Psychedelia, p.23
Psychedelia, page 23
This is a key reason why Exotica culture fits so well into the psychedelic puzzle: it projects an alternate reality that is almost real. The distance between the baseline state and the imagined state of Exotica is not ridiculously wide, as it is in a Fantasy novel. Although the lifestyle suggested by Exotica records differs from the white collar, 8-to-5 Westerner's reality in every single way, it is still a modest, attainable fantasy. The vintage Space Exotica music has a similar almost-real quality, as mankind reaches further and further out into the galaxy. When Exotica music was revived in the 1990s, there was a parallel but independent revival of '50s Tiki culture, and these two expressions of escapism combined into a rich, alternate culture. The psychedelicist can, with very little effort, tip the perceptual balance of an Exotica situation so that the 'fantasy' is favored, and then settle himself or herself inside this alternate reality for substantial periods of time. In a psychedelic state the reality-dissolving power of an exotic milieu, such as a lavishly decorated Chinese nightclub or an ambitious museum exhibition, may be so strong that there is no choice but to accept the passage into the new instance of reality; a kind of benign, mental Shanghaiing which is familiar to many acidheads.
The psychedelic journey to another world (Tahiti or the Moon) can be very richly experienced, because the visions of Exotica culture are modest and attainable, and have become even more so in the decades that have passed since the 1950s. Additional to its allure, and in clear opposition to the teenage-dominated late '60s hippie Psychedelia, Exotica is not the dream of a child. Children and teenagers do not fantasize about sunsets over empty beaches. It is the fantasy of an adult, and the fact that it allows an element of dream into the stern world of mature men and women is one of Exotica's more remarkable achievements. The artist creating a dream for grown-ups does not have a very wide canvas to work with, which undoubtedly contributes to the almost-real quality of these fantasies. This particular aspect, perhaps more than any other, was lost when the 1960s rolled in with its cargo of young loud-mouths, whose utopian ideals could hardly be called 'almost- real'. The loss of a significant ability to dream occurred in the early 1960s, not just to Psychedelia, but to pop culture in general, as Exotica was found to be old and in the way. Of course, this loss was only illusory, as the music and its rich context merely went into hibernation, to be discovered by later and less egocentric generations of psychedelicists.
In recent decades, the rediscovery and refinement of a pre-sixties trip culture has occurred, albeit on a modest scale. The men and women who enjoy escapades into the almost-real understand what was not understood in the 1960s, namely that this is a game best played in private and among like-minded friends. Their activity is in line with the purposeless play advocated by Alan Watts' psychedelic philosophy; it is arguably one of the most elegant forms of purposeless play. At the same time, this is a game that remains restricted to the zone of moderate psychedelization, and it displays the limitations of Exotica music and culture. No one is likely to enter Exotica culture with the hope of finding a complete lifestyle, or answers to the more complex questions of life.
The fact that one can create or choose one's reality remains Exotica's most powerful contribution to Psychedelia, but it is not possible to reach this insight by way of Exotica alone; only the confirmation thereof. The initial deconstruction of Western man's various delusions about life and consciousness must be facilitated with a more powerful psychedelic experience than a moderate trip in the realm of Exotica. To achieve this awakening with a minimized risk for adverse reactions, there is a need for mental readiness, for spiritual openness and psychologica l self-insight. There is no contradiction between this more profound occupation and the joyous games of Exotica, but Exotica culture itself offers little guidance in these matters, since its ambition is primarily to entertain. What seems to be in short supply is the tools to make Exotica a complete lifestyle, one that can include the difficult rites of passage as well as the moments of wondrous escape.
9
This brings us to the most important Exotica recording of all; Eden Ahbez' Eden's Island from 1960. Although it differs from the typical Exotica album in several ways, genre fans are happy to embrace it as a key specimen in the fauna, and it towers as a unique and much admired development of the style. Its standing among proto-psychedelic recordings is matched only by Alan Watts' This Is It, and together the two albums present a complete launch pad for the explicitly psychedelic music that succeeded them. Except for their shared West Coast origins, the two albums could not have been more different; where Watts is experimental, iconoclastic and crazed, Ahbez is mature, reflective and inviting. Like so much else in these chapters, the re-discovery of Ahbez was prompted by psychedelicized music researchers in the late 1980s-early 1990s, and in recent decades his legend has grown substantially. As will be shown in a later chapter, Eden Ahbez' life story is intertwined with the emergence of alternative cultures in the USA, and his pioneering album is in that sense only a paragraph in his biography. From the perspective of psychedelic lifestyles it is however of utmost importance, displaying the possibility to merge a deeply felt spirituality with the joyous, playful attitude of Exotica culture. Although Ahbez made his living as a songwriter (most famously with Nat King Cole's great 'Nature Boy'), he was first and foremost a thinker and seeker. The pop culture and easy listening landscape of the 1950s was not crowded with thinkers, and the more ambitious minds to gravitate towards Exotica tended to be formally schooled composers and musicologists, rather than philosophers.
Ahbez had envisioned a spiritual parable that merged the peaceful vagabond life with spiritual fulfillment already in the 1940s, and the hit song 'Nature Boy' was an excerpt from this story. He continued to write songs that combined the simple with the essential in a rare way, but did not release much until he got the chance to do Eden's Island. Exotica music was at the height of its popularity at the time, which may have prompted Ahbez to embark on this project. Across the eleven tracks he invokes the basic elements of the style into a homogenous tropical island blend that forms the perfect soundtrack for his message. The songs have the kind of simplicity that comes from a very pure place, and a common meeting ground for the listener and Ahbez is found on the paradisiacal beach he describes as his home. Again, this is not a teenager's fantasy, but the testimony of an adult wanderer who has lived a life and travelled far. At the same time, there is a child-like purity to the insights that Ahbez' has gathered during his journey and meditations, and in that sense he resembles some of the most revered masters in the Eastern tradition.
I had a little boat
(I called it Life)
Once I went out
And never came back
A later passage from the same 'Gospel Of Nature' poem, omitted from the song but printed on the sleeve, illuminates the short path from naïve seeker manifesto to Buddhist-flavored metaphysics. The transition that Ahbez describes is profoundly psychedelic, recalling Plato's words on how the hallucinogenic kykeon at Eleusis raised one's attention from the forms of the world to the ideas of the eternal:
The storm was over
And the sea was calm
It was strange and wonderful
Like seeing the world
And seeing through the world
Like moving among the objects of the world
As though there were no objects to move among
As though there was no world
As though there was no mover
In retrospect, Eden's Island seems like the logic culmination of the Exotica fantasy, but in actuality there was very little in the genre that pointed towards it. The natural correspondence between Ahbez, a vagabond philosopher who wrote brilliant pop songs, and the musical landscape that Exotica had shaped for itself in the late '50s, is one of those fortunate accidents that highlight the road of Psychedelia. Ahbez was not a natural vocalist and realized this, but through an ingenious combination of instrumental tracks and vocal arrangements, his spiritual stamp is felt in every track on the album. The title song names and outlines the place where the listener meets Ahbez, a place that is a state of mind as much as a South Sea island. While the fantasy atolls in Exotica are usually uninhabited while waiting for their escapist visitors, there is a gentle host to greet us at Eden's Island. A series of superb instrumental Exotica tracks fill in environmental details of birds, the jungle and ocean surf in the classic Martin Denny manner, enforcing the perceived reality of this island. Ahbez returns with a half-spoken reading from his 'Gospel Of Nature' over low-key backing, making his presence and that of his naturist beliefs as vivid as the island where the record is set.
And in the evening
(When the sky is on fire)
Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral
Where all men are brothers
Where all things are bound by law
And crowned with love
Side 2 opens with a couple of lighter pop songs with a calypso tone, providing necessary detail of the carefree day-to-day life on the island, before the mood deepens again towards the end of the record. With no sense of ill will, Eden sends a message to an increasingly confused and cynical future:
And when I told the people in the village
That I went out and never came back
They all laughed
And called me the Wanderer
And I laughed with them
They didn't know
They were the Wanderers
10
Released on a modest West Coast record label, Eden's Island did not become the pioneering milestone it appears as in retrospect, yet the album and Ahbez' semi-legendary personality maintained a presence among like-minded artists of the 1960s. Both Brian Wilson and Donovan sought the company and inspiration of Ahbez while working on some of their most spiritually charged music around 1966-67, and there was a passing of the torch, in a low-key manner. Alas, the link back to the life-embracing escapism of Ahbez' Exotica music, as found in some of Wilson's dreamy 'pocket symphonies' and Donovan's For Little Ones, could not withstand the pressure of the late 1960s with its increasingly aggressive climate and 'heavy' rock music. A decade after the release of his masterpiece, Ahbez' name was slipping into forgetfulness, while the spiritual naturism he had long sought to teach was, ironically enough, becoming an ideal to many young Westerners.
Eden Ahbez had made several disciples along the way, and among them singer Herb Jeffries commands special attention to psychedelicists. As 'Nature Boy' became a standard for solo vocalists during the 1950s, the spiritually inclined Jeffries learned that this song was part of a side-long suite Ahbez had written but not recorded. Around 1956 Jeffries, who was a vocalist in the classic grand production style, arranged and recorded the entire Nature Boy Suite as one half of a privately financed album, released as The Singing Prophet on his own Olympic label. Found in its entirety only on Jeffries' obscure album, Nature Boy Suite was Ahbez' first lifestyle composition, before he embarked on Eden's Island, and the two works complement and illuminate one another. A spoken prolog by Jeffries, supported by dramatic orchestration, introduces themes familiar from Eden's Island: the eternal sea as a symbol for the universe, the wandering seeker, and the peaceful revelation found in Innerspace. A powerful version of 'Nature Boy' follows, quite different from Nat King Cole's melodic subtlety, and the suite unfolds in a similar shift between spoken narration and big band vocal arrangements. Jeffries' deep baritone, reflecting a complete immersion in Ahbez' spiritual message, is balanced by a few playful, up-tempo passages. The cosmology here is arguably less Buddhist and more Swedenborgian, unless one sees it as a mere question of semantics:
Love is the law of life
And love must grow
From personal love
Into universal love
And from universal love
Into eternal love
As on Eden's Island, key statements like this are reserved for the spoken passages to ensure that their exact contents come across, while the song lyrics are somewhat more conventional. An elega nt balance between presentation and message is thus achieved. Beyond similarities, there is a significant thematic distance between the Nature Boy Suite and Eden's Island, in the sense that Eden had not yet found his island, or any similar foothold for his philosophy. Instead the protagonist appears more adrift on the 'sea of eternity', and he describes his life in a past tense, asking the listener to 'remember me'. So while a loving naturist spirituality is common to both suites, the years that passed between them seem to cause an anchoring of Ahbez' philosophy into a specific location, making the latter work less abstract and more mature. Of course, Ahbez may have been further inspired to set his song cycle on a metaphorical island by the current Exotica trend.
The Singing Prophet cannot be called Exotica in any established sense of the word, yet listeners of a lysergic mindset may find its musical presentation to be proto-psychedelic in other ways. Herb Jeffries' approach to the production of the suite was radically different from what Ahbez would do on Eden's Island. Rather than mellow and reflective, Jeffries is extravagant and expansive, landing somewhere between a Gershwin musical and classic Hollywood movie scores. Supported by a rich, dramatic orchestration he pours his full vocal resources into the songs in a way that modern listeners might consider 'overblown'. And still, the sincere message of spiritual love, and the unquestionable commitment of both Jeffries and Ahbez, makes modern-day cynicism ring puerile and pointless. In addition to salvaging a vital Eden Ahbez work otherwise lost, Jeffries' recording takes on a multilayered complexity which psychedelicists tend to enjoy, perhaps because it matches the myriad of contradictions that drugs like LSD reveal, from profound issues of identity to the perception of an individual color.10
In Herb Jeffries case such a complexity is hardly deliberate, but the outcome of the marriage of two elements which modern perspectives insist to be incompatible; an extravagant presentation of a sincere spiritual message. The proto-psychedelic qualities inherent in Ahbez' spiritual quest take on an unexpectedly surreal dimension due to Jeffries' taste for grand orchestrations. None of this applies to Eden's Island, which is instead marked by a total stylistic coherence. The two works offer food for thought in the matter of psychedelic aesthetics, in addition to their dire ct attraction upon the listener. Another work on the fringe of Exotica worth considering along these lines is the aforementioned Ports Of Paradise by Alfred Newman, which resembles and even transcends The Singing Prophet in its grandeur of presentation, reflecting Newman's background in movie soundtrack composition. Despite its typical genre packaging and titles like 'The Enchanted Sea' it marks the yonder shore of Exotica, far from the intimate, nocturnal jazz combo style of Martin Denny. For that reason it is not favored by some genre specialists, who also find Les Baxter's more generous soundscapes too rich for comfort. However, the overwhelming splendor in Newman's presentation of simple island life may attract psychedelic listeners, entertained by the stylistic incongruity while admiring the lavish orchestrations and chorals. In a sense this late (1961) work closes a showbiz cycle of exotic escapism that had begun with the South Pacific musical in 1948.
A curious case on the Exotica fringe that has attracted modern cult admiration is that of Paul Page. A former model and TV show host, Page carried on a life-long love affair with Pacific Rim cultures, and touted Polynesian lifestyles – although he had never been there – even before tiki culture came into vogue. Page released several LPs of which the most popular, The Reef Is Calling (c1960), resembles Eden's Island in certain aspects. Like Eden Ahbez, Page was a songwriter and performer who couldn't sing, and he solved this problem in a way very much like Ahbez, mixing half- spoken parables with Exotica instrumentals and occasional female choruses. Paul Page was no vagabond seeker into the mysteries of eternal love however, but rather a nightclub Playboy who on occasion pretended to be a weather-bitten sea captain. His albums mix deep sea tall-tales with starry-eyed poems about the magic of the Pacific Ocean, all of it held together by a band of top-flight Hawaii musicians. The mix of disparate but equally dated elements make for a distinctively transporting experience, although it may be for seasoned students of proto-psychedelic Exotica only, as the destination of this journey is not a paradisiacal beach in the South Seas, but rather a half- empty tiki bar in Santa Monica. Paul Page was sincere about his love of the islands, and ultimately relocated to Hawaii where he continued to tend bar and record albums, including a tribute to Blanding, the great island poet.
Two period albums with an unquestionable relevance to the psychedelic quest remain to be dealt with, even if they don't have much in common.11 Exotic Dreams (1959) was the debut album from Japanese-Hawaiian vocalist Ethel Azama, and is one of relatively few Exotica albums to feature vocals through-out. Arranged by Martin Denny associate Paul Conrad, about half the LP plays like a Denny or Arthur Lyman-style combo backing a Far East vocalist on standards like 'Harbor Lights'. Agreeable as that is, the real trip lies in the album's middle third, where Ms. Azama & co on several tracks crystallize an alien, psychedelic sound that seems a blueprint for the late '60 s acid queen flavors of Grace Slick or Linda Perhacs. Azama's Pacific Rim accent and icy vocal style combine with haunting oriental melodies and esoteric instrumentation to create music that isn't exotic as much as otherworldly. As most vintage albums in the genre, it's an excellent production which contributes to its timeless quality. Disowned by some Exotica purists, and by no means a master-piece like Eden's Island, parts of Exotic Dreams work as a female proto-psych complement to Eden Ahbez' more famous work.
