As part of our Great Lost Films feature in the current issue of UNCUT, I wrote a piece on the making of The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider. One of the people I spoke to was The Last Movie's screenwriter Stewart Stern. At one point during our interview, Stern mused dryly: "It was never quiet around Dennis."
Certainly, Dennis Hopper - who died today aged 74 – was too tempestuous a personality ever to be considered quiet, even by Hollywood's colourful standards.
Apologies that blogs were a bit thin on the ground last week: as I maybe mentioned, I got pretty caught up in collating your Great Lost Albums into a Top 50 to run in the issue out at the end of June. A surfeit of great stuff there, and I’ll post some of your suggestions that didn’t make the 50 here in a couple of weeks or so.
Only had half an ear on new records these past couple of days, since Mark and I have been sifting through your many, many nominations for Great Lost Albums, following our special the other month. Pretty amazing discoveries there, that are going to keep us busy for a while.
Last autumn, after I’d placed a Sun Araw track on an Uncut psych CD called "Seeing For Miles", I fell into an occasional email correspondence with Cameron Stallones, the LA musician who records under that name.
The first thing Paul Major says when Endless Boogie shuffle onstage is, “This is the last song of the night.” Droll joke, it seems. But 35 minutes later, as the band come to a juddering halt and ponder whether to attempt an encore, it turns out to have been true. One song, infinite possibilities.
