It’s hard to figure out where the HOTES cassette album: “Off Duty Beelzebub” should appear in the chronology of the group’s chaotic collection of recordings. It appears here because the final raw materials that it was composed from were recorded by George Gibson and C. Goff III on April 13th, 1990.

In producing Off Duty Beelzebub, Goff’s objective was to put together a cassette album focused around controversial readings and interpretations of evangelical Christian literature and Biblical prophesies. To create this heretical concoction, Goff employed a four track tape recorder as a makeshift cauldron, in which he stirred together carefully chosen vials of improvised Ether to serve up a tonic which flows with quirky and haunting sonic mystery. The recipe for this brew called for a stereo cassette recording made by Goff, Gibson, and Robert Silverman on November 18th, 1989, and a Frippertronics-style tape loop recording made by Goff, Silverman, Killr “Mark” Kaswan, and Stuart Sands sometime in 1988, to be boiled together with the April 13th recording mentioned above.

All of the members of the Herd express their candidacies for exorcism by preaching, petitioning, proselytizing, chanting, and speaking in tongues. The results likely forever denied them invitations to revival meetings hosted by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.

Off Duty Beelzebub was released as a 90 minute cassette album by Taped Rugs Productions in 1991. The album was co-released by ECTO Tapes of Oklahoma City.

Taped Rugs presents here two of the album’s big hits.

1) “Floss Your Soul” (This is actually one of the true stand-outs from the entire HOTES collection of recordings -- a Silverman-inspired twisted tale that positions every listener directly between outer space and hell.)

and

2) “Deities For Dollars”

THE AUDIO COMPONENT OF THIS PODCAST HAS BEEN REMOVED TO ALLOW MORE EPISODES IN THIS SERIES TO BE POSTED. IT IS NOW AVAILABLE AT THE LINK BELOW:
http://www.archive.org/details/OffDutyBeelzebub