You call that music?

Confessions of a diehard fan of novelty albums

By F. Andrew Taylor

It's a pain in the ass to be the only one in the office without an intricate knowledge of every piss-ant metal band from the last 20 years. Half the time I don't know if my co-workers are talking about the bass player from Dokken, a degrading sex act or both. My own music collection could only be charitably called eclectic. I'll admit it: It's a godforsaken freak show. Here are five of the oddest.

Jimmy Buffet, Christmas Island. You can have your Bing Crosby and Mannheim Steamroller. When the tree is being trimmed, I gotta have guys in loud shirts singing about tropical beaches, drunken sailors and ganja. It blunts (ha!) the trauma of the previous three months of Christmas Muzak.

Various artists, Howard the Duck: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack. Yes, it is easily one of the most reviled films in recent memory, but it did feature a very young Tim Robbins, and songs produced by Thomas Dolby back when he had a career. Unfortunately, half the album is the lackluster orchestral score, which detracts from the goofiness of the rest of the songs. How can you not love Lea Thompson singing, "What good is pussy when you can't afford to eat?"

Various artists, Place of General Happiness. Once upon a time there was a 'zine called Duplex Planet put together by David Greenberger. Before he had a career at National Public Radio, he worked at a retirement home. He convinced one of the oldsters, Earnest Noyes Brookings, to write poems. Brookings became a prolific if odd poet. He was much more concerned with getting it to rhyme than such petty concerns such as depth or natural flow. The result is a lot of poems about common things with some really hilarious strangled lines. For example, a quatrain from "Skin": "Skin covers flesh of animals and humans/ The former covered with fur and the latter on the head has hair/ The skin could be reminiscent of Harry Truman/ Animals covered with fur, humans generally bare." This CD is one of five with Brookings' poems set to music by various musicians, including Brave Combo, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and XTC.

Bruce Willis, The Return of Bruno. I consider this the companion cassette to my Cybill Shepherd's Cybill Does It...To Cole Porter album. The big difference is that she can sing. Fortunately, Willis has the good sense to choose songs that don't stretch his range, which results in passable covers of "Respect Yourself," Young Blood" and "Secret Agent Man," among others. After all these years, great dollops of liquid smarm still drip from the tape.

Various artists, Gumby. I suppose this could be considered a tribute album, a celebration of all things Gumby. I suspect the inception involved a bet or enough controlled substances to paralyze the entire population of Pocatello, Idaho. Two of the songs ("Concrete and Clay" and "Bend Me, Shape Me") are simply covers that fit the theme. The rest of the songs are Gumby-specific, including "The Ballad of Gumby," "We All Are Gumby" and, painfully, "(In Love) with You Gumby" performed by Moon Unit and Dweezil Zappa. Jonathon Richmond sings "I Like Gumby" with the same nasal earnestness with which he claims to be a little airplane and a little dinosaur on his own albums. The whole thing climaxes with Frank Sinatra Jr. singing the original TV theme, "The Gumby Heart Song."

I hope you've all found this little trip through the strange recesses of my music collection entertaining and educational. If nothing else, we've learned that my spell checker doesn't know Sinatra or Dweezil but it has no problem with Gumby. There's something weird and important about that, but I can't figure it out because "Pokey's Polka" is running too loudly in my head.