Generoso and Lily’s Bovine Ska and Rocksteady: The 20th Annual Anti-Valentine’s Day Show! 2-9-16

Well Daltons, Don’t Do It Then!

Hello Bovine Ska and Rocksteady Listeners!

A prized tradition during the almost twenty year run of Generoso And Lily’s Bovine Ska And Rocksteady from when it was started was the Annual Anti-Valentine’s Day. This is where I, Generoso, would play two hours of songs featuring sets dedicated to many maladies associated with love like the pain breaking up, revenge, sadness, rejection…Yep, you get the picture. These sets would be combined with dire facts relating to love like the current divorce rate and the costs of such splits and stories, many sent in by listeners, that regale accounts of tragic relationships from blind dates to the end of thirty year marriages. Fun!

Why would I do this, a now happily married man take such an assault on the saccharin, greeting card created holiday that ruins couplings both young and old? Well, you got part of the answer there but the other part consists of feelings held by the long term committed bachelor that I was prior to meeting my lifelong cohost Lily. You see, I had seven relationships in my past life as a single end between the first and fourteenth of February with three ending on the very saint’s feast day. Coincidence, no I don’t think so as this “holiday” puts an unneeded pressure on relationships as the kind of gift/evening is contingent on the current duration/affection amount of the union. For example, let’s say that you have been dating for two weeks when the dreaded Cupid Day occurs…What amount of buy in are you supposed to have? If you do too much, it may make a more sensible partner run from level jumping and not enough pageantry might convince the more romantic partner that they are not the intended apple of your eye.

Hence, Valentine’s Day is the giant foot stamping on the flower of budding romance.

The 2016 year’s Anti-Valentine’s Day Show selected sets based on the following moments of a doomed relationship in a chronological breakup order…The FOOL set which normally occurs during the Valentine’s Day preparation that leads to failure, the set that highlights the moments when you let that love GO, the music assembled for the times when you realize that they are GONE. The subsequent set of songs about HEARTACHES when you start to notice that your love is no longer sitting with you on the couch. As you stare at the empty couch, you begin to feel SORRY for messing it all up which forces you to sadly REMEMBER all of the good times you had as opposed to moments like when she opened up your Valentine’s Day present and called you an asshole for getting her a set of car air fresheners because you thought that it would be funny to remind her that her car smell like an old man’s armpit (I thought she would think it was funny).

So, you can now profit from my years of pain and listen to a superbly curated Anti Valentine’s Day Radio Show that features top ska, rocksteady, and reggae by such artists as The Heptones, Alton Ellis, Bob Andy and many more in the comfort and safety of your own home via Mixcloud.

Please share the show on Facebook and Mixcloud.

Enjoy and screw Valentine’s Day

Love,
Generoso and Lily

“The Cars That Ate Paris,” Peter Weir’s Fiendishly Funny Debut Is The Prequel To Mad Max

George Miller, I Think You’ve Seen This Car

During the idyllic opening scene of Peter Weir’s debut film, The Cars That Ate Paris, we spy a well-to-do couple who are footloose and fancy free getting into their snappy roadster. They are wearing the finest vines, and sport that seventies natural-looking hair while smoking fine uppity cigarettes as they take a drive in the scenic Australian countryside, but things don’t stay lovely for long as the couple is hurled off the side of a hill and killed in a gruesome roll out. Crash. You see, our commercial-quality travelers were living the high life that few lived in 1970s Australia, but now they have crossed the town line of Paris–Paris, Australia that is, where cars and the people who drive them become the solution to a community’s financial woes.

Yes, all is not well in the Weir’s genre-defying town of Paris, Australia. Travelers who dare to broach its gates soon find a “boneshaker” of a road that is complete with “traps” designed by the town elders to guarantee that tourists donate more than a few coins for a picture postcard at the local gas station. There is a process in place for these visitors that is divided into two categories: those who die and those who survive. Those who die have their smashed up cars taken to the local chop shop to be salvaged for parts that will eventually be made into bizarre post-apocalyptic road rockets to be driven by Paris’ wild and uncontrollable youths. Next the deceased’s clothes, money, and gadgets will be first divvied up by the town’s government, led by their righteous Mayor (John Meillon, who most American audiences will identify as Crocodile Dundee’s dimwitted sidekick, Walt), and whatever remains will be distributed to the remaining common Parisians who use the items as bartering tools for food, gas, etc like a dysfunctional farming community.

Those who live will not only get the aforementioned pilfering of their valuables like their deceased fellow travelers but also will get the special prize of a free lobotomy at the local hospital so that they can turned into various states of “veggie.” Why make the damaged tourists into “veggies” you may ask? To use them as guinea pigs for experimental procedures that the local doctors are dying to try out, since “you can’t do these things in a city hospital,” one doctor explains. You now begin to think of the town of Paris as a Spam factory: There is no waste as they use every single part of the animal.

There is another unofficial use for the living as evidenced by the mayor’s beautiful “adopted” children and a recent arrival, Arthur Waldo (Terry Camilleri), whose brother George is killed when their caravan unsurprisingly goes flying off of one of the town’s many road traps. Arthur, is a heartbreakingly sullen, and seemingly nonthreatening fellow who escaped death with nary a scratch, which makes him eligible to become the makeshift offspring of our jolly mayor. Through his own admission, we find out that Arthur, who is still crushed from his brother’s untimely demise, is also a convicted felon, who years earlier was responsible for vehicular death of an elderly man, so he is not too eager to get behind the wheel of a car again, which is good because no one really makes it out of Paris alive anyway, which appears to be Weir’s gentile nod to a protectionist Australia which barred immigration until the late 1970s. Yes, Arthur is “fixed” to take in the sights and is content to be stay put. Content in a way that would make the denizens of a Yorgos Lanthimos film simply green with envy.

Arthur is given a job at the chop shop/hospital and gets a lot of half answers from the doctors and orderlies as to why the wards are packed with the Monty Pythonesque bandaged (my brain hurts anyone?) mentally disabled “veggies.” Arthur doesn’t particularly care for his new employment as a guardian of the lobotomy farm, but as he is still going into a mad panic of flashbacks whenever he sits behind a wheel, he will stay and accept a new position that was recently created by his father/mayor, that of “town parking supervisor,” which will put the sheepish Arthur right in the cross hairs of the town’s rambunctious and growing swell of young Road Warrior extras who, judging from their western attire, seem to be auditioning for a new Sergio Leone film, and who have more than a few jalopies that Miller would use in subsequent editions of his own post apocalyptic films of the Max variety.

The Town That Ate Paris mostly succeeds both as a comedy and as social commentary throughout even though the last third of the film is more Animal House than Dogtooth in terms of examining societal woes of a then economically challenged Australia. One scene does hint as Weir’s societal focus on a future project: the scene where the mayor’s unflattering aboriginal sculpture is defiantly destroyed by the hands of Paris’ renegade hot rod driving teens. That moment provides the strongest reminder that Weir would eventually create a film that stays on point with its clever attack on contemporary Australian society and its history of the treatment of the Aborigines, 1977’s The Last Wave.

Trailer For The Cars That Ate Paris

Nonetheless, Weir’s film is quite an impressive debut as it is chock full of wretchedly insane ideas and not too gentile pokes at the ruling class who must confront an ever increasing population of unemployed youth before the big one hits and the elderly are at the mercy of these desperate teens and their soon to be new leader, Lord Humongous.

Giallos and Expressionism in a Family Drama: Sarah Horrocks’s The Leopard

With a new year always comes new goals. We have whirred past a month and a half of 2016, and this year, I am committed to digging deeper into the physical and digital shelves of the comics world to find the unexpected. As a result, I’ll try my best to veer away from the major independent publishers here on this blog, with the exception of works that I just cannot pass up, in the hopes of excavating works that strive for something bolder, be it by a visual style, a narrative structure, or a subject.

In this quest, after a bit of searching, I’m happy to present a review for Sarah Horrocks’s The Leopard.

Alluring Cover for Volume 1 of The Leopard

Sure, a cover never tells a full story, but sometimes a cover strikes you and forces you to peek inside. After spending a couple of hours searching through various online comics providers only to find too many recycled genre motifs and archetypes (vampires are over, zombies are fading, time travel is an overused method of transportation across story arcs…), I saw the cover for volume two of The Leopard and a description which included the term “giallo”and was instantly intrigued.

From a premise perspective, nothing in the basic plot of The Leopard is out of the ordinary. The matriarch of a wealthy family lies on her deathbed, and her offspring return to their childhood home to determine the fate of the family’s riches. As expected, the children despise each other, united only in their hate for their mother and their thirst for fortune, and consequently, when all of the siblings must remain in the same place for more than an hour, nothing good will come from the bonding time. The warring wealthy family is not a foreign theme in media; from Antigone to Dallas to You’re Next, family members have battled and killed each other over inheritances and power for thousands of years, regardless of changes in society, so the family of The Leopard does not experience an unfamiliar conflict to any reader; however, the art and the development of the different characters involved distinguish The Leopard from other family dramas and horror stories, creating a visually fascinating and psychedelic mystery that pays homage to Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Andrzej Żuławski along with, of course, Luchino Visconti and his film that shares the same name as this series.

Given the clear inspiration from three filmmakers with outstanding and unique visual styles, Horrocks, like the three mentioned above, persistently experiments with the visual style on her medium. Every page of the the first three volumes of The Leopard presents something surprising, and while some ideas work better than others, every single page demands extra study and admiration. In The Leopard, you will find piercing color combinations, collage, and even some radial paneling, all of which help to create an appropriately ominous and disorienting mood for the sinister deeds on the horizon. While at points, the art may exceed the complexity of the story, it never takes over and makes The Leopard just a collection of artwork; every visual detail has a role in conveying the motivations and personas of each character, and this is the strongest feature of Horrocks’s style as a creator.

One of my favorite pages of giallo-inspired artwork from The Leopard (page from Volume 2)

To emphasize themes and ideas in horror, The Leopard and the comics paired with each volume have rich references to brilliant works and iconic images for any cineaste. Horrocks alludes to the in-shower eye gouging of Fulci’s Zombi, Isabelle Adjani’s disconcerting lovemaking with a tentacled creature in Żuławski’s Posession, and the ballet school of Argento’s Suspiria in her work here, conveying her own inspiration in visual storytelling and connecting the reader to the tones and moods of these works. While I was excited to see any reference to Żuławski, these specific allusions somewhat hurt the success of the comics. Horrocks already has her own strong style that blends influences from giallo, horror, and experimental film, so the inclusion of nearly exact ideas from the works that inspire her as allusions or homage distract your focus from the characters, the story, and the artwork of the comics because you leave Horrocks’s world that she has meticulously created to think about the work of other creators that are somewhat but not entirely connected to The Leopard.

While The Leopard absolutely contains deeply embedded cues from cinema in its storytelling, the overall aesthetic of the series has a starkness and grotesque nature much like the artists of the Die Brücke group. The sharp color combinations of the pages form images that are unified but also jarring, severe, and fantastic, much like the work of Kirschner. And in a similar stylistic vein, the family members have exaggerated forms that make them appear more like demons than people, which, based on their personas as the series progresses, makes sense, for none of their ugliness lies internally; the hideousness presents its plumage on the faces and figures of the characters and reinforces the incorporation of German Expressionist visual concepts.

With such a distinctive combination of styles, Horrocks proves her awareness in her own work in addition to her unconventional (by comics standards, at least) sources of inspiration. In turn, The Leopard aims for far more than your traditional comic, and though at times, the influences slightly overwhelm the series (after all, it’s a great challenge to incorporate stalwarts of Western art and cinema), all of the diligence to create a new and daring comics reading experience shows itself on the pages.

Currently only available in digital format, this is one of the first digital comics I really wished I had in print, and for that statement alone, The Leopard should be on your reading list as soon as possible; I suspect Horrocks will have even more to admire and astonish in future volumes, and you will want to be there for the extravaganza.

The Leopard is written and illustrated by Sarah Horrocks. It is available via Gumroad here.

Generoso and Lily’s Bovine Ska and Rocksteady: Charlie Moo And His Moo’s Label 2-2-16

The Smooth Voice Of Mellowlark, Basil Gabbidon

Welcome Bovine Ska and Rocksteady Listeners,

The February 2nd, 2016 edition of Generoso and Lily’s Bovine Ska and Rocksteady that contained a twenty-years-in-the-making spotlight on Charlie Moo’s MOO’S LABEL began with the smooth sounds of the rocksteady duo and Ewan and Denver’s cut on Jolly in 1967, “I Want You So Bad” and ended that first set with another rocksteady duet featuring a young Phil Pratt teaming up with Ken Boothe on Caltone in 1968 with “Sweet Song For My Baby.” We followed that first set up with another set of rare rocksteady before going into our weekly mento set that began with the voice of Alerth Bedasse and his cut for Chin’s in 1956, “Calypso Pepperpot.” To get you ready for the Moo’s Label spotlight we ended the first hour with a rollicking set of Jamaican rhythm and blues beginning with The Mellowlarks cut that came out on Coxsone All Stars label in 1960, “No More Wedding.” When that set ended, we started our long overdue spotlight of the Moo’s label.

Given the name of this show, we’ve wanted to have this spotlight for a few years now, and after plenty of searching and scouting, we’ve finally gathered enough tracks to present the Moo’s label spotlight.

During the thriving era of Jamaican Rhythm and Blues, many shop owners took a crack at the recording business. Labels sprung up as quickly as they ceased to exist, but many managed to capture the earliest sounds of some of Jamaica’s soon to be superstars and such was the case with Charlie Moo’s label. According to Prince Buster, Charlie Moo owned an ice cream parlor at the corner of Orange and North Street. This parlor was a popular meeting spot in the heart of a lot of musical activity. This humble parlor would soon transform into the Beverley’s Record Store when Leslie Kong and Charlie Moo became business partners, but Moo would only produce records himself for two years. We began with an artist who was essential during the early Jamaican Rhythm and Blues period and who recorded three tracks for Charlie Moo, Lloyd Clarke. This is his earliest cut for the Moo’s label, “60 years,” from 1961.

Beginning the second set is vocalist Owen Gray, who was already an established star during the Jamaican Rhythm and Blues period, having cut many important singles for Coxsone Dodd’s Worldisc label, including “On the Beach,” the very first Jamaican track to mention a sound system. He only cut this one track, “Time Will Tell,” for Charlie Moo, but would eventually cut many more for Charlie’s business partner, Leslie Kong and his Beverley’s label.

You can listen to our full Bovine Ska and Rocksteady from February 2nd, 2016 HERE. Subscribe to our show on Mixcloud; it’s FREE, and you’ll get an email every Tuesday when we post a new show.

For all of our listeners on the east coast, we hope this show keeps you warm!!! Please help us and spread the word and repost if you liked the show!

For news on the upcoming spotlights and fun discoveries tied to early Jamaican music, join the group for the Bovine Ska and Rocksteady on Facebook.

XOXO,
Lily and Generoso

Martyrs or Not: Sean Lewis and Ben Mackey’s Saints

Upon returning to America from travels in Italy, it seemed wholly appropriate to pick up Sean Lewis and Ben Mackey’s Saints. As much as Generoso and I have been adjusting our diets as we re-acclimate with America, I figured that I should also readjust to American culture in comics by reading something mildly related to the Catholic churches and the gargantuan paintings we encountered last week. Also, at one point, we stood by the altar that contained Saint Peter’s remains, so Saints feels like a reasonable selection to reacquaint myself with the secular and non-secular blending that is embedded in the identity of America.

Lewis’s first foray into comics, Saints explores the intersection of reincarnation, sainthood, and the battle against evil. The spirits and the powers of Saint Lucy, Sebastian, Blaise, and Stephen have emerged in today’s world as adults who not only need to adjust to life but also have a divine calling to join together to battle a surge of evil. In biblical times, the archangel Michael defeated the devil and the fallen angels in the battle in heaven, but in our contemporary world, a man who claims to be the incarnation of Michael leads a society of congregations who offer their children to battle against saints, who are believed to bring about the end of times when they reappear on earth. With Michael’s increasing power, Lucy, Sebastian, Blaise, and Stephen begin receiving messages from God that lead them to each other in order to face Michael’s new children’s crusade.

Favorite cover: Issue 5

Within a five issues, Saints packs in a ton. Lewis anchors the ensemble tale with the introspection and growth of Blaise, the saint with the least amount of confidence in his own identity much less his responsibilities to God and humanity. In secular reality, Blaise has attached himself to failed metal groups in order to relate to other people, but his connection to the metal groups feels all too thin and full of false idols. Consequently, when Blaise begins having recurring cryptic dreams set entirely in gold with strangers he feels some familiarity with, he does not dismiss them, but he also does not attempt to understand them. That is, until Sebastian, one of the people in the dream appears at a concert and explains that Blaise’s dreams signify a higher calling.

Once Sebastian and Blaise find Lucy and Stephen, the group attempts to decode why they have received messages to come together as well as their history in their previous lives. When the modern Michael’s army begins to attack them, the group goes into hiding and spend more time trying to understand each other, making Saints less of a superhero tale about the battle between good and evil and more of a road tale, where traveling forces characters to better understand their purpose.

Saints has a fascinating premise, and I must admit it kept me engaged even though the execution of the storytelling may not be the best. In an interview, Lewis described the writing process as one where he wrote a short story that he and Mackey then dissected to form the panels. This distillation from a longer story rather than the construction of a script or storyboard leads the first couple of issues of Saints to have a clumsiness and awkwardness in the progression of ideas and conversations from panel to panel and page to page, but by the fourth issue, the bumps begin to smooth out. Mackey’s shifts in color help ease the transitions from dream sequences to the saints’ reality to the building of Michael’s congregation and army, so even though the panel flow does not always work in the first three issues, you never get lost between the different branches of the story.

Given its non-secular focus, I cannot bypass a discussion of the adaptation of biblical concepts. I, in no way, am a scholar of Christianity, but I do understand some of the core tenants of the Bible. Lewis definitely loosely interprets the archangel Michael, but his modernization of the saints does not feel too distant from their original personas. While a secular fictional tale about the faith could use saints’ powers as superpowers, I appreciate that Lewis de-emphasizes the saints’ supernatural abilities and focuses the series on the saints understanding their divine calling; I hope Saints begins to focus more on the psychological aspect of the martyrdom of these saints, for those ruminations could make this series rise from just being entertaining to something daring and innovative. Additionally, the martyrdom aspect of the saints distinguishes these characters from any others out there in the comic book world that have some supernatural ability and some responsibility to other humans; by exploring this security or insecurity in faith and grace or hesitation toward martyrdom, Saints can emerge as a faith based series that intelligently and relatably discusses how to interpret and apply faith in a modern world.

Saints has solid footing in an excellent concept. I hope it digs further into the hearts and minds of its characters and their conflicts with their higher calling, but regardless, I’ll still follow along because Lewis and Mackey are aiming for a big idea and have yet to enter the pretentious territory, and that impresses me.

Saints is written by Sean Lewis and illustrated by Ben Mackey. Issues 1-5 are available via Image Comics.

The Lucio Fulci Bloodbath Goes West In 1975’s “Four of the Apocalypse”

Thomas Milian As The Mansoneque Chaco

One of the more amazing experiences that Lily and I made had our recent visit to Rome was a visit to Cinecitta, the famed Italian movie studio that was built by Mussolini in the late 1930s to save the fading film industry which not only produced propaganda films during the early years of fascism, but also created many popular narrative films, including those of directors such as Raffaello Matarazzo. Unfortunately, the studios were bombed during the final months of World War Two, the damaged buildings and sets became home to thousand of displaced refugees for a few years before being revived as a functioning production studio during the Neo-Realist period. This Neo-Realist era would subsequently turn into the golden age of Cinecitta with the rise of Italian directors, Frederico Fellini, and Bernardo Bertolucci. as well as the studios becoming the place to shoot sword and sandal films by not only Italian auteurs but also famed American directors like Joseph L. Mankiewicz who shot his epic, Cleopatra which starred Elizabeth Taylor there in 1963.

As the 1960s rolled on, the studios began to crank out numerous Italian or spaghetti westerns. a fact that shouldn’t be lost on anyone who reads this blog as I have reviewed several rare titles within the genre over the last few years. What I did not know until visiting Cinecitta is that many of these films are not revered in Italy as they have been deemed too colonial in their message by a predominance of Italian film goers. That message of the antiquated perception of these titles was made quite clear during our tour of Cinecitta, though the museum still chose to honor this genre with an impressive, albeit smallish portion of their museum. Long gone were the western town sets that littered the lots of the studio, they were demolished in the 1980s to make way for the construction of sets depicting ancient Rome which were needed for a new generation of sword and sandal films like HBO’s 2004 series Rome. This fact being somewhat bizarre to me as the spaghetti western was originally the genre that took sword and sandal out of Italian mainstream popularity. Lily and I were still thrilled to see their spaghetti western exhibit which had a film tribute to the genre, Clint Eastwood’s actual poncho from Sergio Leone’s classic, For A Few Dollars More, and a few rare film posters strew around the western saloon edifice for effect. One such poster was that of a rarely seen 1975 spaghetti that surprisingly was directed by horror master Lucio Fulci (The Beyond, Zombie) that caught Lily’s eye, Four Of The Apocalypse. I was also intrigued and immediately went online to pick up a copy through the folks at Blue Underground who had it waiting for us when we returned from Italy.

Released in 1975 when the western was fading out of vogue for the less costly to produce Eurocrime film, Four Of The Apocalypse was banned in several countries on its initial release because of, you guessed it, the graphic violence and sadistic cruelty that mark many a subsequent Fulci film and although the violence is fairly disturbing at points that should not dissuade you from seeing a very personal and at times, emotionally complex late spaghetti western. No stranger to the western genre after two successful adaptations of Jack London’s White Fang in 1973 and 1974, Fulci drew from two well-known 19th century short stories from famed western writer Bret Harte, The Outcasts Of Poker Flats and in the last third of the film, Fulci uses Harte’s heartwarming tale, The Luck Of Roaring Camp. Our film begins with gambler Stubby Preston (an extremely well-coiffed Fabio Testi) as he arrives via coach to the rollicking gold town of Salt Flats with a plan to bust the town’s casino to only be met by the town’s sheriff, who immediately locks up Stubby in the town pokey with a pregnant hooker named Bunny (Lynne Frederick), the town drunk, Clem (Michael J. Pollard, the wheel man from Bonnie and Clyde) and Bud (Harry Baird), an African American man who does not have all of his marbles. The four quickly bond in the cell and are soon shuffled out of town by the apathetic sheriff when vigilantes decide to do on a murderous coup.

The quartet are cast out upon a wagon but are not at odds with one another. Sure, there is sometime acrimonious sexual tension between Stubby and Bunny, and Clem is savagely jonesing for a drink but all in all our protagonists have accepted their roles as outcasts and are supportive of one another as they travel onward. Our group soon stumbles upon a well-meaning wagon train of religious crusaders who distill of bit of homespun wisdom on our misfit travelers but after a few words and a meal, they all go their separate ways. Juxtaposing the harmony is the sudden jarring inclusion of Chaco (Thomas Milian) a vile Charlie Mansonesque killer, complete with tattoos fashioned under his eyes, who seems to unable to move an inch without killing something in his way and whether that target is a wild animal or the lawmen that are following Chaco, they are doomed to die and in the case of one sheriff, he is brutally tortured and mutilated before dying. Following the carnage, there is a scene that seems to be pulled from Jodorowsky’s psychedelic western El Topo, when Chaco feeds our four misfits some peyote but a trippy voyage does not follow as indeed this Chaco is bad news for everyone he touches and this moment of letting their guard down will cost our broken heroes dearly. Even though the four escape death through the hands of Chaco, they are more damaged than ever before and must make their way to safety with a wounded member on a stretcher and a soon to be delivering Bunny. They will walk through blazing heat and snow, landing in a ghost town before an eventual visit to an all male mining camp which provides some of the most hopeful moments in Four Of The Apocalypse, moments that are directly pulled from the pages of Harte’s whimsical story, The Luck Of Roaring Camp.

Beautifully lensed by cinematographer Sergio Salvati, and a folksy score that is more McCabe and Mrs. Miller than Morricone, Four Of The Apocalypse consistently strives to be a cut above the later Italian westerns of that period. All of our leads put in fine performances with special notice going to Milian who completely embodies the horror within the maniacal Chaco. Milian is absolutely terrifying and gobbles up screen time whenever he appears in the film. As for the well-noted graphic violence that Fulci employs in Four Of The Apocalypse, it does in fact hurt the film to the extent that it goes beyond what is necessary to amplify Thomas Milian’s performance as Chaco. It is almost like Fulci felt the need to add the red stuff because be believed that the character of Chaco wasn’t compelling/dreadful enough to be the target of the viewer’s ire. Milian’s psycho method-acting driven performance is definitely enough to make you burn with hatred against Chaco and thus audiences could’ve been spared the extra cruelty that is more off-putting than emotionally effecting.

Regardless of the extemporaneous violence, I would still would place Fulci’s Four Of The Apocalypse along with Enzo G. Castellari’s 1976 masterpiece, Keoma as one of the best examples of a late-era Italian western. Though these films may not be seen as high art in preset day Italy, to me they still resonate as having a brave originality that most American westerns of the same era never possessed.

Generoso and Lily’s Bovine Ska and Rocksteady: Jah Lloyd’s Teem Label 1-26-16

Top Tune From Winston Jarrett On Teem

Howdy Bovine Ska and Rocksteady Listeners!

We started the January 26th. 2016 episode of Generoso and Lily’s Bovine Ska and Rocksteady with two sets of dynamite rare ska beginning with The Spanishtown Ska Beats on the Soulsville Center Label in 1965 doing the original version of the song that Keith and Tex made famous, “Stop That Train.” A mento set followed which ended with the Sugar Belly Combo and their flying bamboo saxophone version of the classic mento of “Rucumbine” which was released on Studio One in 1966. We ended the first hour with a long set of early reggae that started with a version to version excursion of the Mediators 1970 hit on Success, “When You Go To A Party.” After that set we began our half hour spotlight of the TEEM LABEL…

Born Patrick Lloyd Francis, Jah Lloyd, who was also known as Jah Lion and Jah Ali, was introduced to the growing music industry in Kingston when he moved from his hometown of St. Catherine to Trench Town at the age of 12. Early in his recording career, he was a founding member of The Eagles. However, he would not stay with the group, and Francis joined strengths with Fitzroy Bunny Simpson to form The Mediators (sometimes noted as The Meditators). The group recorded for Coxsone Dodd, but Francis found a place with Rupie Edwards, who not only recorded the duo but also gave Francis a job as a salesman for the Success label and record shop. After working for Success for two years, Francis knew many of the key players in the record industry, and when he himself wanted to record again, he approached Lee Scratch Perry. Inspired by the rise of deejays, particularly Big Youth, Francis decided to toast over records rather than sing for the Upsetter label. After recording a few tracks for Lee Scratch Perry, Francis decided to open up his Teem label with his brother Vincent where he would produce other artists and release some of his own recordings as well.

Francis’s former singing partner, Bunny Simpson re-entered his life, this time with his new group The Diamonds. At this point, they had recorded for Stranger Cole and Derrick Harriot, but at Teem, they scored a big hit with “Shame and Pride.” Francis introduced The Diamonds to Joseph “JoJo” Hoo-Kim, who produced them at Channel One, where the group, who eventually became known as The Mighty Diamonds, rose to great success.

You can listen to our full Bovine Ska and Rocksteady from January 26, 2016 HERE. Subscribe to our show on Mixcloud; it’s FREE, and you’ll get an email every Tuesday when we post a new show.