Charles Darwin, father of evolution theory and bane of people who don’t grasp that science and faith can coexist (honestly, if one really wants to believe in a god, I feel as though a complex system like evolution would only strengthen a case for a divine creator… how, the educated faithful could ask, could evolution happen unless someone had finely tuned the organisms of life to adapt?) It’s possible Darwin is the heart of what it means to be groundbreaking. All the same, you’ll want to dance.A week ago, while we were on a brief vacation, taking care of personal life, like we do sometimes, we missed the anniversary of Mr. But if all that’s starting to seem a bit po-faced, check out the Tommy Seebach Band’s ineffably camp 1977 disco-rock “Apache”: it’s hard to believe it’s not some stupendous mickey-take. (He deserves an award for services to musical genealogy.) There’s also an entire documentary about it, 2013’s Sample This. For an exhaustive list, look up the blogger Michaelangelo Matos. Their break has been looped and chopped, spliced and diced, repackaged and repurposed, by artists from LL Cool J to Missy Elliott, and Moby to Goldie. Jim Gordon, who suffers from schizophrenia, remains in prison for murdering his mother in 1983. The Incredible Bongo Band broke up in 1974 - King Errisson later touring with Neil Diamond, and Michael Viner becoming a publisher who died of cancer in 2009. The English singer and songwriter Jerry Lordan in 1960, the year after he wrote ‘Apache’ © Alamy By the end of the 1970s, such “breakbeats” had emerged as the cornerstone of hip-hop - as joyously confirmed by the Sugarhill Gang’s 1981 “Apache”, complete with exhortations for Tonto and Kemo-Sabe to “jump on it”. His so-called “Merry-Go-Round” sent clubbers “hype”. He claims the credit for extending the percussion break on “Apache” together with similar tracks or a copy of the same record. It came to the attention of a Bronx DJ, a Jamaican known as Kool Herc. Track two on their soon-to-be-obscure 1973 LP was an infectiously percussive, horn-fuelled and organ-driven “Apache”. This group, which included the Motown conga player King Errisson and the Pet Sounds and Derek and the Dominoes drummer Jim Gordon, was hastily dubbed the Incredible Bongo Band. One of his numbers, “Bongo Rock”, caught on enough that he reconvened the session musicians who had made it to record an album of the same name. Viner was given the job of providing incidental music for that shlocky 1972 flick. It needed a Hollywood makeover to become a dance floor smash and one of the most sampled tunes in history: enter MGM’s soundtracks director Michael Viner and The Thing with Two Heads. By the “Flower Power” era, however, “Apache” was redolent of a squarer time. There were three other guitar versions of note in the 1960s - by the surf-rocky Ventures, the fuzzier Davie Allan and The Arrows, and those bad-acid growlers the Edgar Broughton Band. Cheesy, but curiously affecting, his ballad is just waiting for Quentin Tarantino to rediscover it. “Alone, all alone by the campfire/she dreamed of her love,” he croons. Later in 1961, the country singer Sonny James did a vocal version. Twinkly, even slightly prissy, it nevertheless ensured that “Apache” was already something like a phenomenon. It only made No 24.įebruary of the following year saw Jorgen Ingmann, future Eurovision winner, take his cover to No 2 in America. Weedon’s slower, almost wistful “Apache” snuck out the next month. Frustrated, Lordan passed the music on to The Shadows, and their dramatic, hard-riding rendition - released in July 1960, with Hank Marvin’s twangy guitar to the fore - became an unexpected UK No 1. Weedon cut a version, but his record company sat on it. Lordan wrote a stirring instrumental that he sold to the guitar whizz Bert Weedon, the man behind the 1957 book Play in a Day that taught generations of famous names - Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Brian May among them. It starred Lancaster as a brave holding out as Geronimo surrendered. The story begins in 1959 when the English songwriter Jerry Lordan was inspired by the Robert Aldrich film Apache.
What links Burt Lancaster and the birth of hip-hop? Or pioneer rappers the Sugarhill Gang and the B-movie The Thing with Two Heads? Or a Danish Eurovision winner and a Native American rebel? The answer is a tale as wild and random as the best kind of party night, and it revolves around the Incredible Bongo Band’s reworking of “Apache”, once described as “the most crazed piece of orchestral funk ever recorded”.
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