'OH MY GOD': Are you ready for Bernie Sanders' foray into folk music? [audio]

Sarah D. | 3:26 PM on September 17, 2014

The year was 1987. Musician Todd Lockwood decided that what the world really needed was a Bernie Sanders folk album. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I heard Bernie Sanders sing a cheap-drum-machine-reggae version of “This Land is Your Land,” and nothing was the same http://t.co/8sFzH6Yf8d

— Tyler Machado (@tylermachado) September 17, 2014

More from Seven Days:

“As talented of a guy as he is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go,” Lockwood said. “This is a guy who couldn’t even tap his foot to music coming over the radio. No sense of melody. No sense of rhythm — the rhythm part surprised me, because he has good rhythm when he’s delivering a speech in public.”

So they had to come up with a plan B. Lockwood decided to turn the event into a “We Are The World”-style recording session: He called in a couple dozen Vermont musicians to serve as backup singers, while Bernie more or less read/preached the key lyrics with as much rhythm as he could muster.

…

The resulting album was among the more popular ones that the label produced that year. They sold a few hundred cassette tapes at record stores throughout Vermont, Lockwood said — many to conservatives who bought them as gag gifts.

Well, duh. What else could you possibly do with such a sonic abomination?