The Pope Smokes Dope - Single

Listeners of a certain age might get some of their best laughs in years from the CD reissue of The Pope Smokes Dope on Orange Records. And Lord knows, at the time of this CD release in the mid-2000s there was precious little to laugh at — about as little as there was in 1972, when the Vietnam War was still raging and Richard Nixon was starting to put what looked like his stooges on the Supreme Court. In 2006, the CD edition of The Pope Smokes Dope appeared just in time for the George W. Bush Supreme Court to be taking shape as the United States was still struggling to find the guts to admit that maybe going to war in Iraq was a mistake. And here are David Peel & the Lower East Side doing the upbeat "Everybody's Smoking Marijuana" — which starts out with a goof/homage to Country Joe & the Fish — and the vicious Merle Haggard/"Okie from Muskogee" parody "The Hippie from New York City," both as laugh-out-loud funny as they were back when, and leading into the catchy and delightful "Ballad of New York City." And those are merely the preludes to a phantasmagoria of countercultural images, chants, phrases, and outrages. This is arguably the finest piece of musical agitprop to emerge from the '60s counterculture (even if it took till 1972 to appear). Under John Lennon and Yoko Ono's production, Peel is presented without compromise with the most rudimentary of guitar and percussion accompaniment, none of it amplified, yet it all holds together in a coherent and cohesive statement, musical and otherwise. It's funny where it should be and serious in all the right places, and the result is a listening experience that's ultimately laugh-provoking and savage. Some elements of it recall Lennon and Ono's Sometime in New York City, but overall the album more resembles the Country Joe & the Fish Rag Baby EPs from mid-'60s Berkeley, only with some more subtle edges and quietly sophisticated attributes. Perhaps the high point is "F Is Not a Dirty Word," in which Peel goes through the origins and usages of the word in question — he's not only grammatically correct throughout but musically adept and engaging. And he almost tops himself with "The Birth Control Blues," an account of youthful ingenuity and improvisation concerning the subject at hand set in an early-'60s rock idiom — specifically recalling "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" — that evolves into a stunning spoken word piece with musical accompaniment. And after all of that, "The Pope Smokes Dope" — which helped get this album banned in every country in the world except the United States, Canada, and Japan — is almost anticlimactic, except that it's so outrageous a song and filled with such irreverent conceits that it carries listeners to the end successfully. The 2006 reissue from Peel's own Orange Records has been expanded with the addition of "Amerika" from the film Please Stand By, which features Peel accompanied by Yoko Ono in one of her more effective vocal incarnations; an interview with John Lennon in which he explains how he met Peel; and a seven-minute "dance remix" (!!!!) of "Everybody's Smokin'" that resembles a Yoko Ono sound collage more than ever and does manage to hold up across its running time, perhaps proving Lennon's stated point about the potential universal appeal of Peel's music.