This is from 1965, before Peter went on the South Beach Diet and lost 75 pounds.
Peter has always been way ahead of his time:
Category Archives: funny
Seth MacFarlane Knows
Life is busy.
That is my cheap shit excuse for neglecting to surrender my share of contributions to the Site here over the past weeks.
Truth is, my life is very busy, although I am in the process of transitioning from one of those more than demanding day jobs that really pays the bills and provides my health care, to the ranks of the retired. Although for me retired means writing four or five baseball columns a week, working on some fiction, being at the ball park, playing music, writing songs, and well, writing here too among other things.
Well, rest assured, just because I get distracted and forget to post stuff here, it doesn’t mean I am not thinking about it.
And, while I have a lot of fodder floating around in my grey cells, somehow when watching Family Guy a couple of weeks ago I saw this which demonstrates just how brilliant Seth MacFarlane and his mates can be.
I get if you hate Family Guy. Peter Griffin is as oafish and mostly offensive a character as we can imagine. In fact if The Simpsons has proved to be the best representation of American Family life ever recorded, the Griffin family has pushed that envelope by showing our basically soulless full of reality TV instant experts internet cell phone culture in an even more visceral way.
In other words, yeah: lots of fart and toilet jokes, too much blood and vomit, lots of gags that no one can let go of, and on and on.
However, if you can indulge creator MacFarlane just a little, when he is on, he is so on it is scary.
And, very often, that on is the result of some musical genius.
Not that we are talking Lou Reed or the Hellacopters or original music.
More like knowing that the ever-hot Lois Griffin banged all of Kiss as a young woman, something that makes her Trog husband Peter proud.
But, the show also riffs other songs and genres and stuff so brilliantly. As in the song/sequence below where MacFarlane and mates take on Disney, not only in song, but with just a few deft line changes from the animators, and a little creative use of metaphor, well, you get this:
OK, so it ain’t rock’n’roll, but it is funny and I do like it. It is also smart, which I also like.
When I think about it, in fact, most of my earliest exposure to classical music–aside from what my parents usually had going in the background–was the result of Looney Tunes, as in this great clip of Bugs playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 (although when I first saw it, I had no idea what the music was):
To finish off, I am going back to Family Guy, again with a song and dance number that is so clever, and to pair with Bugs and his ilk, links back to the 30’s with the song Bag O’ Weed which totally riffs on the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup (I looked for a video clip of the brothers banging on the helmeted heads of the enemy Sylvanians with dubbed xylophone music that MacFarlane parodies, and could not find one).
However, if you watch carefully during the finale, you will indeed see a Groucho head spill out (at 2:49) among the images, giving credit where credit is due right after the Duck Soup riff (instead of helmets, Brian and Stewie are banging on bongs).
OK, so I got that out of my system, and I can start writing about some serious music. Like Foghat.
Happy and safe holiday to you all.
Punk
Lemmy
It’s Pedophilia Time!
Not sure how I managed to never see this until now, but it came up in the youtube fly eye after the Slade concluded.
Young(er – he was already up there when he hit the big-time) Mr. Glitter looks like the spawn of Brian Johnson from AC/DC and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.
This is about as fun as creepy gets.
Larry The Lamb
Being the lemming I am, for all these years I’ve referred to Marc Bolan’s voice as “Larry the Lamb” because I’d read it elsewhere. This morning I realized I didn’t really know who Larry the Lamb was.
Mystery solved. He was a cartoon character in a Davey and Goliath/Gumby-like childrens show.
Take a look. It’s actually pretty funny for as long as you can stand it. Stick around for at least a minute and a half for this exchange:
Larry: I thought you were a fairy.
Cop: A fairy? Me? Do I look like a fairy?
Larry: I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. Baaah.
Cop: Then be careful what you say, my lad.
Lunch Break: Frank Zappa, “Eddie Are You Kidding?”
As a result of some odd Tout Wars drafting machinations last weekend, I was prompted to write about that, and in the process, brought up Frank Zappa and his band The Mothers of Invention.
After which it occurred to me that we have never given the brilliant, funny, and iconoclastic–not to mention great guitar player–much due on this site.
So, I will try to rectify that.
My appreciation of the man dates back to 1968, when as a long haired kid I attended a John Birch Society meeting wherein the backwards rednecks presented a program on how rock music corrupts our youth, making them become long haired degenerate dope smokers (just like me?).
I went with a handful of friends, and it was very scary as these guys were–and still are–neo-Nazis, but now I can look back on the whole affair with some kind of romantic eye.
A few years later my oldest and closest friend, Stephen Clayton and I saw the Mothers, on one of the weirdest bills ever. Opening was the band founded by then ex-Quicksilver guitar player, John Cippolina, Copperhead. Next was the jazz fusion band, Weather Report (who I have since seen three more times), and then Zappa and his mates hit the stage, playing Chunga’s Revenge that I can remember.
Zappa has also been sort of an American version of John Mayall, with the likes Lowell George, George Duke, Terry Bozio, Ansley Dunbar, and eventually Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (AKA Flo and Eddie, ex-patriots of the Turtles), among other luminaries, in his band.
The tune I picked for today’s edification is the eternally funny Eddie Are You Kidding from the album Just Another Band From L.A. (note too that Zappa’s influence moved, as year’s later the great Los Lobos paid homage by naming their compilation album, Just Another Band from East L.A.).
Just for fun, I also added this terrific clip of Zappa appearing before Congress in 1985, testifying before Tipper Gore’s stupid committee who were monitoring music and lyrics at the time for appropriateness. Note that Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snyder–three artists who could not be more different–all testified, and all three dissed the whole process as a bunch of shit.
Rightfully so! Anyway, Zappa was smart, funny, and eloquent as you will see if you hit the clip below.
Gaming Spotify.
A band needed money to tour. Which makes sense, since album sales are nothing. And touring costs money.
They made an album of short songs with no noise, called it Sleepify, and posted it on Spotify. Then had friends of the band play the record over and over. Repeat and repeat. Slowly, the royalty rate added up to a full tank of gas. Now that’s rock.
Brilliant, and unsustainable. Have a great time on the road.
What Is Hip?
I’m not sure Tower of Power included the question mark, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. (Clip is from 1976 live album, with question mark.)
A website devoted to data with the uneuphonious name of Pricenomics devised a way to discover which bands are the best hipster bands, by plotting their ratings on Pitchfork (high is cool) and their Facebook likes (high is uncool). It will surprise no one that Vampire Weekend straddles the divide between pop and hip.
Follow the link to find out which bands are the hippest and those too pop to matter.
What is definitely not hip at this point, if it ever was, is Tower of Power. But they can play.
VOTE IN THE COMMENTS: Beatles vs. Stones
I’m reading this book, called Beatles vs. Stones
The New York Library is having a debate, with Mike Meyers and some other folks facing off on this hot issue, on February 27th, at Lincoln Center.
In anticipation of that, Gothamist has a post today declaring the Beatles clear winners, by comparing three truly awful late Stones songs no one has ever heard of to Revolver, Abbey Road and The Beatles. It’s worth listening to the Stones songs just to make the question somewhat more interesting.
For my part, I listen to the Stones much more than the Beatles, even records I played out decades ago, but without specific criteria it’s a tough choice between them. Seems likely the Beatles were the more creative while bridging the transition from early 60s pop forms to rock, while the Stones were more influential twisting blues and r’n’b forms into rock and pop music going forward into the future.
In any case, giving the Stones demerits for continuing to write material, no matter how crappy, long after they could have stopped trying, doesn’t seem fair. Especially when the other guys, the non-aligned Beatles, made plenty of crap music as solo artists. But it does make me wonder why the Stones they didn’t recognize how awful so much of it was and have the self-respect to bury it. Could their taste have become that rotten?