Month: July 2006

Right after I post an early Pink Floyd video comes word that Syd Barrett — the band’s “troubled genius” — has died.
Syd was a strange character. For those who don’t know the history, he founded the band and wrote and sang nearly all of its early songs. But thanks to a potent admixture of schizophrenia and lysergic acid diethylamide, he lost his mind. The rest of the band gently eased him out and went on to global superstardom. For the last 30-plus years, Syd’d been a crazy man living alone in Cambridge, painting abstract canvases and living off Floyd royalties.
Because he’s gone private, Syd lived on primarily as an image — inspiring tribute songs like “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Fans imagined him as a kindhearted child in need of protection, an injured songbird. His musical production consisted of only one good album and a bunch of unlistenable solo work, interspersed with occasional glimpses of sense. But from that body of work — and one extended exercise in mythmaking — developed a legend.
Here’s Joe Boyd, the band’s early promoter, on the Syd he knew; he makes the worthwhile and undernoted point that the band succeeded in part because Syd “was incredibly good looking: he had these dark eyes, and this curly black hair, and he was very, very appealing; girls loved him.”
(Today, that seems strange on a couple of levels. First, because the remaining band members post-Syd are, well, quite unattractive sorts; and second, because the post-Syd band and their fans are both so drearily self-conscious about how intellectual and profound they each are. When I was in eighth grade, liking Pink Floyd was a marker that I was a serious person, and it was the complete absence of fun post 1972 that eventually drove me away. So I really like the idea that the most “serious” of classic rock bands, the only one that would inspire Tom Stoppard plays, got an early edge because its lead singer was hot. On the other hand, it also gives his descent into crazy eyebrow-shaving fat man status in the 1970s a sort of awful resonance.)
I linked to a bunch of early Floyd videos a few months ago, and most of those links still work. But the best is this video of “Interstellar Overdrive” from the 1967 doc Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.

Columns I have no desire to read in my local newspaper:

I realize many of you get mouth ulcers, but after a little studying on my part, I learned that only a lucky chosen few get them regularly, and sometimes, in droves. I’m one of the lucky ones, and ohhhh, I get them everywhere. I get them on my lip, behind my lip, in that little spot where your top lip meets your bottom lip, on my gums, inside my gums, on my tongue, under my tongue, on the roof of my mouth and yes, oh yes, even inside my throat on occasion.

Perhaps the most patronizing moment in early rock criticism: Pink Floyd appears on the BBC, May 14, 1967. Despite a pretty good (if poorly miked) rendition of “Astronomy Domine,” with Syd Barrett in full hippie regalia, they get savaged by the Viennese voice of establishment music, Hans Keller.

Syd and Roger Waters actually deal with the insulting questions (“Why has it all got to be so terribly loud? For me, frankly, it’s too loud. I just can’t bear it”) well, I thought. They seem rather amused.

I spent a lot of time searching through SEC filings not long ago, so this error is of particular note to me. (And the filing in question is still up.)

Frightening news from the housing markets:

As housing prices soared last year, an eye-popping 43% of first-time home buyers purchased their homes with no-money-down loans, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors…

The median first-time home buyer scraped together a down payment of only 2% on a $150,000 home in 2005, the NAR found…

[Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research] and other economists are concerned that many lenders have pushed a series of creative but potentially dangerous loans to help more Americans afford a home.

That 43% number is just staggering to me.

Everything silly about 1970s masculinity, wrapped up neatly in one movie named Stunt Rock: heavy metal, stuntmen, dune buggies, car chases…and wizards!

Even better, the band in question is still around!
I’m going to guess that video director Jon Watts saw that movie before helming Jason Forrest‘s “Steppin’ Off”:In fact, I’ll more than guess it, since one of Forrest’s labelmates performed under the name Stunt Rock.

A new term for me: “cottaging.” (Definition here.)
Speaking of gay pop (as the above linked article does), I remember in seventh grade reading, in my school library, a book on the history of rock and roll. (We’re talking 1987 or thereabouts.) The book had been published around 1984, and the author was British. In a section on “The Biggest Bands of All Time,” alongside The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the like was an extended paean to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I was a dumb little shit at the time, but even I thought that seemed like a reach. But I guess if you were in London in 1984, it made a sort of sense.
Here’s the famously banned video for their biggest hit, “Relax”:

FGTH is apparently still around, although sans lead singer Holly Johnson.
Finally, while I’m linking to over-the-top gay videos of the mid-1980s, I present the Village People’s “Sex Over the Phone.” (I linked to it obliquely earlier.) The truly astounding thing about this one: No matter how stuffed with homoeroticism the video is — and despite the fact it was shot in 1985, many years after America figured out these Village gentlemen may not all be heterosexual — at the 2:25 mark it completely switches gears and pretends its subject is the glory of straight phone sex. I wonder what the marketing thought behind that one was.

I’m not sure which is sadder:
1. That dead one-hit country wonder Johnny Paycheck, sometime in the 1990s, switched the capitalization of his last name to PayCheck; or
2. That his widow apparently goes by Sharon PayCheck and his son Jonathan PayCheck.
Best paragraph from his New York Times obit (not online, but by Ben Ratliff): “Though he made his first records in 1958, it was not until the mid-1970s that a movement came along that could accommodate his rowdy, jail-prone life. Suddenly, when certain country singers were marketed as Outlaws, it became acceptable for them to look like hippies and act like pirates.”

My old Toronto buddy Katherine — a person I might have tagged, mere days ago, as Friend Least Likely To Appear On A Reality Television Program(me) — is in fact appearing on such a program(me). It’s called Skooled, apparently, and features a bunch of teenagers swapping roles with a bunch of teachers. (Katherine would be of that second group.) She’s blogging about it, too. Local newspaper story here.