The strange 1976 Cat Stevens song and video, Banapple Gas

My pal Mark Casale and I were speaking about Captain Beefheart last night (as we are often wish to do) and were yucking it up over the surreal late-night TELEVISION commercial for the Beef’s 1970 record, Lick My Decals Off, Child(which I posted about last month).

This prompted Mark to ask me if I ‘d ever seen the strange promo video for Cat Steven’s 1976 tune, Banapple Gas

[Numbers] was based upon a fictional world in a far-off galaxy called Polygor. The album included a brochure with excerpts from a prepared book of the exact same name composed by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott. The booklet includes pen-and-ink illustrations drawn by Stevens.

The principle of the album is a fantastic spiritual musical which is set on the world Polygor. In the story there is a castle with a number maker. This machine exists to fulfill the sole function of the world– to distribute numbers to the remainder of the universe: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (but especially not 0). The 9 occupants of Polygor, the Polygons, are Monad, Dupey, Trezlar, Cubis, Qizlo, Hexidor, Septo, Octav, and Novim. As the last lines of the book state, they “followed a life of routine that had actually existed for as long as any might keep in mind. … It was, therefore, all the more stunning when on a normal day things initially started to fail.” The change takes the form of Jzero, who comes from no place as a servant and eventually puzzles everyone with his simple fact. ( Wikipedia)

Um, sure. OK.

An online search likewise discovers claims that Banapple Gas was a referral to Banadine (the mythic drug made from banana peels), an acquired form of LSD, and/or another name for Amyl Nitrite.

Image: YouTube