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July 1, 2009

DOLLYWOOD to NEVERLAND: JACKO "PLAYING WITH ANGELS" [SUICIDAL FANS PLEA]

Michael Jackson: Dolly Parton releases video tribute – see it here!

Dolly Parton has paid tribute to tragic Michael Jackson in her video diary.

The country music legend recalls Jacko’s “musical genius” and says she thinks he is now playing with the angels.

“We lost a true music legend,” she says. “This is a sad time for music lovers everywhere.

“I knew Michael and he really was a true musical genius, and a fantastic performer and a really sweet, sweet soul.

“I always thought Michael had the heart of an angel and I’m sure he’s rejoicing with them now. He’ll live on through his music.

”Dolly, 63, then urges fans to make the most of life and thanks her own fans for their support.

“Remember to make every day count and enjoy this wonderful journey that we’re all on together,” she says.

~ NICHOPOULOOZA

JACKO "PLAYING WITH ANGELS" "DOLLY PARTON" dollywood DIARY DOLLY PARTON MOURNS "MICHAEL JACKSON" breasts tits Reverend "jesse jackson" seven commit suicide TROUBLED FANS “musical genius” heart angel "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU" nichopoulooza SUICIDAL DD "double d" neverland cleavage busty endowed holler tennessee "pigeon forge" boobs "porter wagoner"

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Michael Jackson's Pets and Animals


Michael Jackson's Pets and Animals

June 26, 2009

Animals played an important role in Michael Jackson's life, abruptly cut short yesterday. One of Jackson's earliest hits, and a personal favorite song of his, was "Ben," a loving tribute to a pet rat. Jackson was just 14 years old when he recorded the song, becoming the youngest ever performer at the time to top the U.S. charts while still being a member of a group, The Jacksons.

"Ben" was written for a 1972 film of the same name. A young boy befriends Ben the rat in the movie, which was echoed in Jackson's own life since he owned a rat as well.

Pet rats were just some of the animals that Jackson cared for, and was associated with, throughout his much too short time on Earth. Please join me in a look at some of the others.

Like many young boys, Jackson owned a mini menagerie of dogs and reptiles. But, just as his superstar life spun out of "normalcy," so too did his collection of animals as time went on. His November 1986 line of stuffed toys called "Michael's Pets" paid tribute to just a handful of these animal companions— frogs, rabbits, snakes, ostriches, giraffes, llamas and, of course, Bubbles the chimp.

Jackson rescued Bubbles from a Texas cancer research clinic in 1985 when the chimpanzee was three years old. For several years, the two were inseparable. Bubbles slept in a crib at the corner of Jackson's bedroom, where he alone was allowed to use the singer's private bathroom.

Bubbles Moonwalking

Bubbles was present during the recording sessions for the Bad album. Bubbles learned how to dance and Moonwalk, and was Jackson's escort for many important award ceremonies and events. We all seek out individuals who are like us as friends, but I think Jackson had such an extraordinary life that he had trouble finding anyone to truly bond with. My guess is that he could project his need to care for another onto Bubbles, at least during this period.

When Jackson's son Prince Michael II was born, Bubbles supposedly became aggressive toward the new young presence in the singer's residences. The chimpanzee was moved to an animal sanctuary. He is now believed to be living a quiet life at a ranch in Sylmar, California.

Michael Jackson also famously loved spiders, with Katharine Hepburn and other celebrity friends at the time expressing awe, and often dismay, at his elaborate spider enclosures. His tarantulas made headlines during a few of the singer's seemingly endless series of legal trials. In 2002, for example, the singer limped into a courtroom on crutches, explaining that he was suffering from a spider bite.

"I love tarantulas, but not the little kind," the shoeless Jackson explained.

Jackson's own enormous ranch, Neverland, housed not only rare spiders, but also a video game arcade, amusement park rides and a train. But the real eye-catcher was the private zoo, which once held an elephant, a lion and other exotic animals.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a complaint in January 2006, claiming the animals were being mistreated. This was attributed by others to Jackson's money, legal and paparazzi problems, which forced him to abandon the ranch. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, however, inspected the animals at the zoo and found no evidence of abuse or neglect.

Neverland

Jackson rarely visited Neverland Ranch again, instead living between Bahrain, Europe and Las Vegas. More recently, he'd been living in a rented home in Holmby Hills near Los Angeles.

The connection between Michael Jackson and animals, as well as related controversies, swirled until the very hour of the singer's death.

Animal activists were planning to stage a boycott of Jackson's 50 planned, sold-out concerts, since sources leaked that the singer planned to make his entrance with exotic animals.

An unnamed source was quoted by the London Telegraph as saying, "He hopes to make it the most spectacular gig ever. For the jungle section, he wants to ride out on an African elephant with panthers led on gold chains. Parrots and other birds will fly behind him. If it goes to plan it will look incredible."

Craig Redmond, director of the Captive Animals Protection Society, issued a response that included, "Exploiting animals in this way really is a thing of the past and not something that someone like Michael Jackson should be doing. It would be like a circus act – a practice opposed by most people in the UK – and we are appealing to him and his management not to spoil the show by using animals."

If the rumor was true, Jackson may have had in mind the Ben Hur Live show, planned for the same venue and scheduled for later this year. It supposedly will include some 100 animals on stage.

The controversies mirror Jackson's own life: part spectacle, part quiet, withdrawn gentleness. Over the years he reached out to animals for their unconditional love and non-judgmental companionship, which I think he often gave back to them in return. While details about his private world will no doubt continue to emerge in the months to come, it would not surprise me to learn that his deepest and most long-standing friendships were with the many animals with which he shared his life.

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I GOT PICKED UP BY A HOMO TONIGHT! Planet Homo

Night of the Iguana




If you have never seen this 1964 classic black and white film by legendary director John Houston, rent it. The film is the stuff of legends: The movie featured a defrocked priest (Burton), bawdy widow (Ava Gardner), spinster artist (Deborah Kerr) and nymphet (Sue Lyon, fresh from Lolita). But Liz Taylor upstaged the entire 1964 film with her saucy shenanigans. Her passionate affair with the leading man – both were married to other partners – garnered headlines around the world. After the filming, the couple lingered in the idyllic tropical town. For her 32nd birthday, Burton gave her Casa Kimberly, a $57,000 villa linked to his own by an arched, cotton-candy-pink bridge, one story above the cobbled street. Also present were the peculiar playwright Tennessee Williams and rowdy, pistol-packing Mexican director-actor Emilio Fernandez. Once Huston reminisced: "The press gathered down there expecting something to happen with all these volatile personalities. They felt the lid would blow off and there would be fireworks. When there weren’t any, they were reduced to writing about Puerto Vallarta. And, I’m afraid, that was the beginning of its popularity, which was a mixed blessing." One only wonders if Williams had his way with the two very sexy Mexican servants, Pedro and Pepe, who literally shake their maracas throughout the movie. The film was made in 1963; while filming, President Kennedy was assassinated. Houston, fed up with America, would renounce his US citizenship. He would eventually retire to Puerto Vallarta. The film itself is extraordinary for its performances: Richard Burton casts a sexy, boyish charm to his defrocked priest. Ava Gardner plays Maxine, a kind of retired beat poet hostess who gets to keep the Mexican boys, but yearns for Burton. Deborah Kerr is the unsuspecting key to the movie. Clearly there was something going on (in character) with Burton and Kerr, and she gets to deliver the best Williams lines. Tennessee Williams certainly did have this themes, and one them was poetry. In this film, a 97 year old poet completes his final poem and dies. But there is poetry throughout this film, in that fascinating mood that only Tennessee Williams could create, which is a world where people speak in beautiful metaphors with lush prose that nearly borders the ridiculous, but manages to stay just on the side of reason.


Planet Homo
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Ramsey Kearney TV Spot [Singer of] Peace & Love (Blind Man's Penis) + Trubee Story of Song via: Song-Poem Website



Ramsey Kearney, singer of "Blind Man's Penis"

John Trubee
Peace & Love (Blind Man's Penis)

In five minutes of stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness), I hammered out the following:


"Peace & Love (Blind Man's Penis)"


I got high last night on LSD

My mind was beautiful, and I was free

Warts loved my nipples because they are pink

Vomit on me, baby

Yeah Yeah Yeah.


Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind

It's erect because he's blind, it's erect because he's blind

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind

It's erect because he is blind


Let's make love under the stars and watch for UFOs

And if little baby Martians come out of the UFOs

You can fuck them

Yeah Yeah Yeah.


The zebra spilled its plastinia on bemis

And the gelatin fingers oozed electric marbles

Ramona's titties died in hell

And the Nazis want to kill everyone.


Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind ... etc.

--lyrics by John Trubee, music and vocals by Ramsey Kearney.


John Trubee occupies a special star in the song-poem ouevre. His "Peace & Love" (AKA "Blind Man's Penis") is the most famous song-poem recording of all time. Ramsey Kearney applies to Trubee's dadaist, acid trip manifesto the special sauce which makes this one of the most unreproducible experiments in the history of popular music.

You Too Can Be A Recording Star!
by John Trubee

"Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind." This ludicrous line was invented out of sheer boredom and homicidal frustration as I labored as a cashier in a convenience store in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1975. I'd scribble some poems and weird phrases on a legal pad to vent my seething anguish. Writing on the job was a kind of self-invented therapy to prevent the onset of mental illness due to occupational stress and severe teenage alienation.

In late spring of 1976, I bought one of those horrible sleazy tabloids you find in supermarkets by the check-out stand. I had to keep up on my UFO sightings and mass hatchet murders. In the back pages of the Midnight Globe, I scanned the ads and saw: "Co-write on a 50-50 basis, earn $20,000 royalties, send your song poems to ..." some outfit in Nashville, Tennessee. I thought to myself: wouldn't it be fun to send these people the most ridiculous, stupid, vile, obscene, retarded Iyrics, to see their response?

I wanted to get an emotional letter from the jerks in Nashville. I wanted them to tell me I was crazy. I wanted them to curse me out in writing so I could show all my friends. Several weeks later I received a letter from Nashville Co-Writers which began:

Dear John,

We have just received your lyrics and think they are very worthy of being recorded with the full Nashville Sound Production. ... I am enclosing a contract of acceptance. Please sign and return along with $79.95 to cover the cost for each song to be completed ...

Aha! They wanted my money. I knew it! But if I send them the money, they would send me a tape and a record of my lyrics set to music. Although $79.95 was a lot to a minimum wage teenager, I signed the "contract of acceptance" and returned it with a check. Several weeks later I received a 7-inch, 45 RPM record that had a label and grooves only on one side. Typed on the white label was "Peace & Love" (John Trubee-Will Gentry). I immediately rushed upstairs and put this little gem on the turntable for a listen. Over the lamest, most minimal country track was some country hack singing the lyrics I wrote. I was stunned. They did change one line, though -- they excised all mention of Stevie Wonder and had the singer croon repeatedly "A blind man" instead. Also enclosed with the disc was a photograph of Ramsey Kearney, the guy who sang the damned thing. Wearing a butterfly-print polyester shirt, Ramsey looked like the perfect man to sing these demented lyrics. Several weeks later, Nashville sent a teeny 3-inch reel tape of the song in extreme stereo -- one channel had only the prerecorded rhythm track while the other channel featured Ramsey singing those idiot lyrics with a little slap-back echo thrown in. For years I had recorded hours of tapes of my teenage band, prank phone calls, studio demo tapes, synthesizer blurbles, and various recordings of an unusual nature. I wanted all this hard work to be heard, and I loved distributing my tapes simply to annoy people and sometimes even to enlighten or entertain them.

FULL VERSION BELOW:

John Trubee occupies his own special page in our song-poem discography, only in part because it doesn't easily fit in anywhere else. His solitary excusion into the form, "Peace & Love" (popularly known as "Blind Man's Penis"), is the most famous song-poem recording of all time, yet it was done -- on the lyrics end, at least -- as a tongue-in-cheek lark. It is the strangely detached, apathetic reading singer Ramsey Kearney gives to Trubee's dada/surrealist account of an acid trip that makes this song work. And work it does -- I'm sure I've listened to "Blind Man's Penis" over 100 times by now and I still haven't found the bottom of its well of delights.

The story of this hilarious record has been told numerous times. Reprinted below is Trubee's own poignant account, slightly modified from the version that appeared in the September 1985 issue of Spin magazine.

You Too Can Be A Recording Star!
Article by John Trubee

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind. This ludicrous line was invented out of sheer boredom and homicidal frustration as I labored as a cashier in a convenience store in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1975. I'd scribble some poems and weird phrases on a legal pad to vent my seething anguish. Writing on the job was a kind of self-invented therapy to prevent the onset of mental illness due to occupational stress and severe teenage alienation.

In late spring of 1976, I bought one of those horrible sleazy tabloids you find in supermarkets by the check-out stand. I had to keep up on my UFO sightings and mass hatchet murders.

In the back pages of the Midnight Globe (not the National Enquirer, as erroneously reported elsewhere -- was it Time?), I scanned the geeky little ads and saw: "Cowrite on a 50-50 basis, earn $20,000 royalties, send your song poems to ..." some outfit in Nashville, Tennessee. I thought to myself: wouldn't it be fun to send these people the most ridiculous, stupid, vile, obscene, retarded Iyrics to see their response?

In five minutes of stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness), I hammered out the following:


Peace & Love

I got high last night on LSD
My mind was beautiful, and I was free
Warts loved my nipples because they are pink
Vomit on me, baby
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind
It's erect because he's blind, it's erect because he's blind
Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind
It's erect because he is blind

Let's make love under the stars and watch for UFOs
And if little baby Martians come out of the UFOs
You can fuck them
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

The zebra spilled its plastinia on bemis
And the gelatin fingers oozed electric marbles
Ramona's titties died in hell
And the Nazis want to kill everyone.

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind ... etc.


I wanted to get an emotional letter from the jerks in Nashville. I wanted them to tell me I was crazy. I wanted there to curse me out in writing so I could show all my friends.

Several weeks later I received a letter from Nashville Co-Writers which began:

Dear John,

We have just received your lyrics and think they are very worthy of being recorded with the full Nashville Sound Production. ... I am enclosing a contract of acceptance. Please sign and return along with $79.95 to cover the cost for each song to be completed ...

Aha! They wanted my money. I knew it! But if I send them the money, they would send me a tape and a record of my lyrics set to music. Although $79.95 was a lot to a minimum wage teenager, I signed the "contract of acceptance" and returned it with a check. Several weeks later I received a 7-inch, 45 RPM record that had a label and grooves only on one side. Typed on the white label was "Peace & Love" (John Trubee-Will Gentry). I immediately rushed upstairs and put this little gem on the turntable for a listen. Over the lamest, most minimal country track was some country hack singing the lyrics I wrote. I was stunned.

They did change one line, though -- they excised all mention of Stevie Wonder and had the singer croon repeatedly "A blind man" instead.

Also enclosed with the disc (actually an acetate) was a photograph of Ramsey Kearney, the guy who sang the damned thing. Wearing a butterfly-print polyester shirt, Ramsey looked like the perfect man to sing these demented lyrics.

Several weeks later, Nashville sent a teeny 3-inch reel tape of the song in extreme stereo -- one channel had only the prerecorded rhythm track while the other channel featured Ramsey singing those idiot lyrics with a little slap-back echo thrown in.

For years I had recorded hours of tapes of my teenage band, prank phone calls, studio demo tapes, synthesizer blurbles, and various recordings of an unusual nature. I wanted all this hard work to be heard, and I loved distributing my tapes simply to annoy people and sometimes even to enlighten or entertain them. I am a music fanatic, a recording fanatic, and I needed to get this material out. It was my response to a world that seems always to have told me that I am small and worthless. Putting out music for the hell of it was my way of giving the finger to a universe indifferent to my existence.

In December 1982, I received a call at work from Ron Stringer, guitarist for the Fibonaccis, an L.A. art band. Earlier that year at a gig at Al's Bar, I had given him a John Trubee sampler cassette, which contained my Nashville prank song, "Peace & Love." Ron evidently played the tape for record producer Craig Leon, who was helping the Fibonaccis release their song "Tumors" on vinyl. Craig liked "Peace & Love" so much that he wanted to release it as a 45.

Craig managed to have the record pressed by Enigma, whom I had never even heard of. I got 50 free promo copies of the record. We didn't discuss any specific deal. Any sort of greed, bitchery, money hassles, or small-minded haggling might have discouraged Enigma from marketing my record. I felt that they were doing me a favor by bothering to press it and give me some free copies. In retrospect, this attitude is one of profound naiveté borne of youthful inexperience.

When I drove to Torrance one night after work to pick up the 50 copies of my beautiful record, some guy from Greenworld came up to me and, referring to the 250 copies they had pressed, said, "We already invested $20 in this record, and we don't want to have anything more to do with it." Great. I spend years of my life playing music, studying music, using all my spare moments working on my music to agonizingly drag it into the world to give to people, and I still get the callous snub from the typical idiot in the music business.

The records were in plain white sleeves and had blank white labels. For $16 I had four rubber stamps made at a stationery store so I could stamp each record with the pertinent information. I also bought several hundred plastic record sleeves from a local Licorice Pizza and designed and photocopied my own little cover to insert along with the record.

With my original 50 copies, I did a promotional mailing to Dr. Demento and various radio stations, not expecting any response whatsoever.

I sent a copy to Los Angeles TV vampiress Elvira, a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson, who at the time hosted a show at progressive radio station KROQ-FM in Pasadena. She sent a postcard explaining that she'd attempt to play the record on her show, but she wasn't sure she would be able to due to the offensive lyric content. I basically shrugged it off, put her postcard in my files, and forgot about it.

That Sunday, Zoogz Rift, in whose band I played bass, called and told me to quickly turn on KROQ. I did, and sure enough, they were playing my song. The enlightened and godlike DJs at KROQ thereafter regularly played it.

Enigma re-pressed the record, adding it to their catalogue and christening it with the new moniker "A Blind Man's Penis," even designing a groovy little label for it. Matt Groening devoted his entire Sound Mix column in the Reader, a weekly Los Angeles tabloid, to the convoluted story of how "A Blind Man's Penis" came into existence.

I'm currently working on my second Enigma LP with my band, the Ugly Janitors of America. You, too, Mister Composer/Musician, can put out records if you bother to go to the trouble of sending obscene lyrics and suicide notes through the U.S. Postal Service, as I did. The obsolete and reactionary machinery of the music industry needs the irreverent pranks of ugly outsiders if it's to survive its rapidly calcifying descent into hermetically sealed grayness and keep alive a spark of that rebellious, independent, antiestablishment spirit of rock 'n' roll!



Ramsey Kearney, singer of "Blind Man's Penis"


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