Bill Murray, Ken Kesey, and the video crew at the First Perennial Poetic Hoo-Haw, 1976 (photo by Clyde Keller)   “Everybody with his fucking hand out,” William S. Burroughs slurs, deep in his cups....

  Nick Drake died in 1974 at the age of 26. But his brief life had a lasting and profound impact. It took a television commercial to rescue his music from cultdom and introduce it to an international...

  Everybody needs a hobby, right? Meet “sweater dude,” Sam Barsky whose hobby is to knit sweaters of places and then have photos taken of himself wearing those sweaters at these places. Sam was...

via Pinterest   When you’ve worn out The Purple Knif Show, do not cry. Just keep adjusting the dial until you tune in to Radio Cramps again. In 1984, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach were the...

via Pinterest   When you’ve worn out The Purple Knif Show, do not cry. Just keep adjusting the dial until you tune in to Radio Cramps again. In 1984, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach were the...

Blue Arrow Records, photo via Facebook I know of very few vinyl obsessives who’ve never availed themselves of the global online music database at discogs.com. A crowdsourced and fact-checked project...

Photo: © Raeanne Rubenstein. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the recording of MC5’s seminal live/debut album, Kick out the Jams. To celebrate, guitarist Wayne Kramer has hit the road with an...

‘Portrait of Andre Breton’ by Man Ray, c. 1930   Europe after the Rain, the Arts Council of Great Britain’s 1978 documentary on Dada and Surrealism, looks at the careers of André Breton, Tristan...

  Note: There has been some confusion about what happened at Sonos this week. After running this story, we were given reason to doubt that Mothersbaugh ever made these remarks. It turns out that he...

‘Tree Man’ By Hieronymus Bosch From ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ I’m not a big knickknack person. I like to keep my home sparse in the “tiny objects” departament. But I must admit I really do dig...

  This morning I was alerted to the fact that the first Black Sabbath album was unveiled upon this world like an evil curse on this day 47 years ago. Try to imagine what kind of experience it was...

  The August 1990 issue of SPIN—which came out closer to the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show than to Lorde’s appearance on SNL a few weeks back—was dedicated to “35 Years of Rock ‘n’...

  Watch below as Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick becomes the very first person in history to say “fuck” on American television on August 19th, 1969—the day after Woodstock—on The Dick Cavett Show....

  Promo video for Nico’s “Evening of Light” directed by François De Menil in 1969, but probably finished much later. There was a tantalizingly brief clip of this in the Nico: Icon documentary. Not...

Photo credit: Rob Baker Ashton A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh You know the drill. I’ve idolised Iggy Pop since the seventies, loved Underworld through the burgeo...

  In 1922, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland was published in the Criterion magazine. It was read by no more than a handful of people. The poem was then republished in book form in a limited edition...

The MacPaint years: ‘George & James,’ Volume One of the Residents’ American Composer Series It’s starting to look like the Residents are probably not going to finish that American Composers Series...

  In December 1967, during the height of the Cold War, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming off Cheviot Beach, near Point Nepean, Victoria. Holt was a strong swimmer,...

  In the summer of 1989, a promotional-only release by the Replacements was sent out to radio stations. Entitled Inconcerated Live, the disc included the group’s latest single, “Achin’ to Be” plus...

  Well, maybe not exactly. I mean, the calf isn’t trying to trademark “devil horns” or anything absurd like that. But you gotta admit the calf, appropriately named Genie, does bear a rather striking...

  A lot of people have written sonnets, but nobody in the English language is more associated with the form than William Shakespeare. In 1609 Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto edition containing Shakes...

  I’ve been a fan of ‘70s funk priestess Betty Davis since a friend played me her sophomore long-player, 1974’s They Say I’m Different, in the mid-‘90s. I was hooked by the second track, “He Was a...

  On December 1st, 1991, members of Nirvana played a stealthy acoustic gig in a Scottish bar. The group’s second album, Nevermind, had been released a few months prior and was steadily increasing in...

Freddie Mercury first met David Bowie in the summer of 1970, when he was trying to sell Bowie a pair of suede boots. Mercury co-managed a stall in Kensington Market, with Roger Taylor, and while...

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, June 1974 (via WalesOnline)   Don Van Vliet was capable of vocal ferocity. He commanded extremes of volume and timbre that murdered microphones. In the program...

  A loft in Manhattan, New York, 1979: Talking Heads are working on their latest album Fear of Music. A TV crew from England are present making a documentary for the UK arts series The South Bank...

  Jesus of Nazareth, known in certain circles as “Christ” and regarded among members of that fellowship as the spiritual redeemer of humanity, has a long-standing reputation as a worker of miracles....

  Energy: A Documentary about Damo Suzuki will be the first feature-length movie about the singer of “Vitamin C,” “Mother Sky,” “Mushroom,” “Spoon,” “Halleluwah,” and “Moonshake,” who once said he...

Emilio Estevez on the set of ‘Repo Man.’   Alex Cox was thirty-years-old when he took on the task of directing his first feature-length film, 1984’s Repo Man. It’s a film which seems to perfectly...