GET CRAZY (1983) - FInally Avail... on Youtube. Lou Reed's Dead. Long live Auden!

"Death is just another step on the journey, man.... The end is always a new beginning."

At last... Been waiting for this movie to come to DVD in forever. Sure it's a bit dumb and crude and confusing, but so are the Ramones. The late great Lou Reed plays great late scenes as a mercurial brooder rock star, seen above in an apartment meant to resemble Dylan's album cover for "Bringing it all Back Home." There's a sort of version of The Runaways, the Grateful Dead, Iggy Pop, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Blind Luther Washington, BB King, who delivers a great funeral oration for Howlin' Blind Luther Washington, which could surely apply to Lou:

He was the greatest guitar player,
the greatest driver,
the greatest manager,
Lover of women,
Drinker of whiskey,

God, this here is my man
and you better take care of him,
or I will wax
your
ass

For fans of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, and hey, THE APPLE... and lovers of the Lou, who will be missed.

"Screw stadiums!"

Demonic Soundtracks from Beyond the Grave - A Spotify Mix to Creep out the very fall itself

Fall, and its bite-size candy trick-or-treat assortments, pumpkin guts still on your fingers,
the slowly spiraling colored dry leaves, the darkness and the chill each
with its own rooted black wet shiver,
the crisp new school year already darkening into sinister homework maze; girls and/or guys gone wild... with other people, you left alone
with the Hardy Boys inside Smuggler's Coven,
but then the movies, that autumnal chill in the creeping tick-tockable momentum of HALLOWEEN, PHANTASM, SUSPIRIA, PHENOMENA,
they're coming to get you Barbara,

but then they leave without you,
curled under the watchful eye of your dozing big daddy, the heater coming on for the first time since May with the smell of mold and mop handle incense.
mom in the kitchen, the safety of her presence without the meddling,
and then when they dress and leave for bridge... you're all alone
and barely old enough to be without a babysitter. Powerless, even with a butcher knife in your side pocket
And the chill in the leaf-swirling wind settles into your bones
like a personal threat.

I feel it all whenever I hear one of those great horror soundtracks from the 70s-80s, the time when simplicity and synthesizers and eerie time signatures left an uncanny mark that no amount of Williams, Goldsmith, Shore, or Elfman-style orchestral themes could or will ever match. Less is more and the more instruments and elocution you stuff the music with the less we care. We're not idiots. Imagine HALLOWEEN if scored by John Williams. Yiick!



Yeah, he got lucky with JAWS, which is mainly a rip of the rip of Les Baxter's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 'initiation ceremony / shamanic dream' ritual music which itself is lifted from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But then, all you need to hear is that ridiculous jaunty pirate music when the boys go out on the Orca to know that shark cue was a bleedin' fluke. Less is more: Goblin, John Carpenter, Ennio Morricone, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, and of course the ones that started it all, the creepy sing-song theme of ROSEMARY'S BABY and the moody keyboards of "Tubular Bells."

And a special shout out to the groups/composers Zombi and Umberto, who make music for 70s-80s movies that never existed! They use the Italian / American drive-in synth score format as a jumping off point, into the dark spooky heart of the creepiness that is the fall we love, remember, and chill to, so come along, or you might get left behind... in the dark!

OVER THE EDGE sountrack (1979) + Other Anthems of Middle School late 70s (Spotify Mix)

Someone had to do make one - there was a soundtrack for ahwile on vinyl, but you knew that. And nothing on Spotify, so here it is. I cobbled the original songs in the order I remember them, and put on some songs that either could, should, or would have been on there, as they were/are a part of my life in one way or the other, and from the approx. same time and capture the same theme of wild rebellion.

If you have Spotify or something like it - enjoy whilst kicking back with a lil' hash, a 1.75 of Old Crow, some acid, and a brick to throw through the school window. If not, well, you can read my handy rant on this, the greatest youth film of all time aside from Dazed and Confused. Think of it as Dazed's little brother, who never got the chances to be crazy provided the Dazed crew.

Man oh man. Some day....

 In AA there's a saying "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." The ultimate factor that destroys New Grenada is the refusal of the parents to admit that the base of their pyramid will probably not widen, and that their kids aren't going to just stop growing just because the town isn't. Kids can't slow their maturation to suit your dowdy suburban growth schedule! Nowadays kids don't blow up their schools and the result is micro-managing parents breathing down their necks and ransacking their sock drawers at will. But today's kids are fighting back, finally. It's Wall Street they're going after now... where the money from Middle America flows and drops like a giant Coinstar. I watch these protesters on the news and for the first time in awhile I have hope. One day, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun, but first, I guess, the darkness... like homework, must be endured. Give the darkness to Claude, let him smoke it; Matt Dillon, go on and create modern indie junkie comovage cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford. Motorcycle Boy, YOU Live! We... we belong dead. We will go now, into the beyond. Never before has a bus ride to juvenile hall seemed like such a triumph, a march into Valhalla, on the rays of a beautiful sun, one day, when the world is much righter.

When I was 17... I had a very Punk Year (Spotify Mix)

Punk was a big tent in the early 80s--it included thrash or 'slam dancing' (as moshing was called then), but also reggae, Dylan, Bowie, T. Rex, Stones, Johnny Cash, and what would later become known as Goth. Mainly even over and above the thrash, at least where I was concerned, was the free-form originality of rock songwriter groups like REM, Minutemen, Husker Du, X, Flesh Eaters, DOA, will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag?

And me, I got into punk via Lou Reed, and wearing a Lou shirt caught me the notice of the punk contingent at school, who turned me onto the Clash, and by extension Bob Marley. That's right, Bob Marley used to be punk rock. Why? Because the only way to learn about him, if you were a white kid in the 'burbs, was via the Clash; I remember picking up an LP of Natty Dread from the 'world music' folder, and listening at home under my covers with headphones and feeling like I was breaking some kind of law, arriving at some wild-ass destination.

Maybe I was, and am.... our main hangout was City Gardens in Trenton, usually $5-10 for an all-ages show, in the days all ages could smoke, and mosh, and look tough. We'd sit on the floor under the stage and smoke so many cigarettes we'd almost pass out. Man I was bored of each band after three songs. But whatever, it's history: I saw Ramones (probably five times), Iggy Pop (thrice), Replacements, X, Husker Du, Circle Jerks, REM, and Lou Reed. At home we'd watch tapes of RUDE BOY, GIMME SHELTER, GET CRAZY, and REPO MAN while smoking in the house and siphoning our parent's liquor after they'd gone to bed. I wore combat boots, black eyeliner, a crew cut with a duck tail, and flat black nail polish. Like I said, big tent. I've gone through a dozen seismic taste shifts since, but hey. Shit still holds up.

1993- When We were on MTV, the NY Times Style Section, and Ruling the City, so Hungover.... so Hungover

A mix straight from the NYC streets in 1993, when MTV was cool, Nirvana changed popular music for the better, more or less, and I had St. Vitus Dance and a love of PJ Harvey. I had Dry and Rid of Me on cassette, as well as Siamese Dream, Beck's Mellow Gold, Nevermind (of course), and Urge Overkill and listened to them during the super hot NYC summer on my Walkman while staggering around the black gum-sticky Manhattan streets, the music frying my dilated nerves and making the grime sparkle. Sexual longing and unemployment shame made it all come together like a soft-loud-soft chorus.

Soon enough the boy bands and dance music, the Britneys and the Syncs, would bury the grunge / punk scene. Cobain died, his wife went postal, Billy Corgan wouldn't sit with us at Chez Esaada the same night Catherine threw up like wine fountain in the midst of our circle, and Phillip got kicked out for a gay bathroom moment.. We went to Lansky's a lot - a real old speakeasy with a back alley entrance guarded by real rats on the LES. I'm sure it's gone now - while there, in our tuxes we made the NYTimes Style section cover - different times.

I don't suppose things are that crazy yet stylish now. For one thing you can't smoke in bars anymore, and you can't dance--the only two things I had left after I got sober in 98 and my fab friends are all now married with kids. The ones who kept doing coke are either dead or summering in Ibiza and Fire Island where sobesky poor folks like me dare not follow. That's fine for me, baby I'm a rolling stone. Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah, I can bleed when I want to bleed!
 



Things happen. Portishead and Tricky and Moby and MDMA changed the landscape. The sudden availability of cheap, good, delivery service coke changed it still further, badly. Right around the time I was getting sober and convulsing on the couch, my crew started with the rolled-up 20s and parties were marked by sudden surges of sleazy dealers stealing our hotties' attention and luring everyone but me upstairs to the master bedroom. I stood there, swaying, oblivious by the downstairs snack tray 'til I realized I was alone; they were all upstairs, angling for their money's worth. And so I left, and never came back. The 90s were over. It all came down. But we have the music, still... here.... on this Spotify mix, if you can press play, suckers, then I say the world is ours...

Finnegan's Wake Explained! The Clancy Brothers and Usquebaugh!

During the folk revival of the early 60s there was no one as cool, as hearty, as manly and drunky as The Clancy Brothers. Their LP, "A spontaneous performance" was in my parents' record collection and it became my favorite album from like age three to seven. I even made up crazy dances in the rec room (or 'gorpenplatz' as my dad called it), "Gorps!" he'd say when I'd show off my skills, including building a gallows out of couch cushions for the song "Roddy McCorley" ("He was excecuted on the Bridge of Toome in County Antermin Ireland. He was hanged. This is his story." The Clancy's appear in Pete Hammil's "A Drinking Life" and I love them though I'm not Irish at all.

 This is their story.

Check especially out the last video where one of the Clancys explains Finnegan's Wake. 

 




Abd kastktm here's my favorite Clancy album, mainly because I discovered it as a child (in my parent's collection) and loved its robust courage and hearty playfulness: I would make a gallows scaffold out of couch cushions and mock execute myself in a weird dance I made up, around five or six years old, set to "Roddy McCorley" oh for home video cameras back in that pre-VCR era!

Max's 46 - Voyage to the Plast (eredness)