Maybe You Should Drive

You'd have to be pretty dumb to give your band a name like Psychobilly Cadillac nowadays, since it conjures up all kinds of lame images of pompadour-wearing upright double bass players and girls with ugly tattoos wearing poodle skirts, though it probably wasn't such a good idea back in 1990, either. I really only bought this record because I used to buy almost everything on St. Valentine, the label that it's on. Not that I was a major completist about it or anything, just at one time or another I'd owned at least half of the first two-dozen or so proper releases that St. Valentine had put out.

The a-side, "Mean Old Main", is fairly decent as a countrified rocker, but the real gem (if you can even call it that) is the b-side, "D'Mirage", which sounds like the Butthole Surfers covering "Mexican Radio" as interpreted by someone crappy like the Del Fuegos. Had "D'Mirage" come out a decade or so earlier it might be appearing on compilations now as some long-lost outsider psych-punk track (or maybe not), but as it was it came out in 1991, which rubs some of the shine off... though it does have a clever Pink Floyd "The Wall" reference tacked onto the end, at least.

There's a sticker on the inner sleeve that says to play "D'Mirage" on either 33-1/3 or 45, and since I'm a sucker for dumb jokes, of course I tried it (and then ripped it so that you can hear the results), though it's not really all that interesting at the slower speed and just sounds like a bad Days of The New song. I'd already tried that trick a few years before this record came out, anyway, when sometimes at the record store we'd play Madonna's "Into The Groove" 45 on 33 while there were customers in the store, just to see if anyone noticed. Usually people ended up bobbing their heads up and down, thinking it was a cover version, since the speed change was so seamless that it made Madonna sound like Earth, Wind, and Fire or something.

The dumb joke and the mildly amusing booklet are what make this single easily worth 50 cents, though I think I paid two dollars for it.




Psychobilly Cadillac -

(these files are now listen-only)

"Mean Old Man"

"D'Mirage"

"D'Mirage (33-1/3rd)"