Steve Reynolds Program - Eindhoven Chicken Masque
Back Again
Hey all y’all!
As a change-up, I decided to type up a McSweeney’s-style list for this section. I then realized McSweeney’s is still going strong. So I sent it there instead. I’m one for two in submissions so far. Wish me luck.
Went to the theater to see Shin Ultraman. It was a damn hoot. The plot made little sense and ended on a place called The Planet Of Light with a weird likening of Ultraman to Jesus Christ, just like it should have.
Back on Spotify, dammit. Their interface is much less frustrating than the other enormo jukebox apps. Please forgive my household.
Song #19
Eindhoven Chicken Masque
by Butthole Surfers
In high school, different social groups gravitate to different activities. You can predict to which activity most will go, but high school by high school, the Freaks congregate in different places. A friend told me their high school’s shop class was where the antisocial and radical, no matter the gender, gathered with each other. In other high schools, a literature class will pack them in.
At my high school, it was the debate team that served as Radical HQ. One debating classmate became communications director for PETA and a few others led WTO protests in Seattle. Sure, most have settled down with age, but back then their debate skills got your mind reeling. My class of competitive speech aka drama club (apparently I was in the “needy” social group) shared a classroom with debate so I osmosed freakness through proximity (my delve into extremes began in college).
All this is to say I first learned of Butthole Surfers when I was a pimply and awkward high school senior. In class on a Monday when I should have been rehearsing for a competition, a debater told me of driving to Dallas to see this insane band that weekend. He told me about their stage show- they lit cymbals on fire, covered themselves in chocolate and projected a 8mm film of a grisly surgery behind them. He widely grinned while telling me about this; I probably looked like a child watching a magic trick hearing of his adventure.
What he did not describe was the actual Buttholes’s music. So I had to imagine what it sounded like. It wasn’t easy to find their music (especially when it wasn’t my top priority) in those times, but I heard “Sweat Loaf,” “Cherub” and “Hey” and liked them, though it seemed shock value was the band’s whole raison d'être.
It took an instrumental to convert me to the Buttholes. Gibby Haynes is an all-time front man and his vocals are so integral to the band’s identity, so isolating the music without his crazed effluvium reveal the creative force of the other band members.
Touch & Go Records 1986 compilation God’s Favorite Dog, had Big Black, Killdozer, and other bands who were noisy, fast and abrasive. But the opening track, “Eindhoven Chicken Masque” (an inside joke of a name I don’t need explained) starts with Paul Leary’s deliberately slow and dissonant guitar playing an off-kilter riff in a minor key, followed by a reverbed horn section playing the same melodic line.
It sounds almost majestic, like it would accompany a royal caravan through an alien landscape. Then after a minute, the guitars louden and the drumming grows more fintense. They work that riff for all its worth until they all end on a final note together, something you don’t think these freaks would be able to manage, what with all the toad poisons and synthesized banana peels coursing through their veins and bouncing off their brain cells.
They do nail it, and they reveal the strength of the Freaks. What seems contrarian, or weird for weird sakes, often has real reason or feeling. It just may take the deepest cut to fully get it.
Back Out
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” by Outkast. Would perfectly follow Eindhoven as the last two songs on a mixtape.
Our shop’s open. Come get some fud.