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Nobody Eats Oranges...
Some Mornings
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“Don’t try to make me believe that you’re not a dirty little beast who’d like to hurt everything around you, and be hurt by everybody— and you’d love it! And it’d make you practically die, and you’re creaming in your pants just thinking about it, baby, aren’t ya?” Such is the question posed by Tom Zacharias, long-forgotten Swedish porn-funk mastermind, on the opening track to Belinda, a mind-blowing piece of uncomfortable aural erotica that would have been lost to the sands of time if not for Anthology Recordings. When you first hear those kooky Scandinavian beats and glibly juvenile lyrical admonishments, you find yourself in a moment of revelation that could only exist in a Web 2.0 world.
Ever since pop music’s inception, there have been brow-furrowed critics skeptical of the medium’s value as an art form—naysayers who cite pop music’s intrinsic disposability as its greatest defect. Is it hard to blame them? After all, the pop industry depends on its customers’ fickle loyalty— fortunes are made by convincing the kids to put down last month’s chart-topper and buy into “the next big thing.” The castaways of fame and fortune have for decades been confined to the languorous purgatory of dusty thrift store record crates, and the vast libraries of obsessive rarity collectors.
The advent of Compact Discs breathed new life into a small fraction of previously forgotten recordings, as the production cost for reissues dropped considerably from the vinyl days. But CDs can go out of print almost as easily as records, and the problem of contemporary music’s expendability remained. Broadband connections, the proliferation of digital music players, and a quietly growing label called Anthology Recordings are changing all that.
Established in response to the lack of “obscure, but influential” titles on digital outlets like the iTunes Music Store, Anthology is the first all-digital reissue label. Since opening shop in the fall of 2006, the label already offers more than 100 albums of rare material for download in a high quality, non-restrictive format. The albums Anthology reissues come from a carefully selected, truly eclectic range of genres and cultures. Titles range from New York post-punk (China Shop’s 21 Puffs on the Cassette), to Thai surf rock (Thai Beat A Go-Go, a compilation released by Swedish label Subliminal Sounds in 2004), to Turkish psychedelia (Bunalim’s 1969 self-titled debut).
Anyone who’s casually flipped through a used record crate knows the true gems are few and far between, lost between instrumental albums of Christmas traditionals and multiple copies of Peter Frampton -- Greatest Hits. Given the variety of fantastic cover art that adorned even the crappiest of records in the days of 12” vinyl, buying an unfamiliar album on artwork alone is at best a risky endeavor. So, perhaps the best feature of Anthology is that you can listen to samples of each song on an album before you come to a decision. In fact, browsing the Anthology site and listening to every sample in sight isn’t bad way to while away a few hours in front of your computer screen and discover a bunch of amazing bands in the process.
Since you may not have such liberal amounts of time on your hand, Mean has chosen three favorites for review— but there are dozens more like these on Anthology’s site— and likely hundreds more that will soon surface from their long sentences in obscurity, former prisoners of their own physical boundaries. Thanks to the Internet and a few devoted reissue fanatics, these cultural artifacts will survive long after their Vinyl counterparts have warped beyond recognition. Pop music has transformed from a disposable medium into an invincible one, no longer subject to the worries of unit production costs. All hail the new digital age, gatekeeper to our forgotten past!
C.A. Quintet
C. A. Quintet’s Trip Thru Hell, like many of the albums in Anthology’s roster, comes from the wildly fluctuating late 60’s. The British invasion was over, replaced by musical excursions into flower power, political consciousness, and psychedelia. In the great state of Minnesota, singer/producer Ken Erwin and his trusty band-mates were departing from the saccharine-sweet love songs of their contemporaries, instead taking Twin City listeners on a “Trip Thru Hell”.
Sharply contrasting the rough and tough, unsettling vision of hell that would come out of heavy metal a decade later, C. A. Quintet’s demonic afterworld isn’t such a bad place to spend the night. In the album notes, Ken Erwin relates that growing up in St. Paul, he began to question Christianity at an early age. It was after being expelled from catechism that he realized he was destined for Hell, based on the rules of the Bible: “You know, rules like not swearing and so forth.”
It’s pretty unusual in the world of rock for a front-man to claim cursing as his biggest sin, and it’s this same sort of Brandon and Brenda Walsh Minnesota morality that makes the dark rollercoaster ride of Trip Thru Hell so quaint and fun. The album begins with a nine-minute instrumental experiment that descends into a vaguely sinister drum solo before rising to an extremely rad bass-line that becomes the oft-repeated theme for the record. The remainder of the album is comprised mainly of exploratory pop songs that meander in all the right directions. The original seven songs on Trip Thru Hell are supplemented with twelve previously unavailable cuts, including the groovy “Dr. of Philosophy” and the goofy “Bury Me in A Marijuana Field”, which contains the lyrics “I can go out in a blaze of glory / when you roll a joint out of me”. The most enjoyable track on the album may be the band’s foreboding cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You”—an impressively eerie take on a song that so many have done wrong.
The Daisy Chain
Deep within the Orange County, four fair-skinned flower children joined forces in the mid-60s to form The Daisy Chain. All-female rock groups were basically unheard of at the time: with the exception of Goldie and the Gingerbreads, who had signed with Atlantic in 1964, there were no serious girl bands to speak of in 1967, when the band released Straight or Lame. The group (formerly named The Ladybirds in tribute to Ladybird Johnson) received marginal local success, playing L.A. hotspots like The Cheetah and The Whisky A-Go-Go.
Straight or Lame has a definite San Francisco vibe, clearly drawing inspiration from Grace Slick, but with a musical perspective that can’t be pinned down as plain old psychedelia. The album rather mixes hippy stylings with elements of soul, R&B and pleasant yet superfluous brass instrumentation. The problems in Straight or Lame are obvious enough to understand why the band never hit it big, but the creativity present in its muddled pop songs is captivating and endearing. “Run Spot Run” reads like a poem written on LSD, performed in a gloriously blasé, slightly tone-deaf manner and accompanied by an excited flute soaring above a chorus of cosmic whistles. The very next track, “Unhappy for Me,” swings back into reality with an embittered love song that would sound almost like a 50’s pop ballad if it weren’t being carried away to a deranged, questionably transcendent place by an insistent trumpet and flailing organ interludes. The Daisy Chain broke up before putting out another album, but it would have been interesting to see where they would go with all the potential outlined in Straight or Lame. Several remaining members of the band re-formed for Birtha, a slightly more successful hard rock group that released two albums in the early ‘70s.
Tom Zacharias
Perhaps the most entertaining album I’ve come across on Anthology Recordings is Swedish psycho-savant Tom Zacharias’ mid-70’s pornographic funk-fest Belinda. It’s like the no-holds barred grandparent to San Francisco-based Gravy Train!!!!’s raunchy dance music. Vaginal dryness? Foot fetish? Scat? Incest? Zacharias wants to take you there, and in such a hilarious, gloriously groovy way that you’ll be booking the first ticket to Stockholm to find out what they’re putting in the water. Only in the midst of the sexual revolution could Belinda find success, in spite of its exclusive availability though Swedish porn shops and mail-order advertisements in porno rags. When Zacharias placed similar ads in the pages of said magazines’ American counterparts, however, he failed to tap the market. Not surprisingly, the readers of Hustler and Screw were unenthused about the idea of exchanging their American dollars for Krona in order to attain an unheard-of Swedish sex-themed funk album.
The story of Tom Zacharias’ life is too unbelievable and intricate to try and summarize here— but I’ll try. According to the liner notes for Belinda, Zacharias went to school with the king of Sweden, became a tennis champion at an early age, and then dropped out of the sports world to become a Lenny Bruce-esque performance artist. Throughout his life, Zacharias also worked as Sweden’s first male pin-up boy, erotic novelist, prolific recording artist, and “star of a bizarre televised enema championship.”
The first six tracks on Belinda are rare English-language versions of Zacharias’ smutty tunes. Sung by Dory Previn-esque New Yorker Suzie Heine, the tracks are not for those with delicate sensibilities—but will be loved by anyone who appreciates Karen Finley or Peaches. “Please Daddy” is probably the most uncomfortable (and hysterical) cut, written from the perspective of a fiendish girl adamantly imploring her father (voiced by Zacharias) for an incestuous relationship, at one point launching into squeaky kid voice and demanding her father give her a “screw” for Christmas. If the shock value and childish humor of these extremely explicit opening songs doesn’t float your boat, you can at least appreciate the remaining 16 tracks (sung in Swedish) on the basis of musical value alone. Drawing comparisons to Blaxploitation film soundtrack music, Belinda’s heavy beats and funky grooves can fuel any dance party, Hollywood orgy, or hippy happening. It’s also worth nothing that Zacharias’ follow-up to Belinda was a much tamer album that was awarded “Children’s Record of the Year”, only to be crushed commercially by competition from the wildly popular Smurf records.
http://www.anthologyrecordings.com/
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