Looking for a last-minute excuse to get away from your extended family this Thanksgiving? Here’s half an hour of us talking about seasonal Totally Pauly episodes (plus bonus Son in Law!) that is guaranteed to clear the room if you put it on during the festivities. You can thank us later. We’ll be back in two weeks to close out Year (1) of the Weasel with 1997’s The Curse of Inferno!
When we last left our hero, it was 1989 and the world was teetering on the brink of full-blown Weaselmania; now, we’re picking up for a deep dive into the peak of Pauly Shore‘s pre-movie fame, including his MTV show Totally (Different) Pauly, his two (!) imperial-era standup comedy albums, and his 1992 victory-lap HBO special Pauly Does Dallas. Next time, we’ll finally talk about Encino Man! Sound good, buuu-ddies? Cool.
Video version (with much better audio syncing than last time) below:
00:00:00 Pauly’s Totally Buff Special
00:02:30 A representative example of the Totally Different Pauly opening
At long last, we’re finally concluding our two-parter on Pamela Des Barres’ epochal memoir I’m with the Band! In this episode, we get in some more digs at our nemesis Jimmy Page, with some bonus potshots at Don Johnson, and continue to gush about how nice it is to read a book where you don’t end up hating the protagonist by the end. The Book Club will be taking October off, but we’ll reconvene in November for a reader-selected book TBD–if you haven’t already suggested something, get your votes in now!
This month’s Headbangers Book Club Official Selection is a special one, as it’s the first book we’ve read that’s not a total sausage party! Pamela Des Barres may not have been a rock star in her own right (unless you count her brief stint in the Zappa-sponsored girl group the GTO’s), but her memoir I’m with the Band is a vital counterpoint to the male-dominated hijinks of ’60s and ’70s rock; plus there’s a couple of real questionable relationships with preteen boys, so it fits right in with our previous selection in even more ways than expected! We’ll be back in a few weeks with Part 2. Thanks for listening!
Turns out Meat Loaf needed a little extra time in the oven, but we’re finally back to discuss the late vocal powerhouse’s 2000 memoir To Hell and Back. Join us as we ponder Meat’s many concussions, his suitably operatic relationship with the also-recently-departed Jim Steinman, and how he’s easily in the top five of anti-maskers we would have been okay catching COVID from. We’ll be back around the middle of next month for a special Jheri Curl June miniseries on Morris Day‘s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk!
Hey mothertruckers, we’re Bach in the saddle with Part 2 of our series on Sebastian Bach‘s 18 and Life on Skid Row! This book really picked up in the second half, so please excuse the slightly flabby runtime; there’s just too many good stories for us not to discuss them. Join us again in two weeks when we discuss the first half of the late Meat Loaf‘s To Hell and Back! Rock it up!
After almost three years of ripping on trashy rock biographies with Dystopian Book Club, it was only a matter of time for us to get around to the trashiest of them all: Neil Strauss’ and Mötley Crüe’s masterpiece of filth-wallowing, The Dirt. The two-hour conversation we had doesn’t even begin to cover everything in the book, but we think it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the movie adaptation that just premiered on Netflix. Thanks to our YouTube subscribers Bruce Gaskins and Tony Bernardo for recommending we cover this book–I think it’s obvious that it gave us a lot of joy.
It didn’t take a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for this year’s Jheri Curl Junepodcast. Rick James may be the most important architect of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music who we hadn’t already commemorated with a long-term feature. He also has a hell of a story: one he told in not one, but two posthumous memoirs–2007’s Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Superfreak and 2014’s Glow–which makes him a perfect candidate for the Dystopian Book Club. A “habitual line-stepper” in both life and art, James was vital in bridging the gap between 1970s P-Funk and 1980s Jheri Curl; his later decline into drug addiction and imprisonment was unfortunate, but could only somewhat dampen his boundless talent and charisma. So join us on this most sacred of occasions as we celebrate Mr. Cold Blooded himself: a man whose artistic potential was the only thing bigger than his larger-than-life personality and appetites. Gimme some ganja!
