Hillbilly Hayride #2

Just One More

Goin' Instro-Mental #2

The Night Rider

MC5 on the TeeVee!

The song doesn't actually start until the :55 point. So you can enjoy the intro, or fast-forward, or you can "run and extension cord to your TV, set it on the hood of your car and pretend your at the drive-in movies." What's a drive-in movie?

Hillbilly Hayride #1

The New Raunchy

Who can tell the true identity of Shady Walls?

Goin' Instro-Mental #1

Del-Tone Rock

AGOG: The World of Timothy Carey

Still from Kubrick's Paths of Glory

The World's Greatest Sinner

This month, October 15 - 25, the Anthology Film Archive in New York City features a tribute to the great Timothy Carey, the legendary "character-actor, madman, poet laureate of flatulence, and gonzo auteur." Highlights of the series include rare screenings of Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, The World's Greatest Sinner, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Poor White Trash, One-Eyed Jacks, plus the recent documentary by Carey's son Romeo, Making Sinner. This really is a rare opportunity to see these films on the screen. How can you go wrong with a guy whose middle name contains the word Agog(lia)?

We Never Learn: Exposing the Gunk Punk Undergut

In his new book We Never Learn, the Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books, 2010), former New Bomb Turks frontman, and now author Eric Davidson occasionally uses phrases like “the last moment,” and “the end days.” Such phrases usually appear in the context of describing some aspect of now-extinct New York City and its last relevant spurts of rocknroll. For example, according to Davidson, the band Pussy Galore rose from “the very last moment of lower Manhattan as the glorified dung heap at the end of the American empire.” Similarly, the Devil Dogs, who formed in New York in 1989, did so during “the end days of the ol’ Bowery landscape.” These qualifiers get dropped into the copy fairly early on, and seem incidental enough at first. But read on and they begin to take on broader implications. In coining the admittedly silly name Gunk Punk and shaping it into a coherent scene worth chronicling, Davidson might be writing about the “last moment” and “end days” of rocknroll itself.
    About that scene: the Undergut stretched way past New York City, reaching as far as the West Coast, Europe, Japan, Detroit, Memphis, even Ohio! For its pioneers Davidson nominates bands like the aforementioned Pussy Galore, plus the Raunch Hands, Lazy Cowgirls, Dwarves, Cynics, Gories, Billy Childish, and Death of Samantha, among others. Somehow, without these antecedents, most of which go back to the ‘80’s, the early aughts wouldn’t have been blessed with goobers like the White Stripes and the Hives. Or so the hypothesis goes. In the middle limbo between the scene’s earliest detectable pulse and its commercially viable culmination, we get pretty much the entire Crypt Records catalog, circa mid-90’s.

Mike Edison’s Third Annual Banned Book Party

Says Mike Edison, author of the memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, former High Times publisher, editor at Screw, etc., about his Banned Book Party: “Beyond the traditional prudishness of America, we are constantly facing new kinds of more insidious censorship born out of media conglomeration and new intellectual pathologies, like the concept of ‘net neutrality.’ We are going to attack all of that, plus I get to read some really filthy poetry with a bongo player. It’s my kind of party.”

Live soundtrack by the Space Liberation Pocket Arkestra, featuring BOB BERT (ex-Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, etc) and MICKEY FINN (Boss Hog).

Joining the party this year will be very special guests, HERALD PRICE FAHRINGER, the pre-eminent free speech attorney who has spent a career fighting for the First Amendment, defending free speech warriors such as LARRY FLYNT, and going toe-to-toe with the enemies of free expression, most notably former mayor RUDOLPH GIULIANI in the Battle of Times Square; and publishing avatar RICHARD NASH, named by the Utne Reader this year as one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World.

Housing Works Bookstore Café
126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-334-3324
Wed, September 29th, 7 pm FREE

Lyres on the Tee-Vee!

"Don't Give It Up Now" circa '84