I have not actually seen all of this fine looking Brian Eno documentary in its entirety but what I have seen looks great. I have sent the last day or two trying to edit the full film down to manageable sizes and then getting it uploaded to my trusty Viddler account. it covers the range of his career from the glam days of Roxy Music to his more modern recording. The guy is absolutely brilliant and interesting all the way through even when he is wearing women’s clothes. The film also touches on some of his non-music related interests such as art, his curious journals and odd little inventions. I am about to finally sit down and watch the entire documentary with my wife. Renaissance man hardly begins to describe Eno and the vast contributions he has made to the areas of experimental and popular music. I have another Eno documentary whose quality is far from the level of this BBC4 production but I may edit it up and get it up here as well one day if anyone is interested.

Later: I finished watching the video just a moment ago and cannot recommend this enough to both Eno fans and to people who hardly know the guy or his work. But I am sure most anybody has heard one of the songs he has produced for U2 and maybe for the less  super-popular  Coldplay.  I was so inspired I am getting some hardware and software I have long needed in order to finally (I hope) be able to record my own original music onto my computer. I do that now with prerecorded loops but I want to make my own loops. And this Eno documentary got me off my lazy rump and shopping on line for the weird gadgets I will need to do that.  A gentlemen, a musician, an artist and a philosopher.

MORE OF BRIAN ENO’S BBC4 DOCUMENTARY HERE >>

Here are some selections from the album Teenage Mojo Workout by the surf/rock-a-billy style girl band from Tokyo called The 5,6,7,8’s. So named because they focus their sound on music from the 50’s to 80’s. The core of the band are sisters Sachiko on drums on and Yoshiko (aka Ronnie) Fujiyama on guitar and lead vocals though the girls often take turns wailing into the mic. There have been some lineup changes as far as bass goes but Akiko Yomo has filled the slot since the 1990’s. The band has a garage sound and Quentin Tarantino used them in his Kill Bill film during the House of Blue Leaves sequence. The sound is definitely raw but it is a side of Japanese music I welcome over the sappy J-Pop stuff you hear all over Asia these days. American culture, with good reason, has been more noticable in Japan than any other Asian culture. This is for better or worse and there is a strong fascination with good ol’ Yankee kitsch in Japan that is noticeably absent from countries like China. Their album covers are clever take offs of old 60’s covers by girl bands like the Ronnettes. The songs are usually sung in Japanese but sometimes in a pretty rough English that you will either love or hate. Part of the band’s underground success is their appearance and attitudes. They stay in character most of the time off stage and they sport teenage-deb type tattoos. The gals all typically wear  groovy retro hairdos and rolled up blue jeans or  sleek leather outfits. And hell they’re just cool Japanese chicks so that is a super plus no matter how crumby their songs are. Not for everyone’s taste and that is why there are here at The Uranium Café. More 60′s style Japanese pop music coming in the future.

TEENAGE MOJO WORKOUT

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HARLEM SHUFFLE

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GREEN ONIONS

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HOW TO DOWNLOAD AND SAVE AUDIO/VISUAL FILES FROM THE URANIUM CAFE:
If you want to download and save an audio (or even video) file this is the easiest way to do it:
1) Use Mozilla Firefox
2) Install any number of add-ons that capture Flash Media. I use Fast Video Download. It is straight forward and easy.
3) Play the file let it buffer a bit then click on FVD in your status bar and select the file then rename it after the download completes.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo)

1966/Director: Sergio Leone/Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone

Cast/ Eli Wallach, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Enzo Petito

I was living in San Antonio Texas where my dad was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was released. We all packed ourselves in his Valiant station wagon and went to the Valley-Hi Drive to see the film and it left an impression on me that was to linger for the rest of my life. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a film that falls into a very narrow category for me. Films that I feel are not only great films but films worthy of deeper introspection and multiple viewings and each viewing seems as fresh as the first one. It is a film I am not even comfortable commenting on here. There are a few others as well that would make me shudder to do a post here at my humble site about: Apocalypse Now, The Last Picture Show, Dr. Zhivago, Lord Jim and even Blade Runner and other films of the same caliber that have left such a lasting impact on me that I simply feel unworthy to expound on them in any fashion. And is another reason and that is that films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Apocalypse Now have been critiqued and reviewed to death on the net. I usually try to select more obscure and little viewed films of an often trashier variety here at the Café to pander. Also I try not to be too pretentious with my comments and speculations. I will leave all that to the experts. Certainly many films deserve deeper philosophical reflection but I am not the sort of person to publicly delve into all that sort of thing. In simple terms I like to proceed with my foot as much out of my mouth as possible. But when I watch a film like this one I am usually transported to another world all together. So with that as an introduction let’s take a look at this western masterpiece by maestro Sergio Leone.

MORE OF THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY HERE >>

Hot on the heels of my first rare Robert Fripp interview is this second tasty little morsel. Fripp is young and intense here, looking like he did from the time of his Exposure album. He is in good spirits as he chats with the two fanboy hosts with enviable connections at the Boffomondo Show. Not sure what that is but it looks like some type of public access thing back when some of those shows were cool.  There is some info on the show at the link I posted. Seems these guys (sort of a couple Wayne’s World type  lads) really dug prog rock (as I do) and somehow got some big names to appear on their LA based cable show. Other than Fripp some people they had include Adrian Bellew, John Wetton, Phil Collins, and fusion guitarist Al Di Meola. and  I can’t remember where I got this but it looks like it may have come from Youtube as it was in four short sections which I joined together and uploaded to my Viddler account. Lots of talk about King Crimson and its break up after the Red album.  Not much more to say about this one except that it is not to be missed by Fripp and King Crimson devotees. Will have my Fripp article back up soon I hope after I get the audio file hosting sorted out. Enjoy.

ROBERT FRIPP INTERVIEW 02 HERE >>

If you do not care much for Robert Fripp then this post and the next one will not interest you much. If you like the man and his contributions to music as both a musician and as a producer then you will may want to check these out. I forget where I got them from but this interview and the next one are pretty short but worth watching. Fripp does not seem to do a lot of interviews in any format and so these video interviews I came across are of special interest to Fripp enthusiasts. Both are ripped from fair quality VHS tapes and on this one Fripp performs some music as well (laden with Frippertronics and ambience) in a place called The Reverberation Chamber at the Acoustic Research Lab. The next interview, coming in the next post or two, shows a more hyper and manic, and there more entertaining, Fripp while this one has the King Crimson mentor a little more laid back but none the less cynical at times about the state of modern music as when he discusses appearing live in public (“we are all turkeys”) and watching music videos. And this was a few decades ago when ‘modern’ music didn’t reek as bad as it does now in the 21st century. If you’re curious I also have a Brian Eno interview I may need to edit a bit before uploading it somewhere, but it is pretty cool too. If you like Eno that is. Some people do like this sort of stuff I realize. I, on the other hand, admire both Fripp and Eno and actually owned their collaborative album No Pussyfooting album on vinyl at one time. Have it on digital MP3 nown along with their other collaborations,  and still give it a listen now and then. I will eventually get back up my post of five albums by Fripp that I stuck back in my draft folder after having issues with the audio files being disabled by the hosting service. I will be hosting those files at my own account soon and that post will be back up in a month or so I hope. For now enjoy this little look into the great mind of one of progressive rock’s most creative and hardest working individuals.

ROBERT FRIPP INTERVIEW 01 HERE >>

I am a little worn out from doing my podcast earlier today and then uploading some tunes to use for this post to acknowledge the birthday of Jimmy Page, a true uranium embued musician if there ever was one.  Since I am really worn out I am not going to say much about a man whom I could say way too much easily. Had the fortune to see him twice in concert, once with Led Zeppelin. Front row even. Am I blessed or what. Posting a video here. No shortage of Zep stuff on Youtube so I selected the live performance of Trampled Under Foot from Earl’s Court, in 1975. Also a few songs I uploaded to edublogs.tv. Some stuff you may not have heard. From The Firm, his one solo album called Outrider and the title song from the pretty decent Page/Plant solo effort called Walking Into Clarksdale. The few Page related articles I have done here are fairly popular in terms of traffic. My post on the Lucifer Rising Soundtrack has now become my most commented on post.  Anyway, I am wiped out suddenly. Had bigger plans for this post. I made the entire podcast, edited it and uploaded it earlier and now want to relax. And in any case, there will always be more mention on Mr. Page here in the future.

MORE JIMMY PAGE STUFF HERE >>

One of my more popular posts in terms of visits and comments has been my post on the Jimmy Page soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. The post contains the full soundtrack that I uploaded to a dependable site and it should be downloadable but may require a little patience and I think a full veriosn of Quicktime. If that is too much to figure out then the soundtrack is actually available on line with a little searching and here is a working Rapidshare link to get the full album. I just tested it and the link seems to be okay:

Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising Soundtrack at Rapidshare

I recently got a comment form reader Karl and was stunned to discover that he actually had a copy of the album and was kind enough to share some scans of the cover art and a little story of how he happen to acquire a copy. As legend has it there were only 666 copies of the blue vinyl version ever made it is a rare thing indeed. I really like this soundtrack and have listened to it in it s entirety several times. It is a very special thing to have had someone who owns a copy contact me and share he experience and now I will share it you as I posted his story below. Thanks Karl for the scans of the booklet and a picture of the actual blue vinyl itself with the label. I believe  that the album was to be played at 45 rpm and each side was about 11 minutes long. Some people online believe the existence of the album is myth and that the recordings were only recently salvaged from old tapes. I think we can put that belief to rest now.

MORE ABOUT KARL’S ACQUISITION OF JIMMY PAGES SOUNDTRACK TO LUCIFER RISING HERE >>