TVD’s The Idelic Hour with Jon Sidel

Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

Runnin’ to-and-fro – hard workin’ at the mill. / Never fail in the mail – yeah, come a rotten bill! / Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business. / Too much monkey business for me to be involved in! / Salesman talkin’ to me – tryin’ to run me up a creek. / Says you can buy now, gone try – you can pay me next week, ahh!

Pay phone – something wrong – dime gone – will hold / I ought to sue the operator for spinning me a tale- ahh! / Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business. / Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!

This week’s Idelic Hour has Harambe in mind. The 450 lb. gorilla was gunned down in the Cincinnati zoo after a three-year old boy fell into his cage. What a fucking drag it must be to be a monkey in a cage. Harambe at seventeen was the gorilla equivalent of a 54 year old dude.

Imagine being trapped in a prison surrounded by humans who are more interested in the triggers of their AR-15s than watching their children. (Idelic fans remember The Who in Cincinnati.) I’m sure poor Harambe was thinking, “What is this child doing in the this gross puddle of water? Let me try to help him. But these clumsy old fucking prison hands?”

Cut to: Ohio Replican, black baseball cap, red shirt, AR-15 in hand… “kablooey.”

Ironically it wasn’t long ago that we watched the latest version of Dawn of the Planet of The Apes on HBO. Upon seeing humans, Caesar put it simply, “LEAVVVVVEEEE!”

Anyway, what a bummer. I’ll call it a “Shakespearean bummer.” It’s way beyond too much sad monkey business for me to think about. Here’s an hour of songs with gorillas, monkeys, apes, prisoners, and Harambe in mind.

Who would fardels bear / To grunt and sweat under a weary life / But that the dread of something after death / The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?

RIP dude.