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
/

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

The material for Coconut Hotel was recorded in 1967 shortly after The Parable of Arable Land.

See also: Red Crayola's "The Group as It Is Today" essay, written June 1, 1967

Release

Mentioned as an upcoming release in July 1994

Test pressing dated January 20, 1995

Released March 25, 1995 by Drag City

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.

Frederick Barthelme

The second LP by the original group, which was released about thirty years later as Coconut Hotel, was a refinement of what we were intrigued by—noise, cut up into hat-size sections. The “one-second-pieces,” where we each played single sounds at unplanned but orchestrated-by-watching-each-other intervals, were a high point, as were various other concept pieces (three minutes of organ, for example, six hands on a piano, pieces for various prepared instruments). This is what the Crayola was about in ’67. This is what we played in the clubs in Houston, and in concerts in California, and what we recorded when we recorded a (possibly still unreleased) LP with the late John Fahey in Berkeley in 1967. This is what we did at the Berkeley Folk Festival, and at the Angry Arts Festival in Venice, California, and at Joan Crystal’s Lousiana Gallery openings, and just about wherever they’d let us back then. We started with “House of the Rising Sun” and a year later were taping contact microphones to our throats, and putting big copper wires in the place as guitar strings, miking ice (Steve Cunningham’s great moment), and trying out small electric motors. The idea was that pure, saintly sound could save you from certain death and that rock & roll was—dare I say it?—fundamentally compromised. We were not entirely wrong, as history has demonstrated.

Mayo Thompson, 2005

In a sense Coconut Hotel was more improvisatory than any of our other International Artists albums. Even though the tracks are much shorter. For instance, the piano piece that's on there is a pure improvisation in the sense of, OK, it's rolling. We didn't try 20 or 30 and take the best one. We took the first one. The guitar piece where the guitar has this completely eccentric tuning, I just had a go and that was it. The next thing we had was an organ build-up. It was like, this is what the organ sounds like, this is what it sounds like when you turn it on, this is what it sounds like when it goes from its quietest to its loudest note playing C.

Mayo Thompson, 2023

That music got us invited to the festival in Berkeley. It was the penultimate step before making sounds that raised the question: is that music? The label never really heard it. Lelan Rogers—our producer on the 'The Parable of Arable Land'—and Billy Jo Dillard, one of the lawyers who owned the label, sat on the grass out in front of the studio while we recorded. It’s our riposte, in a way, to what everyone else was doing. From the start we thought of putting paid to everything. Ideas were consumed in the making. We were making gestures after which there would be nothing left to do but quit, or repeat—go thematic—idiomatic—rehash—play kitsch and or camp it up—provide plentitude—all nice of course—entertainment. We understood that people like music. We, too, of course. 'Coconut Hotel' was recorded at Walt Andrus’ studio—where we made ‘The Parable of Arable Land’. We worked on it with him and with Frank Davis, dear people. We recorded stereo, everything live, no overdubs. We had some plans and improvised on them. We knew it was likely unlike anything else going on. A bit mad-science perhaps, but in a good way I think, not meant unfriendly. It’s finally out on Drag City Records.

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.

David Grubbs, 2022

Sitting in a studio in Chicago with Mayo and Albert Oehlen and listening to the master tape of this the first time it had been played in decades was one for the ages. Wild, wild record.

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

Heyfever

1996

Carsten Görig

Ich war ja letzten Sommer mal bei einem Konzert in Hamburg im Knust und es war schönes Wetter und Gregor und York haben irgendeine Band interview! (ich glaube Flying Saucer Attack) undich stand vorder Tür und trank ein Weizen und ließ mich wärmen, als die vermutlich schönste Frau, die ich im letzten Jahr sah vorbeikam und mich mit weichen Knien da stehen ließ. Sie war dann auch im Knust und ich stand dann zwei Stunden in unglaublicher Nervosität rum, fand die Bands ja niedlich und alles, ging dann aber mit unglaublich mieser Laune da weg (ratet mal (und fragt mal meine beiden Mitfahrer oder Fahrer, je nachdem, nach meiner Laune)), nun jedenfalls spielten einige Wochen später auch Red Krayola am selben Ort ein fantastisches Konzert, aber diese Frau war nicht dort, was nichts machte. Diese Platte klingt nicht so, wie. Red Krayolaan diesem Abend waren, aber das macht auch nichts. Hier regnen Gitarren und kleine Mäuse irippeln über das Klavier und das alles wurde 1967 aufgenommen, als alle die, die in Neuseeland heute ähnliches versuchen noch mit roter Kreide Tafeln beschmierten. Erwartet keine Songs, aber gute frei Sachen, die aber dennoch sehr nach Red Krayola klingen, wieso ist mir ein Rätsel.

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.