So Bad It’s Good

The 60 Canadian schoolchildren fumbled their way through Beach Boys and David Bowie songs, singing out of tune and drumming off beat. It was music only a parent could love, and that’s exactly who it was intended for when the Langley Schools Music Project was recorded in an echo-y gymnasium 26 years ago.

But today this novelty recording has not only been reissued commercially, it has gone through four pressings since its October release--the latest musical obscurity to bubble up to the outer edges of the mainstream in what has come to be known as “outsider music.”

“It’s like your homework project winning the Nobel Prize,” said Hans Fenger, who was 29 and new to teaching when he started recording his students on a two-track tape machine in 1976. “To me, I just made music with kids. We had a good time, but I never thought of it outside the immediate realm that it was in.”

Most outsider musicians don’t think beyond the immediate realm. Their music is so far afield of convention that they know its chances for mass popularity are next to nil--even its most successful artists are only moderately so by mainstream commercial standards.

Prized for its bumbling imperfection, naive originality and unflinching honesty, outsider music isn’t for everyone, yet every few years a recording is discovered by someone with music industry connections. What was once an odd and little-known piece of music is picked up for distribution, played on free-form radio and sold in record stores. While the first impulse in listening to it is often to laugh, it has a quality that keeps listeners coming back and, in the process, often wins the artists a cult-like following.

The Langley Schools Music Project is merely the latest in a string of unlikely acts that have enjoyed outsider success in the last decade. Acts such as the Del Rubio Triplets (a trio of gray-haired go-go gals from San Pedro who toured nursing homes, strumming their guitars and sing-speaking hits by Devo and the Rolling Stones) and the Shaggs (three sisters whose father forced them to form a band in 1967). Barely able to tune their instruments, let alone play them, the Shaggs’ drumming sounded “like a peg-leg stumbling through a field of bald Uniroyals,” rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote.

Sound unlistenable? It is to the average music fan. But one man’s trash being another’s treasure, outsider music is gaining a growing cadre of listeners who view it as a welcome alternative to the perfectly produced confections that dominate today’s music charts.

“It’s an antidote to what people are hearing on the radio. Here’s something that’s real. It’s flawed, but it’s genuine,” said Irwin Chusid, host of the Incorrect Music program on WFMU, a New Jersey public radio station that champions outsider music, and author of “Songs in the Key of Z” (A Cappella, 2000) and a Web site (keyofz.com)on the subject.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be hearing it on commercial radio anytime soon.

“It’s hard to imagine the Langley Schools being on KROQ or MTV,” said Jon Dolan, an associate editor at Spin magazine, although it has been on NPR. “Kitsch things can make it into the mainstream, but it’s usually through more obscure channels.”

Outsider music has come to encompass everything from singing puppets to something called song-poems, making a clean definition difficult. As one fan put it, it’s all in the listening. There isn’t a formula so much as a quality to the music. Generally speaking, the artists are ordinary people singing earnestly about what really matters to them.

Chusid says Langley has become a gateway to outsider music for many. Because the artists are children and because they are singing well-known songs by the Carpenters, Barry Manilow and other pop stars, Langley is far easier to listen to and less off-putting than other outsider artists, many of whom live on society’s fringe. People like Wesley Willis--a 320-pound schizophrenic Chicago street artist who pens songs with titles like “They Threw Me Out of Church” and “I’m Sorry That I Got Fat”--and Frances Baskerville, a Texas psychic who sings her predictions.

The term “outsider music” was first used by Chusid in an article he wrote in 1996 for Pulse, a music magazine, but its genesis derives from “outsider art.” That term originally described artwork by psychiatric patients but now includes works by a variety of other untrained, intuitive artists. The Langley Schools Music Project first came to Chusid’s attention when a listener sent him a tape a few years ago. He had heard hundreds of other school recordings--marching bands with squawking clarinets, off-key choral ensembles--but was so impressed with Langley that he chased down Fenger and arranged a record deal.

There is usually something uncomfortable and off about outsider music, whether it’s the incongruity of a 9-year-old girl singing about romantic love and loss on the Langley record, or the melodic ineptitude, technical folly and mundane subject matter of the Shaggs performing songs about their parents and their pet cat Foot Foot. But there is also an originality and inventiveness and singularity of vision that can be absent in commercially successful music--music that may be written and performed by an artist but is influenced by dozens of additional people in the process.

“Artistically, there’s always been, since punk, the assumption that inspired amateurism is more meaningful than any kind of professionalism,” said Dolan of Spin. “After you’ve tired yourself out listening to the Ramones and Wire and Replacements, it bleeds over into fetishizing disability.” Dolan says that with outsider music, fans “have to go further and further away to find things that seem obscure” once an artist has been discovered.

Phil Milstein doesn’t disagree. An outsider music fan, he said: “People who are listening carefully and for whom music is important, they need to find new things constantly. I’m not saying that makes people like us better, but definitely ... more prone to having to work hard to seek out [music] from down beneath the surface.

“We’re so used to music where everything fits right,” added Milstein, who runs the American Song-Poem Music Archives Web site (www.aspma.com). “There’s a hegemony of rhythm and harmony in the music that we hear, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn’t be thought of as the only correct solution to making music.”

Milstein is a collector and historian of song-poems--songs that are written by amateurs but performed by professional musicians who “sight-sing,” improvising a melody on first read and recording it in a single take.

Song-poems are just beginning to gain attention among outsider music fans. There is an extensive Web site devoted to the subject, and several compilation CDs. A documentary film and a book on the subject are also in the works. Whereas collectors used to be able to find song-poem records in abundance at thrift stores, they are now being traded on EBay at collectors’ prices--records that used to cost 15 cents now fetch $15.

A handful of companies still make song-poems, but the genre’s heyday was the ‘60s and ‘70s, when hundreds of companies advertised in magazines, soliciting songs from amateur poets who paid a few hundred dollars to have their music shopped to record labels and music publishers. Hundreds of thousands of songs were recorded this way, though few made it anywhere within earshot of a record exec.

“Even the big songwriters of the day like Bacharach and Mancini had a heck of a time getting a hit, so you can imagine what the odds are of any of these people coming up with [one],” said Gene Merlino, a professional studio singer who worked with Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and other top performers and who also sang song-poems on the side.

Such highly unfavorable odds didn’t stop people from submitting some extremely strange songs--on subjects from tooth rot to midwifery and everything in between. Merlino, who lives in Camarillo, estimates he sang about 10,000 song-poems during the 35 years he was in the business--decidedly unpoetic and inadvertently humorous ditties with titles like “We Are the Men Counting Sheep” and “Be My Shark.”

The term song-poem is a bit of an oxymoron since many were anything but poetic, penned with little sense of meter or linguistic grace. “Most of the time they were really bad. The trick was trying to get through these things sometimes without dying of laughter from the material,” said Merlino, who was once instructed by a writer to hack and cough his way through the recording of “The Smoking Song.”

“What’s interesting about song-poems is that they are unlike anything else that exists in the music industry,” said Jamie Meltzer, a San Francisco filmmaker who recently finished the song-poem documentary “Off the Charts.” “They’re just songs written by ordinary people expressing what they feel they have to express, whether it’s a good song or not.”

Another story from the realm of outsider music that has captured the attention of filmmakers is that of the Shaggs, whose music languished for decades before making an impression.

Dot Semprini was 19 when her dad, thinking his daughters could be bigger than the Beatles, signed up her and her sisters for weekly music lessons. The Shaggs only made it as far as the local town hall in Fremont, N.H., where they played weekly gigs and were frequently jeered and pelted with soda cans. Undeterred by negative audience reaction, the girls’ father paid a studio to record “Philosophy of the World” in 1969 and “Shaggs’ Own Thing” in 1972, records that figured prominently in no one’s record collection except their family’s until the early ‘80s.

That’s when Terry Adams, of the band NRBQ, contacted Semprini to ask if he could re-release them. Semprini, who wrote and sang most of the Shaggs’ songs, found the group’s master tapes buried in an old army trunk upstairs in her house. “Philosophy of the World” was re-released in 1980 and again in 1988. Rolling Stone has since named it one of the 100 most influential alternative records of all time.

Semprini, who says she “is still surprised if somebody likes it,” now receives almost daily fan mail. And the Shaggs’ story is in development at Artisan Pictures, the same film company that released “The Blair Witch Project.”

The popularity of the Shaggs and other outsider groups invites the question: How much of the enthusiasm for outsider music is genuine appreciation, and how much is just a cheap laugh?

“It’s a very complex equation,” said Milstein, “but I think the irony level needs to be tempered considerably because it’s insulting to the people who were involved if they’re treated as a joke or just as fodder for cheap fraternity house follies.”

That is especially true if the artist is psychologically troubled. Works of genius often walk the line between sanity and craziness, as artists such as Daniel Johnston can attest.

Johnston, a 30-something manic depressive who lives at home with his parents in Austin, Texas, is widely heralded as a pop genius, a la the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. His career is almost a metaphor for his illness. At its high point, he was signed to Atlantic Records. At its lowest, he was confined to a mental institution. His songs, which he first recorded into a hand-held tape recorder and handed out to pretty girls on the street and sold to local record stores in the early ‘80s, have been performed by Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and numerous other indie rock luminaries. From there, they fell into the hands of deejays at noncommercial college and public radio stations around the country, including some of the more left-leaning ones in L.A. such as KXLU, which began playing them.

Most of the re-releases of outsider music that catch on typically sell in the tens--not hundreds--of thousands, enough to recoup costs for the record label but far from what’s required to chart. Even the Langley Schools Music Project, which is considered a great success, has sold only 25,000 copies--not enough to make anyone rich but enough to funnel a few dollars back to the school.

And, while it is gaining in popularity, outsider music can never be mainstream, said Chusid, the DJ responsible for giving Langley a larger audience. “By its very definition,” he said, “it’s outsider, it’s marginal.”