WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Vincent Price / "Hitler and Witchcraft"

WFMU Dept. of Occult Studies brings you this short essay from noted gourmet, actor and demonologist
Vincent Price. Here produced for record by Roger Karshner and written and directed by Terry d'Oberoff. It comes from the highly-recommended double lp "Vincent Price Witchcraft and Magic", a fun effort marred only slightly by the decision to add 'spooky' echo delay to Price's voice throughout the whole record. Since a Boyd Rice interview is likely coming up soon in this space, this track is a little taste of what won't be discussed in a few weeks. Enjoy a Vinnie snack:

Hitler and Witchcraft

Seize the Time: Pat Thomas, Black Power, and Listen, Whitey!

As author Pat Thomas puts it, “Every revolution needs a soundtrack!” And in the late-'60s/early-'70s, the soundtrack and the revolution were often one in the same. In hs new book, Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (Fantagraphics), and companion CD/double-LP of the same name (Light in the Attic), Thomas examines the Black Power movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, the explosion of creativity happening across the musical spectrum at the time, and the now-obscure Black power protest anthems that resulted from the two movements intertwining.

A writer, producer, and musician, Thomas has also worked at Water and 4 Men With Beards, where he began his research for the Listen, Whitey! project. Surely the crate-digging chops he honed while at those labels came in handy when tracking down some of the impossibly deep musical relics from the heyday of the would-be black revolution (most notably Black Panther house band The Lumpen).

It’s almost shocking that no one has explored this topic in depth until now, given the longevity of the Black Power aesthetic and our continued obsession with "The '60s." When taking into account the rocky state of our nation  (politically, socially, and culturally) and the fledgling Occupy movement creeping into the mainstream, it seems not only timely but essential. (Although one shudders to think what a consensus-driven Occupy soundtrack might sound like.) 

The Quietly Lasting Impact of Ennio Morricone and Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza

by Kathleen Furey

Ennio Morricone: La Musica Parla (The Music Talks)

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Ennio Morricone is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers of all time. In the span of his six-decade career, he has scored over 500 films and television shows, including Fistful of Dollars (1964,) The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1967,) and Danger: Diabolik (1968.) Morricone’s scores are not the traditional, lush, string-filled scores that Henry Mancini and Max Steiner were fond of in the first part of the sixties. Instead, Morricone used sounds like coyote howls and cracking whips as well as surf guitars to illustrate the films of such directors as Sergio Leone, Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

Morricone’s unusual musical tastes led him to join the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, an avant-garde free-improvisation group founded by Franco Evangelisti in 1964. The group functioned as “musical scientists” of sorts, dedicating themselves to using anti-musical systems and noise techniques (again, using sounds like cracking whips and animal howls to accent musical styles like surf guitars) to mash together musical stylings from the fifty years leading up to the group’s formation. The group labeled their technique “Instant Compostion.” Nothing was ever composed on paper, just recorded directly to tape.

These unusual techniques helped provide Morricone with some of his most memorable film scores. The theme from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly has had a major impact on westerns. The musical scores for

Web 0.0: Douglas Adams’s Hyperland

By Tom Keiser

Hyperland (Douglas Adams)

What's on today on Network Awesome

When did you first hear of the Internet? Was it when you were in college, and finally saw a way to connect with people without a huge long distance bill? Were you in high school, and found out you could skip hours of ungodly research at a library when you could look something up on one of the first search engines? Or, was it in 1990, when you turned on the BBC and watched a documentary hosted by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker, entitled Hyperland?

Hyperland posits that Modern Man, in the guise of Douglas Adams, would be so tired of the dreck on television, that he would strive for a better way to put his free time to good use. Adams uses The Price Is Right to mark the nadir of popular culture. It makes you think how far we’ve come in twenty years.

Adams falls into a dream sequence, which starts with him taking his television to the local dump. It is there

10 Seconds from Every Top-100 Song Ever + A Free Cut-up Software!

1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

In 1959, Billboard began releasing their annual charts of the top 100 songs of each year.  Here are mp3s with 10 seconds of every single top 100 song ever.  Follow the lists along with the music on this site.  There are some errors here, so bear with me and do point out major imperfections in the comments.  If you've been following my column in the past, all of these mp3s are improved versions, with crossfades in between tracks and smarter choices of clips.

I produced these supercuts with a software that Frederic Cornu and I developed together.  Fred is a genius and I'm eternally grateful to him.  This software is VERY SIMPLE to use and 100% FREE.  It simply takes a music playlist of your choice (from iTunes or a similar program), finds the loudest point of each song and stitches all the songs together.  These supercuts are useful to condense information and I think they're totally beautiful too.

In a few minutes, you can easily make supercuts of your music collection, even if you are a luddite.  Download the file below, unzip the folder and click "Run Supercut-O-Matic"...there'll be a button to press in the program to give you further instructions.

UPDATE!  You can get improved versions of the Supercut-O-Matic at this link.  The new version gives you more options, such as changing the size of each clip, the crossfade, and more!

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Mac (2mb zip file)

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Windows (3mb zip file)

Source code for Linux

Once you've made your files, send them to me (contact info is provided in the program's helpme file) and I will release YOUR MUSIC on a CD!  Do you have a completist collection of yodeling music, blues singers, minimal-synth, presidential speeches or tuba solos?  Use Supercut-O-Matic and SEND ME THE RESULTS!  Please do contact me with any feedback.

"Supercuts Supercut", a CD with the best submissions I get, is available to anybody who pledges $75 or more to my radio show in the current WFMU fundraising marathon!  Use the widget below to pledge to the greatest radio station on the planet and help us broadcast for another year.  Also, if you pledge $30 or more to my show, I will remix a top 100 song of your choice LIVE on the air.

Russia's Cartoon Powerhouse: Soyuzmultifilm and The Mystery of the Third Planet

By Daniel Creahan

Movie - The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981)

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In the phenomenal “Krusty Gets Canceled” episode of The Simpsons (one of my personal favorites, even if you only consider Bette Midler’s superhuman strength), Krusty, having lost Itchy and Scratchy to a competitor, is forced to resort to Eastern Block animation, namely a strange communist derivative called  Worker and Parsite.  Needless to say, the kids don’t stick around­.­­

The short is a pretty bold-faced homage to the Russian powerhouse of animation, Soyuzmultfilm, and its many imitators.  Formed by Stalin as a reaction to the budding cultural phenomenon of Mickey Mouse, the state-run studio employed an approach eerily similar to a 5-year plan to build Soviet animation into a global power.  And power it was.  Even today, Soyuzmultfilm is the second largest animation studio in the world.  All told, the studio has produced over 1,500 works in its 77 year history (1).

I’ve seen the studio’s work pop up a few times in the last few several weeks of programming on Network

Appropriating Forms: Violence and Godspeed You! Black Emperor

By Robert Ham, Doc - Mitsuo Yanagimachi: Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1976)

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In his book Retromania, peerless cultural critic Simon Reynolds spends an entire chapter talking about a particularly "Japanese sensibility": "the way that [they] would curate, assimilate and reprocess Western popular culture.

"According [journalist W. David] Marx, in Japan style is not personal, a matter of cultivated quirks and differences, but impersonal, an external standard to which you have to measure up."

While Reynolds was used the above points to frame his discussion of Japanese music and its tendency to reflect back on sounds and ideas from the American and European counterparts, they just as easily port over to another facet of Japanese youth culture: bosozoku motorcycle gangs.

FOOD (1972) – Gordon Matta-Clark's Restaurant – Directed by Robert Frank

FOOD is a short film directed by aritst/photographer Robert Frank about Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden's conceptual restaurant. Founded in 1972 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, FOOD brought together many factors of the local community, artists and otherwise, becoming a space for dialogue and conversation as well as a living piece in it of itself. 

The Ballad Of Caryl Chessman (MP3s)

     

Ronnie Hawkins  -  The Ballad Of Caryl Chessman (Let Him Live, Let Him Live, Let Him Live)

Hoyle Miller  -  Twelve Years On Death Row

Country Johnny Mathis  -  Caryl Chessman

In July 1948, Caryl Chessman, also known as "The Red Light Bandit," was sentenced to die in the California gas chamber after being convicted on 17 charges of robbery, kidnapping and rape.  Chessman's residence on death row was somewhat anomalous in that his crimes did not involve the taking of a life.  However, the fact that he was convicted of kidnapping with bodily harm enabled the state of California to charge him with the violation of the Federal Kidnapping Act (sometimes referred to as the Little Lindbergh Law), which was regarded as a capital offense.

Strange Bedfellows: A Rockabilly Session and a Voice of Reason on Anti-Communism (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 25)

"One never know, do one?" - Fats Waller

Today's tape was intriguing enough when I heard the first six minutes of it. When I heard the remainder of the tape (which also indicated what that six minutes had been recorded over, I was even more fascinated.

Recorded over the initial third of the tape, at 15 IPS (the speed often used at recording studios), in whole track mono, after some initial setting up sounds, were versions of two Rockabilly classics, the first being "Heartless Woman" (most often associated with Terry Noland) and the second being "The Fool" (Sanford Clark's huge hit from 1956). There is no indication anywhere on the tape or box as to who is performing on these tracks, or even that they exist on the tape.

1.) Unknown - Set Up (MP3)   |  2.) Unknown - Heartless Woman (MP3)  |  3.) Unknown - The Fool (MP3)

Well, as soon as these recordings end, the rest of what they were erasing shows up, at 7 1/2 IPS and again in whole track mono. And it is just as fascinating as that Rockabilly session, and yet couldn't be more different than it. What remains are three full episodes (and a fragment of a fourth) of a show hosted by Edwin Randall, short radio shows he hosted for The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and on which he was joined by Harry P. Cain.

A quick internet search - and I don't for a moment claim to be an expert on any of this - shows that Harry P. Cain was a senator from Washington, and that he served in that position just long enough to develop strong ties to Joseph McCarthy, and join him in the legendary crusade against Communists. This has tended to paint him with the same brush with which history has painted McCarthy. However, once relieved of his seat in Congress, Cain was appointed to the Subversive Activities Control Board, where he began to question some of decisions being made in the name of protecting the nation from Communists, particularly in the area of violations of civil liberties. After making a point of raising these concerns in a variety of ways, he alienated those with whom he had previously worked, including President Eisenhower, and he resigned from the Control Board.

It would appear that these radio shows date from near the end of Cain's time on the Subversive Activities Control Board. They mention his three years on the Board, a time frame he never actually reached - he resigned after 2 1/2 years! The interviews are primarily focused on his concerns about civil liberties, and he brings up several examples of questionable use of Government power, as well as how difficult it was for the little guy to fight back. With one of ideals of The American Friends Service Committee being social justice, a radio show produced by that organization would have been a good fit for Cain to express his views, as they were near the end of his tenure on the Control Board.

(The very last bit is a very brief fragment of yet another show hosted by Edwin Randell, which itself was mostly erased by the show featuring Harry P. Cain. It was on the tape, so I included it.)

4.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Fragment and Full Episode 1 (MP3)  |  5.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Full Episode 2 (MP3)  |  6.) Edwin Randall and Harry P Cain (For the American Friends Service Committee) - Full Episode 3 (MP3)  |  7.) Edwin Randall and Bill Hoisel - Fragment (MP3)  | Tape (JPG)

A Joy Division in Nazi Disneyland

Last week the web was wriggling with outrage over The Disney Store Corporation offering for sale a Mickey Mouse™ T-shirt in the graphic style of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures albumcover -- not that the iconic white-on-black waveform image (plucked from the Cambidge Encyclopedia of Astronomy by drummer Stephen Morris) was any stranger to absurd marketing schemes.

 

Glenn Beck / The Invisible Committee

Oldie but Goodie

Collaboration between Glenn Beck and The Invisible Committee

- - -

Glenn Beck lives and works in Dallas, TX

You can purchase The Coming Insurrection here

The Tale Of Floyd Collins (MP3)

The Tale Of Floyd Collins comes to us from Arkansas native Ronnie Hawkins, who found success and fame after following Conway Twitty's advice and relocating to Canada.

In 1960, several decades after the fact, Hawkins, a cousin of rockabilly pioneer Dale Hawkins, released this topical song about the 1925 death of cave explorer Floyd Collins who became trapped 55 feet underground in what is now part of Mammoth Cave National Park just outside of Cave City, Kentucky.  Collins got stuck while exploring and though rescue teams worked around the clock to try to save him, they were ulimately unsuccessful and after 14 hellish days Collins succumbed to exposure, thirst and starvation.

Ronnie Hawkins  -  The Tale Of Floyd Collins  (3:03)

The Curse of Brando Island

The ghastly Spectres which were doomed at last
To tell as true a tale of dangers past, 
As ever the dark annals of the deep
Disclosed for man to dread or woman weep. 

-- The Island, Lord Byron

In 1960, while on a scouting journey for locations for Mutiny On The Bounty, Marlon Brando visits the atoll Tetiaroa and falls in love with the former home of Tahitian royalty. Two years later, Brando marries his second Mutiny co-star, Tarita Teriipia, who played his Polynesian wife in the film and purchases Tetiaroa for $200,000 with the intention of making it his home. Little did Brando know what his island paradise would bring he and his visitors, for in acting, one not only brings himself to a role, but the role can transform the actor's real personality, permenantly -- a most dangerous game for friends and family of the 'Godfather' and 'Colonel Kurtz'.

Hear 10 Secs from Every Hit Song of the '90s

1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999

I watched part of The Crow last night (yeah, just part...we had to turn it off it was so bad) and was struck by how much of a solidified, historical aesthetic the '90s already has, just as much as the '80s or the '70s are a static time capsule of cultural silliness.  Yes, it was when I saw the faux-wet goth haircut of that "Craven" guy (real subtle name there, excellent foreshadowing) that I experienced the Proustian recollection and realized that I'm no longer "becoming a man", I'm just "a man".  The time of Jnco jeans and Darias is over.  And it was a simpler time, was it not?  No 9/11, no three simultaneous wars, no economic disaster and no Snooki.  Listen to these mp3s and pine for these more pastoral days of yore.  Read along with the clips here.

Find the rest of my "Ten Secs of _0s" column here, and listen to my radio show here.  Next up is the exciting conclusion...Every Top 100 song ever!  Plus I'll release the software I used to produce these chartsweeps along with a contest to showcase your supercut on my upcoming FMU marathon premium!

Entr’acte: The Rodeo Clown

 

So: Bullriding. You get on the bull in a chute, and the gate opens, and the bull comes out and bucks, and you stay on as long as you can, and then you fall off. Or, if you manage to stay on for eight (8!) seconds, then they blow a horn and you can jump off. And then what happens? You’re on the ground, in an enclosed area, with a pissed-off 2200-pound animal with big testicles, big horns, and also possibly ’roid rage. (There was a bull-doping steroids scandal in 2007.)  For your protection, they bring in the clowns.

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

By Gabriella Arrigoni - Collection: TV Party

Watch more on Network Awesome

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

Elvis To KLF: The Train I Ride Is Sixteen Coaches Long

Life with a three-year-old can find you focusing on on forms and representations of transportation you wouldn't otherwise. Trains, for example, hold a particular resonance with the developing mind that challenge their relative rarity compared to cars and airplanes. We've found ourselves meeting constant demands for all things trains by discovering the online world of obsessive documentarians of all things locomotive. Watching this narration-and-music-free modern footage of old-fashioned steam engines has caused us to consider the sensual impact the advent of train travel would have on the rural blues men who would incorporate the sound of trains into their music and use the eeire whistle of the coming train as a metaphor for all great changes in life, love and death.

Burgess Meredith, Singer / part four of four

Recently I tracked down Burgess Meredith's delightful autobiography, So Far, So Good, and was finally able to get a tidbit of information about his 1960 lp that I'm so fond of: Songs and Stories of the Gold Rush.  I've previously covered this album and parts of another one where he recites and sings at this blog, and now let's listen to the last four cuts of the batch and hear what Meredith himself had to say about the project.

Chuck-a-Luck      Here to See the Diggin's      My Government Claim      Burgess lp Outro

 

FUN Go! America! Celebrates New Jersey, on My Castle of Quiet, 12.18.2011

FUN—as I've come to know the Philadelphia-based combo, its sounds and membership, I realize how truly appropriate the name is for what they do. FUN are able to apply clever, inventive, fresh ideas to their improvised music-making, minus all the beard-stroking and pretentious, high-minded, music-conservatory-based conceptualization and back-patting that often accompanies similar activities.

For their FUN Go! America! tour, a 50-year project that involves one performance a year, each in a different state, on the very date that that state was inducted into the Union, FUN came to New Jersey on December 18th, to WFMU's Studio B, to render two unique, smartly conceived and individually distinct long-form improvisations. The concept of the tour alone is staggering, and relies upon FUN's members having access to interstate transportation, and living long enough, to execute the mass concept in its entirety.