“I think you have it,” Beck is saying.
“I really remember that we talked about it and you said that you wanted to take it so it would be safe.”
There’s only one problem–well, there are actually several problems, but the biggie is Caporino’s choice of subject matter, which is a little, um, adolescent, as may be discerned from several song titles. In plain point of fact, Caporino wanders among the fields of sexual juvenilia and schoolyard scatology with an expert’s eye; human genitalia and bodily functions are to him what haystacks were to Monet.
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Caporino grew up in New Orleans and went to Southeastern Louisiana University; he was in bands in high school and college: “In high school we were playing Top 40 stuff, really mawkish stuff like Firefall’s “You Are the Woman.’ The most annoying song was “Magic’ by Pilot. But the most disappointing thing was the lead singer; my little guitar solo was a really important thing to me, but he was the kind of guy who’d stand over you with the microphone, doing a Freddie Mercury thing while you were playing. It was really hard for me to deal with.”
In Boston, the pair released a couple of seven-inch EPs, Hammeroid! and I’ve Shot My Load . . . and I’m Ready for the Grave. The former includes the timeless “It’s So Big It’s Fluorescent,” the latter a bruising classic called “Dick About It” (as in, “you don’t have to be a”). Their new record (the pair finally found the pressing–it was at Dudley’s house, under the Ds, next to Dire Straits, because the only other entirely blank album jacket she had was a promotional copy of a Mark Knopfler solo album), while it sounds like it was recorded through a pair of headphones, is simply breathtaking; melodies, hooks, and humor just burst off the record on song after song. “Music to Make You Love” is relatively clean; it’s Caporino’s tribute to the legendary “punk rock” episode of Quincy (in the show’s last scene, an unctuous Jack Klugman dances to pathetic music in a bar, he asks his partner: “Why do people listen to music to make you hate, when they can listen to music that makes you love?”). “MOTO Love” is an anthem, and “Dingleberry Rock” starts where “Long Tall Sally” leaves off, and heads right into the toilet from there. On CD, you get the weirdest MOTO song of all, a ten-minute instrumental called “For Marge,” just a lilting electric- piano line and distant sleighbells–that is to say, just piano, sleighbells, and, about five minutes into the song, a huge crash!
