When Drew McIntyre puts on his nom de musique Big Pauper, no genre is safe. Since taking on this guise, McIntyre has laid his unique stamp on downtempo, hip-hop, ambient, and experimental. He has even exhibited the chutzpah to grab the work of Beck and mash it up and remix it with even more head nodding grooves and swirls of sound. Big Pauper is geared up to release a brand new album on April 26th via Circle Into Square Records, entitled Beyond My Means.
I was the kind of kid growing up that was always scheming, stealing, wheeling & dealing. I was a conniving little devil and if you had old collectibles I was going to find a way to charm the sense out of you and jack your shit. It didn’t matter if it was a Civil War sword, Soupy Sales trading cards, or a Dick Nixon bobble head. If it was old and dusty it was about to be mine.
None of it was ever mine for long however. The novelty of ownership typically wore off quickly. Being the snot-nosed little entrepreneur I was I started setting up shop at community yard sales to make room for more useless collectibles. People seemed rather entertained to do business with a six year old and I was always happy to take their money.
Somewhere amidst my prepubescent capitalist ventures I discovered records. I’d see ’em around at yard sales and was fascinated with the idea of there being so many of them to collect and listen to. We had a couple lying around the house, but they were all poor examples of what music should be. My grandparents’ place wasn’t much better, but there were always lots of other interesting things lying around to get my filthy mitts on. We had a medium-sized family on that side and when siblings would fly the coop they would leave their relics behind and forget about them for the decades to come. This is where I acquired what I hazily might consider one of my favorite first records.
While visiting my grandparents in the spring of 1990, I discovered a closet in my aunt’s old room I had yet to pillage. Under a pile of rotting yearbooks and a stack of half-painted canvases (that I remember also nabbing) I unearthed a batch of records that made my consumer sensibilities feverish and my musical curiosities erect. My aunt was the only one in the family, to my knowledge, awake in the sixties and her record collection elegantly reflected that. Atom Heart Mother, Sgt. Pepper, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Millennium; it was all there! The same shit I listen to today even. My grandparents seemed happy to see some “junk” leaving the house so they graciously helped me load up the trunk of the car and away I went.
Amidst this hefty stack of abandoned wax, I discovered Mothermania: The Best of The Mothers of Invention. It is a record I revere as having completely flipped my world as a kiddo. I’m not sure what initially attracted me to it out of the bunch. Maybe it was the fact that the record was called Mothermania and there were a bunch of creepy middle aged men on the cover. Maybe it was the hilarious gatefold of mustaches or the advertisement for something ominously entitled “Uncle Meat: The Musical.” Whatever it was, it’s exterior did nothing to prepare me for what was actually on the record.
Mothermania was bizarre, absurd, vulgar and musically unlike anything I had heard up to that point. It sounded like a cross between Smiley Smile and a car crash. In fact I remember wondering why they didn’t sing “nice” like the Beach Boys. “Surfer Girl” aside I was fascinated by those demented male harmonies, all that silly vegetable talk and the dissonant calamity of kazoos, gongs and tape delays. I mean, “It Can’t Happen Here” is bat shit crazy! What do you even say to a track like that? Looking back on it, this record probably had a more profound effect on me then I realize, but if I remember correctly it was a love/hate relationship.
Like most kids, I had a deep fascination with poop, farts and fucking…anything forbidden or taboo, I had to be the playground expert. I think all this went down before I got in to R. Crumb and underground comix (the Fritz the Cat obsession was age eight) so I was still a little underdeveloped in the vast land of felching, butt plugs, and bondage. But the fascination was there. Mothermania had some nasty bits about it and this was initially an enthusiastic draw for me. But as my focus shifted past the words themselves and in to the intentions within the words I found myself confused and disturbed by the perverse world of human sexuality presented on Mothermania. Doing the nasty on the White House lawn with a 13 year old? Smothering your daughter with chocolate syrup and strapping her on? Is this what adults do?
I remember getting tired of this uncomfortable and useless sexual guilt I would get from listening to “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” and I decided to destroy the record. I had this nasty soot-floor basement in my creepy two hundred year old Victorian home that was to be its burial ground. It was like the basement from The ‘Burbs, you just didn’t go down in that shit. I stood at the top of the basement steps with the lights turned off and Mothermania in my hands. I took the record out of its sleeve and with every ounce of second grade angst I could muster up I chucked it in to the darkness.
I remember expecting an explosion or something. Maybe some sparks or at least a loud sound but there was no such luck. I turned on the basement lights, went downstairs and there it lay. It was filthy from the floor but to the dismay of my dainty little soot covered ego it lay unscathed. The “Idiot Bastard Son” was still there. “Hungry Freaks Daddy” was still hungry. Even “Plastic People” was still plastic. I left it down there at the foot of the stairs in defeat (thinking the basement monster might eat it) and discovered it a couple of months later mixed in with my parents’ Lionel Richie and Seals & Crofts records.
It found its way back in to my collection with a little time, experience and depravity. Strangely enough I still have it to this day and it remains in near mint condition. In fact, I just threw it on the turntable for the sake of writing this article and it still sounds terrific. I think I overreacted a bit with the toss down the stairs but listening to it again pleasantly reminded myself why I went through such a heavy Zappa phase. This record from start to finish is pure creative brilliance. It is a delicious ayahuasca soup of absurdity, social commentary and playful musicianship. Every rock icon in the sixties had their freak flag to fly but few chose to fly a flag made of prune skin, cream cheese and TV dinners.
