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

This thread could be the hoax.

SO, youve heard the songs? but you have no copy of them?

you can find "We will retake saigon" there.

so so so so interesting, please dont let this thread die.

fucking hell. Though I have to admit liking the melodies to the songs, even if I don't like the lyrics.

http://www.dartmouth82.org/index.php?r=11

...which doesn't AUTOMATICALLY prove "Buddy Holocaust" is real. If I were to exercise my conspiracy-theory-or-obsessive-desire-to-debunk-thereof mindset, I could claim that Bill Tate was the host onto which the hoax was attached.

I do find the dynamic of believing this or not itself to be fascinating.

People either FIRMLY BELIEVE it's a hoax, or people just merely accept that it's all real.

No one is FIRMLY BELIEVING it's all real, nor are people merely accepting it is a hoax.. (which gives a little more credence to Buddy Holocaust/Bill-Tate-acting-as being, in fact, real)

I'm a big fan of ambivilence and not really knowing who the joke's on. I mean, the Wire went from praising the Frogs as gay geniuses to utterly ignoring their existence inside of a couple of months, and I figure that's because they felt they got "tricked" -- but I really do think that the Frogs (and Buddy Holocaust and Anal Cunt and Jim Roche, for Pete's sake) are tapping into some very weird territory for themselves as artists and people. Even though it could all be easily dismissed as a "joke", I'm still left with the impression that these folks are too respectful of their material for it all to be just a put on, man.

ARRRRRRRRRGH! The two sides of my mind are still battling!

donut, if you get a copy of the full tape, will you shake it down, please? i would be in your debt

REALLY?

"who invented BH -- some college student, or those wackos at FMU?"

really, this is just beyond interesting. fuck my exam tomorrow.

That person was an idiot.

Eh? Lee Greenwood, Darryl Worley, Toby Keith, Charlie Daniels Band ... ?

Mr. Bread, were you there at the panel? Would you like to shed light on why that person is an idiot? Because I've seen this person moderate another panel, and give a presentation in the past, and I can attest that this person is NOT an idiot.

Thanks for your great insight, by the way.

How do you know it was obvious?

and they were offended when his piece played? How much should you have to dance around it?

The person was not offended at the presentation. The person was offended at the song in question... specifically the "Drugs Made Me Do This" song.. a song that describes in detail sticking a knife into one's girlfriend, taking out her internals, and eating them. It may be "haha" to some, but I think many people have a right to be offended by a song like that, no matter what the fucking intention of the song was.

Anyway...

I wouldn't have started a thread about Buddy Holocaust if he was just a more controversial Wally Pleasant.

I'm totally not trying to be contentious about this, by the way, I just feel like I'm missing something.

xpost: yeah, but unfortunately many college kids do kill themselves.

Isn't there a lot of stuff like this way way underground, like I've seen weird right wing, quasi-offensive country tapes by artists I've never heard of at weird truckstops and the like...this seems to be getting more attention just cuz of the Dartmouth connection and the fact that it might be satire? Look at stuff like the David Allen Coe dirty/racist records and stuff like that...I don't think Doug's right when he says there's no tradition of right wing type music in America, it just never gets covered.

I got a personal email from Rob Graff himself (look above) who was in Bill Tate's (would-be) graduating class at Dartmouth confirming the whole thing to be true.

I also got a message from Eric Weisbard himself confirming that Bill Tate/"Buddy Holocaust" is not a hoax. And he also pleaded that he doesn't wish for that tape to circulate just yet, because there are some obviously very delicate details surrounding letting Bill Tate's parents and relatives know about this before anything is "officially" distributed, and I think Eric makes an extremely cogent point.

So there you have it.

I apologize to the great folks at WFMU for accusing them and anyone else possibly involved of doing a "hoax" in this manner, although it was really meant as an odd form of compliment, since -- HAD this been a hoax -- it would have been an exemplary execution of one, and I would believe the folks at WFMU would be succinct and smooth enough to do it.

(I say "EXTREME shock" because KEXP, to me, seems like a station that's too afraid to even play the A-Frames without isolating listeners, much less a very graphicly violent obscurity)

just wow.

I've never met the Frogs, but I have talked to Seth Putnam, and he's very nice.

I've never been on the same bill as them as a band member, and I did get a vibe from both of them, off stage, that was really quite "distant", for lack of a better term, so I can understand getting the "asshole" vibe if I were to be backstage with them. But I did see both of them being nice and apologizing for the stage act after the live show. So, different strokes, different shows, different folks, etc.

Although the really creepy guy who came on stage to show us his "thing" during the set never got an apology. The drummer reacted horrificly to him (and "it") telling the guy "What the fuck is that? Looks like one of those things you see at the state fair."

Anyway, I guess this should go on the Frogs thread instead. Apologies for the digression.

i saw at cbgb circa my daughter the broad and they sounded like a grunge band gone bad, which i mean i the good sense. they were loud, unhinged, weird and loaded with hooks. a couple years later i saw them opening for guided by voices and they were standoffish and boring and it occurred to me there was no reason whatsoever to see them more than once, but i did love that once.

Goddamn. There's only one way to rectify this situation.

The one time I saw the Frogs was in Seattle about a couple of years ago (and Ned was there!).

The weird fucking thing was I had seen them *twice* that week some thousand miles apart, as some days previously they ended up unexpectedly on a bill in between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Lovetones. A Frogs show followed by Anton in mega rant mode *as well as* the best version of BJM backing him yet = a night to remember.

The Frogs definitely react with their audience as things happen -- the San Diego show was much more 'focused,' in a relative sense, than the bizarro world of the Seattle show, which was also the final one of the tour. The audience in Seattle was also much more confrontational.

I suspect this is also true of Buddy Holocaust; having only heard the stuff Eric W. played--well, who's the intended sympathetic audience for e.g. "Another Kent State" (in the same way that there could be an intended sympathetic audience for, say, "I Ain't Marching Anymore")--someone who saw Kent State as not horrible, not even unfortunate-but-necessary, but as a good thing? Could there even be such an audience? To imagine a sympathetic audience for that song, do you have to somehow dehumanize them?

No, I could imagine it. I don't WANT to imagine it but I could, all too easily, and without dehumanizing.

That's the question of the thread, along with this one: To create a character that can sing that song sympathetically/convincingly, do you have to somehoe dehumanize yourself?

I don't have any Budd Holocaust files, but Jim Roche, whom I name-dropped, is obscure enough that folks should look here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/roche.html

"Bubble Blower" and "Fight It Out" are the two to listen to if you only listen to two.

Scroll down a bit. You'll have to listen to those two songs on Real Player, which is gross, but you can hear it.

I really liked "Forced to Kill on PCP."

Oh, and someone already linked to "We'll Re-Take Saigon" on WFMU's "On the Download" column.

"Any French Hall missive would not be complete without mentioing the late Bill Tate, our resident genius, who wrote a massive study of Nietzsche, spent nine successive terms "on", then tragically committed suicide at the age of 21 in the fall of 1981. I always think of Bill on his birthday (Sept. 3). He is buried in Laurel, Iowa."

I apologize if it was already posted.

not a modest feat