So I’ve been revisiting these forums a lot lately, as I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now (and which I know plenty of people here have already done), namely: put together a personal playlist of WBM demos & rarities.
For the most part I arranged things chronologically (as best I could, anyway), and for “liner notes” I mostly relied on posts here by D-Mod and Matt and a few others. But for the 11ToW portion of my bespoke anthology, I wanted to hold back the Maui rehearsal of “Surf and/or Die” and put it side by side with “Medical Science” as culminating companion pieces. And—for show-and-tell time—here, inspired by y’all, is what I wrote:
The Last Act of the Show
In principle, a run-through of “Surf and/or Die” belongs in the basket with all the other Maui tracks. And the rehearsal take below is a relatively early one, nothing special, with the Tribe banging on all cylinders but still feeling out their approach. Yet the song itself is so singular (“the high point, the crowning achievement, of 11ToW”—yeah: like Matt Kerns, I, too, am saying that) that its anthological reprise deserves a kind of ultimo pride of place. Or, as it happens, penultimo, as there’s also one last finished tune out of Maui, “Medical Science,” that Dr. Becker only saw fit to lay on the Japanese. The aforementioned S. Victor Aaron actually squeezes both tunes into the same breath, deeming it “a real head scratcher as to why [“Medical Science”] got left off the American version” of Whack. It may be “no ‘Surf and/or Die,’” he says, somewhat deprecatingly (allowing as how “MS” nevertheless has a “good groove” that “goes a long way“),“but it belonged on the same album.”
Of course an apple is no orange, either. And yet: different species, genus, family, order, class, and phylum…but same kingdom. Just like W. H. Auden’s Old Masters, when the late 20th-century word-painter W. C. Becker sees “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky”—or, for that matter, a perfectly ordinary “bruised and battered” soul, “[l]ooking for a lonely heart to take refuge in”—he doesn’t flinch, or look away, or sail calmly on. (About suffering he was never wrong, the Moody Bastard; how well he understands its human position.) He examines the thing, he turns it over, he proffers a pitiless diagnosis. “And so what about… / … that hypothetical spectre, your gilt-edged soul / Which defied many perils, in the face of all reason…?” Well, you know…medical science is helpless in a case like this.
P.S.: and just wanted to add some very belated but very deep gratitude for this site and everything on it. It's been such a soul-tonic to spend so much time with Walter's music again. Three-plus albums' worth and counting...crazy, and beautiful.