Graham Reid | | 1 min read
As with most sensible people, Elsewhere has long enjoyed music which isn't. The comedic noise of Spike Jones, the Goons, Spinal Tap, the exotica of Martin Denny, Esquivel, the outer space sounds of weird electronica and so on . . . all get airplay around our way.
As do early Captain Beefheart, spoken word albums, soundtracks from disturbing movies (A Scanner Darkly most recently, always Lost Weekend) and so much more.
Pop music seems too safe and commodified alongside these musicians who often didn't care whether they made the charts or even any money, but just followed their own wayward path.
How else to explain this track by Big Walter and the Thunderbirds?
Apparently Big Walter Price was something of a local legend around Louisiana when he recorded this for the Myrl label and acknowledged both the popular dance the Watusi and his guitarist Albert Collins' hit Freeze. Quite why it sounds so exotic is another issue.
Pieces of music like this would be lost if it were not for archivists like the late Vicki Fox who was putting the bizarre complitation Sounds of the Unexpected (her third in a series of strangeness for Ace).
Among the household names here (joke!) are Jan Davis (with Watusi Zombie), Felix and his Fabulous Cats (Savage Girl), The Forbidden Five (RFD Rangoon) and . . .
Okay, some better known names then: Bo Diddley (Aztec), Gabor Szabo (his distinctly odd take on Ellington's Caravan), and Leonard Nimoy with Music to Watch Space Girls By.
Actually Nimoy/Spock isn't on the instrumental which is a weird treatment of the piece by Charles Green originally written as a Pepsi commercial and became an MOR hit for the Bob Crewe Generation.
This is an excellent collection of the unusual and most definitely unexpected: Ray Cathode is here too, as is Lee Scratch Perry's Upsetters, the mad funk of Travis Wammack and of course Martin Denny with his idiosyncratic take on Miserlou.
Sounds of the Unexpected: Weird and Wacky Instrumentals from Pop's Final Frontiers on Ace is out through Border in New Zealand.
Sensible people will know what to do.
(And we will doubless be back into this compilation soon for another posting From the Vaults)
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