Member Since: 30/07/2007
Band Website: http://www.myspace.com/goescalypso
Band Members: Andy (electronics), Dagmar (electronics) and Claire (electronics)
Influences: .
Sounds Like: In early July 1957, United Artists rushed into wide release its latest contribution to the burgeoning “teen-pic†genre. The film’s improbable plot revolves around a dour psychology grad student (played by a thirty-eight-year-old Bobby Troup) whose empirical data on mass hysteria show incontrovertibly that rock and roll is about to be supplanted by calypso—much to the dismay of his bald, bespectacled, rock-loving thesis advisor. The professor’s club-owner chum, Barney—a crass, cigar-chomping lunkhead who has bet his business’s future on rock and roll—belligerently dismisses young Bob’s findings. But Professor Winthrop, who ruefully understands that “you can’t argue with science,†contrives to save his skeptical friend from ruin by persuading the club’s main attraction, perky ingenue Jo Thomas (Judy Tyler, who would costar that same year with Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock), to study under his own star pupil behind her boss’s back. When Barney belatedly learns of Jo’s clandestine flirtation, he sees red—until he watches her raise the roof at a rival venue with a vaguely tropical tune exhorting calypso to “roll†and “rock†in order to “raise [its] flock.†Then, with all the zealotry of the fresh convert, he rechristens his own nightspot “Club Trinidad,†strings palm fronds and fishnets on the walls and ceiling, bedecks himself and his staff in tattered shirts and straw hats, and takes to addressing his patrons as “Gatos†(“That’s calypso for ‘Cats,’†he explains). Vindicating Bob’s thesis, the youthful club-goers at the former “Club Down Beat†are duly hysterical over Jo’s new act. Record executives materialize out of thin air, falling over each other to sign her, and everyone, we’re given to understand, lives happily ever after.
2The fairy-tale ending actually would not have seemed so implausible when filming began a couple of months earlier. The Calypso Craze was then at its zenith, and brash predictions of rock’s imminent demise filled the air. But the reason it later seemed preposterous—and the reason for the studio’s nervous haste in hustling the movie, strangely titled Bop Girl Goes Calypso, to market—was that it turned out to be a very late entry in the calypso derby. Following on the heels of two earlier contenders, Allied Artists’ Calypso Joe (with Ellington alumnus Herb Jeffries in the title role, opposite a then unknown Angie Dickinson) and Columbia’s Calypso Heat Wave (featuring aspiring song-and-dance man Joel Grey and lounge singer Maya Angelou), United Artists’ picture hit the screens in a much different climate, as the fad was fizzling, and the film’s “Rock versus Calypso†premise was largely moot. Calypso, it was generally agreed, had lost.
Record Label: Life's blood
Type of Label: Indie