(solving, once and for all, whether it is spelled d-o-s or d-o-e-s!)
Good morning — and happy almost New-Year, if you celebrate that kind of thing!
(My resolution is to listen to some more SWAMP POP!)
Sometimes, you let YouTube take over your life. As Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his Being Peace, sometimes we sit down in front of the television, and ask it to come inside and colonize us. I’ve been colonized by YouTube recently — in the form of those persnickety, endlessly fascinating creatures called the YouTube Mixes. It’s incredible — it’s like being able to access some other mind, right there over YouTube, picking what you listen to! And the best part about it, for an ertswhile connector-and-wannabe-historical-thinker like myself, is you spend all of your time thinking about what possibly could connect the tunes together; and you end up discovering a whole lot in the process.
Yesterday, my standard SWAMP POP! listening lead me into unknown — and completely — fertile grounds. The strangest thing of all to come out of these listens was the exposure to a band I’ve never heard of before: TORNADOS. This was the song that provided the introductions:
(Apparently, this is a progenitor of the modern-day music video, called a Scopitone! Whoooa it was made to play in jukeboxes! How cool/crazy is that ?!?)
So — who or what are TORNADOS? From pictures and what I can gather from YouTube footage, they’re a five-piece troupe, pretty fond of wearing slick suites, and dedicated to playing a sort of proto-space-age, slightly Eastern-Bloc themed, Western instrumental bonanza. Most of their hits seem to come from the early 1960s — 1963, to be exact, which is the date attributed to “Ridin’ the Wind,” “Telestar,” and our new personal favorite, “Robot.” Other look-up-worthy tracks include “Life on Venus,” “All the Stars in the Sky,” and “Do You Come Here Often?”; not to mention “Globetrotter,” “Blackpool Rock,” and the worth-it-just-to-see-what-it’s-about “The Ice Cream Man.” Here’s a particularly fantastic sample of what they were up to:
(Be careful when looking up TORNADOS — otherwise, you’ll likely come across “hits” like “Destroyed in Seconds” and “Into the Storm” !)
The guy who’s credited with starting all of this madness is a fellow named Joe Meek. Besides finding ways to create some of the most believable laser-like noises in history, Joe Meek was a record producer in England, working primarily with the DECCA label. The Tornados served as his house band for various projects; and they remained together, in various incarnations, until 1966, when they released “Do You Come Here Often” — argued to be one of the first “openly gay” pop records produced on a major UK label:
And, oh yeah — that crazy, space-ages noise you’re hearing would be the clavioline. (My mom once dated a man who played the synthesizer; I guess I’ve never, until now, understood the appeal.)
Meek wrote, produced, and engineered for a number of UK hits during the 1960s, including hits by Lonnie Donegan, John Leyton, and the Honeycombs. You can hear his unique, space-age-otherworldly touch on late-rockabilly/space pop, even on records like these:
(This music’s also getting called “Spaghettic Western” in alot of the YouTube commentaries, so maybe I don’t much know the difference between space-age and Wild West. Or maybe this [finally!] explains this !)
His meteoric career was apparently all-the-more-so remarkable because he was tonedeaf; and then, as so often will happen, he turned his gun on his landlady, and then himself. Still, though, in his brief career, Meek pioneered a sort of music that — well; I’m not entirely sure it ever caught on. But it does sound like (here we go again!) nothin’ else I’ve ever heard. And, of course, he basically pioneered the British invasion: The Tornados’ “Telestar” hit #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart quite a few year before the Beatles came to be, making it the first UK crossover hit to top the American pop charts.
(Oh yeah — I have heard this! And, by the way, this YouTube video links to a little-known band called Procol Harum, that by buddy Joshua got me into a few years back. His grandfather loved them, and I’d never known where on earth their crazy, pioneering, Jack-and-the-Beanstalk sort of proto-Love sound had come from. Well, apparently, here’s [part of!] our answer !!!)
(Though, if you’re going to get into procol Harum, you really need to get into the longer stuff.)
There’s also apparently a very disappointing biopic on Meek & the Tornados, called “TELESTAR: THE JOE MEEK STORY”:
There’s also a pretty decent-looking and amusingly-narrated BBC-style documentary on Meek, in four or so parts — all available on YouTube!:
Well — there was (and remains) certainly a whole lot more to that story than just some guys dancing (rather stiffly!) in a field with boxes on their heads! So, there you have it: the Tornados story, or at least enough to start with.
Have a lovely end-of-the-year, make sure to play some claviofile, and do a rockin’ shuffle!
Yours in the Space-Age,
jessi
PS — one more, for the New Year! I mean Age!:
