Magic Mustache Ride

Their name is Bastard, although Orphan seems more apt a handle—for why would any sensible parent lay claim to this mustachioed sausage party? Thankfully, Bastard’s story is a short one. Conceived backstage at Toto concert in Brussels in the spring of 1975, Bastard was the product of a rather strange tryst involving the roadies of opening bands, Bulge and Fanny, a men’s room handicap stall, Robert Plant’s prosthetic, and a female centaur AWOL from a trashy sci-fi paperback. Nine months after the curtain fell, Bastard, propelled by a drummer named Toto (told you!), slithered and oozed onto the pages of Kerrang! (three full years before the magazine began publishing) and into the back-alley cabarets of Hamburg, where, in a moment of true serendipity, they successfully propositioned the very man who awarded them a record deal. The resultant album is the only one emblazoned with the Bastard name and the band’s four-headed dog logo (so many heads, so few balls). The record is notable but for one thing, and that thing has nothing to do with the music on it (no one will actually admit to dropping the needle on this plastic turd, myself included). See the sleazoid second from the left with the porn ’stache and the patches on his jeans? Yeah, that’s right; he tore those swatches from the AIDS quilt and stitched ’em to his crotch. Fuckin' bastard!

Grammar Snacks (Ecstatic Wax Edition)

The Semi-Misunderstood Semicolon

(Starring Captain and Tennille!?)

 I assume most of you know what a semicolon (;) is and where it’s located on the keyboard or touch screen. Most of you also know how it functions in modern-day communications: as the wink in a happy-faced emoticon, right? Yep, Mr. Semicolon is the Captain to Ms. Close Parenthesis’s Tennille. But here’s a little-known fact: the semicolon is actually a punctuation mark that has practical applications in our myriad writings. If that sounds like I’m insulting your intelligence, I’m sorry. It’s just that until he recently found work as one-half (appropriate since the prefix “semi-” means “half”) of the ol’ wink ’n’ smile, the semicolon had long been neglected—even misused.

It’s a story that somewhat mirrors the life of Captain Daryl Dragon. Once a master yachtsman and a helmsman of his own Carnival® poop ship, the Captain had his life forever altered when his prank-pulling first mate stirred some PCP into his morning coffee. With PCP onboard, the Captain determined that he could get to Jamaica faster by steaming his Carnival® cruiser clear through a small Caribbean island occupied by a Sandals® resort instead of going around it. He beached the ship, of course, and had to be forcibly removed from its bridge. (During the melee, the Captain was heard to say, “Don’t tase me, bro!” a full 25 years before it entered the national lexicon.)

Later, the Captain emerged from his angel dust-fueled rampage in the empty Sandals® lounge. Drinking Chablis straight from the box, the now-unemployed Captain, who was also well-known for plying more romantic waters with a few tickles of the ivories, stumbled over to the vacant piano to console himself with a melody.

Arriving early to knock back a few Tropical Breeze® daiquiris prior to her nightly torture fest of torch songs in the Sandals® lounge (where sandals aren’t allowed after 6 p.m.), singer Toni Tennille heard the Captain pounding out a rough but delightfully saccharine melody—the very one that would soon crystallize into the song “Love Will Keep Us Together.” And that is when Capt. Dragon and Toni Tennille consummated pop music’s greatest union as Captain and Tennille.

Unlike the Captain, however, the semicolon prefers not to be a lounge act with the close parenthesis; he simply wants to punctuate sentences—nothing more. But before we can grant him his wish, we must remind ourselves of the semicolon’s proper use. Let the following rules and their corresponding examples guide you.

Use a semicolon to join two independent clauses not joined by a coordinating conjunction. Further, from the Associated Press Stylebook: “…use the semicolon [within a sentence] to indicate a greater separation of thought and information than a comma can convey but less than the separation that a period implies.” For example:

On account of the idiotic yachting hat he always wore while banging on the piano, Daryl Dragon drew the nickname “Captain Keyboard” from the Beach Boys’ Mike Love; because of his penchant for drinking rum excessively and vomiting on women as he serenaded them with “I Get Around,” Mike Love got the nickname “Captain Morgan” from Daryl Dragon.

Besides joining two independent clauses, the semicolon also comes in handy within a sentence containing phrases with other internal punctuation, such as commas. For example:

The Captain shipwrecked his music career following an incident on the Santa Monica Pier involving Alka-Seltzer®, bread, and an unruly audience of seagulls. His career is survived by his wife, Toni Tennille of Long Beach, Calif.; son, Captain Jr. of Daytona Beach, Fla.; drinking buddy, Mike Love of Malibu, Calif.; 341 dorky yachtsman hats; AM radio; and millions of discarded LP records polluting America’s landfills, thrift stores, and rummage sales.

(Dear Mike Love and Daryl Dragon, the above story is a work of fiction. I'm broke anyway, so don't waste your time suing.)

Special thanks to Brieann Gonczy.

Germany's Last Polka

It’s not an everyday occurrence that a truly remarkable album is exhumed from the dusty heaps of discarded vinyl at the thrift store. It’s an even rarer occurrence that an LP of true historical import is rediscovered. Let alone two. Two that are related. Two that tell the long-forgotten tale of the Great Rock ’n’ Roll Wars of the 1950s and ’60s.

So it was one sunny Saturday morning at the local Goodwill as I rummaged the dusty stacks of wax (the platters that seemingly no longer matter) that my dirty fingers flipped to these two LPs: Walt Groller and His Orchestra’s Auf Wiedersehen and the Little German Band’s Auf Geht’s! On the surface, they appear to be your typical oompah party music albums that crossed the ocean from the Fatherland a generation ago, begging for one last polka on the turntable. Yet it takes an astute collector with master’s degree in ethnomusicology (thank you, University of Phoenix®!) such as me to recognize these recordings for what they actually are: crucial documents containing German folk songs, battle hymns, and field recordings inspired by and captured during the Great Rock ’n’ Roll Wars.

What were the Great Rock ’n’ Roll Wars? You might recall that in the 1950s a new strain of popular music sprouted up like pustules on a pubescent face. It was called rock ’n’ roll, a crude, most unwholesome marriage of hillbilly music and rhythm and blues, and it swept through the United States faster than diarrhea in a hot tub. The music was savage, loud and obnoxious and featured prominent use of the electric guitar and drums. It soon inspired mass hysteria among millions of horny degenerates (teenagers) and led to rebellion, chaos and societal collapse. Churches and schools were torched. Planned Parenthoods, liquor stores, massage parlors and marijuana dispensaries sprang up at every corner strip mall. Morals fled north to Alaska. And communists moved into the White House. It was a scary scene to be sure: a once peaceful, verdant, prosperous, Christ-loving nation had been raped and pillaged into a dystopian wasteland.

With flies buzzing America the Carcass, rock ’n’ roll turned its voracious appetite east toward Europe and went swimming.

Across the pond in the old country, Germany, still nursing the self-inflicted wounds and humiliation it sustained both during and after World War II, braced for the onslaught. It was 1957 when American rock ’n’ roll, led by Elvis Presley (a.k.a. Private Pelvis), stormed the western shores of Europe and began its high-decibel charge eastward toward Das Fatherland. Having been crushed and then occupied by the U.S. and its allies, Germany thought that by making a triumphant stand against this nascent musical enemy it might rekindle national pride among the citizenry and reclaim its place as a major player on the world stage. Or any stage for that matter. Even a stage at some local festival involving wiener dogs, warm lager, toten hosen and luft balloons. Indeed, Germany wasn’t about to let such filthy, impure music impregnate its kartoffelpuffer (that’s German for potato pancake, thank you very much).

So the country dispatched its warriors to the Black Forest, the strategy being that the thick vegetation would provide sufficient cover for national forces to surprise and pounce on the unsuspecting invaders. But because the country’s elite soldiers were either dead or still imprisoned (something about crimes against humanity committed during WWII), Germany’s leaders were forced to draft its accordion-wielding yodelers, all 249,000 of them, to do battle. It was a decision that wrought disastrous consequences, but at the time, the entire country rallied behind its leaders as they held out hope that their unconventional militia would triumph.

This brings us to the records this post serves to highlight. The first record shown above, Auf Wiedersehen by Walt Groller and His Orchestra, depicts an actual scene of an oompah band sending Germany’s heroes off to war on the wings of a high-tempo waltz and bright, soaring notes, a most fitting Auf Wiedersehen for sure. Meanwhile, the second album, Auf Geht’s! by the Little German Band, meanwhile, shows members of an elite accordion battalion hiking into the Black Forest (and toward their certain deaths).

What transpired on the battlefield was gruesome. Germany fought, and fought valiantly. For 20 minutes. Emerging from the cover of the Black Forest for pre-battle polka pep rally, the accordionists were ambushed by the sound of a million guitars roaring from a mountain of Marshall stacks. They were overwhelmed, blown back, unable to match the amplified barrage with their feeble squeezeboxes, whose cumbersome shape and heavy weight impeded and ultimately prohibited a hasty retreat back into forest. When the cliché dust settled, the smoke parted, and the last yodels and accordion farts echoed into the past, a quarter million men lay in a bloody, smoking heap, their lederhosen in tatters, accordions destroyed. I won’t go into detail about how rock ’n’ roll celebrated their victory, except to say that they made sandwiches of their adversaries, hence the name of Black Forest Ham. 

With Germany out of the way, rock conquered Europe, and the rest of the globe soon surrendered, as billions of people from all nations raised their horned hands in unison to salute to their new leader. I can only imagine what the world might have been had polka successfully stood up to the rock ’n’ roll aggressors. Suffice it to say it would have been a better place. Just because.

Should you happen across these records in your archaeological digs in the vinyl mines of Goodwill, know that you’re holding a piece of important history, about a war everyone else has either forgotten or never known about.

Of Flat Surf and Beached Boys

The 50-year-old Beach Boys consummated their golden jubilee this week with the release of a new studio album, That’s Why God Made the Radio (the Almighty does not make radios, by the way)—the first Beach Boys album to include both Brian Wilson (a.k.a. the hero) and Mike Love (a.k.a. the villain) in more than—shit, I don’t know—many years. Detractors will say this album, like the band’s concurrent reunion tour, is a blatant cash-grab, that it sounds less like a rejuvenated band with its creative powers restored than a reanimated corpse in tattered beach wear. Gosh, people can be so cynical. Indeed, the Beach Boys' endless summer may have ended long ago, but they prove in all their geriatric glory that they can hang 10 (and brains) in the winter of their years. Well, except for the ones who are still dead. Anyway, as I prepare to bask in the radiating glory of wobbly old men hobbling around on stage in Bermuda shorts and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts for one last go-around, I can cite hundreds of reasons why That’s Why God Made the Radio (again, God didn’t invent the radio; God merely tolerated its creation) justifies its existence. Allow me to share some of those reasons with you today.

That’s Why God Made the Radio deserves its existence and your dwindling disposable income because:

There’s nothing sweeter than being serenaded by paunchy septuagenarians puttering around in baseball caps.

In his catatonic, drooling state, Brian is still a genius.

Unlike Smile, That’s Why God Made the Radio is sodden with relatable lyrics.

Pining for the same simple things—summer, sun, cars, waves and babes—50 years later is cute. Or pathetic.

Empty, cynical nostalgia for a phony Southern California dream is deeply moving.

Brian’s fragile psyche makes this collection very poignant. (The same has also been said about every Brian Wilson-related recording since 1967—even his infamous “Smart Girls” rap song.)

The California Raisins haven’t made an album in over 20 years.

The gift shop at the Zuma Beach Shack Motel Resort and RV Rental needs a new soundtrack.

The hopelessly behind-the-times Beach Boys are timeless.

The Beach Boys think the kids are still buying albums.

It’s important to remember that as the ocean is deep the Beach Boys are shallow.

A Guy with Kaleidescope Pipes

I bought this album for its cover. Look at it: It comes in colors, everywhere. It’s like a rainbow. In fact, it’s a bright psychedelic lovefest of colors, a cross between the Kinks’ Face to Face and the Chocolate Watch Band’s No Way Out. And check out Virgil Fox: He has pipes sprouting from his head. And that bow tie, might it have belonged to the Electric Prunes? While Into the Classics: Meditations and Sonic Spectaculars may have psychedelic connotations in the title, this is no psychedelic record. It wasn’t even released in the ’60s, during the psychedelic era, but the early ’70s. Virgil Fox plays the Aeolian-Skinner Organ—without accompaniment. And he’s not guiding you on a wild magic carpet ride into new sonic and sensory realms; he's taking you to church. Yep, Virgil was letting the flowers of his imagination sprout not in some incense-clouded harem, but in some incense-clouded cathedral. On this album, he sticks to the classics, working his dizzy fingers through Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Bohm. Psychedelic or not, his choice of material is inspired, his performance superlative. Just imagine yourself seated alone one lazy summer afternoon in the cool comfort of a gothic cathedral, the sun gleaming through stained-glass windows, letting dusty rays of beautiful colors shower down on you as you take in Virgil’s virtuosity. This record may venture down some well-trodden paths, but with a little imagination, you can set your sights for the center of the sun.

I wrote this piece a few years back. I pulled it out of mothballs (and gave it an editorial bath) after listening to Fox’s record on my hi-fi last week.

Wretched Records and Crappy Covers

This record goes to show that you can stuff a schlock-slinging goober into a leather jacket and put him on a motorcycle and he’ll still be a schlock-slinging goober. When kids tore the wrapping paper from this record on Christmas Day, where their parents saw good, clean, rockin’ fun, they saw a literal and figurative square.

This was released hot on the heels of Ruth Welcome's worldwide smash hit, Lo-Fi Lute.

Sadly, ol’ Dizzy Fingers never made another record. While promoting his LP in Africa, Cope was gunned down by ivory poachers who wanted his teeth.

“Hey, boys, before tonight’s gig, why don’t you say we all head down to the Sears Portrait Studio for our album close-up? We can shop for Toughskins afterward.” This so-called auspicious debut is so good that the LP’s original owner didn’t crack the seal—no doubt to keep it “mint.”

For every new album being stamped on wax these days there seems to be several more being reissued. Somehow I don’t think this record will ever get its 180-gram colored vinyl deluxe redux. Call it a hunch.

California Raisins: Still Ripe After All These Years

We’ve all been hearing about the existential and aesthetical crises besieging the music industry these days. It’s scary out there. Rampant illegal downloading, collapsing CD sales, shuttering retail stores, Lana Del Ray, that mystery substance seen running down Christina Aguilera’s leg at Etta James’s funeral, and now Whitney Houston’s death on the eve of the perhaps the most impotent, I mean important, music event of the year, the Grammys. Oh, the Grammys. Admit it, you watch it. Remember how you cheered when Natalie Cole beat out Nirvana for album of the year in 1992 by duetting with her dead dad? Unforgettable!

Today’s apocalyptic collapse reminds me of a time, not long ago, when the music industry last found itself teetering on the brink. It was the late 1980s. Michael Jackson was busy erecting Neverland. Madonna was making great films. Bono was brainstorming ways to exploit the AIDS crisis in Africa. Phil Collins was opening tanning salons across the U.K. Unsure their leading lights would ever return to the spotlight, label heads, industry insiders and that vampiric U.S. lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), met secretly in a White House bunker brainstorming a plan to save their jobs and restore their six-figure bonuses. Their solutions: Kip Winger and Milli Vanilli. Strokes of genius to be sure, but those short-term fixes would prove to be long-term headaches the beleaguered industry had not anticipated. Milli Vanilli were outed as fakes, and the popularity of Winger’s “She’s Only 17” had the unintended effect of causing an increase in statutory rape cases through middle America.

Meanwhile, Ahmet Ertegun, who had co-founded Atlantic Records and who, along with his brother, Nesuhi, had presided over some of the greatest recordings of all time from John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, Buffalo Springfield, Led Zeppelin and John Astley, was quietly nurturing a new act behind the scenes, a young yet wrinkled group of musicians bent on launching a back-to-basics revival of pop music. That act was the California Raisins.

Having successfully reintroduced America to the poop-stimulating wonders of rotten grapes via one of the most unforgettable advertising campaigns in history, the California Raisins, composed of Stretch, Beebop, A.C. and Red, sought to capitalize on their meteoric rise to fame. Now that they were in the spotlight—they weren’t about to wither; they’re raisins after all! They entertained sitcom offers, clothing deals, merchandising agreements, attaching their image to line of best-selling colon-cleansing products, including Super Colon Blow cereal. Alas, none of those things held much appeal. The California Raisins wanted to perform; they wanted to make music; they wanted to be onstage. The desire for rotted grapes, whether boxed in snack-sized portions or harvested in various states of decay from dumpsters, was surpassed only by the demand for a legitimate vinyl release of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the song heard in all the TV and radio ads.

The interest was not surprising. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was a song that represented so much promise when Marvin Gaye first recorded it 20 years earlier. But his version fell well short of the upper reaches of the pop charts. The problem was that Gaye wasn’t a grape, or a raisin. He lacked the emotional intuition, conviction, not to mention street cred, needed to transform the song into transcendental masterpiece.

Atlantic Records boss Ertegun recognized this and seized the opportunity of packaging the California Raisins into a pop music snack that would not only flush the bowels of a constipated music industry, but also delight and nourish music fans for decades to come. He invited the Raisins to his Los Angeles home studio under the auspices of having them record some low-key demos. He simply instructed them to have fun, play around with their favorite tunes, explore the space, etc. Later, if all went well, he’d sign them and bankroll the production of a proper studio album.

The California Raisins didn’t need to test the waters; their chemistry was undeniable, their musicianship unbelievable, their deliciousness unbeatable. They were ready. Nevertheless, they indulged Ertegun, and went about recording a dozen or so songs, including a stripped-down take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” In the small basement studio, the Raisins worked fast, faster than the raisin’s effect on the human digestive system. Within an hour, they delivered an album’s worth of songs with a working titled of Led Zeppelin 1. Ertegun was stunned by what he heard. The Raisins’ recordings of “Green Onions,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Cool Jerk” could no longer be claimed by the forgettable artists who originally “popularized” them. No, these songs, especially the searing reworking of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” now belonged to the California Raisins.

Released in 1988, the Raisins’ debut LP, now titled Meet the Raisins, bowed at No. 1 and stayed there for three years. Every song on the album, including the studio outtakes, rehearsals, false starts and abandoned demos, topped the singles’ charts. In fact, for three straight weeks in 1989, all 40 songs in America’s Top 40 belonged to the California Raisins. The Raisins won a record 78 Grammys in three years. And their debut album was so good that it won Best Album three-straight years.

Everywhere they went, the Raisins were mobbed by fans—the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Beatles. But the Raisins soon grew spoiled, figuratively speaking of course. Legend has it that they required that all raisins be removed from the trail mix and raisin bran they ate backstage. While the Raisins weren’t about to eat their own, raisin consumption throughout the world was such that grapes were no longer used for wine, juice, jelly or even grapes. To keep up with demand all harvested grapes were dehydrated and rotted into raisins. Naturally, greenhouse gasses quadrupled, setting off some pretty catastrophic environmental catastrophes across the globe. Oceans, rivers and lakes all turned brown. Cloud formations now consisted mostly of methane. Humans now had to submit to monthly emissions checks. And the smell, oh the smell.

Finally, the backlash came in 1992. We won’t get into all the details, scandals and betrayals here—not today at least. Suffice it to say, the sweet sun-ripened treat turned foul, its shelf life expired. And that was that. The California Raisins were no more—and were never to be seen in public, together or separately, again.

Now, some 20 years later, with the music industry again spiraling down the toilet bowl, who better than the California Raisins to flush out the toxins and bring about a renaissance? Sadly, the Grammys blew a huge opportunity last Sunday. Following Whitney Houston’s death, the Grammy people should have asked the Raisins to perform in her place so that, just as pioneering Natalie Cole did with her deceased Nat King Cole, the California Raisins could have duetted with a jumbo-tron animation of Whitney Houston. They could have sung a medley of Houston favorites, including “I’m Every Raisin,” “I Wanna Dance with Some Raisin” and her signature signature “I Will Always Love Raisins.” It would have been a poignant tribute—as well as an effective passing of the torch. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye (or nose—ah, cocaine) in the audience. And it would have been the most watched, instead of the second-most watched, Grammys ever.

And so the question remains: when can we expect the second coming of the California Raisins? Only Stretch, Beebop, A.C. and Red know for sure.