Now this really took some time to prep and organize. The bottle label we produced this year was deliberately kept simple (as was the next) because everything else associated with the project was so complicated. For the Bottles story we actually produced a CD insert, to size and professionally printed (courtesy of Dingo, I mean my friend Sid).
I had been working on this off and on for probably six months. Nobody I've talked to yet has gotten all the references and jokes that are built into the story. In order to create the history of the band I've had to 'borrow' images from numerous sources, usually available over the net.
For the Major Catastrophe label I started with something I was familiar with, an album called Lumpy Gravy by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. From there I added a number of bits and pieces, a number of characters from privious years wine labels and also shots of myself and Ralph and Sid.
In Flabby Road my son Elliot is in both shots, once on the sidewalk, once on the car. The beer cases in the road came from a picture on the net about a transport truck spilling its cargo. The actual shoot we did for our images was fun because we carted down all the saws and snowshoes and everything to what we felt was a fairly remote arean in Toronto, and yet we still seemed to attract an audience as we shot the pictures.
There are also pictures and references to many other things, like Greyhound and one of its driving instructors Mike Sullivan.
I have always been a big fan of the Beatles and so it was fun to create the dark image of the band featuring us. I hope you enjoy it too.
Anyway, here's the wine label.
And here's the story:
The Bottles were a Scottish rock group from Cesspool in Peat, Scotland, near Argyle. They are almost universally regarded as the worst band of all time and a runner up for the distinction of being the most grating noise in the universe. The group shattered many eardrums and achieved international criticism for their nerve to call what they did ‘playing music’. They were, and in spite of themselves, a very influential band. Their music made many musicians want to play… other types of music, any other type.
Dubbed ‘The Flab Two-Four’, the Bottles were comprised of two brothers, Colin Campbell and Ralph Campbell, and their mad drimmer Dingo. The two brothers were the principal songwriters and fecal disturbers of the group.
History:
Ralph Campbell formed a ‘Stumble’ group, the Henchmen, in 1957. On July 6th of that year, he met his brother Colin for the first time and asked him for money. Colin refused and joined the band instead. Their first regular gigs were at the nearby Campbell castle, in a club called ‘the Dungeon’. The castle was in excellent shape until the Campbells started playing there. They made the place the ruin it is today.
Castle Campbell
The Henchmen went through a progression of name changes to avoid their creditors: Dong Long and the Stubby Bottles, the Stubby Bottles, and eventually, tired of trying to remember how to spell ‘stubby’, they settled for just ‘The Bottles’. The band went through a couple of drummers in this time as well until Dingo (named as such because he used to growl and bark at audiences, sniff crotches and hump peoples legs) was found asleep at the drum kit and refused to leave. He was also asked for money, this time by both Campbells. He loaned them his credit card. The lineup was now set.
Dingo
In the early years the Bottles used to drink on stage and throw bottles at those people in the audience who clapped when they finished a song. They found out later that clapping was supposed to be a good thing but decided to still throw bottles because it was now part of their image and they were getting rather good at picking off targets, particularly in the balconies.
It wasn’t long into their career when they were asked to play in Germany for a while in order to give Scotland a break. They appeared at the infamous ‘Rat Cellar’ where they perfected their lack of talent and were discovered to be an effective form of pest control. Upon returning to the British Isles they released their first single “Love My Do Do”, which for some bizarre reason made the British charts, likely because it was mistakenly purchased by many Londoners as a record on how to house train a dog. They quickly released an album, ‘Please Police Me’, in order to see if they could make a quick buck before anyone realized they had no talent at all.
The music they played at this stage was often referred to as The Mercy Beat or The Bloody Beat, as in ‘ It’d be a bloody mercy killing if we just beat the expletive deleted out of them and left them for dead’.
The Bottles created a sensation in Scotland in the early nineteen-sixties (dubbed Bottlephobia by the press) notable for the screaming and swooning young women who saw the band, usually followed by vomiting. Eventually they were forced to leave the British Isles and go to North America as one of the several ‘thug’ British bands who were forced to do the same in what has been termed the ‘British Home Invasion’.
The Bottles had a friendly rivalry with another band... The Runny Stools, fronted by Dick Dagger. Well, not really friendly, but they seldom engaged in open warfare. Usually it was just an exchange of insults, and whatever objects came easily to hand. Mainly the members of both bands tolerated one another because they both were just too comatose to bother.
In the 60’s, when the Bottles was forced to leave the country again, this time on parole, they embarked on a world tour, not that they wouldn’t have liked to stay in any one spot for a while but once the host country discovered who these imbeciles were it wasn’t very long before they were forced to move on.
Bottlemania literally exploded in the United States when a wine barrel, part of Colin’s ‘personal’ luggage, blew up at Customs and Immigration because somebody shook it. They performed three national television appearances on the Mike Sullivan Show, rescheduled each time because the cameras kept breaking down for some unknown reason. They stopped touring in 1966. They ran out of gas, literally. The credit card they were using, belonging to Dingo (in the name of Stark Raving Richard), was maxed out and had to be put down.
The Mike Sullivan Show
Their last live gig was at the Hollywood Bowl-A-Rama, an all night bowling alley and chili stand, billed as ‘No Deposit, No Return’. It was closed by the Health Department because of the unsanitary condition of the band. They weren’t allowed to play until they changed their underwear. What the authorities didn’t know is that they changed with one another.
Around this time Ralph made a comment that the Bottles were more popular than a book he had once seen on how to pick bug crap out of ground black pepper… which caused an immense and angry reaction from entomologists worldwide. They flew into a rage and decided to boycott the band which they already weren’t buying music from anyway. Ralph also had to apologize to his sixth grade science teacher.
The Bottles retired to the studio (actually an abandoned petrochemical storage tank) and started producing albums at an alarming rate. Among their releases were such classics as Yelp!, A Day’s Night’s Hard, Revolt’er, Rubber Boot, The Mostly Brown Album, and the important Major Catastrophe’s Stretch Fabric and the Elastic Waist Band..
The Bottles also embarked on some very eclectic projects, one of which was the Maniacal Misery Tour in which they made concoctions of chili and wine which they served from a beat up old Greyhound bus touring the countryside, and then drove away before the cramps and barfing set in. They were also featured in two movies: ‘Yelp!’ and ‘A Day’s Night’s Hard’ but nobody cared and certainly didn’t go to see them.
The End: Broken Bottles
The band stayed together for an astonishing number of years until one day, because they’d run out of drink the night before, everyone woke up sober and quit the band on the spot.
After The Bottles broke up Ralph and his ‘significantly other’ Yoyo Yoko (an eccentric organic gardener from Sussex in Ashes, England) and guitarist Cleric Apton (formerly of the band ‘Crud’) went on to form ‘The Plastic No No Band’ (named after a dildo owned and operated by Yoyo Yoko) also to no critical success.
Ralph and Yoyo also staged a ‘run in’ at a major hotel in Toronto, Canada because they had to keep running into the bathroom and throwing up. There they recorded ‘Give Peas a Chance’.
Colin went on to form ‘T’ings’ and released a number of awful albums like: ‘Wieners and Beans”, “T’ings over America” and “Band on the Rum.” He moved back to Scotland where he is currently living in squalor with a sheep named Stella.
The Music:
Many of the songs written by the Bottles were about their personal experiences – like drinking too much and falling down. A good example of this was the song ‘Trickle to Rot’ which was about drinking the fermented runoff from a cattle feeding corn crib and getting drunk. The lyrics went:
“I think I’m gonna’ be sick, I think it’s today, yeuggh.
The cow that just drank this stuff’s melting away, ugh.
…He drank a trickle of rot, now he don’t care.”
A whole album was devoted to the theme of running away from angry mobs in ‘Beat The Bottles’.
Rubber Boot
The albums ‘Rubber Boot’ and ‘Revolt’er’ hearalded in a new era of experimentation for the Bottles – this time with real musical instruments, although the songs were still pure shit drivel. Most of the songs were, of course, about drinking, with wine as the beverage of choice, although other songs were a significant departure to this motif and concentrated on bodily functions like ‘Paperback Wiper’.
Other songs of that era focused on their familiar surroundings, like the dumpster and the alleyway they used to live in, featured in the songs ‘Pissy Lane’ or ‘Raw Septic Fields Forever’, and on the albums ‘Yellow Dump Truck’, and what has been called ‘The Mostly Brown Album’.
The Mostly Brown Album
After spending months in the studio, mainly because they couldn’t find the exit door, they released ‘Major Catastrophe’s Stretch Fabric and the Elastic Waist Band’– a concept album which set new heights for the band – they actually sold some.
Major Catastrophe's Stretch Fabric and the Elastic Waist Band
‘Major Catastrophe’ was a chance for the bottles to let their hair down, which promptly fell out. The songs for the album were composed at the time that they were studying Eastern Standard Mysticism under their teacher and guru Mahahaha Ronnie. It was he who guided them in the discipline of TransientMental Indentation – which involved hitting one another over the head with small ballpean hammers. Mahahaha Ronnie was also a practicioner of Yogic Flying, in which he got his pupils to buy him first class plane tickets so he could fly to other countries and annoy people with his meaningless prattle.
The Bottles were also, it must be admitted, experimenting with drugs at this time, usually those which could be dissolved in wine – like Draino and Septibac (although certain mountain grown fungus also became popular for their mind altering effects which weren’t really needed). Their music reflected this.
‘Loopy in the Sty with Doorknob’, one of the songs from the Catastrophe album, was puzzled over because of its unfathomable lyrics like:
“Picture yourself in a hat made of paper,
With cellophane jock strap and polka dot tie.
Somebody snickered, you answered quite groggy,
My woman’s inflatable, guy”.
It was eventually realized that it was not really a song about a bad drug trip, just a bad song.
The album ‘Flabby Road’ played up the theme that Colin was really a male impersonator. On the cover he’s shown walking across the road in a bathrobe and about to step in a turd
(Possibly a mirror of the problems being encountered with their production company Crapple Corp which had been formed after the voluntary death of their manager Brian Von Frankensteen.)
The ‘Letter B’ album (also called the bum or bathroom album) was the final album put out by the Bottles, and thank goodness. The title song by the same name really said it all:
“When I find myself in times of trouble,
Constipation comes to me,
There must be a movement,
Letter B.”
Letter B
The Bottles have firmly stolen their place in music history and then run for the bathroom in order to puke.They will be sorely remembered by many, particularly those who’ve witnessed their shows from balcony seats.
Again, there will never be a band quite like them, and according to popular sentiment that is a bloody good thing too.
The rear of the CD booklet had this:
2 comments:
Hey, wait a minute, I wasn't in the original "Letter B" cover - late breaking changes?
It just seemed the right thing to do posting you (as Dingo) on the album and on the web instead of the original pumpkin butt.
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