Estus W. Pirkle – If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

MPLP – 2368 1968

The crown jewel of crazy spoken word Christian albums.

Why? I’ve got several dozens of records like this. So many, in fact, that they’ve grown to have their own section of my collection. I’m just about ready to split that section into a section of what’s going to happen when the communists take over records.

Why is this one so special? Never mind that it’s currently going for a pretty penny on record auction sites. It’s the reason it is that makes it so special. It’s not only record that spawned the equally batshit crazy Ron Ormand film of the same name (go Google it. We’ll wait.).  It’s also the record from which Negativland sampled from to create the classic track from their best-selling LP Escape From Noise, Christianity Is Stupid, immortalizing Rev. Pirkle forever. In it, Pirkle can be heard entoning ‘Christianity is stupid! Communism is good! Give up!’ over and over, backed by a martial industrial, metallic beat. It got a lot of airplay on college radio. Maybe it’s the first thing you heard by them. It’s probably the closest the band’s ever had to a hit record until the U2/Casey Kasem debacle. I know I put it on a lot of mix tapes for friends for many years in the 80s.

To be fair, the record itself takes a while to heat up. Pirkle is an energetic speaker. I imagine someone had to take him out with a dart gun to get him to stop a sermon. He just goes on non-stop like a trailer park meth-head. The first half of the LP is concerned with the Book of Jeremiah and attempts to connect modern, backslidden Christians with passages from that part of the bible before getting to what happens when the evil communists take over America. It’s not until side two that things really pick up, with Pirkle telling a lot of John Birch-type horror stories about some of the (possibly conflated) things that communists did to Christians when they took over various countries. It’s pretty unsettling – made all the more hysterical by Pirkle’s chatterbox delivery.
It isn’t until well into the last half of the second side that he gets into the passage so famously sampled in the Negativland track. And it’s easy to see why they – perhaps Don Joyce – found it so humorous and ripe for appropriation. Pirkle lists the litany of atrocities in the first person. It doesn’t take much work with a razor blade or audio editor to have him admitting to some pretty horrible war crimes. It’s pretty dang hilarious, actually.

Estus Pirkle put out a few more LPs and lived to around 2005. There’s no telling what he made of today’s radicalized religious climate. No doubt he would’ve been pretty much a fish out of water what with gay rights and today’s attitudes with reproductive rights and society’s total abandonment of scriptural living. I don’t know if he ever ventured into the multimedia world again. He probably lived long enough to see his forays into the film world met with scorn and ridicule (Ron Ormand also filmed his epic sermon The Burning Hell). I once made a half-assed attempt to secure copies of Footmen by writing his still-existing church, inquiring about copies (imagining a basement filled with of boxes of records) – but to no avail.

But now you can have it! Not mine, mind you, but you can now listen to it, in glorious 1968 mono. Some words on the rip. The audio quality is a bit less than stellar. Either the pressing or the master doesn’t sound that great. There’s some audible distortion that’s in the record. It’s not due to the condition – it appears virtually unplayed – but it the grooves have the glassine appearance of a record that’s been cut in such a way as to maximize the play time per side. I’ve tried to rip it in the best way possible but to my ears, it doesn’t sound so great. I don’t think it detracts from its nuttiness, though.

Here it is:
Give up

Boilerplate on rips and the sharing thereof:
As you may have noticed, I’ve been ripping some rare records from my own collection that – as far as I know – no one has posted elsewhere. They’re there for your entertainment. If you would like to host them on your own blog, download them yourself and upload them to the host of your choice – but please respect my hard work and accredit this blog..  I am more than willing to share them that way. If you’d like to host some of these files and reprint my reviews, kindly ask me.

 

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Guess Who’s Here? God!

Strange Christian spoken word LP that’s apparently an activity game of some kind.
Listeners are supposed to follow along with the instructions on the back cover – perhaps mediated by a youth pastor or something – and answer questions or imagine some hypothetical scenarios. The theme is around god being present in life whether we know it or not, watching everything we do.
There’s some pretty funny parts, especially the audio true or false portion (I’ve played this to death on my radio show). Astute Negativland fans will recognize parts of this as having been sampled on 1989’s Helter Stupid album.

Download

Dr. J.D. Carlson – How Can A Man Rise Above The Fear Of Death?

Praise Records, c. 196?

I know. A lot of my rips have been crazy Xtian sermon records lately. It’s just that I have so many of them and so many that I never see anyone post anywhere else.

Sorry.

This one’s really kooky, though. Dr. Carlson has a really silly delivery style, really stilted and with weird annunciation, like maybe he’s really Canadian or something. I especially like how he pronounces evil as EEE-vel.  He rambles from one tangent to the next, attempting some really dumb humor along the way – maybe in an attempt to inject a little levity in a somewhat depressing subject – death.  I’m willing to bet you never heard the words dying, died and death more on one record in your life. 

I can’t find a lot of information on J.D. Carlson or this sermon. I think it’s really ripe for cut-up or audio collage. What do you think?

Dying, Died, Dead.

Ira North – If I Were A Woman – Eden Records

Here’s a rip of a record the cover of which has been making the rounds the past year or so. It is a perennial favorite on all those ‘wacky record covers’ sites, due to the hilarious juxtaposition of the picture and the cluelessly out-of-touch title.

North is a pretty typical Deep South type preacher man, but he can get his captive audience rolling in the aisles with his homey, down-to-earth sense of humor.

The subject matter of this record, however, seems to be the total subordination of women, as per biblical doctrine. It’s pretty infuriating to listen to. Lots of craptacular sound-bites to be had for all you sample-heads.

Ironically enough, I found mine in a Salvation Army for a buck.

Enjoy!

Y: RFK Assassination Record

Odd little piece of Robert F. Kennedy assassination memorabilia that was assembled and produced by Doug Moody of Mystic Studios – who many may recall as the producer of those wonderful and sometimes wretched Mystic punk rock compilations of the mid-80s.

It’s a collection of audio from around the time of RFK’s assassination. It includes interviews with eyewitnesses, from people who came to believe immediately following that tragic event that perhaps there was a conspiracy to take his life, some recollections from people that knew Sirhan Sirhan and also some audio verite from the actual assassination. Each portion of the LP either begins or ends with a key speech by Robert Kennedy – including his chillingly ironic violence in America speech.

Apparently, Doug or perhaps RFK conspiracy theorist filmmaker Theodor Carach tried to sell it to Zappa’s Straight label but it ended up not coming out. I found this quote somewhere but lost my notes from whence it came (probably from one of the more esoteric corners of communities of people who collect Zappa interviews):

“A man came to us with some tapes. He had been making a documentary album about the assassination of Robert Kennedy and he had interviewed all these people and he had put together this really fantastic album. That was when we had the Bizarre label and the deal with Warner Brothers on the bizarre label was we could bring projects to them and they had the right to refuse them and they heard that and that’s why it never came out. They were afraid of it.”

I don’t think the film from where this audio comes from ever came to fruition, so perhaps because of or in spite of that, Moody assembled it into an LP and it eventually came out on Solar Records, but I am unsure of the year. It has a more-or-less functional entry on Discogs. Given that the Warner/Bizarre/Straight deal only lasted from 1969 to 1973, I am guessing it came out somewhere within that (missed) window of opportunity – give or take a year or two. Someone on Collector Frenzy talks about having a copy signed by Ted Carach and dated ’74, so we know it was no later than that. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.

The cover is an interesting illustration made on a typewriter simply using the letter ‘y’. Clever, eh?

Download

 

Repost: Marlin Perkins – The Cat’s Meow

Not the cover. I have no idea what the cover looked like.

A two-sided 7″ 33 1/3 RPM single put out by Norden Labs to promote a feline distemper vaccine, featuring TV’s Marlin Perkins.
Marlin, as you all know, was host of the long-running television program Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from the 60’s and well into the 70’s
Here Marlin waxes scientifically about the existence of the Abominable Snowman and somehow – on side two – manages to relate it to the vaccine Felocine.

Side One:

Side Two:

Download. (updated 5/24/14)

Repost: Crazy Found Record: Don and John Lampien

I Won’t Say I Love You/BW The Sheik of Araby

Low budget looking 7 inch 45 rpm I found in a christian thrift store.
I couldn’t pass it up; it had all the marks of a homemade record or at the very least a vanity recording of the type where some truck driver scraped up enough money to cut a record. Plus, it was from nearby Seaside Oregon, so my curiosity was doubly piqued.

How can I describe these recordings? On the a-side, one of the Lampien brothers (I’m assuming) croons a heartfelt love song while someone does a fair Helen Wiggins of The Shaggs impersonation, barely keeping time and switching the accent from snare to high-hat mid-song.

A-Side: I Won’t Say I Love You

On the flip, we have a swinging country song that incorporates the old standard The Sheik of Araby and while the drumming Lampien manages to keep time well enough this time around (I’m guessing the boys learned how studio playback worked by this point), the song incorporates a Donald Duck-like voice as counterpoint to the singing.

B-Side: The Sheik of Araby

Crazy!

I immediately rushed back to the store and bought every copy they had.

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