Hula Hoop - Oh Toby
Hula Hoop - Sometimes I Feel Just Alright
Hula Hoop - Blues From a Vaseline Gun
Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun
This programme featured a repeat of Hula Hoop’s Peel Session, which was originally broadcast on 8 January 1993. When this blog covered that show, of the three tracks I heard, I was initially only interested in Blues From a Vaseline Gun, but the repeat has given me a chance to reassess the session, and I’m delighted to now have the opportunity to include three-quarters of it on the metaphorical mixtape.
Listening to the three tracks here, I’m struck by a couple of things:
a) They recorded the session in November 1992, before news of the dissolution of Pixies became widely known. I wonder if they got wind of the fact that Black Francis was getting ready to move on to new projects, because in this session, they sound like they’re auditioning to replace them.
b) When considering the content and themes of these tracks, I wonder whether the members of Hula Hoop had been spending a lot of time watching 1970s New Hollywood movies. I say this because each of them puts me in mind of a film from that period,; one of them blatantly, the other two slightly more obliquely.
Oh Toby = Five Easy Pieces (1970) - Well this is a giveaway, most especially because the title of the film is bellowed several times over during the closing 15 seconds of the song. But the tale of the protagonist in Oh Toby is an updated version of what happens to Bobby Dupea in Bob Rafelson’s film. One difference though is that I think Hula Hoop are taking a slightly more sympathetic line towards their protagonist than Rafelson, Carole Eastman and Jack Nicholson did with Dupea. Whereas Dupea willingly walked away from a wealthy lifestyle and a potential career as a classical musician in order to work in the oilfields and screw around with cafe waitresses, Toby’s friend saw his dreams crushed at school and by a world that wouldn’t offer him the opportunities he hoped for. Although he finds consolation in his factory worker girlfriend, his Billy Joel and Bruce Hornsby CDs and his night-time joint, it’s clear that regret bites hard. Perhaps he wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll piano, but the lessons and suit his mother got him when he was 9 meant he was forced into playing classical style and an inability to satisfy what he was expected to do and what he wanted to do caused him to retreat, wounded, into the underclass.
Sometimes I Feel Just Alright = Klute (1971) - Sometimes, when watching a film, we may find that our interest and focus switches from the main characters to a supporting or minor one. Klute is named after a private investigator, played by Donald Sutherland, but I have seen it suggested that a more accurate title for the film would have been Bree, given that this is the character that the actions of the film revolve around and Jane Fonda dominates it. Her character is a freelance prostitute, looking to leave paid sex behind either to become an actress or a model. Although marketed as a thriller, the film is essentially a character study of Bree as she tries to cope with changing her life, her growing attraction to Klute and the danger she finds herself in as they try to discover what happened to Klute’s missing friend, who may have had links to Bree as an abusive client of hers. Along the way, Klute and ourselves meet some of the characters who populated Bree’s world when she was turning tricks. One of them is a prostitute turned drug addict called Arlyn Page, who Klute and Bree meet in a scene which shows that while Bree is struggling to keep her head above water, her life could have been considerably worse had she she gone the same way as Arlyn. We only meet her in one scene but it’s a memorable one, given the desperate edginess of a struggling addict conveyed by Dorothy Tristan.
I think Hula Hoop had Arlyn Page in mind when they wrote Sometimes I Feel Just Alright, which observes the inexorable descent of a woman into suicide in a devastatingly dispassionate way. The song refers to the way that girl frequently never sleeps alone, that she sleeps with lots of boys and, most memorably, kisses men with a duplex mouth/sucking in life through big blue lips. Perhaps, she is a prostitute, moving from client to client and losing her individuality with each encounter. After all, we’re told her eyes are jaundiced. From 2:30 onwards, the song takes us on the journey to death, with her sedated by a combination of knife and pills. And as she slips below the water that feels like snow, she hears the title of the song bearing her on her way. With its references to sleepless nights, and her being punished for crimes she doesn’t remember, I’ve concluded that the subject of this song is either dying or dead and that they are either a junkie or a vampire. If it’s the latter, then I propose the following:
The Addiction (1995) = Sometimes I Feel Just Alright - Maybe this track was culturally paying forward to Abel Ferrara’s heroin metaphor vampire film. I can picture him and screenwriter, Nicholas St. John discussing the movie, with a copy of Hula Hoop’s album, My Sweet Amputee playing in the background. Also, the brittle, highly strung quality of the music sounds tailor made for the inside thoughts of The Addiction’s lead character, Kathleen, a quiet philosophy student turned vampire. As played by Lili Taylor, we see her hesitatingly drawn into life as a vampire, only to become consumed by it to an extent which has her finally craving death.
Blues From a Vaseline Gun = Tracks (1976) - Hula Hoop have covered drifters, drug addicts/vampires and now they round off the set with the viewpoint of a psycho. If Blues From a Vaseline Gun had been written from the perspective of the lead character in Tracks, I’m guessing that they’ve picked up from the final 15 minutes of the film, whereby Dennis Hopper, on a day off from escorting the coffin of a fellow serviceman killed in Vietnam on a train journey across America, ends up sabotaging a romantic afternoon in the park with Taryn Power, due to a series of PTSD induced hallucinations/flashbacks which have been building up inside him over the course of his journey. These eventually lead to him conducting an assault on the small town where his colleague is buried in a funeral where he is the only attendee.
The mood in Blues From a Vaseline Gun captures this spirit of romance, sensuality, mental disorientation and violence as the protagonist in it goes from an open-air session of foreplay into some kind of breakdown leading to violence. The difference being that they recognise what they’ve done, whereas by the end of Tracks, Hopper is fully committed to bringing the hell of a Vietnamese foxhole to a seemingly indifferent small town America.
Tables lifting.
The hammer’s clicking and the match is struck.
Another line from the song which leads me to think that it’s inspired by Tracks is because during the film, Hopper’s main companion is a small hand held radio from which provides the pretext for the film’s soundtrack of 1930s/40s songs to be heard. And in Blues From a Vaseline Gun, in the aftermath of whatever rampage the protagonist has gone on, they go back to their car, tormented by visions of red and find that your face is bleeding from the radio dial. But there’s no consolation in this, as they will just take up the gun again and try to blast the memory away.
The skill of Hula Hoop’s set is how they fit such intense and distressing themes into such joyous music. However, I was not persuaded either from January or March 1993 by the fourth song of the session, Leave Time to Go. Whichever movie inspired that track is not one I’m in a hurry to see.
John Peel would have been failing in his duties as a public service broadcaster if he had not followed Blues From a Vaseline Gun with a play of Vaseline Machine Gun by the acoustic guitar player, Leo Kottke. Originally recorded for Kottke’s 1969 album 6 - and 12-String Guitar, the inspiration for the track came from Kottke being woken from an open-air sleep by the noise from a nearby game of volleyball.
Peel dedicated it to his brother, Alan, who was hosting the Estonian group, Roovel Oobik, who had come over to the UK to record a Peel Session on March 20, but found to their horror, that the earliest they could return to Estonia was April 4. Peel had offered the band a chance to stay at Peel Acres, but the band had declined as they felt there was not going to be enough for them to do in Stowmarket compared to London.
Some links
Hula Hoop have put most of their output, including both their Peel Sessions on their Bandcamp page.
Tracks has been uploaded to YouTube, albeit in a version which sounds like it’s suffering from low-grade tinnitus. If you can’t face the prospect of sitting through Hopper, Dean Stockwell and others improvising on a train, then watch from 1:16 to the end to see where I think Hula Hoop may have been getting inspiration from.
Or maybe Tracks is inspiring me since I made similar associations around the relationship between Dennis Hopper and Taryn Power’s characters when blogging about Sundress by Hum, last year.
Klute, Five Easy Pieces and The Addiction are all on streaming services.
Lyrics copyright of their authors.
Videos courtesy of Distrokid (Hula Hoop) and Dan Phillips (Kottke).
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