Song 186: “Frownland” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

Andrew Hickey (0:03)

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.

Andrew Hickey (0:08)

Song 186, Frownland, by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Before we begin, a quick note. This episode contains discussion of mental illness, drug abuse, and cult-like controlling behaviours. There's also a short clip of a song which those who have urinary incontinence might end up setting.

Pop music is, and always has been, music for the young. And in particular, a lot of pop music has always been aimed at very small children. And because rock and roll and the TV both became popular phenomena at the same time, and the two grew up together, that means that since very early on there have been attempts to combine rock and roll with children's TV.

These attempts got supercharged after the Beatles became the biggest thing not just in popular music, but in entertainment. Every kid loved the Beatles and their music. And so very quickly the Beatles got their own Saturday morning kids cartoon on American TV, with impersonators voicing the four lads from, well, wherever they're from. It's not Liverpool.

SPEAKER_3 (1:12)

It's no use, John.

Andrew Hickey (1:14)

We can't rehearse with these people hangin about.

SPEAKER_4 (1:16)

Get out of there, you little rascal. You're ruining me tone.

Here, now. Let go of that electric cord before I, I, I, I, I, I...

That settles it. We have to find somewhere else to rehearse. Lads, I know the perfect place. It's big and it's empty.

Andrew Hickey (1:37)

It sounds fine, but how do we all fit inside your head?

SPEAKER_4 (1:42)

This is it, mates.

Andrew Hickey (1:43)

That cartoon was popular enough and ran for long enough that by the end of it the cartoon group were having rather racist adventures in a cartoon version of The Mayan Civilization to the tune of Tomorrow Never Knows and then having a follow-the-bouncing-bowl sing-along to She Said She Said, encouraging the little kiddies watching at home to sing, She said I know what it's like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad, and she's making me feel like I've never been born.

One has to wonder what the people making the cartoon thought they were doing by that point. Of course, part of the problem there was that the Beatles didn't owe their career to children's TV. They were independent musicians who didn't even watch the cartoons featuring the caricatures of themselves. Though, apparently, after John Lennon moved to the US in the 70s, he went through a phase of watching the show in reruns, and their greatest concern when coming up with songs wasn't whether they would be suitable for Saturday morning shows. Of course, the solution to this problem was to create a band specifically for Children's TV.

But of course, as we heard in the episodes on the Monkeys, they soon enough started to take control of their own music. And by Season 2, instead of recording songs like Apples, Peaches, Bananas and Pears, they were recording Daily Nightly, a song with elliptical lyrics which, depending on who you believe, are either a protest against the police repression during the Sunset Strip Riots or about sex work. But as we heard in the episode on The Locomotion, Don Kirschner, the original music supervisor for the Monkeys, worked with other people making children's TV. And for example, Little Eva has a guest appearance singing on Hanna Barbera's Magilla Gavilla Cartoon.

And when the Monkeys became too difficult for him to work with, Kirschner had the idea of creating a Cartoon Rock Band. If there were no real band members at all, just cartoon characters, they could never do anything that he didn't want them to. And for a while, the Archies worked as well as he could have dreamed.

But Kirschner wasn't the first one to have the idea of a Rock Band that was just a cartoon. Hanna Barbera had made a few attempts at things like that, though it took them a while to get anything off the ground. In 1965, as we heard in the episode on Vince Taylor, Hanna Barbera Records started up as its own label. For years, there had been records released of the characters from their cartoons, but now they were becoming a proper record label, putting out tracks by people like Louis Prima and Les Baxter, as well as attempts at creating bubblegum pop, usually performed by Danny Hutton, a session singer who had come to Hanna Barbera through Kim Fowley and who would later go on to be one of the lead singers of Three Dog Night. The first of these singles that Hanna Barbera put out was by a studio group called The Creations Four, Dance in the Sand.