Kurt Cobain once tried to get one of his songs featured in cult ’90s cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show – according to one of the voice actors who starred in it.
Billy West, who provided the voice of the feline simpleton character Stimpy, has claimed that the Nirvana frontman showed up at the Los Angeles offices of Spümcø, the animation company behind the show.
“One day, this scraggly kid came in and said he wanted to write a song for Ren & Stimpy,” he said on podcast Nerdist, “and it was Kurt Cobain.”
West‘s account hasn’t been verified by anyone who knew the late singer/guitarist, but whether it was indeed him or not who showed up, the “scraggly kid”‘s song was rejected by the show’s chiefs.
“They [TV bosses] said, ‘Yeah, that’s great,'” West explained, “and they threw it in the wastebasket”.
In their latest video, Ithaca Audio mixes 16 tracks live on a 23-year-old Tascam tape machine, blending music by Etta James, Deadmau5, and more. The project was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the cassette tape, which Ithaca calls the “format that brought us mixtapes and the birth of home sampling culture.” The mashup is so precisely timed, as you can see in the video below, that it’s hard to believe it’s live. Chris Evans-Roberts, who created the mix and the video with Andy Rae, explains how they did it:
Before using the tape we prepared 16 tracks of loops on the computer. These were time stretched and pitch-shifted so that they all looped in sync with each other and were in the same key. These loops were then recorded onto the 16 tracks on the Tascam tape machine. All 16 tracks loop continuously when the tape machine plays back. By using the mute buttons at the bottom of the machine we can control which of the loops are heard at any one time. The amount of vocal parts did mean that we needed to be very accurate with bringing various tracks in and out. In the end we devised our own type of score to help with structuring the performance.
King Missile is basically New York-based poet/performance artist John S. Hall and a revolving cast of musicians who come up with sympathetic settings for his droll, mostly spoken word narratives.
“Jesus Was Way Cool” was a big college radio hit for the band and one of their two best-known songs (along with 1992’s “Detachable Penis”, an unlikely MTV and alternative radio hit). Interestingly, it was at a 1991 concert that Hall joked to the audience that the title of their next single would be “Detachable Penis”. He later decided to go ahead and write the song.
The band first came to my attention when a girlfriend lent me a mixtape with the title “Way Cool Tape”, which not only served as my introduction to King Missile but to John Hiatt as well. Wish I could have a look at that tape today–I’d like to see what other treasures it may have contained.
When several years passed after their 1998 Failure album, I’d assumed the band broke up. Turns out John S. Hall was attending law school. He has since opened his own practice specializing in entertainment law.
From one of the most well-received Americana/indie folk albums of last year, the prodigious self-titled debut by Seattle band The Head and the Heart. It’s an album of beautiful harmonies, confident performances and lyrics that belie the youth of the band members, who are all in their twenties.
From a record that made several 2012 year-end best-of lists, Tame Impala’s Lonerism album. The band clearly shoots for a psychedelic late-60’s sound. Sounds a little like a Revolver outtake.
A look back at Middle Earth in rock & roll, from Led Zeppelin to Rush and Beyond
By Andy Greene
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was once dismissed as the geekiest book series in history. But little did the jocks who picked on kids carrying The Two Towers around their middle school know that many of their favorite bands were total Tolkien nuts. Here’s a pocket guide to the long history of rock music about Middle Earth:
Led Zeppelin
Zeppelin are probably the best known Lord of the Rings heads in rock & roll. The narrator of their 1969 classic “Ramble On” finds himself in a very bizarre version of Middle Earth – a land where Mordor appears to be a great place to meet beautiful women, and Gollum and Sauron are more interested in fighting over the narrator’s girlfriend than getting their hands on the One Ring. Aside from this weirdness, it’s clear that Jimmy Page was a huge Tolkien fan, as the opening lines of “Ramble On” paraphrase a poem that Tolkien wrote in the Elvish tongue of Quenya. Led Zeppelin went on to reference their favorite fantasy series in two songs from 1971: “Misty Mountain Hop” (named for the place where Bilbo Baggins and his dwarf pals spend some time in The Hobbit) and “The Battle of Evermore” (“The ring wraiths ride in black/Ride on!”).
Black Sabbath Right around the time Led Zeppelin were recording “Ramble On,” Black Sabbath were cutting “The Wizard” for their first album. Does this guy sound familiar? “Evil power disappears/Demons worry when the wizard is near/He turns tears into joy/Everyone’s happy when the wizard walks by.” Geezer Butler was reading The Lord of the Rings when he wrote the lyrics, and he based the character of the wizard off of Gandalf.
Rush Rush’s drummer-lyricist Neil Peart has always been a voracious reader. He must have worked his way towards The Lord of the Rings by the mid-1970s, because 1975’s “Rivendell” was named after the great Elven city where Elrond dwelt. The following year, Peart wrote “The Necromancer” – which was Gandalf’s name for Sauron in The Hobbit.
Genesis It’s no great surprise that prog bands were way into Lord of the Rings. “Stagnation,” from Genesis’ 1970 LP Trespass, isn’t explicitly about Middle Earth, but many fans have noticed lyrics that seem to evoke Gollum: “Will I wait forever, besides the silent mirror/And fish for bitter minnows amongst the weeds and slimy water.” The song came out within months of “Ramble On” and “The Wizard.” Clearly, 1970 was a good year for LOTR-rock.
Pink Floyd Syd Barrett wrote most of Pink Floyd’s early lyrics. Nobody knows exactly what 1967’s “The Gnome” is about, but many fans believe it’s at least partly Lord of the Rings-inspired. The gnome in question wears a scarlet tunic, is named Gimble Gromble and has “a big adventure,” all of which sounds pretty Tolkien-esque to us.
Megadeth In the past decade, many more people have seen Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies than actually read the books for the first time. That probably explains why Megadeth’s Tolkien-inspired “This Day We Fight!” takes its title from a line in The Return of the King that appeared nowhere in the books.
Dimmu Borgir The Norwegian metal band’s lead singer calls himself Shagrath – a minor variation on the name of a very mean orc from The Lord of the Rings.
Leonard Nimoy The Star Trek star’s 1968 LP Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy reaches peak nerd nirvana with a song called “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” No, your eyes and ears don’t deceive you – that’s Mr. Spock himself retelling the story of The Hobbit to a jaunty folk-rock tune. This one has to be seen to be believed.
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And I’ll add one to the list, a song that never seems to get a mention in conversations of Tolkien-inspired rock, no doubt because the band’s popularity isn’t nearly that of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc.
Camel was clearly inspired by the character of Gandalf on 1974’s “Nimrodel/The Procession/The White Rider”. Skip to 2:30 and 5:40 for the pertinent (and in fact, only) lyrics.
Every Moment Has A Song 