Bloodhound Gang – "The Bad Touch" (2000)

I want you smothered

Want you covered

Like my Waffle House hash browns

As you know if you read the most recent 2 or 3 lines, I dreamed last week that we had a question about songs with the word “dog” in their titles at our last trivia contest.  That post listed ten dog songs (including “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges), ten songs with “cat” in their titles (like “What’s New Pussycat” by Tom Jones and “Honky Cat” by Elton John), and ten songs whose titles mentioned animals other than dogs or cats (including “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane and “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd).

Today, I’m going to give you my list of the best 25 recording artists with an animal in their name.  Here goes:

  1. Adam Ant

  2. Animals

  3. Beastie Boys

  4. Bloodhound Gang

The Bloodhound Gang

  5. Blue Öyster Cult

  6. Buffalo Springfield

  7. Byrds

  8. Country Joe and the Fish

  9. Crazy Horse

10. Danger Mouse

11. Eagles

12. Eagles of Death Metal

13. Echo & the Bunnymen

14. Great White

15. Iron Butterfly

16. Modest Mouse

17. Monkees

18. Snoop Dogg

19. Steppenwolf

20. T Rex

21. Three Dog Night

22. Toad the Wet Sprocket

23. Toadies

24. Turtles

25. Yardbirds

(You can use the comment form to the right if you think I left out anyone who deserves to be on that list . . . but I didn’t.)

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I can’t resist the opportunity to feature the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” whenever I can.  Like this guy, I can’t believe the lyrics:

Click here to watch the official music video for “The Bad Touch.”  (It’s been viewed over HALF A BILLION times on YouTube.)

Click here to buy “The Bad Touch” from Amazon.

Fugazi – "Bulldog Front" (1988)

It’s all attention to armor

To the armor you wear so well

My weekly trivia contests always include one or more questions about pop music.

There’s always a three-part question where the host plays brief snippets from three records that have something in common, and asks players to identify either the titles of the songs or the artists performing the songs.  (For example, last week the host played three excerpts from covers of Prince songs, and asked us to identify the three recording artists doing those covers.  The week before that, we were asked to come up with the titles of these three songs, all of which referenced major-league baseball teams: “Royals” by Lorde, “Red Red Wine” by UB40, and “She Talks to Angels” by the Black Crowes.)

There are often other questions related to popular recording artists as well.  On occasion, the ten-point “bonus” sheet asks us to match ten song or album titles to the artists who recorded them, or the years when they were released.

One reason a successful trivia team almost always has a mixture of younger and older players is that very few people who know sixties music also know nineties music, or aughts music.  

I’m old, and I’m great on the records that came out when I was in high school and college, but I don’t know squat about the newer stuff – that’s why I like to have at least one thirtysomething or fortysomething teammate.

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A few nights ago, I had a dream about getting a trivia question about songs with “dog” in the title.

After waking up, I lay in bed and tried to think of songs that fit that description.  Here are ten that I came up with off the top of my head:

“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley (1956)

“Walking the Dog” by Rufus Thomas (1963)

“I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges (1969)

“Hey Bulldog” by the Beatles (1969)

“Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin (1971)

“Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo (1971)

“Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie (1974)

“Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth (1975)

“Bulldog Front” by Fugazi (1988)

“Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men (2000)

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There are a fair number of records with “cat” in their title as well.  Here are ten of them:

“What’s New, Pussycat?” By Tom Jones (1965)

“Nashville Cats” by the Lovin’ Spoonful (1966)

“Stray Cat Blues” by the Rolling Stones (1968)

“China Cat Sunflower” by the Grateful Dead (1969)

“Honky Cat” by Elton John (1972)

“Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin (1974)

“The Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart (1976) 

“Cat Scratch Fever” by Ted Nugent (1977)

“Cool for Cats” by Squeeze (1979)

“Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” by David Bowie (1983)

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Of course, there are some very well-known records whose titles reference animals other than dogs or cats.  Here are ten examples:

“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (1967)

“I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles (1967)

“Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones (1969)

“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath (1970)

“A Horse with No Name” by America (1971)

“Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973)

“Rock Lobster” by the B-52s (1978)

“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (1982)

“Hungry Like the Wolf’ by Duran Duran (1982)

“When Doves Cry” by Prince (1984)

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Each of those three lists has some truly great records.  But I think the records on the third list are probably stronger on average than the records on either of the first two.

If I had to choose between the records on the dog list and the records on the cat list, I think I’d go with the dog records.  (There are some truly awful records on the cat list.)

I’ll send all three lists to the company that puts on the trivia games my team plays in and tell them they’re free to use them to construct future questions – no charge!

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I’m embarrassed by the fact that 2 or 3 lines has never featured a Fugazi record until now.

I lived in Washington, DC during the heyday of that city’s “harDCore” punk scene.  But I never saw Fugazi – or Minor Threat or the Bad Brains or Tru Fax and the Insaniacs or any of the other great local bands of that era – perform live.  

Why didn’t I ever go to one of their shows?  Because – to quote the immortal Red Forman – I was a dumbass!

I could have gone to this Fugazi
show if I wasn’t such a dumbass

Fugazi was immensely influential on punk and alternative music in the eighties and nineties.  Nirvana admired them and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam said that seeing the band live “was a life-changing experience.”  They were a favorite of Joey Ramone of the Ramones and Joe Strummer of the Clash – Strummer told Rolling Stone in 2000 that Fugazi was the band that best exemplified “the spirit of punk.”   Jack White and individual members of groups as musically diverse as Arcade Fire, Blink-182, Blur, Bon Iver, the Drive-By Truckers, Linkin Park, Modest Mouse, Paramore, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tool – to name just a few – have also cited Fugazi as an influence. 

Click here to listen to “Bulldog Front,” which was released in 1988 on Fugazi’s eponymous debut EP.  (It was re-released the following year on the band’s first full-length album, 13 Songs.)

Click here to buy “Bulldog Front” from Amazon.

Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams – "Ohio" (1953)

Why, oh why, oh why oh

Why did I ever leave Ohio?

I read Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust when I was in college . . . but that was a l-o-n-g time ago.

I don’t remember much about that book.  So I had no clue how to answer the following question when it popped up at trivia earlier this week:

“What enduring animated TV character shares his first and last name with one of the main characters in the 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust?”

None of my teammates had ever heard of that book, much less read it.  So it looked like we were in trouble.

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Nathanael West, the author of The Day of the Locust, was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City in 1903.

West dropped out of high school but managed to get admitted to Tufts College (now Tufts University) by presenting a forged high school diploma.

After Tufts got wise to West and expelled him, he got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of his cousin, a Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein. 

According to his biographer, West did little schoolwork at Brown but read extensively.  I bet he would have been a good trivia player.

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Speaking of trivia . . .

We ended up turning in “Homer Simpson” as our answer to the question posed above.  

The first episode of The Simpsons aired in 1989, so Homer certainly qualified as an enduring character.  Of course, you could say the same about Bart Simpson.  

My team thought about going with Simpson fils instead of Simpson père as our answer, but we couldn’t decide whether to refer to him as “Bart” or “Bartholomew.”  (Our trivia host is a pretty picky guy.)

Homer Simpson at work

In the end, we stuck with Homer – and that turned out to be the right choice.  Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

(Here are some of our other correct answers from that night: Enola Gay, DeLorean, Tom Selleck, Tampa Bay Rays, Y is for Yesterday, 1984, Carli Lloyd, Napster, and La Paz.)

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In The Day of the Locust, Homer Simpson is a bookkeeper from Iowa whose doctor advised him to move to California for his health.  

Homer has been described as a “soft-mannered, sexually repressed, and socially ill-at-ease” man whose inner torment is manifested through the seemingly uncontrollable movements of his unnaturally large hands.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, told an interviewer in 2012 why he chose to name his protagonist after The Day of the Locust character.  “Homer was my father's name,” Groening said, “and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ – I just went with it.”

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The Day of the Locust is set in Hollywood, and most of the book’s characters other than Homer Simpson work in the movie industry.  

Nathanael West knew that industry well.  He had been employed as a screenwriter by several Hollywood studios, and his wife Eileen was Walt Disney’s executive assistant.

A year after The Day of the Locust was published, West and his wife died in an automobile collision resulting from his failure to stop at a stop sign. 

Coincidentally, West’s friend and fellow novelist-cum-screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald had died from a heart attack the day before.

Eileen’s body was cremated and her ashes placed in her husband’s coffin for burial.  I wonder if their family chose to do it that way so they only had to pay for one cemetery space instead of two.

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The Wests died just a few days before they were scheduled to fly to New York City to attend the opening night of My Sister Eileen, a play that was based on autobiographical short stories written by Eileen’s sister Ruth.  

In those stories – and in the play based on them – Ruth and Eileen are sisters who move from Ohio to New York City to seek fame and fortune.  (Older sister Ruth wants to be a writer while younger sister Eileen is an aspiring actress.) 

My Sister Eileen was very successful – it ran for 864 performances, and was made into a 1942 movie starring Rosalind Russell.  

My Sister Eileen also inspired the 1953 musical Wonderful Town – which won five Tony Awards (including Best Musical).  

My Sister Eileen is also the title of a 1955 musical comedy film that’s based on the original play, but doesn’t use the music from Wonderful Town.  (Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, had wanted to make a movie version of Wonderful Town, but couldn’t agree on a price for the film rights for the musical.  So he had a new score written and ordered other changes to avoid running afoul of the copyright laws.) 

Last but not least, My Sister Eileen was turned into a sitcom that aired during the 1960-61 season on CBS.

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Ruth and Eileen didn’t have it easy when they upped stakes and moved to New York City.  In today’s featured song from Act One of Wonderful Town, the sisters wonder if it would have been better for them if they had stayed in Ohio.

Click here to listen to the original cast recording of “Ohio,” with Rosalind Russell as Ruth and Edie Adams as Eileen.  (If you don’t know who Edie Adams is, click here to watch her singing “Big Spender” on behalf of Muriel cigars.)

Click here to buy “Ohio” from Amazon.