Coconut Hotel

Coconut Hotel
Studio album by The Red Crayola
Released	March 25, 1995
Recorded	1967
Studio	Walt Andrus Studio Houston, Texas
Label	Drag City
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Track listing

Side A

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Boards"	6:28
2.	"Water Pour"	4:39
3.	"One-Second Pieces" (36)	3:24

Side B

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Organ Buildup"	1:05
2.	"Vocal"	6:28
3.	"Free Guitar"	6:27
4.	"One-Minute Imposition"	1:08
5.	"Piano"	2:10
6.	"Guitar"	1:28
Total length:		33:21

Background

Valle Aridane Hotel, 2021

Recorded 1967

Released 1995

Personnel

The Red Crayola

• Frederick Barthelme
• Steve Cunningham
• Mayo Thompson

Technical

• The Red Crayola - producer

• Walt Andrus - engineer

Cover art

The cover photo was taken by Mayo Thompson, likely in 1966, and shows the Coconut Hotel in the Canary Islands. The building is now the Valle Aridane Hotel.

The band photo on the back cover is by Les Blank.

Issues

	Release	Format	Label	Cat. No.	Notes
	1995	LP	Drag City	DC62
	1995	CD	Drag City	DC62CD
	2014	LP	Drag City	DC62

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 1996

The first record did business. IA called me and said, let's have a second album, we need another album.  We recorded a second album, Coconut Hotel, which the label didn't like at all, which was this abstract music, the most extreme version of the logic that we could conceive of at that time, and also answered to our needs. I mean, if people are going to claim that they're making innovations, we felt anybody who makes these claims had better make them in light of what's going on in jazz, and what's going on in R&B, and places where music is--there's certain kinds of things where experimentation within forms, within closures, are going on. To talk about experimental music and not know Cage seemed to us a fatuous proposition. You have to know these things. Our music was informed by steering a course through those things that we saw as landmarks, and various things that we saw us piles of dogshit in the street.

Mayo Thompson, 1999

Coconut Hotel is the key to the Live 1967 stuff. It is both thoughtful and freeform. The improvisational aspects come out of jazz and chance music, like John Cage. The reason that it sound coherent today is that we got quite good at it. As far as raw musical talent goes, I have a limited amount. What I bring to music is an ear for a sound that accommodates a lot of things that don't typically go together.

Reviews

CMJ New Music Report

July 3, 1995

We casually dismissed initial pre-release announcements of Coconut Hotel, the great "lost" Red Krayola album from 1967, thinking it was merely a joke from those nutty pranksters at Drag City, but lo and behold, here is an unheard curio from the Mayo Thompson archives. Bearing little relation to either the freak-out psychedelia of Parable of Arable Land (1967) or the wonderfully oddball songs of God Bless The Red Crayola And All Who Sail With Her (1968), Coconut Hotel is not a great revelation but a rather interesting oddity: Thompson and Krayola kohorts Rick Barthelme and Steve Cunningham play spare improvisations with a pile of different instruments — occasional plucks, miscellaneous horn bleats, piano tinkling, wandering drones, the sound of pouring water, etc. The highlight is several dozen "One Second Pieces" for trumpet/piano/percussion.

Testcard #1

September 1995

AllMusic

Richie Unterberger

As strange as the Red Krayola's debut album was, their proposed follow-up, Coconut Hotel, was far stranger. This all-instrumental recording was more appropriately classified as twentieth-century avant-garde music than rock, and was rejected by International Artists for release in 1967, finally seeing the light of day on Drag City in 1995. All power to the Krayola for doing things their own way, but it's not hard to understand International Artists' reasoning. This has so little commercial potential that it makes Zappa's Lumpy Gravy sound like AM radio fodder. Dissonant exotic plucked strings, spooky organ clusters, 36 (yes, 36) "One-Second Pieces"--these are not tunes that you can hum, by any stretch of the imagination. Some acoustic guitar pieces bear the influence of John Fahey (with whom the Krayola recorded some unreleased material around this time). It's totally uncompromising, and rather wearisome, to be honest. It's like nothing else that nominally "rock" groups were doing in 1967, but it's not nearly as interesting as their official releases from the late '60s, which had at least a few loose ties to conventional song structures.

The Trouser Press guide to '90s rock

1997

[...] Coconut Hotel, however, is pushing it. The all-improvised doodles on various real (guitar, horns, bass, piano, organ) and found instruments (mainly splashing water, handy clangables, shakeables and chalkboard-pleasant scrapeables) was recorded in 1967 by the original Red Crayola (Thompson, Steve Cunningham and Frederick Barthelme) and understandably rejected by International Artists as the followup to The Parable of Arable Land. The trio's photo on the back cover is no less unnerving or off-putting than the random contents, which could only serve as a fatal test for hypertension or the soundtrack to something far more squirm-inducing than Eraserhead.