WELCOME TO THE DUNGEON

During my growing up years in the psychological hellhole of Westport, Connecticut, I was a square-peg-in-a-round-hole kid who had a few equally oddball/misfit pals and no interest in the sports and other bullshit that captivated most of my peers, but I was an utter slave to music.

Like most children of the time I was indoctrinated to the ways of pop music by AM radio, but I soon discovered WBLI out of Long Island, my nominee for the best oldies station ever to grace the airwaves; it played all of the familiar doo-wop, soul and British invasion material, but they also aired a cornucopia of obscurities that ranged all across the musical landscape, complete with discussions of the artists and their histories. While I devoured all of this musical lore I had no clue that I was not only getting the foundation of my rock ‘n’ roll education, but my mind was being opened to accepting whatever was thrown my way, no matter how bizarre, stupid or just plain bad.

Then came the dark day when WBLI changed format and went Country, and I once more had to rely on mainstream pop music radio to keep me entertained; those were the waning days of disco and the burgeoning of the new wave era, soon to be followed by the insidious influence of MTV and the subsequent death of creativity in popular music. During this time I got heavily into anything that was diametrically opposed to disco and its ilk, namely punk rock, novelty recordings, and heavy metal, anything somewhat different and strange. This stance rendered me something of a musical pariah in school, but my tastes proved sneakily seductive, and soon a lot of my peers found themselves intrigued by the music that I would bring around. Sometimes I would even haul my pitiful excuse for a stereo to our basement parties, supplemented with a crateful of danceable vinyl oddities such as Lene Lovich’s immortal “New Toy,” “Da Da Da” by Trio, “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and “Spring In Fialta” by Slow Children, and the foot-soldiers for the Doors and Van Halen bobbed and pseudo-can-canned to it, as much to their surprise as to mine.

When I left home for college in the fall of 1983, my musical horizons were further expanded by an art school where everyone who lived in the dormitories, be they male or female, seemed to have brought their vast record libraries, and as a result our interests cross-pollinated. Aided by my fellow students and the then-exceptional radio station WLIR — a bastion of punk, new wave and downright strangeness — I slowly acquired a record collection that became notorious on campus as a miniature Library of Alexandria for LP addicts, and a repository for the strangest shit ever committed to polyvinyl.

Which brings us to this site.

I was moving a few of the many boxes of stuff that are threatening to crowd me out of house and home, when I uncovered a crate containing some vinyl LPs that I had converted to CD at a friend’s house almost two years ago; finding that crate reminded me of the many items in my collection that will probably never, EVER be released in disc, and I hit upon the idea of chronicling these relics for both myself and you, the unsuspecting curiosity seeker. Here you will find it all; strange cover albums, children’s items, bizarre attempts at comedy, and things that defy an form of ready analysis. All of the recordings described here are 100% real, and many of them are simply horrendous, but when you see them, ask yourself the same question that I have asked myself over and over during nearly three decades of hardcore record collecting: “How can I not have this on my shelf?”

- El Buncho, keeper of the Sound Dungeon

Way before her Fox television series, Tracey Ullman released this album of girl group-style pop tunes, presumably as a tribute to the stuff she enjoyed as a kid. Considering when it came out (the early 1980’s) this throwback is bizarre indeed; it’s so ultra-girly that it could make Wesley Snipes menstruate, and somehow manages to remain rather upbeat even when dealing with subjects of romantic loss and uncertainty. I picked this album up for the incredibly bouncy “Breakaway,” the story of a girl’s inability to leave her louse of a boyfriend despite his incessant mistreatment of her, and if you can find it I highly recommend checking out the accompanying video over on YouTube, a frothy romp that features Ullman and two other actresses as teenage UK schoolgirls hanging out and spinning their 45's while amusingly miming the song into a hairbrush and mimicking all the classic 1960’s girl group moves, complete with fantasy sequences involving sixties-era choreography and costumes. Oh, and this album yielded a single that actually made it into the Billboard chart, namely “They Don’t Know About Us.”

Phil Austin was once part of the seminal seventies comedy troupe the Firesign Theater, and this solo effort is one of the most lysergic concoctions in my entire collection. Aurally, the LP is set up to simulate the effect of sitting in front of the TV and randomly flipping back and forth with the remote, stumbling across oddball commercials, children’s programs, religious weirdness, ludicrous country/western numbers from out of nowhere, and sitcoms, most prominent of which is an “I Love Lucy” takeoff involving Tricky Retardo awaiting the return of his brother, Jesus — not “Hay-Soose,” but literally Jesus — and the upcoming final confrontation between good and evil, the latter being personified by the Devil and shady President “Nick Exxon.” It’s kind of impossible to describe this comedic shibboleth and have it make any sort of coherent sense; you just have to sit there and let it happen, all of the seemingly disparate elements falling into place in a rich, bizarre comic mosaic. Further proof that everyone was stoned in the 1970’s, including the President.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR ITALIAN CHICKS!!! Man, did I ever want to titty-fuck the shit out of Annette Funicello, and I know I’m not alone in that sentiment!

The ultra-saccharine “Mickey Mouse Club” was rerun on syndicated television during the mid-1970’s, presumably to cash in on the then-pervasive nostalgia for the 1950’s, so us kids of the Watergate era could witness a children’s show that looked like it was made by and for Hitler Youth. It was a soul-free parade of excruciatingly upstanding white kids in crewcuts, prim skirts and mouse-eared yarmulkes who went by the group moniker “Mouseketeers,” and performed cutesy old standards that were ancient when dirt was invented — anything to steer the youth of the USA away from that godless rock ‘n’ roll and “race” music! — buttressed by the occasional cartoon from the Disney catalog and vomitious chapters of original serials like “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” a nondescript chapter play that would have been vastly improved (to say nothing of being considerably more interesting) if its tweener stars had been portraying fifties-era homosexuals. I hated all of it, but I could not tear my gaze away from the cutest of the female members of the Mouse Gestapo, the doe-eyed, kinky haired brunette goddess that was Annette Funicello (born 1942). In the earlier segments she was merely the only somewhat-ethnic-looking of Uncle Walt’s stormtroopers, but then puberty hit, and it hit with a vengeance, transforming the once simply appealing kid into a bodacious bombshell from the Boot; I have heard it reliably reported that many an adolescent male tuned in simply to watch Annette breathe in those tight sweaters, and I can tell you that such was the case for me. Anyway, Das UberDisney was quick to exploit Annette’s newfound one-handed potential, giving her an eponymous serial on the TV show and casting her in many, many roles in slapdash features and guest parts on ancillary shows such as “Zorro.”

By the time she hit her later teens Annette had moved on to the BEACH PARTY series, a gaggle of low budget ozoners where she unconvincingly starred with Frankie Avalon as his chaste surf bunny girlfriend, films that ran perpetually on Manhattan’s Monday through Friday 4:30 movie, each and every feeble one displaying her pasta-fed assets to their best advantage (except for the one where she was pregnant and they shot her from the tits up, and who could complain about that?). Those films and her Disney output yielded a small mountain of mediocre singles and LPs, and all but one of the tunes are about as weak as pre-bubblegum can get. The one that doesn’t eat raw cojones is the theme song from THE MONKEY’S UNCLE, one of a handful of pictures she co-starred in as the squeeze of gay-as-the-hills Tommy Kirk. The reason it doesn’t suck is that it’s an effort heavily ruled by the just-out-of-the-box Beach Boys.

If you were listening to the radio during the spring and summer of 1979 you are no doubt familiar with “Pop Muzik,” a monolithic one-hit wonder of epic proportions. You know it, the one with the nasal chorus of:

New York, London, Paris, Munich
Ev’rybody talk about (pause) Pop Muzik!

I tell you, the fucking thing was everywhere, and that’s no mean feat for a tune as bizarre as it was at the time; punk never really had any impact on the airwaves in the States and the so-called "new wave" had not really happened yet so no one knew quite what to make of “Pop Muzik,” but it had an infectious tune and you could dance to it, so it was welcomed with open arms by a bewildered public. Come to think of it, this hit at about the same time as Gary Numan’s equally epochal “Cars,” making them the real vanguard of new wave…

Anyway, most people never bothered to pick up M’s (real name Robin Scott) full-length album — I certainly didn’t until years later when I snagged it for a dollar in a cutout bin — and there’s good reason for that: other than the hit single every other track bites a huge, veiny moose cock.

My curiosity about the LP was spurred by how good the song on the B-side to “Pop Muzik” was, a truly strange synth-rocker entitled “M Factor.” When I picked up the forty-five and had listened to the A-side a few times I flipped the disc over and checked out the also-ran, a song that was actually strong enough to warrant a featured release of its own. Yet for some obscure reason “M Factor” was left off of the “New York, London, Paris, Munich” album, which really pissed me off since I got the single years before I really started taking good care of my records, and it had existed for years without a sleeve, collecting the inevitable pops and hisses encountered when played again. Then, many years later, I stumbled across a mint condition Mexican twelve-inch single that included both “Pop Muzik” (here retitled “Muzika Pop”) and “M Factor” (“Factor M”) but what made the disc really noteworthy was the fact that it was one of those records where you had to drop the needle in precisely the right groove, depending on which song you wanted to hear; side A included the single-length version of “Pop Muzik,” excuse me, “Muzika Pop,” and “M Factor,” while the extended version of the hit dominated side B.

The only previous experience I’d had with that wacky groove trick was with Monty Python’s “Matching Tie and Handkerchief” album, an album that is actually three-sided thanks to the gimmick, but the M single gave me no warning. I eventually figured it out, and then realized that it was written on the jacket and as I don’t speak much Spanish…

Here’s an example of what pop music would have sounded like if black people had never happened.

The title says it all, as this is nothing but spoken instruction on the title activity. It comes with an instruction booklet and features about an hour of a guy making “ee-UUUnk” noises. Lemme tell ya, this’ll really put her in the mood…

SECOND CITY TELEVISION — SCTV for short — was one of the funniest things ever to grace the airwaves, and the success of the spinoff MacKenzie Brothers “Great White North” LP made a followup seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, they went with a Count Floyd EP, something that I thoroughly enjoyed, but that character is far less accessible to the general public than the beer-drinking MacKenzies since Floyd’s whole schtick requires at least a passing familiarity with the whole “horror host” thing that was a common fixture of local television stations from the 1950’s but was slowly dying out by the mid-1980’s, with Elvira and Commander USA being among the last to go. On this EP Floyd (a fake vampire with a bad Bela Lugosi accent who howls like a werewolf for no apparent reason and hosted the never scary “Monster Chiller Horror Theater”) , attempts to launch an ill-advised career in pop music with such anti-hits as “Reggae Christmas Eve In Transylvania,” the smarmy makeout tune “Treat You Like A Lady” — in which Floyd invites his inamorata to “go down for the count…Count Floyd, that is! Heh heh heh!"), and the immortal “Count Floyd Is Back,” a “live” bit in which the stadium audience at a Rolling Stones concert is told that the Stones can’t make it, so instead they get Count Floyd; the resounding “Booooo” that greets the Count nearly made me piss myself the first time I heard it, and his efforts to curry their favor rocket down the bowl faster than greased diarrhea. When he finally gives up and makes his way from the stage, the announcer tries to ease the general ill will by stating “Count Floyd has left the auditorium!” to which Floyd petulantly exclaims, “And I’m not coming back, either!” as though anyone in the bloodthirsty rabble would give a squirt of rat’s piss. It’s funny as hell, but I honestly think you had to be there for Floyd in the first place to really appreciate it.

Ah, Disco Tex…

Back in the days when disco was first erupting onto the scene, the single “Get Dancin’” made it to number ten on the Billboard chart, bolstered by a mindlessly catchy beat, lyrics that could have been written by a five-year-old (and just may have been), and the flaming exhortations of former-hairdresser Monty Rock III (“Disco Tex”) urging the listener to get on the dance floor because “we need you!” No joke, this was the outright gayest thing ever heard in the Top 40 up to that time, a distinction that even the Village People didn’t eclipse because most of the general public didn’t get the gag until the flack over “In the Navy.” Just listening to Disco Tex’s ranting and raving about how we have to get together and “boogie woogie woogie” will wear you out, and possibly inspire an urge to throw on a feather boa and some fierce jewelery.

Ever hear of a notorious porno flick from the early-1980’s called CAFÉ FLESH? Released right around the time when the public became aware of AIDS, the film was a bleak, post-apocalyptic tale set within a nightclub where “sex positives” engaged in all manner of osh-osh for the amusement of the “sex negatives” in the audience. You see, there was some sort of germ warfare disaster that caused around 98% of the world’s populace to be unable to fuck without getting violently ill, so those who remained unaffected were pressed into service as entertainment for a world that is slowly dying out. The movie’s as serious as a heart attack and a real downer, made that much more disturbing by its bizarre set pieces, disturbing soundtrack, and joyless hardcore scenes of penetration and ejaculation.

So what does that have to do with the album on display above? “The Key of Cool” is the soundtrack to CAFÉ FLESH, not that you’d ever know that if you hadn’t seen the flick, and even then the only giveaway is the masked visage on the cover, the creepy likeness of one of the masked stage performers. The music is cold, slightly creepy, and yet evocative of a dystopia that’s the flipside of such sexual/hedonistic paradises like you’d see in something like LOGAN’S RUN.

One of the zillions of bizarre one-shots to grace the alternative airwaves in the 1980’s, this oddity is ostensibly a dance floor record, but it eschews the familiar disco and new wave sound to give a breathless audience…a tap dance record about a werewolf who’s so psyched to be a lycanthrope that he just can’t help but to channel his inner Savion Glover. ??? How the fuck does someone even come up with a concept like that? And despite the group’s name there is nary a trace of electric guitar to be found anywhere on this twelve-inch.

This seemingly innocent kid’s record — from Disneyland Records no less — is a beautifully disguised gem that introduced me to the concepts of adultery, subterfuge as self-defense, wholesale misogyny as enforced local policy, Islamic vengeance, and lust built through anticipation. It focuses on the famous story of how Scheherazade kept a bitter, cuckolded sultan from serially marrying, fucking and killing the young women of Baghdad by telling him serialized fantastic tales for one-thousand and one nights, during which time he grows to love her for her fascinating yarns (to say nothing of her drop-dead beauty), all of which, though cleaned up for a younger audience, is presented in a completely straightforward manner that does not talk down to the kiddies and accents the proceedings with excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s beautifully evocate Scheherazade suite. And as for Scheherazade herself, the actress who gives her voice sounds sexy and exotic as hell! No joke, this has been one of my favorite records for thirty-six years — I got it from my grandmother when I was five — and if given a choice of keeping only ten of the albums out of the 2000-plus I’ve acquired, this would absolutely make the cut.

I’m pretty sure that this was the first album issued by the now-legendary Rhino Records, and what a way to launch a record label! These guys are exactly what they bill themselves as, namely an actual orchestra of kazoos, and while this can at times sound like a beehive gone tuneful after someone dropped a gallon of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill red wine on it, once you get used to the absurdity of hearing familiar tunes rendered entirely by being blasted through plastic-encased wax paper, this stuff is actually pretty good. And the guy who solos during “Whole Lotta Love” sounds completely wiped out by the end of the piece.

Thankfully less prevalent now than in decades past, the music album by a hot television star was once an obligatory fixture on the pop culture landscape. Such unlikely would-be crooners included Jack Webb, Leonard Nimoy (perpetrator of the supremely ridiculous “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”), William Shatner (whose must-have “Transformed Man” LP is an unintentionally hilarious meeting of pretentious, overwrought acting, questionable material and lysergic primal scream histrionics), Scott Baio, Ed “Kookie” Byrnes, and countless others, most of whom had absolutely no business stepping in front of a microphone. Lynda Carter, the righteous piece of ass who brought Wonder Woman to life in the mid-1970’s — consequently causing the sales of Jurgen’s hand lotion and economy-size boxes of tissues to skyrocket — cut an inevitable album as her star was on the rise, and it’s basically a mediocre sampling of seventies chick rock/folk. The only reason I ever picked it up was for the stunning photo of Lynda on the back cover; why the fuck was this surefire boner-generator not positioned more prominently on the nation’s record shelves, to say nothing of having it made into a poster?

I mean, just look at her! JESUS H. CHRIST!!!

Just what the world needs: a Turkish Elvis impersonator. Totally unnecessary, this is as painful as watching your cousin Eustace pretend to be the King at your family’s annual clambake/white lightnin’ tasting.

If there was one thing that I really fucking hated as a child, it was any form of children's entertainment that treated kids like we were idiots, and no genre was more guilty of such treatment than that of "kiddie" records. Mostly consisting of nauseating songs and cloyingly-told stories, children's records were a real insult to my intelligence so when I got my hands on one that didn't talk down to me I treasured it like it was rarer than tits on a fish. This album is part of that rarified group and is an utter joy for us "monster kids;" the album consists of two stories — or more accurately performances — , one of which unveils antique recordings of Frankenstein's monster angrily ruminating on his creator and his miserable existence, while the other predates Anne Rice's INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE by over a decade with a terrific segment depicting Count Dracula addressing a curiosity seeker who has tracked him down. Both pieces are utterly compelling, especially if you were raised on the films in Universal Pictures' classic horror cycle, and if you really look for it this is available on CD.

The title says it all.

No way would the estate of the King allow this compilation to be released legally since it contains literally the worst shit Elvis ever recorded, most of which is culled from his "films." A goldmine of unmitigated crap, this is a real endurance test, even for the most diehard of Elvis-heads and includes such cringe-worthy horrors as "Song of the Shrimp," "Dominic the Impotent Bull," "There's No Room to Rhumba In A Sports Car," the virtually-unlistenable "Confidence," "Signs of the Zodiac," "Queenie Wahine's Papaya," and — I shit you not — "Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce." We also get treated to a couple of live tracks that present a very wasted Elvis butchering a couple of his classics, but the album earns its hefty collector's price for the incredible rendition of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm," in which Elvis sings the Old MacDonald part and makes it clear that if the animals of his farm ever get out of line he will merrily eat each and every one of them.

And just when you thought this album was as over-the-top as it could possibly get, the distributors — listed as both "RCA Victim Records" and "Rip-Off Corporation of America" — included a xeroxed copy of one of Dr. Nick's prescription sheets, a horrifying artifact that makes one wonder just how Elvis survived as long as he did.

Yip Yip Coyote first came to my attention by being featured on the soundtrack to BACHELOR PARTY, and the tune included there, "Dream of the West," came from out of nowhere to become one of my favorite recordings.

A project of Malcom McClaren, the mastermmind — some would say Svengali — behind the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, Yip Yip Coyote is solid proof that McClaren's tack of throwing anything against the pop music wall to see what sticks was not necessarily a sound business strategy; where the Sex Pistols succeeded on genuine social outrage and Bow Wow Wow offered a then-unique multicultural stew of rock and African Burundi rhythms, Yip Yip Coyote was a conceptual clusterfuck that attempted to gene-splice cowboy themes with overproduced dance music, and with the exceptions of "Dream of the West," "Cry Like the Wind," and the charming "Pioneer Girl," the album yields little worth listening to, and the British-accented vocals just do not work in conjunction with its shitkicker aesthetic.

You've just gotta love that band name, and the single includes the non-hit "I Wish I Was Gay So You Would Hate Me."

Considering it's ludicrous title and seemingly questionable concept, if ever there was an album that had no right to be as good as it is, this is it. Joe Quijano's approach here is absolutely serious — much to my initial disappointment — and the Latin-style instrumental covers of the musical's deathless tunes are truly excellent.

The one truly funny thing on the otherwise laugh-free HAPPY DAYS spinoff LAVERNE & SHIRLEY was the pair of Lenny and Squiggy, a couple of would-be Lotharios who were just about the biggest losers/idiots you've ever seen, and their popularity spawned a pretty amusing live show. The live show was captured on this album, featuring Squiggy (David Lander) on the "Squigg-o-phone" (a couple of coffee cans soldered together to create a crude didgeridoo/percussion instrument-on-steroids) and Lenny (Michael McKean) on guitar. A former member of the humorous rock group the Credibility Gap — who recorded the awesome "Foreign Novelty Smash" — McKean later went on to be David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, but the real point of interest on this album is the presence of Christopher Guest, not only credited as such, but also playing in character as Tap's legendary axe-hero, Nigel "It goes to eleven" Tufnel (see below).

After the well-deserved critical and commercial success of the incredible heavy metal "mockumentary" THIS IS SPINAL TAP, the creators released the must-have soundtrack LP, but how many of you out there got your hands on Tap's Christmas single, "Christmas With the Devil?"

To the best of my knowledge it has not been rereleased, and that's really no great loss because it totally sucks ass. The title track is just lazy and feeble, and the B-side is an allegedly funny "scratch" mix. To borrow a two word review from the movie, it's a real "shit sandwich."

This album may just be the oddest on display here in the Dungeon; I found it for a dollar in a cutout bin and just had to have it. I mean, how often do you find an album of sounds and music for your at-home S & M sessions fronted by a crazed uber-queen, on the Hot Waffle label no less?

Side A features eerie background music that drones on for about twenty minutes, and side B repeats the same track, only with the added bonus of the occasional whip-crack sound effect and some poor bastard screaming, "Yaaaah!" by way of emphasis.