Street snagged a few minutes with Dengue Fever bassist Senon Williams and drummer Paul Smith before they joined their band mates on the Casbah stage earlier today. Coincidentally, the Casbah seems to play a reoccurring role in fate's grand plan for Dengue Fever. It was after a show at the Casbah in 2005 that the band was stopped at the San Clemente checkpoint while on their way back to L.A. CBP agents discovered vocalist Nimol, a Cambodian citizen, was living in the U.S. with an expired visa and readied her for deportation. But in what you could call the ultimate act of turning lemons into lemonade, the whole band decided to go with her and tour the land from which their music takes its inspiration.
That's a big deal, given that the music of Dengue Fever, 1960s psychedelic rock that's heavy with organ shrills and screeching vocals, hasn't been heard in Cambodia since the '60s. It's most commonly associated with '60s Cambodian rock stars like Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, who were famous for blending traditional Khmer music with the rock, rhythm and blues that was pouring out of the West. Both are believed to be among the 1.5 million victims who perished in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, a genocide that crushed music, art and anything else that remotely had to do with creativity and free thought in Cambodia. Picture it: five Americans and one Cambodian returning a brand of music to an entire nation, many of whom never knew it was theirs to begin with.
They caught the whole experience on film and turned it into a documentary, "Sleepwalking Though the Mekong."
Other than that, the guys said while they wouldn't necessarily consider themselves world musicians, they admitted that being pegged as a world band from time to time isn't such a bad thing. Why? World music festivals tend to not be so stingy when it comes to overnight accommodations.
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