Weird Medicine Healthcare for the Rest of Us

Really, no one is getting better here.  Apologies to the original copyright owners.  This is obviously satire, they can’t be serious, right?  (“They” being “we,” of course).

In honor of Star Wars Episode VII, coming soon to a theater near you, I am reposting a song that my friend Fred Vultee and I did with our other friends Gil Fray and Doug Baker in 1977, soon after seeing the first Star Wars movie.   It was also our first attempt at ping-pong multitracking with multiple instruments.  We didn’t have drums so Fred and I beat on pots and pans.  Very low tech, but somehow I was in possession of a Korg synthesizer and posted a tasty synth solo somewhere in there.  Yes, that’s me at the end, yelling like an idiot about “struttin’ our stuff…in the Milky Way…”  I had no shame at that time.

Enjoy!

LYRICS:

GENERALISSIMO!  OBI WAN KENOBI!
I WANT TO BE A FUNKY JEDI KNIGHT
FIGHT THE DEATH STAR WITH ALL MY MIGHT
USE THE FORCE AND IT COME OUT RIGHT
CAUSE I’M A FUNKY JEDI KNIGHT

WELL GENERALISSIMO! OBI WAN KENOBI!

NOW LOOK AT THEM TUSKEN RAIDERS
BE FRIENDS WITH OLD DARTH VADER
AND LOOK AT THEM OLD SAND PEOPLE
DON’T LIKE OLD R2-D2

GENERALISSIMO! OBI WAN KENOBI!
<CHORUS>

WHEN OL’ DARTH VADER USE THE FORCE
YOU KNOW NOTHIN’ COULD BE WORSE
AND LOOK AT THOSE STINKIN’ JAWAS…
THEY DON’T OBEY NO LAW-AS!

GENERALISSIMO!  OBI WAN KENOBI!

<RIFF>

People have been asking me for the “Ask A Prostitute” theme music. It’s basically an AppleLoop jingle with a vocoder saying “ASK A PROSTITUTE” over and over. If you make it into a ringtone, please let me know how that goes over at work.

your obt svt,

Steve

Well, the Vodka Tampon Challenge was our second scientific “mythbusting” endeavor…the first being Double Vasectomy Todd’s loss of 80 lbs and gaining of 1 and 3/4 inches of penis length, thus confirming “The Rule of 35” or “Dr Steve’s Rule” that says for every 35 lbs of weight loss, you regain 1 inch (approximately) of visible male membership.

The Vodka Tampon Challenge was affected, however, by my recent loss of vision…posterior uveitis knocked me from 20/20 to 20/200 in a day and I had to get steroids injected in my dumb eyes again.   This is all documented on my pal “LobstaJohnson”s YouTube site which I recommend you check out.  Anyway, it was scientific enough.  The premise is pretty iffy…who would really think that the small amount of alcohol on the surface of a tampon would be absorbed at all, much less cause inebriation?   We proved that it is MALARKEY (you’ll have to listen to the show to find out how) and it does nothing but cause pretty significant vaginal irritation.   DO NOT TRY THIS CRAP AT HOME.   We do it, so you don’t have to do stupid stuff.

Speaking of stupid stuff, I’ve had a ton of emails requesting the CB ALIEN mp3.  So here it is.  I wrote it with Freb Vultee in something like 1977 at the height of the CB Craze and decided to pass it along to our trucker listeners as a kind of a tribute.  Probably would have done better to just say “we appreciate each and every one of you” and left it at that.  Anyway, here it is.   Do with it what you will (I recommend simply ignoring it).

July 10th will be the last weekend that Weird Medicine owns the Midnight Slot.  July 17th begins the reign of terror known as Big Kev’s Geek Stuff and we’ll alternate weeks until someone above us changes things again or until either Kev or I keel over.

Until next time

your pal,

Steve

“Fez out of Balance”

This was inspired by something Ronnie B said that inspired something that Sherwin Sleeves said…and of course I just stole the idea.

I had forgotten how much I loved “Koyaanisqatsi” (Life out of Balance) and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, buy it immediately from  the Weird Medicine Drug Store.

It’s slow and plodding, not brilliant and thoughtful like Philip Glass’s original, but it’s the first music I’ve put together in over 6 years so it was fun to do.  I basically did it for @sherwinsleeves and @djjd1962 who were talking about Philip Glass on twitter one day and I happened to eavesdrop.

Anyway, I love Fezzie and if he’s a little out of balance today, who isn’t?  Maybe this will help.  It certainly was therapeutic for me.

Still no news from Sirius about the live show April 24th.  I’m despairing that it will happen.  I’ll post more as I find out.

your pal,

Steve

We jumped ship a little to play “Blind Man’s Penis” on our October 25th show, but we got a ton of emails requesting a copy of the .mp3.

I’m pretty sure it’s “public domain” at this point, as I found it on a website dedicated to songpoems and those who love them.

Here’s the article about the song straight from the author himself (again cribbed from songpoemmusic.com):

You Too Can Be A Recording Star!
Article by John Trubee

Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind. This ludicrous line was invented out of sheer boredom and homicidal frustration as I labored as a cashier in a convenience store in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1975. I’d scribble some poems and weird phrases on a legal pad to vent my seething anguish. Writing on the job was a kind of self-invented therapy to prevent the onset of mental illness due to occupational stress and severe teenage alienation.

In late spring of 1976, I bought one of those horrible sleazy tabloids you find in supermarkets by the check-out stand. I had to keep up on my UFO sightings and mass hatchet murders.

In the back pages of the Midnight Globe (not the National Enquirer, as erroneously reported elsewhere — was it Time?), I scanned the geeky little ads and saw: “Cowrite on a 50-50 basis, earn $20,000 royalties, send your song poems to …” some outfit in Nashville, Tennessee. I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be fun to send these people the most ridiculous, stupid, vile, obscene, retarded Iyrics to see their response?

In five minutes of stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness), I hammered out the following:

Peace & Love

I got high last night on LSD
My mind was beautiful, and I was free
Warts loved my nipples because they are pink
Vomit on me, baby
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind
It’s erect because he’s blind, it’s erect because he’s blind
Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind
It’s erect because he is blind

Let’s make love under the stars and watch for UFOs
And if little baby Martians come out of the UFOs
You can fuck them
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

The zebra spilled its plastinia on bemis
And the gelatin fingers oozed electric marbles
Ramona’s titties died in hell
And the Nazis want to kill everyone.

Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind … etc.

I wanted to get an emotional letter from the jerks in Nashville. I wanted them to tell me I was crazy. I wanted there to curse me out in writing so I could show all my friends.

Several weeks later I received a letter from Nashville Co-Writers which began:

Dear John,We have just received your lyrics and think they are very worthy of being recorded with the full Nashville Sound Production. … I am enclosing a contract of acceptance. Please sign and return along with $79.95 to cover the cost for each song to be completed …

Aha! They wanted my money. I knew it! But if I send them the money, they would send me a tape and a record of my lyrics set to music. Although $79.95 was a lot to a minimum wage teenager, I signed the “contract of acceptance” and returned it with a check. Several weeks later I received a 7-inch, 45 RPM record that had a label and grooves only on one side. Typed on the white label was “Peace & Love” (John Trubee-Will Gentry). I immediately rushed upstairs and put this little gem on the turntable for a listen. Over the lamest, most minimal country track was some country hack singing the lyrics I wrote. I was stunned.

They did change one line, though — they excised all mention of Stevie Wonder and had the singer croon repeatedly “A blind man” instead.

Also enclosed with the disc (actually an acetate) was a photograph of Ramsey Kearney, the guy who sang the damned thing. Wearing a butterfly-print polyester shirt, Ramsey looked like the perfect man to sing these demented lyrics.

Several weeks later, Nashville sent a teeny 3-inch reel tape of the song in extreme stereo — one channel had only the prerecorded rhythm track while the other channel featured Ramsey singing those idiot lyrics with a little slap-back echo thrown in.

For years I had recorded hours of tapes of my teenage band, prank phone calls, studio demo tapes, synthesizer blurbles, and various recordings of an unusual nature. I wanted all this hard work to be heard, and I loved distributing my tapes simply to annoy people and sometimes even to enlighten or entertain them. I am a music fanatic, a recording fanatic, and I needed to get this material out. It was my response to a world that seems always to have told me that I am small and worthless. Putting out music for the hell of it was my way of giving the finger to a universe indifferent to my existence.

In December 1982, I received a call at work from Ron Stringer, guitarist for the Fibonaccis, an L.A. art band. Earlier that year at a gig at Al’s Bar, I had given him a John Trubee sampler cassette, which contained my Nashville prank song, “Peace & Love.” Ron evidently played the tape for record producer Craig Leon, who was helping the Fibonaccis release their song “Tumors” on vinyl. Craig liked “Peace & Love” so much that he wanted to release it as a 45.

Craig managed to have the record pressed by Enigma, whom I had never even heard of. I got 50 free promo copies of the record. We didn’t discuss any specific deal. Any sort of greed, bitchery, money hassles, or small-minded haggling might have discouraged Enigma from marketing my record. I felt that they were doing me a favor by bothering to press it and give me some free copies. In retrospect, this attitude is one of profound naiveté borne of youthful inexperience.

When I drove to Torrance one night after work to pick up the 50 copies of my beautiful record, some guy from Greenworld came up to me and, referring to the 250 copies they had pressed, said, “We already invested $20 in this record, and we don’t want to have anything more to do with it.” Great. I spend years of my life playing music, studying music, using all my spare moments working on my music to agonizingly drag it into the world to give to people, and I still get the callous snub from the typical idiot in the music business.

The records were in plain white sleeves and had blank white labels. For $16 I had four rubber stamps made at a stationery store so I could stamp each record with the pertinent information. I also bought several hundred plastic record sleeves from a local Licorice Pizza and designed and photocopied my own little cover to insert along with the record.

With my original 50 copies, I did a promotional mailing to Dr. Demento and various radio stations, not expecting any response whatsoever.

I sent a copy to Los Angeles TV vampiress Elvira, a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson, who at the time hosted a show at progressive radio station KROQ-FM in Pasadena. She sent a postcard explaining that she’d attempt to play the record on her show, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to due to the offensive lyric content. I basically shrugged it off, put her postcard in my files, and forgot about it.

That Sunday, Zoogz Rift, in whose band I played bass, called and told me to quickly turn on KROQ. I did, and sure enough, they were playing my song. The enlightened and godlike DJs at KROQ thereafter regularly played it.

Enigma re-pressed the record, adding it to their catalogue and christening it with the new moniker “A Blind Man’s Penis,” even designing a groovy little label for it. Matt Groening devoted his entire Sound Mix column in the Reader, a weekly Los Angeles tabloid, to the convoluted story of how “A Blind Man’s Penis” came into existence.

I’m currently working on my second Enigma LP with my band, the Ugly Janitors of America. You, too, Mister Composer/Musician, can put out records if you bother to go to the trouble of sending obscene lyrics and suicide notes through the U.S. Postal Service, as I did. The obsolete and reactionary machinery of the music industry needs the irreverent pranks of ugly outsiders if it’s to survive its rapidly calcifying descent into hermetically sealed grayness and keep alive a spark of that rebellious, independent, antiestablishment spirit of rock ‘n’ roll!

Ramsey Kearney, singer of “Blind Man’s Penis”

By popular demand, here is the theme music for the XM Satellite Radio show, “Weird Medicine,” written by Sean Hurley and performed by Ron and Fez regular contributor Sherwin Sleeves.