A music review in a Cleveland weekly rag called it grinding “garage rock.” But “Lemon Twist” is whole lot noisier than that.
I was on a Cramps psychobilly camp horror jag at the time, binging on my record club copy of “Flamejob.” The Cramps (well, along with the Monkees, among many others) are a guilty pleasure. Their surrealist singer/screamer/patent leather spike heel wearer, Lux Interior, was really a kind-of nerd named Erick Lee Purkhiser who hailed from my neck of the woods, not too far south of me, from Stow, Ohio, so it was in my regional DNA to cheer him on.
Lux Interior’s lyrics are hilarious. So are Cramps song titles (“Bikini Girls With Machine Guns,” anyone?) And the guitar onslaught that kicks off Flamejob’s opening track, “Mean Machine,” is unrelenting. And hypnotic. Just get a load of the wall-o-distortion guitar tsunami rattling through the tune — that’s the garage vibe I was going for in “Lemon Twist.”
Flamejob’s second track, “Ultra Twist,” in particular hit a raw nerve. Lux Interior caterwauls about the Ultra Twist, which ostensibly sounds like a curious new dance step, but upon closer listen is really a very, very old dance step, indeed:
Come on let's do it
Do the ultra twist
Jam it in and screw it
Do the ultra twist
Just go like this
The comic audacity of giving “the nasty” a goofy dance name appealed to my proclivity for all of the harebrained dances that dominated the early ‘60s teen scene — the Watusi. The Twist. The Swim. The Frug. Readers may recall that I’d written a tune on that very topic, “Girl Got Shimmy.” You may not.
No matter.
“Ultra Twist” inspired my fanboy tribute, “Lemon Twist:”
Do the lemon twist
Well it goes like this
Baby, grate my rind
Baby, you’re so fine
Baby, peel my skin
That’s the bag I’m in
Aside from the obvious Cramps homage, I packed “Lemon Twist” with Easter egg tribute references. Examples:
The song is a bit of a nod to Led Zep’s “The Lemon Song,” itself a nod to Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”
The last line of the first verse, (“…that’s the bag I’m in”) is a tip of the hat to Buzzy Linhart, another fellow Clevelander. Always dug his cover of “That’s the Bag I’m In.” It’s an obscure tune that turns out to have been written by yet another obscure Cleveland musician, Fred Neil.
Head scratcher? Nah — I’m guessing you know both Fred and Buzzy:
Fred Neil also wrote a little number called “Everybody's Talkin'." Harry Nilsson’s cover of that song kinda made it onto the soundtrack of an Academy Award winning flick you may recall. Oh, and Harry picked up a Grammy for singing it.
You may be surprised to learn that you know Buzzy Linhart, as well. He wrote a song that ultimately became Bette Midler’s signature tune, “Friends.” But Clevelanders of my cohort most remember him for his excellent track, “Talk About a Morning,” which was a mainstay on WMMS-FM (“The Buzzard”) back in the day. Invariably, “Talk About a Morning” was the tune ‘MMS freak deejays were cranking when your 70’s clock radio alarm went off at ungodly hours on work day mornings.
“Lemon Twist” is the only one of our songs on which I can readily recall Bob doing full drum overdubs. There’s no chorus or bridge in the tune per se, but you can hear his overdubbed tom tom fills as the verses end. Very jungle! With two drum kits and three distorted electric guitars pulsating with heavy tremolo and reverb, the mix winds up being pretty dense. There’s a lot going on in what sounds like a simple song. Our engineer’s track sheet explains it all in the simplest terms:
Umm, so, what exactly is the horseshoe on track 9 and the shovel on track 14 all about? While I’m pretty sure they are more conventionally used to off Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum in the conservatory, they are apparently elements integral to the mix of “Lemon Twist.”
Well, it goes like this…
“Lemon Twist”
by Fencl/Walker
© 2003 It’s Yours? Music
from the Boho Zen LP “This is Where We Are”
. . . . . . . . .
“Ultra Twist”
by Interior/Rorschach
from the Cramps LP “Flamejob”
© BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC