Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
"Kung Fu
Fighting" by Carl Douglas is one of my
favorite songs in the world, ever. I sing it in
the shower. I sang it to my last girlfriend. I
sang it continuously last New Year's Eve,
bouncing up and down in in a white bathrobe with
my friend Bill and dodging a blind woman who kept
trying to whack me with her long white cane every
time I ran by bellowing, "Make sure you have
eeeeeeexpert ti-ming!" (I also got
to ride in a Hummer while listening to the
Shaggs, but that's another story.)
Some of my friends
call "Kung Fu Fighting" racist, but
Carl Douglas is a black man, and my friends and I
attended a well-known public college where we
were taught in no uncertain terms, that a member
of a minority group cannot, by definition, be a
racist, no matter how s/he might portray members
of any other ethnic group. I like to think I
learned my lessons well. This college, just
incidentally, began to hold classes just two
years before "Kung Fu Fighting" hit
Number One on the Billboard charts.
And these are two
legacies of the 70's.
"People my
age never got to really live the late
70's," writes Dave Thomas on the best 70's
Web Page I've seen, http://www.rt66.com/dthomas/70s/. "I was too young to
flirt with chicks on the CB, to go to a disco...
I never got the chance to get involved, much less
to get disillusioned or embarrassed later. The
magic will never die because I'll never have the
chance to try it and find out it was all just a
lot of hype." The magic fails against most
people born before 1966; one friend of mine
bought Believe in Music the first time
around, turned it into a Frisbee not long after,
and now denies that anything happened musically
before the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch.
Coming to full
consciousness, i.e. puberty, during the actual
70's seems to prevent one from indulging in the
nostalgia being packaged, bought, sold,
trumpeted, and retrofitted in smiley-face
plastered compilations by Rhino and others.
The recent K-Tel
reissues of their classic 70's compilations--Believe
in Music, Out of Sight, Music Power, Dynamite,
and Music Express --don't give anything
away. Same ketchup-mustard-and-blacklight covers,
same choppy cutout photos of the stars (Mr.
Douglas' headband looks presciently Ferengi),
even the misspelling of Dobie Gray's name inside
of Music Power is exactly duplicated.
Oddly enough, that's also the only one that
doesn't add "also playable on mono"
after "stereo" on its back cover. No
bonus tracks. No liner notes. It's as if the
discs unceremoniously popped out of a world where
humans went digital with nary a vinyl swipe.
Twenty years ago these were artifacts in the
making lying around in your older sister's
bedroom, your neighbor's sunroom, awaiting your
headphone pleasure on a purloined turntable. They
haven't been dug up. They've been made again.
With this
skincrawling non-nostalgia in mind, the most
unforgettable lazerburnt offering--in a crowded
field of "Kung Fu Fighting," an English
Beach Boy knockoff, Rick Springfield praying to
Gaia, Jim Stafford's spiders and snakes, The
Raspberries inventing power pop, and the lonely
harrumphing of of Gordon Sinclair--is two minutes
near the end of Out of Sight, Prelude's
a capella take on Neil Young's "After the
Gold Rush," a mishmashed canvas of garden
parties and silver spaceships and peyote
orchestras trumpeting the Armageddon so prettily,
and a world unable to save itself, in immaculate
harmony that lodges samurai sword-like midbone.
"All in a dream, all in a dream/The loading
had begun," the women pipe, and suddenly
we're at the climax of Childhood's End
--in a world doomed not only die but be
forgotten, as its only survivors cast away the
few remaining remnants of what was called
humanity--rather than in the fever dream of some
palooka who's eaten three tabs and tripped over a
footstool. "Flying Mother Nature's silver
seed/To a new home in the sun." As if the
most silvery spaceship could bring anything
living to the center of the sun. And this may be
the true legacy of the 70's.
One
You've Never Seen Befo' Dept.: Penthouse Letters: The
Magazine of Sexual Marvels, July 1997. Woman
comes home, gets jumped by an unknown man who
forces her down on her knees, ties her hands
behind her back and then whispers, "Come on,
I have all night. You've heard of the midnight
ramble? Well honey, I'm not one of those."
I braced for a
swift sonic axe swipe, downward SHUNK
through the air, which is what happens after
those lines, approximately, appear near the end
of "Midnight Rambler," Mick Jagger's
tip of the hat to Albert DeSalvo, the Boston
Strangler. Jagger's protagonist stuck a
"knife right down your throat baby";
DeSalvo never used knives; that SHUNK
tells me it doesn't make much difference. SHUNK
is the sound of power. Affirmation of power
through destruction. Bring your hand down on the SHUNK
in front of your friends at the bar. Spit a beer.
Spike a volleyball. Pivot your pelvis. It's sexy
energy.
Two Penthouse
pages later nothing happens that Albert DeSalvo
didn't do in real life excepting of course that
he practiced on unwilling and truly helpless
victims and didn't leave them alive to testify.
And of course, he doesn't come back and drive the
willing lady crazy several times a week
thenceforth. I've abandoned all thought, of
course, that these letters are real people
writing in with real songs of knowledge and
experience.
But I can't decide
which is more frightening--two guys in a cubicle
garnishing their bondage with classic rock
without realizing what inspired it, or some
nightmasked real-life rapist knowing all too
well.
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