So even though Tarantino’s latest failed to put Paul Revere or his Raiders back up at the Toppermost of the Poppermost, and American Funnyman Neil Hamburger’s long-too-awaited Still Dwelling seems to have passed totally under the fryer, the Pig Player this past year was kept busy as always spinning, alphabetically as always…
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Well then! Your fearless columnist stayed up on line all night all last week, scouring the virtual globe as it were, asking anyone and everyone he surfed across out there that timeless and timely musical question:
“WHY WOULD YOU REALLY RATHER BE LISTENING TO THE BEACH BOYS THIS DECEMBER 25th?”
IRWIN CHUSID (author, Songs In The Key Of Z):
Outsider music is a slippery genre. It’s musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications; they are sincere about it. They mean it. They’re not doing it to be funny. They’re not doing it to be outrageous. This is a sincere musical expression. Wild Man Fischer in many ways is a poster child for outsider music.
In the summer of 2005, a package arrived at the Hollywood offices of Highway 61 Entertainment from London with no return address. Inside were two mini-cassette tapes dated December 30, 1999 and labeled The Last Testament of George Harrison.
Saturday, September the 13th of 1969 broke particularly warm and bright over the blue suburban skies outside Toronto. As this was to be the day the drummer in my very first teenaged garage combo agreed to accompany me from Port Credit all the way into the Big City in order that I could buy my very first teenaged guitar. But! An electric one this time; the better to approximate the walls of sound on our bass player’s “Summertime Blues” record …Blue Cheer version, that is.
A Full Disclosure right up front, one and all:
’Way back in the 1980 hey!day of my funzine The Pig Paper, a certain Kevin Michael Allin sent over a sweetly autographed, stuffed-with-promo-material copy of an album called Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be which had been newly issued on none other than David “The Pope Smokes Dope” Peel’s Orange Records imprint. It sounded then, and remains today, a most spirited indeed collection of incredibly powerful pop in that classic Stooges / New York Dolls mold, with lyrics – especially heard in a, shall we say, immediate post-Pistols frame of ear – not really all that “shocking” whatsoever.
Bullseye Records of Canada
