By now everybody knows about the Wu-Tang Clan selling their single-copy album The Wu-Once Upon A Time In Shaolin to the seventh most hated person on the planet, pharmacology exploiter Martin Shkreli.
And by now most people know there was a (false) rumour going around that the Wu had it written into their sales contract that that were legally permitted one “caper” where Bull Murray would join them and they could attempt to steal the album back.
As sad as we are knowing this will probably never happen, Sarah took the time to assess the various Wu members’ martial arts skills to judge whether or not they actually could pull off such a caper.
When Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes decided to take his Boots Electric solo project on the road he realized he had a problem.
“I only wrote 10 songs for the Boots Electric album [Honkey Kong] and I’ve got to play longer sets,” Hughes tells Spinner. “So I’m covering Amy Winehouse and Olivia Newton-John. I just sort of made them my style.”
“I love Amy Winehouse,” he adds. “And I got to know her just a little bit on a festival tour a couple years ago. And I thought she was an angel and I could tell that she was
broken. While we were in Norway they had just announced that she had missed her flight and that she wouldn’t be performing. And about five minutes after that she comes stumbling out of her dressing room. And I was like, ‘That’s rock ‘n’ roll.’
“But she was surrounded by nothing but vipers and sharks. So ‘You Know I’m No Good,’ that song is so deep and so honest, man. You can’t sustain that kind of energy and inspiration without being a special person, y’know.”
Hughes covers “You Know I’m No Good” from her now-classic Back to Black album, but does it up in his own “style,” as he’s fond of saying, where he’s “trying to buttfuck George Clinton with Gary Numan using Little Richard as a dick.” In less graphic language, he’s making down ‘n’ dirty disco-rock.
That sleaze-rock vibe also works perfectly for reinterpreting Newton-John’s “Physical,” whose video confused many a young man back in the ’80s.
“My mom would always do jazzercise,” says Hughes. “And I always got kicked out of the living room when they were doing the Richard Simmons workout, even though I would hide and check out those one-piece leotards in action, believe me. You have to bend to the wills of the devil — this ain’t a bible study.”
Hughes may dig his lurid videos, but he’s still supportive of the women in rock and considers Juliette Lewis, who guests on Honkey Kong, his spirit guide. And he’s clearly genuine in his appreciation for both Winehouse and Newton-John.
Not to be forgotten, though, Boots Electric also have a version of classic rocker “Abracadabra” by Steve Miller Band worked out for their North American tour which kicked off last week.
Watch Boots Electric’s Honkey Tonk album trailer:
This story originally appeared Nov. 3, 2011 on Spinner.
My grandparents purchased a modest but charming cottage on Lake Erie in the 1960s. To this day, the rest of my family enjoy the property by staying there, sunning themselves on the beach, splashing around in the water, and having bonfires. At some point in my adolescence, I started enjoying it by staying up late, listening to creepy music, and writing stories about murder and guilt that were set at our charming little family cottage.
I was — and I remain — mesmerized by Lake Erie, the runt of the great lake litter whose unpredictability rivals that of its musically celebrated sister, Gitchigumi. It’s shallow and fickle. It can look absolutely stunning on a sunny day and like hell on a windy winter one. And the chunk of it that belongs to Wainfleet, Ontario, where our cottage is located, is so isolated from and forgotten by the rest of the world that I became convinced that all sorts of sinister things could go down there.
To the best of my knowledge, nothing like that has happened on the Wainfleet shore in the two decades I’ve been writing these ghastly stories. People have, tragically, drowned in Erie’s fatally deceiving undertow in nearby towns. Neighbours have come and gone, occasionally before their time. The carcass of what could have been a testicle-biting monster fish may or may not have washed up next door a couple years ago. But not once has anyone caused the death of a sibling or best friend and then engaged in untold amounts of psychodrama in and around the property.
But I have never let that stop me. To this day, I continue to write twisted stories about weird shit happening in Wainfleet, and I continue to insist that it can be the eeriest (sorry) place on Earth. If you let it.
“Million Days,” a story that I wrote curled up on the top bunk of what we creatively call “The Bunk Room” at the cottage, while I was listening to “Million Days In May” from The Headstone’s sophomore album, Teeth and Tissue, and reading even more Joseph Fucking Conrad, is the piece that started it all. I have no idea how I got this plot out of those lyrics. Or how I came up with it at all. Or how no one ever thought to take me to a therapist when I continued to write things like this.
I was so completely enthralled with my own talent and vision that I later adapted the story into a feature length screenplay. Which I then submitted in a screenwriting contest run by the Canadian Film Centre. I was so shocked and heartbroken when it didn’t win that I sobbed for a week straight.
I re-read the script a few years ago. The loss now makes perfect sense.
I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff over at the music-ish charity ‘n’ good news website Samaritan Mag so I decided to collect some of my latest pieces all in one place.
Before I introduce this week’s installment in the Sarah Murders the CanRock Cannon With Her Terrible Teenage Words, I feel the need to state, unequivocally, that I was an insufferable teenager. At least when it came to books and my “art.”
This was probably already clear for anyone who read or scanned the previous entry in this series — or anyone who has ever met me — but I felt that it needed to be said.
I was pleasant about most other things in life — or at least shy enough to hide all of my weird edges and flagrant cultural snobbery and random disagreeability. But when it came to literature I just couldn’t stop myself. I was, obviously, a genius, and I wasn’t about to temper my vision for anything. Especially not for an overly simplistic grade nine English assignment that I knew was brutally beneath me.
This is how I came to write “Birthday Boy” in the early days of 1997, just after I turned 15.
Although I technically attended high school in the dying days of Ontario’s destreamed grade nine, our classes had been unofficially separated into three levels. I had started the year in the ostensibly “advanced” English class but was moved to the comprehensive class after a series of bizarre fights with my teacher that involved, among other things, Joseph Fucking Conrad (of course) erupting into an all-out feud that made the learning environment pretty much impossible for everyone involved. Because the only thing worse than an insufferable teenage lit snob is an even more insufferable teacher who can’t be enough of a grownup to handle an insufferable teenage lit snob.
Anyway, my ego wasn’t taking it well. And so, when we did a unit on One Minute Mysteries and were asked to write simple, plucky versions of our own, I decided to reassert my genius. I deconstructed the form of the Two-Minute Mystery and I rebuilt it into whatever the hell is going on in this story.
What’s even more baffling and sad about this whole process is that this story isn’t actually based on the Junkhouse song. Nor is it based on the album of the same name. It is based on the commercial for the album that ran on MuchMusic that involved some spiel from Tom Wilson that does not actually appear in the lyrics of any song.
I got an A on the assignment, but my teacher commented that it was “Too deep.”
I thought this was glowing praise. Because I was an insufferable little piece of shit.
Not once during this entire process did anyone send me to the guidance counselor.
Risky Fuel 