🏳️Dangerous Minds

Website favicondangerousminds.net

Dangerous Minds is a compendium of the new and strange-new ideas, new art forms, new approaches to social issues and new finds from the outer reaches of pop culture. Our editorial policy, such that it is, reflects the interests, whimsies and peculiarities of the individual writers. We are your favorite distraction. 

[](https://dangerousminds.net/)

*   [HOME](https://dangerousminds.net/)

*   [ARTICLES](https://dangerousminds.net/articles)

*   [TOPICS](https://dangerousminds.net/categories)

*   [ARCHIVES](https://dangerousminds.net/archives)

*   [CONTRIBUTORS](https://dangerousminds.net/contributors)

*   [ADVERTISE](https://dangerousminds.net/advertising)

*   [CONTACT US](https://dangerousminds.net/suggest)

*     

FOLLOW US ON:[](https://www.facebook.com/DangerousMindsBlog/)[](https://twitter.com/DangerMindsBlog)[](https://pinterest.com/dangerousminds/)[](http://www.reddit.com/domain/dangerousminds.net)[](http://feeds.feedburner.com/dangerousminds/dot/net)GET THE NEWSLETTER

Email Address 

[CONTACT US](https://dangerousminds.net/suggest)

[

](https://dangerousminds.net/)

*   [ADVERTISE](https://dangerousminds.net/advertising)

*   [ARTICLES](https://dangerousminds.net/articles)

*   [HOME](https://dangerousminds.net/)

*   [ARCHIVES](https://dangerousminds.net/archives)

*   [CONTRIBUTORS](https://dangerousminds.net/contributors)

*   TOPICS

    *   [A girl's best friend is her guitar](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/a_girls_best_friend_is_her_guitar)

    *   [Activism](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/activism)

    *   [Advertising](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/advertising)

    *   [Advertorial](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/advertorial)

    *   [American-style (Republican) Christianity](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/american-style_republican_christianity)

    *   [Amusing](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Amusing)

    *   [Animals](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/animals)

    *   [Animation](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/animation)

    *   [Art](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Art)

    *   [Belief](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Belief)

    *   [Books](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Books)

    *   [Class War](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/class_war)

    *   [Crime](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/crime)

    *   [Current Events](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/current_events)

    *   [Dance](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/dance)

    *   [Design](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/design)

    *   [Drugs](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/drugs)

    *   [Economy](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/economy)

    *   [Fashion](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/fashion)

    *   [Featured](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/featured)

    *   [Feminism](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/feminism)

    *   [Food](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/food)

    *   [Games](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/video_games)

    *   [Hip-hop](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/hip-hop)

    *   [History](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/history)

    *   [Hysteria](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/hysteria)

    *   [Idiocracy](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/idiocracy)

    *   [Kooks](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/kooks)

    *   [Literature](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/literature)

    *   [Media](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/media)

    *   [Movies](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/movies)

    *   [Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

    *   [Occult](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/occult)

    *   [One-hit wonders](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/one-hit_wonders)

    *   [Politics](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/politics)

    *   [Pop Culture](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/pop_culture)

    *   [Punk](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/punk)

    *   [Queer](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/queer)

    *   [R.I.P.](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/r.i.p)

    *   [Race](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/race)

    *   [Science/Tech](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/science_tech)

    *   [Sex](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/sex)

    *   [Sports](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/sports)

    *   [Stupid or Evil?](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Stupid_or_Evil)

    *   [Superstar](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/superstar)

    *   [Television](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/television)

    *   [The wrong side of history](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/the_wrong_side_of_history)

    *   [They hate us for our freedom](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/they_hate_us_for_our_freedom)

    *   [Thinkers](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/thinkers)

    *   [U.S.A.!!!](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/u.s.a)

    *   [Unorthodox](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/unorthodox)

[

‘Tangled Up in Dylan’: Insane documentary about Bob Dylan’s most obsessive fan

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/tangled_up_in_dylan_insane_documentary_about_bob_dylan)

01.23.2025

11:19 am

Topics:

[Kooks](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/kooks)

[Movies](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/movies)

Tags:

[Bob Dylan](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Bob-Dylan)

[A.J. Weberman](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/A.J.-Weberman)

If you appreciate whimsical documentaries about eccentric or marginal types—much of Louis Theroux’s work, the Wild Man Fischer doc _[dErailRoaDed](http://www.derailroaded.com/)_ and Keith Allen’s deliriously insane _[Little Lady Fauntleroy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814192/)_ would fall into this category—or if you are a Bob Dylan completest, then you might be interested in _[Tangled Up in Dylan: The Ballad of AJ Weberman](http://www.balladofajweberman.com/)_ directed by James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfe.

AJ Weberman is infamous, if he is known at all, among Dylan aficionados for being the obsessed stalker who Bob Dylan physically assaulted in 1971 because he had been harassing his family. Weberman picked through their trash (he calls his stinky style of sleuthing the science of “Garbology”) and staged demonstrations (with the “Dylan Liberation Front,” the students of his “[Dylanology](http://dylanology.org/)” classes) outside of Dylan’s MacDougal Street brownstone, apparently with the aim of convincing Dylan to, uh, _join the revolution, man…_ but having the result of really pissing him off.

_[Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman](http://www.audiophileusa.com/item.cfm?record=69640&c=1&kw=Pop)_ is the title of a much-sought after Dylan curio, a bootleg LP made from recordings of Weberman and Dylan talking on the telephone. It’s a fascinating conversation—indeed it’s what got the filmmakers interested in such an odd character in the first place—but it’s baffling why a superstar like Bob Dylan would have given such a freak his phone number in the first place (Weberman taught a class in “Dylanology” and had interviewed Dylan for the underground press before he got weird on him).

Here’s what Weberman told Rolling Stone’s Marc Jacobson, years later, about the time Dylan beat him up:

> “I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker. . . . I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever fucked with his wife, he’d beat the shit out of me. A couple of days later, I’m on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me.

> 

> “I turn around and it’s like—Dylan. I’m thinking, ‘Can you believe this? I’m getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan!’ I said, ‘Hey, man, how you doin’?’ But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He’s little, but he’s strong. He works out. I wouldn’t fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. He gets up, rips off my ‘Free Bob Dylan’ button and walks away. Never says a word.

> 

> “The Bowery bums were coming over, asking, ‘How much he get?’ Like I got rolled. . . . I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some fucking lawyer. That was the last time I ever saw him, except once with one of his kids, maybe Jakob, and he said, ‘A.J. is so ashamed of his Jewishness, he got a nose job,’ which was true—at least in the fact that I got a nose job. . . .”

Weberman has written several books about Dylan (_[RightWing Bob: What the Liberal Media Doesn’t Want You To Know About Bob Dylan](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439256152/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dangeminds-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1439256152)_ being one of them) and other subjects (such as _[HOMOTHUG: The Secret Life of Rudy Guiliani](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419689398/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dangeminds-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1419689398)_) and maintains to this day that Dylan sends him secret messages in song lyrics.

I’ve had my own (one-sided) run-ins with the notoriously prickly Weberman: In April of 1997, only a matter of a few months after Disinformation was launched on the Internet, I posted [an innocuous enough item there about Aron Kay AKA “Pie Man,”](http://web.archive.org/web/19970415230226/http://www.disinfo.com/prop/diss/prop_diss_pieman.html) another aging Yippie holdover like Weberman who was known for his habit of “pieing” people he thought deserved ridiculing like Anita Bryant, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt and Andy Warhol.

Kay and Weberman are old cronies and I guess what happened is that he told Weberman about this counterculture website that had written about him and Weberman took a look, noticed a collection of links to various JFK assassination sites that I’d prepared, saw that _his_ JFK assassination site wasn’t listed there and promptly started leaving long, hateful, spiteful messages (three in all) on my answering machine. Someone I’d never met was _fucking furious_ at me, over something that I _didn’t do_. My sin was one of omission—I didn’t know about [his website](http://www.ajweberman.com/)—but it seemed to leave the guy utterly unhinged.

I didn’t hear from him again for ten years until my wife signed me up for Facebook. One day soon afterwards she asked me: “Do you know some dude named AJ Weberman? He’s saying shitty things about you and trolling you on your Facebook wall.”

“Oh that guy. No, I don’t know him, but he’s done this before to me, just ban him, will you?”

That’s the end of my AJ Weberman story, although I suspect he’ll read this post and have something to say in the comments.  

Via email, I asked the filmmakers, James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfeabout getting tangled up with Weberman:

**I know that both of you are big Dylan fans. How did you stumble across AJ Weberman and decide to make a film about him?**  

We first came across Weberman in various biographies of Dylan. He was and probably always will be portrayed as a persistent nuisance in the extreme. The way people wrote about him was purely hateful which stuck out. We then heard the bootlegged phone call him made to Dylan which made for fascinating listening and we thought, ‘I wonder what this guy is doing now?’  

**What do you make of his “Dylanology”?**  

Weberman has an incredible analytical brain. His conclusions maybe off kilter but the ride is entertaining and sometimes illuminating. While many scholars interpret Dylan’s work within the vernacular of the blues or folk music traditions, it’s interesting to read Dylan from a street slang, streetwise level, which is where Weberman places him. And some of his insights, the way he sees those songs are fascinating. However, I feel Weberman has an agenda which often shapes his interpretations and distorts them. Some of his conclusions I disagree with, some anger me, some amuse me. It’s important to note for those that haven’t seen the film, that it’s not just a mouth piece for Weberman’s insights and wild fantasies about Dylan – there’s plenty of that you can read for yourselves on the web if you want to.  

**In the infamous recording of his phone conversation with Dylan, I couldn’t for the life of me understand Dylan’s own motivation in bothering to accommodate an asshole like Weberman. Most people, let alone someone as famous as Bob Dylan, would have told Weberman to go fuck himself or let the police deal with him, but Dylan, even after insulting him, continues to speak with him—albeit warily—and even agrees to a future call. Do you think Dylan was thinking “Well this guys a kook, but he’s a fan, so I owe him politeness” and just trying to deal with him on that level or WHAT? (My wife remarked during that part of your film “Why does Bob Dylan stay on the phone with this creep?” as well. It bothered her!)**  

I think perhaps Dylan was trying to work out how much of a nut Weberman was. This is a good few years before Lennon was shot but I bet part of Dylan’s receptiveness to Weberman was to try to work out if he was dangerous. By the time of the phone call however, Dylan had met Weberman a number of times and probably worked out that he wasn’t a psycho, so I think there was something else going on. I think in some way Dylan enjoyed the banter. Weberman does not kowtow to Dylan, he doesn’t let him get away with anything on that call, he challenges Dylan and when Dylan counter attacks these challenges, Weberman comes back at him with more. Perhaps Dylan found this refreshing to the hordes of people that fell over themselves to agree with him and praise him.  

**I’ve never had any personal interaction with Weberman, but he’s called my apartment in NYC and left abusive messages for me and some nasty posts on my Facebook wall. However, I must say, he doesn’t seem nearly as crazy in your film as I imagined he’d be in real life. Do you reckon he was on his best behavior because there was a camera on him?**  

Not really. Weberman has a nasty streak in him which I think you see in our film but it’s not the only aspect of his personality.  

**Near the start of the film he admits to getting physical with his wife resulting in a retraining order and also of spending some time in jail. How long was he actually incarcerated for dealing pot?**  

I forget now – I think the sentence was two years.  

**How does Weberman make a living these days?**  

It’s a good question. I believe he does a bit of work gathering information for the Jewish Defense League. He also writes books – the _[Dylan to English](http://dylanology.org/dictionary.htm)_ dictionary, his book on who really killed JFK and _Homo Thug_ which was about Giuliani. I don’t know how much money he makes from these however.  

**How did he react to your film? Did he throw a tantrum and call your voice mail repeatedly? Nasty emails?**  

He never really commented on the film. In fact, he has never really asked us any personal questions about our lives at all. When we meet up with him these days, it’s just straight into whatever is on his mind. So no, he’s never let on what he thought about it. He probably would have preferred it if we used more of his Dylanology rants and kept in some of the more outrageous conclusions he comes up with. There was one point while shooting he said he would prefer it if we stopped filming, then he immediately changed his mind and said fuck it, lets keep it in the style of _cinéma vérité_. I liked that.  

**Have you ever heard if Bob Dylan saw your doc? I’d imagine that he’d get a real kick out of it.**  

I really hope he has seen it. I gave a copy to the producer of _No Direction Home_ who promised he’d pass it on to Dylan. Who knows if that happened? If he has seen it, I hope he liked it.  

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

01.23.2025

11:19 am

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/tangled_up_in_dylan_insane_documentary_about_bob_dylan#disqus_thread)

[

‘The Last Sacrifice’: Rupert Russell’s New Film Examining the Murder That Inspired ‘The Wicker Man’

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_last_sacrifice_rupert_russells_new_film_examining_the_murder_that_inspi)

11.11.2024

05:34 am

Topics:

Tags:

[witchcraft](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/witchcraft)

[occult](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/occult)

[murder](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/murder)

[Rupert Russell](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Rupert-Russell)

[films](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/films)

Scene: Lower Quinton in South Warwickshire, England. Population 493. A quiet village, settled in its ways, where everyone knows each other and strangers are not welcome—or so it seems.

On the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day 1945, Charles Walton a seventy-four-year-old farm laborer left his home at Lower Quinton to begin his day’s work. Walton was employed by Alfred Potter at Firs Farm. He was tasked with cutting down hedges at a field on the slope of Meon Hill. It was a cold morning. Mist slowly dispersed as the sun warmed the land. There had been a bad harvest in the previous year, it was hoped this summer would bring a better yield.

Potter later claimed he saw Walton working in his short sleeves at around lunchtime. He said Walton had an hour’s worth of hedge still to trim. He watched as Walton hacked away at the branches with his trouncing hook.

When Walton’s adopted niece Edith Walton returned from her work that night, she was surprised to find her uncle not yet home. Edith knew Walton did not like working late as he suffered from arthritis. She decided to go and look for her uncle. She enlisted the help of a neighbor, Harry Beasley, and the farmer Alfred Potter.

Climbing up Meon Hill, the three discovered Walton’s body. He had been brutally murdered. His trouncing hook was embedded in his neck. His blood soaked the ground. A pitchfork had been thrust through his head, puncturing eye and cheek. His trousers were undone. His shirt and jacket open. A large cross had been carved on his chest. It was later said natterjack toads were placed around his body. Walton’s death looked like a ritual sacrifice.

Charles Walton was a quiet man. He was feared by some and considered odd by others. It was said he could cast an evil eye which could blight crops and kill cattle. They said he could also talk to animals, tame wild dogs, and call birds from the sky into his hand. This led to the whispered accusation Walton was a witch.

Walton’s murder attracted the attention of the London press. The countryside was a remote, foreign land to those denizens of the city, who tended to view country folk as backward, filled with superstition, strange individuals who practiced pagan rituals and witchcraft.  

The local constabulary were baffled by Walton’s murder. Scotland Yard was approached for assistance. On February 16th, Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, the Yard’s most successful detective, was dispatched to solve the crime.

Fabian decided to interview all of the inhabitants of Lower Quinton. However, he found the local residents taciturn and unwilling to cooperate with his investigation. He also discovered the only other murder to have previously taken place in the village had been in 1875 when a young woman Ann Tennant was similarly slaughtered with a pitchfork by a farm laborer James Heywood. Heywood claimed he had killed Tennant because she was a witch who had cast spells against him.

The ritualistic nature of Walton’s murder intrigued academic and Egyptolgist Margaret Murray. She traveled to the village to make her own inquiries. Murray was an expert on the occult and believed Walton’s death was a blood sacrifice carried out by a coven of witches.

Fabian believed he knew the perpetrator of Walton’s murder, but he had insufficient evidence to make an arrest. He returned to London. Walton’s murder remains unsolved to this day.

In 1970, Fabian wrote about Charles Walton’s murder in his memoir _The Anatomy of Crime_:

> I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.

So begins [Rupert Russell](https://www.rupertrussell.com/)‘s excellent documentary film _[The Last Sacrifice](https://mubi.com/en/gb/films/the-last-sacrifice-2024)_, which examines the events surrounding Charles Walton’s death. The film explains how this bloody murder in 1945 unleashed a new genre called folk horror leading to a slate of films like _Plague of the Zombies_, _The Blood on Satan’s Claw_, and most famously _The Wicker Man_.  

[

READ ON▸

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_last_sacrifice_rupert_russells_new_film_examining_the_murder_that_inspi)

Posted by Paul Gallagher

|

11.11.2024

05:34 am

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_last_sacrifice_rupert_russells_new_film_examining_the_murder_that_inspi#disqus_thread)

[

Burning Down the House: An Exclusive Interview with Artist Roxana Halls

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/exclusive_interview_with_artist_roxana_halls)

09.30.2024

06:55 pm

Topics:

Tags:

[artists](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/artists)

[queer](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/queer)

[Roxana Halls](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Roxana-Halls)

When the artist Roxana Halls was a child she considered becoming an actor or better still a film director when she grew up. Halls invented stories and ideas for the films she imagined she would make but soon realised the overly collaborative nature of filmmaking would only dilute her vision. This led Halls to seek other ways to capture the images which burst like fireworks in her head. She decided on painting. From early self-portraits in her bedroom-cum-studio at her parents home, first in Plaistow, London, later a small town in Devon, Halls taught herself how to paint picture by picture through hard work, discipline and an innate desire to make her ideas visible.

After briefly attending Plymouth College of Art & Design, Halls returned to London where she established her first studio in an abandoned theater. It was a perfect venue for an artist whose passions were art and performance. Around this time, Halls began collecting mannequins which she incorporated into her work - sometimes explicitly recognisable, sometimes appearing as an uncanny presence.

Among Halls early works is _Tingle-Tangle_ a series of paintings exhibited at the Royal National Theater in 2009. Partially inspired by her time staying in Berlin and through the film _Cabaret_, Halls paintings revealed how “through the alchemy of paint, an inventive aesthetic can transform the mundane - cardboard sets and charity shop costumes - into extraordinary spectacle.”

Next came the series _Appetite_ which examined sex, identity, and female repression through the inhibiting forms of censure, surveillance, and denial in women’s relationship to food.

Halls works within a feminist tradition as an artist. Her paintings engage the viewer in a dialectic. In her series _Laughing While…_ (2013-ongoing), Halls presents women center stage laughing euphorically, joyously, while behind a wrecked car ignites, a house burns, a shop has been looted, or a plane has crashed. These are brave women. Revolutionary, rebellious women liberating themselves from the strictures enforced on them by others. Our first response may be to smile at these women in acknowledgement of their actions then perhaps wonder how much we are similarly seeking our own liberation. 

[Roxana Halls](https://roxanahalls.com/home.html) lives with her wife and has her studio in south London. Over the past twenty years, Halls has created [a significant and substantial body of work](https://roxanahalls.com/section/16016.html), which places her as one of the most important and pioneering artists working today **Dangerous Minds** contacted Halls to discuss her work and career.  

_The artist Roxana Halls in her studio, photograph by Kris Kesiak._  

**How did you become a painter? What inspired you?**

**Roxana Halls**: I didn’t exactly decide to become an artist, it was more of a sense of vocation to me. I hadn’t really made a great deal of work as a kid in terms of painting, I’d written stories and illustrated them and apparently one of my earliest activities was to cut shapes out of paper and images out of mags and move them around on a large board to make movable visual tales.

Painting, however, no more than the average child until one night aged sixteen I thought I’d try some oil painting and although the painting I made – it was a self-portrait which I still keep – is pretty abysmal I somehow just knew from then on there was nothing else for me. It was more a kind of uncovering of purpose than making a choice.

**I have read you originally wanted to be an actor, if you had followed that path what kind of actor would you have become?**

**RH**; Yes, for a while I imagined I might be, and I’ve often spoken about that in interviews in relation to self-portraiture and the taking on of guises. I can’t recall what I envisaged at the time other than to take on as wide the roles and possibilities that were offered to me but certainly, I didn’t imagine anything mainstream or broadly popular.

But long before enjoying acting for a while, one of my earliest memories is of the playground pretending to be a film director and casting fellow pupils as my performers in my upcoming movie. I strongly recall an incident where I made an error of judgment in casting my lead actress and causing some tears! I often feel that in another life and under other circumstances I would have been a film director, but we can’t choose our language, it chooses us. I’m often struck by how our younger selves can intuit some bedrock of truth about our natures which we keep mining for a lifetime.  

_‘Laughing While Crashing’_  

[

READ ON▸

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/exclusive_interview_with_artist_roxana_halls)

Posted by Paul Gallagher

|

09.30.2024

06:55 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/exclusive_interview_with_artist_roxana_halls#disqus_thread)

[

Remembering Paul Laffoley on what would have been his 89th birthday

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/remembering_paul_laffoley_on_what_would_have_been_his_89th_birthday)

08.14.2024

10:07 pm

Topics:

[Art](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Art)

Tags:

[Paul Laffoley](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Paul-Laffoley)

Today would have been the 89th birthday of my good friend, the great genius artist and thinker Paul Laffoley. It’s been nearly a decade since he died, and the world is a much less interesting place without him in it. Our home has so many visual reminders of Paul, including an extraordinary horoscope he did for me with tiny, tiny handwriting, that’s in my office, that I am always quasi-thinking about him. Not necessarily consciously thinking _about_ him, but nevertheless, he’s always there in my everyday life. Knowing Paul was one of the best experiences of my life.

William Alderick wrote [a terrific essay about Paul](https://infinitethought.substack.com/p/enter-the-bauhauroque) on his Substack that I want to call your attention to:

> Encountering US artist Paul Laffoley for the first time at a Disinformation weekend in upstate New York back in 2004 has left an indelible mark on me ever since. Somewhere between Buddha and Back to The Future’s Doc Brown, Laffoley gave a slide show of his works, lecturing with a lion’s paw in place of his left foot on his various theoretical subjects encompassing alternative histories, blueprints for future human development, Goethe’s Ur-plant re-articulated into genetically engineered living architecture and his design for a working time machine. As collector Norman Dolph puts it in his foreword to Laffoley’s book The Phenomenology of Revelation, Laffoley could be the ‘spokes-painter of a consciousness yet unborn’.

> 

> The problem is that the ideas presented in Laffoley’s science fiction visions are so far removed from established reality that by definition they’re insane. His mandalic architectural blueprints of metaphysical ideas regularly pay homage to and draw on such a diverse range of intellectual ingredients that no one person can possibly be capable of properly evaluating it all: Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Madame Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, Nikola Tesla, H.G Wells, Claude Bragdon, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Teilard de Chardin, to name a very small and under-representative selection. Much of Laffoley’s lack of attention within the mainstream art industry can be put down to this. As Disinformation host Richard Metzger muses, Laffoley’s ‘singular erudition’ and transdisciplinary auto-didacticism, almost entirely self-taught and thus free of academic compartmentalization and categorization, is so over most people’s heads that he’s misunderstood to the point of tragicomedy.

**  

Read more of “[Enter the Bauhauroque](https://infinitethought.substack.com/p/enter-the-bauhauroque).”**

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

08.14.2024

10:07 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/remembering_paul_laffoley_on_what_would_have_been_his_89th_birthday#disqus_thread)

[

‘Disneyland in Dagenham’: Scott Lavene is back with a terrific new album!

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/disneyland_in_dagenham_scott_lavene_is_back_with_a_terrific_new_album)

06.09.2024

03:12 pm

Topics:

[Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

Tags:

[Scott Lavene](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Scott-Lavene)

John Peel’s oft-repeated line about how the Fall’s music was “always different, always the same” could also be said about the output of English singer-songwriter Scott Lavene, although with just four albums under his belt, he’s got a long way to go before catching up to the Fall’s apparently infinite back catalog. And much like the late Mark E. Smith’s, Lavene’s music is so infused with his own idiosyncratic personality and lyrical preoccupations (custard, double denim, drinking, stealing roses from his racist neighbor’s garden) that no one would ever mistake one of his songs for anyone else’s. With his latest album, _Disneyland in Dagenham_, Lavene’s tunes are, in fact, largely the same as heard on his previous two long players (2019’s _[Broke](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/any_best_albums_of_2019_lists_that_dont_have_scott_lavenes_broke_near_the_t)_ and 2021’s _[Milk City Sweethearts](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/best_album_of_the_year_scott_lavene_returns_with_milk_city_sweethearts)_) which is not, I hasten to add, an indication of _actual sameness_, but more an indication of consistently high quality and great songwriting. That he delivers exactly what his audience expects from a Scott Lavene album—always different, always the same and always _really fucking good._

According to TIDAL, I’ve listened to _Disneyland in Dagenham_ 186 times in the past month. I’ve already listened to it from start to finish twice today and it’s not even 9 am here. I think it’s safe for the reader to assume that I really love this album. It’s world-class. All killer, no filler.  An instant classic. Every song is a 10 out of 10. I like every single song on it so much that it almost seems like a greatest hits album to my ears after only four weeks. I could say the same about his other albums, too. Another observation about Lavene’s music—this occurred to me while revisiting his previous albums—is how well they are sequenced and how satisfying they are as start-to-finish listens. That and his arrangements are really sophisticated. Yes indeed, _Disneyland in Dagenham_ is exactly what I expected from a Scott Lavene album and after a three-year wait, I was not the slightest bit disappointed. I mean, _who listens to the same album 186 times in one month?_

Scott Lavene has been compared a lot to Ian Dury—I’ve done it myself—and that is a valid juxtaposition for quite a few reasons. First off, who’d mistake one of Ian Dury’s songs for anyone else’s? The same could be said of Lavene’s music. They both embrace narrative songwriting, wry portrayals of dodgy characters they’ve met along the way, wild nights out, working-class Britain, self-reflection, humor, Billericay, and wordplay, each capable of finding profound insights in life’s most mundane details. Additionally, the two men share a similar… let’s call it a “life force” that emanates from the grooves of their records. Were Ian Dury still alive, I suspect he’d see the commonality between their work himself.

Allow me to clarify further: Being compared to someone like Ian Dury as a songwriter would indicate an ineffably _unique_ approach, would it not? It’s not that I think Lavene is all that influenced by Ian Dury. There might be some influence, sure, but if I can express this properly the thing that they probably have most in common as songwriters is that they are both, and cannot pretend to be otherwise, _genuinely who they are_. The music itself doesn’t sound even remotely the same, it’s the approach, and the strength of the personality. You don’t hear that much true originality or individuality anymore and when you do it’s striking. It stands out. Just as Mark E. Smith could only sound like Mark E. Smith, and Ian Dury sound like Ian Dury, Scott Lavene can only sound like Scott Lavene. 

_Disneyland in Dagenham_ kicks off with “Paper Roses,” a wistful ballad of doomed love, a duet of sorts with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn lending his distinctive gravelly voice as a cynical bookie who won’t accept a bet on the relationship lasting. “Custard” is about family life, walking the dog, and, you guessed it, custard. “Debbie,” one of the album’s singles, portrays the titular subject, a mad inventor on a mission for Zeus, surrounded by her machinery and lots and lots and lots of fuses. (“Take the bread out of that, it’s not a toaster” goes the whispered chorus.)

“[Horse and I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs8EdYtbcNg)” sounds like it started as a short story—I was reminded of both Bob Dylan’s _Tarantula_ “novel” (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as Steve Martin’s _Cruel Shoes_—and tells the tale of Lavene and an equestrian pal busking across France performing Talking Heads and Cure covers. It’s a masterpiece in under four minutes. I fucking love this one. The album’s title track is a bittersweet and delicate paean to life outside of London, then we get to “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen” a bouncy New Wave raver of a song namechecking the macho Hollywood legend and imagining that he’d be the sad one not to be Scott Lavene if he only knew what he was missing out on. It’s fantastic and is followed by another banger, “[Julie Johnson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN-HQjqxibs)” a song I usually play twice in a row, if not ten times in a row every time I listen to _Disneyland in Dagenham_ (which, I will remind you has been _quite often_ in recent weeks.) “Little Bird” is a sweet ballad about two lovers being viewed by a feathered friend. It could be a tear-jerker in a Broadway or West End musical. “Rats” finds Lavene asking if he “can just be America’s sweetheart” and the amusing “Keeping it Local” ably caps a very satisfying song cycle.

Let me conclude by inviting you to listen to _Disneyland in Dagenham_ below and reminding you that once you’ve finished, you’ll want to check out the rest of Scott Lavene’s catalog. If you’ve never heard his wonderful music before, I envy you, because you’re in for a fantastic treat.  

_“Disneyland in Dagenham”_  

_“Debbie”_  

_“Sadly, I’m Not Steve McQueen”_  

_Julie Johnson_

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

06.09.2024

03:12 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/disneyland_in_dagenham_scott_lavene_is_back_with_a_terrific_new_album#disqus_thread)

[

‘Love Exposure’: The sprawling Japanese cult film masterpiece that you must see before you die

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/love_exposure)

05.23.2024

04:15 pm

Topics:

[Movies](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/movies)

Tags:

[Japan](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Japan)

[Sion Sono](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Sion-Sono)

[Yura Yura Teikoku](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Yura-Yura-Teikoku)

> It’s too bad words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘epic’ have been so overused by excitable film critics, because Sion Sono’s _Love Exposure_ is an actual epic masterpiece that is going to dominate the filmscape for decades.” - New York Asian Film Festival

> 

> “Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”—Film Four

Japanese auteur Sion Sono’s extraordinary 2008 film _Love Exposure_ (“Ai no mukidashi”) is the epic—yet still whimsical—story of Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima), the “king of the perverts.” Yu is the ninja master of the “up skirt” photograph. After his mother dies, Yu’s father becomes a Catholic priest. He insists that his son confess his sins to him. Yu, a good boy, has nothing really to confess so he just makes stuff up that his father doesn’t even believe. Eventually he falls in with a new crowd and soon his transgressions are a bit more… sinful. Still, Yu himself is not aroused by his own panty shots and lives an otherwise chaste life as he patiently awaits the arrival of his one true love. He’s only “sinning” for the sake of his relationship with his father.

Yu loses a bet and he is obliged to dress as a woman and kiss a girl he likes. As the boys are goofing off, they come across a young girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), who is about to be attacked by a gang. Yu is instantly smitten with the beautiful Yoko and—still dressed as a woman—he jumps into the fight and together they kick the gang’s collective ass. To fulfill the conditions of the bet, Yu kisses Yoko who begins to think she is a lesbian and crushes hard on Yu’s disguise of “Miss Scorpion” (an obvious nod to the 70s Japanese women in prison _Female Convict Scorpion_ film series) Yu believes he has finally met his one true love… and she thinks he’s a woman!  

Yu then finds out that his father the priest has a new girlfriend and will be leaving the priesthood to marry her. Guess who his new step sister is going to be?

The entire first hour of the film—the title card appears 58 minutes in—is but a prologue, setting up what’s to come. The Aum Shinrikyo-like cult religion, the gory violence and the explosions all happen later…It’s a pretty epic love story as far as they go. Trust me, you have never seen THIS film before (or anything else even remotely like it). **But you really need to.**

I’d recommend Sono’s loopy masterpiece (and it _is_ a masterpiece) to anyone with a taste for unusual world cinema, which is not to say it’s esoteric in any way, because it’s not. _Love Exposure_ is a real crowd pleaser. It’s an event! It may run for four hours, true, but it felt like two, trust me, don’t be intimidated by the length. Even if someone doesn’t love it as much as I do, surely they would appreciate it. It’s such an unusual cinematic experience. And it’s great fun. When it was over, I was sad there wasn’t more. When’s the last time you felt that way about a four hour film? Feel that way about _Ben Hur_ or _The Irishman_?  

_A trailer for Sino Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ with English subtitles. I can’t say that it’s successful at getting the film’s point across, but that would just be impossible._

It didn’t take but a minute after the film had ended for me to jump online and try to buy the film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t exist as such, but aside from a bit of Beethoven’s “Symphony No.7 in A Major” and Ravel’s “Bolero” the entire four hour film’s soundtrack consists of three amazing songs by the long running Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku (“The Wobbling Empire”). These same three songs are played over and over and over again. After four hours, they are drilled into your DNA for life.

Although I personally had never heard of them before, Yura Yura Teikoku were around from 1989 to 2010. They are one of the very few “underground” groups in Japan ever to become a major commercial act. They almost never played outside of Japan, and were, and still are, criminally obscure outside of their homeland. I’ll try to describe their sound, but it’s sort of pointless as Yura Yura Teikoku cover so much territory from song to song. They’re intense, but they’re melodic. At times the trio—who describe their own music simply as “psychedelic rock”—sound like Can crossed with Phish. Or early Flaming Lips doing a spaghetti western theme. Other times they remind me of a 60s garage rock band like The Sonics, but the next song will sound like Lloyd Cole. The one after that sounds like the lovechild of Neu! and the Grateful Dead. Or even the Ventures channeled through Ennio Morricone or a combination of Pink Floyd with The Blow Monkeys! Suffice to say, they are all over the map musically, from heavier riff-based guitar rock to prettier tunes that would make a great soundtrack for a picnic on a sunny day. From hard-rock workouts that will crush your head to things that you would whistle along with. Black Sabbath to Burt Bacharach on the same album, if not the same song.

The one area of commonality that nearly ALL of Yura Yura Teikoku’s music has—trust me, because I’ve been positively gorging myself on it lately—is that their songs posses a quality that make them sound uncannily familiar. The three songs featured so prominently in _Love Exposure_ are especially adept earworms.  Have a listen to my new favorite band, Yura Yura Teikoku. Chances are that they might become your new favorite new band, too.  

_“Kudo desu (Hollow Me)”_  

More after the jump…

[

READ ON▸

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/love_exposure)

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

05.23.2024

04:15 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/love_exposure#disqus_thread)

[

Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an analog vinyl snob

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/extreme_record_collecting_confessions_of_an_analog_vinyl_snob)

04.24.2024

02:36 pm

Topics:

[Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

[Pop Culture](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/pop_culture)

Tags:

[records](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/records)

[analog](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/analog)

Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”

Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost _none_ of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.

Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

_**Continues after the jump…**_

[

READ ON▸

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/extreme_record_collecting_confessions_of_an_analog_vinyl_snob)

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

04.24.2024

02:36 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/extreme_record_collecting_confessions_of_an_analog_vinyl_snob#disqus_thread)

[

‘1970’: Spectacular, nearly unseen shots of Iggy Pop from an underground magazine called ‘Earth’

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/1970_spectacular_nearly_unseen_shots_of_iggy_pop_from_an_underground_magazi)

03.29.2024

09:22 am

Topics:

[Art](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/Art)

[Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

Tags:

[Iggy Pop](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Iggy-Pop)

[Bud Lee](http://www.budleepicturemaker.com) (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s _Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant_, and _Fiddler on the Roof_.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of _Gone With The Wind_ with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like CREEM. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.  

_Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine._  

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

03.29.2024

09:22 am

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/1970_spectacular_nearly_unseen_shots_of_iggy_pop_from_an_underground_magazi#disqus_thread)

[

‘Saturation 70’: Story of the long lost Gram Parsons sci fi movie told in new book

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/saturation_70_story_of_the_long_lost_gram_parsons_sci_fi_movie_told_in_new_)

03.27.2024

02:56 pm

Topics:

[Movies](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/movies)

[Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

Tags:

[Gram Parsons](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Gram-Parsons)

Six years before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary but ill-fated 1975 attempt to film Frank Herbert’s _Dune_—the story of which was compellingly told in the recent documentary _Jodorowsky’s Dune_—there was another similarly ambitious and ground-breaking film project that, until recently, was largely unknown.

_Saturation 70_ was a special effects-laden science fiction movie starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Julian Jones, the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Unlike _Dune_, _Saturation 70_ _did_ actually make it into production and _was_ shot, but never completed, then was forgotten and undocumented for over forty years.

The film was written and directed by Tony Foutz, who crops up in several music histories, usually described as a ‘Stones insider’, but was actually much more than that. His father, Moray Foutz, was an early executive at Walt Disney. The younger Foutz had his own equally fascinating career path, working in the mid-sixties as a first assistant director in Italy for Gille Pontecorvo, Orson Welles and Marco Ferreri – for whom he later wrote _Tales of Ordinary Madness_, the first film adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s work. His connection to the Stones came via Anita Pallenberg, who he met in Rome during the filming of Roger Vadim’s _Barbarella_ at Cinecitta Studios in the summer of 1967. Through her, he also befriended Keith Richards.

In 1968, while staying at Richards’ Redlands estate, Foutz wrote a script entitled _Maxagasm_ in collaboration with Sam Shepard, for himself to direct as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones, who were to star in the movie and produce an original soundtrack album for it. During pre-production for _Maxagasm_ in Los Angeles, Foutz was tipped off about Integratron designer and space devotee George Van Tassel’s ‘Spaceship Convention’ at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree, an annual gathering of UFO abductees and alien enthusiasts. Foutz gathered up some friends to go and film documentary footage there, intending to use it as a way of testing out special effects he was planning for _Maxagasm_.  

_Gram Parsons at the piano in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, 1970. Still from the ‘Saturation 70’ promo reel (Anthony Foutz Archive)._

On that trip were Gram Parsons (Foutz’s roommate at the Chateau Marmont), Michelle Phillips, Julian Jones and his mother, Linda Lawrence (Parsons’ then-girlfriend), rock photographer Andee Cohen, Flying Burrito Brothers roadie Phil Kaufman, and western character actor Ted Markland—known as ‘[the Mayor of Joshua Tree’](http://www.laweekly.com/2001-10-11/columns/in-character/) for his role in popularizing the location as a retreat for the hip Hollywood set. (It was Markland who first took Lenny Bruce, then the Stones, Parsons and Foutz to the desert to imbibe psychedelics and sit under the stars, scanning the sky for UFOs.) Also along for the ride were cinematographer Bruce Logan and special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, both fresh off working on Stanley Kubrick’s _2001_.

Fired up his experience at Giant Rock, Foutz decided to incorporate the footage they’d shot into another feature film project, that came together as a kind of counter culture version of the _Wizard of Oz_, about a lost star child (Julian Jones) who falls through a wormhole into present day Los Angeles and tries to find his way back home, assisted by four alien beings—the Kosmic Kiddies—who wear clean suits to protect them from the pollution. (The title of the film referenced the level at which carbon monoxide in human blood becomes lethal.)  

_The Kosmic Kiddies, from R to L: Tony Foutz, Michelle Phillips, Gram Parsons, [Phil Kaufman](http://ultimateclassicrock.com/gram-parsons-body-theft-case-settled/) and Andee Cohen. Photo: Tom Wilkes_

_Saturation ’70_ was shot in and around Los Angeles from October 1969 through spring of 1970 and included several spectacular set pieces: a surreal shootout between a Viet Cong soldier and an American G.I. in the aisles of Gelson’s supermarket in Century City (noted gun fan, Phil Spector, visited the set that day and stood on the sidelines to watch); a cowboy picnic on the Avenue of the Stars featuring country music couturier Nudie Cohn and a bevy of cowgirl cheerleaders; and a parade of Ford Edsel cars roaring through the City of Industry in a flying V-formation. He also filmed the Kosmic Kiddies roaming around the city in their clean suits and masks—inside them, Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Stash Klossowski de Rola (the son of painter Balthus) and Andee Cohen.

Seeing an opportunity for cross promotion with his music career, Parsons had the Flying Burrito Brothers wear the same suits on the cover of their second album, _Burrito Deluxe_ (also named in honor of the working title for Foutz’s script, “Rutabaga Deluxe”). Parsons and Roger McGuinn were brought together to write songs for and score the soundtrack. Rolling Stone would report that McGuinn intended to use the Moog synthesizer he had acquired at the Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier.  

_Julian Jones and his fairy godmother_

Once principal photography was complete, Foutz started working on the special effects sequences at Doug Trumbull’s Canoga Park facility, incorporating computer-processed visual effects Trumbull was developing there that allowed for graphic and textual overlays on pre-existing film images—a revolutionary idea at the time. Among the effects Foutz and Trumbull were working to create were propagandistic data clouds that floated in the sky (akin to the dirigibles later seen in Ridley Scott’s _Blade Runner_), towering skyscrapers made of television screens and dinosaurs roaming among the derricks in the Inglewood Oil Field near La Cienega Boulevard.  

_Skid Row Los Angeles, 1970. Not much has changed. Look closely at the signs._

However, before they could complete their work, funding for the film fell through, the producers abandoned the project and the entire project collapsed. All of the footage was subsequently lost apart from one five minute showreel cut to the Flying Burrito Brothers version of the Jagger/Richards song, “Wild Horses,” which Parsons had contributed to the writing of a few months earlier.

For years, existence of the film was little more than a rumour among Gram Parsons fans—a strange anomalous event in his short, gloried career—but now all the existing production photos have been dusted off for an upcoming book that recreates the film shoot, and the story of _Saturation 70_ can finally be told.

**Preorder _Saturation 70: A Vision Past of the Future Foretold_ [HERE](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wolfandsalmon/saturation-70-a-deluxe-art-book-about-a-lost-sci-fi-film).**  

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

03.27.2024

02:56 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/saturation_70_story_of_the_long_lost_gram_parsons_sci_fi_movie_told_in_new_#disqus_thread)

[

‘Weezy, get me some LSD’: When Sherman Hemsley met Gong

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/weezy_get_me_some_lsd_when_sherman_hemsley_met_gong)

03.24.2024

04:42 pm

Topics:

[Music](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/music)

[R.I.P.](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/r.i.p)

[Television](https://dangerousminds.net/categories/category/television)

Tags:

[Gong](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Gong)

[Daevid Allen](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Daevid-Allen)

[Sherman Hemsley](https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Sherman-Hemsley)

Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played George Jefferson, was known to be a huge fan of prog rock, especially Gentle Giant, Nektar and Gong.

Hemsley collaborated with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7” (never produced). Hemsley also did an interpretive dance to the Gentle Giant song “Proclamation” on Dinah Shore’s 70s talkshow, that was apparently _somewhat confusing_ for her.

But the best story, I mean _the best story of all time_, is the one told by Gong’s Daevid Allen about his encounter with the beloved 70’s sitcom star. Here is Allen’s verbatim tale as related to Mitch Myers (and originally published in [Magnet](http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2009/03/05/george-jefferson-worlds-biggest-gong-fan/) magazine):

> “It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought,  ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’

> 

> I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’

> 

> Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.

> 

> We went up to the top floor and there was this big room with darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.

> 

> \[My girlfriend\] Maggie and I were really tired and went to our room to go to bed. The room had one mattress with an electric blanket and that was it. No bed covering, no pillow, nothing. The next day we came down and Sherman showed us a couple of \[The Jeffersons\] episodes.

> 

> One of our fans came and rescued us, but not before Sherman took us to see these Hollywood PR people. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Hemsley wants us to get the information we need in order to do these Flying Teapot billboards on Sunset Strip.’ I looked at them and thought they were the cheesiest, most nasty people that I had ever seen in my life and I gave them the runaround. I just wanted out of there. I liked Sherman a lot. He was a very personable, charming guy. I just had a lot of trouble with the people around him.”

Oi, if Daevid Allen thinks you’re weird, _you must be a stone freak!_ (Like our pal, opera singer/actor [Jesse Merlin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH4kiI4oTng). He met Daevid Allen in San Francisco and Allen said “Just look at him. He’s a perfect example **_of himself!_**” Coming from Daevid Allen, that’s the best compliment in the history of the world, isn’t it?)

_Below, Sherman Hemsley as “George Jefferson,” dancing up a storm to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way”!_  

_**After the jump, Gong on French TV, 1973.**_

[

READ ON▸

](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/weezy_get_me_some_lsd_when_sherman_hemsley_met_gong)

Posted by Richard Metzger

|

03.24.2024

04:42 pm

|

[Leave a comment](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/weezy_get_me_some_lsd_when_sherman_hemsley_met_gong#disqus_thread)

Page 1 of 2338  **1** [2](https://dangerousminds.net/P10) [3](https://dangerousminds.net/P20) [\>](https://dangerousminds.net/P10)  [Last ›](https://dangerousminds.net/P23370)

FEATURED ARTICLES

*   [Oliver Reed as a prototype Alex from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in ‘These are the Damned’](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/oliver_reed_as_a_prototype_alex_from_a_clockwork_orange_in_these_are_the_da)

*   [‘I Have No Desire To Be Nico’: Post-Punk’s Muse Of Manchester, Linder Sterling](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/i_have_no_desire_to_be_nico_post_punks_muse_of_manchester_linder_sterling)

*   [Nina Hagen’s ‘Nunsexmonkrock’: Greatest (and weirdest) unsung masterpiece of the postpunk era?](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/nina_hagens_nunsexmonkrock_greatest_and_weirdest_unsung_masterpiece_of_the_)

*   [Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an analog vinyl snob](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/extreme_record_collecting_confessions_of_an_analog_vinyl_snob)

*   [A long, rambling blog post about my Nico obsession (+ some astonishing, seldom seen TV performances)](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/a_long_rambling_blog_post_about_my_nico_obsession)

Š2025 Dangerous Minds | [Privacy Policy](https://dangerousminds.net/privacy-policy)

adsense ad

Support Free Content

--------------------

Disable Your Ad Blocker

-----------------------

We use ads to keep our content free for you.

Please allow ads and let sponsors fund your surfing. You can find instructions [here](https://www.edealinfo.com/remove-adblocker.php) as to how.

Thank you!