MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

I am attending some kind of music camp run by David Bowie. One of the activities in the camp involves being woken up at 0600 by a Bowie song blasting over the PA. We all have to run out of our rooms and re-enact the video of whatever song is playing. The song I remember is “TVC-15”, which means we have to recreate the SNL appearance with Klaus Nomi and the TV monitor poodle.

I see Bowie parading purposefully down the corridor outside my room – he is sporting the same Bowie look as in the original video. I remember thinking he’s taller than I thought he would be.

Later in the same dream, during a break in the music camp activities, I am cutting images of Samantha Fox out of old magazines whilst watching a TV documentary about her recently revealed career as a secret agent for the British government. She apparently worked as an underground trade representative, going into Third World countries to negotiate secret trade deals with dictators.

Fox is onscreen talking about the time she went to Cuba and met with Fidel Castro, and hung out with him for a few weeks. The screen cuts to never-before-published photographs of Fox and Castro on a beach in Cayo Largo del Sur. Fox is posing topless and shiny with suntan lotion. Fidel is looking very pleased with himself, smoking a cigar and whacking golf balls into the Caribbean.

I make a note to search for the documentary on YouTube – I’m thinking I could use soundbites from her interview as drops in my Bowie camp project.

And then I woke up.

Have a cigar,

This is dF

Remember the old days when the hep kids used to groove to Captain Beefheart on the TVs?



Yeah, me neither.

PRODUCTION NOTE: For those not acquainted with Captain Beefheart, the song is "Flash Gordon's Ape" from the LP Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

Picked a banana and threw it at the sun,

This is dF

Via Pirate Treasure:



Everything tastes better when it’s DIY,

This is dF

[Sorry. Terrible joke.]

You all know about Bill Cosby. You may or may not know about Kim Fowley – i.e. what he did to Jackie Fuchs (a.k.a. Jackie Fox), Kari Krome and at least a few other women – but if you do, it’s probably because of Joan Jett’s statement on the matter.

I don’t have much to say about Cosby or Fowley that isn’t painfully obvious, expect I’m more surprised and disappointed by the former. I never cared for Cosby’s 80s sitcom (which I thought was a rehash of his onstage comedy material at the time), but I grew up on his comedy albums and the Fat Albert cartoons, which were great, so it’s a drag he’s a drug-raper. And while I’m not really a fan of Fowley, I am a fan of The Runaways, so of course I feel bad for Fuchs.

As for Jett, Fuchs claims that Jett and Cherie Currie were there and saw what was happening. Jett has said she was unaware that it happened and would have stopped it if she had been. (For the record, Cherie Currie has said the same thing, but most of the focus has been on Joan, probably because she’s far more well-known.)

Reactions from fans on the FaceTwitter Outrage Monkey Machine have been mixed. Some are supportive of Jett, some otherwise. Having spent the last couple of days pondering this, I’ve come up with a few points I think are worth considering:

1. I wasn’t there, so all I have to go on is second-hand info from different sources, some of which conflicts.

2. We’re talking about an incident that happened 40 years ago in which substance abuse in one form or another was taking place. That does not mean Fuchs is lying or mistaken. It means that in situations like that, yr going to get conflicting memories over what happened, and none may be 100% accurate.

3. It’s possible the other band members were there during the rape but didn’t realize at the time that it was non-consensual. (The article mentions in a footnote that someone high on ludes might look like they're enjoying themselves even if they’re really not.)

4. Given the likely use of drugs and alcohol at the time, it’s also possible that Jett genuinely has no memory of the incident. She also may not have been in good enough condition to assess the situation accurately. She may also have been traumatized in her own way (possibly thinking: “That could be me,” or “Am I next?”) and has blocked it out of her memory.

5. The last part of the article makes clear that Jackie doesn’t blame any of the other bystanders – partly because of the “bystander effect”, and partly because at the end of the day, the real villain is Fowley.

7. It’s easy to say as a grown-up in a relatively normal lower-middle-class environment in 2015 that “Jett should have recognized immediately what was going on and done something”. When yr 16 years old and caught up in the weird drug-fuelled decadent madness of the LA rock scene circa the mid-1970s (when “date rape” as a term wasn’t really embedded in the public consciousness like it does now), the situation probably wasn’t that easy to assess.

So.

With all that in mind – and again, based on the public information on hand – I don't really have anything bad to say about Joan in terms of what happened 40 years ago. Given my own teenage years, I’m the last person who can criticize a teenager for making bad decisions –especially as Fuchs evidently doesn’t bear her any ill will over what happened, either.

That said, some people are more critical over Jett’s response to the article, to include her alleged lack of response when the journalist contacted her for comment.

A lot of that is second-hand info, so all I can comment on is Jett’s official statement.

Well, look: either you believe her or you don’t. And based on the above points, it’s entirely possible that either Joan’s statement is truthful, or she sincerely believes it is.

And in any case, it’s important to remember that Jett is a flawed human like the rest of us. Imagine being Joan and getting a phone call out of nowhere from a HuffPo journalist saying [paraphrased], “Hey, Kim Fowley raped yr bass player 40 years ago and she says you watched the whole thing – gotta quote?” Even if Cherkis put it more delicately, maybe you really didn’t feel like rehashing Fowley’s dirty life and times, especially something you honestly didn’t remember anyway. (As McDonnell points out in her post, the story of Fowley raping a woman at a party in front of people has been circulating for awhile – the name of the victim was never revealed in those accounts, and Jett had already said she didn't remember it.)

Imagine further that shortly afterwards, every blog on the interwub starts reblogging the HuffPo piece with the clickbait headline: “Runaways Bassist: I Was Raped as Joan Jett Watched”.

How would YOU react in that situation? Especially when every minute you DON’T respond increases the likelihood that people will assume yr guilty or hiding something? And remembering too that – the FaceTwitter Outrage Monkey Machine being what it is – some people are going to hate on you no matter what you say?

So no, I’m not really going to lay into Joan over this – not based on current public information. I expect we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming days, and information may emerge that warrants outrage against Jett. But until then, I don't think she deserves to be singled out over this. I don’t expect her to be a saint, and it’s unfair to hold it against her for not being one, especially when Fuchs doesn’t.

It’s also unfair to make her the focus of the story instead of what Fowley did to Fuchs and others. I suspect at least some bloggers are trying to make this about Jett solely because she’s the most well-known and successful of the Runaways – certainly more so than Fuchs or even Fowley.

At the end of the day, I think it’s a case of readers trying to process a complex and horrific event in simplistic either/or terms. When stories conflict, we pick a side and assume the other person is lying, because that’s easy and fits into our simplistic moral code of right and wrong. “Must be one thing or the other, it’s all perfectly simple!” Except when it’s not.

I’ll close by linking to the statements that other key players have made regarding the article:

Cherie Currie

Vicki Blue

Kari Krome (who wrote some lyrics for the band and was also assaulted by Fowley)

Note that in all of them, everyone is supportive of Fuchs, and none of them cast Jett or Currie as villains.

I also recommend this post from Evelyn McDonnell – who wrote the Runaways bio Queens Of Noise – who points out that it is indeed possible for Fuchs and Jett to say different things about the event without lying about it, and that it’s unfair to blame Jett then and now.

And finally, here’s Jackie Fuchs’ response to everyone else’s responses. She’s still not angry with them:


Bad reputation,

This is dF

Looking back on this list, it seems that a lot of the songs I liked as a kid (circa early-mid 70s) were ballads – not as in soppy love songs with an electric guitar solo, but as in songs that told stories.

But only one of them was made into a film.




Well, sort of. The film’s story has almost nothing to do with the song, which is of course about a jealous husband who becomes a victim of crooked Southern justice.

Which apparently is why Cher turned it down (or rather, Sonny Bono turned it down for her over concerns it might annoy her Southern fan base). In fact, according to legend, none of the singers it was shopped to had much interest, nor did the music label people who didn’t know how to pigeonhole it into a format. Even the guy who wrote it – Bobby Russell (a.k.a. Mr Vicki Lawrence at the time) – didn’t think it was all that great a song anyway. So Vicki went and recorded the damn thing herself.

Back story!

Anyway, listening to it now, I think it holds up pretty well. But then I like a good story about crooked Southern justice.

FUN FACT: Because Top 40 DJs in the 70s rarely bothered to tell you who performed the songs you just heard, it wasn’t until I got a copy of the 45 that I realized the singer was the same woman who played Mama on the Carol Burnett Show.

Supper's waiting at home and I gotta get to it,

This is dF

It’s still Father’s Day in the West, so this will also count as my post for that.



I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my dad was a session musician in Nashville in the 1950s/60s, and also played with The Bluenotes (sort of the de facto house band for Colonial Records in North Carolina). His biggest claim to fame is working with Roy Orbison, but according to AllMusic – and I only just learned about this today – his credits also include Grandpa Jones. And apparently Ann Margret recorded one of his songs.

So, wow.

Anyway, he recorded and released this solo 45 in 1961. It’s the B-side of another song of his, “Lover’s Holiday”. Apparently Billboard was impressed.

So naturally the 45 was in our house. I listened to this a lot when I was a kid, but I’m not sure I still have it anymore. It may be in storage somewhere in the US.

Anyway, point being, I hadn’t heard this in something like 35 years, and had in fact completely forgotten about it. Then I decided to Google up something of his for Father’s Day and this popped up. As soon as it started playing, I recognized it and remembered each part of it – the boingy distorted riff, the mournful backup singers, the fadeout.

It’s been a sort of strange year for me in regards to my dad. We didn’t have the greatest of relationships, and just when we were on the point of reconciling that in 1984, he died suddenly of a heart attack.

So it goes.

But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, and … well, let’s just say I’ve come to terms with it all, and it’s cool. I just wish I’d put more effort into archiving his music when I still had it all in the house.

Anyway, I dig this record. I think it stands up with some of the better (if obscure) rockabilly records of the era.

But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

All in the family,

This is dF

They say celebrity deaths happen in threes. In the last 24 hours we lost Sir Christopher Lee, Ornette Coleman and Dusty Rhodes.

It doesn't get much more diverse than that.

I confess I don’t have much to say about Coleman, if only because I wasn’t really aware he was still alive. I have two of his landmark albums from 1959 (The Shape Of Jazz To Come, Tomorrow Is The Question!), and I confess I only got into him because Henry Rollins name-dropped him and John Zorn did a covers album of Coleman compositions. But there’s no doubt he was an original.

The same could possibly be said of Dusty Rhodes, who was a TV staple for me growing up in Tennessee watching professional wrestling on weekends. He was always a standout and could always work a crowd whether he was a heel or a babyface. I had mixed feelings about his American Dream gimmick in the WWF with the polka dot outfits and all that. On the other hand, Rhodes made the most of it. Who else could get away with going on national television in a butcher shop and saying, “You can beat my prices, but you sure can’t beat my meat.”

As for Sir Christopher Lee, well, this probably sums it up better than anything I could write.



You can also add to that list, “Was on the cover of a Wings album”.



Respect.

And you will know us by the trail of dead,

This is dF

As longtime fans know, we’ve been participating in a project where we use bootlegged isolated drum tracks from famous drummers and fool around with them.

Here’s the latest entry in that series, in which we finally give the world our interpretation of the Village People, who are awesome. We apologize for any inconvenience or excessive manliness all over yr headphones.

But boy was it fun.



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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Written by Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo, Victor Willis and Peter Whitehead
Ruined by Banäna Deäthmüffins

The part of Goo Deäthmüffin was played by John Bonham for demonstration purposes only. No disrespect or copyright infringement is intended (and would be pointless anyway because it's not like anyone buys our stuff)

©2015 Terribly Frog Music. Derechos Reservados!

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Like this song? Why not down it and other fine lo-fi tracks from the official Banäna Deäthmüffins page on Soundcloud?

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Call me Mister Eagle,

This is dF

No, not Blur.

The Sonics are one of those legendary bands who were more influential than commercially successful. The Sonics basically invented hard loud garage rock in the mid-1960s, recorded two great albums, then fell apart.

They’ve reformed off and on over the years in various combinations, but they’ve been more active in the last seven years. The 2015 lineup features three original members – Gerry Roslie, Larry Parypa and Rob Lind – plus a rhythm section whose combined pedigree includes The Kingsmen, Agent Orange and Dick Dale.

So they have a new album out – their fifth, and the first once since 1980’s Sinderella (which for some people doesn’t really count because it only featured Roslie and was basically new versions of old songs).

As much as I love their first two albums, I admit I was skeptical that a bunch of guys in their 60s and 70s could pack the same feral punch that made their first two records so exhilarating.

Turns out I worried for nothing.

Listen to this. It’s the lead-off single (which was released as part of a split single with Mudhoney for Record Store Day).



Holy crap. It’s like the last 49 years never happened.

I also like that they opted for mono instead of stereo. Apart from keeping their sound consistent, it makes a good case that mono – at least sometimes – sounds better than stereo.

Anyway, this is easily one of the most surprising comeback stories of the year. The only way you could top this was if the 13th Floor Elevators were getting back together.

Oh, wait.

Don’t need no doctor,

This is dF

Seeing as how the 2016 POTUS race is officially underway, here’s some appropriate theme music as you listen to the candidates make their pitch.



PRODUCTION NOTE: Yes, I’m including the candidates you actually like.

You love it,

This is dF