Maurice Rocco and the Psychedelic Roots of Thai Music: Race, Queerness, and Urban Change w/ Benjamin Tausig

Mack: It’s the mid 1940s, somewhere in the United States. You’re in a bar or maybe a train station and you’ve got a little time to kill. You walk over to a six and a half foot tall wooden jukebox with an art deco design. This jukebox has a screen on it. It’s called a Panoram, and it’s basically the MTV or YouTube of its day.

You put a dime in the slot. And an internal film projector starts to roll a black and white music movie called A Soundy.

On the screen appears a handsome black man meticulously dressed in a white suit, standing over a large grand piano and pounding out the fastest boogie woogie you’ve ever heard draped around the piano. Are three women eye candy more than anything else. They bob to the music and seem to swoon over the man whose name is Maurice Rocco in the 1940s.

Maurice Rocco is a rising star on silver screen and Panoram alike. He’s phenomenally talented. He exudes charm and there’s something he does with his eyes, widening them, fluttering them, even rolling them around in his head. This isn’t the humiliating eye rolling of minstrelsy demanded of black performers by so many white film directors in this era.

No. It is a suggestion of something else, something the Hollywood sensors would never allow to be shown on screen or even spoken of a decade later. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis will be biting Maurice Rocco’s style, standing at the piano just like him. And pounding out that high speed boogie. Little Richard will even cop rocko’s.

Eye rolling. People will call it rock and roll. By that time, soundies will be a forgotten medium. The few panorama machines that remain will be found in peep shows and dirty bookstores repurposed as early pay-per-view porn. People will watch Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis at home. On the medium that replaced the Panoram, the television and Maurice Rocco, this Rocco who helped spawn rock and roll.

He’ll be forgotten too. Eventually he’ll tire of the pressures and indignities of living in America as a black man and as a man who loved other men. He’ll start a new life as a performer in a Bangkok nightclub. Still standing at the piano and singing his hits for executives and officers as the American War in Vietnam rages nearby.

Today you’re gonna meet an ethnomusicologist who studies sound in Thailand. In the course of his studies, he unearthed the story of Maurice Rocco, his life in Bangkok, and its tragic end. Benjamin Taussig is gonna tell us about Rocco. And a whole lot more that’s coming up on 

phantom Power 

 this is Phantom power.

Mack: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mac Hagood outside in my yard here in Cincinnati. It’s a rare, non rainy day and I’m enjoying being outside today. My guest is Ethnomusicologist Ben Taussig, someone I’ve really wanted to talk to for years on this show. Ben is a brilliant scholar and a really great guy, and we’re gonna talk about his new book.

Bangkok after dark. Great title, right? I’m intrigued already. So before I talked to Ben, I want to just talk a little bit about something that you heard right before the cold opened to this show. Um, there was a big booming voice that said SpectreVision Radio. Um, and I need to check this, but I’m pretty sure that that was the voice that used to announce.

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Those of you Night Owl Radio listeners of a certain age are gonna know what I’m talking about, right?

But anyway, SpectreVision is a production company. Based in LA they do films, but they also do podcast and digital content. SpectreVision is run by screenwriter Daniel Noah, and actor Elijah Wood. One thing that I did not know is that the Lord of the Rings star is also a DJ and a huge sound nerd.

Once I, uh, kinda looked them up, I realized I’d seen a couple of films of theirs and the sound design on these films were fantastic. And in fact, SpectreVision is known for doing really great sound design. I saw a film called LFO, which is about a guy who wields mind control through sound, pretty intriguing, and then the completely insane Mandy starring Nicholas Cage.

Definitely worth a watch and definitely intriguing use of sound and music. So basically, these guys reached out to me, apparently they’re Phantom Power fans and they invited me to join their network and I said yes. So what does that mean for the show? Uh, I hope it’s gonna mean that. I’m gonna be able to reach a larger audience over time.

Um, as I’ve discussed on this show before, I’m a big believer in public scholarship and doing compelling work for the public, and I’m looking forward to learning from folks with real serious production and, uh, marketing experience. That said I don’t really plan to change much about the show. I mean, I guess we might gain access to some higher profile guests, but, um, I really just plan to keep interviewing my favorite sound scholars, sound artists and composers as always.

And I suppose the biggest change you’ll notice is that Sonic logo, the SpectreVision logo at the start of the show, as well as some very limited ads and promos for other shows on the network. Um, and that’s really about it. If those things bother you, um, you know, you can always join the Phantom Power community and you’ll get the extended ad free versions of our podcast in the members only feed, and you’ll get other exclusive content delivered straight to your email inbox. So that’s always an option. You can learn more about that at phantompod.org. And, uh, yeah, other than that, I’m really excited about this new chapter for the show. 

Okay. Speaking of the show, let’s get to today’s show. Benjamin Taussig is an ethnomusicologist and associate professor of critical music studies at SUNY Stony Brook. His scholarship combines ethnographic and historical approaches to the study of sound and its roles in political protest and descent. Cold War era, music and nightlife encounters urban space.

Sex and Gender Alterity. His new book, Bangkok After Dark, Maurice Rocco and Cold War Global Nightlife is out now from Duke University Press. Um, this book is a biography of American jazz pianist, Maurice Rocco, who became an expatriate in Bangkok in 1964 and lived there until his murder in 1976. Ben is also the author of Bangkok is Ringing Sound, protest and Constraint, that came out in 2019 on Oxford University Press.

it’s an ethnography of Thailand’s 2010 and 2011 red shirt, anti-government protest movement, and that’s a book that won the 2020, British Forum for ethnomusicology book prize. In this conversation, we start off talking about that first book and then we segue into talking about the new one.

If you are interested in protests. Thai music, media and politics. The proto music videos known as soundies, queer Studies, the Cold War, sex work, jazz. I mean, this show kind of has it all. Ben has really fascinating insights. I think he’s a really distinctive scholar and I think you’re gonna love this conversation.

Ben has also experimented with radio and audio book production, and in this interview he turned off his fan. On a sweltering New York City Day, just so his mic would sound better. That’s the kind of commitment to quality to sound that Benjamin  Taussig has. So please enjoy my conversation with Benjamin Taussig. Hey, Ben. Welcome. Welcome.

to the show. 

Ben: Thank you so much. Mack, great to be on here.

Mack: been, I’ve been wanting to have you on for a long time, and I was just thinking about this like a minute ago. I really feel like you’re one of the very first, sort of peers that I met in the sound studies world back when we were both graduate students.

Ben: Yeah.

Mack: I think you were putting together like a sound studies panel and I signed onto that.

Am I remembering that? Is that how you remember us meeting?

Ben: That sounds right. And I’d have to figure out exactly what the panel was, but you know, in those days there, there weren’t a lot of us 

Mack: Yeah. Yeah.

They really weren’t. And I, I remember thinking, you know, you were super smart, really nice guy, but I also felt like we both had this sort of shared interest in like the interplay between sound and space, just even at that early time when I think our ideas were just kind of forming. 

Ben: Right 

Mack: And so I was just like sort of wondering like, how did, how did that become an interest of yours to begin with?

Ben: Well, the first project I did in sound studies was, was in New York City. And, you know, it was in my own apartment building. You know, in the way that sometimes in graduate school you do projects that are really close to your experience, which is actually a good way to, to do any project.

Um, but I, you know, I mean, I had this horrible, horrible noise situation in my building. Um, and it involved a neighbor, a next door neighbor, uh, you know, really, really nice couple. Uh, but they were in a dispute with the people who lived above ’em. Uh, and it was, you know, kind of couched as a noise dispute, but it was really a religious dispute, 

Mack: Huh

Ben: the people who lived above them practiced  Santería.

And the, the people who were next to me were, were Christian. And the, the, the noise was kind of always sutured to these religious concerns and, you know, these ideas about like what, what was religiously appropriate and what you should be doing in the home and, and what you shouldn’t be doing and what was holy and unholy and sacred and profane and, and that, all that.

And it was, you know, an abbreviated project that I never published, but I did present about it. Um, and I think that kind of clued me into, you know, thinking about how much sound and space are, are related and how much we can think about space through sound.

Mack: Yeah. Yeah. And so was this, uh, when you were at NYU, you, were you a, uh, and you were an ethnomusicology student? 

Ben: That’s right. Yes. I was in a, I was in a musicology student, but you know, the sound studies was really in the water at that institution at that time. And a lot of the graduate students were working on sound studies to some degree. We were all very excited about it and, you know, trying to sort of figure out how to, how to make it part of our work.

Mack: It definitely felt at the time, like most of the people who were interested in sound studies were grad students and we were all like, looking for some,

Ben: Yeah.

Mack: some leadership. Um, not that there weren’t fo, you know, because there were those folks out there who were sort of, had blazed a

trail and probably made the whole project seem a lot more thinkable. But, um, yeah, it was, there was sort of heady times. I, I, I think one thing. That certainly, you know, made our work different is that you were doing field work in Thailand. 

Ben: Yeah 

Mack: Where did your interest in Thailand come from?

Ben: Well, I was really interested in Bangkok rather than Thailand as a whole initially, uh, as a city that in many ways paralleled New York City. You know, it’s roughly the same size. Um, but it, you know, I’ve been thinking about New York and sound politics in New York for about a year. When I went to Thailand on an unrelated trip, and it just, it, it really struck me as a place that had a fascinating set of politics that I wanted to understand a little bit better.

And I wanted to understand the difference between how noise and sound were sort of adjudicated and understood, uh, in that place and as compared to how they were understood in, in New York. And so it kind of became a project of, of thinking about Bangkok, which I found interesting in all kinds of ways, but also thinking about it in comparison to, to New York City as a city.

So it was really kind of an urban studies project,

um, in, its, in its earliest moments, it’s, it’s grown to, to encompass Thailand more broadly as I’ve continued to work there for, you know, about 20 years now. But, uh, but the original impetus was kind of in Bangkok. Uh, the interest was in Bangkok as an urban space.

Ah, okay. That’s really interesting. So what, was this while you were a Master’s student or were you already a PhD at that

I did the master’s in PhD combined program, so

Mack: Oh right. Okay. Okay. So that must have meant that you didn’t have any Thai when, when you first got interested.

Ben: The first time that I went to Thailand, I did not, uh, but I started learning Thai immediately after that because when I started to think about it as a research site, the language I recognized would be essential. Um, so in 2007, uh, I began studying Thai as a language as well as reading heavily in Thai history and other Thai topics outside of that.

But I was pretty much a, a full on effort, um, once I got interested in it, and it never stopped. Um, and then I got a Fulbright, which took me to Thailand for my dissertation field work in 2010. 

Mack: Wow. You know, just thinking about, you know, I, I lived in Taiwan for almost four years and, you know, learned Mandarin at least to speak,

and, and listened to Mandarin fairly. Okay. Um, but that language had four tones, so you didn’t all just need to think about the phonetic aspects that you would have in English, but

there were also these tonal aspects where a word would have a different meaning if was said with a different inflection. And then I went to Thailand and I heard that there were five tones, 

Ben: yeah.

Mack: and I was like, that just sounds exponentially harder just to have like

Ben: It, it is, yes. I mean, there, there’s all kinds of mistakes you can make that, you know, result in embarrassing situations as, as is true in any country. But the tonality introduces another dimension to that for sure.

Mack: Do you think that that implicates a different relationship to sound like, uh, you know, in, in Chinese, just, it seems like the puns were nonstop. Um, and just thinking about the sonic dimensions of that were there differences that you noticed?

Ben: Thai speakers are also very fond of puns. Um, but I don’t know, I guess I’d be hesitant to attribute it, uh, causally to the way that people sort of think about their sound worlds. But I mean, I, I absolutely think that there are, you know, powerful differences in the, the, the kind of habitus of Thai listeners, um, in everyday life.

And what registers as meaningful sound, what registers as, uh, disruptive sound. Those things are organized very, very differently. It could be that tonality and language plays some role in it. Um, but I think there’s a whole lot of factors.

Mack: Yeah, that makes sense. You know, a few months ago now, I had Andrew simon on the show and he was in Cairo studying and you know, the Arab Spring erupted and then suddenly he’s confronted with all these questions about sound and media and, and political movements. Sounds to me like perhaps more that you went there in. In search of understanding some of these issues, but nevertheless, like your first book, which is fantastic, Bangkok is bringing, uh, based on your dissertation work, it throws us into the center of a political movement and, and sort of the sounds of that movement. Um, could you tell us a little bit about that book and, and how it evolved?

Ben: absolutely. Well, that book was also an urban studies book initially, and the Fulbright proposal was, was one for understanding, uh, musical patterns of musical transmission in, uh, in, in urban space as it has developed, um, and how, how that affected, uh, musical transmission and musical education. But the project, the, the actual book, as you know, is not about that.

Mack: No. 

Ben: Um, and the reason for that was that, you know, this protest movement was happening in a way that I could not have anticipated. It started in March. Of, uh, 2010, and I arrived at the end of that month. And so it, it had just gotten underway and it was, you know, in a word, it was too fascinating for me to ignore.

Um, so I really did kind of change the project pretty dramatically and ended up doing an ethnography of what was around me, which is always true, I think to a degree with ethnography that, 

Mack: Sure 

Ben: you play the hand that you’re dealt, uh, which is not always the one that you expect it to be dealt.

Uh, it’s not, you know, sometimes it’s a stronger hand, sometimes it’s a weaker hand. Sometimes it’s just a weirder hand. And I think mine was mostly weirder. Um, but I, you know, I did some of the things that I had set out to do, but I also was tracking this movement wherever it went. And, uh, you know, it still ended up having a lot of dimensions of spatiality, which in, in fact was, as we’ve been talking about, the very thing that I’d been interested in, including in New York, uh, in my Fulbright proposal and so forth.

 There were a lot of similarities at that time between, for example, the way that the, uh, Arab Spring played out, uh, the way that the protests in Turkey. Played out at that time, the way that Occupy Wall Street played out.

Uh, there was just a kind of a global tendency, uh, for occupations of critical downtown spaces often, which focused on money. Um, and that was true in Thailand as well. So, you know, people were camped out in near, you know, giant malls and, uh, you know, near the insurance company buildings and things like that, you know, really kind of centrally situated.

And what I was interested in was the spatiality of these encampments, uh, which, you know, which were totally spontaneous and yet at the same time reflected a lot about how Thai society operates, right? So you could actually, you could glean a lot of difference, uh, which was significant and, and sort of told you something about Thailand as a whole.

Uh, the, the, the ways that people order themselves and organize themselves, uh, the way that, you know, you can kind of observe, uh, rurality and, uh, and, and urbanness like kind of dividing themselves in. These, you know, spontaneous protests in the same way that they existed in Thai society more broadly. So I was interested in these sort of manifestations of, of space that kind of spoke to the totality of, of the country and its politics,

Mack: Wow. And, and, and just to give people a thumbnail sketch of those politics. So Thailand’s a constitutional monarchy, I guess, right?

So you have like a, a political leader who’s the prime minister, and then you would have this hereditary leader who’s the king. But then there’s this also sort of unconstitutional third party, which is the military, which seems to have a coup every, know, once in a while. Um, and then we also seem to have gotten a, basically like a hereditary line on the side of the, the political leadership. So can you maybe talk about the red shirt movement and Thaksin and, and just help people understand that context?

Ben: Yeah, well, your, your description of it was quite lucid. In fact, um, you know, it, it is ostensibly a democracy, but there is this sort of third rail, uh, which is the monarchy, uh, which is entitled to say whatever it wants and do whatever it wants. It’s, it’s essentially impune.

And that of course, you know, puts a limit on how democratic you can be, right? Because there are things you can absolutely not say, um, or speak about, not only critically, but really in any way other than reverentially. So, I mean, that creates a weird circumstance and people hide behind it.

You’re saying about the royal family, like you just can’t say much of anything about them right? 

You can’t say anything critical at all. Uh, moreover, you can’t say anything critical about any Royals anywhere. Um, so it’s like monarchy as an institution is impune in Thailand. Uh, you can’t say anything negative about, you know, the King of England, that’s absolutely off limits. So the protections that are extended to the Thai King are actually, uh, broader than that.

Right? And, and of course it also applies to the entire royal family in Thailand, and many people will sort of hide behind that impunity. Um, so people who claim to speak in the name of the monarchy can, for example, like advance political projects that they want to advance, uh, and put the Royal imprimatur on them.

And then nobody can say anything critical about them because if they’re associated with the, the monarchy, then those projects can’t be critiqued either. It’s a weird circumstance and it’s been challenged in all kinds of ways. Um, and during the red shirt movement, uh, you had this figure, Thaksin, Thaksin Shinawatra .

Um, who was this telecommunications tycoon. Uh, you know, a billionaire, very, very rich guy. Um, and he was seen as an ally of the poor. Um, it’s quite complicated. I think you could productively draw comparisons to, to somebody like Trump or George W. Bush in the sense that, you know, uh, Thaksin is really not a great guy.

Uh, he’s certainly not a person of the left. Um, but there was this kind of a working class attachment to him, and that working class attachment was not always expressed in sort of conservative ways either. So, I mean, it, it doesn’t map on. All that well to the American context, for example, like you kind of have to take it in its own right.

Mack: Yeah

Ben: but you know, I I, I think the red shirts made a lot of good points. Um, you know, they, they also had some subgroups that were actually like quite, you know, communist. Um, so, you know, there, there were some that I identified with, or, you know, found myself kind of like more at home in, um, but I kind of made my way through different subsets of the red shirts trying to understand how they fought and how they related to one another.

And, you know, in particular, like the, the way that they would make sound and how that sound would express something about their ideology and their social position. Um, and since that time, you know, yes, you’re correct. The Shinawatra family has now had three prime ministers, uh, in total.

 And in fact, a a lot of red shirts now see Thaksin as having betrayed them. Um, you his, his party, uh, has aligned with the military and kind of become, uh, a shell of what it formerly had been. And so that’s been something that former supporters of the red shirts have been reckoning with since then.

Mack: So you’re there, you’re making field recordings, you’re interacting with. These red shirt, uh, movement encampments. Um, I mean, the way that you write about the sounds one of the most vivid openings to an academic book that I can remember because it’s just like, it sounds so overwhelming and, and, and stressful and hot and crowded together with people and full of sound and just sort of like, there’s a whole sort of feeling of excess to the entire thing that I think you draw really vividly in the book, and I really love that about the book. Um, but beyond that, evoking that kind of experience in the reader, like what did you find that you learned that you wanted to share in that book about the relationship between sound and politics, sound and space.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think that there, there, there were a few different insights that to me were sort of central to the book. Um, among them, and these are not necessarily in order, um, was that when we make politicized sound, we can’t use it as a magic bullet, as a political magic bullet.

And I think that at the time that we were coming up in sound studies, that was a claim that I was finding a lot in the literature that, um, you know, sound was this kind of alternative to visuality. And of course, you know, folks like Jonathan Stern of critique this as well. Uh, that sound was this sort of alternative to visuality it transcended borders, right?

It was non Cartesian. It was non-linear. Uh, it, presented an alternative to the way that, you know, politics is ordered and categorized in, you know, area studies and, you know, all this Cold War stuff. And, and what I had observed when I was there for these protests actually, was that sound actually couldn’t necessarily travel all that far.

When you were in, for example, a big protest movement and you had one particular voice or one particular idea to, to express, there were lit quite literally, you know. Tens of subgroups all around you whose sounds you were contending with. And even if you all were under the same banner, right?

In this case the red shirts, it, it was very, very difficult to get your ideas out there, right? You could try, um, and sometimes you could succeed, but it wasn’t always possible. And the, this idea of constraint, right, which is in the title was, was really central to me at that time to sort of talk back to folks in sound studies who were kind of romanticizing sound, um, as, as like a special tool, right?

Like a kind of a secret tool to conduct politics. Um, and I wanted to suggest that in fact, like a lot of times sound is quite stuck and quite limited.

Mack: Yeah. I, I really liked that a lot about the book, that it did sort of cut against the grain of a lot of some rather romantic notions about sound that I think in the early days of sound studies were very tempting to embrace, certainly, you know, to myself. Um, but then again, I think we, both of us were also in interested in how sound can be a limit or how it, and how it can be limited, and how there can be sonic walls and interference. And, and just on a very basic level, you know, what I think about, when I think about that first book of yours is like there’s a sort of, uh, almost intrinsic relationship between. Democracy and, and a kind of babble like so many voices at once creates a kind of noise and, and like, that’s just almost ontological issue democracy that I think we need to take very seriously and try to think about, especially as we’ve created this global internet found that it didn’t produce a global village, where we could hear each other lucidly as we imagine, and, and instead there’s a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of disinformation, a whole lot of confusion.

Um, so Yeah. I wonder now, you know, in hindsight, looking at your book. In this new era that we’re in politically, especially here in the United States, where as you mentioned, you know, red shirts, red hats, like there are some similarities be drawn. A kind of a rural movement that was sort of looked down upon by the intellectual urban

Ben: Mm-hmm.

Mack: uh, a media mogul at the helm. I mean, certainly burse comes to mind. comes to mind, like there, it does feel like something globally is happening where very important critiques are being made of the entrenched power structure. And yet there’s something very limited about the ability of people collectively to do something about it.

Ben: Absolutely. Yeah. And when I was doing the research, you know, I, I became aware at a certain point that I was in a very particular moment in history in terms of how, uh, media we’re operating. Um, and of course, you know, media or central to, to how sound circulates. Um, and it, it was in some ways a great moment or a better moment than the present because, uh, media were very unruly and there were a lot of different types and people could kind of enter into different media networks depending on who they were.

So, you know, you got like, a lot of people have these, like walkie talkies basically. Like the kind that firemen have. Um, and, and they would use those to communicate, and oftentimes they had them because of their job, right? They may have been like moto taxi drivers or, you know, emergency workers or something.

So they already had these devices and that became their kind of communicative network. You had sort of emergently people using Twitter, but it was only a few people, right? It was a highly elite, highly educated. Uh, group. Um, and then you had other people who would buy CDs, right?

So that was kind of their media network. And the CDs had all kinds of political content on them, and they would come to every rally, and the rallies were constant, so they would like pick up a couple of CDs every time, and the CDs were just being churned out by musicians and, and politicians and figures.

So you, you had all these different sort of like, networks of circulation that didn’t necessarily overlap, um, in a way that, I don’t know whether that’s quite true anymore. Um, I, I would like it to be, but you know, you sort of felt, a kind of collapse or a universalizing, where you, you know, you sort of had to be on Twitter or you were nowhere, uh, or Facebook or whatever it was at the moment, right? Where, where social media kind of flattened things and, um. You actually had less diversity in terms of the communicative networks that people would sort of rely on for their information, um, for their communication.

And I think that has affected how politics is conducted, right? I, I think we see now, um, that you have to be on the right platform, if you want to reach people. And of course that also makes you very visible, right?

So it ultimately serves the cause of surveillance. So, you know, these, these sort of hopes that we had for social media as a thing that could be, uh, liberatory once upon a time I think has gone the other direction and become, uh, a, a bit of a prison for activists.

Mack: So you said that you, you know, were interested in these spatial issues.

You were also originally interested in music and as you said, music does come into play in the book. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of rural music that folks were listening to and then sort of political valences of that?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, genre mattered a lot. Genre always signifies identity to some degree, and in the protest movements, it, it really did. Uh, so, you know, a lot of the most potent music at The red shirt protest was, was music that’s associated with the rural areas. Uh, sometimes the Northeast, which is called  Isaan, uh, and sometimes other, other agrarian parts of the country.

Um, you know,  luk  thung was a big one. Um, that’s a kind of like a broad umbrella term for, uh, a genre that’s been around kind of since like the thirties or forties in Thailand. Um, that’s often analogized to country music in the us you know, a lot of songs about, um, like labor, uh, relationships, like, uh, migration, stuff like that.

Um, there were other genres. There, there are a lot of sub genres of another broad category called mor lam. Which I didn’t know as well when I was writing the first book, but, which was definitely present. And the presence of these genres in these kind of rich urban areas, uh, where, you know, elites tend to congregate and shop and, uh, do business was like really, really provocative.

Um, so, you know, that was the main way that genre kind of presented itself was as a sort of provocation. You do hear it all the time on the street in Thailand. Uh, people play it on the street, they listen to it, you know, street vendors tend to listen to it on radios. It’s pretty ubiquitous.

And so you had this sense of it being present already in the city as a music of the underclass, and then all of a sudden, uh, becoming the kind of soundtrack of a political movement that was largely populated by the underclass.

Mack: Yeah. It, it’s so interesting to think about, you know, the rural nature of luk

thung and, and mor lam and the fact that that music was kind of seen as an affront if you, they were ac occupying these fancy parts of town. I mean, because I think for like a certain type of American hipster, like those are the two genres of Thai music that we’re familiar with via the Sublime Frequencies label.

I mean, it’s a lot of, it’s incredible music but knowing more about the sort of rural, I don’t want to stay nostalgia, although I think, I think it can be a very, you know, nostalgic sort of music. Um, but also just about the sorts of separation that people are having to deal with, you know, being laborers in urban areas from the rural I think that’s kind of, kind of poignant that that music became symbolic in the political movement as well.

Ben: Yeah, it, it really was, um, you know, a lot of people traveled to join the protest. They didn’t necessarily live in Bangkok. Even people from rural areas who work in Bangkok don’t live in Bangkok. In fact, they don’t identify with Thailand at all. Right? If they’re going to Bangkok, they’ll say like,  ’Bpai Thai’ like going to Thailand. Um, you know, because they, they consider themselves essentially to be Laotian. You know, music absolutely signified that, right? It’s in a way that people often use music to as an index of home, um, as a way to sort of like, uh, emotionally reconnect with a place that you’re displaced from. Um, you know, that music remains very important for a lot of migrant laborers.

Mack: Yeah. Yeah. Um, just outta curiosity, like maybe one last question about, uh. Your experience of writing that first book? There were some really, I remember one moment where you’re in the back of a truck with a tarp over it and the rain is very loud on the tarp and it’s kind of creating this white noise that allows you to kind of speak privately with, with, one woman who is then able to express her actual feelings about the royal family. 

Can you maybe talk a little bit about that and then also your role as a foreigner in Thailand. Did you have certain kinds of freedom of speech or would would that have been, dangerous to your liberty to speak about the royal family as well?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, that was a remarkable trip. Uh, I remember it extremely well, um, from 15 years ago. The woman’s nickname was Meek. Um, I wouldn’t give her real name, but, that was a reminder of, you know, the ways in which I talk about sonic niches in the book, and that was a niche that lent itself to a private conversation, right?

An intimate conversation that couldn’t have happened in public because someone might have overheard you. And sometimes it’s the case that, you know, when you are in a, in a certain kind of enclosed space and you have the benefit of, uh, sound around you, that insulates you, you know, you can say certain kinds of things that you couldn’t say otherwise.

 So, you know, that was an example of these sort of sonic niches that emerge because of contextual conditions that was true throughout the protest movement, for sure. Um. As far as my capacity to speak, I didn’t know. And, you know, I guess I would argue that I still, I couldn’t have known where the line is with speech.

And, you know, I think probably, unfortunately American listeners can now relate to this, probably pretty directly, but nobody really knew where the line was. And so, you know, you engage in a lot of self-censorship as a result. Um, you try to be open, um, about how you speak, but you’re aware that as soon as you stick your head above water, that you are putting yourself at risk and you never really know when you are, uh, at risk and when you’re safe.

Mack: Well, um, perhaps, uh, we should move on to your new book, which I. I. really, really enjoyed reading. It’s called Bangkok After Dark. Uh, do you wanna maybe give us like the brief elevator pitch about what this book’s

Ben: Sure. So, I mean, this book was certainly connected to my first book, uh, and indeed to the themes of urban Space and development. Uh, and it was also connected to genre. Um, and you know, we, you, we talked a moment ago about mor lam. Um, when I listened to Malam in the present, uh, I’m always very curious about, you know, what the histories of that genre are and why is it so appealing to, uh, American and Euro American listeners, you know, what is it?

Um, and I can kind of even before I’d studied this stuff, I could kind of pick some things out, right? Like it has that psychedelic tonality. Um, sometimes you’ll hear blues in it, uh, to some degree. There’s a lot of jamming. The sound of the Phin, which is the lead instrument, often mimics, uh, an electric guitar in its function.

And I wanted to know kind of how that came about. And I had some suspicions, uh, that it dated to the Vietnam War and so I started to research the Vietnam War era in Thailand. So we’re talking about roughly 1959 to 1976, um, the years that the United States was heavily invested in Thailand as a partner in that region.

Uh, kind of an anti-communist partner. And I started studying sort of how the music evolved, um, how it came to sound, the way that it sounds, and then how that music ended up in the hands of Western listeners. On the way to studying these questions, I found this individual, Maurice Rocco, whose name is in the title of the book, and who was on the cover of the book.

Who you know, has this fascinating life story. Uh, you know, he was a star in the American nightclub scene. He was actually kind of a household name in the US in the forties. He fell out of fashion in the fifties and he ended up moving first to Europe and then ultimately to Bangkok in 1964. Uh, he lived there for 12 years, uh, until he was murdered by two young male sex workers in 1976.

And, uh, having sort of figured out the outline of his story. I, I, first of all, I was just interested in him as an individual. I thought, this is somebody who really should be studied. But I was also interested in the ways that he could illuminate those same questions that I had about Thailand. Um, and, and the development of genres like mor lam, right?

In other words, the sort of intimate relationship between, uh, America and Thailand, right? Which, uh, was kind of fostered during that time. And it generated things like the sort of psychedelic version of mor lam. And ultimately Rocco became a kind of a through line. So the book is a biography of him, but it’s also about these broader Thai American relationships that developed during the Cold War.

Mack: Wow. That is so fascinating because I did not realize that. The sort of, uh, genesis of this book was questions that I myself have had well listening to these genres of music and some other genres of music in Southeast Asia that have a sort of, length. They seem in many ways to, to have some of the structures of pop music and yet sound very much unlike western pop music. 

Um, and was always myself curious about what roles Western imperialism and the American military presence and so on might have had in that. So that’s really interesting to learn that those questions led you to this book. 

As you say, this book really focuses on this person of Maurice rocco, a pretty big star in the 1940s, and yet. Someone most of us have never heard of. 

Um, maybe we can talk, uh, a little bit more about his heyday and, his era of popularity. It seemed to me that from what you were saying, one of the ways he sort of got his start in the wider public eye was by appearing in soundies, which is something that my good buddy Andrea Kelly has written about. And you, you cite in the book, 

Ben: know her work well. Yeah. Yeah.

Mack: And Andrea’s a good friend. Um, and so you, you sort of do a close

reading of one of these soundies called, uh,

Rocco Blues, which for folks who are, you know, watching this on YouTube or Spotify, we, we will show you some of it, uh, as we talk. But, um, Rocco Blues. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what soundies were and maybe what this video shows us and what we can learn about Maurice Rocco from it.

Ben: Yeah, so I mean, soundies are pretty amazing. They were one of a number of different types of musical media that, that, you know, existed in the 20th century. They were actually kind of a visual musical medium, which was unusual for that period of time. So they were essentially like little music videos.

I mean, that’s kind of how they read. Uh, they were made basically in, in the forties. I think maybe a few of them were made in the thirties, but I think they were mostly limited to the forties. And the company went out of business in like 45 or 47, and. You, you’d have these different musicians, some of whom were big stars, right?

 Like, duke Ellington has a couple soundies, but there’s also much more, uh, minor stars who, who would record them. And the, usually they’re about three minutes long. And you, as a patron, the way that you would watch a soundie was, you know, not in your home, um, but actually in a bar or, like a train station.

And they had these consoles, which were called panoram, uh, you know, which sort of looked like those, like old style, like very large wooden TV consoles. You’d put in, it was a nickel or a dime, and you’d watch a series of soundies as a result, right?

So you could pick like the set of clips you wanted to watch after you, you know, you paid your nickel or dime. Um, and Rocco made a bunch of these soundies and he was great for them because he was a total performer. Um, his music is quite unremarkable if you listen to it, uh, as audio and incredible if you watch him as a performer, you know, like that was the art, right?

Like the, the art was him performing. Um, and so he made a bunch of these soundies and he would always stand up when he played, right? Which was his thing was that he would stand up while he played the piano, which like, if you played the piano, you know how difficult that is and he would do all this kind of like, creative stuff with the piano itself. Sometimes he would spin the piano, uh, you know, he’d played the piano, housing, percussively, things like that.

Um, but in this particular soundie, Rocco Blues, uh, he’s actually adapting this like, very old Irish standard, right? I don’t know when it was written, but it’s very, very old.

Um, and it’s, it’s called Molly Malone, and it’s the story of this woman, uh, you know, who walks around Dublin and she sells, uh, fish from her mobile, like, you know, her cart. Um, and like she has a suitor and the suitor wants to, uh, wants to marry her. But, uh, her condition is that she needs to stay there, uh, in Dublin, right? She won’t leave. 

And in the original version, like she ends up dying. Um, and, you know, it’s, this, like sad Irish ballad, but Rocco adapts it, uh, so that she and her suitor end up getting married. 

Um, but it’s like, it’s just such a strange thing for Rocco in 1943 to be playing this sort of jazz or blue ified version of this old Irish standard.

Um, and you know, moreover, you know, it’s, it’s the mid forties and he’s kind of already anticipating rock and roll in the way that he performs, right? So he’s, he stands up, he looks like, you know, Jerry Lee Lewis would later look, he looks like little Richard would look in about a decade. Playing the piano, uh, as he stands and doing all kinds of like, creative physical stuff.

Really just a consummate performer. And, uh, he’s also doing like a lot of queer signaling as he plays. You can watch the video. It’s on YouTube for, for, uh, Rocco Blues. But, you know, he, he does this, this kind of eye rolling stuff, you know, he is got like heavy makeup on his eyes.

Maurice Rocco: Maurice Rocco – Rocco Blues 

Ben: You’ll think of Little Richard right away. Right? And, and in fact, it’s very likely that little Richard sort of pulled from him or from others who are doing similar things with this sort of queer signaling, uh, that would’ve become part of the template of rock and roll.

Mack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really interesting because, you know. The eye rolling also has a sort of, you know, more unfortunate forebearer in, in sort of like the ways that black people were portrayed in musical film and vaudeville and comedy with a sort of eyeroll thing. Can you talk maybe a little bit more about like the different ways that this could signify and that history?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had to be very cautious with that, be for exactly the reason that you’re pointing out, right? Because, uh, the gesturing with the eyes could also be a, a symbol of minstrelsy. Um, it, there, there are some earlier, uh, Rocco film clips in which he’s kind of minstrelised by the director. Um, but it was very important to consider the director in each case.

Because directors were pretty explicit about their politics and their relationship to minstrelsy. Um, and the director of Rocko Blues was white, but he was, uh, like absolutely opposed to the use of minstrel signaling, he was on the record saying he would never do it.

 And he didn’t, right? Like if you, if you watch the stuff that he produced, he also made movies. He didn’t do any minstrelsy. He didn’t do that at all. 

Mack: Yeah. And the, I gotta, I just say like, these soundies make Rocco look great.

I mean, he’s a, he’s a beautiful man. He looks so elegant. So beautiful. And a lot of times he’s just like looking right at the camera in, in a way that I think just sort of elevates him and may then also sort of creates, as you say, a form of intimacy with the viewer.

Ben: Yeah.

Mack: And also there just this funny kaleidoscope effect that comes up over and over where suddenly there’s like eight of his hands playing the piano or what have you. Um, it’s a bit psychedelic. 

Ben: Is a little bit psychedelic. It’s true. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways you can read this as a precursor to rock and roll. Um, but yeah, I mean the queer signaling, to me it’s, it’s clear, you know, I’ve watched this clip hundreds of times and, you know, read everything that’s been written about it no matter how minor.

If you place it side by side with other soundies that were directed by other directors, you can start to see the difference, right, between the sort of queer signaling and the way that the eyes are used, um, to, to do that. Um, which again, again, it, it helps to think about Little Richard, right?

Because there are such strong overlaps between the way that Rocco is signaling and the way that Little Richard did that, you can start to see that as a through line, right? Um, that was different from, uh, what you’d see in a lot of other soundies, unfortunately.

Mack: And you write that we don’t have a lot of direct evidence that little Richard learned this standing piano technique from Rocco, but there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to, to indicate that he did. I mean, Rocco was famous for this, 

Ben: was very famous for it. 

Mack: And he was the only one doing it.

Ben: Right. So I, I do have some evidence that to me, it wasn’t to the point that I could say it outright, but I did one interview with the, the child of somebody who knew Rocco well from Oxford  Louis  Rodabaugh. Um, and the son of  Louis  Rodabaugh said that Rocco had taught Jerry Lee Lewis how to stand at the piano.

Um, but that’s, it’s only one source claiming that so I can only make that claim so confidently, but as you said, nobody else was doing it right. Nobody else was standing at the piano. And that I have researched exhaustively. It’s very difficult to research something in a negative sense like that.

Like, um, rather than looking for something, you’re looking for the absence of something, but any way that you can sort of word it. If you were looking for a standing pianism, uh, the only reference you would find was to Rocco. And if you would find somebody else, they would always be, uh, written about in reference to Rocco.

So like  Loumell Morgan, who was a, a pianist who in the 1950s, you know, he would get written about sometimes and it would be like, oh, like  Loumell Morgan, like plays standing up just like Maurice Rocco. Right. So like Rocco was, he was the reference for it. Uh, pretty clearly.

Maurice Rocco: Maurice Rocco – Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar

Mack: Then even musically, I mean he’s playing this Boogie Wooy style with a very heavy percussive left hand that’s just like proto rock and roll. Like you can hear it there that that’s not like a huge jump to get to jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard from what Maurice Rocko was doing. Musically either. 

Ben: Absolutely. I mean, Booey Woogie was such an important precursor to rock and roll, and I think it’s a, a type of, you know, jazz blues that I, I think people understand it as a precursor to rock and roll, but it maybe hasn’t been studied to the same degree as, as some other precursors to rock have.

Mack: Yeah. So. Despite the fact that he was in these soundies and then went on to, you know, be in some Hollywood movies that I think maybe some of, one of which maybe displays his talents even more, uh, vibrantly, 

Maurice Rocco: maurice Rocco in Incendiary Blonde

Mack: he sort of peaks in the forties, starts to see his career crater in the fifties, winds up traveling, you know, in Europe, in Australia and, and then eventually sort of finds a refuge in Thailand, in Bangkok in the mid sixties. Um, you really make a very strong connection between this arc of his career and the fact that he was a black queer man. Um, and also the fact that we don’t. Know that much about him also seems to represent that reality as well in certain ways. You wanna talk maybe a little bit about that?

Ben: your timeline is correct. He was a person who didn’t have a lot of career opportunities after about 1955 in the US. Um, you know, pop music stars when they’re reaching 40 or even 35 years old, are a lot less interesting often to, to the industry, especially if they’re black.

Um, and, he just kind of lost, lost gigs, you know, he wasn’t getting booked anymore. Um, but he went to, uh, Australia and New Zealand as part of a tour called the Harlem Blackbirds for nine months between those two years, uh, which was organized by an impresario named Larry Steele, uh, who had done some sort of all black reviews in the United States and decided to do this one in Australia and New Zealand.

And he picked Rocco as his headliner. And by 55, Rocco really had like very little career left in the United States. But when he went abroad. He was seen as this like megastar, right? His career was like all of a sudden turbocharged, and he was making money. And you know, I, I talked to one of the women who, uh, was a chorus girl on that tour.

And she told me just that, you know, that he was basically untouchable, um, you know, on that tour. He was like the big star and she was just a lowly chorus girl. And, you know, hearing that he was in that position at that time, it presents such a contrast, right?

So he, like his career was totally hollowed out in the United States. But then when he gets abroad, he finds a new audience, right? And so then it starts to make sense why he would leave the United States. So he comes back to the US after Australia and New Zealand, but it’s back to the way it was. His career is just as in the tank as it had been, um, in the early 1950s.

And then, you know, he, and then he just leaves. And the only, uh, thing that we really know about it comes from, uh, one of his brothers, Ohmer Rockhold. Uh, Rocko was a stage name. His, uh, given name was Rockhold. Um. His brother Ohmer, he alluded to, to race, you know, like Rocco had mentioned that he felt that in the United States it was racism in part that was, that was holding him back.

Um, you know, we have to remember as well that in the 1950s, I mean, among the many times that the United States has sort of spiraled into sort of racial nightmares, the 1950s was, was absolutely one of those, you know, I mean, of course you have the, you know, the seeds of the Civil Rights movement, but you also have Emmett Till.

Um, you also have, joe McCarthy, right? Like black people and queer people are being targeted in a really, really acute way, and Rocco could not have not felt that. Um, and so if he started to realize that playing abroad was, was gonna be a profitable gig where he would be respected as compared with the United States where he would be targeted, potentially, leaving was more appealing, and so that’s what he did. 

And so he went to Europe, um, in 1959. He played in England for a while, then went to France and the Netherlands and a few other places. Uh, he ended up, uh, moving to Thailand in 64. It’s not exactly clear why he decided to go there, but, you know, there, there are a few possibilities.

Um, he likely was offered a gig, a nightly gig at the Oriental Hotel by, uh, a woman who had been involved in the, uh, redevelopment of that hotel. Uh, she seemed to have known him. So he probably got invited to do that and decided that it, you know, it was something that was worth doing. So.

Mack: So he makes his way to Thailand and then really the remainder of the book becomes an exploration through the figure of Rocco, of like a number of themes in this encounter between, to put it in a very cliched way, east and west, and, and American colonialism and the military presence of the United states in Asia, and then the sort of social and cultural impacts of that. And, and it’s, it’s truly fascinating. Maybe we can just start off by setting the stage of Bangkok in the mid 1960s when the American war in Vietnam is beginning and Bangkok basically becomes sort of a playground for, for G.I.’s. Can you maybe just tell us about that era and what, what it looked like, what it sounded like?

What, what were those spaces like? That Maurice Rocco was inhabiting.

Ben: Yeah. So I mean, the United States had been, uh, cozying up to Thailand for at least six years, you could trace it all the way back to the early years of, of Eisenhower to the early 1950s. Um, and what that meant at that time was mostly that, uh, you know, American developmental money was being pumped into Thailand.

And so there were all these agencies, right? USIS, uh, USOM, uh, United States Operation Mission in Thailand, uh, that were sort of responsible for, uh, shepherding money, uh, from American contractors or from the American government into Thailand, and then finding contractors to do the work. And so it, it essentially meant the, like wholesale rapid fire modernization of the country.

So, you know, you have a country that’s very much an agrarian place, relatively small population, relatively undeveloped. And all of a sudden you have these, you know, like big American contracting firms from, you know, Dallas, right? Like coming in with like trucks and people and expertise, and they’re just building roads and they’re covering over canals because canals are seen as old fashioned, right?

You need roads and highways, and you need factories, and you need radio, right? That kind of like spreads the, you know, the, the voice of the government to the provinces. And, um, you need education, right? So there’s like schools being built. I mean, so you have this real wholesale modernization of the country happening, um, in the 1960s.

Um, it becomes a very modern place, very quickly. And in rural places often how that manifests is through bases, US air bases. So you have these air bases, which are these kind of like walled off things. And you have the, the American G.I.’s who are doing whatever they’re doing, they’re bringing in airplanes, they’re dealing with weapons and things like that.

All of which are the instruments that end up fighting the war in Vietnam, right? It’s basically the whole war is fought from Thailand. Um, but in Bangkok, you know, it’s already a bigger city, so it, it manifests a little bit differently, but you still get a lot of G.I.’s hanging out there.

 What is different about Bangkok is that it’s also an r and r center. So it’s not just a place to sort of prosecute this war, it’s also a place for leisure because all these G.I.’s who are, you know, soon to be fighting in Vietnam already kind of coming in massive numbers. They’re all men between the ages of 19 and 25.

I mean, with the exception of some officers who are older, most of them are men between the ages of 19 and 25. They’re, they’ve never been outside of, you know, their hometown before they need stuff to do. Right. And you can imagine the things that that produces, right? It produces like nightclub industries.

Um, you know, it produces like sex work industries, consumer opportunities, right? Things that they can buy. Because they’re all getting hazard pay and stuff like that. So they have money to spend. So Bangkok really gets transformed by these American G.I.’s as customers. Um, and that’s the context that Rocco walks into, right?

Um, there are all these people who are like, they’re very modern, they’re very young. Jazz is very cool and highbrow, it’s seen as American, like him as a black person is, uh, a very desirable kind of, uh, avatar of this music. So he, you know, gets to play at the fanciest hotel in the country, essentially, um, for audiences that have a lot of money and a lot of, you know, that, that are very elite, very cosmopolitan.

So that’s the, the moment that he kind of walks into,

Mack: And just to be clear, he probably wouldn’t have been playing for the rank and file

G.I.’s. He would’ve been playing for other groups of people, right?

Ben: That’s right. Yeah. He did tend to play for a, a more elite crowd. Right. So he would be more likely to play for officers. Um, and, and not just Americans, right. Also people from other countries, maybe business people as well. Um, but the broader context was one of, you know, sort of leisure created by the American presence.

He just so happened to be in an upper tier of it.

Mack: So since I feel like we’re sort of getting into the territory, that was your original question about the, the influence of, you know, rock and roll on Thailand. So can you talk somewhat about like what music was playing in these clubs for, for G.I.’s and, and um, and what kind of musical genres emerged from that?

Ben: Yeah. So I mean, there were a few different ways that Western Music was kind of making its way into Thailand at the time, and one of them was through, uh, post exchange stores and post exchange stores, uh, were these facilities where G.I.’s could buy stuff.

They were run by the military. And G.I.’s could buy food, right? Coca-Cola was like a really, really important thing that you could purchase, and you can also buy music, right? Uh, so they would buy records. Um, sometimes those records would also, you know, uh, conveniently disappear from the back of a truck.

Um, oftentimes like G.I.’s were sort of in cahoots with Thai people. Um, you know, stuff would get stolen, uh, and then sold. So the records would make their way into Thailand more broadly. So people were hearing them. Uh, Thais, were hearing that music. Uh, but the other thing that would happen is that American G.I.’s wanted to hear that music live.

So, you know, like Sergeant Peppers would come out and then there would be all these musicians, uh, mostly Southeast Asian musicians who were very adept at learning, uh, to play music as soon as it came out, right? So, a New Beatles album comes out, A new Pink Floyd album comes out. There are musicians who will learn it like that day and then, you know, by that night, be ready to play it at the bar, and the G.I.’s will pay to hear it.

Um, a lot of them were Filipino. In fact, um, that’s probably actually the most significant constituency of people who could do that. But there were also ties who could do it as well. Uh, folks like  Lam  Morrison, um, who’s, you know, remains very famous in Thailand as a kind of a hard rock icon. Um, he’s called Lam  Morrison because, uh, American G.I.’s gave him that nickname because he was particularly good at learning  Doors songs.

Um, 

Mack: Ah,

Ben: He would play at the bass, he would play, you know, door songs as soon as they were released. Um, and so in that way you get sort of experts, right? You get people who know how to play that music. Um, so in these ways, Western music is circulating in Thailand. Um, and there’s one sort of case that I followed in particular.

I was around right after, uh, a, a very famous impresario, uh, died, passed away. Uh, and he was the one who had electrified this instrument called the Phin, um, which is, the functional equivalent of the guitar in, mor lam ploen groups, which is a specific kind of mor lam.

Mack: And just to describe it a little bit, it’s a stringed lute like instrument that often has sort of like a bird head on the, on where the tuners are? 

Ben: it’s like a, a little serpent head, like at the end of the neck. Um, but yeah, I mean, it’s like a heavy wood instrument. Um, you know, most of the time they have three strings, but sometimes, people will play a two string phin, but, you know, it’s a kind of a jammy instrument.

Like it’s, it’s essentially a lead, melodic instrument. And for a long time it had been played more, more strummed, right. As an acoustic instrument, but, uh, this, this particular figure, uh, figured out how to electrify it, right? He added pickups to it. And the, the way that he had expertise in electricity was that he had been part of the team that electrified his home town, right? 

And he had learned that from the American military, right? Because again, the American military was modernizing the country. So they, they taught Thais how to work with electrical systems. And he set up this electrical system in his hometown, and he was kind of like, well, I know how to do that.

So now I could apply that to, to the Phin and let’s see what happens, right? So he did, and then all of a sudden you have the electric Phin. Um, so it’s really routed through coloniality and, and colonial development. Uh, you know, this music is kind of connected to those things in intricate ways.

Mack: Oh man. That is super fascinating. So these later chapters of the book. Really think deeply about how certain dimensions of Rocco’s identity, come to the fore or interact in the Thai context. Um, so maybe let’s start with his blackness, because you’ve, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I’d like to hear more about this. Um, how did his race, how was it thought of differently? How did he experience blackness differently in the Thai context?

Ben: Yeah, so I mean, chapter five, which is the last chapter of the book before the conclusion, um, kind of deals in, in two parts. One with blackness and one with queerness in Thailand during the period that Rocco lived there. And, in brief, I understand Thailand have been a reprieve for him.

Um, you know, there, there is all kinds of evidence, not only from Rocco but from other, uh, you know, black artists, intellectuals have traveled during this time that, you know, places outside of the United States where just generally more comfortable places to be. Lots and lots of people are on the record talking about that quite explicitly.

Not to say that that other places in the world were perfect, but that they escaped the kind of the worst effects of racism and homophobia, um, including James Baldwin, um, you know, and Duke Ellington and, and a number of others. 

Mack: I mean, when I lived in Taiwan in, in the nineties, I knew black musicians who were playing at hotels who were saying the exact same thing. We were treated better here and in Japan than we are back home.

Ben: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and it’s not a claim that I would make, you know, lightly or, or, you know, based on scan evidence. And I did talk to a lot of contemporary folks, uh, you know, black people living in Thailand about this topic. And you really get, uh, similar answers from everybody, right? Um, about what it’s like basically to escape systems of racial identification that can be just really, really oppressive in, uh, in the west.

Um, so Thailand was, I, I think a little bit of a reprieve for him. Um. It’s not to say that Thais don’t use, uh, you know the wrong word sometimes, um, or, you know, misunderstand. But blackness is kind of outside of the, the broader ambit of the local kind of set of definitions, um, for understanding identity.

There is colorism, there absolutely is colorism and oftentimes Thais think about color in terms of local definitions or understandings of colorism that correspond to, uh, you know, rural versus urban identity basically. Right? So rural people who are darker, it’s probably their fault basically, you know, in, in a, in a sort of a karmic sense, right?

That, uh, that in a past life, uh, they did something that made them suffer in this life, um, and also made their skin darker, right? So dark skin is associated with sort of karmic deficits. But American blackness is something else. It’s something else. And. Uh, in a lot of cases, black people were sort of like understood to be an exception essentially, um, to be almost like untouchable in that way.

Um, you know, this is tricky stuff and it changes over time, but that seems to be what the racial paradigm was at the time. Like, if you were American and black, you were someone else, right? Like you were, you were not to be judged. Like, Thai people were just sort of like, well, we don’t quite understand you.

There are exceptions to that, but for the most part, that was the situation. And so he would’ve been comfortable in that, right. You know, it was a space where he could exist outside of a racialized oppression elsewhere.

Mack: Yeah. You know, one thing that interests me is that we’ve been using the term queer to refer to Rocco, but as far as I’m aware, we don’t really know how he would’ve referred to himself. That’s lost to time.

Ben: Right.

Mack: And it just brings to mind, you know, like  Foucault’s history of sexuality where  Foucault claims that the, the very idea that someone’s sexual orientation is this kind of fixed, stable essence within them, that is in itself a very modern western idea. And that if we look to other cultures, other parts of Western history, other moments in Western history, um, there might’ve been words for particular practices, but there weren’t necessarily words for alleged types of people based on who they were attracted to or what have you. 

And that really came to mind for me when I was reading your book, because you make a similar claim about, you know, being queer or gay in Thailand in the mid sixties when, when Rocco gets there. So can you maybe talk about what he was walking into, what cultural context?

Ben: I mean, this is, this is a hugely, hugely complex thing. Um, and I, I think you’re absolutely right that the ground is always shifting here. Um, both in Thailand, as in other places. Um, and it had been shifting for a long time. In 1965, the word gay is first used in a Thai context. Um, that word had not existed prior to that.

Uh, there were of course all kinds of ways of talking about same-sex relationships, but, uh, they were mostly organized through the figure of  puchai. Uh, uh, this is among men, right? I think women are, you know, that there’s a kind of an invisibility there that’s, you know, necessitates its own comment.

Um, but among men you have the figure of the  puchai who is like the sort of male adult, uh, and then  kathoey, right, who is a kind of a feminized, uh, partner. Um, and  kathoey has other meanings and has had other meanings. In fact, it’s a thousands of years old term, uh, that, you know, um. Has had different valences and kind of changes over time.

But at that time, right in the early sixties,  puchai and  kathoey were seen as the kind of unequal partners within, uh, a homosexual relationship. The word gay, uh, was seen as an importation from the west, and it signaled equal relationships between, uh, gay male partners and between homosexual male partners.

Um, and everybody was fascinated by it, right? It was like all the rage in the newspapers. Um, it actually happened because of another murder. Another American, uh, who was killed, who was homosexual. And he was understood to have been killed by his partner, right? A male partner. And Thai people were like, well, who, like, what was going on with this relationship? And the newspapers were like, it’s something called gay where, you know, the two men are equals, they’re social equals. Um, which, you know, is, is something that we’re not familiar with at this time. And so, so gay was the sort of new term, um, in that moment.

Again, it, it didn’t introduce the concept of same sex relationships, but it did introduce a sense of social equality right. Between, uh, partners. So Rocco was kind of coming at a time when there was a lot that was unsettled about how these things were organized, about how identity was organized, about how things were defined and categorized.

And it was so unsettled actually that, uh, he could kind of just like. be in the tumult, like in the confusion, in the uncertainty, right? Whatever it was that he wanted, whoever it was that he loved, nobody was really sure how it was defined yet. And it wasn’t really stigmatized. It was like a matter of curiosity, but there were no legal limitations on it.

No one would judge him. No one really understood. They might have been a little curious about it. They might have wanted to know about it, but, you know, he wasn’t going to get picked up by the cops. He wasn’t going to, you know, lose jobs. Nobody was gonna ask. And so it was that really, that unsettledness that became a sort of a refuge for him.

The fact that these things were not defined as opposed to the US where, you know, the idea of, of homosexuality was like very, very firmly understood and moralized and correlated with communism and all this other stuff. So,

Mack: And so even though there were definitely black queer spaces in the United states context, there was still this legal, um, and, and physical threat.

Ben: exactly. And, and, and in Bangkok, he could really escape that. There has been a fair bit written about queerness in Thailand. Uh, Peter Jackson, um, is a scholar of Thailand who’s written about it quite extensively, but it is like a head spinning kind of thing.

Like dealing with the, you know, the, the definitions and the way that they change over time, um, is kind of like excitingly confusing, right. Um, where, you know, it’s, it’s really, really dynamic. The ways that like the west kind of asserts a certain kind of force, um, and, and ends up influencing local definitions is, is absolutely true, but there’s also local understandings that, uh, kind of exceed that.

Um, so it’s really complicated stuff and…

Mack: am I remembering correctly that because you were speaking earlier about the  kathoey and that in the more remote paths that, that re-referred to certain types of acts, but not necessarily certain types of people. And then is it in contact with the West that this becomes these categories of, of people?

Ben: Yes it seems like it. 

Mack: Like is  Foucault kind of right? At least in the Thai

context about, 

Ben: well, I mean this, so there, there are some, uh, fairly prominent debates about this actually, uh, between the anthropologist  Rosalyn Morris and, uh, the aforementioned Peter Jackson, where they kind of debate precisely whether  Foucault is the right reference point for, uh, thinking about how queerness operates in Thailand.

Um, so, you know, the, the, it’s an open question, right? It depends. It depends which argument you, you subscribe to. Um, but you know, for the purposes of understanding Rocco’s experience, what really interested me was the tumult and the unsettledness and the way that that. Became a kind of a gap for him, right?

Where these definitions were in flux. These categories were in flux. So he, he lived very comfortably, right? For those 12 years, he was not bothered. He was never arrested for queerness, right? During that time. Um, you know, he, as far as we know, he was never judged or bothered.

Everybody that I’ve talked to who knew him in Thailand, you know, may some of them knew, some of them didn’t. Um, but, you know, it, it didn’t matter to them. That unsettledness was, was precisely the space in which he was able to be.

Mack: Let’s talk more about that. I, I would love to hear about those, those years where, I mean, as far as we know, were those happy years for him. Can you talk about like, what kind of money was he making? How did he live, you know, where did he live? Like a, a little bit about, about what that life was?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I would hesitate to say, you know, that he was happy. ’cause I don’t know, um, you know, he was not somebody who left the kind of evidence that would allow us to know whether he was happy. But, but we do know that he was safe, um, at least until, you know, 76. Because when his safety went away, that was evident, right?

So we can say that, you know, between the time that he arrived and, uh, early 1976, he was definitely safe. Um, we don’t know if he was happy, but we know that he was safe. We also know that he was very well compensated. Uh, playing at the Oriental Hotel was an absolutely premier gig, one of the best musical opportunities you could have in the entire country at that time.

Um, I found some evidence, uh, again, the sort of thing that, you know, w. One could allude to, but not sort of claim firmly, uh, that he played in an ensemble with the king of Thailand, um, who was a jazz musician himself, and who often played with visiting foreign jazz musicians. Uh, he invited some very prominent ones, uh, Benny Goodman in particular, among others to play with him. And, uh, the historian of a particular hotel made reference to Rocco having routinely played with the king of Thailand in sort of after hour sessions.

So, you know, whether or not this historian is correct, it’s believable because we know that he was playing really, really high profile gigs, um, and thus would’ve been earning a lot of money.

Mack: Well, I suppose we should talk about, the end of his story. You wanna talk a little bit about that?

Ben: Sure. Um, so he was murdered in March of 1976. There’s a political context here that, you know, I, I, I’ll explain very briefly, but in 1973, Thailand, uh, had a democratic government, um, which, you know, was kind of student led and very exciting and very progressive. But the second that, that. Democratic government came into power, right wing elements were very resistant to it and started plotting to reverse it. Um, and so between 73 and 76, you have the growth of, uh, these right-wing Buddhist, uh, groups, like oftentimes like youth groups, uh, young men who are kind of like, don’t have jobs, and don’t have opportunities.

And they kind of get recruited into these right-wing Buddhist groups. Um, and then by 76, they’re kind of ready to go and they end up, uh, executing a, uh, a coup, a military coup of the government. Um, and they also, uh, commit a massacre against university students at  Thammasat at university in Bangkok. Uh, you know, it’s a huge tragedy, very famous.

Um, and that was in October of 76. Rocco was killed in March, and by the time that he was killed, although the massacre and the coup had not happened yet. there was like very, very, uh, intense political tumult, turmoil, lawlessness, violence, everyday violence. Sometimes it was political violence, but sometimes it was just theft, um, or murder or things like that.

And so Rocco was kind of, at that moment, uh, he was the victim of, you know, some people who were basically opportunists, right? So these boys that he brought back to his hotel, unfortunately they robbed him and killed him, or attempted to rob him and killed him. So he was killed in the context of this political turmoil that was happening around that time.

Mack: Wow. Yeah, that’s, it’s a, it’s really tragic, um, having. Done, you know, this book, which I think is fascinating. And then we haven’t, we didn’t talk too much really about the fact that there’s a connection here. Um, you’re originally from Ohio? 

Ben: I am, yeah.

Mack: And Maurice Rocco was from Oxford, Ohio, which is where my university Miami university is located. That’s a kind of interesting coincidence and also, um, you sort of end the book with, with the fact that there was a why don’t you talk about that?

Ben: Yeah. So, uh, you know, this book was written very, uh, collaboratively and one of the collaborators who I worked with was a local historian in Oxford, Ohio, um, who works for the Smith Libraries. Uh, you may be familiar with this network of public libraries. And she had been doing genealogical work as well as historical work about Rocco’s life.

Um, I found her, you know, just sort of in the early stages of, of trying to understand his life. Uh, I found her and we connected and we ended up doing a lot of the research kind of side by side. So she, she was doing it for purposes of local history, and I was doing it for purposes of the book, but we ended up contributing to each other and giving each other information and details and sharing resources and stuff like that.

You know, I was obviously able to do more research on the Thai side, which was, uh, interesting to her. And she was able to get into really granular stuff at the level of the county and things like that. You know, she knew where to find various records and things like that. So we, like we, we did, we worked very collaboratively.

There were others who I worked with, uh, as well, um, including in Thailand. But, um, so she invited me back, uh, to speak at the dedication of Maurice Rocco’s, uh, Ohio Historical marker, uh, which is in I believe it’s called the Woodside Public Cemetery in Oxford, um, where he’s buried.

His ashes were returned there, um, after he was killed, um, he was cremated at a wat in Thailand, uh, and his ashes were placed in his mother’s grave, um, in the cemetery in Oxford, in the public cemetery. And so I spoke, um, I got to talk to, you know, some people who were, you know, related to the family. He himself had no children, but, uh, you know, there were a couple of, uh, nieces there as well as people who had connections to the family otherwise.

And I got to talk to them and, um, the book kind of ends there, right? With me thinking about what it was appropriate for me to kind of say about Rocco, which, you know, is a theme we haven’t talked about much today, but was hugely important, um, was, you know, thinking about sort of like, what can be said and what should be said about a person after death.

Um, which is something that, that I thematized. Um, especially somebody who sought privacy. Um, I mean, he had a complicated life. You know, he, he was married actually to a woman briefly, um, you know, which is not an unusual thing, uh, especially for entertainers in the 20th century. These mixed orientation marriages were not that uncommon.

Um, but he was quite abusive to her. Um, and you know, this is something that I write about in the book and I did everything I could to find the sources there. Um, and you know, I mean, that was something that I felt like was really important to represent and to talk about. Um, but there were other moments in Rocco’s life where, you know, he was kind of hiding.

Um, probably just sort of being himself, maybe just living away from documentation in, in some sense or another. And I really reckoned with, uh, what to say about those moments, right? Whether I should try to unearth them at all, whether it was my right. Um, you know, even though he is dead. do we really have a blank check, right?

As historians to write about everything? Um, and I’m not sure that we do. Um, so the book involves a lot of grappling with that, and that’s kind of what the conclusion is about, right? Is, you know, as I speak about Rocco at the dedication of his historical marker, how do I deal with the fact that he was a really complicated person?

Um, you know, what do I say? What do I not say in various contexts?

Mack: I think that is a really important theme that, you know, is present throughout the book, thinking about these gaps in the biography and whether they should remain gaps because perhaps that’s what he really intended.

Yeah. Well, it’s a beautiful book. Uh, congratulations. I, I thought it was a fantastic read and I learned so much from it. 

And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge. Thanks to Ben Taussig for being on the show. You can find links to some of the things we talked about. Sign up for our free newsletter, or even become part of the Phantom Power Community and get bonus content. It’s all@phantompod.org. Phantom Power is produced by me, Mac Hagood, and edited by Cameron Naylor.

Outro music is by blue the fifth. I’ll talk to you next time.