Bocephus King
All Children Believe In Heaven
Tonic Records TRCD 0103
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Bocephus
King and his big show band The Rigalattos caused ripples of excitement
on every festival they played in Europe, the US and of course
his native Canada. That was the summer of 2000 and he had just
released his third album: Blue Sickness.. Three years
later the tall dark stranger from Vancouver is back with a brand-new
album and a whole a cast of new musicians.
All Children Believe In Heaven is an extraordinary
creation. It is totally different from anything you will have
heard this year and from anything you are likely going to hear.
It's a nightmarish movie scenario about booze, pills, doom, death,
destruction and religion, not necessarily in ths order, set to
a soundtrack of exuberant, almost operatic music. It is starring
Jesus and Montgomery Clift and has cameo roles for Buddha, Mother
Mary, Groucho Marx and many others.
King introduces his album with two quotes. One by Rev. Theolopolous
Jones, the other by the good doctor Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter's
children who believed in heaven were the flower children, "A
generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers who never understood
the old mystic fallacy of the acid culture. The desperate assumption
that someone, or at least some force is tending the light at
the end of the tunnel."
King's children are just as doomed. Their belief in heaven
is lost on a long and desperate trip leading deeper and deeper
into the tunnel. All Children Believe In Heaven is the
gloomiest, most death-ridden album I have heard for a long time,
but what keeps it from being depressing and dreary, is the same
sort of perversely uplifting excitement that is also transmitted
by certain violent and dark movies. Bocephus King likes movies.
He also likes John Coltrane and Townes Van Zandt. It's all
there in his music and a lot more.
King is a superb lyricist and musician. Not only has he written
all ten songs and the instrumental title track himself and plays
about ten instruments on the album, he is also responsible for
all the arrangements. We're talking about stunning arrangements
here that give the music a Vaudevillian, circus-like character.
Send in the clowns....but there is little room for clowns in
Bocephus King's world. His world is a boxing arena where Jesus
takes bets on his soul ("Jesus the Bookie"), a wasteland
where "the faithless hope death will be painless,"
("They Love Each Other.") and heaven is "just
a death away" ("St.Hallelujah"). Nothing funny
down here, no sir.
As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Gonna duck and dive
I'm gonna dodge the left
Abraham's gonna referee
And Neal Cassidy's gonna pray for me
Morricone plays a lullaby.
("Jesus the Bookie")
Do you want to meet a man who can namedrop Muddy Waters, John
the Baptist, Jake La Motta, Mother Mary, Muhammed Ali, Roberto
Duran, Judas, Henry Miller, Abraham, Neal Cassidy, Morricone,
Ray Carver and Ali Baba and all of his his forty thieves in just
one song? Meet Bocephus King! Do you want to meet a man who
can hide at least a dozen of musical quotes from the last sixty
years of popular music into just one song? Meet Bocephus King.
Do you want to meet a man who can cover oriental, (Country&)
Western and Balkan music in just one song? Meet Bocephus King.
If King's not a genius, he must be at least some sort of Canadian
equivalent of one.
King's obsession with religion against a backdrop of street
violence is unsettling. The opener "St.Hallelujah"
smells of Delta swamp and of New Orleans in spite of the "New
York blues" the singer claims to have. But wherever he
looks from Mexico to San Francisco, "memories and highways's
(are) cutting up history's wrists" and "babies (are)
crying absolutely forever/ reached high for God and lost the
beat."
"Wreck of the Century" continues where "St.Hallelujah"
left off. It's a junkie's lament where "your messiah's
not late, he just isn't coming," where Babylon's burning
and "it's too late to stop/ we've gone too far." The
music is dramatic Bowie/Ziggy Stardust with the Byrds
seemingly floating in and out.
Tragic actor Montgomery Clift stars in "Goodnight Forever
Montgomery Clift." This is what you'd probably get when
you told Santana and Steely Dan to improvise on the Kinks' "Lola."
And that's only the music. The lyrics are Hollywood- and hell-bound
with "benzendine ghosts on highways from here to Tangiers"
and "Jesus' son face down on his rails."
Blackout on Broadway, baby, love is a myth
And it's goodnight forever Montgomery Clift
Well it's bombs over Babylon and every last idol will fall.
A strange but pleasant combination of Mariachi and Indian
music introduces "They Love Each Other," a gorgious
post-punk powerpop tune subtly refering to "ladies of the
canyon" whom everybody wants, but no one can have which
is good news, because - after all - life is "too long and
costs too much money." Exit Bocephus King only to return
in the next scene and welcome us "to the land of the murdered
love story." Accompanied by romantic guitars, this classic
love-gone-wrong duet (with Coco Love Alcorn?) comes as close
to a country song as anything does on this album, though words
as
Forget that we met but remember we parted
I should have stopped dead, before all of this started
are may-be slightly too sarcastic for the genre. And lines
as
All things are broken, that which haven't been borrowed
On your finger today, in the pawn shop tomorrow
It hurt to be born; now it hurts to be breathing
While death is approaching city limits this evening.
are definitely more Johnny Dowd than Johnny Cash.
"Hollywood" starts cheerful like a pop song from
the sixties, then continues like a mini-opera built on several
layers of cheerful sixties and seventies ditties (Loving Spoonful,
Mamas& Papas, Sparks, T-Rex). The lyrics, however, are far
from cheerful. Hollywood, in the eyes of the writer, is clearly
not the place to be.
There's no stars
Except for sidewalks
Prescription junkies detox!
Or washed up be thy name.
It is desolate, dangerous and vanity- and insanity-infested,
not even worthwhile dreaming about. "Just go to sleep, don't
go to Hollywood," King repeats again and again before he
gets drowned out by very Californian beach music and the clinking
of cocktail glasses..
"It Hollows You Out" starts as a laid-back reggae tune,
but quickly transforms into late-seventies Iggy Pop.
There's truth in your lies
And dust in your veins
You'll die in your sleep if you're lucky
You've been looking for meaning in nothing
If you go down to Chinatown
What you lose will not be found
A female doo-wop choir and the sound of an accordeon give
this menacing anti-drug song an almost unbearable lightness.
It goes right in and hollows you out
Hollows you out like a black hole
It goes right in and it hollows you out
And when it leaves there's only echoes.
"Lullaby Blues" is not much of a blues, it's Santana's
"Samba Pa Ti" mixed with a calypso rhythm and bits
and pieces of Queen thrown in, if my ears don't deceive me.
The lyrics set off describing what sounds like a "shooting
gallery" where
Forensics men are everywhere
Searching from the bottom to the top of the stairs
For a fingerprint or a strand of hair
But there was nothing to tell that there was anyone there.
Unfortunately, I then get lost in these rather intricate lyrics.
Sometimes too many images can be too much. Happens in the movies
as well.
I have similar problems with the "Stella Bella Blue,"
an otherwise charmingly beautiful song reminiscent of The Kinks'
"Lazy Sunday Afternoon" with a lovely Spanish guitar
intro by, I presume, Paul Rigby, a great guitar player from Calgary,
Alberta who has been playing with Bocephus for a long time.
The title track "All Children Believe In Heaven,"
is a classy piece of music that changes halfway through from
an oriental tune into a Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack
and back, then shifts into Balkan gear before switching back
into oriental mood. After that a subway trein passes and takes
us all back home. I hope some filmmaker, maybe a Wim Wenders
or Jim Jarmisch type of guy, will pick it up and use it. That
the title track closes the album and that it's an instrumental
is King's final clever chess move. He has told the stories of
his doomed children in ten songs and, somehow, there are no words
left or as Rev. Theolopolous Jones is quoted: "All hope
can never be lost but, after all is said and done, the bloodstains
will be the least of our worries."
There's only one negative thing about All Children Believe
in Heaven , and that only concerns the American fans: so
far it's only released in Canada and Europe. For the American
readers who live up north a visit to a record shop just across
the border is highly recommended.
www.bocephusking.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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