Welcome to the GARQ #5, which I type as I listen to the insane laughter and whoops and scoops from Alan Watts’s This is IT, perhaps the first psychedelic recording, from 1962. But this isn’t about psychedelia, per se, or at least the pharmacological kind (though Watts did see some use to that brand of experience, too), but rather about not making sense in interesting ways, in spontaneous and unfiltered performances that tap into IT, as the album’s back cover explains, quoting from Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology (1962):
“If our sanity is to be strong and flexible, there must be periods for the expression of completely spontaneous movement–for dancing, singing, howling, babbling, jumping, groaning, wailing–in short for following any motion to which the organism as a whole seems to be inclined… The function of intervals for nonsense is not merely as an outlet for pent-up emotion or unused psychic energy, but to set in motion a mode of spontaneous action, which, though first appearing as nonsense, can eventually express itself in intelligible forms.”
The album, with Alan Watts, Roger Somers, Leah Ananda, Joel Andrews, Henry Jacobs, and William Loughborough, has seven tracks of chanting, gibberish, semi-spiritual susurrations, and a coherence that belies its claim of IT-ness, or at least that makes it an interesting listen. If you’re hearing pre-echoes of something like Frank Zappa’s “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” off of Freak Out (1967), or Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (1969), you clearly have two ears.
And for our bit of book this time, let me bring to the fore the rare book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda (1958), written by Doris Sanders and illustrated by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), who was well-known for the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). It’s a testament to their brief relationship–and it contains a set of one-liners that mix creature with rhyming accoutrement. The effect is always silly–but the connections can be so tenuous and incongruent, yet made apt by the illustration, that they approach nonsense. This is also that rare example of nonsense written by women.
Lastly, a small tribute to a nonsense numen, Stanley Unwin (1911-2002). Unwin is the master of improvisational nonsense speech performance, as witnessed in his unending performances on the comedy stage, in film, and music. His was the narrative voice in the seminal Small Faces album, Ogden’s Nut-Gone Flake (1968) and he played the Chancellor of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), among many other film roles in the 1950s and 60s that exercised his faux-academic leciturnage. His improvisatory nonsense style became known as “Unwinese.” Here is a talk on the intricacies of atomic energy. You’ll find more in the Anthology.
Cheerybunkbye for the endagiphone of this, our fifthian instickstallminimint. Check out more on: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE