That '70s Reality

The 1970s was an incredibly strange decade. I lived in it the entire way. Whole buncha stuff happened. Mainly starting off with that anything cool or underground about the previous decade was put through a centrifuge and rebranded as commonplace. The corpse of the '60s had rotted and been eaten and the remains were being propped up and sold at a hyper-consumable discount by anyone quick enough to grab hold of a chunk, and the "hedonism" of that time that was deeply frowned upon got a makeover as to be suddenly acceptable and usable for profit, ka-ching! Vans were a thing, and I mean the boxy vehicles, not the skater-shoes. There were trading cards about vans. I have some. I'll post one below. Big rig trucks and their CB radios were another thing, with several movies actually being made to celebrate the "trucker culture". Short, unisex perms were in abundance. Men were walking around in gym-shorts, and the lapels on blazers and button-ups were as wide as albatross wings and many times more elaborate in color than any parrot you've come across. Children were highly sexualized, and I mean on a Weimar Republic scale. 

Cocaine was nearly a household item. In fact, McDonalds ceased production of their plastic coffee-stirrers because everyone was using them as coke-spoons. Amphetamines and dildos were sold in ads in popular TV/movie magazines (eg. Photoplay, which had been around since the 1920's) that sat alongside People and the National Enquirer in the checkout line. "Groupies" were teenage-to-twenties girls-and-women who would follow touring music groups (HENCE the term) around in order to have, well, sexual relations with whoever. "Super-groupies" like Pamela Des Barres would pursue the bigger acts like Aerosmith, Zeppelin, The Who, Bowie, KISS etc. TV sitcoms were to become time-capsules of rigid normalcy wrapped in a drug-fueled fashion sense. The po-po became hip. Gumbyflappers went from hippie-DIY to mass production. Tight, itchy polyester shirts were nearly mandatory and as breathable in the summer as wearing a plastic bag. Aquamarine \ yellow \ ultra-frost newt-green eye-shadow combos came into everyday use. Art deco made a big comeback and was horribly abused. Avocado-colored toilets were surrounded by plush, deep-pile carpets in far too many people's bathrooms. ALL OF THIS WAS COMPLETELY NORMAL! Not saying ALL of it was bad, but it's what we quickly acclimated to.

(My cards are in storage, so this is off the web. I do have this, tho'. It's so pretty, and a safe bet there's a waterbed in the back. Oh yeah - waterbeds were huge in the '70s too.)

On top of this, both the New Hollywood and punk sprouted out of the few cracks in the linoleum, and the seeds of women's lib, queer-freedom and racial justice had cemented their roots and were growing!

So that's a synopsis. That didn't even mention plaid suits.

Something else that grew from the '70s was the ICBC - the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, formed by the provincial government (the province being British Columbia) in 1973. You'd think, from their title, that they handled all forms of insurance available, but it was just for automobiles. Basically, if you're a British Columbian and have a car accident, you go through ICBC for the claims and such. SO, by example, if another driver is way over the speed limit driving in reverse in the wrong lane and plows into you, they review the case, and reward the person who crashed into you. That sounds like a joke, I know.

With more complaints than anyone can count from auto-owners over the years, the ICBC aroused the ire of drivers - whether involved in accidents or not - through their seeming willingness to give payout to the instigators of any vehicular misadventures and also by raising premiums at an apparently notorious rate.

Which brings about this month's artist/recording, B.C.-group Flasher with their double-sided disc of disdain, "Icky Bicky / Tricky Icky" (Icky-bicky is verbal shorthand, used mostly in disrespect) on Criminal Records, no date given, but doubtfully out after '85. 

This has been called proto-metal, heavy psych, and a couple other things (and has a spot on a compilation called "Brown Acid - The Fifth Trip"), but to me it's more biker-bar heavy rock with a hint of funk beat and a touch of soul (the female backing v's). But I'm stuffed with butter chicken and cheap beer right now, so my thought process is kinda sludgy and I could be thinking of like ABBA or something. The first cut has some choice derision barked out by someone you'd picture owning a home-customized Harley and a work-beaten Dodge pickup with post-diggers and shovels in the flatbed and an 8-year-old Mastiff named 'Poodle-Pounder' straining at a chain in the back yard. I like it! The flip is something unusual: it's the A-side track again, but played backwards. Layered over top of this is what's made to sound like an anti-ICBC rally, with participants jeering and mocking a corporate rep wielding a megaphone. It's what most likely awarded the single its heavy-psych label.

As for the band itself, I can't find anything online indicating release date, or any kind of reviews. I thought at least the Georgia Straight would've had something, but no luck. Anyways, take a listen, and maybe get some throwback-commiseration if you've had any grief with said corporation as of late.

And if you want your very own copy, I see a Discogs seller in England has one for a hefty $42 (Canadian).

Download:  

Icky Bicky

Tricky Icky

(And this may be the last post for a while, as I'm moving again and things are chaotic, to say the very least.)

You know my name (please don't look up my Facebook page)

A few months ago I moved from Vancouver to Maple Ridge for money-saving reasons. MR is two hours away from Van. Unfortunately what I'm now saving in dollars is what I'm losing in sanity due to this new rural lifestyle.

I'm used to dense throngs of pedestrians representing every race creed and culture milling about in a neighborhood filled with nearly nothing but independent stores and restaurants a block away from me, where we cross the street without looking, and if a car beeps its little horn, we stop in front of them and stare down the driver until a point is made; people first. Then yer little car.

Now it's a 20-minute walk from my townhouse-cluster (like an anthill for humans) to "the city" which is 90% white and there are more lifted pickup trucks and A&W's than humans. And I mean egregiously-powerful monster trucks with no purpose other than being powerful. Some even have Confederate flags on them. Yes, they know they're in B.C., which is in Canada which wasn't (still isn't) a part of the Confederate U.S. southern state territory. So I don't know. Oh yeah I do! They're racists! Also, people here actually smile and say Hi passing by you on the sidewalk and get this: it's not sarcastic, and they actually get legit offended if you don't do the same in return! I feel like Kevin Bacon in Flashdance, only he doesn't blow up the Death Star. Or whatever that movie is. You get the idea, I guess? I'm basically in opposite-land! Confusion has become my default setting.

So today on the now 90-min-plus-long bus ride home from work (it was 45 minutes before), I have no idea why, but the memory of a girl that I had an enormous crush on when I was in grade like nine or ten and maybe fifteen or whatever came over me. There's a lot of nothing to look at outside the window, so looking inside the self and its weird, morphing, mental photo-albums becomes a thing you get to do. Esp. if you don't have unlimited data.

Now, I had it SUPER-heavy for this girl. We shared an art class and I was one year older than her. I'll skip all the details because  - I mean, when you think of past moments and people like this, you're thinking of them as you did at that time , not as who you are now, so basically I'm a fifty-year-old thinking about how hot and beautiful a 13-to-14-year-old was. Fine for Vladimir Nabokov, but not me.

Anyways, I imagined how she must look these days, slipped into a platonic fantasy-situation where we'd meet up today and etc etc, snapped out of it and got off the bus and went home.

...aaaand looked her up on Facebook. Yep, I did that.

It was weird, and I shouldn't, I mean really shouldn't have done that thing. 

But it was a thing I did.

I feel like each love we have, be it crush, fling, marriage, failed romance etc is its own little animal and it gets fed and cared for differently than any of the others. And some shouldn't be fed at all. I mean, they gotta get put down. So when I - and this only came to me later the next morning when a song I had on dug some old, unrelated feels out of me - sat on that bus tripping away, I was subconsciously dusting off a set of complicated emotions that were never meant to be unpacked again, breaking some sort of safety seal like a four-year-old with a new bottle of 'candy' found in the medicine cabinet. I'd discovered a dime bag in an old drawer and it had a few crumbs left in it of some of the best shit I'd had in the 80's and like a dumbass I hadda go and dab the remains expecting to suddenly re-live the good ol' days, and now I'm freaking out, finding it kinda difficult to put everything away again where it should've stayed. Is it possible to re-crush after 30-something years!? I'M PLAYING RE-ANIMATOR WITH DEAD MEMORIES!? Keeping in line with my first allegory, I hit up the Pet Sematary and we all know how that pans out.

For about an hour afterwards I just felt odd, misplaced, and I guess jarred into that feeling of being one step further all up in the face of mortality. Actually, it's six hours later now and I'm still a bit shook. As to why, though, I can't pin down.

Actually, yeah, I can. That's exactly it: she aged, and accomplished a lot so far in her life. Whereas I'm still a kid in my head, and have done nothing. 

What was I expecting, huh? A taller, slightly-more-mature version of That Girl with maybe a little grey in the same Jr.-high-styled hair? 

35+ years monstrously climbed outta the cellar of memories and kicked a reality-check in place of the old, fuzzy mental photograph I have of a person I had mentality-changing feelings about. 

Now I'm sitting here just blanketing my cold soul in some old comfort and feelings I haven't gotten cozy with in a long while, but it's mildewy and strange so away it goes. Eventually I guess. This is so weird. I hauled an emotional corpse out of its grave and am paying a toll for the effort. A small part of this is also probably because I haven't physically changed much since school. I weigh the same and my (albeit thinning) hair is only starting to sprout silver. And I still think and act like I'm 20. Hell, two years ago I got back on a skateboard after a double-decade absence and I'm ripping way harder than I ever used to. Maybe I lack a time-filter? Dude with the scythe is starting to walk faster behind me,  and I'm tripping on his shadow in the lamplight while daydreaming about the past. Uh-oh. I guess I'll sort it all out? Someday?

But until that miracle happens, I still love all the music that I was ever into, including punk and The Who (a band I got heavily acquainted with way back in the time-frame that the above loveawkwardness happened), two musical entities mashed up in this year's (haw) entry. 

This is Dumbrock Vol.5: Tommy in Seven Minutes - a tribute of a sort, I guess, to that classic Who album on one side, and the other with four versions of The Beatles' "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". Released in 1994 on clear vinyl (my version at least) with twelve very varied bands taking on the rock opera with jubilant abandon, all of whom you can see on the jacket-scans below;

The Beatles-side I can take or leave, really, but I'm all-in for the main feature. Even in '94 I only knew 5-6 of these bands, which makes sense I guess as musically this thing's all over the place. It's so much fun I kinda wish a full album could've been done, but it seems seven minutes is a perfect length. As for any other release under the Dumbrock flag, I can't find anything. And as for That Girl, I wish you an amazing life. I'm going to forget you again and try to stop running in a worn circle.    

Download here: 

TI7MYKMNLUTN 

(Oh and it looks like I'm back, at least for a little while. I also have these files in .flac if anyone deems them worthy of an upgrade. And I'm still unsure about the new background pic I'm using)

Hey!

Just a rough spell. I have some stuff lined up. Before 2050 at least. An LP of Ernest Hemingway talking about things? You got it. Life gets in the way sometimes. Or most of the time. Edit: After editing some posts to fix some obvious drink-addled syntax, I realize how much I miss writing this stuff. Hopefully the next apartment I rent will be stress-free and I can concentrate on everything I want to do.

Personal Angst and Re-upping Files! Also, they're all back up!!

Well, I was recently alerted that some files were no longer accessible for download and came on to re-up them, but it seems that my host, "ADrive", is going all-pay as of 2016, right on Jan. 1st! I'm not the most well-paid person, or even the brightest thing when it comes to finances, so a subscription to some file-thingie-whatever site is beyond me. However, MediaFire seems to still be free, so I'll re-load everything up there, hopefully soon. I know! When something's unavailable that I totally want on some blog, I can't help but go on a rampage while screaming, "WHY CAN'T THEY JUST TAKE 20 MINUTES TO blah blah something", I forget what I scream since I pass out from all the blood raging through my head, and then I'm sad. My present woes are legitimate, though; recently evicted and having just moved into the new, much smaller place with the adventurous discovery of a few cockroaches and my cat not eating/drinking, throwing up bile and losing weight from the stress of unfamiliarity has my concerns focused regrettably elsewhere. So all I can say is, bookmark this thing (or get notices? does this do that?) and hopefully my little cat will get acclimated soon, I'll be free of all these damn boxes laying around and I can get all this forgotten strangeness to the deserving parties again. And I have a few new things I ripped months ago that got sidelined need to see the light. (I guess telling us in school that - once out of school - the only times that we wouldn't be filled with stress would be when we were either drunk or sleeping was thought of as a bad idea) Cheers and thanks for being here. 
(PS - no, sorry; I don't have the pictured 45 available, it's merely a visual aid interpreting my melancholy)  

(EDIT:Everything has been re-upped! Enjoy!)

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.