Blight from the Past

I've always been just a little nuts about Blightobody, a Columbia band that had an extremely slight burst of national fame in 1994, when it won a Best Band contest on the then-struggling Conan O'Brien Show.

Doubtless, almost nobody noticed except the locals, as Conan hadn't even been on the air a year and was fighting off news of its imminent demise on an almost daily basis. Also, to tell the truth, Blightobody was very much of a love-it-or-hate-it sort of thing; their winning song, after all, was this rather odd ditty called "Party Snout" about a fake dog mask. Either you were into their goofy groove or you just thought they were annoying as hell.

Me, I liked them a lot. Still do, as I was reminded when I found the site linked above, where you can hear their breakthrough (for lack of a better word) album, Poovy's Grove. It's a gloriously odd album, full of bravely stupid lyrics that recall the early Stooges, and played with terrific bar-band enthusiasm. "Nothing is better/when you're fleshy from the wetter" -- what in the hell does that mean? Is it some kind of post-coital thing? Who cares?

Another thing: I thought they represented the city well -- or maybe better than Columbia deserves, as no one will ever accuse Columbia of being a really happening place. It's always been a city with a massive identity crisis, in that it just hasn't seen that much action since it was torched by Sherman. Blightobody would have been a way of saying to the world: we're just as strange as you are.

Instead our goodwill ambassadors are Hootie & the Blowfish or that whiny sob sister Danielle Howle.

Anyway, after weeks of hitting this site, I finally clicked on the contact link to ask how I could buy the thing. Within minutes, I got a response -- from Todd Turner, the drummer responsible for the band's massive-attack backbeat -- who kindly offered to send me the disc for nothing.

I am eternally in his debt.