Described as a renaissance man, Mike Edison is a noted New York journalist, musician, author, and provocateur. His most recent book, Sympathy for the Drummer – Why Charlie Watts Matter, is a biography on the Rolling Stones drummer who sadly passed away earlier this week. Edison himself spent much of the 1980s and 1990s seeing the world from behind a drum set — opening for bands as diverse as Sonic Youth and Soundgarden (and moonlighting with punk rock legend GG Allin, for whom he later wrote the song “GG Allin Died Last Night”) — more recently Edison can be seen with his blues, gospel, and garage-punk experiment The Edison Rocket Train. His other writing credentials are no less impressive, having written extensive liner notes for, among others, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
We are still only scratching the surface of the fascinating life of a musician and author who also speaks frequently on free speech, sex, drugs, and the American counterculture. PopMatters declared he was “proof positive that one can be both edgy and erudite, lowbrow and literate, and take joy in the unbridled pleasures of the id without sacrificing the higher mind.” It’s his love for Capt. Beefheart, Hank Williams, and Odetta that led him to the door of Andalusian Troubadours Guadalupe Plata who won the 2013 coveted Impala Award for Best European Rock Band, as well as Artist of the Year, Best Live Act, and Best Rock Album from the Independent Music Awards.
Earlier this year, they released their collaborative debut album The Devil Can’t Do You No Harm (6th April 2021 via Everlasting Records), which has been beautifully described as “a record of spirit and passion, at once ultra-modern — this is the soundtrack for a new generation of intellectual outlaws, resistance fighters, blues scholars, and defiant individualists who still believe in rock’n’roll as a powerful agent of deliverance and freedom —and deeply fermented in tradition,drawing on the plugged-in mojo and swampy hoodoo of Bo Diddley and the Staple Singers, and the demonic and divine sounds of the street songs and church music that are the very spine of rock’n’roll.”
Today, we have the pleasure of sharing their video for an epic telling of the story of John Henry, the classic American tale of Man vs. Machine, and a metaphor for modern times and the perils of technology. John Henry, the steel-driving man, wins the classic battle of man vs machine, but he dies doing it. Never to be silenced, his hammer rings out in the sky forever.
Directed and Produced by Mike Edison, who has produced numerous videos for his books and music, John Henry features 50 new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Peter Landau.
Edison has a long history with Peter – they met while they were at art school in New York in the early 1980s, playing in each other’s punk rock bands and generally making a mess. Peter is the consummate New Yorker – he appeared in the film Midnight Cowboy when he was six years old. Later he was the first drummer New York punk horror band White Zombie, and could be seen go-go dancing in the 1980s with storied shock rockers the Lunachicks. More recently he has created a popular series of obituary paintings, hundreds of one-a-day watercolours, which inspired Edison to invite him to collaborate on this retelling of a song that goes back as far as the American Civil War, and has been interpreted by Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, and countless others.
The spectacular editing was handled by long-time Edison collaborator B.A Miale who directed two other videos for the ME & GP project. She is a highly regarded light-artist, video manipulator, and visual magician who has done live light shows for frequent Edison collaborator Jon Spencer, as well as for artists as diverse as Dick Dale, the Black Lips, and the Oh Sees, not to mention runway shows during New York’s fashion week, circus acts, and more. JOHN HENRY by Mike Edison and Guadalupe Plata is more than a music video — at five-plus minutes it is a lyric narrative film, woven with the dark fabric of American myth.
John Henry is also our Song of the Day.
Edison lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Visit him at www.mikeedison.com
Order The Devil Can’t Do You No Harm via Rough Trade: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/mike-edison-and-guadalupe-plata/the-devil-can-t-do-you-no-harm