The Patty Duke Fanzine
4: Patty’s Favorite ‘Boy Bands’
Top Quality Rock & Roll
Mike Dereniewski’s absurd fascination for trash-pop icon Patty Duke seems genuine enough, although the real treat and raison d’etre of his fanzine is the double 7” that comes with it, featuring under-underground bands covering Patty Duke songs – songs Patty Duke herself has covered. It’s not pretty, but it’s far more interesting than you’d think.
It starts out politely, with Mark Robinson’s droning acoustic rendition of “Come Live With Me,” but that’s enough normality for this 7”. Steward’s take on “The World Is Watching Us” meshes fuzz-pop with naive Japanese electronica, a meeting of Ween and the Smurfs. Good, catchy, but weird, weird, weird. Panicsville’s “My Own Little Place” reverts to irreverent Rephlex lunacy, all minimalist knob-twiddling madness, while the doodling cartoon electro found on The W-Vibe’s “Save Your Heart For Me” suggests these guys have watched one Teletubbies episode too many.
Delta Waves’ “Dead David” starts off with this bewildered Star Trek computer voice going off the rails on top of some Third Encounter synthesizer, and ends up in pure Animi land. Freaky. Frankie & The S.E.M.M., meanwhile, tackle “Blowin’ In The Wind” by merely recording white noise from a radio (frenziedly dialing back and forth between stations), covering the idea behind the song rather than the actual song. Brilliant or just absurd, whichever way you look at it, a strange tribute to Patty Duke, but in the artists’ complete destruction of all tonality and logic behind the songs, a perfectly fitting one.
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