Buddy Holocaust -- forgotten anti-anti-establishment folk hero/martyr? or recent WFMU concocted hoax?

Relating back to the Afterthoughts thread from the EMP Pop Conference presentations, Eric Weisbard -- also notably one of the curators of this conference alongside his wife, Ann Powers, who both did a marvelous job, and are great great people to boot -- did a presentation himself on a character who went under the name of Buddy Holocaust. The following is the synopsis of the piece that can be found here as well, but I'll reproduce it here...

"The Buddy Holocaust Story"

On July 29, 1981, Bill Tate, a Dartmouth student, gave his only concert as Buddy Holocaust, "pragmatic nihilist" folk singer. "We will retake Saigon," he sang in one number, sounding like Phil Ochs in the employ of Oliver North. "Give me your love or I?ll destroy the world," went a more casual ditty. There was "Drugs Did This to Me" (he kills her and eats her) and "These Morons Have to Go (retching as he impersonates them)," both as catchy as they were hateful. Presumably, Tate was kidding: exaggerating the famous conservatism of his fellow students. But he brought a fierceness to the role, an embattled sense of humor, that made such conclusions suspect. Tate was too good at being Buddy Holocaust to resist him.

According to Rob Graff, "He performed dress[ed] in a military uniform to an audience that was not certain if he was serious or not (I?m not sure whether he knew himself for sure). . . . He dropped out of college just after the concert, and went to his parents house in Southern California (where they had moved from Chagrin Falls, OH). The story is that he shopped around the tape of his concert to folks in the music industry, and - perhaps not surprisingly - found little interest in its commercial potential. I heard that he died in the fall of 1981 when he drove his (parents?) car into a highway bridge piling at very high speed with no skid marks - an apparent suicide. Stark music. It?s been over 20 years, but some of his lines still haunt me."

Me too. I?ll dig more into the history, talk about how the tape found its way to Princeton, where we played it on college radio, to Columbia, where just last year an group called The Weirdo Party performed "That?ll Teach Ya, Hiroshima" in a group rendition with tuba, and to WFMU, where a digitized copy is about to hit the airwaves. The pop masquerade always, I think, holds mirrors up to mirrors. This will be a story about someone who got lost in the reflections.

...so, Eric gives his presentation, and he shows this flyer for the singular show that happened, for which he profusely thanked an old cohort of his who he used to go to Princeton with. It looks very much like a flyer I'd expected to be made for such a thing in 1981 or so.. very much photo-copying basics. He begins with the first song "Another Kent State" but Buddy introduces the song to the audience (paraphrasing): "Hope you're enjoying your dinner.. I'll warn you right now that you may vomit in the process.... Just a warning. Don't say I didn't tell you..." and then launches into a song where he aggressively strums his guitar, his sole musical instrument aside from his voice, and sings about wishing there would be another Kent State i.e. another annihilation of protesting hippies, because, of course, "they deserve it" "Wouldn't it be great.. to have another Kent State."

The songs above are also played. "What Drugs Did To Me" physically sickened me. I was this close to having a panic attack and passing out. I didn't expect this at all. I felt very disturbed by this. I figure that was the purpose.

(Also noteworthy, while I didn't hear every song on the tape, there were no swear words used ever in the clips I heard.)

Eric goes on to tell the story listed above, and presents the dilemma. How "kidding" was Buddy Holocaust? We'll never know.

It was a great piece, absolutely, despite my being VERY unnerved by the one song in particular. I won't name names, but one of the panelists and moderators for the conference behind me voiced EXTREME distress and dissent towards this song having been played... and I honestly felt good that someone else felt the same way as me.

After the entire panel (which was part of the Black Mass panel moderated by Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls) finished, I admittedly went up to Eric and asked if I could get a CDR copy of this Buddy Holocaust tape, and he told me, noddingly, "Let's talk about it"

...

So, I tell my friends on another online forum about Buddy Holocaust and present the synopsis above, and -- again, without naming names -- I get the reply from a friend, "I smell hoax".

I literally sunk into my chair at work reading those three words.

I fucking fell for it, didn't I? How embarrassing is that? Buddy Holocaust doesn't exist. This was obviously something that some characters at WFMU made up that makes for a great story about a long lost extreme obscurity figure for the purpose of this type of dialogue.. and given the whole masquerade theme of the conference, Eric and Ann must have played along -- Eric being a Princeton alumni himself -- keeping very straight faces during the presentation while they were unveiling this "story" about this guy, who really was just fabricated semi-recently.

Or was it?

I can't tell. I do believe there are people out there obscure enough to warrant a google search that only shows mostly links to plays on WMFU charts. On the other hand... hmmmmmmmmmmm.

In retrospect, this piece may have been more evocative than I thought.

For those of you who attended or not... thoughts?