Psst? In search of some real dada, daddy-o? Some musical shit that busts the scale of the absurdist meter? Well have I got the thing for you. Follow me into this dark alley and I’ll show you. It’s a toss-off LP recorded by producer Bob Johnston and some of the crack Nashville sessions musicians (e.g., Kenny Buttrey on drums, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano and keyboards, and Henry Strzelecki on bass to name a few) who helped Bob Dylan record Blonde on Blonde, and who inspired by “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” decided to one-up Bobby D by creating an artifact so strange and hilarious I’m positively certain Dada’s creator, Alfred Jarry, would give it three thumbs up.
This may well be the oddest LP ever released by a major label, and it’s virtually indescribable. I can only assume that large quantities of alcohol and drugs were consumed. It’s less an album than a beautiful example of self-sabotage, with the band taking popular songs of the day and folding, spindling, and mutilating them. It’s great fun and should definitely be spun at parties that have gone out of control. Bob Dylan, what hath thou wrought?
Opener “Bang Bang” (a Nancy Sinatra tune) is sung by one of the female vocalists—the credits are sketchy—and features a Eastern European lilt, a Romanian violin riff by Brenton “Ping-Pong” Banks, and lots of machine gun sound effects. It’s a miracle that nobody cracks up laughing until the end, when somebody shouts, “Bang!” If that isn’t weird enough, the band takes the classic “Monday, Monday” and reimagines it with a staccato lead singer, deranged backing vocals, an uncredited and lunatic slide whistle, a trumpet fanfare by Charlie “Bugs” McCoy, and God only knows what else. The album’s greatest downfall is the failure to list who’s singing what: the vocalists are listed as Durl Glin, Princess La Mar Fike, Mort “Mortuary” Thomasson, and Tummy “Mole” Hill, while “The Swamp Women” include The Incomparable R. Lean (aka Arlene Harden) and Luscious Norma Jean Owen.
The band follows “Monday, Monday” with another Nancy Sinatra tune, “How Does That Grab You Darlin’?” It opens on a Dylanesque note with some guitar by either Bugs McCoy or One-Finger Mac Gayden and a vague echo on piano of “Rainy Day Women” before turning into a full-blown production number, with some great female lead vocals, lots of horns, and a thumping beat, to say nothing of somebody doing a really gnarly imitation of a tomcat in heat. The cry, “Are you ready? 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-?“ followed by some “Yeah, yeahs!” opens “Good Lovin’,” which features a radical kazoo break, some funky guitar, and a swinging sixties feel thanks to the horn section. Meanwhile the trumpet blares, the kazoo takes what can only be described as one of the worst solos of all time, and the band ends the song the way it started, by counting, this time to 11.
The band then takes on the challenge of desecrating the Herman’s Hermits’ “Leaning on the Lamp Post.” It opens with some cowboy movie saloon piano, then the singer comes in, joined by the horns. Then the song takes off, a moveable carnival, and the singer takes off after it, and mayhem ensues until the song slows long enough for the singer to say a few more words about the lady he hopes comes by. And then the song goes out on a big Dixieland flourish, muted trumpet and other horns included, and that’s it. The same guy takes on lead vocal duties on the band’s cover of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream,” and this one’s a doozy. It starts out normally enough, but the vocalist sounds demented and is backed by somebody imitating a bass who is even more deranged, and then there’s the somebody who keeps sneezing and coughing as if the daydream is giving them hay fever, before the horns come raucously in, accompanied by some screams and shouts. Which return later on, as the song fades out and the band goes into their very own cover of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” which one of the female vocalists sings. The horns are as great as on the original, the group singing is ragtag, and the harmonica is just like Dylan stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again, and in short this humorous masterpiece is the only song on the LP on which the band plays it straight.
Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” gets massacred, to the extent that the female lead vocalist cracks up in the middle, as does somebody else in the band. It opens like a Band song with some “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” horns, but that female vocalist isn’t trying on purpose, while the drums are out-of-kilter and everyone likes it that way. Meanwhile the choruses are totally berserk, and it’s an anti-classic from beginning to end. Meanwhile, the band’s cover of The Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” may not rival the original, but it makes up for its lack of quality with big laughs, from the way the male lead singer hangs on to the word “away” to the church bells that ring out the hour of failure while the group vocals almost work. Some great trumpet follows, along with those clanging bells, and the singer talks some of the lyrics while someone pants behind him. Then the song speeds up before going into a big crescendo, with lots of soul shouts and cries, before exiting stage left.
I love the band’s cover of The McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy,” which inexplicably opens with a Tarzan cry and which I vote the best song on the LP. It has ragtag spirit, lots of great harmonica and horns, and some hangdog group vocals, and if the lead singer cracks up it’s not because the song isn’t great, but because he’s having such a great time singing it. This one is a classic, from its recurring beat to its prolonged end, where the song slows only to bounce back up again, with the horns’ closing followed again by that Tarzan call. The LP closes with a deranged cover of Shirley Ellis’ 1964 novelty hit “The Name Game,” which opens with some woebegone horns followed by a vocalist talking with some heavy echo about the rules of the game before the band kicks in, singers going at it, piano and horns predominating. Then the rule maker returns, a piano plays an out-of-kilter run, and the singers and horns and piano come back, and that’s all she wrote, people.
How Columbia Records allowed this LP to be released is undoubtedly a story in itself, but I’m glad they did because I feel a bit richer for just having heard it. Dylan was less an artist than a contagious disease in the Year of Our Lord 1966, and there is no better example of the impact that direct contact with him had on his fellow musicians than this album, which of course spawned no follow-up. It’s a record into which its makers put neither heart nor soul, only funny bone, and I can only imagine what the people who bought it thought of it. But I know its players had a whale of a good time making it, and that’s good enough for me.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
