Damn You, Andy Williams
I will never get back the time and mental energy I spent as a 6-year-old in 1976 trying to decipher a throwaway novelty pop song from 1958.
This week’s blog is brought to you by the word “mondegreen”. A mondegreen is when the listener mishears a lyric from a song as a funny or nonsensical line as opposed to the actual words. The term was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright, who had heard an old Scottish ballad as a child and interpreted the line“They laid him on the green” as“The Lady Mondegreen”. Some of the more famous mondegreens include “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”, from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”,“There’s a bathroom on the right”instead of “There’s a bad moon on the rise”,from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising”,“The girl with colitis goes by”in place of“The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”from The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, et cetera, et cetera. Hell, there are so many misinterpretations of Manfred Mann’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light” that nobody’s really sure what the “revved up like a douche” line actually is. I mean, I guess you could look it up, but where’s the fun in that?
Anyway, I digress. This is the story of yours truly as an extremely unworldly kindergartener, with utterly no frame of reference for Pop Culture (beyond a borderline-maniacal obsession with the TV shows Happy Days and Sha Na Na, that is), mondegreening the living shit out of an Andy Williams record.
A year or so earlier, my younger sister Jill and I had been gifted a battered and scratched stack of unsleeved 45 rpm singles that had belonged to our mom and her sister, our Aunt Pat, in the late 1950s. At every opportunity, we would play them on our little orange GE portable record player, and they slowly pushed our Disney movie soundtrack LPs out of heavy rotation.
Oh, the flood of sense memories finding this photo online gave me…
It was an absolutely bonkers assortment of songs and artists, that I suspect they got through one of those mail-order record clubs that used to keep sending you stuff in a never-ending flood. I remember some of my favorites were “Chattanooga Choo Choo”by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, (featuring Tex Beneke on vocals!), “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” by Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, “Young Blood” by the Coasters, Tab Hunter’s rather anemic version of Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”,backed with his even more anemic version of Marty Robbins’ “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” (which had a bad skip; to this day I hear it in my head: “A white…sport coat… and a piiiinnnk… carrrrrnation… nation… nation… nation…”), and Steve Lawrence’s cover of Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll”. Apparently, Mom and Aunt Pat had a taste for squeakier-cleaner watered-down covers of the Real Stuff, although Lawrence’s “Party Doll” does have a couple absolutely ripping guitar solos. Really. Check it out.
The king of the hill/top of the heap of the collection, the crown jewel, was Elvis Presley’s 1958 hit “All Shook Up” (b/w “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”), our copy of which I literally wore out, and still adore to this day. A lot of those songs were certifiably unhip, but I can trace my all-encompassing love of music directly back to that weird-ass, beat up stack of 45s, especially that Elvis song. No joke. Along with my well-thumbed copy of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, those records and that little turntable were my prized possessions as a little kid. Those songs are deep in my blood, as lame as some of them undeniably are in retrospect.
Speaking of…
One of the other 45s that sank its teeth in me (capped and snowy, pearly white as they may have been) was another banger from 1958, by Andy Williams. I feel like Andy Williams is slowly fading from the world’s collective memory, which is kind of a shame. He was a crooner in the grand Bing Crosby tradition who had a hit TV variety show for almost a decade. Audrey Hepburn may have sung “Moon River” in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but Andy Williams made it his own theme song, recording his version the following year and scoring a massive hit with it. He also made a metric shit ton of Christmas albums and holiday TV specials; chances are, if you hear “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” when you’re out Christmas shopping, you’re hearing his version.
Good ol’ AW was represented in that old stack of records with his hit single, “Hawaiian Wedding Song”. That track never really grabbed my young ear (too mushy for my taste at the time, probably), but the absolute banger on the B-side sure did: “The House of Bamboo”.
Looking back with 50 years of accumulated life experience, I can now clearly picture the meeting with Williams and his manager and the record label: “Andy, you gotta give the kids something. They’re crazy about this Beatnik scene. We got a song for you- the kids are gonna love it.”
At the time I first heard it, however, I didn’t have the faintest idea what a beatnik was. My worldview was limited. Almost every line in the song flew over my head. Didn’t matter, though. It had bongos. To paraphrase Lloyd Lindsay Young on the Beastie Boys’ “B-Boy Boullabaisse”, it was a trip, it had a funky beat, and I could bug out to it. I sang along to it, too- loud and proud, blissfully unaware of most of what I was singing about, phoneticizing a great deal of the lyrics. The mondegreens, rest assured, were mondegreening.
And now, beloved, I will treat you to what nobody asked for: I will parse the lyrics of “The House of Bamboo”, both as I heard them as a 6-year-old, and with annotations by an older, wiser person who’s had the song stuck in a cobwebby back corner of his brain for nigh on 49 years and is desperate to get it out. Feel free to listen along here:
Number FIfty-Four
The house with the bamboo door
Bamboo roof and bamboo walls
They’ve even got a bamboo floor
(I’m no structural engineer, but this seems like an ill-advised method of construction, especially for a public gathering place.)
You must get to know SoHo Joe
(6-year-old Tod, growing up in neither New York City nor London, but rather in rural Ohio, had no idea where or what SoHo was. So I thought the owner in question was a Korean man named So Ho Cho.)
He runs an espresso
(Again- what’s an espresso? No clue. But I let this one slide with a shrug.)
Called the House of Bamboo
It’s-a made of sticks
Sticks and bricks
(Now hold on. I thought it had a bamboo door, roof, walls, and floor. Now you’re saying it’s made of sticks and bricks? At this point Andy Williams is becoming an unreliable narrator.)
But you can get your kicks
At the House of Bamboo
In this casino
You can drink a ‘chino
(I didn’t know what an espresso was, so what were the odds I’d know what a cappuccino was, much less a slang word for cappuccino (that I’m not sure is actually a thing)? But, again, I let it slide.)
And it’s gotcha swingin’ to the cha cha
(Here’s perhaps the biggest swing-and-a-miss on young Tod’s part: being unfamiliar with the cha cha dance, I assumed a “chacha” was a part of the building. I pictured the chacha being up in the rafters somewhere, like a lofted ceiling. SIDE NOTE: I didn’t realize until I was writing this piece that Andy Williams sings “swingin’ TO the cha cha”. I had, up until now, thought he sang “swingin’ THROUGH the cha cha”, which implies that there was a rope hanging from the ceiling that you could use to swing through the chacha. Seems like a liability lawsuit waiting to happen, So Ho Cho. Hope you’ve lawyered up, or at least make folks sign a waiver before climbing up in the chacha. Someone could get badly hurt, especially if it’s not load-bearing bamboo.)
Dance the bolero in a sombrero
(Bolero??? At this point I was just making sounds with my mouth as I was singing.)
And shake like a snake
(I really liked this part, because a maraca came in during the pause after that line, and it sounded like a rattlesnake. PRODUCTION VALUE!)
You wanna drop in when the cats are hoppin’
(Wait, it’s got cats, too? This place is awesome.)
Let your two feet move-a to the big beat
Pick yourself a kitten and a-listen to a platter
That rocks the jukebox
(So you can come in, have a ‘chino (?) and, while you’re working up the nerve to climb up into the chacha and swing around on the rope, you can pick out one of many kittens that are available to play with. So Ho Cho was a visionary businessman who predicted the rise of modern cat cafés, 60 years ahead of the curve.)
I’m-a tellin’ you
When you’re blue
Well, there’s a lot to do
At the House of Bamboo
(CLEARLY.)
(At this point there’s a groovy little call-and-response with Andy and a guitar. I was already, at the age of 6 [9 years before I actually started playing], zeroing in on guitar parts in songs. My life was pre-ordained, folks; I had no choice.)
(Dut Dut Dut Dunut Nut Nuh)
You’ve got to know
(Da Da Duh)
SoHo Joe
(Dununuh Nut Nut Nuh)
He runs an espresso
Called the House of Bamboo
(Dut Da Duh)
In this casino
You can drink a ‘chino
Let your two feet move-a to the big beat
Pick yourself a kitten and listen to a platter
That rocks
(Really pushing the kittens. Smart marketing.)
I’m a-tellin’ you
When you’re blue
Well there’s a lot to do
At the House of Bamboo.
Number Fifty-Four
The house with the bamboo door
Bamboo roof and bamboo walls
They’ve even got a bamboo floor
In the House of Bamboo
Aaaand, SCENE.
Later on, I realized that Andy wasn’t singing about cats, which paints the House of Bamboo in a different, possibly sordid light. Was So Ho Cho a pimp? Was this a House of Bamboo of ill-repute? A House of Bamboo of the Rising Sun? Or was it just an innocent place to meet girls, like Surf City in the Jan and Dean song? A target-rich environment, as Maverick put it in Top Gun? We may never know for sure.
I was sitting in a drive-through in Camarillo, California yesterday and saw a building across the 101 called the House of Bamboo. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t get to investigate, but not in too big of a hurry to take a photo and text my sister:
Our ensuing conversation put this song back in my head. I had to exorcise it by writing this blog. I’m sorry/you’re welcome.
Weirdly, while I was researching “The House of Bamboo” I learned that last year, 67 years after its release, “THoB” actually charted in the UK, thanks to its being featured in the TV show This City Is Ours, so maybe I counted Andy Williams out prematurely. I can only hope that this weird little earworm of a song is alive again, feeding on the young clueless brains of a new generation, and that there’s at least one little British kid who’s hearing it, bopping around the house, and wondering what a chacha is. Damn you, Andy Williams. And thank you.