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...
Freakout!!: The Great New Guitar Sounds Freakout Guitars (Spin-O-Rama, 1967)
This super-cheesy whammy-bar fueled version of the Rolling Stones classic has always been a personal guilty pleasure of mine. In fact both sides of this album are worth a listen (it's department store budget albums like this one that also have some of the most kickass talk-over music for your community LPFM radio show.)
I think this was as close to a psychedelic album as Spin-O-Rama Records ever got.
Greetings again my naughty readers. Today, we're going to look at one of the most bizarre non-music records of the 1960s.
Not much is known about this album. Yet it remains one of the most collectible non-music LPs for it's rarity and, um, oddness. Tortura was produced by Los Angeles based Flag Publications, noteworthy for it's um, kinky products. Which of course includes “adult and juvenile discipline, transvestism, home movie and Polaroid hobbyists, exotica, sunbathing groups, male models, leather and rubber apparel, restraint, male and female domination and bondage." So there. The other thing about the Tortura album was that it was mentioned in a 1969 obscenity trial, United States v. Baranov which ruled against the album along with several pornographic mail-order publications. Could it have been Flag Publications themselves that were on trial? Listening to Tortura, it's not much more than whipping sounds and lots of "Ooooh"s, "Ahhhh"s "Ohhhh"s. But hardly anything worth making a federal case over. These utterances are more like the commentary you would make at a 6 year old's crayon drawing than anything illicitly sensual.
The telephone "gossip bench" was a throwback to the early days of the telephone. They were often found in hallways and foyers for privacy. They had space for a telephone and sometimes a directory or drawer space. They typically date from the 1900s to the 1960s (but I remember seeing a few in department store catalogs as late as the 1980s.) But as more people began getting their own phones in their own rooms and private lines, they became obsolete.
However, they've found new uses today as a book nook or laptop/netbook desks.
If you've never heard of this album, you might not be ready for it.
You may have grown up in the 1960s and thought you heard everything the 1960s had to offer. But if you haven't heard this album, you still haven't heard it all.
The Shaggs were Dorothy "Dot" Wiggin, Helen Wiggin and Betty Wiggin (and later, Rachel Wiggin), four sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire. They were formed as a group not under their own initiative, but by their dad, Austin Wiggin Jr.. His mother predicted Austin would marry a strawberry blonde woman and they would have daughters who would become a world famous music group.
The first two predictions came true. Austin married a strawberry blonde woman, Annie. And they had daughters. So Austin Wiggin Jr. set about making the third come true. He bought his daughters a drum kit and two guitars. And that was it. No formal lessons in playing or singing. They were on their own musically.
As a result, The Shaggs evolved, um, differently....
The Shaggs played live around the Fremont area. But the audiences weren't exactly thrilled by what they heard and often threw things at the band. It didn't matter. Austin Wiggin was going to make his girls stars. So he took the next step; Recording an album.
Austin Wiggin pulled out most of his savings to finance the album. They went to Boston and recorded Philosophy of The World on the independent Third World Recordings label. They pressed 1,000 copies of Philosophy of The World.
And 900 of them promptly disappeared. As with the head of Third World Recordings. Most of the remaining 100 copies went to radio stations, some of which escaped into the wild (as radio promo copies of albums often did.) Only one single was released, "My Pal Foot-Foot"(Foot-Foot was the name of Dot Wiggin's cat.)
To this day, no one knows what happened to those 900 missing album copies (or Foot-Foot.)
Or (as some wonder) if they were even printed.
Philosophy of The World has been called one of the worst records of all time. But Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain called Philosophy of The World
one of their favorite albums of all time. But who would even unleash
such an album? Beat timing? Song structure? Performing on key? Big
production? Artistic lyrics? FAH! Overrated.
But the reality was the Wiggin girls only went with what they honestly knew, which wasn't much. But they made the best of it to appease their father (although one could imagine the conflicts that must have went on between the girls and their dad at times were as bad as their music.) And the fact they weren't pretentious or egotistical lyrically (the song topics were about pets, sports cars, Halloween and random musings) made them just as inspiring. They became the godmothers of DIY punk and outsider music.
It's been said The Velvet Underground and Nico had 30,000 initial copies pressed and everyone who bought a copy started a band. The Shaggs pressed 1,000 copies of Philosophy of The World, lost 900 of them and still had the same effect. But Philosophy of The World, by all odds should never have survived.
The few copies that escaped quickly became collector's items initially not for their value, but for their weirdness. And their rarity has made the original LPs extremely valuable.
The Shaggs stayed together as an act until 1975. They did make an unreleased second album and on this one, there was studio help at last Their act had become famous once again when Boston rock station WBCN began playing tracks from Philosophy of The World as a joke, the album began getting renewed interest. Comedy radio host Dr. Demento also played tracks from Philosophy of The World on his syndicated radio show, which further interested/shocked listeners. When the jazz group NRBQ discovered them, they talked the Shaggs into re-releasing Philosophy of The World in 1980.
This is most likely not Ellen, the DJ you hear on the aircheck below (I picked the photo because the studio equipment was period-correct for live operated FM radio stations of 1968...And she looked cool.)
There's a certain indescribable beauty to an unscoped radio aircheck.
Hold up, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself; What's an unscoped radio aircheck?
An unscoped radio aircheck is a complete, unedited recording of an over the air radio or TV broadcast. For example, have you ever popped a blank cassette in your tape deck, hit record and just let the tape roll until it ends, capturing DJ talk, commercials, music, jingles, everything? Congratulations! You just made an unscoped aircheck! Without even knowing what you were doing was even professionally called!
They're like aural snapshots back in time. To a time and/or place we may or may not remember. For however long the tape lasts, you get to virtually relive that time again. But in a non-intrusive way, where you can go about doing other things while enjoying the soundtrack.
KMSC 102.1 was a "popular, semi-classical, and semi-jazz music and news" (i.e. Easy Listening) radio station in the Houston area. With studios in the pre-fab city of Clear Lake City, TX (which was annexed into Houston proper in the '70s) It's still home to the Manned Spacecraft Center (which was renamed into the Johnson Space Center in 1973.)
Recorded at around 4:18am on Saturday morning, August 17, 1968. On this tape, you'll hear Ellen play space-age jazz, the kind of stuff you'd probably expect in a master-planned bedroom community full of astronauts and engineers. The DJ, Ellen, is young, groovy, her Texas accent pure and uncompromised. The music is directly from vinyl, as evidenced by the surface noise and occasional skip or stuck groove.
KMSC continued until 1975. 102.1 FM in Houston has been the legendary KMJQ "Majic 102" since 1977.
"Yes, you read right! This is the world-famous "Tisch-Bumbass". a
real cool one man jazz band that requires absolutely no talent to play
---- just nerve....Beautifully hand-carved in Germany and made of the
finest materials, your 'Tisch-Bum-bass' will survive the wildest
parties." - Escapade Magazine, August 1962.
The wildest parties. (You know? The ones with pretzels?)
This was Escapade Magazine, August 1962. I was born in 1968. So my takeaway from reading this was teasers like her in 1962 were hopelessly drawn to guys who can play the pie pan. tambourine, bicycle horn, cedar block, and cowbell simultaneously. It must've been a magical time. Like hair metal. Until the Beatles showed up....
A tisch (or "table") bumbass (also known as a Stumpf Fiddle or Devil's Stick)is a smaller version of a Medieval European headache-on-a-stick. It's essentially How Many Noisemakers Can You Put On One Thing? You might have seen it at carnivals and circuses (or wherever clog dancing is allowed.)
