this post was rewritten to minimize risk of copyright infringement
Earache My Eye features
Alice Bowie and is one of the most entertaining comedy bits that the 1970s comic duo of
Cheech and Chong. They recorded it for The Cheech and Chong Wedding Album
1974 and was also featured on their Greatest Hits album. The musical portion of this piece has been covered by bands like
Korn and
Soundgarden. This piece is considered to be one of the greatest
novelty audio pieces of all time, and has been featured repeatedly on the
Doctor Demento radio program.
In the routine,
Tommy Chong plays a punk high school student with an attitude. At the beginning of the piece he's snoring. We hear an alarm clock, and then Chong wakes up noisily. He starts up a record of kickass pop metal rock with
Cheech Marin singing the lyrics as if he were a
David Lee Roth clone. The original lyrics are available
elsewhere on the Internet, but only if you know where to look. After approximately sixteen bars or so of this, we hear the sound effect of a record
scratch.
Or to be more precise, as the song continues, we hear in the background a knocking sound and the voice of Chong's father.
"I said turn that thing down and get ready for school!" The song is then unceremoniously cut short with the disturbing scratching of a
vinyl LP record.
The
punk kid and the
unhip dad then proceed to have an argument over values. The unhip Dad believes the son should stop listening to loud raucous music and concentrate on scholastic opportunities. The son complains first that he suffers from an
ear infection then begins reacting to his fathers accusatory behavior by turning everything he says into an opportunity for a punchline. This causes the father to resort to violent behavior in hopes of such negative conditioning shaping his youth into a productive member of society. Although at first the son laughs at his father's weak spanking prowess, the sound effects quickly change to indicate a more impressive display and eventually the son relents. As the father leaves assuming his son's going to get ready for school, the son whimpers like a little girl.
The door slams shut. The punk kid continues whimpering a bit, then the whimpering quickly goes from pathetic to bitter, as the record of the pop metal song plays again to fade out.
...
It
loses something in the translation from audio to mere text doesn't it? Really. Honest. It's very funny. And one of the few pieces Cheech and Chong did which wasn't mostly just
drug references.