transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] You know what's missing? Real talk about what black men go through mentally and emotionally. Man Listen, mental health conversations for men of color. We're diving into the real stuff, the pressure, the struggles, the healing. No filters, just brothers sharing their truth about navigating life and finding purpose. Whether you're living it, supporting someone who is, or just want to understand, this is for you. I'm Mark McCray, and I'm ready to have these conversations. Find us by searching Man Listen Mental, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 2:
[00:32] Everybody talked about it since I first moved to Oregon. The big one, the earthquake that trashed the whole West Coast, total destruction.

Speaker 3:
[00:40] Officially calling it the largest natural disaster in American history.

Speaker 2:
[00:44] I just didn't know what would help me next. So I took it all, even the gun. It was time.

Speaker 3:
[00:51] Cello? American Afterlife, presented by Pair of Thieves, the number one fiction and drama podcast in America. Listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts, available now.

Speaker 4:
[01:03] You know, sometimes the most memorable songs aren't the ones that scale the charts or that you hear in stadiums or on the radio, but the ones that defy all logic. Talking about tracks that stop you cold, dead in your tracks, and make you ask, what the hell did I just listen to? Today, we're celebrating eight of Rock's strangest songs that broke every rule in the book, including the legend who ruled 1986 with an iconic record only to wait six years to put out a follow-up because his new songs sent him into utter madness, including one where he delved into the minds of the truly demented to write a song that seemed harmless, but lyrically it's the strangest, creepiest song of his time. He also got the story of a rock icon who woke up his 14-year-old daughter at 3 a.m. to record a monologue of 80s Southern cow slang over a heavy guitar riff. Then there's the tale of a 60s artist who wrote a song about going insane and it was so controversial it was banned nation-wide. Thought people here would harm themselves. We're also gonna dive into a family band foretold by prophecy, mind you, attempting to play rock and roll without ever having actually heard what rock and roll is supposed to sound like. They'd never heard it and they had to invent it. It's coming up next. Hey music junkies, Professor of Rock, always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest songs of all time. You know, if you remember tearing open a package of wacky packs back in the day, you're going to dig this channel of deep musical nostalgia. Now make sure that you're subscribed. A lot of people think they are and they are not. Make sure to like, comment, and share this video so we can keep this channel going. It's been a tough couple of months, but we're going as hard as we can. All right, so it's time to cover the weird, the wild, the wacky, strange, the strangest songs of the rock era. Songs that were so out there that they just can't be ignored. Coming in at number eight on the countdown of Rock Strangest Songs, we're heading over to the Netherlands back to the early 70s. We're gonna track down the Dutch Prog Rockers' Focus and their insane high octane hit, Hocus Pocus. And nobody, I mean, nobody was prepared for what they unleashed on this track. Hocus Pocus is like musical schizophrenia, if you will. It's a jarring collision of high art rock and circus tent absurdity. I mean, you got this bone crushing, heavy metal riff tearing through the airwaves like a chainsaw, but then you've also got moments of yodeling and whistling and scatting. I mean, it's crazy, it's absurd. It's so amazing too. I love this song. So Focus formed in Amsterdam in 1969 when classically trained organist and flautist, I like to say flutist, Thijs van Leeuwen recruited bassist Martin Dresden and drummer Hans Cleaver to serve as a backing trio for the Dutch production of the rock musical Hare. Originally, Focus was a vocal heavy act influenced by jazz and chamber music, so there's that. However, the band underwent a radical transformation in 1970 with the addition of virtuoso guitarist Jan Ackermann, whose explosive style shifted them, especially their sound, to a more progressive rock. After their 1970 debut album, Focus Plays, Focus failed to make much commercial headway. The lineup was completely overhauled, putting drummer Pierre van der Linden and bassist Cyril Havermans into the mix. This refined unit retreated to a castle in the Netherlands in 1971 to record their breakthrough album, Moving Waves. So yeah, the band was actually rehearsing in this castle. It was actually called Castile Grunafeldt, Castile Grunafeldt, not quite Castle Grayskull. But they had this wing of an 18th century estate all to themselves. According to Theis, they could play as loud as they wanted. Well, there Jan Ackerman started playing this heavy driving riff. And then, you know, realizing, you know, Theis realizing that he had this amazing acoustic space to, you know, stretch out. And he did something completely off the wall. He started yodeling, even though he'd never yodeled a day in his life. And then another funny thing, when Jan Ackerman played it, he played it as a send up of all the rock bands of his time. He wrote it as a joke to take the piss out of him in the process to try to mock prog rock. And he accidentally created a rock classic that could hold its own alongside his contemporaries. It was never supposed to be a hit. And even though there's plenty of singing in the song, it doesn't really have lyrics. Said Van Lier, shortly before leaving for England to record the second album, we were playing at a castle. The guitarist suddenly plays that riff. And then just spontaneously, Pierre threw in a two bar drum solo. And I started yodeling. It came from no where. A piece of pure improvisation, inspired by the fun of playing together. While Hocus Pocus, that was released as a single across Europe in 71, it didn't really penetrate the American zeitgeist until about 73. So when Sire Records released a sped up version, sometimes called Hocus Pocus 2, and that high speed re-recording climbed to number nine of the Hot 100 in June of 73. The band was shocked that it became the US. Top 10 hit. Van Lier said, in amazement, it's just a jam, a total joke. But suddenly we're on the Billboard charts next to Paul McCartney and George Harrison. And Hocus Pocus's legacy, it didn't stop there. I mean, it's been repeatedly used in pop culture, you know, Supernatural, My Name is Earl, the Robocop reboot, Trolls, World Tour and my personal favorite, Baby Driver. The song broke boundaries and climbed the charts, leaving audiences speechless on both sides of the Atlantic as the only yodeling song to hit the charts. Pretty cool. All right, next up at number seven on our Countdown to Rock Strangers songs, I got Napoleon XIV with They're Coming to Take Me Away. Ha. Yeah, the title of the song has the word ha in it. Here's the story though, back in 1966 under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, Jerry Samuels created one of the most mind bending and controversial hits of its day. Now, Samuels was a brilliant engineer who just wanted to see how far he could push the boundaries of recording technology in public taste for that matter. He'd been a shut in studio worker for years and if this track is any indication, might not have hurt him to go outside and soak in a little sunshine every now and again. That said though, Napoleon really captures our cultures fears of mental unraveling in this song. Samuels used a simple snare drum, a tambourine and hand clap rhythm derived from the old Scottish march, The Campbells Are Coming. And over that beat, he delivered a manic spiraling spoken word vocal performance. So he opens with the lines, Remember when you ran away and I got on my knees and begged you not to leave because I'd go berserk? And from there Napoleon completely loses his mind, informing us that they're coming to take him away to the funny farm where life is beautiful and he'll be happy to see those young men in clean white coats. Yeah, that's what he says. Did you know that the average employer has to sift through around 250 resumes for just one job? That's like listening to a thousand demo tapes just to find one band worth signing. Well, if you're hiring, here's the good news. You can review those resumes faster with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. And today, you can try for free at ziprecruiter.com/rock. ZipRecruiter's matching tech finds the right people fast. And with that new feature, candidates who are qualified and actually want the job rise right to the top. And even better, they can tell you in their own words why they're interested. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site on G2. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rock. That's ziprecruiter.com/rock. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. So Napoleon achieved the song's crazy vocal pitch shift by actually manipulating the recording speed of his vocal track with a variable frequency oscillator. And it makes it sound completely unhinged. But the track was incredibly controversial for its portrayal of insanity. And it was soon banned by radio stations across the United States. But it actually did reach number three on the Hot 100. Now the really crazy part of this story is how Samuels tried to protect his creation. He actually wrote the track as a sick joke, his words. It was about a man losing his mind over a woman. But you know, to throw sensors off the trail, Samuels added a clever final line about the ASPCA, which stands for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He also featured a mangy mutt so that they would think the song was actually about a runaway dog to try to get past sensors.

Speaker 5:
[10:31] They do, they'll put you in the ASPCA, you mangy mutt.

Speaker 4:
[10:36] Samuels also admitted that he was concerned that the song would be perceived as making fun of those with mental illness, which he wasn't trying to do. But the madness didn't stop with the lyrics. Diving head on into the madness, the flip side of the single was actually the entire song played in reverse. Even the record label and the iconic Warner Brothers logo on that side were printed as a mirror image. That's crazy stuff for sure. Even though their coming to take me away Ha was banned, it sold over a million copies and remains an absolute staple of weird music history. It's a brilliant dark snapshot of the mid-60s pop landscape for sure, and it still sounds just as bizarre and unnerving today as it did 60 plus years ago. All right, coming in at number six with a bullet, we're stepping into the cutting edge of modern musical madness. We're going to cover a song that I've received about 1,100 requests to cover just in a few weeks. It's already been the talk of the internet for weeks, talking about Angine de Poitrine. Hope I said that right, in their 2024 single Sherpa. Let me tell you, this has got to be the strangest musical duo in recent memory. I love them. There's a lot of reasons for this. Coming out of Quebec, the band is comprised of two self-described space-time voyagers who go by the names Ken and Clec de Poitrine. A Cam plays in loops guitar and bass, while Clec handles the drum kit. Angine de Poitrine, that translates to Angina Pectoris, which is a medical term for chest pain caused by a lack of blood flow to the heart. That's how I've been feeling lately. But if the names weren't strange enough, things get even stranger when you see what they look like. And it's really iconic at this point. The duo is entirely hidden behind oversized paper mache masks with large noses and polka dotted body suits. I made a really cool paper mache mask with my grandma when I was a little kid, but it's nowhere close to as cool as this. These costumes and personas were created as a joke and it kind of stuck. Having been told they couldn't perform in back to back gigs at the same venue, they did one show as themselves and the next disguised in costume. And as the band has evolved, the members have chosen to remain anonymous and to maintain that total anonymity. The duo doesn't speak any known human language. So there's that. And that's the tone that allows us to remain anonymous. And as you can imagine, the music, it's just as bizarre as they are. A blend of experimental rock and microtonal math rock, their music sounds like it comes from another planet. To help achieve this, Ken uses a custom built 24 note quarter tone double neck guitar. One neck features a traditional fretboard, while the other is equipped with additional frets to achieve those unorthodox intervals, and it's amazing. And they're also doing all this with limited vision, looking out of small eye slits cut out of their masks. And they're also doing all this with limited vision, looking out of small eye slits cut out of their masks. The band's released on June 14th, 2024, and their follow up album, Volume 2, dropped actually April 3rd, 2026. The band's released a handful of singles so far, their mind-blowing track Sherpa being their first. Said Cann about that, with Sherpa we wanted to create a guide, much like the name suggests, that leads the listener from the familiar 12-note world into the 24-note microtonal madness that we live in. So Sherpa is a good place to start. We want to check out this band. Angine de Poitrine is becoming a surprise phenomenon, for sure. When they released their album, it rocketed to the number one spot on the Discog's Most Wanted List, dethroning Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets department. And currently, they're selling out major venues and winning over everybody, really. I mean, every YouTuber, every musical YouTuber's covered them, Rick Beata, Justin Hawkins. I mean, if you love experimental art and mind-bending musicianship, you got to check these guys out. They're pushing the boundaries of what's musically possible, at least right now. Coming in at number five, I've got the novelty duo Barnes and Barnes with Fish Heads. This surreal project was created by childhood friends, Bill Mummy, who actually played Will Robinson in the classic TV show Lost in Space, and his high school friend, Robert Hamer.

Speaker 3:
[15:55] Playmate of Young Penny, portrayed by Angela Cartwright. Billy Moomy plays her brother, Will.

Speaker 4:
[16:00] They initially began making music back in 1970, taking on the personas of Art and Artie Barnes. But this bizarre track rapidly transcended its low-budget bedroom origins to become the most requested song in the history of the legendary Dr. Demento radio show.

Speaker 6:
[16:17] Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads.

Speaker 4:
[16:21] Fish heads utilize highly manipulated, high-pitched sped-up vocals to detail an absurdist celebration of detached fish heads. Quite a subject for a song. Said Bill about it, We wanted to make something that sounded like it came from another planet, where the laws of nature and logic didn't quite apply. The lyrics celebrate fish heads as roly-poly and delicious to eat and are basically a deadpan rundown of a day in the life of a fish head, including everything that fish heads can't do. They can't play baseball, they can't wear sweaters, they're not good dancers and they don't play the drums. It's ridiculous. It's brilliant though. And somehow you can't get it out of your head once you hear it. Fish heads was initially released as a single in 1978, but was then added to the duo's debut album, Vubaha, in 1980. The track also birthed a surreal music video directed by a then unknown actor and aspiring filmmaker by the name of Bill Paxton. Yes, it's that Bill Paxton.

Speaker 6:
[17:22] It wasn't your fault.

Speaker 2:
[17:24] That's it, man.

Speaker 5:
[17:25] Game over, man. It's game over.

Speaker 4:
[17:27] The music video was created on a shoestring budget and features bizarre imagery of individuals wearing large fish heads engaging in parties and everyday human activities. Actually even got Dr. Demento to make a small cameo as a wino who becomes completely entranced upon discovering a discarded fish head in a back alley. And Bill Paxton was so convinced of the video's artistic brilliance, he actually flew to New York and lobbied Lorne Michaels in Saturday Night Live to air it. He had to wait at the Rockefeller Center lobby for days before anyone would evaluate the tape. But that persistence paid off. The video aired on SNL for two consecutive weeks in December of 80, and it became an overnight sensation and later received heavy rotation on early MTV. After the release of Fish Heads, Barnes & Barnes released a string of increasingly eccentric albums like Spaz Chow in 1981, and Amazing Adult Fantasy in 1984. They released nearly 20 albums and EPs. Their latest actually came out in 2022. All right, for the number four spot on the countdown, we're actually heading back to 1982 with the Zappa Clan and the middle of the night novelty masterpiece, Valley Girl. All right, Frank Zappa definitely a certified musical genius and a master of biting social satire. And for Valley Girl, he set out to construct a satirical mockery of the shallow consumerist culture that was proliferating in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Salcal, Southern California. On the song he was joined by his teenage daughter, Moon Unit, who basically just missed her dad. He spent most of his time locked away in the basement studio. To get his attention, the 14-year-old slipped a formal note under his studio door like a business proposal. She asked to sing on one of his albums. Frank didn't respond for months, though, till in a late night moment of inspiration, he came up with the idea for the song Valley Girl. So he woke up Moon Unit in the middle of the night and he had her record a monologue of a Southern California Valley speak over a heavy guitar riff. Moon Unit drew upon a real conversation she had overheard at local parties and shopping malls to construct a highly animated satirical vocal delivery.

Speaker 2:
[19:54] I love going to clothing stores and stuff. I like to buy the neatest miniskirts.

Speaker 4:
[19:59] Valley Girl is like an 80s linguistic time capsule San Fernando Valley youth culture. The song marks the shallow consumer's lifestyle of Valley Girls, characterized by their obsession with shopping, manicures, and social status. It famously popularized a hyper-specific dialect when his vowels speak, introducing the rest of the world to a lexicon of exaggerated slang. Throughout the track, Moon Unit rattles off phrases that became cultural staples, including gag me with a spoon, gross out, totally, and of course tubular. Beyond just the vocabulary, the song captured the distinctive uptalking inflection and the relentless use of the word like. The funny thing is, youth culture across America overwhelmingly embraced it. Southern California catchphrases went national when the song received heavy radio rotation. Valley Girl was a big hit. It reached number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 12 on the US Top Rock Tracks Chart. It actually became Zappa's biggest hit. It was a bizarre cultural phenomenon for sure. So even though Zappa was making fun of the culture, he ended up immortalizing it. You know, Frank rolled with it like any dad with a teenage daughter would. In a Canada 20 Questions interview, Moon revealed that because of the song's fame, boys were really terrified to meet Frank. Imagine meeting Frank Zappa as the potential father. I guess she'd bring a date over and Frank would walk into the room. He'd look the suitor up and down. He'd let out a single grunt and he'd walk out. And the boys would have to spend the rest of the night trying to decipher if that meant that they approved of them or he was gonna kill them. Frank later admitted that he enjoyed the intimidation factor that this song gave him.

Speaker 6:
[21:49] My name, my name is Andrew.

Speaker 4:
[21:51] All right, coming in the number three position on our countdown, I've got a song that on first listen, it may not seem like it's that strange, but when you listen to the lyrics and you hear the story behind it, I'm telling you, that's gonna change. Talk about the brilliant Peter Gabriel with his haunting 1992 single, Digging in the Dirt. So after his 1986 six-times Platinum LP So, Peter Gabriel waited six years to release another studio album, Us. According to producer Daniel Anwar, the idea for Us was to have Peter strip away the veil and stop hiding behind masks, which he had literally done many times in the past. Peter Gabriel said, There were more negative and vulnerable parts in my personality exposed when I made this record. I used John Lennon as a model in this. He wasn't afraid of burying the negative parts of his personality. So helping to facilitate the look behind the curtain was the end of Peter's marriage in 1987 and his breakup with Rosanna Arquette in 1992. The ending of both relationships would leave him shaken. As Peter worked on Us, the sessions became kind of a therapy. Gabriel dug deep to face down his demons and to explore the darker corners of the human psyche. Cue Digging in the Dirt. Peter Gabriel has never been afraid to explore the extremes of the human condition. That's for sure. But on this track, he went to a place that was darker than anything he'd ever attempted before. Into the minds of serial killers. Seriously, he actually studied the clinical psychology of the most perverse crimes for this particular track. Digging in the Dirt was heavily influenced by the anthology book, Why We Kill, understanding violence across cultures and disciplines. Peter examined the psychological triggers of real killers and then used them to map out his own aggressive impulses. And as you might expect, Digging in the Dirt is unsettling really in the best way possible because his music is so brilliant. Peter Gabriel goes to some genuinely dark places here though. Dredging up his buried resentments and the ugly stuff most of us would rather keep hidden. The digging metaphor running through the song, that can be understood in multiple ways actually. First, there's the idea of the mind itself being the soil and our thoughts are like seeds pushing their way to the surface, ultimately becoming our actions. Then there's this idea of digging up dirt on someone, in this case ourselves, confronting the less savory parts of our character or one's character. Peter Gabriel described this as digging through layers of ego and pain to expose the bastard within. Or finally, you can see the song through a killer's eyes, Digging in the Dirt to Bear Your Victims, which, yeah, it's just creepy. But however you want to read into it, the song is really uncomfortable to listen to because it's truly honest. According to Peter Gabriel, that's the whole point. What he would say is that you've got to drag the dark stuff into the light, because if you don't, it will fester inside until it ultimately destroys you. Peter Gabriel, for his part, doesn't flinch. You know, when he screams, shut your mouth, I know what you are, you really feel it. To achieve vocals that felt authentic to a man losing control and falling into rage, Peter Gabriel pushed himself into a state of extreme physical and emotional exhaustion in the studio. He wanted his explosive screams to sound like a man violently losing his grip on reality. It wasn't a pleasant experience for him, but you got to give him credit. He was committed to his art. After it was released on September 7th, 1992, Digging in the Dirt went to number one on both the Billboard Modern Rock Charts and the Album Rock Charts and the music video, which was filled with disturbing stop-motion imagery of Peter Gabriel being buried alive, and of course won a Grammy Award. All right, coming in number two on our countdown, we're getting to some serious experimental territory here. None other than Pink Floyd and several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a picked. Pink Floyd, of course, no stranger to pushing boundaries, and to getting a little weird, especially in the early Sid Barrett days. I mean, you got tracks like The Gnome, Bike, Scream, Thy Last Scream, C. Emily Play, Jug Band Blues, I could go on and on. But Sid didn't have the monopoly on all of Pink Floyd's weirdness. After his unfortunate departure, Roger Waters' lead band continued down the road less traveled. And for the proof, we're gonna go into 1969's hybrid studio live album, Umaguma, and several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a picked. Said Roger Waters about this avant-garde album, we were all very into the idea of being artists with a capital A. We wanted to see how far we could push the listener before they actually just turned the record off. That's not something you really want to do as an artist. You want them to keep listening. Well, this five minute surrealist soundscape with the incredibly long title probably pushed a lot of listeners to turn it off. But small furry animals definitely gets a gold star for creativity. When you listen to the track, it sounds like it could be a field recording of a forest filled with rodents and screeching birds. But here's the honest truth. Every single animal sound on this track was created exclusively by Roger Waters using his own body, which also means there wasn't a single musical instrument used on the track. There was no Gilmore guitar on this one, no bass, no keyboards, no drums, no anything. Roger Waters achieved the track's soundscape by slapping his own body, thumping the studio floor, and making rhythmic popping noises with his mouth. He then took those raw human sounds and manipulated the tape speeds to create a sound environment thick with bizarre activity, for sure. Roger also lays down a few stanzas of spoken word poetry and an exaggerated Scottish burr. The whole thing is a wild stream of consciousness performance that kind of leaves you wondering what the hell you just listened to. And hey, if you want to get even a little bit weirder with it, if you listen closely to the original vinyl pressing, in about the four minute and 32 second mark, if you played at 16 RPM, you can hear a hidden message where Roger actually asks, that was pretty avant-garde, wasn't it? Yeah, Roger, it definitely was. That's me in a flippin and dinnin and a seein the crag, crag, crag. All right, comin in at the number one spot on our countdown, you know, I contemplated this one for a while because the song I chose here is really more of a band choice or a series of songs by this band. We covered them briefly last year when talking about the worst bands of all time. But honestly, I think they're kind of awesome because they're so strange, they're so bad, they're good. So I'm going to focus on just one of their songs, but I'm going to play you some of their catalog as well. At number one, I have what might be the strangest anomaly in recorded music history. I'm talking about the Shaggs and their song My Pal Foot Foot. Now formed in the small town of Fremont, New Hampshire during the late 60s, the teenage sisters Dorothy aka Dot, Betty and Helen Wiggin, were compelled to become musicians by their controlling father, Austin Wiggin. Reason behind this was because of a palm reading prophecy that was delivered to Austin by his own mother when he was just a boy. This prophecy stated that he would marry a strawberry blonde, have two sons she would not live to see, and that his daughters would form a popular musical band. After the first two predictions actually came true, Austin obsessed over fulfilling the final prophecy. He pulled him out of school and forced him into a grueling practice schedule. Actually, many times he would lock these girls into a practice space for hours and force him to play without food or water. Now to ensure that his daughters didn't corrupt their pure natural sound with the music of the day, the popular music, rock and roll, Austin actually banned them from listening to the radio or rock and roll at all. This created a complete anomaly in music history. A band attempting to play rock and roll without ever actually hearing what rock and roll was supposed to sound like. During the recording of their only album, Philosophy of the World, the studio engineers were so baffled by the girls' lack of rhythm that they reportedly stopped the session only for Austin to insist that they were just getting it right. Now, all the songs on Philosophy of the World featured wildly out of tune guitars, erratic rhythms and wandering melodies, just kind of streaming consciousness stuff. Critics have called the Shaggs music both the worst ever made and unintentionally brilliant. The song My Pal Foot Foot typifies both. Check this out, on the surface, My Pal Foot Foot is a juvenile lament about a missing family cat. But you know, knowing the backstory of the band gives a song unexpected depth and meaning. Written by Dot, the song actually details the frantic search for her runaway cat named Foot Foot. But the confusion and loss she feels over losing her pet, it's also really a metaphor for being trapped in their father's strict isolated world. Now, since the cat is the only one who's gonna escape the house, they're just prisoners to this thing. I mean, later Dot would actually say, he just disappeared one day and I was so upset I wrote a song about him, he was the only one who could go where he wanted in the family. And although the song ends with Foot Foot being discovered standing behind the tree, the sisters actually revealed that this was a total fabrication forced on the song by their father to give it a positive ending, a positive resolution. It was all wishful thinking. In real life, the happy ending never happened. And so long as their father lived, there would be no happy ending for them either. Released on the Small Fleetwood Records label, the single was intended to be the girl's big break, but instead it became a phantom artifact after the majority of the pressings were never released. Like the full length album, My Pal Foot Foot suffered from a distribution disaster. Austin Wiggin reportedly paid for a thousand copies, but because of a shady deal with the label owner, only a handful ever reached the public. So what happened to the girls in the band? Talked a little bit about it last time. The Shaggs career came to an immediate ending in 1975 when their father Austin died of a sudden heart attack. The girls who didn't share their father's obsessive musical aspirations stopped playing and they sold their equipment. They used to play kind of down at the town square for people in the community and people would poke fun at them and make fun of them while they were playing. It was really disastrous. But, you know what? They became cult legends. Yeah, their legacy didn't die. Rare copies of the album were discovered by influential fans like Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain who championed their unique sound. And from there, like I said, they became the stuff of cult legend. And if you've never heard the Shaggs, you got to listen. I'll link to it below. You're not going to believe your ears. It's really kind of awesome. I also love the songs Philosophy of the World and What Our Parents. These are songs from the purest form of innocence in rock history. No guile, no pretentiousness, just sisters who are writing straight from their heart. In this cruel and divisive world that we live in right now, this whole record is kind of refreshing. It's so bad, it's great. And I just, I love the Shaggs. This is the second time we've covered them on here. And I really do, it's just refreshing to hear something that is pure and from the heart, it's real. I mean, I'd rather listen to it than a lot of pop music that's on there. And sure, it's out of tune and it's crazy. It's really bad, but it's great. Let's have a great discussion. That's, those are the strangest songs. What do you think are songs that I miss? Should we do a volume two? Are there any of the strange songs I miss? I want to have a great discussion below and talk about all of these songs. What are the strangest songs of all time? Songs that stop you dead in your tracks. I love those kinds of songs. If you like our content, we invite you to subscribe. We'd love to have you as part of our community. Until next time, records and the truth, my friends.