There is a wonderful book to be written about the life of Jerry Lordan. He was an RAF radar operator, a stand up, he was in advertising, and eventually wrote a handful of songs that would become hits on the early 1960s UK pop charts.
One, Apache — one of those wonderful surf-spaghetti western instrumentals that were popular in the early 1960s — was initially sold to Burt Weedon, though Lordan hated his version. Indeed, compared to what followed, it seems hopeless plodding and pesdetrian.
The Shadows were the first to make it a hit, and their version is much closer to what Lordan wanted — it’s subtle but driving, and plays with the dynamics of the composition, raising and lowering the intensity as befits the cinema of the piece (Apache was inspired by Robert Aldrich‘s whitewashed 1953 film of the same name).
In the years following The Shadows UK chart-topper, the song became something of a guitar group standard, with The Ventures and Jorgen Ingmann putting out successful versions.
As writer and critic Michaelangelo Matos points out, Apache relies on layers upon layers of inauthenticity — an English ad man writing a theme tune inspired by a Western that has Burt Lancaster playing a Native American. Matos describes Ingmann’s version as taking “something that was already sourced in the ersatz” and adding “a sonic patina of ‘exotica’, turning a simulacrum of a simulacrum into a Moebius loop of third-hand representation”.
There is no reason such hokey, faintly problematic kitsch should survive the decade that spawned it.
And yet, Apache has two lives, and both are the product of a certain post-war optimism and opportunism. Just as Lordan was a hustler who tried his hand at various money-making schemes before turning to show biz, Michael Viner was no artist.
Viner had been a political operator during the 1960s, before joining MGM. He specialised in cheap novelty records — The Best of Macrel Marceau, 19 minutes of silence bookended by applause being the most transparently useless and the funniest.
In 1972, with the intention of recording a soundtrack for scifi B-movie The Thing with Two Heads, Viner threw together The Incredible Bongo Band.
A project more than a band, it was cobbled together during MGM recording facilities down-time, using whichever studio musicians happened to be around — allegedly including uncredited stars like John Lennon and Glen Campbell. They ended up putting two albums out.
It’s worth listening to their 1973 version of Apache — never released as a single — with fresh ears. Those thunderous echoing drums, that storm cloud of horns, that bright metallic guitar, that fizzing organ. It still thumps you in the stomach, to this day.
The Incredible Bongo Band had a couple of minor hits, presumably made their money back, and would now be long forgotten were it not for a Jamaican American funk fan called Clive Campbell.
At street parties and break-dancing competitions in the mid-to-late 1970s — by which point Lordan was acting in British comedy-porn films — in the Bronx, Campbell was performing as DJ Kool Herc, perfecting a technique that would eventually become the fundamental building block of hip hop.
Herc pioneered “the merry go round”, in which he would extend the percussive soloing in a song — the break — by playing two copies of the same record, syncing them so their breaks would flow into one another and cutting between the two seamlessly.
There was (and still is) no snobbery in this bricolage. A record could be by a funk legend like James Brown, or a quickie cash-in like The Incredible Bongo Band, an obscure English rock group like Babe Ruth, or even a misbehaving proto-boy band like The Turtles; if it had a stretch of unaccompanied drums that sounded good, it was welcome at the party.
Pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaata both adored Herc. They took the merry go round, augmented it with 808s and synths, and created the first masterpieces of recorded hip hop.
From there, the fixation on breaks was woven into hip hop’s DNA.
The Sugarhill Gang, has-beens two years after Rapper’s Delight gave them rap’s first hit single, put out Apache (Jump On It). A hit in Europe that, like most of their work, makes up for lack of substance with an abundance of fun.
The same year it featured in the party masterpiece The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel.
And from then on, it resurfaces, repurposed and fresh as ever in every generation of rap — Nas, The Roots, Logic and literally hundreds more.
Of course, the question right now is — what the actual fuck is the point of any of this? In the teeth of a global pandemic, and the countless other ways in which humanity feels at a frontier from which it can never return, what good does music writing do anyone?
I’m not sure I know. The best I can do is say music pins together layer upon layer of human experience — personal, political, historical — like a toothpick through a sandwich.
It’s why I’m slightly obsessed with samples and sampling. I love the acknowledgement it implies; that even the cheapest trash might possess a quality that, due to a combination of factors, is utterly arresting, completely unrepeatable.
I love that, far from vulgar theft, there’s a generosity in a lot of sampling, a need for the audience to hear the same thrill, the same beauty the sampler hears. And it places the song in a historical setting, explicitly the product of years of evolution and innovation from other artists.
Eight seconds of unaccompanied drums in 1973 can at once take you back to the second world war, and shoot you forward 50 years, several generations into a genre that was years from being born.
Or maybe (to self plagiarise a little) through it’s unrepeatable quality, its odd kismet — like the peculiar crackle of your particular copy of a record, a voice inadvertently cracking, the gentle wheeze of fingers running along guitar strings — it just barrels directly from your ears to the hairs on your arm.
And the artists and grifters and jobbing session hacks who unknowingly take their place in chains of events that alter what’s possible in music give me hope.
As Australia’s already poorly supported arts sector struggles with event after event being cancelled — not to mention the affect this has Australia’s largely ignored critical community — it seems all the more important to focus on what this stuff means.
When we come out on the other side of the storm — however long it last, whatever damage it does — we will need it.
Dancing to Architecture 