…And the message is: “Christmas Time Is Here,” as per the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s theme music from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which you can have Viperized in either stereo-chorus-y peppermint, or in pure unvarnished location sound vanilla.
“Christmas Time is Here” — all fancy
download the mp3 | download the wav file
“Christmas Time is Here” — nice and plain
Just in time for the season, Irene Vipersdottir Jerving has, once again, struck holiday gold. You may remember last year’s “Christmasy Blues” (and if you don’t, see below). This year’s offering is titled “Feliz Meriton,” and it goes like this:
Feliz Meriton
download the mp3 | download the uncompressed wav file
The song is faux French with some Spanish influence (don’t bother to look up the meaning of “meriton” — it doesn’t exist). Irene sings all three vocal tracks. And as she tells you in the pages of her own online IRENE Magazine, “This is a song in D minor, so don’t cry!”
And now, think back to 2009, when you and I were young. “The Christmasy Blues”:
And “Jingle Bells”
By popular demand – and by popular, I mean Riley wants to hear it – here are The Viper and His Famous Orchestra, live at Mike ‘N’ Molly’s in Champaign, Illinois closing out their show of August 7, 2009 with “Benny Lava.” Newly home-mastered.
The song proved controversial because it raised two questions: 1) whether or not in performing it we were really just doing someone else’s joke and 2) who the joke is on. We comport, you decide.
Ron Henn, Summer 2009 (not at Mike ‘N’ Molly’s), mulls over the
question of whether he can fully commit to singing “Benny Lava”
Riley Broach recently took the trouble to create this ringtone of “Sharkin’,” yours free for the downloading (right click to download).
In honor of the UW-Madison Teaching Assistants’ Association event that The Viper and His Famous Orchestra will be playing this Friday evening, September 3, I’m posting here a recording of one of the Viper earliest performances for the Graduate Employees Organization of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
right click here to download mp3
“I’ve heard of Big 10 schools with representation…”
The exigent occasion for such poetry was — if I’m remembering this right — an attempt by the university’s administration to abolish part of the tuition & fee waiver for graduate assistants not working in their home departments (this would have had a big effect on English, for example, who drew teachers for their professional writing and other classes from places like the Law school) but to soften the blow with the announcement of a new, but kind of rinky-dink, dental benefit.
DETAILS: It sounds like I’m playing a guitar — my singing cowboy one? — rather than ukulele. Carrie Rentschler was a GEO member in the audience. GSAC was the company shop.
The Viper & His Famous Orchestra 