The One That Didn't Get Away

Gentle Reader, let my words lift you up out of comfortable reading chair and beckon you to come along with me to faraway Southeast Asia, strife-torn and mysterious, once home to people like me who wanted to build whole cities according to their own specifications (except that they didn't have computers and were rich kings, so they just actually built them.) Here, in the lazy waters of the Mekong River, they pulled this monster out of the water.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a catfish. A 9ft., 650lb. catfish. Look at the size of that monster! It's funny, because there's currently a bit of a dust-up in the southern (catfish-producing) states about whether or not to ban the cheaper and arguably better-tasting Vietnamese catfish from the States after a test revealed some prohibited antibiotics in a few samples. Looking at a picture of what the Leviathan above looked like when cut into steaks, you can see why the more petite domestic model might have reason to be a little nervous.

But SE Asia has been on my mind lately for another reason, namely a compilation of Cambodian popular music from the 1960's and '70's called Cambodia Rocks. It's a winsome collection of garage rock and psychadelic songs performed in the native tongue but obviously inspired by what was going on in America and Britain at the time. I've heard a bunch of '60's rock from South America (Os Mutantes!) and Japan, but this Cambodian stuff was so fantastic and took me completely by surprise. The guitar is edgey and bluesy, and the vocals are really ethereal and affecting.

But as good as the music is, the context in which they were created is pretty mind-blowing. All these huge American G.I.'s come over with transistor radios playing all this rock music, and I imagine that teenagers all over Cambodia must've thought they had just been invaded by rock and roll aliens. I have no idea what they must've thought, but it probably didn't sound like much that they've heard before. I have this record of a neo-traditional Laotian group called the Khac Chi Ensemble, and some of their stuff sounds a bit like rock and roll even though it's recorded on native instruments and they're performing traditional songs, so I'm not sure what the music scene was like, but it still must've been impressive to hear all these snarling guitars and shouting foreigners, all while bombs were blowing up everything.

So there's all these kids learning to play guitar and singing about whatever it is that they're singing about, but really rocking out and it sounds like they're having fun. But then, just as they're putting together all these great songs that could've been hits in the U.S. if they were in English, the nation gets plunged into a brutal civil war and the Khmer Rouge destroy everything associated with modernity and city life. The guitars and presumably the guitarists are all gone. Hauntingly, the record doesn't list any info for who's playing the music, when they were recorded or even what the names of the songs are. I can imagine that somebody must've found a trunk in an attic that wasn't burned, where some kid squirreled away his favorite records and maybe his guitar, hoping that he'd get a chance to play them once again someday.