Children of the Sun

It was the '70s, okay? Everything had to have a vaguely erotic nude airbrushed chrome hood ornament thingy.

It’s been at least 35 years since I thought of this song. If you were in high school in the late ’70s, you’ll prob­a­bly shriek in hor­ror and out­rage just from see­ing the title and artist: “Chil­dren of the Sun” by Bil­ly Thorpe.

If, like me, you bought the album, you no doubt remem­ber Thor­pe and the rest of band looked mighty weird, even by ’70s standards:

In addi­tion to the req­ui­site vague­ly erot­ic nude air­brushed chrome hood orna­ment thingy on the cov­er, you also had to have a pho­to of the band doing any­thing except smil­ing. Smil­ing was right out.

This pho­to is fur­ther enweird­ened by the guy on the left putting on part of a three-piece suit and then for­get­ting what he was doing, the guy in the mid­dle star­ing at the cam­era while look­ing like an Amish child moles­ter, and Bill Thor­pe over on the right look­ing like he can’t stand the sight of the oth­er two.

If you’re under 30 and won­der­ing why I bought a whole album just to get one song, lemme ‘splain:

In those dark pre­his­toric times, an awful lot of artists got rich sell­ing albums with one, maybe two, hit songs, plus six or sev­en son­ic abor­tions they threw togeth­er in 20 min­utes or so, know­ing if you were seri­ous about your music sound­ing bet­ter than an old AM radio with a blown speak­er, you’d pay $9 to get just the one or two hits.

Things have real­ly changed.

Nowa­days artists write one okay­ish “meh” type of song, put it on YouTube, go do a bunch of blow with Kanye West or Kei$ha or those are the only cur­rent artists I can name; then you can throw togeth­er an okay­ish “meh” video and 73 alter­nate ver­sions and a video doc­u­men­tary about you writ­ing the song and karaoke ver­sions and then do a half sea­son of “Amer­i­ca’s Got Atten­tion Whores” and by then you’re pret­ty much set for life.

It’s a gui­tar, Bil­ly. You don’t need to shove it into your armpit like it’s a crutch.

Any­way, Thor­pe looks even weird­er on video than he did in pho­tos. Plus he’s play­ing a Les Paul strapped up almost to his chin, so it looks like cross between a vio­lin and a mandolin.

If you’re real­ly brave, or you’re crazy, or your gag reflex does­n’t work, you can watch the video. It’s right down there. Don’t say I did­n’t warn you.