Dr. Frank's What's-it

I Wanna Hole Your Ham

Morning read: all the Beatles songs ranked.

Ranking shmanking, I don't really care about that, but unlike whoever wrote that Rolling Stones list a ways back, Bill Wyman (not *that* BW) has interesting things to say in the capsule reviews of each song. (And basically he's just a better writer.) I found it fun rather than irritating (which I can say about few enough things in this life.) He is more indulgent of John's excesses than he is of Paul's, which is a kind of personality type in a way, one that used to be a bit more common I think, and it's probable that your meter is calibrated differently than his. His #1 is entirely predictable, not that I disagree with it. About a third of these could be #1 to the degree that it matters. (It'd be "I Want to Hold Your Hand" for me, probably, just because.) I think he really underestimates "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," which is a John highlight for me.

p.s. in re., Bill Wyman, the critic: Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones bass player, once had his lawyers send a demand to Bill Wyman the critic that he cease and desist using his own name because it was the same as Bill Wyman the bass player's stage name: . It doesn't seem as if that went anywhere, but if I were Bill Wyman I'd have framed that letter or something.

p.p.s., in re IWTHYH: once upon a drunken uber ride the driver asked us what music we wanted him to play. "Beatles" my girlfriend slurred. We had to spell it for him (he genuinely seemed never to have heard of this group) so he could enter it in his app. He asked what our favorite song was. "I Wanna Hole Your Ham" I managed to burble. Somehow he found the correct track. Halfway through it, the guy said, "you know, boss, this is some pretty good shit." I don't think he was putting us on. The Power of Music.

The Confusion and the Glory

Like so many of the things we've done over the years, the "Mr T Experience? Nein Danke!" shirt design was a bit of a misfire. A parody of a seemingly ubiquitous anti-nuclear power campaign logo, it seemed funny, slightly mischievous, maybe even almost clever. Once we'd printed them up, though, it soon became apparent that we'd misjudged our audience (or something.) As Aaron succinctly put it: "nobody gets it." (Which was something of a de facto MTX motto. They should put in on my tombstone, really.) Turned out the original wasn't quite as ubiquitous as we'd imagined.

Nevertheless, we persevered in trying to unload them, one by one, to a bemused public. Years and years later, we succeeded in doing so, and turned our attention to other things nobody was going to get. When the band caught a sort of "second wind" in the mid-90s, however, we started to get lots of people coming up at shows and asking if we had any of those "nine dank" shirts. They still didn't get it, generally speaking, but somehow that misfire had become popular as its own discrete thing, completely separate from the thing it was a parody of. Weird phenomenon. So we made more and scattered approximately one zillion of them around the USA and the world. It was one of the more popular designs we'd ever done.

But that was long, long ago. Sounds Radical is doing a limited re-issue of it now. You don't have to get it to get it, just do it now: orders are open through June 12. Celebrate the confusion and the glory.