BAH & THE HUMBUGS: BIGGER THAN SANTA
A 25th Anniversary Humbug Tribute
Featuring Humbugs songs performed by the following bands:
NOELLA MCCOY
Mistletoe is Poison
That Noella McCoy was born on Christmas Day is well known; exactly what year remains mysterious. The vibrant singer-songwriter-piano-player emerged around 2000 as an amazingly precocious 14-year-old; but documents soon showed that Noella was attending school in 1975, making her at least 29 years old.
Gentlemen, needless to say, have not inquired further than this. But there's nothing gentle about this Yuletide firecracker. Her debut double album Go Jump Off the Empire State Building You Ignorant Jackass raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging for both its savage lyrical content and its virtuosic instrumentation with sweet vocals.
Her second album, Your Parents Made a Big Mistake Named You, carried the idea further, offending more than a few listeners. But the more she antagonized people, the stronger and more popular Noella seemed to become. Even her oft-quoted "What do you expect? I'm not Doris freakin' Day" only seemed to endear her further to the public at large.
Noella's follow-up was her first all-Christmas album, EVE. This referred not to the night before Christmas but the first woman. In Noella's version, Eve shows up at the manger to offer the baby Jesus some pieces of apple — knowing full well that young babies should not be eating raw apples. The irreverent storyline is festooned with non-doctrinal tunes like "Hey Joseph," "Heavenward Yours," "Dance of the 7 Bales" and the haunting lullaby "Suck, Jesus, Suck."
The odd story recounted by the songs is framed by a modern-day woman grieving over a lost love, who sings the opening halting waltz "Mistletoe is Poison" and then dreams the Eve-in-the-Manger story as vicarious revenge. The final song, "I Ate You Forever," strongly implies that she has literally consumed the poisonous plant as one last dramatic gesture.
Reception of the album was mixed. There was anger mixed with hatred and resentment, but there was also a good bit of disgust, horror and fury added in. This was all combined with an intermittent homicidal rage — a potent mix indeed.
Noella went into hiding for several years and was rumored for some time to be living at Paisley Park in Minneapolis. But when she emerged it was on the arm of Steve Adams, the Vegas impressario billionaire. In interviews Noella revealed that she was retiring from performing and songwriting — the whole outrageous-musical-wunderkind persona was just "to catch a man." She hasn't released a record since.
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Mistletoe is Poison (Lehmkuhl)
I've done all the course work |