So as some of you already know, I have a compulsive thrift store music habit – essentially a poverty-friendly form of retail therapy that I strongly recommend to folks who are addicted to buying music but who can’t see their way clear to dropping $13 on every crazy music purchase they make.
I’ll get into the specific reasons why thrift store music kicks so much major ass in a different post. For now, I want to share a jaw-dropping discovery I made today in a Salvation Army store: the Most Amazing Liner Notes In the History Of Recorded Music.
See, as I flipped through the store’s bins of dusty old vinyl, I came across something particularly weird: a copy of an album entitled Sorcery! by a guy named Sabu. I had no idea who Sabu is, or what kind of music he plays (turns out it’s atmospheric, latin-tinged, percussion-heavy stuff), but I figured from the album title and the bizarro photo montage on the cover that it had to be weird enough for a $1 spin back at the pad. So I smacked my George Washington on the countertop, picked up my long-player, and headed for the door. Stopping off at a chili parlor on the way home, I pulled the record out to look at it with more focus as I waited for my bowl of Texas-style. And that’s when I seen ’em.
Liner notes. Crazy liner notes. Not crazy like Funkadelic liner notes crazy. Not crazy like, I dunno, Kevin Rowland solo album crazy. I mean wild, weird, hallucinogenic, strange…beautiful. Uncredited, but whoever wrote them (in 1961, it seems) is/was a stone genius. After getting home, I did the old Interweb thing to try and figure out what the blazes was the story with these liner notes. Who wrote ’em? Why? Was anybody else as astonished by them as I was?
Well, it turns out there’s a record store that devoted an entire page to reprinting the notes, under the meta-tag: “Liner Notes Of the Gods” — so it seems I’m not the only fan. And, no, there was still no attribution. I’m copying and pasting them here for your enjoyment/amazement. I’ll be very disappointed if the literati amongst us (I’m especially looking at Mark, Rick, and Oats) don’t offer up their thoughts on the following. I think it’s remarkable stuff.
From the shores of the rivers of the sun come sounds, sounds various, beautiful and horrible with life, sounds as old as time, heard when brute creatures trod the earth, sounds that owe nothing to civilization and everything to rank and teeming biology. Product of a thousand animal and insect chirps, creeks, wails, thuds, thumps and stricken cries, they are an aural anthology of nature in its true guise, that nature that owns the earth and speaks for it, nature that is as ancient as the planets and as endless as the sun itself. The brooding heat that makes fecund every mite and molecule it touches has teemed into being a million forms of curious life, forms in the water, on land, in the earth and in the air, forms that live on other forms, or within them. Even their diseases are themselves new forms of life, life spongily multiplying amid death everywhere in an eternal cycle that produces its own whirring, multi-farious cacophony like the inner workings of a monstrous biological machine turned loose and run amuk. Man, the white-collared animal, occasionally dares to insert his prying boat, a lone dugout or a venturesome canoe, into these regions hung with vine where waters run that are grown to their surfaces with vagrant lilies, errant bitter ferns of musty odor, slime-decked pools of dead life rising with the swell. Man, the technical beast, opens an ear to the voice that sounds and he hears the original black and sordid magic of life, that sorcery he too came out of and now fears.
Here a mating call and a death rattle uttered by separate and independent beasts combine into a peculiar, haunting chime. The whine of a mateless mammal and the ticking of some hundred tiny pests occur haphazardly together to give an orchestra of blood and friction music indiscriminately scored for fauna and winds. The earth moves and the air moves with it and the whole regenerate pulsing and green-grown ball of firmament plunges through space as though it had a destiny. The tentacles of insects tickle the fringes of the cosmos and the beards of hairy animals wave freely in the gaseous envelope in which we and they float as we highball around the sun. This is the sorcery of life in its rutting, elemental source-design. This is the rhythmic magic of birth and rot and the constant burning muddy indigestion of the cosmic super-imposition of life on life on life, all grown into a heap and dying while aborning, corpses and genes well mixed in a great stew of fertility and reproduction and decay.
Life grows apace in lands where men still know the joys of being eaten alive by other men and/or by small fishes in furious clusters. Life jumps and bounds along rivers that dump indiscriminate cargoes of matter and debris into deep green seas, oceans that swallow whole subcontinents as glibly, blithely as the alligator gorges on its young, seas that reach from subtropic to subarctic and balance at once the breathless reaches of the armpit regions with the frigidity of the poles. The Aurora flips and flows on top of the world, aching across the empty void like a great tautened tongue, magnetic and muscular in its wild energy, kissing the whole world.
In old jungles strange ache-hungry birds watch from trees that wilt and hang. Small loin-clothed men step brittlely through overgrown verdure. Natural boleros sound in the teeth of giant crocodiles crunching the bones of careless waterfowl, while in the grass banks, the lice violate in aimless joy the matted fur of some dead, cold, warm-blooded species.
SABU …
…has heard all this and much more. The rhythmic cadences of nature’s boiler room are here, the aural history of the sex life of a cosmic corn popper, the wail and chime and gong sound of the eternal SORCERY.
Well, I’m sure you see the comedy in this kind of overwriting as well. Kind of like a big swell of strings draped over a compost heap.
Have you ever looked at any of the Cecil Taylor liner notes?
That said, what was the chili parlor you stopped off in? There are one or two there in Arlington that I really miss now that I’m in California–although our local low budget delicacy, the fish taco, is very fine in its own right.
Cecil Taylor liner notes are a hoot. Was the main function of liner notes in the 1960’s a bone for musicians to throw to their whacko poet friends?
I’ve always liked the droll liner notes on Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill written by Donald Fagin under a pseudonym.
Dr. John
Wow — one of the few instances where I’m not being a sarcastic dick, and everybody reckons it’s comedy gold! I really think those liner notes are great, in the same way that a Terence Trent D’Arby concept album is great: chock full of ridiculous conceits, but at least not tied down by some too-cool-for-school need to shrink from ambition. I say: let’s have more wacko poetry in today’s liner notes, and less meaningless pince-nez chronologia. (Shouldn’t we be disdainfully assessing the comedy hidden beneath *that* crap?)
Isn’t that a large reason why we exist? I don’t know why, but the whole time I read your post I kept thinking of a stoned night during which a friend threatened to play a Deodato album he’d come across.
My favourite part was: “the ticking of some hundred tiny pests occur haphazardly together to give an orchestra of blood and friction music indiscriminately scored for fauna and winds.” Awesome.
Going through my vinyl, I was just reminded that on two re-issues of Beau Brummels material that the old liner notes are just recycled from the original release! And, big pet peeve: opening a CD sleeve and finding the dreaded inside panel page empty and white where information could be!
I’ve always enjoyed a little random self-preservationism though; if you can’t get someone to write about you, write about yourself: “The composer is the alchemist, labouring long into the night: mixing music –making brand new melodies into grand old memories… then with friends or all alone he adds and blends the magic of words. I am fortunate to meet them along the road and we smile and share our common gifts by spinning dreams… and the people listened, and they were pleased and so were we to see our dreams come true… dreams of spun gold. From your huckleberry friend, Andy” Dreams of spun gold? The magic of words? I’m listening Andy Williams, I’m listening;)
Everything else aside – great posting, and great posting name! Hrundi V. Bakshi – “Mr. Bakshi, were you also aware that in 1878 they weren’t wearing *underwater* watches…”
“chock full of ridiculous conceits, but at least not tied down by some too-cool-for-school need to shrink from ambition.”
I didn’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, just that the comedy of purple prose was part of the enjoyment.
I’m not sure I’ve figured out how the rest of you are quoting from each other’s texts; I know there was a note to that effect at some point but I didn’t really understand it.
I still want to know what chili place you went to. I’m not kidding; I need these DC area reminiscences from time to time.
*Puts on her pince nez,*
Just use a ‘blockquote’ open and closing tag.
*takes off pince nez…;)
Thanks very much–but I have no clue what that means.
A tag can be placed at the beginning and end of text to make the text between the tags perform an action –be it bold, italics, linking a url, or quoting within text. Here’s a link to some examples of how to use basic html:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
Thought these liner notes were apropo;)
This is how you would blockquote the sentence- This is how you “blockquote.”
Type it just like that. To do italics substitute “blockquote” with “em”. To bold substitute “strong” and so on. More info can be found here-
in the User’s Guide “Tips on Tagging”.
Thank you for your attention.
The Back Office
The liner notes are awesome – for a record of sounds of the jungle. Gives me no confidence that the music of Sabu will achieve anything like it.
Taken as an essay, the whole thing kind of drops off a table once they get to the, um, Sabu part.
If you could see the back cover where the liner notes are printed, you’d see why the wacko essay ends so abruptly; the guy just ran out of space. Or, more likely: I envision a J. Jonah Jameson-like character staring at a sheaf of typewritten pages and spluttering: “What the… Robbie, you tell that dope-smoking, bongo-playing beatnik idiot that he’s got twelve hundred words — twelve hundred, do you hear me? — to say what he needs to say about this Sabu character! Better yet, just hand me that red pen over there… (makes a few scratches on page three)… Yep, that’ll do. Perfect. Print it!”
Actually, it would have been better to end it in the middle of one of those sentences and just put …SABU!
Naturally, we’d assume he’s declared himself to be the avatar of the avant, his work a musically mordant, copiously copulatory, genetically generous offspring of the formless phonics of man in his reverent recitation of Gaia’s aural authority in conjuction with his control of the analog waves everpresent in the biospheric bathtub containing the obligatory offal and olio, as he pungently performs her whispered wisdom.
Or perhaps that would just be me.