Weird Medicine Healthcare for the Rest of Us

The last show of 2008 was packed with firsts…the first call from our Weird Medicine voicemail (423 DIE TUTI), the first “live audience” (three guys from our home town, plus “East TN Ed”), and the first playing of Shooby Taylor’s “Stout Hearted Men” ever on XM 202 (check him out at shooby.com!)

My pal Murray and I recorded this song before anyone had ever heard of a digital recording.   It was done on cassette and the multitracking was accomplished by “ping ponging” tracks back and forth between two recorders…a recipe for noisy, crap-o-licious audio with lots of wow, flutter and heck, who ever heard of a mic screen, so it’s full of popping “P’s”, too.

This song was part of the Squirrel Mabry Cycle, a concept “album” with a backstory;  Mr Mabry always wanted to be a big recording star, so he wrote some Christmas songs and had a friend who supposedly had connections in the recording industry.   He paid big bucks to make this demo tape, and it’s pretty obvious he got ripped off.  Anyway, someday perhaps the whole Cycle will emerge.

So whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanza, or Winter Solstice, anyone can enjoy listening to someone else’s anguish as they get conned out of their life savings making some stupid demo tape.

That’s Murray as Squirrel, and playing guitar.  I’m shining on bass, Casio, and background vocals.  (yecch).

Enjoy “Heavenly Parole” by the ever awful Squirrel Mabry…

(We were going to submit this to Ron and Fez as an original Christmas song, but it’s just too long and has too many defects to seriously send it in.   And it’s too long to play on Weird Medicine (at 6 minutes it’d be 1/10th of the whole show), so I’m just posting it here.   If you like it, let me know!

I won’t reprint too much here…everything you need to know is well documented at shooby.com.  Suffice it to say that Shooby Taylor was a gem–a unique individual with confidence a mile wide, and I love him.  Probably the worst scat singer ever to pay to have a demo tape made, his art is so delightfully awful that I can listen to it over and over again (and have, since I first heard this stuff over 20 years ago).

I really like the two cuts he recorded with the organist.   The others on his tapes were voiced over recordings of other artists, and they’re not nearly as entertaining.

Anyway, we got a lot of requests for the .mp3 file for Shooby’s version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, so here it is.

Here’s a low bitrate version of the prerecorded “Weird Medicine” from Oct 25, 2008 on XM 202 and Sirius 197.  If you really want the high-bitrate version, email me and I’ll send you a yousendit link to download the whole thing.   I’m going to post the unedited phoners, too…we covered a LOT of ground in those that didn’t make it to air.

Thanks again to Foundry Music Jeff, Brooklyn Blowhard, and Lana From Canada for their help with this show, and thanks again to O&A, R&F, and the whole XM202 staff for being so cool to us.

Here was the promo for the June 21st Weird Medicine as it ran on XM 202.  This was the first time I attempted to do a real “production piece”.  Since then I bought a “real” microphone (CAD e100) to replace the CAD 22-A’s we’ve been using.  Hopefully production will sound a little better in the future.