Tokyo snarkCast

Well, the attack of the Konzak's Christmas Clarence Gooey Duck in English and Japanese all started for me with today's post on the WFMU's "Beware of the Blog."

Jim Gaerhart - Clarence The Geoduck (MP3, 5:53): This is a holiday promotional 45, both in English and Japanese for the Russell Company - home of the Russell 2000 Index [of stocks], and obviously made long before the company had billions of bucks...

The Geoduck clam, pronounced "Gooey Duck," is the giant clam of American Northwest coast, with a profoundly phallic shape of the siphon, has led to the belief in Japan and China that the shellfish has aphrodisiac properties. This lead to recording a Japanese version of the Gooey Duck Song by harpmaker-storyteller Ron Konzak of Washington State. The group "Pierymplezak" (Ron Konzak, Bob Dalrymple, Judy and Jerry Elfendah, et al) released the song in 1972 as a 45 single by "Acme Music" (GNP Crescendo, #468). The novelty song was popular hit in the Seattle area and it's still a standard tune found in Cub Scout song books.

I trimmed down the nearly six minute long Christmas promotional single to just the English and Japanese versions of the song, which I've posted here on Aodomatic an iPod-ready, MP3 format (3:08 minutes) of the tune.

You can also watch and listen to the Goggle video of Konzak's Gooey Duck Song (Geoduck) Seattle Songs (2 min 29 sec)

And be sure to check out Ron Konzak's konzak.com website.