The Rotor Rooter Good Time Christmas Band

The last of my Christmas bin purchases - and it turns out it wasn't a Christmas album at all. It was just a very unusual (in the most awesome way imaginable) album by a few horn players with a great sense of humour.

Since I bought it for Christmas, I'll post this the day after Epiphany and start the new year with something a little more unusual than my normal fare.

Trying to describe this is a little like trying to taste a menu by looking at it.

For those of a certain age who remember The Gong Show, imagine one of the weirder acts like The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (fronted by Richard Elfman, Danny's older brother) who managed to captivate the judges without getting gonged and actually win their episode.

From the little I can find on these guys, The Rotor Rooter Good Time Christmas Band were very much in the same wheelhouse as the future Oingo Boingo boys - and they were only lads.

The Rotor Rooter Good Time Christmas Band were seasoned players who made one lone album that appears to have been lost to the sands of time. Listening to this now, I wonder how this would have warped my musical development.

I mean, these guys throw it all in a blender, from "The Good Ship Lollipop," complete with a stranger trying to give candy to a kid, to a cover of "Purple Haze" - yes, that one - and it is way better than you'd expect. Then they go and perform "The Beer Bottle Polka."

I mean, nothing was sacred.

While this is more musical comedy, the guys obviously had some serious chops. This isn't an album I can listen to all the time, but it's an album I'm pretty happy to have found.

Dr. Demento gave the band some love, and I'll be honest, he didn't make the airwaves up here - or at least anywhere I ever heard. But without him we'd have missed out on Weird Al, and I'll bet a silver dollar Weird Al had heard of these guys. So, in a way, it's sort of a closed loop, and I at least benefited indirectly.

There is a little information out there on some sites, but not a lot of good information. One of the great mysteries is how Van Halen came to cover their cover of "Happy Trails." It's kind of on the nose.

The credited band on the back cover goes like this:

Awf d'Walle
Bb Baxter
Buffalo Steve
Sgt. Charts
Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a.
Little Orphan Ollie

Come on, those are pretty friggin' awesome as far as nom de plumes go. I mean, these guys have honest-to-goodness secret identities.

I'm not sure how much training they had on the Whoopee Cushion or the Flapamba (which kind of looks like a xylophone, but weirder), but they certainly loaded up on a lot of stuff that added to their charm..

If you ever stumble upon this in the Christmas section, do yourself a favour and pick it up. Sure, I only paid a buck, but knowing what I now know, I'd have paid double that to get my hands on this.

There seems to be a blog by Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a. that hasn't been updated in over a decade, but it's a pretty fun read and probably the only place you're likely to find any information at all on this lost piece of history.

If you want to get a taste of what they were like, they have a number of tracks posted to Bandcamp - many of them not on the album.

I may just go dig out my trombone and see if I can't get my lip back in shape and figure out where eighth position is again.

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