The last post covered the single Brontosaurus by the British band The Move. This time around, I want to look at how that single was marketed over the other side of the Atlantic. The Move's US label, A&M, published this X-rated advert for the single in Billboard in the summer of 1970. Is this really what songwriter Roy Wood meant by "doing the Brontosaurus"? Colour me skeptical. Is this even a feasible physical hypothesis for how sauropods did the deed? For more thoughts about dinosaur sex, see the links at the bottom of the page. The text accompanying the advert was more than a little overblown, and in a few short but magnificent sentences managed to libel the plant-eating Brontosaurus ("savage and merciless", "pre-history's brutalest beast"), make an inappropriate joke about WW2 bombing of the UK, and make some highly dubious claims about the record being so "heavy" that it was destroying radios. Here it is, reproduced in full: "It's not every rock and roll single that's musically enormous enough, intimidating enough, savage and merciless enough to call itself by the name of pre-history's brutalest beast. The Move's newest single is a definite exception. In England, where more than a few have pronounced it the heaviest thing to hit the country since the last Luftwaffe bomber disappeared over the horizon, it single-pawedly restored The Move to a formidable position of prominence. The week it reached number four on the British charts saw more transister and other radios explode in mid-air than in the entire seventy-three years previous. Which might give you some indication. Brave FM stations in this country have been programming it relentlessly, the damage to their transmitters not deterring them from sharing this "heaviest single ever recorded" with their listeners. To understate feloniously, this is not a record to be taken lightly. The Move's "Brontosaurus" Extraordinary rock and roll A&M 1197, for those who dare." You can view the advert on Google Books here. For those interested in the eternal questions around dinosaur copulation, journalist Brian Switek has written several articles about this, including for Smithsonian.com and Scientific American, as well as in his book My Beloved Brontosaurus.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |