Turds of Misery are from Iowa and a cult internet 70s band via this one photo and sans any actual music, though according to a site I’ve just visited, one guy says the band played a mean enough Wild Thing [that’s how I want to interpret the reference and actual quality, though if you’d said it was a shit version there would be a linguistic symmetry] and the seated gentleman minus signifying t-shirt was his dad. I lived in Iowa and certainly went to school with guys who looked like the one on the left with the crew cut, but not the dad with the tash - though I was there mainly in the mid 60s and the father would have been run out of town as a Commie. Like I would have been had anyone worked out for sure that it was my friend Peter and me who nearly burnt our small town down, but the massive straw stack that was incinerated never reached the equally massive gasoline tank next to it on the farm, and they never found out who it really was, though my recollection is Peter lit the first match.
My two residential tenures prompt memories of two specific bands: the
first I have written about elsewhere and in 1964 was the Beatles via The Ed
Sullivan Show [their hair 'frighteningly' long for that clean-cut time so you understand what I mean about
the dad in the photo]; the other was Iron Butterfly and Ina Gadda Da Vida, [released in 1968 yet I think I would have first heard it there in late '69/early '70] but that was a shorter
stay and I never returned., and also missed out on seeing the Turds.
Could this band have been called the Turds of Ecstacy, their actual
name being too literal? I guess not. A scatological tautology would have been a
prevailing inclination of the time and place: no complex paradoxes when it’s
only farm crops and animals on an infinite horizon. That could have been the title of
their first famous hippie album: Corn and Cows
on the Horizon. Better than Turds of Ennui, although......
I grew up in East Moline, just over the Iowa/Illinois border from Davenport. The Turds played a show at my high school, UT, in '75 or '76. I remember it feeling pretty subversive at the time I mean, a ROCK band? From a DIFFERENT STATE? In my SCHOOL? Wow! They certainly were not billed as 'Turds of Misery,' but sure enough, showed up wearing those exact shirts advertising themselves as such. I don't think the adults present were impressed!
ReplyDeleteCan't be certain of them playing 'Wild Thing,' but I hazily recall a particularly loud n' loose version of 'Communication Breakdown,' with the vocalist struggling with some of the higher notes (not many wouldn't).
They weren't invited back.
A wonderful anecdote, also validating the existence of the Turds! I was too young when living in Elk Horn to attend concerts - not that there were any - and I certainly don't recall any bands coming to school! Good of you to stop by and leave a message.
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