Agent Orange – "Bloodstains" (1979)

I've lost my sense

I've lost control

I've lost my mind

Agent Orange is a surf-punk band that formed in Orange County, California in 1979.  Their song "Bloodstains" became a big hit in southern California when legendary KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer (who introduced a number of punk and new wave bands to his Los Angeles listeners) played it regularly.  

Agent Orange's frontman, Mike Palm, contended that the Offspring's 1994 hit, "Come Out and Play," appropriated a Middle Eastern-sounding guitar riff from "Bloodstains."  But the Offspring's publisher declined to pay royalties, citing a musicologist who opined that while both records did use the Phrygian scale, the two guitar parts were not identical.

(If you want to know what a Phrygian scale sounds like, play a C-major scale with the D, A, and B flatted.)

Another Orange County band, the Vandals, poked fun at Palm's claim in their 1996 song, "Aging Orange":

Back in ancient Egypt 

Many pharaohs went to jail

For misappropriation

Of my Phrygian scale

I said, "Listen, Tutankhamen, 

You're driving me insane

It's obvious those bellies are all

Dancing to 'Bloodstains.'"

Click here to read a 1996 Los Angeles Times story about the dispute.

And click here to read a discussion of the whole meshugganah mess on an Offspring.com forum.  (Robbie Fields, who contributed the most content to this discussion, was a former high-school substitute teacher who founded Posh Boy Records, which released records by Agent Orange and other Orange County punk bands.)

The "Bloodstains" saga came to a very odd conclusion in 2000, when Offspring covered the song for the soundtrack of Ready to Rumble, a forgettable "comedy" movie about World Championship Wrestling.

Here's the trailer to that movie:

Here's Offspring's "Come Out and Play."  The riff that Offspring allegedly stole from "Bloodstains" begins about 25 seconds into the song:

Here's Agent Orange's "Bloodstains."  The guitar riff that was allegedly stolen by Offspring begins at 1:12 of the song:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

R.E.M. -- "Orange Crush" (1988)

Follow me

Don't follow me

Make up your mind, Michael Stipe!

As for me, I'm choosing the "Don't follow me" option.  That's because I think you'd have to be nuts to follow Michael Stipe anywhere.

R.E.M.

I'm not a big fan of R.E.M., but you don't have a lot of choices when you need a song with "orange" in the title.

Michael Stipe -- the exceedingly brown-eyed lead singer of R.E.M. -- has said that "Orange Crush" is about a young American football player who goes to fight in Vietnam.

(Ha!)

R.E.M. lead guitarist Peter Buck had this to say about our featured song:

I must have played this song onstage over three hundred times, and I still don't know what the f*ck it's about.  The funny thing is, every time I play it, it means something different to me, and I find myself moved emotionally.  Noel Coward made some remark about the potency of cheap music, and while I wouldn't describe the song as cheap in any way, sometimes great songwriting isn't the point.  A couple of chords, a good melody and some words can mean more than a seven-hundred-page novel, mind you.  Not a good seven-hundred-page novel mind you, but more say, a long Jacqueline Susann novel.  [Although] I really liked Valley of the Dolls.

(I don't think I'd follow Peter Buck anywhere either.)

The title of "Orange Crush" isn't a reference to the carbonated soft drink.  Rather, it's a reference to the herbicide popularly known as Agent Orange.

Agent Orange (which got its name from the orange-striped plastic barrels it was shipped in) became famous during the Vietnam War. 

A U.S. Army helicopter applying
Agent Orange in Vietnam

In November 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorized "Operation Ranch Hand," the code name for a U.S. military program designed to destroy food crops as well as jungle foliage in Vietnam.

Over the next decade, the military sprayed about 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other chemical herbicides in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

The health effects of Agent Orange have been debated for years, but the Department of Veterans Affairs has officially acknowledged that several cancers and other diseases are associated with exposure to the herbicide.

Here's the official music video for "Orange Crush":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: