Music, Sweet Music

There are songs we all like that don't fit in with our usual tastes.  While I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, I'm never one to turn up my nose at a good punk show.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about those weirdo songs that seem to have nothing to do with liking anything else, but they get stuck in your head at random moments, and make you feel generally awesome whenever you hear them.

I have five.  Let me tell you about them.

Queen - Seven Seas of Rhye: 

This one is probably the most straightforward of my set.  For one thing, it's Queen.  Queen is fucking awesome.  Never mind that of the album Jazz, Rolling Stone magazine gave yet more evidence that they should for the fucking love of god get out of the editorial business by saying "Queen hasn’t the imagination to play jazz – Queen hasn't the imagination, for that matter, to play rock & roll." 

Rolling Stone was like the Vice magazine of the 1960's and now it clings to any threadbare sense of relevance by saying over and over again "OMGZ I WAS AT WOODSTOCK" or fucking whatever like an overbearing parent from the hippy days that tells embarrassing stories about how much acid they took when you were in the womb. Rolling Stone is so painfully wrong about Queen that I can't even in good conscience recommend their magazine for lining a bird cage lest you anger the birds so much that the birds attack their human masters with bloody bird fury exactly like that one movie. I think it was called Flappy Flappy Peck Peck.

But in addition to being generally Awesome, Seven Seas of Rhye is about the world of Rhye, a fantasy world filled with witches, ogres, giants, knights, and so on that Freddie Mercury invented with his sister when they were kids.  Yes, Freddie Mercury was basically playing Dungeons and Dragons Before there ever was such a thing.

I first heard the song in 1997 - I was living in East Lansing and drinking tons of beer, hanging out with great friends and not yet soured on the college experience.  Not a bad time to find a new song.


The Barkays - Soulfinger

First, this is an obviously bad-assed track.  It's got a sort of bloated big-band Mary-had-a-Little-Lamb intro that just barfs out into all these discordant horns and screaming disco freaks in a way that jumps through your ears, into your brain, and kicks things around.  There is nothing bad about this song - even the restful soulfinger, soulfinger refrain just delivers a nice break from the driving sex of the song.  Did you hear that goddamned guitar solo?  It does not GET funkier than that.

But that's only half of why I like it.  Any boy who came out of his sexual latency during the cold war remembers the Dan Aykroyd / Chevy Chase movie Spies Like Us.  We don't remember this movie for the hilarious cameo by Bob Hope, or the barely-not-tragic reference to Afghan Mujaheddin "Freedom Fighters" as American allies.

No, we remember the Russian girl coming out of her tent in bra and panties.  Just a little jiggle, a whole lot of stretch, and boom - an adolescence packed with fervent sweaty dreams of warm tents and white snow.  Soulfinger just happens to be the last thing in that dreadfully unfunny movie that we remember paying attention to before we saw her. 

The Seekers - Georgie Girl

This is a song I like because I used to like it, even though I don't remember liking it.  See, my mom got it in her head at some point that I really liked this song when I was about, oh, four years old.  I don't remember a thing from any time before I turned six or so, and thus I have to take her word for it.


But when I was a poor little child growing up in rural Michigan I had all of three albums of my own:  Pac-Man Fever, The Lone Ranger Adventures, and a copy of Georgie Girl performed by The Baja Marimba Band.

So really it wasn't even the original version that I liked, if I ever really liked it at all - it was a swanky instrumental played by a California novelty act.  This very much informs selection number four.


The Baja Marimba Band - Winchester Cathedral

The song is pretty much impossible to find, so here's the original. 


How meta is this, right?  Okay, so that above mentioned novelty act decided they would in turn cover a song by the New Vaudeville Band, themselves a novelty act as they found inspiration for their whistling, megaphone-amplified sound in old pressings of 1920's hits of Rudy Vallee. 


You're confused?  Screw you - I have to live with this every day.

The problem with liking this version of this song is there is basically NO chance I'm ever going to hear it again.  NOBODY outside of me, my mother, the old lady working the counter at the salvation army, and some weirdos on youtube have ever heard of the Baja Marimba Band. I only know this song at all because it was the track on the record (yes, record) before Georgie Girl.

To drive the point home, Tom T. Fucking Hall produced more records, achieved greater success, and is more accessible today, than the Baja Marimba Band.  Go ahead and listen - you probably deserve it because I probably hate you.

But never mind that this song may exist entirely in my head - it's a catchy tune with not one but two nifty novelty gimmicks, and when I have my psychotic blackouts in which I smell things that aren't there, taste colors that aren't real, and elevate my consciousness to a place no one else can follow, Winchester Cathedral as performed by the Baja Marimba Band is what I hear.



Boney M - The Rivers of Babylon

The latest addition of songs that basically make me flip out in a good way, I had never heard this song until probably 2008 or so.  I was in the best Italian restaurant in the world, drinking martinis like they were tap water, when I had to excuse myself to use the little boy's room.  As I stood evacuating the better part of a liter of Tanqueray, this song came on.

A little about that restaurant - it is a favorite local haunt with great food.  Even the tourist trap that it is attached too, the Liberace museum, is not much of a tourist trap.  Thus it's usually pretty easy to get a table. I recommend it to anyone visiting Vegas. 

Because it was in large part designed by Liberace himself (the bar was flown over from England and reconstructed board-by-board and brick-by-brick) it has a great deal of character and charm.  It's kitschy, it's weird, it's fun, and it's very obviously and awesomely dated.

It basically feels like it deserved to be a set piece for the Quentin Tarantino movie Jackie Brown.  And in that spirit, as Boney M's song played,  I pissed and marveled at the octagonal cherry-red sinks and thought man, this would be a weird time and place to get in a fight, and it occurred to me that it would be a perfectly Tarantino-esque setting and scene: two guys trying like hell to kill each other in a restroom imported from England by Liberace in the 1970's while Germany's only successful Reggae group played a song based on an old Jewish Psalm over the PA system.

It was perfect - in that moment, I had a wonderful connectedness to one unique skein of universal consciousness.  I tuned out.  I saw stars.  I smelled sandalwood.  I went back and had a sublime dinner and a few more cocktails, and I added this song to my collection of quirky, awesome tracks that until now I've kept just for me.