UNDER APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR JUNE 2016: THE GYNECOLOGISTS
The recent untimely death of the legendary Prince – a former child prodigy simply bursting with talent who has a musical legacy anyone would be proud to call their own – revived the story of the founding of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) that I remember being populated by Senators’ wives, with all of them being Republican save the most prominent member, Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator and future Vice President Al Gore. They were concerned about the effects of rock music lyrics on impressionable children, and that led to Senate hearings and notorious “Parental Advisory / Explicit Lyrics” stickers that appeared on many records beginning in the 1980’s. The controversy had the predictable result of both encouraging sales of supposedly offensive music while simultaneously making a lot of albums difficult to find – Walmart for one refused to sell any CD’s with a Parental Advisory sticker.
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But before I get into all of that, let me share this appreciation for Prince that was posted by Nick Gillespie on reason.com as part of the best commentary on the PMRC that I have been able to find online. It is quite a bit more barbed than the mainstream accolades that you and I have been reading of late.
“Prince is dead and we look to see who might replace him and see no one on the horizon. As Brian Doherty so aptly puts it, ‘He was a bold rebel in terms of image and message, playing with still-prevalent social confines of propriety in behavior, dress, and comportment, mixing sex and religion like they were his own personal possessions he was generous enough to share with us, destroying color lines in pop music and its fandom.’
“More than Michael Jackson and arguably even more than Madonna — to name two other ’80s icons who challenged all forms of social convention in a pop-music setting — Prince took us all to a strange new place that was better than the one we came from. (In this, his legacy recalls that of David Bowie.)
“In the wake of the social progress of the past several decades, it’s hard to recapture how threatening the Paisley One once seemed, this gender-bender guy who shredded guitar solos that put Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton to shame while prancing around onstage in skivvies and high heels. He was funkier than pre-criminality Rick James and minced around with less shame and self-consciousness than Liberace. Madonna broke sexual taboos by being sluttish, which was no small thing; but as a fey black man who surrounded himself with hotter-than-the-sun lady musicians, [Prince] was simultaneously the embodiment of campy Little Richard and that hoariest of White America boogeymen, the hypersexualized black man.
“No wonder he scared the living s--t out of ultra-squares such as Al [Gore] and Tipper Gore. In 1985, the future vice president and planet-saver and his wife were, as Tipper’s 1987 best-selling anti-rock, anti-Satanism, anti-sex manifesto put it, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Tipper headed up the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), whose sacred document was a list of songs it called ‘The Filthy Fifteen’. These were songs that glorified sex, drugs, Satan, and masturbation and could pervert your kid — or even lead them to commit suicide. At number one on the list was Prince’s ‘Darling Nikki’, from his massive soundtrack record to Purple Rain (jeezus, wasn’t that movie a revelation? Of what exactly, I can’t remember; but finally, it seemed, a rock star had truly delivered on the genius we all wanted to see emerge from pop music into film).”
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I heard the story I believe on CBS Sunday Morning; my own seething anger at the time about the whole PMRC charade had been blunted somewhat by seeing the tongue-in-cheek 2002 movie that VH1 broadcast called Warning: Parental Advisory. (As an aside, I have no children of my own, and that might have affected how I feel about it all, though I very much doubt it). It seems that little Karenna Gore (11 years old at the time) was a Prince fan, and Mom and Dad bought her the Purple Rain soundtrack album. And then the track “Darling Nikki” came on; in the context of the film, the Prince character was engaging in what might be called “slut-shaming” today:
I knew a girl named Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend I met her in a hotel lobby Masturbating with a magazine
This was also a central story in their best-selling book, appearing on the third page of Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society: “The song went on and on, in a similar manner. I couldn’t believe my ears! The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned — then I got mad!”
The Nick Gillespie piece continued: “Of course, when you’re the wife of a second-generation U. S. Senator, your mad counts for more than most of the rest of us. In 1985, the Senate wasted its time and our money by holding a hearing on the dread menace of dirty lyrics and the whole bang-the-gong medley of backward masking, rock-induced suicide, and sexual promiscuity. Just a few years later, Al [Gore] and Tipper [Gore] would reinvent themselves as diehard Grateful Dead fans, the better to look hip while campaigning with Bill [Clinton] and Hillary Clinton (another couple of revanchist baby boomers who burned a hell of a lot of time in the 1990’s attacking broadcast TV and basic cable as impossibly violent and desperately in need of regulation).”
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The infamous Filthy Fifteen, along with the reasons for their inclusion on the list, follow. Not only is Prince listed first on the list, he was also the songwriter for #2, “Sugar Walls”; and Vanity, at #4, is a one-time Prince protegé.
2. Sheena Easton – “Sugar Walls” (sex)
3. Judas Priest – “Eat Me Alive” (sex)
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I had intended to go down the list, one by one, since the point of this post is to examine the outrageous and often offensive lyrics that rock music has created over the years, beyond those that I have talked about previously in earlier posts. Frankly, the Filthy Fifteen is under-whelming in this regard and doesn’t deserve that much attention. Most of the rock artists on the list are well known enough, but I am not at all familiar with Mercyful Fate or Venom, the two “occult” offenders. Their music is pretty disgusting all right, and they likely have the PMRC to thank for one-half of their record sales.
Only a third of the songs on this list – “We’re Not Gonna Take It”, “She Bop”, “Sugar Walls”, “Dress You Up”, and “In My House” – were hits, and only the Twisted Sister number is really a signature song. Most of the Filthy Fifteen are deep album cuts that, even at the time, were likely unfamiliar to many of the fans of these bands and artists. For me, the Prince song “Darling Nikki” does not ring a bell; and the same goes for those by Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, and AC/DC. If this was intended as a resource to help out parents instead of just a publicity stunt, adding the album names would have saved everyone a lot of time.
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The biggest surprise though is how unimaginative and pedestrian the Filthy Fifteen list is. The fact that 9 of the 15 songs on the list – and 4 of the 5 hits – are there due to “sex” raised my eyebrows at least. The number of double entendres about sex in rock music over the decades has to run into the hundreds by now – “rock and roll” itself was originally a slang term for making love – and that is pretty much all that is going on here. After all, these musicians are trying to write songs that might get played on the radio, and being truly explicit doesn’t work.
Only 2 songs on the Filthy Fifteen are listed for “drug and alcohol use”, and as far as I can tell, neither talks about drugs. The list is laden with heavy-metal bands as might be expected, but the best they could do with Black Sabbath – whose very name promises lurid occult references – is a song about getting drunk? Really?
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Just one song on the Filthy Fifteen list, “Animal (F--k Like A Beast)” has a vulgar title, and W.A.S.P. had already made the decision to leave the controversial song off their debut album, W.A.S.P. The copy of the song that I have is on a 12-inch single; the cover features a circular saw blade emerging from a codpiece – the image is more cartoonish than offensive to me at least.
Rolling Stone magazine published an overview last year called “PMRC’s ‘Filthy 15’: Where Are They Now?”, where they give some of the lyrics. For the most part, they are no more offensive than the song titles. Here are some samples as taken from the Rolling Stone article, chosen almost at random: “Don’t you struggle / Don’t you fight / Let me put my love into you / Let me cut your cake with my knife” (from “Let Me Put My Love Into You”); “When it comes down to makin’ love / I’ll satisfy your every need / And every fantasy you think up” (from “In My House”); “Saturday, I feel right / I’ve been drinking all day . . . / I got my whiskey / I got my wine / I got my woman / And this time, the lights are going out” (from “High ’n Dry”).
“Dress You Up” comes from the Madonna album Like a Virgin and is among the tamer songs in her canon; just for starters, the title song on that album, “Like a Virgin” is a lot steamier.
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Why “We’re Not Gonna Take It” showed up at all among the Filthy Fifteen is a real puzzler, but it brought out the ire of Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who provided the most memorable testimony at the U. S. Senate hearing that he made even more effective by dressing up for the occasion. The other two musicians who testified were Frank Zappa – at least one of the F15 alumni praised him as running interference for the whole rock industry – and John Denver. This wide-ranging trio gives some indication as to how offended rock musicians were in turn about the whole offending-lyrics business.
As quoted in the Nick Gillespie post, Dee Snider told the U. S. Senate: “You will note from the lyrics before you that there is absolutely no violence of any type either sung about or implied anywhere in the song. Now, it strikes me that the PMRC may have confused our video presentation for this song . . . with the lyrics, with the meaning of the lyrics. It is no secret that the videos often depict story lines completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song they accompany. The video ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Road Runner – Wile E. Coyote theme. Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons.”
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Rolling Stone’s article provides reflections from some of the rock artists involved in the PMRC controversy. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider has this to say: “Everything I represented, stood for and said back then, I have lived and stand by today. . . . I practice self-censorship. When my own family got into Tenacious D, the first album [Tenacious D], including my little daughter who was only eight, I made a special tape for her without ‘F--k Her Gently’ on it ’cause she wasn’t ready for ‘F--k Her Gently’. But she clearly listened [to] ‘Wonderboy’ and the other songs her brothers were listening to. This is hands-on parenting and everything I stood for.”
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From what I know of her, Vanity was even more over-the-top than Madonna when it comes to sexuality. She is now a born-again Christian and says of her musical career: “I was young and irresponsible, a silly woman laden with sin, not caring for anything except fame and fortune and self.”
Although quite religious in her own way, Madonna has a different take: “I like to provoke; it’s in my DNA. But nine times out of 10, there’s a reason for it.”
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Blackie Lawless, frontman for W.A.S.P., is also a born-again Christian today; but he isn’t letting these people off the hook: “At the time, to have a female senator hold up a picture of my crotch in front of the Congress of the United States made me ask myself, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m just some kid in a rock & roll band. Do these guys have nothing better to do with our tax money?’ But now being a born-again Christian, I’ve not played that song [‘Animal (F--k Like A Beast)’] for almost 10 years. Knowing what we know now, the PMRC should have stood for ‘Politicians Masked as Reelection Campaigns’. It was Al Gore’s ‘Joe McCarthy moment’.”
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The only song on the Filthy Fifteen that I think deserves special attention is Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop”; the song is on her major hit album, She’s So Unusual. It really is a clever take on masturbation that got past a lot of people – in fact, the music video of the song that featured a judge and a tunnel and all the rest of it provided a lot of clues that the song didn’t.
The opening verse refers to Blueboy, a gay pornographic magazine; the lyric sheet put the name in lower case though:
We-hell – I see them every night in tight blue jeans – In the pages of a blue boy magazine
The next verse is a little more explicit:
Do I wanna go out with a lion’s roar Or do I wanna go south ’n get me some more . . . They say I better stop - or I’ll go blind
The final verse winds it up nicely:
Hey, hey – they say I better get a chaperone Because I can’t stop messin’ with the danger zone No, I won’t worry, and I won’t fret Ain’t no law against it yet
The conjugation of the made-up verb “bop” that forms most of the chorus is just another way of saying, “everybody’s doing it”; it also includes a reference to the 1957 Gene Vincent hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, presumably where the songwriters borrowed the word:
She bop – he bop – a-we bop I bop – you bop – a-they bop Be bop – be bop-a-lu bop, I hope He ↑ will understand
That last line in the chorus is the real coup de grace for this song. There is an up arrow in the lyric sheet in the album, making this an unmistakable reference to God; this line is even performed in a different tempo from the rest of the song. The first time it is sung, one of the characters in the video does an exaggerated double-take.
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Songs about masturbation were fairly common in the 1980’s, and several became hits. (Prince’s “Darling Nikki” was not even released as a single). Examples include “The Stroke” by Billy Squier, “I Touch Myself” by DiVinyls, and “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors – the latter song is a reference to what some people say a face can look like at the moment of climax.
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You want feelthy leerics? How about this number, “Please Please Me” by the Beatles? This is the “A” side of their third single and the first to make much noise in their home country; it is also the title song on their first album, Please Please Me. To me, this song is easier to figure out than most on the Filthy Fifteen, once you think about the lyrics even a little: The singer is asking his girlfriend to perform oral sex on him, since he is already performing oral sex on her. I have referred to this song previously, but let me just lay it all out for you this time:
Last night I said these words to my girl I know you never even try, girl C’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon) Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
You don’t need me to show the way, love Why do I always have to say, love C’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon)
Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
I don’t wanna sound complaining But you know there’s always rain in my heart (In my heart) I do all the pleasing with you, it’s so hard to reason With you, whoah yeah, why do you make me blue
Last night I said these words to my girl I know you never even try, girl C’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon), c’mon (C’mon) Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you (Me) Whoa yeah, like I please you (Me) Whoa yeah, like I please you
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The most famous case of supposedly offensive lyrics in popular music is “Louie Louie”, specifically the version by the Kingsmen. The original version of “Louie Louie” was released in 1957 by Richard Berry (who is also the songwriter); it has a Latin American beat, and the lyrics are clearly about a sailor pining away for his woman back home.
A lesser known version of “Louie Louie” was released in 1960 by Rockin’ Robin Roberts backed by the Wailers, a rock band from Tacoma, Washington that is often cited as being the first garage rock band in history. It was in this recording that the famous call was introduced: “Let’s give it to ’em, right now!” Neither of these recordings made the charts though.
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The Kingsmen released “Louie Louie” in 1963, and that is the one that became such a hit. I remember hearing “Louie Louie” on the radio just about every summer when I was growing up after that. The beat meter was accidentally changed, as was the style of the song; lead singer Jack Ely is the one who mumbled the lyrics.
From Wikipedia: “The Kingsmen transformed [Richard] Berry’s easy-going ballad into a raucous romp, complete with a twangy guitar, occasional background chatter, and nearly unintelligible lyrics by [Jack] Ely. A guitar break is triggered by the shout, ‘Okay, let’s give it to ’em right now!’, which first appeared in the Wailers’ version, as did the entire guitar break (although, in the Wailers’ version, a few notes differ, and the entire band played the break).
“Critic Dave Marsh suggests it is this moment that gives the recording greatness: ‘[Jack Ely] went for it so avidly you’d have thought he’d spotted the jugular of a lifelong enemy, so crudely that, at that instant, Ely sounds like Donald Duck on helium. And it’s that faintly ridiculous air that makes the Kingsmen’s record the classic that it is, especially since it’s followed by a guitar solo that’s just as wacky.’”
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The Actual Lyrics to “Louie Louie”
Rumors began to spread that the slurred vocals in “Louie Louie” covered up new lyrics about the sailor having sex with his woman rather than merely missing her. I remember listening to the record over and over trying to pick up on some of the lyrics; the only thing I ever thought that I heard was, “I felt my pole high in her hair” (whatever that was supposed to mean).
Lyric sheets began circulating with the “real” lyrics on them. Here is what the FBI reportedly uncovered – yes, this official agency of the government that is supposed to be investigating criminal activity took their time to investigate the lyrics to a rock and roll song. Iggy Pop often sang the song with these lyrics, now that they had been conveniently written down.
A fine little girl a-waiting for me She’s just a girl across the way We’ll take her and park all alone She’s never a girl I lay at home
At night at ten I lay her again F--k you girl, oh all the way Oh my bed and I lay her there I meet a rose in her hair
The lyrics that circulated in Detroit went this way:
There is a fine little girl waiting for me She is just a girl across the way When I take her all alone She’s never the girl I lay at home
Tonight at ten I’ll lay her again We’ll f--k your girl and by the way And on that chair I’ll lay her there I felt my boner in her hair
There are probably at least a dozen more dirty versions of “Louie Louie” that are available on the Internet. The FBI closed its investigation in 1965 with the famous conclusion that the lyrics for “Louie Louie” are “unintelligible at any speed”.
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There is a wonderful scene in the Richard Dreyfuss movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus about a jazz musician who takes a job as a high school music teacher. One of his students, played by Alicia Witt, is struggling with her clarinet playing. He tells her, “’There’s more to music than the notes on the paper.” Up until then, the movie has been dealing with “serious” music; but at this point, Dreyfuss reaches into a pile of 45’s and puts on “Louie Louie”.
He gives a little speech while it is playing: “Listen. These fellas have absolutely no harmonic sense. They can’t sing, the lead singer is yelling. They’re playing the same boring three chords over and over and over. The recording sucks. The lyrics are awful when you can understand them, if you can hear them. This song is about a decibel away from being noise. But we love it. I love it! Do you love it?” (She nods).
“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because it has heart. These guys are playing with everything they have and they’re having fun. They love it, so we love it.”
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It is fair to say that Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts are a North Carolina institution. With original bandleader Doug Clark’s death in 2002, the band is now known as Doug Clark’s Hot Nuts. Combining a hot African-American R&B band with the raunchiness of a Redd Foxx “party record”, the Hot Nuts are popular throughout the state and into adjoining areas as well, particularly at college fraternities, though they play at a lot of black clubs also. Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts are said to have been the inspiration for the party band in the film National Lampoon’s Animal House, Otis Day and the Knights.
Doug Clark (a native of Chapel Hill) put the band together in the early 1960’s, with his brother John Clark on saxophone. They played dance hits of the day interspersed with bawdy songs that included “My Ding-a-Ling” (long before Chuck Berry had his sole #1 hit with “My Ding-a-Ling” in 1972), “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box” (later played at the end of the New York porno cable program, The Robin Byrd Show), “Big Jugs” (a reworking of the Jimmy Dean song “Big John”), “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”, “Two Old Maids”, and “Gay Caballero”.
Their signature song was “Hot Nuts”, with a chorus that went: “Nuts / Hot nuts / You get them from the peanut man / Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah / Nuts / Hot nuts / You get them any way you can.” Between the choruses are couplets typically about women they have known (sample: “See that girl all dressed in pink / She’s the one who made my finger stink”), and the band had an endless supply of lyrics that could make any word seem dirty. Even though there is nothing particularly offensive about their name, the Hot Nuts, their appearances were usually advertised on the radio as simply “Doug Clark”.
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Jubilee Records clandestinely introduced a label specifically for Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, appropriately called Gross Records; and they put out a total of nine albums between 1961 and 1969, beginning with Nuts to You (featuring Doug Clark flipping the bird to the audience). I have that album and their second, On Campus that I purchased for under $2 each ages ago. Somebody just didn’t know what they had!
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Every once in a while, I encounter the above album by Coven, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (1969) in a rack at a record store; and it scares the crap out of me every time. Three faces and a skull stare implacably from the cover; in fact, the way the lettering is laid out, it is not clear whether it is witchcraft or Coven itself that is doing the destroying. Inside the gate-fold album cover is a nude woman lying on an altar (with the skull strategically placed); I have read that a black mass is held that way. The album ends with a 13-minute cut called “Satanic Mass”. I recently purchased a compilation album that, unbeknownst to me, has a song from this album on it. I cannot seem to find it now, and it is just as well.
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The opening track on Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls by Coven is called “Black Sabbath”. Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, the opening song on the debut album Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath is also called “Black Sabbath”. The Allmusic article on this album by Steve Huey, which came out the following year, opens with: “Black Sabbath’s debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre.”
Furthermore, the bass guitarist in Coven is Oz Osborne, having practically the same name as the best known bandmember in Black Sabbath, lead singer Ozzy Osbourne. But the similarities end there: Black Sabbath is a British band from the industrial city of Birmingham; Coven is from Chicago. From everything I have heard and read, Black Sabbath is anti-Satanic if anything; Coven had Satanic trappings in their concerts from the beginning.
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Powerful lead singer Jinx Dawson (by then based in California) performed a song for the 1971 Tom Laughlin film, Billy Jack called “One Tin Soldier” that was originally recorded by a Canadian band called the Original Caste. The song was released as “One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)” – in fact, that was the original name for the film as well – under her old band name Coven and made it to #26 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song is basically a fable about a hidden treasure rumored to be gold that the “mountain people” offer to share with but not give to the “valley people”. The identity of the treasure masks somewhat the bloodbath described in the final verses:
Now the valley [people] cried with anger “Mount your horses! Draw your sword!” And they killed the mountain-people So they won their just reward
Now they stood beside the treasure On the mountain, dark and red Turned the stone and looked beneath it “Peace on Earth” was all it said
It is in the chorus of “One Tin Soldier” though where a mocking, even treacherous tone can be heard; this is not a call against hypocrisy but an attack on Christian theology itself:
Go ahead and hate your neighbor Go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven You can justify it in the end
There won’t be any trumpets blowing Come the judgment day On the bloody morning after One tin soldier rides away
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Lightening the mood some, Betty Blowtorch is an all-woman punk rock band that is more like this month’s UARB than anyone I have talked about so far. Allmusic described the band like this: “Strutting with the guts of Joan Jett and harsh vocals of L7, this hard rock four-piece is truly individualistic and unafraid to be disruptive. Bianca Butthole (bass/vocals), Sharon Needles (guitar), Blare N. Bitch (guitar), and Judy Molish (drums) follow Hollywood’s heavy metal/glam rock scene with a passion for sexed-up anthems of fantasy, and have been honing their nasty rock ways since the late ’90s.”
Everyone but Molish had previously been in a band called Butt Trumpet – with similar sensibility though not all-female – along with vocalist Thom Bone and drummer Jerry Geronimo. Betty Blowtorch was formed in 1998, and while not exactly a pose, their brand of sex-obsessed punk is clearly performed with a wink at the audience – their first single, “Size Queen” has guest musician Vanilla Ice (“Ice Ice Baby”) rapping about the size of his member – and also has surprising professionalism. After their full-length album, Are You Man Enough? came out in 2001, Betty Blowtorch began touring with the hard rock/psychobilly band Nashville Pussy.
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As to the lyrics in the Betty Blowtorch song that I have, “Shut up and F--k” – taken from the same compilation album, Dr. Wu Records Compilation Vol. 2-000 (2000) as “We Came, We Saw, We Drank” by past UARB Mötochrist – I have nothing to add.
Baby, baby standing at the bar You saw me wanking my bass guitar Baby, baby get on your knees Cause I want you to worship me
I don’t care who you are I just want to f--k in your car
Shut up and f--k Shut up and f--k
Some people might call me a slut What can I say, I wanna bust a nut I strap on my biggest dildo It makes me hot when you’re screaming “no”
I don’t wanna know your name I just wanna f--kin get laid
Shut up and f--k Shut up and f--k
I don’t want conversation I just want penis penetration I don’t want you to be mine I just wanna sixty-nine
Shut up and f--k Shut up and f--k Shut up and f--k Shut up and f--k
Whatcha gonna do tonight? Shut up and f--k
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The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for June 2016 is THE GYNECOLOGISTS, a truly wild, truly outrageous punk rock band from Indiana whose bandleader Tommy Afterbirth “came up with the idea of recording and pressing the vilest gross-out novelty record EVER”. Which of their 30-some songs he meant is difficult to know for certain – probably it was the one about The Brady Bunch that he was already working on, “Sex Orgy with the Bradee Bunch” (the misspelled name was probably used to avoid potential lawsuits). The boys used the record label name Vomit Productions for their first release, where the front cover included a photo of Tommy Afterbirth’s own dog’s poop.
The best info on the band comes from the voluminous liner notes written by John Barge for the compilation CD, Hoosier Psychopaths (2007); Barge had been in a punk rock band called the Panics. The original version of the liner notes – including the quote given above – appears on a website on Indiana music called www.musicalfamilytree.net .
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Even by punk rock standards, the bandmembers’ names in the Gynecologists were inventive: bandleader and chief songwriter Tommy Afterbirth (lead vocals), John Wilkes Booth (keyboard player turned guitarist), Simon Scrotum (bass guitar – he was also an insurance salesman), and Milburn Drysdale (drums). Milburn Drysdale (played by Raymond Bailey) was the banker who lived next door to The Beverly Hillbillies family; in this classic sitcom that was filled to the brim with colorful characters, he was probably my favorite of them all. By the time that their 1984 release, A Goat . . . You Geek came out, the new bass guitarist named Kid Death (who is from Oregon) had improved their sound as a “a much more straight forward kick ass punk rock band”, as John Barge put it.
As far as I can tell, they only ever took one photograph of the Gynecologists; it is immediately identifiable from the stovepipe hat worn and the electric guitar held by the namesake of the real John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Its first appearance was on the back cover of their debut release, Feces and Psychopaths, where the bandleader Tommy Afterbirth had the appellation “M.D.”.
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Tommy Afterbirth is credited with all of the deranged lyrics on the songs by the Gynecologists. Their cheesy covers of hit songs like “Brandy”, “Shape of Things to Come”, “We’re an American Band”, and “Ride Captain Ride” also suit their gonzo style; another song that they recorded was a 1973 hit by Bobby Womack called “Across 110th Street”.
Mostly, the Gynecologists mined pop culture – “Aunt Bee” (a character on The Andy Griffith Show), “M.A.S.H.E.R” (based on the long-running sitcom, M*A*S*H), “Love and Haight” (a reference to the center of hippiedom in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco) – news stories – “McMartin Preschool”, “Kent State” – and bodily functions – “Bloody Kotex”, “Gotta Piss”, “Peanut Butter Prophylactic” – as the subjects of their songs. The “Psychopaths” side of their first release, an EP called Feces and Psychopaths (1981) includes songs about Rev. Jim Jones (who was also from Indiana) called “Jimmy Jones” and the child-killing mass murderer John Wayne Gacy, “John Wayne Gacy”. Another song, “Dahmer’s Diner” refers to the cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
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The Gynecologists are probably best known for “Sex Orgy with the Bradee Bunch”; I have a vague recollection of having heard the song previously, though I have no idea where. The Brady Bunch has an unusual premise for a sitcom: A man with three sons marries a woman with three daughters. I don’t know whether this was intended originally, but the males and females are not related to each other, so it wouldn’t really be incest for any of them to have sex with each other – not even within the context of the show, never mind in real life. Wikipedia never brings it up, but this was a definite undercurrent in the show that was on a lot of (dirty) minds. As notoriously randy as actors and actresses are, it is not surprising that plenty of rumors and scandals have seen the light of day.
Suffice it to say that everyone in the sitcom seems to put in an appearance – even the family dog. One girl’s best friend is her vibrator, one of the boys is a chronic masturbator; that’ll give you an idea of how the song goes. The song starts with a flushing toilet to boot.
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Song lyrics are hard to come by on the Internet for songs by the Gynecologists, and what is being sung is usually hard to understand. John Barge quotes some of the song lyrics in his liner notes. For instance, “Ron and Nancy” imagines sexual antics not far removed from those envisioned in “Sex Orgy with the Bradee Bunch”: “Even Ed Meese got a piece!” In “Kent State”, Tommy Afterbirth sings: “Those traitors don’t even deserve a decent burial.” As Barge puts it: “Those who seek succor from politically correct song lyrics will find little sustenance here.”
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Most of the lyrics for one of their songs, “Infant Doe” are printed on the album cover of Bukkake Hit Parade. The story is of the tragic end of a deformed baby and is probably something that was in the newspaper. “Infant Doe” was performed straight, though in their inimitable style, and shows that the Gynecologists had heart. The song is included on a compilation album called The Master Tape, Vol. 2.
Born with Down Syndrome
His parents wouldn’t take him home
They didn’t buy him a casket
They threw him in a cardboard box (the song actually says a “Hefty bag”)
He was anonymous
He had no esophagus
He’s infant Doe
A subtext in a lot of punk rock music is the idea of being at the mercy of forces beyond your control, even from the beginning of life. This is particularly true of the legendary public-access program, New Wave Theatre that was a Los Angeles punk-rock showcase and so much more. In a future post, I will give a tribute to this show; thus far, I have not really done justice to New Wave Theatre and their host Peter Ivers (who wound up being murdered in a case that has not been solved to this day).
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As taken from the John Barge liner notes about the Gynecologists: “The story begins in a small unnamed redneck town south of Indianapolis where Tommy [Afterbirth] grew up. Tommy’s gateway drug to punk rock was his father’s drive-in movie theater, which, along with such prosaic family fare like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, thrilled the local yahoos with garish horror films and cheap psychedelic biker flicks during the sixties. From this Tommy learned to love the seedy underbelly of pop culture with a fixation that bordered on compulsive.”
Tommy Afterbirth has some notable milestones in his life besides the Gynecologists. He was quite the athlete in his younger days; he competed in a statewide basketball free-throw shooting contest, finishing in second place. The winner of that contest, Steve Alford is a true basketball legend who led the Indiana University Hoosiers to the 1987 national championship and was the school’s all-time leading scorer at the time. Alford currently serves as the coach of the UCLA Bruins, the position previously held by one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, John Wooden.
Tommy Afterbirth also has an entrepreneurial spirit; while he was still in high school, he started a record store. He recruited the other bandmembers in the Gynecologists from a local heavy metal band called Stone Edge; they were mostly a covers band but had one original song to their credit, a put-down number called “Dog Face” that was included on the first release by the Gynecologists. Tommy even convinced a local minister to loan them a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a synthesizer for their first recording sessions.
Tommy Afterbirth has surprising connections to the Republican Party and actually served as an official delegate to the 1976 and 1980 Republican National Conventions. Although he and his family were on the receiving end of some of his band’s songs – such as “Ron and Nancy”, “Young Ron” and “Nancy Reagan on Crack” – Tommy Afterbirth boasted of having shaken hands with future President Ronald Reagan on two occasions; and, while at the 1976 Republican National Convention, he bought a beer for future President George H. W. Bush. The name of their third release, Kinder, Gentler Nation (1989) is taken from Bush’s acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention. For one album cover, they even went so far as to paste Nancy Reagan’s head on . . . oh, never mind. Then again, their feelings about the other party are apparent in their song, “Democrats Suck Donkey Dicks”.
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The most comprehensive compilation album of the Gynecologists, a CD called Hoosier Psychopaths on Gulcher Records, has 30 songs, including each of their recordings in order; besides the two I have already discussed, they include two cassette-only releases, A Goat . . . You Geek (1984) and Auto-Erotica Asphyxia & Various Moldy Turds (1994). According to John Barge, their latter album included a host of other guest musicians and characters: Dave Death, Bob Tangleweed, Lumpy Repellant, Kevin Drake, Buster Hyman, and Frankie Camaro. (The Bukkake Hit Parade liner notes have several other “special guests” in their list: Ricky Retardo, Mrs. Food, Bejhan Mirhadi, and Tina Chang). There are also a half-dozen unreleased rarities on Hoosier Psychopaths; three show two titles, so there might be nine actually.
The vinyl album by the Gynecologists that I have, Bukkake Hit Parade (2002) – “bukkake” is a term used in Japanese pornography that is appropriate, but I will let you look it up if you wish – has a different name for the drummer, Pippy Longstocking. (Pippi Longstocking is a popular character in children’s literature having unusual pigtails who was created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren). Despite the apparently comprehensive Hoosier Psychopaths, and unless some of their songs have multiple titles, the 13 cuts on Bukkake Hit Parade include more than a few songs that aren’t on the CD: “Nancy Reagan on Crack”, “M.A.S.H.E.R”, “Dahmer’s Diner”, “Across 110th Street”, and “Sally Struthers’ Tears”.
The omission of “Sally Struthers’ Tears” is particularly surprising, since it is one of my favorites by the Gynecologists (along with “Across 110th Street”). After her run on All in the Family, Sally Struthers made a series of commercials for the Christian Children’s Fund charity where she would often be shown crying. Despite the mercilessly mocking tone of the song, Tommy Afterbirth manages to capture the way she would plead for help for these children at a cost of “pennies a day”.
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Bukkake Hit Parade by the Gynecologists is on an Italian label called Rave Up Records; the album is Volume 26 in a long series called American Lost Punk Rock Nuggets that was started in 1999. The Discogs website shows the full list of 79 albums, including 3 that were released in 2015; I guess there are even more to come.
There are songs by the Gynecologists on albums in two long-running punk-rock compilation album series: Killed by Death #18 (“Sex Orgy with the Bradee Bunch”) and Bloodstains Across the Midwest (“Gym Gerard”, based on a TV personality), with the cover of the latter album having a crude drawing of the famous photograph from the 1970 Kent State University shootings.
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Story of the Month: DEAD KENNEDYS (from July 2012)
In certain circles at least, Dead Kennedys are as well known as the Grateful Dead. They are the founders of hardcore punk in the San Francisco Bay area, though most of that action was in Los Angeles. Their 1980 debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is one of the landmark punk rock albums of all time and includes most of their well-known songs, such as “California Über Alles”, “Holiday in Cambodia”, “Kill the Poor”, and a cover of “Viva Las Vegas”.
As is common in the punk rock community, many of the bandmembers picked their own names; the name of front man Jello Biafra still has a certain ring to it I suppose, though hardly anyone remembers the breakaway African state Biafra (1967-1970), the once and future province of Nigeria. Other bandmembers were East Bay Ray, Klaus Fluoride and 6025; the latter gentleman left the band in 1979, perhaps because they weren’t hardcore enough: One song of his that is included on their debut album is “Forward to Death” (as in: “I’m looking . . .”) and features the lyric: “I don’t need this f--king world”.
Dead Kennedys is certainly among the most outrageous band names of all time, though Jello Biafra insists that they were not trying to insult the Kennedy family but were trying “to bring attention to the end of the American Dream”.
Even at the time, the brand name “Jell-O” didn’t seem cool enough for a punk rock artiste, though the name turned up once again in the comic-punk band Green Jellö.
I was first exposed unknowingly to Dead Kennedys when someone scrawled the lyrics to one of their songs, “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” in the basement of the apartment building where our real estate office in Raleigh was located for many years. Until I got my own copy of Fresh Fruit several years later, I didn’t realize where those lyrics came from, but they did seem too professional for just anyone to have come up with.
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The Honor Roll of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists follows, in date order, including a link to the original Facebook posts and the theme of the article.
Jun 2016 – THE GYNECOLOGISTS; Offensive Rock Music Lyrics
(Year 10 Review)
