Bill Frisch vs. The Ku Klux Klan, 1922

"Ku-Ku", The Klucking of the Ku Klux Klan

Performed by Billy Frisch
Recorded May 1922
Written by ER, BG, BG

[lyrics transcribed from the sheet music]

Shh! Shh! what an awful sight
Shh! Shh! See those forms in white
there's a hundred thousand men
and cows and donkeys in the band,
Shh! Shh! can't you hear that sound
Shh! Shh! going all around,
tell me don't you fear it can't you hear it
traveling thru' the land;

[chorus]
Ku-Ku, Ku-Ku, that's the kluck kluck klucking
of the Ku Klux Klan,
Ku-Ku, Ku-ku, that's the gobble, gobble, gobble,
of the Goblin Man,
they call 'round in their nighties
and if you're not your best,
they'll dress you like a chicken
put feathers on your chest*,
Ku-Ku, Ku-Ku, they will get you if they can,

So if your land-lord tries to profiteer,
tell the Klan and he will surely hear
Ku, Ku Ku, that's the klucking of the Ku Klux Klan

So don't drink wine and don't drink homemade beer
if you do you're surely goin' to hear
Ku, Ku Ku, that's the klucking of the Ku Klux Klan

So if you really want to disappear
beat your wife and you will surely hear
Ku, Ku Ku, that's the klucking of the Ku Klux Klan

Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Black Cats & Hoot Owls (With Sound Effects)

Clara Smith & Her Five Black Kittens - Black Cat Moan (Columbia, 1927)

Ma Rainey - Black Cat Hoot Owl Blues (Paramount, 1928)

Dolly Ross & Porter Grainger - Hootin' Owl Blues (Brunswick, 1927)

Wade Curtiss & His Rhythm Rockers - Puddy Cat (1964/1997)

Chat mystérieux, chat séraphique, chat étrange 

("Mysterious cat, seraphic strange cat") - Baudelaire

The fur harbours electricity and sends swift currents of this lightning up the arm of him who strokes the animal. Sometimes, alone with a cat in the dead silences of the night, I have watched the creature’s eyes suddenly dilate, her ears point back; with arched spine a startling, unexpected, unexplained prance across the floor follows; then puss settles back again to laundry and repose as if nothing had happened. What has happened? What has awakened this fit of wildness? Is it some noise unheard by humans, an unwelcome smell, or some reminiscence of the terrible mediaeval nights when the cat joined the witch in her broom-stick trails across the face of the moon? - Carl Van Vechten, The Cat & The Occult, 1922

That horror of horrors, "good taste", has often kept sound effects & other sonic onomatopoeia from clucking, whining, whistling & purring anywhere near the sanctified aeries of serious music, but even the whorehouse of popular music felt compelled to create a ghetto for such hijinks, Novelty Music. And while most listeners think immediately of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "The Monster Mash", Ray Stevens' "The Streak", or any number of Dickie Goodman & David Seville records when asked to give an example of great Novelty Music, it's a grand & noble tradition whose squawkings, hoarse aspirations & mellifluous glossolalia are encountered well beyond the goofball musics of our demented youth. It has created some of the truly transcendent moments in both rock music ( The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird") & in longhair music (Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals), but the ancient blues recordings that actually experimented with atmosphere (for novelty is atmosphere intensified with sonic tricks) are often the rarest, the least-heard. 

It seems no one wants to discuss studio trickery, no matter how primitive it may be, when discussing old blues & jazz records. Critics & aficionados flock to these records because they are so very "genuine", because they are hissing, growly dolmens that, by their very nature, eschew novelty. The vivid cat-yowls, carnal growling from voice & band, temperamental screeches & hoots from singing saws -- these paint the old mossy dolmens a feverish hot-pink.  

Organlogue One-Reelers (Master Art Products, 1930s)

The tortured, sentimental warbling of slightly warped, century-old, pipe organ records is really the reason I started this blog, but I wanted to make it seem as though I had other interests. Plus, I just can't bring myself to write the masterpiece such music deserves at this point in time, so I'll just tease a little until I'm ready to give these records the full Nick Tosches treatment. 

While this post features Organlogues -- one-reel, theatre organ-driven singalongs played before films in the 1930s -- the first video is not technically one of those. It features Jesse Crawford & his wife Helen, ostensibly at home, ditzing around with "Tea for Two" from No, No Nanette. Crawford was the premier theater organist of the late-1920s/early-1930s & recorded some amazing records. Though, as is the danger with old organ records, he also recorded hundreds of upbeat, Shakey's Pizza-style ditties that will make you want to rip the ears off your head. There will be much more about Jesse Crawford in future posts, but this seemed like a fine place to make introductions.

There were thirty or so Organlogues made by Master Art Products & they manage to perfectly illustrate the point where sentimentality & artifice float ethereally past being heart-warming into the realm of the eerie. The images rise from some oneiric theater apron, fold out like a funeral fan & then resolve in a mother's tears, while the theater organ's tremulant creates that airy, disembodied vibrato that tingles the tiny hairs on the back of the neck. These are truly spectral little memento mori from our collective gloaming.  

Happy Birthday to Charles Baudelaire - Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (Philips, 1968)

Weena from George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) intones the decadent dirges of Charles Baudelaire while sarod master Ali Akbar Khan enshrouds her funereal intensity in poppy-seed brocade. It's one of those records that could only have been made during the 1960s, when Caedmon Records, Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message with Marshall McLuhan - Columbia Records, 1968), Sidney Poitier (Poitier Meets Plato - Warner Bros. Records, 1964), Timothy Leary, Mort Garson & Ruth White (Flowers of Evil - Limelight Records, 1969) were releasing the true Head Music.

Yvette Mimieux & a Morlock, The Time Machine (1960)

While Mimieux's readings aren't particularly remarkable, the producers wisely chose the most ornate translations of six poems from Les Fleurs Du Mal, Baudelaire's florid & death-obsessed masterpiece (first published in 1857). While many translations over the years have sought to create less mediated readings of the poems, condensing the syntax a bit to more accurately reflect the precision of Baudelaire's poetry, it is the translations by Edna St. Vincent Millay & George Dillon that evoke the sickly smell of rotting funeral flowers English readers have come to expect from the poet. And couching Baudelaire's "sickening green-house atmosphere" in luxurious, slow-falling petals of sarod, sitar & tabla, creates the perfect aural equivalent to Nicholas Roeg & Donald Cammell's orientalist mindfuck noir, Performance (1970).

The Baudelaire libretto for Track Three, "The Murdered Woman":

Christine Jorgensen - Crazy Little Men b/w Nervous Jervis (Jolt Records, 1957)

A shy, skinny waif from the Bronx who "ran from fistfights & rough-and-tumble games", blue-collar carpenter's kid George Jorgensen, Jr. managed to become the kind of crazy exception to America's puritanical sexual attitudes that seems only to occur when media exposure, wide-eyed public curiosity & a subject's narcissistic willingness to "play along" combine to create a dazzling perfect storm. While 1952's post-war conformity of values had certainly created seedy, lurid back-alleys where pent-up ids could frolic under the cover of shadows, nothing in a Levittown PTA meeting or rumpus-room Concerned Citizens coffee-klatch could prepare the newly-minted Eisenhower pod-people for George Jorgensen flying to Denmark, consulting with adventurous Dr. Christian Hamburger, having three surgeries to correct her "disparity of impulses" & returning home as the lovely, vivacious & statuesque blonde, Christine (the name was a tribute to Dr. Hamburger) Jorgensen.

Oh, and did I mention that George had been a soldier in the United States army? Well, all the headlines did.

A brain-melting social transgression like this, if played out on a local scale, could have left Christine a social outcast, a freak dependent on the pity of strangers, but as played out on a national & international scale, it made her an instant celebrity. Not that the attentions were all positive, far from it. And there was certainly a freak-show element to the attentions lavished on 26-year-old Jorgensen, but, in the end, curiosity won out over hostility. And if one needed to be semi-civil & just a little open-minded in order to catch a glimpse of this new variety of human, then it was worth it to refrain from frothing at the mouth. But a third element was necessary to keep Jorgensen from being mercilessly heckled at every turn & becoming just another Very Special Person, like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy or Prince Randian. Unlike transgender cases before this, Christine Jorgensen was a good sport (though she had her temperamental moments) & she was rarely shy about spotlights, interviewers or cameras. She seemed preternaturally suited for stardom the minute she arrived back in NYC from Denmark in 1953.

She appeared on thousands of magazine covers, on every major radio & television talk-show, gave indelible left-field cameos in numerous television series, attended all manner of swanky soiree, toured the world's upscale nightspots with a cabaret act, wrote a best-selling autobiography, starred in five theatrical productions, was the subject of a Louis Farrakhan calypso song, inspired at least four films & countless pulp novels & was signed to Mercury Records (though these torch-song recordings never did materialize).  Her cabaret act - which wowed 'em in Las Vegas, Paris, New York City, LA & London -- consisted of fairly dodgy Marlene Dietrich, Mae West & Talullah Bankhead impressions, but as the final fizz on an evening of double martinis, she was the absolute berries. AND she ended her performance by donning a Wonder Woman costume.

Not much remains of her career as a chanteuse, though one supposes there are bootleg recordings of her floating around in the kind of circles I'd sell my teeth to join. One of her final live performances, a sold-out 1983 show at The Frog Pond in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles has been officially released & you can get it online for $12 new, significantly less used.

The true oddities in her recording career, however, are these two sides, cut as a one-off 7-inch 45 for Jolt Records in 1957. "Crazy Little Men" is a distaff version of Leiber & Stoller's "Kansas City" in which a heartbroken Jorgensen, dumped by her earth-man, flies off in a spaceship to be consoled by the "crazy little men" of the moon. Charting a strange trajectory that somehow allows her to pass Venus, Mars & Jupiter on the way, our jilted darling is finally embraced by the moon Casanovas, who woo her in the chirpy, sped-up voices we know all too well from Ross Bagdasarian, Sheb Wooley & Dickie Goodman records. 

Perhaps her husky-sexy reading was more than an attempt to cash in on the late-'50s "little green men" craze. After all, Jorgensen's engagement to labor union bookkeeper John Traub had recently hit the skids & another love affair with Massapequa typist Howard Knox was also turning sour. The track is swathed in amateurish reverb that gives the record a priceless end-of-career spookshow vibe. It's a bargain-basement Gotterdammerung that would radiate grotesque bathos if not for Jorgensen's effortless, wee-hour good humor. Listening to it you get the same feeling as when, half-way through an early Ed Wood film, you just can't laugh anymore & you actually start getting a transportive variety of "the creeps" as you think about Bela Lugosi, Vampira & Criswell being real people whose life work is represented in these one-of-a-kind ramshackle dreams. As Christine Jorgensen moans the names of the planets beneath the sound of a vacuum-cleaner hose held ten inches from a tired Telefunken microphone, beneath all that shabby velveteen reverb, as a guitar part recorded ten days prior chugs away robotically, in service to nothing in particular, you can feel that same desperate, cathartic loneliness. It passes, because the song is just too goddamn ridiculous to grip one's finer feelings for long, but it plucks at them just the same.



For more about this record, Jorgensen's career & a great interview from the 1958 Christine Jorgensen Reveals LP, check out this amazing site: Queer Music Heritage

R. H. Naylor - What Your Birth Stars Foretell (Eclipse 78 rpm Records, 1933)

Richard Harold Naylor was one of the very first newspaper astrologers, beginning his weekly column in London's Sunday Express in 1930 primarily as a series of horoscope readings for the Royal Family, with general astrological forecasts appended as an after-thought. Though Royalty-mad Londoners were quite taken with his readings for the newly-minted Princess Margaret, they were equally enthralled by his forecasts for their own workaday lives & Naylor became a celebrity overnight.

The Express had wanted famous Irish astrologer & occultist Cheiro (William John Warner) for the column, but the Brahmin-trained clairvoyant begged off & the column was given to his debonair acolyte, Naylor. Cheiro was the palmist of choice for high society, having told the fortunes of such luminaries as Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Mata Hari, Oscar Wilde, Grover Cleveland & Sarah Bernhardt. Late in life, Warner moved to Hollywood & married a countess. He wrote several screenplays, became an astrologer of note for the Tinseltown elite & passed away from a heart attack in 1936, his illustrious career given short shrift in U.S. newspapers & magazines, which described him simply as an "oldtime palmist". Meanwhile, his ambitious protege Naylor's career was in full flower. He had two insanely popular newspaper columns, "What the Stars Foretell" & "Your Stars", the first dedicated to predicting future news events, the second to more general portents for each of the twelve star signs. Express Editor Arthur Christiansen (from 1933 to 1957) said of Naylor: "His horoscopes became a power in the land. If he said that Monday was a bad day for buying, then the buyers of more than one West End store waited for the stars to become more propitious." Naylor's columns ran until the the mid-1940s & by then nearly every newspaper & magazine had its own astrologer. Still, Naylor was the king & he was coaxed out of retirement in 1952 for another popular zodiac column, this one running up until his death later that year. His son John took over from there.

Unsurprisingly, Naylor augmented his income with a series of enormously popular books & pamphlets (Astrology Reveals What Type of Woman Makes the Best Wife, Astrology Reveals Whether a Woman Should Devote Her Career to Love or Marriage, Personal Magnetism & the Stars), sold-out public appearances & this amazing series of 78 rpm records released by the British label Eclipse (also home to Leslie Sarony, Don Sesta & His Gaucho Orchestra & The Ambassadors Twelve) which sold records exclusively in Woolworth stores. While a seemingly random amalgam of sound effects & typically starry organ music noodle away in the background, Naylor quips suavely on characteristics for each zodiac sign, coming off like Noel Coward in a turban (or Stan Laurel in a fez). He's actually quite funny & his wry, sophisticated wordplay is clever far beyond the call of duty. And remember, "If December people live too well, they soon cultivate livers & their tempers suffer in consequence. Anyhow, take heart: December people live long & always die happy".