Robert Quine, one of many moonlit fans of
Pierre Myers (aka
Pete Myers, aka
The Mad Daddy), writes in
Wavy Gravy's booklet that he tried to record all the music from
Daddy's Dadaistic radio shows, turning the recorder off when the mad one took the microphone.
Wavy Gravy itself throws itself too far in the opposite direction.
Myers served up galactic seat-of-the-pants raps, rhyming at will with only the occasional stumble, his recital of 26 alphabetical adjectives, in roughly that many seconds, sillified more than sullied by the consideration that he made most of them up. With only hints of his favorite platters, though, this disc omits the full flavor that
Andre Williams' "Greasy Chicken," among others, gave to a typical night on the Cleveland airwaves. Lacking the interplay of voice and vinyl you get from, say, the Cruisin' series, you notice how the
Daddy, however madly, wrings only limited changes from the Gillette razors, dehumidifiers, guitar schools, and record shops he's called upon to plug. This is an intriguing historical document nonetheless; after all, any man who'd fight a forced vacation by parachuting into Lake Erie (which he'd originally plan to fill with Jello) must be worth a glance-and-a-half. But the widely-circulated bootleg tapes of actual shows probably give you a better sense of the galvanization.
Myers inveighed that the show was "Nutty but it's never never dull/Just as long as the light burns in my skull!" A move to New York City didn't turn out like he'd hoped. One night before his shift began, while his second wife lay in bed,
Pierre Myers stepped into the bathroom with a shotgun, and the light fell out of him. ~ Andrew Hamlin