100 VINYLZ: #100 - Tattooed Beat Messiah LP by Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction

(1988, Vertigo Records)
This is a replacement vinyl, as originally I had this on one of many yellow shell Sony 90 minute dubbed tapes I made from my boy Evil Ed back in high school, back when tape dubbing was the RIAA‘s piracy threat of doom. It was always a favorite tape of mine (I think Faster Pussycat’s first self-titled album may have been dubbed on the other side), and while in the college, I saw it one time in the used record store of note in Richmond, which would be Plan 9 in Carytown. (I am sure I will get into a long explanation of that place during this project, but the first entry is not the time for it yet.)
Zodiac Mindwarp, by today’s standards, would be lumped into the “hair metal” movement, which is why I have always hated that hair metal label. As a dude (haha, I said “dude”) who was listening to music back then, it wasn’t as black and white as “heavy metal” and “hair metal”. Lots of music was being made that bridged that gap (Guns’n’Roses most famously, but also shit like Circus of Power, Armored Saint, Accept, L.A. Guns, The Cult, etc.). Most of what I’d consider to be bonafide hair metal was designed for pussies (either girls with actual pussies, because they need music too, or dudes who acted like pussies and worked too hard to fit in, not drinking too much nor smoking homegrown at the local arcade, and just fitting in pussy-getting skills around such delinquent behavior, which is also funny because us delinquents usually got more pussy - or at least more awesome pussy - than those pussy dudes with the watered-down rock-n-roll ever could). Hair metal makes it seem so fucking gay and stupid, and a lot of it was (insert standard VH1 learned music critic meme of “Nirvana changed everything blah blah blah” right here). But there was a lot of shit that was straight up rock-n-roll, fuck the bitches (both figuratively and literally), let’s get fucked up as fuck and fucking fuck, you fucks.
The one and only Zodiac Mindwarp record (that I know of) is this, but even better. A lot of these guys have their mental faculties, and for as crazy as everyone says Axl Rose is, he knows what he’s doing. Zodiac Mindwarp (real name Mark Manning) was a drugged-up space cowboy who could think 3000 words a minute and make them rhyme and have sort of a reason, but like a paranoid schizophrenic handing out homemade Jack Chick-style pamphlets, he didn’t really “know” what he was doing. This, of course, makes this album way better than others like it. He uses big words and combines shit that doesn’t really make sense (for example: Zodiac Mindwarp), but pulls it off, because in his personally warped mindstate, he believed it. You can see those aging fags on VH1 playing washed-up rock star talking about “hair metal” all the time, but those guys were playing a role, waiting for the gimmick to die so they could move on to some other stage of their life. Zodiac Mindwarp was all-in from the get-go (double-hyphenated cliché word score internet Scrabble rules - 153 points!).
For further proof of all this, consult your local library for Fucked By Rock by Mark Manning. My wife got it for me for my birthday because a guy I internet-know who was involved with GNR at times highly do-or-die recommended it to me. And it’s a crazy fucking book, with full insight into an acid casualty rock star two decades behind the well-known wave of hippie fuckers who you’d expect to be acid casualties. Manning was going to be the singer or was the singer or some shit for The Cult at some point, but ruined the gig by being... well, by being himself, so pretentious ass Ian Astbury was the singer instead. If you are a fan of reading books by semi-famous people who tell you how debaucherous their life was (European brothels where underage girls were duct taped into position ass-up for your personal pleasures, for example), then this is a book you probably ought to try and check out.
In the dilapidated camper behind my house where I do most of my compound-related quality lounging, there are three album covers with the albums removed taped up to the walls - The Coup’s 12-inch single cover for “Not Yet Free” (which is a highly-stylized drawing of a woman with her baby in a sling on one shoulder and a machine gun strapped over her other shoulder), the recalled cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors with guitarist Steve Gaines wobbly-eyed and engulfed in flames (which became poor taste soon after when he died in a fiery plane crash the band had), and the cover for Tattooed Beat Messiah. It inspires me, like a motherfucker.