A Short Biography of Keith Haring Told with Comic Book Illustrations & Music

in Art, History, Museums, Music, Travel | March 8th, 2021

Singer-song­writer-car­toon­ist Jef­frey Lewis is a wor­thy exem­plar of NYC street cred.

Born, raised, and still resid­ing on New York City’s Low­er East Side, he draws comics under the “judg­men­tal” gaze of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Mod­ern Car­toon­ist and writes songs beneath a poster of The Ter­mi­na­tor onto which he graft­ed the face of Lou Reed from a stolen Time Out New York pro­mo.

Billing him­self as “among NYC’s top slingers of folk / garage­rock / antifolk,” Lewis pairs his songs with comics dur­ing live shows, pro­ject­ing orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions or flip­ping the pages of a sketch­book large enough for the audi­ence to see, a prac­tice he refers to as “low bud­get films.”

He’s also an ama­teur his­to­ri­an, as evi­denced by his eight-minute opus The His­to­ry of Punk on the Low­er East Side, 1950–1975 and  a series of extreme­ly “low bud­get films” for the His­to­ry chan­nel, on top­ics such as the French Rev­o­lu­tion, Mar­co Polo, and the fall of the Sovi­et Union.

His lat­est effort is a 3‑minute biog­ra­phy of artist Kei­th Har­ing, above, for the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art Mag­a­zine’s new Illus­trat­ed Lives series.

While Lewis isn’t a con­tem­po­rary of Haring’s, they def­i­nite­ly breathed the same air:

While Har­ing was spend­ing a cou­ple of for­ma­tive years involved with Club 57 and PS 122, there was lit­tle six-year-old me walk­ing down the street, so I can remem­ber and draw that ear­ly ’80s Low­er East Side/East Vil­lage with­out much stretch. My whole brain is made out of fire escapes and fire hydrants and ten­e­ment cor­nices.

Lewis gives then-ris­ing stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and per­for­mance artist Klaus Nomi cameo appear­ances, before escort­ing Har­ing down into the sub­way for a lit­er­al light­bulb moment.

In Haring’s own words:

…It seemed obvi­ous to me when I saw the first emp­ty sub­way pan­el that this was the per­fect sit­u­a­tion. The adver­tise­ments that fill every sub­way plat­form are changed peri­od­i­cal­ly. When there aren’t enough new ads, a black paper pan­el is sub­sti­tut­ed. I remem­ber notic­ing a pan­el in the Times Square sta­tion and imme­di­ate­ly going above­ground and buy­ing chalk. After the first draw­ing, things just fell into place. I began draw­ing in the sub­ways as a hob­by on my way to work. I had to ride the sub­ways often and would do a draw­ing while wait­ing for a train. In a few weeks, I start­ed to get respons­es from peo­ple who saw me doing it.

After a while, my sub­way draw­ings became more of a respon­si­bil­i­ty than a hob­by. So many peo­ple wished me luck and told me to “keep it up” that it became dif­fi­cult to stop. From the begin­ning, one of the main incen­tives was this con­tact with peo­ple. It became a reward­ing expe­ri­ence to draw and to see the draw­ings being appre­ci­at­ed. The num­ber of peo­ple pass­ing one of these draw­ings in a week was phe­nom­e­nal. Even if the draw­ing only remained up for only one day, enough peo­ple saw it to make it eas­i­ly worth my effort.

Towards the end of his jam-packed, 22-page “low bud­get film,” Lewis wan­ders from his tra­di­tion­al approach to car­toon­ing, reveal­ing him­self to be a keen stu­dent of Haring’s bold graph­ic style.

The final image, to the lyric, “Keith’s explo­sive short life­time and gen­er­ous heart speak like an infi­nite foun­tain from some deep well­spring of art,” is breath­tak­ing.

Spend time with some oth­er New York City icons that have cropped up in Jef­frey Lewis’ music, includ­ing the Chelsea Hotel, the sub­way, the bridges, and St. Mark’s Place.

Watch his low bud­get films for the His­to­ry Chan­nel here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kei­th Haring’s Eclec­tic Jour­nal Entries Go Online

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Dogs, Inspired by Kei­th Har­ing

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Last Interview Book Series Features the Final Words of Cultural Icons: Borges to Bowie, Philip K. Dick to Frida Kahlo

in Literature, Music | March 3rd, 2021

Where were you when you heard that Hunter S. Thomp­son had died? The unique­ly addled, unique­ly inci­sive tak­er of the strange trip that was 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca checked out six­teen years ago last month, a span of time in which we’ve also lost a great many oth­er influ­en­tial fig­ures cul­tur­al and coun­ter­cul­tur­al. The depart­ed include many of Thomp­son’s col­leagues in let­ters: soci­etal diag­nos­ti­cians like David Fos­ter Wal­lace and Christo­pher Hitchens; con­jur­ers of the fan­tas­ti­cal and the famil­iar like Ursu­la K. Le Guin and Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez; and spe­cial­ists in oth­er fields — Oliv­er Sacks from neu­rol­o­gy, Antho­ny Bour­dain from the kitchen, Nora Ephron from Hol­ly­wood — who on the page enter­tained us as they shared their exper­tise.

All of these writ­ers have passed into esteemed com­pa­ny: not just that of lumi­nar­ies from bygone eras, but of vol­umes in Melville House­’s Last Inter­view series. “Can you think of three writ­ers who, on the face of it, would have had less to say to each oth­er at a din­ner par­ty?” asks NPR’s Mau­reen Cor­ri­g­an, review­ing Last Inter­view vol­umes on Ephron, Ernest Hem­ing­way, and Philip K. Dick.

“Hem­ing­way would have knocked back the booze and gone all moody and silent; the noto­ri­ous­ly para­noid Dick would have been under the table check­ing for bug­ging devices and Ephron would’ve chan­neled what she called ‘the tru­ly life-sav­ing tech­nique’ taught to her by her Hol­ly­wood screen­writer par­ents to get through a rough time: the mantra, ‘Some­day this will be a sto­ry!’ ”

With a range of deceased icons, includ­ing Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., Julia Child and Jorge Luis Borges, Fred Rogers and Fri­da Kahlo, the Last Inter­view books cast a wide net for such an aes­thet­i­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly uni­fied project. “Each vol­ume offers, besides use­ful insights into its par­tic­u­lar author’s work, what an old friend would call ‘civ­i­lized enter­tain­ment,’ ” writes Michael Dir­da in The Wash­ing­ton Post. “Near­ly all the titles actu­al­ly con­tain sev­er­al inter­views, and some add intro­duc­tions. For instance, the Rober­to Bolaño opens with a 40-page crit­i­cal essay.” In some cas­es the inter­view­ers are as notable as the inter­vie­wees: “Two of Lou Reed’s ques­tion­ers — the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed nov­el­ists Neil Gaiman and Paul Auster — are now prob­a­bly as well known as the leg­endary co-founder of the Vel­vet Under­ground.”

From the world of music the series includes not just Reed but David Bowie and Prince, two oth­er one-man cul­tur­al forces who left us in the past decade, as well as their equal­ly irre­place­able pre­de­ces­sors John­ny Cash and Bil­lie Hol­i­day. At the moment you can buy the entire Last Inter­view col­lec­tion on Ama­zon (in Kin­dle for­mat) for USD $344, which comes out to about $10 per book with 34 vol­umes in total. You may find this an eco­nom­i­cal solu­tion, a way to explore the final thoughts of fig­ures fea­tured more than once here on Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles’ Last Inter­view and Final Moments Cap­tured on Film

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

Mau­rice Sendak’s Emo­tion­al Last Inter­view with NPR’s Ter­ry Gross, Ani­mat­ed by Christoph Nie­mann

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

Janis Joplin’s Last TV Per­for­mance & Inter­view: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

Watch John­ny Cash’s Poignant Final Inter­view & His Last Per­for­mance: “Death, Where Is Thy Sting?” (2003)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Where Did the Metal Scream Come From? And How Do Metal Vocalists Avoid Destroying Their Vocal Cords?

in Music | March 3rd, 2021

Do met­al singers take vocal lessons? Sure­ly not the greats of old! Did Bruce Dick­in­son, Rob Hal­ford, and Ozzy Osbourne take lessons? Or did they dive into the debauch­ery head­first, scream­ing?

Iron Maiden’s Dick­in­son has been rumored to have received opera train­ing. This is not true. Instead, he stole his vocal tech­nique from his “den­tist ex-girl­friend,” he says. “As an ex-pupil of the very pres­ti­gious Chel­tenham Ladies’ Col­lege, she’d had quite exten­sive singing lessons, and she kept a note­book.” It changed his life.

Ozzy’s gui­tarist Zakk Wylde tells a fun­ny sto­ry of the Black Sab­bath legend’s wife Sharon order­ing him up a coach… just once… a “man with a brief­case,” says the burly shred­der, sent to take care of “our Joe Mon­tana.” But Osbourne did end up work­ing with a vocal coach, Kath­leen Rig­gs, more reg­u­lar­ly in lat­er years.

Judas Priest’s Hal­ford? He doesn’t men­tion a coach, but he does talk a lot about care and train­ing. “My form of extreme singing,” he says, “it’s like a work­out, you know…. Your vocal cords are mus­cles — they get burned out, they get tired.” As for his pio­neer­ing screams of over 40 years ago, he mus­es, “I some­times think that’s a bit of a curse that I sang and record­ed those cer­tain songs so long ago, when I was a younger guy with a younger set of vocal cords.” He near­ly wrecked his voice, he says, with cocaine and Jack Daniels.

It’s not opera, but met­al singing is a seri­ous­ly ath­let­ic activ­i­ty and has only become more so as its vocals have grown more extreme, even if its fash­ion sense has not. As clas­si­cal­ly trained singer and actress Melis­sa Cross — the “Queen of Scream” — relates in the video at the top, she first became a met­al vocal coach when a pro­duc­er friend called her in dis­may: the singers he was record­ing couldn’t get through a ses­sion with­out cough­ing blood.

Where did the met­al scream come from, and why is it so preva­lent if it’s such an unhealthy way to move one’s vocal folds day after day with­out train­ing and tech­nique? Vikings, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,”; Led Zep­pelin, Black Sab­bath, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, of course… babies…. These are all points of ori­gin for today’s extreme met­al singing, say hosts LA Buck­n­er and Nahre Sol in the PBS video fur­ther up.

The two talk to Cross about scream­ing with­out bleed­ing, and met­al vocal­ist Natal­ie Kreuger talks about how warmups and opera-like breath­ing tech­niques are essen­tial to main­tain­ing vocal fit­ness. And if you need more con­vinc­ing that met­al singing requires seri­ous pow­er and sta­mi­na, take a look at the 10 longest live screams in met­al, above. Let’s hope they all heed the exam­ple of the elder met­al gods.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ori­gins of the Death Growl in Met­al Music

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Why the Flood of Musician Memoirs? An Exploration by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #84

in Books, Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | March 3rd, 2021

There’s been an explo­sion of rock and roll auto­bi­ogra­phies in recent years, with pret­ty much every music leg­end (and many oth­ers) being invit­ed by some pub­lish­er or oth­er to write or dic­tate their sto­ry. What’s the par­tic­u­lar appeal of this kind of recount­ing, what’s the con­nec­tion between writ­ing and read­ing these books on the one hand and pro­duc­ing and lis­ten­ing to the actu­al music on the oth­er? Do we get a rough­ly equiv­a­lent ben­e­fit from a biog­ra­phy, doc­u­men­tary, or film depic­tion of the per­son­’s life?

Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt along with guest Lau­ra Davis-Chanin, author of her own music mem­oir, each picked a book, cov­er­ing Elvis Costel­lo, Car­rie Brown­stein, Ozzy Osbourne, and Deb­bie Har­ry respec­tive­ly. Reflect­ing on these read­ing expe­ri­ences we com­pare the author’s pur­pos­es in writ­ing the book, how con­fes­sion­al or drug-addled or twist­ed the sto­ry is, what is empha­sized and what’s not, and what res­onat­ed in the sto­ry beyond the idio­syn­crat­ic recount­ing of that per­son­’s life.

Check out Lau­ra’s two books, hear her talk about her musi­cal adven­tures on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music, and hear her dis­cuss clas­sic lit­er­a­ture on Phi Fic.

Some of the NEM episodes where Mark talked with guests about their auto-biogra­phies fea­tured Chris Frantz of Talk­ing Heads, Jim Peterik of Sur­vivor, Andy Pow­ell of Wish­bone Ash, Dan­ny Seraphine of Chica­go and John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch.

We did­n’t use much research for this episode, but you can read lists of par­tic­u­lar­ly good music mem­oirs from Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The Oak­land Press has an arti­cle about music biogra­phies and auto­bi­ogra­phies emerg­ing at the end of 2020.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A List of 132 Radical, Mind-Expanding Books from Rage Against the Machine

in Books, Music, Politics | March 2nd, 2021

If you like Rage Against the Machine, but don’t like their “polit­i­cal bs,” you haven’t actu­al­ly lis­tened to Rage Against the Machine, whose entire rai­son d’être is con­tained with­in the name. What is “the Machine”? Let’s hear it from the band them­selves. Singer Zack de la Rocha point­ed out that the title of their sec­ond album, 1996’s Evil Empire, came from “Ronald Reagan’s slan­der of the Sovi­et Union in the eight­ies, which the band feels could just as eas­i­ly apply to the Unit­ed States.”

The Machine is cap­i­tal­ism and mil­i­tarism, what Dwight D. Eisen­how­er once famous­ly called the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” but which has fold­ed in oth­er oppres­sive mech­a­nisms since the coin­ing of that phrase, includ­ing the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex and immi­gra­tion-indus­tri­al com­plex. The Machine is a mega-com­plex with a lot of mov­ing parts, and the mem­bers of RATM have done the work to crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine them, inform­ing their music and activism with read­ing and study.

Evil Empire, for exam­ple, fea­tured in its lin­er notes a pho­to of “a pile of rad­i­cal books,” “and the group post­ed a lengthy read­ing list to com­ple­ment it on their site,” declares the site Rad­i­cal Reads. Debates often rage on social media over whether activists should read the­o­ry. One answer to the ques­tion might be the com­mit­ment of RATM, who have stead­fast­ly lived out their con­vic­tions over the decades while also, osten­si­bly, read­ing Marx, Mar­cuse, and Fanon.

There are more acces­si­ble the­o­rists on the list: fierce essay­ists like for­mer death row inmate and Black Pan­ther Mumia Abu-Jamal and Hen­ry David Thore­au, whose Walden and “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence” both appear. The Anar­chist Cook­book shows up, but so too does Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, biogra­phies of Miles Davis and Bob Mar­ley, Taschen’s Dali: The Paint­ings, James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist of a Young Man, and Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer. This is not a list of strict­ly “polit­i­cal” books so much as a list of books that open us up to oth­er ways of see­ing.

These are also, in many cas­es, books we do not encounter unless we seek them out. “I cer­tain­ly didn’t find any of those books at my Uni­ver­si­ty High School library,” de la Rocha told MTV in 1996, “Many of those books may give peo­ple new insight into some of the fear and some of the pain they might be expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of some of the very ugly poli­cies the gov­ern­ment is impos­ing upon us right now.” Doubt­less, he would still endorse the sen­ti­ment. The work­ings of the Machine, after all, don’t seem to change much for the peo­ple on the bot­tom when it gets new man­age­ment at the top.

Read the full list of Evil Empire book rec­om­men­da­tions on Good Reads. And as a bonus, hear a Spo­ti­fy playlist of rad­i­cal music just above, com­piled by RATM gui­tarist Tom Morel­lo. The 241 song list runs

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Morel­lo Responds to Angry Fans Who Sud­den­ly Real­ize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Polit­i­cal: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Con­tain Polit­i­cal BS?”

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Hear Brian Eno Reinvent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

in Music | March 1st, 2021

Dis­creet Music came out in 1975, when most of its first lis­ten­ers had nev­er heard any­thing quite like it; there must have been some debate as to whether to call it “music” at all. Bri­an Eno’s fourth solo album, released on his own label Obscure Records, rep­re­sent­ed a depar­ture from his own pre­vi­ous work, and even more so from that of his for­mer band, the art-rock out­fit Roxy Music. The record­ing that occu­pies the entire A side of Dis­creet Music fea­tures no vocals, and indeed no lyrics; no per­cus­sion, and no beat. Those qual­i­ties, of course, had plen­ty of prece­dent in music his­to­ry, but the same can’t be said for its near-acci­den­tal com­po­si­tion­al method, which involved a syn­the­siz­er, a tape-delay sys­tem, a graph­ic equal­iz­er, an echo unit, and a cou­ple of tape recorders, all con­nect­ed in a loop: a series of devices, left to their own devices.

Some cite Dis­creet Music, which pre­ced­ed Eno’s well-known Music for Air­ports by three years, as the ori­gin point of ambi­ent music as we know it today. Its inspi­ra­tion goes a few years fur­ther back, as Eno him­self tells it, to a peri­od around about 1970 when he was con­va­lesc­ing after a car wreck. “A friend of mine came over to see me. I was con­fined to bed; I could­n’t move. But as she left she said, ‘Shall I put a record on?’ ”

The music “was much too qui­et but I could­n’t reach to turn it up, and it was rain­ing out­side. It was a record of 18th-cen­tu­ry harp music, I remem­ber. I lay there at first kind of frus­trat­ed by this sit­u­a­tion, but then I start­ed lis­ten­ing to the rain and lis­ten­ing to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.”

Today Eno counts this “a great musi­cal expe­ri­ence for me, and I sud­den­ly thought of this idea of mak­ing music that did­n’t impose itself on your space in the same way, but cre­at­ed a sort of land­scape you could belong to.” His sto­ry illu­mi­nates the emer­gence of not just a new music, but a new way of hear­ing old music. Dis­creet Music’s B side per­forms a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of its own with vari­a­tions on Johann Pachel­bel’s Canon in D, “Full­ness of Wind,” “French Cat­a­logues,” and “Bru­tal Ardour.” On Eno’s instruc­tions, the Cock­pit Ensem­ble repeat­ed parts of the score while grad­u­al­ly alter­ing it, imbu­ing this famil­iar (not least from wed­dings) 17th-cen­tu­ry piece with an oth­er­world­ly grandeur. Like their mis­trans­lat­ed-from-the French titles, these vari­a­tions may in some sense be “man­gled,” but they become all the more ambigu­ous­ly evoca­tive for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

Expe­ri­ence a Video Paint­ing of Bri­an Eno’s Thurs­day After­noon That Has Soothed & Relaxed Mil­lions of Peo­ple

Hear Albums from Bri­an Eno’s 1970s Label, Obscure Records

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Pachelbel’s Canon Played by Train Horns

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Radiohead Ballets: Watch Ballets Choreographed Creatively to the Music of Radiohead

in Dance, Music | February 26th, 2021

Since Radiohead’s last release, A Moon-Shaped Pool, mem­bers of the band have been absorbed in oth­er projects. They’ve turned their band’s web­site into an archive for their discog­ra­phy and a library for rar­i­ties and ephemera — send­ing not-so-sub­tle sig­nals their time togeth­er has reached a nat­ur­al end, even if drum­mer Phil Sel­way said in 2020 “there are always con­ver­sa­tions going on…. We’ll see. We’re talk­ing.”

Two of the band’s most promi­nent mem­bers, gui­tarist Jon­ny Green­wood and front­man Thom Yorke, devot­ed their tal­ents to film scores, a medi­um Green­wood has explored for many years: in the the­atri­cal vio­lence of There Will Be Blood, for exam­ple, the hor­rif­ic after­math of We Need to Talk about Kevin, and the almost bal­let­ic blood­i­ness of You Were Nev­er Here. Yorke, mean­while, scored Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s Sus­piria, a film in which bal­let dancers’ bod­ies are bro­ken and blood­ied by black mag­ic.

Green­wood, Yorke and com­pa­ny excel at con­jur­ing atmos­pheres of dread, despair, and dis­ori­en­ta­tion, traits that suit them well for art­house film. They might not have seemed a nat­ur­al fit, how­ev­er, for bal­let. And yet, Jason Kot­tke reports, the two are “togeth­er at last” — or at least as of 2016, when chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Robert Bon­dara toured Take Me With You, a piece scored to sev­er­al Radio­head songs, includ­ing In Rain­bows’ “Reck­on­er,” which you can see inter­pret­ed above by two dancers from the Pol­ish Nation­al Bal­let.

The per­for­mance is an ath­let­ic response to a kinet­ic track, in chore­og­ra­phy not unlike pairs fig­ure skat­ing at times. It is not, how­ev­er, the first time the band has inspired a bal­let. In 2005, Roman­ian dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Edward Clug cre­at­ed a mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion of Shake­speare set to songs from OK Com­put­er and Kid A. Radio and Juli­et debuted in Slove­nia, toured the world, cel­e­brat­ed its hun­dredth per­for­mance in 2012, and was sched­uled to open in Moscow in 2020.

Clug drew on a pri­or con­nec­tion: OK Com­put­er’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” was writ­ten for, but not used in, the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film adap­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s play. After Radio and Juli­et, Clug once again drew inspi­ra­tion from his favorite band (“They are the sound­track to my oth­er side; lis­ten­ing to them feels like I’m find­ing a self that I haven’t met yet.”) Clug’s piece “Proof” (pre­view above), set to “Fer­al” from The King of Limbs, debuted in 2017, his first for the Ned­er­lands Dans The­ater. If we are to have no more Radio­head, here’s hop­ing at least we’ll see more Radio­head bal­lets.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Watch The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys, a Free Film Documenting the Making of the 1980s Super Group

in Music | February 26th, 2021

“It real­ly had very lit­tle to do with com­bin­ing a bunch of famous peo­ple,” says Tom Pet­ty about the Trav­el­ing Wilburys. “It was a bunch of friends that just hap­pened to be real­ly good at mak­ing music.”

One of the most mod­est super­groups of the 20th cen­tu­ry, one that fate and chance threw togeth­er for a very brief peri­od, the Trav­el­ing Wilburys made music that sits out­side the usu­al his­to­ries of 1980s music, fea­tur­ing five men in dif­fer­ent states of their careers. Tom Pet­ty was about to have a come­back, George Har­ri­son had just had one, Jeff Lynne was no longer hav­ing chart hits as ELO, but he was shap­ing the sound of the late 1980s as a pro­duc­er, Roy Orbi­son was *about* to have a posthu­mous come­back, and Bob Dylan was…doing what­ev­er Dylan does—every album he put out in the ‘80s had an equal num­ber of detrac­tors and come­back claimants. Put it this way: the Trav­el­ing Wilburys didn’t feel like a nos­tal­gia act, and nei­ther did it feel like a mar­ket­ing idea. It was actu­al­ly light­ning in a bot­tle.

“It was George’s band,” Lynne says in the above mini doc­u­men­tary, but it wasn’t real­ly formed as one. It just sort of *evolved*.

As he explains ear­ly in the doc, Har­ri­son was hav­ing din­ner with Roy Orbi­son and Jeff Lynne and invit­ed them along to a stu­dio in Los Ange­les the next day. He had the han­ker­ing to make a tune, and they wound up using Bob Dylan’s home studio—the nor­mal­ly reclu­sive Dylan actu­al­ly picked up the phone on the first ring and gave the okay. And Harrison’s gui­tar was over at Tom Petty’s house, so he came along as well. The song they record­ed that day was “Han­dle with Care,” which fell togeth­er like mag­ic. (Dylan pro­vid­ed the title after look­ing over at a card­board box).

Har­ri­son sat on the song for a while, hav­ing no idea what to do with it. The only thing he could do, was to record nine more songs and call it an album. Which, once they had found time in everybody’s sched­ule, they did. The songs were record­ed at the home stu­dio of Dave Stew­art (of the Eury­th­mics) and final­ized back in Lon­don with Har­ri­son and Lynne. The group gave them­selves the assign­ment of one song writ­ten and record­ed per day. That the record isn’t a mish-mash of jam­ming, left­over ideas, and cov­ers, and instead has a legit­i­mate amount of clas­sic sin­gles and career-high­light moments is a tes­ta­ment to the friend­ship between the five (and drum­mer Jim Kelt­ner, who knew them all).

Friends indeed, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t also big fans of each oth­er. What’s cool to watch in the doc is how in awe they all seem: George is amazed by Bob’s cryp­tic scrawled lyrics and his abil­i­ty to nail a song on essen­tial­ly the first take. Tom Pet­ty is in awe of George’s demo­c­ra­t­ic ways with choos­ing who gets to sing one of the songs, regard­less of who wrote it—really, how do you fol­low Roy Orbison’s ver­sion of a song? But Tom Pet­ty still had a go.

The album main­tains that friend­ly vibe in the record­ing: micro­phones were mobile to catch music wher­ev­er it hap­pened. Jim Kelt­ner played rhythm on the inside of the kitchen’s refrig­er­a­tor. Songs were writ­ten in the kitchen. And after the work was done, the music would con­tin­ue. “A lot of ukule­les till dawn,” says Har­ri­son.

Roy Orbi­son only made it into the first music video off of the album, “Han­dle With Care.” He passed away just after the album went plat­inum in 1988, and appears as an emp­ty rock­ing chair on the next video, “The End of the Line.”

The four remain­ing Wilburys would reunite for one more album (jok­ing­ly titled Vol­ume 3 by prankster Har­ri­son), but the first album still sounds time­less, five friends just hav­ing a good time togeth­er.

The True His­to­ry Of The Trav­el­ing Wilburys will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Har­ri­son Wrote His Last Let­ter to Austin Pow­ers Cre­ator Mike Myers, Ask­ing for a Mini Me Doll (2001)

Sad 7‑Foot Tall Clown Sings “Pin­ball Wiz­ard” in the Style of John­ny Cash, and Oth­er Hits by Roy Orbi­son, Cheap Trick & More

The Sto­ry of WHER, America’s Pio­neer­ing, First All-Woman Radio Sta­tion (1955)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast