Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo Vol. 2!

One very great thing about crafting a “sonic zoo” of old-time Americana is the unpredictable ways that animal songs flit between hyper-realism, innuendo, religiosity, and symbology—so convoluted that you can’t even begin to pull the song apart. O what a tangled web we weave:

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Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo pt. 1

When the Beach Boys recorded the dense, meticulous, and perpetually indefinable Pet Sounds in the period between July of 1965 and April of 1966, recording technicians captured front man and musical ingénue Brian Wilson asking studio engineer Chuck Britz to add to the dog-whistles, organs, double-cellos, and coca-cola cans, a horse:

“Hey, Chuck, is it possible we can bring a horse in here without…if we don’t screw everything up?…Honest to God, now, the horse is tame and everything!”

Brian Wilson’s startling request is set, amongst other surviving clips from the now colloquially-named “Dog Barking Sessions,” to the tune of his two dogs, Banana and Louie, barking excitedly. His request didn’t make the cut on Pet Sounds, but the same two dogs did make it onto the end of “Caroline, No,” one of two singles released before the album itself.

Incorporating the incidental aura of his soundscape into his music is par for the course in Brian Wilson’s oeuvre, but the dogs themselves are specific for their expert ears—lyricist, singer, and Beach Boys co-founder Mike Love, in fact, was said to call Wilson “dog-ears” for their shocking sensitivity. We might consider, with this relationship of happy accident in mind, what the relationship between our “pets” and our “sounds” actually is.

Animals have been imitated in musical compositions for years. I think immediately of Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals from 1886, though I’m sure that in vaudeville, minstrelsy, and other popular entertainments, the tradition is much older. Catalyzed at least in part by John Cage’s “4’33” (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of any combination of instruments resting, silent, while the intended audience listens to the ambient noise of their surroundings), the inclusion of animal sounds in rock and roll might similarly serve to blur the distinction between art and the everyday, drawing attention to the textured sounds of the recording environment.

It might also, a la Donna Haraway, query the foundational relationship between human and animal. Since A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway has expanded her conversation about the intersection of human and technology in this, our technofuture, to one that considers our inter-species relationship with dogs. Understanding our relationship to dogs, for Haraway, helps us to understand our ethical relationship to our natural environment. How, then, do we listen to, and hear, this nature, and how does it talk back?

Obviously, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ rapturous “Alligator Wine” isn’t an intentional contribution to zoomusicology (an entire discipline about inter-species musical collaboration!). The endless stream of musical innuendo—rep’d here most overtly by Hasil Adkins’ nasty proto-punk “Chicken Walk” (an innuendo I started to explore in C-H-I-C-K-E-N, Vol. 1), PJ Harvey’s “Snake,” and the Cramps’ “Swing the Big Eyed Rabbit”—is similarly irreverent. Still, the sheer breadth of songs about animals does point to our fascination with animal soundings and symbologies. What is that freaky, low-down “Camel Walk”? What makes the “Milk Cow Blues,” recorded live, here, by the Kinks for their BBC Sessions in 1965, so persistently coverable? How amazing is it that Bikini Kill wrote a song about female self-sufficiency called “Star Fish”?

I’m very into all the tunes on this, the first volume of Sonic Zoo. It’s a loud, weirdo Noah’s Ark, and each song treats its animals differently. Come for Moondog, Daniel Johnston, King Kahn & BBQ and Fred Neil, leave with the dogs, cats, star fish, regular fish, cow, chicken, rabbit, camel, alligator, snake, rat, duck, dolphin. All with Wayne Coyne signing us off: “I thought I’d free the animals all locked up at the zoo.” An ongoing series of animals unchained! 

Big Sound Saturdays: Hot Meat (Songs To Bake To)

 

 

I guess it’s probably true that even if there are things in the world that are inherent goods, weather isn’t one of them. Winter people confuse me and I don’t want to talk about it. Fall and spring people make sense, opinion-wise, but the whole thing seems ultimately kinda milktoast; why not just go for it? I’m for the summer, and not just its beginning—the long haul, California’s dry desert heat, New York’s simmering trash swamp, Virginia when it feels like the literal surface of the sun. I like that body-bake feeling that makes you want to lie down and toast forever in the sun rays, I never want it to end!

 

Finding the best jams for deep summer proved trickier than I thought it’d be. No formula for vibes, I guess. Inspired by my best friend in California, who covers herself in literal olive oil when we lay coast-side and bakes her body like a big pasta, by ghost towns swimming in desert people and ants, swampy crocodiles and livid punk rock, noble pups panting in the sun, lazy Sundays and The Hawaiian Craze, I couldn’t decide on a single sound so I put them all together. Riding into the sun with Lou Reed (no truer words than “it’s hard to live in the city”), Hot Meat comes from Bjork’s early punk band The SugarCubes’ eponymous title—this mix is truly of Songs To Bake To.

 

Listen here, then, for Shadow Music from Thailand, Hawaiian tunes from Kalama’s Quartet, Kenyan guitar jams from the Mombasa Swingsters and country guitar twangs from Speedy West, Cambodian Bodega Pop from Touch Saly, soul-crushing reggae from the Soulettes, heavy rock from Pavement and swamp pop from Rod Bernard and Myron Lee & the Caddies. Hot jazz from the Nite Owls! Detroit R&B! Kurt Vile! The late and ever-great Townes Van Zandt! In truth, this mix is a little bit of an excuse to make public once more TVZ’s gut-wrenching and ever-so-small “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya,” but Hot Meat, in its thrust for sounding deep summer, sings the opposite, too. I kinda like getting duped by the summer. Maybe it’s a good exercise in letting yourself go.

 

 

 

Big Sound Saturdays: No Bed of Roses, Vol. 2 (Mixed Bouquet)

Like the Pluto of the musicsphere, mixes are kinda like micro-histories, and crafting a history begs a staggering breadth of choices. What kind of history can you make with hundreds of songs about the rose?

Big Sound Saturdays: Country Christmas!

We had this tradition for a while at WKCR-FM: Once a year, 36 hours straight of live programmed country music, the annual Country Music Festival. It was full of secrets! The overnights are always the hardest to cover, so we peppered them with country couples, truck-driving country (and the sub-genre, mark me, of alien-versus-trucker races), and my favorite: every midnight, an unannounced hour of country Christmas.

Country Christmas flies an unbelievable wingspan—transitioning from Christmas carols to the ever-growing realm of undeniable pop in the 1940s, it’s still a genre that carries some weight and some more Billboard chart-toppers. In 2003 alone, Jimmy Wayne’s “Paper Angels” was at #18 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart, Marty Stewart’s “Even Santa Claus Gets the Blues” hit #55, and at #30, Kenny Chesney’s “All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan,” birthed from the exhausting and oft-reiterated genre of Beach Music (weirdly, like the murder ballad, country-songs-about-the-beach is looped into genre blankets but not really talked about on its own).

Which is to say! I (mostly) kept my cool this first round and pulled almost exclusively from the 1950s and 1960s: Tex Ritter, Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn’s “Good Old Country Christmas.” I listened to so many country Christmas songs that I actually started to confuse the two genres. Like, not all country songs are Christmas songs—blasphemy!—but is every kinda classic Christmas song just really “country?” It’s crazy how well “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (not included here, you’re welcome) fits with Leroy Van Dyke’s sound, how easily Gene Autry (track 5, you’re also welcome) sings “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane).” Hank Thompson’s scooping, bluesy intro to “I’d Like To Have An Elephant For Christmas” is just one of many markers of country music’s dark tonal (and often lyrical, melodic, referential…) underbelly, but maybe Christmas carols have that, too?

In any case, diving into a mix like this is dizzying, but don’t let it defeat you. Leading in with a cautionary tale by the great Ferlin Husky—“Christmas is holy, not a holiday”—I’ve thrown Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ paean to Hawaiian country music “Mele Kalikimaka (The Hawaiian Christmas Song)” in with Hank Snow’s Christmas boogie and Tex Ritter’s Christmas polka and even included a couples duet, Red Foley and Judy Martin’s “Our Christmas Waltz.” Even though some of these songs are, I admit, deeply stupid (Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Christmas Dinner” is a long, jingly catalogue of hot holiday foods), there’s also beauty—Faron Young’s “You’re The Angel On My Christmas Tree”—and Brenda Lee’s disorienting “I’m Gonna Lasso Santa Claus,” a cowboy vigilante battle that paints Santa as the great withholder and teen dream Lee as a blonde, bedazzled Robin Hood.

Anyway, it’s kind of like Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere today, and I thought we might as well celebrate. From the Louvin Brothers, ACRO Collective, and I, Merry Christmas, all the time!

Weekly Dance Break: Rebirth of Slick – Cool Like Dat (Digable Planets)

An old one but a good one, which wormed its way back into my mind by way of the movie Dope. Take a break and chill like that.

Big Sound Saturdays: Apocalypse Sound!!

The 1940’s and ‘50’s boast such an enormous archive of atomic bomb scare songs—most of them lovingly compiled onto the Atomic Platters (“Cold War music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security”)—that it feels a little tired to loop them all into a mix that would probably end up being kind of hard to listen to. I went for apocalypses of mind and body instead, with tunes ranging from totally explicit (Elvis Costello’s “Waiting for the End of the World”) to personal disaster, the girl group Heartbeats’ self-released, organ-laden heavy-hitter “Cryin’ Inside.”

In the hopes of mixing these songs into something that sounds like an atomic explosion, this mix is a little out of my usual Big Sound Saturdays fare. Apocalypse Sound!! is loaded with garage rock, punk, riot grrl, afrobeat, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and some big tunes from Italy, Indonesia, and Thailand. I Giganti’s “La Bomba Atomica” is a 1960’s patchwork of low register swamp sounds and earnest falsetto, bombs in the night, and the ever-irrepressible Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “Frenzy” is to the tune of frantic disorientation that I’m hoping the mix will bring you, the listener, into. Barring Chance Halladay’s “13 Women”— a heavy, huge, hilarious apocalypse, like the Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” in Big Man fantasy space—everyone on here is pissed off. I even rounded it off with a song that The Red Elvises wrote for the post-apocalyptic rock ballad-cum-samurai film Six String Samurai, a furious ska boogie that dances itself all over Leonard Nimoy’s cautionary “Visit To A Sad Planet.” No holds barred in any of these songs. Paint them on your body, carve them in your walls!

Big Sound Saturdays: Crazy Arms

American music—country music, especially—is littered with body parts. There’s no word in the English language for the object-animation of Faron Young singing “hello, walls” or George Jones coaxing each piece of his house furniture to life in “The Grand Tour.” “Personification” is too simple when the walls literally, naturally, talk back. These songs sit, to me, in a confusing pre- and late-capitalist space: wisdom resides in places and objects are animated by their use, on the one hand, and things have value irrespective of their production on the other. Singing “well look here, is that a teardrop in the corner of your pane?” is sweet and lowdown, but it also (knowingly) treats Young like an object amongst objects. It’s probably worth lingering on why that metaphor is so available, so funny, and so sad.

When emancipated from the body, “cold shoulders” and knee bones work similarly to singing windows and memory-filled chairs. In “The Jukebox of History,” Aaron Fox writes beautifully on this kind of object confusion: because country music—always stereotypical and personal, objective and subjective—sets the categories of “true” and “false” in motion, “solid ‘objects’ become speaking ‘subjects,’ and heartbroken ‘subjects’ consume themselves as commodified objects.” Driven by what Fox calls “the metanarrative of Desire,” feelings and people are thing-ified; in the metanarrative of Loss, things turn into “speaking, feelingful presences.”

Jerry Jeff Walker’s wistful “About Her Eyes” is an aubade to “her eyes, her face and her hair,” buoyed by the kind of desire that’s languid and comfortable and tangled in the wailing wa-wa that hearkens to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. It’s a strange song, if only for the incongruity of all the floating parts of “her” face and the sheer airiness of the piece altogether. In a tune that sings of hiding and sailing on a breeze, sent off with the blues falsetto that hurls out and up, Walker’s crooning about his lover’s body parts disturbs the concrete referent of the piece and questions the capacity of music to really point and hold to anything.

The most famously freaky of the batch, Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” is an ambling, peripatetic, hopeless tune, where the “crazy arms that reach to hold somebody new” seem, at first, to be hers—the betrayer—second his, the scorned, but their severance from the body is the real point of it. Breaking up, in “Crazy Arms,” is nonsensical. It doesn’t compute. It happened, though, and the undeniable reality of this impossible act actually morphs lived reality into a place where arms can act on their own, a kind of mystical object-oriented magic. Even if “this ain’t no crazy dream,” “these treasured dreams I have for you and me” are lodged in Price’s “troubled mind,” and the entire plane of country-song existence collapses, also, within it.

Wynn Stewart’s “Unfaithful Arms” performs a similar apocalypse of light and darkness collapsing together, but the thingness of the cheater—her arms, not her body—manages to sort of abscond her from guilt. And the great Dolly Parton, easily one of the most creatively out-there country singers ever to’ve graced us with “Little Andy,” removes Bobby from “Bobby’s Arms” completely. It’s a safe-space utopia, insistent, I think, that the only way to achieve such a perfect comfort is to have the body, ditch the man.

Bobby’s arms they are warm when he holds me

Bobby’s arms always comfort and console me

When I’m in his arms hold tight, I know everything’s alright—

Just as long as I’m inside Bobby’s arms.

Not every song on here is a country song. “Big Leg Blues” is a classic blues tune, Ruth Brown’s “Lucky Lips” is a goofy proto-rock ‘n’ roll love song, “Snap Your Fingers” and “Knee Bone” are early folk/blues from Mississippi, and “Skip” Spence, the Beach Boys, and Linda Perhacs are steeped in rural psychadelia. Still, for floating body parts, country really carries the crown. My iTunes alone has 18 songs about blue eyes! If desire morphs people into objects for consumption, the body, like a machine, loses its products through its fragmented methods of production. Arms are for holding, but it sits wrong when they are also for love. Country is brilliant in that way. When the Man in Black laments, “I’ll always get a cold shoulder from you,” he knows the problem is that a shoulder can’t love you. Hello walls, definitively. These songs are a handful of milagros, little talismans that praise just as they denigrate. Listen with your ears.

Big Sound Saturdays: Saturday Morning Coming Down

I’ve never really felt summer come slowly. Winter is always a crash-and-burn disaster, so bad that I forget it annually, and spring is sudden and confusing, Charlottesville alighting with still-too-cold undergrad summer gear and the uninsistent southern laughter of men and women about to go home. Now that it’s mid-May, the East coast is alternately drenched and bathed in the happiest early summer sunlight, and all I want to do is lie down and be swallowed by it.

I made a mix for that! All kinds of country, a little gospel, a little folk, some slant-blues. Karen Dalton’s holy warbles are the sneak-up, crooning “love is blind” into Bobby Charles’ cool invective, “you gotta give me all the love I want.” I threw in a few classics—Billy Joe Shaver’s blithe farewell to his “bottom dollar,” Dave Van Ronk growling the original “Baby Let Me Lay It On You,” a faux-Hawaiian version of “Soldier’s Joy,” Riley Puckett singing the hobo lullaby, “Ragged But Right,” that dates back to at least as early as 1900 and makes me feel justified, in all its confidence, for causing some kind of scene. A mix for sitting still, “Milky White Way” paces us, and Jake Fussel’s “Raggy Levy”—a cover of the Georgia Sea Island Singers’ call-and-response song by the same name—is a sit-down shimmy. “Cairo Blues,” with its unrelenting “KAY-row,” has a place on my ongoing list of heart-rending yelps. There’s fife and Hawaiian slide guitar, four-part harmony and organ, the great and eternal Doug Sahm! Happy summer, ACRO friends. Things are only looking up.

Big Sound Saturdays: Soft Steps (Music for Sleep)

A few years ago, I learned the name of something I’ve experienced my whole life. The irresistible warm tingling on the back of my head and around my ears that I get, rarely, from an older woman speaking softly—in middle school, my friend’s mom describing her teaching job, a waitress explaining the specials at my high school haunt, one of my many post-college female bosses describing spreadsheets. It has a name, which Andrea Seigel describes with very relatable awe on This American Life: “autonomous sensory meridian response,” nonsexual euphoria. Existing, without question, anecdotally, ASMR lacks real scientific substance. It’s a pleasure connection that we’ve yet to codify. There’s a reassuring connection, I think, between the group of people who feel this and listeners. Call it disparate communities, alone together, and think of how hard it is to describe why sound makes you feel things. Not silly—important, and this is a mix to prove it.

Sonic softness, warmth and light and jingling bells, is oft-sought and under-actuated in folk music. It’s easy for a sound to become burdened by its progenitor’s emotionality, and if there’s anything I hate it’s a sappy folk song. These sleep sounds, culled from American and some Caribbean recordings from the late 1920s up through the late 1960s, have this “unbearable lightness.” Autoharp and ukulele and lots of a capella—Zora Neale Hurston play-singing “Bama Bama” during her ethnographic trip to Haiti in 1937, take note!—fall in and out of each other, a patchwork for rest.
In lots of ways, they’re strange together. The Pinder Family has Bahamian folk hero Joseph Spence, whose verse acrobatics entered the American pantheon by way of an American tour in 1978 and a slew of covers by the likes of Ry Cooder and the Grateful Dead. “The Genial Hawaiians” were borne of the Hawaiian culture craze that came into its own just around 30 years after Queen Lili’uokalani was forced to abdicate her throne in the face of American colonial invasion. There’s still no official agreement—no science!—on what exactly to call the instrument that Washington Phillips made to accompany himself in the sixteen extant recordings he made for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1929. And Alan Lomax sent Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” in a capsule into outer space so that aliens might know what the world is capable of. There’s Cajun and British folk songs, American ballads and gospel jubilations. Plenty to curl up with. Happy Saturday night.

Special thanks to the preservers of many of these songs: Dust-to-Digital, Joe Bussard, the Association for Cultural Equity, Chris King. Songs may not have a science, but they always come from somewhere. These archivists, collectors, and re-issuers are committed to preserving the memory of these artists.