Voices of the Angels - The Final Chapter

...when I was 13 or 14, me and my best friend, Chris Sabourin (at the time - we "broke up" a few years later over - of all things - a large quantity of very old MAD Magazine back-issues) were spending a lazy summer afternoon wandering down a backwoods trail near the dyke in our old hometown; a small river with beautiful overhanging willows and the occasional sewage drain-pipe joining one side to the other (which we would always puff up our ain't-afraida-nuthin' chests to and cross, well, about three feet of before quivering back to the home-shore and saying something like "Ah, there's nothing over there anyway!" in a quick excuse), under which a small flock of Mallards might float, along with maybe a small log, which would get caught up in a stack of dumped tires or a misused shopping cart, now brown from being covered with decaying algae & motor-oil.
As we kicked rocks along the way, we spotted something shining off to the right, buried in the tall grass. Excited by the prospect of not being bored anymore, we rushed over and found two rifles with scopes, a huge bowie knife, and about three boxes of tranquilizer-darts, spilled onto the dirt & mixed in with the grass.
We completely freaked out.
What luck! Guns! Ammo (sorta)! Scopes!
My friend grabbed the knife (as I already had one that size), and I grabbed a rifle and started tugging at the sight-scope to get it off. We briefly imagined ourselves sauntering down the sun-scorched avenues of our 'burg with weapons almost as tall as we were and decided against it, although we made plans to hide them and get back under cover of the night to recapture the deadly items.
Anyway, we heard some noise in the distance, and carefully took a peek down the path. FUCK! A truck marked with some official city-seal and about four huge lumberjack-types inside was slowly trundling towards our position. We had a quickly-negated plan to grab the guns and lam it, but they were too damn big to go unnoticed in the hands of teenagers down a dirt path.
(I also imagined picking them off with the tranks, but that would have required some kind of aiming skill - a skill withered by my trading in the slingshot for sitting in front of Donkey Kong)
We dropped everything and bolted.
They never saw us, didn't chase us. I incorporated the brilliant plan of stopping just out of sight and sitting on the curb next to the road where the trail's exit merged: guilty kids would keep running - we just looked like a couple teens sitting in the sun. And we could see what they were doing.
They loaded up the firearms without any excitement, like it was them who left the items there in the first place, and slowly drove off.
We got up and started walking.

“So, whadda ya wanna do?”...

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VOTA 4

Voices of the Angels Part 3

...remember sweltering summer days in Port Coquitlam; BMX-biking alone through heat-rippled streets with neither a moving car nor any of the thousands of kids my age, also set adrift for two months, in sight.

Eerie silence but for the combined hum of knobby tires sticking to hot asphalt and uncountable A/C units from seemingly deserted homes... where they all were I never could fathom and never found out. Inside watching TV or playing Atari? No laughter, no cheering from any of these homes. Off to Disneyland? Summer Camp?

Oh – there's the mail-lady.

Okay, so I'm not in some Twilight Zone episode or left behind as rapture-fodder, but the robotic affectations of her movements that the job requires doesn't comfort me at all.

Winding through the sidestreets, dead end cul-de-sacs grinding my tires in a 180-degree turn, and somehow I find the abandoned “playground” in the middle of this particular area that's only accessible through a tiny paved passage between houses.

I slowly tour the mobius-strip concrete-8 that winds through the entire area, a cracked and tree-root-warped cement path with a little bridge in the middle rising over the junction; a few giant tractor-tires are scattered about, almost buried in weeds and erupting from the earth like farmland Easter-Island statues, peeling clown-paint on them nearly completely removed by the elements and years of neglect. There's a three-person swing-set with one seat wrapped tight around the top. Another is dangling from one chain, and the last is making a disturbing screeching wail from rusted chains holding a shredded canvas seat catching the dry wind.

Elsewhere, what was once a sandbox leisurely swallows unrecognizable and sun-faded plastic bits of toys. A discarded tricycle rusts peacefully against the wooden fence in a forgotten corner, and a doll-torso with matted hair and eyes frozen in horror glares up at me from a clump of undeveloped dandelions.

I ride over the small bridge once, back the bike up to the highest point for an overview of the entire area, and suddenly I'm overcome with chills; I mean one moment I'm fine and next this creeping terror with ice-legs crawls over my back like a blanket of millipedes and I am gone, I am outta there, and I never ever go back.

This side of the Voices of the Angels double-LP features author Danny Sugerman, Chris D (of the Flesheaters and Divine Horsemen to name a couple), and Doug Moody, infamous for his Mystic Records label of the 1980's.

Standouts (for me) are the Richard Meltzer track - "Wednesday...", and Cheryl Smith's "Sure", while the Jane Bond & the Undercovermen is merely a radio spot for the Rodney on the ROQ show.

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Side 3

(photo of kid in Smiths shirt on bike c.1988, found on the sidewalk some years ago)

Voices of the Angels Pt. 2

Featuring the second side of the Voices of the Angels double LP. As I have no further images of the album to share (the back side being nothing but a mass of tiny tiny tiny words), here is the team card of the California Golden Seals c.1975.

 

Keep an ear out for side three!

Download here:

Voices 2

Voices of the Angels

I just got an MP3 player. This is my first “personal audio” player I've had in about twenty years, no joke. My last thing was a Walkman-type deal from some company other than whoever put out the original “Walkman”, but it still played cassette tapes. Can't recall if it had radio-function. No idea what happened to it. I probably threw it under a bus.

So I completely skipped past the portable-CD-'kman period, and, lamentably, the mini-CD-'kman phase.

The 'batteries dying out after three plays' with the cassette version killed any momentum for me. Nothing like a really long bus ride and halfway through it the song fades to nothing and you're stuck there, still nodding your head to the beat (Tiny Tim, I think it was) after the music died because you didn't want anyone else around you to know that your energy supply has deep-sixed. Who needs the humiliation? So you bang your skull to Burt Bacharach or whatever but in reality you're listening to the banal jaw-motoring of mall-sprites in the seats around you and it's just a chore, really.

So this MP3-thing is like really tiny, insanely hard to navigate even with these delicate, slender girl-fingers of mine, and after a week or so of ownership, I still instinctively pull it out of my pocket after six or so songs ready to flip the tape over. Very weird sensation. 

It can play movies, but I refuse that function out of pure spite.

People spend thousands for a five-foot LCD/LED/Plasma/3D TV flatscreen then rush out and spend hundreds on a 3” screen to watch the same movies. Right there, that makes me want to kill society as a whole, not just certain segments.

Three weeks I give myself til this thing squirts out of my fingers and under that damn bus.

What has any of this got to do with people talking words on vinyl? Let me stretch my segue-fingers and I'll tell you.

The main reason I got the personal player – do people still call these a “Walkman”? In a generic sense like Band-Aids or Popsicles or martinis? Because that's two syllables, and the other option is “MP3 player”, which is a lip-tiring five syllables – is to block out everybody else. I finally became exhausted with the general ineffervescence of my lovely fellow humans (not to mention the cell-talkers. Not sure what the psychology is on being aggravated by one-sided conversations, but it seems prevalent) on certain segments of mass transit. The suburban stretches only, though. The discordant ramblings you get on the inner-city buses is like having three William Burroughs' reciting different crime-scene reports while fresh off shotgunned Lysol hits with Nyquil chasers.

Why, something like listening to THIS!

Released in 1982 on the Freeway Records label by Harvey Kubernik, this two-disc set was produced in order to capture the spoken-word/poetry scene of L.A. during what was I suppose a second-wave underground beat recital movement. Featuring a hell of a lot of people as well-known as Charles Bukowski, Pleasant Gehman and Geza X amongst nearly 80 other performers, and liner notes by some guy named Ray Manzarek.

Quality? You want quality?! You find another blog, right now.

The rest of you, click something below. I'll be posting one side over the next four blogs, perhaps interspersed with some music so I don't alienate, uh, everyone.

 Download here:

Voices of the Angels Side 1

Dog Food Music

Dr. Ballard's Presents Variations on the Ballard Beat

There was a time when dog food companies released music. The fact that this doesn't happen anymore makes me a melancholy man. Sure, Star****s can put out CD's with famous names on them to give out or sell, but that don't count at all, and Iggy or the Ramones on a TV ad counts less. 

Something like this, and many other singles and releases in the same vein, are dripping with integrity, and other stuff, because of the originality and rear-vision weirdness of it all. Does AVON hand an original composition over to, say, Mindless Self Indulgence so they can put out a 7" single? Have the folks behind Depends undergarments landed Justin Biebre (the real Canadian spelling) to put out a short wax ditty? Is semi-retired Celine Dion doing a cover of Barbed-Wire Love for the TwoDaLoo? 

No!

So all we can do is sigh, and get horribly drunk while sucking on a musk-flavored Life Saver and wonder how our lives turned out so utterly wrong, or something, and listen to stuff like this.

Released in the mid-to-late 50's and featuring the Herman Apple Quintet (Bix Belair on trumpet and Moe Slutsky on drums) on the Dr. Ballard label,  recorded by RCA's Montreal division, so perhaps this was a Canadian-only release? Seems Mr. Apple was a Quebecois, as the only other release I could come up with from him was a Christmas album done entirely in French. 

 

Four versions done in different popular genres at the time. Somewhat disappointingly, there's no lyrics here, just the jingle-music. Ah well. Have a listen and see if you don't end up with a cupboard full of dog food by the end of the day.

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Cha-cha

Shuffle 

Rock and Roll 

Foxtrot

(and a PS: the Family Band albums have now been posted in full over on their page)

More Hockey Music

No! I haven't abandoned the blog.

Trust me, when I do give it up, I'll have some 'farewell' post and not leave anyone hanging like so, so many other blogs.

The past two months or whatever have been filled with a): the purchase of a new PC and b): a friend and roommate of the past 7-point-something years moving out to the Island for healthier climes. Both of which had me putting off a LOT of things before moving on.

The new 'puter moves at the speed of light compared to my previous 2003 Vaio (w/the capacity for a ridiculous RAM upgrade which will enable it to practically read my thoughts and perform functions before I even touch the mouse) and I weep with joy at it's noiseless existence. Unfortunately, my DNS server is fucked up right now and 2/3's of any sites I visit can't be reached, so that's something to be addressed really really soon.

The other thing holding me back this long while was my friend moving away, which caused no small amount of personal angst on many levels, but where she's living now is a much cleaner abode. (This place is almost literally held up by various forms of mold)

I think everything is settled now, so it's back to posting horrible awesomeness that common sense demands be left to obscurity.

Today, we got Phil Esposito and the Ranger Rockers and Dionne and the Puck-Tones with their double-A side tribute to hockey-love analogies released in 1979, with proceeds going towards the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. 

Produced by Alan Thicke (he loves his hockey), I gotta give the Stambley Cup to (Marcel) Dionne and his boys with their pop-flavored entry, and the fact they have the original Kings' jerseys with the purple-gold scheme happenin'.

Phil & the Rangers pretty much look like male-models in comparison, and the 50's-style rockin' tune they belt out is good but they ain't no Ralph Nielson & the Chancellors (or even H. Adkins stuffed with raw meat & rye). And well they shouldn't be. It's a fun disc.

I think my copy still has my 16-year-old babysitter's (neighbor's kid) drool on it from when she'd stare at Ron Duguay's face for seemingly hours on end...

Download here:

Hockey Sock Rock
Please Forgive My Misconduct Last Night

Darwin is the way

I forget exactly where I first witnessed the painted nature scene cover with its sideways exclamation of "IT JUST IS!" and the little tiny duck, at first glance seemingly holding up a sign with its wing, but I'm certain it was on one of the then-few "bad album cover art" sites which introduced many of us to the wonderful world of weird listening pleasures.

And like everyone else, I was hopelessly baffled not only by WHAT just was, but what the hell was an "eck"? 

A first assumption based on the little sign and familiarity with belief-system terminology directs one to think it's a religious album (some spirit-guide is always "the way"), but wtf is "eck"?! Most would dismiss the connection since eck is more of a gutteral sound of disapproval than anything offering comfort from within.

But religious is exactly what it is, as I discovered one fine day in the local Value Village, already somewhat out of spirits from flapping past a few too many dusty Manilow, Roger Wittiker (sp?) and Baby Beluga jackets. 

Then I suddenly froze, eyes popping, iris' expanding, senses alerted immediately with my mind tallying up noises and peripheral movements so as to detect any human presence about me ready to leap over my shoulder, grab the disc and flee to the cashier before I could snap out of it and give chase.  
I should point out that my cratedigger-ninja skills have since been honed to the point where an intrusive hand would be disabled and broken in sixteen places before reaching my pick, so beware.

There it was. THAT cover. Like right in front of me. A 'famed obscurity'. 
Still in partial shrinkwrap and otherwise in mint condition - previous owners not sufficiently moved for repeat listenings I guess. 
I feverishly kept it clasped to my chest as I rummaged through the rest of the swill in hopes more manna was left by maybe the same donator. Nothing else, but I was happy enough anyways, giggling and skipping to the checkout, flippantly knocking over old ladies with armfuls of ceramic owls and officious-looking argyle-nerds and their Power Rangers retro-fetish accumulations. (no offense to either parties, but ceramic owls suck and there's this one local argyle-nerd who just...  I won't get started.)

As for what Eck is... well, it stands for Eckankar, and after that, please Google it. I did, and trying to give a synopsis here would be like giving a two-sentence overview of the Roman Empire. 

I recommend several of the links you'll find on the first page of searching, though: plenty of history from both the Eck believers as well as former members with their own anti-Eck pages with bizarre tales of cult behavior as well as news reports on recent rather large gatherings of Eckists in Nigeria, supposedly converting thousands of people as they move around. You'll also read of how this 'lost' religion was re-found and the conflicting tales about Darwin Gross' emergence as the Eck movement's leader, and how some of the more vocal ex-ecks have purportedly been harassed by group members who want things kept on the QT. 

So I guess it's like Scientology, but with fewer billions of dollars. And like Scientology, that paragraph above sounds like something I totally made up, but it's all so weirdly true.

And hey! Vancouver has or had its own eck-centre (albeit very tiny) on Kingsway in Burnaby: 

Abandoned for several years, it seems. About a block away from an abandoned taxidermy shop whose fluorescent lights still burn away behind locked doors. Very creepy. Is there a connection!? Perhaps not.

Okay, what does the record sound like?

The first side (or 1-4, here) is Darwin singing the sacred love songs of eck. Lush orchestra, female group-vocal back-up... like easy listening of the '50s, but with Darwin Gross' soft words of enlightenment wafting through the lilting melodies.

Darwin (972nd Living Master of Eck btw) has a not-unpleasant voice that is fine on the higher end but tends to flatten on the lower notes. Mebbe comparable to an Andy Williams who got strep-throat as a kid & the pipes got damaged, or Vince Neill crossed with a young Bing Crosby after one of those tours you take through a helium factory. 

So where was Gross' head during all of this? Was he just some guy who wanted to sing, a little spiritually towards the 'E' in the gas tank of the soul, just wanting a little assurance at the pump, maybe getting a little bag of those pink-colored 'Jolly Time' pistachios while he's there? Off-handedly mentioning to the grease-smeared attendant that he thinks he'd make an alright balladeer and the guy says to him he says, "Sure, why not? I always thought I could do it myself, but, y'know - who's gonna man the pumps all day 'way out here? Folks gotta have their gas, right? Hey - I say go for it!". Gross - one elbow leaning on the dirty Formica counter-top - slowly smiles, strokes his chin thoughtfully while throwing his tweed sports-jacket over his shoulder, shakes the attendant's hand with a "Thanks, brother!" as he makes ready to leave and they agree to meet up later for a few games of canasta, but you just know it never happens.

Eckists are s**t at canasta.

Track list:
A1     It Just Is    
A2     With Eckankar    
A3     At The Grass Roots    
A4     Oh, How I Love The Bless Sugmad    
B1     The Law Of The Self    
B2     Purity


Download here:

IT JUST IS!

And if you just want a sample track and not all of them, I would suggest "At the Grass Roots", mainly for the female chorus lyrics. 

(EDIT: Since posting this, the aforementioned taxidermy shop burnt nearly to the ground - possibly from the lights being turned on for ten years straight - and the Eck office has been leased! I think to a high-speed internet company)

Japanese kiddies show!

Probably.

Resurrecting myself from the fog of blogitus (where immediately after procuring a blog, one suffers from an intense and sudden indifference for what the person envisioned as a happy daily ritual of sharing one's thoughts, opinions, exciting news, corporate vandalism, and/or sufficiently weird enough stuff for an unknown reason), I've returned with meagre offerings!

Here I have a 7" seemingly from the late 60's, most likely from Japan, featuring a scene which can be observed by looking at this picture:

On it we have a cheerful tune about something entitled Pin Pon Pan, with enough whistles and boings planted everywhere to keep just about anyone happy. The flip is (I think) the same song but a different version, slowed down somewhat.

The best thing about the disc, however, is the hand-written note I found inside after getting it home. 

Apparently written to a grade-school teacher by someone able to translate the singing, they were kind enough to include the Anglicized lyrics. Oh and what lyrics:

"Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom - pin pon pan pon 
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom - pin pon pan pon 
Tiger pro-wrestler in stripe pants 
Keep putting it in over and over again, 
but never fails, off it comes 
Gonbaranakucha (meaning "preserve", but in this instance, a way of cheering on a competitor) 
One hand whipping and the other holding up the slippery pants 
Win, win, tiger's pro-wrestler 

Hippo-person is so stupid 
He disguises to look like someone else 
But is always easily identified 
Gonbaranakucha 
Blowing out smoke 
Blowing out smoke 
Go go hippo-person 
Do a somersault (or roll over) and you're a mole 
Do a somersault (or roll over) and you're a (?) 
Do a somersault (or roll over) and you're a King Champion 
Do a somersault (or roll over) and you're a bride 

Run, run Kintaro 
Jump over dishes and newspaper 
Run, run Kintaro 
The restroom is just nearby 
Endure, hurry hurry! 
Hanako-san, Hanako-san 
Mama's name is Hanako-san 
Welcome Hanako-san 
Please do join us all 

The crocodile's bride has terrible athlete's foot 
No matter how much she scratches, it's itchy, itchy 
Gonbaranakucha 
Swish, swash goes your skirt, athlete's foot, itchy itchy 
Swish, swash goes your skirt, athlete's foot, itchy itchy 
Scratch, scratch, scratch, crocodile's bride 

Let us be a frog - pin pon pan pon pin 
Let us be a huge snake - pin pon pan pon pin 
Let us be a caterpillar - pin pon pan pon pin 
Let us be a crow - pin pon pan pon pin 

Thank you, thank you 
Thank you for the exercise 
Let us all say together 
Thank you very much!" 

Ah..... whipping, slippery pants, athlete's foot... It's like a song about the surprise party given for me after I moved into my first apartment.

Someday soon I'm going to plead Rod McKuen to cover this in English.

Download here:

JKS!