GREEN JELLŸ
8 p.m. Juanita’s. $5.
Back in 1987, Reagan was snoozing his way through the Iran-Contra hearings, S&Ls were failing faster than you could say “repossessed Lamborghini” and a punk band called Green Jello appeared on the Gong Show. It was clear that the band was brought on as one of the sacrificial lambs guaranteed to be ridiculed and gonged off the show in a matter of moments.
But little did then-host Don Bleu realize that the band he was smugly escorting offstage would soon go on to conquer the world of pop music, to record albums of timeless beauty and sophistication and create a catalog of masterworks rivaled only by that of the Beatles.
Just kidding. Green Jellÿ (as the band was renamed after a threat of copyright litigation from the fine folks at Kraft Foods) was a heavy metal novelty act along the lines of Gwar, right down to the giant foam rubber costumes, scatological humor and ridiculous characters (e.g. Satan’s Ham, Cowgod and Shitman — a walking pile of corn kernel-riddled feces, naturally). The band had one of those increasingly rare fluky radio hits with 1993’s “Three Little Pigs,” memorable for its Claymation video and falsetto chorus “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.”
So what’s the band up to in 2011? Here’s one way to find out.