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 to get the hit sin­gle,¹ he 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.

1. If you’re under 30, lemme ‘splain: In those dark pre­his­toric times, an awful lot of artists got rich sell­ing albums with one, maybe two, hit songs and 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.