These Hits Are Hilarious Misses

Grade-school chorus can be a wasteland of musical inspiration. But sometimes a teacher will take such a different approach in molding the angelic voices to his own vision that something truly weird results.

That was the case a quarter-century ago when a Western Canadian teacher named Hans Genger got the youthful singers from miles around to gather in an echo-prone gymnasium one Saturday, where he captured their versions of a number of then-current pop and rock songs on a primitive two-track tape recorder.

The resulting album, never meant to go beyond the kids’ parents or indulgent grandparents, earned a cult following among bad-music connoisseurs.

There’s something about wrongheaded approaches to ‘60s pop that has always attracted fanatics who previously have gobbled deliciously bad reissues by Sebastian Cabot, Sammy Davis and the undisputed king of skewed music, William Shatner.

The Langley Schools Music Project’s “Innocence and Despair” (on Bar/None Records) is different from those ego-driven star projects. There is a guileless innocence to the kids’ approach and an occasionally transporting choral blast that makes it work like the best of inspired folk art.

That happens especially when the chorus tackles selections that are more out of this world, including David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” whose performance here is probably more informed by the Carpenters cover. The approaches are weird enough to have made originators notice.

“The backing arrangement is astounding,” Bowie says of the “Space Oddity” cover. “The effect of all those young voices singing ‘Calling Occupants’ is charming,” says Richard Carpenter.

It’s when the students accompany their voices with their own stabs at instruments that the amateurism turns to hilarity.

Picking up on Brian Wilson’s wavelength, the album works best on the Beach Boys songs, a half dozen of them. The only other group so well represented is Wings, whose “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” opens the set and whose tempo-changing “Band on the Run” confounds the kids later.

Because this is the ‘70s, there are other oddities, from Barry Manilow (“Mandy”) to the Eagles (“Desperado”) to Michael Murphy (“Wildfire”). But the kids seem to get most into Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Into Something Good” and the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night.”

“Innocence and Despair” falls into the category of fascinating found art, whose original participants are probably as puzzled by its reemergence as will be more conventional music fans.

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Roger Catlin is rock music critic at the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.