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During the 80s, Kid Creole was the zoot-suited ‘Tropical Gangster’, a Latino Cab Calloway mixing pop, p-funk, big band swing and Latin rhythms for a series of global chart smashes, from ‘Stool Pidgeon’ and ‘Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy’ to ‘Endicott’.
Under his real name, August Darnell, Kid Creole had developed his feel for unusual music fusions and intelligent, acerbic life stories since 1974 through a series of projects as a prolific writer, musician and producer. Starting as a key member of Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band alongside his brother, Stony Browder Jr. in 1974, Darnell then masterminded Machine’s disco anthem ‘There But For The Grace Of God’ before becoming the in-house producer for Ze Records in New York. There, he helped fashion the grungy Ze sound through Cristina’s trash disco debut album and groundbreaking genre-bending work for Aural Exciters, James Chance and more.
Taking the name from the Elvis Presley film, Darnell created Kid Creole in 1980 and alongside his three female singers, The Coconuts, led by his Wife Addy, and a band including Dr. Buzzard’s Coati Mundi, he began honing his alter ego.
With today’s DJs consistently championing Darnell's early work, this exclusive Strut release covers 1974 to 1982 and features rare extended versions and album tracks released on CD for the first time. Compilation by DJ Guido of Paris DJs with extended sleeve notes by legendary New York journalist Brian Chin.
Tracklisting:
01. Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band – Sunshower 4.03
02. Aural Exciters – Marathon Runner 6.27
03. Kid Creole & The Coconuts – Going Places (Zemix version) 4.40
04. Gichy Dan’s Beachwood No. 9 – On A Day Like Today 5.28
05. Machine – There But For The Grace Of God Go I (LP version) 5.30
06. Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rumba Band - I’m An Indian Too (12” version) 7.47
07. Coati Mundi – Pharaoh (Can’t Take It To The Grave) 3.58
08. Aural Exciters – Emile (Night Rate) 6.48
09. Kid Creole – He’s Not Such A Bad Guy (12” version) 5.16
10. James White & The Blacks – Contort Yourself (August Darnell remix) 6.17 (Ze)
11. Cristina – The Ballad Of Immoral Manufacture 8.13
12. Ron Rogers – Don’t Play With My Emotions 4.36
13. Kid Creole & The Coconuts – Double On Back 4.27
14. Aural Exciters – Paradise 3.10
15. Kid Creole - Off The Coast Of Me 4.54
KID CREOLE aka AUGUST DARNELL is AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS
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Sleeve notes by Vivien Goldman
(Cue extended drum roll)
Dramatis Personae:
Stony Browder: autocratic musical mastermind behind Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band
Kid Creole: The Young Pretender, founder of Kid Creole & The Coconuts
Coati Mundi: vibes orchestrator, August's key musical cohort
Bob Blank: producer / engineer. It all happened at his place
Carol Colman: relentlessly funky bass player
Yogi Horton: drummer R.I.P, Colman's partner
Adriana Kaegi: Mama Coconut, co-originator of Kid Creole & The Coconuts, vocalist, choreographer, dancer, stylist, designer
Michael Zilkha: founder of Ze Records, young whizzkid, musical entrepreneur
Cristina: Zilkha's posh babe sang on a lark, cut a classic
Chris Blackwell: éminence grise, funded Ze Records
Don Armando aka Sonny Bonilla: artist, August's mentor
Gichy Dan aka Frank Passalaqua (TK sp.): soulful crooner
Fonda Rae: singer, early member of Kid Creole’s crew
Cory Daye: sultry vocalist of Savannah Band; Stony's muse
Lori Eastside: provocative streetwise dancer and early Kid Creole singer
Sue-Sandra Minsky: the petite Bronx minx known as Sue Who, August's original sidekick and amour. She'd do anything for the band and her man
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(Horns strike up)
Turn down the lights, settle back in your seats or put on your dancing shoes, and let them entertain you. Press the button and rewind the decades back to when all New York was dancing - and that means uptown in salsa joints in Spanish Harlem, elsewhere uptown in the Bronx where hip hop was learning to (be) fly, and downtown where the punky no-wave fringe was beginning to shake it like crazy in dives like Hurrah's, the Roxy, Area, the Squat Theatre and the Mudd Club. The shiny silver Disco monster was a freaky release, a blessing that would soon seem a curse for many live musicians.
What a different New York it was then. "At nightclubs, there was no $1000.00 for a table or you don't get in," says Adriana. "In those days you got in if you were cool. Everyone cared about being creative and supported each other's showcases."
Artists could always find crash pads within walking distance of the nightspots that were crucibles for the new mixed-up aesthetic. Conga players jammed on stoops and sidewalks. Kids in Kangols would chuck some lino on the ground and breakdance in Union Square. Strolling home through the Lower East Side at dawn from a rooftop party, you'd hear roosters crow in the squatted gardens that were once burned-out buildings. In after-hours clubs, teens would graffiti the loft walls while the DJ played. Every corner, every night suggested adventure, as you can hear in this music.
"Believe me, when you leave New York you go nowhere," as August Darnell sings on the early Kid Creole & The Coconuts track, ‘Going Places’. In tune with the times, that nugget of wisdom was imparted to Darnell by hip hop supermother, Sylvia Robinson of prototypical rap label Sugar Hill Records, some of whose players were part of that cookin' Savannah Band / Kid Creole brew.
"'Going Places' was an important song for us," Darnell remembers. "It was one of those great sessions where we did 623 takes and then picked the first one. It wasn't about making money, it was about experimentation. Loved those days."
And rightly so, because on this CD you can hear the emancipation of August Darnell and his transition from sideman to band leader, from kid brother to Godfather. On the journey, he and his truly motley crew experimented with way-out sounds culled from the palette of movie soundtracks, musicals, Westerns, Caribbean grooves, disco and funk and their own fevered imaginations.
Freeze frame on that moment - 1979-‘81 to be precise - and then set that stomping history to slo-mo so we can really scrutinise the brothers and sisters who populate these (mostly) long-lost tracks, gathered together (kudos Carol Colman!) and re-conjured from casually hoarded cassettes, or dusty masters that needed to be baked.
Meet Stony Browder, the warped, autocratic musical mastermind behind Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, whose triumphant ‘Cherchez La Femme’ stopped hearts and launched several careers. Long and lean, he looks like a matinée idol in his butcher boy cap. His is the vision and his the whim that decrees whether the artists gathered on this compilation are in or out of the Savannah Band.
Our other leading man is a wiry, stylish young lyricist, bass player and roué called August Darnell. His position in the Savannah Band is ambiguous, coloured by the fact that he's Stony's Browder's kid brother.
The Savannah Band with Stony, August, "Sugar Coated" Andy Hernandez, singer Cory Daye and drummer Mickey Sevilla open the curtains onto a decadent yet innocent alternate universe. Sirens in 1930s tea gowns entrance you with languorous, voluptuous rhythms adorned with risqué lyrics; big band and little island motifs mingle to the swish of tropical rain.
Together, the Browder boys defy convention and pillage their passions to invent a new breed. Of convoluted and deliberately obfuscated racial heritage, the brothers decide to promote their pan-genetic Creole Creed: a better, brighter reality that ignores gender and colour restrictions.
Unfortunately, claiming their mixed heritage with pride was largely perceived by "radical" American youth as almost heinously passing for white; both Savannah Band and later, Kid Creole & The Coconuts, always fared better in Europe than at home.
Balancing the Browder Brothers' tussling testosterone are the women - creative, earthy, sensual. Love and music intermingle in all their multi-level scenarios. Dangerous dames like Adriana Kaegi aka Mama Coconut, a blonde Swiss bombshell who hit Manhattan as a dance student. Soon she becomes August's muse and co-conspirator as he splits from his brother. It is at a dinner for her 21st birthday that she, August and Mundi will grab a napkin and scribble the plan for the Kid Creole extravaganza, with its dancing girls a sexy send-up of the Southern states' worst fear - a gaggle of blond beauties utterly controlled by a mulatto in expensive clothing.
"In actuality, August and I were dismissed from the Savannah Band by Stony," Mundi recalls. "He was not too thrilled with our efforts to create what would turn out to be a "lifeboat" for us. One day we showed up to rehearsals and there were our replacements - though August and I had intended to continue with Savannah Band while still doing our "Creole" thing." So now Kid Creole & The Coconuts really step out.
Early Kid Creole is a diva's delight. There's kooky, zany bigmouth Lori Eastside, who always scores A for Attitude, known for her elastic physical flexibility and edgy stage presence as much as for her voice. Creator of the dance system, Rockercise, Eastside is both band front woman and Mundi's passion when the Kid Creole combo is very young. You can hear her being a snotty, endearing Lower East Side brat on the Coconuts' girl group song, 'He's Not Such A Bad Guy After All', a direct quote from Addy's defence of her bad boy hubby that he turned into a song. "She'd always stand up for her man," August remembers fondly, "and this song was a tongue in cheek way of taking it further out."
When August pisses Lori off, she leaves the band but shows up at a gig specially to jeer and pelt her former boss with rotten fruit. Eastside grows up to be a top casting director in the movies.
Earnest, passionate Miss Carol Colman, August's loyal lieutenant, is the sorcerer's apprentice. One of the exceedingly few female bass players out there, Colman's propulsive style made August declare her his bass soulmate on first hearing. Captured from the session and r'n'b circuit, Colman gets to work for the Creole cause, inspired by her devotion to the genius of August Darnell. Her man back then was drummer Yogi Horton, who died in 1987. Also known as Luther Vandross's drummer, Yogi is also key at Sugar Hill. "That disco beat meant a drummer could not stop using one hand playing that pea soup hi hat. Yogi's goal was to END THAT BEAT so drummers could play their drums again," recalls Colman. "Even after people began programming drum machines, they still called Yogi for sessions, just to overdub his mighty tom toms."
Together, Colman and Horton were a human rhythm machine and they truly turn out many of these tracks. At sessions like Don Armando's 'I'm An Indian, Too' they don't even know which singer will grace these tracks - but any vocalist's lucky to ride one of these beat babies.
Curvaceous Gauguin-esque beauty Fonda Rae is soon to find her own success with the juicy disco smash ‘Over Like A Fat Rat’ but at the moment captured here, when she sings with Taana Gardner on ‘Going To A Showdown’, she tells friends she's worried that her velvety, church-based vocals don't mesh with the Coconuts' brittle sopranoes. Fonda Rae never commits fully to the Kid Creole crowd - although she looks dynamite in the Coconuts' coconut bras and grass hula skirts that Addy makes for early downtown gigs at the Ritz, where Bob Marley comes to see them play.
Sue Who is really sassy little Susandra Minsky, a minx from the Bronx who kvetches on 'Paradise,' originally the B-side of her version of 'My Boy Lollipop.' August's first love, Susandra lived with him on Riverside Drive even before the legendary Mimi became his muse, followed by Adriana. Susandra, who later entranced Bob Blank, shopped the Savannah Band tapes and helped score their RCA deal. Back in the day, pre-Zilkha, Susandra is Cory Daye's best friend and the unsung heroine of the Savannah Band, even working in Ninth Avenue bars to help keep the whole crowd afloat.
Stony Browder's extravagant fancies set the tone for much of the madness to come. The singer with a voice like a butterfly kiss, Cory Daye, who Adriana always says is her favourite singer ever, is abruptly promoted from backing singer to lead when the brothers fail to find their "hearthrob male crooner”. "You're gonna have to do it, then," Stony instructs Daye. "August was shocked," Daye now recalls mischievously. But not as amazed as the Savannah Band's producer Sandy Linzer when, at the last minute, Stony summarily whips off 'Sunshower's full orchestration, stripping the track back to African head drum, triangle, bass and guitar. "It sent Sandy into a tizzy - he thought we were insane," chuckles Daye.
In fact, 'Sunshower' becomes a club classic and the sessions demonstrate the fantastic capacity of the extended Darnell family. Among Darnell's closest men in the team are Andy Hernandez, the Savannah Band vibes player, who's an arranger, orchestrator, percussionist, MC and dancer, soon to be known as Coati Mundi; and Savannah Band percussionist, Don Armando aka Sonny Bonnilla, who's Hernandez' neighbour in the Wagner Projects in Spanish Harlem.
"He was the oldest of all of us, including Stony. Sonny was an infamous hero, a free spirit," says Mundi. It is Don Armando's idea to use a familiar Latin chorus, "Oyelo Mi Sabor," (Listen to my flavour,) on the Savannah Band's ‘Sunshower,’ sung by the producer's kids. But it is Mundi's idea, decades before laptops and Garage Band, to create a loop of those sparse instruments that Stony had approved for 'Sunshower.' Their primitive but effective method involves recording a live beat onto 1/4" tape, cutting it up and physically making an actual loop of tape.
But outside of that happy synergy, there is fraternal friction in the Savannah Band camp. Living up to his name, Stony decrees that August must remain a bass player and lyricist only; but August's creative urges will not be denied. In an epic sibling power struggle, August fights with his capricious yet brilliant brother for his own artistic identity.
His primary musical partner in the breakout is the compact, dynamic Hernandez. Long a regular at Latino sessions all over Manhattan, Hernandez is beloved as a party-starter for every situation, a formidably skilled musician and a goofy, deft physical and verbal comic. When the Savannah Band's success make the whole team bankable, Hernandez runs his own sessions while August puts together bands to produce. They become regulars in the recording studios of Chappell Music and Mundi is the point person for all of August's productions, responsible for booking session musicians like Colman and Horton.
Surfing the wave of all the hot sounds pumping through the Manhattan streets, producer / engineer Bob Blank is the bridge and catalyst. He introduces beaming, curly-haired Michael Zilkha, a fledgling musical entrepreneur, to August Darnell, suggesting him as a possible producer for Zilkha's girlfriend Cristina.
"He was suave, clever, urbane, ironic," recalls Zilkha. "He really cared about lyrics, which I did too."
Their professional association is to define one of popular music's most original, thrilling eras with Zilkha's Ze label. The men will help fulfill one another's dreams.
And making possible the whole Ze extravaganza is a maverick who'd first shaken the music industry in the 1960s, Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, who saw some sort of kindred spirit in both men. "Michael can recognise and seek out talent that others don't see. You grasp at the opportunity of bringing a person like that into your company in some way. And Kid Creole I understood very well; I knew Cab Calloway's music, his inspiration, but August gave it that tropical spin. I loved Kid Creole."
So with the full backing of their label/s, the games begin. Many of our protagonists are flawed, imperfect heroes. Men like Gichy Dan and Don Armando are colourful characters who seem to rule the streets and the studios - but ultimately can't control either. Silken-voiced Staten Island crooner Gichy Dan, aka Frank Passalacqua, took the name of a 1950s rock'n'roll number, 'Beachwood # 9,' for his combo with Gilbert Colon, Juan Fabian and Lourdes Cotto.
"We would concoct this romance thing, then make up some profound story," as Mundi says. Gichy Dan was baby-faced, sweetly dispositioned and everyone adored him. Adriana says, "Gichy Dan would have been a new Johnny Mathis, if he hadn't died prematurely of AIDS." For August, "Gichy Dan was the precursor to Kid Creole & The Coconuts; had I known it, he would have been Kid Creole. I knew he could handle the material."
Don Armando, on the other hand, was a player, a persuasive ladykiller of lethal charm, a King of Cool who really became August's role model. Stony succumbed to his passion for sultry, smoky-voiced chanteuse Cory Daye, "his femme fatale," as August observes, and kicked both Gichy Dan and Don Armando out of the Savannah Band right before the release of the album; but August continued to frequent them both.
After the Savannah Band were a hit and August was bankable, he naturally turned to his old mentor to add some brio to the un-named, non-specific combo originally funded by RCA, which became Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band; by now, Don Armando had moved from Spanish Harlem to the 2nd Avenue Projects. His ‘Goin’ To A Showdown’ dated back to the Chappell Studios sessions with Colman and Horton, long before the Don Armando project was even thought of. Now it is adroitly re-purposed into what Mundi calls "a disco Western album with elements of salsa."
The sub-text of its pulp fiction sleeve, Fonda Rae dressed as an Indian squaw tied to a tree while Don Armando in a tuxedo holds a horse next to her as if to - what? rescue her? canter off into the sunset, solo? - is great material for a thesis. However, the screwball vibe was very personal. The musical-loving crew re-invent Irving Berlin's lyrics and score from 'Annie Get Your Gun,' for Don Armando's first single, 'I'm An Indian, Too.'
"We were all into those John Ford movies as children. Besides, me and Stony have Indian blood on our mother's side, and we had a running joke - 'That's the Indian in us!'" August says. "And of course we always felt like the Indian, the outsider."
"We all thought 'I'm An Indian, Too' was the hit record," recalls Michael Zilkha bemusedly, "but of course we had it completely wrong. It was the B-side, 'Deputy of Love,' which was actually a demo by Ronnie Rogers, that became huge. That's emblematic of Ze's history, I suppose," he self-deprecates sweetly.
Bob Blank and August Darnell's other house band, effectively, was The Aural Exciters, whose album was called 'Spooks In Space.' Their name came from a piece of outboard gear that Blank rented by the day, "designed to add oomph to the sound," Mundi remembers. "Instead of just making an anonymous compilation for all the artists at Ze Records, people like Ronnie Rogers, we thought of a name to give it some personality." Thus the Aural Exciters became a talent grab bag for this over-achieving artistic community. "It could be anyone who walked in," August recalls enthusiastically. "I'd have a few chords, but there were no parts. We'd just gather round the piano and start up, people would create parts and a song would evolve." Sometimes jams like 'Double On Back,' studio noodles that had become transitional links between songs onstage, grew to be songs themselves. On August and Addy's first date, he took her to an Aural Exciters session at Blank Tape. "I wound up in the sound booth blowing bubbles!" Adriana remembers with amusement. "Those were the sort of sound effects Bob Blank invented." For a flash of raw Aural Exciters madness, just check the tap dancing on 'Marathon Runner,' courtesy a young kid called Mickey Baker that Bob brought in to Blank Tape.
"We were into the energy of punk and new wave," says Mundi. "We were just goofing off, having fun. A regular adult label wouldn't have accepted us. Michael Zilkha was very important. He created a label that allowed us to express our creativity and enthusiasm for craziness."
Indeed, these tracks were cut in a frenzied circus of creativity with August and Michael Zilkha as ringmasters. Zilkha explains, "I always thought of it in theatrical terms as a repertory company. I liked the fact that August was very cinematic and told stories." Their tracks sparked off what was around them, like the out-of-it girl who hit on August at a club and tried to give him "Emile, you fool!" when the non-doper August confessed ignorance of the amyl nitrate "poppers" on offer. Sung by Christine Wiltshire, the result was 'Emile (Night Rate)' - geddit?
According to Blank, August was on the outs with Mimi, his muse of the moment, and chose to book his sessions from 12 p.m. on, thus ensuring he'd have somewhere to be overnight. Colman clearly recalls one later session, when August sent her out repeatedly to scavenge in the local garbage for beer bottles to smash on the wall in the sound booth. Getting the right smash took all night.
"I remember us as being very perfectionist. A lot of time was spent on these tracks, they were very rigorously made. They weren't spontaneous explosions, like the Troggs," says Michael Zilkha, then corrects himself. "Actually, the Aural Exciters were spontaneous. The whole world would kind of accumulate in the studio. And Cristina's lyrics for "Is That All There Is" just came out, like that, in one take with minimal vocal overdubs. That was spontaneous!"
The immediate project when Darnell met Zilkha was Cristina, who was taking time off from her history studies at Harvard. She impressed Bob Blank by swanning into his comparatively grotty downtown studio with her mother, both wearing identical mink coats.
So transgressive in every way was Cristina's lurid, delirious evocation of anything goes nightlife that it prompted a threatened lawsuit from legendary songwriters Leiber and Stoller who had originally crafted the song for Peggy Lee. "Yeah, Cristina was out for about a minute and then it was pulled," August recalls laconically.
Yet relish Cristina's dramatic declamation and wish you were there, raving, raging and yes, maybe even retching, beside her. "We didn't really look at her as talent, she was just the boss's girlfriend who we were working with, and why not," confesses Mundi, "but in retrospect, Christina was pretty awesome. Michael Zilkha decided he was going to give his girfriend the best session ever and it was magical."
"Even though it was an adaptation, 'Is That All There Is' showed that Cristina could write lyrics. She then went on to make her Christmas song 'Things Fall Apart' and then 'Sleep It Off' with Was (Not Was) - their first ever outside production and pretty brilliant. That album has become very fashionable in the digital era," Zilkha concludes.
Unbeknownst to some of the loose collective, while the multi-artist Darnell production machine is gaining speed, the Kid Creole and the Coconuts band are about to hit the road, wheels smoking, and swiftly pull out ahead.
As session bass player and lynchpin of the Aural Exciters, along with Horton, Carol Colman is amazed to discover when she turns up one day that her usual session and studio cohorts are now Kid Creole & The Coconuts, and that Andy Hernandez has suddenly mutated into this berserker Coati Mundi person. Hernandez was always a firecracker, and as Coati Mundi he explodes round the stage, simultaneously rapping, pounding percussion and reeling on those rubber legs; an earthy, slapstick foil to August's polished, high-class insouciance. Fully channelling the suave heartbreaker, Kid Creole, Darnell is even more dashing than before. "I liked to throw in really crazy things to totally undermine August's sophisticated lyrics," reminisces Mundi.
Therapeutically speaking, some analysts might construe Darnell's entire career as an extended primal scream of fury at being suppressed and controlled by Big Brother. If so, August channelled his rage compassionately. On tracks like 'Double On Back,' a tribute to Stony whose brilliance was never in doubt, one hears a very different August Darnell from the slick wordsmith and constructed characters of his narrative songs as Kid Creole. Over a funky, pumping jam that recalls Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and James Brown or prime Marvin Gaye vamps, Darnell blurts out his feelings with colloquial emotion. "I wanted Stony to come back to how he was before he went out there and got so paranoid, to come back to the guy he used to be," Darnell confides.
Leaving us wanting more in the best showbiz tradition, Ze Records' tantalising legacy includes groundbreakers like James White & The Blacks, Was (Not Was), Suicide and the Waitresses. But for fans of clever tropical funk, the jewel in the Ze crown has to be Kid Creole & The Coconuts, the band August, Addy and Coati Mundi form. Their original singers include Fonda Rae, very briefly even Cory Daye and Susandra Minsky before the format settles down to the Kid bouncing off Mundi and the three Coconuts, all clones of Adriana herself.
Album one, 'Off The Coast Of Me,' is largely re-vamped from the clan's Chappell demos while they were still with Savannah Band and RCA. By second album time, with 'Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places,' the band's personality is even stronger, as you can hear on 'Going Places’ and ‘I Am’. As forceful an identity statement as anything from the Savannah Band's Creole Creed, 'I Am' challenges the radio programmers who all concerned could already see would be a problem, as the eclectic Creole mix was regarded as TOO mixed and therefore unprogrammeable. Its hook, "Music belongs to the people" is so perky it sounds tongue in cheek -- but it isn't, really.
Mundi looks back fondly on his partnership with August, despite its own sibling-esque tensions that ultimately led to his departure from the band. But he always knew himself as a solo performer, too, and when Kid Creole was riding high he got to make his own solo album on Virgin in 1983, on which 'Pharaoh' appears. Mundi wrote 'Pharaoh' long before Kid Creole, or even Savannah Band. He was absorbed in the ideas of Muhammed Ali; the Black Panthers and their Puerto Rican equivalent, The Young Lords; enraged by the Vietnam War and fired up by tales of Hannibal and Cleopatra. "I wanted to write a social message song about greed, something revolutionary that would hit home," says Mundi. "To show that greed is not just in The Man but in your neighbours round the way."
By then, Kid Creole & The Coconuts had graduated from being an underground entity itching to bust out and were pop chart fixtures in Europe. The change came with their third album, 1982's 'Tropical Gangsters'. Ironically, contractual obligations and a pressing financial squeeze prompted Zilkha to submit 'Tropical Gangsters' to Sire Records' supremo Seymour Stein as a Kid Creole album, though it had actually been intended as August's solo work. Soon, hits like 'Annie I'm Not Your Daddy' 'Stool Pigeon' and 'I'm A Wonderful Thing, Baby,' dropped from 'Tropical Gangsters' like ripe mangoes from an abundant tree.
But this CD leaves the Kid Creole crew about to set sail on their great adventure, which would see them play for royalty and rogues in every land where drums make people dance. And that's everywhere.
The final Kid Creole track here, ‘Off The Coast of Me,’ was cut at Chappell Music; Zilkha came to the session but they hadn't signed yet. August's most intimate offering - a lyrical, lilting, non-ironic hula swoon - it's also a homage to his bond with his impossible but wonderful big brother Stony, who died in 2001. Clearly, it's a kissing cousin to our opening Savannah Band track, 'Sunshower,' on which, years before, Stony had so suddenly and savagely stripped away every embellishment to reveal a tune that whispers its way into your soul for always. For August, the song says everything about the endurance of the Browder Brothers' joint Utopia.
"'Off The Coast of Me' is our icon, the Kid Creole masterpiece. It's poetic and the tropical island imagery haunts me. For life."
(Bring in the strings -- glissando.)
Vivien Goldman, February 2008
