LOCK DOWN THEATER NIGHT 20

Don't know how many of you have seen this but it's just about the best documentary on punk rock as I've seen. Punk: Attitude, a film by Don Letts who quite definitely has the credentials to back it up. He was a DJ at the Roxy, an early punk club at ground zero, London, England, 1977. There were so few punk records at the time that he filled in with reggae, which is a big reason why so many early punk rockers picked up on reggae. He later started filming gigs, later still was in Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones of the Clash. He's been around, and he knows what's what. I've posted about him, or mentioned him several times here, most recently just a week or so ago on the Marvin Gaye post (the video talk about "What's Goin' On"). Dude is as important as anyone out of the London punk scene, more influential than most, eloquent and with a knack for pointing out the important elements. An anthropologist of sorts.

Punk Attitude is his two hour documentary on the music, the attitude, the life and the history of punk rock, with all sorts of heavyweights. Good as this documentary is, you really need to get the DVD set because the extras include several short mini-docs (women in punk, L.A. punk, etc.) that are just as good.

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Listen:
Don Letts' Culture Clash, Joe Strummer tribute show at Radio Clash

LETTS MEETS PEEL IN HI-FI

Every so often I go back to the John Peel site to see the most recent posts. It's hard to beleive that it's been ten years since he died. And the interesting shit just keeps coming. One thing added since the last time I checked it out is the Record Box, a series of posts with different notable music types pullimg favorites from his massive collection and explaining the reasons why the records were chosen. One of the posts features the picks of Don Letts. (You should know him by now.)

Letts starts with regggae, King Stitt, Big Youth, Augustus Pablo, and the Congos, then inexplicably changes directions and goes to the Idle Race (Jeff Lynne's pre-Move, pre-ELO band), then Led Zep, Bowie, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown and Funkadelic. Then onto punk rock related stuff. Back to reggae, then the Slits and PiL. You get the drift. Cool, no brainer stuff, right? But Letts was there way before you, and may actually be, in a butterfly effect, part of the reason you first heard some of the songs. He was a stealth tastemaker. Peel himself was a tastemaker supreme. So, to have Don Letts picking through John Peel's records is worth checking out. There's also an eighteen minute video of Letts talking about the records.When you get to the page, click on the first one and go about your business while they play in succession. Here's just two of them, these two because they're smack dab in the middle of the Letts/Peel Venn diagram.

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Listen:
Bob Marley and the Wailers - Punky Reggae Party mp3 at Pixie Radio
Sex Pistols - Anarchy In the UK mp3 at Ebaums World
Visit:
Don Letts at John Peel Archive Letts's picks from Peels stash
John Peel Archive Home page

JACK OF ALL TRADES

The unassuming looking guy above is Don Letts, a DJ, filmmaker, and musician, and, this is important, the person most responsible for turning UK punks onto reggae. He was the DJ at the Roxy in London when they they were booking a lot of punk bands. At the time (1976-77), there was very little new punk on vinyl, so Letts played what he knew, reggae. The common thought was that reggae was another sort of rebel music, thereby allied with punk. In the overall scheme of things all of that matters, but the real reason for this post is to hep you to Letts's documentary about punk rock, Punk: Attitude. Someone just posted the whole thing on YouTube and it's probably the most definitive take there is on the subject.

Letts was there, as a participant and observer, but it isn't just his version of history. In the film he nabs interviews with a who's who of punk affiliated personalities. In just the first few minutes there's John Cale, David Johansen, Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore, Jello Biafra, and Henry Rollins. It's a chronological verbal history, dotted with rare footage, and it is thorough. If the link below is dead, which is often the case when full-length videos are posted, just do a search at YouTube and you're bound to come up with some teasers. Regardless, it's worth laying out the dough because the DVD comes with another disc of short docs, among them one on women in punk, and another excellent take on the West Coast scene.

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Listen:
Bob Marley and the Wailers - Punky Reggae Party mp3 at Pixie Radio 12" Jamaican pressing
Video: 
Don Letts interview at Red Bull Academy "The cultural revolution of two spliffs and one beer, told by the man who unified punk and reggae" (Text version below) 
Visit: 
Don Letts - Interview at Red Bull Academy 
Don Letts at Wikipedia 
Don Letts - Radio show at the BBC

BUTTERFLY EFFECT

If you've ever wondered why the hell there's reggae all over this place, along side rock 'n' roll and other seemingly disparate types of music, there's a reason probably only obvious to old punk rockers. For a lot of us geezers, even here in the states, it can be traced back to DJ Don Letts. He worked at the Roxy, a London night club, back in the seventies, spinning records between punk bands.  There was very little punk rock on vinyl at the time, so he turned to the music he knew, and that was reggae. Like punk rock, a lot of it was rebel music, and that loose connection essentially all it took for early UK punk bands to embrace the music. Many became well versed in reggae, even if it wasn't necessarily absorbed into their music. But the influence was there, most notably with the Clash, who covered reggae songs like "Police and Thieves", wrote their own versions ("Guns of Brixton", "White Man in Hammersmith Palais") and recorded with Lee Perry producing.  But the Clash weren't alone. Generation X's "Wild Dub", the B side on their "Wild Youth" single, was a somewhat feeble attempt to bridge the dub gap (before it became commonplace). The Slits, who wholly embraced reggae, brought a whole new low tech/high imagination hybrid to the table. 

Some of the UK bands would mention this person or that, and that's when it the sound really spread in punk circles. For instance, when Johnny Rotten name dropped reggae toaster Dr Alimantado in an interview, UK record sales for Alimantado spiked. But it wasn't limited to the UK for long.  As UK punk zines slowly reached the U.S., a whole other crowd was turned on. Hell, my very first reggae 45, "New Star" by Tapper Zukie, was bought via a recommendation by some long forgotten punk taste maker (Poly Styrene?).  In the second issue of my short lived zine, contributors submitted Top Ten lists. Mine included Tapper Zukie and U Roy records, both of which were bought at the same independent record store that had the hot punk shit.  To put this into period context, it all happened before Bob Marley became a household name around hippie flop houses and college dorms. He was pretty much just another reggae artist. That said, his song, "Punky Reggae Party", celebrated the unlikely alliance, name dropping punky reggae party attendees, starting with his own band name, followed by the Damned, the Jam, the Clash, the Maytals and Dr. Feelgood. (Well intended as it was, Marley, in an slight case of randomized bullshitting, picked a few there that don't quite belong, eh?) The lines that follow the name dropping verse were music to punk ears, "No boring old farts, no boring old farts, no boring old farts, will be there!" Punky reggae party. OK.

  

It's really pretty remarkable when you think of how many people were tuned onto reggae via this very real butterfly effect. Letts himself cites the film The Harder They Come, punk rock, and Bob Marley, in that order, for the rise of reggae. And the whole punk rock part of the equation came about because Don Letts didn't have any punk records. 

Notes:: Letts later began film making, and was a member of Big Audio Dynamite. In  2005, he produced Punk: Attitude, what may be the definitive documentary of punk rock. Really, he gets it right. It's good, and it's authentic (highly recomended). About the music below, it's a smattering of related stuff, all worthwhile hot ass shit. Read the little blurbs for the reasons. I could have hunted for more, but I gotta sew this thing up.

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Listen: 
Bob Marley and the Wailers - Punky Reggae Party mp3 at You Sound Like a Robot 
Bob Marley and the Wailers - Stir It Up mp3 Original JA version 
Bob Marley and the Wailers - Soul Rebel mp3 at Review Stalker Produced by Lee Perry 
Jimmy Cliff - Guns of Brixton mp3 at Groove on Fire Clash cover 
U Roy - 006 mp3 at Groove on Fire Produced by Lee Perry 
Dr. Alimantado - Poison Flour mp3 at Le Blog de la Grande Chose 
Live set: 
The Clash - Live at the Palladium (1979) at Captain's Dead Complete set as a zip and individual songs as mp3s. Good quality soundboard recordings, for those who care. 
Video: 
Don Letts interview at Red Bull Academy "The cultural revolution of two spliffs and one beer, told by the man who unified punk and reggae" (Text version below) 
Visit: 
Don Letts - Interview at Red Bull Academy 
Don Letts at Wikipedia 
Don Letts - Radio show at the BBC

TAKE A DRIVE WITH SOME OLD FRIENDS

Should you have a long drive ahead of you this week, here's enough to keep you from dozing off. You might agree that a lot of podcasts found online can seem like vanity mixes, and not quite what real radio is like. But I ran into a few radio shows that, though I've only listened to a portion (there's hours of them to get through), sound interesting enough to help you drive a few more miles before pulling over for another cup of coffee.

First up is a bunch of Joe Strummer's "London Calling" radio shows, that originally aired on BBC's World Service radio, from 1998 to 2002. Eighteen in all, there's hours and hours of good stuff. And there's also Don Letts Culture Clash, a Joe Strummer tribute show, from 2007.

Next up is a radio show, in two parts. It's John Lydon visiting Steve Jones on his Jonesy's Jukebox show, originally aired on Indie 103.1 FM, in 2006. This one is a hoot. It's really neat to hear the two of them, older and presumably wiser, talk about music some thirty years after they first met.

If you can't get to downloading these right away, rest easy. They've apparently been online for some time, so just come back and get 'em later. And a little PSA here: don't drive drowsy, and by all means, don't drive drunk or stoned, you know it's idiotic.

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John Lydon with Steve Jones on Jonesy's Jukebox, Part 1
John Lydon with Steve Jones on Jonesy's Jukebox, Part 2
Originally aired on Indie 103.1 FM, March, 2006. at John Lydon's site.

Joe Strummer's London Calling 2000 Show 1 (of 6 from 2000)
Joe Strummer's London Calling 2001 Show 1 (of 4 from 2001)
Joe Strummer's London Calling 2002 Show 1 (of 4 from 2002)
All 18 shows, originally aired on BBC's World Service, 1998 - 2002, at Radio Clash

Don Letts' Culture Clash, Joe Strummer tribute show at Radio Clash