Tom Carvel's Bad Fun

Songs emanate from everywhere in the universe. Tunes good and bad (as determined by people like Dave) have origin stories in the craziest of places.  Bands have changed their sounds because of bizarre confluences and random experiences. A group I played with in high school changed our sound for a recording because by buddy Ned had been given a hand-me-down steel drum. As that episode turned out, that was terrible development. 

Stories like this have popped up since the beginnings of rock and roll. Peter Gabriel was inspired to leave Genesis based on seeing a Springsteen show, something he related in the lyrics of the first single off his debut solo album, "Solsbury Hill." And that was the theme song in this beautiful film:

Peter Gabriel now says that that Springsteen '75 Hammersmith Odeon tour -- which he did actually attend, and which was bad-assed through and through -- had nothing to do with the decision and called the backstory "hogwash," but our pal Jason has reminded us for decades...

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Paul Simon wrote "Mother and Child Reunion" based on a diner meal offering a chicken and egg platter of the same name. So they say.

The late, lamented Ian Curtis of Joy Division wrote the fantastic "Love Will Tear Us Apart" generally as a inverse-Victory gesture to the music business but specifically as a reply to Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep us Together." Amusing. Except for the part where he hanged himself within the year as a result of a love triangle tearing his life apart. Yiddit.

Don McLean was obviously inspired by Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens' tragic plane crash and legacy enough to write, record, and rest on the laurels of "American Pie." That's well-known and obvious. Less so is that a woman named Lori Lieberman took in an L.A. Don McLean show and wrote a song about it. Like to hear it here it go, as Calhoun Tubbs used to say. So check it out.

It was rather famously borrowed and recut a couple of years later. This is, as they say, the real deal. 

Okay, so what's your point there, Whitdog?

I learned those factoids decades ago. Cool shit. Meanwhile, I learned this next bit last week. Not as cool, just ridiculous.

So take this band The Cult. Yorkshire band of contraction, as in from Southern Death Cult to Death Cult to The Cult. Eventually they became Cu. No, not really.

The Cult, featuring vocalist Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy have been around for 40 years. They have reputedly inspired acts like Insane Clown Posse, the Butthole Surfers, Andrew WK, and Random Idiots. Goth rock. Post-punk. Eventually a hard rock band.

You mightn't have heard of early tracks of theirs like "Dreamtime," "Go West," or "Horse Nation." Not

bad. I especially like "Spiritwalker." Worth a listen.

You certainly are familiar with the album Love, The Cult's 1985 breakthrough. A staple on SiriusXM's 1stWave channel. It's outstanding all the way through. It starts with the colossal "Nirvana," itself inspired by a Seattle-area band from 1991... wait, no. And it builds from there.

Howard Stern loves the Love track "Rain," and on this matter, Howard and I agree. But "The Phoenix" is tip-top. It's all good shit.

And the ubiquitous '80s-alt-rock anthem from this album is, of course, this:

Overplayed to the hilt, but a great one.

So then, according to a 2018 article on the website A Pop Life:

In the summer of 1986 the band went into the studio (the Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, England, property of Richard Branson) with producer Steve Brown. Brown had been responsible for the production of Love. Following the motto “never change a winning team”, the band set out to work. A total of 11 songs were recorded. The new album, provisionally titled Peace, was ready to go. Or wasn’t it?

So here's a smidge of what Peace would have sounded like. 

Like Love, a bit heavier, pretty dense. A few songs sound close to where they eventually landed, like "Love Removal Machine." Others, like "Outlaw," are a million miles away. 

Anyway, then something happened, and months later, out popped Electric. A taut, sinewy war horse of a record that made the Peace sessions seem rather mule-like. Ten great songs and one lousy cover tune. Ian and Billy at the top of their game. Out of the gates with "Wildflower," you knew it was large, but for the uninitiated, listen to this song (also featured at the beginning of last year's Flash movie), one of my all-time favorites:

Damn. What happened?  What could it have been that took Ian Astbury, Billy Duffy, and The Cult's sound from a swirling slog of guitar... grunge, for lack of a better word, into this crisp ass-kicker?

What was so good that it made Dave take the cover of Electric into a tattoo parlor in 1989, point at that bandname in that font, and say to the artist, "I want this on my leg"?

It was Cooky Puss. 

Wait, what? Cooky Puss changed a rock and roll album???!! Come on!

>

No, no. That's Cookie Puss, as chronicled here. This is "Cooky Puss."  The song. The one we referenced last week in Notify 8. The one where Ad-Rock calls Carvel and asks to speak to Cookie Puss. Repeatedly. Over a simple b-boy rhythm. [And this all happened to them next.]

Confused? Let me go tenfold on ya.

That same A Pop Life article says:

When singer Ian Astbury heard the song Cooky Puss by the Beastie Boys (which was produced by Rick Rubin), he knew the band’s route had to change. It had to be more raw, direct, just as the band sounded live.

Come, now. Really. Truly?

I have doubled and tripled my fact-checking on this, and short of talking to Ian, this is what he believes. Peace, now known as The Manor Sessions, became Electric because of fucking "Cooky Puss." (And Rick Rubin, obvi. We know he's the real record-flip ingredient here.)

Astbury confirms this in other interviews.  Brooklyn Vegan:

I’d never try, never think that we could appropriate hip-hop culture or appropriate hip-hop music into what we do. That would be gauche. It wouldn’t be authentic. Certainly it’s part of what we’ve done in the past. I mean the reason we made the Electric album was because of hip-hop. It was because we heard the Beastie Boys. I heard “Cookie Puss” in a club in Toronto very early on. Like ’85. I heard that song, and I was just like it’s so dope hearing that. Obviously hip-hop was this new music. It wasn’t things like Sugar Hill Gang or whatever. We were hearing some of this stuff. Until we came to New York in the early 80’s I didn’t know what culture really was. Being more directly kind of in front of clubs and hearing that kind of music, and then hearing “Cookie Puss”. There was something about that. We came to New York, we came to Electric Lady, we’re part of the Def Jam family. 

[Ianspeak is always and forever terrible rockliché nonsense. Nothing new here.] Vanyaland:

It was a completely different approach. Working with Steve Brown on the initial sessions, I was actually talking about Rick Rubin. I had heard “Cooky Puss” by the Beastie Boys and I wanted to get that sound, and Steve Brown was still into that textured, layered sound and had a different vision of what it should be. I felt that the music we were making, the lifestyle we were living and what was motivating me as a writer was much rawer.

GTB fave KEXP:

I remember hearing “Cookie Puss” in a club in Toronto in, like, ’85. And I went to the DJ and I said, “What is this?” And he went, “It’s by The Beastie Boys.” I had to know everything about them. When I found out they were being produced by Rick Rubin, I thought, he’s got to produce us because that is the sound. Stripped back, rhythmically driven, direct. We had to get that sound. So, we went and pursued Rick Rubin. We met him in ’86 and I want to say he was in an NYU dorm room but that may be a projection of time. But I’m pretty sure we were. I remember we sat in a very small room and he put on a TV. He had a VHS and he put on Blue Cheer and said, “What do you think of this?” We were like, “Wow, it’s really raw, it’s really primal.” And Rick said, “I think you need a bit more of this in your music.” We were young guys, like, 25 at the time. And we were both, like, “This is so exciting!” It wasn’t as nuanced as the English producers who were making these elaborate pop records, layered and textured and what have you. This was way primal and direct and completely reflected our lifestyle at that time. So, that was the link between the Beastie Boys and The Cult. Then, if you look at the MTV New Year’s party in 1986 going into ’87, you’ll see me on stage with them performing “No Sleep to Brooklyn.” I was part of the posse on stage. We really immersed ourselves in that world, the Def Jam world. There were such incredible things in New York at that time and the conduit was the Beastie Boys. Then, later, things like the Tibetan Freedom Concert, which we played with Adam [Yauch]. I wouldn’t say it was an intimate relationship but it was certainly a parallel trajectory in some ways. 

So ludicrous. So good. 

It's not even just that it would be blatant name-checking cred-seeking to mention that he saw the Beasties in 1986, it's just... "Cooky Puss"? It's not "She's On It" or "Fight for Your Right" or "Slow and Low" with Run-D.M.C. or "She's Crafty" with faux Jimmy Page axegrinding or their early punk thrash shit or my fave "Rhymin & Stealin" or anything, anything at all that's not a backbeat with a dipshit crank call. Has he even heard "Cooky Puss"???

The reality is that there are a dozen or more instances of this bizarre recollection that Astbury had, as told to different journalists. Curiously, each instance happened between about 2010 and 2018. No mention of the Cookie Puss persuasion way back when it happened, or in the 90's, or the early aughts. Chances are that, as usual, Ian made up some weird bullshit and stuck with it because it sounded cool and made The Cult seem more relevant. 

• Like his fascination with Native America that informed his cultural appropriation and got him sued by the Sioux. 
• Like when he quipped, "Peace on earth and good will toward men - that is something we need to work on. Like Nelson Mandela, we should learn from him."
• Like when he said, "I've liked the Yankees since I was a kid. I grew up in Canada so I kind of identified with New York sports teams."
• Like when he channeled Marty Balin and Salvador Dali to write, "Sittin' on a mountain, looking at the sun / Plastic fantastic lobster telephone."
• Like when he says anything. It's fun to play along.

But I'll repeat: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And since we're quoting, I'll offer one of my favorite lines ever, a good one from Four Weddings and a Funeral: "Quite right... why be dull?"

Keep on truckin', Ian.

Anyway, there's your Whitneypedia stupid music worthless bullshit hour for today.