Maybe the only page on the web to reference Peter Tork and Andy Summers...

I was just thinking, I happen to own copies of the two very worst songs ever recorded by popular bands. They are:

Mother, by the Police (Andy Summers' sole contribution to the otherwise flawless "Synchronicity"), and

Your Auntie Grizelda, by the Monkees (one of the few tunes sung by Peter Tork, from their debut "Meet the Monkees" [and, thankfully, nowhere else]).

Mother, a screeching rant sung in Summers' worst I-don't-really-sound-good-singing-so-I'll-just-make-myself-sound-deranged voice, is enough to make even the most devoted Police fan turn in his badge and hurl his copies of Regatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta as hard as he can against a brick wall.

Mother makes me wish my CD player came with an "erase" button.

Mother makes me want to stick sharp objects into my ears.

Mother makes me want to find Andy Summers' mother and ask her why, why, WHY she didn't chip in for some vocal lessons while the boy was learning to play the guitar.

Your Auntie Grizelda, for those of you who haven't heard it, is roughly the aural equivalent of the mold Mike found in his house this month. Ugly, destructive, and requiring a lot of bleach and hot water to get rid of. Egads, this song is really putrescent. I'm sorry that I don't have a link to an mp3 of it, but you won't be.

What's weird is that both of these songs are about older women exerting control over younger men. In Mother, Andy is wailing about his relationship with his dear old mum, in a disturbingly Oedipal way. In Auntie Grizelda, Peter warbles off-key about the trials he faces trying to be involved with a girl who has a buttinsky Aunt named, well, Grizelda.



Frankly, if I ever met someone named "Grizelda," I'd run in the opposite direction, as some chick in shiny red shoes is probably about to drop a house on her.


I really would.