History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
If you need something to keep you from uncontrollably masturbating every six hours, I kinda think you probably need something a little more substantial than gum.......
All
Hail The Saviour Of Computer Geeks Everywhere. It was programmed with
scalable compatibility and simplicity, yet It was decommissioned on the
UNIVAC mainframe for our parsing errors......
Interesting tune from Opus. Austria is usually one of the last places on
Earth you'd look for reggae. But this one hit wonder scored a massive
new wave hit with this flytape catchy tune.
Instant '80s Pop Culture Fact: "Live Is Life" was the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's favourite song. It also came out at the height of his cult's popularity.
Imagine a bobblehead of this guy if you want a visual of how the Bhagwan danced.....
Some time in the late '60s or early '70s, a strange record appeared
I see a fence back there and I'm really hoping this cover shot was taken at a state hospital.
It gets worse. Look at the back cover. Click on it to enlarge. Read it.
You read this correctly. This was a middle aged woman, (allegedly) channeling a three year old.
How a woman like this is loose on the streets (let alone allowed anywhere near children. Or a recording studio) is beyond me. But it takes "Born-Again Christian" to a brand new low (instead of being "born again", why don't they just GROW UP.)
I honestly don't know what it is with evangelist women and big hair, geological layers of makeup and poodles, I just don't.
But it's not just this woman who scares me like crazy. It's her enablers. Jay W. Turney, Steve Chandler, Eddie Crook and the entire staff of Electric Arts Studio of Madisonville, KY.
Mr. Turney is also this woman's husband. Whom she also refers to as "Daddy". And the oozing disgust about this record only BEGINS there.
There's nothing I can say that can illustrate this horror better than LISTENING to this record itself.
King Diamond was the Marilyn Manson of the '80s. A self proclaimed Satan worshipper and frontman of the occult-metal band Mercyful Fate who went solo with a new band in 1986. He plays with both bands today.
If not exactly the most ORIGINAL guy on earth......
Pete Wentz? OK, yeah, he came later.....But see what Satanic music does to you, kids?
King Diamond and Mercyful Fate were popular with hardcore metal fans, but had virtually no commercial rock radio airplay (that darned devil warshipping thang put most major rock radio station managers teeth on edge.) It also didn't help their label, Roadrunner Records (now home to Nickelback.) was still a struggling Dutch independent until the '90s.
This is off King Diamond's first full album, Fatal Portrait.
Here's a two-hit wonder from 1989, Kevin Paige was poised to become "the
next George Michael" (along with COUNTLESS other male pop acts that year, including Donny Osmond,
- of all people - because he also had a similar George Michael-y sounding
pop comeback hit himself that year.)
Who knew being "the next George
Michael" would be a compliment that has it's
boot on entirely another foot today?
After "Don't Shut Me Out" (and it's follow-up "Anything I Want", also
Top 20) Kevin Paige completely vanished from the pop scene as quickly as
he came. He became a house songwriter for Zomba Records before taking that always lucrative detour of faded pop stars - Contemporary Christian music.
Here's Kevin Paige's BIZARRE conservative Christian reworking of John Lennon's "Imagine"
I can't remember how I found it, but it looked like a little radio, but
with no tuning dial. You turned it on and it played a simple Buddhist
chant over and over and over again, using a microchip in the unit. That
was all it did. On it's side, it had a receptor for an AC adapter and an
external speaker (I plugged this into my stereo using a patch cord, but
the output was monaural and sound only came from the left speaker of my
stereo.) It ran on 4 "AA" batteries. It's model number was #K-747....
Nobody
I showed this to knew what it was either. The writing on the unit was
definitely Chinese. But although I can tell the differences between
Asian characters, I'm not very good at reading them individually. But
one character did say "Buddha". So that was my only real clue.
Well, I had a breakthrough a few years ago whilst searching Google. It looks like this was a chant player for Amitabha Buddhists. The chant itself repeated "Ahhhh-Mit-Abha....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha.....Ahhhh-Mit-Abha" over and over.
Here's what it sounds like (though the chant my player sounds a little different....)
More on Amitabha Buddhism and electronic players.....
http://www.amtbweb.org/tchet420.htm This
little thing was a mystery to me for the longest time. But the back
story is just as fascinating as the player itself.......
