Little Hits

Ultimate Spinach — Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess (edit)

(original version found on Ultimate Spinach, MGM Records 1968; this edit from the promo soundtrack of the 2006 film Monkey Warfare)

To this day, Boston bands tend to be leery of the concept of a local scene. This is partially due to the legendary standoffishness of New Englanders, but mostly because of what happened in 1968 with the Bosstown Sound. Basically, this was nothing more than a marketing hype by MGM/Verve to create from whole cloth an east coast rival to the San Francisco sound. As it happens, some of the bands involved were pretty good — Orpheus were frequently genuinely great — and with about four decades of hindsight, it’s clear that a lot of the San Francisco bands actually sucked a lot harder.

If Orpheus were the Beatlesque pop group in the Bosstown Sound, the Ultimate Spinach were both more experimental and more cynical. Rather like Love’s Forever Changes, the first couple of Velvets records and the Mothers’ We’re Only In It For The Money, the self-titled debut of the Ultimate Spinach is one of the few psych-era albums to call bullshit on the whole peace and love idea. In hindsight, “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess,” written by multi-instrumentalist bandleader Ian Bruce-Douglas and sung by the chillingly seductive Barbara Hudson, sounds like a deadpan parody of psychedelic malarkey taken to a logical extreme.

This edit is from the soundtrack of the Canadian indie comedy-drama Monkey Warfare, which my wife and I saw at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. I don’t believe the disc was ever intended for release: the director, Reg Harkema, was just handing out copies of the LP after the screening, and the disc lacks much copyright info. However, copies might show up on eBay if you’re lucky. It’s a great soundtrack, with tunes by Outrageous Cherry, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the Fugs, Refused, the Make Up, the Pink Mountaintops, Comets On Fire, Sun Ra, Weird War and Leonard Cohen along with this vintage slice of bad-trip psych. At just under three and a half minutes, this version excises about five minutes of psych-instro wank, including a lengthy theremin solo that’s actually more interesting in concept than execution. You won’t miss it. The snippet of dialogue at the end features two of the film’s stars, Canadian indie cinema god Don McKellar and relative newcomer Nadia Litz (pictured below). I don’t know how likely it is to actually hit theaters in the states — we always try to limit ourselves only to movies that we may never get a chance to see again — but if you get the opportunity, I recommend it, particularly if you’ve ever suffered through one of Godard’s revolutionary-period movies; this is basically one of those with a goofy sense of humor. If nothing else, you should head over to the film’s MySpace page to see a bizarrely hilarious epilogue (entitled “Molotov cocktail scene”) that was excised after the festival screenings for legal reasons that will become entirely clear.

–Stewart Mason