the Martian Entropy Band

I have been working with the recording a little bit, especially Warp Factor 217, which I think is really stupendous, and amazing musicianship on everyone's part, all the way down the line.

 Bill hasn't been mentioned much YET in this blog, but I just wanted to say that I've been listening to him and I just LOVE his drumming on this recording. I have applied a multiband compressor and parametric EQs to the tape and it really brings out Billy drums, because it pumps up the quiet parts in between the loud parts. So the drums really start to come alive. And man, Billy was right on top of it. I simply love his rhythmic vocabulary.

nuff said fer now

-Hugh

 Yeah - Billy was one awesome drummer - highly energetic and extremely solid, with a rare technical proficiency.

 Billy's nickname was "the Blimp", but it wasn't because he was overweight (you can see  in the pictures, he was as thin as any of us, which was ... pretty doggone thin).  Billy was totally into Captain Beefheart's music, and one of the Captain's craziest tunes, a favorite of mine, too, was titled "The Blimp."  I think it was on the album "Trout Mask Replica", and Billy was just enthralled with "The Blimp", and quoted it or said things that sounded like it frequently.  Thus, he acquired the nickname to match.  It was all crazy fun, and big fun to boot.

More later ... I will be jamming with Billy and his excellent bass player friend (Ben Piner) again tomorrow night and will again urge Billy to get on-line ,and get in here and contribute!

 Yesterday my oldest daughter (24) was over to visit me along with her son (my first grandkid) little Sebastian, usually known by his nickname "Sea Bass".  She said that she told her mother, Sue, my first wife (and girlfriend at least part of the time when the Martian Entropy Band existed), about this website, and Sue said she had a bunch of stories to contribute.  I will see if I can get her to either enter them herself or write them down so I can enter them for her.  This site just gets better and better!

Party on, all Martians! 

Keep on jamming! 

I totally remember Sue! Hi Sue, come on in the water's fine! yup Bill Gracie was called "the blimp" because he had basically "become" the Trout Mask Replica album by then... LOL! When I first met him, his almost every response to anything was, "it's the blimp, Frank!" It was quite positive, really. So, he became know as the Blimp. I'm going to attempt to embed a youtube video with that song, here:

 <attempt>

it doesn't work, but you can view the video/listen to the song here, it has the whole song, with Frank Zappa in the control room, producing the album for Don Van Vliet.

</attempt>

There were several other phrases from that album that Billy used frequently, most notably: "A Squid Eating Dough in a Polyethylene bag, is Fast and Bulbous". The phrase 'fast and bulbous' was also used by Frank Zappa in a booklet that came with the Uncle Meat album, it said "Zorch Stroking Fast and Bulbous" and had a picture of I think a zebra's hind end being, err... zorch stroked I guess by the disembodied foot of a mannequin. Cal Schenkel at his finest! I can hear Mike saying in a deadpan voice, "sick"... and of course he'd be right :)

Mike had a long haired black cat named Grymalkin, who was cute but liked to sit on everybody's lap all the time so one day we started calling her "Bulbous", and it stuck. And thenceafter she was known as Bulbous throughout the house of madness.

Ultimately the phrase mutated or evolved (or degenerated) into a totally original phrase, which was "Get Down, Boogie Around, Like a Squid", which was accepted as a part of regular vocabulary by just about everyone in our circle of folks before it was over. It was just something that we said, you know, when you passed someone in the hall, or when you answered the telephone, or whatever. But of course, it was Billy's phrase.

In fact, I think it is in order for a song to be written, with that as the title and main premise. I'll be working on it...

Billie had a deer's hoof, which he'd had mounted on the radio antennae of his convertible mustang (if memory serves). The hoof, he referred to as the "Zomby Hoof" in homage to Frank Zappa's "Zomby Woof". If I recall correctly, that car had a slight run-in with a telephone pole... There, by the Grace of God goes Gracie LOL

oh yeah, hearing the song again reminds me, we did a radio show on the University of Michigan radio station, anyone remember the call letters? (I understand Wayne has the reel-to-reel and may grace us with another round of fine workmanship in digitising it ! nudge nudge, wink wink)... at any rate, I vividly recall on that tape, Bill Gracie was in the studio with us (not Doggie Boone, yes?) and when Bill was asked to say a few words for the fine folks at home, he quoted Captain Beefheart's line, "put me in the thadrack shadrack, I see you floating down the gutter, I'll buy you a bottle of wine!" ROTFLMAO!!!! It kind of left the interviewer speechless, as I recall. what a guy. I'll tell you, he was always several steps ahead of everybody.

I'm so glad you reminded me of the "zombie hoof".   When billy wiped it out into that tree up on the hill on Earhart road, the hoof left the antenna and flew into the woods.  We never thought it would be seen again, but I somehow think I remember that Billy went back, possibly a few weeks later, and ACTUALLY FOUND IT!  What happened to it after that, I don't remember, but I'll ask Billy soon (I may be jamming with him tonight).

That zombie hoof just cracked me up to no end.  What crazy-fun silliness ...

The squid references became all the more poignant after Billy and his lifelong friend, Bobby McGee (sp? - now deceased) took their girlfriends (and who else?) to the Jersey or Virginia shore, and went fishing with squid for bait.  Somehow Bobby left the bait on the dock that afternoon, and when they came back the next day it was really revolting, so bad that nobody wanted to go onto the dock at all, as I remember.  "Put a lid on that squid!" somebody shouted at Bobby, and the phrase became part of their, and the band's, lexicon thereafter.  It was often used in reference to stopping or shutting up anything distasteful.  We were crazy nutz back then ... no doubt about it, but we sure had fun.

thanks for commenting Tim... would be interested to know what happened to Bobby McGee... not only did I know him through Billie but Bobby's mother (and local artist Molly Eldersveld) was my mother's best friend at the time.

I do recall the "put a lid on that squid" phrase also!

 another fine point in this is that the Get Down, Boogie around like a squid phrase was often done as a two-part call and response item:

person #1: Get Down!

person #2: Boogie Around!

both: Like a Squid!

this is called living your art, folks, and we did.

BTW. I mentioned this entry to Billy when I jammed with him last Monday night, and he laughed loudly.  He did say that he was dropping Bobby McGhee off somewhere that night, and going 70+  when he came to the place where Earhart Road changes from 4 lanes to 2 lanes ... and he was in the wrong lane.  Earhart was paved by that time, I believe, but narrow, with thick woods on both sides of the road.  Billy said the car was totally wrecked, with the steering wheel extending over his head and into the back seat when the accident was over.  He said he crawled out of the car and was spotted by some passers by a few minutes later, who knew him and picked him up.  He also said that, unfortunately, he never did find the "Zombie Hoof", but sure misses it now.  He also laughed at the suggestion that he had come to resemble the Trout Mask Replica, and reminded me of all the times we went carp fishing back in those days. 

Now I am experiencing a powerful yearning to listen to Trout Mask Replica again.  Readers - if you haven't heard it, you owe it to yourself to experience this amazing and poignant piece of early '70's culture.