Rick: Stay tuned for a crockumentary about a typical white dwarf physicist turned red giant rock star and strayed too far off the edge of the stage and accelerated twoards the center of the earth. Brought to you by Grungemoney, the distortion pedal you don't need a guitar to use. In square wave or sawtooth.
[music]
Adam: [narrator] His name was Joseph Marshall Stacks.
Joe: I think I'll smash my guitar.
Adam: She was named Betty Ephedrine.
Sam: I think I'll go smoke lunch.
Adam: [narrator] He was not a rock star. He was not an overnight sensation. She was not sensational and stayed for almost a week. She did not exist, and neither, in fact, did he. No, there was no such entity, there were no such entities. I don't even think there could have been two people in this story, let alone a story. Which reminds me of a little class A story within a story -- now then once upon a time that would begin afterwards, there was a physics major who did bizarre experiments with liquid nitrogen because he wanted to be cool, but...naahhh. Well, anyway, let's find out. Shall we?
Joe: [smoker] Listen Betty. It's hard for me to spew this, but, the Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment is going on the road. Sooner than tomorrow.
Sam: [rockchick, scathed] You rhythm harpsichordists are all sidemen anyway!
Joe: Who knows, maybe someday we'll reform as Futrelle-Burkhardt-Markewich-Cain-Cooperan? You know, that french guy, how-do-you-pronounce-his-name? Anyway, yeah, so where was I?...Oh, oh yeah. So I launched a giant air balloon and flew five miles over the mighty Champaigne-Urbana Sky-line. (Of course this was years ago, before anyone really lived in Urbana.) Yeah, it's true, I think I was the first person to cross the mighty Champaigne-Urbana border in a hot-air balloon. No, really. Of course, after that there was a whole sleu of copy cats. Oh yeah, you shoul've seen the sky. The whole thing was lit with balloons. Now that was something! Then those composers came to town, and, well things just ain't been the same around here since.
Sam: Listen, Freak, I'm following the Dead! [door slams]
Adam: But this mocumentary is not about them. Its about a physicist who could twist and Subatomic rock: The Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment.
Rick: This unfortunate travesty has been brought to you by Grungemoney. All distortion with no notes to get in your way.
Commerical guy: Are you starved for more great -- Wait a minute, uh I didn't agree to say this. What is this anyway? "Are you starved for more great rock and roll?" Yeah sure! And this?! "Well get ready for the rock and roll welfare state. It's grunge money! 'Cause we all know that great rock and roll is the first human need!?" Heck, why don't we just take all those homeless people and lock 'em up in the Assembly Hall for LallaPallooza, or how ever you spell the damned thing. I mean that would get them off the streets and outa' sight, and make a fortune for Fraudmiser beer all at once. Isn't that what all those hip, young legislators want?...
Rick: That's enough outa' you pall. You're fired!
Commercial guy: [trailing off] Oh yeah, well you can't fire me 'cause I quit!
Adam: The Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment exploded platinumgasmatterialistoryographitoplasmagoricalifornicatiom All over the stage at the Filmore West, filling stations misteriously began to crop up, along with crops and a major highway and a privately owned and sloperateddansonofabitoolatedon'tyouthink donut hole in the ozone layer, which was said to have formed from a recombinationationalitrigger of smoke from marijuanaconda cigarettes and hidroflorocarbonsaigonewiththewindobiegillisittimetogogetentigergitatorto tsallfolks preleased fuzz into the atmosphere by excessive useage of wa-wa pedals from flower power plants in the late sixties and early humid to mid seventies. In 1969 the preprotopunk era never happened to protest when Andy Foland, "left hand," formed an early band with Eric Claptongue, Jeff Beckon, Paging Jimmy Pageboy, Edgard Varez and Donna Summertime Blues Magoos called The Neo-Classifieds, which exploded onto the British posh invasion of the body-snatchers of Panama. So powerful was this explosion as to kick the time/space/money continuum off kilter knocking its kilt offhand causing its socks to stop, drop, hop, slop, flop, bop, top, mop, hock, rock, and roll. This astronomological eventure discoincided with the release of the Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment's first album: Doctor Dream Collides with the Antidream and the hit cassingle, Doctor Faustus Collides head-on with the AntiFaustus. The coincidences, fueled by the tragicomic death of all the dismembers of the Neo-Classifieds but Andy and Edgard when a plane choked on its own vomit and crashed and burned into the rotating restaurant where Eric, Jeff, Jim and Donna, and Jim--two Jims for some reason--were eating copious amounts of toasted cheese olive pickle caper anchovy sandwiches, pineapple slices, and drinkink hearty glasses of sPort Royal, was the first time in thistory a fizzy physicist and a hoochy-coochy futurist would make it to the top of the mop top charts in two bands at once in a while. Andy and Edgard had a brand new police lineup including, among the many, Iannis Xenakis and Sugar Sugar Ray Charles Ives and excluding many people, including Ronald Reagan, Mutt and Jeff, Beck and Call and Oates, Jimmy Hendrix Page, Eric Claptongue, MaDonna Summer, and the Rock and Roll V.P., Al Gore. Rumors that much ofthe band's lineup was from other planetary systems were mostly true. They were the loudest of the mal and misinformed youths mocking the block off and onto the Bay of Pigs Area Scene in 1967.
Andy: Can't Leon, braying & cloud.? Di, dean, she oh! whiff led agasp..., as differ,... whuh?... skied, a mar- jar., so-ark. At fillet-beans, mo' ram end,... Notre! autonomy hoppled, flatter... rent quit?: mall ow! fartful, casa data aqua. If'n, I. preview a wart I'm IL fixate-fish? you're furry! Fonzzie!
This is The Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment
Fan: [background stadium concert noise] [talking loudly because it's hard for the fan to hear] Yeah, I saw the sAndy Foland sElectric Pickle sExperiment while stripping on stew stablets of saspirin man. They were bad.
Interviewer: You were tripping?
Fan: No man, they were. Right off the stage. That Tesla Coil was groovy.
Andy: [in a British accent] You see, we made albums about quarks before quark was a four letter word. Nowadays people don't get into particle 'n roll like they used to. They say, "It's too esoteric,"I can't see it under a scanning electron microscope," things like that.
Producer: No no no, they didn't start out as a band, see? They were more of a travelling laboratory that would give lectures across the country. But liquid nitrogen can only magnetize a crowd for so long. Eventually they went to go see Pink Floyd, and after they saw how those boys made money off of dry ice and lasers, they decided to try something a bit more... blatantly commercial. They sold out and they were let into society and paid well to do it.
Andy: [live] This song is about the Z naught, that elusive particle which may someday confirm electroweak theory...
Narrator: There was a long period of time beginning in the early 80s when the Pickle Experiment hit financial straights. By the 80s all of RCA Records' best contracts were with the Military Industrial Complex, a world wide overnight sensation who had just returned from a tour of Grenada and Beirut to promote their latest album, Invisible Hand. Many of the bands records had been shreded, and, when questioned by Rolling Stone magazine, the lead singer of the Complex, Edy Ology, said, "The Band comes before all else." -As Andy recalls this time:
Andy: With the Military Industrial Complex being so big and all it was hard for a physicist to land a gig anywhere else but as a professional studio, female, preferabley black, better still, rasta backup singer for the Complex. But then of course if one didn't write the kind of vocals the complex needed one was plum out of a job. It was a real heck of a time for those of us who actually could write music. I mean, those guys in the complex needed those backup singers just to cover up the unmusical violences they were commiting all over the stage. The backups were the only people with any talent in the band, and they didn't even know that themselves because they were writing all those krappy chord progressions and doing all those repetitive manouvers just like the rest of the band. But, you see, they looked good, and they made the whole outfit look good up there on the technocratic stage. This kind of thing worked brilliantly in the big American Stadiums, and it went over quite well in the Europe Theatre as well. As for the third world tours, well those were financial successes, but the band didn't look so hot for a while in the public image. That was fixed up, of course, later on when they went on their Iraq tour, which was sponsored by Coors Beer. Anyway, during those years things got real tight for us in the Pickle Experiment. The Complex looked like a high tech, high budget, well oiled machine on stage, and we just couldn't get into that whole image thing. For us particle 'n roll was always about the physics of music, never about money. In 1983 we began a project for a new album. Rick at that point was playing a gorgeous 1967 Fender Particle Accelerator, and William had just composed four thousand, two hundred and sixty seven new songs, each lasting about a nanosecond, which we were going to put on the album. Well, we just couldn't get the damned thing off the ground, with the complex and all dominating all the major recording contracts. We were actually forced to disband for a while. Rick and William got day jobs, and I began working on a cold fusion project with a drummer and bassist who were old chaps of mine from middle school. We got a few gigs here and there, and managed to scrape by, but it didn't last. We couldn't get along. We would get into these major collisions all the time, and one day the whole thing just kind of mushroomed. It got to be too much, so I decided to call the old band members and see if we could get something together again.
Fan: [Boston Dead Head] I saw the Andy Foland Electric Pickle Experiment on their 1990 reunion tour. I'll never forget it. After I caught the show in Worster I was so into them that I followed them for months. I don't know man, I was pretty messed up from the Bufferin I had popped before the show, but the Electric Pickle was so hot that night it changed my way of seeing things. They were so good even the Dead cancelled their tour right in the middle of singing Casey Jones at Buffalo Stadium so that they could follow the Pickle. They walked right off the stage in the middle of the song, out into the parking lot, and ripped off the first V.W. van they saw (It was mine which I thaught was pretty far out man.) so that they could tour with the Experiment. It was really something to see, man.