LCD 27: The Truth That Must Be Told

The Truth That Must Be Told:
Marlin Wallace and the Extraterrestrial Communist Conspiracy

By Don Bolles

Marlin Wallace is a vanity-pressing outsider-music type from Springfield, MO, but with a twist-or maybe a few. The songs are pretty amazing by themselves, covering such subject matter as a field encounter with a steel-fisted yeti ("Abominable Snow Creature"), the voyage of Columbus, exotic and feral jungle-women ("La-Lo-Ram-Ya"), space travel, dinosaurs, ghost trains, Vietnam, and one about a mysterious, disembodied whistler named "Whistling Bill."

These are surprisingly well-played and recorded, almost song-poems. Most are written by Wallace, and sung by some of what I assume must be his friends- about six vocalists in all on the Corrillions Double Album. The piece de resistance, however, has to be the liner notes, also written by Mr. Wallace. Just under a small black and white photo featuring the artiste with an acoustic guitar that would be at home on a Ferlin Husky or Johnny Cash LP, they start out innocuously enough: "Music has always been a part of my life..."

If you read on, though, you'll quickly come to the meat of Marlin's matter in the very next section. Entitled "The Truth That Must Be Told," he reveals: "For over ten years I've lived under almost constant Red torture. I never know what moment of the day or night that a laser is going to hit me, causing excruciating pain."

The "Reds" have apparently been tormenting Marlin with lasers, fired at him from satellites orbiting the Earth, since 1961. And since the lasers can "penetrate ordinary buildings without leaving a trace," there is nothing the FBI and police can do about it.

Even though Marlin discovered that he could stop some kinds of laser attacks with a piece of ceramic, the assaults continue. The Reds are now "concentrating their vicious torture in the areas of my body that cause the greatest amount of agitation and pain. My sex organs, rectum, head, and liver have been consistently hit with different kinds of lasers." It's amazing that Wallace ever leaves the bathroom with all these shenanigans going on, let alone crank out a couple of albums and a mind-boggling array of 7-inch singles, all with the words Fight Communism! on the labels.

But prolific songwriting turns out, for Wallace, to be a double-edged sword. In a section of the liner notes called "Communist Plagiarism," he exposes one of the Reds' dirtiest tricks-they began stealing his songs, not only from his conscious mind, but also from his unconscious mind when he was asleep. Even before thinking of a song, Wallace would hear it coming from a nearby radio or TV, pilfered from his dreams, the sneaky Commies changing "just enough notes and words to legally get away with it."

Further Frances Dec-like observations, set forth in sections headed "Red Asylums" and "The Communist 'Frame' Job," serve to alert others potentially at risk to the fact that all mental hospitals are merely fronts for hideous Red torture dens, where "non-conforming" Americans are routinely turned into zombies through brain surgery, poisonous injections, shock treatments, and drugs. "Intricate mind-reading computers and subliminal control," he asserts, "have brought a new form of mental slavery to mankind." The Reds are now apparently able to control the dreams and thoughts of God-fearing Americans through "outside interference and inference," in order to reprogram them to accept the evil Red doctrines-the ultimate purpose behind the Red conspiracy.

Oddly enough, though, only two of the 30 tracks on the Corrillions Double Album have anything at all to say on the subject of the Red Menace. "This is War," has a casual reference to an enemy soldier being a "Red," and in "The Russian Bear," in which Mr. Wallace warns that the "Great Russian Bear is a-gitten' ready to make war' and is systematically 'a-takin' over this world."

One wonders what Wallace thinks of recent events, such as the fall of Communism in the country formerly known as the Soviet Union, for instance. Unfortunately, all that is known of Marlin's recent past (according to Springfield punk band/studio owners the Skeletons, in whose facility he cut a few tracks) is that he will now only record between the hours of 10 and 11 in the morning- presumably when the Communist satellite laser operators break for lunch-and he tends to remove his dentures and set them on his amp just before the red (uh oh) light goes on.

But really all we need to know about this latter-day hero-in-hell is on his albums. The music, lovingly rendered and recorded, provides a tasteful vehicle for his endearingly naive and often haunting lyrics. The use of different lead singers (all sounding as if Wallace was standing right in front of them, personally directing their every vocal inflection) infuses each song with its own unique feel. Wallace's weird, range-intensive "yodeling" style provides a unifying challenge to all the Corrillions' singers. Sound effects are also used liberally, even to the point of completely drowning out the vocal track for most of "The Jungle In Flight."

However, most important to Wallace are the liner notes that coat the back cover as thoroughly as a Xerox prophet coats an 8 1/2 X 14 piece of paper. These not only expose the Red conspiracy, but ultimately spell out the reason we should fight it with every means at our disposal, including music, even on the vanity-pressing level. "Freedom will not come through deceptive indoctrination, but by people accepting the universal truth that, indeed, all God's creatures, including mankind, have the right to think for themselves."

"This," concludes Wallace, "is the law of nature and this is how it was meant to be."