Outsiders: Wild Man Fischer

Barnes & Barnes gave the world Fish Heads, the most requested song in the history of the Doctor Demento show, and produced two albums by Wild Man Fischer, “the father of outsider music” to people who don't know who Harry Partch is. Larry Fischer, arguably the most bizarre recording artist ever to sign with a major label, has two albums -- Pronounced Normal and Nothing Scary -- being reissued on Collectors’ Choice Music, along with Barnes & Barnes’ classic Voobaha album.

Barnes & Barnes was Art and Artie Barnes, noms du disques for childhood friends Bill Mumy (yes, Will Robinson on Lost in Space) and Robert Haimer. They weren't trying to make it big; they just wanted to get played by Doctor Demento. Drawing on 50s and 60s comic books, including EC (which specialized in horror, crime and sci-fi), pre-superhero Marvel, and R. Crumb, they created such demented masterpieces as The Vomit Song, Boogie Woogie Amputee and Fish Heads, the latter spawning a popular music video on MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central that Rolling Stone named #57 on its all time best video list. For a while, they were signed to mega-manager Bill Siddons, who handled the Doors.

Voobaha was issued in 1976, then digitally remastered and reissued as a CD on Rhino. Haimer went back to the original tapes to prepare for the Collectors’ Choice reissue, and added some previously unreleased tracks, I Gotta Get a Fake I.D., plus alternate takes of Political Statement, Boogie Woogie Amputee and Fish Heads, so make sure you're getting the new release if you buy.

L.A. singer/songwriter Fischer's first album, recorded in the late ‘60s by Frank Zappa for Bizarre Records, spawned the underground hit Merry Go Round and the brief monologue I Used To Be Shy. Fischer was in and out of mental institutions and seldom kept an address for longer than a couple of months. His second album, Wildmania (already reissued by Collectors’ Choice) was one of the very first Rhino lps. But that didn’t mean that Rhino founders Richard Foos and Harold Bronson could readily locate him. Barnes & Barnes, however, were up for the Alan Lomax-like challenge and somehow found the mostly homeless Fischer. They were delighted to discover that he was a fan of Fish Heads. The session for Pronounced Normal followed, its title inspired by the song The Wild Man Fischer Story from his first album.

One track, The Bouillabaisse, was intended to be a psychedelic dream, his outsider Sgt. Pepper interlude -- all good, until Fischer became convinced, according to Mumy’s liner notes, that the song contained subliminal messages and that Barnes & Barnes, Demento, Zappa and “Weird Al” Yankovic, among others, were conspiring to sever his penis, chop him into little pieces and throw him to the sharks. Although he disappeared soon after, he began to phone the Barneses again around the time of the album’s 1981 release -- sometimes many times a day. The producers seized the moment to take on one more album, the 32-track Nothing Scary, released in 1984 and containing such gems as Derailroaded, Larry & the New Wave and Music Business Shark.

Resources:
The Legend Of Wild Man Fischer by Eichhorn and Williams
Yeah: The Essential Barnes & Barnes
Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (The Shaggs, Daniel Johnston, Joe Meek, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, Tiny Tim, etc.)
Songs in the Key of Z, Vol. 2: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (Shooby Taylor, B. J. Snowden, Eddie Murray Tangela Tricoli, etc.)