If you’re like me (and hopefully for your sake, you are not) much of your record shopping involves finding covers that look interesting and only then looking into the artist. I never know what is going to catch my eye. Certainly some genres and time periods have their own “look”, like 80s metal and hip hop, 90s hardcore, 70s experimental electronica. So, so many amazing artists have come to my attention because an album cover attracted me. Another type of record that give off a unique vibe is private press releases, which are very basic, or very amateurish, or more often than not, both.
And it was this basic-ness that led me to pull Paul Vanase’s In The World Of Baby Bones out of a bin over at Volver Records yesterday. The front jacket is just white words on a black background, clearly hand-draw (though interestingly enough with some font-based printing in the upper right corner). When you think about someone putting out their own record in the 1970s, they wouldn’t have the easy access to graphics tools that basically exist, well, on every device these days. Even I was able to design what I thought was a pretty decent j-card for my cassette release a few years ago, and if I can do it, anyone can.
Anyway… back to Paul Vanase. Having the words “baby bones” in the title feels at least potentially provocative, so I flipped it over and that’s when I saw the true magic:
Baby Bones is here!
Cosmic Spunk is…
DISCO ~CABA~ ROCK
What. In. The. Actual. Hell.
Paul looks like a silver lamé Anton Lavey, a disco Ming the Merciless. You can’t (or at least I can’t) not want to immediately learn more about what the hell is going on here, so I had to buy it, and I’ve spent a few hours today going down the Paul Vanase rabbit hole. And what a warren it is. Fortunately for us Scram Magazine tracked Vanase down in 2006 and gave us a fantastic interview HERE, in which he describes performing and directing in gay theatre, his love for lamé, and ghost-writing episodes of Fantasy Island, giving you just a little peek inside what was just one of the underground subcultures in 1970s and 80s New York City (and Los Angeles). He has two film acting credits to his name as well, my favorite of which is for 1975s Saturday Night At The Baths in which he is credited in the roles of both “Towel Queen” and “Football Player – Gay Team”. Musically the “band” Baby Bones made the rounds too, including as regulars at C.B.G.B.’s and Max’s and once famously opening at C.B.G.B.’s for The Ramones, a show in which dildos were used as props (read a bit more HERE).
The album opens with “Baby Bones” which is… I mean, this is a straight up cabaret number. The harmonizing is… amazingly demented and, if I’m keeping it real, pretty good, as is the musicianship. This is a stage number – you feel like there should be a dancing revue, prancing about in amazing outfits and tons and tons of makeup. That leads into “Sticking Needles Through Paper Doll Eyes” and… I’m just… the piano prances while Vanase cavorts. You can almost feel the attitude coming off of him, not in a sneering punk rock way but in a, well, sneering cabaret way? Is that a thing? Clearly it was a thing, though probably one that existed well outside of the mainstream. The whole thing feels very much like a stage soundtrack. The B side does get a bit darker, particularly on “Hopeless Case”, but this is still very much a performative album.
In the Scram interview Vanase said he pressed 5,000 copies of In The World Of Baby Bones, which seems ambitious, though given Vanase’s wide-ranging performance outlets maybe there was enough demand. Of course the article goes on to mention that any number of thrift stores in the Los Angeles area were known to have dozens of copies, a fact that didn’t seem to phase Vanase one bit when asked about it. After sparkling in the gutter glitter theatre and rock scenes how appropriate to end up in thrift stores coast to coast. My audience loves trash lol. Discogs sales have ranged between $20 and $40, and as of this writing there are a number of sellers offering it. You’re not gonna find it streaming, and I sincerely doubt it will be re-pressed. As of the Scram interview Vanase indicated he had another album completed and moving toward publishing, but I wasn’t able to track down anything more about it. Fortunately, however, if you want to give it a listen, at least one intrepid YouTuber! posted a rip.