Uncle Jim - Superstars of Greenwich Meantime LP (Black Velvet Fuckere, 2005)
Incredible (and hilarious) onslaught of diarrhetic jive from Alan Bishop & his Sun City backing band. Edition of 500 copies (courtesy of Louisville's late great Black Velvet Fuckere label) w/ paste-on/wrap-around xerox dolla bill.
"Ruling at the perpetual pivot and pole of a peerless sound world over the past 25 years, the Sun City Girls are one of the few last arab cowboys of genius... SUPERSTARS OF GREENWICH MEANTIME is the premier long player from the UNCLE JIM... a smoked out X Y=Fuck You dialectic. Rawer than Rudy Ray Moore, shrewder than Lenny Bruce, more spoken tongue wizard insanity than Lord Buckley and more deranged than Charles Baudelaire; this is Alan Bishop's own personal anthology of black humour, filled to the brim full of diatribes backed up by bad ass musicians (including all of the Sun City Girls). A masterpiece of the SCG cannon." - Black Velvet Fuckere
"Uncle Jim is a spoken-word persona of Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, based on his real relative; the original Uncle Jim lived in Virginia, and passed away in 2002. Bishop's takes on his uncle's idiosyncratic musings have appeared sporadically, starting in 1984 on the debut SCG album, but Superstars is the first disc devoted solely to the curmudgeonly character. Like a collision of conspiracy theorists, blue comics, Beat poets, and revolutionary rappers, these six tracks of rapid-fire rant set to music are amusing and vitriolic. “Liberties” starts things off with Jim/Bishop marveling that with so much room for greatness, why is the room so empty? It then veers into a dissertation on the underground market for Bigfoot/ Yeti body parts, before ending with Jim visiting heaven, which is “like a handicraft market gone wrong.” Scathing commentary abounds, e.g., “I hate terminal cafe dwellers; it's the blue-light cell-phone cancer of the fidget fumblers,” on the outrageously raunchy hip hop of “Graduation Day.” And there are plenty of zingers, like “You wouldn't know cool if you were a Charlie Parker horn solo.” While Uncle Jim inspires all the text on this album, the wistful “Flashback” consists entirely of verbatim quotes from the man, stuff like “When I die, I'm coming back!” And in a way, he did, via Superstars of Greenwich Meantime." - Mike Rowell (SF Weekly)