Sound Poems - AltWeeklies.com

MUSIC
HIGH ON LIFE
Rodd Keith garners a cult following in death.
Sound
Poems
Experimental, weird
and firmly dead,
Rodd Keith is hot again
By Sara Bir
he fruits of the recording studio are
inherently refined ones, because that’s
what a studio is for: refining music,
making songs sound clean and good.
Even reclusive singer-songwriters hunkering
down over the four-tracks in their bedrooms
sculpt and refine sound. All of the wonderful
three-minute songs on your mix tape and the
little pop symphonies oozing out of the radio
have been crafted with care to deliver the
maximum amount of euphoria per second,
like yummy audio crack.
There’s something lost in the process,
though—the looseness, the freedom, the
spark of creation, the happening. Every now
and then a recording comes along with such
qualities in spades, but it demands a good
hunk of commitment from the listener for
maximum payoff: the tantric sex of the
music world.
A truly bizarre CD from obscure legend
Rodd Keith offers both the tantra and the
crack. Released on the defiant Tzadik label,
the posthumous Ecstacy [sic] to Frenzy will
easily be one of the most far-out discs of the
year, and probably fewer than a thousand
people will ever hear it. Such long-lost pathos
is the underlying appeal of musician Rodd
T
Keith, however. In the ’60s and early ’70s,
Keith applied his palatably skewed musical
genius to composing, performing and
recording song poems (strange fruit of those
“send us your lyrics”ads seen in magazines) to
make ends meet.
Keith’s love of hallucinogens literally
became his downfall when, in 1974, he fell to
his death from an L.A. freeway overpass in a
drug-addled haze.The song poems left behind—
whose heavy reliance on Chamberlain organs
give them an intoxicatingly woozy, hurdygurdy wobble—are the bulk of Keith’s musical
legacy, and their accidental juxtaposition of
pop-music conventions with avant-garde
experimentalism have garnered Keith a cult
following in the decades since his death.
Ecstacy to Frenzy does contain a few song
poems, but it’s an entirely different trip that
allows us to glimpse pure, unmitigated Rodd
Keith. Prone to all-night solo recording
sessions, Keith once cut a tape reel containing
an epic 33-minute jam embedded with echoladen hiccups, nonsensical babble and
childlike sing-song scat.
After filling up one side, Keith flipped
the tape over and proceeded to record on the
other side. Thus, the resulting track, dubbed
“Shome Howe Jehovason Plays,” appears in
two versions on Ecstacy to Frenzy: on one, the
right channel plays in reverse; on the second,
the track is actually played backward (so that
the left channel is in reverse). Whether Keith
listened to the playback of the first side in
reverse as he recorded the second side remains
a mystery, but there’s more than enough
synchronicity happening between the two
channels to back this theory up.
In any case, either version of “Shome
Howe Jehovason Plays”is befuddling enough
for one sitting. Set against a backdrop of
meandering organ drones and sudden piano
tinklings, it’s like hallucinogenic funeralparlor music, fascinating and exasperating in
the same way that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine
Music can be.
After slogging through Keith’s journey to
the center of the mind, the three song-poem
tracks on the CD seem abrupt, even if the
maniacally jerky “Beat of the Traps”(not
without a touch of Screamin’ Jay Hawkinsesque spook and stagger) is hardly in keeping
with what was coming out of most everything
else on the pop radar at the time. Oddly
enough, the titular “Ecstacy to Frenzy”—
doubtlessly the result of a song-poem client’s
drug trip—is suave and catchy enough to suit
Barry Manilow’s catalogue.
The shamelessly irresistible two minutes
and 26 seconds of “Little Rugbug”stick out
like a sweet pinkie in a sea of sore thumbs;
perhaps the finest example of the song-poem
genre, the vapid Hallmark card lyrics dote over
the anonymous scribe’s toddler (“Playing on
the floor / Someone I adore / Creeping,
crawling, going to explore”), while Keith’s
inspired Chamberlain pipes out sappy yet
achingly sentimental sprightly flute, oboe
and organ lines.
For complete music dorks only, Ecstacy to
Frenzy offers a rare chance to hear music
isolated from any commercial context. Keith
didn’t record “Shome Howe Jehovason Plays”
for anything other than his own utter
enjoyment, and the version heard on the
CD remains blissfully unaltered.
THE BOHEMIAN
05.19.04-05.25.04
49
MUSIC
not always move product, something I realized
when a co-worker forcibly ejected my Original
Carter Family CD from the stereo. I guess oldtimey Appalachian woe gels badly with
gourmet foodstuffs that retail for $30 a pound.
Selecting the five most subversive CDs I
could think of, I loaded them into the CD
changer one morning before the store opened,
telling no one of my Folgers-esque switch. I
wanted to believe that, played at the correct
volume, unlikely songs could provoke an
explosion of cash transactions greater than the
scatting expertise of Sarah Vaughn, whose
crystal-clear voice I had had just about
enough of. Here are the results of this steely
scientific experiment:
CHOCOLAT, MON AMOUR
Gainsbourg’s nasty French lyrics move product.
Buying
Blare
A study in the mechanics
of shopping music
By Sara Bir
he right music can make you buy stuff.
Ladies, if you’ve ever blundered into a
Victoria’s Secret with the Mozart
cranked up and suddenly felt a bodily
need to purchase a new wardrobe of lacy, satin
undergarments, you know what I mean.
Typically, though, shopping music isn’t
meant to be heard, but felt: it’s a soothing,
familiarizing white noise in the form of Air
Supply and Phil Collins. At a Safeway once it
took me a whole minute of passive listening to
realize that they were playing an R.E.M. song.
How long have they been playing R.E.M. in
grocery stores? I felt conquered, yet liberated.
R.E.M. used to be music for arty college kids,
and now it’s a soundtrack for buying
Hamburger Helper.
The social dynamics of music in places of
commerce has been a large part of my life lately,
as I work in an upscale chocolate boutique.
While we may be upscale, we’re still cheap
enough to pipe our shopping soundtrack
through a janky little stereo offering songs
of two genres: jazz vocals and world music.
Listening to this stuff for nearly 40 hours a
week has greatly altered my attitude toward
Cole Porter, as well as made me realize that
“world music”is just a euphemism for “third
world music.”
To maintain my sanity, as well as shake
things up a bit, I decided to conduct a little
experiment: play music I really like, and see if
it motivated people to buy chocolate. This is
not as simple as it sounds. Good music does
T
1) Ween, Quebec
Figuring that the soft-rock ballad
“Chocolate Town”would be a perfect fit, I
forgot that the album opens with a raucous
Motörhead-style rocker and had to scramble
to grab the remote so I could skip over that
one. Ween can craft lovely, melodic songs, but
they inconveniently feature lyrical passages
like “Fuck you, you stinky ass ho.” Fearing for
my job, I wussed out and skipped the entire
CD.
Chocolate commerce rating: 1
Subversiveness rating: 10
2) The Ramones, End of the Century
The Ramones lost a huge chunk of their
trademark punch at the overbearing hands of
producer Phil Spector here, so this is thusly
soft enough around the edges to play around
children. Plus “Chinese Rocks”is on the
album, and I like the idea of playing songs
about heroin at work.
Chocolate commerce rating: 5
Subversiveness rating: 5.5
3) Stereolab, Mars Audiac Quintet
For whatever reason, customers in a
chocolate store respond readily to French
music. Stereolab, not French per se, does have
a French lead vocalist. What’s better, many of
their songs contain politically radical lyrics
buried under layers of foxy Moog and Farfisa
drones. Lounge + French + Marxism = $.
Chocolate commerce rating: 9
Subversiveness rating: 9.5
4) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
Lynn’s much-ballyhooed new album is
amazingly good, though I worried that
playing it would result in more of the dreaded
Appalachian stigma. But holler-bred Loretta
can pull off something that the Carter family
can’t: she sings about getting fucked up and
fucking in a time-honored Nashville tradition
that alludes to obscenity in such a familyfriendly way. We had ourselves a chocolatey
honky-tonk!
Chocolate commerce rating: 7
Subversiveness rating: 8
5) Serge Gainsbourg, Comic Strip
The homely Gainsbourg triumphs! Some
of these lyrics are totally lecherous, but
because it’s French, no one knows! The trick is to
play music that is evocative to the subconscious
self (French + chocolate = sexy!), yet
noninterruptive to the conscious self. It’s a
fine line to walk, but a vital one, and Serge G.
pulls it off with perverted Gallic style.
Chocolate commerce rating: 10
Subversiveness rating: Je t’aime . . . moi non
plus.
THE BOHEMIAN
07.28.04-08.03.04
43