Well, the prog contest has started, and my entry is up first. But before I tell you about that first matchup, I need to do this.
One of the entries in the prog tournament is the Strawbs' album A Collection of Antiques and Curios. And this led me into telling the guys involved in the tourny that I knew John Ford of The Strawbs, and that he had even one time backed me at a show while I sang my singular "greatest hit" song. I haven't told them what the song is yet, but what I did tell them is that I had written a song that I was sometimes invited to perform at certain musical venues, and that it was something of a "cult classic" within a very select (i.e. tiny) group of musical friends here on Long Island. One of the guys asked to hear it, and I'm going to send it to him, although I'm not happy with the only known recorded version of the song. (I flubbed the second verse a little, and I let it run too long by putting an extra musical verse in between the second verse and the chorus, so it feels a little draggy to me.) But if I'm not all that proud of this particular performance, I'll always be proud of the song itself.
So I figured if I'm going to send him the song, I should least explain it and how it came about. And what better place to lay all of that out than here.
There were four main elements that went into the creation of "Alien Anal Probe Blues". The first was the University of Stony Brook. When Denise and I first moved out to Suffolk County from Queens, I discovered The Spot, the graduate student lounge on the campus of SUNY Stony Brook. I went there one night to catch a performance of the band My Favorite, and immediately fell in love with the place. Before too long, I became friends with Godfrey, who ran The Spot (and booked all of the bands there), which led to me getting to know a number of the members of the staff of WUSB, the campus radio station (which I think has the strongest and furthest-reaching signal of any college station on Long Island). This eventually led to me joining the staff and doing a local music show on WUSB in the wee hours of the morning for about two-and-a-half years.
The second element was the blues. It's a funny thing, because while there's definitely some diversity here, by and large, Long Island, NY has to be one of the most prosperous places on Earth. This is especially true of Nassau and Suffolk counties, the two counties most often associated with it. (Technically, Brooklyn and Queens counties, both of which are part of New York City, are also part of Long Island - they're clearly part of the physical island. But when most people say "Long Island", they're really thinking of Nassau and Suffolk County.) But as prosperous and well off as Long Island is as a community, for some reason, there is a huge blues scene out here. The Long Island Blues Society has always had a thriving membership, and WUSB, being a community radio station as well as a college station, has always had more than its fair share of blues shows. So a form of music that was created by dirt-poor African-Americans in the Deep South of the U.S. is practiced rigorously and lovingly by hordes of mostly well-to-do white guys (and gals) in this huge, sprawling suburb of New York.
The third element was space aliens. One of the people I met through Stony Brook was Mike McMullen, a pleasant fellow who fronted a space-themed rock band called Argon and the Flying Sauces. Mike told me that he was fascinated with UFOs, and that growing up in northern Suffolk County, he and his friends used to love to lay up on their rooftops at night and watch the skies, because apparently Suffolk (the easternmost county in New York State -- if you go any further east, you're swimming in the Atlantic Ocean) was a hotbed of UFO activity throughout the 1980s. (I later learned one possible reason for this -- apparently, there was an Air Force base out here in those days somewhere near Montauk. And my guess is that the skies were pretty full in those days, but that the aircraft spotted were disappointingly terrestrial.)
And the fourth element was South Park. I'm a huge fan of the show South Park (although I've lost track of it in recent years.) And the very first episode of South Park (and still one of the funniest) is entitled "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe".
Now Stony Brook University is about as far north as you can go in Suffolk County. And Patchogue, where I live, is as far south. And one of the primary roads you can take to drive north to south and back again without hitting a zillion traffic lights is County Road 97, otherwise known as Nicholls Road. So as you can imagine, I spent a lot of days, and especially nights, driving up and down on Nicholls Road.
This one fine evening, I was driving home on Nicholls Road listening to one of the blues shows on WUSB. Now I have often teased my blues-loving friends that most blues songs have the same basic chord progression, and that you could take the lyrics from one blues song and transpose them onto any other blues song with little difficulty. And as I drove, sort of vaguely thinking about my friend Mike McMullen and flying saucers over Nicholls Road, and having just watched the South Park episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" the night before, a bunch of lyrics came together in my head. And as they did, I started to sing these lyrics to every single blues song that they played on WUSB during that long drive home. And by time I got home, I had written the magic that is "Alien Anal Probe Blues".
Alien Anal Probe Blues
Woke up this morning
I was feeling kind of down
Woke up this morning
I was feeling kind of down
Well my pants were down around my ankles
And I was strapped to a metal table face down
Won’t somebody help me
I’ve got me those alien anal probe blues
Won’t somebody help me
I’ve got me those alien anal probe blues
And if it was you here on this table
Well I’ll bet you’d have them too.
I see you laughing in the corner
But you do not get my point
I see you laughing in the corner
But you do not get my point
It’s just that every single one of those alien fingers
Must have at least six or seven joints!
Now I’ve seen me some bad times
But this is sure the worst
If you want to touch me down there
You’ve got to take me dancing first
Woke up this morning
I had me those alien anal probe blues
And if it was you here on this table
Well I’ll bet you’d have them too.
Now I’m a man of peace
And I believe we can be friends
I swear to God I’m a man of peace
And I believe we can be friends
But we’re gonna throw down space brother
If you go up my ass again!
Well, one and one is two
Two and two is four
I’d sit down and talk the whole thing out
But my ass is too damn sore!
Woke up this morning
I had me those alien anal probe blues
And if it was you here on this table
Well I’ll bet you’d have them too.
