In my misspent youth, I was truly Stones over Beatles.  The Stones were still trying to shock and instigate well into the 1980’s while the Beatle’s wrote “pop” songs and gave up in 1970.  I never really gave the Beatles their due until about seven years ago, I started to listen to their catalogue.  Truths:  The Beatles are not a mere “pop” band.  They rocked hard when they felt the need.  ”She’s So Heavy” is the heaviest song of the ’60’s.  Tony Iommi says so.  Are you gonna argue with Tony Iommi?  Didn’t think so.  Also listen to “Helter Skelter”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, “So Tired” and “Revolution.”  The Beatles tore the shite up when they felt like it.

But let’s not ignore their waxed wings getting too high to the sun.  I’m talking about the horrid cinematic experience that is The Magical Mystery Tour. 

The Beatles were and are a culture-changing collective.  Separately, well, not so.  Study Paul’s output, George’s output, John’s self-absorbed out-put.  Damn, Ringo comes out looking like the genius of the bunch!  Maybe he was.

And then you have the Magical Mystery Tour.  A vanity project on the heels of the overrated, pretentious Sgt. Pepper album.  Yep, I said it.  The Sgt. Pepper album sucks.  I’ve always hated it.  Except for ”A Day in the Life.”  That is a saving grace.  Can’t love that song enough.  Anyways, enough about that release.  MMT (the album) was actually a musical improvement, but the movie was a painful piece of hurt.  Mind you, the song clips were fun and weird, but there was no plot, no form, no nothing.  It was like a home movie of John and Paul being bored, taking a horse’s share of LSD and trying to capture a moment.  I’m not a cruel man.  I will allow you to watch the movie and all it’s horrid bits on your own time.  In good will, I will offer whatever sweet highlights I can conjure off our good buddy YouTube.

Actually one of my fave Beatle’s tunes.  Who wouldn’t want to be a Beatle at this point?  No screamed out concerts, no getting mauled by 16 year-olds, just being able to create and be a weirdo.

 And of course, there were the rare moments of musical/visual bliss, such as this clip.  The Beatles and Hula Girls.  Nice touch.

Could the 1950’s appear to be any less fun?  Dig the father and son.  

They drank like fish, smoked like paper mill chimneys, and ate popcorn coated in artery-clogging yellow sludge.  Yet they are still around, the survivors of the post-WWII generation, while the rest of us are dropping off like flies, oft before age 60.  Makes you wonder, makes you wonder…

Some Kind of Monster is an excellent film in that it presented me Metallica since I long had lost interest in them in a way that made them fascinating again, if not for all the wrong reasons. 

It wasn’t the Load album that shied me away as it did so many other more dullard, unadventurous hardcore fans.  No, I thought that release was genius, the haircuts, the semen as cover-art, Kirk’s black nail polish and all.  I saw it as a kiss-off to all the hardline metal purists.  Plus, the songwriting was really, really solid, I thought.  Slower, but solid.  I was impressed.  When the band did a song and video for the film Mission Impossible 2, I pretty much admit I had an ass-full of them.  Lars acting like a little bitch over Napster pretty much nailed the wooden steak in their heart.  Not that I agree with music piracy, but prosecuting your own fans?  C’mon.

Metallica in the mid-80’s were the anti-rockstars.  They dressed like their fans.  They were not particularily handsome.  They had pimples.  Thier music was a revelation to the lost boys of the Reagan era.  Listening to Metallica’s Ride The Lightning or Master of Puppets in 1985 or 86 was akin to hearing the Sex Pistols or The Ramones in the ’70’s.  They were ours.  We made them huge.  They perhaps became the monster that the movie’s title refers to.

The film centers on the making of the dubiuos back-to-basics album St. Anger.  Bassist Jason Newstead has flown the coop and now they are stuck with a therapist trying to keep the group together.  This is a scenario one might have guessed that The Beatles might have tried, but Metallica?  Perish the thought!  Turns out there is a heaping helping of dysfunction amonst the boys, including James Hetfield’s substance abuse issues.  Little wonder seeing as they decided upon the band name combining the words metal and vodka when they were, what, age 16 or something?  Thus James goes into rehab and reappears wearing glasses for whatever reason.  The therapist tries to become Billy Preston to Metallica’s John, Paul, George, and Ringo (with producer Bob Rock playing the Paul/bassist role since Jason Newstead ran away screaming).  I never warmed up to the St. Anger album.  It seems over-ambitious, and way too self-aware.  Plus, it sounds like Lars is beating on empty cat food tins instead of drums.  Last year’s Death Magnetic was an interesting car-wreck.  Maybe it is too much to ask for Metallica to return to yesterday.  However, SKOM remains a fascinating record of a band ready to implode but deciding that their day jobs were too sweet to lose afterall.  Even though I sound cynical, the movie is fascinating in its own right, if nothing else but for the egos that superstardom can spawn.  Metallica, for all of their early “we are just like our fans” cocksure bluster, managed to become one of the biggest group of rock stars ever.  Be damn careful what you wish for.

I hated high school with a passion at the time I reserved only for self-pleasurement, but the one thing that got me through many a bleak, pre-home room morn with sanity intact, besides AC/DC cassettes, was pulling up to the then Amoco mini-mart in Nekoosa, Wi circa 1986, and purchasing a mill town white-trash breakfast of Mountain Dew and Doritos.  At the advanced age of 41, I now limit my junk-food diet down to damn near nil, but friends and neighbors, let me tell you that no one junk-food snack and no single soft drink combo compares to the Dew and the Doritos.  And I’m not talking all these new hip, new flavors Doritos is trying to push.  I’m a purist, and it is nacho cheese with the nuclear orange-colored cheese dust that coats your hands that is the flavor that matches the Dew.  Let us not mess with taste bud asthetics here, people.  Some days when I’m still feeling immortal and my weight at age 17, I sneak a small bag and a can from a vending machine and relive a simple pleasure from a hideous time.

Here are some vintage commercials.  This one makes me wish they’d do away with the current superhero breast-plate style logo and go retro.  Hillbillies and all.  Hillbillies are eternally cooler than a bunch of dork-wads trying to be extreme.  Besides, the Surge youths of the ’90’s could take on today’s extreme-living Dew enthusiasts and spank them like unruly 19th century schoolchildren.

Projectile corks, banjo music and scantly-clad, sexually aggresive moutain gals.  Now that’s extreme!  Here’s more…

Doritos also doubled as a weapon in the early 1980’s.  Their power has diminished throughout the years, sadly.  There was a point in time where I had my entire hometown under seige for fear of my change of weather whims and a nasty-ass corn chip beat down.  Lordy, I miss yesterday (cue up Boys II Men).

For those unaware, Jim Carroll was a poet, rocker, and autobiographer.  His most well-known written work is The Basketball Diaries, which with brutal honesty, documented Carroll’s basketball scholarship at a Catholic school in the 1960’s and his descent into drug addiction and prostitution.  It was made into a suprisingly solid film in 1995 starring Leonardo DiCaprio.  He also fronted The Jim Carroll Band.  The group had a minor early ’80’s hit with the song “People Who Died.”  I liked his writing very much while I found his music to be hit-or-miss.  The Jim Carroll Band’s “best of” album A World Without Gravity is certainly worth checking out for the hidden gem here and there, however. 

No, The Clooney did not sing on here, but he lip-syncs like none other.  I love this movie, as does my Dad.

Early Clooney via Big Screen with vampire strippers, weird ol’ Quentin Tarrantino, and gunplay.  The perfect late-night weekend movie.

Some current Clooney that might be balls-out excellent if the movie is as cool as the the trailer.  Or the movie’s title.

2. Punchy:  Oh admit it, you PC hypocites! Cartoon violence is funnier than an evening with Joe Biden.  However, I do imagine that Punchy in his prime really put a dent in tourism for our beloved 50th state.

3. Mac Tonight:  Yes, there was something terribly creepy about him, but kudos to McD’s for trying to make their image a bit more urbane and sophisticated in 1988.  Still, kinda creepy.  Not as creepy as the first Ronald McDonald.  Or even the current Ronald.  Come to think of it, a pianist with a curved moon face isn’t all that bad.

4. The Frito Bandito:  Yes, I know he was seen as a racist stereotype.  But he was a fraking BANDITO!!!  Does that make every Latino a bandito?  Um, no.  Is everyone living in the U.S. a cowboy?  Again, no.  Being PC and constantly afraid to offend sucks the fun out of living.  No matter what your race, none of us are special.  We are all messed up equally.  Let us laugh at each other and most importantly ourselves.  That is what will save our doomed asses.  Anyways, the Frito Bandito was legend.  I had a Frito Bandito pencil eraser in first grade.  The Bandito was eventually replaced by the lesser W.C. Frito.  We will discuss him at another time.  Extra props given to the Bandito as he was given voice by the legendary Mel Blanc (basically every cool voice given to every cool Warner Bros. Cartoon character) and animated by the legendary Tex Avery (Droopy, Barney Bear, and countless classic MGM cartoons of the ’40’s and 50’s).

5. Burger Chef and Jeff:  Burger Chef ruled.  They had a salad bar type setting where you could doctor up your burgers as you wanted them.  They eventually began to fade out in the early to mid 1980’s.  Too bad.  The concept was excellent, as was the food as I recall.  The gent who did the voice of Burger Chef was also the voice of Tigger and Gargamel from The Smurfs.  A dorky fact to share with dorky company.

Hostess Choco-Bliss:  Imagine two slices of devil’s food cake topped with chocolate frosting and injected with light chocolate filling.  Yes, it was as insanely addictive as it sounds.  This MIA junk-food legend of the late 1980’s was enough to make a woman with a satanic case of PMS purr like a kitten.  I liked it too!

Mama Leone’s Lasagne:  Another ’80’s refuge.  It came in a jar and was wonderful in a microwave.  I recall the taste beat all the canned pastas and the jar added a bit more snob appeal as well as resourcefulness; pop the top, nuke, and savor.  No picture or clip for this.  That’s how shortly lived it was. 

Heinz Ketchup…with Onion!:  I was always a ketchup enthusiast.  As a kid I was warned by my step-mother that the acidity of the king of condiments would eat away at my stomach lining.  Ha!  Thanks to processed tomatoes and their super-charged properties of Lycopeen, I have a prostate that cannot be beat!  The most awesome ketchups ever was when Heinz introduced real bits of onion in their product.  It was heavenly and completely owned on burgers.  Again, this was about 1987-88.  In hindsight, I can see why this product didn’t take off as well as I feel it should’ve.  An onion lover, I was clearly in the minority on this.  I recall working for a large Wisconsin supermarket chain at this time.  Whenever the break room ran out of ketchup, I’d immediately grab a bottle of this tomato-onion ambrosia.  Wow, did my fellow co-workers hate me for my choice!  Such unsophisticated tastes they had.  Here’s a block of commercials from 1987, one of which for Heinz Ketchup and Onions.

  Surge:  It was pushed as a kind of Mountain Dew on steroids.  It was supposed to give you energy and make your inhabitions regarding personal safety drop to the furnace room level.  It was the color of your urine when you take really powerful vitamins.  The taste?  Well, it was an aquired one, but once you developed it, you were hooked like a discount prostitute on crystal meth.  Surge dominated around the mid-’90’s and thus it was marketed to the post-grunge, alternative, Gen X, extreme activity enthusiasts.  The commercials portrayed young people acting recklessly and, quite frankly, irrationally as well.  If they put half the effort into finding jobs as they did hurling themselves into bruise-producing stunts and trying to score tickets to Lollapalooza…well, these damn kids these days.   Surge plugged along after a more tasteful logo (dig the logo on the bottle,  it looks like road-kill) was implemented and experiments with various can sizes (one was as big as an oil can with enough caffeine to stun a camel).  It eventually petered out, though I read that it is still available in Norway or Iceland.

Coke Black (or Blak):  This is the most recent and possibly most longed for.  About two years ago or so, Coca-Cola came out with a fusion beverage of Coke mixed with the flavor of coffee.  It came in four packs of classy black glass bottles.  I found it to be delicious and brilliant.  I was apparently alone.  Like a lover you meet on an exotic local who collides into your life and makes fierce and desperate love on a vibrating bed until every muscle including The Muscle of Love is sore (shameless AC reference), before stealing your wallet and climbing out the hotel window, when Coke Blak fell of the face of the planet, I was left disappointed, my body screaming for more.

Fruit-Brute:  Last but certainly not least, Fruit-Brute was the goofball werewolf pal of Boo-Berry, Frankenberry, and Count Chocula.  Judging from his bib overalls he was also an advocate of gay pride.  Nobody I know remembers the Fruit-Brute, but I do.  Thank you, YouTube.  It was excellent.  Not as excellent as Count Chocula, but pretty damned excellent nonetheless.  Quentin Tarrantino must’ve thought so too.  It’s the cereal that Eric Stoltz is shown eating in Pulp Fiction.  Ah, unnaturally-colored and flavored breakfast cereal and the non-PC, uneducational saturday morning cartoons of the late 1970’s.  That was freakin’ bliss, children.  That was freakin’ bliss. 

What are some of your gastronomical “one’s that got away?”  I’d love to hear about them.

A Hate cartoon series was proposed to MTV, but it never got off the ground.  Bagge did come up with some warped animated shorts about the father of 3/4 of the Beach Boys; Murray Wilson.  Murray Wilson is the reason his son, Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson, ended up a basketcase.  The cartoon clips are amusing as all hell, and more than likely, painfully real.  Check out any Hate anthology you can find, and as always, you can thank me later.  Here’s Mr. Bagge’s take on Brian Wilson’s insane father.

Here’s Brian Wilson somewhere in the ’70’s.  He’s apparently better now.  And by the way, I’m not a huge Beach Boys fan, but the Pet Sounds album is a classic and it freaking owns.  Get a copy and thank me later.  As always.