Show #136 June 13, 2015

Our Planetary Power Pop show is dedicated to Barbarella and the great Jenny Agutter!

Barbarella- The Glitterhouse Barbarella 
Another Girl, Another Planet- The Only Ones Special View 
Help Yourself- Greg Pope Fanboy 
Dead or Alive- John Cale Honi Soit 
Partied Out- Kurt Baker Brand New Beat 
On the Weekend- The Reducers Last Tracks and Lost Songs 
Revolution in Apt. 29- Wayne Kramer The Return of Citizen Wayne 
N.D.- Runarounds Waiting For The Hurricane 
^Under The Milky Way- The Church Under The Milky Way 
Probably Me- The Jellybricks Youngstown Tune-Up 
Space Age Love- Zolar X Timeless 
*Planet Mercury- Gruppo Sportivo Pop! Goes The Brain/Design Moderne 
*Destination Venus- The Rezillos Can't Stand the Rezillos: The (Almost) Complete Rezillos 
*Heaven And Earth- The Grip Weeds How I Won The War 
*Rocket To Mars- Lisa Mychols Sweet Sinsations 
*Moons of Jupiter- Scruffy The Cat Time Never Forgets: The Anthology ('86-'88) 
*Saturn- Neats 1981-84 The Ace of Hearts Years 
*Anus Of Uranus- Klaatu 3:47 E.S.T. 
*Neptune- Glenn Tilbrook Transatlantic Ping Pong 
*Hallucinating Pluto- The B-52's Hallucinating Pluto 
If I Ever Wanted Easier- Wyatt Funderburk Novel and Profane 
Fall To Bits- DM3 Dig it the Most 
I Know The Cure- Warm Soda Symbolic Dream 
>Marquee Moon- Television Marquee Moon 
Under The Gun- Rob Bonfiglio Freeway 
Please Believe Me- LMNOP Elemen Opee Elpee 
We'll Inherit the Earth- The Replacements Don't Tell a Soul

^Power Pop Peak:  #24 Billboard Hot 100 4/9/88 

*SacroSet:  Solar System Songs

>Power Pop Prototype:  1977

In the summer of 1978 I was lucky enough to see the movie Barbarella at the Kingston Drive-In, unlucky enough to be in the same car with my mom and sister the night I saw it.  What was Mum thinking- Barbarella gets naked before the opening credits are even done!  Even now, I'm squinching in my seat as I think about watching Barbarella in the Excessive Machine- designed to "pleasure" her to death, it was no match for her voracious

An Immersive Experience

sexual appetite- with Mum and Sarah beside me.  So there we are, the three of us trying not to make a sound, our eyes locked on the screen for fear of making eye contact with each other.  Youch!  Even in these uncomfortable circumstances I could see how undeniably sexy Jane Fonda is in the movie.  Yet, as taken as I was with Barbarella, my heart belonged to another outer space hottie- the great Jenny Agutter. 

Even a year after seeing it, my next door neighbor Steven Manning couldn't stop talking about the movie Logan's Run.  

Steven was two years older than me and saw the movie the

How did this fashion not catch on?!?

week it came out as well as several times during its theatrical run.  The story sounded awesome to me- a world of sex and drugs where everything is cool until you turn 30, then they kill you.  Truth be told, what really piqued my interest was Steven's description of Jessica, the female lead played by the lovely Jenny Agutter- particularly the fact that she TAKES HER CLOTHES OFF IN THE MOVIE!  I had never heard of

PG in '81, Sex Offender Registry Today!

such a thing!  This was back in the 70's when you could have a nice bit of nudity in a PG picture.  (I'll never forget showing Clash of The Titans to 10 year old Jack and 7 year old Nica- Jaime screaming as a naked Perseus and his mom walk down the beach). 

Anyway, I didn't know about Logan's Run when it was in theaters during the

Oh, Jenny!

summer of 1976 and had resigned myself to never seeing Jenny Agutter's- or any woman's- breasts for the rest of my sad, pitiful life.  Sure I'd sneaked peeks at Playboy at my Uncle Bob's house in Maryland, but these were living, breathing 3-D breasts!  What's worse in the summer of 1977 they were planning on showing Logan's Run on TV... stupid breast-free TV!  Then, something miraculous happened.  I saw in the Boston Globe, the paper I delivered each morning, that Logan's Run was playing at the South Shore Twin Drive-In in Braintree!  This was a year after its theatrical release and two weeks before it was going to be on TV but

Michael York, Farrah Fawcett, Jenny Agutter

there it was.  I begged my parents to go and they agreed so I finally got to see Jenny Agutter naked!  The nude scene is two seconds long and pretty unsexy (she is changing out of her soaking wet sideless dress) but it was still very cool.  I loved the movie too- I'm a sucker for a good finger-wagging science fiction dystopia, from the Planet Of The Apes movies to Westworld to Soylent Green (spoiler alert! the latter is people).  I was so taken with Jenny

She doesn't really mean it.

Agutter I barely registered that Farrah Fawcett was also in Logan's Run. And this was AFTER her iconic poster, which I later learned is what got her the role in to begin with.  Have to say I've always thought her smile seemed super-fake, so I've never cared for Farrah's poster.  Yes, I noticed her other "assets" but the fake smile was a deal-breaker.  In any case, I was never a guy who had posters of girls on his walls- all my posters were of dudes with guitars.

Leia in her Hutt-kini

As an aside, the next year when Star Wars came out I remember thinking "good movie, but where's all the sex?" After sexy movies like Barbarella and Logan's Run it seemed like there was something missing from Star Wars.  We had to wait for the underwhelming Return of the Jedi to get anything close to sex, and you only see Leia in her Hutt-kini for less than a minute.  Fanboys have been drooling over this scene for a generation- I imagine their heads would've exploded if there had actually been bare breasts.  Instead we get taken to a world of Teddy Bears....TEDDY BEARS!  Damn you George Lucas- I blame you for taking the sex out of science-fiction movies!  But I digress...

Donald and Jenny

After Logan's Run I realized I had seen Jenny Agutter in The Eagle Has Landed- at the time my favorite WW II movie (Donald Sutherland is pure psycho).  The next film I saw her in was An American Werewolf In London- my favorite movie of 1981 and another in which she takes her clothes off (though that's not the only reason I like it).  None of this had prepared me for the home video revolution a few years later.  Now actively searching for Jenny Agutter movies on video I found one called Walkabout that came out in 1971.  Jenny is 16 in the movie, a couple of years younger than I was at the time- so for the first time I was no longer watching an older woman.  Walkabout is a great film about a brother and sister lost in the Australian outback after their father ruins a picnic by going nuts, setting the car on fire and shooting himself.  They

Luc (the director's son) and Jenny

are helped out by an Aboriginal boy.  The most striking scene in the film- one I was in no way prepared for- is five minutes of the girl and her brother skinny dipping in a river.  Five minutes of a fully naked Jenny Agutter!  You'd think I'd be in heaven but it kind of weirded me out.  I had lusted after this woman as a boy but as a young man it made me uncomfortable seeing her as a naked 16 year old girl.  Freud would have a field day with that.  Not surprising, the skinny dipping scene was originally cut out of the original American theatrical release then put back in for home video.  

Jenny on Call The Midwife

My wife Jaime was watching Call The Midwife the other night and I was very happy to see Jenny Agutter appear on screen.  She's still acting and still beautiful and thanks to the show is working more now than at any other point in her career.  We'll always have Logan's Run Jenny!

Pluto- the 9th PLANET dammit!!

There's one other thing I want to mention about tonight's SacroSets of Planetary Power Pop.  I played three sets of three songs each for the nine, yes NINE planets in our Solar System.  I don't want to hear any bulls**t about Pluto not being a planet.  Dwarf planet my ass!  Moon of Neptune- get bent!  My only hope is that NASA's New Horizons mission will end all this nonsense and restore Pluto to it's rightful place.  We've already heard more about Pluto in the last two weeks than at anytime since the mendacious downgrade of its rightful status as the ninth planet in our solar system.  How important is this issue to me?  My sister Sarah knows, she bought me this awesome shirt

Which is so cool it even glows in the dark!

HAIL PLUTO!

Download this week's show below (Click to stream or to download, right click and "SAVE TARGET AS")
ALL KINDSA GIRLS #136