Unchained Melody

I heard the classic Righteous Brothers song “Unchained Melody” this morning. It brought back a memory of my time in Africa. For about a year, I lived and worked in Nigeria and Angola. I was working for a seismic company called Western Geophysical. We had been hired by Nigerian Gulf, which was a joint venture between the Nigerian government and Gulf Oil. We worked offshore doing seismic soundings to attempt to identify good places to drill for oil. This was in the 1980s and I was in my mid-20s.

The process of oil exploration was very complex, so I won’t try to describe it. But for the purposes of this memory, imagine I am on a 15 to 20 foot long aluminum flat-bottomed boat. I am operating complicated navigational equipment (this was before GPS became common). I had a boat driver, Chico, from the Philippines and two Nigerian crewmen. One of our jobs was to drive the boat in as straight a line as possible and drop buoys every 100 meters.

Driving a boat in a perfectly straight line is tricky—wind and currents are caonstantly pushing you off the line. And we can’t go too fast because our crewmen had to drop buoys at a particular place. The pressure to stay “on line” was intense, and my driver would be anxious during this task. He was eager to do it right. He would judge how well he was doing by looking at a screen on my navigation device, made by a French seismic tech company called Sercel. It was a box with a tiny screen that showed the position of the boat compared to the line it was supposed to be following.

When we approached the line to drop the buoys, Chico would tense up and start singing “Unchained Melody” in a tuneless, quiet but somewhat urgent way to himself.

“Oh, my love, my darling

I hunger for your touch”

I would also be staring intently at the screen and every time we would hit the 100 meter point, I would shoult out to window to the guys on the front of the boat to throw out a buoy. The line we were on could be as short as a kilometer, but was often much longer. We were surrounded by Nigerian Gulf drilling and production platforms, as well as the boats and helicopters that service them. We were close to the shore, which was the delta for the Niger river. We could see the shore from where we were working.

I had heard the song before. I had Joni Mitchell’s 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast. She includes a song called "Chinese Café / Unchained Melody". It is a nostalgic song about her youth, teenage or 20s, going to the Chinese cafe with friends and listening to “Unchained Melody” on the jukebox. She quotes “Unchained Melody” in the song, so when Chico nervously recited the words, I heard Joni Mitchell’s voice. I can’t hear that song (either the Joni Mitchell version or the Righteous Brothers version) without thinking about Nigeria and Chico.

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