Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: The De-Evolution and Fall of Classic Tiki

This week Ben explores “The De-evolution and Fall of Classic Tiki,” with a look at abandoned tiki landmarks like the Mount Carmel Beachcomber, a midcentury knock-off version of the Zombie, and Link Wray’s 1974 classic “Rumble.”

It’s tiki history, forgotten places, vintage drinks, and great music—all in one episode.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

It's Friday afternoon, and it's time to light the torches once again for Tiki Talk. Ben Willis with you. Tiki as a pop culture movement has certainly seen its shares of ups and its shares of downs as well. And Tiki historian and author Sven Kirsten describes what happened after Tiki reached its absolute heights in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He describes it going through what he called Tiki's de-evolution, essentially the falling to pieces of what had once been one of the most popular leisure aesthetics of America in the mid-20th century. And just as quickly as tiki pop came into prominence after World War II and following Hawaii's statehood in the late 1950s, with the following conflicts in the Pacific, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and with that, the advent of instant communication, and essentially the Vietnam conflict being televised, the American people and especially the younger generation really got to see almost firsthand the horrors of war with the backdrop of the Pacific as it's setting. And with the anti-war movement in the late 1960s, 1970s, came this shift in the viewpoint of the younger generation towards their parents' leisure activities. As every generation knows, what their parents do for fun is the epitome of being uncool. And going to a tiki bar, having a luau, sipping something out of a carved mug, began to be seen by the youngest generation as embarrassingly uncool and unhip, and part of the establishment aesthetic. It's what their parents did, it's what the presidents did for their pastime. And so as the baby boomers began to age into early adulthood, they fully rejected, for the most part, the inauthenticity of tiki pop. And so much unfortunately, in a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this led to the shuttering of many great historic tiki establishments over the years, through the 1970s and the late 1990s as well. As Fen Kirsten says in his book Tiki Pop, by the 1980s, most Tiki temples had been shuttered, and the word tiki had faded mostly from the American language. In America's wholesale rejection of tiki pop, works of artistic merit, wood carvings, interior design, signage, architecture were destroyed to make way for, quote, better things. And soon tiki was completely forgotten on a cultural level. And as he says, another generation had passed before what little still remained was rediscovered, thankfully, and reappreciated for its creative value. Thankfully, thankfully, we now have the second wave and now third wave of the tiki revival, preserving and now creating new tiki spaces. Ultimately, it fell to Generation X and the Elder Millennials to light the torches of Tiki once again as a culture in America. And if you were to ask me what encapsulates the mid-century decline and fall of Tiki cocktails in particular, on top of everything, I would easily point to the classic mid-century version of Don the Beach Comer's zombie. Now, if you're familiar with Don Beach's original zombie, you know it is a very spicy, rum-forward, almost a harsh cocktail, but he guarded his recipe furiously. So some people suspect that he may have leaked a false recipe at some point to throw his competition off his track, so to speak. And so at some point, we had the following recipe for a zombie attributed to Don Beach, although it almost in no way resembles his original recipe from the 1930s. The mid-century zombie is as follows: In your shaker with lots of crushed ice, we're going to take one ounce of fresh lime juice, one ounce of fresh lemon juice, one ounce of unsweetened pineapple juice, one ounce of passion fruit syrup, one ounce of light Puerto Rican rum, one ounce of gold Puerto Rican rum, one ounce of overproof demerara rum, a lemon heart 151 would be ideal here, a teaspoon of Demerara sugar syrup, and one dash of Angostura bitters. Shake well in your shaker with lots of ice and pour unstrained into a tall zombie glass and garnish with a mint sprig. As Beach Bum Berry explains in his remixed gallery of tiki drinks, this appears attributed to Don the Beachcomber by Lewis Spivak in his 1950 book Barbecue Chef, they suspect that this recipe was crafted for the benefit of the lay readers in the Barbecue Chef book. It's much easier to make than the original. Certainly a balanced cocktail and a tall drink at that to get you through an evening, even if it in no way resembles the original zombie. So, until we meet on another island out there, somewhere, this is Ben Willis saying Aloha. We're gonna leave you with another mid-century reimagining of a classic from Link Ray. It's his 1974 version of the song that got banned just for its title back in the 50s. It's Rumble from 1974 on Tinky Talk.