Fifties Teenagers And Fifties Rock - Revision history

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:37, 22 September 2021

2021-09-22T17:37:53Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 20:32, 14 September 2021

2021-09-14T20:32:54Z

Spider of Destiny at 20:36, 19 November 2020

2020-11-19T20:36:39Z

Spider of Destiny at 19:48, 13 October 2020

2020-10-13T19:48:36Z

Spider of Destiny at 19:48, 13 October 2020

2020-10-13T19:48:05Z

Spider of Destiny at 14:08, 16 September 2011

2011-09-16T14:08:13Z

Spider of Destiny at 13:23, 16 September 2011

2011-09-16T13:23:55Z

Spider of Destiny at 22:20, 28 November 2010

2010-11-28T22:20:40Z

Spider of Destiny at 22:19, 28 November 2010

2010-11-28T22:19:24Z

Show changes

Duncan: Undo revision 30760 by Beveclark (Talk)

2009-12-05T03:33:29Z

Undo revision 30760 by Beveclark (Talk)

@@ Line 41: / Line 41: @@
 As for our taste in singers, my set just wouldn't listen to any white rock. It was always punier than the black stuff, and a lot of it was simply inept imitation. But then I was lucky to have black rock available, since the musical taste of a community not only affects, but is, in turn, affected by what is available at the moment. For instance, Claremont just had Dixie and semi-classical in its main record store. Many people hadn't even heard of someone like Muddy Waters. The blues freak of the '50s was a real rarity.
-So, a statement that appeared in some newspaper article about pop music, saying how great it is that we have finally gotten away from the puerile slush of the '50s, was probably made by someone who never heard any of that decade's great R&B numbers. He probably only heard stuff on easy access labels like Liberty, Dot and, maybe, Capitol. And, even if you were into R&B at that time, there was still another strata, one beneath the accessible R&B records. If you knew and liked R&B, then you knew [[Little Willie John]] and [[Hank Ballard]] on the King label. Once you found a store, they were as easy to get as [[Pat Boone]] on Dot was for all America. But some of the best really happening stuff was strictly one-shot. It would be a monumental job of research to list all the little label releases during that time. Companies were being formed everywhere. For instance, in Arizona there was a company that put out Bat Records. Maybe they put out only one record, maybe hundreds. It was so small, you don't know. For records like that, you really had to scuffle around, haunt places that sold used jukebox records from the South. If you did that kind of scouting, you might come across someone like [[Roy Tann]].
+So, a statement that appeared in some newspaper article about pop music, saying how great it is that we have finally gotten away from the puerile slush of the '50s, was probably made by someone who never heard any of that decade's great R&B numbers. He probably only heard stuff on easy access labels like Liberty, Dot and, maybe, Capitol. And, even if you were into R&B at that time, there was still another strata, one beneath the accessible R&B records. If you knew and liked R&B, then you knew [[Wikipedia:Little Willie John|Little Willie John]] and [[Hank Ballard]] on the King label. Once you found a store, they were as easy to get as [[Pat Boone]] on Dot was for all America. But some of the best really happening stuff was strictly one-shot. It would be a monumental job of research to list all the little label releases during that time. Companies were being formed everywhere. For instance, in Arizona there was a company that put out Bat Records. Maybe they put out only one record, maybe hundreds. It was so small, you don't know. For records like that, you really had to scuffle around, haunt places that sold used jukebox records from the South. If you did that kind of scouting, you might come across someone like [[Roy Tann]].
 In 1956, I hit upon the only record of this Roy Tann I ever saw. It was called "I Don't Like It," and it was on the Tan label. Hmmm. It went like this:

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
-'''D.A.'s and peggers. [[Muddy Waters]]. [[Joe Houston]]. [[Hank Ballard]]. Elvis. "[[I Was A Teenage Werewolf]]." [[The Penguins]]. A guided tour by today's iconoclast of Rock who says, "Things look like they've changed more than they have."<br>
+'''D.A.'s and peggers. [[Muddy Waters]]. [[Joe Houston]]. [[Hank Ballard]]. Elvis. "[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050530/ I Was A Teenage Werewolf]." [[The Penguins]]. A guided tour by today's iconoclast of Rock who says, "Things look like they've changed more than they have."<br>
 All teenagers are fad-conscious and follow the leader. Because of this, a certain ideal image will usually come to pervade an entire school. During the '50s, I went to four separate high schools. Although each was in Southern California, their images were distinctly different. I went, in chronological order, to Claremont High School in Claremont, Grossmont High School in El Cajon near San Diego, Mission Bay High School in San Diego, and Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, where I graduated.
@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 A lot of things look like they've changed more than they really have. For instance, all this dropping out. Today if a kid splits from his home and lives in the streets, he can always join up with some hippies – some group that will take him in. In the '50s, no one dropped out. You left the house and you were an adult and had to go punch it out with all of them. The main reason a kid would be in the streets then was to participate in a gang fight. It's easy to overestimate kids' independence from the family when they've just exchanged them.
-The underground gets a lot of press coverage today; it didn't get much at all in the '50s. [[Elvis Presley]] was the most widely known figure, and, in my group, he was liked mostly by the girls and younger guys. But in San Diego, which is a good town for blues, a lot of the boys liked [[Howlin' Wolf]] and [[B. B. King]] better. Their music was stronger and the kids responded to it. Also, blues are usually appreciated most by people who feel themselves alienated and oppressed, regardless of education or economics. The blues lovers I knew then, the ones with the leather jackets, certainly were those kind of people. They felt oppressed by everything, and they were the ones who developed all that teenage slang. It never came from the madras shirt set who only took over and adopted some collegiate expressions, probably from their older brothers and sisters. The real gritty slang came from those guys who felt themselves so threatened that they would do everything they could to look hard even if they didn't get a chance to act hard. And the reason it developed is very similar to the reason slaves in the South developed their own talk – to fool their masters, to make them feel superior, exclusive. Same thing with the clothing and hair styles. Some of these guys from that period are still around. In East L.A., guys in their early thirties who still wear DA's and peggers are called ''veteranos.'' In fact, most of the gangs I was familiar with were Mexican, and a lot of those guys – the ''pachucos'' – still dress and think the same way today. Most of them married their old girl friends and are working in a garage.
+The underground gets a lot of press coverage today; it didn't get much at all in the '50s. [[Elvis Presley]] was the most widely known figure, and, in my group, he was liked mostly by the girls and younger guys. But in San Diego, which is a good town for blues, a lot of the boys liked [[Howlin' Wolf]] and [[Wikipedia:B.B. King|B. B. King]] better. Their music was stronger and the kids responded to it. Also, blues are usually appreciated most by people who feel themselves alienated and oppressed, regardless of education or economics. The blues lovers I knew then, the ones with the leather jackets, certainly were those kind of people. They felt oppressed by everything, and they were the ones who developed all that teenage slang. It never came from the madras shirt set who only took over and adopted some collegiate expressions, probably from their older brothers and sisters. The real gritty slang came from those guys who felt themselves so threatened that they would do everything they could to look hard even if they didn't get a chance to act hard. And the reason it developed is very similar to the reason slaves in the South developed their own talk – to fool their masters, to make them feel superior, exclusive. Same thing with the clothing and hair styles. Some of these guys from that period are still around. In East L.A., guys in their early thirties who still wear DA's and peggers are called ''veteranos.'' In fact, most of the gangs I was familiar with were Mexican, and a lot of those guys – the ''pachucos'' – still dress and think the same way today. Most of them married their old girl friends and are working in a garage.
-Any figure who was alienated became a potential idol. This could take strange turns. There was a lot of identification with James Dean, but there was also a lot of identification with ''[[I Was A Teenage Werewolf]].'' In that movie, an evil doctor turns a teenager into a werewolf. Naturally, the teenager is alienated, and the doctor, being an adult, is someone to blame. This stuff is going on all the time. Madison Avenue is constantly injecting people with product desires which turn them into mad consumers. The people I hung around with were sold on monsters and horror of every kind. And if I sat down to draw a picture, you could bet it would be a monster. It was great to laugh at that stuff – that's why we loved it – so we could convince ourselves it didn't scare us, that something didn't scare us. I couldn't stand any other type of movie. I saw stuff like ''[[The Wasp Woman|Wasp Woman]], [[Beast From Haunted Cave|The Beast of Haunted Cave]],'' and (very good!) Attack of the ''[[The Killer Shrews|Killer Shrews]].''
+Any figure who was alienated became a potential idol. This could take strange turns. There was a lot of identification with James Dean, but there was also a lot of identification with ''[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050530/ I Was A Teenage Werewolf].'' In that movie, an evil doctor turns a teenager into a werewolf. Naturally, the teenager is alienated, and the doctor, being an adult, is someone to blame. This stuff is going on all the time. Madison Avenue is constantly injecting people with product desires which turn them into mad consumers. The people I hung around with were sold on monsters and horror of every kind. And if I sat down to draw a picture, you could bet it would be a monster. It was great to laugh at that stuff – that's why we loved it – so we could convince ourselves it didn't scare us, that something didn't scare us. I couldn't stand any other type of movie. I saw stuff like ''[[The Wasp Woman|Wasp Woman]], [[Beast From Haunted Cave|The Beast of Haunted Cave]],'' and (very good!) Attack of the ''[[The Killer Shrews|Killer Shrews]].''
 In ''Not of this Earth,'' a dude wearing wraparound glasses takes this thing out of a tube. It looks like a stretched piece of wizened romaine lettuce. He sets it on a table and right away it starts puffing up. Then it picks up and hovers off through the window until it comes in some other guy's window. It drifts over to the guy, hovers above him, then drops – woosh – around his head, and, closing in, bites him. It's great! The blood is coming from underneath onto his white shirt and he's going, "Whhaaarrghh!" I saw that three times, and when I had learned to tell just when that thing was going to get him, I'd sit behind some noisy kids, and right at the exact second, grab the kid's throat, and then, in a flash, sit right back. Panic out!
-Out of a town's neighborhood theaters, there would be one where all the teenagers went. It was comparable to a '50s Fillmore, or any of your local psychedelic dungeons of today. Nobody really cared what was being shown. It was just a dark place where guys went to meet some girl who they tried to make it with later, if not there. There was this one theater in Lancaster where, looking down the seats, you'd see a head here, another one there, fine, but then you'd see some huddled lump of blankets or clothes that was moving, and then another and another. And then you'd notice all these bodies jammed in weird positions against the walls – [[Kama Sutra]] 375 with a leg sticking up-and the monster was happening on the screen. It was really great!
+Out of a town's neighborhood theaters, there would be one where all the teenagers went. It was comparable to a '50s Fillmore, or any of your local psychedelic dungeons of today. Nobody really cared what was being shown. It was just a dark place where guys went to meet some girl who they tried to make it with later, if not there. There was this one theater in Lancaster where, looking down the seats, you'd see a head here, another one there, fine, but then you'd see some huddled lump of blankets or clothes that was moving, and then another and another. And then you'd notice all these bodies jammed in weird positions against the walls – [[Wikipedia:Kama Sutra|Kama Sutra]] 375 with a leg sticking up-and the monster was happening on the screen. It was really great!
 My fascination with monsters extended, like that of a lot of other kids, to comics. Horror comics. All the things EC did – ''The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt,'' that stuff. Mad was big too, appealing as it did to a certain lunatic fringe with a certain type of humor. Those were comics that girls used to glance at and go, "Eeeewe!" And some of that stuff was a little raunchy. I remember reading a ''Plastic Man'' comic where a guy blew his nose on his coattail with the word ''snork'' above it. Heavy business for the children in those days.
@@ Line 67: / Line 67: @@
 Oh, man, they were really talking some good stuff then. Compare that with tutti frutti, awrootie by the time [[Pat Boone]] got through with it, and the whole thing's ridiculous.
-Another great label, besides Tann, was [[Dootone]], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
+Another great label, besides Tann, was [https://www.discogs.com/label/92986-Dootone-Records Dootone], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
 One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews & The Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
-I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "[[Nite Owl]]" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite Of Spring]]" with [[The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.
+I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "[[Nite Owl]]" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite Of Spring]]" with [[Wikipedia:The Moonglows|The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.
 Love lyrics were some of the best things in the old R&B. If you listened to the words superficially, you might have thought they were talking about "old love"-hold hands, kiss her, ask her out -- but they weren't. They were talking about getting laid. The beginning of the sexual revolution is chronicled in song and story on those oldies. Also, if you took all those songs with the ice-cream cone changes, (there must have been thousands):

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:36, 19 November 2020
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	Today, for a girl to have status, she has to make it with a rock star. I find this to be a definite improvement.		Today, for a girl to have status, she has to make it with a rock star. I find this to be a definite improvement.
	[[Category:Articles by Zappa]]		[[Category:Articles by Zappa]]
		+	[[Category:1970]]

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 Another great label, besides Tann, was [[Dootone]], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
-One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews & the Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
+One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews & The Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
 I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "[[Nite Owl]]" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite Of Spring]]" with [[The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.

@@ Line 69: / Line 69: @@
 Another great label, besides Tann, was [[Dootone]], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
-One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews and the Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
+One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews & the Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
 I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "[[Nite Owl]]" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite Of Spring]]" with [[The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.

@@ Line 41: / Line 41: @@
 As for our taste in singers, my set just wouldn't listen to any white rock. It was always punier than the black stuff, and a lot of it was simply inept imitation. But then I was lucky to have black rock available, since the musical taste of a community not only affects, but is, in turn, affected by what is available at the moment. For instance, Claremont just had Dixie and semi-classical in its main record store. Many people hadn't even heard of someone like Muddy Waters. The blues freak of the '50s was a real rarity.
-So, a statement that appeared in some newspaper article about pop music, saying how great it is that we have finally gotten away from the puerile slush of the '50s, was probably made by someone who never heard any of that decade's great R&B numbers. He probably only heard stuff on easy access labels like Liberty, Dot and, maybe, Capitol. And, even if you were into R&B at that time, there was still another strata, one beneath the accessible R&B records. If you knew and liked R&B, then you knew [[Little Willie John]] and [[Hank Ballard]] on the King label. Once you found a store, they were as easy to get as [[Pat Boone]] on Dot was for all America. But some of the best really happening stuff was strictly one-shot. It would be a monumental job of research to list all the little label releases during that time. Companies were being formed everywhere. For instance, in Arizona there was a company that put out Bat Records. Maybe they put out only one record, maybe hundreds. It was so small, you don't know. For records like that, you really had to scuffle around, haunt places that sold used jukebox records from the South. If you did that kind of scouting, you might come across someone like [[Roy Tan]].
+So, a statement that appeared in some newspaper article about pop music, saying how great it is that we have finally gotten away from the puerile slush of the '50s, was probably made by someone who never heard any of that decade's great R&B numbers. He probably only heard stuff on easy access labels like Liberty, Dot and, maybe, Capitol. And, even if you were into R&B at that time, there was still another strata, one beneath the accessible R&B records. If you knew and liked R&B, then you knew [[Little Willie John]] and [[Hank Ballard]] on the King label. Once you found a store, they were as easy to get as [[Pat Boone]] on Dot was for all America. But some of the best really happening stuff was strictly one-shot. It would be a monumental job of research to list all the little label releases during that time. Companies were being formed everywhere. For instance, in Arizona there was a company that put out Bat Records. Maybe they put out only one record, maybe hundreds. It was so small, you don't know. For records like that, you really had to scuffle around, haunt places that sold used jukebox records from the South. If you did that kind of scouting, you might come across someone like [[Roy Tann]].
-In 1956, I hit upon the only record of this Roy Tan I ever saw. It was called "I Don't Like It," and it was on the Tan label. Hmmm. It went like this:
+In 1956, I hit upon the only record of this Roy Tann I ever saw. It was called "I Don't Like It," and it was on the Tan label. Hmmm. It went like this:
 <blockquote>''You been rockin' on my baby,<br>
@@ Line 54: / Line 54: @@
 ''Daddy, you got to go.<br></blockquote>
-The other side starts like this: Roy Tan: "Ah, you tend to spring chicken. Girl, what's your name?" Girl: "My name's Isabella and I'm off to a party. I can't talk to you right now." Then Roy breaks into song:
+The other side starts like this: Roy Tann: "Ah, you tend to spring chicken. Girl, what's your name?" Girl: "My name's Isabella and I'm off to a party. I can't talk to you right now." Then Roy breaks into song:
 <blockquote>''Isabella, Isabella,<br>
@@ Line 67: / Line 67: @@
 Oh, man, they were really talking some good stuff then. Compare that with tutti frutti, awrootie by the time [[Pat Boone]] got through with it, and the whole thing's ridiculous.
-Another great label, besides Tan, was [[Dootone]], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
+Another great label, besides Tann, was [[Dootone]], the one that first released "[[Earth Angel]]" by [[The Penguins]], but they had a lot of other great stuff like "Love Will Make Your Mind Go Wild," which had a dance on the other side – "The Ookey Ook." Then there was "Ay Si Si She Likes to Mambo," which had the odd line about how their radios were turned low down so nobody could see 'em when they really went to town. As if the radio was controlling the lights in the room.
 One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews and the Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.

@@ Line 71: / Line 71: @@
 One of the strangest, if not ''the'' strangest record of all time wasn't a one-shot, but came out on the other side of "Teardrops" by [[Lee Andrews and the Hearts]]. "Teardrops," a love song, was the big hit and "The Girl Around the Corner" was passed over, but it's fantastic. It's the most abstract lyric I've ever heard – highly stylized. It has to do with a girl named Buddha Macrae and a guy named Butchie Stover who "makes love like a Casanova." This guy is telling about some chick around the corner and how far out she is, and he succeeds, while all the time, someone in the background is going "Bum Bum Dee-Rahcha." I still can't figure it out, it's insane. And if I ever met this Buddha Macrae chick, I'd uh ... I don't think I could handle it.
-I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "Nite Owl" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite of Spring]]" with [[The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.
+I have a few friends who come over to the house, and we whip through those 45s of mine three to four times a month 'til they're coming out of our ears. It's like a time machine; takes me right back to school days. I can almost smell what was cooking in the kitchen when I first heard them. And in the ''[[Cruising With Ruben & The Jets|Reuben and the Jets]]'' ([[Wikipedia:Sic|sic]]) album, I very consciously took all those hot numbers – "Nite Owl" and "Cherry Pie" – all of them, and blended them in combinations to come up with my songs. I even mixed parts of "[[The Rite Of Spring]]" with [[The Moonglows]]' style of harmony. I took some of their better lines too.
 Love lyrics were some of the best things in the old R&B. If you listened to the words superficially, you might have thought they were talking about "old love"-hold hands, kiss her, ask her out -- but they weren't. They were talking about getting laid. The beginning of the sexual revolution is chronicled in song and story on those oldies. Also, if you took all those songs with the ice-cream cone changes, (there must have been thousands):

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 At one point during Beatlemania, the guys started faking English accents and ''really'' pulled the wool over the chick's eyes. Of course, after going that far, the next step was to get a band together just like [[The Beatles]] and have more glamor. "Let's get in there and then we can play a job at the dance." So they started learning how to play like Beatle records from scratch. Some got tired of imitating and, wholly by accident, started playing their own music. But most found it hard to break their imitative image even if they wanted to since there's always some schmucko beer bar owner who wants a Beatle or a Rolling Stones band, and will pay for it. Even at fraternity drink-outs, if you don't sound like [[Jimi Hendrix]] or [[Eric Clapton]], they don't even want you to play. The boys are just as narrow as the girls. Actually, some of the girls have improved. In fact, the main difference between then and now is that there are about ten percent less puny-minded girls. Consider: for a girl to have status in the '50s she had to wear her dress sticking out with all those starchy petticoats and eat her lunch on the school's front lawn and be a cheerleader. She had to be "real cute" and sublimate sex feelings with school spirit, student government, church or whatever.
 Today, for a girl to have status, she has to make it with a rock star. I find this to be a definite improvement.
 [[Category:Articles by Zappa]]