Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: Exotica, Classic Album Covers, and a Paradise Cooler

Ben Willis dives into Exotica, the hypnotic soundtrack of Tiki culture. Explore the stunning art of classic Exotica album covers, sip on a refreshing Paradise Cooler, and groove to "Utopia" by Combustible Edison, a standout track from the 90s Exotica revival.

Ben Willis brings the island vibes.

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Transcript

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Billy Idol Rebel Yell more, more, more on your home for Rock and Roll, MegaRock 100.5 and 105.5. It's 2.45, it's Friday afternoon, and it's time to light the torches once again as we sit back and escape for a little bit for tiki talk on Mega Rock. One of those most enduring symbols of tiki and mid-century leisure culture has to be, has to be the Aloha shirt. The brightly colored, loose-fitting shirt that just, when you see it, it says, we're going to have a good time, you know. But how do we get to that Aloha shirt? Kind of a circuitous winding way, and in a strange way, oddly, for a big symbol of Pacific Island culture, and kind of as it was filtered through American culture later on, it kind of had its genesis with missionaries who introduced what they called the Mother Hubbard dress to the Pacific Islands as they came through. And they saw the Native Islanders and they said, Oh no, we cannot have scantily clad people in this hot climate, of course. That's scandalous. We have to cover up everybody head to toe in a long, loose fitting garment, which was at the time in the Victorian era called a Mother Hubbard dress. So that's what they did. And later on, as things changed and shifted into the late 19th century, that turned into what was later known in many places, but especially in Hawaii, as the Moo Moo, which was at the time, originally an undergarment, but later became acceptable as a house dress and maybe as a bathing suit. And originally it was just a plain white cotton garment. Very loose fitting, allowed you to move around, do your stuff. But later on, as the 19th century turned into the 20th century, uh the desire to decorate, of course, took over, and also the availability at the time of inexpensive, brightly colored, printed cotton cloth that was just beginning to be introduced and imported from East Asia and China in particular. And so they started making Moumoos, not just from the plain white cloth, but from this very colorful patterns with hibiscus and palm leaves and other floral designs, of course. And sometimes the geometric patterns that you might have seen on top of cloth as well, or kappa cloth. But that's how we got the colorful Moumoos. How do we get the colorful Aloha shirts? Well, we can thank some of those same actually Chinese vendors who came in and set up shop specifically in Hawaii and said, we're gonna take our cloth and we're gonna make dress shirts loose fitting, you know, with these patterns, and we're gonna sell them, we're gonna market them, we're gonna actually call them at the time, it was very common to call any product made in Hawaii, Aloha blank or blank. So they simply called them Aloha shirts, and they became so popular that by 1951, Harry S. Truman, President Truman, was featured on the cover of, I believe it was Life Magazine, on vacation, famously in an Aloha shirt, and the rest is history. You can see some of my collection of shirts, not all of them, but I've got a few up there on our Facebook page at Mega Rock PA. But we can thank once again, going back, essentially, those initial missionaries for kind of sparking that idea. But, you know, even those missionaries, whatever their intentions may have been, could have their downfall in the end. And that's today's cocktail. The missionary's downfall would really be the downfall, honestly, of anybody who tastes one or two of these. Goes back another Don the Beach Comer recipe from the 1930s. Might just be your downfall if you have too many. Here's the recipe. One half ounce fresh lime juice, one half fresh ounce of peach brandy, an ounce of 50-50 honey syrup, one ounce of light Puerto Rican rum, something like a bicardi, two ounces, a quarter cup of diced fresh pineapple, another quarter cup of fresh mint leaves, tightly packed into that quarter cup measuring cup. We're gonna blend that with a three-quarter cup of crushed ice until it's well smooth. So this is a classic blender drink. Blend for 20 full seconds, pour it into a wide champagne glass, and put just a couple tiny sprigs of mint right in the center as a garnish. This actually serves two, believe it or not. So, the missionaries' downfall, but we do have them to thank in the end for the aloha shirts that we know and love. So, until we meet another island somewhere else, this is Ben Willis saying Aloha for Tiki Talk on Mega Rock, and we'll leave you with an anthem that was actually written for the returning ceremony for Eluru in Australia. It's Midnight Oil and the Dead Heart on Mega Rock.