I got a very Beastie Boys/Ramones/Dead Kennedys vibe off the first track, a punky number wherein vocalist Richard “Handsome Dick” Manitoba screams out the he is “the next big thing” but midway through declares that “Sorry baby, I just can’t get it on anymore”. This is followed by a guitar solo that utterly fails to match the time signature of the track but still totally works.
There’s a certain phallic symbolism to the guitar, especially in rock. Zappa once said something along the lines of “A saxophone can sound sleazy, but to sound *really* dirty you need an electric guitar”. But equally, this can be parodied. The hurried solo here, Steve Hackett’s limping and fuzzy solo in Genesis’ Counting Out Time – if the rock guitar solo symbolises male sexual prowess, it can equally demonstrate sexual gaucheness, embarrassing awkwardness and failure, and I love the parody of the boastful rock-god in this track.
This is followed by a shouted version of the Sonny and Cher song I Got You Babe, and we know roughly where we’re headed with this album. There’s a Zappa-esque quality to some of the lyrics; the rocker Master Race Rock, for example, claims that
“We're the members of the master race
Got no style, and we got no grace
Sleep all night, sleep all day
Nothing good on TV anyway”
And hopefully anyone with any brains can see that this isn’t as serious treatise on racial supremacy.
Moving on to Side Two, and the tracks are more like punk parodies of classic rock and roll or surf rock, with Beach Boys style backing vocals on (I Live For) Cars And Girls, or the surf rock cover California Sun.
It’s all great raucous and iconoclastic fun, perhaps, like Zappa, a little too knowingly parodic at times, and I think the novelty would wear off after a while (it did, a bit, for me as the album went on). Listening to it from fifty years in the future there’s nothing particularly unusual about the music, but going from contemporary reviews it was very confusing to some reviewers at the time, who really didn’t know what to make of it. What, had they not heard The Sonics or The Flamin’ Groovies?
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