"Witchi Tai To" / Brewer & Shipley

Cleaning out my brother's LP collection a year ago, the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley's Weeds was one of the few scarred 1960s LPs I made sure to squirrel away. (That and his autographed copy of Biff Rose's The Thorn in Mrs. Rose's Side, a record that I never expect to make a fortune with on eBay.)  I can't say that anybody fought me for it, but that's cool.

Brewer & Shipley's biggest hit, "One Toke Over the Line" (heh heh, heh heh) wouldn't come along until their next album, 1970's Tarkio.  But Holt Hughes was ahead on the curve most of the time on this sort of stuff. I have vivid memories of listening to this album with him (another important cut: their cover of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower") in our home in the Indianapolis suburbs and feeling totally plugged into the counterculture zeitgeist. Which, when you think about it, is quite a feat.

Brewer & Shipley didn't write this song; it was written by Jim Pepper, a Native American jazz saxophonist, who incorporated elements of his Creek and Kaw ancestors' peyote songs. So at one stroke, B & S were able to proclaim their solidarity with the oppressed Native American peoples AND with hallucinogenic drugs.  Talk about a win-win.

According to Michael Brewer, the duo kept hearing Pepper's recording of this song on Midwest radio stations (remember when radio was local?) while they were touring. Two sons of the heartland -- Brewer from Oklahoma and Tom Shipley from Ohio -- these guys simply fell in love this song,
beamed at them out of the Midwestern airwaves. 

Jim Pepper being a jazz guy and all, it's no surprise that the percussion track of this song is addictive. Water drums, bongos, congas, whatever they used, this is a track that from start to finish is all about the rhythm. No wonder it's bored itself into my brain lately.

 Equally seductive are the half-chanted lyrics, most of them what I've been assuming for a half-century or more are legit Native American poetry:  "Witchi tai tai, kimarah / Womanika, womanika / Hey-ney, hey-ney, no-wah."  Okay, so there's a few English words at the beginning: "What a spirit spring is bringing round my head / Makes me feel glad that I'm not dead." But let's be honest: That's not a whole lot more comprehensible than the Native American lyrics. Let's just submit ourselves to the incantatory flow and go with it.

Remember that 1971 TV ad about pollution with the crying Indian? (Turns out the actor was Italian-American, but that's 20th-century hucksterism in a nutshell). That was all part of the counterculture mythology, the solidarity with Native Americans. Granted, that was before a handful of tribes struck gold with casino wealth, but as a child of the 60s, hey, I'm not gonna begrudge them that. We befouled their continent, who are we to judge?

Give yourself into this song, and it could just as easily be a sitar-laden raga from the other kind of Indian music. Kind of a cool thing in 1969 to realize that we didn't need no maharishis -- we could groove on our own home-grown transcendent culture.

"The Israelites" /
Desmond Dekker & the Aces

Ska or reggae?  You decide.

And does it matter?  When this song came out in the spring of 1969, hitting #1 in the UK, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands -- even edging into the US Top Ten -- most people outside of Jamaica didn't know the difference and didn't care. Dekker's strong Jamaican accent, the relatively simple production, that heavy bassline all told us it was "island music." It didn't occur to me to wonder why a guy from Jamaica would be singing about people from Israel.  All I knew was (cue up the American Bandstand theme) it had a great beat and you could dance to it.

So tonight I'm watching old episodes of the daffy British slapstick comedy Doctor in the House (thank you, YouTube!) -- a show I used to watch in re-runs on late-night Indianapolis PBS with my brother and sister. It was the summer of '75, the last time we all three were living at home, and our nightly rendezvous with this mad Britcom was essential. Around 10pm we'd drive out to the 24-hour Marsh supermarket (quite a novelty in those days, that all-night schedule) to buy our customary Doritos and Pepsi and Nabisco's Famous Cookies assortment, then race home in time for that perky theme song. Good times, good times . . . I can still hear Holt's mad cackle in my heart.

But I digress. In the episode I watched tonight, the show's hero, med student Michael Upton (played by Barry Evans, if you must know), can't study because his dorm room is so noisy. And lo and behold, what record is his neighbor rudely blasting at top volume? Yes, this 1969 hit, probably still on the charts when this episode first aired. Jeez, I hadn't thought about this song in probably 40 years.
But what a great song it is.

Desmond Dekker said this song just flew into his head, one night while he was walking through a park in a poor section of Kingston and overheard a couple arguing about money. It's as if he just transcribed the man's lament: "Get up in the morning, slavin' for bread / So that every mouth can be fed / Oh, oh, me Israelite." The dogged syncopation is just right -- it really makes you feel how weary the singer is from his daily dutiful grind. I love how the Aces join in on those doleful "oh's," as if consoling him -- or maybe just reminding us how many others are bowed down by the same hopeless struggle.

Ah, the Biblical references of reggae -- like "Rivers of Babylon," a song I wouldn't hear until 2 years later when I saw The Harder They Come. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. You don't even have to know that Rastafarians identified with the Lost Tribes of Israel. It's like African-American slaves in the cotton fields, singing "Go Down, Moses," a coded message protesting their own enslavement. All poor Jamaicans, not just the Rastas, knew what it felt to labor for a foreign king, remembering Zion.

In the second verse, his wife's left him; in the third he woefully describes his raggedy clothes -- "shirt them-a tear up, trousers is gone" (though I'm sure in 1969 I could not decipher those lyrics; thanks, internet!). I did get the next line: "Don't want to end up like Bonnie & Clyde." This was just a year after Arthur Penn's film about those romantic Depression-era gangsters (was Warren Beatty not hot in that movie?) and only a couple months after Georgie Fame's   "Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde" hit the airwaves; of course that reference would jump out at me. This guy doesn't want to resort to a life of crime, even though so many in Kingston did. Or maybe he just doesn't want to end up riddled with bullets in a police shoot-out -- well, who could blame him?

What a downbeat song this could have been -- yet the tempo ticks along, that trippy melody bounces around the scale. It's as if the act of singing the song itself keeps him from despair. If I were a DJ, I'd play this song alongside Lee Dorsey's "Working in a Coal Mine" and Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang."  In 1968, what did I know about working long hours for no pay? To be honest, what do I know about it now?  But thanks to records like these, at least I have given it more than a passing thought.