"Operative 73 Takes A Swim"

More Escaped Fetal Pigs videos are coming, but we'll take a break from the series in this post since I have some news.  I wrote a story for New Pop Lit.  It is called "Operative 73 Takes A Swim" and it can be found here.  The editor, King Wenclas, also discusses the story a bit here and here.  The second link likely has the first appearance anywhere of the author photo for my latest novel, Frequently Asked Questions About Being Dead, the publication of which is rapidly progressing.  It may even be out before the end of the year.  In any case, it will be out sometime soon, provided I don't hit any major life obstacles.  In the meantime, you will just have to be satisfied with this story to tide you over.  I wrote it for an old literary acquaintance who has since passed on.  I certainly didn't always agree with him, particularly when he moved his focus from literature to politics, but I tried to give him the happy ending, well happier anyway, in fiction that he apparently missed out on in life, or death.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Bad Catholic"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991. "Bad Catholic" was not a song The Escaped Fetal Pigs played often. In fact, this might have been the only time we played it; it certainly appears to be the only recording of the song. At this time, we were branching out, and I was learning to play guitar, so I may have written both the lyrics and music for this one, though it might have been one of the last ones where I wrote the lyrics and Mark wrote the music. It's about a person who believes in God, but never goes to church. It's semi-boring, just like a mass, which is probably why we didn't play it much, but the chorus is kind of catchy. You can hum it the next time you're in a church. The video is fun as well. I like it when Mark channels his inner Gene Simmons for the camera, and I also like Simon's cymbal hits at the end of some lines.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Oompa Loompa Love"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991. "Oompa Loompa Love" was one of our last "hits" (meaning it got played on the local college radio station and live audiences liked it).  Sadly, it never got put on an album, which back then meant we never put it on a self-released cassette.  The band had plans to make a new cassette, but we never got it together enough to do so.  The recording of the song that got played on the radio was a demo Mark did all by himself.  Obviously, he was inspired by his love of the movie Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.  In the song, the Oompa Loompas rebel and try to find some love.  This was another fun song to play even though I really didn't have much to do during it.  I was gradually learning guitar at this point, but didn't play it much live with The Pigs.  In subsequent bands, I would usually sing and play guitar or just play guitar.  It was kind of fun in The Pigs to just sing even if it was just silly songs about manufacturing chocolate love dolls. 

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Mutilate A Baby Doll"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991. "Mutilate A Baby Doll" was a fun song to play.  It had a simple catchy riff and our guitarist Mark Justice usually brought a baby doll for the audience and the band to savage.  Mark wrote the song, which I always thought was a parody of the many violent heavy metal songs.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Iron Seuss"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991.  Some things are known to go great together:  peanut butter and jelly, Batman and Robin, and so on and so forth.  Some things are not known to go great together, but they do.  Such is Dr. Seuss and Black Sabbath.

This song was a holdover from the first band Mark Justice and I were in together, which was called The Darrow Dregs.  The Dregs started as a goof in the basement of Darrow Hall at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio USA.  There were some rooms in the basement for music students to practice in.  One such room had a piano, which our buddy Tim Hustmyer played.  Mark played guitar and another friend from the dorm, Frank Esposito, sang.  At some point, they got together jamming and goofing on songs.  For example, "American Woman" became "Cafeteria Woman" complaining about the quality of dorm food.

At some point, I got roped in because I played harmonica.  And, at some point, someone, probably Mark with his penchant for heavy metal, decided "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath would sound great with lyrics from Dr. Seuss.  It was probably the biggest "hit" by The Dregs, based on crowd response.  When that band broke up (Frank and Tim decided that studying was a bit more important than being in a comedy folk band), Mark and I carried on under a new name, The Escaped Fetal Pigs.  We kept some of the better songs by The Dregs, and, among them, of course, "Iron Seuss", which sounded even better when played with bass, drums, and electric guitar, though I, of course, kept playing harmonica on it.  By this point, I did more singing than harmonica playing, but on some songs I kept playing Magic Dick (Google that if you don't know who that is), and this is one of them.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Rob Lowe's Video Store"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991.  "Rob Lowe's Video Store" poked fun at the infamous sex video that came out featuring Rob Lowe and an underage girl at the 1988 Democratic convention.  It has a fun disco beat.  Well, the song does anyway.  I don't know if the sex video does; I never saw it that I can recall.  In any case, I don't remember doing so, but, like Ronald Reagan, I don't remember much of the 1980s, but yes, mistakes were made, so maybe I did.  Probably not though, because it's not like these days where videos get spread throughout the Internet quickly.  Back then, tapes had to get bootlegged, copied, and passed around, and a bit more work was involved.  Watching Rob have sex probably didn't interest me much, though I do remember that he came to Bowling Green to campaign for Michael Dukakis (the scandal happened later when the tape surfaced).  Anyway, old Rob Lowe managed to bounce back from that scandal pretty well.  One hopes the girls/women in the video managed to also do so.  In the song, the video store sells only naughty video tapes until the police arrive to arrest Rob Lowe.  A staple of the live set was having the members of the band claim to be Rob Lowe to impress women only to deny being Rob Lowe when the police arrive.  On this particular night, we modified that shtick a bit to include a shoutout to our buddy Scott Law of the Toledo hardcore band The Stain.  We were a bit fascinated with Scott at the time.  He was an outrageous frontman who one never knew what he might do on stage.  He could take off his pants.  He could show up with an ax and chop up the stage.  He could offer to have sex to stop a war.  Supposedly, his band would start supplying him with various drugs well before showtime and then watch what happened when he hit the stage.  Who knows the truth though?  The stories, rumors, and legends are endless.  We certainly enjoyed him and his antics.  If The Pigs had stayed together, I am sure we would have written a song about him.

Alas, for now, you have to settle for one about Rob Lowe.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "Hatebomb"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem.  Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991.  This song was one of the later Pigs songs when we started to morph from comedy rock to music that was a bit more serious as well as aggressive (we were listening to a lot of Slayer and hardcore punk if I remember correctly).  This song is still pretty humorous though, well, as humorous as explosives go.  It was inspired by one of my old managers at K-Mart, who used to put on a disguise and go spy on another store, Fisher's Big Wheel, that was a block over.  In the song, two rival store managers start a real price war between their two stores and start engaging in combat, culminating in each sending bombs to one another.

By the way, I worked for K-Mart, but Fisher's Big Wheel had a better music selection since they carried The Dead Milkmen.

The Escaped Fetal Pigs - "The Cult Of Pogo And Porky Pine"

This is from the tv show Musical Mayhem. Jimmie Frederick taped the show at The Good Tymes Pub in Bowling Green, Ohio USA in the Fall of 1991. This song was fun to play live as we liked to do the Sid Vicious pogo dance during it. It's not named for that though. It's based on Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. The narrative of the song involves a bunch of people who find some old Pogo books and base a religion on them.

Hey, there are worse religions!

In this version, the band plays their standard roles. We also would do a version where Simon (the drummer) would sing, Mark (the guitarist) would play drums, Jim (the bassist) would play guitar, and I (the singer) would play bass. Maybe someday I'll find a video of that. In the meantime, there is this.

More Pigs are coming for the next few months. I have already found another videotape with more good Pigs stuff on it. I also have the Pogeybait portion of Musical Mayhem coming. Party like it is 1991!