“I came to New York in the late ’60s. On cold nights in the downtown area, on street corners, you could find trash-can fires. These fires were tended by street people.”
 — I cannot guarantee that you will be as surprised as I was when you see where this one goes, but I have to believe that the odds are pretty much in my favor.

This one sounded so good in another tab that I have not even watched the video content yet, so hopefully it’s not like porn or racism or just a nonstop montage of various people holding “Bush did 9/11” signs or whatever. Anyway, song pretty, new album in June.

by Kevin Sweeting

There is a certain type of musician who is mostly famous for being unknown. You’re probably familiar: an independent documentary filmmaker pulls a beloved musician from the ash pile of rock and roll history and — with the help of some talking heads and archival concert flyers — brings them in to the spotlight for their encore. It is a genre pioneered by The Nomi Song and Anvil! The Story of Anvil and rounded out recently by A Band Called Death and the Oscar winning Searching For Sugarman and it’s always a captivating story, a kind of final balancing of the Scales of Rock Justice.

We talk about movies like Band Called Death and Searching For Sugarman in a slightly different way than we do other types of documentaries. While at their core they outline the hard-won lessons of creating art and remaining true to oneself, part of the appeal of these documentaries is that they let us in early. Knowledge of the unknown is the most valuable form of social currency, and the hook behind the rediscovery of Sixto Rodriguez and Death is that you can get in on the ground floor and play tastemaker. These movies work, like all popular documentaries, not because they are compelling (although they are) but because their stories are personally valuable. They’re conversational turnkeys, perfect little sound bites to carry us through the Have You Heard and Have You Seen dance of party small talk with a bit of cachet. It’s all temporary of course, as the stories in A Band Called Death and Searching For Sugarman gyre out into wider circles of recognition, we — the audience — are forced to search for a new passion-project director resurrecting some new, best, unknown thing (or, you know, just keep our mouths shut at parties, but whatever).

If director Kieran Turner and Eschatone Records have their way, that next “unknown” thing will be Jobriath, so, if you’re not, you might as well get acquainted.

Jobriath was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on a military base in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania in 1946, seventeen years before anyone thought the town would play home to the Country’s Largest Shopping Mall. Before he would die of HIV in 1983, relatively unknown and uneulogized, he would be a child prodigy pianist, a California prostitute, a member of Hair’s Los Angeles ensemble, the first big-league openly gay rock musician, a tragic lounge singer, and briefly, with rock Svengali Jerry Brandt at the controls, a kind of spectacular firecracker flash in the pan of rock and roll history.

After a prodigious childhood playing piano and church organ, a tour of several nom de plumes, and a stint in the Army, little Bruce went AWOL and turned up in Los Angeles, where he landed a role as Woof — a Rolling Stones-obsessed, gay hippie struggling to reconcile his religion — in the Earl Carroll Theatre production of Hair. It was a role Bruce, now going by Jobriath Salisbury, was seemingly born to play. In 1969, Jobriath left Hair with cast mates Cheri Kohler Gage and Richard Marshall to form Pidgeon, a one-record baroque folk band with unisex harmonies to spare that didn’t coast very far. I imagine that they consumed a lot of drugs.

With Pidgeon grounded, Jobriath started sending out demo tapes, which caught the attention of Jerry Brandt, the owner of the East Village’s Electric Circus and former manager to Carly Simon. Brandt flew out to Los Angeles, pulled a street-hustling Jobriath from his life of destitute schizophrenic alcoholism, and flew him back to New York for a new life of glamorous, schizophrenic alcoholism. In 1973, Jobriath, now calling himself Jobriath Boone, signed a $500,000 deal with Elektra Records, with Brandt at the helm. As a benchmark, I would just like to note that that same year, the New York Dolls, a band that — unlike Jobriath’s — already had songs, a following, and a series of dates opening for Rod Stewart under their studded belts, signed a two-record contract with Mercury for $25,000. Comparative cigarette ash.

Brandt immediately began his PR assault and for a time Jobriath was everywhere. Brandt crowed to any journalist that would listen about his porcelain star and filled the pages of rock magazines with advertisements proclaiming “Jerry Brandt Presents… Jobriath.” Elektra ponied up $80,000 more and full-page ads ran in Vogue, Penthouse, Rolling Stone and the New York Times. Jobriath hadn’t played a single live note and Brandt was out strafing Music Week with quotes running him alongside the Beatles-Elvis-Stones Mt. Rushmore of Rock. A 47-foot billboard of a marble-Jobriath, naked and crawling on smashed legs, hung in Times Square. The hype was titanic, and at the center of it all was this fucking guy, Jobriath Boone, in a gallon of liquid eyeliner and a painted-on unitard.

Jobriath did not pussy-foot around. While Elton John and Freddie Mercury were snugly in the closet and Klaus Nomi was nothing above 14th Street, Jobriath was unabashedly declaring himself the “the true fairy of rock ’n’ roll.” Elsewhere, the crazed androgyny of glam was all transgression-grubbing sizzle and no steak. David Bowie was pretty deliberately fooling no one with his prep-school overtures of bisexuality and Mick Jagger and his nail polish could ride that sneer of masculine sexual aggression past any name-calling, but Jobriath? Jobriath made no attempt to pass. “Asking me if I’m a homosexual is like asking James Brown if he’s black,” Jobriath told the press.

The album was great, not that it mattered. Songs like “Take Me I’m Yours” and “I’maman” boil with plunking show tune piano laid over ballad guitars and stadium rock hammered dulcimer. No one cared. Failure was the show the public wanted and Jobriath was a ready-made butt of the joke. A glittering, overinflated, gay balloon in a room full of tacks, Jobriath had been conscripted as a fey, overhyped failure the moment he’d hit the public spotlight. Everyone likes to watch Icarus melt his $500,000-wax-wing-publicity-campaign, but Jobriath’s unabashed homosexuality sweetened the deal for rock’s — for America’s — audience of de rigueur homophobes.

Album sales were limp, and by the time Elektra downgraded Jobriath’s live debut from the Paris Opera House to New York’s The Bottom Line, everyone had pretty much checked out. Jobriath and his backing band, The Creatures, did somehow manage to land themselves on an episode of “Midnight Special” alongside Gordon Lightfoot and Richie Havens. Watching the footage today, it’s hard to imagine a backlash-primed audience watching Jobriath walk on stage dressed in space-exploration chic without licking their lips in preparation for a laugh. There was a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” just six months later, but no one cared.

With his albums in the dollar bins, and his career remembered only as a cautionary tale of metastatic hype, Jobriath slunk off to the Chelsea Hotel to reinvent himself yet again. He spent his remaining days living in the Chelsea’s rooftop pyramid apartment, performing regularly under several names, most consistently as Cole Berlin, a winking Weimar-styled piano singer with a regular gig at the Covent Garden restaurant. He died alone in his bed from an AIDS-related illness on August 3, 1983 — one week after the end of his original ten-year contract with Jerry Brandt expired.

But, like all good obscurity stories, Jobriath’s doesn’t end there. The cool kids dug through the bins and found his albums. He’s been name checked by Okkervil River and The Pet Shop Boys. Morrissey emerged as a particularly powerful advocate. (In 1992, Mozz, apparently unawares, even attempted to book a nine-years-in-the-grave-Jobriath as an opener on the “Your Arsenal” tour.) 1998 saw the release of “Lonely Planet Boy,” a compilation of previously unheard Jobriath recordings, on Morrissey’s own Attack! Records. In 2006, Def Leppard covered “Heartbeat” for a Wal-mart exclusive edition of “Yeah!.” Last year, Ann Magnuson, who was in the know all along, Kickstarted an album of Jobriath songs.

Jobriath A.D., a not-exactly-new but newly available 2012 documentary directed by Kieran Turner, chronicling Jobriath’s career, is more-than-compelling-enough to snag a mention in the New Yorker. Most exciting, though, are the projects coming out of Eschatone Records, the second of which is out in May. The Unreleased, Exclusive, Never Before Heard bounty of an eBay auction, paired with remastered recordings of rare bootlegs, “As The River Flows” is primed to be the kind of limited edition LP that both Jobriath obsessives and the broader community of Record Collecting People can curl their toes over.

Kevin Sweeting is a person on the internet and other places also.

by Abe Sauer

While Kentucky’s courts (maybe) legalize same-sex marriage, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has vetoed Senate Bill 1062. That bill would have amended Arizona’s 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act to give anyone an exemption from any state law that interferes with their free exercise of religion. Like Arizona, Kansas recently killed a similar bill. Georgia, Tennessee and South Dakota (especially South Dakota!) have dosey-doed with the similar laws. (Meanwhile, the media has been calling these “Gay Jim Crow,” laws which has to make the already terrible daily existence of anyone named James Crow even more unbearable.)

But has anyone in these states thought about how they’re going to get a cab if these laws pass?

For years now, municipalities have been running into legal tangles with Muslim taxi drivers who refuse service on religious grounds.

In Minneapolis in 2007, airport officials reported that about 100 passengers each month were refused taxi service for religious reasons, with the total logged refusals between 2002 and 2008 numbering 5,200. Most of these cases involved Muslim drivers who, citing religious reasons, declined to pick up passengers carrying alcohol or those accompanied by dogs, acts that, outlined in a statement from Minnesota’s Muslim American Society, involved “cooperating in sin according to Islam.”

And it’s not just a U.S. problem. One Toronto Sun columnist was scandalized after a Muslim driver refused to allow her dachsie Kishka into his car.

In 2008, Minnesota’s Muslim taxi drivers lost their battle in court, with the state’s court of appeals ruling that drivers could be penalized according to the Metropolitan Airports Commission’s rules. Those rules suspend the license of drivers for 30 days for refusing a pick-up. A second infraction brings a two-year revocation.

By the looks of it, Arizona’s SB1062 — and its cousins — would allow Muslim drivers the freedom to conduct their radical Islamic transportation jihads against dogs and booze.

Can you guess how conservative reactions differed when it comes to the merits of these two points of view on religious freedom? You don’t have to!

Just over two months ago, Glenn Beck-founded conservative site The Blaze reported the story of a blind man whose assistant dog was repeatedly refused taxi service on religious grounds. The comments on the piece are, almost without exception, not on the side of the drivers’ religious freedoms (with a dose of racism for good measure).

Meanwhile, The Blaze also just ran a story about the Arizona bill that would allow Christians to refuse service to gays. Can you guess which side most of the conservative commenters are on now?

Abe Sauer’s latest book is the north woods parody “Goodnight Loon.” He is also the author of the book “How to be: North Dakota.” Email him at abesauer @ gmail.com.

“We are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less,” wrote the great Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. “We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we… yes, I assure you… we should be begging to be under control again at once.” On the other hand, actress Sarah Jessica Parker is finally releasing her line of shoes, the SJP Collection, and though the footwear “is set to be exclusively available at Nordstrom and nordstrom.com, from Feb. 28 to March 2, Carrie Bradshaw fangirls can flock to her NYC pop-up shop and get their fashion fix,” so who’s to say?

It is rare that a single local news story so fully encapsulates the tenor of the times, but when it does happen, boy, have you ever got something special on your hands.

“The office of a New York state Senate leader has intervened in a political tussle over a uniquely contemporary problem: a barrage of unwanted emails from a listserv. New York City Councilman Daniel Dromm said in letters to Senate Coalition Co-leaders Jeff Klein and Dean Skelos, and Senate Democratic Conference Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, that an email newsletter from Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. was ‘harassing’ him. Mr. Dromm said Mr. Diaz ignored more than 10 requests to stop sending him the senator’s email newsletter, and is intending to ‘vex’ him with views in the emails that Mr. Dromm said are bigoted against gay people…. A spokesman for Ms. Stewart-Cousins said a member of the office reached out to Mr. Diaz’s aides last week about the email tussle, and ‘it is our understanding that he was removed from the list.’”

Happy birthday to Ralph Nader, a tireless activist to whom we all owe a debt a gratitude as a result of… well, I guess the car thing was something. Anyway, America’s greatest living symbol of unintended consequences turns 80 today.

It is now past 10 AM here in the east. If you are still a little groggy, a little less limber or alert than you’d usually be at this hour, please play this on repeat until you find yourself awake. I can’t imagine it will take all that long. Also, this is GREAT. [Via]