Sun City Girls - Horse Cock Phepner (1987)

The Sun City Girls' third album (titled in honor of a pet nickname for Ronald Reagan, apparently) burbled like a sewer somewhere below the sunny facade of The Gipper's America circa 1987. Overloaded with political and sexual obsessions, the Phoenix trio spouts out a disturbing and dizzying diatribe borne of first-hand knowledge of pornography and high-level government trickery. Taking off from somewhere near the axis of the Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders, Rick and Alan Bishop and Charlie Gocher plow through rants like "Porno Shop" (which is visited by Edwin Meese), "Kill the Klansmen," "Aristocrats of Impertinence," "Eyeball in a Quart Jar of Snot," and a bracing charge through the aforementioned Fugs' "CIA Man," updated to include relevant references to Middle Eastern overlords. Also here is one of the band's most brilliantly twisted inventions, "Nancy," wherein Mrs. Reagan is involved in seedy sexual situations with Mr. T, Ted Koppel, and Sam Donaldson. Though several winding, stream-of-consciousness tracks (e.g., "It's Underneath the House" and "Saint Bernard's Observation Booth") threaten to derail the momentum, there are moments of pure brilliance (the rock-en-Espanol harbinger "Esta Susan En Casa?") that save the record from succumbing to overindulgence. Despite not containing the kind of instrumental and improvisational magic that highlighted later releases, Horse Cock Phepner reveals the Girls at their most dementedly manic, and is essential to understanding the group's cockeyed philosophical mastery.