10-The Michigan Daily -Wednesday, June 29, 1994
Geggy Tah: Hard to categorize, good to hear, coming soon
8y Ted Watts
Geggy Tah is a spunky band that
takes its name from the inability of
the little sisters of its two main mem-
bers to pronounce those members'
names. The band seems to take de-
light in evading agenre. For, while on
David Byrne's world music oriented
Luaka Bop label, Geggy Tah hails
from California and creates songs
using (and sometimes inspired by)
-1the oddest things.
"I think I can be as influenced by
acardriving by as by an album some-
times, in terms of just sonically," ex-
plainsTommy Jordan, the Tahhalfof
the unit. "Or like a garage door going
up. Like in (our song) 'L.A. Lujah.'
We recorded that in a garage and the
part that sounds like trumpets going
'Reargghhh!,' that squeak is just the
garage door into the studio and that
wasprettyinspiring.It'samazinghow
spiritual it can be, a garage door."
Unfortunately, that can't give you
a very good indication of the band's
sound. Picture them as They Might
Be Giants but sounding a lot more playing keyboards, guitars, samples
like David Byrne and being more and harmonica. We have a brick we
intently serious at times.GregKurstin, play. The brick plays in the band, too.
$ :
let us," says Jordan. "Some venues
won't let us. And we can't take her to
London when we play there because
of the six-month quarantine for ani-
mals. She's better behaved than us,
and, of course, she knows what we're
thinking all the time." 0
"Rrrrrrrrr," says Gina.
GEGGYTAHwiI p ayatSt. Andr
tommorrow with Toad the Wet
Sprocket. Doors open at 7:30. Call
961-MELT.
:eeJt,/
This is Geggy Tah. Don't you want to trust them implicitly on sight?
the Geggy half of the group, has stud-
ied piano under Jaki Byard and has
had quite a bit of interaction with
other important jazzists. But Geggy
Tah is not a normal type of musical
setup in any respect.
"(On tour) we switch around in-
struments a lot," says Kurstin. "I'm
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Tommy plays a little red toy. Then he
plays a trumpet, a little toy trumpet,
some bottles and a steel drum. John
the bass player plays mostly bass."
Kurstin also illuminates a similar
cacaphony of events surrounding the
recording of their album. "A lot of the
stuff was just Tommy andrme playing
around, having fun. So most of the
skeleton tracks were already done by
the time we really started to do any-
thing. Then we went to G-Son Stu-
dios (the Beastie Boys' studio). We
were hanging out and basically pol-
ishing up the demos. Then we got our
own equipment and recorded stuff in
Tommy'sgrandfather'sbasement. So
basically we started out in G-Son but
went on and did a lot of stuff else-
where, and a lot of it was done before
any of that."
ThecommonthreadinallofGeggy
Tah's work may be Gina, their dog
and model on the cover of their al-
bum, "Grand Opening". She was
present for the recording of the album
and accompanies the group on tour.
"We take her on stage when venues
The Myths of August:
A Personal
Exploration of Our
Tragic Cold War Affair
With the Atom
Stewart L. Udall
Pantheon Books
In the late 1940s the U.S. govern-
ment opened a uranium mine in Ari-
zona, and ignoring the warnings of
several doctors and radiation experts,
exposed Native American miners to
levels of radiation 500 times greater
than that allowed in other industries.
The Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) refused to install proper venti-
lation systems, and sent in doctors to
diligently monitor the health of the
miners, most of whom, as predicted,
died from lung cancer. Stewart Udall,
World WarII bomber pilot, U.S. rep-
resentative and the Secretary of the
Interior to Kennedy, documents these
abuses, and many more, in his new
book. "The Myths of August" is a
compilation of his research on the
subject of the Cold War and the U.S.
government'segregiousactions in the
name of national security.
In addition to the travesty of the
uranium mines, Udall describes the
AEC's effort to suppress knowledge
that its nuclear tests in Nevada were
exposing Americans to dangerous lev-
els of radiation .from fallout. Even
more horrifying is the fact that medi-
cal experts were again sent in to docu-
ment the burgeoning cancer rates eve1
though nothing was or ever would
done to protect the population.
It should be nothing new to the
public that government officials
would seek to suppress knowledge
that their experiments were killing
people, but the fact that Udall impli-
cates most of the scientific commu-
nity that worked with the government
is new. Yet it is unfortunate that
Udall's book includes only a shod
section on some of the more horrify-
ing experiments conducted in the
1950s. For instance, the government
has recently revealed that AEC scien-
tists and doctors conducted experi-
ments on 751 pregnant women with-
out their consent who went to local
hospitals in Tennessee for routine
checkups. They were given injections
of irradiated iron to see how many
their children would develop cance .
Udall writes his book so as to be
accessible to the layperson, and he
includes summaries of many argu-
ments given by historians that show,
for example, the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was unnecessary-lacking
the support of military commanders
who felt that Japan had already lost
the war.
After reading about the shocking
lapses in moral judgment by some of
our most prominent scientific and ci-
vilian leaders, it is hard not to think of
the words of Robert Guillain survey-
ing the ruins of Hiroshima: "I am
ashamed for the West. I am ashamed
for science. I am ashamed for man-
kind."
Naomi Snyde
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