Oh-so-fine Toni Basil has announced a new online class — on '60s go-go dancing! She'll not only teach you how to go-go dance, but will also "deep dive" into how it influenced art, fashion, and music. And she should know, because she was there. If you only think of the 76-year-old for her big 1981 hit "Mickey," you've missed out on her illustrious career in acting, dance and choreography. This compilation shows the "goddess of go-go" doing her thing in several circa-1960s films. Prepare to be impressed:

Her four-part series begins July 5 ($10/class).

Thanks, Baby Doe!

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Last century, the Muzak company created custom mixes of soft music for locations ranging from doctor's office waiting rooms and restaurants to barber shops and, yes, elevators. Muzak were self-proclaimed "specialists in the physiological and psychological applications of music." Two decades before Brian Eno riffed on this environmental music concept with his phenomenal "Music for Airports" (below), Muzak provided music for airplanes in the form of reel-to-reel mix tapes played on United Airlines flights. Above is one such collection. Fly the friendly skies.

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I think my feelings about this somewhat unlikely pairing of Tom Jones and Crosby, Still, Nash & Young can best be expressed by some of the comments on YouTube:

"When I was a kid, I thought Tom Jones was the height of uncool. Looking back, it was clearly the other way round."

"This is gonna be the LAMEST thing ever...10 seconds later...OMG...This is freakin' AWESOME!!!"

[H/t Michael Colombo]

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I mean, at least folks caught up in The Cold War were allowed to head outside to buy building supplies without worrying about getting a ticket or falling ill. Read the rest

In the late 1960 NASA engineers were tasked with developing a digital flight computer that took up just one cubic foot of  space on the Apollo 11 capsule and the software to guide the crew to the Moon. This TED-Ed video explains how it was done.

From YouTube:

The Apollo 11 moon landing was about the astronauts, mission control, software and hardware all working together as a seamless integrated system. None of which would have been possible without the contributions of one engineer: Margaret Hamilton. Who was this pioneer? Matt Porter and Margaret Hamilton detail how a woman and her team launched the software that took mankind to the Moon.

Fifty one years ago today, the first incarnation of the prog rock band, King Crimson, gathered in a cramped basement space below the Fulham Palace Cafe in London. One of the instruments the band would use that would come to distinguish their early sound was that strange, iconic 60s instrument, the Mellotron.

Keyboardist Ian McDonald was taken by the sound of this instrument as it was employed by the Moody Blues (and on The Beatles' Strawberry Fields) and thought it would work well with the type of lush and orchestral sound the band was looking to create. Later in the year, in the summer of 1969, the instrument would again appear on David Bowie's Space Oddity (played by future Yes man, Rick Wakeman).

Of all of the strange instruments that've worked the edges of popular music (the Theremin also comes to mind), the Mellotron is probably the oddest. Basically an upright organ cabinet filled with tape heads and recorded tape strips that you trigger through the keyboard, the Mellotron is like some crazy one-off contraption that caught on and actually got manufactured.

In this video, Allison Stout, of Bell Tone Synth Works, a synthesizer repair shop in Philadelphia, PA, takes us under the hood of a Mellotron MK1 and how it works. One can only imagine how finicky and prone to breakage touring versions of these things must have been.

And here's one of King Crimson's Mellotrons in action during a performance in 1974 at the ORTFTV Studios in Paris. Read the rest

Ram Dass -- counterculture icon, psychedelic pioneer, and spiritual guide -- has died at age 88. After turning on with his Harvard psychology colleague Timothy Leary in the early 1960s, Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert) became an intrepid explorer of higher consciousness and dedicated his life to teaching what he learned to the world. From Tricycle:

In Be Here Now, Ram Dass‘s first book for the masses, which has sold over 2 million copies since publication in 1971, he offered seekers an engaging, unconventional, slightly zany roadmap for finding a spiritual path and a more enduring connection to higher consciousness than a tab of acid could bring. From then on, in close to a dozen books and countless teachings, retreats, and podcasts, Ram Dass continued to share the wisdom of a journey that had long gone beyond personal transformation to embrace a cosmic worldview and social agenda...

“My life has been a dance between power and love,” he observed after the massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 that left the charismatic, preternaturally articulate teacher groping for words. “First part, till Harvard: power, power, power, power. Up until drugs, I thought power was the end all and be all, because I was a little individual. Then drugs: love, love, love, love. My first mushroom trip was so profound that I saw radiance was inside, and I said, ‘I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.'”

The Art Nouveau movement was started in response to a rapidly-changing -- and in the eyes of artists, ugly -- world. So it makes sense that the San Francisco artists designing rock posters, album covers, and the like in the 1960s would crib Art Nouveau's distinct style. They were responding to their own rapidly-changing, and ugly, world. While these free-spirited designers took heavy inspiration from Art Nouveau, they made their art their own by popping the colors to be vibrant and high-contrast, according to this Vox video.

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Abbie Hoffman and Martin Carey arrive at The Pentagon to do a literal hand-count on how many protestors will be needed to encircle the building for a protest. On the way out they apply for, and receive, a permit to initiate an Exorcism to rid the base of its evil demons.

Part one of "LEVITATION OF THE PENTAGON" — Continued Next Week

From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

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A spirited conversation between Hunter S. Thompson and John Wilcock. From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

Look for a holiday follow-up to this story in December, detailing "How the Freaks Almost Took the Town".

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Shown at top of fold: Cover to OTHER SCENES, Volume 1, Number 6, September 1968 — Additional items on the history of OTHER SCENES will be included in the comments section over the week.

From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

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A relieving of tensions between John and the East Village Other leads to the development of the UPS.

From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

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From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

Greetings, Wilcock readers! The series will complete here on Boing Boing, in weekly installments, through the end of the year.

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I'm thrilled to report the release of The Family Acid: California, the book I published with Timothy Daly, my Ozma Records partner and co-producer of the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition. Limited to just 1,500 clothbound copies, it's a far-out photo album from a very unconventional family.

For more than 50 years, photographer Roger Steffens has explored the electric arteries of the counterculture, embracing mind-expanding experiences, deep social connection, and unadulterated fun at every turn. After serving in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, Steffens immersed himself in California’s vibrant bohemia. Since then, with his wife Mary and children Kate and Devon, he has sought out the eccentric, the outlandish, and the transcendent. Just as often, it finds him, grinning, a camera in one hand and a joint in the other. Steffens took the spectacular snapshots in this new collection between 1968 and 2015 during his family's freewheeling adventures throughout the visionary state they call home.

Steffens is an intrepid explorer of the fringe but he’s also a family man. He met his wife Mary under a lunar eclipse in a pygmy forest in Mendocino, California while on LSD. Soon after, they conjured up a daughter, Kate, and son, Devon. Family vacations took the foursome up and down the West Coast, from the gritty glam of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to reggae festivals in Humboldt, fiery protests in Berkeley to the ancient redwoods of Big Sur and the wilds of Death Valley. Along the way, they’d rendezvous with likeminded freaks, artists, musicians, and writers, from Bob Marley and Timothy Leary to actor John Ritter and war photographer Tim Page, the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now. Read the rest

"The sponsors said it was going to be three days of peace and music. It was that alright, and much more." Read the rest

For more than 50 years, Roger Steffens has traveled the electric arteries of the counterculture embracing mind-expanding experiences, deep social connection, and unadulterated fun at every turn. And he’s captured it all on film. After serving in Vietnam during the final 26 months of the ‘60s, where he won a Bronze Star for founding a refugee campaign that raised over 100 tons of food and clothing, he spent a year lecturing against the war before settling in Marrakech. Finally returning Stateside in 1972, he immersed himself in the vibrant bohemias of Berkeley, Los Angeles, and beyond, touring his highly-acclaimed one-man show, “Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry.” A psychedelic polymath, Steffens worked as an actor, poet, editor, archivist, lecturer, author, NPR radio DJ and interviewer and, yes, photographer. Driven by his own insatiable curiosity and passion, he was on a perpetual quest for the eccentric, the outlandish, the transcendent. Just as often, it found him, smiling, a camera in one hand and a joint in the other.

Roger Steffens is an intrepid explorer of the fringe but he’s also a family man. He met his wife Mary under a lunar eclipse in a pygmy forest in Mendocino, California while on LSD. Soon after, they conjured up a daughter, Kate, and son, Devon. Family vacations took the foursome up and down the West Coast, from the gritty glam of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to reggae festivals in Humboldt, fiery protests in Berkeley to the ancient redwoods of Big Sur and the wilds of Death Valley. Read the rest

Dig that, ya squares!

(via Weird Universe)

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