Fair Warning

On sale at U.S. pop-record counters last week was a ten-inch number with an attached red sticker of warning: "The enclosed record is HORRIBLE." The label was an understatement. The tunes (Fish and There's a New Sound) offer some of the most nightmarish vocals of modern times to the accompaniment of an asthmatic calliope. Sample lyric:

There's a new sound; it's deep down in the ground,

And everyone who listens to it squirms

Because this new sound, so deep down in the ground,

Is the sound that's made by worms.

The perpetrators are two experienced Tin Pan Alley hands named Tony Burrello and Tom Murray who became discouraged, they say, over the poor sales of their most ambitious stuff. "We are in an era," they concluded, "where good is bad and bad is good." With that, they formed the Horrible Record Co., sat down and in cold blood wrote words and music to both songs "during the next 17 minutes."

Fish is a commonplace lampoon of poor singers and non-sequitur lyrics. But There's a New Sound is an unrelenting and fairly unforgettable satire on such gimmicks as echo chambers and dog barks (as in Doggie in the Window). There's a New Sound depends on a Donald Ducklike cackle and a jigging country beat. Its chorus gets repeated five times (each time a tone higher) and its melody uses just two notes, "for simplicity."

Songwriters Burrello and Murray thought they had made a pretty effective protest record, ordered 500 copies for disk jockeys. But in two weeks the composers have received orders for more than 100,000 copies, and the demand shows no sign of falling off. Tunesmith Murray is frightened. He is afraid, he says, that the team will become known as the "Horrible Twins" and will never be able to write anything serious again. Worse than that, the U.S. public may "have a secret desire for really horrible music. It's getting into the psychiatric."

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