The Nose on the Senate's 'porn rock' hearings, 30 years later

The parents of many, if not most, of the Nose’s gentle readers might not yet have had the sex that spawned them when, in 1985, the issue of raunchy rock lyrics erupted in the U.S. Senate’s “porn rock” hearing. It was a free-speech rock fan’s wet dream, this highly public spectacle that prompted the Recording Industry of America Association (RIAA) to affix “Parental Advisory” stickers on musical releases it deemed possibly offensive to the sexual sensibilities of the parents of minors. Rock stars sparred with U.S. senators as bawdy lyrics such as those from the Mentors’ scat-rock classic ‘Golden Showers,’ with its Nose-flaring reference to “anal vapors,” were recited into the Congressional Record. If a DVD of the hearing were released today, the Motion Picture Association of America would likely feel compelled to give it an “R” rating.

Baltimore’s connection to the “Contents of Music and the Lyrics of Records” hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was twofold. Its native son, the late freak-rock champion Frank Zappa, in whose memory a bust sits along Frank Zappa Way in Highlandtown, was one of its star witnesses. And the legendary Baltimore-Washington radio DJ Cerphe Colwell also gave the committee some things to ponder. A month prior, in August 1985, the two sat down in Baltimore for a videotaped interview that has surfaced on the internet in recent years.

Zappa descended on the hearing because a coven of connected women in D.C., who he called “the Washington wives,” had come together earlier that year to form the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which quickly whipped up public sentiment against what it considered to be offensive lyrics, releasing its “Filthy Fifteen” songs by artists ranging from Prince to Sheena Easton and clamoring for a way to enable parents to screen such smut before their kids could hear it. 

Ultimately, as well all know, the PMRC succeeded in getting RIAA’s concession: what quickly became known as “Tipper stickers,” a now-dated idiom referring to PRMC co-founder Tipper Gore. She’s the wife of then-Sen. Al Gore Jr., who sat on the committee—he even copped to being a Zappa fan—and went on to become the country’s vice president. While the stickers might have helped some parents avoid being offended over the years, they mostly helped kids know what to buy. When seen on record-store racks by pimple-faced teenagers, they all but screamed, “Buy me! Buy me!”

Exhibit A: Disney-fied boy-band token Nick Jonas sheds his purity and gets his first “Parental Advisory” sticker on his late-2014 solo release, and his name promptly appears on the top-10 list of the Billboard charts.

Come 1986, Zappa’s legislative concerns arrived in Maryland. State Del. Judith Toth of Montgomery County had gotten a measure passed in the House of Delegates that would have reformed the Free State’s obscenity laws so that recordings deemed obscene could not be sold to minors. The Nose’s favorite lobbyist, since-convicted felon Bruce Bereano, wooed Zappa to come testify against the bill in the Maryland Senate in February 1986, and it was a satisfying appearance, thankfully preserved in Zappa’s “Video from Hell”.