The Smiths – Back to the Old House

source

Ever think about Flynn bringing his Walkman into the system, and he’s just so extremely excited about sharing/introducing music - what’s more liberating than music? Celebrate a free system etc. Yori tries to share what she’s listening to to Tron and nearly breaks the headphones. Tron gets excited “we have that too!” And shares program music - which I imagine is largely just noise like dialup , feed back, and other sounds we associate with computers. Sort of really disorganized synth pop.

I can see Flynn as “have you ever listened to this album high?” And then gets absolutely destroyed at the board meeting because the system doesn’t work for a solid week.

Making the grid Flynn 100% established music as more of a thing, maybe even hid user song files?! I think it would be fascinating to see what would develop in a mesh of program and human music???

people in the tags of that poll thinking our house csny is our house by madness. kill yourselves

Peter Tork and The Peter Tork Project, early 1980s; photos by Michael Ventura/Alamy.

“Eventually, Tork moved to New York City, working odd jobs and performing ‘sporadically.’ In the early ‘80s, after he quit drinking, he started a couple of bands, Peter Tork and the New Monks, and the heavy-metal-leaning Peter Tork Project. But Tork says that heavy drinking had ‘left me with mediocre skills. Until I started working on my skills again, it didn’t matter.’” - Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1992

“In June of 1982, Peter Tork was in my face again. It was at a gritty, downscale, but packed-to-the-gills club in Boston called Bunratty’s. (Long gone.) Tork, then 40, was on a tour he described as the ‘I Have to Laugh to Keep from Crying Tour.’ It was billed as Peter Tork and the New Monks – Tork plus four crack musicians providing a hard-rock ride down memory lane. We talked a bit between sets. Me: ‘What it’s like going through life and to always be viewed as a former Monkee?’ Tork: ‘Compared to what?’ I paused for a moment and thought to myself, ‘Exactly! When this is the life you’ve known, what can you compare it to?’ (This was one of the best answers I’d ever had to one of my queries.) I re-used this anecdote when I talked to Ringo years later – switching up Monkees for Beatles in his case – and he chuckled. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What can you compare it to? This is where I am and this is what I am.’ So, why were we Bostonians packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the post-punk heyday to hear ‘60s pop done live and loud? ‘A lot of people come out and they want to remember the old songs,’ Tork said. ‘They want to drift back to when they were fetuses or however old they were then.’ [...] ‘When I arrive at the gates of St. Peter,’ Tork quipped, ‘he’s going to say First one to go . . . okay, we’ll let you in.’ One Peter to another. ‘When I quit the Monkees,’ Tork continued, ‘the first thing I wanted to do was divorce myself from the whole thing entirely.’ Tork formed a ‘straight- ahead pop rock’ band, Peter Tork and/or Release, but it failed to go anywhere. In late 1971 and early 1972 Tork spent three months in jail for possession of hashish. Tork, who was a folk musician prior to Monkee-dom, resurfaced in 1977 to play an acoustic gig at CBGB’s, at the time New York’s prime punk club. In a sense, punk was responsible for bringing Tork back to work. The Sex Pistols did a vicious sloppy cover of ‘Steppin’ Stone,’ and other punk new wave bands have embraced the Monkees on two levels: 1) damn good pop tunes and, 2) potential kitsch value. Tork, who was married and living in Venice, Calif., was on a tour playing small U.S. clubs. (Dolenz and Jones, incidentally, had also formed Monkees facsimiles at that time and were rumored still to be big stars in Japan.) Tork has been around the area all week – he was playing an even dive-ier club in nearby Somerville the next night – unveiling a repertoire that consisted of some Monkees tunes, some non-Monkees originals, and some early rock ‘n’ roll covers. He wasn’t exactly playing the Monkees’ songs by the (Boyce & Hart) book. I’d venture to say this was almost hard rock/heavy metal Monkees music. ‘The [Monkees] records are a little thin by contemporary standards,’ Tork said. ‘People who are just into rock ‘n’ roll and had a lot of contempt for the Monkees phenomenon as a whole aren’t going to come in the first place. People who are on the borderline – they liked the Monkees and they like rock ‘n’ roll today – are going to come. If I play it like it was off the records, they’re going to say ‘Well, it was nice to see him but so what?’ If I play ’em right and they want to dance, I’ve got good musicians whacking away and they’re going to come back.” Tork’s musicians – Phil Simon and Nelson Bogart, guitars; Vince Barranco, drums; and Paul Ill, bass – have played variously with Little Feat, Dave Brubeck, Joe Beck and Carolyne Mas. [...] Although not signed to a label, Tork said producer Jimmy Miller (Rolling Stones, Traffic) was ready to record an album with them. (Jimmy Miller, who lived in our region, was had made maybe the greatest Stones album ever in Exile on Main St., but was drug-damaged goods by that point, sad to say.) ‘My goals right now are to make a living entertaining,’ Tork said. ‘Put away something for my old age, cookouts on the weekend, no big thing. You never know what’s going to happen. One of these days I might make a mark on my own.’”- Rock and Roll Globe, February 2022

from eroica with love (1976-2012) fan illustrations for Y.A.S.A. (x)

it's interesting how horror can age so well and comedy can age so badly given that they're both reflective of their time and all about tension

A CERTAIN RATIO // 1982 [1982, MAR 2023]

oh yeah adding onto siouxsie and rhe banshees !!! he only got to see the first year or so of their second group ('the Creatures') after they disbanded satb

(the Creatures went on from 1981-2003 or smth.)

Thing Ford Missed #81: The Creatures

now that is one ominous caption. welcome back ford did you know you missed The Creatures. what creatures you may ask. well

Misfits - Skulls

robert plant reference.... :)

Rare Fallout single 'Batteries not included'

Palmer already plays honkai, hope you do so

Peter Tork in Montreal, May 26, 1982; photographed for The Gazette.

“‘There are two kinds of pain,’ [Tork] was saying yesterday, as he dipped down into the sometimes-murky well of his own experience. ‘One is the pain of growing up. The other is the pain of refusing to do so. ‘To my mind, the first is better because although it’s infinitely more difficult to deal with, at least it changes. It,’ and he paused for the longest of moments, ‘somehow gets better.' […] [H]is somehow has meant cleaning up his act, giving up the old standbys of drinking and drugging. For another, it has also meant learning to overcome the fear that life straight would somehow turn him into a pallid clone, his days marked by the slow tick of agonizing sameness. Which took not a little amount of courage and a lot of will. ‘Looking back now, I realize I was compulsive,’ he says. ‘And that comes from the lie that you have to do everything yourself. Making it. And you can’t make it without the support system of other people. I think this whole business we’re into now about glorifying the individual is a temporary historical aberration. That you can’t ask for help, that there is no sense of community. ‘Anyway, at the end of the long road, the chemistry backfired,’ he recalled. ‘It was like being totally aphasic. Conversations which, when I started with drugs, seemed intelligent, articular and enlightening, at the end became disjointed. ‘On the road, I would reward myself for not getting blitzed before a performance by getting blitzed after it. I’d make promises to myself at home and then the minute I got back on the road, the controls came off and I was right back where I started from. When you’re in that condition, issues of will become very fuzzy.’ The solution slowly became less so. ‘I realized I had a choice,’ he said. ‘Either a dull life or no life at all. Amazingly, life straight and sober has turned out to be a delight. Now I’m blitzed on natch.’ [...] ‘Part of me was in the middle of the Monkee thing,’ Tork recalls, ‘and part of me was outside it, isolated from it. The Monkees’ records were for teenyboppers and the instrumentations were deliberately non-threatening. Everybody said the Monkees were a plastic pop group, I guess because we became known through television. But nobody said anything about the creation that was the Mary Tyler Moore or I Love Lucy shows. No TV shows were judged by that standard.’ When it was all over, he went out on his own and, during the 1970s, tried a variety of things which never seemed to work out. Television didn’t want him, publishers were indifferent about a book on the Monkees and he was battling the alcohol and the drugs. Today, that war is over and Tork is hoping to devote all his energies once again to his music. ‘I guess I look for things with a little bounce,’ he says. ‘A lot of what passes for pop music today has no grace. Yes, that’s the word. Like sledge-hammer rock. Or heavy metal music. My ears are softer and I guess I look for tone quality much more. But high-energy jump-rock I do like.’ The future, for what it’s worth, seems to have its own special promise and Tork is beginning to believe much is still possible. This time on the track, at least, he intends on being master of his own controls. ‘I used to ask myself, “Why me?” before,’ he says. ‘Now I’m saying, “What the hell, why not?”’” - article by John Fitzgerald, The Gazette, May 27, 1982 (x)

Shout out to, I believe, Oxfam or some similar charity for using Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" for their adverts on I think the UK History Channel (which no longer exists) back in about 2006, because as a result, I have a lifelong hatred of that song, which sucks because as an adult I really like Kate Bush and now I always have to skip that track.

"Are you ready to do The Workout?"

It's Jane Fonda's original 1982 workout tape!

This best selling, chart topping VHS established the need for home video players to women. The popularity of Jane's workout tape is the catalyst for the home video industry through the 80's and 90's, eventually evolving into the online streaming services today.

Before Jane Fonda's Workout, fitness was considered a male endeavor and most gyms were for men exclusively. The success of the tape opened up the industry to women who could exercise in the comfort and privacy of their own home. While workout LPs were already being produced off of the rise of fitness studios and programs like aerobics and Jazzercise, tapes solidified Fonda and other fitness instructors like Richard Simmons, as well as fitness fashion, into the American pop culture lexicon of the 80's.

Also, The Workout holds up. The same moves are commonly featured in current video fitness instruction, and Jane's calming voice, positive demeanor, and encouraging instruction is emulated today. The program is simple, fast paced, and genuinely challenging.

A lot more can be said about this tape: how Jane didn't profit from the tape, or any of the subsequent 27 exercise tapes she filmed and released, as the explicit reason for the original book, LP, and tape was to fund her political activism; How the rise in women's interest in fitness created a whole new fashion genre that is now a $48 billion industry; How many comments on this youtube upload very sweetly reminisce on doing the workout daily with moms and older sisters; How Jane was already 45 years old at the time of filming.

Jane Fonda is an icon, and many elements of current American culture can be traced back to this exact tape. You should try it.

Happy Sunday Slutday, lovelies. I'm off to buy leg warmers.