Secondhands is a column that examines music of the past through a modern lens.

In one of the fantasies I have about my own death, I’m lying in a small, wood-paneled room deep in the jungle listening to a song called “Cherchez La Femme” by Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. Fat-leaved plants crowd the window. Sometimes I see birds, sometimes unfamiliar-looking varieties of monkey. They don’t bother me. Nothing bothers me anymore. When the song ends, I reach over to the record player on my nightstand and start it again. It sounds like something grandparents might listen to. Not my grandparents, necessarily, but grandparents in general: Someone who has traded in the angst of their youth for a state of terminal relaxation. Visions of nightclubs and island resorts fill my brain; places where the air smells like liquor and bananas, and the people dance until their legs crumple. I feel like a bubble floating up through a tall glass of champagne. Eventually, I die. That’s it. 

None of this is meant to sound morbid; I don’t want to die any sooner than I have to. The reason I imagine the Savannah Band as my soundtrack is that death, like their music, has always seemed like an exotic experience to me: A trip to a place I’ve always imagined, but have never actually gone. 

Naturally, “exotic” is a relative term: To a poor person, money might seem exotic; to someone from the barrens of Mongolia, Nickelback might seem exotic. I remember visiting Kenya as a teenager and being fascinated by the bargaining power of a cotton T-shirt with the words "U.S. SOCCER" printed on it. Of course, all I wanted was a little wooden statue of a giraffe. 

“Growing up in the Bronx, where money was tight, you watched television,” the Savannah Band’s singer, Cory Daye, told Stereo Review in 1979. “I always leaned toward the musicals.” 

Daye’s favorite program was something called “Million Dollar Movie”, which ran on WOR-TV 9 from the mid-1950s to sometime in the 1970s. It was a grab bag of material, some of it classic, some forgotten. The program’s opening credits present New York as a glamorous place where men in tasseled uniforms are always opening limo doors for people in overcoats and furs, where people are mostly rich and even crime could be exciting. When the Savannah Band formed in the mid-70s, New York was on the edge of bankruptcy, and Daye was working as a topless waitress at a bar called Hungry Hilda’s. “Million Dollar Movie” was somewhere she might have liked to visit for a night or two. 

The Savannah Band’s songwriters—two brothers named August Darnell and Stony Browder, Jr.—met Daye in high school. Culturally, Browder and Darnell were mutts: mixed-race kids who loved the Beatles born to southern parents in a neighborhood populated by Latinos and Italians. Onstage, they wore zoot suits in homage to the gangsters and big-band leaders of the 1940s. The suits flapped like the sails of small boats. Everyone thought they were ridiculous, especially Browder and Darnell.

Andy Hernandez, their vibraphone player, was invited to join them only after filling out a questionnaire. Topics included his political affiliation, his taste in women, and his feelings on the prospect of wearing tight pants. The test was graded on a scale of 100. (Darnell was a high-school English teacher at the time.) Hernandez scored a 48. In most cases, this would be considered failure. 

But in most cases, everything the Savannah Band did would have been considered failure, which is probably how they managed to succeed. In 1976, RCA released their first album. (Darnell wanted to be on RCA because that was Elvis’ label—the same Elvis who by '76 had become a beautiful clown of himself, rocketing toward death on a giant Quaalude.) 

The album seemed aware that disco existed and treated it with the kind of passing curiosity that dogs do when sniffing other dogs. Most of it sounded like some eerie, glamorous iteration of big-band music that had been popular 40 years earlier, when Cab Calloway worked at the Cotton Club and Xavier Cugat conducted orchestras at the Waldorf-Astoria with one hand while reportedly cradling a Chihuahua in another—something that Cory Daye might have seen on “Million Dollar Movie”. 

By October of that year, “Cherchez La Femme” was the #1 disco song in the country. The band went on to make three albums in three years, each one less commercially relevant than the last. After they broke up, Darnell started Kid Creole & the Coconuts, a band that extended several of the ideas he’d played with in the Savannah Band into new wave. (Tropical Gangsters is the one to listen to.) For a little while in the 1980s, Darnell said Kid Creole was so famous overseas that he “lived in the NME.” (My purely speculative guess is that Europe couldn’t get over just how “American” he seemed.)

He also served as house producer for Ze, a New York label that put out weird, polyglot records that spanned no wave, dance music, and theatrical lounge-jazz—a quintessentially New York sound once compiled under the banner Mutant Disco. (For a Darnell-only compilation, there’s Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983, on Strut.) At some point, Cory Daye made a solo album. Her voice sounds beautiful on it, but without Darnell and Browder, she was stranded as just another disco singer. “I was always against disco,” she once said, “but they made me do it.” The cover was an airbrushed picture of her and her cocker spaniel, a small blonde creature named Mr. Limelight. They called it Cory and Me. 

Almost 30 years later, a relatively unknown rapper named M.I.A. sampled a Savannah Band song called “Sunshower”. Maya Arulpragasam was born in London but raised in Sri Lanka, where her parents were from. When she was 10, her mother moved her back to England in the midst of a Sri Lankan civil war—one that Maya’s father stayed behind to help fight. She ended up in public housing, then later went to art school in London. Mixed heritage—or the idea that you might be from two seemingly contradictory places at once—isn’t just the subject of her music; it’s what generated her music in the first place. Despite the fact that she had spent most of her formative years in the UK, she had dark skin and a long name, and knew that that’s what people would see first. In a lot of ways, she wasn’t all that different from Browder or Darnell: An artist who played up her foreignness to an audience who would’ve seen her as foreign no matter what she said or did. 

At this point I was living in Brooklyn and noticed that most of my favorite local indie bands seemed to circle around some communally held fantasy of a faraway place. Animal Collective was one; Black Dice was another; Excepter—whose live shows were some of the most transformative and least explainable experiences of my young-ish life—was a third. Watching these bands onstage was less like watching musicians and more like watching a séance, or some imaginary tribal ritual. The parallels were probably intentional, and I immediately understood: As someone who lived next to a highway and rode the subway to a job where I sat in climate-controlled air for eight to 10 hours a day only to reward myself with $12 drinks, I too knew the dream of a life that seemed more primitive, pure, and connected to the heart of the matter than the one I was living. Later, when I moved to the Arizona desert, I couldn’t stop listening to Eric B. & Rakim and early LL Cool J. Suddenly, I romanticized the hustle. 

That’s the way it is, I think. No matter where we are, we need to be able to imagine that there’s somewhere else. We don’t have to go there, and we probably don’t want to—if we did, we wouldn’t be able to dream about it anymore. By tapping so directly into what a previous generation had considered to be exotic, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band were almost making a joke: The so-called globalization of business and technology makes the world feel smaller all the time, but people in the city will still fantasize about the jungle for the same reasons that there are multiple compilations of Cambodian bands from the 1960s desperately trying to figure out how to play garage rock: We’ll always be more fascinated by the things we aren’t than the things we are. 

Which brings me back to this idea about death. It’s possible I’ve been listening to Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City too much—an album borderline-obsessed with death by a band that, ironically, used to get criticized for trying to sound “exotic”—but I keep thinking that death might be the only universally exotic experience there is. That the grass isn't just greener on the other side, but a shade I've never seen before.   

A few weeks ago I was sitting around a table in a Japanese-style house in the woods of Redding, Connecticut, playing cards with friends I have known since I was a child. I’d never been to the house before, but something about it felt familiar: the paper screens dividing the rooms, the wood-beamed ceilings, the big windows with black foliage curling around their edges outside. 

Tasked with turning on some music, I opened my computer and scrolled around for a minute, then turned on the first Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band album. I was instantly back in my little jungle room. “I’ll grow a tail or two for you,” Cory Daye sang, her voice like a kite loose in the wind. “Spend the rest of my days locked up in a zoo.” 

I did a little rumba toward the card table, dreaming of that quiet place on the horizon of my imagination. “It’s your turn,” someone said, so I sat down to take it.