The First Album
The Tubes' first self-titled album The Tubes (1975) was produced by Al Kooper. The track "White Punks on Dope" was an "absurd anthem of wretched excess" and a tribute to their rich, white teenage fan base in San Francisco Since then the song has been covered by Mötley Crüe, and the German rock musician Nina Hagen took the tune and set new lyrics to it (not a translation of the original lyrics), titled her work TV-Glotzer ("Couch Potato"), and used this song as the opening track of her own debut album Nina Hagen Band, released 1978 on CBS/Germany Records. The album track "What Do You Want From Life?", which became another of the Tubes' signature songs, satirizes consumerism and celebrity culture and climaxes in a "hard-sell" monologue by Waybill, which name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams and Randolph Mantooth and well-known products of the period including the Dynagym exercise machine and a host of American vehicles including the Winnebago and the Mercury Montclair.
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