Mid-Week Movie Break: Head

What needs to be said, really. 

The Monkees hit like gangbusters when the television series appeared in 1966, a formulated situation comedy playing off of the success of Beatlemania and A Hard Day’s Night. The records flew off the shelves, lunch boxes were manufactured, disturbing hand puppets were fabricated! Then the public learned that The Monkees weren’t actually a thing beyond the marketing department of NBC, and that aside from contributing vocals, Peter Tork’s occasional fretwork, and Mike Nesmith composing and producing a few songs, the records were largely the product of Los Angeles studio musicians, not the ragtag Marx Brothers-esque Beatles wannabes on the picture box. And the backlash was hard.

Disturbing hand puppet.

Even after the band started recording their own albums, playing their own instruments, the public opinion had already set and was as hard as concrete. The Monkees television series had become played out as it rolled into its second season and would end on March 25th of that year. So the boys got together with Jack Nicholson and some cannabis and devised a swan song send off, or middle finger, really, to the world. Head was released in November of 1968, eight months after the show had run its initial course (though has lived on in syndication for decades since). It fared poorly at the box office, hardly resembling the goofy antics of the television character personas that the public had come to establish with the foursome. It was picked apart by critics for being nonsensical and having no plot, but if watched carefully, it actually does have fairly obvious agenda. We start with Micky Dolenz jumping off of a bridge; as dark as it may be, the ultimate form of release. From there things spiral outward and inward, cycling around through various vignettes that play off the group’s image, the band’s response to the public perception of the group’s image, and spotlights each band member in their own solo skit, only to have the group repeatedly end up confined in some literal box or another. It plays directly off of the retooled “(Theme From) The Monkees” chanted as a mantra in the film, backed with tinkling barroom piano: Hey, hey, we are The Monkees /You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies …You say we’re manufactured / To that we all agree / So make your choice / And we’ll rejoice / In never being free

"He'll never make it through this intense bombardment. Nobody could."
Michael Nesmith warning the viewers what they're in for in Head.

We then end with the knowledge that not even jumping off a bridge could free Dolenz, as the ocean wasn’t what it had appeared to be either, and part with an image of the boys being carted away in a large aquarium on the back of a studio lot truck.

The question often asked to suss out which side of the line someone stands on when it comes to classic rock from the 1960s seems to be "Beatles or The Stones." I for one prefer The Monkees over either, and with the Memorial Day weekend coming up, maybe take some time to visit (or re-visit) Head.

Watch the trailer here.

Ichiban Live!

Skin It Back

Les Francais: Palpitations

The Henchmen VI: Is Love Real

Bojoura: Looking For The Land (pt. 2)

Bobbie Dee: I Don't Love You

The Dixie Nightingales: Hush Hush

Sensational Armon Singers: Everybody's Talking About Heaven

Marc Bolan & Gloria Jones: Cry Baby (piano version)

Sister Pat Hall: Sunken Rags

Rozetta Johnson: Who Ae You Gonna Love (Your Woman Or Your Wife)

Freddie Scott: Loving You Is Killing Me

T-Bone Walker: You Don't Know What You're Doing

James Cotton: Baker Shop Boogie

Sonny Boy Williamson (No. 2): Mighty Long Time

Nancy Lee Jordan: Woman

Nico: Sixty/Forty

Tommy Bush: Skin It Back (pts. 1 & 2)

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Theme De Yoyo

Ted Hawkins: The Good And The Bad

Link Davis: Allons A Lafayette

The Silver Caboose: Loving You Is Killing Me

Bojoura: Looking For The Land (pt. 1)

Andy Rose: If You Want Me

Roger Guitar & The Guitar Dusters: Take Back Your Heart

LISTEN NOW

Mid-Week Movie Break: Black Tight Killers

Biff! Bang! Pow! All we’re missing are the flashing onomatopoeia title cards in this swinging 1966 time capsule of the grooviest aspects of the mid-60’s pop culture mania, for this week’s Mid-Week Movie Break. This week we highlight the tongue-in-cheek spectacle Black Tight Killers, starring Akira Kobayashi and Chieko Matsubara.

Screen grab showcasing some of the oddball club interiors seen in the film.

Sandwiched between the tail end of the Nikkatsu noir movies of the 1960’s, and the first wave of the Pinky Violence exploitation films on the 1970’s, Black Tight Killers (Ore ni Sawaru to Abunaize) is a pop art spectacle well worth the time it takes to seek it out.  For a taste of what’s in store for you, you can watch the trailer here.

Akira Kobayashi 45 on Colombia

Our hero (Kobayashi) is a combat photographer named Hondo. Hondo is enchanted by a young stewardess named Yuriko (Matsubara) during his flight back home from a recent assignment, and she concedes to have dinner with him. The date doesn’t end well, as Yuriko is kidnapped and Hondo is framed for the death of a gangster. The real killers? A group of women in black tights and jackets with knives hidden in their hair brushes; the titular Black Tight Killers! It appears Yuriko is a marked woman, as a coalition of hoods–formed by American mafioso and Japanese yakuza–are after her to get their hands on some gold her father may have stolen and hidden away during WWII. As Hondo tries to clear himself with the police and track down the missing Yuriko, he’s constantly hindered, and helped, by the group of assassins who employ such bizarre weaponry as exploding golf balls, chewing gum bullets to spit into the eyes of their enemies, deadly tape measures, and 45rpm records thrown like throwing stars. And get this, when they aren’t out foiling Hondo or knocking off gangsters, the ladies moonlight as a troupe of go-go dancers in a crazy rock club! What is their part in all of this madness? Watch and find out!

Take all of the best camp elements of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., James Bond and Batman, throw in some Takeshi Terauchi surf guitar and Japanese Group Sounds 45s, some secret agent jazz, a little skin (though no visible nudity), go-go dancing film breaks, blend well, then you have the crazy concoction that is Black Tight Killers. Want more proof of the candy colored madness that awaits you? Watch this dream sequence from the film (not the original music, though)! It’s like The 5.6.7.8.’s got their own girl gang flick!

The Black Tight Killers in a masked go-go dance frenzy

The film was directed by Yasuharu Hasebe, who went on to direct Alleycat Rock: Female Boss, about warring female biker gangs, and a number of the aforementioned Pinky Violence films. Lead actor Akira Kobayashi did some film and television work through the early 1970s, was a popular crooner for a while, including the title tracks to a number of his films, then became a professional golfer. Actress Chieko Matsubara was spotted at a beauty contest and has since starred in over 115 films, including the classic Tokyo Drifter which came out the same year as our feature, and is still working today. She also apparently did some crooning of her own, as suggested by the sleeve pictured below. She released some singles in he late 60s on Columbia. The amazing soundtrack is provided by prolific film and television composer Naozumi Yamamoto, and as far as I can tell, is not available in any format, which is a damn shame.

Note the Goldfinger-esque gold-painted dancers. This is a plot point in how
the crooks intend to do away with Yuriko.

Chieko Matsubara 45 for Colombia Records.

Make with the Shake :: Tonight at 8pm

Feeling cooped up? Squawk along at home with a brand new episode of Make with the Shakewith DJ Pat K, live at 8pm eastern! Wet your beak with the finest selections of vintage soul, garage, r&b, and surf! Do the funky quarantined chicken, only on Ichiban! Click here for the livestream, chat, playlist, and archive!

!

Mid-Week Movie Break: The Adventures Of The Masked Phantom

“Maybe he’s got something on his chin he can’t erase/ and that’s why he wears that silly mask upon his face.…” Yes, the anthem our cloaked cowpoke The Masked Phantom is saddled with (joke intended) is more mockery than tribute, but fun all the same. This week’s Mid-Week Movie Break features a caped cowboy avenger lodged firmly somewhere between The Lone Ranger and The Shadow, and the only starring vehicle for one-time stunt pilot Monte ‘Alamo’ Rawlins, an aw-shucks John Wayne wannabe playing the part of a drifter named “Alamo” and the titular hero.

 The plot involves some nefarious goings-on at an ore mine owned and operated by young Stan Barton and his grandma Mary. Stan’s an upstanding, virtuous character, but his silent partner Robert Murdock, a shady business man from “back East”, has secretly taken control of the outfit, laundering stolen gold from his friends back home and mixing it with the ore mined from the Barton excavation site. The feds are on the track of the crooks, and with Murdock being a “silent” partner, all roads lead to Stan for the frame-up. Barton intends to hit the road and leave Stan holding the bag, but then fate lends a hand by having Alamo and his sidekick Boots The Wonder Dog (also billed as Boots The Human Dog) wander into the valley to intervene. Alamo steps in during a shootout between Stan and Murdock’s hired hands after the reveal of Murdock’s misdeeds. Stan and Alamo lose each other in the proceeding fracas, but Alamo makes his way to the Barton ranch where a surly Granny tells him of the legend of The Masked Phantom, a do-gooder who would throw a knife with a death’s head carved into the handle, bringing justice to a lawless valley years back. Alamo decides to take up the mantle of The Phantom to try and take down Murdock’s gang, believing that criminals are “a superstitious lot” (seems I’ve heard that somewhere before). With the help of crooning cowhand Tooney and gyrating goofball Dumpy, Alamo goes on a knife-throwing rampage to right all wrongs before trotting off into the sunset again. This was clearly staged as the hopeful first entry in a series of films for Alamo and his roving pals Dumpy and Tooney, but alas it wasn’t to be.

George Douglas as Sheriff Dubbitt (right) in Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman

Monte 'Alamo' Rawlins (left) and Tooney (Art Davis, billed as Larry Mason)
with Boots the Wonder Dog, who's just retrieved the Phantom's knife.

The Adventures Of The Masked Phantom is a 1939 low budget oater from the days of quickie b-westerns, produced by B.F. Zeidman Productions Ltd, who made a slew of quick exploitation pictures between 1922 and 1939. There are plot holes you could build a U-Store-It in, but the momentum here is pulp adventure fun, so leave reason under the sofa and enjoy the ride. I say that The Masked Phantom is lodged somewhere between The Lone Ranger and The Shadow because like The Lone Ranger, our hero wears a mask and dispenses some six-gun justice on dastardly evildoers, but his main offensive seems to be playing on the fear of the legend of The Phantom itself. The legend goes if you see the knife of The Phantom, you have twelve hours to live, so a good deal of Alamo’s time using the guise of our cloaked character seems to be dedicated to throwing knives at crowded boardwalks and cackling loudly to spook Murdock and his goons. 

Betty Burgess - photo from Univ. of Washington archives.

As stated above, Monte Rawlins was a stunt pilot from Washington who eventually made his way to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. He did some aerial stunt work and played a couple uncredited bit parts as cowhands until cast here in his lone starring role. Shorty after The Adventures Of The Masked Phantom he joined the Marine Corps during WWII, then became a sound engineer for poverty row production house Monogram Pictures and Disney Studios. Our crooning cowhand Tooney was played by b-western stalwart Art Davis who played largely uncredited roles in films like Border G-Man and Code Of The Cactus. Sadly, despite a majority of his roles being musical, I’ve yet to find evidence that he actually recorded any music. If anyone can provide anything that suggests otherwise, I’d be greatly interested in hearing it. Our comic relief Dumpy is played by bit part actor and skilled dancer Sonny Lamont; you can see him hot footin’ it in MGM’s A Letter for Evie with Marsha Hunt and John Carroll, as well as in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. Baddie Murdock is played by actor George Douglas, the member of the cast list who has the most credits to his name, including parts in Ichiban friendly favorites like Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (as Sheriff Dubbitt) and The Colossus Of New York. Stan is played by Matty Kemp, actor and producer who later became the caretaker of the estate of actress Mary Pickford. Stan’s hardly utilized love interest Carol is played by actress Betty Burgess, whose white bra is seen burning through her sweater the entire picture. You’d think someone would’ve pointed that out to her, but with a sweater so tight that it looks like you’d need a potato peeler to remove it, maybe there just wasn’t time for a wardrobe change. The picture was directed by Charles Abbott, who directed only one other picture, another b-western called The Fighting Texan, two years prior. My favorite character, Granny, played by Dot Karroll in her only film role, sings a song called “A Rip Snortin’ Two Gun Gal” while firing off a pair of pistols in the living room. That wasn’t pressed to 78 either, unfortunately, but that same year Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers recorded a version for Okeh, and you now have the privilege of hearing it here.

The Real Nitty Gritty is up on DJ Roulette this morning!

Brand new episode of The Real Nitty Gritty is up next at 11:00 AM ET on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban! Savage R&B, frantic freakbeat, gruesome garage, gutbucket blues, greasy rockabilly, sweaty soul, & sleazy instrotrash platters spun for your enjoyment. Follow the link for the live stream, playlist and comments: https://wfmu.org/playlists/RG

Little Records With The Big G

Greg Cartwright

Don't miss out on our latest Ichiban show, Little Records With Big G!  Every Saturday night from 8 - 10 PM.  He's the "geezer with the pleasers" for sure.  Seen hear DJ'ing an Ichiban party in 2015.

Floyd McClellan meets Mad Jak Otruba

Floyd McClellan:

I Am An Ex-Convict From A Florida Chain Gang

Mad Jak Otruba & The Screamin’ Shambles:

The Break Of Day

House Of The Rising Mouse

Sick To My Stomach Blues

Suck Me

Sado-Masochistic Woman

Try To Remember

The Boogie Man

Termites

Diana

Try To Rev-member

Little Queenie

Carol

Big Fat Car

Gonna Slice You Baby

LISTEN NOW

Make with the Shake! Thursday at 8pm eastern!

Get carried away to another world of sound with tonight's episode of Make with the Shake! Join DJ Pat K on another excursion through the sounds of vintage soul, r&b, surf, and garage on an all-new live episode! Tune in at 8pm eastern via the free WFMU app, or click here for the livestream, playlist, chat, and archive! 

Mid-Week Movie Break: The Monster Of Piedras Blancas

This week we utilize our Mid-Week Movie Break to hit the beach! Not the sunny, surfer-filled beaches of Hawaii, Southern California, or Lake City, MN,  but the craggy, brackish lighthouse property on the coastal outskirts of Piedras Blancas, CA. Get your baggies on and remember — six feet apart!

A page from issue 18 of The Monster Times,
spotlighting TMOPB.

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas is a sleepy little creature feature produced by Vanwick Productions, and is largely the culmination of favors called in by producer Jack Kevan, a makeup specialist and effects engineer who worked under the infamous Bud Westmore at Universal. You can watch the trailer here, or the entire picture here. It features a bevy of familiar faces from the world of 1950s television and b-film celluloid, like Les Tremayne (The Angry Red Planet, The Monolith Monsters) and Forrest Lewis (The Thing That Couldn’t Die), and features some shocking-for-its-time gore, especially when compared to what companies like AIP and Universal-International were putting out concurrently. The story hinges on a persnickety lighthouse keeper named Sturges forming a relationship with a legendary sea monster after his wife passes away. Lonely and isolated, Sturges (John Harmon, veteran radio, television and film actor who has appeared in key episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Rifleman and others) discovers that the rumored monster is real and starts to leave meat scraps for it. The monster grows dependent on Sturges’s offerings, so much so that years later when Sturges arrives at the local grocer’s store a day late and doesn’t get the scraps, the monster goes on a  killing spree. In the mix to add to the drama is Sturges’s daughter Lucille, back from college for the summer, and her new beau, a young scientist simply named Fred.

The opening shot to the Flipper episode "Flipper's Monster".

Our young protagonists Fred and Lucille, simply credited as “The Boy” and “The Girl”, are played by Jeanne Carmen and Don Sullivan. Carmen was a pinup queen and actress who starred with Jayne Mansfield in The Untamed Youth and was a familiar face within the pages of men’s magazines of the time. She was also an uncredited stripper in the Betty Page burlesque film Striporama and was the first female trick-shot golfer. You can hear her tell it all here. Yes, it would be criminal to neglect the fact that she was also in a Three Stooges short, “A Merry Mix-Up”, even if it was during the waning Joe Besser years. Sullivan is probably better known for his starring role in the teens vs. monster cult classic The Giant Gila Monster, which came out the same year. We get to hear Don rock out in Gila Monster with his ukulele, crooning “The Mushroom Song,” which you can see/hear here.  Carmen allegedly had some ties to the Kennedys and the mob and was advised to make herself scarce after Marilyn Monroe turned up dead, eventually moving to Arizona where she lived in obscurity for decades. Sullivan left the entertainment business to become a chemist and entrepreneur for the cosmetic hair care industry. 

Jeanne Carmen in a publicity still from The Three Stooges short A Merry Mix-Up.
Carmen is third from the left, cuddling up to Joe Besser.

The picture was produced by Jack Kevan and production partner Irvin Berwick, a one-time dialog editor for Columbia who had worked with William Castle and Jack Arnold, so he was already entrenched in the ways of the low budget sci-fi/horror/monster movie. Tired of working in obscurity in largely thankless and uncredited roles for the studios, Kevan and Berwick decided to try their hand at becoming independent producers, hence Vanwick Productions. The picture was made for around $29,000 with a number of favors and at-cost help being utilized from Kevan’s old connections at Universal. To my knowledge the only other picture Vanwick Productions ever had a hand in producing is a seedy 1966 drama called The Street Is My Beat, filmed in Texas. Kevan and Berwick did work together again however on pictures like Crown International’s The 7th Commandment (1961).

Don Sullivan on his book The Perfect Look:
Don Sullivan's Hair Care Secrets

Jack Kevan had helped develop the Gill-man suit for the Creature From The Black Lagoon and the applications for the titular creatures in The Mole People; elements of both were used in the Piedras Blancas monster costume, as well as pieces from the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. The Piedras Blancas suit surfaced again years later in the 1965 Flipper tv series episode “Flipper’s Monster”, where Flipper comes across a low-budget monster movie production. The episode was directed by none other than Ricou Browning, the man who wore the Gill-man suit for the underwater shots in Creature From The Black Lagoon and can be seen here. The Monster Of Piedras Blancas was directed by Berwick, whose son Wayne makes an appearance as the little boy who finds the headless grocer. The film is ably acted for the most part. If anything it’s really the pacing that keeps it from being something special, which by no means should imply that it’s unwatchable. It’s a by-the-numbers late 1950s low budget monster movie which tries to make up for its short changing you on action with a mild dose of gore vis-a-vis some decapitated heads. Berwick went on to direct low budget pictures like Strange Compulsion, Malibu High and Hitch Hike To Hell through the early 1980s. Kevan, who helped with makeup effects on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Abbott And Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde to The Incredible Shrinking Man, seems to have abandoned the Hollywood game for the most part after The Monster Of Piedras Blancas and by the mid-sixties had joined Don Sullivan in the cosmetics field, as indicated by this 1965 article (below) from the Honolulu Star Bulletin.

Honolulu Star Bulletin article highlighting the career of Jack Kevan.

Though the film was largely forgotten after it’s release, it’s a fun little foam rubber monster romp that has endured mostly as an iconic still image of the titular monster brandishing one of the aforementioned severed heads, featured regularly in monster magazines of the 1960s and 70s, forcing itself onto the must-see lists of a whole generation of monster kids who were probably unlikely to find it before the advent of home video, save in a truncated 8mm print released to the consumer market. Punk aficionados will recognize the famous still of the monster and rubber head from the cover of the Angry Samoans’s 1982 debut LP “Back From Samoa”. 

Packaging of the Super 8 home movie version of
The Monster of Piedras Blancas.

While The Monster Of Piedras Blancas isn’t as strong a fish-man monster film as even the weakest of the Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon trilogy, nor nearly as revered a cult classic as Del Tenney’s The Horror Of Party Beach, I still recommend a viewing.

Let's Go Down in the Congo!!!

Well, I couldn't torture you folks (or myself) any longer, and I've got the time at the moment to whip this together. Plus, who couldn't use something cool to listen to today? Or you could use this to annoy your rug rats, or that roommate who thinks he's too cool to groove to wild vocal group sounds!

Here are all the Vocal Group 45's of the Week in a handy dandy download, in case you missed any along the way! Delete all those other files and stick with this. They've been sequenced etc so you can throw them into iTunes and be on your way. OR burn it to a CD and go from there.

This is Volume 2, Volume 1 was called Bottle Up and Go Do the Hunch! Which you can find on Ichiban if you missed it. Just use the search engine in the upper left hand corner!

So Take My Hand and LETS_GO_DOWN_IN_THE_CONGO! (download)

Thanks to the fabulous J.R. Williams for the cover!

Kogar tSA