Born Too Late: The Supper Club

There is a continual assault on the English language. The intertunnel, and especially typing with your thumbs into a Portable Pandora’s Portmanteau, has led to the destruction of many words, including “led,” which is now misspelled lead uniformly. It’s right up there with vise/vice, loose/lose, and spelling et cetera “ect.” If you point out any of these errors, you are immediately enlisted in the shutzstaffel. Language evolves, you’re lectured. It never occurs to the lecturer that it can also devolve.

So lately the hipsters have glommed onto the term “supper club,” and want to use it to describe ghost kitchens, or informal meals shared by a group of people who use “deck” as an adjective. I won’t have it.

You see, instead of resurrecting a perfectly good term like supper club and debasing it, they should resurrect supper clubs, period. Our parents and grandparents got to go out to eat once in a while and hear live music and turn their ankles dancing. I wish we could.

But as the losing coach said, and I paraphrase, “Larry Bird isn’t walking through that door, and neither is Michel Legrand, or Sacha Distel.” Michel went to his reward after 86 busy years, and is no doubt waving down from a cloud on high to the lava pit his agent is doing the backstroke in. Sacha exhausted himself by trading in Brigitte Bardot for an Olympic skier, and checked out at 71. If he didn’t die happy, he wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t know about you, but man, I could go for a big dose of Gibson L-5s, ruffled shirts, shop-class glasses, and scat singing right about now. And a veal parm with a salad in one of those pressed plywood bowls. Oil and vinegar from the cruets, baby.

Sing Flat, Look Sharp

Texas Troubadours, indeed. Plenty of heavy hitters in that band. But Buddy Emmons, holy shit. Ernie Tubb was an impresario. If you’re a musician, you might be familiar with this sort of fellow. You can’t quite put your finger on their talent. Can’t really sing or play well enough to stand out. Not exactly Cary Grantish either.

Tubb was not known to possess the most adept voice: he always sang flat and actually mocked his own singing. He told an interviewer that 95% of the men in bars would hear his music on the juke box and say to their girlfriends, “I can sing better than him,” and Tubb added they would be right.

But somehow or another they end up with ten guys with way more talent working for them. I guess that’s the talent. Getting the gigs is the supreme skill. And a lot of those kinds of guys turn a taciturn, smiling face to the public, but are slightly more, ahem, serious in their private affairs.

In 1957, he walked into the lobby of the National Life Building in Nashville in the early morning hours and fired a .357 magnum, intending to shoot music producer Jim Denny. Instead, Tubb mistakenly shot at WSM news director, Bill Williams, as he was walking in to work. Luckily, Tubb barely missed (twice) before realizing he had shot at the wrong man. He was arrested and charged with public drunkenness.

Ernie Tubb is one of those guys that becomes larger than life. A country Santa Claus. I swear he was born looking fifty-five years old, but in return, the heavens decreed he would never look much older, either. He appeared on the Grand Ole Opry long after he had the chart hits to make it inevitable. He set up shop down the street with an eponymous record store, and hosted his own show, the Midnite Jamboree, right from the middle of the record stacks.

People just liked him. Sometimes it’s a simple as that.

No Makeup No Lip Rouge

Woody Guthrie wrote around about 1,000 song lyrics that never got published or set to music in his lifetime. Woody couldn’t read or write music so there were no notations indicating how he would want them to sound. Bob Dylan said Woody told Bob to go to New York and look up his wife Margie and get the boxes of song lyrics and set them to music, but Dylan said that when he got to the house, only Woody’s son Arlo and the babysitter were home, so he went away empty-handed.

Much later on, Woody’s daughter gave them to Billy Bragg and he set some to music and recorded them with the band Wilco. The album is named after the address on Coney Island where Woody used to live.

If you have any questions about why a guy would write a song titled: Ingrid Bergman, watch the screen test again.

If you’ll walk across my camera
I will flash the world your story
I will pay you more than money, Ingrid Bergman

Not by pennies dimes nor quarters
But with happy sons and daughters
And they’ll sing around Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman