I am quite obsessed with this song from 1978: "Boem Boem" by The Internationals:
The only problem is that they're singing in Dutch, which I don't speak. I found the lyrics here, which are as follows:
Toen ik drie turven was, en buiten speelde, jij als cowboy en ik als indiaan, ons nooit verveelden.
't Is een stuk uit m'n leven, en bij me gebleven. Toen jij verdween, ging iets door me heen.
Boem Boem Boem Boem, je hebt m'n hart geraakt. Boem Boem Boem Boem, m'n ogen rood gemaakt. Jong zijn is fijn, maar soms doet 't pijn. Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa
Nu ik wat ouder ben, lijkt 't een avontuur. Soms met Pieter, Dennis of John, maar wel van korte duur.
Maar een stuk uit m'n leven, is bij me gebleven. Toen jij verdween, ging iets door me heen.
Boem Boem Boem Boem, je hebt m'n hart geraakt. Boem Boem Boem Boem, m'n ogen rood gemaakt. Jong zijn is fijn, maar soms doet 't pijn. Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa
Boem Boem Boem Boem, je hebt m'n hart geraakt. Boem Boem Boem Boem, m'n ogen rood gemaakt. Jong zijn is fijn, maar soms doet 't pijn. Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa
Lacking any other resources I tried plugging the first verse into Babelfish, which came back as:
Then I three tally were, and outside played, you as a cowboy and I as a indiaan, our never annoyed themselves. ' t is a piece from m' n lives, and at me remained. When you disappeared, something passang away by me.
Okay, I more or less follow the basic idea...and then comes the chorus:
Boem Boem Boem Boem, you have m' n heart touched. Boem Boem Boem Boem, m' n looks rood made. Young is fine, but does sometimes ' t pain. Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-Boem-Boem-di-waa-haa
"m' n looks rood made," eh? The innernets fail me this time. HELP ME WITH THIS, SOMEBODY.
My goodness, has it been almost two weeks? OOOPS. Family is in town. TIP: The Peterson Auto Museum is superduper, although they need an actual museum cafe, not just a bleak room with a couple of vending machines in the corner. For shame.
A quick note--Kevin Bronson very kindly placed us again on his L.A. Songs Of The Year list/podcast for the year--please do take a look/listen, and thanks Kevin!
Also, I think just about one of the nicest things anyone said about us (well not us specifically, but partially) this year was tucked into a little "Live Music Options" blurb from earlier this month on You Set The Scene:
Pretty good week for shows. If y0u want a good sampling of the breadth of local bands, start off with the Movies tonight, then see No Age tomorrow, Afternoons on Wednesday, Crystal Antlers/The Bronx on Friday, The Sweet Hurt/Monolators on Saturday and Little Joy on Sunday. None of those bands sound anything alike.
Sunday afternoon show w/ Fol Chen, free food AND BEER
Hi everyone:
We've got a very very interesting show for our last set of 2008--we're playing with Fol Chen this Sunday the 14th at the Ricardo Montalban Theater at 3:20 in the afternoon! This place (no, I've never been there before, either) is on Vine between Sunset & Hollywood, and here's the details:
The Los Angeles Dodgeball Society Presents Dodgeball X-mas party Sunday, Dec 14th 2-9pmpm No Dodgeball but...
2-5pm bands:
2:30-3:00 - Fol Chen - www. myspace. com/folchen
3:20-3:50 - The Monolators - www. myspace. com/themonolators
4:10-4:40 - Little Red Radio - www. myspace. com/littleredradio
5-7pm - Film Screening of "Better Off Dead" featuring John Cusack
7-9pm Stand up comedy featuring Patton Oswald, Doug Benson & More!
Admission: $5-$10 un-used toy for holiday toy drive or $5-$10 donation.
@ The Nike Montalban Theater
1615 Vine Street, 90028 - Between Hollywood and Sunset FREE BEER/VODKA & FREE FOOD!
Let me repeat that: FREE BEER/VODKA & FREE FOOD!
I do have a favor to ask: please please tell the person at the door which band you're coming to see (us, I hope) so we can get paid...which is always helpful...
After that show we're gonna hotfoot it over to this show so we can play a song with Cobra Lilies--we'd like to see you there too:
We've got an updated online Monolators store for you--here's where you can get our cd's, vinyl records, and t-shirts (possible Xmas potential?). It's got both domestic and international shipping rates set, so we're ready for you all...
Need a hand-silk screened onesie?
Or maybe a hand-silk screened shopping bag? We've got that too. Heh. Please take a look.
This is the best review I've read yet--here it is, word for word. I did not translate this myself--this is how it appears on Nexhollyhoshi’s Weblog. I don't actually know what it means, but there it is. I suspect that “They Was a Licensed pilot inwards the Drove” is some kind of mutation of "I Was A Captain In The Army," but as to what “Pigment To excess” means, I cannot say.
Backward in passage to Sound truck August 30, 2008
Heliograph congruent with David Greenwald
The Monolators are a Los Angeles-based ensemble singing that plays lo-fi garage museum piece-country rock. Sometimes her’in respect to an indie-without warning stable, for whereupon”Atom Was a Gendarme mutual regard the Organization,” just the same sometimes higher-ups percolate cook quartering songs. Sometimes management gate a sign major in regard to inner man, direct– the drums in relation with”Deputy” give out a hardly any besides the pledge, producing the encincture designation en route to snare. Ego’s endearing; the balada inasmuch as wobbling and likeable doesn’t sad, like this.
Twenty-four.A. kids: the amateur band is pottering just now at the Come up again at 8 p.m.
The Monolators - “They Was a Licensed pilot inwards the Drove”: mp3 The Monolators - “Pigment To excess”: mp3
Well this review of Don't Dance about sums it up as well as anything...translated from the original Portugese via babelfish:
Husband and woman, of Los Angeles, had decided to create this band, know themselves there if for tédio or diversion. The Monolators is very good, yes Sir, with those coarse vocaizinhos, powerful baixão, one pegadinha of British band who drank in the source of punk North American Stooges phase.
Lo-fi of the good one. MGP simple, without artifices but very pegadizo. They do not invent anything but they have a great capacity to make very good songs. Attention to this group.
This weekend w/ Ema & The Ghosts, and also Long Beach!
Here's something that concerns both Monolators AND Cobra Lilies--
This Saturday we're delighted delighted delighted to play our dear friend (and fellow Cobra Lily) Ema and the Ghost's cd release show at Pehrspace! It's going to be incredibly exciting and we're so happy that we can come back to play at Pehrspace! The Sweet Hurt, Karabal Nightlife, and the mysterious and piquant Gunferty are also playing--I can't wait! Oh did you know: it's an all-request night, in the sense that Ema chose our set list for us!
It's been too long since we played in Long Beach, but all that will change on Sunday when we have our way with Alex's Bar with, yes! The Henry Clay People and Valley Arena! We have special friends sitting in with us that night! We go on first, at 9pm, HCP at 10, and Valley Arena at 11. Yea verily!
Shall we see you at one of these wonderful shows? Oh I hope so!
Everything about this clip is wonderful. Oscar Aleman was an Argentinian guitarist who lived in Paris in the 1930's--he was the leader of Josephine Baker's band (!) and was friends with Django Reinhardt (!!). Plus he could dance! Oh my yes, can he dance.
Here are some wonderful pictures of our last residency night, courtesy of Mr. Carnage himself: It was prom, thus the tux. White clip-on bow tie is in process of falling off. Some day I'll have to learn to tie a real one.
These are all from the "Hello" episode. Note absence of said clip-on white tie. That thing cost twelve bucks! Gyp.
It's hard to write this last entry for our Pehrspace residency because I'm pretty sad that it's all over. I can't imagine a better place to do a month-long run and I can't imagine a better host than Sean--we're incredibly grateful for the opportunity, to all the other bands who shared the month with us, and to everyone who came out to see the shows. The last week was fantastic and it was wonderful to see so many friends there--thank you all! I can't really describe the night as well as Sean did, but I will try:
The show opened with...a puppet show! Yes! How many places can boast that? The Greek? The Forum? I think not. It was (mostly) a shadow puppet play, with the hinged/jointed paper puppets brought out in front of the silhouette screen sometimes, and with some interaction between the puppets and human actors as well. The players are called Cristina's Puppet Show--I can't find a myspace or web page for them, but there's some pictures to give you an idea here.
SPEAKING of shadow puppets, this reminds me of a 3D shadow puppet play I was involved in way back in my Cal Arts years--probably my finest moment of those days, in fact. It was part of a stereographic photography class I took (yes, this was in art school) taught by Gary Schwartz, who I need to track down some day. Gary set up a translucent screen with two slide projectors casting red and green lights on the screen, and set up our puppets between the projectors and the screen (got it?). The audience was on the other side of the screen and wore those red and green glasses that one uses to watch Creature From The Black Lagoon in 3D. This actually created a 3D shadow effect: as our puppets moved closer to the projectors and away from the screen, their shadows actually appeared to come closer to the audience. You should try this sometime. The play itself was not much to speak of--it was a series of vignettes based on natural disasters--earthquakes, etc. My job was to sing and play banjo between the vignettes. The only part of the play that I remember at all is the "giant pus-filled boil on my ass" vignette (apparently we decided that those are natural disasters too), in which a puppet had an inflamed abscess on its backside lanced with, I think, a javelin--there was a balloon filled with confetti involved. My clearest memory is of Gary narrating the episode using a voice he described as an "agonized, screeching fop." It went something like: "OOOHHH! OHHHHHHHHH! There's a giant pus-filled boil on my ASS! OHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" And so on and so forth.
Anyway. Also playing with us last week was Ema & The Ghosts, who (as always) charmed everyone, and played the best version of one of our old songs, "Prom Queen," that ever was or ever shall be, including an amazing keyboard solo that fortunately is preserved for posterity via the magic of 4-track tape. Perhaps Ms. Ema will allow us to post it here? We shall see.
Also on the bill were a trio of bands from Denver: Dugout Canoe, Milton Melvin Croissant, and Caldera Lakes. Now, I've seen Caldera Lakes a couple of times before (in fact I believe we played with them at Pehrspace a few months ago) and I did not realize they are not a local band! Their vocalist comes from Denver--so we're very lucky that we got to play with them. They're a "poppy" noise band, with very definite song structures (they start off soft, build, crescendo, and then calm back down again) with echo-y, chanted/sung vocals, and eclectic instrumentation: wind chimes, a little mandolin-y like instrument (a charango? Not sure) and an amplified 16mm film editing block, among others. Their music is moody and beautiful, but they were somewhat nonplussed by PA distortion, which I thought was kinda cool but they clearly weren't expecting. Still, a great set.
And then we played, and again it's all kinda a blur--I do recall that we played "Hot Sleigh" for the first (and, so far, only) time, and that Jake from The Breakups helped us out by playing sleigh bells...the rest was all material from Don't Dance. Our pals Nate and Wendy sang backup on "CA-3A-569," just like on the record--and Ema and Jesse danced/wrestled with us on "Hearts Going Steady," which we played as an encore after we accidentally skipped it in the main set. And then there was the Song Of The Month.
We decided, given that our theme for the night was "prom," that we needed a slow-dance number. This was difficult because we don't have many slow songs, and of the few we do have, we'd played them already in previous weeks' sets. So we decided to do a cover, which quickly became a tossup between "Hello" by Lionel Richie and "I Want To Know What Love Is" by Foreigner. Now--I secretly ADORE and cherish the Foreigner song and would have loved to cover it--it's all the way up there with "Shadows Of The Night" in terms of cover songs in my book. But "Hello" easily won because it has the most amazing/disturbing music video of all time, ever. So "Hello" it was, and I shall post the resulting live recording soon. And, I might add, there apparently is video of our performance out there, too (thanks Elaine!).
And that was the bittersweet end of our Pehrspace run. Fortunately for us, Sean seems to want us back, and in fact we're playing Ema's record release show at Pehrspace this Saturday! So we'll be back soon. Thanks again to Sean, Kyle, and everyone who helped make our residency such a pleasure. We'll see you soon!
