The video is taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show on Friday 5 March 1993. By the time he came to re-broadcast Sissy Bar, seven weeks later, he had a clearer idea over what The Peter Fonda Album was all about. It was released by a collective that called itself Peter the Man Eeter and comprised six different artists, some of whom never released anything other than the track that they recorded for this album. I suspect that the artists involved all knew each other to some degree, not least because a couple of them appeared on a follow up album which was dedicated to Night of the Living Dead. One of the artists who appeared on both records, an underground film maker called Jon Moritsugu recorded a tune for the Living Dead record called The Death of Peter Fonda.
The Peter Fonda Album appears to have been inspired by a group of people who hero worshipped Fonda. I’ve not heard the album in full, and some of the tracks listed on it leave me wondering what they have to do with Peter Fonda. Zip Code Rapists for instance offer up a cover of Her Majesty, the shortest Beatles song, but surely She Said She Said would be a better choice given that Fonda inspired John Lennon to write it in the first place. Sissy Bar, though, offers a direct and obvious link to Fonda, being as it is a complete deconstruction of Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf, one of the key tracks on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, a film which Fonda co-wrote. As you’ll hear in the video, Peel was absolutely knocked out by what K-Tel Wet Dream had done and rightly so. There appear to be four different versions going on throughout the track, including snippets of the original recording, but interspersed with wild percussion, oriental guitar, funk freak outs, a refrain of the chorus which sounds like it’s been cribbed from a Liverpool rehearsal room space, a Woodstock-style ending, and at regular intervals throughout, Born to Be Wild’s iconic riff - albeit presented in thunderously compressed form.
K-Tel Wet Dream are smart enough to present all this in a little over 3 minutes and they keep the changes in mood and volume coming at regular intervals so nothing ever gets boring or irritating. I think that Sissy Bar nods to Fonda in a couple of other respects. The track as a whole could be taken as an attempt to set the acid trip scene in Easy Rider to music, but the use of compression in it makes me wonder whether they were inspired by Fonda’s cover of Donovan’s Catch the Wind. In late 1965, Fonda released a single, November Night, which he backed with Catch the Wind. Although Fonda sings it with a light sweetness of tone, the backing is considerably heavier than Donovan’s original with producer Hugh Masekela providing piercingly mournful washes of brass and a bassline that sits down heavily on the recording as though the wind that Fonda is trying to catch is less a breeze and more a mistral.
Videos courtesy of John Peel and Billy.
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