Welcome To the Funhouse
Sermons! Vol 9: Helloween
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re celebrating Devil’s Night with a tribute to our favourite radio show of all time.
Prelude:
This was scheduled to go out this morning at 7:30 am but at the last minute, I pulled back because it isn’t very good and reads like a basic blog post. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in design jobs and wasn’t able to devote the real time Halloween deserves; instead of talking about how the holiday has been twisted in the American psyche, a day we’ve decided to celebrate the masks and costumes we wear instead of hide behind them, or the collective weirdness of the haunted house—a phenomenon explored by my favourite anthropologist / artist Cameron Jamie, or how losing radio shows to streaming audio has robbed us of our connection to music and our time. Instead I just basically talked about myself, which isn’t nearly as interesting and comes off like me trying to impress readers. But alas…
I loved three things when I was thirteen: Skateboarding, horror movies and heavy music. I did lots of cheap special effects. I had a sword. I made a Metallica kite for an Earth Science project. Evidently I only drew skulls. My mom admitted to me in my thirties that they were a bit scared of me for a minute. To me, this sounds like a normal thirteen year old.
Two things I definitely did at thirteen:
I made a fake head wound with liquid latex and Ben Nye stage blood (mint flavour, great deep red colour), then took my bike, threw it on the side of the road and waited next to it until a car would come—then I’d fake that I’d had a terrible accident by crawling in the street. It was fun until one lady screeched to a halt, ran over to me and insisted on calling an ambulance.
Staged exploding blood fights on a busy intersection during rush hour traffic (for maximum visibility). Here’s a cheap (and stupid) way to make a squib: Take a condom and fill it with stage blood. Tape a Black Cat firecracker to one side, with the fuse exposed. Tape the condom to a soup can lid, with the firecracker between it and the condom (to “protect” you from the explosion). Tape the whole mess to your chest, light the fuse, say a quick prayer, then laugh like crazy as blood explodes everywhere.
One Halloween, I made a fake body and dragged it up on to the roof above the front door. I hid behind the pitch of the roof, and every time a group of children would come up the walk, I’d throw the body down on them, then stand up yelling. I was wearing an old goalie mask I’d bought for $5 at a garage sale in Alaska. I also had a machete. It was 1987. Kids were terrified. This went on for hours.
SERMONS! is reader-supported. If you’re wishing to support our work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Otherwise, we’ll all probably forget about this thing.
If you lived within 50 miles of Houston in the 1980s and listened to punk music, you probably listened to Chuck Roast and his show The Funhouse on KPFT 90.5. He played a schizo mix of punk, industrial and noise music. He also owned a record store and played in the noise band Turmoil in the Toybox. His show is where I first heard psychedelic punk maniacs Butthole Surfers, crusty animal rights punks Concrete Sox, the terrifying nightmare of early Nurse With Wound, and the culture jam of Negativeland and locals Culturcide. If you were adventurous in your listening, Chuck Roast had your ear. You can read / hear more about The Funhouse at Mark Twistworthy’s now defunct Texas Punk Treasure Chest. I can’t remember how I discovered it, but I was probably rotating the dial towards 91.7, a college radio station that I also was recording stuff from all the time.
The Funhouse had a huge impact on me. It had a huge impact on a lot of people. I think my whole life I’ve been trying to carry that forward, to create my shapeshifting version of The Funhouse. The way I used to make mixtapes, splicing and pasting. The way I made turntable mixes I was too hesitant to play in public; weird, collages of sound and children’s records, occasionally punctuated with actual, listenable songs.1 Sermons!, where I try and dig through all I remember and all I discover in my endless excitement for music.
I’ll forever be indebted to Chuck Roast—he scrambled my young brain so wonderfully. So here’s a tribute. His Halloween shows were some of his best, a mash of horror novelty records, Halloween sound effect records, terrifying industrial noise, musique concrete and blistering mutant hardcore. A total assault on good taste and a listener’s patience. It’s only an hour. It’s not a party mix, unless your guests are a bunch of freaks. There isn’t a song on here that was released past 1989 (except the Fliehende Sturme song which I just really like), and I can hear Chuck playing all of these. I’ve tried to make something that feels like those shows (as far as a playlist can anyway). Most of you probably won’t like it all, or any of it. I challenge you though to listen to it like I’d have to listen to the radio show: unable to fast forward—which ended up rewarding me in so many ways now that I look back. We don’t give music the time enough these days. Let these songs work their chaotic magic.
I may pass it on to him, but more likely not; he still has a record store in Houston called Vinal Edge (yes, it’s purposefully misspelled)—it’s been in business for over thirty years.
I really do love Halloween.
SERMONS! is brought to you by Musik Klub. You can also find Jamie on Twitter and Instagram, if that’s your thing. Like what you’re hearing? Help spread the word!
Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
Strangest records I had and loved to mix in were a collection of children’s speech therapy records involving the character Mr Big Ears, a rabbit teaching a group of kids how to make the mouth sound for R, for example…”ERRRR, ERRRRR, ARRRRRR”. My girlfriend at the time was a teacher at a School for the Blind, and she grabbed them for me when they were throwing them out. They were scratched to hell, and were extremely creepy when I’d pitch the speed down. They were amazing.
I loved your postscript about the strangest record you have ever owned. Some weirdo albums out there had no intention of being odd, weird, or creepy, but they are downright haunting (same with some very disturbing album covers).
On the flip side, there are some really great acid/prog albums that create a deep, dark, and disturbing listen. Two that immediately come to mind are the bad trip, acid-drenched Comus "First Utterance" (with its equally twisted album art) and C.A. Quintet's "Trip Thru Hell." Both are downright ominous, weird, and quite demonic for their time.
On a side note, when I was 10 or 11 years old, on Halloween I used to turn our garage into a haunted house. I would get a folding table and put out slimy foods, olives, noodles, etc., and turn out the lights, play eerie music from those kid's records of "Scary Sounds," and invite my friends over. With the lights off, their sense of sight was taken away, and then I relied on their sense of touch by asking them to put their hands in the cold, slimy, or warm, noodly food and then would say it was "organs" and the olives were "eyeballs." It was fun; they thought I was the weird KISS guy who was crap at football and enjoyed looking at Fangoria magazine, but we all liked each other.
These days, however, I am a wimp and struggle with a lot of horror films. I thought 'Midsommar' was absolutely brilliant, and the sense of dread Aster created from start to finish was fantastic. But it is more psychological, which I can handle, appreciate, respect, and even like. It's the slasher, gore, and relentless violence that I really struggle with these days.
PS: Playlist saved!
What a great playlist! You even included Tales of Terror from Sacramento.
Awesome.