This is Your Final Warning

GET EVOLVED
And get erect. Get your bad self out on the dance floor and shake your funky aspect. Get in line and make that stinky primate scene. Get rid of that hair and do the sex-is-a-beautiful-thing machine. Get your cool unit stirring up that mess and get out of that scummy gene pool before you start to regress. Get off that hairy bottom and do the low-down Pope. Get your primal horde together and do the don’t-use-soap. Get rid of that HAM BONE and let a man do the man’s man’s man’s world where a man is King. Get out of that red red robe and do the bare-naked holy-father thing.

HIT ME ONE TIME - YEOW!
But what about that littlest sex machine? Did he die and go to Heaven to do the smokin’ burnin’ mess day and night before the Stool of Glory? Or is he in the Bottomless Pit with his hot pants around his ankles and a swarm of fiery vermin swirling around his head?

AND WHAT ABOUT DARWIN?
Do you like the idea of your daughter mating with a lower form of life? He drives up to the house, dragging the curse behind at the end of a chain, blows his horn and does some kind of prehensile hand-jive. Out she comes, a vision in pink: your baby, your chattel, your little girl. And with a black blast from the tailpipe he’s whisked her away. You know it! You can feel it! In no time they’re in the back seat, grunting and snuffling and co-mingling their DNA. Do you really want her precious pink bottom on that cheap vinyl car seat? Do you want her coming home already half-devolved? Bristly black hair on her tongue. Walking bowlegged and gibbering like the Queen of the Mandrills.

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!
It doesn’t make a bit of difference if you go up or down the food chain, you’re still food. Sure, Little Hammy can get himself elected Soul Brother Number One. Okay, okay, the Reptilian Herod can fight for a hundred years to regain the seven-tiered crown of Gnegg. All right, the Piltdown Man can pick nits out of his fur for a dozen generations and end up the Pope on Easter morning in his flashiest robe. But they’re still on the chain gang and they still can’t wash off the curse.

GO AHEAD, ASK THE POPE
He’s awake every night, counting out loud until the sun comes up and the Renegade Apes go crawling back to their holes. He’s grunting and grinding his teeth and still he can hear them out on the perimeter, trying to dig their way under the chain-link fence. He’s sitting half-naked on the edge of the seat, puffing on a filter-tip “APE” - his brand of smokes. They keep away the smell, but not the sound. Even with Blessed Virgin De-Jinxing Oil and the whole College of Cardinals chain-smoking “APE”s, he still can’t get any relief.

FUNKY, BUT AMAZING, GRACE
I thought I heard Martin Luther shout: open the window, let the vile vapors out. I thought I heard Martin Luther say: Hey, Father Babylon, mend your way. Cold and lonely in that Borgia tomb. High above the Pit of Doom. Get rid of those relics and that holy grue. Get rid of those sainted corpses too.

IT’S A FACT
In Darwin’s day, mummies were looted from their tombs and carted off by the Sons of Ham. The Pharaoh’s dusty flesh brought a higher price than his hoard of gold, black pearls, and funeral goo. It was no more an agent of eternal life than pink lint or Monkey Lard, but it sure got eaten up fast, once the fad caught on.

BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS
At this very moment, there’s a family of missing links driving a late model Eldorado with the Infant of Prague resplendent in pink dashboard fur. They’re singing “An Infinite Number of Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and trying to find the exit for the Afterlife. But their search will go on forever. They’ll stop night after night at the motels that Time forgot: “The Serpent Mound Lodge,” “King Herod’s Rest,” and “The All-seeing Eye of the Baleful Uhunis Inn,” and they’ll find the gene pool getting scummy because the lower forms keep relieving themselves into it. And with all this going on, you might well be wondering, “How’s a true believer supposed to get any evolving done?”

CALL IT FATE
Call it Natural Selection. Call it anything you want. The awful truth remains: Primates descended from reptiles. Primates actually are reptiles! It’s no great leap going from slimy scales to nice pink skin, given a few million years of bad hygiene. Hot-blooded, cold-blooded, who cares? Reptiles once ruled the Earth and now their smarty-pants two-legged descendants have taken over. Primates rule the World by remote control! Primates invented soap. Primates invented the Great Chain of Being. Primates invented the LIMBO. How low can you go?

LET’S GET PERSONAL
You can hide inside that monkey-love arouser matrix all you want, but sooner or later you’re going to stand bare-naked and perfectly pink before the throne of JUDGMENT. You can expose your Hairless Wonder to the Dark Patriarch, but you’re still going to find yourself at the edge of the ABYSS, wishing you’d brought along some powerful deodorant.

ARE YOU READY?
In those last days, the Jet-black Pharaohs will rise up in the East to slay the Funky Primate. The King of the Hominids will break out of his tomb and conquer the Golden Crescent. The stone-drunk Noah will stand naked again to lay a final curse on his son, but Ham’s shake-shake-shaking it off and screaming “Me am bearing your Drooly Doom no more!” Even the Whistler and BOOK OF RULES will get down off their thrones and join in. And at the stroke of Absolute Midnight, the Ace of Popes will flash across the sky trailing a plume of black miasma. The battle will rage for seven-times-seventy weeks and the outcome may very well depend on YOU. The key to victory is in your hands. The time has come. You’ve got to take a stand.

Satellite of Love

The last man stepped off the Moon in December of 1972 and the space age ended. The ominous nights of Sputnik and Telstar, the luminous days of Soyuz and Apollo, were over. Yet the glam in glamor still out-glows Venus or Sirius (the diamond dog-star). We can catch a glimmer if we turn our gazes outward. Something is up there, just beyond sight, beyond understanding. Something glistens and chitters on the sidereal horizon. Sex-change in the sky -transgendered planetary crossings - the radiation of the occult spheres.

“I watched for a little while,” Lou Reed croons, like a junkie over his spoon, “I love to watch things on TV.”

Bowie saw it and knew it first. But it was Lou who gave it a name: the Satellite of Love. Lou Reed, late to glam, the most lurid and lucid of the seers, was the true voice of the celestial shine (one third heroin, one third mascara and one third high frequency spectra). “Satellite’s gone” Lou sings, both celebration and lamentation, “way up to Mars.”

Lou Reed’s move into the trans-orbital limelight came with his second solo album. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Transformer gleams with some Ziggy Stardust fallout. The monster hit off the album was “Walk on the Wild Side.” With this, Lou managed to produce queasy-making titillation for the AM dial - with its fairy tales of cross-dressing speed-freaks and crystalline violet sweet tooth. What really pushed the tune to the top of the charts was the great and mysterious Herbie Flowers on bass (doubling electric and upright - he later claimed - so he’d get paid twice). The revelation, however, came with the second single off the second album.

This Satellite of Love is Sputnik after the secret operation. It’s Telstar with one last mysterious TV message to relay to earth. Lou put a sleazy man-woman transformer on the back of the album cover, forcing the obvious transvestite pun. This deflects attention from the far more important electromagnetic phenomenon - AC transformed into DC in order to power the cathode ray tube that was the heart of every TV.

In ‘73, soaking in the magic transmissions still had a televisonary aura - late night flicker, the mystic fuzz and flare - the warm hum and cooked-dust scent of vacuum tubes. The tiny disappearing dot in the center of the screen as it goes dead. Static fuzz and stereophonic buzz.

A year later Lou was the self-proclaimed Rock and Roll Animal, with black bondage leather and amphetamine twitchcraft. But on “Satellite of Love,” he’s the wide-eyed sky-dreamer. At first listen, the cut is just a charming bit of throwaway pop filler. The trannies and druggies from the earlier hit got all the attention. Now they’re banal clichés. The light of metallic orbital orbs, however, blinking and beeping in the night sky, remains with us.

The ghost of Soviets’ first silver ovum-in-orbit still circles the globe with bright morning-star spikes, a medieval mace-head without the shaft. A steely ball of transistors and diodes, Sputnik spins in silent gyres. It transmits the crypto-hit-tunes, traveling around the earth, around our thoughts, like electrons around the nucleus which is the thinker of those thoughts.

The Soviet code name was Object D. But after launch in 1957, the satellite became Sputnik - the name meaning literally “traveling companion.” The word “satellite” too has a rich occult genealogy, signifying: minion, fan-boy, follower, acolyte, worshipper. In 1962, “Telstar” had thousands of devotees as a big radio hit: guitars, organ, and the sound of rocket engines instead of voices.

“Things like that,” Lou confessed ten years later, “drive me out of my mind.”

His “Satellite of Love” came together in its ecstatic four-chord coda. Silvery lounge piano, finger-snaps, horns added in layers and then Bowie’s fey background vocals. The gorgeous whoosh of his “Ahhhh!” - hitting a falsetto D above the operatic tenor’s high C. The gleeful “Ah - ooooh!” like a glorious gay werewolf howling at the artificial moon.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

The egomaniac whine of the brain-sick teenager: no one conjured this sound better than Ozzy Osbourne. On the first four Black Sabbath albums, he screamed and wailed and did his horrific Hammer-films schtick. Still, like shouting “Boo!” in a crowded seance, the old spookshow was getting tiresome. The cover of the fifth album stays with the old satanic nightmare routine. But the music on the disc is more fit for high school vomit-buzz than human sacrifice.

1973 was the year the Romilar hit the fan. Sticky, nauseating, cheap, and available in every drugstore in America, Romilar cough syrup was the drug of choice for every self-disrespecting fifteen year old boy. Especially when drunk with loud pain-drenched metaloid music, dextromethorphan (the chief ingredient in Romilar) produces visual distortion, a messed up sense of time and space, sweats, diarrhea, dilated pupils, teeth-grinding and gut-spasms. Lo! dextromethorphan will take you there, to that wonderland of teenaged misery and madness.

By the end of ‘73, Romilar elixir had been pulled off the shelves and the brain-eating puke-euphoria tidal wave was over. So Black Sabbath’s gift for Christmas of ‘73 was perfect, like cough syrup converted into sound. Ozzy gives us a few of the usual references to hell and damnation. Still, there’s less focus on the fate of his immortal soul than on his gag reflex and the swollen tissue of his brain. With the headphones clamped on tight and the volume knob turned far into the skull-crushing zone, this album is the aural equivalent of three bottle of Romilar.

Sabbath’s earlier albums had all sold millions and the band’s wealth got them all the best liquor and drugs they wanted. While they might’ve been rehearsing with their noses burnt by high grade coke and their guts sloshing with cognac and twelve year old scotch, they continued to make music not for millionaires, but kids working at minimum wage.

The band, dulled by drugs and success, had started rehearsals in L.A. This fell apart and they ended up renting Clearwell Castle in the ancient royal forest of Dean. Guitarist Tony Iommi claimed that the fifth album really came alive in the dungeons there. Supposedly the riff for the album’s title track was born in the gloom and grue of medieval torture chambers. But like the mock-demonic doom rides of the earlier albums, this too is mostly booga-booga cooked up for gullible American kids. Even the castle itself was a fake - though looking medieval, it was built in the 1700s as a retro-nostalgia folly.

Cut away all the gothick claptrap and what’s left is primo vintage-73 pukadelic product. Here, the kings of downer metal serve up their last great heap of steamy sound-stench. They give a halfhearted nod to the prog rock of the day: there are a few synthesizer squigglies courtesy of Rick Wakeman, on loan from Yes. Iommi does an acoustic guitar noodle track, named “Fluff” for obvious reasons. The rest, the tunes that teenagers kept lifting the needle to replay, are swollen Romilar-riffs with Ozzy’s razor blade pain-shriek on top.

Not surprisingly, he adds plenty of death-yammer: “no return . . . killing yourself . . . into the dust . . . dying day . . . living death . . . execution . . . living just for dying . . .” What fifteen year old locked in his bedroom in a dextromethorphan daze wouldn’t think this is the most profound poetry he’d ever heard?

“Pain, suffering and misery!” Ozzy wails. “You bastards!” he screams. Iommi keeps grinding out the hallucinogenic buzz-sludge. Ozzy keeps shrieking about “universal secrets” and “the secret within your mind.” And fifty thousand sublimely unhappy teenagers retch into paper bags.

Jumpin' the Gunne

Jumpin’ the Gunne


I really want to hate this thing. I want to claim that it’s the worst of the worst. 1973 gave us so much that was so wrong. Hyperbolic bombast - Brain Salad Surgery. Early senility rock - Goat’s Head Soup. Opiated suicidal sump-diver sludge - Lou Reed’s Berlin. And Uriah Heep Live. Against such festering slabs of musical offal, how could a one-hit wonder band achieve such singular status?

JoJo Gunne were not incompetent. That might have provided some amusement, like watching a drunken toddler drive an ambulance full of burn victims. The band was in fact cursed by competence. They can make a passable boozed-up yahoo boogie sound with pseudo-funky slide guitar and LA-rock piano stylings.

What makes Jumpin the Gunne so bafflingly awful is the balance it strikes between minimal ability and drug-addled idiocy. I think this album contains third-rate white boy shoogity-boogity, but I’m not sure. I want to claim it’s the worst, but I don’t think I’ll ever truly know. With song titles such as “Monkey Music” and “High School Drool,” it promises something that will at least be offensive. No such luck. My ear drums register the sound, but a nanosecond later, nothing remains.

No matter how I approach it - headphones in a dark room or as party-noise - I literally can’t listen to this album. I don’t mean I run screaming to yank it off the turntable. I mean my brain truly cannot process the sound. JoJo Gunne manages the amazing feat of creating something so profoundly mediocre that almost nothing sticks in my mind.

Then I gaze at the cover and my hopes rise again. Jumpin’ the Gunne should be truly horrible. Some coke-headed cretin decided that showing a hugely obese buck-naked chick magically flying out of bed (where the four Gunne boy are sitting under the covers) would make for solid sales. Better (or worse) yet is the inside of the fold-out sleeve, where again Ms. Corpulence is displayed, on her belly, making kissy faces to a small happy piglet.

All the album credits are written on her naked pink flesh - including the requisite “Made to be played loud” claim and the mysterious acknowledgment “Cowboy pig courtesy Warren Archer.”

The band ‘s only real hit - “Run Run Run” - was the first single I ever bought. It’s tuneful, rollicking and still tickles the tiny bones in my middle ear. But that’s all. Beyond “Run Run Run” JoJo Gunne’s legacy is just vapor and haze, a ghost that floats in the interzone reaches of popcult nowhereland.

Best? Worst? They’re meaningless words. Aesthetic terms are like bits of crusty burnt food and this album is coated with Super-Teflon. It’s beyond, above, outside any categories of judgment. I’m not even positive that the thing actually exists. I can hold the cover in my hands and put the disc on the turntable. I can gaze at the flying porcine bimbo with the inexplicable white ankle-strap platform shoes. I can try to listen and remember, but it’s like light passing through clear glass, or gamma rays passing through my body: no trace is left behind.

ROCK ON

Here is the ghost in the Top 40 machine, a spectral cry to raise the dead. Here is the gleaming slice of occult vinyl that goes where no song has gone before, and comes back with the prettiest corpse in Hollywood history. Hear the exhortation to some nameless “kid” - and understand why there is a legend that the track was actually cut in James Dean’s tomb.

Pulsing from a million radios in the holy year of 73, David Essex’s “Rock On” is a fulcrum balancing both past and future, one of the crucial songs of this most crucial of years. Echoing in a haze of Jamaican dub (with reverb-soaked bass playing lead, tom-toms and congas giving a jungle vibe, dead stops opening into absolute harrowing silence, and no guitar) it anticipates music that will be supposedly cutting edge ten years later. “Rock On” also harks back to 50s-era poppy dreamland, conjuring up summertime blues and blue suede shoes.

It’s obvious, though, that more than nostalgia animates the singer. This compulsive call to “Rock On” rises years before cretin-metal devil horn handjiving. It doesn’t mean merely to get stupid and loud. This “Rock On” points toward ghosty resurrection. The question “Where do we go from here?” comes from nowhere and finds no answer. Sadness and death linger in the grooves. Multi-tracked vocals add to the opioid reverie. “See her shake on the movie screen.” Who is the “Baby Queen”? We never find out.

The hypnotic bass on “Rock On” is played by the great Herbie Flowers. Creating the brilliant throb-bottoms for 1972’s “Jump Into the Fire” and “Walk On the Wild Side,” anchoring Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album and hundreds of other hits, Herbie Flowers was the primo bass presence of the era.

Disco too lurks in the grooves. The strings on early-70s dance-hits are universally despised by critics and ignored by dance-floor fans. But the pocket-orchestra riffing is exactly what lifts disco from its banality. Disco’s beat is moronically monotonous, and the lyrics idiotic (“boogie oogie oogie” indeed). However, the sleaze of studio strings and quasi-jazz horn intrusions are exactly what brings the devotee back again and again.

As a one-hit wonder who ended up far more successful acting than making music, David Essex here does the cinematic mind-meld. The song veers toward romance (“prettiest girl I ever seen”), then fades into a lost-soul call: hissing slippery sibilants (“sssssssh”) and gospel wails (“oh my soul!”). More trance than dance, more necromantic spell than pop song, “Rock On” still lingers in the ether - tugging at the souls of dead stars and lonely planet kids who remember, or who have convinced themselves that their music-spawned memories are real.

BIG GURL - Maximum Fun Assault

She's back - after 23 years in the shadows. Huge, sexy, a juggernaut of stunning idiocy and murder-glee genius, Big Gurl has returned to conquer all electronic reading devices and human brains. For exactly the same price as the original paperback edition, this underground classic is now available to any who dare enter its turgid and tainted depths.

"Big Gurl is the prose equivalent of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson stoned on evil speed and Sterno." - Hakim Bey

tinyurl.com/biggurlbeats

The Plan

Glam rock had two crypto-Mormons: Mick Ronson and Arthur Killer Kane. The Osmond Brothers on the other hand were up front about their religio-sexual orientation. Five squeaky-teen heartthrob guys with gleaming teeth and big hair, they released their Plan in the middle of glam's greatest year.

White and shiny as mayonnaise, the Osmonds had been dominating the charts since 1970. After a run of massively successful albums, though, they wanted to stretch out and to tell the Latter Day Saint story through song. So they retired to their private musical sanctum (Kolob Studies in Los Angeles - named after God's home-planet) and came up with this Great Hetero Mormon Mini-opera Concept Album.

There's a lot less bubble-gum here than on their earlier records, which explains why it did so poorly with the fans. Not many twelve year old non-LDS girls with the hots for Donny wanted to hear about pre-mortal existence and the end of the world.

As a concept album, it starts predictably with the jingle of Asian bells, ancient flutes, mysterioso harp plinking and voices floating from channel to channel. Mostly though, the album is slick radio-friendly pop with a few nods toward glam.

God's mysterious plan keeps coming up, though it's never made explicit. Heaven gets mentioned. Heavenly Father and the Mormon prophet Joe Smith remain in the shadows, or are far above, orbiting around earth. Like Bowie's Aladdin Sane and Jobriath himself, the singer on "Goin' Home" is a "space man from a different land" and he needs to return.

The first track is "War in Heaven" and at the end we learn about "The Last Days." Even in the sappiest love song on the album, "Darlin,'" the Osmonds manage to slide in some LDS theology. Like other songs on this revelation-drenched slab of vinyl, "Darlin'" mixes up romance and revelation. "There's no end if I'm with you," the boys sing with their hormone-hyped voices. Clearly, they're excited about something. But what? True love? True religion? "Let Me In" is the most disturbing track. Twisting together spirituality and sleazy seduction, it's one of the best God-is-my-girlfriend songs ever recorded.

Some songs are so oblique that even Mormon initiates can't pierce their glistening surface. Featuring a funky Jew's harp and squealy harmonica, "Mirror, Mirror" condemns some nameless other-self who'll "step on those who kiss your feet," and ends with the warning "you can't fool me."

For those in the know, the line "as we would be, he once was" is straight out of Mormon theology. If we just accept the teachings of the whitest religion in the world, we all can become gods and have our own planet, as gloriously snazzy as Kolob. There's real endless power waiting for the Mormon faithful. When the Osmonds sing "we control infinity" they mean it as literal truth.