The Least Dangerous Game

I covet secrets, just like everybody, because avarice catharsis paranoia something something. You don't need me to write about it because we already have V., The Assault, Incendies, and Robert Caro. But musically-minded goofballs who eschew the Great Tapestry of History narratives know there's something else you can play that doesn't involve any war crimes. Hunting mystery songs is the best game ever!

A sound/lyric/melody fragment to a music nerd is like a collapsing dam to Superman, or a peacock feather to a cat. You love helping civilians (That dopey refrain you remember is from “Holiday” by The Other Ones!). You love helping yourself (Hm, here’s a cassette of me in 1984 playing some chords on a Bontempi mouth organ…aha, it’s “Catch Me I’m Falling” by Real Life!).

The ones you solve quickly go on your next playlist. The ones that linger for years become podcast episodes. The unsolved ones become cries for help like this. There’s joy, of course, in the endless miles of false trails and weird sights in pursuit of the right answer. But I just want to bag this record, please:

When the Firesign Theatre were on the radio they played a lot of music, and never back-announced anything. One week in November 1970 it was all Japanese records. The show ended with a truly haunting instrumental.

The game starts, of course, with Supposition One: This record existed. Their engineer told me they always played their own records, never the station’s, so which Firehead brought it? None of them remembered. To be sure I shelf-read all their collections. Whoever owned it lost it.

Supposition Two: This song has a name. A Japanese friend-of-a-friend identified the tune as 中国地方の子守唄, “Chugoku-Chiho no Komoriuta”—a lullaby.

A lucky break: they played the record more than once that night. The instrumentation strongly matched at least three more of that show’s songs, which were called…what? My Japanese source was stumped, so I brute-force-listened to entire Japanese midi sites until I lassoed ’em: あんたがたどこさ, “Anta-gata-dokosa”; 俵はごろごろ, “Tawara wa Gorogoro”; and 通りゃんせ, “Toryanse” (“Let Me Pass” —in Japan this song plays at traffic lights).

A whole LP of children's songs done Mod by a sizzling '60s pops orchestra? Kewl! And this glorious insight led…nowhere. I’ve Googled the titles translated, transliterated, and in Kanji. The Internet has NOT ingested this record yet. I even bought a half dozen ringers containing only three out of four songs just in case.

I need to know who makes an entire album of children’s songs in Exotica style. A Japanese arranger, for a Japanese audience, who’d get it? Or an American arranging for Americans who wouldn’t know better?

The WORLD needs to know, so that if Dreamworks makes an all-toddler detective noir, they have something to play when Yuki, Dragon Lady of Shibuya, makes her entrance in a blue silk diaper.

Mainly I want a good copy of this good song. Because good songs go a lot further than venison.