Meat Shits

From my comments in the first BIUL:

“The Meat Shits were a ‘pornogrind’ band from Modesto, California with whom I have been smitten since 1990. I have a purple vinyl EP of a live Shits show that the liners claim gave a waitress a heart attack. I once possessed a shirt sporting the band’s current lineup- names like Turd Cutter and Cunt Slime- until it was seized and destroyed by a grandma.”

Every so often, I can pull off a perfect “HELLOOOO” as depicted in the cartoon above. It must be done alone; anyone within earshot will become angry. I’d record myself, but nobody wants to hear it. Believe me.

Here’s what it’s supposed to sound like:

Feel free to take some time and let that sink in. I’m well aware of how miraculous it is. This was my gateway drug to John Zorn’s Naked City. Those samples are from 8-track porn, Return of the Living Dead, Animal House, Dead Alive, and the theme from the Munsters. The first time I saw Predator 2, the titular alien let out a howl just like the vocalist of the Meat Shits, and my friend and I laughed so hard we had to stop the VCR.

The purple vinyl EP is called Pornoholic. I still have it because I hid it after the aforementioned grandmother cut up my shirt. Kids: if you’re gonna be punk, wash your own damn clothes. If you’re too lazy to clean your profane little duds, then you deserve what you get. (Plus, the front of my shirt, a gift from a friend and fellow Shits fan, read “Regurgitated Semen”, and featured a photo of a nude lady demonstrating same.)

The cover of Pornoholic is so vile it can’t be displayed on YouTube. I thought about digging it out and scanning it; it’s beyond NSFW, it’s Not Safe For Life. I’d describe it, but I’m eating right now. I never determined exactly which song sent the waitress into cardiac arrest.

My cassette copy of Bowel-Rot quit long ago, and I don’t have a turntable, so these YouTube clips are a godsend. There are times when I need to hear the prank call that intros their old tape. It’s such a jolly opener for a band that sounds like monstrous demons from the very bowels of Hell.

GWAR is another lateral move I made from the Meat Shits. Listening to their seminal (huh huh) sophomore album, Scumdogs of the Universe, it wasn’t hard to imagine the group as prehistoric alien perverts who delight in crack cocaine and anal rape. (Their Hollywood-level fabrication and costuming skills completed this illusion in concerts.) Circa 1990, there was a wonderful backlash against the censorship labels of the PMRC, where many metal bands went overboard like 2 Live Crew, and were as nasty as they wanted to be.

Scumdogs was produced partly by Alain Jourgensen of Ministry, hot off the incredible A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste. Unfortunately GWAR’s thunder was stolen for much of the ’90s by a group called Green Jelly (originally “Jello” until a lawsuit, with an umlaut over the last letter), known for a character called “Shitman” and a truly execrable single, “Three Little Pigs”. Green Jelly was stuff your dumb little brother was into, before he knew better. They were like GoBots are to Transformers; technically Green Jelly was first, but GWAR did it better.

At the fin du 20ème siècle, Green Jelly was mostly forgotten, and masks on-stage came to be more the realm of assholes like Slipknot. Time was, masks were a necessity to keep you from getting your ass kicked for your words. The godfather of pornogrind, El Duce, used to sport a black hood with his band, the Mentors. He did the same when I saw him perform with his latter-day group Gardy Loo, gargling ditties like “Clitoctomy”. Sometime later he unfortunately kissed a train.

But even the biggest shockwaves subside. The peak of shock music (such as it was) passed as soon as the record labels saw the damage done by the dreaded parental advisory labels. By the mid-90s, they did the trick; music with dirty words was officially market poison. When I bought Mr. Bungle in 1991, I had to show the cashier my drivers’ license to prove I was over 18. Two years later, I was working in the same store, carding kids trying to purchase Eazy-E’s It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa. A year after that I had to card kids for The Offspring’s Smash, because it had “dumbshit motherfucker” or some such on it. That same year, I almost lost my job when I put the hotly-anticipated Pearl Jam album Vitalogy on the PA, and since it lacked the parental advisory sticker, I was taken by surprise when Eddie Vedder screamed “I NEVER SUCKED SATAN’S DICK!!!”

Look at the state of popular music today. Did thirty years of Tipper Gore’s little censorship sticker really make things better, or did they demarcate against an entire style of expression? Do you see how control has been exerted, over three decades, leading us to the sanitized state we are now in? I witnessed GWAR shows where effigies of political leaders were beheaded and sodomized. To quote Frank Zappa, you can’t do that on stage anymore.

And you can’t turn shit into meat.