Have you ever heard of The Tubes?  If you were a teen in the 70’s reading CREEM magazine you would have first been introduced to them.  Like KISS, who I also learned about through CREEM magazine, The Tubes were featured in an article complete with pictures of their stage show.  I was intrigued.  I wanted to know what they sounded like but there were no Tubes albums at the PX (post exchange) on Ft. Buchanan in Puerto Rico.  I had to wait until we returned to the states on vacation in 1975 and walk into a K-Mart in Natchez Mississippi to luckily find the album and then beg my Mom into buying it for me.  I was 13 at the time.

The album, The Tubes, was released in June 1975 and in hindsight it was just pure coincidence and luck that it was sitting in a record bin in a K-Mart in Natchez Mississippi.  It could be considered fate?  Since getting that album I’ve been a life-long Tubes fan but have never seen them live.

The Tubes are a band from San Francisco that formed in 1972.  They made big news with their cabaret style show that acted out their songs.  They were made for MTV before there was MTV.  Two of my favorite Tubes songs off their first album include White Punks on Dope and Mondo Bondage.  Both prominently visualized through their stage show.  Imagine a character in 10 inch platform boots dressed in a glitter costume named Quay Lude singing White Punks on Dope.  Fee Waybill, lead singer for the band, had a vivid imagination.

Most folks know The Tubes from their later songs She’s a Beauty and Talk to Ya Later, both from the early 80s and the MTV era, but I say their best stuff is on their first three albums – The Tubes, Young and Rich, and Now.

Like many of my Vinyl of the Month’s, this one brought back many memories of that vacation during the summer of 1975.  Not just the album purchase.  For that I chose The Tubes by The Tubes to be this month’s Vinyl of the Month.