The sea

The sea. Its mystery and expanse has inspired innumerable poets, writers, artists and musicians throughout the millennia, its endless capacity for beauty and violence has silenced individuals not usually given to speechless wonder.

Cursed, mythologized, prayed to, every seafaring culture has its own tradition of music of the sea, from Vietnamese fishermen’s poem-songs to Irish shanties.

The tradition would renew itself in the strangest ways after World War II, as Americans drew further into the suburbs. Smooth easy-listening themes like Frank Chacksfield’s “Ebb Tide“ and Nat “King” Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” sold in the millions, and they sounded lovely on the new hi-fi, all sumptuous strings and soothing sunset moods. Such productions were but Technicolor fantasia, though - the sea as great make-out spot. If they signaled the extent to which the ocean played a role in Americans’ romantic imagination, they also reminded us the vicissitudes of the sea had become utterly inconsequential to our daily lives. Which of course is how Americans have long preferred our relationship with Nature to stand.

Still, there were some livelier alternatives to the Ray Conniffs and Billy Vaughns. Cocktail jazz exotica, for instance, a beloved sub-genre here at Office Naps. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny could hardly be described as authentic, and any personal connection to the sea was mostly through the tourist industry, but they made well-known Asian and Polynesian folk songs of the sea a staple of their repertoire, and infused “Beyond the Sea” and “Harbor Lights” with a proper, if kitschy, mystery. There was surf music, too, impressionist music’s final and only stand in American rock ‘n’ roll - “Pipeline” as a sort of Pacific arabesque. Sometimes surf music was made by surfers themselves. It was the spiritual peak of the guitar instrumental form.

There are also this week’s artistes, the instrumental combos who straddled surf music and exotica. They summoned atmosphere every Thursday night, Debussys for the Officers’ Club dance, though one struggles to imagine a greater gulf between Debussy and the Melody Mates. Debussy never had those cool foghorn sound effects, for one.

1. The Melody Mates, Enchantment (Nix)
“Enchantment” would be the second of two Melody Mates 45s. The first, the rockin’ instrumental “Just Plain Guit,” was released on Decca Records in 1959. This gem followed on the tiny Pittsburgh label Nix in 1961. But besides the group’s probable Pittsburgh origins and their members James Testa, Gene Toney and Vladimir Maleckar, little is known about the Melody Mates.

The most fruitful lead here is our narrator, one Nick Cenci, who introduces “Enchantment” with a certain earnestness. From the late ‘50s onwards, Cenci, a Pittsburgh producer and promoter, was involved with much of the city’s teen pop, and many of its indie labels, Nix included.

For thousands of years, the distant blue horizon has called to the restless seaman, and both he and the Melody Mates have shared something of a fundamental understanding. A voyage into the unknown is nothing without its beckoning Shangri-La, and a beckoning Shangri-La is nothing without its wordless falsetto wail. “Enchantment” is a wonderful high camp: it’s got prom magic written all over it.

Alas, “Enchantment” is also an obvious cash-in record. It was identical in concept and atmosphere (including the bell buoys and the lapping waves) to the Islanders’ “Enchanted Sea” (hear excerpt here) a dreamy, seaward instrumental that hit the top-twenty, and had the benefit of doing so in 1959, two years before the Melody Mates plied the same waters.

“Enchantment” was doomed to sink without a trace, and did so, taking the Melody Mates with it. It wouldn’t be last of Nick Cenci. With his business partner - infamous Los Angeles promoter Herb Cohen (who was in town for a few years while credit problems on the West Coast blew over) - Cenci would put together the Co & Ce label in the early ‘60s. It was one of the city’s most successful labels, with a motley assortment of mid-decade Pittsburgh acts - ‘50s-leaning vocal pop from Lou Christie and the Vogues (who had two of Co & Ce’s top ten hits, “You’re the One” and “Five O’Clock World”), pop-rock from the Fenways, and a 45 by wild garage band the Swamp Rats.

Oddly enough, “Enchantment” would be covered note-for-note (including the prologue) by a Los Angeles group called the Castiles a year or two later.

2. Eden Ahbez, Tobago (Del-Fi)
So many terrific stories persist about “Nature Boy” Eden Ahbez - that he was raised in an orphanage, for instance, that he walked across the continent eight times - and so little exists in the way of hard fact, that summoning even the barest sketch of the man is only to repeat those same mythologies. Which perhaps does say something about Ahbez, who America recalls as composer of the standard “Nature Boy.” Ahbez was, if nothing else, a skilled manager of his own mythology.

Consensus is that he was born Alexander Aberle in either 1908 or 1913 to a Jewish Brooklyn family. Adopted in his youth by a small-town family in southeastern Kansas, he grew up as George McGrew, and later, as a young man, he lived for spells in Kansas City and New York City. Certainly he was inclined to the musical arts; there is speculation, especially concerning Ahbez’s New York City years, that he was involved in Yiddish musical theater.

The details begin to coalesce in 1941, when Ahbez arrived in Los Angeles, apparently with hopes of earning a living as a songwriter. He began playing piano at the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw foods restaurant, one of the earliest of its kind in the states. The Eutropheon was run by John and Vera Richter, German followers of Lebensreform, a fascinating nature-worship and “natural health” movement based in ideals of a temperance and vigorous, natural living, along with stray bits of Eastern spirituality. The movement developed in the industrializing Germany of the late 19th Century, and its ideas spread with German emigration. The Eutropheon - founded in 1917 by the Richters - would become a hub for adherents and image-conscious celebrities alike. Gloria Swanson was an habitué, apparently.

The image and philosophy of this health-obsessed asceticism must have resonated with Ahbez on some level. Thus in Lotusland was Eden Ahbez, Nature Boy, truly born. The Nature Boys - there was actually a whole group of them, including Hollywood health guru Gypsy Boots - were mostly American males taken with the Lebensreform lifestyle, and they were as good at having their pictures as they were at sustaining themselves on raw food and growing their beards long.

The "Nature Boys" in full regalia, Topanga Canyon, 1948. Eden Ahbez is in front. Future California fitness guru Gypsy Boots is back row, left. (Photo from hippy.com, courtesy of Gypsy Boots.)

References to Ahbez as a beatnik and proto-hippie abound. That’s not quite the case, however. Certainly there was their wooly appearance, but the Nature Boys preached temperance, not the radical politics or the sexual and chemical libertarianism of the hippie counterculture. They’re more directly connected to 19th Century Protestant Germany - as well as to the bohemian fringes of California surf culture that followed them. Regardless, the “Nature Boys” were a local phenomenon in the late ‘40s and 1950s. Ahbez, who’d never abandoned his ambition for selling songs, leveraged his unique celebrity, striking up a partnership with Cowboy Jack Patton, a Hollywood radio personality and health nut. Together, they landed the words and melody to Ahbez’s autobiographical “Nature Boy” (part of a larger Nature Boy Suite, apparently) in Nat “King” Cole’s hands. Just as improbably, it became a number one hit, one of the biggest of Cole’s early mainstream singing career. Somehow this all made sense in post-War Southern California.

Though “Nature Boy” was not without its controversies (songwriter Herman Yablakoff sued, alleging that the Eastern melody to "Nature Boy" came from his song "Sveig Mein Härtz"), Ahbez’s celebrity increased to a national level - there were articles in Time, Life and Newsweek magazines. It was a role that did not seem to disagree with him. Ahbez continued publishing and selling his unique songs in Hollywood (including “Lonely Island,” a minor 1959 hit for Sam Cooke), just as the legends proliferated: he and his young wife had once lived for a time beneath the Hollywood sign, his young family foraged for food in the Hollywood hills.

His sole album - 1960 Eden’s Island - is the culmination of both his philosophy and musical career. Released on Bob Keene’s hip Del-Fi label, Eden’s Island capitalizes on Ahbez’s image as the sun-worshipping, beachcombing vegetarian-philosopher. West Coast pianist Paul Moer’s instrumentation was California jazz at its most exotic, with Ahbez - on flute and hand drum - accompanying the soft vibes and Martin Denny-style birdcalls. Even better, Ahbez gently intoned his own poetry over the score. Composed as a “spiritual song cycle,” the poems are idylls of the Nature Boy lifestyle - terribly redolent of Rod McKuen and a certain type of lightweight mysticism. Nonetheless the album is highly original, an absolute high point of American post-War exotica and armchair escapism. (Hear an excerpt of the album's "Full Moon" here.)

Eden’s Island did not sell well in its time, though. And thereafter do the details of Ahbez’s existence grow hazy again. He penned and recorded (usually pseudonymously) a few more obscure 45 recordings in the early ‘60s, he was spotted in a 1967 photograph with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and he met with folk boy-wonder Donovan the same year.

There was always something of the showman to Ahbez, part mystic, part beneficent charlatan. To his credit, however, he lived out the life he advocated. Shortly before his death, he was interviewed standing next to the van where he lived, still the long-haired vegetarian, still quoting his own philosophy.

Sadly, Ahbez was struck and killed by an automobile in 1995.

“Tobago,” an instrumental taken from the same session that produced Eden’s Island, only appeared on 45.

3. Bruce Norman Quintet, Keeper of the Sea (Rust)
Should sound familiar. The dirge rhythm, the tremolo guitar, the sound effects, the mysterious communion with the sea. Hardly a triumph of the imagination, but no good concept should be without its repeat visits. Think seafood buffet.

New York City’s Rust Records was the smallish subsidiary of Laurie Records, a pop-oriented indie label, one of the more prolific of its kind during the ‘60s. Rust itself was around for a just few years in the mid-‘60s, its output leaning heavily towards commercial pop. With some discographical triangulation, we can safely identify a 1963 release date for “Keeper of the Sea,” and we can probably assume the group was from the New York or New Jersey area. But further details about Bruce Norman or producer John Brindle must remain, for the moment, speculative.

Surf exotica

If it was the instrumental that kept rock ‘n’ roll simmering in the murky years between its ‘50s inception and arrival of the British Invasion in 1963, then surf music would be the instrumental’s final, most colorful efflorescence.

Excited by classy, guitar-based instrumental hits like the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run”, Duane Eddy’s “Movin’ and Groovin’” and the Fireballs’ “Bulldog,” American teenagers everywhere - Southern California included - began forming their own hard-driving instrumental combos in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Some regions would develop their own subtle variations of instrumental rock ‘n’ roll - none, however, as distinct as the Pacific Coast’s. The booming reverberation, the propulsive thrust, the “moody” minor keys and the vibrato guitar accents of early regional hits like the Gamblers’ "Moon Dawg!" (1960), the Revels’ "Church Key" (1960), and the Belairs’ "Mr. Moto" (1961) were the stylistic elements which captured Southern Californian youth’s vision, if not experience, of their own sun-and-surf predilections. Just a year later, numbers like Dick Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’” and the Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards” embodied surf music in all of its formalized glory, a new aesthetic forged from ringing Fender guitars, sunshine and arcane surfer references. Surf music was like some tanned, grinning evolution of the whole instrumental genre. Peculiarly adapted to beaches and teen clubs, it came crawling from the primordial Pacific waters to capture America’s Kennedy-era consciousness.

Surf music, though clearly something new, nonetheless shared certain characteristics with an unlikely older cousin: exotica. The overlap is especially apparent with a cocktail jazz combo like Martin Denny’s or Arthur Lyman’s. Before vocal harmonies began dominating surf music, both styles were obviously instrumental, and both styles' adherents occasionally dipped into the same bag of exotic standards like “The Breeze and I,” “Miserlou,” “Quiet Village” and “Istanbul.”

The most significant shared characteristic, though, is that both surf and exotica music sought to summon sensation through sheer atmospherics. The surf groups, with their staccato guitar runs and crashing drums, preoccupied themselves with the dizzying rush of the wild surf. Exotica’s proponents knew that the real action was back on shore, casually dressed and safely settled around the kalua pig at Luau Village, but there would be plenty of moments when surf music crossed, even if inadvertently, into exotica’s tropical waters. Read on.

1. The Blazers, Bangalore (Acree)
The Blazers were a brief-lived Fullerton, California surf group. Their “Bangalore” was the second of two excellent instrumental surf 45s, their first, 1963’s “Beaver Patrol,” was banned, according to legend, from local radio airplay due to its title’s innuendo. Both of the Blazers’ 45s would be released in 1963 on Acree Records, a tiny label formed by Vern Acree, Sr., a professional country and western guitarist and the father of the Blazers’ lead guitarist.

The Blazers’ two singles were recorded at the legendary Downey Records, a small studio located in the back of a record store in Downey, California. Part recording studio, part record store, part record label, Downey Records was the sort of sympathetic, independent operation at the foundation of any thriving regional rock ‘n’ roll scene.

On “Bangalore,” the Blazers themselves - lead guitarist Vern Acree, Jr., rhythm guitarists Steve Morris and Wayne Bouchard, saxophonist Larry Robins, drummer Chris Holguin and bassist John Morris - voyage to the east, completely on their own fabricated terms, and pay homage to Dick Dale’s influential “Miserlou,” surf music’s best-known exotica anthem.

In 1962, surf music was thriving, but it was still largely a phenomenon particular to Southern California. The young Beach Boys would have their first local hit, “Surfin’,” that year. Same for the Marketts’ “Surfer’s Stomp” and Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards,” early recordings that directly referenced the lifestyle in their titles. Fender’s all-important standalone reverb unit for its electric guitars had just been introduced. By 1963, however, even the record industry’s major labels, for all of their erratic beneficence, sensed something was afoot, and so did a national consciousness taken with the fantasy of sun, fun and the opposite sex that surf music offered. Providence would smile and a national spotlight would shine, however briefly, upon groups like the Surfaris (“Wipe Out”) and the Chantays (“Pipeline”).

Such would not be the fortune of the Blazers, alas, nor the vast majority of their surf-inclined brethren. They’d play the same high school dances and armory hall teen shows for the next year or two until high school graduation or the British Invasion rendered the whole genre obsolete.

2. The Surfmen, Paradise Cove (Titan)
Composed of Ray Hunt (lead guitar), Nick Drury (rhythm guitar), Armon Frank (sax), Randall Anglin (bass) and Tim Fitzpatrick (drums), the Surfmen were integral to the Southern California instrumental surf music phenomenon from its very inception. The Surfmen grew out of the Expressos, a young group from the Orange County suburbs who issued one 45, “Teenage Express” - with its flipside “Wondering,” an early version of “Paradise Cove” - on the local Trans-American label in 1960. Changing their name, the Surfmen would record and release a handful of 45s on Titan Records before finally metamorphosing, late in 1962, into the Lively Ones, one of surf music’s finest combos.

“Paradise Cove” and its flipside “Ghost Hop” would be the first of the Surfmen’s three 45s, all recorded in 1962. While not quite the deadly thoroughbreds that the Lively Ones were, the Surfmen’s atmospherics and echoing guitar sound captured the spirit, if not the sound, of the nascent surf instrumental.

Paradise Cove is a real place, actually, a formerly popular surfing spot near Malibu. Like Tahiti, Tehran, Thailand or any subject matter popular in exotica music’s geography, the song’s locale is invested with fanciful measures of mystery and intrigue. The real Paradise Cove was a place you went to surf. The song “Paradise Cove” - one of a number of solitary meditations like the Beach Boys’ “The Lonely Sea,” the Essex’s “Pray for Surf” or the Sandals’ “Theme From the Endless Summer” - was nothing you’d want to paddle across. Mostly it was a place for sunset communion and prayers to Poseidon for perfectly cylindrical waves. Dense, savory musical atmosphere was the mission here. Not reality.

3. The Pharos, Pintor (Del-Fi)
Aspiring jazz-musician-turned-entrepreneur Bob Keane formed, after some initial tribulations in Los Angeles’s independent record industry, his Del-Fi Records label in 1957. Ritchie Valen’s Latin-tinged rock ‘n’ roll put Keane’s fledgling label decisively on the map with hits like “Donna” and “La Bamba.” While Del-Fi’s succeeding years served post-War California with a fascinating body of teen rock and pop, exotica, Latin jazz and instrumental novelties, by 1963 - the genre’s apotheosis year - surf music would be the label’s bread and butter, sleek, reverb-heavy productions its specialty. To scan the Del-Fi Records album discography is to scan some of surf’s archetypal instrumental groups: the Lively Ones, the Sentinals, the Impacts, Dave Myers and the Surftones. Perusing the label’s 45 discography, on the other hand, is chasing rainbows. The Gonzos? The Moongooners? The Centavos, anyone?

Add the Pharos to that list. Except that it was almost certainly from 1963, no one anywhere seems to have anything to say about either the group or their songwriter Jack Irvin, but I won’t belabor the folly of further speculation. Just say that “Pintor” makes up one of surf music’s more endearing legacies, an ephemeral streak tinged loosely by the Spanish fandango. The Sentinals did it with “Latin’ia,” the Trashmen with their “Malaguena.” What is the sound of wishful thinking? “Pintor,” of course, the music of the Iberian Peninsula transformed into blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sun-crazy fantasia.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop mix

This is the rose-colored soundtrack I strive to cocoon my life in, a CD-length metaphor for the first time you watched Solaris. Part of the ongoing Office Naps psychedelic pop mix series.

Office Naps Fall 2007 Psychedelic Pop Mix

The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (7", Prince)
The Deep Six, Rising Sun (7", Liberty)
The Buff Organization, Upside Down World (7", Original Sound)
Chip Taylor, You Should Be From Monterey (7", Rainy Day)
The Gordian Knot, Year of the Sun (7", Verve)
Celebrated Renaissance Band, Heavy Is the Sundown (7", Lion)
Hard Times, Blew Mind (Blew Mind, World Pacific)
Phil Cordell, Red Lady (7", Janus)
The Glass Family, Agorn (Elements of Complex Variables) (7", Warner Brothers)
Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (7", Capitol)
Mercy, Our Winter Love (The Mercy and Love (Can Make You Happy), Sundi)
The Group Therapy, Thoughts (7", Mercury)
English Setters, Wake Up (7", Jubilee)
Dave Miller Set, Mr. Guy Fawkes (7", Spin)
Art Guy, Where You Gonna Go (7", Valiant)
Smokey and His Sister, Creators of Rain (7", Columbia)
The Raik's Progress, Why Did You Rob Us, Tank? (7", Liberty)
The Federal Duck, Peace In My Mind (The Federal Duck, Musicor)
Sonny Bono, Motel II (Chastity, soundtrack, Atco)
Peter Pan & the Good Fairies, Kaleidoscope (7", Challenge)
The Collection, Both Sides Now (7", The Hot Biscuit Company)
Pipes of Pan, Monday Morning Rain (7", Page One)
Emil Richards and the Factory, No Place I'd Rather Be (7", Uni)
The Sandals, Coming Down Slow (The Last of the Ski Bums, soundtrack, World Pacific)
Thomas Edisun's Electric Light Bulb Band, Common Attitude (7", Tamm)
The Yardbirds, Glimpses (Little Games, Epic)
Eden's Children, Echoes (Sure Looks Real, ABC)
The Soundz, Freak Out, pt. 1 (7", Crown-Psychedel*lite)

Everybody wipe out now

When they’re discussed at all, the early 1960s are usually derided as rock ‘n’ roll’s Dark Ages, the years when the hot guitar licks and sexualized strains of boogie and backbeat were subdued by an army of brylcreemed teen idols steering pop music safely back to Middle America.

It’s an unfair characterization. First, the Fabians and Frankie Avalons aside, there actually were a number of fascinating teen pop and R&B productions particular to the time.

Second, and far more significantly, there is truth to the prevailing idea that rock ‘n’ roll in its original form fell out of commercial favor during the early ‘60s. But the spirit of adolescent musical fervor would remain very much alive in that time. The spirit had just reconfigured itself, stealing into the high school gyms, dancehalls and beer parties of the American landscape.

The Southern rockabilly front men, if you could find them in 1961, might be singing country in hinterland juke joints. Elvis was onscreen warbling “Blue Hawaii,” Little Richard had gone gospel and the Beatles were still pups. But from Tacoma, Washington and San Antonio to Minneapolis and Portland, Maine, every American burg had its young proponents of rock ‘n’ roll in the early ‘60s, its homegrown version of the Fireballs or the Champs. They were the combos turning out energetic, boozy covers like “Greenback Dollar,” “Tequila,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” and maybe a wild original or two. They took up the mantle of rock ‘n’ roll where the first generation had left off, taking their cues from a different lineage of musicians: the Isley Brothers, Link Wray and Wraymen, Bo Diddley, the Coasters, the Fendermen.

With saxophones, twangy guitars, matching suits, and a repertoire of party-friendly R&B vocals and raunchy instrumentals, groups like the Ventures (“Walk, Don’t Run”), the Rivieras (“California Sun”) and the Johnny & the Hurricanes (“Red River Rock”) sprang from the demographic that would sustain rock ‘n’ roll for decades to come: the towns and suburbs of middle class America. It wasn’t as flamboyant perhaps as the first generation, but great rock ‘n’ roll, it turns out, was not in a state of hibernation in the early ‘60s. Not at all. It had just flown to the provinces.

Two or three years later, some groups might update their repertoires with the staccato guitar runs of surf music, that most stylized form of early ‘60s instrumental rock ‘n’ roll. Another year or two would pass and other groups might ditch the saxophones and buzz cuts altogether and, with any luck, transition successfully into the British Invasion. Some, however, seem to have always existed in a twilight zone of their own singular making. Like this week's selections.

1. The Lincoln Trio, Shake Down (Fascination)
Fascination was a small independent label founded in the late ‘50s by legendary Detroit record impresario Armen Boladian. With only one other 45 (the similarly obscure and exotic “Garden of Eden,” also on Fascination Records) to their name, the whys and hows of the Lincoln Trio, however, remain elusive. The names in “Shake Down”’s writing credits can be spotted on several other Fascination releases, suggesting that Claude Howard, Jacob Davidson and Isidore Jacobs were Detroit studio songwriters and musicians that Boladian regularly hired.

They may been professional musicians. Or not. The guitar is muffled, the bass nearly non-existent: Boladian’s production technique is either sloppy or bracingly spontaneous, depending on the frame of mind. There’s a wonderfully dark and raw energy to 1960’s “Shake Down,” though. The kind of energy that says danger and drama. The kind of energy that’s impossible to recreate if you’ve had more than ten minutes to practice beforehand.

Armen Boladian would go on to form one of the great independent soul labels of the ‘70s, Westbound Records, home to the Parliament/Funkadelic aggregation, the Ohio Players and the Detroit Emeralds among other notables.

Boladian, strangely enough, has been in sampling and copyright law news in recent years.

2. The Crescents (Featuring Chiyo), Pink Dominos (Era)
The Crescents were formed in Los Angeles in the early ‘60s by Tom Bresh (guitar), Tom Mitchell (bass), Ray Reed (saxophone) and the mysterious Chiyo (guitar).

Bill Eucker (the writer credited for “Pink Dominos”) was a guitar instructor at Ernie Ball’s store and studio in Thousand Oaks, California. It seems likely that it was there that Eucker handed off “Pink Dominos” to the Crescents’ guitarist Thom Bresh, then a young pupil at Ball’s studio.

Idle speculation aside, the group’s second 45 was “Devil’s Surf” and, with a title like that, you pretty much knew what you were getting: a minor-key title laden with echo, crashing drums and exotic surf guitar riffs. On the other hand, no listener would ever have any idea what “Pink Dominos” were, which in turn meant that Chiyo and company could do pretty much whatever they wanted with it. And so they did, turning their studio time into a noisy, pounding workout that was popular enough with the part of America that did not suffer from migraines to make it a small hit in 1963.

The Crescents were like other early ‘60s instrumental bands during California surf music’s glory years, issuing a few obscure 45s before migrating on to other things with the advent of the British Invasion. The Crescents were categorically unlike any other such groups, however, in one way: Chiyo was female. This would make her one of the very few, if not the only, female guitarists in all of surf music, as far as I know.

The Crescent’s guitarist Thom Bresh is the son of legendary country singer-songwriter and guitar picker Merle Travis. Bresh, himself a renowned guitarist, has enjoyed a wildly varied career in television, film and country music since a young age. He remains active in the industry today.

3. Ronny Kae, Swinging Drums (Band Box)
Session drummer Ronny Kae’s professional career began in his native New York City, but he’s more likely to be remembered - at least in his adopted state of Colorado - as the founder of one of Denver’s venerable music shops, Drum City (now Drum City Guitarland).

Before Drum City’s beginnings in 1965, though, before the Louisiana Purchase and before, even, the signing of the Magna Carta. It was somewhere around last Ice Age, I believe, back with the wooly mammoths and glaciers and everything when Ronny Kae would be cutting a few feral records of his own. Sandy Nelson, Earl Palmer, Hal Blaine: there was precedent for session drummers who made successful pop instrumentals in the early ‘60s, but nothing could have prepared audiences for the hairy kinetic racket that is 1962’s “Swinging Drums.”

“Pink Dominos” may be primitive, but “Swinging Drums” is positively prehistoric. If the instrumentation of “Shake Down” is unorthodox, then “Swinging Drums” is avant-garde. Minimalist art or caveman curiosity? As with all the best early rock ‘n’ roll recordings, “Swinging Drums” must be considered both ways.

Band Box was a tiny Denver record label. Shortly after “Swinging Drums,” Kae would follow up with another lowbrow milestone, “Drums Fell Off a Cliff,” also on Band Box.

After a successful, decades-long run in the retail musical instrument business, Ronny Kae passed on in 1993. His sons Tim and Jason now run Drum City Guitarland.

In the trail of Telstar

There’s a special place in the constellations for the brilliant British pop producer and innovator Joe Meek and his 1962 instrumental hit “Telstar.”

Britain’s musical eccentrics and studio experimentalists did not enjoy the same host of independent labels that America’s did in the 1950s and ‘60s. Joe Meek’s sparkling vision of pop sonics was so strong and so utterly distinct - and his production techniques so eccentric - that he chose to, or had to, work outside the conservative studio system which then dominated the British music scene. And so, after a few fairly constrained years as an engineer in London's IBC studios, Meek set up shop in his own London flat, recording on his home-made equipment and recording very much on his own terms, leasing the masters he made to the big British labels. His maverick studio shop was a bold move, but the Joe Meek sound proved not only immediately identifiable but also quite successful. Many of his recordings were British hits, and some, like the Honeycombs' “Have I the Right,” charted in America as well.

Though his sound ultimately fell out of favor with the advent of ‘60s psychedelia, Joe Meek has earned a fair amount of renewed attention in the past decade or so. It’s not really the prodigious body of work or the bizarre, dramatic arc of his personal life that this week’s Office Naps is devoted to, however. Rather, it’s the one song which was far and away his biggest international hit, and the song for which Meek is best remembered: “Telstar.” (Listen to an excerpt of “Telstar” here.)

“Telstar,” performed by Meek’s house band the Tornados, topped the American pop charts for five weeks in 1962, and occasionally you’ll see it described as the first hit of the British Invasion. That’s a bit misleading, though, as “Telstar” is wholly dissimilar from the groups of the British Invasion - the song truly belongs to the preceding years of space age pop and guitar instrumentals. And though it’s pretty singular to that era as well, “Telstar” was typical of the Joe Meek sound: multi-tracked musical parts, echo, a shrill and “compressed” production, electronic gadgetry and home-made sound effects, an outer space aesthetic, and weird, exotic instruments (like the clavioline keyboard heard so prominently).

The Space Race, that ominous amalgam of astrophysics and Cold War ideology, may have spooked some. Meek, though, saw the Space Race not for its undercurrent of nuclear annihilation but rather for what it really was: pure, exhilarating pageantry.

Three, then, of the many lesser meteorites spawned in “Telstar”’s vapor trail this week on Office Naps.

(I do not even begin to describe the Joe Meek saga. John McCready’s excellent Mojo article is a good place to start for that.)

1. The Vulcanes, Twilight City (Capitol)
The Vulcanes were a popular surf and instrumental band in early '60s Los Angeles; they released a few big-production instrumentals on Capitol Records with help from industry producers and players like H.B. Barnum and Joe Saraceno.

“Twilight City,” from 1964 (along with the excellent “Moon Probe,” its flipside) is the most interesting of the lot. It doesn’t exactly copy the “Telstar” riff, but the anthemic thrust and the reverbed guitars are there, and, eventually, so is the effect: the cold majesty of outer space. Of course, you could have named this track “Wave Rider” or “Surf Whip” and it would have made a great surfing paean, too. That’s what’s endearing about a lot of ‘60s guitar instrumentals: so much depends upon the title.

Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted the name David Axelrod for his producer credit. It’s not the sublime orchestrated funk for which he later earned the lasting support of DJs and funk collectors, but “Twilight City”’s expert use echo and crystalline production style are quintessential Axelrod.

Thank to former Vulcanes saxophonist Don Roberts for the information on the Vulcanes.

2. The Astronomers, Relay - Son of Telstar (Ember)
“Telstar” done Shadows-style. “Telstar” done, that is, in the style of the definitive ‘60s British guitar instrumental group the Shadows, those polite glasses-wearing counterparts to the Ventures.

“Relay - Son of Telstar,” while released on New York City’s Ember label around 1963, was recorded in Britain. This may be the Shadows themselves, actually, playing here under an assumed name. Not only does “Relay” sound exactly like the Shadows’ impeccable handiwork, but the songwriters involved - Ray Adams, Elaine Murtagh, and Valerie Murtagh - also penned songs for the group (including “Dance On,” a big hit).

There are whole compilations dedicated to such iterations of “Telstar,” and as an obsessive collector, I find myself dealing the urge to track down all of them. But where did they all go, exactly? Were they sent rocketing into the firmament? Have they all been squirreled away, Roswell-style, in some top-secret bunker?

Maybe, I’m thinking, maybe they don’t want me to find them.

On final note, “Relay”’s producer, Gerry Bron, is perhaps best known today for his dubious legacy of producing and wrangling British hard rock dinosaurs Uriah Heep

3. The Double IV, Magic Star (Capitol)
Overwhelmingly Aryan vocals, electronic flourishes, and trebly, glass-shattering production - “Magic Star” is pretty much the way you’d imagine Joe Meek’s fantasy vocal vision of his biggest hit to sound. Except, of course, there might not be quite so many ladies heard in the mix; Meek had a habit of grooming the fellows he fancied - regardless of their vocal abilities - as singers.

Of course, the Double IV were not a Joe Meek vehicle, but rather a Los Angeles studio group assembled by Jimmie Haskell. Haskell, in addition to a long, ongoing career in the Los Angeles studio world as a for-hire pop arranger, composer, and conductor, himself cut a fascinating album of knob-turning pop-electronica in 1957 entitled Count Down.

Haskell and company’s “Magic Star” was released around 1963.