Obviously Halloween

So, okay, it's been a while, because I had three different albums lined up to post and they all looked promising, but like ten minutes into the first sides I caught myself staring at the turntable with that sadness that puppies have when you tell them that you're actually a cat-person and they have to leave. Many, many times albums that aesthetically seem ridiculously awesome turn out to actually devour both your time AND expectations in an aural frenzy of really boring shit.

One of these was Woody Woodbury's "First Annual Message from the President of the Booze Is the Only Answer Club" from 1960. 

Woody was or maybe even still is a comedian who specialized in drinking-humor - not to be confused with those comedians whose routine was playing drunk while doing their act - which is basically telling an audience of drinkers that drinking is just great, so I feel the routine is a little limited. The album here is made up of a live recording in Florida where Woodbury pretty much just wanders the crowd asking rather tame questions and hopes for the drunks to fill in for the laughs. It's failing hard on my ears but I dunno; different types of humor are for the most part only funny in the era they came from, excluding the very talented work. 

A shame, as the LP comes in an amazing package; a shiny gold gatefold-box holds everything, including a small catalogue that features other albums on the label, a newsletter, and a little 130-page paperback full of jokes and "witticisms", set into a separator that sits above the vinyl. I's love to know the stat's for this - what the production cost was and how well it sold, if there was a profit made, etc. 

Hmmm. Okay, just did a quick Wikipedia visit and went to WW's official website, and it's pretty fascinating! Click here to check the gallery section out! Might have to do a piece on the guy after all!

And the otheralbums I may mention in the next posts, but right now I'll do the obviousest thing and put up a goddamn Halloween sound-effects LP. (Seriously, I just ran out of Halloween-themed stuff, and while I'd love to post some old Misfits, it's just too done to death by others)

So this is "Sounds to Make You Shiver!" on kid's label Pickwick. Good and weird cover-art. Cheap-ass effects.
Side 1 is "A Night in a Haunted House", and you'll realize a few minutes in that the owners should really close the windows - the wind blowing through the place in insane. It's actually not a bad listen, and the mish-mash of everything is so non-linear it can really get your imagination running around wondering what the exact hell is happening.

The second side is shorter chops of separate effects, many you'll recognize from the first side. The "Cats" and "Dogs" tracks, well, they're human-made cat and dog noises. Ask your friend to meow and it'll pretty much be better than this, but nowhere near as spooky, I guess. Back-cover!!:

Download:  

A Night in a Haunted House
Blood-trembling, skin-curdling effects

100% Undiluted

Pretty much a staple on "weird album cover" sites, this simple but striking LP art catches most off-guard and produces at least a few laughs caused most likely by unclear or confused connotations; for one - "lesbian concentrate", which conjures up all sorts of impressions. Two - ...well, no, I think that finishes it.  

It is, of course, a visual spin on a can of Minute Maid frozen concentrate orange juice, with some condensation rippling the bottom and oranges on the side made into the "Venus" symbol, BUT WHAT THE HELL DOES ORANGE JUICE HAVE TO DO WITH LESBIANS!? I hear you profanity-laced-screaming at your monitor (the walls are thin in this building)(hey, Greg.). After all, something you're not familiar with can be pretty damn funny.

When I was younger, my hetero-male and media-fed imagination only brought up two dissimilar forms of imagery when the L-word was ever passed through my ear canals and those of course were A) boyish creatures with shag haircuts that hated men with such hate and B) super-hot porn-action!! and as time wore on I learned that the media likes high-contrast stereotypes for whatever evil reasons and most lesbians are neither seething cauldrons of rage bent on castration-sprees nor walking XXX-DVD covers, which was a great relief as I just can't handle either of those types of people. And I'd later become good friends with several lesbian couples and have dinners and movie-nights and stuff.

Another thing I did when I was younger was listen to the Dead Kennedys, which was awesome. And somewhere in the seemingly mountainous reams of information (translated into punkese via hardcore rhythms, scathing satire-rage lyrics and dada-esque photo-collages) contained in the DK's magazine-size inserts and booklets in the albums there was a picture of Hollywood screen-star and songstress Anita Bryant. Covered in pie.

Deciding that if it was worth Jello Biafra's derision, I had to know more. 

During the '60s, Anita sang her way through music charts, sorta like a female Pat Boone (or vice versa) with innocuous pop tunes and some country stuff and religious things. 1969, she becomes the spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. She also gets more religiousafied, in that bad way that makes some of them filter their 'discomfort' with gayness through like two misinterpreted lines out of a 12,000,000-line book, and started to proudly denounce a good chunk of humanity as 'less-than'.

So that wasn't good. 

Some people have problems with other people, and that's fine. When those problems are based on misinformation and fear, then we move out of the 'fine' area, and when someone has a modicum of authority/fame and uses that to impart their imaginary moral high-ground to the masses, then someone named Tom Higgins just might smash your face with a banana-cream pie.
Boycott-time, and the LGBT community hit the OJ market hard, gaining huge support through celebrities like Barbra Streisand and from the beginning of all this there came out this album from the national women's recording label (Olivia) with a plain white cover and a mocking can of orange juice as one more slap in Anita's face.
So there you have it! I sort of get an anti-climactic feeling now after knowing the context of the cover art, though; kind of deflates the WTF-ness and wonder of it all, but makes up for it twice over in historical context.

Musically, I was wrong about this album; I owned it for years with only a smattering of chords from each track listened to when first getting it and then somewhere down the line I mentally mixed it up with one of the other lesbian LPs I have and thought it was all bad folk-music (a lot of bad folk came out in 70's DIY). Until I recently - wait, yeah - today, tried ripping it to the PC and found out it's pretty cool. Some funk, some folk, some spoken word, most of the lyrics are awesome and the first track, "Don't Pray for Me" being a scathing rebuttal/attack on Mme. Bryant ("Stop quoting scriptures out of context, to stir up feelings of bigotry!"), followed by the track "Nina" which I thought was about Nina Simone, who as it turns out was not exactly a supporter of all that is gay, but nope. That track is performed by Meg Christian, who I also happen to have an album by and is also the very first LP that the Olivia label put out in '74. Amazing voice. 

So there ya go: a seemingly-silly album jacket with some very strong stuff underneath that was a lending hand in the LGBT equality movement. Like I said, I tried to rip my copy, but it turns out it's pretty trashed with skips & everything, so I grabbed a copy from the Internet Archive and it includes the front & back covers as well as liner notes and inserts. Check it out, very worth it! And here's a page that has the covers and inserts and lyrics (included in the dl below).

Track list:

A1 Linda Tillery - Don't Pray for Me

A2 Meg Christian - Nina

A3 Teresa Trull - Prove It on Me Blues

A4 Cris Williamson - Sweet Woman

A5 Judy Grahn - A History of Lesbianism

A6 Berkeley Women's Music Collective - Gay and Proud

A7 Sue Fink - Leaping Lesbians

B1 Gwen Avery - Sugar Mama

B2 BeBe K'Roche - Kahlua Mama

B3 Mary Watkins - No Hiding Place

B4 Pat Parker - For Straight Folks...

B5 Meg Christian - Ode to a Gym Teacher

B6 Teresa Trull - Woman-Loving Women

 

Download:
Juice!  (contains image-files of front and back covers, liner notes and inserts)

Bat Pie; The Crown City Four - Sing a Song of Sickness

I first saw the cover to this like 12-15 years ago on some "weird LP art" site and it always freaked me out a bit with it's Charles Addams-like illustration of a couple of creepy beatnik-types gazing lovingly over a giant pie as a small colony of bats erupt from the pastry into the evil-scientist-like lab settings.

Add to this the title of "Sing a Song of Sickness" and I totally needed to find this and see what the hell was up. It HAD to be disturbing; how could you look at this cover and not be intrigued? So many questions: what are their intentions? Why is the pie crust seemingly liquid? Why is the boy gnawing on the table? Is this some sort of visual allegory for a joke common in the early sixties? What the fuck?
Well - many, many years later and I found it somewhere. I can't remember where I lucked out on this sort-of-rarity, but I probably got a vinyl-geek hard-on and had to walk away from the wherever-it-was slightly bent over.
When I flipped it and looked at the back cover my expectations faltered a bit on seeing a caricature of four clean-cut smiling lads' heads caught in a swirl of musical notes, and their group name going by The Crown City Four. I was enough of a record-nerd by this point that these two signifiers would bring me to an album of barbershop-quartet music. But I had hope.

Nope... hope's dashed; it's barbershop-quartet music.
I don't have enough hyperbole or adjectives or adjectival hyperbole (aside: when I was a kid, I thought for years that this was pronounced "hyper-bowl", and that's the most interesting fact in the entire world) in my system to convey my pure dismissal of this form of music.
BUT! with song titles like Watch World War Three (on Pay TV) and The Annual Get-Together of the KKK and the NAACP, this had to have some merit, and yeah okay it does.

In case you're unfamiliar with what the hell barbershop quartet music is, it's quite obviously four guys singing. And they have a closely dynamic harmonic range, baritone to tenor, or however deep-to-high voices are done up (no castratos here), and it's usually acapella but these boys have the instruments going sometimes. And not just boys. Two tracks have a female solo vocalist, the funnier track being I Saw Adolph Today, the tale of a woman seeing the nefarious dictator working behind the counter of a Jewish deli after falling on hard times.  Yes, it's all pretty much black humor dressed up in wholesome-sounding b-shop-q flavors, and it works for the most part, especially if you know what the hell they're singing about.

Dated from the early-1960's, these guys had a previous album out on the PIP label entitled Smash Flops and it looks as if it had the same amount of Robert Colbert-like satire as this one does. Here's a portion of the back cover, go ahead and click the thing.

And as far as the title is concerned, the term "sick" had a small hold on the American vernacular for a minute - books like Jules Feiffer's "SICK SICK SICK" from '58 and Lenny Bruce's "The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce" from '59 being examples. I'm not exactly sure of the context, but I don't think it's the same as today's usage where it means really, really keen.

Track listing:

A1     Watch World War III (On Pay TV)     2:14
A2     Fill Out The Policies, Mother     2:06
A3     The Annual Get-Together (Of The KKK And The NAACP)     1:38
A4     Guillotine Days     3:05
A5     Fifty Million Commies Can't Be Wrong     1:43
A6     That Big Sporting House In The Sky     2:59
B1     It's Fun To Be Hazed     1:56
B2     Oh What We Grow (In Old Mexico)     3:02
B3     Send The Girls Over There     1:48
B4     I Saw Adolph Today     1:53
B5     The Richer They Are (The Slower I Cure Them)     2:21
B6     Leave The Slums Alone

Download here:
SICKNESS

(PS - Went through all previous entries and added track listings where needed. No idea why this never occurred to me before. No - I'm not OCD with typing tracks out and measuring the times; they're merely copy-pasted from music-sites. Also added nice green "download here" prompts.)

Seduction Through Witchcraft (and your pet turtle)

Unrequited love is like being buried alive in a heart-shaped coffin.

YES I'm going through this AGAIN so I'm gonna bleed here for a bit and I just hope it's not too cringe-inducing for those happy souls entwined in the blissful embrace of some form of relationship that isn't sour yet that is more awesome than anything and certainly better than this chicken & capellini in homemade sauce made from the tears of the clearly unwanted and dined on alone in an empty apartment that mocks my existence with hollow echoes of utter, utter solitude.

Haha - just kidding. I have a cat, it's not that empty (the mocking continues, however).

Months of correspondence with someone who is an 80% match with my twisted soul and I was reading her all wrong so big deal, it's my fault for wishing too much and JESUS when that oxytocin starts pumping through your system like nitro in a dragster's fuel lines (see last entry) the mind goes completely batshit with infatuation-fantasies and damn I feel stupid now. But not really, because it's all very human and we all go through it and blah blah blah and honestly I've done this so many times in my life I actually have a planned schedule on how to survive the bombed-emotions process in a complicated chart that helps immeasurably. Okay, it's actually a big photo of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Same thing.

I'VE WRITTEN A POEM ABOUT IT ! READ IT NOW !

soliloquy into a dead phone

I want to experience life with you;

drink beer with you,

walk down terrible alleys in the rain with your hand in mine,

hear you sneeze from another room,

miss you when you're out,

wonder about a look you gave me the other day,

ride in a cab with you,

fall asleep with you in a booth in the Ovaltine Cafe
    only to be shaken awake by an aggravated waitress.

hold your hair back as you vomit in the toilet.

place a surprised smile of yours in the palm of eternity

and smell cigarette smoke in your hair.

I want to bring you tea when you're sick in bed (with a spike of whiskey obviously),

see you cry to know you're human and be shaken to the core by it,

and feel your heartbeat with my ear to your breast.

I want to taste something you've made, seen something you've created, be a part of your history

 and

crumble to dust in our old age together knowing this hasn't all

 been some sort of mistake.

Now was that so bad?

I haven't given up hope, though, and thankfully before passing out hideously drunk and naked halfway through my door into the hallway of the lobby last night I dug this thing out of my collection and prepared to woo her back through falsitudes and Satan, probably. Apparently I still need a special type of beetle and a live turtle though so maybe I'll do it next week.

And, yes, of course I'm kidding; if I can't win over the Morticia to my Gomez, the Connie to my Dee Dee Ramone, the Poison Ivy to my Lux Interior, the Mallory to my Mickey purely with my wit and charm then I'll just OH GOD I'M GOING TO DIE ALONE! 

So here we have something that has seen other music blogs before but so what it's awesome.

 

Keep in mind that the last of the sixties into the mid-seventies was rife with activities and such that you'd be arrested for (probably) today; morally, the USA was like Weimar Berlin in this 5-to-6 year period, but way tackier and culturally-benign in comparison. Butterfly-collared Sammy Davis Jr. and Jayne Mansfield partying down with Anton LaVey? C'mon.
Recorded in 1969 by the world's only "Officially Appointed Official Witch" (it's true), this gem of echoey weirdness will ensure you get some form of love from somebody somewhere - perhaps in an orgy - if you do the exact steps necessary for what it is you're looking for. If that sounds vague, take a look at the tracks on the album;

The Self Fascination Ritual for Increased Power
The Isis Full Moon Ring for Magical Protection
The Demon Spell for Energy
Orgies: A Tool of Witchcraft
Sun Sign Amulets for Spiritual Protection
The Coleopterous Charm for Romantic Adventure
The Turkish Bean Spell for Tender Love
Seduction Spells From Around the World
The Emotional Bondage Spell
The Earthquake Spell for Unwanted Lovers
Witches and Wizzards

Yeah and there's no way in hell you're not listening to this. And play on some windy half-drunk night preferably inside a pentagram (which historically is NOT 'satanic' so there) with wild animals scampering about and for christ's sake buy a cloak already.

Download here:
Seduction Through Witchcraft 

(There's click/hiss in the first few tracks, but removed thereafter)

And check out her site! (Looks like it hasn't been updated since '03)

I'm off to sob uncontrollably and/or watch American Horror Story.

Burning rubber

I was just going to plop one of my poems in here in an act of obtuse laziness but since I haven't posted anything in a few days (days, year - same thing) I'd feel guilty, and I feel guilt... well, ridiculously easy. I was going to put a metaphor in there but the only two words that came to me right away were moth and butter and I couldn't negotiate the term 'guilt' with them properly without feeling inept and somewhat aroused.

Anyways, I strongly feel that the human race is 90% wrong at least half of the time, which mathematically equates to us fucking everything up anywhere from 110% to 240% of every waking moment, globally. Some people screw things around so magnificently that they double up the worldwide awkwardness for the rest of us and take up the slack for the unnaturally perfect who never do anything for the greater good.

We live in a constant state of TV-inebriation and advertisement-sanitization scrubbing our reality away (TEETH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE A LIGHT YELLOW! BREATH ISN'T NATURALLY MINTY! TOENAILS ARE... okay, cut the toenails) with no view outside of our homes untainted by some bipedal perversion of reality selling us purple Windex or Fresh-Alps-Sun-Dried-Laundry Febreze or manly steel-grey-colored razors/feminine pink-lavender-colored razors. Sure, graffiti is a crime, but that empty public space where art could be is taken up by some unattainable physique chewing Mentos because $ > society. 

Photoshopped-perfection wildfire-brandishes your cityscape, blazing a spotlight on that mole on your cheek, focusing a camera on your incorrect nose, and introduces your receding hairline to everyone around you like a guest of honor at a surprise party. They don't make nice clothes for the plus-size members of our population, so go buy some sweatpants and a baggy top to highlight your ostracization, fatty. Oh, and everyone? Make sure you feel bad and anxious all the time, too.

One bus-stop ad makes you unsure of yourself and anxiety-amped, the next one sells you an anti-depressant. 

But there I go again, grabbing my highly-decorated and quite obvious rant-flag to scream down the highway like I expect to be noticed, or like I don't think most people already know this but put zero effort into changing it because bills/rent/food/family/time/how-the-hell-do-I-do-that?/etc.

So like yeah.

This isn't about us being wrong because some cock-bag (hold it, hold it, hold it... wait - why is human genitalia [and sexuality, and products-relating-to: c*nt, d*ck, dildo etc] often or always deferred to when needing an insult?  They're the best parts of the human body - I mean, have you ever even touched some genitals? It's so much better than touching your eyeball or the black stuff under the fridge - so some questions about all this double-standardness arise) sits at a desk and thinks of ways to make all of us feel like shit because the new Crystal-Lite watermelon/goji-berry elixer didn't take off as expected, but about how we're so unconsciously trained by that shaved-body Adonis in Buffalo jeans shoving a bulge at us from the bus shelter at six A.M. before work to be uncomfortable in our own entities that not only our whole day is slaughtered in thinking, "that woman over there couldn't possibly think I'm attractive - I HAVE A NORMAL BODY.", but our lives are somewhat controlled to an extent as well.

(Wait. Did I just contradict myself about how this isn't about that but then it totally is? Good.)

Our eyeballs can't really escape "flawless" people, as they invade our vision non-stop wherever we go and it only ends when we look in a mirror in order to find natural things to unnaturally fix, and then in our friend's or co-worker's faces and think "geez, a little effort?" and it's all just horrible. 

And it's been going on for so long now that it's like some shitty "1984"-like auto-medication taken on a daily basis to ensure a populace so self-aware that entire industries from the ones pandering to depression and anxiety to Lululemon survive on it.

We're all wrong in this together; we fart and get caught picking our noses, vomit when it's least appreciated by ourselves and others, have unconcealable rashes on freshly-shaved/waxed, um, areas, and have unmakeupped-faces dribbling mucous while suffering a cold in front of someone we find desirable, so you're a human and start getting re-used to that. Remember when you were a little kid and it was all about being a free human? Find that again. I'm sure you can look past that pimple on their forehead; I believe in you. Fight the system. You're already fighting it by reading this, and you've won if I've made you think. 

Now here's something that has surprisingly little to do with that tower of words above, so put all that crap aside because we're heading back to 1964 to burn rubber and inhale some CO.

Nowadays things like this just make no damn sense, but drag racing was big in the 1960's. Really big. Car magazines, car-humor magazines, toys, model kits and sound-effects-albums like this beautiful thing existed in abundance. Seriously. And I'm not bashing that, either. Please bring all this back, somebody.

Echoing announcers giving indecipherable play-by-play; revving engines; squealing tires; crowds cheering. And an ambulance.

Sometimes I can just really go for massive burnouts with the bass up and the scared neighbors, and this does the trick. I actually have two copies of this: the stereo one pictured, and a mono version. No, I don't have that ability to tell the difference between mono/stereo unless the piano or feet or whatever is 'moving' from one speaker over to the next, it's just that the mono-version record is a gatefold with color photos and extra stuff in the packaging, so I'm a geek in an aesthetic rather than aural way.

And I'm very cynical in thinking anyone can tell the difference between engine-noises, so I didn't split any tracks up, settling for giving the two sides their places. So, sorry. But here's the track list if you care to do it yourself:

    A1 Super Stock Eliminations (Stick Shift)
    A2 Super Stock Eliminations (Automatic Shift)
    A3 Dragster Eliminations
    A4 Mr. Stock  Eliminator of 1964
    A5 AA/Street Roadster Eliminator
    A6 Top Fuel Eliminator
    A7 Top Gasoline Eliminator
    B1 The Sounds at the Finish Line
    B2 Blower Blowing Up On Dragster + Ambulance
    B3 A Two Engine Dragster, "The Freight Train"
    B4 The Sound of Shifting
    B5 "Troubles" at Starting Line
    B6 Stock Cars Lined Up Behind Ready Line
    B7 Dragsters Time Trials
    B8 Roadsters Time Trials

Download here:
vroooooom