My first book

Pleased to announce my first book. It's not music related but is about my time living in Cambodia. It's a Kindle book, so cheap as chips. If you read it and enjoy it let me know, or better still put a positive review on Amazon. 

http://www.amazon.com/Cambodia-Orphan-Tourism-Me-ebook/dp/B00CR0N1JI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1369993205&sr=1-1&keywords=ron+hawkins

Also if you enjoy any of the posts on the blog, comment, it gets lonely in the webernet.

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Bikini in Vietnam

So this week I am going to feature another 45 that I found in the dusty, dirty Ho Chi Minh City antique store. 

Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini is one of those songs, like Girl From Ipanema, that  we all know and probably wish that we didn’t. First recorded by Brian Hyland  it was a US number one hit in August, 1960, and made the top 10 in other countries, including number 8 in the UK and number 2 in Australia.

1960 was a year for novelty songs with Running Bear, Alley-Oop and Mr Custer also becoming number one hits. It says a lot about me that I can sing all of them for you...

Bryan Hyland himself had a number of minor hits and two other major Top 10 hits, Sealed With a Kiss in 1962 (number 3) and Gypsy Woman in 1970 (number 3, also), no I don’t know it either and frankly can’t even be bothered Googling it. (OK, I just listened on YouTube, don’t bother, it's awful). 

There have been many, many versions of IBTWYPB and it has been sung in French (by Dalida), German, Portuguese, Bulgarian (!), Spanish, Finnish and Greek. Our version is Vietnamese. 
Unfortunately the Vietnamese 45s I found have had hard lives and are a bit rough. They are also mainly traditional Vietnamese music which frankly can be a bit boring, especially as most of the songs last well over five minutes.

What’s interesting is that most of the songs start off with a Western melody, as with IBTWYPB and then will go into an extended traditional direction as you’ll hear, I’ve cut it it off early for your sanity, but included a little of the traditional section so you can get the drift. Listen for the fellow playing the stringed instrument, he gets some impressive runs going. Many of the tracks also have extended talking bits, comedy I guess.

Now I asked my good Vietnamese friend, Khanh, to tell me what they are saying in this song because I can’t imagine that they’d be singing about a bikini (people in Vietnam still go into the water at the beach fully clothed!). So Khanh tells me that:

This song is talking about a man inviting his friend to go to drink beer, but his friend is busy, he can’t go to drink beer, he has to go with girls (it means "prostitute"). That's all.

So there we have it, the girl in the teeny weeny bikini has morphed into something less innocent.

When the North Vietnamese Army came through Saigon these records were seen as being anti-revolutionary, in fact it is still illegal to own them, but I doubt that the Party cares too much about them now. People destroyed their records or hid them, or buried them, which explains their filthy condition. People would also tear the labels off so that the record couldn’t be identified. 

One thing I like about Vietnamese 45s is that they are often in coloured vinyl. They are also a little larger in size, maybe to accommodate their extended length and maintain quality, they don’t fit into standard sleeves.

Bang Bang Bulgaria

This time around I am giving you a Bulgarian version of Bang Bang by the Mapraputa Paguhcka. 

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), to give it its full title, was of course made famous by Cher and made #2 on the US charts and #3 on the UK charts in 1966. It was written by the seriously under-rated Sonny Bono.

Unfortunately for Cher it is the version by the wonderful Nancy Sinatra, also recorded in 1966, that has become the definitive one. Many years later it went on to trump Cher when it was used over the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003). 

Full of drama, it is a song that has had many, many versions. There are contemporary Turkish, French, Mandarin, Romanian and Portuguese covers (even the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band took a stab at it!). The song continues to be popular and has recently been covered by many English speaking bands and performers as well as recent Vietnamese, Italian and Greek versions.

I found our Bulgarian version in a very dusty, dirty Ho Chi Minh City antique store. These stores are usually cramped, hot and full of rubbish, often the ‘antiques’ are counterfeit, such as the genuine zippo lighters from the war. On entering there was nothing much of interest, but in back where the store owner was eating his lunch was a huge pile of 45s, thrown together in no order. Not only Vietnamese ones, but French, Czech, Japanese, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Singaporean, American. Many of the Eastern European ones, would have been left by the USSR ‘consultants’ who were in Vietnam until the end of the Cold War.

As with our last entry’s star Siti Salmah I found pretty much nothing about Mapraputa Paguhcka, so she is another person we are pulling from obscurity. The song was released on an EP on the Balkanton label which was owned and operated by the Bulgarian government. Interestingly for us record nerds this particular EP runs at 33 rpm, which is uncommon. 

 

On the cover Mapraputa is looking very Puppet On A String. 

I found out from a Bulgarian site dedicated to Bulgarian rock and pop that this EP was released in 1970, 43 years ago. It has travelled from Bulgaria to Saigon, survived an invasion and now rests in its old age in Australia.

It’s a rollicking version, sort of variety show, I imagine dancers in diaphanous flowing outfits grooving behind Mapraputa as she belts it out. I like the sexy ‘yeahs’ she gives us and they have put in an unexpected bridge section which ends with ‘hey, hey, hey’.  In this reworking Mapraputa has completely lost the spirit of the number. Nevertheless, it has its own gormless charm and at a little over two minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome. 

In searching for information I discovered that this version of the song has been sampled on a mix called Bulgarian Funk First by a couple of Dutch DJs Adrennalin & Frank the Tank. You can download a whole bunch of free music from their site, but alas they had no information about Mapraputa either. In fact their site seems frozen in time with no updates for a while, here is the link: 

http://www.schallplattenpolizei.nl/mixes/bulgarian-funk-first/ 

In contrast to what we are led to believe there was actually quite a lot of rock and pop music produced in Eastern Europe and a lot of bands toured (the Rolling Stones performed in Poland in 1967, Howlin’ Wolf performed in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1964!).

Enjoy. Next time we’ll visit the girl with the Teeny Polka Dot Bikini – she’s in Vietnam.

First stop: Malaysia

Sounds off the Map is a blog dedicated to music I have collected in the United States, around Australia and across South East Asia; mainly 45s, LPs become a bit difficult to cart about. 

The blog is not about ‘outsider’ music or ‘incredibly strange’ music, pretty much everything included will be mainstream within its own culture. It will be music that I think is just plain good, interesting or maybe even 'funny' to Western ears – look forward to a Cantonese version of Delilah.

Every couple of weeks I’ll post an mp3 of a lost song, provide scans and any additional information I can find out about those involved in the record. I especially like interpretations of western songs – but we won’t be limited to that. 

I am not an ethnomusicologist, much of the music I present and like will be commercial and released prior to 1975. So there’ll be no Vietnamese Death Metal (but it does exist), or purely traditional music. 

I’m limiting the blog to 45s and the time period when 45s were the way music was transported around the world – a time of no Internet downloads, no music video, no CDs, no mammoth world tours and follow-up DVD, just vinyl.

The 45 was a sort of talisman from another world, very little but the music was attached to it, maybe just a picture sleeve. From the music they heard, people then created their own versions through the lens of their culture and created their own little talismans, some of which have ended up with me.

In listening to this music and hunting it out, what I have learnt is that we can talk about genres, we can classify, we can sort and become experts in our field of ‘like’. However if we keep our ears open, the root function of music - to communicate an emotion and human experience will always grab us if the music is good and we wish to hear it. Genre fades away and there is just music. 

Now to our first entry Siti Salmah’s Pura Pura released on the Gunung Tahan label (Gunung Tahan is a mountain in west Malaysia). I found this in box in a market in Kuala Lumpur. The stallholder was very genial older fellow and was able to help out with what was on the 45s, steering me away from the strictly folk ones. 

As I worked through the box of 45s a Singaporean man arrived, obviously a friend of the stallholder, they began to reminisce about the records, telling me:

You are getting some memories here with these.

Could this scene be played out with MP3s? 

The stall holder was asking 45 Malaysian Ringgit for this particular memory, about $14 Australian dollars, I think I got him pretty quickly down to 20 Ringgit (about $6).The way Siti looks at us with those bright wide eyes and Mona Lisa like smile, I couldn't leave her there.

A strong sixties girl pop song, Pura Pura, sung in Malay, is held up by that solid pillar of a riff from the Kinks – You Really Got Me – played on an urgent organ. The song moves along and a big surprise is a neat little fuzz tone guitar solo. 



According to Google translate ‘pura pura’ in Malay means ‘hypocrisy’. 

I've found out very little about Siti Salmah. It appears that this song is probably from 1969-70 and is included on an EP with three other good but not exceptional songs. She did release another EP in 1970, which I’d grab if I saw it (but that’s me). 

A fellow has put another song up on YouTube, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__s68m-j02g

which includes a number of vintage pictures, but it appears that Siti Salmah is obscure even in Malaysia. Her backing band are The Colours who seemed to be a tight bunch of musos, but no information on them either.

Next time we’ll be bouncing over to Bulgaria, via Saigon, with a cover of Bang Bang.

Siti Salmah