Song of the Day
"The name is Billy Carter not Billy Corgan and it's screaming messiahs, not smashing pumpkins."
Smash the Marketplace- Screaming Blue Messiahs
1986 was a dismal year for me musically speaking. The three bands that meant the most to me from a cultural perspective, the Clash, Gang of Four and Mission of Burma had all disbanded in the course of the last two years. Roots reggae had fallen out of favor in Jamaica. And James Brown still couldn’t get on his good foot. (
Good god! Bring me my cape and my sceptor, Maceo!)
The 1986 hit parade turned into a death march to the edge of a rancid landfill of musical garbage. The best of Music in 1986 was a pathetic grab bag of the most insipid, contrived and musically toxic performances ever presented for mass consumption by the
brain-dead-and-now-on-life-supports music industry. Surfing the crest of musical stardom was Mr. Mister, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Huey Lewis and the News, Falco, Peter Cetera, Survivor, Bananarama, Billy Ocean, Kenny Loggins, Lionel Ritchie, Wham! and INXS (
whose name I thought was pronounced "inks" for a couple of years, to show you how tuned out I was from the hip MTV subculture). Listening to mainstream music and watching MTV back in '86 was as dangerous as sampling the free Kool-Aid in Jonestown, back in '78.
The one MOR performer that actually had some talent was Whitney Houston, but I couldn't escape the saturation bombing of the song
I Will Always Love You. I Will Always Love You was stalking me everywhere and jackhammering itself into my brain until I got a migrane. All of my worst nightmares in 1986 had
I Will Always Love You on the soundtrack
It got to the point where every time I heard Whitney singing those fateful opening lyrics: "
If I should stay, I'd only be in your way..." I began to responding her lyric by yelling back at her "
That’s right Whitney so get the f*ck outta here, girl" which some people (mostly teenaged girls) playing the song on their boom box took personally. Maybe I owe a sincere apology to all of those teenage girls I scared the hell out of in 1986. Ummm... maybe not.
I'm personally grateful that the boombox fad ended because the boom box gave blanket persmission to all tone deaf people to waterboard captive audiences with a tidal wave of abysmal music. I spent many a long subway ride in 1986 being hijacked by a boom box operator and taken on a hellish excursion to Satan’s palace of musical demenita.
The horror...the horror of it all.
After that rant I can barely remember my selection for
Song of the Day... Oh yeah... The Screaming Blue Messiahs... SBC's music was the only ray of light that got me through 1986. I felt like I had wasted the best decade of my prime years during the 12 months of 1986. The Screaming Blue Messiahs lifted me up from the lithium induced haze of a really bad year and gave me a swift kick in the ass. I want personally thank the Messiahs for intervening before I had a chance to pull off a
Double Van Gogh Knife Procedure on my ears.
The one live performance I saw them was at was Spit in Boston. I was not disappointed. The Screaming Blue Messiahs were an angry, raging beast to behold in concert. Most SBM fans don't need read another commentary on Bill Carter's fiery guitar playing or his menacing stage personae, so I'll spare the agony. I will only say that Bill did better windmills that Pete Townsend.
A couple years after I saw them at Spit in '86, the Messiahs fell from the face of the earth never to be heard from again and their former label Elektra Records has never bothered to issue any of the Messiah's albums in CD format in the USA. Not even Rhino Records ever reissued any SBM albums. And Rhino wants to broker a reissue deal with nearly every band in history that nobody cared about.
Around four years I back began a collector's search a vinyl edition of SBM's first album
Gun Shy. The album had been long absent from my personal collection, but I had also had a second reason for the search: Maybe be there was a story that could be told about the demise and afterlife of this great band. I checked with their former label Elektra who dropped them in 1990, no luck except I found out Elektra had long since sold the recording and publication rights to SBM’s music sold to the Warner Tamerline Publishing Group. I checked the legal filings of Warner Tamerline and found there was never any litigation filed by Warner Tameriline vs. Bill Carter or vice versa. All of the performance and songwriting credits were in Bill Carter's name but no legal filings by Carter or Warner Tramerline. So there was no pending litagation that prevented the reissue of SBM back catalog. So why weren't there any reissues of SBM's albums over the past 20 odd years?
Then one day out of the blue, an administrator at music forum owned by Brit music publication Mojo , mentioned in passing that the Screaming Blue Messiah's former manager was a forum member. He introduced me to a guy named Haile Milgrim and I did a background check on what Haile told me about himself, and I found out that this guy was the real thing. Milgrim had a credit on the SBM's first album as creative director for the band. When I met Haile, he was employed by the Grateful Dead organization as an associate producer in the ambitious project to release remastered edtions of the all of the Dead's studio albums.
Haile told me that the reason why the SBM's titles have never been re-issued is that when guitarist Bill Carter walked away from the band, he burned all of his bridges with the music industry and won't even discuss, much less sign off on any projects in which he was the performer or songwriter . And Bill Carter is primary performer and sole songwriter for nearly all of SBM's songs.
Haile told me that Bill pursues his second great passion in life: motorcycles, and works in a motorcycle repair shop somewhere in London. He mentioned the specific area of London but I didn't bother to write it down in my notes. According to Haile Milgrim, Bill Carter never looked back and has no regrets. There was one final incident in my SBM dossier that is worth relating to SBM fans.
About a year after I talked to Haile. a slightly mysterious event happened. Early in 2006 on the page of a MySpace member named "Screaming Bill Carter", three previously unreleased SBM songs were posted for download. Within a week the songs and the MySpace account had disappeared, never to return. Hmmmm.
Comments on the Song: Any band who plays a song called
Smash the Market Place should be arrested for shamelessly pandering to my own vulgar Trotskyist taste in music. But hey... don't look at me, I'm the last person who would file a pandering complaint against the band. Instead I say this: The act of smashing the market place is a life affirming act! Smashing the market place is a blow against the empire. Smashing the market place is right up there rocking the casbah, demanding to be sedated or kickin' out the jams. Shall we pick up our bats and run riotously through streets smashing the market place?"
Oh hell, yes!