Bobby Joe Ebola Song of the Week: Liver Lover

Hello again, Dear Reader! It’s your old arch-frenemy Dan Abbott from Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, a musical comedy duo I started with fellow food service shit-worker Corbett Redford in the Before-Time. If you’re wondering what THAT means, we toured the nation delighting and confusing the fringes of the subterranean music scene beginning in the late 90s, singing toe-tapping acoustic odes to destruction, doom, and…doo-doo (check out our full discography here). Sadly, we are now more machine than man, twisted and evil. But with our 25th Anniversary coming up, we’re looking back at one of our songs each week to explore what on earth we could have been thinking.

This week we’re squinting dubiously at “Liver Lover”, a track from Carmelita Sings!: Visions of a Rock Apocalypse, the sprawling, nearly 30-track mega-album first released in 2000, right before we went on a near-decade hiatus.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear right off — this is not written from personal experience. Neither Corbett nor I ever fucked a piece of liver. 100% certainty. I’ve done some weird shit, but despite being exposed to near-fatal levels of the insidious Liberal Agenda, this has never been on my sexual itinerary. We have never fucked liver. Everyone clear on that? That said, the day is young, internet trends pop up quickly nowadays, and we’re both very impressionable. No shame in our game.

You may say it’s strange but it is true

I’ve finally found a way to replace you

You were so frigid but our love still wouldn’t keep

My new companion is inanimate and cheap

On the day she left me, I found

My lover, my liver weighed only half a pound

A ziplock bag, a microwave and in went dinner

I made love to a dead cow’s innards

(Chorus)

’Cause I’m a Liver Lover

Don’t want no other

Gimme that soggy dead delight

Lover! Liver

Just one warm sliver

I won’t need any onions tonight

The space between the couch cushions is just right for me

I’ll slouch down with my baggy and do the nasty on my knees

Everyone calls me the Liver King

But I’m so happy because it feels just like the real thing

(Chorus)

My roommates think I’m sick but I think it’s great

When I go shopping I almost always find a date

Liver won’t treat me wrong, will never be untrue

And if I had a real girl I’d probably love her liver too

(Chorus)

I first heard the story from Corbett one night at the Hermosa House, after we’d finished songwriting and practicing for several hours in the kitchen. There were many of these nights, filled with free pizza brought over by one of our Round Table coworkers, cheap beer and copious trips to the gravity bong out on the back deck, a mutilated gallon milk jug suspended in the brownish water of an igloo cooler, with a large, blackened chamber haphazardly duct-taped to the milk jug’s lid.

Our songwriting sessions were just one part of the whirl of activity in that house; S.P.A.M. Records was picking up steam, and we were not only organizing our regular shows and tours for ourselves, but for most of the year we were putting on Geekfest, the monthly all-ages guerrilla concerts that had begun to connect us to the wider world of underground music. So there were always flyers to make, records being folded, T-shirts being screened in the backyard. But ultimately, it came back to making music, and for me at least, those times where we were writing songs in the kitchen and bringing our stoned housemates (and ourselves) to red-faced tears of laughter, were the best and most important parts of what we were doing.

So one of these nights Corbett was telling a story he’d never told before. He’d lived on his own from age 16, so he had a few years on most of us when it came to bad-roommate stories. He’d lived with a guy early on who had roughly the same schedule, and they would spend late nights watching TV together.

There are times like that, in the dead of night, when it seems like even God has gone to bed, and you can speak truths to your closest confidants. Corbett was sitting on the couch with his housemate, stoned, flipping channels. Nobody had spoken in a while.

“You know what feels really good?” the housemate said gently.

Corbett froze, but said nothing. Stared straight ahead at the flickering TV.

“You take a piece of liver, and put it between a couple of pieces of bread,” his housemate continued, the words starting to rush out. “White bread is the best. You don’t want seeded bread.”

Corbett sat paralyzed, unable even to press the remote control. There was no escape.

“You put the liver and the bread into a ziplock bag, and you put it in the microwave for like a minute and a half. And then you take that out and put it between the couch cushions.”

Corbett could feel beads of sweat forming on his brow as his brain put together what he was hearing, and he turned to regard his housemate, who looked him in the eye to deliver the final horror.

“It feels just like the real thing.”

Corbett looked away, not even able to make eye contact with the faces on the TV. Nobody spoke for a while. Corbett tried to find some kind of response, any response, but this was nothing our generation had been trained for, a social situation for which neither Goofus and Gallant comics, PBS programming nor G.I. Joe safety PSAs had prepared him.

“There… there are some things we just don’t talk about.”

There were a few more agonizing moments of silence, as they sat side by side on the couch. Finally Corbett got up, went to his room and closed the door.

When Corbett was done with his story, the kitchen exploded in laughter and curses of disbelief. There wasn’t really any way to top that, and it was late, so the denizens of Hermosa house began peeling off to go to bed, chuckling themselves to sleep. Pretty soon I found myself alone in the kitchen. There was no way I was getting to sleep.

Sometimes songs just give birth to themselves fully-formed out of your skull, and you just kinda act as the midwife for your own brain. I stayed up all that night, coaxing that song out of my skull, trying to coat the rather upsetting grain of sand Corbett had planted in my mind’s oyster in a thick shellac of humor.

See, I felt a little bad that Corbett’s old roommate had clearly felt a certain amount of shame about masturbating with liver. If he’d been the singer of an 80s hair-metal band, he probably could have sold his unorthodox proclivities as rebellious and even glamorous. Instead of a lonely schlub from the suburbs defiling groceries in tearful convulsions, I envisioned him as a spandex-clad Axl Rose style rock god, and tried to give the song a Use Your Illusion level of sexual bombast. The line between gross and sexy is often in the pants of the beholder.

Liver Lover became one of my favorite songs to play live. As an acoustic band, we had to make up for the lack of a rhythm section with extra theatricality. I think this is the sort of vibe Tenacious D was going for, though we didn’t know about them until years later. Anyway, this was a song that would make people laugh in spite of themselves, and we won over more than one hostile punk or metal audience with this song. When we finally recorded it in the summer of 1999, we gave it the full band treatment, so that everyone else could hear what we heard when we played it with just a guitar and a couple of voices.

It became something of a fan favorite, and I recall a particular bar show years later, on a rainy September night (it was my birthday) wherein two of our most stalwart fans showed up and requested we play it. About halfway through the song, one of them produced a Ziploc bag from his trench coat pocket, and lobbed a dark crimson projectile at me, underhanded, like he was playing horseshoes. There was a cold splat, and suddenly there was a half pound of beef liver neatly resting on top of my acoustic guitar, wedged up against my white T-shirt, dripping coagulating meat juice down the front of my guitar.

I gotta be honest, it wasn’t really the sort of thing we got into rock’n’roll for, but we couldn’t exactly get mad about it. We’d sown this strange little army ourselves, like Cadmus planting dragon’s teeth in the earth, except it was the mental image of fucking raw liver in a filthy couch cushion we’d planted, and they’d sprung up a motley roomful of misfits and weirdos, gathering in out of the rain to feel less alone for a night. We had nobody but ourselves to blame; the only thing to do was finish the song. Sometimes rock’n’roll is a messy business.

Thanks for reading! To hear more of our songs and go down a very strange internet rabbit hole, visit www.bobbyjoeebola.com. You’ll find links to our music in just about any format you might want, plus music videos, merchandise, and a whole lot more. See you next week!

-Dan