Fred's Book Club: Right on the Pea Stain.

Greetings and salutations on this Hump Day, my friends, as we dive into another book in the Humpback Writers feature. Do the writers actually have hunched backs? Not that I'm aware of. We just went with the Humpback theme for Hump Day and now we regret it. Still, if you know of any writers who suffer from kyphosis, or are actual humpback whales, please alert me. 

This week's book celebrates the wonderful inability of people to understand the mumbling and bumbling of modern singers, or just the inability of people to listen properly to anything. Yes, we are discussing mondegreens. Webster's defines the mondegreen as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung," which comes "from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'." And this book will convince you that people are very poor earwitnesses.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics is a fine collection of comically misheard words by author Gavin Edwards, who began collecting them for a piece in the now-defunct Details magazine. The title of our blog entry today comes from a mishearing of Cat Stevens's "Ride on the Peace Train." 

In the introduction to the book, Edwards writes, mondegreens "tend to be about primal concerns: food, sex, animals. Any misheard lyric is an impromptu audio Rorschach test. It can be alarming to discover that significant parts of our brains want pop songs to cover the lyrical topics of cheese, walruses, and clowns." He swears that all the mondegreens in this book are genuine, in that people really reported believing these were the actual lyrics of well-known songs.

Here are some classics from the pages, illustrated by collaborator Chris Kalb, with the correct lyric below:

Others that I'm sure you can guess include "Slow-Motion Walter, fire-engine guy" (Deep Purple), "Mice aroma" (the Knack), "Clown Control to Mao Tse-Tung" (David Bowie), and "Everybody's got a hungry horse" (Bruce Springsteen). 

Gavin Edwards has written many other books, including three more collections of mondegreens: He's Got the Whole World in His Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and the inevitable Christmas collection, Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly. We applaud Edwards for helping popularize the idea of mondegreens, and promoting some classic examples with his writing. It's a true cultural contribution. 

Or, as the band Hot Chocolate once sang, at least according to this book, "I believe in milk and cows." And who can argue with that?

Return of the Spurn.

About a month ago I suggested that my younger dog, Nipper, had gotten to spurning breakfast so often that he could have been part of one of those mid-sixties groups that had maybe one hit -- Nipper and the Spurners! And he has continued to spurn periodically since I posted on the topic.

Well, longtime friend and never-commenter Mr. Philbin demanded a fake history of this fake band. And at Your Daily Dose of Vitamin Fred, we live to oblige.

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The Spurners were formed in 1963 in the proud city of Paterson, following a sound now known in legend as Jerseybeat. Johnny Nipper (born Johann Hinklegosser Maximilian von Ulm) formed the band, originally known as Nipper and the Spurners. "We were too poor to be a garage band," he told MTV's Beat the Music in 1993. "More like a garbage band. We practiced in an abandoned bowling alley, running extension cords to Mrs. O'Reilly's patio. We were formed on the premise that everything was stupid and we were spurning it."

The Spurners became fast favorites of large and grumpy crowds of teenagers throughout the state of New Jersey. They released their own single by pressing the 45s onto old X-ray film from autopsies. The songs, "I Kibble You Not" and "Denial Aisle," got the attention of music promoters in New York, and the band began to get gigs in the big city. At that time the group name was shortened to The Spurners, which fit better on marquees.

Moonbat Records signed the group in 1965, and "Kibble" reached #52 on the charts by December of that year. Their first full album, No, was commercially successful but not a hit. Songs like "Go Away (Stay Away)," "Ain't Too Proud to Shun," and "Rainy Day Spurnin'" did get some radio play.

Other songs included "This Dog Won't Hunt or Anything
Else" and "All You Need Is Shove"

The Spurners might have had a better career, but they turned down many opportunities. They refused to do an Asian tour, saying they'd heard bad things about the food. They chose not to appear on television's American Bandstand when they found out the host was not Dick Bark, as they'd thought. And when a rising young Jerseyite tried to join the group in the late sixties, they told him no, that he was a lousy singer, and Bruce was a funny name.

Still, they managed to keep recording, releasing many more tracks, such as "Put a Little Shun in Your Heart" (1969), "One Nope Over the Line" (1970), "Can Get (and Have Had) Enough of Your Love" (1974), "No No No No No No No No Song" (1975), then, in a change of gears, "Disco Inspurno (Spurn Baby Spurn)" (1976) and "I Just Want to Stop, Period" (1978). Their last song to chart, from the 1981 record Too Much Is More Than Enough, was "Spurnin' for You," which got to #99. After that, the group was tired of the whole business. Charges of plagiarism, which the band refused to answer, had dogged them for years. At last the legal troubles and personal difficulties got to be too much, and after two decades the Spurners began to spurn one another.

At different times, members have toured solo, using the Spurner name. Others, like drummer Hank "Hot" Doggerel, toured on their own into the late 1990s, in his case with the group Juncyard Dawgz, while bassist Fredo Poodelski started a group called the Nix.

But that was about it for the Spurners, who never tried to reunite and never gave interviews after 1993. As rock historian Stiiv Johnson wrote in his memoir, Pop Stars I Have Seen Vomit, "So dedicated were they to the fine arts of spurning, shunning, rejection, and negativity, it's actually amazing that they managed to form a band in the first place, let alone continue for almost twenty years."

Smell like Bruce.

I came upon an interesting bit of disputed trivia, about Bruce Springsteen, the Jersey Shore, 1960s teenage boys, soap, and maybe Star Trek.

As Springsteen fans know, his first real band when he was a short, skinny teenage dork in Freehold, New Jersey, was called the Castiles. Brucebase reports that the band played at least 115 shows, and also made some recordings.

The site also reports that the band was named "after a brand of soap." Peter Ames Carlin, in his book Bruce, said the name of the band was a "tribute to Castile shampoo, the brand local teams seemed to favor".

They're both right and wrong, I think.

Castile is not a brand of soap but a kind of soap; as Webster's tells us, castile soap is not made from animal fat, as many soaps are, but is "a fine hard bland soap made from olive oil and sodium hydroxide" or other vegetable oils, originally associated with Spain's Castile region. Back in the 1960s there was not quite the preponderance of soaps that there is today, and certainly nothing like the vast variety of shampoos. I found precious few trademarks on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site using the name "castile" that dated to that era. So who was making castile soap when the Castiles began playing in 1965?

Kirk's Castile Soap, made with coconut rather than olive oil, has been around since 1839, and is still around today. I suspect this was the soap that the boys in the Freehold area liked, and it would have been perfectly acceptable to use it as a shampoo too. (Pace Carlin, although Kirk's makes a shampoo now, but I would guess that they didn't fifty years ago.)

Bottom line: If I'm right, you can find out what Bruce and his buddies smelled like in 1965 by buying some Kirk's. I got this bar at Walmart.

Is it worth the effort? Well, if you're into non-animal-fat soap, I suppose this is a good option. It's not expensive; it's a nice, soft soap, feels pleasant on the skin, and doesn't seem to be any more drying or less effective at cleaning than your average bar soap. The scent is mild, not perfumey, and not at all coconutty, at least to me, so you don't smell like a big piña colada as you mosey down the boardwalk.

As for the Star Trek thing: I was just imagining if the Castiles had actually used the brand name rather than the type of their favorite soap, and called themselves the Kirks. In 1965 they might have sounded like a religious folk group from Scotland. But in September of 1966, they would have sounded like Star Trek fanatics. And they kept playing until 1968, so the name might have grown uncomfortable.

I guess they could have changed it to the E Street Band or something.

Snow problem.

As we go to press, Washington is getting pounded by a virtually unprecedented avalanche of snow---could total more than two feet when done---leaving the nation stricken with hilarity. No, no, that's not right; the nation is in terror, hoping everyone there is okay, especially the people in charge of its Social Security payments, Medicare payments, Medicaid payments, SNAP payments, farm subsidy payments, etc. etc. etc.... 

As long as I get mine. We're thinking of making that our national slogan.

But we're all concerned that terrorists might attack while Washington is paralyzed by snow. In fact, we know that in the 1990 classic Die Hard 2, the terrorists' plot required Washington, D.C. to completely socked in by snow.

It's like this: When you see the movie, you realize that the carefully devised plot by the evildoers requires Dulles Airport to be in chaos from snowfall with dozens of planes in the air unable to land because of the weather. When the terrorists take over the air traffic control system, they have a bunch of planes circling and low on fuel, unable to head to other airports, a situation that would not occur unless Dulles were unexpectedly snowed in, which never happens.

Is help on the way? Maybe... if it weren't for the impenetrable snowstorm.

There are many technical mistakes in the film that would go over Joe Layman's head, but are detailed by the indispensable site Movie Mistakes. But while detailing the impossible (phony ignition requirements of jet fuel, for example), they ignore the preposterously improbable, like Dulles getting unexpectedly snowed in, which never happens.

Later in the movie, a bunch of bad guys make an escape on snowmobiles, which means they had massive amounts of snow-based equipment in place to carry out their plot---as soon as Dulles was unexpectedly snowed in, W.N.H.

I loved the movie, but the weather issue began to bother me shortly after I saw it, and it bothers me to this day.

Anyway, even if D.C. is buried completely in snow today, no one can say this wasn't expected. So listen, terrorists: Flights are being canceled. The planes are already being rerouted. The airports will be shut down. There's no target. Give it up.

And remember: We still have Bruce Willis.

Even SMOD fears Bruce Willis.

They called him Bruce.

This whole Bruce Jenner thing you may have heard about has gotten me rather sad.

When I was a kid and thought Bruce Wayne (Batman---shh, don't tell) was the coolest guy in the world, it bothered me that simultaneously the name Bruce had become a shorthand joke for an extremely effeminate type of homosexual. Batman is not like that! I wanted to say.

Some theorized that this joke on the name actually came from Batman, as a grown man living with an unrelated teenage boy, but I never bought that explanation. An exploitative adult male would, certainly in those days, not "ponce about" and draw attention to himself that way. He would just wear costumes at night and beat up clowns. Wait, this is getting confusing. (So is the rumor that Bruce Wayne is dead, but I think we can discount that. Famous characters dying in comic books has become the new impoverished country photo op; all the best people have to do it once in a while.)

I remember reading that Bob Kane, when he created Batman, chose the name Bruce Wayne from two very manly men of history: Robert the Bruce, the King of Scots, and Revolutionary War hero Anthony "Mad Anthony" Wayne. Very butch: Robert (whose last name was Bruce, not "the Bruce") beat up the British for Scotch independence. And you don't get a nickname like "Mad Anthony," or a recreation area named for you off the Palisades Parkway, by being a scaredy-cat. Kane meant for Bruce Wayne to be a very tough, virile guy.

And what about some of the other Bruces? Bruce Lee was a legend when I was a kid, even though he died when I was quite young; the playground stories were ferocious, about how he could pull out a man's heart with his bare hand and the guy wouldn't know about it until three hours later, when he was getting into his car and fell over---whoa! no way!

You don't mess with Bruce Lee. Even though he was dead, he could beat you up.

You didn't mess with Bruce Banner, either. Although he was not a manly man, until he got all Hulked up. Interestingly, when they made the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk TV show back in 1978, they changed the character's name to David Banner because of all the flagrancy associated with the name Bruce at the time. At least that's what Stan Lee said.

Bruce Springsteen looked like an all-American manly man in the early '80s, but has turned out to be a typical tax-dodging showbiz jerk, with that great brand of socialism that divas love: income equality for thee... but not for me.

Then there was Bruce Jenner, a magnificent Olympic athlete. Although he always was too much of a California kind of guy to be a macho man. He wasn't the sort of athlete who went on to play Tarzan; he was the sort of athlete who went on to Hollywood Squares. So while he didn't hurt the Bruce cause, he didn't help it much. Now, of course, he's wounded it, perhaps fatally.

Maybe it was hopeless anyway. Some of the most famous names from comic books have become pretty rare in the real world, possibly because of the connection to the characters. Bruce, Clark, Reed, and Lois are extremely uncommon names now. Peter Parker's first name survives because he has a Biblical connection.

But there has been no St. Bruce. I checked.

(Some seem to be rushing to declare a St. Caitlyn, however.)