The Jaki Leibzeit Drum Clinic

Rockin out wit Jaki

Life has been getting in the way of this Blog thing of late. Too many family duties, project thingoes, guitar fiddlings, ganjing, werking my gjerkin, and watching some funky Gialli has detracted somewhat. I just watched bits and pieces of the CAN DVD, mainly the CAN FREE CONCERT from the early 70s. One thing is quite clear early on in it - geez who wouldn't want Jaki Leibzeit to drum in their band? A gun, maestro, one of the wildest, loosest and tightest drummerz of all-time, I might even pip him over Ginger Baker or some other twats (that bloke from ROYDE?)...But DON'T DESPAIR! Coming up I have more fantastic toilet-break reading like : My 5 favourite non-Leone Spaghetti Westerns and non-Argento/Bava Giallos. Tasmanian/Melbourne band Keith's Yard: Aussie kids, are Weetbix Kids. Something possibly worthwhile on Vincent Nathali's kinda-whatever-sorta Cybperpunk flick CYPHER, a guided static virtual tour of my house, including shots of Sid my-pet Wolf-Spider, the skank Kubrick tunnel, and my sugar-shitsharp Tasmanian Oak floorboards from the 60s! Who are the important new American auteurs, and does anyone give a shit when Xbox 360 and Playstation3 are on the horizon? Why people ignore contemporary Australian culture (coz its SHIT and run by elitist snobs who have never worked an honest day, nor made an honest BUCK in their lives!) and some other shit I can pluck outta absolutely, positively nowhere, but might be of interest to YEW> Breaker>>Breaker 10-4...................................................................................@#$>...........!

LEGENDS of Country/blues guitar

Don't mess with Rev. Gary Davis - he's a religious man, you know.

Its interesting in these multi-media Internerd days that the best way to listen to music is to actually watch it. Many an innerlectyool goes on and on and on and on and on about the 'authenticity' of music like it's some sort of badge of honour to validate the totally shithouse, trendy, annoying and ultimately DATED music some of them blab on about. All you have to do is look at the LAMERS that write for Salon or Slate or the Villgae Voice or CMJ journal, or...., there are thousands of them out there (me too, but I'm too low-brow and lack diction) with sqaure glasses or fat arses getting paid good salaries to write about some fucking CUCK post-structuralist NOTHING treatise on the Fiery Furnaces or the Curried Arshole Party or the Ex or ...., it's all too easy, and I'm ranting.

ANYSWAYS, some of the best shit you can listen to is on DVD, especially now that is delivers bootiful STEREO or even better DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1 or even DTS into your lounge room (if you can afford it).. But one thing the digital age does nicely is polish up the raw and the scungy - like BOOTLEGS, raw FAN RECORDINGS or heck, even old 50s or 60s 'documentary' type recording - like the beauties that appear on this DVD I borrowed from the public library 'LEGENDS OF COUNTRY BLUES GUITAR VOL.2 (Vestapol/Rounder)..Anyway, this DVD is the best ART MOVIE I've seen this year, no doubt. Raw footage taken in some of these blokes' houses or trailers, in fact in one scene you can hear the phone ringing in the background! Dunno how to describe it, but it really puts the 'meaning' of the whole Blues thing into perspective. These were just regular blokes, playing guitar in their own inimitable way - no pretence - and what seem quite clear as the origins of what the snobs call 'outsider' art, but ultimately reps. the DEMOCRITASATION of art in it's purest sense. Sure, we have that now with the fuggen GLOBAL IDOL reality-TV-George-Orwell-'60-minutes-of-HATE'-shite-no-talnet-shows, but this blues stuff was something else. Watch it, listen to it - the pure, raw, fluid, complex playing - and have yr mind blown in chunks. More observations and thoughts to come...

NICO enrico

NICO: CHELSEA GIRL (Polydor)

I've had this digitalised on my Zen thing for the past week or so. An intensely beautiful and creative album, you had Nico having some of the best songwriters of her generation, if not all time ply their skills here: Reed, Dylan, Hardin, Cale maybe, and some might say Jackson Browne, but it aint forcken me unless I'm a total ignoramus or a fan of agit-plop (enlighten me otherwise if you could be frucked.) It could easily be pegged as a lost Velvets album, and Siren released that Velvets boxset in the early 90s that even chucked some track on it. Cale, Reed AND Morrison all play on it. ALL great stuff, a no brainer. As a youngerish adult I remember reading some bio on her, I can't remember the name exactly, but it was a total trag-comedy, the funniest part being her love affair with an over-weight biker in Western Australia only known as skvosher! Like Ed Kuepper, Brian Eno and a few others, many people are put off by Nico's monochromatic, Teutonic voice. It's really not that bad compared to say 95% of those indie-shmindie gelechters that get lots of press in the Village Voice and other yuppie lifetsyle rags.

In recent times I've been becoming a more hoity-toity pretentious cunt, epseically in regards to cinema, and got wind of the French drekteur Phillip Garrel, who I think had an affair with Nico, and she DEFINITELY became his muse, even to this day, espesh in one of his more recent flickers, SAUVAGE INNOCENCE.

Benchmark pose/attitude for inner-city boho chicks

Anyway her work with Garrel despite being quite arty, poetic, surreal and torpid, is also a good snapshot of where Nico was at, at that point in her life, which is the gothic, anorexic, junkie look, that incredibly is quite popular amongst some more glamorous sub-cultures of the wealthy mentally ill.

The Inner Scar - geddit?

I am digressing here. LA CICARICE INTERIEURE is the film for which the Nico album DESERT SHORE was the soundtrack, pardon my poor positioning of nouns. For those that haven't heard DESERT SHORE, it's a very folky, Celtic-Gallic, ancient sounding record, like much of the freaky folky shit going at the time. Getting back to CHELSEA GIRLS, well you have one of the truly genre busting freaky-folk indie-shmindie records of all-time right there and then. So for you freak-folk fuckers, get DESERT SHORE and CHELSEA GIRL and twiddle the night away. Getting back to filmic studies...

Nico: A good ad for heroin useage VS.

Emily, who came out of the grave (see Emilio Miraglia killer DVD boxset booty!)

So Nico wasn't in a good way, but she made these avant-garde art-films that have massive, innerlectyool clout amongst the hoity toities and the toitie hoities , and made some of the best freak-folk, post-Velvets third-album muzak of the time. But really it was Reed practicing for BERLIN and the like. So there you have it to chew on.