Category: Taking You Bastards To School

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It All Began As A Summer Vacation …

Burnt Offerings, the 1973 inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining, was made into a movie in 1976 starring Burgess Meredith, Bette Davis, Oliver Reed, and Karen Black. I’m almost certain it’s one of those horror flicks that scared the everliving shit out of me when it aired on network television back in the day.

The story concerns a family who moves into an old house that regenerates itself by twisting the life force of the occupants who become violent and either kill each other or are killed off while the member of the household who becomes possessed by the spirit of the house survives and becomes a sentinel (in this case “elderly Mrs. Allardyce”), awaiting the next family to be lured once the powers of the existing sentinel wear down and a successor must be found.

We watched it on Amazon Prime the other night – for nostalgia more than anything. It’s pretty slow by today’s standards, but suitably creepy. I kinda want to read the book now, which is recently back in print.

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Classic Album Sunday On Thursday

Check it out, you bastards.

BMG’s Art of The Album series presents a unique insight into the making of a seminal album. Recorded on the 8th June 2016, Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible of The Damned sat down with Colleen Murphy from Classic Album Sundays to discuss the stories, recording and impact of one punk’s very first album release.

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Sex Pistols At Winterland

Recorded January 14, 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, CA.

Setlist:
0:00:00 – God Save The Queen
0:04:13 – I Wanna Be Me
0:08:19 – I’m A Lazy Sod
0:10:42 – New York
0:14:25 – EMI
0:18:09 – Belsen Was A Gas
0:20:22 – Bodies
0:25:15 – Holidays In The Sun
0:29:19 – Liar
0:34:15 – No Feelings
0:37:18 – Problems
0:41:56 – Pretty Vacant
0:45:14 – Anarchy In The UK
0:49:00 – No Fun

The Winterland Ballroom, originally called the New Dreamland Auditorium, opened on June 29, 1928. It initially served as a venue for boxing, opera, and tennis matches, but sometime in the late 1930s, it began to be used as an ice skating rink too – hence the name change.

In 1966, world-renowned asshole Bill Graham began renting the 37,675 square foot space for the rock ‘n’ roll, and it hosted concerts by artists including Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, The J. Geils Band, The Who, Queen, Slade, Boston, Cream, Yes, Kiss, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Styx, Van Morrison, The Allman Brothers Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Ten Years After, Rush, Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, Golden Earring, Grand Funk Railroad, Humble Pie, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Robin Trower, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Loggins and Messina, Lee Michaels, Heart, Journey, Deep Purple, J.J. Cale, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Foghat, Mountain, B.B. King, Elvis Costello, and the incomparable Sha Na Na.

Legal capacity was 5,400 souls, so the Winterland was decent-sized but cozy. It was where Zeppelin first performed “Whole Lotta Love,” Scorsese shot The Last Waltz, and parts of “Frampton Comes Alive” were recorded.

Unfortunately, it also served as a sort of home base for The Grateful Dead, so it had to be torn down. Okay, not really. It was purchased by Consolidated Capitol Inc in 1978, demolished in 1985, and replaced with apartments.

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Shit

Marie Severin, Marvel Comics artist, dead at 89.

She was probably best known for Not Brand Ecch, a series satirizing Marvel’s (and everybody else’s) heroes, but she also co-created Spider-Woman.
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The Short-Timers

This novel was the source text of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It follows the career of the sardonic narrator from the organized sadism of Marine basic training to an assignment as a combat reporter in Vietnam to his experiences as a platoon commander after the Tet offensive, portraying the descent into barbarism that marked America’s intervention in Vietnam.

The Short-Timers has been out of print for a while, so used paperbacks are going for as much as $430.00 on Amazon (the cheapest is a mass market paperback for about $46.00). Luckily, the author’s family made it available for free as a PDF. There are some typos, but it’s a fair trade. Read the first sentence and you won’t be able to put it down.

The Short Timers (This is the PDF.)

I did a little research on Hasford, as is my want. Although he sounds foreign, he was an Alabama boy. Sadly, he got into some trouble for stealing books from several libraries. Like, $20,000 worth of books, and died broke off the coast of Greece from untreated diabetes. 45 is way too young.