IF IT PAYS TO BEAT A DEAD HORSE WITH A SPATULA, THEN THAT'S GOOD ADVERTISING !

Wow! Bizarre. This and the next ad are from around 1890!

But, as Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

What the heck does this ad mean? Copy reads;
"Be Grateful For That Plateful
American chow,
is better right now,
than millions abroad have been getting,
So it gives us a pain,
when people complain,
at the table Uncle Sam is setting!"
Smoothness, one of the 5 Crowns is force-feeding peas and mashed potatoes to "Toughness the Wanter".The other 5 Crowns; Flavor, Lightness, Body & Richness watch, peeking from behind a partly opened door. This ad is from the 1940s.

Copy reads, "Should a Gentleman offer a Tiparillo to a Librarian?"
Nowadays, a naked librarian would be embarrassed to be seen smoking in public.

Copy reads: "Know why Wolfschmidt Vodka's making such a splash? Because it's the only vodka that's won 33 medals!"
"When I hear that I feel like shouting Bloody Mary!"
What kind of medals do vodkas win? Apparently that's none of our business. In the late 1960's most people still believed you shouldn't eat within an hour before swimming, but apparently alcohol consumption was practically recomended. 
  

BACK FROM THE GRAVE Rockin' 1966 Punkers!

          I love compilation CDs of impossibly obscure, great old singles. These compilations allow a cheapskate geek like me to own hundreds and hundreds of ultra – cool songs without having to waste the money and time that collector geeks spend to score the original old records.

          In the area of 60’s rock ‘n’ roll, the Nuggets and Pebbles series get the lion’s share of critical attention. Every Pebbles disc has at least  three or four mind blowing classics, and the first two Nuggets boxes are sheer ambrosia. My favorite however, is the Back From The Grave series. While Pebbles and Nuggets intermix garage band trash (That’s a compliment!) with psychedelia*, folk rock* and full - blown pop music productions**, “Back From the Grave” never veers from pure, sinister, ultra primitive, demonic, garage band trash! Before the more common term “garage band rock ‘n’ roll” took over, this type of music was referred to as “60’s punk”, and these comps show the accuracy of that term! You won’t think for one second that any of these musicians are professionals or over the age of twenty at the most. (And that’s the way rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be!!!) On the CDs there are five volumes, numbering 1 through 4, then skipping to #8. (There were eight original vinyl double - record volumes, the contents of which can fit into five digital discs, so apparently the fifth CD is listed as the “eighth”  as a sign of completeness.) Each of these CDs contains between 29 & 32 songs!

       These songs have to be heard to be believed, but I can’t resist trying to describe a few. On Volume One; “Jack the Ripper” by The One Way Streets, in which the singer is out in the slum after dark in the age of the Ripper murders. The song is something of a call and response, with the lead singing things like “Now I hear my mother calling me”, followed by the band shouting “Jack the Rippa! Jack the Rippa!”. He needn’t have worried – at the end of the song he realizes he is Jack the Ripper. The lyrics (but not the wild music) of “Surfside Date” by The Triumphs is a great, sarcastic fun – in – the- sun parody; “We’ll take a dip in the waves / Like sun – ripened surfside slaves / After that usual razzamatazz / I’ll take you home and all that jazz / We’ve had a surfside date!” When someone unearthed it years later, they assumed “The Crusher” by The Novas featured the TV wrestler The Crusher on lead vocals. However, it was really a 300 pound 16 year old boy imitating “the great athlete”. The lyrics go along the lines of, ”Do the hammer lock, Do the hammer lock, Do the hammer lock you turkey - necks, everybody do it now. ROAR!!! Do the eye gouge, Do the eye gouge, Do the eye gouge you turkey necks etc.)

          Volume Two is just as great – among the many highlight is “Willie the Wild One” by Willie the Wild One. According to the song, the guy drives a motor cycle and has long purple hair. After singing the verses he likes to holler masochistically “AW – SUFFER!” Oddly, Conrad Birdie, the Elvis parody character in the wholesome Broadway play “Bye, Bye Birdie” frequently yells that during one of his songs, after which the girls all swoon.  

            The insanity is unabated through Volumes Three & Four. The former kicks off with a gloriously tacky, hyperactive organ riff from “In the Hall of the Mountain King” introducing the great “Stormy” by The Jesters of Newport”; “ I love you girl, but you’ll never adore me / You’re like the ocean / You’re stormy”. “Nonymous” by The Treytones sports the lyric, “Had a blind date the other night / She looked like the loser of a hatchet fight!” The song is unrelenting until the band stops on a dime after the lead singer shouts “That’s it! I Quit!”

            The latter has “The Snails’ Love Song” by The Snails. The band plays the same four note R&B riff over and over again, while the vocalist (an ultra nerdy looking white teenage boy – pictured in the CDs booklet) does a James Brown type rap: “Yeh, we’re the snails, (“audience” cheers) over here is Mister Randy Corley on gee-tar (“audience” cheers)” Apparently the band invited about a dozen friends into the studio to create a party atmosphere -- punctuated by cheers from the audience and calls for sandwiches! Volume four also includes two songs by The Spiders, Alice Cooper’s original teen garage band!

          By the way, the same label, Crypt, that released Back From the Grave, also released two volumes of Garage Punk Unknowns. Every one of the 31 songs on Volume One is great. It includes great Mersey Beat style remakes of Bobby Vinton’s Roses are Red My Love, and

Frankie Lane

’s Jezebel. It’s every bit as great as the first four volumes of Back from… and beats that series’ lackluster Volume Eight all to hell. Garage Punk Unknowns Vol. One is a tad less wild than that other series – perhaps that warranted a different title in the producer’s minds. Like Back From 8, Volume Two of Garage Punk Unknowns is a disappointment too, except for The Little Boy Blues remake of The Yardbirds remake of Tiny Bradshaw’s R&B classic “Train Kept A Rollin’”. It features the wild, rewritten lyric, “She was a heifer, and I’m a real gone stud!” I recommend getting the song on the vastly superior Pebbles Volume 10.

      

         

* (not that there’s anything wrong with it)

** (not that there’s anything wrong with ‘em)

World's Weirdest Comic Books Pt.1

From the creators of Shazam! (aka Cpt. Marvel) came "Fatman the Flying Saucer" (no. 1 April, 1967). Van Crawford saved the life of an extraterrestrial. The grateful E.T. gave Van a chocolate drink that would transform him into a flying saucer. Van teams up with Lucious Pindle, a thin teenager alias The Tinman.
In issue one (was there ever an issue 2?) Anti-Man (who is similar to The Creature From the Black Lagoon) is hell bent on destruction of the human race, since they have destroyed his race, leaving him the last of his kind. Before any real destruction can be done, anti-man's battle-ax wife shows up and tells him he needs to support their 5,000 tadpoles. She explains that "Every time he gets hopped up on seaweed juice", he goes around claiming he's the last of the species.

Of course, Elsie is the mascot of Borden Foods, and her husband Elmer is the namesake of  Elmer's glue. This November 1949 comic is about their domestic adventures with their children Beulah and Beauregard. In one story, Elmer is shrunk down to the size of a mouse by Beauregard's chemistry set. The mice tell him they would prefer cheese rather than the bacon he puts in their mouse traps.Surprisingly, this is the only pro-dairy product statement in the book. 

A parody of the Johnson administration. Ladybird as Wonder Woman is hilarious. (1966)

(June 2004) These guys spend a lot of long, lonely nights on the road. One night, despite their being in denial, old mother nature takes her course, and the duo begin an ongoing homosexual relationship. (The smell of Petey's socks drive Butch insane with desire, and cupids fill their tawdry hotel room.) They begin seeing penis shapes everywhere they look.  To confirm to themselves that they "hate the fags", the two engage in a killing spree, mass murdering homosexuals. (Hey -- I said these were weird!)

This is the first in an on-going series I will do whenever I can't come up with anything else to do.
 

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- The Mesopotamians

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- "All about the public acceptance of fragile ideas."

          Last Sunday, October 30, I saw They Might Be Giants perform at The Englert Theatre in Iowa City, Iowa. I am used to seeing bluegrass bands, where five or six people come out with acoustic instruments and blow the audience away with nothing more than their pure musical virtuosity. TMBG’s huge, rear – screen projections, dozens of colored light effects, disco mirror ball & dry ice fog struck me as a bit of culture shock. (I was a bit prepared for it, because their show was like this when I saw them in person ten years ago.) My unavoidable reaction – “is this about dazzling an audience with special effects, or is it about MUSIC & IDEAS?”  I enjoyed the show, but felt it was seriously lacking content. Happily, I would be proven wrong as the night progressed.

           Surprisingly, just as they had done ten years ago, the band played “Fingertips” in it’s entirety. “Fingertips” is 20 separate, utterly disjointed song fragments ranging from about 10 to 20 seconds in length. An audience member who has never heard the original  “Apollo 18” CD would have absolutely no idea what was going on during this. Hey – I’ve owned the album for something like 20 years, and I still have absolutely no idea what was going on during this.

            Well into the show, John Flansburgh made a valuable comment – “This show is about the public acceptance of fragile ideas.” Shortly after this, one of them stated that it was time for The (somebody?) and (somebody?) Show”. (the vocals during the music were perfectly amplified, but when the guys were speaking, their voices were often so distorted they were incomprehensible.) Anyway, the guys had a small camera they could use to project a live image of the audience on the huge rear screen. They turned this camera around and performed a puppet show projected on the screen, featuring a pair of somewhat linty looking, knitted, googly eyed puppets. Even though I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying, the concept itself was hilarious and charming, and it completely won me over for the rest of the show.

          NOW I understood what they were doing! They were using all their high – tech gadgetry to strong-arm a rock audience into accepting their “fragile ideas”. To perform a puppet show in the middle of a wild rock concert is “a fragile idea”. Their stubborn insistence on performing the utterly incoherent “Fingertips” was a “fragile idea”.

          Throughout the evening, They performed “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, “Snail Shell”, “Ana Ng”, “Dead” (remember, “I returned a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date etc.”) and many others. At some point they performed their mind boggling new song “Cloisonné” with John Linnell playing a huge bass saxophone. Now, a week later, I don’t quite remember when certain songs were performed in the show. Hey, I go to a show to enjoy it, not to take notes! Anyway, towards the end of the show, Linnell finally got out the accordion, to joyous applause from all. They performed their classic “Triangle Man”. The show proper ended with the anthemic “The Mesopotamians”.    

            For the first of two encores, they performed “If I Was A Girl”, as a duet, with both guys on vocals and Linnell’s accordion the only instrument. (Most of the show had Linnell and Flansburgh backed by a four piece rock band.) They performed one of my all time favorites, the jazzy “Lie Still Little Bottle” with Linnell on bass sax, Flansburgh improvising on a portable little electronic noise making machine (fragile idea, anyone?), and another band member on keyboards. The first encore ended with the rather anti – climactic “Why Won’t You Die?’

           The second encore got off to a rousing start with the standard, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, and ended with an equally rousing “Hi, We’re The Replacements”. So, They Might Be Giants ended their show by introducing themselves as a different band! I think that would be yet another of this bands’ fragile ideas.