Stomock

This song was on both versions of Ferdukia. It's the coming-of-age story of the boy who got left in the woods. There's a parallel song for the boy the king kept, which features the line, "I played my flute/and clicked my heels/and gaily escaped under cover of night."

The key to this song, of course, slant-rhymes with 'home'.

There was a long hiatus in Stomock recording while the two halves of the Stomock lived busy lives separated by broad physical distances. In 1996, for instance, we were separated by 6,436.8 miles, give or take a tenth of a mile.

In the meantime, the Internet developed to the point where we could mail files back and forth. That's how we recorded Gut Work in 2000 (more on that later) and the second version of Ferdukia.

We spent more time on Ferdukia, I believe, than on anything before or since. It wasn't the back-and-forth that caused us to spend more time; we just worked on it very hard. And I think it shows. We threw out the songs that didn't fit our sorta-storyline and wrote new ones. We made an effort to make the songs hold together so the thing sounds like an album rather than a collection of songs made by two guys with wildly variant musical skill sets operating at a distance.

I'm proud of it, as you can tell. So I'll start with one of the new songs, When Cheng Met Eng. The original "siamese twins" analogize nicely with Ferdukia's hero/villains... not that one should take us all that seriously on any front. I wrote this one & played guitar. Bryan added bass, backing vocals and the solo.

The next album was Endangered Feces, recorded in 1989. But looking at the track list (and listening to the quality of the songs digitized from the ancient tape) I don't feel like sharing anything from that one.

Ferdukia, which followed, was a rock opera about two boys conceived in badness, born joined at the stomock, and separated at birth. The album follows (loosely) their travels as they move dissatisfied through life, eventually finding each other and paying a hack doctor to sew them back together. As the doctor who splits them apart notes in Two Sons in One (this podcast's title), "This could lead to tragic consequences."

A teacher of mine once  observed, regarding late-80's Saturday Night Live, "when you parody something that's already self-satirizing, people yawn." Ferdukia's essentially a parody of The Who's Tommy, which is somewhat self-satirizing (not intentionally, perhaps) but I think it took on a life of its own.

Many of our friends contributed. David M. did all of the drums. Steve Sinistarr sang on (and in the persona of) The Royal Nursery Maid. Mike S. played Dr. Greenpeace, who was not nearly as sinister as Mike himself. I played my first guitar on this (Life's Such a Joy, Sally Speaks Out) not counting a dubious solo on an earlier recording.

The true tragic consequences wouldn't materialize until 14 years later when we remade Ferdukia. But that can wait until the next podcast.

In 2004, we re-recorded some of the songs from our fuzzy early tapes. Here's Hang Out Yer Stomock.

The first Stomock songs were recorded in the winter of 1986-87, during a break from my freshman year in college. The sequence is a little blurry for me now, but we recorded a short tape called "Distended" and another whose name I can't remember. We declared them to be "EPs" since they only had a few songs. All of those recordings are lost, but, alas, plenty more are not. This is one of those. It's from the third tape, which we declared to be an album since it had more songs. It was called "Noxious Effluvia" and the first track, "Hang Out Yer Stomock" was a song about... Stomock, naturally, which provided advice to our many fans. This has all of the essential Stomock elements: a gut metaphor extended as far as it will go, faux arrogance, faux philosophy, and a weak pun that's only noticeable if you have a copy of the written lyrics. The line "but now the rumbling has rhythm" alludes to the drummer who was there for part of the album... but not for this version of this song. Somehow, that makes it just right.

Lyrics

I set out to write an Easter carol. I don't think I succeeded. As the Other Stomock once said, "listen in the spirit of prayerful devotion."

I marked it explicit out of deference for tender religious sensibilities. There's no icky poo poo language, though.

I was issued a special dispensation.

Everything in this song is completely and literally true.