I can’t find an exact date for this article but it mentions the Stones’ collaboration with that wanker Godard, so it has to be from 1968. Keith should’ve been more worried about Her Majesty’s constabulary landing in his garden, cos that was what they did the previous year when they busted him and Mick for having speed and pot on the premises. Just wondering what else may have been circulating at Redlands that brought on Keith’s more cosmic visitors…
Somewhat to my surprise, I only just discovered Neil Young FINALLY released Chrome Dreams a few weeks ago, only 46 years later than planned (and a mere 16 years after Chrome Dreams II)… Neil has a track record, as it were, of recording albums then not releasing them, including Homegrown which he shelved in 1975 in favour of Tonight’s the Night which he’d also shelved two years earlier, but this is probably his best-known example of that tendency. In March 1977 a test pressing was made, and somehow this eventually escaped into the wild and was the basis of various bootlegs from the early 90s onwards, while in the meantime Neil had second thoughts and converted a chunk of it into American Stars ‘n’ Bars (which came out a few months later) and recycled other songs for other albums into the 90s.
Some Steve Hoffman Forum nerd in a thread about the album was iffy about the provenance of the acetate and the tracklisting of same, partly because the album ran some 50+ minutes and he thought that was too long for a 70s Neil record. Surprise surprise, though, Chrome Dreams turns out to be the same as the bootleg after all (albeit the vinyl release is a three-sided double LP)… but the album kind of complicates that matter with its back cover:
Now, one of these things is not like the other, with the album tracklist being on the right and… something else on the left. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m guessing it was an alternative proposed tracklist? Noticeable differences include the removal of “Powderfinger” and the addition of “Lotta Love” (which turned up on Comes a Time) and “White Line” (which didn’t turn up on record until Ragged Glory). I just wonder what the point of putting this as the back cover art was.
As for the album itself… I suppose it’s OK? I don’t like it as much as some critics seem to do, and it’s kind of disconcerting hearing some of these songs outside of whatever album they finally appeared on, even though this was their “original” context. None of the songs are new and only two of the actual recordings (alternate versions of “Hold Back the Tears” and “Sedan Delivery”) are previously unreleased. It’s a bit much as it stands, and I think if you cut “Tears” (not as good in this version as the American Stars ‘n’ Bars re-recording) and “Like a Hurricane” (obviously magnificent but kind of out of place here), you not only get a shorter album (about 37 minutes) to make that bloke from the Hoffman forum happy, you get a more cohesive one. But even in that slightly truncated form I just don’t think it’s the hidden masterpiece some are claiming it is.
I’ve always said it was a myth that you could find absolutely everything on the Internet, but you could find a lot more than you might have expected. I was reminded of this tonight when I found a recording of a song called “Die Fahne hoch” on Internet Archive tonight. If you don’t recognise that name, you may know its informal title, The Horst Wessel Song.
I found it in a collection called “78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood, L.P.“; as the name may indicate, it is full (literally hundreds of thousands) of 78rpm records posted by George Blood LP, a company specialising in film and audio preservation. It was just… there as part of this collection. In among things like records by Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, even up to the early rock ‘n’ roll era, plus early jazz and country and blues and gospel and… whatever the fuck THIS is. The collection is so big that describing it like this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
In fact, there’s more than one Horst-Wessel-Lied recording in the George Blood collection. And they’re all just there like… normal records. And they’re not normal. “Die Fahne hoch” was the official anthem of THE FUCKING NAZI PARTY from 1930 to 1945 as well the other national anthem of Germany under Hitler after “Deutschland Über Alles”. It was a love letter to the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts, the Nazis’ original paramilitary wing of which Wessel had been a commander (and which Hitler would notably come to love rather less than the song). It’s been banned in Germany and Austria since 1945. At least two of these recordings feature the actual SA choir. They’re not normal records. And, I suppose, neither are the Soviet-era records the George Blood collection also includes, to be sure, but somehow even though the Soviet Union was obviously hardly better than the 3rd Reich those Soviet records bother me less than the Nazi ones.
And I say that as someone who, you know, actually owns Nazi-era recordings. Many years ago EMI had a CD series of early recordings of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, mostly from the period of the 3rd Reich. I’ve got products of Nazi Germany sitting in one of my old CD containers. I don’t think of those Bruckner recordings as “Nazi” productions when I listen to them cos, you know, Bruckner himself wasn’t a Nazi or anything, but that’s kind of what they are… I’ve got Richard Strauss doing his Alpensinfonie in 1941. And I’ve got a download of the famous 1945 “Emperor” concerto, famous for being an early stereo tape recording and for having anti-aircraft gunfire in the background during the quieter moments.
Obviously Nazi Germany had arts and entertainment like any other country; it’s just that they were Nazi arts and entertainment. Which is why I shouldn’t be surprised to find recordings of Horst Wessel on the Internet, and I suppose that, really, I’m actually not. I think it’s just the context in which I did find them that took me aback more than the act of finding them did. Anyway, the icing on the cake came at the bottom of the page for the record, in the form of a comment from someone who said words to the effect of “I’m Argentinian and my grandfather used to play this all the time”. I’ll just BET he did, my friend…
This is possibly the strangest Beatles-related story I’ve ever read, cos it contains a theory I’ve somehow never heard of until now… namely that Paul McCartney wasn’t present for the Sgt Pepper album cover photoshoot and was added in later, and that someone stood in for him on the back cover in which he is noticeably not facing the camera.
What?
The really odd thing is that the Graun is telling this story—which is actually about an interesting bit of memorabilia, a press pack for the never released Sessions collection, going to auction—as if the mystery were only being solved now rather than… decades ago. Behold, if you will, the inner gatefold picture from Sgt Pepper as it appeared in 1967 (picture ganked from Discogs):
So, if Macca wasn’t there for the album photoshoot… who’s this in between John and George? Did they secretly arrange another photoshoot that he did turn up to for some reason (given that pretty much every day of the Fabs’ activity is on record somewhere, it’d have to have been secret or we’d have known long ago)? Did they make unusually sure that his apparent stand-in for the back looked exactly like him from the front too? If he wasn’t at the photoshoot but they had a perfect indistinguishable stand-in for the gatefold photo, why not just use him on the cover photo rather than paste the real one in later?
And if it’s been a mystery since then about whether or not Paul was present, why does Mark Lewisohn’s book about the Fabs’ recording sessions (published in 1987 and which I’ve had since about 1991 or 92) have so many outtakes from the photoshoot in which Paul is, frankly, right there? And why does the Graun article acknowledge there’s other photos of him proving Paul was there when they’re trying to sell this story as finally solving the mystery? None of this makes sense…
RIP Ron S Peno, the not always easily penetrable voice of Died Pretty (yeah, “Winterland”, I’m talking about you there). Alas, the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2019 seems to have not gone entirely away after all; only about six weeks ago the band had to call off an October tour cos both Ronnie and drummer Chris Welsh were both fighting cancer, and I imagine Welsh’s headspace is not great right now with this news…
One of the highlights of DP’s peak period, “Caressing Swine” from Trace, their first major label album.
Ron’s post-DP project with Kim Salmon, The Darling Downs, and “Circa 65”
Ron’s guest appearance on Black Cab’s 2009 album Call Signs.
One of the iconographers of punk is gone. Apparently Reid literally suffered for his art, too; one day he was out walking while wearing a t-shirt with his “God Save the Queen” design on it and he got set upon by a gang who broke his leg. I don’t suppose many people connected to the Sex Pistols came away from them without at least some damage…
Ian Watkins got stabbed. No, I don’t know why it took so long for something like this to happen either…
Former Lostprophets vocalist Ian Watkins was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for what can only be described as the most horrific child sex offenses you can imagine. […] The Mirror is now reporting that Watkins has been beaten and stabbed in prison and is currently in life-threatening condition. According to a source from the report, “He was found by officers after being held hostage and battered on Saturday morning. He’s in a life-threatening condition and there are fears he could die. If he survives, he’ll have been very lucky.”
Watkins was taken hostage by three inmates shortly after 9am on Saturday, August 5. Watkins was stabbed and beaten, and was eventually freed by prison officers six hours after the incident.
That said, BBC reports the injuries actually weren’t life-threatening, so I have no idea what’s what. But who’s actually afraid that this cunt might die? I can’t imagine anyone outside of his immediate family who might actually be sad at the thought of him dying, and frankly even they shouldn’t. Maybe they don’t, in fact. As I said, the only surprise is that it’s taken nearly 10 years for someone to try and wipe Watkins out; he’s a fucking monstrosity surrounded by other monstrosities in that prison… personally I worry more about the guys who obviously had an opportunity somehow to end him but didn’t, I could imagine someone going after them now…
Klingfilm ist Krieg! I do believe I’ve just found possibly the greatest black metal band photo of all time. I gather the band are Carpathian Forest, and I have no idea what they thought they were doing with this, but it fills me with an inexpressible joy. Blood, corpsepaint, posturing with spikes and a guy who, like me, really shouldn’t go about shirtless like that. AND the Glad Wrap. Honestly, Gorgoroth think they’re something with their naked women on crucifixes, this, whatever the fuck it is, would be a far more interesting live spectacle…
This is a weirdly sad picture, but also weirdly funny in a way: the Sex Pistols are sitting around watching Sid try to play guitar presumably before their show at the Longhorn Ballroom, part of the infamous January 1978 tour that ended them a few days later. The Longhorn was better known for country music (and for having been run at one point by Jack Ruby), but Malcolm McLaren had made a point of booking “redneck” venues like that to create a stink, which he undeniably got whether or not the band wanted it… I said “presumably” before the show because Sid’s nose was broken in the course of it and he was covered in blood by the end of it, which he is not here. I particularly love Lydon in this shot for some reason, glumly regarding the spectacle before him, unable to decide if Sid learning guitar is the worst thing to ever happen to the band or mild in comparison with the other shit the band had suffered by this time. Couldn’t be much worse than his bass playing, surely.
Here’s a somewhat perplexing double bill, with the brothers Cavalera having decided to go back to their, er, roots and re-record the first two Sepultura releases, the Bestial Devastation EP from 1985 and the Morbid Visions album from 1985, each with a “new” track made from unused material from that time. The most perplexing thing about it, perhaps, is that it actually works; the only thing they’ve really updated (apart from the artwork) is the sound, which was of course a lot rougher on the 80s originals, particularly on Morbid Visions… I mean, that sound has its charms for the sort of 80s teenage Satan metal it is, but the new versions do benefit from the improved sound. Otherwise, both records are exactly what you might expect, i.e. 80s teenage Satan metal being revisited in later life by two of the people responsible for it and associates, and fuck me if they don’t just smash both of them out with great vigour.
I just wonder why. Apart from remodelling the Cavalera Conspiracy logo to resemble the old Sepultura one, I don’t think it’s meant as a dig at their old bandmates, and it doesn’t seem to be a Taylor Swift-type situation where’s she’s trying to reclaim her music from Scooter Braun, or a Guns ‘n’ Roses siuation where Axl Rose talked about re-recording Appetite for Destruction to screw the other band members out of royalties. Maybe Max and Iggor did indeed just want to see if they could make the old stuff sound better. Whatever, I like it.
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