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Fig, born Robert Newton to carnival folk in 1969, was, from a very
early age, a public television junkie and voracious reader who went on
to spend much of his childhood in a bookmobile. Eventually, and strictly
by chance, his parents' caravan, while pulling out of a kosher rib joint
in Weehauken, New Jersey in May of 1977, collided with the bookmobile,
whose driver had kidnapped the soft-spoken, tow-headed young Fig five
years earlier. Frightened but extremely well-read, the boy was reunited
with his parents, who, to no avail, tried to talk the bookmobile driver
into keeping him. According to Fig, seeing Star Wars for the first time a few
days after his release was a formative event in the then eight-year-old's
life. Not only did he see the movie 27 times (before the advent of home
video, mind you), but his incessant, word-for-word parroting of the
film's dialogue was something which his gypsy parents eventually came to
fear was a form of demonic possession. While they were not Catholic,
they did manage to find a shady Jesuit priest who would perform an
exorcism for the right number of ride tickets. Fig's interest in music came at an early age, too. When he was 10, he
re-wrote the words to something called "The Alphabet Song,"
shortly before announcing to the world at an imaginary press conference
that Ptook!, the little man who lived in his stomach, was forming a
labor union with Sheldon, the silly little troll who lived in the septic
tank. Coincidentally, that was the same year that Fig became a ward of
one of the state's finest mental health facilities, leaving his parents
to pursue their greatest dream, namely, not having to claim the boy as a
dependent anymore. Rewriting lyrics to popular songs would serve him well later on (and
we hear that as a result of Fig's playground "Alphabet" ditty,
the original tune became known all over the English-speaking world.) In
1989, he embarked on a most ambitious recording project -- recording his
own versions of every song released since the day he was born. He
recorded three parodies, as well as three original songs, before he ran
out of money and was forced to spend most of the 1990's submitting to
various medical experiments so that he could pay back his investors. "No English today, please," said Mrkl Svbrnltz, an
immigrant telemarketer and reluctant investor in Fig's dream project,
when asked to comment on his tenuous relationship with the up-and-coming
recording star. After hitting the financial jackpot for testing a
fertility drug for Grundle Pharmaceutical, a drug company that
specialized in manufacturing a popular pill known as Placebo, Fig paid
Svbrnltz and 53 other investors back in full. Svbrnltz, through a
translator, said that in addition to finishing his Ph.D in Pez Dispenser
Design, he is going to use the found money to buy some vowels for his
name. In 1998, after making child support payments to 23 female Grundle
Pharmaceutical test subjects, Fig had enough money left over to finish
the album. He recorded seven more songs and as a peace offering to his
parents, bought a Capuchin monkey named Ungawa, which he then put a
dress on and taught to dance. One day, during Ungawa's toilet training,
Fig's father, wondering why the hell there was a monkey on his toilet,
snapped the now-famous picture that adorns the cover of the album. "Monkey Bismuth" is that album -- Fig's first -- and he
vengefully promises that it will not be his last. While his parents
claim to have never have been able to have children of their own, they
did wish Fig the best of luck in finding his parents, wherever they
might be, and that they are also quite proud of their recently-adopted
daughter, Ungawa. |
