Is ‘Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela’ the most outsider album of all time?
“We’re taking off for the moon,” Lucia Pamela excitedly exclaims like a captain overly eager to spend some time with their secret second family in Crete, before regaining composure and demanding that passengers fasten their seatbelts. It’s an unsubtle start to the album Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela, with the title concept instantly ushered into the first lines before quixotic space sounds have had no more than 1.5 seconds to build up the ambience.
It then takes four seconds for her to announce, “Oh, we have landed on the moon”, following the vague sense of an ascending note. And that’s where the whole album takes place thereafter. To Pamela, this was literal. Throughout her life, the outsider star insisted that the album was recorded on our lunar neighbour, evidenced by the fact it clearly transposes the different air up there. Anyone who scoffed or pointed out that there isn’t actually any air up there were deemed cynics, too stuffy to understand her Apollo art.
As far as Pamela was concerned, she had built a rocket, explored the Milky Way, stopped off on the moon, and put her classical training to use by recording every instrument available to her and then reciting the sights she was beholding. The grain of truth is that she received some classical training as a child because her mother was a noted concert pianist. However, it’s doubtful that her claim was true that Ignacy Jan Paderewski, legendary composer and Polish prime minister, pronounced she would one day be the greatest musician in the world.
But all that being said, she did have a life as comparable to touring the Milk Way as a terrestrial existence can be. As her obituary stated: “Entertainer, singer, songwriter, radio & TV star, multi-instrumentalist, all-girl orchestra leader, Ziegfeld Follies beauty, Miss St. Louis 1926, and lunar explorer Lucia Pamela Angelo passed away in Los Angeles on Thursday July 25, of cardiac arrest. She was.98.”
At one point in that life, more specifically 1969, she contracted the independent Florida record label, Gulfstream, and got them to release her only studio effort. By the sound of all the sodden reverb, slightly off-the-click overdubs and mocked Joe Meek effects layered like oil onto water, it was actually recorded in a DIY studio in her hometown of Fresno. When she was later asked why she had gone to this trouble, she gave the ultimate outsider answer: “Why? Because I wanted to.”
In truth, that speaks to the album’s joy beyond the madness. In fact, it speaks of art at its finest in many ways. While Pamela might not have had the honed skill to achieve that pinnacle, the sense of creating for the joy of it is something the buoys many brilliant masterpieces, even those with pointed intent. As David Bowie said of a fellow outsider artist: “Daniel Johnston reminds me of aspects that made me love art in the first place.” That beautiful sense of unbridled imagination makes the lunar world that Pamela creates eminently habitable.
Pamela lived by this imaginative outlook. As a fellow by the name of Kirk Biglione told Irwin Chusid for his outsider music bible Songs in the Key of Z: “The last time I saw Lucia, she was trying to raise funds to build an amusement park, with a ride that would actually take visitors to another planet. Not such a strange proposition when you consider that she’s also convinced her pink Cadillac can fly.”
This is largely how she was known in life: the kindly, quirky woman who drove her pink car through Fresno. Her private projects beyond that were wide and varied – including a mother-daughter vocal duo, her Christmas tree was decorated all year, which I suppose makes it an ornamental tree, and her presence as the matron of the local theme park was forever joyful. Thus, the kitsch, swampy, and slightly incorrect ways of Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela can’t detract from the notion of a belle who wanted to know about the Nut People on the moon and their beguiling native Almond tongue.
Sadly, the International Colouring Contest that came with the record might not have been enough to launch it into the commercial stratosphere. Still, it was otherworldly enough to bring some brightness to our often all too realist daily lives and enjoy enough of a rebirth for the likes of Stereolab to pay her homage.
You can find the magnificent original liner notes for her album below.
Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela liner notes:
“The reason that Lucia is putting out this album is that everybody is asking and begging her to make a recording. Now they can have her in their homes to entertain them whenever they choose to do so and have her close to them at any time they want. Well, finally she is responding to their requests, and here is the first album from LUCIA PAMELA! So prepare yourselves for great entertainment.”
“Now we would like to give you just a little history of this great star and entertainer: Lucia Pamela . . . She started to perform when she was four years old. She is the daughter of a very fine concert pianist, and at her first performance at the age of four she sang and played an Indian Love Song which she wrote herself, music and lyrics. At the age of five, six and seven years of age, her mother could not take her away from the piano; she had to force her away from the piano to eat. At the age of seven years she started to play concerts on the stage with her mother and also played concerts on the stage with the great piano soloist, Charles Kunkle, who was a that time one of the finest concert pianists of the world. He was equal to Paderewski, who was the greatest pianist in the world. He, himself, in person, attended one of the concerts that Lucia Pamela was playing when she was about eight years old. Paderewski was so amazed and so enthused that he went back stage and gave a note written by him to Lucia’s mother about her daughter, telling her what he thought about Lucia. In this note one of the phrases was, “your daughter is a natural born pianist, and she will be the finest pianist in the world when she grows up.” Her mother has preserved this note throughout the years.”
“Now to go on with this story, Lucia was about twelve years old when she was playing concerts all over with Charles Kunkel who was the first cousin of the great Beethoven. As she was growing up and attending school she won a scholarship to go to college, and she chose to attend college in Germany and the name of this college was, The Beethoven Conservatory of Music and Voice. The people in charge of the conservatory in Germany, after hearing her play the piano and sing, told her mother that her daughter was already so much advanced that there was not much they could do to teach her, but we will be glad and honored to take her under our wing and have her play concerts and continue with her singing, and we would give her advice on anything she would need. This is what was told to her mother by the Beethoven Music Conservatory in Germany, the greatest in Europe.”
“She was elected Miss St. Louis (this is how beautiful our Lucia Pamela was and still is). She was asked directly from the great Flo Zeigfeld to be part of his great follies on Broadway, and to perform her act in the show, which she did. (Mr. Flo Zeigfeld gave a great party in honor of Lucia). She did movie picture work with the William Goldman-Skouras Bros. Movie Industry, etc., etc. So the steps on the ladder of success started to go up, up and up for LUCIA PAMELA.”
“We cannot continue with this story of Lucia Pamela: we have no more space to write. We will save it for the next album that will be out. We here at Gulfstream Recording Studios are very proud and honored to have such a rare talent and star like Lucia Pamela at our studios. This is the girl who is still going strong, so buy this album and make sure you see her in person wherever she is performing. It is a treat you will not forget, for she is truly one of the greatest entertainers that there ever was!”
Considering those notes were self-written, that’s not a bad appraisal to afford yourself.
