Category: Music Bob

I was wondering if Butthole Surfers classics like “Hairway to Steven” and “Locust Abortion Technician” were available somewhere on the Internet. I’d lost my copies long ago when I abandoned my cassette deck. So I started Googling around and quickly found the official site of Gibby and the boys. It has the perfect proportions of creepy, bizarre and off-the-wall to reflect the Butthole Surfers experience. And even better, it has free MP3s of several classic bootlegs.

I highly recommend the bone-crunchingly psychedelic Double Live, recorded sometime around 1988. And while you’re at it, download a copy of the bootleg Tejass for a taste of their mid-’90s incarnation.

Boy howdy. They don’t make music like that no more …

Via BoingBoing, here’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in a while: A Finnish new wave band and the Red Army Chorus belt out a pretty bodacious version of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Go comrade, go.

Not sure why, but I’ve had the riff from UFOs “Rock Bottom” ricocheting around in my head for the past several days. Yesterday, I finally broke down and downloaded “Strangers in the Night” from iTunes. It’s truly one of the great live albums of the ’70s, and it’s largely forgotten. Michael Schenker’s guitar work is amazing. The dude was a whack job, but he could shred. And he had a sense of melody that many speed demons lack.

I’ve been listening to the album nonstop almost since I downloaded it, bringing back memories of Pittsburgh teen angst, Iron City beer and the parking lot of a dilapidated skating rink where we spent way too many nights blasting UFO from a boom box, taking particular pride in the fact that we were sitting in a former stone quarry that used to be called Rock Bottom.