What DO you want from life? Somehow I totally forgot about a song I own on vinyl until I saw a recent mention of it on Facebook. What was old becomes new again in social media, evidently.
After repeatedly hearing just one song on the local radio station Q104, I acquired the 1975 eponymous first album by a San Francisco area band known as The Tubes, produced by the legendary Al Kooper. According to Wikipedia, “The Tubes formed in 1972 in San Francisco from two Phoenix bands after they both relocated to San Francisco in 1969. The Beans…and The Red White and Blues Band…
The band’s loud, heavy jamming style didn’t attract attention and in order to make money the band would go back to Phoenix and sell-out shows to make rent.”
The album had other notable songs, notably White Punks on Dope, but it didn’t grab me as much as another tune. “The album track ‘What Do You Want from Life?’, which became another of the Tubes’ signature songs, satirizes consumerism and celebrity culture and climaxes in a ‘hard-sell’ monologue by [Fee] Waybill, which name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams, and Randolph Mantooth, as well as well-known products of the period, including the Dynagym exercise machine and a host of American vehicles such as the Winnebago and the Mercury Montclair.” It is a peculiar song that I found rather funny, and now, a peculiar time capsule.
The band would gain greater commercial success in the following decade. “In July 2015, they started a 40th-anniversary European tour, including dates in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. Dates in the U.S. followed.”
LISTEN TO What Do You Want From Life HERE or HERE.
I note for reference that the first post-Rutles album by Dirk McQuickly and his new band Punk Floyd was titled White Dopes on Punk.
My favorite Tubes track remains “Don’t Touch Me There,” from their second album (Young and Rich).
San Francisco in the late 1970s… a strange graffiti appeared all over the place: W.P.O.D. It was understood to mean White Punks On Dope. This graffiti caught the attention of the editors and content providers of the SF Chronicle newspaper, which coincidentally was the flagship rag of the Hearst Corporation (and like the “Albany” Times Union was before competition from the internet, utterly worthless when it came to reporting unbiased real news.)
So the Chronicle set out to discover what White Punks On Dope was all about. Was it a movement? Was it a social statement? Was it racism? Was it an advertisement for illegal drugs? I recall reading an interview in the Chronicle with some random character who came up with a story about how it was a statement of identity for a certain kind of person, just who he was talking about was never clear. At no point did it occur to the out of touch employees of the Chronicle that it was a song track off a popular album from a few years earlier.