The Led Zeppelin-ABBA Sex Club Story!

I don't know how I missed this three years ago, but tonight I read about a situation that has to go down as one of the stranger evenings in all of rock'n'roll.

To back up a tad, none other than Led Zeppelin recorded their In Through The Out Door record in 1978 at a studio ABBA had recently built, Polar Studios in Stockholm, Sweden. Apparently, while this was going on, it was not unusual to spend evenings out in each other's company.

But I'll let Robert Plant explain:

"I knew Benny and Bjorn very well. Jimmy and I were hanging around with them most nights.

"There were some really good clubs. People would go to bed on circle-shaped mattresses in front of us.

"Men and women would start having sex while we were having a drink."

Imagine that:

Stockholm, Sweden. 1978. A live sex club. And who is sitting around talking and having drinks while the bodies are getting all sweaty and the fluids are exchanging?

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson. Hot dog.

That may have actually happened. In fact, that probably did happen.

I'm going to imagine that, after one too many of these sex-club-fueled benders, the quartet caught a limo back to Polar, found Bonzo and John Paul Jones still there jamming out, and recorded a sex jam so filthy - so sleazy and nasty - that the very same night the master tapes were smuggled out under Stig Anderson's orders, and now lie forgotten in some filing cabinet somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered and set the world on fire.

JG Ballard!

Like so many, I first became aware of J.G. Ballard through the Re/Search edition of his Atrocity Exhibition, as well as their other coverage of his ideas. To say he was an influence is understating it - indeed, I was obsessed with the whole car crash thing for a long time.

From Re/Search:

R/S: We're interested in the problem of image thresholds building up in ourselves, because we have been exposing ourselves to more and more images of a horrific kind. I wouldn't call it a morality problem, yet—

JGB: There is an element of that, isn't there? You could end up in that sort of affect-less realm where you suspend judgment on everything. One's got to be very wary of denting one's own feelings, which is what happens to people who, say, work in labs where experiments are done using animals.

There was a girl on TV the other night—there's been some antivivisection activity going on at present, with members of animal liberation movements breaking into labs and releasing animals, many of them locked into electrodes and drips . . . She was saying that in working with lab animals, the thing that frightened her was the fact that she noticed she was becoming calloused or indifferent to the animals' feelings. And, that this was inevitable. If you're a man handling monkeys on a table to prepare them for some sort of operation, after awhile you just give them a goddamn thump! That's what happens, and after awhile you don't even notice it—the situation brutalizes you, numbs you, to any sort of response.

That's the problem with all this stuff—unless you're using it in some sort of informed way, out of some sort of imaginative commitment (I know that sounds like an easy get out, but it's still true), you are in danger of being numbed to the very powerful stimuli that attracted you in the first place. I mean, you end up with the worst of both worlds!

Now he has died and become past, particularly strange because he seemed always to be speaking from the future.

Video Overdose!

This collection of VHS covers is too good not to share.

Found via Metafilter.

Sleazy Meanz!

Announcing a MySpace page for my home-recording alias of the last few years, Sleazy Meanz.

Some of these songs you may recognize as No No Zero demos, others were recorded for one of a growing list of "Sleazy Meanz records" (which, in real life, are CDRs given to maybe two or three of my friends each at best).

I'm not practising with any band or playing any shows nowadays (boo hoo) so this is a way for me to feel like I still have my big toe in the water or something, I guess.

For the record, I've had a no MySpace bias until now (hence no No No Zero MySpace page) so I feel a bit sheepish here in starting one. I've been using the site more recently to hear new bands & (thus far) successfully managing to ignore all the other crap I hate about it.

This, and the rank despair over my own non-band-in state, tipped me over the edge to the dark side.

I'll see how it goes.

100!

This is post #100 for Penetrating Insights & I figured that marks a good time to have a moment of honest self-appraisal here.

The simple truth is that No No Zero, the band (obstentiously the reason for the blog in the first place) hasn't done anything in the past year & doesn't look likely to be doing anything anytime too soon.

We have recording plans for this summer but, as to when that stuff (assuming it happens) might actually see the light of day, your guess is as good as mine. It's a bummer, but that's the way it is right now.

I plan to continue this blog, but the No No Zero aspect of it will likely continue to diminish. As far as what the guys in the band are doing, last May's post on that topic remains up to date AFAIK as to who is in what band.

I'll keep posting what No No Zero updates I do have here, including news from Signed By Force, who of course are selling our (strangely expensive when used) debut record Rough Stuff (now available in Europe and the U.S.).

So what can you expect to see here? Sleaze, disturb & stupid crap, as before; probably lots of scans of paperback covers & whatever else I lay my hands on, the odd essay on this or that, Uschi Digard, porn.

If you've been reading the blog already, it shouldn't be changing much. I'm just clearing the air about this as it's been on my mind.

And now, without further delay, here's some live GFE for you, Youtube style --

The Road To Success!

From the great Space Ghetto. Original artist unknown.