Echoes of Vietnam: "Cheeseburger," Sandy Bull, Hamza El Din

 

I only "discovered" (really, because a friend turned me onto him) Sandy Bull fairly recently.  My pal burned a CD or two of Sandy Bull for me, and then I found his 1972 Demolition Derby at a vintage record store, and of course bought it. What had intrigued me about Bull was that he was very eclectic and that his eclecticism included playing the oud, in addition to his basic folk instrument, the guitar.

I was intrigued by this note from the back of the Demolition Derby album. 

 

 

 Just a small anti-war message, from the era of massive opposition to the Vietnam War, on a modest "folk" album. When you hear the album, you hardly notice it, it's just 2 seconds long, and sounds like a scratch, or a quick movement of the needle across the vinyl.

I did some hunting around, and it turns out that the "Cheeseburger" is better known as the "Daisy Cutter," the name for the BLU-82, a 15,000 pound "conventional" bomb. According to wikipedia it was used in Vietnam to flatten a section of forest into a helicopter landing, hence the name "Daisy Cutter." (This of course was how the US military described its uses, and you can find video clips on the web that describe it in this way.) But wikipedia also tells us that it was used against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese troops in Laos in 1971, and by the South Vietnamese army in 1975. They were later used in the Gulf War in 1991 -- "as much for their psychological effects as for their anti-personnel effect." 

Check out what Newsweek wrote about the BLU-82 and its effects in Kuwait in 1991.

"The men of the Eighth Squadron believed that the BLU-82 bomb could send an even more powerful message. In the early-morning hours of Feb. 7, Maj. Skip Davenport's MC-130E Combat Talon cargo plane lumbered off the runway. In its belly sat the massive bomb. Behind Major Davenport, a companion plane lifted off, carrying another BLU-82 (Davenport and his wingman became known as the Blues Brothers).

The day before, their target area had been rained with leaflets warning the soldiers below: "Tomorrow if you don't surrender we're going to drop on you the largest conventional weapon in the world." The Iraqis who dared to sleep that night found out the allies weren't kidding. The explosion of a Daisy Cutter looks like an atomic bomb detonating. In the southwest corner of Kuwait that night, an enormous mushroom cloud flared into the dark. Sound travels for miles in the barren desert, and soon Iraqi radio nets along the border crackled with traffic. Col. Jesse Johnson, Schwarzkopf's special-operations commander, cabled a message back to the U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Florida: "We're not too sure how you say 'Jesus Christ' in Iraqi." A British SAS commando team on a secret reconnaissance mission near the explosion frantically radioed back to its headquarters: "Sir, the blokes have just nuked Kuwait!"

The next day a Combat Talon swept over the bomb site for another leaflet drop with a follow-up message: "You have just been hit with the largest conventional bomb in the world. More are on the way." The victims below didn't need much more convincing. The day after the BLU-82 attack, an Iraqi battalion commander and his staff raced across the border to surrender. Among the defectors was the commander's intelligence officer, clutching maps of the minefields along the Kuwait border. The intelligence bonanza enabled Central Command officers to pick out the gaps and weak spots in the mine defenses. When the ground war began Marine and allied forces breached them within hours." (emphases added)

It was also used against the Taliban and al-Qaida early in the Afghanistan War, in an effort to destroy cave complexes as well as to demoralize enemy fighters. It was used at Tora Bora! Last dropped, in testing in Utah, in 2008. 

What about Sandy Bull and the oud? He picked it up after he met Egyptian Nubian artist Hamza El Din in Rome in the early 60s (Hamza was studying music there at the time). They met up again in New York City, roomed together for five years, and in that apartment Hamza El Din recorded his second album, Al Oud (Vanguard, 1965) and Sandy Bull recorded his second album, Inventions for Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard, 1965). As Hamza El Din told SFGate in 2001, Bull was far ahead of his time, doing what we would term "world music" long before it became a popular genre, by the 1980s. His experimentations were not all that successful, at least in the marketplace, and his recording career was in hiatus from the mid-seventies until the late 1980s. He passed away in April 2001. (For more details on Bull, please consult the SFGate article, linked abovve.)

Robert Crumb plays his North African 78s

The iconic cartoonist R. Crumb is well-known as a collector of 78s, many of which he has picked up during his residence in southern France, where he has lived since 1993. (He owns around 5,000 of them.)

He has appeared a number of times over the last year on John's Old Time Radio Show, most recently to play a number of 78s in his collection recorded by North African musicians.

It's really an amazing show, and the music quite remarkable. I was quite surprised at how good those old 78 rpms sounded. I highly recommend that you download the podcast and listen repeatedly.

Some of the artists on the session are quite well known, such as the Jewish-Arab singer Habiba Msika from Tunisia, about whom I recently posted. (Unfortunately, the track is not identified, presumably because the title is written in Arabic on the album label. I urge you to post a comment, asking that R. Crumb post photos of the labels of the songs in question, so that those of us who read Arabic can identify the songs.)

There is the great Morrocan singer Hocine Slaoui, who recorded the famous song “Dakhlau Al-Merikani” (The Coming of the Americans), a comment on the arrival of Allied Troops in North Africa in 1942. It includes the recurring refrain in English, “All I hear is ‘Ok, Ok. C’mon. Bye-bye.’” (It's also known as "El Marikan Ain Zerka" (The American with the blue eye)). Check it out here.

And there is the celebrated violinist Sami Shawa, who was born in Syria but whose career was in Cairo, who was known both for his solo recordings (here is his "Taqsim Hijaz") and also for his work with great singers like Umm Kalthoum.

And according to JewishMorocco, there are two other Tunisian Jewish singers on the set, besides Habiba Msika: Fritna Darmon (here's another track from her) and Asher Mizrahi.

The rest of the artists, I've been unable to track down any information about.

R. Crumb put out a collection in 2003 called Hot Women: Women Singers from the Torrid Regions of the World, with tracks culled from his 78s collection. (He airs his rather antediluvian geographical theories about what produces "hot" music on the radio show as well.)

It contains three tracks from North Africa: (1) "Guenene Tini" by Cheikha Tetma (1930). Cheikha Tetma was a singer and 'ud player from Tlemcen, Algeria, who performed in the hawzi genre, the brand of Andalusian music specific to Tlemcen. Listen here. (2) "Khraïfi" by Aïcha Relizania (1938): listen here). I know nothing about her, but the name indicates that she was from Rélizane (Arabic, Ghalīzān), a village of European colonizers in the Oran region of Algeria. It's the same town that rai star Cheikha Rimitti (who originally recorded as Cheikha Remitti Relizania) grew up in. (3) "Yama N'Chauf Haja Tegennen" by Julie Marsellaise (1929). Again, I have no information about her, other than that she is from Tunisia, and I've not yet heard the song in question, but here's another recording by her, "Ya Helaouet el-Clap." (The video for that song shows the record in question, and it appears that her full name might be Julie Marsellaise Mahieddine.)

[Correction added December 9, 2013, thanks to Chris Silver (see comments below). Julie Marsellaise should be spelled Marseillaise -- the misspelling is from the Crumb collection, and is no doubt what is written on the record label. She got her name (and is also known as Julie La Marseillaise) from a stint she did at the Alcazar Theater in Marseille. No surprise, there was lots of cultural traffic, then and now, between North Africa and France. Julie's family name was Abitbol, and her daughter Ninette Abitbol was married in 1941 to the great Tunisian singer, oudist, and composer, Hédi Jouini. Ninette was a singer and dancer in her own right, who took the stage name of Widad. (Jouini, born Hédi Belhassine, has been called the "Frank Sinatra" of the Arab World, and his granddaughter Claire Belhassine has recently made a film about him called "Papa Hedi.") 

The "Mahieddine" that I saw on the Julie Marseillaise record label refers to the great Algerian singer and actor Mahieddine Bachetarzi, who also managed many acts.]

Let's pray that another collection, devoted to music of North Africa, is forthcoming. It would be great if an expert on North African music could be hired to work on the notes!