For this episode of Transmissions, we’re joined by author, WFMU DJ, and historian of all things “heady,” Jesse Jarnow. With society in a state of monumental flux, it felt like the perfect time to ring Jesse up to discuss the radical possibilities of the current moment, science fiction, various dystopian and utopian happenings and jam culture’s ahead of the curve embrace of live streaming tech.
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Transmissions Podcast :: Jesse Jarnow’s Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America
Welcome to the sixth episode of AD’s Transmissions podcast , our recurring series of in-depth conversations. In this episode, Jason P. Woodbury sits down with Jesse Jarnow, host of WFMU’s The Frow Show , to discuss his recent […]
The Last Next Place: Sanjay Mishra and Jerry Garcia, 1994-1995
(…the latest entry of ‘blanks and postage’—author jesse jarnow’s irregular column for aquarium drunkard highlighting the fringe and beyond.) Sanjay Mishra’s colleague warned him about the corporate spies and that he should […]
Lost Live Grease, Recovering the Hampton Grease Band
The importance of the Hampton Grease Band is almost always reduced to factoids. Mainly that their sole album, 1971’s Music To Eat, was allegedly the second worse-selling double-LP in Columbia Records’ history, after an instructional yoga set.
The Hampton Grease Band deserve better. The Hampton Grease Band were the South’s first freaks, and still their most incredible.
Cosmic Pedal Steel Situations :: Winter 2020
Pioneers like Daniel Lanois and Chas Smith paved the way in the 1980s, but the past several years have seen a very welcome pedal steel ambient scene emerging from the underground. Here are just a handful that have caught our ears from artists like Susan Alcorn, Barry Walker Jr., North Americans, Heather Leigh, and more.
Aquarium Drunkard Book Club :: Chapter One
Warren Zevon once said “We love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.” But even if your towering “too read” can’t guarantee immortality, those pages can make life feel even more worth living. Welcome to the inaugural Aquarium Drunkard Book Club. This installment finds Tyler Wilcox guiding us through a few of his recent reads. Enjoy. More soon.
Blanks & Postage: Kyle Barnett and the Record Cultures of Wild Midwest
Despite a plot that takes place a century ago, nearly every twist of Kyle Barnett’s new scholarly work Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry feels acutely connected to the present. With a big picture historical view, Barnett maps how the unsettled and undefined chaos of American music coalesced into the modern world of record labels and genres with all their racist complexities and romantic myths.
Blanks And Postage: How To Build A Diving Bell, or Tape-Hunting Tips For Quarantined Gormandizers
Just as many of us were folding into our geo-domes for extended isolation in early March, a tweet floated across my transom that asked the reader to “Imagine a world where there were archives of live P-Funk and Fela recordings as extensive and well-curated as those devoted to the Grateful Dead.” To paraphrase a recent viral hit: it’s easy if you try. At least, the imagining is. Just pretend that they’re the Dead…
Blanks And Postage :: The 21st Century Cosmicomics of Jesse Jacobs
“Psychedelic but readable” is how the proprietor of my local heady art emporium, Desert Island Comics, introduced me to the work of Jesse Jacobs a few years ago. While an accurate blurb, it only barely covers 2017’s Crawl Space, the Canadian artist’s breakthrough full-length book as a sequential narrative-maker…
Blanks And Postage: Psychedelic Futures
For this month’s Blanks And Postage column, author Jesse Jarnow, explores the myriad worlds of psychedelic sci-fi pulp lit…and beyond.
Blanks And Postage: Like A Road Leading Home – The Elusive Sarah Fulcher and the Less Elusive Jerry Garcia
Of the many improvisers to regularly share a stage with Jerry Garcia, almost none were women. A new archival release from 1973 brings attention to one of Garcia’s least known […]
Blanks And Postage: San Francisco Radical Laboratory and the Mysterious Moogist of Altamont
The Bay Area convergence of art, technology, drugs, and other disciplines is well-documented, but one mostly forgotten node is the San Francisco Radical Laboratory at 759 Harrison Street. The home base of composer Doug McKechnie and electrical engineer Bruce Hatch …
Neil Young and Crazy Horse :: Colorado
So we didn’t exactly get Year of the Horse, part II in 2019. But we did get another Neil Young and Crazy Horse album, Colorado, released a little over 50 years after Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere introduced the world to this extraordinary pairing. Amazingly, three out of the four musicians who made that epochal 1969 LP are still onboard – and together they still sound like no one else….
Blanks And Postage: News From the Silk Trombone / Delving into the Deadhead Tour Zine MIKEL
As Dead & Co. fire up the machine for their fall outing, a remarkable stash of the early ‘80s Deadhead zine MIKEL provides a DIY window into what life on Grateful Dead tour was (sur)really like in the early ‘80s, before 1987’s In the Dark blew the band into the top 10 and football stadiums…
Erik Davis on High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
High Weirdness is author Erik Davis’ most heroic effort yet: a more than 400-page immersion into the lives of Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson, figureheads of American weirdness. With these three serving as a psychic trinity to orbit, Davis is free to address the shifts in consciousness that occurred on the American West Coast in the 1970s: “I’m interested in the drift of the counterculture.”