Introduction
Greetings! My name is John Bradley (@jhb on SocialGalactic, bradley@trilon.com everywhere else), music producer, guitar player, singer, lyricist, artist/designer, video editor, and all-purpose gadabout. In the coming months I’ll be documenting all of the various songs and videos released as part of the Booster Patrol/Boomer Patrol/Vaxx Trax musical projects, and hopefully convince you to give them a listen. Or a re-listen, if you haven’t heard them in years.
My benefactor Vox Day has moved on to producing new music directly via Suno, bypassing the annoyance of working with opinionated musicians, so these three sub-projects are largely finished, save for the annual additions to our A Very Boosted Christmas collection, the occasional new “let’s mock the Boomers” song, the very occasional new song from me, and my decidedly leisurely efforts to produce videos for all of the tracks that still don’t have videos.
If you’d just like to plow ahead and enjoy our songs and videos, rather than wait around for this retrospective to get to a specific track that interests you, you can find most of our music in one of four places:
Note: There will be a number of unreleased tracks appearing in this retrospective as links to unlisted videos. The only way to get to them will be through the links that eventually appear in these pages. So if you like getting Secret Insider ‘Stuff’, keep checking in as subsequent parts of this series are released.
Hand Over Fluffy Pillow
The Boomer Patrol project got started in June 2021, when Vox penned parody lyrics to Simon & Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water called Hand Over Fluffy Pillow. The song established certain key concepts of the Boomer Patrol project:
- boomers dying alone and unloved, probably in a nursing home
- where they’d be suffocated with fluffy pillows by third-world ‘healthcare’ workers
Why? Vox has written extensively about why the boomers were the worst generation ever. See his blog for details.
When you’re weary, feeling old,
With regret in your eyes
I will take control
I’m at your side
For when times get hard
And your kids aren’t around
Like a hand over fluffy pillow
I will press it down
A gentle hand with a fluffy pillow
I will hold you down
At the time, Vox didn’t know me from Adam, but I took his lyrics and sent him a completed performance of same within two days. He was sufficiently impressed that he started writing more parody lyrics to well-known songs and sending them to me for production, to be played on his Darkstreams.
So here’s the very first of the 100+ songs I’ve produced as part of the Booster/Boomer/Vaxx meta-project. It’s not perfect, and there are things I’d do differently today, but at the time I was trying to complete it as quickly as possible, just in case anyone else had the same idea!
Hush Now
The second Boomer Patrol track was a parody version of Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over, starting a long tradition of Vox asking for covers of songs I’d never heard of.
Recorded & released in July 2021. There’s even a brief reprise of Hand Over Fluffy Pillow, which wasn’t as arbitrarily forced in there as you might think. If you listen to the original recording, the keyboard player plays something very akin to the chorus of that song right as the song fades out.
There are Boomers within, there are Boomers without
We’re silencing a wicked generation
There’s a shape on the bed, I see pillows ahead
As they’re booming right up to the day
The pillows descend
Hush now, hush now, don’t breathe it’s over
Hush now, hush now, as the pillows come
They come, they come, to put a world between us
You know the silence wins
Note: This song turns up much later as a straight cover of the original song, complete with a spiffy hand-drawn video. See Booster Patrol Retrospective #19 when it eventually becomes available. Or just go watch the video right now over on YouTube.
Taking Care of Boomers
The third Boomer Patrol track was a parody version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s Taking Care of Business, a song I was familiar with.
Lyrics by Vox, singing and playing by me.
Features some extended guitar solos and whatnot, a harbinger of what was to come in 2022 when the Booster Patrol concept was born.
Recorded & released in September 2021.
Go and get yourself a cushion
Drop it down and start pushin’
It won’t take you long to make ’em mellow!
Send ’em to a better place
With a smile on your face
We just help them out of the way
What the hell you waitin’ for
You’ll be comin’ back for more!
We love to work with boomers all day.