Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch” series, “Spooktober Edition” where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music from the 60’s to today. Weekdays At Noon EST. Enjoy the trip!

As the spookiest night of the year descends on us, and given that we’re way too old to be out trick or treating, Heres a Halloween themed rock song for you to indulge instead.

Whilst Halloween is traditionally a big deal in the USA, we’ve seen it building up in Australia over the last few years with fancy dress parties, kids out collecting candy door to door, and lots of houses covered in cobwebs. All just a bit of fun believed to be an extension of the pagan tradition of celebrating the dead.

Werewolves Of London – Warren Zevon

Probably Warren Zevon’s best-known song, co-written with guitarist Waddy Wachtel and recorded with Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.

According to legend, a Werewolf is a man who turns into a wolf when there is a full moon. The only way to kill one is to shoot it through the heart with a silver bullet.

This was featured in the 1986 movie The Color Of Money in a scene where Tom Cruise and his perfect hair run the table at a pool hall. Robbie Robertson from The Band put together the soundtrack, which also includes the Eric Clapton song “It’s In The Way That You Use It,” written specifically for the film.

The lyrics tell the story of “a hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent.” He’s well-dressed (“I’d like to meet his tailor”), well-groomed (“His hair was perfect”), and “preying on little old ladies.”

October 31, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch” series Spooktober Edition where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music from the 60’s to today. Enjoy the trip!

Creepy Green Light” is a song by Type O Negative, included on the fifth album World Coming Down, released in September 13th 1999. This song was formerly titled “Spooky Green Light” before it was renamed while the album was in production.

It is track #8 in the album World Coming Down.

Creepy Green Light has a BPM/tempo of 130, is in the key C Major and has a duration of 06:56. Below is a table of the meta data for Creepy Green Light.

This song is split into three cantos—the first and third cantos are titled “Creepy Green Light”, and the one in the middle is titled “Frightening Black Night”. The middle is instrumental featuring an organ followed by doom metal riff over it, so all the lyrics are sung during the first and third cantos.

October 28, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Clutch, “Drink to the Dead” (Pure Rock Fury, 2001)

Here’s a hot take for you: Clutch are an underrated band. It’s hot because Clutch is an extremely popular band; their career spans fourteen full-length releases and a plethora of EPs, rarities, collections, and so on. They also jam-pack every single show they played in the Before Times and are widely celebrated online. And yet, Clutch has garnered for itself a name of a fun, raucous band, with the adjective “dad rock” being thrown around (a fact that vocalist Neil Fallon has recently, and hilariously, owned). To be sure, they are those facts and then some: Clutch’s music is some of the grooviest and most irreverent stuff out there and has been for literally more than two decades at this point. But alongside, Clutch are also known for having great lyrics, ranging from everything between religion, economics, politics, ecology, mythological creatures, literary references, legends, Americana and much more.

At the end of the day, Halloween is a day when we frolic to honor the dearly departed. No band gets at the holiday’s pagan roots like Clutch, whose 2001 album-closer “Drink to the Dead” understands the shadowy wooden heart of this feast of fools. The track’s tipsy swaying and exciting-yet-melancholy lyrics sum up the reason for the season, that much-needed revelry people need as the fall sends a deathly chill down their spines. If you’re going to make it through the demise of all things, why not do it dressed up as asses, drunk to the nines?

October 27, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Lunch” series, “Spooktober Edition” where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music from the 60’s to today. Weekdays At Noon EST. Enjoy the trip!

Concrete Blonde, ‘Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)’

With Johnette Napolitano on vocals and bass and former Sparks bassist James Mankey on guitar, plus a succession of drummers, Concrete Blonde cooked up a sweetly sulfurous blend of goth, punk, and alternative rock, shot through with Napolitano’s knack for indelible hooks.

Concrete Blonde’s 1990 track “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” revels in its vamp glamour, slinking along with a sexy groove and slashing horror-movie guitars as frontwoman Johnette Napolitano sings entirely unambiguous lyrics about New Orleans blood suckers straight out of an Anne Rice novel.

October 25, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Celtic Frost, “Into The Crypts Of Rays”

“Into The Crypts of Rays” is the first track on Swiss metal band Celtic Frost’s landmark first album Morbid Tales 1984. The songs based in a true story. As such, it introduced the world to Celtic Frost.

This song is about Gilles de Rais, who was the Marshall of France during the Hundred Years War, and companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc. Yes, that Joan of Arc. Gilles de Rais was also a famous serial murderer of children! He was tried and found guilty, and sentenced to burn at the stake. So Martin Ain read about him and made him the subject for a song.

Also in Precious Metal, Tom Warrior mentions that the story of Gilles de Rais appealed to him when Ain showed it to him because of its “irony and sarcasm.” And in the same paragraph, here’s a peek into research work back in 1984: “Researching things like that back then was a huge undertaking, because it was pre-Internet. You really had to be a fanatic to get into all that stuff; you had to raid libraries and go to secondhand bookstores to find it. You couldn’t go to Wikipedia or something like that.” Now, did you young whippersnappers get all that?

Celtic Frost was originally born out of the ashes of the group Hellhammer. Tom Warrior and Martin Ain, both doing vocals and guitars, were in Hellhammer when it disbanded, and began Celtic Frost along with session drummer Stephen Priestly. To this day, Priestly is a little chapped about being credited on the album as “session drummer,” when by the time they got to recording he was playing a larger role.

October 24, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Sufjan Stevens – John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (2005)

Gory tales of serial killers are some of the most frightening subject matter. They will haunt people for decades because they are not only horrific, they are true. More terrifying than most works of fiction. Grisly stories about the grim side of human existence are actually kinda fascinating, so it’s no surprise some of our favourite bands have taken inspiration from the world’s most notorious murderers.

John Wayne Gacy dubbed the “killer clown” was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy regularly performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, personas he had devised.

It’s easy to focus on serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s part-time job as a clown, casting him as the real-life Pennywise. But on his 2005 album Illinois, singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens approaches the murderer with haunting grace. Instead of focusing on the killer’s horrific circus antics, he looks at the dulcet, human side of this broken soul and his terrible deed. The track is all the more frightening because it can make the listener cry, and reminds them that for all the cult of personality that surrounds them, serial killers are – God help us – people.

October 21, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

NINE INCH NAILS – PIGGY

(The Downward Spiral, 1994)

Nine Inch Nails’ magnum opus, The Downward spiral, is a bleak, visceral and harrowing concept album that explores some of the darkest points of human experience. Holding no punches, it is an industrial, nail-biting, jaw dropping, nut-crunching exploration into humankind’s eternal conflicts. The psychological duality of helplessness and defiance; vulnerability and bitterness; misery and rage. In all senses it is a cathartic explosion that rallies against the American mainstream, the superficiality of modern consumerism and the crippling isolation of the culturally disenfranchised.

Despite appearing on The Downward Spiral, an album chronicling the destruction of man, Piggy isn’t necessarily evil in and of itself. It’s the context in which the song was created that makes it truly unsettling.

In 1992, Trent Reznor scrapped his original plan to record the follow-up to Nine Inch Nails’ debut Pretty Hate Machine in New Orleans, decamping instead to 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon. It was here in 1969 that actress Sharon Tate (the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski) and four others were brutally murdered by the Charles Manson ‘family’. Although Trent suggests he only discovered the address’ grisly history after he’d decided to record there – claiming it was chosen for the suitability of the space – he subsequently read up on the incident, suggesting ‘The Tate House’ “didn’t feel terrifying as much as sad.” Despite the sense of melancholy, Trent would use it to record 1992’s Broken EP, The Downward Spiral and Marilyn Manson’s debut album, Portrait Of An American Family, which Trent produced.

The song’s title has been the subject of speculation. Former live guitarist Richard Patrick, who would later form the band Filter, has suggested he was once given the nickname ‘Piggy’, while The Beatles’ song Piggies was said to have had considerable influence on Charles Manson. Despite Trent redubbing the address ‘Le Pig’, a reference to the word that was written in blood on the front door by the murderers – and The Downward Spiral also featuring a song called March Of The Pigs – Trent denies either was directly related to what had taken place at the site of their makeshift studio.

In a sobering postscript, Trent ended up meeting Sharon Tate’s sister. She asked him about whether he thought he was exploiting her sister’s death – an encounter Trent admits caused him to breakdown, having suddenly seen things from her perspective.

October 20, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

“Spirits in the Night” by Bruce Springsteen

This song tells about ghosts who haunt people during the night. The ghosts are spirits of those who were wronged and unable to rest due to their murderer still being alive. It’s very rare for a song about this topic to become popular.

Greasy Lake is a lake near Howel NJ. It gets its name from the idea that homeless people living around the lake used it for bathing, washing dishes, etc. The homeless people were known as “Gypsy Angels” or the “Spirits In The Night.”

Part of Springsteen’s first album, it was a #40 US hit for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band when they covered it in 1977.

Springsteen wrote this after Columbia Records rejected his first attempt at an album, telling him to make some songs that could be played on the radio. He came up with this and “Blinded By The Light.”

October 19, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

The Nomads “Where the Wolf Bane Blooms”

This one has all the hallmarks of the genre, from the loud-ass drums to the swirling organ in the background. The guitar solo that starts howling at 1:02 is an appropriately lupine touch.

But it’s the lyrics here that really stand out, all about “the pale light of the moon” and “ancient voices” capped off with a reworking of The Wolf Man’s famous poem about lycanthropy to suit the tune, “you may be pure of heart, and pure of soul, but you’ll become a wolf when the moon is full.”

October 18, 2022 0

Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch” series, Spooktober Edition where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music from the 60’s to today. Weekdays At Noon EST. Enjoy the trip!

Tim Curry “Sweet Transvestite”

“Sweet Transvestite” is a song from the 1973 British musical stage production The Rocky Horror Show and its 1975 film counterpart The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song is performed by the character, Dr Frank N. Furter, originally played by Tim Curry released in 1973.

Regardless of your thoughts on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its attendant subculture, we are certain of one thing: if you don’t like “Sweet Transvestite” you don’t like rock n’ roll. That guitar kicks in at 52 seconds into this clip, and what follows is one of the most perfectly arranged, muscular tunes of its kind, capped off by Tim Curry’s raised eyebrow “zero fucks given” vocal.

October 17, 2022 0

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Concrete Blonde, ‘Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)’

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Sufjan Stevens – John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (2005)

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NINE INCH NAILS – PIGGY

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The Nomads “Where the Wolf Bane Blooms”

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Tim Curry “Sweet Transvestite”

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