Donald J. Bingle

 May 2021 Newsletter

Regular readers of this newsletter know that Jean Rabe and I have been working on a sequel to our three-time Silver Falchion Winning paranormal fantasy, horror, mystery, legal thriller with a touch of romance and humor, The Love-Haight Case Files. In connection with that, we're switching publishers and re-releasing the first book with a new cover, then following up with the sequel a couple of months later. So, today is my newsletter cover reveal of BOTH covers. Above is the new cover for Book One. Below is the cover for Book Two. Both covers were done by the incomparable Juan Padron.

Watch this space for more details on both releases. In the meantime, you can always read my Dick Thornby Thriller series. Go HERE for all the links.

 

Darkly Humorous Music

 

It seems like every long-running television series eventually has a musical episode, so why should my newsletter be any different? Not that I'm going to regale you with my singing--no one wants to hear that. Instead, I'm going to chat about some songs and groups you've probably never heard of because I find them fun and amusing.

 

My musical taste is eclectic (which is a fancy way of saying weird and somewhat scary). Oh, sure, I have played a lot of mainstream stuff over the years (from The Beach Boys to Queen, and Meat Loaf to Britney Spears and Katy Perry), but I've also had a taste for novelty stuff, too. I had 45 rpm records (and can sing the lyrics) of They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha! (with the song played backwards on the B side--I listened to both sides), and Beep Beep and Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah. I also remember classics from Dr. Demento like It's a Very Comfy Chair to Transfusion. (By the way, even though The Night Chicago Died says there is an East Side of Chicago, there's really not.) Gamers may know of Luke Ski's parody filk songs about Star Wars and such, but his rap version of Hamlet (which apparently parodies Snoop Dogg's Murder was the Case is his masterpiece in my mind. Also, check out Julie Brown's CD.

 

But, it's even more bizarre to follow groups who put out a lot of ... ahem ... eclectic stuff than to like a the occasional novelty or parody song. In this regard, I want to suggest three groups for your listening pleasure.

 

First up, mostly because I was just listening to them, is Alestorm. You know, the infamous Scottish folk heavy-metal pirate band. I first heard of them by way of their music video for Keelhauled. They have plenty of other more or less heavy metal pirate music like Captain Morgan's Revenge, Black Sails at Midnight, and Nancy the Tavern Wench, but also some stranger and more darkly humorous fare, like Leviathan, Death Throes of the Terror Squid, Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship, and Wooden Leg. And, they have plenty of drinking and party songs like Treasure Chest Pirate Quest, You Are a Pirate, and Drink (aka We Are Here to Drink Your Beer). In their last couple of albums, Alestorm has also pushed their NSFW bizarreness up an additional notch. They turned one CD (No Grave But the Sea) into a double CD by repeating all of the songs from the first in the second but barked by dogs. (Here's a sample.) And, in their latest, Curse of the Crystal Coconut, they did a similar thing, except repeating the songs in 16th Century style (plenty of harpsichord, but it really comes off as a kind of 1970s pop synthesizer sound to me.)

 

The next group is Nerf Herder. You've heard them, because they are the group that did the theme song to the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (They also appeared several times in the series, playing at The Bronze.) They have a weird mix of metal and grunge ballads with bizarre lyrics. My standouts include everything from Sorry to You Don't Want a Boyfriend, What You Want is Mr. Spock. But, they also have songs like New Wave Girl, Stand by Your Manatee, and High School Reunion. Like Alestorm, some Nerf Herders songs will cross the line into offensive, but just pass those up and move onto the next for cool fun.

 

Finally, I have to bring up Big Daddy, which is a group I first heard of because they did an album of 80s songs done fifties style. Since I wasn't listening to much pop music in the 80s (working too much), in a number of cases these were the first versions I heard of these songs. Big Daddy has done a number of additional albums with more oldies versions of newer stuff, which I used in a Timemaster game scenario I wrote years ago, but the classic has to be their re-do of the entire Beatles Sgt. Pepper done fifties style. There's even a noticeable murmuring during the long drawn out chord at the end which, if you record and play backwards, says "Why are you listening to this? Don't you have better things to do?"

 

Ooga Chuka, Ooga Ooga-Ooga Chuka (a blog post about music from April 20, 2014) 

 

Went to see Transcendence last night (a better than expected four out of five stars, perhaps because it is a thinky movie and I like that it shares some themes about uploading consciousness with my first novel, Forced Conversion and saw the movie trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which not only looked cool, but featured the Blue Swede cover of B.J. Thomas’ Hooked on a Feeling, commonly known as the Ooga Chuka Song (or Hooga Chaka ... your spelling may vary), a number one hit in the U.S. and several other countries from early in 1974.

 

Now, I’m not Forrest Gump, but I have had a few minor brushes with history in my life and, oddly enough, one of them involves this song. You see, in 1974, I was a sophomore at The University of Chicago, living in one of the dorms: Thompson House in the now-demolished Pierce Tower. Believe it or not, Thompson House claims credit for making Blue Swede’s version of Hooked on a Feeling a hit in the United States. Yep, we claim credit for making a song a #1 hit.

 

How? Well, one night someone in the dorm was listening to an obscure FM radio station—I don’t remember which one anymore—which played stuff that was well outside of the Top 40 hits. You probably couldn’t get them to play a hit if you tried. They played Ooga Chuka and this fellow thought it was pretty funny and pretty catchy. True enough if you’ve ever heard it. (Strange, but true, Blue Swede’s was the second cover to use the Ooga Chuka background, following Jonathan King’s 1971 version, which hit #23 on the U.K. charts in 1971 and which based the Ooga Chuka chant on Johnny Preston’s 1959 song, Running Bear.)

 

In any case, this fellow in my dorm wanted to share the song with other people around the halls, but of course there were no MP3 players and he didn’t own the vinyl record, so the only way to accomplish that was to gather a few guys in his room and call the radio station and request that they play the song again and then wait until they did. Eventually they did and those guys did pretty much the same thing.

 

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(continued from previous column)

 

It’s tough to find ways to amuse yourself on the campus of The University of Chicago, especially during the gray days of winter.

 

After that process repeated itself a few times, some fellow, whose name is lost to the mists of history, but may have been George Swinton, proposed that everyone call into the radio station to request the song so that they would play it more and more often and—this is the important part—someone else tune their radio to a slightly more mainstream FM station until that new station picked up the song and played it. After all, the FM stations paid attention to their competition’s playlists. Once that occurred, all of the phone-calling would shift to the new station and a yet more mainstream FM station would be monitored until they picked up the song. And so on and so on. Rinse and repeat.

 

Now, of course we didn’t have cell phones. Heck, billionaires didn’t have car phones yet. And there were no landlines in our dorm rooms. All we had was eight pay phones, one each in the four corners of the two floor dorm. So, all of these calls had to be made on pay phones. I think it is fair to say that the workability of this brilliant plan to subject Ooga Chuka on an unsuspecting world was materially assisted by the fact that pretty much the entire dorm had recently learned how to “penny” the phones. (Yep, no dial-tone first back in those days either, but enough said about that. The pay phones were taken out after a few months.)

 

More and more people got involved in the project and pretty soon the call in requests were clicking in on a regular basis. So much so, that the people at the radio stations started recognizing voices (no caller I.D. then either), so some callers started disguising their voice. The goal was to work the song up the FM lists, onto the AM lists, through WCFL in Chicago to the Holy Grail, WLS, the 50,000 watt mega top pop 40 station in Chicago. On a good day, WLS could be picked up by most of the central part of the country, as far away as Texas and Georgia. Finally, WLS played the song and the guys in my dorm logged more than two hundred calls in requests in the first hour alone to play the song again. One DJ got so sick of the requests and our calls that he put the song on as his shift/show was ending and left the studio so he wouldn’t have to listen to it again.

 

And the rest is history. Or it’s not. I don’t have enough knowledge about where and on what days the song climbed the various local charts. Maybe Thompson House was a frothy bit of sea foam on a tsunami of public opinion pushing the song up the charts. I’ll never know. All I do know is that in celebration of our victory, one night, at about 3 a.m. everyone set up their speakers facing out of the bay windows of their dorm rooms, waited until WLS played the song, cranked up the volume on our stereos to the max and blasted Ooga Chuka across the south side of Chicago with a bass that rattled windows, woke up hard-working mundanes, scared babies, and cracked speakers.

 

We were hooked on a feeling of power and elation. We believed we had made a hit song. I can’t say that we actually made Ooga Chuka a hit. But to this day, we claim to have made Ooga Chuka a hit.

 

And, as the summer progresses and Guardians of the Galaxy turns into a hit and the song reappears on the Billboard charts (see Wired’s article, Why Hooked on a Feeling Will Be the Song of the Summer Again, assuming they still have such things, I’ll reflect fondly on my brush with history.

 

So, what are the connections with writing for today’s rant? Two things.

 

First of all, causation is very complicated. The interaction of motivations and people and events sometimes leads to consequences that are hard to fathom, let alone explain. But the more important is that absolute truth sometimes doesn’t make the best story.

 

I’ve seen many writers (and you’ve undoubtedly patiently listened to many individuals at parties) relating events that have no oomph to them and when you call them on the fact that their tale had no point or punchline or was mind-numbingly boring, their answer is “But that’s what happened.”

 

Here’s the real truth.

 

Just because something happened a certain way doesn’t make it a story. Now in memoir and non-fiction, truth is important. And, you’ve got nothing but your integrity and your memory to maintain that line. (Interestingly, however, I’ve read that one reason that police are so interested in getting statements right away isn’t so much that memories fade quickly, but that when you retell a story repeatedly research shows that your brain stops accessing the actual memories of the event and starts accessing your memories of telling the story, which, by the way, is an explanation for how people actually believe things that may not and even could not have occurred. At some point they misspeak or misremember and that error, like a mutant virus, gets replicated into the future until it takes over.)

 

In memoirs, story is still important, but in fiction, it’s everything. Sure, the story needs to be credible and engaging and internally consistent, but most important it has to be a story, whether or not it’s the truth.

 

This is my story and I’m sticking to it. After all, the guys from Thompson House are the ones who climbed campus buildings in the night, who dressed up a gargoyle above an entrance to the quads as Santa Claus, who flew thousands of paper airplanes out of the eighth floor window trying to get one to hit the seminary across Garfield Avenue, and who shot tennis ball cannons trying to hit the Field House half a block away.

 

Thompson House forever. (Shorey sucks.)

 

I’ve written some other stories you might find amusing or thought-provoking. You can check them out or read more about me and my writing at www.donaldjbingle.com. And if you want to take it upon yourself to read and review my stuff and talk it up and try with your friends to turn anything I've written into a #1 hit just to say you had, I'd be most grateful.

 

Heck, that would be a story I'd love to tell.

 

 
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Donald J. Bingle is the author of seven books and more than sixty shorter works in the horror, thriller, science fiction, mystery, fantasy, steampunk, romance, comedy, and memoir genres. His books include Forced Conversion (near future military scifi), GREENSWORD (darkly comedic eco-thriller), Frame Shop (murder in a suburban writers' group), and the Dick Thornby spy thriller series (Net Impact; Wet Work, and Flash Drive). He also co-authored (with Jean Rabe) The Love-Haight Case Files (a three-time Silver Falchion winning paranormal urban fantasy about two lawyers who represent the legal rights of supernatural creatures in a magic-filled San Francisco; sequel is in the works). Don also edited Familiar Spirits (an anthology of ghost stories).

Many of Don's shorter works can be found in his Writer on Demand TM collections.

 

Get the audiobook version of Net Impact at Audible.com, Amazon, and iTunes and the audiobook version of Wet Work at Audible.com, Amazon, and iTunes.

 

Full disclosure: Various links in my newsletter or on my website may include Amazon Affiliate coding, which gets me a small referral fee (at no cost to you) if you purchase after clicking through. 

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