Madness

Original air date: March 18, 2025

This episode was inspired by…well…feeling crazy. The world is unrecognizable to me lately, I cannot fathom the things I am seeing, and I’m surrounded by people acting as if everything is absolutely normal. I kept coming back to this quote from Welcome to the Monkey House by my beloved Kurt Vonnegut:

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”

So I wanted to explore themes of madness and perceived madness, so there are stories about poisonous workplaces inducing symptoms (and efforts from organized labor helping to change dangerous manufacturing processes), the remarkably wholesome tale of a legendary punk show in an asylum, very public and terrifying gaslighting of women by powerful men, and prairie fever (another example of breakdowns caused by isolation, poverty, and a lack of support networks).

Sometimes the sanest people are the crazy ones.

Playlist

• Let’s Go Crazy - Prince

• We’re All Mad - the Circus Contraption Band

• We’re All Mad Here - Tom Waits

• Mad Hatter - Melanie Martinez

• Losing Touch - the Killers

• Psychotic Reaction (live) - the Cramps

• Institutionalized - Suicidal Tendencies

• She Cracked - the Modern Lovers

• She Cracked - Siouxsie & the Banshees

• Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle - Nirvana

• Insanity - Oingo Boingo

• Trouble’s Coming - Royal Blood

• Madness - Muse

• Nervous Breakdown - Black Flag

• Where Is My Mind? - Pixies

• Twisted - Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross

• Psycho Killer - Talking Heads

• All the Madmen - David Bowie

• Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment - Ramones

• I Wanna Be Sedated - Nouvelle Vague

• Lunatic Fringe - Red Rider

• Lead a Normal Life - Peter Gabriel

• My Descent Into Madness - Eels

My Stories

Mad Hatters

• Erethism

• Mad as a Hatter: Global efforts to reduce mercury emissions Feb 18, 2013, By Sudipta Chakraborty

• Mercury Poisoning info from the World Health Organization’s INCHEM (Internationally peer reviewed chemical safety information)

• Danbury Shakes

• The Untold Story Of The Danbury Shakes by Leslie Veliz

The Cramps 1979 show at Napa State

• Cramps at Napa YouTube

• We Were There to be There YouTube

• Shit Got Crazy: When The Cramps and The Mutants Invaded a Mental Hospital By Phil Barber January 14, 2015

• The Cramps Play a Mental Health Hospital in Napa, California in 1978: The Punkest of Punk Concerts (in Music, Psychology | July 19th, 2024) Open Culture

• Mike Plante and Jason Willis on Their Cramps/Mutants Punk Doc, We Were There To Be There by Scott Macaulay (in Directors, Interviews on Jul 13, 2021) Filmmaker Magazine

• Psyched: Doc recounts when The Cramps and The Mutants played Napa State By Chelsea Kurnick

Prairie Fever

• Prairie Madness

• Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy (my own well worn copy)

Poems

• Mad Girl’s Love Song, by Sylvia Plath

•  Love In The Asylum, By Dylan Thomas

•  Much Madness Is Divinest Sense, by Emily Dickinson

• The Sick Muse by Charles Baudelaire, translated by William A. Sigler