eden ahbez
The proto-hippie composer who wrote ‘Nature Boy’ for Nat King Cole and recorded a single album of tropical mood music—Eden’s Island, 1960—that sits sideways to the canonical Exotica catalog and reads, sixty years later, like the genre’s strangest and most personal entry. A bearded, sandal-wearing, raw-food-eating wanderer who lived under the L in the Hollywood Hills and built a small body of work that pop and exotica have both claimed.
eden ahbez—lowercase by his own insistence, the same way bell hooks would later style her name a generation on—was born George Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn in 1908. Most of his biography is foreshadowed by a single 1947 act: walking up to the stage door of the Lincoln Theatre in Los Angeles where Nat King Cole was playing, handing the doorman a sheet of music, and asking that it reach Mr. Cole. The song was “Nature Boy.” Cole recorded it the following year. It hit number one on the Billboard pop chart for eight straight weeks, became one of the best-selling singles of 1948, and gave ahbez enough royalty income to live the way he wanted to live for the rest of his life, which turned out to be a very specific way.
He grew his hair and his beard out. He wore a white tunic and sandals. He ate raw vegetables, slept outdoors, and lived for stretches under the first L of the Hollywood sign before the city fenced it off. The press called him “the Hermit Songwriter” and ran photographs of him sitting cross-legged in the dirt. Reporters who asked him about money were told he lived on three dollars a week. He was practicing a kind of West Coast proto-hippie life roughly twenty years before the term existed—a thread that connects backward to the German Lebensreform and forward to the Topanga Canyon scene of the late 1960s, with ahbez personally in the middle of both as a quiet, slightly off-center precedent.
The music kept happening alongside the lifestyle. ahbez wrote and placed songs through the 1950s—Eartha Kitt, Frankie Laine, Sam Cooke, and Herb Jeffries all recorded him—but the central project of his recording career was the album he made under his own name in 1960: Eden’s Island, on Del-Fi Records. Twelve tracks of spoken-and-sung pieces over orchestral arrangements that draw from Exotica’s standard toolkit (flute, vibes, congas, mixed choir) and from somewhere stranger and more personal. ahbez delivers most of the lyrics in a half-spoken, half-melodic murmur, mid-distance microphone, like a man telling a friend about a dream he had. The orchestra around him is professionally exotica-shaped—Martin Denny had been on the charts for three years by then and Del-Fi knew the format—but the vocal performance breaks the genre’s polite frame in a way no other 1960 record did.
The album sold modestly on release, drifted out of print, and became a collectors’ object in the lounge revival of the 1990s. The Dionysus reissue (2003) and several subsequent vinyl pressings put it back in circulation. By the mid-2000s, Eden’s Island had been retroactively claimed as canonical proto-exotica—adjacent to Baxter and Denny but unmistakably its own object, somewhere between an exotica record and a beat-generation folk album.
ahbez recorded sporadically through the 1960s and 1970s—a small clutch of singles, contributions to other artists’ sessions, the occasional television appearance—and then receded entirely from the music industry. He continued to write songs into old age and continued to live more or less the way he had been living since the 1940s. He died in 1995 from injuries sustained when he was hit by a car in Sky Valley, California. He was 86.
Start here
Eden’s Island (1960) is the only album you need, and you need it. “Full Moon” or “Tradewind” or “La Mar” are the easiest entry points; “Mongoose” is the strangest single track in the early-1960s exotica catalog; “Eden’s Cove” is the meditation at the heart of the record. “Nature Boy” the song is a separate matter—Nat King Cole’s 1948 version is the canonical one, and you’ve probably already heard it.
Why he matters
ahbez gave Exotica its strangest and most personal album and connected the genre, sideways, to the West Coast spiritual-bohemian thread that ran through the 1950s and would explode in the late 1960s. Eden’s Island sits at the intersection of three traditions—the mainstream Exotica of Denny and Baxter, the proto-hippie countercultural milieu, and the older European Lebensreform utopianism that ahbez himself embodied. Most exotica records sound like commercial product made well; Eden’s Island sounds like a single person’s belief system put to tape. Sixty-plus years on, it’s the rare record that gets stranger and more affecting with each replay.