Forty Years of Madness.

I wrote a post forever ago about the "Hour of Madness," a Dr. Demento-style radio show I listened to as a pre-teen in the early early 80's. (Go ahead and hit that link, I'll wait. It's only two paragraphs.) I dug out a few of the tapes tonight and made voice memos of them, played on one o' them Crosley record-your-old-shit-to-CD deals that's already a relic itself.

I know I have another tape where the DJ, Gail Massey, mentions me and my nerd pal Jeff. (I’m sure it's around here somewhere, because, well, what isn't?) On that same tape, she also shouts out to another kid from Plainview: Joe, who hoped to recruit fellow HoM listeners into becoming his acolytes by joining the "Joe from Plainview Fan Club." I wonder how that panned out.

Anyway, I cobbled together a series of clips taken from three tapes, and a photo of one of them--a dynamic Computron™ brand cassette, made with love in Hong Kong, a tape which even back then hissed more than a coven of particularly cranky witches--accompanies this oxymoronic "audio-only video." (By the way, if you are planning on starting a band anytime soon, I suggest you call it "Hong Kong Computron." Actually, I insist. No, I don’t care that you’re a chamber musician.)

I assembled this hodgepodge (there's only one full song, with just openings and closings of the rest) for no reason other than that it conjures a time well before the Internet, when finding weird stuff was a calling. Weird movies, weird books, weird music, for weird people. Not just anyone could be weird back then. It required a certain tenacity and a tough skin, because one's weirdness was only cool to the other weirdos. Do you know how many of my peers I played the spare blues of Scatman T.J. for--either his paean to cooking rats ("Cookin' Rats") or his romantic praise for someone's mama ("Goin' Out with Yo' Mama")--only to be met with a blank-yet-derisive stare? Probably zero, now that I think of it, but you know what I mean.

The mad melange starts with the end of "Only the Good Eat Lunch" by a guy calling himself "Joel Williams," if I remember correctly. There's a cut to Massey saying "WNYT, the Hour of Madness." Massey segued from Tom Lehrer to a request for Wild Man Fischer's "My Name is Larry." After that was Robert Klein doing his Our Gang bit, and Massey name-drops Plainview (that requester mighta been me, I was a big Little Rascals fan), into old-school Weird Al.

Next is the end of "Obese Man" by the Ladmo Trio, from the long-running Phoenix, Arizona kiddie show Wallace & Ladmo. (The tapes may be forty years old, but these are things I learned forty seconds ago.) This cuts to a real oddity that I left in its entirety. Stars on Echo (again, if my recollector isn't rusted, because I’ve found precisely squat on the webs) was a few high school students somewhere on Long Island who evidently hated the Dutch studio-musician group Stars on 45, whose oldies medley was a hit at the time. I can remember listening to this with friends and cracking up, but I find the droning performance and boys' room acoustics somewhat painful to endure now. Massey is heard for a second before I cut to what may or may not be Joe Renda doing a station ID, as his song (with the Variable Speed Band) "Eugene" begins.

The original Weird Al recording of "My Bologna" ends, and Massey explains that the song was number three on the countdown that night (preceded by Bruce Baum's "Marty Feldman Eyes"). That leads to the second most-requested song, one I'm sure you'll recall, by Napoleon XIV (ha-HAAA!). Cut to the end, and the song in the top spot is introed by a bit of The Rutles' "Number One."

Only a few hushed opening seconds of the climactic novelty record were captured before I popped the record button off. It's from an "ethnic" comedy album which was at that time about 15 years old, featuring several familiar comic actors. A John Cashman Lollipop Award to anyone who can name the song (the artist, the album, whatever)...