It looks as if JAMES BROWN may soon have to alter one of his many aliases and start calling himself "the hardest working man in shoe business." The soul pioneer will be the focal point of the Christmas window display at New York's Barney's clothing and footwear emporium for the entire holiday season -- which, of course, lasts about five months these days.| Don't fret about the grandfather -- er, godfather -- of soul getting enough bathroom breaks, though: Barney's will be using a larger-than-life replica of Brown, complete with lips that will sync in tune with his hits -- just like Madonna's do when she goes on tour...
Since it's been quite a while between court fights over cheaply-made garments on this side of the Atlantic, we decided to go sniffing around England -- not always a pleasant olfactory experience -- and found that authorities in Yorkshire just stripped a local student of a t-shirt deemed "obscene." The lad, Steven Oakes, was detained by the boys in blue after initially refusing to remove his CLINT BOON EXPERIENCE tee, which was emblazoned with the catchphrase "Cooler Than F--k" -- itself a play on the "Cool as Fuck" shirts once hawked by Boon's old band, the INSPIRAL CARPETS. Threatened with arrest, Oakes complied and stripped down, only to have his garment confiscated and his permanent record marked with a warning that he'd be hauled off to the pokey if he committed any similar atrocities in the future...
After all the publicity surrounding JARVIS COCKER's battle with the animatronic being known as MICHAEL JACKSON, you'd think that Jacko's fellow artificial life forms would think twice before trying to make nice with the feisty Pulp leader. But the Teletubbies are made of pretty stern stuff -- and decided to wade in and ask the singer's blessing for a tune called "Tubby People," which bears a strange resemblance to Pulp's "Common People." Cocker declined to go along with the cuddlification of that particular tune -- although we'd wager that he'd have taken perverse pleasure in helping Tinky Winky & company work up a version of "Sorted for E's and Wizz."
We knew that the Broadway appearance of Tommy was one of those slippery slope sorta things, but we never dreamed it would come to this: Next month, Knitting Factory Records will release a "tribute" to Fiddler on the Roof, with the dinner theater trimmings retrofitted for rock world consumption. Participants include usual suspects like JILL SOBULE (who runs off with the best-known tune, "Sunrise, Sunset") as well as somewhat more surprising recruits, including sonic pie-throwers NEGATIVLAND (assigned to rework "Tevye's Dream") and the RESIDENTS (responsible for a deconstruction of "Matchmaker"). Wake us when the hip-hop version of The Boys in the Band arrives...
DAVID SPRAGUE
(October 22, 1999)