Good Year for the Weirdos
Otis Fodder's 365 Days project
Four-year-old children squeal gospel numbers to the thrumming of ancestral Hammond organs. Minor celebrities spin harrowing yarns of the dangers of drugs. ('He opened the door. Smoke!' Instrumental stab. 'Smoke! Everywhere was smoke! Everybody was smoking marijuana. Marijuana cigarette.') A preacher slowly explains, and then sings, that our table food is not Jesus, as part of the multiple-disc Religion for Retarded instruction course. Georgina Dobson, 71, sends us 'The Message': a pensioner's London walks, rapped. Someone sings about blue. Andy Williams does Japanese; the US Air Force does Easy Listening; Van Morrison does as little as he can to fulfil his contractual obligations; William Shatner does what he has always done (this time, to Elton John's 'Rocket Man'). The remit of 365 Days is, to be sure, a large one.
Otis Fodder, the site's creator, tells us no more than that his selections, posted daily until the end of this year, will be 'obscure', and of interest to listeners of '"outsider" music'; most of them are curated by others. Many 'outsiders' do contribute their idiosyncratic visions (see above. In fact, see the site); but the group is celebrated as much as the individual. Rose Hill Junior High School Jazz Ensemble turn the Beatles' 'Lady Madonna' into a live improvisation of marathon inclusiveness. In an effort to sell air-conditioning, Chromalox create a lengthy song-cycle to evoke the Eight Seasons of Chromalox and assert somehow that air-con breathes in harmony with nature; General Electric's Silicone Products Division gives us Got To Investigate Silicones, a well-produced musical about sand.
Yet almost everything has its own peculiar musical merit. Musical innovator Nicholas Slonimsky's selections are delights, in particular the mercurial 'Castoria': the text of an advert for children's laxative is invested with a rollercoaster of emotion, from anguish (constipation) to triumph (when it at last 'opens the bowels'). Jeri Kelly's indescribable voice, half Southern munchkin and half air-horn, makes 'Poor Ole Santa Claus' an underground festive classic. Even the selections from Christian musicals are catchy. Ronald K. Wells' I Wonder heralds the entrance of its atheistic villain ('Church? Bible?'), with a melody fit to seduce the most devout Sunday-schooler; 'Natural High' rocks out in high style.
What 365 Days is not is a collection of insincere novelties. Glimpsed through the cracks and crackles exorcised from chart records' studio polish, each track contains the ghost of its story: the family singalongs of a 1957 Christmas, the song-poem band setting their commissioned lyrics to music at a rate of twelve songs per hour. What we find at first hilariously misguided reveals an internal logic that becomes clearer on each play. To listen to 365 Days is to be shown around humankind's bewildering variety of mindsets - corporate, scholarly, fundamentalist, cultist, politico, obsessive, acid-fried, plain insane - in the medium of their fullest expression. We may not be converted by these eccentric creations, but we can't dismiss the dedication which created them.