As part of my ongoing campaign to drive away every regular reader of this blog forever, I've recorded yet another version of Alice Cooper's Ballad of Dwight Frye, a song that has fascinated me since childhood. This one uses a live performance effect on the rhythm and vocals track and something called "British Invasion" on the lead. I get lost for awhile and just go with it. As a result, it's more than eight minutes long. This is how I amuse myself. It beats the shit out of bad tv. Alice fans will appreciate the clip below of The Man, in top form back in the 70s.
The music obsession has progressed. I rerecorded the Ballad of Dwight Frye today, figuring I could do a hell of lot better than last time. Back then, I recorded the guitar first and then did the vocals as a second track. This time, I proved I can both walk and chew gum by doing it all at once. Total time saver.
My narcissistic love affair with my new recording equipment continues. This is a 2 AM version of Alice Cooper's 1971 Ballad of Dwight Fry. I played this song for a friend a week or two ago, and her reaction was, "I didn't know Alice Cooper wrote good songs." Yes. Alice Cooper crafted smart, quirky pop gems, and to the twelve or thirteen year-old young Tim Harris, this song was deeply meaningful. I'm not exactly sure why. I identified with it. I still do. The song is off the uniformly brilliant Love It To Death album, best known for his breakthrough hit, "I'm Eighteen." Last year I posted an amazing version of Alice's Is It My Body, also from that record, which remains one of my favorite YouTube music videos of all time.
Dwight Frye (1899-1943) was an early horror movie actor, "The Man with the Thousand-Watt Stare," who specialized in playing the mentally imbalanced. The song is written around a character he may have played. Frye can be seen in his full glory below in his 1933 The Vampire Bat.
What the hell good is rock & roll if it doesn't freak your parents out at least a little? When I was eleven or twelve, no one did it for me quite like Alice.
I remember Christmas of 1972 for one thing only. I'd convinced my mom to put the School's Out album under the tree for me. The sleeve was designed to open up like a school desk, and when I lifted the top, there was a pair of girls' panties stretched around the record. The room went silent. "Give those to your sister," my mother said calmly. I did, and we went on about our holiday morning as if nothing odd had just happened.
The clip below of an MTV-style treatment of Elected from the later Billion Dollar Babies isn't as funny, although it tries harder. It does, however, with its prescient chimpanzee and cash-filled wheelbarrow imagery, remind me of a certain President to come later.
“Being is becoming,” and if we’re not “becoming,” we’re probably not doing much “being” either. This blog was started in a half-assed attempt at self-excavation. I have at least two unusual personality traits. The first is that I’m abnormally comfortable with ambiguity. I can happily muck about in the gray areas for years on end. This is probably why I love Seattle. The other is that I have a completely unrealistic belief in my own agency, which I tend to act upon. This blog has changed my life in more ways than I ever imagined. As my job as ED of a activist newspaper sold by homeless people, my vision for organizing, my thinking as a teacher, my history as a working-poor loser turned middle-class “advocate,” and my life as a parent swirled about me, this blog has been a path toward the center. We live in dangerous times, and the seductions to an easy, half-lived life of anesthetized materialism are all around. I have come to understand that my work is to be a revolutionary, both out in the world and within myself, turning over what is old, rotten, stale, and repressive, and building for a future where we can all find happiness and have the things we truly need.
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