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. 
 

The Beatles by Guy Peellaert

Animation director Chuck Braverman won an Oscar in 1974 for Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, his 14-minute animated history of the Beatles and their preeminent place in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. It’s a celebration of Beatlemania that is moving, amazing and inspiring.

I saw this three times when I was a kid. It used to come around once a year in the mid-70s as part of a weekend matinee movie “roadshow” that was four hours of Beatles films for $4. Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles at Shea Stadium and Japan ‘66 were some of the other films I recall seeing, but the clear highlight of the show each time was Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, which used footage of the group combined with flashy pop art photo-montage animation. Trust me, this was a pretty astonishing thing to see at the time. Produced by Apple (who else could have gotten all the rights to this material?) and Braverman Productions, it aired on TV one time on Geraldo Rivera’s late night ABC program Good Night America (also where the “Zapruder Film” was first seen on television in 1975).

It’s a seriously cool film, but for whatever reason, it’s practically disappeared off the face of the earth. One of the few places you can actually still rent a 16mm print is at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD. (They’ve got quite a few cool things in their collection.)

A minor footnote to this film’s history is that it was picked apart for clues to the whole dumb “Paul is Dead” theory at the time. Braverman also made the opening montage to the dystopian sci-fi cult favorite, Soylent Green.

It’s a pity that the only complete version I could find of this marvelous little Oscar-winning film is so washed-out and tatty looking, but it’s the best I could do, so be grateful for small miracles. You’ll have to mentally “restore” it in your mind as you watch. Do watch it full screen as well, there’s a lot going on.
 

 
At two o’clock on June 15th, 1938, a truck pulled-up outside the church hall at St. Mary Magdalene, Hucknall Torkard, England. The vehicle was packed with planks of wood, picks, shovels, crowbars and other assorted tools. The Reverend Canon Thomas Gerrard Barber watched from a side window as a small group of workmen unloaded the vehicle. The driver leaned against the truck smoking a cigarette. His questions to the men removing the tools went unanswered. Barber had ensured all those involved in his plans were pledged to secrecy. No one had thought it possible, but somehow Barber had managed it. This was the day the reverend would oversee the opening of Lord Byron’s coffin situated in a vault beneath the church. Once the men were finished, the driver stubbed his cigarette, returned to his cab, and drove back to the depot in Nottingham.

Over the next two hours, “the Antiquary, the Surveyor, and the Doctor arrived” followed by “the Mason.” It was all rather like the appearance of suspects in a game of Clue. Their arrival was staggered so as not to attract any unwanted attention. Barber was concerned that if the public knew of his intentions there would be an outcry, or at worst a queue around the church longer than the one for his Sunday service.

Near four o’clock, the “workmen” returned. Interesting to note that Barber in his book on the events of this day, Byron and Where He is Buried, used the lower case to name these men rather the capitalization preferred for The Architect, the Mason, and those other professionals. Even in text the working class must be shown their place. Inside the church Barber discussed with the Architect and the Mason the best way to gain access to Byron’s family crypt.

An old print of the interior of the Church shows two large flagstones covering the entrance to the Vault. One of these stones can be seen at the foot of the Chancel steps. It is six feet long, two feet four inches wide, and six inches thick. It was conjectured that the other large stone was covered by the Chancel steps, and that it would be necessary first of all to remove the steps on the south side of the Chancel in order to obtain an entrance to the Vault. Before the work started it was impossible to obtain any information whatever as to the size of the Vault, and to its actual position relatively to the Chancel floor.

Barber was a strange man, an odd mix of contrary passions.. He was as the Fortean Times noted, “a passionate admirer of Byron and a determined controversialist: a dangerous combination, it transpired, in a man placed in charge of the church where the poet had been buried.” For whatever reason, Barber believed he had some connection with the great poet. He never quite made this connection clear but alluded to it like Madame Arcati waffling on about her “vibrations” claiming he had “a personal appointment with Byron.” He was proud the poet had been buried at his church but was deeply concerned that Byron’s body might not actually reside there.
 

 
Between 1887 and 1888, there had been restoration work at St. Mary Magdalene “to allow for the addition of transepts.” This meant digging into the foundation. Though promises were made (by the architects and builders) that there would be no damage or alterations to Lord Byron’s vault, Barber feared that this was exactly what had happened. This thought dripped, dripped, dripped, and made Barber anxious about the whereabouts of the dead poet.

Early in 1938, he confided his fears to the church warden A. E. Houldsworth. Barber expressed his intention to examine the Byron vault and “clear up all doubts as to the Poet’s burial place and compile a record of the contents of the vault.”

He wrote to his local Member of Parliament requesting permission from the Home Office to open the crypt. He also wrote to the surviving Lord Byron, who was then Vicar of Thrumpton, asking for his permission to enter the family vault. The vicar gave his agreement and “expressed his fervent hope that great family treasure would be discovered with his ancestors and returned to him.”
 

 
At four o’clock, the doors to the church were locked. Inside, around forty (where the fuck did they come from?) invited guests (er…okay….) waited expectantly for the opening of Byron’s vault (what else where they expecting…vespers?). According to notes written by Houldsworth, among those in attendance was one name that Bart Simpson would surely appreciate:

Rev. Canon Barber & his wife
Mr Seymour Cocks MP [lol]
N. M. Lane, diocesan surveyor
Mr Holland Walker
Capt & Mrs McCraith
Dr Llewellyn
Mr & Mrs G. L. Willis (vicar’s warden)
Mr & Mrs c. G. Campbell banker
Mr Claude Bullock, photographer
Mr Geoffrey Johnstone
Mr Jim Bettridge (church fireman)

Of the rest in attendance, Houldsworth hadn’t a Scooby, other than he was surprised that so many had been invited by the good Reverend. As the workmen opened the vault, the guests discussed curtains, mortgages, flower-arranging, and the possibility of war.

At six-thirty, the masons finally removed the slab. A breath of cool, dank air rose into the warm church. Doctor Llewellyn lowered a miner’s safety lamp into the opening to test the air. It was fine. Barber then became (as he described it) “the first to make the descent” into the vault.

His first impression was “one of disappointment.”

It was totally different from what I had imagined. I had seen in my imagination a large sepulchral chamber with shelves inserted in the walls and arranged above one another, and on each shelf a coffin. To find myself in a Vault of the smallest dimensions, and coffins at my feet stacked one upon another with no apparent attempt at arrangement, giving the impression that they had almost been thrown into position, was at first an outrage to my sense of reverence and decency. I descended the steps with very mixed feelings. I could not bring myself to believe that this was the Vault as it had been originally built, nor yet could I could I allow myself to think that the coffins were in their original positions. Had the size of the Vault been reduced and the coffins moved at the time of the 1887-1888 restoration, to allow for the building of the two foot wall on the north of the Vault as an additional support for the Chancel floor?

Pondering these questions, Barber returned to the church. He then invited his guests to retire to the Church House for some tea and refreshments while he considered what to do next. The three workmen were left behind.
 

 
With their appetites sated, the Reverend and his guests returned to the church and the freshly opened vault.

From a distant view the two coffins appeared to be in excellent condition. They were each surmounted by a coronet… The coronet on the centre coffin bore six orbs on long stems, but the other coronet had apparently been robbed of the silver orbs which had originally been fixed on short stems close to the rim.

The coffins were covered with purple velvet, now much faded, and some of the handles removed. A closer examination revealed the centre coffin to be that of Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada, Lady Lovelace.

At the foot of the staircase, resting on a child’s lead coffin was a casket which, according to the inscription on the wooden lid and on the casket inside, contained the heart and brains of Lord Noel Byron. The vault also contained six other lead shells all in a considerable state of dissolution–the bottom coffins in the tiers being crushed almost flat by the immense weight above them.

Then Barber noticed that “there were evident signs that the Vault had been disturbed, and the poet’s coffin opened.” He called upon Mr. Claude Bullock to take photographs of the coffin. With the knowledge that someone had opened Byron’s coffin, Barber began to worry about what lay inside.

Someone had deliberately opened the coffin. A horrible fear came over me that souvenirs might have been taken from within the coffin. The idea was revolting, but I could not dismiss it. Had the body itself been removed? Horrible thought!

Eventually after much dithering, Barber opened the casket to find another coffin inside.

Dare I look within? Yes, the world should know the truth—that the body of the great poet was there—or that the coffin was empty. Reverently, very reverently, I raised the lid, and before my eyes there lay the embalmed body of Byron in as perfect a condition as when it was placed in the coffin one hundred and fourteen years ago. His features and hair easily recognisable from the portraits with which I was so familiar. The serene, almost happy expression on his face made a profound impression on me. The feet and ankles were uncovered., and I was able to establish the fact that his lameness had been that of his right foot. But enough—I gently lowered the lid of the coffin—and as I did so, breathed a prayer for the peace of his soul.

 

 
His fears were quashed, Barber was happy with what he had done. Basically dug up a grave for reasons of personal vanity. The Reverend Barber does come across as a bit of a pompous git. He was also disingenuous as the one thing he failed to mention about Byron’s corpse was the very attribute that shocked some and titillated others.

Barber was correct someone had already opened Byron’s coffin. But this did not happen during the church’s restoration in 1887-88 but less than an hour prior to his examination of Byron’s corpse. Houldsworth and his hired workmen had entered the crypt while Barber and his pals had tea.

Houldsworth went down into the crypt where he saw that Byron’s coffin was missing its nameplate, brass ornaments, and velvet covering. Though it looked solid it was soft and spongy to the touch. He called upon two workmen (Johnstone and Bettridge) to help raise the lid. Inside was a lead shell. When this was removed, another wooden coffin was visible inside.

After raising this we were able to see Lord Byron’s body which was in an excellent state of preservation. No decomposition had taken place and the head, torso and limbs were quite solid. The only parts skeletonised were the forearms, hands, lower shins, ankles and feet, though his right foot was not seen in the coffin. The hair on his head, body and limbs was intact, though grey. His sexual organ shewed quite abnormal development. There was a hole in his breast and at the back of his head, where his heart and brains had been removed. These are placed in a large urn near the coffin. The manufacture, ornaments and furnishings of the urn is identical with that of the coffin. The sculptured medallion on the church chancel wall is an excellent representation of Lord Byron as he still appeared in 1938.

There was a rumor long shared that Byron lay in his coffin with a humongous erection. This, of course, is just a myth. As Houldsworth later told journalist Byron Rogers of the Sheffield Star newspaper the idea came to the three workmen to open the poet’s coffin when Barber and co. had disappeared for tea:

“We didn’t take too kindly to that,” said Arnold Houldsworth. “I mean, we’d done the work. And Jim Bettridge suddenly says, ‘Let’s have a look on him.’ ‘You can’t do that,’ I says. ‘Just you watch me,’ says Jim. He put his spade in, there was a layer of wood, then one of lead, and I think another one of wood. And there he was, old Byron.”
“Good God, what did he look like?” I said.
“Just like in the portraits. He was bone from the elbows to his hands and from the knees down, but the rest was perfect. Good-looking man putting on a bit of weight, he’d gone bald. He was quite naked, you know,” and then he stopped, listening for something that must have been a clatter of china in the kitchen, where his wife was making tea for us, for he went on very quickly,  “Look, I’ve been in the Army, I’ve been in bathhouses, I’ve seen men. But I never saw nothing like him.” He stopped again, and nodding his head, meaningfully, as novelists say, began to tap a spot just above his knee. “He was built like a pony.”
“How many of you take sugar?” said Mrs Houldsworth, coming with the tea.

Whether any of the Reverend Barber’s guests saw Lord Byron’s corpse in the flesh (so to speak) and what they made of it, has never been recorded, other than some of the women felt faint when leaving the crypt, but there may have a light of admiration dancing in their eyes. Barber later returned to the vault on his own at midnight to keep his “personal appointment with Byron” and to most likely to ogle at the size of the great poet’s knob.

Lord Byron—poet, adventurer, rebel, adulterer, and a man hung like a horse.
 

 
H/T Flashbak and Fortean Times.
 

 
Before Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud during the summer of 1938 in London, the great Surrealist artist had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to meet the revered psychoanalyst at his consulting rooms in Vienna. Dali had lacked the confidence to knock unannounced on Freud’s door and instead had wandered the cobbled strasse holding “long and exhaustive imaginary conversations” with his idol. He had also fantasised about bringing Freud back arm-in-arm to his room at the Hotel Sacher, imagining the great psychoanalyst “clinging to the curtains” while he babbled freely about his dreams, his sexuality, and his fears.

Dali had spent his teens and early twenties reading Freud‘s works on the unconscious, on sexuality and The Interpretation of Dreams. His inability to meet the psychoanalyst in Vienna suggests Dali was in some way terrified of Freud, as if this grand examiner of human behavior was capable of seeing straight through him like a believer might feel when coming face-to-face with God.

When Albert Einstein met Freud in 1927, it was a meeting of equals. Two men who were pioneers in their chosen professions yet who had no understanding of what the other did or why it was important. Einstein later said Freud knew as much about physics as he did about psychoanalysis and claimed he could not understand the point of analysis at all. When offered to be psychoanalyzed by the great headshrinker, Einstein had refused stating he preferred to remain in “darkness” about his own motivations.

Freud fled to London from Vienna after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. He had heard of how the Nazis had burned his books, but dismissed the seriousness of their actions by saying:

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.

His nonchalance was bluster. When there was a sudden rise in anti-semitic attacks in Vienna, Freud quickly made preparations to flee the country. He arrived in London in April 1938.

Because of their interest in dreams and the unconscious, it may have seemed obvious that Dali and Freud would have made natural friends, but Freud’s taste in art was strictly traditional and he was wary of the Surrealists after a run-in with André Breton in 1921.

Breton was deeply enamored with Freud’s work and had been inspired to develop a technique of “spontaneous” writing to give free expression to unconscious thoughts and desires. Unlike Dali, Breton had the confidence to turn-up unannounced at Freud’s door and thrust his genius on the great man. Freud was not impressed. His lack of enthusiasm caused Breton to later dismiss Freud as nothing more than a “general practitioner…an old man without elegance” working away in his shabby consulting rooms.

Despite this, Breton still credited Freud with pioneering work into the unconscious imagination in his Surrealist manifesto in 1924:

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.

 

 
Dali did not have a manifesto, but he did have a painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus which he wanted to show Freud. The meeting between the two men was organized by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was also exiled in London.

Dali was just thirty-four. Freud, nearing the end of his life, was eighty-one. Dali arrived with his wife Gala and the art collector Edward James, who carried The Metamorphosis of Narcissus under his arm.

Dali was intimidated by the “father figure” Freud. His conversation was nervous and stilted. Freud asked if all Spaniards looked like him? If they did, then this might explain the Spanish Civil War. Freud’s joke fell flat. Dali later wrote that he wanted to be seen “a kind of dandy of universal intellectualism,” and be treated as an equal. As if showing his credentials, he presented Freud with a magazine that contained an article he had written about paranoia. Freud barely looked at it. Trying to interest him in the article, Dali explained;

...it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent.

Freud just stared “with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge.”

Then Dali revealed his painting, to which Freud said:

...in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious…

Dali was unsure what Freud meant and took his comment as criticism.

While small chat was exchanged between Freud, Gala and James, Dali began sketching. He suddenly saw Freud as a gastropod:

Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!

 

Dali’s drawing of Freud is now at the Freud Museum.
 
Dali thought his meeting with Freud a failure, but days later, Freud wrote Stefan Zweig:

I really have reason to thank you for the introduction which brought me yesterday’s visitors. For until then I was inclined to look upon the surrealists – who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint – as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol), cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.

Zweig never showed Freud Dali’s sketch of him, fearing the picture looked more like a skull than a snail.
 

 
Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali (1969) is a made for television documentary that captured the artist in fine fettle as he delighted in performing for the camera. Dali is seen indulging in his trademark mix of showman, clown and serious artist, hammering out a tuneless miaow on a cat piano (Dali associated pianos with sex after his father left an illustrated book on the effects of venereal diseases atop the family piano as a warning to the dangers of sexual intercourse); or sowing feathers in the air, as two children follow pushing the head of a plaster rhinoceros; or, his attempt to paint the sky. Directed by Jean-Christophe Averty, with narration provided by Orson Welles.

Peter Laughner early 1976. Photo Credit: Mik Mellen
 
Peter Laughner was a singer-songwriter-guitarist and apparent force of nature who has been credited with jump-starting the underground music scene in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1970s. Laughner was perhaps most famously a founding member of Pere Ubu—you might say he was their Syd Barrett—and before that Rocket from the Tombs, the legendarily bonkers Ubu predecessor with David Thomas and three soon-to-be Dead Boys. He had a group with future Contortion Adele Bertei called Peter and the Wolves. Laughner was involved in many different combinations of Cleveland musicians, all of them short-lived. He was a Dylan-imitating folkie (although a very good Dylan-imitating folkie to be sure), in a jugband blues combo and he went to New York to jam with Tom Verlaine when Richard Lloyd briefly left Television. He was also a memorable writer for CREEM and various local Cleveland alt-weeklies. His biography makes it seem like he was trying several musical directions simultaneously and enlisting others to his various causes, and volunteering for theirs in turn, creating sparks and willing a scene to happen by sheer force of personality.

The new Peter Laughner box set from Cleveland-based Smog Veil Records is a very, very unusual pop culture product. It’s also a difficult thing to “review,” resistant to any sort of standard approach to that task. Many box sets celebrate a lifetime’s musical achievements, greatest hits, but Peter Laughner died at the age of 24. He had no hits, in fact he was apparently only ever in an actual recording studio once, with Pere Ubu to record their first single. This is a scrapbook of memories, newspaper and magazine clippings and a box of old tapes that had been made by a dead friend that have been fashioned into something at once a highbrow rock collectible fetish item and a sincere tribute to someone who died over 40 years ago, but is still fondly remembered. The target audience for a box set (five CDs or albums and a hardback book) of amateurishly recorded live performances, 4-track recordings made late at night in his bedroom at his parents’ home and so forth is going to be very, very small, consisting mostly of Pere Ubu fanatics, rock critics, otaku rock snobs, people who actually knew Peter Laughner and other curious Clevelanders. Or maybe you, who knows? (If you are intrigued, I suggest acting quickly as 80% of the run—which will not be republished—has already been sold according to the label’s website.)
 

 
For someone who died so young, he actually left behind a helluva lot of stuff. Over the course of Peter Laughner‘s five discs, you see this young guy’s talent forming and it’s sad to think what he might’ve gone on to do had he not been so self destructive. (Even his one-time partner-in-crime Lester Bangs stopped seeing him near the end.) Obviously (and I do mean very obviously) the original material is highly derivative of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, indicated even by his song titles—take “Amphetamine” or “Baudelaire” for two pronounced examples. This is not to say that these songs are bad, not at all, but merely to indicate what the listener is in for. There are a lot of cover versions, some of them very good, but ultimately they are just cover versions, and made from lo-fi sources at that. Repeat plays are not something I anticipate, frankly.

For such a young man Peter Laughner had pretty serious talents as a poet/lyricist but as a guitar player, holy shit, get the fuck out of here. He could go from playing something that would have tied John Fahey up in knots to his utterly astonishing flamethrower guitar work in Rocket from the Tombs, a band that left behind a live tape made at a loft party in 1975 that became a legendary bootleg. (That crazed performance, released by Smog Veil along with two other live shows as The Day Earth Met The Rocket From the Tombs in 2002, was rhapsodized over lovingly for an entire chapter in Julian Cope’s Copendium, and deservedly so. It sounds like early KISS being tasered as they sing and play and manages to be far, far more violent than anything Pere Ubu or the Dead Boys would ever record. RFTT songs have been covered by Guns n’ Roses, Peter Murphy, Mission of Burma and others.)
 

Handwritten note and photo booth photo of Peter Laughner, October 1976,courtesy of Carol A. Aronson.
 
For me, the star of this set is the book (designed by longtime DM contributor Ron Kretsch) which features reminiscences by friends and associates, an explanation of the ten-year-long project’s gestation, and crucially, Laughner’s own writing clipped from local papers and CREEM magazine. The CREEM pieces I recall vividly as they were published in the very first issues of that magazine that I would buy (or rather my innocent mother would buy for me at Kroger) in 1976 when I was ten. Seen in hindsight, he had extremely good taste in music.

This is how Laughner’s CREEM review of Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby album began. As I read it again decades later every word came back to me:

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn’t go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)

I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record.

I came on to my sister-in-law “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out.” I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution…I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must’ve figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water…

A line like “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out,” first read at such a young age, well, tender poesy like that stays with you, doesn’t it? And who knows how much of it really happened? With Laughner’s reputation as a world class wastrel, I’d wager that all of it probably did, exactly as described.

In summation, Peter Laughner is certainly not for everyone, but if it sounds like it might be for you, then it most probably is. I prefer to think of it the way I approach Robert Johnson’s music. Lo-fi though it might be, it’s all we’ve got of him. It’s worth it to ignore the tape hiss and scratchy 78 rpm record sound to get to the heart of the blues. And that’s what we have here, but it’s the blues channeled through the voice and mutant guitar of an immensely talented middle class white kid living in Cleveland who burned out at the age of 24, but never completely faded away.
 

 
More from the ‘Peter Laughner’ box set, after the jump…

 
A few months back online record club Vinyl Me, Please and Drexel University’s student-run MAD Dragon Records released Laugh To Keep From Crying by the Nat Turner Rebellion. The album was comprised of nearly 50-year-old, mostly never-released recordings of this short-lived Philadelphia-based band who were working in the hard-funk plus horns arena (think Sly & The Family Stone meets Blood, Sweat & Tears). The group broke up when one member pulled a gun on another, but decades later, when all but one of them is deceased, the music they made together is being discussed on NPR and by Rolling Stone. The initial pressing of the LP sold out almost instantly.

The Nat Turner Rebellion’s recordings had been stored in the library of Philly’s famous Sigma Sound Studios, the studio closely associated with Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, the pre-disco hit factory showcasing “The Sound of Philadelphia” which was responsible for an astounding 175 gold and platinum records. David Bowie recorded Young Americans in Sigma’s Philly location. Stevie Wonder recorded there. Thom Bell worked there constantly. The studio’s house band MSFB (“Mother Father Sister Brother”) employed a pool of more than 30 top studio musicians and were Philadelphia’s answer to the Wrecking Crew. Even krautrockers Amon Düül II did something at Sigma. During its heyday the studio was booked out for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
 

 
Founder Joseph Tarsia closed Sigma’s Philly location in 2003 (Sigma’s New York location was sold in 1988) and donated over 7000 unclaimed tapes from the studio’s tape library to the Drexel University Audio Archive. Drexel’s Music Industry department is regarded as one of the finest in America. The university has its own independent record label, MAD Dragon Music Group, and an artist services firm, concert promotion company and a booking agency. The Nat Turner Rebellion project is the first of what will no doubt be many more released from the Sigma Sound tapes.

I asked some questions about the Sigma Sound archive and the school’s program via email, to Toby Seay and Marc Offenbach from Drexel University’s Music Industry Program and Audio Archives.

How was it that the Sigma Sound archives came to Drexel?

Toby Seay: The Sigma Collection was donated to Drexel in 2005. The donation consisted of all the tapes that were left behind at the studio for whatever reason. When the studio was sold a few years prior to donation, Sigma spent years and lots of money trying to locate all the original tape owners. They made phone calls, took out ads in all the trade magazines, and after an exhaustive search, what was still not picked up was considered abandoned property. It was then that a deed was issued for the physical tapes, which allowed for the transfer and donation into the hands of Drexel. It was a very forward-thinking decision. Here are studio recordings needing a home and Drexel has a pioneering Music Industry program that could use these tapes for educational purposes. Additionally, universities are great homes for these types of collections as they all have archives, researchers, licensing departments, and all the things needed to preserve media collections. So, in our case, the tape owners contacted Marcy Rauer Wagman, who was the Drexel Music Industry program’s Director at the time. She worked out the deal and got the tapes to campus. What that means is that we are the owners of the physical tapes. But we do not own the intellectual property that is recorded on the tapes. This is a very typical situation for libraries and archives.

Do you also have the original tape machines from the studio?

Toby Seay: We have a few machines from Sigma. We have two ½” 4-track Scully 280s, two ¼” Scully 2-track 280s, and a ¼” Ampex 440. These were obtained later to supplement the collection. We do have other artifacts from Sigma, such as the EMT Reverb Plates, the “Recording” lights from above the doors, and numerous pieces of test equipment - not to mention boxes and boxes of paper records related to the studio.
 

 
Some of the names seen in the various picture of the archive are pretty notable acts, if not superstar performers like David Bowie and Sly Stone. What ARE those tapes? Are there really Young Americans outtakes in the collection?

Toby Seay: Yes, as Bowie recorded most of Young Americans at Sigma, the Bowie tapes are 2” 16-track outtakes of those sessions. There are a number of early renditions of the song “Young Americans” as well as “John, I’m Only Dancing,” and many others. There are a few unreleased songs as well. The Sly Stone tapes are 2” 24-track recordings that were originally recorded at CBS Studios in San Francisco in 1976 for the Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back album. Again, not sure why they are in the Sigma Collection, but I assume they were brought in for mixing.

I noticed the Amon Düül II tape in one of the photos? What’s that? 

Toby Seay: It is a 2” 24-track safety of “Ain’t Today Yesterday’s Tomorrow” recorded in 1977. I have no idea how it came to be in the Sigma Collection. The album that this song is on, Almost Alive, only lists studios in Munich, Manchester, and London. It may have been sent for string recordings or mixing, or who knows?

Anything else that is particularly noteworthy?

Toby Seay: While we don’t have the Gamble and Huff PIR tapes for which Philadelphia is known, our collection does have some pretty significant artists represented. Sometimes those are just outtake reels that got left behind and sometimes it is the actual masters. We have a lot of Grover Washington, Jr., Teddy Pendergrass, Patti LaBelle, mostly from the late 80s and early 90s. We also have a great collection of disco recordings that really show the development of that genre, things like Earl Young and the Trammps’ “Zing, Went the Strings of my Heart,” Jackie Moore’s “This Time Baby,” Odea Coates’ “That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles,” and TNJ’s “Don’t Forget About Me.” The list goes on and on.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Being invested with a knighthood can have its advantages. The media will take a knight more seriously and give credence to their pronouncements no matter how inane. Financial services are generally easier to obtain. And there is the potential to be excused of questionable activities, no matter how criminal.

When the illustrious actor John Gielgud was awarded a knighthood in June 1953, he wrote to his friend Edith Evans to say that he “was very proud to be in such noble company,” and hoped to do his best and “be a credit to you all.”

Four months later, Gielgud was arrested for “importuning” an undercover police officer in a public convenience. He described this incident as a “moment of madness” that could have destroyed his career.

Gielgud waited a long time for his knighthood. He had been an international star of stage and film for over thirty years. He had starred in a record-breaking production of Hamlet on Broadway and caused a sensation in the lead of Romeo and Juliet in London’s West End. His contemporaries Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson had already been knighted by the time Gielgud received his honor—even though he was arguably the better, more respected and longer-serving actor. One can only assume that part of the reason for this delay came from suspicions over Gielgud’s long-time status as a well-known bachelor. This was something which had been a subject for comment and innuendo as far back as 1931, when in a eulogy to Gielgud’s performances in Romeo and Juliet and J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, some dignitary named Justice Langton commented that although “Mr. Gielgud [was] still unmarried” (nudge-nudge, wink, wink) he hoped the actor would “soon meet with not only a Good Nymph but a Constant Companion.”

Gielgud was gay at a time when homosexuality in Britain was punishable by a fine, or imprisonment, or chemical castration—as what happened to the code-breaking war hero Alan Turing. Gielgud was highly discreet about his sexual orientation. Not from fear of imprisonment but to avoid upsetting his mother.

In 1951, the Conservative Party won the general election and Winston Churchill was returned to office to serve his second term as Prime Minister. Churchill had high hopes for his premiership with plans to develop Britain’s “special relationship” with America and maintain the country’s position as the third major force in the world. At home, the Conservatives were preoccupied with building a new future. However, Churchill was old and his health poor. In 1953, he suffered a mini-stroke. Rather than retiring, he continued with his obligations as Prime Minister much to frustration of his deputy Anthony Eden. Under the Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, the Tories seemed obsessed with a “plague of sodomy” which they believed gripped the country. Buggers were everywhere—or so it seemed to Fyffe. He became determined to “rid England of this male vice … this plague.” The press were encouraged to manufacture homophobic hysteria among the public by which the police could use their full force to arrest and intimidate gay men. Prosecutions for “gross indecency between men” rose by almost 500% to 5,443 under Fyffe’s charge.

The law stipulated that a man could be arrested for merely the intent of committing an act of “gross indecency.” Bars and clubs were raided, phones bugged, suspected homosexuals placed under police surveillance and officers were sent undercover to entrap men in public locations such as toilets which were known for cruising or rather cottaging.
 

Gielgud in his Oscar-winning role as Hobson in ‘Arthur’ with Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli.
 
On the night of Tuesday October 20th, fired up by a few drinks and after a long day’s rehearsal on the play A Day by the Sea, Gielgud popped into his local public convenience on the off chance of some sex. There at the urinal lurked an undercover policeman to whom Gielgud unfortunately gave the “glad eye.” How he knew this unassuming young man was up for a bit of cock fun—one can only surmise. As the great Alan Bennett once joked, pointing percy at the porcelain for twenty minutes is a performance that merits an Oscar or a Tony—more often a Tony than an Oscar in such circumstances. Gielgud was arrested and taken to Chelsea police station where he gave his name as “Arthur Gielgud” and his occupation as “a clerk earning £1,000 a year.” He was charged with “importuning” and ordered to appear in court the following morning.

That night, Gielgud contemplated suicide. Though he reckoned his career was over, his greatest concern was the effect his arrest would have on his mother:

I thought it might kill her. She hated publicity of any kind. Thank God my father had died before that because he would never have got over it.

 
More dear Johnny, after the jump…
 

 
When Marty Feldman met Francis Bacon drink was involved.

Before he became internationally famous for his performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman was a very successful and hugely influential comedy scriptwriter with his long-time writing partner Barry Took.

One night in London, sometime during the almost swinging sixties, Feldman and Took had been working late finishing off another episode of their hit radio show Round the Horne. It had been a good day, a productive day, and now Feldman was on his way home to see his wife, Lauretta. As he walked through the city he heard jazz coming from an art gallery. The band were playing “Night in Tunisia.” It piqued his interest. Feldman had started off as a jazz musician when he was fifteen playing trumpet with his own band and occasionally filling in with other combos. He wandered towards the gallery. A small crowd stood around clinking glasses. Ah, jazz, art, and free booze.

Feldman snaffled a couple of cocktails and had a look at the paintings. Not bad. Interesting. Certainly different but not really to his taste. Against one bare white wall there stood a man who looked like he was losing his battle to keep himself or the building up. He had the look of an aged choirboy gone to seed. A round turnip head, with dyed hair slicked back, and just a hint of rouge on his cheeks. He wore a leather jacket, a white shirt (top button undone) and blue paint splattered denims. Feldman thought he looked familiar but wasn’t quite sure where from?

What was said, we can only imagine, but it apparently began with the man against the wall commenting on Feldman’s distinctive face.

“I could use that face,” he might have said
“Well, I’m using it myself at the moment,” Feldman replied in our imaginary dialog.
“Your eyes,” returned the first.
“Yes, they’re my eyes.”
“You don’t understand, I. Have. To. Paint. You,” almost like Edith Evans’ “handbag” in The Importance of Being Earnest.

The man against the wall leaned towards Feldman as if attempting to capture something invisible between them.

“I,” he continued, “must paint you. You look the sort of man I could do something with.”

Feldman thought what sort of things this man might want to do with him then decided this strange character was trying to pick him up.

“Here, take my number,” the man said. He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Feldman took the paper and watched the man who was no longer holding up the wall stagger off into the night.

The next morning, over breakfast, Feldman told his wife Lauretta about the man at the gallery who had tried to pick him up. “He wanted to paint my portrait, ” he added.

“Who was it?” Lauretta asked.

“Dunno. He wrote his name down.”

Feldman retrieved the slip of paper and said, “Francis. That’s all it says.”

Lauretta asked Feldman to describe this painter. He did. Lauretta then suggested her husband had met Francis Bacon.
 

Francis Bacon in his studio.
 
Moving forward a few months: Feldman spent the day writing with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a local pub. It was a long day’s writing and drinking into the night. Eventually, the threesome were “poured out of the place hammered” trying to remember who they were and where they lived. Somehow they got lost and ended up (surprise, surprise) at another art gallery party.

Once again, Feldman tucked into the cocktails, this time joined by the equally drunk Cook and Moore. And once again, there was that man Francis holding up a wall. As Feldman recounted the incident in his autobiography eYE Marty:

I spotted my old pal Francis standing at a distance and pointed him out to Peter, who knew my story because I had become obsessed with what-ifs. Bacon’s work was fetching high prices and it would have been fun if he’d painted a portrait of me and I hadn’t told Lauretta, just inviting her to a gallery and pretended it was no big deal.

Cook told Moore about Bacon’s offer to paint Feldman’s portrait.

Without hesitation, Dudley went up to Bacon and told him that Marty was now ready to be painted.

Unfortunately, the temperamental Bacon told Moore that he had “never seen or talked to [Feldman] in his life.”

Though Bacon may not have known Feldman, he was bound to be at least acquainted with Cook and Moore, as he had often visited Cook’s Establishment Club, and had been at parties also attended by Pete ‘n’ Dud. Perhaps, as Feldman suggested, Bacon saw the state the trio were in and thought they were just “a bunch of drunken wankers.”
 

Pete ‘n’ Dud.
 
More shenanigans from Feldman, Bacon, and co, after the jump…
 

 
BLAM!!!

Fifty years ago, the rules of engagement changed. On Thursday May 15th 1969, police opened fire with shotguns on mostly peaceful, unarmed student demonstrators who were protesting the seizure of the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA.

The cops were given the green light to do whatever the fuck they wanted or in PR parlance use whatever force was necessary to remove the demonstrators. The word had come down from California’s Governor Ronald Reagan who thought Berkeley was “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Some of the cops agreed. These were mostly hyped-up ex-Vietnam vets who thought hippie draft-dodging commie student bastards were the nearest thing to the VC they’d ever get a chance to blast on home turf. The cops were just pawns in a game but their actions were bloody, unnecessary, fatal, and ultimately futile.

BLAM!!!

In the mid-1950s, the University of Berkeley wanted to buy a stretch of land to redevelop as student residences, a parking lot, and some campus offices. Student numbers were growing and there was a lack of good affordable student housing. The university bods eyed up a 2.8 acre plot of land just east of Telegraph Hill and about a block from one of Berkeley’s other student dormitories. As there wasn’t enough cash to buy the land and pay for its redevelopment, the plans were put on hold until 1967 when the university bought the plot by eminent domain (or compulsory purchase) for $1.3m. The land had about 25 various low-rent working class dwellings which were soon bulldozed to make way for the bright shiny brand new future.

But fuck all happened.

After almost two years, the land had become nothing more than a dumping ground for garbage and wrecked automobiles. Word soon went round campus, with an earnestness only the young can afford, that the land grab, the bulldozing of the houses, and the promise of a bright new shiny future had just been a clever ruse to rid Berkeley from the influence of the radical left-wing dropouts who lived in the plot’s low rent dwellings. Word was the cops and some university officials saw these people as the main instigators of Berkeley’s anti-Vietnam and anti-capitalist agitation. Get rid of them, the story went, and the university and the city and the state were getting rid of a goddam irritant.

There was some substance to this theory, which was in no small part aided by Governor Reagan’s vehemence against Berkeley, but it wholly overlooked a bigger issue which was universities like most academic institutions are run by well-meaning ditherers whose business acumen is hamstrung by their good intentions. Left untended, the site was bringing the neighborhood down and damaging local businesses.

In April 1969, concerned residents, business owners, merchants, students and alike got together to decide what they could do to change the site. The best suggestion came from student Wendy Schlesinger and anti-war activist Michael Delacour who offered up a plan to turn the area into a people’s park and free speech area. This suggestion was unanimously agreed upon by those who attended the meeting. Unfortunately, they never presented their idea for possible consideration to the university land owners. But fuck them. They’d never taken an interest in the site, they’d just bulldozed a shitload of houses and let it to go wild.

The People’s Park brought together around a thousand volunteers who helped clear out this abandoned ground for wrecked cars and dumped trash and start to landscape and plant trees and flowers. By mid-May, the People’s Park was open to all. But back on campus, trouble was brewing.
 

 
More on the battle of People’s Park, after the jump…
 

“Iggy Pop 1970”
 
A new company called Wax Face Toys is launching with a remarkable figurine of Iggy Pop. Wax Face make licensed figures in resin and vinyl featuring cult heroes from the world of music and film. The Iggy figurine was sculpted in London by former Madame Tussauds artists and measures 15.7 inches (40 centimeters). It is based on the well-known photograph taken by Thomas Copi of the Stooges performing at the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970. There was a previous Iggy sculpt that was sold via the now defunct Toys ‘R Us website, and although it was done well, it depicted Iggy in his 60s, not his youthful, out-of-his-mind prime. The Iggy depicted here is 23 and obviously full of piss, vinegar and other assorted psychoactive snacks.

There’s an interesting history behind Iggy’s iconic pose:

The Cincinnati music festival—which also included Alice Cooper, Traffic, Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, Mott the Hoople, Ten Years After, Bob Seger, Tommy Bolin’s band Zephyr and several other acts—took place on June 13th, 1970 at Crosley Field the soon-to-be former home of the Cincinnati Reds. (The Reds would play just a few more games there before moving on to Riverfront Stadium, probably the only reason why the promoters were allowed to hold the event there.)

The leaflet for the event read:

‘Bring blankets, pillows, watermelon, incense, ozone rice, your old lady, babies, and other assorted goodies and do your own thing’

Hippie-flippy and trippy, my finger-poppin’ daddio, but unfortunately a small number of the audience decided to get drunk and break shit, causing over $6000 of damages to the baseball diamond. It was Cincinnati after all!

The festival was shot with three video cameras and cut live like a sporting event with play-by-play commentary. It was later edited down to a 90-minute program titled Midsummer Rock that was broadcast on local television station WLWT and syndicated elsewhere. The producers felt they could tap into the same sort of counterculture youth market as the Woodstock film (which was actually playing in Cincinnati movie theaters the week of the festival) except for television, so they brought in 58-year-old Jack Lescoulie, a square announcer from The Today Show, to make it all seem a little less scary for TV audiences.
 

 
I’m not altogether sure how successful they were with that. Iggy—in what is perhaps the only extant sync-sound footage of the original Stooges—was clearly pumped full of drugs. LOTS of drugs. He paces the stage shirtless, seething, frantic, with silver gloves and a leather collar, like a big cat on meth. He jumps into the audience several times before convincing audience members to hold him aloft as he walks across their hands like he’s Jesus Christ walking on water. You can actually see the moment when Copi got his shot when a bright flash goes off precisely at the right moment. Then all of a sudden Iggy has a large tub of peanut butter that he smears all over himself and gleefully throws into the audience. It’s one of the great rock and roll moments.

Years later Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys took credit for bringing the tub of peanut butter from his parents’ house in nearby Dayton and putting it directly into the Iggster’s hands, knowing fully well what he would do with it. You can hear Jack Lescoulie’s startled reaction to what’s going: “That’s… peanut butter!” he says.

The black resin Iggy figure will be available to purchase from 11AM EST on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019 online at www.waxface.com. The price is $199 + postage and handling. Orders will ship in June.
 

 
More after the jump…