Viv Kitson wrote:
> Dom - Maybe I should remove the Miles Davis CD and put on an old Ramones LP
> I have somewhere. ("Blitzkrieg Bop", yeah!). Or Neil Young and Crazy Horse,
> Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes - also on LP somewhere. The other alternative
> is to drag out the Fugs CD sent to me by Candice Ward. Haven't listened to
> that for over a year and, when I first got it from Candice, it was something
> like 30 years since I had last heard the Fugs. Well worth a return "listen"
> isn't it, Candice!?
Sure is, Viv--Matthew Arnold never sounded so cheap, and it doesn't hurt to
be reminded every third decade that "you can't outdrink the Angel of Death."
You know who else had some powerful cheap songs? Those mysterious
heteronymous-pseudonymous Travelling Wilburys. Lyrics like "She's My Baby"--
She sits down on the sofa
pours herself a drink
says honey honey honey
ain't got no time to think
--to die for!
You were probably a big fan of "Boo Wilbury" in particular, but it was
always ol' "Muddy" for me. And how about these classic liner notes for their
second album written by Professor "Tiny" Hampton of the Intelligent Life
Amongst Rock Journalism department at the University of Please Yourself,
California?
The etymological origins of The Travelling Wilburys have aroused something
of a controversy amongst academic circles. Did they, as Professor "Bobby"
Sinfield believes, originate from the various Wilbury Fairs which travelled
Europe in Medieval times, titillating the populace with contemporary
ballads, or were they rather derived from "YE TRAVELLING WILLBURYS," who
were popular locksmiths during the Crusades, used to picking or unlocking
jammed chastity belts (rather like today's emergency plumbers)? Dr. Arthur
Noseputty of Cambridge believes they were closely related to the Strangling
Dingleberries, which is not a Group but a disease, an unpleasant form of
crotch-rot, arguing that a "WILLBERRY" is often used as an expression for a
piece of crud found in the crevice of an ancient pair of y-fronts; but I
think this can be discounted, not only because of his silly name but also
from his habit of impersonating Ethel Merman during lectures. Some have even
gone on to suggest tenuous links with The Pillsburys, the group who invented
Flour Power.
Dim Sun, a Chinese academic, argues that they may be related to "THE
STROLLING TILBURYS," Queen Elizabeth the First's favourite minstrels, and
backs this suspicion with the observation that The Travelling Wilburys is an
obvious anagram of "V. BURYING WILL'S THEATRE," clearly a reference to the
closing of Shakespeare's Globe theatre by Villiers during an outbreak of
plague. This would account for the constant travelling. Indeed, many victims
of plague and St. Vitus' dance literally danced themselves to death, and it
is this dancing theme that resurfaces with The Wilbury Twist. Not a cocktail
but a dance craze, reminiscent of The Wilbury Quadrille made famous at Bath
in 1790 by Beau Diddley, and the Wilbury Waltz, which swept Vienna in the
1890's.
One thing, however, remains certain. The circumambulatory peregrinations of
these itinerant mundivagrant peripatetic nomads has already disgorged one
collection of popular lyrical cantata, which happily encapsulated their
dithyrambic antiphonic contrapuntal threnodies as a satisfactory auricular
experience for the hedonistic gratification of the hoi-polloi on a popular
epigraphically inscribed gramophonic recording. Now here's another one.
Cheers,
Candice
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