| Pop & Circumstance: Kai-Ray |
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| Written by Max Sparber | |
| Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 09:17 PM | |
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Welcome to Pop & Circumstance. This brand new column space will feature rotating authors writing about numerous subjects from various angles and points of view. This week, MNSpeak editor Max Sparber weighs in on a slice of Twin Cities garage band history, Kai Ray's "Trashman's Blues" single. The history of Twin Cities garage band music isn't very well remembered, but when it is, its origins tend to go something like this: In Christmas of 1962, three Minneapolis band members vacationed in Balboa Beach. These fellows had played in a variety of local party bands, and they spent their vacation looting California record stores for surf instrumentals when they weren't stretched out on the beach. These fellows returned to Minneapolis and cut a record that welded together two songs by a raucous L.A. doo-wop band called The Rivingtons: "Papa-Ooh-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird." This they performed in gravelly, excitable vocals and a pounding surf beat, creating "Surfin' Bird," which tore up the national charts, and also birthed the local garage scene. This is a pretty good history, as histories go. It forgets that there were already hundreds of teen bands in the Twin Cities, actively rehearsing in their parents garages—The Trashmen themselves were in a few, including the Strings Kings, who recorded some genuinely wild rockabilly inspired shouters for the Gaity label. But never mind. Stories have to start somewhere and "Surfin ' Bird" is about as good a start as any. Besides, surf instrumentals hadn't really found an audience in the Twin Cities and, after "Surfin' Bird," you'd be hard-pressed to find a local band that hadn't incorporated the sound into their act in one way or another.  But there is a local 45 rpm single that's worth mentioning as a sort of transitional album, existing somewhere between the hillbilly rock and roll of the '50s and the stripped-down garage beat of the '60s. A local performer named Richard A. Caire released a song called "Trashman's Blues" under the name Kai-Ray in 1961 (currently available as a vinyl single from Norton). The song is an uptempo country blues number with a rollicking Bo Diddley beat, and features Kai-Ray asking his local sanitation worker the cost of hauling away a pile of garbage. The song was a popular regional favorite, and is important to this story because The Trashmen took their name from it; Kai-Ray later penned a number of songs for the Trashmen, including their a Beach Boys-inspired anthem, "New Generation."But it is the flipside of "Trashman's Blues" that interests us here. The song is called "I Want Some of That" (also often called "Jungle Talk"), and it's a real oddity. The essential melody is a fairly straightforward rockabilly shouter, but it is bookended by a wild, deliberately primitive chant. Over a relentless tom drum beat, Kai-Ray lets loose with a high keening, sounding something like the lampoon of Native American tribal music that accompanies the Tomahawk Chop. Kai-Ray also makes a sort of melodic Bronx cheer before launching into his song, which, despite its lyrics, is also deliberately primitive, consisting of simple pidgin English phrases repeated over and over again. "Baby take it on back," he exhorts. "Big coconut hat!" Listen to I Want Some of That (aka: Jungle Talk) The song is a very early example of a few features that would be hallmarks of '60s garage music, particularly in the Twin Cities. His song's faux-primitive sensibilities would pop up frequently in '60s garage rock: It was a decade of caveman vests, pounding tom-toms, and pidgin lyrics. And Kai-Rasy's lunatic vocals throughout the song was the first of dozens, if not hundreds, of local tunes in which the singers had license to go haywire—most famously in the gibbered middle bridge of "Surfin' Bird." Kai-Ray's song may not be the Twin Cities' first garage band song, but it certainly is father to the scene—an early example of the weirdness and wildness that would pour out of Minneapolis for the next decade. It's no wonder The Cramps, themselves known for weird and wild tastes, have covered so many songs from local rockers, including "Surfin' Bird"—the compilation album, "Songs the Cramps Taught Us," even included Kai-Ray's "I Want Some of That." |
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| Last Updated: Monday, October 22, 2007 at 12:55 AM |
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