Between Rocket from the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu, John Reis appeared to be cropping up on John Peel’s early 90s playlists as frequently as Mark E. Smith. By October 1992, Rocket from the Crypt were poised to release their second album, Circa: Now!, which would see them incorporate for the first time the “classic” RFTC sound of melding punk rock with brass in an attempt to become an alt-rock version of Chicago. However, in kicking off this edition of John Peel’s Music, Peel went back a year to their debut album, Paint as a Fragrance.
Maybelline is one of the more throwaway tracks on the album, built around a riff that hybridises Status Quo and Motorhead. Naming a piledriving rock song after a leading cosmetics firm and referring to the subject of the song as “he” throughout conjures up images of deranged transvestites shambling around their towns, accosting strangers to reel off the list of things that make them happy in the slightly woozy middle section. For myself, I like to think of it as the ramblings of a Maybelline salesman who’s spent too many days on the road travelling out to make sales or pitch up at conventions. Too much time spent thinking of make-up means they’re in danger of becoming make-up. The only thing keeping him sane is the list of his favourite things in the mid-section. Forgive me if this all seems far fetched, but we have little to go on. It doesn’t even seem tangentially attached to the homophonically similar Chuck Berry song, which Peel admitted that he had been tempted to play after Maybelline, but demurred on the grounds that, “It would be too obvious if I did that. You’d disapprove if I did that.” Either way, it didn’t end up with Rocket from the Crypt getting engaged by Maybelline’s marketing department.
Video courtesy of Damian Stachelski
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