The Ya Ho Wa 13: The strangest music ever made by a cult?
The term “cult act” is one that gets thrown around a lot these days.
One doesn’t have to clear that much of a bar to be called a “cult band” or a “cult artist”. More often than not, you just need to make weird music and have a small but devoted following. Even then, the goalposts can be moved. There are stadium-slaying pop acts, the kind who make radio-friendly, unit-shifting music, who’ve been cult acts. This is mainly due to the sheer devotion of their fanbase, contrasted with how few people outside of that bubble have heard their work.
Thus, we get the normal definition of cult act. A band or artist with a particularly devoted following.
Most musicians in the world qualify as that, and one wonders how the hundreds of actual cults that make music would feel about that level of gimmick infringement. I mean, probably fine because anything that happens outside of their group doesn’t really matter.
Still, they might feel a little affronted considering the effort they’ve put in to make their group a true cult, yet people still call the BTS Army the same thing.
Among the best examples of this are the group Ya Ho Wa 13. This is a band actually formed out of members of The Source Family, a real-life cult formed by Father Yod (James Edward Baker to his mum) and based in a Hollywood Hills mansion in the early 1970s, until his death in 1975.
In the two years they were playing together, they recorded ten albums of mainly improvised psychedelic rock, built around Father Yod’s preaching, and would you believe it, the band actually found a following outside of their family.
What were The Ya Ho Wa 13?
In a way, this is kind of a miracle.
The band tried to jump on the psychedelic rock bandwagon over half a decade after it had crashed and burned in an acid flashback-induced haze. Thus, no record label was ever interested in actually releasing their music. The thing is, they didn’t really need to. Father Yod’s money came from owning a handful of successful restaurants on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. While that cash paid for his family’s bed and board at their mansion, it also provided a place for their records to be sold.
Thus, Yod paid for the records of The Ya Ho Wa 13 to be pressed privately and began selling them as a limited run in his restaurants. Perhaps the kind of people who go out for organic vegetarian food in Los Angeles might have been the target audience for their brand of improvised psychedelic rock, but even then, probably not. Even in the weird and… well, probably not that wonderful world of music made by actual cults, the music of The Ya Ho Wa 13 is profoundly weird.
The barely tonal, totally improvised noise created by the band is one thing, but Yod takes this to a whole other level of grating. His preaching often becomes meaningless rambling and sometimes descends into outright screaming. That said, the cult itself only existed because sometimes people do find real meaning in the manipulative bollocks these conniving charlatans peddle. In a similar way, some people are desperate enough for meaning that they can listen to the “music” created by it and find meaning in it.
Perhaps that’s the true meaning of a cult. Whether it’s a band or a community, you find meaning in something that the outside world doesn’t. Sometimes for good, but oftentimes for ill.