While Princess Wei and Rev. Stang made their trek from Ohio to Texas, L.A. and San Francisco, and back, spreading disease, climbing rocks in national monuments, and breaking limbs all the way, they recorded daily road reports for HOUR OF SLACK. While these too-honest reports admittedly required strenuous editing, interspersing them with “regular” abnormal SubGenius material (such as rants about religion, stupidity and conspiracies) has made them at least seemingly more seemly. Other contributors include Mr. F. LeMur, The Large, Rev. Penn Jillette, Rev. Frodis “Suds” Pshaw, Dr. Sinister, Dr. Hal, Lonesome Cowboy Dave, Puzzling Evidence, The Firesign Theatre and Dr. Philo Drummond. Incidentally, the March 11 episode of the NPR show “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” we are told, will feature interviews with Rev. Stang along with Howard Stern, Camille Paglia, Jack Abramoff and others. The theme is “Scoundrels!” ( http://ttbook.org/ )

The Church Audio Monks in Dobbstown unearthed this excellent fossil episode at a dig in Vault Canyon — this was found at the Cassette Tape Masters layer, dating it to around 1995 or 1996. These were the “Golden Shower Years” of the SubGenius/ESO Swamp Radio shows (WCSB, Cleveland), when Prof. Chas Smith led Lonesome Cowboy Dave and Rev. Stang through maze-like live shows — with live musical accompaniment by Chas and other ESO musicians). Pieces of those were then scavenged for Hours of Slack, interspersed with songs, collages, and weird radio history clips, in this case including Rev. Mojo Nixon, a memorable Papa Joe Mama Sermon from a Pittsburg devival, Rev. Bill T. Miller’s Out of Band Experience (OBE), a reading by Stang from his BIG BOOK OF CONSPIRACIESintro, the one and only Joe Auffrict, Cleveland Satanist, in clips from an interview before his comedy career, Philo’s little brother Sphinx on Puzzling Evidence, Stang reading the greatest Nenslo SubGenius Conspiracy rant. Begins with clips from Rev. Bleepo Abernathy and Rev. Nick Nolin. Doesn’t end.

This episode is all one fantastic old-school media barrage by the hard-working and very talented Rev. Xister, normally heard weekly on our fellow SubGenius show, The Ministry of Slack. It’s a collage about The Conspiracy, using what would be to him older movies and music, and harkens back the carefully-arranged media barrages that we used to splice up on reel-to-reel tape back in the 1980s before Hour of Slack was born. I don’t think “Bob” or SubGenius are mentioned at all, but it is PURE SubGenius. It’s 90 minutes long too, so this is only Part One of SHIP OF STATE by Rev. Xister.