Don't think. Know. The 17th amendment was the death knell of the Republic. The United States Senate was called the worlds greatest deliberative body, because each State sent it's best and brightest to the Senate. the 17th gave us....Joe Biden. http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/joebiden/a/top-10-biden-quotes.htm Then we passed the 18th . We were at least smart enough to repeal (and that's the only one to be repealed) that. 'nuff said.
What does this have to do with the price of milk in the USA? Sorry to TGG for the side conversation... There, there now......no need to get prickly. I may be the dull 'butter knife' in the proverbial drawer in some respects but let's not suggest that some neo-Guido mugs from the Church of the "We Turn It Up to 11" litergy as being recherché to the point of incompehension even to these metallicized, tinnitus-wracked ears. Or, to (once again) cite the Tubes (who were doing waaay-over-the-top live shows when Manowar/Madonna were in diapers) and whose live shows made M/M look like child's play by incomparison....assuredly, I more than got it: ‘They Didn’t Get It!’: Fee Waybill and the Tubes Bay Area rocker little known, but influential. ‘They Didn’t Get It!’: Fee Waybill and the Tubes Photo courtesy of Vance Petrunoff Fee Waybill, aka “Quay Lewd,” performing at the Sausalito Art Festival. Posted: Wednesday, September 15, 2013 12:00 am ‘They Didn’t Get It!’: Fee Waybill and the TubesBy Bradley Gray Since their formation in 1969, Bay Area rockers the Tubes have honed a craft that no other act has come close to matching: live theatrical rock. Their concerts are the stuff of legend, with outrageous stage props, costumes, dancing girls and the memorable alter egos of Tubes singer and frontman Fee Waybill. The Tubes paved the way for “This Is Spinal Tap,” Devo, the Plasmatics and a whole new era of musical performers. The Tubes got early notoriety for appearing in the Mitchell Brothers’ 1972 film “The Resurrection of Eve” (starring Marilyn Chambers). Labor Day weekend saw the Tubes playing to a huge home crowd at the Sausalito Art Festival, looking and sounding as sharp as they ever did. The enthusiastic crowd chanted along with their 1975 anthem “White Punks on Dope” and lined the barriers after the show hoping for Fee Waybill’s autograph. Marinscope’s Bradley Gray sat down with Waybill at the Sausalito Art Festival and chatted about the Tubes’ journey. Bradley Gray: What inspired the outrageous stage shows, and how did it grow into what it became? Fee Waybill: It started with Kenny Ortega. From the very beginning, we did the theatrics. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. That’s why we call ourselves the Tubes, because it’s a visual reference to television, the boob tube. That’s why. It started small and developed over the years. We built our own props out of cardboard and Mylar. The bigger it got, the more money we spent on it, until it just ate us alive. It was an insane production and it was so expensive and so over the top that it just sucked us dry. BG: I know there was a time in the 1980s that you guys went out on the road, lost your contract and came home broke. FW: Yeah. That was the major turning point. We went out on the road for years and years, and always got tour support from A&M Records. When we’d run out of money, they’d make us sign for extra records or take our publishing or something. We left A&M and signed with Capitol, and did three more records there. Our last record for them, called “Love Bomb,” was a disaster. We went out on tour, Capitol fired us, we lost a fortune and came back home. We spent a lot of time playing smaller dates, and paid back all the money we owed. At the end of the payback, I left. I packed up and moved to L.A. BG: Were you able to retain any publishing rights or do you still get any Tubes royalties? FW: Oh no. Nothing. I think we owned 7½ percent of our A&M publishing royalties. Capitol was a little better, but we sold off the publishing a little later. So I left, and we didn’t get back together until seven or eight years later. BG: Tell me about some of your memories of playing shows in Marin. FW: [Lead guitarist] Bill Spooner used to live in Mill Valley. So we played in Marin a lot. New George’s, and some dinky little hole in Fairfax, a tiny little bar; I can’t remember the name. One of our first gigs in Marin was at Dominican College in San Rafael. It was Catholic, and we did a total balls-out show. The funny thing is that during the middle of the concert, the nuns came in and made everyone leave. All of the college kids had to be out of the hall. So when the lights came up after we did “White Punks on Dope,” the whole place was empty. The nuns said “Screw this band!” We couldn’t see because the stage lights were so bright. So the house lights came up and there was nobody there. We never got hired back to play Dominican College. BG: I saw you play at one of the Day on the Green shows in Oakland. FW: Yeah, Sept. 17, 1983. It was my birthday. We had just done a big tour with David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, playing football stadiums all around the country. That was a great tour. That show was the biggest local show we’ve ever done. Bowie loved us. He would stand on the stage every night. He just went crazy. I must say that he was just a little too enamored of me. A little too in love with me. Scary. I wasn’t down with that, even though I’m from San Francisco! It was a really fun, great time. BG: You are the most visual rock act ever. How visual are you when you aren’t on stage or in your personal life. FW: I’m no more visual than anybody else. I live in Venice Beach, I ride my bike around, I go to Gold’s Gym, I work out, my trainer and I go to the beach after every workout and we go swimming. BG: Was there ever a time you couldn’t go to the grocery store? FW: Not really. Everybody thinks they’re a star in Venice Beach. BG: Of all of your alter egos and onstage personas, Quay Lewd stands out as the most memorable. FW: Quay Lewd started as an amalgam of Rod Stewart, David Bowie, David Johansen, Robert Plant and all the quasi-homosexual glam-rock gay lead singers with platform shoes in the 1970s. Quay is a parody. It’s satire. People missed the whole concept of parody. They didn’t get it. If you listen to the lyrics of “White Punks of Dope,” it’s about not taking drugs. It’s total satire! It’s the story of our lives: They didn’t get it. They were too clever. There’s your headline: They didn’t get it. We are underappreciated and unknown. BG: What will the Tubes be remembered for in the history of rock ’n’ roll? FW: Our legacy is theater rock. There aren’t very many bands that ever did anything theatrical. Genesis, Alice Cooper, Bowie in the early days, and maybe the Plasmatics. Very few bands could hold a candle to the type of theatrical production we did in the heyday. It’s never been repeated. ____________________________________________________________________ As for the "Vengence is Thine!" lyrics in your previous post by Manowar, GWAR offers a more refined approach to lyrics. Euphoric and metaphoric - they just don't write love songs like this anymore I met her down at the donkey show. She was minutes past thirteen. Sucking on a cherry yoo-hoo. Reading "Nuggets" magazine. Cum splattered tube-top. Scrawny pre-pube tits. I saw that I was working out, on a quadraplegic chick.
And no....GWAR does not go from Orson fucking Wells...in a rare orchestral segue to "Burning Death Destruction...raping the daughters and wives" in english clear enough to be understood at the beach or rolling up to B2Dub. It's the white equivalent to rolling up with NWA/FTP
I'm sure everybody thought the US Senate was the world's greatest deliberative body, not just Americans, but everybody. Because that's just how things work even when Hollywood isn't spreading the news.
Tho, you're missing the actual point. It was great, because it distilled the best and the brightest from among the people. you know...Democratically.
Again, aside from Americans who gives a crap? The British would say Disraeli vs Gladstone was just as important and influential on modern culture as any of those guys. Every culture of any significance would say the same about their influential politicians and political philosophers. Now of course Hollywood has been blaring the beat for close to a century now and so the message they are blaring has become hard to ignore, but it's just like any other form of effective advertising - the content is nowhere near as compelling as the methods used to embellish and polish and shine it up.
If you'd said great initially we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. You said greatest and the odds on that are really low. Unless you're polling in America of course.
Awesome, good man. Saw The Plasmatics at a Schaefer beer-sponsored summer series of concerts, this one on a Hudson River pier. In a nutshell: the band arrives via helicopter, hits the stage and goes into a couple of numbers. Then Wendy O. runs down the pier, jumps into a Cadillac and heads back towards the band and jumps out just before the car hits the stage and plunges into the Hudson taking the amps and stage equipment with it. Wholesome family fun. Short version (perkiest tits in rock): Long version (includes car/pyrotechnics--fast fwd to the 12:30 mark):
The wife just bought tickets for the Tubes. Not quite sure how I feel about that, but you cannot tell me for one second this isn't the greatest nation on earth.
