Monday, November 30, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving! Or, "Why a "joke" punk band reminds me of my parents..."

A dominating central figure of my parents living room was a stereo cabinet housing an aforementioned reel to reel tape deck, a receiver, a vinyl record player, and some kind of dolby a-b-c switch... this was a separate component that I think was eventually shrunk to the size of a pea and could be found on the side of every walkman produced in the 80's.
This component when switched a certain way and in combination with some knob or switch on the receiver would create a noise that would scare the living daylights out of my sister and I...
I remember we attributed this noise to some character (from sesame street?) called Sammy the Snake... which is weird because it didn't so much sound like a snake to me. I remember for some reason thinking that it sounded like an attack of screaming indians and a hurricane wind combined.

I was 5-7 years old and this made sense to me.

Eventually the stereo cabinet contained a dual tape deck and around 1989 or 1990 a single tray JVC CD player...(fancy!)

One of the occasional records my parents would play was Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, an atrociously long, hippie sounding Thanksgiving story of sticking it to "the man" and then hanging out at your favorite diner...or something.

I am obviously not a fan. I do,however remember being entertained by the passage where the narrator is going to see a shrink... it went like this:

And I waked in and sat down and they gave
me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and
he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down
yelling, "KILL, KILL."


Spencer is about to be the same age I surely heard this for the first time...maybe I should play it for him....

maybe not...

Instead, I'll play him this song by Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, a comedy rock band, formed in Manchester, England in 1973. They apparently hung around long enough to watch the punk explosion around 1976-77 and trained their attention towards lampooning it by mimicking it. Mimicking it in a really convincing way...This song, "Kill" was apparently a jab at The Dammned's goth-punk image.

Immediately upon hearing it I was reminded of Arlo Guthrie going all Psycho-Killer...

What do you think...


Kill (NSFW warning, and NO I wont be playing this for Spencer, not just yet.)

From their outstandingly sarcastic "Snuff Rock" EP

2 comments:

missfaith said...

i think we used to call that noise the indian noise....and Sammy the Snake was the only thing that scared us just as much!

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