So I saw the new Spider-Man film at a preview in Nashville tonight. I’m not sure when the review embargo gets lifted, but I’m not going to offer any judgments or spoilers here. If you saw Tom Holland’s turn as the web-slinger in his extended cameo in Captain America: Civil War you’ve got a good sense of what to expect from this Marvel Studios summer tentpole. If you liked the new Spidey in the Civil War flick you’ll love the new Spider-Man movie. If this new take on Spidey turned you off in the last Captain America outing you’ll really hate the new Spider-Man movie.

The new flick doubles-down on the notion of Spider-Man as a young teenager and it’s a fun and fresh take — the original Peter Parker was introduced to the world as a 17 year old, but in the current Marvel universe, Parker was bit by the spider that changed his life at the age of 15, and this latest iteration begins shortly after that fateful sting and the events in Civil War. But the thing I liked best about the new Spider-Man is how it shouted out the animated series from 1967, and how it felt like a love letter to the gritty New York City that those old cartoons captured so well: the classic cartoon theme song is quoted in the opening credits and the phrase “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” had me recalling the title sequence from the old cartoon which is also quoted in the lyrics of the theme song. The film also highlights music from the Ramones, and spotlights old school NYC icons like the Staten Island Ferry and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island — all icons of pre-Giuliani Gotham when New York stood for gritty toughness instead of bundled derivatives and the effete pleasures of locally-sourced, artisanal, small batch conspicuous consumption.

Check out old school Spidey in old school New York with this playlist of a ton of episodes from the 1967 animated series that even predates me. Even if you don’t have the time to watch this right now, just leave it on in the background to dig the flat-out jams that accompanied this funkiest-ever Spider-Man…

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1967 was the Summer of Love, and by that time Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the counterculture, was already two years into his transformation from folkie legend to rock star which began when he plugged-in a Fender Stratocaster and “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan had even released rock masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde by the time the Summer of Love was in full bloom which made the release of D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering rock doc, Don’t Look Back, seem exactly like looking back in 1967. The film captured the last flickers of Dylan as a wandering acoustic troubadour during his 1965 tour in England. Here’s the word from The Guardian…

“Very few people change the way of the world,” says Baldassare. “To me there is before Elvis and after Elvis, before Cassius Clay and after Muhammad Ali, and before Bob Dylan and after Bob Dylan. In Don’t Look Back we have the rare vantage point of seeing that moment just before.”

Shot handheld on black-and-white 16mm film, Don’t Look Back invented the “rockumentary”. Its fly-on-the-wall style flew in the face of contemporary cinematic convention, and its reputation and influence has steadily grown since its release in 1967. In 2014, the British Film Institute’s authoritative poll of movie industry experts ranked Don’t Look Back as one of the 10 best documentaries of all time.

Since the mid-1950s Pennebaker had been a pioneer of the observational “direct cinema” style, and had even helped develop the small synchronised sound and vision system which enabled it. While making films for Life magazine, he was looking for a more personal project when he met Bob Dylan in a bar in Greenwich Village. “He [Dylan] said: I have an idea for a film where I write out all the words to this song on pieces of paper, and I’ll just throw them down as I read them,” Pennebaker recalls. “I said: that’s a fantastic idea.” This eventually became the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues “video” (actually the opening sequence in Don’t Look Back).

Celebrating the film and looking back on Don’t Look Back, here’s more than an hour of outtakes from the film that I found on YouTube…

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Getting back to posting about this year’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I’m interested in another take on the season that announced the rise of the hippie. While the phrase Summer of Love conjures images of willowy hippy girls and long haired hippie dudes frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, at the same time there was another kind of revolution happening on the other side of the world. While America’s West Coast was getting blazed on peace and love, London was in a full swing cultural upheaval of their own as a generation of young people rejected post-war austerity for their own take on American sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the word from the Daily Beast…

There came a moment when London first shook off the coils of hidebound British society, the sobriety of convention, the obedience of norms that had made it a funless place in its post-war years. As no other city has ever done, London suddenly owned a whole decade and became synonymous with the culture of that decade—the 1960s.

So much of what makes London what it is now is came from that time. There was a cultural and social insurrection that transformed every idea of what was permissible in society and in the arts.

Here’s a BBC doc about London’s version of that most psychedelic season…

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After recent posts about The Doors and Easy Rider, I’m on a bit of a hippy jag, and the fact that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love means that I’ll likely linger on the longhairs for a lot of posts during these warm weather months. It’s always fun to celebrate the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation, but what about the darker side of that cultural revolution? What if the flower children were actually grown by the military industrial complex in order to undermine opposition to the Vietnam War? And what if Laurel Canyon was the hothouse where this strange strain was synthesized?

Meet writer Dave McGowan, author of Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon…

David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s previous books include Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion.

How did an uncanny amount of rock superstars emerge from the rustic Laurel Canyon scene of the mid 60s when the primary music centers of the US at that time were NYC, Nashville, and Detroit? Why were many of these future stars sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and extreme privilege who just happened to all arrive in LA at the same time? From the Lizard King Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, even the Monkees, they all had conspicuous family heritages that did not exactly jive with what would become the free love, anti war soundtrack of a generation. Meanwhile, looming behind these musicians was a dark underbelly of Hollywood stars, young turks, the mob, shadowy intelligence assets, and charmers like little Charlie Manson who everyone liked at first.. How and why did this all happen? And what about that covert military installation on Lookout Mountain? Are you ready to have your rock and roll fantasies challenged? You may never listen to this music the same way ever again.

Here’s The Antidote interview with McGowan…

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This month we remember the death of John Coltrane on July 17, 1967. Coltrane’s resume stretches from R&B honking to playing with be-bop legends like Miles and Monk, to pioneering his own spiritually illuminated free jazz in the last decades of his life. A true giant of American music, Coltrane makes my shortlist of heroes of any kind, and I’m psyched to share The World According to John Coltrane in celebration of his luminous legacy…

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A quick Google search finds Blonde on Blonde on most every top rock albums shortlist and it always places high in rankings of Dylan’s best. I take Highway 61 Revisited over Blonde, but Blonde is probably in any Dylanologist’s top three.

Blonde‘s epic poetics in songs like “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” are always mesmerizing, but the goofball wordplay in songs like “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35″ and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” shows that Dylan was always cool enough to know that it was only rock ‘n’ roll, and once Dylan and producer Bob Johnston added a rollicking assembly of Nashville studio pros to the album’s mix it signaled Dylan’s completed transformation from protesting folkie to rock superstar.

Blonde on Blonde was released in 1966, the same year that D.A. Pennebaker filmed his second Dylan concert tour film, Eat the Document. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back chronicled Dylan’s 1965 solo tour. That film was directed by Pennebaker and released in 1967. Docment‘s documenting of the 1966 tour wasn’t released until 1972. Document was directed by Dylan with Pennebaker playing cinematographer. Here’s the word from Wiki…

Though shooting had completed for the film, Dylan’s July 1966 motorcycle accident delayed the editing process. Once well enough to work again, Dylan edited the film himself. ABC rejected the film as incomprehensible for a mainstream audience.

It has never been released on home video and prints are rarely screened in theaters. Some footage from Eat the Document was used in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

Here’s a track list:

Tell Me, Momma
What Kind Of Friend Is This?
I Can’t Leave Her Behind
Like A Rolling Stone
I Still Miss Someone
I Don’t Believe You
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Baby Let Me Follow You Down
Mr. Tambourine Man
One Too Many Mornings
On A Rainy Afternoon

Here’s an hour-long version of Document from my channel on YouTube…

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More than a year ago, on this blog, I added a post about John Coltrane. It was a July entry, remembering the giant’s death in that month in 1967. Today I’m remembering Trane’s birth on September 23, 1926. Here’s the same post from last summer. Whether in life or in death, Coltrane looms large for me and I can’t say more or offer a better example of the man’s greatness than I did than I did 14 months ago…

On this day in 1967 we lost a giant of jazz. John Coltrane is a personal hero of mine. As a saxophonist I’ve always been enthralled by the instrument’s superlative ability to mimic the human voice and one is hard pressed to find any other horn man in jazz who exemplified the saxophone’s potential for eloquence like Coltrane.

The following clip is my favorite John Coltrane document of all time: the video captures his classic quartet at the height of their power, literally steaming as they strain to realize every moment of this electrifying expression; it demonstrates the influence that Eastern music had only begun to have over the musician and composer, and it finds Coltrane poised directly between his be-bop roots and the free jazz frontiers that he would help to map in the second half of his career.

This video is officially one of “My Favorite Things”…

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The new Psychedelic Sex book published by Taschen this spring is currently being sold on eBay for $69. That’s a silly point to make about what amounts to a seriously in-depth look at what happened to the burgeoning culture of “men’s magazines” when they ran smack into the psychedelic revolution in the 1960′s.

During a tiny, titillating window between 1967 and 1972, LSD, the sexual revolution, pop art graphics and the go-go entrepreneurialism that’s always been the hallmark of the pornography industry all combined in a cauldron of hippie chicks, surfer girls and counterculture couplings that created “psychedelic sex.” While the freaks flew their flags of free love and good drugs in San Francisco, men’s magazine publishers were anxious to sell the revolution to the squares on the sidelines.

Magazines like Way Out and Where It’s At attempted to capture the aesthetics of psychedelic culture beginning at the place where the jeans and the fringe and the flowers hit the floor. In a sense, the magazines were playing catch-up — the actual permissiveness and experimentation that was happening in the youth culture of the time was making the forbidden fruit that men’s magazines always claimed to offer look like something much more boring that what might have been happening on a college campus or after hours at the coffeehouse.

Like Hollywood films and television of the era, these magazines ultimately had to be satisfied with presenting a facsimile of the hippie lifestyle, but there’s something refreshingly honest and direct and innocent about these pictures of real people with real natural bodies that makes contemporary magazine photography in any genre look cold, slick, machined and unreal. The book also recalls a time when a premium nudie magazine would have to be purchased in person for a pretty penny, long before the internet make similar images available for nothing and in private, devaluing both the images and the viewer according to Taschen’s Sexy Books Editor, Dian Hanson.

Make no mistake, Psychedelic Sex is a pornographic publication full of outrageous images from six years of niche publications that capture the psychedelic era in a wild spread of flesh, fantasy, paisley and pop art. The book is gorgeous and hilarious and — at the risk of sounding like a square myself — it also includes two illuminating essays by collector Eric Godtland and that timeless spokesman of the 1960′s, the “father of the underground press,” Paul Krassner.

The book measures in at 408 pages and comes in a great pop art slipcase.

To get you in the mood for, er, reading, here’s a chapter from Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations audiobook in which he recounts a boudoir encounter under the influence of datura and DMT. Bizarre. Freaky. Hilarious…

Psychedelic SEX Terence Mckenna recounts having sex on high doses of datura and DMT from Ethereal Exposition on Vimeo.

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