Outré refugees

Dig a little below the surface and you’ll find in our cumulative 45 rpm output a discography of the strangest musical impulses. Rare were the financial returns great for the independently pressed 45 record but rare was its overhead, either. Its inexpensiveness has made it, since the early ‘50s, the first (and last, often) commercial frontier of America’s idiosyncratic visionaries and of its overlooked, exotic, homespun and most anti-social musical niches. I tend to rhapsodize endlessly about this relationship on Office Naps. Visionaries and musical niches, though: these are forces that redeem American culture.

Such dynamics, the subtle balance of economic and creative energies, were still going strong in the mid and late ‘60s. The 45 was still the predominant format in much of popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll - though not for much longer - and examples of unconventional 45 records were just as ample, if not more ample, in 1968 as they were in 1958. It’s simply that, of the unusual or nominally experimental records that were issued commercially, they were then more likely to be the work of rock musicians, psychedelic individualists like Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson and the Holy Modal Rounders. In the guise of psychedelia, their freakishness would even perversely capture a fleeting commercial potential.

That’s what’s different about the selections this week, all recorded and released in the mid- and late ‘60s, the psychedelic era. They are likely strange by most listeners’ standards. Nonetheless they are neither rock nor psychedelic. They seem to be from some different moment, like beatnik artifacts washed up in a later decade. Their anomaly only seems to increase the profundity of their strangeness.

1. Kali Bahlu, Lonely Teardrops (Terra)
The enigmatic Kali Bahlu was a young woman in 1967 when she released her Cosmic Remembrance LP on the then-foundering World-Pacific record label. A swirling tableau of gongs, sitars, tablas and Bahlu’s Buddhist chanting and fairy-tale ruminations, Cosmic Remembrance is an album known for its general incongruity and for testing listeners’ patience. For all of its faux-Eastern artifice and Bahlu’s voice - sometimes a feral soprano, sometimes a jarring, child-like babble - Cosmic Remembrance is nonetheless quite unique, a relic that stands apart from its era. (Hear an excerpt of the album’s “A Cosmic Telephone Call” here).

“Lonely Teardrops” - Bahlu’s first recording, I believe - is not wholly dissimilar from the otherworldly atmosphere of her Cosmic Remembrance LP. It’s just much better. It’s also Kali Bahlu singing from some grimmer place. The ominous rumblings, Bahlu’s naked, if indecipherable, emotion, the wonderfully stark gloom: those of us drawn to sunless, wintry tundras find much to love in the remarkable “Lonely Teardrops.” This is the reason bears hibernate. Brighter days lay ahead for Kali Bahlu, however - they could hardly get any bleaker.

Whether it was the Bahlu of “Lonely Teardrops” banging on a detuned guitar - or the beatific Bahlu rambling in sing-song tones about Lord Buddha and “clocks of never” on Cosmic Remembrance - this is clearly someone on a separate psychic plane. Often referred to as acid-influenced, that is perhaps a disservice to the peculiar experience of Kali Bahlu, whose Californian, pseudo-Buddhist cosmic consciousness just happened to synchronize with hippie sensibilities.

Kali Bahlu would later be involved in some capacity with a few hens-teeth-obscure ‘70s albums of Eastern-inspired singing and commune vibes by the Los Angeles hippie-rock group Lite Storm. Bizarrely, Bahlu was more recently spotted in Taiwanese filmmaker Mei-Juin Chen’s film Hollywood Hotel.

I’ve found no conclusive information on Terra Records or this selection’s producer, Michael O’Shanessey. I believe “Lonely Teardrops” was recorded in 1966 or 1967.

2. George Loa and Maui Loa (Little Brother), Polynesian Chant of Green Creation: Cosmic Climax (Green Power)
The brothers Loa, this week’s mystery artists.

This is Hawaiian cosmology reinvented for a headier moment in history. The flute and conga drum channel grooviness. Same for the sexual overtones of the selection’s spoken-word introduction and title. The haunting call-and-response chanting seems authentic enough, but whether or not it was a pre-coital dance of the Polynesian gods is anyone’s guess.

There’s nothing one can definitively point out as either a precedent or an obvious target audience for 1969’s “Cosmic Climax. “ One might have found it being sold from ads in the back of a Stag magazine or peddled to shell-bar tourists. It might have been handed to you at last summer’s gathering of the tribe. Whoa, thanks man. But let’s not mistake the 45 rpm record for a medium that demands market analysis or committed commercial vision. It can be many visions all at once. It can be a great mass of anthropologically incorrect, conflicting intentions.

“Cosmic Climax” was recorded in Hawaii or possibly Los Angeles.

3. Miriam, Catwalk (Tanqueray)
“Catwalk” is the handiwork of the Hollywood actress Miriam Byrd-Nethery and her husband Clu Gulager, an actor, too, and later an aspiring filmmaker.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery (born 1929 in Arkansas) and Clu Gulager (born a year earlier in Oklahoma) met in the theater department at Baylor University, married and found their first professional theater and television work in New York City. Relocating to Hollywood in the late ‘50s, Gulager would go on to distinguish himself as a prolific genre actor in both movies and television, including deputy sheriff Emmett Ryker in TV’s The Virginian, rig-hand-and-ladies-man Abilene in The Last Picture Show and contract killer Lee in The Killers. Starting with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, Gulager’s work as horror movie stock character revived an acting career that continues today, albeit at a subdued pace.

Miriam, too, managed her own small-time acting career in Hollywood, but if it was Gulager who enjoyed the spotlight, theirs would first be a marriage, then family, energized above all by a spirit of collaboration and the noblest of artistic endeavors: filmmaking. Their obsession with producing films - including the family’s eight years in Tulsa trying unsuccessfully to realize their grisly serial killer horror noir Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (its saga detailed in an engrossing 1997 LA Weekly article) - put them on the brink of starvation.

None of this does anything but increase the charm of this maverick and quintessentially American couple, whose lust for creative, budget-minded expression reached early fruition on “Catwalk,” a slice of pure Sunset Strip eccentricity from 1967. Ever wonder what really goes inside the actors studio? This is it.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery passed away in 2003.

Message from the ghetto

What ties this week’s selections together is not merely their spoken word component (though it’s significant, certainly). Nor is it just their cause of change and greater societal welfare. Awareness-raising ballads, agitprop invective, activist commentary, summons-to-action and subversive parody are everywhere in recorded music - African-American or otherwise.

Their defining aspect, rather, is their specificity. “Invitation to Black Power,” “It’s Free” and “I Care About Detroit” aren’t broad laments of urban blight or gospel-liberated anthems. Theirs are messages associated with specific causes, specific religious organizations, specific cities, specific venereal diseases, even, and they’re calibrated to their communities accordingly.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s would be the apogee of this sort of thing, specialized message records reflecting the general tumult of the era - the counterculture, the assassinations, the radical strategizing and the sexual and cultural politics. Music suffused the era’s upheavals, and the years’ idealism and anger inspired more than a few to disseminate the word in turn on the very model of audio expediency, the 45 rpm record. It’s music meets message meets shiny black wax this week on Office Naps.

1. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Despite its reference to the "long, hot summer” - Detroit’s deadly spell of rioting and discord in 1967 - I believe that “Invitation to Black Power” was actually produced in Chicago. The selection was likely recorded in 1968 or 1969 - after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, certainly. But no substantive light can be shed on the Shahid Quintet or Richard or Earl Shabazz, who, either way, were probably not related. (Shabazz is a frequent surname assumed by Nation of Islam adherents.)

Its mysteries aside, “Invitation to Black Power” is a fascinating, a one-of-a-kind snapshot of a particular dimension of the black inner-city experience of the late ‘60s. It’s a bit amateur, sure, and its format is more a throwback to earlier beat-poetry-with-cool-jazz collaborations than the screeching saxophones and intellectual aspirations of contemporaries like Archie Shepp or Amiri Baraka. But it succeeds in one account: running down, humorously and unpretentiously, the Nation of Islam promise of rebirth, equality and separation of the races.

2. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Which is not to say that “Invitation to Black Power” was ever a proselytizing tool espoused, officially or otherwise, by the Nation of Islam in the local communities. It has more the flavor of a vanity project, the handiwork of a ragged jazz combo and two men with poetic and theatrical proclivities and the zealous energies of the converted.

Earl Shabazz and Richard Shabazz might have envisioned their record finding its way to their local Black Nationalist bookstore, they might have seen it being sold at local poetry readings. Some forty-odd years later, though, they likely wouldn’t have foreseen that their recording had landed mostly in hands of white record collectors, the inevitable home to such cultural ephemera.

3. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, I Care About Detroit (Motown and Stein & Van Stock, Inc.)
A name that looms large in America’s pop music annals, William “Smokey” Robinson was born in 1940 in Detroit and grew up singing and writing songs for the local vocal group the Five Chimes. The Five Chimes became the Matadors who, in turn, metamorphosed into the Miracles, the group with whom Robinson, the very icon of the romantic, urbane tenor, would go on to become one of the definitive voices of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Besides his considerable vocal gifts, there was Robinson’s acumen behind-the-scenes at Motown Records and his longstanding partnership with the man at the head of the Hitsville U.S.A. empire, Berry Gordy, Jr. It was Berry Gordy, then an aspiring producer, who recorded the Miracles for their first single “Got a Job,” a minor hit for the New York City-based End Records in 1958. It was Gordy who signed the Miracles as one the first groups to his fledgling Tamla Records (later absorbed under the Motown Record Corporation aegis) and it was Gordy, too, who made Smokey Robinson the company’s vice-president in 1961.

If early Miracles records failed to catch fire, 1960’s million-seller “Shop Around” changed all that. It would be the first in a decade-long series of hits like “Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion” and “The Tears of a Clown.” Robinson’s successes as in-house songwriter and, later, producer mirrored both the ascendancy of the Miracles as one of the decade’s great soul groups and the broader fortunes of Motown.

The little-known “I Care About Detroit” was Motown in full 1968 flower, the synthesis of social consciousness and soulful groove, the embodiment of young, interracial, turned-on America. Penned by Michigan labor attorney Jack Combs and Detroit R&B vocalist Jimmy “Soul” Clark, this was the second of two Motown 45s produced for “Detroit Is Happening,” a summer-long education and recreation program implemented after the Detroit riots of 1967.

The record industry was not quite the cynical monolith in 1968 that it is today. Still, Motown Records was a mainstream tastemaker and hardly one to hurl itself at a cause without a certain reflexive measure of caution. If Motown is to be commended for their gesture to public service, then Detroit’s disillusionment was that much more acute when Motown Records abandoned the imperiled city for its sleek new Los Angeles headquarters in 1972. Coming together for unity and progress seemed like a good idea until everybody had tried out their new, leather-upholstered swivel chairs.

Officially parting with the Miracles in 1972 to pursue a solo career, Robinson’s success as an adult-contemporary R&B singer - and unwitting pioneer of the dreaded quiet storm format - tapered off sometime after his biggest solo hit, 1981’s “Being With You.” A vice-president at Motown until the company’s sale to MCA in 1988, Robinson has remained semi-retired since, with a few albums of smooth ballads and gospel in the last decade-and-a-half.

4. Bishops of the Holy Rollers Fallout Shelter with Curtis Colbert, It’s Free (CAVDA)
This spoken-word gem was written and performed in part by Gylan Kain, a poet and a founding member of the Last Poets, easily the best-known spoken-word group in the pre-rap era. To the relentless beat of conga drums, the Last Poets spieled unsparingly about revolution, racist society, poverty and the plight of African-Americans. Kain, though he never actually recorded with the Last Poets, took their aesthetic one step further on his sole LP, 1971’s Blue Guerrilla, a potent stew of psychedelic, funky jazz and Kain’s incendiary poetry and surreal incantations.

Produced by Gylan and Denise Kain (his wife, presumably) for the Chicago-based Citizens Alliance for VD Awareness, “It’s Free” has moments that bear resemblance to Blue Guerilla’s colorful, stream-of-consciousness imagery. If the references to “johnsons” and pre-AIDS unprotected sex seem a bit quaint in 21st Century America, then the level-headed humanism and candor of “It’s Free” seem positively radical in cultural terrain presently mediated by sinister, regressive forces like the Christian Coalition. Still, “It’s Free”’s quandary is not unlike that of any organization attempting to connect with a younger demographic. It’s hip, it’s direct, “It’s Free” rises to the challenge of outreach with aplomb and intelligence. The problem was neither its message nor how it was conveyed, though. The problem, rather, was the stomach-turning imagery of "It's Free." No one ever, ever played this record, which explains why this 45 is always in perfect condition when you find it.

In recent years, Gylan Kain has collaborated with the Dutch jazz and turntablist group Electric Barbarian.

Get rhythm

The drum machine was one of a wave of early mass-produced electronic instruments and studio devices in the ‘60s that expanded by quantum leaps the technological and creative bounds of music and recording.

Historically speaking, however, early drum machines like Ace Tone Rhythm Ace and the Maestro’s Rhythm King, with their somewhat awkward analog drum sounds and preset rhythms, would long remain marginal to keyboard synthesizer counterparts like the Moog. A Moog could wow early '70s audiences with bleeps, gurgles and swooping sequences of tonal pulses. Early Japanese-made drum machines, intended from the start as an organ accompaniment or rehearsal aid, mostly just sat there, dutifully pattering away in metronomic samba time and eventually finding their niche as a built-in component in Lowrey and Hammond church organs.

The Maestro Rhythm King (Picture credit, Backbeat Books, from their book Strange Sounds: Offbeat Instruments and Sonic Experiments in Pop.)

It wouldn’t really be until after Roland’s introduction of its crunching TR-808 drum machines in the early ‘80s that the drum machine would finally find its true calling - electronic dance music - and become less of a bastard stepchild.

Nonetheless, from Bee Gee Robin Gibb (1970's Robin's Reign) and

Sly Stone protégés Little Sister (1970’s “Stanga”) to Dick Hyman and soul-pop guitar innovator Shuggie Otis (1974’s “XL-30”), the drum machine did catch the attention of the occasional pop musician or two. For some, its gadgetry was enough to add a futuristic sheen. For others, like Sly Stone, who used it on the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the drum machine was a probably a nice option after you’d fired another drummer in a coke-fuelled meltdown. Most of these musicians seemed to recognize that the drum machine was too incidental to ever supplant an actual drummer, but, luckily for us, there were still a few eccentrics left over that heard the ring of the cash register somewhere in those mechanized rhythms.

1. Timmy Thomas, Funky Me (Glades)
Best known for his 1972 hit “Why Can’t We Live Together,” singer and keyboardist Timmy Thomas grew up in Indiana playing piano in his minister father’s Methodist Church. Graduating from Tennessee’s Lane College with a BA in music, Thomas did some session keyboard work for the Memphis soul independent Goldwax Records, and, a few obscure soul numbers under his name for Goldwax later, he settled in Florida in the late ‘60s. There he worked as a college administrator and opened his own Miami Beach club, “Timmy’s Lounge." There Thomas recorded his impassioned peace-and-harmony anthem “Why Can’t We Live Together” for the tiny local Konduko label in 1972.

Leased for distribution by Florida music impresario Henry Stone for his Glades label, the spare organ-and-rhythm arrangements of “Why Can’t We Live Together” (hear excerpt here) made for a somewhat unlikely million-seller in 1972. Just as unlikely, however, was its chugging instrumental flipside “Funky Me.” Unerring in its tempo, its juicy organ vamps and mechanical funkiness would have made a good b-side on some early ‘80s New York art-disco 12”. This was the danger of an early drum machine like the Maestro Rhythm King. Simultaneously hit the “rhumba” and “go go” presets and suddenly you were ten years into the future.

In 1973 Timmy Thomas released the full-length album Why Can’t We Live Together, which sustained the spare aesthetic of “Funky Me” and “Why Can’t We Live Together.” Thomas currently works as a music teacher and director of One Art, an independent music and arts educational initiative in Florida, and has recorded sporadically in the decades since.

2. Simtec Simmons, Tea Pot (Maurci)
1967’s “Tea Pot,” for all its whimsical qualities, was not some after-hours lark of a studio engineer at loose ends. This selection was the handiwork of Simtec Simmons, the singer, guitarist and leader of aspiring Chicago R&B group the Tea Boxes. “Tea Pot,” according to legend, was recorded at the behest of Herb “Kool Gent” Kent, a Chicago radio disc jockey who was taken with the sound of the rhythm machine and who in turn encouraged Simmons and his combo to record using it.

“Tea Pot” features Simtec Simmons on guitar and two members of the Tea Boxes - his brother Ronald Simmons on bass and Bobby Pointer on the drum machine. Released on Maurice Jackson’s tiny Chicago soul label Maurci in 1967, “Tea Pot” was, improbably enough, a good-sized regional hit, its anomalous and quirky appeal sending robots all over the upper Midwest to their local record shops for something they could finally dance to.

Around the time of “Tea Pot”’s release, Simtec and the Tea Boxes were performing as part of a nightclub act with another local Chicago R&B group, Wylie Dixon and the Wheels. The two bandleaders would join together as the hard-edged funky soul duo Simtec and Wylie in 1969, going on in the early ‘70s to score some sizeable hits like “Do It Like Mama” and “Gotta Get Over the Hump”. After a few more years of recording and performing in Chicago, Simmons quit the music business in the late ‘70s.

3.

The Computer and the Little Fooler, Computing (Maurci)
Let me paint a picture for you. In 1967, a song like “A Day in the Life” (hear excerpt here) was transcendent, an orchestral capstone to the Beatles’ Summer of Love tour de force. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix was pushing psychedelia’s outer limits with space guitar epics like “Third Stone From the Sun” (excerpt here). That same year the Velvet Underground’s noisy, experimental aesthetic would culminate in a selection like “I Heard Her Call My Name” (excerpt here), and, on the R&B charts, James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” (excerpt here) steered popular African-American rhythms into dark new directions.

And, somewhere on the south side of Chicago in 1967, our friends from the previous selection - Simtec Simmons and Maurci Records head honcho Maurice Jackson - rushed this selection out to a market awaiting a follow-up to “Tea Box.”

4. The Computer and the Little Fooler, Sw-w-wis-s-sh (Maurci)
I’m not sure who or what the Little Fooler was, but I’d wager that he was roughly the size and shape of a pocket calculator.

The weirdest post-War American music has always shown up first on the 45 rpm record, one of the most expedient of commercial music media. But, that said, the strange-witted minimalism of “Computing” and its backwards flipside “Sw-w-wis-s-sh” beggars all belief. “Computing” was neither funny nor weird enough to be a novelty record, nor did it offer anything that anyone could point to as a being conventionally instrumental. There’s simply little sense to be made of it. Sometimes I think this is the greatest record ever made.

Cinema funky

Just as its antecedents in the mid-‘60s had their sitar interludes and fuzztone atmospherics, the hipper cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s oozed with wah-wah guitars, jazz basslines and funky backbeats. And why not? Whatever Tinseltown's machinations, film had long been a dramatic and stylish medium, and its soundtrack composers were some of the coolest talents around. Movie and television scores afforded lucrative opportunities for a Lalo Schifrin or Henry Mancini to satisfy some serious interests in jazz and composition, if not to experiment with riffs from psychedelic rock or dark rhythms from funk.

Before funk became an obligatory element of every post-Shaft blaxploitation picture, though, before it became a cliché on primetime television fare like CHiPs, there were this week’s selections. Some of these were written for movies. Some of them weren’t written for the screen but wound up there. Some of these were versions of soundtrack themes that exceeded the original. At one end of town, circa 1970, there were serious young men with serious pedigrees from music conservatories sitting in studios with handfuls of annotated charts. At the other end of town, the poorer part of town, churning funk music spun out in endless iterations. And, in that planetary stretch in between, these selections happened.

1. Roy Budd, Carter (DJM)
Roy Budd was a British musical prodigy who began his professional career as a jazz pianist at the tender age of sixteen. It would be his later soundtrack work for movies like Kidnapped (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978), however, for which Budd would find his lasting fame.

Budd imparted a chilly minimalism to “Carter,” his theme for 1971’s Get Carter, a British thriller starring Michael Caine. One can run down the possibilities all day and still never account for how Budd managed, with only a motley ensemble of bass, Indian tablas, and electric harpsichord and piano, to create a tableau so perfectly redolent of both the stark landscape of northern England and of the gangsters who went shooting about there with characteristic disregard.

Budd passed on in 1993. He was forty-six.

2. Julio Gutierrez, Last Tango in Paris (Vico)
The great Julio Gutierrez emigrated from his native Cuba in the late ‘50s, pursuing his calling in both Miami and New York City with freelance stints as a composer, session pianist and musical director. Despite two very hip ‘60s Latin jazz LPs, Progressive Latin and Havana B.C., Gutierrez would never regain the stature he’d enjoyed in Cuba, where, in addition to leading the legendary Cuban Jam Sessions series, he’d been among his country’s best known modern bandleaders and composers.

1972 would perhaps represent the crowning year for the pornographic movie in its brief-lived moment of mainstream chic, and few soundtrack themes would better encapsulate its adults-only art-house cachet than Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.” 1972 would also mark one of the final years of Gutierrez’s recording career, but if his would hereafter be one of diminishing visibility, it wasn’t for lack of audacity. Other Latin bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Rosario and Tito Puente would tackle Barbieri’s continental boudoir anthem, but no one else would inject it with the same groovily psychedelic flair.

Gutierrez died in New York City in 1990.

3. The Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints On the Moon (Warner Brothers)
British-born Johnny Harris first made a name for himself in the mid-‘60s writing arrangements for pop singers like Petula Clark and Jackie Trent. Later in the decade, Harris would produce and arrange sessions for Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Shirley Bassey and other pop acts including the Flirtations. His career arc would also include turns in the late ‘60s touring with Tom Jones and serving as musical director for British singer Lulu’s brief-lived variety show Happening For Lulu.

We are not discussing a serious jazzbo or renegade experimentalist here. Harris’s, rather, was a professional kind of hip, a kind that distinguished itself as a turtleneck-and-beads-wearing young talent in the somewhat staid end of the British pop studio system.

While an ear attuned to the latest in the pop charts meant getting served with unenviable tasks like resuscitating Paul Anka’s career, it also afforded its share of fringe benefits. Like John Schroeder, Harris would release a handful of LPs and 45s under his own name. Albums like 1970’s Movements were uneven affairs, certainly, with polite, state-of-the-art covers of “Light My Fire” and “Give Peace a Chance” along with some more adventurous moments like the funky “Fragments of Fear,” “Stepping Stones” and this selection.

Inspired by the Apollo moon landings and subsequently used for the British ITV Network coverage of NASA’s lunar missions, “Footprints on the Moon” follows in the great tradition of Les Baxter’s Space Escapade or Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo’s Moon Gas, albums where the moon’s surface was imagined more as luminescent lovers’ playground than science's new frontier. Each reverberating piano note of “Footprints on the Moon” seems to bring the listener one gravity-defying step closer to their astrological love destiny. Careful, Libra, your love investments will soon pay off, but watch for a calculating Capricorn to step across your earth shadow.

Since 1972 Johnny Harris has lived in Los Angeles, working mostly in television composition, most famously for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Wonder Woman.

(Thanks go to this site for much of the information on Johnny Harris.)

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

The third installment of the Office Naps mix, and it’s all over the place. From Turkish wah-wah guitars and ’60s garage ragas to Yusef Lateef’s Mecca-wise wail, it’s Middle Eastern only in the loosest possible sense of the term. If there ever there was a darbuka to be struck or an argol to be wrangled, however, it’s probably in there. Enjoy.

-DJ Little Danny

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

Rosko With The John Berberian Ensemble, Perfection (Music and Gibran: A Contemporary Interpretation Of the Author Of The Prophet, Verve Forecast)
Charles Kynard & Buddy Collette, Blue Sands (Warm Winds, World-Pacific)
The Freak Scene, Grok! (Psychedelic Psoul, Columbia)
Elias Rahbani, Dance of Maria (Mosaic of the Orient, EMI)
Fifty Foot Hose, Opus 777 (Cauldron, Limelight)
Mohamed "Mike" Hegazi and His Golden Guitar, Nouni (Belly Dance With Zeina, Emi)
The Off-Set, Xanthia (Lisa) (7”, Jubilee)
Lloyd Miller with the Press Keys Quartet, Gol-E Gandom (Oriental Jazz, East-West)
Fairuz, Yalla Tenam Rima (Bint El-Harass, soundtrack, Parlophone)
Istanbul Calgicilari, Sax Gazel (Disco Fasil I, Bip!)
T. Swift & The Electric Bag, Free Form In 6 (Are You Experienced, Custom)
1st Century, Looking Down (7”, Capitol)
Don Randi Trio, Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver Jazz, Reprise)
The Kaleidoscope, Pulsating Dream (Side Trips, Epic)
Omar Khorshid and His Guitar, Guitar El Chark (Rhythms From the Orient, Voice of Lebanon)
Ozel Turkbas, Bovzovkia Solo (Dance Into Your Sultan's Heart, Elay)
The Devil's Anvil, Hala Laya (7”, Columbia)
Ganimian & His Oriental Music, Swingin' The Blues (Come With Me To the Casbah, Atco)
Okay Temiz, East Breeze (Drummer of Two Worlds, Finnadar)
Clyde Borly & His Percussions, Afromania (Music In 5 Dimensions, Atco)
Sabah with Chahine's International Orchestra, Hully Gully (Halli Galli Dabka) (Music From a Millionaire's Playground, Parlophone)
Yusef Lateef, Sister Mamie (Live at Pep's, Impulse!)
The Rotary Connection, I Took A Ride (Caravan) (Rotary Connection, Cadet Concept)
Dorothy Ashby, Soul Vibrations (Afro-Harping, Cadet)
Herbie Mann, Incense (Impressions of the Middle East, Atlantic)
Lalo Schifrin, The Snake's Dance (Lalo = Brilliance: The Piano of Lalo Schifrin, Roulette)
Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharoah's Curse (7”, GNP)
Johnny Lewis Trio and Millie, Snake Hips (7”, Coral)
Sonny Lester & His Orchestra, Song of India (Little Egypt Presents More How To Belly-Dance For Your Husband, Roulette)

Struck wordless

You’d occasionally spot them on easy-listening records of the ‘50s and ‘60s, those theremin-throated songbirds, their voices swooning, wailing and wordlessly calling with celestial llllaaaahhhhhhhhs.

I’m talking, of course, about wordless vocalists. It is a bit like birdwatching, actually. Jungle exotica, easy-listening themes for outer space, atmospheric soundtrack pieces, and easy orchestral confections: these were their native habitats. They were sometimes heard clustered in groups, more often they were to be spotted crooning by themselves, their voices coloratura hovering somewhere between the South Pacific and the Crab Nebula. A primarily female phenomenon, wordless vocals were a sort of musical stand-in for the feminine mystique. Adaptable enough to conjure anything from seductive playmate and tropical siren to green-tinted moon maiden, wordless vocals relied on their musical context for their meaning.

There were a few albums that featured the wordless vocalist as a headlining star and soloist, but releases like Mary Mayo’s Street of Dreams (1953) and Leda Annest’s Portrait of Leda (1958) were extremely rare. Mostly the wordless vocalists were talented studio and background singers like Marni Nixon, Patricia (aka Petula) Clark, Loulie Jean Norman and the aforementioned Mayo.

Jackie Gleason used them, as did Les Baxter and Juan Esquivel. And so did this week’s artists. As is sometimes the case with Office Naps, the selections are joined by a shared musical device rather than their participation in any musical movement or fringe-dwelling sub-genre. This week’s selections were the phenomenon of independent minds thinking alike, mostly, but the net effect of was basically the same: instrumental music transformed into space-age reverie.

1. Yusef Lateef, Titoro (Riverside)
The pre-‘70s discography of multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef is one of jazz’s most fascinating and otherworldly. Born in Detroit, and long identified with that city’s post-War jazz scene, Lateef grew up playing tenor saxophone; his early musical apprenticeship would culminate with a stint in Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop orchestra of the late ‘40s. Studies in composition and flute followed, and when Lateef’s own recording career as a leader began in 1957, his eastward proclivities were already intact. The next ten years would produce a singular body of work on jazz labels like Savoy, Riverside, New Jazz, and Impulse.

Yusef Lateef could, and did, play straight ahead with the best of jazz’s heavyweights. It’s his Eastern-themed albums and compositions, however, which represent his most interesting work. From Lateef’s earliest dates, albums like Jazz and the Sounds of Nature, Prayer to the East, Eastern Sounds, Jazz ‘Round the World showcased an interest in African, Asian, and, most importantly, Middle Eastern music. Compositions like “Iqbal” and “Mahaba” were, at the time, essentially unique, the reedman’s unabashed exoticism matched only by his acquisitive tastes in unorthodox solo instruments. In addition to being one of era’s most respected jazz flautists, Lateef blew bassoon and oboe. He blew shenhai and argol, too, with a muezzin’s fervor. He even blew theremin (“Sound Wave” on 1966’s A Flat, G Flat and C).

Though always well regarded by his peers, Lateef is, even today, rarely championed by jazz’s critical and historical establishment. It’s no fault of their own, I suppose, but they have long confused exotic with kitschy.

Perhaps critical reception was the reason why this 1961 version of Billy Taylor’s “Titoro” (which was cut during the sessions for Lateef’s The Centaur and the Phoenix album) was only released on 45 in its day. “Titoro”’s vision of jazz is more Afro-Latin exotica than serious bop, more Playboy than Downbeat.

After a late ‘60s switch to Atlantic Records, Lateef’s records were marketed to a younger audience with great crossover success but less originality. Yusef Lateef is today long retired from the commercial record business. At the age of eighty-six, he has remained very productive, inspiringly so, dividing his time between academia, composition and his own record label, YAL.

2. Rita Moss, Daydream (Rozell)
A Los Angeles-based pianist and singer, Rita Moss began her recording career as a pop and jazz soloist in the mid-‘50s, but would release material only sporadically thereafter. She was pictured on her first album (1956’s forgotten Introducing Rita Moss) singing while simultaneously playing, one hand on each, piano and bongos. A later stretch at Los Angeles-based Dot Records produced three late ‘60s albums with Moss singing in lusher orchestrated pop territory. It would be Moss’s sung theme to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby (her vocals are heard only in the movie, I believe) and a smallish cult hit the same year, “Just a Dream Ago,” that represent her lasting claim to fame.

Then there is this obscurity, likely recorded in the early ‘60s, and produced in Hollywood, mood machine to the world. “Daydream” is as much blank canvas as it is Ellington standard. Dusky reverie? Beachfront siesta? Anonymous guestroom rendezvous? “Daydream” was any of these, really, a vessel for whatever shadowy phantasm or narcotic vision we wanted to project upon it. That is mood music.

3. Big Jox Orchestra, Cut-A-Loose (Valencia) What “Cut-A-Loose” lacks in refined musicianship, it makes up for with beatnik insouciance. There but for the grace of wordless vocals go thee: this might have been just another sloppy jazz 45.

With infamous producer and record impresario Leo Austell’s writer credit here - as well as the city’s characteristic rough honking saxophone sound - it can be reasonably adduced that “Cut-A-Loose” was recorded in Chicago. Otherwise, we’re dealing here with a mystery group, a group that will, I suspect, always remain so, no matter how many times we google “big” and “jox” together over the coming decades.

Everything about “Cut-A-Loose” suggests an early- to mid-‘60s release. Again, total speculation.

Office Naps, the Sex Issue

Anyone who shares my perverse fascination with mass-produced pop culture would probably also tell you that the best place to understand the role of sexuality within a particular society is, in fact, its mass-produced pop culture.

Recorded music's diffuse and inexpensive channels of distribution and production have long lent it to sexual content. The independent record industry has been less vulnerable than its more centralized counterpart, the film industry, to external regulation and censorship. As a non-visual medium, though, music has generally limited itself to sexual humor, boasting, innuendo and sound effects. The sensory and more narrative experience of film has played the more critical role in sex’s media mainstreaming.

Still, cinema and recorded music (not to mention non-recorded media like magazines and books) have charted similar, sometimes converging, courses in both their place in American culture and their representations of American sexuality. For every blue burlesque record, bit of 78 rpm hillbilly and blues innuendo, or album of bedsprings squeaking, there was an exposé of nudist camp culture or a Russ Meyer movie. Sex’s weirdly sublimated existence at the fringes of music and film tells us just as much about our puritan hang-ups as it does about our actual sexual practices.

Mainstream pop culture started to loosen up in the ‘60s. By the 1970s, counterculture had seeped its way into mass culture, and, electrified by the spirit of economic opportunism and hippie-era free love, Americans momentarily achieved a sort of embarrassed stalemate with their sexuality. Joy of Sex was a bestseller and there was, of course, the Pill. Wives read about key party foibles in Cosmopolitan magazine. Hipper couples made that furtive trip to catch Deep Throat. After all, Johnny Carson had done it.

Film probably did more any other popular medium to change the landscape of sexuality and to reclaim it from media marginality. But there’s no denying the sexiness and air of sex about a lot of the pop and soul (and later, disco) of the era either. If nothing else, hits like Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s heavy-breathing “Je T’Aime” (hear an excerpt here) and the Chakachas’ “Jungle Fever” (excerpt here) and the Hair soundtrack measured that changing sexual landscape. Movies like Emmanuelle or Last Tango in Paris may have been pushing the envelope of popular discretion, but, still, you were more likely to only own their soundtracks.

I’ll leave such needless analysis at that, though. I offer up this week’s selections as part of the first annual Office Naps Sex Issue, and in the resurrected, gaudy spirit of Porno Chic. (And thank you Wikipedia, you pop culture godsend, for carrying such an entry to begin with.)

1. Manpower, Please Love Me (Erotica) (Philips)
This was actually the Welsh progressive rock group Man, renamed here by Philips Records as the more prurient “Manpower” for the U.S. release of their 1969 debut album Revelations. It’s an album lauded - at least by those who care about such things - as a sort of concept-rock masterpiece. I can’t personally attest to its music, but I can tell you it’s an album with titles like “The Future Hides Its Face,” and “And Castles Rise in Children’s Eyes” and liner notes which extoll Man in near-cosmic terms, promising that “there will be ‘a beginning but no end’ to their music.” Sure. Sounds great, guys.

Like many other hippie relics, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the artistic aspirations leave off and the exploitation begins. Which brings us this selection, taken from the Revelations album. Ground-breaking provocation or cheap thrill? The band would rather us believe the former, of course, but the increasingly seismic moans of “Please Love Me (Erotica)” favor the latter.

“Please Love Me (Erotica)” was apparently a big success in the European pop charts in the late ‘60s.

2. Damaso Pérez Prado, Sexomania (Orfeon)
Pérez Prado was the Cuban-born pianist and bandleader best remembered as a great populizer of the mambo, especially in this country. His “Patricia,” “Mambo No. 5” and “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” were gigantic pop hits in the ‘50s, and they exemplified Prado’s style. Bombastic, bright, brassy, and punctuated by Prado’s trademark "¡Dilo!" grunt, they weren’t the most advanced arrangements, but they were accessible and certainly a lot of fun.

Outside of American’s Latino communities, Prado was known throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s as the “King of the Mambo.” There was some merit to the title: Prado sold more records than Tito Puento, Tito Rodriguez, and Machito combined. By the early ‘70s, though, when “Sexomania” was recorded, Prado had departed for Mexico (where he’d first achieved fame in the late ‘40s), his fortunes and popularity in precipitous decline on the American pop charts.

Prado’s grunting and heavy Afro-Latin dance rhythms - not to mention some lurid album covers - subtly indulged Middle America’s antiquated ideas of exotic intrigue and oversexed natives. In theory, then, Prado should have been poised to capitalize on our brief vogue for sexual expression in the early '70s. Never perhaps the most versatile of bandleaders, though, here was Prado updated with some choppy guitars and a chorus of groovy nymphettes but sounding on “Sexomania” much as he always had: all grunts and screaming brass.

"Sexomania" was originally released in 1972. Orfeon is a large Mexican record label.

3. George Wilder, Partly Cloudy - Part I (Wilmax)
Not soundtrack music per se, but if ever there was a theme in search of adult cinema, then “Partly Cloudy” is it. Likely recorded in the mid-‘60s, this creamsicle predates the golden era of sax-you-down, easy-listening porn soundtracks. There are no orgasms or explicit references here. There’s just no need for that sort of cheap titillation. Just a cloud of pink saxophone and soft-focus harmonies that says far more about a stimulating For Mature Audiences Only experience than thumping percussion or wah-wah guitars ever could.

The George Wilder here is likely the track’s saxophonist, the same George Wilder who played in a late ‘40s version of the Stan Kenton orchestra . “Partly Cloudy” was recorded in Los Angeles.

Begrudging respect must be paid here to the eternally brilliant Crud Crud. Soriano beat me to this track by a mere day or two.

Spoken weird

As long as there have been phonograph records, there have been spoken word records (poet Robert Browning in 1888, for example). Speeches, inspirational lectures, sermons, poetry, plays, books, short stories, travelogues, oral histories, memoirs, random thoughts and confidences, comedy routines - the list goes on forever. If someone were there to say, recite, or emote it, then somewhere there would be a record of it.

Records coupling the spoken word with music have been around for a while, too, but it took the combination of two currents of post-War American urban subculture - bebop jazz and Beat poetry - to really fire the American romantic imagination. What could be more urbane, more hiply American, more Beat (at least to the '50s American mind) than waxing freely over a walking bassline?

Of course, there were in reality very few poetry-with-jazz records made by “real” bohemians, and for every Jack Kerouac, Bob Dorough, Eden Ahbez, or Kenneth Rexroth there were dozens who were there to capitalize on the phenomenon. Whether it’s cartoonish hipster-jive Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins, the watered-down product of Rod McKuen, or the beatnik satire of Del Close or Henry Jacobs (see below), though, I happily make room for all of them here on Office Naps.

1. An Interview of Our Times Conducted by S. Petterstein, A History of Jazz (World Pacific)
Shorty Petterstein was the beatnik persona of Bay Area institution Henry Jacobs, who in real life managed to be both more normal and far hipper than his satirical creation.

After late ‘40s broadcasting stints on the Mexican border and in Chicago (where he crossed paths with Ken Nordine), Henry Jacobs alighted in the San Francisco; he'd henceforth be associated with the city and its experimental ethos. Jacobs was fascinated with sound. More specifically, he was fascinated by the possibilities of manipulating taped recordings of sound. Accordingly, it’s Jacobs’ early audio projects (some of which were released on Folkways Records in the ‘50s) as well as his Vortex collaborations with filmmaker Jordan Belson for which he’s probably best remembered today.

The Vortex experiments alone should have earned Jacobs the key to the city. A series of audio/visual happenings organized by Jacobs and Belson at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, the Vortex experiments (properly known as the Vortex Experiments in Sound and Light, also represented on Folkways) featured Jacobs’ collages and audio manipulations in addition to compositions by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Toru Takemitsu, and Luciano Berio.

Read more about the guy and you get the feeling that if someone in San Francisco was dropping a television into the trash in 1959, then Jacobs would be there to collaborate. Jacobs was involved with everyone and everything. He was the force behind comedian Lenny Bruce’s first record (Interviews of Our Times). He rubbed shoulders with Afro-Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria and Beats like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Allen Ginsberg. He was a disc jockey at Berkeley’s groundbreaking KPFA, where he mixed ethnic field recordings with his penchant for radio satire.

Which brings us finally to 1958’s “A History of Jazz.” Taken from The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein: More Interviews of Our Time, “A History of Jazz,” is characteristic of both the album’s twisted style as well as the Shorty Petterstein alter ego (which Jacobs had been cultivating during his radio broadcasts).

This selection is one of the album’s weirder and more atmospheric sketches, too. The foghorn, the bells, the distant harbor noises: it evokes an image of Jacobs (or Petterstein, rather), alone at 3 a.m. in some Grant Avenue walk-up and free associating into his portable reel-to-reel, jazz records at hand.

And that’s the history of jazz.

Jacobs would go on to collaborate with auteurs George Lucas and Walter Murch on their THX 1138 film. He’d contribute to PBS’s early ‘70s animated show The Fine Art of Goofing Off, receive a 1964 Oscar nomination for his anti-smoking short “Breaking the Habit,” and pay the bills with ads created for Japan Airlines and Bank of America. Though no longer active in the business, Jacobs is alive and well in Northern California; he presently co-curates of the Alan Watts archives.
You can hear a fairly recent NPR story on Jacobs here.

(Incidentally, I believe that the three musical snippets heard in rapid succession on “A History of Jazz” are records by Louis Armstrong, George Russell, and Miles Davis.)

2. Ken Nordine, Crimson and Olive (Dunwich)
“Crimson and Olive” is manna from the mind of Ken Nordine, a Chicago personality who’s carved out a unique niche for himself with his insomniac creativity and a richly resonant, basso profundo voice. Long involved in broadcasting and commercial voice-over work, Nordine is much like Henry Jacobs in that he’s notched successes in and out of the square, corporate world.

Nordine’s major label recording career began in the mid-‘50s with his narration for orchestra leader Billy Vaughn’s Shifting, Whispering Sands EP, a Western-themed easy-listening suite arranged for Vaughn (and based on country-pop singer Rusty Draper’s 1955 hit). Though novel, Shifting, Whispering Sands was a staid ‘50s choral affair.

The record’s success led to infinitely hipper territory, however, as Nordine was able to sell Dot Records on releasing several albums’ worth of his surreal and ruminative stories (set against the cool jazz backdrop of the Fred Katz group). An extension of Nordine’s ‘50s radio show, this was the beginning of the Word Jazz albums. While Nordine would continue these spoken word and musical experiments over the decades (including collaborations with artists as unlikely as Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, and the Grateful Dead), it’s perhaps his Colors album that represents the culmination of Nordine’s word jazz technique.

Improbably, Colors started out life as a commercial campaign for Fuller Paint Company. From the familiar blue and yellow, to obscure hues like puce and ecru, the project would be expanded to thirty-four sketches of thirty-four anthropomorphized colors, and eventually edited and released on Philips Records in 1965.

“Crimson and Olive,” though one of the album’s weaker sketches musically (and not containing “Olive,” either, as promised in the title), nonetheless represents Nordine’s jazzy, oddly philosophical style of wordplay. This is also the only place I’ve seen anything from Nordine’s Colors album released on 45. The flipside of this selection is “Bachman,” a Batman parody credited to “Ken Nordine Accompanied By His Rubber Frogs.”

At age eighty-eight, Nordine is still very much active in radio and recording today. He released an album of his word jazz (Transparent Mask) in 2001, and I was delighted to hear him in fine form earlier this year on NPR, too.

(The Dunwich label seen here is far and away better known for its roster of ‘60s Chicago garage bands like the Shadows of Knight, the Del-Vetts, and Saturday’s Children.)

3. U.B.’s Group, Percussive Woman (Warner Brothers)
Not Ken Nordine, but a crude imitation of Nordine during his ‘50s Word Jazz heyday.

So, yes, this selection is every obnoxious cliché about women, passed off as paternal wisdom. “Percussive Woman” is a relic, if nothing else. But it actually sounds really good, all beat poetry percussion and misterioso bass and what not.

The “Rogers” credited as co-writer on this obscurity is Milt Rogers, a music director and staff arranger at Dot Records, obviously on temporary leave from Dot for a bit of freelance work. The “Hendler” is Herb Hendler, a long-time A&R man, producer, and composer who’s probably best known as the lyricist behind Ralph Flanagan’s 1953 Big Band hit “Hot Toddy.”

“Percussive Woman” was recorded in 1962.

Office Naps Mix Spring 2007

The second installment of the Office Naps mix. More of my favorite ‘60s soft psychedelics and electronic pop, the mix perhaps steering towards the former this time ‘round. You may not know some of the artists, but it’s got an odd overall tang which you sitar-obsessed collector-types should intuitively recognize.

Office Naps Mix Spring 2007

Millennium, Prelude (7”, Columbia)
Appletree Theatre, Hightower Square (7”, Verve Forecast)
Joyride, Childhood's End (Friend Sound, RCA)
J.K. & Co., Fly (Suddenly One Summer, White Whale)
Bobby Christian, Mooganga (Vibe-brations, Ovation)
Critters, Awake in a Dream (Touch ‘n Go With the Critters, Project 3)
White Noise, Firebird (An Electric Storm, Island)
Beautiful Daze, City Jungle, pt. 1 (7”, RPR)
Network, The Boys and The Girls (7”, Spar)
Chapter V, The Sun is Green (7”, Verve Folkways)
Human Touch, I Can Imagine (7”, Warner Brothers)
Lee Mallory, Many Are the Times (7”, Valiant)
Shadow Casters, Going to the Moon (7”, J.R.P.)
Rouges, Secondary Man (7”, Thunderbird)
Ceyleib People, Changes (7”, Vault)
July, The Way (7”, Columbia)
World of Oz, Like a Tear (The World of Oz, Deram)
Ken Thorne, Sadie's Theme (The Touchables, soundtrack, 20th Century Fox)
Chamaeleon Church, Camillia is Changing (Chamaeleon Church, MGM)
Don Robertson, Why? (Dawn, Verve)
Lewis & Clarke Expedition, Why Need They Pretend? (7”, Colgems)
Antonio Carlos Jobim, Children's Games (Stone Flower, CTI)
Young Idea, Colours of Darkness (7”, Capitol)
David McCallum, House of Mirrors (Music: It’s Happening Now!, Capitol)
Beach-Niks, Last Night I Cried (7”, Sea-Mist)
Electric Prunes, I (Underground, Reprise)
Freeborne, Land of Diana (Peak Impressions, Monitor)
King Biscuit Entertainers, Pride (7”, Burdette)

Doin' the promo mash

1. The Houston Post, Get With it (Pams Productions)
The basslines thump and the bongos bounce. “Get with it,” the voices exhort, “get with the Houston Post!” The mood is celebratory. A manufactured celebratory. But still - it's celebratory.

If music is a reflection of the society which engenders it, then the Houston Post’s America breathed an atmosphere that was equal parts ersatz discotheque glamour and marketing pitch. Sure, the Houston Post was trying to sell more newspapers, but that’s only half the story. “Get With It” doesn't worry itself with advertising the Post’s expanded sports section or its new Washington office.

Instead, it advertises the broader idea of the Post’s get-with-itude. It’s classic branding, and the Post’s determination to be something more than just the first choice in newpapers for Houston suburbanites is obvious here.

The flipside of “Get With It” contains the instructions for a dance named, against better judgment, the Wink. You can get a sense of how it goes here. A little later here, too - you’re coming along nicely! Still, a little further along - everybody ready to Wink? You think you are, but actually you’re still not quite ready to do the Wink. Finally, after interminable instruction, it all comes together here, sort of.

No one ever learned how to Wink. That wasn’t the point. Inventing a zany dance was, however. It was an obligatory part of branding your product to the young and the hip in 1966.

Alas, such outreach never paid off for the Post. The paper eventually folded in 1995; the youthful demographic they so desperately appealed to grew up and started reading the Houston Chronicle instead.

A short history of the Houston Post can be found here.

2. Vox, Wah-Wah
This was a product demonstration record for the new Vox Wah-Wah guitar pedal, the device that quickly became any self-respecting guitarist’s choice for sounding way groovier. The Wah-Wah would endure as one of pop music’s emblematic guitar sounds throughout the ‘60s, heard to ever sleazier effect as the ‘70s wore on. In early 1967, however, the Vox Wah-Wah was still an unproven commercial commodity. Likewise, the quarry here was not the average amateur teenaged musician but rather the business community, the music shops and suppliers and studios. They needed a little persuasion before stocking something ostensibly little more than a psychedelic do-dad.

If you can’t make it through the first four-and-a-half minutes of sales pitching, you can jump to the last bit, where everything is breezily wrapped up for us with the Benzedrine-inhaling verve that we're accustomed to.

Originally distributed on a laminate card to music shops that stocked Vox guitars and amplifiers, this selection has all the inevitable fidelity of music etched into cardboard grooves. The musician patiently demonstrating all of this for us is the California session guitarist (and inventor) Del Casher. There’s a good interview with Del here, where he reminisces about his involvement with the Wah-Wah pedal, Fender’s EccoPhonic Tape Delay/Echo unit, and a mysterious entity known as the Vox Ampliphonic Orchestra.

3. The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Band, The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Beer Drinking Song (RCA Custom)
Sadly, this garish discotheque existed only in TV commercials for Utica Club, once touted as the flagship beer of the Matt Brewing Company.

An indispensable part of any Far Out scene is a balcony bar where characters from disparate moments in history could convene over a cold one.

Anything could happen at Utica Club, we're told. Life-sized paintings came to life. Waitresses slid down firemen’s poles. Octogenarians. Anything.

It was a spontaneous and strangely psychedelic fraternity that awaited you at Utica Club. As far as the music went, “The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Beer Drinking Song” was basically a post-“Incense and Peppermints” variation on the same theme of inebriated spontaneity. While you and your buddies hully gullied in place, trying to make sense of all this, why not also hully gully your way over to the Wegman’s for a case of discount brew?

This selection was created for Matt Brewing Company by one of commercial music’s best-credentialed composers, the great Sasha Burland. Burland was also the brains behind two albums by the Nutty Squirrels, the jazz cousins to those loathsome rodentia, Alvin & the Chipmunks.

“The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Beer Drinking Song” has been documented before at Otis Fodder’s ur-music blog, the 365 Days Project. The discussion which originally ensued was instrumental in writing this post.

Office Naps Mix 2006

Dreamy pop psychedelia, soundtrack gadgetry, and '60s electronics: my version of the holidays. Merry Mix-mas!

Office Naps Mix 2006

Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints on the Moon (7", Warner Brothers)
Scott Walker, It's Raining Today (Scott 3, Smash)
West Minist'r, Carnival (7", Razzberry)
John Barry, Something's Up! (The Knack... and How to Get It, soundtrack, United Artists)
Buffalo Springfield, Expecting to Fly (Buffalo Springfield Again, Atco)
Sound Vendor, Mister Sun (7", Liquid Stereo)
13th Floor Elevators, May the Circle Remain Unbroken (Bull of the Woods, International Artists)
Electric Flag, Peter's Trip (The Trip, soundtrack, Sidewalk)
Peepl, Freedom (7”, Roaring)
Chad & Jeremy, Distant Shores (Distant Shores, Columbia)
Oracle, Don't Say No (7”, Verve Forecast)
Bruce Haack, Super Nova (The Electric Lucifer, Columbia)
George Harrison, Greasy Legs (Wonderwall Music, soundtrack, Apple)
Moon, Brother Lou's Love Colony (Without Earth and the Moon, Imperial)
Societie, Bird Has Flown (7”, Deram)
Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66, Celebration of the Sunrise (Stillness, A&M)
John Wood, Maiden Voyage (Turn of the Century… And I’ll Come Back, Ranwood)
Poppy Family, There's No Blood in Bone (Which Way You Goin’ Billy?, London)
Phil Moore, Jr., A Now Thing (Right On, Atlantic)
Organ Grinders, Mirror Images (7”, Smash)
Fred Weinberg, The Keen Machine (The Weinberg Method of Non-synthetic Electronic Rock, Anvil)
Hooterville Trolley, No Silver Bird (7”, Lynnette)
United States of America, Clouds (United States of America, Columbia)
Electrosoniks, Orbit Aurora (Electronic Music, Philips)
Quincy Jones, Threadbare (The Slender Thread, soundtrack, Mercury)

****

Thank you to everyone who's written, commented, contributed to, complimented, recognized, criticized, linked to, and otherwise read and enjoyed Office Naps in 2006!

-Little Danny

'60s Filipino pop music

Like other Asian nations, much of the ‘60s pop music (and many of the ‘60s pop music personalities) of the Philippines came from the country’s own stylized version of Western cinema. Still, as far as the pop music scene of ‘60s Metro Manila goes, it’s rock ‘n’ roll records that I think of as the galvanizing force. Imported by US servicemen stationed at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Naval Station, and played on Armed Forces radio, I imagine the impression such records might have made on the Filipino teenager, and I imagine, too, a city a bit like the pre-Beatles Liverpool of the late ‘50s. The records were hard to come by, the musical instruments were impossible to come by, and, by virtue of its scarcity and the music’s exotic energy and excitement, the fascination with rock ‘n’ roll was born.

Commensurate with a rising wave of activism and civil unrest in the Philippines - and a growing awareness of Filipino cultural identity - rock ‘n’ roll assumed more countercultural tones as the 1960s wore on, coalescing finally as Pinoy Rock in the late '60s. It’s the earlier forms of '60s Filipino pop music that are surveyed (very, very noncomprehensively) this week on Office Naps, though.

The amazing Pinoy Classic Rock site was indispensable in writing this week’s post.

1. Eddie Peregrina & The Blinkers, Blue Eyes (D’Swan)
Singer Eddie Peregrina seems to be best remembered for his tearjerking ballads; here with his ragtag band the Blinkers, however, the poppy harmonies, stinging fuzz tone distortion, and rough ‘n’ tumble production are nothing if not reminiscent of a mid-‘60s American garage band doing their Yardbirds impression. It’s the kind of convoluted cultural exchange that makes my head hurt; it occurs to me that, in a weird, metaphysical way, their “Blue Eyes” is the culmination of 5000 years of Western and Eastern civilization. You won’t see NASA launching this record on a Voyager mission any time soon, though.

The Blinkers were Salvador "Buddy" Yap (bass), Edgardo "Bee" Morelos (rhythm guitar), Max "Boy" Alcaide (drums), and Edgard "Eddie" Peregrina (vocals, lead guitar, and organ). I would guess that they recorded “Blue Eyes” in 1968.

Eddie Peregrina apparently died in a car accident at age thirty, sadly.

2. Vilma Valera, I Got You (I Feel Good) (Jonal)
It seems to have been generally understood in Philippines show business that, as an actress in the movies, you would also sing in the movies. Ms. Valera still deserves some sort of special spirit award for having the audacity to rework this early James Brown dance floor hit, however. I suspect the producers at Jonal studios decided that Quezon City was just far enough away from American copyright law (and James Brown himself) to act with impunity. Besides, if anyone ever came around to hassle them, they'd be ready with their fuzzbox.

A popular actress of ‘60s Filipino cinema, Vilma Valera performed this as part of Boogaloo, a movie made in 1968 - a moment in Phillipines history that, if nothing else, had fully embraced mascara. Check out this fantastic lobby poster for it.

Vilma Valera recorded several albums before her retirement from show business (and marriage to American Air Force commander Darrell Arthur Morrow) in the early ‘70s. She now resides in Sacramento, California.

3. Helen Gamboa, Shing-A-Ling Time (Jonal)
It’s a cover version of the Liberty Belles’ girl-group soul anthem, it’s a big, brassy, thumping discotheque bombshell, and it’s all powered by the five thousand horsepower bouffant of Ms. Gamboa, Filipino show biz superstar.

"Shing-A-Ling Time" was performed for 1968’s Shing-A-Ling-A-Loo - one of a suite of pictures starring Ms. Gamboa that year. The prospect of titles like Boogaloo (with Vilma Valera, above), Bang-shang-a-lang, Let's Go Hippie, and Operation: Discotheque kind of makes my eyes glaze over; they’re movies that are probably better in concept than they are in reality but, still, you’re glad that they got made.

As with her colleague Vilma Valera’s “I Got You,” the arranging and conducting was handled by the enigmatic D’Amarillo, who, if these two selections are representative, seems to have been the Philippines’ equivalent of hip ‘60s soundtrack composers like Lalo Schifrin and Quincy Jones.

Gamboa later married Vicente Tito Sotto, popular Filipino congressman and himself a former film and music personality.

Please take time today to reflect upon the vertiginous glory of Ms. Gamboa’s hair.

4. Ronnie Villar & The Firedons, El Tomador (Mabuhay)
England’s Cliff Richard was one of the first Western rock ‘n’ rollers to break into the Asian pop markets, albeit with a polished form of the music. The Shadows, Richard’s backing band, recorded separately as