Wednesday, November 09, 2005

SWAP-MEET SUPERSTARS pt2: BOB VIDO

Monday's post about Mingering Mike reminded me of Bob Vido: they were both musical visionaries who only made private recordings complemented by an enormous amount of visual art (fake album covers, etc), both were discovered when their life's work was put out for sale at a flea-market, and both discoverers established web-sites dedicated to their discovery. But unlike the recently uncovered Mingering Mike (both the alive-and-well man and his work), Vido and his wild music and paintings came to light only after his death.

Many of you may already know about Vido thanks to a mention in Irwin Chusid's book and companion CDs "Songs In The Key of Z," (essential reading and listening, by the way, if you're new to all this), and a song ("Boo-Bah-Bah") posted on Otis Fodder's "365 Project." But you may not know that Vido's discoverer, Los Angeles' Jonathan Ward, has added more songs to the website.

Unlike the down-to-earth Mingering Mike, Vido fancied himself a mystic/scientist/philosopher, penning a bewildering book detailing his invented field of "Rhizology." And say what you will about his music, but the Bulgarian-born Angeleno, who worked as a commercial draftsman for most of his life, was an excellent, if eccentric, visual artist by anyone's standards. I especially like his space/ufo paintings.

Vido called himself a one-man-band who could play live on a variety of instruments over backing tapes, but it's yet to be determined if Vido ever did perform in public. His songs are divided into jaunty accordian ruminations on bizarre subjects like "Fridgenometry," or horn-driven flights of fancy that have been compared to Space-Age free-jazz madman Sun Ra. These are just excerpts, unfortunately, but Ward is hoping for a CD release someday:

"The Fridgenometer"
"Total Creative Music"
"Piano Concerto"

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff, although not as great as the classic, Boo-Bah-Bah.
Respect to the people who dig in the other side of history and come up with these kinds of gems for us.

Anonymous said...

this shit is crazy man where can i get the full songs at i want them

Mr Fab said...

Unfortunately, there is only one man on the face of the earth (so far as we know) who has these recordings, so we just have to wait until he releases them.

Anonymous said...

If you really want them, go to WFMU.org and go to the search page. Type in Bob Vido and find all the streams with his songs. You can use a tool like "total recorder" to record the audio stream from your soundcard - that way you can record anything you listen to over the web. I think on Irwin Chusid's show you can fid @ least 4 or 5 full length vido songs.