Dogbowl

While the roots of psychedelic pop are undoubtedly firmly planted in the culture of the Sixties, with bands such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Zombies, the very earliest Pink Floyd and Love leading the charge, there's no doubt that some of the most magical moments in this offshoot of the pop family were released in the decades that followed. In the Eighties, when the psychedelic revival hit one of its peaks (think, for instance, of the Paisley Underground movement), those sounds balanced between lysergic visions and melodic rapture also began to tickle the imagination of Stephen Tunney, a musician from the Bronx (born there in 1959) who, under the stage name Dogbowl, recorded "Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain", a masterpiece of surreal psychedelic pop that saw the light of day during the now-legendary year of 1991.

You hit me over my head

When I lay my eyes on you

Tunney had received his musical baptism at the age of four, when his parents took him to the drive-in to see "A Hard Day's Night", the first film starring the Beatles. Another band that greatly struck his imagination were the Monkees, because, in his own words, "they had a way of presenting music that also leaned on visual impact, following the lesson taught by the Marx Brothers, who used comic depictions of music-making as key parts of their films (Harpo and the harp, Chico and the piano, Groucho as singer – as far as I'm concerned, the Marx Brothers were true punk rockers!)." After trying, without much enthusiasm, to play trumpet, Tunney switched to guitar, the instrument with which he would begin putting down his first musical ideas.

In 1977, after reading an article about Johnny Rotten, he listened to the "Never Mind The Bollocks" by the Sex Pistols and recognized in it, he said, "the sound of revolution." So he started playing in a punk band, fumbling through the mandatory three chords in an attempt to write his first songs, built "on simple chord progressions." He didn't exactly manage to come up with anything memorable, so at a certain point he let it go and looked elsewhere. In 1986, after choosing the nom de guerre Dogbowl ("It all happened by chance. I was assigning ridiculous names to the members of one of my early bands, and one of the musicians asked me: 'Okay, so what's going to be your ridiculous name?' I remember there was a dog bowl [dogbowl] on the rehearsal room floor, so I said: 'Dogbowl, my name will be Dogbowl!' For better or worse, it stuck. People remembered that name, because Stephen Tunney wasn't exactly easy to remember")... having chosen the nom de guerre Dogbowl, then, Tunney joined, as guitarist, the first lineup of King Missile (the one whose name still had "Dog Fly Religion" in parentheses), contributing to "Fluting On The Hump" (1987) and "They" (1988), records released on Shimmy-Disc capable of synthesizing, with a surreal touch, needless to say, indie-rock, anti-folk, psychedelia, garage-rock and more.

Once that adventure was over, Tunney stayed on good terms with Shimmy-Disc owner Kramer (born Stephen Michael Bonner), another great outsider of psychedelic experimentation, who also ran the Noise New York recording studio. Backed by the brilliant producer, our man made his solo debut with "Tit! (An Opera)" (1989), a concentrate of oblique psychedelic pop that seemed to arrive from some distant planet whose inhabitants spend all day listening to Syd Barrett, Frank Zappa, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, They Might Be Giants, Kevin Ayers and Julian Cope. It was, in short, already an excellent work, but the real masterstroke would come two years later with the psych-pop carousel of "Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain", whose title referred, among other things, to the mythological figure of the Cyclops: "I've always liked it when Greek mythology collides with pop culture, and I've always loved the character of the Cyclops, as a kind of clumsy and terrifying figure. I've always been a huge fan of both Jules Verne's Nautilus and the Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine,' and I like the idea of unpacking a similar theme across a record. But it's also fun to give a record a long, absurd title."

Also influencing the surreal stories sung by Tunney, often populated by monsters that, when all is said and done, are anything but scary, was the work of Raymond Frederick Harryhausen (1920-2013), who in the late Fifties had applied the stop-motion technique to live-action, after starting out, as a young man, making shorts using dinosaur puppets he built himself. As the great English director Terry Gilliam recalled: "What we do today with the help of computers, Ray was doing much earlier digitally and without computers, using only his fingers." Harryhausen's visions and creations were fundamental to the scenarios evoked by Tunney on "Cyclops...": "As a child I was always fascinated by the hyperrealistic results of stop-motion animation, particularly by the cyclopes in 'The 7th Voyage of Sinbad' [a film directed in 1958 by Nathan Juran]. Those particular cyclops figures seemed to me the most effective representation of the Freudian Id, meaning they acted completely without regard for society or human interaction. They were fiercely determined, since they had only one eye... they were wild creatures and yet they knew how to grab a person and cage them, then cook them whenever they felt like it. They were terribly frightening and, at the same time, very intriguing. I think it was also the jerky movements of stop-motion animation that gave a hyperrealistic quality to the scenes with those one-eyed beasts, and I think that's a fascinating quality of all of Ray Harryhausen's work: the animations themselves weren't perfect, yet they were incredibly interesting to watch, as if, through the imperfect movement of stop-motion, they created an alternative visual reality, which interested me a great deal. I think that was one of the main reasons I titled the record 'Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain'... because the nautical nature of a submarine and the steampunk qualities of a mad cyclops made for a really beautiful combination."

Compared to the debut, Tunney shuffled a few pieces around on his band's chessboard: "For 'Tit! (An Opera)', I put together a group of musicians and then we started working on new songs. I knew my second record had to have a grand, almost mythological scope, and I think the songs, in the order they're in, convey that idea. We brought in Race Age, a wonderful drummer ('Tit' had no drums! Some drum machine, but no actual drums), while Lee Ming Tah switched from lap steel guitar to bass. With a real drummer, the sound expanded substantially. I knew it had to be colorful, and with the collaboration of my brother Chris [clarinet, sax, organ and vocals] and Michael J. Schumacher on guitar, I was sure these different sonic points of view would either come together or collide. I love the idea that the listener might feel like they're watching a film while listening to 'Cyclops Nuclear Submarine Captain'. It remains my favorite among all my albums."

With guitarist Daryl Dragon rounding out the lineup and the ever-present Kramer at the helm (and, when needed, ready to pitch in on organ and backing vocals), the album was recorded in about a month at Noise New York studios in Manhattan.

This is the moment

And that is the moment you caught me

The opener "You Hit Me Over My Head" already makes things clear from the start, with its dazed clarinet and the sticky sound of a wah-wah: Dogbowl's music is one of childlike happiness, of a parallel world where everything is wildly colorful, oversized and bizarre, because that's what children's dreams are like, especially those of kids experiencing, even if only unconsciously, the thrill of love for the first time. Specifically, "You Hit Me Over My Head" frames the theme of falling in love through the image of a spider luring its prey into its web. So the woman has a "heart like a web," and all it takes is one look from her for the man to fall into it "like a fly" drawn in by "honey." This idea of love as a disruptive force that essentially enslaves the person in love, following a tradition that can be traced back at least to classical elegy, continues on the following title track, which sounds like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band playing some bizarre dance night, with sax and clarinet duelling in flourishes and hallucinations. The man is "the cyclops captain of a nuclear submarine," unable to help but gaze at his beloved with his "big old eyeball" and "through a periscope." Here, though, the erotic tension is far more pronounced, though still laced with a creeping irony: "I want to fire my torpedo inside you, baby."

"South American Eye" is a wonderful ballad evoking far-off lands, the same lands that the man in love, here likened to an "Arab horseman," has flown over, watching "beneath him/ the Arabian oil fields in the dark/ [which] were like patches of fire dancing," before finally finding his "Argentine princess" "atop the Empire State Building," where she is busy playing "her viola-cello."

Outside Argentina was burning

As she played her cello or viola

While the country was falling in ash

There was music in her ears

She smiled, a sound so lovely

So lost was she eternally

Below he saw the desert pass beneath as he flew

In the darkness the Arabian oil fields

Were like fire spots dancing

He smiled, the desert air lovely

Carries him into the sky

Later, when the morning arrived

He flew right down to her

She was playing her cello-viola

At the top of the empire state building

Hello my Argentine princess

"South American Eye" is one of the tracks Tunney is still most pleased with today: "We had a lot of fun making it. I remember Kramer telling me I should sing it like a crooner, like Rudy Vallée, which I did as best I could!"

The following "Swan" is infectious with its vaudeville frenzy, with the female figure taking on the traits of a swan with a "neck twenty feet tall" (but she's also a "dalmatian," a "sea serpent," a "dinosaur"!), while the man is nothing more than a sailor who can only watch her from afar, in tears, "because if I stay/ the swan will swallow me like a flower."

Blending raga, free-jazz, lounge-music and post-hangover disenchantment, "Ferris Wheel" instead leads us into the memories of a broken love:

So many years ago you broke my heart

Under the light bulbs bursting as the roller coaster

Slammed into me with the words you sing-song

I spent the night wandering to the dark

As the Ferris wheel followed me all the way home

Rolling like a memory and covered in bright lights

And comets and planets and comets and planets

And comets and planets

I felt the lust that takes you down to the harbor

I felt the lust that takes you down to the harbor

You kissed his lips on his lusty ship

And I watched you sail away

“Toilet!”, racing along at breakneck speed through an unbridled Zappa-esque saraband, finds our hero pondering the reasons that drive a woman to “dump him down the toilet”, bringing to mind the very young Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa: it was 1958, and in an empty classroom at Antelope Valley High School they laid down their very first recording, “Lost In A Whirlpool”, a grotesque blues built on a bizarre little story that Zappa had pulled out of the hat of his imagination, picturing precisely a guy who gets flushed down the toilet by his woman. It was, as good old Frank himself put it, “an alternate surf scenario”, a definition that could just as well be lassoed in to capture the essence of “Toilet!”, a track in which not only the music but also Tunney’s singing is torrential, overwhelming, almost mimicking the swirl of a flushing toilet…

We’re only at track six out of nineteen, but Tunney’s inspiration is already at its peak. Every track impresses with its meticulous construction and its melodic filigree. Not a second is wasted. There isn’t a single weak moment. “Silkworm Exploding” is an irresistible pop fanfare with a joy-shaped chorus (“When you kiss me, I’m a silkworm exploding”): the woman kisses the cyclops-man and he turns into a silkworm exploding with happiness! In the background lies the tragic story of the Titanic, which here is no longer tragic, because imagination can do anything, even erase its sinking and picture the Titanic’s own transformation into “an airship floating in the sky, light as a giant silkworm”, an airship that “is finally arriving in New York City”, look!, “you can see it, its passengers are waving as it floats over Manhattan/ beneath the clouds, it’s docking nose-first atop the Chrysler Building”!

After the delicate watercolour of “Window Fall Down” (where the woman’s hands are “made of ivory/ and made for me like falling hailstones”, and where the surreal atmosphere pervading the whole record is firmly anchored around other poetic images such as “flowers that talk without stopping”), here comes the drumming merry-go-round of “Float” (woman and love as an obsession filling the silence of the night…). Then, “Love Bomb”, which tells of a love in which the line between spirituality and carnality once again explodes noisily like a bomb: “I’ll chase you and then I’ll kiss you/ I’ll put my tongue inside your mouth/ Under the covers we are lovers/ You kiss my button and I explode with you”. Downright hilarious, on the other hand, is the politicized gag of “Revolution Of The Homeless”, which Zappa would have approved of with a big grin, letting himself get swept up in the story of these homeless people determined to start a revolution, because in the United States “people are desperate”, so off they go burning police cars, seizing television stations, storming the White House Oval Office… even calling in the army, because the soldiers themselves will end up fighting “for the freedom to be protected”.

Then the submarine, which is, if you just want it to be!, a flying saucer, sets off again… and this time towards Mongolia (“Flying Saucer Over Mongolia”), and once more we, together with our hero—indeed we ourselves have by now become that very hero—find ourselves in the midst of images sliding one into the other, in a carousel of inventions, and there’s “a great big old eyeball/ rolling along the white fence/ under the falling shooting stars/ plummeting beneath purple planets”, and there’s “a rock with a great peak/ licking my earlobe/ floating in the midnight sun/ up in the purple Arctic Circle”, and “a giraffe is dancing/ the tango on my forehead”, and I see Genghis Khan, and I dream of “screaming horses tap-dancing”.

“Beautiful Trailer Park”, instead, transports us into a village fair told as a bedtime story, and within this fairy tale open passageways lead to other fairy tales that contain still more fairy tales, hiding within them “a beautiful trailer park”, “a small company of sailors”, “a mighty ship made of ivory”, and a man, with a leg also made of ivory, who carries a knife and who “will sail with his train until he kills the white beast”, the one that “shines in the dark/ and will spray a fountain of blasphemy from its tank”. Once again, Tunney’s crooning blends perfectly with the magic of a music that seems to come from a parallel dimension, in which psychedelic pop lays bare its most childlike branches (Syd Barrett again, of course!) through the lens of an old-fashioned romanticism (Kevin Ayers, wherever you are, give us a sign!) or, better said, of a time outside of time, where the child truly is father of the man, to borrow from Brian Wilson’s “Child Is The Father Of The Man”, one of the gems of “Smile Sessions”.

If one wanted to trace Tunney’s punk heritage within these grooves, albeit obviously filtered through the sieve of psychedelic pop, one could turn to “Apple Mary”, where the woman to be loved is precisely this Apple Mary, who has “apple-pie eyes” and when she kisses her man makes him feel “like a piece of candy”, while all around dreamlike images proliferate, because in a dream anything is possible, even finding ourselves, with our beloved, in “a plastic tree”, drinking “cellophane tea”, “while Pluto-man has his head in the sand” and “Orangutan-bangatang is eating a boomerang/ And you excite me/ When you lie down on the wet carpet floor”…

In the serenade of “Flower Garden Bed”, the cyclops-man has instead broken into “little pieces”, after trying to fly over the roof of his beloved’s house. No matter: she can plant them in her “flower garden bed”, where “I will grow in you and you in me”, because “every little piece of me/ will find every little piece of you”. And while in “Carnival In The Swamp” the two will dance atop “a ten-foot crocodile”, thus honouring a carnival held in a swamp, as “the fireflies dance with the light of their lantern”, in “So Painful” (bolstered by a clarinet played much as Captain Beefheart himself might have done) the pain of separation (“she is much happier being with him/ and it’s so sincere, this love they’re living”) is transfigured into a jaunty gait.

The journey of Dogbowl and his crew is completed with a touch of nostalgia, a feeling that runs from start to finish through the bittersweet “Shopping Mall”. Love is one of the great pillars of existence, perhaps the pillar par excellence. In the eyes of his beloved, a man may glimpse the Aurora Borealis, Halley’s Comet or Kohoutek’s; she may be nothing less than the Venus painted by Botticelli… and yet, the feeling of love, the one capable of building a bridge between two people’s lives, is always precarious, because love is essentially desire, which means it’s a bit like looking at the stars: you try to grasp them, but they just stay there, indifferent, more or less bright and, above all, far away. It is this unbridgeable distance that, in the end, matters most. And there is the possibility of holding, with our eyes, that gaze the woman turns towards us, perhaps imagining ourselves as latter-day troubadours of love in keeping with the dictates of that poetic style Dante said was built around “sweet and graceful” rhymes… And yet, beyond that gaze lies the Mystery, the Enigma, our own restlessness, which is what must be endured, especially when we are immersed in the chaotic coming and going of what Marc Augé called “non-places”.

Aurora Borealis I find

So deep in your pupils inside your eyes

Away with a halo of icicles

Falling from you

Halley’s Comet and Comet Kohoutek

Each hold a spot in a velvety iris

Passing through both of your eyes

When you’re eliminating me

(…)

Botticelli was dreaming of you

When the seashell opened presenting you

He painted you naked

And I fainted and fell to the floor

(…)

There’s not a lonelier place in the world

Than sitting alone in a shopping mall

Just waiting for someone to happen

Anyone at all

“There's no lonelier condition in the world/ than sitting alone in a shopping mall/ Waiting for something to happen/ Anything at all,” sings the one-eyed man Dogbowl, as the music circles his loneliness before slipping into silence.

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04/02/2024