Julius Wechter and The Baja Marimba Band - Fowl Play

The late '60s were an awesome time for so many reasons - not least among them was the music. Music was exploding and splintering into a million (okay, maybe a dozen) different directions and the generation gap was widening, and if you were over 30 you weren't to be trusted. There was no middle ground.

Maybe not, but there was middle of the road.

For a brief period of time up to the late '60s there was this strange no man's land, where popular artists had their songs filtered through the lens of other artists who were considered safe for consumption and that somehow made it palatable to an older generation who wanted to be hip to what the kids were down with, but who couldn't stand what the kids were actually listening to.

This is what I believe at any rate. How else to do explain this type of stuff. It's too easy to blame Herb Albert and Jerry Moss who founded A&M and unleashed The Tijuana Brass in 1962 with a range of originals and homogenized versions of popular songs. If Jackie Gleason had been more on the ball he could have done this with strings instead of a trumpet - or in the case of Julius Wechter, a marimba.

Regardless, I should probably at least stay at least somewhat on point and write about what I know, instead of trying to make up a load of nonsense I have no actual point of reference for. Seriously I was five years old when this album came out and I'm pretty sure most of my thoughts and ambitions at the time were about eating, making it to the toilet and what time was The Rocky and Bullwinkle show on ... yes that I do remember, along with Gumby and Pokey.

My musical tastes were not sophisticated. The only albums I listened to were kids records, of which I had two, and one I still have: Vivien Leigh in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. Yeah, it was enthralling, it's an undated record but my earliest memories of lying on the floor in front of the old stereo console were to this album.

Suffice to say that along with "Old MacDonald" she was the shit. Even if she didn't sing.

Anyways, the point I was eventually getting to has now eluded me, and if I was to do the honourable thing, I'd go back and edit this down and remove all of this meanderambling nonsense. If you're reading this I'm going to go out on a limb and state the obvious ... I didn't do the honourable thing.

So let's get back to Mr. Wechter and his Baja Marimba Band. Fowl Play was the band's sixth album since their debut in 1964, and by 1971 they'd cranked out ten albums for A&M. Pretty impressive. Now the music is actually what I was hoping for and the songs were played straight, but there was a wink and nod as well as a bit of a mischievous" streak to the band's original songs. There were only two on this album, the opening track, "Fowl Play" and "Baja Humbug" which were actually a lot of fun. Of the eleven songs here only two songs are in the three minute range. One slighty over, the other slightly under. Otherwise it was two minutes, two and a half tops and they were done.

The covers on this one were pretty interesting, from "Windy" to "Fiddler on the Roof" and an oddly moving version of the Beatles "She's Leaving Home" and "The Look of Love" from Casino Royale were all pretty fun ... I'm hesitant to say good, but it's weirdly nostalgic as well. This is what used to pass for adult contemporary and easy listening ... I wonder what they'd have made of Kenny G?

As an added bit of trivia, I learned that it was Julius Wechter who wrote "Spanish Flea" for Herb Alpert.

Ah, the sixties.