Gorilla Face
The Glitter Band — "Angel Face" (1974)
Happy Saturday, Jagged Time Lapsers!
The baseball season has started, and while this in itself is sadly no longer a source of joy for me — and the news of Opening Day’s MLB.TV outage and the league’s spineless decision to scrub the word “diversity” from its website because it makes white supremacists mad isn’t exactly rekindling the embers of my once-ardent fandom — I still love watching 1976’s The Bad News Bears at this time every year.
And while Greenland selfishly refuses to let our poor Vice President fuck a single one of their couches, my own overseas approval rating currently remains high enough to be invited back to the UK-based movie podcast In Film We Trust — my favorite film podcast, in fact — this time to discuss said cinematic classic, which in my not-so-humble opinion remains the greatest baseball film ever made.
It’s a really fun and quite in-depth conversation, one which Redd Kross into the mix and also finds the supremely knowledgeable Scottish hosts hipping this Yank to a couple of factoids about the film that I’d somehow missed along the way. Pop a bottle of Lucky Lager and check it out!
And speaking of Redd Kross… my friend and fellow author
invited me to guest on his Radio Kingston show GO GO KITTY the other night, and we had a blast discussing Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, spinning a bunch of my favorite Redd Kross tracks from all across their discography, and playing a set of music from some of the band’s major influences, including Patti Smith, The Runaways and Sonny Bono. The show is now archived on the Radio Kingston website, and though I can’t seem to embed the station’s player here, you can access it at the following link:https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/go-go-kitty/episodes/special-guest-dan-epstein
There was also Redd Kross (and baseball) chat aplenty this week when I guested on the
podcast with my old L.A. journalist pal and his co-host Lev Anderson. A swell time was had by all, and I reckon you might enjoy it as well…
And finally, if you missed it — and haven’t yet had yer fill of my yakking — my CROSSED CHANNELS partner
and I released our 15th podcast episode this week. This time out, we discuss the majesty of Slade, a band we both love though the stories behind our respective fandom are quite different…
As one might surmise from my recent run of Slade-tastic posts — including the first two parts of my extensive 2003 Noddy Holder interview — my head has recently been spending a lot of time in early/mid-seventies England. Which, for all the problems and issues that the UK faced at the time, still makes for a nice mental respite from treading water under the fecal greaseball waterfall that is America 2025.
So while today’s post steps out of Slade mode for the moment, it nonetheless remains firmly rooted in the dreary brown-and-gray ambience of the UK in the autumn of 1974 — a time and place that I retain a deep fondness for, and which quite obviously planted the seeds of my subsequent love of The Kinks, T. Rex, The Jam and many dozens of other British bands and artists, even though I was deeply ambivalent about being there at the time…
My sociologist father was on sabbatical that semester at the University of Warwick in Coventry, and he’d brought me and my sister (who were eight and six years old at the time) along to live with him in the nearby town of Royal Leamington Spa. We sublet a detached house on an “estate” — a term which my dad mistakenly thought signified something much grander than the lookalike string of drab red brick houses that lined our street. He was thus deeply disappointed when we pulled up for the first time in our rented Mini and saw something like this, albeit with less-impressive landscaping…
I really liked our temporary digs, though, and there was so much else that I really liked (and even loved) about our English sojourn: The castles, the museums, the train rides, the greasy bags of newspaper-wrapped chicken and chips (I didn’t like any fish that wasn’t a fish stick), the ever-present sense of history, the fascinating differences between American and British toys, candy and comic books, and of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Unfortunately, I also had to go to school while we were there, an experience which I didn’t much like at all — and one which brought pretty much every rebellious and reactionary aspect of my young self screaming to the fore. Though my father had thankfully worked it out ahead of time with the school’s headmistress that my sister and I would not have to wear school uniforms (as a Midwestern kid, I thought it absurd that boys were forced to wear shorts to school in even the most miserable weather), and that we were not to be “caned” for any infractions, I still bristled at the unfamiliar regimentation of the British school day.
I also felt completely like the proverbial stranger in a strange land. Not only did I deeply miss my friends back in Ann Arbor, but I missed having any sort of shared common ground with my classmates; these English kids had all been weaned on foods and sports and books and TV shows that I’d never even heard of, and they were likewise just as confused by the references that I’d drop. But instead of expressing any curiosity about what they were into (which I was afraid would open me up to ridicule), I responded to this pervasive sense of alienation by unleashing my inner John Wayne: I spoke with an exaggerated “American” accent, proclaimed that my country was the greatest in the world and everyone else could fuck off, and got into fistfights on the playground at the slightest provocation — which was usually something as innocuous as being good-naturedly teased for being a “Yank”. I’m sure the headmistress wished many times that she’d been free to cane my proto-MAGA/Tanner Boyle ass; I certainly deserved it.
I eventually calmed down and settled in somewhat — thanks in part to our lessons on the Norman Invasion and the Bayeux Tapestry, which were more interesting to me than anything I’d been taught back at Burns Park Elementary in Ann Arbor — but unsurprisingly didn’t make many friends among my Leamington Spa classmates. My closest pal was a kid named Malcolm, who was my age and lived a couple of houses down from our place; we’d met a week or so before school started, so I wasn’t in John Wayne mode yet, and we bonded immediately over our collections of toy soldiers and the contrasts between G.I. Joe and Action Man. And though we later did get into one major scrap (I bloodied his nose after he took a swing at me with a cricket bat) apologies were exchanged and all was forgiven by the next day. Overall, it was a really nice friendship.
Malcolm was a chatty kid with some definite “class clown” tendencies — in retrospect, he was a little like a low-wattage Keith Moon, quite cherubic and polite in demeanor but always game for the gross-out. I still have a vivid memory of him crouching on the sidewalk in his school uniform and showily pretending to lick a pile of dog shit while several of our female classmates squealed in horror. I often wonder what became of him.
Malcolm had a burgeoning interest in popular music, which — as mentioned in Part 2 of my Noddy chat — was not something I cared at all about at the time. (I have a vague memory of him having an adolescent older brother, whereas I didn’t have the benefit of an older sibling with a record collection.) We hung out at each other’s houses a lot after school, and on several occasions he invited me to watch Top of the Pops with him. “They have Americans on sometimes,” he’d tell me, but I just didn’t care, though of course in retrospect I wish I’d taken him up on his offer.
The one record I remember Malcolm playing over and over was “Angel Face,” the stomping glam-pop nugget from The Glitter Band, which had made it to #4 on the UK charts earlier that year. Not that any of that information would have meant anything to me at the time; even though I liked the song, such was my complete disinterest in pop music that I didn’t even bother to make a mental note of the band’s name. It wouldn’t be until about twenty years later, when I started to dig into UK glam beyond the basic Bowie-Bolan-Slade-Sweet axis, that I heard “Angel Face” again and finally figured out who’d recorded it.
The Glitter Band were a British sextet originally hired to back unlikely glam icon Gary Glitter (who was already 30 years old and looked not unlike Shelly Winters in an Elvis wig) on his live appearances. Their double-drumming lineup ably reproduced the raucous sound of such Glitter hits as “Rock and Roll Parts 1 and 2” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am),” a sound which had been originally created and established in the studio by Glitter’s manager/songwriter/producer Mike Leander. But in 1973, the band’s trombonist and musical director John Rossall got Leander’s go-ahead to make some similar-sounding records under the Glitter Band name; and while they continued to back Glitter (who many years later would be convicted of child sexual abuse and other heinous sexual offenses) until 1976, The Glitter Band also enjoyed substantial UK chart success on their own, scoring five Top 10 hits in 1974 and 75.
“Angel Face” remains my favorite Glitter Band single — partly because of its thumping martial drums and wall of squalling horns, but also because it reminds me of Malcolm. We’d sit together in his family’s small dining room after school, enjoying baked beans and toast and spinning the song over and over again on the vintage console stereo while singing along using slightly altered lyrics of his devising. “Gorilla Face/Gorilla Face/You’ve got the cutest gorilla face,” we’d sing, laughing hysterically all the while.
But the part of the song that always made me laugh ‘til I nearly choked was the pre-chorus (“I see your picture/What do I see?/The face of an angel/Staring at me”), the third line of which Malcolm adjusted to “The face of a gorilla”. The idea of someone having a framed snapshot of a gorilla in a place of honor on their desk — or on their bedroom dresser, like the disturbing topless sunbathing pic of Malcolm’s mom that I’d inadvertently glimpsed while chasing an errant toy airplane into his parents’ room — seemed to me like the funniest thing imaginable. Hell, it still kinda cracks me up; I might actually have to get one to help brighten these dark days.
In just a year or so, having returned to the US and slowly becoming more aware of what was on the radio, making up lyrics of our own (usually really raunchy and inappropriate ones) to contemporary pop hits would become a favorite pastime for me and my friends. It’s still something of a tic that my inner fourth grader and I grapple with in my head to this day; my ex-wife told me many times that I ruined some of her favorite songs by blurting out “improved” lyrics of my own — and, well, guilty as charged.
In my defense, I blame early exposure to the song parodies of MAD Magazine and National Lampoon (Weird Al and Blowfly would come along for me later), as well as my Grandpa Fred’s occasional forays in this particular field. But I also blame/credit Malcolm for getting me started on this dark path, even if we were only swapping out “angel” for “gorilla” at the time.
Thanks, Malcolm.
In another world Malcom may be with ya & a Gretsch.
The idea of a framed photo of a gorilla on someone’s desk made me chuckle too 😆