*by Steve Aydt*

"Baxter starts it on marimba and with a shout for Chico Guerrero to move in on torrid timbales Then comes Chino Pozo with his boisterous bongos. A booming congo drum slapped solidly by Cuban Domingo Dariea joins in. Chico's tinging cymbal is heard above the cacophony as Aime Vereicke and Oswaldo (El Gringo) Oliveira come in with additional drum effects. Result: mad, mad track." So go the liner notes for Les Baxter's Teen Drums, a demented, crew-cut take on a Beat-hood too weird to have existed in North Beach. Baxter is the thinking man's musical revisionist. He pushes Polynesian culture, the Aztecs, Beatniks, Voodoo mysteries, and even Lovecraftian cosmic horror (soundtrack to The Dunwich Horror) through the silly straw of a long-lost bachelor pad age when unlikely fertility rites appeased Tiki gods. In the beginning, there was Les Baxter and it must be remembered that it was Baxter's "Quiet Village" that Martin Denny interpreted. But if Baxter was the God of Bachelor Pad Jazz, then Martin Denny was its Prophet. Let those who have ears dig these utterly nutty riffs.

With inspired hot chunks of wax like Jungle Jazz, Tamboo!, The Primitive and The Passionate, and Skins !, Baxter and his ensemble hooted, beat, blew, and chanted their way into the dawn of a lost age of musical history. Every repressed white bachelor of the late '50s and early '60s had the heart of a primitive savage and the predatory instincts of a jungle cat. And it was Martin Denny who transformed every bachelor's apartment into a Hi-Fi paradise. Just check out any Exotica album or the extraordinarily weird Afro-Desia. Some of Denny's later work veers disappointingly close to piano bar schmaltz, with less emphasis on the bird calls and other elements which make albums like Quiet Village so vividly dense. Fortunately a Rhino CD exists which unearths a choice selection of cuts along with an informative booklet.

Along with Perez Prado, Baxter and Denny created an unquenchable desire for novelty jazz featuring weird sound effects, Latin rhythms, primitive percussion, rabid stereo effects, and even futuristic Easy Listening complete with Moogs, theramins, and obnoxious amounts of echo-box gee whizzery. No one capitalized on these trends better than Enoch Light and Command Records. Rummage through thrift store bins until your fingers bleed with the stigmata of idiocy; in a genre which can be more miss than hit, the Command label seldom fails. Enoch Light knew what people wanted: completely over-the-top arrangements, obnoxious amounts of percussion, cartoon sound effects, stupid stereo gimmicks, and speed, Daddy-O. Light's "Anything you can do, I can do better, faster, louder, and weirder" philosophy resulted in some of the freakiest oddities ever committed to LP. Old standards became unrecognizable experiments in terror. And the already weird Bachelor Pad Jazz was transmogrified in a Bedlam of audio alchemy into dangerous, adrenaline-ridden brouhaha.

Meanwhile, in the evil laboratories of RCA, mad geniuses worked with devilish intensity on the unbelievable Stereo Action Series, a forum in which artists allowed their music to be squeezed and mutated. Forget the fucked-up Beatles, who are nothing more than pathetic Liverpool hacks compared to Movin' and Groovin' by The Three Suns or Dynamica by Ray Martin. Also, Bernie Green's Futura gave listeners a glimpse of what Bachelor Pad Jazz would sound like in the future (i.e. the 1970s): the audio equivalent of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. But it was Richard Hayman who gave us the most brilliant example of the music of the future- a 6 minute electronic sitar and synth version of "Goin' Out of My Head."

In this endless well of sound it is impossible to hit all of the greats: Tony Mottola, Esquivel, Dick Hyman, Dick Schory, Henri Rene, Leo Addeo, Bert Kaempfert, Billy May, the Surfmen, etc. Much of the fun lies in exploring the endless varieties of obscurities and spin-offs generated by this trend. But no assessment, to my mind, would be complete without a nod to Edmundo Ros. Ros is the Latin music ubermensch, the avatar of Mambo. Ros makes a splash in both instrumentals and decidedly peculiar vocal choices. To hear Ros sing "Hare Krishna" from the musical Hair is to explode with amazed delight. His "Thank You Very Much" will frighten and nauseate your guests while you leap with glee. Who else would have the balls to record Mambo versions of "The National Emblem March", "Deep In The Heart of Texas," and "The Blue Danube"? And his egomaniacal "El Mundo de Edmundo" could well be what next generation's self-styled Satanists will listen to instead of Death Metal. Fuck yeah, Edmundo rules !

Audio Anarchists rise up ! Quit throwing down fifteen bucks a pop for some suck-ass band when you can get fifteen of these incredible albums for the same money and no one in the goddamned music industry stands to benefit from your purchase. There was never anything like it before and there will never be anything like it again. It is truly the only soundtrack for the end times.