Zior

Zior is bad black drums and music from the beard. A bonfire. See that Dirty blond with hair down past her naked ass. Over sized 70’s nipples. A book by Crowley that nobody has read till the end or understands. But It’s better than Mao’s red book. And what about that hammer film we saw on acid? Shit man I couldn’t make sense of it. The guy who did the cover for the Sabbath record with the witch on it did this one. Pass the chillum.

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Ed Askew

In June I turned fifteen. The only thing I wanted for my birthday was “Ask The Unicorn”. I already had an Ed Askew T-Shirt, the one with Ed playing that crazy instrument of his, laughing, with the mushroom cloud behind him. But I didn’t have the album. My mom bought it for me, even though she was a little tripped out by the cover. Finally! I thought I’d be the last kid at school to get it. I really didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of being called a poser because I had the shirt but not the record.

Well does my mom regret that present. Ed Askew infuriates her. She hates him. When I get home from school, I walk in, pass her without saying hello, go right up to my room, slam the door, and crank “Ask The Unicorn” at full volume. I don’t even get to “Marigolds” before she is banging on the door yelling at me to turn it down. “What is this crap!!!” she says. “It’s music that was made the year you were born mom!” It doesn’t matter to her. It’s nonsense to her ears. Just noise.

But Friday night, when I head down to Seaside Heights, It’s blasting from almost every car on the strip! Ed speaks to my generation man and I don’t care what any parent or teacher thinks. They hate it because Ed reminds them that they blew it. They had a chance to drop out and grow beards and live on farms and forget the city but they couldn’t give it up. All the kids at my school are with it. They are all ready and can’t wait to give it up, just dying to drop out. We are reading survival manuals, and books on how to farm, and weave baskets and do macramé. When we graduate we aren’t going to collage. We are heading up to the hills and down to the valley, to the river, and we’re saying fuck our parents and fuck society. We’re not afraid to ask the unicorn! With middle finger in air screaming “Fancy That!’

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Neil Merryweather

In the early seventies, Hollywood was a Mecca for teenage runaways. Pimps and pushers swooped in like vultures, to pick the bones clean, of mid western kids, who had dreams around their heads, fire in their eyes, and hatred for their parents. The star studded sidewalks were lined with ripe teens begging for change, looking to score, and willing to get it on with just about anyone, if the price or the temperature, was right.

Rock star Neil Merryweather used to have a recording studio, situated at the corner of Ivar and Hollywood Blvd, the heart of runaway land. Neil was fascinated by the subculture. In between recording sessions he would wander out on to the boulevard and have smoke, and talk, and listen to the stories of these wayward kids. It wasn’t long before Neil decided to invite some up to his studio to record them, telling there own stories, in there own words.


Taking a cue from Brion Gysin, Neil cut up the audiotape of these stories, and thematically pieced it back together. He brought in a group of studio musicians and laid down tracks behind it. He directed the band to play in the style of music that related to what the runaway generation was listening to. It was glam rock!

The resulting document is “Space Rangers”.

So let’s meet up at the crash pad over on Cherokee and all lie down together on a dirty mattress, eat a cheap hot dog, shoot some speed, take a sip of jug wine, pop a red and listen to what street life is like on Hollywood Blvd, nineteen hundred and seventy four.

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BANG

My uncle is in his 50’s. He lives alone in a trailer, he drives a forklift, he can’t drink or do drugs any more because his liver will fall out and his heart would stop. He is obsessed with pizza and is very slowly working on a pizza cookbook.

In the early seventies he was in a band called BANG. They were the modal for the group depicted in the movie “Almost Famous”. A power trio compared to Sabbath, Zeppelin, Cream, and Hendrix. In reality they were trying to be The Guess Who, but were too pissed off and full of testosterone to touch the depth or sensitivity of Burton Cummings craftsmanship. But guitar wise could out Bachman Randy Bachman any day of the seven-day weekend, resulting in a sound, best described as, The Guess Who after a lobotomy. Bang even opened for The Guess Who and would fire a double barrel shotgun into the air right before starting the set. BANG! BANG!

Lot’s of record collectors think the groups home state to be Florida, but really it's Pennsylvania. For some reason they were hugely popular in the sunshine state. My uncle said the record was even advertised on billboards in the Daytona area.

Why Florida?

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Hank Ballard

Blake Carrol of Detroit Michigan Writes:

“Dear High Priest of Good Times,
I am a post-apocalyptic revolutionary based out of the area that was once called “Detroit Michigan”. My brothers and sisters and I, hunt, fish, farm, fight & fuck out here on the great urban prairie. Even though the world has ended, we live a relatively happy life amongst its ashes. The only thing we miss is rock and roll music and sometimes coca cola. Is there any way you could help?”

...Well Blake I can’t help you out with the soda but I do happen to have some Pre-apocalyptic music from that once great metropolis known as Detroit. It is a known fact that Hank Ballard & The Midnighters played a hand in Detroit’s down fall.

Hank Ballard was a student of the black arts. In 1950 he founded the First African Church Of Satan on Hastings Street. The Church attracted allot of attention and controversy. The sermons resembled Baptist ceremony, including rousing gospel style tunes replacing any sanctified imagery, with sexually explicate lyrics, meant to conjure up the devil, or “old scratch” as they called him. The parishioners would be worked into frenzy that eyewitnesses said resembled an orgy. The church was only up and running for a year before the locals ran them out and burned the building town. Many Detroit natives believed to even speak of the place brought bad luck.

Hank hung up the collar and decided to try and spread his evil message by reworking his sermons into R&B numbers. He joined forces with The Midnighters and began recording and performing. One such sermon “the Twist” , would later be covered by Chubby Checker and started a seemingly harmless dance craze.

As for the city of Detroit, the damage was done. Hank’s witchy ways had incited the devil or some other angry spirit to take residence in the Motor City. It wasn’t long after the auto plants started closing and the place began to burn. The writing was on the wall when in 1954, “work with me Annie” went to number one on the R&B charts. That summer was Detroit’s hottest in history.

Enjoy Blake. Give My Love to Detroit!

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German Oak

"We dedicate this record to our parents which had a bad time in World War 2."

Is this what Nazi hippies sound like when they form a band? Maybe. Most likely it’s a teenage gang of Kraut, proto punk peaceniks, on acid, jamming one afternoon down in an air raid shelter.

File under: Degenerate Art

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New American Century

B.U.S.H. Is a DJ collective from Brazil that specializes in mash ups. They fuse Minor Threat with garage rock nuggets like The Seeds, The Count Five, and The Music Machine. The combo is quite danceable, but so very angry. Why so Angry? Brazil is a tropical paradise. What do they have down there to be angry about?

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Barrington Spence

Not many people know, but when “Speak Softly” was released, in the grater Kingston area, the pussy this man got within a 15-mile radius of his tenement yard, was out of control. If you think hard day’s night was hard for the Beatles, you should have checked this mans checkered pants, circa 1975. The mania prompted the title of a future LP: “Star in The Ghetto”.

Actually he might have been residing in Texas or New York when it hit the streets. No matter where he was I'm sure the ladies followed.

I read some shit about him being a low rent Ken Boothe. I don't know what that means.



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Do I know you?

I used to know Mike’s limo driver and he said that after this record went to number one on the UK charts, Mike would get blasted out of his mind and ride around in the back of the limo, with no shirt on and a pistol, yelling “tonight’s ganna be the night!”, cranking Hank Williams on a portable reel-to-reel player, over and over again.

Mike looks white but he is really a black man, born in Greenville, Mississippi. He claims his birthday is in the 1940’s, but reliable sources say Mike was born sometime around 1909, making him about a hundred years old.

Cooper found an old forbidden book written by a 16th century monk in an abandoned shack just north of London England. Nobody knows what was written in that book. All we know is he stopped playing the blues soon after and switched to what he called “Gospel”, or “Magick Lantern Music”. Who’s gospel was this? It certainly didn’t sound like anything that was done in any church this side of the Nile. “Do I know You” was the first of it’s kind.

Mike still plays music today. He also writes restaurant reviews for food magazines and edits a recipe column in a local newspaper.

If anyone knows where to get any of his other recordings let me know. His records have been banned in the United States. I picked up an eight-track copy of this on a recent trip to Brazil.



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