A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

Does anyone ever really WRITE a 12-bar blues song?

Most every band has at least one. Even metal bands. They’re usually the less-serious ones, and given Rampage’s more-than-most leanings towards humor, it was to our credit that it was still the joke song, even in the middle of songs like “Doom Metal” and “Bloody Leg”. Anyway, this song got its start from the 1995 “Xenicide” sessions with Stevie Saline. After we knocked out “Ticket to Hell” with its 12-bar section, he said he wanted to do a total 12-bar song. We just figured we’d write it about being unable to score chicks, and figured ‘blues song, blue balls’, and then the title sprang up from euphemism and the rest really just wrote itself:

I got the wigglesnake blues
And it's coming after you
I got the wigglesnake blues
And it's all full of goo
If you don't pet my snake
His balls will turn blue

I got a hot tamale, baby
It needs to be shucked
I got a hot tamale, baby
It needs to be shucked
Break out the salsa
make my tamale hot as... whoops!

I got a creme horn baby
It's loaded, can't you see?
I got a creme horn baby
Don't need no cash - it's free
Please suck out the cream
And leave the shaft to me

I got the wigglesnake blues
And it's coming after you
I got the wigglesnake blues
And it's all full of goo
If you don't pet my snake
His balls will turn blue

I got the wigglesnake blues
I got the wigglesnake blues
I got the wigglesnake blues
I got the wigglesnake blues
It's not just the snake
His two neighbors are, too (it's an attitude, baby)

Wigglesnake blues....

Beyond that, the rest is just typical blues comping - 12 bars, solos between verses, extended comping here and there. We ripped it out and left it on tape.

When Paul and I started jamming that one fateful day that Rampage re-formed in 1995, we naturally played this one, because, well, it’s 12-bar, which anyone can play. Paul liked the humor in it, so it just became one we always played. When I started programming stuff for the first Misogyny EP, the very first full-band thing Rampage would do, I did this one first because it was the easiest song and I figured it was the best place to start - if I couldn’t make my studio setup work on something so easy, then best to find out earlier rather than later. It of course worked out fine, and the rest, as they say, is history.

(My earlier caveats to the depiction of misogyny in music apply here. This particular song, though, I just chalk up to being the typical “wanna get laid” type of vibe common in most rock and lighter ends of heavy metal, chiefly the hair variety. Over time I’ve gotten better at incorporating more of the standard rock-n-roll guitarisms, so later versions are much better than what got recorded here. In fact, I’m really happy with the version of this EP that I rerecorded in 2006. Maybe I’ll have to do something with those tracks some day.)