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[miko2]

Today's Song: Zoom Daddy by the Swirling Eddies

I dreamed this morning that Midnight Oil had released a new cd with a cover of the song Zoom Daddy by the Swirling Eddies (featuring Terry Taylor).

I don't know why this was important. It falls into the "nearly impossible probability" file. Nor have I listened to Zoom Daddy or any Swirling Eddies song in a long, long time.

Zoom Daddy was the title song from the third Swirling Eddie's cd -- and in some ways I think of it as their Darn Floor, Big Bite cd. Darn Floor, Big Bite was the most brilliant, least popular, and least understood album from the Daniel Amos (Da), another Terry Taylor band. It was based on a signed description of an earthquake by Koko the gorilla: "Darn floor, bad bite. Trouble trouble!" and starting from there, compared Koko's limited understanding of what an earthquake was to man's limited understanding of the concept and nature of God. But the entire album is lyrically and musically complicated beyond anything else the band had done. To quote Wikipedia:

"The album is also heavily inspired by the works of Czesław Miłosz, especially in songs like "The Unattainable Earth" (which was named after one of Miłosz' books), "Safety Net", "Pictures of the Gone World", "Divine Instant", and "Half Light, Epoch, and Phase". Taylor also incorporated several lines from the book Little, Big by John Crowley into his lyrics, including the line "I drink you endlessly toward myhollow heart" in the song "Earth Household." Taylor's love for Annie Dillard comes through strongly with the final song, "The Shape Of Air", which features an all star choir."

(Darn Floor, Big Bite has long been out of print, but is due to be rereleased by Arena Rock Recording Company, which also distributes for Hem, one of my favorite dreampop groups.)

Zoom Daddy is, in some ways, even stranger and harder to grasp than Darn Floor, Big Bite. It's the Eddies's only completely serious cd, although that doesn't prevent it from being outright weird. But on their first two cds the Swirling Eddies were very light-hearted, and even though some songs were also quite pointed lyrically (Big Guns is still one of my favorite songs and describes the current White House's bomb-first foreign diplomacy perfectly, even though it was written in the early 1990's), many of the songs on those two cds are quite frivilous -- Arthur Fhardy's Yodeling Party, Hide the Beer, the Pastor's Here, Outdoor Elvis.

Then they produced Zoom Daddy, a cd as lryically dense and simply lyrical as that of Darn Floor, Big Bite. Like Darn Floor, it was an instant classic and years ahead of its time.

After that the Swirling Eddies released one more studio cd -- the ultra silly Sacred Cows, in which they took lyrically stupid but popular songs from Contemporary Christian Music and provided really really bad covers of them. Normal bands don't change direction so violently, but it's a hilarious cd.

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There's a music list on Amazon.com that places these cds together on the same list:

Darn Floor, Big Bite by Daniel Amos
Demons Dance Alone by Residents
Zoom Daddy by Swirling Eddies
Flood by They Might be Giants
Black Letter Days by Frank Black
Sea Change by Beck
Boingo by Oingo Boingo
Tell Another Joke On the Ol' Choppin' Block by Danielson Familey
Popular Favorites 1976-1992/Sand in the Vaseline by the Talking Heads
Adore by Smashing Pumpkins
The Brown Album by Primus
Kid A by Radiohead

That is all very experimental and/or just plain weird music with clever or complicated (or just plain weird) lyrics. I can understand what the list maker is getting at.

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Okay, now that all of that is out of the way -- Zoom Daddy isn't to be found on iTunes or eMusic or anywhere really. You can still buy the cds for good used prices off Amazon.com though, and I found a video on Youtube so I had to make it my song of the day anyway.

Terry Taylor and Friends - Zoom Daddy

God Went Bowling -- cool fan adaptation of the song from the Zoom Daddy cd

(You gotta love how that song still confuses people -- as evident by comments like "How can a mythological creature play a sport?" and "I think this is what is meant by blasphemy".)

Safety Net by Terry Taylor and Friends (song from Darn Floor, Big Bite