Luie Luie — Touchy
This reissue appeared in 2007 on Companion Records- a bay area record label that focuses in on reissuing bizarre musical fare & odd outsider albums from the past. The CD is housed in a digipak sleeve, which takes in on it’s front cover a flamboyantly & colourful yet oddly over painted photo of Luie Luie. Also included is a 20 page booklet which takes in rare photos, concert flyers, art work, and a new introduction from Luie himself which sheds some light on his original inspiration for the album.
Luie Luie( real name Luis Johnston) is a Southern California screenwriter, painter, and musician who has spent the past 30 years working in almost complete obscurity. He has been playing live at various restaurants, lounges, and country clubs for three decades and is still going strong today. And apparently he also written and starred in a feature film(!?) and shaken hands with Elvis Presley.
Touchy features ten tracks worth of warped 'n' wonky sonic fare that sits somewhere between slurred Mariachi music, up-beat yet unwell 70’s library music, overly showy organ & moog heavy easy listening fare, and (often) very loud & jarring trumpet music. Mr LL plays all the instruments himself, ( and by the sounds of it) produced the album- and each track is a sees him playing a mixture of: trumpet, drums, weird percussive matter, moog, guitar and flute…and on a few tracks we just get many layered & effect engulfed drifts of him playing showy yet melted & unwell trumpet music.
All of the above would be appealing on it’s own, but there are a few thing’s that push this album to weird great-ness. Firstly each & every one of the ten tracks here has a cheery through often quite bizarre spoken word introduction by Mr LL himself. And secondly this is actually a conceptual dance album(!?), based around the “Touchy” which is a dance Mr LL invented himself…I won’t go into the details of the “Touchy” here, but trust me it’s both amusing, bizarre, and oddly heart-warming/ charming.
So if you’re a fan of off-kilter, bizarre, yet buoyant & fun easy listening/ outsider music, Touchy will be right up your street…and trust me you really won’t have heard anything quite like this before!