I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MONTY PYTHON-“Rock Notes” (1980).

This skit (more of a monologue) comes from Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album, the first Python album I ever bought.  It’s not my favorite bit from them, but it’s short and wedged in the middle of the rest of the album which means that I know it by heart.  Now, the skit is most famous for naming Toad the Wet Sprocket (Eric Idle says he tried to come up with the most absurd name he could think of and there it was).  The band featured Flamboyant Ambidextrous Rex who fell off the back of a motorcycle.

What I tend to forget is that the rest of the joke is all about one band Dead Monkeys who have just broken up again.  They were together for ten years, but for nine of those years the band had other names.  Primarily, the names are fishy: Dead Salmon, Trout, Poached Trout in a White Wine Sauce, Dead Herring.  Then they ditched the fishy references for Dead Loss, Heads Together, Dead Together and ultimately Helen Shapiro.

This extended riff is rather silly and I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for a joke on bands.  I can’t think of many bands who have broken up and reformed under new names (I mean, yes, there’s a couple, but not enough to warrant this extended joke).

And yet, I still remember the joke, so it must be something, right?

What do I think of Dead Duck? or Lobster?

[READ: September 16, 2014] “Liner Notes”

This Shouts & Murmurs piece begins so strongly that I was super excited to read it.  Saunders riffs on liner notes in albums, specifically failed albums.  His liner notes are for the album 2776: A Musical Journey Through America’s Past, Present & Future which is just another attempt to “engage with the vast sweep of American history” via the musical epic.

The best joke is citing Meat Loaf’s “Ben Franklin Makes Love in a Foggy Grove of Trees” (which failed to translate to live performance).  [I would totally listen to that song].  He then talks about a Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber production of “Johnny Tremain” which was too intellectual for a nineteen-seventies audience.  But I feel like Saunders goes off track when, instead of staying with the slightly absurd realism, he jumps the shark by saying that the songs were too risqué “for a staid culture that, at that time, still believed that babies came when you left a pastel turtleneck rolled up in a wad overnight.”  It broke me right out of the exaggerated realism into the realm of outrageous farce.

Which is a shame because returning to real artists like Tom Waits making a biography of Jesse James called “A White-Trash Rambling Christ Figure Just Shot Your Brother, Amigo” is pretty darn funny.

After that introduction, Saunders gets into the meat of the matter–he has been asked to writ the liner notes for 2776.  When he was a kid, he imagined what it was like to be on the scene when classic albums were made. Like the gate fold sleeve from the Allman Brothers Bands’ Brothers and Sisters album.  Did the girls have Southern accents?  “Were some of them actually Brits?  That would be hot…  Would the girls have been like ‘Y’all, look at this cute Yankee preteen–let’s have him off for a quick towboat in the bloody lorry.'”  (That’s pretty funny).

But he says there is no need for speculation because he was there for 2776.  This album had contributions from everyone in rock: Bruce, Bono, Beyoncé (a few weeks before she was famous). It even had Led Zeppelin (and unreleased track called “Among the Hessian Troops at Saratgoga.”  However, the crux of the matter is that all of these tracks were discarded for one reason or another.

He describes “the farm” where the recording took place (and the locals who didn’t much care for them).  As he goes on he talks about more and more things that make this album the disaster he knows it will be.

There’s some amusing jokes that play with how these liner notes are written (like what tense this should be written in and use of the word “we” in regards to who made decisions about the album).

Like the Monty Python skit it feels a little too long and sort of loses the plot along the way, but there’s enough solid jokes to make me laugh just thinking about them.