Twenty Years Ago Skip Floont And The Crusty Undies Barely Keep It Together…And Then Don’t.

Behold the story of the greatest band you've never heard of, who changed music forever. Actually...for about ten minutes.   Everything Skip Floont touched turned to platinum during the '80s, even actual platinum, starting with the sales carryover from his 1979 solo debut Drums Are Round And So Is Your Mama and continuing through a series of bestselling releases that included a pair of albums with his band The Crusty Undies, the solo Flushed A Cat Down The Loo LP and a greatest-hits record that contained a couple of new hits, despite one whole side consisting of nothing but road manager Fleece Throbknuckle clearing his nose. When Floont And The Crusty Undies announced an May 13, 1989, release for their 101th studio LP in eight months, Cocaine Sure Is Fun, expectations were understandably high.

Squinting at the liner notes from a great distance in low lighting, it seems reasonable to assume that Cocaine Sure Is Fun was destined to become yet another huge hit for the very lucky Floont and his band. Like Floont's previous release, a soundtrack album for the 1986 Ferd Slimthud movie OH MY GOD WHAT DID YOU EAT, as well as 1984's Tunes For You, Idiot, the new LP boasted the involvement of producer Spanks McThundertrouser,  who'd helped give Floont recent work the slightly rougher, more no-nonsense sound of a marching band high on methamphetamines walking into oncoming traffic, while working to maintain the focus on keeping wildlife out of the studio that had made the band such reliable hitmakers, despite the fact that they were basically awful people.

But if the personnel were basically the same, it was still immediately evident that Cocaine Sure Is Fun presented a Different Floont, which became it's new title one Thursday morning around eleven when Floont realized cocaine was anything but fun when basisst Gurven Trough tried to rob a liquor store with a carp. Clustering together 155 songs that timed out to around 28 minutes, including the exploding tuba concerto,  the album announced itself with first song "Room In My Pants For An Immigrant Family Of Six"  a one minute dirge of lost keys that begins on a starkly flatulent note before closing with the gut-wrenching plea "OH CHRIST GET OFF ME FOOT YOU BLOODY TUBBY WANKER/ And I love you so." In between, there's a brief howling middle section in which guitar player Asquith Daisymangler unleashes a torrent of over modulated mouthed WHEEDLE WHEEDLE WHEE! noises because he left his guitar on the crosstown bus.

The album quickly flopped, a subsequent dance mix of "RICK ASTLEY IS HIDING IN ME BUSHES, THAT BLOODY TOFF" tearing up the Christian music charts, much to the confusion of everybody and sending A Different Side of Floont roaring back up the charts, where it sold fifty bazillion copies, all the money from it then spent by Floont on overly floppy hats and dumpsters full of cocaine.

"Bloody depressing, that is" says Floont today, from the room he rents at the back of the middle school where he's a part time janitor and full time loon. "Get out of me closet, you wanker."

Sadly, all the members of the Crusty Undies died in the Mysterious Floppy Hat And Cocaine Dumpster Blaze of 1990, and could not be reached for comment, because they were, in fact, dead.

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