The Steve Reynolds Program - Bam Bam
Another day, another rambling you don't have to pay for! How lucky can you be? (the answer is "noticeably")
I'm in the middle of watching La Belle Noiseuse, the four hour French film about an old artist painting a young model. If you like the scratchy sounds of nibs on paper, you'll LOVE this movie. This and Frank Auerbach - Legendary Painter In The Studio are like the fiction/documentary versions of the same thing. Watch, compare, and pretend you're an old man with talent and drive but lacking in social skill. It's fun!
Song #4
Bam Bam
by Sister Nancy
Some songs instantly bring an image or memory to mind without fail. Bam Bam is one for me. When I hear Sister Nancy’s voice echoing over a clarinet-led horn section and low end bass, I clearly see my pal Allen’s face moving in tight clockwise circles, like a cat following a laser pointer on the floor in front of him.
We were at a friend’s basement party in Brooklyn. He lived in south Williamsburg and was friends with some third-generation Brooklyn dudes. (Once in a while I’d go meet up with this crew at the waterfront “park”--then just a patch of dirt by large broken concrete slabs and rocks on the East River-- and watch the sun set over the still-standing World Trade Center. Blunts would be smoked and there’d be lots of talk like “Oh shit! There’s some mad purple in this fuckin’ sunset!”) One of his pals was deejaying in the corner and had a wide range of people dancing.
Allen and I, the Okies in the room, weren’t dancing. We were just drinking and smoking and taking it in. I remember a Russian gal dancing as badly as anyone I’ve ever seen, but she was having a blast so it was great. A six note intro for a song came on. The bass played on the up beat and I realized the d.j. had switched from straight high-tempo dance to something slower, more interesting.
Immediately, I loved Sister Nancy’s toasting. Her nasal voice almost was the lead woodwind in sound and the punctuation of the words bam bam was almost scatting. It may mean something in Jamaica, but in that basement it was a sound to luxuriate in.
I half-asked half-commanded Allen to find out what was playing so he walked over to the table where the d.j. was. Instead of talking to him, Allen did the thing of leaning over the record to read the label. AI watched his face moving in circles to catch the words—the aforementioned image forever in my brain.
He serpentined back to our spot and leaned over to yell in my ear. “’BAM BAM’ by Sister Nancy!” He pronounced Bam Bam like Barney and Betty Rubble’s annoyingly unfunny baby’s name/catch phrase. The party raged on.
The next day I went to the neighborhood record store (Napster was due to drop in a few months) and luckily found the track on the London label Soul Jazz Records compilation 300% Dynamite. That comp, full of what I now know to be the biggest classic Jamaican tunes I missed in my life until then, played constantly in our 400 square foot apartment and on headphones on my subway commute.
It was a great shake-up from the indie rock I almost exclusively listened to. It led to buying all the Dynamite comps I could find. And it led to lots of listens to Sister Nancy singing about her prowess in the dj field.
Some say “bam bam dilla” means bum deal, but Sister Nancy has said she took the nonsense syllables from albino toaster Yellowman, who I only know from “Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt” off a high school hippie friend’s reggae cassette. Whatever it is, I get an impression of a perfect confluence of mood and production to almost bring me back to being high in a basement and watching a face going in circles every time I hear it. And that's my happy place.