Sideways Scuttle Butt Sushi Maneuver

Oh my!

For the record, this 9+ minute chunk of YouTube goodness ranks among my favorite television moments of all time...

This is SCTV, my second favorite TV show of all time (after The Simpsons), and more specifically, this is John Candy playing Gil Fisher, The Fishin' Musician...Among all the brilliantly amazing John Candy characters on SCTV (hmmm, Hank Ranks fodder?), Gil Fisher must rank in the top 10, which is saying more than it sounds like I'm saying if you know what I'm saying.

Anyways, This is The Tubes appearance on The Fishin' Musician, wherein they go fishing for large mouth bass and later perform one of their biggest hits, "Sushi Girl", back at the Scuttle Butt Lodge. It may be nothing more than nostalgia, but like I said, this is one of my favorite moments in TV history.

Now, if only YouTube had The Plasmatics appearance on Gil Fisher's show...

Hotcha! Hank

Sideways Quay Lewd Pinball Maneuver

So, here we've got the self-same "White Punks On Dope" from this week's SOMETHING 4 THE WEEKEND, performed live by The Tubes on The Old Grey Whistle Test, probably around 1976...Roadie-turned-frontman Fee Waybill (how's THAT for a great rock'n'roll stage name?) appears here in the guise of Quay Lewd, the drug-addled rock'n'roll nincompoop who tries to keep his shit together, all atop 13 inch high rise platform shoes...I might be wrong, but I believe Fee broke his ankle and tore an ACL during this particular performance...

Yeah, I think I'm wrong about that...

I gotta believe this particular character is a send-up of Elton John, who was certainly drug-addled throughout the 1970's, and though I'd say it's not Elton's fault that he wore those huge shoes in TOMMY, it IS his fault that he adopted them for his own stage show.

In any event, this clip from TOMMY is a totally sweet music video in it's own right, and LONG LIVE THE TUBES!

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 54

By the mid-70's, Frank Zappa had branched out into just about every conceivable style and genre of music known to semi-educated man. Certainly gone were the highly theatrical shenanigans of his live act circa 1968, replaced with nothing more than the sheer force of the man's charisma and words...No need to rely upon stuffed giraffes spewing whipped cream and the like anymore, not when ya got the best "rock" musicians in the world onstage, not when the music and the message are so strong...

So, who would fill that void? Who could rock righteously, but with a theatrical flair that left the kids slack-jawed and drooling? KISS, you say? Oh sure, they had the circus pomp down cold, but it was too much flash, not enough righteous rocking (save Ace Frehley)...Alice Cooper? Well sure, except by the mid-70's he was dancing with spiders, singing sappy ballads and showtune-sounding treacle, and simply taking himself way too seriously...

The answer, my friends, is The Tubes.

The Tubes: "White Punks On Dope": 128k mp3

The Tubes emerged fully-trimmed and sarcastic from San Francisco via Phoenix in 1975. They immediately proved themselves rather adept at seemingly every style and genre of music known to semi-educated man. Not only that, but they believed that humor belongs in music, and it ought to be presented with as much silly pomp as possible. And boy, did they deliver.

Mostly, The Tubes targeted the nonsensical ego and excesses of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, but in general they had a fairly profound interest in pop culture, and proved themselves ahead of the curve in terms of music videos...In fact, they knew their live act was killer, and so they shopped a demo music video rather than the typical audio-only demo-tape, and it helped them land their deal with A&M in 1974.

Anyways, this is all my way of simply saying that The Tubes are the rightful heirs to whatever crown Frank Zappa & The Mothers wore circa 1968.

Despite a couple of mainstream hits in the early '80's (again, thanks to music video and The Tubes visual brilliance), I don't think the band ever got their rightful due.

And if you want to extend this thread I got going here, I might suggest that The Flaming Lips are the rightful heirs to The Tubes...And so on and so forth...

Hotcha! Hank