RAY

This week was a good one. As a result, there’s no rants on here whatsoever. The highlight was meeting Ray Barbee briefly at the Vans OTW spot in Berlin. It’s not cool to fan out, but it’s a natural response if it’s somebody you looked up to as a kid. I’ve only felt the lurching out-of-body fan reaction when I’m speaking to my childhood heroes — it happened during a conversation with Big Daddy Kane a few years back, and it very nearly happened during throwaway words with Mr. Barbee. It’s that flashback during an interaction to watching something or gawping at an LP cover with a feeling of distant awe a few decades prior, then realising that you’re chatting with that near-mythical individual. In 1988 and 1989 I watched Steve Saiz, Ray Barbee, Eric Sanderson and Chet Thomas’s ‘Public Domain’ section on repeat. I even held a tape recorder up to the TV speakers to get an audio copy of McRad’s ‘Weakness.’

Barbee in ‘Public Domain’ evokes a summer of listening to Run-DMC’s underrated ‘Tougher Than Leather’ and being apprehended by local metallers who were at least six years older than me who saw my ‘Killers’ t-shirt and asked me what my favourite Iron Maiden album was — on claiming that it was ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ they said, “Fuck off! It’s got keyboards on it” and proceeded to rub crisps into my mullet hairdo. Traumatic times. I have strong evidence that one of the gang was Chris Law, formerly of Crooked Tongues, adidas Originals and now a Converse resident in Boston. I’ll have my revenge one day.

Other than the KP/hair incident, it’s a time I remember fondly, but Ray and his boys had style, flow and an aggression, fluidly merging vert and freestyle elements with something new that transformed everybody’s perception of the landscape around them as we rode like grems — barely able to ollie — while performing our best vocal impressions of the ‘Weakness’ riff. I was a terrible skater, but in my head I was in that sequence. The skating, soundtrack and black and white film was an epiphany moment for me — it never made me a pro skater, but it fueled my preoccupation with sub-cultures. My mum said that preoccupation would never get me anywhere…and she was nearly right. But it got me to Berlin to meet Ray Barbee.

Now Stacy Peralta’s ‘Bones Brigade’ has debuted at Sundance (according to Hitfix, “Bones Brigade” also features cameos from the likes of Shepard Fairey, Ben Harper and Fred Durst, whose every appearance earned loud and vocal derision from the premiere night crowd.”), I assume that I won’t be alone in this 1980’s skateboard nostalgia this year. Flicking through a book and finding a RAD magazine sticker reminds me of the stickers that preempted the quest for Supreme box logos. These things are as evocative of 1988 as Powell’s VHS effort. I’m no OBEY fan, but their ‘Who is Chuck Treece?’ video on that story behind ‘Weakness’s inclusion from 2010 was excellent, as was Slap’s Ray Barbee ‘Public Domain’ commentary. Ray Barbee seemed like a nice bloke.

Another of the week’s highlights was the news that Giorgio Moroder would score Kim Jones’ menswear show for Louis Vuitton in Paris on Thursday. My preoccupation with Moroder’s work has been made clear here many times. Donna Summer, his classic ‘From Here to Eternity’ and ‘Midnight Express’s soundtrack are implemented and bombers, sharp, slim tailoring and some more eccentric elements are perfectly deployed to the tempo. The shiny metallic details, PARIS belts and headwear evoke something very contemporary, with some cues from a time when McDonalds coffee stirrers were perfect for cocaine usage (I like how the long-cancelled 1970’s freebies are listed as McDonalds Coke Spoon on eBay) for those doing bumps on a budget. So we know about Giorgio’s Cizeta-Moroder supercar creation and that he was trying to put together a musical called ‘Spago’ but ended up giving the name to Wolfgang Puck for his restaurant, but there’s always time to re-up this image of him openly doing a hefty line of chop, with his yayo carrier looking on. Giorgio Moroder…legend. Salutes to Fast Fashion for upping the Louis, Kris Van Assche and Rick Owens shows. 

‘Men’s File’ magazine has such a pleasant price point and a deeper level of content than any heritage cash in, that it’s more than a fad rider — the Uncle Ralph co-sign and frequent emphasis on motorbike culture, makes it seem like something targeted at those people who like to learn the history and profiles some of the individuals who seem to pull off past looks as if they never left, rather than looking like they just wandered off one of those sepia-effect wild west family photos at a theme park. With their pop-up opening the other week on Lamb’s Conduit Street, issue six of the magazine dropped too. Their The Curator online store deals in replicas, so if you can pull off a 1950s motorcycle cap without looking like a laughing-stock, you’re probably one of the chosen few who’d end up in the pages of the magazine. The new issue has dogs, vintage garments and profiles on bare-bones custom bike build pioneer Shinya Kimura and another hero of mine, Mr. Hitoshi Tsujimoto of The Real McCoy’s.

I also enjoyed this interview at ‘A Fist in the Face of God’ with Kick and Sindre of Nekromantheon that discusses the creative benefits of drinking corpse water.

Anybody else perplexed at Quentin Tarantino’s dismissal of ‘Drive’ in the “Nice Try” category of his best and worst of 2011 lists? Is there only room for one film in the wilfully surface level car movie throwback stakes? ‘Drive’ wasn’t ‘Grindhouse’ fodder, but it could easily have slotted into a 1985 video store themed sequel.

THE COCAINE, MILK & RED PEPPER DIET

“There’s a fly floating around in my milk and he’s… he’s a foreign body in it, you see, and he’s getting a lot of milk. That’s kind of how I felt – a foreign body and I couldn’t help but soak it up, you know. I hated it when I first came here, I couldn’t see any of it.”

Cocaine’s a helluva drug. Curious that it’s easier to obtain now than herb, but that’s not the purpose of this post. Bowie appreciations are DONE. Yep, no stone has been left unturned, and they’re played-out like McQueen mini-essays (of which, this blog pleads guilty), but having been on a documentary kick, watching the great unreleaseds, and withheld studies of a few choice musicians, of which ‘Cocksucker Blues’ and ‘Cracked Actor’ stand tall, and with a bootleg of Bowie’s 05.09.74 Los Angeles Ampitheater performance blasting, self-indulgence wins again. After all, is it possible to tire of images of the great man at this point in his career? Well on his way to becoming an unlikely sartorial inspiration for a generation of British youth more inclined toward beating each other senseless than fey introspection around three years later, in 1974, his transitional phase between glam showman, blue-eyed soul and traces of the Berlin ‘look’ is present when he hits America’s west coast.

Pitched between absolute focus and a visibly burnt-out need to move on at the time of filming, it’s not surprising that David’s vetoed a DVD release of ‘Cracked Actor’ – first shown on BBC2 in early 1975, but if you’re looking for him at his absolute best, the ‘Diamond Dogs’ tour is it. Sadly, this is the only footage of it, because understandably, the artist’s not too proud of his prodigious disco shit habit at this point-in-time. Beyond the sonic side, this is the ultimate example of the Bowie’s self-destruction and restless urge to reinvent to keep ahead of the imitators. They might have brought him to the peak of total destruction, but the drugs probably helped propel that level of genius. At the point in time documented, he’s the coolest motherfucker on the planet. No question.

(Bottom two grabs taken from the infamous ‘coke & milk’ alternate ending of the documentary)

Were you to try to subside on nothing but top quality yayo, milk and red peppers, you’d repel people. Not so, Bowie, skinny enough to slip down a drain, borderline vampiric, yet, as is his way, still that dude. Numerous reports indicate he lived on that diet during the ‘Diamond Dogs’ era, with the addition of nicotine and a YSL wardrobe to compliment the pallor. As an addiction spirals, the artist still governs the zeitgeist. That’s no mean feat. Highlights in the documentary are the moments that reinforce tales of that consumption – a deleted ending, apparently present on a US screening, shows him holding a white bag that’s significantly more than an eight-ball, taking a hearty sniff and lick before downing some dairy. Ron Burgundy might have made an ill-fated choice with his hot weather beverage pick, but it seems even more curious when David’s in the back of a limo driving through the desert, brimmed hat on in the blazing heat, slurping milk and blasting Aretha Franklin, blankly making the above outsider observation using his carton as part of the analogy. Best of all is his lapse into excitable cockney wideboy on clocking a wax museum – “Look! A wax museum. Imagine ‘avin a bleedin’ wax museum out in the middle of the desert. You’d think it would melt wouldn’t you?”

Proto-moonwalking across the stage, making out with a prop skull while wearing some of the flyest sunglasses ever made during a blistering performance of the titular track and including a young Luther Vandross in the backing band, from what’s collated here, this was an immaculately executed show, and as a documentary, it’s not judgmental or too intrusive (bar the aforementioned excised conclusion) when it comes to the obviously troubled subject. That’s a surprise given the sensationalist era in which it was screened. It lets Bowie do what he does, contradicting himself, occasionally slipping into introspect before coming alive onstage. An official release on DVD/Blu-Ray would be welcome. The following month, the ‘Diamond Dogs’ tour would become the ‘Soul/Philly Dogs’ tour, with Eddie Floyd and Ohio Players covers in the set, but the same elements of expressionist, ambitious theatre in the staging of the shows, and the next incarnation, embracing those adopted elements fully.

In his Thin White Duke phase just prior to ‘Low’ during recordings made a year later, that diet might have altered, but Bowie was still fond of one type of the white stuff, but for some serious sniffs and jitters, his December 1974 Dick Cavett interview makes the chats caught by Yentob and company seem comfortable by comparison.

The dystopic views espoused on ‘Diamond Dogs’ owed a lot to old Bill Burroughs, so it seemed natural to bring the two together, as ‘Rolling Stone’ did earlier that year. Opiate wisdom versus cocaine babble makes for an engaging conversation, especially on matters of Warhol. It’s reprinted here, and in the excellent ‘Rolling Stone Book of the Beats.’ The accompanying photoshoot is good – it’s worth noting Bowie’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ tee, worn long before kitschy practitioners of plastic cultdom pumped ’em out everywhere. No piece on this period could work without a bunch of images, plus, for good measure, a killer shot of the great man post 1976 drug bust (hence the much Retweeted mugshot) flanked by his bodyguard and a Sunday Times magazine cover from the same year.

Enough of the weak potted history. The paragraphs above were just an excuse to chuck these pictures up on the site:

HIGH TIMES MAGAZINE’S COCAINE YEARS

You’ve got to salute anyone taking the plunge into paper at a time when magazines meet their makers faster than the startling, saddening number of A, B and C-listers over the last five months. That’s not to say that just because you’re bloody minded enough to swim against the deadly swells of the magazine industry’s slow decline your publication will be any good, but it’s admirable nonetheless. With any luck, the new breed of editors and publishers will possess a single percent of the lunacy of Tom Forcade rather than sitting blandly in an office of vintage Eames pieces, stroking a vintage Woolrich coat.

For those of us a little bored of “you weren’t there maaaaaaaan” yippie types talking about dropping out and pranking folks, it’s nice to hear about something genuinely subersive, and the origins of High Times are just that. Tom started the magazine in 1974 with 12k and the proceeds of a drug deal and what could have been a burn-out fanzine, was a glossy creation, well-designed, hiring the best writers and at one point carrying over a hundred staffers. The professionalism of the Trans-High Corporation just made it all the more subversive.