One From the Grave: Juicy Lucy
July 10 2008 at 06:40:08 AM
You into genital tricks? “Tight & Shiny?” “Grandmother’s Tongue?” Aw, naw? How ‘bout “Fruit Basket?” The best. Easy. A tuck and run; give the gals a surprise from the rear. The shopping sack crushed snug betwixt the thighs. Nuttin’ but a bowl of bruised fruit. The Juice had the idea. Don’t think these gearheads were vogue’n for the twinks behind private club’s closed doors. Gander at the sleeve-art. Record’s straight set. It’s Alpert’s
Whipped Cream & Other Delights cum Carmen Miranda. A chorus line of Can-Can Girls, heads capped in the grocer’s green aisle, exploding frothy, fructose-drenched arabesques. These were to be jejune imagery erotique without equal. Persistent residual via
The Donny & Marie Show? —Maybe make-merry Marie Osmond waxing Miranda, Carmen? Her crown corona’d in falling tendrils of swollen green grapes? O… The rest is for the Self-Help §. Down wind at a point, I got wind of
Lie Back & Enjoy It before I knelt slack-jawed and silly-puttied before the S/T. The volk knows it. They’s done lived it. Hell, they might even have romped in it—tasted it. The Juice’s debut slab works as easy prolegomena. HERE’S WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE ABOUT! Yup. It screams. Its gatefold relaxes—a tableau of flesh: Mater Gaia herself vo-lup-tah-tay, wading the Dionysian dregs’ afterthought. Grapes, of course. A few slightly engorged bananas. A half masticated melon. Ah, Carmen Miranda. —Nothin’ like a pictorial analogue to get the un-oxygenated fluids flowing. Mo’ hard candy, pleeze.
Imprimis: Merely knowing an ensemble appropriated the burger-wid-hott-cheez-injection foodstuff as its inimitable moniker coulda/shoulda/woulda been enough. Subjected to
Juicy Lucy proper coerced that sludgy retreat into self-satisfied, gourmandean glow—abreast of aperitifs, sitting amongst a propulsive gut struggling—noisily—with the peristalsis of some four dozen bivalves slicked with nothing so much but a meyer lemon spray. Nothin’ like the “blues rawk” fo-on-tha-flow-ball-slap to aid and abet. Seeking solace in Led Zepp’s “Lemon Song” is not a door prize prized. It ain’t even emboldening. Nothing to stand on. It’s all wily instruction from the Odinist R. Plant to some precious pre-teen. Knees kiss the lino. Shiny and white: those patent leather go-go boots sparkle. O… She’s got just as much potency as you do, Preterite Plant. And with your organ being milk’d and all, you’d think you’d crane an eager ear…
But calling the Juice “blues rawk” is akin to settling for Dennis Wilson as a “surfer.” The streets were lined with the sluts, fo sho. Surfaced omnipresent as ball-gags at Southern Baptist conventions. To wit: Bertha, Black Widow, Blue Cheer, Cactus, Dias de Blues, Groundhogs, Josefus, May Blitz, Moby Grape, Patto, Stone the Crows, Toad, Trader Horne, et fuckin’ alia. Company’s good, and with a pedigree whipped up Petri-dish style within the hall closet laboratory, there was nothin’ left to do but run like rabbits at a greyhound race. That the Juice has/had connections not just separation of six degrees from SLADE, SNAFU, and—for sweet fuck’s sake—WHITESNAKE, shows what sort of molecular tendencies we’re dealing with. Flight or Fight? How about both? Sometimes this stuff comes on like a lot lizard; other times it retreats as the floor under the feet once the entire quart of 151-proof rum manages to sneak its way into the bloodstream.
So… The sounds. “Mississippi Woman.” Um. The sort of trucker pit-stop grudge fuck that shoulda been all over
Easy Rider like white on rice. Still smells like Hopper’s beard. Workman-gauge weed. Fortified wine. Three-days-in-the-saddle style crotch rot. Nuff sed. To follow it with a verso of “Who Do You Love” that not only nixes Mr. MojoRisin, but also bumps Bo from the perch perfection provokes some serious noggin’ scratchin.’ Jesus Harold Christ. Listen to Campbell’s guitar work… Maybe it’s his lap steel playin’? They’re both motherfuckin’ commendable.
In toto: tasty, chunky bits of fudge to cavity your teeth with. By the time Campbell is sneering his way through the rhythms wanton of “She’s Mine/She’s Yours,” you’re more than physically capable of shouldering this load. All the psychic baggage lost in the sauce, Ray Owen’s lung globber approach to vox more like Jagger saddled with arms fulla junk, lips an inflated Lady Liberty labial in fuckin’ vivo. The bad-vibe permagrins persist: Chu Berry’s “Nadine” goes screamin’ forth, the Look, Ma! No hands! dicta spat from every Hell’s Angel’s jugwine encrusted piehole. No worries. “Chicago North Western,” American weirdo beardo shit loosey goosey as if the Allman Bros. Band were ever able to crank out a bit of frog-giggin’ blues sorta sober by the light of the moon. “Just One Time” hopscotches backwards from Van Dyke Park’s
Discover America and plants two feet akimbo amongst Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” and a vast majority of The Beach Boys’
Wild Honey—if brought about through Zappa’s session horde harnessed with adderall. It’s an undead sort of song; craving brains in ways more bona fides than any Swedish Death Metal outfit worth its weight in salz. This is the tune that sticks in the craw. Dig the processed horns. The goofy marimba. The gallow’s pole guitar. The link conspicuously missing from No-Neck Blues Band, Van Morrison, The Stooges’ “We Will Fall,” Smothers Brothers, Exidor, any sort of meat product embellished with pimentos and/or Spanish olives and cheese. Holding true is hard to do… “I had sunny-side up; I had sunny-side down; I had sunny-side all zee way ah-wound!”
[Nuts & bolts of this piece appeared previously in slightly altered form upon The Drude’s Head Heritage site under a moniker that shall not be revealed.]
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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