THE SOUTHERN PIGFISH ALBUM...

How’s this for a Southern Pigfish album? Not in order, of course:

For Their Own Ends (folk-rock)
Vampire Roumanian Babies (fast country, almost ragtime)
The Strange Saga of Quoth, the Parrot (talking blues)
Love Trails of the Zombie Snails (folk-rock)
Born Again Barbie (Everly Brothers-style rockabilly)
The Dead Sweethearts Polka (polka, of course)
In the Shadows, I’ll be Watching You (mod. slow two-step)
Dirty Deeds We Done to Sheep (Johnny Cash-style rock ‘n’ roll)
Naked Space Hamsters in Love (fast bluegrass)
Test Tube Baby (fast Elvis-style rock ‘n’ roll)
Bedpans for Brains (country rock)

That gives us aliens, vampires, zombies (well, zombie snails), and sheep, and we get to discuss religion, politics, serial killers, stalkers, bestiality, the economy, and sex in the laboratory, among other things. Who says music isn’t educational?

Yes, “Shadows” is a two-step, and “Hamsters” is bluegrass, and Southern Pigfish is your classic folk-rock band, but I’m not sure it matters much. Screamin’ Gulch, the punk-rock band I played with in Medford, used to do “Naked Space Hamsters in Love” as a regular part of our repertoire, and it sounded just fine as punk-rock. “Genre” is the bin the music store is going to put your records in after you die. It may not mean much before then. What all the above songs have in common is they’re more than a little outrageous. A lot of them have a political cast as well, which is supposed to be one of Southern Pigfish’s trademarks.

And they are all supposed to be videos as well. (I wanted to be real experimental with this thing, and release the album on a flash drive rather than CD.) “Bedpans” will be the hardest one to film, because I need a cast of five singers (actually, lip-synchers) besides myself—two girls and three guys, all dressed up as characters from The Wizard of Oz—and I’m not sure where I’m going to get them. (I have a couple of ideas, though.) “Born Again Barbie” I scripted out a couple of years ago, with a cast of (what else?) Barbies, of which there are rather a lot out in the garage. I figured out how to film the whole thing with my digital camera; what I need—that I have located, but haven’t been willing to spend money on—are props: Barbie-sized guitars, and such.

“Quoth” can be filmed Porter Wagoner style, as noted in an earlier blog. “The Dead Sweethearts Polka” could be done much the same way, only using a riverfront scene instead of a beach (and I think I know the perfect location)—and for variety, I’d like to include footage at least of the accordion player. And “For Their Own Ends” pretty much has to be a live performance. Every video needs to be different, just like every song needs to be different. One does not want to be predictable.

Our postmistress had kittens (actually, her cat did), and I’ve arranged to have one of them star in the music video of “The Dog’s Song” when he gets a little older. I need about five minutes’ total footage of the kitten doing Hyperactive Kitten Things, and I have been told there is no doubt this kitten will be able to deliver. That’ll be a few weeks from now, and will give me time to practice with the movie camera before I have to do the work.

Joe