Plucking and F**king

First album memories from "Weird Al" Yankovic, Mitski, and GWAR's Blöthar the Berserker

If there’s a universal truth I’ve learned, it’s that everybody has at least one fantastic yarn about their very first record.

Not the album they talk about when they’re trying to impress a first date or show off their obscure musical tastes to friends: “When I was eight, the only music that mattered to me was Thelonious Monk and Neutral Milk Hotel.” I’m talking about the record that shook their prepubescent soul long before they saw social value in pretending to be Lester Bangs or Greil Marcus. Songs that brought them to tears or made them feel powerful and fearless—and maybe even foolish enough to think that music could be their salvation.

We all have that album—the album—that feels like bedrock, that we can’t talk about without getting emotional. You know that album, what it meant to you. You’re thinking of it right now. It’s the record that first made you feel understood in ways you didn’t think possible by sound waves captured on a machine.

Here’s a few conversations I’ve had with people who make music for a living about the first album that changed everything for them.

Mike Bishop (aka Blöthar the Berserker)

A young Mike Bishop (left) and the rock creature he became (right)

A founding member and current lead singer of GWAR, a punk-inflected metal band composed of banished intergalactic Scumdogs who splatter their audiences with fountains of (fake) viscous fluids. Bishop plays Blöthar the Berserker, who carries a barrel axe and has an udder that sprays a mysterious and disgusting goo on grateful fans.

Eric Spitznagel: Do you remember your first record?

Mike Bishop: Oh yeah. It was Billy Joel’s The Stranger. And then John Lennon’s Double Fantasy. I also had a collection of Apple-branded 45s, which came in a hard box with a lid and hinges. It was a lot of really weird stuff, like Jimi Hendrix and CCR and the Plastic Ono Band. To me, it was a very odd musical landscape. But sometimes the music you choose finds its way to you rather than you seeking it out. 

ES: How does it find you?

MB: I had two grandmothers who couldn’t have been more different. One was very straitlaced and proper and Christian. The other grandmother was a little more…she was a drinker and a partier.  She had an organ and a guitar. Both grandmothers listened to music, but [my] Christian grandma, Odessa, had records at her house. She listened to a lot of Freddy Fender. She had all these records that I used to flip through, just looking for something interesting. One day, I was looking through her collection, and I came across Rock and Roll Over. 

ES: The KISS record?

MB: Yes.

ES: Your Christian grandma had Rock and Roll Over by KISS?

MB: Apparently.