In
the autumn and winter of 1994, I
was touring North America as the keyboard player in the band Pigface.
December, 2004:
revised January 2006
In
the autumn and winter of 1994, I
was touring North America as the keyboard player in the band Pigface.
The band were doing a three hour show every night, and
the gruelling tour schedule - 44 shows in 45 days in 43 cities - meant
that there
was little time for exploring the various places that the band were
visitng. This didn't stop me from
finding some time to explore the lost relics of the mid century
Polynesian Pop craze in cities all over the continent.
Why?
Well... my interest in Tiki Style had begun in the
late
1980s.
I had always been interested in art, with primitive
and
tribal art being of particular interest.
Also of interest to me is the popular culture of the
middle 20th century: the art deco era
through the early 1960s.
During a trip to the coast in 1991,
I discovered a Tiki bar left over from the 1950s, and it all came
crashing together.
I thought to myself: "This place was built in
the 1950s, and is a classic example of the style of the era...
PLUS,
there's (faux) primitive art here, AND I can get a DRINK!".
Somehow, both sex and travel seemed to be a part of it too.
Everything I like, all rolled together.
I was
sold.
By the time the Pigface gig rolled around a few years
later, I had begun photographing, cataloging, and collecting history
on these places. Living in Chicago, I was completely unaware that
there were enclaves of people all over the west coast who were
interested in this stuff; I thought I was the only person out there who
was crazed with this primal Tiki-lust. I had been living (on a
tour bus!) with Genesis P. Orridge during the tour; he was formerly a
member of the band Throbbing Gristle, who had dedicated thier
industrial noise records to Martin Denny, and who had paid tribute to
Denny's LP covers on their own record sleeves. Gen got me hooked
on Exotica, which I immediatley understood to be the soundtrack to the
bar I had found on the coast three years earlier.
The big event which has brought you, dear reader, and
I together occurred during that same concert tour in the year
1994.
One of the people in the production had a laptop, and one day they
showed me how to hook it up to a phone line and get onto this new thing
called the Internet. I'd heard people talking about the Internet
for a few years, and I was sort of vaguely aware of something called a
MoDem that let you hook your computer to a telephone line. But I
hadn't ever explored why that might be useful to me.
I already had a computer; I used it for writing and
for composing music. There was no WWW just quite yet, but after
my pal in Pigface showed me how Email and chat rooms worked, I knew
that I'd have to get me a MoDem ASAP. So I did.
| The Tiki Bar Review Pages
started
life, then, as
"The Tiki FAQ" at the very end of 1994, shortly after my return from
the concert tour. At that time, it was a text document that
I would periodically post to UseNet groups (an old-school internet
bulletin-board
message posting system, that is actually still in use today by a
hardcore group of old-timers) listing
the
few dozen people, places, and things Tiki that I was aware of at the
time.
In 1995, the first web pages started to appear, so I decided
that
I wanted to learn how to make a web site. A Tiki site seemed like the
natural subject matter. I wanted to
share
all of the photos of Tiki bars I had been archiving. I decided to
make each page a review, hoping to eventually establish a comprehensive
listing of ALL Tiki Bars everywhere, in one convenient spot. I had no idea that there were other Tiki worshipers out there, but slowly and surely I started recieving Email about my site. A trickle became a mighty river, and then a typhoon. Frankly, I was astounded that there were other people out there interested in this stuff. Given that there were no other Tiki sites on the web at that time, all of the Tiki worshipers out there were directing all of their email at me. Without asking for it, I started getting listings of more Tiki locations to visit, and people even started snail-mailing me pictures and other ephemera to scan in to the Tiki Bar Review Pages. Over the next seven years, the site grew in size and expanded
in
scope, just as my own knowledge of Tiki history and geography grew
similarly.
While travelling both for work (more concert tours with Ministry, Royal
Crown Revue, and others) and for fun, I visited Tiki Bars all over the
world, and made a whole slew of new
friends.
I became a better writer, a better photographer, and a better web
master...
although the site, graphically, is still kind of remedial and ugly! Now, I didn't know it, but around the same time that
the Tiki FAQ became the TBRP, a fella in California started a printed
fanzine called Tiki News. I didn't get hip to Otto Von Stroheim's
'zine for a few years, and when I did, I initially saw him as
compeition. This attitude quickly reversed itself when I realized
that he and I were brothers of a sort, Tiki Monks spreading the ancient
wisdom of the Tiki to our scattered followers. Through his medium
of paper, and my medium of digital bits, we enlightened the populace
throughout the late 1990s. As the Tiki Bar Review Pages started to progress from 'occasionally seen' to 'popular' to 'hugely popular' (it was even written about in Playboy... who later asked me to write for them!), I had the idea to create a big colorful coffee table book full of pictures of vintage Tiki stuff. I even had a name - “The Book of Tiki”! Imagine my surprise when I found out that a guy in Los Angeles not only had the same idea for a book, but had even come up with the same title! I suppose that given the rising popularity of Tiki at that time, a book of this nature was inevitable... and the title just seems to fit so well that two people coming up with the same idea isn’t so far-fetched. In retrospect, I am actually glad that Sven Kirsten’s own Book of Tiki is the one that got published - he has access to a far greater trove of ephemera than I have ever had, and his wealth of knowledge can only be compared to my own thusly: if I am a walking encyclopedia of Tiki, then Sven is an entire library. Frankly, I couldn’t have done that particular book nearly as well. And, it turns out that Sven had begun his project years before Otto or I had gone public - it just took him a while to convince Taschen to print it! |
|
After pondering it for a bit, searching around for ideas that wouldn’t be pale emulations of Sven’s book, and giving up entirely for a while, it hit me like a slap in the face: my book was already written! It was all on my web page, waiting to be converted into a travel guide to all Tiki everywhere.
The question I get asked, in person and via Email, several times per week, is “I am going to (fill in a city). Where can I find a Tiki Bar?". I had found myself referring people back to specific sections of my own site almost daily to answer their questions. The glaring fault of this web site, however, is that it isn’t portable. On one occasion, I found myself pulling into an internet cafe in Seattle to look up my own web site in order to get the address for a Tiki bar. I knew that there must be others on similar quests - they had been writing to me for at least six years.
It was clear what format the book had to take - it would be a comprehensive field guide for the urban archaeologist seeking the Tiki. Lightweight, inexpensive, and portable. Something that you could throw into your luggage on those occasions where Fodor’s or Lonely Planet just wouldn’t do.
Sven and I had become buddies over the ensuing years, and in his preface to the book I eventually dubbed Tiki Road Trip, he writes: “Upon publication of my Book of Tiki, in which I documented the history and Golden Age of American Tiki culture in the 1950’s and 1960’s, some novices to the phenomenon saw all the colorful imagery and happily expected to find a fully functioning Polynesian paradise just around the corner of their neighborhood. I had not fully clarified that more than ninety percent of the Tiki havens in my book no longer exist, having fallen victim to the changes in taste and political correctness, and that The Book of Tiki was a socio-historical documentation, NOT a restaurant guide. This book IS a restaurant guide, but not in a purely consumerist sense. The criteria present in the search for a Tiki establishment are quite different than those for any other restaurant....”.
That sums it up.
Both authors had agreed: there was room, even a need, for both books.
|
In addition, another interesting thing had happened: I was no
longer the only Tiki site on the net, not by a longshot. Of the
most note, in early 2002 my pals Hanford and Mig had taken a clumsy and
slow Yahoo
group called Tiki Central and moved it to their own server with their
own software running things. Now, Tiki people had a place to go
to communicate, share ideas and information, swap photos, sell Tiki
items, and get to know each other much more efficiently than they could
on the Tiki Bar Review Pages. The site is a huge success, far
bigger and better than my humble web design skills (not to mention my
tiny bandwidth allowance) could ever have dreamed of achieving.
In the 1990s, I had to hand-post every email, photo, recipe, or listing
that was sent to me. Sometimes I'd get 20 or 30 emails per
day. Now, on Tiki Central, all users can do this themselves, and
have instant feedback to their questions, comments, or information from
a community of 5500 people. To a very large degree, this has taken the burden off of me,
and
allowed me to move away from maintining the TBRP. This has freed
up time for other projects... like Tiki
Road Trip,
plus my
upcoming book on Easter Island - Big
Stone Head
- and my
musical project, Left
Orbit Temple. And, in turn, the TBRP sort
of withered and became - at best - a quaint relic of the beginning of
the Tiki renaissance of the late 1990s. So I got to work on Tiki Road Trip - in my spare time at first, and then later with more gusto, rewriting all of the material on my site. I did research, fact checking, and yes, plenty of urban archaeology. I redoubled my attempts to track down every Tiki bar that exists - and every one that ever existed. I wanted to assemble a complete history of Polynesian Pop, to be presented in the format of a time-warp travel guide, one that would have been as useful in 1960 as it is today. To a large degree, I think I have achieved that goal. Tiki Road Trip (released by Santa Monica Press in April of 2003) has five times the information that the Tiki Bar Review Pages had at it’s peak. Compiling my book in the necessary format required some painful choices. The first choice, the hardest choice, and the one that made Tiki Road Trip very different from The Tiki Bar Review Pages, is that I had to leave out all of the anecdotes of my personal journeys to these Tiki Bars. The text of Tiki Road Trip is much less of a subjective personal history than the web site is, and much more a ‘professional’ travel guide. From early 2003 until early 2006, Tiki Bar Review
Pages was a place to check for updates to Tiki Road Trip,
and
it still contained both new and old first-person narratives
of any
adventures I may have during my wide and varied Tiki travels. A
lot of my favorite writing was stuff that wasn't appropriate for the
book, becasue it was anecdotes and stories about my adventures.
So the site became a place to preserve that material... but updates
definitely became infrequent. While that archive festered, I became involved in writing more
books and magazine articles, planning events, and a bunch of other
stuff. The idea of maintining the site became a real chore -
especially with Tiki Central and other sites more than taking up the
slack - and so I let the TBRP fade away. But... by 2006, I got tired of people emailing me about all of
the
stuff that was out of date, so I made the call to just end it. And I did. That said... |
|
Thanks go out to the 3500+ people who have Emailed me regarding
all
things
Tiki between 1994 and 2006, and I hope that you will all enjoy the
books Tiki
Road Trip, and Big
Stone Head.
Finally -
I spent thousands of hours and a lot of money keeping the Tiki Bar
Review Pages going for more than a decade.
I made nothing from it.
My only wish is that in 30 years, when someone writes the history
of the Polynesian Pop revivial of the 1990s-2000s, that they mention it.
The end!
.
I have maintained this web site since 1995.
I write and create photos because I enjoy it.
People tell me they enjoy reading this site, so I keep it going.
However...
This site has cost me a lot of hours, and a lot of money.
And, unlike my writing for magazines or books, there is no
publisher sending me checks for the work I do on this site.
So...
Left Orbit Temple
Tiki Road Trip
Big Stone Head
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