B.E.P.

In the summer of 1975, three high schoolers in Osceola, Arkansas—two of the six Dingle brothers and their second cousin Larry Jr.—decided to start a rock band.  They drew straws to decide who got to play which instrument, and soon the guitar-bass-drums lineup was established.  They jammed for a couple of months playing covers by bands like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but they lacked a key element:  a credible singer.  (There was a reason that no member of the extended Dingle clan had been invited to join a church choir since the Civil War.) 

That all changed in August 1975, when senior Martin Stewart transferred to town from Memphis, Tennessee.  Hearing the band practicing from a block away while he was taking out the trash, Stewart introduced himself and proposed that not only could he be their singer but he also could supply original songs—in fact, he had penned over 900 in the last three years.  The others were dubious, but when they heard Stewart sing (a captivating blend of Bob Dylan and Tammy Wynette) and read some of his lyrics (which they didn’t understand, but thought looked cool), the band was sold.  Stewart turned the guys on to another influence, the quirky and under-the-radar (but now sadly defunct) Memphis band Big Star.  Soon, the underage band was gigging throughout the area, becoming particularly popular at frat parties in Jonesboro even though Stewart’s obscure lyrics and mumbling delivery were an acquired taste.

A local talent scout heard the band and suggested that, if they had enough original songs, they should record an album and see if it had legs.  “No problem,” said Stewart, pulling out his Trapper Keeper full of hand-penned lyrics (which the other members had annotated with an almost random assortment of chords).  Pooling their resources, the band travelled to Little Rock and Comet Studios (famed for discovering Jewish rockabilly legend Preston “Levi” Aaron).  Hammering out 14 songs in an epic six-hour recording session, the band was proud of the result.  For some reason naming themselves “B.E.P.” (the medical acronym for bladder evacuation perception, the subconscious reflexive sense most adults have that permits them to keep from wetting the bed during deep slumber), the band paid to press 100 copies of “Spirit and Solitude” and hawked them throughout the region, with limited success.

Although the music was catchy, the problem seemed to be the impenetrable lyrics and almost imperceptible vocals.  (Stewart maintained that the recording engineer had deliberately buried his voice in the mix, an allegation that the engineer later willfully acknowledged.)  But the band persevered, continuing to play school dances, car shows and frat parties.  That is, until April 1976, when it all came crashing to a halt.

At an ASU Psi Iota Gamma fraternity party, philosophy junior Sydney Lou Hoover quickly ascertained that the band’s lyrics (and song titles, which Stewart yelled out to the band between numbers, eschewing a set list) were not only cryptic but also strangely familiar.  By the middle of the second set, she had it:  every single lyric (and, in fact, every title) was plagiarized from some random part of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 19th century opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  (The precocious Hoover had tackled the tome in her AP World Lit class at the all-girls high school she had attended in Hot Springs).   Feigning ignorance, Hoover inquired of Stewart while the other band members packed the gear (as always, without Stewart's help due to his slight build and indifference).  No sooner had Hoover mentioned the word “Nietzsche” to Stewart than he broke into tears and ran out of the room, his longtime secret now revealed.  As he subsequently confessed to his bandmates, not only could he not write original lyrics, he had absolutely no idea what the thousands of words he copied out of TSZ meant.  The other band members were willing to give it a pass (they couldn’t write lyrics either), but Stewart, outed as a fraud, knew his future was not in music.  (He later moved to the Ozarks and opened a canoe concession.)

The Dingle brothers and Larry Jr. carried on for another year as instrumental act Woe Nellie, shifting their focus to an eclectic amalgamation of ‘60s surf rock and what would become known in subsequent decades as nü metal.

Fun fact:  Two years following the demise of B.E.P., an 18-year-old Michael Stipe was rummaging through some boxes at a thrift shop in Collinsville, Illinois when he stumbled across a copy of “Spirit and Solitude.”  Never having heard of the band, he purchased the album for 35 cents—along with a four-volume set of William Faulkner novels and James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Stipe soon thereafter left for the University of Georgia.