Music For Animals

Laurel Canyon Music Company together with famous gorilla Koko who understands  English and communicates through the use of a variant of American Sign Language have produced a music CD.

When we first contacted the Gorilla Foundation, they told us that it was too bad, but Koko didn’t particularly like music so we shouldn’t too feel bad if she wasn’t interested. It probably wasn’t personal. After all, she didn’t like Sting or Paul McCartney so why should she like what we were doing.We used all the information about Koko that we had gotten from Dr. Patterson to create the content for our first song – Koko - Fine Animal Gorilla (Koko’s name for herself). It was a soft rap song using a mellow female voice.

Koko - Fine Animal Koko is the only gorilla in the world who communicates using a varient of ASL. The Gorilla foundation is the only organization dedicated to understanding and saving the endangered Lowland Gorilla. The Laurel Canyon Animal Company created Fine Animal orilla (Koko’s name for herself) to benefit the Gorilla Foundation. Many of the lyrics are taken from conversations with Koko. She approved all the lyrics on the CD. She enjoys the and we hope you will too. Over thirty-five musicians and vocalists contributed to

$14.95 + S+H

When we sent a rough mix to the Foundation we received a call the day after the CD arrived telling us for the first time Koko loved the music. We personally think it was because almost every word in every song was about something Koko was very familiar with. From her scary alligator plush toy, her trip to Maui, to her two favorite games – tickling and the game of chase.

Our process  was to create a song and then sent it to the Gorilla foundation so that Koko could listen and approve or disapprove each song. Since Koko understands English perfectly she knew what we were writing about and sometimes didn’t like what we were writing so we had to change lyrics several times.

Koko became our co-producer. It was really cool. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind — for real. We were communicating with another species using computers and music.

Interspecies communication.

We finished the CD – with Koko’s approval of course.

We were planning to release Koko’s CD in due time so we could prepare a publicity campaign but it didn’t work out exactly as we planned. A reporter for the San Mateo County Times called the Gorilla Foundation to check up on anything new that was happening with Koko – like I said earlier she is very famous, especially in the San Francisco area. (She was born on the 4th of July at the San Francisco Zoo.) Someone at the Foundation told the reporter about Koko’s new CD and our carefully timed publicity campaign flew right out the window. The next morning the headlines on the front page of the San Mateo County Times read

LOOK OUT BRITTANY — KOKO’S GOING POP!

The Gorilla was out of the bag – and that’s another story.