Goddamn.
If I didn't give much creedence to conspiracy theories and shadowy figures withholding world-altering information before, I'm David fucking Duchovny without the monotone now.
Here's the scoop: there's a band out there, on the world-renowned Amphetamine Reptile label, a demented, hellbent-for-pleather kinda garage-punk quartet, and their name happens to be the same as ours. A strange coincidence, no question, particularly when you consider what a singularly inappropriate name Lollipop is for either us or them. Sure, there's the time-honored phallic symbolism of the name, the whole lick 'n' suck thing, but that doesn't quite wash - in purely semantic terms, it's one of those words that sounds a little too cutesy, too cloying. To look at the grimy, long-haired gang that makes up Lollipop (the band) or the pasty-faced, bad-complected unshaven little walking hangovers that comprise Lollipop (the magazine) is to see that the name doesn't even fit in terms of the flakiest irony - it's just flat-out wrong.
So the question remains: Who's zooming who here? Did Lollipop (the magazine) do to Lollipop (the band) what Jann "He's Chunky and Straight... No! He's Slim and Gay!... Stop, You're Both Right!" Wenner pulled on Muddy Waters (after he'd already been ripped by a skinny Limey with a frightening facial labia), title homage/plagiarism-wise? Or did Lollipop (the band) see a discarded copy of Lollipop (the magazine) in its formative stages, perhaps even lying unread among the armament mags on Tom Hazlemeyer's desk, and think "yeeaaahhh...that's the way to go. And no one will ever know the difference. What's the chance of a little Boston-area piece of freebie wood-pulp like this sticking around long enough to even notice that we lifted their moniker from 'em? Hell, by the time our debut album's out, the whole staff'll probably be too busy trying to pick up Marines in the bus station for cigarette money to complain!" This was the sort of mystery that was right up my alley - something absolutely no one else cared one way or the other about. My kind of task. I set to work.
As my first order of business, I contacted AmRep's publicity operatives in Minneapolis, humbly requesting an audience with one or more members of the group and copies of their records for "research purposes." What? Huh, now that you mention it, I guess we do have the same name. Now, isn't that funny...
While waiting for that information to come through, I subtly interrogated the editor/publisher of this magazine, lulling him into a false sense of security by feigning knowledge of whatever tight-pantsed, mousse-coiffed bass player for a band with a disgusting adjective for a name and an illegible Rorshach blot for a logo he was hoping to track down for an interview of his own, then casually slipping in the question: "So, didja steal the name of the magazine from an upstate New York-based scuzz-rock group or what?" He smiled enigmatically but stonewalled. By which I mean, he had one of his goons - excuse me, "interns" - pick me up and fling me head-first into a granite partition he had built for just such an occasion. I wondered if he was hiding something, but I let it go and even attempted to appease him by allowing him to rest his coffee mug on my head for the next fortnight.
The albums arrived in the post a few days later - Dog Piss on Dog, their first release, and Sucked In, Blown Out, their brand-new sophomore effort. Any nomenclatural qualms aside, they're fantastic records, far beyond the simple fuzz-thuggery of their would-be new-garage peers. In fact, they have a crazed contempo swing, like an electrified bull's pizzle upside your ears, madly-throttled guitars and hobnail beats bolstering the untrammeled scree-yah of vocalist Marc (no last names, probably to elude the authorities) - the albums carry "Parental Advisory" stickers on them, but, since the lyrics are pretty much unintelligible, it was surely just to cover retailers' bets, like an old Pussy Galore record: I'm sure they're saying something offensive underneath all that aural mung. No question, this is not a mere attempt to regain a monoxided past that may well never have existed, but a breed of emission-belching efficiency that chugs right past nostalgia into the scum-'n'-crud-caked future.
So they're good records. Fine. But I needed answers, dammit, so I kept my scheduled phone date with second-guitarist Curt, who, as it turned out, lived up to his name - his responses to my questions were mostly on the brief side, which could have been a function of the fact that I not only had no good filler questions to ask (to bide my time before I dropped the bomb), but also that the connection was so bad (and our office uncharacteristically overrun with nattering pseudo-employees) that neither of us could hear much of what the other had to say.
Except when it came to the big question, the one that set me off in this quest and had me discovering both some mighty impressive rabid rock (not to mention the wildest take on "7 & 7 Is" since Arthur Lee's original) and the true meaning of "flat-top" along the way. After all the drab, grunting not-so-niceties had been covered (I seem to recall talking about Burt Reynolds movies and puzzling over the definition of the word "hesher," a term some Flipside writer sprung on them during their cover-story interview that neither of us could define), I coolly flipped him the query like I was flicking open a gold-plated pig-sticker, and he hipped me to the answer, the solution to the conundrum that was plaguing my soul when I could have been doing something more constructive with my time like alphabetizing my sock drawer by fabric name.
Now, here's where the conspiracy comes in - I can't for the life of me find the tape the interview is on. Every goddamned word I ever breathed, every fumfered syllable and halting glottal stopgap I ever choked out in the presence of an entertainer is all right here in front of me in my cluttered workspace, and yet this interview is gone, lost forever in some quark-like implosion, some scrungy black hole where all mysteries go to remain ever-elusive. And now I'm left with an overwhelming sense of frustration and a 1000-word gap where a full-page, listed-on-the-cover interview should go with the presses steamed up and waiting to press it into the pulp. But no matter - I can just take a perfectly ordinary 250-word review's worth of info, wrap it in a literary device tattered from excessive use, and run with it like hell 'til the page is filled. I've got a few mysterious tricks of my own, heh heh heh.
Lollipop vs. Lollipop
