Don Armando’s 2nd Avenue Rhumba Band, “Goin’ To a Showdown” (1979)
Whoa. Welcome back. You’d think with more than a few blog “series” being juggled, as it were, I’d be more apt to update. As my grandma says, sure but no. Blame the long string of unseasonably warm days in Minneapolis lately. 70º plus for, what, two weeks? Clown white tends to melt when you’re sweating profusely.
Dance music, on the other hand, sounds pretty good between allergic fits. Feeling good, sneezing gorgeous. Which makes it all the more appropriate that I just last week got a response from a full-on, beanie-wearing dance scholar with a link to a song I’d originally asked him for back when he first wrote about it: Maniac’s Don Armando’s 2nd Ave. Rhumba Band’s “Goin’ To a Showdown.” Rich, who I deeply hope hasn’t been saving this track for a major blog post of his own (then again, he did pretty much call the track stupid), has already written more than enough about this sweet/’tarded gem and it’s place within the context of Maniac. Combine his paragraphs with what I wrote on Ms. 45 some weeks back and you’ve got the idea. New York as hell as fashion runway as scarfaced glamourpuss. “More, More, Morbid” nails it, not even so much because of the similar sound between the two songs (which mostly comes from that buggy rhythm guitar) but more so because of their fertile pastures by which graze both disco superficiality and legitimate underground scuzz (porn, slasher flicks, pornographic slasher flicks). Nihilism sounds better with bad disco.
The lyrics of the song aren’t really clear in the film. The photographer ingenue’s runway banter is way too hot in the mix (in every sense). But listening to the song in its nekkidness, it’s hard to presume it wasn’t actually written for the film. It’s every bit as incoherent and, well, awkward as the movie…
[An aside: As turn-of-the-me-decade grindhouse superstars go, I don’t cherish Maniac in the same sense as I do either Ms. 45 or Cannibal Holocaust. Those two films come from legitimately dark, furious corners, even if the former is harmlessly loopy and the latter is capable of ruining you as a human being. Maniac is just opportunistic and fortunate in equal measure. It’s accidentally compelling in the same sense that, I suppose, Joe Spinell could be considered accidentally charismatic.]
…but there’s a lot more tying the ditty to the gritty than the incessant refrain “laugh… for the photograph” and what I’d take to be the attempt by the singers — one of which is Fonda “Fat Rat” Rae — to mimic Goblin’s Suspiria vocals. They even reference the bubble bath that one of the hopeless fashion models takes before her unfortunate midnight visit from Joe Spinell’s title psychopath. “You’ll leave a lovely corpse behind?” You could practically pull a “My Heart Will Go On” music video and match that up with those mannequins and their sticky “wigs” like Leonardo giving Kate nothing to fear.
Interestingly enough, while Don Armando’s 2nd Ave. Rhumba Band were a one-shot, they were part of an extensive dance legacy, having been built from the ashes of Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. Which makes some sense of the Rhumba Band’s whole Linda Lovelace as Annie Oakley schtick. The Savannah Band and its many offshoots synthesized ’40s big band nostalgia, voodoo mysticism and campy westward expansion imagery for God knows why. Since executive producer (and possible “Showdown” songwriter, though I’m only speculating) August Darnell also had his hand in writing the nasty Machine epic “There But For Grace of God Go I,” I’m inclined to guess there was a point to it all. But, when it comes to appreciating disco as camp, too much speculation is worse than none at all.
