Syd Barrett, the visionary co-founder of Pink Floyd, was the groundbreaking band’s original singer, guitar player and main songwriter. Pink Floyd should be admired for their evolution and innovation over five decades, but for some the band was never the same after they lost Syd in 1968. Even after he left the band Barrett wasn’t done with music and he released two solo records in 1970: Madcap Laughs and Barrett which included the song “Effervescing Elephant.” Here’s Laughing Squid with the word on the tune and a video that was created to celebrate the song and the artist…

After departing from Pink Floyd in 1968, the troubled but talented Syd Barrett released “Barrett“, his eponymous 1970 album, which was also to be his last. The album included the wonderfully alliterative, but somewhat grim song entitled “Effervescing Elephant“, for which an amusing animated music video was made in that same year.

Here’s the video…

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45 years ago, October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin died of an overdose in a Hollywood hotel. On May 2, 20016 I published a review of the then-new Janis: Little Girl Blue DVD in The Contributor. On the anniversary of Joplin’s death, here’s another look at that review. The film is currently streaming on Netflix…

Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Amy Berg has made hard-hitting exposés about the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal (Deliver Us From Evil, 2006), Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ child sex abuse scandal (Prophet’s Prey, 2015) as well as the struggles of the wrongly imprisoned West Memphis Three (West of Memphis, 2012). Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015) is about a less-traumatic subject, but this story about the life and legacy of 1960s icon Janis Joplin paints a more intimate portrait than most rock docs, telling more about the girl Joplin was and the woman she became than about the star we still know. The acclaimed movie debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 2015 and a new DVD will be released Friday, May 6.

In the film’s introduction Joplin hams it up for the camera: she rolls on the floor laughing; she stops to have her picture taken wearing a fur coat and a matching hat; she leads her band through an incendiary reading of “Tell Mama” which astute students of music films will recognize from the 2003 Canadian-rock-festival-on-rails-documentary, Festival Express. When the soundtrack isn’t shuttering through the frenzy of Joplin’s distinctive, scratchy soul wailing, it hums with the heartfelt narration of contemporary singer/songwriter Cat Power reading from Joplin’s letters, relating the singer’s thoughts about talent and ambition:

“I’ve been looking around and I’ve noticed something. After you reach a certain level of talent – and quite a few have that talent – the deciding factor is ambition or, as I see it, how much you really need, need to be loved and need to be proud of yourself. And I guess that’s what ambition is. It’s not all a depraved quest for position or money. Maybe it’s for love? Lots of love, ha, Janis.”

Janis Joplin was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas. The film portrays the Lone Star version of an idyllic small town upbringing, but makes it clear that Janis never fit in and never really wanted to. She gained weight and her skin broke out as she grew into a young woman. When she saw that she could get attention for acting out and rocking the boat in conservative Port Arthur she couldn’t resist – Janis wore tight skirts and got a “beatnik” haircut, she picked fights and started singing along with records by folk blues muse Odetta. Joplin briefly attended the University of Texas in Austin where she dumbfounded the folk music community with her amazing voice, but still found herself ridiculed by fraternity bullies for her odd clothes and bad skin. It wasn’t until she lit out for San Francisco that Janis found a community of freaks that recognized her as one of their own.

Most of the interviews here are with family and friends that knew the singer well, and most of the insights reflect that intimacy. Likewise, the narrating of Joplin’s letters tell us how much she valued those closest to her, and how much she needed their support and encouragement. The device of narrated letters might have become distracting, but Berg sprinkles the readings deliberately and effectively throughout, and while Cat Power’s Southeastern drawl isn’t exactly Texan, her careful, thoughtful readings bring notes of grace and warmth to the story of Joplin’s often painful, lonely and chaotic life.

Of course, Little Girl is hazy with weed, soaked in alcohol, and tripping on batches of vintage LSD. The singer died from a heroin overdose on Oct. 4, 1970, and this documentary reveals that, for Joplin, drinks and drugs were a means of fitting-in with her new friends as well as a means to numb the sense of alienation that followed her despite her celebrated singing and subsequent fame. It’s also clear that fame – especially the adulation received at her concert performances – was just as powerful for Joplin as her Southern Comfort and her syringe.

Fans of Joplin’s music might feel short-changed here – outside of detailing Joplin’s experiences at The Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967 there’s very little examination of Joplin’s songs or her records. Berg is thoroughly focused on Joplin’s personal experience of her life, her talent, and her fame, and perhaps it’s fitting that this fascinating film – like its furious subject – seems to end too soon.

Here’s Janis months before her death…

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Over the weekend Open Culture pointed back to one of its own posts to remember Jimi Hendrix’ death in London on September 17, 1970.

Here are a couple of great acoustic performances with some words from Open Culture…

Solo acoustic recordings of Hendrix—film and audio—are incredibly rare. In fact, the only other footage may be the short clip above of Hendrix at a party playing a partial blues rendition of “Hound Dog.” If like me you’re a fan of Hendrix, acoustic blues, or both, these videos will make you hunger for more Jimi unplugged. While Hendrix did more than anyone before him to turn guitar amps into instruments with his squalls of electric feedback and distorted wah-wah squeals, when you strip his playing down to basics, he’s still pretty much as good as it gets.

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45 years ago, in 1970, Rod Stewart released this second solo record, Gasoline Alley. Classic tunes like “Cut Across Shorty,” “It’s All Over Now” and the title track make this Stewart’s first great solo record, delivering on the promise of 1969′s An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down and setting the stage for Every Picture Tells a Story and the massive success of the song “Maggie May.” Of course, in the early 1970′s it was hard to tell the difference between Rod’s songs with the Faces and his solo tunes which often featured members of the Faces listed in their credits. With that in mind, let’s celebrate Gasoline Alley with a Faces show at the Marquee in London in the year of its release…

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In his early career Hal Ashby was an editor who won an Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night. Of course, Ashby is now known as the director of some of the best films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960′s through the early 1980′s including Coming Home, Harold and Maude and Being There. Ashby was a counterculture figure whose personal, idiosyncratic movies eventually gave way to his increasingly eccentric persona fueled by a gradually out of control drug habit. Ashby died on the road with the Rolling Stones, overdosing while filming the concert movie Let’s Spend the Night Together.

This year we celebrate the 45th anniversary of Ashby’s first film, The Landlord. Here’s Beau Bridges as a privileged preppy who becomes a fish out of water when he buys an inner-city tenement building…

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It’s common for folks like myself and the readers of this blog to frequent sites and browse magazines filled with articles about leaps in information processing, advances in artificial intelligence and the future of human/machine interfacing. It’s the 21st century after all, and even though many of our institutions and officials are woefully culture-bound to reality paradigms that were cast aside many decades ago, the rest of us are living in the future and busy helping to define what tomorrow will be instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by perceived, pessimistic inevitabilities.

We’re used to this kind of thinking and these ideas in 2015, but we can also feel the anxiety of trying to maintain a sense of self and place when the very nature of information seems to be changing, and changing everything we understand about ourselves and the world around us.

Some folks saw this coming almost 50 years ago, and you can watch a movie about it. Here’s the skinny from a YouTube page about Future Shock…

‘Future Shock’ is a documentary film based on the book written in 1970 by sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler. Released in 1972, with a cigar-chomping Orson Welles as on-screen narrator, this piece of futurism is darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia… A great opening features a montage of car crashes and civil unrest intercut with two figures walking
in a green field (while creepy synthesizers play in the background) who are soon revealed to be automatons with creepy robot faces — a nice metaphor for the fear of the unrecognizable, cold, and chaotic future society that Toffler thought we were all headed for…

So what exactly is “Future Shock”? Sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler explains: “We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems
and it’s decision-making processes… Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation…”

“Toffler’s main argument is that humanity (as of 1970, when the book was written), is in the midst of an enormous shift from an industrial society to a super-industrial society; this new society will be characterized by such things as an acceleration of images, words, ideas, and technologies that could possibly overwhelm mankind, resulting in a serious disconnect when
these new ideas reach their fruition (if not well before then). This disconnect is ‘future shock’, an inability to process the enormous amounts of information and change associated with the super-industrial revolution.

This is Future Shock…

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This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Kinks debut album and we’re not the only ones. The band themselves have announced a major reissue project to celebrate their five decade birthday, and given the group’s famous inability to get along this news is like getting a gift you never even hoped for.

Here’s Uncut with the details…

To mark their 50th anniversary, The Kinks have announced details of an extensive re-release programme covering their classic 1964-1970 catalogue.

The first album in the series will be 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One, which will be reissued on August 18.

This 2-CD reissue expanded edition comes with Mono and Stereo mixes as well as unreleased material and alternative versions, all re-mastered from original tapes by Kinks archivist Andrew Sandoval. The booklet contains rare and unreleased images from the era plus new extensive liner notes. Disc 2 features the 1971 soundtrack album Percy which is also packed with fantastic bonus content.

Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One will be followed by more titles later in the year. The reissue campaign is being masterminded by BMG, who acquired The Kinks catalogue when it bought Sanctuary Records in 2013. BMG has partnered with Sony Music for the release programme.

Here’s a Biography Channel take on the story of the band and their timeless, relentless music…

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Devo rejected hippie escapism as well as the ungrounded aggression of punk — “We knew why we were angry. We knew who we were angry with” — to criticize technology, social conformity and dumbed-down consumer culture. The band’s name alludes to “devolution,” a concept born from the idea that the band felt everything and everyone in America was becoming stupider and uglier as the country descended into the Reagan-era.

While the band’s modus operandi is familiar to fans, even many Devo loyalists don’t know the full details of Devo’s origin story: Mothersbaugh and fellow Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis were all attending Kent State University in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard opened-fire on unarmed student anti-war protesters killing four and wounding nine. It was a catalyzing event for the band and one that proved their then-nascent idea that idiocy found its reflection in art in the form of a kind of spastic tragedy.

Are We Not Men is an in-production documentary of the band that’s got fans waiting on pins and needles. While I prefer to post full films/docs/shows here, this fat clip from the upcoming movie offers an illuminating glimpse at how the lighting-flash-horror of the Kent State shootings brought Devo yelping and jerking to life. The video also includes the band’s jaw-dropping debut on SNL…

Devo Documentary Kent State from Tony Pemberton on Vimeo.

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