A Year of Blind Spots: Bongo Rock

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Bongo Rock

Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band

1973

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Bongo Rock by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band:

The Incredible Bongo Band was assembled from a variety of unknown session musicians to provide chase music for the 1972 MGM B-movie The Thing with Two Heads. Michael Viner, head of the short-lived MGM subsidiary label Pride, gathered the musicians together and recorded two tracks—"Bongo Rock" and "Bongolia." MGM decided to release these tracks as a double-sided 45, which went on to sell more than one million copies. An LP was hurriedly recorded to follow up on its success.

Once again, Viner rounded up the session players (whose names have been lost to time—Viner himself cannot recall the lineup), and they recorded the album over a few days in Canada, with a variety of players, Viner included, dropping into the sessions.

The album sold in reasonable quantities at the time, but has since grown to legendary status due to its appropriation by subsequent generations. It was the drum breakdowns in the band's cover of the Shadows' hit "Apache" that, when extended with the use of two vinyl copies by New York's DJ Kool Herc, heralded the birth of hip hop. And since then, the track has been sampled by hundreds of artists (beginning with the Sugarhill Gang's track of the same name), as has the LP's title track "Bongo Rock," the result being that the album has become a cult classic and a collector's item.

A follow-up, The Return of the Incredible Bongo Band, appeared in 1974, but failed to capture the energy or success of the debut, despite guest appearances from the likes of Ringo Starr.

What Joe has to say about Bongo Rock by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band:

You know what makes me fucking giddy as hell? Finally bringing into focus a song that had hitherto been ubiquitous like nitrogen, unseen and unnamed but always seeming to be there, for no better and no worse. "Apache" was that song for me. Both versions, apparently. The version here brought sudden clarity to so many small moments in my life. Celebratory moments, at block parties and in fire halls and on dance floors everywhere, that incessant, party rap thing that I didn't really like but didn't hate either, always fucking there, just playing.

When I heard the Incredible Bongo Band play "Apache," so many things snapped into place at once. Mainly: one, that the bongo breakdown was sampled on whatever old-school hip hop song I knew so well had been sampled from this song, right here; two, that this was without a motherfucking doubt the reason why 1001 Albums took me down a side path toward a fucking bongo album, that it was "important" due to the sampling. The blurb, when I finally read it, took me home—"Apache," as I knew it from so many First Holy Communion parties, was performed by the Sugarhill Gang.

The rest of this album is exactly what you'd expect from a group of anonymous musicians who got together to record chase scene music. I like it, but I'm not writing home about it. Instrumental music can be fun, but there's a ceiling to that fun. I'll always remember Bongo Rock, but mostly as a curio. I don't think I'll ever hear any of these songs beyond the context of this blog post and the album I listened to in order to write it. Except in sample form, of course.

And I'm not fucking exaggerating either. Listen to this true story from ten minutes ago. It was a Tuesday afternoon. I had a flat bike tire fixed near my work, and so I was riding it back to the office from the shop. I had left my computer after typing out the blurb from the book that you see above, and I handled the bike business before I planned to write "Joe's thoughts" on this thing. So I'm riding back to the office, and I'm beating a yellow light at 16th and Walnut, and what song do you think I heard blasting out of a truck at the red light in the other direction? That's fucking right: motherfucking "Apache" by the Sugarhill Gang.

What are the odds? Not as slim as you think, if you know this song at all. A true "oh shit!" moment for ol' Joey here, though, and I'll remember it always. That's music. Even the weird-ass goofy-ass instrumental albums can do that to you sometimes.