"Dave the Butcher"

'Swordfishtrombones' (1983)

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Finally, 70+ songs into this project, we hit Swordfishtrombones. The album that changed everything. And the first song we get to discuss is…“Dave the Butcher.”

Okay, a two-minute instrumental is maybe not the most exciting launchpad. But Tom himself didn’t think it was a throwaway. In an interview promoting the album, he called this “one of my favorite selections.” So let’s give it a close listen.

The song consists of only two instruments. The primary instrument is B-3 organ, Tom himself blaring away at top volume. “I wanted that carnival feeling on it,” he explained of his playing. “Kind of a nightmare alley with Tyrone Power and John Blundell. Kind of a monkey on wood alcohol.” (In another interview, he refined the comparison to “a retarded monkey on Benzedrine.”)

The second instrument is credited as “bass boo bams,” played by percussionist Victor Feldman. I thought this instrument sounded made-up at first—I wouldn’t put it past Tom—but it’s not. Boo bams are an enormously large, fairly obscure arrangement of drums. I lost count at 24 drums in one YouTube video I found. They are all exactly the same size and appearance on top, but tuned to different pitches by extending the bottoms to different depths. The entire arrangement can be ten feet long, so the player might need to run back and forth. Boo bams were also used on the Batman soundtrack, and you can see a clip of them in action here (6:13):

The title “Dave the Butcher” seems random for an instrumental, but in interviews, Tom gave this character an entire backstory. In fact, he claimed Dave was a real person he had met: “He had yellow hair, looked completely demented, wore a leopard collar made out of real leopard skin and he had two different kinds of shoes, he wore one boot and one Oxford. He worked at a butchery shop so I tried to imagine the music going on in his head while he was cutting up little pork loins."

So when you listen to this song, imagine this as the music playing in the head of a yellow-haired, leopard-collared, two-booted butcher cutting up pork loins.