He adopted the name Govinda, which he shortened to Govi – how conveniently vaguely Spanish.
He is German by birth (born Werner Monka in 1949), played in various bands describable as “classic” rock in his early twenties, then went full-on New Age and moved to India. Speaking of Hawaii, guess who is based there now. This would put him in league with Martin Denny, whose successful 1950’s Exotica records went to excessive lengths to put listeners in an Hawaiian frame of mind, despite being recorded by non-Islanders in New York City. He may have well been trying to fool people into thinking he was he had an album called “AndalucÍan Nights,” for crying out loud. After some light googling, I found out he wasn’t Spanish at all. I didn’t expect, though, for Govi to look as vanilla as he did. This was it! It was called “Torero.” It certainly lent more credence to my idea that this was just some Spanish guitar guy backed by studio musicians. I hadn’t thought of that name in ages, but I started stumbling through YouTube trying to remember what that song was called.Īfter a few false starts, I landed on one video with that unmistakable Flamenco guitar intro. I clicked over to ensure that “Return to Innocence” wasn’t the next song in my queue, and I saw a few tracks by Govi lined up on the right column. YouTube, in its quest to make you listen to the same VEVO artist 35 times per day, slid me over into world-music territory on its algorithm. I listened to The Best Pessimist’s “Walking with Happiness,” an beautiful instrumental track that’s as great as its title is terrible. Every now and again, I’ll decide that my work mode requires some This Will Destroy You (whose music, ironically, has the opposite effect on me). One day last year, I was on YouTube, streaming music in my office when I wound up on some post-rock channel. Even as Wikipedia expanded into hegemony, it never occurred to me to seek out this recording’s origin story. I burned it to mix CDs I would use for studying or really anything that required an ethereal Flamenco gypsy experience (so, you know…anything). I had a Compaq Presario laptop through my four years of college and into my first year living in DC. The Mp3 lived on the hard drive of whatever computer I was using for years. I double-clicked, and within a few minutes, I had a 5-minute long dream that transported me back to the whitewashed houses of Andalucía and the parched landscape on the outskirts of Segovia (my favorite place on that trip, and to this day one of my favorite cities on Earth).
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One of the tracks that come up on the server just said “Govi-Flamenco.Mp3.” It had a very high usage rate on the network, which meant it would probably download in fewer than 3 hours. After sleeping off my first bout of jet lag, I went straight to the Napster-equipped family computer (possibly KaZaa, if it was after Lars Ulrich and his rich buddies detonated Napster) and searched for Flamenco music. In June of 2000, I returned home from a coming-of-age trip to Spain with about 35 of my high school classmates. Here’s my story about why I love this song. Now, I’ve never seen “The Prince of Tides,” and I have no idea what it’s about, but I think horses running on a beach wouldn’t be out of place in there. Here’s a video somebody made for the song “Torero” accompanied by footage that appears to be taken from a Made-for-TV prequel to “The Prince of Tides.” Because it was 1993 and fans of schitzophonic world music weren’t much for buying vinyl (it’s hard to flip the record over with wet clay all over your hands), the label Real Music (out of Sausalito, why not?) released it solely on CD.
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Also, they both had ridiculous hair/general appearances while at their commercial peaks: Cretu looking more or less like you’d expect the person who made “Return to Innocence” to look, and Govi in full Alan Jackson cosplay on the cover of Cuchama, his third album and likely his first to be named for an indigenous holy site in the California desert. I realize calling him an “enigma” is appropriate, since he and Michael Cretu are both German-bred zen-seeking musicians with a flair for making music that suburban moms did crossword puzzles to in the nineties. Govi was an enigma to me for at least ten years. Have you checked that one out? Because The Caretaker’s stuff is amazing. I’ve been embroiled in trying to meet a couple of deadlines this week, so here’s another entry in a similar vein to the one about the Caretaker.
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