completely blown. I knew there was some connection between David Bowie and Lou Reed, but that was about it. What made me decide to spend my weekly $1 allowance on the magazine was the title the author, Lester Bangs, had given that cover story: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves (or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake).” I found this very intriguing and mysterious. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. What’s a death dwarf? And why was Lou Reed a famous one?

That legendary encounter between Reed and Bangs is today something studied at universities, an iconic bit of rock lore and a classic piece of gonzo journalism. It had a tremendous hold on my not-so-innocent young imagination. It might have been the first thing I’d ever read that made drugs seem really cool. It also made me want to talk—and write—just like Lester Bangs. As a literary stylist I put him on the same level as Kurt Vonnegut, that’s how much I liked what he did. Plus Bangs had tremendous taste in music. If he championed a group or performer, I had to hear it, even if that meant—in the case of the Velvet Underground or the Stooges—doing yard work for my parents and neighbors until I could save up enough money to buy German imports via Moby Disc, an LA-based record store that advertised their mail-order business in CREEM. (My mother had to get money orders from the post office for me to do this. It would take four to six weeks to get the album, but if you were in a rural area, this was your only option back then. If anything it goes to show the lengths someone would go to purchase as-yet-unheard music that Bangs had rhapsodized about. His prose was so good and evocative that I just knew—I was sure of it—that if he was enthusiastic about something, I was no doubt going to love it, too. Lester never let me down, not ever, not once.)

I discovered so many things via CREEM: Obviously Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Patti Smith, MC5, the New York Dolls, Ramones, Sex Pistols, the Clash. Yeah, CREEM really warped me, but in a good way. Had I not found it when I did, who knows, I might have gone on to become a respectable adult. 

It should come as no surprise then, reader, that I heartily enjoyed the new documentary, CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine.  The briskly-paced, well art-directed film was produced by JJ Kramer—son of CREEM publisher Barry Kramer—and directed by Scott Crawford, who made 2014’s Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC, 1980-90. It’s a real family affair—they had access to everything—but not in a way that pulls any punches about some of the complex personalities involved. You get the viewpoint of many of the insiders who were actually there (including Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus and co-producer Jaan Uhelszki) and several notables who weren’t, but who were greatly influenced by the gang of misfits who produced the magazine (Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers tells the charming tale of realizing that CREEM had moved their offices to his Michigan hometown and riding his bike over there only to see Alice-fucking-Cooper on his way out the front door!) 

This is a really great time capsule pop culture piece and a film that needed to be made just for history’s sake, but it’s not merely a nostalgia stroll for old men. A young person watching this doc, especially in the context of what’s happening globally, sees the birth of a scene and how it was the sheer force of Barry Kramer’s personality that initially birthed it, but also how CREEM became this strange attractor of such bright-burning talent. If you read between lines (of speed, coke or “green”—some of you will hear that dog whistle) the takeaway, dear young people of 2020 is that if you want your own scene, you gotta start it yourself.

Recommended.

CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine is released Friday, August 7, on digital and in theaters. 
 

An alternate image for Alice Cooper’s album ‘Killer.’ This image was also used for a calendar that came along with the record.
 
In the May 6th, 1972 issue of Billboard, there’s an amusing story about how a controversial poster of Alice Cooper (pictured above) ended up plastered on a “staff only” door in the White House during Richard Nixon’s administration. Allegedly, someone at Warner Bros., Cooper’s label at the time, had a pal (described as a “semi-longhaired fellow”) who worked at the White House. The W.H. staffer’s rocker friend would send him care packages full of records and other Warner-related stuff including a poster of Alice Cooper hanging from a noose covered in fake blood. The image was an alternate for Cooper’s 1971 album Killer and also appeared on a nifty Alice Cooper calendar for 1972, included in the record. The staffer then took the poster and stuck it on a door at the end of a “staff only” corridor in the W.H., presumably until it was discovered and burned by one of Tricky Dick’s dicks.

Did this really happen? One can only hope, as Bob Regehr, one of Warner’s greatest assets in the 70s and 80s, was Cooper’s champion and likely had everything to do with the circulation of this fantastic piece of folklore. Regehr was instrumental in signing acts like Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, and Laurie Anderson. Back in the day, Cooper had Regehr in the first spot in his Rolodex, and for their next act to keep Killer on everyone’s mind, they devised a plan to throw an elaborate party in Cooper’s honor. And when I say “elaborate,” I really mean “deranged,” which makes more sense since this was 1971 and Alice Cooper was involved.

But before we get to the party to end all parties, there’s a little twist as to why the party was dubbed “The Coming Out Party for Miss Alice Cooper.” According to another Warner executive, Stan Cornyn, he was part of a conversation about Killer with Joel Friedman, Warner’s head of distribution for the U.S., and Regehr, who was heading up Warner’s Artist Relations. When Cornyn heard Friedman say, “Alice Cooper! Her record is doing great!” he and Regehr dreamed up the idea of Cooper “coming out” to the world during a star-studded, debaucherous party. And that’s precisely what happened—because it ain’t a real party until the gorilla suit rented for the occasion goes missing during the festivities, never to be seen again.

Held at The Ambassador Hotel, the hotel staff did not know any of the details behind the “coming out” party to be held in their Venetian ballroom. Here’s the wording on the invitation:

“You and a guest are cordially invited to attend the summer season debut of Alice Cooper, to be held at the Venetian Room, Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, the evening of Wednesday, July 14th, 8:30 PM to midnight. Formal dress or equivalent costume is requested, but hardly mandatory.”

The details of the party were left to Dennis Lopez who had plenty of experience throwing unforgettable bashes all over San Francisco for legendary drag troupe The Cockettes. Cooper was known to spend time with the Cockettes whenever he came through S.F., as Cooper dug their “gender fuck” vibe, and likewise, the Cockettes dug Cooper’s over-the-top showmanship. Advertised as a “formal dress” kind of ball, many guests did arrive dressed to the nines. Inside the Venetian Room, an orchestra was in full swing. After guests were greeted by a Cockette dressed in a gorilla suit, more Cockettes (many with beards, beaded gowns, and headdresses) threw red roses as approximately 500 party goers entered, including Randy Newman, various Beach Boys, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Because it’s not a fucking party until someone sticks their dick in a plaster mold. Other members of the Cockettes were dressed as cigarette girls offering up cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. In addition to the orchestra, Elsie May, aka T.V. Mama (a former backup singer for James Brown), and her “stoned-freak out soul band” ran through a few numbers before T.V. Mama (a lady of “ample” proportions) stripped down to her undies and performed topless. But what about the guest of honor, Alice Cooper?

Continues after the jump…

 
The Mental Experience sub label of Lleida, Spain-based Guerssen Records has a knack for finding some seriously outré stuff. They take long forgotten—and some never recalled—material from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and give it new life for adventuresome listeners who are insatiable for something “new” to listen to. The label’s oddball connoisseurship—and the lengths they go to to uncover this stuff—exceeds what most reissue units dabble in. Their latest project is Clear Memory by Bomis Prendin—the name of a member, and of the band, like Alice Cooper—originally released in 1984 on 50 handmade cassettes.
 

 
Bomis Prendin’s Clear Memory is the sort of group/artist/album one used to find out about on the late Mutant Sounds blog. Or perhaps the infamous Nurse With Wound list, which they’re on. It’s experimental and it’s very, very obscure. Bomis Prendin describes themselves as “the band that put the harm in harmony, and the odious in melodious” and they’ve been at it—continuously at it—since the late 1970s, some of them playing together before that. The Washington, D.C. “noisicians” collective made hours and hours of weird recordings, very little that’s been released in corporeal form, although you can find a lot of their material for download on the Free Music Archive. When they did release their insane music, it was sometimes on flexi-discs, sometimes on bespoke cassettes or CD-Rs.
 

 
The Bomis Prendin sound is that of homemade industrial-noise-psych-pop-experimental. It’s quite striking. The press materials compare them to Faust, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Olivia Tremor Control and the Residents, and yes, that seems about right. It’s worth mentioning that Bomis Prendin were contemporaries of all these bands, even if only Nurse With Wound noticed at the time.
 

 
More after the jump…