I first turned on to the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band in college, but really became a fan in the years after I graduated. The group was an easy sell for an avid fan of Monty Python, which I discovered in high school in the late 1970s on my local PBS station's Saturday night broadcasts. The Bonzos' music was a blend of Monty Python-style absurdist humor, British music hall, and acid rock, very much a product of the art school fueled British underground of the late 1960s; and one of their members, Neil Innes, appeared in and wrote the music for the Pythons' Holy Grail. I later learned that they first made their mark in Britain on the Python precursor Do Not Adjust Your Set, a program nominally for children that included four future Pythons. I only recently learned that the group was lionized by other members of the British underground: Jimi Hendrix was a big fan, for example, and early in their career, the group Cream improbably wanted to move towards Bonzo-style absurdist theater. Hearing the 2010 compilation of source material for many of the group's songs, Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us, gave me a further appreciation of their music. Like their American contemporaries the folk terrorists the Holy Modal Rounders, who pillaged from Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music and other sources and freely rewrote the songs to reflect their addled sensibility (prior versions of "Hesitation Blues" did not include the word "psycho-delic"), the Bonzos felt free to augment their source tunes. The original version of one of my favorite songs by the group, "Hunting Tigers Out in 'Indiah'" (the last word was their spelling), does not feature the following painful couplet: "Tigers don't go out on rainy nights / They've no need to whet their appetites." A further revelation was seeing them perform some of their songs on YouTube posts from Do Not Adjust Your Set and elsewhere. Like Spike Jones before them and their American contemporaries the Mothers of Invention, they conceived their songs not merely as music, but as performance pieces with a strong theatrical component: "The Sound of Music" (kinda but not really the title track from the film), "Tubas in the Moonlight," "Canyons of Your Mind," and the aforementioned "Tigers" all lose something without the visuals. As the performances of "Tigers," "There's a Monster Coming" (trigger warning: black face), and other songs bear out, they were not above the prevalent racist and sexist views of their day (another thing they share with the Pythons). Still, making allowances for the different mores of that era, their oeuvre is a breath of fresh air for these fractious times.
A final bit of trivia: the Canadian group Death Cab for Cutie took their name from a song from the Bonzos' debut LP, Gorilla.
June 9, 2024
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When Culture Club hit the American airwaves my senior year of high school, it was a revelation to me. The only pop artist I was then aware of who had engaged in anything like Boy George's gender bending was David Bowie, but my knowledge of his early '70s phase was limited to the cover photo and some of the lyrics to the songs of Ziggy Stardust, which my brother had a cassette copy of, and which I liked well enough to dub. But Bowie was singing rock and roll, and Culture Club was making music that was far less, well, male. Their first couple of singles to make a splash Stateside, "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" and "Time (Clock of the Heart)," were both huge hits, which in itself seemed a surreal development to a kid from a conservative American small town. So even though I didn't particularly like these songs at the time, I picked up a copy of the latter -- the former had come and gone by the time I screwed up my courage to commit to the purchase -- and bought each new single as it appeared over the next couple of years: eight in total, all of which I still have. I liked a few of their subsequent singles ("Karma Chameleon," "Church of the Poison Mind," "I'll Tumble 4 Ya"), but I don't recall that I ever played any of them after buying them. My fandom was a tacit declaration of identity rather than an expression of my musical taste. I was reminded of this a couple of nights ago when "Karma Chameleon" was included in a medley of queer-friendly songs during a post-game interlude at the Pirates' annual Pride Night game. I was with five friends waiting for the fireworks show the team puts on after every Friday home game, and started singing along -- a belated but joyous assertion of queer me.
December 3, 2023
I recently purchased a 1980s double LP compilation of Sam Cooke's hits called The Man and His Music, and it has been a revelation. I've loved his swan song before his premature death, "A Change Is Gonna Come," for years -- and listening to it again now, I was reminded what a remarkable performance it is -- but I knew his other classics only from other people's versions (and EVERYBODY was covering his songs back in the day). But his own versions -- "Chain Gang," "Cupid," "Another Saturday Night," the surprisingly gritty "Shake," the lovely "Bring It on Home to Me," and the aforementioned finale: just WOW.
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I'm a fan of first-wave British punk, and Northern Ireland band Stiff Little Fingers' early records have long appealed to me both for their sound and for their sharp political lyrics. Perhaps my favorite song by them is "Tin Soldiers," the final track on their second LP, Nobody's Heroes. It's the story of the young men who follow conventional wisdom ("He joined up to get a job / And show he wasn't scared...He joined up cos Dad knew best / To do right by his son...") and soon find out what they've signed up for:
Though on its face this is a very different experience from anything I went through, the general sense of compromise and loss spoke to me, and Jake Burns' enraged lead vocals and the sheer power of the music, in particular the urgent hyper-thump of Ali McMordie's bass and the simple distorted howl of Burns' guitar at the song's conclusion, still send chills through me.
It was only today, though, when I listened to the song for the nth time during a work break, that it suddenly spoke to me on a very personal level: the cost of acceding to what everyone told me I was...dad (family/community/etc.) knew best...signed away my name and my youth (and much of my adult life)...In that moment Burns' rage was mine, and the song's roaring wind-down with the rhythm section driving the protesting guitar to the end dictated by the choices made--a final note like the door of a jail cell or crypt slamming--encapsulated all the pain I still feel about those lost decades.
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